Ecology 101

Canavan, Gerry. Feature 101: "Ecology 101." SFRA Review #314 (Winter 2015 [sic]): pp. 16-25.[1]

Excellent essay, simultaneously only occasionally relevant, and central to the question of human relations to our technology and to a world in which the science of ecology reminds us of our limits, and, perhaps especially, our limits given our technology.

I have suggested elsewhere that even cyberpunk should be read as a kind of reactive backlash to ecological thinking, insofar as the rapid 1980s relocation of the object of SF desire to a place inside the computer can itself be read as an attempt to circumvent the "reality principle" of ecological scarcity by positing an interior cybernetic world where such limits no longer apply. [§5.4]

[5.5] To the extent that twentieth-century science fiction historically imagined a radically unlimited, techno-optimistic future of Promethean world-transformation — provided we don’t, say, nuke ourselves in the meantime — ecological science has therefore tended to function not as a licensor or guarantor, but as its bad conscience. (Canavan, p. 21)

RDE, finishing, 9Aug21