We are all products of the historical imperial project, though not necessarily artefacts of a deterministic history. Since almost every extant society today can look back at moments in time when they were subject to empire in one form or another, it would be foolish to assume our imaginations have not been conditioned, in some manner, by this experience. We are the products of our societies; our deepest and most private values have been informed by an historical presence or absence of political and economic power. We are not required to be proud of our societies or even like them very much, but it is essential we become aware of who we are and why we are this way in order to ensure our future does not repeat the past mistakes of abusive power-manipulation.
But to be consciously aware of and continually objectify all social development even within our own small part of the global culture is an impossible task. We are too close to the picture and can see only details when what we really need to examine is the more general design and frame of the image. And to do this we require an inverse telescope: a tool with the ability to capture the quantum image and locate it within the greater representation, and with the additional ability to transpose images at will. There are many such mechanisms in current use: everything from divergent political systems and educational philosophies to the world of the Arts and even the daily news reports. But these devices are restrained by the human ability (or inability) to embrace the contemporary and initiate change. The smallest elements of the image such as minor legislation or the regulation of a banking system may evolve comparatively quickly, but the more complex aspects of social development can take years, decades, to develop, as has been witnessed in the fall of the USSR and the decentralised emergence of the former Soviet states. And even these developments, major though they are in relation to our current perception of global society, are still only references of the contemporary or, at best, the near future. Clairvoyance is not an attribute our species enjoys, and therefore all we can extrapolate from the near past and today is what is probable tomorrow or next year. To explore and investigate what might be of importance to us in fifty, one hundred or even one thousand years hence, we have only our imaginations as guide, and often the best of these futuristic imaginations are given voice through the experiments of SF.
Many SF texts deal with the purely fabulous: worlds where dragons become domesticated[i], or where an expanding humanity encounters weird creatures[ii] only to discover the fantasy of the Other is reduced to the political realities once again. These are works that liberate our imaginations, which enable us to play with power and the results of that power and which permit us the extravagances of Homer and Carroll. These narratives are fiction in one of its unalloyed forms, exceeding even the magical realism of Voltaire and Márquez, as perfect utopia is created and the hero is always victorious. Then there is the other side of SF: narratives that look back into the past of our various cultures and define a differing Weltanschauung from which a single potential future is extrapolated and investigated. Though many SF texts bear a similarity to others, each of these literary investigations is sufficiently different to affect a slightly different result, and it is through the intellectual amalgam of these results that we may see something of the possible far future here and now in the contemporary. As well as Asimov’s vision of cities encased in steel, the Dune novels of Herbert, the spindizzy-powered cities of Blish; Macleod’s The Stone Canal, Orwell’s Animal Farm and Heinlein’s Red Planet are all examples of experiments in the purely imaginative.
Nor does SF's inescapable intertextuality diminish the function of a single text, for just as scientific development builds upon the discoveries and innovations of earlier generations, so too does SF incorporate and adapt worthy elements from preceding narratives. An example of this is Shelley's monstrous creation of 1818 where both her monster and her science inspired numerous related works about the dangers of the Promethean impulse. In more modern works we see a reiterated concern of both the creation of biological and non-biological life, such as Edmond Hamilton's The Metal Giants (1928) in which an artificial brain goes mad turns against its creator, and Ursula Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) which explores the existence of clones on a mining planet. In turn, Clarke's Imperial Earth and Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? invoke a more socially 'acceptable' approach to cloning or artificially conceived life as they engage with narratives of imperial exclusivity and the human biological imperative to maintain both bloodline and the notion of 'Home'. Banks extrapolates this concept still further and incorporates the design of artificial life into his multi-sentient Culture. The clear intertextual inheritance in SF is not only useful in the genre: it becomes essential if authors are to explore concepts to their fullest. And as Shelley's prototype continues to evolve into the ambiguous potential of artificial life, so too have authors of SF taken the basic precepts of an archaic political system and dissected its possible nuances for the generations ahead, taking the classically moulded shape of ancient empire and evolving it into the form of meta-empire.
It is almost impossible to ascertain when writers first began incorporating the idea and ideals of power and imperialism into SF. Was it De Bergerac's Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune of 1657, or perhaps De Grainville's Le Dernier Homme of 1805? Certainly George T. Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871) established the notion of the 'future-war' at a time when Britain's own empire was about to destabilise and two of the world's greatest SF writers, Wells and Verne, were only beginning to explore the different uses and abuses of power in such dystopian works as The Time Machine: An Invention (1895) and Maître du Monde (1904). However, it must be remembered that these early authors lived in imperial times. Secure in their Western lifestyles, their respective countries holding massive colonial dominions, it would seem only natural for them to manifest aspects of imperialism in contemporary narratives. US writer Jack London's most formidable work, The Iron Heel (1907), speaks even further of political dystopia as his 27th century scholars unearth a 20th century fascist oligarchy and an account of the proletariat's epic revolutionary struggle against the State.
