12 Min Read
April 25, 2025
By
Vanina Saracino (she/they) is an independent curator, writer, and lecturer focused on intersectional, lens- and time-based art. She teaches at UdK Berlin and co-curated Screen City Biennial. A co-founder of OLHO (Brazil), she led video programming at ikonoTV (2013–2017) and works on ecological themes. Saracino has held residencies in Europe, the U.S., and the Middle East. She holds MAs in Arts Management and Art Theory and has been an IKT member since 2015.
Science fiction (SF) is not a prediction of the future, but a radiography of our present that exposes situated desires, latent anxieties, sociopolitical fractures, and ideological undercurrents. As Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, SF does not forecast but interrogates; it disturbs or reverses habitual ways of thinking, stretching language beyond its present limits, creating metaphors and daring to experiment in imagination.2
Energy futures have long been central to science fiction speculation, a concern that feels especially urgent today amid debates about transitioning from fossil fuels to renewable sources. In the SF laboratory, energy futures have been probed, infrastructures dismantled and reimagined, and radical alliances between human and non-human metabolisms envisioned. Such narratives have disrupted extractive, growth-driven paradigms and often challenged the dominant epistemologies of labour and consumption under capitalism.
A recurring motif within SF is that of human photosynthesis. This idea appears across visions of the future in both speculative fiction and Earth system science, pointing toward deep-time metabolic transitions that envision a radically new relationship to energy and its use. I consider three short stories by Philip K. Dick, Kōbō Abe, and Kim Stanley Robinson, alongside Vladimir Vernadsky’s notion of human autotrophy and Lynn Margulis’s Homo photosyntheticus, to examine how these works signal human metabolic independence as a speculative site of political, economic, and philosophical reconfiguration, challenging extractivist paradigms.
In Philip K. Dick’s Piper in the Woods (1953), workers on an asteroid mining colony start claiming that they have turned into plants. Refusing to work altogether, they maintain that the only meaningful state of existence is sitting in the sun in contemplation. As their refusal to work spreads, productivity collapses, prompting the arrival of a physician tasked with finding a solution. One of the affected workers challenges the fundamental assumption that an interplanetary society must be sustained through relentless labour, questioning why humans must push themselves to the limits, even venturing into space, to uphold such a system. Having spent his entire life in pursuit of a dream that ultimately proved deceptive, he finally admits, “I wish I’d become a plant earlier.”3 Rapidly, more workers undergo this transformation, not in a biological sense, but as a profound shift in Weltanschauung—a reorientation of perception and values in response to external pressures. What is initially considered an epidemic contagion or a massive psychological breakdown emerges instead as a radical philosophical and political stance: an act of collective resistance through the embodiment of the vegetal ways of being-in-the-world.
A similar scenario unfolds in Kōbō Abe’s Namari no Tamago (鉛の卵, “The Lead Egg”). Awakening from cryogenic sleep 800,000 years into the future, far beyond the intended timeline of his experiment, a scientist finds himself among human-like beings who resemble trees. This species has evolved photosynthetic abilities in adaptation to a past geological period marked by food scarcity and an abundance of sunlight. Having severed themselves from the previous metabolic constraints of human biology, they now reject the notion of labour, referring to the “ancient” humans (our contemporaries) as a species enslaved by work. Instead, they prefer to exist in the sun—and often to indulge in gambling. In their world, predation or any exploitation of other beings’ biochemical work is strictly forbidden, and even proffering the word to eat is a taboo. The ultimate punishment for violating these laws is not death, but something far worse in their society: banishment to the world of remaining ancient humans, and being condemned to work in a relentless cycle.
The prospect of a universe populated by photosynthetic humans interrogates and challenges dominant epistemologies of labour and energy consumption from a metabolic perspective. It disrupts the conventional, mechanistic definition of energy as the “capacity to do work” and, instead, it redirects attention to the fundamental labour of life, metabolism, as the relational, unceasing, symbiotic negotiation between bodies and their environments, spanning from molecular interactions to the planetary scale. Photosynthesis is the foundation for life on Earth, thus of our planetary metabolism, yet it has been edited out of the canon of mainstream economics and aggressively denied by neoliberal thought.4 Notably, in these stories, human photosynthesis carries a more or less explicit critique of the imperialistic ethos traditionally associated with certain SF narratives, often characterized by a “macho fear of ever being inactive, receptive, open, quiet, still”.5 Both Philip K. Dick and Kōbō Abe present the act of becoming plant as a form of political resistance to the external pressure of work—a deliberate deceleration that disrupts capitalism’s temporality. In their stories, humans who have embraced this transformation experience serenity and pleasure through withdrawal from an unquestioned, fast-paced work cycle.
