Vegetarianism and Science Fiction: A History of Utopian Animal Ethics 3031383478, 9783031383472

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PALGRAVE STUDIES IN ANIMALS AND LITERATURE

Vegetarianism and Science Fiction A History of Utopian Animal Ethics Joshua Bulleid

Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature Series Editors

Susan McHugh Department of English University of New England Auburn, ME, USA Robert McKay School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK John Miller School of English University of Sheffield Sheffield, UK

Various academic disciplines can now be found in the process of executing an ‘animal turn’, questioning the ethical and philosophical grounds of human exceptionalism by taking seriously the nonhuman animal presences that haunt the margins of history, anthropology, philosophy, sociology and literary studies. Such work is characterised by a series of broad, cross-­ disciplinary questions. How might we rethink and problematise the separation of the human from other animals? What are the ethical and political stakes of our relationships with other species? How might we locate and understand the agency of animals in human cultures? This series publishes work that looks, specifically, at the implications of the ‘animal turn’ for the field of English Studies. Language is often thought of as the key marker of humanity’s difference from other species; animals may have codes, calls or songs, but humans have a mode of communication of a wholly other order. The primary motivation is to muddy this assumption and to animalise the canons of English Literature by rethinking representations of animals and interspecies encounter. Whereas animals are conventionally read as objects of fable, allegory or metaphor (and as signs of specifically human concerns), this series significantly extends the new insights of interdisciplinary animal studies by tracing the engagement of such figuration with the material lives of animals. It examines textual cultures as variously embodying a debt to or an intimacy with animals and advances understanding of how the aesthetic engagements of literary arts have always done more than simply illustrate natural history. We publish studies of the representation of animals in literary texts from the Middle Ages to the present and with reference to the discipline’s key thematic concerns, genres and critical methods. The series focuses on literary prose and poetry, while also accommodating related discussion of the full range of materials and texts and contexts (from theatre and film to fine art, journalism, the law, popular writing and other cultural ephemera) with which English studies now engages. Series Board Karl Steel (Brooklyn College) Erica Fudge (Strathclyde) Kevin Hutchings (UNBC) Philip Armstrong (Canterbury) Carrie Rohman (Lafayette) Wendy Woodward (Western Cape)

Joshua Bulleid

Vegetarianism and Science Fiction A History of Utopian Animal Ethics

Joshua Bulleid Melbourne, VIC, Australia

ISSN 2634-6338     ISSN 2634-6346 (electronic) Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature ISBN 978-3-031-38346-5    ISBN 978-3-031-38347-2 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover image: Westend61/Getty Images This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In other studies you go as far as others have gone before you, and there is nothing more to know; but in a scientific pursuit there is continual food for discovery. —Victor Frankenstein

Acknowledgements

Thank you to Patrick Spedding, Andrew Milner, and Gerry Canavan for their continued support, and to Pratchett, Shelley, Milton, and Le Guin for looking after me.

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Praise for Vegetarianism and Science Fiction “This is an important book on an important topic. Anglophone science fiction has repeatedly speculated about vegetarian variants of utopian and dystopian futures. Yet, the topic is only rarely and often inadequately addressed in the relevant secondary literature. Bulleid’s Vegetarianism and Science Fiction more than fills the gap and will be a must for all serious scholars of the genre.” —Andrew Milner, co-author of Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach “To imagine alternative worlds allows a fiction writer to re-imagine our relationships with the other animals. Numerous novels envision an end to our tawdry and selfish human-centered attitudes. How marvelous that Joshua Bulleid examines, with care and alertness, this creative refashioning of ethical commitments.” —Carol J. Adams, author of The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegetarian Critical Theory “Bulleid’s Vegetarianism and Science Fiction offers a provocative and timely lens through which to read works from across the genre of science fiction. Via various theoretical lenses (ecocriticism, utopian studies, critical animal studies, and vegan studies), Bulleid investigates science fiction’s historical attention to animal and human relationships and its interrogation of what—and who— we eat.” —Laura Wright, author of The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror “Spanning more than two centuries of science fictional speculation, Bulleid’s instant-classic shows how the genre continually produces vegetarian provocations as its way of thinking about freedom, revolution, masculinity, utopia, kindness, cruelty, happiness, misery, life, death, and what it really means to be a human being in a world where everyone needs to eat.” —Gerry Canavan, co-editor of The Cambridge History of Science Fiction and Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction

Contents

1 The  Speculative Politics of Meat: Utopia, Carnism, and Critical Animal Studies  1 Utopia and Science Fiction   2 Carnism and Speciesism   5 Vegetarianism and Veganism   6 Critical Animal Studies  10 Food Studies and Science Fiction  18 Chapter Breakdown  22 References  25 2 Feed  My Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Romantic Vegetarian Precedent 31 Percy Shelley’s Vegetarian Vindication  33 Frankenstein  36 Frankenstein’s Fall  37 Child of Nature  39 The Creature’s Fall  47 Children of Cain  49 Ecocritical Inclinations  52 The Last Man and Others  54 Conclusion  56 References  57

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3 You  Are What You Eat: Bestiality and Other “Carnal Cravings” in the Works of H. G. Wells 63 Darwinism  64 The Time Machine   67 The Island of Doctor Moreau   76 The War of the Worlds   84 Later Scientific Romances and Mainstream Novels  88 Modern Utopias  92 Conclusion  96 References  97 4 My  God, It’s Full of Starch! Arthur C. Clarke, Alternative Meat, and the Hunting Hypothesis103 Alternative Meat and the Dystopian Tradition 104 Space Exploration and Environmental Sustainability 112 Ethical Endorsements and Buddhist Influences 120 Space Odyssey Series and the Hunting Hypothesis 124 Conclusion 132 References 133 5 Should  Androids Eat Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick, Interspecies Empathy, and Animal Liberation141 Early Empathetic Experiences 143 Early Short Stories and Novels 146 Dr Bloodmoney  149 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  151 Blade Runner 162 Later Theological Turn 164 Conclusion 168 References 169 6 The  Critical Carnist Shift: Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia E. Butler and the Critical Utopian Period173 The Critical Utopian Canon 175 Piercy’s Primitivist and Post-Catastrophic Carnisms 178 Coming Home to Carnism in Le Guin 182 Callenbach’s Carnist Ecotopia(s) 185

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Octavia E. Butler 188 Patternist 190 Xenogenesis 197 Later Parables 202 Conclusion 204 References 204 7 Where’s  the Beef? Kim Stanley Robinson’s Carnist Climate Change Catastrophes209 Future Primitive  211 Three Californias  213 Mars Trilogy and Other Space Colonisation Novels 215 Science in the Capital  221 Climate Policy 221 Buddhism 224 Nineteenth-Century Influences 229 Nonhuman Subjectivity 231 (Erasure of) Nonhuman Sympathy 235 The Ministry for the Future  237 Conclusion 238 References 239 8 That  Way Maddness Lies: Returning to Carnism in Margaret Atwood’s Science Fiction245 Survivalism and Realist Fiction 247 The Handmaids’ Tales 251 The Blind Assassin and Later Realist Fiction 254 The MaddAddam Trilogy 257 Children of “Nature” 258 Inner Animality 264 Alternative Meats 267 Sexual Politics 269 Interspecies Empathy and Animal Activism 271 Neocarnist Environmentalism 273 Conclusion 277 References 278

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9 The  Last Word in Gastronomy? Veganism, Ecocriticism, Pandemic Science Fiction and the Future283 Veganism 285 Climate Fiction and Ecocriticism 292 Pandemic Science Fiction 298 Looking Forward 308 References 310 Index315

CHAPTER 1

The Speculative Politics of Meat: Utopia, Carnism, and Critical Animal Studies

Vegetarianism has been a frequent marker of idealised, utopian societies, throughout science fiction’s literary history. The prevalence of vegetarianism within the genre is perhaps unsurprising, given the modern iterations of both the modern science fiction and modern animal ethics transitions share a common origin within the early-nineteenth-century works of Mary and Percy Shelley. The Shelleys, along with many other influential writers from the Romantic period, frequently represented vegetarianism as a natural state of being, from which humanity had fallen, arguing that a return to vegetarianism and mutual relationships with other animals would usher in—or at least coincide with—a new, utopian epoch. A similar “lapsarian” engagement with dietary and animal ethics echoes throughout modern science fiction well into the late-twentieth-century, providing a basis for early-twentieth-century utopian communities and the later Animal Liberation movement. During the mid-1970s, however, Romantic conceptions of vegetarianism were suddenly usurped by a widespread idealisation of meat-based, hunter-gatherer-style societies, largely inspired by Indigenous American cultures and the modern ecological movement. This study takes a historical approach, examining the evolving engagements with vegetarianism and animal ethics in the works of major science fiction authors, focusing on the works of Mary Shelley, H. G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Philip K. Dick, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Marge Piercy, Octavia E. Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Margaret Atwood © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_1

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within their respective social contexts, while tracing the development of vegetarian trends from the Romantic period of the early nineteenth century to the first decades of the twenty-first century. It thereby contributes to the growing interest in the fields of utopian studies, ecocriticism and critical animal studies by establishing the extent that science fiction’s prominent engagements with vegetarianism and animal ethics have been an extension of contemporary vegetarian philosophy and activism and how the vegetarian ideals promoted within science fiction and utopian literature have had a real-world impact on the awareness and spread of vegetarianism and animal advocacy. However, it is first necessary to establish and explore the core concepts of science fiction, utopia, carnism, vegetarianism, veganism, and critical animal studies.

Utopia and Science Fiction As a form of utopianism, science fiction requires readers to consider, and often admit, the possibility of alternative realities and world views. The genre therefore often functions as “a kind of futurology,” whereby authors (and readers) can “advocate what [they] see as desirable possible futures” or “urge against what they see as undesirable possible futures” (Milner 180). As the foundational utopian philosopher Ernst Bloch argued: The essential function of utopia is a critique of what is present. If we had not already gone beyond the barriers, we could not even perceive them as barriers. (Bloch and Adorno 12)

As Fredric Jameson—perhaps the most pre-eminent voice in modern science fiction and utopian scholarship—argues, the first step in any cultural revolution is to “think the break” with prevailing ideologies (232). Bloch himself, however, held modern science fiction in contempt, declaring it a “liberal bourgeoisie” literature that only ever ended in “horror and stupidity” (1:440). Robinson—Jameson’s student—has also pointed out that “the moment you start to write sentences, you’re portraying something that ought to be,” so that even purportedly “realist” literatures are merely utopias “in disguise” (9). Nevertheless, as Jameson observes, science fiction is itself a “representational meditation on radical difference,” which “aims at imagining, and sometimes even at realising a system radically different from this one” (xii).

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Science fiction’s archetypal academic definition comes from Darko Suvin, who defines it as “a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition” and which is “distinguished by the narrative dominance or hegemony of a fictional ‘novum’ (novelty, innovation) validated by cognitive logic” (20, 79). Suvin’s definition has been endlessly grappled with since its concoction, its most notable revision coming from Carl Freedman’s weakening of “cognition” to “cognition effect” (18, italics removed). As Gerry Canavan observes, however, effectual cognition was arguably always present in Suvin’s original definition (xix). Science fiction can therefore be considered to operate on two primary levels: “estranging” the reader from their social environment through semi-fantastic speculation while (ideally) retaining a “cognitive” connection to their basic reality. It is therefore able to present radical utopian possibilities while remaining implicitly connected to the real world, suggesting the real world may one day be capable of transforming into the utopian alternative, or at least something approximate. Consequently, it provides perhaps the most potent form of artistic utopian expression, with many influential critics often conceiving of it as a highly effective, almost integral catalyst for utopian revolution, with Tom Moylan contending that “a collective solution and/or a radical change in the social structure” simply “is not possible in mainstream realistic fiction” (58). The degree to which science fiction and utopia are related is a complex and continually contended aspect of their scholarship, with many influential critics even arguing they are entirely identical genres. Suvin himself contends that utopia is merely the “sociopolitical subgenre of science fiction,” since it relies on the science-fictional method of cognitive estrangement to assert its “more perfectly organized” world views (76, 49, italics removed). Jameson supports Suvin’s position, invoking it no less than five times throughout his influential Archaeologies of the Future (2005) (xiv, 57, 393, 410, 414–15). However, as Andrew Milner points out, the complete identification of science fiction and utopia is a primarily North American position popularised through the journal Science Fiction Studies, which Suvin co-founded in 1973, while European critics such as Jean Baudrillard and Raymond Williams have each asserted complex yet clear distinctions between the utopian and science-fictional traditions (Milner 90–99). Milner—an Anglo-Australian critic—himself argues science fiction and utopia are “cognate” yet distinct “selective traditions,” the boundaries of which are “continuously policed, challenged and disrupted”

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(90, 40–41, italics removed). Even Suvin seems to stagger under the ambition of his claims, immediately muddying his admittedly “paradoxical” reasoning by arguing that science fiction only became capable of “englobing” utopia “after expanding into its modern phase”; so that it is “not a daughter, yet a niece of utopia,” from which it has “collaterally descended” (76). Nevertheless, his arguments show that the two genres share similar (if not identical) mechanisms for asserting their desired realities. Therefore, while it might be a stretch to claim that all utopias are necessarily a subset of science fiction, it is harder to deny that all of science fiction’s socio-political subset is necessarily utopian.1 Another thing science fiction and utopia share is a preoccupation with vegetarianism and animal ethics. Utopian endorsements of a meat-free diet date back (at least) to Plato’s prototypical Republic (ca. 308 BCE), the citizens of which enjoy a vegetarian regime of luxurious vegetables so that they may lead a “peaceful and healthy life” rather than exist as part of an “unjust,” carnivorous society that would inevitably “lead to war” (59–61, 103). Although the inhabitants of Thomas More’s eponymous Utopia (1516) remain carnivorous, they “suffer none of their citizens to kill their cattle,” concerned that the butchering of animals will lead their inherent sense of “pity and good nature” to become “much impaired” (83). They also consider hunting a “foolish thing” that ought to “stir pity,” leaving what animal slaughter continues to be carried out by slaves outside of their towns (84). Similar condemnations of meat-eating recur throughout other early influential utopias, such as Tommaso Campanella’s The City of the Sun (1602), whose inhabitants only accept animal slaughter as “an unjustifiable action for the sake of justifiable ones” (52). In fact, the only significant pre-nineteenth-century utopias to openly and enthusiastically endorse meat-eating are Francis Bacon’s fragmentary “New Atlantis” (1624) and Henry Neville’s The Isle of Pines (1668). The inhabitants of Bacon’s utopian isle of Bensalem are privy to scientifically enhanced meats whose consumption greatly increases their strength and longevity, which makes it rather ironic that Bacon himself perished of pneumonia, supposedly caught while conducting an 1  The term “utopian” is used here in the general sense, to refer to both alternate and allegedly “better” societies, while “dystopian” refers to supposedly worse ones. The influential utopian critic Lyman Tower Sargent has attempted to establish the usage of “eutopian” to refer to utopia in its positive aspect, while the neutral “utopian” is reserved for merely different or “heterotopian” situations (“Three Faces” 7). However, the term has largely failed to catch on, outside of extremely specific, often taxonomically focused utopian criticism.

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experiment into the preservative effects of freezing meat (“New Atlantis” 180; Bevan 295–96). Yet while Bacon’s scientific utopia is perhaps of particular significance for the later science fiction tradition, his utopians’ reverence for flesh food remains at odds with the genre’s traditional aversions to meat-eating, while the almost-miraculous abundance of fowl in Neville’s novel is perhaps more characteristic of what the influential utopian critic Lyman Tower Sargent calls “fantasies of abundance” than of genuine utopian extrapolation (Neville 196; Sargent, “Everyday Life” 18).2 Most significant, however, is not vegetarianism’s frequency within traditional utopian literature but the degree to which it remained central to the ethical and environmental ethos of its idealised societies, with some of the ideologies most frequently and forcefully challenged within traditional utopian literature being those of speciesism and “carnism.”

Carnism and Speciesism Carnism is a term coined by the social psychologist Melanie Joy in 2001 to describe “the belief system [by] which eating certain animals is considered ethical and appropriate” (Carnism 29–30). Previously, terms like “meat-eater” or “carnivore” were regularly used within common and critical discourse to describe people who eat meat. However, as Joy argues, such terms present meat-eating “as though it were divorced from a person’s beliefs and values,” implying that “the person who eats meat is acting outside of a belief system,” thereby failing to acknowledge the ideology involved in deciding to eat other animals (29). Vegetarianism and veganism are thereby commonly presented as subjective ideologies, while rationalisations for carnism are presented as objective “facts” defended by arguments relying upon what Joy calls “the Three Ns of Justification”: that “eating animals is normal, natural, and necessary” (96, italics original, see also Weitzenfeld and Joy 24). As Joy explains, however: Carnists … are not the same as carnivores. Carnivores are animals that are dependent on meat to survive. Carnists are also not merely omnivores. An omnivore is an animal … that has the physiological ability to ingest both plants and meat. … [L]ike “carnivore,” “omnivore” is a term that describes one’s biological constitution, not one’s philosophical choice. Carnists eat 2  See Bulleid, “Better Societies” 51, for further examination of vegetarianism and animal ethics in early utopias.

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meat not because they need to, but because they choose to, and choices always stem from beliefs. (Carnism 30)

Moreover, unlike biological imperatives, ideological choices are subject to change and therefore susceptible to utopian influence. However, Carnism is only one part of the complex system of ideologies that enables the violent exploitation and mistreatment of nonhuman animals. Carnism itself is a “a sub-ideology of speciesism” (Weitzenfeld and Joy 21)—a term conceived by Oxford Group philosopher Richard D. Ryder in 1970, which identifies “a prejudice or attitude of bias in favor of the interests of members of one’s own species and against those of members of other species” (Singer 6). Unlike anthropocentric terms such as “human chauvinism,” which imply that violence committed against nonhuman animals is only “an individual’s irrational practice,” speciesism—like carnism—captures the ideological motivations behind interspecies injustices, which “mutually reinforc[e] one another through constructing, legitimating, and reproducing a human-animal hierarchy and binary” (Weitzenfeld and Joy 11, 3). As the Oxford Group philosopher David Wood argues, meat-eating is “only the most visible and violent front of our undeclared war on the creatures with whom we share the planet” (32). Nevertheless, as Adam Weitzenfeld and Joy observe, the “most grand and omnipresent occurrences” of speciesism continue to be the commonplace “exploitation, objectification, and consumption of animals as food” (20–21). Therefore, the first logical—and arguably most effective—step in combatting speciesism is to address carnism, and the easiest way to do that is to adopt a vegetarian or vegan diet.

Vegetarianism and Veganism The term “vegetarian” first came into common usage during the mid-­ nineteenth century, alongside the establishment of the modern science fiction tradition. Previously, non-meat-eaters were commonly referred to either as “Pythagoreans,” “Brahmins,” or followers of a “natural diet” (see Spencer 38–69, 70–85). Like these earlier labels, “vegetarian” necessarily implies an ideological position. Whereas “herbivorous” animals “feed naturally on herbage or the leaves of plants,” a “vegetarian” consciously “abstains from eating animal food and lives principally or wholly on a plant-based diet” (OED, “herbivorous” adj.; “vegetarian” n. and adj.). As Joy observes:

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[W]e do not call vegetarians “plant-eaters” or “non-meat-eaters” because we understand that vegetarianism, though its principles are manifested in the act of abstaining from the consumption of flesh, is actually a philosophy in which the subjugation of other animals is considered unnecessary and unjust. (“Language of Meat”)

As with the distinction between a carnivore and a carnist, “a vegetarian is not simply a ‘plant eater,’” but rather “a person who chooses not to eat meat” (Carnism 29, italics added). To adopt vegetarianism is therefore to consciously challenge carnist and speciesist ideologies. Vegetarianism has been recognised by both literary and historical critics for its inherent utopian qualities. In his popular Vegetarianism: A History (2000) (originally published as The Heretic’s Feast (1993)), Colin Spencer argues that to become vegetarian would “be not simply a criticism of meateating but of power” itself (33). As he observes, the emergence of vegetarian ideology “inevitably” requires “the questioning of received wisdom and established mores,” further noting that “the vegetarian creed has been one of dissidence, comprising rebels and outsiders, individuals and groups who find the society they live in to lack moral worth” (xiii). The influential science fiction critic George Slusser concurs, arguing that society’s “greatest pariahs” are “those who violate the community of the table” and that it is only in the “pariah forms of SF and horror” that such utopian eaters emerge as an “active literary presence” (“Solitary Eater” 57). Slusser also recognises the “heretical” qualities of vegetarianism in the introduction to Foods of the Gods: Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction (1996), observing that such radical ideas “do not spring to the forefront of public awareness without having evolved in the shadows for great lengths of time” (“Of Food” xi). For as long as carnism is the dominant ideology, vegetarianism will necessarily constitute a form of utopian resistance. Indeed, an increased critical awareness of carnism has concurred with a rise in vegetarian and vegan-focused criticism. Significant examples include Laura Wright’s The Vegan Studies Project (2015) and collections such as Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R.  Simonsen’s Critical Perspectives on Veganism (2016), Emelia Quinn and Benjamin Westwood’s Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture (2018), Jovian Parry’s PhD dissertation Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction (2019), Seán McCorry and John Miller’s Literature and Meat since 1900 (2019) and Quinn’s Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (2021). As the

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titles of these works also suggest there has been an increasing emphasis on “vegan,” as opposed to “vegetarian” philosophy. The term “vegan” was first used by Vegan Society founder Donald Watson in 1944 to describe a diet that excluded animal products (specifically dairy, eggs and honey) in addition to animal flesh (2). Previously, people who abstained from dairy and other animal products in addition to meat were commonly described as “total,” “strict,” or “non-lacto” vegetarians. Yet while originally and commonly conceived as a linguistic convenience to describe a specific dietary practice, within recent critical discourse, the term “veganism” has come to represent a more generalised animal ethics philosophy. In 1979, the Vegan Society themselves expanded their definition of veganism to describe a broader “philosophy and way of living” that seeks to exclude—as far as is possible and practicable—all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, animals for food, clothing or any other purpose; and by extension, promotes the development and use of animal-free alternatives for the benefit of humans, animals and the environment. (Vegan Society)

Similar, more ideological definitions have been adopted by many modern animal ethics theorists. Weitzenfeld and Joy, for example, endorse a specifically “Vegan praxis” as a means of “challenging the hegemony of speciesist institutions and anthropocentrist ideology,” with Joy earlier specifically defining veganism as the ideological “counterpoint” carnism (Weitzenfeld and Joy 4; Joy and Tuider vii). Quinn and Westwood, moreover, have influentially defined veganism as a “practice and identity,” which resists “reduction to proscriptive dietary practices or pragmatic goals” (12, 5). Such definitions are often asserted in an attempt to circumvent veganism’s reputation as an overly strict, almost “puritan,” philosophy. However, the insistence upon veganism as an open and undefinable practice has also led to a curious conflict with vegetarianism. Rather than encouraging vegetarianism as part of a broader vegan ideology, Quinn and Westwood define veganism specifically in opposition (or at least preference) to vegetarianism, which they argue is “fundamentally attached to, and secure with proscriptions” (4). They argue that although vegetarians “may often object to other kinds of animal exploitation,” the “occupation of a vegetarian identity relies on a clearly defined limit in relation to animal flesh and ingestion” (ibid.). Conversely, Quinn and Westwood contend that veganism, being attended “by contradictions and

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inconsistencies,” requires an “acknowledgment of the need for responses that aren’t geared towards a desire for cohesive practices” (ibid.). Elsewhere, to support their argument, they cite the influential animal philosopher Matthew Calarco, who claims that “insofar as vegetarianism holds itself up as the moral code of eating, it risks stalling the question of eating well and collapsing into a self-assured form of good conscience” (195, italics original; quoted in Quinn and Westwood 5). However, Calarco immediately qualifies that simply to criticize vegetarianism for its propensity to lapse into good conscience … is to ignore the larger issue of whether or not vegetarianism is generally a more respectful and grateful way of relating to other animals than is meat-eating or other modes of eating. (195)

By reducing vegetarianism to its commonly understood definition as “an abstinence from meat eating,” Quinn and Westwood risk relying upon and reinforcing the kind of constrictive dictionary definitions of anti-­ carnist ideology they specifically set out to oppose (4, 1). Moreover, Quinn and Westwood’s own definition of veganism is based on numerous proscriptions: Ethical vegans don’t eat meat, fish, dairy, eggs, or honey. They don’t wear leather, wool, or feathers. They don’t buy household or cosmetic products that have been tested on animals, and they don’t participate in hunting, visit zoos, or visit the circus. (19)

Their insistence on vegan prohibitions is perhaps simply one of veganism’s many essential inconsistencies. Nevertheless, while Quinn and Westwood likely support vegetarianism in practice, by characterising it as a closed-off ideology, they discredit its essential contribution to combatting speciesism—setting it up in opposition to veganism, rather than recognising it as an essential step toward establishing a wider anti-speciesist ideology. As Wood (to whom Calarco is responding in the above quotation) argues: Vegetarianism, like any progressive position, can become a finite symbolic substitute for an unlimited and undelimitable responsibility … it can also spearhead a powerful, practical, multidimensional transformation of our broader political engagement.” (32)

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Nowhere within vegetarian ideology—any more than veganism or any other moral ideology—is there a hard limit on what else could and should be done. As Animal Liberation founder Peter Singer contends, “The verbal point … is not the important one. What we should ask is whether the use of these other animal products is morally justifiable” (175). Moreover, veganism itself was not commonly recognised within popular and critical discourse until the early twenty-first century, with many foundational works of contemporary critical animal studies published during the late twentieth century using the term “vegetarian” when asserting their anti-­ speciesist philosophies. Explicit (or even implied) references to veganism within pre-twenty-­ first-century science fiction and utopian literature are even scarcer, with many of the anti-carnist examples discussed in this study focusing foremost upon promoting abstinence from flesh-eating. It therefore foregrounds a primarily “vegetarian,” rather than “vegan,” tradition, with the term “vegetarian” being used inclusively, to refer to the anti-carnist ideologies and practices of vegetarians and vegans alike, and the term “vegan” used to specifically refer to individuals and instances that adhere to or demand abstinence from animal products beyond the consumption of flesh.

Critical Animal Studies In addition to its examination of vegan and vegetarian philosophy, this study adds to the growing academic area of “critical animal studies.” As opposed to the emphasis on abstract theory characteristic of traditional human–animal studies, critical animal studies foregrounds activism and intersectionality while also promoting an “awareness of historically-­ constructed ideologies and systems of power and domination in which humans have oppressed and exploited animals” (Best 2). The establishment of the Institute for Critical Animal Studies3 in 2007 was inspired by its founders’ perception of a planetary “point of crisis,” “evident most dramatically in the intensified slaughter and exploitation of [nonhuman] animals” and the “monumental environmental ecological threats of global warming, rainforest destruction, desertification, air and water pollution, and resource scarcity, to which animal agriculture is a prime contributor” (Best et al. 4). The active promotion of vegetarianism is therefore a central 3

 Formerly the Center on Animal Liberation Affairs (sic).

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tenet of critical animal studies, to which this study contributes by clarifying and making readers aware of how essential vegetarianism is to one of twenty-first-century culture’s most popular and influential literary forms. Like science fiction and vegetarianism, critical animal studies is an inherently utopian project. In the eponymous introduction to Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable (2014), sociologist John Sorenson observes how: In the context of global capitalism and the ideology of neoliberalism … the proposal that the interests of other animals should be given equal consideration to those of humans is regarded as unthinkable. (xv, italics added)

He thereby invokes a utopian response to the exploitation of nonhuman animals, further arguing it is essential “for radical politics to think the unthinkable by accepting the politics of animal liberation as fundamental to its approach” (xvi). Quinn similarly argues that “veganism can be seen as an identity intimately connected to utopian speculations,” acknowledging that “meat-eating and the question of the animal present a difficulty in the present that requires resolution in fantastical imaginings (10). Literary critic Joshua Schuster goes even further, arguing that “being a vegan means living in a partially alternate world that has a science fiction feel because it involves continual cognitive estrangement from social norms” and that: To be a vegan is to call for another world where one stands with animals while disrupting the current order of power, sovereignty, and authority that is built on the exploitations of [nonhuman] animals. (219, 211)

Sorenson similarly observes that, under neoliberalism, everyday speciesism has increasingly involved “new forms of mutilation and genetic manipulation that seem to have been created at some bizarre intersection of the genres of science fiction and horror” (xv). His statement gestures toward Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1831), and he is certainly not alone in framing animal ethics as not only a utopian but distinctly science-­ fictional issue. Much of modern vegan and animal studies follows from Carol J. Adams’s 1990 book The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist Vegetarian Theory, which has been described as the “bible of the vegan community” (Jesella). By examining the intersections of sexism and speciesism, Adams

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developed a “feminist-vegetarian critical theory,” which emphasises the exposure of carnist exploitation along with the literary and cultural transmission of vegetarianism. Her primary critical contribution is the application of the term “absent referent”—adapted from the feminist literary criticism of Margaret Homans—to the often-obscured animal subject, who is slaughtered to provide meat. As Adams explains: Behind every meal of meat is an absence: the death of the animal whose place the meat takes. The “absent referent” is that which separates the meat eater from the animal and the animal from the end product. The function of the absent referent is to keep our “meat” separated from any idea that she or he was once an animal … to keep something from being seen as having been someone. (Sexual Politics xxiv, italics original, see also 22)

In response, Adams encourages “re-membering” (as opposed to dis-­ membering) animal bodies through the cultural transmission of vegetarianism (primarily through women’s fiction) (90). Adams argues—again, using the language of Homans—that texts and authors re-member and “bear the vegetarian word” by alluding to “the literal words of a vegetarian from an earlier text,” featuring “figures in novels who recall historic vegetarians,” “translating vegetarian texts,” clearly identifying the absent referent by “referring directly to dead animals” and inspiring their readers to “stop eating meat” (90–91). Adams thereby endorses a utopian praxis whereby “the authority of previous vegetarian texts authors new vegetarians who take vegetarian words literally” (69). Moreover, when introducing the notion of “bearing the vegetarian word,” Adams cites Homans’s example of how Mary Shelley bears the vegetarian word of her husband Percy Shelley by writing Frankenstein’s famous creature as a vegetarian akin to the speaker of her husband’s Alastor (1816) (Adams, Sexual Politics 90; see also Homans 100–19). Frankenstein is therefore not only foundational to modern science fiction but also vegan critical theory and critical animal studies themselves.4 Quinn, however, argues that “vegan words obey a different type of law to that outlined by Adams,” arguing that veganism cannot be “directly transmitted through literary narratives” (90, 139). She nevertheless acknowledges literature’s ability to articulate 4  The original 1990 edition of The Sexual Politics of Meat contains no instance of the word “vegan,” which was only added in the 2010, 20th anniversary edition. Nevertheless, in a later introduction, Adams clarifies that her foundational “feminist-vegetarian theory” is “truly a feminist-vegan theory” (63) and has embraced the “vegan” label throughout her later work.

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“multiple discourses around our relation to the nonhuman dislodges the centrality of scientific rationality and anthropocentrism to the progress narratives of Western civilization” (99–100). Although literary recognitions of carnism and the transmission of vegetarian and vegan philosophy are not the ultimate in vegan communication, they remain an essential and influential aspect of vegan praxis. Another ubiquitous figure in modern animal studies is the French deconstructionist philosopher Jacques Derrida, who became influential following the publication of the first part of his ten-hour, 1997 address “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow).” As its title suggests, the address poses an overt challenge to the Cartesian human/animal divide, which Derrida argued had dominated Western metaphysics up until the late twentieth century (and arguably still does). Conversely, Derrida contends the “unsubstitutable singularity” of all animal lives, although he maintained a distinction between “what calls itself man and what he calls the animal,” the denial of which he considered an “asinine” and “naive misapprehension” (Animal 9, 30, italics original). Derrida sought a complication, rather than collapsing, of human–animal boundaries, maintaining in a 2001 discussion with psychoanalyst Élizabeth Roudinesco that “there is not only one border, unified and indivisible, between Man and the Animal,” but rather “irreducible differences, uncrossable borders between so many species of living beings” (Derrida and Roudinesco 66). The indisputability of nonhuman subjectivity had considerable implications for Derrida’s equally influential ethics of eating. In a 1989 interview with fellow French philosopher Jean Luc Nancy, Derrida identified an ingrained ideology within Western culture whereby intelligible, meat-­ eating, male subjects are privileged above all others. He called the ideology “carno-phallogocentrism,” amending the “carno-” prefix to the already established, masculine and language-focused ideology of “phallogocentrism” as a reminder that “the subject that is being critiqued in post-humanist thought should be understood not simply as a fully self-­ present, speaking, masculine subject but also as a quintessentially human, animal-flesh-eating subject” (Derrida, “Eating Well” 113; Adams and Calarco 33, italics added). For Derrida, therefore, meat-eating fills a “sacrificial” role, bestowing masculine valour and justifying the “noncriminal putting to death” of other animals, so that the issue of “eating well” is not about what not to eat but rather “determining the best, most respectful,

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most grateful, and also most giving way of relating to the other and of relating the other to the self” (“Eating Well” 112–114). During his conversations with Roudinesco, Derrida expresses “sympathy” with animal liberation activists, who he considers to be “in the right” and to have “good reasons to rise up against the way [nonhuman] animals are treated” (Derrida and Roudinesco 67, 64, italics original, see also 70). He also contended that industrialised violence against nonhuman animals would “not be tolerated for very much longer,” while declaring that “the relations between humans and [other] animals must change … both in the sense of an ‘ontological’ necessity and of an ‘ethical’ duty” (64, italics original). Yet while Derrida considered the advocation of animal advocacy something he “might … want to do,” he refused to advance his arguments in support of vegetarianism, environmentalism or nonhuman animal welfare (“Eating Well” 112). During his conversation with Roudinesco, Derrida explicitly declares that he does not “believe in absolute ‘vegetarianism,’ nor in the ethical purity of its intentions,” insisting on symbolic incorporation (even cannibalism) as a necessity of subjectivity, leading him to question the “existence of the non-carnivore in general” (Derrida and Roudinesco 67–68). Their discussion also ends with Roudinesco declaring any proposed “prohibition against killing animals” both undesirable and, apparently, “impossible to put into practice in our societies,” to which Derrida responded that it would “no doubt … always be necessary to kill [nonhuman] animals” (69–70).5 While Derrida shared many of the same concerns as vegetarian advocates, his largely descriptive engagements with speciesism ultimately only reinforce, rather than challenge, its ingrained ideals. Moreover, despite Derrida’s prominence within critical animal studies, his contributions are not as revolutionary or original as often claimed. As both Sorenson and Parry point out, (eco)feminist scholars had been “writing about the intersectionality of sexism, ratiocentrism and anthropocentrism for decades” before Derrida (Parry 142–43; Sorenson xxi). Adams has responded—on behalf of all feminist animal scholars—that Derrida’s observations in “The Animal” are “something women have known and

5  Exactly why a necessity for symbolic sacrifices should prevent or invalidate efforts to reduce the actual, materialist sacrifices of living beings is never fully resolved.

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said for years!” (“Animal Manifesto” 123).6 Quinn and Westwood have even positioned Adams and Derrida as “opposing poles” of the animal studies spectrum due to their “contradictory emphases on insufficiency and utopianism” (15). Surprisingly, Adams is one of Derrida’s more sympathetic critics, seeing “a genuine animal rights sensibility” in his stubbornly anti-vegetarian philosophy (“Animal Manifesto” 123). He has undoubtedly been instrumental in the popularisation of critical animal studies. Nevertheless, as the influential feminist and post-humanist scholar Donna J. Haraway proclaims: “Derrida did some wonderful stuff, but he doesn’t [sic] start animal studies” (Williams 157). Haraway’s own ethical philosophy often borders on science fiction. In her influential “Cyborg Manifesto” (1985), for example, she argues, “we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism,” to whom “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optic illusion” (149–50). Indeed, Haraway credits science fiction with “much” of what she knows about relationships nonhuman animals and for challenging her anthropocentric conception of “species,” characterising animal rights in the “Cyborg Manifesto” as “a clear-sighted recognition of connection across the discredited breach of nature and culture” (Species Meet 217, 18, 310n23; “Cyborg Manifesto” 152, see also 173, 178–81). More recently, however, Haraway has expressed contempt for animal activists, dismissing them as the “rights besotted” in her controversial Companion Species Manifesto (2003), before declaring comparisons between industrial animal slaughter, human slavery and the Holocaust, which have long fuelled animal rights discourse “outrageous” (48, 51).7 Her statements drew intense criticism from Adams, who described the Companion Species Manifesto as “extremely disturbing,” “uneven” and often “downright petulant,” with Haraway’s embracing of controversial animal trainer Vicki Hearne constituting an “impatient” and “dated” 6  For further elaboration on feminist animal philosophy, see Josephine Donovan and Carol J.  Adams, eds., The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader (Columbia University Press, 2007). 7  Haraway makes a further confounding reference to science fiction in When Species Meet (2008), when claiming “species chicken” “raptured” the participants of underground, female fight clubs “right out of History and into his trannie [sic] sf world,” within which he is “not against surrendering a pound of flesh” (266). The statement itself is rather perplexing and, as Parry argues, it is questionable to what extent the chapter that contains the quotation even falls “within the feminist tradition of theorising in solidarity with the subaltern” (Edible Subjectivities 218n85).

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­ ismissal of animal rights philosophy (“Animal Manifesto” 125).8 Another d reviewer similarly noted that Haraway’s manifesto sounded like the work of a “good eugenicist,” while failing “to provide a convincing theory of ethics for different species and kinds” (Zylinska 130–31). Haraway claims to oppose the “meat-industrial complex,” having acknowledged vegetarianism and veganism as “powerful feminist positions” (Species Meet 296, 80). However, she also argues that abstinence from meat-eating “would consign most domestic animals to the status of curated heritage collections or to just plain extermination” (80). These kinds of objection are taken seriously by vegetarian and vegan activists, with greater consideration of the issue constituting Singer’s one major philosophical revision to Animal Liberation (albeit based largely on his controversial views about abortion) (228). Nevertheless, as Singer concludes: “Killing animals for food (except when necessary for sheer survival) makes us think of them as objects we can use casually for our own nonessential purposes” (229). Moreover, as Adams argues, Haraway continues to preserve “the dominance that ontologizes [nonhuman] animals as edible” through her refusal to “acknowledge the possibility that livestock might also be companion species” (“Animal Manifesto” 126). Like Derrida, Haraway consistently rebukes vegetarianism’s validity as a valuable and transformative practice while decrying the anthropocentric, humanist ideologies it inherently opposes. Although Haraway and Derrida’s philosophies remain influential, animal studies scholars have become less reverent of them as the discipline moves into closer alignment with an activist-based approach. As Sorenson argues, “it is difficult to understand how either Derrida or Haraway has gained prominence in the field of animal studies,” given neither of them offer a “commitment to vegetarianism” or any “practical help in terms of efforts to reduce the exploitation of nonhuman animals and advance the cause of animal rights” (xix). Indeed, while he remains influential, Derrida’s stock among modern animal ethicists appears to be waning. The Canadian philosopher Angus Taylor has also criticised him for refusing to endorse vegetarianism or even “taking any form of ethical stance” (88). 8  Hearne was known for disciplining nonhuman animals by painfully pinching their ears and argued all animal happiness comes from “a capacity for satisfactions that come from work in the fullest sense” under conditions of ownership and obeyance (“What’s Wrong” 59, 62; Adam’s Task 70, 90). For a further critique of Hearne’s animal philosophy with regard to Haraway, see Fudge, Pets 87–98.

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Notable American ethicist Gary Steiner has similarly condemned Derrida’s dismissal of vegetarianism and the “detached insight” of postmodern morality altogether, while pointing out that “only someone who has not lived as a strict vegan … could come to the conclusion that embracing veganism signals the end of responsibility,” rather than the “beginning” (Animals 128–29). The editors of the 2014 collection Defining Critical Animal Studies have even questioned his validity as a critical animal studies scholar altogether (Nocella et  al., “Emergence” xxv). As Calarco contends: Derrida is not our pastor or physician, he should not serve as our guide to eating well. If Derrida is hesitant to openly declare that … vegetarianism is generally a more respectful way of relating to animals than meat eating is, then we should proceed without him. (197)

As Wood recognises, Derrida’s “Carnophallogocentrism is not a dispensation of Being toward which resistance is futile; it is a mutually reinforcing network of powers, schemata of domination and investments that has to reproduce itself to stay in existence.” Vegetarianism, as he argues, is therefore “not just about substituting beans for beef,” but an essential “site for proliferating resistance” to the reproduction of carnist and speciesist ideologies (33). Calarco has criticised vegetarian advocates, such as Wood, who take Derrida’s arguments to imply that resistance to speciesism is futile, contending that Derrida simply asserts vegetarianism as “a different mode of denegation” to other forms of resistance (194, italics original). It perhaps follows more logically from such arguments that vegetarianism is (or can be) a form of deconstruction, rather than that “deconstruction is vegetarianism,” as Wood claims (33, italics added; see also Calarco 190). Calarco further contends that Wood’s conclusion is “somewhat trivial,” arguing that rather than vegetarianism as deconstruction, “what is needed is a thorough deconstruction of existing discourses on vegetarianism” (196, 175, 197–98). Sorenson similarly argues that: To be effective in moving these concerns from the margins to the centre, to ensure that animal rights is no longer unthinkable but sensible, normative and inevitable, we must overcome not only the deeply rooted ideology of human exceptionalism and the corporate-funded propaganda that encourages animal exploitation, but also the various forms of conservative,

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­ bscurantist, and welfare thought that have been dominant in the field of o animal studies. (xvi)

However, focusing on deconstructing vegetarianism while carnism remains the dominant ideology does little to prevent the suffering and deaths of the nonhuman animals that vegan advocates ultimately seek to protect. As McCorry and Miller argue, “literary and broader cultural studies are necessary in order to continue to unravel meat’s complexities, to examine its affective, aesthetic, and ideological components, and to imaginatively attend to the animal lives and deaths on which the meat industry is constructed” (2). While it is important to engage critically with vegetarianism, its deconstruction should not be prioritised over its promotion. Unlike the mode of postmodernist animal studies exemplified by Haraway and Derrida, contemporary critical animal studies “explicitly aligns itself with the animal rights movement” (Sorenson xx). As Sorenson explains: It does not take a neutral or supposedly objective and detached approach to the exploitation of animals, but directly expresses its opposition to such practices and its support for alternatives. (xxi)

Though theoretical in nature, this study therefore aligns itself with a critical animal studies ideology, through its emphasis on activism and tangible, real-world applications and interventions.

Food Studies and Science Fiction In addition to its ongoing cinematic dominance, science fiction has undergone a recent literary resurgence.9 The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins (2008–2010), for example, is now one of the best-selling literary properties of all time, dictating much of popular and young adult media since its publication. Science fiction novels have also started winning major literary awards. Most significantly, Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments (2019) was awarded the 2019 Booker Prize. Jeanette Winterson’s Frankissstein (2019)—a science-fictional retelling of Frankenstein, which 9  At the time of writing, science fiction films, such as those in the Star Wars (1977–), Jurassic Park (1993–), Avatar (2009) and Marvel Cinematic Universe (2008–) franchises account for over half of the top-ten and top-twenty highest-grossing films of all time (Box Office Mojo).

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features a vegetarian analogue of Mary Shelley herself—was also long-­ listed for the award, with The Power (2016), the debut novel by Atwood’s protégé Naomi Alderman, also winning the 2017 Women’s Prize for Fiction. Additionally, science fiction texts including Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Nobel Prize-winning author Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker-­ nominated Never Let Me Go (2005), wherein cloned humans who are casually harvested for their organs provide analogues for farm animals and the cultural acceptance of carnism, are now common inclusions in high-­ school English curricula. Science fiction’s cultural influence has never been more pervasive or pertinent. Science fiction’s increased significance during the twenty-first century coincides with the increasing cultural presence and influence of vegetarianism. Recent polls estimate that 3–5 per cent of the US and UK population identify as vegetarian, along with around a 1–2 per cent annual increase in vegetarians and vegans (Stahler; Newport; Vegetarian Times; Vegan Life). Similar polls seem to estimate the vegan populations of Japan, Austria, Canada, Germany, Israel, Italy, Sweden, and Switzerland to be between 1 and 3 per cent (Meyer). A 2019 poll even contended that approximately 12 per cent of Australians were vegetarian, increasing by 1 per cent since 2014 and approximately 2.5 per cent since 2012 (Roy Morgan). These estimates pale in comparison to the over 95 per cent of remaining meat-eaters and are more than balanced out by an average 1–4 per cent yearly increase in meat consumption throughout the twenty-first century (MLA 5). It is also unclear whether vegan and vegetarian populations are primarily increasing due to new adopters, broadened definitions or cultural immigration. Nevertheless, vegetarianism and veganism continue to increase at a significant rate, often bringing with them an amplified awareness of animal welfare and environmental issues. As Joy and Jen Tuider observe, veganism has grown during the early twenty-first century, “from an unknown, fringe vegetarian submovement to a way of life embraced by some of the world’s top celebrities, businesspeople, politicians, and thought leaders” (vi). A vegetarian diet has long been recognised as more efficient and environmentally friendly than diets incorporating meat. The deteriorating environmental effects of animal farming and potential benefits of vegetarianism are therefore of significant interest to the rapidly growing scholarly area of “ecocriticism,” or “the study of the relationship between literature and the physical environment” (Branch and Slovic xvi). Science fiction has also seen an increase in the production and celebration of more

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environmentally conscious works (see Milner and Burgmann). Nevertheless, as Patrick D.  Murphy observes, “attention to nature has always been a significant aspect” of science fiction, the “ethical dimension” of which “has long included a particular elaboration and method” of environmentalism, which “in the public domain combines ethical theory and political activism” (373). Indeed, science fiction has received similar praise for its utopian potentiality among environmentalists and ecocritics as it has among vegan theorists. The pioneering eco-critic Lawrence Buell has argued that “no genre potentially matches up with a planetary level of thinking ‘environment’ better than science fiction” (57). The celebrated Indian novelist Amitav Ghosh concurs, arguing that “realist” literature is unequipped to confront climate change, having been drawn into “modes of concealment that prevented people from recognising the realities of their plight,” while direct engagements with “radical improbabilities” were banished to the “generic outhouses” of fantasy, horror and science fiction (11, 24). Science fictional endorsements of vegetarianism are therefore essential in promoting more environmentally sustainable futures as well as more ethical ones. Increasing interest is being paid to the role of food in science fiction. Nevertheless, major examinations remain scarce. Notable examples include the Foods of the Gods collection, edited by Gary Westfahl, George Slusser, and Eric S. Rabkin, and Warren Belasco’s Meals to Come: A History of the Future of Food (2006). The increased feasibility of “synthetic” and “cultured” meat has also inspired several studies that blur the line between realistic speculation and science fiction, as explored by McCorry and Miller in Literature and Meat Since 1900. Sargent’s recent article “Everyday Life in Utopia: Food” (2015) has also been extremely influential within utopian food studies, providing an analysis of literary trends with regard to culinary content and its treatment in real-world utopian societies. Therein, Sargent acknowledges that “vegetarianism has been a regular theme in utopia,” dating its emergence to the anonymous Voyage to the Centre of the Earth (1755). He also claims that “most of the time” it reflected concerns of health and prohibition, citing James Silk Buckingham’s National Evils and Practical Remedies (1849) in support of his argument (22). However—as examples such as Plato’s Republic show—utopian vegetarianism dates all the way back to utopia’s origins and has been far more consistently prompted by concerns about animal

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ethics. Moreover, while Buckingham’s utopia includes prohibitions against the introduction of intoxicating substances, no mention of vegetarianism is made throughout the cited passage, which instead describes regulations for the placement of “cattle markets” and “slaughter houses for butchers,” implying both the presence and acceptance of carnism (143–44, 151). In focusing on the practicalities of utopian food practices, their ethical and environmental significances seem to have been overlooked. An increased interest in animal studies within science fiction scholarship has nevertheless been encouraged by Science Fiction Studies editor Sherryl Vint, whose Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (2010) provides a focused examination of the role of nonhuman animals in science fiction literature. Therein, Vint argues—from a Derridean basis—that science fiction, “more than any other literature,” is able to challenge the supposed separation between humans and other animals “because its generic premises enable us to imagine the animal quite literally looking at and addressing us from a non-anthropocentric perspective” (6). As she observes science fiction, authors often include nonhuman animals in their stories because they are “interested in what animals experience and how our social relations with them might be transformed” (3). The book begins with a chapter titled “Always Already Meat,” examining the science-fictional construction of a “human-animal boundary” that distinguishes between edible and non-edible animals. As Quinn observes, however, “the role of vegan identity and praxis” is also made “conspicuous by its absence in Vint’s work” (10). Besides a brief mention of Wells’s War of the Worlds (1887/1888) and a minor examination of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), none of the texts Vint primarily focuses on—John W. Campbell’s “Who Goes There?” (1938), “Morality Meat” (1985) by Raccoona Sheldon (aka Alice Sheldon, aka “James Tiptree Jr.”), Paul McAuley’s White Devils (2004) and Carol Emshwiller’s “Sanctuary” (2007)—would usually be considered “major works” of the genre, thereby limiting the significance of their cultural and utopian influence. Greater examination is therefore needed of science-fictional treatments of vegetarianism and more influential representations of carnism. This study fills that gap by presenting a thorough investigation of sciencefictional representations of vegetarianism and carnism, focusing on major, influential works and their influence on real-world ethical philosophy and animal activism.

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Chapter Breakdown This study takes a historical approach, analysing the development of the vegetarian trend within Western culture, wherein carnism is “arguably the deepest, most pervasive and catastrophic” (Weitzenfeld and Joy 4). Chapter 2 examines the works of Mary Shelley, exploring the Romantic notions of vegetarianism she embeds into science fiction from its beginning. It examines her classic novel Frankenstein (1818) as an intersection of the foundational Western myths of Prometheus and Genesis, beginning with an examination of the myths’ vegetarian associations within the Romantic Culture of late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century English literature and their influential interpretation by Shelley’s husband, the poet Percy Shelley. An extended analysis of Frankenstein then shows how it associates animal cruelty with scientific hubris and how the novel’s famous creature first offers humanity the possibility of a (post-human) vegetarian utopia before descending into murderous carnism himself. It concludes by briefly exploring Shelley’s continuation of the ethical vegetarian theme in her second science fiction novel The Last Man, showing how science fiction’s vegetarian theme is rooted in Romantic archetypes that remain entrenched within the genre. Chapter 3 explores the influence of Darwinism on the representation of vegetarianism in the foundational science fiction and utopian works of H.  G. Wells. It begins by examining the often-ambiguous treatment of vegetarianism in Wells’s early and extremely influential scientific romances The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1888). The examination then turns to Wells’s later utopian works, which display an increasing impatience and hostility towards vegetarians. However, as the analysis shows, the popular reception and interpretation of his novels has meant that many of the Romantic vegetarian ideals he sought to undermine continued to be promoted throughout the early twentieth century, during which many of the genre’s most popular and lasting tropes were established. Chapters 4 and 5 examine the treatment of vegetarianism and animal ethics in the works of perhaps the two most influential twentieth-century science fiction authors, Arthur C.  Clarke and Philip K.  Dick. Although Clarke and Dick’s careers overlap, Clarke’s work is indicative of more traditional “Golden Age” science fiction, popular during the mid-twentieth century, while Dick’s is characteristic of the more transgressive American “New Wave” science fiction, which gained popularity during the century’s

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second half. Clarke and Dick also provide complementary examples of the United Kingdom (UK) and United States (US) traditions, both authors lending their names to prestigious science fiction awards in their respective countries. From Chap. 5 onwards, the study also becomes primarily focused upon US and North American science fiction, which has become largely “hegemonic” within the genre since the mid-twentieth century (Milner and Burgmann 60–62). Chapter 4 examines Clarke’s frequent promotion of vegetarianism and the development of synthetic meat in response to the pressing population concerns and extra-terrestrial ambitions of the mid-twentieth century. It begins with an overview of the dystopian treatment of artificial and synthetic meats in the foundational (and largely British) dystopias of the early twentieth century and the current debates surrounding alternative meat technologies. It then examines how Clarke, conversely, portrayed synthetic meats positively and often promoted them as essential for extra-­ terrestrial travel and environmental sustainability throughout both his fiction and non-fiction writing. Extensive consideration is also given to the influence of twentieth-century evolutionary theories—particularly the carnist “Hunting Hypothesis”—on Clarke’s Space Odyssey series (1968–1996), evidencing both a departure from and ultimate reinforcement of science fiction’s long-standing vegetarian tradition. This chapter shows how practical endorsements of vegetarianism were incorporated into science fiction by one of the genre’s most impactful authors, even as it was becoming synonymous with dystopia elsewhere. Chapter 5 examines the works of Philip K. Dick, highlighting the similarities between Dick’s frequent advocacy of animal ethics and the animal liberation movement of the 1970s. The analysis begins with an examination of Dick’s attitudes towards other animals in his early life and the frequent promotion of vegetarianism throughout his early short stories. It then turns to an extensive examination of Dick’s most famous and influential novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), showing how the novel anticipated many fundamental arguments of the animal liberation movement while also continuing the Romantic themes established by Shelley. A comparison to Dick’s earlier novel Dr Bloodmoney (1965) is then conducted, elaborating on how similar explorations of speciesism and animal liberation were seeded and developed throughout Dick’s work. Lastly, it examines Dick’s late-life theological turn, showing how his life-­ long emphasis on empathy and animal ethics remained essential to his

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religious philosophies and experiences, which were themselves seemingly informed by science fiction’s vegetarian tradition. Chapter 6 takes a broader approach than the other chapters, examining the shift away from endorsements of vegetarianism towards allegedly more “natural” and environmentally friendly modes of carnism within the celebrated and influential “critical” utopian science fiction novels of the late twentieth century. The chapter primarily focuses on four authors from the critical utopian period in Ursula K. Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Ernest Callenbach, and Octavia E. Butler, beginning with an examination of Le Guin’s canonical critical utopias The Dispossessed (1974) and Always Coming Home (1986). The analysis shows a consistent preference within Le Guin’s literature for “hunter-gatherer” style carnism, largely inspired by Native Californian traditions, which is reflected in the analysis of Callenbach’s influential Ecotopia (1975)—a definitive work of modern, ecological science fiction—which conflicts with Callenbach’s later endorsements of vegetarianism within the novel’s sequel Ecotopia Emerging (1981) and environmentalist writing. The analysis then turns to the contrasting representations of vegetarianism and animal ethics in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and her foundational “critical dystopia” He, She and It (1991) and concludes with an extended analysis of the more complex and persistent engagements with vegetarianism and animal ethics in the works of Octavia E. Butler. The critical period is often credited with broadening science fiction’s cultural influences in terms of race, gender, and sexuality. As the analysis shows, however, it also reinforced many carno-masculinist ideals that remained influential throughout the late-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Chapters 7 and 8 examine the works of the two authors whose work has likely been the most critically examined and influential within twenty-first-­ century science fiction and the climate fiction movement. However, unlike the vegetarian endorsements made by the influential nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors examined in the previous chapters, these authors have largely neglected and even discredited vegetarianism as a viable ethical or environmental policy. Kim Stanley Robinson provides the focus of Chap. 7, with the analysis being based around his three major trilogies: Three Californias (1984–1990), the Mars trilogy (1992–1996), and Science in the Capital (2004–2007/2015). It shows how vegetarianism is regularly neglected and dismissed throughout Robinson’s work, despite his frequent reliance upon tropes that previously inspired vegetarian endorsements from the

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authors examined earlier in this study, along with pressing new influences, including increased insistence by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) of the need to reduce meat-eating in order to combat climate change. This chapter evidences a primitivist disruption of science fiction’s Romantic vegetarian tradition, coinciding with an increased environmental focus. Chapter 8 examines the culmination of all the themes explored in the previous chapters within the works of Margaret Atwood. It begins by examining the repeated associations between carnism and sexual violence in Atwood’s early feminist novels before exploring the continuation of these themes in Atwood’s landmark feminist dystopia The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and The Testaments. Following a brief examination of Atwood’s explicit rejection of science fiction’s vegetarian tradition in Atwood’s Booker Prize-winning The Blind Assassin (2000), the analysis then turns to Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2003–2013), showing how the series endorses a similar “primitivist” and essentially carnist politics to that seen in Robinson’s works, despite its overt engagement with science fiction’s Romantic tradition. Chapter 9 then traces the overall development of science fiction’s vegetarian trend, analysing the emergence and influence of “neocarnism” on both the genre and its criticism. It observes the increasing neglect of vegetarianism and veganism in twenty-first-century science fiction and modern ecocriticism, before surveying twenty-first-century science fiction’s engagements with vegetarianism and animal ethics regarding the growing areas of veganism, climate fiction, and pandemic fiction. It concludes proposing the need for continued and more culturally diverse investigations into utopian and science-fictional representations to better understand how science fiction’s potential deconstruction of carnist prejudices can best aid real-world activism.

References Adams, Carol J. “An Animal Manifesto: Gender, Identity, and Vegan-Feminism in the Twenty-First Century.” Interview by Tom Tyler. Parallax 12, no. 1 (2006): 120–28. ———. The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory, 25th anniversary ed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015.

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Adams, Carol J., and Matthew Calarco. “Derrida and The Sexual Politics of Meat.” Meat Culture, edited by Annie Potts, 31–53. Brill, 2016. Bacon, Francis. “The New Atlantis.” Three Early Modern Utopias, edited by Susan Bruce, 149–86. Oxford University Press, 2010. Best, Steven. Introduction to Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 5, no. 1 (2007): 2–3. Best, Steven, Anthony J.  Nocella, II, Richard Kahn, Carol Gigliotti, and Lisa Kemmerer. “Introducing Critical Animal Studies.” Animal Liberation Philosophy and Policy Journal 5, no. 1 (2007): 4–5. Bevan, Bryan. The Real Francis Bacon: A Biography. Centaur Press, 1960. Bloch, Ernst. The Principle of Hope, 3 vols. Translated by Neville Plaice, Stephen Plaice and Paul Knight. MIT Press, 1986. Bloch, Ernst and Theodor W.  Adorno. “Something’s Missing: A Discussion between Ernst Bloch and Theodor W.  Adorno on the Contradictions of Utopian Longing.” The Utopian Function of Art and Literature: Selected Essays, by Ernst Bloch, translated by Jack Zipes and Frank Mecklenburg, 1–17. MIT Press, 1988. Box Office Mojo. “Top Lifetime Grosses: Worldwide.” Updated 4 March 2020. https://www.boxofficemojo.com/chart/ww_top_lifetime_gross/. Branch, Michael P., and Scott Slovic. “Surveying the Emergence of Ecocriticism.” Introduction to The ISLE Reader: Ecocriticism, 1993–2003, xiii–xxiii. University of Georgia Press, 2003. Buckingham, James S. National Evils and Practical Remedies. P. Jackson, 1849. Buell, Lawrence. The Future of Environmental Criticism: Environmental Crisis and Literary Imagination. Blackwell Publishing, 2005. Calarco, Matthew. “Deconstruction is Not Vegetarianism: Humanism, Subjectivity, and Animal Ethics.” Continental Philosophy Review 37, no. 2 (2004): 175–201. Campanella, Tommaso. The City of the Sun. Translation anonymous. Floating Press, 2009. Canavan, Jerry. “The Suvin Event.” Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre by Darko Suvin, 2nd ed. Edited by Gerry Canavan, xi–xxxvi. Peter Lang, 2016. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Translated by David Wills, Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet. Fordham University Press, 2008. ———. “‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject.” Interview by Jean Luc Nancy. Who Comes After the Subject? edited by Eduardo Cadava, Peter Connor and Jean Luc Nancy, translated by Peter Connor and Avital Ronell, 96–119. Routledge, 1991. Derrida, Jacques, and Élisabeth Roudinesco. “Violence Against Animals.” For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue. Translated by Jeff Fort, 62–76. Stanford University Press, 2004.

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Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2000. Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable. University of Chicago Press, 2016. Haraway, Donna J. The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Prickly Paradigm, 2003. ———. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 149–81. Free Association Books, 1991. ———. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Hearne, Vicki. Adam’s Task: Calling Animals by Name. HarperPerennial, 1994. ———. “What’s Wrong with Animal Rights.” Harper’s Magazine 283, no. 1696 (September, 1991): 59–64. Homans, Margaret. Bearing the Word: Language and the Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing. University of Chicago Press, 1986. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. Verso, 2005. Jesella, Kara. “Vegans Exhibiting an Ever Wilder Side for Their Cause.” The New York Times, 2008. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/27/arts/27iht-­ vegan.1.11463224.html. Joy, Melanie. “From Carnivore to Carnist: Liberating the Language of Meat.” Satya, 2001. https://www.satyamag.com/sept01/joy.html. ———. Why We Love Dogs, Eat Pigs, and Wear Cows: An Introduction to Carnism. Conari, 2011. Joy, Melanie, and Jen Tuider. Foreword to Critical Perspectives on Veganism, edited by Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R.  Simonsen, v–xv. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. McCorry, Seán, and John Miller. “Introduction: Meat Critique.” Literature and Meat Since 1900, 1–17. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Meyer, Mandy. “This Is How Many Vegans Are In The World Right Now (2020 Update).” WTVOX, 2020. https://www.wtvox.com/lifestyle/2019­the-­world-­of-­vegan-­but-­how-­many-­vegans-­are-­in-­the-­world/. Milner, Andrew. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2012. Milner, Andrew, and J.  R. Burgmann. Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach. Liverpool University Press, 2020. MLA (Meat & Livestock Australia). “2020 State of the Industry Report: The Australian Red Meat and Livestock Industry.” 2020. https://www.mla.com. au/globalassets/mla-­c orporate/prices%2D%2Dmarkets/documents/ trends%2D%2Danalysis/soti-­report/mla-­state-­of-­industry-­report-­2020.pdf. More, Thomas. Utopia, 2nd ed. Edited by Edward Arber, translated by Ralph Robinson. A. Constable, 1906. Moylan, Tom. Demand the Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, 2nd ed. Edited by Raffaella Baccolini. Peter Lang, 2014.

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Murphy, Patrick D. “Environmentalism.” The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould, Andrew M. Butler, Adam Roberts and Sherryl Vint, 373–82. Routledge, 2009. Neville, Henry. The Isle of Pines. Three Early Modern Utopias, edited by Susan Bruce, 187–212. Oxford University Press, 2010. Newport, Frank. “In U.S., 5% Consider Themselves Vegetarians,” Gallup.com 2012. https://www.gallup.com/poll/156215/consider-­themselves-­ vegetarians.aspx. Nocella, Anthony J. II, John Sorenson, Kim Socha and Atsuko Matsuoka. “The Emergence of Critical Animal Studies: The Rise of Intersectional Animal Liberation.” Introduction to Defining Critical Animal Studies an Intersectional Social Justice Approach for Liberation, xix–xxxvi. Peter Lang, 2014. OED (Oxford English Dictionary). The Oxford English Dictionary Online. Oxford UP. Updated 2022. Parry, Jovian. Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction. PhD thesis, York University, 2019. Plato. The Republic. Translated by Desmond Lee. Penguin, 2007. Quinn, Emelia. Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan 1818 to Present. Oxford University Press, 2021. Quinn, Emelia, and Benjamin Westwood. “Thinking Through Veganism.” Introduction to Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture, 1–24. Springer International Publishing, 2018. Robinson, Kim Stanley. “Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change.” Utopian Studies 27, no. 1 (2016): 1–15. Roy Morgan. “Rise in Vegetarianism Not Halting the March of Obesity.” 2019. https://www.roymorgan.com/findings/7944-­vegetarianism-­in-­2018-­april-­ 2018-­201904120608. Ryder, Richard D. “Speciesism Again: The Original Leaflet.” Critical Society, vol. 2 (2010): 1–2. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “Everyday Life in Utopia: Food.” Food Utopias: Reimagining Citizenship, Ethics and Community, edited by Paul V.  Stock, Michael Carolan and Christopher Rosin, 14–32. Taylor and Francis, 2015. ———. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37. Schuster, Joshua. “The Vegan and the Sovereign.” Critical Perspectives on Veganism, edited by Carla Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simonsen, 203–23. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation. 3rd ed. Ecco, 2002. Slusser, George. “Of Food, Gods, and Men: The Theory and Practice of Science Fictional Eating.” Introduction to Foods of the Gods: Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl, George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 56–74. University of Georgia Press, 1996.

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Sorenson, John. “Thinking the Unthinkable.” Introduction to Critical Animal Studies: Thinking the Unthinkable, xi–xxxiv. Canadian Scholars, 2014. Spencer, Colin. Vegetarianism: A History. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. Stahler, Charles. 2012. “How Often Do Americans Eat Vegetarian Meals? And How Many Adults in the U.S. are Vegetarian?” Vegetarian Resource Group, 2012. https://www.vrg.org/blog/2012/05/18/how-­often-­do-­americans-­ eat-­vegetarian-­meals-­and-­how-­many-­adults-­in-­the-­u-­s-­are-­vegetarian. Steiner, Gary. Animals and the Limits of Postmodernism. Columbia University Press, 2013. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. 2nd ed. Edited by Gerry Canavan. Peter Lang, 2016. Taylor, Angus. Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate, 3rd ed. Broadview, 2009. Vegan Life. “Veganism Booms By 350%.” 2016. https://www.veganlifemag. com/veganism-­booms/. The Vegan Society. “Definition of Veganism.” The Vegan Society. https:// www.vegansociety.com/go-­vegan/definition-­veganism. Vegetarian Times. “Vegetarianism in America.” 2008. https://www.vegetariantimes.com/uncategorized/vegetarianism-­in-­america/. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool University Press, 2010. Watson, Donald. The Vegan News 1, no. 1 (1944). Weitzenfeld, Adam and Melanie Joy. “An Overview of Anthropocentrism, Humanism, and Speciesism in Critical Animal Theory.” Counterpoints 448 (2013): 3–27. Williams, Jeffrey J. “Science Stories.” Interview with Donna J. Haraway. Minnesota Review, vol. 73–74, no. 1 (2009–2010): 133–63. Wood, David. “Comment ne pas manger—Deconstruction and Humanism.” In Animal Others: On Ethics, Ontology and Animal Life, edited by H.  Peter Steeves, 15–36. State University of New York Press, 1999. Zylinska, Joanna. “Dogs R Us?” Review of The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People and Significant Otherness, by Donna Haraway, Paralax, vol. 12, no. 1 (2006): 129–31.

CHAPTER 2

Feed My Frankenstein: Mary Shelley’s Romantic Vegetarian Precedent

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818) is often considered the “original” work of modern, English science fiction (Aldiss and Wingrove 25, see also 36–46). The novel—which involves its eponymous scientist Victor Frankenstein animating an unnamed, humanoid creature—was famously conceived as a “ghost story” in 1816, while Shelley was staying at a Swiss villa with her future-husband, the poet Percy Shelley, and his contemporary Lord Byron (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 193–97). It was also written during a time of extensive vegetarian activism, the late 1700s being a “decisive moment” when vegetarianism predominantly tilted from “thought to action,” while the early 1800s marked the beginning of vegetarianism as “a specifically Romantic ideological practice” (Preece 232; Morton 6, italics original). Percy Shelley was by far the most influential and militant vegetarian among the Romantics, having had a direct influence on the establishment of the London Vegetarian Society and the RSPCA. When he first adopted vegetarianism in 1812, his then-wife Harriet Westbrook wrote that it was “the best thing in the world” and that “it would be [a] very great injustice to eat flesh again” (P. B. Shelley, Letters 1:275, 1:367n4). He then eloped with Mary (then Mary Godwin) in 1814, making vegetarianism an early focus of their relationship. The Shelleys might even be considered vegan pioneers, since they only ever allowed eggs and butter into their cooking “under protest” and, even then, only “sparingly” (Hogg 2:419). Yet while Percy Shelley’s © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_2

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vegetarianism has received extensive critical attention, Mary’s own is often overlooked.1 Rod Preece even presents her as a carnist corruptor who convinced Percy to take up a “temporary flesh diet because of his illness,” although he provides no evidence of the incident (257). Although Mary’s vegetarianism may have waned following her husband’s death in 1822, she continued to promote a meat-free diet as an effective response to illness, encouraging a friend in 1827 to abstain “almost entirely from meat” to treat her headaches (M. Shelley, Letters 1:567). She may not have practised her entire life, but Mary Shelley’s confidence in the health benefits of vegetarianism never waned. Percy Shelley was not Mary Shelley’s only vegetarian influence. Her father, the author William Godwin to whom Frankenstein is dedicated— gave up meat and alcohol for health reasons during the early nineteenth century and regularly dined with the vegetarian Newton family, to whom he likely introduced Percy Shelley (St. Clair, Godwins 261–63). Vegetarianism also often featured as a mark of ethical superiority in Godwin’s novels, particularly Fleetwood (1805), the eponymous protagonist of which refuses to “persecute dumb animals by hunting and fishing” (22). Romantic archetype expert Peter L.  Thorslev characterises Fleetwood’s vegetarianism is a move away from the “abstract principles” of Godwin’s Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793) (Thorslev 33). Yet while vegetarianism is never made explicit in Godwin’s earlier enquiry, it is implied by its utilitarian philosophy, which values other “beings” for their “consciousness” and approves of a sharp knife “being employed in carving food, rather than in maiming men or other animals,” suggesting previous vegetarian inclinations (308–9). Mary Shelley’s mother, the feminist pioneer Mary Wollstonecraft, begins her Vindication of the Rights of Women by appealing to “man’s pre-eminence over the brute creation” and declaring biological arguments for human herbivorousness “contrary to the opinion of anatomists” (91, 94n). She also criticised Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s desire for a return to prelapsarian nature as a “placid” and “unsophisticated” celebration of “barbarism” (103). Yet Wollstonecraft still considered animal abuse detrimental to human morality, including a story in her Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children (1782) about a 1  As St. Clair points out, “the notion that Mary Shelley was held back in the shadow of a famous and successful male author is an anachronistic casting back of modern presumptions,” the first edition of Frankenstein having made “more money than all P. B. Shelley’s works would fetch in his lifetime” (“Impact” 41, 43).

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young boy who is chastised for tormenting a “harmless” mouse for fear that “after tormenting animals [he] will not fail to torment men” (195). Her earlier Vindication of the Rights of Men (1790) also envisions a utopian “garden more inviting than Eden,” wherein “the shepherd would then love the sheep he daily tended” (147). Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation (1975) even begins with an appeal to A Vindication of the Rights of Women as a catalyst for extending ethical subjectivity to other animals, despite its own speciesist sentiments (1). Well before meeting her husband, Shelley was subjected to considerable vegetarian and anti-­ speciesist influence. Percy Shelley was nevertheless her most prominent influence and it is his vegetarian philosophy that is primarily perpetuated throughout Frankenstein and the science fiction tradition it spawned.

Percy Shelley’s Vegetarian Vindication Percy Shelley’s 1813 “Vindication of Natural Diet” is perhaps the single most influential piece of nineteenth-century vegetarian propaganda. Therein Shelley argued that “the language spoken … by the mythology of nearly all religions seems to prove, that at some distant period man forsook the path of nature, and sacrificed the purity and happiness of his being to unnatural appetites” (5). More specifically, he contends that the Abrahamic “allegory of Adam and Eve eating of the tree of evil … admits of no other explanation than the disease and crime that have flowed from unnatural diet” and that “Prometheus (who represents the human race) effected some great change in the condition of his nature, and applied fire to culinary purposes,” whereafter “his vitals were devoured by the vulture of disease” (5–6, parenthesis original). Shelley’s arguments were primarily influenced by John Frank Newton, whose Return to Nature, or, a Defence of the Vegetable Regimen (1811), he prominently quotes in “A Vindication of Natural Diet” (P. B. Shelley, “Vindication” 6). Like Shelley, Newton attributed humanity’s Fall into carnism to Prometheus, who “first taught the use of animal food … and of fire, with which to render it more digestible and pleasing to the taste,” after which humanity “became diseased, the partaker of a precarious existence and no longer descended slowly to [its] grave” and equates the forbidden fruit in Genesis with “meat-eating” (Newton 6, 8–9; quoted ibid.). Newton and Shelley thereby pre-empted Jacques Derrida’s argument that Western speciesism largely derives from the “purposive intersection” of Prometheus and Genesis by almost 200 years, while actively urging their readers to abstain from meat-eating so

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that humanity might be restored to “healthful innocence” (P. B. Shelley, “Vindication” 5–6, 18; Derrida, Animal 20). Despite the metaphysical focus of “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” Percy Shelley was primarily converted to vegetarianism by its apparent health benefits, with the vegetarian experiments of Newton and his doctor William Lambe convincing him there was no disease that vegetarianism could not cure, save for hereditary ones, which he maintained stemmed from the carnist abuse of previous generations (P. B. Shelley, “Vindication” 12–15). Howard Williams credits Lambe and eighteenth-century physician George Cheyne, as the founders of English dietetics (198). Both were significant proponents of vegetarianism, Cheyne declaring in his influential Essay on Regimen (1740) that animal flesh “never was intended” as human food and was “only permitted as a curse or punishment” (55). Lambe likewise argued that, along with its physical benefits, vegetarianism resulted in “milder, character dispositions more benevolent, and morals more pure” (10). The Shelleys’s vegetarianism was also heavily influenced by their close friend Joseph Ritson, who argued in his Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty (1802), that “the experience of ages gives ample testimony” to the “fact” that “the use of animal food disposes man to cruel and ferocious actions” (86). Shelley’s enthusiastic endorsement of vegetarianism’s medicinal benefits is undermined by his record of ill health, however. Mary Shelley described him as “fragile in health and frame” around the time he wrote “A Vindication of Natural Diet” and later cited his “precarious state” as a motivation for travelling to Geneva, where she began writing Frankenstein (Shelley and Shelley 6:103, 124; M.  Shelley, “Queen Mab” 166–67). Percy Shelley himself even urged writer and critic Leigh Hunt not to tell anyone he was unwell, since “the advocate of a new system of diet is held bound to be invulnerable by disease” (Letters 1:543). As his biographer Richard Holmes suggests, Percy Shelley’s vegetarianism was perhaps “as much prompted by misplaced medical considerations as by ideological ones” (220). Nevertheless, as Tristram Stuart argues, Shelley’s “belief in the power of his vegetarian lifestyle … was not entirely at odds with the dominant scientific understanding of his period” (380). Shelley argued that humanity resembles “frugivorous animals in everything, and carnivorous [animals] in nothing,” and that “it is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion” (“Vindication” 7–8). Again, his arguments reflect those of Lambe, who maintained that “man in his proper nature” is “strictly to be ranked among the herbivorous animals; and that the use of flesh of animals

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is a deviation from the laws of his nature, and is universally a cause for disease and premature death” (8). Shelley’s arguments were further bolstered by contemporary reports of islands where there had been no previous human contact and other animals seemingly lived in herbivorous harmony (Stuart 387–90). Indeed, Erasmus Darwin—whose work provided a direct influence for Frankenstein (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 3, 195)—took these seemingly Edenic islands to suggest that the “fear” nonhuman animals “all conceive at the sight of mankind, is an acquired article of knowledge,” which could therefore be unlearned (219–20). Such ideas would be later scrutinised, but Shelley’s belief in humanity’s natural herbivorous was consistent with many prominent Romantic philosophers and scientists. Regardless of its accuracy, “A Vindication of Natural Diet” was immensely influential. The essay was first published as a note to Shelley’s “philosophical poem” Queen Mab (1813), which was distributed widely within the radical circles he frequented. The poem similarly invokes a lapsarian carnist deterioration, the “Earth groan[ing] beneath religion’s iron age / … / Making the Earth a slaughter-house!” (lines 7.44–48). In response, he offers a vision of a utopian future, where “Health … / Glows in the fruits,” and humanity:              no longer now … slays the lamb that looks him in the face. And horribly devours his mangled flesh, Which still avenging nature’s broken law, Kindled all putrid humours in his frame. (lines 8.114–15, 8.211–15)

The scene invokes the Messianic age glimpsed in the Biblical book of Isaiah (11:6–9), with Shelley emphasising its return of nonhuman animals, as well as humans, to vegetarianism; tigers no longer satiate their “unnatural famine” with the “flesh of lambs” and lions, likewise, forget their “thirst for blood” and lay down “beside the dreadless kid,” their true “nature” revealed to be “as the nature of a lamb” (lines 8.79–80, 8.124–28). Shelley hereby presents a return to prelapsarian vegetarianism as a natural inevitability, rather than a moral imperative, albeit one he sought to hasten through his poetry. Similar vegetarian endorsements appear throughout Shelley’s other poetry. The idealised Poet of Alastor, for example, “linger[s] long / In lonesome vales, making the wild his home / Until the doves and squirrels would partake / From his innocuous hand his bloodless food” (lines 98–101). The Hindu rebellion of Laon and Cythna

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(1818; later published as The Revolt of Islam) also climaxes in a vegetarian feast, after which “never again may blood of bird or beast, / Stain with a venomous stream a human feast” (lines v.5.523–27). Percy Shelley’s poetry proved immensely influential on the nineteenth century’s burgeoning vegetarian and social revolutions. Queen Mab became a “basic text in working class culture,” with Vegetarian Society vice-president William Axon and author Henry Salt calling “A Vindication of Natural Diet” “perhaps the most powerful and eloquent plea ever put forward in favour of the Vegetarian cause” in their 1884 reprint (Spencer 236; Salt and Axon iii). Shelley later denounced Queen Mab as “crude and immature” (P. B. Shelley, Queen Mab 168). In 1817—while Frankenstein was still being written, however—he considered the poem’s sentiments had only “gained rather than lost that beauty & that grandeur which first determined him to devote his life to the investigation and inculcation of them” (P. B. Shelley, Letters 1:567). Timothy Morton even suggests that the Shelleys were “collaborating between 1814 and 1816 on a collection of works revolving around the [vegetarian] themes already presented in Queen Mab,” noting the “sheer strength and vigour” with which similar themes are presented in Mary Shelley’s early novels (47). Indeed, many vegetarian and revolutionary themes of Percy Shelley’s writing are carried over into Frankenstein, to which the myths of Prometheus and Genesis are central. As its alternative title implies, Victor Frankenstein represents a “modern Prometheus” whose sympathies toward other animals are degrading due to his defiance of the “natural” order. His herbivorous creature, conversely, bases much of his understanding on the representation of Genesis in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), which inspires in him the desire to return to a prelapsarian vegetarian utopia. A Romantic representation of vegetarianism is thereby embedded into both Frankenstein and the very foundation of modern science fiction itself.

Frankenstein Although Frankenstein’s original “Preface” warns that no inference “prejudicing any philosophical doctrine of whatever kind” is drawn from its pages, it also proclaims “a point of view to the imagination for the delineating of human passions more comprehensive and commanding than any which the ordinary relations of existing events can yield” (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 3–4). Percy Shelley also insisted on its instructive powers in a preprepared review of the novel, with Frankenstein himself claiming the

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“strange incidents” of his story “will afford a view of nature, which may enlarge your faculties and understanding” (P. B. Shelley, “On Frankenstein” 310; M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 17). As William St. Clair observes, the Shelleys clearly intended Frankenstein to contribute “to the general intellectual and moral improvement of society in its … cumulative progress towards perfection” (“Impact” 41). Prominent among the novel’s many moral layers is an emphasis on vegetarianism, which reflects the prelapsarian philosophy expressed in Percy Shelley’s “Vindication of Natural Diet” and other vegetarian writing. Frankenstein’s ungodly scientific pursuits render him increasingly insensitive to nonhuman suffering, with the creature similarly transitioning from innocent vegetarianism to a carnivorously coded callousness as he become more corrupted by his exposures to human culture. Frankenstein’s Fall Lapsarian notions about animal cruelty are evident from Frankenstein’s opening scenes, which are narrated by the ship captain and failed poet Robert Walton, who seeks a utopian “region of beauty and delight” in the North Pole (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 10). Walton likens his voyage to that of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798), which tells of an Antarctic explorer who shoots an albatross, after which he and his crew are forced into living death until he recognises the inherent “beauty” of other animals (lines 272–91). Walton promises he “shall kill no albatross” with his shipmaster also refusing to hunt because “he cannot endure to spill blood” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 9–10). The other members of the crew are enthusiastic hunters, however, and Walton’s peaceful relationship with other animals has already been compromised by accompanying “whale-fishers on several expeditions to the North Sea” (7). The shipmaster’s refusal to hunt also conflicts with his history as a whaler and is removed from the popular 1831 revised edition Frankenstein (9–10, cf. 200). Like Coleridge’s Mariner, therefore, Walton’s regard for nonhuman animals appears inversely proportionate to his scientific interests. Frankenstein displays a similar disregard for nonhuman animals. He and his creature are first glimpsed driving dog-sledges across the arctic. Although the creature’s canine companions appear vital—progressing rapidly across the ice sheets—only one of Frankenstein’s dogs is alive when he is retrieved by Walton (12–13). What happens to the surviving dog is never disclosed, although Frankenstein recalls putting the others through

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“incredible toil,” only ever stopping to remove one of them who has died from “fatigue,” and finding the need to feed them “bitterly irksome” (176). His pursuit of the creature is similarly founded upon speciesist prejudices. As the creature acknowledges, his creator “would not call it murder” if he was killed, conceiving of him as “an animal” to be “hunted like the chamois, and destroyed as a beast of prey” (119, 169). Frankenstein’s central conflict, therefore, rests upon a speciesist logic that distinguishes between “killable” and “non-killable” animals (see Haraway 80). Frankenstein’s flippant treatment of nonhuman animals during the Arctic chase is indicative of his scientific sensibilities. He dismisses other animals as “more necessary beings,” considering human sensibilities “superior to those apparent in the brute” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 24, 75). He is also filled with “utmost wonder” when witnessing one of the popular eighteenth-century “air-pump” experiments, whereby a small animal (usually a bird) was placed in a bell jar and suffocated to death with a vacuum, as depicted in Jospeh Wright’s painting An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump (1768), which is often considered emblematic of eighteenth-­century science’s indifference to nonhuman life (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 24; Boddice 2008, 101). It was not only scientists who conducted air-pump experiments. Well into the nineteenth century, it was legal for anyone to “experiment” on any animals considered their “property,” with air-pump experiments being a “common parlor demonstration” (Perkins 15). Indeed, Frankenstein witnessed his air-pump experiment not within a university laboratory but in the company of a private “gentleman” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 24). The British poet John Oswald nevertheless rebuked the “sons of moderns science” who “with ruffian violence interrogate trembling nature” and whom “the fibres of agonising animals, delight to scrutinize,” in his influential vegetarian treatise, The Cry of Nature (1791) (31–33). Shelley’s novel suggests a similar deterioration of Frankenstein’s soul in response to his unfeeling, scientific cruelties. Frankenstein’s humanity is explicitly degraded by acts of animal abuse. Stealing nonhuman body parts from slaughterhouses causes his “human nature” to “turn with loathing” (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 36). His Promethean efforts to “tortur[e] the living animal to animate the lifeless clay” similarly leave him without “soul or sensation,” so that, recognising the tendency of science to “weaken your affections,” he declares his studies “unlawful” and “not befitting the human mind” (37). Following his first confrontation with the creature, Frankenstein also hallucinates being

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surrounded by “a multitude of filthy animals, inflicting upon [him] incessant torture” (123). His statement recalls how French poet Louis Racine imagined “the beasts would tear Descartes and his followers asunder if they possessed intelligence and divined his opinions of them” in his poem La Religion (1742) (quoted in Rosenfield 60, see also 55–59). Although there is no record of Mary or Percy Shelley having read Racine’s work, he was an influential Milton scholar and would have surely been of interest had they come across it. A more immediate allusion, as Stephanie Rowe points out, is Swiss Romantic philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s allegation that “the human soul” excites “a natural repugnance at seeing any other sensible being … suffer pain or death” (Rowe 140n5; Rousseau, Discourse 95). To counter the deterioration of human sensibilities, therefore, Rousseau often encouraged a return to “natural,” vegetarian living, as exemplified by Frankenstein’s creature. Child of Nature In contrast to Frankenstein’s Promethean scientist, the creature embodies the archetype of the innocent, vegetarian “Child of Nature”—a Romantic updating of the “Noble Savage,” whose origins can be traced to legends of “a prehistorical ‘golden age,’” and which was “frequently fused with visions of prelapsarian Eden” (Thorslev 27–28). Although a common feature within early eighteenth-century literature, the notion of the Noble Savage was widely popularised through Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality, also known as the Second Discourse (1755), which contains almost identical arguments regarding humanity’s anatomical herbivorousness to those in Percy Shelley’s “Vindication of Natural Diet” (cf. Rousseau, Discourse 187–88n(e), P. B. Shelley, “Vindication” 8). Yet while Mary Shelley read many of Rousseau’s works while writing Frankenstein, there is no evidence she ever read the Second Discourse (see M.  Shelley Journals, 1:89, 1:92, 1:94, 1:101, 1:121, 1:182–83). Nevertheless, as Paul A. Cantor points out, its influence was “so pervasive in the late eighteenth century that one need not show that individual Romantics had read it in order to claim that it shaped their thinking about human nature” (4–5; see also P.  B. Shelley 1965g, 139n1). Anne K.  Mellor therefore argues that the creature is an embodiment of “Rousseau’s natural man” who, at first, appears “no different from [nonhuman] animals, responding unconsciously to the needs of his flesh and the changing conditions of his environment” (47). However, rather than the Noble Savage, the creature

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more accurately represents the later Romantic archetype of the Child of Nature, who—according to Thorslev—is “more sentimental, and distinctly naïve,” and is often “thrust into a strange adult society with nothing but … native innocence and ignorance”: There is almost always some obscurity or mystery connected with [their] birth … [they have] been raised in some relatively wild and uncultivated place … [they are] always depicted as a being close to nature and to natural life, and this association has given him moral principles and love and natural generosity … [They are] physically strong and healthy, and [have] a temperament to correspond. … naturally ebullient, even aggressive, and it is this aggressiveness, combined with his naïveté, which gets him into so many scrapes … [they are] either incapable of or hostile to analytic reason, and depends upon instinct, emotion, or native intuition, and, of course, on [their] natural goodness of heart.” (Thorslev 29–30)

Shelley’s creature is similarly home in nature and lacking the kind of rationality and intellect valued within Western culture; he is “a bit too naked, stripped … of all of the ‘prejudices’ of civilization, and thus stripped also of most of his individuality and human diversity” (29). Thorslev considers William Wordsworth to be “the only great poet of the Romantic Movement proper who ma[de] much use of the Child of Nature” (34). However, the creature is a clear example of the archetype, which has had a far greater and longer-lasting cultural impact. Vegetarianism is a key component of the Child of Nature, whose first “truly romantic stage” is epitomised in Godwin’s Fleetwood (1805) (Thorslev 33). Like Fleetwood, Frankenstein’s creature is a vegetarian. He begins his life wandering in the wilderness, “tormented by hunger and thirst” until he eats “some berries” and later flees into the Swiss Alps like Fleetwood (and Byron) before him (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 80–81; see also Thorslev 34). The feminist critic Margaret Homans also reads Frankenstein as a “literalization” of Alastor that both “embodies” and “criticises” Percy Shelley’s “romantic imagination,” so that it becomes an ironic refutation of the “postromantic” ideology that it is “a woman’s duty to transcribe and give birth to men’s words” (115). Indeed, it is Homans’s analysis of how Frankenstein bears the “vegetarian word” of Alastor that Carol J. Adams cites (in isolation) when defining how women writers can resist carnism through literature in The Sexual Politics of Meat (1990) (90). Frankenstein and Percy Shelley’s vegetarian philosophy are

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therefore not only foundational to the modern science fictional tradition but also modern vegetarian and critical animal studies themselves. Mary Shelley further echoes “A Vindication of Natural Diet” in Frankenstein by making the creature’s first encounter with human civilisation a distinctly Promethean confrontation with carnism. When the creature discovers a fire “left by some wandering beggars,” he is “overcome with delight” at its warmth. In a moment of hubris, he thrusts his hand “into the live embers,” only to withdraw it “with a cry of pain.” He then begins systematically investigating the fire’s utility, discovering that, although his berries are “spoiled,” his nuts and roots are much improved by being cooked, even tasting the roasted “offals” (sic) the beggars leave behind (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 81). As Emelia Quinn observes, the encounter with fire in Frankenstein as the “prerequisite for meat consumption” signals the creature’s “descent” … from vegetarianism to meat-­ eating through his transformation from natural man … to monster corrupted by the human sphere,” the offal serving as “a monstrous parody of the apple from the tree of knowledge” (Reading Veganism 41). Morton similarly considers that the creature’s “cooked offals supplement his diet of nuts, roots and acorns,” so that “Frankenstein creates a monster who finds out about how good it is to cook flesh” (47). Indeed, Thorslev argues that what made the Child of Nature so appealing appealed to Romantic writers was precisely because—unlike the Noble Savage—it “was capable of considerable development” and could therefore be used in “initiation- into-evil” tales, with their encounters with human society often coinciding with a fall from “natural” innocence (30). However, the creature never attempts to procure more meat, continuing to search for “a few acorns to assuage the pangs of [his] hunger” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 82). As Adams argues, the creature thereby rejects the “promethean gift” of meat-eating and maintains his vegetarian innocence in the face of the fire’s corrupting influence (126). The creature thereby offers a utopian model of prelapsarian innocence. Whether Frankenstein’s creature is consciously vegetarian, or merely herbivorous has long been debated. In addition to human body parts, he is constructed from nonhuman animal materials taken from “the dissecting room and the slaughterhouse” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 37). Adams claims the creature is “anatomically vegetarian,” since “it is only herbivorous animals who are consumed by humans” (104). Quinn concurs, arguing the creature is “biologically herbivorous,” due to his slaughterhouse anatomy (Reading Veganism 37–38). If so, the creature’s “vegetarianism”

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might be dismissed as a biological imperative rather than an ethical choice. Adams’s reasoning is dubious, however: pigs, chickens, ducks and geese are omnivorous, sharks and other sea creatures are exclusively carnivorous, as are many other animals commonly eaten by humans from non-AngloAmerican cultures, and Rowe also suggests the possibility of non-herbivorous animals, such as dogs and cats, being included in the parts of his body taken from dissecting rooms (147n18). Such arguments also ignore the human components that make up most of the creature, making him biologically omnivorous at best. The partial slaughterhouse origins of his anatomy nevertheless render him a “bizarre by-product of meat-eating” who—as Jackson Petsce argues—“problematises the notion of human subjectivity by virtue of his hybrid position that is neither wholly human nor wholly animal” (98, 100). The creature therefore not only presents a new, prelapsarian innocence to humanity but does so while embodying its many nonhuman victims and further “endangering the carnivorist [sic] social order” through the forceful assertion of his vegetarianism (99). Food plays a significant role in the creature’s interaction with human society. After fleeing into the forest, he is drawn to a town by the “vegetables in the gardens” and the “milk and cheese” placed in its windows.” Once there, he immediately steals some “bread, cheese, milk, and wine,” discovering he does “not like” the latter (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 83). The similar dismissals of the wine and the offal suggest a connection to Percy Shelley’s combined condemnation of meat and alcohol in “A Vindication of Natural Diet.” Quinn also suggests the creature’s desire for dairy is an example of his “inability to escape human corruptions, rather than [a] bodily need,” when characterising him as a vegan rather than a vegetarian (“Hideous Progeny” 157). That the creature accepts the milk and cheese while rejecting the offal, however, suggests a physiological distinction between flesh and other animal products and perhaps a philosophical one by Mary Shelley as well. Adams also identifies the rustic, vegetarian meals of the creature’s unwitting foster family, the De Laceys,2 with Rousseau’s “ideal” rustic diet of “milk, vegetables, eggs, cheese, brown bread, with tolerable wine” in The Confessions (1769/1782), which Shelley read twice while writing Frankenstein (Adams 102; Rousseau, Confessions 1:86; M.  Shelley Journals 1:89, 1:182). Rousseau, however, 2  There is an inconsistency in the spelling of “De Lacey”/ “De Lacy” in Frankenstein’s 1818 edition. The 1831 edition uses “De Lacey” consistently.

