Tag Archives: Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

Colonizing the Colonizers

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Science-fiction draws many of its themes, and much of its emotional force, from colonialism. So argues John Rieder in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, and he makes a pretty compelling case. To take perhaps the most obvious example, H.G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds derives its plot from a reversal of colonial roles; instead of the invaders, the British become the invaded. The book’s horror is derived from imagining oneself undergoing the trauma that one has inflicted on others — the terror of first contact; the subjugation to superior weapons; the wholesale destruction of one’s civilization; even the ultimate humiliation of watching your fellows betray you to the new overlords. The book can be seen either/both as a satire or critique of colonialism, and as a self-serving disavowal of responsibility — a way to see oneself as sinned against either to sympathize with the oppressed or to deny one’s status as sinner.

John Christopher’s novel The Possessors was written in 1964, long after the period that Rieder discusses. Yet here to colonialism is an important touchstone — and in similar ways. The novel is (a probably intentional variation on John W. Campbell’s short story “Who Goes There?”) is set in an Alpine skiing chalet. An alien spore, long buried in the snow, is exhumed by a rockslide, and begins to possess the vacationers one by one. The novel features unusually deft and vivid characterization, which makes the possessions especially frightening. Christopher gives us real people with complicated pasts and presents, and then erases them.

Imperialism here, of course, is not by sheer force of arms — in fact, when they are taken over by the possessors, humans become less physically threatening — they are slower and clumsier (though better able to survive extremes of cold.) Instead, the invasion occurs through stealth and corruption — an extension of the cultural betrayal that Wells touches on in the War of the Worlds when he mentions humans hunting other humans on behalf of the Martians.

The shift from overt to covert overthrow has, presumably, something to do with the Cold War. The enemy operates through misdirection and persuasion; conquering first by weakening from within. This isn’t so much a variation on Wells as it is a completion, or perfection, of his themes. Again, in the War of the Worlds, the invaders take the place of the invaded; here, the same thing happens, only moreso. In this sense, for Christopher science fiction tropes don’t merely become a metaphor for the Cold War — rather, the Western narrative of Communism is actually revealed as itself a science-fiction trope. The nightmare of Communist infiltration, the fear of turning into the enemy, is a story first told by sci-fi writers, for whom imperial invasion was preceded/enabled by becoming the other.

Again, it’s possible to see The War of the Worlds as a satire of imperialism if you squint a little. In more fully embodying the tropes, though, the Possessors closes down some of the ambiguity. Identifying with the enemy is a possibility, but one that is explicitly condemned and linked to weakness when Mandy is mentally persuaded to join the possessors “freely”, implicitly because they prey upon her alcoholism and loneliness. Moreover, the transformation/invasion of self is explicitly compared to a rape — or, as Christopher puts it, to “a grotesque and hideous mass rape of the soul rather than the body.”

In The Possessors, then, it’s much clearer that the image of the self as invaded is not a way to sympathize, but is rather a justification for not sympathizing. Indeed, it becomes an excuse for genocidal violence, as Selby, a plastic surgeon who gradually becomes the book’s protagonist, explains:

If this thing is an intelligence, and alien, then there is one thing it must know — that there can be question of toleration between it and us. We have to wipe it out, if we are not going to be assimilated by it.

This isn’t actually especially logical. The humans know little or nothing for sure about the alien. Indeed, they don’t even know it’s an alien, really. They now that a bunch of folks have gone nuts, and appear to be acting in concert to recruit others. That’s it. They don’t know for sure that talking wouldn’t help; they don’t know that reconciliation is impossible — they don’t even know what they’re reconciling with, or whether the folks out there — who sure look like their former friends — could be bargained with or talked to.

Nonetheless, the book makes clear that Selby is right, about everything. Christopher provides us with a little narration at the beginning and in other parts of the book so that we know what the threat is better than the characters do. So we find out that the characters are facing an alien intelligence and that that intelligence does in fact take over entire planets. Extermination is necessary. And so, when children and one’s own sisters and wives are all burned to death in the cleansing fire, there is sadness but no guilt or questioning. Invasion must be punished by death, even if (especially if?) the invaders look just like us.

