The best books on plants in science fiction

My good friend (and co-editor) Jerry Määttä might have a bone to pick with me if I left this classic off of the list. And for good reason! Not only is it one of his favorites (check out his work on Wyndam in our collection and elsewhere), it is one of the first books people tend to think of when they think of plants in science fiction, heck, when they think of plants in literature! It is a sensational book about ambulatory plants that have jumped up the food chain, turning people into salads. A fairly early offering in the genre, Wyndam’s classic has influenced untold novels, movies, and graphic novels. It still packs a mean sting, too! 

Jeff VanderMeer is so well known for connecting Nature and the Weird that he has been called “the weird Thoreau.” This resonance with uncanniness, strangeness, and surreality can be seen throughout much of VanderMeer’s oeuvre, from the mushroom detectives of his Ambergris series to the blooming deer of the Southern Reach Trilogy (of which Annihilation is the first book). He’s so well-versed in the odd that Benjamin Robinson titled his excellent book on VanderMeer’s fiction None of This is Normal. 

Annihilation was my gateway into VanderMeer’s wondrous mind. It is mostly set in the liminal space known as Area X, where even known knowns like species and time become unknown. It’s a love letter to the unknown; it’s a note from the brink of climactic climate change. It’s weird. It’s wonderful. Bonus: Alison Sperling and I both wrote about it in my own book. There’s even a movie based on it starring Natalie Portman. 

Multiple award-winning Rosewater had me hooked from the start: a fungal network of alien lifeforms that allows the protagonist Kaaro access to others’ minds? Sold! Connectivity is such a huge issue in today’s world. Yes, please! A topiary labyrinth that acts as a hideout? So cool! Africanfuturism/biopunk/romance based in Yoruba culture? I am here for it! The prose, too, delivers on the promise of the premise. When I finished Rosewater by Tade Thompson, I immediately wanted more. The British-born Nigerian psychiatrist was already on it: there are two more books in the Wormwood trilogy (and a ton more texts in his bibliography). Score! 

If you like Ursula K. Le Guin’s short story about a forest planet, “Vaster Than Empires and More Slow,” you might love my fellow Wisconsin-native Sue Burke’s novel Semiosis. (Haven’t read Le Guin’s story? Add it to your list! It’s a gem.) At the heart of Semiosis is the question: ‘what if humans colonized a world that was already inhabited by intelligent life – and that lifeform was vegetal?’ The word “semiosis” refers to the production of meaning, so it’s fitting that in this generational starship novel, Burke digs into biology and chemistry to speculate on how humans might learn to adapt and communicate with sentient vegetation. She even includes a chapter from a plant’s point of view! Come for the plants, stay for the first-class world building.  

This is a great gateway collection. In fact, this was one of the first anthologies of plant-related speculative stories that I read after falling in love with science-fictional plants. I jumped at it when I saw that it includes authors such as H. G. Wells and Algernon Blackwood and am glad I did. I have written about a number of the stories I met in this collection. Awesome extra: there are two other volumes in this series.