The Age of Aquarius All Over Again by David Brooks New York Times June 11 2019

Introduction

It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.ⁱⁱ Women poured into professional anthropology, as graduate students and established kinesthesia members alike questioned the necessity of conceptualizing the evolution of humanity as driven primarily past men on the hunt.³ Rigorous scientific piece of work in cultural anthropology and primatology allowed "Adult female the Gatherer" to take her place alongside "Man the Hunter."^iv Elaine Morgan, a writer of radio shows for BBC Wales, provided 1 of the kickoff pop-evolutionary alternatives to the "Tarzanist" assumptions of many tales of human evolution. She noted: "Everything depends on context. A knife is a weapon or a tool according to whether y'all use it for disemboweling your enemy or for chopping parsley."^five Morgan imbued agency in humanity's female ancestors by adding a controversial aquatic stage to the narrative of human evolution.⁶ Living at the h2o'southward border, she suggested, may have protected early on humans during a fourth dimension of Pleistocene drought and provided them with plenty of nutrient. Substantial time in the water, she reasoned, would have left indelible marks on our bodies, which she identified in our layer of subcutaneous fat, the swirled patterns of hair on the backs of men, or the breasts of women that provide babies with a firm grip on their mothers' bodies.

Whether based in the ocean, the desert, or the forest, ecological interpretations of human evolution played a crucial part in postwar evolutionary epics of humanity'due south past.⁷ Scientists suggested our ancestors' transition from forest-dwelling apes to hunters on the open up savannah depended crucially on this same shift in ecological surround. Woods-dwelling vegetarian gorillas and peaceful chimpanzees provided powerful alternative primate models to the hierarchical baboons that roamed far beyond the protection of the copse.⁸ Cantankerous-cultural anthropological comparisons appeared to echo assumptions that members of human communities who dwelled in the forests should exist more pacific than those who lived in the open savannahs.^nine The wood, in each of these examples, provided analogical evidence for an irenic Edenic by earlier our ancestors' profound transformation into hunters in the crucible of the African savannah. These narratives also spoke to ecology's functional centrality to reconstructions of humanity'southward by after the Second World War. In the mid-1970s, this piece of cake contrast between wood and savannah met with a crucial difficulty when Jane Goodall's research group at Gombe realized chimpanzees killed each other too. According to National Geographic, they were capable of war.¹⁰

In imagining alternative possible futures for humanity, writers of speculative science and scientific discipline fiction thus constitute in the aquatic a realm of conceptual possibility that potentially avoided the violence of terrestrial landscapes.¹¹ The United states Navy had certainly tried to militarize the oceans, even going so far as to call their depths "inner" space, a direct parallel to the interest of the air force with the exploration of "outer" space. In 1963, Vice Admiral William F. Radborn suggested that in a decade, the navy would operate submarines that could conduct research at a depth of twenty,000 feet and diminutive-powered transponders to communicate under sea water ice, and officers would piece of work at depths of 1800 feet for a month at a time. An editor of the Boston Earth added, "were it non for the author … the description of what the United States armada will be like 10 years from at present would seem like a page out of science fiction."¹² Yet the promise of the oceans as a limitless frontier somewhen paled in comparison to the vastness of infinite and excitement over the Apollo missions.¹³

In deep evolutionary time, our nigh distant ancestors had crawled out of the salty brine that spawned all planetary life, long before they encountered the arid savannah.¹⁴ Fifty-fifty without the aquatic ape, oceans thus offered a reminder of humanity's epic primordial past. Every bit Rachel Carson wrote in her immensely popular The Sea Around Us, "as life itself began in the sea, then each of us begins his individual life in a miniature bounding main within his female parent's womb, and in the stages of his embryonic evolution repeats the steps by which his race evolved, from gill-breathing inhabitants of a h2o world to creatures able to live on land."¹⁵ Although the far afar ancestors of the homo lineage had left the ocean millions of years agone, Carson noted, humanity had slowly been finding its manner dorsum to the sea. Humans "could not physically re-enter the ocean equally the seals and whales had done," just using their ingenuity and reason, they could "re-enter it mentally and imaginatively."^sixteen Carson wrote with a sure pen nigh the charismatic wonders of the ocean, including the origins of life itself in the murky, wet past; "the unending darkness" of the deep abyss; and the "inverted 'timber line'" below which vegetation cannot grow.¹⁷ Throughout the book, she too wove a message of hope and cyclical renewal. Even "the very iciness of the winter sea" promised a new spring, only as particles of material were "used over and once again, first past ane creature, and so by another."¹⁸

Countercultural associations of the oceans added to their draw as an alternative to normative terrestrial conceptions of intelligence and sexuality.¹⁹ Dolphins entered the public spotlight every bit the aquatic equivalent of primates—an intelligent species capable of recognizing themselves in mirrors and communicating through audio.²⁰ Connections between women and water have a long history, from mermaids to synchronized swimming.²¹ More than important for Morgan may have been local folkloric transformative traditions that featured female selkies, who could take both human and seal forms.²² Edifice on these tropes, Morgan crafted a feminist, aquatic account of humanity's evolutionary by equally an antidote to stories nearly the transformative ability of men on the savannah. She wrote of a by in which the primal characteristics that made us human—our bipedal posture, our capacity for spoken language and facility with tools, our power to cooperate with others—arose when our human ancestors partially adapted to life in the intertidal zone. With the added buoyancy of water, Morgan suggested, they learned to wade in search of food afterward the plentiful supplies of the forest vanished. They wielded rocks to crack open shellfish. With most of their bodies surrounded by water, they lost their fur, gained subcutaneous fat to protect against hypothermia, and over time developed the capacity to communicate verbally. Morgan'southward aquatic apes were more cooperative than the savannah beasts of anthropological tomes, as their environmental required gathering proteinaceous creatures rather than hunting them. Even if readers enjoyed her sarcastic rejoinder to life on the savannah, still, most assumed her reconstruction of humanity's past was mere theorize. In The Descent of Woman, Morgan suggestively reinterpreted existing paleoanthropological information merely supplied no new evidence of her own beyond appeals to readers' common sense experience of their own bodies. Practicing evolutionists deemed her aquatic theory the worst kind of pseudoscience (fig. ane).²³

Figure 1.

Elaine Morgan reasoned in Descent of Woman (1972) that extended exposure to h2o over generations would have acquired human being ancestors to lose their body hair, learn to walk upright thank you to the added buoyancy of the water, and gain a layer of subcutaneous fat to help regulate internal torso temperatures. This drawing accompanied a thoroughgoing critique of Morgan's arguments and her show cowritten past a paleoanthropologist and a physician: Lowenstein and Zihlman, "Watered Down Version" (cit. n. 23). (Illustration by Bill Prochnow.)

