Author: sfrarev

The Hero Doesn’t Need a Face and We Don’t Need a Hero: 3%, Social Justice, and the Shared Protagonism of Brazilian Science Fiction

Thais Lassali

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell develops the theory that there is a common structure to many stories, myths, and legends called the “monomyth” or “the hero’s journey.” More than merely naming the main character of a given narrative, the hero is an archetype, an image that synthesizes social ideas of what heroism and valor are. This means that in a given society, all heroes share some traits, such as looking just like any other person on the outside, but having exceptional qualities on the inside (Campbell 95). And these qualities help the adventure entice him, call him to action, to travel (metaphorically or not) to achieve his own greatness; another feature of the hero is that he is meant to be great, in many cases since he was conceived or born. He is fated to be who he is.

Campbell’s idea became very influential in what audiovisual narratives assume a hero is and in the way it builds this archetype and its story. But Campbell’s ideas were not widely accepted when his book was first released. A great influence in popularizing Campbell’s work was George Lucas and his Star Wars films. It is up to debate how much influence Campbell’s work had on the making of the original script of the 1977 movie. Chris Taylor argues that based on early drafts, Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough and a far wider range of references were more influential (533), with Campbell’s book serving more as a “user’s manual” for understanding Frazer’s work (245).

After the movie was released, the association between Campbell’s and Lucas’s works became unavoidable. Influential critics such as Roger Ebert quickly recognized the relation between Lucas’s film and mythology, pointing to a lexicon very similar to those Campbell used in The Hero with A Thousand Faces. Through the end of the 1970s and all of the 1980s, Lucas embraced this supposed influence, turning himself into a great advocate of Campbell’s work. After Star Wars’ tremendous success, the hero’s journey spread like a plague in Hollywood, mainly in science fiction and fantasy film narratives, but also in other genres and media. Even a big player like Disney took advantage of that: a memo written in the end of the 1980s by screenwriter Christopher Vogler circulated inside the studio praising the monomyth and offering a guide to replicate it. Not by coincidence, all Disney’s big hits of the 1990s were structured around the hero’s journey.

Ursula Le Guin performs a compelling analysis of the hero in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. She underlines the idea that the hero must act to be considered heroic; thus it is fair to say that the hero’s journey and, by extension, heroic stories, are centered around action-based narratives. This may sound insignificant, but it is actually important: it makes heroic narratives about those who can act and by extension, those who end up overcoming the existing power structures. As Michel Foucault states, power exists only in relation and action; power and knowledge imply one another (26-27), and narratives play a large role in spreading knowledge and, therefore, power. It is not only about who, but also about what: the hero must travel, must fight, must hurl the spear, must shoot, must kill (Le Guin 31) to overcome what he is supposed to. So the hero was born exceptional and for this exceptionality to be shown, he must sacrifice something, sometimes even himself, for the greater good. But, most of all, he must sacrifice something for his own success. This may sound like heroism, but it is also very similar to what white men did in Africa, America, and in many parts of Asia and the Middle East.

It is phenomenal how Hollywood can make these imperialist traits so ingrained with the hero figure and, moreover, how they make it look completely apolitical. Hollywood takes away the political aspects of the hero’s actions by making their narratives sound like good stories, like stories of an individual overcoming difficulties to become the hero he was meant to be. But Hollywood has also added something more to this mixture. The United States has a public self-narrative of exceptionalism and sacrifice, which some experts like Robert Bellah call the civil religion of the United States. Of course, it can be seen more clearly in politics, but it is also present in movies and especially, as one might expect, in Hollywood science fiction and fantasy. 

Don’t get me wrong, I like Star Wars a lot. I actually like Luke Skywalker, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi. And even John Connor, Neo, Capitan America, Hulk. Damn it, I like Iron Man . . . Film reception is complex; these characters aren’t just part of a plain fairy tale about the hero. They are what we make of them too, how we relate ourselves to them. But the thing is: their stories are theirs; I can make them mine, for example, but as somebody who values diversity, their stories can’t be the only ones that are distributed to the entire world. Not just because they all tell stories of white men, but because we should search for other ways to tell stories—stories that are different, not just with minorities playing the same parts.

It is important that we valorize diversity in how we tell stories. The Brazilian series 3% is a great example of that. The series, produced and streamed by Netflix, is set in the near future. In the first season, we see how the population of the impoverished Inland (“Continente,” in Portuguese) can take a chance when they are twenty years old to change their lives by participating in “The Process,” a challenge that only three percent of the participants are able to pass. Those who are accepted by The Process go to the richer and technologically advanced Offshore, or “Maralto.” In the following three seasons, we discover that Offshore hides many secrets to maintain its dominant position over Inland and its population. We watch a group of Inland youngsters in their twenties who, for many different reasons, join a rebellious movement that wants to destroy the Offshore.

From the first season, we follow the paths of Michele, Fernando, Marco, Rafael, and Joana while they try to survive and join the top 3%. While Michele and Fernando seem to take a more prominent position as the main characters, Rafael and Joana are significant in showing the viewers aspects of Offshore that, at first glance, are hidden. In turn, Marco serves as the character who shows us the complexities of Inland. At the same time, the importance of Marco, Rafael, and Joana grows through the seasons. After a period of fighting against the Offshore, they found The Shell, an egalitarian place where those who don’t believe in the Process and its hierarchy can live. With Michele taking part as a founder of The Shell, the series shows us how important the collectivity is for this place to fulfill its objective. Every one of the main characters is complex in their own way and assumes one important function in the narrative. As we might expect, Offshore doesn’t accept the existence of The Shell and its people must confront the nuances of violent fighting against an oppressive system, choosing when to negotiate with it and how to help the poor population of the Inland.

3% has an action-based narrative, and the actions that characters perform are what move the story forward. They hurl the spear, they shoot, they kill. But here we can’t separate characters into good guys versus the villains because their motivations are not black and white. Indeed, this is what gives their actions weight. In a heroic narrative, if the villain dies, most of the time we accept it, as killing the villain is the hero’s main goal. In 3% we can’t easily accept it because we don’t know who the real villain is. If there is a villain at all, it is society, and along with it, the hierarchy, the difficult circumstances in which the Inlanders live, and the conflicted relationship between Inland and Offshore.

At the same time, there are many moments in every season where the narrative takes some time to breathe, to just enjoy the complexity of each character, to contemplate joy even in a miserable reality, even if this joy might be sad. The second season has a great example of that: in a very tense moment, there is something that resembles Brazilian carnival with percussion instruments and a lot of color and happiness. But the lyric that Liniker (a Brazilian singer) is singing—“Preciso me encontrar” [I Need to Find Me], written by the famous samba singer and songwriter Candeia and made famous in the voice of Cartola—has many mixed feelings that are summarized in a popular Brazilian saying: “rir pra não chorar” [laugh to not cry], which means that in a sad situation, people can choose to laugh even if it is more rational to cry.

But what probably is the most important thing about 3% is that it does not exemplify heroism. The protagonism here is shared: Michele, Fernando, Marco, Rafael, and Joana are important in the same way, and each one of them has a complete narrative arc (with the exception of Fernando). At the same time, none of them is exceptional. On the contrary, in 3% we see the everyday lives of normal people who are full of flaws. People oppressed by Offshore, people who trust the placement of their lives through the Process, but, simply put, people. They are not archetypes like a hero; they are complex, working more on a gray scale, sometimes doing things that we can’t understand or agree with, things that are condemnable.

If the hero works in a “one for all” way, focusing on individual greatness to achieve well-being for all, in 3% we see both “one for oneself” and “all for all,” and they can be either positive or negative, depending on the situation. It depends on how others will react, on what that will lead to. That is a great way to represent a rebellion against an oppressive society because social justice is not about one person changing everything or about a hero, but about collective change, about creating new ways of living together in a place, about liberating everyone from oppressive chains, metaphorical or real. Moreover, achieving this is difficult, it is not a trip to Disney World.

Brazilian science fiction seems to be increasingly betting on collective solutions for its stories. The 2021 film Bacurau by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, for example, tells the story of a small village in northeast Brazil called Bacurau that is attacked by a group of foreign psychopaths who intends to murder the entire population of the region just to feed their hunger to kill. To avoid that, the people of Bacurau unite to find a collective solution to their problem. It is not beautiful, but answers the attack they are suffering in the same way. With this same feeling, we also recall White Out Black In, directed by Adirley Queirós. This film is fictional and also a documentary depicting the lives of victims of police violence in the city of Brasilia, Brazil’s capital. The fictional solution the two main characters find for all the problems Brazilian state caused them is to destroy the government buildings with a sound bomb made with pancadão, a subgenre of Brazilian funk music. Again, a collective solution solves a collective problem, not in a beautiful or heroic way, but in thinking and acting collectively.

So if there is anything that Brazilian science fiction is trying to think through, of which 3% is a part, it is that we don’t need a hero, we need hierarchical changes and social justice, and that only will be achieved if we stop and think together about the Brazil that we want. At the same time, the problems that Brazil faces are not only ours, they were established in the colonial era and deepened by capitalism in many places around the world. But Brazilian science fiction doesn’t want to save the world, we want every community to unite to find solutions to their problems. That might not be beautiful and heroic, but it could be more productive than heroism.

WORKS CITED

3%. Created by Pedro Aguilera, Boutique Filmes, 2016-2020.

Bacurau. Directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho and Juliano Dornelles, CinemaScópio and Globo Filmes, 2019.

Bellah, Robert. Beyond Belief: Essays on Religion in a Post-Traditional World. Harper & Row Publishers, 1976.

Campbell, Joseph. The Hero with a Thousand Faces. 4th ed., Joseph Campbell Foundation, 2020.

Ebert, Roger. “Star Wars, 4 stars.” RogerEbert.com, 01 Jan. 1977, www.rogerebert.com/reviews/star-wars-1977.

Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. 2nd ed., Vintage, 1995.

Frazer, James. The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion. Macmillan, 1976.

Le Guin, Ursula K.. The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction. Ignota, 2019.

Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope. Directed  by George Lucas, Lucasfilm, 1977.

Taylor, Chris. How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise. Basic Books, 2014.

Vogler, Christopher. The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers. Michael Wiese Productions, 2007.

White Out, Black In. Directed by Adirley Queirós, Cinco da Norte, Vitrine filmes, 2015.

Thais Lassali is a Ph.D. student in social anthropology at the University of Campinas, Brazil. She also has a bachelor’s degree in social sciences and a master’s degree in social anthropology at the same university. She is a member of the Laboratory of Fiction and Science (LABFICC) and of the Atelier of Anthropology and Symbolic Production (APSA), both of the University of Campinas. Her research interests are science fiction, Hollywood cinema, film, media and gender studies, and anthropology of science. This text is a partial outcome of the doctoral research made by the author with financing of the Research Support Foundation of the State of São Paulo (Fundação de Amparo a Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo – FAPESP), Process Number 2018/00862-6.

When was Celtic Futurism? The Irish Immrama as Proto-Science-Fiction

Chris Loughlin

Here begins the voyage of Máel Dúin’s boat. . . .
An abundance of wonders was seen in the world on the blue ocean. (Oskamp 101)

Many remarkable things, many marvels, many mysteries [was] their pleasant story, as swift Máel Dúin told. (179)

This paper investigates the historical basis for an alternative futurism: Celtic Futurism, or “cymroddyfodoliaeth” (ap Dyffrig; “Uniting Alternative Futurisms”). Fantastical voyages, which in the Irish context are “immrama,” are one of the historiographical bases for Celtic Futurism. The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction presents a sceptical view of the long history of science fiction. The editors describe proto-science fiction as merely setting the stage for the self-conscious development of the genre in the nineteenth century (Nicholls). Adam Roberts, however, whilst providing a much more favourable analysis of proto-science fiction, claims there was a thousand-year hiatus between Greco-Roman voyage tales and their re-emergence, contemporaneously, with the Protestant Reformation and Copernican revolutions (33-39). Yet the topic is still a relatively under-researched area of knowledge. The opening quotations above, from Immram curaig Máel Dúin, demonstrate that fantastical voyages were a component of Irish medieval culture. This paper will demonstrate a strong role for fantastical voyages—the immrama (“rowing about,” or voyager, tales) of Ireland in the medieval period—in the definition of science fiction. It will utilise the stories of Saint Brendan, Bran, and Máel Dúin to re-read the history of science fiction. It will present evidence to answer the question: When was Celtic Futurism? Last, it will contribute evidence to the definition, and discussion, of alternative futurisms and further discussion about the imperial gaze.

This paper will, first, examine and discuss the immrama (literally, “rowing about”) tales and related texts. It will highlight the stories of Saint Brendan, Bran, and Máel Dúin as examples of fantastical voyages and demonstrate how these contribute to proto-science fiction. However, there are also other tales from the Irish medieval world which contribute to a long history of science fiction; the echtrai (adventures) and exile stories concern issues of the otherworld, for example, whilst other stories from the period also contain fantastical elements, most famously the Táin Bó Cúalnge [the Cattle Raid of Cooley]. Many of these tales can also be considered tributaries to the wider history of Irish science fiction, but this will not form the central analysis in this paper. The second section considers the primary source bases of the immrama and Immram curaig Máel Dúin. The publication, translation, and secondary literature on the tales will also be discussed. Last, the immrama will be discussed in relation to definitions of science fiction. It will be demonstrated here that these tales are not only fantastical voyages, but are also examples of proto-science fiction. The stories’ use of fantastical place, time, and inner worlds highlights a longer and more variegated history of science fiction. It will highlight the basis for future research on an alternative futurism: Celtic Futurism, or cymroddyfodoliaeth.

The Immrama (“rowing about”) Tales

The Navigation of Saint Brendan is the first story which is accepted in the secondary literature as a voyager tale. The story exists in 125 manuscript copies, was one of the earliest published stories, and was translated into vernacular versions (Wooding xi). The earliest version of it is the Latin Navigatio Sancti Brendani abbatis and is probably from the ninth century CE, although an earlier version is contained in the Vita Brendani (Mackley 1). In this tale Brendan is inspired to visit the Promised Land of the Saints. Fourteen monks are chosen for the crew, but three further “supernumerary” monks insist on accompanying them; they subsequently leave the crew at key moments of the journey (4). The voyage lasts seven years with returns to certain locations at key dates in the liturgical year. They visit fantastical places such as an unoccupied stronghold, an island of enormous sheep, a mobile island, which is really a giant fish or whale, and an island of birds, which are the earthly form of angels. Finally, they are granted visions of heaven and hell: the former expressed by a pious hermit named Paul, and the latter by Judas Iscariot. The Navigatio was, however, conflated with the Vita Brendani and Betha Brénnain during their transmission (Wooding xxv, xxvii-xxviii). The tale of Brendan probably forms the starting point of a wider ecclesiastical and secular tradition of voyager tales (Oskamp). There has been debate about the dating and location of the writing of Brendan’s voyage. Carney argued for an authorship in Ireland in approximately 800 CE (46), whilst Selmer attributed it to an Irish author in Lotharingia in the first half of the tenth century (qtd. in Dumville 120).

Immram Brain maic Febul, or The Voyage of Bran, son of Febul, has been dated as the earliest Irish voyager tale (Carney 73). Barbara Hilliers described this tale as “a curious composition; we might think of it as a collection of poems about the otherworld, set onto the framework of a voyager tale” (71). The poem combines elements of pagan, otherworld, and Christian allegory. Bran and his companions set out after he is invited by an otherworld woman to her island. They subsequently visit inis subai, the island of joy. They also visit tir inna mBan, the island of women. However, they leave and return to Ireland due to their homesickness. When they arrive back home, however, time has passed differently for those at home, who tell Bran, “we do not know such a one [Bran, son of Febul], though the voyage of Bran is in our ancient stories” (The Voyage of Bran 32). There are two further extant immrama, Immram Snédgusa ocus Maic Riagla and Immram curaig Ua Corra. Whilst further Irish voyager titles exist there is no manuscript record of their contents (Wooding xii). Further complicating matters is the role of the otherworld in other Irish stories. For example, these are recorded in the echtrai (adventures), exile stories, and other literature from medieval Ireland. Mackley uses the “fantastic” to analyse the stories of Saint Brendan; he highlights the broader category through which we can understand medieval Irish literature. However, arguably, the combination of imagination and reality in these tales makes the fantastic voyage and proto-science fiction more attractive concepts.

The most thorough reconstruction of Immram curaig Máel Dúin is the 1970 study by Oskamp. Máel Dúin combines elements of Atlantic and Irish geography with the fantastical and otherworldly. It survives in both a poetical and prose version. It is clearly influenced by both Christian and pagan beliefs. Máel Dúin, the titular protagonist, is a product of a liaison between a local king and a nun, but his father is murdered by rogues, and he is fostered by a different family and queen. As a youth he is taunted about his parentage and confronts his foster mother who tells him about his true heritage. He consults a druid, who tells him the number of companions he must take, and he sets out to avenge his father’s death. His foster brothers insist on accompanying the expedition and are the supernumeraries of the voyage. They visit the island where the murderers live but are driven off course by a storm. Máel Dúin “reproaches his foster brothers that it is because of their presence that he cannot reach his goal” (Oskamp 44). They are, subsequently, forced to visit over thirty fantastical islands during their journey. They visit islands inhabited by giant ants, a horse-like monster, the giant’s horse race, with a house where there are leaping salmon, wondrous fruits, the revolving beast and fighting horses, the fiery swine, the black and white sheep, the burning river, the miserly miller, and the black wailers. They also visit islands of imaginative geography, such as that of the four fences, and one with a crystal and glass bridge. They see an island of chanting birds, a wondrous fountain, and savage smiths. They also witness a sea of glass and a sea of clouds. They visit an island of silver, and one of the companions, Diurán, cuts off a piece of silver net which they bring back to the altar at Armagh. They also visit an island of women (tir inna mBan) and of different saints and hermits. Nearing the end of their voyage, they visit the hermit of Tory Island. He advises Máel Dúin to forgive his father’s murderers. He states, “slay him not, but forgive him, because God has saved you from many perils, and you, too, are men deserving death” (Oskamp 172-173). They then visit the island of the rogues who murdered Máel Dúin’s father, and he forgives the murder. This ends their journey, and they return to Ireland. Máel Dúin combines elements of pagan belief with an overarching Christian allegory of forgiveness. But the combination of fiction, imagination, and reality makes it a piece of proto-science fiction. Immram curaig Máel Dúin, alongside other immrama, utilises the sea literally and metaphorically. The latter makes them an interesting precursor to New Wave science fiction’s examination of inner worlds, psychology, and crisis. This also links the immrama to the reaction to Norse invasions, the Anglo-Norman occupation, and science fiction discussion of colonialism (a point considered further below). Next, this paper will examine the complex primary source basis of the voyager tales and the secondary literature.

