Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Some of the editors who made that type of statement have since been taking a little extra effort to be seen to be supportive of people of color in the genre; but they have not, to my knowledge, acknowledged why they are doing so. And they have not, to my knowledge, acknowledged fault and apologized. You can’t bring about reconciliation by doing little or nothing. You can’t make change that way. So at some level, perhaps the will really isn’t there. I know some of these editors and I respect the good books they’ve made happen. But at the moment I have no reason to trust them and I do not wish to be published by them.

  I believe it was a clueful white person who coined the phrase “RaceFail ’09” to signify the more vehemently recalcitrant white voices in the debate. A couple of those voices have adopted the nomenclature “failfandom” as a pejorative to denote people in the community, especially people of color, who unapologetically name the racism we perceive. RaceFail ’09 generated thousands of Internet postings, links to many of which have been archived on the Web.4

  So that is the context in which I attended ICFA in 2009. It took me a long time to get over being so scared and angry that I couldn’t write my speech. I actually completed the bulk of it at the conference the day before, when I had a bolt of inspiration about an angle from which to tackle it. I decided to make the first half of my address somewhat performative. It is a culture-jamming of references from fantasy, science fiction, and linguistic and cultural references from the American and Caribbean parts of the African diaspora. I’ve footnoted some of them here. Because the first half of the speech was in effect a script, there were a few performance notes in it that I’d written to myself. These are between square brackets, in capitals. There is also an afterword about an exchange I had minutes after finishing my speech.

  A reluctant ambassador from the planet of midnight

  Good afternoon. I’d like to thank the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for dedicating this year’s ICFA to the theme of race in the literature of the fantastic, and for inviting Mr. Tatsumi, Mr. Yep, me, and many others to address the topic.

  The first thing I’d like to say is . . .

  [be light-headed, then become the horse5]

  Uh—oh my. It worked. I’m here. [look at hands, then at audience]

  Dear people, please don’t be alarmed. I mean no harm. I really don’t. I’m riding on the head of this horse only for a short time, I promise you. Please don’t hurt me. This was an extreme measure. There seemed to be no other way to communicate directly with you.

  I come from another planet. For decades now, we have been receiving broadcasts from your planet that seem to be intended for us. We are delighted, and honored, and also puzzled. We have teams of our best translators working to decipher your messages, and we cannot honestly tell whether they are gestures of friendship, or of aggression. As you might imagine, it’s quite important for us to know which. If it is indeed friendship, we would be delighted to reciprocate. If of aggression, well, as one of our ethno-cultural groups might say, “Don’t start none, there won’t be none.”

  I should be very clear: I do not represent my whole planet. Neither do I represent my whole ethnocultural group. Or even all of the translators assigned to this project; try to get any two of us to agree to the same thing . . . There was vehement disagreement among us about whether I should attempt this dire method of direct communication. So, frankly, I snuck away when no one was looking.

  [fiddle with clothing]

  My, this horse does dress most uncomfortably, doesn’t she?

  [take top shirt off to reveal t-shirt that reads “speaker to white folks”]

  This? This is merely my name, dear friends. Or my title, if you will. I hope I may indeed call you friends. But to help ensure my safety, or at least to create a record of what happens this day, I am accompanied by my companion, Dances With White People, and his recording device. [indicate david findlay, who’s videotaping6] Again, please don’t be alarmed. It is not a weapon of any kind.

  So. To the business at hand. It is my hope that if I repeat to you some of the most vexing phrases we’ve received from your peoples, that you might be able to clarify their meanings. I decided to address this conference because, as you might imagine, we, as a different race of beings than you are, are very interested in the stories you tell each other about interracial relations. We have had bad experiences with the collision of cultures. Some of them even between groups on our own planet. So I’m sure you can understand why we are concerned.

  Our first sign that perhaps our responses to you were going awry was when we released this document into your world:

  [slide: original cover of novel midnight robber accurately depicting the protagonist, who is a brown-skinned little girl with black african features]

  When one of the cultures of your world reconfigured it, this was the result:

  [slide: cover of itallan translation of midnight robber (il planeta di mezzanotte) showing protagonist as a blue-skinned young woman with european features and straight hair, wearing a bra top and fringed miniskirt]

  As far as our translators can tell, the title of this version can be rendered as The Planet of Midnight, which, according to your understanding, seems to be where the blue people live. We have noticed a preponderance of wistful references in your literature to magical people with blue skin.

  [slides: nightcrawler; mystique; the beast (all from the x-men); kali; krishna; dr. manhattan; papa smurf; smurfette; the cookie monster; etc. but none of the beings from avatar, cuz i’m ornery that way and don’t want to invoke that particular farce in this space today. besides, the connection should be self-evident]

  Since none of the images of real people from your world show such blue-skinned beings, we can only theorize about what these images symbolize or eulogize. Perhaps a race of yours that has gone extinct, or that has self-destructed. Perhaps it is a race that has gone into voluntary seclusion, maybe as an attempt at self-protection. The more pessimistic among us fear that this is a race being kept in isolation, for what horrendous planet-wide crime we shudder to imagine; or that it is a race of earlier sentient beings that you have exterminated. Whatever the truth of the matter, we’re sure you realize why it is of extreme importance to us to learn whether imprisonment, extinction, and mythologizing are your only methods of dealing with interspecies conflict.