For authors of scientific discipline fiction, however, oceans continued to provide an ecologically plausible alternative to humanity's own past and a fruitful space for speculation about its future. This essay examines two American science fiction novels—Kurt Vonnegut's Galápagos and Joan Slonczewski's A Door into Ocean, both published in the mid-1980s—that create a afar future for humanity defined by water.²⁴ Vonnegut and Slonczewski grounded their narratives in electric current biological theory, paleobiological and microbiological, respectively. Both imagined life after an apocalypse of human causation. In Vonnegut's darkly humorous account, human development continues but only when people are stripped of weapons and other forms of technology. Slonczewski maintained a fierce optimism in her writing as she forged a link betwixt women and nature to envision a future in which (some) humans learned to live in harmony with the body of water rather than seeking to conquer it. Both books served to warn readers of the hubris inherent to capitalism run amok.

Although it hardly comes as a surprise that authors of scientific discipline fiction, fifty-fifty evolutionary sci-fi, worked to make their narratives scientifically accurate, both books would have been classified in the 1980s equally "soft" (rather than "difficult") science fiction—a term frequently accompanied past a healthy dose of derision. Science fiction author and critic Charles Platt, for example, vilified the rise of such "New Wave" science fiction, lamenting that "the torso of literature I love has been doped up and defiled, draped in imitation finery and turned into a flabby old hooker smelling of festering lesions and cheap perfume."²⁵ He lamented the loss of the brash, rebellious experience of the science fiction he had read and fallen in love with equally an boyish boy in the 1950s. In its identify, he suggested, came a "new 'soft' scientific discipline fiction" that verged on fantasy. Due to the popularity of Richard Adams's Watership Downwardly and J. R. R. Tolkien'southward iii-volume Lord of the Rings, followed past novels by Robert Heinlein, Robert Howard, Frank Herbert, Terry Brooks, and others, Platt posited that fantasy had become a genre in its own right.²⁶ At the same fourth dimension, women had created a new strand of science fiction with an "admirable" "concern for human values," he wrote. The success of Joan Vinge, Vonda McIntyre, Ursula Le Guin, Joanna Russ, Kate Wilhelm, and Carol Emshwiller had helped erode "science fiction's i groovy strength that had distinguished it from all other fantastic literature: its implicit claim that events described could actually come true."²⁷ At the root of his jeremiad was a conventionalities that the commercial success of science fiction starting in the 1960s produced a glut of mediocre writing, all of which sold brilliantly and made information technology hard to detect any true emerging talent.²⁸ Too ofttimes, he deemed, authors invented the impossible, and bent the known rules of the physical world to save themselves from working out rigorously scientific mechanisms. (His complaints echoed those mounted by practicing anthropologists against Morgan'south aquatic ape.)

Platt's historical taxonomy of the genre mirrored the rising currency of "soft science" equally a term used to depict nonlaboratory social scientific discipline research, from anthropology to homo biology.²⁹ All the same, his label of some science fiction as "soft," and therefore unconcerned with plausibility, elided the careful attention many of these authors paid to contemporary social science. Platt's categories thus implicitly reflected the denigration of the social sciences as scientific discipline, rather than a lack of engagement with their precepts or analytical methods.³⁰ For technological optimists in the 1980s, the progress of science and engineering science could and should be outside the political realm. Good science—"existent" science—they believed, was apolitical, especially when it came to theories of human nature.³¹ With the do good of hindsight, nosotros tin encounter more hands that authors of soft science fiction in the 1980s, like Vonnegut and Slonczewski, took world building to exist serious scientific work incommunicable to separate from moral import.³²

In their easily, aquatic landscapes provided a powerful means of challenging traditional accounts of human evolution that correlated arid savannahs with all-male hunting groups, while still adhering to the biological principle that through natural choice concrete environments inexorably shaped the creatures inhabiting them.³³ Alternatives to traditional evolutionary narratives took a diverseness of forms. Vonnegut used Galápagos to highlight the importance of contingency to the normal performance of evolution. In A Door into Ocean, Slonczewski took inspiration from the resonance between new-wave science fiction and second-wave feminism that immune authors to explore alternatives to the techno-utopian worlds imagined for women by male visioneers.³⁴ (Ironically, although Platt lamented the demise of techno-utopian factualism, he—like Vonnegut and Slonczewski—feared the destructive potential of rampant capitalism, admitting in its short-term chapters to ruin the core of science fiction by catering too heavily to new audiences.) Alien ecological landscapes thus provided a plausible scientific mechanism for imagining a universal humanity governed by anarchistic politics, genders, and economies. The power of the feminine aquatic stemmed not from its association with a single set of affective connotations, but from its generative intellectual slipperiness.

Kurt Vonnegut's Furry Feminine Future

In Kurt Vonnegut'south cynical guide to the evolution of humanity, Galápagos, 1985 marked the year when a global economic crisis would cripple the earth's infrastructure. A devastating strain of bacteria that consumed human egg cells would render all but a handful of women infertile. Just a few humans would escape this fate, having been marooned on the Galápagos Islands past a series of unlikely events, beyond the reach of other people and therefore the spread of the disease. This small handful of women and a unmarried homo thus became the progenitors of all time to come humanity. The story is told from the perspective of the ghost of Leon Trout a million years in the future, having observed the fate of humanity in the meantime.³⁵ In retrospect, Trout deemed the twentieth century the "era of big brains." Our brains acquired us endless amounts of trouble, he repeats throughout the book. Every bit humans had adapted to life in the water, natural selection had shrunk our brains and transformed our hands, which had one time been and so dexterous, into flippers. Humans became pacific because we could neither anticipate how to make weapons nor use them. Humanity's evolutionary fate every bit sleek, hirsuite, "innocent fisherfolk," had been every bit much a thing of adventure as of fitness.³⁶

After the Second Earth War, Vonnegut spent five years studying anthropology at the University of Chicago. Although his anthropological musings often found their way into his fiction, he never published as an anthropologist. When Vonnegut and his second wife, Jill Krementz, visited the Galápagos in 1981, he reported being "fascinated by the island's natural life." He added: "I spent as much time at that place as Charles Darwin did—two weeks. Nosotros had advantages that Darwin didn't accept. Our guides all had graduate degrees in biology. Nosotros had motorboats to move usa effectually the islands more easily than rowboats could when Darwin visited the Galapagos in the 1830s. And, virtually of import, nosotros knew Darwin'south theory of development, and Darwin didn't when he was there."³⁷

Soon afterwards returning, Vonnegut gave a lecture in New York City at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine. (According to their online material, the cathedral is the length of half dozen blue whales.) Vonnegut spoke near the strange creatures he had seen on the Galápagos Islands—specially the blue-footed boobies who in courtship iteratively and solemnly raised each beautiful, vivid foot to show their prospective mates. He idea nigh the millions of years needed to create such natural intricacies; this was a span of fourth dimension vast to us but a mere wink in nature's eye. However long it had taken for nature to craft humans, he feared nosotros were running out of time. Death itself was erstwhile, he told his audience, but the scale of our destructive capacity threatened our very existence every bit a species. The previous night, Vonnegut reported, he had dreamed of meeting the descendants of humanity in a m years. In his dream, he asked these survivors how humanity had managed to persist for so long. Their reply? "Past preferring life over expiry for themselves and others at every opportunity, even at the expense of being dishonored."³⁸

3 years subsequently, Vonnegut published Galápagos, a longer reflection on what would be required for humanity to survive for a million years—orders of magnitude longer than his earlier thought experiment. In Vonnegut's fantasy, an sick-fated celebrity cruise to the renowned islands strands a scattering of lost souls on the entirely fictional Santa Rosalia. The members of this genetic bottleneck are rich, poor, likeable, detestable, and ethnically diverse. Vonnegut took great care to institute the truly random circumstances that led each individual to a place on Bahía de Darwin, humanity's new ark to the future.

