The Inward Urge: 1960s Science Fiction and Imperialism

THE INWARD URGE: 1960s SCIENCE FICTION AND IMPERIALISM

David M. Higgins

Submitted to the faculty of the University Graduate School in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Departments of English and American Studies Indiana University April 2010

UMI Number: 3409100

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Accepted by the Graduate faculty, Indiana University, in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.

Doctoral Committee

__________________________________ De Witt Douglas Kilgore, PhD Committee Chair

__________________________________ Patrick Brantlinger, PhD

__________________________________ Eva Cherniavsky, PhD

__________________________________ Rob Latham, PhD

__________________________________ Ranu Samantrai, PhD

April 16, 2010 ii

© 2010 David M. Higgins ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

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Acknowledgements This project would not have been possible without the guidance of De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Rob Latham; I am deeply grateful for their support, and I am also indebted to Patrick Brantlinger, Eva Cherniavsky, and Ranu Samantrai for their help and feedback. Additionally, I would like to extend my deepest gratitude to Alyc Helms, Carmen Fisher, Roby Duncan, Darja Malcolm-Clarke, Marcia Baczynski, Tatyana Brown, Lewis Lain, Dani Duncan, and Jeff Sartain; all of these readers and friends helped me in the trenches of this project in countless ways. Portions of this project were presented at The International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts and at the annual meeting of the Science Fiction Research Association, and I’d like to thank my colleagues at both conferences for their generous comments. My work would not have been possible without the financial support provided by the Indiana University departments of English and American Studies. Everyone who participated in IU Live Action’s “A Tale of Winter” also made an impact on this dissertation; I couldn’t have done this without all of you! Deep thanks also to all of the members of Freedomcommunity (especially Craig Cady) who have helped me reflect upon what is centrally important in my creative and intellectual expressions. Finally, I want to thank my parents Debra and Michael Higgins and my grandparents Donald and Beatrice Cohn; your love and support has made this journey possible for me, and I appreciate the many ways you have encouraged and sustained me through many years of academic and professional development.

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David M. Higgins THE INWARD URGE: 1960s SCIENCE FICTION AND IMPERIALISM Science fiction’s “inward” turn in the 1960s coincides with an introspective shift in British and American imperial imaginings. In a moment when the ideal of the “frontier” is transforming in America, and at a time when decolonization is reversing the European colonial project, science fiction turns its attention to “inner” rather than “outer” spaces, and this introspective turn indexes the changing contours of imperial discourse and practice in the 1960s. The science fiction of this period rejects the ontological imperialism of modernist meta-narratives by exploring valid plural subjectivities; at the same time, it indexes the ways in which imperial power can utilize postmodern tactics to retain asymmetrical privilege. This dissertation indexes Cold War transformations in imperial imaginings in the fiction of Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, J. G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, Philip K. Dick, Philip Jose Farmer, Joanna Russ, Samuel Delany, and Ursula K. Le Guin. These texts offer revealing insights into the continuing power of modern imperial strategies and into emergent formations of postmodern neo-imperialism.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

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Introduction: The Inward Urge

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Chapter One: The Evolution of Psychedelic Manhood

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Chapter Two: Revolutions in the Head

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Chapter Three: Imperial Thermodynamics

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Chapter Four: Awakening the Imperial Unconscious

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Chapter Five: Towards a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction

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Bibliography

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Introduction: The Inward Urge

My central argument in this dissertation is that science fiction‟s “inward” turn in the 1960s (in contrast to its “outward” expansive emphasis in previous decades) coincides with an introspective shift in British and American imperial imaginings. In a moment when the ideal of the “frontier” is transforming in America, and at a time when decolonization is reversing the European colonial project, science fiction turns its attention to “inner” rather than “outer” spaces, and this introspective turn indexes the changing contours of imperial discourse and practice in the 1960s. The title of my dissertation, The Inward Urge, is an adaptation of the title of John Wyndham‟s 1962 collection The Outward Urge, a series of stories that each frame outer space as a receding “frontier.” In his critical study Frontiers Past and Future: Science Fiction and the American West, Carl Abbott outlines how science fiction novelists have imagined the exploration and colonization of outer space as a continuation of the settlement of the American West. Although his study emphasizes the American frontier context, Abbott also acknowledges that there is a continuity between American Westerns and British colonial-adventure narratives that finds its extrapolative expression in SF‟s outward emphasis: “Once the imperial adventure or quest romance was freed of real settings, it was easy to transpose the adventures to other planets and sun systems. Writers pioneered science fiction by shifting the focus from lost races and places to new peoples on new worlds, writing the fantastic forward rather than sideways or backward in time” (10).

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Other scholars, such as Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, have interrogated the connections between the European tradition of imperial romance (the “boys‟ adventure” stories of Kipling, Stevenson, A.E.W. Mason, and Percival Christopher Wren) and the American Western narrative tradition. Despite their work, a gulf in thinking still remains in many conceptions of the connections between European imperialism and the experience of the American “frontier.” It is a testament to the continuing power of the idealistic mythos of the American frontier that the United States‟ history of westward expansion is still sometimes understood as an exceptional adventure rather than as a brutal imperial conquest; indeed, one could argue that the only thing “exceptional” about American imperialism was the terrible scale of its success. Unlike most European colonies, which decolonized and achieved independence after World War II, Native Americans were never integrated into a colonial system; instead, they were marginalized and subjected to extraordinary violence. The scale of this atrocity makes the very notion of Native American “decolonization” nearly unthinkable. A number of scholars in recent years have called into question science fiction‟s implication in the production of Euro-American imperial discourses. Following Edward Said‟s argument in Culture and Imperialism that imperial practices are unthinkable without the imaginative support of cultural productions (such as literature, film, and television), critics such as Patricia Kerslake, Istvan Csicery-Ronay, Jr., Gwynneth Jones, and John Rieder have interrogated the various ways in which science fiction, with its constant exploration into the unknown and confrontation with the alien “other,” has historically functioned as an imaginary literature of Empire. These scholars were preceded by an earlier generation, which included critics such as Richard Slotkin and 2

David Mogen, who examined SF‟s relationship with the Western, but these scholars rarely acknowledged in any comprehensive way the continuities between American Westerns and British colonial-adventure narratives. The emerging critical trend in science fiction studies (exemplified by Rieder and Kerslake) focuses on the way science fiction imagines outward movement – travel from earth to the stars, for example – in imperial terms as a continuation of the Western imperial tradition. In the 1960s, however, at the moment when European decolonization had shattered the mythos of imperial adventure, and when American optimism about “progress” and “manifest destiny” were confronting repressed histories of racial violence in the face of Civil Rights and mass protest against the Vietnam War, a new movement in science fiction emerged that rejected “outward” explorations in favor of “inward” critique. J.G. Ballard, one of the major voices of the British New Wave, famously argued that the most “alien” world to explore was Earth itself in the 1960s, and New Wave fictions typically focused on exploring the “inner” spaces of the mind and emotions or on exploring the taken-for-granted underpinnings of commonplace social and political habits of Western culture (Pringle, “Ballard” 84). New Wave authors frame “inner space” explorations during a cultural moment influenced by the emergence of LSD and psychedelic counterculture. Colin Greenland suggests that the introduction of LSD plays a major role in the development of counterculture in the 1960s; he notes that a populist “revolution” against normative consensual reality spreads from the West Coast of America throughout Europe, and that an active psychedelic counterculture interested in exploring new terrains of perception and new modes of expression influences the aesthetic and political agendas of New Wave 3

science fiction. In this regard, New Wave writers stand alongside other artists in the 1960s who are interested in defining the subjectivity of “inner space” as a new “frontier” that should be explored for personal, social, and political growth in the face of subjective ideological stagnation. John Hellman observes a similar agenda in the work of New Journalists such as Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, and Tom Wolfe; New Journalism is motivated by a dissatisfaction with the mimetic reality portrayed by the mass media and a desire to gain access to a more authentic subjective truth. Artists within the New Wave, New Journalism, and psychedelic counterculture (in the form of hallucinogenic “pioneers” like Kesey and Timothy Leary) are united in their dissatisfaction with consensual reality and their determination to explore new transgressive subjective terrains. Most writers, fans, and historians agree that the New Wave crystallized in 1964 when Michael Moorcock took over as editor of the British SF magazine New Worlds and began publishing unusual SF stories featuring avant-garde meditations on self and society rather than the more familiar bug-eyed-monster outer-space exploration narratives. John Wyndham, the author of The Outward Urge (and other classic British SF stories like Day of the Triffids), had published SF stories in the pages of New Worlds before Moorcock took over as the magazine‟s editor. If Wyndham and his contemporaries represented a period of outward emphasis in science fiction, Moorcock and his circle represented, in many ways, the opposite: Wyndham was interested in outer space; Moorcock was concerned with inner space. Wyndham focused on physics and astronomy; Moorcock emphasized psychology and sociology. Wyndham‟s generation was optimistic and expansive; Moorcock‟s generation was critical (some would say pessimistic) and 4

apocalyptic. I therefore call this project The Inward Urge, because I think that the New Wave produces different kind of science fiction than the work that preceded it. What is the nature of this difference? And most importantly, if the New Wave valorizes an inward exploration (into the mysteries of mind, self, and society), what consequence does this have for the way in which these science fiction stories reproduce or challenge imperial discourses? If the New Wave is sensitive to the form of imperialism that emerges from the categorical assumptions of modern Enlightenment rationalism, how sensitive (or insensitive) are New Wave projects to the new postmodern strategies of imperial power described by Jameson, Harvey, Hardt, and Negri? In The Location of Culture (1994) Homi Bhabha suggests that the significance of postmodernism lies not only in the fact that it is a mode of thought and expression that challenges modernist meta-narratives, but also in the understanding that those grand meta-narratives form the “enunciative boundaries” of voices, experiences, and histories. The boundary that excludes certain subjective experiences is, in his view, the space from which majoritarian power begins “presencing” (7). The canonical center of culture, he observes, is always elusively empty and negative; Deleuze and Guattari articulate something similar in A Thousand Plateaus when they suggest that no one perfectly occupies a „majoritarian‟ position, because such a position is an excessive gestalt that fails to correspond with the complexity of real subjects. Bhabha‟s work (along with the work of Pease, Kaplan, Rowe, and Sanchez) suggests that exclusive attention to canonical „centers‟ misses the point (and fails to critique the cultural dynamics of imperial knowledge and discourse formation) because exclusion and negation form the bedrock of discursive subjectivites. 5

Building from Bhabha and placing his work alongside insights from scholars such as David Harvey, Fredrick Jameson, Michael Hardt, and Antonio Negri, a pair of interconnected problems emerges regarding the relations between postmodernism and imperialism. On one hand, the subjective plurality of postmodern texts challenges what Robert Young calls the „ontological imperialism‟ of the modernist Enlightenmentrational project (the notion that there is a single, knowable truth that can be discovered and represented above all other truths). At the same time, however, scholars like Harvey point out that postmodern fluidity, depthlessness, and play have become the strategies (or meta-tactics) of power under conditions of postmodernity. As Hardt and Negri observe, power has evacuated the towers of rational unity and now stands in alliance with minority critics who champion the cause of decentralization and fluid adaptation. If modern imperialism has been characterized by the cartographic imperative to map, define, rationalize, territorialize, and conquer, Harvey and others suggest that imperialism under postmodernity is characterized by the drive to liberate markets, deterritorialize modes and methods of production, and reorganize resources in nonlinear, adaptable rhizomes of tactical deployment. My work addresses both dimensions of this imperial dichotomy. To put my research in the context of Amy Kaplan‟s comments from “Left Alone With America,” my project considers both the role of culture in the establishment of (and resistance to) Empire and the role of Empire in the constitution of culture. The science fiction narratives I examine reject the ontological imperialism of modernist meta-narratives by exploring plural valid subjective worlds of experience, and they also remain critical of the ways in which power can utilize postmodern tactics to retain asymmetrical privilege for 6

elite subjects. These texts therefore offer challenges to both the continuing power of modern imperial strategies and to postmodern neo-imperial tactics. Consider, for example, the writing of Joanna Russ. The Female Man is an exploration in ontological plurality; Russ takes her readers on a journey through multiple subjective positions (Joanna, Jael, Janet, Jeannine) available to women in cultures where different forms of social inequality restrict women‟s rights and freedoms. Her book upsets the rational-modern paradigm that suggests there is a fundamental ontology that can be discovered and described through a „proper‟ way of knowing and representing the world, and her extrapolation reveals the pain and frustration suffered by women whose subjective experiences are rendered invalid by centralizing epistemological norms. At the same time, however, Russ deconstructs the fluid and decentrialized strategies that maintain masculine discursive hegemony. Several times in her novel (as well as in her nonfiction) she mimics conversations between men and women that create discursive no-win situations for women because „logical‟ grounds continue to shift in favor of men; no matter what a woman says in The Female Man, the woman will be infantilized or discredited because male privilege tactically shifts „rational‟ discursive positions to suit its own ends. Russ is therefore able to critique both the exclusionary power of modern-rational meta-narratives and the ways in which discursive power uses “fluid” postmodern tactics to maintain hegemonic authority. A similar pattern can be observed in the writings of Philip K. Dick. The characters in Dick‟s stories experience extreme epistemological upheavals; they begin with the belief that they have an appropriate mode of knowing the world only to discover that everything they know is a lie. Often this epistemological reversal occurs several 7

times, and Dick‟s protagonists are left inhabiting worlds that lacks basic ontological stability. At the same time, however, Dick does not unproblematically celebrate postmodern shifting subjectivities; he also remains remarkably critical of the way spacetime compression under conditions of postmodernity can accumulate exploitative power for national and corporate megaliths. In “Paycheck” and “Minority Report,” for example, Dick presents settings in which corporate and national interests struggle over time travel technologies (which he presents as fictive devices to represent the mastery over latecapitalist space-time compression), and these struggles are always undertaken at the expense of exploited workers and excluded social minorities. The most interesting aspect of the SF texts I examine in the 1960s is their dual potential for both exploring the authenticity of plural subjectivities and their capacity for modeling the ways in which power continues to concentrate in the hands of privileged elites through fluid and decentralizing postmodern tactics. Many critical approaches to imperialism address one side or the other of this dichotomy, but few attempt to grapple with both; a middle ground is needed between celebrations of postmodernism such as those offered by Carlton Smith and Mary Pat Brady and condemnations of postmodernity that characterize the works of Harvey and Jameson. Science fiction texts in the 1960s therefore intervene in critiques of imperialism on two fronts: on one hand they challenge the modern-rational imperialism of meta-narrative maps, and on the other they challenge the injustice of postmodern gambits that accumulate power and privilege through tactical deterritorializations. My first chapter, “The Evolution of Psychedelic Manhood,” surveys three iconic science fiction texts: Robert A. Heinlein‟s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Frank 8

Herbert‟s Dune (1965), and Arthur C. Clarke‟s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). These popular novels appropriate the postcolonial notion of "psychic decolonization" for the advantage of privileged male subjects; in addition, they fantasize what Istvan CsiceryRonay Jr. describes as the entelechtical transition from colonial imperialism towards Hardt and Negri's postmodern notion of Empire. Each of these three novels offers a superficial critique of imperial expansion and colonial occupation; Stranger challenges the idea that a foreign territory occupied by indigenous natives (in this case Martians) can be legitimately “claimed” by settler colonists. Dune dramatizes the uprising of a colonized diaspora population against their imperial oppressors. 2001 warns that the apotheosis of contemporary imperialism may be the nuclear annihilation of the human race. Despite this, all three narratives portray inward voyages in imperial terms, and each text replaces or augments the conquest of outer space with a central focus on the conquest of inner space. Inner space explorations offer a way of “freeing” the racially unmarked male subject from the repressive “internal colonization” of the mind; in this sense, Fanon‟s notion of psychic decolonization is appropriated in the service of the Western privilege it opposes in its intended context. The invariable goal of these 1960s inner voyages is self-mastery; that which is alien in the self must be mastered, and that which is unknown or unconscious must be brought to awareness and contained through deliberate rational control.1

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This emphasis on self-mastery replicates the construction of an imperial self in older popular adventure fictions such as Beaux Geste, The Four Feathers, Tarzan of the Apes, etc.

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This valorization of self-mastery reinforces an Enlightenment emphasis on progress and racial superiority, and it enshrines an instrumental attitude toward the human body. Furthermore, all three texts valorize a superhuman mastery over rapid movement through time and space that David Harvey characterizes as the cornerstone of postmodern economic imperialism. The powers of each representative hero in these novels exemplify what David Harvey refers to as “space-time compression,” or the ability to move and communicate over vast distances so quickly and efficiently that the world (or the galaxy, etc.) seems to become a smaller place. Despite a widespread rejection of territorial colonialism and imperialism, these texts nonetheless demonstrate a ubiquitous celebration of inward journeys framed in imperial terms. On one hand, this emphasis on inner-conquest extends discursive trends familiar within imperial adventure paradigms; on the other hand, this framing also celebrates values, such as a command over the “compression” of space and time, that are characteristic of what Hardt and Negri call “postmodern” expressions of imperial sovereignty. Chapter Two, “Revolutions in the Head,” introduces science fiction‟s New Wave, and it argues that New Wave fictions re-articulate constructions of masculinity that occur in American and British imperial-adventure genres. Some New Wave authors replicate the attitudes of Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke in the ways that they break down normative attitudes towards imperialism while at the same time rearticulating and recovering imperial figurations of heroic masculinity. Others, however, carry the critique of Empire further and deconstruct imperial and neo-imperial gender formations. This chapter divides the New Wave into two major groups; it first examines New Wave writers who critique imperialism but leave in place unchallenged assumptions 10

about imperial masculinity, and it concludes by examining authors who in some way incorporate a critique of imperial models of gender into the core of their work. The writings of the first group, represented by J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, Philip K. Dick, and Philip Jose Farmer, exemplify a prevalent underlying anxiety about the loss of masculine potency and power. These writers draw upon frontier and adventure discourses to critique imperialism while reconstituting and reinforcing traditional models of heroic masculine identity. The writings of the second group, represented by the works of Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel Delany, offer an alternative deployment of imperial critique that questions the repressive gender ideologies associated with imperial adventure. The chapter concludes with the assertion that New Wave frontier-adventure narratives can enable artists to question the gendered ideologies that had formerly been reinforced by sites of frontier-adventure discourse. The best examples of the liberatory potential offered by this kind of work are exemplified in Russ, Le Guin, and Delany, while the work of many others tends to question imperialism while continuing to reinforce imperial gender representations. Chapter Three, “Imperial Thermodynamics,” examines British postcolonial ambivalence in the work of Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard, and it concludes with an analysis of Marxist geographer David Harvey's role in the New Wave. This chapter argues that British SF authors respond to the historical moment of Western European decolonization with profoundly mixed feelings, and that they utilize the metaphor of "entropy" to thematize the decline and fall of empire.

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In both Moorcock and Ballard‟s work, the New Wave framing of imperial decline as a thermodynamic process echoes an earlier pattern exemplified by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). Conrad's notion of imperial thermodynamics (and his corresponding ambivalence concerning the virtues and vices of colonialism) informs the writings of the British New Wave authors who address the decline of Empire. On one hand, Empires must inevitably fall, and perhaps they deserve to fall due to their crimes and injustices. Despite their flaws, however, empires are still great because they represent the peak of human endeavor; they embody an attempt to build something lasting in the face of an endless decline into darkness. These authors each replicate Conrad's ambivalence concerning the thermodynamic decline of Empire during a historical moment framed by decolonization rather than during Conrad's moment of colonial ascendancy. J.G. Ballard in particular extends and develops Conrad's paradigm; his short fictions portray differences in geographic space as alternatives in psychological evolutionary time. Travel from imperial center to outer periphery, for Ballard, is a journey backward in evolutionary psychological time; it is a voyage away from the developmental consciousness of civilization into the primal unconscious of the human evolutionary past. Like Conrad, Ballard is ambivalent about this journey; contemporary humans may be psychotic, but the only alternative is a regression into a savage pre-consciousness that Ballard views as an unacceptable degeneration. Moorcock's saga of Elric of Melnibone also embodies the contradictions of postcolonial ambivalence; the Elric stories present a simultaneous love of Empire alongside the discourse of its inevitable (and perhaps necessary) fall. In the Elric saga, 12

the "evil" of Empire is natural and inevitable, yet at the same time imperialists disavow agency for imperial injustices. This chapter demonstrates that what Paul Gilroy refers to as “postcolonial melancholia” is only one among many possible responses to a British postwar crisis in imperial legitimacy; if "melancholia" originates in the sudden loss of feeling of moral legitimacy and consequently results in a resentful forgetting of history, the "ambivalence" embodied in the Elric saga is more like a resentful revisionist remembering of colonial history; it is a remembering in loaded terms that foregrounds the injustices of imperialist practice while at the same time justifying such injustices as natural, inevitable, and necessary. This chapter concludes, however, on a hopeful note by examining the role of social geographer David Harvey in the New Wave movement. Harvey's contributions to New Worlds challenge the movement as a whole to complicate its use of the metaphor of entropy and to consider with greater care the changing nature of postmodern imperialism in the postwar era. Chapter Four, “Awakening the Imperial Unconscious,” examines Samuel Delany's early SF trilogy The Fall of the Towers, and it suggests that Delany's simultaneous commitment to a modern emphasis on rational epistemology and a postmodern sensitivity to problems of subjectivity and difference allows him to explore the complexities of cognitively "mapping" postmodern imperial conditions. Delany‟s fiction expresses a simultaneous commitment to both modern and postmodern modes of political consciousness; his novels prioritize objective knowledge while at the same time valuing the irreducibility of subjective experience. Delany‟s figuration of political consciousness thus navigates a difficult middle ground between what Marianne DeKoven calls the modern “politics of the social” and the postmodern “politics of the self” (134). 13

If, as Brian McHale argues, modernity is characterized by a belief that phenomena can be objectively “known” and postmodernity, in contrast, can be characterized by an emphasis on multiple, simultaneous, valid, and incommensurable modes of understanding, Delany resolves this tension by suggesting that a valid epistemology must be based on factual knowledge of existing conditions, but that multiple understandings of similar “facts” will nonetheless produce different interpretations and alternative meanings. The central object of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers is imperial war. Throughout the trilogy, the Empire of Toromon mobilizes and fights a seeminglyinevitable war, yet few characters have any clear knowledge of what the war is about or against whom it will be fought. Towers is written against the backdrop of the ongoing Vietnam War, and it offers a specific response to Heinlein‟s perspective on imperial war in his popular novel Starship Troopers (1959). The key difference between Delany and Heinlein‟s alternative views is that Heinlein believes that a “correct” epistemological point of view can be produced through education, civic and military service, and technological modification, and Delany suggests that even similar experiences of given phenomena will be irreducibly differentiated by alternative points of view. This is an important difference because Heinlein‟s modern epistemology reifies the seeming inevitability of imperial wars, while Delany‟s perspective, carefully situated between dominant modernity and emergent postmodernity, demands a much greater attentiveness to the increasingly complex political, social, and economic conditions that produce latecapitalist imperial wars. The central problem Delany outlines is that while no single character has a clear grasp of how Empire is operating, Empire nonetheless continues to function. Delany 14

portrays a complex social, political, and economic situation – akin to Hardt and Negri‟s definition of Empire – with no single central locus of control and domination; economic and material conditions are produced through habitual biopolitical repetitions throughout the Empire at once. No single antagonist is responsible for the problems in Toromon, and even some who are profiting most are powerless to prevent the enslavement and subjugation of those around them. This lack of adequate “cognitive mapping” means that no single agent has the knowledge to change the trajectories that drive the empire toward a bewildering and incomprehensible war. Any unqualified acceptance of postmodern disorientation is unacceptable for Delany, because the absence of “cognitive maps” results in acquiescence to the expansion of Empire as a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri, Empire xii). Greater “consciousness” of these conditions, however, does not result in a perfect utopian political paradigm, because specific conditions will always be more complicated than any map can model, and social awareness alone does not result in political, economic, and institutional transformation. In his dual commitment to empirical mapping and to the irreducibility of subjective experience, Delany offers a resolution to what seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between modern and postmodern ideals of political consciousness. Chapter Five, “Towards a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction,” turns to an examination of the Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. Le Guin participates in the critique of imperialism that characterizes most science fiction in the 1960s, but her extrapolations develop throughout the course of the Hainish cycle beyond a negative critique of 15

imperialism towards a positive and creative conceptualization of what Paul Gilroy calls "cosmopolitan conviviality." Like other SF writers in this period, Le Guin is critical of colonial imperialism, and like Delany, she holds a dual-commitment to a "cognitive mapping" of changing imperial conditions and to the acceptance and exploration of lived differences. Also like Delany, she critiques what Hardt and Negri refer to as the "counter-revolutions" of both modernity and postmodernity, and she remains devoted to both of their more radical "revolutions.” What's particularly interesting about Le Guin, however, is that it is possible to trace her thinking throughout the Hainish cycle from an underdeveloped critique of imperialism in the Worlds of Exile and Illusion novels to a more fully developed imperial critique and a further radical imagining of the possible political shapes of instantiated cosmopolitanism in The Left Hand of Darkness. Le Guin's Hainish fictions assert that cosmopolitanism entails the philosophical and institutional establishment of an always-unfinished hegemony that is constantly in the process of interrogating and renegotiating its own constitutive exclusions. In Le Guin‟s extrapolative imaginings, cosmopolitanism can be found in the “mystical” commitment of the Ekumen in The Left Hand of Darkness; it is an always-unfinished process, or (in Shevek‟s terms) it is a commitment to the perpetual “unbuilding” of limiting walls. The positive contribution of this "unbuilding," however, is that it refuses to function as a deterritorialization that serves the interests of a higher-order imperial reterritorialization. Le Guin's cosmopolitanism emerges from what Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Zizek conceptualize as the radical contingency of actual existing

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relations and a commitment to the deterritorialization of the power in favor of convivial relations where individuals and social bodies interact on equitable terms.

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Chapter One: The Evolution of Psychedelic Manhood

Introduction British and American imperialisms were transforming at the middle of the twentieth century. While Britain‟s vast empire was decolonizing during the 1950s and 1960s, America was experiencing a crisis of exhausted imperial “frontiers;” the space race may have opened new horizons for scientific exploration, but outer space was a distant “frontier” that could only be accessed by a small technocratic elite.1 Additionally, the optimistic ideal of “frontier” exploration in America was increasingly criticized for its imperial underpinnings; popular opposition to the Vietnam War and the dynamic influence of feminism and civil rights caused many Americans to reconsider the troublesome imperial legacies of American history rather than continuing to view the nation‟s past through optimistic lenses of cultural unity and manifest destiny. America, with its vast postwar wealth, was also beginning to exercise a powerful influence on global economics through the foundation of the IMF and the World Bank. At the same time, the United States found itself engaged in an economic and political “cold war” against the Soviet Union, and as a result, the US entered a new era of imperialism based on indirect and covert modes of economic and military influence. The economic reality of modern imperialism, described by Hannah Arendt as the drive to extend national power in order to secure capital investments abroad, was as 1

Carl Abbott observes in Frontiers Past and Future that many science fiction writers have applied (and continue to apply) frontier metaphors to outer-space exploration and settlement. One of the best examinations of the disjunctions that arise from applying a frontier-exploration paradigm to real-world space travel is Tom Wolfe‟s nonfiction novel The Right Stuff (1979). Wolfe‟s portrayal of the Mercury astronauts demonstrates that although the pilots (and the American public) wanted to understand the space program as a drama in which “cowboys” were bravely pioneering a new “frontier,” the rigors of the space environment required most piloting functions to be carried out by computers, causing the astronauts themselves to feel like redundant passengers or “spam in a can.”

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strong as ever during the 1960s. Indeed, the main transformation during this time was from a mode of imperial sovereignty based on direct territorial control toward a decentered regime of economic globalization (the regime Hardt and Negri refer to as “Empire”) that can be seen as an uninterrupted consequence of the “political emancipation of the bourgeoisie” that Arendt examines in The Origins of Totalitarianism (123). Despite this continuity in imperial practice, the discourses that had once made imperialism exciting and adventurous for many in the West were coming under attack within the popular sphere. Although it is tempting to regard these cultural challenges to imperial adventure as a Freudian return of the repressed histories of violence whose erasures mystify imperial domination, the reality is less promising; dreams of Empire did not perish in Britain or America during this time. Instead, they were transformed. One transformation was an imaginative movement inward, and this movement was expressed in both science fiction and popular culture as a drive to understand “inner” spaces in imperial terms. This inward movement was catalyzed by the mid-century ascendancy of psychological sciences alongside a general cultural tendency to “defamiliarize” the intimate and a sociological drive to understand the taken-for-granted social world as an “alien” environment equally as strange as any faraway land. As a result of Empire‟s imaginative turn inward, Western imperial discourses are re-articulated in the 1960s. This chapter examines the cultural production of imperial discourses during a period when dreams of Empire are challenged from without and within. My analysis surveys three representative science fiction texts, Robert A. Heinlein‟s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Frank Herbert‟s Dune (1965), and Arthur

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C. Clarke‟s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), in order to establish the dominant patterns that unfold from the discursive matrix of “inner space” imaginings during the period. On the surface, each of these texts offers a critique of imperial expansion and colonial occupation. Stranger in a Strange Land challenges the idea that a foreign territory occupied by indigenous natives (in this case Martians) can be legitimately “claimed” by settler colonists. Dune dramatizes the uprising of a colonized diaspora population against their imperial oppressors. 2001 warns that the apotheosis of contemporary imperialism may be the nuclear annihilation of the entire human race. Despite these basic objections to imperialism as it is popularly understood at midcentury, all three texts nonetheless valorize a mastery over rapid movement through time and space that David Harvey characterizes as the cornerstone of postmodern economic imperialism. Furthermore, the novels‟ mutual emphases on self-control and self-mastery reinforce Enlightenment values such as rationality, control over nature, and teleological progress that fortify imperial fantasies in the era of modernity. This valorization of innerconquest also rearticulates racial and gendered hierarchies of differentiation; mastery over one‟s own inner-space results in domination over economic, social, political, and material realities, and the “masters” of these spaces are invariably psychic supermen who are invariably racially unmarked males.

Texts and Representative Popularity In Culture and Imperialism (1994), Edward Said argues that cultural production is inseparable from imperial practice: “The great cultural archive . . . is where the intellectual and aesthetic investments in overseas domination are made” (xii). My

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analysis (The Inward Urge) is an index of the continuous force and changing texture of these investments during the 1960s. One drawback of Said‟s argument is that he defines “culture” narrowly as “high culture” (the literary canon), rather than considering the production of imperial discourse more broadly within popular and mass cultures. Imperial discourses are negotiated in popular genres, particularly in science fiction, just as powerfully (if not moreso) than in canonical literary genres. Many scholars, including Richard Slotkin, David Mogen, Gwyneth Jones, John Rieder, and Patricia Kerslake, have highlighted science fiction‟s historical entanglements with imperial narratives and practices. Due to these entanglements, it is useful to examine what Marianne DeKoven calls “representative” science fiction texts – novels that achieved widespread popularity and influence throughout American and British culture – in order to examine the discursive transformations within imperial fantasy that were occurring during the 1960s (7). Few science fiction texts are more “representative” of the dreams and contradictions of the 1960s than Heinlein‟s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Herbert‟s Dune (1965), and Clarke‟s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). In The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (1968), Tom Wolfe discovers a copy of Stranger on Ken Kesey‟s bookshelf, and he paints an extended comparison between Kesey‟s Pranksters and the characters and circumstances in Heinlein‟s novel (Wolfe 123). According to Gary Lachman, Stranger was one of the few novels (along with Hermann Hesse‟s Siddhartha) that Charles Manson allowed the members of his “family” to read; the truth of this anecdote has been debated, but its widespread popularity as a literary urban legend speaks volumes about

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the novel‟s status as a “cult classic” in the 1960s.2 Stranger tells the story of Valentine Michael Smith, a human raised from birth among Martians, whose “alien” way of thinking and seeing the world gives him superhuman control over his body and a unique “outside” perspective on human habits and behaviors on Earth. Stranger won the Hugo award for best novel in 1962, and its popularity has been so enduring that it has never been out of print since its original release. Ace books claims that it is one of the first SF novels ever to achieve bestseller status in both hardcover and paperback forms. Frank Herbert‟s Dune has similar iconic status as the first best-selling hardcover SF novel, and (with over 12 million copies sold worldwide) it may be the best-selling SF novel of all time. Dune, which was a joint Hugo winner in 1966 and the first winner of the Nebula award for best novel, centers on the story of Paul Atreides, a young noble whose house is destroyed by their longstanding enemies the Harkonnens on the desert planet Arrakis. Paul and his mother take refuge with the native population, the Fremen, and Paul – through the consumption of the psychedelic “spice melange” – eventually develops godlike precognitive powers and leads the Fremen in a revolt against the galactic Empire. Dune‟s popularity resulted in five sequels during Herbert‟s lifetime (and several more after his death), a popular film adaptation by David Lynch in 1984, and a Sci Fi Channel original miniseries in 2000. 2001: A Space Odyssey was similarly popular due to its release alongside the Stanley Kubrick film of the same name, and although the novel may have been overshadowed by the film‟s popular success, both projects were developed together in a collaborative process after Kubrick contacted Clarke in 1964 to discuss his interest in 2

For a summary of the debates concerning Charles Manson‟s exposure to the novel, see Tim Blackmore‟s “Talking with „Strangers‟: Interrogating the Many Texts that became Heinlein‟s Stranger in a Strange Land.”

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making a science fiction film. 2001 (the novel) tells the story of astronaut David Bowman, the lone survivor of humankind‟s first expedition to Saturn to investigate the presence of strange alien artifacts known as “monoliths.” Bowman eventually evolves into a godlike being with the help of genetic modification by the monoliths, and this evolutionary leap echoes a process shown at the beginning of the novel, when the monoliths arrive on Earth at the dawn of human history to modify and accelerate the evolutionary process of man‟s primate ancestors. After his ascension to genetic godhood, Bowman returns to Earth and ends the threat of global nuclear war with a casual effort of his galactic consciousness. Time magazine called 2001 “the greatest science fiction novel of our time,” and Clarke, in part due to recognition of his efforts with 2001, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth for “Services for Literature.” All these novels gained popular acclaim far beyond the status typically achieved by science fiction stories; each novel offers an iconic narrative with broad appeal in the 1960s and beyond, and the similarities between these narratives illuminate the changes taking place in Western imperial discourse during the middle of the twentieth century.

Imperial Critique In The Wretched of the Earth (1961), Frantz Fanon calls on the people of the West to “wake up, put on their thinking caps and stop playing the irresponsible game of Sleeping Beauty” regarding colonial conditions and injustices throughout the world (62). There is an extent to which the West answers Fanon‟s challenge: decolonization, Civil Rights, and Vietnam transform the popular ideals of adventurous imperialism into embarrassing historical stains in Western culture. This transformation does not arrest the

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continuing development of imperialism (particularly economic imperialism); but it casts an ugly shadow on the traditional imperial practices of direct political, economic, and territorial control. This shadow, a critique of colonial imperialism, is reflected in “representative” mainstream SF texts of the 1960s; each of the three novels examined here criticizes specific imperial “adventure” tropes and traditions. Stranger in a Strange Land challenges the legitimacy of colonial annexation and occupation, and it calls into question the process by which an occupied territory can be seen as “empty” or “open” for conquest through the dehumanization of its native inhabitants. In a plea to the government of the global Federation, Jubal Harshaw argues that because indigenous Martians occupy Mars, all debates about the possible “legal” ownership of Mars by settlers from Earth must be rejected. At first, it appears that humans will make a colonial claim on Mars based on the Larkin Decision, a legal ruling establishing that “real flesh and blood men” who maintain an occupation of a new planetary territory have legal property rights over the planet rather than the nations or corporations that sponsor them (43). Based on the Larkin Decision, Valentine Michael Smith could be said to “own” the planet Mars, and the legal conflict over this contested ownership of Mars is one of the central tensions of the first part of the novel. In an early scene, Jill Boardman argues that it is incomprehensible to imagine that a single individual could “own” an entire inhabited planet: “This notion of a single man owning an entire planet . . . it‟s fantastic!” (54 original emphasis). Outlining the problem with a greater degree of historical sensitivity, Ben Caxton responds that it is unclear whether the fact that Mars is inhabited will have any bearing on the decision of the courts

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concerning its status as property, and he cites a long history of colonial injustices to support his concern: In the fifteenth century the Pope deeded the entire western hemisphere to Spain and Portugal and nobody paid the slightest attention to the fact that the real estate was already occupied by several million Indians with their own laws, customs, and notions of property rights. His grant was pretty effective, too. Take a look at a western hemisphere map sometime and notice where Spanish is spoken and where Portuguese is spoken – and see how much the Indians have left. (54-55) Heinlein uses this conversation to dramatize the contradiction between the “common sense” view (represented by Boardman) that it is unjust to claim ownership over an inhabited territory and the historical awareness (represented by Caxton) that such injustices have a long history and a continuing legacy. Between Boardman‟s objection that no single person can be said to “own” an occupied planet and Caxton‟s demonstration that this has been more common than not, Heinlein invites the reader to participate in a different kind of “common sense” than the kind represented by many pulp SF novels. Boardman‟s view takes for granted the natural rights of native inhabitants to their property and personhood, while Caxton articulates a historical critique of the imperial attitudes and practices that have denied indigenous peoples of such rights in the name of power and profit. Heinlein thus anticipates Patricia Nelson Limerick‟s argument from The Legacy of Conquest (1987) that “new organizing ideas” are required in both American historiography and in popular American historical imaginaries in order to deconstruct the notion that frontier exploration took place on an uninhabited terrain or “virgin” landscape. Heinlein‟s narrative foregrounds a historical awareness of frontier injustices;

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in particular, he highlights the ways in which colonizing powers have been willing to deny the personhood of racial and ethnic others (such as Native Americans) in the pursuit of imperial economic advantages. Harshaw deconstructs the foundation of this imperial attitude; one cannot make a claim to ownership of Mars, he argues, because the planet is already “owned” and inhabited by Martians. This assertion of the rights of indigenous people to their territory and personhood challenges a long Western history in which “alien” people can be conveniently “erased” (both conceptually and physically) from landscapes in order to clear the space for imperial expansion.3 The question of Smith‟s legal right to “ownership” of Mars is finally resolved in a high-profile meeting between Smith‟s legal team and Secretary General Joseph Douglas of the Federation of Free States. During this meeting, Harshaw forces the Federation to extend sovereign diplomatic recognition to Mars by displaying a Martian flag, by demanding equitable table space, and by playing a Martian “anthem” during the opening ceremony. Each of these gestures highlights the fact that Douglas is not simply meeting an individual with a property claim; he is negotiating with the representative of an occupied sovereign territory. Next, Harshaw challenges the notion that the Larkin Decision can apply to Mars (as it had previously applied to the Moon) because Mars is already inhabited and Smith is acting as the Martian ambassador. Finally, he warns the Federation that the true extent of Martian military power is unknown: “Before we attempt to parcel out lands which do

3

For more on the gothic erasure and Freudian return of indigenous figures on the literary terrain of the American West, see David Mogen, Scott P. Sanders, and Joanne B Karpinski‟s “Introduction” to their edited volume Frontier Gothic (1993).

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not belong to us, it behooves us to be very sure what peach switches are hanging in the Martian kitchen” (258). The final point undermines the earlier gestures; when Harshaw presents the Martians as inviolate sovereigns, he draws on a realist political tradition that recognizes Others as “persons” and accords them what Chantal Mouffe calls “agonistic” ethical consideration. When invoking the threat of the Martian “peach switch,” however, Harshaw frames the situation in the context of a Hobbsian “state of nature” where force and power are the central considerations and where “right” is determined by “might” alone. To suggest that it is wrong to engage in colonial conquest because the “natives” might respond with military strength is to cede the possibility that it might be right to colonize if they were less powerful; there is a difference (which Heinlein elides) between the weak ethical position that it is inappropriate to steal from someone because they might fight back and the stronger ethical position which assumes that is it is inappropriate to commit theft in the first place. Although Jubal‟s final comment about the Martian “switch” diminishes the force of his anti-imperial critique, it still demonstrates an ethical awareness of cultural “others” as self-determining agents; this falls short of fully according dignity and equal personhood to such aliens, but it is a far cry from objectifying them as inhuman “bugeyed monsters,” as had been common in earlier forms of pulp science fiction. Herbert‟s Dune is similarly critical of colonialism; Paul Atreides sides with the colonized Fremen against the exploitation of the corrupt profit-driven galactic Imperium. In Dune, the Fremen are a colonized people whose subjugation to the whims of Empire are unjust, and readers are invited to side with the Fremen in their liberatory quest to overthrow their colonial masters.

