Silent Spring
Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, originally published in 1962, warns of the devastating consequences of the misuse of chemicals on the natural world and therefore on humans. It is not a work of science fiction, but it employs speculative devices that are profoundly science fictional. This happens most obviously at the beginning of the book in the short chapter titled ‘A Fable for Tomorrow’: “There was once a town in the heart of America where all life seemed to live in harmony with its surroundings.” (Silent Spring. Penguin Classics London 2012, P.3) This town “lay in the midst of a chequerboard of prosperous farms,” (3) surrounded by animals and plants, an interrelated system of human and nature that was vibrant, alive and beautiful. It had been this way for generations: “So it had been from the days many years ago when the first settlers raised their houses, sank their wells, and built their barns.” (3) Then, a blight comes and with it an appalling change over every aspect of this network of life: “Some evil spell had settled on the community: mysterious maladies swept the flocks of chickens; the cattle and sheep sicked and died. Everywhere was the shadow of death.” (3) This shadow falls over humans, animals and plants:
“On the farms the hens brooded, but no chicks hatched. The farmers complained that they were unable to raise any pigs — the litters were small and the young survived only a few days. The apple trees were coming into bloom but no bees droned among the blossoms, so there was no pollination and there would be no fruit.” (4)
Vegetation is withered, as if destroyed by fire, the streams lifeless. “No witchcraft, no enemy action had silenced the rebirth of new life in this stricken world. The people had done it to themselves.” (4) This is a place, she writes, that does not exist as a singular location but that many communities have suffered numerous aspects of the individual disasters that accumulate in her fable.
Her warning, that these disasters are already taking place through the accumulation of chemical pollution, is developed in Chapter 2. Carson powerfully asserts that along with the possibility of human extinction through nuclear war,
“the central problem of our age has therefore become the contamination of man’s total environment with such substances of incredible potential for harm — substances that accumulate in the tissues of plants and animals and even penetrate the germ cells to shatter or alter the very material of heredity upon which the shape of the future depends.” (9)
She looks to the future with a sense of irony, thinking about how deliberate alteration of “the human germ plasm by design” might be envisioned for some kind of advancement but is already potentially taking place through chemicals and radiation: “It is ironic to think that man might determine his own future by something so seemingly trivial as the choice of an insect spray.” (9) Here Carson makes use of a different science fictional strategy. Whereas in her fable, she asks the reader to imagine a situation where already extant processes come together to form a totality, here she asks the reader to imagine a perspective of looking back onto the present:
“All this has been risked — for what? Future historians may well be amazed by our distorted sense of proportion. How could intelligent beings seek to control a few unwanted species by a method that contaminated the entire environment and brought the threat of disease and death even to their own kind? Yet that is precisely what we have done.” (9)
Carson’s book makes for devastating reading, and has contributed to wider understandings of the consequences of human processes. However, it is important to acknowledge a final chapter as another potentially science fictional element, or perhaps an element that might be incorporated more into thinking about science fiction and possible futures. The science fictional ideas at the beginning have a counterpoint in the powerful sense of future orientation at the end of the book, when Carson provides a sense of alternative paths. Her concluding chapter is titled ‘The Other Road’, which outlines very practical solutions that are biological in nature, viable alternatives to the massively destructive chemical methods of insect control so thoroughly condemned in the book.