Vonnegut based his evolutionary theory in Galápagos on current trends in biological thought, peculiarly those consort by Stephen Jay Gould in the pages of Natural History magazine.³⁹ Development, for Vonnegut, was necessarily contingent and inconsistently progressive, and information technology changed its focus in fits and starts. As humanity regressed to a more animalistic state, nosotros also became more than peaceful, retreating to a small-brained primeval innocence.^xl (Leon Trout called this progress indeed.) The genetic bottleneck of humanity created past the small handful of survivors in turn creates substantial genetic drift, so that future generations of humans resemble those few individuals left to repopulate Earth. One of the survivors includes a young girl, the beginning child built-in on Santa Rosalia, who had a fine pelt of dark hair—a genetic consequence of her grandmother'due south survival of the atomic flop in Hiroshima. Trout notes sagely that humans almost certainly would have become hairier somewhen, only this happy circumstance speeded the process considerably. Contingency, every bit manifested in genetic migrate as well as punctuated evolutionary changes, was key to paleobiologists' reimagining of gimmicky evolutionary theory in the 1980s, especially for Gould.⁴¹

Gould hoped to break downwardly popular assumptions that evolutionary fitness somehow meant that the all-time or brightest individuals were necessarily those who left the nigh offspring. Sometimes, he reasoned, individuals survived and reproduced because they happened to be in the right place at the right time. Selection could favor, subsequently all, ridiculous traits. The "Irish gaelic Elk" (so named despite the fact that it is neither an elk nor exclusively Irish) constituted 1 of Gould'south favorite examples of this phenomenon.⁴² Vonnegut discusses the Irish elk explicitly, linking the fate of their antlers to that of human brains. The large size of homo brains, co-ordinate to Vonnegut, had brought humans nothing just misery and had come to imperil our very existence. Edifice on long-standing tropes in the colloquial scientific discipline literature of the mean solar day, Vonnegut suggested that humans' capacity to anticipate, manufacture, and use nuclear weapons had outstripped our social savvy in maintaining peace once they existed.⁴³ "Tin it be doubted," the ghostly narrator asks, "that 3-kilogram brains were in one case nigh fatal defects in the evolution of the human race?"⁴⁴ He returns once more and again to this theme—the very trait that assured our survival, on which humans judged their value and self-worth, was the very same trait that needed to be tamed to ensure the survival of the species. Vonnegut's satire feels peculiarly dire in these moments. To survive biologically, we would need to sacrifice all literature and Beethoven'south 9th Symphony (a indicate that Vonnegut repeated eight times over the course of the novel).

Yet if Vonnegut actually had read Gould every bit closely as he claimed, he probable knew that evolutionists no longer propagated this mono-causal tale of the Irish elk's extinction. The exceedingly big Pleistocene deer exhibited behemothic antlers that were so big equally to be functionally useless in battle. Gould had suggested they attracted female person mates and and so were useful in and of themselves, without having to exist twisted or turned, much less bashed against the antlers of another male person.⁴⁵ Despite modern sociology, Gould argued that the species later on went extinct considering of changing climatic conditions, not the size of the antlers. He also argued vociferously that if scientists were to replay the tape of life, it would never turn out the same.⁴⁶ Chance events would intercede. Life would turn out differently. This opens the possibility that for Vonnegut, humanity might not accept been as doomed as the narrator—already reconciled to humanity'south fate equally fisherfolk—insisted.

That humanity had any futurity, hirsuite or otherwise, looked rather dour once the handful of remaining people had been marooned on Santa Rosalia. They included newborn Akiko Hiroguchi, her mother Hisako Hiroguchi, Selena MacIntosh, Mary Hepburn (historic period threescore-one), Captain Adolf Heist (age threescore-six), and six Kanka-bono women from the mountains of Republic of ecuador who kept their names hidden from the rest of the grouping. Equally the helm was "a racist," Vonnegut wrote, he was "not at all fatigued to Hisako or her furry daughter, and to the lowest degree of all to the Indian women."⁴⁷ It was Mary whose marvel was piqued past her big brain and desire to know "whether a adult female could be impregnated by another one on a desert island without any technical help."⁴⁸

Leon Trout narrates the scene equally if it took place in a pic: "Mary Hepburn, as though hypnotized, dips her correct index finger into herself and then into an eighteen-year-onetime Kanka-bono woman, making her significant."⁴⁹ She then repeats this five more times, and all half-dozen women diameter children. When Mary had first stepped human foot on Santa Rosalia (150 pages earlier), she stumbled, abrading her duke. A pocket-size finch landed on that same finger and gently drank the droplets of claret that had appeared. In fact, this was how she had known they were marooned on Santa Rosalia—Geospiza difficilis, that queer, bloodsucking finch lived merely there. (Information technology seems fitting that finch speciation should play at least a bit role in any novel about evolution in the Galápagos, even if the species itself does not be.⁵⁰)

Vonnegut's evolutionary vision could exist read every bit darkly optimistic. Certainly, humanity at the end of his million-yr glance into the future had managed to survive the ravages of natural selection, adventure mutation, and farthermost local weather condition (admitting in newly aquatic form). By returning to the ocean and abandoning military adventurism, humanity might yet survive enlarged, iii-kilogram brains.⁵¹ Simply at what cost? Humans had reverted to their animalistic, primordial past. Any attempt to escape back to a terrestrial existence was met by those ravenous egg-eating leaner.

Shortly after publication, Gould read Galápagos rapidly, over ane weekend. He wrote to Vonnegut the post-obit Monday, praising the novel as "beautifully accurate" in its delineation of evolution's quirkiness and punctuated progress. Gould approved of the novel'south accent on contingency equally inherent to the procedure of evolution and would on occasion assign it in his courses. Elsewhere, Gould would suggest, "In Vonnegut'due south novel, the pathways of history may be broadly constrained by such general principles as natural selection, but contingency has so much maneuvering room within these boundaries that any particular outcome owes more to a quirky series of antecedent events than to channels set by nature's laws."⁵² Vonnegut replied immediately, admitting that Gould had been constantly on his mind every bit he wrote.⁵³ Like Gould, he had sought to undermine sociobiological arguments that implied the about successful members of society had attained their positions because they were smarter or more attractive.⁵⁴ In Galápagos, people had non survived because they were more fit than their neighbors; instead, they survived thank you to sheer take chances.

