On the Failure of Scientific Prophecy

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Arthur C. Clarke, Failure, Prophecy, science, science fiction, Technology, The Sentinel

Continuing an earlier discussion of the cultural and religious hopes placed on technologies, a few thoughts inspired by a recent re-reading of Arthur C. Clarke’s 1983 short-story collection The Sentinel, which contains stories written from 1946 to 1979:

Outside of the clear and simple pleasure of watching a master doing what he does best (and my criticisms here aside, Clarke was a master of hard science fiction, undoubtedly one of the all-time greats), what strikes the reader (at least this reader) about this early collection is Clarke’s persistent tendency to overestimate both the significance of new technological developments and the pace of scientific advancement.  Even the simplest developments hold the power to alter the world fundamentally, and almost always for the better.

To take but a single example, in the gripping and disquieting story ‘Rescue Party’, the development of the helicopter brings about the end of almost all the great cities, which seems laughable decades later (indeed, when faced daily with the average automobile driver’s lack of skill and discretion, the thought of the helicopter as ‘universal transportation’ is enough to cause nightmares). Since the story was written in 1946, urbanisation has continued apace and more and more rural land is dedicated to massive farming and ranching operations built on the model of heavy industry, with all of the environmental and social costs that this threatens. Far from the rural idyll that the helicopter brings to the Earth in ‘Rescue Party’, the helicopter remains of limited use and did little or nothing to curb the explosive growth of the cities which began with the Industrial Revolution and has continued with only a few and rather minor counter-trends, and these are confined largely to the Anglo-European world and the wealthier of its colonies.

Viewed from the vantage point of Clarke’s eternal post-World War II optimism, the future for scientific development is bright.  Clarke simply assumes for the sake of these stories that the exploration of space would continue and that progress towards the planets was inevitable.  It would also be accomplished by very little conflict and even less bloodshed.  The solar system was as ripe for exploration and colonisation as the New World was centuries earlier.  On this point, for all of his vision, Clarke was perpetually blinded by his British colonial ideologies, whether he was aware of them or not.  This is crystal clear in the story ‘Songs of the Distant Earth’ (and to a lesser extent ‘Breaking Strain’), which re-enacts the British encounter with the South Pacific in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and which subtly but unmistakably reinforces the myth of history as progress.

This, it turns out, is a symptom of a larger problem with the stories in The Sentinal.  At the same time that he is making huge, counter-intuitive leaps about the effects of new technologies, Clarke’s view of culture and history is strangely anaemic.  This particular blindness, in which Clarke is by no means alone among science-fiction writers, is coupled with a curious lack of imagination in the cultural and social sphere.  For he is unable to imagine a world that is fundamentally different from our own, or at least the world as Clake saw it from the former British colony of Sri Lanka, where he spent much of his life.  The Sentinel‘s stories exist in a future that looks a good like the present.  The sense of cultural, political, and economic inertia present in these stories is stunning. Clarke imagines little political upheaval and fails to anticipate developments such as the end of the Soviet Union only two decades after the last story here was written.

Clarke’s tendency towards prophetic hyperbole is thus rooted in his failure to understand that technology is at least partially cultural. Clarke’s failure, then, beside his blind belief in the inherent value of technological development, is his inability (or his simple refusal) to understand that technology, quite removed from its scientific side, is also immersed in human culture, which influences and even determines its use and reception.  Given that the Clarke who wrote The Sentinel – and Clarke was a complex, sometimes contradictory man wrote or co-wrote literally hundreds of books and stories which do not add up to a fully coherent ideology of philosophy of history – can not imagine a world without the United States, Britain, the Soviet Union, consumer capitalism, and an independent mass media, his view of technology was similarly limited.

He also imagines that governments will continue to fund science for the sake of science, though he does realise that at least some of the motivation behind the golden age of space exploration was political and military.  This prediction, which is never made explicit but is present in each and every story in the collection, has also failed to materialise, largely given the limited resources governments now give to pure science and the ever more persistent demand that science and technological development serve some kind of purpose – usually economic – rather than serving the interests of disinterested knowledge.  Clarke fails to anticipate the cultural and economic forces that have brought space exploration to a near standstill or limited it to uninspiring and wasteful projects like the International Space Station. According to the timeline Clarke imagines in 2001, and in the story ‘The Sentinel’, which provided the kernel of the larger novel, there was to be permanent bases on the moon in place by the mid 1990s.  Instead, the Apollo programme has been relegated to a footnote in Cold War history ripe for re-appropriation in popular culture texts like Michael Bay’s jingoistic, neo-fascist film Transformers: Dark of the Moon.

