Story Collider is a podcast and magazine collecting “true stories about how science has affected people’s lives.” Aaron Wolfe’s story, “Saving Hubble, Saving Aaron,” is about how science fiction makes a life of science possible — by sparking wonder, sure, but also by allowing us an escape from the brutality of scientific reality and offering a purity of hope that only fiction can maintain.
(h/t Lisa. Transcript, currently in progress, available here.)
I’ve been bingeing on science fiction lately, both in books and on television. It’s no coincidence that I’m rewatching Stargate SG-1, discovering Fringe, and reading Contact while I’m establishing myself in a new community after losing both my job and my marriage.
In science fiction, anything is possible and ordinary people become extraordinary heroes. Those heroes rarely suffer from endless days of mundane grief or fits of existential purposelessness. Details about physics, biology, anthropology, psychology — not to mention alien languages, technical sleight-of-hand, alternative histories, future backstories, whole fictional cultures — keep the audience’s attention occupied on a level beyond the seductively fantastical plot itself. It doesn’t hurt that people like me, civilian nerds whose special skills are confined to words or numbers or stars or chemicals or whatever unglamorous esoterica, get to be at the center of the action. It’s wish-fulfillment, it’s escape, it’s a perfect distraction.
Science fiction also has great potential for political engagement. In college I took a course with playwright and novelist Andrea Hairston called “Shamans, Shapeshifters, and the Magic IF.” We explored how genres like fantasy and science fiction take advantage of their distance from reality to throw hard truths into sharp relief. (See also: Brecht’s alienation.) Indeed, science fiction and its artistic relatives have been employed to great feminist effect — as in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for an example that is particularly relevant to current politics in the United States; or X-Men (2000), a parable of identity politics.
The best awareness-raising stories don’t actually fix the big problems like gender inequality, because no tidy end to those conflicts would ring true. But most stories do provide some resolution, however temporary or superficial: we came home from this adventure; we staved off this catastrophe; we walked away from that shoot-out with all our limbs in tact.
Those fabricated resolutions offer a kind of catharsis that I, as a feminist, long for. Scary legislation gets mulled over for months, killed, and then reintroduced, bigger and scarier, years later. Protest campaigns are launched, attract a smattering of media attention, and then go ignored for months because they aren’t new anymore. You call one person out on their carelessly hateful language, or you explain privilege to them, and maybe they even listen! But then they fail to apply those concepts broadly, or there happens to be more than one person in your life, and the next day it’s all here we go again.
I don’t have to tell you this. You know what it’s like. We can’t ever feel that we’ve found the solution and cured the epidemic, hooray, the end! because oppression is a million interconnected epidemics and the pathogens that cause them are adaptive little fuckers. We can’t take off our uniforms and go home because the Patriarchy knows where we live and is probably coming over for dinner.
So you can escape into action-adventure, where it’s very clear who the good guys are and the bad guys are and at the end we can all rest easy because the bad guys are dead. But good luck enjoying that, because the bad guys are probably people of color and the good guys’ main virtue is violence and their heroic “protective” vibe is kind of creepy if you think about it. Different but parallel issues apply for romance and other easy realism. Alternatively, you can go for more difficult, culturally-critical realism or nonfiction, but that’s a busman’s holiday for feminists.
Science fiction is just as vulnerable to problematic representation as other genres. Its canon is rife with exoticization and paternalism, in particular. Yet I find that science fiction as a medium is uniquely capable of combining escapism and engagement in a kind of productive utopianism that promises to save me and save the world.
Science fiction asks the big questions: What does it mean to be human? What makes people good or bad? What does it feel like to be different? Why can’t we all just get along? It elevates social issues to epic meaning-of-life and fate-of-the-universe glory. And it reminds us that while the end may not be in sight, we are working towards something meaningful. It invites us to imagine a time when we can take off our uniforms, declare our missions accomplished, and go home for the night. It suggests that our world can be different from how it happens to be — even different from how we are able to imagine it.
