Author: sfrarev

SFRA Review is the flagship publication of the Science Fiction Research Association since 1971.

Review of The Mimicking of Known Successes

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Fiction Reviews

download

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

download

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

WORKS CITED

Angus, Ian. Facing the Anthropocene: Fossil Capitalism and the Crisis of the Earth System. NYU Press, 2016.

Arboleda, Martín. Planetary Mine: Territories of Extraction under Late Capitalism. Verso, 2020.

Bauman, Zygmunt. Wasted Lives: Modernity and Its Outcasts. Polity, 2017.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. Duke University Press, 2010.

Chen, Qiufan. Waste Tide. 2013. Translated by Ken Liu, Tor Books, 2019.

—. “Chen Qiufan: Why did I Write a Science Fiction Novel about E-Waste?” Interview with Guangzhao Lyu, Angela Chan, and Mia Chen Ma. Vector, vol. 293, 16 Mar. 2021.

vector-bsfa.com/2021/03/10/chen-qiufan-why-did-i-write-a-science-fiction-novel-about-e-waste/

Accessed on 1 December 2022.

Codeluppi, Martina, “Smog and the Psyche: Chen Qiufan’s Reading of the Urban Anthropocene.” Writing Chinese: A Journal of Contemporary Sinophone Literature, vol. 1, no. 1, pp. 60–81. http://doi.org/10.22599/wcj.35

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.

Hird, Myra J. Canada’s Waste Flows. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2021.

Hua, Yuanyuan “The Dual Alienation in Waste Tide.” Comparative Literature Studies 1, vol. 57, no. 4, December 2020, pp. 670–685. https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.57.4.0670

Jiang, Jing. Found in Translation: “New People” in Twentieth-Century Chinese Science Fiction. Columbia University Press, 2021.

Jiang, Qian. “Translation and the Development of Science Fiction in Twentieth-Century China” Science Fiction Studies 119, vol. 40, pt. 1, , March 2013, pp. 116-132. DOI:10.5621/sciefictstud.40.1.0116.

Jiang, Yuqin. “Ecotech, Alienation, and Science Realism in the Chinese Cyborg Novel Waste Tide.” Comparative Literature Studies, vol. 57, no. 4 pp, 1 December 2020, pp. 655–669. doi: https://doi.org/10.5325/complitstudies.57.4.0655

Lepawsky, Josh. Reassembling Rubbish: Worlding Electronic Waste. MIT Press, 2018.

Li, Hua. “The Environment, Humankind, and Slow Violence in Chinese Science Fiction.” Communication and the Public, vol 3, no. 4, 2018, pp. 270–282. https://doi.org/10.1177/2057047318812971

—. Chinese Science Fiction During the Post-Mao Cultural Thaw. University of Toronto Press, 2021.

Lyu, Guangzhao. “Waste People and the Vampiric Society.” Extrapolation, vol. 62, iss. 3, 2021, pp. 309–329. doi:10.3828/extr.2021.17.

Ma, Mia Chen. “Rethinking the Urban Form: Overpopulation, Resource Depletion, and Chinese Cities in Science Fiction.” Ecocriticism and Chinese Literature: Imagined Landscapes and Real Lived Spaces, edited by Riccardo Moratto, Nicoletta Pesaro, and Di-kai Chao. Routledge, 2022.

Malm, Andreas. Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming. Verso, 2016.

—. The Progress of This Storm Nature and Society in a Warming World. Verso, 2020.

Morton, Timothy and Dominic Boyer. Hyposubjects: On Becoming Human. Open Humanities Press, 2021.

Moore, Jason W. Anthropocene or Capitalocene?: Nature, History, and the Crisis of Capitalism. PM Press, 2016.

—. Capitalism in the Web of Life. Verso, 2015.

—. “Wasting Away: How Capitalism Lays Waste to the Web of Life, and Why It Can’t Stop.” Working Paper, World-Ecology Research Group, Binghamton University, October 2022.

—. “Marx and the Historical Ecology of Capital Accumulation on a World Scale: Comment on Hornborg.” Journal of World-Systems Research, vol. 6, no. 1, pp. 134-139, 2000.

Ooi, Yen. “Translating the Chinese Monster in Waste Tide.” Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation, edited by Ian Campbell. Palgrave Macmillan, 2021, pp. 237-261.

Patel, Raj, and Jason W. Moore. A History of the World in Seven Cheap Things: A Guide to Capitalism, Nature, and the Future of the Planet. Verso Books, 2020.

Song, Mingwei and Theodore Huters. The Reincarnated Giant: An Anthology of Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction. Columbia University Press, 2018.

Song, Mingwei. “After 1989: The New Wave of Chinese Science Fiction.” China Perspectives, vol. 1, 2015, pp. 7–13. doi:10.4000/chinaperspectives.6618.

Wark, McKenzie. Molecular Red: Theory for the Anthropocene. Verso, 2016.

Xiong, Christine. “Rethinking the Cyborg in Chen Quifan’s Waste Tide.” Foundation 139, vol. 50, no. 2, 2021, pp. 75-89.

Yusoff, Kathryn. A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None. University of Minnesota Press, 2018.

Zylinska, Joanna. Minimal Ethics for the Anthropocene. Saint Philip Street Press, 2020.

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

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

Features

download

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. 

Violating the Ecotopian Promise: Reading Colonial Extraction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

Features

download

Violating the Ecotopian Promise: Reading Colonial Extraction in Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain

Jasmine Sharma

Speculative fiction offers a critical insight into our present reality through alternative forms of representation. It incorporates exquisite facets of science, fabulation, fantasy, and magical realism to transform familiar reality in order that we think upon it afresh, as outsiders. Today, the post-pandemic market is flooded with voluminous works of speculative fiction, which invite readers and critics alike to posit culturally urgent contemporary questions pertaining to the future of humanity. The text I analyze here includes dynamic bio-wars and biopiracy, ecological crisis amid rising capitalism, and aquatic and alpine pollution due to malfunctioning industrial setups. This eventually leads to contagious viral exposure, environmental contamination, and the extensive migration of indigenous populations.

Amitav Ghosh’s The Living Mountain: A Fable for our Times (2022) is a work of ecotopian speculative fiction that our century direly needs. Traversing his earlier fiction and non-fiction works such as The Hungry Tide (2004), The Great Derangement: Climate Change and the Unthinkable (2016), The Gun Island (2019), and The Nutmeg’s Curse: Parables for a Planet in Crisis (2021), the author writes an interesting dream tale to chart the history of the human-environment relationship. Delineating the disastrous impacts of ecological imperialism and colonial extraction, the book attempts to capture the unanticipated stimulation of an ecocide amid the growing avidity of the masses. By the end of the tale, Ghosh presents a sharp critique of anthropocentric voracity at the cost of environmental degradation as well as the dire need for humans to reconnect with nature and its bounty.

The link between humans and the environment dates back thousands of centuries. Literary studies intensify this link with impeccable plots, fascinating narratives, and struggling characters postulating explorative ideas to spread educative awareness. This interdisciplinary bent towards environmental and ecological themes in literature has, over the years, led to the establishment of the ecocritical school of thought. However, its premises for theorizing and interpreting are not limited to reading the romantic and deep, ecological ideas of the sublime and the wilderness, but also extends to the issue of environmental struggles against the more dominant paradigms of development, science, technology, displacement of indigenous populations, and colonization. In The Ecocritical Reader, Cherly Glotfelty foresees “Ecocriticism becoming a multi-ethnic movement with stronger connections made between the environment and the issues of social justice and when a diversity of voices are encouraged to contribute to the discussion” (xxv). Further, in his 1999 essay, “The Ecocritical Insurgency,” Lawrence Buell reflects on the unleashed potential of ecocritical studies, noting: “The untapped opportunities (of postcolonial ecocriticism) are still much greater than the achievements thus far. For example, India offers distinguished traditions of environmental historiography, ecological science, and environmentalist thought as well as a rich literary archive that engages environmental issues; but ecocriticism has not, so far, tapped very deeply into it” (710). Ghosh’s later writings, including the one under present study, epitomize the ecosophical spirit that Buell discusses around two decades back. It encompasses an urgent call for the preservation of natural ecosystems while censuring the misuse of environmental resources.

“Ecological imperialism” refers to the “violent appropriation of indigenous land to the ill-considered introduction of non-domestic livestock and European agricultural activities” (Huggan and Tiffan 3). However, Ghosh’s fable features much more than the use of non-domestic livestock and agricultural farming. It depicts a categorically determined and gory plunder of the living mountain, enough to invite the reverence of nature. This macabre pillage consequently leads to the physical, psychological and, at the end, epistemological conditioning of colonized communities leading to their consequent downfall.

