Race in American Science Fiction

Isiah Lavender

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780253005137
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

A critical examination of Blackness and race in the predominantly White genre. Noting that science fiction is characterized by an investment in the proliferation of racial difference, Isiah Lavender III argues that racial alterity is fundamental to the genre's narrative strategy. Race in American Science Fiction offers a systematic classification of ways that race appears and how it is silenced in science fiction, while developing a critical vocabulary designed to focus attention on often-overlooked racial implications. These focused readings of science fiction contextualize race within the genre's better-known master narratives and agendas. Authors discussed include Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, and Ursula K. Le Guin, among many others. "Critically ambitious.... Isiah Lavender spurs a direct conversation about race and racism in science fiction." —De Witt Douglas Kilgore, author of Astrofuturism: Science, Race, and Visions of Utopia in Space

1	Racing Science Fiction

Science fiction produces alien and divergent neighborhoods, with strange and dissimilar signs, shifting identities, and distorted realities of existence. For example, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) is a dystopian novel set in the not too distant future around the city of Los Angeles, where downward spiraling middle-class people live in interracial walled communities for protection against the decaying and regressing social order of twenty-first-century America. This sf narrative takes the form of an autobiographical journal relating Lauren Olamina’s intimate experiences of the world as her community crumbles around her. She begins a new religion, Earthseed, where “God is change,” as she flees north through the ensuing anarchy and violence with her multiracial band of survivors, encountering various situations, ranging from gunfights and cannibalism to escaped slaves and wildfire (Sower, 3). Ultimately, the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars (Sower, 199). Butler’s story is of great consequence to readers because she explores the psychological and spiritual repercussions of racism on a disintegrating country that illustrate the importance of examining attitudes, assumptions, and feelings by which society has conditioned everyone.

Lauren is afflicted with hyperempathy syndrome, a congenital disease passed to her from her mother, an abuser of a drug called “Paracetco, the smart pill” (Sower, 11). Hyperempathy syndrome is a delusional ailment, which causes Lauren to experience the pain and pleasure of others around her. This illness creates in her a profound sense of compassion, allowing her to fight the sense of hopelessness and indifference surrounding her. It grants her the wisdom to lead people. In this light Lauren learns to value community and all it offers—solidarity, activism, and self-reliance. She and her followers must learn, teach, adapt, and grow. As Butler writes: “Embrace diversity. Or be destroyed” (Sower, 181). And so by embracing all that her community is, Lauren adapts, in the Darwinian sense, in order to survive.

Butler and other sf writers like her use sf to move us outside of our normal comprehension and allow us to see how race operates culturally. This kind of writing takes us beyond the scope of our ordinary experiences and forces us to mediate between what we already know about race and what we can learn about it by reading sf. The means to accomplish this kind of mediation relates to concepts of otherhood. And in terms of the black/white binary, sf authors would do well to examine settings, signs, and characters, even themselves, based on how otherhood fits science fiction. Butler does understand these relations, and her Parable books present a bleak, nightmarish view of a possible future in alarming detail—where there is unchecked violence and crime; the rapid spread of drugs like pyro, which induces people to start fires; gangs, drug addicts, and homeless people dominating the streets; greedy multinational corporations buying up pieces of the country; federal deregulation of minimum wages, which allows (debt) slavery to make a comeback; escalating energy, food, and water prices; spreading hunger; a corrupt, lazy, and ineffectual police force; simple diseases such as measles and cholera raging out of control; an exponentially increasing birth rate; global warming; a growing gap between the rich and poor; declining educational systems; polygamy; the failure of moral teachings from various religions, most especially Christianity; the decay of modern communication technologies such as television and dependence on older technologies such as public radio for world news; dismantling of the space program; rusting cars, guns and fire—literally social chaos caused by a convergence of social, environmental, and economic crises. As Peter Stillman describes it, “The United States is no longer the storied land of freedom and plenty” (18). In other words, twenty-first-century American life is a living hell.

