Green Planets by Gerry Canavan

that central moral recognition of the Cold War—that there would be no point in firing back, even if the other side launched first. Our hero chooses life over universal death, even if he has to kill to ensure that the future gets its chance.
    Leo Szilard, “The Voice of the Dolphins” (1961). Once we learn to speak with the dolphins, they ask us to please not destroy the planet with our bombs.
    Sherri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988). Another secessionist ecotopia set in the Pacific Northwest, this one with more radical gender politics than Callenbach’s.
    Sheree R. Thomas (ed.), Dark Matter (2000) and Dark Matter: Reading the Bones (2004). Afro-futurist anthologies that each contain stories of ecological crisis, environmental justice, and environmental racism.
    Lavie Tidhar (ed.), The Apex Book of World SF (2009) and The Apex Book of World SF 2 (2012). Stories across both collections of global SF suggest the increasing indistinguishability between postcolonial theory, anticapitalism, antiglobalization, and ecocritique. Also strongly recommended along these same lines: So Long Been Dreaming (edited by Nalo Hopkinson and Uppinder Mehan, 2004).
    James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), “The Last Flight of Dr. Ain” (1969). Another mad scientist decides the only answer to the ecological crisis is to destroy the human race through a virus. “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) is also noteworthy for its refreshingly straightforward articulation of the premise of much 1970s feminist and ecofeminist works of SF —“First, let’s kill all the men.”
    J. R. R. Tolkien, The Lord of the Rings (1954). Another fantasy entry, The Lord of the Rings depicts a clash between the Brave New World of the orcs and the Arcadia of the hobbits, culminating with a snake-in-the-garden moment of attempted industrialization within Hobbiton itself.
    Karen Traviss, City of Pearl (2004). The first book in Traviss’s Wess’har Wars series of novels details competition between colonizing groups with very different cultural assumptions on the alien world Cavanaugh’s Star.
    George Turner, The Sea and Summer (1987). A future historian looks back on the society whose collapse (ours) created his own. A new edition has just been released from Gollancz.
    Jack Vance, The Dying Earth (1950). Seminal fantasy series deals with an Earth near the end of time, with a transformed climate and biosphere.
    Gordon Van Gelder (ed.), Welcome to the Greenhouse (2011). An anthology of previously unpublished stories about climate change from well-known authors across the genre.
    Jules Verne, Invasion from the Sea (1905). Verne’s last novel concerns the possibility of terraforming Africa by flooding the Sahara.
    Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos (1985). Vonnegut’s evolutionary novel sees the last fertile human beings on the planet shipwrecked on the Galápagos Islands and evolving, over millennia,into creatures much like dolphins. The next evolution of man has much-diminished cognitive capacity, but for the darkly comic Vonnegut that’s just another argument in its favor. Also of note is Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle (1963), which has civilization end as a result of man’s propensity to invent insane, destructive, and totally unnecessary devices without ever stopping to ask first if it should .
    David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest (1996). Ecological disasters abound in this important novel of the near future, which also memorably treats consumer capitalism, nuclear war, and the porousness of the human-animal boundary.
    Ian Watson, The Jonah Kit (1975). This strange but intriguing novel includes frequent trips inside the minds of whales. Fans of Watson will also enjoy his “Slow Birds” (1983), about an idyllic pastoral world that is periodically invaded by strange, metal cylinders, nuclear missiles from another dimension (ours).
    Peter Watts, Starfish (1999). Grim novel finds