Papers of Legendary Author Jack Vance Now at The University of Texas at Tyler
Billy Cryer
In late April of 1967, Ursula K. Le Guin sent off a handwritten note to 6383 Valley View Road in Oakland, California. “Dear Mr. Vance,” began Le Guin in her unmistakable compact, graceful pen strokes. “This is a fan letter—an unmitigated fan letter. I have read all your books & stories with the greatest pleasure, and then after a while re-read them with greater pleasure. There are some lovely imaginations at work in s.f. now, but the work itself is so often botched or sketched or compromised; yours never; you are competent, an artist. Write more books, write more books. Yours gratefully, Ursula K. Le Guin.”
This letter—together with a substantial archive of author papers—now resides at The University of Texas at Tyler as the Jack Vance Collection. One of the most acclaimed and influential American science fiction and fantasy authors of the twentieth century, Jack Vance (1916-2013) remains one of the most obscure and least studied literary figures. Winner of multiple Hugo Awards, a Nebula Award, and two World Fantasy Awards—as well as the Edgar Award for mystery fiction and the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Grand Master honor—Vance authored more than sixty novels and well over a hundred short stories over a period of seven decades. Since the appearance of “The World-Thinker” in 1945 in Thrilling Wonder Stories, Vance’s richly imagined worlds, vivid prose style, and mesmerizing narratives have inspired generations of writers. Vance shaped contemporary genre fiction in ways that academic scholarship has yet to fully explore.
The Jack Vance Collection comprises more than 60 boxes of materials spanning the full breadth of Vance’s life and career. The collection includes handwritten and typescript copies of dozens of manuscripts; juvenilia and other unpublished works; extensive correspondence with editors, publishers, fellow authors, and readers; notebooks, personal diaries, and travel journals; numerous photographs; and an array of realia—including Vance’s musical instruments. Materials produced by the author date from approximately the 1940s through the early 2000s. Several of Vance’s early manuscripts are in the hands of individual collectors, and a small collection of Vance papers are housed at Boston University’s Howard Gotlieb Archival Research Center. However, the majority of the author’s manuscripts and nearly all the other personal papers are now located at UT Tyler’s Robert R. Muntz Library.
The manuscripts of Vance’s published works are particularly comprehensive. They represent nearly all of Vance’s major works, including those that comprise his most celebrated series, such as The Dying Earth, Lyonesse, and Demon Princes. Vance wrote initial drafts of novels and stories by hand, then made extensive revisions on typescript manuscripts prepared by his wife Norma Vance. “Norma was strongly supportive of my writing from the start, and we began working as a team,” wrote Vance in his 2009 autobiography. “I cannot emphasize enough how hard Norma worked over the course of my career—certainly as hard as I have, if not more” (86). The manuscripts are a testament to the magnitude of Norma Vance’s contributions to her husband’s success.
Also among these early materials are a handful of Vance’s college English and journalism papers while at University of California, Berkeley during the late 1930s and early 1940s. These papers glimmer with Vance’s trademark sardonic wit. For one English essay assignment, the student was tasked with an analysis of Henry David Thoreau’s Walden. In a discussion on the chapter “Solitude,” Vance argues that the author enjoyed a “compromising kind of solitude,” that, in fact, Thoreau was at best a “parlor hermit”: “He could have achieved a real solitude by moving to Wyoming or Montana,” observes Vance. “But there would also have been Apaches eager to remove Thoreau’s scalp. He may have thought of this and decided that Concord was far enough.” Vance concludes his essay on a note of frustration about the restrictive nature of prescriptive writing topics, as a general practice:
However, all of this theorizing to the side, what is there to say? I dislike the idea of writing with any seriousness in so admittedly mechanical a vehicle as a weekly theme, classically scribbled during the hour preceding class. I could very easily comment, with considerable feeling, upon Death Valley in the moonlight, and speculatively, speak of frangipani blossoms and white sails bellying to the trade winds, and even more speculatively tell of the unimaginable grandeur and empty black vastness of interplanetary space.
The Jack Vance Collection was acquired through the efforts of Dr. Billy Cryer, who is curating the collection—and who for several years made regular trips to the Vance residence in Oakland to begin organizing the late author’s papers. Special acknowledgement goes to the Vance estate, as well as UT Tyler archivist Rachel Motes, who has facilitated the transition of the collection to its new repository. A finding aid is currently in preparation and will be made available, along with the collection, once it has been fully organized. For inquiries about the Jack Vance Collection, please contact Billy Cryer at bcryer@uttyler.edu.
WORKS CITED
Silverberg, Robert. “The Eyes of the Overworld and The Dying Earth.” Writers of the 21st Century: Jack Vance, edited by Tim Underwood and Chuck Miller, Taplinger Publishing Company, 1980, pp. 117-129.
Vance, Jack. This is Me, Jack Vance! (Or, More Properly, This is “I”). Subterranean Press, 2009.
Africanfuturism and Francophone Fiction: Science, Spiritualism, and Speculation
Isaac Joslin
Differences in worldviews are the result of culturally specific language, which when examined more closely, often reveals an underlying commonality between human societies. A line from Nnedi Okorafor’s novel, Noor (2021) highlights the examination of science and spiritualism within Africanfuturist francophone fiction. In Okorafor’s story, a stranger named DNA who accompanies AO, the protagonist explains: “‘Science is mostly witchcraft… See what it has done to humanity, and the more science there is, the more there is to see. You are a spirit.’” (Okorafor, 2021 46). Although AO is a hybrid machine-human cyborg, DNA’s assertion that she is above all, a spirit, which is something beyond the scope of scientific rationalism, is a clear acknowledgment of its limits. This personal recognition of the spiritual quality of a human body whose life is nonetheless intertwined with the science of supporting cybernetic technologies serves to further reinforce his equation of science to witchcraft, indicating the presence of two distinct yet functionally similar systems of engaging the world. The implications of the above quotation, therefore, are that science has expanded to the point that it has enveloped humanity, which must be reminded that it is not merely material, but also spiritual. From a postcolonial African perspective, the application of “scientific” knowledge, reason, and rationality, were the premises upon which European colonial projects posited their objectives to discover and “civilize” other cultures around the globe. Through theorizations of African cultures and spiritual traditions in the writings of John Mbiti, Felwine Sarr, and Achille Mbembe, this article will explore indigenous African conceptions of temporality and existence through an Africanfuturist reading of select Francophone African texts by Boubacar Boris Diop and Jean-Marie Adiaffi.
“Every Mukamba is a story-teller,” writes the late John Mbiti (1983, 3) in the introduction to his collection of Akamba Stories, a Bantu indigenous people group inhabiting the Kenyan and Tanzanian borderlands. This perception of human beings as fundamentally narrative in nature resonates with the theoretical concept of ecolinguistics, which Arran Stibbe (2015) defines as such: “The stories are important because they influence how individuals think, and if they are spread widely across a culture then they can become stories-we-live-by and influence prevailing modes of thought in the whole society” (16). The stories that comprise the worldviews of many indigenous African cultures, like the Akamba depict a world that is infused with spiritual significance, as Mbiti further clarifies: “To speak of Akamba religion is almost misleading, since religious beliefs and practices are interwoven in the whole of life and do not constitute a department of their own.” (1983, 14). In his essay on “African traditional religion,” Kofi Asare Opoku (1993) expounds on this worldview while also invoking Yoruba and Akan spiritual traditions from West Africa, saying that “[e]verything begins with God” (71). Opoku argues that “God created man and placed him at the centre of the cosmos, not as its master but as a caretaker in a dependent role, and man is expected to remain in harmony with the universe since he is part of it” (73). The key point in this religious worldview that infuses all aspects of life is that of connection and relationship, such that Opoku continues by proposing that “[t]o be human means to belong to a family or community [… and] community is not restricted to relations with human beings along. There is community with nature since man is part of nature and is expected to cooperate with it” (1993, 76-77). One can therefore read in the stories of many indigenous African cultures, a worldview in which humans participate in the natural and spiritual world, both of which are intertwined through a divine presence-in-absence that animates the existential fabrics of the natural and spiritual worlds together. The kind of spiritualism embodied by traditional African cultures has strong implications for understanding temporality, science, and human subjectivity in ways that contrast starkly with predominantly Eurocentric modes of thought. These notions are explored further in this essay by a concerted readings of fictional African texts—stories—analyzed through the theoretical lens of Africanfuturism.
Africanfururism is distinct from Afrofuturism, although the two share many salient features. Ytasha Womack describes Afrofuturist mixing of science-fiction and fantasy as a means of “imagining possible futures through a black cultural lens” (2013, 9). Reynaldo Anderson articulates Afrofuturism 2.0 as a project for “humanity that is not bound up with the ideals of white Enlightenment universalism, critical theory, science, or technology” (2016, 231). Interestingly, however, Afrofuturism operates through a fundamentally diasporic lens in that its constructions of science-fiction and fantasy remain entrenched within a particularly Western, if not uniquely African American perspective. For this reason, Nnedi Okorafor (2019) coined the term, “Africanfuturism,” which like Afrofuturism is an artistic movement that challenges dominant narratives about Africa, though from an explicitly non-Western perspective, emphasizing the centrality of the African continent and its diverse indigenous cultures. Africanfuturism, as such, promotes visions of, “a technologically advanced Africa that has overcome many of its currently daunting challenges and is enjoying the benefits of socio-economic and political development…” (Oku 2021, 76). Kimberly Cleveland’s recent book (2024), Africanfuturism, highlights many interesting works of art, although predominantly from anglophone Africa. This essay will apply Africanfuturism as a framework for investigating francophone African stories, as well as the manners in which they are told, in order to articulate alternative constructs of time, spirits, and science from an open plurality of cultural perspectives steeped in indigenous African practices, philosophies, and cosmographies.
Although anglophone fiction has typically dominated the field of Afrofuturist discourse—for example the recent anthology edited by Sheree Renée Thomas, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight, Africa Risen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction (2022)—the globalization and popularity of the genre and its constitutive sub-genres, as well as the evolution of the theoretical perspectives outlined above, have led to the emergence of a discourse on francophone Afrofuturist artworks. For example, in the introduction to a special issue of the journal, Oeuvres et Critiques dedicated to French language science fiction, editors Paul Scott and Antje Ziethen (2019) explore the concepts of futurist fiction and Afrofuturism in francophone textual traditions, including an invitation to “apprehend science-fiction from a particularly African perspective” (Scott and Ziethen 2019, 12).1 This notion, alluded to in the differentiation of Africanfuturism, takes its theoretical and cultural distance from European enlightenment ideal of linear time, singular narratives, and mechanization as the ultimate form of technological progress. More recently, still, the journal, Études Littéraires Africaines published a special issue on “Futurs africains: utopies et dystopies” [African futures: utopias and dystopias] in which works by francophone authors, including Thierno Monénembo, Léonora Miano, Abdelaziz Belkhodja, and Sony Labou Tansi are analyzed as representative examples of what Ninon Chavoz and Anthnoy Mangeon, author of L’Afrique au future: le renversement des mondes (2022), articulate the particularities of francophone Africanfuturist fiction vis-à-vis the dominant anglophone productions within the genre. They argue that because of French assimilationist policies throughout the African continent, francophone writers are invariably more concerned with, “la thématique de l’inversion et du renversement des mondes” [a thematic of inversion and reversal of worlds] (Chavoz and Mangeon 2022, 14). Not only has Afrofuturism gained traction in francophone literary and critical discourse, the popular French publication, Usbek&Rica released its 38th issue in print in January of 2023,2 which includes a 40-page dossier on Afrofuturism and a reference to the book, Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions (Kloetzli 2023, 158). The uptick in academic and popular publications on Afrofuturist francophone productions signals an important moment to investigate further the themes of progress and technology, as well as the languages and temporalities employed in the articulation of such concepts, from a critical postcolonial perspective.
In a particularly salient article on the early theatre of Sony Labou Tansi, Céline Gahungu explains some of the particularities of francophone Africanfuturist fiction by marking a distinction between science-fiction and political-fiction (2022). Her analysis of four plays from the early 1970’s, all of which are set at the fin-de-siècle of the late 1990’s, illuminates not only the differences between these two anticipatory forms of storytelling, but also some striking commonalities. Political-fiction poses the futurist hypothesis with regard to “the polemic and political question of ‘development’” and its concomitant values of “personal enrichment, productivity, and global competitiveness” constitute the fundamental axes of a worldview hinging upon disaster (Gahungu 2022, 65). The significant difference between this perspective and that of science-fiction is that the projected societal or planetary cataclysm is predicated upon the slow and steady accumulation of toxicities resulting from the unfettered continuation of globalist extractive development practices rather than the result of some advanced technological weapon or of “a scientific discourse gone crazy” (Gahungu 2022, 67). In both cases, the science and politics of societal and planetary decomposition in Sony Labou Tansi’s works depict a future in which the dehumanizing logics inherent in colonialism and in its postcolonial reconfigurations that continue to prioritize profit margins above any other forms of perceived progress, are called into question through the revelation of their ultimately destructive consequences.3 These logics that dominate global discourses of development described by Senegalese political economist Felwine Sarr in his book, Afrotopia, through an ecolinguistic configuration. Sarr points out that “[k]ey words such as development, economic emergence, growth, and struggles against poverty are, for some, the principal concepts of the dominant episteme of the era.” (2019, xiii). Sarr concludes that contemporary global society operates according to predetermined rules and that “[p]rogress, reason, growth, order—these will become the keywords of the episteme of modernity in the West” (2019, 6). By contrast, one can posit alternative notions of progress and development through the telling of future stories in which alternative political, scientific, and epistemological orientations enter into the realm of possibility through the speculative turn.
Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel, Le Temps de Tamango, first published in 1981, constitutes one such narrative example of futurist francophone political-fiction. The fracturing of time and narrative identities are multiplied in ways that defy the singular and linear logics that define commonly accepted notions of time and subjectivity. In this novel, which refuses to be a novel, the main character, N’Dongo Thiam, is an engineer educated in Germany who, having returned to Senegal, also dabbles in the literary arts as well as subversive political activities. N’Dongo’s identity is intertwined with Tamango, an alias devised by the dissident political group M.A.R.S. for the person whose intended task was to carry out an assassination plot on the State’s military counselor, the Frenchman, François Navarro.4 Interestingly, Tamango is also the name of the fictional slave rebel invented by Prosper Mérimée in the 1929 novella by that name but modeled on an actual historical figure. When a bullet strikes Mamba, the fictional leader of the general strike of 1968 in Dakar, the protest errs aimlessly through the streets before petering out, much like the aftermath of Tamango’s rebellion, as N’Dongo reflects on the tragic irony: “After the revolt and the victory he must have had to let the ship float about at random. That’s what got him lost. He did not know how to steer a ship. Nice topic for a novel” (Diop 2010, 42).5 A piece of literary deconstruction, the text mixes facts and fictions with pasts and futures and can be likened to a meta-narrative of the detective genre of “polar,” as an intellectual is interested in uncovering what the informed reader can interpret to be the fictionalized events that transpired around the actual popular uprisings of May 1968 in Dakar. The resultant text of Diop’s novel is what this anonymous researcher has uncovered in the projected future of 2063, one hundred and three years after Senegalese national independence in 1960. His narrative, which is broken up into three parts, each one supplanted with a section of “notes” compiled by the Narrator6 in his efforts to reconstruct the time and space of Dakar in 1968, which has seemingly vanished from memory after a successful socialist revolution that is to have taken place in 2015 and drastically altered the national landscape (Diop 2010, 60). In particular, the narrator is interested in uncovering the story of N’Dongo Thiam whose implication in the events remains sufficiently occult and ambiguous.
Taken as an example of a futuristic “Afrotopian” imaginary, Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel Le Temps de Tamango is particularly salient for its time-traveling temporal distortions. Although the specific setting is the 1968 Dakar demonstrations,7 which the Narrator portrays in his descriptions of the protesters and the revolutionary group M.A.R.S. The protagonist, N’Dongo Thiam, is an integral member of this group. Over the course of his reconstruction of events, the Narrator who had previously known and had some correspondence with N’Dongo while the latter was studying in Germany, reencounters N’Dongo at a Christmas party after many years. He recalls that in one of his letters to N’Dongo he had spoken of Samba Diallo, the protagonist of Cheikh Hamidou Kane’s L’Aventure ambiguë (1961), and how he had remained unchanged, true to his origins, even when in France. (Diop 2010, 69) Unlike Samba Diallo, however, N’Dongo had never replied to his letter. In some ways, one can read N’Dongo as a specific type: the European-educated African intellectual who has taken up the novelistic project as means to express longing and homesickness while simultaneously composing a discourse critical of Franco-African relations. N’Dongo’s particular project was entitled Les Fenêtres de Lauchammer, which he describes thusly: “So you sat down by your window and you described Africa from the other side of Lauchammer. And after ten years you realized you were telling stories to fall asleep to” (Diop 2010, 70, my translation). N’Dongo describes how he tore up the manuscript and threw it to the fire, an act that recalls how Rimbaud would have done the same with his Une saison en enfer, wherein the narrator wishes to express to N’Dongo how his having thrown the manuscript in the fire may very well have been his very own way of writing his Windows of Lauchammer. Destruction and production are conflated in the creative act. A narrator refusing to be a novelist and an impossible novel are only the first layer of estrangement. N’Dongo as a reprisal of Tamango and perhaps also as a double of Kane’s fictional protagonist, Samba Diallo. Furthermore, there is an alternate narrator whose story is reconstructed through the commentary of the Narrator’s “notes” and who is revealed at the very end of the story to be N’Dongo’s friend Kader (Diop 2010, 162). The multilayered identities and temporalities in Diop’s novel are indicative of an Africanfuturist worldview that articulates numerous possibilities for what can be.
In essence, the novel’s fractured and refabricated narrative threads create the effect of a literary time machine, demonstrating how past, present, and future, are all related and relative to one another. This notion of interrelated temporalities corresponds to what John Biti argues in terms of time, explaining how for the Akamba “time is divided into two main sections: Tene (the Past), and Mituki (the immediate Present). Everything moves back into the Tene period, and past events constitute Time” (Mbiti 1983, 17). Although there is a great geographical distance between Kenya and Senegal, the temporal vision presented in Boubacar Boris Diop’s novel reflects a similar understanding of the present time feeding into the past. Writing about the 1960’s during the 1980’s, but projecting another 80 years into the future, as Diop does, reveals the ways in which past histories are reconstructed through present perspectives, and also that present perspectives will become those reconstructed histories of yet-to-be-realized future perspectives. To this point, Sarr defines the concept of Afro-contemporaneity as “[t]o name one’s own contemporaneity is to inscribe it within a project: to give it meaning, indicating the values it must accomplish, and to create a space and an environment where these values can be accomplished. Afro-contemporaneity is this present time, this psychological continuum of the lived experience of Africans…” (2019, 22). The project of making one’s own time and giving it meaning is inherently linked to the notion of occupying time, which implies the articulation of activity in the world of individual and collective agency. This very notion of temporal agency, or being in time within a particularly African worldview will be explored further through an examination of culturally determined thought processes and worldviews in relation to specific cultural ideologies—spiritual or scientific—that are in turn informed by a unique cultural orientation toward existence.
A scientific understanding of time, agency, and the world rests at the base of human cultures, as it precipitates a common understanding of narratological identity construction, the capacity to envision and engage in useful and beneficial activities, and to do so in a manner that corresponds with the environmental orderliness of a given population. In her book, Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Thought and Behavior, Marimba Ani employs the concept of utamawazo, which is like the concept of a worldview, but differs in that as it “places more emphasis on conscious mental operations and refers to the way in which both speculative and nonspeculative thought is structured by ideology and bio-cultural experience” (Ani 1994, 15). Furthermore, Ani argues that the thought processes of a culture are dependent upon what she terms the asili or “the germinal principle of the being of a culture, its essence (Ani 1994, 12). Accordingly, there is a certain worldview or conglomerate of thought processes resulting from a cultural essence, which indicate how the world is thought and experienced. Furthermore, she delineates the collective affect of a culture’s asili, which she defines as concept of utamahoro, which is “the vitality of a culture . . . a force made powerful through its collectiveness” (Ani 1994, 16-17). The central question for our analysis here is what precisely constitutes the cultural essence of a culture —African or European—and how does this essence manifest itself in thought, worldview, and vitality, paying particular attention to the concepts of science and spirituality within a temporal framework.
In terms of time and temporality, Ivoirian poet, philosopher and novelist Jean-Marie Adé Adiaffi’s novel La carte d’identité, translated as The Identity Card (1983), provides us with an example of the ways in which a linear temporality is insufficient for characterizing the “continuum of lived experience of Africans” that Sarr alludes to above.8 This alternate conception of time, as well as a corresponding vision of the world and human agency resides at the core of Adiaffi’s novel, which traces the surreal journey of the protagonist Mélédouman, a name that paradoxically means “‘I have no name’ or more precisely, ‘they falsified my name’” (Adiaffi 1983, 1), as he seeks to uncover his missing identity card for the colonial authorities. However, the novel subverts the conventions of space, time and subjectivity, suspending reality within the time of a sacred week, at the end of which he discovers an embodied identity with cultural and spiritual significance far beyond the facts and statistics of the material circumstances of one’s birth, parents, given name, and so forth. Mélédouman’s journey to discover himself in relation to the world and its “deep time” of a continuous present retreating into an infinite past tense is punctuated by a transcendent spiritualism that infuses the world with significance.
It is important to note, first and foremost, that Adiaffi’s text defies the conventional rules of novelistic forms, combining theatrical dialogue, poetic interludes, and prose in a fashion that seeks to embody the orality of storytelling that is fundamental to many indigenous African cultures. Adiaffi refers to his writing style as n’zassa, or “genre without genre,” and by privileging multiple modes of expression, the text itself undermines the primacy of written documentation, which undergirds all of Western imperialism. Whether in the form of maps, identification cards, land deeds or contracts, all of which operate to divide and differentiate the totality of the world and humanity, singularity and documentation are the modus operandi of global rationalist capitalist civilization. This fact is further reinforced by Mélédouman’s blindness in the text, which is the result of his imprisonment and torture by colonial authorities. Beginning his journey the sacred week, Mélédouman demands to be taught “your science, the knowledge of primeval, original time” (Adiaffi 1983, 49). There is an expressed desire to understand the past, the (Tene) into which all presents (Mituki) flow, beyond the linear, written histories of Western European superpowers. This task to uncover the past or “play the Sherlock Holmes of history” (Adiaffi 1983, 49) marks a thematic link between Adiaffi and Diop’s work, although the latter is more focused on the time of twentieth-century political histories from that present’s future, whereas the former looks to the deep past of indigenous knowledge systems and traditions from the present’s past.
Jean-Marie Adiaffi was a descendent of indigenous Agni ruling elite (his father) as well as an animist priestesses (his grandmother) and following his philosophical studies at the Sorbonne in Paris during the late 1960’s, he returned to Côte d’Ivoire intent upon expositing the indigenous philosophies and religions of his people while working to fight against primitivist prejudices, thereby proposing Bossonism as a modern indigenous African religion. Véronique Duchesne (2000) describes Adiaffi’s project as such:
“Le Bossonisme affirme l’existence, dans la conception africaine, d’un dieu unique créateur du monde et des hommes. […] Ce Dieu suprême se tient loin des hommes avec lesquels il n’a aucune relation. Il a créé des puissances intermédiaires, envoyées comme des messagers, les Bossons.” (Duchesne 2000, 304)
[Bossonism affirms the existence, within African conceptuality, of a god which is the sole creator of the world and of humanity … This supreme being is distanced from humanity and has no relation with it, and so created intermediary powers which are sent as messengers, the Bossons.]
Much like the Aimu, which is the name given to the spirits that inhabit the world of the Akamba (Mbiti 1983, 15), Bossons are, like the orisha in the Yoruba spiritual tradition (Opoku 1993, 71), distinct divinities that inhabit the earth and animate existence through their presence. Between the Agni, Yoruba, and Akamba religious traditions, we see a striking similarity in the role that intermediary spiritual entities play in relation to an absent creator God and the existential functioning of human societies across the African continent. The resultant worldview as it pertains to the natural environment is one in which the material and the metaphysical intermingle, where the juxtaposition between the spiritual and the scientific is harmonically intertwined through a temporality that continually re-presents the past. Birago Diop’s poem “Souffles” [“Breaths”], articulates this vision through the imperative: “Listen more often / to things than to beings / the voice of the fire / the water that speaks / the voice of the wind / the bush that weeps / this is the ancestor’s breathing” (Diop 1960). The voices of the wind, the fire, the water, the flora are all infused with the breath of the ancestors, animating the world with their past-time, breathing the significance of deep time into the objects that make up the world, animating them with spirit and significance.
Scientifically speaking, linear economic humanism marks the current societal understanding of these elemental forces, in that human nature constitutes the dominant environmental component of the Anthropocene. The active and animating power that provides the framework for human and non-human activity on a planetary scale is that which operates according to the laws and logics of economics, all of which rests upon the premise that seconds, minutes, hours, days, months, and years accumulate according to a steady and constant fixed progression. This worldview is limited by a culturally specific set of logics encoded in language, as Sarr proposes that “[i]n this context, economic discourse functions as a language that ensures the establishment of a common symbolic code through which the group’s ability to name, think, and experience the real develops” (2019, 49). If the human experience of reality is governed by laws of economics, constituting the cultural essence or asili of a globalized Western European culture, then the worldview (utamawazo) and vitality (utamahoro) will be a reflection of those particular cultural values. The condition of being confronted with antagonistic cultural values inherent in (post)colonial societies is what drives Mélédouman to seek to reconstruct his own cultural identification in order to better apprehend ways in which to interact with the world around him. He declares: “Forgotten science of our forefathers, science of power and strength” (Adiaffi 1983, 99). Mélédouman is not concerned with the science of West, but with a different science, one which seeks not only to “stud[y] nature […] to penetrate its laws in order to own it and master it,” but also “to understand the laws of the supernatural, in order to own and master it too” (Adiaffi 1983, 100). The recognition of a supernatural reality that is superimposed upon and infuses itself in and through the natural order of things yields an alternative understanding of human relationships with these worlds, resulting in a different ethos and affective modality of existence. He goes on to articulate this vision further:
“The science of nature is still too young to face such a new challenge. The question has to be put scientifically. If we consider science according to its results and not its methods, it certainly has gone beyond the wildest magician’s dreams. Its results can indeed be seen as more magical than magic itself – but a different kind of magic, a magic which can prove, explain. That is the major difference. Who knows whether all unexplained facts are not simply the results of unknown methods, methods we have yet to discover from their very results?” (Adiaffi 1983, 100)
Recalling the quotation from Nnedi Okorafor from the beginning of the essay, once again, one observes that magic and science operate to serve a similar function, which is to explain unexplainable phenomena. Within indigenous African imaginaries, time and matter are infused with spiritual significance, unlike the purely scientific rationalism of a global economic system that operates primarily through the destruction and exploitation of people, their time, and their material environments. While science is the logic that vehicles such a system, Mélédouman’s observation insinuates that the scientific worldview is itself more magical than magic; its realities often times border on the realms of the impossible within human imagination and experience. Furthermore, he seems to imply that a magical worldview may be equally valid as a way to approach nature, a notion that is echoed by Sarr who argues that “[t]he legitimacy of this method, which consists of attempting to grasp the African real or reality [le réel Africain] through the tool we call science, has not been called into question” (Sarr 2019, 81). Since scientific inquiry has been the privileged method of knowledge production in most societies, one must wonder if knowledge and experience could be enriched by considering the value of different methods of inquiry, including but not limited to the spiritual and the speculative.
If, for example, science, or magic as it were, explained temporality differently, like those conceptions explored earlier in Diop’s novel, then one can begin to articulate alternative models to linear progress. For example, in their article, “Inviting a decolonial practice of future imaginaries of nature: Introducing the Entangled Time Tree,” Terry and her co-authors describe multiple alternative formulations of time, “including perspectives that are not linear in their conceptualization of time and that connect to the multi-layered place-based futures found in African storytelling” (2024, 3). Rather than avaricious competition against the notion of time running out, or what is often referred to as “apocalyptic time,” one might imagine that alternative modes of engagement with time and space can foster more inclusive relationships between humans and nature, as Terry et al. suggest: “[African speculative] fiction embodies animist folktales, and highlights the moral value placed on multi-species interactions and reciprocity […] as a way to re-emphasize the human-nature-culture interdependencies that disciplinary science turned away from during the Enlightenment” (7). Accordingly, the entangled temporalities of animism-infused storytelling might also yield an understanding of nature that consists of the entirety of beings, both human and non-human, both living and non-living that occupy the terrestrial, cosmic, and psychic spaces of experience. Just as entangled temporalities foreground the relation between human and non-human communicative agencies that allow for humanity and its constituent relationships to appear and function according to different sets of ideological and practical principles.
