Pastoral science fiction is a subgenre of science fiction which uses bucolic, rural settings, like other forms of pastoral literature. Since it is a subgenre of science fiction, authors may set stories either on Earth or another habitable planet or moon, sometimes including a terraformed planet or moon. Unlike most genres of science fiction, pastoral science fiction works downplay the role of futuristic technologies. The pioneer is author Clifford Simak (1904–1988), a science fiction Grand Master whose output included stories written in the 1950s and 1960s about rural people who have contact with extraterrestrial beings who hide their alien identity.
Pastoral science fiction stories typically show a reverence for the land, its life-giving food harvests, the cycle of the seasons, and the role of the community. While fertile agrarian environments on Earth or Earth-like planets are common settings, some works may be set on ocean or desert planets or habitable moons. The rural dwellers, such as farmers and small-townspeople, are depicted sympathetically, albeit with the tendency to portray them as conservative and suspicious of change. The simple, peaceful rural life is often contrasted with the negative aspects of noisy, dirty, fast-paced cities. Some works take a Luddite tone, criticizing mechanization and industrialization and showing the ills of urbanization and over-reliance on advanced technologies.
Terminology The subgenre is also called "rural science fiction" (RSF) in some 2020s sources.Huang, Mingfen and Xiang, Lingling. "A Comparative Analysis of "Rural Science Fiction", a New Chinese Film Genre" Journal of Chinese Film Studies, vol. 3, no. 1, 2023, pp. 143-158. https://doi.org/10.1515/jcfs-2022-0007 Kirkus Reviews has noted the subgenre of "small-town science fiction" set in the countryside, which takes inspiration from Ray Bradbury's stories about bucolic towns. Simon Reynolds has applied this subgenre to film, stating that Super 8 is a "small town science fiction movie".
Theory
American historian and literary critic Leo Marx's book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Idea (1964) sets out the theoretical underpinnings of modern pastoral literature. He states that the pastoral setting has a "dynamic relationship with [t]echnology", which transforms the pastoral ideal of an idyllic paradise into "commodified nostalgia" about a "middle landscape" (which is in between the small farms that are still within the town gates and the wilderness that lies beyond) where lives can be "lived in harmony, momentarily unburdened by history." This sentimental version of the American pastoral uses rural landscapes and sublimation to create a sense of nostalgia and an "illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture."
Tom Shippey contrasts between the pastoral genre, which focuses on "rural, nostalgic, [and] conservative" communities, and genres focused on societies that use technologies to create new tools and devices. For example, in mainstream science fiction, there is often an emphasis on the role of advanced technologies (spaceships, robots, computers, etc.) and their impact on people and society. Shippey states that these literatures about innovation and technology-oriented "fabril" societies depict these cultures as "overwhelmingly urban, disruptive, future-oriented, eager for novelty,"' and "centred on the image of the 'faber'" (craftsman, from a root meaning "fashioning" or "fitting") which historically referred to a blacksmith, but in a science fiction context, it refers to creators, designers, and builders of new artefacts and devices. These could be new spaceships, laser weapons, artificial intelligence or other technology, which Darko Suvin collectively refers to as the "novum" element of science fiction.
Andy Sawyer argues that the pastoral genre in science fiction depends on the "tension between these two modes", in which pastoral science fiction (SF) focuses on "anxiety about the future", whereas stories about urban faber society tend to enthusiastic about the future and the changes it will bring. Leo Marx gives an example of the busy, noisy urban life disrupting the peaceful rural realm with his recounting of Nathaniel Hawthorne working in the woods in the countryside when the quiet was shattered with the shrieking of a train locomotive whistle, showing "technology's intrusion into the pastoral landscape."
Pastoral stories have a nostalgic and sentimental focus on tradition, in contrast to "faber cultures which are obsessed with developing innovations. Darko Suvin states that due to "cognitive estrangement", the pastoral genre is closer to science fiction than it is to fantasy. Pastoral symbols and myths are at the roots of American cultural narratives. Along with apocalyptic and urban strands, pastoral symbols are "mutually interpenetrating elements" in American Protestant culture and part of the values of the Enlightenment. The pastoral opposition between the country and the city may be recreated by comparing Earth to a technologically advanced alien planet.
Sawyer uses English literary critic and poet William Empson's 1950 argument that the pastoral genre "compress[es] complex meaning into emblematic ecological images" of "wilderness, garden and farm" that serve as "metaphor, a poetic idea" showing the impact of technology on how we relate to nature. Pastoral stories typically focus on communities and regular people's life events, such as falling in love, marriage, birth, and death, and on processes that are key to sustaining rural communities, such as harvesting food. As well, pastoral stories often use the changing seasons as an organizing framework and as metaphor for natural cycles (e.g., Brian Aldiss' Helliconia Spring). Sawyer argues that some pastoral utopias have a dark side, in that the idyllic setting for the few settlers or colonists was achieved at the expense of the land being turned into a dystopia for the Indigenous inhabitants who were displaced or used as slaves to clear the land.
Antecedents One of the antecedents of pastoral science fiction works was nineteenth century rural utopian pastorals which depicted an idyllic Arcadia. Most utopian writers placed a strong emphasis on technological progress as a way to a better future; examples range from Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) to King Gillette's The Human Drift (1894) to Alexander Craig's Ionia (1898) to H. G. Wells's A Modern Utopia (1905). However, a minority of nineteenth century utopian writers reacted with a skepticism toward, or even a rejection of, technological progress, and favored a return to a rural, agrarian simplicity.
These "pastoral utopias" include William Morris's News from Nowhere (1891), about a future common ownership society based on agrarian production in small communities where people take pleasure in nature; the "Altrurian trilogy" by William Dean Howells, including A Traveler from Altruria (1894), about a faraway island of Altruria where all resources are shared and craftspeople work slowly on their work, as there is no capitalist pressure (and well as its sequels), and W.H. Hudson's A Crystal Age, a pastoral utopia where people have no machines and only simple devices; they plow their fields with horses and use axes to chop down trees. News from Nowhere is both from the pastoral genre and it is soft science fiction, since the premise of the story is time travel to a utopian future. Canadian science fiction author Frederick Philip Grove's novels The Master of the Mill (1944) and Consider Her Ways (1947) blend pastoral science fiction with naturalism and utopian themes.
Hidden aliens in a rural area
One challenge with writing pastoral science fiction is that if the advanced, futuristic technologies are too prominent, their presence may undercut the bucolic rural setting. One solution is to set the story in an isolated rural area, and have aliens with advanced technologies (interstellar travel, spaceships, etc.) land in the region, but keep their advanced technologies hidden from all or almost all people. Sam Jordison states that Simak "pioneered 'pastoral science-fiction with Way Station (1963) and earlier stories by creating scenarios in which aliens land in the isolated woods. In Way Station, a Civil War veteran living in a rural farmhouse strikes a deal with aliens soon after the war. In return for letting the aliens convert his house into a hidden "way station" for aliens traveling between galaxies, the aliens give him immortality, so that he is still alive in the 1960s (and appears like a young man). Two other pastoral examples from Simak with "hidden aliens" include "Neighbor" (June 1954 issue of Astounding Science Fiction), which is about a new immigrant to an isolated rural region who arrives with an automated tractor powered by a mysterious advanced technology and the ability to cure illnesses beyond what current medicine can treat (the townsfolk do not realize he is a human-appearing alien), and "A Death in the House" (October 1959 issue of Galaxy), which is about an old farmer who finds a small crashed UFO and an injured alien in the woods, and keeps the discovery hidden from curious big-city scientists until he can repair the alien's spaceship so it can return to its planet.
Under the Dome is a 2013-2015 American science-fiction mystery drama television series based on Stephen King's 2009 novel of the same name which is about the residents of a small town who are trapped under massive, transparent and indestructible dome after an alien species sends an "egg" inside a meteor which crashes in the small town. The alien egg explodes, forming a mysterious transparent force that cuts the town off from the rest of the world. The people trapped inside find their own ways to survive with diminishing resources and rising tensions.
The Austrian-German science fiction film The Wall (2012), like Under the Dome, depicts a mysterious, transparent force field that suddenly appears. In The Wall, based on the 1963 novel Die Wand by Austrian writer Marlen Haushofer, a woman who visits a hunting lodge in the Austrian Alps discovers she is cut off from all human contact by a mysterious invisible wall. In the novel, the female character sees the trappings of modern life visible on the other side of the wall, such as her Mercedes-Benz car, being overgrown by plants. Trapped behind the invisible wall, she learns to hunt animals for food.
In The Tommyknockers a 1987 science fiction novel by Stephen King, a woman living in a rural area in Maine discovers a spaceship that has been buried for millennia on her property. As she excavates the ship, she and the townsfolk gradually fall under the influence of mysterious alien powers. The townsfolk cannot leave the town, due to an invisible barrier, and outsiders are repelled by the noxious gases the ship emits.
Nope is a 2022 American science fiction horror film written, directed, and produced by Jordan Peele, about horse-wrangling siblings who attempt to capture evidence of an unidentified flying object or extraterrestrial flying organism at a ranch in the tiny community in Agua Dulce in California's Sierra Pelona Ridge region.
In John Wyndham's novel The Midwich Cuckoos (1957), extraterrestrials land a silvery object in the rural village of Midwich and all human and animal life is knocked unconscious by an unknown means; after a day they all recover. However, every woman of child-bearing age is pregnant by xenogenesis. Nine months later, 31 boys and 30 girls are born who have none of the genetic characteristics of their mothers. They not completely human and they have telepathic abilities, they can control others' actions, and they have group minds and accelerated development.