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Review of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds

Non-Fiction Reviews

Review of Dangerous Visions and New Worlds

Mark Scroggins

Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre, eds. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds: Radical Science Fiction, 1950-1985. PM Press, 2021. Paperback. 224 pg. $29.95. ISBN 9781629638836.

Andrew Nette and Iain McIntyre’s essay collection Dangerous Visions and New Worlds, as its title indicates, focuses in the first case on the 1960s ‘New Wave’ in science fiction, a movement whose key moments include Michael Moorcock’s editorship of New Worlds (from 1964) and Harlan Ellison’s 1967 anthology Dangerous Visions. The collection’s thirty-five-year subtitle, however, signals its larger scope and ambitions: an overview of what the New Wave made possible—an opening up of the genre to a wide variety of new voices, new thematic concerns, new formal constructions. Histories of SF invariably devote a chapter to the New Wave, describing how its writers, as part of larger counter-cultural movements in the postwar decades, reacted against an overwhelmingly white, male ‘Golden Age’ genre that avoided psychologism, elided sexuality, and prized technological and scientific extrapolation over social exploration. But they tend to read the New Wave as part of a dialectical back-and-forth within the genre, a temporary shift in priorities which would be absorbed and transcended in the following decades. Dangerous Visions and New Worlds implicitly asserts that contemporary SF— perhaps the most multifarious, diverse, and socially and politically engaged of popular cultural forms—was not just made possible by, but is the New Wave, a tsunami which never receded, but continues to buoy us up.

Sumptuously illustrated with photographs of authors, book covers, and other ephemera, Dangerous Visions and New Worlds appears at first glance more like a coffee table book than a serious overview of the genre. It contains almost forty items, which toggle between two- or three-page capsule presentations and full-length, deeply developed essays. The capsule presentations (sidebars?) tend to be brief thematic summaries or short bibliographic notes: nuclear war in SF, drugs in SF, revolution and rebellion in SF; the publishing history of New Worlds, Doctor Who novelizations, The Women’s Press and SF; and so forth.

The full-length essays—which, alas, vary widely in quality—cover an unexpected variety of topics, from the fairly canonical (J. G. Ballard’s SF work, Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree Jr., Philip K. Dick, Octavia Butler), to the relatively obscure (Hank Lopez’s Afro-6 [1969], gay SF novels of the 1970s, Denis Jackson’s The Black Commandos [2013]), to the pleasantly quirky: one doesn’t expect to find an essay on R. A. Lafferty in such a volume, but Nick Mamatas’s “God Does, Perhaps? The Unlikely New Wave SF of R. A. Lafferty” is welcome reading.

Nicholas Tredell’s “The Energy Exhibit: Radical Science Fiction in the 1960s” offers an excellent distillation of what was new about Moorcock’s New Worlds, as well as some good examinations of representative books by Brian W. Aldiss, Norman Spinrad, and Moorcock himself. In “On Earth the Air Is Free: The Feminist Science Fiction of Judith Merril,” Kat Clay provides a welcome reminder of what was really ground-breaking about the work of the anthologist and writer who by some accounts coined the term “New Wave.” Rebecca Baumann’s “Speculative Fuckbooks: The Brief Life of Essex House, 1968-1969” is a straightforward history of this SF-porno publisher, whose rather high-minded, even ‘literary’ project was undermined by its very conditions of possibility: the 1960s court cases which made pornographic fiction legal in the US resulted in a flood of easily accessible erotica, a saturated marketplace in which Essex House could not survive.

This is not for the most part an academic collection, though a few of its essays were previously published in scholarly journals. It’s good to re-read Rob Latham’s lively “Sextrapolation in New Wave Science Fiction”; others of the “academic” chapters, unfortunately, have the stuffy atmosphere of dissertation chapters. There’s a wonderful breadth and variety to the materials covered in Dangerous Visions and New Worlds, but at times the book feels just plain scattered, both in its subject matter and in the approaches its authors adopt. While essays on the Strugatsky brothers (a career overview) or Le Guin and Heinlein (comparing The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress [1966] and The Dispossessed [1974]) are informative, it seems something of a stretch to include them among the other materials here assembled.

One shouldn’t go to Dangerous Visions and New Worlds expecting something like a Cambridge Companion to New Wave SF; it’s just not that sort of book. But one would have welcomed, if not a full bibliography of materials related to the subject, at least some suggestions for further reading, and perhaps a timeline of important events and publications. And one would have welcomed a greater degree of editorial uniformity among the pieces (including some draconian cuts to some of the more wordy essays). One of the volume’s great joys, however, is its plethora of reproductions of paperback covers—literally hundreds of them, ranging from ‘60s and ‘70s updates of Golden Age pulp motifs to the mind-blowing abstractions and surreal scenes that make SF cover illustration one of the most consistently stimulating subgenres of visual art in the last third of the twentieth century.

Mark Scroggins is a widely published poet, biographer, and critic on modern and contemporary poetry. In the Fantasy/SF field, he has published a monograph, Michael Moorcock: Fiction, Fantasy and the World’s Pain (2015), and essays and reviews in Foundation, JFA, Fafnir, and the NYRSF.

Review of Science Fiction

SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 3

Non-Fiction Reviews

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Review of Science Fiction

R. Baker

Sherryl Vint. Science Fiction. The MIT Press, 2021. The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series. Paperback. 224 pg. $15.95. ISBN 9780262539999.

Sherryl Vint’s Science Fiction aims to provide a foundation for understanding science fiction (SF), both as a genre and as a pervasive, multifaceted cultural discourse. Surrounded as we are by rapid industrialization, hyper-networked communication, and complex sociopolitical issues, Vint writes, “it has become axiomatic to say that the world is becoming like science fiction… in ways both marvelous and malign” (2). Taking this as its starting point, the book serves as a sustained exploration of SF as a mode of thinking and cultural praxis. Deftly sidestepping arguments for yet another, ever-more-exact operational definition of what precisely SF is, Science Fiction instead takes a much more interesting track: focusing on the many things SF can do.

The overarching question, explored from multiple angles and disciplines, is simple: how can science fiction (and its derivatives) help people—from many walks of life—respond to and conceptualize the contemporary world? How and by whom is SF, and its myriad influents, being used as a powerful tool to imagine the world otherwise, both in terms of ‘hard’ science and in the service of culture, ethics, and social justice? Although Vint does her due diligence in laying the introductory groundwork of canon, influential writers, and milestones in the history of SF, she also makes it clear from the start that these histories are fraught, variegated, and messy, just like science and technology, governance and philosophical systems, and human history writ large. Vint follows many, multivocal threads of speculative possibility throughout the text, making connections between fields and time periods, and offering alternatives to common-knowledge understandings of SF and its canon. Science Fiction is not an exhaustive history of must-read works, nor does it dicker about the parameters of genre inclusion and definitional technicalities. Instead, it focuses on the outward expansion of SF and SF thinking– particularly in recent decades– and the ways it entangles itself within wider communities, discourses, and debates ranging far beyond the fiction itself. Science fiction, Vint contends, offers an important set of tools, an “everyday language” allowing people to think through and intervene in the myriad possibilities arising from “the world made otherwise” through rapid industrialization and technological change (4).

Although it would be impossible for any book to cover every aspect of SF and its offshoots, Vint nevertheless manages to enfold an impressively wide range of disciplinary fields and foci: the utopian tradition, futurology/speculative design, the colonial imaginary, AI and transhumanism, genomics and posthumanism, the Anthropocene, and speculative economics/financialization each receive their own dedicated chapter, and together make up the overarching organization of the book. However, the choice of these chapters (at the inevitable exclusion of others) is not as restrictive as one might think; each serves as a scaffold rather than a fencing-in and points the curious reader toward myriad supplemental sources. Vint is a thoughtful and courteous facilitator throughout, tipping her hat towards the various parties, artistic and cultural traditions, political agendas, scientific innovations, academic disciplines, and sociocultural impacts swirling around or bridging these conversations, even for matters she admits are beyond the scope of the book. In both form and content, Science Fiction upholds its (refreshingly pragmatic) thesis: that SF is an active and evolving mode of thought, better understood as a cultural praxis than as a static, definable canon (165).

One of the book’s many strengths is how it both actively challenges the widespread assumption that ‘hard’ SF is the gold standard to which the genre should be upheld, while also carefully tracing the history of editorial gatekeeping via which such ‘norms’ arose. Acknowledging that “there is a relationship between science fiction and science, albeit not the simple fantasy that science fiction inspired specific inventions” (45), Vint also points out the problematic, techno-determinist tendency for those in power to automatically equate all science and innovation with progress; the text offers examples of how SF (and SF scholarship) continues to have an important role in deconstructing such facile assumptions. It emphasizes the nonlinear, often co-iterative relationships between science fiction, scientists, innovators, entrepreneurs, artists, and social justice movements alike, all of whom engage, in various ways, with speculating the parameters of the possible. Vint’s straightforward, unapologetic discussion about the deeply colonial tendencies that creep through SF, on levels both historical and contemporary, is particularly well-executed here. Equally so is the book’s interest in the many countervailing voices challenging such hegemonies, particularly the rise of BIPOC, feminist, and queer SF as central to the discourse in recent decades.