Clarke on the set of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey

Given Clarke’s often dismissive attitude towards organised religion – see Childhood’s End and The Fountains of Paradise for examples – his failure to acknowledge the failures of scientific prophecy is all the more striking. It also highlights the similarities between placing one’s hopes in the next step in scientific development and placing one’s hopes in the great coming of a saviour figure – as in Christianity, messianic Judaism, some forms of Buddhism, and countless other traditions – who will interrupt the course of history and bring about a new and better world.  Over the course of The Sentinel, Clarke simply ignores the marginal predictive value of his persistent overestimation of the power and significance of incremental scientific developments.  When one prophecy fails, he simply moves on to another tale of the partial redemption of the world by a new technology while never addressing the previous failure (it is worth noting that he did get some things – many things, in fact – right, including his invention of the concept of the geosynchronous communications satellite).

By simply ignoring the failures of his prophetic imagination, Clarke reminds me irresistibly of those Christians who have been convinced that the apocalypse was just around the corner (just as the gospels claim that Jesus promised some two millennia ago), despite the fact that this prophecy has been failing over and over again for centuries.  The fact that technology has failed time and again to live up to its promises, like so many religious prophecies, that it has failed to bring about greater social and economic equity, something we were promised would happen with the arrival of the printing press, the steam engine, the railroad, electricity, the telegraph, photography, the cinema radio, television, the personal computer, and, most recently, the Internet (or Web 2.0, which was to save us – again – from the inequities of the earlier technologies), is in itself interesting.

What is more interesting, at least in the context of religious prophecy, is how immune this belief in technological salvation is to historical realities and the complexity of human culture.  This points to a persistence of belief that is structurally very similar to the continued rationalisations of failed religious prophecy.  Even if Hal Lindsey’s identification of events in the 1970s and 1980s with the events of the Book of Revelation failed to accurately predict the beginnings of the end of times, this does not stop millions of people from believing precisely the same thing about more recent world events.

This is not a coincidence, of course, given how the structures of the Christian narrative of history persist and are transformed in the narratives of modernity, particularly in secular eschatologies like those of classical Marxism, the National Socialists, and all of those people that believe that technology is going to save us.  The real question I have here is how to begin to think more rationally about the true capabilities of science and technology, especially when the potential of both is limited so clearly and so persistently by economics and politics.  If someone like Arthur C. Clarke can get things so clearly wrong, why do we persist in waiting for the next technology, the one that is going to save us? Why do we continue on as if this were an inevitable fact?  I think some of this might be because most people, like Clarke, and unable to imagine a world that is truly, fundamentally different from our own.

In practical, this-worldly terms, if we are waiting for the arrival of that magical machine that will save us from all of our follies (many of them, of course, technological, like the internal-combustion engine) without coupling this with a serious and sustained effort to change the cultures that surround this anticipation and make it bear the burden of a dark and difficult future, we would be just as well to be waiting for Jesus (or Maitreya, the Buddha of the future in many schools of Mahayana Buddhist thought), who is coming along soon.

Any day now …

Call and Response (One): Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow

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Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg, Christianity, colonialism, Mary Doria Russell, missionaries, Pornography, science fiction, theodicy

In what will hopefully become a recurring feature here at The Dunedin School, we are proud to present the opening of an ongoing dialogue about a single text.  For our inaugural Call and Response, we have chosen Mary Doria Russell’s 1996 science fiction novel The Sparrow as our object of discussion.  Set in the mid-twenty-first century, The Sparrow recounts the fate of an interstellar mission, led by the Society of Jesus, to a distant planet known as Rakhat.  Though thematically a sci-fi novel that explores the classic trope of ‘first contact’, The Sparrow unfolds almost like a detective story, slowly peeling away the layers of rumour and hearsay to arrive, finally, at the horrific truth of why the Jesuit Emilio Sandoz was the only member of his expedition to survive and make the return journey to Earth.  WARNING: these posts will contain very significant plot spoilers, so if you’re interested in reading the book (as you should be), read it first, then come back here and see what other readers have made of it.  The Dunedin School believes firmly that the analysis of books should never be allowed to impinge on the pure, elemental pleasure of reading them.

Before her deserved success as a novelist, Russell, a convert to Judaism, worked in the academy in the fields of physical and cultural anthropology.  Incidentally, as an academic, one of the pleasures of reading The Sparrow comes from watching Russell struggling to break out of the formal strictures of academic writing – in her Acknowledgements, she admits to feeling uneasy ‘without footnotes and a huge bibliography’[1] – and stretch her legs into prose fiction.  To her credit, Russell is largely successfully, though, on an aesthetic front, the novel is at times something of a mixed bag.  Some of the dialogue she concocts between her characters, especially when expressing deep, even mawkish affection, is stilted or even flat-out clumsy, due, perhaps, to years spent observing people with a detached intellectual eye (one of the perils of working in the human sciences).  Structurally and allegorically, however, Russell rarely puts a foot wrong and the novel’s intricate structure, without which it would lose a good deal of its power, never falters.

