P L A N T S & S C I E N C E F I C T I O N
During this quarantine I have been living in California at my roommate’s house. I grew up Vermont, and it seems that all the places I have spent time in – outside of Vermont, all have a similar climate and environment to the East Coast: four seasons, humidity, snow, rain, old mountains, lakes… the California climate I am currently in is quite different: its dry, hot (90 degrees this week!), green (at least for now…), vibrant, with tall, rugged, red mountains. The plants in particular are incredibly strange – and I don’t think that’s the Vermont talking. My friends’ family agrees – the plants around here are bizarre.
The space around me is so unfamiliar – perhaps this is the closest thing I might get to ever existing in another world. Is this another world? The constant strange-ness around makes me think about how science-fiction-y our own planet is. We are comfortable with and accept the things around us because they are “earthly” but perhaps they aren’t so. We distance ourselves from SF worlds and only envision them in our imagination, but perhaps we just need to look around a little longer or explore a new place to find it in the world around us. This sounds a bit like the old “no, we are the aliens” argument, but I think it’s fun to think about and disturb my own sense of comfort here and there.
I do this almost every morning! Most often I wake up at 7:00am and walk around the neighborhood to look at and listen to the plants and animals (mostly lizards!) around me. It’s a pleasant, yet provoking, way to start the day. Below are some pictures of plants I have come across:
^This Agave plant is absolutely massive! It is probably 1.5X the size of me! I have never seen anything like it.
These stalks grow out of the center of Aloe plants (and sometimes Agave plants) after they “die”. These things are massive!
In pursuit of this topic I did a little research about plants and science fiction. I found this data-base that chronicles botanical fiction beginning in 1844 into the present. There are some familiar authors!
Haha, I really enjoyed this post. I also like getting caught up in all the “other-wordly” stuff that exists right here on Earth! If you use Twitter, I follow this page called @WonderOfScience (https://twitter.com/wonderofscience). It’s sometimes boring science stuff but a lot of it is cool nature stuff, too!
It’s crazy that all of those flowers are stuff you yourself have come across. Do you have a particular interest in flowers or was it just the most obvious sci-fi thing over there? Have you come across anything else in your life so far that you’ve felt has been other worldly, too?