Science Fiction Criticism
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28. Thomas M. Disch, The Genocides (New York: Pocket Books, 1979), p. 104.
29. See Frank B. Golley, A History of the Ecosystem Concept in Ecology: More Than the Sum of the Parts (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996).
30. Charles S. Elton, The Ecology of Invasions by Animals and Plants (London: Chapman & Hall, 1972).
31. Elton, pp. 31, 32, 109.
32. Elton, p. 51.
33. Elton, pp. 77–93.
34. William H. McNeill, Plagues and Peoples (Garden City, NY: Anchor, 1976), p. 177.
35. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1983).
36. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 279.
37. Alan Taylor, American Colonies (New York: Viking, 2001), p. 47.
38. Thomas M. Disch, “Introduction: On Saving the World,” in The Ruins of Earth: An Anthology of Stories of the Immediate Future, ed. by Thomas M. Disch (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1971), pp. 1–7 (p. 5).
39. Disch, “Introduction: On Saving the World,” p. 5.
40. Disch, “Introduction,” p. 5.
41. Disch, The Genocides, p. 5. (Further references to The Genocides are to the edition cited in note 28 above and will appear in the text.)
42. Hartwell, p. xiv.
43. The publication of Silent Spring is generally seen as the catalytic event that spawned the modern environmental movement: sec Victor B. Sheffer, The Shaping of Environmentalism in America (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), pp. 119–21; and John McCormick, The Global Environmental Movement, 2nd edn (New York: John Wiley, 1995), pp. 65–67.
44. Cronon, Changes in the Land, p. 53.
45. Michael Stern, “From Technique to Critique: Knowledge and Human Interests in Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar, The Jagged Orbit, and The Sheep Look Up,” Science Fiction Studies, 3.2 (1976), 112–30. See also Neal Bukeavich, “‘Are We Adopting the Right Measures to Cope?’: Ecocrisis in John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar,” Science Fiction Studies, 29.1 (2002), 53–70; and, for a review of ecological themes in post-1960s SF, Patrick D. Murphy, “The Non-Alibi of Alien Scapes: SF and Ecocriticism,” in Beyond Nature Writing; Expanding the Boundaries of Ecocriticism, ed. by Karla Armbruster and Kathleen R. Wallace (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2001), pp. 263–78. A more general survey is Brian Stableford’s “Science Fiction and Ecology,” in A Companion to Science Fiction, ed. by Seed, pp. 127–41.
46. Ursula K. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, in Again, Dangerous Visions, ed. by Harlan Ellison (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972), pp. 32–117.
47. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, p. 34.
48. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, p. 35.
49. For a discussion of Le Guin’s ecofeminism see Patrick D. Murphy, Literature, Nature, Other: Ecofeminist Critiques (Albany: SUNY Press, 1995), pp. 111–21.
50. Ursula K. Le Guin, “Introduction to The Word for World Is Forest,” in Le Guin, The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction, ed. by Susan Wood (New York: Perigee, 1979), pp. 149–54 (p. 151).
51. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, p. 73.
52. Susan Wood complains that the author was “unfortunately [not] successful in avoiding the limitations of moral outrage at contemporary problems”: see “Discovering Worlds: The Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin,” in Ursula K. Le Guin; Modern Critical Views, ed. by Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea House, 1986), pp. 183–209 (pp. 186–87).
53. Ian Watson, “The Forest as Metaphor for Mind: The Word for World Is Forest and ‘Vaster Than Empires and More Slow’,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. by Bloom, pp. 47–55 (p. 48).
54. Cronon, Changes in the Land, p. 124.
55. Clifton Fadiman and Jean White, Ecocide—and Thoughts toward Survival (Santa Barbara, CA: Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, 1971). For a contemporaneous history see From Conservation to Ecology: The Development of Environmental Concern, ed. by Carroll Pursell (New York: Thomas Y. Growell, 1973).
56. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, p. 35.
57. Although both these works were published after Le Guin’s novel, the issues they treated were widely debated during the late 1960s and early 1970s. For an excellent overview of these debates see Roderick Frazier Nash, The Rights of Nature: A History of Environmental Ethics (Maclison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
58. See Nash, p. 129. As Nash summarizes Stone’s position: “Fines would be assessed and collected (by guardians) on behalf of these creatures and used to restore their habitat or create an alternative to the one destroyed.”