Extractive colonialism, or “colonial extraction,” characterizes the diplomatic mediation between the colonizers (the Anthropoi) and the colonized (the Varvaroi, or the indigenous communities) with the purpose of slashing out the latter from their natural habitat and, instead, extracting raw materials, natural history specimens, and ethnographic artefacts from the newly colonized reserve. In the essay, “Decolonizing Conservation Policy: How Colonial Land and Conservation Ideologies Persist and Perpetuate Indigenous Injustices at the Expense of the Environment,” Liara Dominguez and Colin Luoma argue that the “separation of indigenous people from their natural environment was a crucial component of colonization” (1). In fact, “the widespread plunder of natural resources was a hallmark of colonization. Nature was something that was to be commodified in order to enrich the colonial power. In turn, indigenous were treated as business enterprises, with seemingly unlimited resources to exploit” (5).

Ghosh’s shortest book ever, this slender volume of 35 pages has much to unravel about the zeal to conquer nature and its subsequent aftermath. Unlike his previous works, which present a historical account of real-life ecological communities, The Living Mountain holds a speculative mirror to the harsh reality of the present and advances a caveat against this hegemonizing cycle. Critiquing anthropological capitalism, the narrative is a commentary on the growing megalomania that, if not interrupted, may lead to an ecological crash.

Crafted as a fable that employs literary metaphors of the aesthetic and the sublime, this enthralling masterpiece engenders strong emotions of awe and wonder in its readers. The presentation of its fascinating content in prosaic stanzas further adds a creative dimension to the overall reading experience. Devangana Das’s emblematizing illustrations supplement the narrative, making it vitally comprehensive to its textual audience. In fact, each illustration could be read in parallel to the semantic idea introduced henceforth. The fable begins with the voice of an unnamed narrator introducing her book club buddy, Maansi. Both of them share a common interest in engaging in thought-provoking discussions through regular reading exercises. Each New Year, they choose a subject and commit themselves to reading and discussing it in the next twelve months. The narrative gains momentum as soon as Maansi introduces the term, ‘Anthropocene,’ for the upcoming year. ‘Anthropocene’ is a grippling term that they cannot even pronounce correctly at first, but look forward to researching and laying hold of a suitable reading list. In the meantime, the narrator waits for Maansi’s response until, one fine day, her message pops up on the screen. This message invites the readers to get ready for a captivating tale of the living mountain, the breathing Mahaparbat that protects its dedicated population from natural disasters and enemy attacks.

From here on, the fable unfolds as a dream that Maansi visualizes after digging into the term, ‘Anthropocene.’ In the dream lies the crux of the fable that the author beautifully delineates:

In my dream I was a young girl growing up in the valley that was home to a cluster of warring villages high in the Himalaya. Overlooking our Valley was an immense, snowy mountain, whose peak was almost always wreathed in clouds. The mountain was called Mahaparbat, Great Mountain, and despite our differences all of us who lived in the Valley revered the mountain: our ancestors had told us that of all the world’s mountains ours was the most alive; that it would protect us and look after us- but only on condition that we told stories about it, and sang about it, and danced for it- but always from a distance (7).

This ‘distance’ indicates a plea for cordial interactions between nature and humans. It admonishes the people of the valley (or any foreign settlers) against exploiting its scenic beauty and ecological abundance. In fact, nobody is allowed to set foot on its holy slopes, as then the mountain wouldn’t protect its people, but may instead punish them in unimaginable and horrendous ways. At the same time, the Mahaparbat is the home of exotic herbs and minerals, adding to its divine charm that the inhabitants aim to maintain at all cost. However, things undergo a drastic change when colonizers get to know about the magical resources of the mountain and attempt to plunder its heavenly abode.

On the surface, Ghosh’s fable appears as a speculative tale of colonization. With no specifically named characters (except Maansi, who recalls her dream), the narrative presents counteractive ideologies. On one side stands ‘Anthropoi’ (a term Ghosh uses for the colonizers who desire to exert anthropocentric control over the mountain), and the other side is occupied by ‘Varvaroi’ (the original inhabitants of the valley) who have faith in the power of the mountain and desire to preserve its deific status. The ideological clash between the two forms the central argument of the narrative. At first, both groups struggle to maintain the interest of their respective community. The Anthropoi dominate the Varvaroi and, despite all warnings, set foot on the living mountain to ransack its bounteous resources. The Varvaroi, on the other hand, try their level best to believe in the folklore of their sanctified ‘Mahaparbat,’ but the day isn’t far off when they, too, become victim to Anthropoi greed. And finally, the moment arrives when both join hands and target the living mountain to fulfil their avaricious intentions. The author describes this change of attitude as:

Our eyes were drawn inexorably to the Anthropoi as they ascended Mahaparbat’s mysterious, glistening snows. We watched spellbound as they pulled themselves with their ropes and tackle…The lives of the Anthropoi seemed infinitely more exciting than our own wretched existence down in the Valley…As time went by, our attitude towards the Mountain began to change- our reverence slowly shifted away from the Mountain and attached itself instead to the spectacle of the climb. Gradually as the spectacle took the place that the Mountain occupied in our hearts, we burned with the desire to ascend those slopes ourselves (19).

This shift in perspective signifies the impending anthropocentric doom that the Anthropoi and Varvaroi fail to realize. None of them actually care about the Great Mountain. What matters is who climbs higher and conquers its precipitous slopes. This eventually leads to a fanatical and competitive urge to defeat their opponent without considering the robustness of the Living Mountain. In fact, climbing high intoxicates each of the climbers and makes them desperate to reach its topmost point. In reciprocation, what untwines is the scathing wrath of the ‘Mahaparbat,’ the epitome of sentient nature itself, in the form of devastating avalanches and landslides that sweep away a vast number of valley inhabitants.

However, deep down, ‘The Living Mountain’ is a learning lesson that resonates with human actions. It bears testimony to the insatiable greed of humans, which can lead to cataclysmic consequences. This makes Ghosh’s fable a touchstone of contemporary concern, requiring uncompromising attention and a diligent acumen to be able to dissolve the disastrous hegemony of man over nature. In fact, the tale is much more than a post-pandemic cautionary speculation on the affront to truth that we chose to peripheralize or, more precisely, ignore. In fact, it calls for a persistent understanding of the ecological misconduct that we have unconsciously added to our everyday activities. Thus, The Living Mountain manifests as an extant truth that we are born with and continue to reap its harvest. It reiterates itself in each one of us through Maansi’s dream, which we still fail to think upon.

Still, we cannot miss the author’s ustopia as we read the final sentences of the fable: “How are you? she cried. How dare you speak of the Mountain as though you were its masters, and it were your plaything, your child? Have you understood nothing of what it has been trying to teach you? Nothing at all?”. These sentences add a two-fold perspective to the fable: first, they highlight the harsh repercussions that anthropocentric greed meets in the face of an environmental catastrophe and, second, they anticipate a promising transformation of human ideology through eco-friendly actions. In short, the fable provides a remarkable opportunity to the readers to reprimand ecological mismanagement and encourage the sustainable use of environmental resources.

Macroscopically, Ghosh’s fable encapsulates the epistemological essence of sustainable development. It creatively directs its audience to explore the United Nations’ agenda of Sustainable Development Goals 2030, thus making it equally interesting for development policy critics. In particular, it focuses on Goal 15 of the charter, which promises to “protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification and halt the reverse land degradation and halt diversity loss” (“Sustainable Development Goals 2030”). This acts in conjunction with the Indian Biodiversity Act (2002), which “provides for conservation of biological diversity, sustainable use of its components and fair and equitable sharing of all benefits out of the use of biological resources, knowledge and for matters connected therewith or incident thereto” (“Indian Biodiversity Act”), the Rights of Nature, which is “grounded in the recognition that humankind and Nature share a fundamental non-anthropocentric relationship” (“Rights of Nature”), and other similar manifestos implemented by global governments. Each of these memorandums reaffirm our ‘Mother Earth’ and its ecosystems as a common expression that we equally share and which, therefore, must be treated with respect by all.

A lucid expression of Ghosh’s perspectival agency, The Living Mountain creatively acknowledges the interrelation between humans and ecology. It re-establishes our neglected connection with Mother Earth and calls for the revitalization of the ecosystem. The author, through a circular and fantastical narrative, laments the poignant deterioration of the planet. Through this engaging fable, Ghosh records a contemporary global scenario of environmental adversity that caters to the massive outreach necessary for the optimal protection of our ecosphere. The Living Mountain is a remarkable read for those interested in speculative fiction and ecotopian narratives. It motivates its audience to adopt eco-friendly practices of preservation and sustenance. Entangling the past, present, and future into a well-knit web, this fable sets the groundwork for a sustainable human-nature interaction today, tomorrow, and henceforth.

WORKS CITED

Buell, Lawrence. “The Ecocritical Insurgency.” The John Hopkins University Press, vol. 30, no. 3, 1999, 699-712.

Dominque, Lara and Colin Luoma. “Decolonizing Conservation Policy: How Colonial Land and Conservation Ideologies Persist and Perpetuate Indigenous Injustices at the Expense of the Environment.” Land, vol. 9, no. 65, 2020, 1-22.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Living Mountain. HarperCollins Publishers, 2022.

Glotfelty, Cherly and Harold Fromm. The Ecocritical Reader: Landmarks in Literary Ecology. The University of Georgia Press, 1996.

