Land of Milk and Honey

Land of Milk and Honey draws on the genre of ecological dystopias. Traditional dystopias, such as Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s 1984 (1949), and Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), are set in the future, feature evil societies run by malignant governments, and reflect mid-20th-century anxieties about totalitarianism by demonstrating the horrors of a society controlling the lives of individual citizens.

During the second half of the 20th century, the development of critical theory, environmental science, and Cold War anxieties led to the expansion of dystopia. Dystopias from the 1950s, such as Walter M. Miller’s Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), center the aftereffects of nuclear war.

As nonfiction works such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) began to critically examine how governments, especially the US government, harmed the environment for chemical company profits, these concerns appeared in speculative fiction such as Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), which depicts an empire stripping a planet of its resources, rendering its environment uninhabitable and thus destroying the Indigenous culture. Silent Spring’s grim consideration of a future blighted by human activity continues to influence science fiction to this day: Hugo winner and Nebula nominee Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem (2008) cites it directly.

The increasing popularity of critical theory also expanded conceptions of dystopia, using the genre to reflect the interplay of government power and inequality. In the future of Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993), climate change leads to increasing inequality and fascistic government control. In many ways, Parable of the Sower is the direct antecedent to Land of Milk and Honey. Both works describe the agricultural suburbs of Los Angeles during a near-future famine, are critical of Christianity as marketing for politicians and as an instrument of control, and depict governments as either incompetent or corrupt. However, the two visions diverge. Butler’s sequel, Parable of the Talents (1998), concludes with the successful launch of colonial spaceships, ending the series on an optimistic note. In contrast, Land of Milk and Honey’s spaceship explodes, dashing hopes of off-Earth existence and incentivizing the ultra-wealthy to intervene in dealing with the smog. In this, Land of Milk and Honey echoes the recent climate change awareness slogan “There Is No Planet B,” which urges action on Earth rather than dreams of post-planetary existence.