Intelligent Plants in Science Fiction

The weeping, speaking trees in Virgil and Dante recommend that the thought of communication with plants is of wonderful antiquity, yet only in the sense of transmigration of human souls into plants; the topic is not however actual plant intelligence in its personal appropriate.

Then comes the transitional instance in the early element of William Hope Hodgson's The Boats of the Glen Carrig (1907). In the chapter 'The Land of Lonesomeness' we are taken to an island in which there is a wailing in the course of the evening, and evil trees are prone to wrap their branches round the unwary traveller. The narrative suggests that human souls are somehow sucked into the trees and then beckon for far more to join them. The sense of horror is peculiar and effective. The atmosphere is that of supernatural worry, however the operate can marginally count as science fiction.

Then comes the terrific age of magazine science fiction, and all sorts of portrayals of intelligent plants blossom out into the literature.

Murray Leinster's 'Proxima Centauri', dating from the early years of pulp SF, depicts malevolent space-travelling plants attacking human explorers. A extra subtle strategy comes from the globe-wide vegetable intelligence in the 1931 story 'Seedling of Mars' by Clark Ashton Smith, exactly where humanity is subjugated by the guarantee of Utopia. Raymond Z Gallun, a further vintage 1930s writer, developed a far more evocative variation on this theme in 'Seeds of the Dusk', exactly where this time humanity is gassed to peaceful death by an alien vegetable invader in the far future. In this final story, the reader is developed to really feel that the removal of the final degenerate humans is no wonderful loss to the planet.

As a transform from these threats, in Clifford D Simak's All Flesh is Grass (1965) we basically enounter a benevolent (though somewhat ruthless) intelligent life in plant form, though the form it requires is that of a planetwide biological laptop or computer that performs throughout photosynthesis, and is only outwardly related to the plant life we know. All Flesh is Grass is one of Simak's most effective novels, a joy to read. Proclaiming the brotherhood of all species in his gentle, humane, inimitable style, there is nonetheless practically nothing soft or flabby about it, and it includes lots of excitement, menace and that impingement of a strange cosmos upon ordinary life, which is the hallmark of a specific subgenre of science fiction - what one could possibly call the compact-town cataclysm.

What of plant civilization thought of in itself, without the need of regard to its impingement upon humanity? For this you have to go to Olaf Stapledon, to the eight pages in Star Maker (1937) in which he narrates the rise and fall of the 'plant men' of a tiny, hot, power-wealthy globe. The story of the beings he describes is dominated by the strain involving their active evening-time and their contemplative day-time natures. The balance is sooner or later lost, and initially one, then the other nature predominates, major to the doom of the plant men and their planet. In 40 years of reading science fiction I have under no circumstances come across something remotely related in intensity to these eight pages, as far as the theme of plant intelligence is concerned. It is a parable of universal relevance to all cultures, in the strain it lays on the very important value of fidelity to one's natural origins.

Robert Gibson is caretaker of the Ooranye Project, generating a fictional giant world which can be explored on www.ooranye.com. The project's aim is to meld the subgenres of Future History and Planetary Romance, resulting in more than a million years of civilization with its personal societies, customs, conflicts, triumphs and disasters, politics, philosophies, flora and fauna, empires each human and non-human, and adventures that range more than an region ten occasions that of the surface of the Earth. Lovers of planetary adventure are invited to view the history, comment on the progress of the project, access the tales and preserve in touch with the producing destiny of Ooranye.