Perhaps best of all, the escape that science fiction offers is to a world where our engagement is always effective. Every action signifies, and every person makes a difference. Grief is never meaningless. We are fairly burdened with purpose. The refuge itself is a renewed call to arms.
Whenever I’m losing hope in the world, I turn to Ursula K. LeGuin’s “The Left Hand of Darkness” and “The Dispossessed.” They are difficult and culturally critical and don’t give easy answers, but they fill me with hope because they are truly utopian fiction, imagining a world better than our own.
I really disagree – but I am not angry about it!!! Science fiction stories about invading other planets are a way to whitewash settler-colonialism and make it heroic again. It doesnt throw hard truths into sharp relief, it covers them up. They just change the setting from cannibal island or the wild west to a different planet/universe but the message is the same and the victims of colonization aren’t even human. And if they try to be pc by including Black or Asian people in the crew (at least they don’t include Indigenous people, that would make it too obvious!) that is worse because they are making poc complicit in colonization. All the races come together – to wipe out another group and steal their planet. It’s worse when they portray the human invaders as benign and pretend it is not colonialism, Victorian colonizers saw themselves as humanitarianists too. Anthropology, biology, even linguistics aren’t neutral truths they are weapons used against colonized people -now aliens. It isn’t escapism for me it is depressing.
If there was a scifi movie where a crew turned up raped and pillaged and infected all the aliens with syphilis, traded them alcohol in return for their slave labour building the human colony, wiped out the majority of the population but honoured them by allowing the survivors to dance at hotels to entertain tourists from earth, when they weren’t cleaning the rooms – that would reveal hard truths. But then the aliens and humans could be reconciled by including alien crew members on the next mission to colonize another planet and everything would be ok!
Stories set in other realities or the distant future that deal with race are almost always horrifying, like the coals vs pearls book. It doesn’t make me feel better to read about the way things could be in a different universe when that is not the way things are. It is just lying. it makes white people feel better to deny reality, they don’t need science fiction for that.
Oh sorry if this is a derail! I hope my language was not too strong for anybody’s nerves..
@ Nadine
I agree that there’s a lot of bad, racist, sexist, colonialist, etc. sci fi out there, but then again the same can be said for a lot of genres because they all exist in an oppressive framework. But I wouldn’t agree that these problems are inherent to the genre. There’s also a lot of science fiction fans among people of colour, indigenous people, etc.! Authors and readers alike. And while there’s always room to be critical consumers of literature and media and you’re absolutely right that there are many examples of science fiction which obscures and perpetuates the status quo, many creators also use this genre to explore and challenge oppressive tropes, like Le Guin’s work cited by Erin in the previous comment, Atwood’s Handmaid’s Tale mentioned in the OP (I can also add just off the top of my head Samuel Delaney, Octavia Butler, Nalo Hopkinson – oh gosh, there are so, so many authors! And that’s just books!). I think that’s what Brigid was getting at.
I’m at the wrong computer now, but when I get back on my regular computer, I’ve got lots of links to fen of colour describing what science fiction means to them and more resources for awesome kyriarchy-challenging sci fi.
Okay, I dug up some big lists. I haven’t read everything here so I can’t recommend all of them exactly, but it’s a great place to start!
Recs for Indigenous/Anti-Colonialist AUs, Indigenous History, POC SFF Traditions
Indigenous Spec Fic
Women SF Writers of Color
Wikipedia article: Speculative fiction by writers of color
I’m also going to throw out some specific love for Minister Faust out as well because he doesn’t seem to be on any of those lists and we need some more Canadian POC sci-fi author love!
As for what sci-fi/fantasy means to POC writers and readers, I can share Deepa D.’s I didn’t dream of dragons, Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (that’s a novel and TW for difficult content around rape and abuse), and, well, probably more but I need to go make dinner now! Anyway, given how often POC sci-fi/fantasy fans have often been erased both in mainstream culture and within the fan subcultures as well, I just wanted to be sure that it didn’t happen here!