This truth is re-affirmed, with a brilliant twist, in the much-lauded 1946 novella, Vintage Season, by C.L. Moore, a pseudonym for Henry Kuttner and Catherine L. Moore. In the story, the protagonist, Oliver Wilson, rents his house to a group of three mysteriously awe-inspiring strangers for a surprisingly large amount of money. Here’s a description:

The man went first. He was tall and dark and he wore his clothes and carried his body with that peculiar arrogant assurance that comes from perfect confidence in every phase of one’s being. The two women were laughing as they followed him. Their voices were light and sweet, and their faces were beautiful, each in its own exotic way, but the first thing Oliver thought of when he looked at them was: Expensive!

It was not only that patina of perfection that seemed to dwell in every line of their incredibly flawless garments. There are degrees of wealth beyond which wealth itself ceases to have significance. Oliver has seen before, on rare occasions, something like this assurance that the earth turning beneath their well-shod feet turned only to their whim.

Eventually, Oliver discovers where that aura of certainty comes from. These are not visitors from another country; they are visitors from the future. They have traveled back in time to Oliver’s day because it is a historically glorious spring.

Or so they say. As it turns out, the attraction was not exactly the spring, but its end. The visitors have come to watch a catastrophic asteroid hit, which impacts near Oliver’s house. The asteroid unleashes a plague which kills we-don’t-know-quite-how-many, but presumably millions, if not billions. Moreover, Oliver realizes, the visitors — including a women who becomes Oliver’s lover — are inoculated against the plague. They could have saved Oliver, and everyone else, if they wanted to. They did not because they liked their own time, had no wish to change it by changing the past…and perhaps most of all, because they couldn’t be bothered. Thus Oliver’s thoughts after the asteroid.

Revulsion shook him. Remembering the touch of Kleph’s lips, he felt a sour sickness on his tongue. Alluring she had been: he knew that too well. But the aftermath —

There was something about this race from the future. He had felt it dimly at first, before Kleph’s nearness had drowned caution and buffered his sensibilities. Time traveling purely as an escape mechanism seemed almost blasphemous. A race with such power—

Kleph—leaving him for the barbaric splendid cornoation at Rome a thousand years ago-how had she seen him? Not as a living breathing man. He knew that, very certainly Kleph’s race were spectators.

The visitors, then, are tourists, whose entertainment is the suffering and death of those who have made their luxurious lifestyle possible. As John Rieder writes, “The inevitability of history becomes rather difficult to tell apart from a naturalizing ideology that protects and disavows responsibility for the hierarchical difference between the tourists and the natives.”

It’s also worth pointing out, though, that “difference between the tourists and the natives” is in fact no difference. Oliver’s description of the visitors — wealthy, powerful, uncaring, decadent, spectatorial — is also, and surely intentionally, a description of Oliver’s own Western society, which also entertains itself with visions of apocalypse — like, for instance, the novella “Vintage Season.” This parallel is further emphasized by the introduction of Cenbe, an artist from the future who makes artwork incorporating footage of terrible disasters throughout history. His final triumph is a piece involving the events of this story — a piece, which arguably, does the same thing that the novella does.

Like Wells and Christopher, then, Kuttner and Moore present the possibility of our own colonialism being done unto us. And, again, as in those other narratives, the reaction to such self-violation is self-vengeance; the judgement on the callousness of the decadent tourists is fire visited upon decadent tourists — even if, ostensibly, the wrong ones. In most such narratives, of course, the elimination of the other who is the self is seen as the ultimate triumph, a quintessential apotheosis of integration and mastery. For Kuttner and Moore, on the other hand, it is presented as a kind of tragically banal inadequacy, almost as if colonialism, whether for colonized or colonizer, is not a narrative of triumph at all.

Tyrannosaurus Stalin

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Dystopias are always also utopias, just as hell always also implies a heaven. A blighted future is a warning, but it’s also a hope that the wrong-doers (if they do not repent) will finally, finally get theirs. Orwell’s 1984 broods luxuriously on the triumph of totalitarianism over all those who do not see as clearly as he. Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games revels in the voyeuristic exploitation bloodshed enabled by scolding us all for our voyeuristic exploitation jones. Disaster porn is — adamently, enthusiastically — porn, a sadistic/masochistic wallow in the end times. Grim visions are what we want to see; the rain of fire that scourges injustice — or, sometimes, that just scourges. Because scourging is fun.