Reflecting on his science fiction writing, Vonnegut after claimed he constitute information technology difficult because he needed to attend to 2 things at once—he sought to both "hold the reader emotionally" and "make sense scientifically." Vonnegut ensured that Galápagos was "responsible" in its presentation of evolution and natural selection. Good science fiction, for Vonnegut, made people rethink the capacity of science to solve some kinds of questions only not others. He added quickly, "Information technology's a lot easier if you're not funny."⁵⁵

Joan Slonczewski's Symbiotic Sharers of Shora

When Joan Slonczewski read Frank Herbert'southward Dune, she was inspired to write her ain ecological science fiction—she believed she could do better, scientifically and politically.⁵⁶ Slonczewski trained as a microbiologist and began educational activity at Kenyon Higher in Gambier, Ohio, in 1984. She published A Door into Ocean a yr later, although she had been working on it for some time. The students who worked in her laboratory would come up to refer to her, with affection and awe, as "The Sloncz," and appreciated her use of science fiction in her science classes. Slonczewski set A Door into Ocean in the watery world of Shora, abode to an aquatic, decentralized, nonviolent, all-female Sharer gild. Shora was the antonym of Herbert's desert planet where harsh environmental conditions bred a race of natural warriors. Slonczewski's ecofeminist arroyo fit well into an established genre populated by authors similar Margaret Atwood, Ursula Le Guin, and Marge Piercy, who combined second-wave feminism with environmental concerns.⁵⁷ Similar trends characterized contemporaneous scholarship in the humanities, where deep environmental and feminism combined in Carolyn Merchant'southward Death of Nature.⁵⁸ Whereas Merchant sought to certificate the early modern slaughter of nature in feminine guise at the hands of machines and masculine reductionism, Slonczewski resurrected feminine nature in futuristic form on an alien planet. Like Merchant, Slonczewski mobilized femininity as a foil to the extractive violence she saw equally characterizing contemporary political and economic arrangements in "the West."

In her work as a microbiologist, Slonczewski explored the interior workings of the gram-negative leaner Escherichia coli, commonly found in the intestines of mammals. Human digestive wellness symbiotically depends on some strains of Eastward. coli, although other strains can cause major foodborne illnesses. Her inquiry at the time of A Door into Sea's publication explored how these mutual leaner maintain a consistent internal environs, especially pH levels.⁵⁹ The thought that symbiotic relationships existed between organisms with radically different evolutionary origins was hardly new in the 1980s, only the importance of symbiosis as a process in the history of life on Earth was steadily gaining traction among both biologists and colloquial science readers.⁶⁰

Slonczewski used A Door into Sea to accost questions of diversity and cooperation in the living earth. Herbert had created an ecologically distinct desert planet in which to base his ballsy story. Yet no living ecology could exist with such paltry species variety, she insisted. (When David Lynch directed his recounting of the Dune story, released in 1984, he ventured to the quartz fields of the Samalayuca Desert in Mexico, known for its spectacular sandscapes, and lying only an 60 minutes south of El Paso. Lynch deemed the area insufficiently "pristine" to represent the desolate world Herbert had envisioned and hired 300 men to remove all rocks, shrubs, and cacti from the 25 square miles where he would exist filming.⁶¹) Slonczewski bridled, too, at Herbert's normalization of aggression in his depiction of humans every bit born warriors, hardened by circumstance and surround. At the other end of the political spectrum, she constitute herself every bit disappointed by Le Guin'southward Word for World is Wood, where the peaceful, idyllic creechies, a far distant descendent of human space travelers, were able to repel their colonial invaders (another species of humans) only afterwards adopting the violence of their oppressors.⁶² Slonczewski saw in the history of colonialism a similar tragedy, where local leaders had to go westernized to sally as national heroes.⁶³

In search of an alternative to Dune's dry vistas, Slonczewski chose an aquatic surroundings.⁶⁴ She had read Morgan's Descent of Woman and was impressed with the notion that fish have excellent protein composition for human brain evolution.⁶⁵ Additionally, her imagination had been sparked by the pages of National Geographic, where she read nigh the Ama of Nihon, women who pigeon without SCUBA gear in search of mollusks.⁶⁶ In A Door into Ocean, readers starting time meet the Sharers who live on an aquatic moon called Shora, through the eyes of another culture, the Valans who occupy the terrestrial planet Valedon, effectually which Shora orbits. Whereas the Valans are miners, rock shapers, capitalist, and militaristic, the Sharers are aquaculturalists, irenic, and all female. Regarded past the Valans as "pre-stone age," the Sharers are marked, likewise, by their lavender or deep violet peel color. Sharers live on floating rafts that sit atop the ocean, shaping their domicile structures from ocean silk, and diving to great depths to notice and cultivate food. The royal color of the Sharers' skin derives from a symbiotic relationship with "breath microbes." In the novel, Slonczewski detailed how these breath microbes possessed a color-changing molecule shaped like a "ring of dots." And "when this molecule held oxygen, it turned purple, similar a calorie-free switch."⁶⁷ When it gave up its oxygen, nonetheless, it turned white. Embedded in the skin of Sharers, these molecules released oxygen at times when their host was deprived of sufficient air, allowing them to dive for upwards to fifteen minutes on a single breath—when they surfaced, their skin was quite stake. Initial impressions thus paint a moving picture of two cultures: one white, technologically advanced colonizer trading small baubles for boatloads of sea silk; and one majestic, living in symbiotic harmony with their world, and in danger of extermination.

Every bit a teenager, Slonczewski had read Margaret Mead'south Coming of Age in Samoa, and her books reverberate Mead'south delivery to fluid sexual identity, especially for women.⁶⁸ She has described her characters as "pansexual." (The transgressive erotics of mermaids held greater social relevance in the early modern menstruation, although the subversive connotations of the aquatic have never fully prodigal.⁶⁹) The gendered and racialized tropes that open A Door into Ocean slowly erode over the course of the novel. Valan visitors to Shora observe themselves changing color; at first the hollows of their cheeks look a little lavender, and and then even in bright sunlight their skin gains a vibrant violet hue as the breath microbes integrate themselves into their physiologies. Visitors could cull to remedy this state of affairs with a phalanx of antibiotics. Other physical differences are far more ingrained in each population. With the centuries of their separation, Sharers possess inner eyelids that act as natural goggles when they dive. They also can no longer copulate with males, reproducing instead through the fusion of ova from ii women bonded every bit partners. These processes, the novel makes clear, had been accelerated with the guidance of "life-shapers" and provide an early clue that the Shorans' lack of technological prowess might not be as straightforward equally it first appears.

In vitro fertilization (IVF) had go more fact than dystopian speculative fiction with the 1978 nascency of Louise Brown in Oldham Infirmary in the United Kingdom. American researchers at the time had been hard at work on a similar procedure, but Doris Del-Zio had found her hopes dashed in 1973, when Dr. Vande Wiele let the test tube with her eggs and her husband's sperm stand up out on a hospital counter, effectively stopping cell sectionalization and the procedure. She claimed that Vande Wiele had killed her baby and sued him, the infirmary, and Columbia University, where the work had taken identify; he in turn insisted he had stopped a unsafe procedure and that the concoction would take harmed and mayhap killed her. Louise Brown was born simply 1 week afterwards the American trial began. Her birth made international news, not only for the success of the process but also because, despite earlier fears that IVF babies would likely be born in some mode malformed, Louise was completely healthy. (Meanwhile, the jury institute that Dr. Vande Wiele had been at fault, merely awarded the Del-Zios just a small fraction of the damages they had demanded.) By September of 1982, 124 IVF babies had been born around the world.^lxx In the intervening years, the media hubbub over IVF had died downward considerably. Slonczewski raised the political stakes past imagining a globe in which the cold metallic of the laboratory was replaced by the botanical warmth of the Shorans' life-shaping chambers, where they could craft an embryo through the fusion of eggs.

