Gwyneth
Jones
Metempsychosis of the Machine: Science
Fiction in the Halls of Karma
The Mills Of
God. In the Museum
of Mankind near Piccadilly Circus, London, the textiles
exhibit includes a display of cotton robes, embroidered in
vivid geometric patterns by nineteenth-century Ethiopian
noblewomen. One of the robes has the Manchester mill mark
clearly visible, printed across one shoulder: most likely,
reads the placard, deliberately on show to affirm the fine
quality and high price of the material. I was born in
Manchester. My grandmother, left alone with three little
boys under four years old in 1914, spent her life in the
mills. Conditions were not so terrible then as in the
previous century, but she and my father and his brothers
were just about as poor as you can be without dying of it. I
know something of what happened to the slaves of King
Cotton. Still I feel an irrational tug of pride as I read
the card: to think that some noblewoman, living in alien
luxury so far from my home she might as well have been on
another planet, regarded Manchester cotton—my people's
goods—as a status-symbol; exotic treasure.
In Foumban, where the
forest-covered mountains and sweaty river plains of coastal
Cameroon give way to the red, rolling cattle country, the
local ruling dynasty counts back sixteen generations. The
compounds of the nobility have ancient, elaborately carved
gateways. There's also a palace, built in 1911 in heavy
imitation of a German style of grandeur; but we'd come to
see the famous cloth market. We found booths upon booths
piled with bolts of earthy and brilliant colour, inventive
energetic patterns; the air of the market impregnated with
the sweet, dusty smell of fresh cotton. But it was all Dutch
material, printed in the Netherlands. The tourists turn away
disappointed—and besides, it's all so expensive, same price as it would be at home;
if not more. We don't want the empire back, absolutely not.
But still, when we come to Africa we expect to make some
kind of a killing. . . . In Bafoussam, the city where you
catch the bush taxi to picturesque Foumban, the main roads
are paved. The banks are shining monolithic shrines to
capitalism (I've seen them before, these majestic shrines.
In my city, the style is Victorian Gothic). The secondary
streets are red raw dirt and stones. The people who have
crowded into them from miles around, hungry for betterment
and dreaming of freezer cabinets, air-conditioning, glossy
new cars, are living in shacks and bothies and tents and
holes in the ground: scrabbling lumps of flesh drawn into
the maw of a terrible churning vortex. Except for the
temperature (and the snarling of hideously decayed motor
transport), it could be a scene from Mary Barton.1 From north to south, economic
expansion has passed on. Manchester is quiet now. The eater
of souls has moved here.
Pirates of the
Universe. Science
fiction is in the export business. Differences within the
genre—between paranoia and good will, militarism and
evangelical fervour; between the melancholy of European
scientific romance and the brash rocketship-heroes optimism
of the USA—fade as history changes our perspective on
the futures of the past. The primary objective becomes more
clear—a sending outwards, a projection of "our own"
technophilia, our own social and political ideation, into
other realms and other times. The search for new worlds is
secondary. We need them because the market stall must have a
place to stand. But commercial empire building, as we know,
can never be a "pure-ly" economic activity. There must be
go-downs lining the jungle rivers, their traffic muddying
the virgin waters of local price structure. Native clerks
must be trained and thereby alienated from their kin. Soon
guilt-tripping missions must be launched to improve the lot
of the exploited. Before long we find we've had to take over
a whole country, in order to keep those wheels a'turn-ing
back at home. The tiresome necessity becomes a purpose in
itself. Everything is reversed. We came to sell our goods,
we end up taking possession of our customers. . . .
Academic study of the genre,
perceiving sf as a naive yet fascinating puppet theatre of
confrontation between self and not-self, machine and flesh,
master and slave, tends to brush aside the travelogue
element—all those strange suns and skies—as
trivial. It's true that, as in real life, the new
civilisation pasted up around the market stall is often a
flimsy pretence, not seriously intended to deceive the
expected audience.2 But without forcing the connection
back to seventeenth- and sixteenth-century European forays
into Africa and Asia and the New World, or citing Cyrano de
Bergerac or Kepler's space-exploration fantasies, it is
entirely reasonable to call sf the fiction of economic
expansion; and to see its essential story in those terms.
