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“It’s time for Science Fiction to Face up to
Discrimination” (2013), David Barnett declared in the British newspaper The
Guardian, where he argued that genre sf is still
written and read almost exclusively by straight white males. Ironically, his
piece was illustrated with a scene from Joss Whedon’s TV series Firefly
(2002) that shows white captain Malcolm Reynolds (Nathan Fillion) and black
priest Derrial Book (Ron Glass) together. That series also featured several
capable women characters in major roles. But Barnett may not have considered TV
relevant. Anyway, he got right to his own point:
Science
fiction loves a good paradox. Here's one for you: how can a genre that dreams
up alien cultures and mythic races in such minute detail seemingly ignore the
ethnic, religious, gender and sexual diversity right here on the home planet,
here in the real world?[i]
Barnett cited a flap over the appearance of a picture of a
bikini-clad woman on in the Bulletin of
the Science Fiction Writers of America, and the dominance of men running sf
cons, while quoting South African blogger Laura Smith as complaining that sf,
or at least English-language sf, avoids giving voice as characters to “anyone who is POC
[person of colour], female, gay, transgendered; settings and cultures that
aren’t North American or European; non-western folklore and mythology."[ii]
It’s unlikely that Barnett, author of several small press
novels as well as a journalist,[iii]
could have read anywhere near as much sf as longtime fans. But it turned out he
was an sf wannabe, having just broken into steampunk with Gideon Smith and
the Mechanical Girl
(2013), a rather self-congratulatory pastiche of Victorian popular fiction and
its attitudes. He didn’t mention that to The Guardian, and
the only work he cited as a case of discrimination was Saladin Ahmed’s Throne
of the Crescent Moon (2012), a fantasy adventure
set on a world based on traditional Arab-Islamic mythology. Only, you wouldn’t
know from his account that Ahmed won a Locus award
for best first novel, and was nominated for both a Hugo and a Nebula;[iv] nor
that he was published by a genre specialty house (DAW), with raves from genre
writers – including white males.[v] Maybe Barnett never checked any of that
out.
Yet he seemed to know with absolute certainty that science
fiction was all racist and sexist, as if there weren’t any women sf writers to
speak of, let alone that they have won an increasing number of Hugo and Nebula
awards in recent years. Winners from the 21st Century such as Connie
Willis, Lois McMaster Bujold, Catherine Asaro, Elizabeth Moon and Jo Walton
appeared to be unpersons to him. So did women writers of young adult sf like
Suzanne Collins, whose The Hunger Games
(2008) won a number of awards, including the Cybil for Fantasy and Science
Fiction, and was adapted as a hit movie in 2012.
Barnett also seemed to know with equal certainty that there
had never been any significant black writers (Samuel R. Delany, Steven Barnes,
Nalo Hopkinson, the late Octavia Butler) or gay and lesbian writers (Delany
again, David Gerrold, the late Thomas Disch, Nicola Griffith, Elizabeth A. Lynn
and even Tanya Huff), let alone that black characters have appeared in sf by
Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Gunn and others, or even on the screen –
notably Geordi La Forge in Star Trek: the Next Generation
(1987-98), not to mention Lt. Uhura on the original Star Trek
(1966-69) and several movies. He might not have believed that gays and lesbians
had been represented in the works of white writers like Anne McCaffrey and
Marion Zimmer Bradley before the Gay Liberation movement.
It’s unlikely that Barnett had encountered Frederik Pohl’s
“Day Million” (1966), which centers on transgendered transhumans; or Gerrold’s Moonstar
Odyssey (1977), a Nebula nominee in which
children are born sexless and choose whether to be male or female at
adolescence; or that Kim Stanley Robinson’s transgender lovers in 2312
(2012). Two decades before that, Maureen F. McHugh had won the Lambda and James
Tiptree Jr. awards for China Mountain Zhang
(1992), in which the protagonist is a young gay man of mixed Chinese and Hispanic ancestry in a future dominated by China (Would Barnett have even known
about the Tiptree award, or the woman writing under a male name that it honors?).
Chances are that most of what he knew, or believed that he knew, came from
secondary sources – especially academic criticism that sees the genre through
an ideological lens.
Science fiction critics used to be home-grown,
and were usually sf writers before they became sf critics – as witness Damon
Knight and James Blish, whose critical reviews were collected as In Search
of Wonder (1956) and The Issue at Hand
(1964, as by William Atheling Jr.), respectively. And there were literary
historians who specialized in the genre, notably I.F. Clarke with Voices
Prophesying War (1966) and The
Pattern of Expectation (1979).
But things began to get more organized in 1970
with the founding of the Science Fiction Research Association, which sponsors
annual conferences and keeps members up to date with research programs and
projects. SF: The Other Side of Realism
(1971) was the first modern academic book about sf. It was edited by Thomas D.
Clareson, who taught English at the College of Wooster and had founded the sf
journal Extrapolation in 1959. While his book
included entries by several sf writers, notably Blish, Samuel R. Delany, Judith
Merrill Brian Aldiss and Norman Spinrad, they were outnumbered by English
professors.
Foundation,
a British scholarly journal, was launched in England the next year, and
R(ichard).D. Mullen, a himself a professor of English at Indiana State
University (and a contributor to Clareson’s anthology), followed a year later
with Science Fiction Studies, published in Canada by
DePauw University. Academe began taking sf seriously enough that the number of
scholarly works and critics contributing to them multiplied, and several
launched degree programs. And while Delany established himself as a major
figure in sf criticism with sundry commentaries and essays, and book-length
studies beginning with The Jewel-Hinged Jaw
(1977, revised 2009), most serious critical work in the field has been by
academics – Darko Suvin may still be the best known, but there are hundreds of
others. By this time the count of books at least touching on sf could have well
be over a hundred.
There are at least two dozen scholarly
book-length studies about Philip K. Dick alone, a couple in French and Italian
and only one, Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Novels of Philip K. Dick
(1989) by a genre sf writer.[vi]
Not only that, but he has been embraced as a prophet of postmodernism, which
has become (along with neo-Marxism) one of the dominant schools of literary and
cultural criticism; in 1991, Science Fiction
Studies ran a piece by Jean Baudrillard that saw
his role thusly:
It
is hyperreal. It is a universe of simulation, which is something altogether
different. And this is so not because Dick speaks specifically of simulacra. SF
has always done so, but it has always played upon the double, on artificial
replication or imaginary duplication, whereas here the double has disappeared.