Interestingly, the same kind of animist logic that informs the entanglement of human and natural forces within time, can also be applied to contemporary capitalist society, as Achille Mbembe writes in Necropolitics, “the Afrofuturist critique of humanism can only be deepened by combining it with an equivalent critique of capitalism” (2019, 177). He further expounds upon this notion, stating, “capitalism is establishing itself in the modality of an animist religion” (178). In the complex nexus of competing worldviews, such as those that persist in postcolonial contexts, one sees nonetheless some underlying similarities. In the indigenous and Africanfuturist perspective, time moves steadily into the past as do the spirits of the ancestors, animating the world with invisible forces, which in turn precipitate actions and reactions among human and non-human beings in the material sphere. Similarly, one might build upon Mbembe’s Afrofuturist critique of the global capitalist perspective, which depicts time as an accumulating forward momentum containing the traces of past transactions and exchanges, the invisible forces of which animate the material world through designations of value, precipitating conscious orientations and actions within human societies. Understanding that languages, logics and beliefs are culturally contingent affords the opportunity to critique the nature of the real, as the narrator in Diop’s novel states: “I really feel like asking myself if reality exists. Since it never is what it is, it ends up inspiring doubt in even the best intentioned of minds” (2010, 123). This observation reveals that reality is always subject to narration; it is always interpreted through human and non-human frameworks, and therefore never perceived in its absolute totality. The question that remains is which stories we choose to tell as societies in order to ascertain what reality is. Is it pure economic abstraction, linear temporality, and technological development? Or, are there other stories to tell about reality, such as those that reveal a transcendent spiritual realm that imbues the natural world with power and significance within a perpetually receding past-time made up of infinite presents? Okorafor exemplifies the importance of storytelling when she admonishes the younger generations that have, “lost the art of the proverb, the gift of wordplay, the science of fiction, the jujuism of the African’” (2021, 100-101). Telling stories that create and disseminate new, improvised meanings for the world beyond the purely logical constraints of rationalism constitutes a valuable contribution of oral cultures for imagining alternative worldviews for human cultural development.
Let us therefore presume that there are infinite possibilities for developing through storytelling, new magical and scientific conceptions of time, animating forces, and nature which will determine the qualities and characters of human and non-human cultures. One can immediately perceive the consequences of scientific rationalism that promotes a singular worldview and corresponding value system, as Okorafor notes, again through the character, DNA:
“We let them convince us that we had nothing and our lands were useless. If it cannot make money, then it is worthless. That is not our culture, that is capitalism. Yet we still listened. We saw their big cities, we wanted all their nonsense things, we respected their big talk. We learned to prize money over things far more valuable.” (2021, 61)
[1] Translations of French texts are my own: “apprehender la science-fiction d’une perspective proprement africaine.”
[3] See also, Joslin (2018). “Sony Labou Tansi: Une écocritique équatoriale égalitaire,” Nouvelles Études Francophones 33:1, pp. 210-225.
[4] For more on N’Dongo and Tamango, see the “notes” from the third part of Diop’s novel, specifically, p. 178.
[5] This passage is also reminiscent of Rimbaud’s celebrated poem, Le bâteau îvre, or “The drunken boat.”
[6] He insists, “Je ne suis pas un romancier, moi. Je ne suis qu’un Narrateur” (Diop 125) [I am not a novelist, myself. I am only a Narrator].
[7] Abdoulaye Bathily describes these events in his study, Mai 1968 à Dakar ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie (Chaka, 1992).
[8] For more on Adiaffi’s novel, see also, Joslin (2019). “Futurité en francosphère: enjeux du fantastic et de la science-fiction.” Oeuvres & Critiques 44:2, pp. 101-118.
WORKS CITED
Adiaffi, Jean-Marie (1983). The Identity Card. Translated by Brigitte Katiyo. Zimbabwe Publishing House.
Anderson, Reynaldo (2016). “Afrofuturism 2.0 & The Black Speculative Art Movement.” Obsidian, vol. 42, no. 1 and 2, pp. 230-38.
Ani, Marimba (1994). Yurugu: An Afrikan-Centered Critique of European Thought andBehavior. Afrikan World Books.
Bathily, Abdoulaye (1992). Mai 1968 à Dakar ou la révolte universitaire et la démocratie. Éditions Chaka.
Chavoz, Ninon and Anthony Mangeon (2022). “Narrer les futurs africains,” Études LittérairesAfricaines No. 54, pp. 7-15.
Cleveland, Kimberly (2024). Africanfuturism: African Imaginings of other Times, Spaces, andWorlds. Ohio University Press.
Diop, Birago (1960). “Souffles” Leurres et lueurs. Présence Africaine.
Diop, Boubacar Boris (2010). Le Temps de Tamango. Éditions du Rocher.
Duchesne, Véronique (2000). “Le Bossonisme ou comment être ‘moderne’ et de religion africaine,” Présence africaine, n°161/162, pp.299-314.
Gashungu, Céline (2022). Le future dans le premier théâtre de Sony Labou Tansi,” ÉtudesLittéraires Africaines No. 54, pp. 57-73.
Joslin, Isaac (2018). “Sony Labou Tansi: Une écocritique équatoriale égalitaire,” NouvellesÉtudes Francophones 33:1, pp. 210-225.
Joslin, Isaac (2019). “Futurité en francosphère: enjeux du fantastic et de la science-fiction” Œuvres & Critiques 44:2, pp. 101-118.
Kloetzli, Sophie (2023) “‘Cosmo-écologie’: dans les angles morts de l’anthropocène,” Usbek&Rica, No 38, pp. 157-158.
Mangeon, Anthony (2022). L’Afrique au futur: Le renversement des mondes. Éditions Hermann.
Mbembe, Achille (2019). Necropolitics. Translated by Steven Corcoran. Duke University Press.
Mbiti, John S (1983). Akamba Stories. Oxford University Press.
Oku, Arit (2021). “Africanfuturism and the Reframing of Gender in the Fiction of Nnedi Okorafor.” Feminist Africa 2:2, pp.75-89.
Opoku, Kofi Asare (1993). “African traditional religion: An enduring heritage,” in ReligiousPlurality in Africa: Essays in Honour of John S. Mbiti, edited by Jacob K. Olupona and Sulayman S. Nyang. Mouton de Gruyter, pp. 67-82.
Scott, Paul and Antje Ziethen (2019). “La science-fiction en langue française: du merveilleux scientifique à l’afrofuturisme.” Œuvres & Critiques 44:2, pp. 5-14.
Stibbe, Arran (2015). Ecolinguistics: Language, Ecology, and the Stories We Live by. Routledge.
Terry, Naomi, et al. (2024). “Inviting a decolonial practice for future imaginaries of nature: Introducing the Entangled Time Tree,” Environmental Science and Policy 151:103615, pp. 1-11.
Thomas, Sheree Renée, Oghenechovwe Donald Ekpeki, and Zelda Knight, eds (2022). AfricaRisen: A New Era of Speculative Fiction. A Tom Doherty Associates Book.
Womack, Ytasha L (2013). Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-fi and Fantasy Culture. Lawrence Hill Books.
Isaac Joslin holds a PhD from the University of Minnesota in Francophone Studies. Currently Associate Professor of Francophone Studies and Global Futures Scholar at Arizona State University, he has travelled extensively for research in Francophone Africa in Côte d’Ivoire, Senegal, Cameroon, Togo, Burkina Faso, Rwanda, and Burundi. His research interests include Postcolonial Francophone African literatures and cinemas, aesthetics and theories of representation, theories of cultural hybridity, ecocriticism, Afrofuturism and Africanfuturism, as well as pedagogical approaches for teaching African literatures and cultures. He has published scholarly articles on African literature and culture in the International Journal of Francophone Studies, Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, African Literature Today, The French Review, Critical African Studies, Nouvelles Études Francophones, Œuvres et Critiques, and others. His first monograph from Ohio University Press (2023) is entitled, Afrofuturisms: Ecology, Humanity, and Francophone Cultural Expressions.
The Picture Is Right, the Scale Is Wrong: Scalar Calibration in Katherine MacLean’s “Pictures Don’t Lie”
George Kaldis
The Picture Is Right
Katherine MacLean’s “Pictures Don’t Lie” begins from an apparent triumph of first contact. A terrestrial scientist receives extraterrestrial broadcasts, reconstructs them into intelligible images, identifies humanlike bodies, recognizes gestures and emotional expression, and eventually establishes two-way communication. The alien visitors are not mute, unknowable, or resistant to interpretation. Their signals can be decoded; their appearance can be seen; their intentions can be inferred; their arrival can be coordinated. Yet the encounter ends catastrophically. MacLean’s story stages an unusually precise failure. The problem is not that the alien cannot be understood, but that successful understanding has omitted one relation necessary for material contact. The humans know what the visitors look like, what they intend, where they believe themselves to be, and when they have landed. What they do not know is the scale at which any of that information becomes physically commensurable with their own world.
Brian Stableford already identifies “Pictures Don’t Lie” as one of the exemplary puzzle structures of MacLean’s early fiction. He describes her method as embedding a striking idea within a problem whose solution the protagonists must discover, calling “Pictures Don’t Lie” a classic instance and noting that the scientists’ otherwise successful analysis depends upon an “entirely understandable but ultimately disastrous assumption.” Stableford correctly identifies the story’s architecture, but his phrase “entirely understandable but ultimately disastrous assumption” names rather than theorizes the mechanism (Stableford 489). The assumption itself deserves greater precision. The fatal error is not simply a mistaken guess about the aliens’ bodily dimensions. It is the tacit conversion of representational resemblance into material commensurability: because the visitors look human, move intelligibly, use recognizable technology, and communicate successfully, human magnitude silently becomes the standard against which their physical existence is interpreted. The story’s puzzle is not that the aliens are unexpectedly small; it is that no one recognizes scale as something requiring calibration until every other interpretive procedure has already succeeded.
That concern is consistent with what Jane Donawerth identifies as the structural role of scientific knowledge in MacLean’s fiction. Donawerth notes both the relative critical neglect of MacLean’s scientifically grounded fiction and the structural force of its science: scientific information organizes the problem-and-solution logic rather than merely decorating it (“Katherine MacLean” 53–54, 58). Her account of women in Golden Age SF likewise situates MacLean within a magazine culture whose conventions women writers appropriated and revised; here, the familiar technoscientific first-contact scenario becomes the very machinery of miscalibration (“Women” 232). “Pictures Don’t Lie” makes calibration perform precisely this structural function. The story repeatedly foregrounds technical adjustments (signal speed, scanning, color, sound, motion, ratios) before the final revelation makes clear that magnitude has escaped the same scrutiny. MacLean thus distributes the eventual error throughout the process by which the alien becomes visible and intelligible. The ending does not suddenly introduce scale into an otherwise unrelated narrative. It reveals that scale has been the unexamined condition under which every prior act of interpretation has taken place.
I use scalar calibration to name that missing operation: the establishment of a relation through which represented magnitude becomes materially commensurable with an observer’s frame of reference. Scale names the relation; calibration names the epistemic procedure by which that relation is established across representational systems. Miscalibration names the failure of that procedure: not a missing measurement but a misapplied one, a scale imported from elsewhere and treated as given. As a critical term, scalar calibration identifies not measurement alone but the transfer of scale across representational systems. It marks the point at which internally coherent relations are converted into assumptions about material commensurability.
In “Pictures Don’t Lie,” first contact succeeds at familiar first-contact coordinates (signal reception, visual reconstruction, recognition of intelligence, linguistic exchange) and fails at the point where those successful representations must be translated into shared physical space. MacLean’s human observers repeatedly confront the need to calibrate the information they receive, but they mistake the relational consistency of their reconstructed alien world for evidence that this world already shares their own material scale. The story’s title is more exact than its twist initially suggests. The pictures do not need to deceive anyone. Their observers need only treat what the pictures preserve as though it included what they never establish. The failure of first contact occurs not because alien difference remains inaccessible, but because similarity conceals the ruler by which difference has already been measured.
Relations Without Scale
Nathen’s confidence in the universality of pictures is immediately complicated by the labor required to make the alien transmission visible at all. The image does not arrive as an image. It must be extracted from a signal whose scanning rhythm has to be discovered, synchronized, and converted into a display; even after this procedure succeeds, the colors on the screen are assignments rather than recovered properties. MacLean therefore places a technical contradiction beneath Nathen’s claim that pictures are “understandable in any language” (MacLean 105). The visual field that appears to escape translation is itself the product of translation-like operations. Ronald Giere’s account of scientific observation clarifies the point without reducing it to skepticism: an instrument responds selectively to its input, and its output depends upon both the phenomenon and the configuration through which that phenomenon is detected. As Giere puts it, “no instrument is perfectly transparent,” and careful calibration can reduce but never eliminate the instrument’s contribution to its output (13–14). Calibration can constrain mediation; it cannot turn technologically produced observation into an unmediated copy of the world. MacLean dramatizes that danger when the laboriously reconstructed display comes to function as an apparently immediate “window,” making the distant figures seem present and readable (107–09). Nathen’s screen is reliable because it has been calibrated, not because mediation has disappeared.
Donna Haraway sharpens this distinction through technologically extended vision. Scientific images do not become objective by escaping apparatus: technological “eyes” build “translations and specific ways of seeing,” not an “unmediated photograph” (Haraway 583). MacLean’s receiver literalizes that problem. Its reconstructed pictures remain usable even though scanning speed, color, and sound are technically imposed. The issue is therefore not whether mediation falsifies the image, but which relations survive mediation and which properties remain uncalibrated. Nathen’s confidence also recalls the historical authority Daston and Galison associate with mechanically produced scientific images: mechanical objectivity made the minimization of human intervention central to evidentiary authority even though artifacts, incidental oddities, and atypical specimens could remain (41–44). Their account functions here as an analogue rather than a genealogy of MacLean’s fictional apparatus.
Jacob exposes that mistake most clearly when he asks Nathen how the colors were established. Nathen has not decoded an alien equivalent of terrestrial color; he has selected values that make the image look plausible. Yet this does not render the display arbitrary. The dependable information lies in the relations among the values: gradations, contrasts, and similarities persist even when the absolute color assigned to any one band remains uncertain. Jacob immediately recognizes that sound may pose the same problem. The pitch produced by the receiver can preserve differences within the signal without establishing the pitch at which an alien would hear or produce it. MacLean has separated two epistemic achievements that Nathen initially treats as one. A representation may preserve an ordered system of differences while failing to establish how that system maps onto an external standard. The distinction is crucial because it makes the later error about size continuous with, rather than exceptional to, the story’s earlier scientific work. Color and pitch already teach the scientists that internally coherent relations do not automatically determine absolute values.
Bas van Fraassen supplies a precise vocabulary for this distinction. Pictorial representation is selective: a picture can represent an object successfully with respect to some features without determining every property of what it depicts. Accuracy in one respect therefore does not imply exhaustive specification. That principle matters in “Pictures Don’t Lie” because the alien image preserves enough structure to sustain recognition. Bodily proportions remain coherent; figures occupy stable positions relative to one another; gestures can be followed; visual contrasts persist. None of those achievements requires the screen to establish the absolute magnitude of the bodies represented on it. The error is consequently not that Nathen trusts an inaccurate image. It is that he treats accuracy with respect to preserved relations as though it also supplied a conversion between the image and human material scale. What the screen gives him is relationally adequate representation. What he silently adds is commensurability. Van Fraassen’s later account of scaling makes the point still sharper: what can remain significant across a scale transformation is precisely what is invariant under rescaling (160–61). MacLean’s image preserves relations well enough to support recognition while leaving the conversion to absolute magnitude unspecified.
MacLean makes the omission harder to dismiss as accidental by placing ratio explicitly inside the scientists’ conceptual world. Their discussion turns to “universal constants as ratio” (MacLean 111), a formulation that foregrounds the very logic necessary to recognize the problem. Ratios permit relations to remain stable across changes in absolute value; they make comparison possible without requiring identity of magnitude. The scientists possess the conceptual machinery needed to distinguish relational regularity from absolute equivalence. They apply that machinery to the signal, to color, to sound, and to physical behavior. What they do not ask is which ratio would connect the represented alien body to a terrestrial standard of length. Perspective identifies a position from which something is represented; scalar calibration establishes how represented quantities become commensurable with an external standard. MacLean’s scientists repeatedly correct the former while leaving the latter implicit.
The story begins applying pressure to that omission before the landing. Jacob notices that something is wrong with the visitors’ “weight-to-speed-to-momentum ratio” (MacLean 112), while Nathen experiments with playback rate. Neither faster nor slower reproduction restores the expected physical coherence. MacLean is not simply withholding the one fact needed for a surprise ending. By this point the story has already taught Nathen that Earth-likeness is true only “in relative terms” (103), that color and pitch can preserve relations without fixing absolute values (110–11), and that ratio itself is a universal comparative form (111). After scan rate, color, pitch, playback speed, and ratio have all been tested or revised, magnitude remains the conspicuous variable that never enters the calibration sequence. The failure is not a refusal to revise (Nathen revises repeatedly) but a failure to recognize the human body as part of the measuring system, a standard so familiar that it remains invisible while everything around it is adjusted. The final revelation does not introduce scale as the solution to the puzzle; it identifies scale as the variable the story has taught its observers to test everywhere else.
“Very Human”
The scalar assumption that survives these repeated recalibrations has already been installed before Nathen begins testing the transmission. When the first stable image appears, the judgment is immediate: “Very human” (MacLean 102). Yet MacLean almost immediately qualifies the apparent Earth-likeness as true “only in relative terms” (103), planting relationality before its scalar consequence can be recognized. Read retrospectively, “Very human” does more than register morphological resemblance. It begins a chain of mutually reinforcing inferences through which bodily similarity, recognizable gesture, technological activity, terrestrial-looking surroundings, and the expectation of a “huge spaceship” become mutually confirming signs of a shared material world (103). None of these observations establishe the visitors’ magnitude. Yet together they make such a measurement seem unnecessary. Human appearance does not logically entail equivalent magnitude, but MacLean arranges the representational field so that the distinction never initially presents itself as a problem. The force of “Very human” lies precisely in this compression: likeness supplies a familiar body, while terrestrial landscape, gesture, motion, and technological expectation make that familiarity scalar.
Zachary Horton’s account of scale clarifies why that inference can remain unnoticed. Scale is not merely another measurable property attached to an otherwise stable object; it emerges through relations among bodies, environments, and the mediating systems through which they become knowable. Horton argues that knowledge practices stabilize domains around the “unmarked scale of the human” (7), while scalar mediation can itself obscure the seams between distinct scalar milieus. The importance of the unmarked standard is that it does not ordinarily appear as a standard at all. Nathen never explicitly decides that the figures on his screen must possess terrestrial human dimensions. Had he done so, magnitude would become a hypothesis and therefore something available for testing. Instead, human scale enters as the default against which the rest of the representation becomes intelligible. MacLean’s puzzle depends on that asymmetry. Signal speed, color, pitch, and motion appear as variables because their mediation is perceptible; the human body does not, because its magnitude has been naturalized as the background from which those variables are judged.
Timothy Clark makes the consequences of that naturalization more explicit. Clark defines “scale critique” as attention to how a situation alters with the scale at which it is considered; norms that seem coherent may operate only under “usually unexamined assumptions about their scale” (40–41). He later stresses the “contingency of the scale that seems ‘natural’ to human beings” (51). MacLean turns that principle into narrative procedure. The mistake in “Pictures Don’t Lie” is not adequately described by saying that the aliens are smaller than expected, as though size were simply one concealed attribute among others. Changing their magnitude changes the significance of the relations surrounding them. Velocity no longer means what Nathen expects it to mean; atmosphere presents different resistance; terrestrial vegetation acquires different dimensions; a puddle can constitute a major body of water. Size names a property of an object. Scale names the relational frame within which that property reorganizes an environment. What the observers have assumed is not a bodily dimension but a whole field of material commensurability.
This is why successful recognition intensifies rather than corrects the error. The visitors do not merely resemble human silhouettes. Their gestures can be interpreted as gestures; their behavior appears purposeful; their technological activity is recognizable; communication confirms intelligence and intention. Each success makes the reconstructed world more coherent within the frame already established by “Very human.” Malmgren’s account of alien encounter helps expose the reversal. If alien difference becomes intelligible against a human background, greater resemblance might ordinarily seem to reduce the interpretive difficulty of contact. MacLean makes it increase a different difficulty. The visitors become progressively easier to recognize as subjects at exactly the moment their material difference becomes harder to perceive. Recognition and calibration move in opposite directions: every additional sign of humanlike intelligibility strengthens the assumption that the bodies being recognized inhabit the same scalar order as their observers.
The resulting anthropocentrism is more specific than simple projection. Nathen does not imagine that the aliens share human values, psychology, or culture merely because they look familiar, nor does the story depend upon their remaining radically unknowable. The crucial projection is metrological: the body functions as an implicit measuring instrument, converting morphological resemblance into an expectation of dimensional equivalence without announcing that conversion as an interpretive act. That is why the error can survive increasingly conspicuous anomalies. A visible instrument can be recalibrated; an explicit hypothesis can be revised. An unmarked standard is more difficult to correct because it organizes what counts as an anomaly in the first place. Until the visitors attempt to occupy the same physical environment as their observers, human magnitude remains the ruler that measures everything while escaping measurement itself. The landing does not introduce the problem of scale. It forces the standard that has governed the encounter from the beginning to become visible.
Earth at the Wrong Scale
The consequences of that unmarked standard become material when the visitors announce that they have landed. Until this point, discrepancies can still be treated as problems internal to transmission or representation. The landing removes that refuge. Communication continues to function: the visitors report their progress, Nathen understands their statements, and the receiving equipment places the source of the transmission at the airfield. Yet when the message “We’ve landed” arrives, the expected spacecraft is nowhere to be seen (MacLean 117). The landing severs two processes conventionally bundled together as successful contact. Linguistic contact has succeeded, and spatial coordination has succeeded, but the bodies supposedly coordinated within that shared space remain mutually inaccessible. The empty field is not evidence that the visitors have lied or that their message has been mistranslated. It is evidence that the same location can fail to constitute the same environment when observers occupy radically different scalar relations to it.
The visitors’ descriptions initially seem to make their claim even less credible. Their planet of arrival is dark and murky; its atmosphere appears oppressively dense, “thick as glue,” while its gravity and surrounding physical conditions do not match the Earth Nathen believes he is observing (MacLean 117). Read from terrestrial human scale, these reports sound like contradictions. Read from the visitors’ scale, they become observations whose apparent impossibility is produced by the frame through which Nathen evaluates them. MacLean does not solve the contradiction by revealing that one party has been describing a different planet. Both the radio fix and the landing site remain correct; what changes is the relation between the bodies making the observations and the material features they encounter. Environmental description thus becomes evidence of scale, since the same physical world generates different practical conditions once the magnitude of the perceiving and moving body changes. That explanatory economy is formal rather than physically exhaustive, retrospectively coordinating observations that had appeared mutually incompatible.
The “lake” makes this transformation especially clear. Nothing in the terrestrial landscape needs to become physically larger for a puddle to function as a substantial body of water to the visitors. Nor is the alien description simply a mistaken name imposed upon an objectively tiny feature. The relevant relation is environmental rather than lexical. A body of water that is negligible to a human observer can obstruct movement, dominate a field of vision, and organize surrounding terrain for an organism many orders of magnitude smaller. Horton’s insistence that changes of scale alter an entity’s perspective on and relationship to its environment gives the episode its conceptual force. MacLean is not asking the reader to choose between a true human description and a false alien one. “Puddle” and “lake” register different relations between bodies and the same material feature. The eventual revelation corrects the human assumption of commensurability without invalidating the visitors’ report.
Scalar relation likewise reorganizes the rest of the airfield. Grass and ordinary vegetation become enormous growths; commonplace terrestrial organisms acquire monstrous proportions; atmospheric resistance and surface conditions take on consequences invisible at human magnitude. Clark’s account of scale critique is useful here because the change does not merely enlarge or diminish an otherwise stable scene. A shift in scale alters which relations become salient and which material processes determine experience. MacLean’s Earth is consequently made alien without being spatially displaced. The visitors have reached the correct planet and the correct location, yet the world disclosed by their descriptions initially seems incompatible with Earth because the humans assume that spatial coincidence guarantees environmental equivalence. It does not. Shared coordinates establish where bodies are; they do not establish the scalar relations through which those bodies inhabit what is there. The story’s alien landscape is thus produced from ordinary terrestrial matter by changing the bodily standard against which that matter becomes an environment.
The earlier problem of motion now acquires the same explanation. Nathen has treated the apparent speed of the visitors and the rate of their transmissions as variables introduced by broadcasting. He can therefore experiment with playback speed while leaving the represented bodies themselves unchanged. The final realization, “They don’t speed up their broadcasts” (MacLean 120), reverses that procedure. What appeared to be a technical acceleration belongs instead to the physical relations generated by the visitors’ magnitude. MacLean does not require an extended lesson in miniature physics for the narrative point to register. Temporal and kinetic expectations have been calibrated against bodies assumed to occupy a human scalar order. Once that assumption changes, the anomalous “weight-to-speed-to-momentum ratio” encountered earlier no longer stands apart from the environmental contradictions (MacLean 112). It becomes retrospective evidence that the wrong variable had been held constant. The scientists kept adjusting the representation because they never considered recalibrating the body to which the representation referred.
John Rieder’s account of science fiction as a recurrent movement between disorientation and explanation helps distinguish what MacLean accomplishes here from a more general encounter with radical alterity. Rieder identifies a genre pattern in which apparently impossible facts disrupt an existing interpretive order and demand incorporation into a new explanatory frame (89). MacLean follows that movement but makes its resolution unusually exact. Nothing essential about the visitors’ intelligence, language, intentions, or subjective interiority must finally be decoded to explain the impossible airfield. The decisive new information concerns a relation of magnitude. Once that relation changes, observations previously classified as mutually incompatible become mutually supporting. The alien does not retreat into unknowability; the human model becomes revisable. MacLean thereby locates the difficulty of encounter not in an irreducible otherness beyond representation but in the observer’s failure to identify which apparently neutral feature of the representational frame has been supplied from home. Suvin’s definition of SF as “cognitive estrangement” helps name the operation, but MacLean makes it unusually literal: ordinary Earth becomes strange when cognition must revise the scalar relation through which the familiar world had been organized (Suvin 4).
The magnifying glass at the story’s end makes that correction materially visible. It identifies what the receiver could not establish and what the observers never thought to ask: the conversion between the dimensions represented on the screen and the dimensions of the bodies occupying the airfield. The revelation retrospectively reorganizes the evidence without requiring most of it to become false. The visitors did land, and the directional fix did locate them. Their strange terrain is simply the terrain surrounding the station. Their apparent lake, gigantic vegetation, oppressive atmosphere, and extraordinary creatures belong to Earth as encountered through a radically different bodily magnitude. Even the transmission anomaly participates in the same scalar system. The final discovery does more than disclose that the visitors are tiny. It demonstrates why a long sequence of successful observations could converge on a materially disastrous conclusion. The humans possessed enough information to establish relations within the alien world, but not the calibration required to place that world beside their own. When the missing relation is finally supplied, the alien planet does not disappear. It becomes Earth seen from a scale the human observers had never recognized as absent. The remaining question is why the reader, who has access to MacLean’s narration rather than Nathen’s apparatus, has made the same omission.
The Reader’s Missing Ruler
The scalar error exposed at the airfield does not belong only to Nathen and his colleagues. MacLean has withheld the same measurement from the reader while surrounding its absence with information that makes the represented world appear dimensionally complete. The opening image offers bodies that are “Very human,” an Earth-like landscape, recognizable weather, grass, puddles, an airfield, and the anticipation of a “huge spaceship” (MacLean 102–03). These descriptions establish relations of appearance and environment, but none fixes the visitors’ magnitude. The omission is easy to overlook because the narration does not present magnitude as missing data. Human likeness, familiar terrestrial reference points, and the conventional vocabulary of first contact make the scene feel already scaled. MacLean does something more exact than concealing the size of the aliens until the final pages. She supplies enough conventional information that the absence of measurement does not register as an absence.