Alun Llewellyn’s 1934 sci-fi dystopia, The Strange Invaders presents a particularly complex apocalypse — and, ergo, a particularly complex set of apocalyptic desires. The story is set in a far future earth, where a combination of nuclear holocaust and oncoming ice age have knocked humanity back to the middle ages. The action is centered in a factory town of the former Soviet Union, now a holy city, inhabited by a people called the Rus. The Rus worship a Trinity — Marx, Lenin, Stalin — who they only vaguely understand. Church Fathers rule over a military class of Swords, who keep the peasants in line scraping out a subsistence existence.

This already-quite-grim-thank-you world is plunged into chaos as nomadic Tartars begin fleeing to the Rus’ holy city from the South, seeking shelter. They claim to be pursued by giant, man-eating lizards. The Church Fathers at first don’t believe it (Marx said nothing about giant man-eating lizards!) and so order the Swords and the peasants to massacre the Tartars before they eat too much of the food supply. Soon after the deed is done, though,the saurians show up and set about killing just about everyone they can get their talons on. Finally, in a War-of-the-Worldsish stroke of luck, winter comes in and for some reason the in-all-other-ways evolutionarily perfect lizards are unable to sense the temperature drop soon enough, and go dormant, allowing the few remaining humans to slaughter them. This isn’t exactly a happy ending, though; humans are now trapped between the lizards to the south and advancing glaciers to the north, and while there may be a respite for our particular band of the Rus, humanity’s long-term outlook seems awfully dicey as the book closes.
 

 
In his book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction, John Rieder reads The Strange Invaders along a number of allegorical lines. First, he notes that it maps and reverses the traditional lines of imperialism; instead of a vigorous northern European invasion of the decadent Southern periphery, Llewellyn presents a vital South launching an attack on the decadent, etiolated north.

I don’t necessarily disagree with Rieder’s take here…but I think it’s important to take into account the fact that this is not just any north we’re talking about here, but Russia in particular. Obviously, the Cold War was not underway in 1934 — but Llewellyn (according to Brian W. Aldiss’ preface) had actually visited the Soviet Union, and appears to have had a better sense of its problems than many of his contemporaries. In any case, there’s no doubt that the northern weakness here is a particularized Russian weakness. The blind obedience to authority, the inflexibility, and the cruelty of the Rus is linked specifically by Llewellyn to Communism.

It was a tale often told, a moral often preached. They had sinned; all mankind had sinned. Marx from whom the world had received the blessing of the Faith had remade the world in a plan of Five years…. The faith had been wronged and the Destruction was the vengeance enacted. Therefore must the faith be honoured strictly by those that survived, and they must to that end give obedience unquestioning, surrender thought and spirit and body to their rulers who were guardians of that faith.

Rieder of course appreciates the satirical fillip (now perhaps rendered into almost a commonplace of anti-communism) of turning the resolutely materialist Marx into a deity. But he never quite links the Russian context to the discussion of peripheries. If one does so, the novel becomes a parable not so much of reversing center and margin, but rather of wars on the margins — of Russia, perhaps, being devoured by its own atavistic, subservient Orientalist weakness.

From this perspective, then, the saurians and the Russ are not in opposition, but are on a continuum. And in fact, there is a fair bit of textual support for the idea that the giant lizards are not the death of the Rus, but their perfection. The ideal of the Rus is unthinking obedience; direction without will. Adun, the protagonist, is caught between his human desires and his society’s demand that he become merely the tool of the Fathers — a kind of machine, like those left in the factory/church and worshiped. “The Fathers and the men they kept to uphold them were not to be questioned,” Adun thinks to himself. “Mind and body they commanded, as the Faith directed. He was nothing. He dared do nothing.” (18)

If Adun has to convince himself to become an object, the giant lizards have no such problems. As Rieder notes, the creatures “hover on the uncanny border between the organic and the mechanical.” In one of the most striking passages of the novel (which Rieder quotes), the creatures are envisioned as a depersonalized collective; a single coherent unity of force.

