Pastoral science fiction

The pioneer is author Clifford Simak (1904–1988), a science fiction Grand Master whose output included stories written in the 1950s and 1960s about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity.

[1] Pastoral science fiction stories typically show a reverence for the land, its life-giving food harvests, the cycle of the seasons, and the role of the community.

This sentimental version of the American pastoral uses rural landscapes and sublimation to create a sense of nostalgia and an "illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture."

These could be new spaceships, laser weapons, artificial intelligence or other technology, which Darko Suvin collectively refers to as the "novum" element of science fiction.

Leo Marx gives an example of the busy, noisy urban life disrupting the peaceful rural realm with his recounting of Nathaniel Hawthorne working in the woods in the countryside when the quiet was shattered with the shrieking of a train locomotive whistle, showing "technology’s intrusion into the pastoral landscape.

[3] Sawyer uses English literary critic and poet William Empson's 1950 argument that the pastoral genre "compress[es] complex meaning into emblematic ecological images" of "wilderness, garden and farm" that serve as "metaphor, a poetic idea" showing the impact of technology on how we relate to nature.

Most utopian writers placed a strong emphasis on technological progress as a way to a better future; examples range from Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) to King Gillette's The Human Drift (1894) to Alexander Craig's Ionia (1898) to H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905).

However, a minority of nineteenth century utopian writers reacted with a skepticism toward, or even a rejection of, technological progress, and favored a return to a rural, agrarian simplicity.

These "pastoral utopias"[6] include William Morris's News from Nowhere (1891), about a future common ownership society based on agrarian production in small communities where people take pleasure in nature; the "Altrurian trilogy" by William Dean Howells, including A Traveler from Altruria (1894), about a faraway island of Altruria where all resources are shared and craftspeople work slowly on their work, as there is no capitalist pressure (and well as its sequels), and W.H.

Hudson's A Crystal Age, a pastoral utopia where people have no machines and only simple devices; they plow their fields with horses and use axes to chop down trees.

[7] One challenge with writing pastoral science fiction is that if the advanced, futuristic technologies are too prominent, their presence may undercut the bucolic rural setting.

Sam Jordison states that Simak "pioneered 'pastoral science-fiction'" with Way Station (1963) and earlier stories by creating scenarios in which aliens land in the isolated woods.

In the novel, the female character sees the trappings of modern life visible on the other side of the wall, such as her Mercedes-Benz car, being overgrown by plants.

In The Tommyknockers a 1987 science fiction novel by Stephen King, a woman living in a rural area in Maine discovers a spaceship that has been buried for millennia on her property.

[8] The story is set after a nuclear war, and it depicts a world where Mennonites and Amish farmers teach agricultural skills to fleeing refugees from the ruined cities.

The beleaguered United States government passes the Thirtieth Amendment, an anti-city law that limits towns to a thousand people, in an effort to prevent re-urbanization.

Post-nuclear rural life is hindered from developing further by international treaties imposed by the victorious Soviets, with an unwilling Japan charged with patrolling the West Coast.

In Fredric Brown's "The Waveries" (1945 edition of Astounding Science Fiction), aliens invade the United States and they prevent inhabitants from using electricity, so the people have to revert to a simple, rural lifestyle resembling the Amish culture, using horses, buggies and hand tools.

In the 1980s, pastoral apocalypse themes were used by women science fiction authors to explore feminist issues, such as in Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home (1985).

Canadian filmmaker Pixie Cram makes pastoral science fiction films that use a style she calls "rustic futurism", in which "systems and machines have largely broken-down, and nature inspires a new approach to old questions.

[3] In Robert A Heinlein's Red Planet (1949), teens from a Mars colony meet Martian creatures and realize that the native inhabitants are being oppressed.

Richard McKenna's "Hunter, Come Home" (March 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction) is about planet ecologies that safeguard humans.

To ensure that all young men can keep doing the manhood ritual, which is important to their culture, the government tries to terraform a nearby planet with the plan of breeding Great Russels on it.

[4] Jason W. Ellis states that James Cameron’s science fiction film Avatar “on the level of [its] narrative, re-inscribes and challenges the concept of the machine in the garden” as set out by Leo Marx and Ben-Tov.

[15] Without their computer-automated factories and robot workers, the humans have adopted a simpler agrarian lifestyle based around small communities, using a solarpunk approach in which technology such as solar-powered computers and pedal-powered vehicles are used to live sustainably.

Some works in the subgenre are set in forbidding deserts and desolate wastelands such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1999).

The rigidly controlled society, in which even social interactions are regulated, uses a combination of human gardeners and robots to grow genetically altered fruits and vegetables to provide food.

Gifford states that the post-pastoral is "best used to describe works that successfully suggest a collapse of the human/nature divide whilst being aware of the problematics involved", noting that it is "more about connection than the disconnections essential to the pastoral".

[21] Charles Siebert's Wickerby: An Urban Pastoral describes a man who splits his time between a gritty Brooklyn apartment, where the night is filled with the sounds of pigeons, starlings, and youth gangs shouting, and driving to rural Quebec to squat in an abandoned, tumbledown cabin.