Huggan, Graham and Helen Tiffin. “Green Postcolonialism.” Interventions, vol. 9, no.1, 2009, 1-11.

“Indian Biodiversity Act.” The Biological Diversity Act, 2002- India Code. https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/2046/1/200318.pdf. Accessed 28 August 2022.     

 “Rights of Nature.” Rights of Nature Law and Policy. http://www.harmonywithnatureun.org/rightsOfNature/#:~:text=Rights%20of%20Nature%20is%20grounded,actions%20that%20respect%20this%20relationship. Accessed 19 August 2022.  

“Sustainable Development Goals 2030.” Sustainable Development- The United Nations. https://sdgs.un.org/2030agenda. Accessed 25 August 2022.

New Materialist Considerations about The Man from Mars by Stanislaw Lem

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53 no. 2

Features

download

New Materialist Considerations about The Man from Mars by Stanislaw Lem

Malgorzata Kowalcze

Although Stanislaw Lem’s works comprise a variety of genres (Lethem), it is his abundant contribution to the genre of science fiction that he is arguably most recognized and appreciated for. This paper discusses the writer’s very first SF endeavour, the novel The Man from Mars, which was forgotten for half a century after it had been first published in 1946 in the magazine Nowy Świat Przygód ( “The New World of Adventures”), and has not been translated into English in extenso to date. Lem’s juvenilia is a ‘first contact’ story (Lethem) which raises the question of the inmost desires of two species of intelligent beings, namely, humans and Martians, in which multidimensional extraction plays a major role. Importantly, the book touches upon issues which are central for new materialist research, such as blurring the borders between human and non-human, inherent vitality of matter and agency of objects, to name but a few; and therefore selected concepts of the new materialist theories shall constitute the main framework of my considerations.

The novel is written in a rather light tone, as if the author was playing with words and ideas, not quite aware of the grim and complex undertones lurking in the ostensibly simple story. It reveals the author’s disbelief in the possibility of humans effectively communicating with aliens, which is a repeated theme of Lem’s narratives. “Mutual hostility between humans and Martians appears to be inevitable and forejudged” one critic observes, adding that the novel is actually not about an attempt at communication, but about a fight with aliens, a sort of a trial humanity and its values are subjected to (Jarzebski 478). That makes the Polish writer’s narratives similar to H. G. Wells’s stories which often revolve around the motif of a confrontation between two dissimilar civilisations and therefore it is not without reason that critics point to Wells’s War of the Worlds as the source of Lem’s inspiration for the book.

In the novel, a spaceship from Mars with peculiar substances and species, but most importantly, with a strange machine on board is found. The machine, which is in the shape of a metal cone with several coiled tubes attached to it, turns out to be intelligent and endowed with not only agency, which according to Katherine Hayles is the condition of subjectivity (Hayles 22), but personality as well. A group of scientists carry out a number of experiments, dissecting it and attempting to communicate with it, with the purpose of extracting from it whatever information can possibly be obtained:

So that’s the way it is: that guest from Mars can bring humanity many benefits . . . and even more misfortunes. So a few people gathered and contributed the necessary money, resources and knowledge with the following purpose: to get to know the essence of this stranger . . . messenger from another planet, communicate with him, find out if he knows a lot about us, what technical or mental superiorities he has over us, to use them for the benefit of the public, or, if necessary, to destroy him. (Lem 70)

The Martian is referred to interchangeably as ‘machine,’ ‘creature,’ ‘man,’ or ‘Areanthrop,’ which testifies to the scientists’ original ambiguity regarding its ontological status. There are numerous material, structural, and cognitive dissimilarities between the alien and humans, and yet those differences do not prevent them from recognizing certain qualities that both species share and are intimately and inalienably connected with. First of them is the disposition of perceiving the other as a resource, rather than as their equal and a potential partner of a fair exchange. At the heart of both species’ attitude towards their surroundings appears to be the propensity to extract whatever might be of value and whatever increases their power or influence. The actual purpose for obtaining power over the other species remains unspecified in the novel, but Lem’s narrative suggests that it would serve further extraction rather than creating a mutually beneficial relationship.

Martian and Earthmen’s affinity is also established by their organisms’ originating from the same substance. Despite their physical differences, both species are the forms of life generated by ‘plasma,’ which developed differently on the two planets:

…organized plasma on Mars went a different way than the one on Earth: here by means of evolution it had to develop for itself the locomotor system, the digestive system, the system to interact with the environment, that is, the sensory organs and the nervous system, and on Mars it was different, much simpler. A thinking, but rather infirm, plasma was formed that accelerated evolution by making for itself a machine to move, see, hear, and to protect itself from destruction. (Lem 58)

Karen Barad’s coinage ‘intra-action’ (Barad 248) aptly conveys the nature of that ontological connection, as it emphasizes its inalienability and the reality of both entities’ participating in the same material substratum: “The neologism ‘intraaction’ signifies the mutual constitution of entangled agencies. That is, in contrast to the usual ‘interaction,’ which assumes that there are separate individual agencies that precede their interaction, the notion of intra-action recognizes that distinct agencies do not precede, but rather emerge through, their intra-action” (Barad 2007, 33). Not only are entities intimately unified by the fabric of their material existence, but their very existence is actively formed by intraactions with other entities and their meaning emerges from the intraactive ‘mattering’ of matter: “The world is intraactivity in its differential mattering” (Barad, 2003, 817). At the beginning of the novel the scientists perceive humans as fundamentally different from the stranger and argue against using comparisons and attempting to “humanize this creature too much” (Lem 27); they are willing to understand the creature in its specificity, independently from the human context. As the plot develops, however, their initial attitude changes dramatically and they seem appalled by the fact that the behaviour of Areanthrop resembles human behaviour in many ways.

The two species are intraconnected with each other not only ontologically, but also epistemologically and ethically. Although the human language is unintelligible for the machine, it is revealed that the cognitive processes taking place in their brains are comparable, and the scientists manage to work their brain currents on the Areanthrop’s brain directly, without the intermediate ways (Lem 70). As they become subject to the same procedure by the alien, they too are made privy to the creature’s mind, his memories of Mars included.  Interestingly, what each of the humans can see in the machine’s mind is different – some images are more disturbing than others, as if tailor made for each individual on account of their knowledge, experience and intelligence. One of them, the professor can see beautiful creatures living on Mars who flee in terror the moment “the Lord of Mars, the Areanthrop appears” (93). Then another scientist asks: “So they too…? . . . They too have taken over the surface of the planet and are exterminating other animals?” (93). Apparently, Martians are as unable to see intra-material connections between themselves and other species as humans are and display drives which are similarly destructive to their own planet and its inhabitants. The actions of Martians the professor observes in his vision are ‘unintelligible’ to him and ‘without purpose’ (94), but when he describes them, they strike one as being strangely analogous to human actions – taking over the planet and destroying those elements of the natural environment which come in the way. Nature is disturbingly absent from the plot, which takes place essentially on the premises of a laboratory, and peculiarly present at the same time, manifesting itself in the very corporeality of the protagonists as well as in the figments of their imagination. The most disturbing of the professor’s visions involves some unfathomable barbarity which fills him with terror an which “demolished his understanding of everything” (96). When inquired by others about the nature of the atrocities he witnessed, whether, perhaps, Martians “drink blood, maybe slaughter or eat one another? (…) we know that from the earthly relationships and what else can possibly appall us?” (96), the professor does not get to reply. The reader is left to their own ideas of what these terrifying images might have been.

Notably, the novel was written during or right after the World War II and remnants of the horror of war—fear of unexpected threat that may come any moment or of a destructive weapon of unknown origin that one cannot protect oneself from – can be vividly sensed in it. It is somewhat surprising, therefore, that in The Man from Mars Lem presents humanity favourably, as if in an attempt to confront the trauma and disillusionment with the human ‘nature’ that the war produced. He depicts ethical issues the scientists take into consideration while conducting their experiments, the care they have for one another, as well as for the Areanthrop, whereas the alien comes across as callous, cunning and determined to obtain his evil goals. In the face of the creature’s malice and serious threat it poses to the Earth the scientists are left with no choice but to destroy it together with the whole laboratory.  Such a ‘black and white’ ethical assessment of differences gave way to a much more nuanced and ambiguous depiction of inter-species relationships in Lem’s later works, in which: “Lem goes to great lengths to avoid the facile extremes of describing Contact as a meeting of antagonists bent on pillaging of each other’s troves of scientific secrets . . . or, conversely, a handshake across space between cosmic comrades who inhabit different but amicably disposed utopias” (Swirski, 170). Nevertheless, like in his later works, in The Man from Mars Lem’s approach to the subject and his tone is far from moralizing (Glinter), as the author’s perception of relationships between humans and aliens are complex and his message ambiguous.