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idealised rustic vegetarianism due to its sensuousness and “simplicity” rather than any ethical benefits, and the De Laceys’s “vegetarianism” also results from poverty rather than any ethical inclination (Rousseau Confessions 86–87; M. Shelley, Frankenstein 88). There is also suggestion of Promethean carnism in first words the creature learns from the De Laceys: “fire, milk, bread, and wood” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 89, italics original). Yet, again, they—along with the creature’s provisions of firewood—are more indicative of the De Laceys’s lower-class living than any particular Promethean influence. The creature gains further understanding of human culture through exposure to Romantic literature. He first overhears the De Laceys reading Volney’s Ruins of Empires (1791) and later discovers abandoned copies of Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plutarch’s Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (ca.100 CE) and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s The Sorrows of Werther (1774), inside a “leathern portmanteau,” which inherently connects the creature’s cultural education with carnism (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 103; see also Quinn, Reading Veganism 50). Milton’s poem clearly depicts Eden as a vegetarian utopia and was “the primary form in which Romantic Myth-makers confronted the orthodox account of creation” (Cantor 1). Eden is introduced in Paradise Lost by a scene of Eve preparing a dinner of “savoury fruits” for her and Adam, with the archangel Raphael declaring “flowers and their fruit” to be “Man’s nourishment” (Milton, Paradise Lost lines 5.303–4, 5.479–500). Once Eve eats the forbidden fruit, however, the nonhuman animals become hostile and Adam and Eve are exiled from Eden with all that they “eat or drink … / propagated curse” (lines 10.710–14, 10.728–29).3 The creature’s reading of Paradise Lost as a “true history” bestows upon him a Romantic conception of a prelapsarian, vegetarian humanity (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 104). He is thereby inspired to propose a return to a meatless prelapsarian existence, when requesting Frankenstein to build him a companion. The creature lauds his vegetarianism over his fallen creator, declaring “My food is not that of man; I do not destroy the lamb and the kid, to glut my appetite; acorns and berries afford sufficient nourishment,” and makes similar claims about his proposed 3  Although God’s carnist covenant with Noah is acknowledged and enacted in Paradise Lost, his authorisation of carnism is not made explicit. Additionally, in Milton’s later poem Paradise Regained (1671), Satan tempts a starving Jesus Christ with “Meats by the Law unclean,” reminding him of humanity’s God-given “right” to “all Creatures,” although no meat-specific temptations occur during the corresponding verses of the Bible (Milton, Paradise Lost lines 2.324–325; cf. Matthew 4:1–11, Mark 1:12–13, Luke 4:1–13).

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companion, promising she will be “of the same nature” as himself; that “the sun … will ripen [their] food,” rendering their existence “peaceful and human” (120, italics added). Vegetarianism provides the ethical basis for the creature’s utopian vision, which offers the chance of a new (post-­ human) innocence to the fallen humanity Frankenstein represents. The creature’s promise of a return to vegetarian innocence is later echoed in Percy Shelley’s 1820 poem Prometheus Unbound, which he began while Frankenstein was edited for publication and which is dedicated to “the direct enforcement of reform” through familiarising “more select classes of poetical readers with beautiful idealisms of moral excellence” (M. Shelley, Journals 1:177, 1:226, 1:2:60, 2:174). The poem is a reimagining of a lost sequel to Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound (ca.430 BCE), which Percy Shelley and his cousin Thomas Medwin had started translating in 1817.4 While Aeschylus’s Prometheus is sympathetic to humanity, Shelley’s is sympathetic to all creatures, wishing “no living thing to suffer pain,” and, once unbound, restores the “natural” order, ushering in a Queen Mab-like golden age wherein “men and beasts in happy dreams shall gather / Strength for the coming day, and all its joy” (P. B. Shelley, Prometheus lines 1.30, 3.3.103–4, italics added). Like Frankenstein’s creature, the Chorus of Spirits in Prometheus Unbound intend to conduct their prelapsarian restoration of Nature away “from the new world of man” (lines 4.157). Ironically, while Percy Shelley blamed both Satan and Prometheus for humanity’s fall into carnism, it is largely due to his influence that the two archetypes came to represent “the Romantic Hero apotheosized,” with Mary Shelley later observing how the union of the unbound Prometheus with his wife, Asia—an embodiment of Nature— implies not only a return to nature but also its ultimate perfection through the harmonic incorporation of humanity (Thorslev 108; M.  Shelley “Prometheus,” 269). Frankenstein denies such a return, however, refusing to create a companion for the creature out of fear a “race of devils might be propagated upon the earth” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 138). He thereby 4  The Shelley/Medwin translation of Prometheus Bound (cited here) was published in 1832 and became widely influential, being only the second ever English translation of Aeschylus’s play, to which the Romantic image of Prometheus as a “hero and savior of men owes his character almost entirely” (Thorslev 113). Medwin also claims Milton drew “much of his inspiration” for Paradise Lost from Prometheus Bound in the translation’s introduction (Aeschylus v–vi footnote, see also 67–69, 73–74). Stuart, moreover, states that Medwin “converted to vegetarianism while resident in India,” although there is no evidence to support the claim (395).

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prevents the possibility of a return to vegetarian innocence to avoid another, implicitly carnist fall. Although Paradise Lost carries significant implications for the creature’s lapsarian conception of human nature, the other texts the creature reads have little bearing on his vegetarianism. Plutarch argued against meat eating as a matter of moral degradation in his “Essay on Flesh Eating” and “Rules for the Preservation of Health,” which Adams calls “the quintessential authoritative vegetarian texts” and which Percy Shelley quoted in “A Vindication of Natural Diet” (Adams 91; P. B. Shelley, “Vindication” 6; translated in Morton 129). Yet while Mary Shelley records reading Plutarch’s Lives while writing Frankenstein, there is no record of her having read the Moralia, which contains his vegetarian essays, although she would almost certainly have been aware of them through her husband (Journals 1:91). Nevertheless, the Lives contain no dietary instruction, nor does The Sorrows of Werther, although it was a key text in the rise of Sensibility in the eighteenth century, which likely inspired increasing concerns about nonhuman suffering. Although they do not contain any vegetarian instruction, the books the creature reads are suggestive of an anti-speciesist disposition, which is exposed in his responses to the other literary sources. The details of human “vice and bloodshed” in Ruins of Empire leads him to consider humanity’s most “base and vicious” examples “more abject than … the blind mole or harmless worm” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 95–96). He earlier likens his situation to Aesop’s fable of “The Ass and the Lapdog,” which tells of a donkey who, imitating the behaviour of a lap dog, attempts to sit on their master’s lap only to be beaten (92). It is not clear when or how the creature encountered the story. That he considers that “surely the gentle ass, whose intentions were affectionate … deserved better treatment than blows and execration” suggests some innate, or at least continued, sympathy toward and identification with nonhuman animals (92). Adams argues that “by including animals within its moral circle, the Creature provides an emblem for what it hoped and needed—but failed to receive—from human society” (122). Rowe similarly considers Frankenstein a reiteration of Oswald’s desire to expand the “circle of benevolence” to other animals (Rowe 139; Oswald 25). Moreover, while Sherryl Vint never directly engages with Frankenstein in Animal Alterity (2010), she connects it with later science-fictional explorations of the “human-animal boundary” by H.  G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon (Vint 189–90, 202–3). The creature’s rejection of human culture and alignment

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with nonhuman animals is indeed exposed in his proclamation that he is “not even the same nature as man” and wish that he had “for ever remained in [his] native wood” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 95–96). Yet besides the creature, nonhuman animals are almost entirely absent from the novel. The only other nonhuman(oid) animal ever seen, besides the sledge dogs and suffocated bird discussed earlier, is the De Laceys’s dairy cow. Adams argues that the creature’s “reference to the demands that one cow puts on food resources echoes the modern ecological vegetarian position” (102). Quinn, however, considers his “inability to see the cow as a fellow sentient being” to be similarly “striking” (Reading Veganism 41–42). From a vegan perspective, the creature’s disregard of the dairy cow suggests his “vegetarianism” stems more from a potentially natural herbivorousness than any genuine allegiance with other animals, which is further degraded through his exposure to human culture. The creature’s diet is also all but absent from the many horror-focused theatrical and cinematic adaptations through which his story has primarily persisted. The earliest stage adaptation, Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (1923), replaces the creature’s rejection of offal with his seizing upon a “porridge, with a whole dead sheep in it,” to which he reacts with “surprise and pleasure,” while the Promethean fire over which it cooks “excites his admiration” (Peake 146, italics removed). All other major theatrical and cinematic adaptations have neglected the creature’s diet altogether. Even Kenneth Branagh’s allegedly “more faithful” film Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1994) replaces his promise of a peaceful, vegetarian utopia with one of Arctic isolation from which the viewer may infer all the harshness and carnist necessity carried with it (Branagh “Tale” 9). Less faithful adaptations often even emphasise an apocryphal carnivorousness. The Alice Cooper song “Feed My Frankenstein” (1991) (from which this chapter’s title is taken) interprets the singer’s sexuality as an insatiable, carnivorous monster who explicitly rejects vegetarianism, declaring “I ain’t no veggie, like my flesh on the bone,” while Junji Ito’s 2013 manga adaptation introduces its creature devouring a brown bear (89–90). As St. Clair observes, “survivals” of Frankenstein’s “original moral purpose are rare” among its adaptations, with the creature’s carnism only increasing as he becomes more monstrous (“Impact” 54).

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The Creature’s Fall Like Paradise Lost, which details the falls of both Satan and humanity, Frankenstein contains two falls: that of Frankenstein and the creature himself. Despite his allegedly peaceful nature, the creature kills (at least) three innocent victims over the course of its narrative: Frankenstein’s “fragile” fiancé Elizabeth, his “gentle” younger brother William, and his best friend Clerval whose “soul overflow[s] with ardent affections” (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 21, 52, 130). The creature also frames the Frankensteins’s servant Justine, who is then executed for his crimes and eventually drives Frankenstein to his death. The creature likens himself to Milton’s Satan, having been ostracised from society until “Evil thenceforth became [his] good” (188; quoting Milton, Paradise Lost lines 4.109–10). However, as Anne McWhir argues, the creature “cannot at the same time be both [an] innocent, virtuous, vegetarian, natural man and be a demonic outcast” (81). As with Frankenstein, the creature’s increasing callousness coincides with a growing disregard for humans and other animals. Shelley describes the creature’s violence in explicitly carnivorous language. After being attacked by Felix De Lacey, who finds him in their cottage, he claims he could have “torn [De Lacey] limb from limb, like the lion rends the antelope,” and “glutted [him]self with their shrieks and misery” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 110–11). He uses similar language when vowing vengeance against Frankenstein, promising to “glut the maw of death, until it be satiated with the blood of [his] remaining friends” (77, italics added). William also considers the creature an “ogre” who wants to “eat” him (117), the anthropophagous accusation signalling the creature’s conversion from vegetarian Child of Nature into murderous “monster.” During the Arctic chase, the creature also leaves a “dead hare” for Frankenstein, instructing him to “eat, and be refreshed” and to wrap himself in “furs” (174). In the Arctic, Frankenstein otherwise subsists upon fish and “the wild animals that crossed [his] path,” which he shares with villagers in exchange for “fire and utensils for cooking” (173–74). Martin Priestman therefore argues that Frankenstein’s need for “cooked meat is one of the many failings which raise questions about Victor’s supposed moral superiority over his vegetarian Creature” (49). The instruction to don the hare’s fur also echoes the carnist Fall of Genesis, whereby Adam and Eve are instructed to wear “coats of skins” (3:21). It is the creature himself who appears to

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have killed the hare,5 however, suggesting he has come to disregard both human and nonhuman animal life. It is common to associate the creature’s violent fall with his Miltonic education. He exhibits violent tendencies long before reading Paradise Lost, however. When first attacked by Felix, the creature “imprudently” tears through the forest, desiring to “spread havoc and destruction” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 111). He then searches in “rage” for something “human” to “injure,” turning his “fury toward inanimate objects” and burns down the De Lacey cottage in a moment of “insanity” that “burst all bounds of reason and reflection” (113). Although the creature likens his violent rebellion to Milton’s Satan, it is not inspired by him, and— come the novel’s climax—even he concedes that it is his “vice” and “the frightful catalogue of [his] deeds” that have left him “degraded… beneath the meanest animal” rather than human society (189). A curious connection to “A Vindication of Natural Diet” also suggests he is in fact inherently disposed to violence. During the creature’s animation, Frankenstein is “inexplicably repulsed” by his “dull yellow eye,” which Petsche likens to Derrida’s confrontation with the nonhuman gaze (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 38–39; Petsche 101–2). In “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” however, Percy Shelley attributes Napoleon Bonaparte’s violent and ambitious disposition to carnivorousness, writing that “bile-­ suffused cheek” and “yellow eye … speak no less plainly the character of his unresting ambition than his murders and his victories” (11). Yellow-­ bile was one of the four “humours” in classical medicine, an excess of which was said to imply an irritable and aggressive temperament and cause “yellow skin,” which the creature also has (Jouanna 342; M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 39). The yellow hue of the creature’s anatomy might be attributed to its decomposition, yet there is reason to think tits bilious and Napoleonic allusions are deliberate. Mary Shelley paid close attention to

5  Rowe attempts to reconcile the creature’s uncharacteristic speciesism by suggesting he may have found or stolen the dead hare from the Arctic community whose “store of winter food” he takes to feed his sledge dogs (Rowe 147n18; M. Shelley, Frankenstein 175). The creature’s own sustenance is then brought into question, however. Fruits and vegetables are “almost nonexistent in traditional Inuit diets,” which usually consist of “high concentrations of meat, fat, and fish,” suggesting there would be little for him to eat during the weeks-long chase besides meat (Searles 70–71).

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Buonaparte’s activities while writing Frankenstein,6 and Percy Shelley also read Ben Johnson’s Every Man in His Humour (1598) to her soon after Frankenstein’s publication, suggesting an active interest/familiarity with the humours (M. Shelley, Journals 1:67, 1:72, 2:366–67). In connection with “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” the creature’s yellow eye appears to imply an inherent aggression, which is regularly evidenced throughout Frankenstein.7 Frankenstein’s creature arguably does more to reiterate than breakdown traditional, carnist conceptions. As George Slusser argues, when asserting a “Frankenstein Barrier” that pervades postmodern science fiction, Frankenstein is not about the “original” scientific sin of introducing “change,” but rather the “second-degree sin” against “the second chance modern science offers humanity” (50–51). Although the creature represents a potential new beginning for humanity, his story also suggests it will inevitably fall again. Whether the creature is inherently violent—and therefore unable to uphold his utopian vegetarian values—or falls into violence through his exposure to humanity, a dichotomy between vegetarian innocence and increasingly carnist violence is maintained, which continues to resonate throughout modern science fiction. Children of Cain The creature’s fall from vegetarian innocence into murderous violence is also implied through Shelley’s allusions to the Biblical story of Adam and Eve’s son Cain, the first murderer, who kills his brother Abel following God’s rejection of a vegetarian offering. The creature explicitly identifies himself with Milton’s Satan, proclaiming to Frankenstein: “I ought to be thy Adam; but I am rather the fallen angel” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 77). As Andrew Milner observes, however, the creature’s fall derives from the “sin of murder,” rather than any Satanic desire to “set himself in glory above his peers,” again aligning him more immediately with the envious 6  For further analysis of Napoleon’s influence on Frankenstein, see Andrew M McClellan, “The Politics of Revivification in Lucan’s Bellum Civile and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein,” Frankenstein and its Classics: The Modern Prometheus from Antiquity to Science Fiction, edited by Jesse Weiner, Benjamin Eldon Stevens, and Brett M.  Rogers (Bloomsbury Academic, 2018), 68–73; and Fred V. Randel, “The Political Geography of Horror in Mary Shelley’s ‘Frankenstein.’” ELH 70, no. 2 (Summer 2003): 467–69. 7  Later theories of the four humours associated yellow bile with the element of fire, providing a further—though certainly incidental—Promethean coincidence (Jouanna 340n21, 346).

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and wrathful Cain and the carnist corruption of his progeny (Milton, Paradise Lost lines 1.36–37; Milner 222). Moreover, while Adam and Eve’s Fall is often considered to coincide with the beginning of carnism, meat-eating is still not sanctioned following their exile from Eden, with God still commanding them to “eat the herb of the field” (Gen. 3:17–18). It is not until God rewards Noah—a descendant of Adam and Eve’s third son, Seth—for preserving “two of every” species on his Ark during the flood that carnism is consecrated, with God “deliver[ing]” all other animals to Noah, so that “every moving thing that liveth shall be meat” for him and his children, after which all other animals come to “fear” and “dread” humanity (6:23). Thereafter, animal slaughter is appealed to frequently as a marker of humanity’s relationship with God, most notably in the nonhuman sacrifices that signal God’s first covenant with Abraham and the deception of Esau, which determines its inheritance through Jacob (15:9–10, 25:28–34). The sacrifice of nonhuman animals is also earlier invoked in the Story of Cain and Abel, who each make an offering of their works to God, Cain offering the “fruit of the ground,” while Abel offers “the firstlings of his flock” (4:3–4). Only Abel’s offering receives “respect” from God, so that Cain becomes “wroth” and slays his brother (4:5–9). Although Cain’s killing of Abel is technically the first murder mentioned in the Bible, it is not the first killing to take place, being preceded by Abel’s sacrificial slaughter of his sheep, and it is only through the speciesist prejudices that delineate (some) nonhuman animals as “killable” that Cain is condemned, and Abel elevated. After murdering Abel, the once-peaceful Cain is no longer able to grow vegetables, implying his turn to a “previously forbidden” carnist diet (Rabkin 35). As punishment for the murder, Cain is exiled to the land of Nod, where he establishes the first city, which is populated by his progeny who progressively descend into violence and carnism—his lineage ending with the brothers Jubal and Jabal, the latter of whom is the father of “such as have cattle” (Gen. 4:20). Since carnism is not consecrated in Genesis until after the deluge, the carnism of Cain’s children presumably contributes to the great “wickedness” and “evil” that God seeks to erase through the flood (6:5). Cain’s vegetarian and carnist associations are repeated in Book Eleven of Paradise Lost, when Adam is shown a vision of his progeny and the implications of their fall. He is first shown a tented city, which the angel Michael explains are “the tents / Of wickedness, wherein shall dwell his race / Who slew his brother” (Milton lines 11.607–9, italics added). Indeed,

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as well as fathering the first cattle farmers, Jabal is also “the father of such as dwell in tents” (Gen. 4:20), and the inference of carnism’s corruption is strengthened by the following descriptions of increasing animal agriculture and human violence, until: “Where cattle pastured late, now scattered lies / With carcasses and arms th’ ensanguined field” (Milton lines 11.40–54). The story of Noah is also retold in Paradise Lost, although Milton omits God’s consecration of carnism, and Milton more directly attributes the “wickedness” of Cain’s progeny to their atheism, rather than any dietary transgressions (lines 11.611, 11.625). In “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” however, Percy Shelley explicitly appeals to the visions of Cain’s progeny in Paradise Lost as proof Milton was “well aware” of humanity’s carnist corruption, having had his archangel “exhibit to Adam the consequence of his disobedience” (5).8 The fear of Cain’s generational corruption is also repeated in Frankenstein. When considering the implications of creating a companion for the creature, Frankenstein envisions “a race of devils … propagated upon the earth, who might make the very existence of the species of man a condition precarious and full of terror.” He therefore abandons his creation, so as not to inflict a “curse upon everlasting generations” (M. Shelley, Frankenstein 138). As Milner observes, Frankenstein’s mistrust of the creature’s intentions seeming “to require no rational justification,” perhaps stemming purely from “species-loyalty,” or “‘speciesism’ as contemporary animal rights activists might describe it” (198, 224). The visions of Cain’s offspring in Genesis and Paradise Lost thereby establish a closer archetypal alignment between the creature and the vegetarian-cum-murderer Cain than the hubristic Satan, which the creature is perhaps unable to recognise, since Cain remains unnamed in Paradise Lost. Cain also proved a prominent Romantic archetype, being first “sentimentalized” in German author Salomon Gessner’s The Death of Abel (1758, tr. 1761), which had a direct influence on Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner (Thorslev 97; citing Coleridge, Prefatory Note 146). Percy Shelley also sympathises with Cain in his posthumously published essay “On the Vegetable System of Diet” (1814–15), lamenting “How interminable … the series of calamity which that man who first slew his brother, unthinkingly produced” (343). There is no evidence he or Mary Shelley ever read The Death of Abel, although it seems likely, given their interest in popular literature and association with Byron, who 8

 Percy Shelley misidentifies Michael as “Raphael” in the cited passage.

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acknowledges the popularity and influence of Gessner’s text in the preface to his 1821 drama Cain, A Mystery (881–82). Lord Byron often shared in Shelleys’s vegetarianism, his journals recording numerous instances when he swore off meat (see Life 55, 145, 150, 202, 208, 247, 628). His vegetarianism was fleeting, however, and he eventually decided that his daughter, Allegra, could not be trusted to their care, under which she might “perish of starvation, and green fruit” (New Selection 349). T ⁠ he peacefulness of Byron’s Don Juan is nevertheless displayed through his “weakness, for what most people deem mere vermin” (Don Juan lines 10.397). The breakdown of human society following the sun’s sudden disappearance in “Darkness” (1816)—arguably an early instance of post-­apocalyptic science fiction whose premise is expanded upon in Isaac Asimov’s Nightfall (1941/1990)—also coincides with “tame and tremulous” animals being “slain for food,” until all “the meagre were devour’d / [and] Even dogs assail’d their masters” suggesting a connection between civilisation’s deterioration and an increase in carnist violence (lines 46–47). Moreover, like Shelley’s creature, Byron’s Cain is modelled on Milton’s Satan. He is tempted into murder by “Lucifer” himself, who leverages Cain’s animal sympathies so that he ends up killing Abel out of disgust at God’s pleasure in “the pangs / Of the sad ignorant victims underneath/ [Abel’s] pious knife” (Cain lines 3.300–3). Thorslev argues it is through Byron that the Cain archetype followed that of Satan by becoming “gradually more and more sympathetic,” Byron being “the only major Romantic poet to have used [Cain] as a protagonist in an important work” (93, 109). As with Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound, however, Byron repeats many of the implicit anti-speciesist associations Mary Shelley had already embedded in her earlier and ultimately far more influential Frankenstein. Ecocritical Inclinations Frankenstein has also been recognised for its early science-fictional engagement with environmentalism. In The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction (2009), Patrick D.  Murphy specifically identifies a “proto-­ environmentalist awareness” in the works of Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells that “overtly and obviously encourag[es] readers not only to think but act differently” (380). When defining the “ecogothic,” Andrew Smith and William Hughes also cite the creature’s “challenge” to conventional conceptions of nature as the “clearest expression” of gothic literature’s ecological “language of estrangement” (2–3). Catherine Lanone also examines

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Frankenstein as a “proto-ecocritical text” whose influence extends to Margaret Atwood and beyond (30). Philip Armstrong, moreover, directly connects the novel’s ecological concerns with carnism, arguing that the “universally negative reactions” the creature faces reflect “a cultural concern during the early decades of the nineteenth century regarding the new wave of scientific, and especially agricultural, manipulation of nature,” which included “experimental stock breeding to accelerate meat production” (74). As Colin Spencer notes, the early nineteenth century was a time of increasing economic awareness, when “for the first time in modern history, enough vegetables and cereals were available” for vegetarianism’s adoption to be practical within urban England (227). Indeed, the founder of the Monthly Magazine (1796–43), Sir Richard Phillips, noted among his sixteen “Reasons for Not Eating Animal Food” (1811) that: The forty-seven millions of acres in England and Wales would maintain in abundance as many human inhabitants, if they lived wholly on grain, fruits, and vegetables; but they sustain only twelve millions scantily, while animal food is made the basis of human substance. (311)

Percy Shelley presents a similar economic argument in “A Vindication of Natural Diet,” wherein he observes that “the quantity of nutritious vegetable matter consumed in fattening the carcase of an ox, would afford ten times the sustenance … if gathered immediately from the bosom of the earth” (13). The essay also contains an early connection between climate change and carnism, with Shelley humanity’s conversion to carnism coincided with “some great change in the climates of the earth, with which it has an obvious correspondence” (5). Ecocritical engagements with carnism are not new. They are as old as the modern science fiction tradition and the vegetarian philosophy it bears with it. As Adams observes, concerns about animal-farming’s inefficiency are again reflected in Frankenstein through the De Laceys’s dairy cow, who creates an economic strain upon its “masters” (Adams 102–3; M. Shelley, Frankenstein 88). Animal agriculture is otherwise presented as a peaceful, utopian occupation in Frankenstein, however. In the 1818 edition, Elizabeth fights with Frankenstein’s father, arguing that Frankenstein’s younger brother Ernest should be a farmer, which she considers the “least hurtful, or rather the most beneficial profession of any” (M.  Shelley, Frankenstein 45). The passage is rewritten in the 1831 edition, recasting

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Ernest as an adventurous adolescent, eager to “enter into foreign service” (215). It might also be inferred that Elizabeth intends Ernest to be a vegetable farmer rather than an animal one, due to her vision of him “cultivating the earth” instead of its creatures (45, italics added). Yet while the passage reveals Mary Shelley’s conception of agriculture as a peaceful rather than corrupting occupation, her allusions to the archetypes of Prometheus, Adam, Eve and Cain all suggest she also romanticised farming as an exclusively vegetarian, prelapsarian pursuit.

The Last Man and Others Mary Shelley’s other early writing contains similar vegetarian allusions and endorsements. Like Frankenstein, her second novel Valperga (1923) presents naturalistic vegetarianism in opposition to animal cruelty. Although not science fiction, the novel contains a fantastical element in the witch Mandragola, who is described as a “strange” and “almost deformed” being, “shrivelled and dried up, but agile and swift of motion,” so that she seems “hardly human … unlike every other animal but also … unlike humanity,” seeming to form “a species apart,” continuing Shelley’s associations between vegetarianism, monstrousness and social subversion (370). Mandragola’s description, moreover, recalls that of Frankenstein’s creature and his speciesist isolation. Her “leathern face” also arguably echoes the creature’s nonhuman anatomy, while her diet of “acorns and wood-nuts” explicitly recalls his vegetarianism (369). Earlier in Valperga, the character Beatrice partakes of a similar vegetarian diet after escaping a torturous captivity, further recalling the creature’s vegetarian, wanderings in the wilderness, which culminates in the discovery of fire and the eating of an apple as she re-joins human society (350–51). The allusion suggests of a combined fall, based on the Genesis and Prometheus myths even more explicit than in Frankenstein, although in Valperga the corruption is distinctly Biblical, rather than Promethean. A similar vegetarian escape into the wilderness also occurs in Shelley’s short story “The Heir of Mondolfo” (1877), which was likely “written before the mid 1920s” (Robinson 1976, 395). Elsewhere in Valperga, Beatrice delivers a Miltonic speech rebuking God’s infliction of suffering upon human and nonhuman animals while reminding the Countess Euthanasia of the “myriad of living creatures … quenched in the agonies of death to furnish forth [her fur] cloak,” although she characterises humanity’s “destruction” of other animals as a welcome mercy, arguing it is “better [for them] to die, than to

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suffer!” life’s endless miseries (M.  Shelley, Valperga 330). Nevertheless, the juxtaposition of Beatrice and Mandragola suggests the liberation of a naturalistic, vegetarian existence in preference to a painful, speciesist human society. Utopian, vegetarian sentiments are also prevalent in Shelley’s second foundational science fiction text, The Last Man (1826), which depicts a utopian future society destroyed by a catastrophic plague and contains many tropes prominent within modern science fiction, including utopian vegetarianism. The inhabitants of its utopian state sustain their “delightful” existence by feeding only on the “fruits of the field,” and it is seriously debated whether their Shelleyan leader, Adrian, should “exchange his employment of plucking blackberries, and nursing wounded partridges in the forest for the command of a nation” (59, 74). Adrian’s later appeal to his armies to “cast away the hearts of tigers that burn in [their] breast,” lest the plague triumph in their “butchery, more cruel than her own,” also recalls the vegetarian appeal of Queen Mab, while positioning the plague in carnivorous opposition to their vegetarian utopianism (240–41). The novel also arguably gestures toward the invention of synthetic food through its depiction of a future wherein “the discoveries of science” have resulted in the invention of “machines” to “supply with facility every want of the population,” so that “food sprung up, so to say, spontaneously” (82). Its Romantic utopianism is largely ironic, with the period’s popular humanist ideals undermined by the indiscriminate destruction of the novel’s apocalyptic plague. Its tone is also remorseful, however, and the fact that its utopian vision is vulnerable and impermanent does not negate it as an ideal to aspire towards. That the plague is also described by Adrian’s sister, Idris, as a “renewing hunger,” like that of “the vulture that fed on the heart of Prometheus,” suggests humanity is being punished for its carnist corruption, embodied by the cannibalistic “imposter-prophet” that the protagonists encounter while traversing the post-catastrophic countryside—rather than any vegetarian hubris (242, 309). Shelley’s Last Man himself, meanwhile, undergoes an inverse development to Frankenstein’s creature. Rather than starting life in “natural” vegetarian innocence, Lionel Verney begins The Last Man as a self-described “vagabond shepherd of the hills, a poacher, [and] an unlettered savage” (22). It is only through Adrian’s Romantic tutelage that he attains a perceivably more moral, and eventually vegetarian, state of being. While residing at utopian Windsor, however, Verney fantasises of “rich mental repasts” and resents his “scanty fare, which [he]

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often robbed from the squirrels of the forest,” which Morton reads as an(other) inversion of Alastor, whose poet made “the wild his home, / Until the doves and squirrels would partake / From his innocuous hands his bloodless food” (M.  Shelley, Last Man 61; Morton 250n254; P. B. Shelley, Alastor lines 99–101). Verney is also often “tempted to recur to the lawless feats of [his] boyhood” and considers “knock[ing] down the almost tame pheasants that perched upon the trees,” feeling that “they would better become spit in [his] kitchen than the green leaves of the forest” (M. Shelley, Last Man 61). That Verney and Adrian are often considered analogies of the Shelleys perhaps suggests Mary Shelley’s frustrations with her husband’s vegetarianism. Nevertheless, Verney is able to check his “haughty will” so that he does not actually eat of other animals, although he continues to dream “vainly of such morsels sweet” (61). His statement implies a natural carnism that requires temperance rather than the corrupted vegetarian innocence emphasised in Frankenstein. Similar ideas of vegetarian restriction, rather than rejuvenation, would eventually come to dominate modern science fiction, although they have always remained in contention with the prelapsarian vegetarianism portrayed in Shelley’s original work of science fiction.

Conclusion The centrality of vegetarianism to Frankenstein’s is unsurprising, given the prevalence of vegetarianism within Romantic literature and culture during its composition, along with Mary Shelley’s close proximity to many of nineteenth-century vegetarianism’s most vocal proponents. By entrenching her narrative in the fundamental Western myths of Genesis and Prometheus, she reinforced many of Percy Shelley’s influential arguments regarding humanity’s natural vegetarianism and carnism’s corrupting influence. Her seemingly herbivorous creature is the Child of Nature incarnate, initially representing vegetarian peacefulness and promising a return to prelapsarian innocence through his utopian vision. He and his creator’s natural sympathies towards other animals are each eroded by their exposure to human society. At the novel’s conclusion, both have fallen far from their original innocence. Frankenstein has become unfeeling and unsympathetic in his scientific pursuit of knowledge, while the creature has become a monstrous murderer. The allusions to the similar falls of Prometheus, Satan and Cain reinforce Romantic associations with carnism while also embedding ethical endorsements of peaceful

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vegetarianism in opposition to hubristic and violent behaviour into science fiction from its very beginning. Later adaptations of Frankenstein have largely overlooked the essential vegetarian aspects of its narrative, while still continuing to associate carnism with corruption and depravity as the creature becomes more monstrous. Shelley’s own later science fiction, however, gestures towards representations of vegetarianism as an unnatural and unattainable ideal, which became more prevalent throughout the genre as it developed.

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———. Prometheus Unbound. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter Edwin Peck, vol. 2, 171–262. Ernest Benn, 1965. ———. Queen Mab. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter Edwin Peck, vol. 1, 67–164. Ernest Benn, 1965. ———. “A Vindication of Natural Diet.” The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter Edwin Peck, vol. 6, 3–22. Ernest Benn, 1965. Shelley, Mary, and Percy Shelley. The History of a Six Weeks’ Tour Through a Part of France, Switzerland and Germany, and Holland. The Complete Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Edited by Roger Ingpen and Walter Edwin Peck, vol. 6, 83–143. Ernest Benn, 1965. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation, 3rd ed. Ecco, 2002. Slusser, George. “The Frankenstein Barrier.” Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, edited by George Slusser and Tom Shippey, 46–71. University of Georgia Press, 1992. Smith, Andrew, and William Hughes. “‘Defining the EcoGothic.’ EcoGothic, 1–14. Manchester University Press, 2013. Spencer, Colin. Vegetarianism: A History. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. St. Clair, William. “The Impact of Frankenstein.” Mary Shelley in Her Time, edited by Betty T.  Bennett and Stuart Curran, 38–63. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000. ———. The Godwins and the Shelleys: The Biography of a Family. Faber and Faber, 1989. Stuart, Tristram. The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Thorslev, Peter L.  Jr. The Byronic Hero: Types and Prototypes. University of Minnesota Press, 1962. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool University Press, 2010. Williams, Howard. The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating. University of Illinois Press, 2003. Wollstonecraft, Mary. Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children. Joseph Robinson, 1811. ———. Original Stories from Real Life: With Conversations, Calculated to Regulate the Affections, and Form the Mind to Truth and Goodness, 2nd ed. J. Johnson, 1796. ———. A Vindication of the Rights of Men, in a Letter to the Right Honourable Edmund Burke, Occasioned by his Reflections on the Revolution in France, 2nd ed. J. Johnson, 1790. ———. A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Edited by Miriam Brody. Penguin, 2002.

CHAPTER 3

You Are What You Eat: Bestiality and Other “Carnal Cravings” in the Works of H. G. Wells Although its origins can be traced to Mary Shelley, science fiction was primarily solidified as a genre towards the end of the nineteenth century through the works of writers like Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, with Wells in particular being hailed as the “central writer” in the science fiction tradition, from whom “virtually every subsequent SF writer in the twentieth-­ century literary canon has insisted on their debt to and differences from” (Suvin 244; Milner 33). He also had a profound influence on mainstream politics, being instrumental in establishing the League of Nations and the United Kingdom’s (UK) National Council for Civil Liberties, with his draft of the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Men (1940) providing an early blueprint for the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948). Few authors had more of an impact on the twentieth century than Wells. He also held a lifelong preoccupation with food and eating. The Hindu–Muslim Jem Chip in Robur the Conqueror (1886) (aka The Clipper of the Clouds) is the only vegetarian in all of Verne’s oeuvre, which is otherwise stuffed with enthusiastic and often exotic displays of carnism. Chip is in fact vegan, being a “proscriber of all animal nourishment,” although his diet is represented as an exotic oddity rather than a utopian ideal (17). Conversely, Wells’s works are invariably “larded with gastronomic metaphor … from the qualmishly vegetarian to the most raveningly cannibal” (Kemp 7). His obsession with eating is unsurprising, given how the rise of © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_3

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Darwinism during the late nineteenth century “created a moment of incredible disruption for Victorian society by connecting human and animal life in ways previously unimaginable” (Vint, “Animals” 85), with which Wells was intimately involved. As Darko Suvin points out, Wells was “the first significant writer” who wrote “SF from within the world of science, and not merely facing it” (245), having studied zoology at the prestigious Normal School of Science under T. H. Huxley. While Huxley is now best-known within science fiction circles as the grandfather of Brave New World (1932) author Aldous Huxley, he was better known during the nineteenth century for his fierce promotion of Darwinism. Wells considered his study under Huxley to be “the most educational year of [his] life” (Autobiography 1:201) and was one of three students to graduate from his class with a first-class degree. He went on to teach physics at the Normal School and co-authored the popular biology textbook The Science of Life (1829), with (Aldous Huxley’s brother) Julien Huxley, so that he not only wrote from within the world of science but also helped shape it. The following analysis, therefore, considers how Darwinist and Huxleyan ethics informed Wells’s engagement with science fiction and utopia’s vegetarian tradition and the pressing animal rights concerns of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, beginning with an overview of Darwinism’s impact on vegetarianism and the ethics of eating during the late eighteenth century before an extended examination of Wells’s early scientific romances, paying particular attention to his immensely influential novels The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1887/1888). It then examines Wells’s increasing impatience with vegetarianism throughout his later Utopian cycle and involvement with real-world politics.

Darwinism Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection (1859) and The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex (1871) fundamentally changed how people perceived their relationship(s) to other animals. The common ancestry Darwin asserted between human and nonhuman animals, along with its atheistic implications, widely destabilised traditional Abrahamic notions of humanity’s carnist “dominion” over nonhuman animals. Yet while Darwin’s claim that “disinterested love for all living creatures” is “the most notable attribute of man” is often

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appealed to in support of vegetarianism and animal liberation, the statement was originally presented in support of a division between humans and other animals, who he alleged were inherently incapable of similar compassion and therefore inferior to humans (Descent 105). Darwin also rejected any implicit connections between evolution and vegetarianism, arguing the only biological evidence that “would be of any value” to vegetarianism would be statistics regarding “the amount of labor performed in countries where the population lived on a different diet,” to which he had not given any “special attention” (“Response”). Darwin was also an avid hunter who regularly dined upon the many species he studied and was a member of the notorious Cambridge Glutton Club, which sought to eat animals “before unknown to the human palate” (Van Wyhe 82; see also Noyce). Huxley likewise never extended his ethical considerations to nonhuman animals, dismissing vegetarianism as “philozoic … fanatiscism” (Method 350). Neither of Darwinism’s primary promoters, it seems, had much sympathy for nonhuman animals or even vegetarians themselves. Darwinism is also regularly appealed to in support of carnism, primarily through assertions of a “natural” right to predation and the “survival of the fittest.” Significant developments in vegetarianism and animal rights also occurred throughout the nineteenth century. Various legislations regarding animal welfare were passed in Britain, such as the 1822 Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act and the 1842 Cruelty to Animals Act, leading to the establishment of The Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (RSPCA) in 1824 and the British Vegetarian Society in 1847 (see Spencer 266–68). As Rod Preece points out, however, most nineteenth-century animal advocates “were not evolutionists but were devout Christian reforming members of the establishment,” with most foundational animal welfare legislation being passed “decades before Darwin published The Origin of Species” (Animals 144). Nevertheless, Darwinist vegetarians also often advocated vegetarianism as an ultimate stage of human evolution, in pages of The Vegetarian Messenger (e.g., Oldfield; Pole). The vegetarian advocate Abel Andrew also claimed in an 1895 Vegetarian Society address, later published as Vegetarianism and Evolution (1887), that while “evolution and education have done much to subdue the animal and develop the human,” vegetarianism would “complete the process” (9). Vegetarianism thereby underwent a transformation throughout the nineteenth century, from a kind of “conceptual bonding with the poor” and a desire for a

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“Return to Nature,” to settle “more comfortably within the rhetoric of bourgeois humanitarianism” (Morton 7). The beginning of the twentieth century also saw the establishment of various utopian and often vegetarian socialist societies, with whom Wells was known to associate, his only documented vegetarian meal left him “hungry in the night” (H.  G. Wells, Autobiography 1:313; see also Mackenzie and Mackenzie 62, 174). Vegetarianism was also frequent point of contention between him and influential socialist author George Bernard Shaw, who maintained a lapsarian origin for carnism—via Cain, whose children “took to killing animals as a means of killing time”—in his science-fictional drama Back to Methuselah (1921) (H.  G. Wells, Autobiography 2:539, 2.540; Shaw, Methuselah 87; see also J.  P. Smith 105–7). Wells took more direct influence from Darwinism than traditional religious imagery, however. He was particularly influenced by Huxley’s 1893 lecture Evolution and Ethics, which was widely considered the “culmination” of nineteenth-century Darwinian debates (Paradis 34). Therein, Huxley argued that morality is culturally rather than “naturally” determined, and that humanity’s moral cultivation is just as important as its physical refinement. He thereby rejected his rival Herbert Spencer’s famous notion of “survival of the fittest”—arguing that, instead of the physically superior, it would be “those who are ‘ethically’ the best” who would ultimately prevail (Huxley, Evolution 80–81). Huxley also rejected Rousseau’s Noble Savage as a “baseless fiction” (Method 313), recasting humanity’s inherent animal drives as the basis of “original sin” in the “Prolegomena” to Evolution and Ethics’ 1894 publication (27). Wells repeated many of Huxley’s arguments in his 1896 article “Human Evolution, an Artificial Process,” later characterising the twentieth century as “the opening phase of a period of ethical reconstruction” that would continue the “routing out of almost all the cardinal assumptions on which the minds of the Eighteenth Century dwelt securely” (Anticipations 287). Like Huxley, Wells also emphasised the pedagogical importance of art, characterising his novels as a guide to conduct rather than mere aesthetic expressions (Autobiography 2:497). Yet while Wells often appealed to Darwinism in an attempt to undermine vegetarianism throughout his writing, many of his works ultimately ended up promoting vegetarian and anti-speciesist sympathies.

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The Time Machine The Time Machine is perhaps the most important and influential work in science fiction history, being a “programmatic” work from which “all subsequent significant SF can be said to have sprung” (Suvin 236, 246). Its intensely anti-utopian narrative involves an English inventor—called only the “Time Traveller”—who visits a future where humanity has evolved into two separate species: the herbivorous Eloi and the allegedly cannibalistic, subterranean Morlocks, who raise them as cattle. The Time Machine’s preoccupation with inter- and intra-species consumption has received considerable critical attention. Yet while Wells intended the intensely anti-­ utopian novel to give a “glimpse of the future that ran counter to the placid [nineteenth-century] assumption” that evolution was a “pro-human force making things better and better for mankind” (Preface ix), its speciesist satire has more regularly been interpreted in favour of vegetarian and animal advocacy. The Time Machine is in overt conversation with the nineteenth-century utopian tradition. As Stephen Derry observes, the novel presents “a pessimistic dystopian reply” to many popular nineteenth-century utopias, such as Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1887) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1890), which describe future socialist revolutions (Derry 18). Discussions of diet are conspicuously absent from both texts, although News from Nowhere can be considered at least pescatarian due to the presence of salmon fishers (Morris 2). Morris himself also appears not to have harboured any vegetarian sympathies—Shaw having allegedly been served a suet pudding by his wife, who “couldn’t conceal her contempt” at the “folly” of Shaw’s vegetarianism (Shaw, Letters 106). Bellamy, however, overtly endorses vegetarianism in Looking Backward’s immensely popular sequel Equality (1897), wherein he reveals that his utopians no longer “eat the flesh of animals” and hold a “decided revulsion in sentiment against the former [carnist] practices” of their predecessors, with Bellamy explicitly positioning the vegetarianism of his working-class, socialist revolutionaries in opposition to pre-revolution, capitalist, upper classes who “lived chiefly on flesh” (Equality 285, 85–87). Conversely, The Time Machine satirises the Romantic idealisations of ancient civilisations that—along with informing Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826)—provided a “dominant cornucopian vision” well into the early twentieth century (Belasco 151).

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The Time Machine disrupts traditional, Romantic notions of human nature by projecting a Darwinian understanding upon its ostensibly utopian future setting. The Time Traveller is a member of London’s Linnean Society, to which Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace first announced their theory of natural selection in 1858 (H.  G. Wells, Time Machine 12, 97n1.2). He therefore dismisses his dinner guests’ desires to visit the time of “Homer and Plato” as naive and questions the validity of the novel’s future as a prophesied “Golden Age,” upon finding it littered with architecture reminiscent of ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome (7, 41). After arriving in the future, the Time Traveller shelters underneath a marble statue of a sphinx, wondering: What if in this interval the race had lost its manliness and had developed into something inhuman, unsympathetic, and overwhelmingly powerful? I might seem some old-world savage animal, only the more dreadful and disgusting for our common likeness—a foul creature to be incontinently slain. (22)

The image of the sphinx, which featured on the cover of The Time Machine’s first edition, is likely an allusion to Thomas Carlyle’s 1843 essay “The Sphinx,” which argued for a heroic upper class to guide the working classes out of poverty (Stover 2–4). However, rather than a utopian return to “nature,” these monuments instead hint towards its ironic inversion. The Sphinx’s hybrid anatomy, along with the carvings of other hybrid creatures like fauns and satyrs that the Time Traveller encounters, hints towards the Eloi and the Morlocks’ human origins, with the mythological sphinx’s tendency to consume those who cannot solve its riddle also gesturing towards their cannibalistic relationship (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 30, 60). That the Eloi are presented as “strict vegetarians” would have likely suggested a utopian evolution to nineteenth-century readers (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 27). Yet while the Time Traveller first perceives their society as “a social paradise,” whereby the need for defence and toil are eliminated brought about by an “intelligent … subjugation of nature,” he later realises that their “too-perfect security … had led them to a slow movement of degeneration,” resulting in a “general dwindling in size, strength, and intelligence” (31–33, 50). He hereby projects upon the Eloi the Darwinist concept of “regressive metamorphosis,” first popularised by Wells’s friend and teacher Edwin Ray Lankester in 1880 and later defined by Huxley as the “progress from a condition of relative complexity to one

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of relative uniformity” (T. H. Huxley, Evolution 6; see also H. G. Wells, Time Machine 29–30). Humanity’s regressive metamorphosis continues to its logical conclusion in the Time Traveller’s final, frantic journey thirty million years further into the future, over which he witnesses the regression of all life to its most basic form. Wells thereby recasts (84–85). Wells thereby casts his future in opposition to the common upper-class Victorian “belief in linear progress” (Suvin 248), while also recasting a Rousseauean “return” to nature as an evolutionary “regression.” Shelley’s rejection of Prometheanism is also inverted, the Eloi having forgotten “the art of fire-­ making” and being endlessly astonished by the Time Traveller’s matches, whose “first fire” ends up engulfing and killing his Eloi companion Weena (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 72, 50, 75). Although Wells is more sympathetic to scientific progress than Shelley, he maintains a sense of technological hubris, in contrast to the technological utopianism of his time. Utopian vegetarianism is also satirised through the Time Traveller’s seemingly instinctive and “appropriate” naming of Weena (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 42). Derry reads her as an inversion of the Vril-Ya Zee in Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s The Coming Race (1871) (Derry 21). Like the Eloi, Bulwer-Lytton’s angelic Vril-Ya are vegetarians, abstaining from all “other animal food than milk,” with their imposing physical forms showing that “meat is not required for superior production of muscle fibre” (Bulwer-Lytton 109, 64). The Vril-Ya’s vegetarianism is also prelapsarian in origin, their race having evolved from humans who sheltered underground from the Biblical deluge, while feeling “contempt and horror” for their forefathers, who “degraded” their lives by eating the flesh of animals who sought shelter alongside them (30). David Seed, however, argues that a “more likely” source for Weena’s naming is the more analogous Arowhena in Samuel Butler’s utopian satire Erewhon (1972), to which Butler added two chapters lampooning vegetarian and animal advocates for the 1901 second edition (Seed xlvi).1 Although Wells’s direct 1  The first of Erowhan’s chapters concerns a prophet promoting vegetarianism to increase happiness and “prosperity,” with the increasing legal and religious sanctions against the consumption of further animal foods driving many of the Erewhonians to insanity and self-harm (Butler 263). The second chapter sees a botanist philosopher—secretly a “great meat-eater” himself—attempt to expose the “absurdity” of the newly established Puritan Party by extending such restrictions to vegetables, with fatal results (272). For further analysis, see Joshua Bulleid, “Better Societies for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.” Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction, edited by Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion, and Andrew Milner (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), 53.

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indictment of vegetarians precedes Butler’s, the two influential anti-­ utopianists shared a common disdain for the Romantic vegetarianism of their forbears. The Time Traveller’s Darwinist logic also reveals an anthropocentric ideology that ultimately “equates loss of manliness with loss of humanity” (Hume 38). Indeed, the Eloi’s lack of intelligence suggests they are more likely biological herbivores than willing vegetarians.2 Although the industrial revolution made meat more accessible during the nineteenth century, increased nutritional awareness and formalised vegetarianism also saw “the excessive meat-eating of earlier generations … replaced by dishes of a more vegetarian nature” among English upper classes (Fiddes 24). Wells, therefore, suggests that through indulging in affluent, vegetarian lifestyles, the upper classes have become ignorant prey, with the Time Traveller later reflecting that their day is “as pleasant as the day of the cattle in the field. … And their end was the same” (Time Machine 78)—apparently endorsing Spencerian survival of the fittest over the virtuous triumph Darwin and Huxley endorsed. The Time Traveller’s descriptions of the Eloi as “beautiful and graceful” but “indescribably frail,” with “flushed face[s]” reminiscent of “the more beautiful kind of consumptive” perhaps also inspired Wells’s Victorian readership to associate them with the “physical insipidity” of Romantic vegetarians like Percy Shelley, in contrast to the vigorous, meat-eating Traveller, reinforcing common, carnist conceptions that meat was “synonymous with [a] healthy, normative culture” (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 23; Lee 254). Wells’s descriptions of the Eloi are highly reminiscent of the sections discussing Hindu vegetarianism in the French Enlightenment writer Voltaire’s Essay on the Manners, and Spirit of Nations (1756), wherein he alleged that vegetarianism and the “soft” Indian climate had made the Hindus “entirely resemble those peaceful animals whom we bring up … for the purpose of cutting their throats at our good will and pleasure” (Voltaire, Essai 285, 75; translated in H.  Williams, Ethics 149–50). Although not a vegetarian himself, Voltaire frequently promoted Hindu vegetarianism over carnist Christianity, and his reverence for Hindu vegetarianism was “common currency” among the Romantics (Preece, Sins 2  Even if conscious, the Eloi apparently have no choice in their vegetarianism, since all other animals appear extinct—the Time Traveller’s inference that the Morlocks are responsible for Eloi garments adding an extra layer of horror by suggesting their “leather” belts are, in fact, made from their own skins (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 23, 27, 58).

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213; see also 21–18; H. Williams, Ethics 149–56; Stuart 287–90). Indeed, Mary Shelley requested a copy of Voltaire’s essay, along with Rousseau’s Emilie, Or Treatise on Education (1763), from Jeremy Bentham’s close acquaintance Maria Gisborne in December 1819 (Letters 1:91). There is no evidence of Bentham’s interaction with or direct influence upon the Shelleys, and the request is too late for Voltaire’s essay to have influenced Frankenstein, although it possibly had some influence on Percy Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820), which is discussed in the same letter (ibid.). The relevant sections are also removed in seemingly all of the essay’s English translations. However, Wells taught himself French by reading Voltaire, so it is possible—even likely—that he was familiar with Voltaire’s comparisons between Hindu vegetarians and English cattle (H. G. Wells, Autobiography 1:137–38). His recycling of elements from Voltaire’s proto-science-fiction story Micromégas (1752)—wherein, “through a change in perspective, we arrive at an understanding of the triviality of most human concerns from which … we are able to better develop our ecological relationship to the planet we live on”—for War of the Worlds also proves he was influenced by Voltaire’s detail as much as his anti-­ utopianism (c.f. Voltaire, Micromegas 121–25; Wells, Worlds 7–9). Yet while Wells perhaps intended to destabilise humanity’s perceived evolutionary superiority, he ultimately only reinforces the educated, nineteenth-­ century meat-eating male as the superlative evolutionary form. The Morlocks and the Eloi nevertheless force the Time Traveller to contend with his own animality. His first encounter with a Morlock fills him with an “old instinctive dread” (45), the revelation of their carnivorousness inspiring him with a murderous longing—as admittedly “inhuman” as the Morlocks’ alleged cannibalism (67). His assault upon the Morlocks exemplifies The Time Machine’s “anti-Huxley” attitude in its insistence on the indulgence of animalistic desire as “necessary for human progress” (McLean 40; see also Quinn, “Hideous Progeny” 138). That the Time Traveller confronts Morlocks having run out of matches also implies a regression from his Promethean superiority, so that he is left with “only the weapons and the powers that Nature had endowed [him] with— hands, feet, and teeth,” as he longs to “slake his thirst for murder” (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 54). He does so while indulging in the “succulent giving” of the Morlocks’ “flesh and bone” under his blows, as he determines to make them “pay for their meat” (74). Although the Time Traveller finds an iron bar to aid him in his assault, his attack remains animalistic and predatory. He also displays violent tendencies towards the

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Eloi. When first encountering them, he fantasises about “flinging … them about like nine-pins” and finds it “the hardest task in the world to keep [his] hands off their pretty laughing faces,” when they do not understand him, his “temper” (at having lost his time machine) causing him to drag one across the ground by their robe (24, 37, 38). The Eloi’s vegetarian delicacy and lack of intelligence is thereby considered as deserving of violence as Morlocks’ carnivorous “inhumanity,” with the Time Traveller’s description of them as “delicious people” (33, italics added) betraying the “hunterly logic” that continues to inform his own observations, as much as those of the Morlocks (Lee 256). Even before the Morlocks appear, the seemingly utopian Eloi are suppressed beneath a carnist logic that is all too human. The Time Machine is likely the earliest of science fiction’s numerous “human cattle dystopias,” which foreground “ethical concerns regarding the treatment of other animals within food production regimes” by “subjecting humans to systems of meat production” (Parry 53, 38–9). Other notable science-fictional human cattle dystopias include Richard Fleischer’s film Soylent Green (1973), Alice “Racoona” Sheldon’s “Morality Meat” (1985), Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), and Don Le Pan’s Animals (2009), which destabilise carnist justifications for eating other animals by forcing readers to reflect upon their common edibility. In The Time Machine, the Time Traveller’s early reverence for the ability of “selective breeding” to produce “a more convenient breed of cattle” is contrasted with the horrific revelation that the Eloi are “mere fatted cattle,” to whom Morlocks “probably saw to the breeding of” (31, 62). Emelia Quinn considers the allusion to industrialised Eloi-farming to imply that “the Morlocks have consciously bred out any lingering carnivorous instincts” and are therefore responsible for the Eloi’s herbivorousness (Reading Veganism 82). However, the Time Traveller considers the Morlocks’ maintenance of the Eloi an instinctual “habit of service,” performed “as a man enjoys killing animals in sport: because ancient and departed necessities had impressed it on the organism” (58). Rather than a calculated, economic operation, The Time Machine presents carnism as an inherited, and therefore “natural,” biological characteristic, calculated to confront readers with the uncomfortable “possibility that those animals consumed as meat were not essentially different from the ‘we’ who ate them” (Lee 251). Yet even with their inherent challenge to traditional carnist ideologies, cattle dystopias also necessarily leave intact edible/inedible dualisms, with the line between the two categories “simply redrawn, rather than

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questioning the expulsions enacted by the effects of drawing lines in the first place” (Parry 53). The Morlocks are allegedly “dehumanised” by their cannibalism. As Paul Alkon observes, “distance from cannibalism becomes a measure of humanity” in Wells’s early work (148). Indeed, the Time Traveller considers the Morlocks’ Eloi-farming to suggest “something inhuman and malign” about them (H. G. Wells, Time Machine, 57). He thinks of the Morlocks as “nauseatingly inhuman” and repeatedly compares them to nonhuman animals, describing the first he encounters as “a queer little ape-like figure” that climbs “like a human spider,” and the others he later encounters as “human rats” (45–46, 55, 74). Conversely, he considers the Eloi to have “kept too much of the human form not to claim [his] sympathy” (62). Calling the Morlocks “cannibals” is perhaps inaccurate, however. The devolution of homo sapiens into Morlocks and Eloi has divided a once-united species into “two distinct animals” as biologically distant from the Time Traveller as they are from each other (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 46, italics added). As Peter Hulme argues, while cannibals are “placed on the very borders of humanity,” they cannot be “regarded as inhuman because if they were animals their behaviour would be natural and could not cause the outrage and fear that ‘cannibalism’ has always provoked” (1, italics original). Moreover, the Time Traveller also considers that humanity’s “prejudice against human flesh is no deep-seated instinct,” while speculating that the Morlocks must therefore be “less human and more remote than our cannibal ancestors of three or four thousand years ago,” in a conscious attempt to distance his own humanity from their allegedly “inhuman” eating habits (62). By the novel’s own evolutionary logic, either the Morlocks and Eloi are human, and therefore so is cannibalism, or else they are entirely separate species and the Morlocks’ supposed cannibalistic transgressions equate to commonly accepted carnism, about which there is perhaps something inherently repulsive. Despite his horror at the Morlocks’ Eloi-farming, the Time Traveller nevertheless remains resolutely carnist. He experiences frequent “carnal cravings” when forced to eat a frugivorous diet while living with the Eloi and immediately demands some “mutton” upon returning from the future, since he is “starving for a bit of meat” (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 27, 14). Upon receiving his mutton, the Time Traveller marvels at “what a treat it is to stick a fork into meat again!” refusing to tell his story before consuming some “peptone” [protein], thereby reasserting himself as a (masculine) meat-eating subject, having just returned from the lifeless

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future beach, wherein he “cannot assert his status as [an] eater,” since “‘nothing appears edible … consumable or exploitable” (H.  G. Wells, Time Machine 15, emphasis original; Hume 40). The restorative properties of meat are again reinforced when the scene is revisited towards the end of the novel, with the Time Traveller relating that he “felt so sick and weak” until he “sniffed good wholesome meat,” which conflicts with the “faint halitus of freshly shed blood” that accompanies the revelation of the Morlock’s carnivorousness (87, 54). Carnism, therefore, functions within The Time Machine both to dehumanise and rehumanise its characters, with Wells “position[ing] the red meat-eating Western civilized male as the happy medium between the savage cannibal and ‘physically insipid’ vegetarian” (Parry 53). As Suvin observes, Wells thereby “vividly testifies that a predatory state of affairs is the only even fantastically imaginable alternative” to modern society while also endorsing an idealised, carnist “balance” between cannibalism and vegetarianism, rather than the linear opposition commonly adopted by traditional utopias and early Social Darwinists (238). Alkon also examines The Time Machine—alongside Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” (1729), whose satirical speaker suggests the children of Ireland should be eaten in order to alleviate the country’s economic burden—as an archetypal text that established a “semiotics of cannibalism” within science fiction (142). Suitably, Wells professed a “profound and lifelong admiration” for Swift, to whom he considered The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Time Machine “clumsy tribute[s]” (“Preface” viii; Time Machine 95). In The Time Machine, Wells extends Swift’s proposal to the English upper classes, with the Time Traveller speculating that the Morlocks had turned to cannibalism once their “food had run short” (62). The Morlocks thereby embody the saying “eat the rich,” which— rather ironically—is commonly attributed to Jean-Jacques Rousseau (quoted in Thiers 359), whose “naturalistic” conception of the “noble savage” was so foundational to Shelley’s vegetarian vision. Like her husband, Swift’s speaker also acknowledges that the 25 per cent allowance of males among his proposal’s human breeding stock is “more than we allow to Sheep, black Cattle, or Swine” (232, italics original). Although intended satirically, Swift’s “Modest Proposal” pointed out genuine injustices and inefficiencies of animal agriculture, and many readers likewise expressed real empathy for Wells’s satirical portrayal of his vegetarian victims in The Time Machine. Despite its staunchly anti-utopian sentiments, Romantic reverence for the Eloi and their vegetarianism echo throughout The Time Machine’s many

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adaptations. The novel’s original 1960 film adaptation shows a clear preference for the “peacefulness and beauty” of the Eloi over the “brutality and coarseness” of the Morlocks (Retzinger 382). The Eloi are represented as both capable and heroic in the 1978 and 2002 adaptations, wherein Weena also serves as an adult love interest. The Time Traveller is similarly obsessed with rescuing Weena and the other Eloi—with whom his “sympathies lie naturally”—in Stephen Baxter’s multiple award-­ winning, Wells Estateauthorised literary sequel The Time Ships (1995) (626). Baxter also rewrites the Morlocks as intelligent vegetarians and concludes his novel with the Time Traveller teaching the Eloi vegetarian agriculture (193, 625). Baxter’s Traveller is also filled with “faint disgust” at meat-eating, when first returning from the future as detailed in Wells’s Time Machine (Baxter 6). Nevertheless, he remains an avid carnist who “relishe[s]” a breakfast of bacon and eggs upon his next return, having been forced to subsist upon the Morlock’s “bland” vegetarian fare (193, see also 58–9). David J. Lake’s Time Machine continuations, The Man Who Loved Morlocks (1981) and “The Truth about Weena” (1998), similarly position Weena as a romanticised love interest. As Lake later realised, however, Wells “never intended his Traveller … to try and rescue Weena,” rendering his and similar continuations merely “creative misreadings” (193). The Time Traveller never expresses true sympathy for the Eloi and their vegetarianism. As Suvin argues, Weena more accurately provides a “mawkish avatar of Dickens’s Little Nell and similar Victorian girlish heroines,” rather than a sexual or romantic companion (265n21). The Time Traveller hardly regards his Weena as human, let alone a love interest, the inhuman pronoun in his introduction of her as “my little woman, as I believe it was” precluding her from both sexual and ethical subjectivity (H. G. Wells, Time Machine 42, italics added). Moreover, as Peter Kemp suggests, the Time Traveller’s lack of concern about his own carnism is “a sure sign” his compassion for the Eloi is “less than wholehearted” (15). Suvin similarly observes that the Time Traveller’s commitment to the Eloi is “never logically argued,” suggesting it perhaps flows “from the social consciousness of Wells himself” (237). Wells had little sympathy for real-life vegetarians, however, and those of his traveller seem to derive primarily from the Eloi’s human-like appearance, Weena in particular seeming “more human than she was” because of her human-like “affection” (H.  G. Wells, Time Machine 64). The Time Traveller’s allegiance to the Eloi therefore stems from the same speciesist impulses by which he excludes the Morlocks from ethical subjectivity. Any idealisation of the Eloi is instead implied by Time Machine’s Romantic narrator, who—being an “exemplar of the romantic man”

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(Stover 53n55)—drastically misreads the relationship between Weena and the Time Traveller during the novel’s Epilogue. When the Time traveller produces some flowers that Weena had given him, the narrator receives them as evidence that “even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.” However, Time Traveller offers the flowers unfeelingly, almost as an afterthought, and only ever as empirical evidence of his experiences (91). The narrator thereby provides “another nineteenth-century misreading of the future” to add to those the novel intends to satirise (Derry 21), yet it is his romantic reverence that resonates most influentially throughout popular culture and modern science fiction.

The Island of Doctor Moreau The Island of Doctor Moreau, which details eponymous vivisector’s transformation of nonhuman animals into vegetarian “Beast People,” was poorly received upon publication. Wells later denouncing the novel as a “rather painful” “exercise in youthful blasphemy” and does not even mention it in his autobiography (Preface vii, ix). Nevertheless, many modern critics now consider it his “masterpiece” (Miéville xxvi). It has also proved profoundly influential within critical animal studies, providing a further “foundational” science fiction text that “challenges taxonomic divisions among humans, animals and machines” (Vint, Animal Alterity 188–89). The novel is an implicit rewriting of Frankenstein, which Wells explicitly references in its first draft, with Wells again mounting a Darwinist attack on romantic vegetarianism and perceived human–animal boundaries (Philmus 105n). Yet while Wells makes many important amendments to science fiction’s vegetarian template, The Island of Doctor Moreau remains rooted in Romantic imagery and, like The Time Machine, has predominantly reinforced the kind of vegetarian sympathies Wells set out to dismantle. The novel remains largely based in Classical and Romantic symbolism. Like Frankenstein’s creature, The Island of Doctor Moreau’s human narrator, Edward Prendick, is directly informed by Classical texts. After washing ashore on Moreau’s island following a shipwreck, he is left in a room filled with “editions of the London and Greek classics” where he is later found reading a book by the Roman poet Horace (H. G. Wells, Moreau 32, 38). Although Horace never wrote explicitly in support of vegetarianism, the frequency and “intensity” with which he depicted meat-free meals has led to speculation about his vegetarian sympathies (H. Williams 2n,

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302; Eyres 202). Like Percy Shelley, Horace also considered Prometheus responsible for setting “in our human stomachs / the very violence of raging lions,” through his seemingly original assertion that the Titan took elements from all other animals to make humanity after he ran out of clay (lines 1.16.13–16; translated in Barnett 78).3 The lack of fire in the Beast People’s village similarly suggests a prelapsarian element to their existence (H. G. Wells, Moreau 58). However, they are later said to have simultaneously “lost the art of fire” and “recovered their fear of it” after devolving into “dangerous carnivores” during the novel’s climax (126). Although the Beast people—like Frankenstein’s creature before them—reject the promethean gift of fire, their vegetarianism is considered a postPromethean state of being in contrast to pre-­ Promethean carnivorousness. Like Mary Shelley, Wells grounds his tale in Miltonic mythology. After encountering the Beast People, Prendick wonders whether he will be forced to join their “Comus rout” (52). Comus is the Greek god of festivity, who Milton depicts in his 1634 masque Comus as the son of the sorceress Circe, who is best known for transforming Odysseus’s crew into pigs in Homer’s Odyssey (ca.750 BCE). In Milton’s 1634 masque, Comus likewise transforms those who drink from his enchanted cup into hybrids with human bodies and the heads of nonhuman animals. Wells was likely inspired to connect Moreau with Comus by the 1843 painting The Rout of Comus by Edwin Henry Landseer, who Wells claims his father modelled for and whose vivid paintings of nonhuman animals were frequently used in animal advocacy pamphlets, with Landseer himself serving as vice president of the RSPCA in 1869 (H. G. Wells, Autobiography 1:55; Cronin, Art 31–36). Margaret Atwood has nevertheless positioned Milton’s Comus as an early, influential example of “enchanted island” narratives that informed The Island of Doctor Moreau and—although not as overtly alluded to as Paradise Lost in Frankenstein—the novel constitutes a similar inversion of Milton’s work (158–59). Atwood also suggests The Island of Doctor Moreau can be read as a “Modern Ancient Mariner,” due to Prendick’s inability to properly “love” both human and nonhuman animals (164–65). Although often inverted, The Island of Doctor Moreau remains primarily informed by a similar set of influences as Shelley’s Frankenstein.

 English translations more conventionally attribute the lion’s violence to a general human nature, although the original Latin specifies its effect on the “stomacho” (Horace line 1.16.16). 3

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The Island of Doctor Moreau also parodies Genesis. As Suvin and Brian Aldiss observe, Moreau is “not only a latter-day Dr. Frankenstein but also a demonically inverted God of Genesis,” whose island constitutes a twisted reimagining of Eden, complete with an irrevocable serpent (Suvin 239; Aldiss xxxi; see also Wells, Moreau 79, 77). Atwood goes further, identifying Moreau underlings—the human caretaker Montgomery and Beast Person butler M’ling—as an “unholy trinity” (160). However, there seems little reason to consider Montgomery a Christ figure and even less to consider M’ling any sort of Holy Spirit, and Atwood offers no particular justification for the connection beyond their identical initials. The post-humanist literary critic Carrie Rohman has also posited the seafaring episode at the start of The Island of Doctor Moreau as a “parable of Noah’s Ark,” which implicitly deconstructs the “superiority of man over animal by insisting on their mutual corporeal needs” (124). As discussed in Chap. 2, however, humanity’s supposed dominance over other animals is only reinforced through the parable of the Ark via God’s divine codification of carnism. Nevertheless, like Frankenstein and his creature, Moreau and his Beast People each exemplify a fall from peaceful vegetarianism into violent carnivorousness, which is signalled by increased interspecies cruelty. Like Frankenstein, Moreau is dehumanised by his unfeeling scientific experiments. Although Frankenstein remains ambiguous, Moreau is clearly the villain of his tale, having “never troubled about the ethics” of experiments, otherwise considered so “wantonly cruel” as to cause his expulsion from England (75, 34). Wells claims Moreau and his exile were inspired by the persecution of Oscar Wilde (Preface ix). However, Moreau seems more directly informed by the eighteenth-century French scientist Pierre Louis Moreau de Maupertuis, who apparently “amused himself above all by mating different races [of nonhuman animals] together,” and had converted his home into “a virtual Noah’s ark … filled with animals of every species,” and whose experiences as a castaway perhaps also informed Prendick’s experiences at sea (Glass 205; Roberts 262, 265).4 Huxley was certainly aware of Maupertuis, having referenced him in an 1878 4  Atwood argues Moreau’s name “no doubt” derives from combining the syllable “Mor” from the Latin word mors or mortis (meaning death) with the French word for “water” (l’eau)—“suitable in one who aims at exploring the limits of plasticity”—so that “The whole word means ‘moor’ in French,” thereby rendering “the very white Moreau … also the Black Man of witchcraft tales” (161). Exactly why Wells would want to name Moreau either “black man” or “death-water” is unclear and Maupertuis’s historical precedent seems far more likely and logical.

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Encyclopaedia Britannica entry on “Evolution in Biology” (294). However, Maupertuis also apparently “adore[d] animals” and treated his hybrid creations with “complaisance” (Glass 205). Moreau’s unsympathetic attitude toward other animals is, therefore, more likely inspired by—or at least indicative of—the insensitive attitudes of later nineteenth-­ century vivisectors, such as the French physiologist Claude Bernard, who considered the scientific exploitation of nonhuman animals as a “natural state of affairs” (Preece, Animals 139–40), claiming that: The physiologist is no ordinary man: he is a scientist, possessed and absorbed by the scientific idea that he pursues. He does not hear the cries of animals, he does not see their flowing blood, he sees nothing but his idea, and is aware of nothing but an organism that conceals from him the problem he is seeking to resolve. (Bernard 48)5

The British Cruelty to Animals Act was amended in 1876 to preclude experiments on living animals, except where possible discoveries were considered “useful for saving or prolonging life or alleviating suffering” (3.1), with vivisection eliciting “passionate denunciation” from the “most prominent” vegetarian and animal welfare campaigners (Spencer 266). However, in 1895, Wells himself published an article about “The Limits of Individual Plasticity,” wherein he envisioned a future with vivisectionists “taking living creatures and moulding them into the most amazing forms,” while referencing the vivisectionist John Hunter’s experimental transplanting of animals’ heads onto different bodies (37–39; cf. H. G. Wells, Moreau 71). It is likely Wells primarily published the article to generate interest in The Island of Doctor Moreau, which was published the following year. Nevertheless, Wells remained a lifelong supporter of vivisection, arguing in his 1927 essay “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of Science” that vivisection yielded worthwhile knowledge while causing minimal pain to its nonhuman victims (222–25). He also accused anti-vivisectionists of hypocrisy during a debate with Shaw the same year, pointing out that few of them were vegetarians (Wells and Shaw 3). Ironically, many early vivisection experiments revealed how nonhuman animal anatomy and behaviour resembled that of humans, forming the foundation for many modern Animal Rights and Animal Liberation 5  For further discussion of Moreau’s relationship to Bernard, see Harris 102; Philmus xli– xlii; and Vint, “Animals” 87.

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arguments (as discussed in Chap. 4). Moreover, while Wells may have been sympathetic to Moreau’s means (if not his ends), The Island of Doctor Moreau did far more to vilify than valorise vivisection. Despite Wells’s personal endorsements of vivisection, The Island of Doctor Moreau has proven one of science fiction’s most influential anti-­ science and anti-speciesist texts. Early reviews of the novel characterised Moreau as “a cliché from the pages of an anti-vivisection pamphlet,” while others criticised it for being “ineffective from that point of view” (Mitchell 44; B. Williams 52). The first English film adaptation, The Island of Lost Souls (1932), also played a significant role in the historical suppression of simulated animal suffering, being refused classification for over two decades in the UK, where it was not screened until 1967, due to new restrictions prohibiting cinematic portrayals of animal cruelty (Robertson 56–57). As Mason Harris argues, “in composing this Gothic science-­ fiction story Wells found the temptation to evoke the horrors of vivisection too strong to resist, and in doing so undermined the authority of science more thoroughly than he intended” (101). Even the reprehensible Prendick—who, like Wells, studied “Biology under Huxley” (29)—considers Moreau unintelligible and unsympathetic, finding only “dislike and abhorrence” for his experiments (95–96). Conversely, the Beast People— who refer to Moreau’s laboratory as the “House of Pain”—are specifically described as the “victims” of his “hideous experiment[s]” (59, 52), and it is with them that Prendick and his narrative largely sympathise.6 Like Frankenstein’s creature, Moreau’s creations are vegetarian. The “Law” Moreau forces upon the Beast People to maintain their “humanity” include the commandment “Not to eat, Fish or Flesh” (59). Moreau himself appears to be at least situationally vegetarian. However, he is also a sadistic tyrant who enforces his vegetarian law through the threat of further violence and suffering. Conversely, while Prendick considers Montgomery “tainted” by sympathies for the Beast People, their Beast fear of Moreau leads him to “forgive” the “fear” they first inspired in him, and he maintains that even the murderous puma-woman is the “victim” of 6  One person seemingly unfazed by The Island of Doctor Moreau’s graphic depictions of vivisection was Wells’s grandson, marine biologist Martin Wells, who gloated in a 1998 interview about how he and his wife would eat their “experimental animals” (Dreifus). The younger Wells’s speciesist attitudes are also reflected in his only published novel, Second Coming (2008), wherein the intensely misogynistic protagonist (and likely author-avatar) Miles Wallace—a biologist who finds animals’ insides “often more interesting than the[ir] outsides”—investigates an evolutionary anomaly, brought about by a Moreau-like eugenicist (M. Wells 8, 96).

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Moreau’s experiments (93, 97). He later mercifully executes the rebellious Leopard-man so that he cannot be captured and again submitted to Moreau’s “horrible tortures,” after witnessing “the fact of his humanity” in the terror he displays (94). Quinn argues that, rather than a “sympathetic communion,” Prendick’s experience with the Leopard-Man results in “an increasing desire for distance” from his own animality and that by shooting him “Prendick symbolically makes the animal part of himself abject” (Reading Veganism 78). Indeed, Prendick’s descriptions are not to be trusted. Like all first-person narrators, he is an unreliable one, who is only made more so by his alleged memory loss and apparent dementia (H.  G. Wells, Moreau 5). Yet while Prendick considers massacring the island’s “dangerous carnivores” (126), he only ever attacks the hyena-­ swine, who he considers a “threat,” and his first act following Moreau’s death is to “put an end” to the suffering in his laboratory by “euthanising” its tortured subjects (105, 114). Moreover, the Leopard-man’s suffering reveals his “humanity” to the reader as well as Prendick. As Aldiss observes, it is the Beast People themselves who are the most memorable element of the novel, which is written so that “our conscience is involved” and “we grieve for them” (Aldiss, xxxiv). Just as the Time Traveller’s first-­ person narration in The Time Machine encourages readers to sympathise with his speciesism, Prendick’s narration encourages sympathy for nonhumans, regardless of its credulity. In contrast to the perceived “cannibalism” of The Time Machine, it is carnism that dehumanises both the humans and Beast People in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Just as the dead hare in Frankenstein signalled the creature’s descent into animalistic violence, the discovery of a rabbit “rent to pieces” with its “backbone indisputably gnawed” signals the Leopard-­ man’s violent, animalistic rebellion in The Island of Doctor Moreau (86–7). Rather than taunting his human pursuers, however, the rabbit’s carcass instead evidences the Leopard Man’s inherent carnivorousness, which is provoked by the temptations of human carnism. When Prendick first arrives on Moreau’s island, Montgomery releases a batch of rabbits into the wild so that they might “increase and multiply” in order to alleviate the island’s “certain lack of meat” (30). Upon discovering the rabbit’s remains, Montgomery declares he “did a foolish thing” in showing M’ling “how to skin and cook a rabbit,” after which he saw him “licking his hands” (88). M’ling is next seen with “queer dark stains” around his lips and the omnivorous Swine Men similarly appear “bloodstained … about the mouth” shortly after, with the rest of the Beast People subsequently returning to their original, nonhuman states in the chaotic aftermath.

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Moreau is perhaps correct, then, when suggesting the novel’s violent conclusion could have been avoided had Montgomery simply kept his “taste for meat in hand” (88), although it might also have been avoided had he never conducted his villainous experiments in the first place. That meat-­ eating grants the Beast People the “strength” to resist his command, therefore, positions it as a liberating substance rather than a corrupting one (101). Prendick also later uses his last three revolver cartridges to kill two rabbits for food, revealing a predatory nature similar to that of the Leopard-man (128). That rabbits are considered edible, while the transformed Beast People are not, also suggests a persistent carnist boundary between humanoid and nonhumanoid animals. However, Montgomery also thinks the Beast People’s nonhuman offspring “might serve for meat,” although he is unable to find out, due to their “rabbit-like habit of devouring their young” (85). Rabbits eating their young is not unheard of, although fairly unusual, with Wells’s earlier admiring “the rabbit” for being a “pure vegetarian, and a remarkably moderate drinker” in his 1892 Text-Book of Biology (4). The Beast People’s child-eating might therefore be considered an aberrant result of repressed carnivorousness, which also neatly sidesteps Frankenstein’s concerns about “hideous progeny.” Nevertheless, its toleration under Moreau’s vegetarian Law suggests that carnism is more concerning than cannibalism within their culture. Rather than a lapsarian fall, Wells frequently appeals to Christian Communion as a catalyst for carnist and cannibalistic corruption. Montgomery first introduced in The Island of Doctor Moreau, offering Prendick some boiled mutton (11). Like the Time Traveller, Prendick is “excited” by the mutton’s “appetising smell,” before being reinvigorated by a “scarlet” liquid—presumably wine or brandy—that tastes “like blood,” which Montgomery later implicitly connects to Communion when observing that the blood-licking M’ling “takes his liquor like a Christian” (10, 12, 107). Atwood recognises the scene as an ironic “communion of carnivores … forbidden to the beast folk” (161), which is consistent with Wells’s other representations of religious rituals. In his autobiography, Wells wonders whether there was “anything more corrupting to take into a human mind and be given cardinal importance” or “a more unintelligible mix up of bad metaphysics and grossly materialistic superstition” than the “God-eating” of Christian communion and, even after converting to “diluted” Protestantism in the early 1900s, continued to associate it with cannibalism in his novels, variously describing it as “symbolical cannibalism,” a vampiric mass, God-eating and “a horrible blood bath and a mock cannibal meal” (Autobiography 1:68; God 166;

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Tono-Bungay 47; Meanwhile 262; Bishop 307; see also Kemp 39). Religious laws and rituals are thereby invoked in The Island of Doctor Moreau as enforcers of both oppressive vegetarianism and corrupting cannibalism, while even English carnism is represented as a slippery slope. The Island of Doctor Moreau’s cannibalistic themes reflect a common nineteenth-century “evolutionary anxiety” that the inability to move beyond meat-eating might spell the end of human development (Lee 262). The alternative to vegetarian ascension was often a perceived “regression” into cannibalism and animality. In his 1802 Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty, Joseph Ritson argued that “there can be no doubt” that cannibalism and human sacrifice were “a consequence of the use of animal food,” and London Vegetarian Society President Arnold Frank Hills similarly concluded his 1893 Essays on Vegetarianism, almost a hundred years later, by proclaiming cannibalism “the logical conclusion of flesh-eating” (Ritson 124; Hills 322). Prendick admits to considering cannibalism—“the thing we all had in mind”— while stranded at sea at the beginning of The Island of Doctor Moreau, which causes him to be thrown overboard by the captain of the Ipecacuanha, who declares his ship unsuitable for “cannibals and worse than beasts” (8, 23). There are several hints throughout The Island of Doctor Moreau that suggest Prendick actually participated in cannibalism, which acquire a “greater resonance” in the light of an infamous 1884 trial whereby a group of sailors were found guilty of murder for killing and eating one of their shipmates (Reed). Even if only as a matter of survival, Prendick is considered subhuman for even considering cannibalism, and the novel concludes with his inability to ignore the animal “surging up” through his fellow man upon returning to London (130). Associations between cannibalism and “animalistic” regression are loaded with racist and colonialist connotations. The pioneering nineteenth-­ century neurologist George Beard, for example, claimed more “highly civililized brainworkers” should eat more animal meat, finding it “more easily assimilated,” while “savages” required a herbivorous diet, being “little removed from the common animal stock from which they are derived” (272, 276; quoted in Adams 8). As John Rieder observes, Wells thereby “darwinizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” by “transposing Shelley’s biblical allusions to a racialized evolutionary discourse,” which is “not so much a distorted, metaphorical representation of colonialism as it is a literalization of the racist ideological fantasy that guides much colonial practice” (Rieder 106). Wells rejected such racial delineations, however, arguing that “from the point of view of a biologist” “all races are more or

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less mixed” (Outline 556). As Kemp observes, “cannibalism and carnivorous preying” in his novels are instead “designed to frighten [humans] into full awareness of [their] biological condition” by reminding them of their edibility (34). Wells’s accusations of dehumanisation in The Island of Doctor Moreau are demonstrably indiscriminate. The Ipecacuanha’s captain is described as a “brute,” due to his alcoholism, and Montgomery is similarly considered to have “made a beast” of himself through alcohol (23, 107). Conversely, Prendick twice claims to be an “abstainer from birth,” when offered alcohol, which Quinn takes to imply “upbringing within teetotal and vegetarian circles.” However, Prendick openly desires to trap rabbits and never expresses any reservations about consuming nonhuman meat elsewhere (H.  G. Wells, Moreau 30, 36; Quinn, Reading Veganism 79). Rather than the sensible middle ground presented in The Time Machine, carnism in The Island of Doctor Moreau is considered part of a single corruptive continuum. Through alcohol and cannibalism, Wells made beasts out of humans just as Moreau makes humans out “beasts.” Although human carnism is tolerated, it represents a slippery slope towards cannibalism, the introduction of which spoils the Edenic vegetarianism of the Beast people, which is itself represented as an unjust and unnatural imposition. There are no winners in The Island of Doctor Moreau. Yet while its text suggests vegetarianism is insufficient as a means to induce humanity’s “higher” evolution, it gestures even more strongly toward carnivorousness as a definitive means of evolutionary “regression,” and an inseparable impetus for violence. Moreover, even if its popular reception largely stemmed from being “misrepresented” as an “anti-vivisectionist tract,” the novel nevertheless influentially extended awareness and condemnation of the kind of scientific violence commonly committed against nonhuman animals during the nineteenth century (Parrinder 46). Wells may have sympathised with speciesist science, but his work made it easier to sympathise with its victims.

