Tag Archives: Imperialism and Science Fiction

World Without Imperialism

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Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Left Hand of Darkness is best known for its imaginative take on gender — the inhabitants of the planet Gethen (Winter) are human-descended hermaphrodites, who become male or female (depending on their partners) only during a brief mating cycle (called kemmer) every month.

imagesFor Le Guin, though, the ambisexuality of the Gethenians is about much more than just sex. As she says (through the mouth of a Terran-normal human observing the Gethenians,) the structure of the kemmer cycle rules the Gethenians; all their stories and culture is focused on it. This, she says, is relatively easy for outsiders to understand. But

What is very hard for us to understand is that four-fifths of the time, these people are not sexually motivated at all…. Consider: Anyone can turn his hand to anything. This sounds very simple, but its psychological effects are incalculable…. Consider: A child has no psycho-sexual relationship to his mother and father. There is no myth of Oedipus on Winter….. Consider: There is no unconsenting sex, no rape.

Gethenians, Le Guin goes on to make clear in the rest of the book, are not ruled by the dualism or binaries which structure our thought. Perhaps in part for that reason, they have no war.

I say “perhaps” here advisedly — Le Guin is careful not to absolutely link the absence of masculinity to the absence of violence. There are other possible reasons for the lack of warfare; Gethen is an extremely cold planet, and its inhabitants are in a constant struggle for survival — their battle against the cold is so all-consuming and fierce that they have had little time to develop large scale states or armies. They do, however, have assassinations, and murders, and torture, and even occasional small battles. During the time of the novel, two Gethenian nations have even gotten large enough and powerful enough that it looks like a border dispute might turn into war.

Still, with all these caveats, the fact remains — the Gethenians don’t have men, they don’t have sexual violence, and perhaps not as a direct result, but not incidentally either, they don’t have glory of arms, and they don’t have war.

The link between gender and violence is subtly emphasized on another level as well. The story of the novel focuses not just on the Gethenians, but on a visitor to their planet. Genly Ai, a Terran man, has come to Gethen as a representative of the Ekumen, a pan-galactic organization of cultural traders, or sharers. Genly has come alone on his mission specifically so that the Gethenians do not feel pressured or afraid of him. The Ekumen seek no control; they completely eschew force. When a world accepts their overtures, they simply open communication and begin exchanging knowledge and technology. It’s like the benevolent Star Trek Federation — if the Federation were completely non-violent.

It’s not just Gethen which does not have war, then — it’s the novel itself. And just as Gethen’s lack of warfare is linked more or less explicitly to the gender of its people, so the lack of warfare in The Left Hand of Darkness seems linked, more or less explicitly, to the fact that its writer is a woman.

The book is, certainly, a kind of feminist response to, or critique of, the way that sci-fi generally represents, or imagines, the meetings of cultures. As I’ve said in a number of posts, for sci-fi the meeting of cultures is very often both violent and explicitly imperialist. In fact, from the War of the Worlds on up, the point of sci-fi often seems to be to dramatize, or rationalize, or displace, imperial narratives of conquest. In The War of the Worlds, or John Christopher’s Tripod Trilogy, or Alun Llewellyn’s The Strange Invaders, contact between different cultures is about conquest, one way or the other. Difference means subjugation or extermination; all binaries are unstable.

Le Guin’s world, again, has no binaries. And yet, the novel about a people with no gender difference is in the end a celebration of difference. This is stated perhaps most explicitly near the end of the novel, when Genly Ai’s Gethenien companion, Estraven, goes into kemmer. The two are traveling across a gigantic frozen ice sheet; there is no one else around. Estraven is driven to mate, but the only one to mate with is Genly Ai. Yet the two do not have sex, and Genly explains why:

For it seemed to me, and I think to him, that it was from that sexual tension between us, admitted now and understood, but not assuaged, that the great and sudden assurance of friendship between us rose: a friendship so much needed by us both in our exile, and already so well proved in the days and nights of our bitter journey, that it might as well be called, now as later, love. But it was from the difference between us, not from the affinities and likenesses, but from the difference, that that love came; and it was itself the bridge, the only bridge, across what divided us.