One of the central themes of the novel is subversion of the dualism animate vs. inanimate in the way it presents selected material objects. The alien as such, although a machine is treated as an animate creature due to its sentience and intelligence. But there are also other objects which occupy a sort of liminal space between the animate and the inanimate, e.g.:

It was something hard and cold, but it twitched at once, began to squirm in my hands, and became warm, so that I let go of it involuntarily. It fell on the table and froze in its old form. – A seemingly metallic substance endowed with excitableness – the doctor declaimed with half-closed eyes – It destroys all our notions of living matter and the difference between the animate and the inanimate… (Lem 31)

In such a depiction of material objects resonates new materialist perception of them which focuses on matter’s inherent agency. Jane Bennett’s vital materialism highlights this particularly aptly: “By ’vitality’ I mean the capacity of things—edibles, commodities, storms, metals—not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans but also to act as quasi agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (Bennett viii). Other concepts regarding the animate vs. inanimate relationships that the novel anticipates are the ones of Donna Haraway, Karen Barad or Timothy Morton; Lem’s work also vaticinates the approach of object-oriented ontology as well as that of cyberpunk fiction (Lethem). Undermining of the human vs. non-human dualism and that subversion includes two processes: humanizing of an object and objectification of a human being. The first one is exemplified by the Areanthrop itself—it is the product of plasma, which becomes capable of using a mechanical ‘body’ to exhibit behaviour so similar to the one of a human being that ultimately is treated as such by other characters. The second process is illustrated by the character of one of the scientists, Mr Fink, who is transmuted by the alien into an involuntary ‘machine’, a zombie of sorts, acting mechanically and following instructions given to him by the Areanthrop. The latter motif alludes to the trauma of treating the human body as a resource that characterises war, and the World War II in particular: soldiers’ bodies serving as a weapon, human body parts (hair, skin) extracted in Nazi concentration camps, where brutal experiments on humans were carried out. But what resonates in the novel as well is the lack of human exceptionality, Lem appears to be suggesting that the human body is just one of many forms matter (or in this case, plasma) takes, and there is nothing inherently unique about it. The human body can be manipulated with and extracted just like other bodies on the planet Earth. One’s intelligence does not make them special either, since it is not limited to our planet only; the Areanthrop is an intelligent life form as well, and much more advanced technologically to that. What is more, the author’s perception of intelligence strikes the reader as being far from entirely favourable, as it is intelligence which enables one to come up with most refined methods of subjugation, as Swirski insightfully observes: “Most likely a civilisation sophisticated enough to develop means of interstellar communication will also have developed other technologies, including military” (170).

We are unable to effectively communicate with aliens or to really understand the intricacies of their motives, just as the scientists can understand the technology the Areanthrop uses to some extent only. It goes without saying, however, that we are intimately intraconnected with them by means of participating in the same material substratum—matter—which is multidimensional, agentive, creative and in a way uncanny as well. Human and non-human creatures from other planets can differ biologically, culturally, historically and technologically, which might make it impossible for them to feel connected, and yet the way in which they behave, certain tendencies and propensities which appear to sort of spring from the very ‘structure’ of their constitution reveal their existential likeness. Oddly, and sadly, the propensity to extract and utilize whatever can possibly be reached is presented as a cross-species quality, a survival strategy which needs to be limited, otherwise it turns destructive to the object of extraction and, paradoxically, to the subject of extraction as well. Although seemingly uncomplicated and naïve, The Man from Mars proves to be touchingly insightful about the intricacies of human cognitive processes and impulses, of one’s intuition as well as of their rational thinking, creating a surprisingly holistic picture of a human being, and making the Areanthrop, the alien, look not as alien, as one would assume.

WORKS CITED

Barad, Karen. Meeting the Universe Halfway. Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press, 2007.

—. “Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter”. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 28, no. 3, 2003, pp. 801-831.

—. “Quantum Entanglements and Hauntological Relations of Inheritance. Dis/continuities, Spacetime Enfoldings, and Justice-to-come.” Derrida Today 3, no. 2, 2010, pp. 240-268.

Bennett, Jane. Vibrant Matter. A Political Ecology of Things. Duke University Press, 2010.

Glinter, Ezra. “The World According to Stanislaw Lem.” Los Angeles Review of Books, December 2016, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/world-according-stanislaw-lem/

Hayles, Katherine. “(Un)masking the Agent: Stanislaw Lem’s ‘The Mask’”. The Art and Science of Stanislaw Lem, ed. Peter Swirski. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2006, pp. 22-46.

Jarzębski, Jerzy. ”Lata czterdzieste”. Stanislaw Lem Dzieła, Tom XX, Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, 2009.

Lem, Stanisław. Człowiek z Marsa. Stanislaw Lem Dzieła, Tom XX. Biblioteka Gazety Wyborczej, 2009, pp. 477-484.

Lethem, Jonathan. “My Year of Reading Lemmishly.” London Review of Books, vol. 44, no. 3 February 2022, https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v44/n03/jonathan-lethem/my-year-of-reading-lemmishly.

Swirski, Peter. Stanislaw Lem. Philosopher of the Future. Liverpool University Press, 2015.

Review of Memory’s Legion

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Fiction Reviews

download

Review of Memory’s Legion

Robert J. Creedon

Corey, James S.A. Memory’s Legion Orbit, 2022.

.

Memory’s Legion is a compilation of the novellas and short fiction of the Expanse universe of James S.A. Corey. The Expanse consists of a series of books and short stories, a role-playing game, and a television program. Small parts of Memory’s Legion make up a collection of shorter fiction that was produced for other media. Each is available through other means, but together they are placed in a chronological order related to the main series of books. For someone who only knows the TV series and RPG game, Memory’s Legion expands upon the worlds, characters, and periods of the series. This collection isan amazing introduction to the many elements of the Expanse universe and series. I accessed this text through Audible, which additionally provides authors’ notes (spoken by the authors) and allows the listener to hear the correct pronunciation of names and places. This review will try not to reveal any spoilers but only hint at their existence.     

“Drive” is the first short story. It covers the technological advancement that makes space travel more profitable and accessible in this universe. The Expanse is set 200 years into the future. This story, set 150 years before the main plotline of the series, follows Solomon Epstein as he invents the Epstein Drive to allow faster space travel. The drive enables humankind to venture throughout the solar system, including the Outer Belt and the moons of outer planets. It is a wonderful blend of hard soft science as the authors “show” rather than tell in this story of the first flight. Although theory, it gives a wonderfully detailed explanation of the related theoretical physics. Solomon Epstein reflects upon his past as we learn what this new technology does to him, the pilot. It is a very skillful tribute to this fictional inventor that sets off the entire “expanse” or colonization of the solar system.  

The next three stories are all interconnected as they cover the main zones and characters of the series. “The Butcher of Anderson Station” introduces Colonel Fred Johnson and the Belters with the theme of political strife between governments, corporations, and the Belters. We see how Johnson evolves and observe the living conditions of the people of the Belt and Outer Planets. “The Churn” introduces the background of a major character from Earth with a surprise twist. The hidden twist helps the reader to focus on a wonderful story of the lives of the common people of Earth, demonstrating how the lives of people on Earth are shaped by their high population numbers. We see things like “Basic” Universal Income, free mass transit, and underground economies of the average citizen without looking at only the elites. Once the twist is revealed, it makes a lot more sense. From the TV series, the actor is subdued and only hints at what the character is experiencing, which can be felt from his performance. After reading this, you will have a greater appreciation for elements of his performance and backstory. Finally, “Gods of Risk” continues the story of Bobbie Draper and introduces us to common life on Mars. Mars is colonized and seems to be very much like a modern-day Earth in lifestyle and opportunity. Each of these stories establishes the political environment of their cultures through a personal story that draws in the reader. Each gives its flavor to a crime story of sorts but that just is the medium for these great character stories. Much of the jargon and flavor of each world is conveyed so this makes a great introduction to the cultures for both reading the series and playing the RPG version. 

“The Vital Abyss” covers a discovery and technological development that was not explored well in the series. The story presents a very interesting argument in ethics and philosophy wrapped into a weird story of an unusual situation. I now see that there was really no place for this in the main series, but it is a very deep story that is a pleasure to experience. Strangely, this story also introduces the reader to a theme or element of the Expanse universe that might be missed. A major character has a diverse education that bridges ideas and concepts from many sciences within the story. This mirrors the biological education of one of the authors that adds layers to many of the stories. We also see the higher education skill of secondary fields like philosophy from the author notes or interview at the end of the Audible reading. This does support that any beginning writer should read or listen to this collection with interviews as a lesson on the importance of diverse personal skills and techniques in world building.