The War of the Worlds The War of the Worlds is a more original work than either The Time Machine or The Island of Doctor Moreau, providing a programmatic model for countless alien invasion stories since its 1887 serialisation. Like The Time Machine, Wells considered The War of the Worlds an “assault on human self-satisfaction” (Preface ix). Although the novel makes no direct appeal to vegetarianism, dietary relationships between humans and other animals

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are again at its forefront, with many of its ironic nonhuman sympathies again being widely interpreted in support of vegetarianism and animal rights. The novel’s now-iconic Martian invasion collapses perceived boundaries between humans and other animals. The Martians feed upon the “living blood of other creatures,” displaying an “undeniable preference for men as their source of nourishment,” since they are reminiscent of the Martians’ “feeble” and “flimsy” natural prey, with an unnamed artilleryman envisioning humans being hunted and kept as “pets” under Martian rule (125–26, 156).7 The Martians’ vampiric design conflicts with common contemporary depictions of vegetarian extra-terrestrials, which were proposed as early as 1854 by the Christian scientist and a vocal opponent of evolution David Brewster (see Brewster 160). Wells’s Martians instead originate in his “facetious,” pre-Time Machine article “The Man of the Year Million” (1893; later published as “A Book Unwritten”), wherein he satirised popular notions of vegetarian evolutionary progress by predicting humanity’s development into hyperintelligent, yet physically inept, arthropod-­like organisms (Worlds 127; “Unwritten” 163–68). Unlike the physically feeble Men of the Year Million or the insipid vegetarian Eloi, however, the Martians’ technology allows them to augment their bodies in order to dominate and consume other species. Humans in The War of the Worlds are thereby rendered victims of carnism and speciesism, rather than their perpetrators. The War of the Worlds frequently encourages readers to reflect on the parallels between the Martians’ treatment of humans and the real-world human treatment of other animals. Its introduction also claims the Martians possess “minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic” (7). The phrase “beasts that perish” alludes to Psalm 49, which cautions against materialistic hubris by reminding humans that they will die like all other animals and cannot take riches into the afterlife (Psalms 49:11–14). The novel’s framing thereby satirises the human superiority implied in Genesis while emphasising humanity’s often cruel and distant treatment of other 7  Humanity’s submission to Wellsian alien invaders is explored in John Christopher’s Tripods trilogy (1967–68). None of its novels engage with vegetarianism, however, and although their narrator notices how “the Tripods hunt men, as men hunt foxes” and claims he could not tolerate their rule “any more than a sheep could walk through a slaughterhouse door,” he does so only while pilfering the “beef and ham” that keep the protagonists pleasantly fed throughout the first novel (Christopher 40–41).

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animals.8 Early in the first chapter, The War of the Worlds’ unnamed narrator similarly posits that the technologically superior Martians must consider human “inferior animals,” who are “as alien and lowly as are the monkeys and lemurs to us,” while cautioning the reader not to judge the Martians too harshly and reminding them of the “ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought” upon other Indigenous cultures and nonhuman animals (8–9). His examples of extinct buffalo and dodo species and the massacring of Aboriginal Tasmanians by European settlers positions his critique more readily against the speciesism of colonialism rather than carnism itself. That neither of the two major human characters in the novel—the narrator and the artilleryman—are given names further diminishes the sense of human exceptionalism. However, it is later remarked that the Martians have evolved into “mere selfish intelligence[s], without any of the emotional substratum of the human being” (127), thereby characterising their anthropophagous carnism as a deficit in animal sympathy, by which human beings are allegedly defined. Here too, the narrator reflects that: “The bare idea of this is no doubt horribly repulsive to us, but at the same time I think that we should remember how repulsive our carnivorous habits would seem to an intelligent rabbit” (125). A similar comparison is made towards the novel’s conclusion, the narrator feeling “as a rabbit might feel returning to his burrow” and considering his “sense of dethronement” one “the poor brutes we dominate know only too well,” which has left him “an animal among the animals, under the Martian heel” (144). Although the narrator does not condemn human carnism, he constantly questions—and thereby begins to destabilise—the carnist conceptions that designate humans as inedible. Wells continually draws attention to the edibility of all species throughout The War of the Worlds. Comparisons are made between the Martians’ subjugation of humans and that inflicted by humans upon other animals, including monkeys cows, sheep, horses, lemurs, rats, dodos (again), frogs, wasps, bees, ants, and even microscopic infusoria (8, 40, 30, 47–49, 8, 149, 42, 65, 90, 86, 152–53, 7). The human skeletons “picked clean” beside “the crushed and scattered bones of several cats and rabbits and the 8  The War of the Worlds contains numerous other allusions to Biblical imagery, particularly Revelation and the divine retribution imposed upon Sodom and Gomorrah. However, while its narrator’s trek across a deserted London while ruing the failures of Romanticism owes much to Shelley’s The Last Man, there are no explicitly lapsarian allusions, with only the reported absence of a “Major Eden” hinting at any “Paradise Lost” (H. G. Wells, Worlds 37).

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skull of a sheep” similarly draw attention to the mutual edibility of human and nonhuman animals, with the narrator’s attempt to derive meat from the latter gesturing towards an instinctual, carnivorous drive that violates carnist conventions, while the later scavenging of Martian meat by a pack of dogs even reveals the Martians’ own edibility (146, 166). Their final defeat by bacteria—“the humblest things that God … put upon this earth”—completes the inversion and shows that the Martians too are insecure in their speciesist superiority (168). Like The Island of Doctor Moreau, The War of the Worlds repeatedly collapses distinctions between human and nonhuman species, reminding readers of their animality and edibility, its narrator concluding: “Surely if we have learnt nothing else, this war has taught us pity … for those witless souls that suffer our dominion” (149). Yet while The War of the Worlds suggests a sympathetic response in its narrator and possibly prompts one in its readers, the Martian invasion only strengthens the speciesist prejudices of its human characters. Like The  Time  Machine’s Traveller, neither the narrator nor the artilleryman reflect on their own carnism, eagerly partaking of a meal of “mutton and bread” for fear their hands would never again “touch upon bread or meat” (54). Nonhuman animals are elsewhere seized as “provisions” and defended (primarily from other humans) only insofar as they are considered “property,” destined for human consumption (106). The availability of meat is also often treated as a benchmark of civilisation, with “Gregg the butcher” being the only named character among the “common people” who first witness the Martians’ emergence (17). The narrator and the artilleryman later indulge in a “mock-turtle soup”9 during a play at normalcy on Putney Hill, with the narrator being greeted by a “meat-safe” containing “nothing but maggots” upon his return to desolate London (159–65). The collapse of English society during the Martian invasion also causes the narrator to consider cannibalism, with his knocking out of a contentious parish curate with a “meat-chopper” and considerations about whether to “kill and eat him,” amid dreams of “sumptuous dinners,” further drawing attention to the common edibility of humans and other animals (138–42). The restoration of English civilisation is later signalled by the return of a “butcher-boy in a cart” to London’s streets, with the narrator also rejoicing that “corn, bread and meat” were being sent from America (179, 172). As in The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, Wells does not attempt to “raise” animals to a higher  A traditional English soup made by boiling a calf’s head, in lieu of an actual turtle.

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moral status through The War of the Worlds, but rather destabilises that of humans while asserting middle-class, English carnism as a “normal” state of being. The War of the Worlds’ many influential adaptations, however, have largely presented the story as one of human resilience and aggrandisement. Most of The War of the Worlds’ human humbling is removed from Orson Welles’s infamous 1938 radio adaptation, for which the novel is perhaps now most well-known. All consideration of nonhuman animals is similarly absent from the popular 1953 film adaptation, which cuts its opening monologue at the exact moment nonhuman perspectives are introduced in the original, rendering its dystopian warning distinctly anthropocentric. Nevertheless, its initial publication was widely misinterpreted in favour of vegetarianism. An article in an 1898 edition of international animal rights periodical The Herald of the Golden Age welcomed The War of the Worlds as a force for ushering in a Shelleyan, vegetarian prophecy, praising how “the power of vivid imagination of a writer of romance” provides “an effective way to partially realize the attitude which the lower animal may take towards the lords of creation” (Anon. “Man under Martian” 94). The novel was also recommended in The Vegetarian as “a good story for vegetarians to get their friends to read” upon its original serialisation (Harpur 540). The same page also praises George du Maurier’s The Martian (1897), wherein Martians possess a “moral sense … so far in advance of ours that we haven’t even a terminology for it” and thereby “feed exclusively on edible moss and roots and submarine seaweed” (ibid; du Maurier 366–67). It also discusses the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, whose future utopians in Omega: The Last Days of the World (1894) are “freed form the vulgar necessity of masticating meats” through their scientific advances (198). Within animal ethics circles, at least, The War of the Worlds only added the kind of vegetarian utopianism Wells sought to refute.

Later Scientific Romances and Mainstream Novels While less prominent than in the three novels discussed above, vegetarianism and animal ethics remain almost consistent features of Wells’s other scientific romances. In fact, The Invisible Man (1887) (another rewriting of Frankenstein) and In the Days of the Comet (1906) are the only two of Wells’s science fiction novels that do not directly reference vegetarianism or animal ethics. A critique of hunting can even be found in Wells’s’ early

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(and somewhat science-fictional) religious satire The Wonderful Visit (1895), which begins with a bird-hunting vicar accidentally shooting down an angel who proceeds to interrogate his motives for wanting to kill other animals in the first place (48). Vegetarianism again features as a central theme The First Men in the Moon (1900/1901), which Arthur C. Clarke considered the “finest and most poetic of all spatial romances” (Clarke 398). As Suvin observes, the novel also serves as the culmination of Wells’s “sociobiological and cosmological SF cycle,” while “summarizing and explicating openly his main motifs and devices,” including his earlier engagements with vegetarianism (240). The First Men in the Moon is narrated by the businessman Mr Bedford, who accompanies the vegetarian inventor of an anti-gravity material, Mr Cavor, to the moon, where they encounter the hyperintelligent, insect-like Selenites. Its plot largely parallels that of the The Time Machine, especially in the discovery that the bloated “mooncalves” who populate the moon’s vegetated surface are farmed and feasted upon by the more-intelligent, subterranean Selenites. While one of the mooncalves is described as having an “omnivorous mouth,” there is no indication that they eat anything other than the lunar vegetation, making them effectively herbivorous (H. G. Wells, First Men 72). The mooncalves’ “fat-encumbered” bodies emphasise the horrific realities of animal farming, as do the horrific descriptions of the Selenites’ farming processes during the scenes wherein Bedford and Cavor fight their way out of their underground slaughterhouses, which again recall the Traveller’s assault upon the Morlock’s underground abattoirs (72, 117–23). The Time Traveller’s carnist attitudes are also replicated in Bedford, who is introduced taking pride in his meat-heavy diet, feels “not a little exultation” at his attack upon the Selenites and immediately enjoys an English breakfast, which traditionally involves some combination of bacon, sausages, eggs, beans, tomatoes, mushrooms, bread, and “black pudding” (blood sausage), upon returning from the moon (6, 123, 153–54). Although Bedford is a more ethically ambiguous character than the Time Traveller, his common carnism is again positioned as a sensible middle ground between the inhuman carnivorousness of the Selenites and the naive rationality that has rendered Cavor—like Moreau—both a teetotal and a “vegetarian” (First Men 14). Wells intended Cavor as a “burlesque [of] the effects of specialisation” “Preface” ix) and, indeed, he displays none of the animal sympathies usually associated with vegetarianism. He considers the mooncalves “Disgusting hogs!” and promptly proposes to kill one and eat its raw flesh as a matter of survival (73, 130).

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Moreover, his simple description of human history leaves the Selenites’ hyperintelligent leader, the Grand Lunar, horrified at the idea of people “running about over the surface of [the Earth] … killing one another for beasts to eat,” resulting in the seemingly permanent severance of communication between the two species (199). Nevertheless, the innocent and inventive Cavor remains a more interesting and sympathetic character than the conniving, unimaginative Bedford, continuing Wells’s compassionate portrayal of vegetarians, even as he continues to ridicule them. Wells similarly revisits many themes and situations of his early scientific romances in his later, mainstream novel Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island (1928). While stranded on an island populated by cannibals, the novel’s eponymous protagonist hallucinates about a romantic relationship with a girl named “Wena.” In contrast to the child-like characterisation of Weena in The Time Machine, however, this Wena is explicitly sexualised, Blettsworthy admiring her “tender and exquisite mouth” among other physical features (Blettsworthy 204). Wena is also revealed to be an analogue of Blettsworthy’s wife Rowena, who is contrasted with his earlier love-interest, the omnivorously named “Olive Slaughter,” who—despite her imposing name—is squeamish about her “pork butcher” husband’s profession, confiding in a friend that “she has to put her fingers in her ear” whenever he kills a pig (262–63). The specificity of her husband’s butchering also reinforces humanity’s innate edibility—Blettsworthy having earlier remarked on the “pork-like” flavour of human meat during his hallucination (143)—with the couple producing children said to be every bit as “wholesome as the[ir] stock” (263). Quinn argues that the Time Traveller’s “fatherly love” for Weena thereby merges with an “adult” and “cannibalistic” desire for “the innocent and asexual vegan child” (Reading Veganism 83). However, the association is only applicable to The Time Machine in retrospect, and the influence of Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island was hardly pervasive, being one of Wells’s “least read” books (D. C. Smith 297). Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island also revisits the racial insinuations of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Throughout the novel, the “mixed origin” Blettsworthy (220) grapples with the conflict between his allegedly innate “animality” and the English ideals of his upbringing, which are only exacerbated when he is initiated into the cannibals’ tribe, amidst whom he claims to be “generally” vegetarian by “confining” himself to the “roots and vegetables with which the [human] meat was garnished” (143, 155). The unreliable Blettsworthy nevertheless admits to “daintily” tasting

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human flesh and an “acute longing for good meat” while growing “wearied” and from an “excess of fish” (143, 148). The island’s only other inhabitants are giant herbivorous sloths, who Wells intended to represent the “reactionary staleness” of early twentieth-century socialist movements (Kemp 137). Indeed, Blettsworthy becomes “so insidious, so Fabian, that [he] was doing nothing at all” when wearing one of their skins and later replaces one of the cannibal tribes sages who “died from a surfeit of [human] offal” (146, 188), again positioning his English carnism as a preferable “human” state between an ineffectual, dehumanising vegetarianism and “savage” cannibalism. Food distribution plays an important role in When the Sleeper Wakes (1899)—perhaps the earliest science-fictional dystopia—which was revised as The Sleeper Awakes in 1910 and provided an archetypal model for all major dystopias to come (Suvin 243). Yet while the novel’s underlying rebellion revolves around food strikes, little description of the food itself is given beyond it being “light and pleasant,” albeit “quite strange” (H. G. Wells, Wakes 71; Awakes 60). Moreover, while the novel’s temporarily displaced protagonist often reflects upon the “savage[ry]” of the Victorian era, when confronted with the futuristic “slaughter-house machines” of the novel’s dystopian future, he does so only in terms of their inefficiency (153). The slaughterhouses only appear in the revised edition. However, the earlier version still references a medicinal “pink fluid with a greenish fluorescence and a meaty taste” (Wakes, 30; Awakes, 32), whose unpleasant description portends the preoccupation with artificial and impure meats in later dystopian fiction, as discussed in Chap. 4. Elsewhere, Wells’s focus on vegetarianism lessens throughout the twentieth century, although he continues to provide casual commentary. The suggestively titled Food of the Gods (1904) has surprisingly little to say about actual eating habits, besides its eponymous synthetic substance compelling the gigantified, herbivorous species it creates to “try a smaller brother or so as an aid to a vegetarian dietary” (101). The War in the Air (1908) concludes with a pastoral, post-civilisation generation told that the novel’s catastrophic global conflict began because people had simply “[t]oo much meat and drink” (255), suggesting a similarly naive connection between carnism and warfare to that implied by Cavor in First Men in the Moon. Wells’s contemporaneous mainstream novel Ann Veronica (1909) sees the vegetarian Miss Miniver similarly claim that men are “Brutes!,” poisoned by the “juices of meat slain in anger,” so that “they look at life with bloodshot eyes and dilated nostrils,” while appealing to

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renowned Russian writer and vegetarian campaigner Leo Tolstoy for support (179).10 As Quinn observes, however, Minirva’s protests are “disparagingly aligned with female sexual repression,” with similar alignments evident throughout much of Wells’s non-science-fiction output (Reading Veganism 66; Kemp 15–16). Yet while Wells frequently criticised of vegetarianism in his writing, he nevertheless included an endorsement of ethical vegetarianism in his first and most significant utopian novel.

Modern Utopias In addition to shaping science fiction, Wells was “one of the most prodigal producers of utopias,” who considered their creation and “exhaustive criticism” the “proper and distinctive method of sociology” (Aldiss xix; H. G. Wells, “So-Called Science” 204). As Kim Stanley Robinson points out in Pacific Edge (1990), however, while Wells’s science fiction novels are “still in every library and bookstore,” his later utopias are now largely of only academic interest (120–21). Nevertheless, Wells’s utopian writing had a tangible impact on the real world during the first half of the twentieth century. Wells himself was also instrumental in the promotion and eventual creation of a united League of Nations and Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Moreover, as Kemp observes, vegetarianism continued to be a frequent feature of Wells’s later output, which he treated with “increasing impatience” as his political career progressed (Kemp 15). Despite his distaste for vegetarian reformers, Wells’s earliest and most influential utopian novel, A Modern Utopia (1905), contains a seemingly genuine and undeniably influential endorsement of vegetarianism. The novel depicts an alternative Earth united as a single world state, ruled over by an intellectual class of “samurai,” whom Well’s derived “frankly” from Plato’s Republic (Autobiography 2:659). Like Plato’s ideal state, Wells’s Modern Utopia is vegetarian, a samurai explaining to the novel’s narrator: In all the round world of Utopia, there is no meat. There used to be. But now we cannot stand the thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population that is all educated, and at about the same level of physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We 10  Regarding Tolstoy’s vegetarianism, see his essay “The First Step,” which was originally published as the introduction to his Russian translation of Howard Williams’ Ethics of Diet (1883), in Leo Tolstoy: Selected Essays, translated by Aylmer Maude, edited by Ernest J. Simmons (Random house, 1964), 232.

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never settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last slaughter-house. (Modern Utopia 192)

The Utopians’ vegetarianism is motivated by exclusively ethical concerns, rather than pragmatic ones of hygiene and health. It also causes the protagonist to reflect upon his own society, where they still display the “horrible flayed carcases of brutes dripping blood” in market streets, like the Utopians once did in their “barbaric past” (ibid.). Shelley’s influence is also apparent in A Modern Utopia, via its narrator’s marvelling at the “monster state [his] Frankenstein of reasoning has made” (160). Wells also credited Percy Shelley’s influence on his samurai’s sexual liberation, which he connects with women’s sexual expression in his later novels (Autobiography 1:185, 2:470). As both Quinn and Kemp point out, however, female sexual desire in Wells’s later works is often associated with a desire for meat and contrasted with a chaste, vegetarian feminism that is considered more oppressive than liberating (Quinn, Reading Veganism 66; Kemp 15–16). Wells’s Modern Utopia is also more accurately pescatarian than vegetarian, since its citizens continue to eat fish, with the newly produced “cattle men” that figure among their children’s toys also undermining their alleged eradication of carnism (192, 150). Indeed, vegetarians continue to be portrayed as irrational through the figure of the invasive, leather-wearing “Voice of Nature,” who lives by the strict rule of “no animal substance inside, no vegetable without’” (84). Wells’s long-established dislike of vegetarians also suggests an element of ironic critique to his samurai’s restricted lifestyles. Wells himself considered A Modern Utopia to represent “not so much [his] expectations … as [his] desires” for humanity, and spent years attempting to transform the Fabian Society in the image of the samurai, whose organisation he continued to endorse throughout his later life (Autobiography 2:649, 2:658–59, 2:660–61, 2:745). The novel and the samurai were well received by the Fabian Society, leading to the establishment of many real-life—and often vegetarian—communities in its image, including one led by English poets Maurice Browne and Harold Monro, who extrapolated the samurai’s disciplined regimen into a vegetarian, masculinist manifesto intended to “hasten the evolution of man” (Browne and Monro 29; see also Crossley 452–54; D. C. Smith 101). Although his history suggests an element of ambiguity, Wells’s utopian endorsement of the samurai and their

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vegetarianism seems genuine and, regardless, had another direct influence on the spread of real-world vegetarianism. The World Set Free (1914) is similarly ambiguous. The novel’s opening declaration that “man is the tool-using, fire-making animal”, along with its emphasis on technical progress and harnessing nuclear power, makes by far the most Promethean of Wells’s works  (7). Yet while Percy Shelley accused Prometheus of humanity’s carnist downfall, Wells arguably associates him with humanity’s vegetarian uprising. The novel’s utopian World State hinges on scientific advancements in food production that sees “constant contact with cattle, pigs, poultry, and their excrement” passing “out of human experience,” with humanity “ceasing to be an agricultural animal” (147, 150). However, the World State also rejects the “entirely artificial food” enabled by chemical synthesis to paradoxically preserve the pleasure of growing “natural produce … upon the soil” (150–51). Although it is unclear whether animal agriculture continues in a reduced capacity, the novel nevertheless gestures towards the nostalgic, “neocarnist” returns to organic agriculture that would soon become typical of twentieth-century utopianism. Wells’s later utopias are more characteristically critical of vegetarianism. Meat-eating is of continuous concern to the “Earthling” protagonists of Men Like Gods (1923), who—like the narrator of A Modern Utopia—find themselves suddenly transported to a parallel utopian world. Unlike A Modern Utopia’s vegetarian samurai, however, Men Like Gods’ Utopians quickly reassure their visitors they are “not vegetarians!” before promptly treating them to a “very pleasant meat pate” (35, 41, emphasis and italics original). The visiting Earthlings also encounter a Utopian biologist— ironically named “Soyer”—who is attempting to create a new kind of fowl he hopes will combine “the rich quality of very good beefsteak with the size and delicacy of a fowl’s breast” (169). Yet even here, Wells’s critique of vegetarianism remains ambiguous, with a cook also revealing that “eating bacon has gone out of fashion” in Utopia and condemning the Earthlings’ diet for being “rather destructive” when asked fly 200 miles to kill a pig to satisfy their appetites (108). Yet the Utopians remain staunchly anthropocentric, having put all other species in Utopia on trial to determine what “good” they serve from a human perspective. Those considered “pests” were eliminated, with many larger predators also “emasculated” through enforced vegetarianism (72–73). The “greatly increased” intelligence observed among some of the now-vegetarian species, at the alleged expense of “nothing worth having” (81), suggests some inherent

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intellectual benefits to vegetarianism, similar to that seen in Olaf Stapledon’s contemporaneous Last and First Men (1930), wherein an ultimately evolved human race find vegetables “very beneficial … psychologically” and only eat meat on “rare and sacred occasions” (257).11 Nevertheless, the Utopians’ mastery over nature represents a replacement of the “sense of identification and sympathy with other species” seen in The War of the Worlds with a “divisive, dismissive, and hierarchical attitude, that aims to elevate human beings above the animal world” (Alt 36–37). The eugenic abolishment of nonhuman predation also occurs in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s foundational feminist utopia Herland (1915), which is perhaps the most influential early-twentieth-century utopia outside of Wells’s works. Gilman’s eponymous utopian enclave is devoid of cattle, since its women live entirely off the fruit of their forest, which has been cultivated for maximum efficiency and environmental sustainability (11). Gilman’s utopia also overtly criticises early-twentieth-century carnism. The vegan Herlanders consider the inadequacies of the outside world “nowhere better shown than in the matter of the food supply” and are horrified to discover how dairy farming “robs the cow of her calf and the calf of its true food,” turning “very white” and begging to be excused as further workings of the “meat business” are revealed (79, 47–48). Meat-­ eating is also said to be “decreasing every day” in Gilman’s earlier utopia, Moving the Mountain (1911), while zoos and hunting have been completely eradicated (144, 202). Herland’s deeply troubling sequel, With Her in Our Land (1916), however, foregoes concerns about animal ethics to promote the worldwide implementation of racist eugenics. Wells too paid less attention to vegetarianism in his later utopias. Where mentioned, his descriptions of vegetarians are particularly scathing. In The Shape of Things to Come (1933)—perhaps “the best known English literary Utopia of the 1930s” (Milner 124)—Wells describes late-nineteenth-­ century revolutionaries, including Morris and Shaw, as “impracticable and unconvincing people,” while decrying their association with “anti-­ vivisection and vegetarianism,” and it is only when such figures are replaced by “technicians, scientific workers and able business organizers” that the novel’s utopian revolt becomes “competent” (Wells, Shape  276). Wells expressed similar frustrations about “clauses to establish the legal rights of animals” when helping draft the Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Man, 11  Stapledon also endorses a diet of synthetic food concocted entirely from vegetable matter in the utopian portion of his 1942 novel Darkness and the Light (146).

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despite earlier advocating for the “urgent need of international game laws and a supernational game-keeper” to protect endangered species, such as whales, elephants, and gorillas (Guide 49; Year of Prophesying 308). Utopian revolution is equated with carnist desire in The Open Conspiracy: Blueprints for a World Revolution (1928), wherein Wells also demonstrates the need for a “comprehensive” revolutionary enterprise via a parable about a group of castaways’ efforts to eat a pig perhaps “put ashore from some vessel suddenly converted to vegetarianism” (136–39), with further odd and ineffectual vegetarians appearing in his final utopia, The Holy Terror (1939) (67), and last novel You Can’t Be Too Careful (1941) (146). Despite the support shown for vegetarianism in A Modern Utopia, Wells’s antagonism towards vegetarians only increased in direct proportion to his utopian urgency.

Conclusion Although primarily remembered only for his early scientific romances, few—if any—authors had more impact on the twentieth century than Wells. Just as the revered Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges predicted, his works have seemingly been incorporated as “fables” into the “general memory of the species,” having helped shape science fiction and inform popular culture for well over a century (88). Indeed, Wells considered his scientific romances “appeals for human sympathy quite as much as any ‘sympathetic’ novel,” their “fantastic element[s]” mere devices to “throw up and intensify our natural reactions” (Preface vii). Yet while Wells frequently attempted to destabilise the nineteenth-century notions of a vegetarian “return to nature” Shelley embedded into science fiction, in response to Darwin and Huxley’s evolutionary theories, his characteristic ambiguity and reliance on Shelleyan templates often only reinforced the interspecies sympathies he sought to satirise. As Suvin observes, Wells’s “virtuosity cannot mask the fundamental ambiguity that constitutes both the richness and the weakness” of his works, so that, while expressed in “sincerely darwinist terms,” his science fiction ultimately “indicates a return to quasi-religious eschatology … marked by a contamination of echoes from a … Miltonic or Bunyanesque color scheme” (Suvin 241–42). The overt animal sympathies expressed in the War of the Worlds were enthusiastically received by Victorian vegetarians but have been largely neglected throughout the novel’s more recent reception and adaptations. Nevertheless, many modern readers have expressed explicit sympathy for

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the vegetarian Eloi and Beast People of The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau, which have only been accentuated by their numerous and influential adaptations. Moreover, while Wells’s hostility towards vegetarianism became more pronounced in his later, twentieth-century utopias, his seemingly sincere endorsement of vegetarianism in A Modern Utopia prompted the establishment of several real-world vegetarian communes, ironically rendering Wells the science fiction author who has perhaps had the most direct influence on the spread of vegetarianism in the real world.

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Hume, Kathryn. “Eat or Be Eaten: H.  G. Wells’s Time Machine.” H.  G. Wells, edited by Harold Bloom, 35–51. Chelsea House, 2005. Huxley, T.  H. Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays. Collected Essays, vol. 9. Macmillan, 1894. ———. “Evolution in Biology.” Science and Culture and Other Essays, 274–309. Macmillan and Co., 1888. ———. Method and Results. D. Appleton and Company, 1898. Kemp, Peter. H.  G. Wells and the Culminating Ape: Biological Themes and Imaginative Obsessions. Macmillan Press, 1982. Lake, David J. “The Truth About Weena.” Dreaming Down Under, edited by Jack Dann and Janeen Webb, 160–93. Harper Collins, 1998. Lee, Michael Parrish. “Reading Meat in H. G. Wells.” Studies in the Novel 42, no. 3 (Fall, 2010): 249–68. MacKenzie, Norman, and Jean MacKenzie. H.G. Wells: A Biography. Simon and Schuster, 1973. McLean, Steven. The Early Fiction of H.  G. Wells: Fantasies of Science. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Miéville, China. Introduction to The First Men in the Moon, by H. G. Wells, xiii– xxviii. Penguin, 2005. Milner, Andrew. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2012. Mitchell, Chalmers. Review of The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H.  G. Wells. H.  G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, edited by Patrick Parrinder, 43–46. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Morris, William. News from Nowhere, or An Epoch of Rest. Longmans, Green and Co., 1908. Morton, Timothy. Cultures of Taste/Theories of Appetite: Eating Romanticism, 1–17. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. Noyce, Diana. “Charles Darwin the Gourmet Traveler.” Gastronomica 12, no. 2 (2012): 45–52. Oldfield, Josiah. “This Far!” The Vegetarian Messenger (January 1894): 8–10. Paradis, James. “Evolution and Ethics, in Its Victorian Context.” Evolution and Ethics by T. H. Huxley, edited by James Paradis and George C. Willims, 3–55. Princeton University Press, 1989. Parrinder, Patrick, ed. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Parry, Jovian. Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction. PhD thesis, York University, 2019. Philmus, Robert M., ed. The Island of Doctor Moreau: A Variorum Text, by H. G. Wells. University of Georgia Press, 1993. Pole, Mary Tudor. ‘”The Evolutionary Aspect of Vegetarianism.” The Vegetarian Messenger (November, 1899): 389–92.

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Preece, Rod. Animals and Nature: Cultural Myths, Cultural Realities. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 1999. ———. Sins of the Flesh: A History of Ethical Vegetarian Thought. UBC Press, 2008. Quinn, Emelia. Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan 1818 to Present. Oxford University Press, 2021. ———. “Monstraous Vegan Narratives, Margaret Atwood’s Hideous Progeny.” Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture, edited by Quinn, Emelia, and Benjamin Westwood, 149–73. Springer International Publishing, 2018. Reed, John R. “The Vanity of Law in The Island of Doctor Moreau.” H. G. Wells Under Revision, edited Patrick Parrinder and Christopher Rolfe, 134–44. Associated University Press, 1990. Retzinger, Jean P. “Speculative Visions and Imaginary Meals: Food and the Environment in (Post-Apocalyptic) Science Fiction Films.” Cultural Studies 22, no. 3–4 (2008): 369–90. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Ritson, Joseph. An Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, as a Moral Duty. Richard Phillips, 1802. Roberts, Ian F. “Maupertuis: Doppelgänger of Doctor Moreau.” Science Fiction Studies 28, no. 2 (July, 2001): 261–74. Robertson, James C. The Hidden Cinema: British Film Censorship in Action 1913–1972. Taylor and Francis, 2005. Robinson, Kim Stanley. Pacific Edge. Tom Doherty Associates, 2013. Rohman, Carrie. “Burning Out the Animal: The Failure of Enlightenment Purification in H. G. Wells’s The Island of Doctor Moreau.” Figuring Animals: Essays on Animal Images in Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Popular Culture, edited by Mary Sanders Pollock and Catherine Rainwater, 121–34. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Seed, David. Introduction to The Coming Race, by Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Wesleyan University Press, 2005. Shaw, George Bernard. Back to Methuselah. Brentano’s, 1921. ———. Collected Letters: 1926–1950. Edited by Dan H.  Lawrence. Max Reinhardt, 1988. ———. Pen Portraits and Reviews. Constable and Company, 1949. Shelley, Mary. Letters. Edited by Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. University of Oklahoma Press, 1946. Smith, J. Percy, ed. Bernard Shaw and H. G. Wells. University of Press, 1995. Smith, David C. H.  G. Wells, Desperately Mortal: A Biography. Yale University Press, 1986. Spencer, Colin. Vegetarianism: A History. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2002. Stover, Leon, ed. The Time Machine: An Invention; A Critical Text of the 1895 London First Edition, by H. G. Wells. McFarland & Company, 1996.

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Stuart, Tristram. The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times. W. W. Norton & Company, 2006. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 2nd ed. Edited by Gerry Canavan. Peter Lang, 2016. Swift, Jonathan. “A Modest Proposal For preventing the Children of Poor People From being a Burthen to Their Parents or Country, and for making them Beneficial to the Publick.” A Modest Proposal and Other Writings, 230–39. Penguin, 2009. Thiers, M. A. The History of the French Revolution. 3rd American ed. Translated by Frederick Shoberl. A. Hart, Late Cary & Hart, 1850. Van Wyhe, John. Charles Darwin in The Most Joyful Years. World Scientific Publishing, 2014. Verne, Jules. The Clipper in the Clouds [aka Robur the Conqueror]. Anonymous translation. S. Low, Marston, Searle & Rivington, 1887. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool University Press, 2010. ———. “Animals and Animality from the Island of Doctor Moreau to the Uplift Universe.” The Yearbook of English Studies 37, no. 2 (2007): 85–102. Voltaire. Essai sur les Moeurs, vol. 1. Ouvres Completes de Voltaire. Chez Carez, Thomine et Fortic, 1820. ———. Micromégas. Romances, Tales, and Smaller Pieces of M. de Voltaire, 121–50. P. Dodsley, 1794. Wells, H.  G. Ann Veronica: A Modern Romance. Edited by Cary J.  Snyder. Broadview Press, 2016. ———. Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life and Thought. Chapman and Hall, 1902. ———. “A Book Unwritten.” Certain Personal Matters: A Collection of Material, Mainly Autobiographical. William Heinemann, 1897. ———. Experiment in Autobiography: Discoveries and Conclusions of a Very Ordinary Brain (Since 1866), 2 vols. Gollancz & The Cresset Press, 1934. ———. First Men in the Moon. Penguin, 2005. ———. The Food of the Gods. Sphere, 1977. ———. God the Invisible King. Macmillan Company, 1917. ———. Guide to the New World: A Handbook of Constructive World Revolution. Victor Gollancz, 1941. ———. The History of Mr Polly. Penguin, 2005. ———. The Holy Terror. Simon and Schuster, 1939. ———. “Human Evolution, an Artificial Process.” Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, edited by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes, 210–19. University of California Press, 1975. ———. The Island of Doctor Moreau. Penguin, 2005.

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———. “The Limits of Individual Plasticity.” Early Writings in Science and Science Fiction, edited by Robert M. Philmus and David Y. Hughes, 36–39. University of California Press, 1975. ———. Meanwhile: The Picture of a Lady. George H. Doran, 1927. ———. Men Like Gods. Sphere, 1976. ———. Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island. Ernest Benn, 1923. ———. A Modern Utopia. Penguin, 2005. ———. “The New Review Time Machine: Two Excerpts.” The Definitive Time Machine, edited by Harry M. Geduld, 175–80. Indiana University Press, 1987. ———. The Open Conspiracy: Blue Prints for a World Revolution. Victor Gollancz, 1928. ———. The Outline of History. 3rd edition. Garden City, 1921. ———. Preface to The Scientific Romances of H.  G. Wells, vii–ix. Victor Gollancz, 1933. ———. “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of Science. Anti-Vivisection.” The Way the World Is Going: Guesses and Forecasts of the Years Ahead, 221–30. E. Benn, 1928. ———. The Shape of Things to Come. Penguin, 2005. ———. The Sleeper Awakes. Penguin, 2005. ———. “The So-Called Science of Sociology.” An Englishman Looks at the World. Cassel and Co, 1914. ———. The Soul of a Bishop. Macmillan Company, 1917. ———. Text-Book of Biology—Volume 1: Vertebrata. W. B. Clive & Company, 1893. ———. The Time Machine. Penguin, 2005. ———. Tono-Bungay. Macmillan, 1909. ———. The War in the Air. Penguin, 1976. ———. The War of the Worlds. Penguin, 2005. ———. The Wonderful Visit. E. P. Dutton, 1895. ———. The World Set Free. Corgi, 1976. ———. When the Sleeper Wakes. George Bell and Sons, 1899. ———. You Can’t Be Too Careful: A Sample of Life 1901–1951. Secker & Warburg, 1941. Wells, H. G., and George Bernard Shaw. Experiments on Animals: Views for and Against. The British Union for Abolition of Vivisection, 1927. Wells, Martin. Second Coming. Book Guild Publishing, 2008. Williams, Basil. Review of The Island of Doctor Moreau, by H. G. Wells. H. G. Wells: The Critical Heritage, edited by Patrick Parrinder, 51–52. Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972. Williams, Howard. The Ethics of Diet: A Catena of Authorities Deprecatory of the Practice of Flesh-Eating. University of Illinois Press, 2003.

CHAPTER 4

My God, It’s Full of Starch! Arthur C. Clarke, Alternative Meat, and the Hunting Hypothesis Few, if any, science fiction authors have had a greater impact on the development of real-world technologies than Arthur C. Clarke. His pioneering work on communications satellites is widely recognised. However, Clarke—who was the president of the British Interplanetary Society (BIS) from 1946 to 1947 and again from 1950 to 1953—also provided some of the earliest designs for a functioning lunar base, which continue to influence modern ideas for extra-terrestrial expansion. Moreover, while Clarke considered science fiction’s predictive powers to be largely incidental, he recognised that “the pioneers of astronautics used fiction in a deliberate attempt to spread their ideas to the general public” and admitted to having had “similar propagandistic ideas in mind” (Prelude 4). He also openly acknowledged the continued influence of Mary Shelley and H. G. Wells on the science fiction tradition, satirising the seemingly perpetual plagiarism of their ideas by himself and other science fiction writers in stories like “Dial F for Frankenstein” (1965), “The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told” (1966), and “Herbert George Morly Roberts Wells, Esq.” (1967). His work is suitably stuffed with future food technologies and considerations of dietary ethics, among which endorsements of vegetarianism and more mutual interspecies relationships abound. Nevertheless, he also gave science fiction its most celebrated and iconic depiction of carnism via his collaboration with American director Stanley Kubrick for

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the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, which remains his most well-known and influential work. This chapter examines Clarke’s frequent engagements with alternative meat technologies, including synthesised and lab-grown—“cultured” or “in vitro”—meats, within the context of science fiction’s lapsarian vegetarian tradition. It begins with an overview of the ongoing ethical debates surrounding alternative meat technology, and its broader representation within early-twentieth-century science fiction. It then examines Clarke’s ongoing endorsement of alternative technology as a necessary invention for deep-space exploration and terrestrial sustainability. It then considers the influence of Buddhism and newly established evolutionary theories on Clarke’s writing, before concluding with a prolonged investigation of the influence of the popular “Hunting Hypothesis” of human evolution upon the Space Odyssey series.

Alternative Meat and the Dystopian Tradition Since they are atomically identical to animal flesh, cultured and synthetic meats are more ethically complex for vegetarians than simple plant-based alternatives. The abolitionist vegetarian critic Erica Fudge, for example, questions why research organisations are not “simply promoting” vegetable alternatives, arguing—from a largely Derridean basis—that the desire for cultured or synthetic alternative merely reinforces “the hegemonic power of meat,” while other critics have even extended such objections to plant-based meat alternatives (Fudge 161; Sinclair 230, 242–45; Miller, “In Vitro” 44–45). Even Jovian Parry, who argues cultured meat’s “elision of killing” actually undermines Derrida’s sacrificial logic, concedes its role in “the culinary imperialism of seeking to spread the meat-centric diet of the industrial West to the rest of the world” (147, 133). As Patrick D. Hopkins and Austin Darcy acknowledge, “the hope for a moral consensus on some matters may be even more utopian than hopes for a technological solution” (589). Nevertheless, abolitionist objections to non-animal meats appear to be in the minority. Cultured and synthetic meats have largely received enthusiastic support from vegetarian and animal advocates, with PETA famously offering a US$1 million prize to the first person to produce a commercially viable, cultured chicken nugget. Although the prize went unclaimed, in vitro chicken products have since become available for commercial consumption in Singapore (Carrington). In 2013, the first publicly consumed,

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cultured hamburger was also produced in the US from research backed by Google co-founder and “very famous animal lover” Sergey Brin, whose involvement was revealed in an interview for the speculative In-Vitro Meat Cookbook (2014), which explores the creative possibilities of “carniculture,” through speculative concoctions like “Knitted Meat,” “Dodo Nuggets,” and the tentacled “Throat Tickler” (Mensvoort and Grievink 47–48, 23, 73, 57). Brin claims he was primarily motivated to fund the research for reasons of animal welfare and food production efficiency. However, rather than abolishing meat eating altogether, he envisions alternative meat technology “pristine farms” with only a few animals on them (Jha). Conversely, and although not a vegetarian himself, the project’s leader Mark Post has stated his goal is “to replace the entirety of livestock production with cultured meat,” leading to a sustainable, vegetarian future—although he also concerningly appears to consider himself a Moreauean mad scientist, envisioning “images of hybrids of flamingos and giraffes, a minotaur, or a lamb with a rabbit-head” (Mensvoort and Grievink 50–51, 47). Even so, Animal Liberation founder Peter Singer responded positively to Post’s cultured burger, arguing that “being a vegetarian or vegan is not an end in itself, but a means towards reducing both human and [nonhuman] animal suffering, and leaving a habitable planet to future generations” (“Hamburger”). Animal Rights pioneer Tom Regan has also been quoted saying that if “no injustice is done in the procurement of the cells,” then there is no clear reason why animal rights activists “would have to be against in  vitro meat on moral grounds” (Hawthorne). As Carol J. Adams also points out: The idea that technology is not [already] involved in the production of the hamburger is a belief born of nostalgia married to ignorance and custom. The hamburger exists because of modernist technologies, from the barbed wire to the stun gun. (Burger 125–26; see also “Ethical Spectacles”)

Although the implications of carnism may linger in the desire for alternatives that resemble and replicate animal meat, cultured and synthetic meats offer a pragmatic solution to ongoing animal slaughter. Cultured meat production is often criticised as an “animal-intensive undertaking,” due to its reliance on foetal bovine serum (Dillard-Wright 1706; see also Siegal and Foster 28; McHugh 187n19). However, such criticisms also often overlook vegetarian advancements in the process, Although bovine serum is still a common medium for cultured meat

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growth, an article often cited to support its prevalence states that “using a serum-free medium made from maitake mushroom extract … achieved higher rates of growth than fetal bovine serum,” while also describing other similar experiments that successfully employed non-animal alternatives (Edelman et al. “In Vitro” 659, 661). Post’s burger was also cultured using “zero fetal bovine serum,” with further funding provided to develop “a completely animal-free system for growing cultured meat” (Datar and Luining). Moreover, even in its most animal-intensive iterations, alternative meat culturing offers a more efficient alternative to traditional resource and waste-intensive animal farming. Traditional beef production takes approximately eight times the amount of feed to produce the equivalent amount of edible flesh and even more efficient forms of meat—such as pork, chicken, and fish—still requiring two-to-three times the amount of feed than the meat they produce (Dillard-Wright 1705). Cultured meat, by comparison, only requires two kilos of “feed” for every kilo of meat produced, with proponents arguing that “if cultured meat constituted half of all meat consumed we could halve the greenhouse emissions, and increase forest cover [of Brazil, the world’s largest meat exporter] by 50%” (Tuomisto and Roy). As animal liberation activist Rina Deych points out, cultured meat offers more than a simple dietary alternative: “it’s about the potential to spare the suffering of tens of billions of animals per year and, at the same time, improve human health, and reduce insult to the environment” (Deych). Abolitionists are right that resources might be better spent simply promoting traditional vegetarianism. Nevertheless, while demand for meat and meat-like products remains, cultured meat offers a potentially cruelty-free and environmentally friendly alternative that can only become more appealing to vegetarians and vegans as its production methods become more efficient and less animal-intensive. Media coverage has also largely focused on cultured meat’s environmental and economic benefits and its potential to alleviate the suffering of nonhuman animals, with ample coverage being given to vegetarian reactions. As Patrick D. Hopkins observes, “The overall sense one gets from reading these main-stream news and other media reports is that … the primary social issue to be explored is the position taken by vegetarians” (267). As Hopkins further observes, however, such coverage is perhaps “a poor guide to what actual market forces are in play,” since vegetarians represent a “demographically negligible” minority whose interests are arguably being over-represented (265, 267). Adams disagrees, arguing that “Plant-based meat does not target vegetarian or vegan consumers,”

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and that alternate methods of culturing meat are being used primarily “to create burgers for meat eaters” (Burger 112). Her position is questionable; publicly available meat alternatives are often segregated in supermarkets, placed in speciality vegetarian and vegan sections or otherwise only available through specialist food stores. The increasing addition of meat alternatives to restaurant menus is also likely aimed at drawing in more vegetarian and vegan customers rather than converting carnists ones. Moreover, none of the popular articles on in  vitro meat surveyed by Hopkins contains any statement from meat production organisations, with only “very few” even considering the reactions of meat-eaters themselves, suggesting “the vegetarian reaction to cultured meat was critical to its success and … was somehow a major social factor in the cultured meat narrative” (267). Ironically, the perhaps-disproportionate promotion of cultured meat’s vegetarian benefits is balanced out by common negative associations with Mary Shelley’s pro-vegetarian Frankenstein. Derogative terms like “Frankenstein food,” “frankenmeat’” or “freaky frankenburgers” are common features in discussions concerning in  vitro food technologies (Ronay; Zaraska, citing Zorn; Hines). Even a VegNews article positively portraying “Frankenmeat” considers it “freaky” (Markus 20–21). An examination of cultured meat’s popular communication similarly observed that metaphors drawn from “futuristic dystopian human societies”—such as those in the films Soylent Green (1973) or Jurassic Park (1993)—commonly prompted people to associate alternative meats with “irresponsible” scientists and “out-of-control” monsters, while limiting the “scope for alternative interpretations” (Marcu et  al., “Analogies” 554–55). As John Miller observes, such comparisons exemplify the “discourse of monstrosity cultured meat is embroiled within,” while also characterising it as the “hideous progeny” of “a Promethean society that has sacrificed the wholesome and the organic to immoderate technological ambition,” which also pervades dystopian science fiction tradition (“In Vitro” 46). However, despite its common dystopian associations, cultured meat actually originates in the utopian tradition. The concept of cultured meat is often credited to UK Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s 1931 claim that, “synthetic food will, of course, … be used in the future,” so humanity can “escape the absurdity of growing a whole chicken in order to eat the breast or wing”—likely inspired by biologist Alexis Carrel’s questionable claim he had kept a piece of a chicken heart alive inside a test tube for multiple weeks (Churchill 276; Carrel

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525–26).1 However, the idea of synthesised meat appeared over 50 years earlier in American Author Mary E. Bradley Lane’s early modern feminist utopia Mizora: A World of Women (1880–1881/1890), whose utopian women supplement their principally fruitarian diet with chemically synthesised meats and “keep no cattle, nor animals of any kind for food or labor” (18, 20). Beyond Shelley’s possible gestures in The Last Man, Lane’s appears to be the first science-fictional portrayal of non-animal meat and “exemplifies an upbeat sense of the radical possibilities of technology characteristic of both its time and genre” (Miller, “Literary Invention” 95). The Mizorans are no animal lovers, however, having exterminated all nonhuman species from their society—considering associating with other animals to be “degrading” (Lane 113). That they have also eliminated all people with “dark complexions” from their society (92) also aligns the novel with the uncomfortable eugenic undertones of early-twentieth-­ century utopias, rather than a vegetarian “return to nature.” The “second literary depiction of cultured flesh” likely occurs in German science fiction writer Kurd Lasswitz’s 1897 novel Two Planets, wherein Martian synthesised sausages remain a signal of superior technology and utopian benevolence (Miller, “Literary Invention” 95; Lasswitz 272, ibid.). Conversely, later science fiction authors, regularly employ cultured meat as a dystopian “signifier of hypercontrol, blandness and over-civilization” (Parry 134). Artificial and “impure” meats have been staples of modern dystopian science fiction since its inception, beginning with the meat-like pastes of Wells’s When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) (99). Those counted among the OneState of Yevgeny Zamyatin’s archetypal dystopia We (1921/1924) similarly persist on “petroleum food,” while its rebellious narrator longs to reconnect with the “wild animal[s]” beyond its walls (22, 90–91). Another early dystopian depiction of synthetic food occurs in David H. Keller’s story “Unto Us a Child is Born” (1933), which is narrated by the inventor of a synthetic food machine designed to replace already-ubiquitous test-­ tube meats and concludes with an invocation of Adam and Eve’s exile in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), recalling the utopian “return to nature” encouraged in Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818/1833) (Keller 297). A somewhat utopian treatment of artificial food appears in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), wherein the novel’s dystopian government claim to be capable of synthesising “every morsel of food,” but—as in 1  For a refutation of Carrel, see Hannah Landecker, Culturing Life: How Cells Became Technologies (Harvard University Press, 2007), 166–67.

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Wells’s World Set Free (1914)—refrain in order to preserve the supposed pleasantries of ongoing agricultural labour, while synthetic starches and “vitaminized beef-surrogate[s]” are available to the upper classes, signalling a dystopian class divide (Huxley 197–98, 217).2 In George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949)—probably the most popular and influential dystopia—characters consume an “oily-tasting,” “vomit”-like stew, containing “cubes of spongey pink stuff” they suspect is “probably a preparation of meat,” with its rebellious protagonists relishing “authentic” treats such as “real” chocolate and coffee (53, 147). Orwell himself considered vegetarians to be “cranks” who were “out of touch with common humanity” (Wigan Pier 206–7). Andrew Milner argues that there is “surely a contradiction” between Orwell’s rejection of vegetarians and his promotion of a “political vision centred on justice and liberty,” especially given Orwell’s own conceivably “crankish” history (34). Nevertheless, his condemnation of adulterated meat-products is in keeping with the dystopian tradition’s earliest and most influential instances. Warren Belasco claims there is “a strong dose of vegetarianism” among the heroic survivors and rebuilders of dystopian literature (100). He gives no specific examples, however, and a carnist reverence appears far more common among dystopian rebels. As noted in Chap. 3, the hero of Wells’s revised The Sleeper Awakes (1910) commends, rather than condemns, the efficiency of his dystopian future’s slaughterhouses (153). The availability of meat is also considered an essential step on the road to enlightenment in Jack London’s The Iron Heel (1908), which is often heralded as one of the dystopian genre’s earliest examples (108–10). The Objectivist rebels of Ayn Rand’s Anthem (1938) again assert their individuality by slaughtering and experimenting upon other animals, considering no meal to have “ever tasted better” than one slain and cooked over an open fire (79, 92). 2  Margaret Atwood speculates that the diet of Huxley’s dystopian World State is likely meat-intensive, due to the cows that provide milk and hormones for their infants (Atwood 191; Huxley 62). There is no evidence of meat-eating in Huxley’s text, however. Nevertheless, an incidental critique of industrialised carnism can be inferred from Brave New World’s dystopian admiration of Henry Ford, whose introduction of assembly lines to the automotive industry was inspired by similar methods used in slaughterhouses and resulted in an increased “alienation” and “fragmentation” of human and other animal subjects (literally so in the case of factory farmed animals) (Adams, “Post-Meateating” 52–53; see also Ford 81). If Huxley’s dystopia is intended as a warning against the extension and continuation of Fordism, then it can also be read as a warning against the extension and continuation of (industrialised) carnism.

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The rebels in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1954) similarly celebrate escaping their dystopian society with a campfire cooked bacon breakfast (208–9). Hunting is glorified in Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), wherein the protagonist fantasises about winning “a mountain of strong red meat” from a bear (99–100). A similar reverence for hunting is also expressed in John Wyndham’s The Chrysalids (1955), wherein one of its utopian saviours explicitly rejects vegetarianism, declaring: It is not pleasant to kill any creature … but to pretend that one can live without doing so is self-deception. There has to be meat in the dish … It is neither shameful nor shocking that it should be so: it is simply a part of the great revolving wheel of natural economy. (195, italics added)

If there are any vegetarian heroes among dystopian science fiction, they exist outside its core canon. Dystopian representations of cultured meat remain prominent among the many other mid-twentieth-century works of science fiction that depict an overpopulated future. Perhaps the most influential science-fictional depiction of cultured meat is Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1952/1953), wherein plantation workers cut slices of “pulsating flesh” from an “insensible,” “grey-brown, rubbery hemisphere” of regenerating meat called “Chicken Little” (90, 92). Chicken Little’s massive bulk provides a hidden meeting space for The Space Merchants’ conservationist resistance. As Miller argues, however, Chicken Little “does not represent the liberation from species hierarchy but rather the condemnation of a hypercapitalist disruption of a natural order in which species hierarchies are embedded” (“Literary Invention,” 101–2).3 Indeed, the novel’s protagonist Mitchel Courtenay begins his propagandist rebellion by leveraging a nostalgia for “roast beef,” having earlier reduced conservationist sentiment to the idea that “nature’s way of living was the right way of living,” with (Pohl and Kornbluth 93, 15, italics original). Meat substitutes are elsewhere compared unfavourably with “real” meats, which remain available as a delicacy for the upper classes (26, 44). However, the conservationists’ reverence for “real” meat is demystified in Pohl’s sequel, The Merchants’ War (1984), wherein the animal meat they rear is considered only “medicore” and the narrator is chastised 3  For an analysis of Chicken Little’s feminine gendering and the sexual politics of meat, see Miller, “Literary Invention” 99–100.

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by a Chinese sailor for being an “Animal eater” (23, 134, italics original). An Asian opposition to carnism is also invoked to Pohl’s first solo novel Slave Ship (1956), wherein American soldiers use remote-controlled nonhuman animals to fight against the Vietnamese “Caodai” army, whose leader questions the Americans’ “slaughterhouse” and slave-like treatment of other animals, declaring that he and the Caodai do “not eat flesh,” for it “seems horrible to them” (113). The irony implied by Slave Ship’s title is confirmed in Pohl’s afterword, wherein he declares humans “snobbish animal[s]” who cling to “evolution’s ladder” and saw away at the rungs beneath “in an attempt to sever the connections between [themselves] and the soulless, speechless, brainless Beast … that does not, in fact, exist” (147, ellipses original). Nevertheless, the story ends by suggesting that the Americans’ individual bonds with their animal companions are perhaps more genuine than the blanket reverence of their opponents and that dystopian depictions of alternative meats otherwise remain frequent features of Pohl’s fiction. Another significant early population dystopia is Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel (1954), wherein characters resent the “sharp flavour and definite aftertaste” of “zymoveal,” despite its considerable economic benefits, as well as the novel being a continuation of Asimov’s I, Robot story suite (1950), which concludes with the advent of excessive economic waste due to the popularity of flavourful yeast alternatives (Caves 48; “Evitable Conflict” 191). The extra-terrestrial colonies of Asimov’s juvenile Space Ranger series (1952–1958) similarly resent yeast-based meat alternatives, despite recognising the inefficiency and impracticality of animal agriculture for feeding an overpopulated Earth (46, 53–54). Asimov later integrated his Robot series with his Foundation one (1951–1993), wherein traders express an explicit resentment of vegetarians (Empire 68). However, their anti-vegetarian sentiments are later superseded by the predominantly “vegetarian” (actually pescatarian) utopian population of the telepathic “superorganism” Gaia in the Hugo and Locus Award-winning Foundation’s Edge (1983), showing a progression from dystopian meat-­ substitutes to utopian vegetarianism (354). The dystopian trend is however reinforced by Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), which is probably the most well-known population dystopia, providing the basis for Soylent Green, which takes its name from the dystopian “soylent steaks” relied upon and resented and by the novel’s immense (over)population. Yet while the film famously concludes with the cannibalistic revelation that the reputedly plankton-based

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“Soylent Green is People!” Harrison “boringly insists that it is made of soybeans and lentils” (Fleischer; Westfahl 215). Although commonly recognised as an economic necessity, science fiction authors have largely resented the prospect of alternative meats, resulting in an overwhelming dystopian depiction of alternative meat technology. Indeed, synthetic meat is treated similarly in Clarke’s own dystopian novel The City and the Stars (1956), which contrasts the synthetic food of its dystopian city with the naturally grown food of its surrounding rural cultures (115). Nevertheless, it and the broader dystopian tradition are at odds with his otherwise overwhelmingly positive portrayals of alternative meat technology.

Space Exploration and Environmental Sustainability In contrast to many of his contemporary science fiction authors, Clarke frequently endorsed the development of alternative meat technology as essential for extra-terrestrial expansion and the preservation of Earth’s environment. As he acknowledges in his epilogue to the official Apollo 11 mission memoir, “the chief problem in manned interplanetary travel is not propulsion, but life-support,” with “one of the most important functions of manned space stations” being to “test and develop methods of … food regeneration which can be relied on for periods of years” (“Beyond Apollo” 402). The sheer quantity of resources required for space flight renders continued shipments of Earth food to prospective off-world colonies, entirely impractical, and they become even more unfeasible the further colonisation extends away from Earth—to say nothing of extended, deep-space voyages. Without access to a space elevator—like the one envisioned in Clarke’s Hugo and Nebula Award-winning hard science fiction novel The Fountains of Paradise (1979)—any extra-terrestrial colonies would therefore need to be primarily self-sustaining, with the amount and kind of resources required for animal farming not only unavailable off-­ planet but also better spent sustaining its human colonists, especially when considering longer voyages. Clarke therefore consistently advocated hydroponic plant-farming and the invention of matter synthesis as the most practical means of sustaining extra-terrestrial colonies. His earliest published plans for a lunar outpost, from 1951, envision “pure chemical synthesis, or hydroponic farming” as the primary methods of food provision (Exploration of Space 118). Plans he and later BIS president R. A. Smith published in 1954 similarly include

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hydroponic greenhouses and an algae-based waste management system, which would also contribute “fats and proteins” to the colony (Clarke and Smith 78). Therein, Clarke also claimed hydroponic farming—by which plants are grown in nutrient-rich solutions, without the need for soil— would provide the “the most economical—and perhaps the only method of food-production” available on the moon, and the potential for cacti-­ like vegetation to be planted on the lunar surface, provided nitrates and other necessities for vegetable farming could be “synthesised from their basic elements” (94, 96). Clarke considered that similar “miracles of food synthesis” might also “compensate the colonists for the lack of genuine steak and chops” (ibid.). However, no consideration is given in either text to transporting nonhuman animals to the moon, for food purposes or otherwise. In The Promise of Space (1968), he claimed that chemists would be able to “synthesize any desired food, from such basics as lime, phosphates, carbon dioxide, ammonia, [and] water,” by the beginning of the twenty-first century, while continuing to advocate for algae, hydroponic farming and the development of cacti-like vegetation to support prospective lunar colonies (204). In 1984, he declared that plans for growing hydroponic crops looked “particularly promising,” following the discovery that the lunar surface consisted of soil rather than dust (1984 92). Although Clarke envisioned animals “eventually” being introduced on the moon, in his epilogue to the Apollo 11 memoir (“Beyond Apollo,” 399), the remark is made only parenthetically and appears to be a lone anomaly among his extended envisioning of extra-terrestrial food supplies. The necessity of hydroponic vegetable farming and matter synthesis for space colonisation is continued in Clarke’s early science fiction. His first novel, Prelude to Space (1951), mentions plans for a self-contained moon base, which “would grow its own food supplies under glass” (141). Hydroponic farming similarly sustains the lunar colony in his story “Holiday on the Moon” (1951) (322). Synthetic beef appears in Clarke’s early story “The Lion of Comarre” (1949) and later as a staple of extra-­ terrestrial colonies in “The Road to the Sea” (1951) (“Lion” 131; “Road” 272). Synthetic tissues are also cultivated in Clarke’s second novel, The Sands of Mars (1951), by Martian colonists who decide the introduction of natural meat production would be an inefficient use of space (98). The novel also describes the discovery of a vegetarian Martian species, whose diet is exploited to nurture the planet’s vegetation and oxygenate its atmosphere, although the experience does not seem to affect the colonists’ carnist ideologies, with one of them expressing a desire to go fishing when

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visiting Earth (184). Clarke’s juvenile novel Islands in the Sky (1952) is set in the same space-faring future and was noted for its “detailedly plausible and accurate fictional tour of the space stations which are probable in our near future” (Boucher and McComas 89). However, it gives no indication of the food available in its extra-terrestrial setting, beyond there being coffee and “a glass of water,” although it includes a Mercurian species that might also be considered vegetarian, insofar as it appears to be “some kind of rock-eater” (99, 185, 140). A further lithophageous creature appears in The City and the Stars, although its vegetarian categorisation is made even more questionable, due to its “botanical” nature (216). Clarke’s 1955 novel Earthlight is again set in a lunar colony, similar to the one envisioned in Exploration of the Moon, where lunar colonists eat synthetic meats and hydroponic vegetables grown in kilometres of greenhouses spanning the Moon’s equator, while a lone cow lives in “luxury” in its lunar zoo (11). Although Clarke considered science fiction’s predictive powers to be largely incidental, he also acknowledged that “the pioneers of astronautics used fiction in a deliberate attempt to spread their ideas to the general public,” and admitted to having had “similar propagandistic ideas in mind” (Prelude 4). His consistent depiction of vegetarian, off-­world outposts, therefore, suggests a concerted effort to inform his readers that if extra-terrestrial outposts were ever to be established, they would need to be vegetarian. Not all of Clarke’s fictional space explorers are vegetarians. Passengers on a lunar cruise in A Fall of Moondust (1961) consume “compressed meat” (53). Solar yacht racers similarly snack on liverwurst “Spacetasties” in “The Wind from the Sun” (1964) (833). Astronauts also consume bars of “meat concentrate” in Rendezvous with Rama (1973) (159). Nevertheless, synthetic food is introduced, through contact with extra-­ terrestrial species, in the series of Rama sequels Clarke co-authored with NASA’s Planetary Flight Systems Directorate chief engineer Gentry Lee, with members of the united Earth council complaining about the lack of meat available at an interspecies restaurant that only serves fish in the series final, utopian instalment (Revealed 519).⁠ Clarke also returns to a more practical endorsement of hydroponic farming in one of his final novels, Sunstorm (2005), the second in the Time Odyssey series (2003–2007) Clarke co-authored with Stephen Baxter, which takes place in a parallel universe wherein humans have begun lunar colonisation. As one of the novel’s lunar farmers declares: “We’re all vegetarians up here. It will be a long time before you find a pig or cow or chicken on the Moon” (44). For

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all Clarke’s visionary prowess, the practicalities of maintaining a carnist diet in space eluded him. Contrary to Clarke’s practical depictions of vegetarian space exploration, other science fiction stories involving deep-space voyages and off-­ world colonisation commonly depict the continuation of carnism. Possibly the earliest example of vegetarian lunar colonisation within science fiction is Nat Schachner and Arthur Leo Zagat’s Exiles of the Moon (1931), wherein the lower classes have become so accustomed to synthetic meat made in “food factories” that they consider tales of animal agriculture “fairy stories” (448). However, the story itself involves the re-­introduction of animal agriculture to a depleted Earth, which results in all of the cattle being flayed to make boats, although the story’s carnist colonists ironically find themselves having to adopt a “vegetarian” diet once exiled to the moon without the resources necessary for food synthesis (470, 688). Authors of generation ship stories also often depict crafts containing animal farms, with the intention to continue meat production at their destination, with another prevalent trope of the subgenre being an on-board technological and societal regression, which regularly results in an increase in meat-eating and nonhuman animal slaughter. Clarke’s own early generation ship story, “Rescue Party” (1946), makes no mention of its food supply. Other early examples are overtly carnist. Robert Heinlein’s Orphans of the Sky (1941/1963) includes meat farms along with its hydroponics, while the protagonist of Brian Aldiss’s Non-Stop (1958) is a hunter who stalks his prey across his ship’s decks. Heinlein’s other space colonisation novels also emphasise the continued carnivorousness of their off-world colonies. The protagonist of Farmer in the Sky (1950), for example, leaves behind the dystopian “Syntho-Steaks” of Earth for a colony on Ganymede, where “real” animal products are plentiful, and the lunar colony in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966) even exports meat to Earth (Farmer 9; Moon 45). Vegetarian examples of generation ship stories include Poul Anderson’s Tau Zero (1970), which uses algae as its primary food source, and Neal Stephenson’s Seveneves (2015), wherein the inhabitants of an orbital space ark expect to survive on the kind of “low-calorie vegetarian diet” depicted in science fiction stories, although some of them resort to cannibalism when their station is compromised (Anderson 88; Stephenson 74). Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow (1996) and Children of God (1998) also call the entire concept of carnism into question via their planetary colonists’ contact with extra-terrestrial species, who share a similar dynamic

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to the Eloi and Morlocks in H.  G. Wells’s Time Machine (1895). Vat-­ grown meat is also commonplace in Lois McMaster Bujold’s heavily awarded space Vorkosigan Saga (1986–). Yet while taking meat “from the bodies of real dead animals” is considered a “primitive culinary practice,” Bujold’s characters take to it enthusiastically when given the opportunity (333). Despite often acknowledging vegetarianism’s practical advantages for extra-terrestrial exploration, vegetarian examples are rare and often compromised throughout its many science-fictional representations. Clarke nevertheless had a direct influence on the vegetarianism of what is perhaps the most popular and longest-running example of utopian and space colonisation fiction: Star Trek, whose Federation starships rely on synthetic meat to sustain their many interplanetary exploration and peace-­ keeping missions. Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry often credited Clarke as an important influence, stating that a “great deal” of the series was “guided” by his scientific speculations in Profiles of the Future (1962), which directly inspired the franchise’s distinctive matter transporters (McAleer 168). Therein Clarke also describes a matter “replicator” capable of producing “any food that men have ever desired or imagined,” suggesting his direct influence on its famous food “replicators” as well (Profiles 148–9).4 Synthetic meat is primarily played for comedy in Star Trek’s original series (1967–1969) and often depicted as inferior and unmanly in its later incarnations. Similarly, while its iconic Vulcans are regularly idealised, their vegetarianism is also often represented as repressive, with the few explicit engagements with the diet of half-vulcan protagonist Spock in the original series consistently undermining his ethical philosophy. It is nevertheless declared in an early episode of Star Trek’s extremely influential second series, The Next Generation (1987–1994), that the members of it utopia Federation “no longer enslave animals for food purposes,” with any food resembling flesh instead being “inorganically materialized, out of patterns used by their transporters” (S1E7 “Lonely Among Us”). The vegetarian allegiance of The Next Generation’s character is grossly undermined in current sequel series Picard (2020–), which shows them hunting and skinning rabbit-like animals in an Edenic setting (S1E7 “Nepenthe”). 4  Nanotechnology pioneer K. Eric Drexler was similarly inspired by Clarke’s predictions in Profiles of the Future, leading him to envision “home food growers” capable of molecularly constructing “genuine meat” out of substances like dirt and sand, which would “let people eat ordinary diets without killing anything,” by which “the animal rights movement” would be “strengthened accordingly” (233, see also 149 regarding Clarke’s influence).

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However, the Federation’s vegetarianism and the centrality of interspecies empathy to its utopian vision are reaffirmed in the concurrent flagship series Discovery (2017–) (see Bulleid, “Boldy Going Vegan?” for further analysis).5 Clarke himself praised Star Trek’s “respect for life in all forms,” and NASA’s associate administrator for international relations also recently stated that he hoped “the future will look a lot more like Star Trek, and a lot less like Star Wars,” when discussing future Moon exploration (McAleer 221; Reuters). Star Trek continues to influence real-world space exploration, and—although inconsistent across its many incarnations—any insistence that humanity should “boldly go where no one has gone before” as a vegetarian species is largely due to Clarke’s influence. Currently, space travel has not advanced enough for astronauts to have to forego their carnist appetites. NASA’s space food fact sheet currently offers “familiar, appetizing, well-accepted food items,” including beef, chicken, frankfurters, ham and ham salad spread, spicy meatballs, salmon, tuna, turkey and pork sausages, with modern astronauts able create menus inclined to their individual tastes (NASA, “Food”). Initially, astronauts “endure[d]” eating cubes of freeze-dried powders and semi-liquids, often coated in gelatin (collagens obtained from nonhuman animals) to reduce crumbling, although more familiar fare, such as chicken, vegetables, and even shrimp cocktails, were available by the mid-1960s (NASA, “Human Needs”), with subsequent menus offering meat meals such as bacon squares, spaghetti Bolognese, lobster bisque, and beef stew (Glew 24). The forcible sacrifice of nonhuman animals in achieving real-world space travel should also not be overlooked, especially given that signs reading “Project Barbecue” were hung around the necks of live pigs used in crash tests at the US’s Holloman Air Base, in reference to the researchers’ habit of cooking and eating them once the tests were finished (Burgess and Dubbs 105). For as long as space flights remain short term and colonies

5  Television’s other longest-running science fiction series, Doctor Who (1963–1989), also contains an endorsement of vegetarianism, with the sixth Doctor converting to vegetarianism in a 1985 episode, after encountering an alien race who sought to farm humans for meat (S22E9, “The Two Doctors (Part 3)”). Screenwriter Robert Holmes was motivated to write the story out of his own vegetarianism and was applauded for doing so by Nicola Bryant—a self-described “non-meat eater” (sic)—who played the Doctor’s companion Peri (Cole and Stewart 215n9). The Doctor’s vegetarianism continued to inform the character, until series runner Russell T. Davis deliberately wrote it out of the rebooted series (2005–), concerned that the character would appear too “liberal” and “unrelatable” (quoted ibid., 206–7).

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(relatively) accessible by Earth, it appears space adventurers will not be forced to forego a carnist diet. Clarke’s vegetarian proposals nevertheless concur with many real-world propositions for space colonisation. Although a 1968 NASA-sponsored study into the feasibility of a lunar observatory speculated about shipping chickens from Earth as fertile eggs, it also explicitly recommended doing away with freeze-dried meats sent from Earth, in favour of a grain-­ intensive, vegetarian diet as agriculture improved (LaPatra and Wilson 106, 34). Indeed, there have been considerable advances in extra-­terrestrial vegetable farming in recent years. A vegetable growth system was added to the International Space Station (ISS) in 2014, along with the introduction of an “Advanced Plant Habitat” in 2017, with the intention of preparing the crew to “grow their own food in space during deep-space exploration missions” (Herridge, “Veggie”; “Plant Habitat”). In 2019, an attempt was made to grow actual plants on the moon’s surface within a self-­ contained biosphere established by the Chinese Chang’e 4 lunar lander, although the biosphere—which also included silkworms for oxygenation—lasted only a few days due to the intense temperatures (Letzter; Xiong and Westcott). NASA has nonetheless had recent success growing plants in lunar soil, brought back by the original Apollo astronauts (Associated Press). NASA also invested in the development of alternative meat, with a project led by Morris Benjaminson in 2001 managing to induce growth in segments of muscle tissue cut from goldfish. Despite its success, however, the project was considered too expensive to continue funding (Sample). Research is also currently being conducted into the use of three-dimensional organ printing to produce synthetic meat (Ben-Arye and Levenberg). Although synthetic food production is yet to be fully realised in either a terrestrial or off-world setting, the existence of such projects suggests extra-terrestrial exploration will be a primarily vegetarian endeavour, just as Clarke envisioned. Other high-profile investments are being made in the development of meat alternatives with an aim towards environmental sustainability. The executive chairman of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, lists the development of plant-based meat alternatives as the first of six “moonshot” technologies needed to combat climate change, with the Californian plant-based meat company Impossible Foods reportedly rejecting a US$200–300 million acquisition offer from Google to preserve its own environmental mission (Fehrenbacher; Robinson). Other notable backers, including Bill Gates and Richard Branson, have also invested in the

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development of cultured meat for primarily environmental reasons (Singh; Morgan). Branson’s concerns seem genuine, although Gates has also invested extensively in fossil-fuels, despite his stated environmental concerns, as have traditional meat-production companies, for presumably more economically driven reasons (Klein 236, 499n21; Roberts). Regardless of their motivations, these financial and economically driven investments could lead to tangible environmental and ethical improvements in addition to any ethical benefits alternative meat technologies might bring. In addition to recognising its necessity for deep-space travel, Clarke also considered the development of synthetic food essential for terrestrial sustainability. In a 1967 address to the American Institute of Architects (AIA), he described traditional agriculture as “a ridiculous process,” due to the extreme inefficiency of plants and animals in converting sunlight into usable energy (“Technology” 143). His humorous tone during the address perhaps calls into question the sincerity of his predictions, with matters further confused by his embedding of a seemingly genuine rally against meat-production and additional endorsements of synthetic food within his later, comically toned Engineering and Science article “The Future Isn’t What It Used to Be” (1970). Yet while Clarke identifies himself in the article as a “carnivore who hates vegetables,” while predicting that the development of synthetic foods would likely result from space research, since the development of “a closed-cycle ecology in which all wastes are reprocessed and converted back to food” is essential for “long-­ duration space journeys,” and consistently argued against the continuation of animal farming when discussing environmental sustainability elsewhere (6–7). An environmental endorsement of vegetarianism is also included in Clarke’s utopian novel The Songs of Distant Earth (1986), wherein an inventor’s electrified fish traps are sabotaged by environmental “Conservers” and “people who believe all food should be synthetic because it’s wicked to eat living creatures, like animals—or even plants.” Although the claims of the latter party are dismissed as “crazy,” the Conservers are considered to “have a point,” since overfishing might lead to ecological imbalance (78, italics original). Along with its economic impracticalities, Clarke recognised and regularly promoted the detrimental impacts of carnism on Earth’s environment, which have become an increasing real-world concern. However, it is perhaps the ethical arguments regarding alternative meats that are most heavily emphasised in his fiction.

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Ethical Endorsements and Buddhist Influences In addition to its practical and environmental benefits, Clarke frequently endorsed the ethical benefits of vegetarianism throughout his writing, especially following the increased exposure to Buddhism he experienced after moving to Sri Lanka in 1956. Although not absolute, vegetarianism is prevalent throughout Buddhism and its followers, with most of its vegetarian restrictions being drawn from the first of the tradition’s five precepts, which prescribes abstinence from taking the life or causing the suffering of any sentient creature. Even before moving to Sri Lanka, Clarke often engaged with Buddhism in his fiction, with his 1953 short story “The Nine Billion Names of God” even catching the attention of the Dalai Lama, who wrote to Clarke saying he found the story, which revolves around a Tibetan monastery, “particularly amusing” (Clarke, “Eisenstein” 95). Clarke’s Buddhist influences stand in contrast to the largely Abrahamic influences of earlier science fiction and combine with his economic endorsements to suggest an overwhelmingly pro-vegetarian outlook, which again relies on the development of alternative food production methods and food technologies. Synthetic meat is given a subversive treatment in Clarke’s early story “The Food of the Gods” (1964), which is presented as a transcript from a committee hearing, during which a synthetic food chemist provides a shocking history of twentieth-century eating habits. The development of synthetic meat is again being presented as a “byproduct of space research,” which was primarily developed to address issues of efficiency and population. However, his shift to a synthetic diet is also considered responsible for a “moral gain,” with “such revolting institutions as the slaughterhouse and the butcher’s shop” having “vanished from the face of the Earth” (844). The shift to a synthetic diet is also considered responsible for a “moral gain,” with “such revolting institutions as the slaughterhouse and the butcher’s shop” having “vanished from the face of the Earth” (ibid.). Indeed, the committee considers the twentieth century to possess a “crude, dissecting-room frankness that makes them almost unreadable” and are appalled to learn that, “until a few centuries ago, the favourite food of almost all men was meat—the flesh of once living animals,” which upsets their stomachs and causes one to flee from the room to be sick on several occasions (843, italics original). The concept of carnism is not only unrecognisable but also considered entirely unthinkable to the story’s technologically advanced human population, who consider it “incredible”

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that their ancestors, “coarse and brutal though they were, could have ever tolerated such obscenities” (844–45). In a final twist, the chemist reveals that, although his company’s foods are constructed entirely from inorganic materials, their most popular products replicate meat so exactly as to be chemically undetectable and accuses his competitors of even replicating human flesh. The ending of “Food of the Gods” does not endorse synthetic vegetarianism, but rather subverts it with a shocking implication of humanity’s inherent carnivorousness and cannibalistic inclinations. The ethical implications of synthetic meat are endorsed more favourably elsewhere in Clarke’s fiction. Not only is synthetic food available in Imperial Earth (1975), but meat is a virtually outlawed “perversion,” with prohibitionists arguing its toleration “would do irreparable harm to countless innocent animals and revive the revolting trade of the butcher” (142). A similarly post-carnist future is depicted in Hammer of God (1993), wherein families accustomed to “food recycling system[s]” find “the very idea of eating natural meat hacked from dead animals … utterly revolting,” and even pro-gun senators oppose hunting, considering the shooting of “defenseless animals for sport” to be truly “sick!” (6–7, 29; emphasis original). Humans are similarly judged by extra-terrestrials, regarding their treatment of other species in Clarke’s earlier, influential novel Childhood’s End (1953). One of the first acts undertaken by the novel’s benevolent alien Overlords upon arriving on Earth is the implementation of a “cruelty-to-animals order,” which allows for the slaughter of other animals for “food or in self-defence,” but punishes all other interspecies cruelties by telepathically reflecting any pain inflicted back upon its perpetrators (36). Clarke questioned whether aliens would even be able to recognise terrestrial life-forms, let alone distinguish between humans and other species, when considering the possibility of real-life extra-terrestrial encounters (“Aliens Come” 101–2). Nevertheless, his fiction frequently foregrounded the need for more respectful relationships between humans and other terrestrial species. Indeed, as Tom Shippey notes in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s entry on “Iconoclasm,” Clarke “surprised many sf readers by ultimately arguing for vegetarianism” in his 1957 novel The Deep Range (Shippey). The novel’s vegetarian argument is made even more surprising given its adaptation from Clarke’s 1954 short story of the same name, wherein whale farming is celebrated for putting an end to world hunger (“Deep Range” 488). Conversely, the novel—which was published the year after Clarke moved to Sri Lanka—sees whale farming challenged by a rising

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Buddhist faction led by the Scottish-born Maha Thero Alexander Boyce, who seek to enforce their religion’s fundamental “respect for all living creatures” (Deep Range 158). Boyce is a pragmatic man who “realizes that everybody can’t be a vegetarian” and acknowledges that even the Buddha did not abstain entirely from meat when accepting food offered to him (160, 184). Nevertheless, he maintains that “as soon as such killing is no longer essential, it should cease,” welcoming the move towards synthetic and plankton-based proteins as an opportunity to “shift the burden of guilt” he believes has “haunted all thinking men as they look at the world of life that shares their planet” (184–5). Buddhism is also only able to establish itself as a world power in The Deep Range, after Christianity is considered to have been dealt a “shattering blow” by both Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud (158), with Boyce arguing that humanity has “blackened [its] soul with crimes against the animal kingdom” and incurred a “debt we have to discharge” (169). The novel ends with humanity working towards a more efficient and humane plankton-based diet, which is seen as the first step towards eradicating both world hunger and animal suffering. It is not practical or religious arguments that ultimately convince the novel’s protagonist to cease his slaughterhouse operations and embrace vegetarianism, however, but rather the idea that humanity might encounter other intelligent life forms who “might judge [them] by [their] conduct towards the rest of the animal kingdom” (Deep Range 184–85). The idea recalls “cruelty-to-animals order” in Childhood’s End, and Boyce even cites science fiction’s historical treatment of animal ethics when making such arguments, appealing to Lord Dunsany’s play “The Use of Man” (1937), wherein a foxhunter is transported beyond the solar system and forced to justify humanity’s usefulness to a tribunal of nonhuman animals (Clarke, Deep Range 169–70).6 Boyce admits that, being a “keen hunter,” Dunsany likely wrote the story in jest, although he reminds his opposition that “poets often speak hidden truth of which they themselves are unaware” (170). Twenty years later, Clarke himself claimed The Deep Range was “perhaps even more topical” than when it had been written, while pointing out that Buddhist attitudes towards the slaughter of animals continued to be “regularly featured” within Sri Lankan discourse 6  Childhood’s End also includes a character named “Boyce.” The surname traditionally means “someone who lived by a wood,” which perhaps implies a common “naturalness” to both characters, although they do not share any other obvious characteristics (Hanks).

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during a 1983 Sri Lankan Symposium on Marine Mammals (1984 240). Interspecies ethics, it seems, were never far from his mind. Clarke explores nonhuman animal subjectivity more directly in Dolphin Island (1963), which is aimed at younger readers and involves a group of scientists being recruited by dolphins into war against the orcas. Food-­ chain logistics play a major role in the novel, with the human characters unsure whether to side with the apparently more intelligent and seemingly benevolent dolphins and the orcas who reduce the dolphin population via predation, thereby providing more fish for human fishers (81–83). The humans end up siding with the Dolphins, who they hope will “play an important role in feeding the Earth’s six billion hungry [human] mouths” by helping to round up tuna (118–20). Yet while Dolphin Island may be the most deeply engaged with nonhuman animal subjectivity of any of Clarke’s novels, it is also perhaps the most flippant about their consumption. Its story predominantly takes place on an island off the coast of Queensland, which houses only a “tiny farm of ten pampered cows,” chiefly used for milk (45). The islanders are partial to more exotic meats, however, with the protagonist being assured that they “have a very clever cook” when expressing reservations about eating turtle eggs (47). The reinforcement of an anthropocentric hierarchy is also exemplified in Dolphin Island via the insertion of probes into an orca’s brain, whereby it is then able to be remotely controlled. Clarke claims, in the book’s epilogue, that the ability to control animal behaviour via electrical impulses is “already an accomplished fact,” which he finds both “fascinating” and “rather terrifying” (186). Nevertheless, the ethics of taking away the orcas’ free will are only briefly pondered within the novel and only considered “uncomfortable” insofar as they might be applied to humans (131–32). While Dolphin Island gestures towards a greater recognition of nonhuman subjectivity, it maintains a rigid, carnist hierarchy. Additional connections between Buddhism and ethical vegetarianism continued to appear among Clarke’s later novels. The Fountains of Paradise is set in Sri Lanka and features an influential Buddhist order, whose members do not serve meat in within its, since they find the taking of all life “very low” on their “nicely calibrated scale of toleration” (89). Hammer of God (1993) also echoes The Deep Range in its establishment of “Chrislam”—a hybrid of Christianity, Islam, and “more than a touch of … Buddhism”—leading to the repurposing of fossil fuels for food production (Hammer 103–4). Yet while Clarke considered himself a “crypt[o]buddhist” on at least one occasion, his Authorized Biography (1992)

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claims he “never strayed from the British diet, which emphasises meat and potatoes” (Cherry 37; McAleer 118). He considered living without fresh meat a “certain drawback” of living on a tropical island, and while he was “too fond of fish to shoot them,” he had “no objection to eating them” (Clarke, Coast 5; Indian Ocean 28). He also curiously invokes its novelisation in support of whale ranching in both his American Institute of Architects address and the Engineering and Science article wherein he criticises animal farming’s inefficiency, despite its anti-whaling conclusion (“Technology” 145; “Future” 6). For all his economic and ethical endorsements of vegetarianism, Clarke never lent the diet his practical support and is more widely remembered for the promotion of carnism in 2001 than any of his more vegetarian-friendly offerings.

Space Odyssey Series and the Hunting Hypothesis In 1964, Clarke began collaborating with Kubrick on the screenplay for 2001, with his concurrently written novelisation being published later the same year.7 Kubrick’s film is one of the most well-regarded and influential works of science fiction ever made. It is also one that inextricably links carnism with human advancement, being largely inspired by the “hunting hypothesis” of human evolution, which gained popularity following the discovery of various human-related, hominid fossils in Africa during the early-to-mid-1900s by archaeologists and anthropologists like Raymond Dart and Mary and Louis Leakey. 2001’s opening “Dawn of Man” sequence, which depicts the development of herbivorous, proto-human “man-apes” into violent, meat-eating tool-users—via the influence of the film’s iconic extra-terrestrial “monolith”—is one of the most famous moments in cinematic history.8 The man-­ ape Moon-Watcher’s discovery of tools by violently breaking apart an animal skeleton with one of its bones is intercut with shots of a slain tapir viscerally crashing to the ground. The following scene shows the 7  The only notable difference between Kubrick and Clarke’s versions of 2001 is Kubrick’s relocation of its final act to the moons of Jupiter, rather than Saturn, although Clarke’s series of sequel novels (discussed below), follow Kubrick’s changes, rather than Clarke’s original (Clarke, 2001 225). 8  When discussing religious allusions and readings of 2001, Clarke claimed to have later discovered “a Buddhist sect which worships a large, black rectangular slab” (“Myth” 243; emphasis original). There does not appear to be any particular Buddhist influence on the novel itself, however.

