Joshua (Sha) LaBare The Dragon or the Egg: Hard SF, Ecological Ethics, and Thing Power Thinking

ecologically is perhaps the most important skill of our times. As Timothy Morton argues, ecological readings need not focus on texts with blatant natural and environmentalist themes; like feminist, queer, and race critical approaches, ecological theory is also relevant for thinking about texts with no obvious environmentalist content. As with these other approaches, a radical ecological way of reading may open up thinking that was hitherto unimaginable, thinking with monstrous and transformative potential. With this in mind, "The Dragon or the Egg" draws on one classic hard sf novel - Robert L. Forward's Dragon's Egg (1980) - to show how technoscientific worlding might generate alternate ecologies. Dragon's Egg demonstrates, of course, many if not all of the classic problems of hard sf: women are smart in spite of their beauty, sex is sublimated as violence and technological power, history and evolution are simplified according to a eurocentric survival-of-the-fittest mentality, and anthropomorphism is the rule even for radically alien aliens. Indeed, while satellites, pulsars, and noise are portrayed in exquisite detail, people - both human and nonhuman - are simplified to the point of absurdity. What Dragon's Egg offers is not so much Jamesonian "world reduction" as a form of "person reduction". And yet, why not consider this an asset, demonstrating a new form of ecological worlding without the ever-present biocentric and anthropocentric baggage? "The Dragon or the Egg" uses insights from an alternate reading of Dragon's Egg to explore what Jane Bennett calls "thing power", a depersonification project that reverses many Enlightenment values and opens the way for ecological thinking beyond its current incarnations. In the process, I will also further my argument that ecology is not only vital to sf, but also and more importantly that sf is vital to ecological thinking. Select Bibliography Bennett, Jane. "The Force of Things: Steps Toward an Ecology of Matter." Political Theory 32 (2004): 347-372. Brown, Bill. "Thing Theory." Things. Bill Brown, ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004. 1-16. Forward, Robert L. Dragon's Egg. New York: Ballantine, 1980. Gardner, John. Grendel. New York: Vintage, 1989. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. Jameson, Fredric. World Reduction in Le Guin: The Emergence of Utopian Narrative. Science Fiction Studies 2, no. 3 (November 1975): 221-230. Morton, Timothy. The Ecological Thought. Harvard University Press, 2010.