Science Fiction, New Space Opera, and Neoliberal Globalism

Nostalgia for Infinity

Jerome Winter

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781783169467
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Science Fiction
• Index: Literature

One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

1	The Neoliberal Masters of the Universe: The Origin of New Space Opera in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and M. John Harrison’s Centauri Device and Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy

This chapter explores the response of the space-opera subgenre to what both Lisa Duggan and Daniel Stedman Jones label the second phase of neoliberalism, approximately spanning the early 1960s to the early 1980s. After analysing Samuel Delany’s seminal contribution to the subgenre and M. John Harrison’s less easily periodisable but distinctly New Wave work in the subgenre, the chapter then closes with a brief discussion of the space opera of the mid-1980s, which led directly to the fruition of New Space Opera proper that preoccupies the rest of the book. The second phase of neoliberalism expresses what Foucault considers a distinctly Americanised character and constitutes a gradually coalescing assemblage of so-called fiscal conservative and moderate leftist opposition to the Keynesian compromise and Great Society programmes bundled together by Cold War neoliberal theorists of the time with Soviet Communism. Globally, one of the chief neoliberal victories of the era was the overthrow of a Salvador Allende by Augusto Pinochet in 1973 under the influence of neoliberal advisors of the Chicago School. Additionally, this second phase of neoliberalism generated a significant countercultural rejection of neoliberal doctrine, especially from within the dissident ranks of the Civil Rights movement.

Samuel R. Delany’s Afrofuturist Cyborgs and the Incipient Neoliberal World-System

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A signal catalyst for the 1960s innovation of the space opera sub-genre, Samuel R. Delany brought what he considers an ‘Afrofuturist’ countercultural edge to SF field while he simultaneously brought SF to such a counterculture. In ‘Further Considerations of AfroFuturism’, Kodwo Eshun contends that an African-American appeal to technological futurity – in cultural productions as distinct as Autobiography of Malcom X (1965) and the Black Power movement, Bob Marley’s pan-Africanist music, Duke Ellington’s ‘The Race for Space’ (1962) or Martin Luther King’s ‘Where Do We Go from Here?’ (1966) – characterises a diverse and heterogeneous community of 1960s black musicians, politicians and writers (Eshun 2003: 294). This position develops his theories from More Brilliant than the Sun (1998) that the radical cultural expressions of 1960s Afrofuturism typified by the Sun Ra Arkestra opposed the mainstream humanist black culture of this era (2). In a 1994 interview with Delany, ‘Black to the Future’ in which Mark Dery coined the term Afrofuturism, Samuel R. Delany similarly views Afrofuturism through the perspective of a radical left-wing science fiction community that Delany traces back to the Futurians of the 1930s and 1940s and onward to his contemporaneous anti-Vietnam SF community of the 1960s (Dery 1994: 202). The influence of neoliberal discourse, most visible in the outspoken advocacy as Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek during this period, not only combined promotion of state-induced unbridled markets with a paradoxical distrust of governmental bureaucracy but also, during a period of tumultuous Civil-Rights activism and its backlash, gradually mobilised a political base of ‘cultural nationalism and negatively, though coded, if not blatant, racism’ (Harvey 2005: 46).

Samuel Delany’s space opera Nova (1968) met with a receptive audience among the SF community of its time. The space opera writer Harry Harrison, who serialised portions of the novel in Amazing Stories magazine, as well as prominent critics Judith Merril and Algis Budrys, all hailed Delany’s Nova as a triumph for the SF genre’s development, and as a testament to its immediate popularity the novel was nominated for a Hugo Award for Best Novel by the fan-associated members of the Science Fiction Society in 1969. The critical reputation of the novel among genre-SF audiences has also fared impressively well over the years as determined by its Viking reprintings. Even more recently, David Pringle and Jo Walton, among many other readers, have offered new critical plaudits of the novel. Nonetheless, despite the perspicacity of these reviews, no sustained analysis of the novel as an outgrowth of its immediate neoliberal milieu currently exists.