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previously herbivorous Moon-Watcher beating the leader of a rival group to death with the bone, followed by protracted shots of he and the ape-­ men eating handfuls of raw meat. The sequence then concludes with Moon-Watcher throwing his bone into the air before the film cuts to a shot of a space station in the year 2001. As Sherry Vint recognises, Kubrick’s “Dawn of Man” sequence thereby depicts the “simultaneous birth of [human] civilisation and tool-use,” along with “that of intra- and inter-species violence” and “the human animal/boundary” (“Simians” 230). The connection between carnivorousness and space travel is made even more explicit in Clarke’s novelisation, wherein Moon-Watcher’s recognition of other animals as “thousands of tons of succulent meat” is presented as the first step toward space travel (2001 14–16). In both works, technological advancement is explicitly connected with the advent of (pre-)human carnism. Kubrick and Clarke hereby represent the “hunting hypothesis” of human evolution principally popularised by playwright Robert Ardrey during the mid-twentieth century. Ardrey argued that (proto-)humans only advanced as an intelligent species due to the development of weapons for hunting, and that males are inherently territorial and violent as a result. Time magazine named Ardrey’s 1961 book African Genesis, wherein he characterises “Man” as “a predator with an instinct to kill and a genetic cultural affinity for the weapon,” enabled via “the “union of the enlarging brain and the carnivorous way,” the most “noteworthy” non-fiction book of the 1960s (Ardrey, African Genesis 315–16; Time, “Notable Books”). He later defined the hunting hypothesis as the position that: “Man is man, and not a chimpanzee, because for millions upon millions of evolving years we killed for a living,” and claimed that an Indian branch of hominids had perished during an intense drought purely because “they had not accepted the meat-eating way” (Hunting Hypothesis 10, italics removed; Social Contract 341). For Ardrey, the advent of carnism constituted a separation between “where man began and the animal left off,” whereby humans also allegedly become “sentient rather than sapient beings” (African Genesis 319, italics added). The hunting hypothesis thereby suggested that humans were distinct from and superior to other animals on the basis of an allegedly inherent (and often masculinised) carnism. Ardrey explicitly rejected Romantic lapsarianism. He begins African Genesis declaring: “Not in innocence … was mankind born,” before leveraging his evolutionary theory against an alleged “romantic fallacy” that represents “all human behaviour” as the result of “causes lying within the

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human experience” and which therefore falls “within the general jurisdiction of enlightened man” (1, 146). The argument is one of nature versus nurture, with Ardrey arguing human meat-eating and violence can no longer be conceived of as detriments or aberrations of human nature, since each is merely the inevitable result of genetics. He is particularly critical of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who he dismisses as a “muddled thinker” whose noble savage is “regarded as a good-natured myth by sophisticated minds whose entire intellectual scaffolding would collapse but for [its] props” (148). He also accuses Herbert Spencer and T. H. Huxley of distorting Darwin’s theories of natural selection and setting back evolutionary thought by “sixty or seventy years” by refusing to challenge Rousseau’s Romantic naturalism (169). For Ardrey, the advent of carnism constituted the beginning of human history itself, rather than its corruption. Yet while Ardrey goes to great lengths to discredit a Romantic “return to nature” as a valid moral motivation, he provides no moral justification for meat-­ eating and violence beyond genetic disposition. Ardrey also stifles his assault on lapsarian narratives by revelling in their language and imagery. As Donna Hart and Robert W. Sussman argue in their 2005 book Man the Hunted, which won the W. W. Howells Prize— awarded by the American Anthropological Association to outstanding books in biological anthropology—Ardrey’s account of human nature does “not differ greatly” from traditional notions of original sin and the Fall from grace (194). As its title suggests, African Genesis is rife with allusions to the Abrahamic Fall. Ardrey argues the “story of man’s low emergence” is the story “not of fallen angels but of risen apes” (249). However, he also writes that “hidden away in the fossil fastness are indications of Adam, and of Eden; of a Paradise lost; and of Cain, and of Abel” (249–50). Ardrey also ends African Genesis with a chapter titled “Cain’s Children,” wherein he repeats “we [humans] are Cain’s children” (315, 347, 357), recalling the lapsarian associations between carnism and violence alluded to in Frankenstein while also overlooking Cain’s vegetarian origins. By adopting the language of lapsarianism, Ardrey blurs the lines between his theories and the allegedly opposing Romantic conceptions he works so hard to fit his evolutionary narrative into. Ardrey characterises the “coming of the carnivorous way” as the very beginning of human history (317). The introduction of flesh-eating into the diets of proto-human species within his narrative nevertheless serves as a line of demarcation between

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peaceful herbivorousness and violent carnivorousness, maintaining meat-­ eating as a morally corruptive influence in addition to any promethean advancements it may have enabled. As Melanie Joy and Jen Tuider observe, the problem with “biocarnist” arguments like Ardrey’s is that they refer “not to human history, but to carnistic history,” by looking “not to our early fruit-eating ancestors, but to their later flesh-eating descendants, for confirmation of what is necessary for an optimal human diet” (ix, xii, italics original). Dart’s foundational hunting hypothesis article “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man” (1953) was met by similar resistance within its own publication— the editors of the International Anthropological and Linguistic Review qualifying that, although the existence of “an omnivorous … stage between the frugivorous ape stage and the human one, must … be considered as fact”: [T]his omnivorous, and often carnivorous stage, may have been very short for some of the European races … which is proven by the[ir] intolerance to meat eating, (and much more so to exclusive meat diets) observed in modern man, who suffers from many diseases which immediately disappear under a vegetarian diet. (Dart 218–19, parentheses original)

Their insistence on vegetarianism as a “European” value, along with their further qualification that the omnivorous “South-African apemen” discovered by Dart were, “of course, … only the ancestors of the modern Bushmen and Negroes, and of nobody else,” evidences the continuation of the racist Social Darwinist reverence for vegetarianism so extensively satirised by Wells over 50 years earlier (Dart 218). Later commentators have nevertheless regularly emphasised the herbivorousness of early humans. Peter J. Wilson argues that early hominids were “primarily vegetarian” and left Africa in search of uncontested vegetable foods, while Hart and Sussman have even highlighted the evolutionary role of humans as prey rather than predators (Wilson 131, 135; Hart and Sussman 219–50). Ardrey himself has been criticised by Pulitzer Prize-winning anthropologist Jared Diamond, who describes his hunting hypothesis as “pure fantasy!” while condemning his “purple prose” and “men’s locker-­ room mentality” (33, 57, emphasis original). Jurassic Park author Michael Crichton similarly slated Ardrey’s “fallacious” reasoning and outdated promotion of Social Darwinism during an early review of African Genesis, claiming his speculations demonstrated little more than “a wild

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imagination” (“Social Darwinism”).9 Ardrey was even criticised within Amazing Stories by anthropologist and science fiction author Leon Stover, who characterised him as “a single-minded prosecuting attorney, pushing his case … solely on the grounds of circumstantial evidence,” while arguing that early hominids were merely opportunist browsers who shared the largely “vegetarian” diet of their ape ancestors (128). Moreover, as philosopher Andy Lamey points out, humans are “natural omnivores” only “in the sense that we are able to digest either plant or animal foods, not in the sense that our biology requires us to continue to consume both” (159). Lamey further observes that, “although evolutionary theory emphasises flux, adaptation and change on an explanatory level, it is frequently invoked at a normative level to prevent or rule out some innovation or shift” (157). By definition, true proponents of evolutionary ethics should allow for the “evolution” or adaptation of human vegetarianism rather than encouraging everlasting carnism. Ardrey responded to opposing evolutionary theories in his 1976 book The Hunting Hypothesis, dismissing arguments that evolving humans were always dependant on plant food as “a bit innocent and in fact a carry-over from earlier assumptions” (17). However, his arguments again recall Romantic reasoning, being strikingly similar to those employed by John Frank Newton and Percy Shelley to argue for humanity’s herbivorous heritage during the early 1800s. Along with arguments about dentation, Ardrey claims “there are only a few plant foods of any caloric value … that we can digest without cooking” and that “with the invention of controlled fire … a world of plant food became available” (Hunting Hypothesis 51, 53). Shelley claims “it is only by softening and disguising dead flesh by culinary preparation that it is “rendered susceptible of mastication or digestion,” while Audrey asks, “if eating grass seeds had entered at any 9  Carol J. Adams has recognised Jurassic Park for being representative of postmodern attitudes towards nonhuman animals, while also pointing out that the heroic Lex—the young girl whose hacking skill save the human characters from the carnivorous velociraptors—also happens to be “the sole vegetarian in the movie” (“Post-Meateating” 70). There is no suggestion of vegetarianism in Michael Chrichton’s original 1990 novel, however. The film’s male star, Sam Neill, took an opposite tact, however, appearing from 2006–2012 in a series of ads for Meat and Livestock Australia, with the tagline: “Red meat—we were meant to eat it,” wherein he claimed that: “Over two million years ago our ancestors took a giant leap. They jumped out of the trees and started to eat red meat. The natural proteins helped our brain grow. Hunting forced us to think. Red meat was helping us come to be,” and that, humans therefore “instinctively desire red meat” for “nutrients” that provide them with “vitality and wellbeing” (see MLA, “Evolution”).

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time our ancestral heritage, why is it that we can’t eat them uncooked?” (P.  B Shelley, “Vindication” 6:8; Ardrey, Hunting Hypothesis 54).10 Although they support opposing conclusions, Ardrey and Shelley’s arguments are effectively identical. Moreover, despite his undeniable impact, Andrey has largely disappeared from the public consciousness, with his hunting hypothesis being “generally set aside” by modern evolutionary theorists (Langdon 479–80). While undeniably influential, Ardrey’s hunting hypothesis is at best imprecise and outdated. Ardrey’s theories nevertheless had a direct impact on 2001. Clarke read African Genesis while writing its screenplay and even considered titling the film “A Gift from the Stars” after a line from the book, which ultimately became the title of its novelisation’s ninth chapter (Clarke, Lost Worlds 24). Although Clarke also consulted the head of Anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History who “took a poor view of Ardrey,” he maintained his belief in humanity’s essential carnivorousness, telling Kubrick, who wanted 2001’s extra-terrestrial visitors to “turn man into a carnivore,” that he already “always was” (ibid., italics added). Ironically, Clarke was introduced to Kubrick through the popular animal expert Roger Caras, who became the President of the American Society for the Prevention of Animal Cruelty (ASPCA) in 1991, and Clarke himself later became a spokesman for gorilla conservation, with his “affection for primates” allegedly developing while visiting zoos as research for 2001 (Richter 19, photograph 12n; see also Economist 68; and Stoinski, Steklis and Mehlman 251, regarding Clarke’s activism). While filming 2001, however, he was a staunch supporter of the hunting hypothesis, citing Ardrey, Dart and Desmond Morris during discussions with actor Dan Richter, who played Moon-Watcher in the film (Richter 10, 18).11 Kubrick also gave Richter books by Ardrey, Dart, Morris, and Louis Leakey as background to the “Dawn of Man” sequence and insisted he and the other actors playing the man-apes eat real raw meat during its filming (Richter 21, 123). The meat’s “overwhelming” and “absolutely nauseating” smell “plague[d] them for days,” evidencing the “raw horror” and “intolerable loathing and disgust” Percy Shelley asserts against its natural 10  Ardrey claims there is no evidence of early-human cooking “beyond roasted bones” (Hunting Hypothesis 56, italics added). As Wilson points out, however, the lack of evidence of a vegetable diet is perhaps “simply because bones fossilize more readily than plants” (129). 11  Although Richter refers to his character as “Moonwatcher” in his memoir, Clarke’s hyphenated spelling has been maintained outside of quotation.

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human consumption, rather than the empowering qualities alleged by Ardrey (Richter 123; P. B Shelley, “Vindication” 8). Although Clarke and Kubrick successfully promoted the carnist hunting hypothesis through 2001, the real-world experience of filming it brought Ardrey’s assertions into question. Clarke and Kubrik also further eroded the boundaries between Ardrey’s theories and the Romantic tradition by assimilating them into science fiction’s lapsarian template. Kubrick appealed directly to African Genesis when defending his following film, A Clockwork Orange (1971)—based Anthony Burgess’s 1962, dystopian science fiction novel of the same name—against accusations of perpetuating a neo-fascist agenda similarly, arguing “the miracle of man is not how far he has sunk but how magnificently he has risen” (Kubrick, “Fights Back” 11). However, 2001 ultimately equates humanity’s technological progress with its ethical downfall, with the advent of carnism during the “Dawn of Man” sequence paving the way as much for extra-terrestrial expansion as the atomic weapons, whose “slumbering cargo of death … stir[s] silently” in orbit above Earth (Clarke, 2001 223). In African Genesis, Ardrey declares such nuclear doomsday scenarios, which have “so entranced our neo-romantics,” to be a “melodramatic expression of the Illusion of Central Position” that grants humanity an undue sense of specialised superiority over other animals (320, 143). Conversely, he considers “the weapon” to be humanity’s “most significant cultural endowment,” finding it “difficult to describe the invention of the radiant weapon as anything but the consummation of a species” (African Genesis 318). Yet while Ardrey may have been happy to have humanity’s nuclear holocaust of itself and all the Earth’s other species be its crowning achievement, Clarke and Kubrick have a post-human “Star-Child”—evolved from astronaut David Bowman—rush to Earth and psychically disable all the bombs at the end of their film, specifically to avert such an outcome. As Vint observes, 2001 thereby “suggests that the technological-evolutionary path from hominid to Homo sapiens is a dead end, producing a violent separation of human from all other life” (“Simians” 235). Clarke’s description of Moon-Watcher picking up his bone as a “foreshadowing” of Cain similarly connects the advent of human carnism with violent lapsarianism (Richter x). Vint considers the film’s famous final shot of the Star-Child to therefore suggest a “radical rebirth” for humanity and a “reconnection” with the natural world from which it has so long been separated (“Simians” 236). However, a more obvious conclusion is that humanity has instead transcended Earth and the

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“natural” world altogether, aligning the film’s politics with those of evolutionary ascension, rather than a Rousseauean return to nature. Despite its basis in Ardrey’s hunting hypothesis, 2001 subtly depicts humanity becoming more vegetarian as it advances technologically. Characters in the film are seen consuming liquified foods on the space station, including fish and other animal products like cheese. Its astronauts are also witnessed eating sandwiches, allegedly containing meat. However, when one of them asks for a chicken sandwich, he is told they instead contain “something like” ham, which “tastes the same anyway” and, after inspecting the sandwiches, the astronaut remarks that “they’re getting better at it all the time,” suggesting the meat is synthetic (Kubrick, 2001). Actor Gary Lockwood, who plays astronaut Frank Poole in the film, also describes them as “fake cheese mushroom sandwiches” in the film’s DVD commentary, although it is not clear whether he is referring to the in-film food or the props themselves (Dullea and Lockwood). The meal Bowman watches himself eat shortly before being transformed into the Star-Child by the aliens who first left the monolith on Earth, also appears not to contain any meat, with the scene’s vegetarian implications being supported in Clarke’s novel, wherein Bowman remarks upon the “notable absence” of meat and other animal products in his artificial, alien setting, with all of the food further revealed to be comprised of an unidentified “blue substance” (Kubrick, 2001; Clarke, 2001 214). Although 2001 begins with a celebration of carnivorousness, it concludes with a subtle implication of enlightened vegetarianism. Humanity’s vegetarian ascension is made explicit in Clarke’s series of Space Odyssey sequels. Only the first of the three sequels, 2010: Odyssey Two (1982), has been adapted to film, as 2010: The Year We Make Contact (1984), with Clarke (who has a cameo in the film) being only minimally involved in its adaptation. Neither version contains any engagement with vegetarianism, carnism, or even human evolution. Neither does 1987’s 2061: Odyssey Three. However, the series’ final instalment, 3001: The Final Odyssey (1997), includes an extended return to the notions of vegetarian ascension and post-carnist space exploration, which are so prominent throughout Clarke’s other writing. The space-faring humanity of 3001 enjoys a number of technological advancements, including the development of readily available, synthetic foods. When a revived Poole—who was famously murdered in 2001 by self-aware supercomputer HAL 9000— remarks that his synthetic meal reminds him of the “deer-hunts and barbecues of his youth,” he is met with horror and disgust (89–90). His

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doctor, Professor Anderson, then explains that “corpse-food” had become economically impossible around the beginning of the twenty-first century, largely due to a stigmatising, neurodegenerative “virus” (90). Since then, it has become associated with other “atrocious” and “calmly accepted” practices of the period, such as female mutilation and the use of landmines, whose abandonment has marked humanity’s “transition between barbarism and civilization” (87–88). Anderson’s hesitation when broaching the issue, along with the gastronomic reactions of historian Indra Wallace, suggests a further moral objection to eating animal flesh, like that of the tribunal in “Food of the Gods.” “Hydroponic techniques” are also again endorsed as a more efficient method of food production than animal agriculture (90). Clarke thereby concludes the Space Odyssey series, contending that carnism and carnivorousness are not indispensable characteristics of a higher humanity—as Ardrey argued—but rather that they are a perhaps essential, yet ultimately fleeting, stage in human development.

Conclusion In contrast to the overwhelmingly carnist associations of other authors of dystopian and space colonisation fiction, Clarke was a vocal proponent of vegetarianism as a solution to ethical, economic, and environmental issues, who believed that hydroponic plant-farming and matter synthesis were the only practical means of sustaining extra-terrestrial colonies. He also recognized the inefficiency and environmental impact of animal farming, and he frequently advocated for the development of alternative meats as an essential aspect of terrestrial sustainability, which has been reflected in recent real-world investment in alternative meat technologies, which Clarke also believed might lead to increased ethical benefits. Although his earlier works, such as “Food of the Gods,” maintain traditional dystopian associations with alternative meats, Clarke’s scientific considerations and later exposure to Sri Lankan Buddhism inspired increasing endorsements of vegetarianism’s ethical benefits in his later writing. His influence on Star Trek also led to one of the most widespread depictions of vegetarian utopianism, with projects such as the Chang’e 4 biosphere and NASA’s investments in cultured meat demonstrate ongoing interest in off-world vegetable farming and alternative meat technology. Moreover, while Clarke embedded the popular, carnist “hunting hypothesis” into 2001, he also re-established the utopian vegetarian theme in his continuations of the Space Odyssey series, which depicts a more technologically advanced,

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vegetarian humanity. Although Clarke remained a staunch carnist, resistant to ethical and cultural appeals, he found the scientific arguments undeniable.

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Tuomisto Hanna, and Avijit Roy. “Could Lab-Grown Meat Soon Be the Solution to the World’s Food Crisis?” The Guardian, 22 January, 2012. https://www. t h e g u a r d i a n . c o m / c o m m e n t i s f r e e / 2 0 1 2 / j a n / 2 2 / c u l t u r e d -­m e a t -­ environment-­diet-­nutrition. Vonnegut, Kurt. Player Piano. Granada, 1981. Vint, Sherryl. “Simians, Subjectivity and Sociality: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Two Versions of Planet of the Apes.” Science Fiction Film and Television 2, no. 2 (Autumn, 2009): 225–50. Wells, H. G. The Sleeper Awakes. Penguin, 2005. ———. When the Sleeper Wakes. George Bell and Sons, 1899. Westfahl, Garry. “For Tomorrow We Dine: The Sad Gourmet.” Foods of the Gods: Eating and the Eaten in Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Gary Westfahl, George Slusser and Eric S. Rabkin, 213–23. University of Georgia Press, 1996. Wilson, Peter J. Man, The Promising Primate: The Conditions of Human Evolution. Yale University Press, 1980. Wyndham, John. The Chrysalids. Penguin, 1968. Xiong, Yong, and Ben Westcott. “China’s First plant to Grow on the Moon is Already Dead.” CNN, 17 January, 2019. https://www.edition.cnn. com/2019/01/17/asia/china-­moon-­seed-­dead-­intl/index.html. Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Translated by Clarence Brown. Penguin, 1993. Zaraska, Marta. “Is Lab-Grown Meat Good for Us?” The Atlantic (19 August, 2013). https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/08/is-­lab-­grown-­ meat-­good-­for-­us/278778. Zorn, Eric. “Is Frankenmeat Kosher, Literally or Figuratively?” Chicago Tribune, 13 August, 2013. https://www.blogs.chicagotribune.com/news_columnists_ ezorn/2013/08/is-­frankemeat-­kosher-­literally-­or-­figuratively-­.html.

CHAPTER 5

Should Androids Eat Electric Sheep? Philip K. Dick, Interspecies Empathy, and Animal Liberation Philip K. Dick is one of the most influential writers in science fiction history, whose work challenged the rigid stability of the 1950s “Golden Age” while providing perhaps the “best example” of the genre as a “powerful instrument of social criticism” (Robinson ix–x). He relished in the kinds of “political statements you could make in science fiction you couldn’t do in ‘realistic prose’” and became an increasingly political figure throughout his lifetime, introducing himself to the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) in 1973 as “a well-known science fiction writer,” who had “been involved in left-wing politics and the expression, in my stories and novels, of left-wing ideas” (Rickman, High Castle 188; P. K. Dick, Letters 2:246). Dick’s final published letter also finds him pledging to a prospective Science Fiction Action Coalition⁠, while declaring it “dreadful” that no one else within the science fiction community had volunteered for the position, although no such organisation appears to have come to fruition (P.  K. Dick, Letters 4:315). Many science fiction writers downplay the genre’s political powers, but Dick knowingly deployed his work towards transformative ends, other authors, such as James Baylock, looking to him as “a moral criterion, to judge [their] own activities against” (Rickman, High Castle 68). Dick published over 30 science fiction novels and 120 short stories during his lifetime. Although his earliest efforts were published during the 1950s, he is best remembered as a definitive writer of the late 1960s and © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_5

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early 1970s North American New Wave, and his influence is predominantly felt via his 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and its 1982 adaptation as Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner, which heavily influenced the later “cyberpunk” movement. The sheer volume and density of Dick’s work can be intimidating. As Frederik Pohl observed, however, his writing also “always seemed … to be almost a single immense saga, from which he would more or less arbitrarily lop off sections now and then” (Locus 11). Dick’s work regularly revolved around a common set of themes, including the need for interspecies empathy. As Dick’s late-life biographer Gregg Rickman notes, “[T]he need for empathy is of central importance to his writing,” provided “a test his characters undergo in novel after novel,” with his emphasis on empathetic relationships with other animals leading him to endorse vegetarianism on numerous occasions in both his fiction and in his personal life. Dick’s support for vegetarianism and interspecies empathy is most explicitly endorsed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, wherein nonhuman animals have become virtually extinct following a catastrophic nuclear war, and unempathetic androids are identified via their unfeeling responses to hypothetical situations involving animal cruelty. The novel has therefore been extensively investigated by critical animal studies philosophers and critics. As with the other authors examined in this study, however, Dick’s engagement with animal ethics is not confined to a single text. A broader survey of Dick’s writing shows a persistent concern with humanity’s treatment of other animals from his earliest short stories to his final novels. The following analysis, therefore, begins with an examination of the early empathetic experiences that informed Dick’s lifelong preoccupation with animal ethics. It then investigates representations of vegetarianism and animal ethics in some of his earliest novels and short stories, providing a prolonged investigation of his 1965 novel Dr Bloodmoney, or How We got Along After the Bomb (1965), which anticipates many of the engagements with animal ethics Dick further developed develop in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? An extensive analysis of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? follows, focusing on how the novel anticipates many radical philosophies of the modern Animal Liberation movement while also continuing the lapsarian vegetarian trends established in earlier science fiction. The chapter then concludes by examining the interspecies implications of the theological investigations that dominated Dick’s later life.

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Early Empathetic Experiences Nearly all accounts of Dick contain an anecdote about the kindness he showed towards other animals. He was particularly fond of cats—being rarely photographed without one in hand—with his feline affections apparently stemming from the (unnecessary) putting to death of a cat his family had found in a butcher shop (Rickman, High Castle, 28). His second wife, Kleo, claims he was “very empathetic” with “cats and other small creatures,” and tells of how he would release mice he caught in their home into a vacant lot, rather than kill them (Rickman, High Castle 233). The science fiction and fantasy writer Tim Powers has similarly told of how Dick once provided a cockroach he trapped in his kitchen with food and water, since it “looked ill,” with Dick being “so sorry when the bug died, a day or so later” (Locus 13). Dick’s third wife, Anne, has even related an Androcles-like story, wherein he freed an owl whose claws had become trapped in the body of a dead skunk (Rickman, High Castle 349). Dick was also involved in some proto-Animal Liberation activity as a child when he and his father—who otherwise worked as a meat researcher and livestock reporter—broke into a neighbouring ranch to free some rabbits who were being kept in an exposed cage without food or water (A. R. Dick 294; Rickman, High Castle 27). Dick’s lifelong love of animals was even implied in his naming, with Dick himself appealing to the fact that “Philip” meant “lover of horses” when naming his alter-ego “Horselover Fat” in VALIS (1981), and animal rights philosopher Angus Taylor also pointing out that his middle name—“Kindred”—seems to convey the generous and caring relationships he sought between humans and other animals (189). Dick’s ethical emphasis on interspecies empathy stemmed from an encounter he had with a beetle while in third grade. Having discovered the beetle hiding inside a snail shell, the young Dick began attacking it with a rock as it tried to emerge before realising: This beetle was like I was … He wanted to live … and I was hurting him. For a moment … I was that beetle. Immediately I was different. I was never the same again. I was totally aware of what I was doing, I was just transformed—my essence was changed … His life was as precious to him as my life was to me. (Rickman, Own Words 48, italics added)

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Dick deemed the experience a “satori”—a Buddhist term meaning a sudden experience of enlightenment—declaring in his Exegesis (1974–81/2011), that it was from that moment that his “lifetime of work and insight” began (392). From then on, Dick considered how a person behaved towards other animals to indicate their moral worth and capacity for greater good. In a series of letters written in 1970, for example, Dick describes two women he considered “honorable and good people,” with “a great capacity to give and receive love,” since “both girls love[d] animals” (Letters 1:340, 1:344). During his final conversations with Rickman, Dick maintained that he made “no distinctions between creatures and humans, and animals and bugs” and that “A bug’s life is as precious as my life is to me” since “all life is God,” before joking that wasps and cockroaches constitute an exception for the simple reason that he did not particularly like them (Rickman, Own Words 48). However, Powers’ story about Dick saving the cockroach in his kitchen contradicts his jocular exception. Moreover, when the science fiction writer Charles Platt pointed out that the exception of roaches violated Dick’s entire empathetic premise, Dick claims to have responded that he enjoyed cutting cockroaches in half and then watching “the two halves crawl away in different directions,” causing Platt to turn pale, at which point Dick then gloated: “that just shows how far I’ve led you on my empathy trip, that you would turn pale at the thought of me killing a cockroach” (Rickman, Own Words 48). Even Dick’s dismissals of other animals were framed as lessons in interspecies empathy. Later, when declaring his seemingly genuine belief that humans were disembodied brains being tested by a group of god-like beings as to how they responded to various situations induced by direct sensory stimulation, Dick explained that it was not the “big decisions” that humanity was tested on but rather the “situations that are so small that we don’t even realize there’s a moral element involved,” giving a friend’s attempt to abandon his cat, only to have it put down when it returned a week later as an example of “something terrible” that would fail the supposed test (Rickman, Own Words 45, italics replacing original bold). Such a mode of ethical evaluation recalls the Voigt-Kampff test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, whereby unfeeling androids are distinguished from empathetic human beings through their responses to situations involving animal cruelty and are indicative of the empathetic relationships with nonhuman animals Dick persistently encouraged.

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A differing view of Dick’s relationship with nonhuman animals is implied in Anne’s account of their marriage, however. Despite his earlier catch-and-release policy, Anne recalls Dick putting out poison and traps for a particularly resilient rat, which he also attempted to drown and eventually decapitated with a hatchet (A.  R. Dick 92–3). During the early 1960s, the couple also lived on a farm-like property populated with other animals and, although Dick was known to regularly pick up their small sheep and hug them, he also slaughtered them for food and even developed paralysis in his hands from “holding the hind legs of the sheep while their throats were cut” (Rickman, High Castle 345). The science fiction writer Poul Anderson has also related a story wherein he and his wife complimented a lamb dinner, shared with Dick and Anne, whereafter Dick nodded “gravely” and said, “Ah yes, that’s good old George” (Locus 13; also quoted in Rickman, High Castle 345). It is unclear whether Dick’s remark was intended comically or as a sign of genuine remorse. Either way, he continued to perpetuate carnism through his treatment of animal slaughter as normal and natural, if not necessary. Anne, however, was put off eating mutton from her experiences and considered Dick’s lack of attachment “surprising since he loved animals and was so sensitive,” to which Dick responded by reminding her that he came from a farming background (A. R. Dick 80). Dick’s dispassion towards other animals during their marriage also coincided with his horrific mistreatment of Anne, which included emotional and financial manipulation, physical beatings, committal to a psychiatric ward, and possibly even attempted murder (109–15, 126, 121–22). Even if Dick’s behaviour can be attributed to his exacerbated drug use during the period, his cruelties are unforgivable and do not align with the empathetic ethics he so emphatically preached. Dick nevertheless remained concerned with animal welfare throughout his life and even envisioned a future wherein more Americans would become vegetarian for primarily ethical reasons. In 1976, he wrote to the vegetarian food manufacturer Morningstar Farms, congratulating them on the taste of their mock meats, which he had switched to for “health reasons,” and suggested they redirect their advertising campaign to appeal “to people who are becoming progressively more and more morally squeamish about the killing and eating of animals,” advising them to stress that “animals are our companions and friends and not something or some-one to be eaten” and betting them “a buck that the trend in this country is more and more away from killing and eating animals on ethical grounds rather than merely that of the health of the human doing the eating”

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(Letters 6:304). Dick’s vegetarianism appears to have been short-lived, if ever comprehensive. Yet while Dick claims to have switched to vegetarian “meats” for health reasons, he continued to emphasise the ethical aspects of vegetarianism, which are also regularly emphasised throughout his writing, beginning with his earliest fictions.

Early Short Stories and Novels Dick’s earliest short stories hint at the more radical messages concerning animal consciousness and vegetarianism that would appear in his later work. The first story Dick ever sold, “Roog” (1953), is told from the perspective of a dog. His first published story, “Beyond Lies the Wub” (1952), also sees its titular Martian creature, which resembles a “huge pig,” debating philosophy with a spaceship crew intent upon eating it. Both stories give voice to nonhuman experiences, with the latter directly challenging human carnivorousness. The wub itself is a vegetarian—being “too good-­ natured to hunt for game”—and responds to being eaten by taking over the man’s consciousness from within and questioning how “any lasting contact” can be established between humans and other species if they continue such “barbaric” behaviour (30). The story was followed by a sequel, “Not by Its Cover” (1968), wherein books bound in wub fur are rewritten by the creature’s lingering consciousness, which also appears to hold the secret to immortality. Although the story does not discuss carnivorousness or carnism, Dick’s description of the wub as “a fusion between a hog and a cow” suggests a connection between the enlightened creature and animals commonly consumed by humans (233). As Rickman notes, Dick “differed from … most other sf writers in his ultimate welcome for the alien” (Rickman, High Castle 214), with his earliest celebrations of nonhuman consciousness often connected with critiques of carnism. Although primarily popularised over a decade later in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, empathy towards other animals is earlier promoted as a defining feature of humanity in Dick’s short story “Human Is” (1955), which concerns a dispassionate toxin researcher, Lester Herrick, being replaced by a more benevolent imposter from the planet Rexor IV. Herrick is portrayed as mechanical and inhuman through his unfeeling attitude towards food and animals; he taunts his nephew with descriptions of how animals are used for research and wishes that intravenous delivery of food would be made “universally applicable,” while the Rexorian imposter is considered more human—and is ultimately embraced by the

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family—due to its kind and passionate behaviour (333). However, although Herrick’s dismissal of nonhuman animals is condemned as inhuman, vegetarianism is not promoted in its place, with one of the first signs that gives Herrick’s Rexorian replacement away being its enthusiastic preparation of a “sirloin steak” (ibid.). Nevertheless, Dick considered “Human Is” to represent his “early conclusions as to what is human,” claiming to have “not really changed [his] view” when reflecting on the story over two decades later and contending in his 1976 essay “Man, Android, and Machine” (1976), that the term “human” applies “not to origin or to any ontology but to a way of being in the world” which hinged upon kind actions (“Human” 492; “Man” 212). The theme of dehumanisation also appears, in conjunction with an ironic critique of carnism, in Eye in The Sky (1957), which Dick considered his “breakthrough” novel (“Self-Portrait” 15). The novel’s protagonist, Jack Hamilton, creates a pair of mechanical cats in order to catch mice and flies, with his jocular remark that cats “have no souls,” since they seem only interested in procuring their next (carnivorous) meal sets up a similar ethical boundary to that established between vegetarians and “predatory” animals in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Eye 30). During a later scene satirising dietetics, Hamilton is declared a “savage,” due to his desire to eat “Animal flesh,” with a later description of humans eating “mechanically” further connecting carnist human consumption with dehumanisation (134, 165, italics original). A similar dehumanisation takes place in We Can Build You (1972), wherein a robot-designer becomes concerned that his daughter Pris—who shares her name with an android in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?— has become machine-like following experimental treatment for schizophrenia, noting that although “once she had cared about animals … she had suddenly gotten so that she couldn’t stand a dog or a cat” (Build 29). Although unpublished until 1972, We Can Build You was written ten years earlier as the mainstream effort The First in Our Family (1962), providing another early example of Dick’s fiction wherein the mistreatment of other animals is considered both inhuman and inhumane. Conversely, Dick’s violence towards humans and other animals during his marriage to Anne is reflected in Confessions of a Crap Artist (1959/1975), which was the only of Dick’s realist novels published during his lifetime. Dick claims to have modelled Jack Isidore—the “crap artist” of the novel’s title, who shares a name with an android-sympathist in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?—after himself (Letters 4:14–15). Anne, however, rejected

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the identification between Dick and Isidore, noting instead the similarities between hers and Dick’s abusive relationship to that of Fay and Charley Hume, which ends with Charley shooting the couple’s sheep as well as himself while attempting to murder Fay, and later recalls being “terrified” by Dick’s irresponsible use of a rifle he had bought to shoot at the dogs that had been attacking their sheep (A. R. Dick 56–7, 90). Tensions between Dick and Anne also inspired a vehement defence of biological herbivorousness in Dick’s posthumously published, quasi-­ ainstream novel The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike (1960/1984), wherein the skull of an apparently vegetarian, early humanoid is discovered in a suburban backyard. In 1959, Mary and Louis Leakey discovered a human fossil, which became popularly known as “Nutcracker Man,” since its “teeth “appeared fashioned for crushing food like an old-­fashioned nutcracker” (Cachel 48). Dick argued, therefore, that early hominids had to be herbivorous, since their teeth appeared to be “formed to crack and grind seeds and grains,” although Anne claims to have “prove[d]” him wrong using an unidentified library book that “stated definitively that Neanderthal Man was a meat eater” (A. R. Dick 56).1 Dick retaliated by writing The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, although his own arguments appear to be undercut in the novel when the skull is ultimately revealed as a forgery, intended to call attention to the incisor-less human “chuppers,” who have experienced mutations due to water pollution in the area. Chuppers appear again as holdovers from an earlier period of human evolution who beg for vegetables, since they are incapable of eating meat in Dick’s 1964 science fiction novel in The Simulacra. He also repeated his arguments for proto-human herbivorousness to Rickman shortly before his death (Rickman, Own Words 92). Although he made no ethical arguments based on his insistence on hominid vegetarianism, Dick consistently resisted the kind of biological arguments utilised—by Arthur C. Clarke, among others—to assert the natural necessity of carnism. Meat-eating is also often connected with corruption throughout Dick’s early novels. The algae-based “protine” in Solar Lottery (1955) continues science fiction’s dystopian associations with synthetic meat—albeit in 1  There is some confusion in both Anne and Philip K. Dick’s accounts of the argument about distinctions between hominid types, including Neanderthals, Homo sapiens, and that represented by the OH 5 fossil. They seem to be referring to only a single lineage in the original argument, although Dick makes distinctions between Neanderthal and Cro-Magnon subsets in his later conversations with Rickman (Own Words 92).

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semi-subverted fashion—and meat-marketing is declared a “fitting” occupation for an ex-SS officer in The Unteleported Man (1964), which was revised as Lies, Inc. in 1984 (Solar Lottery 39; Lies 31). Similarly, the antagonist of Martian Time-Slip (1964), Arnie Kott becomes the head of a smuggling ring specialising in terrestrial meats, of which he was previously the “best single customer” (27). While the novel’s Martian colonists rely on shipments from Earth for their main food supply, they also farm animals for both meat and dairy, conflicting with Clarke’s arguments about vegetarian space colonisation, although food for extra-terrestrial colonies is grown artificially in Dick’s other novels (see Bloodmoney 79; Crack 31). Meat is also given a particularly dystopian treatment in Dick’s later novel A Scanner Darkly (1977), whose characters speculate about their burgers being made of “ground up cows’ anuses” (208). Unlike the classic dystopian writers discussed in the previous chapter, who often appealed to the impurity of meat as a symbol of their dystopian societies, the mere presence of meat is often an indication of scarcity or oppression in Dick’s fiction and is explicitly—and extensively—connected with humanity’s corruption in Dr Bloodmoney, which pre-empts many ideas about interspecies empathy more influentially expressed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Dr Bloodmoney Like Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Dr Bloodmoney takes place following a catastrophic nuclear war. The novels are further linked through their similar casts of characters and preoccupation with a set of common themes, including animal predation and subjectivity. In contrast to the definitive dystopianism of Dick’s later novel, however, Dr Bloodmoney perhaps constitutes the “most optimistic” and “only utopian work in all Dick’s opus” (Suvin 117; Robinson 66). Dick himself described Dr Bloodmoney as “an extremely hopeful novel” due to its depiction of humans continuing in the aftermath of disaster (Bloodmoney 275). Darko Suvin considered the novel’s lapsarian situation to represent a “Happy Fall” while also possessing the “richest spectrum of creatures” among any of Dick’s novels (117, 128). Suvin also recognised its characters for their “Rousseauist utopianism,” which suggests the kind of peaceful, vegetarian return to nature endorsed by the Shelleys (Suvin 118, see also 122). Nevertheless, the humans in Dr Bloodymoney largely maintain their carnist prejudices. As in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? “Meat animals”

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have completely disappeared following a nuclear catastrophe in Dr Bloodmoney, with many of its characters claiming not to have tasted traditional meats since the disaster. No attempt to re-establish agricultural animal farming has been made, since “as everyone knew, an acre of land could function better as a source of grains or vegetables” (93). Less-­ traditional meats have become widely available, however. Squirrels are sold at markets, and common recipes have been developed for “dog soup, dog stew, even dog pudding” (137). The post-catastrophe population have also adapted to eating radioactive fish (142). Despite the practical concession to vegetarianism—the novel’s human-caused nuclear catastrophe results in an expansion of carnism, rather than the empathetic and vegetarian relationship with nonhumans inspired in Dick’s later novel. The treatment of nonhuman animals by Dr Bloodmoney’s characters is indicative of their moral positioning. The titular “Dr Bloodmoney,” Dr Bruno Bluthgeld, whose miscalculations (and potential psychic powers) caused the novel’s nuclear catastrophe, seeks to atone for his transgressions by becoming a shepherd and awaiting God’s judgement. That he further develops a “phobia about slaughtering” and refuses to slay his sheep for meat, “no matter what he’s offered,” is a further manifestation of repentance, connecting human absolution with an abstinence from carnivorous activity (121). Conversely, the murderous Hoppy Harrington— whom Dick considered to epitomise the “monster” inside all humanity—is likened by the character Bonny Keller to a “town rat catcher,” causing her to shiver in revulsion (275, 234). The increased cruelty of television salesman Stewart McConchie is also indicated by his brutal treatment of other animals. While first hiding from fallout in a shelter, McConchie kills a rat and eats it raw. Although framed as a matter of survival, Dick emphasises the cruelty of McConchie’s act from the rat’s perspective, drawing attention to its “aware[ness]” and “fear,” as it squeaks “long and sufferingly” (82). McConchie, moreover, continues his exploitation of nonhuman animals even after he leaves the shelter, becoming a salesman of automated animal traps who lives in a “cat-pelt-lined basement” rented to him by the traps’ inventor Dean Hardy (133). A scenario involving a dead animal pelt is a “major element” of the Voigt-Kampff test in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? suggesting its symbolism Hardy and McConchie’s increased disregard for other animal life, along with Dick’s condemnation (Androids 49). Yet Dick himself also decorated his house with rugs made from the skins of his and Anne’s sheep, following their separation (A. R. Dick 175).

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Dick’s true position on animal ethics is therefore better represented in Dr Bloodmoney by the tobacco merchant Andrew Gill, who echoes Dick’s earlier defence of sheep slaughter when stating that being “faced constantly with the death of animals” has “always been one of the basic unpleasant verities of rural life” (184). McConchie is nevertheless dehumanised by his constant proximity to animal slaughter, coming to “gloomily” consider that even a passing animal “ought to be hanging by its hind legs minus its skin” (132). When his own horse is killed and eaten, however, he realises the degrading effects of being an animal trap salesman and dreams of discovering a kind of “mutant potato that would feed everybody in the world” (141). Although McConchie frames his vegetarian revelation in terms of economic rather than ethical advancement, it remains consistent with the ethical vegetarian-carnist dialectic that pervades Dick’s fiction. Indeed, it is McConchie whom Dick considered his “favourite character,” and it is he who most clearly recognises that the different human/nonhuman animal relationships in the novel’s post-catastrophe world are “much closer; there isn’t the great gap between us and them that there was” (277, 136–7). Notions of nonhuman animal intelligence are also investigated in Dr Bloodmoney, wherein nuclear fallout causes the development of greater intelligence among nonhuman species. Bluthgeld’s dog, Terry, is “an extreme mutation,” capable of basic speech, whose face is “intelligent in a new way,” leading some of the human characters to show increased “sympathy” towards him (121). One of the novel’s characters even claims to have a pet rat smart enough to play the flute, and feral cats are also rumoured to have developed a new language. However, since the cats are also said to steal and eat human children, “they themselves [are] caught and eaten in return” (114). That Dr Bloodmoney concludes with Keller two mutated bulldogs luck as they evade one of Hardy’s animal traps nevertheless suggests a more “hopeful” relationship between human and nonhuman animals might be brought about by increased intelligence and greater interspecies empathy, which is further explored in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Although hinted at throughout his earlier output, Dick’s assertion of vegetarian ethics in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is both conscious and concentrated. Like Dr Bloodmoney, the novel is set in a post following

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a catastrophic nuclear war, which has radical implications for humanity’s relationship with other animals, with Dick later writing about how his cat had walked across its pages, urging him to make his readers “understand … that animals are really important right now” (“Self-Portrait” 17). In the novel, nuclear war has caused most nonhuman animals to become extinct, with remaining animals and electronic imitations of them coveted as expensive status symbols. They are also emblems of empathy, which has become highly valued in the post-war society due to the spread of a religion called Mercerism, led by the seemingly supernatural prophet Wilber Mercer. There are also human androids, who—although biologically identical to humans—are allegedly incapable of empathy. They are therefore distinguished from humans via the “Voigt-Kampff test,” which detects empathetic responses to scenarios involving nonhuman suffering. The novel’s plot follows bounty hunter Rick Deckard as he attempts to execute (“retire”) a group of escaped androids who have illegally emigrated to Earth.2 It maintains many of Shelleyan science fiction’s lapsarian vegetarian associations while also anticipating many foundational aspects of later Animal Rights and Animal Liberation philosophy. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? continues science fiction’s traditional lapsarian associations with vegetarianism. Dick considered A Scanner Darkly his “true Paradise Lost,” and VALIS (1981) to be his “Paradise Regained,” but Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a far more explicitly lapsarian text (Exegesis 677). As Sherryl Vint recognises, there is a “general critical consensus” surrounding the novel that considers its human characters to be degraded by their unfeeling, technology-driven lifestyles, with Deckard eventually being “healed by reconnecting with nature” (“Speciesism” 112). The lapsarian nature of the novel is also implied by Dick’s description of the fallout from the war as a “plague … descended from above,” which takes on explicitly apocalyptic connotations of divine retribution (Androids 16). The unempathetic humanity who developed nuclear weapons and deployed them against themselves and other animals are punished by the catastrophic results and seek to establish more mutual interspecies relationships to make amends. Neglecting to care for nonhuman animals is immediately outlawed 2  The name “Dick,” in English, corresponds to “Rick” as a short form of “Richard” (Room, italics removed). The correspondence suggests a potential connection between Dick and Deckard that anticipates his later identification with Horselover Fat and perhaps lends some credence to an identification between the opinions of Deckard and Dick’s own.

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following the war and, although the law appears to have inexplicably lapsed by the time of the novel’s events, their mistreatment continues to be regarded as both “immoral and anti-empathetic” (13). As Deckard explains, so long as “any living being suffer[s], then for all the rest the shadow could not be entirely cast off” (31). The novel’s human characters thereby represent a fallen humanity who make an organised effort towards more empathetic relations with other animals as a means of redemption. The novel’s lapsarian themes are made even more explicit through Mercer, who preaches a love for “all life, especially the [nonhuman] animals,” who he is apparently capable of bringing back from the dead (24). He also facilitates humanity’s empathetic revival through the use of “empathy boxes,” which allow users to share his suffering as he is bombarded with stones while climbing an apparently endless hill. Mercer and his empathy boxes also appear earlier in Dick’s 1964 story “Little Black Box,” which deals directly with Buddhist ethics and phenomenology, although not vegetarianism or interspecies ethics. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, however, he suggests a fusion of classical and Christian myth, through a simultaneous allusion to Christ being tormented while carrying his cross on the Road to Calvary and the Greek myth of Sisyphus, who is forced to push a giant boulder up a hill for eternity. Through their collective religious experience, Mercer forces his followers to reflect on the common suffering of all species. Rather than eliminating speciesism, Mercerism merely relocates the ethical boundary between species. Although Mercer advocates a doctrine of nonviolence, his central decree is that his followers “shall kill only the killers,” leaving them “free to locate the nebulous presence of The Killers wherever [they see] fit” (Androids 31–3, italics removed). Therefore, while “the Killers” are epitomised for Deckard by the androids, who show “no regard for animals,” he in turn justifies his own android executions by declaring them subhuman (32). As Vint recognises, Deckard’s bounty hunting is more “about making rather than policing a boundary,” with Dick “simply [putting] androids in the place historically occupied by [nonhuman] animals” (“Speciesism” 116–7). She therefore argues that, rather than being degraded by his bounty hunting, Deckard and the novel’s other humans are already “android-like” in their emphasis on a rational definition of subjectivity (117). Deckard is also implied to be less empathetic than other human characters since he “hardly ever” undergoes fusion and is perhaps further dehumanised by his bounty-hunting (P.  K. Dick, Androids 173). Mercerism’s specific intricacies and

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contradictions are made moot when it is alleged that both Mercer and “the whole experience” of empathetic fusion are “a swindle” carried out by an actor on a soundstage (210, 207). The essence of his teachings nevertheless appears to hold true, with Deckard becoming “permanently fused” with Mercer after he ceases to rationalise his bounty-hunting (233). As Vint observes, by “embracing animal being,” Deckard rejects “the speciesist discourse that attempts to construct hierarchies and divisions” between “animals and animalized humans in Western culture” (“Speciesism” 117). Dick hereby provides a bridge between science fiction’s traditional, lapsarian engagement with animal ethics and the modern animal ethics philosophies solidified in the decade following the publication of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The modern Animal Liberation and Animal Rights movements began in the early-1970s with a London society of vegetarian philosophy students known as the “Oxford Group,” whose principles were most popularly and influentially communicated via utilitarian philosopher Peter Singer’s 1975 book Animal Liberation. Therein, Singer argues that the only way that any being’s interests can be ethically considered, in any “meaningful way,” is through their capacity to suffer, thereby extending ethical subjectivity to nonhuman animals, before demonstrating how other common criteria for ethical consideration are inevitably founded on speciesist exclusions (7, see also 6–17). Although Singer recognises the implications of vegetarianism in the story of Eden, he also notes that there is “no serious challenge” in Genesis, “to the overall view … that the human species is the pinnacle of creation and has God’s permission to kill and eat other animals” (188). He also dismisses Isaiah’s vision of predators and prey laying together—earlier adopted for the promotion of vegetarianism by Percy Shelley—as “a utopian vision, not a command to be followed immediately” (ibid.). Singer is generally resistant to redemptive narratives, contending that to treat other animals kindly simply as a means of human betterment is a “thoroughly speciesist position,” arguing instead that humans ought to consider the interests of other animals simply “because they have interests” themselves (244, italics added). Instead of Abrahamic or Shelleyan lapsarianism, Singer’s arguments primarily stem from utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who famously declared that the essential question to ask when considering a person’s ethical subjectivity “is not, Can they reason? nor Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?” in his 1789 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (311, italics original; c.f. Singer 7, 203). Bentham was no

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vegetarian, however, immediately preceding his famous quotation by stating: “There is very good reason why we should be suffered to eat such of [nonhuman animals] as we like to eat; we are the better for it, and they are never the worse. … The death they suffer in our hands commonly is, and always may be, a speedier, and by that means a less painful one, than that which would await them in the inevitable course of nature” (ibid.; quoted in Singer 210). Conversely, Singer endorses vegetarianism as the primary means of combatting speciesism, arguing that a meat-free diet “underpins, makes consistent, and gives meaning to all our other activities on behalf of [nonhuman] animals” (Liberation 159). Although immensely influential, Singer’s arguments are not necessarily original. As Josephine Donovan and Carol J.  Adams have pointed out, feminist theorists had formulated similar connections between sexists and speciesist oppression during the early 1970s, with Donovan also identifying Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (1755) as another precursor to Singer’s emphasis upon animal “sensitivity” (Donovan and Adams 9; Donovan 63). Singer himself acknowledges that everything in Animal Liberation “had all been said before” in Henry Salt’s 1892 book Animals’ Rights (Singer xv). Moreover, that Singer begins Animal Liberation with an appeal to Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792) acknowledges his debt to the feminist tradition while also providing an indirect connection to Mary Shelley and the origins of the science fiction tradition, which had a profound impact on his and other Oxford Group philosophers’ conceptions of interspecies ethics (Singer 1). The Oxford Group and Animal Liberation ethics were directly influenced by science fiction’s ongoing challenges to anthropocentrism and the human/animal boundary. As the originator of the term “speciesism,” Richard D.  Ryder recalls, “the popularity of science fiction and recent advances in astronomy … affected the thinking of those of us who were involved in the revival of the animal protection movement” by promoting “the view that the universe may contain other intelligences” (“Laboratory” 88). The co-editor of Ethics and Animals (1983), Harlan B. Miller, concurs, writing: The new respectability of science fiction and the recent discoveries about the other planets of our system have brought popular consciousness to an acknowledgment that somewhere “out there” there are probably other minds, other intelligences, other persons. Of course these other persons will

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not be humans, and thus it follows that humanity is not necessary for personhood. Perhaps if we could learn to communicate with the cetaceans of Earth, we would be better prepared to talk to the creatures of the Proximi Centauri system. (7)

Indeed, Singer makes several distinctly science fictional arguments in Animal Liberation resembling Dick’s thematic explorations in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Like Dick, Singer asserts the subjectivity of nonhuman animals by imagining the possibility of artificial humans. When contemplating whether animals with similar appearances to humans likely share similar biology and emotions, he notes: It is conceivable that one of our close friends is really a cleverly constructed robot, controlled by a brilliant scientist so as to give all the signs of feeling pain, but really no more sensitive than any other machine. (10)

Nevertheless, Singer ultimately argues that it is unlikely that other animals have been “artificially constructed” to imitate human behaviour (as an android might be), which suggests they have evolved along a similar trajectory to humans and therefore share similar biological experiences, such as suffering (11). Several other influential investigations of interspecies interiority, such as David Kellogg Lewis’s “Mad Pain and Martian Pain” (1983) and Derek Parfit’s “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons” (1987), take a similarly science-fictional approach. Conversely, Dick considered evidence of nonhuman subjectivity to be inherently spiritual, explaining in his Exegesis that: There is no active rational way that I can know how that beetle [from his childhood experience] feels or even that it feels; I know by the grace of God; it is a gift conferred on me. … This is the activity of salvation. (835, parentheses removed)

Despite their theoretical differences, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Animal Liberation share a common philosophical and science-­fictional method, with both Dick and Singer appealing to the possibility of artificial beings when asserting the capacity for suffering as a means to extend ethical subjectivity to nonhuman animals. Moreover, although it was written and published almost a decade before Animal Liberation and the establishment of the Oxford Group, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? anticipates Singer’s arguments in two other major ways.

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The first is Dick’s appeal to the capacity for suffering as a basis for ethical subjectivity. The substitutional empathy enabled by Mercerism allows the empathiser to share the suffering of other beings and thereby recognise them as equal ethical subjects. Deckard therefore decides that empathy “must be limited to herbivores or anyhow omnivores who could depart from a meat diet,” since “solitary predators” would be compromised by being made “conscious of the desire to live on the part of [their] prey” (31).3 Singer argues similarly in Animal Liberation, writing that “practically and psychologically it is impossible to be consistent in one’s concern for nonhuman animals while continuing to dine on them” (159). Singer also breaks from his usual utilitarian analysis in asserting that: If we are prepared to take the life of another being merely in order to satisfy our taste for a particular type of food, then that being is no more than a means to our end. In time we will come to regard [other animals] as things for us to use, no matter how strong our compassion may be. (59–60)

Like the humans in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Singer casts the possible degradation of human empathy as the primary reason to adopt vegetarianism. Indeed, the empathetic humans in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? claim to be wholly vegan—both in the sense of veganism as a philosophical outlook and as a practice of abstinence from all animal product—with Voigt-Kampff tests requiring the rejection of items such as a “bear-skin rug” and “a calf-skin wallet” in addition to meat-eating (48–49). To emphasise the point, Deckard strokes the “black leather” of his briefcase while conducting an interrogation, proving that leather items not only remain in existence but are utilised by the very people who would appeal to their possession in order to justify an execution (59). Although the contradiction is potentially an oversight on Dick’s part, it may also simply be one of the many complexities inherent in Deckard’s behaviour that suggest he is dehumanised or even inhuman. The second significant way Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? anticipates Animal Liberation is in its exploration of the “argument from marginal cases,” which disproves the speciesist assertion that humans deserve 3  Adrian Tchaikovsky’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Children of Time (2015) features a species of extra-terrestrial spiders who are accidentally transformed from “a species of solitary hunters into a society” by the introduction of empathy, suggesting a possible tribute to Dick, although Tchaikovsky’s spiders remain carnivorous, and even cannibalistic (590).

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greater ethical consideration than other species since they are more intelligent, by pointing out numerous instances where the reverse is true. Bentham provides an early example, pointing out that “a full-grown horse or dog is beyond comparison a more rational … animal, than [a human] infant of a day or a week or even a month” old (311). Singer concedes that adult humans usually possess intellects that might “lead them to suffer more than animals would in the same circumstances.” However, he also points out that “this same argument gives us a reason for preferring to use human infants—orphans perhaps—or severely retarded human beings for experiments,” since they “would also have no idea of what was going to happen to them” (16). The argument from marginal cases is a particularly controversial aspect of Animal Liberation, which Jovian Parry describes as “a dangerous gambit, because of its theoretical ambivalence” (68). Jacques Derrida also declared it “ridiculous and heinous to place certain animals above handicapped humans in some new hierarchy” (Derrida and Roudinesco 67). The argument has nevertheless been hugely influential within animal ethics philosophy and remains effective at revealing the contradictions involved in excluding nonhumans from ethical consideration. Similar arguments are illustrated in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? via the character John Isidore, who possesses less than average intelligence and is also a “special”—someone who has been mutated by the fallout from the war and is therefore considered “biologically unacceptable” and ceases “in effect, to be part of mankind” (8, 16). By comparison, the more advanced androids Deckard hunts are considered “cleverer than humans,” having “evolved beyond a major—but inferior—segment of mankind” (182, 30). If ethical consideration is based purely on intellect, then the androids are more worthy of consideration than Isidore. However, “no matter how gifted as to pure intellectual capacity” the androids are, they are incapable of participating in empathic fusion, of which even a “chickenhead” human like Isidore is capable (30). Although other humans are unconcerned by the “synthetic sufferings of false animals,” Isidore recognises that “they’re all alive, false animals included,” and also shows the most empathy toward the escaped androids, who he shelters in his apartment (72, 77). While Isidore regards his enhanced empathy as a symptom of having “deteriorate[d] back down the ladder of evolution”, by Dick’s standards, he is the most ethical and “human” character, due to his appreciation of nonhuman subjectivity, and begins the novel already knowing what Deckard only learns in its conclusion: that androids and electric animals “have their lives too” (72, 241). Isidore is

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not a pure character, since he momentarily expresses a longing for “beef gravy,” which the android Pris recognises as the “sort of slip an android would make” (149). Nevertheless, he remains the most empathetic character in the novel, whose virtue is primarily expressed via his sympathy for androids and other nonhuman animals. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? thereby concludes by redirecting the criteria for ethical consideration towards the simple existence of interiority, regardless of intelligence or empathetic capacity. Rather than utilitarian Animal Liberation, therefore, Deckard’s final position perhaps better resembles the Animal Rights philosophy of Singer’s contemporary Tom Regan, who argues that all animals deserve inalienable “rights,” since they are “subjects of a life that fares well or ill for them, logically independent of their utility for others” (244). A universal reverence for all (organic) animal life is also evidenced in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by the fact that carnivorous creatures—such as spiders and snakes—are still considered “sacred,” despite their predatory nature and lack of empathetic capacity (161). The androids are also shown to be unempathetic—and therefore definitively unethical and inhuman(e)—when Pris playfully cuts the legs off a spider (205–6). Josh Toth describes her behaviour as “the natural and paradoxically foundational consequence of carno-­ phallogocentrism,” while Dick himself appealed to it as evidence that Deckard is “correct” to believe that the androids “are vicious machines that must be destroyed” (Toth 73, italics removed; P.  K. Dick “Notes” 155–56; also Letters 1:230–31). Nevertheless, Regan also considers vegetarianism “obligatory,” arguing “we should not be satisfied with anything less than the total dissolution of commercial animal agriculture as we know it” (351). Singer similarly argues that to raise and kill animals for meat is to reduce them to “no more than a means to our end” and “things for us to use,” rather than independent subjects, as they are represented as throughout Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Dick’s other fiction (Singer 159–60). As Vint observes, however, nonhuman animals continue to “exist as commodities rather than as beings [in themselves]” for the human characters in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (“Speciesism” 116). The mere existence of organic animals is dictated by the “State Animal Husbandry Board” in the novel, and they are otherwise traded like cars in the pages of Sidney’s Animal & Fowl Catalogue and in pet shops along “animal row” (P. K. Dick, Androids 9, 27; see also Lee and Sauter, Final Conversations 34–36). In fact, the commodification of nonhuman animals

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provides the primary driving force behind the narrative, since Deckard’s (largely violent) actions are propelled by the prospect that he will be able to afford a genuine animal to replace his electric sheep by collecting bounties on androids. As Toth observes, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? thereby “critiques the human tendency … to commodify, exploit and estrange ‘others’ in the name of humanity,” while “simultaneously exposing the paradoxically self-serving limits of naive empathy” (67). Joshua Schuster similarly contends that Dick merely considers “what veganism without animal liberation, and without many animals, might look like,” portraying “a kind of veganism that not many contemporary vegans would endorse” (204). As he also observes, however, that the “gap” between the world of the novel and the current Anthropocene is not as large as it might seem, since many nonhuman species have already gone extinct or number only approximately 10 per cent of their “historical population sizes” (209). An uncomfortable spectre of subjectivity also underscores the novel’s scenes of nonhuman commodification. When visiting an animal marketplace, Deckard encounters an ostrich who “returns his stare” (27). He later remarks that, whenever you look at sheep, “they’re looking back. Expecting to be fed” (197, italics added). Although Deckard’s later comment is intended comically rather than philosophically, it nevertheless gestures towards Derrida’s recognition of the subjectivity of other animals through their capacity to return the “gaze” of humanity from “the point of view of the absolute other” (11). Having written at length on Derrida’s philosophy of animal subjectivity as applied to science fiction, Vint identifies Deckard’s final realisation of nonhuman subjectivity as a recognition of the need to “reconstitute his subjectivity through a reconfigured relationship to the other,” whereby he is able to “accept a mutual exchange of gazes” with nonhuman lifeforms, which is foreshadowed by his early encounters with nonhuman animals (Vint, Alterity 31). In addition to its anticipations of Animal Liberation, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? also anticipates the foundations of Derrida’s later animal philosophy through its emphasis on the subjectivity implied through a mutual meeting of gazes. Dick and the Animal Liberation movement were each also heavily influenced by the increased attention given to abortion during the 1960s and 1970s, which established the “concept of a person” as an essential aspect of ethical debate (Ryder, “Laboratory” 87; Miller 6). Singer has written extensively in favour of abortion and even the euthanasia of newborn infants with “severe” disabilities, arguing that both practices result in a

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utilitarian reduction of suffering (see 17–20). Dick, on the other hand, was aggressively anti-abortion, although he also invoked interspecies empathy to justify his position. In Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? abortion carries a “life sentence” and is used as part of the Voigt-Kampff test, aligning the issue with issues of nonhuman suffering and interspecies empathy (50). The connections are revisited in Dick’s controversial anti-­ abortion story “The Pre-Persons” (1974), wherein pound trucks patrol for stray animals and supposedly “soulless” human children alike. While writing the story Dick write to the Animal Protection Institute of America, commending them for their work and suggesting that “The Pre-Persons” would “make the point” that “helpless life forms need the protection of the strong, animals or human” (P. K. Dick, Letters 2:331). He again characterised abortion as “a dreadful menace to unborn children, much as there is to animals,” when defending “The Pre-Persons” against criticisms from feminist science fiction author Vonda N.  McIntyre (4:177). The story drew further criticism from notable American New Wave authors, including Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin, suggesting Dick’s departure from the assumed values of the liberal science fiction community (4:177; 3:258–59; Rickman, Own Words 105–6). Alice “Raccoona” Sheldon (aka James Tiptree, Jr.)—who studied Poultry Science and ran a chicken farm with her husband from 1946 to 1952—later used similar analogies between nonhuman animals and aborted infants in support of reproductive rights in her story “Morality Meat” (1985),4 as had predominantly left-wing author Miriam deFord in her earlier science fiction story “The Season of the Babies” (1959). As Parry points out, however, both Sheldon and deFord “deploy the figure of the farmed animal with little accountability to real farmed animals themselves” (229). Likewise, in his attempt to align abortion with animal cruelty in “The Pre-Persons,” Dick appeals to traditional dystopian associations between enforced vegetarianism and overpopulation while overlooking the tangible suffering inflicted on nonhuman animals in the name of carnism that he was so critical of elsewhere in his fiction and especially in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

4  Neither vegetarianism nor carnism play a major role anywhere else in Sheldon’s writing, although she reportedly told McIntyre she was developing plot about a “chicken hatchery set in the asteroids, run by women in competition with a huge processed-foods corporation,” which never came to fruition (Phillips 284).

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Adams argues that the animal ethics movements stemming from Regan and Singer had the misfortune of articulating a modernist claim just as postmodernism absorbs and displaces modernist thinking” (“Manifesto” 127). She argues elsewhere that Regan’s philosophy is particularly “dated” due to “postmodernism’s replacement of the idea of the individual, autonomous subject with the idea of multiple selves and a fluid subject” (“Post-­ Meateating” 55–56). Dick nevertheless posited similar philosophies within a distinctly postmodern framework that emphasised notions of fluid subjectivity almost a decade before either philosopher rose to prominence among animal advocacy movements. As Adams also acknowledges, “cultural” protests have become far more effective in communicating ideas about animal ethics than the “boring,” “absolutist and serious” stances of animal ethics philosophers (“Manifesto” 127). Indeed, the cultural influence of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is far more pervasive than that of either Singer or Regan. Moreover, the vegetarian advocacy in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is far more radical than that of either philosopher: for Singer and Regan, to be vegetarian is to be humane; for Deckard—if not Dick himself—to be vegetarian is to be human. Blade Runner The prominence of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? within Western popular culture (and arguably that of Dick himself) is undeniably due to its adaptation as Ridley Scott’s immensely influential proto-cyberpunk film Blade Runner. Yet, despite communicating Dick’s ideas to a wider audience, almost the entirety of his complex engagement with interspecies ethics is lost among the accentuation of his novel’s lapsarian themes. Rather than the ethical redemption of all humanity, Blade Runner focuses on a Miltonic conflict between created and creator. The film’s three main characters—Deckard (who is potentially a replicant himself), his replicant love-interest Rachel and the rebel replicant Roy Batty—are each pitted against the human “God of biomechanics,” Dr Eldon Tyrell, who invented the replicant technology. Batty openly wages war against his creator throughout the film, which ends with Deckard and Rachel’s defection from the society he governs. As Andrew Milner argues, Deckard and the (other) replicants in Scott’s film are “all recognisably fallen angels,” leading him to locate Blade Runner within a tradition of (science-fictional) fall narratives alongside Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667) (Milner, Literature 262). Critic

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L. G. Heldreth concurs, arguing that Deckard and Rachel driving into the countryside at the conclusion of the film’s original, theatrical cut presents “Deckard, i.e., man, … as a human being who makes his escape into the new Eden with a new Eve” (51). As Milner notes, however, Rachel is definitively not human; nor is Deckard, according to Scott, who settled much speculation in a 2007 interview by stating that his version of the character “was always a replicant” (Milner, Literature 265; citing Kaplan). As accentuated by the ending of Blade Runner’s popular 1992 director’s cut, wherein Rachel and Deckard end the film as fugitives fleeing the city, Blade Runner’s replicants do not represent a hopeful rebirth for humanity but rather “the first of Frankenstein’s race of devils” (ibid.). Dick—who died a few months before Blade Runner’s theatrical release—considered the film to offer “no hint of redemption,” arguing it better-captured the “nightmare” of Dante Alighieri’s Inferno (1472) than the liberation of Paradise Lost (Rickman, Own Words, 241). Moreover, while a police captain’s description of Deckard as “a goddamn one-man slaughterhouse” inadvertently combines the film’s theme of lapsarian dehumanisation with an allusion to meat-eating and animal slaughter, the film has little to offer in the way of interspecies ethics. The preoccupation with nonhuman sentience and subjectivity that dominates Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is almost entirely absent from Blade Runner. The film’s opening scene of the Voigt-Kampff test numbers among modern cinema’s most iconic moments. Yet while Scott’s androids—here called “replicants”—continue to be identified using the Voigt-Kampff test, his film (in all its versions) contains no further engagement with nonhuman(oid) animals, organic or otherwise. An electric animal only appears once, during a brief and incidental scene wherein beyond Deckard covets a deceptively artificial owl, which is used to suggest the similar deception of the humanoid android Rachael, rather than as a comment on the animal itself. The omission of one of the “animal theme” from Blade Runner is perhaps explained by Scott and screenwriter David Peoples’ claims to have never actually read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Rickman, Own Words 220). In an earlier outline for an adaptation—presented as an “objective study as to exactly what [Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?] contains”—Dick acknowledged that most of the novel’s plot, besides the “search & destroy androids theme,” could be removed entirely, despite their significance to the book (“Notes” 159; also Letters 1:230). He was nevertheless displeased by Scott’s omission of the “animal theme,” lamenting that, “Animals aren’t really a factor in the

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movie at all. The sacredness of animal life. That’s out,” while alluding to the preservation of the animal theme as a major motivation in his refusal to release an abridged version of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? to coincide with the film’s release (35). Although Blade Runner solidified Dick’s place in popular culture, it only hinted at the interspecies ethics that were so essential to its source material, as well as Dick’s personal philosophy. Conversely, Denis Villeneuve’s belated sequel Blade Runner 2049 (2017) features prominent depictions of nonhuman animals. The film also stars noted animal activist and widely rumoured vegan Ryan Gosling (see Mullins). Again, however, any actual engagement with interspecies ethics is all but absent from its storyline. That Deckard returns as the keeper of numerous beehives and a pet dog perhaps suggests some kind of attempt at redemption through relationships with nonhuman animals to viewers familiar with the original film’s source material, but there is nothing within the film itself to prompt the connection. Villeneuve also deviates from Dick’s endorsement of vegetarianism. The Voigt-Kampff test is removed from the sequel, robbing the Blade Runner franchise of its last lingering connection to the explicitly vegetarian ethic expressed in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? The film’s opening scene also takes place at a “protein farm” that produces insects for food, suggesting the human population has simply broadened its carnist palette instead of embracing vegetarianism in Blade Runner’s post-catastrophic future. Both Blade Runner films downplay the proto-Animal Liberation philosophies inherent in their source material while enhancing its more traditional lapsarian influences. Nevertheless, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? remains one of the most concentrated and critically examined explorations of vegetarianism and animal ethics in all of science fiction and is by no means an isolated instance within Dick’s writing.

Later Theological Turn In early 1974, Dick claimed to receive visions of a “past life” as a persecuted early Christian. Deciphering these visions consumed Dick until his death and inspired the theological investigations that would become his Exegesis, as well as his semi-autobiographical novel VALIS and its sequels, which served as fictional attempts to rationalise his experience. The final decade of Dick’s life also coincided with an explosion in global animal ethics criticism due to the rise of the Animal Liberation movement during the early 1970s. Dick’s engagement with animal ethics remained rooted

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almost exclusively in theology and classic metaphysics, however. As his fifth and final wife Tessa explains, “toward the end,” Dick was “more in tune with the Old Testament, especially with … the kindness to animals and the needy,” which continued to be reflected in his writing (Rickman, Last Testament 68–9). When first outlining Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974) to science fiction author Roger Zelazny in 1970, Dick described the novel as a study of “seven forms of love,” stressing that “even love for an [nonhuman] animal” was included, and sent two pages exploring the human/ nonhuman animal relationship as a sample, which were presumably the same “two rabbit pages” he sent his editor the same month (P. K. Dick, Letters 1:291, 1:302). The rabbit scene in the finished novel sees the character Ruth Rae telling the story of a friend’s pet rabbit, who behaved affectionately toward two kittens and even attempts an ill-fated relationship with a neighbour’s dog. Her audience commend the rabbit for having a “complex personality,” “pushing against the limits of his … physiology” and “trying to become a more evolved life form, like the cats” (Flow 117). Although the other animals in the story are still considered less intelligent than the human characters, they are also given value via their self-­ consciousness and capacity for both emotions and empathy. Dick stressed to Zelazny that nonhuman animals remained the focus of the original rabbit scene, claiming there was “nothing implied … about human beings improving themselves, or about human beings at all” (Letters 1:302). The novel is more measured, however, with its protagonist later characterising the loss of a pet as worthwhile compared to the unfathomable, horrifying loss of a human being (Flow 118). Singer agrees that the deaths of certain animals (especially humans) may be cause for greater suffering than those of others (19). Nevertheless, it is a notable departure from the “all animals are sacred” approach of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? which is earlier parodied in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said via the mention of a philosopher who prescribes a “mandatory cat” in an attempt to increase empathy (44). There is little consideration of interspecies ethics in VALIS, beyond the character Kevin resenting his Creator for letting his cat be “stupid” enough to get run over (226–27). However, a theological basis for carnism and animal suffering is more explicitly investigated in VALIS’s sequel, The Divine Invasion (1981), which was the last of Dick’s works to be published during his lifetime and was directly inspired by his investigation of the Torah. A biological justification for predation is asserted early in the

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novel, during a scene where Elias—a manifestation of the Hebrew prophet Elijah—engages in a moral debate with a dying dog. The dog justifies killing other animals by claiming it was “constructed to kill smaller things” and therefore “blameless” for its actions, implying larger creatures, including humans, have the right to feed on smaller ones (76). Later, however, the Scientific Legate Nicholas Bulkowsky relates a dream his wife Galina had of a giant fish offering itself as food to a group of people who saw off chunks of its flesh while it is still living to the Christian-Islamic prelate Fulton Statler Harms. Harms interprets the fish as Christ, who offers his flesh so that humanity may have eternal life. Nevertheless, while witnessing the fish’s dissection during the dream Galina thinks, “This is wrong. We are injuring the fish too much,” and believes such an arrangement to be “unfair to the fish,” arguing that humanity “must find another kind of food, which doesn’t cause the great fish suffering” (114). Any biological impulses behind canism remain, but Galina’s dream rejects the role of sacrifice and animal suffering inherent in the Christian narrative while also encouraging a move toward an alternative belief system that minimises suffering by abstaining from eating other animals, with Dick again asserting the capacity to suffer as a basis for ethical consideration in support of vegetarianism. In 1981, Dick claimed he received another vision of a new messiah named Tagore, who lived in Sri Lanka practising “high-technology veterinarian medicine, mainly with large animals such as cattle” (Letters 6:257–8). Like Mercer in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Tagore’s benevolence is exemplified by his dedication to other animals, and Dick wrote to several members of the science fiction community describing him as an ecological martyr who gave voice, not just to the human “elect,” but to “the ecosphere as a whole, from the snail darter [fish] on up” (6:258).5 Dick interpreted a later vision of ape-like alien creatures attempting to make contact with him in an Edenic meadow as an attempt by a higher power to prepare humanity for an encounter with extra-terrestrial life, claiming the creatures appeared “ape-like to suggest” Clarke and Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (Exegesis 859). He concluded, therefore, that the ultimate mission of his fiction was the preparation of humanity for 5  Known recipients of Dick’s Tagore letters include his literary agent Russel Galen, editors Ed Meskys and Lawrence Ashmead and authors Thomas M.  Disch and Grania Davis (P.  K. Dick, Letters 6:256–60; Locus, “Appreciations” 14; see also P.  K. Dick, Exegesis 780–86).

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contact with an alien consciousness by encouraging it to first recognise the subjectivity of all terrestrial animals while appealing to how Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and The Divine Invasion “conceptually prepare[d] the way” for such a meeting as “proof” of the vision’s validity (Exegesis 864). Indeed, Dick refers to the ape-men’s encounter with the monolith in 2001 on numerous other occasions throughout his Exegesis, along with Clarke’s Childhood’s End, which he considered “compatible” with his visions to the extent that—if either were true—each might “grow out” of the other 673, 761, 176–77). Dick’s ethical philosophies were explicitly informed by science fiction’s lapsation themes, which also recast Clarke and Kubrick’s scene of carnist violence into one of interspecies harmony. Moreover, while the authenticity of Dick’s visions is extremely questionable, his interpretations remain consistent with his lifelong philosophical investigations, through which he often emphasised the ethical treatment of nonhuman animals. Dick also argued for a Biblical basis for vegetarianism and the kind treatment of other animals during his correspondence with Le Guin. Dick first wrote to Le Guin in 1974, telling her that, as a result of his visions, he “fell silent for the first time” and “heard the talk of the small creatures” (Letters 3:51). He wrote to Le Guin again in 1981, saying the Torah had “enchanted” him with its “haunting concern for all creatures.” He then quotes Deuteronomy 22:6–7, which cautions against interfering with a mother bird and her hatchlings, appealing to the interpretation of British Chief Rabbi Dr Joseph Herman Hertz, who argued that the bird’s eggs and brood should be left “untouched” since they “are generally unfit for food” (6:218–19; see also Hertz 843).6 Le Guin’s side of the correspondence appears unavailable at present. However, she seems to have taken issue with Dick’s vegetarian interpretation, leading him to clarify in his following letter that Hertz himself was quoting the Medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides, who was “simply pointing out … that a dam brooding on eggs is brooding fertile eggs, which of course are unfit for eating” (P. K. Dick, Letters 6:228). Suvin considers Dick and Le Guin to represent “two extremes” among significant science fiction writers of the 1960s and 1970s, with Le Guin’s work tending towards “oneness,” while Dick’s generally portrayed the “disintegration of order and unity” (134). His distinction largely holds, regarding their aesthetic approach, yet Dick 6  Dick’s quotation of Deuteronomy does not seem to match any particular version of the Torah, including the Hertz translation he appeals to in the same letter.

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seemed far more committed to “oneness” via his constant collapsing of human/nonhuman boundaries, both in fiction and in real life. Le Guin, moreover, considered his “moral vision” to be “desperately clear” and his art “adequate to express that vision” (178).

Conclusion Kim Stanley Robinson has argued that the inconsistency of Dick’s work suggests “the political analyses they embody were not consciously thought out” (xi). Dick’s writings, however, evidence an ongoing engagement with animal ethics that consistently emphasises interspecies empathy and the reduction of suffering. Dick also held great moral influence within the science fiction community, with issues of animal ethics remaining a cornerstone of his fiction, as well as of his personal philosophy and politics. Although his concern for nonhuman animals took various forms, the recognition of other animals as essential beings who deserved as much consideration as any other creature remained central to Dick’s conception of ethics, leading him to embed his fiction with messages of animal ethics and subjectivity. Carnism and other animal cruelties are used as frequent markers of malevolence throughout his work, and Dick often judged people in real-life based upon their treatment of other animals. Although alluded to in Dr Bloodmoney and his early short stories, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? deals directly with issues of speciesism and carnism while also depicting the kind of ethically vegetarian future he envisioned in his later letter to Morningstar Farms. The novel continues science fiction’s traditional lapsarian–vegetarian associations while also anticipating many of the central philosophies of the influential Animal Liberation movement— assessing the capacity to suffer as an essential aspect of ethical subjectivity while rejecting moral distinctions based on intelligence. His ethical conception of animal consciousness also informed his later religious experiences and theological investigations, with Dick interpreting his various “visions” in terms of the messages of species unity embedded in his fiction. Dick also frequently discussed issues of animal empathy with other members of the science fiction community, challenging the carnist conceptions of science fiction authors as much as their readers. Although Dick may not have been a vegetarian himself, he arguably did more than any other author to promote more empathetic and ethical relationships with other animals.

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References Adams, Carol J. “An Animal Manifesto: Gender, Identity, and Vegan-Feminism in the Twenty-First Century.” Interview by Tom Tyler. Parallax 12, no. 1 (2006): 120–28. ———. “Post-Meateating.” Animal Encounters, edited by Tom Tyler and Manuela S. Rossini, 47–72. Brill, 2009. Bentham, Jeremy. Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation. Dover, 2007. Cachel, Susan. Primate and Human Evolution. Cambridge University Press, 2006. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Fordham University Press, 2008. Derrida, Jacques, and Élisabeth Roudinesco. “Violence Against Animals.” For What Tomorrow… A Dialogue. Translated by Jeff Fort, 62–76. Stanford University Press, 2004. Dick, Anne R. Search for Philip K. Dick, 1828–1982: A Memoir and Biography of the Science Fiction Writer. The Edwin Mellen Press, 1995. Dick, Philip K. “Beyond Lies the Wub.” Beyond Lies the Wub, 27–35. Gollancz, 2002. ———. Confessions of a Crap Artist. Haughton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. ———. The Crack in Space. Mariner, 2011. ———. The Divine Invasion. Mariner, 2011. ———. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? Del Rey, 1996. ———. Dr Bloodmoney. Gollancz, 2007. ———. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Edited by Pamela Jackson, Jonathan Lethem and Erik Davis. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. ———. Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012. ———. “Human Is.” Second Variety, 329–42. Voyager 1996. ———. Lies, Inc. Mariner, 2012. ———. The Man in the High Castle. Penguin, 2001. ———. “Man, Android and Machine.” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin, 211–32. Pantheon, 1995. ———. The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike. Gollancz, 2014. ———. Martian Time-Slip. Mariner, 2012. ———. “Not by Its Cover.” We Can Remember It for You Wholesale, 228–37. Grafton, 1991. ———. “Notes on Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” The Shifting Realities of Philip K.  Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin, 155–66. Pantheon, 1995. ———. A Scanner Darkly. DAW Books, 1984. ———. The Selected Letters of Philip K.  Dick. Edited by Don Herron, 6 vols. Underwood Books, 1991–2010.

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———. “Self-Portrait.” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin, 11–17. Pantheon, 1995. ———. The Simulacra. Mariner, 2011. ———. Solar Lottery. Vintage, 1955. ———. VALIS. Gollancz, 2001. Donovan, Josephine. “Animal rights and Feminist Theory.” The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, edited by Josephine Donovan and Carol J. Adams, 58–86. Columbia University Press, 2007. Donovan, Josephine, and Carol J. Adams, eds. Introduction to The Feminist Care Tradition in Animal Ethics: A Reader, 1–20. Columbia University Press, 2007. Heldreth, L.  G. “The Cutting Edges of Blade Runner.” Retrofitting “Blade Runner”: Issues in Ridley Scott’s “Blade Runner” and Philip K.  Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” edited by Judith Kerman. Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1991. Hertz, Joseph Herman. The Pentateuch and Haftorahs: Hebrew Text, English Translation and Commentary, 2nd ed. Soncino Press, 1973. Kaplan, Fred. “A Cult Classic Restored, Again.” New York Times, 30 September, 2007. https://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/30/movies/30kapl.html. Le Guin, Ursula K. “The Modest One.” The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, edited by Susan Wood, 175–78. G. P. Putnam’s Son, 1979. Lee, Gwen and Sauter, Doris Elaine, eds. What if Our World is Their Heaven? The Final Conversations of Philip K. Dick. Gerald Duckworth, 2006. Locus. “Philip K. Dick Appreciations.” Locus 15, no. 5 (May, 1982): 11–5. Miller, Harlan B. “‘Platonists’ and ‘Aristotelians.’” Introduction to Ethics and Animals, edited by Harlan B.  Miller and William H.  Williams. Humana Press, 1983. Milner, Andrew. Literature, Culture and Society, 2nd ed. Routledge, 2005. Mullins, Alisa. “Ryan Gosling, Our Hero.” PETA, 12 September, 2011. https:// www.peta.org/blog/ryan-­gosling-­hero/. Parry, Jovian. Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction. PhD thesis, York University, 2019. Phillips, Julie. James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon. St. Martin’s Press, 2006. Regan, Tom. The Case for Animal Rights. University of California Press, 1983. Rickman, Gregg. Philip K.  Dick: In His Own Words. Long Beach, Fragments West/The Valentine Press, 1988. ———. Philip K.  Dick: The Last Testament. Long Beach, Fragments West/The Valentine Press, 1985. ———. To the High Castle Philip K. Dick: A Life 1928–1962. Fragments West/The Valentine Press, 1989. Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. UMI Research Press, 1984.

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Room, Adrian, ed. Brewer’s Dictionary of Names. Helicon, 2001. Ryder, Richard D. “Speciesism in the Laboratory.” In Defense of Animals: The Second Wave, edited by Peter Singer, 87–104. Blackwell Publishing, 2006. Schuster, Joshua. “The Vegan and the Sovereign.” Critical Perspectives on Veganism, edited by Carla Jodey Castricano and Rasmus R. Simonsen, 203–23. Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Scott, Ridley, dir. Blade Runner. Warner Brothers, 1982. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation, 3rd ed. Ecco, 2002. Suvin, Darko. “Philip K.  Dick’s Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View.” Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, 112–33. Macmillan, 1988. Taylor, Angus. “Electric Sheep and the New Argument from Nature.” Animal Subjects: An Ethical Reader in a Posthuman World, edited by Jodey Castricano, 177–94. Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2008. Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Children of Time. Tor, 2015. Toth, Josh. “Do Androids Eat Electric Sheep?: Egotism, Empathy, and the Ethics of Eating in the Work of Philip K. Dick.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 24, no. 1 (2013): 65–85. Villeneuve, Denis, dir. Blade Runner 2049. Warner Brothers, 2017. Vint, Sherryl. Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal. Liverpool University Press, 2010. ———. “Speciesism and Species Being in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” Mosaic 40, no. 1 (2007): 111–26.

CHAPTER 6

The Critical Carnist Shift: Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia E. Butler and the Critical Utopian Period

In addition to the establishment of Animal Liberation, the 1970s saw a major development in the utopian tradition. In his 1986 book Demand the Impossible, Tom Moylan coined the term “critical utopia” to describe a set of 1970s science fiction texts that rejected utopia as a static “blueprint.” Instead, the authors of these works envisioned utopia as a process of perpetual social change while focusing on “conflict between the ordinary world and the utopia opposed to it” and “the continuing presence of difference and imperfection within utopian society itself” (Moylan, Demand 10). Andrew Milner argues that the critical utopian method has been “formally available and actually deployed” since H.  G. Wells’s A Modern Utopia (1905), with Moylan and other critics’ “determination” to connect the rise of critical utopianism to the 1960s and 1970s American New Left arguably leading them into “an unnecessarily elaborate theoretical taxonomy” (Milner  101; Milner and Burgmann 42). Moylan’s core critical examples of Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1970/1975), Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and Samuel R. Delany’s Triton (1976) have nevertheless become “something like a canon for American SF studies” (Milner 100). Other notable examples Moylan cites include Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia, Suzy McKee Charnas’s second Holdfast Chronicles novel Motherlines © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_6

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(1978), Sally Miller Gearhart’s The Wanderground (1978) and Dorathy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You (first published as The Comforter) (1971), all of which have become emblematic of utopian science fiction’s broadening engagement with sexuality, gender, race and environmentalism. Later, in 1994, Lyman Tower Sargent coined the term “critical dystopia” to describe Piercy’s 1991 novel He, She and It (aka Body of Glass) and the emergence of similar science fiction novels that were simultaneously “both eutopias and dystopias” (“Three Faces” 7, 9). The term was later adopted by Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, who more formally defined critical dystopias as texts that “allow both readers and protagonists to hope by resisting closure” and contain “ambiguous, open endings” that “maintain the utopian impulse within the work,” as opposed to classical dystopias, which only “maintain utopian hope outside their pages” (Baccolini and Moylan 7). Baccolini and Moylan have since created a loose cannon of critical dystopias, with Moylan highlighting Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Gold Coast (1988) and Octavia Butler’s Parable series (1993–1998), and Bacollini applying the term (more controversially) to Katharine Burdekin’s Swastika Night (1937, as by “Murray Constantine”), Margaret Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale (1986) and Butler’s Kindred (1979) (Moylan, “Critical Dystopia” 198; Baccolini 13). The dystopian mode has since become the dominant form of science fiction, with Robinson, Atwood and Butler among its most revered and influential figures. Robinson and Atwood’s works are discussed in detail, during the following chapters. However, to effectively examine engagements with vegetarianism and animal within the critical utopian period of the late twentieth-century, the following analysis takes a broader approach. Rather than focusing on the works of a single author, the following analysis begins by examining the engagement with vegetarianism within Moylan’s critical canon, paying particular attention to Piercy and Le Guin, among whose works vegetarianism and carnism continue to play a central role. It then provides a more focused examination of other influential science fiction works by Piercy and Le Guin, as well as Callenbach’s “Ecotopian” writings, and concludes with a prolonged examination of Butler’s works, among which engagements with vegetarianism and interspecies ethics are particularly prominent. It shows that, while many of the most influential critical utopias continue to endorse vegetarianism as a more ethical mode of existence, the critical period also saw the emergence of an influential trend, indicative of what Melanie Joy calls “neocarnism,” which posits

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traditional hunting practices as biologically essential, ecologically friendly and allegedly humane.

