Sowing Worlds: A Seed Bag for Terraforming with Earth Others

Chapter 6 draws from SF writers Ursula K. Le Guin and Octavia Butler, in alliance with ants and acacia seeds in particular places. The task is to tell an SF adventure story with acacias and their associates as the protagonists. It turns out that Le Guin’s carrier bag theory of narrative comes to the rescue, along with biologist Deborah Gordon’s theories about ant interactions and colony behavior, to elaborate the possibilities of ecological evolutionary developmental biology and nonhierarchical systems theories for shaping the best stories. Science fiction and science fact cohabit happily in this tale. With Le Guin as their scribe, the prose of acacia seeds and the lyrics of lichens give way to the mute poetics of rocks in the final passages.