In these two short stories, written four years apart in the 1950s, this withdrawal is initially dismissed by the main characters as idleness, in accordance with a former, broader tendency to perceive plant life as passive due to its apparent stillness. However, as post-anthropocentric and posthuman perspectives have highlighted, the assumption that plants are immobile and passive beings is a fallacy rooted in human exceptionalism. Michael Marder, among others, argues that vegetal being-in-place is not the opposite of movement; plants do move, and framing human acceleration as the antithesis of plants’ supposedly stationary existence reinforces a hierarchy that diminishes flora, dismissing the agency inherent in plant life.6
Furthermore, and more importantly, the work that plants do, photosynthesis, is all but passive; it enables and supports planetary life at every scale. With this in mind, recent rearticulations of Marxist theory have redefined labour as a “metabolic, relational capacity,” extending it beyond human activity to include not only nonhuman animal labour, but also specifically vegetal labour.7 Such perspectives have become more widespread since the “plant turn” in critical studies, which has drawn attention to the motion, sensing, social, and collaborative aspects of plants. Today, within the environmental humanities, it is not uncommon to find the assertion that the interdependent worldings of vegetal life offer alternative models to the extractive, individualistic logic of capitalism, making the notion of human metabolic independence both provocative and generative.8
If in Philip K. Dick and Kōbō Abe’s short stories vegetal transformation emerges as an evolutionary process without direct human intervention, Kim Stanley Robinson’s more recent Oral Argument (2015) imagines human photosynthesis as technologically engineered through a bio-designed, commercially branded tattoo called Sunskin. Framed as the fictional transcript of a hearing at the US Supreme Court, the story follows the inventor of Sunskin as he defends the far-reaching social and economic consequences of his product. By enabling humans to metabolize sunlight directly, Sunskin has become a mass commodity that disrupts global markets: food consumption declines, demand for goods plummets, people spend more time outdoors, and some argue that widespread human photosynthesis has even catalyzed the economic clash referenced in the story. Much like Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson highlights how a shift toward photosynthetic living would entail not only a metabolic transformation but also a radical redefinition of labour, consumption, and productivity—ultimately unraveling capitalist structures through a gradual disengagement from its imperatives, values, and all-encompassing logic.
Without photosynthesis, animals could not exist: unlike plants and some bacteria, we cannot generate our own energy from sunlight, water, and chemical compounds—a characteristic known in biology as autotrophy. Ukrainian biogeologist Vladimir Vernadsky felt profound discomfort at the thought that, despite humanity “growing powerfully with great acceleration,” our survival, like that of all heterotrophs, still depends essentially on “annihilating other living beings or exploiting their biochemical work.”9 Writing in 1925, he specifically lamented the situation in his contemporary Russia, where famine was pervasive and the political regime was making millions of victims (“Never has the precariousness of human existence been so clear and the spectre of disgrace and decadence so alive in the spirit of disorder.”10) Gathering some hope for the future, he imagined that humans might one day overcome their metabolic dependence with the help of technology, and that this transformation would alter the survival conditions for all, not just for few. In his vision, human autotrophy, opposed to heterotrophy, would be a necessary adaptation to food scarcity, but also a durable solution with a view to the expansion of human communities in outer space, where the stellar light would be a plentiful resource.