Again, though, I completely agree that there is PLENTY in sci-fi that needs criticizing and challenging.
Thanks so much for these, Jadey! I will definitely check them out, and I hope others will, too.
I’ll also throw out this essay by Samuel R. Delaney about being a black science fiction writer, with the caveat that it’s on my to-read list so I haven’t actually read it yet: Racism and Science Fiction
Junot Diaz did a great intro essay to Edgar Rice Burroughs’ Princess of Mars that is a must read for anyone interested in critical discussion of SF and race (especially given Princess of Mars — really really early SF, 1916, I think?). It’s really worth a read — both of them.
Thanks, i will try to read them later. I agree that every genre is just as bad and poc have to read something so if scifi is entertaining to some people that’s ok. Other books I like are equally racist I try to read post-colonial novels but they are hard to get where i live so I usually prefer books that don’t include any poc characters or refer to race at all, and that is just as bad too!
As a tribal librarian, I’ve been looking to include as many genre’s in my fiction , and YA fiction as possible and came accross Daniel Heath Justice’s trilogy The Way of Thorn and Thunder. Justice is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and it is really interesting to have an example of this kind of work by an indigenous author. As explanation, my library only collects materials by/about/for Native people.
Ooh, thanks! I did a quick Google search and found this interview that Innsmouth Free Press did with Daniel Heath Justice. This looks promising:
Interesting commentary, relevant to this post:
And recommendations!
Not derailing — thanks for this comment! I think I actually agree with most of what you’re saying, except I don’t think all scifi is colonialist apologia, and like Jadey, I don’t think being science fiction is what makes problematic scifi problematic.
I do hope Jadey comes back with more suggestions, but right off the bat I’d say if you haven’t read any of Octavia Butler’s work, I strongly recommend it. She conveys some great gender and race commentary with beautiful writing and an inventive imagination.
I think this comes down to the Verfremdungseffekt or ‘alienation effect’ inherent in sci-fi. It lets you get stuff past the usual filters, but that can be used for good (addressing social problems that are difficult to discuss openly) or evil (advocating something that is unacceptable for good reason, by changing the world in which it is set just enough to make the idea seem reasonable).
You might like (or hate!) this book:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream
Brigid, I agree with almost everything you wrote. It isn’t that science fiction isn’t problematic — all fiction is on some level. I think there’s enough space (pun sort of intended) to imagine new possibilities, even in the oldest, most misogynistic stuff. The fantasy of new dreams and creating new worlds is a great space to work out modern issues, but we’re still who we are and we still screw it up. Mary Doria Russell’s “The Sparrow” is a really great example of that, and really worth a read.
And sci-fi and fantasy have been “saving me” since 6th grade when I met Madeleine L’Engle and “A Wrinkle in Time.”
@ Nadine: A lot of sf (especially written rather than film/tv) confronts colonialism and invasion of other worlds. This usually has two purposes:
1. To explore the history of colonisation and invasion in recent and current times (the use of future settings / other worlds to comment on the present);
2. To raise issues of future space “exploration” (and how completely dodgy it could be / probably will be).
So while the Stargate franchises are exactly examples of what you were referring to, not all sf is the same and if you would enjoy reading this type of fiction if it wasn’t racist, a lot does exist.
Sf also is about more than space “exploration”. It explores how we could live in the future, the ethics involved, effects of technology, effects of ideologies, environmental impacts of our current lifestyle and all sorts of wonderful “what if?” questions.
Sf can be, has been, continues to be a way to talk about racism, sexism, cissexism, ableism, classism, heterosexism… It can be, has been, will continue to be guilty of all these prejudices as well. So readers and writers and viewers call out oppressive and unquestioning sf and spread the word about the “good stuff”.
As for fantasy fiction, that’s a whole other lovely conversation with related and specific pitfalls.
So while the Stargate franchises are exactly examples of what you were referring to, not all sf is the same and if you would enjoy reading this type of fiction if it wasn’t racist, a lot does exist.