The plain, where it came down from the river, was alive with inter-weaving movement. They played together in the sun as though its brightness made them glad, running over and under one another, swiftly and in silence, but with an almost fierce alacrity, eager and unhesitating, unceasing. The eye was not quick enough to catch the motion of their rapid, supple bodies that seemed not to move with the effort of muscles but to quiver and leap with an alert life instinct in every part of them. They were brilliant. As he looked, Karasoin saw the play of colour that ran over those great darting bodies, a changing, flashing iridescence like a jewelled mist. Their bodies were green, enamelled in scales like studs of polished jade. But as they writhed and sprang in their playing, points of bronze and gilt winked along their flanks and their throats and bellies as they leaped showed golden and orange, splashed with scarlet. Now and then one would suddenly pause and stand as if turned to a shape of gleaming metal, and then they could see plainly its long, narrow head and slender tail and the smoothly shining body borne on crouching legs that ended in hands like a man’s with long clawed fingers; five.

This is the awesome fulfillment of Ronald Reagan’s “ant heap of totalitarianism.” Stalinism is here embodied not by the proletariat, but by those even below them, the lizards forged into a remorseless, infinitely flexible machine-state. The blind watchmaker forges the revolution, and thus Marxism for Llewellyn will literally, and beautifully, eat itself.

Again, though, just because the lizards are the ultimate totalitarians doesn’t mean that the humans are somehow battling totalitarianism. In 1984, Big Brother is schematically opposed to the human emotions of love, friendship, warmth, and sex. Llewellyn’s vision is less pat. Adun’s love, not to mention his sexual desire, does in fact inspire his resistance to the regime of the Fathers. But that resistance isn’t exactly idyllic. On the contrary, Adun’s passion for the hardly-characterized Erya is almost inseparable from his own pride and desire for power. At one point he threatens (and it is not an idle threat) to kill her if she chooses the captain of the Swords, Karasoin — a murder-lust echoed by his participation in the genocidal slaughter of the Tartars within the city walls. Eventually, Adun does win Erya…by murdering Karasoin after the Sword almost rapes her. Thus, the alternative to mechanized, unfeeling destruction is not love or peace, but rather the cthonic, feeling bloodshed of jealousy, rage, and rape-revenge.

Llewellyn is willing to suggest other possibilities. Erya, for example, has a vision of independence and freedom — though that’s eventually crushed by the ongoing crisis which requires her to get a man for protection or else. Karasoin, before he actually rapes Erya, is ashamed and decides not to attack her — just in time for Adun to hack him apart. And at the book’s end, Adun’s brother Ivan speaks haltingly of the need for men to stop killing each other…and then, of course, he dies of his wounds.

The novel’s flirtations with peace, then, are all cynically inflected; they are raised to be shot down in a frisson of pathos and irony. Both the lizards and the rape-revenge narrative, on the other hand, have a visceral, awful appeal. The beautiful, terrible new force which will inherit the earth; the beautiful, terrible old force that has held the earth: they rush upon each other, soundless or howling, and from their writhing, bloody struggle there rises genre pleasures, old and new — violence, lust, apocalypse, the cleansed earth and the pleasure of watching its filthy cleansing. The Strange Invaders is a bitter reversal of imperialism, a prayer for a more perfectly genocidal imperialism, and — to the extent that its vision is enacted on and powered by Orientalist tropes — arguably an act of imperialism itself.

The final twist of the novel is, perhaps, that, despite its prescient and honorable anti-Stalinism, its apocalyptic vision is ultimately not apocalyptic enough. The saurians, in all their awesome power, and the humans, for all their ugly narrow-mindedness, can neither compare with the power, the ugliness, or the narrow-mindedness of what can’t really compare with the atrocities Stalin was perpetrating while Llewellyn was writing his book. The gigantic force of the state, wielded by a jealous, paranoid madman, was able to generate a holocaust in the Ukraine, and throughout Russia, that makes Llewellyn’s bleak vision — shot through with beauty and with joy at the bleakness — seem positively naive. That’s not Llewellyn’s fault exactly, though. History, indifferent alike to justice and desire, will always be grimmer than dystopia.
 


“Passers-by no longer pay attention to the corpses of starved peasants
on a street in Kharkiv, 1933.”