(Time smooths over the cracks here as well, brushing away
the great divide between East and West and reconstituting
the unity of the mass-market era. Ideology is also a
product, for which markets must be found or created). In
this view of science fiction the other place is no longer mere decor, nor yet
valuable only as a metaphor for the receptive, the female,
the void into which "we" must thrust "ourselves." It is of
vital importance. And the connections between the
other
place of sf and
real-world economic empire are redoubled, by the nature of
the relationship between world-building fiction and the
world from which all fictional worlds are built. Inevitably,
the cultures and landscapes annexed in imagination have been
largely identical with the cultures and landscapes of those
annexed, exploited territories known until recently as the
Third World.
It is hard to make bricks
without straw. The most popular or the most rarefied sf text
has to give the reader some viewpoint that translates the
unknown into story. We so often need to signal that a
society we're writing about is different from "our own":
which means different from the dominant cultures of the
mass-market era. How much simpler and more sensible to
appropriate a set of differences (customs, costumes,
rituals, beliefs, scraps of language, artifacts, kinship
patterns) that we know to be functional (Inuit? Hindu?) than
to trust in our pitifully inadequate powers of invention. If
we were not forced to cannibalize the Third World by the
logical necessity of our outward drive, we would still need
it for copy. It's a habit that we can't seem to give up, no
matter how the status of the target cultures changes. Indeed
sf's re-presentation of the Third World has been weirdly
reminiscent of the real world's enthusiastic translation of
defeated "native peoples" into mass entertainment. In the
beginning there were the Wild West spectacles of the late
nineteenth-century US, and lavish, frankly triumphant
exhibitions of tropical trophies in London and Paris. Lately
the trophies, so as not to be recognized as stolen property,
have had to become ethnographical exhibits;3 and the Red Man freak shows have had
to be sanitized by Hollywood.4 But however apologetically, science
fiction must export: and therefore must control the economy
of the other
place by any means
necessary.
The Politics of
Appropriation. In
contrast to sf's characteristic radical-conservative line on
home politics, attitudes to the fictional colonies have
been, on the face of it, remarkably liberal. Stories
involving human exploitation of newly discovered planets
have often sided with the natives. Only aggressive,
technologically competitive aliens have been demonized. Sf
has been used as a vehicle for protest against real-world
military or commercial depredations in the colonies or
ex-colonies of the White North. The First World monoculture
view of the human future has been inclusive, not exclusive.
It's been assumed that everybody has to join, but at least
everybody's been welcome. Perhaps the worst offence has been
the persistent suggestion, implicit in too many simple-life
affirming novels and stories, that "they" (the people who
have no freezer cabinets or glossy new cars) were much
better off: and all of us rich urban, technophile wordsmiths
would really far prefer to be illiterate ersatz yak-drivers
on planet New Tibet.
Science fiction is never
ahistorical. The respectful and positive attitude to alien
cultures expressed in the liberal sf I read when I was
growing up in the sixties, the fiction of Ursula Le Guin,
James Tiptree, Arthur C. Clarke, Roger Zelazny, Robert
Heinlein (among others) reflected the real world
situation— hopes for the future of newly independent
colonies; fears for the control of vital raw materials;
consciousness of the value of Third World alignment in the
Superpowers' shifting balance of terror; and among US
writers without doubt a conviction that the USA could never
repeat the mistakes of European Imperialists. However, a
wholesale annexation was still going on, under all the good
will. Sf's imperialism by stealth can be observed in the
sixties genre classic, Frank Herbert's Dune (1965). In this highly entertaining
story, members of the dominant echelon of spacefaring
civilisation arrive on the desert planet Arrakis, popularly
known as "Dune." Arrakis is the source of an extremely
important commodity, the "Spice" which keeps old age at bay
and facilitates faster-than-light navigation; and the
homeworld of a Bedouin-oid native race called the "Fremen."
A young boy called Paul Atreides, heir of one of the
dominant echelon's great families, is cast adrift in the
desert. He becomes the Fremen mystic and prophet Muad'dib;
and the leader of an immensely powerful religious and
political movement. Herbert's attitude to the natives of
Arrakis is exemplary. It is the desert people who teach, and
the (economic imperialist) outsiders who learn.