Marie-Laure Ryan’s principle of minimal departure explains how such an omission can nevertheless generate a determinate storyworld (52). Because fictional texts cannot specify every property of the worlds they evoke, readers ordinarily supplement what is stated with assumptions derived from their knowledge of the actual world unless the text gives them reason to depart from those assumptions. In MacLean’s story, no explicit measurement initially forces such a departure. A body described as humanlike is positioned to inherit the dimensional expectations attached to ordinary human bodies rather than remain radically indeterminate in magnitude. The crucial point is that this inference does not feel like an inference. Human scale enters as default information precisely because the narration has not marked it as information requiring construction. Ryan’s account thus identifies the readerly analogue of Nathen’s scientific error: both systems complete an incomplete representation by importing a familiar relation that subsequently becomes difficult to distinguish from what was given. Minimal departure does not simply explain why readers tolerate unspecified details; it explains why the missing measurement arrives already filled. The default is powerful because it is not experienced as an interpretive choice.
Science-fictional competence intensifies that process. Brian Attebery argues that SF readers fill textual gaps from both scientific and generic megatexts; “the less explicit the information, the more need for the reader to be immersed in the genre itself” (8). MacLean can consequently write “spaceship” without rebuilding the concept from first principles. “Huge” appears to supply scale, but it names only a relation whose reference standard remains unstated. Huge compared to what? Alien transmission, landing, airfield, and humanlike visitor similarly belong to an established first-contact vocabulary whose familiarity accelerates world construction. The story turns that competence against the reader. Genre knowledge makes the sparse description efficient, but efficiency has a cost. The reader imports a scalar model along with the icon. The very protocols that make the fictional world rapidly intelligible help conceal which of its properties have been supplied by convention rather than established by the text. Attebery’s discussion of Gary Wolfe’s icon concept sharpens the trap: familiar SF icons such as spaceships and aliens carry inherited information while leaving much unstated, so familiarity accelerates inference (9).
The parallel between Nathen and the reader is structural rather than psychological: narrative representation reproduces the same incompleteness already established in Nathen’s technical representation. Nathen receives an incomplete technologically mediated representation and supplies human scale; MacLean places the reader within narrative conditions that solicit the same completion. MacLean thus makes the reader perform the very miscalibration the plot diagnoses. In each case, the resulting model is coherent enough to absorb contradictory evidence: Nathen treats anomalous motion and environmental description as local technical problems, while the reader treats those anomalies as mysteries within a human-scaled first-contact scenario. The final revelation does not simply disclose withheld information. It exposes what both interpretive systems added to the information they possessed.
This formal symmetry returns the title to the center of the argument. To read “Pictures Don’t Lie” as straightforwardly ironic would imply that visual evidence has betrayed its observers; to read it as a defense of transparent pictorial truth would ignore the layers of scanning, assignment, playback, and inference through which the images become legible. MacLean sustains a more difficult position. Representations can preserve truthful relations without specifying every condition necessary for their material interpretation. The visitors’ bodily proportions, gestures, surroundings, and relative differences can remain intelligible even while absolute color, pitch, temporal rate, and magnitude require further calibration. The picture need not lie for the observer to be wrong. Error enters when the absence of a represented relation is mistaken for evidence that the relation has already been established.
MacLean’s first contact fails not at recognition or communication but at the conversion of successful representation into a supposedly shared material frame. That unmarked magnitude governs the conversion, organizing expectations about bodies, motion, atmosphere, landscape, and technology while escaping the calibrations applied elsewhere. By making the reader reproduce the same mistake, “Pictures Don’t Lie” turns scalar assumption into narrative form. The story suggests that first contact may fail not where difference becomes too radical to understand, but where similarity makes one consequential difference disappear. Scalar calibration names that prior problem: whether observers can identify the human measures already structuring what counts as intelligible contact.
WORKS CITED
Attebery, Brian. “Science Fictional Parabolas: Jazz, Geometry, and Generation Starships.” Parabolas of Science Fiction, edited by Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger, Wesleyan UP, 2013, pp. 3–23.
Clark, Timothy. The Value of Ecocriticism. Cambridge UP, 2019.
Daston, Lorraine, and Peter Galison. Objectivity. Zone Books, 2007.
Donawerth, Jane. “Katherine MacLean’s Short Science Fiction and Cytology: Science as Parabola.” Attebery and Hollinger, pp. 53–69.
Donawerth, Jane. “Women in the Golden Age of Science Fiction.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 232–46.
Giere, Ronald N. Scientific Perspectivism. U of Chicago P, 2006.
Haraway, Donna. “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective.” Feminist Studies, vol. 14, no. 3, 1988, pp. 575–99.
Horton, Zachary. The Cosmic Zoom: Scale, Knowledge, and Mediation. U of Chicago P, 2021.
MacLean, Katherine. “Pictures Don’t Lie.” Galaxy Science Fiction, vol. 2, no. 5, Aug. 1951, pp. 102–21.
Malmgren, Carl D. “Self and Other in SF: Alien Encounters.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 20, no. 1, 1993, pp. 15–33.
Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2008.
Ryan, Marie-Laure. Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory. Indiana UP, 1991.
Stableford, Brian. “Katherine MacLean.” Science Fiction Writers: Critical Studies of the Major Authors from the Early Nineteenth Century to the Present Day, 2nd ed., edited by Richard Bleiler, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1999, pp. 487–95.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. Yale UP, 1979.
van Fraassen, Bas C. Scientific Representation: Paradoxes of Perspective. Oxford UP, 2008.
Fontaine Lien received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Riverside and has taught language, literature, and culture across many institutions. Currently, she is assistant professor of Chinese in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the U.S. Naval Academy. She is the author of Reading Chinese Science Fiction in the Age of Techno-Nationalism (2025, Liverpool University Press). Her research interests include speculative fiction, film and media studies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Naval Academy, Department of the Navy, the Department of War, or the U.S. Government.
Banality, Absurdity, and Liang Qingsan’s Science-Fictional Counter-Narratives
Fontaine Lien
Although the genre has advanced far beyond its pulp days, much of science fiction and speculative fiction has retained elements of escapism and wish fulfillment—it is just that the precise desires have changed along with cultural norms and societal circumstances. To list just one example, whereas past adventures might have imagined heroic and handsome men conquering Mars and rescuing alien princesses (A Princess of Mars) as an obvious replacement for colonialist adventures, recent fiction is more likely to depict a marginalized outcast surviving the apocalypse using their unique gifts. Examples of more relatable protagonists abound in contemporary Chinese science fiction (SF) as well, perhaps because many Chinese SF writers also hold professional day jobs that do not allow them to commit wholesale to imagining fantastical worlds. Few, however, have incorporated the banal and the everyday as Liang Qingsan (né Liang Hua) has, and to great effect.
Liang Qingsan’s two distinctive types of SF writing can be described on the one hand as fantastical steampunk techno-orientalism, and on the other as a genre that mobilizes banality and humorous absurdity, as opposed to novelty and graveness, that forcefully confront us with our quotidian realities. While other scholars have highlighted the serious sociological and environmental concerns of authors such as Liu Cixin, Xia Jia, and Chen Qiufan, I argue that their contemporary Liang’s “minor” science fiction better reflects a particular subset of attitudes within his generational cohort, those who choose to “lie flat” over pursuing wealth or career accomplishments as with previous generations. On the surface writing about trivial situations, Liang’s SF nonetheless utilizes scientific nova in a noteworthy and interesting way, and is an important voice that has heretofore been missing in the consideration of contemporary Chinese SF. Recognizing this voice forces a re-consideration of Chinese SF as world literature: it does not necessarily “speak for the subaltern” (Spivak) or represent any kind of national allegory (Jameson). It can, as Liang’s work demonstrates, speak to the humor and exasperation that pervades everyday life in an era of absurd technological saturation, a problem shared across much of the world.
Liang Qingsan’s Unique Brand of Millennial Science Fiction
Like many of his generational cohort, Liang is an SF writer but also somewhat of a hobbyist SF scholar. Though his primary field of study is in the STEM disciplines, he is an amateur researcher of Qing dynasty history and culture and has taken classes on late-Qing science fiction with the prominent Chinese SF scholar, Wu Yan (Liang, “Boredom” 3). Although he modestly claims to not be able to make a living from writing SF, he is a contracted author with a Shanghai publishing company. A recent book jacket blurb enumerates his hobbies as research, reading manhwa, playing video games, and daydreaming (Liang, Mechanical Wonders). This testimony is representative of the humble self-effacing impression Liang usually gives in his publicity interviews, a good indication of the approachable “ordinariness” of some of his SF.
There is room for debate when it comes to considering Liang’s work as SF. While many of his stories are typically futuristic in either their setting (outer space) or theme (introduction of new technology), Liang’s interest in scholarly research into the late-Qing era means that on the other hand, he is also dedicated to writing about technology and wonder in the steampunk mode, set in the late 19th century, and what role these elements played in the issues that China faced at the time. While the prototypical SF written during the late Qing is characterized as utopian and self-justifying (Wang 39), as well as ambivalent with respect to science and technology (Isaacson 2–3), more than a hundred years later, why would a contemporary SF writer be interested in exploring the role of science in that historical setting? At least based on my own personal consumption of Chinese and sinophone SF, his interest in writing SF-adjacent stories set in that time period makes him a minority among contemporary writers.
A relevant critical term here may be Ken Liu’s “silkpunk,” which he very explicitly defines as “not ‘Asian-flavored steampunk’” and “not ‘Asian-influenced fantasy.’” Instead, in his own work, silkpunk is an emphasis technology that “relies on materials of historical importance to the people of East Asia and the Pacific islands: bamboo, shells, coral, paper, silk, feathers, sinew.” He also takes pains to highlight the “punk” aspect of his novels, which are about “rebellion, resistance, re-appropriation and rejuvenation of tradition, and defiance of authority” (Liu). Peng Chao (a scholar as well as fellow SF writer) mentions that readers have likened Liang’s work to silkpunk but does not elaborate on specifics (28). In my view, Liang’s Qing dynasty fiction does contain a healthy dose of rebellious spirit, which not only provides his usually marginalized cast characters with an excuse for adventure, but also speaks to prevailing sentiments of deprivation and turmoil experienced by many citizens at the time.
Peng has also described Liang’s work in this category as “history-based sci-fi” (28), with a unique aesthetic style that is a combination of nostalgia and technology. If I grasp Peng’s argument correctly, he is saying that the ways in which these works re-imagine the process of technological development in China both represents a nostalgia for that period in history and a way to instill a newfound sense of national pride and cultural confidence.
The second category within Liang’s work, SF based on contemporary settings, is more closely related (though not as much so compared to other writers, as we shall see) to science-fictional realism. Wei Lu points out that the term “sci-fi realism” (kehuan xianshi zhuyi) was largely coined by Chinese SF writers and scholars who needed to find some way to use sci-fi to describe their daily realities. According to Lu and others, because of China’s dramatically accelerated technological development timeline since the late-20th century, there was an urgent need for fiction to address the possible dangers of technology (Lu 706–09). Happily, realism and social realism have long been the privileged literary genres in China, so “the combination of [SF and realism] proves to be surprisingly successful in the complicated Chinese social context” (Lu 707). In this critical formulation, Chinese SF is largely reactive, written in response to dramatic societal changes wrought by technological pursuits undertaken in competition with the West. The scenarios described in these SF stories also tend to be dramatically larger than life: be they the cyborg adventures of Chen Qiufan, an entire folding city in Hao Jingfang’s Folding Beijing, alien invasion in Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem, or the apocalyptic scenarios precipitated by modern transportation in Han Song’s various works.
So how can we categorize Liang’s unique brand of “mundane” SF, and how does it cohere with his more dramatic re-imagining of late imperial China? With respect to mobilizing the concept of quotidian reality in the analysis of science fiction, we have as precedent Sunyoung Ahn’s “The Everyday Life of Artificial Intelligence” and Jonathan Hay’s “Quotidian Science Fiction: Posthuman Dreams of Emancipation.” Citing theorists such as Henri Lefebvre and Raymond Williams, Ahn points out the “inherently utopian quality to thinking about the everyday” (73) which Ted Chiang uses to great effect in The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2010), a novella that critiques the dehumanizing forces of market and technology through “objects” that have infiltrated the everyday lives of characters in the novella: digients, or virtual pets. The humans in the story develop affection for these “pets” through sustained everyday interaction with them on a digital platform, but eventually realize just how much the digients’ existence–and by extension their lives which are affectionately bonded to the digients–depend on the whims of capitalist logic that sustain the digital platform. Though the digients of the story are “things,” their thing-ness falls by the wayside as humans come to see them as important entities in their own right. Ultimately, the characters in this story come to appreciate what is essentially another life form, but also gain an understanding of the precarity of their shared existence, specifically due to sustained interaction through everyday life.
Hay analyzes SF texts that are more optimistic about positive and productive change, arguing that certain texts use the mundanity of everyday life to help readers imagine and accept possible posthuman realities. Through the depiction of banal and repetitive fictional lives, these texts help us imagine gradual social progress, alternatives to capitalism, and posthuman ecosystems, respectively, all of which would be more difficult to accept as possible and relatable without the grounding of mundane reality (Hay 43–44).
In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan also discuss how the quotidian can be a powerful way to make aspects of the Anthropocene relevant to regular people, who may not be familiar with the concept. The quotidian—in other words, the everyday experiences of regular people—can offer a way to understand “statistical” and overwhelming concepts such as climate change and space for individual action and agency (Elinoff and Vaughan 371–72). It can be a “grounding antidote to the apocalyptic” (Elinoff and Vaughan 371). While Liang’s science fiction does not primarily focus on apocalyptic scenarios, its primary subject matter does fall into two categories: contemplating the roles of scientific and Western influence during a cataclysmic time in Chinese history, i.e. the latter days of the Qing dynasty, and contemplating the role of technology in our lives today. In contrast to his exciting, adventurous work depicting a Steampunk-oriented Qing dynasty, the banality and normality of his work on contemporary lives is fascinating in comparison, and this article seeks to locate the shared concerns of these two sectors of Liang’s interest.
In Anthropocene Unseen: A Lexicon, Eli Elinoff and Tyson Vaughan also discuss how the quotidian can be a powerful way to make aspects of the Anthropocene relevant to regular people, who may not be familiar with the concept. The quotidian—in other words, the everyday experiences of regular people—can offer a way to understand “statistical” and overwhelming concepts such as climate change and space for individual action and agency (Elinoff and Vaughan 371–72). It can be a “grounding antidote to the apocalyptic” (Elinoff and Vaughan 371). While Liang’s science fiction does not primarily focus on apocalyptic scenarios, its primary subject matter does fall into two categories: contemplating the roles of scientific and Western influence during a cataclysmic time in Chinese history, i.e. the latter days of the Qing dynasty, and contemplating the role of technology in our lives today. In contrast to his exciting, adventurous work depicting a Steampunk-oriented Qing dynasty, the banality and normality of his work on contemporary lives is fascinating in comparison, and this article seeks to locate the shared concerns of these two sectors of Liang’s interest.
While one can definitely argue that the more quotidian aspects of Liang’s work perhaps reflect his own life as a young man trying to make his way in 21st century China, I argue that banality figured with a humorous lens is key to his vision of our near-future. His steampunk Qing dynasty fiction is colored with a nostalgic adventurousness that nearly obscures the fact that all of its characters are grappling with threatening new technology. When writing about the present, Liang transmogrifies this obscuring nostalgia into banality and absurdity, but in essence still depicts a skeptical attitude toward omnipresent new technology.
The Resolutely Mundane Protagonists of Liang Qingsan’s SF
Few scholars have written about banality in SF other than with respect to the specific texts cited above, though the stylistic feature is occasionally highlighted in the analysis of literature. More well known is Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” concept, famously characterizing the cluster of seemingly inane characteristics in a single individual (Adolf Eichmann) which gave rise to a great evil, an agent of the Nazi Regime and its innumerable crimes (Arendt). In contrast, I wish to consider a banality that is close to its dictionary definition, something that is unremarkable, mundane, even boring. A closely related idea is the everyday, which is akin to boredom but not quite the same. The everyday in fiction resembles so closely our reality that one wonders how it can be interesting enough to write about: protagonists go to uninteresting jobs, possess uninteresting personalities, and muse about their lives in an uninteresting way. Even when the dramatic or the novel intrudes upon their lives, these characters seem unable to resist the pull of their formerly boring lives, trying everything to maintain the status quo and their sense of normality.
The combination of banality and the everyday is essential to the particular worldview and purpose of Liang Qingsan’s near-future SF: not an expression of sublimity, a consideration of great philosophical and ethical conundrums, or an allegorization of geo-political circumstances. What it primarily evokes is simply boredom, banality, and the feeling that the supposedly transformative technologies of the near-future are simply useless ornamentations in our mundane lives. In other words, a remarkably different outlook on technology compared to other SF works: technology not as savior or harbinger of doom, but a reflection of our current problems that require more fundamental solutions.
The characters in this type of Liang Qingsan story typically begin as and remain everyday people going about their jobs and mundane lives, despite their potentially exciting circumstances. The initial paragraphs of “Planet BBQ” (2011),1 for example, depict the exciting “discovery” of a new planet under dangerous circumstances, a procedure called “leaping.” But the story soon reveals that its protagonist is no pioneering hero but a regular traveler, obsessed with his reputation as a “planet exploration strategist,” thinking always of his reputation and how he is perceived by friends and fellow travelers, and not in any way about what it means to discover or visit other planets and what it might mean for their native inhabitants or humanity’s interactions with them. In other words, space travel and contact with other species has become banal.
In “My Happy Pastry Life” (2015),2 there is a similarly blasé reaction to marvelous events. When the narrator’s bread machine somehow creates a human doppelgänger of himself, which then attempts to usurp his life entirely, his internal response is:
I’ve indeed seen many strange things. When I check out at the supermarket, there’s always somebody cutting in line in front of me. When I order beef tendon rice noodles, they always give me fish balls instead. At the subway, I always end up waiting for a train that passes without stopping. And so on. I am indeed a seasoned warrior! (Liang, “Pastry Life” 21)
Firstly, the miraculous technological incident—the creation of a sentient human being from a machine!—in this story is already associated with something utterly banal: a bread machine, an everyday appliance that appears in many households. It is not the outcome of serious scientific inquiry taking place in an ultra-secret government or corporate lab, just something that is discovered by an ordinary office worker upon his return home one day. The examples given above directly after the narrator’s recounting of the miraculous technological incident is an additional layer of banalization, while simultaneously displacing impressions of the fresh incident to remind the reader of the narrator’s everyday concerns and minor inconveniences, none of which have anything to do with the technology of the bread machine, which thus seems irrelevant.
Already, we see that the difference between this type of story and Liang’s Qing-dynasty steampunk adventures is instructive. The banality with which technology is introduced in the story—and the way it is subsequently trivialized—hints that Liang does not believe that speculative technology can produce meaningful change in the present, instead consigning his wildest adventures to a fantastical past. (Even then, whether technology ultimately has a positive impact with respect to China’s ultimate fate is debatable – but that is the subject of another scholarly inquiry.)
Additionally, in stories like “Planet BBQ” and “The Door Leads to the Hallway” (2013),3 Liang combines futuristic technology with the banality, and even irritation, of familiar phenomena in our contemporary society to great effect. “Planet BBQ,” for example, takes place in a time where space travel and the discovery of new planets has been commodified as luxury tourism, instead of the domain of scientific discovery. The industry’s companies thus compete to offer the best equipment for these endeavors: oxygen tanks with the largest life-saving reserves, and the most protective spacesuits, for example – an advantage that ironically becomes a disadvantage. It is an industry that has generated entertainment publications and forums full of “strategy guides” dedicated to high-level (attractive to tourists or commercial interests) planets, mirroring our planetary tourism industry. When “Planet BBQ’s” narrator Zhang Xiaobai crash lands on the titular planet, his first reaction is to marvel at a planet seemingly full of sentient beings that happen to take the form of foods that human beings are interested in eating, and his second reaction is that he will now be able to write a new strategy guide as a claim to fame.
In the midst of starvation and unable to access the plentiful amounts of food items that are seemingly ripe for the taking, he exhausts his options of attempting to pass the food through his airtight spacesuit, cursing the fact that some manufacturers offer suits with an “interior and exterior exchange port,” but his does not. Then, he fantasizes about having a spacesuit that is light as a bubble, allowing exterior objects to enter when necessary. He muses, “Can’t reality be more science-fictional?,” underscoring—despite its setting—the felt banality of his existence (Liang, “Planet BBQ” 7).
Both “Planet BBQ” and “My Happy Pastry Life” thus utilize the unexpected preeminence of banality to great effect. While “BBQ” has the most obvious science-fictional topic of space travel, many SF stories feature sudden and marvelous scientific discoveries like that which the narrator encounters in “Pastry Life.” In either case, the sense of wonder that could be engendered by these nova are quickly set aside for more pedestrian concerns such as the narrator’s ability to maintain his usual routine in “Pastry,” and Zhang’s concerns over his influencer credibility in “BBQ.”
A Future Made Out of Meat and Pastry: The Deflating Effects of Humor and Absurdity
While the circumstances in the two stories quickly settle into a pedestrian rhythm, Liang applies a liberal dose of humor and absurdity to both enhance the readability of his stories and underscore the exasperating contrast between amazing technology and attitudes or circumstances that negate its supposedly wondrous utility. In “My Happy Pastry Life,” the mixture of pathos, existential despair, and quirky humor creates just such cognitive dissonance. In a society where workers feel disposable, Liang’s narrator fittingly finds himself easily replaced by a pastry doppelgänger. The narrator’s internal monologue as he realizes what has happened perfectly encapsulates the story’s combination of ontological anxiety and absurdist humor:
All my hard work, my struggles, the respect I’ve wanted to earn, or should I say that I wanted to demonstrate the unique qualities that only I possess? But I was so easily replaced by pastries! And they so easily out-performed me after they replaced me… (Liang, “Pastry Life” 32)
In a more typical SF story, one could imagine a similar narrative, but centered around being replaced by automation or by artificial intelligence — the typical boogeymen of SF existential anxiety. But bread and pastries are traditionally sustenance and comfort for human beings, not to mention devices such as the bread machine are usually embraced because they enable convenience and efficiency in one small aspect of the modern middle-class lifestyle, but are not essential or revolutionary enough to be threatening as a piece of technology. Here, suddenly, what is usually comforting is transformed into something absurdly threatening. But the narrator does not have a typical response to the threat, either. Because he sees that the pastry versions of himself perform so well both in terms of career and romantic endeavors, instead of investing in these areas himself, he redoubles his effort in the creation of pastries – as his creations seem have guaranteed success, but he himself does not, at least through the way he used to live his life. Here, Liang emphasizes the very absurdity of the situation by describing, in a comically serious manner, the deliberation and zeal with which the narrator creates pastry after pastry that have essentially replaced his own function in society:
As long as the pastries are made in the bread machine, they should become people…. To make apple pie pastry, one needs not just fresh apples and butter for the filling, but a crust that will accentuate these characteristics. The flour requires large amounts of butter, and the baking time and temperature must be exact… [The apple pastry] was steaming hot, but flaky and tender. Each bite contained the juiciness of fruit but also the delicious decadence of butter… Everything was proceeding smoothly! My happiness—I had a feeling that my happiness had finally arrived! (Liang, “Pastry Life” 30)
The narrator does not exactly describe or investigate how or why his bread machine is able to produce sentient human beings, much less how these human beings emerge as exact replicas of himself, only better. Through the magic of literary narrative, the reader gradually comes to accept these absurdities as we realize that the narrator has accepted it, too. The mystery is how and why the narrator’s pastry selves seem to perform their functions far more admirably. Eventually, we come to understand that the narrator’s inability to “read” the blurry faces of his pastry selves amounts to a kind of literal and psychic misrecognition – the narrator has heretofore not realized that in society, he has never had an authentic self or an ego properly identified as his own; his life and dreams have in some way been shaped by the expectations of work and productivity, and by the expectations of others. Thus, when the narrator ultimately realizes that he himself may also be a bread machine creation, created to continue baking pastry selves ad infinitum, this realization is not surprising because it is in line with how the narrator views his function and work in society: deliciously individual, but ultimately utilitarian, disposable, and replaceable. The reason that the narrator so readily accepted the absurd situation in which he found himself baking pastry replacements, is because he himself was already one: he was not the individual, self-actuating entity that he supposed himself to be, but an interchangeable one in an endless series.
On “Planet BBQ,” the author’s skillful description of the protagonist’s increasingly acute hunger—a mundane reality that all readers must have encountered in their lives—gradually acclimates us to the story’s outrageous premise: that Zhang has crash landed on a planet where the biosphere is teaming with various grilled meats and organs, steaks and lamb chops, rotisserie ducks, and fully-cooked pigs, etc., ready to eat but somehow also alive and seemingly sentient, and bodies of water that are essentially barbecue sauce. The “sauce oceans” even contain bits of vegetation, aromatics such as scallions and cilantro. Having accepted this textual reality, we root for the protagonist and laugh wordlessly with him as he painstakingly finds a way to pass one of the pieces of meat through a valve, all the while getting ever more desperately ravenous. When Zhang finally succeeds in obtaining the piece of meat, he is scalded by his prize because it has just come from an environment where the temperature is apparently 800 degrees Celsius.4 Humorously, because the meat was forced through the oxygen tank one-way valve, it arrives almost shredded into pieces. After this painstaking process that takes up approximately eighty percent of the story, Zhang’s verdict is, humorously and anticlimactically, “It turns out that ground-up pork belly was quite unappetizing… [he] silently swore that he would never eat grilled meat again” (Liang, “Planet BBQ” 13).
The ending of “Planet BBQ” adds to the absurdity that at this point we have come to accept, and also provides an ironic commentary to what the protagonist has just experienced. Mistaking an inbound spacecraft for a rescue vessel, Zhang fantasizes about capitalizing on this adventure on his blog. He feels smug self-satisfied about being a “pioneer,” about having a near-death experience (he will naturally not mention the bathos of spending hours to acquire a piece of meat that ends up being unsatisfying), and imagines being able to bring groups of his admiring followers back to revisit this planet with him. It is at this juncture that Zhang realizes that the spacecraft has flown over his head to land directly next to a clearly man-made structure, a restaurant called “Planet BBQ Premiere Restaurant, Branch No. 4.” These words are the final ones of the story. My somewhat inelegant translation aside, this signage immediately reveals the true nature of the fascinating planet that Zhang has landed on. Not only has it been “populated” (destroying who knows what kind of native ecosystems once in existence) as a commercial venture, it has been done to satisfy an outrageous whim: that of creating an entire planet where grilled meats and its accoutrements are readily available for consumption. The adventurous pioneering spirit and wonder of discovery that one is accustomed to in sublime SF is doubly pierced: by Zhang’s comic episode with the meat, and the final blow of the planet’s real purpose.
Conceptual Frameworks for Liang’s SF and Their Applications
While the depiction of the banal and the absurd risk becoming just that and no more, Liang’s SF is important precisely because of the counterbalance it offers to most popular Chinese SF. While myself and others have identified elsewhere that Chinese SF is largely concerned with social and environmental justice (Luo; Song; Zhou and Liu), Liang’s work is unique in approaching these topics through the lens of banality and absurdity. There are two important advantages to Liang’s unique fictional voice: 1) its relevance to contemporary youth and work culture and 2) its ironicization and subversion of ideas relating to the power and impact of technology as envisioned by China and most Chinese SF.