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The administrative apparatus of the Empire is the CHOAM corporation – an institutional regime of production and trade divided between the power of the Emperor (who holds a 51% controlling interest in CHOAM) and the noble houses of the Landstraad. Control of CHOAM directorships is the true source of power in the Empire; Duke Leto knowingly walks into a trap set for him on Arrakis by the Harkonnens because the promise of a CHOAM directorship outweighs the potential threat. The final major power in the Empire, the Spacing Guild, holds a crucial monopoly over the transportation of people and materials across interstellar distances. Dune thus emphasizes that the Imperium is constituted by a complex economic regime of production, distribution, and consumption in addition to direct political and territorial control. Imperial economics in Dune depend on what Partha Chatterjee and Eva Cherniavsky call a “differential incorporation” of economic subjects (Cherniavsky11). Colonized populations, such as the Fremen, are included in the Empire‟s regime (they are considered to be subjects of the Empire‟s might and authority), yet they are included differently – they are regarded as a native labor pool to be tamed and exploited. The Fremen are included insofar as they are subject to the Empire‟s power, but their inclusion is different; they are excluded when it comes to the rights and protections accorded to privileged noble subjects of the Empire who are in all cases Landsraad corporations and their constituent members. Dune suggests that such a differential incorporation of colonized subjects is unjust, and it dramatizes the uprising of the Fremen as a successful nationalist movement similar to the decolonization movements of the 1950s celebrated by Fanon. Liet-Kynes, the imperial planetary ecologist who “goes native” to lead the Fremen against the Empire,

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is presented as a “good guerilla leader” (226), and Paul follows his example in staging a guerilla revolution against the Empire. Paul realizes that on Arrakis the Empire is vulnerable to guerilla tactics: “It‟s been so long since guerillas were effective that the mighty have forgotten how to fight them” (451). Dune celebrates guerilla warfare as a new kind of military power; Paul and his father call this “desert power,” in contrast to the “sea” and “air” powers that were effective on Caladan and that are the historical cornerstones of British and American imperial hegemony in their respective eras. Dune‟s valorization of “desert power” and guerilla warfare aligns its sympathies with anti-imperial nationalist and revolutionary movements in the 1950s and 1960s. Not only does it celebrate the use of guerilla tactics for the purpose of decolonization, but it also uncannily prefigures the widespread use of guerilla tactics against both Russian and American imperial forces in difficult environments (such as Afghanistan) throughout the Cold War. Dune argues that a context of increasing global (or galactic) interconnection inevitably creates complex global (or intergalactic) dependencies. One tactic for attempting to injure an Empire, then, is to strike at these vulnerable dependencies. Paul accomplishes this when he threatens to destroy the spice on Arrakis (crippling interstellar transport), and OPEC, angered at what it perceived as the injustice of U.S. imperial efforts to aid Israel, attempts a similar threat during the 1974 embargo on oil to the United States. Dune posits an economic Empire predicated on the differential incorporation of colonial subjects. The empire is corrupt, fat, and bloated with profits, and this is embodied in the gruesome figure of Baron Harkonnen, who is so fat that he must be lifted

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by anti-gravity suspensors (275). The Baron‟s body mirrors the bloated corpus of the Empire itself; both are fat with profit stolen and exploited from the bodies of colonized subjects. Dune invites readers to identify with the revolutionary guerillas fighting to end the injustice of these imperial conditions. While Stranger and Dune focus on problems of colonial occupation and exploitation, 2001 frames imperialism as the inevitable byproduct of technological progress; as humans develop the tools to command nature, the novel argues, they immediately use these tools to dominate other human beings. The opening chapters of 2001 explicitly associate the development of the ability to use tools with the emergence of imperial aggression. Under the psychedelic influence of an alien monolith, “Moon Watcher” (an evolutionary ancestor of modern humans) experiences “a pleasing sense of power and authority” when he realizes that he can use a stone to kill a pig (18). At the same time, however, Moon Watcher‟s mastery over nature immediately becomes mastery over other humans; “intoxicated” by a sense of power from killing a leopard, Moon Watcher launches an attack against the “Others” who occupy the other side of the stream from Moon Watcher‟s tribe. Moon Watcher murders One ear by bashing his head in with the leopard‟s skull, and the Others flee in terror, leaving Moon Watcher the unchallenged “master of the world” (28). Clarke problematizes this valorization of mastery in the context of imperial violence against human beings. He shows that the development of technology gives humans immense advantages in hunting, agriculture, communication, and the development of art and philosophy. Running parallel to this development, however, is a steady increase the human capacity for violent aggression:

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With stone and bronze and iron and steel he had run the gamut of everything that could pierce and slash, and quite early in time he had learned how to strike down his victims from a distance. The spear, the bow, the gun, and finally the guided missile had given him weapons of infinite range and all but infinite power. (31) The human conquest of nature is consistently shadowed by the human conquest of other humans, and in the “present” of the novel (the imagined near-future of the 1960s), this violence threatens to overshadow the progressive benefits offered by technological progress: Without those weapons, often though he had used them against himself, Man would never have conquered his world. Into them he had put his heart and soul, and for ages they had served him well. But now, as long as they existed, he was living on borrowed time. (31) The danger Clarke alludes to is the threat of nuclear annihilation. In the near-future settting of the story, the United States and Russia have overcome their Cold War tensions (as demonstrated by Dr. Floyd‟s friendly encounter with Dr. Dimitri Moisevitch on his way to the Moon), but the world is nonetheless in a state of “permanent crisis” due to rampant overpopulation (27). Western states are locked in political tension with the “Chinese Empire,” home to one-third of the world‟s population, which is recklessly selling nuclear arms to “the smallest have-not nations” (38). Clarke argues that at a time when international co-operation is vital to reach the stars, nations remain deadlocked in aggressive tension with one another: With the need for international cooperation more urgent than ever, there were still as many frontiers as in any earlier age. In a million years, the human race had lost few of its aggressive instincts; along symbolic lines visible only to politicians, the thirty-eight nuclear powers watched one another with belligerent anxiety. Among them, they possessed sufficient 31

megatonnage to remove the entire surface crust of the planet. Although there had been – miraculously – no use of atomic weapons, this situation could hardly last forever. (37) Clarke‟s suggestions that there are “still as many frontiers” as in earlier times refers to the exploration of outer space as a “new frontier” following the previous progression of terrestrial territorial frontiers; a “frontier” in this sense is a trans-historical space where “Man” must test himself against the challenges posed by nature and prevail through technological superiority and mastery. If Heinlein challenges the notion that the “frontier” is an empty space ripe for conquest, arguing instead that such “empty” spaces are often occupied by human beings (or other sovereign creatures), Clarke seems sensitive to this as well in his opening portrayal of Moon Watcher‟s violent assault on the Others. In the novel‟s imagined future, however, outer space is the only “empty” space, because the contemporary “Others” (“the smallest have-not nations”) possess equally destructive nuclear technologies as “we” do. In this environment, no one can enjoy the pleasurable “mastery” over the world that Moon Watcher experiences when he murders One Ear. Instead, everyone‟s aggressive craving for “mastery” over others threatens to conflict with everyone else‟s, and the annihilation of all life on Earth is posited as the inevitable result. On Moon Base Clavius, scientific and technological progress have been directed towards the peaceful end of space exploration: “After ten thousand years, men had at last found something as exciting as war. Unfortunately, not all nations had yet realized that fact” (58). The irony, Clarke notes, is that the “skills that had been used to build this underground empire had been developed during the half century of the Cold War” (58). Again, Clarke intimates that technological progress and imperial aggression develop 32

concurrently, and he suggests that these intertwined tendencies must finally be decoupled; imperial aggression, formerly tolerable, now threatens to end human existence once and for all. Clarke‟s solution to this impasse is embodied in David Bowman, the astronaut-pioneer whose voyage to Saturn (and beyond) enables him to return to Earth with the power to permanently end the danger of nuclear holocaust. Each of these three novels reflects a Western dissatisfaction with imperialism as it had been previously imagined and practiced. Stranger indicts the notion that an indigenous population can be conceptually “erased” by colonial settlers in order to imagine a landscape as “empty” or “free” for the taking by whoever settles there. Dune challenges the injustice of the imperial exploitation of indigenous populations as labor pools for the extraction and production of natural resources, and it valorizes the military victory of the nationalist Fremen against the imperial metropolis. 2001, in contrast, responds to the cold war threat of nuclear annihilation by imperial superpowers, and it suggests that unchecked imperial aggression will lead to nuclear annihilation rather than to “progress.” Despite these specific differences, each novel shares a central concern with the injustices and potential nightmares of imperial histories and practices. In this sense, some Westerners, such as Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke, seem to hear Fanon‟s call to “wake up!” In the preface to The Wretched of the Earth, Jean-Paul Sartre asserts that “we, too, peoples of Europe, we are being decolonized: meaning the colonist inside every one of us is surgically extracted in a bloody operation. Let‟s take a good look at ourselves, if we have the courage, and let‟s see what has become of us” (lvii). Sartre, like the representative science fiction texts of the 1960s, accepts the guilt and responsibility for colonialism that Fanon demands, and in doing so, he is able to re-

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align himself against the colonizers and with the decolonizing world. If outward “adventure” has turned out to be a spiritual disease, Western men must now turn the adventure inward in order to heal the damage that they have done to themselves and to the world.

Inward Imperialism, Self-Mastery, and Evolution Susan Zieger argues that 19th and early 20th century drug narratives are framed by imperial metaphors of “travel, exploration, and conquest” (1531). Zieger examines a genealogy of texts, including Thomas de Quincey‟s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) and Fitz Hugh Ludlow‟s The Hasheesh Eater (1857), and she argues that these autobiographies depict chemical hallucination as an outward journey, or as a way of vicariously exploring the Orient (for de Quincey) or the American West (for Ludlow), without leaving one‟s own domestic milieu. Zieger suggests that these portrayals of hallucinogenic drug experiences are shaped by unacknowledged imperial metaphors: “Projecting the deep subjectivity of inner space onto the seemingly vast, unpopulated continent, the drugged dreamer appears oblivious to the imperial power giving shape to his fantasies” (1532). In her view, drug narratives simplify and mythologize the imaginative encounter of imperial frontiers; one is able to take opium to explore the mysteries of “the Orient” only so long as the Mystical East is imagined as an idealized dreamland safely insulated from foreign people and disconnected from troubling and complex imperial histories. Her conclusion is that such autobiographies re-inscribe imperial metaphors and reinforce troubling models of race and masculinity.

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Heinlein‟s Stranger in a Strange Land, Herbert‟s Dune, and Clarke‟s 2001: A Space Odyssey offer variations on Zieger‟s model; each presents the equivalent of a drug experience (“consciousness expansion” is achieved through drugs or alien influences), but these novels criticize territorial colonialism and posit inner space as a territory “colonized” by social norms and unconscious urges. Rather than projecting outward to explore “the Orient” or “the West,” these narratives suggest that altered states of consciousness offer inward voyages to master and liberate territories of strangeness within the self. If 19th century drug autobiographies frame hallucination as the outward conquest of an imperial frontier, 20th century psychedelic science fiction novels reverse imaginary direction and frame drug experiences as inward missions to decolonize consciousness. Despite their general critiques of imperialism and colonialism, all of these narratives portray inward voyages in imperial terms, and each text operates similarly to the drug narratives Zieger describes; they all replace or augment the conquest of outer space with a central focus on the conquest of inner space. Inner space exploration offers a way of “freeing” the racially unmarked male subject from the repressive “internal colonization” of the mind; in this sense, Fanon‟s notion of psychic decolonization is appropriated in the service of the Western privilege it opposes in its intended context. The goal, invariably, of these 1960s inner voyages is self-mastery; that which is alien in the self must be mastered, and that which is unknown or unconscious must be brought to awareness and contained through deliberate rational control. In Stranger in a Strange Land, Valentine Michael Smith‟s childhood experience on Mars endows him with a mode of consciousness that grants him superhuman self-

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control; he can hold his breath indefinitely, he can control his autonomic nervous functions, and he has advanced mental powers such as telepathy, psychic projection, and the ability to “discorporate” threatening people and objects with his thoughts. The novel suggests that all humans are potentially capable of such mental feats, but until they are trained in the Martian language and Martian thinking by Smith, they are limited by human cultural habits of mind and unable to develop such powers.4 Carol McGurk traces a parallel between Heinlein‟s Smith and Kipling‟s Mowgli from The Jungle Book; both novels offer an “account of a human child raised by at once innocent and predatory nonhuman beings” (508). A further comparison can be drawn between Smith and Burroughs‟ Tarzan of the Apes; both are masculine exemplars of a “race” that has obtained an imperial advantage, yet both benefit (and return to redeem their home societies) due to their upbringing at the colonial periphery. The conquest of inner space in Stranger centers on the attainment of perfect selfpossession; enhanced consciousness results in the development of masterful mental powers and psychic control. It is as though when confronted with various challenges to white masculine privilege in the West in the 1960s (such as feminism, decolonization, and civil rights), white masculinity turns to Freudian psychology to seek inward for a lost sense of the “property” in the self that Cherniavsky characterizes as central to whiteness (xxii). Self-control, particularly a deep control over one‟s own thoughts, feelings, and

4

While the novel intimates that anyone is capable of these powers, some individuals, like Jubal Harshaw, are inherently closer to Martian thinking, and thus they are more likely to develop such abilities. Many critics have noted that despite Stranger‟s relative populism, the novel reflects a Calvinist attitude toward the existence of a predestined “elect” who surpass the rest of the human race. For discussions of the Calvinist aspects of the novel see George Edgar Slusser‟s Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (1976), H. Bruce Franklin‟s Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction (1980), and Russell Blackford‟s “Neo-Bible and Ur-Text: The „Original Uncut” Stranger in a Strange Land” (Foundation 53, 1991).

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bodily functions, is equated with self-ownership; in this light, it is not surprising that Stranger opens with a conflict over who has the right to possess Smith‟s body (how and where he will be held in custody after his return from Mars), and that the early chapters of the novel focus on Smith‟s allies helping the “childlike” Martian to gain social, economic, and political self-possession to match his extraordinary psychic and physical self-ownership. Stranger emphasizes that Smith‟s alien way of thinking gives him superhuman control over his own body and mind; he has super powers because he has extraordinary self-conscious awareness. Consciousness expansion (in this case, the product of being raised in a culture uninhibited by human cultural norms) offers Smith a more extensive and complete self-possession than that available to most humans.5 This is first demonstrated when Smith arrives on Earth and struggles to adapt to the planet‟s unfamiliar gravity; he reveals his unusual ability to control his own physiology when he deliberately lowers his heart rate and respiration and then sets them to continue automatically at this preferred rate. Later, when the authorities arrive at Jubal‟s mansion, Smith shows that he can hold his breath indefinitely, he can dilate his sense of time in order to experience events in slow motion, and he can project his mind and perceptions outside his body. His followers later develop similar powers; they lose weight, they are immune to sickness, and they are able to function with very little sleep due to the immense physiological control offered by their enhanced self-perception: “The essence of the discipline is, first, self awareness,” Smith argues, “ and then, self-control” (505).

5

In his early study of Heinlein, Franklin suggests that Smith‟s perfect self-possession “embodies our most infantile fantasies and the central goal of bourgeois ideology – the unfettered freedom of the individual will” (130).

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Enhanced consciousness, or the mastery of one‟s own unconscious processes, allows perfect self-possession and the ultimate triumph of reason, mind, and will over corporeal existence. The decolonization of inner-space in Stranger is intimately associated with the defamiliarization of language and culture. Consciousness expansion, in Heinlein‟s estimation, is a matter of unlearning languages that encode faulty assumptions and learning new languages to take their place. Language essentially “colonizes” perception, and learning a new language (in this case Martian) leads to a new “decolonized” state of consciousness.6 Smith arrives on Earth with no understanding of human language, and his Martian way of speaking and thinking offer him a fundamentally different way of looking at the world: “his thoughts, pure Martian abstractions from half a million years of wildly alien culture, traveled so far from any human experience as to be untranslatable” (20). The early chapters of the novel invite the reader to experience familiar social norms and customs strangely through Smith‟s eyes; readers are interpellated as “strangers” in the “strange land” of the familiar, and despite the novel‟s extrapolative futuristic setting, the estrangements readers are invited to contemplate center on mid-century American norms. The ways in which people think and behave, Heinlein suggests, are shaped, molded, and limited by language. Smith begins the novel only understanding phenomena in Martian terms, and he is constantly surprised by the assumptions bundled in the simplest English expressions. Smith becomes confused, for example, when he is asked if 6

Shau Reno notes that Stranger‟s concern with the relationships between language, culture, and perception are influenced by Heinlein‟s exposure to popular work in cultural anthropology during the 1950s. See Reno, “The Zuni Indian Tribe: A model for “Stranger in a Strange Land‟s‟ Martian Culture.” Extrapolation 36:2, 1995.

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he “feels like” food (25). A straightforward inquiry into his state of hunger becomes confusing when it is interpreted literally and juxtaposed against Martian cultural associations that sacralize the consumption of the dead. The effects of estrangement have a more critical edge, however, when it comes to human social and sexual taboos. When he first meets Jill Boardman, for example, Mike asks her to take off her clothes so that he can see what she looks like (having been raised on Mars, he has never seen a human female before). Heinlein uses Mike and Jill‟s relationship to develop a critique of human sexual norms, particularly the habitual and reflexive sense of “ownership” that characterizes mononormative Western relationships. Near the end of the novel, for example, Smith concludes that jealousy, or the desire to possess others as objects, poisons human relationships; every “wrongness” in human interaction is “a corollary of „jealousy‟ . . . I still don‟t grok jealousy in its fullness,” he says, “it seems an insanity to me, a terrible wrongness” (508). Despite the novel‟s well-noted normativizations of heterosexuality and biological gender,7 Stranger’s challenge to presumptive mononormativity (the “naturalness” of monogamous and monamorous sexual relationships) remains one of the novel‟s valuable critical insights. The defamiliarization of taken-for-granted customs (particularly sexual taboos) is the path to consciousness expansion in Stranger; Smith shows his followers how to unlearn restrictive habits of mind created by human culture and language. Heinlein quickly reveals, however, that the “stakes” of consciousness expansion center on the reconstitution of masculine mastery and potency. Early in the novel, Jubal berates Jill for threatening to turn Smith into a “conformist” by indoctrinating him into normative social 7

See Slusser, Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land (1976), Blackford, “Neo-Bible and Ur-Text: The „Original Uncut” Stranger in a Strange Land” (Foundation 53, 1991), and McGuirk, “Does Not Grok In Fullness (Science Fiction Studies 29:3, 2002).

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behaviors, and when she argues that it is for his own good, he quips, “That‟s the excuse they gave the tomcat just before the operation” (136). Smith is presented as hypermasculine because he hasn‟t been tamed by the customs of society; his experience on Mars makes him more of a “man” than most men on Earth. The “decolonization” of inner space thus allows for a recovery of masculine potency and power. Heinlein‟s figuration of the decolonization of consciousness parallels Fanon‟s model of psychic decolonization in Black Skin, White Masks. According to Pal Ahluwalia and Abebe Zegeye, Fanon “documents the manner in which colonialism distorts the colonial subject‟s psyche,” and he argues that “colonization dehumanizes and objectifies the colonized, rendering them incapable of being human” (456). Dehumanization and emasculation are inseparable for both Heinlein and Fanon; for Heinlein, however, dehumanization allows for the recovery of masculine potency. It is Smith‟s status as a non-human, as a creature raised outside “human” culture, that allows him to become more than human and to transcend the emasculating restrictions on human behavior encoded within social customs and taboos. Smith‟s recovery of masculine potency and power reveals its most authoritarian dimensions when Smith concludes that it is acceptable to “discorporate” humans who embody “wrongness” in order to advance the human race as a whole. In Smith‟s estimation, it is “utterly impossible to kill a man” because discorporation simply initiates a new phase in a being‟s spiritual life cycle; making “wrong” people go away is “like a referee removing a man from a game for „unnecessary roughness‟” (509). Unlike Fanon‟s decolonizing subject, who utilizes violence against colonial oppressors in order to re-establish a lost sense of wholeness, Smith represents a privileged subject, secure in

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his identity and virility, who uses violence to institute what he decides will be a positive change in the human race as a whole. He begins by discorporating “vicious” humans languishing in jail and then goes on to eliminate others who he sees as even more offensive: “some of them were even in public office” (509). He notes, casually, that he sent 150 people “back to the foot of the line to try again” in a single night; in his role as “referee,” he believes he has an indisputable sense of the “wrongness” of certain people, and his enlightened perspective authorizes him to use lethal force to distinguish between humans with the greatest potential for change and others who are evolutionary dead ends. There is a distinct change in Smith at the midpoint of the novel that Boardman characterizes as a transition from “docility to dominance” (345). If the early Smith represents what Deleuze and Guatarri call a “deterritorializing” perspective that opens the possibility of minoritarian “becomings” outside the boundaries of socially accepted norms, the later Smith “reterritorializatizes” even more restrictive codes and axioms. By the later chapters of the novel, Smith always knows best, and he grows “steadily in strength and sureness – in all ways” (345). The early Smith questions; the later Smith teaches others how to grok the “right” perspective. This is precisely the danger of “microfascist” reterritorializations that can emerge in the wake of revolutionary breakdowns that Deleuze and Guatarri warn against in A Thousand Plateaus: “one deterritorializes, massifies, but only to knot and annul the mass movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others” (228).8

8

For a summary of the critical arguments concerning the latent “fascism” in Heinlein‟s fiction, see Tim Blackmore‟s “Talking with „Strangers‟: interrogating the many texts that became Heinlein‟s „Stranger in a Strange Land.‟” (Extrapolation 36:2, 1995).

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Smith‟s “marginal reterritorializations” (such as his assertion of the obvious rightness of killing those who are “wrong” in order to benefit humanity as a whole) are centrally concerned with the concentration of power in the hands of authoritative white male subjects. Masculine authority, previously “domesticated” by social and cultural norms, can now rule with a clear conscience. The psychic decolonization of white masculinity, now radically disjoined from its Fanonian context, becomes the basis for reinstituting elite masculine privilege over “lesser” beings. Furthermore, mastery over inner space is presented as an evolutionary advantage for Smith and his followers. Smith grows concerned that his efforts to help humanity may be wasted because selfish humans who are incapable of grokking his message vastly outnumber those with elite and enlightened potential. On Mars, the “wrong” type of young Martians are “weeded out” for the benefit of the race, but no such process takes place on Earth. “One way or another,” Smith argues, “competing and weeding has to take place . . . or the race goes down hill” (510 original ellipses). This leads him to doubt his own mission: I am beginning to wonder if full grokking will show that I am on the wrong track entirely – that this race must be split up, hating each other, fighting each other, constantly unhappy and at war even with their own individual selves . . . simply to have that weeding out that every race must have. (511, original ellipses) Harshaw offers Smith the reassurance he needs in the face of such hopelessness: “damn it, lad, you‟ve been doing the weeding out – or rather, the failures have been doing it to themselves by not listening to you” (511). Harshaw goes on to argue that Smith‟s followers, with their enhanced abilities and heightened self-mastery, are naturally more

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competitive than the “failures,” and that this will inevitably cause a change in the human race as a whole: “If one tenth of one percent of the population is capable of getting the news, then all you have to do is show them,” Jubal says, “and in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth” (512). Discipline, or the self-mastery that comes from “decolonizing” one‟s own inner space, is the key to economic success. This is the case even without the benefit of Martian super powers: “the disciplined can make any amount of money at anything . . . when competing with the half-awake” one of Smith‟s followers argues (486). Heinlein may challenge the legitimacy of territorial imperialism, but he nonetheless supports the assertion of a hierarchy of consciousness in which the “disciplined” are fit to rule over the “half-awake.” As Slusser observes, “the relationship he draws between election and material success is familiar. If one is elected, he necessarily succeeds; if one succeeds, he is obviously one of the elect . . . the fittest survive, and in doing so they are elected according to nature‟s laws” (37). In this regard, Heinlein reinforces capitalist economic axioms that suggest that there is an unlimited surplus of wealth available for those who are capable of obtaining it and that to be capable of such profit is to deserve it even at the expense of other beings. The conquest of inner space, for Heinlein, inevitably leads to evolutionary progress. Having a more correct perspective not only makes one smarter, faster, and more economically and sexually competitive, it also authorizes one to liquidate lesser beings, to view them as a separate category of humanity, and to benevolently paternalize them in the name of the advancement of the race as a whole.

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The central narrative movement of Frank Herbert‟s Dune is similarly directed inward; Paul Atreides experiences increasingly powerful psychedelic “trips” using the “spice melange” until he attains superhuman self-control and an expanded omniscient consciousness. Herbert‟s philosophy of consciousness expansion in Dune is even more exclusive than Heinlein‟s implicit Calvinism in Stranger in a Strange Land; in Dune, only the Kwisatz Haderach, a genetic superman produced through centuries of eugenic breeding, can achieve omniscience, and the Kwisatz Haderach must be male. Paul‟s inner voyage to become the Kwisatz Haderach runs parallel to a social and political inward journey; the desert planet Arrakis begins as a subjugated colony vital to imperial economics, but rather than attempting to decolonize Arrakis, Paul seeks to use the planet‟s power (both its natural resources and its military potential) in order to gain control of the Empire from within. Rather than dismantling the Imperium, the novel posits the redemption of Empire through the enlightened guidance of a male superman who has successfully decolonized the reaches of his own inner space. Dune valorizes self-control and independence, and it demonizes addiction, habit, appetite, and reliance. Herbert demonstrates this at the beginning of the novel when the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam subjects Paul to the gom jabbar ritual. The Bene Gesserit believe that self-control (defined as mastery over one‟s involuntary reactions) distinguishes “humans” from “animals.” To this end, they subject “potential” humans to extreme pain as a test of their humanity; Paul must keep his hand in a pain-inducer, even though it feels like his skin is being burned away, in order to prove that his mind and will are stronger than his instinctive reflexes; as Mohiam remarks, “a human can override any

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nerve in the body” (10). Should Paul flinch or withdraw his hand, she will kill him with the poison needle of the gom jabbar, a weapon that “kills only animals” (8). The gom jabbar tests Paul‟s command over his own inner space; he is successful only if he can conquer, through will and reason, the parts of himself that otherwise function involuntarily. Dune thus valorizes self-mastery to a fetishistic level, and it demonizes impulses that reduce or diminish an individual‟s self-control. The Harkonnens, for example, are characterized by uncontrollable appetites; Baron Harkonnen is so obese that he requires technology to move his bloated body. He is a slave to his appetites, and his addictive consumption is portrayed as vulgar and monstrous; Herbert graphically emphasizes this through the Baron‟s unrestrained lust for violent homosexual intercourse with young boys. Baron Harkonnen also enslaves others though their appetites, dependencies, and passions. He manipulates Doctor Yueh (breaking his imperial conditioning) by kidnapping and threatening his Benne Gesserit wife. He controls his mentat through mélange addiction, he manipulates Thufir Hawat by twisting his lust for revenge and addicting him to a poison that requires a daily antidote, and he addicts his bodyguard to drugs in order to ensure his obedience. In each of these ways, Baron Harkonnen thematizes the dangers of the loss of self-control; dependency is framed as a vulnerability that can be exploited by one‟s enemies. Power, in Herbert‟s novum, is achieved by manipulating and controlling the dependencies of others while remaining as independent as possible oneself. This theme of dependency extends beyond personal relationships into the economic and political systems of the galactic Imperium. Paul manipulates the Spacing

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Guild by threatening its dependency on spice. As David M. Miller notes, the economic and political system of the Imperium hinges on the spice: “The Imperium depends on the Landsraat, the Landsraat upon the Imperium. Both draw economic power from CHOAM. CHOAM cannot function without the Space Guild, but the Space Guild is dependant upon spice” (19). Herbert‟s setting reflects (on a galactic scale) the conditions of postmodern globalization emergent during the 1960s; extensive forms of connectivity across space and time require high-speed transportation (what David Harvey refers to as “time-space compression”), and transportation requires natural resources that have limited availability. Miller insightfully compares the role of spice in Dune to the importance of oil in late 20th century global economics; just as an OPEC oil embargo was deployed as a threat to global oil supply in 1973, Paul uses the threat of a spice embargo (or the complete destruction of the spice on Arrakis) to bring the empire to its knees: “The people who can destroy a thing, they control it,” he tells his allies during their mobilization for war against the Harkonnens (422). In this sense, personal dependencies (like addictions) are directly juxtaposed with political and economic dependencies; Herbert valorizes self-contained systems, whether these are individual bodies, economies, nation-states, or biospheres. Dune suggests that colonization creates a relationship of mutual dependency between the imperial center and the colonized periphery; the novel explores the possibility that the power differential of such a mutual dependency can be reversed in order to address the imbalance of power between the imperial center and the colonial margins. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that the greatest challenge faced by many decolonizing nations is that they were damaged by colonial exploitation and the

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subsequent withdrawal of colonial powers; the colonizers exploited available resources and then withdrew, leaving the nations internally devastated, and then found new ways (without direct territorial control) to maintain an economic advantage at the developing nations‟ expense, continuing the cycle of exploitation in new form. Herbert imagines an alternative to this process of decolonization; instead of winning such a troubled independence from Empire, the Fremen of Arrakis seize control of the imperial system by manipulating the Empire‟s constitutive dependencies on spice. Paul becomes Emperor by manipulating the Imperium‟s spice addiction, and Stillgar (the Fremen chief) becomes the planetary governor of Arrakis, putting the Fremen in control of their own planet and of the Imperium as a whole. In some ways, Herbert‟s dream of a reversal of power between center and periphery is more radical than Fanon‟s call for independence, reparation, and autonomous self-development for postcolonial nations in the wake of colonial withdrawal. At the same time, however, the decolonization of Arrakis is not accomplished through the efforts of the colonized; Dune suggests that colonial injustices will be corrected by an elite agent from the imperial center (the equivalent of an enlightened American or European) who will lead colonized subjects to a better situation. Paul thus emerges as a “Lawrence of Arabia” figure who leads the savage Arabic Fremen to victory over the Empire. Furthermore, Paul‟s goal is to correct the errors and excesses of Empire rather than to dismantle the imperial system; Herbert offers an apology for Empire in Dune rather than a sustained critique of imperial injustices. A postcolonial extrapolation might imagine the Fremen overthrowing the Imperium on their own terms in order to achieve

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autonomous self-determination. In Herbert‟s novel, however, all indigenous progress is stimulated and guided by heroic outsiders. Imperialism is beneficial for colonies, Herbert implies, because it spreads progress and civilization; the problem is the tyranny of bad leaders, not the systemic injustices of the imperial system itself. Even the ecologist who organizes the Fremen resistance in the first place, Pardot Kynes, is an outsider and an imperial agent who, like Paul, “goes native” to join the Fremen and become a leader among them. Like Heinlein, Herbert essentially offers a critique of territorial imperialism while upholding the axioms of capitalist accumulation that motivate modern imperial exploits in the first place. Dune is remarkable in its capacity to offer such condescending paternalism alongside a critique of imperial culture and politics. Herbert offers a Western audience a way to have-their-cake-and-eat-it too; readers are invited to distance themselves from identification with imperial oppressors and to identify with decolonizing nationalists overcoming the tyranny of imperialism. At the same time, such identification with the decolonizing Fremen is incomplete; the Fremen, while virtuous and uncorrupted by civilization like the Native Americans in Cooper‟s Leatherstocking Tales, are still savages who only achieve progress and liberation when aided by an enlightened outsider from the imperial center. Paul thus serves as an ultimate figure of fantasy identification for Western readers; he is the enlightened post-imperial subject who remains distant from both the corruption of the imperial metropolis and from the savagery of the Fremen nationalists. He is one of the Fremen, yet he is also above them; he proves himself superior to the Fremen (and everyone else) in every challenge presented to him.

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Ultimately, even more than Heinlein‟s Valentine Michael Smith, Paul embodies the epitome of genetic perfection and the apotheosis of Western masculinity. Paul‟s evolutionary perfection is exemplified by his heightened capacity for selfcontrol; in both personal and socio-political terms, Dune suggests that the ultimate purpose of any inward movement is to achieve perfect autonomy and self-mastery. At a historical junction when territorial imperialism has come under challenge, inward conquest offers a new “space” for the repetition of classic imperial adventure tropes, particularly insofar as it allows for the reconstitution of challenged authoritative masculinity. Paul‟s ascension centers on the acquisition of control; his journey inward to master both himself and the Empire revolves around his struggle to achieve domination over material contingency. Like Smith, Paul is remarkable due to his capacity to exert the dominance of reason and mind over body and emotion. His power increases when he “awakens” to psychic consciousness after his father‟s death, but his consciousness is at first dangerously limited; he suffers from blind-spots in his precognitive powers that threaten to endanger his control over unforeseeable contingency. Paul observes the future, but his act of observation changes this future, and this makes future events even more uncertain. As a result, he feels helpless to prevent his oncoming destiny to ignite a “jihad” or holy war that will spread death and destruction throughout human civilization. Paul‟s solution is to drink the most powerful psychedelic in existence, an act that no man has ever before survived, and his subsequent near-death experience grants him near-omniscient knowledge. With access to absolute and perfect information, he is freed

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from the unpredictable terrors of contingency; he gains the ability to maneuver the Emperor and the Spacing Guild into an advantageous final confrontation on Arrakis. In the end, Dune offers a recuperation of heroic imperial masculinity in the guise of internal decolonization. In a cultural environment where colonial fantasies are being deconstructed, Herbert creates a traditional imperial hero who fights on the side of the liberating nationalists. At a cultural moment when feminism threatens the stability of traditional gender roles, Dune offers the comfortable fantasy of a genetic superman who is “super” because he can do what powerful women do better than they can. Paul possesses perfect self-control and psychedelic omniscience; he emerges as a conservative hero for the contradictory fantasies of the rebellious 1960s. At first glance, 2001 appears to narrate an outward journey rather than an inward one. David Bowman‟s voyage to Saturn, however, culminates in the inward expansion of his consciousness. Bowman‟s heightened capacity for self-mastery, framed in the novel as the essential characteristic of a true frontiersman, gives him the discipline to reach a faraway monolith on Iapetus which transports him to an alien consciousness-raising artifact left behind by a mysterious elder race that developed the monolith technology. Bowman‟s personal reserve in the face of fear during his journey to Saturn stands in sharp contrast to Hal‟s psychotic hysteria and dramatic loss of self-control; Bowman proves himself on the frontier by mastering his own involuntary reactions and emotions. Like Stranger and Dune, 2001 centers on an inward journey; all three novels foreground inward voyages to achieve enhanced self-mastery and personal control. Clarke suggests that all outward explorations are inward adventures because the process of “frontier” exploration is a process of unlocking and evolving hidden depths of

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human potential. The biological drive to explore new, unfamiliar, and dangerous environments is an evolutionary impetus that forces humans to develop greater degrees of resourcefulness, awareness, and self-control. Ultimately, just in Dune and Stranger, the inward journey in 2001 leads to the consolidation of power and authority in a new, godlike, and authoritarian master subject. Conquest, in all three narratives, is selfconquest. The central goal is to achieve the complete mastery of the rational mind over the body and emotions. In each novel this ascendancy is marked as an evolutionary leap forward for the human race, and “humanity” is emblematically embodied in a masterful male subject. The climax of 2001 centers on Bowman‟s ascension to psychedelic godhood. Through access to alien technology, Bowman evolves into a “star child” possessing omnipotent control over both himself and over the fabric of space and time. In this iteration of the traditional imperial adventure narrative, masculine hegemony is still achieved in battle against a racialized “other” (in this case a psychotic artificial intelligence) on the frontier, but the novel emphasizes that this is really Bowman‟s victory over his own unconscious impulses. As with Valentine Michael Smith and Paul Atreides, self-mastery for David Bowman is the pathway to mastery over space and time. Clarke begins the “Foreward” of 2001 by noting that there are a hundred billions suns in the Milky Way – enough stars to represent every human who has ever lived. He continues: every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small nearby star we call the Sun. And many – perhaps most – of those alien suns have planets circling them. So certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-man, his own private, world-sized heaven – or hell. (xvii)

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Clarke builds on this opening invocation of a superabundant surplus among the stars in the opening section of the novel, “Primeval Night,” where he suggests that until the intervention of the monoliths, mankind‟s primitive ancestors were starving amid a surplus of food until they achieved the cognitive leap to develop tools. Clarke‟s central theme is that in each successive stage of evolutionary development, mankind is surrounded by a surplus of resources (food, energy, land, etc.), and the only thing that stops humans from taking advantage of these resources is their inability to conceptualize methods to gain access to them. This theme reflects an investment in the capitalist fantasy of unlimited surplus that drives imperialism in the modern era. The capitalist logic of ever-expanding markets and economic frontiers is based on the fundamental disavowal of scarcity. Imperial capitalism imagines that there is never scarcity in any sense that would imply the need for the conservation of resources; it is a fantasy that suggests that there is only ever a temporary relative scarcity that can be overcome through innovation, because beyond the relative limits of scarcity there is an infinite surplus to be accessed by the bold, the innovative, the worthy, and the elite. The affluent deserve the benefits of wealth because they‟ve innovated ways to access this infinite surplus. People who are poor, in contrast, can be left behind with no moral reservations, as we‟ve seen in Heinlein, because everything is right there for the taking if you‟re simply clever and competitive enough to obtain it. This logic only works in a conceptual system that presupposes superabundant surplus; in the milieu of a “closed” system with limited resources, such a capitalist fantasy quickly crumbles. Capitalism and imperialism therefore intersect at the junction

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of their mutual disavowal of “closed” systems. There are no absolute limits; there are only relative limits to be overcome through entrepreneurial innovation. This assumption of the availability of superabundant surplus for the cognitive elite is where Clarke emerges as an inner-space imperialist. The challenge of accessing superabundant resources in outer-space is above all a perceptual journey into one‟s own taken-forgranted assumptions; they key to evolutionary progress is the ability to recognize abundance where others observe only scarcity. The difference between lesser and greater evolutionary beings, according to 2001, is the ability to see possibilities where others do not. Consciousness expansion, or the ability to perceive “relative” limits where others see “absolute” limits isn‟t just innovation for Clarke; it is a cognitive evolution that makes one part of a different “race” than other creatures, and as Clarke shows, this racial difference legitimizes the use of violence by the “superior” race against the race deemed “inferior.” Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke each valorize self-control and a cognitive command of emotions and unconscious nervous functions. Additionally, in each instance their novels emphasize the conquest of inner space as an evolutionary leap forward. In Stranger, Mike discovers a critical “wrongness” within humanity that disturbs him. Jubal comforts him at the climax of the novel by suggesting that if he can enlighten just a tiny portion of the population, the remainder will not be able to compete, and the “right” race of humanity will evolve forward. Similarly, the central problem in Dune is the widespread genetic “degeneration” of the human race; the bene gesserit attempt to resolve this with their breeding program to produce the Kwisatz Haderach, and Paul‟s

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position as the apotheosis of human genetic perfection enables him to harness the unstoppable “jihad” that drives humanity, like an instinctual “sexual heat,” to spread war and destruction to create new genetic possibilities. Finally, 2001 suggests that pioneering explorers are the vanguard of evolutionary progress; Bowman evolves into a new type of human (just like his primate ancestors) because his curiosity and self-control give him a competitive advantage in dangerous survival situations.

Conclusion These novels‟ valorization of self-mastery as an “evolutionary” advantage reinforces an Enlightenment emphasis on progress, racial superiority, and a way of viewing the body as a machine or instrument to achieve ends rather than as an end-initself. Although imperialism and colonialism may be contested within the popular realm in the 1960s, these attitudes suggest that certain modern imperial values remain consistent. Additionally, in each of the cases examined here, the narrative of the conquest of inner space results in the redemption of the larger capitalist imperial project from its mid-century shortcomings. Stranger in a Strange Land posits a “free market” of evolutionary competition in which the murder or “discorporation” of people who embody “wrongness” is justifiable, and in which the dissemination of an enlightened paradigm is a competitive evolutionary advantage that will advance the destiny of the human race. There is no need, in Stranger, for the imperial conquest of Mars; economic “winners” will be able to gain a comparative advantage in any context, and they are obligated surpass and ultimately eliminate the economic “losers” for the good of the race as a whole. In Dune, Paul Atreides does not

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ultimately lead the Fremen to rebel against the Empire and decolonize Arrakis in the service of self-determination; instead, he leads a revolution that integrates Arrakis more efficiently into the imperial system. 2001 is probably the most troubling example when it comes to the redemption of imperial adventure; although Empire building leads to a crisis of nuclear brinksmanship in the story‟s imagined future, the novel nonetheless draws a direct continuity between imperial progress and human evolution. Clarke suggests that pioneers, explorers, and conquerors are the most evolutionarily advanced breed of humankind, and he implicitly argues that they deserve to become benevolent supermen guiding the progress of the human race. If all three novels reinforce the axioms of modern imperialism, they also suggest that self-mastery (the conquest of inner space) inexorably leads to the mastery of space and time; the powers of each representative hero metaphorically exemplify what David Harvey refers to as “space-time compression,” or the ability to move and communicate over vast distances so quickly and efficiently that the world (or the galaxy, etc.) seems to become a smaller place. In Stranger, this mastery of space-time compression is represented by Smith‟s ability to teleport and to dilate his personal sense of time; these abilities grant him and his followers unparalleled competitive advantages. Paul Atreides develops a similar mastery of space and time when his psychedelic use of the spice grants him omnicient information control. Paul recognizes that the Empire‟s entire economic regime depends on the superluminal space-time compression offered by the Spacing Guild in the service of transportation and trade. By manipulating the Guild‟s spice dependency, Paul effectively gains economic control of the Empire. David Bowman‟s evolution into a cosmic “star

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child” grants him similar powers to move across vast distances, a mastery over information inaccessible to other humans, and the ability to “discorporate” objects (like nuclear weapons) with the power of his mind. These novels, then, valorize both traditional modern values (control, progress, mastery) and newer postmodern values, such as the mastery of time-space compression to maintain and enjoy an advantage in an evolutionary competitive marketplace where the strong profit and evolve while the weak suffer and die. All three novels therefore offer the worst of two imperial worlds; there is a simultaneous deployment of what Hardt and Negri identify as modern and postmodern imperialist paradigms. One of the places this is most visible is in the novels‟ constructions of masculinity. The sublime relocation of the imperial frontier to the imaginative domains of inner space inaugurates an era that valorizes the evolution of psychedelic masculinity. Within this discursive environment, “consciousness expansion” or the development of superhuman awareness (via alien influences or drugs) allows man to evolve into superman. All the novels explicitly associate consciousness expansion with evolution, and it is no coincidence that in each case the super-evolved individual is a male who represents the elite class of his social and cultural milleu. The evolution of psychedelic masculinity involves a rejection of passive consumerism (allowing oneself to be defined by appetites and consumption habits) in favor of active self-possession. Psychedelic men are not end-consumers: they are timespace manipulators who regulate and control flows of information, production, and consumption. In Stranger, Smith becomes the ultimate object of consumption; he sacrifices himself to dismemberment by the hands of an angry crowd (with commercial

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breaks), and he is then literally eaten by his nest-mates. Smith is also a master media manipulator; he produces a message, and he masters the art of persuading others to consume his message. In Dune, Paul becomes Emperor and manipulates his Imperium based on its addiction to spice, which is a resource he alone controls. In 2001, David Bowman begins, just like his primate ancestors, as a victim of energy “scarcity” amid inaccessible abundance, and he then becomes the masterful deliverer of an extraordinary and incomparable energy surplus. This emphasis on productive mastery (being defined as a master of information or production, or as an object of consumption, but never as a passive consumer) reflects a nostalgia for what E. Anthony Rotundo calls the American self-made masculinity of the 19th century, with its emphasis on intense self-regulation, the harnessing of passion based on will, and competitiveness combined with rigid self-control. More disturbingly, this emphasis on control also emulates models of fascist masculinity described by Claus Theweleit in Male Fantasies. Theweleit notes that fascist masculinity (the apotheosis of the values of modernity) is characterized by an emphasis on self-control and an imperative to treat the male body as an efficient machine. Theweleit also observes that fascist masculine models demonstrate a ubiquitous paranoia regarding uncontrolled “masses” on both a social level (one must be able to both manipulate and rise above the social masses) and on a personal-physical level (the unregulated and undifferentiated “mass” of ones own organs and emotions is regarded as inextricably feminine, and thus subject to relentless regulation, discipline, and control in order to produce cool, competent, and machine-like masculinity).

