Brainwashed into believing in a Moral Dictator called ‘God’: Caprica

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artificial intelligence, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, globalization, monotheism, Zoë Graystone

The Battlestar Galactica prequel series, Caprica, really started to hit its straps at about Episode 4: ‘Gravedancing’ (for more on BSG-related topics from Tyrone and Eric, visit here, here, and here).

Caprica is set on the planet of the same name, a planet possessing technology a decade or so more advanced than ours, and on the brink of developing artificial intelligence. The planet Caprica is controlled by global business and a world government, exercising effective political control over the other eleven of the twelve colonies, and wielding a  powerful law enforcement and intelligence service called the Global Defense Department (G.D.D.). The parallels to our own political situation (in descending order of power: global business, the U.S. government, and the F.B.I.) are obvious.

The only apparent threat to established power is posed by the terrorist group, Soldiers of The One, whose monorail bomb explosion in the first, pilot episode killed Zoë Graystone, daughter of artificial intelligence entrepreneur, Daniel Graystone. The dominant religious belief within the twelve colonies is polytheism, one more or less based on the ancient Greek pantheon. This polytheistic religion is practiced more nominally and with less literalism on Caprica than it is on other planets, such as the more fundamentalist Gemenon and Tauron. By contrast, the religious innovation of the Soldiers of The One (S.T.O) is monotheism, belief in one God, a belief that sets them against the secularizing and nominally polytheistic Caprican government.

This clash in worldviews – and again the parallels with life on Earth in 2010 are obvious – produces some fiery religious dialogue, punctuated with the usual half-truths, ignorance, fear, and prejudice. When the G.D.D. confronts Amanda Graystone (Zoë Graystone’s mother) and proceeds to force a search of Zoë’s possessions for evidence of her links with the S.T.O., the confrontation produces one of the best lines of the season to this point:

Amanda Graystone (Zoë’s mother): What do you think you’re going to find here?
Jordan (GDD Agent): I really don’t know. Maybe who she met with. Who brainwashed her into believing in a moral dictator called ‘God’…

The GDD agent then delivers a line which nicely captures the inevitable conflict which arises when a political power and a rival religious power each claim absolute authority – and the resulting systemic violence from the political hegemony, defended as though it were benignly protecting the existing order from unaccountable violence:

Jordan (GDD Agent): I’m sorry if we have to take your daughter’s life apart in order to put other terrorists behind bars. But if we have to, then so be it.

After Zoë’s involvement with the S.T.O. is made public, the Graystones are invited on a comedian’s talk show –  the media form in which most Caprican young people receive their news. The theme of religious conflict is further developed on the show. Amanda Graystone is asked why she didn’t report her daughter as a terrorist, and replies that she never knew:

Amanda Graystone: When was I supposed to call the cops?
Baxter Sarno: Well, I don’t know, maybe when she started worshiping the big Destructo-God-In-The-Sky, maybe?
Daniel Graystone (Zoë’s father): We didn’t know, there weren’t any signs.
Baxter Sarno: You said she was ‘troubled’.
Daniel Graystone: See… she was angry. That’s a better word. My wife’s right.
Baxter Sarno: Well, ok, ‘angry’, but I would also like to add – “morally blank”. Because the virtual world is a poor teacher and doesn’t provide boundaries…
Daniel Graystone: You know who would completely agree with that – that is Zoe. And that’s exactly how the S.T.O. [Soldiers of The One] got to her… She saw things in the virtual world – ritual sacrifices, games like New Cap City, and she felt the absence of moral guidelines, just like you do, like a lot of folks do. And into that absence steps the S.T.O., offering this marvelous ultimate moral arbiter. It’s quite appealing – for a teenage girl especially.