Liang’s incorporation of the most banal elements of everyday existence and thoughts offers the opportunity for readers to both reevaluate the purpose of technology in real life, and the purpose of the scientific imagination in SF. In Liang’s absurdist SF, his lone protagonists encounter technology that either creates unnecessary complications in their lives, or causes them to reflect further upon the meaninglessness of their daily routines. In these stories, technology neither revolutionizes nor subverts the status quo of social or political conditions at large, because the story provides no opportunity to register impact on a larger scale. There is no hint of the larger physical world beyond the small patch of planet on which Zhang crash lands in “Planet BBQ,” or beyond the commute between home and office that the protagonist of “My Happy Pastry Life” undertakes everyday. For a large part of the story, “Planet BBQ’s” Zhang struggles extensively in a comic-absurdist manner just to pass a single morsel of meat through his spacesuit, revealing a fatal flaw in the suit’s design, only to be disappointed by the taste. The protagonist of “Pastry Life” discovers that his machine can make sentient people that look and act just like him, but his concern is whether the pastry people can win the heart of the colleague he admires, and whether they can perform work functions without anyone discovering his absence, thus banalizing and routinizing these miraculous biological creations. These fictional scenarios are likely to recall for the reader moments in their lives that relate to technological frustration that relate to, and further maintain, the status quo of banal everyday life. For example, Zhang’s struggle may be akin to being forced to use slow and complicated software systems for a work or bureaucratic function rather than reliable pen and paper. On the other hand, the “Pastry Life” protagonist’s one-of-a-kind bread machine produces sentient beings who then… go to work at a boring office job, an outcome which thematically echoes the ways in which revolutionary algorithmic and artificial intelligence technology are being used to further the ends of invasive capitalism, creating conditions not for creativity or transcendence, but simply more work.
These realizations provide a framework for reevaluating the ways in which contemporary SF curtails the parameters by which our near future can be imagined. Usually, the science-fictional imagination is spoken of in the positive sense of inspiring the future, but it is equally likely that the conditions for both scientific inquiry and literary creativity are incubated within the same contemporary technological milieu. Liang’s work points to the ways in which our current imagination is already strictly limited by mundane concerns and the pressures of an ultra-capitalist society, so it is a voice within contemporary Chinese SF that we should not ignore.
To reiterate perspectives on Chinese SF from two representative recent works of scholarship, Lu asserts that “science fiction in China… has always been taken as a literary way to express the strong desire of the Chinese people to realize and adapt to modernization, urbanization, industrialization, and globalization” (Lu 708), while Peng likewise argues that SF promotes modernization, except one that is parallel to and nourished by a national narrative of growth and progress. These two types of discourses both assume that science and science-fictional ideas promote positive growth and equate technological development with progress. What is unique about Liang’s SF is, as mentioned earlier, its kinship with the “lie flat” ethos that seeks to question, if not disrupt, this kind of ideological narrative that is intertwined with unadulterated technological and capitalistic growth.
As Wendy Su explains, Xi Jinping’s “internal circulation” strategy, designed to reduce Chinese dependence on international markets and technologies, also created intensified competition and increasing frustration among China’s youth: “The anxiety further extends to the uncertainty in the job market and the insecurity of income, and turns into a fear for the future, a sense of futile effort and the pointless meaning of life, and eventually an attitude of lying flat” (Su 133). While this “lying-flatism” emerged as a result of post-pandemic geopolitical and economic instability, Su also identifies various subcultures from the past two decades as precedents. Though these subcultures emerged due to a variety of different factors, what they have in common is a negative outlook that disclaims the official national narrative of harmony, progress, and growth (Su 133). Liang’s “mundane SF,” all published since the mid-2010s, substitutes whimsy for negativity, but is clearly informed by sentiments of youthful discontent with the status quo.
“My Happy Pastry Life” most directly speaks to this kind of discontent as the narrator’s already mundane life and minor career ambitions turn out to be illusions pierced by the revelation that he is not only easily replaced, but was an illusory human being himself. The ease with which his machine produces sentient entities that are capable of replacing a human being renders insignificant that human’s aspirations and sense of purpose in modern-day society, just as many modern Chinese youth feel like interchangeable cogs who feel out of step with the country’s prescribed economic goals and social objectives. On the other hand, the scenario described in “Planet BBQ” implies that much of what a modern nation strives to achieve in the name of technological progress is ultimately used not for the material benefit of its people as a whole, but for idle, vain pleasures such as the type of space travel depicted in the story. The two settings, while seemingly unrelated, are connected through their shared conviction that our banal realities of work and striving are not inherently worthwhile objectives, but merely ends to imposed capitalistic means.
Thus while much of Chinese SF, as Lu and Peng assert, does indeed express the aspirations and fears pertaining to China’s dramatic modernization process and thus could be said to evince a kind of unique “Chineseness,” Liang’s work crafts a narrative relatable to a large part of the world that is suffering under relentless capitalistic technological development, pursuing productivity, efficiency, and growth instead of serious scientific investigation, while losing the sense of self and humanity that would be accessible during a less hectic existence. While those who control most of the world’s resources would have us believe that social classes, ethnic groups, and nation-states are in competition with one another for survival, Liang’s stories reveal much more absurdist rationales underlying modern day-to-day routines: resources and ingenuity spent on creating a planet of sentient food, and an impulse to “go to work” and perform despite one’s biological existence coming into question. The felt mundanity and exasperation in these stories underscore a kind of fundamental human struggle that would be relatable regardless of language or nationality, striving for a kind of connectedness across our existences despite politics and division.
To encounter mundanity and absurdity in a work of SF—a reflection of one’s everyday life—is unexpected, as SF is popularly conceived as an escapist genre depicting awe-inspiring “Big Dumb Objects” that contrast with human insignificance.5 In addition to this relatively unusual approach and tone, Liang’s work is important for two reasons: first, it is a voice of representation within Chinese SF that, along with the “porridge SF” of Xia Jia, contributes to the heterogeneity and maturity of Chinese SF as a genre. For the Chinese reader, it is undoubtedly refreshing to encounter SF that is sympathetic to one’s everyday struggles and does not only depict exceptional people accomplishing impressive feats. Certainly, many SF stories depict ordinary people struggling against extraordinary circumstances, but despite the relatable nature of the characters, the incredible situations in which they find themselves ultimately help the reader readily process the story as “merely” fictional entertainment, not relevant to one’s everyday life. For the non-Chinese reader, this type of SF helps mitigate the negative stereotype of China as fiercely competitive and nationalistic.
Secondly, “SF of everyday life” such as Liang’s stories and Ted Chiang’s The Lifecycle of Software Objects draws attention to a different way that the science-fictional can impact our everyday lives. Its unexpected use of science and technology is revelational in that it immediately feels authentically true to life in ways that much more dramatic narratives do not. One counter-intuitively important aspect of the SF imaginary is not always evident: SF hypothesizes unimaginably optimistic and pessimistic scenarios, but it should also acknowledge the ways in which technological nova do not change our lives, where it may encounter or point to intractable problems that are attributable to societal structure and human psychology, and not technological developments. These stories’ foregrounding of the mundane drives home this point, so they should not be dismissed as mere whimsy or a “lesser” version of the sublime SF of Big Dumb Objects or national narratives. Instead of presenting escapist fantasies or reflections of philosophy or geopolitics, they ask us to look within and scrutinize the way technology potentially impacts the meaning of our own lives.
NOTES
[1] 《烤肉自助星》
[2] 《面包我的幸福》
[3] 《门，是穿堂门的门》
[4] The text does not explain why the meat has not been burnt to a crisp.
[5] The editors of Science Fiction Encyclopedia have since replaced this “jocular yet affectionate” term first coined in 1981 with the more appropriate yet less fun “macrostructure,” because the big objects depicted in SF are not always “dumb” in any sense of the term, but turn out to be sentient and/or intelligent (“Big Dumb Objects”).
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Fontaine Lien received her Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of California, Riverside and has taught language, literature, and culture across many institutions. Currently, she is assistant professor of Chinese in the Department of Languages and Cultures at the U.S. Naval Academy. She is the author of Reading Chinese Science Fiction in the Age of Techno-Nationalism (2025, Liverpool University Press). Her research interests include speculative fiction, film and media studies, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the U.S. Naval Academy, Department of the Navy, the Department of War, or the U.S. Government.
Editor’s Note: This is a paper I published in a peer-reviewed online film studies journal in 2019. The journal has since gone dark, and I want to preserve the paper and cite it in future research, so I’m taking advantage of my position as editor here to reproduce it.
Near the end of the first act of Blade Runner 2049 (Denis Villeneuve, 2017), the hologram girlfriend Joi (Ana de Armas) of the protagonist K (Ryan Gosling) expresses the desire to cheer him up after a hard day. K is a Replicant, a vatgrown human gengineered for strength, reflexes, perception and, as the film’s opening crawl states, obedience. The crawl also describes K’s job: a Blade Runner is a police officer whose primary job is to “retire” renegade Replicants by killing them. K’s hard day has included killing another person for the crime of unauthorized existence; he also undergoes what the overlay text tells us is a “post-traumatic baseline test”. In this test, he repeats back to an unseen interviewer words from seemingly arbitrary phrases as a demonstration that he remains obedient. Joi pulls from a book on the table an image of that book; viewers see her from K’s perspective holding up the book; its title and author, Pale Fire (1962) by Vladimir Nabokov, are clearly visible, framed by her hands near the center of the screen.
“Let’s read”, she says, to which he responds, “You hate that book”. She shrugs, tosses the image to the side, changes her outfit in the blink of an eye and asks him to dance. The presence of Pale Fire is a brief illusion in the film, perhaps something intended to provide Blade Runner 2049 (BR49) with reflected depth or glory, in the manner that BR49 takes from the original Blade Runner (Ridley Scott, 1982) and the title of Nabokov’s novel and the poem within the novel take from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens. Yet the arbitrary phrases K repeats in his test of obedience are in fact lines from the same poem: Joi may discard the image of Pale Fire, but the deliberate framing of the book encourages viewers to investigate how it might reflect upon the film.
This essay will argue that the presence of Pale Fire in BR49 repositions the film as metafictional science fiction: the film demands to be watched and re-watched in conjunction with other texts it references, including Pale Fire, in much the same manner as Nabokov’s novel demands to be read and re-read. The disjunctions and misdirections in the novel, centered on whether and to what extent its narrator can be trusted, enable us to view the film’s implied successful revolution by Replicants against their masters as an appealing but ultimately false narrative. The film places viewers in a position structurally equivalent to readers of Pale Fire and to K inside BR49’s story: we are led to jump to an attractive conclusion even though we are shown evidence that the conclusion is unjustified. The film uses a particular visual motif of focusing on holographic illusion as illusion, especially around Joi, in order to both distract from and draw attention to the misdirection. Both Blade Runner films are science fiction (SF): if we read them through the understanding of SF literature as estranging conditions in our own world as a means of reflecting upon those conditions, we can understand that both films estrange the growing dominance of corporate power in their respective eras. The first film shows that this dominance can be slowed, arrested or even reversed, if only through violence. BR49 appears to make the same point, but attention to Pale Fire and to the visual motif of illusion enables a reading of the film as much bleaker, where opportunities to challenge corporate power are always already foreclosed.
For those who have seen Blade Runner (BR82) but not BR49, the sequel presumes that Deckard (Harrison Ford) and Rachael (Sean Young) are indeed able to live outside the reach of corporate power, if only for a couple of years. The protagonist of BR49 is K, a Replicant who serves as a Blade Runner in the collapsed ecosystem of midcentury Los Angeles. After “retiring” a Replicant, he discovers traces on what prove to be the bones of Rachael that she, also a Replicant, gave birth. This promises to upend the society of BR49, in that the difference between Replicants and born humans is no longer empathy (as in the first film) but rather the capacity to reproduce. There is a rebel Replicant underground, who believe the child will lead them to a successful revolution against their corporate and human oppressors. Joi helps K convince himself that he is the now-grown child; he tracks down Deckard, who is the only one who knows that the child is in fact Ana Stelline (Carla Juri), a designer of implanted memories sequestered in her lab on the pretext that she has an autoimmune condition. When the Wallace Corporation, the successor to the first film’s Tyrell Corporation, captures Deckard in order to extract the secret from him, K intervenes. He kills Wallace’s (Jared Leto) Replicant enforcer Luv (Sylvia Hoeks) and frames Deckard as dead so that Deckard might reunite with his daughter without fear of Wallace tracking them down. K dies as a result.
Blade Runnerand SF
Both Blade Runner films are SF: they were conceived and marketed as such, and designated as such in major databases such as IMDB and Box Office Mojo. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the original Blade Runner “the most influential SF film”. (Clute and Nicholls, 224) For how we might analyze SF films, Annette Kuhn established five categories, one of which is reflection, where a film embodies real-world sociocultural issues, such as the perception of 1950s SF film as Cold War paranoia. (Kuhn, 16) In this essay, I will focus on the parallel trope in criticism of SF literature, cognitive estrangement. The term comes from the work of SF critic Darko Suvin; he took “estrangement” from the works of playwright Bertolt Brecht, who defined it as “a representation [that] allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar”. (Willett, 192) This is often phrased as “a reflection in a distorting mirror”. For Suvin, the alternative imaginative framework of an SF text contains a novum or new thing. Suvin borrows the term “novum” from another of his chief influences, Ernst Bloch, defining it as a “totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviating from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality”. The novum is plausible as an extrapolation from currently-understood science or as a rewrite of history based on the appearance of the novum before the time in which a work is set, hence “cognitive”. The work of SF uses the consequences of the novum’s presence to reflect upon or question the current conditions in the author’s society. (Suvin, 10) In both films, the novum is Replicants, cognitive in that in 1982 it was a plausible future extrapolation to 2019 and cognitive in 2017 as an extrapolation from the first film. SF and metafiction are of course not mutually exclusive: SF grandmaster Robert A. Heinlein’s The Number of the Beast (1980) has its characters jumping between his own and others’ fictional worlds, while much of Philip K. Dick’s work has metafictional elements.
There are at least as many readings of BR82 through cognitive estrangement as there are cuts of the film; Replicants as slaves is one of the more common approaches. Judith B. Kerman argues that Replicants are lower than slaves:
Although Mosaic law allowed slavery, the slaves of the Israelites had clear legal rights, based specifically on empathy, the memory that the Israelites had been slaves and strangers in a strange land (Exodus 22:20). It is obvious that the replicants have no such protection, and they are even, by definition, excluded from empathy (their own, and human empathy toward them). (Kernan 2005, 36)
Yet slavery is the reflection in the distorting mirror: BR82 discusses it openly, most notably in the climactic scene on the rooftop. I believe the mirror reflects the real-world effect of the growth of corporate power in the years leading up to 1982. Government that represents the interests of citizens has been reduced to violence in the service of unelected oligarchs such as Tyrell; people live in darkness lit by enormous advertisements, while the CEO lives like a pharaoh. Humans, born or Replicant, have little to no say in the direction or structure of their society. BR49 maintains essentially the same paradigm, with Tyrell replaced by Wallace and rain by snow. The ads are holographic now, but Replicants remain slaves.
Pale Fireand Blade Runner 2049
Nabokov’s Pale Fire is a work of problematic, very funny and often absurd literary analysis; it is also a moving meditation on death and grief. The poem “Pale Fire”, written by recently-deceased American poet-professor John Shade, is presented with foreword, annotation and index by Charles Kinbote, a professor from the possibly fictional Baltic country of Zembla. In the poem, Shade muses on his life, most notably the death by drowning of his teenaged daughter Hazel. This appears quite straightforward and often trite, though in fact it is self-reflective and complex. The poem’s primary theme is of Shade overcoming his grief through his faith that the patterns he sees in the world are indicative of a life beyond his. Kinbote, who may or may not be the exiled king of Zembla, argues that the poem is about his own life as king, the overthrow of his regime, and his subsequent escape and flight to America. He backs up his claim through highly improbable and discursive readings of the poem and the unsupported assertion that he convinced Shade to write his story in the guise of the poet’s own. The novel culminates with the reveal that Shade was murdered just after he finished the poem. Kinbote claims the killer is an assassin sent by the new Zemblan regime to assassinate him; the man is likely a local criminal who mistakes Shade for Kinbote’s landlord, the judge who sentenced him to prison. Kinbote takes advantage of Shade’s widow’s grief to make off with the index cards upon which the sole copy of the poem is written, then presents to us the poem and his preposterous reading thereof. We have no guarantee the poem is as Shade wrote it; we have no guarantee Shade even wrote the poem; the lack of guarantee is in many aspects precisely the point of Pale Fire. Kinbote himself may or may not be a figment of Shade’s imagination (or vice versa); he also may be V. Botkin, a paranoid and delusional visiting professor.
The indeterminacy of Pale Fire makes it as studied and argued-over a text in literary criticism as BR82 is in criticism of SF cinema. The novel addresses the interplay between authors and readers as much as the stories of Shade’s or Kinbote’s lives. Many of the earliest critiques framed the novel as a “puzzle box” or “jewel box”, both in admiration of its construction and to imply that a sufficiently careful reading could tease out the answer to the puzzle. (McCarthy) For a generation, critics argued enthusiastically for different and often mutually exclusive positions on the roles of poet Shade and commentator Kinbote, (Maddox, 15-18) or Kinbote’s “real” identity as V. Botkin. (Alexandrov, 374-375) Pale Fire is “a text of absolute uncertainty”. (McHale, 18) Many critics address Nabokov’s long interest in the writing of chess puzzles in between writing critically-acclaimed bestsellers1 in his adopted language and curating the Lepidoptera collection at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. (Boyd 1999, 9) Chess puzzles typically only admit one solution, hence the hypothesis that Pale Fire also does. Thomas Karshan argues that the entire text is a game, and we need to read it “playfully”, without regard for definite truth, because to solve the puzzle would be to end it, and the novel “equates ending with death”. For Karshan, the desire to find the solution is what drives readers to perform the difficult work of decoding that “initiate[s] us in the play of thought” and transforms readers into writers. (Karshan, 205-206) For Maurice Couturier, the search for the solution to the puzzle is always already doomed to fail because of “various elements of overdetermination” within the text. (Couturier, 56-62)
In the poem, Shade, in search of solace for his grief, succumbs to one of the fits to which he is sometimes subject:
And blood-black nothingness began to spin A system of cells interlinked within\ Cells interlinked within cells interlinked Within one stem. And dreadfully distinct Against the dark, a tall white fountain played. [703-707] (Nabokov, 59)
These are of course the very words K and the interviewer exchange in the baseline test in BR49. Viewers may not recognize them as lines from the poem, but after seeing Joi present the book, and hearing the words again later in the film when K botches the test, they may look up the words and find their origin in the novel. Readers who scan the section of the poem surrounding these lines will find that the “tall white fountain” is a nebulous representation of proof of an afterlife. Shade reads a newspaper story about a woman who after a near-death experience also recounts seeing a tall white fountain. When Shade seeks out the source, he finds that the article contains a misprint: the woman saw a mountain, not a fountain. [747-802] (Nabokov, 60-62) It’s a curious choice for a test of obedience: to repeat the tall white fountain is in fact to misspeak, to misinterpret. K may have read or even reread Pale Fire; he may have started it but stopped reading because Joi “hates that book”; he certainly learns to misspeak and thus to disobey over the course of the film.
I will undertake a critical reading of BR49 through the 1999 monograph on Pale Fire written by Brian Boyd, also a biographer of Nabokov. Boyd writes about the experience of multiple readings of the novel, especially insofar as this replicates the process of scientific discovery. (Boyd 1999, 3-4) In the first of Boyd’s three approaches to the text, he begins with the foreword before moving to the poem and thence the commentary and index. From the second paragraph of the foreword, it’s evident that Kinbote interjects more of himself into the commentary than is proper for an academic editor. For Boyd, this leads to a fork in the path at the end of the fifth paragraph, where Kinbote urges readers to see his note on line 991. (Nabokov, 15) Readers who turn to the note will be able to follow a trail of cross-references leading to the revelation that Kinbote (believes he) is the exiled king of Zembla. Readers who turn to the notes will then frame the poem in a rather different manner than does the linear reading Boyd believes readers will follow once they have dismissed Kinbote as unreliable. The remainder of the foreword, for linear readers, gives no further cross-references, but ample evidence to question Kinbote’s competence, his custody of the poem, his relationship to Shade, his personality, sexuality and sanity. Shade’s poem, then, becomes for linear readers the “true” story, especially given its humility and lack of bombast, and Kinbote an intruder trying to hijack it for his own ends. (Boyd 1999, 15-24)
In BR49, K does not enter the story with the preconceived idea that he’s the chosen one or “specimen”,2 nor is he played as a comic figure or unreliable narrator, but he’s still clearly framed as the protagonist of the film. Once he finds the wooden horse, even though he knows full well he’s a Replicant with implanted memories, he’s smitten with the idea that he’s the specimen—the protagonist of his own story. Ana Stelline, the real specimen, tells him “someone lived” his memory of the horse. K’s reaction to this is extreme emotion; first-time viewers accustomed to the tropes of film understand he believes himself to be the “someone”. He ignores or transcends his own programming, learns to lie and exhibits a considerably broader range of emotion. In this reading, BR49 is rather more subtle than Pale Fire: whereas the novel foregrounds Kinbote’s unreliability, the film encourages viewing Ana not as the specimen—though she lives in a specimen jar—but as a tertiary character. To the extent that BR49 gives us the story of the real specimen, it only takes place in one long sequence at the precise midpoint of the film and in a very brief penultimate scene. Most of what viewers see in the film is K’s story. In this reading, having Joi hold up an image of Pale Fire reads as something of a wink and a nod to the sort of clever people who know their modern literary classics, much as the references to Shakespeare, Swift, Pope, Eliot and others in the poem, especially those that Kinbote ignores or misinterprets in the commentary, are clues laid for readers by Nabokov the chess puzzle designer. The presence of Pale Fire is a clue to first-time viewers that they ought not to be nearly as shocked or crushed as K himself is when the narrative of him as the specimen turns out to be false.
Boyd’s second approach to Pale Fire imagines readers giving the novel a rereading, forearmed with the knowledge that Shade is dead and Kinbote an egoist or madman. Careful examination of all four sections of the text leads readers to visiting Russian professor V. Botkin. The stress caused by Botkin’s exile compels him to reimagine himself first as Kinbote, then as the king of Zembla. Boyd finds much support in the text for this reading, where Botkin, desperately in need of affirmation or distraction from suicidal ideation, imposes upon Shade’s tolerance and gentle nature to try to induce Shade to write about the delusional Zemblan narrative, which Botkin constructs from their mutual colleagues and the objects and books in his landlord’s home. (Boyd 1999, 91-106) This makes of Kinbote a tragic figure rather than a buffoon or villain.
Viewers who rewatch BR49, forearmed with the knowledge that Ana is the specimen, may find that it adds nuance but relatively little in the way of structural difference. While a second viewing can bring additional pathos to K’s role in creating his own delusion,3 it doesn’t refocus the film. Nevertheless, this rewatching does draw attention to the sheer emptiness of K’s physical and emotional life in the film’s first act. Gosling plays his movements in the initial scenes as jerky and robotic, his face a mask. K knows what he is: a created being, a mostly inhuman killer of humans who are trying to be human. He’s aware that his “childhood” in the orphanage with the toy horse is a set of implanted memories, designed to create emotional responses that mimic those of a human and thereby make him more obedient to his masters. Yet he warms as he begins to believe he might be a born creature, one with a soul, as he puts it to Joshi. His face softens and grows more expressive and his movements looser. A rewatching with the knowledge that he’s delusional underscores his alienation and provokes sympathy, in a manner analogous to how rereaders of Pale Fire might sympathize more with Kinbote/Botkin and his need to do anything to make himself feel that he matters. K knows that if he’s the specimen, Wallace is going to try to vivisect him, but that’s only in one respect worse than another night eating grubs after another day killing his own kind, with his only company a hologram girlfriend.
Boyd’s third reading, or “re-rereading”, centers upon putting in abeyance the conflict between text and commentary in favor of tracing the paths that do exist. He begins his re-rereading by identifying the central question posed by the poem: whether there is an afterlife and whether something of Shade’s daughter Hazel survived her death. While Shade explicitly dismisses her “survival as conventional ghost, phantom, shade”, he ends the poem believing that his sense of order within chaos implies that she is in some way still alive. Through close re-rereading of the poem and commentary, and of the apparent gibberish of the message Kinbote says Shade and his wife and daughter received in a purportedly haunted barn, Boyd grounds an argument that Hazel or her spirit is alive within the poem, but that Shade is unable to perceive this. Boyd interlinks the names of butterflies, one of Kinbote’s many missed cues, and one of Nabokov’s other works of fiction to scaffold a more general argument that in the text and world of Pale Fire, the dead send messages to the living, who can perceive the messages as phenomena but not as carriers of meaning. The message in the barn is not gibberish but a warning from Shade’s Aunt Maud; the Red Admirable butterfly mentioned near the end of the poem is Hazel-as-Psyche. Both try to deter Shade from walking to Kinbote’s house, where he will be killed, but Shade cannot understand their efforts as messages, much less decode them. (Boyd 1999, 131-144) Participation in the quest for meaning both leads readers to the hidden presence of the dead yet alive and transforms Pale Fire into a metafictional text: readers become aware that the text foregrounds its own construction and exhibits slippage among levels of narrative.
BR49 presents two messages from the dead to the living: the scalpel marks on Rachael’s pelvis and the Joi advertisement near the end.
The advertisement is much simpler to decode, in that Joi, here still played by de Armas, serves as inspiration for K to emerge from his existential crisis and decide to rescue Deckard. Gosling gives enough nuance to K’s reaction to the giant, bare-breasted hologram crouching down and telling him he looks like a good joe that it’s evident that K knows that this is manipulation—and yet, it motivates him.
In the scene where Rachael’s bones are examined, the characters in the room, human and Replicant, immediately understand that the scalpel marks are a message and that their meaning is clear. Joshi states in the subsequent scene that “the world is built on a wall” that separates kind, and that without that wall there will be war, or slaughter. The marks on Rachael’s pelvis break down that wall. Joshi engages in a debate with K over what it means to be born, a question that comes up multiple times in the film: K says, “to be born is to have a soul, I guess.” Later, Joi will link this to “being wanted”: this appears to be a facet of underground Replicant culture.
The dependence of status upon the biological, however, is by the standards of real-world 2017 problematic: no serious scholar would try to argue that only those who can bear biological children are truly human. Many critical responses to BR49 take issue with the implications of the consistent focus on reproduction. To take one of many examples on the internet, Emma Louise Backe argues that:
…the central conceit of the movie—that replicants have the capacity to reproduce and therefore ascend from their status as sub-human citizens—the promise of transformation through child-bearing is a tired trope of science fiction, one that reinforces, rather than subverts, the future of the female. (Backe)
She’s not wrong about the tiredness of the trope, but I’d like to propose that one use of Pale Fire in the film is to induce viewers to wonder how accurate the commentary is—not Backe’s, but rather Joshi’s and K’s when they talk about walls and souls. To rewatch the film shows that K sees his own “birthday” when he kneels down in front of the dead tree; to re-rewatch the film reminds us that K knows well that his memories are implanted and that he is to some extent aware that he’s jumping to a conclusion belied by evidence.3 He talks himself into believing that he’s the specimen, but some part of his mind immediately understands the truth that he’s a secondary character in another’s story. I believe it’s more productive to read Joshi’s description of the wall as misdirection, or perhaps propaganda. There is indeed a wall in BR49, and it’s not just the enormous one that separates the risen sea from the city. Yet nor does it separate humans and Replicants insofar as they are fertile and infertile. The wall in the film separates kind, but those kinds are free and slave, not human and Replicant. The existence of a child born from two Replicants only threatens war or slaughter insofar as it’s the final foreclosure upon the hopes of Replicants that they might one day be free. The film doesn’t state whether the child of a slave is itself a slave, as in the antebellum USA, but Niander Wallace, the CEO in BR49, thinks he could have the numbers he wants if Replicants could reproduce.
Reading the first film through the lens of cognitive estrangement allows us to see slavery as a distorted reflection of the dominance of corporate power. Wallace clearly imagines the children of Replicants as his own children. He treats them as his slaves, though he estranges this through his soaring rhetoric about angels. Viewers may think that Wallace believes he’s trying to help humanity, even though he has just stated that “every leap of civilization was built off the back of a disposable workforce”. In BR82, Tyrell gives Replicants a four-year lifespan; it’s said that this is in order to prevent them from developing attachments that might lead to rebellion, but it’s also a means of protecting the Tyrell Corporation’s profits. As Kerman points out, “As in the case of any slave, the design flaw is not so much the short life as the development of control problems which make a short life convenient.” (Kerman 1991, 21) In BR49, the open-ended lifespan of Replicants is a problem for Wallace: they go underground and farm grubs, or pluck out their right eyeballs and form a rag-tag Résistance, or just move to Vegas and keep bees and drink—but they all stop working for the Wallace Corporation. Yet if Replicants can have children, this protects Wallace’s profits.
