Ecocide, the widespread annihilation of nature, constitutes the principal theme of Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running (1972) and Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973). Seeking recourse to one of the major film genres, namely, science fiction, these films emphatically disclose an inconvenient truth—the imminent extinction of the ecosystem. Set in a dystopian world, the films outline two futuristic probabilities: the sustenance of the last trace of bio-network only on spaceships in Silent Running and the overpopulated city haunted by the scarcity of natural resources in Soylent Green. In other words, while Silent Running strategically uncovers an already depleted biosphere, Soylent Green systematically examines the road to ecological perdition. Significantly, the cinematic space resorts to diverse techniques, including stills, close-up, voice-over, and music, to convey the petrifying reality that awaits humanity in the near future. Drawing the title from Davis Guggenheim’s An Inconvenient Truth, a documentary on global warming, this paper, in analyzing the environmental apocalypse in Silent Running and Soylent Green, seeks to reveal how the cinematography weaves an ecocentric discourse to promote the inevitable truth that ecosphere is intrinsic to human survival.

Thomas Pynchon (1937- ) has been acknowledged as “the greatest living writer in the English-speaking world who almost alone among his contemporaries . . . has refused to let ‘Pynchon’ stand for anything but his books” (Mendelson 1978, 1). Pynchon lives incognito, shuns press interviews, avoids the glare of the footlights of publicity, resists the lure of consumer and media-dominated society, and refrains from advertisements for himself. One has only the books to go by since there are no media-controlled images of the writer to fall back upon. Perhaps, Pynchon is a classic illustration of Eliot’s idea of “escape from personality” or Keats’s view of “negative capability.” Newman (1986, 11) refers to Pynchon as “a self-effacing prophet of doom . . . the recording conscience of our demise as a culture and the voice of salvational alternatives.” These are valuable attributes for a writer who has taken upon himself the task of addressing the most important cultural and social issues concerning the plight of man caught in the web of contemporary culture that extols technology and death rather than humanity and life. Pynchon’s excursions through contemporary America illuminate, above all, a ‘Thanatoid’ world, a region of sorrow resembling death and destruction.

Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) appeared on the literary scene seventeen years after Gravity’s Rainbow (1973). Reviewers immediately saw in Vineland the terrible implications of a world gone astray. Rushdie (1990, l) found the book to be “a political novel about what America has been doing to itself, to its children, all these many years.” Leonard (1990, 281) referred to the novel as “a republic of metaphors, a theme park of sixties obsessions—television, mysticism, revolution, rock and roll, Vietnam, drugs, paranoia, and repression.” Leithauser (1990, 7) called it a “political paranoia” and said that “the novel asks us to entertain the notion that, beginning with Nixon and culminating with Reagan, our government came to regard its subclass of easy doping lay abouts—its Zoyd Wheelers as meriting not merely contempt but brutal repression and, perhaps, extermination. Deep in the hills of northern California, in the imaginary county of Vineland from which the book draws its title, a military installation has gone up for the evident purpose of sowing domestic terror.”

American Literature Journal, Amor in Pound, Classical European Literature, Homosexuality, Diastasis, Olga-Circe-Artemis, Heterosexual Love, Homosexual Love.