This exchange captures something Bruce Lincoln notes in Holy Terrors. The typical response of the U.S. to Muslim terrorism was to deny that the terrorists operated from religious motivations; to instead paint them as amoral agents acting merely for political – or even selfish – purposes. Such a slant is completely contradicted by the nature of the instructions which each of the 9/11 bombers were issued and followed before the attack – which stressed the religious rationale for their actions at almost every step of the way, and which was couched in language which emphasized their overall goals of holiness, cleansing, and purity. If any religious element was mentioned in official U.S. media reports, it was painted as a variety opposed to “true Islam” – as though the religion the 9/11 bombers practised was somehow not a valid form of religion. But while it is certainly not a valid form of Islam for the vast majority of Muslims, it does constitute “genuine” Islam for some.

Before her death, Zoë created a virtual copy of herself, the program for which becomes the prototype for artificial intelligence and the creation of the Cylons.

As the Mother of an entirely new species, her name, Zoë, takes on a special significance. It means “Life” in Greek, for which the corresponding Hebrew name is חוה (Ḥavvah): “Eve”.

From Caprica & Coupland to Žižek on Immortality

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Andrei Tarkovsky, Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Monstrosity of Christ, Slavoj Žižek

Eric recently commented on the way the forthcoming Battlestar Galactica prequel, Caprica, reflects the 20th Century Western shift from otherworldly to this-wordly spirituality:

“… The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter…”
(Dr Eric Repphun)

In response, I wondered if the transhumanists might be the ones today who have reincorporated the infinite into this dominant strand of this-worldly spirituality. For, in the transhumanist body, both the finite-material and the infinite defeat of death are combined. Much like the Christ.

And as a spooky synchronicity (religiously speaking), Slavoj Žižek recently gave a lecture (with the same title as the book he co-wrote with John Millbank, The Monstrosity of Christ, 2009), in which he says this:

“Did you notice how, in contrast to previous centuries, especially the Nineteenth Century – when the topic of finitude was, as it were, reserved for materialism, and spiritualists, idealists were talking about (and I simplify very much, but nonetheless) the infinite, the spiritual dimension is our contact with the infinite, and so on – all of a sudden (it started with Heidegger, taken over by others) in the Twentieth Century, it’s the very finitude which becomes the ultimate support of spiritualization. The idea is that – precisely insofar as we are finite beings, that is to say, irreducibly thrown into a world that we cannot ever dominate, rooted in this world, unable to withdraw from our concrete place in historical reality to gain a kind of a neutral position, above the run of, outside the run of things – precisely because of this, we cannot ever think of dominating technologically, or in any other way, reality. So we have to remain open for an unfathomable transcendent otherness.

So again, no wonder that even with cinema-makers, I noticed – like, who is the most materialist cinema-maker, arguably, probably, over the Twentieth Century? My choice would have been Andrei Tarkovsky – the Russian guy. But he is also the most spiritualist. You see this idea that, precisely because of this idea that we are stuck into our bodies, our place, this gives to our existence an unfathomable abyss that sustains it, which is the proper place of spirituality.

And on the other hand, the only ones who are ready to take over – in a way that I don’t accept, but nonetheless – the old topics of immortality, infinity, in the sense of getting out of one’s body, are some (usually, even the more vulgar ones) Darwinists, brain scientists or cognitive scientists who claim, you know this idea that that the ultimate, especially in the so-called tech-gnosis movement, where the idea is that the ultimate goal of recent digital, bio-genetic development is to transform our very personal identity into – to cut a long story short – into software; into a virtual program which can then be downloaded from one to another hardware, so that we can indefinitely reproduce ourselves. So that’s an interesting reversal.

Where I am, along with Alan Badiou, is on the side of infinity here – not this vulgar materialist infinity, but nonetheless an infinity, if nothing else the Freudian infinity, even immortality.”