Studying the Immrama and Secondary Literature

The Irish voyager tales “have received relatively limited critical attention” (Wooding xvii). This is primarily due to their existence in a minority vernacular language. However, Wooding has also emphasised the comparative neglect: the old English Seafarer, a lyric of just 126 lines, has a bibliography of over 250 items; whereas the entire corpus of literature on the immrama “warrants barely 50 items” (xvii). The Navigatio Brendani has also suffered from a more surprising critical neglect. Since the publication of Wooding’s anthology of scholarly criticism, however, there has been a modest development of interest in the tales. Another issue has been the lack of scholarly editions of the immrama to encourage further study. The principal immrama were translated between 1888 and 1905 by Whitley Stokes and Kuno Meyer. Whilst a scholarly edition of the immrama was attempted in the later 1930s, their publication was interrupted by the war and then death of the translator, Anton van Hamel, in 1945. The latest scholarly translation of Immram curaig Máel Dúin was published in 1970 but did not include a glossary. Unfortunately, other immrama are only accessible in Stoke’s and Meyer’s translations, which are now very dated. As Wooding wrote in the first scholarly anthology of criticism on these tales, “this is a very unsatisfactory state of affairs and confusing even for the professional student of Celtic literature” (xix). An important issue for study of the immrama is, therefore, their existence in Latin and vernacular literatures, a situation mirrored in the secondary literature. Some of this secondary literature has not been translated, which has further hampered study of the tales in the Anglophone world. So, how does this relate to Immram curaig Máel Dúin?

Immram curaig Máel Dúin survives in four manuscript sources. Linguistically it is one of the earliest voyager tales, “as early as the eighth century or ninth” (Clancy 203). The smaller manuscript sources consist of two fragments, both held at the British Library, London (Brown and Groenewegen). Lebor na hUidre [the Book of the Dun Cow] is the earliest full manuscript source, dating to the twelfth century and earlier scribes (Oskamp 89-90). A more detailed version, both the poem and prose, exists in another medieval Irish manuscript, the Yellow Book of Lecan. Whitley Stokes translated Immram curaig Máel Dúin into English in the late 1880s and this version remains important for discussion of the story (Stokes “part 1”). Stokes amalgamated materials from all four manuscript sources. Kuno Meyer also translated Immram curaig Máel Dúin in the early 1900s and collated from the Yellow Book of Lecan and the Harleian manuscripts. Anton Van Hamel translated the text in his collection Immrama in the late 1930s. Oskamp in his 1970 book, The Voyage of Máel Dúin. A study in early Irish voyage literature followed by an edition of Immram Curaig Máele Dúin from the YBL in TCD, utilised the Yellow Book of Lecan as his source material. Alongside these primary source translations, there are also popular poetry and prose versions of the story. For example, Patrick Joyce wrote a popular English translation which was published in 1879, which was probably the source for Tennyson’s 1880 poetical version of the tale (Joyce; Tennyson). There is also a series of beautiful illustrations to the tale by J. D. Batten, included in Joseph Jacobs’s 1919 book, The Book of Wonder Voyages. However, there has also been a rather complex historiographical debate about the history of the immrama and other Irish otherworld tales.

The most important introduction to the immrama and the historical debates they have inspired, to date, is the J. M. Wooding anthology of criticism from 2000, The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature. This book details debates which have occurred around Irish voyager literature, but one of the key questions has been the relationship between Ireland’s pagan, oral culture, and subsequent Christian literate society. Some scholars, such as Rudolf Thurneysen and Myles Dillon, felt the voyager tales were originally pagan, native productions which were later written down (Oskamp 11-12). Carney, by contrast, stressed that the texts were “all written . . . in the monasteries by the monks, and that these tales were often meant as ‘Christian allegories’” (12; see also Wooding xx-xxii). Kathleen Hughes felt that the voyager tales were a reaction to Norse invasions of Ireland during the medieval period (qtd. in Oskamp 16). Further research during the twentieth century has clearly demonstrated the inter-relationship between the Navigatio and the immrama. There are, however, unresolved issues and avenues for further research. For example, the influence of The Aeneid, and other classical sources, has still been under-researched and correlates with my own claims. Mackley’s work on the Navigatio has highlighted the inter-relationship between imagination and reality by examining that text through the prism of the “fantastic.” Last, the most knowledgeable expert on Irish science fiction, Jack Fennell, has highlighted the under-appreciated contribution early Irish literature made to science fiction (Irish Science Fiction; A Brilliant Void). The final section of this paper examines some definitions of science fiction and demonstrates the immrama as examples of both fantastical voyages and proto-science fiction.

The Immrama as Proto-Science Fiction

Peter Nicholls, in an entry on the history of science fiction from the definitive The Encyclopaedia of Science Fiction, claims the genre is “impure” and did not finally take shape until the nineteenth century. Whilst elements existed in previous epochs, he has further stated that, “it requires a consciousness of the scientific outlook, and it probably also requires a sense of the possibilities of change, whether social or technological.” In further entries in The Encyclopaedia, Stableford establishes that fantastic voyages and proto-science fiction are important precursors to the field (“Fantastic Voyages”; “Proto SF”). However, Nicholls also provides a list of five key elements which became melded into science fiction: one, the fantastic voyage; two, the utopia and dystopia; three, the philosophical tale; four, the gothic; five, the technological and sociological anticipation. Clearly the immrama combine the first three elements, but arguably the voyager tales also contain the last two components. In contrast to this sceptical view is one adopted by Adam Roberts in The History of Science Fiction. Roberts claims that science fiction can be understood in much less, definitive, hard-science terms, “but rather into a delineation of the continuum by which SF can be meaningfully separated out as that form of the Fantastic that embodies a technical (materialist) ‘enframing’, as opposed to the religious (supernatural) approach we would today call ‘Fantasy’” (21). However, Roberts’s view succumbs to a hard differentiation between oral and written culture: “for over 1,000 years SF fell into abeyance as a literary mode. Its disappearance was connected, very obviously, with the more general collapse of literary culture, and of literacy itself” (30). He goes on to make the point that medieval European culture was explicitly concentrated on religious themes and science fiction was only able to re-emerge following the religious changes of the Reformation and the scientific-technological changes associated with modernity and the Copernican revolution (33-39). This, however, creates a misleading chronology as it passes over the rich fantastical voyage and journeys to the otherworld of the literatures of medieval Europe. Further, some authors have posited a relationship between colonialism, modernity, and science fiction (Rieder). As was noted previously, Kathleen Hughes noted a relationship between the Norse invasions of Ireland and the immrama. The most famous colonisation of Ireland, however, began with the Anglo-Norman invasions of the twelfth century (although the Christian invasions of Ireland could also be considered colonialist). It is therefore clear that there is a strong basis for further research into the immrama as proto-science fiction and discussion of the relationship of colonialism, modernity, and sociological and technological change. This research will further enrich knowledge of alternative futurisms and discussion of the imperial gaze.

The last area this paper will consider is the recent emergence of historiography on Irish science fiction. This work has been conducted by Fennell, Howard, and Maume. They mostly concentrate on the latter history of modernity. Fennell has mentioned that there is an argument to be made for the longer-term history of Irish science fiction, although in his monograph he concentrates on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Fennell’s highlighting of the role of myth and mythology is a useful framework within which to consider the immrama and Irish medieval literatures. Further, Mackley’s work on the Navigatio has usefully adopted the “fantastic” as the frame within which to consider this work. Mackley’s view correlates with both Fennell and Roberts. It is unarguable that the immrama are important examples of fantastical voyages and should, therefore, be considered proto-science fiction. We should heed Roberts’s call for considering the field of science fiction as a spectrum, rather than a definitive literary category. Further, many of the stories of the Irish medieval societies contain either fantastical elements or voyages to otherworlds, or both. Immram Brain contains, for example, an important difference in experience of time: when Bran and his companions return to Ireland, they are told, “we do not know such a one [Bran, son of Febul], though the voyage of Bran is in our ancient stories” (Meyer 32). This contrasting experience of time is a motif which appears in other stories from medieval Ireland. Last, the immrama and exile tales are often discussed as expressive of Christian allegory and the sea voyage as a metaphor for spiritual journey. This fits with the expansive understanding of science fiction expressed by New Wave authors with their discussion of crisis, disaster, inner-worlds, and psychology. These themes are particularly pertinent for discussing the far-reaching impact which Christianization, Norse invasion, and colonialist occupation had on Ireland. These stories—the echtrai, immrama, and other Irish tales—offer important avenues for future research on the long history of science fiction and alternative futurisms.

Celtic Futurism

This paper tentatively set out the first evidence for the alternative futurism of Celtic Futurism. It read the immrama (“rowing about”) tales as examples of fantastic voyages and proto-science fiction. The paper utilised Rodhri ap Dyfrig’s “cymroddyfodoliaeth” (Welsh or Celtic futurism) as a framework within which to investigate Irish medieval literature. It has demonstrated that there are science fiction elements to the immrama, echtrai, and other tales from medieval Ireland. The evidence cited above, however, also highlights areas to consider for future research. First, we can further investigate the immrama and other Irish stories as proto-science fiction, for example, how they utilised conceptions of technology, time, and the otherworld requires further detailed investigation. How this relates to colonialism, crisis, and psychology will add evidence to the legitimacy of Celtic Futurism. Second, considering how these stories relate to other medieval literatures would be a useful exercise, for example, how do these Irish stories compare with the fantastical voyages and other world tales of Wales and other cultures? The comparison of these stories with Norse and Viking culture would also be a useful task. The investigation of Celtic Futurism as a form of proto-science fiction is an important area of research for the longer-term history of the field. It also has something to contribute to wider discussion of the issue of indigenous futurism and the losses caused by colonialism, modernity, and progress.

WORKS CITED

Brown, Patrick, and Groenewegen, Dennis. “Immram curaig Mail Dúin: ‘The voyage of Máel Dúin’s curach.’” CODECS: Collaborative Online Database and e-Resources for Celtic Studies Immram curaig Mail Dúin. www.vanhamel.nl/codecs/Immram_curaig_Mail_D%C3%BAin. Accessed 8 September 2021.

Carney, James. “The Earliest Bran Material.” The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism, edited by J. M. Wooding, Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 73-90.

Clancy, Thomas O. “Subversion at Sea: Structure, Style and Intent in the Immrama.” The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism, edited by J. M. Wooding, Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 194-225.