Difference, then — between races, between genders, between individuals — is not a thing to be erased or denied, but a place to live upon, and the only ground for life and for love.

On the one hand, Le Guin’s alternative to imperialism — basically, love one another — seems too easy, or even glib. The Ekumen is — like that old Federation — simply too good to be true. Certainly, the history of the U.S. seems to caution pretty strongly against believing empires when they say that they are only empiring for the good of those empired.

And Genly Ai himself seems too good by half. His sexual abstention, which gives the pivotal scene above much of its force, seems hard to credit when looked at more than cursorily. He has, supposedly, been on Gethen for more than a year; he’s planning to be there for much longer; he does not seem to be intimate with anyone back on his home planet, or with his colleagues circling in stasis in the ship above. Has he just decided to never have sex again for the rest of his life — or at the least for many years? That’s a bit hard to swallow, especially given the history of imperialism and sexuality on the one hand, and the taboo-less ease of sex in the Gethenien culture on the other. What’s even harder to credit is the fact that throughout the entire book, Genly basically never expresses any sexual desire; not for the Getheniens around him, not for anyone in his past, not looking forward to the future. He is preternaturally continent. Le Guin — like Genly himself — seems to feel that not only gender, but sex, must to be verboten if difference is not to result in violence.

But even with those caveats, Left Hand of Darkness still manages something pretty rare at the time, and I think rare still — a sci-fi cross-cultural friendship which feels both genuinely cross-cultural, and genuinely like friendship. And, the book suggests, one of the greatest gifts of that friendship, or that difference, is to give you a sense of your own difference or individuality. There’s a lovely moment in the book when Genly Ai suddenly sees his own masculinity — his competitiveness, his investment in his own strength, his honor — from the vantage of his relationship with Estraven, as a cultural construct, a burden, even, that he can put down if he chooses. And there is also the moment when we get Estraven’s view of him.

There is a frailty about him. He is all unprotected, exposed, vulnerable, even to his sexual organ, which he must carry always outside himself; but he is strong, unbelievably strong. I am not sure he can keep hauling any longer than I can, but he can haul harder and faster than I — twice as hard…. To match his frailty and strength, he has a spirit easy to despair and quick to defiance: a fierce, impatient courage. This slow, hard crawling work we have been doing these days wears him out in body and will, so that if he were one of my race I should think him a coward, but he is anything but that; he has a ready bravery I have never seen the like of.

This is certainly about Genly Ai in particular, as an individual — but it’s also about his masculinity, which is, in Estraven’s eyes, not foolish or violent, but vulnerable and strong and gallant. Le Guin refuses a story in which the colonizers are evil and must be erased, just as she refuses one in which the colonized are barbarians and must be erased. Rather, she suggests, when you erase the other you erase yourself; what eyes can see you if you poke out everyone else’s eyes? The Left Hand of Darkness may not be convincing in every respect, but it is, at the very least, a useful reminder that difference is the basis, not just of genocide, but of love as well.

The Nigerians Invade London

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screen-shot-2012-06-03-at-4-30-20-pmJohn Christopher’s novel, The Possessors, is (among other things) a metaphor of imperial reversal, in which Westerners have the tables turned on them and become colonial victims of space invaders. Christopher’s fantastic Tripods Trilogy also flips colonialism, this time more specifically focused on Christopher’s native England.

Christopher’s “The Long Winter” from 1962, though, seemed like it would be different. I’d heard that it was an apocalyptic tale of a new ice age. No invading aliens; no imperial metaphor.

Shows what I know. The Long Winter is indeed about a new ice age; due to some typically vague scientific gobbledygook, the sun’s rays start to weaken, temperatures plummet, and the British isles, not to mention a large portion of the rest of the world, becomes so cold as to be virtually uninhabitable. Fuel stocks are used up, food becomes scarce, and civilization quickly and efficiently collapses into savagery.

