Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (625 page)

Standing in the middle of the street, I looked up to Mr. Morris’s sixth-floor window. He was on the balcony, waving frantically at me. In the dark, I could just see the Y of the slingshot in his hand. He shouted, “Go and stand in the entranceway, girl! I comin’ down!” He disappeared inside, and I headed back towards the building. By the time I got there, I was weak-kneed and shaky; reaction was setting in, and my head was spinning from the blow I’d taken. I didn’t think I’d ever get the taste of that man’s flesh out of my mouth. I leaned against the inside door, waiting for Mr. Morris. It wasn’t long before he came bustling out of the elevator, let me inside, and sat me down on the couch in the lobby, fussing the whole time.

“Jesus Christ, child! Is a good thing I decide to watch from the balcony to make sure you reach the car safe! Lawd, look at what happen to you, eh? Just because you had the kindness to spen’ a little time with a ol’ man like me! I sorry, girl; I sorry can’t done!”

“It’s okay, Mr. Morris; it’s not your fault. I’m all right. I’m just glad that you were watching.” I was getting a little hysterical. “I come to rescue you with my food bank freeze-dried turkey dinner, and you end up rescuing me instead! I have to ask you, though, Mr. Morris; how come every time you rescue a lady, you end up breaking her windows?”

* * * *

That Sunday, I drove over to my parents’ place for Thanksgiving dinner. I was wearing a beret, cocked at a chic angle over the cauliflower ear that the mugger had given me. No sense panicking my mom and dad. I had gone to the emergency hospital on Friday night, and they’d disinfected and bandaged me. I was all right; in fact, I was so happy that two days later, I still felt giddy. So nice to know that there wouldn’t be photos of my dead body on the covers of the tabloids that week.

As I pulled up in the car, I could see my parents through the living room window, sitting and watching television. I went inside.

“Mom! Dad! Happy Thanksgiving!” I gave my mother a kiss, smiled at my dad.

“Cynthia, child,” he said, “I glad you reach; I could start making the gravy now.”

“Marvin, don’t be so stupidee,” my mother scolded. “You know she won’t eat no gravy; she mindin’ she figure!”

“It’s okay, Mom; it’s Thanksgiving, and I’m going to eat everything you put on my plate. If I get too fat, I’m just going to have to start walking to work. You’ve got to work with what you’ve got, after all.” She looked surprised, but didn’t say anything.

I poked around in the kitchen, like I always did. Dad stood at the stove, stirring the gravy. There was another saucepan on the stove, with the remains of that

morning’s cocoa in it. It smelt wonderful. I reached around my father to turn on the burner under the cocoa. He frowned at me.

“Is cocoa-tea, Cyn’Cyn. You don’t drink that no more.”

“I just want to finish what’s left in the pot, Dad. I mean, you don’t want it to go to waste, do you?”

* * * *

Copyright © 1996 by Nalo Hopkinson.

“To be a person of colour [sic] writing science fiction,” notes Nalo Hopkinson in the introduction to the anthology
So Long Been Dreaming: Postcolonial Science Fiction and Fantasy
, “is to be under suspicion of having internalized one’s colonization” since “one of the most familiar memes of science fiction is that of going to foreign countries and colonizing the natives” (7). For writers such as Hopkinson, who was born in Jamaica and uses Caribbean history and its storytelling traditions in her writing, science fiction “makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things,” particularly examining and critiquing the ongoing presence and practice of colonialism (9). Colonialism, simply defined, “is the conquest and control of other people’s lands and goods” (Loomba 2). Colonial practices and rule, particularly in the nineteenth century, “was legitimized by anthropological theories which increasingly portrayed the peoples of the colonized world as inferior, childlike, or feminine, incapable of looking after themselves […] and requiring the paternal rule of the west for their own best interests” (Young 2). These theories, as Robert J.C. Young points out, were rooted in racism: White, western culture was deemed inherently, naturally superior, the only source of true civilization. This belief in Western superiority is reflected in the lost world tale
She
, by Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard, which depicts an African subterranean civilization, known as the Kor, who still engage in cannibalism, and are ruled by a mysterious white woman, Ayesha, or “She-who-must-be-obeyed.” The British adventurers who encounter the Kor and Ayesha represent British imperialism, and yet Ayesha herself presents a potential threat to the British Empire itself through her intentions to go to England and replace Queen Victoria. The most famous evocation and criticism of British imperialism, however, can be found in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. While Africa and its peoples are presented as barbaric and degenerate, Conrad also questions the motives and supposed civility of Western culture through the megalomaniacal behavior of the murderous station manager Kurtz. In turn, science fiction also developed a conflicted relationship towards imperialism, as can be seen in H. G. Wells’s War of the Worlds that would develop over time to a far more critical stance, as in The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, “His Vegetable Wife” by Pat Murphy, John Kessel’s “Invaders,” and Orson Scott Card’s “America.”