Of course, an academic reader whose work focuses more narrowly will doubtless find points of contention, or problematic omissions, within a given chapter. Speaking for myself—colored by my own focus on the environmental humanities—Vint’s chapters on climate change SF, and on speculative finance/economics, felt somewhat rushed and rather curtailed in terms of complexity, particularly with regard to political critique. Indeed, despite its excellent discussion of racism and sexism in the history of SF, the book as a whole is oddly shy about addressing contemporary SF as activist praxis in terms of climate and class justice. For example, despite an extended discussion of Kim Stanley Robinson and his work that declares him “unquestionably the most important living sf writer addressing environmental themes” (134), Vint makes no mention of his (increasingly outspoken) environmental socialist politics. However, given its widely heterogenous target audience, where one can assume neither common cause nor shared vocabulary, and the book’s overall goals, the decision to remain somewhat politically hands-off is understandable. For this reason, the ‘further reading’ bibliography at the end of the book, along with a helpful glossary of terms, is an especially excellent addition.

In sum, Science Fiction is both enjoyable to read and genuinely useful as a teaching tool: equally appropriate for the undergraduate classroom, early-career scholars building knowledge foundations, and field-adjacent researchers looking for a primer on how sf intersects with their own work. The book sketches an outline of SF as a genre, and how it functions as a cognitive toolkit for the postindustrial world: a creative cultural form offering ways of thinking otherwise within the fraught, often-dystopic, technology-ridden 21^st century.

R. Baker is an English PhD candidate at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Their work is situated at the intersections of the environmental humanities, contemporary science fiction, and feminist STS, with a focus on anticolonial and anticapitalist worldbuilding, particularly surrounding the social and technical infrastructures of climate justice, restoration and repair. Their current project focuses on contemporary narratives of space travel, exploration, and colonization; they are broadly interested in how these speculative scientific discourses, alongside science fiction, might also push against dominant narratives of conquest and control.

Slavic Folklore, Communism, and Time: Lyuben Dilov

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Features

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Slavic Folklore, Communism, and Time: Lyuben Dilov

Andy Erbschloe

Bulgarian fantasist Lyuben Dilov died in 2008, but his humanist tech-magic satires live on and provide a glimpse into a segment of Soviet-era intelligentsia who were dutifully ridiculing the excesses of the West while also lampooning their own self-appointed leaders behind a veneer of distant stars and time machines.

Translating any older book well demands familiarity with the context of its writing and the audience it was written for. But SF, in theory, should be more forgiving. Being inherently futurist and instructive or at least cautioning, it should escape its substrate and offer its audience a future less burdened by the contemporary shackles that bind reader and author alike. It’s not cynicism! Proper science-fiction just isn’t written about how great your society is now. Imagine: Let’s keep doing this! Forever! In every corner of the universe!

Following that logic, translating an old time-travel book should be even easier, in theory; especially one conveniently structured with well-known elements of Slavic folklore. Lyuben Dilov’s Unfinished Novel of a Student spans four millennia. It was submitted to the Bulgarian state publisher in 1985. And as its translator, contrary to logic, I find that it isn’t even clear if my obligation is to the readers of the ’80s, the ones of today, or the ones in the twenty-fourth century. I’m worried that it might be all three.

Over thirty years after its publication, it took about three years to translate Unfinished Novel to English. Our language changed in the thirty; and about the same amount in the three. For example, in the past, you may have been frightened to discover someone “following” you. The Oxford English Dictionary(OED) changed it in 2020 to be a good thing. In 2021, they revised the entry for “mass extinction”, so these things aren’t completely devoid of semantic consequence. Dilov didn’t write about mass extinction in this book, an unforgivable sin for any SF writer in our own era. In the 1980s, Dilov and his colleagues were tasked with writing “socialist realism” about the future as a place of universal abundance and equality. In 2022, OED added an entry for “energy poverty”.

Socialist realism, the prevailing philosophy dispersed by the Ministries of Culture of the various Soviet-ized states, saw art as a tool to build the ideal citizen, and their science-fiction was no different. There was no mandate to explore the furthest bounds of technology, only a mandate to create the ideal citizens to be responsible for that technology. So when Isaac Asimov has two robots having a conversation with each other, that would essentially be outside the genre of “speculative fiction”, the SF/fantasy of the Soviet world that utilized familiar, localized human structures like folk tales and myths.

In Unfinished Novel, the borrowed Slavic folk structure in turn borrows heavily from sci-fi tropes and scenarios. Lyuben Dilov wrote this about originality in his 1981 novel, The Missed Chance,

…originality is not contained in the unrepeatableness of a given plot or situation – the question is what you express through it.

We’re fortunate for Dilov’s forgiveness. Isaac Asimov’s short story “Cal”(1991) is remarkably similar to The Missed Chance. I wonder if Asimov read the Russian translation?

I made all Dilov’s talking computers genderless, and I made other “contemporary” linguistic choices, mostly related to gender. The decidedly non-English source challenges the translator to imitate the texture of the original’s lexical choices. Translator Brian Nelson uses the term “creative imitation”. But the heaviest lifting of bringing the future of the past to this present now is matching the cadence, and that’s all in the context.

Dilov excuses himself from any technical continuity errors right from the introduction,

Let the reader not worry if some things seem unmotivated and unclear, they also seem so to the author…

and the translator asks only this same consideration because no human knows the secrets of time, right?

Well, in Slavic folklore, Baba Yaga knows them. And in Unfinished Novel, the Professor of Temporal Flight knows. Everyone who comes into contact with foreign times must have their memories wiped; everyone but him. By Dilov’s time, Soviet state atheism had degraded the Christianity that had corroded Baba Yaga’s paganism before it. So Dilov’s professor hearkens back to the dual-natured Baba Yaga of pre-Christian folklore: both creator and destroyer, bridge between the living and the dead, lacking free will. Completing the allegory, Baba Yaga is often depicted as the goddess of masculine-femine duality and of time.

But history books and propaganda movies, not only religions, are also used to nudge society towards desired change. We find that not only our hero Cyana but also her twentieth-century beloved, at various times, find employment as historians. This allows Dilov to hint that maybe historians are flawed humans too, despite whatever era they write from or about.

Another facet of Slavic folklore is the appearance of three brothers, and this is rather clearly reflected in the three men Cyana encounters off course in her malfunctioning chronolet. When faced with the unimaginable future girl and her chronolet, the first two are tried and found wanting. Just like in the tales, the third is the fool who turns out wise in the end. This one was the historian, now changed professions to, guess what… a SF writer. But rather than him saving the damsel from the dragon, it’s Cyana who comes back to retrieve him from the wastelands of the twentieth century, easily defeating the dragon (his wife) with her future judo.

Dilov did foresee Cyana’s multifunctional smart watch but not the “selfie” which entered English way back in 2014 alongside “wardrobe malfunction”. Cyana does experience “wardrobe malfunction”, however, on a few occasions along her journey: not understanding why her skirt is too short for rush hour in “contemporary” communist Sofia, or why Praxiteles shouldn’t sculpt her fully nude in tyrannical ancient Athens. This is Dilov’s take on the conflicting mores and virtues of disparate societies and how their hypocrisies, if there are any, always look sillier from a distance. And fittingly, even some of Dilov’s own ideas about decency may have already fallen out of favor by now.

Coincidentally, Dilov was the first to formulate a Fourth Law to supplement Asimov’s Three, preceding Asimov’s own Zeroth Law by nine years (The Path of Icarus (1976), Robots and Empires (1985))

Dilov excuses himself from any technical continuity errors, but he then constantly reminds the reader that you won’t get any disclaimer like that from a historian, no matter the number of their Laws.

An Excerpt from the Introduction to Unfinished Novel

In this novel, we’ll be describing the adventures of a history student from the twenty-fourth century. We’ll go on to discuss the machines of time and also time’s messes which cannot but occur when people and machines meddle in its course. Let the reader not worry if some things seem unmotivated and unclear, they also seem so to the author. For, time is the foundation of clarity in our lives – if it gets mixed up, the natural order of everything gets mixed up.

But this natural order of things is not actually natural at all. Humans have invented their own time; they’ve forged it into shelves, racks, cupboards, and chests of drawers to arrange in them, one after another, the works of their own hand – and works not made by hands too – while real, universal time is probably just one shelf with no beginning and no end, so that no matter where you set something on it, you will still never know exactly where it’s located. That’s why, with the invention of the time machine, humans would confuse only their own time, not universal time. In universal time, it wouldn’t be illegal at all for a novel like this one to not look like a novel and to begin, for example, with its third chapter instead of its first. And it is not illogical for it to remain incomplete because, even according to the laws of our thinking, for the reader of today, it isn’t possible for a given action or event which will occur in several centuries to be completed.

Therefore: do not blame the author for the mess he dared present to you! It is ours, it is human

From the Vice President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the Vice President

Ida Yoshinaga

The burgeoning excitement for our annual summer conference, evidenced by greater numbers of paper and panel proposals received for last year’s vibrant gathering in Oslo, and now for the upcoming Dresden 2023 meeting (including those submitted by in-person attendees of the latter), invigorates again the pressing question of how to expand science-fiction studies past our default Western and Global North circuits, to encompass speculative-fiction production and reception in other parts of the world.

From suggestions by members of our SFRA country representatives group, by our general membership, and by global CoFutures colleagues in Norway, we on the Executive Council have expanded these representatives to include SFRA members from China (Regina Kanyu Wang), Ireland (Thomas Connolly, pulling double duty as webmaster), Portugal (Tânia Cerqueira and Manuel José Sousa Oliveira), the Philippines (Gabriela Lee, also our At-Large Executive Committee member), in addition to adding reps of our Australia group (Yimin Xu).