Perhaps such critical neglect stems from the fact that Delany has himself distanced himself from his first five space opera novels published from the early-to-late 1960s, before the writer was 25 years old, by Ace Books, under the editorial stewardship of the ex-Futurian Donald Wollheim. In the Dery interview, Delany claims these space operas ‘yearned to be at – were suffused with a yearning for – the most traditional SF enterprise’ (Dery 1994: 190), suggesting an interest in the coded construction of blackness by white culture – explained by way of James Baldwin’s ‘darkness within ourselves’ – as opposed to a straightforward Afrofuturist affirmation of marginalised black culture. Yet, as Delany himself attests, portions of the novel Nova were nevertheless rejected for serialisation by John W. Campbell, the conservative editor of Astounding magazine, because its protagonist, Lorq Von Ray, is described as mixed race. Interestingly, the racial politics of Nova in fact encode an intersection of ethnic, postcolonial cultural politics and space opera conventions that extrapolate on the emergent countercultural development of the information-technology revolution in the dawning neoliberal era. Despite the author’s later embarrassed misgivings, the space operatic setting of Nova does not therefore serve simply as an escapist backdrop but rather as a creative site for the aesthetic transformation of an adversarial worldliness. Delany rewrites ingrained white cultural mythologies to generate an alternative, subaltern resistance to the emergent neoliberal paradigm. Moreover, displacing the withering scorn for pulp era space opera of a New Wave critic like M. John Harrison discussed below, Delany seems to have written Nova to revisit the space opera subgenre so as to plug into its proletarian Futurian roots.

In November 1978, Samuel R. Delany delivered a speech at the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York City, called ‘The Necessity of Tomorrow(s).’ Following Theodore Sturgeon’s call to ask the next question, Delany poses this probing hypothetical to his audience: ‘Could there be a specifically black science fiction?’ (Dery 13). Speaking near the Harlem mortuary where he was raised, Delany ponders this science fictional conjecture by defending why this question matters: ‘we need images of tomorrow; and our people need them more than most’ (Dery 14). Although what the first-person plural of ‘our people’ may exactly connote remains unsaid – and the issue of racialist identification in the author generally remains a worthwhile subject for scholarly dispute – this speech doubtlessly marks Delany’s early adopter participation in the discourse of Afrofuturism. In the interview with Dery, Delany engages with the problematic of ‘black nationalism’ by claiming that:

Deep within my work, I’ve situated material that the disenfranchised people in this country, victimized by oppression and an oppressive discourse based on the evil and valorized notion of nationhood and its hideous white – no other colour – underbelly, imperialism, must face but cannot without internalizing the power concepts and relationships inescapably entwined with the notion of ‘nation’ itself.

(Dery 1994: 188)

Affirming Afrofuturism for its tactical political utility, Delany attempts simultaneously to interrogate the complicity of race, nation and empire in fashioning such cultural politics. His Harlem audience needs images of tomorrow precisely because futurity has been historically denied to disadvantaged ethnic US audiences who nonetheless in the process of crafting these science-fictional tomorrows must also invest in concepts of nationhood and neo-imperialism dubiously bound up with neoliberal narratives of technological and economic progress and growth.

As opposed to the problematic post-racial colour blindness that Mark Bould in ‘The Ships Landed Ages Ago: Afrofuturism and Black SF’ (2007) limns in many science-fictional treatments of racial ideologies, Delany exploits cognitively and affectively estranged future-oriented political allegory to supplement what he refers to in the interview as ‘the systematic, conscientious, and massive destruction of African cultural remnants’ (Dery 191) experienced by African-Americans at large. In ‘The Necessity of Tomorrow(s)’ (2012), Delany refers to this project of political-economic regeneration for the black community as escaping the trap of being caught in a ‘web, a net, with no way to struggle free’ (Delany 14). This metaphor of a web recalls the scene in Delany’s Nova (1968) in which the ironised authorial mouthpiece Katin Crawford holds up a hunting net and explains to the wandering minstrel character Mouse that a ‘great web spreads across the galaxy’, constituting a ‘matrix in which history happens today’ that awaits a ‘catastrophic ripple’, which will ‘break the net asunder’ (174). The resonance of such web imagery to our neoliberal, information-driven globe is no coincidence, however prophetic it may seem; rather, Delany retools the protocols and codes of traditional pulp era, Futurian influenced space opera to address the resurgent hegemony of race, nation and empire in the neoliberal world system transformed by the utopian promise of a burgeoning infrastructure of information technology.1