The Critical Utopian Canon The four novels of Moylan’s critical cannon are almost unanimous in their perpetuation of science fiction’s traditionally positive portrayal of vegetarianism. The lone exception is Russ’s Female Man, which begins with its primary utopian character describing how she single-handedly stalked and killed a wolf as a child (1). The scene is suggestive of an underlying violence within the novel’s utopian society, which is both empowering and discomforting. No contrasting vegetarian endorsement is provided, however, and no other endorsements or engagements with vegetarianism appear anywhere else throughout Russ’s fiction. Indeed, Russ, considered appeals to vegetarianism one of many late-twentieth century methods of “abandoning or gutting feminism” by amalgamating it “with the anti-­ feminist intellectual tradition it used to criticize” (“Women’s Review” 287). She also delighted in the idea that the “vegetarian sophonts” in Poul Anderson’s 1968 novel Satan’s World “do not have purer souls than omnivores and carnivores. However, their sins are different” (“Magazine of Fantasy” 43; quoting Anderson, Satan’s World 231). Russ’s adamant anti-­ vegetarianism is nevertheless an extreme exception among the critical canon. The other three texts of Moylan’s critical canon continue to espouse a familiar, vegetarian ethic. The revolutionary hero of Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Shevek, is a vegetarian (72). Admittedly, his vegetarianism primarily stems from a lack of animal life on his home planet (128). So does the quasi-vegan, pescatarian existence of the Getheneans in Le Guin’s landmark science fiction novel The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) (10–11). That Shevek recognises his hosts’ pet otter as a “brother,” still suggests a kinship with nonhuman animals as part of The Dispossessed’s critical ideology, with Le Guin later observing that “science fiction is almost the only kind of story that ever really admits of a world not dominated by human beings” when introducing Wells’s Time Machine (1894/1895) (Le Guin, Dispossessed 131; Introduction 137). The lead character in Samuel R. Delany’s Triton, Bron Helstrom, is not a vegetarian. They play a more antagonistic role in their novel, however, with their carnism being contrasted with their idealised, vegetarian co-worker Miriamne (67). They are also made “uncomfortabl[e]” when encountering a bloodstained butcher

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while visiting Earth, which is characterised as the “most conservative” of planets, 168, 172). In an attempt to fit in with Triton’s progressive culture, the originally male Helstorm later undergoes a gender-reassignment operation and orders a vegetarian meal, which they find “pleasanter than any” had on Earth (278). Meat and eating do not play a significant role in any of Delany’s other science fiction, save perhaps Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), wherein an extra-terrestrial jellyfish-like creature offers its own flesh as food to the novel’s human protagonist (92). The scene recalls Douglas Adams’s bovine “Dish of the Day,” in The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), whose enthusiasm to be eaten encourages the protagonist to simply order “a green salad” instead (227–28). Yet while Delany’s human characters are offput by the alien’s offer, the incident does not inspire a broader reflection on carnism. Delany’s use of the vegetarian trope in Triton is also characteristically complex and possibly ironic. Nevertheless, he and Le Guin maintain a traditional dichotomy between dystopian carnism and utopian vegetarianism in their most influential critical utopias. Vegetarianism is explicitly endorsed in Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, which envisions the establishment of a largely vegetarian utopian conclave as a possible future for Mattapoisett, Massachusetts. As with Philip K.  Dick, empathy is the driving force behind Piercy’s utopian endorsement of vegetarianism. Her utopia includes dedicated Earth and Animal Advocates, who speak for “the rights of the total environment,” with the Mattapoiseans primarily credit their widespread vegetarianism to their ability to communicate with nonhuman species using sign language (100, 150). As a result, there is a prominent political movement that aims to outlaw hunting, and they also recognise meat farming as an “inefficient use of grains” (100). Women on the Edge of Time’s utopia is not entirely vegetarian, however. Its visiting protagonist Connie Ramos later introduced to visitors from other cultures who continue to “eat plenty of meat,” and the Mattapoiseans themselves also consume meat during holidays as a way of “culling the herd” (210, 100). Imperfection and progress are nevertheless key elements of the critical utopian model, with Woman on the Edge of Time strongly suggests an aspiration towards a completely vegetarian state, even if it has not yet been achieved. Piercy also makes numerous connections between the mistreatment of women and nonhuman animals throughout Woman on the Edge of Time. Ramos remarks early on that prostitution—the selling of a person’s “flesh”—is not dissimilar to the consumption of pigs and even

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“cannibalism” (39). The connection is made particularly damning when Ramos is accidentally projected into an alternative, dystopian future, where she is confronted by a “holigraph” entertainment titled “Good Enough to Eat,” which promises “mass rapes, torture” and the “ultimate cannibal scene”—all in extreme close-up (293). The less-privileged inhabitants of the dystopia are perhaps vegetarians themselves, however, inasmuch as they are forced to eat “mined” food made from “coal and algae and wood by-products,” while the nefarious upper classes continue to feed on a “sexy” diet of animal tissue (296). Along with her utopian-vegetarian associations, Piercy continues the dystopian traditions of vegetarian impurity and villainous carnism. Vegetarian engagements also persist among Moylan’s lesser critical utopias. The utopian “dreamers” of Bryant’s The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You are each accompanied by nonhuman companions they consider “kin”⁠ and consider killing and eating any animal unthinkable (50, 159). Conversely, the novel’s masculinist narrator dreams of “red meat” and “roast pig” and attempts to introduce written language to the dreamers, by writing with a bone on animal hides collected from naturally deceased animals, suggesting a carno-phallogocentric connection between written language and nonhuman animal slaughter (101, 106). Vegetarianism is portrayed more favourably in neopaganist pioneer Starhawk’s 1993 novel The Fifth Sacred Thing. As in Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, meat-­ eating is “one of the most long-standing debates” in the novel’s utopia, whose animal advocates are vegans, arguing that “you can’t really raise animals for dairy without killing the males” (268). Moylan considers The Fifth Sacred Thing a “dystopian narrative” (“N-H-N’” 27). Sargant, however, has dubbed it “the best New Age eutopia,” (“US Eutopias” 226). It is also one of few utopian or science fiction texts to explicitly endorse a vegan diet. Yet while Bryant and Starhawk’s texts continue the promotion of vegetarianism and animal ethics characteristic of traditional, Shellean science fiction and early feminist utopias, they are perhaps the exception, rather than the rule. Other critical utopias are more ambiguous, or overtly carnist. Like Le Guin’s Shevek, the patriarchal, post-catestrophic communes of Charnas’s Holdfast Chronicles might be called vegetarian, since their members survive exclusively on seaweed following the supposed “extinction of all creatures lower than man” via nuclear fallout (Charnas 10). They also treat women as subhuman slaves, however, with the series’ female protagonist later leading a rebellion of female hunters to usurp the Holdfasters and

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restore meat-eating as a means of living in greater harmony with nature. In Gearhart’s Wanderground, nonhuman animals communicate their consent to be killed telepathically, characterising their carnism as harmonious and humane (30). Although Gearhart’s author profile in the cited edition of The Wanderground states she is “involved in the Animal Rights Movement,” her novel normalises carnism, rather than condemning it. Burdekin’s Swastika Night even envisions a future wherein the Nazis still hold power in Germany, while positioning an indulgent, carnist Jesus Christ against a legendary Adolf Hitler, who was “so unnaturally wicked that even the dead flesh of beasts and the wine of grain or fruit had to shrink from him and eject themselves from his company” (Constantine 177–78).1 Burdekin’s Hitler is wholly satirical and her Christ obviously ironic. She also continues to connect sexist and speciesist oppression through its Nazis’ reduction of women to “the condition of speaking animals” (73, see also 10, 12, 70, 175). Burdekin nevertheless aligns vegetarianism with totalitarian oppression and carnism with its resistance. Moreover, while Charnas, Gearhart and Burdekin’s texts are less influential examples of the critical utopian form, overt endorsements of carnism are also prominent among Callenbach’s “ecotopian” writings, as well as Le Guin and Piercy’s later science fiction, despite their previously prominent endorsements of vegetarianism.2

Piercy’s Primitivist and Post-Catastrophic Carnisms Woman on the Edge of Time is indicative of a broader vegetarian impulse within Piercy’s writing. It was Piercy’s next-published novel, following mainstream effort Small Changes (1973), wherein a repressed housewife 1  For an analysis of vegetarianism and Nazism, see Tristram Stuart, The Bloodless Revolution: A Cultural History of Vegetarianism from 1600 to Modern Times (W. W. Norton & Company, 2006), 434–44. 2  A less significant feminist science fiction novel from the critical period that maintains the genre’s traditional endorsements and associations with vegetarianism is Jody Scott’s Passing for Human (1977), wherein a group of extra-terrestrial, body-hopping, “Rysemian” anthropologists condemn humanity to “euthanasia” for their “insane” and “sadistic” treatment of other animals (chap. 9). Jones is also extremely critical of primitivist ecological ideologies, with one Rysemian pointing out the hypocrisy of speciesist humans “prattling endlessly about ‘ecology’” (chap. 17). Conversely, the Rysemians assert a Shelleyan ideology of their own, whereby increases in disease and misery are directly linked with humanity’s continued interspecies abuses, and partake of artificial “neo-mutton” that “no animal had to die to provide,” which they find “more succulent than [actual] lambchops” (ibid., chap. 5).

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named Beth is awakened into political activism, after recognising herself as a “a trapped animal eating a dead animal” while eating meat loaf (35). Carol J. Adams praises Beth for her rejection of “meat and marriage” and becoming a “conscientious objector to the war against women and [nonhuman] animals” (Sexual Politics 119). However, Beth is only ever pescatarian and a later scene sees her having “abandoned her vegetarianism,” since “she did not want to set herself apart from the other women” in her new household (Piercy, Small Changes 253, 285). Beth’s pescatarianism is sensibly pragmatic and her abstinence from meat need not be pure to be symbolically significant and Beth’s overbearing husband is certainly aligned with the patriarchal carnism she initially rejects (see 253). However, carnism is also reinforced as a normal practice that unties women in social rebellion, rather than dividing them. Despite her vegetarian endorsements in Woman on the Edge of Time, Piercy’s other utopian fiction is also predominantly pro-carnist. She later associates carnism with utopian resistance rather than dystopian oppression in He, She and It, which takes place in a post-nuclear catastrophe future where corporations fight for control over citizens. As in Woman on the Edge of Time’s dystopia, upper-class corporations in He, She and It have access to “real” food, including meat, while the lower-classes get by on algae-based, vat-grown fodder (Body 415). It is also a retelling of the Jewish Golem legend and draws many direct parallels to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which the android Yod is given to study so that he may better understand his situation. Yod’s quest to be considered human is a central theme of the novel, with considerable attention also given to nonhuman rights and animal sympathies. The novel’s central utopian enclave of Tikva nevertheless “raises much of its own produce, fish and chicken[s]” (207). Although Piercy’s earlier critical utopians fought for vegetarianism and animal rights, those of her later opus are nostalgic for a return to more “natural” means of food production and animal farming. Piercy’s only other science fiction novel, Dance the Eagle to Sleep (1970) also contains an overtly carnist idealisation of Native Californians, which became common throughout later 1970s utopias. The novel is set in a dystopian near-future, almost indistinguishable from the 1960s, and describes an attempt by a group of disenfranchised high school students to establish a Native American-influenced agrarian utopia. Although far less influential than Piercy’s later science fiction novels, Dance the Eagle to Sleep has been noted by Moylan for its exploration of “political organizing and radicalization” (“Critical Dystopia” 36). Its utopians envision

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themselves a “Tribe” of “Indians” attempting to recreate more naturalistic precolonial conditions. The group’s leader, Corey, is half-Native American on “both sides” (a quarter Oglala Sioux/Dakota and a quarter Choctaw) (Piercy, Dance 17). However, he frequently grapples with the “fraud” of his identity, which is learned “out of books” and “shitty cowboy movies” (24). In an attempt to connect more directly with his Native American heritage, he undergoes a fasting-induced vision quest during which he is visited by the spirit of “grandfather buffalo,” who tells him: “I was the bread of your people. I was the house and the shirt and the blanket and the bow and the belly” and that it is “beautiful” that the world was made out of his “flesh,” “bone,” “hide” and “sinews” (25). Grandfather buffalo then charges Corey with teaching people to “turn away from being white,” because “the whites were crazy … colonizers and dominators and enslavers” who “always defined themselves out of nature, on top of the landscape,” telling Cory to teach them the “good ways of being in harmony … with their bodies and their tribe and each other and the land” (26). Corey is also inspired by the Dakotan victims of the Wounded Knee massacre, who believed their dancing “would bring back the world they could still remember, … in which things had been happy and good and right, when there had been buffalo for all to eat,” when “the world that was good and made sense” (22–23). Piercy would later explore the utopianism of her own Jewish heritage in He, She and It, but in Dance the Eagle to Sleep she explicitly idealises Native American cultures and the supposedly consensual carnism they allegedly imply. As one of Piercy’s utopian Indians observes, their organisation is also a “throwback” to the ill-fated nineteenth-century utopian commune of Brook Farm, which was located near Boston and was inspired by naturalistic philosophers such as Charles Fourier, Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson (75). Brook Farm was not vegetarian, with meat only ever being restricted for economic reasons (Delano 192). Similarly, while Piercy’s Indians primarily focus on growing their own vegetables, they also raise sheep and chickens for meat, with the latter also being equated with the commune’s women by the male Indians (Dance 70, 106, 132). The Indians also scavenge meat products stolen from them by a group of “underprivileged” black adolescents who have similarly fled into the Catskill mountains, where they “hunt and trap” animals such as “squirrels,” “birds,” “dogs and occasionally a deer” (100–1). However, their attempts at hunting and construction of animal-skin clothing are ultimately ineffective without agricultural support or Corey’s Native American

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guidance, leaving them in an apparently animalistic state. When starved for food while being hunted by militaristic police, they fall upon green shoots of grass like “little animals,” eating only “roots and leaves” so that they are “hungry all the time,” until they become “like animals that below a certain minimum population will not mate any more and become extinct” (162, 167, 171). One of the most active female Indians, Ginny, becomes similarly irrational and ineffectually “animal in her pregnancy” (184). Despite her allegedly “harmonious” Native American framework, Piercy frequently uses comparisons to nonhuman animals as an indication of her human characters’ weakness and victimisation rather than treating them as equal and worthwhile companions. Meat-analogies are also often used to describe the dystopian condition of Dance the Eagle to Sleep’s near-future population. Overly satiated and unempathetic dystopian masses are considered “just meat on the hoof” (11), while capitalist exploiters think themselves “real people,” while those they metaphorically “ate” are “just fodder”—asking them to empathise with their victims being as ineffective as “asking a diner to weep for the fish on his plate” (85). Grandfather buffalo similarly considers such people to have “become barnyard animals who give milk and butter to their owners and decide nothing, not even the hours of their slaughter” (26), having “sold out” to the “savage, war-mad, torturing cannibal streak” of colonial empire (26–27). Corey even considers himself to have become something “rotten,” which smells of “stinking meat,” during a period of his fast that brings on “bad thoughts” of violent, sexual mutilation (24). As Corey proclaims, “food is the basic stuff of politics” (85), nonhuman animals and their meat being considered a basic and undesirable state of existence throughout Piercy’s earliest engagement with science fiction and utopia.3 Moreover, while Piercy’s engagement with the ethics of eating became more complex and ambiguous among her later and far more influential work, it is the carnist idealisation of Native American cultures seen in Dance the Eagle to Sleep and the dystopian longing for genuine animal products seen in He She and It, rather than the empathetic vegetarianism of Woman on the Edge of Time, that echoes most prominently throughout later science fiction. 3  Ironically, the cited 2012 edition of Dance the Eagle to Sleep is published by PM Press, which “specializes in radical, Marxist and anarchist literature” and advertises its range of “vegan” cookbooks in the book’s back pages, suggesting some countercultural evolution from the kind of carnist ideologies displayed in the novel to modern, anarchist veganism.

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Coming Home to Carnism in Le Guin Le Guin’s science fiction specifically challenges traditional, patriarchal ideas about human evolution. In her 1988 essay “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” Le Guin claims that up to eighty percent of what prehistoric humans ate was gathered, and that “only in the extreme arctic was meat the staple food” (165). Citing Elizabeth Fisher’s 1975 book Woman’s Creation, Le Guin argues that the first piece of human technology was probably some kind of container to carry children or gathered vegetables in, rather than the bone “the Ape Man first bashed somebody over the head with” in Clarke and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), while also asserting her own science fiction as a “cultural carrier bag,” intended to redefine the genre’s traditional, Promethean promotion of technology as a “weapon of domination” (167, 170). In her influential 1989 book Primate Visions, Donna Haraway similarly rejects the Hunting Hypothesis of Ardrey and other prominent, mid-twentieth-century, male primatologists, in favour of a greater emphasis on the female-led theory of “Woman the Gatherer,” asserted by Adrienne Zihlman, Nancy Tanner and other female anthropologists and primatologists during the 1970s (126–27, 228; see also Hart and Sussman 213–17). She also acknowledges its influence on and promotion through science fiction novels, such as Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (299). Yet while Le Guin and Piercy each sought to lessen the prominent (and often masculinist) emphasis on carnism within Western culture, neither fully adopted a vegetarian ideology in their writing. Although often remarked upon, Shevek’s vegetarianism is an exception among Le Guin’s heroes, who are otherwise unwaveringly carnist. Notable among her science fiction is The Word for World is Forest (1972), wherein the enthusiasm for meat and hunting of extra-terrestrial (and exclusively male) human colonists’ is contrasted with peaceful, indigenous Athsheans, who are more spiritually connected to their environment (14–18, 24). Yet while “rape, violent assault, and murder virtually don’t exist” among the Athsheans, meat remains a “staple” of their diet (74). Support for carnism is even more prominent among her fantasy novels, which regularly idealise rustic, agricultural lifestyles. The heroic Archmage of her Earthsea cycle (1968–2001) is a goat herd, while the protagonist of Gifts (2004) accepts the argument that herbivorous animals are essentially “prey,” for whom a “quick kill’s best,” as “a clear position, with its own justice” (156). The heroes of Gifts’ Nebula Award-winning sequel Powers (2007) and her

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early science fiction novel Planet of Exile (1966) are also hunters. Moreover, while Shevek’s vegetarianism is incidental and largely inconsequential, Le Guin provides one of the most detailed explorations of utopian neocarnism in her revered later critical utopia Always Coming Home (1985). Always Coming Home is presented as an anthropological investigation of a future culture, called the Kesh, who are greatly influenced by Native Californian cultures, as detailed by Le Guin’s father, the influential anthropologist Alfred Louis Kroeber (c.f. Kroeber, Handbook 293–95, 737). The section detailing the Kesh’s eating habits contends that hunting is “of very little real importance” to their food supply—being primarily preserved as a sport for children, who also consume most of its spoils, while the gathering of vegetable foods, such as acorns, greens, roots, herbs, seeds, and berries, is said to be a “major source of food” (437). The Kesh also possess an unexplained but repeatedly mentioned aversion to beef, the violation of which emphasises the violence of the masculinist Condor tribe (366, 415, 421, 190). They also refer to their domestic animals as “commensals,” meaning “people living together” (419). Their emphasis on nonhuman subjectivity and downplaying of meat-eating suggests a predominantly vegetarian arrangement. The novel nevertheless repeatedly reinforces a carnist hierarchy. A section on animal relations contends that both birds and mammals are “regularly hunted by adults for food,” with the Kesh continuing to raise cattle, lamb, goats, chickens, rabbits, quail and guinea pig-like “himpi” for their meat and leather (414–21). Eating himpi is contentiou among the Kesh, with groups who abstain considered to carry “some moral advantage” (418). As the novel’s opening episode illustrates, however, the relationship is largely based upon commodification, rather than mutual respect, with the mass slaughter of a Kesh community’s himpi by a sheepdog made up for by the mere gift of a compensatory lamb (9). As with many works influenced by Indigenous American cultures, human-nonhuman relationships in Always Coming Home are presented as more compassionate through a ritualised display of gratitude towards slaughtered animals. Animals killed by the Kesh are addressed by members of their “Blood Lodge,” who recite the following: Your life ends now, your death begins. Beautiful one, give us our need. We give you our words. (90)

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As Jean Kazez argues, such shows of carnist “respect” rely on a “myth of consent” whereby nonhuman animals are assumed to agree to their consumption through the mere act of thanking them, while lacking the “mental equipment to think about humans and their needs, nor should we think they would put us before themselves if they did” (17). Moreover, while the Kesh recitation is normally never omitted, it is also often “gabbled without the least feeling or understanding,” with the one-word abbreviation “arrariv” (“my words”) “spoken as mindlessly as our ‘bless you’ to a sneeze” (Le Guin, Always 90, 93). The need to ritualise the slaughter and consumption of nonhuman animals reveals an inherent unease about their exploitation, while Le Guin’s immediate minimising of the Kesh’s allegedly respectful display calls its sincerity into question. Le Guin herself considered that “As hunter-gatherers, our relationship to the animals was not one of using, caretaking, ownership. We were among, not above. We were a link in the food chain. We hunted deer; lions hunted us” (“Cheek” 45). Her sentiments are echoed by a Kesh poet, who writes: “You can take them, you can eat them / Like you they are food / They are with you, not for you” (Always 76). However, even in a utopia as detailed as Always Coming Home, nonhuman animals themselves are never given agency and their inner experiences are never explored. Nor are there any instances of nonhuman animals preying upon humans in the novel to compare with its many scenes of humans killing and eating nonhuman ones. As with many claims of nonhuman animals’ compliance in carnism, the Kesh’s declarations are made from the privileged position of an apex predator and, although Always Coming Home is often suggestive of more mutual relationships with nonhuman animals, each of these suggestions are also subverted by a subtle reinforcement of carnism. Le Guin’s own relationship with vegetarianism appears similarly ambiguous. In 2011, she commended the Oregon Legislature for banning poultry batteries “at last,” while regretting that she would “not live to see the birds go free,” since those “who run our lives demand that torture, ordure, and disease continue” until 2024 (“Without Egg” 178).4 A year later, however, Le Guin lampooned vegetarians in her satirical essay “A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy” (2012), wherein she encouraged the adoption of an “aerovore” diet to spare the “endless, enormous ordeal of the vegetables we keep in captivity or capture wild” (128). Although Le Guin 4  Le Guin died in 2018, seven years after the battery ban was passed but still six before it would go into effect.

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expressed sympathy for the nonhuman victims of industrialised farming, she appears to have considered vegetarianism ludicrous, with her support for carnism being widely reflected in her fiction.

Callenbach’s Carnist Ecotopia(s) The current ecological-utopian, or “ecotopian,” tradition is largely derived from Callenbach’s eponymous Ecotopia (1975), which Frederic Jameson calls “the most important Utopia to have emerged from the North American 1960s” (Archaeologies 13n5). The novel describes an ecologically focused nation-state, located along the North-West Coast of the United States, which eschews much of modern technology, in an attempt to live in greater harmony with nature. William Henry Hudson’s late-­ nineteenth-­century utopia A Crystal Age (1887) has been recognised for its “remarkable” anticipation of “modern ecological mysticism” and for presenting a vision of sustainability “practiced much in the manner of Ernest Callenbach’s later Ecotopia” (Stableford and Clute; Page 43). Hudson’s utopians are peaceful vegetarians, Callenbach’s Ecotopians are violent masculinists who emphasise hunting. Ecotopia begins with hunters returning to the Ecotopian town square, where they “allow people to admire their kill,” with the narrator reporting that “game” animals provide “a source of considerable meat in the Ecotopian diet,” while their flesh is further “prized for its spiritual qualities” (15). Children hunt “for meat as well as sport,” with male Ecotopians also participating in “war games,” intended to prevent an allegedly inherent masculine competitiveness from manifesting itself in “perverse forms, like war” (35–36, 81). The effectiveness of Ecotopia’s games is rather undermined when—rather than being pacified—the novel’s narrator, William Weston, is instead inspired by them to “more or less rape” his Ecotopian chaperone, suggesting an inherent connection between carnivorous- ness and aggressive (male) behaviour (76).5 Moreover, while Weston is at first “shocked” and “disgust[ed]” by an the “ghoulish” display in the town square—describing the “introduction of synthetic meat” as one of the “great achievements” of American industry—he soon overcomes his “squeamish[ness] about violence” and converts to the Eotopian lifestyle (15, 18, 58). Although other critical utopian authors similarly endorse hunting as 5  For an extended critique of sexism in Ecotopia, see Naoimi Jacobs, “Failures of the Imagination in Ecotopia,” Extrapolation 38, no. 4 (Winter, 1997): 318–26.

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ecologically sustainable, Callenbach’s brand of idealised Ecotopian Carnism is emblematic of a masculinist violence that stands in opposition to the more humane and peaceful vegetarian options presented in more prominent critical utopias. Callenbach is more favourable to vegetarianism in his other writing. His prequel novel Ecotopia Emerging (1981) reveals that many of Ecotopia’s founders “were either vegetarians or followed diets in which … meat and fish were used sparingly,” who also regularly emphasised the economic and environmental advantages of a less meat-intensive diet (166, 93, 186). The novel is preceded by Callenbach’s Ecotopian Encyclopedia (1980), wherein he acknowledges that “there is no earthly biological reason why you must eat meat at all,” that it is possible to have “a perfectly healthy diet without eating any meat at all” and that the “widespread American belief that you need ‘red meat’ for good health is totally without basis” (83, 156, 255). Like Philip K.  Dick, Callenbach predicted America would move away from carnism, citing concerns about the potential chemical contamination of animal products along with “strong economic as well as nutritional motives for moving toward vegetarianism” (156, 256). He also acknowledges Carnism’s financial and economic inefficiencies, pointing out the “heavy cost” of feeding farmed animals vegetable foods, “which we could have just as well have eaten directly after all,” arguing that “it is often easiest to begin with food” when making lifestyle changes, since “it’s something you can easily control: if you want to stop eating meat, you can just do it” (83, 156, 81). Despite the inherently aggressive and intensely carnist lifestyle they inspire in Ecotopia, Callenbach even characterises Native Americans and other “primitive hunters” as “quasi-vegetarians” positioning vegetarianism as a peaceful alternative to Ecotopia’s war games when pointing out that “Many vegetarians claim that eating a purely vegetarian diet … reduces aggressiveness” (Encyclopedia 256, 156). Although Ecotopia Emerging’s vegetarian endorsement is retrospective, it is surprising it was not endorsed in the original Ecotopia, given Callenbach’s preoccupation with it in the Ecotopian Encyclopedia. Callenbach also recognised connections between carnism and climate change. He identifies animal farming as an “often ignored” and “major, direct cause of global warming,” which produces a “greater warming effect than the emissions of all our cars and trucks” in the revised edition of Ecology: A Pocket Guide (1999/2008) (69), where he continues to encourage ecological practices “inspired by Native American thinking”

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(Ecology 36). He also notes the “degrading” effects of mass animal farming on land, water and human health (69). However, he makes no recommendation to reduce or abstain from the consumption of animal products, only parenthetically acknowledging a proposed reduction in animal farming as “a potentially significant move” in combatting climate change, before dismissing it a cause “without numerous advocates despite the fact that what we eat is more important than what we drive in causing warming” (75). Callenbach is similarly dismissive of vegetarian concerns in Ecology’s entry on Predation, where he glorifies hunting and animal culling as a necessary substitute for the human displacement of natural predators, while lamenting that “some humans who love wild animals find it hard to accept the necessity of predation” (109). He also endorses the continuation of carnist practices in the most recent edition of Living Cheaply With Style (2000, previously published as Living Poor with Style (1972) and Living Cheaply (1993)), encouraging readers to raise animals such as chickens and fish for food, to “Eat More Poultry” and to consume more organ meats, which he insists are “delicious” three times in a single paragraph (65–68,  36–37). Although Callenbach’s renewed passion for carnism conflicts with his earlier recommendations of vegetarianism, it remains reflective of the carnist enthusiasm that pervades his even earlier and significantly more influential Ecotopia. Callenbach similarly reverts to a primitivist-inspired glorification of carnism in his only other fictional publication: the short story “Chocco” (1994), which was published in Robinson’s collection Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias (1994). As with Ecotopia, the story begins with hunters returning home with their kills, while the story’s other ecotopians are described wearing deerskin cloaks and consuming bowls of meat stew (189–90)—Robinson recognising, Callenbach’s repeated invocation of a “specific Native American culture” (344). Unlike Ecotopia, however, “Chocco” is distinctly postlapsarian. The story follows the “fall” of a previous (implicitly twentieth century) society, caused by increased disease and food shortages brought about by climate change (204–5) and attributed, by the new society, to “primitive” and inefficient farming methods and a lack of hunting reserves (207). Ironically, Callenbach’s new society actually benefits from global warming, which has increased temperature and rainfall just enough to allow for the more efficient farming of basic vegetables, supplemented by gathering and the hunting deer, rabbits and bears (197). Like the science fiction authors he inspired, Callenbach has

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become less supportive of vegetarianism as its political and ecological significance has increased.

Octavia E. Butler In the mid-1970s, Octavia E. Butler became the first—and for a long time only—female “Black science-fiction writer working successfully” (“Obsession” 134). Her hugely influential output primally consists of three series: the Patternist novels (1976–1984)—a sprawling history centring around a war between humans who have evolved psychic abilities and others who have been mutated by an extra-terrestrial parasite—the Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–1989)—about a group of humans charged with repopulating the Earth after being rescued from nuclear annihilation by alien “gene traders”—and the first two novels of an unfinished Parable trilogy (1993–1998)—about the founding of a new religion in a post-­ catastrophic United States—along with the standalone time-travel novel Kindred and alien-vampire novel Fledgling (2005). Butler claimed not to “write utopian science fiction,” since she did not “believe imperfect humans can form a perfect society” (Beal 14). She nevertheless praised science fiction’s ability to steer both readers and writers “off the beaten track” and “the narrow, narrow footpath of what ‘everyone’ is saying, doing, [and] thinking” and “consider alternative ways of thinking and doing” (“Obsession” 135). Her emphasis on alternative viewpoints informed her real world ethics, to the extent that she even became a vegetarian toward the end of her life, “not because she objected to eating meat but because she could not stomach the torture of animals” (as though the two activities could be separate in a world without cultured or synthetic meats) (Due 274; see also Shawl 210). Moreover, as Gerry Canavan notes, Butler maintained a “lifelong interest” in nonhuman subjectivity, with “the possibilities and challenges posed by interspecies communication” with a “strong interest in animality as a heterotopic (even, perhaps, quasi-utopian) alternative to the human” persisting throughout her writing (73–74, parentheses original). In a 2002 article written for Oprah Winfrey’s widely circulated O magazine, Butler describes the experience of “getting to know [her] first nonhuman being” when staring into the eyes of a cocker spaniel named Baba, who belonged to the family she and her mother lived with around age three:

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One day he and I found ourselves [sic] sitting nose to nose on the floor of the upstairs hall. … No doubt Baba had investigated me before, but I hadn’t been aware of it. Now, for the first time, I began to notice him. He had dark, clear eyes, a wet nose, a mouth that seemed to smile somehow. I didn’t know what he was, but I knew he was alive, aware, and looking back at me. I touched him and stared at him. He bore it patiently. With surprise and bottomless curiosity, I began to understand that he was someone else. He wasn’t like any of the people in the house. He was someone else entirely. (“Eye Witness” 79)

“Eyes always mattered” to Butler after that, reminding her that “someone else was there” and that “it is better—much more interesting—to get to know others and to discover who and what they are … to look into their eyes with open curiosity and learn once more about someone else” (79). Later, when visiting a zoo on a school trip, a seven-year-old Butler “saw chimpanzee eyes for the first time,” which she recognised as “the eyes of an unhappy animal, all alone, locked in a bare, concrete-floored, iron-­ barred cage.” When some of her classmates began throwing peanuts at the chimpanzee, Butler looked away, “still too young to understand the concept of being ashamed of [her] species,” but feeling “horrible” and wanting the chimpanzee to be “free” (79). Butler’s article emphasises nonhuman subjectivity. However, its ultimate argument is not the promotion of interspecies empathy, but rather how such interspecies encounters had taught her to “hate the metaphorical cages” of “cages of race, gender, class,” so that—while the intersection of speciesism and other human prejudices is important to recognise—her ultimate call in the article is for greater empathy between humans, rather than other species. In an unpublished 1980 essay titled “How Do You Envisage First Contact with an Alien Species?” Butler also points out how humans “have already had contact with intelligent, nonhuman species” (quoted in Canavan 73). At one point, she was even researching for a potential novel “based around primate communication and signing apes” being “raised alongside humans as semi-siblings”, considering the speciesist subjugation of such obviously intelligent animals an ethical violation, equivalent to those imposed by colonialism and sexism, and cautioned that humanity might one day suffer similar abuses at the hands of “another equally arrogant and somewhat more powerful species” (quoted in Canavan 73–74). Here, again, however, Butler maintains language and intelligence as valid benchmarks for ethical consideration. Moreover, while almost all of Butler

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novels engage overtly with the ethics of carnism, they also all ultimately represent carnism as a necessary and essential aspect of humanity. Patternist The Patternist series details the development of two conflicting post-­ human species: the powerful telepathic Patternists and the voracious cat-­ like Clayarks. The series engages with an array of complex themes, including colonialism, eugenics, species hybridity, sexual subjugation and interspecies empathy, which continue to be emphasised throughout her later writing. The first-written (though third-published) Patternist novel, Survivor (1978), is set far in the series’ future. It tells of a group of religious human “Missionaries” who have fled Earth attempting to settle on another planet inhabited by a humanoid, hunter-gatherer species called the Kohn. Butler quickly disowned the novel as an amateur effort based on the “implausible” interbreeding of the novel’s human protagonist Alanna Verrick with the Kohn Diut (see Canavan 57). Nevertheless, Survivor foregrounds many themes that remained staple of Butler’s writing throughout her career, including an emphasis on what it means to not only be dehumanised but actively animalised. Survivor’s various factions all assert their superiority over the others by branding them “animals.” Derogatory comparisons to animals are made thirty-three times throughout the novel, at a rate of about once every six pages. Alanna begins the story as a “wild human” who turned “feral” after her parents were killed (and presumably eaten) by Clayarks, leading the Missionaries to consider her “more animal than human” (Butler, Survivor 1, 30). The Missionaries similarly demean the Kohen as “animals,” likening them to “strangely colored, furred caricatures of human beings” (5). Although Alanna’s foster father, a Missionary leader, defends her humanity, he maintains that the Kohn are subhuman, since they “have never had spiritual beliefs” and therefore, perhaps do not “have souls” (1, 184–85). As Alanna observes: The Missionaries had made a religion of maintaining and spreading their own version of humanity—a religion that had helped them to preserve that humanity back on Earth. Now, though, their religion had gotten in their way. It had helped them to justify their belief that the Kohn were lower

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creatures—higher than apes, but lower than true humans who had been made in the image of God. (5)

Conversely, the Kohn recognise the human colonists as “people,” sparing their lives while mercilessly slaughtering their cattle, who they consider “merely another kind of helpless animal” (37). They nevertheless distinguish themselves from rival factions by branding them “animals,” with treacherous Kohn receiving a particularly brutal punishment, whereby they have their eyes, hands and legs burnt off and are forced to “go on all fours … tied by the neck like some special kind of animal” until someone kills them (137). Alanna is also treated “like an animal” among them, having “no rights” and “no freedoms” Diut does not allow (97). Moreover, the Kohn Haileh is paradoxically labelled an “animal” both as the perpetrator of brutal behaviour, but also as the victim of a vengeful attack it inspires from Alanna (72). Throughout Survivor Butler persistently represents “humanity” as a speciesist cultural construction used to justify violence toward transgressors and outsiders, regardless of their species. Diut’s Kohn faction, the Tehkohn, are also violent hunters. Although Diut claims they are “mostly” vegetable farmers who only maintain “some hunters to defend against animals and raiders, and to get meat,” their hide-covered tents and abundance of animal-skin rugs suggest otherwise (9). As Alanna observes, the Tehkohn actually hunt “as much game as they could when they could,” ensuring a “plentiful supply of wild game” by killing off “all the non-Tehkohn predators” and “irrigating the land around them to attract their prey” (55–56). The Tehkhon are particularly proud of hunting the large, carnivorous jehruk, who they accuse of killing all the “leaf eaters” that should have been theirs to eat (110). Again, there is a paradoxical animalisation at the centre of their hunting practices. Some senior Tehkohn refuse to eat jehruk meat, taking “pride in its ferocity” while “claiming that they and the jehruk shared a common ancestor,” and when Alanna watches Diut fighting a jehruk she is unable to “tell which was the animal” (110). Later, Alanna learns to “distinguish the animal” by slaying a jehruk herself (112). Although the Kohn claim even the “lowest animal” has a right to defend itself, their culture relies on a speciesist assertion “animals” as killable and themselves as entitled killers (110). The Missionaries also fear animalisation, with some suspecting their ships are a “trick,” leading them “like cattle to be slaughtered” (33). As Survivor shows, animalisation is an essential aspect of colonisation and other cultural exploitations. Nevertheless, the respect both humans and Kohn

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demand throughout Survivor is rooted in an ethical distinction between human and nonhuman animals that normalises the exploitative treatment of nonhuman animals. The second-published Patternist novel, Mind of My Mind (1977), describes how the Patternists were created through a eugenic breeding program, engineered by the body-swapping psychic vampire Doro. An early chapter reveals how—after being taken captive by Egyptian slavers— he “started to notice the way people bred animals” and began to “breed” the “kinds of people who tasted best” when he fed on their energy, eventually resulting in the creation of the Patternists (Mind 336–37). Canavan reads the Patternists as “superheroes in a world where human beings are primarily driven by Darwinist urges rather than ethical considerations— which is to say, our world, as Butler understood it to actually exist” (43). However, Doro’s eugenic program also reflects the alarming ambitions of his author. When asked about the theme of immortality in her work, Butler responded: When I was in my teens … someone would always ask, “If you could do anything you wanted to do, no holds barred, what would you do? I’d answer that I wanted to live forever and breed people—which didn’t go over all that well with my friends. In a sense, that desire is what drives Doro in Wild Seed and Mind of My Mind. (McCaffery and McMenamin 61–62)

Her statement suggests some uncomfortable sympathies with Doro and his Eugenic program. Doro’s psychic daughter Mary—herself a result of Doro’s eugenic rearing—is horrified by his actions, however, reflecting that “breed didn’t sound like the kind of word that should be applied to people” (Mind 336, italics original). For millennia, Doro treats the people his program produces as expendable cattle rather than sympathetic subjects, having slaughtered (and presumably consumed the minds of) “an untold number of failures … as casually as other people slaughtered cattle” (266). Mary eventually usurps him by linking her powers with those of his other victims and psychically “consume[ing]” him (451). Despite his eugenic aspirations, Butler intended Doro’s demise as a tragedy (Canavan 49). Mary’s triumph can be variably read as both villainous and virtuous. Either way, however, the message is clear: eat or be eaten. The fourth-published Patternist novel, Wild Seed (1980), delves further into Doro’s history, exploring his relationship with another immortal named Anyanwu, who can take the form of humans and other animals by

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consuming their flesh. The novel again emphasises connections between dehumanisation and colonial racism, with Anyanwu being treated as subhuman, since she is “from Africa where people swung through the trees and went naked like animals” (145). It also reveals how Doro’s early eugenic experiments were directed by his “taste” for the “animal sensitives his controlled breeding occasionally produced,” who “suffered every time someone wrung a chicken’s neck or gelded a horse or slaughtered a pig” and who therefore lived “short, unenviable lives,” often ending in suicide (84). Anyanwu likens Doro to Prometheus and the Abrahamic god of the “whites,”6 soon coming to resent how “he was breeding her as one bred cattle and goats” (115–16). She eventually threatens suicide, demanding Doro stop slaughtering his subjects, so that she and her children may live peacefully, without him to “make them animals” (202). Yet while Butler frequently encourages readers to reflect on the subhuman treatment of Doro’s human victims, the treatment of nonhuman animals themselves is rarely questioned. Nonhuman animals are only ever prioritised during an episode wherein Anyanwu spends decades living among dolphins, in the form of one whose “flesh she had eaten,” where she lives free from slavery and molestation (78). Although Anyanwu is “pursued by persistent males” and “bullied” as a dolphin, “only in her true woman-shape could she remember being seriously hurt by males” (79). She is so at peace among their kind that it is “as though the dolphins were not animals” anymore, and she even allows one to mate with her and eventually bears dolphin children (80). Anyanwu’s humanising of the dolphins renders them inedible to her. As a dolphin, she prevents Doro’s son Isaac—who “loved eating dolphin flesh”—from hunting them, and upon returning to human form, forbids him from bringing “any more aboard to be killed,” insisting “they are like people” (81, 86). Canavan argues that the episode with the dolphins offers a glimpse of “life outside the human cycle of failure” that might also “uplift the human” (Canavan 72). Again, however, the extension of ethical subjectivity relies on an elevation to “human” status. Moreover, while Anyanwu forbids Isaac from killing and eating dolphins in her presence, she maintains that he “had no reason to lose his taste for dolphin flesh” 6  A further novel, tentatively titled Doro-Jesus, wherein Doro would be revealed as the father of Jesus Christ and “cast in the role of Satan the tempter” in contrast to his “famously chaste” (and secretly Patternist) son, was planned by Butler but never completed (Canavan 91).

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himself (Butler, Wild Seed 81). Anyanwu prohibition on dolphin-eating stems from personal empathy but does not extend to a general ethic by which others can be justifiably convinced to cease eating meat, outside of interpersonal threats. Anyanwu’s other interspecies transformations are also less ethically informative. When frustrated with her food supply, she takes the form of a leopard and hunts a “sleek doe” whose body she proudly skins, cleans and butchers while in human form—reflecting, simply, that “deer were deer”—and remains happy to eat the flesh of other, apparently less empathetic and civilised, animals, such as deer, turkeys, fish and even bears (103, 147–48). While Wild Seed perhaps promotes interspecies empathy and selective vegetarianism as utopian pursuits, it also reinforces an anthropocentric hierarchy, while suggesting that the only to truly empathise with another animal is to eat it. Veganism is perhaps gestured toward via Anyanwu’s objection to drinking nonhuman milk. She is “sickened” when witnessing its consumption and considers keeping dairy cows an “abomination!” (109–10, emphasis original). Doro reassures her that milk-drinking is a common “custom” among humans, telling her she “must change to suit the customs” and “let others have theirs in peace” (110–11). Anyanwu complies, hiding her moral objections by claiming milk makes her “sick” (111). Milk-drinking is justified by its normality, with physiological justifications for veganism considered acceptable, while ethical ones are rejected. Nevertheless, Anyanwu’s concerns are less about exploited animals themselves than anthropocentric dehumanisation by which she and Isaac are similarly made “animals” and “abominations” through their forced breeding. Although she is perhaps perfectly positioned to broaden the circle of ethical inclusivity, Anyanwu only ever asserts subjectivity by drawing barriers between her humanity and that of other species. Speciesist discrimination is again explored in the first-published Patternist novel Patternmaster (1976), which is set the farthest forward in the series’ timeline, detailing a power struggle between two powerful Patternist brothers amid a war with the Clayarks. Butler considered the Patternist’s social arrangement “egalitarian,” insofar as it collapsed racial and gender divides, since “psionic ability is all that counts” (“Lost Races” 186). However, the establishment of the Patternists merely lads to the emergence of different discriminations, which remain rooted in dehumanisation. Patternmaster’s opening chapter introduces the concept of “mutes”: regular, non-psychic humans, who are “bred and trained” by the Patternists, along with their warhorses, who the Clayarks make a “habit to

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shoot” (630, 721). Later, Butler recognised that the domination of the mutes was “worse” than that instilled by any contemporary “control mechanisms” used on humans, because “the mutes don’t know what’s happening to them” and could not fight back (McCaffery and McMenamin 59). Through the sub-human subjugation of regular humans in Patternmaster’s dystopian future, Butler draws attention to the unjust treatment of suffered by nonhuman species in her contemporary society. The Clayarks are similarly dehumanised. Teray considers them merely “animals,” but upon encountering a figure of one, realises “they were much more sphinxes—creatures who were at least partly human” (641). As in Survivor, the dehumanisation is mutual. In an attempt to understand the Clayarks, Teray interrogates one, who justifies the violence done against the Patternists by telling him they are “enemies” and therefore “not people” (Patternmaster 681). Teray later realises that, while the Clayark knew some of his language, he knew nothing of theirs, since “Patternists almost never let Clayarks get close enough to them to hear them talk,” and that the two groups therefore “stared at each other across a gulf of disease and physical difference and comfortably told themselves the same lie” that the opposition “not people” (709). Yet while Teray recognises the humanity of the once-human, hybrid Clayarks, the prejudices of both the Patternists’ and the Clayarks continue to rely on species divisions and dehumanisation. The Patternists also do not extend any empathy to other nonhuman animals, continuing to hunt deer and quail, while also farming cattle (711). Although both groups recognise their degrading animalisation of the other, they do not consider the nonhuman animals themselves. The last-published Patternist novel, Clay’s Ark (1984) describes the evolution of the Clayarks from an extra-terrestrial parasite brought to earth by its eponymous spaceship upon returning to Earth from another planet. The novel’s interwoven narrative focusses on the only surviving Clay’s Ark crew member Eli Doyle, as he succumbs to his infection, as well as the human Blake Maslin and his two daughters, Kiera and Rane, who are caught in a conflict between Eli’s Clayark community and a violent, human “car family” led by a man named Badger. As Sherryl Vint recognises, the novel explores new modes of subjectivity “constituted precisely via a new sense of kinship with our animal others,” and suggests that “radical transformation” of perspective is “necessary if we hope to imagine another way to be human subjects” (“Becoming Other” 282, 288).

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The Clayark disease is zoonotic, transferring between species via the consumption of their flesh and milk (Butler, Ark 531–32). Just as Anyanwu alleged, humans are made “abomination” through milk-drinking, with those infected forced to choose between keeping the disease to themselves and maintaining their humanity “as much as possible,” or letting the parasite “make animals” of them (567). There are benefits to the disease, however. Infected humans “don’t seem to get other diseases,” with Eli stressing that Eli stressing that it is a “symbiont, not a parasite” that “doesn’t use cells up the way a virus does” and only “sometimes” kills (531, 487). In contrast to the animalistic beasts portrayed by the Patternists, Eli represents the Clayarks as a sympathetic and arguably enhanced post-human species. Their evolution nevertheless comes at the cost of the host’s perceived humanity, which is primarily threatened by the Clayark’s instinctual and insatiable predation. The sphinx-like Clayarks challenge the integrity of “humanity” as a species. Although humans infected with the Clayark disease maintain their appearance, their children look like “baby sphinx[es]” (615). The infected insist that their children “are not animals!” (531). Yet while Kiera finds the Clayark children “beautiful” and eventually becomes pregnant with her own, Rane fears she will be forced to birth “one little animal after another,” eventually seeking refuge with the car family, whose nonhuman monikers signal their own, brutal inhumanity (531). Conversely, Eli insists the Clayarks “aren’t animals,” since they “have ethics,” and cautions against the potential loss of “humanity” incurred by treating the car family the way they treat others (488, 543). As Vint observes, however, “keeping one’s humanity means keeping a sense of the Other … as someone to whom we owe an ethical duty,” while also “acknowledging that there is a line beyond which no ethical duty is owed,” arguing that—by attempting to maintain his humanity—Eli thereby “preserves as much bad as good” (“Becoming Other” 295). Indeed, while the Clayarks are portrayed as sympathetic, their eventuality does not inspire enhanced interspecies relationships with nonhuman animals and leads to an explicit increase in meat-eating. The preservation of carnism is central to the Clayarks’ attempts to maintain their humanity. Clay’s Ark begins with Eli, whose senses having evolved “in ways not normally thought human,” killing nonhuman animals “with his bare hands” before “eating them raw and drinking their blood” (Butler, Ark 457). Conversely, the infected inhabitants of his later Clayark commune practice traditional, nineteenth-century “subsistence

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farming,” living alongside chickens, pigs, rabbits and cattle raised for slaughter (482). At the same time, Eli’s “changed body” continually tempts him by “making nonhuman behavior pleasurable” and—although he prefers his food “raw and unseasoned”—he continues eating “cooked food” in order to “cling to as much of his humanity as he could” (515). The other infected humans face similar challenges. Gwyn notices how chickens now “smell good raw … and alive,” Eli’s Clayark son Jacob begins to think “uninfected people smell like food” while (514, 624). As the later-set Patternmaster attests, the Clayarks eventually embrace their anthropophagous instincts. The ethics of meat-eating itself are never investigated, however, with the alleged “humanity” of the Patternist series’ human characters consistently asserted via their adherence to traditional carnism. Xenogenesis Interspecies hybridity and the preservation of “humanity” are again foregrounded alongside overt engagements with vegetarianism in the Xenogenesis trilogy, wherein humans are preserved from nuclear extinction by extra-terrestrial “gene traders” called Oankali. The Oankali are non-­ hierarchical and practice ethical vegetarianism, which they attempt to instil in their human subjects. Again, however, meat-eating is represented an essential aspect of human culture, which is maintained in opposition to the Oankali’s interference. The Oankali themselves, moreover, are far more nefarious than they first appear, having primarily salvaged humanity to feed of its genetic material and ultimately intending consume the Earth’s entire ecosystem on order to continue their colonisation of space. The first instalment, Dawn (1987), presents numerous parallels between the Oankali’s treatment of humans and how humans treat other animals. Centuries after the nuclear obliteration of life on Earth, the novel’s human protagonist, Lilith Iyapo, is awakened from stasis aboard the Oankali’s gigantic plant-like ship and charged with assembling a group of humans to reintroduce to the revived Earth. Her situation, and that of the other humans, has overt implications of slavery. Indeed, Butler first conceived of the Oankali as slave traders, who would have featured in a continuation of Patternist’s “Missionaries” narrative (Canavan 93). Nevertheless, it is the speciesist aspects of their treatment that are explicitly invoked in the text itself. As Lilith acknowledges, she is merely being treated how humans “used to treat animals,” with her and the other

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humans being subjected to a “captive breeding program” (Butler, Dawn 63). By manipulating her genes, the Oankali cure Lilith of cancer and grant her the ability to manipulate aspects of their ship, along with enhanced strength, a bolstered immune system and improved memory. Although she eventually embraces her enhancements, Lilith is initially horrified that the Oankali have altered her body “without her consent” (36). Comparisons to carnism are also emphasised via Lilith’s frequent references to herself as a “judas goat” (68, 150, 237, 241). Although saved from extinction and ostensibly empowered, Lilith considers her treatment subhuman and her humanity compromised. The Oankali present themselves as ecological preservationists who also enforce vegetarianism. They neither “kill animals” for Lilith, “nor allow her to kill them” while aboard their ship (90). Instead of meat, she and the other preserved humans are fed “fake meat” made mostly from soybeans and Oankali plants produced by the ship, which draws “on its own substance to make print reconstructions of whatever each cabinet had been taught to produce” (91, 115). The Oankali themselves are reformed carnivores, whose ancestors’ stings began the “digestive process before they even began to eat” (31). The stasis pods they preserve the humans in are also genetically altered carnivorous plants that originally preserved their prey while eating them alive (55–56). The Oankali do not make humanity herbivorous, however, telling them they will be “free to keep and kill animals again” on Earth. Even so, they refuse to feed the humans meat while on the ship, since they “can get along without it” (143). Although not enforced, the adoption vegetarianism is heavily encouraged by the Oankali, who explicitly refute meat-eating as a biological necessity. Meat is nevertheless represented as an overwhelming desire of the novel’s human characters. There is not a single “voluntary vegetarian” among the humans Lilith awakens in order to repopulate the Earth (143). Instead, they all vocally demand meat, often turning to violence when it is withheld. The first other human Lilith is introduced to aboard the ship talks about how he dreams of before attempting to rape her (91). The first human Lilith herself awakens also immediately asks for a steak, referring to the Oankali’s reconstituted food as “plaster of Paris garbage” (127). Another of Lilith’s brood, a “large, angry, not particularly bright woman” named Jean Pelerin later demands “an end to the meatless diet” before attacking Lilith when she explains the Oankali’s vegetarian policies (143). Lilith herself claims she is “content” with the Oankali’s vegetarian meals, although she still misses meat “occasionally” (91). Once released into an

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Earth-like “training room,” she immediately begins spear fishing, with herself and the other humans henceforth enjoying regular meals of fish and turtle meat that repulse the Oankali (235). Moreover, while the Oankali permit the slaughter and consumption of nonhuman animals in preparation for repopulating the Earth, human slaughter is expressly forbidden. The “murderer” Curt is forbidden from returning to Earth after killing Lilith’s lover Joseph, who Curt considers an “animal” due to his genetic enhancements (224–25). Despite their apparent opposition to speciesism, the Oankali maintain a moral distinction between the “murder” a human and the slaughter of nonhuman animals for inessential eating. Vegetarianism is thereby exclusively represented as a repressive, alien imposition, while carnism is depicted as both desirable and seemingly essential to humanity. Carnism continues to be depicted as an essential aspect of human culture in the later Xenogenesis novels. Adulthood Rites (1988) is set on Earth during the human rehabilitation and is narrated by Lilith’s human/ Oankali hybrid son Akin, who is kidnapped by a renegade group of human “Resisters” who reject the Oankali’s genetic and cultural impositions. Like the Oankali, Akin does not eat “fish or meat,” whose consumption will presumably make him “sick” (343). He also possesses enhanced empathy, having any pain he causes “channelled” back upon himself (254). Conversely, the human Resisters are again represented as violent carnists. Although privy to plenty of fish, they crave “real meat,” dreaming of “steaks and chops and roasts and burgers” (330). One of the resisters also shoots an agouti “not because he was hungry for its meat but because he wanted to hurt and frighten” Akin, who then euthanises the small rodent with his poison to relieve its “terrible pain” (332). As in Dawn, (often male-perpetrated) violence is invariably associated with interspecies cruelty and carnism. Lilith’s group of Oankali-integrated humans also establish fish farms and genetically alter “bees, wasps, earthworms, beetles, ants, and other small animals,” along with plants, to produce “new foods” (Rites 297). Cathy M. Peppers considers the humans in Lilith’s hybrid-­ community to represent a harmonious reinterpretation of “Woman the Gatherer,” in contrast to the Resisters’ replication of the heretical “Man the Hunter” narrative, whereby they reinstate racial segregation, organised religion, firearms production, “nuclear” family units and sex trafficking (57–58). As Peppers also recognises, however, Butler’s trilogy instead “privileges” a “third choice,” promised by Lilith and the other humans’ hybrid children (59). Haraway concurs, praising how “Butler writes not of

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Cain or [Noah’s son] Ham,” but of Lilith—the “repudiated wife of Adam”—whose interspecies offspring promise “the possibility of figuring something other than the Second Coming of the sacred image” (“Biopolitics” 227). Indeed, while the human/Oankali hybrids are genetically incapable of carnism, humans on both sides continue to kill fish “for reasons that don’t have much to do with nutrition” in attempt to preserve their “Humanity” (sic) (Butler, Imago 676). Although embracing the Oankali leads to radical reinterpretations of traditional family and social structures, carnism is only ever reinforced. Enthusiasm for the Oankali’s vegetarianism is prominent among Xenogenesis scholarship. Vegan critical theorist Amie Breeze Harper considers it “clear” that the Oankali practice a mode of ecofeminist veganism, “based on the principles of Ahimsa, meaning non-violence towards all beings” (112–13). Nolan Belk similarly takes the Oankali’s vegetarianism “to show … that in the radically better world of the Oankali (and by implication in the here-and-now?), protein can be taken from nuts instead of meat” (376, parentheses original). As Canavan acknowledges, idealisation of the Oankali is “probably the ‘intended’ reading,” given how Butler “significantly stacks the deck” in their favour (101–2). However, in contrast to Vint’s declaration that “the Oankali never mistreat the humans in any way,” Canavan contends that they are instead “gaslighters” who “do almost nothing but harm the humans, in almost literally every possible way,” with their seemingly utopian intervention revealing itself as a “plain retelling of the brutal history of imperialism” once stripped of its “specific science fictional context” (Canavan 104, 106; quoting Vint, Bodies 65). Jovian Parry concurs, arguing that the Oankali “forcibly repudiate the ecofeminist aim of cultivating an ecological network of distinct and interacting agencies of alterity” by incorporating and ultimately “consuming” other species (207). As Canavan further observes, “pro-Oankali critics “almost always endorse some form of the Oankali’s claim of essentialism as a necessary premise” for their endorsement of the Oankali’s supposed post-imperial, posthuman cosmopolitanism (113). If humanity’s alleged hierarchical tendencies are biologically imperative, then they cannot (and arguably should not) be overcome, without genetic intervention. To accept the Oankali’s non-hierarchical organisation and inherent aversion to meat-eating as superior moral positions is therefore to accept human carnism as normal and natural, if not necessary. Peppers points out that Butler shows several male characters resist the “presumably biological imperative” of hierarchical violence, casting doubt on the Oankali’s claims

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about human nature (58). As discussed above, however, none of the exclusively human characters ever actively abstain from meat-eating. The Oankali’s gene-trading is also perhaps closer to carnism than they let on. The Oankali learn about their subjects and other objects by “tasting” their genetic material. Although “taste” is merely an approximation of their sensations, Butler makes the comparisons between the Oankali’s gene-trading and common carnism explicit. The third Xenogenesis novel, Imago (1989), is narrated by another of Lilith’s hybrid offspring Jodahs, who recalls her telling one of his Oankali fathers, Nikanj:7 “It’s a good thing your people don’t eat meat. If you did, the way you talk about us, our flavors and your hunger and your need to taste us, I think you would eat us instead of fiddling with our genes” (689). Their method might be different, but the Oankali are effectively—and consciously—consuming humanity. As Nikanj tells Jodahs: “We feed on them every day … And in the process, we keep them in good health and mix children for them. But they don’t always have to know what we’re doing” (689). The Oankali are only capable of eradicating carnism by incorporating it, Akin observing that while “humans put animals in cages or tried to keep them from straying,” the Oankali “simply bred animals who did not want to stray and who enjoyed doing what they were intended to do” (Rites 446). The Oankali’s preservation efforts are equally suspicious. Jodahs maintains that the Oankali only ever kill “to save life” (Imago 548). In Adulthood Rites, however, it is revealed that rather than being benevolent preservationists, the Oankali are actually cultivating the Earth’s organic materials in order to construct another of their spaceships, which will leave the Earth “as lifeless as the moon” (365). An agreement is eventually reached, whereby human Resisters are voluntarily relocated to a biologically terraformed Mars, although the Oankali expect them to self-obliterate again, due to their allegedly innate hierarchical tendencies. A true preservationist effort would perhaps see the Resisters granted their native habitat of Earth, while the Oankali and their hybrid followers would cultivate Mars for their materials. The Oankali will not relinquish their hold on Earth, however, leading Butler’s fellow feminist science fiction author Joan Slonczewski to liken the Resisters’ relocation to that of “Native Americans forced onto a 7  Rather than a single mother and father, Oankali reproduction requires the mixing of genetics from two different “mothers” and “fathers,” which is then incubated within an Oankali of their third “neuter” sex, so that the resulting child has five different parents of various genders (and species, in the case of the hybrids).

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reservation,” while also noting their indifference to “the fact that all of Earth’s species will ultimately vanish” (“Biologist’s Response” 151, 154).8 The Oankali are thereby recast as environmentally exploitative eugenic colonisers, rather than philanthropic preservationists. Again, Butler places more overt emphasis on the Oankali’s speciesim than their colonialism or environmental exploitation. Butler’s exploration of interspecies ethics in the Xenogenesis trilogy is even more complex than that of the Patternist series. It is also one whereby her engagement and seeming endorsement of vegetarianism as a more ethical and environmentally friendly mode of existence is made explicit. Nevertheless, Butler ultimately represents meat-eating as an essential cultural and perhaps even biological aspect of humanity, implying that the only way to end carnism is to end the human race itself. Later Parables Following the Xenogenesis trilogy, Butler began working on a new novel— tentatively titled Justice—wherein empathy had become a “contagious,” “communicable disease” that renders rapists unable “to rape anyone again because they would feel the victim’s terror and pain” (Canavan 121). Justice eventually morphed into the Parable series, which details the establishment of a new religion in a climate and capitalism-ravished United States by a “hyperempathetic” young girl named Lauren Olamina. Unlike the infected rapists of Justice, the short-lived empaths in Mind of My Mind or the human/Oankali hybrids of Xenogenesis, Lauren does not directly experience the pain she inflicts on other animals. Instead, she merely feels a “big, soft, strange ghost blow, like getting hit with a huge ball of air” (Sower 36). She is thereby perfectly capable of killing nonhuman animals, such as squirrels, rats and birds, who she contends “had to be killed” in order to protect her family’s crops (36–37). Butler thereby disregards the tangible suffering of nonhuman while representing their slaughter as necessary.

8  Slonczewski’s own John W. Campbell Award-winning feminist utopia, A Door into Ocean (1986), centres around a utopian species of post-human genetic engineers and features a vegetarian character whose abstention from meat-eating is inspired by having lived alongside “small thickly furred creatures whose semi-human existence reminded one of the continuum of flesh” (235–36). The majority of her utopians continue to eat meat, however.

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Although vegetarianism and animal ethics are not addressed in Kindred, Butler positions the human characters of her final novel, Fledgling, as willing cattle within a seemingly utopian extra-terrestrial vampire community. Fledgling was published the same year as Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), which popularised the burgeoning “vegetarian vampire” trend, whereby friendly vampires abstain from drinking human blood in favour of feeding from other animals.9 While many vegetarian and vegan critics have argued in favour of these modern vampire’s so-called “vegetarianism” due to its promotion of dietary abstinence and potential ecological implications, it also reinforces traditional species hierarchies and speciesist divisions between human and nonhuman subjectivities. Butler, however, goes even further in depicting a seemingly benevolent vampiric species, called the Ina, for whom the consumption of raw meat is essential to their biological wellbeing, with the novel’s vampiric protagonist, Shori, encouraging the humans she encounters to simply eat what their “body wants” (25). Rather than being transformed into vampires, those Shori bites are made into docile dependents who leave human society to live in seeming harmony with the Ina. As always, Butler’s morality is complex and ambiguous, with Canavan characterising the novel a rewriting of Dawn from the Oankali perspective (165). Fledgling appears more intentionally utopian than the trilogy, however. The Ina’s human “symbionts”—who include an obvious Butler stand-in, in aging, Black author Theodora—leave behind dissatisfying lives, rather than facing-down extinction of the human race and all other life on Earth, and the novel itself has been received within the pages of Utopian Studies as “a vampiric vision where fixed categories and boundaries are challenged and human (or Ina) agency can instigate change” (Brox 392–93). Although critically imperfect, Butler ostensibly presents a “cattle utopia,” wherein humans occupy the idealised position envisioned by proponents of “humane,” free-range, organic farm animals. Despite her own ethical vegetarianism, Butler concluded her career consistently depicting neocarnist arrangements as part of seemingly utopian settings.

9  For further exploration and analysis of the “vegetarian vampire” trend, see Sophie Dungan, Reading the Vegetarian Vampire (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022); and Laura Wright, “Vegan Vampires: The Politics of Drinking Humans and Animals in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and True Blood,” The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror (University of Georgia Press, 2015).

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Conclusion Although the core texts of Moylan’s critical utopian canon largely maintain science fiction’s traditional utopian associations with vegetarianism, the broader movement is indicative of a neocarnist trend that represents meat-eating as ethically enticing and ecologically essential. In part, the move away from vegetarianism also indicates a move away from Abrahamic foundations. Authors like Le Guin, Piercy and especially Callenbach each present romanticised hunter-gatherer utopias, based on idealised interpretations of Native Californian cultures. Nevertheless, each of the authors’ Indigenously inspired carnist utopias continues to suggest a return to nature, with meat-eating now depicted as an essential human quality, rather than an aberrant corruption. Piercy’s dystopian writing also positions traditional animal farming as a natural, utopian alternative to dehumanising corporate depravity. Similar sentiments pervade Butler’s science fiction, wherein notions of humanity and interspecies ethics are frequently foregrounded. Yet, despite her complex investigations and own eventual vegetarianism, Butler consistently represents carnism as a crucial aspect of human culture and possible biological imperative. While the critical utopian mechanics may not necessarily have been invented in the 1970s, the concentrated critical utopian period of the late-twentieth century indicates a radical departure from the traditional utopian vegetarian tradition, toward an ecologically driven, neocarnist ideology which continues to dominate modern science fiction and its prominent “climate fiction” subgenre.

References Adams, Carol J.  The Sexual Politics of Meat: A Feminist-Vegan Critical Theory, 25th anniversary ed. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Adams, Douglas. The Restaurant at the End of the Universe. The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy: A Trilogy in Four Parts, 151–308. Pan, 1992. Anderson, Poul. Satan’s World. Lancer Books, 1968. Baccolini, Raffaella. “Gender and Genre in the Feminist Critical Dystopias of Katharine Burdekin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler.” Future Females, the Next Generation: New Voices and Velocities in Feminist Science Fiction Criticism, edited by Marleen S. Barr, 13–34. Rowman & Littlefield, 2000. Baccolini, Raffaella and Tom Moylan. “Critical Dystopia and Possibilities.” Conclusion to Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, 233–50. Routledge, 2003.

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Beal, Frances. “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre.” Interview with Octavia E. Butler. The Black Scholar 17, no. 2 (March/April, 1986): 14–18. Belk, Nolan. “The Certainty of the Flesh: Octavia Butler’s Use of the Erotic in the Xenogenesis Trilogy.” Utopian Studies 19, no. 3 (2008): 369–89. Brox, Ali. Every Age Has the Vampire It Needs: Octavia Butler’s Vampiric Vision in Fledgling.” Utopian Studies 19, no. 3 (2008): 391–9. Bryant, Dorothy. The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You. Berkeley, 1976. Bulleid, Joshua. “Better Societies for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.” Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction, edited by Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Champion and Andrew Milner, 49–73. Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Butler, Octavia E. Adulthood Rites. Xenogenesis, 245–504. Guild America, 1989. ———. Clay’s Ark. Seed to Harvest, 453–624. Grand Central, 2007. ———. Dawn. Xenogenesis, 3–244. Guild America, 1989. ———. “Eye Witness.” O, The Oprah Magazine 3(5) (May, 2002): 79. ———. Fledgling. Seven Stories Press, 2011. ———. “Furor Scribendi.” Bloodchild and Other Stories, 2nd ed. 137–44. Seven Stories Press, 2005. ———. Imago. Xenogenesis, 505–726. Guild America, 1989. ———. “Lost Races of Science Fiction.” Octavia E. Butler, by Gerry Canavan, 181–86. University of Illinois Press, 2016. ———. Mind of My Mind. Seed to Harvest, 255–452. Grand Central, 2007. ———. Parable of the Sower. The Women’s Press, 1995. ———. Patternmaster. Seed to Harvest, 625–765. Grand Central, 2007. ———. “Positive Obsession.” Bloodchild and Other Stories, 2nd ed. 123–36. Seven Stories Press, 2005. ———. Survivor. Sigwick and Jackson, 1978. ———. Wild Seed. Seed to Harvest, 1–254. Grand Central, 2007. Callenbach, Ernest. “Chocco.” Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, 189–214. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. ———. Ecology: A Pocket Guide, rev. ed. University of California Press, 2008. ———. Ecotopia. Banyan Tree, 2004. ———. Ecotopia Emerging. Bantam, 1982. ———. The Ecotopian Encyclopedia for the 80’s: A Survival Guide for the Age of Inflation. And/Or Press, 1980. ———. Living Cheaply with Style. Ronin, 2000. Canavan, Gerry. Octavia E. Butler. University of Illinois Press, 2016. Charnas, Suzy McKee. Walk to the End of the World. Walk to the End of the World and Motherlines, 1–215. The Women’s Press, 1989. Constantine, Murray [Katherine Burdekin]. Swastika Night. Victor Gollancz, 1940. Delano, Sterling F. Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia. The Belknap Press, 2004. Delany, Samuel R. Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand. Grafton, 1986. ———. Triton. Corgi, 1977.

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Due, Tananarive. Afterword to The Bloomsbury Handbook to Octavia E.  Butler. Edited by Gregory J. Hampton and Kendra R. Parker, 274–80. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Fiddes, Nick. Meat: A Natural Symbol. Routledge, 1992. Ford, Jeffry Alan. “Appreciate Animals to Pieces with a Fork and Knife.” Detroit Free Press, 2 May, 1998. Fudge, Erica. Animal. Reaktion. 2002. Gearhart, Sally Miller. The Wanderground. The Women’s Press, 1985. Haraway, Donna. “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Disease.” Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature, 203–30. Routledge, 1991. ———. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern Science. Routledge, 1989. Harper, Amie Breeze. “The Absence of Meat in Oankali Dietary Philosophy: An Eco- Feminist-Vegan Analysis of Octavia Butler’s Dawn.” The Black Imagination: Science Fiction, Futurism and the Speculative, edited by Sandra Jackson and Julie Moody-Freeman, 111–29. Peter Lang, 2011. Hart, Donna, and Robert W. Sussman. Man the Hunted: Primates, Predators, and Human Evolution, expanded ed. Westview Press, 2009. Hudson, William Henry. A Crystal Age. E. P. Dutton, 1887. Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. Verso, 2005. Joy, Melanie. “Understanding Neocarnism: How Vegan Advocates Can Appreciate and Respond to ‘Happy Meat,’ Locavorism, and ‘Paleo Dieting.’” One Green Planet, 29 July, 2019. https://www.onegreenplanet.org/lifestyle/ understanding-­neocarnism/. Kazez, Jean. Animalkind: What We Owe to Animals. Wiley-Blackwell, 2010. Kroeber, A.  L. Handbook of the Indians of California. Government Printing Office, 1925. Le Guin, Ursula K. Always Coming Home. Grafton, 1988. ———. “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction.” Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, 165–70. Paladin, 1992. ———. “Cheek by Jowl: Animals in Children’s Literature.” Cheek by Jowl: Talks & Essays on How & Why Fantasy Matters, 43–108. Aqueduct Press, 2009. ———. The Dispossessed. Granada, 1981. ———. Gifts. Harcourt, 2006. ———. Introduction to The Time Machine, by H. G. Wells. Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, 179–83. Small Beer Press, 2016. ———. The Left Hand of Darkness. Ace, 2010. ———. “A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy.” No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, 128–30. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. ———. “The New Atlantis.” Dream’s Edge Science Fiction Stories About the Future of Planet Earth, edited by Terry Carr, 185–205. Sierra Club Books, 1980.

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———. The Word for World is Forest. Tor, 2010. ———. “Without Egg.” No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, 173–78. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. McCaffery, Larry, and Jim McMenamin. “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler.” Interview with Octavia E. Butler. Across the Wounded Galaxies: Interviews with Contemporary American Science Fiction Writers, edited by Larry McCaffery, 54–70. University of Illinois Press, 1990. Milner, Andrew. Locating Science Fiction. Liverpool University Press, 2012. Milner, Andrew, and J.  R. Burgmann. Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach. Liverpool University Press, 2020. Moylan, Tom. “The Critical Dystopia.” Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky: Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia, 183–99). Westview Press, 2000. ———. Demand The Impossible: Science Fiction and the Utopian Imagination, 2nd ed. Edited by Raffaella Baccolini. Peter Lang, 2014. ———. “N-H-N’: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dialectics of Ecology.” Arena 35/36 (2011): 22–44. Page, Michael [R.]. “Evolution and Apocalypse in the Golden Age.” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, 40–55. Wesleyan University Press, 2014. Parry, Jovian. Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction. PhD thesis, York University, 2019. Peppers, Cathy M. “Dialogic Origins and Alien Identities in Butler’s Xenogenesis.” Science Fiction Studies 22, no. 1 (March, 1991): 47–62. Piercy, Marge. Body of Glass [aka He, She and It]. Penguin, 1992. ———. Dance the Eagle to Sleep. PM Press, 2012. ———. Small Changes. Penguin, 1987. ———. Woman on the Edge of Time. The Women’s Press, 1979. Plumwood, Val. Environmental Culture: The Ecological Crisis of Reason. Routledge, 2002. Russ, Joanna. The Female Man. Gollancz, 2010. ———. “The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, July 1970.” Reviews of The Ship Who Sang, by Anne McCaffrey, Satan’s World, by Poul Anderson, Report on Probability A, by Brian W.  Aldiss and I Sing the Body Electric, by Ray Bradbury. The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews, 39–46. Liverpool University Press, 2007. ———. “The Women’s Review of Books, VI:7, April 1989.” Letter to the Editors. The Country You Have Never Seen: Essays and Reviews, 287–88. Liverpool University Press, 2007. Sands, Peter. “Octavia Butler’s Chiastic Canniablistics.” Utopian Studies 14, no. 1 (2003): 1–14. Sargent, Lyman Tower. “The Three Faces of Utopianism Revisited.” Utopian Studies 5, no. 1 (1994): 1–37.

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———. “US Eutopias in the 1980s and 1990s: Self-Fashioning in a World of Multiple Identities.” Utopianism/Literary Utopias and National Cultural Identities: A Comparative Perspective, edited by Paola Spinozzi, 221–32. Cotepra, 2001. Scott, Jody. Passing for Human. Strange Particle Press, 2015. ebook. Shawl, Nisi. “The Third Parable.” Strange Matings: Science Fiction, Feminism, African American Voices, And Octavia E. Butler, edited by Rebecca J. Holden and Nisi Shawl, 208–13. Aqueduct, 2013. Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818 Text). Oxford University Press, 2008. Slonczewski, Joan. A Door into Ocean. The Women’s Press, 1987. ———. “Octavia Butler’s Xenogenesis Trilogy: A Biologist’s Response.” Luminescent Threads: Connections to Octavia E.  Butler, edited by Alexandra Pierce and Mimi Mondal, 149–55. Twelfth Planet Press, 2017. Stableford, Brian and John Clute. “Hudson, W H.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 3rd (online) ed. Edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nichols and Graham Sleight. Updated 12 September, 2022. https://sf-­encyclopedia. com/entry/hudson_w_h. Starhawk. The Fifth Sacred Thing. Thorsons, 1997. Taylor, Angus. Animals & Ethics: An Overview of the Philosophical Debate. 3rd ed. Broadview Press, 2009. Weitzenfeld, Adam and Melanie Joy. “An Overview of Anthropocentrism, Humanism, and Speciesism in Critical Animal Theory.” Counterpoints 448 (2013): 3–27. Vint, Sherryl. “Becoming Other: Animals, Kinship, and Butler’s ‘Clay’s Ark.’” Science Fiction Studies 32, no. 2 (July, 2005): 281–300. ———. Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction. University of Toronto Press, 2007.

CHAPTER 7

Where’s the Beef? Kim Stanley Robinson’s Carnist Climate Change Catastrophes

The United Nations Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO) estimates that animal agriculture contributes up to 18 percent of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. According to its 2006 report, Livestock’s Long Shadow, animal farming accounts for approximately 40 percent of anthropogenic emissions of methane, which has a potential atmospheric warming effect approximately twenty-three times that of carbon dioxide, along with almost 10 percent of anthropogenic carbon emissions and the overwhelming majority of nitrous and ammonia emissions (approximately 65 percent in each case) (112–14). As concerns over the environmental effects of climate change and sustainability have escalated, the FAO and other organisations—including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP)—have increasingly advised that any “substantial reduction” of agriculture’s environmental impacts will only be possible with “a substantial worldwide diet change, away from animal products” (UNEP 82). As Nick Fiddes acknowledged in 1991, “The litany of social and environmental sins associated with meat production could almost make one feel that meat alone is responsible for bringing the world to a state of ecological crisis” (210). Seán McCorry and John Miller have even referred to the current epoch as the “Carnocene,” in acknowledgement of how the Earth has been “profoundly and irrevocably damaged in order to accommodate an appetite for the flesh of other creatures” (7). Peter Singer © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_7

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similarly recognised, in Animal Liberation (1975), that “those who claim to care about the well-being of human beings and the preservation of our environment should become vegetarians for that reason alone” (221). Nevertheless, vegetarianism is often overlooked among more recent works of environmentally conscious utopia and science fiction. Arguably, no author has been more focussed on sustainability and the environment than Kim Stanley Robinson, who is “by far the most important of the core cli-fi writers” to have emerged from the science fiction tradition (Milner and Burgmann 65). He was named one of Time Magazine’s “Heroes of the Environment” in 2008 and gave the keynote address at the Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies’ 2019 Earth Day Conference, where he stressed the need to resolve food shortages while simultaneously addressing anthropogenic emissions (Morton; Kanost). He earlier described utopia and science fiction’s capacity to imagine alternative paradigms as a “a necessary survival strategy” in response to climate change (“Remarks” 9, 14). Science fiction’s ability to affect real-­ world climate policy has, of course, been demonstrated by US Senator Jim Inhofe (Republican, Oklahoma), who made Michael Crichton’s controversial climate conspiracy thriller State of Fear (2004) “required reading” for the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works in 2005 and invited its author to advise Congress on “how to consider diverse scientific opinion when making policy,” while declaring global warming “the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people” (Janofsky).1 Conversely, Robinson has often stressed the seriousness of climate change and environmental sustainability in his writing while also often invoking scientific bodies such as the UN organisations cited above. However, Robinson also regularly neglects to address meat-eating’s environmental impacts and is often openly antagonistic (or at least dismissive) toward vegetarianism, instead promoting the kind of “primitivist” eco-carnism, reminiscent of the critical utopias and dystopias examined in the previous chapter. The following analysis establishes a link between Robinson and previous carnist critical utopians through an examination of his 1994 collection 1  Despite Crichton’s scepticism about the human-caused effects of climate change, he acknowledges that humans are “the probable cause” of increased carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere (State 676). He also has a character give a fleeting recommendation of vegetarianism’s health benefits in State of Fear (518), although it is likely intended ironically, since it is made under false pretences—the protagonist suffering from a blue-ringed octopus sting rather than a cholesterol-induced heart attack.

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Future Primitive:  The New Ecotopias. It then shifts focus to Robinson’s own work, focusing on his three major trilogies: Three Californias (1984–1990), the Mars trilogy (1992–1996) and Science in the Capital (2004–2006), and concludes with a brief examination of his newest novel, The Ministry for the Future (2020).

Future Primitive The primitivist ecotopian tradition established by Ernest Callenbach and Ursula K. Le Guin is explicitly continued throughout Robinson’s Future Primitive collection, which he claims represents “a more accurate and sophisticated paradigm of the world as a vast organism, complexly interoperative in ways not previously imagined,” by combining “visions of the post-modern and palaeolithic” (10–11). Its stories are overwhelmingly informed by the idealisation of Native Americans, with Robinson specifically noting Gary Snyder’s poem “Tomorrow’s Song” (1974), which opens the collection, along with Howard Waldrop’s “Mary Margaret Road-Grader” (1976) and Callenbach’s “Chocco” for their invocation of Native American traditions (Robinson, Future Primitive 341, 345). Le Guin’s contribution, “Newton’s Sleep” (1991), continues her own romanticisation of Native American cultures, as does Gene Wolfe’s “‘A Story’ by John V. Marsch,” which involves an indigenous extra-terrestrial culture, who are further characterised in his novel The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) as “ever eager for meat” (246). Conversely, the protagonist of Wolfe’s later, and much more influential Book of the New Sun (1980–1983) is “no longer sure that killing animals to eat is something we are meant to do” after briefly visiting a seemingly utopian future he supposedly brings about and from which a photosynthetic “green man” he frequently encounters likely originates (Autarch 141). Nevertheless, Wolfe’s earlier depiction of idealised Indigenous carnism is consistent with the often hunting-focussed utopian arrangements promoted throughout Future Primitive. An intrinsic carnivorousness, similar to that endorsed by Arthur C.  Clarke in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), is also contended in Future Primitive via Robert Silverberg’s “House of Bones” (1988), wherein a time-traveller finds himself living among a Cro-Magnon tribe. Silverberg’s emphasis on human carnivorousness is particularly curious, given his frequent endorsements of vegetarianism elsewhere. In his earlier story “The Wind and the Rain” (1973)—collected in Terry Carr’s earlier ecotopian

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anthology, Dream’s Edge (1980)—Silverberg recognises “the uncontrolled release of methane into the atmosphere” as “one of the most serious problems” contributing to environmental degradation while also identifying cattle farming as a “major contributor” to its overproduction (“Wind” 286). Silverberg also states, in his autobiography, that he goes “out of [his] way to not to take [animal] life,” and claims he has “no doubt at all” he would be a vegetarian if he had to hunt and butcher animals himself. However, he excuses himself for his continued carnivorism on the basis that he was “created an omnivore” who looks upon meat as a necessary part of his diet (Other Spaces 11–12). He also suggests that the eternal order of his acclaimed novel The Book of Skulls (1971) derive their immortality, in part, from their vegetarian diet (133). Nevertheless, Silverberg’s ethical and environmental endorsements are not apparent in his Future Primitive, which only reinforces the collection’s suggestion of an inherent human carnism. Even when not explicitly informed by supposedly “primitive” cultures, Robinson’s “New Ecotopias” are often overtly carnist. The protagonist of Pat Murphy’s “In the Abode of the Snows” (1986) rejects Napoli civilisation, where vegetarian daal is a staple, in favour of hunting mice in the wilderness (51); R. A. Lafferty’s “Boomer Flats” (1971) centres around a Neanderthal-like race who eat frogs, fish and owls (55), while Frederick Turner’s poem From The New World (1985) envisions farmers who “raise and slaughter their own meat,” in a land where “the lamb / and pepper-­ ham here are especially tender and choice” (225). Robinson also praises Gary Kilworth’s novels Hunter’s Moon (1989) and Midnight’s Sun (1990), which are told from the respective perspectives of a fox and a wolf, for “powerfully assert[ing] the ‘peoplehood’ of animals” (Future Primitive 342), although neither make an argument for vegetarianism. Kilworth’s Future Primitive contribution “Hogfoot Right and Bird-Hands” (1987) is set in a time when cats are rare and androids common, possibly suggesting a lineage with the vegetarian future of Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). The only tale in the collection that directly addresses vegetarianism, however, is taken from Paul Park’s Soldiers of Paradise (1987), which inverts science fiction’s vegetarian trend by pitting a caste of suppressed carnivores against a ruling class of vegetarian “barbarians” (Park 229). Despite utopia and science fiction’s many historical endorsements of vegetarianism, Future Primitive contains no positive endorsements of vegetarianism, with many of its authors also being united by their

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portrayal of carnism as an essential or, at least, expected element of their sustainable societies.