When Backe argues that transformation through childbearing is an SF cliché, she’s half right: it is a sexist cliché, but BR49 does not present childbearing as ascension from sub-human status. Rather, childbearing is the final barring of humanity to Replicants. If knowledge of the existence of the specimen will bring war, it’s not because the knowledge means Replicants will be free, but rather that they will be forever slaves. Guided by the shade of Pale Fire, we can understand that the Replicants are behaving like Kinbote: they grasp at scraps of narrative in order to construct a meaningful story in which they are the protagonists rather than the preterite. Out of a desperate need to patch his suicidal alienation, Botkin/Kinbote assembles—in Boyd’s re-rereading, Hazel inspires him to assemble—from his colleagues and his landlord’s house a story in which he is king. Out of a similar need, K uses memories he knows are implants in order to assemble a story in which he is the wanted child. The renegade Replicants cast themselves as rebels who would overthrow an interstellar empire.
Holographic Illusion in Blade Runner 2049
Yet BR49 is not a work of print literature: a full “reading” of the film will encompass whether and how its visuals dovetail with the effects of Pale Fire. I believe that the film uses a visual motif to estrange the dramatic increase in corporate dominance of Western society from 1982 to 2017; this same motif also reinforces skepticism toward the narratives of K as the specimen and the Replicant underground as having a fighting chance. There is a particular sort of holographic illusion in the film, especially in the presence of Joi, where our attention is drawn to the fact that it’s an illusion. Joi inspires K throughout the film, even beyond her death; her desire to be “real” mirrors the desire of Replicants in BR82 to be human and to have more life; in discussions of BR49, most viewers find it tragic that Luv kills her by stomping on the emanator just as Joi says “I love you”. We want her to be human, especially since the first film encourages us to expand our definition of humanity. Yet BR49’s focus on the evident illusion of Joi’s presence signals that underneath her apparent autonomy and humanity, she’s another product of the same corporation that creates K and sends him off to kill the specimen.
Just before we see the image of Pale Fire, the projector in the apartment articulates in order to manifest hologram Joi, dressed as a waitress. She carries a hologram of a plate of food, which she places over the bowl of grubs K has prepared for dinner:
We can see what’s on the plate, but at no point does the image of the meal fully cover the bowl of grubs; thirty seconds later, the image is gone and the grubs are still there. The illusion creates a simulacrum of a better or more appealing reality: this screenshot is the point at which the illusion most clearly overlays the reality, but even here, it’s still obviously an illusion. Joi lights his cigarette; K then clearly, deliberately, blows smoke through her, but immediately follows this up by moving his feet so that she can sit down. Once she sits, we see the bowl of grubs, naked of illusion, between them. This first encounter with Joi takes this particular, ambivalent form as a means of drawing the attention of careful viewers—the sort who might follow Kinbote’s direction and turn to the commentary on “Pale Fire” before reading the poem—to the sleight of hand involved in its presentation of Joi as human. The overlay on the bowl of grubs, its incomplete coverage and its subsequent disappearance, all within the space of a few lines of dialogue, serve as a key to inform careful viewers of what Joi is and is not. K interacts with her as if she’s human, making space for her to sit down, asking her how her day was, telling her not to fuss—but all of this is itself a game of pretend, that she is a real person who cares for him and he is a real person who is cared for. How ludic the game is for K, especially at first, is difficult to gauge: he genuinely seems to care, but he also blows smoke at and through her.
The original The Matrix (Wachowski Brothers, 1999) draws our attention to Jean Baudrillard’s work on simulations and simulacra in the same manner that BR49 does with Pale Fire, leaving viewers who follow that path to a deeper understanding of how the hyperreality of the matrix almost demands Cypher’s betrayal of the crew. (Baudrillard, 174-175) When Joi, herself an illusion, holds up Nabokov’s text, it’s an invitation to explore how the novel might affect our understanding of the film; yet the illusions surrounding Joi and her (self-)presentation are partly concealed by her apparent humanity.
As the film progresses, Joi explores her growing humanity, or rather appears to explore what appears to be her growing humanity. Because the first film encourages an expansive definition of humanity, we’re inclined to sympathize with her, but to read the film metafictionally is to understand that it’s as easy for us to jump to conclusions as it is for K. He sees the (planted) evidence and thinks himself the chosen one; we see Joi inspiring K and slot it into a trope to which we’ve been sensitized. The resistance Replicants have evidently watched a lot of movies, too, because they slot themselves into the Star Wars narrative, and don’t the rag-tag rebels led by a princess always end up defeating the totalitarians? Yet K knows his memories are implanted; the resistance is up against insurmountable odds.
Later in the scene, K fetches the package containing the emanator and tells Joi it’s their anniversary. She says “It is?”; he answers, “Let’s just say that it is”, further illustrating the issue at hand here. As she gushes over the emanator, he reboots the system, freezing her in place:
The film gives three images and a sound: the Wallace logo, her customization menu, the update window and the Joi music, the first six notes of Peter’s theme from Peter and the Wolf. In just a few seconds, we’re shown that Joi is a product of the same corporation that creates and enslaves flesh-and-blood humans. She looks the way she does because K has chosen that appearance. She can be updated, implying that developers have control over her personality. There’s even a tune that reminds K, and us, that all these features that distinguish Joi from a “real” human exist. Joi is a work of fiction explicitly designed to mitigate the lack of connection that characterizes this estrangement of our world—“everything you want to hear”, says the advertisement K walks by just before he enters the building.
Yet even in a rewatching, or a re-rewatching à la Boyd, it’s difficult not to fall for the illusion and to think that Joi is in some way meaningfully human. Joi says she has “cabin fever”, and then an illusion is placed before us, and we’re told and shown it’s an illusion. Like K, however, we want to believe, even though “cabin fever” makes it clear that Joi, a product of the Wallace Corporation, is programmed to make K, also a product of the Wallace Corporation, want to spend his hard-earned murder bonus on yet another product of the Wallace Corporation. She’s there to manipulate; her motives are not to teach K to embrace life except insofar as this drives him to act in Wallace’s interests. The theme from Peter and the Wolf is well-chosen, because while the symphony’s narrative is that of a child who ignores the patriarch’s command, goes over the wall and saves the day, the purpose of Prokofiev’s piece is to teach children how to “read” a symphony by recognizing the themes played by different instruments. (Morrison, 51) Like Pale Fire and BR49, it’s metafictional.
In the very next scene, K leads Joi to the roof, where he walks out into the rain, buttoning up his coat and collar against the cold. We see a long shot of her left hand, as she stabilizes the hologram so that (it appears that) the raindrops land on her skin instead of passing through:
She looks up into the rain; now, the illusion is nearly perfect. He even sort of smiles, but she, in her flimsy dress that were she real wouldn’t be appropriate in this weather, is weeping, evidently overcome by emotion. The illusion is broken when a floodlight renders her translucent, but the emotion continues. She comes in for a kiss, which seems very real, until she glitches; he has six seconds of befuddlement until the Automated Joi System Override window comes up. He walks by her while she’s still frozen, and only then remembers to take out the emanator and turn her off.
It’s both easy to recognize and difficult to remember that the illusion is only an overlay, not real. She only looks solid in the absence of direct, bright light, but her feelings seem real—certainly realer than his—and what real human wouldn’t want that kiss to be real? He’s freeing her from “cabin fever”; she’s freeing him from existential loneliness. Joi, however, is a work of fiction: the raindrops on her hand aren’t any more real than the hand itself. Joi is a(n instance of a) computer program, a very sophisticated one to be sure, but not an autonomous intelligence with real feelings. Watching the film for the first time, she seems very human; rewatching the film, she seems like something a very lonely human might bond with; even re-rewatching the film, it’s difficult to keep in mind that K’s feelings have also been programmed. Luv tells him “I see you’re also a customer”, which in context is two Replicants pointing out each other’s artificiality, or perhaps flirting. It also serves as another indication that Joi is a corporate product—and that the Wallace Corporation knows it can use Joi to manipulate K.
Half an hour later in the film, K brings the emanator to the DNA viewing room. Throughout the scene, Joi keeps moving her head back and forth, sometimes directly occupying the space of K’s head, sometimes moving just to one side. Her first comment is “Mere data makes a man”, then says that he’s made up of an alphabet of four letters, while she only has ones and zeroes.
Those who have seen BR82 may see her as akin to a Replicant and thus able to become human through empathy. Yet the film keeps showing the illusion, so upon re-rewatching we ought to question whether this isn’t a narrative we’re being encouraged to embrace. When K discovers the existence of twins, Joi says, “I always knew you were special”, which seems like the sort of thing a caring girlfriend would say, but is also quite plausible from a program acting in the overriding interest of the Wallace Corporation. K knows his memories aren’t his own, but she whispers lovingly “to be born, to be wanted”. The temptation is great enough to send him on a quest for what he might think is himself. He takes Joi in the car with him, until it’s shorted out, whereupon she begins to flicker in and out of existence; we can hear the Peter and the Wolf theme, the aural cue that Joi is an instrument, not a human. After the car crash-lands, she manifests outside the door and calls out to awaken him.
de Armas plays it well, as if she really were a girlfriend in every way except the tangible, such that it’s easy to forget that to whatever extent she’s human, she’s a slave to Wallace. It’s implausible that the emanator and the Joi code are not in some way being monitored; sure enough, the moment there’s real danger, missiles start falling and the perspective cuts to Luv. But of course this isn’t because Luv cares for K,4 but rather because he can find something the corporation desperately wants. “Get up and do your fuckin’ job”, Luv murmurs as if to K while she casually slaughters dozens of born humans from a drone as another slave works on her fingernails. The humans are dismembered, but this isn’t an illusion; rather, the illusion lies in to whatever extent K believes the ignis ex machina reifies his Joi-inspired belief that he’s special. He’s a product of the Wallace Corporation, inspired by another product of the same corporation, monitored and rescued (and later beaten up and left for dead) by a third product of that corporation. The illusions are beautiful, however, and the narratives attractive, so a watcher or even a rewatcher can be excused for thinking him the hero with subjectivity and her a proto- or quasi-human who cares for him:
K returns home, to Joi saying “I want to be real for you” and the entrance of the Replicant “doxie” or sex worker, Mariette. Joi overlays herself on Mariette’s body, then they embrace K together. It seems to fall into familiar tropes: spirit possesses body, two become one. Joi tells Mariette to hold still so she can “sync” with her. It’s the film’s most tender scene, as well, but the direction goes to great lengths to foreground how much of it is an illusion clearly visible to all three parties.
Here is the same view of Joi and Mariette together, a few seconds before:
Viewers may frame this as Joi doing her best to be real, to come as close as she can to giving K the physical connection he desperately seeks; they may reframe it as yet another example of the tired and sexist trope of a woman only existing in order to inspire a man. But it’s also possible to re-reframe it as an exchange: Mariette gets money for her (human, if Replicant) body, K gains an inspirational catharsis, Joi-the-program gains more control over K in furtherance of the mission to find and capture the specimen. All three are Wallace Corporation products.
In the morning, Joi wants to be deleted from the console. This seems to make her more human, because now she can die; when she does die, it’s more poignant. Yet her stated reason for deletion from the console, “They can download my memories”, is clearly nonsense: of course the console backs (this instance of) her up on a cloud, and it’s only barely less implausible that the emanator doesn’t do the same. She dies because her mission is over, just like K’s, which is why he’s left for dead, as well. The illusion is that K is special, wanted, like a born human, when in fact he’s a slave being manipulated by the corporation that made him. Yet the hyperreality of Joi’s presentation can misdirect viewers just as it misdirects him. Even though the film repeatedly tells and shows us that she’s a piece of commercial software, Joi’s arc is compelling: viewers may believe that she’s on some meaningful level human, or growing into humanity, especially given that both Blade Runner films foreground the question of what makes a person human.
Pseudo-Rachael
The only iteration in the film of this sort of deliberate illusion outside Joi’s presence takes place when Wallace brings out pseudo-Rachael as a potential reward for Deckard’s cooperation. The film has already made repeated, and significant, metafictional references to the first Blade Runner, but it is at this point that these metafictional references become especially significant:
Deckard, however, is no K. After thirty years, his memories are far more his own than whatever might have been implanted, and he knows full well that Rachael is dead and that he must also die if he’s to protect their child. She says “I love you”, but he accepted reality long ago; he dismisses the illusion after one long look. Her death seems gratuitous, but is also foreordained, in that once she’s dismissed as a work of fiction, she’s no longer valuable to Wallace.
Yet pseudo-Rachael is also illusion on another axis, that of the creation of the film and its position as a sequel. K and Luv hear clips from the original film in Wallace’s data archive; Deckard gets to see clips from BR82, featuring the original Rachael and the younger Ford as young Deckard. These scenes make use of well-established means to lend weight to a sequel by including iconic images and dialogue from its predecessor. Pseudo-Rachael, however, is a new thing, a reincarnation much simpler within the film than without. Wallace can clone her from DNA and train the clone to look and move and talk like young Rachael; this is elementary, given his other powers. But to bring back the younger Young in the film is only just now possible in the real world; it could not have happened absent a staggering technical and human cost. In BR49, actor Loren Peta was dressed in the 1982 film’s Rachael makeup, clothes and hair; she worked onstage with the other actors during principal photography. Later, both Peta and Young used motion-capture equipment while reading pseudo-Rachael’s lines; then, digital artists built a simulacrum of the younger Young’s face atop Peta’s.
The two-minute scene took a full year for visual effects supervisor John Nelson to complete. (Vilkomerson) Why go to such lengths, other than for the love of a challenge, especially when Deckard isn’t fooled at all by the illusion? I submit that the presence of pseudo-Rachael is directed at viewers passionate about the original film. Its purpose is to overlay this different take on Replicants, what it means to be human and the increasing dominance of corporations in real-world 2017, in order both to authenticate it as a sequel and to cloak this much bleaker film in the comparative optimism of its predecessor. The overall visual aesthetic of the film, including the many specific visuals such as the Pan Am logo, links BR49 to the original. So do the noir plot, the music, the focus on the barriers or continuum between human and Replicant, the casting of Ford and of (pseudo-)Young. The films are clearly discontinuous, however: the opening crawl talks of the collapse of the old order; the Blackout is shoehorned in; Wallace is not Tyrell, despite his megalomania, his love of profit from slavery and his weird eyes. On a metafictional level, the Los Angeles of the original film’s 2019 did not come to pass: while some of the first film’s power lay in its plausibility as a future extrapolated from the real Los Angeles of 1982, the sequel cannot directly lay claim to that sort of authority. Yet bringing pseudo-Rachael into the film, especially so close to the end, tangibly (re-)relinks BR49 to the original. We’ve seen and heard clips of her, but now she’s present: it evokes nostalgia for the first film, which for all its murder has a fundamentally optimistic and inclusive definition of humanity and ends with Rachael and Deckard both free. Though pseudo-Rachael is obviously a simulacrum both to Deckard and to viewers, her presence colors our experience of the film, even if BR49 puts the original Rachael’s bones in a box and brutally kills her replacement after two minutes on screen.
We may, before re-rewatching, think of the ending of BR49 as positive: K has become human by dying for his beliefs and Deckard and Ana are now safe, as all connection between them and Wallace is cut off. Ana the specimen, the Replicant who was born and thereby wanted, can become the leader, or symbol, of the coming revolution. These are tropes we’re inclined to follow unless and until we learn to (re-)reread with skepticism toward narratives. When we do, and we follow not where illusion wants to lead us but rather the facts and logic, we don’t arrive at revolution, but a much bleaker world where born but unwanted humans harpoon flying cars from trash piles, and a Replicant revolution will be put down quickly and brutally. We’ve been putting microchips in our cats and dogs since before the millennium: is it really plausible that the Wallace Corporation can’t track all the Replicants, even those who have plucked out their right eyes? How likely is it that Replicants don’t have remotely-activated devices that can drop them unconscious or kill them instantly? The film seems to end well, but that’s because its use of illusion distracts us from thinking about metafiction in the way that Pale Fire demands. There’s no way Deckard is going to take Ana on a swooping air-car ride into a green wilderness, and not only because the only green wilderness left is the illusory one she turns off to reveal her specimen jar upon K’s entry. The future is (fore)closed, not open: BR49 only seems optimistic because of its familiar tropes and because it borrows some of its predecessor’s aura through Rachael’s iconic look.
Estrangement in Blade Runner 2049
In the original Blade Runner, the presence of Replicant slaves can be read in SF terms as an estrangement of the growth in corporate power in the decades before 1982. Yet a sufficiently committed revolutionary can make a major change. Roy Batty kills Tyrell and JF Sebastian, the overseer of the genetic control mechanisms that keep Replicants slaves. The first film implies, or at least proposes, that absent the capitalist the proletariat might be free—to use terms dated even in 1982, yet somehow still relevant today. With respect to BR49, watchers or even rewatchers might well think its ending as or more optimistic than that of BR82; we might well imagine the Résistance storming Wallace’s pyramid. But this is illusion: the presence of Pale Fire can inspire us to re-rewatch and wonder whether, like K, we’re imagining something that isn’t shown on screen because it’s not possible. The illusion around Joi draws attention to how we might wish to be skeptical about narratives presented to us as natural just because they’re appealing.
The estrangement in BR49 is of our own society of 2017, where corporate power has only continued to grow, to the point where it’s insurmountable. In the world of the film, it’s nothing but Wallace Corporation slaves all the way down: even Joshi, the sole born human and the representative of public authority, works for them, and she’s murdered the moment she tries to resist. Surveillance and other technologies have increased with economic inequality to the point where revolution or even major change is a pipe dream. Even a heroic sacrifice will at best kill only a replaceable minion. The CEO can escape ecological disaster, but the slaves remain slaves: like medieval serfs, they’re owned by the lord, and their purpose is to breed, toil and die. The parallels to our own world are too evident, and too dreary, to enumerate. BR49 is much, much bleaker than its predecessor, but it’s draped in just enough illusion to make a false narrative of hope seem appealing. Its pessimism about our own world is remarkable, for a mainstream Hollywood film. Because it’s SF cinema, however, some might focus on the set design, costumes, special effects, etc., all of which are first-rate but also distract from the social criticism at its heart.
Yet if we use Pale Fire as the key to unlocking a metafictional reading of the film, we can understand how and why BR49 subverts the conventions of mainstream SF cinema in a way that the original film, with its optimistic ending and use of romantic love as a driver of the plot, does not. We cannot, however, simply end here. The constant presence of metafiction in the film problematizes the very notion of its having an ending, positive or no. We may be better served by examining the ambiguity of both films’ endings as constitutive of their familial relation and also of an examination of, and demand for, the persistence of humanity in a world dominated by technology and corporate power. Much ink, real and virtual, has been spilled over the question of whether Deckard in the first film is or is not a Replicant; much of the metafictionality of BR82 lies in this question. The second film answers it definitively, but also poses many more questions that it refuses to answer. In (re-)rewatching both films, we can see that the power of metafictional SF lies in the complications and ambiguities with which it reflects our own world.
NOTES
[1] Both Pale Fire and Lolita (1955) are in the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels (in English) for the twentieth century. Lolita was a runaway bestseller; Pale Fire, a superficially more difficult text, was somewhat less successful.
[2] This is the name Wallace gives the then still hypothetical child of Replicants. No other name beyond “the child” is provided.
[3] Notably, that his reaction when he learns that “someone lived this [memory]” is rage rather than elation.
[4] Though she does say to him “It is invigorating, being asked personal questions. Makes one feel… desired”.
WORKS CITED
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Barlow, Aaron. “Reel Toads and Imaginary Cities: Philip K. Dick, Blade Runner and the Contemporary Science Fiction Movie”, in Brooker 2005, pp. 43-58.
Baudrillard, Jean. “Simulacra and Simulations”, in Jean Baudrillard: Selected Writings, edited by Mark Poster. 2nd ed. Stanford University Press, 2001, pp. 169-187.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott. USA. 1982.
Blade Runner 2049. Dir. Denis Villeneuve. USA. 2017.
Boyd, Brian. Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years. Princeton, 1991.
—. Nabokov’s Pale Fire: The Magic of Artistic Discovery. Princeton, 1999.
Brooker, Will, ed. The Blade Runner Experience: The Legacy of a Science Fiction Classic. London: Wallflower Press, 2005.
Clute, John and Peter Nicholls. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1999.
Couturier, Maurice. “The Near-Tyranny of the Author: Pale Fire”. In Nabokov and His Fiction: New Perspectives, edited by Julian W. Connolly. Cambridge, 1999.
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Kerman, Judith B. “Technology and Politics in the Blade Runner Dystopia”, in ——, ed, Retrofitting Blade Runner: Issues in Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner and Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. Bowling Green OH: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1991, pp. 16-24.
—. “Post-Millennium Blade Runner”, in Brooker 2005, pp. 31-39.
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Binary Classification of Science Fiction: Examining Hard and Soft SF
Enze Shi
Science fiction (SF) is a relatively new literary genre with contributions from many new authors. Due to this, it has lacked a consistent definition amongst readers as compared to other genres like horror and drama. SF emerged from base fiction and is differentiated by its involvement of science and realism. For some, SF is defined as the straightforward combination of science, imagination, and fiction. However, there are also more theoretical approaches. For example, Darko Suvin defines SF as a literary genre whose necessity is the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition (372). Paul Kincaid stated that “the inability to define science fiction” has been long recognized (409). This definitional ambiguity has created ongoing debate within SF scholarship. This controversy has its benefits; it has helped redefine the boundaries between SF and the other genres, allowing scholars to examine why this genre emerged from conventional fiction.
SF had rapidly grown since the early 19th century. Two centuries of development created a huge catalog in SF. This proliferation not only made this genre more prevalent but also let readers and scholars develop an internal classification: hard and soft SF. In simple words, hard SF adheres to science and reality to a higher degree than soft SF. While the binary classification of SF into hard and soft creates a convenient framework for understanding, it ultimately oversimplifies the genre’s rich complexity. Overemphasizing categorizing hard and soft SF leads to misplaced attention and distorted interpretation in SF criticism. Instead, SF criticism should prioritize its primary purpose: exploring universal questions, challenging readers’ perspectives, and influencing reality. A more meaningful application of the hard and soft classification is through relative comparison; stating a work is “harder” or “softer” than others, rather than assigning absolute labels. This approach acknowledges the interdependent and overlapping nature of this category, allowing for a more comprehensive evolution without forcing a reductive classification onto complex work.
Defining Hard and Soft Science Fiction
Hard and soft SF have subjective and vague guidelines: hard SF adheres more precisely to scientific principles and realism, while soft SF has more imaginative elements. However, these guidelines often overlap, making it possible for a work to qualify as both hard and soft SF simultaneously. Thus, scholars have attempted to define them more accurately. Allen Steele, for instance, defined hard SF as “the form of imaginative literature that uses either established or carefully extrapolated science as its backbone.” (4) Meanwhile, Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction offers two complementary definitions of soft SF; first, as fiction emphasizing the social science and focusing on societal, cultural, or political development rather than natural science and technology; second, as SF where scientific elements serve as the background rather than central focus (Prucher 191). Nevertheless, in practice, many SF narratives still contain elements of both categories, challenging this binary classification.
Dune as a Case Study of Classification Tension
A prime example of the hard and soft debate is Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), a novel that defies simple categorizations and illustrates the limits of binary classification. Dune can be credibly placed in either category, leading to debate over its hard or soft classification. Examining how scholars justify each side, we can see how such rigid distinctions often fail to rigorously and objectively define SF works.
Many scholars argue that Dune contains strong elements of hard SF. John W. Campbell, the editor of Analog Science Fiction and Fact, where Dune was originally published, specifically referred to it as “hard science-fiction worked out in meticulous detail.” (592–3) In speaking of Villeneuve’s 2021 film adaptation, Burgett argues that it is much harder and more grounded than most other SF films. Their justifications are particularly adapted from Dune’s ecologically grounded world-building and plausible technologies. Frank Herbert’s detailed explanation of Arrakis’s water cycle, sandworms’ biology, and desert climate reflects scientific realism. Gerald Jonas noted that Herbert “so completely worked out the interactions of man and beast and geography and climate,” that Dune became the standard for ecological SF. While some may argue that ecology belongs to the soft sciences, proponents of the hard SF justify its classification using Herbert’s logical consistency from real environmental science. In addition, the technologies in Dune, while not heavily described, also reflect real scientific concepts. Devices like stillsuits that recycle water and ornithopters that mimic bird flight are theoretically possible to create (Kennedy). Thus, Herbert’s attention to scientific possibilities in his setting is a crucial justification. Altogether, these elements provide strong arguments for critics and readers who believe Dune is a valid candidate for hard SF.
On the other hand, many scholars believe that Dune is a soft SF work by definition, not primarily because it lacks scientific detail, but because it focuses more on social, cultural, and psychological exploration. For example, Xu Tengyue explicitly analyzes Villeneuve’s Dune as an example of a “soft science fiction film,” noting that soft SF film “pays more attention to the expression of human values and story lines” rather than elaborate special effects or technical applications (82). In other words, Dune emphasizes “soft” science (anthropology, sociology, psychology, political science, ecology) over the “hard” sciences like physics (Kennedy). Soft SF deals directly or indirectly with anthropology, ecology, psychology, and sociology (Nicholls). By this criterion, Dune fits the soft SF genre. Moreover, its plot centers on culture (the Fremen society), politics (imperial and feudal power struggles), religion (Messianic prophecy and mythmaking), and psychology (Paul’s mental training and prescient visions). Additionally, some argue that the deliberate suppression of science in Dune makes it soft SF. Herbert does introduce devices such as stillsuits and ornithopters, technologies grounded in plausible engineering. However, his deliberate omission of computers, robots, and artificial intelligence reflects a larger thematic purpose: to emphasize human evolution, religious myth, and political systems over technical advancement. By intentionally downplaying certain advanced technology, he focused on the essence of humanity. These approaches align with soft SF, offering strong arguments on the side of the debate that supports Dune’s soft classification.
This debate over Dune reveals a deeper issue: hard and soft classification often reflects personal interpretation more than objective analysis. It highlights its fundamental inability to rigidly classify any work of SF. Whether labeled hard or soft SF depends largely on which elements a critic chooses to emphasize. To justify their argument in this debate, the interpreters spend a great deal of time finding and analyzing the scientific connection, which is not the primary focus of SF.
Examining SF’s Focus in Global Contexts: Western and Chinese SF Evolution
Overemphasizing the hard and soft debate often leads critics to hyper-fixate on a work’s scientific accuracy. However, solely integrating science into fiction has never been the primary focus of SF. Instead, its primary focus lies in its potential to address broad social, ethical, and philosophical questions. To understand these deeper focuses, we better step back from rigid classification and examine how SF has developed across different cultural contexts. A comprehensive examination cannot focus solely on Western SF works such as Frankenstein, The Foundation series, and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Although Western SF is fundamental to the genre, there are other major players in the larger world of SF. Chinese SF is one of these significant contributors. Liu Cixin’s novel The Three‑Body Problem (2008; Eng. trans. 2014) and his novella The Wandering Earth (2000; film adaptation 2019) have both achieved international acclaim. Shaped by distinct political, economic, and cultural histories, Western and Chinese SF provide broader and unique insights into the primary focus of SF through a holistic analysis.
Starting with Western SF, it is widely believed that Western SF emerged with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), which used scientific curiosity to examine the ethical and moral dilemmas of its time (Ellis 27). In the late 19th century, the genre expanded with Jules Verne’s adventurous voyages and H.G. Wells’s cautionary tales, which both integrated new scientific ideas with speculation, but Verne leaned toward scientific fantasies while Wells leaned toward scientific romances (Ege 93). Entering the early to mid-20th century, the so-called “Golden Age of SF” had authors like Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, whose works not only entertained but also reflected contemporary issues and ideas related to scientific progress. Nowadays, SF books and films vary greatly in topics and settings, addressing complex societal, environmental, and technological issues. Its greater flexibility in world-setting and range of topics reaches a larger audience. Throughout these periods, Western SF evolved not merely to speculate on technological advancements, but to reflect contemporary messages and issues.