In From Counterculture to Cyberculture (2008), Fred Turner documents how a neoliberal elite made strategic alliances with but also pre-emptively foreclosed the broader utopian aspirations of a global counterculture at large. Delany’s Nova blends the burgeoning of a network society with a 1960s counterculture by what New Wave scholar Rob Latham in a discussion of Delany’s earlier Babel-17 refers to as bringing ‘even more bohemian authenticity to the genre than had earlier SF hipsters such as Sheckley and Theodore Sturgeon’ (2014: 390). Moreover, as Carl Malmgren argues in his reading of Babel-17, Delany shows a clear nostalgic interest in the artistic output in this period not only in science fiction per se but of recovering more specifically the critically disregarded subgenre of space opera given its ‘action-packed, fast-paced Star Wars space opera, involving intergalactic war, treacherous spies, exotic locales, strange aliens, dangerous missions, and rousing space battles’ (1996: 5). In Delany’s Nova, perhaps the most flagrant pulp era touchstone is the elevation of the theoretician who first conceptualised the cyborg technology in the novel, Ashton Clark Smith, into a household deity that denizens of the galaxy frequently invoke as an oath or an epithet. This name is a slight rearrangement of pulp space opera practitioner Clark Ashton Smith with whom Delany in an interview with Algis Budrys associates a ‘pretty’ stylistic fair; rather than dismissing the pulp era influence as producing sub-literate, non-canonical ephemera as many other literary critics do, Delany privileges the power of the space-opera subgenre to achieve a lasting significance. Indeed, in his subsequent criticism, such as the often quoted essay ‘About Five Thousand Hundred and Seventy Five Words’ (1984), Delany influentially conceives of SF as a ‘paraliterature’ that contains specific conventions, practices, and ways of reading that distinguish it from mundane, mainstream literary fiction. By self-consciously reclaiming space opera, Delany distinguishes his work in part from the British New Wave of Michael Moorcock, J.G. Ballard and M. John Harrison, among many others, who Delany notes in Starboard Wine often rejected ‘spaceships, superweapons, interplanetary and interstellar conflicts’ as ‘better suited to comic books than serious literature’ (Delany 2012: 215).

In other words, Delany reconfigures the narrative and subgenre apparatus of space opera – especially its technocultural reinvention of heroic adventure, romantic quests, and epic journeys – into an oppositional, minority and marginal mythos at odds not only with E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith and Robert Heinlein’s right libertarian political allegories but also opposed to the neoliberal paradigm that began to crystallise during this period. Despite the stridency of certain New Wave polemics, it should be noted that Delany here clearly still shows influences and affiliations with traditional space opera of a more progressive and leftist streak, including Jack Vance’s mythopoeic space fantasies, Alfred Bester’s noir-tinged space operas, and Asimov’s Futurian ‘Foundation’ series. As such, Delany reoriented space opera away from a political allegory of capitalist expansion into the infinite cosmos, manoeuvring the subgenre into a recasting of infinity as a site of the ethnic, postcolonial ‘techno-imaginary’. Patrice Flichy coined this term ‘techno-imaginary’ to refer to a mediated assemblage of representations and images through which groups project their own utopian desires for a social and political collectivity onto technological inventions and discoveries. Likewise, Fred Turner documents the development of cybernetic rhetoric that tapped into the pervading techno-imaginary, stressing the discourses of homeostasis, cooperation, and feedback in information system theory from mid-century advocates such as Norbert Wiener, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller to the expansion of neoliberalism under Ronald Reagan’s ‘new economy’ constituted by an ‘emergent corporate elect – entrepreneurial, technologically savvy, but socially and culturally conservative’ (2008: 176). Neoliberal ideology begins to germinate in this period, paradoxically accelerated in its development by the bureaucratic initiatives of the computerised space race, and this incipient neoliberalism can be viewed in the 1960s as awaiting its eventual widespread policy application under Reagan and Thatcher.

Many black critics, however, attacked both neoliberal ideology and the space race policy in a fashion for which Delany’s brand of Afrofuturism shows clear affinities. While many black public intellectuals spoke out against the misdirected funds that the US space programme symbolised when inner-city infrastructure languished (Tribbe 2014: 36–9), the US government exploited the ‘aura of competence’ (McCurdy 1997: 84) that the space programme exuded to progress other ambitious initiatives such as civil-rights laws and anti-poverty campaigns. Many black people felt ostracised by NASA, or what Norman Mailer in Of a Fire on the Moon (1970) begrudgingly derides as the triumph of White Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture. In such a contested zone of cultural debate, Delany’s creative Afrofuturist discourse writes from within the belly of the beast, renegotiating space-culture icons and tropes to transform the hegemonic imperative at the nexus of 1960s cyberculture.

For instance, in Dhalgren (1975), the critically controversial but commercially successful novel Delany published after a 5-year hiatus following the publication of Nova, Delany explicitly addresses the ideological processes of compromise and renegotiation that undergirds the space opera trappings in the earlier Nova. Dhalgren registers the epochal crisis in capitalism that would fuel the backlash of neoliberalism in the 1980s and 1990s through a mysterious, pseudo-apocalyptic catastrophe that afflicts the Midwestern metropolis of Bellona, occupied only by a countercultural vestige of misfits, outsiders and victims. Moreover, one of the inexplicable phenomena that occurs in Bellona is the arrival of two moons in the night sky; in the strange subjective space of the novel, Delany registers the mythopoeic and discursive resonance of Earth’s lunar satellite made otherwise mundane by the US space programme.