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All of the representative 1960s SF novels examined here celebrate the regulation of social or individual uncontrolled masses, and they associate “mass” with the abject feminine. In Stranger, the public masses are portrayed as dupes who are subject to tricks and media manipulation. Women, in particular, constitute the imagined mass-audience for media consumption; most of the advertisements presented in the novel are directed at female viewers. Men, like Jubal and Smith, demonstrate a greater potential to take a molecular mass (such as a nest or household) and unify it into a molar whole. Dune suggests that if the masses are left uncontrolled, they will run wild in a hysterical “jihad” resulting in war and chaotic destruction. In 2001 the monoliths feminize the masses (turning them into desiring consumers) in order to evolve them into masculine masters; men who represent the evolutionary vanguard (like Moon Watcher and David Bowman) must become subjects before they evolve into masterful self-controlled beings. Hal, in contrast, cannot control his emotions and becomes “hysterical” while Bowman succeeds in controlling his inner mass. Finally, Theweleit argues that fascist masculinity valorizes race; all the novels seem, on the surface, to reject biological racism. They are each multi-racial, and none explicitly espouses white superiority. In each case, however, race is not ultimately determined by skin color or by ethnicity, but by the inherent capacity for enhanced consciousness. Individuals with advanced awareness (and corresponding degrees of advanced control) are a separate race of evolutionary progress, and these advanced individuals are always male and racially unmarked. Hardt and Negri suggest that postmodernity ushers in a transition from racial differentiation based on biological categories to a new mode of differentiation based on cultural difference that functions in

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exactly the same way. In these narratives, consciousness becomes the basis of differentiation, and differences in consciousness are the product of genetics, cultural cultivation, psychedelic use, alien influence, and inherent Calvinist merit. In conclusion, these three representative texts suggest that America in the 1960s valorizes the evolution of psychedelic masculinity. Despite a widespread rejection of territorial colonialism and imperialism, there is nonetheless a ubiquitous celebration of inward journeys framed in imperial terms. On one hand, this emphasis on inner-conquest extends discursive trends familiar within imperial adventure paradigms. On the other hand, this framing also celebrates values, such as a command over the “compression” of space and time, that are characteristic of what Hardt and Negri call “postmodern” expressions of imperial sovereignty.

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Chapter Two: Revolutions in the Head

Introduction Herbert, Heinlein, and Clarke are not the only science fiction writers who overtly critique imperialism in their science fiction imaginings; the condemnation of colonial empire and the critique of the American “frontier” project are ubiquitous throughout the science fiction of the 1960s. This chapter considers a range of New Wave SF texts that offer critical perspectives concerning imperial discourses and practices. Some New Wave authors mirror the attitudes of Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke insofar as they deterritorialize doxical attitudes towards imperialism while at the same time rearticulating and recovering imperial figurations of heroic masculinity. Others, however, carry the critique of Empire further and deconstruct imperial and neo-imperial gender formations. Before engaging these various projects, however, it is useful to first introduce the New Wave itself; unlike the “representative” cultural SF texts I examined in chapter one, the avant-garde New Wave project represents a discursive undercurrent in American and British culture in the 1960s. The New Wave in science fiction has been a difficult movement to classify. Critics and fans agree that something important happened within science fiction during the 1960s, and most agree that the effects of this change are still felt today. Despite this agreement, a wide range of argument persists as to exactly who belonged to the New Wave, where it was taking place, and why it was significant. Thomas D. Clareson, for example, draws a strong distinction between the “pessimistic” writers of the New Wave and the optimism of more conventional science fiction. In Understanding Contemporary

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American Science Fiction, he asks “how long can a generation be bludgeoned with pessimistic assumptions before those assumptions can be accepted and reacted to as fact? . . . one wonders to what extent SF itself fed and shaped the tempers of the 1960s” (215). The terms of Clareson‟s argument reveal his own assumptions; the “tempers” of the 1960s (including the civil rights movement, feminist movements, and multiple British and American countercultures) cannot simply be dismissed as “pessimistic” in nature. Such a critique oversimplifies both the complex social changes taking place during the 1960s and the new developments taking place within the innovative science fiction of the period. Despite this underlying conservatism, however, Clareson‟s evaluation of the New Wave highlights one unifying characteristic shared by the various SF artists of this movement: New Wave writers were dissatisfied with the status quo, they considered themselves to be rebels, and they wanted things to change. What exactly they wanted to change, and what they were rebelling against, is another set of questions entirely. Aside from a general rejection of imperialism, the dissatisfaction expressed by New Wave writers is aimed at multiple (and sometimes conflicting) targets. Most New Wavers were tired of the restrictive conventions of conservative genre-SF and wanted to explore new horizons of style, content, and structure. Stephen P. Lockwood notes that Michael Moorcock repeatedly articulated three core goals of the New Wave in the pages of New Worlds: the movement struggled to “revitalize” science fiction by breaking down habitual forms and stagnant genre structures, to create a new form of fiction that amalgamated modern fiction and SF, and to convince publishers and fans of the seriousness of science fiction as a valid literary form (Lockwood 2-3). In struggling toward these goals the New Wave was almost

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universally united, and SF critic Peter Nicholls argues that, despite many internal differences, the New Wave “did more than any other kind of SF to break down the barriers between sf and mainstream fiction” (“New Wave” 866). While most New Wave writers echo this emphasis on “breaking down barriers,” they also loudly and publicly disagree on where these barriers are located and what exactly needs to be broken down. In the introduction to his anthology Dangerous Visions (the work most frequently cited as the launching point of the American New Wave), Harlan Ellison hastens to distinguish his project from the work of his British counterparts: “my „new thing‟ is neither Judith Merril‟s „new thing‟ nor Michael Moorcock‟s „new thing.‟ Ask for us by our brand names” (xxiv, his emphasis). Ellison‟s emphatic argument that his new thing is different than their new thing (“they” are the constellation of writers congregated around Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard publishing in the British magazine New Worlds – usually seen as the birthplace of the British New Wave in 1964) raises several questions that Ellison does not address. If both writer/editors emphasize their desire to “break down the boundaries” that have been constraining science fiction, then where is the difference between Ellison‟s “new thing” and Moorcock‟s “new thing”? How much of a difference can be seen between American and British science fiction of this time, and why is there such a repeated denial by so many New Wave writers that they are part of a larger movement at all? In a letter published in 1978, Thomas Disch commented: “I have no opinion of the „new wave‟ in sf, since I don‟t believe that was ever a meaningful classification. If you mean to ask – do I feel solidarity with all writers who have ever been lumped together under that heading – certainly I do not” (Nicholls, “New Wave” 867). Yet two

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decades later, he writes in 1998 that “My sense of the New Wave, with twenty-five years of hindsight, is that its irreducible nucleus was the dyad of J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, with Ballard in the role of T.S. Elliot and Moorcock as Ezra Pound, a Svengali for all seasons, ready to welcome anyone into the club who might in some way advance the cause” (Disch, Dreams 104). From this quote it seems that Disch is looking back to see the origins of the New Wave in a particularly British context (The New Worlds writers), but Disch later goes on to suggest that he considers science fiction to be an essentially American genre with origins dating back to Edgar Allen Poe. To complicate matters further, a wide variety of American writers (including Disch, Spinrad, and Sladek) moved to London in the 1960s to be part of the New Worlds publishing circle, and a large number of British New Worlds writers (including Ballard himself and Brian Aldiss) published short stories in Ellison‟s Dangerous Visions and his subsequent anthology Again, Dangerous Visions. Despite the fact that they often deny any association with each other, it is clear that there are connections between the writers of the New Wave and between the kinds of creative projects they undertake. This leaves us with several questions: What are the relationships between the different writers of the New Wave? How exactly can the New Wave be classified as a movement? What are the similarities and differences between the New Wave in British and American contexts, and why do New Wavers either deny an association with one another or define their associations within (rather than across) national boundaries?

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Frontier Adventure and Psychedelic Exploration It is useful to begin by questioning the strict spheres of “American” and “British” New Wave science fiction as separate and distinct categories. There are important insights to be gained in examining the differences between British and American New Wave projects: Stephen Lockwood notes that Michael Moorcock‟s most significant publishing obstacles in England were ideological resistance; many of his political opponents felt that the “unworkable extremism” of his political agenda simply went too far. At one point, New Worlds lost a major source of financial income – a special Arts Council grant secured with the help of Brian Aldiss – when a leading UK retailnewsagent chain refused to carry copies of the magazine due to what it felt to be the political extremism of Norman Spinrad‟s serialized story Bug Jack Baron (Stableford 867). In contrast, Harlan Ellison‟s most significant problem in the United States was the financial power of major publishers who didn‟t want to risk an unsafe investment in a new form of SF that might not market as well as the usual “formula” genre fiction (Lockwood 3-4). Ellison didn‟t face the same political opposition that Moorcock was struggling against, but unlike Moorcock, he had severe problems with basic issues of funding and distribution. Because the concept and format of the Dangerous Visions anthology was so unusual, Doubleday was unwilling to risk a high financial investment in the project, and Ellison ended up financing a large portion of the anthology himself (Ellison xxvi). From these differences alone, we can see that there are useful reasons to consider the particular national differences between the British and American New Wave projects.

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They both emerge from unique historical and political situations in opposition to different normative and censoring state apparatuses. However, few of the authors themselves (as we can see with Disch‟s comments above) focus on specific historical or cultural differences when they make their arguments for national exclusivity. The general investment in keeping these national categories separate obscures a high degree of national cross-pollination (and ideological overlap) between British and American authors. In order to consider the complexity of this trans-Atlantic cross-pollination, it is useful to trace the origins of the some the most important ideological themes and assumptions shared by British and American science fictions. There is a strong connection in science fiction between American frontier-exploration narratives and British colonial-adventure narratives, particularly around the construction of imperial masculine identities. This connection is often embodied the figure of the masculine adventure-hero who defines himself through exploration and conquest on the frontier; this “frontier” can be located in the American West, in the Colonies of the Empire, in the deep reaches of outer space, or in other interchangeable fantastic locations. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam argue that the imperialist “ordering of the world” reached its peak around the beginning of the 20th century and that this peak coincided with the origins of film and cinema. The largest film-producing states (England, France, the United States, and Germany) were also the leading imperialist countries, and the development of cinema coincided with a period when enthusiasm for the imperial project was beginning to spread from the elite to the popular realm:

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For the working classes of Europe and Euro-America, photogenic wars in remote parts of the empire became diverting entertainments, serving to „neutralize the class struggle and transform class solidarity into national and racial solidarity.‟ The cinema adopted the popular fictions of colonialist writers like Kipling for India, Rider Haggard, Edgar Wallace and Edgar Rice Burroughs for Africa, and absorbed popular genres like the „conquest fiction‟ of the American southwest. (154) Watching the colonized or savage “other” in the comfort of the theatre became a powerful way to define a national “us” and thereby to mask inequalities inherent in the existing class strata. Although Shohat and Stam focus on the adaptation of colonialadventure stories, it is important to note that there is already a crossover between British colonial-adventure and American frontier-exploration narratives in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, who served in the US Calvary, who applied to join Theodore Roosevelt‟s “Rough Riders” in 1898, and who acknowledged not only Kipling as an inspiration but also self-consciously followed in the literary footsteps of Jack London and Owen Wister (Slotkin 196-197).1 Furthermore, early cinema focused on American imperial projects and formula Westerns as often as it centered on depictions of exotic subjects of the British Empire and adaptations of British colonial-adventure stories. Native Americans were transformed into a mass spectacle onscreen as frequently as exotic colonial subjects, particularly given the filming and production of Buffalo Bill Cody‟s Wild West Show during the turn of the century (Belton 208). One of the first publicized imperial conflicts on film recorded the activities of Theodore Roosevelt and his Rough Riders during the Spanish American war

1

See Richard Slotkin‟s chapter “From the Open Range to the Mean Streets” in Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America (194-211) for a more elaborate discussion of Burroughs‟ relation to colonialism and the Western genre. It is also interesting to note that Burroughs‟ work underwent a significant revival during the 1960s during the time when the New Wave was starting to emerge.

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in 1898 (Robinson 73), and the often-adapted Western dime-novels of Owen Wister and Zane Grey established the conventions and formula patterns that would eventually be adapted to create the science fiction formulas that Moorcock, Ellison, and the other New Wave writers were struggling to resist.2 Thus, the writers of the New Wave sought to escape from science fiction conventions that had imperialistic origins in both American frontier-exploration discourses and British colonial-adventure narratives. Shohat and Stam also note that imperial discourses around the turn of the century share a focus on the connection between colonial adventure and masculinity. They cite Baden-Powell‟s introduction from Scouting for Boys (1908), which praises “the frontiersmen of all parts of our Empire. The „trappers‟ of North America, hunters of Central Africa, the British pioneers, explorers, and missionaries all over Asia and the wild parts of the world, . . . the constabulary of North-West Canada and of South-Africa” (153). Shohat and Stam examine this in relation to colonial narratives of masculine initiation: “pioneering” adventures on the wild frontier initiate boys into the world of men, yet they also initiate disconnected individual men into membership within an elite masculinist imperial fraternity: For white male heroes, the benighted colonial regions offered „charismatic realms of adventure‟ free from „the complexities of relations with white women.‟ Adventure films, and the „adventure‟ of going to the cinema, provided a vicarious experience of passionate fraternity, a playing field for the self-realization of the white European male. (153) Baden-Powell‟s use of “frontier” language (and the fact that his Boy Scouts would quickly become a larger a phenomenon in the United States than they were in Britain)

2

For a more thorough discussion of the connections between the Western and early (“pre” New Wave) formula science fiction, see David Mogen, Wilderness Visions: Science Fiction Westerns.

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suggests that there is a similar process of masculine initiation at work within discourses of American nationalism. Furthermore, it reveals that there is a large degree of historical connection between British and American discourses of masculinity, national exceptionalism, and colonial elitism.3 Despite clear differences, there are also strong continuities between American frontier-exploration stories and British colonial-adventure narratives; there has been a trans-Atlantic mixing between these discourses at least since Hollywood began simultaneously producing Westerns and adaptations of British colonial-adventure stories at the beginning of the century. For the purposes of examining the New Wave, it is also instructive to note that these American (frontier-exploration) and British (colonial-adventure) traditions comingle in a unique manner as they inform and are rearticulated by elements of British and American psychedelic counterculture in the 1960s. Colin Greenland notes that a generation gap emerges in both Britain and America following a major increase of affluence and personal income in the aftermath of World War Two. Greenland and Tom Wolfe both argue that this new economic prosperity makes possible the initial emergence of a youth based counter-culture.4 Madison Avenue literally invents the marketing category of “teenager” during the early 1950s in order to define an identity and a style for mass consumption among newly-affluent youth. This category then develops its own identity, group consciousness, and critical stance toward its parent generations. Greenland argues that the subsequent introduction of LSD in youth cultures during the

3

An extended discussion of these connections can also be found in Donald Pease and Amy Kaplan‟s Cultures of U.S. Imperialism. 4 Greenland discusses this in the introduction to The Entropy Exhibition, while Tom Wolfe focuses on this theme in most of his early “new journalism” essays (particularly in The Pump House Gang and The KandyKolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, but also in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test).

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early 1960s plays a major role in the further self-development of British and American countercultures: Anyone who takes LSD undergoes intense reorganization of his perception of matter, space, time, and identity. He makes a complete reexamination of the foundations of consciousness, not systematically but spontaneously, experientially. This in itself makes him different from someone who does not take LSD . . . There are the makings here of a complete social division: revolution in the head, along with the highways of perception and understanding. (6) Greenland‟s analysis suggests that many of the social upheavals of the 1960s stem from a subsequent large-scale sense of estrangement and alienation; rather than an emphasis on continuity with the past, British and American countercultures begin to proliferate isolated and subjective worldviews focusing on new realities and new unexplored horizons. To define their utopian visions, countercultural movements (like those who followed Ken Kesey and Timothy Leary in America, and Beatle-fanatics in Britain) often drew on science fiction stories, colonial adventure narratives, and American western myths to find appropriate narratives of regeneration and rejuvenation to help shape their utopian dreams.5 While New Wave writers were often skeptical of countercultural “hippie” utopianism, many were still strongly influenced by the radical atmosphere of the 1960s and the prevalent rhetoric of “consciousness expansion” surrounding psychedelic counterculture. Many of their works (such as Brian Aldiss‟ Barefoot in the Head and Thomas Disch‟s Camp Concentration) directly address psychedelic drugs and the various problems or possibilities offered by psychedelic consciousness expansion. Many New 5

This intersection of psychedelic countercultural utopianism and frontier-adventure discourse can be explored in great detail, particularly in the works of Ken Kesey, Frank Hebert, Timothy Leary, Tom Wolfe, and Hunter S. Thompson.

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Wave writers (particularly Philip K. Dick and Samuel R. Delany) worked from the fundamental assumption (often abstracted from earlier counterculture figures like William S. Burroughs) that the consensual reality celebrated by mimetic fiction was an illusion maintained in the interests of a conservative or elite ruling class, and these writers assumed that a wider range of “shifting realities” (to use a term employed by Lawrence Sutin in Dick‟s biography) were hidden beneath the surface of this consensual reality. This context sets the stage for the historical and discursive contexts in which the New Wave writers make their “boundary breaking” interventions. Both American and British New Wave writers are almost always concerned with questioning or exploring the breakdown of consensus realities. Furthermore, this rebellious emphasis on “boundary breaking” draws upon American (frontier-exploration) and British (colonial-adventure) narratives (mixed and merged in 1960s psychedelic counterculture) in order to establish new realities in response to these perceived breakdowns. Despite their ideological differences, the New Wave authors are all in some way attempting to re-quilt new “real” anchor points (or points de capiton in Lacanian terms) to anchor new “realities.” These “quilting points,” loaded with libidinal investment, serve as stabilizing mechanisms that assure the naturalness of particular ideological subject positions. According to Slavoj Zizek, all ideological fields are held together by these quilting points: a multitude of floating signifiers or “proto-ideological elements” are “structured into a unified field through the intervention of a certain „nodal point‟ (the Lacanian point de caption) which „quilts‟ them, stops their sliding and fixes their meaning. . . . The „quilting‟ performs the totalization by means of which this free

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floating of ideological elements is halted, fixed – that is to say, by means of which they become part of the structured network of meaning” (87). In short, the quilting point is a particular element that feels “real” or absolutely meaningful due to an excessive emotional investment in the naturalness of this site. This fixed element is overdetermined: it speaks itself too loudly, and the misrecognition of its surplus or excess (the way we are interpellated into reading the signifier as carrying “obvious” norms and unquestioned assumptions) makes possible our acceptance of ideologically charged values and meanings.6 The discourse of frontier exploration and colonial adventure that these authors are drawing on allows them to explore the “shifting realities” of the 1960s and to consider certain ideologies that are destabilizing, fragmenting, and coming into question. The excessive investment most New Wave writers share in the reality of a new horizon of possibilities outside the “frontiers” of established convention is exactly what allows them to craft frontier-adventure narratives that critique (with varying degrees of success) the troublesome imperial ideologies most often reified by traditional frontier-adventure narratives. These challenges to imperial discourse are not evenly expressed across the board, and the disagreements among the New Wavers tend to center around issues of gender and sexuality. While these authors are all in agreement that science fiction needs to “break free” of previous formula restrictions on style, structure, and content, their ideas concerning where they should go with science fiction as they “break free” varies along a wide ideological spectrum.

6

For a more detailed discussion of these “quilting points,” see Zizek‟s The Sublime Object of Ideology, 87129.

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New Wave Adventures and “The Real Man” From this perspective, the New Wave can be ideologically broken into two major groups: there are New Wave writers who critique imperialism but leave unchallenged problematic assumptions about imperial masculinity, and there are writers who in some way incorporate a critique of imperial models of gender into the core of their work. In the writing of the first group, represented by J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, Brian Aldiss, Thomas Disch, Philip K. Dick, and Philip Jose Farmer, one can see a prevalent underlying anxiety about the loss of masculine potency and power. These writers draw upon frontier and adventure discourses to critique nationalism and colonialism while reconstituting and reinforcing traditional models of heroic masculine identity. Their investment in “boundary breaking” projects allows them to question certain doxical nodes, but many of their underlying assumptions remain “quilted” around the reality of masculine power and the “natural” relationship between particular forms of gendered behavior and biological sex. Michael Moorcock and Thomas M. Disch offer strong critiques of colonialism and imperialism, yet their works nonetheless reveal a strong underlying anxiety about the loss of masculine potency and power. In Moorcock‟s “Oswald Bastable” novels – The Warlord of the Air, The Land Leviathan, and The Steel Tsar (collected together in 1993 as A Nomad of the Time Streams) – Moorcock chronicles the adventures of an officer in the British Royal Service (from the year 1904) who becomes lost in time and travels between different possible realities as a result of his visit to the Temple of the Future Buddha (hidden in the Himalayan mountains on the far frontier of the British Empire). While the novels themselves have a classic “pulp adventure” format and style, Moorcock

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makes use of a disorienting narrative structure in his attempt to expand the political consciousness of his readers. Moorcock establishes the first person perspective of Bastable, who at first identifies with the glories of an imperial, paternalistic, and global future utopia, but then he shifts perspective to have Bastable identify with nationalist revolutionaries when he (and the reader) are lead to an understanding of the real-world British colonial injustices (such as Britain‟s founding role in Chinese opium production) that make such a flawed “utopia” possible. A similar shift takes place in The Land Leviathan, where Bastable begins by aligning himself with white Euro-American nations who are attempting to stop African imperialist Cicero Hood from conquering the world and enslaving the white race; Bastable switches sides to join Hood after he is forced to confront the brutal realities and horrors of white global racism. It would seem from the messages conveyed in all three novels that Moorcock opposes any homogeneous masculinist vision of “utopian” control or order. While he uses the colonial adventure genre to critique colonialism, paternalism, racism, and class inequality, the gender representations within the series reveal a strong and unquestioned investment in the reality of essential gender roles. The male heroes – including Bastable, his enemies, and his mentors – remain the active, potent, central figures in the narrative, while the only significant female character in the series, Una Perrson, is eternally beautiful, enigmatic, seductive, and generally devoid of agency aside from her ability to motivate or entice the male protagonists. Moorcock thus attempts to recuperate the masculine adventure hero by putting him up against the problems of colonialism, nationalism, and racism that he had once helped to police and reinforce. It is as if Moorcock says, “yes, the pulp colonial frontier hero has been responsible for terrible

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crimes, but this doesn‟t change the fact that he is a sterling example of a real man and a real hero, and he can continue to be a real manly hero if we simply tell stories where he attempts to atone for those past crimes.” The heroic vision of masculinity is not a problem for Moorcock; would-be male heroes (like the majority of his readers) can continue to be “Eternal Champions” if their minds can be opened to the larger scope of the significant political enemies they should be fighting against. If Moorcock questions the justice of paternalistic colonialism while reinforcing the “reality” of the masculine adventure hero, Thomas Disch is extremely critical of both American frontier optimism and the utopianism of psychedelic counterculture, yet he grounds his critique on the authoritative “reality” of the classic western literary canon. In his novel Camp Concentration, Disch offers a strikingly dystopian view of American frontierism and the conquest of “inner space.” The story is set in a secret military research compound hidden in an abandoned gold mine somewhere in the American West where scientists are subjecting prisoners (mostly conscientious objectors from a war that takes place in the near future) to injections of a super-psychedelic drug called Palladine. Palladine heightens the intelligence of the prisoner-subject to a state beyond genius while slowly killing him over the course of nine painful months. Disch characterizes Humphrey Haast, the doctor in charge of the project, as the nightmarish embodiment of the worst aspects of frontier and counterculture ideology. Haast is determined to move beyond the frontiers of conventional scientific thinking: “Without science we wouldn‟t have radiation, or computers, or Krebiozen, or men on the moon. But science is only one way of looking at things . . . The important thing, as even Busk realizes, is to let them [the Palladine subjects] steer their own course. They‟ve got

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to break away from the old patterns of thought, blaze trails, explore” (44). In effect, Haast – who locates his lab in a gold mine at the “end” of the Western frontier, who has seen science reach its farthest frontiers on the moon and in the exploration of nuclear power – attempts to conquer what he sees as a new frontier of “inner space” through his research. Yet Disch makes clear to us that this “new frontier” (like the others in American history that have come before it) is pioneered only through exploitation, torture, and racial conquest. The “real” explorers are the Palladine subjects, whose bodies rot and waste away in this horrible “concentration” camp in order to fuel Haast‟s pioneering ambitions. Furthermore, Disch questions the notion that “breaking down the barriers” of perception can lead to genius. Aimee Busk, one of the project scientists, explains the project of the facility in the following terms: “The question is, for a modern investigator, what actually takes place in the brain at the moment that an Archimedes says „Eureka!‟ It seems clear, now, that it is a sort of a breakdown – literally, the mind disintegrates, and the old, distinct categories are for a little while fluid and capable of re-formation” (58). In many ways, Busk articulates here a central philosophy of the New Wave; by breaking down the boundaries limiting perception and expression, new pathways will supposedly open that will lead to new positive possibilities. Yet Louis Sacchetti, the prisonerprotagonist of the novel, responds to Busk by asserting that it is “the re-formation of the disrupted categories in which the art of genius consists. It‟s not the breakdown that counts, but the new juxtapositions that follow. Madmen can break down just as spectacularly as geniuses” (58).

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Disch questions the investment quilted around the positive possibilities offered by boundary-breaking frontier projects, yet when new juxtapositions lead to new ideas in Camp Concentration, they are strictly juxtapositions inspired by the Western literary canon. The Palladine subjects (and Disch) juggle continual references to literary classics, including allusions to the Bible, Aquinas, the Kabbalah, classical alchemy, Wagner, Bunyan, Milton, Rilke, Rimbaud, and others. Engagement with these texts is what Disch defines as “genius;” we never see Mordechai Washington (the black “leader” of the Palladine subjects) spin extraordinary insights from juxtapositions of Frederick Douglass, Lao Tsu, Karl Marx, Martin Luther King, or anyone else outside the Anglo-American high literary tradition. Thus, while Disch‟s critique of psychedelic frontier utopianism has liberatory potential, he polices the authenticity and authority of the masculine Western literary canon in his definition of emancipatory “genius.” In contrast to Moorcock and Disch, who focus their critique on political and military imperial projects, Philip Jose Farmer and J. G. Ballard share a central concern with the unreality of a modern (or futuristic) society bombarded by endlessly reproducible images and simulacra, and their anxiety leads them to craft misogynistic narratives that attempt to recover and reconstitute the un-simulated authenticity of masculine identity. Farmer is a self-conscious fan of pulp colonial adventure stories who often deliberately attempts to tie his creative work to earlier frontier and adventure traditions; he re-writes the characters of Tarzan and Doc Savage, and historical figures such as Sir Richard Burton, Samuel Clemens, and Jack London become the main characters of his popular Riverworld novels (Clute and Pringle 418).

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In “Riders of the Purple Wage,” the short story Harlan Ellison introduces as the “finest” work of fiction in the Dangerous Visions anthology, Farmer tells the tale of a depressing utopian future where material overabundance has caused Americans to become infantile zombies dependant on a maternal socialist government for subsistence. “Uncle Sam” provides everyone with “the purple wage” (a form of universal welfare), and as a result men no longer need to fight or strive to provide for their families: lacking self-respect, the fathers become free-floaters, nomads on the steppes of sex. Mother, with a capital M, becomes the dominant figure in the family. She may be playing around, too, but she‟s taking care of the kids; she‟s around most of the time. Thus, with the father a lower-case figure, absent, weak, or indifferent, the children often become homosexual or ambisexual. The wonderland is also a fairyland. (57) Mothers are the central enemy in this story: the government is portrayed as an overbearing mother who provides sustenance in order to enslave individuals through dependence, and this theme of maternal over-dependence recurs throughout the narrative; the characters live in egg-shaped womb houses with egg-shaped rooms and oval doors, and the media is portrayed as a great Mother feeding candy entertainment through the glass nipple of the television. The hero of the story is a rare individual who grows up with a strong fatherfigure; Chib Winnegan is an artist who takes his grandfather‟s advice and attempts to “cut the umbilical cord” linking him to mother, culture, and society so that he can grow up to be a real man. While the story offers some cultural and political criticisms, it does so only by misogynistically re-gendering the paternal, colonizing state as a maternal force, and the logic of this association is only possible due to a deep and symptomatically threatened investment in the ultimate reality of potent and self-actualizing manhood. 77

Like the dying breed of cowboys portrayed by Owen Wister‟s Riders of the Purple Sage (the western novel from which Farmer appropriates the ironic title of his story) real men like Chib Winnegan must fight to retain their manhood in the face of the supposedly feminizing and civilizing apparatuses of society and culture. J. G. Ballard‟s work demonstrates a similar negative attitude toward women and women‟s bodies, and although his writing is characterized by a much higher degree of theoretical complexity, he still retains a deep investment in the reality of the penetrating male explorer. Ballard, who is strongly influenced by French surrealism and poststructuralism, leads the movement among the New Wave writers away from narratives of outer space exploration in favor of what he calls “inner space;” in Ballard‟s view, nothing could be as fantastic or unexplainable as the workings of the human mind, and “the only true alien planet,” he suggests, “is earth” (Pringle, “Ballard” 84). His controversial book The Atrocity Exhibition is a surreal critique of cultural norms; its pages offer a logically organized textbook written from the perspective of a homicidal psychotic who describes the perverse and brutal dissection of everything from cultural icons and philosophical concepts to women‟s bodies and female genitalia. A gothic aesthetic of perversity forms the core of Ballard‟s artistic philosophy: “I think we‟re all innately perverse,” he remarks, “capable of enormous cruelty, yet paradoxically our talent for the perverse, the violent, and obscene may be a good thing. We may have to go through this phase to reach something on the other side. It‟s a mistake to hold back and refuse one‟s nature” (Atrocity Exhibition 6). Ballard theorizes that a proliferation of media simulacra have alienated individuals from the basic realities of life, and that the only way to overcome this

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alienation is through a continuous probing at the boundaries of taboo in order to reach whatever lies beyond. This incisive and hyper-critical stance allows him to cut apart and investigate from within all manner of ideological problems, yet by his own admission he fails to question the “naturalness” of the drive to push the frontiers of perception and the always-displaced reality of whatever glorious possibilities exist on “the other side.” Ballard falls prey to exactly the problems with frontier-adventure discourse that Disch diagnoses in Camp Concentration: as Saccetti says, “its not the breakdown that counts, but the new juxtapositions that follow. Madmen can break down just as spectacularly as geniuses” (58). Ballard is so intent on breakthroughs that he fails to offer the possibility of something positive to come after; “the other side” is always and continually out of reach. As a result, The Atrocity Exhibition becomes a narrative where perverse exploration is always acted out on female bodies by a male “explorer” and his scalpel. If the West was often seen as a “virgin land” to be exploited by masculine explorers, Ballard participates in this tradition of frontier exploration by treating female bodies as alien landscapes to be cut, butchered, beaten, and torn in his quest to reach whatever possibilities lie beyond the nebulous frontiers of taboo. Not all New Wave writers are as cruel in their representations of women as Ballard. Philip K. Dick and Brian Aldiss, for example, acknowledge or address (although to a significantly lesser degree than Russ, LeGuin, or Delany) the problems inherent in traditional models of pulp frontier-adventure masculinity. Dick is probably one of the most popular and interesting writers among the New Wave, and one of his first major novels, The Man in the High Castle, is a narrative determined to question and explore the nature of “authenticity.” The Man in the High Castle is a parallel world story; the action

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takes place in a an alternate reality where the Allied powers have lost World War Two and where Japan and Germany have colonized the Pacific and Atlantic coasts of the former United States. The story is told though a variety of shifting perspectives, including those of benevolent Japanese colonizers (Mr. Tagomi, Paul Kasura), Americans living under Japanese rule (Robert Chilidan, Frank Fink), and free Americans living in the un-colonized central states (Julianna Fink). Within the world of the novel, each of the characters encounters a fictional book, The Grasshopper Lies Heavy, which tells the tale of another parallel world where Japan and Germany lost the war. Part of the cleverness of the book lies in its ability to question and challenge the natural right of a colonial power to rule over a colonized people; in one brilliant moment, Paul Kasura subtly and paternalistically leads Robert Chilidan through the steps of learning to think like a “civilized” and “dignified” individual according to Japanese cultural norms while manipulating him the entire time into acting against his own financial best interests (173-184). We also discover that the unchecked imperialistic Germans have continued their campaign of racial genocide on the continent of Africa and that they have colonized the solar system in an endless quest for new frontiers. The parallel world setting allows Dick to critique British and American colonial attitudes and practices by placing readers in the first-person perspective of colonized American subjects. Furthermore, part of the crisis that lies at the center of the novel is a crisis of masculinity; all of the colonized male characters (Chilidan and Fink) are portrayed as impotent not just because of their racial inferiority, but also because they are unable to attain the feminine objects of their desire. Frank Fink gets into all sorts of trouble because he‟s trying to recover his lost wife (who left him at the end of the war) and his

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lost sense of masculine potency; at one point he reasons, “right now I‟m nothing, but if I can swing this, then maybe I can get Juliana back. I know what she wants – she deserves to be married to a man who matters, an important person in the community, not some meshuggener. Men used to be men, in the old days; before the war for instance. But all that‟s gone now” (53). Dick accomplishes a dual critique of paternalistic colonialism and of heroic frontier masculinity; on one hand he emphasizes the feelings of impotency experienced by the colonial Americans and the social structures by which they are made to feel impotent, yet on the other hand the hyper-masculinity of the imperialistic German frontiersmen is revealed to be an overwhelmingly suicidal drive for control (similar to the aggressive drive Bodenland displays in Aldiss‟ Frankenstein Unbound). The authenticity of masculinity and masculine identity in Man in the High Castle is revealed to be just as fragile as the authentic “historicity” of the antiques that Chilidan sells, yet despite these breakdowns, the novel is still characterized by a kind of nostalgic longing for an authentic masculinity that sets it apart from other New Wave writers, like Russ, LeGuin, and Delany, who attempt to wrestle with issues of gender in a more direct and complicated way. Like Philip K. Dick, Brian Aldiss attempts to address gender issues in relation to frontier-adventure fiction, yet his critique remains undeveloped and fails to interrogate his own investment in particular kinds of “heroic” masculine behavior and gender roles. Like many New Wave writers, Aldiss sees himself as a kind of pioneer pushing the frontiers of a new territory; in a 1964 conversation he remarks, “I find I would much rather write science fiction than anything else. The dead weight is so much less than in

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the field of the ordinary novel. There‟s a sense in which you are conquering a fresh country” (Collings 4). The protagonists in his novels are similarly pioneers and frontiersmen; Barefoot in the Head presents a psychedelic visionary named Colin Charteris (who is described as a cowboy, a pilot, and a race car driver all at once) who leads the way to new spiritual and metaphysical revolutions after Europe is bombed with hallucinogenic chemical weapons by middle eastern terrorists. In Frankenstein Unbound, the central protagonist is a Texan named Joe Bodenland from the year 2020 who gets lost in time and returns to the 19th century where he meets Victor Frankenstein (and his famous monster) and well as Frankenstein‟s creator Mary Shelly. When Bodenland first arrives in the past, he misses his home and family, yet he is euphoric about his temporal displacement. His senses seem to be open in a new way (he spends several moments describing the shock of new sights, smells, and feelings), and he also feels something remarkable “awaken” inside of him: “I was back in history!” he narrates, “Something had come over me. Rising from the bed, I felt curiously unlike myself. Or rather, I could feel the old cautious Bodenland inside, but it seemed as if a new man, fitted for decision and adventure, had taken control of me” (28). Like Chib Winnegan from “Riders of the Purple Wage,” Bodenland is able to break free from the cautious and constrained masculinity that has been imposed on him by society and recover a more active manhood that has been “sleeping” within him all along. This “new man” seems to be the adventurous Texas frontiersman rooted in his blood; he is more assertive, more aggressive, and more “mythic.” Unlike Philip Jose Farmer, however, Aldiss seems to be aware that there are problems with this model of adventurous frontier masculinity; at the end of the novel,

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Bodenland hunts down Frankenstein‟s monster and its mate, and in a desperate final moment the monster curses him: “In trying to destroy what you do not understand, you destroy yourself! Only that lack of understanding makes you see a great divide between our natures. When you hate and fear me, you believe it is because of our differences. Oh, no, Bodenland! – it is because of our similarities that you bring such detestation to bear on me!” (210). Despite this appeal, Bodenland shoots the monster and its partner dead, and readers are left to wonder whether Frankenstein‟s creation or Bodenland himself is the greater monster. Aldiss thus accomplishes a perceptual trick similar to the technique used by Moorcock; the reader at first is encouraged to identify with the “new man” Bodenland finds within himself, but later we are invited to recoil from this identification when Bodenland‟s “awakened” masculinity leads him to cause the same kind of senseless slaughter that has been the major thematic problem throughout the entire novel. One additional scene from the very first chapter of the book is illustrative when unraveling Aldiss‟ attitude in relation to gender. After meeting Bodenland in the very first chapter on the setting of his “ranch” in New Houston, he watches the children on the ranch perform a pagan ritual; they bury one of the children's motor scooters in the sand, cover it with flowers, and dance around the monument to the technological past. They dance around their feast: “Round and round the grave they went! Then the dance broke up in rather desultory fashion, and Tony popped his penis out of his trunks and showed it to Doreen. She made some comment, smiling, and that was that. They all ran and jumped into the pool again” (7). This scene characterizes Aldiss‟ view of sexual harmony and equality; the negative aspects of masculinity are summarized as the

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egotistical will to dominate and control the alienated “other,” and in a more perfect world the male is able to “show his penis” without asserting himself aggressively and without any fear of rejection or vulnerability. A critic such as Julia Kristeva, however, would rightfully note that Ballard still enshrines a deep investment in an unequal gender dynamic: the little girl certainly doesn‟t show the little boy her genitals, and this seems symptomatic of a larger set of un-addressed problems; violently aggressive or playfully exhibitionistic, the novel is still centrally concerned with male agency and masculine identity, and the women in the story (like Doreen and Mary Shelly herself, who Bodenland ends up sleeping with) serve as little more than mirrors for these narcissistic explorations of masculinity. Jon Elster might suggest that the critiques these authors level at imperial discourse perform a kind of “external negation” which serves to mask the ideological operation of a vigorous reinforcement of threatened or anxious masculine identity. In Political Psychology, Elster notes that there is an important psychological difference between “the absence of awareness of x” (external negation) and “the awareness of the absence of x” (internal negation). In the case of these New Wave writers, we can observe that the anxious awareness of the absence of sense and meaningfulness that they produce in their critiques of imperialism can actually serve to help maintain an absence of awareness (or a symptomatic failure to recognize) of the senselessness behind particular assumptions concerning gendered behaviors. Put more simply, the power of their negative critique of colonialism is strong enough to distract attention from irrational investments in the “reality” of threatened masculine gender identities that are simultaneously at the core of their work.

