Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  4. Perhaps the most important work on More’s innovative utopianism is Louis Marin’s Utopiques: jeux d’espaces (Paris, 1973). A convenient discussion of Marin’s argument may be found in Fredric Jameson’s “Of Islands and Trenches: Naturalization [sic—the term ought to read “Neutralization”] and the Production of Utopian Discourse,” Diacritics (June 1977), pp. 2-21.

  5. For a useful discussion of humanity and Otherness in Lem’s novel, see Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s “The Book is the Alien: On Certain and Uncertain Readings of Lem’s Solaris,” SFS, 12 (1985): 6–21. See also Mark Rose, Alien Encounters (Cambridge, MA: 1981), pp. 82-95; and Darko Suvin, “The Open-Ended Parables of Stanislaw Lem and Solaris,” in Solaris, ed. cit., pp. 212-23.

  6. One of the few critics to stress the role of the I Ching and Oriental philosophy in Dick’s novel is Patricia Warrick, “The Encounter of Taoism and Fascism in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle,” SFS, 7 (1980): 174-90.

  Works cited

  Delany, Samuel R. The Jewel-Hinged Jaw: Notes on the Language of Science Fiction. NY: Berkley Windhover Books, 1978.

  Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? 1968; rpt. NY: Ballantine Books, 1982.

  —. The Man in the High Castle. 1962; rpt. NY: Berkley Medallion Books, 1974.

  Eagleton, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983.

  Horkheimer, Max. Critical Theory: Selected Essays, trans. Matthew J. O’Connell et al. NY: Herder & Herder, 1972.

  Le Guin, Ursula K. The Dispossessed. 1974; rpt. NY: Avon Books, 1975.

  Lem, Stanislaw. Solaris [1961], trans. Joanna Kilmartin & Steve Cox. NY: Berkley Books, 1971.

  Russ, Joanna. The Two of Them. 1978; rpt. NY: Berkley Books, 1979.

  Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale UP, 1979.

  20

  Alien cryptographies: The view from queer

  Wendy Pearson

  Fiction, then, can be divided according to the manner in which men’s relationships to other men and their surroundings are illuminated. If this is accomplished by endeavoring faithfully to reproduce empirical surfaces and textures vouched for by human senses and common sense, I propose to call it naturalistic fiction. If, on the contrary, an endeavor is made to illuminate such relations by creating a radically or significantly different formal framework. . . I propose to call it estranged fiction.

  —Darko Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (18)

  1 Introduction: Fear of a queer galaxy

  On November 25, 1998, the memberships of the U.S.S. Harvey Milk and the Voyager Visibility Project (offshoots of the lesbian and gay sf group, the Gaylaxians) issued a call for a boycott of the then soon-to-be-released Star Trek: Insurrection. After nearly two decades of lobbying the producers of the various Star Trek shows and movies for the inclusion of a lesbian or gay character1 in a cast intended to represent all types of humans (including a variety of racial and ethnic types, as well as both sexes2) and quite a miscellany of aliens, the group’s membership has finally, it seems, had enough. Curious as it might seem at first glance, sf shows seem to be the last hold-outs in a medium that is rapidly accommodating itself to the idea that there really are lesbian and gay people in the “real” world that television claims, however peculiarly, to reflect (in precisely that mode that Suvin labels “naturalistic”).

  Spokespeople for the Voyager Visibility Project note, trenchantly enough, that despite the addition of visible lesbian and gay characters to non-sf television shows, “it is just as important as ever to show that gays and lesbians will exist and will be accepted in the future.” The heteronormative assumptions behind much science fiction, both cinematic and literary, are very neatly exposed by the circular reasoning with which the producers of Star Trek refute demands for visibly non-straight characters: homophobia, they say, does not exist in the future as it is shown on Star Trek; gay characters therefore cannot be shown, since to introduce the issue of homosexuality is to turn it back into a problem: in order for Star Trek to depict a non-homophobic view of the future, it must depict a universe with no homosexuals in it.3 Clearly, logic is not a pre-requisite for would-be television gurus.

