Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-victimhood 1609387848, 9781609387846

Citation preview

V R E V E R S E C O L O N I Z AT I O N

The New Amer ican Canon The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture Samuel Cohen, series editor

v reverse colonization S C I E N C E F I C T I O N, I M P E R I A L FA N TA S Y, A N D A LT- V I C T I M H O O D

David M. Higgins

U n i v er si t y of Iowa Pr ess | Iowa Ci t y

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2021 by the University of Iowa Press www.uipress.uiowa.edu Printed in the United States of America Design by April Leidig No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. Printed on acid-­free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-­in-­Publication Data Names: Higgins, David M. (David Michael), author. Title: Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-­victimhood / by David Michael Higgins. Description: Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, [2021] | Series: The New American Canon: The Iowa Series in Contemporary Literature and Culture | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Identifiers: LCCN 2021001184 (print) | LCCN 2021001185 (ebook) | ISBN 9781609387846 (paperback; acid-­free paper) | ISBN 9781609387853 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Science fiction—History and criticism. | Science fiction Films— History and criticism. | Colonization in literature. | Victims in literature. Classification: LCC PN3433.6 .H54  2021 (print) | LCC PN3433.6 (ebook) | DDC 809.3/8762—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001184 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021001185 Parts of this book were previously published as “Survivance in Indigenous Science Fictions: Vizenor, Silko, Glancy, and the Rejection of Imperial Victimry,” Extrapolation 57.1–2 (Spring/Summer 2016): 51–72. (Credit: Liverpool University Press) and “Psychic Decolonization in 1960s Science Fiction,” Science Fiction Studies 40.2 (July 2013): 228–45.

For Jerry Holcomb, who launched the journey

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments ix introduc tion

Bizarro Victimhood  1 chap ter 1

Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity  31 chap ter 2

Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle  59 chap ter 3

The Whiteness of Black Iron Prisons  89 chap ter 4

Victims of Entropy  125 chap ter 5

Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era  159 conclusion

Alternatives to Imperial Masochism  189 Notes 203 Bibliography 215 Index 229

ACKNOWLED GMENT S

I owe a debt of gratitude to many people for their generous support during my research and writing process. In particular, I want to thank De Witt Douglas Kilgore, Rob Latham, John Rieder, Rebecca Sheldon, and Sherryl Vint for their extraordinary intellectual support and companionship as I have worked on this project. In addition, I’d like to thank the many professional colleagues who offered feedback on chapters or influenced my thinking at various points during the writing process, including (but not limited to) Katherine Bishop, Patrick Brantlinger, Gerry Canavan, Siobhan Carroll, Linda Charnes, Eva Cherniavsky, Mica Hilson, Jim Kincaid, Patrick McAleer, Hugh C. O’Connell, Ranu Samantrai, and Steven Shaviro. I’ve also benefited from thoughtful feedback and conversation with friends and colleagues during the annual meetings of the American Studies Association, the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts, the Science Fiction Research Association, the Society for Utopian Studies, and the Society for Science, Literature, and the Arts. I am also fortunate to have many personal friends who have, through correspondence and conversation, been instrumental to my creative process. An incomplete list of those to whom I owe a debt of gratitude includes Craig Cady, Ben Caron, Tatyana Brown, Roby Duncan, Gregg Edwards, Matthew Franklin, Stephanie Gottesman, Paul Grasshoff, Nathan Hampson, Emilie Hanson, Alyc Helms, Bernadette Hollyday, Matthew Iung, Miranda Jane, Lewis Lain, Peter MacDonald, Katie Messer, Mike Messer, Kasper Kritch, Beth Lessen, Orrin Pratt, John Tod, and Christopher Williams. I’d also like to thank Jerry Holcomb, to whom I have dedicated this book—his long-­ago class on U.S. history started a powerful trajectory of thinking for me that ultimately culminated in this project. Completing this work would have been much more difficult without generous sabbatical support provided by the Minnesota State Colleges and

x Acknowledgments

Universities System and Inver Hills Community College. I’d particularly like to thank Ann Deiman-­Thornton, the dean who initially approved my sabbatical project, and all the Minnesota State College Faculty (MSCF) representatives who work tirelessly to ensure fair wages and benefits (such as sabbatical support) for college faculty in our system. It has been a great pleasure working with Samuel Cohen, Meredith Stabel, Laura Poole, and the entire team at the University of Iowa Press. Very special thanks go to Iowa’s marketing director, Allison Means, who coined the term “alt-­victimhood” for the book’s title after reading the manuscript draft. Finally, I’d also like to thank my parents, Debra and Michael Higgins, and my (now deceased) grandparents, Donald and Beatrice Cohn. Your love and support has made this book possible, and I appreciate the many ways you encouraged and supported me throughout the years.

V R E V E R S E C O L O N I Z AT I O N

V INTRODVC TION

Bizarro Victimhood

T

his book examines reverse colonization narratives: stories like H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds that invite audiences who are most often the beneficiaries of empire to imagine what it feels like to be on the receiving end of imperial conquest. Reverse colonization narratives, in other words, speculatively switch the roles of perpetrator and victim (in a variety of imaginative contexts) to provoke audiences to identify with (or as) colonized victims. It is important to examine the widespread popularity of reverse colonization narratives today, in my view, because identification with victimhood has become a strange source of ideological power for imperial subjects in our contemporary moment: as surprising as it may seem, imagining oneself as a colonized victim often serves as the ideological core of imperial fantasy for those who benefit the most from modern-­day conditions of empire. In his landmark work Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said argues that imperial practices are unthinkable without the imaginative support of cultural productions (such as literature, film, and television). Empire, in other words, often emerges from and depends on the popular narratives that make imperialism thinkable. A variety of scholars—including John Rieder, Istvan Csicsery-­Ronay Jr., Gwyneth Jones, and Patricia Kerslake—have examined the various ways science fiction, with its constant exploration of the unknown and its confrontations with alien Others, has historically functioned as an enabling literature of empire.1 This critical tradition has highlighted how science fiction has frequently portrayed outward movement—travel from Earth to the stars, for example—as a continuation of the Western

2 Introduction

imperial project, and it demonstrates that science fiction has often been a key site where the ideological dream work of imperialism unfolds. Few scholars have examined how imperial fantasy—or the web of cultural narratives that makes empire thinkable—has undergone a dramatic transformation since the mid-­twentieth century that carries profound consequences today. During the period of science fiction’s initial emergence as a recognizable genre in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it was often possible (particularly in the context of American westerns and British colonial adventure narratives) for authors and other cultural producers to imagine colonial conquest as a glorious and progressive undertaking. Since the 1960s, however, the romance of colonization has lost much of its popular appeal for Western audiences; instead, there has been a pronounced tendency to celebrate anticolonial forces struggling against domination and oppression. In a cultural milieu where colonizers are now usually imagined as villains, anticolonial insurgents and resistance figures are nearly universal heroes: almost everyone can identify with (or as) the daring heroes of the Rebel Alliance from Star Wars struggling to overthrow the Galactic Empire (or the First Order, or whichever dastardly imperial entity will inevitably come next). In a cultural context dominated by popular anticolonial sentiments, then, it is unsurprising that the imaginative position of the rebel or victim is often appropriated by those who benefit the most from existing social inequities. By imagining oneself as a rebel and collectively identifying with fantastic forms of victimhood, subjects who already enjoy social hegemony are able to justify economic inequality, expansions of police and military power, climate devastation, new articulations of racism, and countless other forms of violence—all purportedly in the name of security, self-­defense, and self-­protection. As writers such as Corey Robin, Angela Nagle, and Matthew N. Lyons observe, modern reactionaries in particular have mobilized powerful political sentiment by identifying as victims and framing themselves as revolutionary insurgents struggling to achieve heroic liberation against overwhelming odds. In this book, I use the term imperial masochism to refer to the way subjects who enjoy the advantages of empire adopt the fantastical role of colonized victims to fortify and expand their agency. Unlike more respectable

Introduction 3

flavors of erotic masochism—which can involve rich, subtle, and complex explorations of pain’s various pleasures—imperial masochism is less about an authentic enjoyment of pain and more about enjoying the presumed moral superiority that fantasies of victimization enable. In the ideology of imperial masochism, imperial practice is justified on the basis of liberatory decolonization, and privilege is sustained through the appropriation of victimhood. Modern day colonizers, in other words, conquer in the name of freedom; they oppress on behalf of the battle against oppression. Through the fantasy logic of imperial masochism, even those who benefit the most from the conditions of modern-­day empire (such as white supremacists, antifeminists, neoreactionaries, and right-­wing extremists) are able to imagine themselves as injured minorities fighting a heroic struggle against colonizing systems of control and domination. (It’s often the case that imperial masochists don’t necessarily even need to believe their own claims concerning victimhood; such claims are sometimes sincere and at other times ironic or rhetorical—a mockery of the status supposedly accorded to victims in social justice discourse.) Imperial masochism, I argue, has become a cornerstone of imperial fantasy in our contemporary moment: we are all, now, perversely invited to imagine ourselves as insurgents fighting against an oppressive empire (even when we are often the ones who benefit from the global inequities of modern imperialism). Given science fiction’s long history of entanglement with imperial fantasy, it should come as no surprise that imperial masochism is often supported and enabled by science fictional references and metaphors. This observation—that a science fictional logic has become central to appropriating victimhood for subjects of privilege—is one of the central insights of this book. To understand science fiction’s troubling complicity in the formation of modern imperial discourses and practices, it is useful to explore profound changes that occur in science fiction during the transformative era of the 1960s, when reverse colonization narratives emerged to become one of the dominant modes of science fiction storytelling during the postwar countercultural moment. In short, the 1960s were when it became overwhelmingly uncool to be a conqueror or colonizer in Euro-­American popular culture and when the imaginative tide turned decisively toward anticolonial and anti-­imperial dreams of emancipation and liberation instead.

4 Introduction

For this reason, each chapter in this book examines key science fiction texts from the 1960s and early 1970s to explore a range of stories that express dreams of reverse colonization during a postwar historical era when the ideologies and practices of empire were radically transforming. To explore the long-­term effects of this shift in imperial fantasy, however, I often examine science fictional reverse colonization narratives from the 1960s alongside (and in conversation with) the worldviews of twenty-­first-­century reactionary figures (such as incels, antifeminists, white nationalists, alt-­right activists, and neoreactionaries). My purpose in performing this sometimes counterintuitive juxtaposition is to demonstrate that pivotal changes in imperial fantasy that occurred during the 1960s have led to dire consequences in the contemporary era. Anti-­imperial sentiments, which often seemed progressive in the emancipatory glow of the countercultural 1960s, have now become one of the most powerful foundations of conservative ressentiment in the twenty-­first century. Today’s reactionary appropriation of righteous, anti-­imperial victimhood—the sense that white men, in particular, are somehow colonized victims fighting an insurgent resistance against an oppressive establishment—depends on a science fictional logic that achieved dominance in imperial fantasy during the 1960s and has continued to gain momentum ever since.