The mixed-race, nameless protagonist referred to as Kid explains that ‘for the last fifty thousand science fiction novels [the moon] had just been a light hanging up there. And now it was…a place’ (Delany 98). Delany then complicates this dissipation of the science fictional lunar mystique into a deflated American space culture after the moon landing by the arrival of the white astronaut Captain Kamp, part-tourist, part-spy and ‘more or less the image of the establishment’ (455) despite his occasional folk singing. To a sympathetic audience of Kid, Captain Kamp defends the US manned space programme ‘folks starving in India notwithstanding’ given that ‘if there’s a real threat of world starvation, technology will have to be used to avoid it’ (459). Moreover, Captain Kamp identifies his astronaut experience in the Apollo programme as an extraordinary ‘adventure’, though the bizarre cosmological happenings of Bellona only dumbfound him. In Bellona, the grandiose promise of a progressive future adventure descends into the Babel-like confusion of the perplexed technocratic experts.

In Nova, Delany similarly recontextualises the peak of 1960s space-infected cyberculture to explore the complexity of marginal and oppositional desire for utopian social transformation. After all, as Fred Turner documents, the incipient networks of 1960s mainframe-oriented cyberculture were indeed increasingly visible during this tumultuous period, fuelled by corporate and military-industrial researchers in the Defense Department’s Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs ,as well as by Stewart Brand’s Whole-Earth Catalog and student protest movements. For Delany, moreover, the far future space opera backdrop of a cyberculture-infused intergalactic space serves as a zone for the unfettered reinscription of the neoliberal agenda. By the 1960s, the triumphant reception of Milton Friedman’s best-selling Capitalism and Freedom (1962) demonstrates the polemical virulence with which a Chicago School neoliberal faith in unbridled capitalism equated any governmental regulation, service, or spending with Soviet communism.

In The Birth of Biopolitics (2008) lectures, however, Foucault claims that this Cold War neoliberal aversion to what Friedman and Hayek branded the ‘collectivism’ of state planning expanded into a distinctively American dissemination of neoliberalism that should be viewed more broadly than simply an academic or theoretical orientation. Foucault claims that during this period neoliberalism grew to become a wide-ranging discursive social construction through which bodies actively and voluntarily reproduced and reanimated market-oriented competition, inequality, capital accumulation and self-interested individualism. Market actors are seen here as a self-entrepreneurial repository of biological powers, the homo economicus, that rationalises, sanction and enables putative ‘free markets’, which are in fact the byproducts of extensive governmental regulation and administration. From a self-consciously Foucauldian perspective, in Heavenly Breakfast (1979), Delany himself refects on his experience in a rock-group commune in New York during the Summer of Love in 1967, near the time when he was completing the manuscript of Nova. In the essayistic memoir, Delany describes a wholesale refusal of a drop-out commune member to participate in American society, even in so much as a survey against the Vietnam War, as suggesting the limits of countercultural revolt within an emerging neoliberal regime: ‘our differences are purely personal, as are all political encounters within the statistical matrix of a megalithic republic’ (33).

Delany’s Afrofuturism might indeed seem to contradict the views of many outspoken black critics of the Apollo era; yet Delany’s excursion into the subgenre also seizes the opportunity that, as Ross Posnock argues, ‘sci-fi was indeed an arena decidedly more plastic than the market offered by [other] commercial fiction of the early sixties’ (Posnock 1998: 282) to achieve a ‘cosmopolitan collage’ that interrogates the construction of racialised subjects. Despite Delany’s deep hostility to the pseudo-scientific, ultimately fantastic substrate of biological essentialism inherent in racial discourse, his fiction and criticism firmly remains committed to what Jeffrey Allen Tucker analyses as Delany’s sophisticated and tactical identification with racial politics as a salient cultural rubric for understanding his work. In ‘Racism and Science Fiction’ (1998), where Delany explains that John W. Campbell rejected Nova for its black-skinned protagonist, Delany parodies Campbell’s overly decorous hesitancy that his audience was not ready for such an innovation: ‘it was as though I’d happened to have dressed my main character in a purple brocade dinner jacket…and purple brocade just wasn’t big with buyers that season’ (385). Far from dissolving race into an undifferentiated post-racial mass in the vein of futuristic speculation adopted by Heinlein’s often subtly racialised protagonists, in this qu...

Table of contents

• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1    The Neoliberal Masters of the Universe: The Origin of New Space Opera in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and M. John Harrison’s Centauri Device and Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy
• 2    ‘Moments in the Fall’: Neoliberal Globalism and Utopian Socialist Desire in Ken MacLeod’s ‘Fall Revolution’ Quartet and lain M. Banks’s ‘Culture’ Series
• 3    Global Feminism and Neoliberal Crisis in Gwyneth Jones’s ‘Aleutian Trilogy’
• 4    ‘Archipelagoes of Stars’: Caribbean Cosmopolitics in Postcolonial SF
• Works cited
• Notes