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Article Excerpt
* It is now widely acknowledged that Rachel Carson's Silent Spring (1962), one of the central texts of the modern environmental movement, is as much a work of science fiction as of science fact. M. Jimmie Killingsworth and Jacqueline S. Palmer have argued that Silent Spring is rooted in the apocalyptic imagination characteristic of the dystopian, technophobic strain of science fiction: terming Carson's grim "Fable for Tomorrow" a "brief experiment in science fiction" ("Silent Spring" 177), one that "invokes the specter of 'evil science' (embodied in popular culture as the mad scientists of comic books and the egghead aliens of science fiction movies)," Killingsworth and Palmer demonstrate that Carson utilizes the techniques of projective fiction to puncture the twin dreams of unlimited scientific progress and absolute human mastery of the physical environment on which the pesticide industry traded ("Millennial Ecology" 30). Readings of Carson's debt to science fiction have focused on her manipulation of the nuclear-nightmare narratives of the Cold War era. Thus Lawrence Buell, in his chapter on "Environmental Apocalypticism" in The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture (1995), writes "Carson's prose ... draws on the apocalyptic frame of reference that high-tech militarism and years of Cold War consciousness have implanted in her readers' minds" (293), while Ralph H. Lutts suggests that Carson, by "sounding an alarm about a kind of pollution that was invisible to the senses" and that "could result in cancer, birth defects, and genetic mutations," was subtly connecting pesticides to a more familiar poison: "Pesticides could be understood as another form of fallout" (19). (1) In these readings, what distinguishes Carson as science fiction writer is the speculative nature of her rhetoric: in chapters such as "Through a Narrow Window" and "One in Every Four," where Carson freely admits a lack of conclusive evidence linking pesticides to cancer and genetic mutation, or in "Nature Fights Back," where she extrapolates from current trends of insect resistance to imagine armies of super-insects descending on a nation already enfeebled by its own thoughtless devices, Carson mobilizes readers' hopes and fears by conjuring visions as fantastic as those dreamed up by the industry she assails.
With this image of insect armies in mind, I would like to propose that Carson's science fictional rhetoric draws not only on the nuclear tradition but on an allied discourse: the narrative of alien invasion, and specifically of insect invasion, that peaked with the so-called "big bug" films of the 1950s. Alien invasion narratives are practically synonymous with modern science fiction, dating at least to H. G. Wells's 1898 novel The War of the Worlds. They also constitute a genre of peculiar longevity and durability in the American popular imagination, with roots as deep as the Salem witch trials of 1692, which were steeped in the tropes of invisibility, contagion, and identity confusion that would remain fundamental to the genre. (In an indigenous context, one might even consider such narratives inseparable from the arrival of invading foreigners in the Americas.) In the decade before the publication of Silent Spring, this pervasive fantasy was expressed with particular frequency and fervency throughout U.S. popular and political discourse; from communists to homosexuals to rock 'n' roll, Americans imagined legions of subversive enemies worming into the social fabric. Motion pictures of the decade followed suit, with films such as The Thing from Another World (1951), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1955), and The Blob (1958) remaining staples of the science fiction cinema. Paralleling this tradition, the "big bug" films--including Them! (1954), Tarantula (1955), The Deadly Mantis (1957), The Black Scorpion (1957), Beginning of the End (1957), and Earth v. the Spider (1958)--pictured in the epidemic of oversized arthropods a uniquely alien, implacable enemy bent on national or global domination. Manifesting not only threats of nuclear holocaust and Communist subversion but also the doomsday rhetoric of the pesticide industry and its government flacks, the "big bug" films gave shape to deeply seated fears of invading insect armies and to deeply rooted hopes of a land cleansed of such monstrous antagonists. (2)
At the same time, the "big bug" films expressed the conflicted attitude toward science and, in particular, toward scientific assaults on the natural world that matured in the decade before Silent Spring. If these films made concrete hysterical prophecies of insectile Armageddon, at the same time they expressed the competing apocalyptic strain that Susan Sontag identifies as central to fifties science fiction film: "it is not enough to remark that contemporary attitudes [toward science]--as reflected in science fiction films--remain ambivalent, that the scientist is treated as both satanist and savior. The proportions have changed, because of the new context in which the old admiration and fear of the scientist are located. For his sphere of influence is no longer local, himself or his immediate community. It is planetary, cosmic" (218). In the case of the "big bug" films, this fear of science run amok took a unique form: nervously conflating warring arthropods and anthropoids, these films raised doubts as to which side was ultimately the graver threat to the earth and its creatures.