Narratively, Slonczewski interwove two parallel stories throughout the novel—a honey story between a Valan and a Sharer, and a chronicle of the fates of their respective cultures. Spinel and Lystra learn to respect each other'due south strengths and weaknesses. Valans and Sharers come to a mutually beneficial agreement regarding the resources of Shora. To counter the Valans' weapons, the Sharers offer passive resistance. Some Sharers accept their ain lives rather than remain captives. When the Valans imprison Sharer children, they let them remain captive. Sharer children too join their elders on hunger strikes in protest of the Valans' armed forces presence on their planet. They become to know the Valan soldiers, successfully breaking their resolve to fire on unarmed Sharers. As events go more than heated, they even offering themselves for execution, stepping in front of a firing squad bent on shooting imprisoned Sharers, and thus requiring the already hesitant Valan soldiers to impale even more people in carrying out their orders. As crucial to the plot, a scattering of "life-sharers" alter the jiff microbes rendering them resistant to antibiotics. The inevitable spread of purple through the soldiers' bodies leaves them visibly marked past their experiences in Shora. If the imperial color of their skin served as an analogy for race, Slonczewski's narrative demonstrated the biological arbitrariness of any such physical mark. This physical transformation also reinforces the Valans' increasing belief that the Sharers possess far more than scientific skill than they initially had thought.

A telling passage tardily in the volume between Siderite, a Valan scientist who has lived on Shora for years to understand their life-shaping skills, and Realgar, head of the Valan military forces, explains a fleck more about the history of the moon. "What sort of people are probable to develop methods of confrontation which exclude violence?" Siderite poses to Realgar, who responds: "People who take no weapons." Siderite waves his response away: "The first tools man invented were knives and arrows. Remember again. Who were the Sharers?" Realgar later replies, "A people whose weapons are too deadly to be used."⁷¹ In this substitution, Slonczewski flips reader expectations (although to be fair, there are plenty of hints earlier in the book). The Shorans had become peaceful because they had been scientifically advanced.⁷² In the words of 1 Valan who had spent considerable time on Shora, the residents were "post-metal age." For Slonczewski, radical pacifism could succeed only in a society committed to nonviolent resistance, where members refused to share a fate with others if they were unwilling to accept that fate for themselves, besides. Writing during the Cold State of war, she lamented that Americans considered it unpatriotic to talk of peace and thought citizens too easily dismissed pacifism as a "fairy tale." She especially disapproved of narratives in which white saviors (Dune again) arrived to save the planet, or indeed even the universe.⁷³ The Shorans' strategy of passive resistance ultimately found sympathetic ears among the Valans. By the end of A Door into Body of water, not merely had the Sharers scuttled Valan control, but key members of the Valan war machine had internalized their strategic disobedience.

Although the showtime settlers to Shora had the capacity to wreak death upon unwelcome visitors, their modern sisters no longer remember how to construct such bioweapons. For Slonczewski, then, the real ability of passive resistance comes not from mutual fright but from the Valans' realization that Shora and Valedon shared the same fate. In a confrontation between Merwen, a Sharer, and her captor Realgar, she tells him, "When you come to see that your survival is inseparable and indistinguishable from mine, then we both will win." This strategy works because the Valans brainstorm to meet their own position as under the command of a much larger military power that is similar to what they have forced upon the Sharers. Their mutual survival is very much connected later all.

Slonczewski uses the watery world of Shora to demonstrate the potential sympathetic connections between pacifism, feminism, and environmentalism. Unlike Vonnegut, Slonczewski approached her Shoran subjects with sincere optimism, conceptualizing her novel every bit an existence proof for the kind of earth she saw around her. Nonviolent resistance did work. Feminism was powerful. Thoughtful, collaborative science could lead to breakthroughs in humanity's capacity to live in greater harmony with the environment.

Notes

^one Regna Darnell, Invisible Genealogies: A History of American Anthropology (Lincoln, Nebr., 2001), 322.

² James Rado and Gerome Ragni, lyrics; Galt MacDermot, music, Hair: The American Tribal Love-Stone Musical (1967). In the original off-Broadway release of Hair, the grapheme Claude was a space conflicting.

³ Donna Jeanne Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Scientific discipline (New York, N.Y., 1989).

⁴ Richard B. Lee and Irven DeVore, eds., Human the Hunter (Chicago, Sick., 1968); Sally Linton, "Woman the Gatherer: Male Bias in Anthropology," in Women in Cross-cultural Perspective, ed. S. East. Jacobs (Urbana, Ill., 1971), 9–21; Nancy Tanner and Adrienne Zihlman, "Women in Evolution, Part 1, Innovation and Selection in Human Origins," Signs 1 (1976): 585–608.

⁵ Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman (1972; repr., London, 1985), 156. On the opening of the ocean to humanity's gaze in the 1950s, see Helen Rozwadowski, "From Danger Zone to Globe of Wonder: The 1950s Transformation of the Ocean'southward Depths," Coriolis 4 (2013): 1–xx.

^six Morgan first came across this idea in Desmond Morris, The Naked Ape: A Zoologist'south Written report of the Human Animal (New York, N.Y., 1967), 43–5, as Morris discussed Sir Alister Hardy's proposal that humanity might have had a heretofore unrecognized aquatic past; Alister Hardy, "Was Man More Aquatic in the By?" New Scientist, 17 March 1960, 642–five. On the narrative conventions of evolutionary histories as heroic tales, come across Misia Landau, "Human Evolution as Narrative," Amer. Scient. 72 (1984): 262–8; and Landau, Narratives of Human Evolution (New Oasis, Conn., 1991).

^vii Nasser Zakariya, A Final Story: Science, Myth, and Beginnings (Chicago, Ill., 2017); Erika Lorraine Milam, Creatures of Cain: The Chase for Human Nature in Common cold War America (Princeton, N.J., 2019).

⁸ Donna Haraway, "The Politics of Being Female: Primatology Is a Genre of Feminist Theory," part 3 in Primate Visions (cit. n. iii), 279–382; Susan Sperling, "The Troop Trope: Birdie Behavior every bit a Model System in the Postwar Catamenia," in Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives, ed. Angela Creager, Elizabeth Lunbeck, and Norton Wise (Durham, N.C., 2007), 73–89.

⁹ Julian Steward, Theory of Civilization Modify: The Methodology of Multilinear Evolution (Urbana, Sick., 1955); Marston Bates, The Forest and the Sea: A Look at the Economy of Nature and the Ecology of Man (New York, Due north.Y., 1960). In anthropology, run across, for case, Colin M. Turnbull, The Forest People (New York, N.Y., 1962); and Turnbull, The Mount People (New York, N.Y., 1972).

^ten Jane Goodall, "Life and Expiry at Gombe," National Geographic, May 1979, 592–621.