Welcome representatives! If you’ve suggestions for more dedicated SFRA folk who can meet virtually 3-4 times a year; share what’s going on with sf production in their own regions, nations, or languages (such as conferences, publications, events, and trends); and advise the EC on ideas for the international future of the organization among other matters, please contact Hugh O’Connell, myself, or other members of the EC.

Here’s our current list of country reps: https://sfra.org/country-representatives/

At the International Conference of the Fantastic in the Arts a few months ago in March, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts BIPOC Caucus held sessions on exploring global methodologies and theories for speculative genre and media. Inspired by the annual theme that underscored contributions from Africanfuturism and Afrofuturism to our evolving discourse on fantastic and speculative arts, as well as by cross discussions that have been arising in Indigenous Futurism and Latinx Futurism, the Caucus has been trying to reach beyond the standard Suvinian and Todorovian conceptualizations of our family of non-real and semi-real genres. Researchers Suparno Banerjee, Nicola Hunt, Taryne Taylor, Candice Thornton, and Guest Scholar Isiah Lavender III discussed topics such as postcolonial and Indigenous terminologies, translation challenges, diversity of regional production, and continuity of spirituality in transnational diaspora.

This August, we expect that both the Executive Committee’s sponsored sessions will follow these worldwide sf themes. They are: two professional-development panels for early-career scholars, including one made up of international postdocs and graduate students looking for work in the global job market; and one diversity, equity, inclusion, and belonging session themed to decolonial and Indigenous Futurist speculative methodologies and related research protocols. Additionally, panel proposals accepted include one similar to the ICFA global theories/methods discussion, put together by German cultural studies scholar Sonja Fritzsche and her colleagues from Peter Lang Publishing’s World Science Fiction Series (on which board I happen to belong).

What is world science fiction? Hoping you can share your mindful, enriching responses this summer with us at TU Dresden, “disrupting” conventional imagination.

From the President

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

From the SFRA Executive Committee

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From the President

Hugh O’Connell

As I look out my office window here in Boston and notice the trees starting to bud, my mind turns to two things: the end of the Spring semester and the annual SFRA conference. This year, as part of our efforts to increase the SFRA’s international representation, we’re partnering with der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung (the German Association for Research in the Fantastic, or GfF) for the joint Disruptive Imaginations Conference.

After attending the virtual 2021 conference hosted by Graham J. Murphy and Seneca College and missing out entirely on the 2022 conference hosted by Bodhisattva Chattopadhyay and the CoFutures collective due to contracting Covid-19, I’m very much looking forward to attending the Disruptive Futures conference in-person, while also taking part in the virtual programming. The organizers have received a stunning number of proposals from an international pool of applicants, and we’re quite optimistic that the conference will continue the ongoing work of globally expanding the SFRA by bringing this internationally diverse array of scholars into conversation with one another.

By now, everyone who sent a proposal should have heard back from the selection committee, but if for some reason you are still waiting, please contact the conference organizers, Julia Gatermann and Moritz Ingwersen at disruptive.imaginations@tu-dresden.de. And for those attending the conference in-person, as you begin to make your travel plans, make sure to check out the resources that the organizers are providing at the dedicated conference website: https://disruptiveimaginations.com. Here, you can find information in both English and German about accommodations, getting around Dresden, and some of the special events that are being planned for both in-person and virtual conference attendees, with more information to be added as we get closer to the start of the conference. And speaking of planning, we’ll be contacting the recipients of the SFRA’s travel grants in the first week of May.

Looking ahead, we’re scheduling another European conference in Estonia in 2024, before heading back to the United States for 2025 and 2026. The SFRA depends on volunteer conference organizers; so, if you would like to see the conference come to your area, please consider putting in a bid to host the conference (the SFRA is currently taking proposals for 2027 and beyond). You can contact me directly, and I’ll be happy to discuss what hosting the conference entails and how to go about putting a proposal together. Even if you are only curious at this stage, please feel free to reach out!

Spring 2023

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

From the SFRA Review

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Spring 2023

Ian Campbell

Our unevenly-distributed science fiction future continues to expand with the advent of “AI”, which is of course not AI but merely a well-trained algorithm. I spent a long Friday last week wishing I was outside enjoying spring weather but instead sitting through first a departmental, then a college meeting about how to cope with the effect of AI on student testing. Looks like we’re headed back to pens and bluebooks and oral exams. Left unsaid was the effect this will have on faculty, especially in face of the concerted right-wing assault on higher education.

But I’ll leave aside the doom and gloom and direct your attention to a couple of opportunities. We here at the SFRA Review are looking for some additional editors, both to expand our offerings and also to take the place of some of our current wonderful editors when they decide to rotate off. This is a great opportunity for an early-career scholar, whether they be ABD or a new faculty member. The workload isn’t tremendous, you’ll have plenty of creative freedom and autonomy, and you can (further) establish your bona fides by contributing to the discourse and profession. Please contact me at icampbell@gsu.edu should you be interested, and we’ll talk further.

On a more personal note, I’d also like to plug the CFP for SF in Translation, vol. 2. There have been some impressive submissions for this edited volume, but the overall quantity isn’t where we’d like it to be: two or three more chapters will help this one over the top and bring this valuable scholarship to the general public. This is another great opportunity for an early-career scholar, though in no way would we be displeased to see established experts submit chapters. Please pass the CFP around among your colleagues.

Review of Elder Race

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Fiction Reviews

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Review of Elder Race

Lucy Nield

Tchaikovsky, Adrian. Elder Race TorDotCom, 2021.

Adrian Tchaikovsky’s 2021 novella, Elder Race, is a beautifully constructed cocktail of fantasy and speculative fiction. Much like Tchaikovsky’s previous works, including the Arthur C. Clarke award-winning Children of Time (2016) and the BSFA-winning Shards of Earth (2021), Elder Race considers the future of humanity away from planet Earth. The story begins on Sophos 4, a planet colonized by humanity around 1,500 years ago. Over time, the modified humans who call Sophos 4 home have forgotten their ancestors’ science and all tales of Earth, or “the otherworld,” have slowly ceased to exist (111). In the space left void of science and Earth knowledge, a new culture and language emerges in the surviving communities. It is a seemingly primitive culture, with a strong belief in magic and “ancient creators who had, the stories said, placed people on the world and taught them how to live” (35). Those who live on Sophos 4 believe that there is one of the ancient sorcerers left on the planet, the last of the Elder Race, who has lived in a local tower for centuries and can only be called upon when there is a threat from old magic, which only he can understand.

The novella’s narrative is split in two, starting with Lynesse, the fourth daughter of the Queen of Lannesite, one of the domains on Sophos 4. Lynesse leads a life she believes is purposeless. As the fourth daughter, she is far from being next in line for the throne, and her unshakable belief that she is a disappointment to her mother seems to influence her every move. She vehemently believes the old stories of her ancestor, Astresse Regent, who awoke the last of the ancients, Nyrgoth Elder. The stories say that Astresse summoned Nyrgoth Elder from his tower and together they fought the evil Magic that was awoken by the warlord Ulmoth. The ancient sorcerer banished the mechanical monster that Ulmoth controlled, and together Astresse and Nyrgoth Elder were victorious. Now that a “new power has arisen in the Ordwood that men say is a demon who steals minds,” Lynesse climbs to the Elder Tower to seek the sorcerer’s help as her ancestor did a century earlier (37).

The other half of the narrative is from the perspective of Nyr Illiam Tevitch. An “anthropologist second class of Earth’s Explorer Corps,” he is centuries old and light years from home (25). Nyr came to Sophos 4 over three centuries ago as part of a team of anthropologists; expected to observe and study the descendants of the original colonists, they were “sent to watch and not act” (147). Nyr has been alone in what remains of his team’s outpost for centuries; with “no word for two hundred and ninety-one years,” Nyr has spent most of the time sleeping, depending on the outpost’s suspension facilities to keep him alive (26). After a couple of centuries sleeping in the suspension pods in the outpost, Astresse Regent comes to him, asking for help, and against his better judgement he agrees. He falls in love with Astresse and considers staying with her. Instead, he ultimately chooses to return to his suspension pod, promising Astresse that should her family be in peril again, they can come to him. It is hard to know if he regrets his decision to leave Astresse; he thinks of her as “a woman of primitive culture who could never have understood what I am, and yet magnificent, radiant. And I had been alone for so long by then” (31). Perhaps trying to denounce the affection he once felt, he diagnoses it instead as a symptom of his loneliness.

As soon as Nyr (Nyrgoth Elder) and Lyn (Lynesse Fourth Daughter) meet, there is a jarring and undeniable language barrier and cultural differences. These lead to miscommunication and trouble understanding one another emotionally, with the differences in linguistic nuance and common vernacular (on both sides) being constantly misunderstood or overlooked. The split narrative provides insights for the reader to comprehend the intention of each character, as does much of the dialogue, but the language barrier remains intact throughout. The “linguistic chasm,” as John Folk-Williams calls it, between Lyn and Nyr is a side effect of the passing of time, but it also highlights the stark differences in belief constructs and local social norms. Many examples litter Nyr’s and Lyn’s interactions, but there are a few of note.