  Nevertheless, while I certainly acknowledge that a visible gay or lesbian character on the cast of a Star Trek show would be a politically astute move for those whose day-to-day politics are focused on an inclusionary, rights-based approach to ameliorating the conditions in which lesbian and gay people live, it’s worth asking whether the inclusion of a gay character on a show that presupposes an already heteronormative view of the human future can be said to “queer” that future in any significant way. If a lesbian officer is shown on the bridge, for instance, or a gay male couple is shown holding hands on the holodeck, either might certainly be an instance of “cognitive estrangement” (to borrow Suvin’s term) for many audience members, but neither instance would necessarily be queer. Of course, the producers will have to use a little—and one might suggest that it would only take a very little—imagination in showing us that their new lieutenant, shall we say, is lesbian, without making her sexuality into a “problem.”

  Moving from a consideration of Star Trek to sf in general, I suggest that the presence of a lesbian or gay character, while not per se a radical or subversive strategy, may change one thing, for a particular reader, the reader who is unused to—and is perhaps searching for—a gay/lesbian presence within sf. In this case, the naturalization of a lesbian or gay character within a plot that has nothing explicitly to do with sexuality may, temporarily, function as a novum for this reader, just as the incidental revelation in Heinlein’s Starship Troopers of Johnny Rico’s blackness did for Samuel Delany.4 In this case it is not so much the character as the character’s environment that produces cognitive estrangement, since the character goes unremarked within his world and is not marked as different, either racially in the case of Rico or sexually in the case of our putative gay/lesbian character. It is precisely this revelation that the Voyager Visibility Project wishes the producers of Star Trek to provide for its viewers: the vision of a future in which queerness is neither hidden nor revealed as difference, but is simply there. Given the ubiquity of political, religious, and social commitment to the continual reinscription of hetero-normative “family values,” this strategy may be queerer and more subversive than one might at first think.5

  For the remainder of this essay, I want to explore what might be implied when one combines the terms “queer theory” and “science fiction.” This contemplation will circulate around two quite different strategic interventions of “queer” into the world of sf—one is the performance of a “queer reading” and the other is the recognition of a “queer text.” In speaking of queer readings, I want to make it clear that this is not necessarily a strategy most usefully applied to already queer texts; similarly, I want to suggest that the inclusion of gay and lesbian characters or issues does not make a text queer. The answer to my earlier question—what would queer Star Trek?—presumes, then, a movement beyond the inclusionary towards a radical re-writing of the assumption within the show of the naturalness, endurance, and fixity of our current understandings of sexuality and its relationship both to the sex/gender dyad and to sociocultural institutions. To return to my Star Trek example one final time, the portrayal of a marriage between, say, Lieutenant Tom Paris and Ensign Harry Kim would certainly be gay—likely in both senses of the word—but it would not necessarily be queer.

  What, exactly, do I mean by “queer?” Or, as an esteemed elderly colleague of mine was heard to say, after reading my partner’s M.A. thesis proposal, “Isn’t queer a bad word?” Of course, queer is a bad word. Despite the particular joy with which both academics6 and activists (often they are the same people) have reappropriated it, for the majority of gays and lesbians “queer” is still an insult, too often accompanied by bottles, fists, or the blows of a baseball bat. Because queer theory is a politically engaged form of academic work, most people immer
sed in the field are only too conscious of the ethical implications of this reappropriation. Queer resonates not only with its pejorative usage, but also with its mundane connotations—odd, strange, eccentric. In fact, the first definition in my dictionary explains it as “deviating from the expected or normal.” Any attempt to define “queer” within a postmodernist theoretical milieu must take into account the context through which we come to understand this deviation: is the deviation itself a misunderstanding by society at large of the fact that we are all human, that lesbians and gays deviate from the normal only in terms of our choice of romantic and sexual partners, a difference which is itself understood in this formulation as minor, even inconsequential? Or does queer deviate from the “normal” in ways that are radical and subversive, dedicated to exposing and challenging an ideologized teleology that reaches beyond sexual attraction to reveal the deeply un-natural and constructed nature of our understandings of biological sex, the performative nature of gender roles, and the sociocultural institutions founded upon this ideology? Or, to put it in its simplest possible terms, is queer a politics of identity or a politics of difference?7