There is no more double; one is always already in the other world, another
world which is not another, without mirrors or projection or utopias as means
for reflection. The simulation is impassable, unsurpassable, checkmated,
without exteriority. We can no longer move "through the mirror" to
the other side, as we could during the golden age of transcendence.[vii]
Postmodernism took academic criticism by storm,
and has been applied to both science fiction itself and sf criticism. In Postmodernist Fiction (1987), Brian McHale applies the theory to the
works of Delany and Ballard, although he is more comfortable with Italo
Calvino, Kurt Vonnegut and William S. Burroughs. Since then, the
movement seems to have become an omnium gatherum
for critiques of sf based on radical feminism, queer theory, culture theory and
postcolonialism.
Marxist critic Frederic Jameson offered his take
on postmodernism as a strategy for corporate control of culture in Postmodernism,
Or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism
(1991), and later applied that to science fiction, including Dick, with Archaeologies of the
Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions (2005). Jameson was
already a mover and shaker in cultural theory, having founded the Marxist
Literary Group (MLG) in 1969 as an affiliate of the Modern Language Association
(MLA).[viii]
Even
if the postmodernists and the Marxists didn’t see eye to eye –Carl Freedman has tried to reconcile
them through a syncretic process in Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000) – they seemed to
agree that there was something rotten in the state of science fiction – in
fact, any science fiction other than Marxist or postmodernist was reactionary.
Some of the ire of critics has been focused on
particular schools of science fiction. Nicola Nixon, in a piece for Science
Fiction Studies called “Cyberpunk:
Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys Satisfied?” (1992),
challenged the claim of that movement to being culturally or politically
radical, and she may have had some valid points. But in her rhetorical overkill
and innuendo she associated it with the right-wing politics of Ronald Reagan
and characterized its founders William Gibson and Bruce Sterling as arrested
adolescent males obsessed with the “size of their dicks.”[ix]
This would certainly have been news to Pat
Cadigan, a charter member of the movement, whose “Rock On” (1986) appeared in Mirrorshades,
a showcase anthology edited by Sterling. That
story became the basis of her cyberpunk novel Synners
(1991), which won the Arthur C. Clarke award and was reprinted 20 years later
as part of the Orion-Gollancz SF Masterworks series. It would also have been
news to Marge Piercy, a feminist novelist, who credited Gibson and other
cyberpunks as influences on her He, She and It
(1991).[x]
Nixon complained that Sterling’s Islands in the Net
(1988) “presents Laura Webster, the central protagonist, as
perpetually in need of rescue from prisons, would-be assassins, and terrorists”[xi] –
without mentioning that it is Laura who ends of saving the world from a global
terrorist cabal (Her husband David isn’t much use.). And, like, male
heroes never suffer imprisonment or face would-be assassins?
Nixon’s diatribe against cyberpunk writers may have been
occasioned by her resentment that they had gotten more publicity than first
generation feminist sf writers like Joanna Russ, Ursula Le Guin, Suzy McKee
Charnas and Sally Miller Gearhart – who had followed “a political and artistic
trajectory from ’60s feminism to its enthusiastic articulation in specifically
feminist utopias. Collectively they provided an often implicit and stinging
critique of male SF writers’ penchant for figuring feminist power as the
threat of the future.”[xii] But
the only example of that “penchant” she had to offer was Parley J. Cooper’s The
Feminists (1971), a work so obscure it probably
wasn’t known to most male sf writers or readers. She apparently wasn’t aware of
genre sf satirical stories of women-on-top like William Tenn’s “The Masculinist
Revolt” (1965); but there haven’t been enough of those to make her case that
male sf writers generally are terrified by any manifestation of female
empowerment.
In a 1975 interview for the Youngstown State University
Oral History Program, Leigh Brackett recalled that when she started writing sf,
“Everybody in the field welcomed me with open arms.”[xiii] She
may have had an androgynous name, but her fellow sf writers and most fans knew
she was a woman. It was the same with C.L. (Catherine) Moore, and Andre (Alice)
Norton. Readers certainly knew who Judith Merrill was. Merrill became a mover
and shaker as anthologist and critic as well as writer, and while she took some
lumps for her support of the controversial New Wave movement in the 1960’s, so
did her male counterparts like Michael Moorcock. Not every female writer has
made it big in science fiction, but neither has every male writer, and there
isn’t any evidence that the men have ever ganged up on the women to hound them
out of the market.
So who denounced women’s fiction in 2011 as “feminine
tosh,” born of their “sentimentality, the narrow view of the world”?[xiv] It
wasn’t Larry Niven, or one of the cyberpunks, or even one of the authors of
military sf (surely the most male-dominated subgenre, although it has also made
room for Elizabeth Moon and Tanya Huff), but Nobel Prize winner V.S. Naipaul.
The fact that Naipaul was born in Trinidad, of Indian ancestry, raises the
question of whether he should be included in the indictment of “Orientalism” as
a syndrome of “imperialist” Western literature.
Edward
Said, in Culture and Imperialism (1993) believes that “the [Western] novel, as a
cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without
each other.”[xv] Even Jane
Austen, by that definition, must have been a staunch colonialist; indeed, Said
reduces Mansfield Park to an exercise in callous indifference to “the agonies of
[slavery in] Caribbean existence.”[xvi]
But
Said hasn’t gone unchallenged. Susan Fraiman, a neither white nor conservative
professor of feminist theory, queer theory, the British novel and culture
studies at the University of Virginia, came to the defense of his most
controversial target with “Jane Austen and Edward Said: Gender, Culture, and
Imperialism” (Critical Inquiry 21.4, summer 1995). Gabrielle D.V.
White, who has taught philosophy at the University of Leeds, devoted an entire
book to the case for Austen as a critic of slavery in Jane Austen in the
Context of Abolition: ‘A Fling at the Slave Trade’ (2006).
Shadia
B. Drury, who teaches philosophy and political science at the University of
Regina in Canada and is a critic of the radical Right,[xvii]
finds fault with Said. First, the idea that non-Western peoples have been totally
brainwashed by Western “Orientalist” discourse “presupposes a certain
feeblemindness on the part of the dominated that adds insult to injury.”