59. On the emergence of Green activism see McCormick, pp. 203–24.
60. Earth Day—The Beginning: A Guide for Survival, ed. by the National Staff of Environmental Action (New York: Bantam, 1970), p. v. On the origins of Earth Day, see Sheffer, pp. 124–25.
61. For a critique of essentialist views of nature see Jeffrey C. Ellis, “On the Search for a Root Cause: Essentialist Tendencies in Environmental Discourse,” in Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, ed. by William Cronon (New York: Norton, 1995), pp. 256–68. Major theoretical/historical studies of nature as a social construction include Neil Evernden, The Social Creation of Nature (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992); and Carolyn Merchant, Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture (New York: Routledge, 2004).
62. Le Guin, The Word for World Is Forest, p. 86 (my emphasis).
63. On Lyubov and other similar figures in Le Guin’s work see Karen Sinclair, “The Hero as Anthropologist,” in Ursula K. Le Guin: Voyager to Inner Lands and to Outer Space, ed. by Joe De Bolt (Port Washington, NY: Kennikat, 1979), pp. 50–65.
64. On Romantic imagery in the novel, especially the anthropomorphizing evocation of the forest as “a metaphor for the landscape of consciousness,” see Peter S. Alterman, “Ursula K. Le Guin: Damsel with a Dulcimer,” in Ursula K. Le Guin, ed. by Joseph D. Olander and Martin Harry Greenberg (New York: Taplinger, 1979), pp. 64–76 (p. 65).
65. Lynn White, Jr., “The Historical Roots of our Ecological Crisis,” in Politics and Environment: A Reader in Ecological Crisis, ed. by Walt Anderson (Pacific Palisades, CA: Goodyear, 1970), pp. 338–49 (p. 342). On the influence of White’s essay see Nash, pp. 88–96.
66. See, e.g., Climate Ark’s continuously updated website “Climate Change and Global Warming” at
67. See T. F. H. Allan, Joseph A. Tainter, and Thomas W. Hoekstra, Supply-Side Sustainability (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003), pp. 259–61.
68. J. R. McNeill, Something New under the Sun: An Environmental History of the Twentieth-Century World (New York: Norton, 2000), p. 262.
34
Alien/Asian: Imagining the racialized future
Stephen Hong Sohn
The Asian is no stranger to technology, science, or, for that matter, science fiction. Jack London’s 1906 short story “The Unparalleled Invasion,” for example, chronicles China’s emergence as a world power coming out from the shadow of Japanese imperialism. In the story’s 1976 setting, China threatens all modern civilizations due to its incredibly fecund citizens numbering in the hundreds of millions. To combat this reproductive menace, biological warfare is conveniently employed to annihilate the Chinese population. Sax Rohmer’s infamous 1913 creation of Dr. Fu Manchu is another example. Fu Manchu twines the figure of the Asian intimately with the dark sciences, as he becomes known as the “devil doctor.” Although set in London’s Chinatown, Rohmer’s Fu Manchu–centered series of novels nevertheless draws on the immigration anxieties that flourished in the United States at that time. The doctor’s dark image was so popular, in fact, that Rohmer resurrected his infamous character time and again, his series becoming a bestseller.
While both London and Rohmer operated within early twe
ntieth-century “yellow peril” fictions, their cultural representations did not emerge from a vacuum.1 Sidney L. Gulick’s foundational study, The American Japanese Problem; a Study of the Racial Relations of the East and the West, published in the same year as “The Unparalleled Invasion,” explains that “Japan’s amazing victory over Russia has raised doubts among white nations. The despised Asiatic, armed and drilled with Western weapons, is a power that must be reckoned with. In the not distant future Asia, armed, drilled, and united, will surpass in power, they aver, any single white people, and it is accordingly a peril to the rest of the world” (225). Here, Gulick refers to the 1905 conclusion of the Russo-Japanese War, which marked a sea change in international relations precisely because it was the first time an Asian nation had defeated a European power in modern warfare. However, Gulick’s rhetorical descriptions illustrate how this historical event reoriented the way the West came to see Japan, especially with respect to its potential destructive power. Certainly, this moment became embedded in the development of yellow peril discourse in the United States, as Asians regardless of their ethnic specificities became connected with territorial threat. For instance, continued tensions over Chinese immigrant laborers resulted in a series of U.S. federal exclusion acts throughout the late nineteenth century that further cemented the status of Asians as alien subjects, unfit for assimilation and integration. But the social context for Fu Manchu extended beyond U.S. borders, encompassing events in China: with the conclusion of the Manchu dynasty, Sun Yat-sen had begun a modernization campaign. According to Urmila Seshagiri, “Fu-Manchu and his hordes … emblematize not only dynastic China’s ideological opposition to the modern Christian West but also the emergent geopolitical ambitions of a post-1911 China determined to fashion itself as a nation unhindered by the imperial designs of Britain, Germany, France, Austria, Italy, Russia, or Japan” (170). From this perspective, both London’s short story and Rohmer’s book series draw from multiple anxieties over Asia as pollutive geography, military menace, and economic competitor. Both London and Rohmer imagine alternative temporalities in which the Asian is inextricably tied to science, the future, and technology.