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Dumville, David M. “Two Approaches to the Dating of Navigatio sancti Brendani.” The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism, edited by J. M. Wooding, Four Courts Press, 2000, pp. 120-32.

Fennell, Jack. Irish Science Fiction. Liverpool UP, 2014.

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Hamel, A. G. van. Immrama, Mediaeval and Modern Irish Series 10. Dublin Institute for Advanced Studies, 1941.

Hillers, Barbara. “Voyages between Heaven and Hell: Navigating the Early Irish Immram Tales.” Proceedings of the Harvard Celtic Colloquium, vol. 13, Department of Celtic Languages & Literatures, Harvard UP, 1993, pp. 66–81.

Howard, Richard. “The Medical Science Fiction of James White: Inside and Outside Sector General.” Medical Humanities, vol. 42, no. 4, 2016, pp. 271-76.

Jacobs, Joseph. The Book of Wonder Voyages. G. P. Putnam’s & Sons, 1919.

Joyce, P. W. Old Celtic Romances: Translated from the Gaelic by P. W. Joyce. C. Kegan Paul & Co, 1879.

Mackley, Jude. The Legend of St Brendan. Brill, 2008.

Maume, P., 2008. “Futures Past: The Science Fiction of Bob Shaw and James White as a Product of Late-Industrial Belfast.” No Country for Old Men: Fresh Perspectives on Irish Literature, edited by Patrick Lyons and Alison O’Malley-Younger, Peter Lang, 2009, pp. 193-214.

Meyer, Kuno. “Incipit do Imrum Curaig Mældúin andso.” Anecdota from Irish Manuscripts. edited by Osborn Bergin, R. I. Best, Kuno Meyer, and J. G. O’Keeffe. vol. 1, 1907, pp. 50–74, 80.

Meyer, Kuno and Alfred Trübner Nutt. The Voyage of Bran, Son of Febal, to the Land of the Living: An Old Irish Saga. AMS Press, 1972.

Nicholls, Peter. “History of SF.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 21 May 2021, www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/history_of_sf. Accessed 24 October 2021.

Oskamp, H. P. A. The Voyage of Máel Dúin. Wolters-Noordhoff, 1970.

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

Roberts, Adam. The History of Science Fiction. Palgrave, 2006.

Stableford, Brian M.“Fantastic Voyages.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 13 Sept. 2021, www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/fantastic_voyages. Accessed 20 October 2021.

—. “Proto SF.” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute, David Langford, Peter Nicholls, and Graham Sleight. Gollancz, 12 July 2021, www.sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/proto_sf. Accessed 24 October 2021.

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University of Kent. “Uniting Alternative Futurisms,” University of Kent, April 2021, www.research.kent.ac.uk/beyondthespectacle/wp-content/uploads/sites/2011/2020/02/CfP.pdf. Accessed 29 August 2021. Wooding, Jonathan M. The Otherworld Voyage in Early Irish Literature: An Anthology of Criticism. Four Courts Press, 2000.

Chris Loughlin is a labour historian of modern Britain and Ireland. He was employed as lecturer in history at Newcastle University, 2018 to 2021, and obtained his training at Queen’s University Belfast. His first monograph was published in 2018, Labour and the Politics of Disloyalty in Belfast, 1921-39. He has also published work on civil rights, loyalty and the foundation of Northern Ireland, gender, sexualities, and industrial relations. He has peer-reviewed work for the Royal Society, Labour History Review and International Labor and Working Class History.

Exoplanets as Sites of Rebellion

Emma Johanna Puranen

Humans leaving Earth to live on an exoplanet, or a planet outside our solar system, is a common storyline in science fiction. Establishing a new society on an unfamiliar world, which might present unknown dangers to human biology or have a small margin of error to maintain human habitability, brings up fundamental questions of governance and forces characters to undergo a radical change. Pre-existing divisions among settlers can be exacerbated, and new ones can be created between the exoplanet settlers and the people back on Earth—either can lead to rebellion and revolt. In this paper, I discuss examples of how distance and harsh conditions on newly settled exoplanets in the novel Aurora by Kim Stanley Robinson, the video game The Outer Worlds, and season four of the television series The Expanse all exacerbate human rights issues and lead to conflict between settlers and people on Earth, or representatives of Earth in the form of governments or private companies. I investigate the tension inherent in the juxtaposition of these fictional revolutions to gain rights for the downtrodden with portrayals of humans moving to exoplanets that are often reminiscent of or re-enacting settler-colonialism. This paper is also inspired by the June 2021 Edinburgh Futures Institute conference The Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty, which delved into many of these questions of governance and rights for space-faring humans. I draw on my position as an interdisciplinary scholar working between astronomy and literature at the St Andrews Centre for Exoplanet Science—itself an interdisciplinary organisation tackling ethical questions about potential human interaction with other worlds and lifeforms —to uplift science fiction as an underutilised source of scholarly thought on these matters. Lessons from science fiction regarding the potential future of humanity in space are especially crucial given recent interest in colonising Mars—after all, as Lucas Mix states, “we don’t do things until we imagine them.”

I will summarise three case studies of fictional revolts on exoplanets and then compare themes that emerge from the three cases. First, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel Aurora (2015) takes place on a generation ship en route to the Tau Ceti system, a real star system about twelve light-years from Earth. The massive generation ship hosts a population of about 2000 people, living spread across twenty-four different Earth biomes (Robinson 45-46, 51). The voyage takes about 170 years at 10 percent the speed of light, spanning the initial generation who left Earth, several caretaker generations who only know life on the ship, and finally the generation that arrives at their destination, an Earth-like moon of the exoplanet Tau Ceti e, which the settlers dub “Aurora” (46, 48). When they arrive at their new exoplanet home, only to find it uninhabitable due to deadly disease-causing prions in the otherwise breathable atmosphere, a conflict emerges among the passengers. One group of settlers from Aurora attempts to return to the ship, but they are killed by those onboard to maintain quarantine. Disagreement over this action leads to brawls among the remaining people on the ship until the ship’s AI itself takes over, physically separating dissidents and referring to itself as “the rule of law” (229). With the Aurora settlement unviable, people are divided under the AI’s arbitration into one group that stays and attempts to terraform another world in the Tau Ceti system, and one that goes against their mission and returns to Earth. 

In Aurora, the survivors, called the “returners,” eventually return to Earth, resorting to novel cryosleep technology after their onboard ecosystems collapse and they run out of food. It is also revealed that the mission to Tau Ceti began with not one generation ship, but two—the other ship was destroyed in a conflict among its passengers, and the memory of this was buried so as not to provoke such a conflict in the remaining ship (232-233). Arriving back at Earth, they find that the reason for their mission was expansionism alone, and that people on Earth are still sending out generation ship after generation ship, with no indication of success from any of the missions. One space advocate argues:

It’s an evolutionary urge, a biological imperative, something like reproduction itself. Possibly it may resemble something like a dandelion or a thistle releasing its seeds to the winds, so that most of the seeds will float away and die. But a certain percentage will take hold and grow. Even if it’s only one percent, that’s success! (429)

This did not prove justification enough for the returners. When they made their decision at Aurora, they rebelled against an Earth they had never known, which had generations ago taken away their agency without their consent. As Aram, one of the returners, puts it, the engineering challenges of settling space might be overcome, but the biological ones are insurmountable: “Life is a planetary expression, and can only survive on its own planet” (428). Aurora argues that humans evolved on Earth, and living anywhere else, particularly the bottle of a generation ship, will lead to ecological collapse.

The Outer Worlds and The Expanse both feature class-based revolts with workers rising up against private companies from Earth that have used the harsh conditions of space to exert more control over their employees. The Outer Worlds, a 2019 video game from Obsidian, takes place in an alternate future in which space is ruled and settled by megacorporations. Workers and corporate elite alike have come to the fictional Halcyon system in faster-than-light ship journeys which include a ten-year cryosleep. The Halcyon system colony, ostensibly ruled by the Halcyon Holdings Corporate Board, is in disarray and features several examples of revolts on exoplanets. When colonists first arrived in Halcyon, before the events of the game, they created a colony on the world Terra-1. Terraforming Terra-1 provoked rapid mutations of the local flora and fauna that made them deadly to humans. This resulted in colonists rebelling against the Board, which then abandoned the colony and attempted to erase its existence via propaganda. By the time of the video game, a violent schism has occurred on Terra-1, now renamed Monarch, splitting the people there into two groups: one a corporate entity separate from the Board, and the other an anarchist group (“Radio Free Monarch”). The second colony attempt in the Halcyon system, on a planet called Terra-2, has gone better for the Board, but is dealing with a plague caused by malnutrition. This plague has caused a group of deserters to leave corporate towns against the will of the Board (“Comes Now the Power”). Ultimately, the Board claims to use a “Lifetime Employment Program” to put most workers in stasis to save resources, though in reality the plan is to kill them to reduce the population so the elites may live in comfort (“The City and the Stars”). The future of the Halcyon system in the story, and the extent to which the Board’s control will be weakened or strengthened, depends on the player’s actions in the video game. The combination of authoritative rule by the Board, and the biological challenges of attempting to live within alien biospheres, leads to multiple situations where human rights are abused and people rise up violently.

The Expanse is unique among the media properties I investigate here in that, in its story, many of the human settlers on the exoplanet come not from Earth but from colonies throughout our own solar system. In the world of The Expanse, which is based on a novel series by James S. A. Corey, Earth is united under the United Nations, Mars is an independent power, and a group called the “Belters” live in the asteroid belt and the outer solar system under the control of various Earth and Mars governmental and corporate powers. The Belters have lived in space for generations, and due to the change in environment and the distance between populations have developed some biological differences from the rest of humanity. They live in cramped conditions under constant resource scarcity and cannot withstand Earth gravity without a painful and expensive course of drugs to strengthen their bodies (“New Terra”).