Since I did mention Stargate my original post, I just want to chime in here and say absolutely, Stargate is extremely problematic with regards to not only space exploration as a new form of colonialism, but also its treatment of real Earth cultures and their histories. Stargate anthropology is not real anthropology, and it’s certainly a far cry from the social-justice-flavored anthropology I was fortunate enough to study in college. If you’re going to watch Stargate, this is important stuff to keep in mind.
And, to clarify: while I mention it as something I watch, I do NOT intend to recommend it as an example of what I’m talking about in most of the above post.
The world of science fiction and its sister-genre fantasy are so big, that I can stack my reading list with feminist and post-colonial authors and still have more than I can fit into my schedule in a year. The critical dystopian futures of Tepper and Atwood, and less-than-perfect futures of Slonczewski and Le Guin strike me as worth reading.
Fantasy IMNSHO is currently undergoing something of a multicultural renaissance. The Carl Brandon society has their own awards and reading lists for SF/F by people of color.
I enjoy quality science fiction immensely. Movies like Contact, K-PAX, Forbidden Planet, Predator, etc. But never looked at them the way this article depicts them. Something to think about.
This is why I read science fiction. The “packaging” is new and different, but people (of all species) and their problems are universal, and seeing characters and problems in a fresh setting lets your brain look at them from a different angle and gain new understanding.
That, and I’m with Brigid: escaping into worlds full of rampant badassery where the day actually gets saved — and by cleverness more often than brute force — keeps me sane. ^_^
@Nadine: W-w-what sci-fi have you been reading/watching?! @_@; Sure, the problematic stuff exists (in spades), but there’s lots of fiercely social-justice flavored stuff out there too.
I’m really fond of a novel titled “Hellspark” by Janet Kagan; a new planet has been discovered and the scientists surveying it are trying to determine whether or not any of the native species are sentient, while corporations lean on them to clear the planet for development. It explores a lot of different ideas — especially what it means to be “sentient — and the characters are great.
That sounds exactly like what I was talking about. Does it explore the issue of what right scientists have to go to other planets and categorize the inhabitants by earth categories that have nothing to do with the creatures being categorized? Colonized people were categorized as flora and fauna by scientists not so long ago and we’re still subjected to that kind of western categorization in our own countries. European colonizers judge what is sentient and what is not, I’m familiar with that ISSUE! The idea that scientists are neutral observers working against colonizing governments to protect the sentient or non-sentient natives is an idea that needs to be explored! That is not how it is on this planet. If Black or poc scientists were included in a book like that it would just add insult to injury.
I am not familiar with Hellspark, so I don’t know the answer to the questions you (Nadine) are asking. From Verity Khat’s description it sounds like the book could go either way. Given a plot where scientists are surveying a new planet for “sentient life” and corporations are pushing for development, I see great potential for an insightful critique of colonization — OR a tacit endorsement of colonialism and erasure of colonized peoples.
One of science fiction’s great opportunities for cultural critique is in the fact that it tells stories that are explicitly different from our own planet’s (or timeline’s) histories. That allows it to take the tropes of our factual history, if you will — colonialism and other stories of oppression — and intentionally turn them on their heads, or turn them inside out, or even replicate them in new settings, to illuminating effect.
Those same plots and techniques can also be used to obscure the truths of Earth’s histories and erase the stories of Earth’s people. The power lies with the author, and to some extent the reader, to determine which way a particular science fiction will go.
True. I shouldn’t generalize about the whole genre because obviously there is more to it than I knew.
I completely agree with you, Brigid. Love the possibilities of the sf/f genres – some of the most exciting writing and tv comes from it. The Stargate franchises are hugely problematic but I still enjoy watching them. And I love, love, Fringe. Still Firefly will always be number one with me.
As for writing, Tepper is deeply flawed, but I love her, Le Guin, amazing with some quibbles (because no one’s perfect), and I second endorsements of Slonczewski. So many amazing writers.
And Brigid, I don’t think the post comes off as endorsing Stargate as a good example of the potential of sf.