However, one century after Vernadsky’s utopian vision, humanity’s participation in the planetary metabolic system appears to be moving in the opposite direction, relying instead on increasing resource extraction and consumption. Under capitalism and its imperative of relentless growth, the techno-pharmacological mediation of the food industry renders human nutrition functionally necrotrophic—exploiting, depleting, and ultimately devastating the environment in the pursuit of violent, uneven, and profoundly unjust economic expansion. A primary example is the meat industry, which epitomizes the atrocious and unsustainable functioning of industrial agriculture. As Troy Vettese and Drew Pendergrass note, livestock raised for human consumption now accounts for 60% of total terrestrial mammalian biomass, with wild mammals accounting for only 4%, and humans the remaining 36%. This livestock contributes disproportionately to carbon pollution simply through respiration, as vast populations of artificially overabundant animals cycle CO₂ back into the atmosphere.11 While it may be impossible to imagine a world entirely without predation within reachable timescales, not to mention Vernadsky’s human autotrophy, the urgent challenge is learning how to live responsibly along and within the necessary act of killing, by refusing “making beings killable.”12
In a book co-written with her son Dorion Sagan, evolutionary biologist Lynn Margulis adopts a deep time perspective and envisions future trajectories of human evolution, including the emergence of Homo photosyntheticus. Margulis, a strong proponent of the idea that evolution is driven not by the gradual accumulation of random mutations—of which, she argued, there is little evidence—but rather by long-term symbiotic relationships that lead to genetic integration (endosymbiosis), proposes that mutually beneficial exchanges between species play a central role in evolution. While Homo photosyntheticus remains speculative, animal photosynthesis is already a biological reality. The green sea slug Elysia chlorotica, for example, has evolved to retain chloroplasts from the algae it consumes, allowing it to derive energy directly from sunlight rather than continuously feeding on other organisms.13 Margulis and Sagan’s vision of a photosynthetic human aligns with speculative depictions of metabolic transformation in the works of Philip K. Dick, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Kōbō Abe; Homo photosyntheticus is imagined as a comparatively “sedentary” being—as well as an interstellar “ultimate vegetarian.”14
If evolution is shaped by deep entanglements and symbiotic alliances, as Margulis suggested, then what kind of metabolic futures could emerge from a reimagining of energy relations? The notion of human photosynthesis, however biologically impossible at present, but perhaps imaginable within a deep time perspective, opens a provocative horizon. It envisions post-carbon and even post-capitalist futures, where survival is disentangled from the annihilation of other organisms, or from the exploitation of their biochemical labour. SF’s visions of human metabolic independence push against the constraints of capitalist realism, dissolving the assumed inevitability of food chains, extractive agriculture and corrosive animal industries, and economies built on the exploitation of metabolic labour. Instead, they articulate counter-imaginaries where sustenance is neither predatory nor accumulative, but embedded in metabolic alliances between the human and the nonhuman. Much like Elysia chlorotica, such a transformation would forge new energy alliances, evolving toward a form of metabolism that transcends predation, drawing instead on the raw power of stellar light.
Notes
1. Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan, Microcosms: Four Billion Years of Microbial Evolution (University of California Press, 1997).
2. Ursula K. Le Guin, Dancing at the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places (Grove Press, 1997).
3. Philip K. Dick, “Piper in the Woods” in The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Vol. 1: Beyond Lies the Wub (Millennium Paperbacks, 1987), 314–360.
4. Jeremy Walker, More Heat Than Life. The Tangled Roots Of Ecology, Energy And Economics (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).
5. Le Guin, Dancing.
6. Michael Marder, “Walking Among Plants” in Four Walks, ed. Gerard Ortín Castellví, (New York, 2017), 68–65.
7. James Palmer, “Putting Forests to Work? Enrolling Vegetal Labor in the Socioecological Fix of Bioenergy Resource Making,” Annals of the American Association of Geographers 111 no. 1 (2020): 141–156, https://doi.org/10.1080/24694452.2020.1749022
8. Marion Ernwein, Franklin Ginn and James Palmer, eds., The Work that Plants Do: Life, Labour and the Future of Vegetal Economies (Transcript Verlag, 2021).
9. Vladimir I. Vernadsky, “Human Autotrophy,” trans. Christine Craig, 21st Century Science & Technology (Fall–Winter 2013) [1925], 13–22.
10. Vernadsky, “Human Autotrophy.”
11. Drew Pendergrass and Troy Vettese, Half-Earth Socialism: A Plan to Save the Future from Extinction, Climate Change and Pandemics (Verso, 2022).
12. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet (University of Minnesota Press, 2008).
13. Sidney K. Pierce, Nicholas E. Curtis and Julie A. Schwartz, “Chlorophyll synthesis by an animal using transferred algal nuclear genes,” Symbiosis 49 (2009):121–131, https://doi.org/10.1007/s13199-009-0044-8
14. Margulis and Sagan, Microcosms.