But all of that is really just a set-up for the heart of the novel — which is an elaborate, gleefully mean-spirited excuse to shuffle the English center and the colonized periphery. As Britain disintegrates, all those who can flee desperately to warmer climes — especially Africa. The influx of wealth in that continent creates a new, flush black upper-class. The white immigrants, meanwhile, have, in most cases, lost everything, and become a despised, racial underclass — living in filth and poverty, eking out menial jobs as maids or laborers or prostitutes.

Christopher’s detailing of this reversal is both remorseless and brilliant. In one sequence, the protagonist Andy and his lover, Maddy, having just discovered that their currency is worthless, spend a night on a Nigerian beach rather than pay for lodging they can’t afford — only to be almost arrested under a newly passed white vagrancy law. In another passage, Christopher describes several white boarding school boys talking among themselves with a “fencing unsureness…[a] glib pretense of acceptance into a society which, they knew at heart, would always deny them.” Andy, overhearing them, connects their attitude instantly to that of some Jews he had himself known at boarding school in England.

What’s best about the book, however, is that Christopher is smart enough about the workings of empire to know that it can’t simply be inverted. Oftentimes, narratives which flip power relations simply assume that those on the bottom will behave like those on the top if given the chance. The “moral” ends up being that everyone would misuse power if given the chance — which may be true, but is certainly banal.

Christopher, though, knows that empire can’t be separated from history. Africa in his world is on top…but it wasn’t always so, and that fact matters a lot. Whites may be discriminated against just as blacks used to be, but the exact inflections of that discrimination are slightly different. Sometimes, this difference makes the whites’ situation even worse. Many of the Nigerians that Andy meets clearly relish the Europeans’ come-uppance — they remember suffering under the English boot, and they are eager for payback.

In other ways, though, the legacy of colonialism is a boon for the fallen Europeans — or at least gives them more options in some situations. Andy’s ex-wife, for example, is able to attach herself as a mistress to a wealthy Nigerian in part, Christopher implies, because European beauty standards remain in force. Similarly, many white men who served in European colonial armies are wanted as trainers by the Nigerian military, which is perpetually preparing for war against the white regime in South Africa.

Perhaps Christopher’s smartest reversal, though, is saved for the end of the book, when a Nigerian expedition travels north to colonize England. Andy goes along on the expedition, which is (after some power struggles) led by his Nigerian friend and benefactor, Abonitu. Abonitu repeatedly says that Andy serves as a kind of totem; a sort of living good luck charm. In some ways, this mirrors the manner in which European narratives often rely on a magic Negro — a black marker of authenticity, who provides the hero with spiritual, earthy wisdom. Andy, however, serves a slightly different purpose; he is not a marker of authenticity, but rather an icon of empire. He represents the shining white city of civilization, the position Abonitu, and Nigeria, is trying to occupy. Abonitu dehumanizes Andy, but the dehumanization functions differently than the way that, say, Tonto is dehumanized. Power is inflected by history; for the Nigerians the magic of conquest is not a seductive, humid heart of darkness, but a seductive, cold heart of white. Thus Abonitu describes his desire to take over London:

“I am excited by the idea,” Abonitu said. “And disgusted with myself, a little. When the princesses and queens of ancient Egypt died, they used to keep the bodies until putrefaction set in before handing them over to the embalmers. That was because they found that otherwise the embalmers used them for their lust. London is a dead queen.”

But London isn’t quite as defenseless as a dead queen. Again, history matters; the English — who, after all, still have modern technology, including guns — are able to fend off the Nigerian invasion. On the one hand, I enjoyed the way that Christopher made Abonitu so much more appealing than the English, so that you (or at least I) end up essentially rooting for the colonizer. But still, it is hard to avoid noticing that, in his imperial set pieces, Christopher pretty much always finishes up with a happy ending in which the plucky English throw off their oppressors. However clever his reversals, and however clearly he sees their hypocrisy and their faults, Christopher’s English background is determinative — his people still, somehow, always have to be the good guy. Even if you know how history works, I guess, it’s extremely hard to keep it from working on you.

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.”