¹¹ On the long fascination with forests every bit a wild precursor to civilization in Western idea, run into Robert Pogue Harrison, Forests: The Shadow of Civilization (Chicago, Ill., 1992). On the role of oceanic cetaceans in Common cold War imagination, see D. Graham Burnett, The Sounding of the Whale: Scientific discipline and Cetaceans in the Twentieth Century (Chicago, Ill., 2012).

¹² Vice Admiral William F. Raborn, "The Navy's Part in Nuclear Age: Exploring 'Inner' Infinite," Boston Earth, 25 Feb 1963, ten.

^xiii Helen Rozwadowski, "Arthur C. Clarke and the Limitations of the Body of water as a Frontier," Environ. Hist. 17 (2012): 578–602; Neil Maher, Apollo in the Historic period of Aquarius (Cambridge, Mass., 2017); Michael J. Neufeld, ed., Spacefarers: Images of Astronauts and Cosmonauts in the Heroic Age Era of Spaceflight (Washington, DC, 2013); Kelly Moore, Disrupting Science: Social Movements, American Scientists, and the Politics of the Military machine, 1945–1975 (Princeton, Due north.J., 2008).

^fourteen Stefan Helmreich, Alien Ocean: Anthropological Voyages in Microbial Seas (Berkeley, Calif., 2009). These associations continue to reflect through recent science fiction narratives. In Gravity, directed by Alfonso Cuarón (2013; Burbank, Calif.: Warner Bros. Entertainment, 2014), DVD, Sandra Bullock is reborn to a new life as she staggers out of the ocean after her harrowing space incubation and splashdown into the watery depths.

¹⁵ Rachel Carson, The Ocean Around U.s.a. (1951; repr., London, 2014), xx.

^sixteen Ibid., 21.

¹⁷ Ibid., 65, 81. Meet besides Jacques-Yves Cousteau, with Frédéric Dumas, The Silent World (New York, N.Y., 1953).

¹⁸ Carson, The Sea (cit. n. xv), 46, 38.

^xix D. Graham Burnett, "A Listen in the H2o," Orion Magazine, May–June 2010, 38–51; John C. Lilly, Man and Dolphin (New York, N.Y., 1961).

²⁰ D. Graham Burnett, "Shots Across the Bow," chap. 6 in The Sounding (cit. n. 11), 517–645; run into also Leo Slizard, The Voice of the Dolphins, and Other Stories (New York, N.Y., 1961); Arthur C. Clarke, Dolphin Island: A Story of the People of the Bounding main (New York, N.Y., 1963); Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (1979; repr., New York, N.Y., 1981); and Alexander Jablokov, A Deeper Bounding main (New York, N.Y., 1992). In Stanisław Lem's Solaris (1961; repr., New York, Due north.Y., 1970), the planetary ocean itself is a self-aware, intelligent entity.

²¹ Astrida Neimanis, "Hydrofeminism: Or, On Condign a Trunk of Water," in Undutiful Daughters: New Directions in Feminist Thought and Practice, ed. Henriette Gunkel, Chrysanthi Nigianni, and Fanny Söderbäck (New York, N.Y., 2012), 85–99.

²² See, for example, Rosalie Chiliad. Fry, Kid of the Western Isles (London, 1957), a fantasy novel for children that John Sayles would later use as the basis for his film The Underground of Roan Inish (1994; Culver City, Calif.: Sony Pictures Habitation Entertainment, 2000), DVD.

²³ Erika Lorraine Milam, "Dunking the Tarzanists: Elaine Morgan and the Aquatic Ape Theory," in Outsider Scientists: Routes to Innovation in Biology, ed. Oren Harman and Michael R. Dietrich (Chicago, Ill., 2013), 223–47; Jerold Lowenstein and Adrienne Zihlman, "The Wading Ape: A Watered-Down Version of Human Development," Oceans 13 (1980): 3–6; Ian Tattersall and Niles Eldredge, "Fact, Theory, and Fantasy in Human being Paleontology," Amer. Scient. 65 (1977): 204–11, on 207.

²⁴ Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos (1985; repr., New York, Northward.Y., 1999); Joan Slonczewski, A Door into Ocean (1985; repr., New York, North.Y., 1986).

²⁵ Charles Platt, "The RAPE of Scientific discipline Fiction," Science Fiction Eye, July 1989, 44–9, on 45. Meet also Pamela Sargent's response in her introduction to Women of Wonder: The Gimmicky Years: Science Fiction past Women from the 1970s to the 1990s, ed. Sargent (Orlando, Fla., 1995), three–6.

²⁶ Richard Adams, Watership Down (New York, N.Y., 1972); J. R. R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring (Boston, Mass., 1954); Tolkien, The Two Towers (Boston, Mass., 1954); Tolkien, The Return of the Male monarch (Boston, Mass., 1955).

²⁷ Platt, "The RAPE," (cit. n. 25), 46 (accent in the original); Joan Vinge, The Snow Queen (New York, N.Y., 1980); Vonda McIntyre, Dreamsnake (New York, Due north.Y., 1978); Ursula Le Guin, A Magician of Earthsea (Berkeley, Calif., 1968); Le Guin, Left Hand of Darkness (New York, North.Y., 1969); Le Guin, The Dispossessed (New York, Northward.Y., 1974), Le Guin, The Discussion for Globe is Wood (New York, North.Y., 1976), among many others; Joanna Russ, The Female Man (New York, Due north.Y., 1975); Kate Wilhelm, Where Tardily the Sweet Birds Sang (New York, N.Y., 1976).

²⁸ See besides Amanda Rees, "From Technician'due south Extravaganza to Logical Fantasy: Science and Society in John Wyndham's Postwar Fiction, 1951–1960," in this volume.

²⁹ Based on searches in JSTOR and Ngram Viewer, both "difficult science" and "soft science" existed in before decades, but they increased in frequency as belittling terms in the 1960s.

³⁰ Mark Solovey and Hamilton Cravens, eds., Common cold War Social Science: Knowledge Production, Liberal Democracy, and Human Nature (New York, North.Y., 2012); Joel Isaac, Working Knowledge: Making the Homo Sciences from Parsons to Kuhn (Cambridge, Mass., 2012).

³¹ Ullica Segerstråle, Defenders of the Truth: The Battle for Scientific discipline in the Sociobiology Debate and Beyond (New York, N.Y., 2000); Aaron Panofsky, Misbehaving Science: Controversy and the Development of Beliefs Genetics (Chicago, Sick., 2014); David Kaiser and W. Patrick McCray, eds., Groovy Science: Knowledge, Innovation, and American Counterculture (Chicago, Ill., 2016).

³² Despite the left-leaning politics of many academics, some "hard social scientific discipline" fiction remained quite conservative in outlook; see many of the stories collected in Leon E. Stover and Harry Harrison, eds., Apeman, Spaceman (New York, N.Y., 1968); and Willis East. McNelly and Leon E. Stover, eds., Above the Human being Landscape: A Social Science Fiction Anthology (Pacific Palisades, Calif., 1972).

³³ Lee and DeVore, Human the Hunter (cit. n. 4); E. O. Wilson, Sociobiology: The New Synthesis (Cambridge, Mass., 1975); Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene (New York, N.Y., 1976).