 

Sequence Without Origin

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I’ve been reading John Rieder’s excellent book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. There’s lots of fun discussion about nightmare invasion scenarios, lost worlds, time travel, constructed humans, and how imperialists love being imperialists, satirize being imperialists, and more or less constantly freak out about the possibility of being imperialized.
 

 
So maybe I’ll talk about all that at some point. In the meantime, though, Rieder also has some really interesting thoughts on genre. Specifically, he argues that a genre is best understood not through a strict formal definition, but rather as a group of texts that bear a “family resemblance.” The term is from Wittgenstein, and Rieder quotes a further explication by scholar Paul Kinkaid:

science fiction is not one thing. Rather, it is any number of things — a future setting, a marvelous device, an ideal society, an alien creature, a twist in time, an interstellar journey, a satirical perspective, a particular approach to the matter of story, whatever we are looking for when we look for science fiction, her more overt, here more subtle — which are braided together in an endless variety of combinations.”

Science-fiction is then a “web of resemblances.”

If sci-fi is a web of resemblances though, that has some surprising implications. Specifically, if the genre is the web, it can’t exist before the web. There can’t be a point of origin, because a point isn’t a web. For there to be family resemblances there has to be a family. Or as Rieder puts it:

The idea that a genre consists of a web of resemblances established by repetition across a large number of texts, and therefore that the emergence of science fiction involves a series of incremental effects that shake up and gradually, cumulatively, reconfigure the system of genres operating in the literary field of production, precludes the notion of science fiction’s ‘miraculous birth’ in a master text like Frankenstein or The Time Machine. A masterpiece might encapsulate an essence, if science fiction had one, and it certainly can epitomize motifs and strategies; but only intertextual repetition can accumulate into a family of resemblances.

This has some obvious implications for the much-bruted question, What Is a Comic? Like science fiction, definitions of comics (most notably Scott McCloud’s) generally focus on formal elements — a sequence of images, in McCloud’s case. As a result, McCloud includes in his definition things like hieroglyphs, while excluding single panel cartoons.

However, if comics are seen as a web of resemblances, then the effort to look for origins or predecessors or even formal tropes starts to look misguided. Instead, it’s more useful to focus on the center — on what things are accepted as comics, as I put it in a post some time back. Comics are not a formal template; they’re a genre that has taken shape since around the early twentieth century, and which can have, like science-fiction, any number of hallmarks — including (for example) sequences of images, superheroes, cartoony art, funny animals, autobiographical storylines, humor, adventure, serialized formats, word bubbles, panel borders….etc.

No doubt some comics folks flinched up there when I called comics a “genre”. And that does bring up a possible objection. Isn’t it wrong to think of comics as a genre, like science fiction? Shouldn’t they instead be compared to a medium, like prose or art or music? And if so, how useful is Rieder’s discussion of genre? Yes, genres may be webs of relations. But aren’t mediums defined formally? Art is always art; writing is always writing — shouldn’t, then, comics always be comics, whether created by the ancient Egyptians or on the internets?

I think the answer to those question is no, still pretty useful, not really and not really. Rieder does couch his formulation in terms of genre. But it works so well for comics that I think it forces you to either decide comics are a genre, or else to decide that the difference between medium and genre isn’t as great as it tends to seem. Egyptian hieroglyphs, after all, can either be writing, art, or comics, depending on which web of relationship you want to emphasize — and once you start thinking about webs of relationships, it’s in fact pretty clear that they aren’t that closely related to any current medium. Similarly, is a novel a genre? Is it a medium? It depends on how you look at it, surely — meaning, specifically, how you look at the web of relations of which it’s a part, and how those relationships are embedded in time and culture.

Comics straddles the line between genre and medium for various reasons — mostly having to do with the fact that (for reasons of commerce and credibility) it still hasn’t consolidated its cultural position the way science fiction has (as genre) or the way film has (as medium.) It’s betwixt and between, which makes the task of definition somewhat fraught and conflicted. But surely Rieder’s discussion leads to the conclusion that drawing these lines is always fraught and conflicted. A generic designation isn’t about dispassionately fitting a model, but about the more emotional task of finding and claiming one’s relations. The downside is that comics, as an origin and a form, doesn’t really exist; the upside, though, is that that leaves so many possibilities open for what comics can be.