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Gender, Sexuality, and Consciousness Expansion In the writings of the second group, represented by the works of Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Samuel Delany, we can see a different deployment of imperial critique that questions conservative gender ideologies associated with imperial adventure. Joanna Russ articulates her critique of masculinity by establishing the “real man” as a synthomatic other; Zizek, following Lacan, describes a synthome as a symptom that is so loaded with emotional value that it becomes a powerful quilting point for libidinal investment within an ideological field against which one‟s own subjectivity is centrally constituted. Due to the fact that Russ‟ position is so strongly defined by her opposition to the “real man,” (or perhaps, as she might argue, because men have relentlessly categorized women as negative, vacant “others” against whom they can define themselves in powerful and positive terms), her ideal goal is for women themselves to become “real men” by taking a stronger and more aggressive stance in opposition to the men who have oppressed them. Although this has the potential to be an empowering vision, it nonetheless leaves in place (and even reinforces) various troublesome models of masculinity that are founded on frontier-exploration and colonial-conquest narratives. In The Adventures of Alyx, Russ tells the story of a red-blooded female time traveling adventure hero (Russ‟ first “female man”) who can easily fight side by side with any of Moorcock‟s “Eternal Champions” without batting an eyelash. In The Female Man (which Phyllis Chesler calls an “interplanetary exploration of feminist inner space”), Russ introduces four women who are each a reflection of “Everywoman:” Jeannine, a weak-willed and girlish librarian who painfully demonstrates (through her powerlessness

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against them) the discursive narratives men use to make women feel inferior; Joanna, a 1970s feminist who fights against these disempowering narratives and social expectations yet fails (through no fault of her own) to earn men‟s respect; Janet, a traveler from a utopian future world where women have disposed of all men and live the adventurous and daring lives of frontier explorers; and Jael, a violent cyborg warrior from a parallel reality where women have defeated the male population by withdrawing from their company and who is attempting to expand her emancipatory war against mankind to other realities as well. Despite her multilayered critique of the countless cultural narratives that disempower and demoralize women, Russ remains invested in the essential reality of “manhood,” and her definition of “manhood” is a concentration of power and selfreliance that is thematically structured by frontier-adventure narratives. Laura (Janet‟s young lover) articulates this with several illustrative comments: I finally gave up and told my mother I didn‟t want to be a girl but she said Oh no, being a girl is wonderful. Why? Because you can wear pretty clothes and you don‟t have to do anything; the men will do it for you. She said that instead of conquering Everest, I could conquer the conqueror of Everest and while he had to go climb the mountain, I could stay home in lazy comfort listening to the radio and eating chocolates. She was upset, I suppose, but you can‟t imbibe someone‟s success by fucking them. (65) On one hand, this commentary serves as a chilling critique of the way women can sometimes (or often, in Russ‟ view) subjugate other women with disempowering and oppressive gender discourses; on the other hand it also reveals that Russ‟ notion of “success” is imaginatively rooted within the expectations of masculinist frontieradventure narratives. “Success” is defined as “conquering Everest,” and Russ‟ 86

underlying assumption is that the conquest of high-adventure frontiers (or in Jael‟s case, the conquest and extermination of enemies) is the pinnacle of emancipation and selfactualization. Aldiss might observe that Russ‟ heroes strive to find within themselves the same “new man” that awakens within Joe Bodenland in Frankenstein Unbound, and as a result they carry with them the same aggressive and “adventurous” drive to conquer and destroy the “other” that makes Bodenland himself a monster by the end of Aldiss‟ novel. Russ seems to believe that “manhood” (defined in terms of power and self-actualization, and structured by expectations grounded in frontier-exploration and colonial-conquest narratives) can be uncoupled from biological sex, yet she nonetheless remains invested in an essential notion of masculinity. As Joanna notes, “Manhood, children… is Manhood” (20, her emphasis and ellipses). Joanna laments that women have never been to the moon (that they are barred from masculine high frontiers) and she finally concludes: What I learned late in life, under my rain of lava, under my kill-or-cure, unhappily, slowly, stubbornly, barely, and in really dreadful pain, was that there is one and only one way to possess that in which we are defective, therefore that which we need, therefore that which we want. Become it. (139) Russ levels a critique at disempowering cultural gender narratives in The Female Man, but she does not do so in order to dismantle these narratives. Instead, she depends on their continued existence – the continued synthomatic opposition between the categories of “men” and “women” – in order to appropriate power for women so that they can usurp masculine dominance and become active conquerors and explorers in a world that will always be characterized by a power imbalance between the “self” and the “other.”

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Ursula K. LeGuin, in contrast, refuses to define a synthomatic “other” in any way whatsoever. As she asserts in “American SF and the Other,” If you deny any affinity with another person or kind of person, if you declare it to be wholly different from yourself - as men have done to women, and class has done to class, and nation has done to nation - you may hate it or deify it; but in either case you have denied its spiritual equality and its human reality. You have made it into a thing, to which the only possible relationship is a power relationship. And thus you have fatally impoverished your own reality. You have, in fact, alienated yourself. (95) In sharp contrast to The Female Man, Le Guin‟s The Left Hand of Darkness attempts to explore gender difference without reinforcing fundamental or essentialist notions of masculinity or femininity. The Left Hand of Darkness is one novel in Le Guin's Hainish cycle; the larger series is about a number of planets that have bonded together into a galactic metaphysical federation to share knowledge, ideas, and information through ansible transmissions (actual travel between the planets is impractical because of the time distortion involved with light speed travel). The Left Hand of Darkness (one of Le Guin‟s most acclaimed works) tells the story of Genly Ai, the “First Mobile” to visit the planet Gethen from the Ekumen. He enters into the middle of a political conflict between two political states, Karhide and Orgoreyn, and the central action of the narrative is structured around overcoming differences and building a relationship between Genli Ai the Envoy and Therem Harth rem ir Estraven of Karhide. Given their long and grueling voyage together through the snow and ice, it is tempting to say that this novel is about homosocial bonding, except for the fact that Estraven isn't a man; like all the Gethens, he is a hermaphrodite who only demonstrates a gender distinction when he enters a reproductive cycle called “kemmering.” 88

The novel works from a set of familiar formulas, yet it breaks the conventional codes of these formulas through an intervention that throws gender categories into question. Le Guin notes that the Gethenians do not divide gender into opposite sexes, and much of the action of the novel records Genli's reactions to this planetary androgyny. Gethenians do not have masculine or feminine “pride,” but rather they play in a social game of “shifgrethor” (which originates from the Gethen word for “shadow”), and this substitutes for a certain kind of competitive gender-based egoism. The notion of shifgrethor works hand in hand with Le Guin‟s powerful focus on reality and unreality: Estraven possesses a “solidness of being, a substantiality, a human grandeur” (7) that others do not have, while there is something “fluid, insubstantial . . . just a little bit unreal” (145) about the cities and people of Orgoreyn. Genli notes that it as if these people “did not cast shadows” (146). Later in the novel Estraven notes that “To oppose something is to maintain it . . . To oppose vulgarity is inevitably to be vulgar . . . To be an atheist is to maintain God” (151). Later Genly and Estraven discuss dualism: “Duality is an essential, isn't it? So long as there is myself and the other” (233). Le Guin‟s philosophy thus espouses overcoming duality within the self rather than attempting to appropriate a kind of power held by an opposing force or individual; to oppose something is to maintain it, and in opposing your “other” you lose yourself and become less substantial. To embrace duality within the self is to play shifgrethor, and such an embrace allows one to become more substantial within oneself. Samuel Delany also offers a critique of traditional constructions of gender and sexuality; his approach is different from Russ and Le Guin, however, and he (and Russ) might suggest that Le Guin‟s anarchic and utopian optimism fails to account for more

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realistic problems of power and inequality. In The American Shore Delany outlines his goals for both his science fiction and his critical work: Science fiction . . . constitutes the prime demotic attack on gravitic value systems - those value systems (of thought, speech, and written analysis) that organize not only the schema above but which organize as well almost all our rhetoric about society (with its lower and upper classes), intelligence (of the higher and lower sort), and social evolution (that has reached a higher or lower level) - in brief, any discourse where the image lower signs the presence “of lesser value” and the image higher signs the presence “of greater value,” however oblique, however critical the expression. And it holds equally for their converse systems, where the basic is of the greatest value and the superficial or superfluous is of the least. (v) Delany‟s work is centrally concerned with disrupting cultural value hierarchies: science fiction can break down barriers of gender, class, and sexuality thought through a complex process of reading, writing, re-reading, and re-writing. His novel The Einstein Intersection is a prime example of his theoretical approach; in its pages he attempts to disrupt the gravitic weight of mythic signs and icons (including figures from frontier and colonial adventure myth) by re-articulating them in strange new contexts that force readers to apprehend them in different (and potentially ideologically challenging) ways. The Einstein Intersection, (which Delany wanted to call A Fabulous, Formless Darkness, but was retitled against his wishes by his publishers) is set on Earth in a far future where humans have abandoned the planet and another species of creatures now resides here. These creatures (which have three sexual categories) live amid the debris of humanity and attempt to understand the human culture they have awkwardly replaced. Neil Gaiman remarks that “As the novel progresses, Delany weaves myth, consciously and un-self-consciously; Lobey, our narrator, is Orpheus, or plays Orpheus, as other

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members of the cast will find themselves playing Jesus and Judas, Jean Harlow (out of Candy Darling), and Billy the Kid. They inhabit our legends awkwardly; they do not fit them” (Delany, Einstein Intersection viii). The fact that the characters don‟t quite fit their assigned mythic archetypes is deliberate on Delany‟s part; he understands literary creation as a process of re-arranging recognizable signifiers in such a way that they strike up new meanings that may have progressive or liberatory potential. One may start off with mythic prepared materials, but as he says: Literary creation is the restructuring of that prepared material by the fixing of a set (or series) of signifiers whose order (and, indeed, whose past order is frequently revised in light of what the restructuring reveals) this restructuring both is and impels . . . It is not a process of „preparing‟ a meaning, an image, a pure signified (which certainly involves other signifiers - words or other signs, but which we call 'signified' here because it is mental and not yet re-presented [i.e., restructured] by utterance), but it is rather the process of letting that signified strike up a signifier, which is fixed by tongue or hand, and the fixing of which, as it reenters the signified, re-contours that signified in such a way that the infinite regress (or better, progress) of specifically fictive discourse is begun and continued. (American Shore 36-37) Delany‟s objective is to put a variety of mythic icons into play in an interesting or unusual way so that the “original” value of the mythic sign is less important than the new way in which we as readers appropriate the sign and make it our own. Like the characters in The Einstein Intersection, we inherit a world of signs that is not ours, and like Lo Lobey, our job is to discover that we do not need to seek out the original meanings of these signs, but rather that we must make them our own (and hopefully build a better present and future than was left to us in the first place). New Wave frontier-adventure narratives can enable artists to question and challenge ideologies of gender and nationalism that had formerly been reinforced by 91

earlier sites of frontier-adventure discourse. The best examples of the liberatory potential offered by this kind of work are the novels of Russ, Le Guin, and Delany to varying degrees, while the work of many of the others tends to question imperialism while continuing to reinforce conservative masculine gender representations. The broad assessment of New Wave texts in this chapter shows that the New Wave as a whole shares a critical outlook towards imperialism. Some authors critique Empire in order to deploy a recovery of authoritative masculinity, while others carry this critique further in order to estrange doxical gender norms. In my final chapters, I‟ll look more closely at the works of Delany and Le Guin where complex SF extrapolations produce a substantive critical theory of the changing shape of imperialism in the 1960s. First, however, I will pause to consider two New Wave writers – Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard – whose fictions reveal a profound and nostalgic ambivalence regarding the downfall of Western European colonialism.

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Chapter Three: Imperial Thermodynamics

Introduction This dissertation has been arguing that science fiction indexes an inward turn in imperial imaginings following the climax of decolonization in the 1960s. In my first chapter, I suggested that the science fiction novels of Frank Herbert, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke are outwardly critical of colonialism, yet they nonetheless appropriate the notion of "psychic decolonization" in order to usurp the liberatory momentum of decolonization and civil rights for the advantage of elite Western male subjects. My second chapter introduced the New Wave and examined how SF‟s inward turn offered new rearticulations of imperial models of masculinity. This chapter more closely examines British New Wave SF authors whose fiction thematizes the decline of Empire. My argument here is that the works of J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock each register (and in various ways theorize) a mode of postcolonial ambivalence that frames the decline of colonial Empire as the inevitable and often tragic consequence of thermodynamic breakdown. Several critics have observed that the New Wave is fascinated by entropy, but these particular fictions reveal that the New Wave interest in the second law of thermodynamics should be reconsidered in the historical context of global decolonization in the 1960s. Ballard and Moorcock portray Empire as simultaneously great and terrible; the collapse of Empire may have been inevitable (in a thermodynamic sense), and Empire may have been corrupt and oppressive, but even so, each author marks the passing of Empire with an attitude of conflicted ambivalence. Empire, in these extrapolative 93

imaginings, represents the apex of civilization and human aspiration striving against entropy, decay, darkness, and savagery. Colin Greenland's The Entropy Exhibition (1983), an in-depth look at the British New Wave, argues that entropy was the movement's central extrapolative theme: The distinctive themes of NW writers - ontological insecurity, alienation, the hidden and hostile dimensions of media and machines, the disintegration of objectivity into subjective worlds of inner space, the dangerously exhilarating multiplication of 'possibilities' - are all primary concerns of their times, though they came to them rather in advance of popular assent. The concept of entropy, a degeneration inevitable from either overorganization or chaos, is the center of this imaginative cluster; hence the frequency with which the writers return to the term, and its fashionability, even for those who use it least scientifically. (201) Despite his argument that New Wave fictions articulate the "ambiguous ideas and problems of modernity" (x), Greenland is hesitant to identify imperialism as one key problem of modernity that is central to New Wave concerns, and he neglects the historical context of Empire in his analysis of New Wave themes. The New Wave approach to "entropy," particularly as exemplified by Ballard and Moorcock, exposes a foundational ambivalence about the changing contours of Empire in the 1960s. On one hand, entropy causes decline; there is often a kind of deep nostalgia for the glories of Empire, particularly in Moorcock's Elric stories. On the other hand, however, entropy also represents liberation from oppressive order. In this context, the injustices of Empire are acknowledged, but male protagonists are often re-situated as freedom fighters seeking to decolonize their own inner spaces, as we have seen in Dune, Stranger in a Strange Land, and 2001.

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Roger Luckhurst's Science Fiction (2005) moves beyond Greenland's analysis and situates the New Wave in the historical context of decolonization. Luckhurst notes that English SF transforms after 1945 due to the dismantling of Empire; he also observes that the UK produces a new round of disaster fictions after World War Two, and that "the British disaster narrative always addressed disenchantment with the imperialist 'civilizing' mission" (131). Luckhurst views the emphasis on entropy within the British New Wave as a continuation of this SF disaster tradition, but instead of portraying such breakdowns as negative, his key examples (Ballard, Moorcock, and Zoline) actively embrace and valorize entropic decay. Building on Luckhurst's view, I argue that entropy is both positive and negative in New Wave fictions, particularly when entropy is used to thematize the decline of Empire. The New Wave focus on entropy tends to frame a nostalgia for Empire as it is in the process of decay and to highlight a different way of understanding "order" – both as the apex of progress and as the apex of domination and territorialization. In both Moorcock and Ballard‟s work, the New Wave framing of imperial decline as a thermodynamic process echoes an earlier pattern exemplified by Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899). Like the New Wave authors under consideration here, Conrad was also fascinated by entropy; in the introduction to a recent edition of Heart of Darkness, A. Michael Matin suggests that Conrad's perspective on human nature is "extrapolated from popularized accounts of the second law of thermodynamics" (xix), and that Conrad's view of the human condition can be observed in an excerpt from his letters, where he remarks:

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The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from the cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardor for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one's clothes in a community of blind men. (Intro xix) In Matin's view, Conrad's guiding "ethic" is a view of the human condition in which humans undertake a futile but necessary struggle against the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. All human aspirations are ultimately pointless, yet it is nonetheless positive and necessary to struggle against this nihilistic futility. Contrad's fascination with thermodynamics informs his understanding of the European imperial project. Marlow opens the account of his adventures in Heart of Darkness with a condemnation of imperial domination: "The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much" (41). However ugly colonialism may be, he nonetheless suggests that it is still worthwhile because of the idea behind it: "What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it; not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea – something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice too. . . ." (41) Throughout Heart of Darkness, Conrad (through Marlow) criticizes the avarice of imperialism (in particular, he condemns the exploitative acquisition of ivory from the Belgian Congo), but he nonetheless romanticizes Empire's civilizing aspects; he implies that without western (imperial) civilization, humankind will devolve into a savage pre96

human condition. Furthermore, this threat of devolution is imagined to be infectious; it is a contagious decay affecting all who come into contact with it, like Marlow and Kurtz. Conrad's view of thermodynamic devolution is premised on an evolutionary paradigm in which Europe embodies the temporal present of humanity while Africa represents the West's evolutionary past. Geographic travel in space for a European subject like Marlow (or for Roman imperialists landing on the shores of Britain) thus literally becomes evolutionary travel backwards in time. Reflecting on the present city of London during the framing narrative, Marlow notes that the cosmopolitan city has also "been one of the dark places of the earth . . . I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here . . . We live in the flicker – may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday" (39-40). "Darkness," in this figuration, represents the origins of evolutionary time; Romans traveling to London in the classic era were moving backwards in time, just as Marlow himself travels back in time when he explores the Congo: "Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and big trees were kings" (73). The indigenous Africans that Marlow encounters are not contemporaneous human beings to him; instead, they are evolutionary ancestors: "They still belonged to the beginnings of time – had no inherited experience to teach them" (82). Drawing on the work of Johannes Fabian and Robert Stafford, John Rieder's Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction notes that this portrayal of travel through imperial space as a voyage backward in evolutionary time is characteristic of early science fiction. He further argues: 97

the repression or denial of the real cotemporaneity of so-called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another. (6) Anne McClintock makes a similar observation in Imperial Leather: The colonial journey into the virgin interior reveals a contradiction, for the journey is figured as proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical time, to what is figured as a prehistoric zone of racial and gender difference . . . According to this trope, colonized people – like women and the working class in the metropolis – do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency – the living embodiment of the archaic „primitive.‟ (30) In the American context, this ideological framing of space as evolutionary time is exemplified by Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis. In Turner's formulation, western frontiersmen are not invading an occupied space; they are returning to an environment of evolutionary origins and restaging human development. Native Americans, in this logic, are the inevitable-yet-necessary losers in the relentless unfolding process of natural selection. Conrad's unique contribution to this Western figuration of space as evolutionary time is his postulation that the second law of thermodynamics applies to evolutionary progress; the imperial civilizations of both London and Rome are only feeble "flickers" of light in the face of inevitable thermodynamic darkness. As a result, Conrad is ambivalent about Empire; as he witnessed firsthand in the Congo, imperialism 98

exemplifies the worst extremes of human greed. At the same time, however, imperial civilizations are the fragile illuminating flares that postpone the inevitable thermodynamic "horror" that Kurtz succumbs to. Conrad's notion of imperial thermodynamics (and his corresponding ambivalence concerning the virtues and vices of colonialism) informs the writings of the British New Wave authors who address the decline of Empire. On one hand, Empires must inevitably fall, and perhaps they deserve to fall due to their crimes and injustices. But despite their flaws, empires are still great, because they represent the peak of human endeavor – they embody an attempt to build something lasting in the face of an endless decay into darkness. The SF authors I examine in this chapter each reflect Conrad's ambivalence about the thermodynamic decline of Empire, yet they do so during a historical moment framed by decolonization, rather than during Conrad's moment of colonial ascendancy. J.G. Ballard in particular extends and develops Conrad's paradigm; his short fictions portray differences in geographic space as alternatives in psychological evolutionary time. Travel from imperial center to outer periphery, for Ballard, is a journey backward in evolutionary psychological time; it is a voyage away from the developmental consciousness of civilization into the primal unconscious of the human evolutionary past. Like Conrad, Ballard is ambivalent about this journey; contemporary humans may be psychotic, but the only alternative is a regression into a savage pre-consciousness that Ballard views as an unacceptable degeneration.

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J.G. Ballard 1 2 "The Drowned Giant" is where Ballard's nostalgia for Empire and his lament over thermodynamic imperial decline is most apparent. The story takes place after a "storm" when the body of an extremely white giant is washed up on a "beach" near a nameless "city." These archetypal locations appear throughout Ballard's stories; he often associates the sea with the unconscious, while the beach represents a liminal zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, and the city embodies a social superego. The dead giant is first admired as an extraordinary spectacle, but the local population eventually tears apart his body; his flesh and muscle are used for fertilizer, and his bones are 1

The stories I examine here come from Ballard's 1964 collection The Terminal Beach (UK edition). There are two collections with the title The Terminal Beach: the British edition and an American edition, both published in 1964. They both include the short stories "The Terminal Beach" and "End-Game," but other than that, they contain completely different collections of short fiction. My citations reference the stories from the UK edition. I also consider one story, "The Voices of Time" (1961), which was published in a collection called The Inner Landscape (1969) along with novellas by Brian Aldiss and Mervyn Peake.

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Ballard was born in 1930 in the International Settlement in Shanghai, and he died of cancer in London on April 19, 2009. He was held as a civilian prisoner in a Japanese internment camp during World War II, and he writes about this experience in his autobiographical novel Empire of the Sun (1984), which was made into a film by Stephen Spielberg in 1987. Ballard, who was born to British parents, first came to the UK in 1946. He studied medicine at Cambridge with the intent to become a psychiatrist, but he never finished his degree; instead, he was encouraged to pursue writing by his success publishing fiction. He spent one year stationed in Canada serving with the RAF, and it was there that he began writing SF stories. Ballard first published science fiction in 1956 in the pages of New Worlds and Science Fantasy, and his work was characterized by his interests in psychology and surrealism; in the words of the SF Encyclopedia, Ballard "eschewed such SF themes as space travel, time travel, aliens and ESP, concentrating instead in near-future decadence and disaster" (84). In a 1962 editorial for New Worlds, Ballard began to advocate a turn to "inner space" explorations in SF stories, and it was here that he made his famous claim that "the only true alien planet is earth" (Pringle, “Ballard” 84). Ballard enjoyed a long and distinguished career; he wrote countless SF short stories and several mainstream literary novels, including Crash (1973), Empire of the Sun (1984), and The Kindness of Women (1991). The SF Encyclopedia calls him "one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from SF" (ibid 85). The Terminal Beach (1964) is a collection of some of Ballard's earliest New Wave writing. Ballard wrote his famous "inner-space" manifesto for New Worlds in 1962 (while John Carnell was still editor), and Moorcock took over New Worlds in 1964 shortly before the collected Beach was published. Although identifying a starting date for the New Wave is difficult (some mark Moorcock's beginning of editorship in 1964, others really point to the switch to large format in 1967), what's important to note is that the Terminal Beach stories were produced during the New Wave's emergence; the characteristic ideas and trends of the New Wave were all there, but the movement as a whole hadn't yet crystallized into something distinctive and recognizable. It is here where it is possible to see Ballard's attitudes about decolonization in their most revealing and unpolished form.

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incorporated into the architecture of the city. After this, the population largely forgets about the giant: "most people, even those who first saw him cast up on the shore after the storm, now remember the giant, if at all, as a large sea beast" (50). It is difficult not to read "The Drowned Giant" as Ballard's allegory for British Empire in the 1960s; something once proud, white, and glorious has perished, and its remains are subsequently devoured by savage cannibals who fail to appreciate what it offered them when it was alive; the allegorical "storm" that leads to the giant's demise is, of course, the upheaval of World War II and decolonization. Ballard places a fetishistic emphasis on the giant's "whiteness," and he fixates the reader's attention on the giant's classical features; after commenting on its "Graecian profile," the narrator observes that: "the shallow forehead, straight high-bridged nose, and curling lips reminded me of a Roman copy of Praxiteles, and the elegantly formed cartouches of the nostrils emphasized the resemblance to monumental sculpture" (41). He later comments on the giant's "Homeric stature," and he frequently refers to its limbs as "columns" (46). These descriptions suggest that the giant embodies the dream corpus of white imperial Western civilization stretching imaginatively from imperial Rome through colonial Britain. The cause of the giant's death is never specified; the narrator refers to its death as the result of a "tragic predicament" (43), and once it washes up on the shore, it quickly succumbs to decay. Ballard frames this decay in thermodynamic terms; the narrator describes the giant's decomposition as its "surrender to that all-demanding system of time" (45). This explicit suggestion that the giant (and by extension the British Empire) was killed by time obscures the more complex causes of decolonization after the "storm" 101

of World War Two. The emotional charge of the story, however, is focused on the sad spectacle of the giant's dead body rather than on the causes of its death. The giant's decomposition is rendered in graphic terms; first, his body changes from white to black as he is trampled upon by the spectators: "The white skin was dappled by the darkening bruises of countless foot-prints" (47). Furthermore, the giant's delicate and refined features are ruined, and the narrator particularly emphasizes the destruction of the nose: "The once straight Graecian nose had been twisted and flattened, stamped into the ballooning face by countless heels" (48). The giant thus begins with delicate white features, but these are violently beaten out of him until he transforms into a grossly stereotypical "black" body with dark skin and a sunken flat nose. The giant's decay, then, is imagined as a process of racial devolution premised on the conceit that white Western civilization represents the apex of evolution and that black bodies represent humankind's evolutionary past. Ballard contrasts the strong-yet-refined features of the giant against the savage and animal characteristics of the spectators, who swarm around him "like flies" and who make "barking noises" like dogs (43). These spectators (aside from the Marlow-esque narrator) are presented as savage cannibals who devour the giant and reduce him to their level, just as the natives of the Congo reduce Kurtz to their level while he resides among them in Heart of Darkness. At the same time, however, the giant becomes the helpless and undeserving victim of "a sudden flood of repressed spite" (48) as the cannibal population desecrates his body with "swastikas" and other graffiti. This portrayal of the population releasing violent repressed rage against the giant reflects Ballard's resentful attitude toward decolonizing subjects like Fanon, who advocate the use of violence 102

against colonial occupiers. In particular, Ballard emphasizes the narrator's disgust at how the populace is seen to profit from the giant's dismemberment; his limbs are severed and taken away for "fertilizer" and "cattle food," and the body of the giant is literally consumed by the population. In the end, the only remaining trace of the giant's greatness can be found in the physical architecture of the city, where the his bones have become doorways and decorative arches. Soon, however, these are incorrectly identified by many as whalebones; the irony is that the giant's greatness is forgotten by those who benefit from its structural significance in their daily lives. In Ballard's extrapolation, then, the situation after decolonization is not one in which Britain, as an imperial power, continues to enjoy economic advantage in relation to its former colonies.3 Instead, "The Drowned Giant" presents a dream-reality where the beautiful (and very white) body of Empire is savagely dismembered and cannibalized. Savage people (allusions to postcolonial subjects) brutally dismember the imperial body; they eat it up, they take bits and pieces of it to be their own, and they fail to remember what it offered them in the first place (despite the fact that they are living off its corpse). If "The Drowned Giant" represents Ballard's most spiteful attitude concerning decolonization, "A Question of Re-Entry" is far more conflicted about the virtues of Empire. In "Re-Entry," Ballard implies that imperialism is a psychotic expression of human inadequacy. Alongside this critique of the outward imperial urge, however, 3

Tony Judt describes the continuing postcolonial economic advantage of former European imperial powers in Postwar: "In the forty-five years after 1950 worldwide exports [from Europe to the rest of the world] increased sixteenfold . . . all industrialized countries gained in these years – the terms of trade moved markedly in their favor after World War Two, as the cost of raw materials and food imported from the nonWestern world fell steadily, while the price of manufactured goods kept rising. In three decades of privileged, unequal exchange with the 'Third World,' the West had something of a license to print money" (326).

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Ballard also portrays non-western peoples as the evolutionary and psychological predecessors of contemporary humankind. "A Question of Re-Entry" takes place in a near future relative to the early 1960s where space exploration is booming and a Western pilot has landed on the moon. The story centers on an agent working for the United Nations (Lt. Connolly) who travels deep into South America with a guide (Captain Pereira) in order to find the missing spacecraft of Colonel Francis Spender, whose capsule re-entered the atmosphere off course and crashed somewhere in South America. Connolly and Pereira attempt to coordinate their search with a "man of action" named Ryker, who is described as "the last of a race of true individualists retreating before the barbed-wire fences and regimentation of 20th century life" (11). Ryker contends that there is no crashed capsule within 500 miles, but despite this, Connolly and Pereira continue investigating; they eventually discover that the Nambikwara tribesmen who Ryker has been living among belong to a "cargo cult," and that Ryker has been using a mechanical clock and a logbook to predict the passing of a satellite overhead in order to secure his leadership over the tribe. When Colonel Spender's capsule crashed nearby, he used the spacecraft as evidence that he could command the gods to produce supernatural abundance from the sky. Connolly is initially concerned that the Nambikwara are cannibals, and despite Pereira's assurances to the contrary, it is ultimately revealed that Spender was devoured by the natives, who rarely consume people, but who nonetheless "eat their gods" (39). In the end, Connolly and Pereira recover evidence of the missing capsule, and they grudgingly leave Ryker to continue his reign of superstition over the local population.

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In "A Question of Re-Entry," Ballard psychoanalyzes the imperial impulse as a psychotic expression of cultural feelings of alienation and inadequacy. He suggests that both the drive to land a man on the moon and the fantastic desire to live like a god among natives in a remote locale are manifestations of a psychotic impulse to expand the ego beyond all natural limitations. Connoly, for example, understands the moon landing to be a powerful psychic event; in his view, it is "the culmination of an age-old ambition with profound psychological implications for mankind," and "the failure to find the astronaut after his return might induce unassuageable feelings of guilt and inadequacy" for Western civilization (9). He goes on to wonder, "If the sea was a symbol of the unconscious, was space perhaps an image of unfettered time, and the inability to penetrate it a tragic exile to one of the limbos of eternity, a symbolic death in life?" (9). Ballard's assertion that humans are confronted with the ultimate limits of their expansive "ambition" in the face of outer space is less a critique of colonial imperialism than it is a lament that Western imperialists have reached the limits of the Enlightenment dream of rational mastery over the natural world. Spender, as a representative of Enlightenment progress, reaches the moon only to be eaten by cannibals upon his return, and Ballard stages this tragedy as an ironic final triumph of "nature" over human will and scientific rationality. Rather than criticizing the instrumentalizing impulse of imperial modernity, "Re-Entry" laments the limits of human power; the energy of Spender's ascent is overcome by the thermodynamic inevitability of his fall. The American failure to master outer-space is juxtaposed with the British failure to master colonial space; astronauts (like Spender) and imperialists (like Kurtz) are ultimately defeated as they attempt to achieve something great and lasting, and both are ultimately conquered by the 105

"darkness" they attempt to transcend. Ballard's fetishization of the astronaut's weakness – his emphasis on Spender's "tragic predicament" – disavows the real strength of both British and American imperialisms, and it avoids any acknowledgement of the need for an ethical redress to colonial injustices. Empires do not decline because they are unjust; instead, they fall because they are, in a thermodynamic sense, unsustainable. Additionally, Ballard portrays Connoly's travel through geographic space (away from the metropolitan centers of the West to the remote regions of South America) as travel backward through evolutionary time; his fictional extrapolation reflects a pattern similar to the colonial discourses observed by McClintock and Rieder. This can be observed when Ryker forces Connolly to confront the psychological reasons for space exploration; he poses a question to Connolly: "Why did they really send a man to the moon?" Connolly, confounded, can give no good answer, and finally proposes that "it was the natural spirit of exploration" (21), which Ryker mocks. Connolly dwells on the implications of Ryker's question about the "real" reason for space exploration throughout the rest of the story: The implication was that the entire space programme was a symptom of some inner unconscious malaise afflicting mankind, and in particular the western technocracies, and that the space craft and satellites had been launched because their flights satisfied certain buried compulsions and desires. By contrast, in the jungle, where the unconscious was manifest and exposed, there was no need for these insane projections. (31) Connoly's sweeping reference to "mankind" excludes the South American natives, who are not considered to be contemporaneous participants in the human race. Instead of being members of the advanced "western technocracies," they reside in "the jungle, 106

where the unconscious was manifest and exposed." Ballard thus situates western nations as the evolved "consciousness" of humankind, and he identifies the Nambikwara in the "jungle" as representations of the human pre-evolutionary "unconscious." Differences in geography thus correspond to differences in evolutionary psychological time; by traveling back in space and time, the Western explorer is also actually making an inward journey into the evolutionary unconscious of the human race. Unlike Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke, Ballard does not imaginatively align his fiction with the liberatory momentum of decolonization and civil rights; on the contrary, he views non-Western peoples as evolutionary ancestors, and (like Conrad) he uses a racially imagined "jungle" as a backdrop for the explorations into white imperial psychology. This reduction of a complex people and place to props and setting is exactly what Chinua Achebe notes is central to Conrad's writing in his essay "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's Heart of Darkness," and Achebe's critique applies equally to Ballard, except that Ballard's evolutionary psychological racism is much more disturbing than Conrad's in its comprehensive racialization of non-Westerners. Both "The Delta at Sunset" and "Deep End" also associate geographical landscapes with evolutionary psychological landscapes. "The Delta at Sunset" tells the story of an archaeologist, Charles Gifford, whose leg is wounded while on an expedition to explore a Toltec ruin. During his recovery, Gifford begins to hallucinate luminescent white snakes on the delta of a nearby river; his visions are disturbing to his wife, Louise, and his assistant, Richard Lowry, who are having an affair. After Gifford observes them conducting a late-night rendezvous, Louise confronts Gifford about his obsession with

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the snakes; in response, Gifford lapses into an unresponsive fugue dreaming of the slithering forms on the delta. Early in the story, Gifford, Louise, and Lowry have a strange argument concerning these snakes. Gifford, who is fascinated by the snakes' emergence each sunset, asserts that they are "carrying around what is virtually a coded internal landscape, a picture of the Paleocene as sharp as our own memories of New York and London" (120). Unsettled by what he perceives as Gifford's madness, Lowry asserts that the snakes are the psychological result of "a shortage of dissolved oxygen" in Gifford's brain. He adds that "Jung believes the snake is primarily a symbol of the unconscious, and that its appearance always heralds a crisis in the psyche" (121). Gifford agrees that the snakes are psychological archetypes, but he disagrees with Lowry's assessment of their meaning: "For me the snake is a symbol of transformation. Every evening at sunset the great lagoons of the Paleocene are re-created here, not only for the snakes but for you and I too, if we care to look. Not for nothing is the snake a symbol of wisdom" (121). What's important here is that Gifford asserts that the physical landscape triggers a return to developmental moments in the evolution of consciousness for both himself and the snakes; both he and the snakes are returned to an early moment in their own respective evolutionary psychology by the "coded" Paleocene landscape. Lowry agrees that the evolutionary ancestors of humans may have internalized external phenomena like snakes as archetypal symbols in the way that Gifford implies, but he disagrees that this is happening for Gifford, because "It was primitive [not contemporary] man who had to assimilate events in the external world to his own psyche" (121). Gifford, however, ignores Lowry's assertion of difference between 108

himself and primitive men: "Absolutely right," he agrees, "how else is nature meaningful, unless she illustrates some inner experience? The only real landscapes are the internal ones, or the external projections of them, such as this delta" (121). Gifford believes that he inhabits a pre-historical landscape; by journeying to Mesoamerica, he has literally traveled backwards in evolutionary and psychological time. The landscape he apprehends in his feverish state is an internal landscape of psychic significance which he projects outward upon the delta. Just as Kurtz ends Heart of Darkness staring past Marlow at a savage "horror" that only he can see, Gifford is psychologically out-of-synch with contemporary humans, and his regression to the psychic state of "primitive man" is catalyzed, just as with Kurtz, by his journey into the non-Western "jungle." Connolly's argument that the unconscious is "manifest" in the jungle is literalized in "The Delta at Sunset;" by traveling to a non-Western space, Westerners travel backward in evolutionary time, and they therefore travel backward into a landscape of unconscious psychological experiences and meanings. The philosophical foundation of this extrapolation is Ballard's belief in a foundational difference between Westerners as representatives of human evolutionary progress and non-Westerners as representatives of primitive human origin. Furthermore, it is possible to devolve into a "primitive" state of consciousness simply by traveling away from the imperial metropolitan centers of New York or London into the undeveloped "jungle" of Mesoamerica. One consequence of Ballard's imperial metanarrative of the evolution of human consciousness is that non-Western peoples are denied subjectivity and agency; rather than being presented as thinking beings capable of authentic thought and experience, they are assumed to be constantly assimilating events in the external world directly into their 109

minds; this is exemplified by the Nambikwara Indians from "A Question of Re-Entry," who view the Echo satellite as their god. There is no possibility for reciprocal communication between Western and non-Western subjects in such a conceptual system; the subaltern (configured as an evolutionary predecessor) literally cannot speak, just as Gifford's Indian aides do not speak throughout "The Delta at Sunset," and just as Gifford himself loses his ability to speak as he regresses into a primitive psychological state at the conclusion. Even at moments when Ballard's protagonists seem to achieve contact beyond themselves, such a reaching outward is ultimately an attempt to overcome a fundamental state of inner-alienation; this is particularly true in "Deep End, " a story set in a far future where the oceans have been destroyed to provide oxygen for the atmospheres of new planets. Many humans are leaving the devastated earth to colonize new worlds abroad, but the protagonist Holliday and his friend Granger are determined to stay behind. In what remains of the Atlantic Ocean, Holliday and Granger discover a fish – the last surviving fish on the entire planet – and they create a small habitat for it. In contemplating the fish (just as Gifford contemplates the snakes) Holliday achieves a mysterious self-recognition: "the fished stayed behind when the first amphibians emerged from the seas two hundred million years ago, just as you and I, in turn, are staying behind now. In a sense all fish are images of ourselves seen in the sea's mirror" (164). Holliday's fish is both a literal fish and a psychological archetype that holds profound psychic meaning; Ballard presents it as both an external object assimilated into Holliday's paradigm and as a literal evolutionary ancestor.

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At the end of the story, a group of violent young boys murder the fish. This devastates Holliday, and Granger tries to console him: "it's not the end of the world," he proposes, unaware of the irony of his statement, and he asks, "why not have it stuffed?" (167). Holliday is enraged: "Have it stuffed? Are you crazy? Do you think I want to make a dummy of myself, fill my own head with straw?" (168). For Holliday, the external landscape (and the creatures that inhabit it) is contiguous with his inner psychological landscape; he experiences the landscape as an embodiment of his own psychological reality. Holliday and the fish are equivalent, part of each other, identically connected in an existential sense. By stuffing the fish, he would be literally stuffing his own head with straw. Granger similarly asserts the continuity of inner and outer landscapes when he laments the draining and destruction of the seas: "The seas are our corporate memory. . . . In draining them we deliberately obliterated our own pasts, to a large extent our selfidentities. . . . Without the sea, life is insupportable. We become nothing more than the ghosts of memories, blind and homeless, flitting through the dry chambers of a gutted skull" (162). In Granger's view, the sea corresponds in a material way with the human unconscious. To destroy the sea is to annihilate the unconscious and obliterate the past, because the past is a spatial location rather than a preceding temporal event. Like the jungle in "Re-Entry" or the delta in "Delta at Sunset," the sea in "Deep End" is a location where the psychological and evolutionary past exists alongside the present, and to the destroy the sea is therefore to commit a suicidal act of violence against the self. Although Ballard's assertion of radical contiguity between self and landscape may offer a basis for environmental praxis (it is difficult to pollute the sea if you believe that 111

by doing so you are polluting yourself), it is nonetheless flawed by its narcissistic solipsism; to assert that self and landscape (and therefore self and other) are all encompassed within the self is an expansion of ego to enfold all phenomena that leaves no room for dialogue or reciprocal communication between autonomous subjects. When Gifford poses his question, "how else is nature meaningful, unless she illustrates some inner experience?" he reduces "nature" (which includes all external phenomena in a binary opposition self/nature) to a mirror in which only self can be seen, and at the same time he genders nature as feminine (and therefore "other" in the binary) in a conceptually essentialist mode. One might (and should) argue that nature can be meaningful in ways that have little to do with one's own inner experiences, and that the meaningfulness of others' experiences as defined in their own terms should be prioritized as well. "Delta" and "Deep End" associate physical landscapes with moments in psychological and evolutionary time, and they further contribute to the production of the privilege of Western subjects by relegating non-Western subjects (and animals) to the status of evolutionary ancestors. This theme reaches its climax in "The Voices of Time;" here Ballard suggests that modern European civilization embodies the apex of evolutionary consciousness and that everything that follows exemplifies the thermodynamic decay of this collective consciousness. "The Voices of Time," is set in a near future after World War III, and it tells the story of a neurosergon named Powers who is suffering from a disease called "narcoma syndrome" that causes him (and thousands of others) to sleep longer each night until they expire into dreamless comas. Narcoma syndrome is caused by evolutionary exhaustion:

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It's simply a matter of biochemistry. The ribonucleic acid templates which unravel the protein chains in all living organisms are wearing out, the dies enscribing the protoplasmic signature have become blunted. After all, they've been running now for over a thousand of a million years. It's time to re-tool. Just as an individual organism's life span is finite, or the life of a yeast colony or a given species, so the life of an entire biological kingdom is of fixed duration. It's always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downwards to the common biological grave. It's a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it's the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-brained star-men, will probably be naked prognathus idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time (84). According to Powers' colleague Whitby, humanity has reached its evolutionary apex, and it is now exhibiting symptoms of exhaustion. Whitby suggests that Western philosophers and artists embodied the apex of human evolution because they needed less sleep (Michelangelo, he notes, supposedly slept for only 4-5 hours per day), and the amount of sleep that people need has been increasing ever since due to biochemical entropic degradation: "How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day" because they needed less sleep (83). The weakness of this extrapolation emerges from the fact that Ballard describes evolution in progressive teleological terms rather than as long-term non-linear changes in response to environmental conditions. Evolution and devolution, in this view, follow a linear progression and descent; the "descendants" of man will be just like their Neolithic ancestors because human evolution is imagined to advance and regress along an established path. Such a paradigm allows no possibilities for parallel evolutionary 113

difference; western civilization is seen to be the apex of human evolution, and nonWestern peoples are literally evolutionary ancestors who persist in the present. Before Whitby's death, the scientist had been developing a process to activate a "silent pair" of genes in various organisms as a possible solution to the narcoma problem. These "silent genes" are harbingers of genetic potential: "the silent genes are a sort of code, a divine message that we inferior organisms are carrying for our more highly developed descendants" (81). Whitby has activated these "silent genes" in various creatures, producing weird mutants, including a sunflower that can supposedly "see" time. In one experiment, Whitby displays the sunflower in various material environments; one flower is surrounded with cretaceous chalk, another with Devonian sandstone, another with asphalt, another with PVC. The sunflower responds to the presence of these materials as though it is "older" or "younger" in its supposed evolutionary development: "the older the surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. With the asphalt chimney it will complete its annual cycle in a week, with the PVC one in a couple of hours" (80). Ballard again fantasizes that a change in material landscape can have a corresponding change in one's own evolutionary maturity. If you put a plant in a landscape of cretaceous chalk, it will be in a different evolutionary "time zone" than if you surround it with PVC, and it will behave (on a metabolic level) accordingly. Supposedly the plant can sense the "age" of the materials surrounding it, and materials from the long past cause the plant to behave as though it were in the past, while new materials such as PVC cause it to have a faster life cycle.

