Green Planets by Gerry Canavan Page A

bioengineered humans working power stations at thermal vents deep underwater.
    Alan Weisman, The World Without Us (2007). Speculative nonfiction concerning what would happen to human infrastructure following the disappearance of the human race, from the near term (days, weeks, months) to geologic time (hundreds of millions of years). Draws in part from Weisman’s journalistic work in the Chernobyl zone, a “world without us” that already exists in the present.
    H. G. Wells, The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896). Vivisection horror. Environmental themes actually characterize most of Wells’s early fiction, from the pseudo-pastoral of The Time Machine (1895) to the near-miss asteroid collision of “The Star” (1897) to the climate change that causes the Martians to invade Earth in The War of the Worlds (1898). 1914’s The World Set Free depicts a human race saved from its plunderous waste of fossil fuels by the invention of atomic energy; Leo Szilard credits the book as his inspiration for the initial theorization of the nuclear bomb.
    Scott Westerfield, Uglies (2005). The occasion for the formation of this Young Adult dystopia is a social collapse brought about by energy scarcity.
    Kate Wilhelm, Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang (1976). Environmental panics collide when, in a collapsing world of pollution, climate change, and overpopulation, an isolated planned community seeking to weather the storm discovers it is universally infertile and must turn to cloning for reproduction.
    Robert Charles Wilson, Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America (2009). Set against a U.S. war in Canada with an emerging Dutch superpower over control of the thawed Northwest Passage, this inventive novel finds the people of a post-oil, post-climate-change future looking back on our era as “the Efflorescence of Oil”—the word “efflorescence” describing an evaporating of water that leaves behind a thin layer of salty detritus.
    Jeanette Winterson, The Stone Gods (1997). Thematically intertwined, self-referential stories about the historical repetition of human-caused ecological disasters, in both the past and the future.
    Gene Wolfe, The Book of the Long Sun (1993–96). Four-book series set on a generational starship in the Dying Earth setting of Wolfe’s even larger Book of the New Sun series.
    Austin Tappan Wright, Islandia (1942). Arcadian utopia located in the South Pacific.
    Ronald Wright, A Scientific Romance (1996). The sudden, inexplicable appearance of H. G. Wells’s Time Machine in a London flat facilitates a trip into a depopulated future.
    Philip Wylie, The End of the Dream (1972). Ecological catastrophe comes to America. Also noteworthy is When Worlds Collide (1933) and its sequel, After Worlds Collide (1933), in which a small number of humans flee Earth, before it is destroyed by collision with a rogue planet, to settle on Bronson Beta.
    John Wyndham, The Day of the Triffids (1951). Walking, intelligent plants take over the world. Also of interest: The Chrysalids (1955), set after an apparent nuclear holocaust that has altered the climate and mutated the biosphere.
    Karen Tei Yamashita, Through the Arc of the Rain Forest (1990). Surreal and comic magical realist novel depicting a network of ecological and capitalist disasters centering on the threatened Brazilian rain forest.
    Pamela Zoline, “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967). In the end, alas, time and entropy only run the one way.
    Film and Television
    A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001). Decline and extinction for the human race, with only our robots left behind to succeed us.
    Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). Invasive species wrecks havoc on prey lacking natural defenses.
    The Atomic Café (Jayne Loader, Kevin Raferty, and Pierce Raferty, 1982). Compilation and creative reframing of U.S. nuclear propaganda.
    Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). A human race desperate for energy sources to sustain their dying