“Strange Dogs” reads simply as a horror story but has many layers. We have advanced forward into time to the colonizing of the planet, Laconia, within the Expanse universe. We meet a young girl named Cara who is growing up on the world as part of what was supposed to be just a five-year mission. She is being raised with rules from Earth on a world where most of those rules do not apply. She is a young, responsible girl trying to do the right thing, but all the rules have changed. The authors say that this is a story of immigrants. The first generation tries to live by their rules from home, but Cara develops through her learning of the rules of the planet. Within this horror story, we see that the planet has different technologies and abilities. I do not see it as horror even though it ends very horror like. It has more of a colonization / immigrant edge to it as two cultures experience conflict. As a Canadian who works in a First Nation community, I recognize a familiar misunderstanding between the Laconians and humans as they try to help. It reminds me of the Westerns where a young child becomes part of tribe or the Star Trek NG episode “Suddenly Human” where the child is reintroduced to humans after being raised by an alien culture. This is a much more interesting way of dealing with the bridging of two different cultures by a person. The total distrust of the events due to human-centered beliefs causes the horror but what would have happened if the characters connected as Cara does, accepting the gifts and knowledge of the “Strange Dogs”? What are we learning from the Indigenous peoples now that we are actually listening and trying to understand? “Strange Dogs” therefore prompts the reader to carefully consider these pivotal topics.

“Auberon” is a story filled with political intrigue. This is due largely to its plot, which focuses upon the aftermath of the Laconian Empire’s takeover of the universe and its subsequent placing of governors on its planets. Strangely, it opens with a wonderful speech about how change is constant and that there is therefore a dire need to learn new rules quickly. There are definite connections to “The Churn” and the recurrence of the social political emphasis in the Expanse universe. We see how a governor deals with a very corrupt planet with limited trusted forces and how the criminal underworld adapts and survives. We learn about the problems of winning a war. What really gets me is how this story is so perfect as a teaser for the series without giving anything away. There is even a reference to “Strange Dogs” linking them. The author’s notes additionally enrich this section. For these reasons, it is a short story that prompts the reader to explore the rest of the series.

“Sins of the Father” tells the tale of one of the characters and how this character ends up wrapped in a very strange fate. A major event happens in the universe, so we see the effects on a group of colonists. Once you read this story, you will also see a strange karma in the fate of the main character, but what struck me was how Earth is being destroyed and we look at the stars and science for solution. Between “Strange Dogs” and this story, we are told it is not a guarantee. There is a secondary lesson in the stories of the Expanse about life on this planet and possible outcomes. This might not be an intentional theme, but I picked up on the possibilities. Not everything turns out, especially for 400 with no way home and no chance of rescue.

The short stories and novellas in this collection are a wonderful gateway into the Expanse universe, whether it is for a reader of the books, a watcher of the TV series, or a gamer interested in the RPG. This also carries great weight for the aspiring writer to see the craftsmanship and diversity of knowledge necessary for creating a realistic universe. We see biology, politics, and philosophy as major viewpoints for the writing. The Expanse universe was also used for a campaign for a roleplaying game by the author. One thing many tabletop or Role Playing Games do is incorporate elements of different fictional worlds. Many read the works of the authors to get the flavor of the universe in which they are playing. The authors of the Expanse do well in explaining the science and technology involved in these stories and exploring the culture of both the leaders and the common folks, especially those of the underworlds. There is even new terminology like “goldilocks planets” and “living on basic” to explain concepts in this view of the universe. 

This collection allows the players to jump off many places for their own games and campaigns through this long story arc. This is a wonderful piece of writing as both an introduction and teaser to the Expanse books or TV series. The Audible package also includes the author’s notes in an interview format after each story, which, by providing the authors’ comments directly, greatly enriches the text. It is a nice package to give clarity plus it provides great insight into the writers and the process. Those author’s notes are very informative to both readers and future writers. For those watching the TV series, these stories are linked in as titles and more. Reading or listening to the stories provides a depth and scope unavailable to consumers solely of the television series. The quality of the reader in the Audible recording is great as there are those voice changes that help the listener understand who is speaking. Additionally, it is read at a great pace and is clearly spoken. Overall, this book and its format are top quality and worth your time whether you be an avid fan or someone looking for a mind-opening piece of science fiction. It provides escapism, provokes important ideas, and introduces strong characters, culminating in a great reading or listening experience. 

Robert Creedon is an intermediate and high school teacher in the Canadian First Nation community.  With backgrounds in emergency services, sociology, and teaching, he has cultivated an interest in science fiction through tabletop role playing games, film, media, and books for over 40 years.  This is his first review of fiction, but he has reviewed books on popular culture and philosophy before.  Robert has also participated in over 50 productions of theater and media.   

Review of A Master of Djinn

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Fiction Reviews

download

Review of A Master of Djinn

Ian Campbell

P. Djéli Clark. A Master of Djinn. Tordotcom, 2021. Hardcover. 400 pg. $18.59. ISBN 978-1250267689.

.

Clark’s debut novel won the Nebula Award for Best Novel in 2021, and in 2022 won the Compton Crook Award for Best Novel and the Locus Award for Best First Novel. It was also nominated for the Hugo Award for Best Novel in 2022. The work depicts an alternate steampunk-esque Cairo of the 1910s, where the technical innovations are the work of the djinn or the result of their influence. There are many social innovations, as well, more on which below. The timelines split in the 1870s, when in our world Egypt was nominally independent but in practice dominated by the British and French: the proximate cause of this was Egypt’s vast indebtedness to those countries, partially due to the cost of the Suez Canal. In Clark’s world, a mystic going by the name al-Jahiz was able to open the door between our world and what Clark refers to as the Kaf, the world of the djinn. The irruption of mystical force into the world enabled Egypt to leapfrog the Western powers both technolgically and socially; this irruption spread to other colonized lands, enabling those societies to throw off their Western oppressors via their cultures’ particular sorts of sorcery and magical beings.

This alternate history provides the background for a police procedural that becomes an epic struggle for power through control of the djinn. Fatma el-Sha’rawi is a senior agent with the Ministry of Alchemy, Enchantments and Supernatural Entities, which is itself part of a highly modernized and efficient Egyptian government. When a British man with ties to the colonial past, who is also the leader of an esoteric brotherhood devoted to al-Jahiz, is murdered along with his whole brotherhood in a clearly sorcerous manner, Fatma is called in to solve the mystery: her main companions in this quest is her new partner, Agent Hadia, and Fatma’s lover Siti, whose heritage proves crucial. The McGuffin here is the Seal of Solomon, which has the power to bind the djinn in service: a villain cosplaying as al-Jahiz returned needs to re-open the gateway between worlds in the service of their own will to power. A Master of Djinn builds upon a previously-published novella and novelette, whose events are summarized in the text of this work. I should note that I have not read these earlier works, on the premise that the novel should be understood as a thing unto itself.

The novel has much to admire. Its world is vivid and particular: Clark has a good picture of Cairo and uses it to his advantage in structuring its steampunk alter. The world is also internally consistent. The novel is quickly-paced and an easy read. The central plot is well-structured, even if its sudden reveal is telegraphed much too clearly. Its version of the 1910s is startlingly modern in terms of social mores, above and beyond the overturning of colonialism: most contemporary readers will appreciate its feminism, queer relationships and other details.

What A Master of Djinn best represents, however, is the hollowing-out of the publishing industry and the vast disservice this does to both writers and readers. Clark is a first-time novelist, and it shows: there are clunky bits of exposition, even including a couple of instances that verge on “As you know, Bob,” and minor infelicities of language here and there. A caring editor would have had him cut down the number of descriptions of clothing, spaced out the introductions of some of the characters, etc. For example, djinn is the group plural and the name of the race of beings. The singular is djinni, yet “djinn” is used in the singular throughout the text; also, there are repeated mentions of masjid, which does mean “mosque”, but it’s singular and the word is consistently used in the plural, where it should be masájid. These infelicities should have been addressed in the editing process, but clearly were not. It’s a testament to Clark’s skill at keeping the story moving and portraying a vivid alternate universe that the novel won the awards it has—but this recognition comes despite, not with the help of, Tor and its editors.

The infelicities are sometimes grating but ultimately trivial—and again, I want to emphasize that my critique here is not of Clark, who’s done a great job as a first-time novelist. More problematic is the glaring lacuna that anyone familiar with the literary tradition in Arabic will find at the heart of A Master of Djinn: his portrayal of djinn very much goes against their nature.

Structurally, the djinn occupy a space in Muslim culture very similar to that of the fey in Celtic-influenced northwestern Europe. The djinn predate humanity—and often predate upon humanity. They are very diverse in form, and fall into groups based on similarity of form. They have great sorcerous power and live far beyond the mortal lifespan. They are arrogant, lack empathy and are often cruel, but are honorable in their generally Lawful Evil way. They can be bargained with, but will obey the bargain only to its literal word and will do what they can to make those words misleading. Some are more curious than actively malevolent; a very, very few are intrigued by humanity and might even verge on the benevolent. The primary structural difference between fey and djinn is that while Christianity is inimical to the former, the djinn are fully imbricated in the Muslim tradition—though the djinn existed in the cultures of the region prior to the advent of Islam. The djinn were created first, and from fire; when god created humans from earth, he demanded the djinn bow down to the first humans. Some refused, while others obeyed. Some djinn became Muslims, while others did not.

The djinn of A Master of Djinn have all the superficial characteristics of the traditional djinn, and many of the powers. They certainly look like djinn: Clark, like many new writers, spends a great deal of space giving us physical descriptions of characters, and the descriptions of the very different physical forms (and outfits) of the djinn go a great deal toward the vividness of his world. The djinn have the same broad variety and particularity in the novel as they do in the literary tradition. Some of them act like djinn, whether their words and actions be arrogant, oblique, opaque or esoteric.