Desert-inspired mysticism is not only spiritually superior
to the (economic imperialist) esoteric discipline in which
the proto "Muad'dib" was originally trained, it also turns
out to be the mechanism that to some degree restores control
of Arrakis's valuable raw materials to the local population.
. . . But such benevolent patronage has a price. Though it
is presumably possible to read Dune as a work of pure, colorful
invention (the splendid tribesfolk with their picturesque
flowing robes and seductive blue-on-blue eyes; the monstrous
sandworms; the harsh beauty of the endless dunes; the rich
detail of an obsessively water-conserving culture), most
readers would be aware of real world sources for this
situation, this landscape, this culture. What happens in
Dune (amidst a wealth of future-Byzantine
court intrigue) is that a rich white boy in a clearly
recognisable fictional Middle East is adopted by some
quasi-Islamic tribesfolk and becomes a version of Mohammed.
What happens in the appendices (which are voluminous, in the
style of those days) is that Fremen culture and religion are
traced not to an Arab interplanetary venture, but to "SPACE
TRAVEL!" itself.5 The Fremen have distant connections
with Islamic tradition, but they themselves belong to the
single, dominant economy that put the rockets into space. .
. . Third World peoples, it appears, are welcome to become
citizens of the future. They may retain their traditions,
costume and language. But they must accept that all trace of
their independent origins must vanish. And it seemed
perfectly natural at the time, a very reasonable way of
looking at the human future. The spacefaring culture at the
back of the story is clearly that of the United States, in
origin, traits, assumptions—and therefore not mine. I
don't remember if I noticed this when I first read
Dune: if I did I didn't care. "We" were
gladly going to put all that sort of thing behind us.
Through the seventies and
eighties alien-world travelogue fell into disfavor. One
could cite many reasons for this eclipse—the deadly
fat-volumes series-syndrome, of which Dune was an early victim; US defeat in
Vietnam, which gave imaginary versions of the Third World a
very different status; the depressingly limited actuality of
real space travel; the emergence of a new generation of
writers, asserting themselves on the mean streets of earth,
because the rest of the galaxy had been carved up long
ago.6 But the global situation was also
changing. The Third World of the dispossessed was vanishing
from its traditional territories, to reappear in threatening
enclaves deep within the First World. The newly emerged
Developing World offered fewer and fewer gentle backwaters,
where colorful mediaeval peasants sans standard consumer durables could be
admired for their immemorial calm. Recently, finding
near-future realism inadequate for the mood of the nineties,
science-fiction writers have returned in droves to the
fantasy diaspora. More devious explanations for period
costume and historical re-enactment on distant planets are
in vogue:7 trophies have become conservation
projects. In the epidemic insecurity of the fin de siecle,
it isn't all that absurd to propose that whole planetary
communities might set themselves up as theme-park
exhibits:8 there is no shortage of evidence
that human groups can and will cling to the past with insane
passion. But in John Barnes's A Million Open Doors (1993), reference to the particular
anxieties of the old dominant economies seems very clear.
After a lengthy period of political breakdown, the "thousand
cultures" of the ethnic-recreation diaspora must accept the
return of central government: they must open up their local
markets to the commercial might of the monoculture. In an
earlier, more innocent science fiction the colonists would
have been the heroes in this situation. They would have
triumphed, like the Fremen. The plot has changed. For John
Barnes economic submission is essential. Not one of those
thousand customers can be allowed to resist the
(re)appearance of MacDonalds on their High Streets. The time
when we could pretend (even in fantasy) that "we" don't need
"them," that we're distributing civilization out of the
kindness of our hearts, has passed away.
Lord of
Light. My own entry
into science fiction (as a writer) came midway, spiritually
and chronologically, between Herbert and Barnes. I had just
had my first children's novel published, when the historical
situation of post-economic imperialism (the time when we
export our usefully-educated selves, having nothing else
left) dispatched me to Singapore, where my husband had a
teaching job. We spent some time traveling, during our
stay, in Java, Sumatra, Bali, Malaysia, and Thailand. I
became fascinated by the culture of the region. A story that
I had begun writing years before—about a robot girl,
her cynical cat-companion; and their search for the humans
they were bound to serve— began to grow into a
far-future romance.9 Nearly twenty years on, I know that
my fiction has been permanently shaped by those three years
in the tropics, and by contact with those cultures. At the
time I felt I was simply using the materials that came to
hand, in a conventional genre tale. My character Cho, the
metagenetic gynoid, was built in Beijing, at the Tumbling
Dice Toy Factory, but she came from Asimov's robot stories.