Puppygate, Antifeminism, and the Alt-­R ight Rather than beginning from the 1960s, let’s open by considering one representative example of how imperial masochism functions today. In the science fiction community, the dynamics of imperial masochism became strikingly visible during the so-­called Puppygate controversy, when a number of mostly white male authors and their supporters used science fictional references and metaphors (with notable success among their followers and in right-­wing media culture at large) to portray themselves as a minority of oppressed victims struggling against an empire of social injustice. Although Puppygate might seem like a minor conflict in the larger context of world events in the 2010s, it encapsulates, in microcosm, the dynamic of imperial masochism that frequently drives reactionary violence in the contemporary era. For those not familiar with Puppygate, here’s a quick recap. In 2013, science fiction author Larry Correia began attempting to influence the Hugo

Introduction 5

Awards, which are given every year at the World Science Fiction Convention (or Worldcon) to recognize outstanding accomplishments in science fiction and fantasy. Correia created a voting coalition called the Sad Puppies to manipulate the award nomination and voting process. The coalition, which was originally called “Sad Puppies Think of the Children” (mocking supposedly bleeding-­heart sensibilities), gained momentum after the 2014 Hugo Awards were swept by younger authors, including significant numbers of women and writers of color. Brad R. Torgersen, another Sad Puppies organizer, characterized the Puppies rebellion as a backlash against liberal affirmative action: the prestigious awards should not be given, in his words, simply because “a writer or artist is (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here) or because a given work features (insert underrepresented minority or victim group here)” (Biggs). One thing to note about the Sad Puppies and their allies is that they refuse to acknowledge that science fiction has ever been implicated in sexist and racist colonial histories. Torgersen, for example, isn’t willing to admit that there might have been anything troubling about science fiction’s pulp-­ era colonial adventure fantasies. “A few decades ago,” he says, “if you saw a lovely spaceship on a book cover, with a gorgeous planet in the background, you could be pretty sure you were going to get a rousing space adventure featuring starships and distant, amazing worlds.” Today, the innocence of such stories, in his view, has been corrupted: “The book has a spaceship on the cover, but is it really going to be a story about space exploration and pioneering derring-­do? Or is the story merely about racial prejudice and exploitation” (Waldman). Nostalgia for a simpler time, as the character Adrian Veidt observes in Alan Moore’s Watchmen, often represents an urge to “retreat and withdraw from reality” to take refuge in “modified visions of a half-­imagined past.”2 This is precisely the flavor of reactionary nostalgia embodied by Torgersen’s yearning for “lovely spaceships,” “gorgeous planets,” and rousing adventures on “distant, amazing worlds.” As Rieder and others have demonstrated,3 early science fiction is often inescapably entangled with Euro-­American imperial fantasies, and even Torgersen can’t help reveal his awareness that such fantasies have often been established on a foundation of “racial prejudice and exploitation.” In the face of a young and diverse generation of science fiction authors who increasingly foreground and problematize the genre’s imperial

6 Introduction

inheritances, Torgersen (and many others) yearn to withdraw into a “half-­ imagined” memory of earlier science fiction, one that includes the supposedly grand adventure but ignores the genre’s unmistakable imperial legacies. Beyond this reactionary nostalgia, what’s truly important to observe about the Sad Puppies (and their more militant spin-­off faction, the Rabid Puppies), is that they also deny that injustices continue to be inflicted on minority groups today by establishing themselves as victims who are subject to unfair oppression. The imperial masochism of the Sad Puppies—their appropriation of a sense of victimhood through the logic of reverse colonization—aligns with other conservative and reactionary groups who deny the existence of social oppression and who instead position themselves as victims struggling against unjust domination. For this reason, Puppygate (like the Gamergate controversy that preceded it) drew national attention when high-­profile figures from the alt-­right4 were emboldened to support the Puppies’ claims to victimhood. In their Breitbart news coverage of Puppygate, for example, Allum Bokhari and Milo Yiannopoulos (the divisive alt-­right media celebrity who sparked national controversy during his Dangerous Faggot speaking tour) wrote in support of the Sad Puppies by using Star Wars references to frame them as a Rebel Alliance struggling against the Galactic Empire of social justice forces that have supposedly corrupted science fiction—and, in their view, American culture at large. Yiannopoulos and Bokhari further portray the “radical activists” of the science fiction establishment (by which they essentially mean women and people of color) as “authoritarians” and “digital puritans” who function as “out-­and-­out cheerleaders for intolerance and censorship.” This imaginative reversal of positions—framing social groups who have been disempowered as members of a colonizing and oppressive establishment—is the essence of imperial masochism, and it enables Yiannopoulos and Bokhari to argue that white male “victims” of the liberal science fiction establishment are “littered across the SFF community.” They conclude that “no one is safe” in an environment where Orwellian liberal “thought police” seek to eliminate “diversity of opinion and political tolerance.” One “victim” Yiannopoulos and Bokhari specifically mention is Theodore Beale (a.k.a. Vox Day), a video game designer, blogger, and far-­right activist who was expelled from the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of

Introduction 7

America (SFWA) for racist comments (in a hate-­fueled blog rant, he called award-­winning author N. K. Jemisin an “ignorant half-­savage”) (Vox Day, “A Black Female Fantasist”). Bokhari and Yiannopoulos gleefully note that Beale, who has been ostracized from the mainstream science fiction community for his misogyny and white supremacist views, is in fact “himself Native American”—evidence, supposedly, that the so-­called liberal science fiction establishment is hypocritically racist and intolerant. Beale’s precise claim to Indigenous heritage is unclear, but he’s quick to self-­identify as Native American, particularly when he is accused of being a white supremacist: “I am an Anglo-­Aztec-­American Indian,” he argues, “who is genetically superior to 99 percent of all blacks on the track and intellectually superior to 99 percent of all whites and Jews, so I’m not inclined towards white supremacy myself” (Vox Day, “(((Cathy Young)))”). Leaving aside the question of the legitimacy of this claim to Indigenous heritage, what’s striking is that Beale’s rhetorical identification as Native American, in his own writing and in how Bokhari and Yiannopoulos portray him, functions to undermine the possibility that he might be a racist, to disavow the agency and advantage he enjoys as a result of masculine social power, and to brand him as a victim figure under attack from social justice elites. This strange rhetorical turning of the tables—a denial of one’s position of social advantage accomplished by claiming the status of a victimized minority—is not the exclusive domain of reactionary figures in the science fiction community. Beale’s ideologically charged appropriation of minority status mirrors, for example, the rhetorical jujitsu performed by Tal Fortgang, a Princeton undergraduate who drew national attention in 2014 when he published an essay in The Princeton Tory (later reprinted by Time) arguing that he should never have to “check his privilege” (as a white male attending an Ivy League university) because he was a descendant of Jewish Holocaust survivors. In his essay, Fortgang begins by painting himself as a victim bullied by the liberal demand to “check your privilege,” an injunction that he argues “descends recklessly, like an Obama-­sanctioned drone, and aims laser-­like at my pinkish-­peach complexion, my maleness, and the nerve I displayed in offering an opinion rooted in a personal Weltanschauung.” He then suggests that he has in fact investigated, or “checked,” the origins of his privilege, whereupon he discovered that his ancestors were Jewish victims

8 Introduction

who fled the Nazis and immigrated, penniless, to the United States, where they worked hard to offer him the inheritances he enjoys today. “I have checked my privilege,” he concludes, “and I apologize for nothing.” Fortgang’s defense of everything he has “personally accomplished” and the “hard work” he has achieved in his life reveals that he doesn’t fully understand the definition of the privilege (the advantages enjoyed by certain social groups at the expense of others) that he has presumably been asked to check. Furthermore, his invocation of Jewish heritage to deflect accusations that he has inherited social advantages sidesteps a freshman-­level cognizance of intersectionality, the recognition that specific categories of social advantage and disadvantage are not reducible to one another or canceled out in a magical wash of equivalence. These avoidances, however, are precisely the point: reactionary imperial masochism asserts that colonizers (in a vague universal sense) are the bad guys and victims are the good guys, and it appropriates victimhood for already-­privileged subjects by redefining socially marginalized groups who are seeking redress for systemic inequities as oppressive perpetrators. Fortgang, Beale, and Yiannopoulos disavow identification as white males to claim minority status—as Jewish, Native American, and gay, respectively—in ways that ultimately fortify and expand their existing forms of agency. What particularly stands out in all these cases is how science fictional discourse functions to enable such fantastical appropriations of victimhood identity. Yiannopoulos, for example, compares science fiction fans who voted “No Award” at Worldcon (in order to block Puppies candidates from receiving Hugos) to “the nightmare firemen of Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451.” He also refers to Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, two respected editors in the science fiction community, as “the Darth Vader and Emperor Palpatine” of the mainstream liberal forces who want to reduce the Hugos to affirmative action awards. He further argues that despite their defeat at the 2015 Worldcon, the Puppies will never surrender: “Like the empire at the end of The Empire Strikes Back,” he says, “the forces of social justice believe they have the rebel puppy alliance on their knees. What they don’t realize is that the puppies are already plotting their approach to 2016, which may not include a large army of Ewoks, but certainly will include many more pissed off fans.”5

Introduction 9

One might argue that the proliferation of science fiction references in the Breitbart coverage of Puppygate reflects a playful or ironic use of science fiction tropes tailored for discussing a controversy occurring in the science fiction community. On a much deeper level, this deployment of science fictional references in modern reactionary discourse is chillingly widespread. In her book Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-­Right, Angela Nagle points out that the metaphor of “taking the red pill” has become “central to alt-­right rhetoric” and that it has also become common among “anti-­feminist masculinist political subcultures that constantly cross-­pollinate with different layers of the online right” (86). References to the red pill come from the popular film The Matrix (1999), in which resistance leader Orpheus (played by Laurence Fishburne) offers prospective new recruit Neo (Keanu Reeves) a choice between two pills: a blue pill, which will enable him to remain asleep and indifferent to his imprisonment in the colonizing system that entraps him, or the red pill, which will awaken him to the sinister truth of his illusionary world and show him “how deep the rabbit hole goes.” Nagle notes that among antifeminists, taking the red pill has now almost universally come to mean “awakening from the blissful mind prison of liberalism into the unplugged reality of societal misandry” (88). For antifeminists, the modern world is dominated by an oppressive social justice regime that hates and disempowers men, and men must therefore awaken from feminist mind control to reclaim their threatened masculinity. In the Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW) movement—to give just one specific example—an elaborate ranking system exists to quantify adherents’ depth of antifeminist engagement. Nagle notes that the starting point, level zero, involves MGTOWs taking the “red pill” and rejecting feminism, after which they can level up, like video game characters, from level one (which involves rejecting long-­term relationships with women) to level four (which requires a complete disengagement from a society presumed to be “poisoned by feminism”) (94). According to Nagle, antifeminist politics of this variety are explored in depth on the Reddit subforum The Red Pill, and she further observes that the alt-­right similarly adopts the metaphor of taking the red pill (on websites like AlternativeRight.com)

10 Introduction

to describe the experience of awakening from the disempowering norms of liberal multi­culturalism into the eyes-­wide-­open world of reactionary white supremacy (88).

