Scraps Of The Untainted Sky

Science Fiction, Utopia, Dystopia

Thomas Moylan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780429977039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Dystopian narrative is a product of the social ferment of the twentieth century. A hundred years of war, famine, disease, state terror, genocide, ecocide, and the depletion of humanity through the buying and selling of everyday life provided fertile ground for this fictive underside of the utopian imagination. From the classical works by E. M. Forster, Yevgeny Zamyatin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and Margaret Atwood, through the new maps of hell in postwar science fiction, and most recently in the dystopian turn of the 1980s and 1990s, this narrative machine has produced challenging cognitive maps of the given historical situation by way of imaginary societies which are even worse than those that lie outside their authors' and readers' doors.In Scraps of the Untainted Sky, Tom Moylan offers a thorough investigation of the history and aesthetics of dystopia. To situate his study, Moylan sets out the methodological paradigm that developed within the interdisciplinary fields of science fiction studies and utopian studies as they grow out of the oppositional political culture of the 1960 and 1970s (the context that produced the project of cultural studies itself). He then presents a thorough account of the textual structure and formal operations of the dystopian text. From there, he focuses on the new science-fictional dystopias that emerged in the context of the economic, political, and cultural convulsions of the 1980s and 1990s, and he examines in detail three of these new "critical dystopias: " Kim Stanley Robinson's The Gold Coast, Octavia Butler's The Parable of the Sower, and Marge Piercy's He, She, and It.With its detailed, documented, and yet accessible presentation, Scraps of the Untainted Sky will be of interest to established scholars as well as students and general readers who are seeking an in-depth introduction to this important area of cultural production.

Part One
Science Fiction and Utopia

1
Dangerous Visions

If any theme runs through all my work, it is what Adrienne Rich once called "re-vision," i.e., the re-perceiving of experience, not because our experience is complex or subtle or hard to understand (though it is sometimes all three) but because so much of what's presented to us as "the real world" or "the way it is" is so obviously untrue that a great deal of social energy must be mobilized to hide that gross and ghastly fact.

—JOANNA RUSS, TO WRITE LIKE A WOMAN (xv)

I

Where in the world am I? What in the world is going on? What am I going to do? These are questions common to science fiction (sf) whenever and wherever one locates it historically or geographically. Especially in the Anglo-American tradition, narratives of alienation and discovery have characterized sf from the early moments of its emergence from the sea of fantastic writing.

In Frankenstein in 1818, Mary Shelley's scientist strives to find a place for himself and his heterodox approach to medieval and modern science in the brave new world of utilitarian, capitalist Britain; and even more so her newborn creature awakes in an alien and alienated society that holds no place for such a radically new human. Both characters ironically and negatively echo the amazement of Shakespeare's Miranda as she stands on the cusp of modernity, colonialism, rationality, and the rest of the economic-cultural package that has led to this particular historical moment at the beginning of the third millennium. In The Time Machine in 1895, H. G. Wells's Time Traveller struggles to ground his vision and find his way, and by metaphoric extension the way of humanity, in a nasty future in which his own present, Wells's empirical moment and the Time Traveller's "Britain," is the terrifying past. In the United States in the early 1960s, Michael Valentine Smith in Robert Heinlein's novel finds himself to be eponymously the stranger in a strange land, the consumer paradise of postwar America. In the parallel world of sf film, David Bowie's character, the cool-headed alien in "Nicholas Roeg's Man Who Fell to Earth (1976) is beset by the disorientation of one who strives to read the signs of the place wherein he lands, simply to apprehend where he is and what is going on, desperately to grasp the rules and framework that produce and shape his fallen location, so that he might somehow regain his own place in the universe. And the commercially popular extraterrestrial in Steven Spielberg's ET (1982) captures the audience's attention and support as it too tries to learn the ways of an alien planet in order to use its culture and its technology to return home.

In these works, as in so much of sf, the protagonists as spacetime travelers— to whom we as readers are attached like so many remora riding the back of a deep-diving whale—struggle to make sense of their world and to act decisively within it. Whether they find themselves in a familiar society now seen freshly and critically or one that is fully alien, they negotiate an "anthropological strangeness," as Bruno Latour and Steve Woolgar would put it.¹ In response, they develop what Michael Taussig calls an implicit social knowledge as they imaginatively move toward a form of cognitively enhanced action, toward a degree of praxis that is most likely and perhaps inevitably in conflict with the society surrounding them.² At the very least, they act in the name of a self-interested effort to be more fully themselves in a difficult place, but more often they strive to be actively part of a found community of people who are also dislocated, and no doubt dispossessed and disempowered, and who are posing similar questions to the entire social reality: asking historically as well as individually where in the world they are, what in the world is going on, and what in the world they can do about it.

And so it is that sf finds ways to explore and to go where others will not, might not, dare not go. It's not the only creative mode to do so, but it is one that has evolved and acquired a relatively privileged niche in the cultures of modernity and postmodernity. Whether one traces sf from the amazing voyages of the early modern period, the utopian narrations of the sixteenth century, the scientific romances of the nineteenth century, the science fictional novels of imperial Britain, or the pulp stories and paperbacks of the neo-imperial United States, this fictive practice has the formal potential to re-vision the world in ways that generate pleasurable, probing, and potentially subversive responses in its readers. Although a good deal of sf—especially since the early 1980s—suffers from a standardization and simplification imposed by the constricted financial demands of publishers and distributors, the texts that do draw on the full measure of the formal capacities of the genre and rise above prevailing common sense and market mediocrity make for worthwhile and challenging reading.

Central to sf's textual tendency to go where others haven't (at least not in ways acknowledged within the purview of those who are inclined to settle for the world as they immediately and unreflectively see it and know it) is sf's imaginative proclivity to re-create the empirical present of its author and implied readers as an "elsewhere" an alternative spacetime that is the empirical moment but not that moment as it is ideologically produced by way of everyday common sense.

In this formal quality lies one of the basic pleasures of the sf text, for it delivers the textual motivation that makes available the specific reading opportunities to which readers of sf return again and again. However much sf is, as Joanna Russ has said, a "didactic" literature, it is one that works by way of a readerly delight in the thoughtful and thought-provoking activity of imagining the elsewhere of a given text, of filling in, co-creating, the imagined (or what Marc Angenot calls the "absent") paradigm of a society that does not exist but that nevertheless supplies a cognitive map of what does exist.³ Such world-building is both the deepest pleasure of reading sf and the source of its most powerfully subversive potential, for if a reader can manage to see the world differently (in that Brechtian sense of overcoming alienation by becoming critically estranged and engaged), she or he might just, especially in concert with friends or comrades and allies, do something to alter it—perhaps on a large scale or ever so slightly, perhaps in a singular deluge or maybe through steady drops of water on apparently stable and solid rock—so as to make that world a more just and congenial place for all who live in it.⁴

When I teach sf, I find that the most difficult problem for some students who are new to this particular variety of the fantastic is their inability or unwillingness to read it on its own formal terms.⁵ Too often they come to sf from their experience with literary modes more ideologically attuned to the society they know and are taught to love and obey. That is, they tend, initially at least, to read sf by way of an assumed realism or mimeticism in which the stories they encounter are set in motion in settings that they assume are ones with which they are familiar. Or if they accept the settings as unfamiliar, they too quickly conclude that the narrative is still comfortably knowable by means of existing social rules; or, alternatively, they find it to be consolingly unknowable because they can then regard the entire text as mere fantasy, and therefore meaningless. Put simply, they don't get sf because they don't realize the consequences, formally and logically, of the text's particular mechanics—namely, its ability to generate cognitively substantial yet estranged alternative worlds.⁶

