Exercising the imagination: ecofeminist science fictions as object-oriented thought experiments in education

ABSTRACT

This essay offers a rationale for deploying ecofeminist science fiction stories as object-oriented thought experiments in science and environmental education, with particular reference to developments in genetics and evolutionary biology, and their implications for human (and more-than-human) reproduction and kinship in the period following the determination of the double helical structure of DNA by scientists affiliated with Cambridge University’s Cavendish Laboratory in 1953, and the impact of subsequent gene-centric discourses on the biological sciences and the wider culture. The utility and defensibility of this approach is exemplified by reference to two science fiction novels by the late Naomi Mitchison that foreground and anticipate implications of genetic sciences for matters of concern to ecofeminists, including reproductive rights and responsibilities, population control, human relations with the more-than-human, and problematizing gendered (and other) binaries in everyday speech and popular culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Ecofeminism
• science fiction
• thought experiments
• nondualism
• genetics
• Naomi Mitchison

Introduction

As a science and environmental educator with special interests in cultural studies of science education, I have long been attuned to Donna Haraway’s assertion (1985, 66) that ‘the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion’ and share Elizabeth de Freitas and Sarah Truman’s (2021) commitment to ‘foregrounding speculative fiction as a way to open up scientific imaginaries … to think through the many pasts, presents, and futures of science’. Thinking through such imaginaries is not only important for science educators, but for all educators who agree with the late Ursula Le Guin’s (2016, 4) standpoint:

The imagination is an essential tool of the mind … 

We have to learn to use it, and how to use it … Young human beings need exercises in imagination as they need exercise in all the basic skills of life … 

When children are taught to hear and learn the central literature of their people, or, in literate cultures, to read and understand it, their imagination is getting a very large part of the exercise it needs.

Nothing else does quite as much for most people, not even the other arts. We are a wordy species. Words are the wings both intellect and imagination fly on … no art or skill is ever useless learning: but to train the mind to take off from immediate reality and return to it with new understanding and new strength, nothing quite equals poem and story.

The significance of imagination for educational discourses and practices is well-established in the relevant literature, such as the substantial work conducted by the Imaginative Education Research Group¹ at Simon Fraser University led by Kieran Egan (2007) from 2001-2022, and taken up by others internationally (e.g. Thomas William Nielsen, Fitzgerald, and Fettes 2010). In relation to science education, the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University² also has a strong research and publication programme.

The contribution of science fiction to fostering imaginaries in academic disciplines other than the sciences is encapsulated in Chiara Mengozzi and Julien Wacquez’s (2023, 145) observation: ‘Over the past decades, an increasing number of researchers in the humanities and social sciences have attributed new qualities and functions to sf [science fiction] narratives, endowing them with a truly scientific utility in knowledge production’. They also note the recent tendency of scholars in the field of environmental humanities who are ‘addressing the Anthropocene, and its material and epistemological consequences, appealing to sf as a conceptual tool for their investigations’, and going so far ‘as to break the rules of academic writing by publishing texts that adopt explicitly sf strategies, that is, counterfactuals’ (145).

This essay contributes to the increasing complentarity of ecofeminism and science fiction identified by Dierdre Byrne (2023, 480–481):

patriarchal worldviews perceive women and nature as secondary terms in the binaries of men/women and culture/nature, [which] underpins patriarchal oppression of women and nonhuman nature. … 

Although it is commonly thought to be the literature of the future, science fiction starts from present conditions and experiences, which it embellishes, extrapolates upon, and extends imaginatively. It is, therefore, not surprising that the Anthropocene – our current era, in which human acts have irrevocably shaped our planet’s fortunes and future – has seen an explosion of science fiction and fantasy about environmental degradation. It is also not surprising, as gender-based violence has come to dominate social media due to its escalating prevalence globally, that recent science fiction centers on gender relationships. The result is a burgeoning publication of ecofeminist science fiction.

Imagination, thought experiments and education

The academic curricula of most Anglophone education systems and institutions in contemporary industrialized nations tend not to offer ‘exercises in imagination’ for people of any age, despite the crucial roles that imagination – literally the ability to produce images in one’s mind – has played in the development of many disciplines. For example, thought experiments have been particularly significant in the history of physics. Indeed, the term ‘thought experiment’ came to the English language in the late-19th and early-twentieth century via translations of papers by the Austrian physicist Ernst Mach (1897; 1905) in which he used the mixed German-Latin word Gedankenexperiment (literally, experiment conducted in the thoughts). Martin Cohen (2005, 55) credits Mach with coining Gedankenexperiment, but Johannes Witt-Hansen (1976) clearly establishes that Danish physicist and chemist Hans Christian Ørsted used the term in 1811. Some philosophers now use the term in a relatively narrow sense. For example, Roy Sorensen (1992, 255) defines a thought experiment as ‘an experiment that purports to achieve its aim without benefit of execution’, due to circumstances that preclude physical testing procedures. James Brown (2004, 1126), prefers a looser characterization:

It’s difficult to say precisely what thought experiments are. Luckily, it’s also unimportant. We know them when we see them, and that’s enough to make discussion possible. A few features are obvious. Thought experiments are carried out in the mind and involve something akin to experience; that is, we typically see something happening in a thought experiment. Often there is more than mere observation. As in a real experiment, there might be calculating, some application of theory, guesswork, and conjecture. The best way to get a grip on what thought experiments are is to simply look at lots of examples.