My borrowing of Third World culture (in this case Malaysian
and Indonesian) was inspired by Roger Zelazny's
Lord of
Light.
Lord of
Light (1967), like
Dune, is a fantasy adventure in which a
highly advanced technological community confronts its
relationship with its subject peoples. In Dune, the monoculture comes to Arrakis
and finds the mediaeval tribesfolk already in place. In
Lord of
Light we learn
through inference and reminiscence that Hindu culture was
salvaged from the archives of a long-ago starship, and
imposed as a tool of social control. The original explorers
of this alien planet have developed powers as near to divine
as makes no difference. They re-enact the Hindu Pantheon,
while their descendants populate the world below in
helpless, caste-ridden ignorance.10 Sam, the renegade immortal, sets out
to destroy the gods so that the masses will be free "to have
can openers and cans to open again." He recreates the life
of the Buddha, in order to loosen the shackles of theocracy.
His fake mission throws up a genuine Bodhisattva, and in
spite of the cunning priests—who swiftly incorporate
Buddhism into their power structure—the new religion
takes hold. However, after some highly colored and
long-winded battle sequences (entirely justified by the
original tradition) the gods are defeated not by Sam's
"Accelerationism" but through the turning of the Great
Wheel. Intervention is not enough. The gods can only be
displaced by time, internal conflict, and unwise
recruitment.
Roger Zelazny, according to
admirers better qualified to judge than I am, did most of
his best work in shorter forms.11 But Lord of Light is a science fiction that endures
with more dignity than Dune, in my opinion, because of Zelazny's
decision to address the identity between the myths he uses and his
own re-telling. He blows away the sf delusion that there is
something inherently, morally superior about power derived
from "science" and machines— as opposed to the
primitive, despicable dominion of magic-makers and
theocrats. Magic is power and power is magic. In the
brilliant stroke of presenting the Hindu pantheon as
comic-book superheroes, Costumed Clowns with Cosmic Powers,
he leaps the gap between the technophilic worshippers of USA
consumerism and every other population of dazzled, adoring
peasants. Nothing else in the book is so memorable, not even
the Rakasha (demons in the form of energy-entity aborigines)
or Sam's dashing, wisecracking progress to genuine
Enlightenment. Much of the novel isn't a great deal
different from anything in Zelazny's prolific fantasy
output. But the final fate of Accelerationism is telling. At
the end of the story, when the Promethean gift has been
delivered, Sam simply vanishes, indistinguishable from the
human crowd. Liberal sf, well supplied with post-holocaust,
post-diaspora reiterations where the export-drive story can
be told all over again, can imagine the end of economic
imperialism: the moment when power has
passed—surrendered, stolen, copied, reinvented,
replicated—into other hands. But no further. The
anxiety in John Barnes's A Million Open Doors is foreshadowed. Can we survive
without our subjects?
The Halls Of
Karma. We write
about "our own" present, other people's pasts. When we read
about the alien world where Hindu culture has been
deliberately recreated, or the far future empire where a
neo-Byzantine society has been thrown up by convergent
evolution, our viewpoint is that of the economically
dominant cultures of the twentieth century, and we will find
that viewpoint embedded somewhere in the narrative. But
science fiction's alien societies are always situated in a
frozen past of their real world counterparts. The Hindus or
the Arab tribesfolk, the magical animists of the world
called Forest, dress in ethnic uniformity. They may have
special futuristic versions of their traditional artifacts
and costumes: they don't have fashion. Their diction, even
when they aren't quoting anything, is archaic. Their cities,
houses, furniture, means of transport are fixed in stasis,
until the science- fiction plot arrives. My own treatment of
the Promethean story, in Divine Endurance, belongs to this school. It has some
realism, some use of the dynamic and volatile situation in
the ASEAN region in the late seventies. But I wanted dreamy,
exotic local color: sarongs and gamelans, the Ramayana
Ballet by moonlight, the scent of a grove of frangipani
trees. Essentially I was looking to recreate Zelazny's
effects: "Near the city of Alundil there was a rich grove of
blue-barked trees, having purple foliage like feathers. It
was famous for its beauty and the shrinelike peace of its
shade...."