Season 4 features a big societal change in the form of the opening of a Ring Gate built by an ancient, unknown alien civilisation that can transport people light-years away in an instant. This opens up a plethora of habitable exoplanets to humanity, and a land grab that destabilises the solar system’s already precarious political situation ensues. Our protagonists are called in to mediate in a struggle between Belter settlers on an Earthlike planet, and an Earth corporation called Royal Charter Energy (RCE) that has been granted an exploration charter by the U.N. for the same planet. The conflict is reflected in the two groups’ different names for the planet—the Belters call it Ilus; the RCE scientists call it New Terra. The Belters, who arrived first, destroy a landing pad just as the RCE ship is landing, causing many deaths (“New Terra”). The remaining RCE scientists try and exert control in the name of their U.N. charter, but this causes tension with the Belters, who have been under Earth’s control for a long time and do not wish to see that re-enacted on this new exoplanet. At the end of the season, the groups are forced to work together against an outside threat, and the name Ilus gains favour, but ultimately the conflict between Belters and Earthers is ongoing.

Although these stories are fictional, they engage with several real-life challenges that would occur if humans were to travel to exoplanets for the purpose of settlement. Chief among these is that exoplanets are isolated. Distances just in our solar system are vast—a hypothetical Mars colony, or even a lunar one, would already be the most isolated group of humans in existence. Exoplanets are orders of magnitude farther away. For humans to reach them in real life would either require a method of propulsion that can speed a craft faster than light, which is currently far outside humanity’s technological capabilities, or else a generation ship, as described in the Aurora section above. A generation ship is still well outside current technology, though certainly much more feasible than faster-than-light travel within the next few hundred years. Many SF stories solve these problems for their narratives by using some form of stasis or cryosleep, as in Aurora and Outer Worlds, or a wormhole or portal, as in The Expanse. Either way, once the exoplanet is reached, the Earth becomes both physically and emotionally distant, and often the settlers either cannot communicate with Earth or can only do so with a substantial delay. This distance necessitates the creation of new forms of government, and makes it very difficult for representatives of Earth power to maintain control in those newly established governments (The Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty). Though The Expanse’s Ring Gate does allow for communication, in Aurora and The Outer Worlds Earth is effectively non-existent for the settlers, who rely on the ship’s council and eventually the AI’s “rule of law,” or the Board, respectively. These nearer bodies govern instead of Earth because it is difficult to enforce laws on people who are that far away.

A second challenge that all three stories contend with is the environments of space and the exoplanet itself. Humans living in space face a closed and fragile ecosystem that can leave them physically weaker. If they reach a planet and find it has life, they, as representatives of Earth’s biosphere, must then interact with a wholly alien biosphere, and this interaction may be dangerous to one or both parties. Lucas Mix, an evolutionary biologist and theologist who presented at The Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty, stresses that evolutionary biology shows there is a link between the distance between populations and their genetic differences, and that the mutation load would be very high in space (Mix). Aurora sees settlers die of prion disease upon breathing an exoplanet’s air; The Outer Worlds sees a botched terraforming attempt render an exoplanet less human-hospitable, as well as a slow starvation of many colonists due to lack of suitable food resources. The Belters of The Expanse, adapted to a harsh life in space, have trouble adjusting to the gravity of Ilus, and some die after bad interactions with the drugs they need to withstand the planetary gravity. These challenges necessitate group cooperation to have a chance at survival. In a society with a low margin of error, authority and strong social norms are likely methods to achieve this cohesion—yet these can breed authoritarianism (Mix). The authorities can then craft a survivalist human-versus-nature narrative, as the Board does in The Outer Worlds: “Please be reminded that acting against the interests of the corporations is acting against the interests of humanity” (outerworlds.obsidian.net/en). Therefore, the environments of space and exoplanets can directly influence governments to restrict human rights.

A specific type of space environment often used to get to exoplanets is the aforementioned generation ship, presented in Aurora, which itself comes with a slew of ethical considerations. SF author Stephen Baxter outlined three ethical dilemmas of such worldships in his Institutions of Extra-Terrestrial Liberty presentation. The caretaker generations of Aurora somewhat successfully grapple with these dilemmas before they arrive at Tau Ceti. The first is the closure—that is, both the lack of possibility of leaving and the biological fragility and instability of a small, closed ecosystem. Second are vocational limitations, in which caretakers have limited choice in their occupation. Third is reproductive control, in which to maintain population and diversity people are told how many children they can or cannot have, and with whom (Baxter). Common among these dilemmas is the lack of agency for the caretakers as well as the generation that arrives at the destination—none of them chose to embark on this voyage. Only the first generation made the decision to leave Earth. The Belters of The Expanse have, to some extent, also been living on a worldship. Generations ago, their ancestors made the decision to move to space, and now forces of employment and biology keep them there. For the first time, with Ilus, they have the opportunity to live on a planet where there isn’t a constant danger of a depressurisation event killing everyone. Generation ships and exoplanets both present extremely challenging settings for any ethical system of governance.

Each of these three SF examples includes violence sparked by conditions in which human rights have been deprioritised and taken away. The exoplanet then presents a tantalising opportunity for escape, if only to a new prison—for many of those who chose to stay and terraform in Aurora, for example, they make their decision not out of duty to the mission bestowed by Earth, but because they cannot bear to stay on the ship any longer: “It’s one zoo or another, as far as I can tell,” says one proponent of staying in Tau Ceti (Robinson 263). In order to understand why all of these fictional situations led to violence, we need to examine the reasons for going to exoplanets in these stories in the first place. In each example, there are two distinct classes of people: a privileged group who go for corporate interests/expansionism (the first generation in Aurora, the Board in Outer Worlds, RCE in The Expanse), and an underprivileged group who had little to no choice in the matter and go in hopes of new opportunities or a better life (the caretaker and arrival generations in Aurora, the workers in Outer Worlds, the Belters in The Expanse). In aiming to make exoplanets their home, both groups are endorsing and practising the colonisation of these other worlds. Baxter notes the approval of colonialism as another ethical dilemma of worldships—there is no other reason to have a worldship than to build a colony somewhere. The privileged group is making the rules, and even though the underprivileged group may be going for reasons more likely to be considered morally just, their going is really a symptom of or a reaction to the privileged group’s actions. The impetus for going is still a colonisation effort that places little value on human lives, or, indeed, exoplanetary environments.

These three stories, all published within the last decade, must be considered in light of concurrent and ongoing discussions on space colonisation, privatisation, and exploration. In real life, several private companies, including Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are currently proposing Martian colonies. These companies do not discount that the task would be arduous—in fact, Musk himself has said, quite bluntly, and quite similarly to the space advocate from Aurora quoted above, “Honestly, a bunch of people probably will die in the beginning” (“Elon Musk”). I argue that before humanity sends anyone to space, we must seriously consider why we are going, and we must establish human rights as a non-negotiable priority. Jim Schwartz, a philosopher focusing on the ethics of space exploration, argued similarly in his Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty talk: “No one has any business creating novel conditions of extreme hardship, and then forcing people (especially future generations) to live under those conditions with no hope of progress or escape.” It is imperative that those in the area of human spaceflight question why they are going, and indeed where they are going. Exoplanets, as seen in these three stories, might already have their own biospheres—how do mission proposers aim to have humanity interact with a pre-existing biosphere? The time to be asking these questions is now, not after we have the technology for such interplanetary and interstellar missions.

Science fiction is often reflective of current discussions within science. SF authors imagine possible futures, and to do so they extrapolate from the world they see around them. These three recent SF stories about the dangers of taking to space without prioritising human rights, and with only expansion and greed as goals, can be read as a warning in response to the current conversation. An alternative to using SF is often to reach for historical analogies on Earth. This happens even within SF—Murtry, an RCE security guard in The Expanse Season 4, and the space advocate in Aurora both employ verbiage supporting the frontier mentality and manifest destiny of the Wild West (“Saeculum”; Robinson 429). Philosopher and anthropologist Kathryn Denning believes that there are places and uses for such historical analogies, but also that they can be messy, and writes that “instead of using past social conditions to make guesses about what would happen if a detection occurred, we might use our knowledge of present social conditions to help ensure that the science can continue to be done” (311). Denning is writing about extra-terrestrial intelligence detections, but I argue her thesis is applicable to the area of humans on exoplanets as well. I add that SF can often provide a better place to look than history when considering the human element in scientific advances like space travel.

Exoplanets often become sites of rebellion in SF because factors including isolation and severe environments create conditions where tyrannical governance can occur. But the exoplanets themselves are only the catalysts for the more deeply rooted issue of travelling to them with expansionist justifications that do not include the guarantee of human rights. It is this lack of care that leads to revolt by the abused parties. Given current popular interest in sending humans to Mars and beyond, conferences like The Institutions of Extra-Terrestrial Liberty are essential for examining the ethical considerations of such proposals. SF provides a vital bridge, accessible to all from academia and industry and the general public, that explores the social ramifications of human settlements on exoplanets. If we listen, we hear that SF is telling us that we need a good reason to go to exoplanets in the first place—and that we ignore human rights in space at our own peril.

WORKS CITED

Baxter, Stephen. “The Voyage of Six Hundred Years: The Ethical Governance of a Worldship.” The Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty, Edinburgh Futures Institute, 8-11 June 2021. Online. Conference Presentation.

Denning, Kathryn. “Impossible Predictions of the Unprecedented: Analogy, History, and the Work of Prognostication.” Astrobiology, History, and Society: Life Beyond Earth and the Impact of Discovery, edited by Douglas A. Vakoch, Springer,2013, pp. 301-312.

“Elon Musk and Peter Diamandis LIVE on $100M XPRIZE Carbon Removal.” YouTube, uploaded by XPRIZE, 22 April 2021, www.youtube.com/watch? v=BN88HPUm6j0.

The Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty. Edinburgh Futures Institute, 8-11 June 2021. Online Conference.