Although yellow peril fictions and other such cultural forms first proliferated more than a century ago, the connection between the Asian and the alien remains a force to draw on to conceptualize racial tension and exclusion. Indeed, this relationship can be more strongly generated by pairing the terms as Alien/Asian. I employ the slash as a nod to the critical interventions offered by Laura Hyun Yi Kang and David Palumbo-Liu, who separately have argued that this punctuation mark functions in the term “Asian/American” to denote how Asia and America stand in an uneasy and unstable relationship with the other.2 Deriving some inspiration, then, from the slash in the phrase Asian/American, the Alien/Asian emphasizes the need to consider the Asian/American through a diverse array of representational conventions that touch on and intersect with fantasy, speculative fiction, science fiction, and other similar genres. In its multiply inflected significations, the Alien/Asian stands as a convenient way to consider the range of methods by which the Asian/American is associated with social difference and fantastical fictional worlds. Indeed, the Alien/Asian can be the extraterrestrial being who seems to speak in a strange yet familiar accented English, the migrant subject tasked with creating innovative technology that can bend the rules of time and space, or the mystical figure who stands at the margins of a narrative providing sage advice to the central hero. In this respect, “Alien/Asian” does invoke conceptions of its homonymic counterparts, “alienation” and “alien nation,” as well as sonically allied phrases such as “alien invasion” and “illegal aliens.” Indeed, the notion of the Alien/Asian is concerned centrally with the racialized subject (and associated racialized entities and signifiers) as he or she appears in imagined futures, alternative realities, and counterfactual narratives. Asian Americans or figures of Asian descent often have played large parts in these speculative terrains and often conspicuously appear in tales of interplanetary travel and galactic exploration.
Examining the Alien/Asian allows us to consider the prospective thesis that cultural production continues to draw from, write against, challenge, negotiate, and problematize the yellow peril concept through speculative cultural productions. Traditionally, the yellow peril operates with an overtly racist representation predicated on the danger it represents to the West’s economic and military primacy. Yet the spectrum that draws the Alien/Asian across the late nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-first centuries demonstrates the dramatically divergent ways that writers have represented—and continue to represent—Asian/Americans and associated Eastern signifiers and cultures as dangerous, subversive, and tactical in visual, aural, and written texts that exceed the bounds of traditional realist narratives.
When viewed this way, it becomes apparent that the yellow peril continues to inform more modern cultural productions. For instance, the cyberpunk wave in the eighties and nineties that cast Asian nations, Japan in particular, as sites for projected futuristic anxieties operates within the same frame—that of the perceived threat the so-called East presents to the West. The most commonly cited cyberpunk texts that include these orientalized futures are William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Ridley Scott’s film Blade Runner (1982). The trend of orientalizing the future has continued through numerous major Hollywood films such as Luc Besson’s The Fifth Element (1997), the Wachowski Brothers’ The Matrix trilogy (1999, 2003, 2003), and Joss Whedon’s Serenity (2005), and literary fictions such as Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash (1992), among other examples. These transformations of the earliest visions of cyberpunk suggest the continuing obsession of the East as a signifier of the future, technology, and other worlds.3 Accordingly, Takayuki Tatsumi contends:
[P]ostcyberpunk science fiction seems to have updated even the old future-war narratives.
What is highly paradoxical, however, is that the more high-tech our society gets, the more atavistic our literature becomes. For us to recognize the extent to which the future-war literary heritage has unwittingly influenced the science fiction of the present, it is important to reconstrue the pre-Wellsian and post-Wellsian narratives that emerged at the turn of the century. (70)
Here, Tatsumi points back to the “future-war narratives” as characterized by London’s “The Unparalleled Invasion” and reminds us how a stronger lineage must be drawn from yellow peril fictions to the contemporary representations of the Alien/Asian.