Three Californias The assumption of continued carnism, common to the Furture Primitive stories, persists throughout Robinson’s own writing, beginning with the ecologically focussed Three Californias trilogy. The trilogy’s first volume, The Wild Shore (1984), is a post-catastrophe pastoral, focussing on a rural Californian commune, following a nuclear war that has obliterated the United States’ industrialised society. The majority of the commune’s food supply is derived from fishing and seafood due to its coastal setting, with some land animals (such as deer) also hunted for their meat. Despite its emphasis on animal food, The Wild Shore remains reliant upon the Romantic interpretation of the Abrahamic Fall narrative that inspired much of science fiction’s longstanding vegetarian tradition. Robinson has referred to it as his “after-the-fall” novel (Foote 278), and the novel’s narrator Hank Fletcher recites passages from John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667), along with lines from William Shakespeare’s Richard II (ca. 1595), which characterise Eden as a “fortress built by Nature for herself / Against infection and the hand of war” in its early chapters (23–24). Fletcher’s teacher Tom interprets Shakespeare’s line “With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder,” as America attempting to “to eat the world and chok[ing] on it” (24). However, the characters in The Wild Shore later express the desire to continue their failed whaling attempts, with Fletcher only resisting due to the violence inflicted upon human whalers in a previous expedition, rather than concern for the whales themselves or ecological balance in general (245). Rather than establishing a harmonious relationship, Robinson’s agrarians consider nature something to be dominated. The trilogy’s second novel, The Gold Coast (1988), depicts an analogue-­ cyberpunk dystopia, where environmental conservation has been foregone in favour of weapons research and urban expansion. As with most urban dystopias, the novel suggests a suspicion of mass-produced meats, with the characters debating the merits of a bug-infested Burger King Whopper against a McDonalds Big Mac made of petroleum “sludge,” with soy hamburgers also indicating poverty, rather than economic or ethical superiority (271, 102). The Gold Coast also proposes a distinct separation from the largely Abrahamic notions of naturalism that inform The Wild Shore and

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other, earlier dystopias, due to its protagonist, Jim McPherson, becoming entrenched in an environmentalist movement explicitly inspired by Native American traditions. In a political pamphlet, McPherson describes early San Franciscans as “Wandering members of the Shoshonean tribes” whose men hunted with bows and arrows while the women gathered roots and berries. These idealised “hunter gatherer” attitudes are positioned in direct opposition to Christianity, through the pamphlet’s allegations against Christian missionaries for eradicating the Native American traditions (116), and, indirectly, through McPherson’s opposition to the Christian character Lucy (22). As in Le Guin’s Always Coming Home, the carnism of Californian natives is downplayed through the pamphlet’s assertion that “acorns and pine nuts were their staples,” although their animal-skin outfits and ritual sacrifice of wild animals are also romanticised (115–16). Like Callenbach and Le Guin’s earlier ecotopias, the Native American-inspired “return to nature” in The Gold Coast constitutes more active participation in carnist rituals, rather than the Abrahamic reinstating of a “natural” abstinence from animal flesh. The third—and most explicitly utopian—of Robinson’s Three Californias, Pacific Edge (1990), details the defence of the sustainable community of El Modena by a group of Green Party activists against encroaching capitalist influences. Tom Moylan has recognised the novel as an important late entry in the critical utopian canon (“Utopia” 4). It is also perhaps one of the first major utopian novels to acknowledge the threat of contemporary climate change, with an early flashback (to the year 2012) revealing newspaper headlines including: “World temperature up another degree Centigrade” and “Species going extinct” (Robinson, Pacific Edge 61, italics removed). Yet despite the threat of global warming and presumed sympathy for disappearing species, Robinson continues to echo Callenbach’s and Le Guin’s neglect of vegetarianism by favouring supposedly more sustainable and “naturalistic” animal farming methods. The similarities of environmental policy, especially to Le Guin, are not incidental. Le Guin is listed, by the newly arrived town-lawyer Oscar, as one of the “California writers” (sic) who inform the utopian community’s ecological vision (269). Robinson further invokes the influence of Le Guin, along with her father’s academic studies of Native Americans, through the character of Sally Tallhawk, an environmental lawyer of Paiutes heritage, who works at the fictional Kroeber College (98). However, rather than endorsing a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, Pacific Edge

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co-opts a number of science-fictional technologies previously employed in the pursuit of vegetarianism. The advanced technologies, such as scientific animal farming practices and self-sufficient houses, that allow the El Modenans to lead a more ecologically friendly existence are derived from “Spaceship technology” (Pacific Edge 125). The emphasis on extra-terrestrial technology recalls Clarke, whose 2001 is alluded to in Pacific Edge (148), and whose influence on Robinson was discussed in Chap. 4. Unlike Clarke, however, Robinson’s technologies never replace animal farming as a means of food production; they only make it more convenient and efficient. Much of Orange County’s chicken stock is provided in Pacific Edge by El Modena’s scientifically supported chicken farm (139), and houses are developed with indoor ponds so that the occupants may source a “good bit of [their] protein” from homegrown fish, who are automatically killed and converted by the home computer into refrigerated fillets (127). Some apprehension is shown toward the in-home animal slaughter by Oscar, originally from Chicago, who initially reacts to the idea of the indoor fish-farms by declaring he does not “like the idea of eating [his] houseguests” (ibid.). His concerns are immediately dismissed by the El Modenans, who expect new citizens to simply “get used to it” (127). The skinning of rabbits is earlier described as a “grisly task,” which comes complete with a “tub for the blood and guts” (56). The slaughter of other animals in Pacific Edge is thereby only briefly acknowledged and—as with Robinson’s other California novels—no serious objection to animal slaughter is ever considered.

Mars Trilogy and Other Space Colonisation Novels Robinson’s Mars trilogy—consisting of the novels Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993) and Blue Mars (1996)—is perhaps his most well-­ known and widely read work. The series depicts the colonisation and eventual terraforming of Mars over a period of two centuries, spanning nearly two thousand pages of intricate detail (and well over if the Martians (1999) short story suite is included). Robinson, however, leaves the eating arrangements of his Martian utopianists largely undescribed, although they certainly aren’t vegetarians. The initial colonists bring animals to farm with them from Earth, hoping that their offspring might be eaten, after radiation renders their first generation inedible (Red Mars 73–74, 84), with roast beef becoming available within the next two decades (at least to

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the upper classes) (321). Both chicken and fish have become fixtures by the beginning of Green Mars and the farming of animals has become common among certain settlements by the novel’s end (29, 532). Confusingly, the introduction of animal food to Mars coincides with concerns that the colonists’ greenhouse-grown vegetables are insufficient to support their growing human population, and while problems persist in introducing animals to support emerging ecological systems on the planet’s surface (30, 230). As Clarke recognised, space colonisation presents situations where resources are at their most valuable and scarce and therefore require the greatest levels of efficiency. Clarke (who has an asteroid named after him the Mars series) considered Red Mars to be “the best novel on the colonization of Mars that has ever been written” (Robinson, Blue Mars “Praise for Red Mars”). Yet Robinson ignores Clarke’s warnings about the impracticalities of carnism on long-term space voyages and extra-­terrestrial settlements. As Robert Markley observes, Robinson’s Martian colonists are only able to achieve control over their off-world environment at the cost of “Massive investments of labor, capital, and resources” (774), and the regular availability of meat on Mars in lieu of stabilised ecosystems and resource efficiency suggests that economic and environmental efficiency are less of a priority to the colonists than the ability to continue carnism on the new planet. The expectation and ease of maintaining meat-eating off-world depicted in the Mars trilogy also conflicts with Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), which, as Rob Latham claims, “probably did more than any other single book to bring ecological awareness into the centre of the genre” (87). Herbert stated that he intended Dune to be “an environmental awareness handbook” and Robinson claims to have read it as “an ecological primer on desert survival” (Herbert, New World 5; Canavan and Robinson 253). Yet while Dune does not directly engage with vegetarianism, the appendix regarding its titular planet’s ecology reveals that “stock animals” are “rare” among its central colony, due to the lack of an adequate water supply (470). Herbert also echoes Clarke’s endorsement of artificial meat in his less rigorous ConSentiency series (1958–1977), wherein, although live animals are raised for food on a “a few of the outback planets,” animal meat has been replaced by synthetic “pseudoflesh” (Whipping Star 60). Nevertheless, animal farming’s immense resource requirements did not seem to bother Robinson when writing his own space colonisation epic. The Mars series also continues Robinson’s idealisation of Native American and Palaeolithic ecologies. The head of the colony’s initial farm

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project, the Japanese biologist Hiroko Ai and her partner, the stowaway Desmond “Coyote” Hawkins, develop the Martian “landscape religion” of “Areophany,” which Coyote characterises as “a consciousness of Mars as a physical space suffused with kami,”2 which he describes as the “spiritual energy or power that rested in the land itself” (Robinson, Red Mars 271, italics in original). Hiroko’s Japanese influence on Aerophany is clear. However, while Coyote’s moniker perhaps suggests a Native American influence, he is rather of Tobagan descent, deriving his alias from his activities as a fugitive in the Martian wilderness (296). Even so, the activities of Coyote and Hiroko’s son Nirgal—an influential spiritual and political leader in his own right—resemble many of the Native American-inspired activities described in previous ecological utopias, along with the palaeolithic practices championed by Robinson in his later Science in the Capital trilogy. Nadia Chernyshevski—a future Martian president—also adds to Aerophany’s primitivist characterisation, interpreting it as “a kind of life that had certain palaeolithic aspects to it, harking back perhaps to some urculture behind all their differences” (Green Mars 487). Primitivist spiritual systems such as Robinson’s Areophany have perhaps fallen out of favour within more recent science fiction science fiction, with the protagonist of what is possibly the most popular twenty-first century story of Mars colonisation—Andy Weir’s The Martian (2013)—criticising botanists who spout similar ecological philosophies as “hippies who thought they could return to some natural world system. Somehow feeding seven billion people through pure gathering” (12–13). Weir’s novel also does not mention meat or animals beyond the need for animal nutrients to support further plant growth in the Martian ecosystem. Nevertheless, while Robinson’s ecological and spiritual reverence for meat-eating conflicts with many of the popular space colonisation stories that both preceded and followed his own, his works remain representative of the primitivist ecological movements endorsed by utopian writers such as Callenbach and Le Guin. As is often the case in Robinson’s works, his idealised hunter-gatherer lifestyle is also endorsed through its sexualisation. At one point, Nirgal falls in with a community of hunters who, like Le Guin’s Native American-­ inspired Kesh, refer to the animals as their “brothers” and “sisters” and give thanks as they butcher them (Blue Mars 463). Their leader, Zo, is introduced looking “vivid as a flame, blood streaks spattering her breasts and legs … her lean white body flowing like something visible in more 2

 Japanese: “divinity” or “spirit.”

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than three dimensions, strong back, long legs, round bottom” (459). The image of a blood-soaked huntress is repeated in Robinson’s Nebula award-­ winning 2312 (2012), when the novel’s protagonist, Swan Er Hong, is found with “her face greasy and streaks of blood on her hands” after a night of (illegally) poaching rabbits in an off-world natural park (54). As a former asteroid terrarium designer, Swan was once responsible for the preservation of traditional terrestrial ecosystems, which had been destroyed on Earth by climate change. She later leads the “re-wilding” process that sees many animal species returned to their natural environments on Earth, once the climate has been stabilised, arguing “our horizontal brothers and sisters,” should not be “enslaved as living meat” (416). As her earlier poaching activities show, however, Swan is no vegetarian. The phrases “our horizontal brothers and sisters” comes from nineteenth-­ century naturalist John Muir, whose readership Robinson claims was “much more connected with [nonhuman] animals … than we are now” (High Sierra 77). In his 2022 hiking memoir, High Sierra, Robinson himself refers to nonhuman animals as “common neighbours,” writing: I’ve realized how bad the situation is for wild creatures everywhere, and I feel the awful dread of the oncoming mass extinction event we are creating. We need to make room for these people. … In fact the whole idea of wilderness has been transformed and redeemed by the necessity of making adequate living room for these fellow citizens of ours.” (164, italics added)

Yet while Robinson proclaims a specific “love” for deer, he also states that “letting their predators live on this continent would be good for them too” (161). Robinson is less concerned about individual animals than the broader ecosystem. Indeed, he declares the early-twentieth-century American ecologist Aldo Leopold’s idea that “what’s good is what’s good for the land” to be “the highest morality” (ibid.). Leopold explicitly rejected Abrahamic notions of nature, arguing: Conservation is getting nowhere because it is incompatible with our Abrahamic concept of land. We abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect. (xxii)

Robinson similarly urges that the “wilderness needs defending as part of a larger project of biosphere survival,” in order to avoid “a mass extinction event that will kill thousands of species of living creatures” (High Sierra

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520). Robinson’s focus on the broader biosphere is admirable and necessary. Again, however, he seems to exclusively conceive of nonhuman animals as abstract objects, rather than individual subjects. Robinson discusses his attitudes toward nonhuman animals in his and Gerry Canavan’s collection of ecologically focussed science fiction criticism, Green Planets (2014). In response to the supposed assertion of “nonhuman values” in 2312, Robinson contends that other animals “exist as beings in their own right” and “do not exist to serve us”; that to “predate on them as food” is “a violation of their existence”; and that “as a matter of self-regard and as a matter of respect for others, we need to care about all living creatures and act accordingly.” However, he also declares that he “still feel[s] it’s all right to eat them, because animals eat other animals,” citing the arguments of Temple Grandin as support for his position (Canavan and Robinson 250). Grandin is a controversial figure within the animal liberation movement, who has long argued in favour of “respectful and compassionate” relationships with other animals while also profiting as a designer of “more humane” slaughterhouse technologies. Although she continues to criticise veganism and vegetarianism as “unnatural” (202), a recent, and extensive, evaluation of her arguments found them both “disappointing and rudimentary,” lacking the “depth and rigor that the issue deserves” (Lamey 145). As Singer notes, moreover, the argument that humans are justified in eating other animals since other animals kill for food themselves “was already old in 1785,” when William Paley observed that “the analogy contended for is extremely lame; since brutes have no power to support life by any other means, and since we have; for the whole human species might subsist entirely upon fruit, pulse, herbs, and roots” (Paley 1:83; Singer 224). A further objection that other animals do many things humans find morally objectionable might also be raised. Nevertheless, as with Robinson’s personal philosophy, there remains a carnist contradiction at the heart of his novels’ messages of ecological equality. There is perhaps some mild suggestion of a progression toward vegetarianism in the Mars trilogy. Some of the “Red Party” conservationists in Green Mars, who oppose Mars’s terraforming, advocate for “the growth of a thin CO2 atmosphere, supporting plants but not animals,” which suggests a greater reliance upon vegetable rather than animal food, although the Martians would presumably still raise animals for meat within their domed settlements. Toward the end of the series, equal citizenship is granted to “other animals, and even to plants, ecosystems, and the elements themselves,” recalling Snyder’s reprimanding of the United States

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(US) for “never [giving] the mountains and rivers, trees and animals, a vote” in Future Primitive (Robinson, Blue Mars 483; Snyder 11). Later still, a member of one of the “minimum impact” communities, which constitute the series’ final form of social organisation, declares that they “grow most of [their] food, and fish for the rest,” which suggests a largely pescatarian existence, enabled by “the technology to go home to gathering” (Robinson, Blue Mars 725). However, none of the trilogy’s technological advances ever eradicates meat-eating. Nor is the prospect of vegetarianism ever made more than inferable, leaving the Martians’ continued carnism as one of the continuing prejudices by which the colonists have perhaps “begun to construct another Earth, just as stupid as the first” (574). The continued carnism of the Mars trilogy is not unique among Robinson’s space colonisation stories, which have almost invariably included means of off-world animal farming. The interplanetary spaceships in his early novel, Icehenge (1984), utilise the excess algae from their air supply to feed farmed animals rather than their human crew (28–9). Algae and lab-grown meat provide almost fifty percent of the central spaceship’s provisions in Robinson’s generation ship novel Aurora (2015) (11), with the ship’s scientists recognising the artificial production of meat as a “clearly more efficient” process than natural farming (309). However, the ship also includes farms where biologically engineered dwarf cattle and other animals are raised for meat. Although the ship’s technological advances allow for the inclusion of nonhuman animals on the Ship’s voyage, they are still considered an expendable luxury, as shown when the human occupants immediately kill and eat ninety percent of the farmed animals on board following the loss of a harvest (326–27). Robinson’s recent novel Red Moon (2018) appears to depict the kind of vegetarian colonisation promoted by Clarke, since its central Chinese lunar colony relies upon extensive greenhouses for both food and infrastructure (31–2). The colony’s vegetarianism is confirmed by the “usual foods” that populate its breakfast buffet, which are almost exclusively vegetarian. The only possible exception is a yoghurt-like substance, which might suggest some kind of animal food processing, although the genuineness of the “yoghurt” is questioned in the novel—as well as being paired with suspicions that “most” of the colony’s food must still have been “flown up from Earth” (14)—offering no definitive proof either way. Even if it is vegetarian, Red Moon remains a lone exception among Robinson’s overwhelmingly carnist considerations of space colonisation.

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Science in the Capital Robinson’s Science in the Capital series is one of the most revered works of twenty-first century utopian science fiction. The trilogy describes the experiences and responses of several Washington DC politicians and political advisors to a number of climate-change-caused catastrophes, including the flash flooding and freezing of the American capital. Founding president of the Australian and New Zealand Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, Kate Rigby describes the series as “a prime example” of a critical and environmentally focussed, heuristic utopia “from within the field of contemporary science fiction” (156). Andrew Milner also lists Science in the Capital—alongside Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) and MaddAddam (2013)—as an example of “positive adaptation” to climate change in contemporary climate fiction (81; see also Milner and Burgmann 44–46). The series consists of three core novels, Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005) and Sixty Degrees Below (2007), which were revised into a single volume titled Green Earth in 2015.3 Robinson’s 1997 novel Antarctica also serves as a precursor to the trilogy, as it features the first appearance of the trilogy’s utopian US President, Phil Chase—whose surname characterises him as a “huntsman”4—and his Chief of Staff cum Climate Change Advisor Wade Norton. Robinson appeals to a number of influences  throughout the series, including engagements with climate policy, Buddhism, Shelleyan Romanticism and Thoreauvian Naturalism, which have traditionally led science fiction authors to promote vegetarianism. Science in the Capital also contains a greater consideration of animal subjectivity than seen elsewhere in Robinson’s work. Nevertheless, he continues to disregard any ethical or environmental benefits of vegetarianism. Climate Policy The Science in the Capital series engages extensively with policy, many of its political discussions emphasising the directives of the United Nations and the IPCC. A bill introduced by then-Senator Chase in Forty Signs of 3  Quotations from the Science in the Capital novels are preserved in Green Earth, unless stated otherwise. 4  The name “Chase” comes from the French chascier, meaning to catch or seize. The name of Robinson’s environmentalist president therefore characterises him as a loving “horse hunter.”

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Rain is based around “conforming to IPCC findings” (43), with the incumbent Republican President interpreting it as mandated “participation in whatever action they recommend” (158). In Fifty Degrees Below, a list of recommendations drafted by National Science Foundation (NSF) head Diane Chang—who later marries Chase, as well as becoming his Presidential Science Advisor—also includes a directive to “Work with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN Environment Programme, its Millennial Project, and other international efforts” (28). Nevertheless, the series almost completely neglects the IPCC’s increasing emphasis on the significant detrimental effects on the environment of industrialised animal farming. UN and IPCC reports have increasingly recommended a reduction in the consumption of animal products as well as ways of mitigating greenhouse gas emissions caused by cattle and other farmed animals. Cattle’s contribution to climate change have been noted since the IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 (FAR 21, 302). The IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report: Climate Change 2001 (TAR), current at the time of the Science in the Capital’s publication, presents a possible reduction of methane emissions from farmed animals and their wastes as one of the “key findings” in its Summary for Policymakers on mitigation (Summary 7). The report also identifies animals and animal wastes as “major sources” of methane and nitrous oxide emissions, with animals estimated to contribute over 438 megatonnes of carbon-equivalent emissions per year (MtCeq/ yr). Methane is briefly acknowledged in Fifty Degrees Below, during one of Diane’s presentations, wherein she fleetingly acknowledges the possibility of capturing and sequestering the dangerous greenhouse gas (Fifty Degrees 127, 130). However, the meeting remains otherwise focussed on carbon pollution produced by cars and power plants. Meat farming’s contribution to global warming is only specifically broached after the presentation, when its mitigation—by way of flatulence-reducing animal feed, rather than reduced meat consumption—is brought up by a colleague, and it is quickly dismissed as an “odd” form of intervention that would likely be laughed out of congress, with its lone proponent himself laughed down by his peers (138). The IPCC’s increasing concern over animal agriculture is supported by the FAO who, in Livestock’s Long Shadow, identify animal farming as “one of the largest sources of greenhouse gases and one of the leading causal factors in the loss of biodiversity” (267). The IPCC’s subsequent 2007 report—released the same year as Sixty Days and Counting—recommends

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more efficient breeding and management practices to reduce methane emissions brought about by increased demand for animal products (IPCC, AR4 510), while the Summary for Policymakers derived from the IPCC’s 2018 assessment report (SR15) states that “deep reductions in emissions of methane” are required in order to limit global warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius, in accordance with The Paris Agreement, and advises that “targeted … mitigation measures” are required to reduce the amounts of nitrous oxide and methane produced by agriculture (12: C.1.2). The FAO also published a report in 2013, titled Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock, which, while it does not recommend or even recognise vegetarianism, examines ways to reduce animal farming’s environmental impact through increased efficiency and mitigation. The most recent IPCC special report, Climate Change and Land (SRCCL) (2019), made headlines worldwide for its insistence on a move toward vegetarianism. The report found that a global move toward “credible low-meat diets” would reduce greenhouse emissions by approximately four-and-a-half to six-and-a-half gross tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, while a vegan scenario “where no animal products are consumed at all” had a potential reduction of almost eight (5:76–77).5 The FAO’s 2017 Future of Food report similarly supports vegetarianism as the least environmentally impactful diet, with vegetarians estimated to produce approximately half as many greenhouse emissions as the average global diet (86). The 2019 report also advocates the introduction of in-vitro/cultured meats to reduce greenhouse emissions from agricultural production (2:89). Nature and The Australian Associated Press each responded to the 2019 report with articles titled “Eat Less Meat” (Schiermeier; AAP); the BBC reported “Plant-Based Diet Can Fight Climate Change” (Harrabin); and articles by American outlets, such as CBS and the New York Times, also emphasised the IPCC’s recommendations to reduce meat intake (CBS; Flavelle). Although the most recent IPCC reports were not available to Robinson when he wrote Science in the Capital, its earlier reports still suggest vegetarianism’s potential benefits in combating climate change. The bodies Robinson and his characters invoke as absolute authorities consider animal farming’s contribution to climate change an essential and pressing concern. Yet the issue is only brought up in the Science in the 5  The SRCCL report’s page numbers are reset with each chapter. To distinguish them from the report’s section headings (which use periods), each chapter has been treated as a separate volume, with colons separating chapter numbers from page references.

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Capital series for it to be derided and dismissed. Robinson’s revision of the series allowed him the opportunity to further emphasise vegetarianism, in light of later IPCC findings. However, the references to animal farming’s impact from the original Science in the Capital Trilogy are almost entirely removed from Green Earth, with the mention of methane during Diane’s NSF presentation reduced to an afterthought, and the mocking, post-meeting discussion eliminated entirely (369–70, 372). Despite increasing concerns about animal farming detailed in the UN and IPCC reports, it appears neither Robinson nor his fictional political reformists take carnism’s contribution to climate change seriously. Robinson’s later novels rarely contain any significant consideration of vegetarianism either. The absence of vegetarianism in Aurora and 2312 is discussed above and it continues to be disparaged in New York 2140 (2017), despite the novel’s environmental focus. The book is set in a future New York that has been flooded, due to global warming, the city’s population now living in the upper levels of its otherwise submerged skyscrapers. The reduction in available farmland means animals must be raised on dedicated “farm floors,” within the towers. The buildings’ inhabitants are therefore responsible for slaughtering their own meat, with many finding it “easier to eat fake meat or become vegetarian” than to raise and kill their own animals, despite the supposedly “super-humane zappers” provided to them (132). Robinson’s treatment of vegetarianism in New York 2140 suggests that, even in the ecologically devastated, post global-warming era of the novel’s future ethical concerns remain more effective at converting people to vegetarianism than are its ecological benefits. However, its intimate animal farming process is revealed during a passage narrated by a proud carnist, who finds “the unavoidable anthropomorphizing of the farm’s pigs had “no restraining effect on [his] fatal hand” and speculates that the “ugly” creatures probably appreciated being “put out of [their] misery,” suggesting a lack of sympathy toward vegetarians on the part of the novel’s narrator as much as its characters (ibid.). Buddhism Robinson claims his interest in science fiction has always been intertwined with ecology and Buddhism (Canavan and Robinson 253). The previous chapters have shown how exposure to Buddhism inspired endorsements of vegetarianism in Dick and Clarke’s science fiction. Clarke, who is thanked specifically in the acknowledgements to Antarctica (561), has

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proven a persistent presence within Robinson’s own writing. As discussed in the previous chapter, Robinson also wrote his doctoral thesis on Dick, for whom he has continued to profess an admiration (Foote 281). However, while Clarke and Dick’s exposures to Buddhism largely inspired a shift toward a more ethical treatment of animals, Robinson brings up Buddhism’s vegetarian implications only to dismiss them. Some of Robinson’s earliest engagements with both Buddhism and vegetarianism occur in his early collection Escape from Kathmandu (1989), which contains a suite of connected novellas centred around the adventures of two American expatriates living in Nepal. In the collection’s first story, the titular “Escape from Kathmandu” (1986), the Americans— George Fergusson and George “Freds” Fredericks—wonder whether a yeti they have befriended and nicknamed “Buddha” is vegetarian before being quickly reassured of his carnivorousness when he eats a piece of beef jerky (51). The concern about the yeti’s “vegetarianism” perhaps stems more from suspicions of the creature’s herbivorousness than any associated Buddhist ethic. Vegetarianism is treated more favourably in the later Kathmandu story, “The True Nature of Shangri-La” (1989). There, Fredericks recalls a time when, as a biology student in the United States, he had to brutally “euthanise” a mutilated dog which had been used in a display of live vivisection and left to suffer in a dumpster (by breaking its neck with the dumpster lid). The scene, which echoes the discovery of the flayed dog that led to Moreau’s exile in H.  G. Wells’s Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), occurs shortly after Fredericks had overheard one of his fellow students refuse to eat a hamburger because she “didn’t believe in the killing of animals because she was a Buddhist” (Robinson, Kathmandu 157). Fredricks then reveals that it was the student’s declaration of vegetarianism, combined with his sympathy for the dog, that inspired his conversion to Buddhism and move to Nepal (156–57). However, Fredericks does not appear to adopt vegetarianism himself. Fergusson might also be considered vegetarian, since he practises a “prophylactic” diet, consisting of nothing but boiled potatoes, hardboiled eggs, wafers and water (163–64). His strict, meat-free diet results from an experience with food poisoning (brought about by a lentil dhal, no less), removing it from any endorsement of animal rights. Regardless, any implicit associations between Buddhism and vegetarianism in Robinson’s Escape from Kathmandu stories remain short-lived and are entirely supplanted in his later, more influential works.

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Appeals to Buddhism remain frequent throughout Robinson’s writing. In Blue Mars, legends are told of the “eighteenth reincarnation of the Dalai Lama” preaching nonviolence to “little red people,” and Nirgal also conceives of Sax as “the Dalai Lama of science” (111–12, 187, italics removed). Maya envisions a potential cure for her memory loss and anhedonia as a sort of “satori,” suggesting a familiarity with Zen Buddhism (622–23). Unlike Clarke’s exposure to Buddhism and Dick’s experiences with “satori,” however, the Buddhist influences in the Mars series do not appear to inspire vegetarianism or any greater consideration for the life of nonhuman animals. Robinson also appeals to Eastern spiritual systems to complement his ecological ideals in Antarctica. Rather than a Tibetan Buddhist guru, it is instead the Chinese Feng Shui master Ta Shu who provides what Sherryl Vint and Mark Bould have called Antarctica’s “problematically Orientalist spiritual core” (260). Ta Shu nevertheless concludes his character arc by proclaiming, “Of course we must give Tibet back to the Tibetans, and let them live on their high plateau in peace” (Robinson, Antarctica 513). Tau Shu also encourages th postmodern-­ Palaeolithic philosophy of “lovingknowing”, through which he insists “we must learn this earth as closely and completely as our Palaeolithic ancestors knew it on the savannah” (Antarctica 507). As Vint and Bould observe, however, Ta Shu’s neo-Palaeolithic attitude “does not acknowledge non-human creatures with whom we share the world,” while also demanding the “sort of mastery associated with both Christian concepts of stewardship and enlightenment science” (262). Tau Shu’s ecologist philosophy, therefore, does not encourage the protection of nonhuman animals so much as reinforce the carnism-prone worldview expressed the neo-Palaeolithic philosophies endorsed elsewhere in Robinson’s writing. Ecological politics and the idealisation of Palaeo-primitivist lifestyles are further connected when Wade likens his activities as a member of the clandestine direct-action group ecotage internationale to “sneak[ing] around like primeval hunters” (Robinson, Antarctica 46). The research station, which is working on experimental methods for extracting oil from Antarctica, is later disrupted by a group of ecological saboteurs who appear to share similar primitivist principles. Interestingly, the impracticalities of adopting a worldwide Palaeolithic model are raised by the station’s head scientist, Carlos, who objects to the “deep-ecology wilderness dream” of the saboteurs, whom he characterises as “well-fed aristocrat[s]” who dream of “killing tigers with their teeth and eating them raw,” on the basis that hunting and gathering is insufficient for feeding the world’s growing

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human population (486). His objections are all but ignored, however, and the narrative ends up overwhelmingly endorsing a combination of the saboteurs’ neo-Palaeoism and Tau Shu’s lovingknowing. Although Robinson positions Eastern spiritualities in opposition to dominant Western ideals, his Eastern spiritualists often only end up reinforcing carnist Western notions about nonhuman animals. Even a worldwide Buddhist expansion in Robinson’s alternative history novel, The Years of Rice and Salt (2002), only leads to the establishment of neo-palaeolithic principles similar to those espoused in Science in the Capital. Moreover, while the novel’s early Chinese empires are said to have “eighteen kinds of soy” and keep “no cattle” (45), they nevertheless enjoy a varied and meat-intensive diet, which conflicts with the “garnish”-like use of meat attributed to the Chinese in Callenbach’s Ecotopia Emerging (1975). Native American culture is also again romanticised in The Years of Rice and Salt, with the Chinese explorers who arrive in America being greeted by a peaceful tribe of Miwoks, who live a Cockaigne-­like existence, where animal food is “so plentiful … that there was no need for agriculture” (204). Although Robinson uses his alternate history in The Years of Rice and Salt to challenge dominant Western and androcentric notions, perceptions of carnism and “noble savagery” are wholly preserved. Buddhism, science fiction, and ecology are never more intertwined among Robinson’s work than in the Science in the Capital trilogy. The first chapter of Forty Signs of Rain introduces a group of Buddhist emissaries from the fictional island nation of Khembalung (named for a mythical Buddhist utopia) who have travelled to the US in an attempt to prosecute the government for its inaction on climate change, which has left their country threatened—and eventually enveloped—by rising sea levels. Khembali Buddhism is framed as overtly empathetic during a lecture on Buddhism and science, when two of their emissaries, Sucandra and Drepung, claim the primary aims of both disciplines to be “right action,” “compassion” and the “reduction of suffering” (Forty Signs 265–66). The previous chapters have shown similar principles to inspire an endorsement of vegetarianism in both Dick and Clarke’s work. However, Robinson remains dismissive of any Buddhist basis for vegetarianism throughout the trilogy. In Forty Signs of Rain, the American scientists Anna and Charlie Quibbler each assume the Khembalis are vegetarian when inviting them over for dinner (64, 102). Yet while the Khembalis reiterate their aims toward a “Reduction in suffering” (109–10) during the dinner, they also quickly reassure the Quibblers that they are carnists, with Drepung

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explaining that “Tibetan Buddhism has never been vegetarian,” since “There were not enough vegetables” (64). The lack of Tibetan vegetation is later reasserted by the Dalai Lama, who comments that Tibet contains “not so many vegetables” (Sixty Days 335, italics removed). The fourteenth Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso—current at the time of both mine and Robinson’s writing—is not vegetarian. He has nonetheless adopted and promoted vegetarianism at different stages throughout his lifetime, including during the first decade of the 2000s, which coincides with the writing and publication of Science in the Capital, and he is reported to eat only vegetarian meals when at his home in India (Westhead). Moreover, Drepung’s justification for the Khembalis’ meat-eating is perhaps rendered less convincing when he immediately adds that, other than the elders, the Khembalis were mostly born on Khembalung or in India, rather than Tibet, suggesting a cultural justification for their continued carnism, rather than an economic one (Forty Signs 64). India has long enjoyed a reputation as an overwhelmingly vegetarian country. In 2009, India’s then environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, claimed in response to a UN Population Fund report that: “The solution to cut emissions is to stop eating beef. It leads to emission of methane which is 23 times more potent than carbon dioxide”, adding that the “best thing” for India was that it was “not a beef-eating nation” (Outlook). His comments are severely undermined by the fact that India contains the world’s second-largest cattle population after Brazil, with recent studies questioning its perception as an overwhelmingly vegetarian nation (Economist).6 Nevertheless, the twenty-to-thirty per cent vegetarian population suggested in such studies remains more than twice that of the next most vegetarian-populated countries. The Kembalis’ carnism is therefore reinforced as an ideological imperative, and Robinson’s deliberate and foregrounded dismissal of vegetarianism when engaging with Buddhism in Science in the Capital similarly suggests a conscious, rather than incidental, neglect.

6  See also Ana Bajželj and Shivani Bothra, “The Rise of Non-Veg: Meat and Egg Consumption and Production in Contemporary India,” The Future of Meat Without Animals, edited by Brianne Donaldson and Christopher Carter (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 67–86; and Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar, “The Food Habits of a Nation.” The Hindu, 14 August, 2006, https://www.thehindu.com/todays-paper/the-food-habits-of-a-nation/ article3089973.ece.

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Nineteenth-Century Influences Indigenous American cultures have no direct influence on the Science in the Capital trilogy, wherein Native Americans are referenced only once, in passing, throughout the entire trilogy (Robinson, Sixty Days 321). Instead, the series finds its ecological ideal in the American “wilderness movement,” which the central protagonist—the biomathematician and political advisor Frank Vanderwal—traces to nineteenth-century Naturalist American artists, including the landscape painter Frederick Church and, especially, the transcendentalist writers Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau (65–66). Frank makes frequent appeals to Thoreau’s classic Naturalist book Walden (1884) throughout Sixty Days and Counting. The discussion of the wilderness movement’s origins is removed from Green Earth. Nevertheless, Walden remains referenced throughout, with Frank still considering Thoreau’s vision of “how to see the land and the animals” as a benchmark for America to “live up to” (Sixty Days 435; Green Earth 985, italics removed). Despite Robinson’s appeal to Walden as a utopian blueprint, he completely ignores its impassioned arguments for vegetarianism. While at Walden pond, Thoreau attempted to imitate an Indian vegetarian diet, allowing only “a little salt pork,” although he later concedes he “could sometimes eat a fried rat with good relish, if it were necessary” (61, 217). Emerson, for his part, considered it “a superstition to insist on … any special diet,” although he took an oft-cited interest in the minimalist vegetarian diet of the fifteenth-century philosopher Luigi Cornaro (Emerson 7.369, 4.210). Conversely, Thoreau dedicates an entire chapter in Walden to the defence of vegetarianism and condemnation of hunting, where he rejects carnivorous diets due to their uncleanliness and “natural” revulsion. He writes that to live by preying on other animals is “a miserable way,” declaring no doubt that it is a part of the destiny of the human race, in its gradual improvement, to leave off eating animals, as surely as the savage tribes have left off eating each other when they came in contact with the more civilized. (216)

Thoreau’s notion of vegetarian ascension recalls similar Social Darwinist positions satirised by Wells in the decades following Walden and directly conflicts with Robinson’s later idealisation of Palaeolithic hunter-gather

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lifestyles. Thoreau’s insistence that the “repugnance to animal food is not the effect of experience, but is an instinct” also conflicts with Robinson’s conception of humanity as innately carnivorous (Thoreau 214). Robinson need not accept Thoreau’s endorsement of vegetarianism. Yet Thoreau’s vegetarian arguments are not addressed anywhere in the Science in the Capital trilogy, evidencing a further neglect of vegetarian thought in Robinson’s writing, despite his continued appeal to sources that endorse vegetarianism as a blueprint for sustainable, utopian societies.7 Percy Shelley’s Romantic conception of nature is also valorised in the Science in the Capital trilogy, with Chase ending his presidential speeches with a line from Shelley’s Ode to the West Wind (1820) (Robinson, Sixty Days 6). Indeed, Shelley is frequently appealed to throughout Robinson’s texts. Icehenge opens with an Epigraph from Shelley’s “Epipsychidion” (1821). Shelley’s “Julien and Modello” (1818–1819/1824) is quoted in the early Mars story “Green Mars” (1985) and Jim McPherson, in The Gold Coast, also frequently likens himself to Shelley (“Green Mars” 212; Gold Coast 67–69, 283). However, none of Robinson’s frequent appeals to Shelley’s environmental conceptions ever inspire consideration of his vegetarian ideals. Mary Shelley is also referred to frequently throughout Robinson’s work. References to Frankenstein and his creature are made in The Gold Coast (107), Red Mars (244, 542) and Antarctica (60, 66, 445). These references, such as the description of Val’s “Bride of Frankenstein sort of body” or the character codenamed X “lumbering around like “Frankenstein’s monster” in Antarctica, are largely superficial (although the description of X comes with an extra carnist dimension, with him being simultaneously compared to “a big side of frozen beef”) (66, 445). Robinson’s reference to The Last Man (1826) in Blue Mars, however, suggests a more specific influence. Shelley’s lesser-known novel is recalled by Sax—the nearest thing the Mars series has to a hero—as a work that “much impressed” him in his youth (Robinson, Blue Mars 257). Although Sax

7  B. F. Skinner’s utopian novel Walden Two (1948), which attempts to apply Thoreau’s isolationist principles within a communal environment, similarly omits his vegetarianism, he nevertheless considered the possibility of new technologies by which a growing human population might sustain itself by “growing more nutritious grains and eating grain rather than meat” in his 1976 preface “Walden Two Revisited” (vii).

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misremembers many of the novel’s details,8 Robinson’s overt reference to The Last Man is a potentially unique phenomenon among major works of science fiction that suggests a greater familiarity with, and reverence for, Shelley’s work than might be expected from other authors. Yet Robinson does not cite either Mary or Percy Shelley as one of the many influences he lists in a 1994 interview with Bud Foote, conducted around the time he was composing Blue Mars (Foote 281). Nevertheless, his frequent references to Mary and Percy Shelley render his refusal to engage with the Romantic vegetarian theme they implanted into science fiction all the more curious. Nonhuman Subjectivity Despite Robinson’s continued disregard for vegetarianism, the Science in the Capital trilogy includes greater consideration of nonhuman animals than his other novels. During the climactic storm in Forty Signs of Rain, Washington D.C.’s zoo animals are released into the city’s national parks on the instruction of the Khembalis. Moylan appeals to the animals’ release as evidence of Robinson’s expanding animal sympathies (“N-H-N’” 34).9 Rigby, likewise, characterises the animals’ release as an opportunity for the “cultivation of … concern for, our other-than-human kin, whose agency and interests are shown to be accorded a growing respect as they too endeavour to adapt to an altered environment” (148). She also praises Robinson’s “deployment of a range of strategies intended to reverse or provide protection from some of the worst impacts of abrupt climate change in the interests of nonhuman as well as human flourishing” within the trilogy (156). Frank echoes Rigby and Moylan’s concerns during an early advisory meeting, when he observes that “All the discussion” had “centered on the impacts to humans” (Fifty Degrees 84). Frank’s 8  Sax recalls that Shelley’s last man “occasionally saw a sail, joined another ship, anchored against a shore, [and] shared a meal” at the end of his story (Robinson, Blue Mars 257). However, The Last Man in fact ends only with Verney setting off on his journey as a sailor, with his final declaration of himself as “THE LAST MAN,” presumably implying that he expects to meet no one else along the way (Shelley, Last Man 374–75). 9  Moylan claims Vint and Bould—who have been critical of Robinson’s anthropocentrism—have shown similar support for Robinson’s treatment of the liberated zoo animals (“N-H-N’” 34; see also Vint and Bould 268). However, while Robinson’s expanding subjectivity is acknowledged in a footnote to their article on his treatment of animals in Antarctica, they do not specifically reference the zoo animals (Vint and Bould 272n5).

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recognition of anthropocentrism inspires his preoccupation with the erasure of “nature” in modern (American) society throughout the trilogy’s second and third volumes. The release of the zoo animals into the city inspires a nomadic collective, who refer to themselves as “ferals,” to practise a supposedly more naturalistic lifestyle based on Palaeolithic practices. Frank becomes associated with the ferals and takes up residence in a tree in one of Washington’s parks, where he leads a similar “treehouse” lifestyle to that envisioned by Robinson in Future Primitive and begins tracking the escaped animals (Fifty Degrees 341). His exposure to the newly “wild” creatures leads him to acknowledge the anthropocentrism of climate change policy, as well as that of his ex-girlfriend Marta, for whom “there were no such things as animals” (Robinson, Sixty Days 165, italics original). Of all Robinson’s characters, Frank is perhaps the most aware of and concerned by nonhuman animals. Frank’s animal sympathies never lead him to question carnism, however. Before joining the ferals, he wrote? commentaries, as the editor of the Journal of Sociobiology, advocating the health benefits of a more “Paleolithic” (sic) lifestyle, including increased animal hunting, although he stops short of suggesting that they “needed to kill all the meat they ate” and acknowledges that he still “did not want” to kill animals for food (Fifty Degrees 146–48). Nevertheless, Frank’s conception of humanity is clearly a carnist one. As he explains to one of his colleagues: “We’re hard-­ wired to understand life on the savannah. Someone gives you meat, they’re your friend. Someone takes your meat, they’re your enemy. … That’s just the way we evolved” (Robinson, Forty Signs 79). Robinson himself expresses similar beliefs in his interview with Foote, claiming that “Because we evolved from primates … we have to think about ourselves and our brains and our values as having evolved from a certain lifestyle in the savannah that lasted over millions of years.” Here, Robinson again proposes a more fulfilling treehouse lifestyle, similar to that lived by Frank in Fifty Degrees Below and endorsed in Future Primitive and broaches the possibility of hunting animals for food, although he admits to not having thought about it “very deeply” (Foote 285). Followers of the utopian Martian philosopher Grimaldi in Robinson’s early novel The Memory of Whiteness (1986) also live in treehouses and among African animals, attempting to recreate “the environment of the African savannah” (108). When Foote broaches the possibly detrimental effects of hunting, Robinson replies that “Very few animals kill for pleasure; [although] the wantonness of the minx is a problem,” to which Foote adds the example

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of shrikes, further challenging the conception of hunting as a peaceful practice (Foote 285). A carnist conception of human civilisation is further reinforced in Robinson’s 2013 novel Shaman, which is set in the Palaeolithic period and reads like an endless—and endlessly-graphic—list of violent acts inflicted upon nonhuman animals. An early scene, for example, sees the protagonist bludgeoning a doe to death while she “lay[s] there quivering as she breathed her last breaths, bleeding from her eyes,” before being skinned, having her brains eaten and her organs and spine torn out. The addressing of the doe as “she,” rather than “it,” suggests a greater consideration of her subjectivity. Nevertheless, a simple “thank you” and a condescending “good deer!” is considered a worthwhile exchange for the doe’s life, her assailant finding himself “floating a little with the joy of the kill” (Robinson, Shaman 37–38). While Robinson acknowledges that Palaeolithic cultures were varied, he maintains that they “all seem to have had a deep and active regard for their fellow animals” (High Sierra 42). In Shaman, however, it is only ever expressed in connection with carnist violence. Frank, conversely, remains reluctant to kill animals himself after joining the ferals. In an attempt to practice “hunting without killing,” he and the ferals refuse the “temptation” to use the zoo animals for target practice for their frisbees, out of concern that their harassment would prevent the animals from prospering in the park (Fifty Degrees 267). Even so, other feral groups are involved in the culling of the park’s deer, and Frank and the others look forward to a feast, at which “There would be lots of venison” (286). The discussion of the park’s deer involves the only mention of veganism in Robinson’s novels. However, the term is only used as a reference point to explain the concept of “fregans,” who “only eat food they’ve gotten for free” (285). No actual engagement with the concept of veganism is involved, and the passage is further dismissive in its ending ironically (and tellingly) with an enthusiastic expectation of meat. Antarctica also includes a group of idealised “feral” humans who practise Palaeolithic hunting techniques (417, 488). As with real-world Arctic cultures, the diet of Antarctica’s ferals is extremely animal intensive. Fried Antarctic toothfish, seal steaks and penguin eggs provide their “protein staples,” with vegetables and cereals imported and grown in greenhouses (414–15). The ferals’ hunting of native Antarctic animals initially causes discomfort among the researchers, with American tour guide Valerie Kenning objecting that “Killing fish and seals was illegal under the Antarctic Treaty,” while also appearing to disprove of the ferals’ seal-skin

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clothes (ibid.). The current “Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals,” adopted in 1972, however, allows for the capturing and killing of all but a few select genus of seal (BAS). The ferals are therefore legally justified in their “technical compliance” with the Treaty and provisions for their continued seal farming are included as part of the New Arctic Treaty proposed at the novel’s conclusion (Robinson, Antarctica 489, 537–38). The New Treaty also demands that all visitors to Antarctica “must forswear violence against humanity … and interact in peaceable ways” (539), although no specific protections for nonhuman animals are included. As Vint and Bould argue, Antarctica’s ferals “idealize an anthropocentric vision of an ecologically-sound lifestyle where other species must be protected only to the extent that their continued presence is necessary to support human life in Antarctica” (270–71). Although Robinson goes on to (lightly) challenge anthropocentrism in Science in the Capital, Antarctica only reinforces the anthropocentric carnism continually asserted in his writing. As Carol J. Adams argues, the postmodern era—wherein “members of the dominant culture claim identification with Native practices,” or follow “diets like the ‘Neanderthal’ diet and the ‘Caveman’ diet,” as they “continue to get their meals of dead animals from dominant practices such as factory farming or ‘organic’ farming”—is one where “Animal rites as heritage or New Age expression” are seen as “supersed animal rights” (64). Robinson’s writing, especially Science in the Capital, embodies such an anti-animal postmodern ethic. Although Frank shows a reluctance to slaughter animals himself, he never questions the notion that they should be slaughtered by others. Although the adoption of a hunter-gatherer lifestyle, such as that promoted by Robinson, Callenbach and Le Guin, would result in a significant reduction in human meat consumption, none of these authors directly addresses the possibility of adopting vegetarianism instead. Moreover, as the FAO points out: “Industrialized livestock systems tend to generate fewer GHG emissions per unit of product than other livestock systems” (Future of Food 85)—brutal efficiency being the raison d’etre of factory farming to begin with. Either way, hunter-gatherer models leave carnist prejudices largely intact and, despite Frank’s acknowledgement of anthropocentrism, the Palaeolithic lifestyle endorsed by the ferals often only reinforces prevailing carnist attitudes.

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(Erasure of) Nonhuman Sympathy Robinson’s writing is not without its animal sympathies. In Antarctica, the mistreatment of nonhuman animals is continually rebuked in the Antarctic researchers’ many discussions of early Antarctic expeditions. The Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen, who conducted the first expedition to the South Pole in 1911, is considered to have lost many “style points” and endured continual criticism for his practice of feeding his sledge dogs to one another (194). The English officer Robert Falcon Scott, who led a notoriously disastrous second expedition, is also declared both “incompetent” and an “idiot” for a lack of “consideration for animals” that resulted in his dogs and horses being knifed to death (210–11). The entire Norwegian culture is also vilified for its whaling practices (215). These criticisms suggest similar condemnation of Frankenstein and the creature’s violent treatment of their sledge dogs during their Arctic pursuit. However, as in Science in the Capital, the criticisms of other cultures’ treatment of nonhuman animals never translates into reflection upon their own carnist values. The mistreatment of nonhuman animals in scientific testing is also explored in Science in the Capital. As Donna Haraway points out, narratives of sacrifice and salvation “pervade U.  S. scientific discourse,” with modern scientists continuing to rely on the exploitation of nonhuman animals in their experiments (47). Moreover, by using “highly stylized language,” modern scientific writing often removes human experimenters from reports through passive phrasing, while euphemisms, such as “sacrifice” instead of “kill,” obscure the often-violent treatment of nonhuman animals (Birke et. al. 60). In Forty Signs of Rain, extensive consideration is given to the psychological impact on the human scientists responsible for “sacrificing” hundreds of lab animals, with the scientists themselves insisting that more confronting terms like “kill” and “murderous” be used in place of sacrificial euphemisms (90, 97), while experiments, such as mice being “decapitated … at a thousand rpm” and being “pump[ed] … full” of a solution “til they just about explode,” are described in graphic, non-­ euphemistic detail (35, 90). The confronting language draws attention to the violent (mis)treatment of nonhumans rather than obscuring it. However, Robinson’s line of criticism primarily empathises with the human scientists doing the slaughtering, rather than the slaughtered animals themselves, who are considered to have been “killed mercifully, and usually only some few months before they would have died naturally,” so

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that there “was no real reason to have qualms” (97). Killing nonhuman animals is thereby considered a necessity of “the business of doing science,” of “improving” and “increasing life” (98). The passage implies a sardonic self-awareness on the part of scientists regarding their treatment of nonhuman animals. Nevertheless, the mouse testing ultimately leads to a new lichen species used to reduce excess carbon dioxide, ultimately glorifying the scientific process that promotes violence against nonhumans. The speciesist subtext is further emphasized by the Khembalis and Quibblers sharing a reassuringly carnivorous meal in the following scene, with the earlier sympathetic scenes also being omitted from Green Earth. A greater consideration of nonhuman subjectivity is projected in Phil Chase’s final blog post, in which the now-President of the United States envisions a more sustainable future, where humanity will “share the world with all the other creatures” (516, italics removed). The passage points towards a more animal-friendly future and has drawn particular praise from critics, including  Milner and Rigby (Milner and Burgmann 154–55; Rigby 157; see also Pak 170). However, the post is omitted from Green Earth, where Chase’s blog posts end instead with a marinade recipe, which concludes: “Best on veggies, chicken, and flank steak. Sear the meat and then cook at a lower heat” (1046, italics removed). Robinson has stated that “nothing important was lost” in the abridgement from Science in the Capital to Green Earth (xiii). As Milner observes, however, the removal of Chase’s final blog entry from Green Earth does not appear to fit into any of the categories of “extraneous details,” “excess verbiage” or “telling readers things they already knew,” by which Robinson justifies his amendments (Milner 87; Robinson, Green Earth xii). The removal of Chase’s final blog post, instead, sees the blatant replacement of a utopian declaration of animal subjectivity with a positive reinforcement of carnism. Milner, moreover, supposes that Robinson removed the post out of concern that readers would find it “implausible … that any Democrat President would ever say such things” (87). If so, Robinson’s removal of the passage further reveals the erasure of animal subjectivity in the real world, showing just how much things have changed since Democrat President Harry S. Truman shocked many Americans—including Le Guin—by using the first ever televised presidential broadcast, in 1947, to suggest they might consider eating less meat in order to preserve grain that could be sent to feed starving people in Europe (see Le Guin 115–20). Chase’s original post provided an integral summation of the kind of utopian existence

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Robinson perhaps hoped the Science in the Capital series might inspire. Its removal not only evidence the erasure of animal subjectivity in the trilogy’s future but also in that of its readers.

The Ministry for the Future Unlike Robinson’s previous works, The Ministry for the Future contains frequent acknowledgements of carnism’s contributions to climate change. The novel has also had an overt political influence, being recommended by previous US President Barack Obama as one of his “favourite books” of 2020 (Obama). Its story begins in 2025 with an Indian heat wave that kills 20 million people, after which the eponymous Ministry is formed to enforce the Paris Agreement. The Ministry, which works in conjunction with the UN and the IPCC, is also charged with “defending all living creatures present and future who cannot speak for themselves, by promoting their legal standing and physical protection,” citing the historical expansion of the moral “circle of inclusion” as precedent for representing the interests of nonhuman animals (16, 35). Yet while Robinson openly acknowledges the essentialness of vegetarianism in curbing climate change, he stops short of completely endorsing it. One of the novel’s protagonists, American-aid-worker-cum-ecoterrorist Frank May, who experienced the heat wave, works at a “meat-processing plant” after returning from India (45). However, he soon becomes incensed that people still “drove cars, ate meat, flew in jets, did all the things that had caused the heat wave and would cause the next one,” becoming “mostly”—although notably not entirely—vegetarian (228, 197). Likewise, the communal meals of the utopian community Ministry Director Mary Murphy joins at the end of the novel are vegetarian only for “the most part” (544). The book also includes an Indian ecoterrorist group that uses drones to bring down passenger jets and infect vast numbers of cattle with “mad cow disease” (229). Although extremely violent, their efforts are nevertheless effective in reducing the consumption of beef, with May reflecting that: Some things were just too dangerous to continue doing. When your veggie burger tasted just as good, while your beef package proclaimed Guaranteed Safe! with a liability waiver in small print at the bottom, you knew a different time had come. (Ibid., 369, italics original)

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Although ecoterrorists are often celebrated in Robinson’s novels, his condemnation of carnism is perhaps still undermined by his association of vegetarianism with extremist violence, with May himself becoming an unstable and murderous (although ultimately sympathetic) vigilante. Moreover, that “many people” consider the Indian ecoterrorists “hypocrites and monsters,” since “Indians didn’t eat cows and so didn’t feel that loss” (230), suggests a continued entrenchment of carnist prejudices within the Ministry itself. Elsewhere in the novel, activists protect newly established “wildlife corridors” against “animal murderers” (364). Yet the activists also continue to consider the deer they defend to be “some kind of mammal weed” (364), while allowing farmers to hunt them as “pests” (362). Robinson similarly endorses agricultural overhaul, along with leaving “a good share of our landscape open to the other animals and the ecological communities that would naturally thrive there,” as part of a “carbon drawdown” scheme, in an article for Bloomberg Green, published approximately a month before The Ministry for the Future (“We Made This Heat”). Again, however, nonhuman animals are treated as a means to an anthropocentric end, rather than fellow victims of climate change and carnism themselves. Moreover, Robinson continues to represent the greater bond between humans and nonhuman animals in The Ministry for the Future as a reestablishment of “Paleolithic” attitudes (502). Although his latest novel showcases a significant increase in the promotion of vegetarianism, many of Robinson’s underlying carnist ideals remain unchallenged.

Conclusion The Ministry of the Future suggests a greater awareness and acknowledgement of carnism’s significant contribution to climate change than Robinson has shown in the past. Nevertheless, his previous writing showcases a deep-seeded carnist attitude informed by the primitivist idealisation of Native American cultures exemplified by the Future Primitive collection. His Three Californias trilogy draws obvious inspiration from Native American cultures while advocating a less industrialised but still carnist social reorganisation. The Mars series and Robinson’s other space colonisation novels assume the continuation of animal farming in off-world colonies and during deep-space exploration, despite their debt to Clarke, who frequently pointed out the impracticalities of extra-terrestrial agriculture. Perhaps most significant is Robinson’s refusal to engage with

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vegetarianism in his more recent climate fiction novels. The benefits of vegetarianism in combating climate change are either completely ignored or brought up only to be dismissed both in New York 2140 and in the Science in the Capital series, despite their invoking a number of scientific, religious and Romantic ideals that previously inspired endorsements of vegetarianism from prominent influences on Robinson, including Clarke, Herbert, Dick, Thoreau and the Shelleys. Robinson’s neglect of vegetarianism coincides with a period when reductions in meat-eating are increasingly being endorsed as part of a practical solution to the environmental issues he has championed. Carnism’s impacts on the environment are not insignificant and the IPPC’s increased emphasis on agricultural emissions shows they are worth considering.

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Kanost, Alberto. “Nelson Institute Holds Earth Day Conference Inspiring Optimism, Resilience.” The Daily Cardinal, 23 April, 2019. https://www.dailycardinal.com/article/2019/04/nelson-­institute-­holds-­earth-­day-­conference-­ inspiring-­optimism-­resilience. Lafferty, R.  A. “Boomer Flats.” Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, 53–74. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. Lamey, Andy. “The Animal Ethics of Temple Grandin: A Protectionist Analysis.” Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 32 (2019): 143–64. Latham, Rob. “Biotic Invasions: Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction.” Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson, 77–95. Wesleyan University Press, 2014. Le Guin, Ursula K. “Lying it All Away.” No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, 115–20. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There. Oxford University Press, 2020. Markley, Robert. “Falling into Theory: Simulation, Terraformation, and Eco-­ Economics in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Martian Trilogy.” Modern Fiction Studies 43, no. 3 (1997): 773–99. Milner, Andrew. “Eutopia, Dystopia and Climate Change.” Ethical Futures and Global Science Fiction, edited by Zachary Kendal, Aisling Smith, Giulia Chapman and Andrew Milner, 77–97. Springer International, 2020. Milner, Andrew, and J.  R. Burgmann. Science Fiction and Climate Change: A Sociological Approach. Liverpool University Press, 2020. Milner, Andrew, J.  R. Burgmann and Rjurik Davidson. “Ice, Fire and Flood: Science Fiction and the Anthropocene.” Again, Dangerous Visions: Essays in Cultural Materialism, by Andrew Milner, edited by J.  R. Bergamann. Haymarket, 2019. Morton, Oliver. “Heroes of the Environment 2008: Kim Stanley Robinson.” Time Magazine, 24 September, 2008. https://www.content.time.com/time/specials/packages/article/0,28804,1841778_1841779_1841803,00.html. Moylan, Tom. “N-H-N’: Kim Stanley Robinson’s Dialectics of Ecology.” Arena 35/36 (2011): 22–44. ———. “‘Utopia is When Our Lives Matter’: Reading Kim Stanley Robinson’s Pacific Edge.” Utopian Studies 6, no. 2 (1995): 1–24. Murphy, Pat. “In the Abode of the Snows.” Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, 29–52. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. Obama, Barack. (@BarackObama). “As 2020 comes to a close, I wanted to share my annual lists of favorites. I’ll start by sharing my favorite books…” Twitter, 17 December, 2020. https://twitter.com/BarackObama/status/1339631 669104570370?lang=en.

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Outlook. “Stop Eating Beef to Avoid Climate Change: Ramesh.” 19 November, 2009. https://www.outlookindia.com/newswire/story/stop-­eating-­beef-­to-­ avoid-­climate-­change-­ramesh/669793. Pak, Chris. “Animals in Science Fiction.” Sci-Fi: A Companion, edited by Jack Fennell, 161–65. Peter Lang, 2019. Paley, William. The Principles of Moral and Political Philosophy, 2 vols. Printed for R. Faulder, 1785. Park, Paul. “Rangeriver Fell.” Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, 229–74. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. Rigby, Kate. “Utopianism, Dystopianism and Ecological Thought.” Utopia: Social Theory and the Future, edited by Michael Hviid Jacobsen and Keith Tester, 141–60. Routledge, 2016. Robinson, Kim Stanley. Antarctica. Harper Collins, 1997. ———. Aurora. Orbit, 2016. ———. Blue Mars. Bantam, 1997. ———. Escape from Kathmandu. Unwin, 1990. ———. Fifty Degrees Below. Bantam, 2007. ———. Forty Signs of Rain. Bantam, 2005. ———, ed. Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. ———. The Gold Coast. Harper Collins, 1995. ———. Green Earth. Del Rey, 2015. ———. “Green Mars.” The Martians, 151–247. Bantam, 1999. ———. Green Mars. Voyager, 1996. ———. The High Sierra. Little, Brown and Company, 2022. ———. Icehenge. Orb, 1998. ———. The Memory of Whiteness. Voyager, 1999. ———. The Ministry for the Future. Orbit, 2020. ———. New York 2140. Orbit, 2017. ———. Pacific Edge. Tom Doherty Associates, 2013. ———. Red Mars. Voyager, 1996. ———. “Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change.” Utopian Studies 27, no. 1 (2016): 1–15. ———. Shaman. Orbit, 2014. ———. A Short, Sharp Shock. Shingletown, California: Mark V. Ziesing, 1990. ———. Sixty Days and Counting. Bantam Dell, 2007. ———. 2312. Orbit, 2013. ———. “We Made This Heat, Now We Cool It.” Bloomberg, 18 September, 2020. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-­0 9-­1 8/the-­k iller-­ heat-­wave-­era-­isn-­t-­inevitable-­yet-­kim-­stanley-­robinson#xj4y7vzkg. ———. The Wild Shore. Harper Collins, 1994. ———. The Years of Rice and Salt. Bantam, 2003.

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Schiermeier, Quirin. “Eat Less Meat: UN Climate-Change Report Calls for Change to Human Diet.” Nature, 8 August, 2019. https://www.nature.com/ articles/d41586-­019-­02409-­7. Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Wordsworth, 2004. Silverberg, Robert. The Book of Skulls. Millennium, 1999. ———. “House of Bones.” Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, 85–110. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. ———. Other Spaces, Other Times. Nonstop Press, 2009. ———. “The Wind and the Rain.” Dream’s Edge: Science Fiction Stories About the Future of Planet Earth, edited by Terry Carr, 286–94. Sierra Club Books, 1980. Singer, Peter. Animal Liberation, 3rd ed. Ecco, 2002. Skinner, B. F. “Walden Two Revisited.” Walden Two. Hackett, 2005. Snyder, Gary. “Tomorrow’s Song.” Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, 13–17. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden, 150th anniversary edition. Edited by J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton University Press, 2004. Turner, Frederick. “Excerpt from The New World.” Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, edited by Kim Stanley Robinson, 21–28. Tom Doherty Associates, 1994. UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme). Assessing the Environmental Impacts of Consumption and Production: Priority Products and Materials, A Report of the Working Group on the Environmental Impacts of Products and Materials to the International Panel for Sustainable Resource Management. United Nations Environment Programme, 2010. Vint, Sherryl, and Mark Bould. “Dead Penguins in Immigrant Pilchard Scandal: Telling Stories About ‘the Environment’ in Antarctica.” Kim Stanley Robinson Maps the Unimaginable: Critical Essays, edited by William J. Burling, 257–73. McFarland & Company, 2009. Weir, Andy. The Martian. Penguin, 2014. Westhead, Rick. “The Dalai Lama is a Meat Eater.” The Star, 16 October, 2010. https://www.thestar.com/news/world/2010/10/16/the_dalai_lama_is_a_ meateater.html. Wolfe, Gene. The Citadel of the Autarch. Arrow, 1984. ———. The Fifth Head of Cerberus. Gollcancz, 2004.

CHAPTER 8

That Way Maddness Lies: Returning to Carnism in Margaret Atwood’s Science Fiction

Margaret Atwood has long resisted categorisation as a science fiction author, insisting her writing instead be labelled “speculative,” since “nothing happens” in her novels “that the human race has not already done at some time in the past, or which it is not doing now … or for which it has not yet developed the technology” (“Writing” 92). Her distinction was famously criticised by Ursula K.  Le Guin, who argued Atwood’s “arbitrarily restrictive definition” seemed “designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders” (Review 195). Another reason Atwood’s distinction appears arbitrary is that her definition of “speculative fiction” is consistent with common and critical conceptions of science fiction, such as Suvin’s “cognitive estrangement,” with Atwood later conceding that what she meant by “speculative fiction” was identical to what Le Guin (and many others) had long called “science fiction” (Atwood, Introduction 5–7). Her prominence within contemporary literary criticism is also largely due to science-fictional efforts like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and the MaddAddam trilogy (2003–13). Atwood’s output has only become increasingly science fictional throughout the twenty-first century. In addition to the MaddAddam trilogy, Atwood has published two further twenty-first-century science fiction novels: The Heart Goes Last (2015) and The Testaments (2019)—a sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, with a large portion of her Booker Prize-winning © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_8

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Blind Assassin (2000) consisting of excerpts from its eponymous science fiction book-within-a-book(-within-a-book). Atwood has also published a volume of science fiction criticism, In Other Worlds (2011), collaborated with Naomi Alderman on the online science fiction novella The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (2012), and written two graphic novel series, Angel Catbird (2016–2017) and War Bears (2018), each based around human-­ animal hybrids. Even by Atwood’s own admission, the ostensibly realist short-story collection Stone Mattress (2014) is removed “at least slightly from the realm of mundane works and days” (309). Although Atwood has continued to publish non-science-fictional poetry, children’s books and short story collections, her only non-science-fictional twenty-first century novels, The Penelopiad (2005) and Hag-Seed (2016), are metafictional retellings of Homeric myth and Willliam Shakespeare’s Tempest (1996), the latter of which Darko Suvin and Atwood herself have each claimed as an influential entry in the science fiction and utopian tradition (see Suvin, Metamorphoses 118; Od Lukijana 13; Atwood, “Flying Rabbits” 30, 34; “Dire Cartographies” 69). If it was unfair to consider Atwood a “science fiction writer” before, it certainly is now. Moreover, while Atwood rejects any responsibility to write moral characters, she acknowledges that all art inherently invokes moral instruction and that science fiction, in particular, “is dripping with message” (Hancock 103–104). When asked about the importance of food and eating to her work, Atwood responded that it is as important “as in human life” (Lyons 228). She later elaborated that she likes to “wonder what people would have for breakfast” when envisioning future societies (Berkowitz). Food is therefore foundational to Atwood’s science-fictional extrapolations, and although she does not discuss vegetarianism in In Other Worlds, she acknowledges it as a common “superficial” feature of utopian literature in her earlier speech “Writing Utopia” (1989) (94).1 Vegetarianism is also a common point of contention within Atwood’s own writing, wherein she frequently positions female characters in vegetarian opposition to a 1  As a graduate student, Atwood began a dissertation on H. Rider Haggard’s foundational “lost world” novel She (1887), wherein the immortal goddess-figure Ayesha declares herself a vegetarian in comparison to both the cannibalistic African tribes she rules and the huntingenthused Englishmen who find themselves in her country (Haggard 198). Although Atwood does not comment on Ayesha’s vegetarianism, she declares her a “supremely transgressive female who challenges male power,” while acknowledging the Darwinist recasting of traditional purity tropes, such as vegetarianism, as ascendant, rather than regressive, qualities (“H. Rider” 113, 111, see also 109),

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predatory patriarchy. Yet while Atwood has a certain “fondness for linking meat-aversion to issues of female disempowerment,” as Jovian Parry observes, she also “always wryly undermines any vegetarian message that might be read into her work,” often endorsing carnist survivalism in its place (J. Parry, “New Nostalgia” 253). The following analysis therefore begins with a brief overview of the establishment of vegetarian and survivalist themes in Atwood’s early realist fiction before examining how they are represented in the science fictional settings of The Handmaid’s Tale series and The Blind Assassin. An extended analysis of the MaddAddam trilogy then explores how Atwood’s survivalism interacts with the traditional arguments for (and against) vegetarianism asserted by this study’s previously examined authors within an explicitly science fictional context.

Survivalism and Realist Fiction Atwood’s attitudes toward nonhuman animals are largely informed by Canadian survivalism. In her early and extremely influential nonfiction book Survival (1972), she proposes “Survival,” “Nature the Monster,” and “Animal Victims” as primary themes of Canadian literature, arguing that while: English animal stories are about [human] “social relations,” [and] American ones are about people killing animals; Canadian ones are about animals being killed, as felt emotionally from inside the fur and feathers. (7, italics original)

Atwood’s first collection, The Animals in That Country (1968)—from which Sherryl Vint takes the title of her forward to the 2008 special issue of Science Fiction Studies on “Animals and Science Fiction”—also explores contrasting cultural treatments of nonhuman animals, asserting the erasure of indigenous Canadian concepts of animal subjectivity and respect for nature by British colonisation (see Vint, “Animals”). As Sally Borrell observes, however, Atwood ultimately dismisses any identification with nonhuman animals within her fiction “in favour of an (anthropocentric) cultural interpretation that displaces genuine empathy” (89). As Emma Parker argues, for Atwood, eating is “unequivocally political,” with her heroines often initially appearing as “victims,” who “demonstrate their powerlessness through their relationship with food” (349–50). Indeed, there is a wealth of feminist-vegetarian criticism

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focussing on Atwood’s first novel, The Edible Woman (1969), beginning with Carol J. Adams’s earliest publication, “The Oedible Complex” (1975), which puns on the novel’s title while characterising Atwood herself as a vegetarian due to the vegetarian sympathies supposedly shown there and in her other early writing (147, 149). Adams’s summation is understandable, given how illustrative The Edible Woman is of the “absent referent,” which would later become foundational to her “feminist-­ vegetarian theory.” Repelled by her fiancé’s graphic tales of rabbit-hunting and the masculinist images of hunters she encounters as a market researcher, the novel’s narrator, Marian finds herself confronting the realities of meat production: She looked down at her own half-eaten steak and suddenly saw it as a hunk of muscle. Blood red. Part of a real cow that once moved and ate and was killed, knocked on the head as it stood in a queue like someone waiting for a streetcar. Of course everyone knew that. But most of the time you never thought about it. (151)

Having recognised a kinship between her own patriarchal oppression and that of butchered animals, Marian’s body starts rejecting all food, beginning with animal products. As Adams observes, Marian sees herself being “consumed by marital oppression” while viewing nonhuman animals with “the new awareness of a common experience” (Sexual Politics 118). Marian vegetarian protest is neither empowering nor desirable, however. Although she considers her body’s refusal to eat “anything that had once been, or … might still be living” as “ethical,” she also maintains a “forlorn hope that her body might change its mind,” while longing to “become again a carnivore, [and] gnaw on a good bone!” (177, 173). Moreover, Marian is only able to express empowerment by resuming the carnist oppression of the other animals, concluding the novel with a proud proclamation that she is eating steak again (180). As Borrell observes, Marian’s cessation of carnism is considered “as irrational and … unsustainable as non-eating,” with Emelia Quinn more-accurately identifying it with “anorexia rather than veganism” (Borrell 89; Quinn 94). Nevertheless, abstinence from meat-eating continues to be represented as an inherently anti-patriarchal act throughout Atwood’s writing. The narrator of her 1982 short story “The Sin Eater” similarly rejects the idea of chaste vegetarianism by ordering a hamburger, with carnist masculinity being taken to the extreme in War Bears (2018), wherein a male character looks

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forward to “an explosion of meat! … like someone dropped this enormous meat bomb!” (Atwood, “Sin Eater” 221–22; Atwood and Steacy, War Bears 3:2, italics in place of bold). Atwood revisits connections between sexism and speciesism in her second novel Surfacing (1972), which Atwood claims resulted from pushing the idea of identifying with nonhuman animals “as far as it goes” (Sandler 43–44). The novel’s unnamed narrator initially dismisses her concerns about hunting and fishing as “irrational” but later rejects such practices after witnessing a group of “Americans” crucify a heron (62, 130–31). Although its killers are in fact Canadian, the heron reappears throughout Surfacing as a symbol of an encroaching and explicitly masculinist “American” imperialism. The narrator’s acquaintance David points out that, like the US, Canada was “founded on the bodies of dead animals” (36). As Atwood notes in in Survival, however, “from the [nonhuman] animal point of view, Canadians are as bad as the slave trade or the Inquisition” (79). Feeling an affinity between herself and hunted animals, she flees into the wilderness, returning to “a state of nature” and remaining a fugitive “natural woman” for the rest of the novel (196). She also envisions the spread of speciesism in explicitly science-fictional terms, likening it to “late show sci-fi movies, creatures from outer space, body snatchers injecting themselves into you dispossessing your brain,” with similar comparisons to science fiction recurring throughout Atwood’s other early, realist fiction (Surfacing 130; see also 90, “Giving Birth” 238; Cat’s Eye 431; “Bad Mouth” 12; Robber Bride 43). Yet while Survival’s narrator scavenges for vegetables in gardens like the creature in Frankenstein, she maintains the possibility of catching animals for food (186). As with The Edible Woman, any suggestion of vegetarianism in Surfacing is “apparently accidental rather than conscious and deliberate” (Borrell 51). Despite her consistent dismissal of vegetarianism, many of Atwood’s characters continue to experience similar revelations about sexism and speciesism. In Cat’s Eye (1988)—which begins with a Wellsian appeal to time travel to frame its shifting narrative—the protagonist, Elaine, notices how her family’s Christmas “resembles a trussed, headless baby,” its “disguise as a meal” is “thrown off,” revealing it as “a large dead bird,” and she later observes how the women in her art history class appear similarly “served up” like “plates of meat and dead lobsters” (155, 381). In Alias Grace (1996), the ostensibly sympathetic psychiatrist Simon similarly imagines women as meat dishes, while the allegedly lecherous Mr. Haraghy

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is noted for having “made his fortune in hog butchering” (60, 193, 199). Elaine’s enthusiastic dissections, compared to the squeamish reactions of her classmates, however, show how she considers nonhuman animals as objects to be studied rather than beings in their own right (Cat’s Eye 291–93). The narrator of Alias Grace (1996) also emphasises her fondness for nonhuman animals on multiple occasions (23, 148, 238). That the narrator is both unreliable and an apparently unwitting accomplice to murder renders her professions of animal sympathy naive at best. She also refuses to kill a chicken, since she claims to have “an aversion to shedding the blood of any living thing,” although she does not object to preparing or eating them afterward (249–50), later likening a woman she is accused of murdering to a rooster destined for the stew pot (315). One of the protagonists of The Robber Bride (1993), Charis, is a conscious vegetarian whose abstinence from meat-eating is, again, interlinked with her own bodily autonomy. She appeals to vegetarianism’s health benefits and shows genuine sympathy for other animals, having first given up meat as a child, upon learning that her bacon breakfast had come from her family’s pet pig (45, 252). Charis’s vegetarianism also inspires an explicit rejection of Christianity, which she finds “full of meat” and animal sacrifices, declaring that “Cain was right to offer up the vegetables” (63). The novel’s other characters, however, merely consider her an “endearing nincompoop” with “mush for brains” (411, 386). Even at her most sympathetic, Atwood does not present vegetarianism as “ethical in any admirable sense” but rather “neurotic and self-deceived” (Taylor 134). Although often aligned with its victims, Atwood’s characters rarely question speciesism itself, and when they do, they are ridiculed. Associations between sexual assault and the smell of meat nevertheless echo throughout Atwood’s fiction. In Life Before Man (1979) the smell of “rotting meat” lingers outside a museum Bug Room decorated with female centrefolds—arguably alluding to how “women’s bodies are devoured by the male gaze”—with Chris later smelling of “faintly rotting meat” after sexually assaulting Elizabeth (Atwood, Life 220, 234; Parker 365). The lingering taste of “rotting meat” left in Rennie’s mouth by a beef sandwich is similarly symbolic of the political and sexual abuse she is about to experience in Bodily Harm (1981) (49; Parker 357). In The Robber Bride, Charis is molested by her uncle, who smells of “rancid meat,” and associates the smell more generally with men and sex (262,

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285).2 The narrator of Alias Grace is also haunted by “the smell of fresh meat” when accosted by a series of mysterious men in her dreams (297). Atwood’s short story “My Life as a Bat” (1992) is even told from the perspective of a bat who perceives human beings as embodiments of “evil,” who stink of “half-digested meat,” Atwood, “Bat” 116). A lone exception occurs in The Testaments, wherein Dr. Grove’s breath instead smells of onions as he sexually assaults Agnes, although her subsequent refusal to eat continues Atwood’s connections between ingestion and bodily autonomy (95). Yet while Atwood repeatedly uses the smell of meat to signify sexual and speciesist violence, it is vegetarianism that is criticised as part of a collection of allegedly “outmoded” causes—such as women’s liberation and the reform of rape laws—in Life Before Man and which is characteristic of encroaching, female rivals in both Cat’s Eye and Lady Oracle (1976) (Life 275; Cat’s Eye 313; Lady 258). Although the women in Atwood’s early novels are often aligned with the nonhuman victims of carnism, it is only through meat-eating that they are empowered.

The Handmaids’ Tales Atwood’s most influential novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, is set in the dystopian North American state of Gilead, wherein male “Commanders” have enslaved all fertile women as “Handmaids,” who are forced to conceive and carry their children, since most of the population has been rendered infertile by nuclear contamination, environmental pollution and over-­ medication (122). Its belated sequel, The Testaments, tells of Gilead’s demise decades later. In both novels, women’s oppression is again frequently linked with nonhuman animals. Women are regularly compared with other animals in The Handmaid’s Tale. The protagonist, Offred, characterises herself and the other Handmaids as “trained pig[s]” and “attentive pet[s],” who are guarded using cattle-prods and marked with tattoos like “cattle-brand[s]” (29, 193, 266, 14). The Handmaids’ edibility is further suggested by their use of butter as a moisturiser, with which they oil themselves “like roast meat on a spit” (107, 55). Offred also compares the Handmaids to Holocaust victims, who she misunderstands as having “been eaten” by the Nazis due to their use of ovens (65). However, the Handmaids’ cruel treatment is more commonly linked to that of chickens, whose carcasses Offred 2

 Charis is referred to as Karen in the cited passages.

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procures from the “All Flesh” butcher.3 A cook’s fingering of a chicken’s giblets as it “lies there, headless and without feet” portends Offred’s later lying “like a dead bird” in a feathered dress as her Commander attempts to seduce her (57–58, 267). The Handmaids are also forced to wear animal costumes at a clandestine brothel Jezebel’s, which smells like “fried chicken, going bad,” and when a rebellious Handmaid attempts to escape in a chicken truck, the Handmaids hanged as punishment are likened to “chickens strung up by the necks in a meatshop window” (245, 259, 289). The repeated comparisons between Handmaids and chickens highlights the similarities between human victims of extreme atrocities and the nonhuman victims of common carnism. Nevertheless, nonhuman animals never appear within the narrative, with their suffering only ever evoked as a metaphor for a human equivalent. Although Atwood employs empathy for other animals to critique patriarchal oppression, she does not engender sympathy for nonhumans themselves. Comparisons between female sex slaves and commonly eaten fowl recur throughout Atwood’s later science fiction. Turkey basters are used to forcibly inseminate women in the dystopian story “Freeforall” (1986), Atwood herself having earlier commented on the “turkey-carcass treatment of women in porn” (“Freeforall”; “Laughter” 15). Prisoners in The Heart Goes Last even raise chickens for sexual intercourse, although the novel’s “chicken pimp” protagonist Stan resists the temptation himself, for fear he’d “start having daydreams” about his imaginary girlfriend Jasmine wearing “feathers” (91). The first episode of The Handmaid’s Tale’s popular television adaptation (2017–) eliminates the chicken allusion, with Offred instead being told to “avoid the chicken” at All Flesh, due to its “crazy levels of dioxin” eliminating the common carnist comparisons of its source material (S1E1 “Offred”). However, chickens continue to be associated with female suffering in The Testaments, which concludes with a statue of the patriarchal-enforcer-cum-feminist-revolutionary Aunt Lydia being discovered “in an abandoned chicken battery farm” (410). Earlier in the novel, the Commander’s daughter Agnes is also told her (adoptive) 3  Both Offred’s husband and her Commander claim that “men needed more meat than women” (73). The overbearing patriarch of Atwood’s later story “Hack Wednesday” (1990) agrees, although the story’s female narrator argues that meat is actually of greater necessity for women, due to the “blood-consuming” demands of childbirth and menstruation (244–45). As the fictional editor of Don LePan’s Animals (2009) points out, however, “the required amounts … of protein and other nutrients could [also] be readily obtained through the consumption of significant amounts of nuts and soy or other legumes” (61n).

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mother is dying by a servant holding “a cleaver in one hand and a … chicken neck in the other” (27). Other allusions are more explicit. Canadian schools claim Gilead’s women are “forced to get pregnant like cows,” and Agnes is indeed horrified to learn that the Biblical tale of the Levite and his Concubine taught to Gileadean children concludes with the concubine being “cut up like a cow by a man who’d treated her like a purchased animal when she was alive” (46, 303). As Aunt Lydia observes of the Gileadean women’s original imprisonment: “They were reducing us to animals—to penned up animas—to our animal nature. … We were to consider ourselves subhuman” (143). She later compares her torturous experiences in solitary confinement to “a recipe for a rough steak,” and although Agnes likens the imagined murder of her Commander to a “slaughter chamber” and a “butcher shop,” the novel’s other carnist imagery is exclusively associated with women’s oppression (170, 229). Many of The Testaments’ other biblical allusions reinforce carnism more than sexism. The story of Cain is inverted to suggest God has given up blood sacrifices in favour of vegetable ones, and Agnes is reminded to be thankful for the animals and vegetables that died to feed them in his name (83, 164). An implicit connection between carnism and the Fall is nevertheless made when Agnes plays a version of Snakes and Ladders, where players ascend up the tree of life and slide down Satanic snakes, while colouring in a picture of the All Flesh butcher shop (107). Paradise Lost also numbers among Aunt Lydia’s banned books, and Genesis is often represented as a story of female rebellion (35). However, none of Gilead’s women seek vegetarian redemption—except perhaps for a group of septuagenarian “semi-vegetarian” gardeners, who are only mentioned in passing (111). Instead, it is the “deer-hunting” resistance leader Ada— based on Atwood’s aunt-in-law, who was “one of the first female hunting and fishing guides in Nova Scotia”—who provides their salvation (378, 419). Ada also brings the women she rescues genuine goat’s cheese, which they relish in contrast to the artificial cheese and other “putrid” substitutes they suffered while in Gilead (84). The Testaments thereby reinforces dystopian fiction’s regular reverence for authentic animal products. Additionally, while Atwood continually likens the oppression of women to the carnist oppression of other animals, she also invariably associates their liberation with hunting and carnism rather than vegetarianism.

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The Blind Assassin and Later Realist Fiction The Blind Assassin’s is a realist memoir, wherein narrator Iris Chase recounts her marriage to button-factory owner Richard Griffen, which is interjected with chapters from a romance novel—also titled The Blind Assassin—attributed to Iris’s sister Laura, following her apparent suicide. In the Blind Assassin novel-within-a-novel, a science fiction writer and political fugitive tells his lover a story—again called “The Blind Assassin”— set on a planet where women are sacrificed to “carnivorous gods” (33). Again, women’s subjugation is equated with patriarchal carnism, with Iris ultimately being revealed as the author of the book, which is an allegory for Griffen’s longstanding sexual assault of Laura. The “Blind Assassin” story parodies science fiction’s vegetarian tradition. Its empathetic female astronaut, B, is on “first-name terms” with her sledge dogs, who she believes “have souls,” despite her “official scientific materialism.” Conversely, the male astronaut, X, is concerned her sympathies might become “a nuisance if they run out of food and have to eat one”, echoing Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein in his calculated disregard of nonhuman life (337). As in many classic science fiction stories, female interspecies empathy is portrayed as naive, in contrast to utilitarian rationalism, with the story’s protagonists ultimately being eaten by wolves (423). When the writer’s lover challenges the patriarchal imagery of his story, he responds by telling her an ironic “happy story” about a planet where “no meat was eaten” and there are “no carnivorous animals” (434). Instead, the planet is inhabited by “peach women” who grow on trees and live in vegetarian peace until a group of male astronauts crash-land on their planet and begin abusing them while longing for “a great big grilled steak, rare, dripping with blood” (434–35). The story inverts early vegetarian-­feminist utopias, such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), wherein masculine carnism is easily conquered by feminine vegetarianism, with the male astronaut’s carnist callousness standing in for the “real life” sexual abuse inflicted on Laura. Yet while Atwood appeals to science fiction’s traditional feminist-vegetarian associations to expose such sexist oppressions, she again depicts vegetarians as passive and powerless. The Blind Assassin also contains Atwood’s most blatant and forceful rejection of vegetarianism. Early in the novel, Iris encounters the following exchange written on a bathroom wall:

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Don’t Eat Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Kill. … Don’t Kill Anything You Aren’t Prepared to Eat. … Don’t Kill. … Don’t Eat. … Fuck Vegetarians—“All Gods Are Carnivorous”—Laura Chase. (104, italics original).

Along with being inspired by the science fiction story, the exchange again reduces vegetarianism to an insubstantial ideology that is violently refuted in the “bold black lettering” of its final lines (ibid.). Moreover, since the exchange takes place in a women’s bathroom, each of its voices are presumably female. The final reinforcement of carnist patriarchy therefore confirms “women’s cultural blindness to—and thus collusion with—their own victimization as well as the victimization of other women” (Bouson 251), especially given Laura and Iris’s ongoing identification with carnism’s nonhuman victims. A further allusion to science fictional vegetarianism occurs in Atwood’s later realist novel Hag-Seed. When a group of prisoners, putting on a production of Shakespeare’s Tempest, object to playing Ariel because he is a fairy, the director reinterprets him as an alien, similar to those depicted in E.T. and Star Trek, after which the prisoners consider him a vegan, since such “weird eating habits” are “the kind of thing you’d expect from aliens” (Atwood, Hag-Seed 103–4).4 Again, however, Atwood undercuts the idea of animal ethics by having the potential objection by animal rights activists to the use of stuffed animals (children’s toys) for an “animal”-skin cape (20) as a reason for the director’s original dismissal from the theatre company. Although implicitly dishonest, the accusation is in keeping with Atwood’s historic ridicule of vegetarian and animal ethics activists. Vegetarianism is also characterised as foolish in The Blind Assassin itself, via Iris and Laura’s “lumpy and inelegant” childhood tutor Miss Violence, who likes to read “romantic novels” while leafing through a scrapbook of pamphlets from “various promoters of self-improvement,” such as “the Swedenborgians, the Fabians, [and] the Vegetarians,” with the scrapbook’s 4  Atwood herself has been written into the Star Trek extended universe. In David R. George’s novel Provenance of Shadows (2006), Spock asks Dr McCoy to give Captain Kirk his copy of her novel Life Before Man (wherein characters play a Star Trek party game). The reference even alludes to interspecies empathy, with McCoy interpreting the novel’s opening lines, in which one of the protagonists likens herself to a “peeled snail,” to signal the vegetarian Spock’s intense distress (George 336; Atwood, Life 11, 155).