Though Butler’s second novel is complicated by dual narrators, Lauren and her resentful daughter, Larkin/Asha Vere, Parable of the Talents (1998) continues the story of Lauren and her fledgling Earth-seed religion, where “change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe” (75). The U.S. is dominated by lawlessness, violence, slavery, and religious fanaticism, among other things. Lauren’s missing brother, Marcus, is back from the dead and rescued from slavery. Later, the first Earthseed community, Acorn, is destroyed; Lauren and her followers are enslaved with electronic “slave collars” by brutal extremists known as the Church of Christian America (Talents, 189); her husband dies in the reeducation camp that Acorn becomes; and her baby daughter is kidnapped and conditioned. Yet somehow Lauren manages to survive and spread the teachings of Earthseed. As the story comes to its end, Lauren is revered as a deity, but she is estranged from her now grown daughter as well as from her brother, a prominent minister in Christian America and an opponent of Earth-seed. Lauren dies before the first Earthseed ship rockets into space, but her ashes are sent with the crew to seed the stars. The second Parable novel is possibly greater in consequence than the first because Butler makes visible the strength and perseverance necessary to unlearn racist patterns and resist oppression. Here is a writer attempting to come to terms with the hurts suffered as a result of racism.

With its depictions of slavery, concentration camps, and religious zealotry, Parable of the Talents addresses issues of racism and persecution far more directly than its predecessor. The “potential” of Earth-seed to overcome differences such as race or class or sexual preference is a part of the struggle for survival (Talents, 361). The promise of human diversity is knotted with the “apocalyptic potential” of “the current racial formation of American society” (Phillips, 306). Butler embeds her critique of racism in the background of the text in such a way that the ability to reason, create technology, and use scientific advances is the only plausible means to potentially survive and progress beyond the evolutionary dead end of discrimination. As described by Patrick Sharp, “The key to Darwin’s vision of evolution was technology: [Darwin] argued that humans had been naturally selected for their ability to invent and use technology” (4). Capitalizing on this sentiment, Butler’s writing estranges reality in such a way that addresses concerns about our lack of preparedness for change as a society and as individuals. As Lauren declares, “If we’re to be anything other than smooth dinosaurs who evolve, specialize, and die, we need the stars” ( Talents, 179). Leaving Earth is the only solution to the coming race war that Lauren is able to envision. The Parable books are politically poignant because many people are afraid to look at reality; instead, they close their eyes and hope it will go away or become better. It is in sf writing such as Butler’s that we see a need for the necessary critical tools to interrogate a genre permeated by racial assumptions.

Butler’s Parable books are important to science fictional race discourse in many ways. First, she offers an incisive critique of race and class in postmodern culture by creating the walled community of Robledo, which happens to be an interracial mix of blacks, whites, Asians, and Latinos struggling to survive together in the midst of social, economic, and environmental crises. Butler’s use of diversity shows us that embracing human differences would eliminate many of the difficulties that we face today because it would dismantle the problem of the color line as society restructures itself. Second, Butler promotes the importance of building a community through thinking, teaching, and activism, where diverse groups of people work together to solve current social problems created by distrust, prejudice, hate, and greed in conjunction with separatism. As Madhu Dubey acknowledges, “The process of finding unity in diversity is necessarily risky and difficult, requiring the ability to interpret unfamiliar cultural codes and the alert balancing of suspicion and trust typical of urban social interactions” (“Folk,” 113). Third, through questioning dominant social paradigms and dismissing them, Butler undermines racial coding in sf with a black woman protagonist without explicitly talking about race. Her work is an effective counter model against racist images presented in the works of white writers, and lends itself nicely to investigating the obvious tensions between these competing representations.

What may be thought of as “black” science fiction has been written by many people of diverse backgrounds—black, white, and other. Of course, factors from race and class to geography and the media help determine how these people write their own kind of black sf. However, addressing this “blackness” in sf is central to changing how we read, define, and critique the genre itself. It is essential to build a dialogue with existing theories of sf, racial science, and popular culture in order to create new ideas about how to apply sf studies to race.