Caprica, Douglas Coupland, and the Problem of Immortality

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Battlestar Galactica, Caprica, death, Douglas Coupland, immortality, Peter Berger

The rebooted television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009) was, in this reporter’s opinion, one of the finest serial narratives in the history of the medium (though the Baltimore-set crime drama The Wire, which ran at pretty much the same time, is arguably just as good). It is science fiction, certainly, but as an allegory, the whole series can be read as a long, eliptical meditation about religion and its role in contemporary society.  Battlestar told the story of the conflict between a far-flung human civilisation called the Twelve Colonies of Kobol and a race of genocidal, fundamentalist robots known as ‘Cylons’.  The Cylons, originally created by Colonial scientists to serve as slave labour in the Colonies, eventually launch a devastating war of rebellion and revenge on the Colonies.  The series follows a handful of human survivors as they flee across the galaxy, pursued by the beings that their parents had created.  Though Battlestar ended its run early this year, a new series, Caprica (the name of one of a Colonial homeworld), which will begin its run in 2010, explores the human world of the Colonies at the time of the creation of the original Cylons.  While it toys with familiar science-fiction and horror themes about the creation of life and the terrible responsibility that this act brings with it, there is something that is even more intriguing about the excellent feature-length pilot episode that was released recently on DVD.  While Battlestar Galactica had a good deal to say about religion, and particularly about the ways in which we in the West view Islam, Caprica adds an interesting dimension to the series’ commentary on religion.

Caprica: Alessandra Torresani as Zoe

In the Caprica pilot, we learn that the fundamental motivation for the development of the original Cylons was a fear of death and the refusal to accept the death of a loved one.  Daniel Graystone, the man most responsible for the creation of the Cylon technology, is driven by a disquieting mixture of greed, ambition, and grief.  Graystone is, in grand Battlestar tradition, is a deeply flawed and compellingly human character.  There is an interesting and troubling parallel between the way Graystone approaches his research and the way that he treats his human daughter that speaks volumes about the ambivalent place that science occupies in the universe of Battlestar and Caprica.  Early in the pilot, Graystone’s precocious teenage daughter Zoe is killed in a human bombing executed by a member of an underground monotheistic sect (the Colonists are polytheists).  Zoe, a secret member of the same sect, has created an effective and sentient virtual copy of herself that Graystone discovers only after her death.  He forcefully appropriates the virtual Zoe and uses her as the basis for the first working Cylon model.  The pilot ends with a truly chilling image of a hulking metal Cylon Centurion, developed for military use, pleading for help in a halting, adolescent girl’s voice.  Though there are real questions as to Graystone’s ultimate motives, it is obvious that he is deeply affected by Zoe’s death and his initial trials with the virtual Zoe and the Cylon bodies are motivated by a desire to undo her death, to deny the basic fact of mortality.  Graystone is suspect in that he is overly ambitious and unscrupulous, but also because he is a deeply rational man unable to face this one troubling aspect of reality.  His attempts to counter death with technology will end, we know before he begins, is the Cylon-led genocide that almost wipes out the human race only a few decades later.

Though this requires a good deal more study before it is anything more than simple conjecture, it seems that the fear of immortality is an increasingly common theme in contemporary genre fiction.  To cite a not insignificant example, in the Harry Potter books, the main villain, Lord Voldemort, is driven largely by a quest for immortality, or by a fear of death.  Likewise, in the lamentable Star Wars prequels, we learn that the motivation driving Anakin Skywalker, who eventually is transformed into über-villain Darth Vader, is again both the fear of death and the refusal to accept that everything must die.  There is something interesting here for the study of religion in that there are deep connections between ideas of mortality and life after death and the Judeo-Christian religious milieu that these texts have grown out of.  If we are to believe Peter Berger’s classic 1969 study, The Sacred Canopy, religion, at least as he conceived it from a largely Eurocentric and Christian-centred perspective, is tied fundamentally to the spectre of death.  Berger writes of the importance of death in religion, which he sees as a social phenomenon which creates a sort of ‘canopy’ of explanations and motivations that helps people make sense of their world:

Its legitimating power, however, has another important dimension – the integration into a comprehensive nomos of precisely those marginal situations in which the reality of everyday life is put in question …The confrontation with death (be it actually witnessing the death of other or anticipating one’s own death in the imagination) constitutes what is probably the most important marginal situation.  Death radically challenges all socially objectivated definitions of reality – of the world, of others, and of self.  Death radically puts into question the taken-for-granted, ‘business as usual’ attitude in which one exists in everyday life … Insofar as the knowledge of death cannot be avoided in any society, legitimations of the reality of the social world in the face of death are decisive requirements in any society.  The importance of religion in such legitimations is obvious.  Religion, then, maintains the socially defined reality by legitimating marginal situations in terms of an all-encompassing sacred reality.[1]