Nyr tries and fails to explain to Lyn and her companion, Esha Free Mark, that he is in fact not a sorcerer. There are simply no appropriate terms in Lyn’s language for what Nyr understands as “scientist,” or “scholar,” so when he states these signifiers, “in their language, these are both cognates for wizard” (85). Nyr’s hypothesis is that, should he attempt to dispel Lyn and Esha of their belief that he is an ancient wizard, he might end up saying “I’m not a wizard; I’m a wizard, or at best a wizard,” an imagined interaction that he finds less than amusing (85). Whilst this is a valid obstruction in their communication, which prevents Nyr from explaining that he is an anthropologist and not a wizard, Tchaikovsky appears to forget that the term and “scholar” and its appropriate definition do not exist for Lyn, which was a slight surprise. Throughout Tchaikovsky’s work, he shows a skill for consistency within the lore of his novels, never forgetting or making errors. However, in this novella he states that the term “scholar” referring to a specialist in a particular branch of research, does not exist for Lyn or the other inhabitants of Sophos 4, but Lyn does use the term slightly later in the text within the same context that Nyr would use it to define himself. This small, perhaps overlooked, slip was something I never thought I would notice in any of Tchaikovsky’s work and hope never to notice again (109). Regardless of this, the difficultly Nyr encounters in his attempt to explain his position continues, and he struggles on to try to explain who he is to Lyn and Esha. He decides to break the rules of anthropology, to tell the ‘true story,’ hoping that they will be able to understand (110). Unfortunately, the language barrier holds fast, and whilst he tries to explain that humans travelled to Sophos 4 from Earth, they hear something else entirely.

Nyr tells stories of humans arriving from Earth, then adapting to their new planet, engineering body modifications for humans and the native livestock, as well as the machinery used in the colonisation process, but all Esha and Lyn hear is that the Elders used “magic” to travel from the “otherworld” (111) and began “teaching the beasts and plants their place, naming them and giving them their roles,” and about the “monsters” that did the will of men (112). Nyr tries his best to remove magic from the conversation, but once he is finished, Lyn simply states, “yes, that is how we tell it,” unable to grasp the concepts he has tried so delicately and desperately to explain (115).

The juxtaposition of Nyr and Lyn is remarkably insightful. In emphasising the generational differences and language barriers, Tchaikovsky successfully dramatizes the ideas surrounding witchcraft being an early version of medical science, or the well-known Arthur C. Clarke phrase that any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. In this novella, Tchaikovsky uses this concept to highlight the difficulties confronted when attempting to cross technological, cultural and language barriers, as well as dramatically different belief systems. In doing so, Tchaikovsky also illuminates the distinctions between Fantasy and SF narratives, and by blending the two genres into one novella he makes it extremely difficult to speculate on the story’s outcome. When approaching a text of either genre, one holds certain expectations or assumptions, which are immediately useless when reading a novella that combines the two.

Unlike some of Tchaikovsky’s other texts, there are fewer allusions than one might expect. Whilst there are some of the usual tropes such as suspension pods, the use of technology to regrow or augment body parts, and someone being very far from home, one might not notice the key text that influences Elder Race unless they take a look at the dedication in the front of the book. In the dedication, Tchaikovsky nods to the late Gene Wolfe and his story “Trip, Trap,” which was the novella’s major inspiration. Constructed as two intercutting narratives, much like Elder Race, the story follows Garth the son of Garth in a fantasy-medieval setting (which is not dissimilar to Lynesse Fourth Daughter) and Dr. Morton Finch, a field xenoarchaeologist investigating possible ancient spacefaring technology. Whilst the narratives are quite different, their structures, focuses on magic, generic combinations, and constructed barriers are similar. The significance of this intertextual connection reveals much about Tchaikovsky and his skills as a writer, as well as the impact of manipulating genre. In his other works, he often utilises puns or alludes to other works in a clever and whimsical way for apparently humorous reasons. However, in using “Trip, Trap” in such an opaque manner, he reveals that his skills move beyond amusing allusions, whilst also illuminating the impact one can have when they blend genres, particularly disrupting expectations and dramatizing the apparent and somewhat noticeable correlation between what can be understood as science and what is viewed as magic.

Elder Race is an emotional novella, and through the narrative Tchaikovsky does what he does best, exploring the future humans might have away from Earth. With this text, Tchaikovsky reminds us that although he has crafted inspiring and award-winning SF novels, he is also an imaginative fantasy writer. Using the inspiration of Wolf’s intercutting narratives as a starting point for his own work, Tchaikovsky creates a story with feeling, magic, and science. Whilst one might find this text frustrating due to its characters’ failure to communicate, the novel confirms what we already know: Tchaikovsky is a commanding, imaginative writer, who can master and manipulate genre is any way he sees fit.

WORKS CITED

Clarke, Arthur C. Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible. Indigo, 2000.

Folk-Williams, John. “Elder Race by Adrian Tchaikovsky – A Review.” Scifi Mind, www.scifimind.com/elder-race-by-adrian-tchaikovsky/. Accessed 28 December 2022.

Wolf, Gene. Storeys from the Old Hotel. Ord Books, 1995.

Lucy Nield is a PhD student and GTA in the Department of English Literature at the University of Liverpool. Her research interests include dog-culture, posthumanism and the Anthropocene within contemporary speculative fiction. She has been an organizer for the Current Research in Speculative Fiction conference at the University of Liverpool since 2019 (@CRSFteam) and is a regular contributor to The Fantasy Hive (@TheFantasyHive). Lucy is an active member of the Olaf Staple Centre (UoL), has been published in Foundation (2021 & 2022) and SFRA (2019 & 2022), with a pending chapter for Bloomsbury’s ‘Future Werewolf,’ (2023), a pending article for Comparative American Studies: An International Journal (2023), as well as a special collection with Extrapolation (2023).

Review of The Mimicking of Known Successes

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Fiction Reviews

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Review of The Mimicking of Known Successes

Jeremy Brett

Older, Malka. The Mimicking of Known SuccessesTordotcom, 2023.

The science fiction detective story is a subgenre with a most respectable line of ancestry and descent: its conventions of the world-weary sleuth or law enforcement agent, the femme fatale (or homme fatale), the uncovering of deadly secrets, the exposure of the seamy and corrupt underbelly of society—all woven into tapestries of fantastical and futuristic settings—have been explored in a myriad of works. We see it in stories ranging from Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (whose noir elements became turbocharged in the 1982 film adaptation Blade Runner)to Rusch’s Retrieval Artist series, Morgan’s Altered Carbon, Mieville’s The City and the City, Chabon’s The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, and Scalzi’s Lock-In. Why the SF and detective genres have mixed in such fruitful combinations might be connected to their mutual concern with the truth of things: detective stories, from the most simplistically pulpy to the most cleverly devised, are tales of uncovering truths, the truths of personal lives, of relationships, of the motives driving people to extremes, and of how societies and their structures (governments, law enforcement, corporations, capitalism) operate in the “real world” in opposition to ideals of law and justice. The best traditions of SF also look towards the exploration of truths—how things such as scientific advancements, encounters with the alien Other, or even simple contact with the unforgiving, hard vacuum of deep space cause human beings to reexamine themselves and their place in the universe and to make revelations about the truth of our existence.

Malka Older is no stranger to stories in which the hidden is uncovered or in which truth becomes a crucial resource. Her Hugo-nominated Centenal Cycle (Infomocracy, Null States, and Plate Tectonics, 2016-2018) explores a near-future Earth whose planetwide political system consists of constantly shifting microdemocracies that depend on information flows for their very existence – the truth of which has nation-changing potential. And she has co-created/co-written several streaming serials—Orphan Black: The Next Chapter and Ninth Step Station, the latter of which is a series of literal detective stories—whose primary themes include the harm done to innocents through deliberate informational occlusion by the powerful. Drawing upon these traditions, Older brings readers a new and honorable addition to the SF detective tale: The Mimicking of Known Successes. An impactful opening sets the tone and the expansive exoticism of the novella’s setting:

The man had disappeared from an isolated platform; the furthest platform eastward, in fact, on the 4°63’ line, never a very popular ring. It took Mossa five hours on the railcar to get there, alone because none of her Investigator colleagues were available, or eager, to take such a long trip for what would almost certainly be confirmation of a suicide.

The platform appeared out of the swirling red fog, and moments later the railcar settled to a halt at what could barely be called a station. Mossa, who had not been looking forward to the long trip herself, had nonetheless passed it in a benevolent daze, looking out at the gaseous horizon that seemed abstractly static and as it moved in constant strange patterns. Once disembarked, she found the rhythm of talking to people on the platform only with difficulty. (Prologue)

At once the necessary economy of information is provided: we have a possible crime, certainly a mystery. We have a detective, one dogged and curious enough to take on a case in which others see no promise, a detective who does not relate well to other people. And we have a setting that is at once familiar to mystery readers: the investigator disembarking from a train into a crime scene. But Older immediately puts an SF spin on this by dropping the reader without warning into a world we instantly know not to be our own. Mimicking is set in a far future, where humanity has fled an environmentally ravaged Earth and set up a ring-structured colony called “Giant” that orbits Jupiter. But within this extraordinarily evocative setting, Older weaves a tale consisting of multiple strands: a “cozy” mystery (one where bloody or extreme violence is generally eschewed); a story of academic life, with all the intrigue and internal rivalries those stories tend to feature (most of the novella is set in the area of Valdegeld University, a center of scholarly tension between rival Moderns, Speculatives, and Classics); and a Holmesian pastiche, in which brilliantly cerebral and peerlessly logical Investigator Mossa teams up with Classic Scholar Pleiti, the novella’s narrator and source of emotional comfort, occasional inspiration, and eventually, romantic connection for Mossa.

