AN EMOTIONAL AFFAIR WITH A PARTICULAR ORCHID: A REVIEW OF PLANTS AND SCIENCE FICTION

Book edited by Katherine E. Bishop, David Higgins and Jerry Maatta. University of Wales Press, 2020.

Originally published in Vector, British Science Fiction Association

Before we dive into the myriad wonders of the first-ever collected volume on plants in SF, let me signpost this article by saying this is not intended as a straightforward book review, more a subjective-entangled way into an intense and highly transformative text. As an Artist, Ecologist, Healer and dyspraxic my approach might be perceived as that of a ‘fuzzy set’, so named by Brian Attlebury, that is ‘affiliated with other texts that might seem to belong to other…terrains’ tending to spy unconventional connections and join unexpected dots. I draw attention to this method as multidisciplinary approaches might be the essence of what this book points to, namely an urgent need for ‘cross-species intimacy, or inter-kingdom intimacy’. My hope is that bridging the separate islands on which different academics tend to reside will foster such closeness.

Slurp, collage, Rhona Eve Clews

Growing up a hippie, the idea of plants and humans being in mutual relationship wasn’t such an odd idea, in fact, all aliveness, like animism, was honoured as such. The garden and its inhabitants, the hills and its plants and creatures were all of equal import. As a child I was teased, nicknamed ‘bee girl’ for crying and speaking out when boys pulled at insect’s wings or daddy-long-legs legs on the school bus home. Such sensitivity was viewed and treated as naive, idealistic, and irrational  – as if it was too lofty to desire equality, care and kinship to be present and active across human and more-than-human worlds.

Fast forward thirty years and, amidst a climate crisis of our own making, a burgeoning audience seeks similar approaches to mutuality and respect. I encountered this audience in the summer of 2019. Inspired by the incongruency of dying plants in our art school’s offices, my fellow artist Lea Collet and I co-curated the exhibition and series of public events, you’re mulchy green, you’re verdant matter at Slade School of Fine Art, UCL, London. We attempted to resituate the art college as a live ecosystem, breathing fresh feminist perspective into a group exhibition, surprised to find a booming interest in Botanics.

you’re mulchy green, you’re verdant matter, poster from exhibition at Slade School of Fine Art

Foregrounding a somatic interconnectedness emphasised in Plants in Science Fiction, we used our bodies as bridges to the plant kingdom, heralding activities that were sensual and immersive, such as ingesting, listening, experiencing, etc. Despite a searing heatwave, the events quickly sold out, participants hungry and asking: How else can I get involved? How else can I help?

Such a desire for action, involvement and direction might also be evidenced in the proliferation of ecological works reconsidering more-than-human perspective, including The Mushroom at the End of the World by Anna Tsing, Entangled Life by Merlin Sheldrake, Rebecca Tama’s Strangers and the Netflix hit My Octopus Teacher. Viewing such developments alongside the increased inclusion of science fiction in mainstream media, the pressing demand for new guidelines on how else we might live becomes apparent. Plants in Science Fiction – a helpful guide for navigating between human and vegetal – arrives just in time.

Post from @hithergreengardener Laura Hayward-Pell on Instagram

Even a quick survey of themes arising from the essays on Plants in Science Fiction, i.e. sex, death, time, bodies, boundarylessness, kinship, self vs. other, gives an accurate glimpse as to the existential confrontation that thinking about plants, or as Marder puts it ‘thinking through plants’, provides. Our very ontology is challenged, which might explain why, as in the Introduction by Katherine E. Bishop, ‘We tend to think of plants as landscape and love objects and metaphors and ornaments and lunch – when we think of them at all’.  Perhaps such a threat to our very fundamental notions and boundaries of ‘being’ explains our history of avoidance here: anything rather than confronting direct questions as to what we ourselves might be! The book bursts with philosophers who have attempted to approach such tensions from a variety of eco-philosophical projects: Deleuze, Guattari, Morton’s mesh, Karen Barad’s intractions, Darwin, Aristotle, Haraway, Miller and a lot of Michael Marder. Plants in Science Fiction persistently wrestles with what it means to be plant, non-human and human as collective beings on a shared planet, rather than as individual species on divided isles that we’ve (tragically) become accustomed to. Many of the classic literature/SF-and-plant texts are present, from Day of the Triffids to Ovid’s Metamorphosis, alongside lesser-known writing. The literature cited was so potent and curious, it even inspired me to go and read Arthur Machen’s horror, completely outside my normal realm of reading.

Resounding and unified perspectives emerge from the essays  – from the trouble that Aristotle has got us into by assuming plant life was low down on an inherent hierarchy,  which fostered the colonial ladder thinking and damaged our ability to handle difference, to the overwhelmingly urgent need to rethink our relationship with the more-than-human world in the face of the climate crisis. SF is deftly shown to encompass sociology, philosophy and anthropology (amongst other disciplines), acting as a much-needed ‘free zone’ or sketchbook for speculating on vegetative, human and other non-human futures.

Gro-bag, Rhona Eve Clews

The book has been thoughtfully divided into three sections, Abjection, Affinity, and Accord which assist in providing a clear route through such a forest of ideas. In fact, accessibility would be my main criticism of the book, for the concepts included are so vital, I wondered if they might be made more easily available for someone not so open or familiar with SF or critical theory. Rich imagery accompanies the book including (but in no way limited to): 

• broad-bean sensory systems picking up impending threats; 

• a city built from seeds modelled on a mycelium network; 

• girls who do handstands to give birth to plants; 

• sentient wood and iron; 

• smell as subversive and philosophical, 

• even bees with addiction problems!

