BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Books, Criticism & Writing >

Post-Colonial Sci-Fi

  
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
18:55 / 05.11.06
Thanks to Barbelith, I rediscovered Paul Park's Celestis , and am about a third of the way through re-reading it, and am finding it absolutely fucking awesome - as well as its very obviously post-colonial setting, it's got riffs on gender identity/gender reassignment, religion, sexuality, disability/mental health politics (arguably), theology and anthropology, it's got explicit and subversive (but not "gratuitous", despite the reviewer quote on the back jacket) sex, and it's incredibly well written - one of very, very few unambiguously "sci-fi" novels i've read that is written in prose as rich, powerful, cliche-free and intelligent as anything in "mainstream literature"...

It's got some obvious influences (Le Guin, Zelazny), but it got me wondering, as one quote on the back described Celestis as "a third world [sic] SF novel; it could be the first ever written", if there are any other books (or indeed films, TV, etc) that either were explicitly concieved as, or could be interpreted as being, "post-colonial" science fiction?

Le Guin's an obvious author to come to mind, but the only one of her books [that i've read] that's explicitly post-colonial is Four Ways To Forgiveness (altho i'd argue there are at least tangentially related themes in both The Dispossessed and The Left Hand Of Darkness, the latter of which, with its race without dual gender, is one i'd reckon to have been an influence on Celestis).

Then there's Zelazny's Lord Of Light, which, altho i'm fairly sure its author didn't intend it to be viewed in those precise terms, could certainly be said to describe a "post-colonial" sdituation and explore some of the themes thereof (and again is a fairly obvious influence on Park's novel)...

Any others?

Also, i'm sort of interested in discussing the general theme of science fiction taking on, or taking from, "real world" politics as inspiration or subject matter - there's an assumption, i think, that if political situations within sci-fi (or fantasy fiction) settings parallel real current or historical situations, then it's necessarily as satire (a la Orwell, etc) - but the works i've mentioned don't feel like satire, so much as explorations of themes that exist in the real world in order to provoke thought about, and resonance with, those situations, without directly satirising them (if that run-on sentence makes any sense...)

(ooh, just thought of another probable influence on Celestis which, altho it can't really be post-colonial, was also arguably one of the first works of "speculative" fiction to address themes of colonialism - Wells's The Island Of Doctor Moreau...)

Thoughts? Is present day sci-fi necessarily post-colonial, as it reflects the post-colonial world that it comes out of [in which case colonial-era sci-fi would necessarily be colonial, sci-fi from the Cold war era would necessarily have Cold War themes (which a lot of it obviously did), etc]? Do these themes have to be addressed explicitly (in any type of literature), or are they imlictly there even without authorial intent? How much sci-fi (or any other form of "speculative" literature) comes out of actual post-colonised areas/cultures? And is sci-fi a more, less, or equally-but-differently useful genre in which to address these themes than "mainstream"/"realist" literature?
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
23:37 / 05.11.06
Probably fitting the bill is Ken MacLeod's "Learning The World"- a colony ship from an advanced human civilisation, which has apparently evolved, socially, past the need for war, happens upon an alien civilization which is in the throes of its equivalent to our industrial revolution. Without giving too much away, the Earth crew, in trying to decide the best way to impose civilization and "enlightenment" on these poor benighted savages, proves itself drastically less than capable for the task. On one level, it can be seen as an immediate Iraq allegory, but I think he's trying to say something a lot more universal about colonialism in it.

Being MacLeod, the argument becomes a lot more complicated along the way, and I think I may need to give it another couple of reads, but I'd say both this and his "Engines Of Light" trilogy fit the bill (Most of Engines Of Light's second volume consists of arguments over whether a progressing civilization should or should not be encouraged to have its inevitable civil war now rather than later, on the grounds that very soon its weapons will be better, and the casualties far higher).
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
07:56 / 06.11.06
CJ Cherryh's 40,000 in Gehenna and Downbelow Station contain elements of colonialism / oppression; 40kIG in particular has two levels of it; the original colonists of the story (themselves effectively indentured servants / slaves) are both colonisers and colonised/subjugated (from two very different directions). It's a good story and told over several generations worth of time from several different viewpoints. Oh, and it has properly alien aliens, too.
 
 
unheimlich manoeuvre
13:42 / 06.11.06
There is also this thread, from last year, where people discuss China Mieville's list of science fiction and fantasy influenced by socialism.