Victimhood and Reactionary Conservativism In his book Alt-­America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, David Neiwert observes that the “strange reversal of realities” that occurs in the worldview of the reactionary right—observable in antifeminists, for example, who deny the existence of gender inequity and imagine themselves instead to be under attack from the colonizing force of feminism—“resembles that of Planet Bizarro, the square planet sometimes visited by Superman,” where everything is reversed: ugliness is beautiful, loss is profit, regression is progress, and villains are the true heroes (36). What sort of Bizarro World are we living in where neo-­Nazis identify as an oppressed minority, where white Princeton students think of themselves as victims under attack from laser-­g uided drones, where misogynists believe themselves trapped in a Matrix of toxic feminist superiority, and where members of the alt-­right fantasize that they are a heroic Rebel Alliance waging insurgent warfare against Orwellian thought police? Why is it possible for the powerful to appropriate the imaginative roles of victims, and how did reactionary conservativism become for many a bleeding-­edge counterculture movement? Nagle, I think correctly, proposes that the alt-­right’s embrace of transgressive countercultural ideology is the nihilistic outcome of a longer nonconformist tradition “that can be traced from the eighteenth-­century writings of the Marquis de Sade, surviving through to the nineteenth-­century Parisian avant-­garde, the Surrealists, the rebel rejection of feminized conformity of postwar America and then to what film critics called 1990s “male-­ rampage films” like American Psycho and Fight Club” (28–29). It is certainly true that the nonconformist tradition Nagle identifies includes simultaneously progressive and reactionary tendencies. As Deleuze and Guattari point out in A Thousand Plateaus, seemingly countercultural deterritorializations that are ostensibly aimed toward breaking down restrictive norms can easily function to establish and fortify alternative hegemonies.6 This is to say that almost every effort to break something down is also an effort to build

Introduction 11

something else in its place. In the nonconformist tradition that Nagle identifies, for example, the breakdown of certain social norms has often gone hand in hand with a retrenchment of patriarchy. The Beats, for example, were rebels against social conformity, but they were not rebelling against traditional masculine roles. On the contrary, in many cases they attempted to recover masculine agency from the threats seemingly posed to it by postwar consumer culture. In short, countercultures have often included reactionary elements. They have sought to shut down certain social transformations in favor of others, and social transformation is not inherently politically progressive. On an even broader scale, modern conservativism has leveraged a sense of victimhood in the name of counterrevolutionary retrenchment ever since its political inception in the aftermath of the French Revolution. As Corey Robin observes in The Reactionary Mind: Conservativism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, “victimhood has been a talking point of the right ever since Burke decried the mob’s treatment of Marie Antoinette. The conservative, to be sure, speaks for a special type of victim: one who has lost something of value, as opposed to the wretched of the earth, whose chief complaint is that they never had anything to lose” (55). This illuminates the key difference between the social politics of the progressive left and the reactionary right: social justice movements aim to redress harms suffered by those who have been systematically disempowered by social, political, and economic conditions of inequality and exploitation, whereas reactionary conservativism too often appropriates victim identity at moments when the advantages enjoyed by elites are threatened. It should be noted that the embrace of identity-­based victimhood politics on the left is by no means unproblematic. Wendy Brown argues in States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity that when “a righteous critique of power from the perspective of the injured” becomes endemic to identity politics, the very righteousness of such critique ultimately “fixes the identities of the injured and the injuring as social positions” and thus “seeks not power or emancipation for the injured or the subordinated, but the revenge of punishment, making the perpetrator hurt as the sufferer does” (26). The embrace of victimhood, even when it is warranted by real injury, often perpetuates a dynamic in which a victim’s identity as victim depends

12 Introduction

on a perpetrator’s identity as perpetrator and forecloses all possibilities for redress other than revenge. When this occurs, as Diane Enns notes, “victims often become the worst perpetrators of all” (10). In The Violence of Victimhood, Enns observes that in contemporary society, “the victimized other has acquired a status beyond critique” (6), and victims are often “relieved of the burden of historical responsibility on the grounds of injury” (19). To occupy the position of the victim is often to be absolved of guilt and invested with the moral authority of righteous retributive agency. Enns explores how this sacred status accorded to victims becomes damaging when victims become vengeful perpetrators, and she and Brown conclude that the left must move beyond victim-­oriented political commitments structured by “the logics of rancor and ressentiment” (Brown, States 75) to exercise what Hannah Arendt theorizes as constructive and affinitive forms of “moral judgement” (Enns 98). As Patricia G. Davis reveals, however, the very problems associated with victimhood identification that Brown and Enns diagnose can actually become advantages in the hands of the reactionary right. In her analysis of the Supreme Court’s 2013 dismantling of key provisions of the Voting Rights Act, for example, Davis demonstrates that “white victimhood” has become “one of the more powerful cultural prisms through which white subjectivity and political victimhood is being shaped” (321). Legislative measures enacted to redress discrimination are now seen, from the perspective of the Roberts Court, as unfair forms of entitlement that discriminate against (and therefore victimize) whites. A judicial commitment to so-­called colorblindness therefore “enables whites to maintain power while simultaneously leveraging the moral authority attached to victim status” (323). Ressentiment, in other words, can become productively operationalized in the service of majority power. From the point of view of those seeking to fortify existing conditions of inequality, occupying a position of permanent victimhood can have extraordinary political value. One of the most useful insights of Robin’s The Reactionary Mind is that this appropriation of victimhood in the service of elite advantage has been central to certain strains of conservative discourse since the eighteenth century. “Since the modern era began,” Robin observes, “men and women

Introduction 13

in subordinate positions have marched against their superiors in the state, church, workplace, and other hierarchical institutions” (3). The emergence of a recognizable conservative political tradition after the French Revolution did not seek to oppose the emancipatory momentum of modern liberalism; instead, it co-­opted its emancipatory rhetoric in the service of domination. “Because freedom is the lingua franca of modern politics,” Robin argues, “conservatives have argued in favor of freedom—the freedom of property owners to do what they wish with their property, the freedom of the powerful to exercise their agency without restriction, and the freedom of markets to exploit economic inequalities—rather than attempting to oppose emancipatory discourse” (194). In this regard, many forms of reactionary conservativism can be thought of as championing libertarian currents in liberalism—commitments to personal freedom and free markets, for example—while rejecting the more robust forms of social liberalism envisioned by John Stuart Mill (and others) that seek to create equitable conditions for all by redressing systematic conditions of inequity and exploitation.7 This limited and opportunistic alignment with liberalism is key to understanding the imperial masochism of the Sad and Rabid Puppies and many of the other victim-­centered currents of the contemporary right. Reactionary conservativism has branded itself as “anti-­establishment” since its earliest days, and it strategically appropriates the rhetoric and discourse of emancipatory revolution to fight a counterrevolutionary struggle against progressive redistributions of power and resources in any given social context.8 Although this has been the case, as Robin demonstrates, since the birth of conservativism in the modern era, the reactionary appropriation of victim identity radically intensified after World War II. This is largely because after the war, as Jeffrey C. Alexander observes, “the project of renaming, dramatizing, reifying, and ritualizing the Holocaust contributed to a moral remaking of the (post)modern (Western) world” (228). Before World War II, one might argue (in very broad terms) that the evolutionary ideology of social Darwinism had made hierarchical conflict seem natural and even inevitable within various forms of social and political discourse in the West. The atrocities of the Holocaust, however, led to what Alexander calls

14 Introduction

“an unprecedented universalization of political and moral responsibility” that subsequently accorded victimhood a kind of sacred ideological status throughout Western culture (229). This sanctification of victimhood, which occurred alongside a flowering of support for liberation and emancipation politics, was intensified by the decolonization of former Western European colonies after the war and by the surging momentum of civil rights movements and countercultures during the 1960s and 1970s. By the end of the 1960s, the ideological imperative to understand most (if not all) Western social conflicts through the discourse of victimhood inaugurated an era during which conservativism’s anti­establishment tendencies became heightened to an extraordinary degree, particularly in the United States. As Lyons notes, “in the 1970s and 1980s, for the first time since World War II, rightists in significant numbers began to withdraw their loyalty from the U.S. government” (ii). Ironically, conservativism’s ideological commitment to battling oppression in the name of privilege has come to serve as the foundation for both neoliberalism, which relentlessly dismantles democratic institutions in the name of privatization and the free market, and far-­right nationalist populism, which in many ways has emerged as a backlash against neoliberalism. What’s particularly striking, however, is that—as we have seen—science fictional references and metaphors have increasingly taken a central role in the discursive construction of insurgent victim identity, especially since the 1960s. Part of my argument here is that the ubiquity of science fictional thinking in reactionary conservativism is not accidental or merely superficial— references to 1984, Star Wars, and The Matrix (among many other science fiction films and texts) represent the right’s engagement with a very specific and largely underanalyzed mode of science fictional discourse: the reverse colonization narrative. Imperial masochism has become central to reactionary conservativism in part because reverse colonization narratives (especially since the 1960s) have encouraged Western audiences to imagine ourselves as innocents under attack from alien invasions and as victims suffering from oppression and domination—despite the fact that (in a Western context) we are most often the ones who invade and occupy, and we are the ones who create and benefit most from widespread systems of social inequity.

Introduction 15

Reverse Colonization What exactly is a reverse colonization narrative? Within existing scholarship, reverse colonization narratives are most often regarded as fictions of foreign and alien invasion that address fears concerning the supposed decline of British imperial power during the Victorian and Edwardian eras. To understand the extraordinary power these narratives acquire during the 1960s and after, it is first useful to consider their early emergence. Stephen D. Arata notes that the perception of imperial decline at the end of the nineteenth century was occasioned by “the decay of British global influence, the loss of overseas markets for British goods, the economic and political rise of Germany and the United States, the increasing unrest in British colonies and possessions,” plus “the growing domestic uneasiness over the morality of imperialism” (622). As Rieder observes, this perception of decline was occasioned less by diminishing imperial activity and more by “mounting imperial competition” between European and U.S. powers in the decades leading up to World War I (Colonialism 124). Regardless of whether the British empire was actually declining during the late Victorian era, popular fiction in England at the end of the nineteenth century thrived on a fascination with the possibility that colonization’s direction might be reversed. Drawing on Patrick Brantlinger’s analysis of “imperial gothic” literature, Arata observes that in late Victorian popular fiction, “a terrifying reversal has occurred: the colonizer finds himself in the position of the colonized, the exploiter becomes exploited, the victimizer victimized,” and “what has been represented as the ‘civilized’ world is on the point of being colonized by ‘primitive’ forces” (623).9 Victorian reverse colonization fantasy thus expresses a sense that the outward march of empire is turning back on itself and the imperial center is threatened by colonizing forces. As such, these fictions often reflect fears concerning immigration and the purity of racial and national boundaries. Arata’s landmark essay on reverse colonization, “The Occidental Tourist,” argues that Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) in particular expresses anxieties related to struggles for racial mastery that are endemic to a cultural milieu dominated by the prevalence of social Darwinism. Part of what makes Dracula terrifying in Arata’s reading is that he is a foreigner who is in many ways

16 Introduction

more British than the British themselves; he invades England and threatens to conquer British society on its own terms. Furthermore, given that blood is often associated with racial identity, Dracula’s vampirism “designates a kind of colonization of the body. Horror arises not because Dracula destroys bodies, but because he appropriates and transforms them. Having yielded to his assault, one literally ‘goes native’ by becoming a vampire oneself” (Arata 630). In other words, Dracula is a symbolic foreigner who is more racially virile than his victims; his vampirism functions as a predatory racial alchemy that threatens the presumed supremacy of white racial identity. On one hand, Dracula is a reverse colonization fantasy inviting the British to see themselves as potential victims in an evolutionary arena of conflict where “vigorous races inevitably displace decaying races” (Arata 642). When read in this light, the novel’s argument is that immigrants and foreigners must be kept at bay and the rising power of imperial competitors like the United States should be viewed as threats to British superiority. The narrative can thus be seen as a call to action in defense of empire in the face of its potential decline. On the other hand, Arata also notes that Dracula can be read as a critique of British imperialism, particularly if Stoker’s position as a transplanted Irish subject is taken into account: “In Count Dracula, Victorian readers could recognize their culture’s imperial ideology mirrored back as a kind of monstrosity. Dracula’s journey from Transylvania to England could be read as a reversal of Britain’s imperial exploitations of ‘weaker’ races, including the Irish” (634). Arata thus reveals that reverse colonization narratives, by turning the tables and asking privileged audiences to imagine themselves on the receiving end of colonial occupation, tend to embody an ambivalent dual potential. On one hand, such narratives can appropriate victim identity for imperial elites by suggesting that imperial supremacy is under attack from hostile forces. At the time, the same stories (read in a different light) can offer critical reflections on empire: “Reverse colonization narratives thus contain the potential for powerful critiques of imperialist ideologies,” Arata argues, “even if that potential usually remains unrealized” (623).10 Few novels exemplify this simultaneous engagement with both imperial masochism and imperial critique more strikingly than The War of the Worlds (1898), a text that is often regarded as the quintessential Victorian