Several kinds of truths are laid bare over the course of Mimicking. The most obvious and relevant to the detective genre of which the novella is unquestionably a part, is that of the mystery itself: the whereabouts and fate of arrogant Scholar Bolien Trewl, last seen at the very platform Mossa arrives at as the story opens. But moving farther along the novella’s ring, Moss and Plieti also uncover truths about their own needs for romantic human connection—it is heart-wrenching to watch Pleiti hesitantly expressing, if only to herself, her desire for Mossa while Mossa responds for much of the novella with tempting, teasing closeness that belies her own deep yearning. In the end, the most profound truths may be less the ones that come at the end of a chain of evidence or a series of clues, and more the ones that reveal things about ourselves as living, connected human beings. In a scene close to the novella’s end, Mossa and Plieti confront their mutual attraction, something both characters take pains to avoid before this pivotal moment.

“Mossa. Mossa. You are doing important work. And – and – and I don’t know anything about Investigator culture, but I could tell your colleagues respect you, admire you even. And you have your own home in this beautiful city. You have changed since university, even if not exactly in the way I – and mostly – and mostly I don’t care.”

“You don’t?”

I should have, I knew that, but I couldn’t. “I don’t.”

“Does that mean – do you mean – Plieti, might I kiss you?”

“Yes,” I said in a rush, and threw my arms around her.

But the most crucial truths within the novella’s own universe involve rival interpretations of humanity’s future in space. The eventual return to a reconstructed Earth is a common dream on Giant—much of the story, for one, circles around the Koffre Institute for Earth Species Preservation, a sanctuary for genetically-reconstructed Earth plants and animals maintained as a resource for the eventual reseeding of a renewed Earth. It is a topic of crucial importance, but on Giant beliefs in its immediacy and practicality become the source of extreme and dramatic tension. As a Classical Geography Scholar, Pleiti studies ancient Earth history as part of a long-range collective plan to re-create the old Earth, but other factions see the truth elsewhere. Pleiti exclaims to a rival Scholar at one point, “You are going to overturn years, decades of planning for Earth reanimation, delay the time when we can finally go back” to which her enraged colleague replies, “It’s never going to be Earth!… Not the Earth that you Classicists deify! It’s never going to be exactly like it was before, and that means you’re never going to be willing to let us get back there.”

Which truth about humanity’s return home is closer to objective reality? Does a colony-wide reconstructive endeavor planned and carried out over decades, if not centuries, better resemble the truth of the situation, or should impulsive, individual decisions rule the day? The truth, as with most things, lies somewhere in the middle, Older tells us. Or, as Mossi puts it, “[A]ttempting to approximate an idealized past is most certainly both futile and foolish, but individually disrupting what absolutely must be a collective endeavor is no better, and selfish as well.” The same sort of collectivist vs. individualist tension marks Older’s Centenal Cycle, and we also see echoes of it in detective fiction, where individual decisions based on impulse and passion and idiosyncratic interpretations of the truth give birth to crime, and where lone investigators must solve crimes for the common good. It is in these concerns with the tensions of warring truths, as well as the expertly drawn Holmes-Watson relationship of Mossa and Pleiti, that we see how beautifully and skillfully The Mimicking of Known Successes follows in the footsteps of the best of both SF and detective fiction.

Jeremy Brett is an Associate Librarian at Cushing Memorial Library & Archives, where he is both Processing Archivist and the Curator of the Science Fiction & Fantasy Research Collection. He has also worked at the University of Iowa, the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, the National Archives and Records Administration-Pacific Region, and the Wisconsin Historical Society. He received his MLS and his MA in History from the University of Maryland – College Park in 1999. His professional interests include science fiction, fan studies, and the intersection of libraries and social justice.

Discard as Extractive Zone in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

Features

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Discard as Extractive Zone in Chen Qiufan’s Waste Tide

Paromita Patranobish

A draft version of this article was presented at the LSFRC conference on SF + Extraction in October 2022. Warm thanks to the panelists and participants, especially Dr. Lyu Guangzhou for their insightful comments and questions. This article has also benefited from the Bucknell Humanities Centre’s Summer Institute workshops held in June 2022. Warm thanks to fellow participants at the Institute, especially Dr. Sarah Gorman and Dr. Rebecca Gordon for their helpful comments on my ongoing work on waste in postcolonial speculative fiction.

In her book Pollution Is Colonialism (2020), Max Liboiron argues for a revised genealogy of environmental toxicity through an emphasis on its connection with colonial history. Departing from critical readings of environmental pollution that locate it within an unspecified and generalized configuration of the Anthropocene, Liboiron identifies in waste a patently postcolonial dynamic, highlighting the ways in which colonization functions through the appropriation of land for settlement, resource mobilization, or outsourcing of unwanted and superfluous matter and populations in order to enforce normative social spaces and their strictly regulated borders. The calibrated logistics that control the large-scale outsourcing of industrial discard–as well as consumer waste to third-world countries and indigenous reserves under the guise of remediation, recycling and management–is, as Liboiron demonstrates, an articulation of contemporary iterations of Western imperial domination and control. Waste and its associated networks of cross-border disposal, landfilling, and overseas recycling legislate global infrastructures within which racially, semantically, and materially marked bodies flourish or perish. Kathryn Yusoff (2018), similarly elaborates on the connections between territorial epistemes and colonial ideologies, showing how colonial geology (be it as the disciplinary production of knowledge about planetary strata or practices of mining, fracking, and archaeological excavations), share a common metaphysical framework. This framework is based on the characterization of land as passive, inert, and brute matter and the extension of these attributes to the body of the colonized other whose labor, as a purely nonhuman resource, can be freely appropriated because it is deemed devoid of human moral and ethical qualifications. Liboiron and Yusoff both point to the dynamic interrelation between ecocidal toxicity, extractive institutions and practices, and the production of certain kinds of resource bodies, both human and nonhuman, as nodes on a matrix of exploitation and control. As Zygmunt Bauman (2004) has persuasively demonstrated, a liquid paradigm of disposability emerges in contemporary neoliberal times as a common threshold for both designating and disenfranchising certain populations, particularly in the Global South, with regard to access to basic infrastructural, medical, and legal facilities, and of relegating them thusly to a (dehumanized) state of discard. In Bauman’s analysis, this deprivation of the conditions that ensure normative personhood doesn’t just accrue as an abstract ideological decision about who or what qualifies for the position of a life worth saving or sustaining. Rather, it is capitalism’s specific petropolitical imaginary and its attendant mechanism of the combustion and metabolization of matter by turning it into potential sites of extraction and biochemical transformation into fuel– including and preeminently into labor-as-fuel– that leads to conditions of deterioration and the expendability of bodies both human and nonhuman.

Thus, if waste and its associated technologies of disposal, management, and remediation serve as mechanisms of extractive capitalist assertion, is it also possible to conceptualize geographies of waste as enabling forms of situated knowledge and sustaining provisional place-based idioms of subjectivity, community, and coexistence that defy available disciplinary and epistemic framings? How might the epistemic and semantic resources of speculative imaginaries, particularly those emerging out of non-Western/indigenous/Global South cultural landscapes that absorb the bulk of capitalism’s toxicities, offer new spatial and ontological articulations? Ones that don’t posit waste as what needs to be put away or fed into cycles of profit and use, but rather reconfigure waste as generative of ecologies of precarity and precarious dwelling, fostering ethical challenges to the anthropogenic megalith of the autonomous, individual subject? If pollution, habitat loss, and ecological devastation are the primary modalities through which extraction’s territorial ramifications materialize at a planetary and species-wide level, how might local responses and vernacular resistances deploy these extraction and extinction zones in creative, even subversive ways? Myra J. Hird (2021) calls such methods micro-ontologies of matter and meaning: viruses, symbionts, bacteria, algae, and plankton—can we think of them as forms of relational survival in entropic environments, providing alternative expressions of life as vibrational intensities and Spinozist affective valences? In a lecture on the subject of science fiction and waste, Chen describes the catalyst for Waste Tide as a deeply personal and disturbing experience of visiting the e-waste recycling district of China’s Guangdong province. He offers a blueprint for the novel in a recollection of this experience:

There, I noticed that everything is chaotic and disorganised, and the waste disposal workers are unprotected and directly exposed to this polluted environment. They try to find recyclable metal components containing a certain amount of rare earth among the discarded cables or electronic parts. Such business has caused serious damage to the local environment of Guiyu. Soil, water and even the air are all contaminated and eroded by the electronic wastes, not to mention the impact on unprotected workers, who are the most direct victims of environmental pollution. (2021)

Based on the nightmarish reality of Guiyu, Chen’s fictionalization is informed by a need to adhere to and anchor literary narrative in the contingency and proximity of specific, mappable, analytically and affectively approachable socioeconomic contexts of precarity, violence, and exploitation. Such a narrative also destabilizes established liberal humanist frameworks for addressing the contentious questions of agency, personhood, rights, and belonging that are at the core of such precarious formations and that involve multiple entangled actants, sites, and histories. Only by securing this discomfiting proximity between the narrative affordances of fabulation and the gritty reality of contemporary neoliberal sacrifice zones and their necropolitics of toxicity, can we conceptualize new decentralized, multiscalar counterhegemonic modes of apprehending and narrativizing social realities. This particular mode of engaging science fiction as critique is what Chen calls “science fiction realism” (2021).