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Furthermore, Whitby believes that activating the "silent genes" might give humans a glimpse into their own possible genetic future because such silent genes already fantastically anticipate the conditions of the future, and if activated, they will lead to evolutionary adaptations suited to future conditions: Without exception the organisms we've irradiated [to activate the silent gene] have entered a final phase of totally disorganized growth, producing dozens of specialized sensory organs whose function we can't even begin to guess. The results are catastrophic – the anemone will literally explode, the Drosophilia cannibalize themselves, and so on. Whether the future implicit in these plants and animals is ever intended to take place, or whether we're merely extrapolating – I don't know. Sometimes I think, though, that the new sensory organs developed are parodies of their real intentions (81). This question is never resolved, but what stands out is that Powers contemplates the possibility that there is a "future implicit in these plants" that might be "intended to take place;" he believes that he might be glimpsing genetic adaptations geared toward the future or "parodies" of the sensory organs that would be "correctly" suited to the future. This imagining relies on the presumption of teleological progressive evolution (evolution as genetic change "towards" a specific predetermined end) rather than evolution as circumstantial change in response to environmental shifts and conditions. Both Whitby and Powers eventually activate their own "silent genes," and they end up drawing weird psychedelic mandalas ("cosmic clocks") and developing the ability to "see time" in the way that the sunflower does; Powers essentially locates (in the night sky) "the source of the cosmos itself" before he ultimately evaporates. In conclusion, Ballard's imaginings are quite different from the optimistic notions of psychedelic evolution presented in Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke. While the latter 115

appropriate the idea of psychic decolonization as a means for continuing forward and evolving into masterful agents, Ballard is instead fixated on devolution as a way of framing the thermodynamic decline of Empire. Key to this difference is the fact that Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke are imagining masterful evolution from the perspective of an emergent American imperial context, while Ballard is more focused on a British colonial context in which the apex of expansion has already been surpassed, and there is no further possibility other than decline. Ballard, who is often lauded as one of the most intellectual theorists of the New Worlds authors, is ultimately quite conservative in his theorization of Empire and decolonization. Of the authors I examine, Ballard is the most resentful about the decline of Western imperialism; Empire, which corresponds with the apex of human cultural consciousness, is misunderstood and cannibalized, and few (in Ballard's view) seem to even grasp that something great has succumbed to the tragic predicament of time's erosion.

Michael Moorcock Moorcock's saga of Elric of Melnibone also embodies the contradictions of postcolonial ambivalence; the Elric stories present a simultaneous love of Empire alongside the discourse of its inevitable (and perhaps necessary) fall. In the Elric saga, the "evil" of Empire is presented as natural and necessary, and at the same time imperialists disavow all agency for imperial relations. Elric was one of the earliest literary inventions of Michael Moorcock, who would later become the editor of New Worlds and one of the major figures of the British New Wave. The earliest Elric stories were published in E. J. Carnell's Science Fantasy from 116

1961 through 1964, and they were also collected in two volumes, The Stealer of Souls (1963) and Stormbringer (1965). Moorcock dedicated the Stormbringer collection to J.G. Ballard, who was an Elric admirer: "For J.G. Ballard," Moorcock says in the dedication, "whose enthusiasm for Elric gave me encouragement to begin this particular book" (215). What explains Ballard's enthusiasm for a sword-and-sorcery figure like Elric? Although Moorcock's prose is aesthetically barren, and his plotlines at first appear to be the most traditional fantasy stock, the Elric saga is quite different from the typical sword and sorcery narratives exemplified by Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian novels. Rather than offering a conflict between good and evil, the Elric sagas concentrate on the tension between "Law" and "Chaos," and neither side in this binary is presented as unambiguously "good." If Conan fetishizes the strength of heroic masculinity, Elric fetishizes weakness; he is a frail figure dependent on his vampiric sword Stormbringer for his power and vitality. Furthermore, Elric's overdetermined albinism accentuates the whiteness of the male fantasy hero to an extreme, and it characterizes such whiteness as a signifier of weakness, delicacy, and dependence. The white Elric must depend on his black sword Stormbringer for strength and vitality; Moorcock continuously emphasizes Elric's dependence on the sword, and the sword's power is inexorably linked with its extreme blackness. Elric can't live without Stormbringer, and even when he accomplishes sorcery without the sword, this magic is referred to as "negromancy" and its blackness is highlighted as essential to its potency. Elric is also an unusual heterosexual fantasy figure; if Conan is an icon of heterosexual wish-fulfillment, Elric represents heterosexual failure; he inevitably ends up 117

involuntarily killing his love interests with his murderous blade. Elric must therefore be understood as an attempt to subvert the values often celebrated by the sword and sorcery genre, and it is its deviations from the norms of this genre where the interest of the Elric saga resides. Furthermore, the Elric stories, while very different from Ballard's extrapolations, are nonetheless very similar in theme to Ballard's Terminal Beach stories; both authors are ambivalent about Empire, and they both characterize the fall of Empire as an inevitable consequence of thermodynamic breakdown. Both authors' ambivalence is a response to the historical moment of decolonization. In his book Postcolonial Melancholia (2005), Paul Gilroy argues that the process of decolonization after World War II confronts Britain with a crisis of moral legitimacy. Faced with the loss of imperial power and the more severe loss of a sense of ideological certainty concerning colonial practices and histories, Gilroy suggests that instead of taking a careful look at its history and values in order to initiate a process of mourning and reconciliation, Britain represses its colonial guilt through an erasure and evacuation of history resulting in an attitude of protracted resentful defensiveness. He argues that this "postcolonial melancholia" leads to continuing racial tension rather than to the establishment of a more positive cosmopolitan conviviality: Once the history of the empire became a source of discomfort, shame, and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that postcolonial people are only unwanted alien intruders without any substantive historical, political, or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects. (90)

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As the New Wave authors under consideration here demonstrate, Gilroy's melancholia is not the only response to this crisis of imperial ideology: Moorcock's Elric stories offer alternative postcolonial apologetics. If "melancholia" originates in the sudden loss of a feeling of moral legitimacy and consequently results in a resentful forgetting of history, the "ambivalence" embodied in Elric is more like a resentful revisionist remembering of colonial history; it is a remembering in loaded terms that foregrounds the injustices of imperialist practice while at the same time justifying such injustices as natural, inevitable, and necessary. Elric encompasses the imaginative investments and contradictions of Britain after decolonization. In his imperial role as the "last emperor" of Melnobone, Elric is a fetishistically white figure who represents Empire (or what is left after the decline of Empire), and he draws his power from an equally fetishistic black sword that represents a "foreign" (or colonial) source of power. Read as an imperial allegory, Elric thus dramatizes the relationship between the "white" imperial center and the "black" colonial periphery; Moorcock implicitly suggests that white imperial power depends on an exploitation of blackness, and that such a relationship of exploitation becomes a symbiosis of mutual addiction and dependency. There are moments when Elric regrets his use of the sword (or when he resents his dependency on the blade), but he is addicted to the power it affords him, and he simply cannot let it go; he alternates, with powerful ambivalence, between hating the sword and wanting to be rid of it and reveling in the extraordinary might it grants him. Elric is thus a quintessential fantasy figure of postcolonial ambivalence; on one hand, he despises his dependency on the blade and yearns (in abstract ways) for self119

sufficiency, yet in practice he loves the intoxicating power it offers him, and the selfloathing generated by his dependency on the sword never, in practice, prevents him from exploiting its use. In the face of the shame of the history of empire after its collapse during the 1960s, the Elric saga presents an apologetics in which the imperial exploitation of colonial territories is imagined to have been regrettable yet unavoidable. Furthermore, the stories allegorize the ways in which imperial masters profit from the continuing exploitation of "blackness" even after the end of territorial colonialism. Blackness, embodied in Stormbringer as terrible and savage (and ultimately feminine), can only accomplish positive ends when wielded and restrained by white hands. This response to decolonization is quite different than the "melancholia" that Gilroy describes; "melancholia" implies a deep, repressed knowing that colonial racism and exploitation were unjust. While there are melancholic elements to the Elric stories, Moorcock's narratives are characterized by an ambivalent suspension between an acknowledgement that colonialism was unjust and a justification for colonial practices on exceptionalist grounds. In one regard, Elric implicitly exposes the Empire's exploitation of and dependency on its periphery; it offers a deeper acknowledgement of colonial history than the "erasure" of history that Gilroy considers. But in another regard, the Elric saga defends the situation of colonial exploitation; it offers a justification for such conditions based on the exceptional nature of the Melnibone empire. The Elric stories contend that the exploitation of "blackness" for gain is unjust, yet it is nonetheless necessary for imperial masters to draw upon "darkness" in order to fight against even greater forms of darkness.

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Moorcock's original Elric story, "The Dreaming City" (1961),4 exemplifies many of the themes that run throughout the Elric saga.5 "The Dreaming City" opens as the avaricious lords of the Purple Towns (and other small city-states) are persuading Elric to help them assault Imrryr the Dreaming City, the last metropolis of fallen Melnibone. Melnibone was once the "Bright Empire" that ruled the world for ten thousand years, but after its fall, the Age of the Bright Empire succumbed to the Age of the Young Kingdoms. Despite Melnibone's collapse, Imrryr is still known as "the greatest merchant city in the world," (13) and the assembled lords are eager to plunder its wealth; they need Elric's aid, however, because only he knows how to penetrate its defenses. Elric agrees to lead the attack on Imrryr, partly because the city had already fallen, "in spirit, five hundred years ago" (15), but more importantly because he has a score to settle with the lord of Imrryr, Yyrkoon, who usurped Elric's Throne and imprisoned his love Cymoril in a magical slumber. Eventually, Elric leads an attack and helps the invading fleet loot and destroy Imrryr. During the attack, Elric battles Yyrkoon, but in the fight he accidentally kills Cymoril; it is unclear whether Elric loses control to Stormbringer, or whether Yyrkoon pushes her onto the blade, or whether Elric's own fury is the cause of her death. It's also ambiguous whether Elric is in control of his own actions or whether the sword acts with a purpose of its own. 4

My citations reference the reprint of “The Dreaming City” in Elric: The Stealer of Souls (2008). Like the examples of Ballard's writing in The Terminal Beach, Moorcock's Elric stories do not represent his best work; part of what makes the early Elric fictions interesting is their enthusiastic incoherence, because within that incoherence one can observe revealing contradictions in postcolonial imperialist fantasy. Moorcock himself admits that he wrote these stories very quickly, for commercial purposes, and that they represent a mess of conscious and unconscious personal references. This is unquestionably bad writing, yet it's very badness is where we can see the changes in imperialist ideology in the most "naked" shape and form.

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Reflecting on the causes of Melnibone's collapse earlier in the story, Moorcock offers several explanations for of the decline of the Bright Empire. Nostalgia for empire is palpable throughout the series (Alan Moore reflects this nostalgia when he imaginatively juxtaposes Britain and Melnibone in his introduction to the 2008 edition of Stealer of Souls), but Moorcock's explanations for the empire's collapse are vague and contradictory. Moorcock first proposes that Melnibone fell due to entropy: "Ravaged, at last, by the formless terror called Time, Melnibone fell and newer nations succeeded her" (11). Like Conrad and Ballard, Moorcock imagines that time inevitably erodes imperial structures and civilized forms of social organization. Moorcock also suggests, however, that the empire fell due to sorcery and outside attack: "Only Melnibone ruled the Earth for one hundred centuries – and then she, shaken by the casting of frightful runes, attacked by powers greater than men; powers who decided that Melnibone's span of ruling had been over-long – then she crumbled and her sons were scattered" (11). The implication is that Melnibone was defeated by time, by its own ambitious striving for power, and by the intervention of outside forces. In this allusive matrix, we can see a contradictory jumble of explanations for the decline of British colonialism: first, imperial decline is a transhistorical inevitability (entropy erodes all "flickers" of light that stand against the darkness); next, the fall of empire is caused by its own overextension (British colonialism ended, in this view, because the empire's ambition was greater than its administrative and managerial capacity); finally, Empire is lost due to foreign interventions (such a causality imaginatively encompasses both German aggression during World War II and American economic policy during the postwar years as reasons for British decolonization). 122

Despite its fall, however, Melnibone is still "the greatest merchant city in the world"(13). Moorcock therefore insightfully suggests that the "fall" of empire is the collapse of its direct colonial rule rather than the dismantling of its economic hegemony, which still remains intact. In Imperialism Without Colonies (2003), Harry Magdoff argues that this surrender of colonial control while retaining economic hegemony is characteristic of European decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s: "the requisite dissolution of the colonies was carried out in such a way as to preserve for the mother country as many of the advantages as possible, and to prevent social revolutions directed to real independence for the former colonies" (109). "The Dreaming City" thus offers a portrait of a colonial empire that has withdrawn from (or lost) direct territorial control, yet at the same time it maintains economic and financial supremacy. The sea-lords who hire Elric for the assault on Imryyr are the lords of former Melnibonian colonies that are still locked into a relationship of economic dependence with Melnibone. Although Moorcock's portrayal of the sea-lords casts them as resentful, greedy thieves and scavengers picking at the corpse of empire (similar to the cannibal population that devours Ballard's "Drowned Giant"), the sea lords can also be seen as postcolonial economic subjects engaging in a strategic attack in order to disrupt a continuing imperial relationship.6 As Magdoff argues, in order to truly decolonize, postcolonial nations must

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It is symptomatic that the "bad guys" in many of these stories are looters who seek to rob the riches of a wealthy city (they are greedy beggars – particularly the case in "To Rescue Tanelorn," when a lord of Chaos leads a "beggar horde" against poor, defenseless Tanelorn. Moorcock offers very racialized descriptions of the beggars; they are vermin, less than human, mindless, etc.) In short, Moorcock describes a world in which "great" cities and empires have an accumulation of vast wealth that needs to be protected against greedy outsiders.

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"overhaul their existing international trade patterns and transform their industrial and financial structure" (111). Given this relationship of continuing dependency between imperial center and periphery, it is suggestive that Imrryr is defended by a bewildering "maze" that outside ships cannot penetrate, and that the sea-lords require Elric's insider knowledge to navigate this maze and reach the heart of Imrryr. As an imperial allegory, this sea-maze uncannily mirrors the "maze" of confusing economic interrelationships that persist and are difficult to untangle in the wake of colonial withdrawal. In the end, Elric fails himself (Cymoril is killed rather than rescued), he fails his home city of Imrryr (which is destroyed), and he fails the postcolonial sea lords (while the invading fleet is attempting to flee with the plunder of Imrryr, the city launches a flight of Dragons, and Elric, who is unable to fight them, uses his sorcery to escape and leaves his allies to die). This triple failure reflects Moorcock's ambivalence concerning imperial relations after the end of colonialism; on one hand, the decadent imperial metropolis does not deserve the wealth and privilege it enjoys, but on the other hand, neither do the cannibalistic sea-lords who are racially and culturally inferior to the descendants of Melnibone. This dilemma has no satisfying imaginative resolution, and entropy itself (in the form of the destruction of both Imryyr and the sea lords) emerges triumphant. The appeal to thermodynamics in "The Dreaming City" is thus a technique for avoiding what appears to be an unsolvable contradiction in the relations between imperial center and postcolonial periphery in the aftermath of decolonization. The social relationship of dependency between empire and periphery dramatized in the conflict between Imryyr and the sea lords is mirrored in Elric's own personal 124

relationship with Stormbringer. At the end of the story, Elric sits on an island alone with the sword, and he soon realizes that Stormbringer is "possessed of more sentience than he had imagined. Yet he was horribly dependent upon it; he realized this with soul-rending certainty. But he feared and resented the sword's power – he hated it bitterly for the chaos it has wrought in his brain and spirit" (41). He attempts to cast the sword away into the water, despite the fact that he will be powerless without it: "Without the sinister sword, he would lose pride – perhaps even life – but he might know the soothing tranquility of pure rest; with it he would have power and strength – but the sword would guide him to a doom-wracked future. He would savor power – but never peace" (42). Elric's dependence on the blade reverses the terms of the dependency dramatized in the conflict between the sea lords and Imryyr: if the sea lords represent former colonies seeking to break their continuing dependency on the imperial metropolis, Elric represents a privileged imperial subject troubled by his own dependence on the foreign "blackness" that is the source of his surplus abundance and strength. Despite Elric's attempt to cast the sword away, Stormbringer refuses to leave him (it haunts him like a monkey's paw), and it starts giving off a "weird devil-scream" until Elric is overtaken by a "sickening sense of defeat" (42). Finally, he swims out, recovers the sword, and resigns himself to keeping it: He reached it and put his fingers around the hilt. At once it settled in his hand and Elric felt strength seep slowly back into his aching body. Then he realized that he and the sword were interdependent, for though he needed the blade, Stormbringer, parasitic, required a user – without a man to yield it, the blade was also powerless. (42)

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If the stalemate between Imryyr and the sea lords ends only in destruction, Elric's personal solution takes a different turn; rather than choosing mutual anihilation, Elric grudgingly accepts dependence upon Stormbringer. On an ethical level he believes that to draw power from the blackness of the blade is an imperfect choice, yet he accepts because he believes he has no other option, and this ultimately frees him to revel in the blade's power. Moorcock thus offers a strange apologetics for postcolonial imperialism after World War II; America and Europe depend on "developing" nations for basic subsistence, and they enjoy an unparalleled comparative standard of living as a result of the unevenness of such relations. Moorcock implies that this is unfortunate yet unavoidable; Elric would cast the sword away if he could, but he cannot. His choice is made for him by the circumstances themselves, and he is a subject with no agency in the matter. This theme – lack of agency – runs throughout the Elric saga. Moorcock's central characters lack agency so that his narratives are able to imaginatively disavow Britain's responsibility for colonial projects; Elric's imperial helplessness allows his readers to avoid assuming self-recognition as "colonizers" during a postcolonial moment when colonization has become ethically suspect. Elric offers an allegorical fantasy in which white Europeans did not set out to aggressively exploit the non-Western world in the pursuit of wealth; they were simply swept along in events that they had no control over. In this ideological fantasy, imperial nations simply responded to what the world demanded of them; they had no choice but to become colonizers. Although they may have performed unjustifiable acts, such acts were called into being as necessary responses to the conditions they faced. 126

The theme of lack of agency runs through many of Moorcock's stories, including the "eternal champion" narratives; these are tales that aren't about Elric himself, but that focus on Elric variants that exist throughout Moorcock's "multiverse" of alternate interconnected realties. One such story, "The Eternal Champion" (1962),7 opens as a twentieth century human, John Daker, is summoned across time and space to become the legendary "Erekose" and defend humanity against the Eldren Hounds of Hell. Daker quickly adjusts to his existence as Erekose, and King Rigenos reveals that he is needed because "The Hounds of Evil rule a third of the world and humankind is weary of the war against them" (6). Erekose reclaims his poisonous sword (a variant of Stormbringer), and he leads the humans in battle against the unhuman Eldren. Erekose is reluctant at first, but feels he must defend humanity as a matter of duty: "As John Daker I saw a meaningless war between two ferocious, blindly hating factions both of whom seemed to be conducting racial jehads, but the danger was patent. Humanity had to be saved" (13). Erekose first believes that the Eldren are alien aggressors (they are always described to him in the ugliest racial terms) who are attacking humanity, and he helps to topple their cities and colonize (or "liberate" from the human perspective) their continent. When an Eldren lady is taken prisoner, Erekose begins to suspect that things are not as they seem, and when he is taken prisoner and held by the Eldren, he discovers that they are pacifists (the world‟s version of elves) who have been relentlessly attacked by the racist humans. In the end, Erekose switches sides and joins the Eldren; he leads a massive decolonization campaign to retake the Eldren continent from the human imperial aggressors. Ultimately, he guides the Eldren to attack the other two continents, and he 7

My citations reference the reprint of “The Eternal Champion” in Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn (2008).

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nearly wipes out all of humanity on the planet in retribution for the humans' original imperial aggression. In the narrative of Erekose's betrayal to join the Eldren, readers are invited to identify with a protagonist who is at first a reluctant imperialist, who then realizes the error of his ways, and who finally becomes the leader of a violent decolonization movement. As with the works of Herbert, Heinlein, and Clarke, Moorcock's eternal champion is an invitation to identify with the victims of oppression and with the liberatory deterritorializing momentum of decolonization. As with other such narratives, the difficulty is not sympathy with the decolonizing agents, but rather with the potential erasure of historical memory that obscures the origins of colonial exploitation in the first place. In, "The Eternal Champion," however, Erekose knows that he is responsible for his aggressive imperial crimes, and what makes the story interesting is the way he switches sides and nearly annihilates the entire human race in an expression of obvious guilt for his earlier actions. Although Erekose seems to take responsibility for his earlier colonial aggression when he sides with the Eldren against the humans, he nonetheless views himself as a passive instrument of a greater cosmic power over which he has no control. Elric and Erekose are both configured as passive heroes swept along in events without agency of their own; although this lack of agency represents Moorcock's attempt to subvert the model of the typical sword and sorcery hero, the notion that British imperialists were drawn into imperialism against their will, "in a fit of absentmindedness," also runs throughout official histories of the British Empire. Bernard Porter's The Lion's Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850-1970 (1975) reads almost exactly like 128

Moorcock's Elric stories in terms of the way that it argues that Britain never intended to colonize the world; such colonization occurred accidentally, in his view, because Britain was swept up in events it had no control over, and it merely responded in the best ways possible to the circumstances it faced. Porter argues that imperialism was for Britain (it may not have been for other countries), a symptom and an effect of her decline in the world, and not of strength . . . the empire was 'controlled' very much less by Britain than it controlled her . . . all along she could only hold on to it by compromising her freedom of action considerably, and in the end could not even do that. My general impression of the empire over the last 100 years is that it was moulded far more by events than it moulded events. (xi) Elric's relation with Stormbringer echoes in fantastic form Porter's history of Britain's imperial relation with the colonized world; Elric can only hold onto Stormbringer by compromising his agency, or "freedom of action," and he is "moulded" by its will much more than he "moulds" it to his own. If Hayden White suggests that historians deal with events that are "traumatic" in nature, and that historians perform a kind of "therapeutic" work by re-emploting events in such a way that they make an acceptable kind of sense, Porter's history exemplifies such a re-emplotment in its most ideologically conservative mode; it offers a reemplotment of history to ease the trauma of the moral crisis that Gilroy describes, and it emplots imperial history in such a way to disavow the agency of colonialist actors. The Elric saga, then, is a fantastic parallel to Porter's history; both outline and reinforce the same ideological re-emplotment of colonial memory. In both cases, the inward re-analysis of Britain's motivation reveals it to be the passive victim of the imperial process rather than the aggressor. 129

Elric's fantastic history is particularly fascinating (in a way that Porter's official history is not) because after the collapse of Melnibone, Elric is still shown to be dependent on the "blackness" of his sword; the empire may have fallen, but there is a continuing relationship of dependency between the Emperor and the "blackness" that is the source of his power. "The Eternal Champion" similarly complicates Porter's easy history because even if Erekose denies agency for his actions, his guilt still offers an unavoidable implicit remembrance of colonial aggressions. Because of the fantastic context, Moorcock's portrait of imperial history is messier, and more revealing, than Porter's official history, even if it explicitly foregrounds the same constitutive disavowal of imperialist agency.

David Harvey My analysis so far has focused on how New Wave writers use the concept of "entropy" to frame the decline of Empire. The early works of Ballard and Moorcock show that the portrayal of decolonization as an entropic inevitability can be a technique for disavowing moral responsibility for colonization. If Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke usurp the liberatory momentum of decolonization for white subjects, Ballard and Moorcock are ambivalent concerning narratives that pose decolonization as libertatory progress, and they instead frame it as a troubling process of thermodynamic decline. I will now conclude this chapter by examining the role of social geographer David Harvey in the New Wave movement. Harvey's contributions to New Worlds challenge authors within the movement as a whole to complicate their use of the metaphor of entropy and to

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consider with greater care the changing nature of imperialism at the midpoint of the 20th century. In his “Editorial Introduction” to the special “Marxism and Fantasy” issue of Historical Materialism (2002), China Mieville mentions (in a passing footnote) that David Harvey published a short story, “Jake in the Forest,” in the SF magazine New Worlds during the 1960s. Mieville offers this brief reference as evidence that notable Marxists have taken speculative fiction seriously and that fantasy should not be categorically dismissed from Marxist concerns.8 The remark is notable because Mieville is aware of both Harvey‟s role as a critical theorist and the New Wave‟s importance as a movement in science fiction, as well as also being aware of Harvey‟s publication in New Worlds. New Wave authors, like Moorcock (who was friends with Harvey in the 1960s) seem generally unfamiliar with the magnitude of Harvey‟s critical importance, while most cultural theorists have neither heard of the New Wave nor of Harvey‟s contributions to it. Although Mieville acknowledges that “Jake in the Forest” was written before Harvey‟s explicit turn to Marxism and issues of social justice in the early 1970s, Harvey‟s participation in the New Wave raises several interesting questions. How might Harvey's critical concerns (and, by extension, much of contemporary critical theory as a whole) have been influenced by his engagement with the New Wave's experimentations? What impact did Harvey‟s early perspectives on the relationships between capitalist

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Mieville gives an incorrect citation for “Jake in the Forest” in his concluding References. His citation reads: “Harvey, David 1965, „Jake in the Forest‟, New Worlds, 49.” Although it is correct that the story was published in New Worlds in 1965, there were monthly issues of New Worlds SF in 1965, each with individual pagination, and “Jake” appears in issue #155 on pages 77-94 (not page 49). The story has not, to my knowledge, been reprinted subsequent to the original issue.

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accumulation, imperialism, and space-time compression have on other New Wave writers and on conversations taking place within the New Wave as a whole in the 1960s? Harvey published two selections in the pages of New Worlds: His short story “Jake in the Forest” appeared in New Worlds SF #155 (October 1965) and his nonfiction article “The Languages of Science” appeared in New Worlds SF #176 (October 1967). Harvey was in his early thirties when these were published; by this time, he had already finished his PhD in Geography at Cambridge in 1961, and he was working as a lecturer in geography at the University of Bristol. While lecturing at Bristol, he was also developing his first book, Explanation in Geography (1969), which was an inquiry into the methodological epistemological foundations of the discipline of geography. Although the 1960s represent an intellectual period before Harvey‟s later examinations of postmodernity, time-space compression, and flexible accumulation, his critical engagement with postmodern questions of identity and difference and his concerns with the imperial contours of modern epistemology are both reflected in his New Wave contributions. Although “Jake in the Forest” is stylistically unusual from a traditional SF perspective, it is emblematically representative of the experimentation that Moorcock was encouraging as the editor of New Worlds during the 1960s. As the story opens, the protagonist, Jake, is exploring a forest and appreciating its symmetry and order while regretting its occasional “unpleasant” asymmetries. Soon he discovers a cabin by a lake, and “without considering the possible consequences” of his action, he enters and meets an enigmatic woman whose beautiful features he has difficulty interpreting (78). She welcomes him, offers him a place to wash, feeds him, brings him coffee and cognac, and 132

offers him a place to sleep. When he attempts to speak to her, she does not communicate verbally, and he is perplexed by his failure to determine the cause of her silence. Throughout the evening, Jake becomes increasingly anxious because he cannot understand the woman‟s actions or motivations. In the manner of a good scientist, he tests several alternative hypotheses against the situation, but none are satisfactory. He attempts to expand his knowledge through methodical observation, but the woman‟s speechlessness thwarts his effort to gather more information. By the time he settles down to sleep, he is anxious and disoriented, and he experiences “a certain fear, fear of some evil force that might snatch the woman away from him and exact retribution from him” (84). The woman visits Jake as he is falling asleep; as she draws near, he suffers increasing “tension” until he stops breathing (87). The story then shifts to Jake‟s perspective as he explores an outdoor landscape; the implication is that this is a psychic and symbolic landscape, but we will learn later that this landscape corresponds to many of the contours of the woman‟s body. Jake‟s journey through this landscape is both sexual and violent; he passes two breast-like “ancient burial mounds” (88), he encounters a phallic “megalith” with “two huge stones” at its base that support a “lintel stone of enormous dimensions” (89), and he finds “a long deep triangular hollow” where he eventually enters a cavern containing a pool of water (89). Continuing beyond the water, he plunges into the darkness of the cavern, hears a cry (he is uncertain if it is his own), and finally “His skin is pierced, His body is maimed, and He acknowledges pain” (90). At last, he reaches a cavern filled with flesh, decay, and human heads, and his passage turns violent as he regards these strange heads: “within the skull of each lies a brain, grey 133

and soft, which forms the catalyst of all His misery . . . He laughs and kicks each skull that lies in his way, He treads on each outstretched suppliant hand, He kicks mud into the eyes that appeal to Him” (90). The narrative then cuts back to the cabin where Jake wakes up and finds the house empty. He goes outside and discovers the woman lying on a rock. When he presses his face to the rock, the woman‟s body resembles the landscape of the odd preceding narrative. He experiences sickness, horror, and a sense of pain and guilt at his own “deformity” (94). After he throws up (his vomit is “the yellow of betrayal”) he finally recovers: “at last his strength returns, and gradually the assurance of his own power returns. He feels the power that lies in his own limbs, in his mouth and thighs” (94). He looks down at the woman, who is now referred to as “the body,” and he quotes Ibsen: “Only that which is lost remains eternal” (94), before the story concludes. The only prior attempt to interpret this strange story comes from Colin Greenland, who mentions “Jake” twice in The Entropy Exhibition (1983). First, Greenland notes that “Jake” is one of several New Wave stories in which “subjective” impressions of inner experiences are valued above “objective” expositions of the external world. Second, he also notes that “Jake” is an example of the New Wave tendency to reject “outer space” fantasies in favor of the unknown “worlds below the belt” (33). Greenland‟s specific argument is that the story “appears to be a grand reverie on the somber mysteries and miraculous transformations of sex” (33). Although Greenland‟s assessment of the story is otherwise insightful, this thesis surprisingly evades the implication that “Jake” can be read as a psycho-geographic survey of a brutal rape and murder. Harvey deploys the enigmatic woman in the story to 134

embody the unknown “other,” who Jake, with his rigid and anxious scientific reasoning process, cannot epistemologically grasp. Jake is characterized by his rational aesthetic sensibility; the woman is “alien” to him, and the fact that he cannot cognitively master her makes him very anxious. In many ways, Jake exemplifies an obsession with scientific rational ordering that Robert Young calls “ontological imperialism;” Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that it is exactly this modern instrumentalizing epistemology that transforms the liberating potential of Enlightenment thought into a philosophy for dehumanizing domination. Harvey‟s exploration of “inner space” in this story is very specific; “Jake” does not examine the inner geography of an archetypal everyman; instead, the story specifically exposes the inner space of a “hard” SF observer (or reader) who is constantly attempting to cognitively master the unknown through a “rational” scientific analytical process overdetermined with the presumption of empirical objectivity. Harvey shows that such an attitude, rather than being truly curious about the unknown, is symptomatically anxious (to the point of violence) when it encounters something which does not fit its pre-assumed axioms. Furthermore, given Harvey‟s later concern with the epistemologies of imperial practice, it is appropriate to read “Jake” as an imperial allegory: Harvey stages an encounter between a colonizing Western subject and a “subaltern” who literally cannot “speak.” Jake imposes certain criteria for rationality on her actions (he demands that her actions make sense on his own terms) and her failure to behave in ways that make sense to him (and his anxiety at his own loss of control in the face of his sexual arousal for her) culminates in tragic and senseless brutality. 135

Harvey‟s later nonfiction article, “The Languages of Science,” is similarly concerned with the violence that can occur when applying an incorrect “map” – in this case a scientific language – to the interpretation of complex phenomena. Harvey‟s inquiry, which takes the place of Moorcock‟s usual editorial in New Worlds SF #176, begins from the acknowledgement that there can be no single objective linguistic “map” of reality, and that different languages will correctly or incorrectly highlight different aspects of the phenomena they describe. Language, Harvey argues, is never an invisible medium of representation; different languages (particularly scientific languages) always pre-assume interpretations about the nature of reality. He cites the history of geometry, from Euclid through Lobachevski, Bolya, and Riemann, in order to show that “within the scientific community a particular language may emerge as the dominant form of communication” and that “science itself, by inventing a particularly powerful language, may inhibit its own development simply by placing too much store by that language” (3). The implications of his subsequent argument have a distinctively New Wave flavor. Harvey argues that “The particular set of artificial languages which are „in power‟ at any particular time serve to mould our view of the world and limit our potential for understanding. They do so simply because they determine the nature and form of our theories about reality” (3). To the extent that he emphasizes the way language limits perception, Harvey participates in a characteristic New Wave interrogation of the limits of subjectivity. In the early issues of New Worlds, there is a ubiquitous invocation of William S. Burroughs (who contends that language “colonizes” perception), and Harvey joins the Burroughs bandwagon in his assertion that language “conditions” perception. 136

What‟s interesting about Harvey‟s view, however, is that he does not propose that there is a better map or language that can offer total epistemological mastery over observable phenomena. He does not propose progress away from error toward absolute knowledge as a solution; instead, he proposes a progression away from error (due to applying incorrect models and presumptions) toward an awareness of plural knowledges and multiple, situated modes of understandings. Harvey‟s view is, unsurprisingly, less paranoid than Burroughs‟; his point is that “In applying a particular linguistic rule . . . we need to be certain that the rule represents something which is true of the data ” (3). The central problem in “Jake in the Forest,” for example, is that the woman‟s actions do not conform to Jake‟s expectations because he applies a “language” of human behavior to his interpretation of her that does not fit the actual data of her existence. His determination to cling to this language and its assumptions rather than trying to understand her in a new way thus has tragic and brutal consequences. Finally, Harvey draws attention to the ways in which scientific language can “penetrate and permeate” everyday thinking. The key example he cites is the second law of thermodynamics: This law simply states that energy tends to dissipate itself and that a particular system tends to assume a state of increasing disorder (or entropy). The notion of inevitable equilibrium and a smoothing out of all differences has been peculiarly pervasive in our social thinking . . . Only certain types of system can be successfully analyzed by means of this model. Not only does the model require that the system be closed, but it also requires that the elements contained in the system are nonhomeostatic (i.e., they are not in any way self-organising). But there are all kinds of systems which are in fact self-reproducing and self-organising. (4) 137

Given that “The Languages of Science” takes the place of the editorial in this issue of New Worlds, it seems that Harvey is making a direct critical statement about the way that New Wave authors deploy the notion of “entropy.” As we have already seen, several critics (particularly Greenland) have commented on the New Wave‟s fascination with entropy and decline. What Harvey attempts to add to this conversation is that entropy is not an absolute principle; it is a way of describing the characteristics of only very specific systems. To use entropy as a conceptual map with disregard for the awareness of the prevalence of self-organizing systems ignores what he calls the “multi-dimensional” aspects of the phenomena under consideration. In his subsequent discussion, Harvey is especially critical of the way that the notion of thermodynamics is applied in economic analysis: for many years it was assumed that the natural laws of economics would lead to an evening-up in economic development throughout the world. Perhaps one of the most significant practical discoveries of the economist in the past twenty years has been the elementary fact that the rich regions grow rich while the poor regions grow relatively poorer, and that this is probably more the natural law of economic growth than an inevitable evening-up process. (4) An economic model that suggests that inevitable entropy will lead to an “evening-up” of resource distribution throughout the world is not only incorrect (insofar as experience shows that rich areas grow richer while poor areas grow poorer), but it also becomes charged imperialist discourse supporting social, political, and economic practices that enable rich areas to exploit poorer ones for their own benefit with a “clear” conscience.

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Harvey‟s article not only attempts to raise the level of conversation about “entropy” and its use as a thematic device in the pages of New Worlds, it also elevates the stakes about New Wave conversations about imperialism more generally. If many British New Wave writers, such as Ballard and Moorcock, apply the notion of entropy in the context of the “decline” of Empire, Harvey is explicitly critical of such conceptualizations. The “decline” of Empire is not an inevitable and regrettable process, as one can see hinted in the early fictions of Moorcock and Ballard; such a view of “decline” is an incorrect mapping of the notion of entropy onto an interpretation of historical causality. Imperialism, Harvey suggests, is a capitalist tendency toward selforganizing accumulation (the rich get richer, the poor get poorer) that is masked by a rhetoric of universal progress (growth is good for everyone). The impact of Harvey‟s thoughts about entropy and economic imperialism on other New Wave authors can be seen in Michael Moorcock‟s “Phase I,” the first Jerry Cornelius story (written in 1965 and published in 1968). “Phase I,” which is a revision of Moorcock‟s original Elric story “The Dreaming City” (1961), centers on a group of rich, powerful, and sexually-perverse conspirators in a near-future Britain who seek help to acquire a microfilm containing valuable information that will allow them to become immensely rich and powerful during Europe‟s apocalyptic economic collapse.9 What is striking about this story is that the conspirators learn about the existence of this “microfilm” from a character named “Mr. Harvey” (199), a “successful drugimporter,” who supplies illegal substances to the film‟s owner. The crux of the story is that there can be immense opportunity for profit if one is in the position to recognize the 9

My citations reference the reprint of “Phase I” in Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn (2008).

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contours of an economic situation with privileged information and the ability to act quickly. All of these qualities are aspects of the “mastery” over time-space compression that Harvey will later consider in The Condition of Postmodernity (1990). Although “entropy” is a central theme in “Phase I,” Moorcock‟s attitude toward entropy has changed in comparison to his earlier writing. Harvey‟s thoughts about economic exploitation from “The Languages of Science” are observable in the story‟s basic structure; in a situation that might appear to herald anarchic breakdown (the “evening up” of everything to the lowest common denominator of anarchy) Moorcock notes that the rich are actually in the position to grow super rich while the rest of the world collapses into economic ruin. “Phase I” embodies Moorcock‟s transition from straightforward postcolonial nostalgia in the wake of British decolonization toward an awareness of the subtleties of neoimperial economic exploitation. It is immensely suggestive that there is a subtle nod to “Mr. Harvey” at the center of this story. Perhaps this is simply a coincidence? Perhaps it is a specific tip of the hat to Harvey himself? In any case, Moorcock‟s attitude toward the relationship between entropy and Empire has shifted demonstrably from his earlier imperialist Elric fantasies. What can we conclude about Harvey‟s relationship with the New Wave? Did Harvey work through some of his early ideas about postmodernity in the pages of New Worlds? Did his thinking influence Moorcock and other New Wave authors toward a more sophisticated view of imperialism? Or (one of my favorite possibilities) does Moorcock‟s characterization of “Mr. Harvey” as a “successful drug importer” imply that Harvey may have been Moorcock‟s own drug dealer? As with any such historical 140

analysis, it is difficult to assert direct causal relations concerning how individual writers and thinkers influenced one another. Nonetheless, I think it is safe to conclude that in addition to being a “genre” and a “movement” and an “aesthetic,” science fiction‟s New Wave was also a conversation, and David Harvey was an active participant in that conversation. Conversations impact people in very different ways: It is possible that the New Wave had an influence on Harvey‟s critical thinking, and therefore on the shape of critical conversations about postmodernity and imperialism today. It is also possible that Harvey‟s contributions had an influence on the aesthetic and thematic concerns of the New Wave. One “topic” of the New Wave conversation was how best to conceptualize “space” and “time,” and by implication, “imperialism” in an era following the climax of territorial colonization. Harvey‟s voice was one among many moving this dialogue in insightful critical directions.