It is on these early beginnings that more modern writers such as Asimov and Heinlein lay the foundation of increasingly ambitious empires. In Asimov's case, the definitive version of the galactic empire is produced: an enormously complex organisation which, thanks to his innovative philosophy of 'Psychohistory', spans years in terms of time as well as distance. But whereas the Asimovean experiments entirely escape the realism of physics, Heinlein makes use of known science, positing an extrapolation of peripheral theoretical physics and allowing his characters to explore not only different dimensions, but also how their cultural and political mores might be adapted in those new and uncharted regions.[iii]
But to be consciously aware of and continually objectify all social development even within our own small part of the global culture is an impossible task. We are too close to the picture and can see only details when what we really need to examine is the more general design and frame of the image. And to do this we require an inverse telescope: a tool with the ability to capture the quantum image and locate it within the greater representation, and with the additional ability to transpose images at will. There are many such mechanisms in current use: everything from divergent political systems and educational philosophies to the world of the Arts and even the daily news reports. But these devices are restrained by the human ability (or inability) to embrace the contemporary and initiate change. The smallest elements of the image such as minor legislation or the regulation of a banking system may evolve comparatively quickly, but the more complex aspects of social development can take years, decades, to develop, as has been witnessed in the fall of the USSR and the decentralised emergence of the former Soviet states. And even these developments, major though they are in relation to our current perception of global society, are still only references of the contemporary or, at best, the near future. Clairvoyance is not an attribute our species enjoys, and therefore all we can extrapolate from the near past and today is what is probable tomorrow or next year. To explore and investigate what might be of importance to us in fifty, one hundred or even one thousand years hence, we have only our imaginations as guide, and often the best of these futuristic imaginations are given voice through the experiments of SF.
Many SF texts deal with the purely fabulous: worlds where dragons become domesticated[i], or where an expanding humanity encounters weird creatures[ii] only to discover the fantasy of the Other is reduced to the political realities once again. These are works that liberate our imaginations, which enable us to play with power and the results of that power and which permit us the extravagances of Homer and Carroll. These narratives are fiction in one of its unalloyed forms, exceeding even the magical realism of Voltaire and Márquez, as perfect utopia is created and the hero is always victorious. Then there is the other side of SF: narratives that look back into the past of our various cultures and define a differing Weltanschauung from which a single potential future is extrapolated and investigated. Though many SF texts bear a similarity to others, each of these literary investigations is sufficiently different to affect a slightly different result, and it is through the intellectual amalgam of these results that we may see something of the possible far future here and now in the contemporary. As well as Asimov’s vision of cities encased in steel, the Dune novels of Herbert, the spindizzy-powered cities of Blish; Macleod’s The Stone Canal, Orwell’s Animal Farm and Heinlein’s Red Planet are all examples of experiments in the purely imaginative.
Nor does SF's inescapable intertextuality diminish the function of a single text, for just as scientific development builds upon the discoveries and innovations of earlier generations, so too does SF incorporate and adapt worthy elements from preceding narratives. An example of this is Shelley's monstrous creation of 1818 where both her monster and her science inspired numerous related works about the dangers of the Promethean impulse. In more modern works we see a reiterated concern of both the creation of biological and non-biological life, such as Edmond Hamilton's The Metal Giants (1928) in which an artificial brain goes mad turns against its creator, and Ursula Le Guin's "Nine Lives" (1969) which explores the existence of clones on a mining planet. In turn, Clarke's Imperial Earth and Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? invoke a more socially 'acceptable' approach to cloning or artificially conceived life as they engage with narratives of imperial exclusivity and the human biological imperative to maintain both bloodline and the notion of 'Home'. Banks extrapolates this concept still further and incorporates the design of artificial life into his multi-sentient Culture. The clear intertextual inheritance in SF is not only useful in the genre: it becomes essential if authors are to explore concepts to their fullest. And as Shelley's prototype continues to evolve into the ambiguous potential of artificial life, so too have authors of SF taken the basic precepts of an archaic political system and dissected its possible nuances for the generations ahead, taking the classically moulded shape of ancient empire and evolving it into the form of meta-empire.
It is almost impossible to ascertain when writers first began incorporating the idea and ideals of power and imperialism into SF. Was it De Bergerac's Histoire Comique des États et Empires de la Lune of 1657, or perhaps De Grainville's Le Dernier Homme of 1805? Certainly George T. Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871) established the notion of the 'future-war' at a time when Britain's own empire was about to destabilise and two of the world's greatest SF writers, Wells and Verne, were only beginning to explore the different uses and abuses of power in such dystopian works as The Time Machine: An Invention (1895) and Maître du Monde (1904). However, it must be remembered that these early authors lived in imperial times. Secure in their Western lifestyles, their respective countries holding massive colonial dominions, it would seem only natural for them to manifest aspects of imperialism in contemporary narratives. US writer Jack London's most formidable work, The Iron Heel (1907), speaks even further of political dystopia as his 27th century scholars unearth a 20th century fascist oligarchy and an account of the proletariat's epic revolutionary struggle against the State.
It is on these early beginnings that more modern writers such as Asimov and Heinlein lay the foundation of increasingly ambitious empires. In Asimov's case, the definitive version of the galactic empire is produced: an enormously complex organisation which, thanks to his innovative philosophy of 'Psychohistory', spans years in terms of time as well as distance. But whereas the Asimovean experiments entirely escape the realism of physics, Heinlein makes use of known science, positing an extrapolation of peripheral theoretical physics and allowing his characters to explore not only different dimensions, but also how their cultural and political mores might be adapted in those new and uncharted regions.[iii]
References:
image of Lunar footprint from www.nasa.gov/
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