"Trashy" sci-fi
November 1, 2015 1:43 PM   Subscribe

I'm kicking around some ideas for a sci-fi story about trash. For inspiration, I'm looking for trash-related passages from sci-fi works (e.g. there have to be some in Neuromancer), fiction or non-fiction about electronic waste, articles about trash from different eras, and articles tracing the provenance of trash, analogous to the links within.

Here's what I've got so far. I'm particularly interested in accretion of trash from different eras, unexpected kinds of brokenness, and creative re-use.

Future:
  • "The Future Mundane": Ethnographic studies constantly highlight technology accretion: the drawer full of cables, the old interaction behaviors, the dusty hard drives, the mouse mats and inherited hardware. Rather than avoid this complexity, good science fiction embraces accretive spaces, where contemporary design and technology sits side by side with older artifacts.
  • the "used future": Lucas told an interviewer during production in England that the Apollo casules may have looked brand new when they soared away, but it was clear when they returned that the interior was littered with candy wrappers, empty Tang cans, and other trash, just like the family station wagon.”
  • "Star Wars: a New Heap"
  • Mundane science fiction
Present: Past: I'm considering writing about an e-waste recycler person, or the lifecycle of e-waste. Also, many things happening in the present are sufficiently science-fictional enough for me to just write about the present.

These sound specific, but I'm still brainstorming, so anything goes!
posted by glass origami robot to Media & Arts (42 answers total) 4 users marked this as a favorite
 
I recall a short story where the human race has been disposing of solid waste by transporting it to another dimension.

Until the denizens thereof figure out from where and whom came this crap raining down upon them and send it back along with their own.

As to the author and title, well, as you will soon see that is not the only time I have forgotten such.
posted by y2karl at 1:50 PM on November 1, 2015


Love and Burning Garbage
posted by 256 at 1:53 PM on November 1, 2015


Best answer: Planetes!! Terrific near-future manga and anime about space trash collectors. There are several storylines about historic trash causing problems in space.
posted by Erasmouse at 1:55 PM on November 1, 2015 [5 favorites]


Best answer: There are scenes in several of William Gibson's books focused on trash and materials reuse, such as the descriptions of the housing attached to the bridge.

Numerous post apocalyptic books, such as The Road, revolve around picking through the leftovers and trash of our era.
posted by Dip Flash at 1:55 PM on November 1, 2015


Best answer: not sure if this applies, but in m john harrison's light most of the technology is trash from previous (more advanced) civilisations. people don't fully understand it, but live with it (some if it intelligent) and adapt it.
posted by andrewcooke at 1:59 PM on November 1, 2015




Futurama - A Big Piece of Garbage
posted by bleep at 2:06 PM on November 1, 2015


Best answer: The theory of kipple from Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.
posted by Candleman at 2:07 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Riddley Walker depicts a post-apocalyptic world in which people dig old cars and machinery out of the mud in order to reuse the iron.
posted by Multicellular Exothermic at 2:10 PM on November 1, 2015


One of the books in Kim Stanley Robinson's Red/Green/Blue Mars series focuses on this. I think it's the middle one.

The beginning of Alastair Reynolds' Century Rain also involves people searching Earth's ruins for trash that might give clues about Earth's past.
posted by Conrad Cornelius o'Donald o'Dell at 2:16 PM on November 1, 2015


Two offhand that I liked as a kid:
- David Brin's "Detritus Affected"
- The Eye, the Ear, and the Arm, by Nancy Farmer
posted by ITheCosmos at 2:19 PM on November 1, 2015


I figure somebody has to mention WALL-E. (That Wikipedia article is surprisingly well-written, by the way, and has some potentially useful links as references.)
posted by sigmagalator at 2:29 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


There is the trash compactor scene in the first Star Wars...
posted by Oyéah at 2:35 PM on November 1, 2015


I came into the thread thinking about Planetes and Wall-E, so instead I will suggest perhaps the rather long and graphic toilet/sewage passage from Gravity's Rainbow..? Not exactly sci-fi (well, maybe Gravity's Rainbow is sci-fi), but...
posted by Slothrop at 2:36 PM on November 1, 2015


Best answer: Am I reading you right that you want beyond sci-fi? A.R. Ammons wrote a book length poem about waste and not about waste (being a poem) that won the National Book Award: Garbage.

One of the main characters in Underworld by Don DeLillo is a waste management executive. There are some significant ruminations in there about waste - the book is eerily prescient in some ways. Here's a sample quote from the book: “Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make?”
posted by barchan at 2:39 PM on November 1, 2015 [2 favorites]


There's the 1977 TV show Quark:
The misadventures of an outer space garbage collector and his crew.
posted by ShooBoo at 3:19 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Surprised no one's mentioned this one yet.
posted by Slinga at 3:41 PM on November 1, 2015


Best answer: Another Man's Treasure - A History of Trash is an episode of the history oriented podcast "Backstory - With the American History Guys".

It has a number of great stories including how wild hogs were chased off the streets of NYC because of, basically, international mockery and shame; how this caused the poor, who counted on the hogs for cheap meat, problems; and how the lack of hogs chomping down on trash lead to the formation of the cities sanitation workers.