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Chapter Four: Awakening the Imperial Unconscious

Introduction In her book Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern, Marianne DeKoven argues that countercultural movements in the 1960s embody a cultural transition from modernity to postmodernity. Central to this shift is a tension between two conflicting ideals of political consciousness: On one hand, sixties countercultures embrace “the neoromantic belief in creativity as a source of meaningful agency over against the construction of passive, instrumental subjectivity in bourgeois capitalist modernity” (69). From this perspective, revolutionary changes in “consciousness” are enlightening voyages from ignorance to truth (guided by the visionary artist) that can result in social, cultural, and political change. On the other hand, this predominantly modern ideal of political consciousness is expressed in the 1960s alongside an emergent postmodern egalitarianism that rejects grand narratives of “awakening” and encompasses a broad coexistence of shifting, relative, and incommensurably valid viewpoints and experiences.1

1

DeKoven implicitly defines “consciousness” as self-reflexive awareness. Although she does not directly address the work of scholars such as N. Katherine Hayles, who examine the embodiment of cognition in order to challenge liberal-humanist ideas of subject and self, DeKoven nonetheless analyzes a historical moment when the modern emphasis on “reason” as a pathway to “true” consciousness functions alongside a postmodern critique of totalizing Enlightenment epistemologies that resonates with Hayles‟ posthumanist concerns. My analysis of The Fall of the Towers follows DeKoven‟s focus on “postmodern” consciousness as an “egalitarian subjectivity” which is “limitlessly differentiable both from others and from itself, constituting and constituted by the infinitely, continually shifting fields and flows of difference of postmodernity” (193). While I do not focus on the cybernetic and posthuman elements of Towers here, another analysis could examine Delany‟s rich and complex deployment of cybernetic tropes, particularly the simulated cyberspace war that takes place in The Towers of Toron.

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Science fictions in the 1960s, particularly the experimental “inner space” explorations of the New Wave, demonstrate a similar tension between modern and postmodern paradigms of political consciousness. If, as DeKoven argues, postmodernity values popular culture “as the privileged site of resistance to the oppressive Enlightenment master-narratives”(71), New Wave science fiction is an unusual hybrid site where modernist aesthetic practices are deployed within a popular genre aiming to challenge the hegemony of modernist values. Samuel Delany‟s fiction, for example, expresses a simultaneous interest in both modern and postmodern modes of political consciousness; his novels prioritize objective knowledge while at the same time valuing the irreducibility of subjective experience. This chapter examines one of Delany‟s earliest and least-acknowledged works, The Fall of the Towers, in order to argue that Delany‟s figuration of political consciousness navigates a rich and difficult middle ground between what DeKoven calls the modern “politics of the social” and the postmodern “politics of the self” (134).2 Delany‟s model of political consciousness offers a resolution to what seems like an impasse between modern and postmodern epistemological paradigms. If, as Brian McHale argues, modernity is characterized by a belief that phenomena can be objectively “known” and postmodernity, in contrast, can be characterized by an emphasis on

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The Fall of the Towers was Delany‟s second project following the completion of his first science fiction novel The Jewels of Aptor (1962). Most scholarship on Delany focuses on his later fiction, particularly Dhalgren (1974), Triton (1976), and the Neveryon series. Towers is rarely mentioned in Delany scholarship; the single notable exception is Seth McEvoy‟s book Samuel R. Delany (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co, 1984), which devotes a full chapter to Towers. McAvoy‟s analysis offers an overview of the trilogy, and he argues that Towers offers analogies to the Vietnam and Korean Wars. My analysis intends to continue and develop the questions concerning the relationship between Towers and imperial war that McAvoy initiates in his more general survey.

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multiple, simultaneous, valid, and incommensurable modes of understanding, Delany resolves this tension by suggesting that a valid epistemology must be based on factual knowledge of existing conditions, but that multiple understandings of similar “facts” will nonetheless produce different interpretations and alternative meanings. Political consciousness must be based on a specific knowledge of objective conditions, but each individual‟s understanding of such conditions will be informed by his or her irreducible subjective experiences. The central object of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers is imperial war. Throughout the trilogy, the Empire of Toromon mobilizes and fights a seeminglyinevitable war, yet few characters have any clear knowledge of what the war is about or against whom it will be fought. Several of Delany‟s works, including Babel-17, Triton, and Empire, situate characters in bewildering environments of violent conflict that they do not initially understand. Towers is Delany‟s first experiment with this theme; it is written against the backdrop of the ongoing Vietnam War, and it offers a specific response to Heinlein‟s perspective on imperial war in his popular novel Starship Troopers (1959). The key difference between Delany‟s and Heinlein‟s alternative views of political consciousness is that Heinlein believes that a “correct” epistemological point of view can be produced through education, civic and military service, and technological modification; Delany, in contrast, suggests that epistemology will always be limited by upper limits of knowability and that even similar experiences of given phenomena will be irreducibly differentiated by alternative points of view. This is an important difference, because Heinlein‟s modern epistemology reifies the seeming inevitability of imperial wars, while Delany‟s perspective, carefully situated between dominant modernity and 144

emergent postmodernity, demands a much greater attentiveness to the increasingly complex political, social, and economic conditions that produce late-capitalist imperial wars. Delany‟s portrayal of the Toromon Empire in Towers anticipates Hardt and Negri‟s definition of postmodern Empire as a power formation without a central locus of control; imperial conditions are replicated throughout the Empire all at once without a central command system. Ultimately, no single antagonist is responsible for the problems in the Empire, and all of the characters in the novel (protagonists and antagonists) have difficulty understanding the economic and material operations of their society in any coherent way. This lack of adequate “cognitive mapping” means that no single agent has the knowledge to change the trajectories that drive the empire toward a bewildering and incomprehensible war. Delany thus refuses to celebrate postmodern depthlessness and relativity because the absence of “cognitive maps” can only serve to support what Hardt and Negri refer to as a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Empire xii). Greater “consciousness” of imperial conditions, however, does not result in a perfect utopian political paradigm, because specific conditions will always be more complicated than any map can model, and social awareness alone does not result in political, economic, and institutional transformation. In his dual commitment to empirical mapping and to the irreducibility of subjective experience, Delany offers a resolution to what seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between modern and postmodern ideals of political consciousness. 145

Cognitive Mapping The Fall of the Towers is a collection of three short novels: Out of the Dead City (originally released as Captives of the Flame in 1963), The Towers of Toron (1964), and City of a Thousand Suns (1965). The books are set in a distant future after nuclear war has devastated the planet. Human civilization topples after a nuclear holocaust known as the “Great Fire,” and the survivors establish a settlement (which eventually becomes a city and then an Empire) on an island called Toron. Toron (and the Toromon Empire) are divided from the rest of the world by radiation barriers that isolate areas so irradiated that they are uninhabitable. The City of Toron (on the isolated island) is the capital of the Empire, and it rules over conquered areas on the mainland up to the edge of the radiation barrier. Humans populate the Empire, but radiation has also created two mutant groups together known as “forest people.” Members of the first group are called “apes” (these are shorter creatures with high foreheads, bony brow-ridges, slow perception, and opposable big toes), and the others are called “giants” (these are tall and broadshouldered creatures with heightened perceptions). Out of the Dead City establishes two central conflicts: First, there is the tension between the Toromon Empire and a nameless enemy that lurks behind the radiation barrier. Second, the novel stages a contest between two ancient cosmic entities: a benevolent “Triple Mind” that adheres to an ethical code preventing it from meddling in the development of younger species and civilizations, and an enemy known as The Lord of the Flames, a malevolent creature that infiltrates young cultures for its own unfathomable purposes. In the first book, the Triple Mind contacts three heroes (Jon 146

Koshar, the Duchess of Petra, and the forest giant Arkor) to inform them that The Lord of the Flames has infiltrated their society and that it is manipulating Toromon toward war. In the second book, Toromon develops teleportation technologies that allow transit beyond the Barrier, and the Empire mobilizes for war, only to discover that there is no actual enemy; the entire “war” is a social hallucination provoked by Empire‟s economic and social inequities, and it is waged within a deadly cyberspace simulation that randomizes soldiers‟ deaths in order to bleed off the Empire‟s underprivileged surplus population. The Lord of the Flames returns and manipulates the Toromon government from within; the heroes must again drive it away. Finally, in City of a Thousand Suns, the Empire is torn apart by internal strife after the truth of the simulated war is revealed, and Toron then comes under “real” attack by the (now-psychotic) sentient computer who simulated the cyberspace conflict and who remotely commands the Empire‟s mechanized military apparatus. Meanwhile, the heroes engage in a final showdown with The Lord of the Flames, only to discover that the conflict between the two cosmic entities is a result of a misunderstanding; when clarity is reached, the antagonism is resolved and The Lord of the Flames leaves Toromon in peace. From its initial scenes, Out of the Dead City interrogates the shape of global imperial economics in a way that reflects changing global conditions in the 1960s and today. In the first chapter, Delany begins by presenting an economic map of the Toromon Empire; he offers a sequence of scenes moving from the farthest frontiers of Toromon to the heart of the capital city. These scenes are unified by the looming presence of the transit ribbon, a matter-transmission system (iconic of the “time-space

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compression” David Harvey describes as characteristic of postmodernity) that physically connects the capital city to the imperial frontier. In this opening sequence, Delany offers an implicit argument about political consciousness; none of the characters in the individual scenes can apprehend the larger shape of the imperial economic order in which they are participants. The reader, however, can see from a broader (removed) vantage how the entire imperial system operates. Delany therefore suggests that imperial exploitation occurs due to the participation of constituent agents who do not fully understand the role they play in the operations of Empire. Greater “consciousness” of specific economic and political conditions, therefore, can lead to significant political change. The problem is that the characters in the story need to be able to see the “big picture” that the readers are presented with in order to properly understand their own participation in the imperial economic system. It is worth examining these opening scenes closely, because they offer a synthesis of the specific practices and operations that sustain Empire. The Prelude begins as the slave Jon Koshar escapes from the tetron ore mines near the Radiation Barrier. Tetron is a unique mineral created by radioactive fallout, and it is the economic lynchpin of the Empire‟s politics; it‟s an almost magical energy source (Toromon‟s fantastic equivalent of fossil fuels) that can power everything from military ships to hydroponic fisheries. As Jon is escaping from the tetron mines, he is contacted by the Triple Consciousness, who seeks to enlist him in the struggle against The Lord of the Flames. After the Prelude, the next scene opens on six forest giants who are attempting to capture runaway slaves. Jon eludes them, but they catch and kill two of his companions, 148

and their bodies are displayed at the tetron mines as examples to dissuade other runaways. During this scene, Delany demonstrates that the demand for tetron ore is increasing at a rapid rate: “The orders for tetron have nearly doubled,” observes Larta, the leader of the guards (9). Her companion Ptorn is uncomfortable with the profit that is being extracted from human slavery: “I wonder what sort of leeches make their living off these miserable. . .” he says, leaving the thought unfinished. Larta answers: “The hydroponics growers, the aquarium manufacturers in Toron . . . They‟re the ones who call for the ore. Then, there‟s the preparation for the war.” Ptorn then introduces the economic situation central to the novel: “They say . . . that since the aquariums have taken over supplying fish to Toron, the fishermen on the coast have nowhere to sell and are being starved out. And with the increased demand for tetron, the prisoners are dying like flies here at the mines. Sometimes I wonder how they supply enough miners” (10). Ptorn suggests that local fishermen are losing their markets because they can‟t compete with large corporate hydroponic aquariums that produce mass quantities of cheap fish at low cost. But the corporate aquariums can only supply cheap fish because they have inexpensive access to tetron ore, which is supplied by state-sanctioned slave labor. In this portrait of imperial economics, it appears at first that the local fish are simply undersold by the manufactured fish. This might be seen as a “natural” consequence of free market capitalism; whoever can offer the most competitive product “deserves” to profit from it. But Delany suggests that the central problem is not the price of fish, but rather the price of labor; the labor of the local fishermen is undersold by the labor of the slaves in the tetron mines. This is not a “free” market situation, because the Empire administers the system of slavery to benefit the corporate fisheries. 149

The forest guards who are capturing the runaway slaves cannot form a complete mental “picture” of this situation. Ptorn has no concept of the “leeches” who are profiting from the system, nor does he know how the “miners” (slaves) are supplied. Larta has a slightly better understanding, but even she cannot grasp the whole situation. Neither, at this point, can the reader; the audience is left struggling to connect the dots between seemingly disparate details and events. Delany offers only glimpses, snapshots, and disconnected fragments that will connect later to reveal a coherent whole. The reader experiences the same disorientation that the characters articulate when attempting to grasp the basic economic conditions of the Empire. In this sense, the novel‟s opening anticipates (by two decades) Fredric Jameson‟s argument that postmodernity represents a totality in which “late” capitalism has become so complex that global systems of production are difficult to envision all at once. Drawing on the work of Kevin Lynch, Jameson calls for a project of “cognitive mapping” to confront this new postmodern complexity; rather than celebrating a play of depthless images disconnected from historical origins, Jameson suggests that the pressing intellectual project of the late 20th and early 21st century is to “map” complex processes of global production in order to expose the new forms of human exploitation that emerge from late capitalist economics: “cognitive mapping in the broader sense comes to require the coordination of existential data (the empirical position of the subject) with unlived, abstract conceptions of the geographic totality” (52). Towers thus prefigures Jameson‟s critique of postmodernity as a “cultural logic” of late capitalism by outlining a situation in which one must resist the allure of cheap fish in order to grapple with the recognition that such fish are produced by slave labor. Larta and Ptorn begin the novel alienated 150

from a conscious apprehension of the most important economic and material conditions that structure their lives, and like the reader, their challenge is to develop a different political consciousness in relation to these conditions. After the scene with the forest guards, Delany introduces a group of “forest people” living in the depths of the jungle. A small “ape” named Lug brings news to a “giant” called Quorl that outsiders (with tetron-powered airships) are building a structure at the base of a mountain at a nearby lake. The apes don‟t understand what is happening, although they suspect that it has something to do with “war” (the same undefined “war” that Petra mentions in the previous scene). The apes cannot cognitively map the situation, so they come to Quorl to find out what is happening. Quorl is pleased: “Good,” he says, “It seemed time they came. Time they built” (11). He is not concerned with the arrival of humans in another area of the jungle; for him, this is an expression of natural progress; he compares the sublime sight of the new construction to “how the lake looks in the morning mist after the rain” (12). In this portrayal, the forest people are basically natives who have been colonized by the Empire, yet they don‟t have an antagonistic relationship with Toromon. The apes don‟t understand the events taking place around them, and the giants have become imperial agents working on behalf of Toromon‟s economic progress. Larta and Ptorn are slavers; they know the jungle well enough to capture the runaway slaves who are usually brought from the city. Toromon‟s system of slavery is based on economic (rather than explicitly racial) imperatives: criminals are conscripted as slaves, and when the Empire needs more labor, it tightens its laws in order to produce more criminals (43). In this sense, Delany imagines that economic imperialism is based on class-slavery rather than 151

race slavery. At the same time, this imperial economic system is predicated upon what Partha Chatterjee and Eva Cherniavsky describe as a “differential incorporation” of racialized subjects; although there are biological differences between humans, apes, and giants due to genetic mutation, each of these basic racial categories is produced by different modes of inclusion and exclusion in the social body of the Empire (Cherniavsky 11). The empire includes everyone (even colonized subjects are part of the social body), but not everyone is included equally; different groups are subject to greater or lesser degrees of social and economic privilege. The giants, for example, are included as agents of Empire in the jungle, but they are excluded from social and political life of the imperial metropolis. Delany‟s insight is that imperial exploitation does not need to be limited to race; with the collapse of emphasis on a strict hierarchy of biological categories, race becomes one strategy among many for the economic reproduction of the Empire‟s biopolitical regime. Rather than creating a space for universal personhood, the absence of hierarchical racial prejudice makes it possible for lower class humans to become enslaved, despite their membership in an ostensibly privileged group, and for the racialized giants to be deployed by the Empire as semi-privileged managers who oversee the slave labor at the colonial periphery. At this point in the novel, Delany seemingly establishes a hierarchy of difference based on biological aptitudes for conscious awareness. The dark skinned “giants” have heightened perceptions and highly developed intellects (sometimes including psychic powers), the humans have average perceptions, and the “apes” have slower minds and less precise senses. If at first glance it appears that the Empire is building a colonial 152

outpost at the lake, Quorl sees something which will only be explained to the reader two novels later when Delany reveals that the settlement in question is actually The City of a Thousand Suns, a utopian alternative to Toron dedicated to providing “food, housing, and creative labor for its whole population” (392). This is an interesting moment for considering Delany‟s figuration of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers. The City of a Thousand Suns represents a modern utopian ideal of political consciousness; the “malcontents” who build the city are dissatisfied with imperial conditions, and their knowledge motivates them to work toward building a progressive alternative; this is what DeKoven refers to as the modern “politics of the social.” Being a “malcontent” means “you don‟t like where you‟ve been, the place where you are is grim, and the only place you see yourself going is not an improvement on what‟s gone before” (41). Quorl, in contrast, defines himself as a “histosent” or a “historically sentient” being, which he defines as “knowing where you‟ve been, where you are, and where you‟re going. It also means appreciating it” (105). Quorl‟s “appreciation” of history anticipates a postmodern political consciousness, or a “politics of the self;” when he sees the arrival of the malcontents, he senses the ways in which the Empire is already producing its own opposition. Rather than motivating him to take action, his historical sense invokes complicity and passive appreciation; Quorl experiences himself acting “within” the complexity of imperial conditions rather than “against” them. Later in the novel, Quorl‟s complicity is challenged when Prince Let (the younger brother of King Uske) is kidnapped and sent to stay with him in the jungle. Let, who has been delivered to the jungle by the Duchess of Petra in order to learn “a certain 153

ruggedness” from living on the frontier (75), befriends a mutant named Tloto, despite Quorl‟s warnings that Tloto should not be directly regarded or acknowledged. Tloto is revealed to possess psychic powers when he rescues Let from a rockslide, and Quorl subsequently delivers him to a temple where he must undergo the ritual scarification that the forest people demand of all psychics. Let is horrified, and Quorl tries to explain that this is simply “custom” and that “it doesn‟t hurt that much . . . we don‟t kill them anymore” (110). During this explanation, Quorl‟s complicity is shattered as he listens to what his own words and excuses sound like from the boy‟s point of view: “Suddenly, having gone all through it with the boy, it seemed twisted to Quorl, incorrect” (110). He abruptly discovers that he has taken for granted the division of those who are different into an alternative “marked” category suffering intense social stigma and alienation. In this moment of revelation, Delany implicitly rejects postmodern complicity with historical “customs” in favor of a deliberate mapping of the social, political, and economic inequities and oppressions these customs can reproduce. Let similarly sheds his complicity and his conviction to always “do what he was told” in order to become a monarch who is more “awake” than his brother Uske (97). Let‟s outward journey to the colonies is also an inward journey into his own habits of perception and interpretation, and this dual movement (both inward and outward) is characteristic of the introspective narratives of frontier and empire offered by avant-garde science fiction in the 1960s.3

3

It is interesting to note that Delany‟s portrayal of Quorl is significantly revised from the original edition of Captives of the Flame (1963) to the complete edition of The Fall of the Towers (revised and collected in 1966) that I am examining here. In the original publication, the scene of Quorl in the opening chapter is very brief; it only shows Quorl sleeping in the jungle as tetron-powered airships pass overhead. The term “histosent” is introduced in the 1966 revision, and there is not a clear contrast between malcontents and histosents in the original edition. This distinction, the corresponding implications for articulating different

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The following segment takes place on the coast of the mainland, where a fisherman named Cithon is angry with his son Tel for being late to join him for fishingwork. Tel (who later becomes a major character when he runs away to work at the aquariums in Toron) has been collecting seashells along the beach, and his father lashes him for being late. Both Tel and his mother live in fear of Cithon, who is presented as the central source of anxiety for the family. Fear widens Tel‟s eyes when his father confronts him, and his voice is described as “quiet” and “defensive.” Grella doesn‟t dare to intervene when Cithon lashes Tel, and she simply continues weaving at her loom: “Inside the shack, the shuttle paused in Grella‟s fist the length of a drawn breath. Then it shot once more between the threads” (13). At first glance, the tension in this scene revolves around masculinity and domestic violence: Cithton rules his family through fear, and he responds with coercive force if anyone speaks against him. At the same time, these domestic problems can be traced to the larger imperial economic situation; the mainland fishermen are suffering hardships as a result of the new hydroponic aquariums, and the only response they can imagine is to work harder to catch more fish (38).4 The family conflict revolves around a lack of basic awareness of key conditions and an inability to cognitively “map” the complexity of the Empire‟s changing economic landscape. Cithton feels powerless and emasculated because his labor is no longer

modes of political consciousness, is introduced in Delany‟s subsequent revision following the original publication. 4

This is similar to the situation Michael Moore examines in Roger and Me, where domestic violence increases in poverty conditions created by a globalization of economic production and the corresponding loss of sustainable local jobs.

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valuable, and he compensates for this sense of powerlessness by demanding greater authority within the domestic space. Ironically, in order to escape his father‟s violence, Tel emigrates to the city of Toron to work for the aquariums, not realizing that aquarium workers (who are often poorly-paid immigrants) are in as bad a situation as the fishermen themselves and that they help to create the conditions that Tel himself is escaping from. The only “valuable” labor in this economic landscape is the slave labor (acquired for “free” by the state and the corporations) performed in the tetron ore mines. The next scene moves across the water to the Island of Toron, the center of the Empire. Here we find two merchants on the wharf as a boatload of fish arrive from the mainland. The “stout” modern merchant (fat from profit) is mocking the “gaunt” merchant (starved from lack of business) for continuing to rely on mainland fish instead of tetron-produced aquarium-grown fish: Tell me, friend . . . Why do you trouble to send your boat all the way to the mainland to buy from the little fishermen there? My aquariums can supply the city with all the food it needs . . . You sell to those families of the island who still insist on the doubtful superiority of your imported delicacies. Did you know, my friend, I am superior in every way to you? I feed more people, so what I produce is superior to what you produce. I charge them less money, so I am financially more benevolent than you. I make more money than you, so I am also financially superior. Also, later this morning my daughter is coming back from University Island, and this evening I will give her a party so great and lavish that she will love me more than any daughter has ever loved a father before. (14) The disparity in wealth between the two merchants is created by exploited labor; the modern merchant can produce a greater quantity of product at a lower price only because he relies on free labor from the tetron mines (15). The old-fashioned merchant can no longer sell fish competitively; instead he sells the authenticity of imported fish: “perhaps 156

my clientele is different than yours,” he replies, implying that aquarium fish will only be purchased by the lower-classes. High-class consumers, he hopes, will continue to buy authentic imported fish instead. The irony of this situation emerges later, when the “imported” fish are the only hors d‟oeuvres served at the high-class party for the “stout” merchant‟s daughter. When the rich merchant is done gloating, another businessman approaches and comments on the exchange: “He‟s a proud man. But you can bring him to his place. Next time he mentions his daughter, ask him about his son, and watch the shame storm into his face” (15). The poor merchant refuses to make such a cut, and we later discover that the stout merchant is actually Jon Koshar‟s father, who profits and boasts at the cost of his own son‟s enslavement. In this scene, Delany transitions from the lower classes exploited by the Empire‟s economic system to a portrayal of the elite classes who profit from it. Jon‟s father, who is one of the primary beneficiaries of the imperial division of labor, is not portrayed as fully conscious of the system. Like all of the other characters in the opening sequence, his subjectivity is predicated on a “false” consciousness; his narrative of superiority depends on the disavowal of his own son‟s exploitation. Unlike the forest guards and the other lower-class characters, who do not have enough information to cognitively map the situation, the smug subjectivity of upper-class businessmen (like Jon‟s father) is premised on a silent disavowal of the information that would make their own social and economic advantage psychologically unbearable. Furthermore, while Jon‟s father is aware of his financial advantage and uses it to elevate himself above his peers, he is still portrayed as a petty businessman who does not 157

understand the power his economic position offers him; it is later revealed that he “has amassed a fortune nearly as large as that in the royal treasury” (21). Although he is unaware of his importance, the Empire now depends on his economic support in order to conduct the war against the “enemy” beyond the barrier, and no one in the government seems situated to recognize that state-enforced slave labor is creating an elite class whose power eclipses the political sovereignty of Toromon itself. As Jon later tells his sister, their father “doesn‟t mean to be, but he‟s almost as much responsible for this thing as any one individual could be” (115). He implicates his father as a primary beneficiary of this system while at the same time denying that any single individual can be entirely responsible for the conditions of the economic formation. This does not portray Jon‟s father as a smooth, coherent global capitalist who takes advantage of systemic imperial inequities to advance his own power and profit; indeed, one criticism of Delany‟s fiction might challenge his hesitation to more strongly incriminate the imperial capitalist as a deliberate and knowing agent of economic exploitation. The Fall of the Towers, however, avoids such a clean division between “true” and “false” consciousness in order to model a situation where no single character is able to objectively model empirical conditions. The next segment moves to the airship hangars deep in the city, where a young military major named Tomar awaits the arrival of Clea Koshar (Jon‟s sister, the daughter who is arriving from University to attend her father‟s party). The two lovers want to spend more time together, but Tomar is busy with preparation for the war. Clea asks him about this, and he responds that the war is not only coming, but that it will be good for the empire: “With the war, there will be work for a lot more people. Your father will be 158

richer. Your brother may come back, and even the thieves and beggars in the Devil‟s Pot will have a chance to do some honest labor” (18). He notes that scientists like Clea will probably be drafted into the war effort also, and this is true; Clea later becomes the “first military hero” of the war after discovering that the radiation from the barrier is artificially generated (112). What‟s remarkable is that Tomar (like almost everyone else) has unthinkingly embraced the notion that the war will be economically beneficial for the Empire because it will create an outlet for surplus labor and lives. As we see later, many of the “thieves and beggars” who inhabit the Devil‟s Pot (the poverty-class “ghetto” of the city of Toron) are immigrants from the mainland who have come to the city in search of economic opportunity only to discover that work is so rare (due to tetron innovations) that they must sell their labor at exploitative costs or seek illegal employment instead. Tomar is right, of course, that the war will make Clea‟s father (and other already-wealthy corporation owners) richer, but ultimately the war will not benefit the entire society; it will advance the rich upper classes and create an “outlet” for class resentment from the exploited lower classes, who will give their labor and lives to support the continuation of the existing economic order. During this scene, Clea shows Tomar a notebook of poems by Vol Nonik, a student who has been expelled from the university. She has an odd feeling about his poem and his expulsion: “They fall like random parts of a puzzle, and you can‟t see where they fit together” (16). These pieces of information are connected; Vol Nonik, his poetry, and his expulsion become vital in the third book of the trilogy, but the reader will only be able to “map” this importance later. In this exchange, Delany‟s aesthetic 159

reinforces his model of political consciousness. Just as the reader needs more information to have an accurate understanding of the data at hand, the characters themselves need more information in order to make sense of the seeming “randomness” of their imperial situation. In response to Clea‟s disorientation, Tomar notes, “this is a pretty confused and random time we‟re living in . . . People are starting to move and migrate all over Toromon. And there‟s all this preparation for the war” (17). His response juxtaposes Clea‟s disorientation against a general feeling of confusion surrounding migration and war. Everything seems “random,” but this randomness is an illusion that evaporates when an accurate cognitive map is available to articulate the relationships between the elements in question. Beginning here and continuing throughout the trilogy, “randomness” serves as Delany‟s central trope for exploring both the need to map relationships between phenomena and the limits to which such mappings are ultimately possible.5 The final segment of the opening chapter takes place in the bedchamber of young King Uske, the monarch of the Empire of Toromon. Uske is throwing a tantrum because his chief minister Chargill awakens him to offer a report on tetron production. Uske, a symbolic rather than practical leader, mocks Chargill for awakening him: Chargill, why is it that roads have been built, prisoners reprieved, and traitors disemboweled at every hour of the afternoon and evening without 5

Clea‟s reference to Vol Nonik‟s poems and her discussion with Tomar about the “randomness” of the imperial situation are absent in the original 1963 Captives of the Flame and added in the 1966 revised collection of The Fall of the Towers. The significance of this scene for Delany‟s figuration of political consciousness is therefore a product of his later consideration, and it is retroactively emphasized in the earlier work following revision.

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anyone expressing the least concern for what I thought? Now, suddenly, at . . . My God, seven o‟clock in the morning! Why must I suddenly be consulted at every twist and turn of empire? (19) From this scene, we can see that the Empire does not have a single center of power. This does not imply an absence of imperial sovereignty; instead, it anticipates what Hardt and Negri describe as a decentered or “network” sovereignty (what they call “Empire”) that includes “the dominant nation-states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers” unevenly united to form a global-imperial economic system functioning both within and beyond its constituent nodes (Multitude, xii). Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. argues that this idea of Empire, despite its shortcomings for developing a critique of contemporary global capitalism, is nonetheless “immensely useful as a tool for understanding contemporary geopolitical mythology, as a cognitive map, in Jameson‟s terms, of the present” (2). In Delany‟s imperial novum, the Empire operates without the conscious thought of its “head,” who would prefer to be “asleep” and let things continue to run automatically. Chargill responds that the king cannot be left alone because the state is “about to enter a war” (19). Uske responds that they should just get the war started, and he indulges in a juvenile fantasy of glorious imperial conquest: “Well, if we had a war . . . I‟d ride in the first line of fire, in the most splendid uniform imaginable, and lead my soldiers into a sweeping victory” (20). This is presented as a naïve sentiment, and the “actual” war that later takes place is presented in terms that evoke the slow brutal senselessness of American imperial activity in Vietnam rather than a nostalgic fantasy of adventuresome colonial conquest. 161

When Uske finally becomes more serious, he attempts to ask what seem like obvious questions: “This war business is ridiculous, and if you expect me to take it seriously, then the Council is going to have to take it seriously. How can we have a war with whatever is beyond the radiation barrier? We don‟t know anything about it. Is it a country? Is it a city? Is it an empire? We don‟t even know if it‟s got a name. We don‟t know how they‟ve crippled our scouting planes. We can‟t monitor radio communication. We don‟t even know if it‟s human” (20). The king goes on to suggest that they send spies to gather actual information about the enemy beyond the barrier, only to be rebuked because it is “obvious” that the radiation makes this impossible. Uske finally gives up, giggling: “Nobody listens to me! Nobody takes any of my suggestions!” and goes back to sleep (21). The problem Delany outlines in this entire opening sequence, as he moves from the edges of the empire to its administrative heart, is that while no single character has a clear grasp of how the Empire is operating, the Empire nonetheless continues to function. The king prefers to spend his time “asleep,” and when he (as the semiconscious “head” of the state) attempts to think about what is happening, his efforts are not taken seriously. Delany offers a complex social, political, and economic situation – akin to Hardt and Negri‟s definition of Empire – with no single central locus of control and domination; economic and material conditions are produced through habitual biopolitical repetitions throughout the Empire at once. No single antagonist is responsible for the problems in the Empire, and even some who are profiting most (like Jon Koshar‟s father) are powerless to prevent the enslavement and subjugation of their own children. This lack of adequate “cognitive mapping” means that no single agent has the knowledge to change 162

the trajectories that are driving the empire toward a bewildering and incomprehensible war.

Randomness and Metacartography So far, I have argued that The Fall of the Towers presents a disorienting imperial hyperspace in which individuals have difficulty accurately “mapping” their own positions within a complex field of inequitable social and economic relations. The disjointed scenes in the opening chapter, connected by the iconic transit ribbon, generate a sense of perplexity that can only be resolved by seeing the imperial economic system as a whole, rather than viewing it from the limited perspectives of the individual characters. In this sense, Towers embraces the idea of a modern utopian epistemology that objectively models economic and social conditions. The pivot between this modern perspective and a postmodern ideal of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers hinges on the limited degree to which cognitive mapping can or should eliminate the sense of “randomness” that Tomar describes in the opening chapter. The seemingly random operations of the imperial system become more comprehensible when they are mapped, but the acquisition of greater empirical knowledge does not automatically generate greater “truths” that provide self-evident axioms for political action. Even when more accurate cognitive maps are available, individual subjects must interpret these maps, and Towers argues that the experiential process of interpretation is irreducibly subjective. Delany shows that there are limits to what can be mapped, because reality is always more complex than representations can model. Although the absence of 163

information disorients individuals and diminishes their agency, the impulse to achieve absolute epistemological mastery produces what Horkheimer and Adorno call “the dialectic of the Enlightenment,” a situation described by Best and Kellner as a monstrous transformation where “instruments of liberation become the means of domination, and when a mode of objectifying thought that was intended to dominate nature also becomes a framework for objectifying and subjugating human beings” (68). The Fall of the Towers explores this problem through its presentation of a fictional game called “randomax,” which becomes a central thematic device for exploring the strengths and limitations of epistemological mapping. In this game, sixteen pennies are set up in a square formation, and one corner penny is removed in order to create a small gap. Players slide either a penny or a dime into the gap, causing two coins from opposite sides to be knocked out of the square. Players make bets on which two coins will be knocked away. In The Towers of Toron, soldiers play randomax while they are stationed “abroad” during the simulated war. The “apes” enjoy the game, but the “giants” avoid playing it, because they seem to have a supernatural power to predict which coins will be knocked away. The giant Ptorn explains this to Tel, who has joined the army following the events of the first book. Ptorn asks Tel to imagine a truck moving down a street that suddenly cuts its motor and eventually rolls to a stop. He asks Tel if he would be able to judge, based on his observation of the truck‟s trajectory, whether he would have time to cross the street without being hit. Tel says he would, and Ptorn explains: Well, do you realize that when you do that, you‟re doing subconsciously a problem that would take a mathematician with pencil and paper who knew 164

the exact weight of the truck, speed, rate of deceleration, and friction component of the wheels at least a couple of minutes to solve? Yet you do it in under half a second with only the inaccurate information your senses gather in a moment or two. (172) Tel still isn‟t sure what this has to do with the success of the “giants” at randomax. Ptorn continues: Just this. You and I can do that. But if you put one of the apes on that street corner, he‟d have to stand there until the truck came to a dead stop before he‟s dare cross over. Oh, sure, if you taught him the mathematics and gave him a pencil, paper, and all the factors, he could figure it out in about the same time any other mathematician could. But he couldn‟t just glance at the decelerating truck and figure where it would stop . . . the way you men can just figure out by looking at things that the apes could never perceive, we can figure out things with just a glance that you men couldn‟t see either, like what angle and how hard to shoot that coin to make the ones we want to fly off the edges of the randomax square . . . I can‟t explain the mathematics to you, but you can‟t explain the mathematics of your slowing truck to me. (173) This explanation is founded on Newtonian principles; the results of material interactions are (at least to a significant degree) calculable. What appears “random” to some observers is predictable to others. At first glance, this hints at a hierarchy of perception, with the “giants” situated as the most perceptually advanced branch of humanity. This hierarchical division of perception implies a parallel hierarchy of political modes of awareness; the randomness of Toromon‟s imperial economic system is not random at all; it is just too complicated to grasp at a single glance (in the same way that late capitalist production, in Jameson‟s analysis, has become too complex to envision at once). Enhanced perception, however, allows one to see the causal chains of exploitation and profit that structure the empire. 165

Delany complicates this notion of a racial hierarchy of perception when Jon and Alter later travel through the City of a Thousand Suns looking for Clea. Jon meets an ape child who is an expert at playing randomax. When a soldier asks him how he can predict which coins will be knocked away, the child replies: The coin you flip has a spin of, say, omega, which in most cases is negligible, so you don‟t have to worry about the torque. The same goes for the acceleration, as long as it‟s hard enough to knock at least two coins off and not so hard it‟ll shatter the entire matrix: call it constant K. The only thing that really matters is the angle of displacement, theta, from the diagonal of the matrix of the line of impact. Once you perceive that accurately, the result is simple vector addition of the force taken through all the possibilities of fifteen . . . It shouldn‟t be called randomax . . . If you perceive all the factors accurately, it isn‟t random at all. (394) This scene overturns the model of hierarchical consciousness Delany proposes in the earlier chapter. Despite Ptorn‟s suggestion that apes cannot predict “obvious” deterministic events, this ape-child (who has been taught the mathematical secrets of the game by Jon‟s sister Clea) has learned the math so thoroughly that its application has become instinctual for him; he can play the game rapidly, shooting coins with just a few quick measurements. He uses a tool (a cross between a compass and a straightedge) to compensate for his lack of basic perceptual ability, but his “consciousness” (his ability to understand the game as predictable rather than random) can still be equal to (or greater than) that of the giants. Towers therefore suggests that there can be different basic perceptual aptitudes, but this doesn‟t imply that one group will naturally be more “conscious” than another. The apes can “expand” their consciousness through education and technology to reach a similar state as the giants (and, ironically, Ptorn is not able to perceive that apes have this same potential for perceptual awareness). 166

Delany‟s development of this theme reaches its climax at the end of City of a Thousand Suns when Vol Nonik contemplates the tensions between randomness and predictability: Yes, when we know everything, the random disappears, but while we‟re finding out we still have to deal with it somehow. So the idea of the random is a philosophical tool, like God, or The Absurd, or Das Ubermensch, Existence, Death, Masculine, Feminine, or Morality. They aren‟t things; they are the names we arbitrarily give to whole areas of things; sharpening tools for the blade of perception we strike reality with. (412) Nonik observes that heightened perceptions can eliminate the illusion of randomness, but the problem remains that until perception reaches extraordinary levels, “we still have to deal with it somehow.” The challenge, then, is not simply to increase perceptive power in order to eliminate randomness (although this is clearly vital), but also to determine how to “deal with” randomness that cannot be eliminated from a given perceptual vantage. Delany suggests that there is always room to expand one‟s consciousness; apes don‟t need to surrender to the “randomness” of the randomax game because they begin from a disadvantaged position. Similarly, the book implies that it is absurd to accept with any degree of complacence the incomprehensibility of social, political, and economic phenomena; “cognitive mapping” of such conditions can offer powerful modes of understanding, and complacency leaves one consuming cheap fish produced from slave labor in tacit support of the imperial economic status quo. At the same time, there are some phenomena that are unpredictable or only semi-predictable. Nonik offers the mathematical example of predicting prime numbers: 167

We can tell exactly what the percentage of prime numbers will be between any two given numbers, yet we still can‟t arrive at a formula to predict exactly where they are, other than by trial and error. Unpredictable and predictable. The product of the first N primes plus one is usually another prime. But between the Nth prime and the prime we arrive at there are always others lurking, scattered throughout the real numbers. Like the irregularities in a poem, the quirks in meaning and syntax and imagery that cage the violent, and the very beautiful. (407) From Nonik‟s perspective, developing enhanced perceptual tools is vital, but grappling with the limits of perception, consciousness, and predictability is equally pressing. Striving for greater awareness can offer greater degrees of control over “random” phenomena, but striving to gain perfect control over things that seem random (such as death) can lead to despair and psychosis. In a scene originally omitted from City of a Thousand Suns (included in the afterward of the revised edition), Nonik suggests to Catham that “Even if a man can‟t control anything else . . . he should at least be able to control when he dies. That‟s all he‟s free to do” (436). This “freedom” can only be achieved through suicide, and this is reflected in Nonik‟s own suicide resulting from his despair following Renna‟s death. The ultimate gesture of control over randomness is self-murder; Nonik‟s definition of “freedom” implies “mastery;” you can only be “free” if you can escape “enslavement” by forces beyond your own deliberate control. This suicidal “freedom” is senseless and unbearable, as Jon discovers by the trilogy‟s conclusion. Towers therefore argues for progressive rational mappings of empirical phenomena while at the same time echoing Horkheimer and Adorno‟s reservations concerning the “dialectic of the enlightenment.” Delany is sensitive to the danger of a 168

violent over-emphasis on epistemological mapping that causes rational inquiry to give birth to technical logics that transform humans into instruments. This threatens to violate Kant‟s fundamental imperative to treat human beings as ends-in-themselves rather than as means-to-achieve ends.6 According to Pheng Cheah, Horkheimer and Adorno make a strong distinction between “instrumental” and “critical” forms of reason: “instrumental” reason is a dominating rationality willing to treat humans as tools or instruments, while “critical” reason, in contrast, liberates Enlightenment rationalism from its complicity with human instrumentality (Inhuman Conditions, 259-262). Horkheimer and Adorno thus propose a critique of modernity intended to transcend modernity‟s limitations, and Delany articulates a similar proposal in City of a Thousand Suns. The novel argues that political consciousness must strive to map empirical conditions, yet it must always remain aware of the limits of mapability to prevent reason from become instrumental rather than liberatory. Towers‟ model of consciousness therefore turns on what DeKoven calls a “pivot” between a utopian modern consciousness and a “postmodern” consciousness that admits (and prioritizes) epistemological limits and subjective multiple mappings. In its investigation of the important limits of rational epistemological mappings, Towers anticipates what Best and Kellner call “metacartography,” or a specific mode of cognitive mapping which acknowledges that “multiple chartings are relevant, indeed necessary, because domains of social reality and specific social contexts are distinct; thus

6

For a discussion of Kant‟s categorical imperatives in relation to human rights, see Pheng Cheah, “Humanity in the Field of Instrumentaility,” PMLA 121:5 (October 1996): 1552-1554. Cheah also discusses Horkheimer and Adorno‟s “dialectic of the enlightenment” in Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2006), 1-13.

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it is a pragmatic question to ask which modes of representation should be used in a particular constellation” (8). A metacartographic emphasis on multiple mappings is vital because, as the narrative argues in Towers: Each person moves toward whatever maturity he is seeking in a different direction. He approaches each observed incident from that direction, sees it from that one side; but it may not be the same side someone else sees . . . We cannot trace the experiences that bring a man to observe a given phenomenon from a given side. Relative to our limited perception, much of his reaction is random. (381-383) Individuals experience “observed incidents” from different angles, and these perceptual differences are not reducible to “random” factors that can be eliminated through the crafting of a perfect rational epistemology. Differences in individual experience make a difference, and this emphasis is particularly important coming from a writer whose own difference (as a black, gay, dyslexic science fiction writer) informs the way he observes (and writes about) various subjects and conditions.

