Five speculative novels that can help to understand our relationship with soil

The continued survival of all land-based species depends in part on a thin layer of topsoil. Degradation of soils around the world through poor land management, pollution and industrial resource extraction are major contributors to climate change and threaten our ability to feed ourselves.

As such, in recent years soil has been the subject of documentaries, the focus of a shift in land management practices and a key resource in the fight against climate change.

By looking at how it is represented in works of fiction, we can try to understand how we humans relate to soil. And through soil, how we relate to the environment more broadly.

The genre of speculative fiction (stories that go beyond the real world) is particularly useful because it comes with an innovative toolkit for taking ideas apart and putting them back together again.

Here are five works of speculative fiction that offer an insight into soil’s importance.

1. Farmer in the Sky by Robert Heinlein (1950)

This short novel follows 21st-century teenager, Bill Lermer, as he and his family leave an overpopulated Earth for a homesteading life on Jupiter’s moon, Ganymede.

There, good soil is a highly prized commodity, and a great deal of effort is put towards generating it. Topsoil is shipped all the way from Earth, and supplied to sharecroppers for the conditioning of their soil. Through agriculture, Heinlein engages with some of the issues involved in establishing new communities.

At the close of the novel, in response to his family returning to Earth, Bill declares that Ganymede is his home and where he belongs.

By working the land he has become a part of it, and part of the farming community. But as with so many science fiction narratives that take a “get it right next time” approach, this novel’s solution involves abandoning a stricken Earth to start again somewhere new.

2. The Mars Trilogy by Kim Stanley Robinson (1992)

Robinson’s trilogy is a re-imagining of the American west on Mars, with a hopeful vision for the formation of a future Utopian society.

Soil microbes often take centre stage in theoretical terraforming (modifying a planet or moon to make it habitable for humans) because they release CO₂ and warm the atmosphere.

In the Mars Trilogy, terraforming is framed as a colonial act undertaken for the benefit of humans alone. However, Robinson’s novels make room for imagining the re-entanglement of humans and ecosystem by highlighting our dependence on soil microbial life.

Looking for something good? Cut through the noise with a carefully curated selection of the latest releases, live events and exhibitions, straight to your inbox every fortnight, on Fridays. Sign up here.

3. Paradises Lost by Ursula K. Le Guin (2002)

This novella describes a multi-generational voyage on a ship destined for a distant Earth-like planet.

Over successive generations spent apart from any semblance of an ecosystem (food is grown in “dirt” with few, carefully curated microbes, and there are no animals or insects on board), social fracture and growing religious fervour develop.

Through Paradises Lost, Le Guin explores our connection with soil and environment, including the depth of its influence on us.

4. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler (1993)

This novel’s setting in a mid-2020s America ruled by a populist president and rocked by climate change and social disorder is rather prescient. It follows teenager Lauren Olamina as she tries to survive in a nightmare near-future of poverty, drought and wildfires.

After her comfortable, walled community is ransacked by drug addicts, Lauren is forced to travel highways by foot, building a new community around her Earthseed religion as she goes. Eventually the community reaches northern California (a highly productive region for agriculture), where they settle and cultivate the land using seeds Lauren has brought with her from her old home.

Soil here is sanctuary – synonymous with social stability and prosperity, it provides food, security and homeland.

The novel closes on the passage from the Bible from which the novel takes its name, making metaphorical seeds of Lauren’s new community and scattering them on “good ground” for a prosperous future.

5. Semiosis by Sue Burke (2018)

Semiosis asks what it would be like for humans to integrate into a completely alien ecosystem, and invites a reflection on our current integration – or lack thereof – with our home ecosystem.

Humans travel from Earth to the far-off world of Pax, where they are forced to depend on their new environment for survival. The planet is already inhabited, and some of its inhabitants can speak through soil microbes and biochemical signals.

Across the generations of human descendants on Pax, a mutually beneficial relationship with the environment is established, with soil as the nexus.

Meg Meredith receives funding from AHRC through the White Rose College for the Arts and Humanities, and through the Grantham Centre for Sustainable Futures.