Second, it ignores the fact that prejudice is a two-way street. Arabs, she
observes, have a pejorative term for Westerners, agnaby, connoting that they
are “part man and part machine” with no depth or soul or feeling for family or
children (Drury herself is of Egyptian Arab Christian origin,). Third, she
argues:
Thanks
to the scam being perpetrated by globalization, it is understandable that
universal principles have fallen on hard times. But just because universal
values can and have been used as instruments of domination, there is no reason
to give up on them altogether. To do so is to undercut the moral ground that
gives the critique of colonialism its traction.[xviii]
It
is a commonplace among Said and other social critics of the Left that those
whose who preached the “universal principles” of the Enlightenment in the 17th
and 18th centuries turned a blind eye to slavery and the slave
trade, on which the power and prosperity of the West depended; and that 19th
Century liberals saw nothing wrong with the colonial exploitation of Asia and
Africa. Yet, even granting that, the ideals of the Enlightenment ended up biting
the hand that fed them in the anti-slavery movement and other progressive
causes. In seemingly benighted Victorian times, when imperialism was at its
zenith, Europe found Belgian King Leopold’s Congo Free State more than it could
stomach. Liberation movements of the 20th Century, moreover, drew in
large part on Western ideals of freedom and democracy: if there had never been
a Locke, there would never have been a Gandhi.
Paul
Brian, professor emeritus of English at Washington State University, contends that
“people struggling for freedom in oppressed nations are more likely to draw
inspiration from the quintessentially European Enlightenment concept of rights
under natural law than they are to turn to postcolonial theory.” Moreover, he
complains, Postcolonial Theory is itself Eurocentric, inasmuch as “it singles
out the colonial experience as the most important fact about the countries
involved. Surely that experience has had many powerful influences; but this is
not necessarily the framework within which writers from—say—India, who have a
long history of precolonial literature, wish to be viewed.”[xix]
By coincidence, Samit Basu addressed that issue in
the Sept. 30, 2013 issue of Strange Horizons, an online magazine
devoted to sf and fantasy and discussion thereof. Basu is known for the
GameWorld fantasy trilogy, described in a Wikipedia entry on the first volume
as “a motley mix of
eastern and western fantasy featuring a huge bestiary of creatures from mythic
traditions from all around the world, both ancient and modern - vanars,
dragons, manticores, rakshases and various others.”[xx]
He made his
US debut with Turbulence (2012), a superhero novel, and has also
written for comics. But asked during a panel discussion on Indian sf and
fantasy whether it should have a specific political agenda, he responded
thusly:
I don't
think there should be any such should-address topics for any nation in any
genre. How is that different from the general ‘Indians should write about
India’ nonsense? I’ve certainly never picked up a work of fiction because it
addresses particular issues that I feel writers from a region/race should
address.
I also
wanted to add that I find the term post-colonial speculative fiction
interesting but fundamentally off-putting. Why would I voluntarily call myself
a post-colonial anything? It’s likely to induce eye-gleams among academics and
complete eye-glazes among civilians. What do you all say when people ask you
what you do?[xxi]
Some prominent Chinese science fiction
critics seem to feel the same way, to read between the lines of a special issue
of Science Fiction Studies devoted to Chinese sf.
Nathaniel
Isaacson took aim at Huangjiang Diasou’s Tales of the Moon Colony (Yuequi Zhimindi
Xiaoshuo),
“recognized as China’s first native work of science fiction,” which was
serialized in 1904-5. Isaacson cited Said in support of his contention that
Chinese sf was inevitably part of the “European imperial project” because it
was impossible for China to respond to Orientalism with Occidentalism.[xxii]
He also cited the seeming misgivings of Lu Xun, a translator of Verne’s novels
over the impact of Western sf,[xxiii]
and concluded that Chinese sf like Tales of the Moon Colony was “complicit with the
imperial will to power” by delegitimizing Chinese culture (including queues, actually
a Manchu imposition) in favor of foreign attire and drinking coffee.[xxiv]
Yet
Chinese sf writer and scholar Yan Wu, in his introduction to the issue,
contrasted Isaacson’s piece with one by Shaoling Ma on Xu Nianci’s “New Tales
of Mr. Braggadocio” (1905). “While Isaacson adopts a theoretical perspective
consistent with Western criticism, Ma has placed more emphasis origins and
development of Chinese classical fiction.”[xxv]
(Ma also takes an orthodox Marxist approach.)
Wu
had collaborated with Xing He on “Chinese Science Fiction” An Overview” for Pathlight, a magazine devoted to
“New Chinese Writing,” and didn’t seem to think its importation into China
through translations like Lu Xun’s had been a surrender to imperialism. They
simply noted that Lu had “declared the purpose of modern science fiction to be
the popularization and spread of scientific knowledge, a proclamation that
continued to guide the genre’s development in China for several generations.”[xxvi]
Further
evidence that early Chinese sf writers weren’t mere patsies for Western
imperialism comes in works like Wu Janrien’s The New Story of the Stone (1908), which imagines
a future China founded on Confucian principles as the world’s leading nation.
Like the ancient Greeks, the ancient and not-so-ancient Chinese regarded
foreigners as barbarians – and some could be as blinkered as their Victorian
European counterparts in their perceptions of the Other. In Biheguan Zhuren’s New Era (1908), China has become the world’s leading superpower by
1999 and conquers most of the world – its allies include Hungarians, on the
basis of their (very distant) Mongol ancestry![xxvii]
Then too, there has been speculation that China rather than Europe might have
achieved global hegemony if it had kept up the Treasure Fleet program.[xxviii]
Despite
such apparent flaws with Said’s thesis, the ideological critique of colonialism
has become so pervasive that it is practically taken for granted that
non-Western cultures never have had and never will have any problems that
weren’t brought on them entirely by the West. In an op-ed piece for The New
York Times
about the racially charged Trayvon Martin case, for example, Isabel Wilkerson
faulted Americans who “tend to think of the rigid stratification of caste as a
distant notion from feudal Europe or Victorian India,”[xxix]
as if there had never been a caste system in India before the British showed
up. And if everything Western is pernicious, should the British be condemned as
harshly for outlawing suttee in India or introducing cricket there as for the Amritsar Massacre or the
Bengal Famine of 1943? But this is going far afield from the issue of
literature.
Said
and his like are known among the intelligentsia, but are hardly household names
to ordinary readers. Even in popular culture, however, their ideas have gained
traction. James Cameron’s blockbuster Avatar (2010), which pits
innocent aliens against imperialist Earthmen, stands all the racist clichés of
old-time Hollywood westerns (and presumably old-time sf) on their heads. Only
Cameron is a white male, and while sf has traditionally been written by white
males – no matter to critics that females are gaining ground now – the same can
be said of most sf criticism. It is symptomatic of an ideology that makes it
sort of a progressive white man’s burden not only to right old wrongs but to
anoint and thus privilege those they deem to speak on behalf of the wronged: is
Said truly the only authentic intellectual voice of what was once called the
Third World?