Mix, Lucas. “To Infinity and Beyond: Biology, Ethics, and Endless Expansion.” The Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty, Edinburgh Futures Institute, 8-11 June 2021. Online. Conference Presentation.

“New Terra.” The Expanse, season 4, episode 1, Alcon Entertainment, Just So, Hivemind, and Amazon Studios, 2019.

The Outer Worlds. Obsidian Entertainment, 2019.

The Outer Worlds. outerworlds.obsidian.net/en. Accessed 10 Jan. 2022.

Robinson, Kim Stanley. Aurora. Orbit, 2015.

Schwartz, Jim. “Lunar Settlement and the Right to Return to Earth.” The Institutions of Extra-terrestrial Liberty, Edinburgh Futures Institute, 8-11 June 2021. Online. Conference Presentation.

“Saeculum.” The Expanse, season 4, episode 9, Alcon Entertainment, Just So, Hivemind, and Amazon Studios, 2019.

Shankar, Naren, executive producer. The Expanse: Season 4. Alcon Entertainment, Just So, Hivemind, and Amazon Studios, 2019.

Emma Johanna Puranen is a postgraduate researcher at the Centre for Exoplanet Science at the University of St Andrews in Scotland. A recipient of a St Leonard’s World-Leading Doctoral Scholarship, she works between the Schools of Modern Languages, Physics & Astronomy, and Biology. She is an interdisciplinary scholar using digital humanities techniques to study the portrayal of exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system, in SF. She is also a science communicator especially interested in dialogues between scientists and SF creators. Emma also writes SF, and you can find her work in Around Distant Suns: Nine Stories Inspired by Research from the St Andrews Centre for Exoplanet Science, as well as in the audio drama ROGUEMAKER, available wherever you get your podcasts.

“So we can walk forward with knowledge of who we were before”: Landscape, History and Resistance in Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts

Gabriely Pinto

This paper is inspired by my M.A. research on the rise of dystopian young adult fiction in Ireland after the economic boom known as the Celtic Tiger and its subsequent crash in 2008. In this article, I argue that landscape in dystopian fiction becomes a site to recover history and to reclaim it as an act of resistance to a controlling ruling body. I wish to demonstrate this through a reading of Sarah Maria Griffin’s debut YA novel Spare and Found Parts. This paper is divided into three sections. First, I take a brief look at the role landscape plays in post-apocalyptic storytelling. After that, I analyze Sarah Maria Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts and investigate the ways in which the landscape is regulated by the government in this particular dystopia. Finally, I examine how landscape becomes a site of resistance by allowing teen characters to access the past which led to the current dystopia, and how they actively reclaim the landscape and its history in an effort to build an informed and better future.

The Role of Landscape

Landscapes play a significant role in world-building in post-apocalyptic storytelling and often reflect the aesthetic of a particular type of dystopia—zombie apocalypse, alien invasion, climate change, etc. The dystopian landscape becomes a symbol of the pre-dystopian past, a reminder of what came before and is no more. It emerges as a space that invokes cultural memory and feelings of nostalgia. This is quite apparent in visual media, for example, such as graphic novels and video games. Games such as The Last of Us and The Last of Us Part II, significantly, are known for their reimagining of familiar landscapes, as they show cityscapes humans fled and nature reclaimed. Games such as Horizon Zero Dawn and Nier: Automata follow a similar trend and depict human landscapes and cityscapes surviving beyond the society that lived in them. In these types of post-apocalyptic role-playing games, the landscape plays a huge part in gathering lore on the past and the civilization that inhabited these decaying spaces before, as the player character collects trinkets of a past long gone or explores buildings that have lost purpose and meaning in the current society. Landscape, thus, invokes cultural memory and, in a way, immortalizes the past that came before.

In the introduction of Arts of Living in a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene, Gan et al. poignantly state that: “Every landscape is haunted by past ways of life” (2). They say this from an ecological standpoint, citing as an example plants whose animal seed dispensers are extinct (2). However, this idea of landscape carrying ghosts of the past resonates with my reading of landscape in dystopian storytelling, particularly in Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts. Irish literature, notably, has shown a disposition to memorialize loss through a distinct landscape.

As suggested by Oona Frawley, “nature and landscape become signifiers, lenses through which it is possible to examine cultural and historical developments” (1). Irish literature shows a tendency to preserve spaces by means of commemoration of the physical landscape, which often “memorializes loss” (1)—be that the loss of an individual who inspired the name of a particular place, or the social system associated with a space. Owing to the circumstances of Ireland’s history of colonization, and periods of large migration, it makes sense that loss often features in the literature and, as such, that landscape emerges as a space to represent it (1). Marie Mianowski, in her edited collection on contemporary Irish landscapes, similarly argues that “the experience of humans with place is preserved in landscape, mingled with the details of history and the power of myth” (4). Considering these views when reading dystopian settings enables us to see how loss and history associated with a particular space can be preserved by means of landscape.

By imagining a nightmarish extrapolation of modern-day anxieties, dystopias often feature a society that failed, and one that is trying to rebuild, however dubiously. Both often inhabit the same space at different times, albeit transformed by whatever catastrophic event brought the end of the previous civilization. That is, the past and the present are intrinsically connected in terms of place. The present would not be, if it were not for the past that preceded it. Judith Butler best summarizes this:

Places are lost—destroyed, vacated, barred—but then there is some new place, and it is not the first, never can be the first. And so there is an impossibility housed at the site of this new place. What is new, newness itself, is founded upon the loss of original place, and so it is a newness that has within it a sense of belatedness, of coming after, and of being thus fundamentally determined by a past that continues to inform it. (468)

Landscape in Spare and Found Parts

The landscape in Griffin’s Spare and Found Parts plays a key role in establishing the post-apocalyptic atmosphere of the novel and in showcasing the extent of the devastation suffered by the surviving community. Griffin’s novel is a dystopian YA retelling of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. The city itself, at times, resembles a monster of decay brought back to life. Dublin—or Dublin’s corpse—comes alive in Griffin’s prose. The city is renamed Black Water City after the river that runs through it, Dublin’s River Liffey, darkened by destruction. Likewise, many iconic Dublin landscapes are completely altered after a catastrophic event.

A hundred years before the novel takes place, technology had advanced greatly. Humanity came to rely heavily on androids which provided an endless source of information. An electromagnetic pulse in an event that came to be known as The Turn ended that world and introduced a disease that caused people to either die or be born without limbs. The surviving ten thousand inhabitants of Black Water City return to a simpler way of life devoid of technology and attempt to rebuild despite the echoes of the epidemic caused by The Turn. It has become common for people to have an augmented limb. Protagonist Nell Crane struggles to fit in even then, as she lost her heart because of the disease and was given a mechanical one instead, which constantly ticks and makes her feel like an outsider. Her father, a Victor Frankenstein-like figure, is credited as the inventor behind the augmented limbs many seek. The landscape and the spaces people are allowed to inhabit in this small surviving community are symbolically controlled by the government. For one, all must follow three core rules:

1. The sick in the Pale, the healed in the Pasture.
2. Contribute, at all cost.
3. All code is blasphemy. (Griffin n.p.)

The rules seek to keep the population under control. All must contribute to society when coming-of-age and computers are absolutely forbidden. One of the rules, however, manifests geographically: while the healed and wealthier are allowed to live in the Pasture with its green fields and idyllic sceneries, the sick are confined to the Pale, the greyer space which still carries the scars of the one hundred years of epidemic post-Turn:

Far outside the boundaries of Black Water City, a silent, guarded line between the Pale and the Pasture. The world changed there. The sick were raised and grew and contributed in the Pale; the healed lived and farmed and prayed in the tall grasslands of the Pasture. (24)

This spatial separation is also a class segregation: while those in the Pale are depicted as working-class and spend their days in hard labor towards rebuilding the city and serving the community, those in the Pasture seem to do minimal work, get better houses and have servants at their disposal. Significantly, those in charge of society are referred to as “The Pastoral Council.” The power lies in the Pasture, and the Pale is in service of it. The “Library Complex,” said to contain a relic of the old world—the written internet—is confined to the Pasture “away from civilian eyes” (15); very few are granted access to it. Nell dreams of being allowed to view such a source of information. But evidently, knowledge is strictly controlled by those in power.

As explained by Raffaella Baccolini, “dystopias show a profound interest in history and, more precisely, in its control, which often implies its revision and even erasure” (115). That impulse to control history is a theme largely explored in Griffin’s novel. Besides restricting access to documents of the past and rigorously prohibiting the use of technology, “official history” perpetuates that the past was singularly bad and has nothing to offer to the present. An irony, considering the ruling government refers to itself as “The Remaining Hibernian Senate” (Griffin 220), implying they are a continuation of those in power prior to the Turn. Nell, who thirsts for knowledge more than anything, is critical of people’s acceptance of this restrictive view of history:

She was sure that the rest of the folk in Black Water City were afraid only because they didn’t ask questions, because they believed what they were told. If all you’d ever heard about the history of your world was horror stories about gleaming boxes full of bad knowledge, of course you’d be afraid. (28-29)

She opposes this fear of past technology, rationalizing it as born out of ignorance. She shows an awareness of the unreliability of those who are telling the story, those with authority. As noted in another instance in the novel: “Asking for a computer was like asking for a gun . . . They frightened the wrong people, and the wrong people wanted them gone.” (121) “The wrong people” have the decision-making power to make them go away. The Council is very much preoccupied in concealing the past that led to the current society and suppressing any attempt to access the communal history related to this past. They “revise” and “erase” history to their advantage and to promote their version of the story. Not only do they seek to manipulate the distant pre-Turn past, but they also attempt to rewrite the recent past and memories of the last years of the epidemic. This is exercised in their control and use of the city spaces. The Gonne Hospital—a famous Dublin department store, repurposed to house the sick after the Turn—for example, is symbolically burned in front of the public, as if to exorcize the trauma that transpired inside:

Hundreds and hundreds of people had died there. The old building had become so contaminated that the council had decreed it unsafe and ordered that it be burned. Ostensibly this was to kill the ends of the virus and stop the aftershocks; but the whole city doomed gas masks and gathered to watch it, a terrible red ceremony. It felt like an exorcism, like ghosts of their sick past scorched out. (83)

The burning of the building aims to erase events related to the sick and the epidemic. It’s a cleanse exercise attended by the whole community. The potential of landscapes and landmarks to invoke cultural memory informs the Council’s decisions. Contrastingly to the hospital, a monument referred to as “The Needle”—the forgotten Spire of Dublin—is the first thing wrapped in plastic to be preserved after the Turn:

It had been left to stand, it was said, because it told no stories. It had no face, no body, no myth. It was just a needle, towering to the hot sky, too slim and smooth to climb, made of such stuff that nobody could even write histories upon its surface. (101)

This is indicative of the conscious totalitarian effort to control information through the regulation of landscapes and landmarks.