The Imperial Unconscious The previous sections have examined modern and postmodern figurations of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers. I have argued that Delany‟s model of consciousness is modern insofar as he demands an empirical mapping of material conditions, and postmodern insofar as he criticizes the instrumental will to knowledge that generates the dialectic of the enlightenment. Any unqualified acceptance of postmodern disorientation is unacceptable for Delany, because the absence of “cognitive maps” results in acquiescence to the expansion 170

of Empire as a “decentered and deterritorializing apparatus of rule that progressively incorporates the entire global realm within its open, expanding frontiers” (Hardt and Negri, Empire xii). Greater “consciousness” of these conditions, however, does not result in a perfect utopian political perspective, because specific conditions will always be more complicated than any map can model, and social awareness alone does not result in political, economic, and institutional transformation. In his dual commitment to empirical mapping and to the irreducibility of subjective experience, Delany offers a resolution to what seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between modern and postmodern ideals of political consciousness. In this third and final section, I examine imperial war as the principle object of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers. If Towers articulates what DeKoven calls a “pivot” between modern and postmodern forms of knowledge, the central epistemological uncertainty in the trilogy centers on the operations of Empire. The Toromon Empire is the dominant social, economic, and political formation in the trilogy, but as we have seen, few characters are able to understand how it functions or why. Each of the three novels centers on imperial war: Out of the Dead City examines the preparation for war and the population‟s acceptance of the discourse of the war‟s “inevitability.” The Towers of Toron stages a simulated cyberwar to maintain the Empire‟s economic status quo. Finally, City of a Thousand Suns portrays an automated technowar (the return of Toromon‟s imperial repressed) resulting from the madness of the sentient computer who managed the cyberspace simulation in the previous book. Delany‟s attitude toward imperial war in this trilogy reflects his dual modern and postmodern commitments. Toron‟s war is generated by economic interests, and it is 171

enabled by the widespread misunderstanding and mystification surrounding imperial economic conditions. This misunderstanding calls for greater “cognitive mapping” of basic imperial operations. Having established the need for empirical mapping, however, Delany simultaneously challenges the idea that a single view or a “correct” subjectivity should be imposed by force because this “instrumental” approach to subjectivity would perpetuate the dialectic of the enlightenment. Furthermore, the coercive production of knowledge and subjectivity reflects an imperial fantasy of “programmable” subjects usable for military ends. Delany dramatizes Tel‟s military brainwashing in The Towers of Toron in order to critique the instrumentalization of knowledge through force, despite the fact that more accurate knowledge is required to dismantle the cultural foundations of imperial war. Out of the Dead City demonstrates how the “inevitability” of war has become an unquestioned consensus throughout the Toromon Empire, despite the fact that only a few members of the Council have any sense of what is causing the war. This widespread acceptance of war is presented as an unconscious “sleep” from which it is difficult to “awaken,” as we have seen exemplified in the figure of young King Uske. In a rare moment of insight during the first book, Geryn (the leader of a group a malcontents) explains the “real” cause of the war: Tormomon has got into a situation where its excesses must be channeled toward something external. Our science has outrun our economics. Our laws have become stricter, and we say it is to stop the rising lawlessness. But it is to supply workers for the mines that the laws tighten, workers who will dig more tetron, that more citizens shall be jobless, and must therefore become lawless to survive. Ten years ago, before the aquariums, there was perhaps four percent unemployment in Toron. Today the prices of fish are a fifth of what they were, yet unemployment has reached 172

twenty percent of the city‟s populace. A quarter of our people starve. More arrive every day. What will we do with them? We will use them to fight a war. The University turns out scientists whose science we cannot use lest it put more people out of work. What will we do with them? We will use them to fight a war. (43) As Geryn‟s critique gains momentum, he continues: “We do not know who or what we will be fighting . . . We will be fighting ourselves, but we will not know it. According to history, it is customary in a war to keep each side in ignorance of the other. Or give them lies like those we use to frighten children instead of the truth” (43). Geryn‟s analysis is penetrating, but the situation is worse than he imagines. Rather than each “side” being kept in ignorance of the other, the “sides” in the war are fabricated constructions. The “enemy behind the barrier” is a staged social hallucination.7 In this sense, Delany‟s fictional war is more “postmodern” than the 7

There are significant differences between the original and revised editions of The Fall of the Towers that are important to note here. In the revised text (my primary focus), there is almost no tangible evidence of an “enemy” behind the radiation barrier; the illusion of an enemy is produced by the trickery of the Lord of the Flames and by the Empire‟s own propaganda technologies. In the original edition of Captives of the Flame, however, the “enemy” is actually a primitive tribe of humans living behind the barrier. Jon explains: “The Lord of the Flames got into one of them just about when he was at age four. Then he gave the kid about sixty-thousand years worth of technical information. So he began building all sorts of goodies, forcing his people to help him, using some equipment from a ruined city that dates from pre-Great Fire times behind the barrier. That‟s how the generators and anti-aircraft guns got constructed” (139). In the original version of The Towers of Toron, Catham explains that when the Lord of the Flames was gone, “we annexed the neo-Neanderthal race that had manned the projectors, the same way that we had annexed the forest people forty years previously” (14). He also notes that the Empire then went on to conquer a “non-human mutant race” called the “Tranu” before encountering the inhuman “Ketrall” who are later revealed to be a fictional construction of the Tormonon government (14). In the revised trilogy, Delany removes all mention of the neo-Neanderthals and the mutant Tranu, and the fictional “Ketrall” are presented as a faceless and unnamed enemy. Seth McAvoy argues that such revisions for the collected 1966 edition are “minor,” although he acknowledges that the removal of reference to actual enemies makes the war more “shadowy” and “heightens the wrongness of the war – that people would fight against and enemy they had never seen seemed far more horrible” (44). I would take this argument further and suggest that Delany‟s revisions emphasize his central focus on the ideological production of imperial war at home; by removing the “monsters” who serve as enemies in the original editions, Delany highlights the monstrousness of the discursive production of Others within imperial cultures.

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Vietnam war to which it alludes. Despite the domestic propaganda that surrounded Vietnam, it is often considered to be a modern imperial war, and the lies told by the American government about Vietnam can unmistakably be revealed as falsehoods.8 Toromon‟s war, in contrast, anticipates the postmodern spectacle of the Persian Gulf Wars, where “real” events are superceded by “virtual” mediations that “erode the distinctions between reality and unreality” (Best and Kellner 73). When soldiers in The Towers of Toron are shown training films to prepare them to confront the “enemy,” they are not being “lied” to in the sense of being shown a “false” representation of their adversary; instead, they are being shown an accurate representation of a fictional enemy that has the real power to kill them, regardless of its fictional ontology. This blurring of truth and falsehood creates a situation “wherein differences and boundaries implode in a process that renders the categories of modern theory obsolete” (Best and Kellner 74). According to Geryn, the central problem generating the need for such spectacular wars is the Empire‟s own abundance. Toromon‟s social and technological advancement has created a variety of excesses: surplus labor has produced an excess of tetron, which produces an of excess cheap fish, which generates excessive joblessness, which results in an explosion of criminals who become tetron miners, etc. The other key “excess” is the excessive abundance of wealth for those (the members of the Council and Jon‟s father) who profit the most from the tetron productions. This imperial economic situation generates social unrest, and this can be seen in the rise of “malcontents” (like Geryn) in Toron. Elites in Toron see the war as a solution to this problem, because war will bleed away the excess malcontents (at the lowest end of 8

See J. William Gibson‟s The Perfect War (1987) for more on Vietnam as a modern imperial conflict.

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the economic spectrum) while allowing the upper classes (particularly the Council) to continue to enjoy extraordinary profits. Delany‟s portrayal of Toromon‟s war as a “safety valve” to manage the unrest resulting from systemic imperial inequities resonates with existing conditions in America in the 1960s and today. 9 Towers dramatizes the rise of a “military-industrial complex” (a social formation in which state capitalism depends on military productions) following World War Two, and Delany implicitly argues that imperial nations (including the United States) depend on military production and violent conflict in order to maintain the wealth and affluence of an elite class (Best and Kellner 58). In Toromon, conscription plays a key role in this process: At the highest levels, academics like Clea are conscripted to develop new technologies, while lower-class malcontents are drafted to fight on the front lines and sacrifice their lives against the enemy. The richness and complexity of Delany‟s narrative makes it difficult to draw an exact parallel between Toromon‟s war and America‟s imperial activities in Vietnam, but few readers in the 1960s would have failed to see Towers as a critical argument against the domestic conscription policies of the Cold War. Towers emphasizes that the central motivation for war is economic. Differential inclusion in the economic system (slavery, the exploitation of colonists, and the corresponding surplus) results in excessive wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, and this drives down the price of labor (forcing the poor to “sell” their labor at a huge disadvantage, because they are essentially competing with “free” slave labor, the product 9

Contemporary studies demonstrate that military enlistment is proportionally higher among lower socioeconomic classes during wartime. See Kleykamp, Meredith. “College, Jobs, or the Military? Enlistment During a Time of War.” Social Science Quarterty 87 (2), 272-290.

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of imperial exploitation). In the novel, the historian Rolth Catham (an expert on twentieth century America) reflects on the importance of continuously expanding state borders for imperial economics; Catham argues that Toron is “unique” because “no empire that we know of before the Great Fire ever survived for over a hundred years in complete isolation from any disruptive force. Nor did any empire, country, or even tribe that was in isolation develop once it had been isolated” (161). Toron, in contrast, has been isolated for over five hundred years, and Catham is certain that “eventually the bottle will explode” (161). Delany explicitly associates imperialism with the need for continuous expansion; without new spaces (either new markets or zones of conflict), imperial conditions are inherently unsustainable. If the first novel in the trilogy examines how inaccurate knowledges are central to imperial war, the second book dramatizes the Empire‟s mass production of military subjectivity. In Out of the Dead City, Toromon‟s subjects have accepted the “inevitability” of the war, and the Council is eager to begin the conflict before the opportunity is “lost” or “misplaced.” Delany emphasizes the economic foundations of this imperial war, and the novel suggests that a greater “mapping” of imperial conditions will be required to disrupt the power of the social consensus driving the war forward. In The Towers of Toron, the war unfolds in earnest, but it is eventually revealed that the entire conflict is a computer-generated simulation (similar to the virtual reality world presented in The Matrix). In the absence of a “real” enemy behind the radiation barrier, the Council has created a fictional opponent and a simulated war calculated by a ruthless computer that executes soldiers at random (based on a randomization process extracted from the principles of the “randomax” game). Again, a heightened “consciousness” of 176

specific conditions is presented as the solution to the social “sleepwalking” that enables the war to take place. At the same time as the novel calls for an “awakening” of consciousness surrounding the basic causes of the war, however, The Towers of Toron also interrogates how the Empire attempts to mass-produce military subjectivity by brainwashing troops to prepare them for cyberspace battles. The instrumentalization of human consciousness is one of the central themes of The Towers of Toron. The book alternates between scenes featuring Jon, Clea, Alter, and the other heroes from the first novel and a parallel narrative of Tel‟s experience as an imperial soldier. Delany depicts Tel‟s basic training as a form of brutal brainwashing, and a military psychologist later notes that the training process is “set up to make the most destructive and illogical human actions appear as controlled and nonrandom as possible” (342). Recruits are bombarded with propaganda about the inhuman menace of the enemy behind the barrier; their training takes place through “vision hoods” and “earphones” (199) and cleverly produced films (202-203). They‟re made to feel “confused and uncomfortable” (200) by disjointed juxtapositions of arousing images such as “a girl with a remarkable figure, wearing a skimpy bathing suit” interrupted by harsh blinding lights and painful deafening noises. The point of these virtual exercises, they are told, is that they should be prepared to respond to shock and disorientation with “calmness, alertness, and quick reactions; not confusion and disorder” (200). Later they are trained in various meaningless tasks; Tel learns how to repair a machine called the 606-B (sometimes confusingly called the 605-B), although he is never told what the machine is used for.

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Tel‟s brainwashing is complete when he is conditioned to give appropriate responses (and to feel that they are appropriate) even when he knows that his actions are meaningless. During his “graduation” from basic training, he is placed in a dark room filled with vague shapes and lights and asked to describe what he sees. Tel reflexively gives Pavlovian responses to harsh sounds (which punish him when he gives an incorrect answer) and pleasant green lights (which reward him when he is appropriately obedient). Finally, Tel is driven to a psychological breakdown by painful blasts of sound, and his programmers demand that he narrate a meaningful interpretation from the random lights and sounds. He describes what he thinks he should see: „the 605-B, or maybe the 606-B, I‟m not sure . . . I have to put it together. I can put both of them together. I can put both of them together . . . that‟s right, either one. They‟re almost the same, but they‟re different down in the drive box. I fix them so . . .‟ And a sudden thought welled warm and comfortable into his mind, and with it amazing relief that started in his shoulders and washed down to his feet. „. . . so we can fight the enemy behind the barrier. That‟s what it‟s for. It must be. It‟s the 606-B, and I can take it apart and put it together, take it apart and put it . . .‟ (206) Tel is battered until he can‟t distinguish his own name from the name of the machine he repairs. This is an instrumentalizing process; Tel must accept his own status as a tool serving his function in relation to other tools. Delany frames this process as frightening and absurd (it echoes other stories, such as Kafka‟s “In the Penal Colony,” that dramatize the horrors of torture in the service of psychological coercion), and he portrays Tel‟s agony in order to highlight the dangers of the “dialectic of the enlightenment,” and the ways in which progressive “reason” can serve to justify human instrumentalization.

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While this “brainwashing” scenario may at first seem like a science fiction extravagance, Delany is not alone in his concern regarding the technological manipulation of human consciousness for military purposes during the 1960s. David Farber notes that after World War II “both military and political elites had come to believe that psychiatry and the behavioral sciences should play a critical role in the liminal world of national security” (21). Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain‟s Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond (1994) chronicles how the CIA conducted LSD experiments on American citizens in the attempt to develop mind-control techniques during the 1950s, and Jonathan D. Moreno‟s Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense (2006) examines how neuroscientific research continues to have military implications at the dawn of the twenty-first century. Delany is not using “mind control” as a fantastic trope: his portrayal of military brainwashing is what Darko Suvin would call a “cognitive” extrapolation of the scientific and political possibilities of his historical moment. Delany‟s portrayal of brainwashing stands in sharp and deliberate contrast to the representation of military mind control in Heinlein‟s popular novel Starship Troopers (1959). In his autobiography The Motion of Light in Water, Delany notes that Towers was a specific response to Heinlein: The United States was already in the first years of the immoral and grueling Vietnam war. Glorifying war as a viable field for personal growth, Robert Heinlein‟s Starship Troopers had recently won a Hugo award for best SF novel of its year . . . Much in the book had fascinated me. But much in it had appalled. I wanted to make my work an answer to what I felt (and still feel) was specious in Heinlein‟s argument. (193)

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Starship Troopers glorifies war, and it celebrates the use of both technology and military discipline in order to produce “correct” states of consciousness. The first chapter begins as “Jonnie” (a mobile infantry soldier) is about to make a “drop” (a landing from space on the surface of a planet to conduct military operations). The book opens: I always get the shakes before a drop. I‟ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can‟t really be afraid. The ship‟s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn‟t fear, it isn‟t anything important – it‟s just the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate. (1) Jonnie‟s training has consisted of “virtual” experience through hypnosis; in Heinlein‟s future, the power of psychological “inner space” has been scientifically harnessed for military use. Drugs, hypnosis, and psychiatric consultation are all tools for producing the proper states of consciousness required for military combat. In addition, the proper “conditioning” of inner space through coercive military discipline produces subjectivities that are both useful and morally “correct.” Consciousness expansion, in Heinlein‟s view, does not lead to an irreducible multiplicity of unique perspectives, but rather to a unitary consensus and a single “correct” way of looking at the world that reifies the values of the society and state. Although Delany appreciates the optimism represented by a future free from racial prejudice (against humans) in Starship Troopers10, he rejects Heinlein‟s celebration of war and his glorification of the technological manipulation of human consciousness for

10

Delany discusses his appreciation for Heinlein‟s treatment of race in Starship Troopers in the first appendix of Trouble on Triton (1976). See Delany, Trouble on Triton. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan UP, 1996. p. 287.

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military ends. Towers is a sustained rejection of the idea that minds should be “corrected” either through technological manipulation or coercive discipline. Heinlein imagines that using hypnosis to upload battle plans will be useful; Delany responds by suggesting that the uploading of human consciousness into a digital battlefield will be a nightmare. In Starship Troopers, military discipline produces the proper political consciousness for active citizenship, and only individuals with military service are enfranchised with the right to vote. In Towers, military “conditioning” does not produce good citizens; it generates a fictional war that sacrifices the bodies and minds of the lower classes in order to maintain an inequitable and unjust imperial order. In sharp contrast to Heinlein, Delany does not portray “truth” as something that is achieved by a specialized elite after years of mental correction and military discipline. The “truth” of the war in Towers is so difficult to accept that neither individuals nor the society as a whole can apprehend it without experiencing psychological trauma. When Jon, Petra, Arkor, Catham, and Clea finally confront the Council with the “truth” of the war, the Council members are confused and indignant; they refuse to believe that the war is fictional. It is soon revealed that the war first “sprouted in the late king‟s mind,” but that the “seeds” of the idea existed throughout “every mind in Toromon” (186). Delany suggests that the entire empire knows and disavows the secret of the war; the unconscious denial of this hidden “truth” is what keeps the Empire whole. Even the Council members, who approved and produced the fictional war, have erased their own memories in order to hide from the horrifying implications of their own actions. Clea, who worked with the scientists to create the technologies for the war, deduced what was actually happening while she was working for the government, and she was so horrified that she 181

repressed the knowledge away within herself and refused to acknowledge it until Arkor telepathically softened her self-imposed mental barriers in his search for the truth. At the end of The Towers of Toron, the telepathic giants reach out into the minds of the citizens of the Empire and release the repressed truth of the war. Delany presents this as a moment of collective consciousness expansion; he offers a montage of scenes where individuals throughout the Empire realize that their negative emotions are hiding their unconscious guilt and understanding of the war. This climax is both psychedelic and apocalyptic; it is “psychedelic” insofar as the giants reach into the minds of the citizens and expand their consciousness of self and world, and it is “apocalyptic” insofar as these revelations disrupt the social relations that constitute the stability of the Empire.11 Delany‟s implication is that any Empire (including America in the 1960s) has an “imperial unconscious” – a set of taken-for-granted social discourses (like the consensus concerning the “inevitability” of war) and socio-economic conditions (like slave labor, economic reality, etc.) – that produce and sustain imperial relations. The giants force Toromon to excavate its own hidden imperial unconscious.12 Furthermore, Delany suggests that this imperial unconscious has a repressive Freudian dimension; the problem is not that individuals cannot map imperial conditions, it‟s that on the whole, they don‟t 11

David Ketterer analyzes the apocalyptic tradition in science fiction; he argues that “apocalyptic transformation results from the creation of a new condition . . . whereby man‟s horizons – temporal, spatial, scientific, and ultimately philosophic – are abruptly expanded” (148). See Ketterer, “The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature.” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays. Ed. Mark Snow. Eaglewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1976. 12

My term “imperial unconscious” is an adaptation of Fredrick Jameson‟s notion of the “political unconscious” from his book of the same name. See Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.

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wish to do so, because the disavowal of such conditions is what maintains the continuity of individual and social imperial identities.13 At the end of The Towers of Toron, the solution Delany offers is mass consciousness raising; the giants “awaken” the population to the reality of the war, the “big lie” is revealed for its hidden truth, and the war immediately comes to an end. In this sense, The Towers of Toron represents a modern attitude toward political consciousness. If the sleeping masses can somehow be enlightened by the apprehension of the truth, political and social change will be the inevitable and immediate result. Insofar as Delany‟s trilogy attempts to offer a specific “map” of the social discourses and economic conditions that produce American imperialism in the 1960s, The Fall of the Towers is a failure. It allegorically references America‟s involvement in Vietnam, yet it fails to map the complexity of Vietnam from an American or a Vietnamese historical perspective. Delany focuses on “war” as a social hallucination, but he fails to interrogate the institutional forms of power that create and sustain wars in spite of popular resistance and mass protest. The solution he offers in The Towers of Toron – a massive awakening of consciousness – is inadequate; a change in awareness of the basic causes and conditions of imperial conflict ends the simulacrum war in Towers, but widespread public awareness and protest does not end America‟s involvement in Vietnam in the 1960s, and public dissatisfaction alone is not sufficient to dismantle America‟s imperial activities in the Middle East today.

13

Delany‟s fascination with how unconscious repression can constitute the boundaries of individual and group identity reflects his debt to Theodore Sturgeon, particularly Sturgeon‟s novel More Than Human (1953). Delany expresses his admiration for Sturgeon several times throughout The Motion of Light in Water.

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Delany‟s “failures,” however, are also his key successes; insofar as it fails to map the specific conditions that involve America in Vietnam (or to extrapolate those conditions accurately in a fictional novum), Towers succeeds in representing the very difficulty of “mapping” imperial economics within an increasingly global postmodern context. Furthermore, Delany addresses the failures of The Towers of Toron in the third and final novel in the trilogy, City of a Thousand Suns. In Suns, we discover that the mass moment of consciousness expansion – what Vol Nonik calls “the bright moment” when the citizens of the empire “learned their doom” – was not enough to completely end the war (305). Despite its fictional ontology, the war becomes embodied in an institutional and material structure; it lives on as the return of Toron‟s imperial repressed within the sentient computer constructed to simulate the war and to randomly decide which solders‟ lives would be lost and spared. In Suns, we discover that it is not enough to “awaken” an imperial population to the injustices of war; in addition to consciousness raising and greater mapping of specific conditions, substantive change also requires the dismantling of embedded power formations. In The Fall of the Towers, this involves stopping the computer and disarming its remote control over the Empire‟s weapons of war. In the real world, this implies specific legal, political, and economic changes, such as actively electing leaders opposed to war, and taking legal action to challenge executive “interpretations” of constitutional law, among many other specific possibilities.

Conclusion In The Motion of Light in Water, Delany comments on the relationships between The Fall of the Towers and postmodernism by describing his reaction to a theatrical 184

experiment called Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts (by Allan Kaprow) that he attended in New York in 1960. Delany begins by observing that his first year of high school, 1956, is often cited (in one of many arbitrary distinctions) as the year America transitioned from an “Industrial” to “Postindustrial” state: “it was the year the country‟s white collar workers finally exceeded in number its combined blue-collar and agricultural workers” (200). This is important because it contextualizes Delany‟s early sensitivity to the larger economic conditions (an early phase of late capitalism and American globalization) now labeled under the term “postmodernity.” He notes, “four years later, only years after this postindustrial point . . . Allan Kaprow first presented a new work, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts . . . Many times now Kaprow‟s piece (today we would call it „performance art‟) has been cited by art historians as the (equally arbitrary) transition between the modern and the postmodern in cultural developments” (201). He then offers his firsthand experience of the performance, which he attended with his cousin Boyd: I confess now (in a way I was unwilling to admit to Boyd at the time), I‟d been disappointed in it. Boyd wanted his singular narrative meaning. And I still wanted my meaningful plentitude. But I can also say, at this distance, that mine was the disappointment of that late romantic sensibility we call modernism presented with the postmodern condition. And the work I saw was far more interesting, strenuous, and aesthetically energetic than the riot of sound, color, and light centered about actorly subjects in control of an endless profusion of fragmentary meanings that I‟d been looking forward to. Also it was far more important: as a representation and analysis of the situation of the subject in history, I don‟t think Kaprow‟s work could have been improved upon. And, in that sense, Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts was about as characteristic a work as one might choose in which to experience the clash that begins our reading of the hugely arbitrary postmodern. (208)

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What does Delany mean when he says that Kaprow‟s happening was “a representation and analysis of the situation of the subject in history,” and therefore “as characteristic a work as one might choose in which to experience the clash that begins our reading of the hugely arbitrary postmodern?” During the happening, the space is divided in an unusual way: the audience is split among the six “parts” (or rooms) where they observe a series of seemingly random “happenings” (setting a ball of string on a table, winding up a toy). Sometimes audience members can sense that something is “happening” in one of the alternate chambers due to the semi-transparency of the plastic walls, but they are also aware of their distance and removal from these events, and they have no context by which to understand if the “happenings” in their chamber are related (in a narrative or causal manner) to the “happenings” in the other chambers. Delany argues that Kaplow‟s work makes a comment about “the situation of the subject in history” because there is not a single subject position (a privileged vantage point) that offers a “better” angle from which to understand what is “happening.” Many things that are “happening” can be quite arbitrary, and no single historical narrative about how they relate to other correlated “happenings” can get to an underlying truth that “unifies” the events. Kaplow‟s postmodern aesthetic uses a very rigorous formal model (the deliberately positioning of viewers, extensive instillation, careful and controlled performances) in order to challenge the (modern) notion that history (understood not as the events, but the subjective „experience‟ of events) can be accessed from a position of epistemological mastery. Delany contrasts his expectation with Boyd‟s, but both of their responses represent “modern” frames of reference: Boyd wants a “singular narrative meaning” 186

(characteristic of modernity and the legacy of Enlightenment rationality), while Delany wants “meaningful plentitude” (characteristic of aesthetic modernism‟s response to modernity, an exploration of multiple perspectives that nonetheless imagines those perspectives from a unitary outside vantage from which they can be compared and evaluated). Kaplow challenges the notion of this outside vantage, suggesting that everyone will leave the happening with their own experience, and it is the disjunction of those experiences (rather than the impulse to unify them) that is the point of the “happening.” Delany then uses this experience to reflect on The Fall of the Towers in light of his response to Eighteen Happenings in Six Parts: The larger point is that this notion of history is almost absent from The Fall of the Towers – from the SF trilogy I planned on the bridge two years later – although I had been exposed to that notion in its most intense artistic representation and had even understood a bit of it. If it emerges in certain of the book‟s images (the multichambered computer, the macrosocial structure, the fragmentary social portraiture), it is accidental, cursory – not psychological, not aesthetic, but . . . historical. (208) Delany says that despite the fact that he was exposed to postmodern aesthetics, he was not intentionally experimenting with them in his own work when he was writing Towers; he was approaching his fiction with a modern aesthetic bias. My argument, however, is that despite his modernist leanings, one of the main subjects of Towers is his analysis of the emergent conditions of postmodernity. Similar to Jameson and David Harvey, Delany implies that a large-scale map of how subjects are formed within economic and political contexts is necessary, particularly under an imperial milieu. Towers is a much more interesting exploration of history and subjectivity than Eighteen Happenings in Six 187

Parts because it deliberately situates the production of individual subjects within economic and political conditions. Kaplow‟s art can comment on “the situation of the subject in history” only by distancing itself from explicit references to specific political and economic conditions. His work integrates art with life and breaks down the walls between author and spectator, but in the end, “normal” people like Boyd just go home confused and bewildered. Delany‟s fiction, in contrast, complements a postmodern politics of the self (a need for personal enlightenment and individual change) with a modern social politics of direct activism. By the end of the trilogy, Delany emerges as a modern revisionist; he embraces the challenges against instrumentality and the celebration of individual subjectivity offered by postmodern critique, and at the same time, he maintains a modern emphasis on the accurate mapping and representation of political and economic circumstances. His fiction calls for strong action (not just personal development and individual awareness) in order to produce social and political change within and against imperial formations of power.

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Chapter Five: Towards A Cosmopolitan Science Fiction

Introduction This dissertation as a whole considers the changes that take place in imperial discourse during a historical moment (the 1960s) when imperial practices are changing throughout the world. My argument has been that SF, as a mode of cultural production that has always been sensitive to Empire, indexes changes in imperial practices and the transformations in imperial discourse that accompany them. My first chapter examined Heinlein, Herbert, and Clark, three authors whose representative SF texts appropriate the postcolonial notion of "psychic decolonization" for the advantage of privileged male subjects, and whose fictional extrapolations fantasize what Istvan Csicery-Ronay Jr. describes as the entelechtical transition from colonial imperialism towards Hardt and Negri's postmodern notion of Empire. My second chapter introduced SF's New Wave, and it argued that by turning from "outer" to "inner" space explorations, New Wave fictions re-articulate constructions of masculinity that occur in American and British imperial-adventure genres. My third chapter examined British postcolonial ambivalence in the work of Michael Moorcock and J.G. Ballard with a concluding examination of Marxist geographer David Harvey's role in the New Wave; the chapter argued that British SF authors respond to the historical moment of Western European decolonization with profoundly mixed feelings, and that they utilize the metaphor of "entropy" to thematize the decline and fall of empire. My fourth chapter considered Samuel Delany's early SF trilogy The Fall of the Towers, and it suggested that Delany's simultaneous commitment

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to a modern emphasis on rational epistemology and a postmodern sensitivity to problems of subjectivity and difference allows him to explore the complexities of cognitively "mapping" postmodern imperial conditions. In this concluding chapter, I turn to an examination of the Hanish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. My overall argument here is that Le Guin participates in the critique of imperialism that characterizes most science fiction in the 1960s, but her extrapolations develop throughout the course of the Hainish cycle beyond a negative critique of imperialism towards a positive and creative conceptualization of what Paul Gilroy calls cosmopolitan “conviviality” (xv). In essence, Le Guin theorizes cosmopolitanism as an alternative to imperial domination and exploitation. Le Guin's Hainish fictions assert that cosmopolitanism entails the philosophical and institutional establishment of an always-unfinished hegemony that is constantly in the process of interrogating and renegotiating its own constitutive exclusions. In Le Guin’s extrapolative imaginings, cosmopolitanism can be found in the “mystical” commitment of the Ekumen in The Left Hand of Darkness; it is an always-unfinished process, or (in Shevek’s terms) it is a commitment to the perpetual “unbuilding” of limiting walls. The positive contribution of this “unbuilding,” however, is that it refuses to function as a deterritorialization that serves the interests of a higher-order imperial reterritorialization, as Deleuze and Guattari argue can often be the case in such situations. Le Guin's cosmopolitanism emerges from what Butler, Laclau, and Zizek conceptualize as the radical contingency of actual existing relations and a commitment to the deterritorialization of the power in favor of convivial relations where individuals and social bodies interact on equitable terms.

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Cosmopolitanism Le Guin's SF extrapolations in the Hainish series resolve a theoretical impasse that troubles contemporary critical dialogues on cosmopolitanism. This impasse is a conceptual fissure in which cosmopolitan ethics are dismissed or problematized due to what can be seen as their reinforcement of universalizing and imperialist discourses. Cosmopolitanism, which was first imbued with theoretical vigor in modern discourse by Immanuel Kant's 1795 essay "Perpetual Peace," refers to an ideal of universal citizenship often considered to have achieved preliminary instrumental form in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Theories of cosmopolitanism have enjoyed a widespread interdisciplinary resurgence in the humanities, in the social sciences, in international relations, and among legal scholars since the 1990s. Despite rich interventions by Jacques Derrida, Paul Gilroy, and Pheng Cheah, some critics dismiss cosmopolitanism as a weak theoretical approach due to the popular treatment it has been given in books like Kwame Anthony Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006) and because cosmopolitan discourse has been an undercurrent in established cross-disciplinary critical theory. In addition to this, several scholars have posited objections to some contemporary conceptions of cosmopolitanism; if various notions of cosmopolitanism all share a commitment to imagining an interconnected world unconstrained by national boundaries, critics such as Zlatko Skrbis, Ian Woodward, and Thanh Duong have argued that cosmopolitanism can serve as another term for capitalist globalization, and that cosmopolitan discourse can be seen as a celebratory enabling logic of global capitalism. Critics also argue that the cosmopolitan

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ideal of "universal citizenship" is an Enlightenment conception that valorizes "reason" and reifies the idea of the "human" in troubling ways. Vivienne Jabri, for example, identifies a "liberal cosmopolitanism" that sanctifies the "human" in order to deploy an exceptionalist discourse that enables privileged sovereign states to impose their will on other states in the name of "human rights” (718-720). From my perspective, the existing critical objections to cosmopolitanism fail to account for differences between what I think of as "strong" and "weak" cosmopolitanisms. I'm adapting this distinction from the comparison Christopher Newfield and Avery F. Gordon make between “strong” and “weak” multiculturalisms in “Multiculturalism’s Unfinished Business.” Newfield and Gordon suggest that “weak” multiculturalism is little more than cultural assimilation or a limited acceptance of difference as long as it is enfolded under a larger sign of national unity. “Strong” multiculturalism, in contrast, is the embrace (on both the micro-social and macroinstitutional levels) of cultural pluralism, or the paradigm that “no single explanatory system or view of reality can account for all the phenomena of life” (a dictionary definition of pluralism that Newfield and Gordon quote on p. 81). Cultural pluralism, in their view, is an attitude that recognizes the valuable alterity of multiple ways of life and strives for a more complex and nuanced negotiation and exchange between cultures; this is a negotiation that goes beyond commodifiable differences (like food and clothing) into more complex ontological and ideological differences. The same distinction articulates the difference between “strong” and “weak” cosmopolitanisms. A strong cosmopolitan perspective answers the call (made by philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas or cultural critics like Judith Butler) to recognize

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the “face” of the Other rather than automatically subsuming the Otherness of the Other in the reductive dialectic of self/not-self. A weak cosmopolitan perspective proposes that there are universal values that are “right and true for every person, in every society,” as President George W. Bush suggests in his 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States of America, and that when there is disagreement concerning these “universal” values, it is appropriate to impose those values on those who disagree through the imperial exercise of force and power (Burke 217). "Weak" cosmopolitanisms fail to account for asymmetries of power between actors who are positioned differently on a global terrain (weak cosmopolitanism is an imperial deterritorialization of one's own limits without regard for the limits of others). "Strong" cosmopolitanisms, in contrast, foreground a consistent acknowledgement of the subjective autonomy of others. Strong cosmopolitan theorists, such as Mary Kaldor, Pheng Cheah, and Paul Gilroy, are committed to the best aspects of the projects of modernity and postmodernity. Like Delany, they aspire to combine a commitment to recognizing and respecting difference (a postmodern emphasis) with a parallel commitment to a kind of utopian idealism (a modern legacy). What's more, cosmopolitan theorists (at their best) are deeply critical of multiple forms of imperial domination, and from their critique of imperialism they establish the foundation for a deep recognition of Others on equitable terms that foreground mutual and reciprocal acknowledgement. The cosmopolitan perspective in international relations (as exemplified by Kaldor) combines ethical idealism (the belief that ethical concerns sometimes trump the sanctity of state sovereignty) with a strong commitment to multilateralism; there may be ethical concerns that merit staging "humanitarian interventions," for example, but no

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single state can determine the "correct" morality and claim to act on behalf of "universal" values; such interventions are only justifiable when a larger multilateral dialogue first occurs. Other strong cosmopolitan thinkers, such as Cheah, attempt to recover the notion of cosmopolitanism from its "weak" variants by theorizing cosmopolitanism as inclusive of differences (the best of postmodernity) while also committed to tactically-defined "universal" ideals (think Donna Haraway's "affinities" rather than "identities") upheld or advocated for by multilateral coalitions. One of the central problems of cosmopolitanism is to imagine a workable "normative" system of political ethics while acknowledging the radical relativity of ethical contexts. The solution (according to Anthony Burke and other political philosophers) is to remain committed to core ethical values without reifying such values as transcendent or universal; in practice, this means a commitment to uphold values (like human life) while remaining open to difficult context-specific dialogues and conversations. Burke argues that the essential challenge of a cosmopolitan ethics is "to create and nurture a permanent space of critique within moral reasoning and doctrine so that politics is never moralised or purified, but is always put to the test of an ethics which is permanently fissured by uncertainty" (163). Such an ethics remains committed to an ideal of progress (the Enlightenment legacy), but it also acknowledges that the notion of "progress" must remain open for multiple interpretations and formulations from a multitude of perspectives; no one ideal of "progress" may claim universal value and supersede all others. Some of the strongest theorizations of cosmopolitanism emerge from theorists who don't refer to it as such; in particular, Butler, Laclau, and Zizek approach the heart of

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cosmopolitan concerns in their collaborative book Contingency, Hegemony, Universality in the context of their debates concerning "radical democracy." Essentially, Butler and her collaborators call for the imagining of a form of political hegemony that constantly evaluates and calls into question its own constitutive exclusions; they seek to imagine an evolving radical democracy that is fundamentally changed from encounter to encounter as it remains open to new configurations based on its encounters with its inevitable exterior.

Le Guin Butler, Laclau, and Zizek theorize cosmopolitanism as a form of radical democracy, but they speak of it in abstract terms; no concrete examples exist in their work of what radical democracy might look like in practice. My argument is that Le Guin develops a strong model of cosmopolitan political practice in her Hanish cycle during the 1960s and 1970s. Like other SF writers in this period, Le Guin is critical of colonial imperialism, and like Delany, she holds a dual-commitment to a "cognitive mapping" of changing imperial conditions and a commitment to the acceptance and exploration of lived differences. Like Delany, she critiques what Hardt and Negri refer to as the "counter-revolutions" of both modernity and postmodernity, and she also remains devoted to both of their more radical "revolutions.” What's particularly interesting about Le Guin, however, is that it is possible to trace her thinking throughout the Hanish cycle from an underdeveloped critique of imperialism in the Worlds of Exile and Illusion novels to a more fully developed imperial critique and a further radical imagining of the

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possible political shapes of instantiated cosmopolitan conviviality in The Left Hand of Darkness. It is the purpose of my dissertation as a whole to show how science fiction indexes changes in imperial discourse in the 1960s. One such change is a movement beyond imperial critique; in addition to "mapping" the contours of continuing imperial injustices in the postcolonial period, some SF also attempts to imagine new and different ways of being in the world, alternative ways for social formations to relate (internally and externally) based on more equitable relations of power. If imperialism is a relationship between social formations that is based upon differential power and exploitation, the alternative, something that might be called "cosmopolitanism," is a relationship between social formations that is based on a more radical acceptance of alterity and more complex forms of equitability. If Carl Freedman suggests in Critical Theory and Science Fiction that SF is itself a form of critical theory, I argue that SF in the 1960s becomes a critical theory of imperialism, and one direction this critical theory moves is towards the imagining of cosmopolitan alternatives to imperial and colonial relations. It is interesting to note that SF arrives at its critical theories of imperialism and colonialism alongside, and sometimes in advance of, other critical theorists; Le Guin extrapolates an imagining of “radical democracy” years before Butler, Laclau, and Zizek. Critical approaches to Le Guin have focused on her imaginings concerning gender, sexuality, and utopianism, but few have examined Le Guin as a writer whose work offers an unfolding critique of imperialism. Furthermore, most critical analyses look at The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, and the Earthsea novels, but few pay attention to her earliest Hanish novels (collected together in Worlds of Exile and

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Illusion). My argument is that it is revealing to read the Hainish cycle from the beginning, because by doing so it is possible to see how Le Guin's later fiction responds to her own earlier ideas; as a whole, her writing moves, through an increasingly intricate imperial critique towards the imagining of a cosmopolitan ethos. Critical approaches that focus on Le Guin's approach to "utopia" gesture in this direction, but they lack sustained attention to how Le Guin responds to specific neo-imperial events and conditions in her immediate historical context.

Worlds of Exile and Illusion Le Guin’s first Hainish novels, collected together as Worlds of Exile and Illusion, exemplify the early seeds of cosmopolitanism in comparison to her later Hainish stories; their main focus is a straightforward critique of colonial imperialism and a developing critique of neoimperialism.

Rocannon’s World Rocannon’s World, which begins with a subaltern’s journey to the center of Empire and concludes with an imperial bureaucrat’s adventure on the imperial periphery, portrays the League of All Worlds (Le Guin’s interstellar supraplanetary body) as an imperial power that organizes client worlds without directly colonizing them; it divides the cosmos into “developed” and “developing” territories and imposes a universal rule upon them justified by the omnicrisis of a lurking “Enemy” that threatens from beyond.

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As such, the League reflects Le Guin’s perspective regarding American imperial globalization during the Cold War. 1 Rocannon’s World (1966) begins with a Prelude in which a noblewoman named Semley from a remote planet on the periphery of the interstellar League travels through space to a museum at the Empire's core to recover a jewel that once belonged to her family. Semley does not realize that although the trip seems brief for her, issues of relativity cause years to pass on her homeworld before she returns, and when she comes home, her husband has died and her daughter has grown up. The remainder of the novel is the story of an ethnologist named Rocannon who travels to Semley’s planet, Fomalhaut II, to conduct a survey expedition there after his encounter with Semley at the League museum. Rocannon's survey team is killed by rebels from a world called Faraday, and Rocannon and a team of indigenous allies infiltrate the rebels’ base in order to use their ansible (a FTL communications device) to contact the League for help; the League ultimately sends unmanned robot drone ships to annihilate the rebel camp. The most interesting portion of Rocannon’s World is the prologue, which begins with an entry on Fomahaut II from the League's Abridged Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms as Rocannon and a museum curator are attempting to identify Semley and her entourage in the museum. The narrative then cuts to Semley's point of view and recounts the story of her decision to leave her home to recover the necklace, her visit to the dwarfish Gdemiar (who bartered the gem to League representatives in 1

Rocannon's World was Le Guin's first published novel; the edition I'm referencing is anthologized along with Planet of Exile (1966) and City of Illusions (1967) in a single volume called Worlds of Exile and Illusion. The prologue to Rocannon's World, “Semley’s Necklace” originally appeared in 1964 in the pages of the SF magazine Amazing Stories.

