Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction

John Rieder

• Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780819573803
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire en science-fiction

This groundbreaking study explores science fiction's complex relationship with colonialism and imperialism. In the first full-length study of the subject, John Rieder argues that the history and ideology of colonialism are crucial components of science fiction's displaced references to history and its engagement in ideological production. With original scholarship and theoretical sophistication, he offers new and innovative readings of both acknowledged classics and rediscovered gems. Rider proposes that the basic texture of much science fiction—in particular its vacillation between fantasies of discovery and visions of disaster—is established by the profound ambivalence that pervades colonial accounts of the exotic "other." Includes discussion of works by Edwin A. Abbott, Edward Bellamy, Edgar Rice Burroughs, John W. Campbell, George Tomkyns Chesney, Arthur Conan Doyle, H. Rider Haggard, Edmond Hamilton, W. H. Hudson, Richard Jefferies, Henry Kuttner, Alun Llewellyn, Jack London, A. Merritt, Catherine L. Moore, William Morris, Garrett P. Serviss, Mary Shelley, Olaf Stapledon, and H. G. Wells.

chapter one

Introduction

The Colonial Gaze and the Frame of Science Fiction

The question organizing this book concerns the connection between the early history of the genre of English-language science fiction and the history and discourses of colonialism. Consider first a brief example. Those searching out the origins of science fiction in English have often pointed to classical and European marvelous journeys to other worlds as an important part of its genealogy (e.g., Philmus 37–55; Aldiss 67–89; Stableford 18–23). It makes sense that if science fiction has anything to do with modern science (I am deferring the problem of defining “science fiction” until the fourth section of this chapter), the Copernican shift from a geocentric to a helio-centric understanding of the solar system provides a crucial point where the ancient plot of the marvelous journey starts becoming something like science fiction, because the Copernican shift radically changed the status of other worlds in relation to our own. An Earth no longer placed at the center of the universe became, potentially, just one more among the incalculable plurality of worlds. Of all the marvelous journeys to other worlds written in Galileo’s seventeenth century, Cyrano de Bergerac’s The Comical History of the States and Empires of the Moon and the Sun (first translated into English in 1656) is the one that science fiction scholars have expressed the greatest admiration for (see Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction 103–106). All the scholars I’ve cited would agree that the main work of Cyrano’s satire is hardly a matter of celestial mechanics, however. Its crux is the way it mocks, parodies, criticizes, and denaturalizes the cultural norms of his French contemporaries. The importance of his satire has far less to do with Copernicus’s taking the Earth out of the center of the solar system than with Cyrano’s taking his own culture out of the center of the human race, making it no longer definitive of the range of human possibilities.

The example of Cyrano suggests that the disturbance of ethnocentrism, the achievement of a perspective from which one’s own culture is only one of a number of possible cultures, is as important a part of the history of science fiction, as much a condition of possibility for the genre’s coming to be, as developments in the physical sciences. The achievement of an estranged, critical perspective on one’s home culture always has been one of the potential benefits of travel in foreign lands. In the fifteenth and the sixteenth centuries, Europeans greatly expanded the extent and the kinds of contacts they had with the non-European world. Between the time of Cyrano and that of H. G. Wells, those contacts enveloped the world in a Europe-centered system of commerce and political power. Europeans mapped the non-European world, settled colonies in it, mined it and farmed it, bought and sold some of its inhabitants, and ruled over many others. In the process of all of this, they also developed a scientific discourse about culture and mankind. Its understanding of human evolution and the relation between culture and technology played a strong part in the works of Wells and his contemporaries that later came to be called science fiction.

Evolutionary theory and anthropology, both profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology and history, are especially important to early science fiction from the mid-nineteenth century on. They matter first of all as conceptual material. Ideas about the nature of humankind are central to any body of literature, but scientific accounts of humanity’s origins and its possible or probable futures are especially basic to science fiction. Evolutionary theory and anthropology also serve as frameworks for the Social Darwinian ideologies that pervade early science fiction. The complex mixture of ideas about competition, adaptation, race, and destiny that was in part generated by evolutionary theory, and was in part an attempt to come to grips with—or to negate—its implications, forms a major part of the thematic material of early science fiction.¹ These will be recurrent topics of discussion in Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.