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“tooled-leather” binding only adding to the novel’s persistent depiction of vegetarianism as inconsistent and ineffectual (192). Atwood’s Blind Assassin nevertheless presents numerous other links between the oppression of women and nonhuman animals. Like Elaine in Cat’s Eye, Laura refuses to eat rabbits, since they look like “skinned babies” (204). Iris finds her bridal trousseau similarly threatening, since it “sounded like trussed—what was done to raw turkeys with skewers and pieces of strings” (291). Once married, her increased social status is symbolised by a series of extravagant animal-fur outfits, with the female character in her “Blind Assassin” story later commenting: “The contrast of fragile veil and rank animal pelt, that’s what appeals to the gentlemen. Delicate flesh” (Blind Assassin 340, see also 458, 557). Laura’s ongoing abuse also culminates in a forced abortion—a process whose association with “kitchen-table butchers” intrigues Iris and Laura with its potential implications of cannibalism (399). The narrator of Surfacing is similarly coerced into having an abortion by her partner, who insists that the aborted foetus “wasn’t a person, only an animal” (145). Mary’s fatal abortion in Alias Grace likewise smells “very similar” to a “butcher’s shop” and leaves the interviewer it is recounted to feeling “as if he’s just come from an abattoir, with the unknown father of the aborted child considered to have treated Mary like a “carcass hung up at the butcher’s” (177–78, 185). The frequently recognised connections between common abuses of women and that of other animals does not inspire any questioning of speciesism or carnism themselves in any of these novels, however. Atwood has repeatedly rejected any identification between herself and her protagonists, particularly regarding their vegetarianism (Kaminski 29; Sandler 47; Solomon 226–27). Yet they often share many of her experiences, with Atwood recently insisting it is “no coincidence” that Surfacing’s narrator is an illustrator and Cat’s Eye’s a painter, given her own artistic history (Angel Catbird 1:7). There is reason to think that her characters’ attitudes toward vegetarianism and other animals is similarly autobiographical in origin. Many details in the quazi-novel Moral Disorder (2006) echo those of Atwood’s life, as detailed in her husband Graeme Gibson’s Bedside Book of Beasts (2009). Its titular story describes the narrator Nell and her husband Tig’s experiences living on a farm, as Atwood and Gibson did during the 1970s (G. Gibson 50–51). Despite being warned against humanising the cattle they raise, the couple’s sons end up giving them names, which the son’s use to inspire “shock and horror” when their meat is eaten, just as Gibson’s sons did when “admiring the taste and texture”

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of their own cattle’s flesh (Atwood, Disorder 144; G. Gibson 50).5 Conversely, Nell likens the “period of invisibility,” during which the cattle are killed are by a hired butcher, to a woman being dismembered by a magician, and refuses to name their new lamb, who is later slaughtered “for no crime except the crime of being himself” (Atwood, Disorder 150, 153, 157). The other cows also continually escape to join a nearby herd, which Nell speculates is because they know they are going to be eaten, and loudly object when the lamb is later taken to the slaughterhouse as though they “knew something was up” (143–44, 157). Once again, however, any endorsement of vegetarianism or animal liberation is ultimately undermined. Nell’s climactic crying over the lamb’s slaughter is prompted by its symbolism of her own domestic repression, rather than the lamb’s loss of life itself, and—although Nell considers herself a “cannibal” for doing so—she ultimately concedes its meat is “delicious,” while resolving to become the type of woman who “would roll up her sleeves and dispense with sentimentality, and do whatever blood-soaked, bad-smelling thing had to be done” (159–60). As in her earliest novels, Atwood’s most recent and autobiographical equation of female and nonhuman suffering aligns vegetarianism with helplessness that is overcome through carnist control, with similar attitudes echoed throughout her science fiction.

The MaddAddam Trilogy Although its popular presence is almost nonexistent, Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is probably the most critically examined work of twenty-first-century literary science fiction to date. The trilogy’s first novel, Oryx and Crake (2003), alternately describes the dystopian lead-up to release of a humanity destroying virus—later called the “Flood”—concocted by the biologist “Crake” (real name: Glenn) and the stewardship of the posthuman species of “Crakers” by his human friend Jimmy (aka “Snowman”) in its aftermath. The second novel, The Year of the Flood (2009), follows two members of the vegetarian religious sect God’s Gardeners, Toby and Ren, in the year following the virus’s activation and concludes with them encountering Jimmy and the Crakers. The final 5  Both Atwood and Gibson have been actively involved with Ontario’s Pelee Island Bird Observatory since it’s foundation in 2004. The sanctuary’s emphasis is on observation, rather than conservation, however, and the couple also supported the installation of “organic farms” on the island (Munroe).

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novel, MaddAddam (2013) describes the establishment of a hybrid human-Craker community and its defence against violent human criminals called “Painballers” and gigantic, genetically engineered intelligent pigs called “pigoons.” The series serves as a culmination of science fiction’s previous vegetarian traditions, bringing together many of the themes fundamental to the works examined in the previous chapters. Children of “Nature” As a post-catastrophic tale that also deals with the scientific creation of life, the MaddAddam trilogy is a “generic parody” of both Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man (Gibert 33). In fact, Frankenstein is somewhat of a fixation for Atwood, serving as direct inspiration for her 1966 poem “Speeches for Dr Frankenstein” (1966) as well as her early watercolours (ca.1970) (S. R. Wilson, Fairy-Tale, plates 6–7). Frankenstein also serves as the basis of her short story “Hairball” (1991; originally titled “Kat”), the “Frankenstein Monster Song” (2004) she wrote for the band One Ring Zero and is frequently alluded to throughout her other writing (e.g., “Freeforall”; Life 53; Robber Bride 102, 192; “Scarlet Ibis” 191). Oryx and Crake also contains several specific allusions to Frankenstein, with Jimmy being shown a film of Frankenstein during an interrogation and crying out for his own “Bride of Frankenstein” when believing himself the last man left alive (303, 199). As Emelia Quinn observes, the reference to film adaptations of Frankenstein, rather than Shelley’s original novel, “emphasizes the impurity of [its] textual origins” (160). Atwood nevertheless considers Frankenstein the “novel of record” regarding scientific pursuits of human perfection, often employing its allusion to imply monstrous impurity in connection with carnism (“Arguing” 132). Pigoons are considered “frankenbacon” and the Crakers “Frankenpeople” with “frankenbabies” in MaddAddam (158, 265). Angel Catbird also features a “frankenrat,” and the cannibalistic recipes Atwood surveys in The CanLit Foodbook (1987) are allegedly inclined toward “the Frankensteins manqué” (Catbird 2:38; Foodbook 4, italics original). Despite her obvious reverence for Frankenstein, its lapsarian-vegetarian endorsements seem lost on Atwood and are explicitly inverted in the MaddAddam trilogy. Like Frankenstein’s creature, Atwood’s Crakers promise a return to an allegedly “natural” vegetarian existence, being taught “what to eat … And what not to hurt” by Jimmy and Crake’s pescatarian girlfriend Oryx (363, 365). They are essentially herbivorous, being described as “vegetarians”

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who “eat mostly grass and leaves and roots” and “do no cooking,” their foods being “plentiful and always available” (186, 358). Moreover, “since they [are] neither hunters nor agriculturalists hungry for land, there [is] no territoriality” among them (186), meaning they “aren’t violent or given to bloodthirsty acts of retribution” (186, 120). Jimmy also imparts a lapsarian conception of humanity to the Crakers, telling them humans “were full of chaos” that “made them do bad things”: They were killing other people all the time. And they were eating up all the Children of Oryx [nonhuman animals] … Every day they were eating them up. They were killing them and killing them, and eating them and eating them. They ate them even when they weren’t hungry. (119)

Humans are hereby represented to the Crakers as violent, insatiable consumers, whose foremost crimes include the unnecessary killing and eating of other animals. Jimmy’s artist friends make similar connections between animal farming and humanity’s downfall, theorising that the human race was “doomed” to extinction “once agriculture was invented,” becoming like a “giant slug eating its way relentlessly through all the other bioforms on the planet” (285). Similar conceptions are common among Atwood’s fiction. In Cat’s Eye, Elaine’s father cautions against an overpopulated world “covered with insulin-producing cows,” whose methane emissions “will choke out the oxygen and perhaps cause the entire earth to become a giant greenhouse” (256). That he does so while “cheerfully, finishing up [his] meatloaf,” however, reveals his carnist hypocrisy, which is reinforced in a later Crake-like tirade wherein he calls for “a new epidemic” to “redress the balance,” while serving “beef stew” (ibid. 293). In The Blind Assassin, Iris reflects that although “people must stop burning things up … Gasoline, oil, whole forests. … they won’t stop. Greed and hunger lash them on, as usual” watching a report about “Global warming” (93). In Life Before Man Lesje feels humanity “has it coming,” concluding humans are “a danger to the universe, a mischievous ape, spiteful, destructive, [and] malevolent” (25, 293). As in Atwood’s other fictions, nonhuman animals are represented as victims of a corrupt and unrelenting humanity in the MaddAddam trilogy, with Jimmy telling the Crakers it was Oryx who prompted Crake to end humanity’s carnivorous chaos (Oryx 119). By replacing humanity with the Crakers, Crake attempts to bring about the kind of “peaceful and human,” vegetarian utopia envisioned by Frankenstein’s creature. As Parry observes, however, the Crakers

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are “clearly something less than human,” lacking art and culture, until inspired by Jimmy’s rampant carnism (“New Nostalgia” 251). Jimmy is an enthusiastic meat-eater, and—as apparently the only human left alive—his carnism is represented to the Crakers as an essential aspect of human nature. He attributes his malnourishment at the beginning of Oryx and Crake to a specific lack of “animal protein,” explaining that “their food was not his food” when the Crakers offer him their leaves and recycled faeces (Oryx 12, 187). Although Jimmy resists killing other animals for fear of offending the Crakers, he nevertheless trains them to bring him a “weekly fish,” which he cooks over a fire, in exchange for his stories (110). As Jimmy observes: “If things had gone as Crake wanted, there would be no more such killing—no more human predation—but he’d reckoned without Snowman and his beastly appetites,” the following statement, that he “can’t live on clover,” reasserting his allegedly essential carnivorousness (116). Meat-eating continues to be depicted as an essential human characteristic throughout the trilogy, with the roasting of a rakunk (racoon/skunk) signalling the otherness of the humans Jimmy and the Craers encounter at the end of Oryx and Crake, while also reinforcing carnism as a tell-tale characteristic of human presence (432). In MaddAddam, the fish-ritual is even codified into Craker lore by the Craker prophet Blackbeard, who declares Jimmy “has to eat a fish or he would get very sick. Because that is the way he is made” (12, italics added).6 Rather than facilitating a return to prelapsarian vegetarianism, the Crakers rewrite humans and their history as essentially carnivorous. Moreover, while fish-eating is represented as a violation of the Crakers’ peaceful “vegetarianism” in Oryx and Crake, by the end of MaddAddam, it has become a mundane ritual the Crakers themselves participate in. By then, they have begun telling their own stories, which are always preceded by: “The hard thing of eating the fish, the smelly bone taste—that is what needs to be done. First the bad things, then the story” (MaddAddam 436, italics added). Although Blackbeard does not swallow the fish, which he notes tastes “very bad” and—as with Octavia E. Butler’s human/Oankali hybrids in Xenogenesis (1987–89)—causes him to make “the noises of a sick person,” the nonessential killing and symbolic consumption of another animal has become a cornerstone of their culture (435–36). As Laura 6  There is also a potential implication of human-Craker predation when Jimmy tells the Crakers their flesh is “made … out of a mango,” after constantly eating mangoes in the early chapters (Oryx 110, 4–5, 6, 13).

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Wright argues, Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy “seems to suggest” that “to be human is to be carnivorous” (83). However, rather than proposing that “to be posthuman” and “thrive in the postapocalyptic world … is to be vegan,” Atwood appears to consider the Crakers incomplete (or at least insubstantial) without carnism (ibid.). Rather than flourishing posthumans, the Crakers are represented as flounderingly inhuman until Jimmy and the other human survivors’ carnism “elevates” them beyond expectation, with Jimmy’s introduction of fire, cooking and carnism to the Crakers thereby casting him as a postmodern Prometheus (Oryx 186). Blackbeard nevertheless maintains that Crakers are distinct from humans since they “do not have battles” and “do not eat a fish” (439). However, he also participates (as translator) in the final battle against the Painballers, which again causes him to make “the noises of a sick person” (440). Although carnism and violence remain repulsive to the Crakers, their existence becomes dependent on them. Shelleyan vegetarianism is also openly parodied in the MaddAddam series through the God’s Gardeners, who preach a combination of Abrahamic lapsarianism and evolutionary naturalism. According to their leader, Adam One, “the Fall of Man was multidimensional”: The ancestral primates fell out of the trees; then they fell from vegetarianism into meat-eating … from instinct into reason, and thus into technology; … from firelessness into fire, and thence into weaponry; … from a joyous life in the moment into the anxious contemplation of the vanished past and the distant future. (Flood 224)

As in Percy Shelley’s philosophy, meat-eat eating is considered a corruption of human innocence, which coincides with the invention of fire and increasing animosity. In Atwood’s 2006 story “The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins,” a bear adamantly declares itself “not like a man” in response to its biblical naming (78, italics original). Yet, rather than the tyrannical domestication asserted by Jacques Derrida, Adam One deems the naming of nonhuman animals in Genesis an act “of loving-kindness and kinship, for man in his fallen state was not yet a carnivore” who had “violated” their trust through “bloodshed,” “gluttony,” pride and disdain” (Atwood, Flood 15; c.f. Derrida 16, 20). He also inverts God’s allegedly carnist covenant with Noah, interpreting its extension to “every living creature,” as proof nonhuman animals “are not senseless, matter, not mere chunks of meat” but have “living souls,”

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with whom the Gardeners, as a “plural Noah,” are charged with keeping “trust” (110; quoting Genesis 9:3). The Gardeners are therefore “strict vegetarians” who stage protests with slogans like “Don’t Eat Death! Animals R Us!” and whose vegetarianism is reasserted throughout Adam One’s many sermons, and William Blake-inspired hymns, which are implied to have inspired Crake’s conception of the Crakers (54, 48, 517, italics removed). As Andrew Milner and J.  R. Burgmann observe, readers are “clearly meant to agree” with much of Adam One’s sermons, arguing that the MaddAddam trilogy’s dystopia becomes “critical” at precisely the point where corporate adaptation to climate change is challenged by the “eutopian enclave” of the God’s Gardeners (112). Indeed, Atwood herself has declared the Gardeners a definitively utopian aspect amid The Year of the Flood’s “dystopia” and even promoted the use of their hymns for “amateur devotional or environmental purposes” (“Dire Cartographies” 93; Flood 517). The Gardeners’ reception among vegetarian and vegan critics has been less favourable, however. Quinn likens them to the nineteenth-­ century Christian-vegetarian Order of Danielites, whom vegetarian scholars have labelled “dotty” and “eccentric,” while arguing their “often comical and contradictory attitudes” compromise them as a “realistic blueprint for the future” (99, 112). Richard Alan Northover similarly considers their “inconsistency and comical aspects” to leave their vegetarianism open to “ecological revision” (88). Atwood herself has also criticised “hippie flower children” for not being “anything you could call a viable left” (Langer 132). Her more recent assessments have been more favourable, however, having supposedly “themed herself” vegetarian for the Year of the Flood book tour after cutting down on “animal fat” due to a “cholesterol problem” (Anderson). Atwood conceded she “shouldn’t use the term” since she was still eating “gastropods, crustaceans and the occasional fish,” with Wright speculating her alleged pescatarianism was simply “part of the showmanship of the tour” (Gould; Wright 83). Their scepticism is understandable, given how vegetarianism is consistently derided throughout the MaddAddam trilogy. While frequently foregrounded, the Gardeners’ vegetarian arguments are also invariably undermined. Adam One is often contrasted with his carnist half-brother Zeb—the “Mad Adam” of the trilogy’s title. Although Adam One sees evolution as a way for God to instil “humility” in humans

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through their proximity to other animals, Zeb points out how human teeth have carnivorous characteristics as justification for his continued carnism (Flood 62, 286). He also leads the Gardener children in “Predator-­ Prey” demonstrations, teaching them how to trap, kill, and eat other animals (167–69). While Adam One is portrayed as an overzealous and ultimately tragic character, Zeb is heavily romanticised and idolised by the Crakers and the male Gardeners for having once eaten a bear (MaddAddam 67–69; Flood 131). He also regularly sneaks in hamburgers from the impoverished “pleeblands” for the Gardners’ healer, Pilar (Flood 127). The Gardeners claim to consider “meat of any kind” to be “obscene,” while allowing numerous loopholes that allow for its consumption and even idolisation, with Zeb’s survivalist faction represented as far more sensible and resilient than the other vegetarian gardeners (75). The MaddAddam trilogy’s other vegetarian and vegan characters are also consistently derided. The ex-Gardener Bernice, who expresses her disapproval of Jimmy’s “carnivorous ways” by burning his leather sandals, is described as both a “fundamentalist” and “pyromaniac” vegan, whose protests are rendered inane by the revelation that “hadn’t been real leather” (Oryx 239, 221–22, italics removed). Bernice’s response, that “they’d been posing as it, and as such deserved their fate” (221), gestures toward the symbolic abolitionism of Erica Fudge and Gary Francione. Yet Jimmy’s insistence that Bernice is “reality challenged in a major way,” while bemoaning her lack of deodorant, seems more likely to be the intended reading, since Atwood emphasises Beatrice’s seemingly irrational behaviour in lieu of any philosophical investigation (Oryx 221–22). Similar attitudes are reflected in Atwood’s real-world activism. In her preface to The Pollution Probe Foundation’s 1989 Canadian Green Consumer Guide, she encourages readers to “lobby for country-of-origin labels on all food, so you know you aren’t eating destroyed Amazonian rainforests with every hamburger bite” (3). The guide itself also acknowledges the inefficiency and environmental impacts of animal farming, which is flagged as hazardous for human hygiene (11, 40–41). No concern is shown for the nonhuman animals themselves, however, with animal liberation groups being described as “disturbing” and “not necessary” and vegetarianism only ever mentioned as a part of an Albertan holiday package (29, 153). Atwood frequently appeals to vegetarianism in both the MaddAddam trilogy and her real life, but her ultimate position is overwhelmingly carnist.

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Inner Animality Although Atwood’s MaddAddam series is overtly informed by Shelley, her attitudes toward vegetarianism and human nature are perhaps more reminiscent of H. G. Wells, whose works she grew up reading and who she considers “surely the “granddaddy” of all science-fictional writers (“In Context” 513). As Sven Wagner acknowledges, Jimmy is “left completely alone among strange creatures that have been altered through science,” like Prendick at the end of The Island of Doctor Moreau (165). Quinn, moreover, likens the Crakers to The Time Machine’s frugivorous, childlike Eloi, while casting Jimmy as a “Gothic double” of the Morlocks, whose “cannibalistic appetite … triumphs throughout the trilogy” (103). As Philip Armstrong also observes, Crake—like Frankenstein and Moreau before him—represents scientific dogmatism, conducting his experiments “in accordance with a radical version of … Darwinism and its late-­ twentieth-­century descendant, evolutionary psychology” (194). Amid all its postapocalypticism, bioengineering remains the central scientific novum of the MaddAddam trilogy, which takes its name from Crake’s mantra: “Adam named the animals. MaddAddam customizes them” (Atwood, Oryx 253, italics removed). It is therefore perhaps most directly descended from The Island of Doctor Moreau, with Atwood continuing the longstanding tradition of rewriting Wells’s “mere vivisectionist” as a “tyrant-­ in-­Training, bent on taking over the world” (“Ten Ways” 150). Wells’s disdain for vegetarianism is also replicated. In addition to the God’s Gardeners, laspsarian vegetarianism is mocked via the commissioning of predatory lion/lamb hybrid “liobams,” by a Christian sect who “reasoned that the only way to fulfil the lion/lamb friendship prophecy without the first eating the second would be to meld the two of them together” (Flood 112). Crake also claims “vegans are highly interested” in the prospect of genetically engineered grass-eating offspring, aligning veganism with an allegedly amoral disregard for nature while gesturing toward the invention of his subhuman Crakers (Oryx 359). Yet, unlike Frankenstein and Moreau, Crake “truly cares about his creatures,” catering for their happiness and attempting to eliminate their suffering (Wagner 191). As Gerry Canavan observes, Crake’s project—for all its murderous misanthropy—“oddly exemplifies Fredric Jameson’s critical notion of the radical break,” while “asserting through allegory the urgent necessity of radically changing our social relations and anti-ecological lifestyles” (Canavan, “Hope” 155). Through the failure of the Crakers as a “vegetarian” species

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and their ultimate enrichment through carnism, however, Atwood suggests vegetarianism is not the way. Rather than any of the bioengineered hybrid-species, Quinn argues it is actually the God’s Gardeners who best resemble Moreau’s Beast People, since their vegetarianism is “a mode of self-discipline that represses an innate carnivorism” (89). Just as the Beast People’s vegetarianism is enforced by Moreau’s “Law,” the Gardeners’ vegetarianism is maintained by “Vegivows,” which are only ever mentioned in relation to carnivorous temptation. Early in The Year of the Flood, Toby chastises herself for shooting a wild boar who was threatening her food supply while resisting the “great temptation” of turning it into a “bacon sandwich” (Atwood, Flood 22). By the end of the novel, however, she is praying for “animal protein” and “almost ready for the switch to full-blown carnivore” (390, 434). The other Gods Gardeners similarly revert to carnism under post-catastrophic conditions. When Toby joins the other survivors at the end of The Year of the Flood, she is greeted with a slice of “delicious” pigoon “pork” and promises of “bacon” (470–71). She is again offered a breakfast of “pig in three forms,” with as side of “Dog ribs”—sourced from genetically altered guard dogs, who the survivors deem “non-dogs,” who “only look like” the real thing—when returning to them at the start of MaddAddam (46; Flood 472). As Toby observes, “it hadn’t taken them long to backslide on the Gardener Vegivows” (MaddAddam 46). Even Adam One ultimately resorts to meat-eating, thanking the “Rat relatives” who have “donated their protein” to him and the other Gardeners following the activation of the virus, declaring: “We would not be Human if we did not prefer to be the devourers rather than the devoured” (413, 416). The survivors’ cook, Rebecca, similarly defends the Gardeners’ renewed meat-eating as necessary and natural alternative to the corporate and potentially cannibalistic SecretBurgers (Flood 471, 40). Toby likewise distinguishes their animal-­ eating from pre-chaos carnists, who she claims “were eating them in the wrong way” (MaddAddam, 114). The Gardeners’ carnist regression admittedly occurs under exceptional circumstances, Adam One recognising that “hunger is a powerful reorganizer of the conscience” (40). Nevertheless, like Wells, Atwood represents meat-eating as both innate and irrepressible. Vegetarianism is similarly undercut by bacon in Atwood and Alderman’s Happy Zombie Sunrise Home, wherein Alderman’s protagonist, Okie, declares she’s “practically a vegetarian,” except that she eats “fish. And chicken. And bacon sometimes, but not very often” (chap. 8). The story’s

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online format allows readers to comment on specific sections, with numerous readers berating Okie’s mother for demanding the death of a bird who has flown inside her house, with several even branding her “evil” (ibid.). Indeed, in Alderman’s award-winning dystopian novel The Power (2015), the cruelty of the abusive Mr Montgomery-Taylor is emphasised by his ownership of a slaughterhouse, with one of the novel’s female protagonists longing to “free” his animals (26–27). Yet while a couple of commentors point out the irony of Okie’s claim to vegetarianism, they also celebrate the making of bacon and eggs in her next segment (Atwood and Alderman chap. 8, 10). Although carnism and animal cruelty are used as effective and frequent markers of “evil” in Atwood and Alderman’s fiction, meat-eating itself remains celebrated by both authors and their readers. The MaddAddam trilogy’s human characters are also frequently reminded of their own edibility. Jimmy’s identification with the hybrid Abominable Snowman—an “apelike man or manlike ape,” allegedly hunted by mountain tribes and consumed in feasts made “all the more exciting … for bordering on cannibalism”—simultaneously positions him as both predator and prey (Oryx 8). He also recalls his compound smelling “like an abattoir” and being greeted by “gnawed human carcasses,” following the virus’s activation (Oryx 267). The chewed corpses suggest scavengers rather than attributing carnivorous qualities to the virus itself. Conversely, the virus that kills Crake’s mother (potentially a Flood prototype) is described as having “chewed through her,” and Toby eventually dies of “a wasting sickness that was eating parts of her away” (MaddAddam 473; Oryx 207). Jimmy similarly suffers an infection caused by microbes intent on “turning his flesh to porridge,” attracting vultures who circle above “waiting for him to become meat” (Oryx 416, 267). Vultures continually drop human body parts throughout The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam with Toby’s presumed consumption by them at its conclusion—something the Gardeners consider a “terrific future to look forward to”—further reinforcing humanity’s own edibility (MaddAddam 473; Flood 19, 71). Like Wells, however, Atwood also uses cannibalism to indicate inhumanity. The Painballers both rape and eat their victims, having been allegedly “reduced to the reptilian brain” with “nothing left of their empathy circuits” (Flood 118, 500; MaddAddam 17, 176). The other human survivors appeal to the Painballers’ supposed lack of humanity when calling for their execution. Nevertheless, the comparisons between the butchering of their human victims to the commonly accepted

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treatment of a Mo’Hair (hair-growing goat/sheep) also reveals their perpetuation of speciesist double standards (MaddAddam 448). Like Wells, Atwood ultimately presents carnism as a natural midpoint between oppressive vegetarianism and dehumanising cannibalism. Alternative Meats The MaddAddam trilogy contains twenty-first-century science fiction’s most influential and critically examined engagement with alternative meat technology so far. Throughout Oryx and Crake, Jimmy snacks on in vitro grown nuggets called “ChickieNobs,” which are harvested from headless “growth units” (Atwood, Oryx 238). Atwood’s ChickieNobs are clearly indebted to Chicken Little from Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s The Space Merchants (1952/1953), which is frequently mentioned alongside Oryx and Crake during discussions of alternative science-fictional meats, often in conjunction with William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) (e.g., Buscemi 134–35; Dillard-Wright 1704; McHugh 192; Morton 8; J. Parry, Edible Subjectivities 43, 137). Yet while cultured meat plays a major role in Oryx and Crake and The Space Merchants, it only appears in a single passage in Neuromancer, wherein animal-grown meat is presented as an expensive alternative to common, vat-grown substitutes (W. Gibson 137–38). Experimental animal farming is also represented in similarly dystopian terms in Atwood’s earlier novels. Elaine’s father in Cat’s Eye considers an attempt to breed “a turkey with four drumsticks, instead of two,” declaring that “the flavour will be sacrificed, of course.” His houseguest also decries the experiment for “fooling with Nature” (154–55). Animal farming is taken to a further, corrupted extreme in The Heart Goes Last, wherin the prison chicken-farming operation is replaced by “headless chickens nourished through tubes,” with the resulting efficiency and perceived elimination of animal cruelty ironically considered “the sort of multiple win” the prison’s totalitarian parent company “has come to stand for!” (107). As Parry observes, Atwood’s cultured meat “never escapes the taint of its unnatural, vegetative origins” (“New Nostalgia” 246). Atwood herself acknowledges that “the Chickie Nob [sic] solution has made giant strides” since Oryx and Crake’s publication (“Dire Cartographies” 92). There has also been over half-a-century of ethical and technological development since the Space Merchants. Nevertheless, Atwood continues to represent alternative meats as inherently impure.

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The economic and environmental benefits of alternative meats are never seriously considered within the MaddAddam trilogy. As Susan McHugh recognises, ChickieNobs are essentially the “utilitarian’s dream creature,” with one of Crake’s associates wryly gloating that “the animal-­ welfare freaks won’t be able to say a word,” since they feel “no pain” (McHugh 191; Atwood, Oryx 238). Indeed, as Parry observes, ChickieNobs are a more efficient, economical and ethical alternative to traditional animal farming, although their ethical and environmental benefits are of “little concern” for Atwood’s characters (“New Nostalgia” 246, 250). Like the other bioengineered species in the MaddAddam trilogy, ChickieNobs are represented as an unnatural aberration. Jimmy initially equates their heedlessness with “going too far,” with his later fondness for them signalling his own dystopian deterioration and causing his girlfriend (and future Gardener) Amanda and her artist friends to stop speaking to him (Oryx 238, 284). ChickieNobs have proven similarly repellent to critics, being variously received as “utterly abject,” “appallingly headless,” “genuinely revolting,” “ethically fastidious,” “nightmarish,” “monstrous beasts” (McHugh 192; Mohr 244; C.  Parry 154; Haraway 268; Canavan 142; Wagner 168). Other cultured meats are similarly treated as offensive and inferior throughout the MaddAddam trilogy. Despite later reverting to carnism, Ren is unable to eat cultured meat after leaving the God’s Gardeners, since it still “stank of dead animal,” while Zeb requires a beer to mask its taste even after becoming accustomed to the “ersatz texture” of soy substitutes (Flood 257, 341; MaddAddam 285, 293).7 Conversely, Toby’s childhood deer hunting is represented as both necessary for protecting her mother’s vegetable garden, as well as extremely nostalgic, with her later wolvog butchering inspiring pleasant memories of “childhood smells” (472). The traditional, animal-derived available to the MaddAddam trilogy’s upper-classes are similarly represented as unadulterated and extremely desirable. Jimmy is treated to “authentic” meats and cheeses, “real”  A similar example of machismic “meat nostalgia,” occurs in Elizabeth Dougherty’s dystopian novel The Blind Pig (2010), wherein genuine bacon sandwiches are considered an irresistible “downfall” for “many vegetarians,” while male consumers of “real” meat are described as “actually manly” and having arms like “steel bands” (237–38, 217, 208). The novel also has its equivalent ChickieNobs and Chicken Little, in the form of the grotesque “Singers”: twisted masses of cultured organs that emit a humming sound, as their flesh is harvested (114). For a comparison with Oryx and Crake, see Nora Castle, “In Vitro Meat and Science Fiction: Contemporary Narratives of Cultured Flesh,” Extrapolation 63, no. 2 (2022): 149–79. 7

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chocolate, coffee and beer when visiting Crake’s upper-class scientific institutions (Atwood Oryx 244–45, 360). He also enjoys “something a lot like real cheese,” which Crake claims is actually derived from “a new species of zucchini,” providing a lone exception to Atwood’s dystopian depiction of alternative animal products (244). Yet Jimmy also revels in the “wild” taste of a capon (a castrated and fattened rooster), which he compares with the “bland tofulike [sic] consistency and … inoffensive flavour” of ChickieNobs when dining at a “five-star” restaurant (Oryx 344). The Year of the Flood goes even further, with Toby living above an “endangered-­ species luxury couture operation” that sells meat from its skins to the private, gourmet restaurant “Rarity” (37). Atwood also describes the cloning and eating of an extinct Thylacine (Tasmanian Tiger) by “a very rich person with refined tastes” in her contemporaneous story “Thylacine Ragout” (2006) (75). Upper-class veganism is also apparent in the MaddAddam trilogy, with the richer compounds serving “pork ribs for the carnivores” along with soy and cultured substitutes “for those who wanted to eat meat without killing animals” (MaddAddam 285; Flood 312). Nevertheless, the overwhelming romanticisation of animal meat primarily functions as a critique of social status that positions it as a “natural” and desirable commodity while invalidating technologies that allow meat-eating’s continuation without the need for nonhuaman animal suffering. Sexual Politics Although often celebrated for their alleged purity among the upper classes, lower-class meats continually carry connotations of cannibalism and sexual abuse throughout the MaddAddam trilogy. The only “real” meat products readily available to the lower classes are SecretBurgers—the secret of which is “what sort of animal protein was actually in them” and are rumoured to even contain human corpses (40). As Parker observes, culinary demonstrations of power in Atwood’s novels often take on cannibalistic overtones, so that “the powerful not only eat, they eat the powerless” (363). SecretBurgers are also connected to sexual violence through Toby’s brutal sexual assaults by her SecretBurgers manager, and later by the cannibalistic Painballer Blanco, with Atwood having earlier characterised violent pornography is a reaction against feminism by men who “like to fantasize about women … being turned into hamburger” [sic] (“Laughter” 14). The inclusion of oryxes on Rarity’s menu similarly suggests the cannibalisation of Oryx and Crake’s eponymous female figure (Flood 37).

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Oryx’s own sexual abuse is characterised through carnist connotations. She claims to be a victim of child pornography, whose aversion to meat-­ eating stems from her traumatic experiences.8 In addition to being made to sleep in a cattle shed, she tells Jimmy that the cameraman who filmed her and “smelled too strong” because he “ate so much meat!” (144, 164, emphasis original). As a result, Oryx avoids eating the pepperoni on the pizzas she and Jimmy often order, although she embraces anchovies, seemingly in opposition to the cameraman’s own dislike of fish (164). Jimmy’s characterisation of Oryx’s gaze looking out of the screen and into “the secret person inside him,” when viewing the pornographic films, recalls Marian’s recognition of the absent animal referent in The Edible Woman (Oryx 104, italics removed). However, rather than being repulsed, Jimmy is instead tantalised by the realisation, considering sucking on Oryx’s fingers to be “the closest she could get to him without being food” (Oryx 371). Another potentially vegetarian character in Oryx and Crake is Jimmy’s stepmother Ramona, who always orders salads for lunch. In contrast to Jimmy’s rebellious, activist mother, Ramona is completely deferential to his father and acts like “a shower-gel babe,” not wanting to “put her neuron power into long sentences” (Oryx 28). As with Atwood’s earlier female characters, any vegetarianism that might be read into Ramona’s character is therefore indictive of feminine meekness in contrast to dominant, male carnism. Jimmy himself continues Atwood’s associations between carnism and predatory, male sexuality, with the pescatarian Oryx’s rejection of other meats stemming from personal trauma instead of any ethical ideology. Connections between carnism and sexual abuse continue throughout the later MaddAddam novels. Bernice describes Jimmy as a “meat-breath” when recounting their sexual histories, with the other Gardeners similarly dismissing her sexually abusive father as “a meat-breath pig-eater” (228, 258). Toby and the other Scales and Tails sex workers’ Mo’Hair wigs make them smell like “mutton” and “lamb chops” (Flood 21, 67). There are, of course, the cannibalistic painballers who rape and eat their victims. Even Zeb is made complicit in the combined carnist and sexist oppression of women and other animals, having worked as part of a mob operation 8  The authenticity of Oryx’s story is questioned throughout Oryx and Crake, with its illegitimacy perhaps supported by Zenia’s nefariously fabricating a similar story about being sold into sexual servitude in The Robber Bride (162–67). Atwood has treated Oryx’s story as genuine during interviews, however (Heilmann and Taylor 255).

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specialising in child sex trafficking and animal meat—“on or off the bone, screams-for-sale extra”—while in hiding (MaddAddam 214–15). He nevertheless continues to be romanticised as a hypermasculine, survivalist saviour, with Ren dreaming of him emerging from a bear-skin, smelling “comforting … like rained-on grass, and cinnamon, and the salty, vinegary, singed-leaf smell of the Gardeners,” in contrast to the common meat-stenches of Atwood’s otherwise villainised sexual abusers (Flood 254). Although Atwood continues to associate carnism with patriarchal oppression throughout the MaddAddam trilogy, she also continues to celebrate neocarnist survivalism, while animal activists are actively derided. Interspecies Empathy and Animal Activism Like Philip K. Dick, Atwood suggests that dystopian consumer societies corrode interspecies empathy. Jimmy’s earliest memory is of diseased cattle being burnt in a “huge bonfire.” After becoming “anxious” that the dead animals are being hurt by the flames, his father appeals to carnism as reassurance, telling him they are “like steaks and sausages, only they still had their skins on” (Oryx 17). For Jimmy, though “the heads make a difference,” and he continues to imagine “the animals looking at him reproachfully out of their burning eyes,” becoming increasingly concerned that “he’d done nothing to rescue them” (20). Jimmy and the reader are thereby confronted with the gaze of the often-absent nonhuman referent while being asked to consider the similar sufferings caused by carnism. As a child, Jimmy is similarly confronted by the gaze of a pigoon, which leaves him “confused about who should be allowed to eat what” (27, italics added). As an adult, however, Jimmy is desensitised to nonhuman suffering, becoming an insatiable carnist and a frequent visitor of “animal snuff sites” (93–94). Although the gaze of the absent referent haunts his memories, it does not inform his actions. The importance of the nonhuman gaze is again emphasised at the beginning of The Year of the Flood. Early in the novel, Toby tends to a garden populated with caterpillars that have been biologically engineered with “a baby face at the front end, with big eyes and a happy smile” that makes them “remarkably difficult to kill” (Flood 18). Her subsequent stepping on a beetle and immediately reciting a prayer for forgiveness is reminiscent of Dick’s own enlightening experience with the beetle. However, Toby’s characterisation of the prayer as a merely “ingrained” habit—along with Atwood’s satirical setting—suggests her sentiment is perhaps

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ingenuous (ibid.). Although Atwood often suggests an empathetic nature to her human characters in the MaddAddam trilogy, she also frequently undercuts their sincerity, which is further brought into question by the universal resumption of carnism by Toby and the other God’s Gardeners following the flood. Even the eventual pacts between the human survivors and the pigoons, whereby the two groups agree to stop eating each other, does more to reinforce carnism and speciesist divisions than erase them. The pact is foreshadowed by a collective hallucination of the deceased Pilar, appearing in the form of a suckling pigeon, after which Toby “can’t manage” her ham (MaddAddam 273, 318). Even so, the other Gardeners continue to aggressively assert their carnism, mourning the loss of “spareribs” for not having shot the sow on sight and considering it a “waste” that the vegetarian Pliar had not simply skinned the pigoon and eaten its meat (273–74, 277–78). The event is nevertheless translated into Craker lore as Pilar having “appeared in the skin of a pig,” just as Zeb had “put on the skin of the bear” (277). Her vegetarianism is thereby erased in their new history, while her peaceful, nonhuman appearance is transmogrified into a symbolic image of carnism. The pact itself also reinforces traditional arguments for denying ethical subjectivity to nonhuman animals. As a symbol of the pact, the pigoons offer the humans a dead piglet, who they are “permitted” to eat, since it is already dead (329). They end up burying it, however, since to consume it “would be like eating a baby” (331). The pigoons have become humanised rather than recognised as ethical subjects themselves. The pact also places particular emphasis on language and intelligence as a measure of subjectivity. Although it is implied that the pigoons were being eaten within the facilities where they were developed, it is also considered that “no one would want to eat an animal whose cells might be identical with at least some of their own” (Oryx 27). Indeed, the only prior reservation about their consumption comes from Manatee, who feels “weird” about eating pigoon meat since “they’ve got human neocortex tissues” (MaddAddam 28). There is also unease about eating Mo’Hair meat, since “it would be hard to slaughter and eat an animal with human hair” (251). The humans’ collective anxieties suggest that language, intelligence and proximity to humanity are necessary for ethical consideration, is again passed on to the Crakers, who justify the pact by inventing a story about a second creation egg “full of words” eaten by themselves and the pigoons, allowing them to think and speak better than other animals (352–53).

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Moreover, the ethics of eating “intelligent” animals is never seriously considered until the pigoons themselves propose the truce, which is only officially accepted (over a hundred pages later) after they help kill a band of renegade Painballers (451). No vegetarian sympathies are extended to any other animals, who the human survivors continue to consider “acceptable” sources of protein (458). The pact with the pigoons is a pragmatic rather than ethical agreement, with the survivors only ceasing the killing and consumption of animals capable of communicating with and actually confronting them about their carnism, rather than conceding that to kill and eat sentient creatures is itself unacceptable. In addition to its undermining of Animal Liberation arguments, the MaddAddam trilogy, as Parry observes, is also “palpably hostile to animal advocacy” (Edible Subjectivities 229). Groups of protestors characterised as “animal welfare freaks” and who foolishly liberate a ChickieNob facility when “the things can’t even walk!” (Atwood, Oryx 238, 397, italics removed). Jimmy’s father even suggests that the cattle he saw being burnt may have been deliberately contaminated by vegetarian activists (Oryx 20). The evasive “MaddAddam” organisation, which later helps develop the Crakers, are initially dismissed by Crake as “just another crazy Animal Liberation org[anisation]” (Oryx, 20, 254). Conversely, Zeb’s survivalist faction are depicted as effective “bioterrorists,” whose overwhelming survival of the Flood, in contrast to the overly carnist general population and the vegetarian Gardeners, suggests them as a sensible centre between carnist complacency and “crazed” animal activism (MaddAddam 4–5; Oryx 397). Rather than using science fiction to question ingrained attitudes about species divisions and animal activism, Atwood actively reinforces them. Neocarnist Environmentalism Atwood and the MaddAddam trilogy often express a neocarnist environmental philosophy similar to that of Kim Stanley Robinson and other critical utopian authors. She has a long history of environmental advocacy and credits “worries about the effects of climate change,” dating back to 1972, as the primary inspiration for the MaddAddam trilogy (“Dire Cartographies” 94; see also Payback 196, 212–13). Yet while Atwood regularly acknowledges animal farming as a major cause of environmental degradation, she never endorses vegetarianism as a possible solution. Instead, she regularly encourages the continuation of carnism on a smaller and allegedly more naturalistic scale.

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Atwood’s environmentalism is largely informed by the American environmentalist Bill McKibben. His 2003 book Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, which examines the intersection of humanity and bioengineering, is recommended as part of a “Reading List” that “may have influenced the founders of the God’s Gardeners” (Atwood, “Reading List”). When reviewing the book, Atwood envisions McKibben as an Earth Day Spirit addressing the “greedy little scrooge in all of us,” later describing Oryx and Crake itself as a “Christmas Carrol” from which Scrooge gets to wake up and change his ways (Atwood, “Arguing” 130; Halliwell 253). She similarly discusses humanity’s environmental “debt” through a parody of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carrol (1843) in her 2008 lecture Payback, wherein she discusses humanity’s environmental “debt,” via the story of a modern-day Scrooge, who “shoots animals, but only from a safe distance,” who is visited by three Earth Day spirits, each promoting a more harmonious human relationship with nonhuman animals (174, 177). Her Spirit of Earth Day Past highlights “examples of earlier and more inclusive attitudes toward animals” in Abrahamic, Buddhist, and Hindu traditions and also echoes the character of Crake when proposing a “pandemic plague” as a way of wiping the slate clean (181, 214). Conversely, the Spirit of Earth Day Future forecasts a utopian future where “evil bottom-scraping fishing practices have been abandoned” and “no one is overweight” due to a diet of fruits and vegetables grown organically on their front lawns (Payback 198–99). Yet while Atwood’s Earth Day spirits condemn industrial animal farming for its environmental impact, they and Atwood primarily oppose industrialisation rather than meat-eating itself. McKibben does not discuss vegetarianism in Enough, although he addresses animal farming’s environmental impacts in his earlier book The End of Nature (1989), which is curiously absent from the Gardener’s Reading List,” despite the many parallels it contains to the plot of the MaddAddam trilogy. Therein, McKibben predicts the rise of religious cults in response to increasing environmental catastrophes, along with genetically engineered “headless chickens” and “tree-eating men,” urging humanity to limit its numbers and “remain God’s creatures instead of making ourselves gods” (End 165, 214). He also acknowledges the alarming contribution of cattle to atmospheric methane levels, arguing in 2010 that “we’d be wise to either turn vegetarian” or convert to Chinese-style cooking which only uses meat “almost as a condiment” (End 15; Eaarth 177). Several of the Gardeners’ other “Reading List” recommendations

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also emphasise vegetarianism. In The Future of Life (2001), Edward O. Wilson argues that the only way to avoid inevitable food shortages is for industrialised nations to move toward a “more vegetarian diet” (33). Ian Morris’s Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels (2015) acknowledges the inefficiency of meat-production and even includes a response by Atwood wherein she notes the cultural progression from “heaps of glistening meat” in Homer’s Odyssey (ca. 700  BCE) to vegan restaurants in the twenty-first century (52, 275n20, 203).9 Moreover, little of McKibben or the other authors’ vegetarian endorsements are reflected in the MaddAddam trilogy. Atwood also reinterprets McKibben’s peaceful depictions of interspecies relationships as endorsements of neocarnism. The story of “Zeb Ate a Bear” is likely based on the environmentalist-musician Jim Stolz’s encounters with grizzly bears, as described by McKibben in The End of Nature (171–72). McKibben took from the experience that humans “don’t necessarily belong at the top in every way,” while Stolz emphasised the bears’ own preference for “veggies” (McKibben, End 172; Stolz). Zeb’s story in the MaddAddam trilogy, however, represents humans as mythical apex predators who (like Butler’s Anyanwu) can only truly become closer to other animals by eating them. As Atwood tells it, Zeb was stranded in the wilderness while hiding out with a group of polar bear conservationists, who he considered “green-hued furfuckers” who “lived off the good intentions of city types with disposable emotions who liked to think they were saving something” (72, 74). When Zeb’s aircraft is brought down by a would-be assassin, he turns cannibal, partially consuming his assailant (86, 93–94). He then wanders the mountains, confronting and killing a bear, whose skin he dons and heart he eats, thereby allegedly learning the “language of bears” (99–100). Although Zeb is represented as the human character who is closest too and has the most understanding of nature, his understanding is only reached through extreme acts of speciesist violence. The alleged essentialness of human carnism common to indigenous-­ inspired neocarnism is reinforced in Toby’s telling of the story to the Crakers. Toby tells them “Zeb felt sorry for the bear” and “didn’t want to hurt it” but would have died if he had not killed it (MaddAddam 69). 9  Atwood similarly addresses the abundance of meat in Classic mythology during The Penelopiad, suggesting that, although Greek heroes “did have the odd fruit or vegetable … you’ve probably never heard of these because no one put them into the songs much” (39).

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However, Zeb—whose “Tex-Mex” DNA suggests a possible Indigenous heritage, despite his being described as a “Russian-bear”—is remorseless and even enthusiastic about his actions, claiming to have experienced a vision of the bear, who he alleges is not even “pissed” since it still lives on in him (Flood 78; MaddAddam 390, 404). The “Words of Zeb Ate a Bear” are secondary only to the story of Oryx and Crake themselves in the Crakers’ new gospel, with Zeb thereby encoded into their culture as a masculinist “Defender” and the vegetarian Gardeners relegated to being his “Helpers” (MaddAddam 467). Zeb therefore represents a more moderate alternative to the Gardeners’ extreme puritanical vegetarianism, with Craker culture also ultimately emphasising Promethean and survivalist carnism rather than prelapsarian or environmentalist vegetarianism. Although Atwood frequently acknowledges animal farming’s environmental impact throughout the MaddAddam trilogy, it is almost always in conjunction with a refutation of vegetarianism. The development of hybrid “kanga-lambs,” who combine the “high-protein yield of sheep” with kangaroos’ “absence of methane-producing, ozone-depleting flatulence” furthers meat-eating, rather than reducing it and only ever appear as “high-end restaurant fare” (Oryx 34; McHugh 206). Crake also proposes infecting people with “a rare allergic reaction to red meat” to reduce humanity’s “carbon footprint” (MaddAddam 288–89). His proposal is deliberately provocative. Zeb’s response, that “we’re hunter-gatherers, we evolved to eat meat,” with anyone susceptible to the rare allergy “slated to be eliminated from the gene pool,” is perhaps even more extreme in its equation of carnivorousness with evolutionary superiority and corresponding condemnation of vegetarians to extinction (289). Nevertheless, it is his vision that plays out, with only the Gardeners who embrace his survivalist carnism surviving the oncoming flood. Gibson endorses similar neocarnist attitudes in The Bedside Book of Beasts, which is included on the Gardeners’ “Reading List” and whose publication date suggests was likely compiled in conjunction with The Year of The Flood. Therein, Gibson condemns industrialised animal slaughter and sport hunting, illustrating his point with Atwood’s poem “It’s Autumn” (2007), which characterises sport hunters as “angry old men” who don’t understand that a true hunter only “borrows” from their kills (G. Gibson 236). Gibson’s book does not mention vegetarianism, besides defending conservationists by distinguishing them from “some tofu-­ eating anti-development plot” (304). Instead, Gibson promotes Native American traditions, which he alleges “put to shame our contemporary

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indifference to the industrial slaughter of the animals we eat,” claiming he and Atwood similarly give “thanks” to the animals they eat, since it seems like “the least [they] could do” (50–51). Although Gibson and Atwood are primarily inspired by North-Midwestern Native American cultures, rather than Californian ones, the neglect of vegetarian philosophy and the idealisation of Native American traditions suggests a survivalist perspective similar to that of Robinson and Callenbach. Indeed, as Dunja M. Mohr observes, “Atwood positions the Crakers as stereotypical icons for indigenous people,” who “peacefully repopulate the depopulated land of the former colonizers” (247, parentheses removed). Atwood makes the allusion clear, with one of the human survivors who helped develop the Crakers claiming Crake considered them “indigenous people, no doubt, … and Homo sapiens sapiens as the greedy, rapacious Conquistadors,” while Jimmy sees them as “The Arawak Indians, welcoming Christopher Columbus with garlands and gifts of fruit … soon to be massacred” (MaddAddam 171, italics original; Oryx 425). Atwood hereby arguably others Indigenous cultures, by separating them from “Homo sapiens sapiens” in the comparison, while also obscuring their “ongoing colonisation” through the “privileging of a settler subject-position” (Frew 199). For all the MaddAddam trilogy’s vegetarian posturing, Atwood—like Robinson and many other critical utopian writers before her—ultimately exemplifies a neocarnist environmental philosophy largely inspired by Indigenous cultures without actually featuring or engaging with them.

Conclusion Atwood’s early realist writings were a major influence on modern feminist-­ vegetarian theory. As with Robinson, however, Atwood’s literary representations of vegetarianism are overwhelmingly unfavourable. Although vegetarians are common within Atwood’s work, they are invariably ridiculed and often contrasted with more forceful assertions of carnism. Her early novels equate vegetarianism with powerlessness, which is only ever overcome through carnist rejuvenation. Moreover, while the suffering of nonhuman animals is frequently invoked in her Handmaid novels, actual nonhuman animals or any genuine sympathies for them are completely absent from their pages. Science fiction’s vegetarian tradition is specifically scorned in The Blind Assassin, even as Atwood maintains allegiances between women’s suffering and nonhuman animals’ carnist exploitation. Similarly, while vegetarianism is recognised and even encouraged as a

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more peaceful and sustainable mode of existence in the MaddAddam trilogy, it is ultimately represented as ineffectual, incoherent and inferior to a primitivist and patriarchal carnism. She is clearly aware of the connections between sexism, speciesism and even colonial oppression, and also recognises how “myths and stories … tell us how and what we feel,” which in turn “determines what we want” (“Art”). According to Atwood, the answer is always meat.

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———. “Hack Wednesday.” Wilderness Tips, 125–247. Virago, 1992. ———. Hag-Seed: The Tempest Retold. Vintage, 2017. ———. The Handmaid’s Tale. Vintage, 1996. ———. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context.’” PMLA 119, no. 3 (2004): 513–17. ———. The Heart Goes Last. Virago, 2015. ———. Introduction to In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, 1–14. Virago, 2012. ———. Lady Oracle. Fawcett Crest, 1976. ———. “Laughter vs. Death.” Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005, 12–18. Carroll & Graf, 2005. ———. Life Before Man. Virago, 1994. ———. MaddAddam. Virago, 2014. ———. Moral Disorder. Bloomsbury, 2006. ———. “My Life as a Bat.” Good Bones and Simple Murders, 109–18. Doubleday, 1994. ———. Oryx and Crake. Virago, 2009. ———. Payback: Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth. House of Anansi Press, 2008. ———. The Penelopiad. Test, 2005. ———. Preface to The Canadian Green Consumer Guide, by Pollution Probe Foundation. McClelland & Stewart, 1989. ———. “Reading List.” Yearoftheflood.com, https://www.yearoftheflood.com/ reading-­list/. ———. The Robber Bride. Virago, 1994. ———. “Scarlet Ibis.” Bluebeard’s Egg, 179–200. Virago, 1988. ———. “The Sin Eater.” Dancing Girls and Other Stories, 213–25. Virago, 1984. ———. Surfacing. Anchor Books, 1998. ———. Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. House of Anansi Press, 1972. ———. “Ten Ways of Looking at The Island of Doctor Moreau, by h. G. Wells.” In Other Worlds: SF and the Human Imagination, 150–67. Virago, 2012. ———. The Testaments. Chatto & Windus, 2019. ———. “Thylacine Ragout.” The Tent, 73–75. Bloomsbury, 2006. ———. “Writing Utopia.” Writing with Intent: Essays, Reviews, Personal Prose: 1983–2005, 92–100. Carroll & Graf, 2005. ———. The Year of the Flood. Virago, 2010. Atwood, Margaret and Naomi Alderman. The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home. Online: Wattpad, 2012. https://www.wattpad.com/8164541-­the-­happy-­ zombie-­sunrise-­home. Atwood, Margaret and Ken Steacy. War Bears, 3 Vols. Dark Horse Comics, 2018. [Pagination added.]

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Berkowitz, Joe. “How Margaret Atwood Creates Scary-Plausible Future Worlds.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Fast Company, 28 October, 2013. https:// www.fastcompany.com/3020366/how-­m argaret-­a twood-­c reates-­s car y­plausible-­future-­worlds?cid=search. Borrell, Sally R. “Atwood’s Animals: Triangular Identification in The Edible Woman, Surfacing and The Blind Assassin.” Master’s thesis, University of Canterbury, 2005. Bouson, J.  Brooks. “Negotiating with Margaret Atwood.” Introduction to Margaret Atwood: The Robber Bride, the Blind Assassin, Oryx and Crake. Continuum, 2011. Buscemi, Francesco. From Body Fuel to Universal Poison: Cultural History of Meat: 1900–The Present. Springer Verlag, 2018. Canavan, Gerry. “Hope, But Not for Us: Ecological Science Fiction and the End of the World in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory 23, no. 2 (2012): 138–59. Derrida, Jacques. The Animal That Therefore I Am. Edited by Marie-Louise Mallet, translated by David Wills. Fordham University Press, 2008. Dillard-Wright, David B. “Synthetic Meat.” Encyclopedia of Food and Agricultural Ethics, edited by Paul B.  Thompson and David M.  Kaplan, 1703–8. Springer, 2014. Dougherty, Elizabeth. The Blind Pig. School Street Books, 2010. Frew, Lee. “‘A Whole New Take on Indigenous’: Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake as Wild Animal Story.” Studies in Canadian Literature/Études en littérature (June, 2014): 199–218. George, David R. III. Star Trek: The Original Series: Crucible: McCoy: Provenance of Shadows. Simon and Schuster, 2006. Gibert, Teresa. “The Monster in the Mirror: Margaret Atwood’s Retelling of the Frankenstein Myth.” Frankenstein Revisited: The Legacy of Mary Shelley’s Masterpiece, edited by Miriam Borham Puyal, 33–50. Ediciones Universidad de Salamanca, 2018. Gibson, Graeme. The Bedside Book of Beasts: A Wildlife Miscellany. Bloomsbury, 2009. Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace, 1984. Gould, Allan. “Margaret Atwood: Write On!” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Good Times, March, 2001. https://www.allangould.com/magazines/interviews/margaretatwood/magazines_interviews_margaretatwood.html. Haggard, H. Rider. She. Wordsworth, 1995. Halliwell, Martin. “Awaiting the Perfect Storm.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 253–64. Ontario Review Press, 2006. Hancock, Geoff. “Tightrope-Walking over Niagara Falls.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 90–118. Ontario Review Press, 2006.

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The Handmaid’s Tale. S1E1. “Offred.” Directed by Reed Morano, written by Bruce Miller. Hulu, 26 April, 2017. Haraway, Donna J. When Species Meet. University of Minnesota Press, 2008. Heilmann, Ann, and Debbie Taylor. “Fifty-Two Ways of Making Butter.” Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 236–52. Ontario Review Press, 2006. Kaminski, Margaret. “Preserving Mythologies.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood: Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 27–32. Ontario Review Press, 1990. Langer, Beryl. “There are No Texts Without Life.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 125–38. Ontario Review Press, 2006. Le Guin, Ursula K. Review of The Year of the Flood, by Margaret Atwood. Words Are My Matter: Writings About Life and Books, 2000–2016, 195–99. Small Beer Press, 2016. LePan, Don. Animals. Soft Skull Press, 2010. Lyons, Bonnie. “Using Other People’s Dreadful Childhoods.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood: Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 221–33. Ontario Review Press, 1990. McHugh, Susan. “Real Artificial: Tissue-Cultured Meat, Genetically Modified Farm Animals, and Fictions.” Configurations. Vol. 18. No 1–2 (Winter, 2010): 181–97. McKibben, Bill. Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet. Times Books, 2010. ———. The End of Nature. Random House, 1989. Munroe, Grant. “How Margaret Atwood and Graeme Gibson Built a Bird Sanctuary.” The Walrus, 18 Aug, 2017 (updated 5 Apr. 2020). https://thewalrus.ca/how-­margaret-­atwood-­and-­graeme-­gibson-­built-­a-­bird-­sanctuary/. Mohr, Dunja M. “The Missing Link: Bridging the Species Divide in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy.” Canadian Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Horror: Bridging the Solitudes, edited by Amy J. Ransom and Dominick Grace, 239–56. Palgrave Macmillan, 2019. Morris, Ian. Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels: How Human Values Evolve. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015. Morton, Mark. “A Pumpkin in a Tablespoon.” Gastronomica, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring, 2011): 7–8. Parker, Emma. “You are What You Eat: The Politics of Eating in the Novels of Margaret Atwood.” Twentieth Century Literature 41, no. 3 (Autumn, 1995): 349–68. Parry, Catherine. Other Animals in Twenty-First Century Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. Parry, Jovian. Edible Subjectivities: Meat in Science Fiction. PhD thesis, York University, 2019.

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———. “Oryx and Crake and the New Nostalgia for Meat.” Society and Animals 17, no. 3 (2009): 241–56. Quinn, Emelia. Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan 1818 to Present. Oxford University Press, 2021. Sandler, Linda. “A Question of Metamorphosis.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Margaret Atwood: Conversations, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 40–57. Ontario Review Press, 1990. Solomon, Evan. “Letting the Words Do the Work.” Interview with Margaret Atwood. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood, edited by Earl G. Ingersoll, 222–35. Ontario Review Press, 2006. Stolz, Walkin’ Jim. “It Ain’t Easy Being an Ol’ Grizzly Bear.” On A Kid for the Wild. Independent, 1990. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 2nd ed. Edited by Gerry Canavan. Peter Lang, 2016. ———. Od Lukijana do Lunjika: Povijesni Pregled I Antologija Naučnofantastičke Literature. Epoha, 1965. Taylor, Chloë. “Abnormal Appetites: Foucault, Atwood, and the Normalization of an Animal-Based Diet.” Journal for Critical Animal Studies 10, no. 4 (2012): 130–48. Vint, Sherryl. “The Animals in That Country’: Science Fiction and Animal Studies.” Science Fiction Studies 35, no. 2 (July, 2008): 177–88. Wagner, Sven. The Scientist as God: A Typological Study of a Literary Motif, 1818 to Present. Universitatsverlag Winter, 2012. Wilson, Edward O. The Future of Life. Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Wright, Laura. The Vegan Studies Project: Food, Animals, and Gender in the Age of Terror. University of Georgia Press, 2015.

CHAPTER 9

The Last Word in Gastronomy? Veganism, Ecocriticism, Pandemic Science Fiction and the Future

Until the mid-1970s, vegetarianism was an almost consistent marker of idealised civilisations within utopian and science fiction literature. Exceptions exist, with foundational dystopias also often promoting a utopian desire for pure and invigorating animal foods and products over bland vegetarian diets. Nevertheless, a radical decline in utopian advocacy of vegetarianism and its widespread replacement by an idealised “naturalistic” carnism can be traced to popular “primitivist” evolutionary theories and Indigenous-inspired ecological ideals established during the second half of the twentieth century. The shift is indicative of a broader embracing of neocarnist ideologies within Western cultures, which characterise more “naturalistic” carnist practices as “sustainable,” “nutritional” and allegedly “humane.” Particularly prominent within neocarnist rhetoric is the promotion of “ecocarnism,” which “holds that the problem is not animal agriculture, but industrial agriculture” (Joy; see also Weitzenfield and Joy 23). As Jacques Derrida observed at the beginning of the twenty-first century: “Industrial meat is not the last word in gastronomy,” noting how “more and more … certain people prefer beasts raised in certain conditions said to be more ‘natural’” (Derrida and Roudinesco 72). Derrida himself was somewhat of a neocarnist, stating that, while he had “no taste for hunting … from a quantitative point of view, it’s nothing compared to the slaughterhouses and the poultry farms” (75). Yet while certainly a “lesser” evil in terms of nonhuman animal suffering, traditional animal © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2_9

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agriculture and other forms of nonhuman exploitation need not be the “last word in gastronomy” either. Implicit in neocarnist arguments is the idea that since factory farming is so reprehensible, less-intensive hunting or agricultural traditions are therefore acceptable, leading to the rise of oxymoronic, neocarnist ideas like “compassionate carnivores” and “happy meat.” As Joy observes, neocarnists often also attempt to “invalidate veganism” by portraying it as “unnatural and unsustainable” and denouncing any aversion to killing animals as a “modern aberration” among “middle-class city-dwellers who are ‘soft’ and ‘disconnected’ from nature.” Erica Fudge has similarly observed the rise of a “new anthropocentrism” during the twenty-first century that emphasises meat’s animal origins while also characterising animal activists as misanthropic “wackos” (Fudge 45; citing Ford). Similar sentiments are observable in the recent science fiction of Margaret Atwood and Kim Stanley Robinson. As Nick Fiddes recognised towards the end of the twentieth century: optimism about the infinite possibilities for a roseate future under absolute human control, expressed most vibrantly in nineteenth-and twentieth-­ century science fiction, has been replaced by a widespread apocalyptic fear for the future, distrust of the present, and a nostalgic hankering for a cleaner, healthier, better, bygone era. (193)

Similar desires can be observed of Mary and Percy Shelley, who sought a return to a “natural diet” during the industrial revolution. As Fiddes recognises, however, no true “natural” human diet “can ever have existed,” with the quest for a more natural existence being “clearly developed in response to the highly processed products of the modern food industry” (ibid.). Moreover, as Joy and Tuider observe, the problem with “biocarnist” arguments is that they refer “not to human history, but to carnistic history,” looking “not to our early fruit-eating ancestors but to their later flesh-eating descendants, for confirmation of what is necessary for an optimal human diet” (ix, xii, italics original). Joy and Fudge also each characterise the rise of neocarnism as a response to a threatening “vegan counternarrative” that has “sufficiently raised awareness of the impact of animal agriculture on animals, the environment, and human health” and a “growing recognition that animals may well be worthy of more than they are being allowed” (Weitzenfeld and Joy 23; Fudge 45–46). Exclusively tracing neocarnism to the successes of animal activism ignores a broader

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unease with industrialisation and technological automation. Nevertheless— while perhaps discouraging to animal advocates—the shift in ideologies toward neocarnism shows how people’s attitudes can be affected and eventually even changed. To assess the extent to which neocarnism and its vegetarian opposition are represented in twenty-first-century science fiction, this concluding chapter provides a broad examination, focussing on the increasingly examined areas of veganism, climate fiction and pandemic science fiction. It then concludes with a call for further investigation into science fictional engagements within Indigenous and other non-Anglo-American traditions.

Veganism Many twenty-first-century vegan critics have broadened the conception of veganism beyond a strict dietary practice, acknowledging its inherent contradictions and inconsistencies and the need for responses that are not “geared towards cohesive practices” (Quinn and Westwood 4). It is important to recognise that individual inconsistencies and contradictions do not invalidate an overall vegan ideology, and proponents of nonhuman animal welfare need not be pure in their vegan practices to be effective communicators and activists. It is active resistance to and abstention from traditional carnist practices that has the potential to preserve nonhuman lives while altering the broader culture, however. An emphasis on open-­ ended definitions over cohesive action, therefore, perhaps minimises the potential for real-world vegan praxis. Similar criticisms can be levelled against carnist authors who frequently emphasise vegetarianism in their utopian fiction. Besides Octavia E. Butler and the Shelleys, none of the authors focused on in this study were ever vegetarians. Even  Arthur C. Clarke and  Philip K. Dick, who stressed vegetarianism as an ethical, environmental and economic imperative, were lifelong carnists who actively participated in animal slaughter. Although it is not necessary for authors to be vegetarian to write effective and influential vegetarian texts, their lack of personal commitment to the cause undermines the effectiveness of their utopian rhetoric, raising questions about the depth of their convictions and their ability to convince others to adopt vegetarianism. Moreover, despite its increasingly significance and openly acknowledged environmental benefits, veganism has next to no representation in modern science fiction. The word “vegan” itself appears in only three of

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this study’s primary texts, where it receives a largely unfavourable and unrepresentative treatment. The term is used etymologically in Robinson’s Fifty Degrees Below (2005) to explain the term “fregan”—whose adherents are enthusiastic hunters who look forward to “fregan potluck” with “lots of venison”—and twice in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003) to describe Bernice as both a “fundamentalist” and a “pyromaniac” vegan (Robinson 285–86; Atwood, Oryx 221, 239). The word “vegan” does not appear at all in The Year of the Flood (2009) and only once during MaddAddam (2013), where meat-alternatives are provided “for the vegans” at a company barbecue, which the book’s romanticised, neocarnist hero, Zeb, finds distasteful (285). In each of these instances, veganism is only ever used to describe its adherents as ludicrous and irrational, or else brought up in the presence of meat-eating, where it is treated as an inferior ideology. Moreover, while the vegetarian characters examined in this study often practice broader animal welfare philosophies, few—if any—could accurately be described as “vegan,” as the term is commonly understood. Frankenstein’s creature possesses a seemingly innate aversion to meat and alcohol but enjoys dairy products and eventually turns to killing both human and nonhuman animals alike. H. G. Wells’s Eloi are unintelligent herbivores who wear leather belts—likely made of their own skins—while his naturally carnivorous Beast People are physically incapable of maintaining Moreau’s vegetarian law. The vegetarian diets of Clarke’s many space travellers are also largely forced upon them due to resource restrictions and arguably compromised by their continued enthusiasm for synthetic substitutes. The humans in Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968) abstain wholly from animal products and appear to practice a coherent philosophy of non-harm toward nonhuman animals. Again, however, their veganism is largely involuntary, being brought about by mass species extinctions, with Joshua Schuster arguing that the “extreme rarity of live animals” in the novel “makes veganism both inevitable and perhaps irrelevant” (204). The same is true of Shevek and the other inhabitants of Anarres in Le Guin’s Dispossessed (1974). Her Kesh also continue to raise nonhuman animals for both meat and trade, despite claiming to minimise meat-eating. Similarly, although Piercy’s utopians in Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) appear to be moving toward total veganism, they still consume meat and celebrate its eating during festivals, while her utopian commune in He, She and It (1991) emphasises animal farming as part of their “natural,” utopian arrangement. Despite Butler’s many

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engagements with vegan and interspecies ethics, vegetarianism is only ever embraced within her fiction by ethically dubious extra-terrestrials, while carnism is consistently reinforced as an essential aspect of humanity. Robinson’s “fregans” are hunters who enthusiastically cull liberated zoo animals for their meat. Even Atwood’s God’s Gardeners eat eggs and keep bees, whose honey they sell for profit, before wholly abandoning their “vegie vows” for small-scale animal agriculture in the MaddAddam trilogy’s supposedly more natural, post-catastrophic setting. Even when strongly suggested, veganism is almost always undermined. Vegan characters themselves are extremely rare. The only works of utopian science fiction surveyed for this study that explicitly endorse a vegan diet are Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915) and Starhawk’s Fifth Sacred Thing (1993). Conversely, celebrations of carnism are abundant among recent award-winning, Anglo-American science fiction novels. Within the space of a few pages, the protagonist of Arkady Martine’s 2020 Hugo Award-winning science fiction novel A Memory Called Empire (2019) goes from being “horribly tempted … and a little horrified” by non-cultured animal meat to enjoying how its juices “bloomed over her tongue” while eating at a “nice” restaurant (314, 317–18, italics original). In its 2022 Hugo and Nebula Award-winning sequel, A Desolation Called Peace (2021), a disembodied extra-terrestrial species attempting to understand humanity, contends that “a body requires meat, because a body is meat,” while also enjoying the “simple pleasure” of its “nutrients, energy, [and] flavor” (104, italics original). In The Fated Sky (2018), the sequel to Mary Robinette Kowal’s Hugo, Nebula and Locus Award-winning novel The Calculating Stars (2018), the objections of “animal activists” to rabbits being raised on the moon are dismissed by one of the protagonists, since his grandma claims “there’s good eating on a rabbit” (Kowal 50). A further rejection of veganism might also be read into Sarah Pinsker’s 2020 Nebula Award-winning A Song for a New Day (2019), wherein one of the characters refuses imitation vegan restaurant offerings in favour of real cheese (149). The extra-terrestrial ship mechanic Nod, in Gareth L. Powell’s BSFA Award-winning Embers of War (2018), begrudges his human crewmates as “stupid ominvores” who have “lost their connection to the World Tree” by relying on “meat and vegetables printed from organic ink” (Powell). His position is inconsequential to the novel’s narrative or politics, and neither human nor extra-terrestrial eating-habits are addressed again in Embers of War or its sequels. No other BSFA

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award-­winning novels within the last decade appear to contain any allusion to vegetarianism. The only recent novel to win a major, American science fiction award that actively engages with interspecies ethics and vegetarianism as part of a utopian narrative is Charlie Jane Anders’ Locus Award-winning The City in the Middle of the Night (2019), which involves its human characters coming to terms with their speciesist, and often carnist, treatment of their planet’s indigenous race of intelligent “crocodiles,” the Galet (who more accurately resemble a mix between lobsters and squid). Anders’ revolutionary protagonists also frequent “vegetarian” restaurants, continuing science fiction’s association between vegetarianism and revolutionary politics, although one of their leaders resists the idea that the Galet could be “people,” since she had “eaten crocodile meat” (161, 250). Anders thereby continues science fiction’s traditional challenging carnism, with one reviewer reducing the novel’s message to the idea that “Grand social ideas … break if you put too much weight on them” (Sheehan). Australian author Laura Jean McKay’s 2020 novel The Animals in That Country (2020), which won the 2021 Arthur C. Clarke award, also foregrounds interspecies ethics, as discussed below in the context of pandemic fiction. Direct engagements with animal ethics, vegetarianism and—especially— veganism are otherwise almost entirely absent among significant works of twenty-first-century science fiction. One lesser-known twenty-first century science fiction series that directly engages with veganism is Karen Traviss’s Wess’har Wars (2004–2008). The series involves the human colonisation of a planet overseen by extra-­ terrestrial “peacekeepers” called the Wess’har who are “like vegans,” since they “make no use whatsoever of other species beyond food plants and they have no tolerance of anyone who does” (City 121). Although its human colonists carry provisions for animal agriculture in the form of frozen embryos and DNA samples, they continue Clarke’s vision of vegetarian expansion, being forced by the Wess’har to form “a vegetarian community” and finding they “could survive without taking the food animal embryos out of cryo” (71). The colony’s leaders are ultimately executed by a member of the Wess’har for their speciesist transgressions, however, which—along with the Wess’har’s reference to humans as “carrion eaters”—suggests an innate and unavoidable interspecies violence to humanity (173). As the series develops, members of an extremist Wess’har faction also travel to Earth, where they are embraced by a majority-­Muslim Australian government and demand a global “end to the use of other

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animal species for food, entertainment, self-decoration and research,” with a human commentor noting that “those who insist on subsistence by hunting as part of their culture must accept that the only justification is a return to the conditions that made it the only nutritional option” (Judge chap. 16). Although the ban on animal-food is eventually enacted (with cell-cultured meat providing ongoing debate), the impending arrival of the Wess’har causes friction between “Greens” and “indigenous peoples” over the issue of meat-eating, with one Indigenous representative claiming: “It’s an insult for the animal welfare lobby to seek to impose a new world order of vegetarianism on indigenous peoples, especially as it’s their host culture that seems to be the one that’s had the most adverse impact on global ecology” (Matriach chap. 18; ibid.). Sherryl Vint has celebrated the series for its “ecopoetics” and anti-anthropocentrism (Alterity 148). So has Parry, although he ultimately criticises Traviss’s reinforcement of carnist dualism, while also examining how the Wess’har might be read as a dystopian extension of “extremist” animal activism, whose intensity only increases as the series progresses (105, see also Parry 87–104). Similarly, while the series’ (primarily) human protagonist, Shan Franklin, is a police officer with environmental animal activist sympathies, the activists themselves are represented as conspiratorial manipulators. Traviss has also distanced herself from any utopian endorsements that might be read into the ideology of the Wess’har, stressing that she is “not vegan” and “not a liberal,” nor “any of [her] characters” (Scalzi, italics original). Moreover, while the exploration of interspecies ethics in the Wess’har Wars is extremely thorough and complex, its popular and critical impact has been minimal. Other notable twenty-first-century, science-fictional engagements with animal ethics include Michale Faber’s Under the Skin (2000) and Nobel Prize-winner Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005). In Faber’s novel, an alien woman seduces and kidnaps hitchhikers who are then butchered and have their meat sent back to her home planet as delicacy. The novel and its 2013 film adaptation have both become cult classics. Faber’s engagement with animal slaughter quickly pivots to focus on the economic and employment logistics of the extra-terrestrial slaughterhouse project rather than any ethical dilemmas inherent in its operation, however, and is perhaps too ambiguous to have had any particular vegetarian influence beyond functioning as a basic human-cattle dystopia. Conversely, Ishiguro’s far more culturally significant treatment is perhaps too subtle. Never Let Me Go revolves around cloned humans who are casually harvested for their organs, providing an analogue for farm animals and the

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cultural acceptance of carnism, among other exploitations. As Maren Tova Linett observes, the novel suggests a “strong parallel with animal farming” that “illuminates the ethical and logical contradictions of the humane meat movement” (117, 120, see also 145). Its story can nevertheless be interpreted as a metaphor for many forms of (often anthropocentric) exploitation, with any intended critique of carnism itself only ever implied via the clones’ being housed on a refurbished farm during their adolescence. Another, more overt, example is Broadview Press founder Don LePan’s Animals (2009), which takes the “argument from marginal cases” to the extreme in its depiction of disabled, “mongrel” children being farmed for meat, following the mass extinction of nonhuman species, caused by climate change and contagious diseases arising from intensive animal farming. The novel is presented as a manuscript written by a vegan activist caring for a deaf child rescued from a factory farm, which is then commented on by the child’s meat-eating “chattel-rights advocate” brother (131, italics removed). Although Parry suggests LePan’s own position may be closer to the brother’s “pragmatic endorsement of ‘welfare,’ in which meat production continues, but in a kindlier fashion,” than vegan abolitionism (66–67). Vint has also praised the novel as one that “compels us to feel with the suffering of animals in the factory farm system and provides intellectual tools to undermine the cultural logic that has enabled us to rationalise this exploitation until now” (Parry 66–67; Vint, “You” 46). Although LePan’s focus is again on industrial rather than universal nonhuman animal slaughter, he hoped Animals would “provide fodder for philosophical debate on the wider arguments concerning whether or not humans should kill and eat non-human animals” (157). LePan and Animals are too minor to have had anywhere near the kind of critical or cultural influence as Atwood, Robinson or any of the other authors primarily examined in this study, however. There has also been an increasing emphasis on interspecies relationships throughout his more recent output influential “new weird” author and anthology editor Jeff VanderMeer’s recent output. Both Borne (2017) and Dead Astronauts (2019) revolve around the emancipation of laboratory animals from a nefarious biotech firm, while A Peculiar Peril (2020) is the first entry in a fantasy series wherein the grandson of an interdimensional explorer known for his “animal rights advocacy” battles an evil magician whose magic relies on animal sacrifice (chap. 1). It is the 2021’s Hummingbird Salamander, however, which contains VanderMeer’s most extensive engagement with animal and environmental activism. The novel

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is set in an alternative near-future ravaged by various pandemics, climate change and general environmental degradation and is narrated by a woman calling herself Jane as she attempts to track down an anti-wildlife trafficking activist named Silvina, who is wanted for her involvement in various murders and acts of eco-terrorism. Throughout the novel, Jane is guided by Silvina’s journal, which details her plans for an environmentalist commune called “Unitopia,” and Janeeventually finds her dead body within an underground bunker which contains a domed “ark,” wherein preserved nonhuman animals frolic amid almost-primordial vegetation (344). Hummingbird Salamander takes its name from imaginary species of hummingbird and salamander who have “gone extinct because of poaching, habitat loss, and climate change” (39). The hummingbirds possessed the ability to see colours outside the usual human spectrum, while the salamanders possessed an ability to breathe through their skin, so that the “intimacy” they “have with their environment forces them to be sentinels of environmental change” (43, 301). The novel concludes with the revelation that Silvina has concocted a serum from the hummingbird and salamander’s DNA, which she hopes will bestow a “radical transformation” upon humans so that they too can “see the world so differently,” with Silvina urging that “we must change to see the world change” (343, italics removed). The novel’s rather Oryx and Crake-esque ending then sees Jane taking the serum and stepping out into the world as a potentially posthuman hybrid charged with preparing the way for the other animals to emerge from the ark in a hundred years. It is nevertheless ambiguous whether Jane will survive the serum’s transformation or whether Silvina’s utopian ideals are merely the result of associating with the kinds of people who think it’s “exciting” to grow “human brains inside some fucked-up animal because they don’t have the ethics god gave a pig” (344, 277). As with Atwood’s Crake, Silvina is not represented as a sympathetic saviour. For most of the narrative, Jane thinks of her as a murderous “cult leader,” with the sketches of explosives in the margins of her journal reflecting how her intentions have been “perverted to eco-fascist ends,” while others consider her “a dangerous martyr who lost perspective” (156–157, 240, 247). Silvina is also intensely misanthropic, writing in her journal: “I want the world to be without us in it … to demolish all of it” and be reborn as “a tree or bush or algae,” and Jane too comes to wonder “how much did the world need to change or did it just need to be rid of us” (242, 346, italics removed). VanderMeer thereby only adds to science

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fiction’s overwhelming depictions of animal and environmental activists as crazed megalomaniacs. Moreover, despite the general focus on interspecies ethics and activism, carnism is never challenged within Hummingbird Salamander. Although Jane expresses discomfort about hunting, she continues to consume animal products, and none of the characters are ever labelled or represented as vegetarians (225, 249). VanderMeer and his wife, Weird Tales editor Ann VanderMeer, also published The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals in 2010, wherein they debated the religiously sanctioned edibility of fictional creatures. Although intended humorously, the guide contains assertions that, although E.T. (the extra-terrestrial) should not be eaten because he is “intelligent,” other intelligent animals such as cows, can still be eaten, since they “don’t travel to other planets using their brains” (“E.T. (Extra-Terrestrial)”). Dolphins are also only deemed inedible because they are “cute” (“Encantado”), reinforcing traditional, anthropocentric justifications for carnism. More recently, PETA has promoted Marvel Studios’ popular film Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 (2023) as an “animal rights masterpiece” that “brilliantly exposes the horrors of testing on animals” (PETA, “#GuardiansoftheGalaxyVol3”). Yet while the film revolves around the rescue of nonhuman animal protagonist Rocket Racoon from the horrific experiments of a sadistic antagonist who seeks to create a “utopian society” through genetic manipulation, there is no mention of vegetarianism and characters are shown eating meat on multiple occasions, without reflection (Gunn).It seems even the most sympathetic science fictional engagements with animal activism are extremely ambiguous and continue to eschew vegetarianism from their environmental and animal ethics ideologies, and the same is unfortunately true of vegetarianism and veganism’s widely acknowledged environmental benefits.

Climate Fiction and Ecocriticism In addition to Atwood and Robinson’s rebuffs, vegetarianism is often overlooked within many influential works of contemporary climate fiction. Besides Atwood’s Gardeners, the only vegetarian utopian collective to appear among Andrew Milner and J. R. Burgmann’s extensive survey of climate fiction novels in Climate Change and Science Fiction (2020) are the Alsatians in German author Dirk C.  Fleck’s MAEVA! trilogy (2008–2015), the “overwhelming majority” of whom have “become vegetarian” and abolished “mass animal husbandry” (Fleck 315, translated in

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Milner and Burgmann 164). Milner and Burgmann also characterise Melanie, who establishes a farm “dedicated to the protection of the non-­ human” as the “most sympathetic” character in French author Jean-Marc Ligny’s Exodes (2012) (Milner and Burgmann 95–96). Melanie refuses to let her animals be eaten, arguing: “Man should no longer be a predator … He has massacred too much, exterminated too much, committed too many atrocities. It’s time to fix now. To create life, instead of destroying it” (Ligny, Exodes 390, translation mine). Yet while sympathetic, Melanie merely represents a fringe philosophy, which is not even shared by her closest acquaintances, rather than a collective ideology. Exodes’ post-­ catastrophic sequel, Semenses (2015), also contains a vegetarian character Ophelia, who swears off meat-eating after taking refuge from human looters in a forest where she finds the company of nonhuman animals “more pleasant” than that of her allegedly “human” attackers (358, translation mine). The other characters are largely carnist survivalists who adapt to eating unconventional animals, like rats and dogs, in order to continue carnism beyond the ravages of climate change. Neither Fleck nor Ligny’s novels have been officially translated into English or received any significant critical attention outside of Milner and Burgmann’s examinations. The other climate fictions examined by Milner and Burgmann do not overtly engage with vegetarianism or are decidedly neocarnist. A.  L. Kennedy’s story “Meat” (2013), for example, presents a post-­ climate-­ catastrophe future, wherein nonhuman animals are scarce and meat-eating is long forgotten (cited in Milner and Burgmann 174). The story itself, however, revolves around a father cooking a contraband steak for his son as a nostalgic delicacy, suggesting climate change should be quelled in order to preserve meat-eating rather than curbing carnism to avert climate catastrophe. The only explicit acknowledgment of carnism’s contributions to climate change acknowledged by Milner and Burgmann comes from Vampire Weekend bassist Chris Baio, who sings: “Try as I may, I can’t quite seem to change my life / I’ll still eat meat / And I still fly / I pass my days / However I like,” on the “cli-fi centrepiece” to his solo album Man of the World (2017) (“DANGEROUE ANAMAL”; quoted in Milner and Burgmann 179). Yet even then, Baio’s acknowledgement is an ironic recognition of resignation and inaction in regard to combating both carnism and climate change. More forceful and science-­ fictional musical engagements with environmentalism and animal ethics can be found in the world of extreme metal. Perhaps most notable are the

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critically acclaimed, American progressive goregrind1 band Cattle Decapitation, whose influential albums Monolith of Inhumanity (2012) and The Anthropocene Extinction (2015) co-opt imagery from 2001: A Space Odyssey and other science fiction texts while delivering post-­ catastrophic narratives about humans self-destructing and nonhuman animals violently reclaiming the Earth in response to carnism, climate change and broader environmental destruction. Grammy-nominated French band Gojira have also produced several albums containing science fictional narratives centred around climate change and environmental and animal preservation while also partnering with real-world activist groups, including the animal activists Sea Shepherd and the anti-deforestation and indigenous rights group Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil. The band’s frontman, Joe Duplantier, has also been an outspoken supporter of veganism,2 although his lyrics have never directly endorsed the diet. Vegetarianism also appears to be overlooked with ecocriticism itself. Among the other recent influential ecocritical texts listed by Milner and Burgmann, only Antonia Mehnert’s Climate Change Fictions (2016) even mentions vegetarianism (Milner and Burgmann 28). Yet while Mehnert gives vegetarianism as an example of how climate change can figure “as a proxy for a variety of political, economic as well as environmentalist projects,” the examples she cites—Mike Hulme’s Why We Disagree About Climate Change (2009) and the special “Changing Climates” edition of Theory, Culture & Society (2010)—do not even mention vegetarianism (Menhert 8, 20n20). Sune Borkfelt and Matthias Stephen’s recent collection Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis (2022) only ever mentions vegetarianism in passing as a theoretical aspect of Jainism and “Care Ethics,” and when clarifying that Native American author Louise Erdrich is “not making an argument for vegetarianism or veganism” in her dystopian novel Future Home of the Living God (2017) (Schotland 207; McAvan 103). Another essay mentions a vegan love interest in Nicholas Royle’s realist comic novel An English Guide to Birdwatching (2017), although no vegan analysis ensues (Lockwood 40). Despite the increasing 1  Goregrind is a subgenre of extreme metal music pioneered by the Swedish band Carcass, whose major members are vegetarians and whose music and imagery often ironically employ images of animal slaughter. Carcass are a major influence on Cattle Decapitation, although their concepts and lyrics are not science fictional. 2  See Simon Bracken, “Gojira: ‘The Extinction of so Many Species is Going to be One of Our Legacies.’” The Irish Times (April 27, 2021), https://www.irishtimes.com/culture/ music/gojira-it-s-not-just-a-trend-it-s-a-movement-it-s-a-revolution-1.4547970.