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exchange for technological advancements), and her unwitting FTL journey to the museum. The story then switches back to Rocannon's point of view as Semley requests the return of the necklace (which the museum curator grants). The story finally shifts to Semley's perspective as she returns home to discover that nine years have passed on her homeworld while two subjective nights have passed for her. What's clever here is the way Le Guin portrays the incongruity between Rocannon’s imperial point of view and Semley’s subaltern perspective. The League of All Worlds is a non-colonial Empire akin to the United States during the Cold War; it seeks out new worlds, conducts a hasty survey of their races, determines which race seems to have the most potential for technological advancement (in this case the dwarfish Gdemiar), develops the technological potential of this race (they alone are given access to FTL space travel and communications), and then imposes (at gunpoint) a tax against all sentient races on the world (including Semley's race, the Angyar). The situation is rich with imperial allusions: The League is portrayed as generally benevolent; they aren't colonizers, they try to cultivate the "development" of species that have technological potential, and they even return Semley’s gem in a weak multicultural gesture of apology. In short, they are portrayed as a quasi-enlightened body, much like the self-image of the US following World War II. The central reason they focus on developing and taxing new races is because all these races will presumably work together against a mysterious nameless "enemy" that threatens them from the outside. The League’s legitimizing narrative for its imperial activities is predicated on what Hardt and Negri refer to as “omnicrisis,” or the establishment of a permanent political context of

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emergency to serve as the justification for imperial domination in a postmodern context where older imperial legitimizing narratives have eroded. The contrast of perspectives in the Prologue is a contrast between the perspectives of imperial center and periphery; Rocannon and the curator only know very brief “facts” about Semley and her world from their incomplete encyclopedic Handy Pocket Guide to Intelligent Life-forms, and their imperial perspective (understanding alien cultures only through encyclopedias and guide books and museum artifacts) shatters against the complex reality of Semley’s situation, which they have no way of accurately comprehending. Le Guin communicates the incommensurability of their worldviews by using SF conventions in the sections presented from Rocannon’s point of view and by using fantasy conventions in the sections presented from Semley’s point of view. The incommensurability of these two perspectives disrupts the traditional dynamics of what John Rieder calls the “colonial gaze,” or a way of looking (recording, cataloging, etc.) that accords epistemological authority to the imperialist while delegitimizing the perspective of the subaltern (7). It is not the case here that the imperialists “know” the inhabitants of Fomalhaut II better than they know themselves; they are not presented as enlightened scientists who are confronted with a superstitious savage. The opposite error – the fetishistic heightening of the magical quality of the other – is perhaps more the case; Rocannon is astonished by Semley’s beauty – he likens her to a “goddess” – and it seems like there is an erotic edge to his desire to “know” her and her world more deeply. What Le Guin is able to emphasize, however, is that Semley’s story only makes sense on her own terms as it is presented through her point of view and from her own perspective.

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Rocannon’s World thus offers a celebration of difference and a sensitivity to the autonomy of subjective experiences that cannot be reduced down to a universal scientific language. The encounter between Rocannon and Semley is precisely the opposite of the encounter between Jake and the silent woman in Harvey’s “Jake in the Forest;” Rocannon refuses to “map” his expectations onto her, and he does not demand that her situation conform to his predetermined epistemological norms. This portrayal offers a firm critique of a modern colonialist epistemology (what Young refers to as “ontological imperialism”), yet it also gestures toward an awareness of the shifting dynamics of postcolonial imperialism. The League imagines itself as a benevolent and inclusive non-imperial supraplanetary body, but as Hardt and Negri argue, postmodern Empire does not rely on the epistemological and categorical mastery demanded by classical imperialism; instead, it seeks to manage and organize difference rather than seeking to eliminate or eradicate difference as in the mode of modern colonial imperialism. The League establishes a racial hierarchy of the native life forms of the planet (one which Rocannon objects to, and he has relations with the planet suspended until better studies can be done), and worse, they take it upon themselves to “develop” one race while taxing all the other races that they can. This paternalistic “development” (in the name of shoring up resources to fight an impending “enemy”) resonates with Western activities in the “developing” world during the Cold War; the attitude is one of trying to help, but the practical result is economic benefit for the empire and a violent disruption of the local way of life that offers minimum ultimate benefits for the indigenous inhabitants as a whole.

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In short, the League embodies a critique of colonial imperialism and a reflection of an emergent set of new imperial norms. Rocannon’s objections to the League’s imperial developmental program increase as he observes the negative effects of the League’s policies firsthand, but the nascent neo-imperial critique that this observation might engender is overshadowed by the urgency of defeating the colonialist rebels from Faraday, and Le Guin is left to further develop a more nuanced neo-imperial critique in her later works.

Planet of Exile Planet of Exile, like Rocannon’s World, embodies a critique of colonialism and explores the complexities of non-colonial modes of imperial domination. Furthermore, the seeds of an early cosmopolitan ethos begin to emerge in Planet of Exile. The novel suggests that the universal idea of the “human” is useful insofar as it creates possibilities for empathy and common ground, but that the idea of “humanity” is limiting insofar as it creates categorical boundaries and exclusions that sublimate real differences under the sign of sameness in reductive ways. Planet of Exile tells the story of a planet with very long seasons where outsiders from the League of Worlds (the Farborn) live in permanent cities among nomadic indigenous peoples. The story takes place long after the events of Rocannon’s World, and the Farborn who reside on this world have been left behind by the League in a sort of permanent exile; the rest of the League population has left the planet to battle the "Enemy" foreshadowed in Rocannon’s World. The remaining Farborn must ally with a group of the natives when the murderous Gaal threaten to destroy them both; the Farborn

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(from the city of Landin) and the local natives (of Tevar) almost reach an agreement to form an alliance, but this is cut short when it becomes known that a Tevaran girl (Rolery) has been having an affair with a Landin leader (Jakob Agat Alterra). After an attack on Jakob, Rolery goes to live with the Farborn; the Gaal arrive and destroy the winter city of Tevar, and the Tevaran refugees seek solace in Landin. In the end, the Landin survivors are able to weather the Gaal attack, and it is revealed that the two peoples have (through a trick of radiation or through the breakdown of Farborn antibiotic sciences) become genetically compatible enough to produce offspring. Planet of Exile is remarkable because it represents Le Guin's early attitude towards the slipperiness of the notion of the "human.” Each of the different races in the story refers to its own members as "humans" while thinking of the others as "nonhumans." As they fall in love, Jakob and Rolery come to regard each other as human, and by extension they also develop the capacity to see members of the other races as humans as well. Robert Young argues that one of the philosophical cornerstones of racism under colonial imperialism is an ontological division of people into humans and non-humans (or as we have seen in Ballard and Moorcock, into contemporary evolved humans and savage evolutionary pre-humans). Le Guin deconstructs this human/non-human binary in Planet of Exile. Furthermore, she develops her critique in a post-colonial imperial context; the offworld Farborn have come to help the native Tevarans "develop" (just as in Rocannon's World), but the Tevarans have not accepted or celebrated alien technological advancement in the 60 years that the Farborn have been living among them. The Farborn League representatives, then, represent a paternalistic neo-imperial program offering

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"development" along the lines preferred by the imperial center, and the Tevarans represent an alternative way of life uninterested in the changes the outsiders wish to encourage; Tevaran resistance thus denaturalizes the modern teleology of progress that implicitly underpins the Farborn developmental mission. As in Rocannon's World, both the benevolent imperialistic Farborn and the friendly indigenous Tevarans are contrasted against a faceless and voiceless enemy; in this case, rather than confronting the colonialist rebels from Faraday, the protagonists must struggle against the indigenous Gaal, a marauding people who ravage everyone in their path as they travel south to escape the winter. The Gaal represent traditional resource-hungry colonialists; they attack, they take territory, and they are interested only in their own power and wealth. Like the rebels in Rocannon’s World, they are accorded no voice; Le Guin never attempts to show the situation from their perspective, and in this way, they reflect Le Guin’s uncompromising (and just) critique of colonial imperialism. Colonial imperialists, like the Rebels and the Gaal, are simply the enemy; there is no need to try to see things from their point of view. The more interesting and complex interaction is between the non-colonial neo-imperialists (the League) and the indigenous population they are attempting to "develop." Planet of Exile is similar to the Prologue of Rocannon’s World insofar as the central emphasis in both is on alternative points of view, and Le Guin uses this contrast between points of view to reflect imperial and subaltern perspectives. The novel moves back and forth each chapter between the perspectives of the Teverans and the Farborn, and during the later chapters, we begin to see these perspectives grow commensurable as Rolery and Jakob Agat Alterra grow closer. The point, of course, is that the two "worlds"

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of experience begin radically different and alien to each other and then slowly start to communicate and blend together. The growing mutual recognition of shared “humanity” between the Farborn and Tevarans is interesting because questions about who qualifies as "human" are central to debates concerning cosmopolitanism. Some theorists have challenged cosmopolitan theory because it can implicitly reify the category of "the human" (and thus inevitably create the category of "non-human"), while others have responded that cosmopolitanism should tactically deploy the notion of the human in a non-essentializing mode for political ends (in a similar way to how some feminists deploy the idea of the "feminine" for political purposes without necessarily essentializing femininity). Le Guin anticipates exactly this kind of cosmopolitan stance; Planet of Exile argues that the label "human" can either be categorically exclusive or that it can be tactically inclusive. The latter, when combined with a commitment to recognizing and respecting difference (the refusal to enshrine Farborn progress as the measure of true humanity) is the cornerstone of a strong cosmopolitan ethos. In short, Planet of Exile offers a preliminary sketch of a strong cosmopolitanism: The idea of the "human" is useful insofar as it creates common ground for dialogue and harmful insofar as it enforces categorical boundaries and sublimates difference under the sign of sameness in reductive ways. It is also an ethos with strength, however, because no matter how "human" we may all be, those who violently refuse to acknowledge the "humanity" of others (such as the Gaal) renounce their own humanity as a consequence, and their expansive colonial ambitions must be opposed.

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City of Illusions Finally, City of Illusions continues the trends established in the preceeding novels: it invites the reader to identify with colonized subjects struggling against a colonial power, and it raises epistemological uncertainty concerning what constitutes the category of the human; the notion of “humanity” becomes divorced from species and instead becomes a shifting signifier for a sense of identificatory affinity between beings. Although the novel forecloses the conceptual possibilities of this epistemological uncertainty by ultimately establishing a categorical division between “humans” and the enemy “Shing,” the division between human and Shing remains unstable, and Le Guin later rejects the concept of categorical “enemies” more thoroughly in her subsequent Hainish novels. City of Illusions is set over a thousand years after the conclusion of Planet of Exile. In the novel, the descendants of Jakob Agat Alterra and Rolery have flourished on Werel, and they have developed the capacity for interstellar travel. The main character in City of Illusions (Ramarren) is part of a team from Werel making the first visit to Earth in over a thousand years. Their ship is attacked, and Ramarren eventually finds himself lost somewhere in North America with no memories. He is taken in by a local group (Zove's House) and he assumes a new identity as "Falk." Here he learns that Earth has been conquered by the Shing, an alien race who keep humanity scattered and undeveloped. The Shing are believed to be able to lie in telepathic speech without being detected (something humans cannot do or detect), and they adhere to a pacifist code that forbids killing.

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Falk is never quite fully accepted by the humans at Zove's House due to his alien features, and he eventually travels west to the city of Es Toch in order to find the Shing. During his travels, he meets a young woman who agrees to help him reach Es Toch; she is eventually revealed as one of the Shing, and she betrays him by delivering him to the Shing when he reaches the city. After his capture, he experiences a series of strange hallucinations as the Shing attempt to probe his mind; he awakens to meet a young boy (Orry) who remembers him as Ramarren and tells him of their trip to Earth and their original mission. The Shing tell Falk that he was shot down by human rebels and that there never was an "Enemy" who arrived from the stars to combat the League of All Worlds; instead, they assert that the League was torn apart from within by internal strife, and a group within the League invented the "Enemy" as an ideological tool to create an environment of crisis on Earth in order to impose order there. The "Shing," they argue, were simply humans from another world who arrived and took on the role of the "Enemy" in order to help re-develop civilization on Earth. Falk suspects (correctly) that this is a lie and that the Shing want to restore his memories in order to find the location of his home planet Werel, but he nonetheless agrees to allow the Shing to heal his damaged mind. This process is supposed to destroy Falk's personality, but after Ramarren reawakens, he undergoes a psychological upheaval and Falk and Ramarren are finally unified into an unstable whole. In the end, Falk-Ramarren resists the Shing attempts to trick Werel's location from him; he steals an interstellar ship for his return home where he intends to warn his own people about the "Enemy" that has destroyed the League. The conceptual failure of City of Illusions is that it posits an ultimate Enemy, the deceptive Shing, rather than following through on the more provocative possibility that

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the League invented the Enemy in order to maintain the atmosphere of omnicrisis in order to secure the legitimacy of its neoimperial rule. Unlike Delany's Towers, where the "enemy" is revealed to be an ideological (and eventually technological) construction created to unify the population of the empire for economic and political purposes, the Shing in City of Illusions are a dreaded enemy without voice or perspective. For a novel (and an entire series) that foregrounds the importance of different points of view, it is surprising that the "enemies" in Worlds of Exile and Illusion are not accorded legitimacy of perspective. City of Illusions reads like an offering from Herbert or Heinlein; Earth has been colonized by invaders, and the hero (despite his identity crisis and his epistemological uncertainty) must fight to help decolonize both the world and his own colonized psychic inner space. It is interesting to note, however, that the Shing are not portrayed as traditional colonizers; they present themselves as a benevolent race attempting to help "develop" the lesser scattered enclaves of humanity who they steward over, yet they do not maintain strict control over their conquered territories; a very small number of Shing rule the Earth, and they do not impose direct colonial control (with local magistrates, etc). Instead, their rule could best be described as an ideological one; they control the population of the earth through fear and propaganda, and this is reinforced only with sporadic police actions. In this regard, their regime reflects a postwar American neoimperial approach that establishes global hegemony through covert operatives, police actions, coercive economic control over "developing" nations, and cultural indoctrination. Similar to the rebel attackers in Rocannon's World and the Gaal in Planet of Exile, however, the Shing have no accessible perspective; they are absolutely Other, and the

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adventure-narrative of Falk-Ramarren’s struggle against them overshadows a more careful consideration of imperial power; such an analysis emerges more clearly in Le Guin’s later works, particularly in The Left Hand of Darkness. City of Illusions participates in the general 1960s SF rejection of colonialism, and it also invites the reader to identify with colonized subjects struggling against a colonial power rather than with heroic colonizers. Again, the most interesting question in the novel (as in Planet of Exile) is the question of what it means to be "human;" Falk is not initially regarded by the people of Zove's House to be human, but they take him in anyway and provisionally accept him as one of their own. The Shing are presented as utterly inhuman, then they seem to be misunderstood humans, and they are finally revealed to be truly inhuman. As with Planet of Exile, the notion of what is "human" in Le Guin's work is denaturalized; it becomes divorced from the concept of species and instead becomes a shifting signifier for a sense of identificatory affinity between beings. On one hand, Le Guin's challenge to the tidy notion of what is human and what is not promisingly disrupts Enlightenment liberal-humanist categories in a way that might lead toward an inclusive transhumanist cosmopolitanism. On the other hand, however, this is not what actually happens in City of Illusions; the Shing turn out to be the inhuman "Enemy" in an absolute sense, and only their total "otherness" allows for Falk and the people of Earth to conceptually group themselves together as "human." Humanity is, finally, only defined in negative relation to its Other. This is a retreat from the more radical position achieved in Planet of Exile, where Jakob Agat Alterra’s conception of "humanity" is eventually accorded to all humanoids, including his own people, the hilfs, and even the marauding enemy Gaal.

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The Left Hand of Darkness The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) represents Le Guin's movement away from the incomplete anti-imperial critique found in World of Exile and Illusion stories towards a more substantial cosmopolitan extrapolation. My dissertation thus far has argued that science fiction can function as a critical theory of imperialism during a historical moment when the contours and discourses of imperial practice are transforming. Like all the other narratives I examine, Le Guin's fiction imaginatively responds to the historical conditions of European decolonization and emergent American neo-imperialism during the 1960s. Unlike others I have considered, however, Le Guin moves beyond critique and offers alternative utopian models of anti-imperial interaction. This is particularly the case in her portrayal of the Ekumen in The Left Hand of Darkness, yet the significance of the Ekumen as a theoretical model for cosmopolitanism can be seen in its fullest expression when compared against its predecessor, the League of All Worlds from the Worlds of Exile and Illusion novels. The key difference between the League and the Ekumen centers on their different normative institutions of political hegemony. In her essay "Restaging the Universal: Hegemony and the Limits of Formalism," Judith Butler draws on Gramsci, Laclau, and Mouffe to describe "hegemony" as the process by which "democratic polities are constituted through exclusions that return to haunt the polities predicated on their absence" (11). She further notes that this "haunting" can become "politically effective precisely insofar as the return of the excluded forces an expansion and rearticulation of the basic premises of democracy itself" (11). This definition of hegemony, and Butler's

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supplemental description of the ghostly exclusions that haunt hegemony's primordial exclusions, aptly describes the imperialistic League of All Worlds from Cities of Exile and Illusion. Le Guin demonstrates that the League is constantly haunted by its foundational exclusions (both the “lesser” races it passes over in its race to develop promising ones and the absolute "Enemy" that founds the urgency of its imperial omnicrisis), and when League hegemony is confronted by its excluded "others," these confrontations and antagonisms are ultimately "politically effective" insofar as a new synthesis – the Ekumen – emerges from the clash of hegemony's thesis and its spectral antitheses. The different claims to universalism made by the League and by the Ekumen are central to Le Guin’s extrapolation towards cosmopolitanism. The League of All Worlds claims to act on behalf of all humankind as a universal community, yet (as Rocannon objects) its definition of “humankind” is selective; at best it is the product of the cultural biases of the first to survey each new world, and at worst it excludes "enemies" such as Rebels, Gaal, and Shing as voiceless and absolute antagonists. If the League represents Le Guin's early thinking about cosmopolitan social and political formations, it climaxes as a theoretical failure; although the League is not a colonial Empire, and although it conceptually embodies a familiar 1960s opposition to territorial colonialism, it nonetheless valorizes emergent neo-imperial modes of inequity and domination. The League is a hegemony with various striations of differential inclusion whose authority is predicated on the "permanent crisis" of the Enemy's impending threat, and the fact that an "Enemy" truly exists does nothing to justify the League's systemic inequities. The Ekumen, in contrast, embodies a very different kind of

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universalizing attitude; rather than an interstellar hegemony predicated on structured differential inclusions, the Ekumen is engaged in what Butler would call a process of cultural "translation" that continuously rearticulates its own hegemonic constitution as it encounters and engages its external "others." Butler offers a passage in "Restaging the Universal" that can illuminate the cosmopolitan aspirations of the Ekumen's project. In a description of Hegel’s attitude toward Kantian epistemology, Butler notes: Hegel implicitly likens the Kantian to one who seeks to know how to swim before actually swimming, and he counters this model of a selfpossessed cognition with one that gives itself over to the activity itself, a form of knowing that is given over to the world it seeks to know. (19) The Kantian epistemological model, in this formulation, is identical to what Robert Young calls "ontological imperialism," or the tendency to begin from an established mode of "knowing" and imposing this a priori knowledge onto conceptions of reality without taking into account the actual complexities of the reality in question. The alternative Hegelian philosophical disposition (which Butler advocates) rejects such an illusion of "cognitive mastery" in favor of a dialectical encounter between knowledge and object that is always resulting in a new dialectic synthesis. Butler continues: Hegel's own persistent references to 'losing oneself' and 'giving oneself over' only confirm the point that the knowing subject cannot be understood as one who imposes ready-made categories on a pregiven world. The categories are shaped by the world it seeks to know, just as the world is not known without the prior action of those categories. And just as Hegel insists on revising several times his very definition of 'universality,' so he makes plain that the categories by which the world becomes available to us are continually remade by the encounter with the world that they facilitate. We do not remain the same, and neither do our cognitive categories, as we enter into a knowing encounter with the world. 212

Both the knowing subject and the world are undone and redone by the act of knowledge. (19-20) Butler gestures here towards a Hegelian revision of the Kantian notion of cosmopolitanism from Perpetual Peace. Objections to "cosmopolitanism" uniformly resist weak cosmopolitan universalisms that impose “ready made categories” on the world; cosmopolitan apologists, in contrast, attempt to theorize a mode of political thought and action that refuses to foreclose difference and alterity under the banner of sameness. Rather than "cosmopolitanism," Butler and her collaborators in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality instead call this "radical democracy," and they use this term to refer to a democratic hegemony that is constantly engaged in dialogue with its constitutive exclusions in such a way that it must always be newly rearticulating its constitutional identity. A radical democratic formation, in this view, must be fluid; it loses itself, or gives itself over, to each new encounter. As it learns, it changes and allows itself to be changed by its exterior rather than imposing its own changes through force or violence. Le Guin thematizes exactly this radical epistemological process in her portrayal of the Ekumen in The Left Hand of Darkness. 2 As First Envoy to Winter, Genley Ai learns that a cosmopolitan democracy is the Ekumen's goal; this means that he himself must transform as a result of his encounter with Winter (and with Estraven) before any equitable interaction between the Ekumen and Winter can be established. Genly understands himself to be an ambassador working to create a relationship with the Ekumen. The Ekumen has rigorous first contact protocols (presumably in place due to the past mistakes made by the League in situations like Fomalhaut II), and the key 2

For a synopsis of The Left Hand of Darkness, see chapter two, “Revolutions in the Head.”

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among these is the rule that the First Envoy to any planet arrives alone without a security guard or a diplomatic entourage. During the novel, Genly realizes that the purpose of this protocol is not just to protect the new world from the domination of the Ekumen, but also to ensure that the Ekumen may be transformed by the new contact just as the world in question will be transformed by its encounter with the Ekumen itself. In the moment when he first understands this, Genly says to Estraven: I thought it was for your sake that I came alone, so obviously alone, so vulnerable, that I could in myself pose no threat, change no balance, not an invasion, but a mere messenger-boy. But there's more to it than that. Alone, I cannot change your world. But I can be changed by it. Alone, I must listen, as well as speak. Alone, the relationship I finally make, if I make one, is not impersonal and not only political; it is individual, it is personal, it is both more and less than political. Not We and They; not I and It; but I and Thou. Not political, not pragmatic, but mystical. In a certain sense the Ekumen is not a body politic, but a body mystic. It considers beginnings to be extremely important. Beginnings, and means. Its doctrine is just the reverse of the doctrine that the end justifies the means. (259) From a Kantian cosmopolitan perspective, the Ekumen embodies the categorical imperative that sentient beings must be treated as ends-in-themselves rather than as means-to-ends. This doctrine is enshrined in Perpetual Peace where it forms the anchor of an anti-imperial ethos of cosmopolitan politics. In addition, however, the Ekumen is also committed to what Butler characterizes as the Hegelian dialectical encounter between self and other in which the self is given over to the other it seeks to know. In such an encounter, the radical democratic hegemony of the Ekumen is by necessity always radically reconstituted. Winter is not simply invited to join the Ekumen; instead, the interaction between Winter and the Ekumen inevitably transforms them both. Both

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entities explore each other on intimate terms, and as is the case with all intimate relationships, both parties are transformed as the result of their closeness. Because of the way the Ekumen operates – because of its non-imperial practices and attitudes – the first contact between Winter and the Ekumen unfolds as a dialogical exchange rather than as the imperial imposition of one hegemony over another. Both the Genthenians and the Ekumen are forced to reconsider the basic categories of inclusion and exclusion that constitute their social formations as a result of their intersection. What’s particularly interesting about The Left Hand of Darkness is that Le Guin shows that the conceptual building blocks that will be re-shaped by both sides in this encounter are normative identifications of sexual and gendered difference. Members of the Ekumen, like Genly, must reconsider the way they understand divisions of masculinity and femininity, and Genthenians must reconsider their attitudes concerning sexual perversion. First contact requires internal reconsiderations of categorical norms, because, as Zizek argues, external differences to any social system can only be understood through analogical references to internal categorical differences that already exist within the system. Zizek asserts: the key feature of the concept of hegemony lies in the contingent connection between intrasocial differences (elements within the social space) and the limit that separates society itself from non-society (chaos, utter decadence, dissolution of all social links) – the limit between the social and its exteriority, the non-social, can articulate itself only in the guise of a difference (by mapping itself onto a difference) between elements of social space. (92) Zizek argues (via Laclau) that in any hegemonic system, external exclusions (the limits that determine the absolute outside of the social body) can only be represented through

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references to internal differences (the differential inclusions that always-already structure the hegemony itself). We can see this in The Left Hand of Darkness: The distinction between Gethenians and non-Gethenians (like Genly) is summarized by the fact that Genly is only recognizable to the King of Karhide as a sexual "pervert." Gethenians are defined as "normal" by their sexual behaviors; "normal" people enter kemmer (and display sexual differentiation) only for a short time. "Perverts" are Gethenians who remain in kemmer beyond its "natural" duration and thus continue to display sexual differentiation for an abnormal time. Perverts are, of course, social outcasts; they are only tolerated in the liminal space of the Fastness (a temple where divination is practiced), and even there they are regarded as monsters. This internal categorical exclusion (Gethenians/pervets) is the central way in which the King of Karhide understands the external difference between the inhabitants of his world and the aliens of the Ekumen. Scientists prove to the King that Genly is not "human" (i.e. he has biological differences from Gethenians despite their humanoid similarities; the King is wary of Genly's assertion that despite these differences they are all nonetheless "men" all descended from the original humanoid inhabitants of Hain), and the King interrogates the Envoy about his differences: "Are they all as black as you?" (This is considered to be a mild difference, since Gethen has humanoids of many colors), and then finally: "They're all like that – like you? . . . So all of them, out on these other planets, are in permanent kemmer? A society of perverts?" (36) The King can only understand the difference between Genthenians and the members of the Ekumen through reference to an internal Genthenian exclusion between "normal" humans and sexual "perverts." In Zizek's terms, "radical antagonism can be

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represented only in a distorted way, through the particular differences internal to the system" (92). The same is true for Genly's view of the inhabitants of Winter; despite his multicultural Envoy training, Genly still views the Genthians through the determining lens of his own assumptions and attitudes about sexual difference; in several instances, Genly "reads" Estraven, for example, as having alternatively masculine or feminine qualities, and the novel as a whole is centered around Genly's "misreadings" of Estraven due to these gendered expectations. Sex and gender differences therefore become the terrain upon which questions about what it means to be "human" unfold; rather than offering an imperial context in which one set of values, attitudes, and economic practices are imposed on another, Le Guin imagines a way that cultural interaction can occur so that a radical cosmopolitan renegotiation of basic categories unfolds instead. This imagining extrapolates toward what Zizek refers to as a "living" universality that involves "the permanent process of the questioning and renegotiation of its own 'official' content" (102). In the encounter between Winter and the Ekumen, both sides are forced, on a very intimate level, to move beyond their “misreadings” of difference (based on existing internal categorical norms) toward a more radical recognition of alterity; Genthenians must learn to see outsiders like Genly as something other than perverts (thus challenging their internal classifications of extended kemmerers as aberrant), and Ekeumen as a whole must learn to see “masculinity” and “femininity” as socially constructed categories rather than as natural biological norms. The Ekumen thus models a cosmopolitan "radical democracy" willing to consistently renegotiate its own definitive hegemony. The Ekumen avoids rigorous self-

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definition, and it instead leaves its identity open to new interpretations and renegotiations. In short, the Ekumen is dedicated to the continuous productive failure of its own identity in favor of a continuous dialectical process of becoming. Genly notes this when he talks about how the Ekumen has no specific laws as such: Member states follow their own laws; when they clash the Ekumen mediates, attempts to make a legal or ethical adjustment or collation or choice. Now if the Ekumen, as an experiment in the superorganic, does eventually fail, it will have to become a peace-keeping force, develop a police, and so on. (136) The development of a police force would mark exactly the failure of the Ekumen’s cosmopolitanism. It would represent the hardening of one hegemony and the antagonistic exclusion of alternatives. Perhaps in the real world this is unavoidable, but the beauty of the Ekumen's "experiment" is its refusal to enforce hegemony and its willingness to be changed by the Other as it enters into a dialogic relationship with its own necessary exterior.

Conclusion The Hainish cycle demonstrates that SF’s historical emergence from colonial discursive contexts can be the central enabling source of its imperial critique. Darko Suvin and Carl Freedman suggest that the “cognitive estrangements” of SF enable the genre to serve as a critical literature that productively denaturalizes doxical norms. In her Hainish fictions, Le Guin progressively refuses to take for granted the conditions under which cultural contact can occur, and she is constantly reconsidering the ethical obligations that large-scale political, military, and economic power should entail. Le

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Guin’s early rejection of territorial colonialism develops into a more insightful critique of neo-imperial economic exploitation, and her extrapolative imagining ultimately leads her to develop a strong cosmopolitan ethos (and a colorful model of what this ethos might look like in practice) in The Left Hand of Darkness. A model of cultural contact like Le Guin’s is urgently needed in a global context where an essentialist "clash of cultures" discourse has become dominant; the "clash of cultures" perspective reifies the notion that there are absolute differences between cultures, and it asserts that these differences can only lead to irrefutable antagonisms. Le Guin, in contrast, shows that cultural differences can become sites of cosmopolitan exploration and negotiation rather than sites of struggle and domination. In my introduction, I argued that one of the most interesting aspects of science fiction in the 1960s is its potential for exploring the authenticity of plural subjectivities while at the same time modeling postmodern imperial power formations. At its best, science fiction’s inward urge celebrates the epistemological relativity of postmodernism while challenging the changing shape of imperialism under postmodernity. Le Guin demonstrates exactly this dual celebration and critique; her fictions are committed to the validity and irreducibility of multiple points of view, and the cosmopolitanism of the Ekumen enshrines a radical acknowledgement of alterity into political practice rather than organizing and managing alterity within inequitable differential hierarchies. Different authors and texts, however, approach these problems in different ways; despite a ubiquitous rejection of colonial imperialism, science fiction indexes the various facets of postmodern imperialism with a heterogeneous mix of approaches. Herbert, Heinlein, and Clarke valorize epistemological mastery, and their psychic supermen

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embody fantasies of absolute command over time and space that symptomatically reveal disturbing continuities between modern and postmodern imperial dreams of authoritative masculinity. Other New Wave texts deploy stronger critiques of imperialism in all its forms, but many nonetheless deterritorialize doxical imperial norms only to reify models of imperial manhood. British New Wave authors, such as Ballard and Moorcock, reflect the emergence of new imperial practices in their extrapolations at the same time as they lament the passing of colonial empire. If many of these authors index new imperial practices in uncritical ways, others, such as Delany and Le Guin, intentionally deconstruct the transformations that occur in imperial imaginings in the 1960s. These various texts reveal that science fiction, as a mode of cultural production that has since its inception been implicated in the formation and perpetuation of imperial imaginings, is a productive site to examine the dreamwork of Empire during a time when imperial discourse and practice are transforming. Modern imperial ideals remain resilient; the imperial urge, or the urge to conquer, dominate, exploit, classify, and control, may turn inward in the 1960s, but this inward turn sometimes reveals clear ideological continuities with the past. This can be seen in Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke, authors who usurp the ideal of “psychic decolonization” for the continuing advantage of privileged elite subjects. Furthermore, apologists for Empire, such as Ballard and Moorcock, demonstrate their commitment to a continuity of imperial imaginings at the same time as they grudgingly admit the inevitable entropic failings of Empire. New Wave fictions in general in the 1960s demonstrate that imperial models of masculinity are re-articulated with remarkable continuity despite the New Wave’s inward turn.

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At the same time, however, science fiction also responds to and reflects new imperial developments. Sometimes, as we have seen in the work of Herbert, Heinlein, and Clarke, it serves as an enabling theory of new modes of imperialism while criticizing colonialism. At other times, as we have seen in the work of Harvey, Delany, and Le Guin, it confronts and critiques the new forms of economic imperialism that gain ascendency after the Cold War. In rare cases, as we have observed in The Left Hand of Darkness, it imagines new modes of cultural interaction that eschew conquest in the name of a strong cosmopolitan ethos. In all of these cases, however, science fiction foregrounds Empire as an epistemological problem rather than taking imperialism for granted as a standard generic trope, and this introspective turn marks SF’s coming of age as a literature that interrogates the shifting discourses and practices of modern and postmodern Empire.

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David Michael Higgins Curriculum Vitae Departments of English and American Studies Indiana University 912 S. Madison St., Bloomington, IN 47403 (812)-272-7044 [email protected] Education PhD in English and American Studies, Indiana University, 2010. Specializations: American Literature 1945-Present, Imperialism, Postcolonial Theory, Postmodernism, Speculative Fiction, Gender Studies, Countercultures and the 1960s. Dissertation: “The Inward Urge: 1960s Science Fiction and Imperialism.” Advisor: De Witt Kilgore; Committee: Patrick Brantlinger, Eva Cherniavsky, Rob Latham, and Ranu Samantrai. M.A. in English, Indiana University, 2004 B.A. in English (Honors, Magna Cum Laude), University of Southern California, 1999 B.A. in History (Honors, Magna Cum Laude), University of Southern California, 1999 Honors, Awards, Fellowships, and Scholarships R.D. Mullen Research Fellowship (2010) Science Fiction Research Association Student Paper Award (2010) IU Live Action MacKenzie Leadership Award (2007) IU Live Action O’Malley Award for Outstanding Achievement (2007) IU English Department Niekamp Dissertation Fellowship (2006) IU English Department Teaching Award Nominee (2003 and 2004) IU English Departmental Fellowship (1999) Phi Beta Kappa National Honor Society (1998) Golden Key National Honor Society (1998) USC Thematic Option Undergraduate Honors Program (1995-1997) USC History and English Honors Programs (1995-1998) USC Residential Honors Program (1995)

Academic Employment Indiana University (Bloomington, Indiana) 2007-2010

Teaching Fellow, Indiana University Department of English • L204: Introduction to Fiction

2006-2007

Associate Instructor, Indiana University Department of American Studies. • A201: US Movements and Institutions: Crisis and American Democracy. • A100: Introduction to American Studies.

2006

Assistant Coordinator, English Department Groups Program. • Assisted in course design, administration, and preparing graduate instructors to teach a composition program aimed at helping disabled, low-income, and/or first-generation college students.

2004

Teaching Consultant, Indiana University Department of English • Assisted in training and supporting new composition instructors through advice, classroom observations, and syllabus/assignment design.

2000-2006

Associate Instructor, Indiana University Department of English • J101: Introduction to College Composition • L230: Introduction to Science Fiction (with Prof. Tom Foster) • L142: Introduction to the Writing and Study of Literature – Work and Play (with Prof. Edward Comentale) • L142: Introduction to the Writing and Study of Literature – American Wests (with Prof. David Nordloh) • L141: Introduction to the Writing and Study of Literature – Misfits and Monsters (with Prof. Linda Charnes) • W170: Special Projects in Reading and Writing - Contemporary Gothic Representations • W231: Professional Writing • W131: Elementary Composition

2002

Field Technician, Glenn Black Laboratory of Archaeology • Worked on archaeological reconnaissance for historic and prehistoric sites in central Indiana.

Ivy Tech State College (Bloomington, Indiana) 2003

Adjunct Professor, Department of English • E211: Technical Writing

Forthcoming Publications “Science Fiction and Empire.” Forthcoming in Science Fiction Film and Television. “Red Planets.” Forthcoming in Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts. “The Evolution of Psychedelic Manhood.” Forthcoming in Science Fiction Studies. “Coded Transmissions: Gender, Genre, and The Matrix.” Forthcoming in Parabolas of Science Fiction. “Key Critical Concepts, Topics, and Critics.” Forthcoming in The Continuum SF Handbook. Publications “Two Perspectives on Doctor Who.” Science Fiction Studies 36:3. November 2009. 542-545. “Finding the Big Other and Making Him Pay.” SFRA Review 288. Spring 2009. 20-22. “Colonialism and Ideological Fantasy: Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.” Science Fiction Studies 36:1. March 2009. 132-138. “Novels and Short Fiction (1960-2005) Second Wave SF.” Women in Science Fiction and Fantasy. Volume One: Overviews. Ed. Robin Anne Reid. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2009. 73-83. “SF and American Wests: Turner’s Cultural Tropes of the American West and Abbott’s Science Fiction and the American West.” Science Fiction Studies 35:1. March 2008. 105-109 Online Publications “An Ingenious Use of Scientific Patter: The Great War and the Science Fiction of H.G. Wells,” in Strange Horizons, 13 March 2006. “The Western Genre Fled Across the Desert, and Stephen King Followed,” in Strange Horizons, 27 June 2005.

Conference Presentations “Black and/or Brown Planets: Politics and Race in Science Fiction.” The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2010. “Imperial Thermodynamics: J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock, and Postcolonial Ambivalence.” The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2010. “The Politics of Race.” (Moderator). The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2010. “Inner Geographies: David Harvey and the New Wave.” The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2009. “Art and Social Critique.” (Moderator). The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2009. “Science Fiction, Space-Time, and Postmodernity.” (Moderator). The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2009. “Art, Freedom, and Society.” (Moderator). The Glaukopis Arts Conference. Black Rock City, Navada, 2008. “The Imperial Unconscious: Samuel R. Delany’s The Fall of the Towers.” Science Fiction Research Association Conference. Lawrence, Kansas. 2008. “The Imperial Sublime: Inner-Space Frontiers in 1960s Science Fiction.” The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2008. “The Sublime in Alien Circumstances.” (Panel Moderator). The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Orlando, Florida, 2008. “Octavia Butler and U.S. Imperialism.” The Modern Language Association. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 2006. “Spectacular Nature and the Visual Arts” (Panel Moderator). Craft, Critique, Culture: Redefining Nature. Iowa City, Iowa, 2006. “Infinite Crisis: Emergency, Disaster, and Moral Authority in Post-9/11 Superhero Narratives.” The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2006. “SF Scholarship: Crossing Academic and Marketing Genre” (Panel Moderator). The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2006.

“Philip K. Dick and the Fluidity of the Real.” The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2005. “Postcolonialism, Cyber-subjectivity, and Afrofuturism” (Panel Moderator). The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2005. “America and its Discontents” (Panel Moderator). Intimacy/Proximity. Bloomington, Indiana, 2005. “Revolutions in the Head: Perceptual Exploration and Gender Discourse in the New Wave Science Fiction of the 1960s.” The International Conference on the Fantastic in the Arts. Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, 2004. “An Inexhaustible Exploration: The Sublimity of Otherness in D.H. Lawrence’s The Rainbow and Women in Love.” Twentieth Century Literature Conference. Louisville, Kentucky, 2004. “Bond and Popular Culture” (Panel Moderator). The Cultural Politics of Ian Fleming and 007. Bloomignton, Indiana, 2003. “Showdowns and Love Triangles in the New Digital Western.” Twentieth Century Literature Conference. Louisville, Kentucky, 2001. “Hallucinations on the New Edge: Cybernetics, Psychedelics, and the Future of the Frontier Myth.” Midwest Modern Language Association. Kansas City, Missouri, 2000. “Digital Gunfights and Digital Romance: Masculine Triumph in The Matrix.” Midwest Modern Language Association. Kansas City, Missouri, 2000. Service Conference Organizer, The Glaukopis Arts Conference. 2008 • Organized the first interdisciplinary arts conference (with over 60 participants) ever to take place at the Black Rock City Arts Festival. Cultural Identities Caucus Organizer, International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts. 2007-2009. • Responsible for organizing a caucus dedicated to furthering the study of cultural identities in fantastic literatures. Articles Editor, Strange Horizons (online). 2004-2008. • Responsible for reviewing manuscripts and edit final drafts for publication in a Hugo-award nominated online speculative fiction journal (www.strangehorizons.com).

President, IU Live Action. Indiana University, Bloomington. 2001-present. • Responsible for administrating a student group dedicated to arts and philanthropy with 100+ graduate and undergraduate members. Treasurer, English Graduate Student Advisory Committee. Indiana University, Bloomington. 2005-2006. • Elected to serve as advocate of graduate interests on an administrative committee; organized finances and fundraisers for graduate events. Treasurer, Going Awry (graduate conference). Indiana University, Bloomington. 2006 • Secured $2500 in grants to cover conference costs and organized budget for event. Treasurer, Intimacy/Proximity (graduate conference). Indiana University, Bloomington. 2005 • Secured $2500 in grants to cover conference costs and organized budget for event. Guest Lecturer, Introduction to Science Fiction. Indiana University, Bloomington. 2004. • Lectured four class sessions for Prof. De Witt Kilgore. Thesis Reader, English Undergraduate Thesis Project. Indiana University, Bloomington. 2004. • Served as an advisor and reader for Mike Quilligan, an undergraduate honors student in English who wrote his thesis on Ray Bradbury and New Wave science fiction.

Professional Memberships Modern Language Association, American Studies Association International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, Science Fiction Research Association.

Languages of Proficiency German, French, Lakhota Sioux (Native American)

References Patrick Brantlinger, Rudy Professor Emeritus of English. Indiana University. Eva Cherniavsky, Professor of English and American Studies. University of Washington. De Witt Douglass Kilgore, Assistant Professor of English and American Studies. Indiana Univerity. Rob Latham, Associate Professor of English. University of California, Riverside. Kathy Overhulse Smith. English Department Associate Chair, Composition Program Coordinator, and Director of Basic Writing & Special Programs. Indiana University. Sherryl Vint, Associate Professor of English at Brock University, First Vice President of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts.