Introduction
Can genres have an intrinsic predisposition to a particular politics? Critics who ask this question of science fiction (SF) often arrive at different answers. Carl Freedman, for example, posits that SF is a “privileged and paradigmatic genre” for Marxism and critical theory, having “the deepest … affinity with the rigors of dialectical thinking,” which would explain the genre’s attraction to Marxist critics such as Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams, and Fredric Jameson.1 By contrast, Aaron Santesso claims the genre leans in a more regressive direction, replete with “fascist energies and ideas.”2 In this chapter, I ask whether SF has a predisposition to a particular ethical outlook, exploring the dominant ethical modes of the SF genre. As with the question of politics, which resurfaces throughout this essay, how this question of ethics is answered depends on how SF is defined and, centrally, the significance given to the American SF pulp magazines , which are central to Santesso’s study but excised from Freedman’s. However, establishing a systematic definition of SF today—one that would include works generally considered SF, exclude (if desired) those of other genres, and navigate a growing body of “post-genre” or “slipstream” works that blend different conventions—would be impossible. It is thus more accurate to speak of SF’s multitude of literary traditions, which provide it with what Samuel R. Delany called SF’s “historical, theoretical, stylistic, and valuative plurality.”3 Rather than seek a single answer to this question of SF’s ethics, I will examine two classic SF works and the traditions they represent: Isaac Asimov’s original Foundation trilogy (1951–1953; serialised 1942–1950), one of the most iconic and well-loved series of the American pulps and SF’s “golden age,” and Yevgeny Zamyatin’s Мы (We, 1921), a highly influential dystopian novel from an Eastern European SF tradition. I argue that the genre SF that developed in the American pulps was dominated by themes and modes of representation best described as totalising, but that works such as Мы demonstrate the potential for SF to engage with a more ethical discourse.4
I thus begin by exploring Emmanuel Levinas’s critique of totalisation, which he finds violent and reductive in its attempts to reduce the world and its inhabitants to finite and knowable concepts. I then turn to Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, focusing primarily on the series’ representation of “psychohistory,” for an example of this totalising project finding a utopian expression in pulp SF. Returning to Levinas, I then consider his writings on the idea of infinity and the disruption of totality in the face-to-face encounter, concepts integral to his understanding of ethics and responsibility. This leads into a Levinasian reading of Zamyatin’s Мы, which demonstrates a philosophical orientation contrary of that of Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, focusing on the power of the encounter with the unknowable other to break apart totalising ideologies. Finally, I will argue that the literary form of each text underpins their different ethical orientations, with Asimov’s straightforwardly “pulpish” mode supporting his series’ totalising approach, and Zamyatin’s disruptive modernist form allowing him to present singular and unknowable characters.
Totality and Ethics
Writing in the decades following World War II, Levinas saw the need to drastically rethink the foundations of a philosophical tradition that had been complicit in the rise of fascism. This resulted in his blistering critique of the concept of totality, which he associates with Western philosophy as a whole. He describes this philosophy as “une tentative de synthèse universelle, une réduction de toute l’expérience, de tout ce qui est sense, à une totalité où la conscience embrasse le monde, ne laisse rien d’autre hors d’elle” (“an attempt at universal synthesis, a reduction of all experiences, of all that is reasonable, to a totality wherein consciousness embraces the world, leaving nothing other outside of itself”).5 Through integration into a comprehensible totality, what is other is stripped of its infinite alterity (its difference) in order to become finite and known—to be conquered, cognitively. Such an approach finds no resistance in objects, which can be integrated into the totality “sans jamais mettre en question la liberté du moi” (“without ever putting into question the freedom of the I”).6 It is when this approach is extended to the other person, singular and unknowable, that its unethical orientation is revealed. The totalisation of the Other necessitates the erasure of their alterity, dissolving them into a concept and subsuming them into a totality, making it an act of violence against the other’s very otherness. Levinas thus identifies totalisation as a kind of imperialism, associating it with “toute la civilisation occidentale de propriété, d’exploitation, de tyrannie politique et de guerre” (“the whole Western civilization of property, exploitation, political tyranny, and war”).7 It is also foundational to fascism, which depends on reductive totalisation to create the neat and all-encompassing narratives and identities that would separate “us” from “them.”
John Clute has argued that genre SF is governed by “two essential assumptions”: first, that the world and its people “can be seen as wholly as required, and described accurately, in words”; and second, “that the ‘world’ … does in the end have a story which can be told.”8 This two-fold belief that the world is knowable and representable reflects genre SF’s often dogmatic scientific positivism, which validates only empirical and conclusive scientific knowledge and would extend “hard” science approaches into areas of social science and philosophy. The result is a generic disposition to totalising themes, narratives, and literary forms. Recasting this in Levinasian terms, genre SF is committed to the idea that the universe, and the others who inhabit it, are ultimately totalisable, and that this totality can be adequately communicated in writing.
Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy
The totalising tendency that dominated genre SF finds powerful expression in Asimov’s Foundation trilogy. Originally published as a series of short stories and novellas in Astounding Science-Fiction between 1942 and 1950, then re-worked into the novels Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953), the Foundation trilogy remains one of the most influential series of the pulp SF era. Although it was awarded a one-off special Hugo Award for Best All-Time Series in 1966, critics have often questioned the reasons behind its enormous success.9 This question frames studies by James Gunn and Charles Elkins, but even Asimov asked the question when re-reading the original trilogy in preparation for Foundation’s Edge (1982):
Gunn posits that the series’ succes...I read [the stories] with mounting uneasiness. I kept waiting for something to happen, and nothing ever did. All three volumes, all the nearly quarter of a million words, consisted of thoughts and of conversations. No action. No physical suspense.What was all the fuss about, then? Why did everyone want more of that stuff?10