Introduction 17

reverse colonization narrative. Wells’s famous tale about Martians invading England provokes a critical awareness of real-­world imperial injustices and invites audiences to imagine themselves as potential victims of colonial assault and invasion. Rieder and Todd Kuchta observe that The War of the Worlds explicitly asks Wells’s countrymen to imagine what it would feel like if England were on the receiving end of its own imperial practices. At the opening of the novel, after describing the “cool and unsympathetic” intellects of the Martians as they turn their predatory gaze toward Earth (5), Wells warns his readers that the would-­be alien conquerors are unsettlingly similar to European colonizers: before we judge them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races. The Tasmanians, in spite of their human likeness, were entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants, in the space of fifty years. Are we such apostles of mercy as to complain if the Martians warred in the same spirit? (7) Wells offers a critical commentary on the genocidal ideologies that propel colonialism, and he invites readers to empathize (at least to some degree) with human and nonhuman others who suffer invasion at the hands of a coldly rational, technologically superior force that violently exploits lands and bodies in the name of resource extraction.11 At the same time, this potential for anti-­imperial empathy is dramatically undermined, as Rieder notes, by Wells’s understanding of colonial warfare as a “natural evolutionary process” in accordance with the prevailing “Social Darwinian ideology” of his time (Colonialism 132). The Tasmanians, in Wells’s description, are an “inferior race,” and The War of the Worlds reinforces (rather than challenges) the idea that a hierarchy of races engage in a natural evolutionary struggle for supremacy. Like Dracula, The War of the Worlds asks audiences to imagine themselves as potential victims of foreign invasion and as possible losers in an evolutionary competition for racial supremacy. In a competitive environment driven by natural selection, the novel suggests, the British may need to make themselves more “fit” to survive, lest they become victims (instead

18 Introduction

of perpetrators) of colonial conquest.12 The tension between imperial maso­ chism and imperial critique in The War of the Worlds embodies what Rieder calls a “double movement” of colonial ideology in reverse colonization narratives: “If, on the one hand, Wells proposes an ethical critique of European colonialism (you are to see in these horrible aliens an image of your own horrible selves), on the other hand, the reduction of humankind to ‘an animal among animals’ simultaneously undermines ethical judgement” (Colonialism 133) and reinforces “the tendency to see colonial warfare as part of a natural evolutionary process” (132). This foundational tension between imperial masochism and imperial critique is observable to varying degrees in almost all reverse colonization narratives: such stories challenge or invert common hierarchies in a given cultural milieu by imagining that subjects who benefit from imperial advantage have become victims of conquest, occupation, or domination. In other words, reverse colonization narratives speculatively turn the tables and ask privileged audiences to imagine what it would be like to be on the receiving end of the violent and exploitative practices they often benefit from in imperial contexts. Optimally (in my view), such narratives provoke thoughtful consideration for those who have been exploited and oppressed by imperial regimes of violence. At the same time, reverse colonization narratives can also simultaneously invite elite audiences to regard themselves as victims (or potential victims) in a way that disavows their positional advantages and undermines or rejects the notion that harm is occurring for others. Reverse colonization stories invite identification with victims, but they can also provoke identification as victims. This essential slipperiness is the key to why reverse colonization narratives have become a dominant science fiction mode (and one of the new cornerstones of imperial fantasy) in the late twentieth century and beyond.

The Postwar Transformation of Imperial Fantasy If reverse colonization narratives were first popularized by Victorian-­era invasion tales like Dracula and The War of the Worlds, they have become omni­present in Western speculative imaginings, particularly since the 1960s. The United States has an earlier history of fantastic emancipation

Introduction 19

narratives and mythologies of imperial masochism: L. Frank Baum’s The Wizard of Oz (1900), for example, celebrates Dorothy as a heroic emancipator rescuing colonized races from oppressive slavery, and the popular mythologies of Custer’s Last Stand and the Battle of the Alamo enshrine the transformation of settler colonial military agents into tragic victims to sanctify righteous and genocidal retribution. Philip Francis Nowlan’s yellow scare–era pulp novella Armageddon 2419 A.D. (1928)—the first appearance of the popular science fiction hero Anthony “Buck” Rogers—imagines a distant future in which the United States has been colonized by “Mongolians” and must fight an anticolonial revolution to establish the racial supremacy of white America (the Buck Rogers adventures tend to mirror the social Darwinian racial politics of War of the Worlds, but without Wells’s implicit critique of imperialism). If such narratives represent one current among various streams of speculative imagining prior to World War II, the tendency to use science fiction to identify with colonized victimhood and imagine heroic battles against imperial forces dramatically intensifies during the postwar period, particularly from the 1960s forward. Luke Skywalker from Star Wars (1977), Neo from The Matrix (1999), Jake Sully from Avatar (2009), and Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games (2012) are a few high-­profile examples of iconic heroes from recent decades who undertake a dramatic insurgency against oppressive imperial forces. These figures encourage audiences to celebrate anticolonial struggles and identify with (or as) victims of conquest and occupation. The popularity of such heroes reflects the changing nature of imperialism—and imperial fantasy—in the decades following World War  II. As Said suggests, imperial practices are “supported and perhaps even impelled by impressive ideological formations” that reinforce what Raymond Williams calls the “structures of feeling” that make empire possible (9). Enabling fictions of empire in Britain and the United States, of course, have markedly different historical trajectories; despite this, Ella Shohat and Robert Stam reveal that there is an intense transatlantic cross-­pollination between British imperial romance narratives (the “boys’ adventure” stories of Kipling, Stevenson, A. E. W. Mason, and Percival Christopher Wren) and American westerns during the early twentieth century, and this dual

20 Introduction

tradition influences the colonial adventure traditions of early science fiction. Although Said pays little attention to speculative genres, science fiction has always played a key role in the articulation of imperial fantasy. As Rieder observes, early science fiction was deeply implicated in the production and distribution of colonial imaginings. Early science fiction stories, Rieder argues, often embodied “fantasies of appropriation” centered on outward expansion and the symbolically sexualized “penetration” of supposedly “virgin” territories in the quest to acquire treasure and wealth (Colonialism 50). In contrast, “visions of catastrophe” in the early science fiction tradition (such as invasion tales and reverse colonization narratives) “appear in large part to be the symmetrical opposites of colonial ideology’s fantasies of appropriation” (Colonialism 123). In other words, early science fiction articulates imperial fantasy through dreams of conquest and nightmares of invasion and destruction. After the 1960s, however, science fiction notably favors invasion stories and visions of catastrophe to a much greater degree than overt fantasies of appropriation. By the late 1960s—in the aftermath of the Holocaust and widespread postwar decolonization movements, and during a cultural moment dominated by the influence of civil rights, feminism, anti–Vietnam War protest, and various other countercultural challenges to authority and tradition—stories celebrating outward conquest in science fiction were dramatically overshadowed by narratives that invite audiences to see themselves as victims or liberators rather than as colonizers. In my view, this shift invites us to examine reverse colonization narratives as they are adapted in a context of expanding postwar U.S. globalization (rather than narrowly defining reverse colonization as a genre that reflects British fears concerning the decline of empire or the threat of immigration).13 Science fiction’s postwar movement away from fantasies of appropriation toward victim-­oriented visions of catastrophe reflects a transformation in Western imperial practice away from expansive territorial colonialism toward indirect (cultural, political, and economic) methods of exploitation and domination that are often rhetorically justified in the name of freedom and emancipation. (This is, of course, darkly ironic given the status of the United States as a settler colonial nation that continues to occupy indigenous lands without redressing its ugly histories of violent colonization.)

Introduction 21

As many scholars have argued, imperialism—particularly U.S. imperialism —radically intensifies in a postwar context dominated by aggressive processes of late capitalist globalization. Although military violence and territorial occupation continue to serve the purposes of postwar empire, new methods of imperial hegemony after World War II often operate without an overt emphasis on direct colonial control of foreign territory. During much of the Cold War, for example, the United States rhetorically positioned itself as fighting for freedom and democracy throughout the world; it was the Soviets, according to Ronald Reagan, who were building an “evil empire,” not the United States. By the 1960s, overt colonialism had gained a negative reputation. Imperial fantasy and the enabling ideological narratives of empire therefore had to adapt and transform, and science fiction turned decisively toward heroic tales of counter-­imperial struggle and resistance to foreign invasion as a result. In this postwar cultural context, the reactionary appropriation of victim identity in the service of imperial advantage gains remarkable momentum throughout the United States. Cold War historian Elaine Tyler May notes that at exactly the moment when the United States had achieved a new kind of hegemony as a global superpower after World War II, a pervasive ideology of fear and insecurity began to transform American cultural life. In her book Fortress America, May suggests that security culture emerged in the United States during the Cold War in response to concerns regarding external and internal communist threats. During the 1950s and 1960s, white Americans began retreating into suburbs, gated communities, and bunker homes— at first in response to threats of communist attack or infiltration. As the civil rights movement gained momentum, the “red scare” also became a “black scare,” and, as May illustrates, fears and insecurities that emerged during the height of the Cold War were ultimately channeled into racist “law and order” policies that fueled white flight, police militarization, the growth of the prison industry, and the political genesis of the New Right. May’s analysis illuminates how a pervasive sense of threat and a subsequent embrace of righteous victimhood have become central to political forms of identification with whiteness, masculinity, and affluence during the postwar period and after. To give just one example of this, May examines the phenomenon of “safe rooms”—which have been imaginatively

22 Introduction

popularized by films like Panic Room (2002) and other home invasion narratives—and offers a revealing quote from the president of a company that installs safe rooms in the homes of the hyper-­rich: “The world is a very scary place right now,” he notes, “especially for people of means; they feel cornered and threatened. . . . When you have so much to lose, and you can afford to, you put a premium on your safety” (May 173). In addition to inspiring an entire franchise of Purge movies, this sentiment captures something at the heart of reverse colonization fantasy. After World War  II, the United States experienced a boom of economic affluence, and white Americans enjoyed a globally relative high quality of life as a result. In this new context, the rich and privileged have learned, as Robin notes, to rhetorically position themselves as victims or potential victims exactly because of the resentment directed at them due to their advantages. Privileged subjects have a lot to lose, after all! The world is (as the safe room president notes) a very scary place, especially if you have lots of stuff and other people envy you or want your stuff. It’s only natural to feel cornered and threatened, and it’s even more natural to hunker down and protect yourself, acting defensively—and even preemptively—to secure your interests. This is the new cornerstone of imperial fantasy after World War II. Empire is no longer overtly about conquest or expansion—it’s about making the world safe. Reverse colonization narratives, which invert the roles of victim and perpetrator, become a powerful resource for imperial elites to appropriate victim identity and imagine themselves as unsafe, threatened, and on the verge of succumbing to an overwhelming assault. In such an ideological context, the fantasy that “they’re coming to take what’s ours” operates as a shield against the shameful truth that “we’re currently already taking what’s theirs.”14 This book argues that the ubiquity of reverse colonization narratives since the 1960s reveals a fundamental transformation in Euro-­American imperial fantasy: the dream logic of reverse colonization overwhelmingly supplants the fantasy of outward colonial conquest in Western imperial discourse after World War II. On one hand, reverse colonization fantasy often enables and fortifies imperial masochism through imaginative appropriation of victim identity for imperial elites. On the other hand, at their best, certain reverse colonization narratives also provoke audiences to critically reflect on their