You've already said Le Guin and that reminds of Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, which is ambiguous anarchist utopianism.
 
 
Closed for Business Time
22:44 / 06.11.06
Octavia Butler's Kindred does a good a job as any I've seen in that vein. Lady travels back in time to the antebellum slavery-ridden Deep South to save slaveowner... is a travesty of the plotline. Deceptively simple and most effective.
 
 
Kiltartan Cross
18:55 / 10.04.07
I've just finished reading Gene Wolfe's The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is decidedly post-colonial; it's actually three linked short stories, set on a pair of remote planets which (depending on how you read the stories; there's a high degree of ambiguity) have seen several waves of colonisation / invasion. The primary theme is the apparent disappearance of the "original" native inhabitants following the arrival of human settlers; the backdrop is a technologically enhanced state exploiting surgically created slaves, although this is not explored in as much depth. Good read, if a little confusing for my poor brain.
 
 
rizla mission
22:19 / 10.04.07
An excellent and not-as-widely-read-as-it-should-be SF book which deals with the eventual, ugly consequences of colonialism in pretty uncompromising terms is Christopher Priest's "Fugue For a Darkening Island".

If it's ok with everyone, instead of writing a new summation of it, I'll simply paste what I said about it in the 'under-rated books' thread a while ago, and on my weblog;


Although it was pretty well regarded when it was published in the ‘70s, this book is rarely sold, read or mentioned these days. This is possibly because, from the evidence of the rather ill-advised title and a brief summary of the plot, it could easily be mistaken for some kind of reactionary anti-immigration tract. But I know Priest is a good egg, so I read it anyway, and I’m glad I did.

In brief, it goes a bit like this; After a series of ominously ill-defined (nuclear?) catastrophes in Africa, an endless succession of rickety ships and barges begin docking all over England’s south coast baring hundreds of thousands of refugees. The right-wing government in power at the time deals with the crisis in the worst way imaginable, establishing virtual concentration camps with no real plan as to what to do, and encouraging the wave of racist attacks that sweep through middle England. Liberal opposition to this policy precipitates a parliamentary crisis, but still neither side know what to do. The Africans, tired of such shoddy treatment, muster their strength as their numbers increase and are soon roaming the Home Counties attacking and occupying villages. Then comes confusion, displacement, civil war, greed and cruelty – stuff we’ve seen on the news a hundred times before, but bringing it back home to England is a chillingly effective device in upturning the reader’s perceptions of it. Priest pulls no punches in exploring the nightmare he has created through the eyes of the cynical, Ballard-esque protagonist as he tries rather haphazardly to protect his family and figure out which way to turn as they find themselves as helplessly stranded as any African refugee.

Obviously Priest doesn’t court xenophobia, but neither does he jump for any of the liberal open goals the plotline might suggest – like 'Heart of Darkness' (which I guess this is an update of in a lot of ways), the book remains non-partisan and offers no heavy-handed political message and no easy answers – the narrative remains cold, simplistic, amoral and brutal as the characters try to stay alive – the violence and betrayals are shocking and harrowing. The basic message: "this is everyone’s fault – we’re all fucked". It' the good old Wyndham-esque English disaster novel turned very, very dark indeed.
 
 
Hallo, Paper Spaceboy
05:30 / 11.04.07
Copper: The primary theme is the apparent disappearance of the "original" native inhabitants following the arrival of human settlers; the backdrop is a technologically enhanced state exploiting surgically created slaves, although this is not explored in as much depth

Reminds me a lot of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, which was Post-Colonial in its way, although maybe a little ahead of its time in some respects and very much of its time in others. There was that same tension/riddle of where the original Martians had gone, or were they there, or were they colonizing us, invisibly...
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
21:00 / 10.09.07
Back from the dead!

Just read Robert Silverberg's Downward to the Earth, which, being about 30 years older than Celestis, has a much better claim to be the "first postcolonial sci-fi novel"... covers many of the same themes as well, possibly an influence, tho i think it's a much more flawed book...