In 1996 it will seem strange
to think of Singapore as a locale of "shrinelike peace and
beauty," but this was a long time ago. I remember the
extraordinary weight and softness of the air as we stepped
off the plane, I remember a wall of grass-green creepers
hung with vivid blue flowers. When I started to write
Divine
Endurance I wanted,
naively, to capture an enchantment, even if it was only a
false-colored shadow; as unreal as those pictures of the
moons of Jupiter they show us on the tv. But though like
Zelazny I had my metaphysical agenda, and a serious use for
the region's culture, the book belonged to my viewpoint, not to the locals'. While
I was living in Singapore the brutal annexation of East
Timor had begun. When I traveled in Java and Sumatra I
heard grim stories about the Jakarta government. But I did
not incorporate the rising ferocity of the Indonesian Empire
into my fiction. In my liberal sf account, the bad guys had
to be the big, white, mechanized
colonialists.12 The little brown natives, though
they could have some internal divisions and dirty politics,
had to be the goodies. (Arguably, colonialism is finally
responsible for the evils of all post-colonial regimes: it's
still true that I dragged my "Rulers" into the plot because
I couldn't imagine a world without them). My story was as
much bound by convention as the Ramayana Ballet itself. It
ended in the traditional way. The Nuclear Weapon,
symbolizing my culture's evil infatuation with
life-destroying technological power, was brought onto the
stage.13 The ultimate threat was displayed,
and then disarmed at the last possible moment by Cho the
gynoid—the ultimate achievement of corrupt technophile
civilization. Thus guilt was expiated, and power (in an
internalized, life-enhancing form) passed into the hands of
the coming race. Whereupon Cho vanished, like Zelazny's Sam,
into a world I could not describe.
For a respectable length of
time, at least since Arthur C. Clarke's famous reproof to
the government of Azania over the treatment of their
country's struggling white minority,14 sf has been reading the demographic
writing on the wall. Once it was brave and noble to suggest
such a thing. Nowadays, though you don't have to be black (or Hispanic, or Asian)
to be a starship captain, it certainly helps. Futuristic
novelists lace their pages with African, Asian, and Hispanic
detail not to provide picturesque scenery on another planet
but to demonstrate their grasp of the way things are going
on earth. The radical-conservative mainstream has adopted
the celebration of multiethnic "traditional lifestyles,"
while the world's poor can be demonized without a murmur of
protest from the public.15 Meanwhile liberals embrace the
depoliticized future-monoculture for which they
used to feel such distaste. Like so many unjust stewards,
bent on pragmatic alliances ahead of an awkward reckoning,
sf writers are trying—in whatever way seems
best—to cook the books. But to date, neither the Karmic
wheel nor those slow grinding mills seem impressed. Sf has
yet to establish a viable relationship with the world beyond
post-imperialism.
Talking
Furniture.
Divine
Endurance is a
feminist novel. The topic of women's human rights gave me
the advantage, unavailable to Roger Zelazny, of an
authentically futuristic subject (besides magical
tech).16 Feminist science fiction has its
problems—plenty of internal conflict to make the good
guys more interesting—but at least I had a novel
product for my market stall: something to discuss that was
interesting to an audience without historical or ethnic
boundaries.17 But the phenomenon of feminist
science fiction—and the separate but by no means
unconnected phenomenon of the substantial commercial and
critical success of women writing sf in recent
decades—raises the question: why hasn't the same thing
happened with "The Third World"? Female characters have
frequently been treated like so much talking furniture; much
of classic sf is openly, ingenuously misogynist. Yet women
writers and editors have maintained a significant minor
presence and power-base within the genre, through all the
shifts in sexual-political climate. Science fiction's
attitude to non-white characters and cultures over the years
has been consistently, remarkably sympathetic. So why are
there still so few Black, Hispanic, or Asian sf writers in
the USA, never mind in the world in general? Perhaps this is
a stupid question. Dedication is rare, and you have to be
pretty dedicated to devote yourself to scribbling futuristic
fantasy if you have a pile of other troubles to deal with.