He concludes, a few pages later:

The world of sacred order, by virtue of being an ongoing human production, is ongoingly confronted with the disordering forces of human existence in time.  The precariousness of every such world is revealed each time men forget or doubt the reality-denying dreams of ‘madness’, and most importantly, each time they consciously encounter death.  Every human society is, in the last resort, man banded together in the face of death.  The power of religion depends, in the last resort, upon the credibility of the banners it puts in the hands of men as they stand before death, or more accurately, as they walk, inevitably, toward it.[2]

Though many scholars have challenged Berger’s ideas (including Berger himself, who came in later decades to disagree with many of his own conclusions), The Sacred Canopy is deservedly a classic in the field.  We have reasons to take him and these ideas seriously.  Though we may be suspect of how reductive his thesis is, there can be little denying that religion and death are in many ways intertwined, especially in the Abrahamic monotheisms.

What does this emerging fear not of mortality but of immortality tell us about the state of religion in the Western world?  It seems odd in an environment that is undergoing something of a religious revival (to use a horribly loose and loaded phrase) that the drive for immortality plays such a destructive role in a number of prominent texts.  If there is indeed a growing suspicion with those who strive for immortality, would this mean that there is also a growing suspicion of a certain kind of religious thought and practice – perhaps reflecting the fact that the writings of some militants from various traditions have given immortality (and its dozens of willing virgin girls or its empty planets to inhabit with one’s innumerable wives) have given the afterlife a bad name?  Or would this mean that contemporary religion is becoming more and more oriented towards this world rather than any other.  Though both of these possibilities likely get to the truth of the matter in different ways, it is the latter suggestion that seems to be more compelling, because there is something profoundly this-worldly about much of modern Western religious practice and its sacralisation (perhaps even divinisation) of the self.  The relentless drive for ‘self-improvement’ or ‘self-realisation’ that is part and parcel of so much of contemporary religious thought and practice, is necessarily a this-worldly matter.  This is an interesting development in that it represents something of a return to the prehistoric religious world that early sociologists like Emile Durkheim and Max Weber described (or, depending on how sympathetic we are to their work, created), which was largely focused on mundane, this-worldly concerns.

This also raises a further question: if this is truly is what is happening out there in world beyond the ivory tower where we in the Dunedin School find ourselves working (though it is in reality not a tower of any sort but a clapped-out two-story house built in the 1920s and later converted into offices with little care or subtlety), what might be driving this change?  Turning again to fictional narrative to approach this question, the Canadian writer Douglas Coupland, in his brilliant 1993 novel, Life After God, speculates on the reasons that his characters are unable or unwilling to think about another world:

Ours was a life lived in paradise and thus it rendered any discussion of transcendental ideas pointless.  Politics, we supposed, existed elsewhere in a televised non-paradise; death was something similar to recycling.  Life was charmed but without politics or religion.  It was the life of the children of the children of pioneers – life after God – a life of earthy salvation on the edge of heaven.  Perhaps this is the finest thing to which we may aspire, the life of peace, the blurring between dream life and real life – and yet I find myself speaking these words with a sense of doubt.  I think there was a trade-off somewhere along the line.  I think the price we paid for our golden life was an inability to fully believe in love; instead we gained an irony that scorched everything it touched.  And I wonder if this irony is the price we paid for the loss of God.  But then I remind myself we are living creatures – we have religious impulses – we must – and yet into what cracks do these impulses flow in a world without religion?  It is something I think about every day.  Sometimes I think it is the only thing worth thinking about.^[3]