As Samuel R. Delany once suggested, inexperienced readers do not see that what appears to be the taken-for-granted background (the setting) is actually in sf the foreground (Or driving force behind the total creation); for before a story can be followed or a character understood, the Active world itself must be indulged in, grasped, learned, and detailed in readers' own minds so that the matters of plot or character can literally make sense.⁷ Instead, they hold fast to an ideologically driven belief in a transparent and unchanging world and follow only the plot as they skim over descriptive parts with clouded eyes. Opting for this retreat to the safety net of familiar narrative practices, they often slam into a text that becomes even more opaque, even less pleasurable, as they avoid the necessary work of learning the complexity of the alternative world in order to understand the characters' actions. Thus they miss, or refuse, the central pleasure of this imaginative mode. If they persist in their readerly mystification, they eventually turn away from sf and adopt the mainstream (what Delany would call mundane) rap on sf as a simpleminded, escapist sub-or trivial literature that toys with scientific or technological marvels or terrors or indulges in fantasies replete with bug-eyed monsters, spaceships, and ray guns. When they don't take up the challenge to break new epistemological and aesthetic ground in their own reading practice, they lose touch with a historically and formally rich fictive tradition that could well give them intellectual pleasure, as well as critical insight to their own time and place. They lose the opportunity to acquire a valuable but "dangerous knowledge," which in its minor key is potentially as challenging to the status quo as those major instances of subversive epistemology in the history of the twentieth century, including the radical readings of the "signs of the times" in base Christian communities, the consciousness-raising discoveries of feminists and their male allies, or the theory-practice analytical spiral of a noncompromised socialist opposition.⁸

The specific textual strategies of sf and the resulting feedback loops in the reading practices learned by what Edward James calls the "determined reader of sf" are my initial topics when I teach sf.⁹ Although there are undeniably as many ways to read the sf text as there are actual readers, those who are familiar with the Active maneuvers of sf (whose skills are sometimes enhanced by their participation in that world of sf fan culture which at its best is knowledgeable and democratic) fairly quickly realize that the "setting" of the text is where the primary action is. The world created by the sf author has its own systemic rules insofar as it is a fully working version of an alternative reality. To avoid the cumbersome and boring task of first explaining that world (in some sort of encyclopedic preview or purview), the author must deliver its substance in sequential bits, appearing as the narrative unfolds, as the pages turn. The genetically informed reader of such a text therefore learns the strange new world not by way of a condensed reality briefing but rather by absorbing and reflecting upon pieces of information that titrate into a comprehensible pattern, by which the reader subsequently "makes sense" of the plot and character development unfolding within that alternative spacetime.

As many writers, fans, and scholars of sf have noted, the experienced sf reader moves through a text like a traveler in a foreign culture or a detective seeking clues to unravel the mystery at hand.¹⁰ Both proceed incrementally, observing and gradually absorbing information, making patterns, discovering ways to see and understand the larger picture in its own right, and finally to act decisively within that new context—to enjoy the newfound culture or to solve the crime and reestablish justice and well-being. Working from a comparison with the process of detection, Edward James notes that "the decoding and assessment of these clues can be a major part of the pleasure provided by the work; indeed, without that decoding and assessment, in a process of careful reading, it may be impossible to understand the text at all" (20th Century 115).¹¹ Sf thus invokes and invites a particular readerly experience built around a distinctive "sense of wonder," a quality that has long been part of the sf community's self-understanding, as can be seen in Damon Knight's 1956 volume of sf criticism entitled In Search of Wonder.

This quite specific pleasure, James suggests, is based in the embrace of a reality that is larger than the lived world of the individual reader. As such, it can be linked, chronologically and epistemologically, to the Romantic notion, and potentially subversive experience, of the Sublime; for the secular sense of magnitude that displaces and relocates the individual in a process both terrifying and satisfying is one that resonates with the "wonder" evoked by the sf text.¹² Unlike the abstract individual response evoked by the Romantic Sublime, however, the "wonder" of sf (as it developed further along in the complex history and experience of modernity) is much more socially, collectively, materially inflected. In a comparison with the traditional realist novel (with its focus on individual personalities as they play out in relatively familiar settings), James observes that sf is more concerned with the created world or produced social environment, more interested in the collective fate of the human species, exploring these concerns in a setting that while resonating with their own material realities, does not actually exist (or exist as such) in the known world of its author or readers. This invented world challenges readers, or seductively invites them, to engage in the thoughtful activity of constructing both the details and the social logic that comprise it.¹³ In doing so, the sf imaginary machine offers them the opportunity to reorganize "their assumptions and knowledge, reversing and distorting conventional structures and relationships, and drawing upon the reservoir of other [sf] fiction, in order to make sense of the text" (20th Century 96).