Introduction 23

own implication in imperial systems of power by inviting them to identify with those who endure systemic oppression under continuing regimes of imperial expansion, occupation, and exploitation. The best critical reverse colonization narratives, often written by authors from the social margins, attempt to mobilize sentiment toward economic, social, and environmental equity, and they seek to forge revolutionary possibilities for affinity between groups situated in different positions of agency and privilege in global contexts of imperial power. Perhaps most bewilderingly, many postwar reverse colonization narratives (just like their earlier Victorian counterparts) simultaneously fortify imperial masochism and provoke critical interrogations of real-­world injustices, depending on how, where, and when they are read and received. This reveals that the contradictory interpellations performed by reverse colonization narratives produce a contested imaginative terrain where imperial fantasy can be fortified or subverted (or both). The goal of this book is to reveal and challenge the ideological hegemony of imperial masochism while amplifying the counterhegemonic potential offered by critical reverse colonization narratives. As the earlier examples of the Sad Puppies, the MGTOW movement, and various alt-­right media figures demonstrate, the phenomenon of what might be called alt-­victimhood or bizarro victimhood has become normative in contemporary reactionary politics because it has been imaginatively enabled through reverse colonization metaphors. Rather than cataloging the numerous examples of this trend in our present time or offering a genealogy of right-­wing reverse colonization narratives—such as William Luther Pierce’s The Turner Diaries (1978), the various works of Ayn Rand, or conservative alternate history invasion films like Red Dawn (1984)—this book explores the 1960s in particular as the key historical moment of transition when reverse colonization fantasy becomes dominant in science fiction (and in Euro-­American culture in a larger sense). Before the 1960s, the trope of reverse colonization was one among many modes of science fiction storytelling. From the 1960s onward, however, reverse colonization arguably becomes one of the most popular tendencies in science fiction, and this fixation enables the emergence of powerful anti-­ imperial critique (on the left) and victimhood appropriations of imperial

24 Introduction

masochism (on the right) that gained popular traction in the following decades. Many of the ideological origins of both contemporary social justice politics and alt-­right reactionary conservativism today can be traced to the transformations in imperial fantasy that took place during the 1960s. For this reason, my analysis centers on science fiction from the 1960s, because it is within the popular literature of this extraordinary decade that reverse colonization emerges as the dominant narrative logic enabling the expression of anti-­imperial critique and reactionary bizarro victimhood. Furthermore, despite Ayn Rand’s unmistakable popularity, reactionary conservativism does not exclusively draw on right-­wing or libertarian science fiction for ideological inspiration. Indeed, the left and the right often look toward the same reverse colonization narratives for support, even as they interpret these narratives in wildly divergent ways. Many often-­cited popular science fiction narratives that inspire both the left and the right, such as Star Wars and The Matrix, were imaginatively enabled by their 1960s precursors. In some cases, these stories would not have been thinkable without the conceptual groundwork accomplished by their counterculture-­era predecessors. Methodologically, this book therefore examines science fiction novels, short stories, films, and TV shows from the 1960s and 1970s to trace the epochal transformations of imperial fantasy that occur in a genre historically implicated in the articulation of imperial imaginings. I focus on a detailed examination of science fiction from the 1960s and 1970s precisely because this period represents a pivotal and contested moment when anti­colonial fantasies of escape and liberation were rapidly overshadowing dreams of outward conquest in Euro-­American popular culture.

Chapter Overview The opening chapters of this study examine the appeal of decolonization fantasies in science fiction during the 1960s and 1970s with a specific emphasis on connections between masculinity and victimhood. Chapter 1, “Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity,” analyzes three iconic texts to show how popular mainstream science fiction authors in the 1960s hijack Frantz Fanon’s notion of “psychic decolonization” for the advantage of elite

Introduction 25

masculine superhero figures. On one hand, Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land (1961), Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965), and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) offer critiques of imperial expansion and colonial occupation; they reject the conquest of outer space (often celebrated in earlier science fiction) in favor of the liberation of inner space. Despite this, all three novels celebrate psychic decolonization to fortify masculine agency: inner space explorations offer a way of freeing male subjects from the repressive internal colonization of the mind. Through the fantasy logic of reverse colonization, dominating male figures are reimagined as victim-­ heroes struggling to escape from normative limitations on their power and potential. Psychedelic breakthroughs in these narratives enable male heroes to escape the restraints of social conventionality and revel in fantasies of uninhibited agency. In this sense, Fanon’s notion of psychic decolonization is appropriated in the service of the Western privilege it opposes in its intended context. My second chapter, “Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle,” begins from an analysis of science fictional victimhood discourse in contemporary incel subculture to reveal how reactionary antifeminist movements today depend on ontological reverse colonization fantasies that were popularized in the 1960s and 1970s in the speculative work of Philip K. Dick. I argue that one of Dick’s most popular novels, The Man in the High Castle (1962), demonstrates the dual nature of reverse colonization fantasy. On one hand, it asks Western audiences to consider what it would feel like to be colonized subjects (rather than colonizers) by offering an alternate history that imagines a world where the United States lost World War II and found itself colonized and occupied by Axis powers. In this regard, The Man in the High Castle exposes various forms of imperial racism that occur in the United States by inviting white Americans to imagine how they might be treated if whites were a systemically subordinated population suffering under settler colonial occupation. On the other hand, The Man in the High Castle uncritically portrays male protagonists as pathetic victims whose masculinity is threatened by powerful feminine figures, and this chapter shows that this misogynistic tendency in Dick’s work—a feeling that manhood has been lost because men are trapped within supposedly emasculating artificial

26 Introduction

worlds—tends to be amplified and celebrated among contemporary antifeminists who draw on reverse colonization discourse as their ideological foundation. The next chapters offer a critical examination of white victimhood fantasies, exploring narratives that imagine white male subjects as imprisoned or besieged by oppressive colonizing forces. Chapter 3, “The Whiteness of Black Iron Prisons,” opens with an analysis of Dick’s metaphysical paranoia regarding inescapable subjective imprisonment (expressed in his letters, fiction, and journals) before broadening to examine the postwar fantasy of escape from oppressive totalitarian confinement. A range of science fiction narratives, stretching from the works of William S. Burroughs in the 1960s to films such as The Matrix at the turn of the millennium and beyond, offer reverse colonization fantasies that invite audiences to identify with prisoners struggling to achieve liberation in the face of vast systems of manipulation and control. Although such imaginings often draw on the emancipatory force of postwar countercultures and protest movements, they also repeatedly frame white protagonists as existential prisoners in troubling ways. Given the mass incarceration of blacks that occurs during the postwar era as part of a conservative backlash against the civil rights movement (as described by studies such as Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow), it is therefore vital to consider the role of white imprisonment fantasies in the larger ideological framework of postwar imperial masochism. This chapter examines the cult TV show The Prisoner (1967–68), the literary adaptation of The Prisoner by Thomas M. Disch, and Disch’s original science fiction novel Camp Concentration (1968) to examine the appeal of imagining white subjects as tragic and heroic prisoners at a moment when blacks are being incarcerated at historically unprecedented rates. I argue that postwar reverse imprisonment fantasies often dramatize a fantastic threat to the presumed self-­possession of white liberal-­human subjects in a manner that reasserts white agency and self-­ownership in the face of postmodern globalization. Such stories accomplish this in a way that underscores the insidious cultural invisibility of mass black incarceration in the postwar era. Chapter 4, “Victims of Entropy,” begins by examining the role of white victimhood fantasies in reactionary discourses surrounding the United Kingdom’s secession from the European Union. During the Brexit refer-

Introduction 27

endum, a variety of conservative figures framed the United Kingdom as a helpless prisoner trapped and colonized by its membership in the EU, and they used the science fictional notion of thermodynamic breakdown to argue that Britain’s unique local character was being entropically eroded by the border-­crossing of immigrant populations. I argue that the concept of entropy has a long and troubling history in speculative imperial fantasies: many British science fiction writers from the 1960s, in particular, respond to the historical aftermath of Western European decolonization with profoundly mixed attitudes, and they repeatedly use the metaphor of entropy to thematize the decline and fall of empire. In the imaginative work of these authors, entropy reverses colonization in a very literal sense; the civilizing work of empire inevitably succumbs to thermodynamic decay, and the imperial center becomes a victim of its own noble yet flawed aspirations in the face of postcolonial backlash. The discourse of entropy discernible in contemporary anti-­immigration sentiments in both Britain and the United States draws on powerful entropic reverse colonization fantasies that gained ascendance in Euro-­American popular culture during the 1960s. By examining the work of two key British science fiction writers from the 1960s—Michael Moorcock and J. G. Ballard—chapter 4 demonstrates that what Paul Gilroy refers to as “postcolonial melancholia” is only one among many possible troubling responses to a British postwar crisis in imperial legitimacy. If melancholia originates in a sudden loss of feeling of moral superiority and consequently results in a resentful forgetting of history, the ambivalence embodied in the works of Moorcock and Ballard exemplify a resentful revisionist remembering of colonial history that foregrounds the injustices of imperialist practice while justifying such injustices as inevitable and necessary. Ultimately, this chapter also examines Moorcock’s and Ballard’s collaborations with David Harvey in the pages of the British science fiction magazine New Worlds. Harvey—who later theorized postmodern time-­space compression in his landmark book The Condition of Postmodernity (1989)—contributed both fiction and nonfiction to New Worlds that challenged other writers to think more deeply and carefully about their use of entropy as a metaphor for imperial decline. I conclude that Harvey (who eventually appeared as a background character in one of Moorcock’s later fictions) encouraged writers to pay attention to the problem of

28 Introduction

epistemology—the question of how we know what we think we know— during a 1960s countercultural moment when the authority of knowledge was increasingly exposed as a product of social construction. As such, Harvey’s thinking contributes important tools that can be used to dismantle reactionary fantasies of imperial masochism. The book’s final chapter, “Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era,” examines the work of Samuel Delany, an artist who has often been highly regarded for his creative accomplishments writing from the social margins but whose recurring preoccupation with problems of empire has gone largely unnoticed. Like Harvey, Delany is centrally concerned with questions of epistemology: his work frequently addresses not only imperial injustice but also the difficulties inherent to understanding (and representing) the changing nature of empire in the postwar era. Delany’s central insight, I argue, is his assertion that one must pay close critical attention to the complexities of imperial politics and economics while at the same time taking seriously the insight that objective truths can only be approached from subjective vantages. Delany reveals that the postmodern cliché that truth is relative—an insight that has been weaponized by contemporary movements like QAnon, which seek to present reactionary antiheroes as insurgent victims battling an oppressive deep state, liberal media establishment—must be enriched by a careful attentiveness to empirically verifiable facts balanced with a thoughtful awareness of the inevitable limits of factual knowledge. The final chapter examines Delany’s early trilogy The Fall of the Towers (1963–65) to argue that his dual commitment to empirical mapping and the irreducibility of subjective experience offers a resolution to what seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between modern and postmodern ideals of political consciousness. Delany offers a much-­needed model for what cognitive justice might look like in today’s post-­truth era—a time when we have seen postmodern theory increasingly weaponized by reactionary propagandists in the service of imperial masochism. The characters in The Fall of the Towers, colonized prisoner-­victims trapped within lies and illusions that exist to perpetuate imperial wars, must strive for psychic liberation just like Paul Atreides and other popular psychedelic science fiction heroes from the 1960s, but their quest for psychic decolonization requires a complex engagement with objective facts and subjective perspectives that exposes (rather than fortifies) the fantasy work that sustains postmodern imperialism.

