Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Recommended further reading

  Badmington, Neil. Alien Chic: Posthumanism and the Other Within. New York: Routledge, 2004.

  Considers how representations of aliens in SF and popular culture activate posthumanist fantasies, putting pressure on humanist ideologies and raising significant questions about selfhood and identity.

  Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1996.

  A searching study of the implications of depictions of female cyborgs in SF and popular culture, focusing on particular intersections of embodiment and technoculture such as reproductive technologies and body modification practices.

  Bukatman, Scott. Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1993.

  A wide-ranging and penetrating analysis of how subjectivity and embodiment have been represented in contemporary SF, especially cyberpunk fiction and film, with its delirious visions of human-machine symbiosis.

  Fernbach, Amanda. Fantasies of Fetishism: From Decadence to the Posthuman. Rutgers, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2002.

  Explores the implications of techno-fetishistic fantasies of self-transformation and the delirious sexualization of machines in SF and popular culture.

  Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

  A pathbreaking study of how cybernetics discourse paved the way for posthuman constructions of the subject; offers incisive readings of SF by Philip K. Dick, William Gibson, Greg Bear, and others.

  Latham, Rob. Consuming Youth: Vampires, Cyborgs and the Culture of Consumption. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2002.

  Examines how contemporary popular culture, including SF and especially cyberpunk, mobilizes figures of nonhuman otherness to allegorize and critique ideologies of consumerism.

  Milburn, Colin. Nanovision: Engineering the Future. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2008.

  Explores how SF and popular-science discourses depict the biological and social implications of nanotechnology, including its challenge to conceptions of the embodied self and its proliferation of posthuman fantasies.

  Raulerson, Joshua. Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2013.

  A compelling study of “post-cyberpunk” SF that considers the implications of the technological Singularity for issues of embodiment and personhood, examining and critiquing both fictional and theoretical depictions of transhumanist and posthumanist futures.

  Telotte, J. P. Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1995.

  Argues that the figure of the artificial person—robots, androids, cyborgs, and other “technological doubles”—is the central image of the SF film genre; offers probing readings of SF films, from Metropolis (1926) through Total Recall (1990), that depict this iconic figure.

  Wolmark, Jenny, ed. Cybersexualities: A Reader on Feminist Theory, Cyborgs and Cyberspace. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 1999.

  A superlative anthology that gathers key readings on the relationship between cyborgs and the dynamics of gender and sexuality; three broad sections address “Technology, Embodiment and Cyberspace,” “Cybersubjects: Cyborgs and Cyberpunks,” and “Cyborg Futures.”

  Part 5

  Race and the legacy of colonialism

  The first reading in this section, a 2003 essay by Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, argues that the emergence and consolidation of the SF genre during the nineteenth century was closely linked with the ideological dynamics of imperialism. Science fiction’s central focus on technological “progress” was, Csicsery-Ronay claims, inextricable from the colonial enterprise of annexing and subjugating territory, a project that established technology as a governing force for both colonizer and colonized alike. Examining the growth of the genre within specific imperialist states, Csicsery-Ronay shows how distinct “national styles” of SF developed in synch with the realities of colonial expansion peculiar to each nation. At the same time, a general ideology of technological control—what Csicsery-Ronay, drawing on the theories of Michael Hardt and Anonio Negri, calls “Empire”—began to establish itself as the encompassing goal of the global colonial regime. This ideology also deeply informs SF, “which likewise rel[ies] on a cosmos governed by the laws and right of technoscience.” The “imperial imagination” of classical SF—its fantasy of extending technocultural dominance outward to the stars—is thus essentially imbricated with imperialist agendas, but this does not mean that the genre cannot generate powerful and trenchant critiques of the implications and effects of technoscientific hegemony. Csicsery-Ronay’s wide-ranging argument has seeded much subsequent SF criticism, which has deployed perspectives from the discourse of postcolonial studies to examine SF’s undeniable debts to Empire.

  The following selection by Kodwo Eshun brilliantly shows how SF can, despite its origins in colonialist histories, be used to arraign the logics of empire. Crafted as an imaginary report written by a team of African archaeologists in a future where African states (today still subject to neocolonial pressures) have combined into a self-governing federation, the essay makes a compelling case for the construction of “counterfutures” that can speak to those whose cultures have been disenfranchised or expropriated by the forces of imperialism. These counterfutures would operate as all SF does: not by attempting in some supposedly disinterested way to predict the coming future but by intervening into present-day politics in order to articulate alternatives. An eloquent defense of “Afrofuturism,” the essay urges writers and other creative practitioners to sift through the genre’s “audiovisions of extraterrestriality, futurology, and techno-science fictions” in search of expressive and ideological resources that can speak to peoples of the African Diaspora, in order to construct a technocultural imaginary out of a reclaimed tradition of black utopian thought. Though SF may have been forged in the crucible of colonialism, Afrofuturist artists can nonetheless use it to craft “powerful competing futures” that combat white European hegemony. As Eshun’s discussion shows, one of the major contributions of Afrofuturism has been to open genre criticism to a broader range of cultural reference than the classic literary corpus, including centrally the work of visual artists and musicians who have used “extraterrestriality as a hyperbolic trope” to address Afro-Diasporic subjects seeking alternative, more just realities.1

