Speculative Botany in Science Fiction #SciFiSunday

Do you remember the first time you understood the nature of a Venus flytrap? The very first time you heard that there lives, on this planet, a plant that with teeth and a mouth that eats animals. When you’re a kid, plants are tall and magestic like redwood trees or yucchy like broccoli or benign like the grass you’re suppored to mow. Plants are not, in any way, supposed to have a mouth and teeth and be able to eat living creatures. When you’re a kid, the first time you see a Venus flytrap slowly close its glistening jaws on a squirming ant seems might have felt like an encounter with an alien creature. As it turns out, the botanical worls is rich soil for speculative fiction. Here’s a review of Plants in Science Fiction by Octavia Cade at Strange Horizons:

Let’s start with creepy plants (“Botanical Tentacles in the Chthulucene” by Shelley Saguaro), because creepy plants are awesome and because there’s never any getting away from bloody Lovecraft, it seems, so let’s get shot of him first. Saguaro points out that “Tentacles are most often attributes of animal species, from giant squids and octopuses to microscopic flagellates and ciliates” (p. 56). Transplanting this animal imagery onto plants, then, gives a monstrous hybrid of a creature, one neither fully plant or animal, a creature defined by its boundary-crossing nature. Looking closely at plant tentacles in the works of H. P. Lovecraft, John Wyndham, and John Boyd, Saguaro comments that these “(frightened) men” (p. 73) were looking to navigate a world that increasingly did not centre them. While plant tentacles can represent the threat of a hybrid other, however—and it’s no coincidence that these creatures are often sourced from regions that white men such as the authors were trying to colonise—they can also be interpreted as a “liberating multi-species” flowering that encourages more diverse relationships and ways of living.

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