Acknowledging and dealing with race in sf may have a significant cultural effect for the twenty-first century because it can prepare us for the looming social changes that may descend upon us as America ceases to be dominated by the white majority, such as those imagined in Butler’s Parable novels. We will be in strange territory with such alarming changes, and sf has already charted a few new paths through that territory. These paths present both opportunities and challenges for society to establish new values. In this regard, sf criticism is essential for stimulating appreciation of diversity. Many sf critics, as well as scholars outside the field, coincidentally suggest spaces in which race can be explored in the genre. Brian Aldiss and David Wingrove’s Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (1986) and Brooks Landon’s Science Fiction after 1900: From the Steam Man to the Stars (1997) are very important to the premises (and promises) of seeing sf criticism through the unique concepts of blackground and otherhood. These authors begin to fill in the historical gaps in our knowledge of sf and its various movements, and by ignoring race in their work, they let us see the vast need to address race and all of its complexities in sf. In fact, these texts further buttress my belief that an underdeveloped, and perhaps checked, tradition of resistance to the sf genre exists. Representations of race in many of the various themes, motifs, metaphors, and icons of the sf tradition are being resisted. Race and racism in sf has hardly been discussed by scholars or fans in any meaningful way. A cultural critic could turn the tradition on its head by offering an overview of sf similar in scope to Aldiss and Wingrove and Landon that discusses racial codes. There are many other sf works that function in much the same way, hinting at racial spaces open to question in science fiction. In other words, room exists in sf to query racial spaces.

For instance, Mark Rose’s Alien Encounters: Anatomy of Science Fiction (1981) establishes a framework for the sf genre by defining its controlling paradigm as the alien encounter. He states, “We can observe the way the concern with the human in relation to the nonhuman projects itself through four logically related categories,” which he identifies as “space, time, machine, and monster” (32).¹ Rose begins here to devise a valuable model that can be used to uncover problematic representations of race as “alien” others. External encounters with aliens symbolize the internal conflicts of a humanity marked, or perhaps scarred, by racial experience, our continual state of difference. Aldiss mentions that “the essential American obsession” in science fiction “is with the Alien—and thus perhaps with self-identity” (Aldiss and Wingrove, 119). To amend his statement: the American obsession with race is often superimposed onto science fiction aliens. Somewhat ironically, Sharon DeGraw welcomes “an extraterrestrial Other” as a “replacement for terrestrial othering focused on ethnicity, race, nationality, or gender” (16). In this respect, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr.’s commentary on aliens is more pointed in terms of race. He notes that sf constructs “alien-human difference as analogous to terrestrial racial difference,” permitting “much the same imaginary sleight-of-hand as the concept of race” (228). The sheer volume of criticism pertaining to the alien dictates that I expand and enrich my exploration of race and racism by touching on the subject of other beings.

Other scholars use the cyborg as a metaphor to complicate notions of identity, such as race that exists on the edge of the human-machine boundary, or to speculate on the idea of a posthumanity: human-artificial hybrids that are disturbingly other. Envisioning exactly how the cyborg occupies a new race position becomes possible when thinking about future projections of human racial history. In the same way, post-humanism changes how we think about our physical being by raising new questions of what is innately or naturally human. Scott Bukatman’s Terminal Identity: The Visual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (1993) looks at the intersection of man and machine as a posthuman subjectivity. Donna J. Haraway’s classic essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto” (1991), also provides a blueprint for investigating new manifestations of race ideology, the cyborg imaginary. Likewise, N. Katherine Hayles’s How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) relates how posthumanism challenges human subjectivity through the increasingly complicated technological development of man machines such as the cyborg or artificial intelligence. “The fact remains that technology is rapidly making the concept of the ‘natural’ human obsolete,” as Sherryl Vint describes it in her book Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction (7). Tension will manifest between humanity and its mechanical progeny along the lines of race and racism, a “new” racism based on “old” ways of thinking about difference. For instance, Philip K. Dick’s novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (1968) complicates what it means to be human in regard to race in one important way: androids pass for human. The severity of discrimination against biological androids, manufactured human beings in the text, is clearly a human fear that manifests racism based on a paranoid belief that machines could replace men.