  The next essay, by Grace Dillon, offers an acute analysis of the work of a major Afrofuturist SF author, Nalo Hopkinson. According to Dillon, Hopkinson’s SF and fantasy writings, emerging from native Caribbean mythology and the hybrid experiences of Creole peoples in the region, collectively articulate a powerful defense of “indigenous scientific literacies,” expanding the parameters of what counts as authentic knowledge within the genre. By contrast with Western science, which constructs the natural world as humanity’s other and opens it for technological management and exploitation, indigenous practices seek a more harmonious and sustainable relationship with the environment—a relationship based on a “sense of spiritual interconnectedness among humans, plants, and animals.” In Hopkinson’s SF, indigenous technological practices are evoked and celebrated in a way that fuses the concerns of Afro-Diasporic and Native American peoples, offering up nuanced and sophisticated explorations of alternative ecological systems.

  Dillon’s discussion links up with my essay on the theme of “Ecological Imperialism” within SF. I argue that SF’s obsession with scenarios of alien invasion and catastrophe cannot be disentangled from colonialist assumptions and anxieties. Moreover, a significant number of these stories engage with concerns regarding the ongoing eco-apocalypse inaugurated by colonial expansion, wherein “alien biota” were transplanted into new environments with disastrous consequences. Looking closely at several works of New Wave SF informed by an ecological consciousness, I show that the genre is capable of developing critical alternatives to the Eurocentric hegemony over
nature, including considerations of kinship with the nonhuman world, which Dillon also advocates.

  The next selection, by Stephen Hong Sohn, expands the critical discourse on alternative futurisms within SF to consider the ways in which the genre has—and can—engage with Asian and Asian American peoples. On the one hand, there is little question that SF has historically trafficked in “yellow peril” fantasies, not just during the heyday of colonialism but in a lingering “techno-Orientalism” that remains legible in many contemporary texts. On the other hand, the thematic linking of Asians with aliens makes possible all manner of “imagined futures, alternative realities, and counterfactual narratives” that explore “racial tension and exclusion” in critical ways. Like Eshun, Sohn seeks to draw attention to cultural productions that not only confront the legacies of colonialist racism and ethnocentrism but also offer modes of extrapolation and speculation that escape the simple binary of the West and its “others.”

  Nalo Hopkinson’s 2009 essay, “A Report from Planet Midnight,” is at once a significant critical intervention into the discourse of race in SF and a brilliant work of performative Afrofuturism in its own right. Originally delivered as a speech at the 2008 International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts, Hopkinson’s piece uses the classic SF trope of “first contact” with alien others to explore the ways in which white authors, editors, and fans have sought, often with unfortunate results, to engage with issues of race and representation. Wearing a t-shirt reading “Speaker to White Folks,” Hopkinson enacted a scenario of voodoo possession, in which her body was “ridden” by an extraterrestrial spirit trying to make sense of typically insensitive communications regarding race and ethnicity.2 Many of the comments that she hilariously “translates” have to do with issues of racial stereotyping and the dynamics of intercultural appropriation. Yet at the same time as she exposes the lines of racial privilege and constraint that operate within the genre, she also makes clear that SF, with its rich and resonant ability to evoke alternative futures, can be a source for hope and solidarity.

  The final essay in this section is Lysa Rivera’s study of “borderlands SF” a work that explores the “experiences not only of alienation, displacement, and marginalization but also those of survival, resistance, and resilience” characteristic of subjects inhabiting the liminal geographic and ideological terrain separating the U.S. from Mexico. As Rivera shows, there has recently been a spate of artistic and cultural work by Latino futurists designed to address the fraught politics surrounding race, immigration, and cultural imperialism, especially in the wake of the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which began implementation in 1994. With its construction of a frontier zone in which technosocial imperatives were given free rein, NAFTA reinvigorated debates about the dynamics of colonialism in a neoliberal era, spawning a series of speculative responses that use the resources of SF to “defamiliarize borderlands topographies, both social and political,” in ways geared to provoke critical reflection and resistance. Like the other readings in this section, Rivera highlights ways in which colonialist imperatives lie at the very heart of the genre’s engagement with the world with the key texts she analyzes showing that readers and viewers “can only apprehend and understand the future through their own colonial past.”

  Notes

  1. The term “Afrofuturism” was coined in 1994 by Mark Dery in a piece included in his book Flame Wars: The Discourse of Cyberculture (Durham, NC: Duke UP, 1994) and developed in books by Eshun, Alondra Nelson, and Louis Chude-Sokei, among others. See “A Notebook on Afrofuturism,” an excellent website with resources on the topic maintained by Howard Ramsby II, which is available at: http://www.culturalfront.org/2012/04/notebook-on-afrofuturism.html, as well as texts cited in the bibliography to this section.

  2. Many of these comments are derived from a fraught online debate within the SF community that has come to be known as “RaceFail ’09.” For a critical discussion, see (on top of Hopkinson’s speech) the entry on the topic on the Fanlore website at http://fanlore.org/wiki/RaceFail_%2709, as well as the wealth of materials available on the Fanhistory website: http://www.fanhistory.com/wiki/Race_Fail_2009.