Maybe if we factored out all the commercial pap, all the
dumb, it's a
living filler that
gets onto the bookshop stacks, the racial disproportion
would be less striking. But there is also a question of
allegiance. Women (white women, anyway) have had a
historical stake in the technophile export business. The
housewife who packed the lunchbox, who lusted and nagged
after the new fridge-freezer, was also working for the
company: and in some sense she knew it. Science fiction did
not have to change its basic charter before women wanted to
get involved. All they asked was a bigger piece of the
action. Perhaps the resistance of those people who
were the action is bound to be more
stubborn.
World
Music. When I found
out I was going to live in Singapore, I had to look it up in
an atlas. Now the electronic island is famous. All the
changes I made in my nineties, revisionist Divine Endurance story, Flowerdust, were in the direction of
recognising the other
place as part of my
own world. The monoculture has come closer since I started
to write, but its genesis is more painful and more costly
than liberal sf ever imagined, in the days when wealth
creation was supposed to be unlimited, and more for them never had to mean less for us. We are reaching, they say, some
very profound limits. In many of our probable futures
Accelerationism seems likely to be replaced by futile
attempts to keep the precious secrets of "technology" locked
up (probably in the vaults of the Pentagon, along with the
Ark of the Covenant, the frozen alien embryos, and all that
other fancy stuff). Science fiction is already recording the
spasms of isolationist paranoia that will convulse the
territories formerly known as "The First World." . . .
Meanwhile, the genre itself has recently been opened up for
exploitation by post-modern academics. Possibly it was the
poetic justice of this latter development that started me
thinking about the subject of this essay. There was also a
panel at the Worldcon in Glasgow in 1995, when we asked the
question "Where are all the African, Asian, South American
writers of the future?" There is science fiction in the USA,
of course. There is science fiction in Japan, in Canada, in
Britain, in Continental Europe both East and West; there is
science fiction in China. But what about the rest: and
why are there so few
non-white faces here in this hall? We were sure there must be enclaves
of sf writers and readers everywhere, but we couldn't prove
it. Someone dredged up a memory of a little boy in an
African town running around in a Superman tee-shirt. I
didn't find this image reassuring. I dismissed Superman as a
form of Coca-Cola, mere White North merchandising, and then
I wondered: has science fiction ever been anything
else?
Perhaps these anxieties are
absurd—the pedantry of the idiot-savante subspecies of
the fantastic that perversely longs to be taken literally. We've been talking from the start
about "World Government," "Earth's Starfleet," now we want
to make good our claim to speak for the whole race, and we
get twitchy if there are any voices missing from the chorus.
And perhaps I should change my mind about that tee-shirt.
Perhaps the best thing that can happen to science
fiction—now that there is only one world—is that
its images should be subsumed into global folklore: Costumed
Clowns with Cosmic Powers, alien invasion movies with Big
Explosions, Star Trek reruns and Asimov reprints. And yet,
though I try to be positive, I see few signs that the
Economic Expansion Machine, the eater of souls, has achieved
enlightenment in its juggernaut progress from North to
South. I predict that the story of the Machine—all
those impractical social engineering projects and fantasies
of infinite instrumentality, all those complicated
dreams—will be born again, many times, in the minds of
future human generations.
NOTES
1. Elizabeth Cleghorn
Gaskell (nee Stevenson), the biographer of Charlotte Bronte,
wrote several novels and stories of Manchester life in the
mid-nineteenth century. The best known may be North and
South;
Mary
Barton (1848) was
the first. Her sympathy for the sufferings of the "hands" in
the industrial and commercial upheavals of those decades was
compromised by political timidity. But on re-reading
Mary
Barton recently,
what struck me most was her evocation of the newly urbanized
landscape—the proximity of immemorial green fields to
the raw ugliness of the factory workers' packed hovels,
demonstrating the violence and abruptness of the historical
change.
2. "Later I read the
Strugatskys and realized that the cultural background of
their books, which I found so weird, the uninvented stage on which the
science fiction happens, was Soviet Russia. It dawned on me
that the other unknown land was real too. It was the country
that I knew from tv and from Hollywood films as "America"
—impenetrably disguised (I was a gullible child) by its
avowed intention to represent somewhere else: the distant
future, a distant planet...."—Gwyneth Jones, from a
book review, Foundation #57:103, Spring 1993.