Lots of great stuff on landfills too.
posted by bswinburn at 3:41 PM on November 1, 2015


Best answer: I don't know if it's quite what you're looking for, but fully half of the classic sci-fi novel Slow River by Nicola Griffith is about sewage treatment.
posted by kyrademon at 3:57 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


check out the sheep look up and paolo bacigalupi's stuff
posted by misanthropicsarah at 4:35 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Brian Herbert's The Garbage Chronicles is, if not good as such, at least splendidly odd.
posted by Sebmojo at 5:24 PM on November 1, 2015


Brian Herbert's Sidney's Comet is also about (to some extent) garbage...
posted by Devonian at 5:47 PM on November 1, 2015


One or more of these books included minor mentions of piles of high tech trash settling by chance into a configuration that resulted in the trashpile becoming a sentient machine, but I honestly can't recall which: The Cyberiad, by Stanislaw Lem; Perdido Street Station by Mieville; and one of the Hitchhiker's Guide books by Douglas Adams. Hopefully this trips someone else's memory.
posted by Sunburnt at 8:13 PM on November 1, 2015 [1 favorite]


Asimov's Strikebreaker, after a fashion.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:26 PM on November 1, 2015


I recall a short story where the human race has been disposing of solid waste by transporting it to another dimension.

Simak or Lieber? There was one with a vacuum cleaner and one with a sink hole in the street used as a dump.

Meanwhile, Iain M. Banks's 'Clean Up' from 'State of the Art':


'Black Holes!' Matriapoll said loudly.

'What's wrong, Matty?' said Oney. The three of them were watching a complicated array of lights and screens in the control cabin. The system and surrounding space was shown diagrammatically, and a little red light had just appeared next to the third planet, counting out from the star.

'I'll tell you what's wrong,' said Matriapoll, clicking his brows with annoyance. 'That Transporter is out-of-order.'

'It's not working, Matty?'

'It's working, but it isn't working properly,' said Matriapoll. 'It's supposed to be depositing the stuff here,' he pointed to an orange area above the star's surface, 'but it isn't doing that. It's putting it down here.' He pointed to another area of the screen; the third planet.

'That's bad?'
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:05 PM on November 1, 2015


Margaret Atwood's Oryx & Crake/The Year of the Flood/Maddadam trilogy deals wityh a post-apocalyptic waste land where all people have are what has been left after the catastrophy. Much, much, much in the way of trash.

"These fragments I have shored against my ruins" - actual The Waste Land.

The idea of bricolage also springs to mind.
posted by kariebookish at 2:29 AM on November 2, 2015


Brian Daley's Alacrity Fitzhugh and Hobart Floyt series has a much-loved porn stash cruelly abandoned to the elements in a rubbish pile outside a spaceship.

Eventually single pages trade for entire fire opals from the aliens. No one knows why.
posted by sebastienbailard at 2:53 AM on November 2, 2015


@Sunburnt - perdido street.
posted by andrewcooke at 3:32 AM on November 2, 2015


Best answer: There's a brief but interesting digression in the middle of Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand where the protagonist meets a gang of sanitation workers, who turn out to be archaeology undergrads making a cultural analysis of the waste that they're processing.
posted by ovvl at 5:16 AM on November 2, 2015


Best answer: Not sci-fi, but Peter Hessler wrote a great piece about 'freelance' garbage collectors in Cairo and the information they glean from the trash.
posted by thebots at 7:30 AM on November 2, 2015


William Gibson's short story The Winter Market features a famous artist that makes art out of trash, and a woman in a robot-exoskeleton found out of power by a dumpster.
posted by gregr at 10:18 AM on November 2, 2015


Okay, I found one of the ones I had vaguely remembered: From Stanislaw Lem's "The Cyberiad," (trans. Michael Kandel) there was indeed another machine that came into being from a pile of trash. From the chapter "Tale of the Three Storytelling Machines of King Genius," the third storytelling machine tells the story:

That evening, something emerged at the edge of the dump, not far from the puddle which had by now dried up, and this something, a creature of pure accident, was Mymosh the Selfbegotten, who had neither mother nor father, but was son unto himself, for his father was Coincidence, and his Mother—Entropy.
posted by Sunburnt at 10:51 AM on November 2, 2015


'Detritrus Affected' from David Brin's 'Otherness' has an archaeologist going through LA's biggest landfill. Eventually they do a count, having found 4M+ human bodies.
posted by sebastienbailard at 11:40 AM on November 2, 2015


Perdido Street Station by China Mieville, Chapter 38:

For ten minutes, constructs and humans dripped steadily into the hollow at the heart of Dump Two. Then the flow stopped, quite suddenly, and there was silence.
“D’you think these constructs are sentient?” whispered Lemuel.
“I’d say so,” said Isaac quietly. “I’m sure it’ll become clear.”
posted by Sunburnt at 11:42 AM on November 2, 2015