Some of the best-known examples of thought experiments are those conducted by the pioneers of postmodern physics in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. As Aspasia Moue, Kyriakos Masavetas and Haido Karayianni (2006, 61) observe, these experiments were often the subjects of conversations or correspondence with each other, and were used to get their points across and to dramatize the revolutionary and/or paradoxical aspects of their theoretical discoveries or explanations.³ Erwin Schrödinger’s cat (quantum mechanics) and Albert Einstein’s elevator (general relativity) and train (special relativity) are now understood as significant ‘events’ in the histories of these disciplines. Since the term ‘thought experiment’ entered the Anglosphere, it has been applied retrospectively to similarly significant speculations in physical science, such as Isaac Newton’s cannonball (force of gravity/planetary motion, circa 1720) and James Maxwell’s demon (thermodynamics, circa 1871). As Ursula Le Guin (1979a, 156) writes, these scientific thought experiments are a species of fiction – stories fashioned along the lines of ‘let’s say this or that is such and so, and see what happens … ’ Thus, for example, in Frankenstein Mary Shelley (1818) can be interpreted as writing: let us say that a young doctor creates a human being in his laboratory … In Dune, Frank Herbert (1965) can be understood as writing: let us say that massive desertification threatens a planet very like Earth … 

Le Guin (1979b, 156, emphasis in original) insists that such experiments are neither extrapolative nor predictive – their form is not, ‘if this goes on, this is what will happen’ – but, rather, are attempts to produce alternative representations of present circumstances and uncertainties; within stories so conceived, ‘thought and intuition can move freely within bounds set only by the terms of the experiment’:

The purpose of a thought-experiment, as the term was used by Schrödinger and other physicists, is not to predict the future – indeed Schrödinger’s most famous thought experiment goes to show that the ‘future,’ on the quantum level, cannot be predicted – but to describe reality, the present world. Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive.

Thought experiments appear in disciplines other than the physical sciences. As James Brown and Yiftach Fehige (2022, 1) observe:

thought experiments are interdisciplinary in two important respects. Firstly, not only philosophers study them as a research topic, but also historians, cognitive scientists, psychologists, etc. Secondly, they are used in many disciplines, including biology, economics, history, mathematics, philosophy, and physics (although … not with the same frequency in each).

Thought experiments also feature in the long history of utopian literature from Thomas More’s (1516) socio-political Utopia first published in Latin (see Dominic Baker-Smith 2000) to recent work linking utopian studies with science/speculative fiction (SF)⁴ (Darko Suvin 2010; 2016; Raymond Williams 2010).

Despite the ubiquity and utility of thought experiments in the history and philosophy of science, science education textbooks and curricula rarely foreground their significance and, where they do, tend to diminish their imaginative dimensions. Studies in the UK (see, for example, John Gilbert and Reiner 2000; Miriam Reiner 1998; Miriam Reiner and Gilbert 2000) showed that school and university physics textbooks tend to conflate thought experiments and thought simulations. In simulations, the behaviour of a physical phenomenon is illustrated rather than tested, theory is taken for granted and embedded rather than being tentative and emergent, and the outcome is assumed rather than anticipated (this distortion of a key concept in science is similar to the distortion than many science teachers and textbooks reproduce by persistently representing demonstrations of physical phenomena – such as a heating a bimetallic strip until it bends – as ‘experiments’). In a previous exploration of science education and environmental education as storytelling practices (Noel Gough 1993), I critically examine the narrative strategies used by educators in these fields to represent and problematize human transactions with the phenomenal world and argue that the conventional discourses of much contemporary science and environmental education rarely encompass the narrative complexities needed to (i) make problems of human interrelationships with environments intelligible (and, thus, amenable to resolution) and (ii) conceptualize postmodern scientific understandings of ‘nature’ and ‘reality’. I suggest that these problems and concepts are modelled more appropriately – and interrogated more critically – by much literary fiction, especially the complex and complicating textual strategies of postmodern SF, and argue that critical readings of SF texts should be integral to science and environmental education and that the narrative strategies of postmodernist fiction (e.g. counterfactuals, metafiction) should be accommodated in their storytelling practices.

Object-orientation of SF

This essay explores the generativity of SF for educational theory and practice, by focussing specifically on the ways that ecofeminist SF stories function as object-oriented thought experiments, and their implications for exercising imaginations and interrogating scientific imaginaries. I respond specifically to a question posed as a focus of the Call For Papers (CFP) for this Special Issue, namely, ‘how is ecofeminist thought currently being taken up in practice in diverse educational sites … ?’ Examples of such sites referred to in the CFP include ‘public pedagogies’, which in my lexicon includes the learnings available to the public via popular SF media. I prefer to focus on works in print media, but I am happy to recognize and celebrate ecofeminist critiques of audio-visual media, such as Lydia Rose and Teresa Bartoli’s (2021, 141) appreciation of James Cameron’s (2009) SF film, Avatar:

Through Avatar’s storyline, a worldwide audience was presented with a reflection of Western society’s attitudes, values, and compulsion to dominate, while being provided a hypothetical case study of idealized ecofeminism, exposing the masses to an imagined world that viewed nature as essential and all life as valuable.

Elsewhere (Noel Gough 1998, 411), I document the pervasive ‘object-orientation’ of SF, characterized by its preoccupation with externalities and a corresponding de-emphasis of fine-grained characterization (see also Damien Broderick 1995; George Turner 1977). For example, much SF speculates on possible human responses to alternative conditions, such as an overpopulated or climate-changed Earth, or the strange environs of another planet, and this alternative environment often takes priority in the writer’s imagination rather than the characters that demonstrate how the imagined conditions might affect humanity in general. Notable exceptions to this characterization include SF by feminist authors such as Margaret Atwood, Octavia Butler, Ursula Le Guin, Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy and Joanna Russ.

The object-orientation of SF has affinities with the recent resurgence of object-orientated philosophical positions, including Levi Bryant’s (2008) ‘ontology of immanence’, Timothy Morton’s (2013) conceptualization of ‘hyperobjects’, Ian Bogost’s (2012) speculations on ‘what it’s like to be a thing’ and Graham Harman’s (2018) ‘object-orientated ontology’ (often abbreviated as ‘OOO’). However, Iris van der Tuin (2014, 231) draws attention to ‘the androcentrism of much OOO’ and Thomas Lemke (2017) notes ‘OOO’s disregard of feminist materialism’. Carol Taylor (2016, 205) observes that not only are the ‘founding fathers’ of OOO – Harman, Bogost, Bryant and Morton – all male, but that they also engage with an exclusively male philosophical lineage with Immanuel Kant, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger being the most prominent figures. Indigenous Canadian feminist Zoe Todd (2016) also argues that the so-called ‘ontological turn’ in Eurocentric philosophy can be interpreted as a form of neocolonialism. I suggest that demonstrating how selected ecofeminist SF stories function as object-oriented thought experiments, not only opens up the scientific imaginaries that underpin them to interrogation, but may also subvert any androcentrism or neocolonialism that inheres in the ontological turn.

In this essay, I demonstrate that two exemplary proto-ecofeminist SF stories⁵, Naomi Mitchison’s (1962) Memoirs of a Spacewoman and Solution Three (1995; originally published 1975), constitute object-oriented thought experiments that potentially open up genetic and evolutionary imaginaries to critque and speculation in educational discourses and practices.

Ecofeminist SF

Although Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is widely recognized as introducing SF as a mode of Anglophone imaginative literature (see, e.g. Debra Benita Shaw 2000), the association of ecofeminism with SF has received scant attention in mainstream literary criticism, although ecocriticism writ large (including feminist ecocriticism) has received more attention (see, e.g. Greta Gaard 2010; 2011; Greta Claire Gaard & Patrick D. Murphy, 1998; Greta Gaard, Estok, and Oppermann 2013). For example, although Gerry Canavan (2014, 271) acknowledges that Frankenstein ‘dramatizes man’s [sic] overstepping of his natural bounds in a manner that would become paradigmatic for the genre’, he does not mention its feminist dimensions, such as its epistolary frame narrative, which mocks and satirizes then popular accounts of masculine, capitalist, and colonialist voyages of discovery. Frankenstein might not be the earliest SF work by a female author – Margaret Cavendish’s (1666/2016) The Blazing World is sometimes cited as a forerunner (see Dale Spender 1986, 42) – but it remains to date the most celebrated and influential launching of a tradition of women’s participation in writing SF.

In Shelley’s wake, feminist and environmental issues have often been intertwined, such that works that can retrospectively be regarded as ecofeminist (or proto-ecofeminist) have featured in SF for more than a century. But ecofeminist analyzes of SF have, until recently, rarely appeared in critical essays on this literature. For example, a relatively recent critical anthology, Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction, co-edited by Canavan and Kim Stanley Robinson (2014), barely acknowledges feminist and ecofeminist issues: ‘feminism’ is listed in the index as appearing on eleven of its 260 pages, while ‘ecomaterialism’ is lumped in with feminism for an additional four pages; ‘ecofeminism’ is listed under ‘feminism’ and as appearing on one page and in one endnote. All of these references pertain to just two female authors, namely, Ursula Le Guin and Maggie Gee. The representation of female SF authors and ecofeminism in Green Planets seems to be indefensible in a volume published as recently as 2014.

Douglas Vakoch (2021) offers a more comprehensive anthology of ecofeminist SF literary criticism, with the scope of the issues canvassed by its contributors having obvious resonances with ecofeminist and intersectional interests, such as climate justice, critical animal studies, ecophilia, embodiment, queer ecologies, ecoterrorism, indigenous and anticolonial studies, to name a few. In this essay, I critically appraise two proto-ecofeminist SF stories that I interpret as object-oriented thought experiments, each of which can be seen as a generative response (albeit in very different ways) to Haraway’s (2016, 116) imperative for humans to ‘make kin, not babies’ in response to the population pressures that contribute to ecological precarity.

Ecofeminism, literature and science: dialogues across differences

In a preface to Ecofeminism in Dialogue Sam Mickey (2017, p. ix) writes:

The very idea of ecofeminism implies communication across differences. In other words, ecofeminism is always already in dialogue. Ecofeminism emerged in the 1970s through dialogue across ecological and feminist perspectives, with people searching for ways of understanding how ecological matters of concern involving natural systems intersect with feminist matters of concern, such as the rights and flourishing of women. That dialogue remains ongoing today, and in the meantime, it has made possible nearly half a century of ecofeminism both as an academic field of study and an area of engagement for activism and advocacy.

Katherine Hayles (1984; 1990; 1991) is among an expanding number of scholars to comprehensively demonstrate the generativity of dialogues across literature and science. As Clare Hanson (2020, 5) observes, the relationship between literature and science ‘has traditionally been conceptualized in two ways’:

The first is the ‘influence’ approach, effectively a one-way model which traces the impact of science on literature. This tends to assume a hierarchical relationship between science and literature, granting epistemological and ontological priority to science, and … while its exponents are happy to argue for the influence of science on literature, they are reluctant to make any stronger causal claim than that literature may ‘anticipate’ scientific developments.

The other approach, exemplified by Hayles’ work, explores parallels between literature and science, seeing them as rooted in a common cultural matrix or shared milieu.

Clearly, the sciences are central to many of the ‘ecological matters of concern involving natural systems’ and the ‘feminist matters of concern’ to which Mickey (quoted above) refers are evident in a variety of literary genres, including academic analysis, literary criticism, and SF. In the following sections, I explore ecological dimensions of feminist matters of concern in the proto-ecofeminist SF of Naomi Mitchison.

Why focus on Naomi Mitchison’s SF?

I focus this essay on Naomi Mitchison’s SF novels for two major reasons. First, Mitchison’s life story embodies and enacts a dialogue across literature and science. As Susan Squier (1995, 163–165) writes, Mitchison ‘describes herself as “coming from a family of scientists” … her father was the celebrated physiologist John Scott Haldane; and her beloved older brother, J.B.S. Haldane, would grow up to be a well-known physiologist, geneticist, and popular science writer, one of the … Cambridge socialist scientists who crucially shaped British science policies’.

According to biographer Jill Benton (1990, 1–2) the young Naomi Haldane was also exposed to a powerful tradition of independent thinking through the women of her family and circle of friends. Her mother, Louisa Trotter Haldane, was a staunch suffragist who always supported women in the professions, went to a woman doctor when possible, and encouraged Naomi to think of medicine as a career. As Rob Hardy (2015, 40) reports:

In 1915, along with her brother, [Naomi] conducted genetic experiments that yielded a co-authored paper on reduplication in mice – one of the earliest English works on Mendelian genetics. But she found herself chafing against the limitations placed on her as a woman and longed for a sphere in which she could express herself … A year later, Naomi Haldane married Gilbert Mitchison, and as Naomi Mitchison she became a successful and prolific novelist. She established her reputation in the 1920s as the author of historical novels but later wrote … two pioneering works of feminist science fiction. Mitchison was also an outspoken feminist and political activist. But at the time of her death at the age of 101in 1999, she had come to be regarded as a ‘neglected’ writer, despite an unrivalled reputation as a historical novelist at the height of her fame in the 1920s and ‘30s.

