BY MICHELLE NIJHUIS

ILLUSTRATION BY DARYN RAY

ECOLOGISTS USED TO BELIEVE that the systems they studied tended toward balance. Over the course of the 20th century, though, they realized that disturbance is not a detour but a destination. Humans can do terrible harm to ecosystems, of course, but disturbance itself is not necessarily a problem; in most ecosystems, the only steady state is a state of upheaval. Relationships between and among species, while indispensable and often enduring, are in constant flux, subject to small and large disruptions. The vaunted “balance of nature” is more or less a mirage.

Science fiction writers and filmmakers seem to have reached a similar understanding. The dystopias and occasional utopias of classic science fiction are akin to what ecologists used to call climax communities — mature forests and other ecosystems believed to be stable until upended by an external force, with the external force in science fiction being your trusty lone hero. Perhaps because these either- or futures exist beyond the “final frontiers” of known space and time, they are often set in imagined Wests: Science fiction and its variants have sent the frontier myth to space (Star Trek, among many others), turned the Pacific Northwest into an insular splinter state (Ecotopia), and sentenced Los Angeles to any number of high-decibel catastrophes.

Later in the 20th century, some writers — including many living and...