The thesis that colonialism is a significant historical context for early science fiction is not an extravagant one. Indeed, its strong foundation in the obvious has been well recognized by scholars of science fiction. Most historians of science fiction agree that utopian and satirical representations of encounters between European travelers and non-Europeans—such as Thomas More’s Utopia (1516), Cyrano’s Comical History, and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726)—form a major part of the genre’s prehistory. Scholars largely (though not universally) agree that the period of the most fervid imperialist expansion in the late nineteenth century is also the crucial period for the emergence of the genre (Suvin, Victorian Science Fiction in the UK 325–26; Clareson, Some Kind of Paradise 4; James, “Science Fiction by Gaslight” 34–35; for one who disagrees, see Delany, Silent Interviews 25–27). Science fiction comes into visibility first in those countries most heavily involved in imperialist projects—France and England—and then gains popularity in the United States, Germany, and Russia as those countries also enter into more and more serious imperial competition (Csicsery-Ronay 231). Most important, no informed reader can doubt that allusions to colonial history and situations are ubiquitous features of early science fiction motifs and plots. It is not a matter of asking whether but of determining precisely how and to what extent the stories engage colonialism. The work of interpreting the relation of colonialism and science fiction really gets under way, then, by attempting to decipher the fiction’s often distorted and topsy-turvy references to colonialism. Only then can one properly ask how early science fiction lives and breathes in the atmosphere of colonial history and its discourses, how it reflects or contributes to ideological production of ideas about the shape of history, and how it might, in varying degrees, enact a struggle over humankind’s ability to reshape it.

From Satirical Reversal to Anthropological Difference

We can start from Edward Said’s argument in Culture and Imperialism that “the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other” (70–71). His thesis is that the social space of the novel, which defines the possibilities allowed to its characters and the limits suffered by them, is involved inextricably with Western Europe’s project of global expansion and control over non-European territories and cultures from the eighteenth century to the present. One could no more separate the psychological and domestic spaces represented in the novel from this emerging sense of a world knit together by Western political and economic control than one could isolate a private realm of emotions and interpersonal relationships from the history of class and property relations during the same period. Said does not argue that imperialism determines the form of the novel, but simply that it provides a structure of possibilities and a distribution of knowledge and power that the novel inevitably articulates.

Emergent English-language science fiction articulates the distribution of knowledge and power at a certain moment of colonialism’s history. If the Victorian vogue for adventure fiction in general seems to ride the rising tide of imperial expansion, particularly into Africa and the Pacific, the increasing popularity of journeys into outer space or under the ground in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries probably reflects the near exhaustion of the actual unexplored areas of the globe—the disappearance of the white spaces on the map, to invoke a famous anecdote of Conrad’s. Having no place on Earth left for the radical exoticism of unexplored territory, the writers invent places elsewhere. But this compensatory reflex is only the beginning of the story. For colonialism is not merely an opening up of new possibilities, a “new world” becoming available to the “old” one, but also provides the impetus behind cognitive revolutions in the biological and human sciences that reshaped European notions of its own history and society. The exotic, once it had been scrutinized, analyzed, theorized, catalogued, and displayed, showed a tendency to turn back upon and re-evaluate those who had thus appropriated and appraised it. As the French philosopher Jacques Derrida put it, “Ethnology could have been born as a science only at the moment when a decentering had come about: at the moment when European culture … had been dislocated, driven from its locus, and forced to stop considering itself as the culture of reference” (282, Derrida’s emphasis). Emergent science fiction also articulates the effects of this dislocation. The double-edged effect of the exotic—as a means of gratifying familiar appetites and as a challenge to one’s sense of the proper or the natural—pervades early science fiction.

Although, as we will see further on, much early science fiction seems merely to transpose and revivify colonial ideologies, the invention of other worlds very often originates in a satirical impulse to turn things upside down and inside out. A satirical reversal of hierarchies generates the comparison of extraterrestrials to colonialists in an episode from Washington Irving’s A History of New York by Diedrich Knickerbocker in 1809, for example. Irving invents a race from the Moon who arrive on the Earth “possessed of superior knowledge in the art of extermination,” on the basis of which, after “finding this planet to be nothing but a howling wilderness, inhabited by us poor savages and wild beasts,” they “take formal possession of it, in the name of his most gracious and philosophical excellency, the man in the moon” (252). Human savagery consists not only in having the wrong skin color (white, not pea-green) and anatomy (two eyes instead of one) but also in humans’ perverse marriage customs and religious beliefs (monogamy and Christianity instead of communal promiscuity and ecstatic Lunacy). Irving’s point is entirely explicit. When the savages ungratefully resist receiving the gifts of civilization, the lunarians convert them to their own way of thinking “by main force” and “graciously permit [the savages] to exist in the torrid deserts of Arabia or the frozen regions of Lapland, there to enjoy the blessings of civilization and the charms of lunar philosophy, in much the same manner as the reformed and enlightened savages of this country are kindly suffered to inhabit the inhospitable forests of the north, or the impenetrable wildernesses of South America” (254).

In the course of the nineteenth century, Irving’s strategy of satiric reversal persists in a number of important proto-science-fiction texts, such as Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872), with its reversal of the values of disease and crime, and James De Mille’s extraordinary lost-race novel, A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder (1888), with its systematic reversal of the values of light and darkness, wealth and poverty, and life and death. The most famous such reversal in the history of science fiction closely resembles Irving’s. At the outset of H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Wells asks his English readers to compare the Martian invasion of Earth with the Europeans’ genocidal invasion of the Tasmanians, thus demanding that the colonizers imagine themselves as the colonized, or the about-to-be-colonized. But in Wells this reversal of perspective entails something more, because the analogy rests on the logic prevalent in contemporary anthropology that the indigenous, primitive other’s present is the colonizer’s own past. Wells’s Martians invading England are like Europeans in Tasmania not just because they are arrogant colonialists invading a technologically inferior civilization, but also because, with their hypertrophied brains and prosthetic machines, they are a version of the human race’s own future.