The narrative of The Sparrow, Russell’s first novel, is in itself fairly simple.  The novel’s structure is considerably more complex; Russell weaves the story of the mission to Rakhat into the story of what happens to Sandoz when he comes back to Earth and faces a Jesuit commission who want to know why the mission ended so disastrously.  Not only are the rest of the tight-knit crew of Jesuits, scientists, and friends killed on Rakhat, but the mission’s presence caused the deaths of a number of sentient natives, including at least one child who had been close to the Jesuits.  Sandoz’s superiors also want to know why Sandoz was discovered after years of silence working as a prostitute on Rakhat.  Finally, they want to know what happened to his hands, which have been mutilated by an operation that removed the flesh and muscles from his palms, leaving him with unnaturally long, skeletal fingers that hang from his arms with a certain perverse grace.  For much of its considerable length, The Sparrow operates on an exquisite slow burn that comes to a boil in the final pages, in a series of emotionally potent revelations that reveal the deeply unsettling truth of what happened to Sandoz and his crew, a fate that has a good deal to tell us about colonialism, faith, and Christianity.

Reading the novel allegorically, and science fiction is, as Peter Nicholls has noted, ‘the great modern literature of metaphor’,[2] what The Sparrow is ‘really about’ is European colonialism and the inevitable if unconscious harm that it caused on Earth.  It is also no less concerned with grappling honestly with the role of Christian missionaries in the history of colonialism.  The novel begins with a very brief Prologue that draws a parallel between the expedition to Rakhat and to the earliest days of European colonialism, in which the then newly-founded Society of Jesus played an important part.  The opening words of the novel are telling: ‘It was predictable, in hindsight’.[3] Rakhat civilisation seems eerily familiar, even though it is literal light-years from Earth.  It is a tribute to Russell’s intricate and tightly-controlled structure that the similarities become more apparent the more the expedition – and in turn, the reader – learns about the different peoples of Rakhat.

Though it is obvious from the first that the gentle, forest-dwelling Runa, the first alien group that Sandoz’s party encounters, are involved in certain economic activities, the extent of capitalism – or something that looks very much like modern European capitalism – on Rakhat only becomes clear in the closing chapters.  The Runa, the reader slowly learns, are the majority population of Rakhat but are under the control of a cultivated species called the Jana’ata, who dwell in cities with a rich, complex culture.  It is, in fact, the Jana’ata’s songs, broadcast on radio signals that are picked up by powerful radio telescopes on Earth, that first draw the Jesuits to Rakhat.  For all their aesthetic development, the minority Jana’ata rule the Runa with a shocking degree of coercion and violence.  The Runa are treated as little more than sympathetic (if intelligent) cattle, despite the fact that they are the engines that make the Jana’ata economy run.  The Runa’s reproduction is strictly controlled, to the extent that the Jana’ata even breed the Runa selectively in order to make them more useful as traders and gatherers.  As readers, once the humans are discovered by the Jana’ata, our guide into the world of the dominant species is one Supaari VaGayjur, who is a wealthy merchant and trader of scent.  As we move from the forests of the Runa into the cities, the allegorical identity with the Jana’ata and European colonialism come into sharp, surprising focus.  Reading all of this as an allegory, it is difficult not to see the echoes of scientific Enlightenment culture in Russell’s descriptions: ‘But Jana’ata life was never simple and rarely straightforward.  Deep in the Jana’ata soul there was an almost unshakeable convictions that things must be controlled, thought out, done correctly, that there was very little margin for error in life.  Tradition was safety; change was danger’.[4] Though hyperbolically amplified in the novel’s allegorical structure, there are also recognisable parallels between the Runa and the economic underclasses which form the majority population of contemporary human life on Earth.