Whatever
their motivation, ideological critics like to have all their ducks in a row, so
it isn’t surprising that some can find nothing but racism, sexism and other
ugly isms in genre sf, as opposed to Avatar – with exceptions
limited to genre authors who are not white males, living or dead, or at least
have Marxist credentials. But their arguments tend to rely on the same sort of
selective citations, confirmation bias and specious logic as those of
right-wingers like David Barton that America’s founding fathers were
fundamentalists.[xxx] In any
case, the reality is far more complicated than most of those who condemn the
genre wholesale – or defend it wholesale, for that matter – are willing to
admit. There really is some bad history out there; it’s just that it isn’t the only history.
Anti-Semitism
was embraced almost unthinkingly by many writers – including sf writers. Verne
sent a stereotypical Jewish villain, Hakkabut, into space in Off on a Comet (1877) – and compounded
that offense by joining the chorus of anti-Dreyfusards. Camille Flammarion’s Omega:
the Last Days of the World (1894) includes a gratuitous scene in which a “noted
American Israelite—a prince of finance,”[xxxi]
faced with a global panic over a comet on possible collision course with Earth,
can think of nothing but making a killing on the stock market. But even the
supposedly progressive H.G. Wells’ In the Days of the Comet (1906) makes a point of
having one Gurker, Jewish Chancellor of the Exchequer, confess his people’s
sins:
“We
Jews,” he said, “have gone through the system of this world, creating nothing,
consolidating many things, destroying much. Our racial self-conceit has been
monstrous. We seem to have used our ample coarse intellectuality for no other
purpose than to develop and master and maintain the convention of property, to
turn life into a sort of mercantile chess and spend our winnings grossly … We
have had no sense of service to mankind. Beauty which is godhead—we made it a
possession.”[xxxii]
Wells,
generally regarded as the father of science fiction as literature, has come under
increasing fire for racism and, especially his support of eugenics. What was
supposed to be a selective breeding program in favor of intelligence was
thoroughly discredited by the horrors of Nazi selective extermination, although
its supporters once included such luminaries as Theodore Roosevelt, Emile Zola,
Bernard Shaw, John Maynard Keynes and Margaret Sanger – all regarded as
progressive thinkers in their day and some still so regarded. Ironically, one
of its most vocal opponents was Christian apologist G.K. Chesterton, generally
regarded today as a reactionary crank.
Ursula
K. Le Guin defends Wells against the charge of racism in her introduction to
his “The Lord of the Dynamos” (1894), in which a black man named Azuma-zi is
treated with contempt by his white boss at a power plant – “Holroyd liked a
nigger because he would stand kicking”[xxxiii]
– but worships the dynamo as a god and sacrifices himself to it. “If you stop
reading at that word, you will miss the fact that the writer’s sympathy is with
the black man, not the white one who beats him,”[xxxiv]
Le Guin observes. But hers may be a minority viewpoint, as a number of critics
have found evidence to the contrary in other works by Wells.
Some
of this is plain spin doctoring. In All Tomorrow’s Cultures: Anthropological
Engagements with the Future (2008), for example, Samuel Gerald Collins cites a
scholarly piece by P.A. Cantor and P. Hufnagel, “The Empire of the Future:
Imperialism and Modernism in H.G. Wells” (2006). Cantor and Hufnagel put the
case that The Time Machine (1895) simply can’t be about a journey to an
imagined future but must rather be “a journey to the imperial frontier.”[xxxv]
Collins picks up on that to argue that the Morlocks must thus truly represent
neither the fate of the working class nor the devolution of humanity but only
the “cultural Other, with the Time Traveller as Joseph Conrad’s Marlow or H.
Rider Haggard’s Quatermain.”[xxxvi]
This
sort of Talmudic commentary has reinforced an attitude towards genre sf as
automatic and unreflective as racism itself. It has become axiomatic that sf
writers can only channel the prejudices of their cultures, and are incapable of
imagining anything beyond the here and now. Aliens, mutants, androids and
robots in sf can never be anything but disparaging caricatures of the Other –
nonwhites or women or gays or whatever. It is the task of critics to
“interrogate” sf works; like suspects being grilled by the police, they must have something to hide.
Yet
critics risk overlooking the obvious. True imperialists and racists have always
been shameless about it. Jack London, surely an embarrassment to the Left
because he was a revolutionary socialist rather than a reactionary, preached
genocide in “The Unparalleled Invasion” (1910), which tells of a war against
China – involving deliberate biological warfare as opposed to the accidental
kind Europeans first brought to America. In David H. Keller’s “The Menace”
(1928) and its sequels, black militants threaten America with a series of
bizarre conspiracies. Besides being vile in its racist message, the series is ludicrous
in its details, such as chemicals that can turn blacks white and vice versa –
although it may have been a backhanded compliment to imagine blacks capable of
producing a fool’s gold that passes ordinary tests, or a window glass that can
drive people insane. It isn’t that
simple when we look at most science fiction, and especially classic sf and the
minds of those who created it.
When
Wells compares the Martian attempt to exterminate mankind, in The War of the
Worlds
(1898), to the “war of extermination” against Tasmanians by Europeans, he
certainly isn’t approving the latter; and by “inferior races” he evidently
means only inferior in power.[xxxvii]
Even the attack on London by Black Police from South Africa in When the
Sleeper Wakes
(1899) is as much a condemnation of dictator Ostrog for resorting to
mercenaries to maintain his power as a crude racist screed against the Africans
who have been promised “lordly times among the ‘poor London’ trash.”[xxxviii]
Yet
Wells commits other transgressions that can’t be explained away. In Anticipations (1901), his first
venture into futurology, he casually dismisses the “swarms of black, and brown,
and dirty-white, and yellow people”[xxxix]
who, for whatever reason, cannot be assimilated into his New Republic – as
other non-whites are expected to, by giving up their native languages, modes of
dress and other cultural distinctions. These “swarms” are destined for
extinction, although not deliberate eradication. Assimilation seems to be the
bottom line again in “The Queer Story of Brownlow’s Newspaper” (1932). An
Englishman of 1931 somehow gets hold of a paper from 1971, and recalls later –
after having lost it – that one of the news items was about a roundup of
brigands near Irkutsk by the Federal Police: “The fellows on both sides looked
mostly Chinese, but there were one or two taller fellows, who might have been
Americans or British or Scandinavians.”[xl]
Wells
has also been damned for his remarks on Francis Galton’s manifesto for eugenics
in The American Journal of Sociology (July 1904): “The mating of two quite healthy
persons may result in disease. I am told it does so in the case of
interbreeding of healthy white men and healthy black women about the Tanganyika
region; the half-breed children are ugly, sickly, and rarely live.”[xli]
It was a stupid thing for him to say; he must have known that
miscegenation had been common elsewhere for generations without producing a
plague of defective children. Yet his point wasn’t about race per se, but to take issue with
Galton’s argument that apparent health was a sure sign of reproductive fitness:
“On the other hand, two not very healthy persons may have mutually corrective
qualities, and may beget sound offspring.”[xlii]
Perhaps
the clearest expression of Wells’ actual viewpoint, at least in his early
works, comes in A Modern Utopia (1905), at the end of a chapter on “Race in
Utopia,” where his alter-ego has it out with a botanist who brings up the issue
of miscegenation – the be-all and end-all for true racists then and for
generations afterwards:
“But
you would not like,” he cried in horror, “your daughter to marry a Chinaman or
a negro?”