In line with the tendency observable in Caprica, Coupland tells us elsewhere that embracing mortality is one of the crucial steps in developing a deeper understanding of the world.  In his Polaroids from the Dead, a collection of essays and journalistic writings, Coupland tells a parabolic story about an ‘enchanted city,’ a city charmed but without rain, and a visit paid to it by a skeleton.  The story is a scathing condemnation of contemporary culture, and particularly its ignorance of the possibility of an afterlife and a purpose to the enigmatic figure of death.  Here Coupland compares the enchanted city, which is in reality a highly disenchanted place, with the genuine enchantment that the interloping skeleton, as both a metaphor for the hidden and as the literal presence of the dead, brings with him.  The skeleton tells the city’s people, who plead for help in making it rain:

‘It is simple … While you live in mortal splendour – with glass elevators and grapes in December – the price you pay for your comfort is a collapsed vision of heaven – the loss of the ability to see pictures in your heads of an afterlife.  You pray for rain, but you also are praying for pictures in your heads that will renew your faith in an afterlife … I am the skeleton that lies deep within each and every one of you.  I am the skeleton just underneath your lips, your eyeballs, your flesh – the skeleton that silently carries both your heart and your mind’.^[4]

Quite contrary to Berger’s concept of the ‘sacred canopy’, in which religion plays a role in protecting people from death, Caprica, along with the work of Coupland (and doubtless many others),  suggests that embracing mortality and the spectre of death may in fact be a characteristic religious gesture of our times.

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[1] Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor Press,1969): 42-44.

[2] Berger, Canopy, 51.

[3] Douglas Coupland, Life After God (New York: Pocket Books, 1994): 273-274.

[4] Douglas Coupland, Polaroids from the Dead (Toronto: HarperCollins, 1996): 59-60.  It is worth noting that the vision of the dancing skeleton reappears in somewhat modified from in Coupland’s 2004 novel, Eleanor Rigby (London: Fourth Estate) in the form of a visionary story about a forsaken community of farmers on a vast prairie who face conflicting information from above. Images of bones and intimations of mortality play an important part in the slowly unfolding story of the farmers. See Coupland, Eleanor, 91-92, 98-99, 102, 159-166, and 248.

Cinema as Exorcism (two): District 9 as Postcolonial Science Fiction

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allegory, apartheid, Battlestar Galactica, District 9, science fiction, South Africa

Lest we allow this to become totally dominated by Deane’s prolific nature, now for something completely different …

Continuing on with the occasional ‘Cinema as Exorcism’ series, we will be delving into the murky waters of the postcolonial world with a trip to District 9, the very fine debut film from South African director Neill Blomkamp, produced by local boy made good Peter Jackson.  The film is an allegorical exploration of the ongoing costs of European colonialism for Africa and its peoples.  Though in a very different sense, this is the film as exorcism, a visceral grappling with the ghosts of the past, particularly that of South African apartheid, though some of the film’s message is more universal.

District 9 is set on an alternative timeline in the city of Johannesburg.  In a twist on the classic science fiction story of alien invasion – the sight of the giant saucer hanging over the city evokes texts as diverse as the film Independence Day and the old television series V – the alien visitors arrive on Earth not as conquerors but as starving, demoralised and leaderless refugees.  Their massive spacecraft, which has a far more functional look than those we are used to seeing, is a derelict wreck, stopped over the city not for strategic reasons, but because that’s where it happened to break down.  The South African government, at first pleased that the aliens had chosen their country, soon finds itself with more than a million alien visitors, who they herd into the titular District 9.  The narrative of the film opens as the private company in charge of alien affairs – the sinister and all too believable Multinational United (MNU) – sets out to evict all of the aliens and move them to District 10, a tent city hundreds of kilometres outside Johannesburg that is, even in MNU’s estimates, nothing less than a concentration camp.  Though on the surface, the film is thrilling and intriguing enough to be getting on with, it would be a great disservice to read it literally.  On one level, it certainly is a story about aliens living in South Africa, but on another level, it is about something altogether more serious and something far more unsettling.

