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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACTS
This essay examines a spate of SF novels and stories by Thomas M. Disch, J. G. Ballard, and others published during the 1960s and 70s that address imminent threats to human survival. Replacing 1950s-era tales of nuclear annihilation, these texts envisioned less immediate, but no less apocalyptic, scenarios involving the wholesale extinction of life on earth. The discussion attempts to place these works in the larger context of the growth of ecological science and the environmental movement, which inspired specific consciousness-raising efforts such as Disch's 1971 theme anthology The Ruins of Earth, and Susan Glicksohn's ecologically oriented fanzine from the 1970s, Aspidistra. The overall goal of the essay is to see how SF began to take a critical, species-wide view of the technological 'progress' that the genre had traditionally celebrated.
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In an essay on H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1898), Peter Fitting argues that tales of 'first contact' within science fiction tend to recapitulate 'the encounters of the European 'discovery' of the New World'. (1) They are thus, whether consciously or not, conquest narratives, though 'usually not characterized as [...] invasion[s]' because they are 'written from the point of view of the invaders', who prefer euphemisms such as 'exploration' to more aggressive or martial constructions of the encounter. (2) The accomplishment of Wells's novel, in Fitting's analysis, is to lay bare the power dynamics of this scenario by depicting a reversal of historical reality, with the imperial hub of late-Victorian London itself subjugated by 'superior creatures who share none the less some of the characteristics of Earth's "lower" species, a humiliation which is compounded by their apparent lack of interest in the humans as an intelligent species'. (3) The irony of this switch of roles is not lost on Wells's narrator, who compares the fate of his fellow Londoners to those of the Tasmanians and even the dodoes, 'entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants'. (4) Stephen Arata uses the term 'reverse colonization' to describe this sort of story in which the centre of empire is besieged by fantastic creatures from its margins; as Brian Aldiss puts it, 'Wells is saying, in effect, to his fellow English, "Look, this is how it feels to be a primitive tribe, and to have a Western nation arriving to civilize you with Maxim guns!"'. (5)
Taking this general argument one step further, John Rieder claims that all manner of disaster stories within SF 'might profitably be considered as the obverse of the celebratory narratives of exploration and discovery [...] that formed the Official Story of colonialism'. (6) The sense of helplessness--geographic, economic, military, and so on--reinforced by catastrophe scenarios lays bare the underlying anxieties of hegemonic power, its inherent contingency and vulnerability, notwithstanding the purported inevitability of Western 'progress'. Moreover, disaster stories, by inverting existing power relations and displacing them into fantastic or futuristic milieux, expose the workings of imperialist ideology, the expedient fantasies that underpin the colonial enterprise; for example, 'although the colonizer knows very well that colonized people are humans like himself, he acts as if they were parodic, grotesque imitations of humans instead', (7) who may conveniently be dispossessed of land, property, and even life. The catastrophe story brings this logic of dispossession home to roost, shattering the surface calm of imperial hegemony and thrusting the colonizers themselves into a sudden chaos of destruction and transformation such as they have typically visited upon others. Narratives of invasion in particular are 'heavily and consistently overdetermined by [their] reference to colonialism', allowing a potentially critical engagement with 'the ideology of progress and its concomitant constructions of agency and destiny', (8) that is, the triumphalist enshrinement of white Westerners at the apex of historical development and the demotion of all others to what anthropologist Eric Wolf calls a 'people without history'. (9)
Of course, to interpret most invasion stories of SF's pulp era as critical of Western progress requires reading against the grain, since their evident message is the fearlessness and ingenuity of Euro-American peoples when confronted by hostile forces. The magazine Astounding Stories, during its 1940s golden age, operated under a philosophy that Brian Stableford and David Pringle identify as 'human chauvinism', by the terms of which 'humanity was destined to get the better of any and all alien species'. (10) Editor John Campbell saw the extraterrestrial expansion of the human race not only as a logical extrapolation of the exploratory impulse of Western civilization, but also explicitly as an outlet for martial aggression; as he remarked in a letter to A. E. van Vogt, when 'other planets are opened to colonization [...] we'll have peace on earth--and war in heaven!'. (11) One of the few tales of successful 'foreign' invasion published during Astounding's heyday was Robert Heinlein's Sixth Column (1941), where the invaders are not aliens from space but a Pan-Asiatic horde that occupies the United States, only to be undermined and eventually defeated by an underground scientific elite masquerading as a popular religion; reverse colonization is thus foiled and the Westward trend of empire reaffirmed. Sixth Column is a forerunner of post-war tales of communist menace, such as Heinlein's own The Puppet Masters (1951), in which slug-like parasites seek to brainwash the US citizenry but ultimately prove no match for the native resourcefulness and righteous rage of humankind: 'they made the mistake of tangling with the toughest, meanest, deadliest, most unrelenting--and ablest--form of life in this section of space, a critter that can be killed but can't be tamed'. (12)
The cinema of the 1950s was filled with similar scenarios of sinister alien infiltration and dogged human resistance; essentially, they allegorized the US struggle with global communism and usually ended with the defeat of the invaders. Yet close readings of these stories reveal a strong undercurrent of unease beneath the bland surface confidence in American values. For example, in Invaders from Mars (1953), as I have argued in a previous essay, 'the paranoia about alien invasion and takeover may merely serve to deflect anxieties about how seamlessly militarist power has inscribed itself into the suburban American landscape'. (13) Similar disquiets can be perceived in films that depict literal communist attacks and occupations, such as Invasion USA (1952), which is, as Cyndy Hendershot has shown, as much about fears of US decadence and conformism as it is about Soviet perfidy. (14) In other words, even invasion stories that valorize human (that is, Western) cunning and bravery may be troubled by doubts regarding the susceptibility to external incursions, the lurking rot at the imperial core that permits such brazen raids from the periphery.
By contrast with American treatments of the theme, which were pugnacious in their refusal to succumb to invasion, post-war British disaster stories had a distinctly elegiac tone, a quality of wistful resignation in the face of imperial decline. As Roger Luckhurst points out, British tales of catastrophe had 'always addressed disenchantment with the imperialist "civilizing" mission', but 1950s versions, confronted with the ongoing collapse of the global empire, used the disaster plot as 'a laboratory reconceiving English selfhood in response to traumatic depredations'. (15) The popular novels of John Wyndham, such as The Day of the Triffids (1951) and The Kraken Wakes (1953), take refuge in pastoralist fantasy as Britain's cities are overrun by marauding invaders, the imperial hegemon shrinking to beleaguered individual (or small-communal) sanctuaries. Brian Aldiss has coined the term 'cosy catastrophe' to describe these sorts of plot, a...
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