Yet Clark has humanized the djinn, and it takes away from the power and innovation of his world, in a way that might not be evident to those unfamiliar with the djinn. Partway through the text, Fatma sees an English woman reading from a luridly-illustrated book of 1001 Nights-esque tales. She responds to this by directly lampshading, anachronistically, the concept of Orientalism, first articulated by Edward Said in 1978, six decades after the novel’s setting. Fatma is right to sneer at the book she sees, but A Master of Djinn performs the opposite trope upon most of its djinn. The djinn are not human, and their djinn-ity is being done something of a disservice by the text. The novel is full of djinn who, despite their baroque appearance and habits, have opinions and take actions that make them seem like 21st-century progressives. Since the advent of the djinn, every hierarchy has been overturned: colonized and colonizers, democrats and authoritarians, men and women. The novel makes it clear that the djinn are the causal factor here: for example, the USA has banned the supernatural, and due to this it remains a backward land drenched in Jim Crow. While I personally am very much on the side of upending hierarchies, there’s a real issue of willing suspension of disbelief, here.

When presented with an alternate world, most readers of SF demand to know by what plausible set of circumstances that world arrived at its current state, but how the djinn caused a progressive revolution is the lacuna at the center of this novel. The technological revolution is clearly backstopped: it arises due to the djinn’s knowledge and sorcerous power, and this conforms to the nature and role of djinn in the literary tradition. With respect to social issues, however, the nature and role of djinn in the literary tradition is to preserve traditional hierarchies. They are for the very most part contemptuous of humans, and deeply resent having had to bow down to us. There are next to no female djinn in the tradition, and the male djinn have no more interest in feminism than do most of the human characters: the 1001 Nights is full of people of both sexes in drag, and notable female characters like Princess Budur who take on a man’s role, but none of it is feminist in the sense of saying that women should have the equal political, economic and social rights as men that they have mostly achieved via the djinn in Clark’s Egypt. The text states several times that while things aren’t yet perfect in Egypt of the 1910s, women have it rather better than their Western sisters. Yet the Egypt of 1870, before the timelines split, was socially conservative to a degree modern readers could hardly understand.

There was in fact a real-world Egyptian feminist movement in the 1910s, though not in the 1870s: it was instrumental in removing the British from direct rule. One of its chief leaders was Huda Sha’rawi (1879-1947), who is best-known for publicly throwing away her headscarf and thereby starting the period between 1922 and the 1990s when Egyptian women of the middle and upper classes did not veil. Fatma el-Sha’rawi is repeatedly said in Clark’s text to be from a downscale background and also a Sa’idi: someone from Upper (southern) Egypt, whose people are darker-skinned, regarded as hayseeds and come under a great deal of racist oppression in the real Egypt of then and even now. It’s a strange re-use of a last name, with the implication of making Egyptian feminism not only somehow djinn-driven but also populist as opposed to being entirely driven by a narrow upper class. The sort of reforms the real Sha’rawi advocated for were incremental, nothing like the openly queer relationship Fatma practices. I’m not advocating against feminism or queer relationships in SF novels: I’m arguing that A Master of Djinn doesn’t explain how any of this happened, and it’s a real distraction from an otherwise engaging story. I’m absolutely willing to suspend disbelief about the presence of the djinn in the novel, because it’s SF and the novum, and it’s cool. But they have to be djinn, and this novel for the most part transforms them into progressive humans. While this isn’t Orientalism, it is a little problematic to take this very well-documented aspect of another literary tradition and adapt the form but not the function.

Again, I’m not critiquing Clark, who deserves next to none of the blame for any of these lacunae: I’m blaming Tor. It would have taken the bare minimum of professionalism on their part to work with him to edit through the small infelicities, and only a little more to have someone familiar with the literary tradition in Arabic read the manuscript and explain where and how the djinn come across as counter to their nature as expressed in that tradition. Clark is clearly blessed with creative talent: I rather doubt it would have taken him long to articulate how the djinn became progressive and to integrate it smoothly into the novel’s additional chapters, and then to perform some minor redjinnification of some of the characters. His story and world are compelling, and I do hope that Clark continues to refine his voice and expand upon what he’s created.

Ian Campbell is the editor of SFRA Review.

Review of The 2084 Report

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Fiction Reviews

download

Review of The 2084 Report

Ada Cheong

Powell, James Lawrence. The 2084 Report: An Oral History of the Great Warming Simon and Schuster, 2020.

.

The 2084 Report is the only work of fiction written by James Lawrence Powell, an American geochemist who has written books on climate science, the Grand Canyon, the Colorado River and the extinction of dinosaurs. The novel is an authoritative chronicle of the effects of climate breakdown as experienced across the globe in an imagined near future. Composed of interviews collected and published in the year 2084 by an unnamed oral historian, it is organised thematically around specific, albeit overlapping, phenomena: droughts and fire, flooding, the rising of sea levels, melting glaciers and permafrost, resource struggles, fascism and xenophobia, death, and nonhuman extinctions. 

Powell’s book plays into a major trope within the cli-fi genre, one which features a future historian interpreting and documenting the errors, failures, and sometimes demise of contemporary life in the Capitalocene. The 2084 Report begins with a preface by a historian, dated Dec 31 2084 in Kentucky. He describes his methods to produce the book, “knowing that it will be read mostly by friends and family” (preface). Like works such as The Age of Stupid, World War Z, and The Collapse of Western Civilization, it conjures what Pieter Vermeulen describes as the “posthumous readability” (880) of climate breakdown and human extinction, evoking “a ravaged future in order to serve as a warning for its present readers” (869).

As is expected of works within this subgenre, Powell’s book is elegiac in tone, as ecological beauty vanishes, and communities lose their lands and livelihoods in the near future. Displaying the vivid speculative prowess of fictional prose, it details the eventual demise of cities and communities in both the Global North and South, as their water resources disappear, from Bangladesh and the Netherlands to Peru and Phoenix. The book features the “ghostly skeleton of some monstrous, dissected sea creature” that the Great Barrier Reef has become (part 8), and the demise of tropical glaciers—a miraculously beautiful “contradicción frágil” (part 4). As ecosystems are torn asunder, so too are monuments of civilisation: China’s Three Gorges Dam is destroyed when a “giant wall of water washed down the Yangtze, sweeping away everything before it” (part 2), and the Statue of Liberty meets a similar demise as “one giant wave toppled her” (part 2).

The novel thus offers a glimpse into what Greg Garrard calls disanthropy, “the world as it is when we are not looking… at once alluring and frighteningly indifferent” (942). Such an aesthetic centres around the downplaying of human agency and exceptionalism in the face of seemingly cosmological and uncontrollable anthropogenic climate phenomena. Vermeulen likewise suggests that works within this subgenre are “sustained exercises in abandoning human life to a geological gaze that is rigorously uninterested in understanding human exceptionality” (880), allowing contemporary readers to “begin facing up to the increasingly inescapable fact of human species finitude” (872). To critics like Garrard and Vermeulen, then, trope performs an important cultural function, one which leans towards a stoic acceptance of climate breakdown rather than action and activism in averting such a future.

Yet, Powell’s book suggests an alternate function that narratives and fiction have to play in the climate crisis. While such texts commonly employ a narrative temporality in which “the present is always also the object of a future memory” (Vermeulen 872), producing “an imagining of the future as if it were already past” (Vermeulen 872), The 2084 Report is slightly different in its temporal inflection. Rather than a book that mourns the future as foregone, it is very much present-oriented, focussed on human agency and the ability to avert a future-without-humanity.

The depth of knowledge that Powell possesses of climate science accurately brings to life the socio-political impacts that the impending ecological fallouts will create. It provides first-hand accounts of the creation and displacement of “25 million Bangladeshi climate refugees” (part 2), the “seemingly endless human chain (that) filled the roads” (part 4) when glacier meltwater dries up, the slow violence of water rations in Phoenix (part 1), and wars within the Arab nations over water (part 5). It is concerned with making real both the slow and dramatic consequences of climate breakdown, drawing strong causal links between climate phenomena and the subjective lives of different human beings. Despite its strong scientific focus (its range of interviewees invariably cite climate statistics), it grapples with both the slow, Nixonian violences of climate breakdown, and its large-scale catastrophes. The 2084 Report thus enables us to approach the material—and affective—reality of our near future.

Unlike the disanthropic works described by Vermuelen and Garrard, however, Powell’s book takes this as the first step towards tackling the climate crisis. As Energy Humanists like Imre Szeman and Dominic Boyer suggest, the climate crisis is not just a technological or scientific problem, but an imaginative and cultural one (Szeman and Boyer 3). Books such as Powell’s novel allow readers to begin properly understanding the affective and cultural consequences of climate breakdown and thus to act to avert it.