Landscape as a Site of Resistance

As further outlined by Baccolini, “history, its knowledge, and memory are . . . dangerous elements that can give the dystopian citizen a potential instrument of resistance” (115). Thus, knowledge of the past is crucial for the dystopian protagonist to have agency and set about changing their world. Once the Council is controlling the information passed down to people and keeping written records under surveillance at the “Library,” the landscape becomes the main source to access memory of the past, to keep its ghosts alive. The cityscape around Nell and her contemporaries is a constant reminder of pain and trauma, but also an impediment to the council’s attempt to erase history. As seen in the case of the hospital, the ostentatious display of burning down the “house of failure” (Griffin 104) is ineffective. Nell recognizes the building used to be a department store, something that no longer exists and has no use to her and her peers. Moreover, when she trespasses into the hospital years after its burning: “lo and behold, there are rooms in there untouched by the fire” (83). The records of the epidemic remain in the rooms of the building, still standing. History cannot be erased or rewritten as long as the space that witnessed it remains. The next step, thereafter, is to resist attempts to censor and regulate knowledge of the past and the spaces inhabited by survivors.

A key feature of dystopian YA is the rebellious spirit of teen protagonists, as they become aware something is not quite right with their society (Sheldon 718). Accordingly, Nell and the other young people in the novel are shown to resist the push to ignore the past and technology. For Nell, the loss of the shared memory of the past and its great discoveries is an impairment and informs her decision to create a computer that looks human, so as to not alienate her peers. Others, she learns, also long to understand their past. They, however, see in the landscape around them a chance to recover their history. They defy the rhetoric that the past has nothing to offer but regret. Their resistance is exercised in the ways they interact with the landscape around them and their conscious effort to reclaim its lost history.

This type of resistance is better actualized with a young underground group of inventors. The Lighthouse Cinema, a five-story underground building, has survived as a structure which is reclaimed by young revolutionaries as a secret base to study “forbidden” technology. While by day they work as “mechanics, bakers, researchers of plants” (Griffin 171), they have been secretly caring for the building—Nell notes the strong smell of cleaning solution, “as if all the badness of this building’s past was being scrubbed out” (156). The building is repurposed as a workshop where they can secretly study and try to better understand banned technology which they recover by exploring abandoned spaces around the city.

Nell’s first trip to The Lighthouse nearly resembles a fairy tale, as she enters a new world hidden beside her own, full of impossibilities come to life. The smell of cleaning products, the bright lights, a contrast to the rationed electricity in the city, and the tech unabashedly used all around her. The preservation of the building is shown to be a deliberate effort to recover their lost past. At first, Nell does not understand why the building is called “The Lighthouse,” however, it is explained to her:

Because that is what it was called. Before us, before anything happened, when this city was a real city with real things to do and places to go and no disease and no war. We have to honour what came before us if we can hope to even come close to rebuilding it . . . (153)

This echoes Nell’s belief that there is no future without the past. The naming is a promise to honor history and keep moving forward in the face of adversity. While the older generation seems crippled by the traumatic past, the younger generation seeks to move beyond grief and shame and attempts to do more than just survive. The building is a testament of past achievements and signals the potential to repeat and improve on positive aspects of their past, while “scrubbing out” the bad. By allowing dystopian characters to access the past that a controlling government is attempting to silence, the building itself becomes a site of resistance, a place to exercise critical thinking and rebellion.

The type of resistance present in Spare and Found Parts is subtle. Within the story itself, the resistance is referred to as a “tiny revolution.” And Nell thinks of her rebellious peers as “the small collective of revolutionaries and restorers” (171). The type of activism, of resistance, presented in the novel is quiet, underground, not ready to openly defy those in power yet, it lacks confidence—they keep waiting to discover “something more” in order to convince the council of their cause: “We’ll tell everyone when the time’s right” (164), they tell Nell. This is a quieter resistance. But the rebellious instinct is there. The spark that may start a larger-scale revolution is there. By exploring and reshaping the darker spaces of their city and the past associated with the landscape around them, the young rebels begin to access memory of the past, reclaim it and learn from it in order to respond to the injustices of their society.

We finish the novel as Nell is about to present her contribution to the council and publicly argue on the societal value of accessing their communal history. She reckons her android “can show us where the world was headed before the Turn, so we can walk forward with knowledge of who we were before, so we don’t make the same mistakes” (394). The warning at the heart of the novel is clear: there is no bright future if one refuses to learn from the past. A closer reading of Griffin’s novel allows us to examine a larger trend in post apocalyptic stories, where the landscape of a world in ruins becomes an unexpected instrument of resistance and can be the spark to set a rebellious spirit in a path of discovery and ignite a revolution.

WORKS CITED

Baccolini, Raffaella. “‘A useful knowledge of the present is rooted in the past’: Memory and Historical Reconciliation in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Telling.” Dark Horizons: Science Fiction and the Dystopian Imagination, edited by Tom Moylan and Raffaella Baccolini, Routledge, 2003, pp. 113-134.

Butler, Judith. “Afterword: After Loss, What Then?.” Loss: The Politics of Mourning, edited by David L. Eng and David Kazanjian, University of California Press, 2003, pp. 467-474.

Frawley, Oona. Irish Pastoral: Nostalgia and Twentieth Century Irish Literature. Irish Academic Press, 2005.

Gan, Elaine et al. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts of the Anthropocene, edited by Anna Tsing, et al., University of Minnesota Press, 2017, pp. 1-16.

Griffin, Sarah Maria. Spare and Found Parts. Greenwillow, 2016.

Horizon Zero Dawn. PlayStation version, Sony, 2017.

Mianowski, Marie. “Introduction: Experiencing and Representing Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts.” Irish Contemporary Landscapes in Literature and the Arts, edited by Marie Mianowski, Palgrave Macmillan, 2011, pp. 1-10.

NieR: Automata. PlayStation version, Square Enix, 2017.

Sheldon, Rebekah. “Dystopian Futures and Utopian Presents in Contemporary Young Adult Science Fiction.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge University Press, 2019, pp. 113-724.

The Last of Us. PlayStation version, Naughty Dog, 2013.

The Last of Us Part II. PlayStation version, Naughty Dog, 2020.

Gabriely Pinto holds an M.A. in Anglo-Irish literature and drama from University College Dublin, completed as the 2018/2019 recipient of the Maria Helena Kopschitz Scholarship. She has a B.A. in English and Portuguese languages and literatures from Federal University of Rio Grande. Her research interests include contemporary Irish young adult fiction, speculative fiction, and gender studies.

Dissolving the Individual: Collective Consciousness as a Rebellion Against Neoliberalism in Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Chana Porter’s The Seep

Jonathan Thornton

In this paper, I explore ideas around collective consciousness and fungal networks as a rebellion against neoliberalism’s co-option of the utopian potential of the internet in the texts Rosewater by Tade Thompson and The Seep by Chana Porter. To do so I first outline some theoretical and conceptual ideas around how the internet has been used to uphold neoliberalism, how fungal networks offer a subversion of this by connecting us to each other and the nonhuman world, and how fungi, with their symbiotic and parasitic interactions with bodies, disrupt the idea of the body as discrete and inviolable. Then I explore these elements through the texts. Finally, I conclude, drawing together ideas between these two texts.

Rob McRuer has a useful definition of neoliberalism in his text Crip Theory, where he emphasises how neoliberalism’s prioritisation of the freedom of capital destroys or transforms into target markets “the public or democratic cultures that might constrain or limit the interest of global capital,” and neoliberalism’s end result of “more global inequality and raw exploitation and less rigidity in terms of how oppression is reproduced (and extended)” (2-3). This is something we can see particularly clearly in the case of the internet, whose revolutionary potential has largely been squandered in favour of propping up the status quo. Prem Sikka acknowledges that while “the internet represents the biggest advance in communication technology since the advent of the printing press,” its effectiveness in bringing about social change for the better is hampered because “it is colonised by corporate as well as radical groups seeking to change society” (765-766). We can see this in how social media, which is supposed to allow us to connect better, has contributed directly to the rise of the alt-right, Brexit, and Trumpism. Tracy L. Hawkins describes in “Facebook, Neoliberalism, and the Foreclosing of Imagination” how neoliberalism uses technology to reify its core beliefs in order to make it more difficult to imagine forms of resistance against it. Hawkins adds, “As a result of this, our ability to imagine new ways to organize society, to address issues of social justice, and to seek our ideal future is greatly curtailed” (137).