(biggest flaw IMO: the central character, a former colonial administrator, feels the need to seek "redemption" for his sins of oppressing the native species, and does it by, basically, exploiting them some more, appropriating their culture, and then being accepted as one of them for little more than prurient curiosity about their way of life)

Kurtz is also stolen directly, name and all, from Conrad (tho i suppose Apocalypse Now also did that... but, y'know, that seemed particularly lazy) - yet as "Bad Colonialist"*, he isn't really that much different from Gunderman as "Good Colonialist"... that aside, still a decent read, with a nice bit of mysticism towards the end...

(It also helped me find the other book mentioned in the other thread, which is Silverberg's Face of the Waters, because of how strongly the writing style reminded me of it, even tho i couldn't remember its author or title - i strongly suspect (tho i'd have to re-read it to be sure) that FotW was another take on postcolonial themes (with quite a similar ending to DttE, if memory serves right)...)

*i was strongly tempted not to correct the typo "Cad Colonialist" ; )
 
 
grant
16:25 / 11.09.07
I love Downward to the Earth in an irrational way, probably due to the age at which I first read the thing.

When I re-read it a few years ago, it seemed like Silverberg was doing with Kipling (or the image-of-Kipling) & Conrad exactly what Le Guin was doing with the Tao Te Ching in Lathe of Heaven - sort of using it as thematic set-dressing to decorate a sci-fi stage.

Here, a story about drugs that change your body into something you dream about! But what can we make it mean? Oh, let's throw some colonial legacy at it! Et voila, a plot emerges.

I think there's probably quite a lot that was published at the same time Silverberg wrote (and a few years before) that was more directly fooling around with the colonial sci-fi of Burroughs - both the Tarzan books and the John Carter books were about bold Anglosphere dudes taming uncivilized lands and defeating savage hordes of barbarians. Like, I'd be surprised if Norman Spinrad hadn't done at least a short story lampooning Burroughs, although nothing comes immediately to mind.

Hmm - there's a Poul Anderson novel called Virgin Planet about a male pilot who crash lands on a planet populated entirely by women. They've developed a whole (barbarian-ish) society based on cloning technology. They're divided into a handful of clans descended from the original crew of a colony ship that crashed - the science officer patched together some kind of machine that makes parthenogenesis possible, and the female crew members all started spawning generation upon generation of identical children (I can't remember if they actually get pregnant, but they might).

Of course, it's a funny romp as the hapless pilot is bound up and passed from tribe to tribe while trying to figure out what's going on (much less how he can explain this Earth thing called "kissing"), with lots of 70s-era battle-of-the-sexes jokes.

I bring it up because it's in part based on that Warlord of Mars outline. Manly man lands on savage planet, and is utterly unable to tame barbarian hordes or woo beautiful alien women. There have to be a few more satires out there somewhere....

---------

Slightly different tack, but what would one make of Dune and the role of/portrayal of the Fremen? Are they just a tripped-out OPEC surrogate with Lawrence-of-Arrakis in charge? Man, I haven't read those books in over a decade....
 
 
grant
16:39 / 11.09.07
Virgin Planet 70s-era?

Sorry, it was written in 1959.

Amazon also tells me it was cited in a few books, including something called Space and Beyond: The Frontier Theme in Science Fiction edited by Gary Westfahl. Excerpts at that link.
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
13:10 / 12.09.07
Slightly different tack, but what would one make of Dune and the role of/portrayal of the Fremen? Are they just a tripped-out OPEC surrogate with Lawrence-of-Arrakis in charge? Man, I haven't read those books in over a decade....

I find the resonances with al-Qaeda quite interesting, though (obviously) unintentional. Guy from rich spice-trading family fucks off into the desert to become the leader of a band of terrorist. They even fly an ornithopter into a spice silo. (And spooky coincidence- al-Qaeda means "the base", Usul means "the base of the pillar". Apparently the books are very popular in the Arab world and the same word is used in translation).

Funny you should mention Spinrad- The Iron Dream came to mind while rereading this thread. It's great. Anyone who hasn't read it, it's billed as "a science fiction novel by Adolf Hitler", and more than anything except maybe Verhoeven's film of Starship Troopers it points up the extremely dodgy ideologies behind a lot of "classic" SF adventure fiction.
 
  
Add Your Reply