“Of
course,” said I, “when you say Chinaman, you think of a creature with a
pigtail, long nails, and insanitary habits, and when you say negro you think of
a filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat. You do this because your
imagination is too feeble to disentangle the inherent qualities of a thing from
its habitual associations.”
“Insult
isn’t argument,” said the botanist.
“Neither
is unsound implication. You make a question of race into a question of unequal
cultures. You would not like your daughter to marry the sort of negro who
steals hens, but then you would also not like your daughter to marry a pure
English hunchback with a squint, or a drunken cab tout of Norman blood. As a
matter of fact, very few well-bred English girls do commit that sort of
indiscretion. But you don’t think it necessary to generalise against men of
your own race because there are drunken cab touts, and why should you
generalize against negroes? Because the proportion of undesirables is higher
among negroes, that does not justify a sweeping condemnation. You may have to
condemn most, but why all? There may be—neither of us knows enough to
deny—negroes who are handsome, capable, courageous.”
“Ugh!”
said the botanist.
“How
detestable you must find Othello!”[xliii]
But
Wells never wrote about an Othello in his own fiction, and neither did any
other sf writers of his time. Another of the ironies of sf history is that the
genre writer who came closest was Edgar Rice Burroughs, in Beyond Thirty (1916) – a short novel
set in 2137, when Abyssinian and Chinese empires contend for control of Europe,
where civilization never recovered from what was still called the Great War
when the story was written.
Jefferson
Turck, the hero, is commander of the aero-sub Coldwater for the Pan American
Federation, and the first American to visit the Old World since travel there
was proscribed in 1971. Captured by the Abyssinians in England, now a barbarian
backwater, he is led to their fort:
I
was escorted within the building into the presence of an old negro, a fine
looking man with a dignified and military bearing. He was a colonel, I was to
learn later, and to him I owe the very humane treatment that was accorded me
while I remained his prisoner.[xliv]
Col.
Abu Belik, commander of a cavalry unit under Emperor Menelek XIV, assures him
that Abyssinia is “the oldest civilized country in the world,” its mission one
of “carrying Christianity to all the benighted heathen of Europe, and Asia as
well.”[xlv]
Of course, he considers even white freemen (most whites are slaves) “inferior
beings, creatures of a lower order”[xlvi]
– and finds it hard to believe that blacks are second-class citizens in
America. Patrician Abyssinians also lord it over the conquered tribesmen of the
rest of Africa; still, they make good soldiers – and they can read and write.
Turck finds it “apparent that the black race has thrived far better in the past
two centuries under men of its own color than it had under the domination of
whites during all previous history.”[xlvii]
Turck
later sours on Belik when ordered to make a spectacle of himself as a personal
servant at a banquet in New Gondar (formerly Berlin) for Emperor Menelek. He
also reacts like a typical white American of Burroughs’ era when the fat old
monarch wants to add Victory, a British girl Turck had fallen for but lost
sight of after both were captured, to his harem. By that time, however, the
Chinese are on the march, and the Abyssinians are getting the worst of it.
Only, no Yellow Peril here; the Chinese Empire turns out to be an enlightened
realm bringing peace and progress to the Old World. This sort of thing hardly
seems the work of a rabid racist, even if it one presses the point, for
example, that Belik is lighter-skinned than people from other parts of Africa –
and there is more evidence on Burroughs side.
In
his Barsoom series beginning with A Princess of Mars (1912), Burroughs had
already portrayed black Martians as an aristocratic people who call themselves
the First-Born, and paired Southern gentleman John Carter with the mixed-race
Dejah Thoris – an interracial romance that made it to the big screen in 2012.
Burroughs has also been credited with “The Black Man’s Burden,” a parody of
Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” that appeared in 1899 in a local
newspaper in Pocatello, Idaho (where he lived at the time), A typical verse
reads:
Take
up the white man’s burden;
Poor
simple folk and free;
Abandon
nature’s freedom,
Embrace
his “Liberty;”
The
goddess of the white man
Who
makes you free in name;
But
in her heart your color
Will
brand you “slave” the same.[xlviii]
Yet
Philip R. Burger, in his afterword to the 2002 University of Nebraska Press
reprint of Burroughs’ The Moon Maid (1925), paints him as practically frothing at
the mouth with racist venom. Perhaps Burger was annoyed by the fact that the
fix-up novel originated as an anti-utopian depiction of a Communist future,
“Under the Red Flag,” that didn’t find a market (He doesn’t seem puzzled as to why it didn’t, at a time
when all true Americans were supposedly obsessed with the threat of the
Bolsheviks.).
“Under
the Red Flag” was retooled as a story about Earth being conquered by invaders
from the Moon, but for Burger this is a sham; he sees the Kalkars in the
published version as obvious caricatures of the kind of “low-class Slavic
laborers” and “dirty Jews”[xlix]
true Americans at the time supposedly blamed for the Red Menace. Never mind
that one of Earth’s defenders in the novel is Moses Samuel, described by Richard A. Lupoff
in Master of Adventure, The Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs, as “a tragic, heroic
figure, one of the most believable of all his characters,”[l]
who suffers martyrdom at the hands of the Kalkars. Lupoff is himself a social
and political liberal, and his survey, first published in 1965 and updated
twice since, offers a far more sympathetic view of Burroughs than Burger’s.
But
it’s not as if Burger couldn’t have found legitimate targets. Although science
fiction generally used to be dismissed as “that crazy Buck Rogers stuff,” few
today remember that the character in the comic strip and serial, movie and TV
adaptations originated in Philip Francis Nowlan’s “Armageddon 2419 A.D.” (1928)
and its sequel “The Airlords of Han” (1929), which appeared in Amazing
Stories
and had nothing to do with space travel but rather a war of liberation by white
Americans against the evil Han – the Yellow Peril of a vintage Victorian future
war novel writ exceeding large.