Its final two chapters are, perhaps, the most obvious example of this urgent aspiration towards the possibility of steering the planet away from climate catastrophe. While the book largely maintains that climate breakdown within the story has become irreversible, past the “point of no return” (part 9), it also insists on the ability to imagine a different future. The narrator, speaking to two professors in energy production and politics, reiterates:

you are saying that several countries, including Canada, France, and Sweden, had shown that an expansion of nuclear power production could have cut fossil-fuel emissions enough between 2020 and 2050 to keep the global temperature rise under 3.6 ° F [2 ° C] and to eliminate fossil-fuel use. More than two dozen countries, including the U.S., China, Russia, and India, had the necessary experience and controls. And yet it was not done. (Look to Sweden I)

The overarching question of the book, then, is not just “why, back in the first few decades of this century, before time had run out, people did not act to at least slow down global warming” (part 0)—but what are our last possible options in averting large-scale climate catastrophe?

In looking urgently towards the options we have at present, Powell’s book is closer in tenor to Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future. Instead of a nihilistic reckoning with a world without us, it is occupied with the political and ecological cascade of actions and consequences that branch from our contemporary moment.

The book remains, ultimately, largely driven by facts, even as it colours in the subjective and affectual experiences of the immediate future. The interviewees presented are voices of authority (politicians/journalists) and scholars who are experts in energy politics, geology, engineering, anthropology and more—with the exception of an indigenous native of Brazil (part 1) and a native of the island of Tuvalu, off the coast of New Zealand (part 3). While the glaringly elitist selection of voices does make space for emotions, with characters feeling “terribly sad” (part 2) or remembering how their favourite beaches grew narrower (part 2), the book’s seemingly limited affective scope is not simply a result of its privileging of science over culture as in the age-old disciplinary distinction.

Rather, it recounts the chaotic, messy fallout of climate breakdown through an incongruously neat aesthetic. Beyond the cataloguing of its interviews by theme and didactic questioning, the prose of the book is largely rational, easy and authoritative. It is at odds with the structure of feeling that has come to characterise the Capitalocene in the 21st-century, one which Fredric Jameson describes as a fundamental break, a “situation where discontinuity has become more fundamental [MP1] than continuity” (318). The overwhelming, discombobulating nature of this simultaneously planetary and unevenly specific fate is unsatisfactorily conveyed by the oral historian’s curated and complete recounting of the near future. The neat sorting of climate phenomena into themes and the narration of the violence wrought by climate breakdown captures the content, but not form, of the experiences to come.

Rather, it recounts the chaotic, messy fallout of climate breakdown through an incongruously neat aesthetic. Beyond the cataloguing of its interviews by theme and didactic questioning, the prose of the book is largely rational, easy and authoritative. It is at odds with the structure of feeling that has come to characterise the Capitalocene in the 21st-century, one which Fredric Jameson describes as a fundamental break, a “situation where discontinuity has become more fundamental than continuity” (318). The overwhelming, discombobulating nature of this simultaneously planetary and unevenly specific fate is unsatisfactorily conveyed by the oral historian’s curated and complete recounting of the near future. The neat sorting of climate phenomena into themes and the narration of the violence wrought by climate breakdown captures the content, but not form, of the experiences to come.

Ultimately, The 2084 Report manages to turn “science faction” into a compliment, suggesting key ways in which narratives and fiction intervene in shaping conceptualisations of the climate crisis. While unable to convincingly pull it off through the quality of its prose, Powell’s book points authoritatively towards the shape of the troubles facing us.

WORKS CITED

Garrard, Greg. “World without Us: Some Types of Disanthropy.” Substance, vol. 41, 2007, pp. 40–60.

Jameson, Fredric. Allegory and Ideology. Verso, 2019.

Szeman, Imre and Dominic Boyer, editors. Energy Humanities: An Anthology. JHU Press, 2017.

Vermeulen, Pieter. “Future Readers: Narrating the Human in the Anthropocene.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 5, 2017, pp. 867-885.

Ada Cheong (she/her) is a PhD candidate based at the University of Exeter. She is fascinated by the alimentary anxieties surrounding the world-food-system, and the ways in which issues such as industrial meat, ultra-processed foods, GM technology etc. register culturally in sf works from the 1970s onwards. Her research more generally concerns the politics and culture of the Capitalocene, and critically engages with the fields of the Energy Humanities and world-ecological literary studies. She is also a communicator and writer for the Food, Farming and Countryside Commission.

Review of New Gods: Yang Jian

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Media Reviews

download

Review of New Gods: Yang Jian

Yimin Xu

The Last of Us. HBO, 2023.

.

New Gods: Yang Jian (hereafter New Gods) is a Chinese 3D animation movie that tells the story of Yang Jian (Wang Kai), a legendary Chinese deity. Taking place in a Ragnarök-alike fictional universe where most gods have lost powers, Yang Jian, the former God of War, now works as a bounty hunter on his steamboat. On his way to a mission, however, Yang encounters his lost nephew Chen Xiang (Li Lanling). Together, Yang and Chen embark on a journey and uncover the truth behind the Yang family’s tragedy—Yang Jian’s mentor Master Yuding (Li Lihong), who sacrifices the Yang family for his own achievements.

The movie draws its inspirations from two related 17th century traditional Chinese novels, 封神演义 (Fengshen Yanyi, Investiture of the Gods) and 西游记 (Xi You Ji, Journey to the West). Together, the two novels exemplify a unique Chinese speculative genre—神魔 (shenmo, gods and demons), with the terminology derived from modern Chinese scholar and literary historian Lu Xun. As Lu Xun points out, shenmo fiction features a dynamic theological and philosophical background of Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese interpretation of Buddhism (104). Shenmo fiction arranges gods and demons in the following orders: celestial court for deity, mortal world for humans and underworlds for demons, echoing to a Confucian power hierarchy of 君 (jun, ruler) and 臣 (chen, subject).

Moreover, shenmo fiction often concentrates on the contradiction between deity and demons, but this opposition is not strictly dichotomous, due to the Taoist yin-yang philosophy. The yin and yang concepts can be understood as any set of opposites, including dark and light, female and male, good and evil. However, the yin and yang are not seen as in a dichotomy, but instead “in constant interaction, yin merging with yang and yang with yin in endless dynamism” (Kam and Edwards, 139). Therefore, in shenmo fiction, a god can transform into a demon and vis-à-vis.

In Journey to the West, Yang Jian is said to be the nephew of 玉帝 (Yu Di, Jade Emperor) the highest ruler of the celestial court. His mother, after having affairs with a mortal man and violating the Confucian power hierarchy, is confined to Mountain Tao. As he grows up, Yang Jian becomes the God of War and splits the mountain to free his mother. Despite his seemingly rebellious behavior, Yang Jian is portrayed as a guardian of celestial court order in Investiture of the Gods.

In the film, the director explores a new matriarchal god order by externalizing the rebellious spirit coded in Yang Jian from the original texts. Unlike his cruel maternal uncle Jade Emperor from Journey to the West, film-Yang Jian assumes a caring and nurturing role as a maternal uncle and mentor to his nephew, Chen Xiang. Such a familial relation evokes of what Bertrand Russel describes in his Marriage and Morals that:

in a matrilineal society a man inherits from his maternal uncle; the functions which we naturally attribute to the father are divided in a matrilineal society between the father and the maternal uncle, affection and care coming from the father, while power and property come from the maternal uncle (28).

With no reference to Chen Xiang’s father throughout the movie, Yang Jian is the sole provider of both affection and power to Chen Xiang, reinforcing the matriarchal discourse in the movie. Moreover, they become more bound to each other through their shared loss of mothers. As the film unfolds, we learn more about the Yang family. Yang Jian and his younger sister Yang Chan (Qiu Qiu) come from a matriarchal deity family, whose female members are burdened with the task of settling down evil forces for the sake of humanities. Therefore, their mother, the first-generation of matriarchal god, sacrifices herself and following their mother’s footsteps, Yang Jian’s younger sister, (Chen Xiang’s mother), the second generation of matriarchal deity, dies in the same manner.

The movie ends shortly after Yang Jian regains mighty power and defies Master Yuding, who is not only responsible for the Yang family’s tragedy, but as the movie narrative implies, related to the fall of the deity. Moreover, the morally corrupt Master Yuding embodies a transformation from a god to a demon, reenforcing my earlier statement. Yang Jian’s deifying Master Yuding, therefore, foreshadows the overthrow of the entire collapsing patriarchal god order in the movie’s sequel, and replaces it with a new matriarchal one, as suggested by the title New Gods.

The movie points out a potential new direction in re-representing traditional Chinese fantasies on modern-day big screen: gender. Significantly, this necessity of a gender perspective applies to broader speculative genres across languages. Indeed, as Veronica Hollinger points out “although sf has often been called ‘the literature of change’, for the most part it has been slow to recognize the historical contingency and cultural conventionality about gendered behaviour and about the ‘natural’ roles of women and men” (126). Yang Jian’s role as a maternal uncle, not as a father or a sexual partner of others, challenges the audience to rethink the often taken-for-granted family concept in speculative literature and film that a family must consist of a couple bounded by sexual relations.