Working out of a semiological analysis, Teresa de Lauretis further suggests that this readerly process does not end with simply making sense of the text.¹⁴ By juxtaposing the familiar claim of a "sense of wonder" with a more theoretically nuanced account of the readerly process as one that requires an intellectual and imaginative "wandering" between the signifiers of the text and the referents of the outside world, she shifts the balance from the text back to the reader. She describes the reader's process of working through the text as an activity of "associating, opposing, relating, remembering, or making unexpected discoveries," thereby launching an adventure within the mind, not the text, that can possibly lead to a re-visioning of "time, space, and social relations" (de Lauretis 165). In the "best" sf, de Lauretis argues that

the reader's sense of wOnder as awe, marvel, portent, revelation is replaced by a sense of wAndering through a mindscape both familiar and unfamiliar. Displaced from the central position of the knowledgeable observer, the reader stands on constantly shifting ground, on the margins of understanding, at the periphery of vision: hence the sense of wAnder, of being dislocated to another space-time continuum where human possibilities are discovered in the intersection of other signs with other meanings, (de Lauretis 165-166)

I will return to the formal operations of sf in more detail in the next chapter when I review the developing body of critical work that from the late 1960s onward accounted for the formal and social significance of what Darko Suvin calls the "feedback oscillation" generated by the relationship between the sf reader and the sf text: a feedback loop that as Suvin puts it, "moves now from the author's and implied reader's norm of reality to the narratively actualized novum [of the sf text] in order to understand the plot-events, and now back from those novelties to the author's reality, in order to see it afresh from the new perspective gained."¹⁵ As Delany observes, it is this very feedback loop, or rather the reading protocol it invites, that constitutes for him the most fruitful way to arrive at the specificity of sf itself: "The genre is not a set of texts or of rhetorical figures but rather a reading protocol complex. .. . The texts central to the genre become those texts that were clearly written to exploit a particular protocol complex—texts which yield a particularly rich reading experience when read according to one complex rather than another."¹⁶ For now, I want to stay in a teacherly mode and turn to two exemplary sf texts so that I can continue my discussion with an emphasis on the sf object itself (as happened in the best moments of the critical turn of the 1960s and 1970s, as it refused the a priori accounts and judgments of orthodox academic scholarship).¹⁷

II

He turned his head—those words have not been in our language for six hundred years—and said, in hid Russian: "Who's that?"

—JOANNA RUSS/'WHEN IT CHANGED" (412)

One of the stories that I find most helpful and pleasurable in my efforts to introduce students (the few who are resistant and the many who are not) to the substance and potential of sf is Joanna Russ's "When It Changed."¹⁸ First published in 1972, it has gained a longer shelf life (in these days of a publishing industry disciplined by the logic of just-in-time, flexible production) as a selection in Science Fiction: The Science Fiction Research Association Anthology, which was brought out in 1988 by one of the leading academic organizations dedicated to sf studies.

"When It Changed" is a text that speaks to many of the concerns that thread their way through my book. For one thing, it works along the axis of the utopian-dystopian imaginary that has so effectively informed sf in the years since the end of World War II, and it is more immediately part of the revival of Utopian writing of the 1960s and 1970s that produced the critical Utopia, of which one of the earliest and best examples is Russ's alternative version of this very story in her 1975 novel, The Female Man.¹⁹ As well—and in keeping with the stra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Permissions
• Preface
• PART ONE: SCIENCE FICTION AND UTOPIA
• PART TWO: DYSTOPIA
• PART THREE: DYSTOPIAN MANEUVERS
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Literary Bibliography and Filmography
• Index