David Morley and Kevin Robins assert that cyberpunk representations embody a kind of techno-Orientalism. They specify that “[w]ithin the political and cultural unconscious of the West, Japan has come to exist as the figure of empty and dehumanised technological power. It represents the alienated and dystopian image of capitalist progress. This provokes both resentment and envy. The Japanese are unfeeling aliens; they are cyborgs and replicants” (170).4 Morley and Robins suggest that this offshoot of Saidian Orientalism5 manifests through ambivalence because it inspires both a desire to denigrate the unfeeling, automaton-like Alien/Asian and an envy that derives from the West’s desire to regain primacy in the global economy. Christine Cornea places techno-Orientalism in a specific social context by explaining that
at the time of Blade Runner’s release certain Eastern economies were growing fast and countries like Japan and Korea were well known for their manufacture of computer components and other cutting-edge technologies. Prior to this, it might have been that these nations were understood as suppliers for the West, but over the course of the 1980s it became apparent that the so called “Tiger Economies” were growing fast and that they were moving from being the copiers/providers of Western-led technology to becoming the inventors/initiators of new technologies. (74)6
These Asian tiger economies, also known as the NICs (newly industrializing countries), required the United States to change its economic policies concerning Asia. In the process, terms such as “Asia-Pacific” and the “Pacific Rim�
�� became ubiquitous. Reflecting on the rise of these economies in the 1980s, Miyohei Shinohara explains that “Japan ha[d] emerged as a big power economically, big enough to make the United States uneasy” (13) while Edson W. Spencer discusses how Japan was perceived during this period as an “economic predator” (153). Walden Bello and Shea Cunningham additionally recount:
[B]y the early 1980s, US policy towards the nics began to change. Triggering this
transformation was that the increasing prosperity of the state-led economies was being achieved principally by running huge trade deficits with the US. This provoked the coming together of US industries threatened by nic imports, resentful US corporations that felt excluded from growing nic domestic markets. (447)
Given these international dynamics, the rise of techno-Orientalism reflects in part the anxieties that germinated in the Asia-Pacific in the 1980s.
In traditional Orientalism, the East is configured as backward, anti-progressive, and primitive. In this respect, techno-Orientalism might suggest an opposite conception of the East, one focused on future-based fictional worlds, except for the fact that the very inhuman qualities projected onto Asian bodies recall the yellow peril designations first levied on migrants and laborers. Even as these speculatively configured Alien/Asians conduct themselves with superb technological efficiency and capitalist expertise, their lack of affect resonates as an undeveloped or, worse still, a retrograde humanism. According to Toshiya Ueno, “Just as the discourse of Orientalism has functioned to build up the identity of the West, techno-Orientalism is set up for the West to preserve its identity in its imagination of the future. It can be defined as the orientalism of cybersociety and the information age, aimed at maintaining a stable identity in a technological environment” (94). Inasmuch as the techno-Orientalist peril destabilizes American exceptionalism in the global marketplace, Ueno clarifies how such cultural productions provide the means to stabilize the West as a terrain of technological war. In this conflict, the West maintains a moralistic superiority despite having lost its high-tech superiority to the East. Hence, the American subject emerges as an embattled but resistant fighter. “Faced with a ‘Japanese future,’ high tech Orientalism resurrects the frontier—in virtual form—in order to secure open space for America,” writes Wendy Hui Kyong Chun. “As opposed to openly racist science fiction of the early to mid-twentieth century that featured the ‘yellow peril,’ cyberpunk fiction does not advocate white supremacy or resurrecting a strong United States of America. It rather offers representations of survivors, of savvy-navigators who can open closed spaces” (“Othering” 251). Chun reads the intricacies within high-tech Orientalist cultural productions as not simply exalting a superior United States, a perspective that has always been a hallmark of yellow peril fictions. London’s short story and Rohmer’s fictions ultimately uphold Western white supremacy at the expense of the Alien/Asian. However, techno-Orientalism, or what Chun calls high-tech Orientalism, troubles the viewpoint that the West can retain or recover a nostalgically configured purity, and posits instead the coherence of “open spaces” embodied through cyberspaces and the Internet. Chun points out that the failures of the West to retain its global economic positioning mean that the U.S. government and affiliated corporations are not to blame for problematic futurescapes. In this instance, a victorious narrative remains: the West, in the form of these “savvy navigators,” can cast itself as the underdog challenger to aggressive Eastern economic growth, thereby cementing the West as the indisputable center for humanistic altruism.