But there are many advantages to increased communication and increased connection, with great potential for activism. What would a network look like that wasn’t so anthropocentric? In his book Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake describes how fungi participate in symbiotic relationships that allow multicellular life to exist, from trees to humans. He says, “We are ecosystems, composed of—and decomposed by—an ecology of microbes, the significance of which is only now coming to light. . . . Symbiosis is a ubiquitous feature of life” (18). I am interested in how thinking about ourselves as ecosystems decentres the idea of the individual, and emphasises how we exist as a part of nature rather than something distinct from it. This idea is echoed in Donna Harraway’s “The Cyborg Manifesto,” which uses the cyborg as a metaphor to disrupt the humanist notion of the historically white male body as distinct from nature, woman, animal, and machine. She argues, “by the late twentieth century, our time, a mythic time, we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism—in short, cyborgs” (“Cyborg” 61). This notion of hybridity between machine and organism extends to the biomolecular machinery of the fungi, the microbiota and the symbionts and parasites that we live intimately with. The notion of the human body as a discrete, inviable self is not compatible with our knowledge of ourselves as interactions of cellular machinery and genetic coding from varied sources both prokaryotic and eukaryotic. Haraway talks about biology as “a kind of cryptography,” and in “Tentacular Thinking” she further explores the idea of humans as interacting biological systems with no clearly defined boundaries: “We are all lichens; so we can be scraped off the rocks by the Furies, who still erupt to avenge crimes against the earth. Alternatively, we can join in the metabolic transformations between and among rocks and critters for living and dying well” (“Tentacular” 56). Using Hawaray’s question from “The Cyborg Manifesto”—“Why should our bodies end at the skin, or include at best other beings encapsulated by skin?” (61)—as a jumping off point, Margrit Shildrick positions hybridity in relation to the disabled body and prostheses. Shildrick argues that prostheses, whether they be replacement limbs, behaviour-altering drugs, or transplanted organs, disrupt ideas about the body as a discrete entity and force us to rethink our ideas about embodiment: “They not only demonstrate the inherent plasticity of the body, but, in the very process of incorporating non-self matter, point to the multiple possibilities of co-corporeality, where bodies are not just contiguous and mutually reliant but entwined with one another” (16). Thus, considering bodies as “contiguous,” “mutually reliant,” and “entwined” disrupts hierarchies of viewing non-disabled bodies as superior to disabled bodies, and allows us to rethink what constitutes a body and what its limits are. How we view embodiment also influences our ideas around subjectivity. This is explored in speculative fiction that engages with the fungal. While works like M. R. Carey’s The Girl With All The Gifts have made the Cordyceps fungi the go-to pseudo-scientific explanation for zombies, other works, such as Tade Thompson’s Rosewater and Chana Porter’s The Seep, engage with the fungal to imagine exciting, if ambiguous, posthuman possibilities for connectivity that echo the early utopian ideals of the internet whilst avoiding its co-option by neoliberalism.

Tade Thompson’s Rosewater is set in a near-future Nigeria where an alien incursion has occurred in the form of Wormwood, which has burrowed under the ground and released fungi-like spores into Earth’s atmosphere. Wormwood is trapped under the dome of Utopicity, and the city of Rosewater has sprung up around it. The alien fungi, or xenoform, attaches itself to the natural fungi on human skin, forming a psychic network called the xenosphere which “sensitives” like protagonist Kaaro are able to access like the internet. In the virtual space of the xenosphere, sensitives are able to embody themselves in nonhuman forms: Kaaro appears as a Griffin and inhabits such surreal places as a palace made of meat. But the xenosphere is more than just a recapitulation of the cyberpunk dream. In Rosewater, everyone is connected into a communal “worldmind,” the differences between discrete individual bodies called into question as consciousness extends across fungal networks and through different people’s minds.

The dome opens once a year, releasing alien fungi into the atmosphere and healing the injured and diseased. However, this process does not always work like the people who flock to visit Rosewater might wish. Whilst some are healed, others are put back together incorrectly—the deformed, or mutated or remade in new and unusual ways—known as the “remade.” Even the dead are infected with xenoforms, brought back to life as soulless zombies, or the reanimates. Thus, the interaction between humans and the alien fungi doesn’t so much return people to an idealised complete body, but remakes it in challenging new forms.

This is further complicated by the ways the xenosphere, like the internet, contributes to upholding some elements of the neoliberal paradigm while subverting others. Kaaro works at a bank, forming a psychic shield to prevent other sensitives from hacking the bank through the xenosphere. Furthermore, Kaaro discovers that the xenoforms are slowly replacing human cells with more xenoforms whilst replicating the original body’s appearance, and that eventually humanity will be entirely replaced. This causes Kaaro to question his own subjectivity:

I am not the same. I don’t look at the dome in the same way. It’s now a stye or a boil, swollen with purulence, waiting, biding its time. I don’t know what my healing has cost me. How many native cells have the xenoforms driven out? Ten, fifteen percent? How human am I? I see the people touching me and the ones at the periphery staring as dead people. Conquered and killed by invaders, walking around carrying their death, but they don’t even know it. (Thompson 263)

The replacement of human cells by the alien xenoforms can be read as a metaphor for colonialism, especially as this all takes place in a Nigeria where the indigenous culture has been overwritten by the all-powerful cultural influences of the West. Thus the fungal entities in Rosewater force us to confront not just the way we think about human bodies but how we think about the body politic in the context of Western post-colonialism.

If the xenosphere in Rosewater is ambiguous in how it both disrupts and upholds the paradigm, the Seep in Chana Porter’s novella of the same name is somewhat more straightforwardly utopian. The Seep, “the friendly neighborhood bodiless sentience that makes your life just a little bit easier,” (Porter 170) is never explicitly described as a fungus, but behaves much like one. The book is set in a world where the Seep has quietly invaded, infiltrated, and linked not just humans, but all life and matter on Earth. This vast interspecies network eliminates capitalism, poverty, and hunger by allowing an immediate empathy between humans, non-human animals and the environment:

The aliens changed all of that. You could hold a product in your hand and feel its history, feel people’s attitudes and emotions as they’d processed the materials. Struggles that had felt impossibly uphill were now suddenly so clear, as if everyone had awoken one morning from the same dream. It was insanity to poison your environment to save a dime. It was insanity to build bigger and bigger bombs to keep the peace. Guns were melted down into scrap metal. Police officers put their uniforms away. (13)

Within this network, neoliberalism’s prioritising of capital above all else becomes literally unthinkable as the old paradigms are swept away by new understanding. Seeptech can alter matter directly, immediately ending scarcity, healing most diseases, and opening up new possibilities for embodiment.

Yet even within this utopian world there are problems. The Seep’s fascination with humans and embodiment leads to it amassing data on every aspect of people’s lives, albeit at least not to sell to the highest bidder like Facebook or Google. The people in the world of the Seep live in a state of constant surveillance:

The Seep loved giving you everything you wanted, in exchange for information about being human. The green flash of a credit stick, at a coffee shop or a bookstore or any number of places, was a marker of where you were and what you wanted, a little dot in a vast, ever-evolving data set. Trina had resigned herself to using credit years ago, to being a little dot in the aliens’ matrix . . . (68)

The narrative focuses on Trina FastHorse Goldberg-Oneka, who is struggling because her wife has decided to be reborn as a baby with no memories of her past life. Because the Seep is a disembodied intelligence, it doesn’t properly understand embodiment and so has difficulty understanding why Trina is unwilling to erase her suffering to feel better. Trina’s embodied life history as a trans woman with Jewish and Native American heritage are important aspects of her identity that she has fought for and has no interest in giving up: “But Trina had labored for this body! She’d fought and kicked and clawed to have her insides match her outsides, and now people changed their faces as easily as getting a haircut. Trina knew then that she wouldn’t change form. . .” (145). Thus the Seep’s network, whilst opening up new possibilities for exploring embodiment, like the internet before it, can also flatten and homogenise aspects of embodied identity in favour of a majority consensus.

So, fungal networks in speculative fiction give us a new way to think about the utopian connectivity promised by the internet whilst avoiding co-option by neoliberalism. Fungi allow us a new way to think about the permeability of the body and the effects this has on embodiment and subjectivity. In Tade Thompson’s Rosewater, fungi connect humanity and its environment into a contiguous whole even as it rewrites the human body as its own. In Chana Porter’s The Seep, the Seep’s alien network connects humans with the non-human world, making capitalist exploitation of both people and the environment impossible. Both books help us to rethink the utopian possibilities of connectivity, whilst critiquing how the internet upholds the neoliberal paradigm.

WORKS CITED

Harraway, Donna. “The Cyborg Manifesto.” Manifestly Haraway, U of Minnesota P, 2016, pp. 3-90.

—. “Tentacular Thinking: Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Cthulucene.” Staying With The Trouble, Duke UP, 2016, pp. 30-57.

Hawkins, Tracy L. “Facebook, Neoliberalism, and the Foreclosing of Imagination.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 52, no. 1, 2019, pp. 137-152.

McRuer, Robert. Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. New York UP, 2006.

Porter, Chana. The Seep. 2020, Soho Press

Sheldrake, Merlin. Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures.The Bodley Head, 2020.

Shildrick, Margrit. “‘Why Should Our Bodies End at the Skin?’ Embodiment, Boundaries, and Somatechnics.” Hypatia, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 14-29.

Sikka, Prem. “The internet and possibilities for counter accounts: some reflections.” Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal, vol. 19 no. 5, 2006, pp. 759-769.

Thompson, Tade. Rosewater. Apex Publications, 2016.

Jonathan Thornton is in his first year studying for a Ph.D. in science fiction literature at the University of Liverpool. He is interested in the portrayal of insects in speculative fiction and fantastika. He has an M.A. in science fiction literature and an M.Sc. in medical entomology, and works as a technician at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine. He has had articles published in the SFRA Review, The Polyphony, Fifty Key Figures in Cyberpunk Culture (Routledge, in press) and the Routledge Handbook to Star Trek (in press). He also writes criticism and reviews and conducts interviews for internet publications Tor dot com, Fantasy Faction, The Fantasy Hive, and Gingernuts of Horror.