Nowlan
was a 100% American for his time; all the heroes have Anglo-Saxon names (some
of which were changed for the 1962 hardcover fix-up), and when Anthony Rogers
first encounters Wilma Deering she is being attacked by “Bad Bloods” –
half-breeds. The Mongols who conquered America while Rogers slept his way from
1919 to 2419 are called the “Yellow Blight,”[li]
and their extermination is clearly intended to make readers stand up and cheer.
Yet an epilogue takes a strange turn as Rogers recalls his post-war world
travels with Wilma:
I
never knew her to show to the men or women of any race anything but the utmost
of sympathetic courtesy and consideration, whether they were the noble
brown-skinned Caucasians of India, the sturdy Balkanites od Southern Europe, or
the simple, spiritual Blacks of Africa, today one of the leading races of the
world – although in the Twentieth Century we regarded them as inferior. This
charity and gentleness of hers did not fail even in our contacts with the
non-Han Mongolians of Japan and the coast provinces of China.[lii]
The
Han? Turns out they were human-alien hybrids, which can’t strike today’s
readers as anything but an attempt by Nowlan to weasel out of his hate speech
(“Yellow Blight” is softened to “Mongolian Blight” only in the book edition.[liii]).
As for that anecdote about Wilma, which contradicts his previous blanket racism, it
would seem that either he had a change of heart after the first part of the
story was published, or that somebody got on his case. Neither alternative
supports the thesis that pulp sf writers and their fans were mere sock puppets
for the racist ideology of the ruling class. That certainly wasn’t true of
Edmond Hamilton’s “A Conquest of Two Worlds” (1932), which savaged racist
imperialism in its bitter account of Earthmen’s subjugation and even
extermination of the natives of Mars and Jupiter.
In
Lawrence Mannings's The Man Who Awoke,
a series that appeared in Wonder Stories in 1933, and was finally published as a
paperback book in 1975, a white banker named Norman Winters sleeps his way into
several epochs of the future Rip Van Winkle style. By the year 20,000, however,
there’s no longer any white race, and a man from that time “greets” him thusly:
“So
you are Winters! But how terribly different from a man you look! Almost like …
an animal!
You have teeth! And your skin is white like the belly of a fish, not like a
brown human face at all.” And as if these differences made him somehow
superior, he drew himself up proudly and disdainfully.[liv]
Only
by 25,000, after Winters’ final awakening in a utopian era, race isn’t even
worth mentioning – it’s no big deal, any more than the practice of free love.
According to Jonathan R. Eller in Becoming Ray Bradbury (2011), pulp and slick
magazine publishers alike were nervous nellies when it came to addressing race.[lv]
But the writers found ways to address it indirectly. One example was Leigh
Brackett, who married Hamilton in 1946 after forging her own career as a writer
of sf, hard-boiled mysteries and screenplays (The Big Sleep).
In
“Citadel of Lost Ships” (1943), which first appeared in Planet Stories, Brackett tells a story
of a fugitive Earthman among the Kraylen, natives of the swamps of Venus who
look vaguely reptilian – blue-white of skin and with crests that resemble
feathers but aren’t – whose homes and lives are threatened by imperialists from
Earth:
"There have been men in the swamps.
Now word has been sent us. It seems there is coal here, and oil, and certain
minerals that men prize. They will drain the swamps for many miles, and work
them."
Campbell let smoke out of his lungs, very
slowly. "Yeah? And what becomes of you?"
The Kraylen turned away and stood framed
in the indigo square of the doorway. The distant drum sobbed and shouted. It
was hot, and yet the sweat turned cold on Campbell's body.
The old man's voice was distant and
throbbing and full of anger, like the drum. Campbell had to strain to hear it.
"They will take us and place us in
camps in the great cities. Small groups of us, so that we are divided and
split. Many people will pay to see us, the strange remnants of old Venus. They
will pay for our skills in the curing of leshen-skins and the writing of quaint music, and tattooing.
We will grow rich."
Campbell dropped the cigarette and ground
it on the dirt floor. Knotted veins stood out on his forehead, and his face was
cruel. The old man whispered:
"We
will die first."[lvi]
Brackett
is obviously drawing a parallel with American Indians and other non-Europeans
robbed of their lands, resources and dignity; the reference to “camps” might
even be a veiled allusion to the then-recent internment of Japanese Americans.
But when a reader wrote Planet Stories that “we never feel any sympathy for the
Kraylen, whose pitifully few numbers and decadent state invite LIQUIDATION,”[lvii]
Brackett reacted angrily at such a seeming patent endorsement of genocide:
If
that isn’t totalitarian reasoning, I never saw it. Under democratic law, any
and every minority, so long as it functions within legal limits, is guaranteed
the right to live, think, and worship as it sees fit. You might as well say we
ought to LIQUIDATE the Mennonites, the Amish, or any other decent, peaceable
group simply because they’re different … It’s well to remember one thing, when
you are planning the liquidation of minorities. Human society is a fluid and
unstable thing. And it’s frightfully embarrassing to wake up one morning and
find that all of a sudden you have become—a minority.[lviii]
More
than 30 years later, in an introduction to The Best of Planet Stories (1975), Brackett
expressed her annoyance at what seemed to be a widespread prejudice against the
kind of sf that had appeared in its pages – what she called “space opera,”
although it is more properly called planetary romance:
A
persistent myth flourishes about space opera which says that stories of the
genre were all about troops of bug-eyed monsters, wooden men with ray-guns,
senseless slaughter and a cretinous jingoism that portrayed the dominant
Earthman happily tramping all over an assortment of extraterrestrials
invariably portrayed as vile, low and menacing. I have even read supposedly eminent
critics who went so far as to say that science fiction had failed miserably in
that it had never considered alien psychologies or the problems of
communication with alien intelligences—something that leads me to wonder what,
if any science fiction these gentlemen have read.[lix]
Who
those “supposedly eminent critics” were, Brackett didn’t say. This was long
before Edward Said, who mentioned Jules Verne in passing but didn’t address sf
as such in Culture and Imperialism. John Rieder, who takes Said’s critique of
Orientalism for gospel, makes it his mission in Colonialism and the
Emergence of Science Fiction (2008) to amend that oversight, and it’s no
surprise that, like his model, he finds exactly what he’s looking for.
