The Critical Carnist Shift: Marge Piercy, Ursula K. Le Guin, Ernest Callenbach, Octavia E. Butler and the Critical Utopian Period

Abstract

This chapter examines the shift away from endorsements of vegetarianism towards allegedly more “natural” and environmentally friendly modes of carnism within the celebrated and influential “critical” utopian science fiction novels of the late twentieth century. The chapter primarily focuses on four authors from the critical utopian period in Ursula K. Le Guin, Marge Piercy, Ernest Callenbach, and Octavia E. Butler, beginning with an examination of Le Guin’s canonical critical utopias The Dispossessed (1974) and Always Coming Home (1986). The analysis shows a consistent preference within Le Guin’s literature for “hunter-gatherer”-style carnism, largely inspired by Native Californian traditions, which is reflected in the analysis of Callenbach’s influential Ecotopia (1975)—a definitive work of modern, ecological science fiction—which conflicts with Callenbach’s later endorsements of vegetarianism within the novel’s sequel Ecotopia Emerging (1981) and environmentalist writing. The analysis then turns to the contrasting representations of vegetarianism and animal ethics in Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and her foundational “critical dystopia” He, She and It (1991) and concludes with an extended analysis of the more complex and persistent engagements with vegetarianism and animal ethics in Octavia E. Butler’s various science fiction series. Although the critical period is often credited with broadening science fiction’s cultural influences in terms of race, gender and sexuality, the analysis shows that it also reinforced many carno-masculinist ideals that remained influential throughout the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.