The Politics of Sci-fi
Lately, there’s been a lot of hand-wringing about woke this and political that, especially in science fiction. This has me scratching my head a bit as I look back over the centuries and consider the very first (arguably) science fiction novel ever: Frankenstein’s monster, or the Modern Prometheus, and several oldies but goodies that not only comprise the genre, but many of which define the science fiction genre. Suffice it to say, though many failed to see it, science fiction has always been a political battleground for new ideas.
The First Science-Fiction Novel
If you’ve ever read the novel Frankenstein; or the Modern Prometheus (going beyond the later fluffy screen adaptations with characters as flat as the midwest cornfields), then you know that it was written in first person, and you will also know that the “fiend” who was created by Dr. Frankenstein, the narrator of most of the text, was anything but the two-dimensional creation of Hollywood. Consider this excerpt:
All men hate the wretched; how, then, must I be hated, who am miserable beyond all living things! Yet you, my creator, detest and spurn me, thy creature, to whom thou art bound by ties only dissoluble by the annihilation of one of us. You purpose to kill me. How dare you sport thus with life? Do your duty towards me, and I will do mine towards you and the rest of mankind… —the fiend
What is this, then, that we read? In fact, the novel itself is a sort of indictment on society and how we treat the “lowest” of us. Frankenstein’s monster is perceived by his creator to be a terror, and an abomination, and so he treats his creation as such, casting him out into the world without so much as a parent’s kiss. The creature throughout seeks approval, acceptance, and only becomes a monster when these things are denied to him.
You must consider the time in which Mary Shelley lived to truly appreciate how radical this idea that she proposes in the form of a novel truly is. Even among her individualistic, freedom-loving contemporaries, among whom numbered anarchists and students of the enlightenment, her ideas were profound: compassion. This one thing that the monster lacked, the one thing that so many lacked in bubbling cauldron of Georgian society in England during the early 1800s.
Forty Years Later
Mary Shelley died in 1851, but the new genre she’d founded did not. Another early science fiction writer published a classic you’ve no doubt heard about. I’ll give you a hint, it was by H.G.Wells, and was his first novel. No, not War of the Worlds, but I’ll forgive you for that. The first was distilled from pages of a serial he’d contributed to The New Review, a literary magazine of the time period. Yes, that’s right—The Time Machine.
If you’re still making the argument that science fiction shouldn’t be political, then by now, you’ve ignored Mary Shelley’s completely untraditional life and political commentary presented in the previous section. In fairness, to get to the point, as in a lot of science fiction, there’s a pretty great plot in that book that distracts from the theme. Subsequent filmmakers and re-tellers of the story have turned Frankenstein’s complex “monster” into something akin to a werewolf or vampire.
But it’s impossible to ignore the social commentary in The Time Machine. The Time Traveller creates a machine capable of traveling through time, and using this device, visits the Golden Age of man, the decline in Man’s civilization, and the rise of the unfortunate creatures called Morlocks. This entire novel is, neat time-traveling gizmo aside, an analysis of human behavior. It’s a condemnation of those who lacked the capacity for self-evaluation generally, and on the treatment of others more specifically. But this one line makes me chuckle whenever people tell me how politics and science-fiction shouldn’t mix:
“‘Communism,’ said I to myself.
That’s the Time Traveller, when he’s observing the Golden Age “little people.” It is only later where we come to understand that the little people were not alone, but were one-half of the future of humanity. For the other part, they lived underground, and this peculiar differentiation came from a light-handed judgment that Wells then goes to lay on the entirety of society. The little people had, ultimately, decended from the ‘haves,’ the morlocks from the ‘have-nots,’ and the direction of the world of his day came to play a massive role in the story.
This was not political avoidance.
A Wide Survey of the Rest
In previous blog posts, I’ve discussed futurism other science fiction works, like the Day of the Triffids by John Wyndham. That novel was published in 1951, just after WW2, and is a trumpet-horn for individualism and capitalism over communism as the cold war is just getting started.
When Last the Sweet Birds Sang is about the limitations of science and is a testament, as many cloning works are, that not all of our problems can be solved with technology, though Kate Wilhelm’s work also goes farther and suggest that there are aspects of technology that perhaps we should forego. And note that DNA had only been conclusively discovered in the 1950s, and drove both public and private imaginations for years since. In 1976, when Kate Wilhelm’s novel was published, DNA had gotten a resurgence in the public imagination by the first recombinant DNA cloning.
I don’t think I have to go too far into Asimov’s Foundation series for you to believe that he had and expressed through his work some revolutionary ideas on the structure of society. Nor do I expect to have to work too hard to explain the themes behind Dune. And that’s just in science fiction novels (of which I’d also include the Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins). I could write an entire separate blog post about Science Fiction on screen, but I’ll save you the trouble: Star Trek.
A Bold Conclusion
The truth is that Science Fiction has always been controversial and pushed the edge of what people understand of society, and that’s for a very good reason: it could be no other way. We science fiction writers have two things we must do every time we write a novel:
Create a compelling yet believable futuristic world.
Introduce conflict for the main character to overcome.
The futuristic world can only come from the author’s experience. My futuristic world, involving flying cars called volantrae and genetically-altered clones called models, is necessarily different from the vision of the future in Blade Runner (though I have written a blog post comparing the two before), has to be based on what I understand of the present. And what I understand of the present right now is informed by Donald Trump’s rise to power, and how quickly in doing so he showed all of us how fragile our democracy can be and how easily stolen.
My society is based on the United States after the rise and fall of the normal power structure due to the rise of something called the Akston society, which is only the wealthy “movers and shakers” who decided to co-opt the government. Sound familiar?
Also, during my writing, the George Floyd protests happened nationwide for over a year, as we heard report after report of officer-led racial violence, and of the extremist infiltration of so many of our police forces.
Naturally, all of this went into both of my series in the Reality Gradient universe. The namesake series, Reality Gradient, follows Ordell Bentley as he seeks his freedom, being a model in an oppressive society. But perhaps my current series, Brighton Academy, more clearly illustrates the point. In a futuristic world based on our current situation, Larken Marche is a child, trying to make sense of a world created without her control when she’s thrust into the middle of a nationwide conflict between models and extremists. Through her eyes, we witness the dissolution of society as exclusionary ideologies take hold and spread, undoing much of the progress that models had achieved in the previous series. Recognize this world yet?
Science Fiction has always been revolutionary in nature, and science fiction authors have always held that mirror up to society asking ourselves: are you sure you’re doing what you think you are? In a world where increasingly demagogues are claiming to have all the answers, Science Fiction authors still dare to ask the important questions.