Besides Western SF, in Raphals’s deep study, Chinese SF development can be generalized into three distinct phases: the utopian phase in the late Qing dynasty; the pedagogical phase in the 1950s; and the speculative phase since 1989 (82). The utopian phase began with the translation of Western literature and the sparking of innovative thought among the populations instead of having captive minds. The scholars proposed that mass translations would help spread advanced Western knowledge into China (82). Additionally, some representative indigenous SF works, for example, Liang Qichao’s Future of New China, commonly involved the prediction of China having a bright future after adopting science (83). The formation of the pedagogical phase aligns with the founding of the People’s Republic of China (1949). Here, SF’s main role was to promote and cement the ideas of Marxism and Maoism, shaping the population’s ideology (Raphal 84). In this phase, SF was integrated into education, which is the most effective approach to control and shape ideology. Lastly, the phase currently ongoing, the speculative phase, began the year of the Tiananmen Square massacre, 1989 (85). The restrictions on speculative literature were eased by the government, allowing a flowering of Chinese SF that directly grappled with the legacy of the Cultural Revolution. This phase answered the rapid technological growth, greater openness, and the evolution of public thought. Across all the phases, Chinese SF has been a mirror of the nation’s ideological shifts and social anxieties.
SF as a Medium for Message, Not Just Method
Examining the evolution of SF across both Western and Chinese contexts reveals a consistent pattern: SF has always assumed multiple unspoken roles, such as conveying messages, examining dilemmas, and critiquing ideology. While scientific concepts provide the framework, they do not have to be the message itself. Instead, they serve as a platform upon which the deeper messages are built. Thus, SF’s focus is on utilizing scientific concepts as a gateway to explore deeper societal and philosophical questions, often imagined through future worlds. This broader function of SF is what critics overlook when they fixate solely on hard or soft classification.
In the case of Dune, the argument about its classification as hard or soft obscures its deeper literary value. The excessive focus on the debate over its binary identification can overlook the work’s rich exploration of themes like political corruption, religious manipulation, and messianic power. These messages are the primary focus and crucial to its literary value. However, they could not be spotlighted while solely focusing on the narrative’s scientific connection.
When Labels Limit: Cognitive Heuristics and Reader Bias
The debate over Dune is just an example. Similar debates emerge whenever a popular SF work is released, which reflects a broader cognitive tendency to simplify complex information. The frequent use of hard and soft labels in marketing and reviews of SF has led many critics and fans to support keeping and promoting this distinction in SF. They argue that the binary labels encourage more audiences who lack deep knowledge in SF to step into this field. The human brain tends to break down complicated and multifactorial entities or problems into a few numbers of ramifications to generalize and make it easier to understand. When presented with only two clear options, as with the binary classification of hard versus soft SF, our brains can more easily process and understand the information, analogous to the binary 0 and 1 mechanism in computer science. This quick and straightforward determination is also called the one-reason decision-making heuristic. This heuristic shows that by focusing on a single, decisive cue rather than an exhaustive set of details, individuals can achieve surprisingly accurate judgments quickly and with minimal cognitive load. As Todd and Gigerenzer argue, heuristics, some in particular, produce accurate decisions by exploiting the structure of applied information and environment (167). Consequently, using a broad, easily digestible label invites non-experts into the field by applying our natural tendency to reduce complex information into clear categories.
In fact, the use of heuristics in SF criticism does make SF more accessible and appealing to a broad audience to some degree. However, it not only generates simplicity and popularity but also preconceived notions or bias. In their influential study, Tversky and Kahneman illustrate that people often rely on heuristics, such as the representativeness heuristic, to make judgements, even when they lead to “systematic and predictable errors” (1131). In terms of SF, that means once a reader or viewer approaches a work with a preconceived perspective that it is either hard or soft, they are more likely to unconsciously focus on the elements that confirm their assumption. As a result, they might overlook other significant elements that are against their assumption, leading to an incomplete and biased interpretation.
Thematic Depth and Real-World Influence in SF
In practice, authors generally do not begin the creative process with a determined intention of making a work that strictly adheres to one sub-genre over the other; instead, they weave together various ideas, techniques, and influences that challenge binary categorization. Like all literature, SF is built on complex narratives, themes, and elements, and rarely do all aspects of a SF work align perfectly within the confines of either hard or soft. This reality makes the argument that justifies a SF work being classified as hard or soft problematic, as it tends to selectively extract supporting elements from throughout the book or film. Therefore, when critics or readers rely solely on these binary classifications, they lack an overview of the work’s whole picture. It ultimately compromises the possibility of a holistic, objective review, which then causes bias and distorted interpretation.
Therefore, rather than sticking with rigid labels, SF criticism should shift toward evaluating the themes, messages, and real-world impact of these works. We can see some of the ideal approaches that have been made while reviewing famous SF works like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series and Liu Cixin’s TheDark Forest (sequel to The Three-Body Problem). Through their comprehensive analysis, we can see the valuable insights it brings.
Specifically, both have conveyed profound messages and challenged readers’ understanding. For instance, in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, science serves as the framework for exploring the rise and fall of civilizations through the emergence of psychohistory, a kind of mathematical sociology. Here, the scientific elements are not the core focus; they are the platform that supports challenging questions about human destiny and social organization. Similarly, Liu Cixin’s TheDark Forest uses complex scientific theories and the vastness of space to showcase humanity’s vulnerability, existential risks, and the consequences of our technological development. Importantly, he proposes a hypothesis among universal civilizations—the Dark Forest hypothesis. In both examples, the quality of science, whether perceived as strong or weak, is subordinate to the larger narrative. Psychohistory and the Dark Forest hypothesis represent two notions in SF theorizing by Asimov and Liu, respectively. Psychohistory is Asimov’s purely fictional mathematical system, while the Dark Forest hypothesis, though dramatized by Liu, reflects real scientific speculation about the Fermi Paradox. However, both authors demonstrate the logical consistency of these concepts within their created, reality-analogous worlds. These theories—one fictional, one speculative—challenge readers’ understanding of society and science and offer provocative predictions about humanity’s future.
Another crucial criterion for SF criticism is examining works’ capacity to indirectly bring influential impacts to reality. Kevin L. Young and Charli Carpenter investigated whether and how popular SF media influence public attitudes toward emerging military technologies, specifically autonomous weapon systems (AWS). Individuals who report higher consumption of SF—measured by the number of iconic killer-robot franchises they have viewed—are significantly more likely to oppose the development and deployment of AWS (573). The direct impact SF has brought into the world is just a mere example of how imaginative narratives can shape reality.
Conclusion: Toward a More Holistic SF Criticism
If SF criticism consistently centered on the purposes that have been presented above, Foundation, The Dark Forest, and SF’s impact on the public opinion about AWS, then the authors’ creative intentions could be more accurately understood and appreciated. This shift not only reduces misinterpretation caused by the rigid hard and soft classification but also creates a more dynamic and meaningful environment in SF. While the binary classification may serve as a helpful guideline when used for relative comparison, it must not overshadow the SF’s larger literary and philosophical contributions. Encouraging such an evaluative approach would push the authors to produce more thoughtful and thematically rich SF works, which focus well on the primary focus and unspoken rules. It could ultimately push the SF community to grow more receptive to diverse voices and exploration, promoting the genre’s continued evolution.
WORKS CITED
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Enze Shi is a researcher who focuses on science fiction, translational, and outcomes research. Being an immigrant from China, both Chinese culture and Western culture had a significant influence on his academic and personal growth. Integrating the perspectives and contributions of both Chinese and Western SF allows him to bring notions with novel approaches. Shi is a student of the Texas Academy of Mathematics and Science at the University of North Texas. There, he conducts chemistry research and is involved in Chinese philosophy classes, being active in both STEM and humanities fields.
Monotheistic Ethics in Caprica: AI, Governance, and Queer Futurity
Nathan Lamarche
It doesn’t concern you sister, that kind of absolutist view of the universe? Right and wrong determined solely by a single all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgement cannot be questioned, and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal? (Caprica, “Pilot”)
This is the question asked in the pilot episode of Caprica, the prequel to Battlestar Galactica that depicts both the emergence of sentient artificial intelligence and the cultural conflict between polytheistic and monotheistic structures of belief and moral values. Detective Duram, a man devoutly committed to the polytheistic status quo, stands theistically opposed to Sister Clarice, the headmistress of the Athenian Academy. Clarice portrays herself publicly as polytheistic, yet secretly leads a cell of the Soldiers of the One, the militarised terrorism branch of the monotheistic church of the colonies, zealots responsible for the recent bombing of a train. It is with irony that shortly after this, he tells her “Know your enemy,” and she echoes back, “Love your enemy, Agent Duram. That is what we followers of Athena believe” (“Pilot”). This black-and-white commentary on a monotheistic system of ethics mirrors real-world criticism of religion’s treatment of queer communities. Abram Brummett, in his paper on queer reproductive rights and access to assisted reproductive technologies, argues that “conscience claims against LGBT individuals ought to be constrained because the underlying metaphysic—that God has decreed the LGBT lifestyle to be sinful—is highly implausible” (272). The Soldiers of the One also use similar illogical justifications, these same conscious claims, for their acts of terror. As Brummett notes, and as we can see in the current global political climate, queer communities face oppression as a result of these “conscience claims,” with some clinics in the United States using overt policies or subtle methods for limiting access to reproductive healthcare on moral grounds (273). There are also growing political threats to queer rights (Moreau). Which decisions require moral justification to enact? Who decides what’s right and what’s wrong? Who opts to restrict queer rights? What systems might humanity use to make those decisions tomorrow?
The AI machines—cylons—in Caprica and Battlestar Galactica carry a code of ethics that positions a right and a wrong, an objective good and evil, and in Battlestar Galactica, this code of ethics in service of their god is used to justify a surprise attack that results in the near-total annihilation of the human race. As it turns out, Agent Duram was fundamentally correct in his aforementioned assessment of dichotomous ethics. The actions taken by the cylons over the course of Battlestar Galactica mirror modern colonial oppressive regimes, and those same black and white codes of dichotomous ethics are used to justify or excuse their actions. At one point in the series, the cylons decide, entirely without remorse, that the genocide was a mistake, sorry! Our bad, oopsies. Well, no harm done, and that it would be just the best idea, really, to live with the humans on a planet called New Caprica, that the humans had believed would be a refuge from the machines. The cylons trespass on this new world, impose their own system of law and order, strip the colonised humans of their rights, abduct and detain or execute dissidents, and commit countless horrific acts in the name of living together in harmony (“Lay Down Your Burdens,” “Occupation”). Colonisation is the antithesis of queer identity and freedom, both fictitiously and in practice. Conversations converging Native studies and queer theory, for instance, recognise the persistence of heteropatriarchal structures wrought by colonialist regimes imposing a disappearance not only on Indigenous peoples, but on queer peoples as well, and that the queering of decolonisation is an essential step in having such conversations (See Smith; Morgensen 2010; Morgensen 2016; Abu-Assab and Eddin).
This discourse of erasure and the paralleled movement in popular society to promote queer rights and pride movements in opposition to the status quo of heteronormativity conforms to the theory of queer futurity, that queerness is a being rather than merely a doing, and the horizon is ever-onwards (Muñoz). And yet, the other side of the coin also remains true. With every step forward, the tide of oppression carries us back. Colonisation is intrinsic, pervasive, and fundamental to the very core of our society, just as the cylon pursuit is fundamental and intrinsic to the lives of the humans in Battlestar Galactica, post-genocide. The values our world holds against queerness are that of invisibility. As with Indigeneity, society wants it gone, out of sight, in a place where it can be ignored and shunned. The claim so often made, that “I don’t care what you do, as long as it’s not in my face,” reflects societal values. How many advertisements use sexual appeal as a selling point? Heteronormativity as a default state, by its very nature, suppresses the existence of queernormativity. It is a deep, ingrained concept even in queer communities, both at the institutional and social level (Van der Toorn et al.). It isn’t necessarily that someone is at fault, nor committing wilful acts of anti-queering, but the message is so deep, so institutionalised through customs and social norms, that this outcome is inevitable, embedded at the subconscious social level (Rafanell and Gorringe).
We must consider an important point: who are the people working to develop AI? The majority are extremely well educated and well paid, with positions across all fields at Open AI, for example, easily earning hundreds of thousands to millions in annual salaries in 2024 (Levels.Fyi). What ratio of developers are queer? How many are Indigenous? Black? Asian? How many are women? How many come from countries not considered part of “the West”? We have innate biases, and AI draws from our instructions, our experiences, our words, and draws from the data fed to it, which is mostly from western English sources and includes societal biases. Thus, the information going into AI is biased information, which makes AI biased in turn. And when we’re coding in how AI should act and react based on various ethical standards, those ethical standards are innately biased because we have certain conceptions of ethics that are not necessarily universal. For instance, there are big differences based on where you are on the planet as to whether marrying your first cousin is socially acceptable. Likewise, and more relevant here, whether homosexuality is deemed morally wrong.
As Damien Patrick Williams puts it, “We must continually ask, who is in the room when we make the decisions that influence, shape, or even determine research directions”? (251–52) These questions are essential for shaping our future reality. Algorithms are inherently neutral. They lack the capacity for ethical considerations. Those considerations instead rest with us and how we design AI, and in turn, which of us are responsible for creating that AI. The perspectives present when the people in positions of power make decisions about how to implement AI are the same perspectives that have created persistent harm in our society; they will create harm again, with or without this new system.
In Battlestar Galactica, the outsourcing of public power away from human beings and towards the cylons on New Caprica, where the cylons and their perspectives become synonymous with the law, creates a violated space devoid of human-centric rights and legal systems. Everything becomes black and white in this world. A human insurgency comes into motion, but instead of re-evaluating the merit of the system and the ethics of the very presence of the cylons, the insurgency is instantly deemed to be evil. Even the families of insurgents, even those simply associated with insurgents, are put on a list for execution. The invasion of the cylons is not merely an occupying force, it is a system of justice and law that bypasses human moderation. The power of decision making is taken out of their hands.
The parallel drawn here between the cylon occupation of New Caprica and our situation in the current political landscape is again not merely one of plutocratic or late-stage capitalist structures. Artificial Intelligence threatens the limited level of control we do have in that system. The exact same outsourcing of queer power to a heteronormative society also deprives queer rights. This is where Detective Duram’s observations hit so strongly. Not only were the cylons originally created in Caprica, the first sentient AI is modelled identically to her creator, a victim of the train bombing. She retains her creator’s personality, emotional ties, expressions, and innate biases, including religious beliefs. Imposing our own subconscious biases on AI will result in a regime, a new human age that will result in an “AI Empire” built on the very foundations of oppression. To avoid this reproduction, we must redevelop from the ground-up, starting with our core philosophies and innate assumptions surrounding its conception (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian). Yet, “Even the most thoughtful and thoroughgoing intervention cannot come close to confronting its deep roots” (Tacheva and Ramasubramanian 10), which are based in subconscious oppression. Proposed approaches to improved AI developmental ethics include training, policy writing, and the consideration of potential world impact (Xivuri and Twinomurinzi), but fall short in diversifying hiring practices and incorporating underrepresented codes of ethics. What happens when an oppressive regime backed by religious connotations of sin decides to use AI to maliciously pursue queer communities? What happens when an individual, organisation, or nation opts to create AI for just this exact purpose?
Outsourcing our public power away from human beings would result in a violation of our rights and legal systems (Liu et al.). Isherwood notes that “queer theology with its postmodern roots asks us to distrust any master narrative” (1349), and in this case, the master narrative is not of a divine being, but of a machine god, a purveyor of all our deepest and darkest secrets, our flaws and biases. The development of AI itself creates a master narrative. Just as the narrative in Caprica (2010) parallels monotheistic ethics that ultimately justify a cylon genocide against humanity, we must be cautious of single-minded codes of morality in the directional development of AI, where lacking developer diversity results in narrow world views, creating a risk of disproportionate impact on queer communities. A single woman’s avatar formed the framework of Caprica’s cylons and their eventual extermination of the human race. Developer homogeneity creates a disproportionate risk, especially in harm to queer communities, who see impact and oppression no matter their origin. Suggested approaches to AI ethics (Xivuri and Twinomurinzi) fail to address diversity hiring and foundational philosophical shortcomings.
Schneider’s book, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity notes the archaic nature of a monotheistic code of ethics as applied to AI development. When modern legal and social battles have us fighting for queer rights, the problem lies in our perceptions of AI ethics. We are quite concerned with whether or not depictions of a human-machine war would kill us all off, and not anywhere near concerned enough with whether AI could impose a perpetual “status quo,” where the only thing that might change it is the will of the ruling class and the decisions made by the individuals with the wealth and power to do so. This is not limited to the ruling class. AI is already capable of profiling, and algorithmic frameworks are used to categorise who deserves or needs help and who doesn’t (Williams). Schneider notes the archaic nature of an anti-queer code of ethics, yet those ethics still form the blood and bone of society.
AI will one day soon even be capable of the distribution of judgment based on its own concepts of sin, inherited by subconscious oppression. Non-AI automated systems of justice are already here, such as Alberta’s Provincial Administrative Penalties Act, (s 16(1), s 18(4)), where legal reviews are held remotely and are not bound by evidence checks. Automated justice forecasts a future where AI is not only involved, but a leader and central figure in these decisions. It’s already being used in some parts of the world (Ulenaers). How long before we let it write legal policies that could have a direct impact on queer freedom? Look at the governance by the cylons on New Caprica, or Canada and the United States blatantly ignoring treaties made with Indigenous peoples. These are systems of governance influenced by colonisation. A government with AI influence would be perpetual, an embedded toxin that we can’t address or convince otherwise. It would be one with dichotomous ethics, the same monotheistic concepts of objective good and evil critiqued in Caprica. Who determines right from wrong? What happens when AI is used as a tool of oppression by groups with pre-conceived notions of sin?
What we might deem extremist, like the terrorist train bombing in Caprica, could be justified through a certain lens as morally correct. This notion of extremism as distinct from terrorism, as a form of morally correct activism, is subjective, but shall we consider air travel for a moment? Random pat-down searches are invasive to queer travellers, both for gender minorities and differing sexual orientations that may have what a heteronormative society deems an unconventional preference for which gender ought to conduct the pat-down. Yet, these pat-downs are justified for matters of safety. Okay, security matters. That’s what the cylons insisted on New Caprica. Arrest the insurgents, put them in camps, that will promote security! Humans are dying in these attacks, too, you know, not just the machines. Cai Wilkinson analyses the lie of queer security, a truth that escapes heteronormative society, saying that “Public bathrooms continue the logic of national borders, with gender policing central to ensuring that only the ‘right’ people enter” (97). Yet, even despite health and privacy concerns (Mehta and Smith-Bindman), safety is apparently essential enough to revoke basic rights and freedoms. That’s the cylon argument as well. The human insurgency put everyone at risk, so detain any suspects in its involvement or affiliation. So, what do we do in real life, in a post-9/11 world? Technology creates the next step towards a supposedly idealised airport security, with metal detectors and scanners. Airports are being equipped at an increasing rate with full body-scanning technology that can detect genitalia through clothing (Elias). In the system’s current implementation, security agents push a button and pick a colour, either blue or pink depending on a brief visual assumption of the traveller’s sex. If the scanner’s expectations of genitalia are not met, it sounds the alarm (Waldron). Those genitals over there have violated airport safety! Or you could always choose the pat down. Which bodily invasion are you signing up for today? Privacy is not a concept we can simply dismiss in this discussion, especially where AI is concerned, but for the sake of brevity, let’s move to the next logical step in our current political atmosphere, the “tomorrow” of this technology. We care about security, right? Acceptability is shaped by our perceptions of safety. A machine would not expect to see threateningly thick hair (Medina). Where else can these scanners go? Oh, AI can tell us. The optimal locations. Banks, sure. Government buildings. Trade centres. Key points of infrastructure.
And queer freedom dies. Bodies on full display, detectable anywhere you go. This implementation, at some point, stops being about merely security, and becomes more about power consolidation (Magnet and Rodgers), and the presence of that power is invisible to most of us, buried in our subconscious. The cylons on New Caprica use their systems of justice to enforce their will, not only their measure of security. Even in attempts to use AI to fight against corruption may lead to new avenues of corruption in turn. Kobis et al. analyse this, noting that “algorithms never operate in a vacuum but are embedded in socio-institutional contexts,” and while bottom-up AI anti-corruption tools can exist, such an approach must be done in keeping with a society adequately prepared for it, and especially in cases of societies where corruption is the default rather than the exception, “top–down AI-based anti-corruption tools can be misappropriated by governments to enhance digital surveillance, suppress opposition and undermine democratic liberties” (Köbis et al.). On New Caprica, the cylons act to corrupt the human system in order to impose their will, and in doing so, act as the default system. In this context, the situation is different from what we might see in the real world; the cylons are also very literally one and the same as the artificial intelligence. And yet, the manipulation of the system is the critical point. The cylons in this case, despite being an artificial intelligence, act more symbolically of the issue of AI in a totalitarian state, rather than a mere literal representation. The more surveillance, the more power. As one of them suggests as a response to the insurgency, “we round up the leaders of the insurgency, and we execute them—publicly. We round up at random groups off the street, and we execute them—publicly. Send a message that the gloves are coming off” (Battlestar Galactica, “Occupation”). After a suicide bombing, they realise that increased control is still needed: “we have a very serious, very straightforward problem; either we increase control or we lose control. That’s a fact” (“Precipice”). Every action, every reaction, is seen as black and white, where the only world that exists is maintaining the world’s status quo, enforced by the visionaries of the current world.
This is not fearmongering; we can see similar situations happening now, in the United States especially. Unfortunately, this paper would not be complete without addressing the human rights violations occurring against queer people in the United States. This discussion cannot be limited in whole to queer rights, as the same issues with dichotomous ethics apply to treatment towards other minority, underserved, and sensitive communities, including a presidential executive order to revoke birthright citizenship (United States, Protecting The Meaning And Value Of American Citizenship), and another to send deportees to a detention centre capable of holding up to 30,000 people (Chao-Fong and Phillips), something eerily reminiscent of Dachau. The changes being implemented refer to concrete definitions for genders, and it is likely that transgender rights are merely the beginning. The suspension of trans people’s passport applications are one indication of further widespread change and impact, as without legal recognition of gender markers on already valid passports for trans American emigrants, and the disruption of those applications, access is far more difficult and restrictive through a lack of proper documentation (Wood), and even trans Canadian travellers face uncertainty in border crossings (Major). In one notable US executive order, the sitting president went so far as to declare that transgender people’s assertion of their identity was “not consistent with the humility and selflessness required of a service member,” and further questioned the integrity and honesty of trans people, along with other relevant qualities, and named that identity “radical gender ideology” (United States, Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness; Lamothe et al.). To question such traits is to question their very fundamental worth and essential humanity; it is not simply akin to, it is a direct degradation of transgender people from human to sub-human by declaring their very identity as compromising to moral values. This order calls into question their very right to exist with dignity and autonomy. The intent is to persecute any dissident opinions, to fire federal employees who fail to support the regime or dare to investigate its leadership, and to purge the concepts of freedoms of speech and expression, to pursue political opponents with military tribunals, to jail election workers, private citizens, and journalists for news networks who refuse to divulge sources or who criticise the president (“Trump’s Enemies List;” “Trump Administration Fires Justice Department Officials Who Investigated Him”).
The issues arising through these dichotomous concepts of “truth” are numerous, and they do not end at traditional concerns over basic human rights and freedoms. In this paper, I have mentioned monotheistic concepts of ethics, and it is important here to call on a very important distinction: this is no criticism of faith. The opinions, faiths, and other beliefs of individuals with regard to religion are not the focus of this argument. Rather, this focus lies on the institutions that have treated religion as a scapegoat and used it as a tool of permission to abuse and exploit the people. State-sanctioned declarations against sodomy, against gender identity, against race and differing religions, these are no longer a warning, a perpetual controversy; they are here. Everything from this moment on, the DEI crisis, the attacks on immigrants, the detention centres, the closing of borders, etc.—these are all the direct display of fascist, monotheistic authoritarianism in the United States. The religious beliefs themselves are not the problem with monotheistic ethics. When Bishop Budde spoke out at the president’s inauguration, for example, to call for mercy for both immigrants and queer people who fear for their lives, she was met with some calling her a part of the radical left, and some even wishing her dead (Bennett). Because she called for mercy. Still, despite religious figures standing in opposition to these changes, the anti-queer laws implemented use arguments of religious structures, regardless of their true intent and origin.
The institutions of religion have, through politics, enabled frightening changes to governance already, and in the midst of this, a government led by the richest people in the richest country in the world has pledged half a trillion dollars to fund artificial intelligence research (Jacobs). How long before that funding is reflected in AI models through new “truth” policies and regulations, with regulated opinions that hold discriminatory values?
If our society contains subconscious biases and restricts queer rights (as it seems evident that it does), and if our biases are passed on to generative artificial intelligence, and if it/they will one day write our policies, police our streets, determine our healthcare access, and judge us in courtrooms… at what point do we realise that the ruling class will no longer be a collective of human beings? With the new political directions across the world, it may not be even subconscious bias, but an ideological imperative imposed upon us by an oligarchy that has found a method of permitting perpetual power. Caprica and Battlestar Galactica embody a colonially oppressive regime that mirrors real life, but this isn’t a regime we can fight and overcome. This is an algorithmic one, which can be programmed to think and do precisely what its creators or controllers want it to. Queer rights today exist for as long as we fight for them to exist. Queer rights tomorrow face an existential threat. How long will it be before the people already saying that “god says your identity is sinful” dictate their beliefs through their power to command AI to carry out a colonised disappearance? How long will it be before a government or ruling elite decides that some events should be wiped from history and ordains that decision through AI? It would be better to rephrase—how long before a Western government decides to do what China has already done with DeepSeek, denying the events of Tiananmen Square (McCarthy)? This is a warning of the oppressive power of AI’s ability to control information, and how easily it can be done by simply declaring an objective “truth.”
Caprica’s cylons operate at more complex levels of coding than our level of technology can muster. At our level of technology, AI is black and white. There is no empathy. No nuance. No understanding. Only an illusion of it, generated to please the status quo, the algorithm generator, and brought to you by our own inner failings. So, do we trust ourselves? Not the version of ourselves that we aspire to be, but the version that we are, the cold, hard reality of the situation. Even if we had the technology for nuance and empathy, this is still a machine, one controlled by humanity, and we have proven ourselves rather adept at manipulating each other and the masses through propaganda, disinformation, and rage. What is the god defined in Caprica but an entity of command? Not a divine being; the belief may exist, but the influence that comes not from that belief, but the control of that belief is what such a deity represents. This divine being is distinct from “god” as a symbol of worship and morality, that all-powerful being with infallible and unquestionable moral ideals.
When speaking to Galen Tyrol, Cavil, a cylon and the primary antagonist of Battlestar Galactica, comments on the futility of prayer, calling it “chanting and singing and mucking about with old half-remembered lines of bad poetry. And you know what it gets you? Exactly nothing.” He further remarks that “I’ve learned enough to know that the gods don’t answer prayers” (Battlestar Galactica “Lay Down Your Burdens, Part 1”). The gods, or god, in this case, are all irrelevant. Prayers are therefore meaningless, because this is not a discussion of faith. This is not about an innate criticism of any religious god, but rather about how god exists in our society, how divine dichotomous truth is represented in our legal, moral, and social frameworks. Religion offers ethics when we don’t have the answers, but it’s not religion that codes those ethics into our society and legal structures. Can we be expected to always know what to do, to always recognise right from wrong? What about our politicians, and others in the oligarchal order who derive greater incentive to ignore morality and prioritise their own gain? AI offers a path to moral recognition, tainted by both an intrinsic limitation of its coding and a flawed human filter. What makes ethical sense is not a factor here, because AI takes its data from our innate beliefs and biases, from our perceptions of right and wrong, not from any sort of divine objective truth. Even without intentional influence, the data it gathers and uses is data originally written by us and our biases. Does it concern us? To have right and wrong be determined solely by an all-knowing, all-powerful being whose judgement cannot be questioned, and in whose name the most horrendous of acts can be sanctioned without appeal? Is Caprica a warning of AI’s relationship with our internal biases? So the question I offer today is a simple one: are we building a god?