Mitchison’s status as a ‘neglected’ author is affirmed by Sara Martin Alegre’s (2015) inclusion of Memoirs of a Spacewoman in a discussion of ‘increasingly rare books of the recent past’. Squier (1995, 177) also notes that Solution Three ‘has been out of print in Great Britain since 1980’ and was not published at all in the U.S., until reprinted by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York in 1995.⁶

My second reason for privileging Mitchison’s novels is a corrolary to my long-standing respect and admiration for Ursula Le Guin (see Noel Gough 2019) and in particular the position she takes in her short essay, ‘The space crone’ (1989, 5–6) in which she imagines highly advanced aliens landing on Earth and seeking a human being to accompany them on their long journey home so that they may ‘learn from an exemplary person the nature of the race’. After considering (and rejecting) a number of predictable possibilities (such as a ‘brave young man, highly educated and in peak physical condition’) she nominates a grandmother ‘who has worked at jobs like cooking, cleaning, bringing up kids … She was a virgin once … and then a sexually potent fertle female, and then went through menapause … only a person who has experienced, accepted, and enacted the entire human condition – the essential quality of which is Change – can fairly represent humanity’. Le Guin apparently regards Mitchison as such an exemplary person (a space crone peer, as it were?), describing her as ‘one of the great subversive thinkers and peaceable transgressors of the twentieth century’ (quoted in Hardy 2015, 4). When I first read Mitchison’s (1962) Memoirs of a Spacewoman, I was not aware that its author was, as Haraway (2008, 180) states, ‘sixty-three years old and in the midst of a rich career as a national and international political activist and writer’, but when I returned to it many years later, I realized that the authenticity and wisdom apparent in the eponymous spacewoman’s ‘voice’ could be related to Mitchison’s subject position as (in Le Guin’s terms) a ‘space crone’.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman: making kin in/with other worlds

Haraway (2008, 157) begins one of her treatises on companion species with four epigraphs, one of which is a quotation from Memoirs of a Spacewoman. Another epigraph in the same essay is taken from Barbara Noske’s (1989, p. xi) Humans and other animals, a critique of human/animal relationships over time: ‘animals are not lesser humans; they are other worlds’. The complementarity of these seemingly disparate texts is foreshadowed in Stacy Alaimo and Susan Hekman’s (2008, 12–13) introduction to the volume in which Haraway’s chapter appears, wherein they state that she.

takes on the question of what ‘nature’ means in the complex practices of contemporary society, arguing that it must encompass demarcation and continuity among actors that are both human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. ‘Nature’ must encompass demarcation and continuity among actors that are both human and nonhuman, organic and inorganic. The practice of ‘otherworldly conversations’ – in which various nonhuman entities participate as subjects rather than objects – provides one model for ethical relations that respect difference and allow for mutual transformation.

Haraway (2008, 178) draws on Noske’s work to affirm that ‘a coherent conversation between people and animals depends on our recognition of their “otherworldly” subject status’ and suggests that SF ‘offers a useful writing practice within which to take up Noske’s arguments’ (180).

Memoirs of a Spacewoman re-entered the orbit of my educational practice in 2015, in the course of responding to a CFP from The Journal of Environmental Education for a Special Issue on the theme of ‘Moving gender from margin to centre in environmental education’ (Annette Gough, Russell, and Whitehouse 2017). Having previously called for more queer scholarship in environmental education (Noel Gough et al. 2003), and disappointed that very little had been forthcoming, I collaborated with a like-minded colleague in seeking alternative approaches to destabilizing heteronormativities in environmental education research. We (Chessa Adsit-Morris and Gough 2017) were drawn to studies that generatively blur and expand the nature/culture divide, and embrace more-than-human qualities to shed light on the limitations of human knowledge/perception patterns and practices. Noreen Giffney and Myra Hird (2008, 6) introduce their edited collection of essays on ‘queering the non/human’ by quoting Jeffrey Cohen’s (2003, 40) assertion: ‘Queer theory is undoubtedly the most radical challenge yet posed to the immutability of sexual identities’. Nevertheless, Cohen is puzzled that ‘a critical movement predicated upon the smashing of boundary should limit itself to the small contours of human form, as if the whole of the body could be contained in the porous embrace of the skin’. We suggested that ‘redrawing, blurring and/or smudging the boundaries of the essential(ized) body … might help us to grapple with the partial and processual becoming of our bodies-in-relation. This detaches form from function, challenges prefigured/predetermined conceptions and understandings of body parts … and opens up possibilities for thinking otherwise (and perversely) about the roles and functional boundaries being created and policed’ (Adsit-Morris and Gough 2017, 71). Many feminists, including Judith Butler, Donna Haraway, and Karen Barad, have challenged conceptions of an ‘essential’ and/or ‘natural’ body. Challenging notions of disembodied (scientific) objectivity, Haraway (1988, 586) writes: ‘The knowing self in all its guises, never finished, whole, simply there and original; it is always constructed and stitched together imperfectly, and therefore able to join with another, to see together without claiming to be another’. Partial vision challenges and draws attention to what Barad (2008, 318) describes as the ‘built-in optics’ of our inherited ontological conceptions, which she asserts are ‘based on a geometry of distance from that which is other’. This practice of determining our orientation(s) through geometries of distance and difference from that which is exterior to us, is achieved through what Haraway (1988, 583) calls ‘passive vision’.