³⁴ On the masculine precepts of science fiction every bit a genre, run across N. Katherine Hayles, How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago. Ill., 1999); and W. Patrick McCray, The Visioneers: How a Group of Elite Scientists Pursued Infinite Colonies, Nanotechnologies, and a Limitless Time to come (Princeton, N.J., 2012), 94–104.

³⁵ Leon Trout is the son of Kilgore Trout who makes an appearance in a multifariousness of other Vonnegut novels, including Breakfast of Champions, or Goodbye Bluish Mon (1973) and Timequake (1997).

³⁶ Gilbert McInnis, "Evolutionary Mythology in the Writings of Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.," Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 46 (2005): 383–96, on 391; Sheila Pardee, "Drifting and Foundering: Evolutionary Theory in Kurt Vonnegut'due south Galápagos," DQR Studies in Literature 57 (2015): 249–65.

³⁷ Quote from Herbert Mitang, "Advantages Darwin Lacked," New York Times, 6 October 1985, BR7. Meet also, Lorrie Moore, "How Humans Got Flippers and Beaks," New York Times, vi October 1985, BR7.

³⁸ Kurt Vonnegut, "Fates Worse than Death," N American Review 267 (1982): 46–9.

³⁹ Many of Gould's essays were and then reprinted in paperback collections, besides available when Vonnegut wrote: Stephen Jay Gould, Always Since Darwin: Reflections in Natural History (New York, N.Y., 1977); The Panda'due south Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History (New York, N.Y., 1980); Hen'due south Teeth and Horse's Toes (New York, N.Y., 1983); and The Flamingo'south Smile: Reflections in Natural History (New York, N.Y., 1985). On Vonnegut's reading of Gould prior to writing Galápagos, and his want to make the novel "reputable scientifically," see his interview with Hank Nuwer, "A Skull Session with Kurt Vonnegut," Southward Carolina Review 19 (1987): 2–23.

^forty Leonard Mustazza, "A Darwinian Eden: Science and Myth in Kurt Vonnegut's 'Galápagos,'" Periodical of the Fantastic in the Arts 3 (1991): 55–65; Donald Morse, "Thinking Intelligently about Scientific discipline and Art: Kurt Vonnegut'due south Galápagos and Bluebeard," Extrapolation 38 (1997): 292–303. Mustazza claims this primeval innocence as ancestral, a contention most evolutionists in the 1980s would not have endorsed. In fact, about "regressions" of humanity in science fiction led to more vehement behavior, not less. Encounter David Kirby, "Darwin on the Cutting Room Flooring: Development, Organized religion, and Moving-picture show Censorship," in this volume.

⁴¹ David Sepkoski, Rereading the Fossil Record: The Growth of Paleobiology every bit an Evolutionary Bailiwick (Chicago, Ill., 2012); Myrna Perez Sheldon, Darwin's Heretic: Stephen Jay Gould, 1941–2002 (unpublished).

⁴² Stephen Jay Gould, "The Misnamed, Mistreated, and Misunderstood Irish Elk," Ever Since Darwin (1979; repr., New York, N.Y., 2007), 79–xc.

⁴³ Run into, for example, Charles Osgood, An Culling to State of war or Give up (Urbana, Sick., 1962), 19; Konrad Lorenz, On Assailment, trans. Marjorie Kerr (New York, N.Y., 1956). On colloquial science, run into Milam, Creatures of Cain (cit. n. 7).

⁴⁴ Vonnegut, Galápagos (cit. n. 24), ix.

⁴⁵ Stephen Jay Gould, "The Origin and Office of 'Bizarre' Structures: Antler Size and Skull Size in the 'Irish Elk,' Megaloceros giganteus," Evolution 28 (1974): 191–220.

⁴⁶ David Sepkoski, "'Replaying Life's Record': Simulations, Metaphors, and Historicity in Stephen Jay Gould's View of Life," Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. Biomed. Sci. 58 (2016): 73–81.

⁴⁷ Vonnegut, Galápagos (cit. northward. 24), 289.

⁴⁸ Ibid., 292.

⁴⁹ Ibid.

⁵⁰ On Charles Darwin's voyage to the Galápagos and the role of finches in his theory of natural option, see Janet Browne, Charles Darwin: Voyaging (New York, N.Y., 1995).

⁵¹ Pardee, "Drifting and Foundering" (cit. north. 36), 265.

⁵² Stephen Jay Gould, Wonderful Life: The Burgess Shale and the Nature of History (New York, N.Y., 1989), 286.

⁵³ Letter from Stephen Jay Gould to Jill Krementz and Kurt Vonnegut, vii October 1985, Box 111, Folder 6; letter from Kurt Vonnegut to Stephen Jay Gould, 10 October 1985, Box 698, Binder 3; M1437 Stephen Jay Gould Papers, 1899–2004, Department of Special Collections & Academy Athenaeum, Stanford University Libraries, Stanford, California.

⁵⁴ Sheldon, Darwin's Heretic (cit. n. 41).

⁵⁵ Zoltán Abády-Nagi, "'Placidity,' 'Backbone,' 'Wisdom': A Talk with Kurt Vonnegut," Hungarian Studies in English language 22 (1991): 23–37.

⁵⁶ Author interview with Joan Slonczewski, 8 March 2017; Frank Herbert, Dune (Philadelphia, Penn., 1965).

⁵⁷ See as well Naomi Mitchison, Memoirs of a Spacewoman (London, 1962); Le Guin, The Word (cit. n. 27); and Marge Piercy, Adult female on the Edge of Time (New York, Due north.Y., 1976).

⁵⁸ Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution (San Francisco, Calif., 1980); Joan Cadden, "Introduction" (485–6), and editor of Focus section, "Getting Dorsum to the Decease of Nature: Rereading Carolyn Merchant," Isis 97 (2006): 485–533, including essays by Katharine Park, Gregg Mitman, Charis Thompson, and a response past Carolyn Merchant.

⁵⁹ Publications contemporary with A Door into Body of water include J. L. Slonczewski, M. W. Wilde, and S. H. Zigmond, "Phosphorylase a Activity equally an Indicator of Neutrophil Activation by Chemotactic Peptides," Journal of Cell Biological science 101 (1985): 1191–vii; J. L. Slonczewski et al., "Effects of pH and Repellent Tactic Stimuli on Protein Methylation Levels in Escherichia coli," Periodical of Bacteriology 152 (1982): 384–99; and J. L. Slonczewski et al., "pH Homeostasis in Escherichia coli: Measurement by P31 Nuclear Magnetic Resonance of Methylphosphonate and Phosphate," Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Usa 78 (1981): 6271–5.

⁶⁰ On the importance of symbiosis to the history of life on Earth, encounter Lynn Margulis, The Origin of Eukaryotic Cells (New Haven, Conn., 1970), 45–68; and James Lovelock, Gaia: A New Look at Life on Earth (New York, N.Y., 1979). Meet besides Jan Sapp, Development by Clan: A History of Symbiosis (New York, North.Y., 1994); Rachel Bricklayer Dentinger, "The Nature of Defense: Coevolutionary Studies, Ecological Interaction, and the Evolution of 'Natural Insecticides,' 1959–1983" (PhD diss., Univ. of Minnesota, 2009); and Michael Ruse, The Gaia Hypothesis: Science on a Heathen Planet (Chicago, Ill., 2013).