Introduction 29

The conclusion, “Alternatives to Imperial Masochism,” briefly examines the trajectory of reverse colonization fantasy between the 1960s and the present, exploring how imperial masochism intensifies from the late Vietnam War era through the period of the United States’s so-­called War on Terror and beyond. During these decades, however, creative and optimistic reverse colonization fantasies also flourish: contemporary North American indigenous futurist authors, for example, eschew what Gerald Vizenor describes as “victimry” (or a traumatic embrace of victimhood) in favor of “survivance” narratives that reject masochism to embrace creative critical alternatives. In addition, graphic narratives like Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006) invite readers to imagine what it might feel like to be an immigrant fleeing imperial conditions of devastation and arriving in a foreign land, encouraging empathy with one’s neighbors in a way that eschews the romance of aggrieved victimhood. I conclude by briefly surveying recent critical reverse colonization narratives to show how these works challenge the hegemony of victim-­centered imperial fantasy in the postwar era, offering hopeful alternatives that challenge and subvert reactionary ideology and politics.

V CHVPTER

1 Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity

N

early everyone who is even passingly familiar with science fiction has heard of Frank Herbert’s Dune (1965) or has seen David Lynch’s popular 1984 film adaptation of the novel. With over 12 million copies sold worldwide, Dune may be the best-­selling science fiction novel of all time, and fans often consider it to be one of the best science fiction novels ever written. It’s one of those extraordinary books that captures a reader’s imagination. Almost everyone seems able to relate to the idea that “fear is the mind killer,” and many draw inspiration from Herbert’s suggestion that fear (and other negative emotions) can be overcome through willpower and heightened states of consciousness. Although Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land may not be quite as popular as Dune, it has similarly touched countless readers in profound ways. It won the Hugo Award for best novel in 1962, and its popularity has been so enduring that it has never been out of print since its original release. Ace Books claims that it is one of the first science fiction novels to achieve best-­seller status in both hardcover and paperback. People who have read Stranger have an almost unconscious tendency to use the word grok to indicate that we really understand what someone means—that we drink the meaning fully and deeply—and we know that “water brother” is a gender-­ neutral term that signifies the deepest form of chosen kinship imaginable. If there’s any other science fiction narrative from the 1960s that has touched popular imaginations as powerfully as Dune and Stranger, it might be 2001: A Space Odyssey, which appeared as a film directed by Stanley Kubrick in 1968. The film’s screenplay was co-­written by Kubrick and

32

ch a p t er 1

Arthur C. Clarke as an expansion of ideas first explored in Clarke’s short story “The Sentinel” (1951), and Clarke released his novelization of the story concurrent with the film’s release. Time magazine memorably called 2001 “the greatest science fiction novel of our time,” and Clarke, in part due to recognition of his efforts with 2001, was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II for “Services to Literature.”1 Stranger, Dune, and 2001 have achieved extraordinary, wide-­reaching popularity in North American and British culture (and beyond). For this reason, they are especially useful for illuminating key transformations in imperial fantasy that were taking place during the 1960s—with long­lasting consequences today. Indeed, as Jordan S. Carroll notes, “fascists love Dune,” and Herbert’s novel is often a favorite science fiction text among white nationalist figures like Richard Spencer and other alt-­right reactionaries, who celebrate what they see as the novel’s progressive vision for creating a racially pure imperial future ethnostate. All three novels offer what can be read as optimistic portrayals of authoritarian Übermensch fantasies. What is key to the appeal of these stories— what makes them feel heroic rather than oppressive—is the fact that Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke frame their iconic supermen as victim-­heroes struggling to achieve freedom, rather than as fascist villains bent on domination. In particular, all three novels use the logic of reverse colonization to portray psychedelic awakening as a triumphant victory against empire. In each work, heroic men must break free of the internal limits of repressive psychic colonization—they must free their minds, so to speak—on the quest to become masterful anti-­imperial emancipators. In this regard, the novels offer a liberatory, counterculture-­era reversal of the outwardly expansive imperial fantasies that Susan Zieger argues are often expressed in hallucinatory drug narratives from earlier eras. Zieger notes that nineteenth-­and early twentieth-­century drug narratives—such as Thomas de Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821) and Fitz Hugh Ludow’s The Hasheesh Eater (1857)—frequently depict chemical hallucinations as outward journeys: they function as a way of vicariously exploring the Orient (for de Quincey) or the American West (for Ludow) without leaving one’s comfortable domestic milieu. Zieger shows that these portrayals of psychedelic hallucination are ubiquitously shaped by unacknowledged



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 33

imperial metaphors: “Projecting the deep subjectivity of inner space onto the seemingly vast, unpopulated continent, the drugged dreamer appears oblivious to the imperial power giving shape to his fantasies” (1532). Stranger, Dune, and 2001 offer striking reversals of this tendency. Each novel celebrates the profound power of consciousness expansion, but these texts—written in a historical context influenced by postwar decolonization and the rise of Cold War U.S. neo-­imperialism—explicitly condemn the Euro-­American project of territorial colonialism. Stranger, for example, challenges the idea that a foreign territory occupied by indigenous natives (in this case Martians) can be appropriated legitimately by settler colonists. Dune dramatizes the uprising of a colonized diaspora population (the Fremen) against outside imperial oppressors. 2001 warns that the apotheosis of Cold War imperialism may be the nuclear annihilation of the human race. These overt challenges to imperial ideology respond to a cultural moment when successful decolonization efforts throughout the world had shattered the European mythos of imperial adventure. Furthermore, they reflect a growing skepticism concerning the racist violence inherent to U.S. frontier narratives, especially in a cultural context influenced by the civil rights movement and (later) mass protests against the Vietnam War. Instead of valorizing outward expansion, then, these novels posit psychological inner space as a territory colonized by repressive social norms and unconscious psychological urges, and they suggest that male subjects who are victimized by internal colonization must break free from such inner limits to achieve heroic freedom and agency. In this manner, all three books contribute to a new postwar articulation of imperial fantasy by inviting men to identify as colonized victims undertaking a heroic struggle to liberate their personal power. This reversal is made possible by the trope of reverse colonization, which imaginatively situates elite male heroes as psychically colonized victims. Decolonizing inner space thus offers a way of liberating the white male subject from a repressive internal colonization of the mind. In this sense, Frantz Fanon’s anticolonial ideal of psychic decolonization, notably articulated in Black Skin, White Masks (1952) and The Wretched of the Earth (1961), is appropriated in the service of the Western imperial paradigms it opposes in its intended context. This is not necessarily to say that these science fiction authors have read

34

ch a p t er 1

Fanon and are directly misappropriating his ideas; it would be more accurate to say that Fanon and the science fiction writers of this era mutually respond to the historical moment of decolonization in similar yet opposed ways. If Fanon (now famously) argues that formerly colonized subjects must decolonize their unconscious patterns of thinking from the weight of Western influences to achieve meaningful self-­determination, Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke echo this perspective but assert that privileged Western subjects must decolonize their psychic interiorities to achieve autonomous self-­ownership.2 Although it is certainly true (as Foucault and many others have shown) that white Europeans and Americans are sometimes subject to repressive regimes of power, it is nonetheless also the case that appropriating the notion of “colonization” as a metaphor to describe all such systems of coercion creates a false equivalence between specific imperial histories (what Europe and the United States have done—and continue to do—to the rest of the world) and the hardships (even when legitimate) experienced by those who largely benefit from colonization and empire. The shared emphasis that Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke place on psychic decolonization illuminates what Timothy Melley refers to as a widespread concern with “agency panic” in postwar fiction (vii). According to Melley, literary postmodern narratives (from authors such as William Burroughs, Margaret Atwood, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLillo, Kathy Acker, and many others) are overwhelmingly characterized by an “intense anxiety about an apparent loss of autonomy, the conviction that one’s actions are being controlled by someone else or that one has been ‘constructed’ by powerful, external agents” (vii). Melley proposes that agency panic is a cultural response to “postmodern theoretical reconceptions of subjectivity” that challenge a coherent sense of possessive individualism and liberal personhood (15). If postmodern theory, for example, reimagines individual identity as a social construction iterated through performative repetitions, postmodern literature responds to this fragmented conception of identity with profound paranoia and a nostalgic yearning for the self-­possessed individualism of liberal human selfhood. Scott Selisker notes that throughout the twentieth century, various advances in science and technology “threatened to uncover and then manipulate the deepest and most human characteristics of humans and groups,”



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 35

reframing humans as programmable subjects rather than self-­determining individuals (5).3 In the face of such unsettling technoscientific advances, Selisker argues, “the prospect of total mental unfreedom loomed just over successive horizons of scientific possibility” (6). Psychology, industrial management, political propaganda, and cybernetics in various ways contributed to the sense of threatened self-­ownership that Melley characterizes as central to postwar agency panic. Melley draws vital attention to the gendered dynamics of agency panic: the postmodern threat to liberal subjectivity is often framed as an erosion of masculine power undertaken by supposedly feminizing social forces. It is useful to reinforce this argument with Eva Cherniavsky’s observation that whiteness often functions as a similarly privileged form of liberal human embodiment premised on masterful bodily self-­possession (xxii). From this combined vantage, agency panic can be understood as an anxious response to the postmodern and poststructuralist erosion of the presumed autonomous self-­possession of whiteness and masculinity. Although Melley masterfully traces the contours of agency panic in literary postmodern fiction, he never quite interrogates its more perverse ideological pleasures—particularly how it enables subjects who occupy positions of social advantage to inhabit an imaginative space of besieged victimhood. In other words, if various conditions of postmodernity seemingly threaten to undermine white masculine self-­ownership, the presence of these threats also enables white masculinity to take refuge in a fantasy of victimhood— often enabled by the logic of reverse colonization—that serves as the foundation of insurgent struggles for the renewal and regeneration of the masterfully self-­possessed liberal (and later neoliberal) subject. In popular science fiction narratives such as Stranger, Dune, and 2001, the defense of liberal personhood takes the shape of a charged heroic identification with decolonizing freedom fighters. The psychedelic science fiction heroes of the 1960s (who become, for many audiences, powerful symbolic figures of insurgent identification) must liberate their psychic inner spaces to achieve perfect self-­ownership. The goal, invariably, of these 1960s inner voyages is self-­mastery; that which is alien in the self must be mastered, and that which is unknown or unconscious must be brought to awareness through deliberate rational control.4