Barad (2014, 222) offers an intriguing alternative to passive visualizing systems (i.e. perceptive eyes transferring information to a conscious brain) in her description of the brittlestar, a species of echinoderm, ‘a brainless and eyeless creature called the brittlestar, an invertebrate … [that] has a skeletal system that also functions as a visual system’. A brittlestar’s skeleton, clad with calcite crystal micro-lenses, is composed of tiny optical arrays that collectively function as a compound eye. Barad (2008, 324; italics in original) explains that the ‘brittlestar does not have a lens serving as the line of separation, the mediator between the mind of the knowing subject and the materiality of the outside world. Brittlestar do not have eyes; they are eyes’. Barad (2008, 324) concludes that, for a being with no eyes and no brain, ‘being and knowing, materiality and intelligibility, substance and form, entail one another’ – there is no Cartesian res cogitans vs. res extensa, there is no ‘optics of mediation, no noumena/phenomena distinction, no question of representation’ because knowing is entangled with the brittlestar’s mode of being. Barad (2008, 324) concludes that, similar to human beings, the brittlestar’s visualizing system ‘is constantly changing its geometry and its topology – autonomising and regenerating its optics in an ongoing reworking of its bodily boundaries’. Commenting on the enthusiasm and excitement that surrounded the ‘discovery’ of this organism’s visual capabilities, Barad (2014, 222) suggests that the brittlestar’s ‘ability … to reconfigure the boundaries and properties of its body is prompting technology enthusiasts to reimagine what it means to be human’.

Memoirs of a Spacewoman not only (re)imagines what it means to be human, but also. imaginatively dramatizes the ‘otherworldly conversations’ to which Alaimo and Hekman refer. It is a story of intra-species communication in which the protagonist, a human communications officer named Mary, recounts her attempts to communicate with any sentient creatures she encounters during her travels. Mary’s encounters with sentient aliens confront her with the limitations of human perception patterns and cognitive practices. The epigraph that Haraway quotes is excerpted from Mary’s reflections on her communications with an alien species she calls ‘radiates’ (five-armed starfish-like intellectual beings that physically resemble Earth’s echinoderms). Mary reflects: ‘One is so used to a two-sided brain, two eyes, two ears, and so on that one takes the whole thing and all that stems from it for granted. Incorrectly, but inevitably. My radiates had an entirely different outlook’ (Mitchison 1962, 17). The radiates had a five-fold logic system in which ‘they never thought in terms of either-or’. Mary adds:

It began to seem to me very peculiar that … so many of my judgments were paired: good and evil, black or white, to be or not to be. Even while one admitted that moral and intellectual judgments were shifting and temporary, they had still seemed to exist. Above all, judgments of scientific precision. But after a certain amount of communication with the radiates all this smudged out.

By learning to think with and communicate with the alien echinoderm-like radiates, Mary is able to understand how they might have evolved:

If alternative means, not one of two, but one, two, three or four out of five, then action is complicated and slowed to the kind of tempo and complexity which is appropriate to an organism with many hundreds of what were in evolutionary time fairly simple sucker and graspers, but which in development have adapted themselves for locomotion, food retention, tool-handling, the finer delicacies of touch and probably for other purposes of which I only became partly aware. It thus came about that with no sense of awkwardness, two or more choices could be made more or less conflicting though never opposite. (Mitchison 1962, 17)

Memoirs of a Spacewoman imagines a future in which animals are drawn into the horizon of the human sciences as we follow Mary’s efforts to communicate with both Terran fauna and with the various alien species that she encounters. Whether they be Terran dogs, pigs, dolphins, and horses, or extra-terrestrial equivalents of echinoderms, centipedes, caterpillars, and butterflies, Mary draws on her capacity for empathic understanding to foster ethical relationships with other Earthly and alien species. Through Mary’s encounters with otherness, she becomes increasingly conscious that her own modes of rationality are embodied: her preference for binary oppositional thinking, as demonstrated in her encounters with the radiates, is a prejudice created (so she concludes) by the bilateral symmetry of the human body. As Gavin Miller (2008, 251) writes, through Mary, Mitchison presents:

an alternative feminine ethical rationality that flows from mammalian embodiment and attachment and that prioritizes relations of attentive care. This ethic, which closely parallels contemporary debates in feminism and animal rights, should – Mitchison’s text implies – complement the sophisticated sympathetic phenomenology apparent in Mary's culture. Mary’s potential ethic of care is, however, repressed by her society, which still takes as normative certain masculine ethical standards.

