Science Fiction and Empire

Liverpool Science Fiction Texts and Studies #35

by Patricia Kerslake

This book is about the human desire to experiment with empire. In the past it was done with real soldiers and expeditions and slaves and trade and misery and force. In the future it will be done with generation ships and off-world pioneers, robots and invasion, electronic sheep and people who just don't want to be pushed around any more. Beginning with a discussion of who 'we' are (hopefully, the good guys) and who 'they' are (anyone who isn't us), this narrative scans the lights of science fiction looking at the places where humans try to touch a variety of futures. Is SF designed to purge our dark imperialistic fantasies, or is it a laboratory of carefully considered trials of political, social and economic scenarios? Which tomorrow are we more likely to accept - where the blood of empire is red or read?

Examining such classic SF texts as Lasswitz's Two Planets and Wells' The War of the Worlds, this book investigates Asimov's Robots and Heinlein's Moon, as well as Robinson's Mars and Banks' postcolonial Culture. We see the rise-and-fall of empire through the eyes of Miller, Clarke and Wyndham, and the apparently inevitable failure of the imperial project as discussed in Solaris, The Dispossessed and The Forever War. This book offers an insight into the darkest power abuses of mankind; where the oppression, silencing and marginalisation of those who are not-us continues and flourishes. Who are the monsters of our future - the Others invading from another planet, or the unseen and unrecognised Other within?

Genres: Nonfiction

222 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2007

Reviews

[Gerhard · Rating 4 out of 5]

Research read. Interesting that Kerslake’s book was published a year before ‘Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) by John Rieder. This is heavier going than Rieder, with the main argument being that science fiction is based on the function and manipulation of political power, of empire and its abuses.

Kerslake questions the purpose of a genre given to imaginative extremes. She states:

Beneath a sometimes superficial appeal, SF is responsible for opening a variety of legitimate and strategic cultural discourses. It is in these cultural disquisitions that we discover the fundamental power and rationale of a genre that ultimately contributes to the knowledge and awareness humanity has of itself.

Kerslake goes on to argue that “the role of empire in SF is a massive form of cultural inculcation.” Cultural, political, and historic forces have transformed SF into “an experiment in the quasi-predictive.” That experiment can be interrogated by post-coloniality so as to explore the notion of power formed within the ‘construct of empire’.

The most interesting chapter for me was the first one, ‘The Self and Representations of the Other in Science Fiction, which looks at the ‘location’ of the Other in SF in light of Said’s famous ‘Orientalism’ (1978):

To successfully position a character as the Other demands the a priori binary construct of centre and periphery, as discussion of the Other is impossible without a primary definition of the self, which, in turn, rests upon where we see ourselves located. If we inhabit the centre of our existence (our world, life, knowledge), then the Other, who cannot inhabit the same place, becomes marginalised by definition …

Yes, Kerslake is pretty wordy and tends to make relatively simple ideas appear far more convoluted than they are. Or need to be. However, read in conjunction with Rieder, these are two seminal texts about the imbrication of empire and colonialism in SF.

[Karl Bunker · Rating 4 out of 5]

There are a number of books similar to this one -- books that look at the field of science fiction through a certain subtopic "lens." Thus we have volumes about science fiction and feminism, science fiction and race, science fiction and religion, and so on.

But whereas the books on those topics seem to end up looking at a fairly narrow slice of SF (a slender intersection of two circles in a Venn diagram, so to speak), Science Fiction and Empire encompasses quite a broad swath of SF. Indeed, I came away from this book feeling that it's one of the more interesting and important works of SF studies I've read.

There are several reasons why the intersection of SF studies and imperialism studies is so unexpectedly wide. As a starting point, there is the huge number of "galactic empire" stories in SF, especially in earlier space opera. What does it say about the culture of SF that such stories were and remain so popular? What sorts of empires, evil and benevolent, were imagined by SF writers?