My own thinking diverges here from that of posthumanist scholars in that I consider these new beings as new races. For example, would constructed humans or informational systems be privileged over their human counterparts? Is individual consciousness essential for machine races? How would this machine identity evolve? How would humanity interact with these other beings? How should race exist if the human body cannot be distinguished from a computer simulation or a cybernetic being? Certainly, sf criticism inspires a hotbed of ontological questions in regard to race and racism.

Aldiss, Landon, Rose, Bukatman, Haraway, Hayles, and Vint suggest spaces where race-reading can be mapped as well as analyzed; they call to mind the deep, dark spaces in criticism defined here as blackground. However, these readings do not go far enough to provide a combination of spatial and social locations ideal for exploring ideas of race. In dealing with the shortage of race criticism, blackground becomes invaluable in seeking to fill in the logical gaps and spaces left by other scholars. Because sf helps us think about the continually changing present through the dual lenses of defamiliarization and extrapolation, it also helps us to think about alternate tomorrows as well as to question images of these tomorrows, distortions of the various historical presents and realities.

We begin at the intersection of Darko Suvin and Samuel R. Delany. Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979) outlines the intellectual gravity and verve necessary for investigating the various textual codes of sf, and Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw (1977; hereafter JHJ) pinpoints the language of sf as a word-by-word, sentence-by-sentence revisionary reading process that produces innovative meanings unique to sf. Suvin supplies a rigorous definition of sf aimed at the content of the genre, and Delany provides a style-conscious definition designed to unveil the distinctive means of expression in sf. Placed together, the trenchant perceptions of these two stars provide a blueprint for deciphering the content and style of sf as the genre presents alternate referential worlds. As a result, science fiction has cultivated and encouraged new ways of reading because of the many valuable attempts at defining it. In the tradition of Suvin’s and Delany’s theories, I am attempting to articulate otherhood in relation to the blackground brought forth in this book as my own mode of reading that offers a new way of interpreting race and racism in sf. I feel that investigating the state of race criticism in terms of how otherhoods work on blackgrounds will illuminate the development and practice of racism in the sf community. Both Suvin and Delany serve as a foundation for this thinking.

Perhaps the most renowned and influential sf theorist, Suvin defines “science fiction as the literature of cognitive estrangement” (4; italics in original). Suvin’s celebrated definition of sf is one of the wellsprings of the genre because it brings a measure of respectability to the study of this “popular” genre in the academic world. His definition also remains a continual source of information over thirty years later. It provides sf with a sense of importance to scholars working in other fields—but why?

In his effort to garner high regard for sf, Suvin emphasizes literary theory in his definition by constructing carefully arranged binary oppositions between everyday forms of fiction and sf and establishing a framework of estrangement. Normal “mainstream” fiction operates through a recognizable framework of naturalism or realism that provides an accurate representation of humanity and culture. The world of the text is similar to our own world; it is concerned about the facts and rejects the visionary component of sf. However, sf functions through estrangement, that is, by presenting something familiar in a way strange enough to make it unfamiliar.

Estrangement ironically separates the known from the unknown, creating a sense of the alien about a familiar object or concept. In other words, the ordinary world is defamiliarized; it is presented in a way that is exceedingly, and perhaps eerily, different from our own experience. In Suvin’s usage, estrangement is a response to genuine originality. For Suvin, “The attitude of estrangement … has grown into the formal framework of the genre” (7; italics in original). Nonetheless, Suvin realizes that estrangement alone is not enough to distinguish sf from other genres because estrangement is also produced in fantasy, horror, gothic fiction, fairy tales, myth, and so on. Cognition comes into play here by making a distinction between sf and everything else in literature.

Cognition literally means the act of knowing based on elements of perception. This knowing can be further reduced to empirical factual knowledge, and in turn empirical knowledge is gained through applying scientific methods of recognition, formulation of a problem, and collecting data through experimentation and observation to form and test hypothetical solutions to the problem. For example, Francis Crick and James Watson discovered the double helix structure of DNA in 1953, and this breakthrough has made many medical advances possible. Cognition, then, becomes a procedure of analyzing and understanding the alternative reality of sf texts that is generated through estrangement.

Hence, cognitive estra...