As a textual resource for science and environmental education, Memoirs of a Spacewoman is not an ecofeminist primer but, rather, offers fertile ground for speculation and debate.

Solution Three: making kin (and babies) differently

As Clare Hanson (2020, 6) writes: ‘[t]he relationship between literature and biology is especially close, as of all the sciences, biology touches most directly on our self-understanding and the way in which we envisage social relations’. For example, evolutionary thought has from the outset been closely entwined with social theory: Charles Darwin was initially inspired by reading the political economy of Thomas Malthus, and Karl Marx was in turn influenced by Darwin’s theories, seeing a connection between natural history and class struggle. Gillian Beer’s (2000, p. xxii) detailed account of the imbrication of Darwin’s evolutionary theory with nineteenth century fiction, also points toward its contemporary relevance:

A compelling reason for the presence of Darwin in argument and in popular imagination at present has been the accumulating realisation over the past decade of how significant the discovery of DNA is for all our lives and futures. Darwin achieved his advances without knowledge of genetics, but DNA has raised anew in a more immediate form many of the controversies crucial in the first wave of reception of The Origin of Species, particularly the troubled realisation that humans and animals share common ancestry, and, it is now known, common genetic material.

Solution Three challenges and critiques our understandings of the relationships (and the histories of these relationships) between literature and science in the ‘postgenomic’ era. As Sarah Richardson and Hallam Stevens, write (2015, 6):

The genome promised to lay bare the blueprint of human biology. That hasn’t happened. … Instead, as sequencing and other new technologies spew forth data, the complexity of biology has seemed to grow by orders of magnitude. The notion of the gene as ‘master molecule’ is gone, but the disagreements exposed uncertainties about how else to talk about the proliferating objects, relationships, and levels involved between DNA and phenotypes.

Solution Three (Mitchison 1995), first published in 1975, is remarkable for its early anticipations of the complex social and ecological implications of the new reproductive technologies enabled by developments in genetics that followed the determination of the double helical structure of DNA in 1953 and subsequent developments such as the Human Genome Project. In Squier’s (1995, 161) perceptive afterword to the 1995 edition, she recalls finding the longhand draft of Solution Three (then titled ‘The Clone Mums’) in the National Library of Scotland. At the time, Squier was investigating literary representations of the new reproductive technologies, which then included critically appraising novels such as Margaret Atwood’s (1985) The Handmaid’s Tale and Fay Weldon’s (1989) The Cloning of Joanna May, and monitoring parliamentary debates and news media reports about human embryo research. Squier (1995, 161) ‘saw how contemporary works of fiction joined journalism and public documents to portray the social disruptions of embryo experimentation, in vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, and fantasies of cloning human embryos’. Squier admits that she was ‘unsettled’ by ‘a manuscript imagining the impact of these reproductive technologies written when they were still only hypothetical. Naomi Mitchison wrote “The Clone Mums” in November 1970, eight years before the inaugural moment of that new medical field: the 1978 birth of the first test-tube baby, Louise Brown’.

Mitchison’s personal engagement with contemporary research in genetics is evident in her ambivalently phrased dedication to James Watson (a family friend and frequent guest in her homes who was also a member of the Cambridge University team that determined the structure of human DNA) in both ‘The Clone Mums’ and Solution Three: ‘To Jim Watson, who first suggested this horrid idea’. The novel explores the feminst/intersectional challenges posed by the new genetics in a novel with a diverse cast of characters – lesbian, gay, and straight, of many races and cultures, from all parts of the imagined future world – all of whom are trying in different ways to create an emancipatory society based upon a new vision of reproductive control and childbearing. Speculating on the novel’s title change, Squier (1995, 163) notes:

[e]arly twentieth-century eugenics had come to a frightened halt with the revelations of the Nazi Final Solution, as its racial purity campaign led to horrors of human experimentation and to death camps. Mitchison’s title change invokes this history, with all its individual and social terrors, but with a crucial twist … By conceiving of a ‘Solution Three’ that follows the Final Solution, Mitchison probed the implications of using reproductive control stratehies not to produce a master race, but rather create a society in which racism, sexism, and militarianism are no more.