From Neill Blomkamp's District 9

The analogy between the aliens and the South African segregationist policy of apartheid, which officially was ended only in 1994, is highly specific: District 9 is a teeming, improvised ghetto that bears a distinct resemblance to South African townships; the aliens speak in a language that includes clicking noises that recall many native South African languages; the aliens are given ‘slave names’ by the government; the official policy is of segregation and containment, all perpetuated under the guise of maintaining order and working for the greater good.  The film focuses on one Wikis Van De Merwe, the MNU office drone who is given the unenviable task of handing out millions of eviction notices to prepare for the forced exodus to District 10.  Wikus (an astonishingly accomplished performance by Sharlto Copley in his first acting role), sporting an Afrikaans accent and a bureaucratic moustache, heads blindly into District 9 armed with a clipboard, a small army of MNU mercenaries, and his own blithe confidence that the aliens are inferior creatures that must be treated with a firm hand.  As the most important human character, Wikus is our guide to a truly alien world, and is it through his experiences that the narrative mirrors not only apartheid but also the open-ended process of reconciliation.  When Wikus turns on his employer and begins to fight alongside the one alien – given the name Christopher Johnson – that attempts to engineer an escape, he does so initially more out of self-interest than in the interests of social justice, asking implicit questions about the driving force behind the end of legal segregation in real-world South Africa.

One of the things that make Wikus both compelling and chilling is that his casual racism towards the aliens is convincing, an uncomfortable mirror of apartheid specifically but one that reflects racism more generally.  Wikus, like many of the people in his world, call the aliens ‘prawns’ for the simple reason that they do resemble actually resemble bipedal shellfish.  This is not merely a descriptive but is also a distancing, dehumanising (using that term very broadly) technique that speaks volumes of the ways in which the aliens are treated by the government, by MNU, and by South Africans of all colours.  The film is clearly intended as a critique of apartheid and it gives us ample reason to pity the aliens and to deplore the way they are treated.  Things are more complicated than this, however, and it needs a good deal more analysis that I can offer here (On a more personal note, throughout the film, I found myself wondering just how much of the film’s allegorical subtlety I was missing, having experienced apartheid South Africa from afar while growing up in the United States).  The film also toys with contemporary racial stereotypes, particularly in its depiction of the only humans who have significant contact with the aliens; a gang of Nigerian criminals who reap the profits of selling the aliens raw meat or trading their advanced weapons for cat food, a favourite alien delicacy.  The Nigerians are portrayed as savage and coldblooded as well as superstitious, almost begging the question as to why the film chooses these as its most significant black characters.

The film’s critique of the treatment of the aliens, impoverished and trapped in a country where they are both feared and hated, extends allegory to its real-world context, where memories of the townships are still very fresh.  The film is about apartheid, but it is also, again allegorically, about what has happened afterwards.  In one of the film’s most striking images, in a long shot, we see Wikus arriving home after a gruelling day of serving eviction notices, the alien mothership hanging over his comfortable middle class home with a massive unacknowledged, almost unconscious weight.  There are, the film suggests, truly horrifying things hanging over the world of men like Wikus, who perform(ed) utterly irrational acts of prejudice and injustice in the name of safety and rationality, even after apartheid as an official policy has ended.

One name for another, a part for the whole: the historic violence of Apartheid can always be treated as  a metonymy.  In its past as well as in its present.  By diverse paths (condensation, displacement, expression, or representation), one can always decipher through its singularity so many other kinds of violence going on in the world.  At once part, casue, effect, example, what is happening here translates what takes place here, always here, wherever one is and whererever one looks, closest to home.  Infinite responsibility, therefore, no rest allowed for any form of good conscience.

Jacques Derrida, Spectres of Marx (1994): xv.