It is to Russell’s credit that she doesn’t condemn the Jana’ata outright and explores the fictional society on its own terms, something which allows her to make some pointed social criticisms.  She has Sandoz compare the Jana’ata to human civilisation:

I am not defending them.  I am trying to explain to you what happened and why.  But it is their society, and the pay their own price for their way of life … There are no beggars on Rakhat.  There is no unemployment.  There is no overcrowding.  No starvation.  No environmental degradation.  There is no genetic disease.  The elderly do not suffer decline.  Those with terminal illnesses do not linger.  They pay a terrible price for this system, but we too pay, Felipe, and the coin we use is the suffering of children.  How many kids starved to death this afternoon, while we sat here?  Just because the corpses aren’t eaten doesn’t make our species any more moral![5]

What is perhaps most intriguing about The Sparrow is that the story of Sandoz – and it really is his story– underlines the problematic connections of Christianity and European expansion during the colonial period.  The whole of the colonial project – and thus all of the destruction it caused – would likely have been simply impossible without the funding, the manpower, and the inherently legitimising power of the Christian churches, who were in this period fighting on all fronts (including the colonial) to gain (or re-gain in the Catholic Church’s case) power in European society.  The churches, then, are doubtless complicit in the seemingly endless negative consequences that have grown out of the colonial period.

Granted, within the larger cultural and economic movement of colonialism, some of the missionaries, Jesuits and others, who travelled out from Europe in this period were first-rate scholars who added considerably to what was known about Asian cultures in Europe, and did so in an honest, sympathetic, and largely non-violent manner.  The Lutheran Bartholomäus Ziegenbalg (1682-1719), the first Protestant missionary in India, is a good example of this kind of more ethical missionary; however, he was, sadly, very much in the minority.  We can see this tension in the New Zealand context in that there were missionaries involved on both sides of the controversy that surrounded the signing of the still-contentious Treaty of Waitangi in 1840.  There were missionaries working on the side of the colonisers who pressured Maori leaders to sign the document; however, there were also those who worked on the side of the Maori and encouraged resistance against the Treaty, which some suspected –with good reason, it turned out – was designed only to give the growing British rule over New Zealand the air of local legitimacy.  Russell, through her fictional construct of spaceflight and alien civilisation, asks a compelling question: Can the drive to better the world ad majorem Dei gloriam, no matter how legitimate, ever be separated out from the evils of the colonial enterprise?  She also asks, balancing the scales; what price should these missionaries be forced to pay for their complicity?

In the novel, Sandoz comes to pay a great, almost unimaginable price, one that is tied up wholly with his identity as a Jesuit, a priest, and a Christian.  Throughout the novel, Russell takes considerable pains to create in Sandoz a central protagonist who is complex and conflicted but in many ways admirable.  Sandoz comes from a poor background and becomes both a Jesuit and an accomplished linguist, all the while trying to work out the realities of his own Christianity.  When the Aricebo radio telescope in his native Puerto Rico first intercepts the first faint radio transmissions of the Jana’ata songs, Sandoz is instrumental in getting the Jesuit mission off the ground.  Sandoz’s motives are profoundly religious – he feels he is being called by God travel to Rakhat – at the same time they are academic and intellectual – as a linguist, he wants to learn more about the songs and those who sang them.  On Earth, Sandoz is a tireless champion of the underprivileged and a dedicated worker in the service of the poor the world over.  His intentions for the interstellar mission, for the most part, are admirable.   For Sandoz, Rakhat is the site for a profound religious awakening, a flowering of the faith that has always troubled him.  Landing on Rakhat and for the first time opening the hatch of their landing craft, Sandoz finds himself suffused with the sort of transformative experience of the presence of his God that he has long admired in others.  In the Prologue, Russell writes of the intentions behind the expedition: ‘The Jesuit scientists went to learn, not to proselytize.  They went so that they might come to know and love God’s other children.  They went for the reason Jesuits have always gone to the farthest frontiers of human exploration.  They went for ad majorem Dei gloriam: for the greater glory of God.  They meant no harm’.[6] Sandoz means no harm, but he nonetheless causes a great deal of it.  He also comes in for more than his share of harm as things, after a long, idyllic interlude on Rakhat spent with the Runa, go very wrong very quickly.  His friends dead, Sandoz returns after a solitary journey across space a pariah, an enigma with mutilated hands.  He arrives home to a world where he is known as a prostitute and a man connected with a number of deaths.  He arrives home to find the Society deeply immersed in the massive controversy the mission has caused.

As we learn towards the end of the novel, Sandoz is not a coldblooded killer or a willing merchant of the flesh but is more than anything the victim of profound cultural misunderstandings.  In their desire to help the Runa, Sandoz and their crew fundamentally alter a social structure they did not understand until it was far too late for them to reverse the changes they had made in their ignorance.  The deaths on Rakhat are the direct result of the violation of the carefully maintained social order.  The minority Jana’ata, who are always in fear of a Runa uprising, cannot tolerate this intrusion and respond with violence.  Sandoz is eventually taken by Suppari to a compound in the city.  It is here that his hands are mutilated in an operation that is designed to make his hands look like the weeping branches of a willow-like tree.  A similar operation causes the death of the only other surviving Jesuit in the interest of pure aesthetics and a desire among the Jana’ata to appear prosperous enough not to need something so mundanely useful as hands.