Extraction in conjunction with and as performed by discard is present in multiple iterations in Chen Qiufan’s speculative dystopia, Waste Tide (2013, English translation, 2019). These comprise the destruction of habitats, ecosystems, and species through pollution, illegal dumping, and the contamination of native lands by imported industrial waste; coerced proximity to and symbolic interchangeability with lethally toxic discarded matter enforced upon laboring bodies; exploitation of vulnerable bodies and species for hazardous scientific experimentation; neoliberal algorithmic nexuses of data mining, surveillance, and neural, affective, and perceptual manipulation/control of technophilic subjects and societies; overexposure of precarious populations to regimes of digital and chemical addictions; and transhumanist cultures of prosthetic enhancement manufactured and marketed by corporate conglomerates. In the text, military-industrial waste is both key to decoding the complex cartography of globalized neoliberal apparatuses of ownership, profit, and control, and an underlying conceptual and material link connecting the multiple nodes of mobility, dispersal, access, and transformation that constitute deregulated, free-market economics.

Waste in the novel has a bifurcated structure, existing, on one hand, as the massive amounts of often unmonitored and illegally transported electronic discard exported out of affluent Western nations and dumped into poverty stricken areas that house recycling centers; and as the contamination of and irreversible damage to bodies, lands, and local flora and fauna by the seepage of toxic substances: heavy metals, plastic, and chemicals generated during processes of disassembly. The “waste people,” (lajiren, literally “garbage people”) the novel’s migrant workers who inhabit these necropolitical discardscapes, living and working under abject conditions, become synecdochic bearers of ecological exploitation and dispossession, their contaminated bodies mirrored in various mutant nonhuman and cyborg forms of life from rapidly breeding jellyfish and deformed radioactive marine life to Pavlovian remote controlled chipped dogs that respond to wireless signals.

In the stratified and divided world of Silicon Isle, the working class is not only equated with waste, their bodies seen as sites of disgust and ghettoized into unsanitary slums; these bodies also simultaneously become sites of alien and abject embodiment. As Lyu Gungzhao has demonstrated with reference to the novel’s exposition of the plight of migrant communities under contemporary capitalist regimes:

The “environmental concerns” that Chen Qiufan spoke of cannot be detached from the general context where a “waste space” is constructed for economic purposes, a place in which numerous precarious jobs are created, mainly for migrant workers without appropriate occupational training and protection. They are the victims not only of environmental crises and pollution but also of their jobs, their dislocation, and the capitalist system, which combine to bring forward all the problems—of which “environmental concerns” is just one of many. (311-12)

These strange corporealities often involve, as we see early in the novel, the mass of discarded prosthetics, augmented body parts, faux sexual organs, and virtual reality devices that the recyclers have to decompose in order to extract precious rare earth metals used in batteries and circuits. Whether it is the dislocated hand of an industrial robot that clamps onto and crushes a young worker, the infected helmet that–when compounded with the protagonist’s toxic neurochemistry–creates a posthuman, postdigital viral consciousness, or an abandoned robot that is animated by synaptic command and human reflexes, Waste Tide traces the trajectory of consumerist pleasure and fantasies of biological transcendence and incessant technologically mediated enhancement of human life in the Capitalocene as an extractive process: an extension of what Jason Moore identifies as capitalism’s pyromaniac drive to subject everything in its path, including planetary matter itself, to metabolic combustion in order to generate usable energy for interminable growth. The figure of prosthetic implants demonstrates how the extractive logic distills and disperses itself inwards from the plantation’s territorial demarcation of valuable and appropriable resource-catering to industrial modernity’s scheme of national progress, to the neoliberal production of neural subjects whose bodies, pleasures, habits, and interiorities become sites for the extraction and mobilization of consumer capitalist knowledge, modification, and control. The prosthetic waste that travels to sweatshops of disassembly where it instrumentalizes an extractive regime based on the exploitation of debt-laden, economically unstable resource and labor-rich lands of the Global South for the steady maintenance and development of the consumer capitalist military industrial complex, is thus already embedded in a larger extractive topography that Martin Arboleda (2020) calls a “planetary mine,” a transnational infrastructure that not only commoditizes as resource, lands, labor, ecologies, and geological strata, but also mines cognitive, epistemic, affective and perceptual fields on both ends of the circular economy.

In the novel, waste, more specifically electronic and biotechnological waste, is both a constellated figure that serves as an instrument of neoliberal geopolitics, as well as a site for new multispecies encounters and entanglements that destabilize ontological boundaries between human/animal, organic/inorganic, and flesh/machine. Further, the novel examines waste as an example of heterogeneous and hybrid formations that, through recurrent disruptive assaults on hegemonic attempts to construct stable borders and sanitized homogeneous interiors, resist being eliminated or forgotten. Waste Tide’s setting is Silicon Isle, an ironically named fictional prototype of South China’s Guiyu region in Guangdong Province, the world’s largest e-waste disposal and recycling center. Here, waste isn’t a mere marginal phenomenon occupying designated out-of-sight spaces of containment; rather, waste constitutes the very material and (as the text demonstrates) corporeal and neural infrastructures within which lives, forms of livability, and livelihoods are determined. Likewise, the toxic colonization of waste is not limited to geography alone, but extends to the bodily and psychic scapes of the inhabitants of Silicon Isle, derogatorily called waste people. As Chen Kaizong, one of the novel’s central characters, poignantly describes, the bodies of the waste workers acquire a porous interchangeability with pollution. At a corporeal level, this exchange literalizes the very erosion of their identities as qualified humans that the biopolitics of extractive capitalism seeks to accomplish as a justification of the appropriation of their dehumanized labor as a source of abstract, nonhuman energy:

He saw the pallid, sickly complexions of the young women and their rough, spotted hands, the result of corrosive, harsh chemicals…. He thought of Mimi; thought of her guileless smile, and underneath, the particles of heavy metal stuck to the walls of her blood vessels; thought of her deformed olfactory cells and damaged immune system. She was like a self-regulating, maintenance-free machine, and like the other hundreds of millions in the high-quality labor force of this land, she would work day after day tirelessly until her death. (124)

In A Billion Black Anthropocenes, Kathryn Yusoff observes that the conversion of labor into a resource under colonialism’s extractive logic is preceded by a metaphysical extraction of the qualities associated with human personhood, thus reducing the colonial subject to a form of pure raw material equatable with mineral ores and plantation produce, and thus legitimately exposable to the same kinds of violence and metabolization. This logic is extended in Chen’s text to the workings of toxicity on bodies exposed to injury and harm. The metaphysical extraction of personhood is accompanied in Silicon Isle’s contested terrain by a permeation, and in the apotheosis of novel’s dystopian telos, transplantation of human anatomy by waste matter to create new posthuman corporeal assemblages. The posthuman in this instance, however, is not a transcendent or idealized paradigm informed by fantasies of anthropocentric perfectibility. Rather, the posthuman abject produced by waste’s contagious vectors of becoming is an open-ended ontology harboring unpredictable boundary crossings and reactions between disparate species, materialities, and technologies. If proximity to lethal waste constitutes a capitalist strategy of depersonalization, the extractive implications of this process become generative, the text shows, of diminished or minor scales of existence beneath the threshold of the anthropocentric subject.

We see this process embodied in two of the novel’s ephebic subjects: the waste girl Mimi and the son of the leader of one the three dynastic clans who share ownership of Silicon Isle. While toying with a strange prosthetic contraption, Mimi is infected with a virus that tampers with her cognitive and sensory capacities. This virus, as we are later informed, is a zoonotic organism originating in the cranial matter of a brutally dismembered primate who is part of a laboratory experiment for inventing life-augmenting neural implants for humans. The same helmet infects and renders comatose the youngest member of the Luo clan. While the boy’s uncontaminated body reacts to the virus by shutting down, in Mimi’s case, the presence of metal particles in her blood accumulated through the manual handling and inhalation of synthetic substances produces a form of neurological hyperactivity, leading to the production of a secondary and autonomic techno-virological consciousness. The key to Mimi’s brain is a fictional Cold War military technology based on remote chemical warfare, the eponymous Project Waste Tide that uses a hallucinogenic drug to immobilize the enemy by producing delusions and psychological terrors. We learn that Project Waste Tide’s postwar toxic terrorism mutates into a commercial enterprise that uses the same military formula to create new kinds of neurological capacities in mammalian brains. Thus, within the novel’s speculative imaginary faux organs, are sites of complex ontological enmeshment between human corporeality: body fluids and secretions, skin, tissue, and hair residue, and nonhuman forms of proliferation–virological and other microorganic life that develop and travel through such discard. As carriers of fleshly remnants and facilitators of new kinds of relational accommodations between inorganic and organic forms, discarded prostheses become commentators on the necropolitical regime of neoliberal capitalism where bodies, body parts, identities, digital data, algorithmic code, viral forms, and inorganic matter are mobilized as interchangeable units in a common transnational flow of information and profit. The zoonotic virus that originates in the brain of a lab animal used for a grizzly experiment remains inactive in Mimi’s brain until her torture with a VR device stimulates it and renders her into a cyborg capable of projecting her consciousness to external nonhuman bodies.