As more and more writers use science fiction to not only interrogate the institution of colonialism, but also to explore questions of gender, race, and identity, a distinct subgenre has emerged: that of postcolonial science fiction. With its emphasis on presenting marginalized figures and groups, its interest in the relationship between power and identity, and, of course, its focus on colonialism, postcolonial science fiction blends the central theoretical concerns of one literary discipline—postcolonialism—with the imaginative possibilities of one of the most enduring literary genres.

In her 2007 work Science Fiction and Empire, Patricia Kerslake poses the following intriguing question: “Is SF designed as the handmaiden, the smoking gun or the nemesis of the imperial project” (63)? Kerslake’s question identifies the contradictory positions that science fiction has taken regarding the imperialist project: on the one hand, science fiction has been a chronicle of imperialistic possibility and inevitability, a celebration of mankind’s ability to subdue and civilize beings not just on Earth, but into the far reaches of space. On the other hand, science fiction has frequently, and loudly, criticized the practices of imperialism,i both on Earth and throughout the galaxy, exposing in particular imperialism’s racism and brutality, its disregard for other cultures, and its firm belief in its own rightness and superiority. In “Invaders,” John Kessel interweaves two narratives: the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs with the arrival of drug-addicted aliens to modern-day America. The relationship between the two narratives is clear: the Spanish are no better than the cocaine junkies from another world, and while the Spanish use physical violence to subdue the Aztecs, the aliens use humanity’s own greed against them, buying priceless pieces of art and even, in one instance, offering to buy Chile. In a stunning ending, a modern-day American travels back in time in a machine provided by the aliens to shortly before the arrival of the Spanish, and alerts the Aztec to this looming threat. This knowledge allows the Aztecs to meet the Spaniards as they arrive, and slaughter them “to the last man,” resulting in a “happily ever after” (850). Pat Murphy focuses specifically on the sexual violence inherent in imperialism in “His Vegetable Wife.” A farmer purchases a “vegetable wife,” a semi-sentient plant in the form of a human woman whose express purpose is to serve him sexually. When she resists his advances, he proceeds to rape her, rationalizing his actions on two levels: first, she is his wife, so it is impossible for him to rape her, and second, her inferior status, coupled with her inability to verbally communicate with him, places the “blame” for the conflict between the farmer and his “wife” on her shoulders. The farmer firmly believes not only in his wife’s inferiority, but his superiority as a man and more civilized form of life, and as such, the vegetable wife is subjected not only to sexual violence, but physical violence, in order to subdue her. In the end, however, she successfully resists, killing the farmer, and planting him in the soil, leaving his body to rot, just like his ideas about his superiority.

Even in texts that appear to be roundly critical of imperialism, however, one can discern a lingering ambivalence about imperialism; in other words, in certain science fiction texts, such as the popular television series
Stargate: SG-1
and its spin-off,
Stargate: Atlantis
, one can see how science fiction is both the handmaiden and nemesis to imperialism at the same time. For eight years of the original series’ ten-year run, the stargate team protected the Earth and numerous other civilizations from the Goa’uld, a parasitical race of beings who physically invade and take over bodies. The Goa’uld are also parasites of technology; they do not create, they steal. This is in direct contrast to the Asgaard, the “little green men” whose incredibly powerful technology and benign natures are presented as clearly superior to both the villainous Goa’uld and the often clumsy, even “childish” Earthlings. While the Goa’uld are also technologically superior to Earth, because they use that technology to dominate and oppress, indeed, to enslave people who believe the Goa’uld to be powerful gods, they are hardly different than the super evil Borg from Star Trek: The Next Generation, whose rhetoric of adaptability is a thin guise for the physical and cultural genocide they commit on a regular basis. The Goa’uld are more than just villains, however; their overt imperialism serves to deflect attention away from the more subtle imperialism of the stargate team, which, in protecting civilizations from the Goa’uld, is also presenting those civilizations with an alternative that is not just preferable, but decidedly American in its ethos. Furthermore, the presence of the Goa’uld, and in the last two seasons of the show, the Ori, allows Stargate: SG-1 to “reveal things about ourselves that are intensely uncomfortable,” but without having to point the finger directly back at ourselves (Roberts 27). In other words, the Goa’uld and the Ori serve as proxies for a postcolonial reevaluation of the imperialist history of the West and its science fiction.