3. Fair exchange is no
robbery. Without doubt many "ethnographical" and "classical"
exhibits now in European museums were more or less honestly
bought and sold, and don't require to be returned to their
homeland any more than my son's miniature basemetal model of
the Empire State Building. But the Greeks still haven't got
their marbles back!
4. A process anatomised in
the film Buffalo Bill
and the Indians, or Sitting Bull's History
Lesson, Dir. Robert
Altman, 1976, US.
5. Dune, Appendix II, Herbert's capitals. The
novel is dedicated rather vaguely "To the people whose
labors go beyond ideas into the realm of `real
materials'—to the dry-land ecologists, wherever they
may be, in whatever time they work...." Islam and the Koran
are mentioned in passing, but Fremen religion is described
as deriving equally from a post-spacefaring pan-ecumenical
movement based on Catholicism and Judaism.
6. It could be argued that
the "social realist" cyberpunk writers themselves only offer
a different tourist itinerary, exploiting colorful natives
and weird rituals closer to home. Notoriously, some critics
have read the use of "voodoo" lore in Gibson in this way.
Gibson's Mona Lisa
Overdrive (1988),
meanwhile, has some of the most dreadful "ethnic" dialogue,
for the British secondary cast, that I've ever seen.
7. Magical science can
explain anything: in Nicola Griffith's Ammonite (1993) a virus causes human settlers
on a distant planet to revert to Celtic tribal
matriarchy.
8. In Orson Scott Card's
Xenocide novels one can visit a "traditional Japan" planet
(complete with "corrupt politicians"!); and a "traditional
Polynesia" planet, with grass skirts (Children of the Mind, 1996). Sheri Tapper's Arbai series
features the same kind of deliberate old-earth pastiche set
up for highly questionable motives (Sideshow, 1992).
9. I started writing in
1978; Divine
Endurance was first
published in 1984. The original story of Cho is much older,
dating back to about 1970.
10. Occasionally the Hindu
re-creation seems to falter. There's a passage in which a
citizen, having heard that modern plumbing is in the
pipeline, keeps buckets of faeces in a back room so as to be
instantly ready to avail himself of the new technology. This
sounds unlikely, considering the Subcontinent's enduring
popular resistance to the disgusting Western practice of
having people emptying their bowels anywhere inside a
dwelling place.
11. E.g., David Hartwell,
"Home is the Hunter," New York Review of Science
Fiction 97:21-22,
Sept 1996.
12. My "Rulers," a powerful
remnant of the technological past, were said to have come
from a great island continent in the Southern Ocean. Many US
readers took this "island" to be North America, but my
geography isn't that bad. Schematically, perhaps those
readers had a point.
13. A startlingly robust
device, this. See the concluding passages of Bruce
Sterling's Islands in
the Net; and of Will
Baker's 1996 "Green Rage" polemic Star Beast, two novels very different in intent
and in period. Among others. If science fiction survives (as
a traditional art form) I expect the Nuclear Weapon scene
(We Lay Down Our Arms) will be in the script a thousand
years from now.
14. Childhood's End, Arthur C. Clarke, 1953: Even today,
Clarke remains an unashamed global monoculturist.
15. See Neal Stephenson's
invocation (in Snow
Crash, 1992) of a
vast raftload of Asian "Refus" as the latest ultimate threat
to Civilization.
16. I have a paper written
by an Italian academic about Divine Endurance that speculates on the relationship
between Cho, the metagenetic gynoid, and Donna Haraway's
Cyborg Manifesto. I freely confess that in 1978 I had never
heard of Donna Haraway. Perhaps Cho's cyborg nature would
bear investigation: but that's another story.
17. At the outset, my
feminist-sf plot was conventional. Cho, with my female rebel
leader, Derveet, and their allies, would struggle against
the patriarchal oppression entrenched in Derveet's society,
and in the society of the foreign Rulers. My first draft of
Divine
Endurance employed
the word Betina for the female quarters of a
household. The Indonesian student who read it for me
objected to this usage. She said it was undignified and
unpleasant, this term would only be used for a female
animal. I knew this: I had intended the term to be
insulting. But I accepted her judgment and started to use
the word dapur, the hearth, instead: which made a
dramatic change to the nature of Peninsulan society, and my
whole perception of the social role of the "veiled
woman."
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