The idea of sentient trees in Science Fiction had become one of the genre’s silly old cliches by the 1960s. John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951) made any new stories seem like a pale imitation. Cartoons, comic books and B-Movies had rendered the idea lifeless. But you can never keep a good SF writer down. John Jakes was such a writer. He actually pre-dated Wyndham by a few months with his “The Dreaming Trees” in Fantastic Adventures (November 1950). His story is one of conservation, speaking for the rights of trees.
Ben Thorsen, a blond-haired, copper-skinned man is the grandson of the spacer who discovered the planet of the Dreaming Trees. The trees are sentient and Ben can even talk to them using a translator. Unfortunately, workmen have come from Rocket City to clear the planet for human colonization. Despite the millions of planets, very few are Earthlike enough for the billions of colonists. Alma Ward has come from the council to consider Thorsen’s petition to save the “living trees” ( a phrase I find stupid. Trees are alive!) as he calls them:
“The Dreaming Trees were scientific oddities, but marvelously beautiful ones. Reaching some five hundred feet in the air, they had long branches that waved and drooped to the ground lik tentacles. But what made them so priceless was their coloring. The trunks, and the very wood of the Dreaming Trees, changed color constantly, swirling from shades of scarlet and yellow to deep blues and greens, every color in the spectrum, and some that could not be classified at all…”
When Alma picks up a broken ray gun, one of the trees pulls the weapon from her hand. Ben has to calm the plant down. Alma can see the trees are unusual and valuable. But the clearing crew won’t wait. They have machines called Samuelsons that ray trees down and turn them to dust.
Thorson gets a desperate idea, but he needs time. He has Alma talk to the crew while his men show up with guns. The workers leave, to return in the morning. All that night, Ben and his men work on building a force field generator. When the crew shows up the next day, Ben is ready. He has generators, air recycling and all the food he needs. He asks Alma to join him, but she refuses. “I can’t. I love the worlds of space, and not the trees,” she says.
Ben throws the switch and a dome of force appears around the trees. The crew tries to break in but give up. Nothing, not even a nuke, can penetrate the dome. (Shades of Stephen King!) Ben will remain inside the dome until the council changes its mind. Alma calls to him through the dome, “I’ll be back.” Ben will wait for that day when he can have the trees and Alma too.
Robert Silverberg was also a writer who wrote of sentient trees in “The Fangs of Trees” from The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, October 1968. This tale feels like a brother to Jakes’ story.
The story opens on a distant planet where Holbrook is waiting for results that will confirm or deny that his crop of Juice Trees has the Rust, a disease sweeping across the planets. His fifteen year old niece, Naomi, is visiting him. Both Holbrook and his niece enjoy the trees’ personalities, feeding them meat.
“From Alcibiades’ crown emerged the thin, sinuous serpentine form of a grasping tendril. Whiplash-fast it crossed the interval between Alcibiades and Caesar and snapped into place around the juice-stealer. The animal had time only to whimper in the first realization that it had been caught before the tendril choked the life from it. On a high arc the tendril returned to Alcibiades’ crown; the gaping mouth of the tree came clearly into view as the leaves parted; the fangs parted; the tendril uncoiled; and the body of the juice-stealer dropped into the tree’s maw. Alcibiades gave a wriggle of pleasure: a mincing, camping quiver of his leaves, arch and coy, self-congratulations for his quick reflexes, which had brought him so tasty a morsel. He was a clever tree, and a handsome one, and very pleased with himself…”
The trees produce a phallic-looking fruit that is filled with a legal narcotic. The fact that Holbrook’s favorite section, sector C, is infected can’t be ignored. He attempts to burn the trees but Naomi stops him. While they struggle, Alcibiades, one of the trees, tries to eat Holbrook. Naomi saves him. Holbrook promises to not kill the trees but he lies. He burns the crop and is tormented by saying to himself, “They’re only trees!” over and over.
Silverberg actually got the cover! Many of F&SF covers don’t illustrate their stories so this is unusual. The story itself is a wonderful look at the growing ecological movement in the 1960s. Holbrook stands for the old school and its exploitation of resources while Naomi represents the “tree-huggers” (she actually hugs a tree!) of future confrontations. Silverberg suggests that the environmentalists may be impractical but perhaps not wrong.
Silverberg also has fun with all the previous Pulp tree monsters, making his Juice Trees as much fun as an Addams Family pet. He could have written the tale essentially the same with ordinary trees, but the active nature of the meat-eaters adds a dimension of action as well as depth to the story. Trees that move like animals seem more relatable, more like us, so when we treat them like inanimate objects the pathos increases.
Both authors speak for the trees, Jakes in the 1950s, though you find conservation messages even earlier in Weird Tales. Sentinent trees, in the hippie ’60s, is easier to imagine. Both men write SF that shows another attitude, a more modern one, as the forests of the world are under attack. Who are the real monsters here?