The Mike Judge movie "Idiocracy" is about a Army soldier who was experimentally frozen, and then his pod was lost, later thrown away in an act of ass-covering, and revealed after a trash avalanche 500 years in the future. This is the setup for the movie about a modern, average-intelligence guy who finds that he's a relative genius in a future entirely populated by morons. Quotable comedy ensues!
posted by Sunburnt at 11:50 AM on November 2, 2015


Best answer: It's a background detail, but one of the more prestigious and politically powerful jobs in the Velm society in Samuel R. Delany's _Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand_ is "tracer," which is essentially bad-ass trash / recyclables / hazardous materials collector crossed with statistical analyst. There's a long passage early in the main part of the book where the narrator thinks back on a childhood internship with them. (Note that, this being Delany, there are plenty of sexual situations in the book.)

Also note this is a *great* book, and it will break your heart because it is so amazing but is also the first half of a story Delany has said pretty definitively he will / can never complete (for complicated personal reasons involving the RL people and situations that inspired it).
posted by aught at 1:51 PM on November 2, 2015


In The Warrior's Apprentice by Lois McMaster Bujold, the third book of the Vorkosigan series, young Miles Vorkosigan of Barrayar visits his mother's homeword, Beta Colony. Unlike his temperate homeworld, Beta is a hostile-environment planet where everyone lives underground in tunnels and domes with a heavily-managed ecosystem.

There's a brief slightly comic scene where in order to avoid some trouble, Miles offers to help the Betans with a problem: a Barrayaran navy deserter who has taken up residence in a trash chamber and refuses to take advantage of any of the generous social services offered by the Betans, but as the man lacks papers and hasn't exactly committed any crime, they are also unable to coerce him, so he's camping out in loophole, of sorts.
posted by Sunburnt at 1:54 PM on November 2, 2015


"Ms Fnd in a Lbry" by Hal Draper, in which a future society reckons with total information overload.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:09 PM on November 2, 2015


Best answer: Haven't read it, but Roadside Picnic:

Roadside Picnic is a work of fiction based on the aftermath of an extraterrestrial event (called the Visitation) which simultaneously took place in half a dozen separate locations around Earth for a two-day period. Neither the Visitors themselves nor their means of arrival or departure were ever seen by the local population who lived inside the relatively small (a few square kilometers) area of each of the six Visitation Zones. Such zones exhibit strange and dangerous phenomena not understood by humans, and contain artifacts with inexplicable, seemingly supernatural properties. The name of the novel derives from an analogy proposed by the character Dr. Valentine Pilman who compares the extraterrestrial event to a picnic:

A picnic. Picture a forest, a country road, a meadow. Cars drive off the country road into the meadow, a group of young people get out carrying bottles, baskets of food, transistor radios, and cameras. They light fires, pitch tents, turn on the music. In the morning they leave. The animals, birds, and insects that watched in horror through the long night creep out from their hiding places. And what do they see? Old spark plugs and old filters strewn around... Rags, burnt-out bulbs, and a monkey wrench left behind... And of course, the usual mess—apple cores, candy wrappers, charred remains of the campfire, cans, bottles, somebody’s handkerchief, somebody’s penknife, torn newspapers, coins, faded flowers picked in another meadow.[2]

In this analogy, the nervous animals are the humans who venture forth after the Visitors left, discovering items and anomalies which are ordinary to those who discarded them, but incomprehensible or deadly to those who find them.

This explanation implies that the Visitors may not have paid any attention to or even noticed the human inhabitants of the planet during their "visit" just as humans do not notice or pay attention to grasshoppers or ladybugs during a picnic. The artifacts and phenomena left behind by the Visitors in the Zones were garbage, discarded and forgotten without any preconceived intergalactic plan to advance or damage humanity. There is little chance that the Visitors will return again, since for them it was a brief stop for reasons unknown on the way to their actual destination.
posted by sebastienbailard at 8:29 PM on November 2, 2015 [1 favorite]


Not the best summary, but The Eighth Voyage from “The Star Diaries” by Stanislaw Lem :


The next big twist comes when one of the other races exposes the real reason our membership was sponsored by the pretzel-folk: It turns out THEY created life on earth, accidentally, when some of their cooks were dumping rotted trash on our otherwise-lifeless orb some billion years ago, and if they can get us membership the they won’t have to pay the hefty environmental impact fee.
posted by sebastienbailard at 5:19 AM on November 3, 2015


In Lois Bujold's novel Komarr, there's a bit where the Imperial Auditor's auditorial seal gets flushed down the toilet. When it is finally traced, there is some concern about the possibility of the ImpSec troopers simply blasting the pipe open to retrieve it.
posted by Bruce H. at 12:30 PM on June 30, 2016


I recall a short story where the human race has been disposing of solid waste ...

Could have been "The Hole Truth" by Lois Bujold. A pothole in the street contains an apparently bottomless pit which the local residents start using for trash disposal. After about a week, all the stuff they've tossed down it comes back up.

Published in the Dreamweaver's Dilemma collection.
posted by Bruce H. at 12:44 PM on June 30, 2016


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