Exposing
overtly racist and colonialist texts and demolishing same is rather like
shooting fish in a barrel, even if some of those fish are obscure works like
Robert Ames Bennett’s Thyra: a Romance of the Polar Pit (1901), one of several
lost race novels (a form Darko Suvin excluded from sf) Rieder skewers. But he
wants to make the case that science fiction invariably justifies racism or
colonialism. Thus, the quest for the North Pole in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), plus passing
references to things colonial, are proof that the novel is really about the
“construction of race” rather than the hubris of creating artificial life.[lx]
Without
citing All Tomorrow’s Cultures, Rieder agrees with Samuel Gerald Collins that
Wells’ The Time Machine is really about colonialism, arguing even that the weather
of the year 802,701 A.D, is hot, not because the Sun is hotter or the Earth
closer to it, but because Wells wants to evoke the tropical climate of Africa
and portray the Eloi as primitive savages. Although the Time Traveller is at
pains to avoid hard and fast judgments, Rieder sees him as contemptuous of the
racial Other because he confesses to being as mystified by the world of the
distant future as a “negro, fresh from Central Africa,” would be in London – as
if Wells’ protagonist hadn’t put himself in the place of that African rather than
that of “a European confronting the enigmatic inhabitants of savage Africa.”[lxi]
And indeed (left out by Rieder), he remarks in the next breath: “Then, think
how narrow the gap between a negro and a white man of our own times, and how
wide the interval between myself and these of the Golden Age!”[lxii]
Perhaps
Rieder’s oddest reading is that Henry Kuttner and C.L. Moore’s “Vintage Season”
(1946) is about “the transition between early-twentieth-century imperialism in
crisis to an emerging postcolonial war system.”[lxiii]
A classic story of visitors from an alien future who seek to preserve its
existence by refusing to warn of a coming disaster that might have been
averted, is reduced to a polemic about the post-World War II Red Scare and the
challenge to American political and economic hegemony. Rieder brackets it with
Robert A. Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters (1951) and Jack Finney’s Invasion of
the Body Snatchers
(1955) – both more generally regarded as inspired by fear of Communism.
There
are whole schools of sf that Rieder leaves out. His only interest in George
Griffith’s future war novel The Angel of the Revolution (1893), for example, is
that what seems a revolutionary socialist cause on the part of the heroes
“metamorphoses into a racist fantasy,”[lxiv]
which leads naturally into the Yellow Peril theme. There isn’t any mention of
the fact that the enemy in Griffith’s novel is Russia – let alone that there
were dozens of future war novels in which European powers fight one another rather than the racial
Other. Said’s doctrine mandates that Europeans always stand
shoulder-to-shoulder against all the other peoples of the world. For Rieder, it
mandates that sf writers be unanimous, or virtually unanimous, in their support
of colonialism and imperialism. Although he does mention Hamilton’s “A Conquest
of Two Worlds,” he complains that it is “resigned to the inevitability”[lxv]
of genocide, and he has nothing to say about Brackett.
The
scope of Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction is necessarily limited
to Anglo-American sf, except for translations of Jules Verne. One can find
examples of untranslated French sf that conform to the Said-Rieder thesis,
notably future war fiction involving the Yellow Peril and even the Black Peril
by Emile Auguste Cyprien Driant (Capitaine Danrit). Paul D’Ivoi, a successor to
Verne, had a simple formula in some of his novels set in the Middle East or
India: British colonialism bad, French colonialism good. But some recently
translated French works are startling for their approach issues of colonialism
and imperialism – not only for the time when they first appeared, but even
today.
In
Hareton Ironcastle’s Amazing Journey (1922), J.H. Rosny aîné seems at the beginning
to be celebrating imperialism and the white race in a tale of exploration and
adventure in what then remained of darkest Africa. After all, Ironcastle is
introduced as a “perfect symbol of the type invented by Gobineau,” and his
daughter Muriel is the kind of classic beauty “that once inspired the sculptors
of goddesses.”
But
Philippe de Maranges, a member of the expedition who takes up with Muriel, sees
the war-like and cannibalistic Goura-Zannkas natives as no different from the
ancient Assyrians, or the Hyksos who invaded Egypt. “This is a scene from olden
times,” he says of a bloody battle that has just taken place between the blacks
of that tribe and the Squat Men, an apparent evolutionary dead-end hominid
species. Muriel holds out hope that such brutality will end one day, which
brings this rejoinder from Phillippe:
Undoubtedly—but perhaps by virtue of the disappearance of the Squat Men
and Goura-Zannkas, under the bullets, bombs or whips of white men… for our
civilization, Muriel, is the most homicidal that has ever appeared on Earth. In
the last three centuries, who have caused the disappearance of more peoples and
populations than all the conquerors of antiquity and the Middle Ages. Roman
destruction was child’s play compared with ours. Don’t you live, Muriel, in a
land as large as Europe, from which you have caused the red race to disappear?
The white men of the expedition later meet their match in a realm where
the counterparts of humans and familiar fauna and flora live under the strict
but benevolent rule of sentient mimosas. It’s almost like something out of Avatar, but Rosny’s novel
appeared as part of a series of roman aventures published in by Ernest
Flammarion in France decades before the ascendancy of the sort of fashionable
white liberal guilt that inspired the movie.
A lesser known French work, perhaps more startling, is Timeslip
Troopers, Brian Stableford’s rendering of La Belle Valence (1923), a time
travel novel originally written by André Blandin and then rewritten by Théo
Varlet, an established sf writer, to secure publication.
The original title refers to both the Spanish city of Valencia and the
oranges it was famed for, which would be hard to convey in a literal
translation; thus the anachronistic play on Heinlein’s Starship Troopers (1959) in the
translation. Nothing is known about Blandin, although Stableford surmises that
he must have been a French officer during World War I. It was he, in any case,
who came up with the plot: French soldiers in the trenches near Metz in 1917
find a time machine in the basement of an old house, and learn to use it.
What follows seems at first only a variation of Mark Twain’s A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), but that’s an
oversimplification. By mischance, the time machine takes not only its operators
but the whole surrounding area – with a company of soldiers, their advanced
weapons, even a British plane that has landed nearby – to the Valencia of 1341.
That puts them in the same position, technologically, as the Spanish
conquistadores in America – only the primitives are the Catholics and their
Inquisition, and it is the Moors the time travellers side
with. This was the age of Averroes, after
all, not that of the ayatollahs. Tortorado, Dominican inquisitor of Valencia,
loves to torture Moors and Jews; he has even forced the daughter of a Jewish
merchant to convert and become his sex slave. And as the French arrive, he is
pursuing a heresy case against a Franciscan monk, Geronimo:
His love of progress and
Enlightenment, and his acquaintance with Moorish and Jewish scholars, had
caused him to be accused of heresy by his rivals, the Dominicans. Arrested in
the middle of the night the previous day, he had been subjected a few hours
later to questioning by water…[lxvi]
Captain Marcel Renard
and his company, outraged by the state of affairs, make short work of the
Spaniards and, after a brief counterattack by Catholic forces, call in Moorish
allies and restore the Emir to power. But that is only the beginning; the men
from the future set out to bring the future to the benighted city, spreading
the teachings of the European Enlightenment, launching a mini-industrial
revolution and even introducing paper money. Renard fantasizes going beyond
Valencia itself (“In six months, Spain will be ours.”[lxvii])
and even bringing about the French Revolution 400 years ahead of time.