  Here are some of the other communications with which we’re having trouble:

  You say: “I’m not racist.”

  Primary translation: “I can wade through feces without getting any of it on me.”

  Secondary translation: “My shit don’t stink.”

  Our dilemma: To us, someone making this kind of delusional claim is in immediate need of the same healing treatments we offer to people who are convinced that they can fly. Such people are a danger to themselves and to others. And yet, the communications from your world are replete with this type of statement from people who do not seem to be under treatment of any kind, and few among you take any steps to limit the harm they do. We are forced to conclude that you must be as laissez-faire in your response to people who think they can fly. This can’t possibly be true, can it? Few of us are willing to visit a planet where we would clearly have to dodge plummeting bodies with every step. [flinch, look upwards]

  You say: “This story is a universal one.”

  Translation: “This story is very specifically about us, and after all, we’re the only ones who matter.”

  Our attempts at translating this one caused quite an argument in our ranks. Several feuds have started as a result, and one or two of them have gotten quite ugly. Because why would any sentient race say something that means its exact opposite? Well, one of our number did point out that we ourselves do occasionally display this regrettable habit. But that’s an us thing; you wouldn’t understand.

  You say: “That thing that you made doesn’t belong to you. It’s universal.”

  Now, this one is complicated. To make any sense
of it at all, we had to proceed from statements of the previous type, in which “universal” means, approximately, “we own it.”

  Therefore, our attempt at a primary translation is this: “I like that thing you made, so I’m going to claim it’s mine. And I’m bigger than you, and nobody who counts really likes you anyway, so you can’t stop me.”

  Secondary translation, for brevity: “I think yours is prettier, so I’m just going to help myself to it.”

  You say: “Ethnic.”

  Primary translation: “Those quaint and somewhat primitive people over there.”

  Secondary translation: “Unnatural, abnormal, or, disgusting, as in your term ‘ethnic food.’”7

  You must understand that on our planet, everyone has an ethnicity. With cultural mixing, some of us have more than one. To us, “ethnic” means “the cultures of everyone.” Clearly we are missing something crucial, and “ethnic” is not the word you actually mean. We beg you to provide us with clarity.

  You say: “God, you people are so exotic.”

  Primary translation: “I, by the power vested in me as a representative of a dominant culture that needs never question its certainty that it is the centre of the universe, hereby dub you ‘the entertainment.’”

  Secondary translation: “God, you people are so ethnic.”

  One of our translators offered a tertiary translation: “Just take this money already and pose with my kid so I can take a picture.” But, between you and me, he’s somewhat, um, argumentative at the best of times.

  You say: “But I’m not the one who enslaved your people. That was my ancestors.”

  Primary translation: “I benefit from the inequities that were institutionalized before my birth, and I have no interest in doing anything to disrupt that comfortable state of affairs.”

  Secondary translation: “I feel really guilty about this stuff, but it’s bigger than me. I’m powerless.”

  Tertiary translation (from you-know-who): “Suck it up, bitches.”

  You say: “I don’t have any culture of my own; that’s why I want yours.”

  Primary translation: “I am wilfully unaware of or repulsed by how ubiquitous my rich and powerful culture has made itself. I’d really rather hang out with you guys.”

  Secondary translation: “I’m bored! This stuff is hard!”

  You say: “I don’t see race.”

  Primary translation: “If I keep very quiet, maybe you wont see me and ask me to do any work.”

  Secondary translation: “I’m just a little black rain-cloud, hovering under the honey tree.”8

  You say: “Eventually this race stuff won’t matter, because we’ll all interbreed and become postracial.”

  Primary translation: “If I keep very quiet, maybe you won’t see me and ask me to do any work. Plus you might have sex with me.”

  Secondary translation: “I don’t want to do my homework!

  This stuff is hard! I want some cookies! Are we there yet?”

  You say: “My grandparents had a hard time too when they came to this country.”

  Primary translation: “Oh, shut up, already. Let’s talk about me some more.”

  Secondary translation: “La-la-la, I can’t hear you. That’s because I don’t see race.”

  You say: “But we can’t do that! That would be affirmative action!”

  Primary translation: “I don’t want to do something that’s proven to work, because then, well, it might work.”

  Oh, dear. The horse is coming back online. She’s putting up quite the struggle. Feisty little filly, ain’t she? So I’m going to have to take my leave of you, and before I could get my answers, too. I’m so sorry. You have my questions, though? You heard them? You can send the explanations out via the usual channels through which you’ve been sending us messages. I promise we’ll hear the . . .

  [become nalo again]

  Wow. What happened there? Never mind, probably just nerves. [take off t-shirt. underneath is a plain black dress, indicate t-shirt] Dunno where that ratty thing came from.