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emphasis on animal farming within climate science, climate fiction authors and their critics do not seem particularly interested in combatting carnism. The broad neglect of vegetarianism in climate fiction and its criticism supports Critical Theory and Animal Liberation (2011) author John Sanbonmatsu’s contention that “animal liberation has been systematically excluded from the discourses of the Left, which continues to bar it from the universe of social justice causes” (44n2). Part of the systematic exclusion, he argues, is the propensity of “prominent and renowned Left-­ feminist critics, such as Margaret Atwood and Barbara Kingsolver” to “vigorously defend meat-eating as ‘natural’ and right—while ridiculing vegetarians—in national best-selling works” (ibid.). Indeed, Kingsolver expresses an explicitly neocarnist attitude in her 2007 book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, which describes her family’s attempt to eat locally and farm their own food for a year, with Kingsolver using the “culturally loaded” word “killing” to describe her family’s slaughter of nonhuman animals, instead using “harvesting” to imply “planing, respect and effort” (220; see also Sanbonmatsu 333–34). Milner and Burgmann have also examined Kingsolver’s novel Flight Behaviour (2007), from the same year, as a significant work of climate fiction that suggests “human beings will somehow muddle through despite the terrible climate changes actually occurring now” (Milner and Burgmann 150–52). Again, the novel is representative of a neocarnist outlook, with one character characterising butchery as an essential, life-saving occupation and its local-food-growing protagonist attempting to “increase” rather than reduce her red meat intake (Kingsolver, Flight chap. 8, chap.11, italics original). The proliferation of neocarnist attitudes like those of Kingsolver, Atwood and Robinson is hardly encouraging to vegetarian and animal activists. Concurrently, it is unclear how representative many of the most commonly examined works of twenty-first-century science fiction are of contemporary ethical and environmentalist attitudes. Although often represented as twenty-first-century science fiction authors, Atwood and Robinson both began writing and producing influential works during the late twentieth-century, with Atwood’s work dating back to the 1960s. Although she and Robinson have made considerable contributions to science fiction, their perspectives remain firmly rooted in arguably dated twentieth-century ideals, which are perhaps unrepresentative of younger readers. Even their characters seem to be aware of the disconnect, with the younger Toby recognising Zeb’s attitudes in Atwood’s MaddAddam are “so twentieth century!” (380, emphasis original). Moreover, the amount

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of critical attention paid to the MaddAddam series is extremely disproportionate to its relatively minor popular influence, especially within science fiction circles. Atwood’s resistance to “science fiction” was famously criticised by Le Guin, who argued Atwood’s “arbitrarily restrictive definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a genre still shunned by hidebound readers, reviewers and prize-awarders” (Le Guin, Review 195; quoted in Atwood, Introduction 5). Atwood responded that “if writing such books would guarantee non-wins, [her] obvious move would be just to avoid writing them” (Introduction 6). Nevertheless, while many of Atwood’s science fiction novels have been nominated for and received prestigious mainstream literary awards, they have received little recognition from science fiction establishments. The Handmaid’s Tale won the inaugural Arthur C.  Clarke Award in 1987—leading to Atwood’s first rejection of the “science fiction” label—and was also nominated for the Locus and Nebula awards. Since then, however, her novels have hardly been recognised. Oryx and Crake was not nominated for any major science US or UK science fiction awards, with The Year of the Flood failing to win the relatively minor John W. Campbell Memorial Award nor MaddAddam the 2014 Locus Award, for which they were nominated. Neither sequel novel was nominated for any major mainstream literary awards. Similarly, despite its general popularity, the otherwise heavily awarded Handmaid’s Tale television series has never been nominated for any major science fiction awards, including the popularly awarded Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation. Moreover, while the dust jacket of The Testaments references Atwood’s 2015 Arthur C. Clarke Award for Imagination in Service to Society, it does not mention The Handmaid’s Tale’s original Arthur C. Clarke Award. The Testaments itself, which judges defied rules to jointly award the 2019 Booker Prize, was not nominated for the Locus or the Hugo and failed to win the 2020 Locus Award. Atwood’s popular influence appears largely restricted to the Handmaids series, and science fiction communities seem to have rejected her just as much as she rejects them. Robinson’s presence within popular science fiction circles is also questionable. His Mars novels received multiple major science fiction awards in the 1990s. The Years of Rice and Salt (2002) also won the 2003 Nebula Award and was nominated for the 2003 Arthur C. Clarke Award, suggesting his greater notoriety within the science fiction establishment. Since then, however, Robinson’s popular and even establishment appeal appears to have declined. Although his Science in the Capital novels all

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received various nominations for the Locus and BSFA awards, none won. Despite the ecocritical focus on New York 2140 (2017) and mainstream praise for The Ministry for the Future (2020). Robinson’s appeal appears limited to academics and longstanding science fiction readers, with none of his works having been adapted into the more popular mediums of film or television. Atwood and Robinson are arguably overrepresented within twentyfirst century science fiction studies and ecocriticism. At the same time, however, no dominant twenty-first century voices have emerged to take her their place. Moreover, many of the more prominent authors of Anglo-­ American science fiction who have arisen share a similar distrust or dismissal of vegetarians and animal activists. In Climate Change and Science Fiction, Milner and Burgmann attempt to identify a “contemporary cli-fi equivalent” to Nevil Shute’s On the Beach (1957): a widely adapted and translated text that has had an “effective practical influence on both elite leaderships and oppositional activists across the world.” They conclude, however, that no such “great cli-fi novel” yet exists (191; see also 50). One text they propose might eventually “fit the bill” is Amitav Ghosh’s Gun Island (2019), which explores how climate change affects both humans and nonhuman animals (ibid.). The novel’s characters also appeal to the sympathies of “vegetarian judges” in India when attempting to shut down an oil refinery (195–96). Nevertheless, Ghosh’s focus remains fossil fuels, rather than carnism, and vegetarianism is not mentioned or explored in Gun Island beyond its use as legal leverage. Ghosh himself, moreover, is emphatically “not a vegetarian,” considering vegetarianism a “loophole” of Mahatma Ghandi’s influential pacifist philosophy he is unwilling to adopt (Canton). Gun Island’s cultural influence is also yet to take hold, with the enthusiastic critical responses to Robinson’s New York 2140 and The Ministry for the Future making them more likely candidates for Milner and Burgmann’s “great cli-fi novel,” although they too currently lack any significant impact outside of insulated academics and science fiction fans. The most significant recent addition to the science-fictional climate fiction canon is American author N.  K. Jemisin’s triple-Hugo-winning Broken Earth trilogy (2015–2017), which is set on a planet wracked by catastrophic climate events due to resource depletion and an unnatural lunar orbit. Although significantly science-fictional, the trilogy is nominally fantasy, with Milner and Burgmann forgoing its extended

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examination, since the climate-catastrophe it depicts “is not anthropogenic” and “does not take place on Earth” (Milner and Burgmann 116). A carnist attitude toward climate change is nevertheless evident from her narrative. The trilogy contains no reference to or implication of vegetarianism, with the carnism of its human characters only intensifying as their environmental situation worsens. Meat shortages are also of the utmost importance, with humans being considered natural hunters who “grow animals for fur,” while the aberrant carnivorousness of other nonhuman species under extreme environmental conditions is regarded as a “slapdash, last-minute fix” (Jemisin, Obelisk Gate 93). Jemisin herself appears to have no vegetarian inclinations, writing: “You don’t fuck with our bacon!” during a Twitter thread encouraging a boycott of pork in response to the Trump administration’s 2019 deregulation of the US pork industry (“pork”). Although foremost a fantasy author, Jemisin echoes the prominent neocarnist endorsements of many other major twenty-first-century science fiction figures.

Pandemic Science Fiction Pandemic science fiction is of increasing interest following COVID-19. As the editors of a recent pandemic-focussed special issue of the Animal Studies Journal observe, “the COVID-19 pandemic, and other zoonotic disease epidemics and pandemics that have preceded it, highlight the devastating repercussions of human exploitation of other animals, and the interlocking of human and animal oppressions” (Taylor, Montford and Kasprzycka 1). Indeed, pandemic science fiction has a longstanding and prominent history with interspecies ethics and animal activism. Yet while animal activists are perhaps more abundant within pandemic fiction than any other science fictional subgenre, their depictions are also overwhelmingly and unjustifiably antagonistic. Possibly the first science fiction novel to reference the COVID-19 pandemic is Melbourne author Asphyxia’s young adult novel Future Girl— published September 29, 2020—wherein the protagonist, Piper, recalls her grandparents dying ‘of coronavirus’ (“Thursday 16 July”). The book focusses on genetically modified food and economic collapse, rather than pandemic catastrophes, with the nefarious synthetic food company at its core having courted “lots of animal rights and climate change activists” with the imitation meats it produces (“Sunday 19 July”). As in much modern science fiction, meat substitutes are represented as ethically and

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nutritionally inferior to self-slaughtered animal meats, which Piper also claims contain some kind of nausea-curing ‘nutrients’ her body ‘really need[s]’ (“Tuesday August 18”). Moreover, despite their having cured cancer, the obesity epidemic and the common cold, among other illnesses, Piper continues to rally against the genetically modified foods, with her arguments “People should have free choice!” about what they ingest and eventual emphasis on “free speech” echoing many real-world protests against mandatory COVID vaccinations (“Sunday 16 August”). Near the novel’s conclusion, Piper and her boyfriend slaughter a chicken together, while Piper reflects that ‘killing together is a kind of intimacy’ (“Monday 21 December”). Although only a minor example of sustainability science fiction, Asphyxia’s dismissal of vegetarianism and animal ethics is indicative of similar attitudes frequently expressed throughout more influential examples of the pandemic subgenre. In his 2022 article “Viral Science Fiction,” Milner outlines five subsets of empirically observed science fiction, which include “post-apocalyptic survivalism,” “time-travel stories,” “political allegories,” “techno-­ thrillers,” and “scientifically plausible” science fiction (9). Most prominent is “post-apocalyptic survivalism,” which includes many texts already examined in this study, such as Shelley’s Last Man, Wells’s War of the Worlds, and Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (9–10). Although Shelley’s Last Man depicts nonhumans flourishing in its plague-driven return to nature, it also represents vegetarianism as an unsustainable, unnatural and arguably naive Romantic ideal. Moreover, while Wells’s War of the Worlds was commended by animal activists for drawing many parallels between its invading Martian forces’ subjugation of humanity and humanity’s own speciesist treatment of other animals, it also normalises and celebrates English carnism. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy is also actively hostile toward animal activists, who are implicated in the release of its catastrophic plague and quickly abandon their vegetarianism in its post-catastrophic setting. Other notable examples include George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), wherein Berkely geography student Ish—whose name alludes to the “last wild [Native American] Indian” Ishi, who was given his name and title by Le Guin’s parents, Alfred and Theodora Kroeber—forms a “tribe” of human survivors who come to rely on Native American inspired hunting. In the rebooted Planet of the Apes film franchise (2011–), the rescue of a scientifically experimented-on chimpanzee by a sympathetic scientist leads to a violent nonhuman uprising and destruction of human

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civilisation. Animal activists are also responsible for releasing a zombie-like virus that obliterates the UK’s human population before spreading to continental Europe in the 2002 British film 28 Days Later and its 2007 sequel. In Gwyneth Jones’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning Bold as Love (2001), environmental and animal activists are even blamed for the release of a catastrophic computer virus that wreaks “apocalyptic havoc” across Europe (278). Although their overall treatment is ambiguous, the activists are referred to as “extremists” and even “Nazis” throughout the novel, with its protagonists ultimately becoming proud neocarnists in its sequels (Rainbow Bridge 286). Throughout the survivalist subgenre, animal activism is frequently represented as the cause of catastrophic pandemics, with an emphasis on carnism portrayed as an essential part of a survivalist response. There are abundant other examples of pandemic science fiction that villainise animal activists among Milner’s other variants. Of particular note is British-American director Terry Gilliam’s film Twelve Monkeys (1995), wherein a prisoner from 2035 is sent back in time to discover the origins of a devastating viral outbreak. The film takes its name from the elusive animal activist group the “Army of the Twelve Monkeys,” led by the “mentally divergent” Jeffrey Goines, who are believed to have released a virus that wiped out 99% of the Earth’s human population, forcing the survivors underground. At the end of the film, however, it is revealed that the Monkeys were merely responsible for releasing the animals from a Florida zoo and caging Goines’ virologist father in their place. The man responsible for the viral outbreak turns out to be Dr. Peters—an “alarmist” environmentalist earlier-introduced proselytising about how the “planet cannot survive excesses of the human race” and their “rape of the environment”—who carries vials of the virus in a briefcase adorned with environmentalist propaganda. Gilliam is more interested in the psychology of trying to prevent the unpreventable catastrophe, rather than the mechanics or politics behind the pandemic itself. Yet the Twelve Monkeys are certainly sympathetic to Peters’ cause, with Goines considering that “maybe the human race deserves to be wiped out” after witnessing footage of scientific animal experiments (Gilliam). Although the concerns of both environmental and animal activists are perhaps validated in Twelve Monkeys, each are also exclusively portrayed as crazed and catastrophic extremists. Another example is American Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Lawrence Wright’s 2020 “plausible science” novel The End of October,

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wherein a seemingly prehistoric virus causes millions of human deaths and the mass slaughter of nonhuman animals across the globe. The virus is eventually revealed to have cloned by Russians from mammoth fossils that have been exposed due to melting icecaps, but not until most of the novel has been spent hunting down the vegan scientist turned eco-fascist, accelerationist, Jürgen Stark, who has been hired by the American government to develop a viral bioweapon to use against Russia. Although Stark is initially represented as a sympathetic figure whose exposure to scientific testing on nonhuman animals causes him to turn to animal activism, he and the activists he leads are ultimately condemned as genocidal extremists (cf. 93–94, 255–56, 366–70). There is perhaps comfort in Milner’s assessment that, while Wright’s “medical science is highly credible,” his social science is “less so” (15) Nevertheless, Wright’s villainisation of animal activists is consistent with a science fiction tradition that is all too ready to condemn animal activists rather than the speciesist scientific practices they oppose. To date, there have not been any catastrophic viral outbreaks attributed to animal activists. As Sorenson asserts, the animal activist movement is “overwhelmingly non-violent,” and “none of its proponents has ever deliberately killed anyone” (Constructing Ecoterrorism chap. 1). Indeed, while the FBI named animal rights activists and eco-terrorists, the “No. 1 domestic terrorism threat” in 2005, crediting them with 1,200 acts “resulting in millions of dollars of damages and monetary loss” over the past fifteen years, not a single murder or pandemic was cited (H. Schuster). Conversely, carnism directly contributed to the transmission of COVID-19, which was first transmitted to humans via a livestock and seafood market in Wuhan, China, with later outbreaks also centring around slaughterhouses. Yet while there are numerous examples of animal activists being blamed for catastrophic pandemics throughout science fiction, the 2011 American film Contagion is the only prominent example to acknowledge any connection between carnism and pandemic outbreaks and, even then, only as an afterthought. Early sections of the film are interjected with close up shots of meat-preparation, and its final sequence reveals the source of its catastrophic outbreak to be a displaced bat’s infection of a pig farm, whose meat is then served at a Chinese casino (Soderbergh). The film’s characters remain unaware of the virus’s zoonotic origins, however, with the bulk of its plot being preoccupied with unrelated conspiracy thriller fare. It is also unclear whether the virus is primarily transmitted due to the meat’s consumption or the chef’s poor hygiene, and the bat’s

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displacement due to land clearing ultimately condemns environmental irresponsibility rather than carnism itself. Another prevalent category that might be added to Milner’s taxonomy is “animal empowerment” pandemic fiction, wherein catastrophic pandemics not only result in nonhuman flourishing from a reduction of the Earth’s human population but also often endow nonhuman animals with enhanced abilities that call into question traditionally asserted human-­ animal boundaries. Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy, Gilliam’s Twelve Monkeys, the Planet of the Apes series, Wright’s End of October, Butler’s Clay’s Ark (1984), LePan’s Animals and Traviss’s Wess’har Wars series— much of which revolves around the containment of a gene-altering alien symbiote—might all be characterised as animal empowerment pandemic fictions. Other notable examples include McKay’s The Animals in that Country, Canadian writer and artist Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth comic series (2009–2013) and its 2021 television adaptation and American author Robert Repino’s War With No Name series (2015–2021). However, even in these ostensibly nonhuman-friendly offerings, vegetarians and animal activists continue to be villainised. The Animals in That Country takes its name from Atwood’s poem and centres around the experiences of Western Australian zoo attendant Jean Bennett and canine-dingo crossbreed Sue during a pandemic caused by a zoonotic infection known as “Zoanthropathy,” which enables “enhanced communications between humans and nonhuman animals” (34–35, italics removed). The book is rife with references to contemporary animal philosophy, having been written as part of a doctoral project exploring “representations of interspecies communication in contemporary adult fiction,” wherein “the nonhuman animal protagonist is no longer an allegory or stand-in for human meaning in fiction, but a destabilising, transgressive and resistant figure” that disrupts a “perceived species divide between human and nonhuman animals” (Fauna Fiction abstract).3 Her novel is nevertheless ambiguous in its depiction of vegetarians and animal activists. McKay is conscious and assertive of her novel’s political and philosophical dimensions, stating:

3  The primary novels McKay examines in her thesis are Marian Engel’s Bear (1976), Suniti Namjoshi’s The Conversations of Cow (1985), Peter Goldsworthy’s Wish (1995), Eva Hornung’s Dog Boy (2009), Benjamin Hale’s The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore (2011) and Colin McAdam’s A Beautiful Truth (2013).

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One of the things I like about conversations with writers making eco-and climate fiction is that we’ve all said: of course we should have good characters and story, but there are also urgent themes that need direct address! … what if a tree or a pig isn’t a metaphor? What if it’s a tree or a pig? What if that’s the subject that needs discussing? We are increasingly raising very specific questions in our work. So I hope that readers will take a moment to step back, be quiet … and really look at other animals. … What happens if we stop and really consider our relationships with them? (Hortle, McKay and Flynn 210, italics and emphasis original)

Rather than collapsing nonhuman communication into human language, Zoanthropathy allows for greater understanding between species while still maintaining their discrete differences. Although expressed as dialogue, the novel’s nonhuman communications are distinguished from humanised speech through their staccato syntax and stylised formatting, with McKay wanting to get the nonhuman dialogue “as far from [her] human way of perceiving as possible” (Hortle, McKay and Flynn 207, parentheses original). Rather than bestowing human language upon nonhuman animals, McKay’s Zoanthropathy enhances the ability of humans (and other animals) to decode the ever-present, yet previously unintelligible, communications of other species. However, Jean begins the novel already conscious that dingoes “wear their fur like feelings” (McKay, Animals 7). When told of Zooanthropathy’s ability to let humans “talk” to other species, Kim similarly insists that they “already” can (36–37). The Animals in that Country is therefore less about imagining what it would be like to talk with nonhuman animals than a warning to pay attention to the conversations that are already happening. The novel is nevertheless ambiguous about vegetarianism and animal activism. Anti-vegetarian conspiracies and rhetoric are frequent features throughout the novel. Vegans and vaccinations are among the many proposed sources for the Zoanthropathy virus bandied about online (45). Jean herself begins the novel as a carnist conspiracy theorist, who blames soy production for “giving us extra boobs, [and] making us susceptible to superflu,” and tells a soy milk-drinking “city chick,” who is “all up herself about livestock.” that if she “ate the things [she’s] supposed to eat we wouldn’t be having this problem.” She is nonetheless enthused about the idea of being able to talk to animals (34). Later, when faced with food shortages, Jean is thankful she learned vegetarian cooking from her “vego” son Lee, although the husband of the lady she buys her food from insists

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the virus is “all a conspiracy” and that “the pollies and the greenies are in it together” (134). A subsequent encounter an abandoned pig truck has her regretting once berating group of animal liberationists because they compared factory farming to Nazi concentration camps, after she is confronted by the abandoned pigs’ “glazed eyes” and “skin stretched over bodies fed to the point of bursting” (129). Jean also encounters a herd of dairy cows who yearn for the return of their stolen calves and later finds herself apologising to the witchery grubs she eats while starving in the wilderness (182–83, 248). Yet while zoanthropathy frequently forces Jean to confront the subjectivity of the nonhuman animals she consumes, she never actively endorses vegetarianism. Animal activists are otherwise represented in the novel by Lee, who views Zoanthropathy as a “gift” (104). At the beginning of the pandemic, he returns to the zoo and releases many of its nonhuman animals—including Sue—into the wild, asserting that the zoo is a “prison” whose nonhuman inmates have “got it in their heads [that] we’re out to kill them” (103). He is repeatedly proven correct, with many of the animals turning on the zookeepers and “hunting [them] back” (87). As Jean acknowledges, Lee might be an “idiot,” but he is “no one’s fool” (221). Lee’s credibility is nevertheless undermined when he runs away with Kim to commune with a group of whales, who call them to “come home” to the sea (208, formatting removed). Upon arriving at the coast, however, Lee and many others like him are violently killed by the whales, who drag them beneath the water, with Kim only surviving due to Jean’s intervention. At best, Lee can therefore read as a “classic case study of vaunting the wild over the domestic,” whose fate warns against overfamiliarity with nonhuman species (Laird 37). At worst, he is yet another science fictional rendering of animal activists as naive, irresponsible and ultimately dangerous. Sweet Tooth is more overtly dismissive of vegetarianism. The series presents a post-catastrophic future wherein humanity has been almost obliterated by a pandemic that also causes new-born human children to become human/nonhuman animal “hybrids.” Its story follows the nine-year-old human-deer hybrid Gus and battle-hardened, human hockey player Tommy Jepperd as they travel across the US to uncover the origins of the infection. Numerous critics have noted how characters in Sweet Tooth “frequently stare back at the reader” in a “sustained spectacle of suffering” (Cardoso pars. 2, 12; see also Zantingh 19). Lemire also draws frequent parallels between the hybrids and the nonhuman victims of traditional animal hunting. Yet while the hybrids appear as a mix of human and

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nonhuman animals, all of those who play an active role in Sweet Tooth— including Gus and his pig-girl companion Wendy—act distinctly humanlike, with only minor physical features (ears/antlers/nose) revealing their hybridity. Only the speech-challenged groundhog-boy Bobby and other nonverbal or distinctly nonhuman hybrids ever exhibit any nonhuman instinct or needs. Nor are there any nonhuman animals featured in Sweet Tooth who are not killed and/or eaten by human or human-coded characters. Sweet Tooth only empowers nonhuman animals by making humans out of them while also maintaining carnist and logocentric distinctions. Lemire also continues the neocarnist trends characteristic of late-­ twentieth and twenty-first-century science fiction. Gus begins Sweet Tooth as a vegetarian who is berated by Jepperd for refusing to eat any “living thing” (2:12–13). However, he is ultimately revealed to be the clone of an earlier hybrid—believed to be an incarnation of the Inuit hunting god Tekkeitsertok—allegedly serving as a “natural” corrective to Anglo-­ American colonisation and environmental exploitation. The series ends with Gus and the other hybrids establishing a “primitivist” utopian community centred around the hunting of nonhuman and non-hybrid animals. In contrast to his previously meagre portrayal, Gus enters the final issue—wherein the primitivist community is presented—as a shirtless, muscular and dramatically antlered adult who defends his and Wendy’s hybrid children from human poachers with his hunting bow (40:9). He is later shown cooking a dead rabbit over a campfire while leading his children in a “prayer” of gratitude, telling them: The gods have given us this rabbit … this animal that is one of us … to sustain us. And for that we are grateful. And we must never forget … The gods once lived in harmony with man. But man forgot their faces and turned to sin and death. And as their world crumbled around them they tried to touch the gods again … to recreate them with science. But this was forbidden. And the gods sent a pestilence. Their breath on the wind. Man’s time was done. They had their chance to live in harmony with the land and they failed. Then we were born. The hybrid. We are one with the land. One with the animals that walk it. But we also carry mankind’s legacy in our blood and bones, so that we never forget that we are no better than they. (40:12; ellipses original, italics in place of bold).

As with Atwood, Callenbach, Le Guin, and Robinson, Lemire’s neocarnism stems from an idealised interpretation of Native Americans. Lemire

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claims Sweet Tooth’s epilogue was “pretty much … fully conceived since the beginning,” with ideas from “a lot of Native American or First Nations literature” he later read “seeping” into its second half (Lindelof). Moreover, that the “Indigenous” perspective is again presented by an author with a European-settler history also “risks raising questions of appropriation and exploitation” (Zantingh 9). That Gus, Wendy and Bobby—who also eats the rabbit while thanking it for its meat—are all hybrids of otherwise herbivorous animals also suggests their omnivorousness and carnism is an essentially human quality (Lemire 40:12). The series thereby concludes with Gus both embodying and actively endorsing a (neo)carnist ideology once challenged by his mere existence. Sweet Tooth’s popular 2021 television adaptation amplifies the comic’s implicit animal ethics.4 The vicious, hybrid-worshiping Animal Armies of Lemire’s text are reimagined as the more peaceful Animal Army who vow to “defend hybrids against all harm.” Their young leader, Bear, also becomes a surrogate mother/sister figure for Gus, who joins him and Jepperd on their travels after realising anger and revenge are “not the animal way” (S1E4 “Secret Sauce”). The adaptation also elaborates on Wendy’s backstory, portraying her as the daughter of former zoo-keeper Aimie who releases all the zoo animals and creates “The Preserve,” which is depicted as a hybrid sanctuary in the adaptation, rather than the clandestine vivisection laboratory of the comics. The television adaptation also ends with an explicit message of species unity, with Gus, Wendy and the other Preserve hybrids embracing each other, while a voiceover (presumably of older Gus) declares: “If we can see past the fear, we find out what really matters, and we learn that sometimes, the things that set us apart can also bring us together” (S1E8 “Big Man”). The adaptation’s second series deviates drastically from the plot of the comic and further emphasises interspecies unity through its focus on various human-led, hybrid rescue attempts. So far, the series—wherein Gus is played by a succession of blond, white-skinned actors—has not touched upon Gus’s Inuit origins, nor their colonialist implications. As in The Rise of Planet of the Apes, however, it remains the fault of the sympathetic scientists who liberate the cloned Gus from their laboratory in both the comic and the TV series,

4  The Sweet Tooth television series is one of Netflix’s most critically acclaimed and popular television ventures, ranking among their ten most-watched “English-language” originals within one month of its release (White).

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who are responsible for unleashing the virus upon humanity and the wider world (see Lemire, vol. 35). Another recent example of pandemic science fiction that foregrounds nonhuman animal uprisings is US author Robert Repino’s War With No Name (2015–2021). The series sees an ant-orchestrated pandemic that causes nonhuman animals to suddenly understand human language while also rendering them capable of walking upright and wielding firearms. Under the command of the Queen of the Ants, the nonhuman animals go to war with the remaining humans in an attempt to stamp out the anthropocentric Abrahamic religions considered responsible for the subjugation of all nonhuman animals and whose spread is controlled by further viral bioweapons. The series contains numerous allusions to science fiction and Romantic traditions. In the interstitial novella Culdesac (2016), humans fight to defend a town called Milton, with the heroic feline resistance fighter Mort(e) (2015) later expressing a “personal” distaste for Paradise Lost (D’Arc chap. 4). Conversely, the first two full-length volumes, Mort(e) (2015) and D’Arc (2017), bear epigraphs from Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale and Shelley’s Frankenstien, and there is also a housecat who renames themself “Le Guin,” suggesting a science fictional opposition to traditional, Abrahamic and Miltonic impositions (Mort(e) chap. 4).5 Nevertheless, Repino’s exploration of the ethics of eating is rather shallow. Although Mort(e) gets involved with a military unit who cook and eat the meat of their human victims, the uplifted carnivorous animals in the first volume primarily survive on mysterious and supposedly substandard “protein rations” grown by the ants on “organic farms” (Mort(e) chap. 3). The novel ends with Mort(e) turning on and defeating the Queen of the Ants, after which he and his canine companion D’Arc become ant ranchers, who trade the meat and skins of the giant ant warriors, who have allegedly become mindless following her defeat, as detailed in D’Arc. Through their supposed empowerment, Repino’s animals made into physical replicas of humans who continue to practice their speciesist and carnist discriminations. Moreover, while canine characters in D’Arc briefly share a meal of “vegan” dog treats they consider “as good as the real thing” vegetarianism and organised (human-led) animal activism are otherwise unmentioned (chap. 14). Pandemic fiction is a surprisingly fertile site for science fictional examinations (and transgressions) of traditional species boundaries. However, 5

 Smart science fiction scholars simply call their cats Le Guin in the first place.

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rather than being revered within the radical interspecies paradigms they depict, animal activists are frequently villainies as either extremely dangerous or woefully inept instigators of apocalyptic catastrophes, wherein meat-eating is often glorified or otherwise unquestioned.6

Looking Forward It is suitable, even desirable, that science fictional and utopian engagements with vegetarianism and animal ethics should become more complex and nuanced as the genres evolve. Rather than being balanced or complicated, however, the above survey shows that vegetarianism is almost completely neglected from contemporary considerations of animal and environmental ethics in favour of largely Indigenous-inspired neocarnist arrangements that often go unquestioned. The increasing interest in utopian and science fictional representations of vegetarianism and animal ethics suggests the need for further investigations into the literature and traditions of other cultures. Western carnism largely originates within Classic and Abrahamic myths that continue to inform modern attitudes toward nonhuman animals (if only subconsciously). Yet rather than being their originators of speciesist attitudes, these “foundational” stories are more likely reflective of historic prejudices against other animals. Carnism and speciesism may derive from similar principles in other cultures, or rest upon entirely different beliefs or even provide different foundations for utopian vegetarian cultures to be built upon, as the prominent Buddhist and Indian influences on Clarke, Dick and even Robinson show. Further investigation into utopian and science-fictional representations of vegetarianism in other cultures, therefore, might also help promote vegetarianism and animal activism within Western Anglo-American societies. Currently, there appears to be no major non-Anglo-American-focussed examples of vegetarian-specific science fiction criticism, or—if there are—they are yet to significantly intersect with Anglo-American-focussed scholarship.7 There is also a need for further investigation into Western traditions. The 6  For further analysis of The Animals in that Country, Sweet Tooth, The War with No Name and other animal empowerment pandemic fictions, see Joshua Bulleid, “The Sixth Extinction: Animal-Empowerment Pandemics in Viral Science Fiction,” Comparative American Studies (forthcoming). 7  The Portuguese Alimentopia Project (2014–2020) is an a major research project investigating the role of food in utopia, although its findings are yet to be substantially translated into English.

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formative French and Russian science fiction traditions, for example, are likely informed by a separate set of cultural assumptions and influences, as much as influential Eastern traditions like the influential Japanese and growing Chinese ones. A global approach would allow greater insight into the cross-cultural motivations behind non-Western carnist and vegetarian ideologies, which may assist in combating speciesism on a global scale. Indigenous perspectives are also an “invaluable in figuring out affirmative alternatives to [speciesist] settler ontologies” (Parry 230). As Wells’s War of the Worlds shows, highlighting similarities between colonial treatments of Indigenous cultures and nonhuman animals can be an effective method of exposing speciesist prejudices since they each operate on similar philosophies of “dehumanisation” (see Adams, “War on Compassion”). However, the suffering of Indigenous people in these stories is also often minimised or overlooked by being transferred onto non-Indigenous subjects. Although Callenbach, Le Guin, Robinson , Atwood and Lemire all adapt idealised versions of Native American traditions, they each also interpret these Indigenous traditions through their own non-Indigenous perspectives to assert a “primitivist” (and often masculinist) carnism. Greater engagement with Indigenous texts, traditions and communities would both clarify their positions and help avoid relying on “primitivist” impositions and idealisations by non-Indigenous authors. Intersections of science fiction and animal ethics are not simply of academic interest. As this study shows, utopian and science-fictional engagements with vegetarianism have had a significant impact on the spread of real-world vegetarianism and animal activism. Percy Shelley’s Queen Mab (1813) and “A Vindication of Natural Diet” (1813) had a profound influence on nineteenth-century animal activism and directly inspired the founders of the Vegetarian Society. Thereafter, his vegetarian message has been most popularly communicated through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which established lapsarian vegetarianism as a foundational aspect of modern science fiction. H. G. Wells’s ambiguous and satirical responses to the Shelleys’ Romantic sentiments resulted in vegetarianism being further entrenched into the genre, with his influential Modern Utopia also inspiring several real-world attempts at establishing vegetarian utopian communes. Arthur C. Clarke’s insistence upon the necessity of a vegetarian diet or the invention of artificial meat-synthesisers for extra-terrestrial colonisation was taken seriously by space exploration organisations and continues to inform their twenty-first century practices and investments. Philip K. Dick’s writing continually challenged anthropocentric

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perceptions, with Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? in particular anticipating many essential tenets of the modern animal rights and liberation movements, whose founders have openly acknowledged science fiction’s influence on their philosophies and even the very conception of “speciesism” itself. Although carnism is regularly celebrated in the fiction of critical utopian authors such as Callenbach and Butler, their nonfiction writing and real-world attitudes often acknowledge and even emphasise the need to reduce meat-eating and embrace more mutual interspecies relationships. Even Atwood’s early fiction was inspirational for modern feminist-­ vegetarian and vegan theory, and it is possible that Robinson’s writing, following The Ministry for the Future, will continue to reflect the increasing scientific emphasis on vegetarianism as a necessary component of combatting climate change. The critical vegetarian impulses science fiction frequently contains and inspires are a considerable, if not essential, catalyst for real world animal activism. As Fredric Jameson argues, the first step in any cultural revolution is to “think the break” with prevailing ideologies (Archaeologies 232). Moreover, as Sorenson observes, “many ideas that are now seen as fundamental to the concept of social justice were once considered absolutely unthinkable,” arguing that “with abolitionist animal rights as the basis of renewed political struggle, we can truly think the unthinkable and imagine new forms of emancipated social life and inclusive justice” (“Thinking” xv, xvii). Science fiction provides a space to imagine an end to speciesism while also exploring the methods and motivations needed to achieve a post-carnist future. Moreover, while critical and philosophical discourses might have moved beyond vegetarianism—into veganism and its deconstruction—science fiction and science fiction criticism are clearly not there yet. Rudimentary exposures of speciesism and promotions of vegetarianism, therefore, continue to be necessary steps toward dismantling carnism. Mythological stories, such as those of Prometheus and Genesis, have helped perpetuate carnist prejudices for thousands of years; new stories will be an essential part of breaking them down.

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Index1

A Abortion, 16, 160, 161, 256 Abrahamic mythology, 33, 64, 126, 153, 204, 214, 218, 308 Adam, 33 The Bible, 43n3, 50 (see also The Bible) Elijah, 166 Fall narrative (see Lapsarianism) Genesis, 154, 253, 261, 262, 310; Abel, 49, 50, 52; Adam, 42, 43, 47, 49–51, 83, 126, 200; Cain, 49–52, 56, 66, 126, 130, 200, 250, 253; Eden, 33, 39, 43, 50, 78, 126, 154, 163, 213; Eve, 33, 43, 47, 49, 50, 108, 163; Ham, 200; Jabal, 50, 51; Jacob, 50, 197; Jubal, 50; Noah, 43n3, 50, 51, 200,

261; Noah’s Ark, 50, 78; Seth, 50 God, 43n3, 49–52, 54, 87, 144, 150, 154, 156, 191, 193, 253, 261, 262, 274, 305 Golem (Jewish), 179 Jesus Christ, 78, 153, 166, 178, 193n6 Lilith, 199, 200 Michael (archangel), 50, 51n8 Raphael (archangel), 43 Revelation, 86n8, 111, 151, 291 Satan, 44, 47, 51, 52, 56, 193n6 Sodom and Gomorrah, 86n8 Activism, 129, 263 animal, 21, 143, 271–277, 284, 289, 292, 298, 300, 301, 303, 304, 307–310 environmental, 290

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 J. Bulleid, Vegetarianism and Science Fiction, Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-38347-2

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Adams, Carol J., 11–16, 12n4, 40–42, 45, 46, 53, 105, 106, 109n2, 128n9, 155, 162, 179, 234, 248 “The Oedible Complex”, 248 The Sexual Politics of Meat, 11, 12n4, 40 Adams, Douglas, 176 The Restaurant at the End of the Universe, 176 Aeschylus, 44, 44n4 Prometheus Bound, 44, 44n4 Aesop, 45 “The Ass and the Lapdog”, 45 Agriculture, 10, 51, 53, 54, 74, 75, 94, 111, 115, 118, 119, 132, 159, 209, 222, 223, 227, 238, 259, 283, 284, 287, 288 animal, 10, 51, 53, 74, 94, 111, 115, 132, 159, 209, 222, 283, 284, 287, 288 Alcohol, 32, 42, 84, 286 Alderman, Naomi, 19, 246, 265, 266 The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (with Margaret Atwood), 246, 265 The Power, 19, 266 Aldiss, Brian, 78, 81, 115 Non-Stop, 115 Alighieri, Dante, 163 Inferno, 163 Alimentopia Project, 308n7 Alkon, Paul, 73, 74 Alphabet (company), 118 Alternative Meats, 286 cultured (in vitro), 20, 104–108, 110, 119, 132, 188, 223, 267, 268 synthetic, 20, 23, 104, 105, 112, 114–116, 118, 120, 121, 131, 148, 185, 188 Amazing Stories, 128

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), 141 American Institute of Architects (AIA), 119, 124 American Museum of Natural History, 129 American Society for the Prevention of Animal Cruelty (ASPCA), 129 Amundsen, Roald, 235 Anders, Charlie Jane, 288 The City in the Middle of the Night, 288 Anderson, Poul, 115, 145, 175 Satan’s World, 175 Tau Zero, 115 Andrew, Abel, 65 Vegetarianism and Evolution, 65 Androcles (fable), 143 Animal activism, 21, 263, 271–277, 284, 289, 292, 298, 300, 301, 303, 307–310 Animal farming, 19, 53, 89, 106, 112, 119, 124, 132, 150, 179, 186, 187, 204, 209, 214–216, 220, 222–224, 238, 259, 263, 267, 268, 273, 274, 276, 286, 290, 295 Animal Liberation (philosophy), 1, 10, 11, 14, 23, 65, 79, 105, 106, 141–168, 173, 219, 257, 263, 273, 295 Animal Protection Institute of America, 161 Animal Rights (philosophy), 16, 18, 116n4, 152, 159 The Animal Studies Journal, 298 Anthropocene, 160 Anthropocentrism, 13, 14, 155, 231n9, 232, 234, 284 Apollo 11, 112, 113 memoir, 113; Clarke epilogue, 112, 113

 INDEX 

Ardrey, Robert, 125–132, 129n10 African Genesis, 125–127, 129, 130 The Hunting Hypothesis, 128 Armstrong, Philip, 53, 264 Arthur C. Clarke Award (for novel), 157n3, 288, 296 Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (organisation), 294 Artificial meat, 178n2 Ashmead, Lawrence, 166n5 Asimov, Isaac, 52, 111 The Caves of Steel, 111 Foundation (series), 111; Foundation’s Edge, 111 Nightfall, 52 Robot (series), 111; I, Robot, 111 Space Ranger (series), 111 Asphyxia (author), 298, 299 Future Girl, 298 Atwood, Margaret, 1, 18, 19, 25, 53, 77, 78, 78n4, 82, 109n2, 174, 221, 245–278, 246n1, 255n4, 257n5, 275n9, 284, 286, 287, 290–292, 295–297, 299, 302, 305, 307, 309, 310 Alias Grace, 249–251, 256 Angel Catbird (with Johnnie Christmas and Tamra Bonvillain), 246, 258 The Animals in That Country (collection), 247; "The Animals in that Country" (poem), 302 “The Animals Reject Their Names and Things Return to Their Origins”, 261 The Blind Assassin, 25, 246, 247, 254–256, 259, 277 Bodily Harm, 250 Canadian Green Consumer Guide introduction (Pollution Probe pamphlet), 263 The CanLit Foodbook, 258

317

Cat’s Eye, 249, 251, 256, 259, 267 The Edible Woman, 248, 249, 270 “Frankenstein Monster Song” (One Ring Zero song), 258 “Freeforall”, 252 “Hack Wednesday”, 252n3 Hag-Seed, 246, 255 “Hairball”, 258 The Handmaid’s Tale (series), 19, 25, 245, 247, 251, 277, 296, 307; The Handmaid’s Tale (novel), 174, 251; The Testaments, 25 The Happy Zombie Sunrise Home (with Naomi Alderman), 246, 265 The Heart Goes Last, 245, 252, 267 In Other Worlds, 246 “It’s Autumn”, 276 Lady Oracle, 251 Life Before Man, 250, 251, 255n4, 259 MaddAddam (series), 25, 245, 247, 257–259, 261–264, 266–271, 273–278, 286, 287, 299, 302; MaddAddam (novel), 221, 258, 260, 266, 268, 295; Oryx and Crake, 221, 257, 258, 260, 267, 269, 270, 270n8, 274; “Reading List”, 274, 276; The Year of the Flood, 257, 262, 265, 266, 269, 271, 276 MaddAddam (trilogy), 268 Moral Disorder (collection), 256 “My Life as a Bat”, 251 Oryx and Crake, 286, 291 Payback, 274 The Penelopiad, 246, 275n9 The Robber Bride, 250, 270n8 “The Sin Eater”, 248 “Speeches for Dr Frankenstein”, 258

318 

INDEX

Atwood, Margaret (cont.) Stone Mattress, 246 Surfacing, 249, 256 Survival, 247, 249 The Testaments, 18, 245, 251, 253, 296 “Thylacine Ragout”, 269 War Bears (with Ken Steacy), 246, 248 “Writing Utopia”, 246 The Year of the Flood, 286, 296 Australian and New Zealand Association for the Study of Literature, Environment and Culture, 221 Australian Associated Press, 223 “Eat Less Meat”, 223 Avatar (Cameron film), 18n9 Axon, William, 36 B Baba (cocker spaniel), 188, 189 Baccolini, Raffaella, 174 Bacon, Francis, 4, 5 “New Atlantis”, 4 Baio, Chris, 293 Man of the World, 293 Baudrillard, Jean, 3 Baxter, Stephen, 75, 114 Sunstorm (with Arthur C. Clarke), 114 The Time Ships, 75 Baylock, James, 141 Beard, George, 83 Belasco, Warren, 20, 109 Meals to Come, 20 Belk, Nolan, 200 Bellamy, Edward, 67 Equality, 67 Looking Backward, 67 Benjaminson, Morris, 118

Bentham, Jeremy, 71, 154, 158 Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation, 154 Bernard, Claude, 79, 79n5 The Bible, 35, 86n8 Deuteronomy, 167, 167n6 Genesis, 22, 33, 36, 47, 50, 51, 54, 56, 78, 85, 253, 261, 310 Isaiah, 35 Old Testament, 165 Psalm 49, 85 revelation, 111 Revelation, 86n8, 151, 291 See also Abrahamic mythology Blake, William, 262 Bloch, Ernst, 2 Bloomberg Green, 238 Robinson article, 238 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 49n6 Booker Prize, 18, 19, 25, 245, 296 Borges, Jorge Luis, 96 Borkfelt, Sune, 294 Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis (with Matthias Stephen), 294 Borrell, Sally, 247, 248 Bould, Mark, 226, 231n9, 234 Bradbury, Ray, 110 Fahrenheit 451, 110 Branagh, Kenneth, 46 Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 11, 46, 179, 309 Branson, Richard, 118, 119 Brewster, David, 85 Brin, Sergey, 105 British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC), 223 “Plant-Based Diet Can Fight Climate Change”, 223 British Interplanetary Society (BIS), 103, 112 British Vegetarian Society, 65

 INDEX 

Broadview Press, 290 Browne, Maurice, 93 Bryant, Dorathy, 174, 177 The Kin of Ata are Waiting for You (aka The Comforter), 174, 177 Bryant, Nicola, 117n5 BSFA Award, 287–288, 297 Buckingham, James Silk, 20, 21 National Evils and Practical Remedies, 20 Buddhism, 104, 120, 122, 123, 124n8, 132, 221, 224–228 Bujold, Lois McMaster, 116 Vorkosigan Saga, 116 Bulwer-Lytton, Edward, 69 The Coming Race, 69 Buonaparte, Napoleon, 48, 49 Burdekin, Katharine, 174 Swastika Night (Constantine), 174, 178 Burger King, 213 Burgess, Anthony, 117, 130 A Clockwork Orange, 130 Burgmann, J. R., 173, 210, 262, 292–295, 297, 298 Climate Change and Science Fiction (with Andrew Milner), 292, 297 Butchers, 21, 87, 90, 120, 121, 143, 175, 194, 217, 252, 253, 256, 257 Butler, Octavia E., 1, 24, 173–174, 188–204, 260, 275, 285, 286, 302, 310 Fledgling, 188, 203 “How Do You Envisage First Contact with an Alien Species?” (unpublished), 189 Justice (unpublished), 202 Kindred, 174, 188, 203 O magazine article, 188

319

Parable (series), 174, 188, 202 Patternist, 188, 190–197, 193n6, 202; Clay’s Ark, 195, 196, 302; Doro-Jesus (unpublished), 193n6; Mind of My Mind, 192, 202; Patternmaster, 194, 195, 197; Survivor, 190–192, 195; Wild Seed, 192–194 Xenogenesis, 188, 197–202, 201n7, 260; Adulthood Rites, 199, 201; Dawn, 197–199, 203; Imago, 200, 201 Butler, Samuel, 69, 69n1, 70 Erewhon, 69; second edition, 69, 69n1 Butter, 31, 181, 251 Byron, Clara Allegra, 52 Byron, Lord George Gordon, 31, 40, 51, 52 Cain, 52 “Darkness”, 52 Don Juan, 52 C Calarco, Matthew, 9, 13, 17 Callenbach, Ernest, 1, 24, 173–178, 185–188, 204, 211, 214, 217, 227, 234, 277, 305, 309, 310 “Chocco”, 187, 211 Ecology: A Pocket Guide, 186 Ecotopia, 24, 173, 185–187, 185n5 Ecotopia Emerging, 24, 186, 227 Ecotopian Encyclopedia, 186 Living Cheaply With Style (aka Living Poor with Style, aka Living Cheaply), 187 Campanella, Tommaso, 4 The City of the Sun, 4 Campbell, John W., 21 “Who Goes There?”, 21

320 

INDEX

Canavan, Gerry, 3, 188–190, 192, 193, 193n6, 200, 202, 203, 219, 264 Green Planets (with Kim Stanley Robinson), 219 Cannibalism, 14, 71, 73, 74, 81–84, 87, 91, 115, 177, 246n1, 256, 266, 267, 269, 272 Cantor, Paul A., 39, 43 Caras, Roger, 129 Carcass (band), 294n1 Care Ethics, 294 Carlyle, Thomas, 68 “The Sphinx”, 68 Carnism, 5, 33, 40, 41, 43, 43n3, 44, 46, 50, 51, 53, 56, 57, 63, 65, 66, 72–75, 78, 81–89, 91, 93, 95, 103, 105, 109n2, 111, 115, 119, 120, 124–126, 128, 130–132, 145–148, 150, 161, 161n4, 165, 168, 174–187, 190, 196–202, 204, 211–214, 216, 220, 224, 227, 228, 232, 234, 236–239, 245–278, 283, 287, 288, 290, 292–295, 297–302, 306, 308, 310 See also Neocarnism Carnivorousness, 46, 48, 71, 74, 77, 78, 81, 82, 84, 89, 115, 121, 125, 127, 129, 131, 132, 146, 211, 260, 276, 298 Carno-phallogocentrism, 13, 159 Carr, Terry, 211 Dream’s Edge, 212 Carrel, Alexis, 107 Castricano, Jodey, 7 Critical Perspectives on Veganism (with Rasmus R. Simonsen), 7 Cattle Decapitation (band), 294, 294n1 The Anthropocene Extinction, 294 Monolith of Inhumanity, 294

Cattle dystopias, 72, 203 Center on Animal Liberation Affairs, 10n3 Chang’e 4 lunar lander, 118 Charnas, Suzy McKee, 173, 177, 178 Holdfast Chronicles, 173, 177; Motherlines, 173 Cheyne, George, 34 Essay on Regimen, 34 Child of Nature (archetype), 39–47, 56 Christianity, 65, 70, 82, 85, 153, 164, 166, 214, 226, 262 Communion, 82 Holy Spirit, 78 See also Abrahamin Mythology; Jesus Christ Christopher, John, 85n7 Tripods (series), 85n7 Church, Frederick, 229 Churchill, Winston, 107 Clarke, Arthur C., 1, 22, 23, 89, 103–104, 112–133, 116n4, 124n7, 124n8, 129n11, 148, 149, 166, 167, 182, 211, 215, 216, 220, 224–227, 238, 239, 285, 286, 288, 296, 308, 309 Authorized Biography (McAleer), 123 Childhood’s End, 121, 122, 122n6, 167 The City and the Stars, 112, 114 The Deep Range (novel), 121–123 "The Deep Range" (story), 121, 122 “Dial F for Frankenstein”, 103 Dolphin Island, 123 Earthlight, 114 Engineering and Science Article, 124 Exploration of the Moon, 114 A Fall of Moondust, 114

 INDEX 

“The Food of the Gods”, 120, 121, 132 The Fountains of Paradise, 112, 123 “The Future Isn’t What it Used to Be” (Engineering and Science article), 119 Hammer of God, 121, 123 “Herbert George Morly Roberts Wells, Esq.”, 103 “Holiday on the Moon”, 113 Imperial Earth, 121 Islands in the Sky, 114 “The Lion of Comarre”, 113 “The Longest Science-Fiction Story Ever Told”, 103 “The Nine Billion Names of God”, 120 Prelude to Space, 113 Profiles of the Future, 116, 116n4 The Promise of Space (with R. A. Smith), 113 Rama (series), 114; Rendezvous with Rama, 114 “Rescue Party”, 115 “The Road to the Sea”, 113 The Sands of Mars, 113 The Songs of Distant Earth, 119 Space Odyssey (series), 23, 104, 132; 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel), 124, 124n7, 124n8, 129, 131, 166, 167, 215, 294; 2010: Odyssey Two, 131; 2061:Odyssey Three, 131; 3001:The Final Odyssey, 131 Sunstorm (with Stephen Baxter), 114 “Technology and the Future” (AIA address), 119 Time Odyssey (series), 114 “The Wind from the Sun”, 114 Classic mythology, 275n9, 308 Androcles, 143

321

Comus, 77 Golden Age (prelapsarian), 44, 68, 141 Prometheus, 22, 33, 36, 44, 54–56, 77, 94, 193, 261, 310 (see also Prometheanism) Sisyphus, 153 Climate change, 20, 25, 53, 118, 186, 187, 209–239, 210n1, 262, 273, 290, 291, 293–295, 297, 298, 310 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 37, 51 The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, 37, 51, 77 Collins, Suzanne, 18 The Hunger Games (series), 18 Colonialism, 83, 86, 189, 190, 202 Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS), 223 Columbus, Christopher, 277 Comus (classical figure), 77 Conquistadors, 277 Constantine, Murray, see Burdekin, Katharine Contagion (Soderbergh film), 301 Convention for the Conservation of Antarctic Seals, 234 Cooper, Alice, 46 “Feed My Frankenstein”, 46 Cornaro, Luigi, 229 COVID-19, 298, 301 Crichton, Michael, 127, 210, 210n1 Jurassic Park (novel), 18n9, 127 State of Fear, 210, 210n1 Critical animal studies, 2, 10–18, 41, 76 Cro-Magnons, 148n1 Cruel Treatment of Cattle Act (British), 65 Cruelty to Animals Act (British), 65, 79 Cultured (In Vitro), see Alternative Meats

322 

INDEX

D Dalai Lama, 120, 226, 228 Gyatso, Tenzin, 228 Danielites, 262 Darcy, Austin, 104 Dart, Raymond, 124, 127, 129 “The Predatory Transition from Ape to Man”, 127 Darwin, Charles, 64, 65, 68, 70, 96, 122, 126 The Descent of Man, 64 On the Origin of Species, 64 See also Darwinism Darwin, Erasmus, 35 Darwinism, 22, 64–66, 68, 246n1, 264 Davis, Grania, 166n5 Davis, Russell T., 117n5 De Maupertuis, Pierre Louis Moreau, 78 Defining Critical Animal Studies (collection), 17 editors, 17 DeFord, Miriam, 161 “The Season of the Babies”, 161 Delany, Samuel R., 173, 175, 176 Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand, 176 Triton, 173, 175, 176 Derrida, Jacques, 13–18, 33, 34, 48, 104, 158, 160, 261, 283 “The Animal”, 13, 14 discussions with Élizabeth Roudinesco, 13 “Eating Well” (interview with Jean Luc Nancy), 13, 14 Derry, Stephen, 67, 69 Descartes, Rene, 39 Deych, Rina, 106 Diamond, Jared, 127 Dick, Anne, 143, 145, 147, 148, 148n1, 150

Dick, Joseph, 143 Dick, Kleo, 143 Dick, Philip K., 1, 21–23, 141–168, 176, 186, 212, 224–227, 239, 271, 285, 286, 308, 309 “Beyond Lies the Wub”, 146 cats, 143 A Christmas Carrol, 274 Confessions of a Crap Artist, 147 The Divine Invasion, 165, 167 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, 21, 23, 142, 144, 146, 147, 149–168, 212, 286, 310 Dr Bloodmoney, 23, 142, 149–151, 168 Exegesis, 144, 156, 164, 167 Eye in The Sky, 147 father, 143 The First in Our Family, 147 Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said, 165 “Human Is”, 146, 147 Lies, Inc., 149 “Little Black Box”, 153 “Man, Android, and Machine”, 147 The Man Whose Teeth Were All Exactly Alike, 148 Martian Time-Slip, 149 “Not by Its Cover”, 146 “The Pre-Persons”, 161 “Roog”, 146 A Scanner Darkly, 149, 152 sheep, 145, 148, 150 The Simulacra, 148 Solar Lottery, 148 The Unteleported Man, 149 VALIS, 143, 152, 164, 165 We Can Build You, 147 Dick, Tessa, 165 Dickens, Charles, 75, 274 A Christmas Carrol, 274 Disch, Thomas M., 166n5

 INDEX 

Doctor Who (series), 117n5 Donovan, Josephine, 155 Dougherty, Elizabeth, 268n7 The Blind Pig, 268n7 Drexler, K. Eric, 116n4 Du Maurier, George, 88 The Martian, 88 Dunsany, Lord Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 122 “The Use of Man”, 122 Duplantier, Joe, 294 See also Gojira (band) Dystopia, see Utopia (genre) E Earth Day, 210, 274 Ecocriticism, 2, 19, 25, 52, 53, 283–310 Ecogothic, 52 Ecology, 119, 178n2, 218, 224, 227, 289 Edibility, 72, 84, 86, 87, 90, 251, 266, 292 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 180, 229 Emshwiller, Carol, 21 “Sanctuary”, 21 Encyclopaedia Britannica, 79 “Evolution in Biology”, 79 Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, 121 “Iconoclasm”, 121 Engel, Marian, 302n3 Bear, 302n3 Engineering and Science (journal), 119, 124 Erdrich, Louise, 294 Future Home of the Living God, 294 E.T. (Spielberg film), 255, 292 Eugenics, 95, 190 Evolution, 65, 67, 68, 84, 85, 93, 104, 124, 125, 128, 131, 148, 158, 182, 195, 196, 262

323

F Faber, Michel, 72, 289 Under the Skin, 72, 289 Fabian Society, 91, 93, 255 Fake meat, 198 Fantasy (genre), 83, 182, 297, 298 Farming agricultural, 150, 284 animal, 149, 203; dairy, 95 factory (industrial), 234, 284, 290, 304; organic, 234, 307 traditional, 204, 283 vegetable, 54, 113, 118, 132, 150, 186, 191, 274; hydroponic, 112–114 Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), 301 Feminism, 93, 175, 269 Feng Shui, 226 Fiddes, Nick, 70, 209, 284 Fisher, Elizaberth, 182 Woman’s Creation, 182 Flammarion, Camille, 88 Omega: The Last Days of the World, 88 Fleck, Dirk C., 292, 293 MAEVA! (series), 292 Fleischer, Richard, 72 Soylent Green, 72, 107, 111 Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) The Future of Food, 20, 223 Livestock’s Long Shadow, 209, 222 Tackling Climate Change Through Livestock, 223 Foods of the Gods (Westfahl, Slusser and Rabkin collection), 7, 20 Foote, Bud, 213, 231–233 Ford, Henry, 109n2 Fourier, Charles, 180 Francione, Gary, 263

324 

INDEX

Freedman, Carl, 3 Freud, Sigmund, 122 Fudge, Erica, 104, 263, 284 G Galen, Russel, 166n5 Gates, Bill, 118, 119 Gearhart, Sally Miller, 174, 178 The Wanderground, 174, 178 Genesis, 154 George, David R., 255n4 Provenance of Shadows, 255n4 Gessner, Saloman, 51, 52 The Death of Abel, 51 Ghandi, Mahatma, 297 Ghosh, Amitav, 20, 297 Gun Island, 297 Gibson, Graeme, 256, 257, 257n5, 276, 277 The Bedside Book of Beasts, 256, 276 Gibson, William, 267 Neuromancer, 267 Gilliam, Terry, 300, 302 Twelve Monkeys, 300, 302 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 95, 254, 287 Herland, 95, 254, 287 Moving the Mountain, 95 With Her in Our Land, 95 Gisborne, Maria, 71 Godwin, William, 32, 40 Concerning Political Justice, 32 Fleetwood, 32, 40 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 43 The Sorrows of Werther, 43, 45 Gojira (band), 294 See also Duplantier, Joe Goldsworthy, Peter, 302n3 Wish, 302n3 Google, 105, 118 Goregrind (genre), 294, 294n1

Gosling, Ryan, 164 Gothic (genre), 52, 80 Grammy awards, 294 Grandin, Temple, 219 Gyatso, Tenzin (Dalai Lama), 228 See also Dalai Lama H Haggard, H. Rider, 246n1 She, 246n1 Hale, Benjamin, 302n3 The Evolution of Bruno Littlemore, 302n3 The Handmaid’s Tale (television series), 252, 296 Haraway, Donna J., 15, 15n7, 16, 16n8, 18, 182, 199, 235, 268 Companion Species Manifesto, 15 “A Cyborg Manifesto”, 15 Primate Visions, 182 When Species Meet, 15n7 Harper, Amie Breeze, 200 Harris, Mason, 80 Harrison, Harry, 111, 112 Make Room! Make Room!, 111 Hart, Donna, 126, 127 Man the Hunted (with Robert Wald Sussman), 126 Hearne, Vicki, 15, 16n8 Heinlein, Robert A., 115 Farmer in the Sky, 115 The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, 115 Orphans of the Sky, 115 Heldreth, L. G., 163 The Herald of the Golden Age, 88 Herbert, Frank, 216, 239 ConSentiency (series), 216 Dune (novel), 216 Herbivorousness, 32, 39, 41, 46, 72, 127, 148 Hertz, Joseph Herman, 167, 167n6

 INDEX 

Hills, Arnold Frank, 83 Essays on Vegetarianism, 83 Hinduism, 70, 71 Hitler, Adolf, 178 Holloman Air Base, 117 Holmes, Richard, 34 Holmes, Robert, 117n5 The Holocaust, 15 Homans, Margaret, 12, 40 Homer, 68, 77, 275 The Odyssey, 77, 275 Hominids, 124, 125, 127, 128, 130, 148, 148n1 Homo sapiens, 73, 277 Honey, 8, 287 Hopkins, Patrick D., 104, 106, 107 Horace, 76, 77, 77n3 Hornung, Eva, 302n3 Dog Boy, 302n3 Hudson, William Henry, 185 A Crystal Age, 185 Hughes, William, 52 Hugo Award, 111, 112, 287, 296, 297 Best Dramatic Presentation, 296 Best Novel, 216 Hulme, Mike, 294 Why We Disagree About Climate Change, 294 Hulme, Peter, 73 Human/nonhuman hybrids, 304 Humourism, 48, 49, 49n7 Hunt, Leigh, 34 Hunter, John, 79 Hunter-gathering, 184, 214, 229 Hunting, 4, 9, 32, 88, 95, 103–133, 153, 175, 176, 180, 182, 183, 185, 187, 191, 193, 226, 229, 232, 233, 253, 268, 276, 283, 284, 289, 292, 299, 304, 305 The Hunting Hypothesis, 23, 103–133, 182

325

Huxley, Aldous, 64, 108, 109, 109n2 Brave New World, 64, 108, 109n2 Huxley, Julien, 64, 66 The Science of Life (with H. G. Wells), 64 Huxley, T. H., 64–66, 68–71, 78, 80, 96, 126 Evolution and Ethics, 66; “Prolegomena”, 66 “Human Evolution, an Artificial Process”, 66 Hybrids, 260 I Impossible Foods (company), 118 Industrial revolution, 70, 284 Inhofe, Jim, 210 Institute for Critical Animal Studies, 10 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Climate Change and Land (SRCCL), 223 First Assessment Report (FAR), 222 Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), 223 Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5 °C (SR15), 223; Summary for Policymakers, 223 Third Assessment Report (TAR), 222 The International Anthropological and Linguistic Review, 127 International Space Station (ISS), 118 Inuit mythology Tekkeitsertok, 305 In-Vitro Meat Cookbook (Mensvoort and Grievink), 105 Ishi, 299 Ishiguro, Kazuo, 19, 289 Never Let Me Go, 19, 289 Islam, 123

326 

INDEX

The Island of Lost Souls (Kenton film), 80 Ito, Junji, 46 Frankenstein, 46 J Jainism, 294 Jameson, Fredric, 2, 3, 185, 264, 310 Archaeologies of the Future, 3 Jemisin, N. K., 297, 298 Broken Earth (series), 297 Jesus Christ, 43n3, 78, 153, 166, 178, 193n6 Johnson, Ben, 49 Every Man in His Humour, 49 John W. Campbell Award, 202n8 Jones, Gwyneth, 178n2, 300 Bold as Love (series), 300; Bold as Love (novel), 300 The Journal of Sociobiology, 232 Joy, Melanie, 5, 6, 8, 19, 127, 174, 283, 284 Judaism, 167, 179, 180 Jurassic Park (Spielberg film), 18n9, 107, 128n9 See also Crichton, Michael K Kazez, Jean, 184 Keller, David H., 108 “Unto Us a Child is Born”, 108 Kemp, Peter, 75, 84, 92, 93 Kennedy, A. L., 293 “Meat”, 293 Kilworth, Gary, 212 “Hogfoot Right and Bird-­ Hands”, 212 Hunter’s Moon, 212 Midnight’s Sun, 212 Kingsolver, Barbara, 295

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, 295 Flight Behaviour, 295 Kornbluth, C. M., 110, 267 The Space Merchants (with Frederick Pohl), 110, 267 Kowal, Mary Robinette, 287 Lady Astronaut, 287; The Calculating Stars, 287; The Fated Sky, 287 Kroeber, Alfred Louis, 183, 214, 299 Kroeber, Theodora, 299 Kubrick, Stanley, 103, 124, 124n7, 125, 129–131, 166, 167, 182 A Clockwork Orange (film), 130 2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 104, 124n7, 129–131, 167, 182, 294 L Lafferty, R. A., 212 “Boomer Flats”, 212 Lake, David J., 75 The Man Who Loved Morlocks, 75 “The Truth about Weena”, 75 Lambe, William, 34 Lamey, Andy, 128 Landseer, Edwin Henry, 77 The Rout of Comus, 77 Lane, Mary E. Bradley, 108 Mizora, 108 Lankester, Edwin Ray, 68 Lanone, Catherine, 52 Lapsarianism, 41, 44, 49, 125, 126, 130, 152–154, 162, 213, 261 Lasswitz, Kurd, 108 Two Planets, 108 Latham, Rob, 216 Le Guin, Ursula K., 1, 24, 82–85, 161, 167, 168, 173–178, 182–184, 184n4, 204, 209, 211,

 INDEX 

214, 217, 234, 236, 245, 286, 296, 299, 305, 307, 309 Always Coming Home, 24, 183, 184, 214, 286 The Annals of the Western Shore; Gifts, 182; Powers, 182 “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction”, 182 Earthsea Cycle, 182 Hanish Cycle; The Dispossessed, 24, 173, 175, 286; The Left Hand of Darkness, 175; Planet of Exile, 183; The Word for World is Forest, 182 “A Modest Proposal: Vegempathy”, 184 “Newton’s Sleep”, 211 Le Pan, Don, 72 Animals, 72, 290 League of Nations, 63, 92 Leakey, Louis, 124, 129, 148 Leakey, Mary, 124, 148 Leather, 9, 70n2, 157, 183, 263, 286 Lee, Gentry, 114 Rama series (with Arthur C. Clarke), 114 Lemire, Jeff, 302, 304–306, 309 Sweet Tooth (comic series), 302, 304–306, 308n6 Leopold, Aldo, 218 LePan, Don, 252n3, 290, 302 animals, 252n3 Lewis, David Kellogg, 156 “Mad Pain and Martian Pain”, 156 Ligny, Jean-Marc, 293 Exodes, 293 Semenses, 293 Linett, Maren Tova, 290 Linnean Society of London, 68 Lockwood, Gary, 131, 294 Locus Award, 111, 288, 296, 297 Logocentrism, 305

327

London, Jack, 109 The Iron Heel, 109 London Vegetarian Society, 31, 36, 83 M Maimonides, Moses, 167 Man the Hunter (theory), 199 See also The Hunting Hypothesis Markley, Robert, 216 Martine, Arkady, 287 A Desolation Called Peace, 287 A Memory Called Empire, 287 Marvel Studios Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3 (Gunn film), 292 Marvel Cinematic Universe, 18n9 Masculinism, 183 McAdam, Colin, 302n3 A Beautiful Truth, 302n3 McAuley, Paul, 21 White Devils, 21 McCorry, Seán, 7, 18, 20, 209 Literature and Meat Since 1900 (with John Miller), 7, 20 McHugh, Susan, 267, 268 McIntyre, Vonda N., 161, 161n4 McKay, Laura Jean, 288, 302, 302n3, 303 The Animals in That Country, 288, 302, 303, 308n6 McKibben, Bill, 274, 275 The End of Nature, 274, 275 Enough: Staying Human in an Engineered Age, 274 McWhir, Anne, 47 Meat and Livestock Australia, 128n9 Sam Neill ads, 128n9 Medwin, Thomas, 44, 44n4 Prometheus Bound (Aeschylus) translation, 44, 44n4

328 

INDEX

Mehnert, Antonia, 294 Climate Change Fictions, 294 Mellor, Anne K., 39 Meskys, Ed, 166n5 Meyer, Stephenie, 203 Twilight, 203 Miller, Harlan B., 155 Ethics and Animals (with William H. Williams), 155 Miller, John, 7, 18, 20, 107, 108, 110, 209 Literature and Meat Since 1900 (with Seán McCorry), 7, 20 Milner, Andrew, 3, 49–51, 109, 162, 163, 173, 221, 236, 262, 292–295, 297–302 Climate Change and Science Fiction (with J. R. Burgmann), 292, 297 “Viral Science Fiction”, 299 Milton, John, 36, 39, 43, 43n3, 44n4, 47–52, 77, 96, 108, 162, 213 Comus, 77 Paradise Lost, 36, 43, 43n3, 44n4, 45, 47, 48, 50, 51, 77, 86n8, 108, 152, 162, 163, 213, 253, 307 Paradise Regained, 43n3, 152 Mohr, Dunja M., 277 Monro, Harold, 93 More, Thomas, 4 Utopia, 4 Morningstar Farms, 145, 168 Morris, Desmond, 129 Morris, Ian, 275 Foragers, Farmers and Fossil Fuels, 275 Morris, William, 67, 95 News from Nowhere, 67 Morton, Timothy, 36, 41, 45, 56 Moylan, Tom, 3, 173–175, 177, 179, 204, 214, 231, 231n9 Demand the Impossible, 173

Muir, John, 218 Murphy, Pat, 212 “In the Abode of the Snows”, 212 Murphy, Patrick D., 20, 52 N Namjoshi, Suniti, 302n3 The Conversations of Cow, 302n3 Nancy, Jean Luc, 13 “Eating Well” (Derrida Interview), 14 National Council for Civil Liberties (UK), 63 National Science Foundation (NSF), 222, 224 Native Americans, 186, 187, 201 Native Californians, 204 Naturalism, 213, 261 Thoreauvian, 221 Nature (journal), 223 “Eat Less Meat” (Schriermeier article), 223 Nazis, 178, 178n1, 251, 300, 304 Neanderthals, 148n1, 234 Nebula Award, 112, 182, 287, 296 Neill, Sam, 128n9 MLA adds, 128n9 Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, 210 2019 Earth Day Conference (Robinson speech), 210 Neocarnism, 25, 174, 204, 284, 306 biocarnism, 127, 284 ecocarnism, 283 Netflix, 306n4 Neville, Henry, 4, 5 The Isle of Pines, 4 Newton, John Frank, 33, 34, 128 family, 32 Return to Nature, 33 The New York Times, 223 Nobel Prize, 19, 289

 INDEX 

Noble Savage (archetype), 39, 41, 74, 126, 227 Normal School of Science, 64 North American Space Agency (NASA), 114, 117, 118, 132 Planetary Flight Systems Directorate, 114 Northover, Richard Alan, 262 Nutcracker Man (fossil), see OH 5 (fossil) O O (magazine), 188 Obama, Barack, 237 OH 5 (fossil), 148, 148n1 Omnivorousness, 306 One Ring Zero (band), 258 Oregon Legislature, 184 Orwell, George, 109 Nineteen Eighty-Four, 109 Oswald, John, 38, 45 The Cry of Nature, 38 Oxford Group (philosophers), 6, 154–156 P Palaeolithic period, 216, 226, 229, 233, 234 Palaeolithic primitivism, 233 Paleolithic, 232, 238 Paley, William, 219 Parfit, Derek, 156 “Divided Minds and the Nature of Persons”, 156 Paris Agreement, 223, 237 Park, Paul, 212 Soldiers of Paradise, 212 Parker, Emma, 247, 250, 269 Parry, Jovian, 7, 14, 15n7, 104, 108, 158, 161, 200, 247, 259, 267, 268, 273, 289, 290 Edible Subjectivities, 7, 267 Pelee Island Bird Observatory, 257n5

329

People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA), 104, 292 Peppers, Cathy M., 199, 200 Pescatarianism, 179, 262 Petsce, Jackson, 42, 48 Phallogocentrism, 13 Phillips, Richard, 53 Monthly Magazine, 53 “Reasons for Not Eating Animal Food”, 53 Piercy, Marge, 1, 24, 173, 174, 176–182, 204, 286 Dance the Eagle to Sleep, 179–181, 181n3 He, She and It (aka Body of Glass), 24, 174, 179, 180, 286 Small Changes, 178, 179 Woman on the Edge of Time, 24, 173, 176–179, 181, 182, 286 Pinsker, Sarah, 287 A Song for a New Day, 287 The Planet of the Apes (film series), 299, 302 The Rise of Planet of the Apes, 306 Plato, 4, 20, 68, 92 Republic, 4, 20, 92 Platt, Charles, 144 Plutarch, 43, 45 Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans, 43 Moralia, 45; “Essay on Flesh Eating”, 45; “Rules for the Preservation of Health”, 45 PM Press, 181n3 Pohl, Frederik, 110, 111, 142, 267 Slave Ship, 111 Space Merchants (series), 267; The Merchants’ War, 110; Space Merchants (with C. M. Kornbluth) (novel), 110, 267

330 

INDEX

The Pollution Probe Foundation, 263 Canadian Green Consumer Guide, 263 Pornography, 269 Post, Mark, 105, 106 Posthumanism, 13, 15, 22, 44, 78, 130, 190, 196, 200, 202n8, 257, 261, 291 Powell, Gareth L., 287 Embers of War (series), 287 Embers of War (novel), 287 Powers, Tim, 143, 144 Preece, Rod, 32, 65 President of the United States, 221, 236, 237 See also Obama, Barack; Truman, Harry S. Presumption; or, the Fate of Frankenstein (Peake play), 46 Priestman, Martin, 47 Primitivism, 25, 178–181, 187, 210, 211, 217, 226, 238, 278, 283, 305, 309 Prometheanism, 39, 41, 43, 69, 71, 77, 182 Prometheus, 22, 33, 36, 44, 44n4, 54–56, 77, 94, 193, 261, 310 Pulitzer Prize, 127, 300 Q Quail, 183, 195 Quinn, Emelia, 7–9, 11, 12, 15, 21, 41–43, 46, 72, 81, 84, 90, 92, 93, 248, 258, 262, 264, 265 Reading Veganism, 43, 84 Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture (Sierra,), 7

R Rabkin, Eric S., 20, 50 Racine, Louis, 39 La Religio, 39 Ramesh, Jairam, 228 Rand, Ayn, 109 Anthem, 109 Regan, Tom, 105, 159, 162 Repino, Robert, 302, 307 Culdesac, 307 D’Arc, 307 Mort(e), 307 War With No Name, 302, 307, 308n6 Richter, Dan, 129, 130 Rickman, Gregg, 142–144, 146, 148, 148n1, 163 Rieder, John, 83 Rigby, Kate, 221, 231, 236 Ritson, Joseph, 34, 83 Essay on Abstinence from Animal Food, 34 Robinson, Kim Stanley, 1, 2, 24, 25, 92, 168, 174, 187, 209–239, 221n4, 231n8, 231n9, 273, 277, 284, 286, 287, 290, 292, 295–297, 305, 308–310 Antarctica, 221, 224, 226, 230, 231n9, 233–235 Aurora, 220, 224 Bloomberg Green article, 238 Escape from Kathmandu, 225; “The True Nature of Shangri-La”, 225 Future Primitive: The New Ecotopias, 187, 211–213, 220, 232, 238 Galileo’s Dream, 297 Green Planets (with Gerry Canavan), 219 High Sierra, 218 Icehenge, 220, 230

 INDEX 

Mars (series), 24, 211, 215, 216, 219, 220, 226, 230; Blue Mars, 215, 217, 226, 230, 231, 231n8; Green Mars, 215, 216, 219, 230; The Martians, 215; Red Mars, 215, 216, 230 The Memory of Whiteness, 232 The Ministry for the Future, 211, 237–238, 297, 310 Nelson Institute address, 210 New York 2140, 224, 239, 297 Red Moon, 220 Science in the Capital (series), 24, 211, 217, 221n3, 239, 296; Fifty Degrees Below, 221, 222, 232, 286; Forty Signs of Rain, 221–222, 227, 231, 235; Green Earth, 221, 221n3, 224, 229, 236; Sixty Days and Counting, 222; Sixty Degrees Below, 221; See also Robinson, Kim Stanley, Antarctica Shaman, 233 Three Californias (series), 24, 211, 213, 215, 238; Pacific Edge, 92, 214, 215; The Gold Coast, 174, 213, 214, 230; The Wild Shore, 213 2312, 218, 219, 224 The Years of Rice and Salt, 227, 296 Roddenberry, Gene, 116 Star Trek (see Star Trek) Rohman, Carrie, 78 Romantic Archetypes, 43, 163 Adam, 43, 47, 49–51, 54, 126 Cain, 49–52, 54, 56, 126 Child of Nature, 39–47, 56 Eve, 43, 47, 54 Noble Savage, 39, 41, 66, 74, 126, 227

331

Prometheus, 22, 33, 36, 44, 44n4, 54–56, 310 Satan, 44, 47–49, 51, 52, 56, 193n6 Roudinesco, Élizabeth, 13 Derrida discussions, 13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 32, 39, 42, 43, 66, 71, 74, 126, 131, 149, 155 The Confessions, 42 Discourse on the Origins of Inequality (Second Discourse), 39, 155 Emilie, Or Treatise on Education, 71 Noble Savage, 39, 66, 74, 126 The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction, 52 Rowe, Stephanie, 39 Royal Society for the Prevention of Cruelty for Animals (RSPCA), 31, 65, 77 Royle, Nicholas, 294 An English Guide to Birdwatching, 294 Russ, Joanna, 161, 173, 175 The Female Man, 173, 175 Russell, Mary Doria, 115 Children of God, 115 The Sparrow, 115 Ryder, Richard D., 6, 155 S St. Clair, William, 32n1, 37, 46 Salt, Henry, 36, 155 Animals’ Rights, 155 Sanbonmatsu, John, 295 Critical Theory and Animal Liberation, 295 Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Men, 63, 95 Wells draft, 95

332 

INDEX

Sargent, Lyman Tower, 4n1, 5, 20, 174 “Everyday Life in Utopia: Food”, 20 Schachner, Nat, 115 Exiles of the Moon (with Arthur Leo Zagat), 115 Schuster, Joshua, 11, 160, 286 Science Fiction Action Coalition, 141 Science Fiction Studies (journal), 3, 21, 247 Animals and Science Fiction special issue, 247 Scott, Jody, 178n2 Passing for Human, 178n2 Scott, Ridley, 142, 162, 163 Blade Runner, 142, 162–164 Scott, Robert Falcon, 235 Sea Shepherd, 294 Seed, David, 69 Sexism, 11, 14, 185n5, 189, 249, 253, 278 Shakespeare, William, 213, 255 Richard II, 213 The Tempest, 246, 255 Shaw, George Bernard, 66, 67, 79, 95 Back to Methuselah, 66 Sheldon, Alice, 21, 72, 161, 161n4 husband, 161 Morality Meat, 21, 72, 161 Shelley, Mary, 1, 11, 12, 19, 22, 23, 31–57, 32n1, 63, 71, 77, 83, 103, 107, 155, 162, 179, 230, 231, 254, 258, 264, 284, 299, 307, 309 Frankenstein, 11, 12, 18, 22, 31, 32, 32n1, 34–54, 42n2, 48n5, 49n6, 56, 57, 67, 71, 76–78, 80, 81, 83, 88, 107, 108, 126, 162, 179, 249, 258, 286, 307, 309; 1831 edition, 37, 42n2; Preface, 36; Review (Percy Shelley), 36

The Heir of Mondolfo, 54 The Last Man, 22, 54–56, 67, 86n8, 108, 230, 231, 231n8, 258, 299 Shelley, Percy, 1, 12, 22, 31–37, 32n1, 39, 40, 42, 44, 44n4, 45, 48, 49, 51–53, 51n8, 56, 70, 71, 77, 93, 94, 128, 129, 154, 230, 231, 261, 284, 309 Alastor, 12, 35, 40, 56 “Epipsychidion”, 230 “Julien and Modello”, 230 Laon and Cythna (aka The Revolt of Islam), 35–36; “On the Vegetable System of Diet”, 51 Ode to the West Wind, 230 Prometheus Unbound, 44, 52, 71 Queen Mab, 35, 36, 44, 55, 309 Review of Frankenstein (Mary Shelley), 12, 22, 36 “A Vindication of Natural Diet”, 33–37, 39, 41, 42, 45, 48, 49, 51, 53, 309 Shippey, Tom, 121 Shute, Nevil, 297 On the Beach, 297 Silverberg, Robert, 211, 212 The Book of Skulls, 212 “House of Bones”, 211 “The Wind and the Rain”, 211 Simonsen, Rasmus R., 7 Critical Perspectives on Veganism (with Jodey Castricano), 7 Singer, Peter, 6, 10, 16, 33, 105, 154–160, 162, 165, 209, 219 Animal Liberation, 16, 33, 154–157, 210 Sisyphus (parable), 153 Skinner, B. F., 230n7 Walden Two, 230n7 “Walden Two Revisited”, 230n7

 INDEX 

Slaughterhouses, 38, 41, 42, 85n7, 89, 91, 109, 109n2, 111, 120, 122, 163, 219, 257, 266, 283, 289, 301 Slavery, 15 Slonczewski, Joan, 201, 202n8 A Door into Ocean, 202n8 Slusser, George, 7, 20, 49 Foods of the Gods (with Westfahl and Rabkin), 7, 20 “Frankenstein Barrier”, 49 Smith, Andrew, 52 Smith, R. A., 112 The Promise of Space, (with Clarke), 113 Snyder, Gary, 211, 219 “Tomorrow’s Song”, 211 Social Darwinism, 74, 127, 229 Sorenson, John, 11, 14, 16–18, 301, 310 Critical Animal Studies, 11 Space colonisation, 113, 115, 116, 118, 132, 149, 215–220, 238 exploration, 104, 112–119, 131, 238, 309 Space Odyssey (series) 2001: A Space Odyssey (novel), 104, 124–132, 182, 211 Speciesism, 5–6, 9, 11, 17, 23, 33, 48n5, 51, 81, 85, 86, 152, 153, 155, 168, 189, 199, 249, 278, 308–310 Spencer, Colin, 6, 7, 36, 53 Vegetarianism (aka The Heretic’s Feast), 7 Spencer, Herbert, 66, 126 Sphinx (classical figure), 68, 195 Sri Lankan Symposium on Marine Mammals, 123 Stapledon, Olaf, 45, 95, 95n11 Darkness and the Light, 95n11 Last and First Men, 95

333

Starhawk, 177, 287 The Fifth Sacred Thing, 177, 287 Star Trek, 116, 117, 132, 255, 255n4 Discovery, 117 The Next Generation, 116 the original series, 116 Picard, 116 Provenance of Shadows (George novel), 255n4 Star Wars (series), 18n9, 117 Steiner, Gary, 17 Stephen, Matthias, 294 Literary Animal Studies and the Climate Crisis (with Sune Borkfelt), 294 Stephenson, Neal, 115 Seveneves, 115 Stewart, George R., 299 Earth Abides, 299 Stolz, Jim, 275 Stover, Leon, 128 Stuart, Tristram, 34, 35, 44n4 Sussman, Robert W., 126, 127 Man the Hunted (with Donna Hart), 126 Suvin, Darko, 3, 4, 64, 74, 75, 78, 89, 91, 96, 149, 167, 245, 246 Swedenborgians, 255 Sweet Tooth (television series), 302, 304–306, 306n4 See also Lemire, Jeff, Sweet Tooth Swift, Jonathan, 74 “A Modest Proposal”, 74 Synthetic meat, see Alternative Meats T Tanner, Nancy, 182 Taylor, Angus, 16, 143, 270n8 Tchaikovsky, Adrian, 157n3 Children of Time, 157n3 Teetotalism, 84, 89 Tekkeitsertok (Inuit god), 305

334 

INDEX

Theory, Culture & Society (journal), 294 “Changing Climates” special issue, 294 Thoreau, Henry David, 180, 229, 230, 230n7, 239 Naturalism, 221, 229 Walden, 229 Thorslev, Peter L., 32, 40, 41, 52 Time (magazine), 125 “Heroes of the Environment”, 210 The Time Machine (Pal film), 75 The Time Machine (Schellerup film), 75 The Time Machine (Spielberg Film), 75 Tiptree, James, Jr., see Sheldon, Alice Tolstoy, Leo, 92, 92n10 Torah, 165, 167, 167n6 Toth, Josh, 159, 160 Traviss, Karen, 288, 289, 302 Wess’har Wars (series), 288, 289, 302 Truman, Harry S., 236 Tuider, Jen, 19, 127, 284 Turner, Frederick, 212 From The New World, 212 28 Days Later (Boyle film), 300 Twitter, 298 2010: The Year We Make Contact (Hyams film), 131 U Under the Skin (Glazer film), 289 United Nations (UN), 237 Declaration of Human Rights, 63 Environment Programme (UNEP), 209, 222; Millennial Project, 222 Food and Agricultural Organisation (FAO), 25, 209, 222, 223, 234

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), 25, 209, 221–224, 237 Population Fund, 228 US Congress, 210 US Senate; Committee on Environment and Public Works, 210; Oregon Legislature, 184 Utilitarianism, 32, 154, 157, 159, 161, 254, 268 Utopian Studies (journal), 2, 203 V Vampire Weekend (band), see Baio, Chris Vampirism, 203, 203n9 VanderMeer, Ann, 292 The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (with Jeff VanderMeer), 292 VanderMeer, Jeff, 290–292 Borne, 290 Dead Astronauts, 290 Hummingbird Salamander, 290–292 The Kosher Guide to Imaginary Animals (with Ann VanderMeer), 292 A Peculiar Peril, 290 Veganism, 2, 5–12, 12n4, 16, 17, 19, 25, 31, 157, 160, 181n3, 194, 200, 219, 223, 233, 264, 269, 283–310 vegans, 6, 8, 9, 63, 105, 106, 175, 255, 264, 286, 287 The Vegan Society, 8 Vegan Studies, 7, 11 The Vegetarian (journal), 88 The Vegetarian Messenger, 65 VegNews, 107 Verne, Jules, 63

 INDEX 

Robur the Conqueror (aka The Clipper of the Clouds), 63 Villeneuve, Denis, 164 Blade Runner 2049, 164 Vint, Sherryl, 21, 45, 125, 130, 152–154, 159, 160, 196, 200, 226, 231n9, 234, 247, 289, 290 Animal Alterity, 21, 45 "The Animals in that Country" (Science Fiction Studies introduction), 247 Vivisection, 79, 80, 80n6, 225 Volney, 43 Ruins of Empires, 43, 45 Voltaire, 70, 71 Essay on the Manners, and Spirit of Nations, 70 Micromégas, 71 Vonnegut, Kurt, 110 Player Piano, 110 Vorkosigan Saga, 116 Voyage to the Centre of the Earth (anonymous), 20 W Wagner, Sven, 264 Waldrop, Howard, 211 Mary Margaret Road-Grader, 211 Wallace, Alfred Russel, 68 The War of the Worlds (Haskin film), 95 Watson, Donald, 8 Weir, Andy, 217 The Martian, 217 Weird Tales, 292 Weitzenfeld, Adam, 6, 8 Welles, Orson, 88 "The War of the Worlds" (radio broadcast), 88

335

Wells, H. G, 1, 21, 22, 45, 52, 63–97, 103, 108, 109, 116, 127, 173, 175, 225, 229, 264–267, 286, 299, 309 Ann Veronica, 91 Estate, 75 The First Men in the Moon, 89, 91 Foods of the Gods, 91 The Holy Terror, 96 In the Days of the Comet, 88 The Invisible Man, 88 The Island of Doctor Moreau, 22, 64, 74, 76–84, 78n4, 79n5, 80n6, 87, 90, 97, 225, 264, 286; first draft, 76 The Limits of Individual Plasticity, 79 The Man of the Year Million, 85 Men Like Gods, 94 A Modern Utopia, 92–94, 96, 97, 173, 309 Mr Blettsworthy on Rampole Island, 90 The Open Conspiracy, 96 “Popular Feeling and the Advancement of Science”, 79 Sankey Declaration of the Rights of Men (draft), 63 The Science of Life (with Julien Huxley), 64 The Shape of Things to Come, 95 The Sleeper Awakes, 91, 109 Text-Book of Biology, 82 The Time Machine, 22, 64, 67–76, 70n2, 81, 84, 85, 87, 89, 90, 97, 175, 264, 286; First edition, 68 The War in the Air, 91 The War of the Worlds, 21, 22, 64, 71, 84–88, 86n8, 95, 96, 299, 309

336 

INDEX

Wells, H. G (cont.) When the Sleeper Wakes, 91, 108; revision (as The Sleeper Awakes), 91 The Wonderful Visit, 89 The World Set Free, 94, 109 You Can’t Be Too Careful, 96 Wells, Martin, 80n6 Second Coming, 80n6 Westbrook, Harriet, 31 Westfahl, Gary, 20 Foods of the Gods (with Slusser and Rabkin), 20 Westwood, Benjamin, 7–9, 15 Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture (with Emelia Quinn), 7 Wilde, Oscar, 78 Williams, Howard, 34, 92n10 Ethics of Diet, 92n10 Williams, Raymond, 3 Wilson, Edward O., 275 The Future of Life, 275 Wilson, Peter J., 127, 129n10 Winfrey, Oprah, 188 O (magazine), 188 Winterson, Jeanette, 18 Frankissstein, 18 Wolfe, Gene, 211 The Book of the New Sun, 211 The Fifth Head of Cerberus, 211 “‘A Story’ by John V.  Marsch,” 211

Wollstonecraft, Mary, 32, 155 Elements of Morality, 32 A Vindication of the Rights of Men, 33 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 32, 33, 155 Woman the Gatherer (theory), 182, 199 Women’s Prize for Fiction, 19 Wood, David, 6, 9, 17 Wordsworth, William, 40 Wounded Knee (massacre), 180 Wright, Jospeh, 38 An Experiment on a Bird in the Air Pump, 38 Wright, Laura, 7, 203n9, 260–262 The Vegan Studies Project, 7 Wright, Lawrence, 300–302 The End of October, 300, 302 Wyndham, John, 110 The Chrysalids, 110 Z Zagat, Arthur Leo, 115 Exiles of the Moon (with Nat Schachner), 115 Zamyatin, Yevgeny, 108 We, 108 Zelazny, Roger, 165 Zihlman, Adrienne, 182 Zoos, 9, 95, 114, 129, 189, 231–233, 231n9, 287, 300, 302, 304, 306