Moreover, the Taoist yin-yang philosophy embedded in the movie can help to diversify, in particular, Anglo-American fantasy and science fiction movie industry. We have seen Hollywood’s efforts to increase diversities in recent years, for instance, Marvel Studios’ Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings features a superhero from Chinese background. Despite their efforts, however, we still see, at least, one of problematic dualism that Donna Haraway pinpoints in A Cyborg Manifesto: technology/nature.In Hollywood-made superhero movies, the technology/nature dichotomy is often associated with an implicit orientalist discourse that represents the non-West others as mysterious and supernatural. In Marvel’s case, American-born heroes, including Ironman and Captain America, are often equipped with high-tech weaponry. The Chinese protagonist Shang-chi, however, attains his super-human abilities from “mysterious” ten-rings. This dichotomy is more evidenced in James Cameron’s Avatar 2: The Way of Water, in which the human colonists, primarily white Americans, use high-tech powers to occupy the planet, whereas the indigenous habitants of Pandora utilize natural resources to defend themselves: extra-terrestrial animals and weaponry made out of wood.

In the film New Gods, the director intentionally blurs the boundary between technology and nature and other dichotomies. Yang Jian, as we see earlier, operates a Western-style steamboat that runs on 混元气 (hunyuan qi, mixed energy), an essentially Taoist element of nature. I should also call attention to Yang Jian’s look here, in that he has three eyes, with the third on his forehead. The three eyes represent 天 (tian, celestial court), 地 (di, underground) and 人 (ren, humans). Thus, the character himself carries a sense of non-binary seeing-it-all. Additionally, the character development of Master Yuding highlights the delicate balance between evil and goodness.

Granted, increasing racial representation, to certain extent, does introduce a different voice to the dominating English-speaking speculative literature and movies. However, that does not necessarily challenge the many problematic dichotomies that distort the representation of the other and will continue to do so. In this sense, the yin-yang philosophy provides another mode of thinking that goes beyond the Westernized binary-mode and transforms “‘Western’” science and politics—the tradition of racist, male-dominant capitalism; the tradition of reproduction of the self from the reflections of the other” (7).

WORKS CITED

Haraway, Donna J. Manifestly Haraway. University of Minnesota Press, 2016. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/warw/detail.action?docID=4392065.

Hollinger, Veronica. “Feminist Theory and Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 125–136.

Lu, Xun. Zhongguo Xiaoshuo Shilüe [The Brief History of Chinese Fiction]. Shanghai Guji Chubanshe, 1998.

Louie Kam and Louise Edwards. “Chinese Masculinity: Theorizing Wen and Wu.” East Asian History, 1994, no.08, pp.135-148. https://www.academia.edu/892144/Chinese_Masculinity_Theorizing_Wen_and_Wu.

Russell, B.  Marriage and Morals. Allen & Unwin, 1929.

Yimin Xu is a Ph.D. student in the School of Humanities and Languages at UNSW Sydney. Her research interest is gender in Chinese science fiction, Chinese fantastical literature and Chinese popular culture in general. Her current PhD project focuses on the modernity rhetoric behind the gender representations in contemporary Chinese science fiction and the resurfacing of the late 19th century national memory of Western semi-colonisation in current Chinese science fiction writing. With her project, she hopes to contribute her own part to the great effort of de-colonisation studies in China. besides her works, she is also the country representative of Australia for the Science Fiction Research Association.

Review of The Last of Us

⮌ SFRA Review, vol. 53, no. 2

Media Reviews

download

Review of The Last of Us

Lúcio Reis-Filho

The Last of Us. HBO, 2023.

.

The Last of Us is a TV adaptation of the eponymous 2013 video game by PlayStation Studio’s Naughty Dog, which has garnered numerous awards and a massive fan base over the last decade. Its success culminated in an ambitious sequel in 2020 and in the TV series in 2023. The HBO adaptation follows the game’s storyline and revolves around the hero Joel (Pedro Pascal), who navigates through a dystopic version of the United States escorting the young girl Ellie (Bella Ramsey), who holds the key to the future of humanity. As the only known person immune to the fungal illness that ravaged the world, Ellie is the pivotal character and a coveted asset in the search for a cure. Among the ruins, however, nature has had a rampant comeback, evidenced by the proliferation of green spaces that literally overgrow the urban areas. In many contemporary eco-dystopias, as Roland Hughes and Pat Wheeler suggests, “Technological progress means both a movement away from and simultaneously a movement into or towards nature” (1). This is certainly the case with The Last of Us.

The HBO adaptation delves deeper into the themes of horror and science fiction that were already present in the original game, which was notable for its immersive gameplay experience that seamlessly integrated action, adventure, and drama. The prologue of the series provides a global perspective on the fungal outbreak, which taps into the quintessential “what if?” question that characterizes apocalyptic fiction in general and has gained renewed relevance, since the game’s plot has only become more gripping in the wake of COVID-19 pandemics. For instance, the prologue in episode 1 (“When You’re Lost in the Darkness”) reinforces the idea of a global outbreak, although the full-range scale of the event is not deepened throughout the series.

The Last of Us also draws from conventions once established by notable works of zombie fiction. Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend (1954), adapted for the screen three times, popularized the concept of “the last man on Earth,” while George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) played a pivotal role in shaping the contemporary zombie. Resident Evil (1996) introduced viral epidemics and genetic mutations to the mix, and Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002) gave rise to athletic, more vicious zombies that relentlessly pursue their prey. Similar to these works, The Last of Us presents an unknown disease that spreads rapidly, ultimately leading to the collapse of society. As denizens succumb, they transform into monstrous beings that attack and bite others primarily to spread their condition, as is the case with the zombies in the Resident Evil franchise, whose two first games are eventually referred to in the series. In episode 1, for instance, the camera angle and the close-up shot on the face of an infected elderly woman recreate the iconic scene of the first zombie ever seen in a Resident Evil game in 1996. Additionally, the explosion that separates Joel and his brother in the city streets echoes the prologue of Resident Evil 2 (1998) when something quite similar happens, opening up two distinct narrative lines for Leon S. Kennedy and Claire Redfield. Like most zombie stories, the infected in The Last of Us are limping, mindless, and violent wanderers with tattered clothes and decaying figures. However, it is a fungal infection rather than a viral one that causes its condition to change. As a result, the infected show a distinctive appearance, with their bodies covered in mold and scaly polyps. By attributing the outbreak to the Cordyceps fungus, which has contaminated wheat and its byproducts, the series sheds light on present-day debates about sustainability, nature conservancy, and the dangers of pesticide poisoning in crops.

Another example on this subject is a noteworthy departure from the game counterpart. The idea of a fungal network and the ubiquitous link between the infected, as seen in the series, highlight the potential impact of human activity on the environment, since the contagion has spread to the soil, causing even minor contact with the fungus mycelium to attract an entire horde in a matter of seconds. Thus, rather than single individuals, the infected become a collective with swarm behavior and a “hive mind”, a concept reminiscent of the zombies in World War Z and the Borg from the Star Trek franchise. In this sense, the infected may embody the revenge of nature, which attempts to restore itself after centuries of depletion by human hands. Although the series does not elaborate on this idea beyond episode 1, it significantly changes the zombies’ character and further emphasizes the eco-criticism. According to Gerald Farca and Charlotte Ladevèze, The Last of Us goes in direct extrapolation from our times, since it shows “a marvelous place where nature has reclaimed the planet and where the old order of a bureaucratic consumer capitalism has literally corroded” (5). The sequence of giraffes wandering serene through the ruins is a poetic example of this.

WORKS CITED

Dendle, Peter. The Zombie Movie Encyclopedia. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010.

Farca, Gerald; Charlotte, Ladevèze. The Journey to Nature: The Last of Us as Critical Dystopia. Proceedings of the First International Joint Conference of DiGRA and FDG Dundee, Scotland: Digital Games Research Association and Society for the Advancement of the Science of Digital Games, v. 13, no. 1, August 2016, DiGRA/FDG, http://www.digra.org/digital-library/publications/the-journey-to-nature-the-last-of-us-as-critical-dystopia/. Accessed 25 Mar. 2023.

Hughes, Rowland; Wheeler, Pat. “Introduction: Eco-dystopias: Nature and the Dystopian Imagination.” Critical Survey, v. 25, no. 2, 2013, pp. 1–6. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/42751030. Accessed 25 Mar. 2023.

Russell, Jamie. Book of the Dead: The Complete History of Zombie Cinema. FAB, 2005.

Lúcio Reis Filho is a Ph.D. in Media Studies, film critic, filmmaker and historian specializing in the intersections between cinema, history and literature, with focus on the horror and science fiction genres. He writes book, film and game reviews, and is coordinator of Projeto Ítaca (https://projetoitaca.com.br/), a Brazilian educational website devoted to the tropes and representations of mythology in the media. His research and academic interests are essentially interdisciplinary, as they cover Cinema, Visual Arts, History, Comparative Literature and Game Studies.