36

ch a p t er 1

This overdetermined emphasis on self-­mastery is most visible in the novels’ constructions of masculinity, where the psychedelic turn toward inner space (in contrast to the outwardly oriented drug narratives of earlier eras) inaugurates a new ideal of awakened manhood. In each novel, consciousness expansion or the development of superhuman awareness (via alien influences or drugs) allows man to evolve into superman. All the books explicitly associate consciousness expansion with evolution, and it is no coincidence that in each case the superevolved individual is a man who represents the elite class of his social and cultural milieu. In addition, heroic masculinity in Stranger, Dune, and 2001 centrally involves a rejection of passive consumerism (allowing oneself to be defined by appetites and consumption habits) in favor of active masterful self-­ possession. Psychedelic supermen, in other words, reject the role of passive consumers: to be a consumer, in each text, is to allow oneself to be a cog in the machine, much like the domesticated subjects of the dystopian World State in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932).5 In contrast to such supposedly emasculating experiences of domestication, psychic decolonization enables the heroes to become time-­space manipulators who regulate and control flows of information, production, and consumption. The trope of reverse colonization enables these novels to use victim identification (fighting off the all-­powerful economic system that threatens to transform one into an unthinking consumer) in the service of reconstituting and reconfiguring masculine agency. In all three novels, then, the male protagonists emphatically reject the role of the passive consumer. In Stranger, Valentine Michael Smith literally becomes an object for consumption; he sacrifices himself to dismemberment by the hands of an angry crowd (with commercial breaks), and he is then literally eaten by his nestmates. Smith is also a master media manipulator; he masters the art of persuading others to consume his worldview. In Dune, Paul Atreides becomes emperor and manipulates the Imperium based on its addiction to the spice, which he alone controls. In 2001, David Bowman begins the story, like his primate ancestors, as a victim of energy scarcity amid inaccessible abundance; he ultimately becomes the masterful deliverer of an extraordinary and incomparable energy surplus. This emphasis on productive mastery (playing the role of a producer, or of an object of consumption,



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 37

but never a passive consumer) reflects a nostalgia for what E. Anthony Rotundo calls the American self-­made masculinity of the nineteenth century, with its emphasis on intense self-­regulation, harnessing passion based on will, and competitiveness combined with rigid self-­control. More disturbingly, the emphasis on masterful control in these novels also emulates, to a certain extent, models of fascist masculinity described by Claus Theweleit in his book Male Fantasies. Theweleit notes that fascist masculinity (which he argues represents the apotheosis of modernity) is characterized by an emphasis on self-­control and an imperative to treat the male body as an efficient machine. Theweleit also observes that fascist ideology perpetuates a deep paranoia regarding uncontrolled masses on both a social level (one must be able to manipulate and rise above the social masses) and on a personal physical level (the unregulated and undifferentiated mass of one’s own organs and emotions is regarded as inextricably feminine and thus subject to relentless regulation, discipline, and control to produce cool, competent, and machine-­like masculinity). These 1960s novels celebrate the regulation of social or individual uncontrolled masses, and they associate masses with the abject feminine. In Stranger, the public masses are portrayed as dupes subject to tricks and media manipulation. Women, in particular, constitute the imagined mass audience for media consumption; most of the advertisements presented in the novel are directed at female viewers. Men such as Jubal and Smith demonstrate a greater potential to take a molecular mass (such as a nest or household) and unify it into a molar whole. Dune suggests that if the masses are left uncontrolled, they will run wild in a hysterical jihad, resulting in war and chaotic destruction. In 2001, the monoliths feminize the masses (turning them into desiring consumers) to evolve them into masculine masters; men who represent the evolutionary vanguard (like Moon Watcher and Dave Bowman) must ultimately evolve into masterful self-­controlled beings. HAL, in contrast, cannot control its emotions and becomes hysterical while Bowman succeeds in controlling his emotional impulses. Theweleit observes that fascist masculinity valorizes racial competitiveness in hierarchies of evolutionary advancement. On the surface, Stranger, Dune, and 2001 seem to reject biological racism; they are overtly multiracial, and none explicitly espouse white superiority. In each novel, however, racial

38

ch a p t er 1

competitiveness is not ultimately determined by skin color or by ethnicity, but by the inherent capacity for enhanced consciousness. Individuals with advanced awareness (and corresponding degrees of advanced agency) are imagined as a separate race of evolutionary progress in humankind, and these heightened individuals are always male and racially unmarked. In their book Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri suggest that postmodernity ushers a transition from racial differentiation based on visible differences (such as skin color) to alternative modes of racial differentiation that function in structurally similar ways without an overt emphasis on biological alterity (191). In these texts, advanced states of consciousness become the fantastical basis for racial differentiation, and differences in consciousness are the product of genetics, cultural cultivation, psychedelic use, alien influence, and raw inherent Calvinist merit. In this regard, Stranger, Dune, and 2001 adapt the racial logic of evolutionary competition observable in earlier reverse colonization narratives (such as Dracula and The War of the Worlds) to function in a post-­Holocaust milieu where struggles to achieve racial supremacy are largely no longer explicitly defensible in the popular sphere.

Stranger in a Strange Land Stranger in a Strange Land might best be considered as an anthropological reverse colonization narrative. During the height of Euro-­American colonial expansion, anthropology often brought to bear what Rieder calls “the colonial gaze” on foreign peoples deemed culturally inferior from the perspective of imperial elites (Colonialism 7). Stranger reverses the direction of this colonial gaze by turning it back on Americans and Europeans from the vantage point of a superior alien race. Heinlein offers the story of a culturally and intellectually superior Martian who visits Earth—not to conquer it, as Wells imagines in War of the Worlds, but to expose the artificial limitations of Earth’s culturally constructed worldviews. In Heinlein’s novel, Smith’s childhood experience growing up on Mars— free from the limitations of Earth’s cultures, languages, and worldviews— endows him with a mode of consciousness that grants him superhuman self-­ control. He can hold his breath indefinitely, he can control his autonomic



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 39

nervous functions, and he has advanced mental powers such as telepathy, psychic projection, and the ability to “discorporate” threatening people and objects with his thoughts. The novel suggests that all humans are potentially capable of such mental feats, but until they are trained in the Martian language and Martian thinking, they are psychologically colonized by human cultural habits of mind and unable to develop such abilities.6 Carol McGuirk traces a parallel between Heinlein’s Smith and Kipling’s Mowgli from The Jungle Book (1894): both texts offer an “account of a human child raised by at once innocent and predatory non-­human beings” (508). A further comparison can be drawn between Smith and Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes: both are masculine exemplars of a subsection of humanity that has obtained an imperial advantage, yet both benefit (and return to redeem their home societies) because of their upbringing at the colonial periphery. In each case, the colonial gaze is reversed by a hero raised outside the imperial center who is therefore able to call the empire’s cultural norms into question, initiating a process of redemption and regeneration that liberates the imperial culture from restrictive attitudes and worldviews. The liberation of inner space in Stranger centers on the attainment of perfect self-­possession; enhanced consciousness leads to masterful mental powers and psychic control. In a cultural context in which white masculine privilege in the West is confronted with various challenges, Stranger reveals that white masculinity turns to evolutionary psychology in an attempt to reconstitute a lost sense of the proprietary self-­possession that Melley and Cherniavsky characterize as central to liberal-­human selfhood (Cherniavsky xxii). In the novel, self-­control—particularly a deliberate control over one’s thoughts, feelings, and bodily functions—is equated with self-­ownership. In this light, it is not surprising that Stranger opens with a conflict over who has the right to possess Smith’s body (determining how and where he will be held in custody after his return from Mars). Nor is it surprising that the early chapters focus on Smith’s allies helping the childlike Martian gain social, economic, and political self-­ownership to match his extraordinary psychic and physical self-­possession. Stranger emphasizes that Smith’s alien way of thinking gives him superhuman control over his body and mind; he has superpowers because he has extraordinary cognitive capacities. Altered human consciousness (in this

40

ch a p t er 1

case, the result of being raised in a culture uninhibited by human cultural norms) offers Smith a more extensive and complete self-­possession than that available to most humans.7 This is first demonstrated when Smith arrives on Earth and struggles to adapt to the planet’s unfamiliar gravity. He reveals his unusual ability to control his physiology when he deliberately lowers his heart rate and respiration, reprogramming these to continue automatically at his preferred rate. Later, when the authorities arrive at Jubal Harshaw’s mansion, Smith reveals that he can hold his breath indefinitely, dilate his sense of time to experience events in slow motion, and project his perceptions outside his body. His followers later develop similar powers: they lose weight, they are immune to sickness, and they are able to function with very little sleep due to the immense physiological control offered by their enhanced self-­perception: “The essence of the discipline is, first, self-­ awareness,” Smith argues, “and then, self-­control” (Stranger 505). Enhanced consciousness, or the mastery of one’s unconscious processes, allows perfect self-­possession and the ultimate triumph of reason, mind, and will over corporeal experience. Smith’s superior mode of consciousness endows him with what we might think of as a reverse colonial gaze: readers are invited to question their social and cultural assumptions by identifying with his alien perspective, and in light of Smith’s superhuman powers, normal humans appear colonized by restrictive structures of thought and perception. The decolonization of perception in Stranger is therefore intimately associated with the defamiliarization of language and culture. Consciousness expansion, in Heinlein’s estimation, is a matter of unlearning languages that encode faulty assumptions and learning new languages to take their place. Language in this sense essentially “colonizes” perception, and learning a new language (such as Martian) leads to a “decolonized” liberation of consciousness.8 Smith arrives on Earth with no understanding of human language, and his Martian way of speaking and thinking offers him a fundamentally different way of looking at the world: “his thoughts, pure Martian abstractions from half a million years of wildly alien culture, traveled so far from any human experience as to be untranslatable” (Heinlein, Stranger 20). The early chapters of the novel invite the reader to experience familiar social norms and customs strangely through Smith’s eyes, like an anthropologist visiting an alien world. Readers



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 41

are interpellated as “strangers” in the “strange land” of the familiar, and despite the novel’s extrapolative futuristic setting, the estrangements readers are invited to contemplate center on mid-­century U.S. norms. The ways people think and behave, Heinlein suggests, are shaped and limited by language. Smith begins the novel only able to understand phenomena in Martian terms, and he is constantly surprised by the assumptions bundled in the simplest English expressions. He becomes confused, for example, when he is asked if he “feels like” food (Heinlein, Stranger 25). A straightforward inquiry into his state of hunger becomes confusing when it is interpreted literally and juxtaposed against Martian cultural associations that sacralize the consumption of the dead. The effects of estrangement have a more critical edge, however, when it comes to human social and sexual taboos. When he first meets Jill Boardman, Smith asks her to remove her clothes so that he can see what she looks like (having been raised on Mars, he has never seen a human woman before). Heinlein uses Smith and Boardman’s relationship to critique human sexual norms, particularly the habitual and reflexive sense of ownership that characterizes mononormative Western relationships.9 Near the end of the novel, for example, Smith concludes that jealousy, or the desire to possess others as objects, poisons human relationships. Every “wrongness” in human interaction is “a corollary of ‘jealousy.’ . . . I still don’t grok jealousy in its fullness,” he says, “it seems an insanity to me, a terrible wrongness” (Heinlein, Stranger 508). Stranger’s challenge to presumptive mononormativity (the naturalness of monogamous sexual relationships) remains one of the novel’s notable insights, despite the story’s repressive normalizations of heterosexuality and biologically essentialized gender roles.10 The defamiliarization of taken-­for-­granted customs (particularly sexual taboos) is the path to consciousness expansion in Stranger; Smith shows his followers how to unlearn restrictive habits of mind created by human culture and language. Heinlein quickly reveals that the stakes of consciousness expansion ultimately center on the reconstitution of masculine mastery and potency. Early in the novel, Harshaw berates Boardman for threatening to turn Smith into a conformist by indoctrinating him into normative social behaviors; when she argues that this is for his own good, Harshaw quips, “That’s the excuse they gave the tomcat just before the operation” (Heinlein,