Silent Spring capitalizes on these doubts. Treating pesticides as a new and even deadlier form of alien invader--one that, ironically, humanity has loosed on itself in its reckless chemical war against the insects--Carson's landmark text draws on the same cultural anxiety that drove the "big bug" films. It argues that the threat of insect invasion pales by comparison to the hazards humanity's own immoderate response has spawned. Reading Silent Spring in light of the earliest and most artistically (as well as commercially) successful of the "big bug" films. Them!, a tale of giant predatory ants and the government scientists who wage war against them, it becomes possible to see the ways in which Carson drew on popular science fiction narratives to lend her work broad appeal and heightened urgency, as well as the ways in which she transformed the genre's ambivalence into pointed polemic. Implicit in the invasion discourse of the "big bug" films, as M. Keith Booker writes, was the question of "who was Us and who was Them" (19). Silent Spring taps this science fictional discourse to provide a disturbing and damning answer.
War with Insects
Tales of marauding insects are as old as modern science fiction itself. In his 1905 short story "The Empire of the Ants," H. G. Wells writes of an infestation of intelligent, warlike Amazonian ants that "are eating up the country" (2): "So far their action has been a steady and progressive settlement, involving the flight or slaughter of every human being in the new areas they invade" (10). In Wells's cynical vision of Darwinian struggle--as well as of imperial hubris--the ants are associated both with the random and untamable forces of Nature and with the underlying savagery of Western civilization. "Who were the real masters?" muses Holroyd, engineer of the gunboat dispatched to deal with the insect menace: "In a few thousand years men had emerged from barbarism to a stage of civilisation that made them feel lords of the future and masters of the earth! But what was to prevent the ants evolving also? ... Suppose presently the ants began to store knowledge, just as men had done by means of books and records, use weapons, form great empires, sustain a planned and organised war?" (4). The answer, as the story's narrator bleakly concludes, is all too obvious: "By 1920 [the ants] will be half-way down the Amazon. 1 fix 1950 or '60 at the latest for the discovery of Europe" (10).
Writing in 1905, Wells could not have predicted that by 1950 such ants would have discovered--and been discovered by--not Europe but America. The fire ant, a South American insect introduced to the United States via the port of Mobile after the first World War, "had spread," in Carson's words, "into the suburbs of Mobile and thereafter continued an invasion that has now carried it into most of the southern states" (161). But as Carson tells the tale, it was not until the 1950s that this "invasion" gained notice and notoriety. "[W]ith the development of chemicals of broad lethal powers," she explains,
there came a sudden change in the official attitude toward the fire ant. In 1957 the United States Department of Agriculture launched one of the most remarkable publicity campaigns in its history. The fire ant suddenly became the target of a barrage of government releases, motion pictures, and government- inspired stories portraying it as a despoiler of southern agriculture and a killer of birds, livestock, and man. A mighty campaign was announced, in which the federal government in cooperation with the afflicted states would ultimately treat some 20,000,000 acres in nine southern states. (162)
One strategy by which this campaign against the ants manufactured public support is particularly salient: "The Agriculture Department sponsored a propaganda movie ... in which horror scenes were built around the fire ant's sting" (164). The hyperbolic vision of an American empire of the ants, Carson suggests, came straight from the rhetoric of science fiction movies. (3)
Though the "big bug" films of the 1950s have most frequently been read (like Silent Spring) in terms of the twin Cold War terrors of nuclear radiation and Communist sedition (4)--and though such readings find ample support in the films themselves, the most obvious example in Them! being the ants' nuclear genesis--Carson's fire ant episode demonstrates that warnings of actual insect invasion, and calls for "all-out chemical war" against the invaders (158), were also common during this period. Nor was the military idiom favored by this "campaign" arbitrary. As Edmund P. Russell III demonstrates, in the years between World War I and Silent Spring "the ability of human beings to kill both national and natural enemies on an unprecedented scale" flourished "partly because of links...
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