What, then, does “postcolonial” mean? If, as the term more immediately suggests, “post” as in “after,” then has science fiction reached a point where it is “over” colonialism, that colonialism is finished? The obvious answer is, of course, no. Just as mankind has yet to move past colonial practices and mindsets, so too is science fiction still intimately invested in both the narrative and philosophical richness that the problem of colonialism and empire provides. Rather than think of “postcolonial” as signifying a point in time, Ella Shohat offers a more useful way to think about the “post” in “postcolonial.” Recognizing that the term is imbued with an “ambiguous spatio-temporality” that assumes shared experiences of imperialism across what are widely different colonial histories, independence movements, and cultures (102), Shohat prefers to think of “post” as referring to “beyond,” which suggests an attempt to interrogate and trouble the ideologies and assumptions that undergird colonialist practice. David Spur, in
The Rhetoric of Empire
, offers further clarification of the term “postcolonial:”

I shall refer to the postcolonial in two ways: as an historical situation marked by the dismantling of traditional institutions of colonial power, and as a search for alternatives to the discourses of the colonial era…in neither the historical nor the cultural sense does the postcolonial mark a clean break with the colonial: the relations of colonizer to colonized have neither remained the same nor have they disappeared. (6-7)

Michelle Reid, in defining “postcolonialism,” the term used to refer to the intellectual study of the “postcolonial” condition, points out that challenging “the Western-centric focus of the literary canon and academic scholarship” is a major aspect to the discipline (256). Just as important is an “examination of the colonial process, the struggle for independence by former colonies, and their creation of distinct national identities” (256).

Finally, Uppinder Mehan, the co-editor of
So Long Been Dreaming
, offers a useful definition of the postcolonial individual:

[. . .]
one who is a member of a nation that has recently achieved independence from its colonizers, but by shifting from the adjective ‘postcolonial’ to the noun ‘postcoloniality’ a more inclusive and I think truer definition comes into play. Postcoloniality includes those of us who are survivors—or descendents of survivors—of sustained, racial colonial processes; the members of cultures of resistance to colonial oppression; the members of minority cultures which are essentially colonized nations within a larger nation; and those of us who identify ourselves as having Aboriginal, African, South Asian, Asian ancestry, wherever we make our homes.
(269)

Postcolonial literature and science fiction actually share much in common, from the genres’ use and refashioning of other genres to suit their own purposes, questions regarding their literary merit as well as those who write in these genres and to what end, to the deeply moral and ethical concerns in which each engage. Both postcolonial literature and science fiction are linked by their engagement with otherness, or alterity. In postcolonial studies, the “Other” is not only situated as the aberrant of the imperialist norm (a norm that is the same as that which marks difference in SF), but significantly by the denial of the “individuation” that is the right of the norm only (Loomba 52). The function of the “Other” is intriguingly similar in both genres: the “Other” consolidates difference as well as solidifies the norm; as both a theoretical concept and a tangible object, the “Other” is used to justify the exploitation and annihilation of peoples, whether red, black, or green; it is used to explain how repulsion and desire can exist concurrently; and it signifies an ever-looming threat of contamination (by sex or disease) as well as violence. As Michelle Reid usefully points out

Postcolonialism interrogates the complex Self/Other relationships created by the colonial encounter. SF imagines encounters with the Other (the alien, the strange newness brought about by change), typically from the perspective of the dominant Self. It perpetuates images of pioneering spaceship crews landing on other planets and exterminating bug-eyed aliens, but also questions and undermines the supposed manifest destiny of space exploration and the oppression of the Other as alien. (257)

It is clear that identification with the “Other” is a significant marker of postcolonial science fiction. In
The Martian Chronicles
, Ray Bradbury offers the reader the voice of the Other in several stories, a voice in some ways more familiar than strange, that encourages identification with the Martians: they have families, engage in silly domestic spats, and even enjoy boating. At the same time, he points out to the reader what makes the Martians different: they wear masks to show emotions, they have golden skin, six fingers, and are shorter than humans. In this complex mixture of similar and alien, Bradbury moves away from H. G. Wells’ more one-note presentation of invading Martians in
War of the Worlds
as insectlike, technologically advanced menaces. The Martians are not the only counter-voices Bradbury provides, however. In “And the Moon be Still as Bright,” a member of the Fourth Expedition, Spender, learns that the majority of the Martian population has been decimated by the chicken pox brought by the Third Expedition. His response is sympathetic, and, I would suggest, postcolonial: he describes to his captain how the cities, mountains, and canals will lose their “proper” Martian names in an attempt to “change [Mars] to fit ourselves” (54). But “no matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it” (54). His captain does not understand Spender’s shame at what is to come, and as such, disagrees with Spender who states “I imagine they hate us” (54). “They accepted what came to them,” Captain Wilder tells Spender, and “they probably don’t mind us being here any more than they’d mind children playing on the lawn” (54). This conversation, and Spender’s refusal to participate any further in the expedition (he retreats to the hills and kills some of his former comrades in an attempt to protect what is left of Mars, only to be killed himself by his captain) is one of several examples in the Chronicles of the melding of postcolonial concerns with science fiction tropes.