  My answer to this question is dependent on my own sense of where queer comes from: a dissatisfaction with both the universalizing (all gays are alike) and the segregating (gay men and lesbians are different) style of “identity politics” influenced by an ethnic model of gayness; the late twentieth century’s intellectual shift to a more contingent, discursive, and localized understanding of the production of knowledge; and AIDS. The construction in the West of AIDS as a disease identified with homosexuality and the concomitant rise of an overt and death-dealing homophobic has discourse reinforced the existing tendencies towards political engagement and consciousness on the part of those theorists, critics, and activists whose work has been gathered under the rubric of queer—even when that term has not always been used by the individuals themselves. Nevertheless, queer remains, both within the academy and among gays and lesbians in general, very much a contested term. As Annamarie Jagose points out in her survey of queer theory’s origins and meanings: “Given the extent of its commitment to denaturalization, queer itself can have neither a foundational logic nor a consistent set of characteristics” (96). Queer’s very slipperiness, however, its tendency towards instability and its pleasure in resisting attempts to make sexuality signify in monolithic ways, are all parts of its appeal. Furthermore, queer suggests a move towards not just a different conception of sexuality, but also towards a different understanding of subjectivity and agency. Lee Edelman notes, in “The Mirror and the Tank,” that

  To the extent that we are capable of identifying those junctures where the gay subjectivity we seek to produce recapitulates the oppressive logic of the culture that necessitated its emergence, we have the chance to displace that logic and begin to articulate the range of options for what might become a postmodern subject; we have the chance, in other words, to challenge, as Andreas Huyssen suggests postmodernism must, “the ideology of the subject (as male, white, and middle-class [and we must add, as he does not, heterosexual]) by developing alternate and different notions of subjectivity.” (111)

  How, we might ask, does sf allow us to develop alternate notions of subjectivity? What practices of representation have developed within the genre to allow for the expression of a subject who is not male, white, middle-class, and heterosexual? To see the potential within the genre for postmodern and, specifically, queer subjects, we need only look at the works of Samuel R. Delany and Joanna Russ. As with each of these writers, sf provides for the potential queer author more than a possible field in which to represent an alternative subjectivity. Its very popularity, its resistance to interpellation within the “mundane” field of literature, provides tools for the author who wishes to avoid the dangers of mimesis that have typically hampered gay and lesbian writing in the naturalist mode. The Cartesian subject of realist fiction always risks reincorporation back into a naturalized and faithful reproduction of “empirical surfaces and textures vouched for by human senses and common sense” (Suvin 18).

  Furthermore, sf has a long history, dating back at least to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, of questioning systems of thought, particularly those we now label metanarratives (science, history, and so on), even as it appears to—and sometimes does—valorize notions of scientific method, objectivity, and progress. Queer, with its denaturalization of master narratives and its movement towards subcultural and subaltern understandings of texts, operates, by analogy, on some of the same levels as sf. As Earl Jackson points out, “Science fiction offers a tradition of representational formalization of a worldview in which the subject is not the cause but the effect of the system that sustains it” (102). This insistence that the subject is the effect of the system neatly recapitulates the imbrication of alternate narrative strategies with dissident subjectivities, with a refusal of the Cartesian subject. This resonates for me with precisely the strategic rationale behind Samuel Delany’s call to resist attempts to reclaim sf as “literature.” In Jackson’s words,

  Delany’s theoretical blueprints for and his own examples of the kind of critical fiction that the science fiction writer can achieve revalorizes the “fictive.” The specific importance Delany places on the paraliterary differences of the genre at once constitute a challenge . . . to the dominant obfuscating obsession with “authenticity,” while providing eloquent theoretical grounding for that challenge as well as for textual practices that prioritize specification over referentiality, the production of meaning over the repetition of “Truth.” It is science fiction’s foundational infidelity to the “real world” that affords the fictive world the status of a critical model. (125)8

  In the remainder of this essay—which is literally un essai, an attempt, to see how sf and queer may illuminate each other—I hope to bring some of this “theoretical grounding” to bear on the actual practice of sf as it has evolved over this century. In so doing, I am going to suggest a variety of models for understanding the intersections of queer with sf at the level of the text. These may include, first, the sf narrative that is not overtly queer, but that can be read analogically within a specific historical context and sensibility; second, what one might call the “proto-queer” text that, although not queer itself, effects a kind of discursive challenge to the naturalized understanding of sexuality and its concomitant sociocultural surround; third, the text that is coded as queer, but in such a way as to hide in plain sight—this is the narrative equivalent of the “open secret,” the one which everybody knows, but no one wishes to call attention to, at least not within the specific historico-cultural milieu in which it was written; and finally, the overtly queer text, the text which questions the “naturalist fiction” that sex and gender and sexuality are matters of “human senses and common sense.”