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Nathan Lamarche is a first year Master of Arts in English student at the University of Alberta, a creative writer, and the Associate Vice President of Labour of the institution’s Graduate Student Association. Their thesis concerns the impact of artificial intelligence and its potential manipulation on social relationships and institutional infrastructures through deceit, artificial empathy, and information control. Their future research will delve into domestic national security policies and international relations and treaties concerning GenAI. Their other areas of research interest lie in rhetoric and composition theory, storytelling, accessibility in academic writing, labour laws and movements, queer theory, neurodivergent communication, and Indigenous literature. When not at the university, you can probably find them buried deep in the mountains backcountry hiking, cooking very strange meals, or deeply immersed in a book. The majority of this paper was originally written for and presented at The Ninth Annual City Tech Science Fiction Symposium on Science Fiction, Artificial Intelligence, and Generative AI on 10 December 2024.
Thirty Years Later: Sacred Scripture, Ghost in The Shell, and Our Lady of Perpetual Cyberpunk
Despite its initial commercial underperformance and lukewarm critical reception, Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost in the Shell (1995) experienced a cult renaissance in the years following its release due to home video sales. It made a hard connection with a highly influential group of filmmakers such as the Wachowski Sisters, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron, who publicly described Oshii’s film in The Guardian as “a stunning work of speculative fiction . . . the first to reach a level of literary excellence” (Rose). The interest in Oshii’s film has not waned as a live-action remake of Ghost in the Shell was released in 2017, and a 4K limited rerelease ran in select IMAX theaters in the U.S. in 2021. In addition to its paradoxical use of cyberpunk trappings to tell a story that resists the usually grim outlook of technological proliferation within the genre, Oshii makes use of uniquely Western Christian archetypes for meaning and metaphor rather than spectacle, as is the usual norm in anime. Oshii’s visual symbols are often religious and distinct from the use of Christian symbols in contemporary works such as Neon Genesis Evangelion (1995–96, Shinseiki Evangerion) which serves no authentic story-telling purpose as Brian Ruh argues in Stray Dog of Anime (54-55). However, the usual interpretation of the film, and perhaps even an interpretation through a Christian framework, falls short of describing the fullness of Oshii’s use of the Christian mythos in Ghost in the Shell. To interpret Oshii’s symbolism as solely Christian is too broad a description for there is a denominational distinction becausewithin that overarching Christian framework, exist older and more telling motifs, the severity and specificity of which can only be described as uniquely Catholic. Oshii employs these Christian and specifically Catholic symbols, as this paper will how, to explore the near-universal desire for evolution, transcendence, and, ultimately, some semblance of an answer to the eternal questions.
Neon Genesis Evangelion is a contemporary to Ghost in the Shell due to its release date and overlap in genre. Neon Genesis Evangelion also uses Christian symbolism, biblical allusions, elements of Shintoism, Judaism, and even creature names such as “Adam” as parts of a universe in order to create an entertaining, high-fantasy mythos. Ghost in the Shell goes much further in developing these motifs by embracing a singular Catholic vision as the central theme and metaphor in a speculative cyberpunk universe. This metaphor serves to sustain Oshii’s argument for the redemptive and even divine qualities of technology as a forceful contrast to the fundamental cynicism of the cyberpunk and tech-noire genres.
Certain Catholic rather than simply Christian clues emerge from Oshii’s life that bring clarity to the director’s enigmatic use of religious tools of expression. Richard Suchenski writes in Senses of Cinema that Oshii at one point seriously considered entering a seminary to become a priest. Brian Ruh, meanwhile, maintains that Oshii’s consideration of seminary was only to study religion (8). Oshii himself stated in a 2004 interview: “When I was in college, I was always interested in Christianity and religion… I even thought of transferring to a Christian seminary… It’s really the phenomena created by religion that I’m most interested in, rather than religion itself” (Mays). This fascination permeates Oshii’s body of work. However, a merely Christian reading of a work is too easily perceived as a default Protestant reading to a Western audience whereas one must take into account the flavor of the Christian framework from Oshii, the would-be priest. While the tiny percentage of Japan’s population identifying as Christian is approximately evenly divided between those identifying as Protestant or Catholic, to a Japanese audience, the difference between the two sub-categories is an irrelevancy, argues Ishikawa Akito, Professor of Religion at Momoyama Gakuin University. In the West, however, the distinction between Catholic and Protestant is of grave importance, and the Catholic distinction is critical in Oshii’s Christian framework, especially to an American audience. In the case of Ghost in the Shell, Oshii’s use of Christianity is founded upon a Catholic rather than Protestant reading of the Christian mythos and is employed accordingly in his filmography—a non-distinction for a Japanese audience, as Akito argues, but a serious one for the Western viewer.
The hardboiled skepticism from other 80s and 90s tech-noir media conveys a general caution about humanity’s relationship with technology, but Oshii resists this trend by elevating technology to a divine position through interlacing technology’s place within the Holy Family of Catholic teaching: Jesus, Joseph, and Mary. Oshii employs this trinity of the Holy Family to affirm humanity’s push towards technological advancement and hybridization, as opposed to the “criticism of the extreme enthusiasm of mankind about science and technology” found in Neon Genesis Evangelion and other tech-noir/cyberpunk media (Napier 89). The Catholicism of Ghost in the Shell, therefore, becomes a sustaining metaphor throughout instead of an avant-garde ambiguity; it is not an undeveloped, cross-shaped explosion as spectacle, or a high-fantasy original creature casually named “Adam.” Instead, Oshii uses the Holy Family metaphor to describe the potential divinity of technology in Ghost in the Shell, with Batou as the chaste St. Joseph the Protector, Major Kusanagi as the Virgin Mary, and the Puppetmaster-Kusinagi hybrid as the newborn Messiah. The Messiah’s body serves not only as a representation but is, within the universe of Ghost in the Shell, the nexus of humanity and divinity, the higher order of technology as humanity’s saving grace. Oshii uses the tools of Catholicism in a secular though highly spiritual manner to perpetuate his tradition of “[alluding] to religion to say something deeper about the human condition” (Ruh 55). Ghost in the Shell can be seen as an example of how Japanese content producers use the images and writings of Christianity; for instance, Kusanagi and the Puppetmaster repeat, almost verbatim, in two separate points in the film, the language of Paul the Apostle in 1 Corinthians 13:11-12: “When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put the ways of childhood behind me. For now, we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face.” But it is also a distinctly Catholic work which makes use of the Holy Family of Catholic doctrine and iconography to offer a secular yethopeful image of the future using metaphors typically reserved for the spiritual realm. Despite all the blood and violence (in the film and in the history of Catholicism), the image Oshii produces is an optimistic theory and suggested map of the next stage of human evolution where technology is not only a boon to ease humanity’s temporal suffering but, from the images of descending angels and mysterious recitations of the Epistles, a divine path forward towards apotheosis.
The trinity of the Holy Family of Catholicism is manifest in the three major characters of Ghost in the Shell. First, Major Kusanagi’s chaste nakedness recalls the Virgin Mary, the mother of Christ. Second, Batou fills the role of St. Joseph the Protector in his platonic relationship with Kusanagi. Third, the Christ child at the end of the film, conceived from this higher power, is preceded by the visiting angel, Gabriel (see Fig. 1). It is not the conventional Christian symbolism employed by typical directors; it is instead the intensely violent and bloody Catholic imagery that unlocks these ancient archetypes and makes Ghost in the Shell a counterclaim for the transcendent potential of technology super-imposed upon a grim tech-noir, cyberpunk context.
Fig. 1. Descending Angel from the Major’s perspective (Oshii 1:13:37)
Major Kusanagi’s nakedness functions as fan service on one level, but more importantly, Oshii emphasizes the nudity to convey a statement on sexuality or, in this case, the lack thereof; the Major has no sex organs. The cyborg is drawn seamlessly around the hips. This is not a loophole to bypass Japanese censors. Oshii chooses to make a point of slamming the viewer in the face for the first ten minutes of the movie with a torso with no visible sex organs. However, despite this lack of an opening, and despite the fact that Kusanagi herself states, “I cannot bear children” (1:11:43-44), she is given a full set of breasts. Due to the lack of sex organs, it is reasonable to conclude that the Major is a virgin. One could argue that, if the Major had once been human before receiving her cybernetic body, perhaps she was not a virgin; however, that objection is irrelevant since, in keeping with a Catholic reading, the Major immaculately receives a new body as demonstrated at the beginning of the film (see Fig. 2). A tension also exists within the popular consensus, as reported by fan wikis, that the Major may, in fact, be solely cyborg, her memories of an original body as artificially constructed as the poor ghost-hacked truck driver in the first half of the film. At one point in the film, she even speculates, “Maybe there never was a real me in the first place, and I’m completely synthetic like that thing” (0:42:36-41). The Major’s chaste nakedness in the film contrasts with the almost hyper-sexuality of the Kusanagi of the manga source material, but this departure from source material is a matter of course for Oshii.
The presence of breasts, the means of nursing, in the assassination scene before the beginning credits, contrasted with the lack of exposed sex organs, indicates a being not of carnal sexuality but rather of sexless motherhood like the Virgin Mary; the Major bears the means of nursing but not the gifts of sexual pleasure, sexual union, or procreation in any typical sense. Oshii denies Major Kusanagi even the chance of traditional sexual agency, thus maintaining her virginity. Like Mary, Major’s motherhood is a gift from a higher force; she is meant for union with this higher force of technological divinity because carnal or human sexuality is too base to give birth to the new creature who emerges at the end of the film. Therefore, Kusanagi is equipped with neither the urge nor the ability for sensual pleasure or physical reproduction but a far more substantial motherhood—a divine motherhood explained through the metaphor of high technology.
Fig. 2. The Major’s Cybernetic Body Creation (Oshii 0:06:16)
Major’s consent to the Puppetmaster for a generative union is a parallel to Mary’s Fiat in Luke 1:38: “May it be done to me according to your word.” Susan Napier states that “it is [Kusanagi’s] body, standing at the nexus between the technological and the human, that can best interrogate the issues of the spirit” (107). The vision of technology as not only good but divine in Ghost in the Shell takes up residence in the womb of a cyborg, for in such an affirmation of technology Kusanagi is already connected to this world as Napier’s nexus. This conception manifests the Catholic teaching that the Virgin Mary was without sin before, during, and after the conception of the Messiah through the Marian dogma of the Immaculate Conception. As the nexus, Kusanagi already has a foot in the world of the divine/technological, but this important presence in the world of sinlessness loses meaning for a Protestant Christian framework which is either hostile to or unconcerned with the Marian doctrine of Immaculate Conception and her perpetual virginity: however, it gains momentum when seen from the Catholic perspective. The doctrine of the Immaculate Conception, as promulgated in the 1854 Ineffabilis Deus states that Mary was free from original sin, a teaching rejected by Protestants (Elwell 595-596). Just as Mary was without sin, the Major is “full of grace” and, as Napier’s nexus, simultaneously occupies the divine space of the technological, manifested in the image of the descending angel, as well as the familiar physical space of flesh and blood; Batou says to Kusanagi, “You’ve got human brain cells in that titanium shell of yours” (42:42-45). She is thus uniquely worthy to participate in the birth of the Messiah.
Kusanagi’s own Immaculate Conception at the beginning of the film shows the Major receiving her new body. The Major assumes a fetal position (Fig. 2) within the water-filled womb from which she emerges, taking on the divine technology within and upon her ghost so that she may be ready to accept the gift from on high. Though born into the baseness of flesh, both Major and Mary’s bodies are literally reconstructed in the image of the divine, a technological Imago Dei and, most importantly, without the essential sin that comes with a humanity bound to its flesh. The Major is reborn through the technologically divine intervention of Oshii’s Immaculate Conception—in this case a divinely digital one, and Kusanagi, the nexus, is now ready to carry the seed within her redeemed womb of sacred wires, holy circuits, and metal (Fig. 2).
Batou has a sexual tension with the Major that he does not indulge, even internally. For example, Batou struggles with this tension on screen, as he winces when he sees the Major unzip her dive-suit in the boat (Fig. 3). He turns away in embarrassment while gritting his teeth (Fig. 4), for he is ashamed that he, as St. Joseph, would even consider the Major in a manner outside of her divinely appointed role; even Batou’s eyes are unequipped for carnal desire, being artificial inserts with a range of tactical filters.
Fig. 3. Batou Reacts to the Major Undressing (Oshii 0:29:52–0:29:52)
Fig. 4. Batou Looks Away (Oshii 0:29:53–0:29:54)
Batou is the chaste St. Joseph, the adoptive father of Christ and the protector of the Holy Family in Catholic doctrine. It is Batou, who later arrives with his self-described “standard-issue big gun” (1:06:12-14), who saves the Major from being crushed by a tank. Though this dynamic may appear to be a muted sexism where the damsel must be rescued, it is vital that Batou fulfill this role within the Holy Family as St. Joseph, the Protector. It is Batou who takes the bullet into his own flesh for the Major in the ending scene, giving her more time to do her great work. It is Batou who cares for the new child at the end of the movie, even though the child is not his biological offspring. It is Batou who covers Major Kusanagi’s nakedness when she must shed her clothing during the employment of thermo-optic camouflage (Fig. 5). This chaste feature of Batou parallels St. Joseph’s own story within the Holy Family. St. Joseph’s relationship with Mary and Batou’s relationship with the Major are chaste ones; a feature that separates the Catholic vision of the Holy Family from a Protestant one.
Fig. 5. Batou Covers a Naked Major Kusanagi with His Coat (Oshii 0:24:20)
“The Protector” has been St. Joseph’s role in Catholic tradition since the beginning but became official in 1882 when Pope Leo XIII declared him so. In the Bible, when Herod searches out the children to be killed, Joseph takes Mary and the newborn Christ to Egypt (Mathew 2:16–18); when the Major, the Puppet Master, and the new being they create are likewise ordered to be killed, Batou protects them with his own body (1:13:39), and he leads them away to his hiding place. When Batou has hidden away the Major (and the new child of whom she is part) in his own safe house, it parallels St. Joseph the Protector who “…did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home” without hesitation or objection (Matthew 1:20). Batou takes his place within the Holy Family, acting with an uneasy obedience to this higher force and in agreement with the Fiat of the Major. It is his role to stand by, keep watch, and protect while the Major and this entity from beyond work to redeem the world.
Even more overt than Oshii’s interjection of scriptures is the robed, glowing angel with feathered wings descending from the light near the end of the film (Fig. 1). The vision of the angel in question functions on three levels, but only one of these is complementary to the Holy Family of Roman Catholic doctrine. The first interpretation of the angel’s descent and the accompanying cascade of feathers fits Oshii’s use of Catholic teaching: this otherworldly creature, as a Christian figure, serves effectively as a secular symbol to represent a being of higher order. Its appearance communicates to the audience and to Kusanagi that she is about to make contact with this higher order, and some kind of transcendence is about to occur. A second interpretation, and the one which explains the presence of the child at the end, is that the angel is Gabriel, the messenger angel (Luke 1:26–35). The angel is descending to announce to the Major that she is to conceive a child with the help of a great and otherworldly force. Then, in the following scene, in a hailstorm of bullets, bodies are destroyed and ripped apart in the throes of the labor pangs (Fig. 7). Despite even Batou’s best efforts to shield her (Fig. 8), Major’s body is eventually pierced by the bullets from the helicopters above, just as Mary’s soul was pierced as foretold by St. Simeon in Luke 2:35: “And a sword will pierce your very soul”The helicopters approach bearing modified snipers; when they come into position, the vehicles unfurl the segmented wings of a dragon with glowing red eyes (Fig. 6), the same dragon from Revelation who follows the pregnant virgin into the desert waiting to devour the child at its moment of birth (Revelation 12:2–4).
Fig. 6. Helicopter Unfurls Metallic Wings as Snipers Prepare to Fire (Oshii 1:07:09)
Fig. 7. Major’s Body Is Ripped Apart (Oshii 1:05:25)
Fig. 8. Batou’s Arm Is Shot Off as He Seeks to Protect the Prone Major Kusanagi (Oshii 1:13:39)
Fig. 9. Red Eyes and Tails of the Helicopters (Oshii 1:11:24)
Nearby, the entire hierarchy of evolution leading to “hominis” as the pinnacle form of natural selection is shown on the engraving of the tree (see Fig. 10). It is a tree similar to the one found in Oshii’s Angel’s Egg (1985) with its cross-carrying soldier and retelling of Noah’s Ark, but this tree is riddled with bullet holes from the tank’s auto-cannons, foreshadowing the disturbance of the natural order that must occur, for this next step will not be a linear and incremental natural selection; it is a disruptive leap into the unknown.
Fig. 10. Tree Engraving Shot by Tank (Oshii 1:04:21)
Batou takes the Major away, sparing her the indignity of the incoming soldiers out to fulfill their orders from King Herod. In the following scene, we see the child. This child bears the face of the Major, for indeed, it is appropriate that the savior carries one half of its mother’s DNA. This is the savior with a foot firmly planted in both worlds. It is the Emmanuel whose arrival has been foretold by the descending angel in the film. It is totally singular and made substantial only through the Major’s Fiat; therefore, it bears her face and her voice.
Through these Catholic archetypes, Oshii does not anticipate a slow incrementalism, for his view of the next step of human evolution involves violent, painful birth and perhaps even a savior to emerge in the divine light of unhindered technological pursuit. His bloody and Catholic symbolism is fulfilled and sustained far more than the casual Christian imagery of a Protestant nature. However, Oshii’s Catholic framework does not serve as one-to-one allegory for the purpose of religious evangelism. Rather, its purpose is that of technological evangelism; the film makes use of the deeply held preexisting Catholic archetypes to convey the image of the next stage of human evolution. It will happen all at once, and it will be the most destructive force of our creative potential. Oshii affirms this new creation, despite the death and pain of metamorphosis, as the new creature asks aloud to itself, “And where does the newborn go from here? The net is vast and infinite” (1:17:35–42).
Oshii does not draw a traditionally Catholic conclusion in his Platonic journey from the Cave; this “net” is not Heaven. As Napier argues, it is “a reference not only to cyberspace but to a kind of non-material Overmind . . . which does not offer much hope for [the] organic human body” (105). Ultimately, Ghost in the Shell suggests “that a union between technology and the spirit can ultimately succeed” (114), and in Oshii’s universe, technology has taken on divine status. To communicate this prophetic statement, Oshii adopts the Catholic metaphor of the Holy Family. The nexus cyborg Major Kusanagi, who is full of grace due to the wires and microchips embedded in her flesh, gives birth to the new creature that is half of Kusanagi but also half of something else so much more. In Ghost in the Shell, Oshii has appropriated the symbols of Catholic theology to state his hypothesis of a secular transcendence. This transcendence is an alternative answer to the visions of heaven and salvation promised by the Abrahamic faith traditions and an alternative to the dire warnings of the cyberpunk genre where technology becomes the means of humanity’s salvation rather than destruction.
Napier, Susan. Anime from “Akira” to “Princess Mononoke”: Experiencing Contemporary Japanese Animation. New York: Palgrave, 2001.
Oshii, Mamoru. Ghost in the Shell. 1995; Beverly Hills, CA: Anchor Bay Entertainment, 1998. DVD, 82 min.
Rayhert, Konstantin. “The Postmodern Theology of ‘Neon Genesis Evangelion’ as a Criticism.” Doxa no. 2 (30) (2018): 161–70. doi:10.18524/2410-2601.2018.2(30).146569.
Brian DeLoach, PhD, is an instructor of composition and independent researcher. He has been published in various political publications, outdoor magazines, journals of education, and has been a contributor to the best-selling Teacher Misery series of books. He lives in Cleveland, Tennessee.
Savannah Welch is an artist and student at Polk State College, where she tutors her peers in writing at the Teaching and Learning Center on campus.
“You telling me my ass isn’t a werewolf”: Science fiction ontology and representing queerness in Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse
Jack Murray
This paper is the result of a number of questions about how representation functions within SF works that construct complex worlds with mechanisms that change how they are understood through their own internally consistent logic. I approach this through the lens of queerness as a way to describe slippery and hard-to-define subject positions and by placing it alongside Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse. I then describe an approach to reading science fiction that I refer to as “science fiction ontology” by drawing on Seo-Young Chu’s lyrical mimesis as a way to understand how science fiction performs the work of representation. Science fiction ontology demonstrates the ways that representation occurs through the internal structures of the fictional world that determine how characters understand themselves as subjects in that world. This differs from allegorical representations which shift the world to be understood primarily from the external perspective of the readers. I read the narrative arc of Biffy the reluctant werewolf alpha, a side plot within Carriger’s Parasolverse, through the framework of science fiction ontology to show how queerness exists within Carriger’s work and how it can be read as a blueprint for queer masculinity.
Gail Carriger’s Parasolverse is a collection of science fiction novels set in an alternate steampunk version of Victorian England. The series consists of three major multibook arcs and several standalone stories that take place between 1850 and the turn of the twentieth century. Within the Parasolverse supernatural elements have influenced the social, cultural, and imperial development of Carriger’s British Empire. The supernatural set is made up of ghosts, vampires, and werewolves, each being a form of the afterlife enabled by the presence of excess soul. When someone with excess soul dies the remaining soul tethers the spirit to their body until the body decomposes and the tether dissipates. Vampires and werewolves, on the other hand, preempt this through a kind of ceremonial death. New vampires are created through the bite of a vampire queen and new werewolves from that of an alpha werewolf, and they become a member of the hive or pack respectively. Carriger positions representations of monstrous beings alongside the social intricacies and romance of Victorian London steeped in science fiction world-building that tends towards the “harder” end of the genre. Representing queerness is complicated in the Parasolverse by the presence of characters whom readers would already understand as queer alongside monsters that are often used allegorically to stand in for queer subjects. Troubling the process of representation also raises questions about how to read representations of queerness in science fiction and fantasy.
Identifying what does and does not count as queer within science fiction literature is particularly difficult due to the inherent ambiguity of the term; the word “queer” expresses a variety of different ideas and performs a variety of linguistic functions. Queer as an identity category gestures towards a multitude of possible gender, sexual, and other identity categories. As Hannah McCann and Whitney Mongahan observe, “queer theory finds its radical potential as a term to challenge, interrogate, destabilize and subvert” (1). The implication is that queer theory is a way of talking about the things that resist definition, description, or otherwise exist outside structural boundaries. Constructing “queer” as a political identity that is “inclusive of all those who stand on the outside of the dominant constructed norm of state-sanctioned white middle- and upper-class heterosexuality”(Cathy Cohen 411) is at the core of queer theory’s critical praxis. Cathy Cohen explains that queerness is necessarily an intersectional analytic that “recognizes how numerous systems of oppression interact to regulate and police the lives of most people”(411) which subsequently expands what it means to be queer. Queer theory identifies structures such as desire and sexuality, then asks how power relations determine what and who get to count as “normal.” Anyone outside of the normative determinations can be said to be queer. Queerness describes an ontological position couched in acknowledging difference while also attending to the concerns about sexuality and gender that give rise to queerness, or as Bo Ruberg poetically puts it, queerness is “a way of being, doing, and desiring differently” (7).
The second part of the question stems from how representation is approached in science fiction and fantasy. If queerness is a question of ontology, then representation is a question of epistemology. That is to say, there is a tension between how we come to know a world and how a diegetic world is known within itself. In a world where the conditions of existence differ radically from ours, how is queerness understood differently? The supernatural and steampunk elements in Carriger’s work disrupt an otherwise familiar Victorian London that would cause a fundamental difference in the characters’ understanding of their world compared to our understanding as readers. After all, how might conceptions of queerness change for a culture where supernatural metamorphosis, monstrous transformation, and definitive proof of the soul’s impact on one’s afterlife is an accepted and commonly acknowledged faction of reality?
Reading the text from our frame of knowledge might approach vampires and werewolves as allegorical for “race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance towards its expression” (J. J. Cohen 52). Monster theory describes this plethora of intensely transdisciplinary approaches to mapping our own semiotic interpretations onto monstrous bodies. Indeed, part of the appeal of using monsters as signifiers, as queer readings are wont to do, is “the realization that meaning itself runs riot” (Halberstam, Skin Shows 2). This type of analysis is useful for examining many themes and anxieties regarding cultural, racial, queer, and othered bodies (J. J. Cohen; Wright; Bildhauer; Creed; Asma; Puar and Rai) as well as positive possible potentialities related productive conceptions of monsters (Lioi; Haraway; MacCormack). These readings are almost always focused on the relationship between the self and underlying queerness or an unknowable other. But what does it mean for monsters to represent queer people, when they also already exist and are actively present in the narrative? Instead, could we use monsters to understand the ontological structures of queerness in Carriger’s world?
These questions propose a method of approaching representation that differs drastically from approaches to reading gothic horror and other fiction genres that frequently address the monstrous. Genre boundaries are points of contention and working through this methodology of reading representation in fiction will necessitate describing how I approach science fiction. Indeed, one could rightly describe Carriger’s novels as fantasy, yet I have been primarily referring to them as science fiction. I turn to Seo-Young Chu’s conception of science fiction as “a mimetic discourse whose objects of representation are nonimaginary yet cognitively estranging” (3), a definition that synthesizes broader discourse within the science fiction community. Chu’s use of mimesis refers to the propensity of art to imitate or represent the real world, a definition which preempts the complex history of mimesis and postulates “the capacity of language to reflect a reality ontologically prior to representation” (2). In many ways I accept the idea that science fiction operates at a level beyond mimetic representations of the real world because science fiction worlds must be ontologically distinct before signification can occur. Allowing a work to create its own internally consistent ontology functions similar to mythology, in that the ontology of a myth exists prior to what it is attempting to represent and allows meaning to emerge through the act of reading within extended contexts. In the previous examples from monster theory, the object being interpreted points to any number of possible objects. Similarly, myths read as parables rely heavily on the storytelling process to influence the production of meaning. This is possible because fiction exists on a spectrum of mimetic intensities that is bounded by a work’s referents’ capacity to be comprehended. On one end are works that are interested in representing concrete objects “ highly susceptible to understanding and amenable to representation”; on the other hand are “referents virtually unknowable, referents that all but defy human language and comprehension” (Chu 6). Chu positions genres of realism at the low intensity end of the mimetic spectrum, while science fiction and fantasy tend towards higher intensity. A text’s position on the spectrum is determined by the relative difficulty of their representational tasks and the difficulty of representation is a function of is the property of referents to be “impossible to represent in a straightforward manner” yet “absolutely real” (Chu 3), what Chu describes as cognitive estrangement. Cognitive estrangement is borrowed from Darko Suvin’s definition of SF as a genre of cognitive estrangement induced through imaginative frameworks that differ from the author’s actual material reality. In contrast to Suvin’s claims that SF’s form of representation as non mimetic and purely imaginative, Chu suggests that “all reality is to some degree cognitively estranging” (7) because it is impossible to completely know and understand a referent. The implication is that all works of representation are, at some intensity, science fiction. Affective vertigo is a similar concept to cognitive estrangement in that each “calls into question (their, anyone’s) epistemological worldview, highlights its fragmentary and inadequate nature, and thereby asks us . . . to acknowledge the failures of our systems of categorization” (Mittman, qtd. in Weinstock 3). The difference is that one precedes the other. Inducing affective vertigo is necessary to conceptualize a cognitively estranging referent. Science fiction as outlined here relies on a literalization of figurative formations within a narrative ontology.
Queerness induces affective vertigo by design and as such, queer subjects are often associated with monsters or the monstrous. Characters are forced to confront queer subjects or their own queer subjectivity through their relationship to the monstrous. Fiction is well suited to the task of representing queer identities, while representing the already slippery concept of queerness which necessitates understanding of being within the work of fiction. What I propose is reading a system of mimesis in a way that draws on extensive worldbuilding to understand how cognitively estranging referents are understood from within the story world. Admittedly this method of reading a text or group of texts is most effective with more expansive collections or texts that have a strong interest in world building. The text can more easily represent the unrepresentable by codifying the rules of the world and ensuring they function consistently. This has the added bonus of allowing the author to subvert or break the rules for dramatic, narrative, or moralizing effect. Being a work of fiction, the author’s episteme impacts the production of the narrative and subsequently its ontology as well as our reading of it. This method and traditional methods are not mutually exclusive. Traditional readings of representation cannot and should not be abandoned; rather, the two approaches supplement one another to encompass a wider scope of analysis.