I only longed for some actual visual images to break up the text, or even ‘pause’ pages to digest the wealth of ideas each essay brims with. There were so many high points from such a powerful, densely-packed quest I will share thoughts on the chapters that particularly stood out to me.

Bark eyes, part of Under Sole and Sky Head, Sycamore bark, Lewis Davidson

Yogi Hale Hendlin delves into Robbins’s Jitterbug Perfume, heralding the potent vehicles of smell and sunlight for transcending the limits of self and transforming our worldview through interspecies interconnectedness. Smell is situated as radical and anarchic, offering a subversive opportunity to dissolve the gap between our fear-based somatic separateness and to ‘grow queerly, much like the rhizomatic and asymmetric growth of plants’ enabling us to ‘…reach our legs down into the fertile soil and moisture of connectedness.’ So enticing! The essay introduces phyto-phenomenology, reframes photosynthesis as Information Technology and contemplates the direct link between flowers and a Higher Power: ‘flowers have a direct line to God that an evangelist would kill for.’ As a Healer the chapter made me want to take an even deeper dive into plant-transcendent experiences, with tantalising dips into Taoism, plant sentience, plant consciousness, sensuality, Kant’s fear of smell and Nietzche’s suspicion of scents, emphasising the rich potential for further adventures into eco-spirituality, environmental philosophy and SF.

Inside Michael’s shed, Port Chalmers, New Zealand, Rhona Eve Clews

T.S. Miller’s Vegetable Love: Desire, Feeling and Sexuality in Botanical Fiction chapter foregrounds plant sexuality, queerness and strangeness for rethinking human-plant relations and provoking kinship. Miller guides us through a range of botanical fictions concerning plant and human couplings and sexually alluring vegetal hybrids, including John Boyd’s The Pollinators of Eden, Pat Murphy’s His Vegetable Wife and Ronald Fraser’s Flower Phantoms. Astutely asking ‘Can plants express themselves, or only ever us?’, he challenges the typified undercurrent of horror that lurks within the convergence of human-plant sexualities and the dominance of anthropocentric norms in the intersection of misogyny, colonialism, and violence against both plants and women. After a welcome and thorough feminist analysis of the texts, Miller notes parallel positionings between the vegetal being and the female subject, looking to Ghosh to encourage an urgent collapse of our current ‘othering’ of the nonhuman, and quoting Marder ‘… to see plants in ourselves, rather than ourselves in plants’. 

Frame of 35mm film from Peony-plush, Rhona Eve Clews

Having read Annihilation for a SF study group, I was especially curious about Alison Sperling’s chapter Queer Ingestions, exploring the weird, expanded and sporous bodies in Jeff VanderMeer’s fiction. Intersecting more-than-humanism, queerness and environmental ethics, and locating the weird via Mark Fisher – ‘the weird de-naturalize’s all worlds, by exposing their instability, their openness to the outside’, Sperling uses the relevance of such boundary-bodily blurs and inside/outside-ness to discuss how familiarity/unfamiliarity is echoed across plants and humans. What happens when we don’t know our insides, or theirs? With a particular interest in weird embodiment, Sperling suggests we reconfigure our normalised notions of queerness, intimacy, and reproduction, using plant-human ‘montages’ in efforts to expand past abject zones of threat and unknown mystery, into a much greater identity embrace. As in Sheldrake’s Entangled Life the discussion delves into the decentralised and often non-individuated bodies of plants and fungi, asking how collapsing conventional notions of hierarchy, foregrounding queer kinship and translating these ‘other’ models to humans might help us navigate the toxicities of the Anthropocene.

Workshop for Beyond Borders, London Science Fiction Research Community Conference, Rhona Eve Clews

Considering VanderMeer’s use of ingestion and intimacy as a jumping-off point into corporeal hybridity, Sperling speaks to porosity and re-enfolding of bodies that occurs through contact and atmosphere where we might encounter ‘the recognition of oneself as always and already other’. In such a metaphysical soup I landed right back into the famous retort from spiritual teacher Ramana Maharshi to a seeker’s question ‘How do I treat others?’ to which he replied ‘There are no others.’ Similar ideas informed a workshop I created for the London Science Fiction Research Community Beyond Borders conference, in recognition that the dominant paradigm of the human body and its borders is out of date, with fixed, binary, normalised, solid able-bodied walls sitting between us. Plant-human relations are presented in this chapter as nothing less than urgent for future survival, for reimagining the body and developing trans-species ethics. Through fiction and philosophy, the essay expands upon how the weird and the vegetal might reshape our understanding, undoing artificial categories to foster a radical reconfiguration of our conception of self/other, vulnerability and community.

Take time for yourself, connect with your favourite humans, oil on canvas, Olha Pryymak

Plants in Science Fiction took me on a transformative and fulfilling deep-dive into the interconnectedness between plants, humans, and our fundamental notions of being. The book consistently demonstrates how thinking with plants confronts our very existence. Each essay offers profound insights, with SF providing a pioneering space for speculation on interspecies ethics, and vegetative, human, and non-human futures. Rather than a solely academic text, my hope is that it becomes a kind of ‘handbook’ for artists, writers, ecologists, gardeners, healers and humans alike, enabling us to redraw and rethink our kinship with the more-than-human world, collapsing our normalised ‘othering’ and informing innovative, inclusive and collective ways of being.