But there's much more to the intersection of imperialism and SF than the immediately obvious. In the study of imperialism, the notion of "the Self" vis a vis "the Other" is a central concept. How do we interact with groups and cultures different from ourselves? How does power influence this interaction? These and related questions have been studied by Edward Said and other "postcolonial" scholars. The parallels to SF are obvious; "the Other" in SF may be aliens, artificial intelligences, future humanity, etc., but many of the issues involved would be familiar to Said and his colleagues.

Further, there are the parallels between exploration (surely one of the central themes of SF) and expansionism (a word almost synonymous with imperialism). Consider the SF idea of teraforming, the ethics of which are explored in Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars trilogy. The notion that any place we can go to thereby becomes our property, to do with as we like, is not far removed from an imperialistic mindset.

And then there's the common SF theme of power struggles between colonists and their home world (e.g. the Mars trilogy again, Heinlein's The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress). Or that of invasion by a technologically superior race upon one less advanced. Again these are issues and fields of thought that have been explored in imperialism studies.

This is just a sampling of some of the ideas covered in this book. There is much more, including a chapter on Iain M. Banks' "meta-empire", "postcolonial" Culture novels that I found particularly interesting.

The target audience for books of the sort I mention in the first paragraph might be characterized as "those who are interested in SF and also interested in [fill in the blank -- feminism, religion, etc.]." Science Fiction and Empire, on the other hand, I would call simply a book for those who are interested in SF. As author Patricia Kerslake puts it, "The theme of empire, [...] is so ingrained in SF that to discuss empire in SF is also to investigate the fundamental purposes and attributes of the genre itself." I completely agree. Kerslake convincingly shows that the overlap between imperialism studies and SF studies is so great that any serious study of SF is simply incomplete without a book like hers.

[Scott Neigh]

Reviewed here.

[Esme]

This book is about my very favorite topic—the impact and resonance of the science fiction genre—and therefore I forgive it for all its sins. Is it very good? No. Should you read it? Probably not. But the fact that it exists fills me with a childlike glee, so if I starred in nonfiction, I would give it five stars for that alone.

Functionally this book reads like Kerslake has just discovered that science fiction is more than Star Wars. Most of her ideas seem obvious to even the casual science fiction reader, and to some degree, reveal how little I think she respects said casual science fiction reader. The idea that empire might have had some influence and connection to most, if not all, science fiction texts seems pretty trivial, and yet somehow Kerslake finds fifty million ways to say the exact same thing and really languish in this new “discovery”. She also somewhat adamantly refuses to explore the reverse implication of this equation, never really asking the impact science fiction has on the empire. In the Kim Stanley Robinson chapter, she skirts around interrogating the impacts of Robinson’s works on Lockheed Martin, but refuses to actually explore that, frustratingly. At many points, it feels like she was inching towards some interesting connections, before retreating back to her comfortable ground of reiterating the same point in fifty million ways.

This is also distinctly a postcolonial book, not a decolonial one, which makes it read pretty dated, especially around the middle points. The only critical piece of theory she really puts in conversation is Said’s Othering, which is pulled out too frequently and yet without enough depth. It’s a prime example of how Kerslake is prone to teetering close, but never into, something interesting: the application of Said’s points about the fictionalizing and successive covetting of the East in science fiction would be an interesting discussion, but Kerlake never actually gets there. It feels a bit like he’s being used for brownie points, especially because she doesn’t have anyone else enter the conversation.

In general, I found that she failed to take either an anthropologist’s decolonial approach or a literary analysis one, leaving the book fluffy and without substance. She didn’t historicize nearly as frequently as I wanted her to, and she also didn’t distinguish between fantasy and science fiction—if there is any in her eyes. She fails to solidify her perspective in the beginning on what makes up science fiction—something I think is critical when performing genre analysis. As always, I have qualms with the paragons of the genre she chooses, but I’ll honestly cut her the slack for that one, because the only context in which I’ll approve of the author’s selective sample is likely if I’m the one making it.

But—but—but! It’s still a book about science fiction as a genre! So therefore who cares. I loved it.