This is the first major African-made (though Blomkamp spent much of his life in Canada) science fiction film and it to the makers’ credit that this is a story that could be told only in Africa.  It is also a story that could only be told as science fiction.  In its almost unrelentingly dark vision of humanity, District 9 is a deeply subversive film.  The distancing effect of the fantastic elements of science fiction – faster than light travel, interstellar civilisations, etc. – allows science fiction to tell such difficult stories and ask difficult questions in ways that more classically realist genres of storytelling cannot.  Science fiction is, as Peter Nicholls notes, both ‘the great modern literature of metaphor’ and ‘pre-eminently the modern literature not of physics, but of metaphysics’.[1] To expand on this topic a bit further, we need only to look at the stunning ‘re-boot’ of the television series Battlestar Galactica (2003-2009), another contemporary science fiction text that uses a carefully created allegory to deconstruct the postcolonial situation and to ask unsettling questions about the colonial powers, in the case the United States.  Given this, as Brian Ott notes, it is ‘a profound mistake’ to interpret the genre ‘literally’.  Writing of Battlestar Galactica’s robotic antagonists, the Cylons, he argues, ‘The issue is not what Cylons are, but what they represent’.[2] The same is true of the aliens in District 9, which, like Battlestar Galactica, is told in a visual language that mixes the fantastic with a gritty, handheld, quasi-documentary realism.  As we have seen, what the aliens in District 9 represent remains an open question, but the first step to answering this question is to recognize the allegorical nature of the narrative itself.

Though we always be careful to attribute too much to authorial intention, it is worth noting that the new Battlestar Galactica is self-consciously allegorical, as executive producer David Eick told the Calgary Herald:

To me, the old sci-fi novels – the [Robert] Heinleins, the [Isaac] Asimovs, the [Ray] Bradburys, the [Philip K.] Dicks and so forth – were all about allegorical sociopolitical commentary.  So it really wasn’t so much about coming up with a new idea.  It was going back to an old one, which is, ‘Let’s use science fiction as the prism or as the smokescreen – as it was sort of invented to be – to discuss and investigate the issues of the day’.[3]

This is true on a more general level as well, as the great American Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson notes of serious science fiction (no space opera allowed):

I would [base] the necessity of ideological analysis on the very nature of SF itself: for me it is only incidentally about science or technology, and even more incidentally about unusual psychic states.  It seems to me that SF is in its very nature a symbolic meditation on history itself, comparable in its emergence as a new genre to the birth of the historical novel around the time of the French Revolution … If this is the case, then, surely we have as readers not been equal to the capacity of the form itself until we have resituated SF into that vision of the relationship of man to social and political and economic forces which is its historical element.[4]

Barry M. Malzberg argues that there is something deeply challenging about the tendency towards allegory in science fiction, which, he argues, explains why it has never been a particularly popular or critically respected genre (though this has arguably changed since he wrote in the 1980s):

It is my assumption that it never will be [popular].  Science fiction is too threatening.  At the center, science fiction is a dangerous literature.  It represents the beast born in the era of enlightenment to snarl at the heart of all intellectual and technological advance … We know not what we do; the engines can eat us up – this is what science fiction has been saying (among many other things) for a long time now.[5]

District 9, like Battlestar Galactica, is just such a dangerous, symbolic meditation on history and both are in many ways exemplary science fiction.  In a formal sense, they correspond to Darko Suvin’s classic definition of science fiction as ‘literature of cognitive estrangement’.[6] Science fiction thus hinges on the collision between what is known and what is unknown, what is and what might be.  Battlestar Galactica’s ‘naturalistic science fiction’ – the phrase showrunner Ronald D. Moore coined to describe the show’s style – and District 9’s mix of documentary technique and the fantastic are a perfect visual complement to Suvin’s meditations on literature.  It is interesting to note also that both of these texts give credence to Suvin’s argument that science-fiction is a literature for times of uncertainty: ‘SF, which focuses on the variable and future-bearing elements from the empirical environment, is found predominantly in the great whirlpool periods of history’[7] and to John Rieder’s claim, in Colonialism and the Rise of Science Fiction, that science fiction emerges particularly in once-powerful societies that have begun to feel threatened, though this is more the case with Battlestar Galactica than with Blomkamp’s film.