  30

  Science fiction and empire

  Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

  In this essay, I will make a preliminary attempt at cognitive mapping. I mean to look at sf as an expression of the political-cultural transformation that originated in European imperialism and was inspired by the ideal of a single global technological regime. I will make the claim that the conditions for the emergence of sf as a genre are made possible by three factors: the technological expansion that drove real imperialism, the need felt by national audiences for literary-cultural mediation as their societies were transformed from historical nations into hegemons, and the fantastic model of achieved technoscientific Empire.

  A quick list of the nations that have produced most of the sf in the past century and a half shows a distinct pattern. The dominant sf nations are precisely those that attempted to expand beyond their national borders in imperialist projects: Britain, France, Germany, Soviet Russia, Japan, and the US.1 The pattern is clear, but not simple. English and French sf took off when their imperial projects were at their heights, and have continued to thrive long after their colonies gained independence.2 German sf was primarily a product of Weimar—that is, after the collapse of the short-lived German imperium.3 Japanese sf—which is now one of the most influential of contemporary international styles—also produced relatively little before the end of World War II.4 Soviet sf picked up a rich Russian tradition of satirical and mystical scientific fantasy and adapted it to its own revolutionary mysticism in the 1920s; after a long dormancy under Stalin, it revived again during the thaw of the 1960s, only to evaporate with the fall of Communism.5 In the US, sf was a well-developed minor genre in the nineteenth century; it exploded in the 1920s and has continued its hegemony ever since. Whether this occurred during the collapse of imperialism as a world-historical project, or fully within a pax Americana that can stand as the American Empire, we will have to examine. Our answers may not only help us to interpret how the sf genre functions in twentieth-century cultural history, but also make us sensitive to its function as a mediator between national literary traditions and that chimerical beast, global technoculture.

  To conduct this investigation, we must be clear about certain concepts that it is hard to be clear about. By sf, we should understand not an ideal category with a putative social or aesthetic logic, but what national audiences understand to be sf—which is less a class than a jelly that shifts around but doesn’t lose its mass. Some core elements of the genre appear in every sf culture, and help to establish an international prototype for what audiences consider sf. But there are significant differences at the “margins” of the class.6 We should also keep in mind that imperialist projects took different forms in different national cultures, depending on when they were embarked upon, the character of the home culture, and their material technological relations. I approach the matter as a complex evolution from imperialist projects that were expansions from nation-consolidating modernizing projects—i.e., attaching territories to the nation-state with the naive belief that the metropole would not be changed—to the condition of global market capitalism that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, in their book Empire (2000), treat as postmodern empire. Sf, I will argue, has been driven by a desire for the imaginary transformation of imperialism into Empire, viewed not primarily in terms of political and economic contests among cartels and peoples, but as a technological regime that affects and ensures the global control system of de-nationalized communications. It is in this sense that Empire is the fantastic entelechy of imperialism, the ideal state that transcends the national competitions leading toward it.

  For most commentators, imperialism is the ideological justification for attempts by a nation-state to extend its power over other, weaker territories, in competition with similar nation-states striving for the
same goals. Hardt and Negri’s concept of Empire, by contrast, is the more or less achieved regime of global capitalism. This regime fatally restricts the power of nation-states, and maintains itself through institutions of global governance and exchange, information technologies, and the de facto military dominance of the United States.

  I am not concerned with whether Hardt and Negri’s model accurately describes the real conditions of the global capitalist regime.7 Its thesis is being put to the test at this very moment, as the US pursues a conquest that resembles classical imperialism at least as much as it does global conflict management. We will see in time whether it has irreparably disturbed the Pax Americana on which so much of Hardt and Negri’s theory rests, or whether it has dramatically expanded the power of the American Empire to enforce “world peace.” For my part, Hardt and Negri’s notion is thin stuff upon which to base a critique of global capitalism. It is, however, immensely useful as a tool for understanding contemporary geopolitical mythology, as a cognitive map, in Jameson’s terms, of the present. It manages to combine crucial ideas about globalization shared by multinational capitalism and Marxist critiques of imperialism; and by doing so it describes an imaginary world-picture in which fundamental historical transformations are conceptualized and rationalized. As a political model, it has the flavor of sf—and thus joins other such political sf-myths as Haraway’s cyborg, Baudrillard’s simulacra, and Deleuze-Guattari’s topologies.8 As a world-model, it is simultaneously an ideological fiction and a way of experiencing the world. It is also what Peter Stockwell calls an architext: a complex cognitive metaphor onto which can be mapped readers’ sense of reality and also the many different parts of the science-fictional megatext—the shared body of works and assumptions of the sf genre (204). In this sense, the idea of Empire is like that of utopia. Indeed, I will argue that the utopian architext is closely linked to the model of Empire. I will emphasize this in science fiction by treating real imperialism as the growing pains of imaginary Empire. I will treat Empire as the entelechy, the embedded goal, the conceptual fulfillment of imperialism.