  Anyway, every few years I come up with another statement about what fantasy and science fiction do. I don’t discard my previous notions; I just add new ones for the consideration of myself and others. I don’t consider them definitive or all-encompassing, and I consider them at best only partially descriptive. But I find them fun to contemplate. The other day, our roommate told us that he’d asked his grandmother what technological invention had revolutionized her life. He thought she’d say the television, but she replied, “No, that thing destroyed my social life.”

  She told him that in fact it was the refrigerator that had changed her life. She said it freed up hours of her days, creating leisure time that allowed her to go and see a movie occasionally, and to hang out with friends.

  My roomie’s story left me thinking about just how labor-intensive it is to maintain a single human life, never mind a family of humans. We are a lot of work; really, to have any quality of life, we are more work than we can manage by ourselves.

  Time was, if you were rich, you had servants to do a lot of the drudge and administrative work for you. Hang on; that one hasn’t changed.

  If you weren’t rich, you got together in communities and shared what labor you could, and you had children to help with the rest. And that one hasn’t changed much, either.

  And if you weren’t the breeding kind, you found other ways to make yourself invaluable to the people in charge. I don’t suppose I’m saying anything about this that is news to this crowd, so please bear with me while I build my argument.

  So that’s a really glossed-over version of how the balance of labor and power has traditionally tended to play out. But as disempowered groups in society become more empowered, they begin to be able to make more choices about where they are going to place their labor efforts.

  We’ve made magic; we’ve created this near-intangible substance called “money” (it’s almost more an idea than a substance, really) which you can use—if you have enough of it—to compel or persuade others to do some of your work for you.

  In many countries of the world, women and men can now choose to have fewer children.

  Sometimes, people are able to choose to do blue-collar work over relatively unskilled labor; can get the education that allows them to do white-collar work, or even end up in the highly skilled labor pool, the one in which you find doctors and lawyers. If you manage to boost yourself there, you can afford to hire people to do a lot of your drudge work for you.

  But the necessity for somebody to do the hard labor to sustain human lives and communities hasn’t gone away. One way we make sure that there are always people to do that work is by deliberately keeping portions of our populations disenfranchized so that they have little choice but drudge work.

  We also create “labor-saving” devices. But as anyone who’s ever used a computer knows, in many ways, those just create new forms of work.

  We’re always imagining new ways around the dilemma. So it seems to me that one of the things that fantasy and science fiction do is to imaginatively address the core problem of who does the work.

  Science fiction looks at technological approaches to the problem, and at all the problems the solutions create. (You know, the discovery that a computer isn’t exactly a labor-saving device. Or the question of what happens when our machines become so complex that they are in effect sentient beings able to demand rights.)

  Fantasy looks at the idea of work. Instead of using technology, it uses magic. But both are labor-saving devices.

  And both fantasy and science fiction wrestle with the current and historical class inequities we maintain in order to have people to do the work.

  Especially in North America, class differences have historically become so entrenched that they are characterized as or conflated with cultural or racial differences.

  And as someone brilliant has said, “Race doesn’t exist, but it’ll kill ya.”

  So one might say that
, at a very deep level, one of the things that fantasy and science fiction do is to use mythmaking to examine and explore socioeconomically configured ethnoracial power imbalances.

  That’s why those of us who live in racialized bodies, and who love and read fantasy and science fiction because we relate so strongly to it, can get so bloody irritated at the level of sheer, wilful ignorance that members of the dominant community bring to the discourse about race and its real-life effects. The discussion is everywhere in the literature, but some of the people in this community can be so adamant about being blind to it, and so determined to derail, belittle, obstruct, and silence those of us for whom it can literally affect the quality of our lives!

  I’ve known for quite some time now that I’d end up on this podium, speaking on race in the fantastic. That was challenging enough, being a person of color addressing a mostly white crowd in North America on the issue of race in anything. I was already anxious and exercized about the whole thing. But then, white people in this community instigated the disturbance in the Force that we’re now calling RaceFail ’09, and what was already loaded became outright trigger-happy.

  I know that some of you already have your backs up because I just said that white people instigated it. So be it. I’m not going to get into defending that statement. I’m up here presumably because somebody in this organization thinks I know what I’m talking about. My point is that writing this speech has been no doddle. I’ve been composing it in my mind for over a year now, through apprehension and anxiety. When it came down to the actual writing of it, I had to take frequent rage breaks.

  In the course of RaceFail ’09, I have heard white people in the community who are angry at the anger displayed by people of color in the community; people who say that we don’t deserve to be listened to if we can’t be polite. I couldn’t figure out why this statement felt wrongheaded to me, until I read a post by my colleague, writer Nora Jemisin, on RaceFail. She pointed out that discussions of race in this community have been happening, politely, for decades. And though there has been change, it has been minimal. When we people of color started to blow up, suddenly there were more of you paying attention. That’s the thing. I’ve said that when you step on my foot once or twice, I might politely ask you to get off it. But by the thousandth time you do it, the excuse of “I didn’t see you there” starts to sound a hell of a lot like, “I don’t care enough about you to pay attention.”