My interest in Carriger’s Parasolverse is twofold. First, the presence of werewolves seeks to induce an affective vertigo, which Carriger leans into by disrupting understandings of werewolf monstrosity by embedding them within the veneer of high class Victorian Culture, a move that corresponds to contemporary monster theory’s focus on how “subjects are ‘monsterized’ and the implications of this process” (Weinstock 25). Specifically I am interested in the process of metamorphosis via death and how queer desire, affect, and power interact within pack dynamics and London high society. Second, Carriger’s inclusion of a diegetic scientific approach the monstrous and its ability to represent queerness as function of science fiction’s “capacity to perform the massively complex representational and epistemological work necessary to render cognitively estranging referents available both for representation and for understanding” (Chu 7). As noted earlier, the epistemological underpinnings of queerness are predicated on disrupting and upsetting interpretative and cognitive categories. Just as Weinstock identifies the emergence of the monster as “the catch-all conceptual category for things that don’t fit” at the moment of affective vertigo (Weinstock 2), queerness comes into being at the moment it is identified as queer. Queerness emerges in relation to nonnormative ways of being, knowing, and desiring that destabilize dominant systems of categorization. Werewolves represent affectively destabilizing subjects and their presence in the world of Carriger’s science fiction comes to represent a construction of queerness.
This analysis will draw on Biffy’s story beginning in the five-book Parasol Protectorate arc as a minor character and then continues through to the follow-up series, The Custard Protocol, and into a number of standalone novellas where he takes on a more central role. In Soulless, Biffy is described as a dandy with extensive espionage training, a marked preference for men, a penchant for women’s fashion—hats in particular—and lover to flamboyant vampire Lord Akeldama. In Blameless, Biffy is kidnapped as part of a hostile vampire plot and is rescued by Lord Maccon and Professor Lyall, the London Pack’s Alpha and Beta, respectively. During the rescue Biffy is fatally shot, and to prevent him from dying Lyall convinces Lord Maccon to metamorphose Biffy into a werewolf. Biffy’s successful change causes friction between the pack and Lord Akeldama. In Heartless we get glimpses of Biffy’s struggle to reconcile the loss of his potential future as a vampire alongside Lord Akeldama with his new place as a werewolf within the London Pack. In Parasol Protectorate book 5, Timeless, it is discovered that Biffy has the traits of an Alpha werewolf and plans are made for Biffy to replace Lyall—who has also become Biffy’s new paramour— and become Lord Maccon’s Beta before taking eventually over as pack Alpha when the strain of holding the pack together eventually forces Lord Maccon to retire. This replacement occurs during the second book of the Custard Protocol series after which Biffy and the London Pack’s stories are picked up in the standalone novellas Romancing the Werewolf and How to Marry a Werewolf.
Werewolf metamorphosis is a literalization of becoming-wolf as Deleuze and Guattari describe it: when man and wolf are made from matter shifted into different configurations, an individual’s relationships with social assemblages and desire is fundamentally restructured. Desire is “never separable from complex assemblages” and “results from a highly developed, engineered setup rich in interactions” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 251). The restructuring of desire comes at the expense of previously existing social flows (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus). In becoming-werewolf, Biffy’s shifting conceptualization of death fundamentally alters his relationship with desire and social subjectivity. Carriger provides insight into the precarious nature of mortal and immortal desire through Biffy’s reflection on changed relationships with mortal friends and newfound empathy for his former lover,
Lord Akeldama’s love, such as it was, was always transient and shared. Now Biffy understood why. True, Biffy was a young immortal, but he was almost fifty, and he’d seen his mortal friends grow old while he had not. Or die in the attempt to become like him. He wasn’t yet old enough to have grown the protective thickness around his heart, the one that made Lord Akeldama’s smiles brittle, but Biffy knew why it was there. (Carriger, Romancing the Werewolf 21)
Desire is a productive force with real, tangible effects (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus). Another way of expressing this idea is to think of desire according to Eve Sedgwick’s definition: “the affective or social force, the glue, even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively charged, that shapes an important relationship” (Sedgwick). Sedgwick uses this framing to describe homosociality as the desiring relationship that invests men in the affairs of other men as a way to uphold forms of masculinity.
Carriger’s werewolf packs disrupt the common conception of normative homosociality with a queer homosociality centered on a politics of care where pack members are attuned to each other’s emotional wellbeing. In keeping with wolf tropes, status within the pack outwardly seems to be determined via physical capability; however, Carriger’s world building shows status based on affective capacity and emotional sensitivity to the pack. The tethers that effervesce from the soul remaining post metamorphosis are a literalization of the relationships between pack werewolves. The network itself centers on a tripartite relationship between the pack’s Alpha, Beta, and Gamma described by Carriger as:
The balance of the pack, the rule of three. Alpha for the head, evolving, shifting, holding too many tethers, burning brighter than the rest of the pack until he snuffed himself out in madness. Beta for the heart, beating a steady rhythm of care, love, resilience, ever steadfast. Gamma for the strength in arms, the warrior, the challenger, the weapon, to remind the pack of what they really were – hunters, trackers, fighters. (Carriger, How to Marry a Werewolf 159)
Biffy’s conceptualization of the dynamic of the pack is somewhat incomplete as a result of the impromptu nature of his metamorphosis. As Alpha he recognizes his duty to keep his pack anchored without fully comprehending the bidirectional nature of the relationship. Professor Lyall explains to Biffy, “when you became Alpha of this pack, you tethered to them, to each and every member. Your tether is the last of your soul, so in a way the pack becomes the Alpha’s soul. And you are theirs” (Carriger, Romancing the Werewolf 102), indicating that while the Alpha provides a stabilizing presence, they also rely on the connection of the pack to stay grounded. Biffy’s metamorphosis is a total disassembly of his prior social assemblage and as a result his integration into the pack goes poorly. The multidirectional flows of affect are demonstrated as Lord Maccon and Lyall bring Biffy into a stabilizing relationship with the pack through his participation in investigations related to the pack’s overall wellbeing as well as the gradual romantic connection between Biffy and Lyall. As Biffy settles into the pack, his capacity for sensing the flow of affect ultimately identifies him with Alpha werewolf potential (Carriger, The Parasol Protectorate, Volume One; Carriger, The Parasol Protectorate, Volume Two).
The mechanics of the soul and its relationship to supernatural metamorphosis and pack dynamics is the focus of the Parasol Protectorate. Excess soul is assumed to be the primary determinant in surviving metamorphosis. The only known indication of excess soul is an individual’s penchant for creativity, though the correlation is presented as speculative at best. Throughout the Parasol Protectorate there are elements of an anti-supernatural cadre of scientists attempting to determine a way of measuring one’s soul for the purpose of identifying those who have supernatural potential. The readings of queer identities are very made very apparent. The efforts to measure soul echo the ways Foucault identifies scientific pathologizing deviant sexuality (63-70) and the way that Halberstam describes medicine’s domain over gender identify categories (Trans* 24-29). Scientific measurement of the soul is an attempt to identify and discipline non-normative bodies. However, the science fiction ontology of Carriger’s world represents queerness as cognitively estranging, something that produces affective vertigo in characters who exist within the narrative world. Rather than representing sexual orientation or gender identity, the politics of the soul represent anxieties around the possibility of being otherwise and the fear associated with being preyed upon by those who exist or desire in non-normative ways. This theme is also present in Biffy’s initial resentment and resistance to becoming a werewolf. The possibility of escaping normative structures following death is perhaps one of the prime draws for metamorphosis as “Werewolves, like vampires, have always been less bound by the limits humans pose on their own desires” (Carriger, Romancing the Werewolf 136). The London Pack is never shown to be interested in maintaining normative sexual desires as long as “Both parties [are] agreeable and willing, and capable of undertaking an informed decision” (136), a view that reflects the same values held in regard to the process of metamorphosis that necessitates education in Pack protocol through serving as a claviger. Many pack members and clavigers can be identified as being what we understand as queer, while the protocols themselves represent queer homosociality predicated on ethics of care.
Scientifically foreclosing the possibility of transformation with the threat of permanent death is a mechanism by which power attempts to retain its influence. This functions in a manner that preys upon a natural fear of loss and death. Where queer desire is subsumed by a desire for oppression. This is not to ideate suicide as a liberatory alternative. Suicide, or the act of desiring one’s own death (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus), is a tool of what Achille Mbembe identifies as necropolitics that sees power incorporate death into the assemblages of biopower (83-92). Instead, in the Parasolverse, becoming-werewolf is a drastic destruction of the social via embracing queerness that, as Lee Edelman says, “must redefine such notions as ‘civil order’ through a rupturing of our foundational faith in the reproduction of futurity” (17). The immortality of werewolves is a fundamental rejection of “the death drive of the dominant order” (17) in the most literal sense. However, the werewolf does not reject the possibility of futurity, instead they “represent a mode of being and feeling that was not quite there” (Muñoz 9) that remains to embrace José Esteban Muñoz’s queer potentiality that is “spawned of a critical investment in utopia” (Muñoz 12). The werewolf metamorphosis and pack dynamic based on desire represents the slippery, cognitively estranging idea of queerness in a way that is useful to queer theory because “power centers are defined much more by what escapes them” (Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus 254). The literal becoming-wolf of Carriger’s werewolves “contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity” (Muñoz 1) which places the subjects in a new relation to the structure of normative power by placing one outside the structures and instead positions them within networks centered on an ethic of care.
Biffy allows us to understand queerness from within his frame of reference as he exists in the world. Treating science fiction worlds as ontologically distinct allows for representation that exist beyond the purely allegorical, opening rendering the unrepresentable visible within the expansive body of a text. By reading the Parasolverse as a science fiction ontology, the werewolf pack is tasked with representing a diagram of queerness that escapes structures of normative power and reimagines the how individuals exist in relation to one another. Using this method of reading ontological representations of queerness in conjunction with allegorical representation and direct representations of queerness allows us to interrogate who gets to be queer, what it means to be queer, and how we understand queerness in relation to the narrative elements of a work of fiction.
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Jack Murrayis a Ph.D. Candidate in the Texts and Technology Program at the University of Central Florida. He received a B.S. Software Engineering and a M.A. in arts, technology, and emerging communication from the University of Texas at Dallas. His research interests include critical game studies, emergent storytelling, and narrative systems. Jack’s current research is focused on the intersection of analog and digital games. He is a frequent collaborator with the Narrative Systems Research Lab, Studio for Mediating Play, and the Center for Humanities and Digital Research @ UCF.
Same As It Ever Was?: Portrayals of Appalachia in William Gibson’s The Peripheral
Jennifer Krause
This paper will investigate representations of Appalachia and Appalachian communities in William Gibson’s The Peripheral. In his novel, Gibson sets one of two alternative futures in Appalachia, though he does not clearly name it as such. Yet instead of leaning into one-note depictions of backwoods drug dealers and fundamentalist preachers preying on rural white trash, Gibson presents a complicated picture of the region that views Appalachia as an internal colony within the United States. He also layers his near future Appalachia within a second layer of colonialism, a colonialism defined by the far future reaching into the past to monetize and manipulate alternate versions of history. This layering allows Gibson to create an intriguing commentary about place-specific stereotyping and the need to create communities that insulate themselves from critique. I therefore posit that by presenting Appalachia as an internal colony within the United States and emphasizing the idea that place matters, The Peripheral complicates and questions both the colonialism more overtly present in the relationship between the different timelines in the novel, as well as the usefulness of colonial models for understanding such complicated and paradoxical relationships.
To begin such an analysis, we need to look into Gibson’s ties to the mountains. Gibson was born on the coast of South Carolina, but lived most of his early life in Wytheville, Virginia. As Gibson mentions in his autobiographical essay “Since 1948,” his experiences in southwest Virginia influenced his own interest in things not of this world. He notes, “I’m convinced that it was this experience of feeling abruptly exiled, to what seemed like the past, that began my relationship with science fiction” (Gibson, Distrust 22). In a question-and-answer session during a book signing in 2015 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington, Kentucky, someone in the audience asked Gibson where the book was set. Gibson answered that he had originally thought the book was set in southern Ohio, somewhere rural, but the more he thought about it, the more he suspected that the book was set very close to Wytheville, where he grew up (“Questions”). In an earlier interview for Tor.com in 2014, Gibson is less willing to point to Wytheville as the setting of the novel, however. He mentions that he wanted the setting to be in Pennsylvania, “right across the Virginia line” (“Gibson on Urbanism”). Yet Gibson goes on to say, “But inevitably, in spite of my wanting that, I think what happened was that my experience of my own childhood colored it all. And so it feels more like a southern small town than anything else. [. . .] There’s a kind of inadvertent generic quality to it that stems from that idea I had that I could make it kind of Everytown. But in the end I guess it’s not really.” Interestingly, all the locations Gibson mentions fall within the traditional boundaries of Appalachia, so even if the novel does not take place in Wytheville exactly, it is still affected by its location somewhere in Appalachia. And though, as Steve Fisher notes in a discussion of Appalachian cultural identity and political activity, “many use the term ‘Appalachian’ in a way that glosses over the diversity of the region and some ugly parts of its history,” there is still a cultural (mis)understanding of the region that allows readers to pick up The Peripheral and know exactly where it takes place (Fisher 58-59). The main character’s hometown may not be Wytheville exactly, but its feel, its undercurrents, and its customs reflect an Appalachian way of life, even if its geography doesn’t.
We must therefore next tackle an understanding of how popular notions of Appalachia and Appalachian stereotypes play out, in scholarship concerning the region as well as in popular adaptations, including Gibson’s novel. The Appalachian way of life most readers will pick up on is usually based on very specific stereotypes. In a discussion of stereotypes in Appalachia, Barbara Ellen Smith mentions that “within the national imaginary, Appalachia is a land of backward, inbred (always implicitly white) hillbillies whose very degradation—in the manner of most binary oppositions—functions to valorize the intelligence and culture of the normative, middle-class American, who is decidedly not from Appalachia” (54). The hillbilly, as a representation of all who live and work and function in Appalachia, is therefore the opposite of everything America stands for, yet still resides within the limits of American culture: worth less than the rest of country, but still white; and deserving of poverty and ridicule and hopelessness perhaps because of their rejection of the rules and strictures they are supposed to live up to.
To combat this view of Appalachia, Helen M. Lewis and Edward E. Knipe suggest the colonialism model as a way to understand Appalachian social, cultural, and economic structures. This model:
describes the Appalachians as a subsociety structurally alienated and lacking resources because of processes of the total economic political system. Those who control the resources preserve their advantages by discrimination. The people are not essentially passive; but these ‘subcultural’ traits of fatalism, passivity, etc. are adjustive techniques of the powerless. They are ways by which people protect their way of life from new economic models and the concomitant alien culture. (15)
Viewing Appalachians as native inhabitants attacked by alien invaders calls into question multiple assumptions made by the stereotypes projected onto the region by both internal and external sources.
In their study, Lewis and Knipe therefore turn to a definition of colonialism, specifically internal colonialism, first introduced by Robert Blauner in a 1969 study of African Americans in the inner city. Blauner’s definition includes multiple steps in the ongoing act of colonization, including “a forced, involuntary entry,” “rapid modifications in values, orientation, and the way of life of the colonized,” “a relationship by which members of the colonized group tend to be administered by representatives of the dominant group,” and finally, “a condition of racism” (Lewis and Knipe 16). A comparison between the situation of African Americans in the late 1960s and inhabitants of the Appalachian region is overtly problematic, on multiple levels, yet the introduction of a social model that considers issues of colonization in the region have been fruitful and provide a useful way to think about how Appalachia is often seen.
So how does all this come together in the novel itself? To begin my analysis, we first need a quick overview of the novel’s plot. In the introduction to an interview with Gibson, Tasneem Raja quips, “The new book, meanwhile, stars a bunch of downtrodden trailer park residents who get caught up in the deadly games of some time-warping elites from 70 years hence” (61). Though this description sums up the plot quickly, it also reveals inherent biases. Yes, the novel’s heroes are rural and poor and trapped by a society that has no use for them, but the main characters don’t live in a trailer park, nor are they as downtrodden as the word implies. The stereotypes in such a description highlight the ways in which place matters in the text. A better description of the plot might read: “The book follows a woman, Flynne, and her community as they deal with the impact of what happens when a group of time travel hobbyists from seventy years in the future decide to meddle with the past. Flynne witnesses a murder in the future, though she thinks she is playing a video game. This leads to two rival powers from the future using her present as a gameboard for their ongoing feud. Flynne must therefore travel to the future through the use of a peripheral body, which allows her to live in her world but interact with theirs, in order to personally identify the murderer and stop the violence that rages in her own timeline.”
This is where a reading of the text from an Appalachian studies perspective becomes useful. If we read Flynne’s hometown as doubly colonized, invaded by the future and internally ostracized by the rest of the United States, we can begin to understand not only how we are supposed to react to her world, but also how we are supposed to reflect revelations within her world back onto our own society. The far future’s colonial attitudes toward the near future are introduced very clearly in a conversation between three main characters. No one knows much about this time-travel hobby, so Lev, a prominent hobbyist, tries to explain it. He says, “The act of connection produces a fork in causality, the new branch causally unique. A stub, as we call them” (Gibson, Peripheral 103). Lowbeer, a high ranking member of what amounts to a police force in the future, asks, “But why do you? [. . .] Call them that. It sounds short. Nasty. Brutish. Wouldn’t one expect the fork’s new branch to continue to grow?” (103). Lev replies, “We do [. . .] assume exactly that. Actually, I’m not sure why enthusiasts settled on that expression” (103). In response to this confusion, one of Lev’s employees interjects, “Imperialism [. . .] We’re third-worlding alternate continua. Calling them stubs makes that a bit easier” (103). This conversation very clearly introduces an imperialist, colonialist agenda into the novel’s use of time travel. Thinking back to the definition of internal colonization Lewis and Knipe use, we can read this as “a forced, involuntary entry,” one recognized as blatantly capitalist and hypocritical by onlookers who are not enthusiasts (16).
This becomes all the more complex if we view the near future, Flynne’s world, as an internal colony within greater U.S. culture. We can see that internal colonization within the fabric of Flynne’s community even before it is touched by Lev’s hobby. The “forced, involuntary entry” in this case is not coal companies that Lewis and Knipe highlight in their study, but drug manufacture, a clear reference to the opioid crisis in rural America. In an assessment of the economy in Flynne’s timeline, one of Lev’s employees in far future London states, “County’s economy is entirely about manufacturing drugs” (Gibson, Peripheral 108). Tommy, a cop in Flynne’s world, explains to Flynne that building drugs is the only way to make real money in their community: “if we all woke up one day and [. . .] that building economy had been taken up to heaven, after a few weeks most people around here wouldn’t have any money for food” (233). The drug trade therefore serves as a mechanism of colonization, bringing a type of predatory capitalism into the region that, like coal, doesn’t actually boost the economy or bring any development for the region or investment in the people.
For Lewis and Knipe, the second step of internal colonization is “rapid modifications in values, orientation, and the way of life of the colonized” (16). We can see this second step both within Flynne’s world before the intervention of far future London as well as through that intervention. Flynne’s community reflects these modifications, as the novel contrasts her childhood home and the homeplace feel of much of the countryside with the modernization and capitalist neglect of the town and its drug dealer leaders. Flynne’s world, though ruled by technology in some respects, is grounded in its sense of place: the endless fields, the rushing creeks, the wind in the trees. This closeness with nature is contrasted by one of the novel’s villains, Corbell Pickett, a politician and community celebrity who also runs the local drug syndicate. His power serves as a reference to the third aspect of internal coloniality that Lewis and Knipe also reference: “a relationship by which members of the colonized group tend to be administered by representatives of the dominant group” (16). When characters drive to Pickett’s home, they pass “a long stretch of white plastic fence, fabbed to look like somebody’s idea of Old Plantation” (Gibson, Peripheral 291). As for the house itself, “They’d painted everything white, she guessed to tie it together, but it didn’t. Looked like somebody had patched a factory, or maybe a car dealership, onto a McMansion, then stuck an Interstate chain restaurant and a couple of swimming pools on top of that” (292). All of these details speak to Pickett’s status as both a colonizer and a representative of the effects of colonization. Pickett’s home, like Pickett himself, reflects a different worldview than Flynne’s homeplace. While Flynne’s family has been in their home for over a century, and that home reflects its connections to the past and to family ties, this is obviously a new building, frankensteined together out of consumerist kitsch. The influence of the drug trade is stark here, revealing the paradox of the region: the modifications the drug trade has made to the community and the power money has over everything else.
The interaction between far-future London and Flynne’s world only deepens the us versus them mentality set up against Flynne and her community. The changes in their way of life, as well as the implication that Flynne’s world is not actually in charge of what is going on, is most clearly obvious in a conversation Flynne has with Macon, a friend of Flynne’s who is one of the first know that they are dealing with interference from the future. Macon asks:
“Know what ‘collateral damage’ means?” “People get hurt because they happen to be near something that somebody needs to happen?” “Think that’s us,” he said. “None of this is happening because any of us are who we are, what we are. Accident, or it started with one, and now we’ve got people who might as well be able to suspend basic laws of physics, or anyway finance, doing whatever it is they’re doing, whatever reason they’re doing it for. So we could get rich, or get killed, and it would all still just be collateral.” (Peripheral 279)
Flynne, her brother, her friends, her family, all have to deal with the reality of this situation. They are part of this plot not because of who they are, but because they were originally preyed upon by Lev and his hobby. All of this randomness leads to Flynne and Macon and all the rest being collateral damage, for good or ill.
This is also where an understanding of Appalachia and the internal colonial model reveals a more nuanced reading of the text. This model creates an intriguing picture of insider versus outsider and what that means for how we can read communities and citizens who have been stereotyped as backward and dispossessed and downtrodden. Barbara Ellen Smith and Steve Fisher lay out why such a model is so enticing for Appalachian scholars, even as it is also problematic. They note:
The analytical power and emotional appeal of the internal colony model lie in its capacity to interrelate spatial or place-based exploitation (Appalachia as dispossessed region) with cultural degradation (Appalachia as America’s Other). It thereby creates Appalachia as a regional collectivity, no longer pathologized but oppressed, and enables us to situate ourselves within a shared cultural geography that recognizes all residents as heirs to a special, place-based identity. Although [. . .] this depiction obscures internal class processes and relationships (along with much else), the stark invocation of thievery, arrogance, and smug condescension by outsiders draws an undeniably powerful line between innocent victims inside the region and profiteering elites on the outside. (Smith and Fisher 76)
The internal colony model allows citizens of the region to create a narrative that sets them not as the Other, but as the protagonist in a plot aimed against them. This understanding of self, founded on a place-based myth of righteousness against outside aggressors, gives Appalachians a way to see themselves as heroes, innocent victims, and righteous underdogs.
Within that context, we can begin to understand why it is so easy for readers to side with Flynne and her community against outside forces, be those forces internal colonizers or colonizers from the far future. Flynne’s identity as part of an already marginalized group helps us to understand her plight and allows us to easily see her as capable and heroic, even if she does live in a place and time that most would consider backwards and primitive. Interestingly, Gibson’s description of his inspiration for The Peripheral echoes these sentiments. In an interview in Mother Jones, Gibson says:
I’m interested in how we came to automatically think of the inhabitants of the past as having been rubes. [. . .] The people in my 22nd century initially assume that anyone they’re dealing with back in 2025 or whenever is just kind of a hick” (Raja 62)
Just like the inhabitants of Appalachia, the inhabitants of the past are much more than they seem, and the internal colony model reinforces the agency, intelligence, and resourcefulness of people who have normally been overlooked or underestimated.
This doubled coloniality in the novel bolsters how we might view the end of the story, too. The final two chapters of the book present a conclusion that seems a bit too easy. The story jumps several years ahead, presenting Flynne happily married to Tommy, with a child on the way. Most of Flynne’s family and friends seem to have paired off nicely, and everyone lives together in new buildings in and around Flynne’s original homeplace. Several critics, scholars, and reviewers have called it a happy ending and left it at that. Others, however, see it as rather more sinister. This ending—which Gibson himself has said, “gave me the creeps!” (“Gibson on Urbanism”)—becomes that much more creepy when read from the vantage of a doubled coloniality . In explaining his rationale for being disturbed with how the novel ends, Gibson continues, “Really, its potential for not being good is really, really high. [. . .] I mean, she’s lovely, but what are they building there? It’s got all kinds of weird third-world bad possibilities. . . . I wasn’t expecting that actually, and it completely weirded me out, and I still haven’t really gotten my head around it” (“Gibson on Urbanism”). Gibson’s reference to “third-world bad possibilities” brings Flynne and her community back to where they started, in a sense, though they are no longer the poor denizens of Appalachia just trying to make some money and get ahead. Now, Flynne and her people have joined the colonizers, both in the future and in their own society. We want to root for Flynne because she is an underdog, one of the oppressed workers in Appalachia, but once she crosses the line and can no longer be seen as an underdog, we must question what we think of her and her future.
This becomes especially apparent if we read the end through an Appalachian studies lens. One of the major arguments against the internal colonial model is that it hides what Smith and Fisher call internal exploiters. They note:
[B]laming “outsiders” for regional economic problems is an over-simplification, if not outright distortion. When we focus on where people are from as the main problem, we run the risk of exonerating everyone in the region as good and implying that we who live here are, in this most fundamental respect of residence, all the same in our righteousness. Race, class, gender, sexual orientation—all are secondary to our zip code. Perhaps most important, this perspective conceals and exonerates internal exploiters [. . .] without whose actions the exploitation of Appalachia would not be possible. (47)
From this perspective, using the internal colony model to help understand Gibson’s text, Flynne and her family can seem to have a happy ending, and we can feel good for them because their potential for chaos and harm is hidden from view by the assumption that where they are from defines who they are. Their hillbilly-ness, their rural ways and Appalachian values, mask the possibility that they could be something else, something far more in keeping with their own colonizers than anyone, including the reader, would want to acknowledge.
Place is therefore of utmost importance in this novel, even if that place is never clearly stated outright. Flynne’s world, as both situated in a version of the past that is our near future, as well as situated in an Appalachia eerily similar to today’s, is ruled by multiple colonialities. This doubled coloniality questions both temporal and geographical stereotypes because of the way Gibson approaches his characters and their places in both time and space. The complex nature of the internal colonial model, however, causes us, as readers, to make certain assumptions about the characters. We see them as capable, intelligent individuals, but they are also flattened because they are defined by place in a way that homogenizes them, ignoring the complex intersectionalities of the region as well as the lived reality of people who are there right now. The internal colonial model that seems to be written into the cosmology of the text therefore also affects our understanding of how the future looks back at the past. Whether or not Flynne’s community is able to save themselves, they still have to rely on the future for security, money, and power. The colonial model in that scenario flattens them as well, creating temporal myths that counteract stereotypes but also build a future that is probably going to look very much like the one they are trying to avoid. Saving the world probably doesn’t actually save the world. The Peripheral, then, asks us to pay attention to how place matters in the text. It also asks us to interrogate the usefulness of colonial models, not only for understanding place-based marginality, but also for expressing the complexities of communities that can’t and shouldn’t be defined by just one thing.
WORKS CITED
Fisher, Steve. “Claiming Appalachia—and the Questions That Go with It.” Appalachian Journal, vol. 38, no. 1, Fall 2010, pp. 58-61.
Fisher, Steve, and Barbara Ellen Smith. “Internal Colony—Are You Sure? Defining, Theorizing, Organizing Appalachia.” Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, Apr. 2016, pp. 45-50. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.5406/jappastud.22.1.0045.
Gibson, William. Distrust That Particular Flavor. Putnam, 2012.
—. Question and Answer Session. Joseph-Beth Booksellers, Lexington, Ky.
Lewis, Helen M., and Edward E. Knipe. “The Colonialism Model: The Appalachian Case.” Colonialism in Modern America: The Appalachian Case, Appalachian State University, 1978, pp. 9-31, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1xp3n1t.5.
Smith, Barbara Ellen. “Transforming Places: Toward a Global Politics of Appalachia.” Appalachia in Regional Context, edited by Dwight B. Billings and Ann E. Kingsolver, University Press of Kentucky, 2018, pp. 49-68. JSTOR, https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctt1z27j0k.6.
Smith, Barbara Ellen, and Steve Fisher. “Reinventing the Region: Defining, Theorizing, Organizing Appalachia.” Journal of Appalachian Studies, vol. 22, no. 1, Spring 2016 2016, pp. 76-79. MLA International Bibliography with Full Text, https://doi.org/10.5406/jappastud.22.1.0076.
Jennifer Krauseis an assistant professor in the English Department at Emory & Henry College in southwest Virginia. Her research interests include cyberpunk, the New Weird, dystopian fiction, and posthumanism.