⁶¹ Dune, directed by David Lynch (1984; Hollywood, Calif.: Universal Studios Home Entertainment, 1984), DVD. In 2009 the Mexican authorities created the Área Natural Protegida Médanos de Samalayuca, although tourism still allows sand-boarding, 4 × 4 dune tours, and other activities.

⁶² Le Guin, The Word (cit. due north. 27). The progressive politics of several of Le Guin's earlier novels may account for Slonczewski's thwarting with The Discussion; see, for example, Left Hand, and Dispossessed (both cit. northward. 27).

⁶³ In my interview with Slonczewski, she mentioned the life of Mahatma Gandhi as an example of this process, although Frantz Fanon would seem an equally natural parallel; Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York, Northward.Y., 1963).

⁶⁴ Slonczewski provides a study guide for the volume on her website and believes science fiction, when constructed well, tin provide students with an introduction to biological concepts: "A Door into Ocean Study Guide," last updated 4 Jan 2001, http://biology.kenyon.edu/slonc/books/adoor_art/adoor_study.htm.

⁶⁵ See as well Betty Meehan, "Hunters by the Seashore," Journal of Human Development 6 (1977): 363–seventy; Meehan, "Man Does Non Live by Calories Alone: The Roles of Shellfish in a Coastal Cuisine," in Sunda and Sahul: Prehistoric Studies in Southeast Asia, Melanesia and Commonwealth of australia, ed. J. Allen, J. Golson, and R. Jones (Cambridge, Mass., 1977): 493–531.

⁶⁶ Luis Marden, "Ama: Ocean Nymphs of Japan," National Geographic, July 1971. A grandmotherly character in the book is fifty-fifty named Ama.

⁶⁷ Slonczewski, A Door (cit. n. 24), 142.

⁶⁸ Margaret Mead, Coming of Historic period in Samoa, foreword by Franz Boas (1928; repr., New York, N.Y., 1961). Mead's classic was reprinted in the early 1960s thanks to a burgeoning interest in "intellectual paperbacks." See Hayward Cirker, "The Scientific Paperback Revolution: A Traditional Medium Assumes a New Role in Science and Education," Science 140 (1963): 591–4; and Melinda Gormley, "Pulp Science: Instruction and Communication in The Paperback Book Revolution," Endeavour 40 (2016): 24–37.

⁶⁹ Run into Tara Pedersen, Mermaids and the Product of Knowledge in Early on Modern England (Farnham, United kingdom, 2015). On the legacy of mermaids, meet Harriet Ritvo, The Platypus and the Mermaid and Other Figments of the Classifying Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1997).

^seventy For a thorough account of these two families and the politics of IVF in the 1970s, see Robin Marantz Henig, Pandora'southward Baby: How the First Exam Tube Babies Sparked the Reproductive Revolution (Cold Bound Harbor, N.Y., 2004).

⁷¹ The idea that there are weapons, from gunpowder to nuclear arms, and then deadly they tin can stop war has a long history; Osgood, Culling (cit. n. 43).

⁷² Factor Abrupt, The Politics of Nonviolent Action, editorial assistance of Marina Finkelstein, 3 vols. (Boston, Mass., 1973).

⁷³ Slonczewski disapproved, too, of Herbert's invocation of a deep species-level memory and ESP among the Bene Gesserit and the Fremen; see Joan Slonczewski and Michael Levy, "Scientific discipline Fiction and the Life Sciences," in The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, ed. Edward James (Cambridge, Great britain, 2003), 174–85.

⁷⁴ Platt, "RAPE" (cit. n. 25), 45. Run across De Witt Douglas Kilgore, "On Mars and Other Heterotopias: A Conclusion," in Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space (Philadelphia, Penn., 2003), 222–38.

⁷⁵ Consider the controversial reception of Donna Haraway's Primate Visions (cit. due north. three); for example, Peter S. Rodman, "Flawed Vision: Deconstruction of Primatology and Primatologists," Curr. Anthropol. 31 (1990): 484–six; and the Sokal affair, starting with Alan Sokal, "Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformative Hermeneutics of Breakthrough Gravity," Social Text 46–47 (1996): 217–52; Sokal, "A Physicist Experiments with Cultural Studies," Lingua Franca vi (1996): 62–4; and Jennifer Ruark, "Allurement and Switch," Relate of Higher Education, 1 Jan 2017. See also Ursula Le Guin and Margaret Atwood's delightful conversation about writing and science fiction in Portland, Oregon, 23 September 2010, 52 min., available online: Literary Arts, "Ursula Le Guin & Margaret Atwood," https://literary-arts.org/archive/ursula-le-guin-margaret-atwood/ (accessed five September 2018), which includes a brief dig at Desmond Morris'due south conceptualization of humans as naked apes.

⁷⁶ Peter Dickinson, A Bone from a Dry Sea (New York, N.Y., 1999).

⁷⁷ Michael Dietrich, "Reinventing Richard Goldschmidt: Reputation, Memory, and Biography," J. Hist. Biol. 44 (2011): 693–712. See as well Greg Bear'due south Darwin'due south Radio (New York, N.Y., 1999) for his vision of what quantum evolution might wait like in the future, where the trigger for an event is a virus; the story is office Richard Preston'southward Hot Zone (New York, N.Y., 1994) and part evolutionary drama.

⁷⁸ Dickinson, Bone (cit. northward. 76), 24.

⁷⁹ Morgan's feminist theory too makes a cameo appearance in Naomi Alderman's The Power (New York, N.Y., 2016), when an anthropologist suggests that girls' new ability to produce electricity from specialized organs by their collar basic "is proof positive of the aquatic ape hypothesis—that nosotros are naked considering nosotros came from the oceans, not the jungle, where one time we terrified the deeps similar the electric eel, the electric ray" (22).

⁸⁰ Brian Fagan, Attacking Ocean: The Past, Present, and Future of Rising Bounding main Levels (London, 2013); Amitav Ghosh, The Smashing Derangement: Climatic change and the Unthinkable (Chicago, Sick., 2016); Elizabeth Deloughrey, "Submarine Futures of the Anthropocene," Comparative Literature 69 (2017): 32–44; Ursula Heise, Imagining Extinction: The Cultural Meanings of Endangered Species (Chicago, Sick., 2016). For fictional dramatizations, see Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower (New York, N.Y., 1993); Waterworld, directed by Kevin Reynolds (1995; Universal City, Calif.: Universal Pictures Domicile Entertainment, 2016), DVD. More classically, run across J. G. Ballard, The Drowned World (New York, N.Y., 1962); Ballard, The Burning World (New York, N.Y., 1964); and Mad Max, directed by George Miller (1979; Beverly Hills, Calif.: Twentieth Century Play a joke on Home Entertainment, 2016), DVD.

⁸¹ Carson, The Bounding main (cit. n. 15), 201, 208, 213.

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Source: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/703642