The confrontation of humans and Martians is thus a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. But this anachronism is the mark of anthropological difference, that is, the way late-nineteenth-century anthropology conceptualized the play of identity and difference between the scientific observer and the anthropological subject—both human, but inhabiting different moments in the history of civilization. As George Stocking puts it in his intellectual history of Victorian anthropology, Victorian anthropologists, while expressing shock at the devastating effects of European contact on the Tasmanians, were able to adopt an apologetic tone about it because they understood the Tasmanians as “living representatives of the early Stone Age,” and thus their “extinction was simply a matter of … placing the Tasmanians back into the dead prehistoric world where they belonged” (282–83). The trope of the savage as a remnant of the past unites such authoritative and influential works as Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society (1877), where the kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders are read as evidence of “our” past, with Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo (1913), where the sexual practices of “primitive” societies are interpreted as developmental stages leading to the mature sexuality of the West. Johannes Fabian has argued that the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another.²

The anachronistic structure of anthropological difference is one of the key features that links emergent science fiction to colonialism. The crucial point is the way it sets into motion a vacillation between fantastic desires and critical estrangement that corresponds to the double-edged effects of the exotic. Robert Stafford, in an excellent essay on “Scientific Exploration and Empire” in the Oxford History of the British Empire, writes that, by the last decades of the century, “absorption in overseas wilderness represented a form of time travel” for the British explorer and, more to the point, for the reading public who seized upon the primitive, abundant, unzoned spaces described in the narratives of exploration as a veritable “fiefdom, calling new worlds into being to redress the balance of the old” (313, 315). Thus when Verne, Wells, and others wrote of voyages underground, under the sea, and into the heavens for the readers of the age of imperialism, the otherworldliness of the colonies provided a new kind of legibility and significance to an ancient plot. Colonial commerce and imperial politics often turned the marvelous voyage into a fantasy of appropriation alluding to real objects and real effects that pervaded and transformed life in the homelands. At the same time, the strange destinations of such voyages now also referred to a centuries-old project of cognitive appropriation, a reading of the exotic other that made possible, and perhaps even necessary, a rereading of oneself. How does science fiction organize this play of the fantastic and the critical?

The Colonial Gaze

Although the reversal of perspective in Wells’s War of the Worlds transposes the positions of colonizer and colonized, the framework of colonial relations itself remains intact in an important way. Wells switches the position of his white Western narrator from its accustomed, dominant, colonizing one to that of the dominated indigenous inhabitant of the colonized land. This strategy makes not only the political, but also the cognitive effects of the framework of colonial relations visible in a tellingly distorted way. The narrator no longer occupies the position usually accorded to the scientific observer, but instead finds himself in that role historically occupied by those who are looked at and theorized about rather than those who look, analyze, and theorize. We can call this cognitive framework establishing the different positions of the one who looks and the one who is looked at the structure of the “colonial gaze,” borrowing and adapting Laura Mulvey’s influential analysis of the cinematic gaze in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.”³ The colonial gaze distributes knowledge and power to the subject who looks, while denying or minimizing access to power for its object, the one looked at. This structure—a cognitive disposition that both rests upon and helps to maintain and reproduce the political and economic arrangements that establish the subjects’ respective positions—remains strikingly present and effective in spite of the reversal of perspective in The War of the Worlds. Let me illustrate by way of comparison with another, pictorial representation of a colonial subject.

Consider the combination of exoticism, realism, science, and ideology in Alonzo Gartley’s 1903 photograph, Native Hawaiian Fisherman with Throw Net (fig. 1). Gartley’s photo orients itself towards its subject, the Hawaiian net fisherman, according to conventions that draw upon both anthropology and ethnography. The man’s clothing and the technology he is using draw attention to his cultural difference from an implicitly Western viewer who occupies the position of the photographic apparatus itself. The clothing and fishing tools identify the man as a primitive, and so, according to the dominant model of ethnographic and anthropological discourse at the time, establish his presence before the photo’s audience as a kind of anachronism that allows them to view their own cultural past. The fisherman becomes an object of knowledge, an exhibit for the contemplative gaze of the photographer and audience to work upon. The archaic figure of the Hawaiian fisherman is no mere curiosity, however, but rather is meant to call out to us across the gulf of the ages. As Morgan writes in his introduction to Ancient Society, “The history of the human race is one in source, one in experience, and one in progress” (xxx). The fisherman’s cultural difference is balanced by his universality. He represents man-the-hunter, confronting an elemental nature rendered powerfully present in the breaking surf and the bright sunlight. The image’s archetypal quality implicates the audience in a commonality between the fisherman searching for his prey and the photographer capturing his image, and this commonality in turn exposes a second difference. For, if the scene articulates the photographer’s technologi...