In Solution Three, Mitchison imagines a society rebuilding after a devastating nuclear war, the governing Council of which turns to reproductive technology to solving problems of human aggression, caused by a rising population and a falling rate of food production (both of which are implicated in contemporary concerns around global climate change). After a cycle of war, overpopulation, food shortage, famine, and resulting violence, the Council adopts a policy known as ‘the Code’ – a reproductive regime comprised of three sweeping edicts: heterosexuality is forbidden, homosexuality is mandated, and reproduction occurs primarily by cloning. Clone children are gestated by state-chosen surrogate mothers, ‘Clone Mums’, whose reproductive identity is regarded as an honour and a privilege. The clone progeny are raised in collective child-care centres until, at around the time of weaning, they show signs of creativity and individualistic play, when they are taken from their gestational mothers and subjected to a procedure euphemistically known as ‘the strengthening’, through which their individuality is effaced and replaced by a set of conditioned responses.

The goal of the reproductive regime imagined in Solution Three is to replace dangerous difference with safe sameness. In her foreword, Mitchison (1995, 6) signals that we should attend to the biological meaning of difference by providing definitions of two key biological terms, clone and meiosis. As Squier (1995, 172–3) points out:

Cloning and meiosis can be understood not only as biological events, but as metaphors. Seen thus, they invoke one of the hottest recent feminist debates: the issue of identity and difference. By adopting ‘Solution Three’ and shifting from meiosis to cloning, Mitchison’s future world is attempting to eradicate aggression, sexism, heterosexism, and racism all at once. In short it is attempting to wipe out difference – not only on the biological level but on the social as well.

Solution Three opens by disclosing that something has gone wrong with ‘the Code’: aggression has increased and the ‘Clone mums’ are beginning to resist surrendering their children. The novel then follows the interwoven experiences of four key characters as they respond to increasingly dysfunctional control strategies. As with many other attempts at a ‘technological fix’ to social problems, Solution Three demonstrates that even well-intentioned projects for reproductive control have unexpected costs.

Conclusion

I share Susanne Kappeler’s (1986, 212) antipathy to the conventional ways of concluding an academic essay: ‘I do not really wish to conclude and sum up, rounding off the argument so as to dump it in a nutshell on the reader. A lot more could be said about any of the topics I have touched upon’. And, because I have now retired from academia, you, dear readers, must be the ones to say it.

Acknowledgements

I thank Emily Gray, Hillary Whitehouse, and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments on an early draft of this essay. I also acknowledge and pay my respects to the traditional custodians of Melbourne/Naarm, the Wurundjeri and Boon Wurrung peoples of the Kulin nation, on whose unceded lands I live and work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

(Regarding the use of full names in the reference list, I depart from the Gender and Education style guidelines to facilitate reading the gender politics of the sources on which I draw. I also believe that it is discourteous to authors to arbitrarily truncate the ways in which they choose to identify themselves.)

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

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Notes on contributors

Noel Gough

Noel Gough is Professor Emeritus in the School of Education at La Trobe University, Melbourne, Australia. His teaching, research, and publications focus on research methodology and curriculum studies, with particular reference to environmental education, science education, internationalisation, and globalisation. He coedited and contributed to Curriculum Visions (Peter Lang, 2002), Internationalisation and Globalisation in Mathematics and Science Education (Springer, 2007), and Transnational Education and Curriculum Studies: International Perspectives (Routledge, 2021) and is founding editor of Transnational Curriculum Inquiry.

Notes

1 https://circe-sfu.ca/ierg/

2 https://csi.asu.edu/

3 See, for example, Michael Frayn’s (2000) play, Copenhagen, a dramatisation of a meeting between Niels Bohr and Werner Heisenberg in 1941.

4 I adopt Haraway’s (1989, 5) characterization of SF: ‘In the late 1960s science fiction anthologist and critic Judith Merril idiosyncratically began using the signifier SF to designate a complex emerging narrative field in which the boundaries between science fiction (conventionally, sf) and fantasy became highly permeable in confusing ways, commercially and linguistically. Her designation, SF, came to be widely adopted as critics, readers, writers, fans, and publishers struggled to comprehend an increasingly heterodox array of writing, reading, and marketing practices indicated by a proliferation of “sf” phrases: speculative fiction, science fiction, science fantasy, speculative futures, speculative fabulation’. More recently, Haraway (2016, 2) adds ‘string figures, speculative feminism, science fact, so far.’, to which I add serious fun

5 I call Mitchison’s two SF stories ‘proto-ecofeminist’ because Memoirs of a Spacewoman clearly predates Francoise d'Eaubonne’s (1974) coinage of the term ecofeminist and although Solution Three was first published in 1975, a longhand draft dates from 1970 (see Susan M. Squier 1995, 161–163).

6 Adding to the evidence of Mitchison’s ‘neglect’, when I sought to purchase a personal copy of Solution Three, the only source I could find that had it in stock offered it as ‘second-hand copy in good condition’. The copy I received appeared never to have been opened and enclosed a slip identifying it as a complimentary review copy.