Waste Tide takes the biopolitical interchangeability between persons and discards through which capitalist societies organize the allocation of resource and power and explores the implications of this interpenetration for a radical reconceptualization of personal autonomy and bounded individuality. The infected brain emerges as a posthuman assemblage of human, animal, viral, and technical agencies whereby the crisis of the normative person becomes a site of ecological and social justice. The discard in this scenario is a specific kind of object indexing economic systems of exploitation and profit but also acting like an object bearing its own chemical, physical, structural, and aesthetic intensities. Waste’s tangled materiality, or what Josh Lepawsky has eloquently described as its archipelagic structure: “These discardscapes are a kind of archipelago—patchy, uneven, and not necessarily coherent” (15), also making it generative of specific articulations of subjectivity. Within waste’s material economy and spatial arrangements exist new fragmented processual and unstable norms for the configuration of new idioms of subjecthood that are not constructed along linear, unified models of development and heredity but are premised instead on processes of dismantling, incoherent connections and asymmetrical relations between disparate components–immanent assemblages that are engendered by discard’s “thing-power,” “the curious ability of inanimate things to animate, to act, to produce effects dramatic and subtle” (Bennett 6).

In Waste Tide, discard offers a semantic and epistemic paradigm for the subject which, unmoored from metaphysical claims to transcendence and humanist anthropocentric pretensions to god-like omniscience and rationalist mastery, is reconfigured in low, abject, minor, and diminutive registers of being and action. In the face of the minoritarian and relational ontology of trash that harbors both the exhaustion and entropy of depleted totalities, the humanist subject is reduced and rendered down as a remnant of Anthropocene fossil capitalism’s pyromania, becoming (in response to the planetary scale of its destruction) an exercise in diminishment. This paradoxical reconfiguration of the historical subject under the cognitively disorienting challenges of the post-Holocene era is termed by Morton and Boyer (2021) a “hyposubject,” a conceptual innovation that both destabilizes the universalist assumptions undergirding the (white, male, protestant, heterosexual) subject as the prototype of anthropos, while also establishing a paradigm of diminished subjectivity as an ethically open and epistemologically receptive formation that can, in turn, offer what Joanna Zylinska (2020) calls minimal ethics as a form of attunement, care, interdependence, and exchange with environments under peril, ruination, and duress.

NOTES

[1] From the transcript of Chen’s public lecture organized by the London Chinese Science Fiction Group on 12th August 2019, and accessed at https://vector-bsfa.com/2021/03/10/chen-qiufan-why-did-i-write-a-science-fiction-novel-about-e-waste/ (date of last access: 14.01.23) See also Vector 293: Chinese Science Fiction, Spring 2021

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Foster, John Bellamy, and Brett Clark. The Robbery of Nature: Capitalism and the Ecological Rift. Monthly Review Press, 2020.

Foster, John Bellamy. Capitalism in the Anthropocene: Ecological Ruin or Ecological Revolution. Monthly Review Press, 2022.

Healey, Cara. “Estranging Realism in Chinese Science Fiction: Hybridity and Environmentalism in Chen Qiufan’s ‘The Waste Tide.’” Modern Chinese Literature and Culture, vol. 29, no. 2, 2017, pp. 1–33.

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Chunks, or a Tin-Opener’s View of Late Capitalism

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

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Chunks, or a Tin-Opener’s View of Late Capitalism

Graham Head

The title of this essay is intended not only to reference the sweet, canned pineapple that I use to string my argument together, and which is one partial focus of the paper, but also reflects that the argument itself comes in, well, chunks.

When, early in Robert Heinlein’s 1958 juvenile novel, Have Spacesuit Will Travel, the protagonist, Clifford, or Kip, tells his father that he is set on going to the moon, the latter answers ‘fine’—but the method is up to Kip. He cites a novel he is reading in which the protagonists try several routes to open a tin can of pineapples:

…when he told me I could go to the Moon, but the means were up to me, he meant just that. I could go tomorrow—provided I could wangle a billet in a space ship.

But he added meditatively, ‘There must be a number of ways to get to the moon, son. Better check ’em all. Reminds me of this passage I’m reading. They’re trying to open a tin of pineapple, and Harris has left the can opener back in London. They try several ways.’ He started to read aloud and I sneaked out – I had heard that passage five hundred times… (Heinlein, Spacesuit, 6)

This was the last of Heinlein’s juveniles published by Scribner’s. In these books, as Farah Mendlesohn argues, he attempts to guide and instruct his audience, assumed to comprise mostly of boys in their early teens, as well as to entertain. For Mendlesohn, this is perhaps his most ‘quintessential’ juvenile, in addition to being a political novel (Mendlesohn, 48, 90-91). It was written after a period when he’d been working on what eventually became the 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land, and a year before Starship Troopers would be released. Kip’s dad is one of Heinlein’s all-knowing omnicompetent father-figures, so, again, we might well expect the book to contain some messages.

The book Kip’s dad is reading is Jerome K. Jerome’s 1889 comic novel, Three Men in a Boat. As he mobilises Jerome’s description of his three characters’ desire for a tin of sweet-fleshed pineapples, he apparently deploys it as a basic narrative of desire motivating entrepreneurial action. Invention, innovation, and adaptation to circumstances are key, and it’s true that these are themes in Heinlein’s novel. In the next chapter, in fact, Heinlein describes how Kip tries to win a trip to the moon by entering a competition to write an advertising slogan for ‘Skyways Soap,’ depicting in loving detail how he mass-produces his competition entries. It seems the conquest of space—or a trip to the moon, at least—is supported by active entrepreneurship and improvisation.

However, looked at another way, this passage from Jerome is a rather strange choice:

We are very fond of pine-apple, all three of us. We looked at the picture on the tin; we thought of the juice. We smiled at one another, and Harris got a spoon ready.

… There was no tin-opener to be found.

Then Harris tried to open the tin with a pocket-knife, and broke the knife and cut himself badly; and George tried a pair of scissors, and the scissors flew up, and nearly put his eye out. While they were dressing their wounds, I tried to make a hole in the thing with the spiky end of the hitcher, and the hitcher slipped and jerked me out between the boat and the bank into two feet of muddy water, and the tin rolled over, uninjured, and broke a teacup.

… Harris rushed at the thing, and caught it up, and flung it far into the middle of the river, and as it sank we hurled our curses at it… (Jerome 116-117)

The desire for pineapple is certainly a parallel to Kip’s wish for the Moon, but Jerome’s protagonists completely fail to open the tin, despite their many attempts. They don’t achieve their aim. They are wounded in the process, and they are clearly figures of fun, not entrepreneurial exemplars. They give up. It is possible that Kip’s father is just tone deaf to what he is saying, but it is perhaps worth looking further. Has he simply offered a rather unhelpful parallel, or is Heinlein hinting at something more?

Jerome’s novel was hugely popular when it was published, a best-seller that seemed to tap into the spirit of the times. His characters and the events he describes touched a chord; they were of the moment. And canned pineapples were a relatively new innovation. They had only just become widespread in Britain, and available to nearly all classes of society, in the previous decade. Perhaps, then, it is worth looking at the means of production of those tins of pineapples.

The first pineapple in Europe was brought over from the Americas by Columbus. For many years afterwards, because of the difficulties of cultivation in a European climate and the fact that the fruit would often rot during long voyages, it was the preserve of the elite classes. Large hothouses were built in the estates of the landed gentry, and it became a symbol of wealth and elite privilege, as well as an object of epicurean—and occasionally sinfully erotic—desire. Early in the nineteenth century, faster and more reliable transport from the Americas made a trade in pineapples to Europe practical. At the same time, more people built hothouses, to grow the fruit in all weathers. Pineapples slowly stopped being the preserve of the very rich and became accessible to the middle classes. Dickens’ titular David Copperfield sees piles of the fruit for sale in London (Dickens, 215), although they remain, for many, an inaccessible object of desire.

By 1850, 200,000 pineapples were being unloaded on the London docks every year. The main source of imported pineapples in this period was the Bahamas, where, by the end of the 18th century, pineapple cultivation had supplanted the pre-eminence of cotton. Following the abolition of slavery in 1834, many ex-slaves were essentially forced to become share croppers, leasing the land for pineapples from a landlord and surrendering up to half of their profits to them in return. It was a pretty miserable existence. They also had to deal with those who marketed and transported the fruit, who would rarely give them a fair price. With the increasingly successful trade with Britain, tens of thousands of acres on the islands of New Providence and Eleuthera were given over solely to the production of pineapples. But development was still paternalistically organised by the ruling British state. Finally, in 1876, a method was devised for canning pineapples. This eased the difficulties of transport and made the fruit available to the masses all year round. A further massive expansion in production and trade occurred as a result. By 1885, over a million pineapples were exported annually, and it was the main crop of the colony. The cultivation of the fruit continued to grow, extending significantly beyond the West Indies to the Azores and North Africa, as well as to Hawaii. There is, of course, no mention of this industrialisation of extraction and production in Jerome’s novel. Ten years later, however, in Wells’ 1897 novel The War of the Worlds, there is a suggestion that this relationship is understood.