At the nadir of his suffering, alone and profoundly wounded with this alien stigmata, Sandoz is sold by Suppari to what he fist thinks is a sort of zoo.  Upon meeting his purchaser, the poet who composed the lovely songs which drew him across the void of space, Sandoz experiences a moment of clarity that justifies in his mind all of the suffering he has endured:

And then, suddenly, everything made sense to him, and the joy of that moment took his breath away.  He had been brought here, step by step, to meet this man: Hlavin Kitheri, a poet – perhaps even a prophet – who of all his kind might know the God whom Emilio Sandoz served.  It was a moment of redemption so profound he almost wept, ashamed that his faith had been so badly eroded by the inchoate fear and the isolation … This is why I am alive, he told himself, and he thanked God with all his soul for allowing him to be here at this moment, to understand all of this at last.[7]

At this very moment of spiritual realisation, Russell brings everything crashing down on Sandoz; the author of the songs has not bought a display animal, but an unwilling prostitute.  That the poet Kitheri himself is the one who first violates Sandoz reveals a design in nature quite different to the one that Sandoz had seen with such joy only seconds before.

Russell gives the reader the irony and the horror of this moment without flinching, taking Sandoz’s suffering and humiliation about as far as it could go: ‘Kitheri, Reshtar of Galatna Palace, the greatest poet of his age, who had ennobled the despised, exalted the ordinary, immortalized the fleeting, a singularity whose artistry was first concentrated and then released, magnified, by the incomparable and unprecedented, inhaled deeply.  We shall sing of this for generations, he thought’.[8] New songs are written about the repeated rape of Sandoz, who reveals to his interrogators much later that the songs of the Jana’ata are nothing more than simple (if beautiful) pornography.  That Sandoz has struggled successfully until this point in his life with his vow of celibacy adds a final and very severe insult to his forced prostitution.  Sandoz is able later to frame his own understanding on very Nietzschean terms, telling his interrogators, ‘Not comedy.  Not tragedy … Perhaps farce’?[9] However, this doesn’t soften the blow of what happens to him on Rakhat, about which he says simply: ‘I laid down all my defences.  I had nothing between me and what happened but the love of God.  And I was raped.  I was naked before God and I was raped’.[10] Tying the title of the book back the Matthew 10:29 (‘Not one sparrow can fall to the ground without your Father knowing about it’) brings out the force of Sandoz’s continual suffering, as his God knows about his suffering but chooses to ignore it in silence.  In this, there is an almost Job-like character to Sandoz’s story.

In these final revelations, The Sparrow sounds a note very much like that of Arthur C. Clarke’s classic 1956 Hugo Award-winning short story, ‘The Star’, in which a group of scientists discover that the brightly-flaring star that features in the biblical narratives of Jesus’ birth was in reality a supernova that laid to waste an interstellar civilisation that far outstripped anything that humanity has managed to achieve.  The narrator of ‘The Star’, a Jesuit priest and scientist not unlike The Sparrow’s Sandoz, finishes his story with a plea that mixes the joy of discovery with a lament that such discovery has little enough to say to the age-old problem of evil: ‘There can be no reasonable doubt: the ancient mystery is solved at last.  Yet, oh God, there were so many stars you could have used. What was the need to give these people to the fire, that the symbol of their passing might shine above Bethlehem?’[11] In The Sparrow, the question of theodicy, as indicated in the opening sentence, should be reframed to include humanity’s persistent inability to learn from its mistakes.

As a firm believer in the openness of the text, I have no problems with the fact that The Sparrow contains within it a number of possible reading; however, the question I wish to put to my fellows here at the School is this: is The Sparrow an apology for or a condemnation of the missionary impulse in Christianity and, just as importantly, in European modernity?  Is it both?  Is it neither?  Does anyone, no matter what their crimes or their intentions, deserve to suffer as Emilio Sandoz suffers, both physically and spiritually?

---

[1] Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow (London: Black Swan, 1996). 505.

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

[3] Russell, Sparrow, 9.

[4] Russell, Sparrow, 423.

[5] Russell, Sparrow, 471.

[6] Russell, Sparrow, 10.

[7] Russell, Sparrow, 485-486.

[8] Russell, Sparrow, 488.

[9] Russell, Sparrow, 478.

[10] Russell, Sparrow, 490.

[11] The full text of the ‘The Star’ is legally available online at http://lucis.net/stuff/clarke/star_clarke.html.

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

Tags

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.