There is perhaps a further argument to be made, at least tentatively: science fiction is genre most suited for telling postcolonial stories.  Though on first glance it might seem that this is true only of telling stories about the victors in the colonial struggle, given that it is the victors who have the greatest access to the technological apparatus so crucial to science fiction; however, Blomkamp, and to a lesser extent Moore and Eick, are showing that there are ways to give voice to those silenced in colonial contexts by using the same genre conventions.  This is, it must be noted, not an entirely original conceit.  Rieder, in fact, argues, ‘The thesis that colonialism is a significant historical context for early science fiction is not an extravagant one’.[8] Expanding on this, he writes:

science fiction exposes something that colonialism imposes.  However … colonialism is not simply the reality that science fiction mystifies.  I am not trying to argue that colonialism is science fiction’s hidden truth.  I want to show that it is part of the genre’s texture, a persistent, important component of its displaced references to history, its engagement in ideological production, and its construction of the possible and the imaginable.[9]

Thus science fiction is in some senses dependent upon European colonialism for its meaning and for its very existence.  There can be little doubt that science fiction as we know it emerged – and I will go out on a limb here and argue that Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein is the first work of proper science fiction – during a period of rapid European expansion.  In an important sense, it also emerged as a reaction to, and at times a reaction against the same technological innovations that made colonial expansion and administration possible in the first place.  Magali Rennes writes of Battlestar Galactica from a postcolonial perspective, and much of what she argues here could also be said about District 9 and its deliberately ambiguous and deeply complex meditation on the legacy of colonialism:

Battlestar Galactica invites us, as viewers, to examine how we occupy ambivalent positions within the legacy of our own colonial family romance.  The series gives us all petty satisfaction to call Cylons ‘toasters’.  And yet it compels us to look in our mental kitchens to see whose face peers out of our toaster’s mirrored side.  It titillates us with the sexual tension between one of us and one of ‘them’ – the exoticized Cylon.  And yet it asks us to prick our own skin and see how our blood is difference from any other human being’s.  It thrills us with the chase of the enemy Cylons.  And yet it begs us to consider what fundamental lack lies within us to continue racist traditions towards our own social ‘enemies.  Will we pass on the legacy of the colonial family romance to our children or will we, as children, disown our European heritage for new parents … and shape the things to come?  In this ‘one nation’, ‘indivisible’, who is the ‘we’ in ‘so say we all?’[10]

Both Battlestar Galactica and District 9 are indeed dangerous fictions, and as we struggle to exorcise the horrors of the long, destructive, and ultimately failed project of European colonialism, we are the better for having them.

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[1] Peter Nicholls, ‘The Monsters and the Critics’, in P. Nicholls (ed.), Explorations of the Marvelous (London: Fontana, 1978: pp. 170-196): 180, 183.

[2] Brian L. Ott, ‘(Re)Framing Fear: Equipment for Living in a Post-9/11 World’, in T. Potter and C. W. Marshall (eds.) Cylons in America: Critical Studies in Battlestar Galactica (London: Continuum, 2008: 13-26): 19.

[3] ‘Battlestar Expands Horizons: Sci-fi references to Middle East impress critics’, Calgary Herald, 7 October 2006: D4.

[4] Jameson, F. (with M. Reynolds and F. Rottensteiner), ‘Change, SF, and Marxism: Open or Closed Universes?’, Science Fiction Studies 1, 4 (1974): 275-276.

[5] Barry N. Malzberg, ‘The Number of the Beast’, in J. Gunn and M. Candelaria (eds.) Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Toronto: The Scarecrow Press, 2005: 37-57): 40.

[6] Darko Suvin, ‘Estrangement and Cognition’, in J. Gunn and M. Candelaria (eds.) Speculations on Speculation: Theories of Science Fiction (Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press, INC, 2005: 23-36): 25.

[7] Suvin, ‘Estrangement’, 26.

[8] John Rieder, Colonialism and the Rise of Science Fiction (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2008): 2.

[9] Rieder, Colonialism, 15.

[10] Magali Rennes, ‘Kiss Me, Now Die!’, in J. Steiff and T. D. Tamplin (eds.) Battlestar Galactica and Philosophy: Mission Accomplished or Mission Frakked Up? (Chicago: Open Court, 2008: 63-76): 75-76.