… I will not tell the needless trouble I had breaking into that house… nor how I ransacked every room for food, until just on the verge of despair, in what seemed to me to be a servant’s bedroom, I found a rat-gnawed crust and two tins of pineapple. The place had been already searched and emptied. In the bar I afterwards found some biscuits and sandwiches that had been overlooked. The latter I could not eat, they were too rotten, but the former not only stayed my hunger, but filled my pockets. (Wells 142)

Wells’ unnamed narrator, tired, hungry, and in hiding from the Martian invaders, chances upon two tins of pineapples in a ruined Surrey house. In mordant opposition to Jerome’s use of the same food a few years earlier, these tins have already been ignored by previous scavengers and hold no interest for the hungry refugee. Situated as they are in an ironic narrative that casts the white, moneyed English as the invaded and brutalised people, this is a telling intervention. Wells’ narrator encounters an industrialised foodstuff that symbolises civilisation, technological advancement, and national power, but also colonialism and exploitation. At the very least, alongside his destruction of the home counties, Wells intends to signal the demise of the comfortable lives of Jerome’s protagonists. There will be no more pleasure-seeking on the Thames. This is a novel that takes colonialism as a key subject, making it hard to believe that Wells didn’t also intend the tin of pineapples as a handy signal of the end of the European hegemony. That said, not every SF use of the tinned fruit is an indicator of colonialism. For example, in George R Stewart’s 1949 novel, Earth Abides, the survivors of a worldwide apocalypse value the tins primarily because they keep their contents safe from predating rats. The tins are valued because they securely preserve their contents. (Stewart 114).

That said, not every SF use of the tinned fruit is an indicator of colonialism. For example, in George R Stewart’s 1949 novel, Earth Abides, the survivors of a worldwide apocalypse value the tins primarily because they keep their contents safe from predating rats. The tins are valued because they securely preserve their contents. (Stewart 114).

Robert and Virginia Heinlein visited a large-scale pineapple cannery in Hawaii as part of their 1953 world tour, and thus had a sense of the scale of cultivation. Many indigenous plants and animals had been swept aside in the mass planting of the fruit, but in writing about this visit, Heinlein professed only a profound pleasure in the development of the island and supported the industrialisation of production (Heinlein, Tramp, 333-334). So is it really reasonable to think that the darker side of pineapple cultivation was also in his mind, when he wrote the novel?

Well, just possibly, because Spacesuit, like The War of the Worlds, is amongst many other things a novel about colonisation and colonialism. Kip, wearing the spacesuit he won in the soap slogan competition and which he has carefully refurbished, is kidnapped by alien—the evil ‘Wormfaces.’ A hostile, spacefaring race, they are scouting the Earth with the intent of invasion and taking it over. They are colonisers. And, to continue our discussion of food, they eat humans. It is impossible for Kip, or the other humans around him, to face up to these creatures; if they give an instruction, there is no possibility of rebellion; it must be obeyed. The Wormface aliens have technology well beyond that of humans, enabling travel to Pluto in only five days. Resistance is only possible with the support of another alien, the Mother Thing, who turns out to be a kind of interstellar policeman.

This places Kip and Peewee, the preadolescent girl who is his fellow-prisoner, in the role of the colonised and the oppressed. And if there is a clear parallel in the book to the failed attempts of Jerome’s boating holidaymakers to open a tin of pineapples, it may lie in Kip’s repeated failed attempts to escape his captivity. He tries several different avenues, including a march across the lunar surface, improvising with their shrinking oxygen supplies, as well as various attempts to escape his cell on Pluto. Innovation and improvisation are shown to be the province of the prisoner, not just the entrepreneur. At one point, in fact, as Kip is fed from tin cans, he manufactures one into a crude knife, hammering it flat with a second can, creating a weapon of resistance from Wells’ symbol of colonisation.

Eventually, Kip and Peewee are rescued by Mother Thing’s colleagues and taken to the star system of Vega to recover. The Mother Thing’s race is far more advanced than that of the Wormfaces; they are members of an enormous civilisation that covers three galaxies (our own and the Magellanic Clouds). They have intergalactic travel and some form of time travel. Once healed, the children are taken to a court in one of the Magellanic Clouds for judgement of both humanity and the Wormface aliens—and if anything, questions of colonisation and exploitation become more insistent. This court judges whole races. Those who are deemed a threat to the great multigalactic civilisation are sentenced to ‘rotation’ into another space without their sun: an act of summary racial genocide. The Wormfaces are found guilty, and despite their aggressive defiance and hatred, are sentenced to death in this way. Part of their defence reveals their contempt for the indigenous humans:

The Wormfaces had been operating in their own part of space engaged in occupying a useful but empty planet, Earth. No possible crime would lie in colonizing a world inhabited merely by animals. (Heinlein, Spacesuit, 150)

Then it is time for the humans to be judged. Kip has already, in all innocence, given the Vegans something of a potted history of human civilisation, as he understands it—a rather warts and all account. The Court also has the power to reach back in time and pluck other examples of the human race out of the past: a Roman soldier (Iunio), who is a legionnaire from the garrison at Eboracum (York), and a Neanderthal from prehistory. The latter is timorous, and is eventually recognised as not of the same species as the humans, so is sent back. Iunio, however, part of the Roman force colonising England, sees everyone else, including the children, as barbarians, uncivilised, and beneath him. He offers to buy Peewee as a slave. He has been guarding the building of a wall in the North, where the weather is awful:

The climate there was terrible, and the natives were bloodthirsty beasts who… didn’t appreciate civilisation—you’d think the eagles [i.e., the Romans] were trying to steal their dinky island… (Heinlein, Spacesuit, 146)

Iunio’s views closely parallel those expressed by the Wormfaces. Both see the indigenous inhabitants they are supplanting as less than human, as bestial. Humans may in fact be no better than the Wormfaces.

This very act of extracting people from the past may suggest a reification of John Rieder’s notion, when discussing The War of the Worlds, that the confrontation of humans and Martians is a kind of anachronism, an incongruous co-habitation of the same moment by people and artifacts from different times. He cites George Stocking’s 1987 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’. (Rieder, 5, ellipses in original)

To the Wormfaces, the humans are animals, invisible. To the Three Galaxies they are children. They are infantilised—as indicated, overtly, by the very name of the Mother Thing who befriends the hero. In each case they occupy the position of indigenous peoples in the face of invaders.

Both the Wormfaces and Iunio end with a defiant, threatening, and self-centred outburst at the galactic court. It is something of a shock to the reader, that when Kip is called to give evidence, he ends in the same fashion. Condemned out of his own mouth, this suggests he is little different from the colonisers. Despite that, the humans are reprieved. In a sense, their infantilisation saves them, as it is hinted in the court that they are a young race that might be trained to know better. The paternalistic galactic empire is judging the human race, rather as the British—at the time the novel was written—were judging their colonies. “It’s the same all over Africa… Africa is growing up… And in all the countries which have been under British control they are being given their independence as soon as they are able to manage their own affairs. (Daniell and Matthew 48)” However, Heinlein also likens the three galaxies to Hawaii in their isolation (Heinlein, Spacesuit, 141). So it may be that, as their decisions are based more on security than justice, he is suggesting they have something of the America of the 1950s about them. Not claiming to be colonisers themselves, but still perhaps setting themselves up to police the whole world.”

It is now, finally, possible to understand Heinlein’s choice of passage from Three Men In a Boat. The frustration of Jerome’s boaters is reflected in Kip’s frustrations with his captivity, but more widely, humankind appears to be curtailed in its desire to drive into space; the novel challenges the notion that humans can expand without check. It takes on one of the pervading monomyths of the genre, and it refutes the notion that humankind will forge into space and build a galactic civilisation there. There are people living there already, and they are dangerous. And humankind has no solution for that.

We can’t have the pineapples.

Admittedly, little of this concern with the colonising urge comes through Kip’s narrative voice, which remains that of a can-do American chap who has just finished high school. He’s bright and brave, he knows engineering and science, and has enough Latin to speak with an ancient Roman. The novel remains, at heart, a juvenile story of derring-do. He defeats the evil aliens, travels to other galaxies, and saves the human race from extinction. The entrepreneurialism noted at the start remains throughout. So I’m not arguing that the main thrust of the novel comprises a paean against colonialism; rather, that this remains as a troubling undercurrent running alongside the main narrative. And, I suggest, a helpful symbol of that parallel current is that pesky tin of pineapples.

NOTES

[1] The material in this section is drawn from Beauman, ch. 9-10 and O’Connor, ch.3.

WORKS CITED

Beauman, Fran. The Pineapple: King of Fruits. Vintage, 2005.

Daniell, David Scott and Jack Matthew. Flight Five Africa: A Ladybird Book of Travel Adventure. Loughborough, Wills and Hepworth, 1961.

Dickens, Charles. The Personal History of David Copperfield. Penguin, 1966.

Heinlein, Robert A. Have Spacesuit – Will Travel. New English Library, 1975.

—. Tramp Royale. Ace, 1992.

Jerome, Jerome K. Three Men in a Boat (To Say Nothing of the Dog). Penguin, 1957.

Mendlesohn, Farah. The Pleasant Profession of Robert A. Heinlein. Unbound, 2019.

O’Connor, Kaori. Pineapple: A Global History. Reaktion, 2013.

Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan University Press, 2008.

Stewart, George R. Earth Abides. Gollancz, 1950.

Wells, H.G. The War of the Worlds. Everyman, 1993.

Graham Head is an independent researcher living in London.