  While this list may have the appearance of being categorical and complete, I want to insist that these “categories” are nothing more than tentative and temporary attempts, readings-in-process of a subject (and subject matter) that is itself in process. None of these readings, then, are necessarily authoritative nor can they take place outside a historical and cultural context, since what is hidden from one audience is plainly visible to another, and what can easily be seen from one perspective is indecipherable from another viewpoint. Like “queer” itself, my discursive strategy in this essay will require movement backwards as well as forwards, will prove on occasion slippery and even fractured in its attempt at narrative, and will remain, no doubt, contestatory and contested.

  2 (E)strange(d) fictions: Who goes there?

  Each of us with an eye on the other to make sure he doesn’t do something—peculiar. Man, aren’t we going to be a trusting bunch! Each man eyeing his neighbors with the grandest exhibition of faith and trust—I’m beginning to know what Connant meant by ‘I wish you could see your eyes.’ Every now and then we all have it, I guess. One of you looks around with a sort of ‘I-wonder-if-the-other-three-are-look.’
—John W. Campbell, Jr., “Who Goes There?” (108)

  I once asked my science-fiction class, during a seminar discussion of The Left Hand of Darkness, whether they could draw any parallels between the construction in the novel of Estraven as a traitor9 and the history, recent at the time Ursula Le Guin wrote the novel, of the House Committee for Un-American Activities. What, they responded, was a House Committee for Un-American Activities? I asked if any of them knew who Joseph McCarthy was—and received eighteen perfectly blank looks. What did the phrase “commie pinko queer” mean? Well, they could parse parts of it—“commie” was a communist and “queer” was, well, you know—but they couldn’t put the parts together. What could being communist possibly have to do with being gay, or vice versa? And what did either have to do with The Left Hand of Darkness?

  Queer how things have changed, isn’t it? And now—belatedly—I should warn you that discussions like this, of sexuality and particularly of sexuality in the context of the fluidity and semantic sensitivity of queer theory, inevitably lead to bad puns and worse jokes. The stories invoked within the complex field of attempting to understand how we exist in the world as sexual beings are fraught with double entendres, contradictions, misapprehensions, and (un)faithful reiterations—so much so that one might, in fact, be tempted to agree with Leo Bersani when he argues that, at heart, most people really don’t like sex (95). Certainly we fear its power, just as we fear being exposed as different. But unlike the differences of race and biological sex, sexual difference is often invisible.10

  I would like to offer, as my first example of a possible application of queer theory to sf, a reading of John W. Campbell’s classic “Who Goes There?”(1938) against the cultural anxiety that enveloped ideas about homosexuality in the era surrounding WWII. At its height, this anxiety was related to a widespread desire to return to a vision of pre-war morality and lifestyle,11 in part by persuading women to return to the home, and in part by repudiating a practice of unspoken but official tolerance—within fairly strict limits—for gays and lesbians in the military and in government service.12 The backlash was spectacular, exacerbated as it was in most of the Western world both by xenophobia and anti-communist propaganda. It is also one of those historical events that exhibits particularly well the imbrication of misogyny and homophobia: both the women and the queers had to be put back in their place. At the same time, the need to reassert heteronormativity was reflected in cultural production by a proliferation, particularly within sf, of both stories and movies which demonized the Other—already a prevalent theme within the genre. While these sf tales are normally viewed as allegories of the dangers of communism, they can also be read as warnings of the dangers of homosexuality to the emergent nuclear family: whereas in Nazi Germany, the Jew and the homosexual were metonymically the same person,13 in the US and Canada, the communist and the homosexual were seen as representing so clear and present a danger to the American way of life as to render them virtually indistinguishable.14