Looking Landwards commemorates the 75th anniversary of the Institution of Agricultural Engineers, but it’s no promo publication; almost all of the stories herein go some way towards shining a light on the Janus faces of agritech, exploring the tension between being advantaged by technology at the same time as being reliant upon it. Douglas Adams used to say that technology invented before you were born always seems perfectly normal, technology invented before you turn thirty is fascinating, awesome and probably worth making a career in, and technology invented after you turn thirty is a profoundly unnatural threat to the right order of things; this is as true in agriculture as anywhere else, despite its lingering veneer of pre-Industrial mundanity.
In British culture particularly, the bucolic fantasy of the country farm retains its currency as a Romantic-era symbol of the pastoral Eden from which we were ejected, supposedly on account of our newly acquired fetish for factories and smokestacks; the farm is the anti-image of the factory, a reactionary yearning in response to the morally compromised progressivism of those dark satanic mills. Despite decades of significant and accelerating change in the science and techné of agriculture—the first and oldest of all human technologies—the semiotic power of the horse-drawn haywain lingers on: an unfounded conservative myth of stewardship and closeness to the land, unmediated by the troubling totems of modernity (and, ideally, the labouring classes).
All of which is to say: what we think of as “the old ways” of farming were revolutionary in their own time, and the dichotomy between modern mass-output technofarming and pre-Industrial agriculture is false; they’re simply successive stages of development, not an either/or binary. Once you get beyond pure subsistence, farmers (and their lords or bosses) have always yearned to harvest more crops with fewer overheads, for less effort, and at lower risk; what’s unique about our contemporary context is a convergence of technological paradigm-shifts accompanying a growing sense of our troubled place as one dreadfully adaptable species among hundreds of thousands of others, embedded in a complex ecosystem whose most basic functions we are only beginning to understand. Our tactical ability to conduct technological interventions into our environment has leapt ahead, but our sense of long-term strategy has been slow to catch up, thus recasting the signification of the farm anew: it is now a frontline in the theatre of an ecological war, a site where our reliance on technology comes face to face with its long-term consequences.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, a linkage between agricultural practice and broader, global issues with regard to climate change is also common to the stories in the anthology, and while a few pieces do little more than rehearse a sockpuppet duel between technology and those nebulous old ways, there’s also a healthy spectrum of utopias and dystopias.In The Cambridge Companion To Science Fiction, Edward James tells us that, in contrast to the classical utopia, the technological utopia—sf’s native iteration of the genre—tends to both propose a perfected utopian society (predicated, at least in part, on a technological revolution rather than a purely political one) and to undermine the very notion that a perfected society is possible. In Looking Landwards this manifests in stories which explore both the necessity of an increasingly technologised and globalised agricultural system, and the consequences—ecological, economic and social—of that necessity.
In some such cases, ecological collapse and agricultural engineering are simply worldbuilding furniture for familiar narrative shapes, as in Terry Martin’s “Contraband”, and Steven Pirie’s disturbing sentient-machines-and-farmer drama, “Mary On The Edge”; elsewhere, Kate Wilson’s “Tractor Time” gives virtual reality and intensive farming the Black Mirror treatment, but its breezy style sells it a little short, while Neal Wooten’s “Veggie Moon” buries a passable punchline in an mass of sub-Sheckleyean overstatement. However, Jetse de Vries just about manages to harvest his crop and eat it; “The World Coyote Made” is one of evolutionary karma, and de Vries gives technology’s two faces equal screentime, declining to stand in judgement even as he celebrates (and mocks) the fecundity of human achievement.
The stories that foreground agricultural life and processes in their narratives go further in their attempts to resolve or confront some of the capitalist contradictions at the heart of modern farming: Kim Lakin-Smith’s “Soul Food” highlights the age-old tensions between short-term productivity gains and long-term environmental decline; M Frost’s “The Blossom Project” concretises the metaphor of agricultural science being caught—like all science, in these post-normal times—between socioeconomic necessity and geopolitical circumstance; and Renee Stern’s “Touch Of Frost” leans toward the allegorical, warning against the total surrender of agricultural agency to the machines even as it suggests we have no choice but to rely on them. The pick of the litter, though, is surely Dev Agarwal’s “Blight”, which not only foregrounds the thankless struggle of the visionary yet un(der)funded agricultural scientist—closer perhaps to the travails of the isolated farmer than either might like to admit—against an ecological collapse scenario, but reexamines the short-term/long-term problem in the politically charged context of pest control and genetic manipulation. (It’s also written with the sort of deft understatement I associate with Ken MacLeod.)
More generally, I think it’s telling that there are no Competent Men or Technocornucopiae populating these pages, and very few Things With Which Hubristic Mankind Should Not Have Meddled; science fiction—in parallel, one might hope, with the broader population—is slowly internalising the grey-scale palette of technological ethics, and looking somewhat closer to home for the real alien invaders (who were always-already ourselves, hungry strangers in strange new lands). Somewhere behind its ribs, the SF weltanschauung is nurturing the growing realisation that the epistemological dichotomy between humankind and nature is false. We are all agricultural engineers, if only by proxy; our insatiable hunger is the mark of our complicity.