“Then Came Pantropy”: Grotesque Bodies, Multispecies Flourishing, and Human-Animal Relationships in Joan Slonczewski's A Door Into Ocean (original) (raw)

2017, Science Fiction Studies

The colonization and habitation of planets calls for the physical modification of space (terraforming) or of bodies (pantropy). While terraforming is often the preferred method for adapting to the conditions of new worlds, pantropy supplements this planetary modification. Discussions of terraforming are linked to issues of climate change, while those of pantropy raise issues related to genetic modification. The oceanic world that Joan Slonczewski depicts in A Door Into Ocean (1986) constrains the way adaptation to and modification of the environment can be conceived. Adapted animal and human bodies evoke the monstrous, grotesque, and sublime; grotesque bodies interrogate the meaning of the animal, the human, and nature. Considering this intersection allows us to explore the interventions into nature that terraforming and pantropy entail, and how pantropy critiques colonialist approaches to terraforming. After a brief discussion of terraforming and pantropy, I will explore how Slonczewski uses pantropy to critique the values and assumptions that underlie the former. Through connections between individual bodies and the ecological body of the world, A Door Into Ocean uses pantropy to refigure terraforming into symbiogenetic communities who adapt and maintain their global environment. The grotesque is fundamental to the text's challenge to colonialist domination embodied in industrial approaches to terraforming. The pantropic subjects and the ecology of the planet Shora are essential to offering an alternative conception of habitation centered on responsiveness to other lives. Jack Williamson coined "terraforming" in his 1942 short story "Collision Orbit." 1 In the same year, James Blish coined "pantrope" to refer to the microscopic humans adapted to inhabit a puddle of water in "Sunken Universe" (1942), later expanded into "Surface Tension" (1952) and incorporated into the fixup novel The Seedling Stars (1957). The emergence of the terms "terraforming" and "pantropy" in the same year suggests an increasing sophistication to the way dialogues about space colonization were constructed in the 1940s. While not exclusive of one another, terraforming and pantropy involves two different modes of habitation, with underlying philosophies that are often opposed insofar as they imply distinct responses to the otherness of nature and other civilizations. "Pantropy," loosely translated, means "changing everything" (Blish, Seedling 8). In The Seedling Stars, the narrator points to pantropy's mythic resonances, arguing that "it went back, in essence, as far as Proteusand as deep into the human mind as the werewolf, the vampire, the fairy changeling, the transmigrated soul" (44). This article's title, "Then Came Pantropy," is drawn from "Seeding Program" in The Seedling Stars, first published as "A Time To Survive" (1956). Colonialism underlies humanity's approach to space colonization in many terraforming narratives. The opposition between terraforming and pantropy turns on a philosophical choice between adapting the other or adapting the self. Terraforming and pantropy are co-dependent technologies that help to accelerate the habitation of other planets. Since The Seedling Stars, pantropy has been expanded to include body modifications other than genetic adaptations, including cyborgization. In A Door into Ocean, the colonizing Valans attempt to establish sovereignty over the indigenous Sharers, in part justifying this endeavor by appealing to the benefits of free trade, and later by pointing to the profits that mineral extraction, Valan fisheries, and seasilk production generate. The adaptation of the environment for the purpose of resource extraction threatens the ecological networks on the planet. The danger that terraforming poses to indigenous communities lies in its disrespect and destruction of modes of habitation based upon a coadaptation of "amborg" communities and their environments. Joan Gordon coined "amborg" to "represent the human/animal interface" understood as "organisms in their most liminal states, not just humans when we acknowledge our family tree, but any animals that interact with, exchange glances with, and acknowledge the presence and sentience of another species" (Gordon 191). The critique of terraforming via pantropy illuminates the choice between the destruction or persistence of existing ecological and cultural networks. Multispecies Flourishing. A Door Into Ocean narrates the struggle between the inhabitants of the ocean planet Shora and occupiers from Valedon, part of the interplanetary Torran empire. Drawing from her Quaker background, Slonczewski presents the indigenous, all-female Sharers as pacifists who practice a consensus-based form of government that stands in stark contrast to the colonizers, who privilege violence and an adherence to hierarchy as strength. In an attempt to preserve their communities, the Sharers Merwin and Usha bring the Valan adolescent Spinel-a "malefreak"-to live with them and the Valan noble, Lady Berenice. Berenice is engaged to Realgar, an officer who later becomes head of the Valan colonizing force. By dwelling with the Sharers, Spinel helps them to better understand their occupiers: the relationships he forms provide new contexts for the Sharers to think about what it means to be human, and this in turn assists Merwen in swaying other Sharers from violent reprisals against the Valans. As the narrative unfolds, the Sharers' non-violent protest and stewardship of their multispecies communities leads them successfully to oppose colonization and terraforming by the Valans. Exploitation of all the planet's inhabitants push the indigenous people to resist occupation. In "Animal Studies in the Era of Biopower," Sherryl Vint explores how A Door Into Ocean offers an alternative to a form of