But the French are running low on ammunition even as they are running
high on hubris. Renard’s troops spend much of their time boozing and wenching –
even the nuns are hot for them – but they also bring the clap. They show reckless
disregard for local sensibilities, punishing those who disrespect them with
menial labor; some even bust heads and loot homes on the slightest pretext.
Geronimo, meanwhile, has gotten high on the thoughts of Rousseau and Marx, and
is so full of himself that he welcomes a crown offered by the French as a new
“pope.” It is all too much, too soon for what is essentially a conservative
society. Resentment against the French and the ways they bring erupts into
violence when the factories fail for want of raw materials, throwing people out
of work; and Tortorado makes good on the opportunity to stage a
counter-revolution.
“Progress is an admirable thing, but it can only be realized in a
propitious atmosphere, in its own time,”[lxviii]
Renard realizes too late – only a few of his men make it back to their own
time, where they take a vow of secrecy about their ill-fated venture in
liberation. And make no mistake about it; they did see themselves as
liberators; critics of the Said-Rieder school who imagine that Western
rationalism devalues only non-Western culture overlook the fact that the
Enlightenment began as a challenge to the European social and
religious order of its time.
Yet Renard and his men end up behaving just like the colonialists Said
and Rieder condemn, and Timeslip Troopers can thus be seen as a
critique of colonialism in the classic sense. But it can also be seen as a
critique of the kind of supposedly benevolent efforts to bring peace and
progress to non-Western cultures that are currently called “nation building.”
In the same context, it can be seen as a critique of past and present
revolutionary movements, social or religious, that reduce people to Believers
and Unbelievers and treat them accordingly.
[i]
http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2013/sep/06/science-fiction-racism-sexism-discrimination,
retrieved Sept. 14, 2013
[ii] Ibid.
[iii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Barnett, retrieved
Sept. 28, 2013
[iv]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Throne_of_the_Crescent_Moon, retrieved Sept. 28,
2013
[vi] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_K._Dick_bibliography#Book-length_critical_studies,
retrieved Sept. 14, 2013
[vii]
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/55/baudrillard55art.htm, retrieves Sept.
24, 2013
[ix]
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/nixon57art.htm, retrieved Sept. 1, 2013
[xi]
http://www.depauw.edu/sfs/backissues/57/nixon57art.htm
[xii] Ibid.
[xiv]
http://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/jun/02/vs-naipaul-jane-austen-women-writers
[xv] Quoted in Rieder, John, Colonialism and the Emergence of Science
Fiction, Wesleyan University Press,
2008, p. 3, from Said, Edward W., Culture and Imperialism, Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 70-71
[xvii] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shadia_Drury, retrieved
April 5, 2013
[xviii] Drury, Shadia B., “Have the Arab Revolutions Defeated
the Orientalist Discourse?” in Free
Enquiry, June-July 2011, p.13.
[xx]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Simoqin_Prophecies, retrieved Oct. 11, 2013
[xxi]
http://www.strangehorizons.com/2013/20130930/2menonsingh-a.shtml, retrieved
Oct. 11, 2013
[xxii] Isaacson, Nathaniel, “Science
Fiction for the Nation” Tales of the Moon Colony and the Birth of Modern Chinese
Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies, March 2013, p. 33
[xxiii] Ibid., pp. 40-41
[xxiv] Ibid., p. 48
[xxv] Wu, Yan, “‘Great Wall Planet:’ Introducing Chinese
Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies, March 2013, p. 6
[xxvii] Wang, David Der-wei, Fin de Siècle Spendor:
Repressed Modernities of Late Qing Fiction, 1849-1911, Stanford University Press, 1997, pp. 306-312,
[xxviii]
http://asianhistory.about.com/od/china/f/zhenghefaq.htm, retrieved Sept. 21,
2013
[xxx] http://www.pfaw.org/rww-in-focus/barton-s-bunk-religious-right-historian-hits-the-big-time-tea-party-america,
retrieved Sep. 17, 2013
[xxxi] Flammarion, Camille, Omega: The Last Days of the
World, translator not given
(University of Nebraska Press, 1999), p. 43
[xxxiii] Wells, H.G., Selected Stories of H.G. Wells, ed. Ursula K. Le Guin (Modern Library Classics,
2004), p. 203
[xxxiv] Ibid., p. 201
[xxxv] Collins, Samuel Gerard, All Tomorrow’s Futures,
Anthropological Engagements with the Future, Berghahn Books, 2008, p. 13
[xxxvi] Ibid.
[xxxix] Wells, Anticipations of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress Upon Human Life And Thought. Harper, 1901, p. 342.
[xli]
http://galton.org/essays/1900-1911/galton-1904-am-journ-soc-eugenics-scope-aims.htm,
retrieved Sept. 17, 2013
[xlii] Ibid.
[xlv] Ibid., p. 114
[xlvi] Ibid., p. 115
[xlvii] Ibid., p. 116
[xlviii] Porges, Edward, Edgar Rice Burroughs, The Man Who
Created Tarzan, Ballantine Books,
1975, Vol. 2, p. 1080
[l] Lupoff, Richard A., Master of Adventure: The
Worlds of Edgar Rice Burroughs,
University of Nebraska Press, 2005, p. 78
[lii] Nowlan, Philip Francis, Armageddon 2419 A.D., Ace Books, 1963, p. 190; verbatim from Project
Gutenberg download of text for “The Airlords of Han” in Amazing Stories, March 1929
[lvi] “The Citadel of Lost Ships,” by Leigh Brackett.pdf,
downloaded from On-Read.com, p. 4
[lx] Rieder, op cit, pp. 99-101
[lxi] Ibid., p. 87
[lxiii] Ibid., p. 154
[lxiv] Ibid., p. 141
[lxv] Ibid., p. 143
[lxvi] Varlet, Théo, and André Blandin, Timeslip Troopers, trans. Brian Stableford, Black Coast Press, 2012, p.
92.
[lxvii] Ibid., p. 155.
[lxviii] Ibid., p. 208