42

ch a p t er 1

Stranger 136). Smith is presented as powerfully masculine because he has not been tamed or domesticated by the customs of society; his experience on Mars makes him more masculine than most men on Earth. The decolonization of inner space allows him to embody the apex of masculine potency and power. Heinlein’s figuration of the decolonization of consciousness uncannily anticipates Fanon’s model of psychic decolonization from Black Skin, White Masks, which was not translated into English until 1967. According to Pal Ahluwalia and Abebe Zegege, Fanon “documents the manner in which colonialism distorts the colonial subject’s psyche” and argues that “colonization dehumanizes and objectifies the colonized, rendering them incapable of being human” (456). Dehumanization and emasculation are inseparable for Heinlein and Fanon; for Heinlein, however, a certain fantastical kind of dehumanization actually allows for the recovery of masculine potency. Smith’s status as a nonhuman, as a being raised outside human culture, is what allows him to become more than human and to transcend the supposedly emasculating restrictions on human behavior encoded in postwar social customs and taboos. Smith’s embodiment of masculine potency reveals its most authoritarian dimensions when he arrives at the conclusion that it is acceptable to “discorporate” humans who contain “wrongness” to advance the human race as a whole. In Smith’s estimation, it is “utterly impossible to kill a man” because discorporation simply initiates a new phase in a being’s spiritual life cycle: making “wrong” people go away is “like a referee removing a man from a game for ‘unnecessary roughness’ ” (Heinlein, Stranger 509). Unlike Fanon’s decolonizing subject, who uses violence against colonial oppressors to reestablish a lost sense of wholeness, Smith embodies an elite subject, secure in his identity and virility, who uses violence to institute what he decides will be a positive eugenic transformation in the human race. He begins by discorporating “vicious” humans languishing in jail, and he goes on to eliminate others whom he sees as even more offensive: “some of them were even in public office” (509). He notes, casually, that he sent 150 people “back to the foot of the line to try again” in a single night; in his role as “referee,” he believes he has an indisputable sense of the “wrongness” of certain people, and his enlightened perspective authorizes him to use lethal force to distinguish



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 43

between humans with the greatest potential for change and others who are evolutionary dead-­ends. In this regard, Heinlein uses Smith to valorize the pseudo-­scientific philosophy of eugenics, or the practice of the reproductive manipulation of a species to artificially produce favorable genetic trends in a population. Despite serious objections from cultural anthropologists such as Franz Boas, eugenics was a popular mode of racist social-­scientific discourse throughout the early twentieth century (many states in the United States, for example, enforced compulsory sterilization of the mentally ill in the early decades of the century). Eugenicist practices lost their widespread popular appeal after Nazi programs of so-­called racial hygiene were revealed in the aftermath of World War II. It might seem unusual to observe eugenicist fantasies in an iconic science fiction hero figure from the early 1960s, but there is a distinct quasi-­fascist change in Smith at the midpoint of the novel that Boardman characterizes as a transition from “docility to dominance” (Heinlein, Stranger 345). If the early Smith represents what Deleuze and Guattari refer to as a deterritorializing perspective that opens the possibility of minoritarian becomings outside the boundaries of socially accepted norms, the later Smith reterritorializes even more restrictive codes and axioms. By the later chapters of the novel, Smith always knows best; he grows “steadily in strength and sureness—in all ways” (345). The early Smith questions; the later Smith teaches others how to grok the “right” perspective. This is precisely the danger of “microfascist” reterritorializations that emerge in the wake of revolutionary breakdowns and which Deleuze and Guattari warn against: “one deterritorializes, massifies, but only to knot and annul the mass movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others” (Thousand 228).11 Smith’s “marginal reterritorializations” (such as his assertion of the obvious rightness of killing those who are “wrong” to benefit humanity as a whole) are centrally concerned with the concentration of power in the hands of authoritative male subjects. Masculine authority, previously domesticated by social and cultural norms, can rule with a clear conscience. The psychic decolonization of white masculinity becomes the basis for reinstituting elite masculine privilege over supposedly lesser beings. In this regard, Stranger exemplifies a new version of the kind of “superman” story that Brian Attebery

44

ch a p t er 1

argues was the “preeminent story form for 1940s and ’50s SF” (63). Attebery notes that the superman story “posits a Darwinian competition between ordinary human beings and a superior mutated race,” and many of these stories “rely on a sexual dynamic derived from Darwin’s popularizers, in which evolutionary developments are demonstrated in males, whose sexual competition is thus also a struggle for racial advancement” (13). Mastery over psychic inner space is presented as an evolutionary advantage for Smith and his followers. Smith grows concerned that his efforts to help humanity may be wasted because selfish humans who are incapable of grokking his message vastly outnumber those with elite and enlightened potential. On Mars, the “wrong” type of young Martians are “weeded out” for the benefit of the race, but no such process takes place on Earth. “One way or another,” Smith argues, “competing and weeding has to take place . . . or the race goes downhill” (Heinlein, Stranger 510). This leads him to doubt his own mission: “I am beginning to wonder if full grokking will show that I am on the wrong track entirely—that this race must be split up, hating each other, fighting each other, constantly unhappy and at war even with their own individual selves . . . simply to have that weeding out that every race must have” (511; emphases in original). Harshaw offers Smith the reassurance he needs in the face of such hopelessness: “damn it, lad, you’ve been doing the weeding out—or rather, the failures have been doing it to themselves by not listening to you” (511; emphases in original). Harshaw goes on to argue that Smith’s followers, with their enhanced abilities and heightened self-­mastery, are naturally more competitive than the failures, and this will inevitably cause a change in the human race as a whole. “If one tenth of one percent of the population is capable of getting the news, then all you have to do is show them,” Jubal says, “and in a matter of some generations all the stupid ones will die out and those with your discipline will inherit the Earth” (512; emphases in original). Discipline, or the self-­mastery that comes from decolonizing one’s own consciousness, is presented as the key to becoming a genetic and economic superman. This is the case even without the benefit of Martian super­powers: “the disciplined can make any amount of money at anything . . . when competing with the half-­awake,” one of Smith’s followers argues (Heinlein, Stranger 486).12 Heinlein may challenge the legitimacy of ter-



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 45

ritorial imperialism central to many earlier forms of imperial fantasy, but he nonetheless supports the assertion of an evolutionary hierarchy of consciousness in which the “disciplined” are fit to rule over the “half-­awake.” As George Slusser observes, “the relationship he draws between election and material success is familiar. If one is elected, he necessarily succeeds; if one succeeds, he is obviously one of the elect . . . the fittest survive, and in doing so they are elected according to nature’s laws” (37). In this regard, Heinlein (like Clarke, as we will see) reinforces an economic worldview suggesting that there is an unlimited surplus of wealth available for those who are capable of obtaining it, and that being capable of achieving such profit is to deserve it even at the expense of other beings. For Heinlein, the liberation of inner space inevitably leads to economic and evolutionary progress; imperial fantasy, in this formulation, continues to valorize domination based on competitive superiority, yet it wears a new ideological face through the use of reverse colonization logic to frame agents of privilege as decolonizing victim-­heroes. Breaking free from psychic limits to achieve an advanced perspective not only makes one smarter, faster, and more economically and sexually competitive, it also authorizes one to liquidate lesser beings, treat them as a separate category of humanity, and benevolently paternalize them in the name of the advancement of the human race as a whole.

Dune Frank Herbert’s Dune similarly focuses on the liberation of inner space as a means to achieve nearly unlimited masculine agency; in the novel, Paul Atreides navigates increasingly powerful psychedelic experiences using the spice melange until he attains superhuman self-­control and an expanded omniscient consciousness. Herbert’s philosophy of consciousness expansion in Dune is even more elite than Heinlein’s implicit Calvinism in Stranger. In Dune, only the Kwisatz Haderach, a genetic superman produced through centuries of eugenic breeding, can achieve omniscient consciousness, and the Kwisatz Haderach must be male. Paul’s quest to become the Kwisatz Haderach proceeds alongside a social and political journey of decolonization. The desert planet Arrakis begins the novel as a subjugated colony vital to imperial economics, but rather than attempting to liberate Arrakis

46

ch a p t er 1

from the imperial system, Paul uses the planet’s power (its natural resources and military potential) to gain control of the empire from within. Rather than dismantling the Imperium, the novel posits the redemption of empire through the enlightened guidance of a male superman who has successfully decolonized his consciousness from restrictive limitations. Like many of William S. Burroughs’s novels from the same period, Dune valorizes self-­control and autonomy, and it demonizes addiction, habit, appetite, and reliance. Herbert demonstrates this at the beginning of the novel when the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam subjects Paul to the gom jabbar ritual. The Bene Gesserit believe that self-­control (defined as mastery over one’s involuntary reactions) distinguishes humans from animals. To this end, they subject potential humans to extreme pain as a test of their humanity. Paul must keep his hand in a pain-­inducer, even though it feels as if his skin is being burned away, to prove that his mind and will are stronger than his instinctive reflexes. As Mohiam remarks, “a human can override any nerve in the body” (Herbert 10). Should Paul flinch or withdraw his hand, she will kill him with the poison needle of the gom jabbar, a weapon that “kills only animals” (8). The gom jabbar tests Paul’s command over himself; he is successful only if he can conquer, through will and reason, the parts of himself that otherwise function involuntarily—as the novel famously asserts, fear is the mind killer. Dune thus valorizes self-­mastery to a fetishistic level, and it demonizes impulses (such as fear) that reduce or diminish a person’s self-­control. The Harkonnens, for example, are characterized by uncontrollable appetites; Baron Harkonnen is so obese that he requires suspensor technology to move his bloated body. He is a slave to his appetites, and his addictive consumption is portrayed as vulgar and monstrous. Herbert graphically emphasizes this through the baron’s unrestrained lust for violent intercourse with young boys. Baron Harkonnen enslaves others though their appetites, dependencies, and passions. He manipulates Doctor Yueh (breaking his imperial conditioning) by kidnapping and threatening his Bene Gesserit wife. He controls his mentat through melange addiction, he manipulates Thufir Hawat by twisting his lust for revenge and addicting him to a poison that requires a



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 47

daily antidote, and he addicts his bodyguard to drugs to ensure his obedience. In these ways, Baron Harkonnen demonstrates the dangers of the loss of self-­control; dependency is framed as a vulnerability that can be exploited by one’s enemies. In Herbert’s novel, power is achieved by manipulating and controlling the dependencies of others while remaining as independent as possible oneself. In this regard, Dune participates in the fascination with addiction and dependence that Melley describes as characteristic of “agency panic.” As Melley observes, “within the discourse of possessive individualism, addicts do not meet the criteria for personhood because they are not wholly autonomous, rational agents” (167). In a historical context where liberal personhood has come under crisis, Dune functions as a fantasy in which absolute autonomy can be reconstituted through decolonizing the self from external dependencies. The narrative logic of reverse colonization enables Paul’s quest for absolute mastery to be framed as a journey to overcome his status as a victim-­figure inhibited by psychic dependencies and limitations. This theme of freedom from dependency extends beyond the individual self into the economic and political systems of the galactic Imperium as a whole: Paul manipulates the Spacing Guild by threatening its dependency on spice. As David M. Miller notes, the economic and political system of the Imperium hinges on the spice: “The Imperium depends on the Landsraad, the Landsraad upon the Imperium. Both draw economic power from CHOAM. CHOAM cannot function without the Space Guild, but the Space Guild is dependent upon spice” (19). Herbert’s setting reflects (on a galactic scale) the conditions of economic globalization that were beginning to emerge in the 1960s: extensive forms of connectivity across space and time require high-­speed transportation, and transportation requires natural resources with limited availability. Miller insightfully compares the role of spice in Dune to the importance of oil in late twentieth-­century global economics. Just as an OPEC oil embargo was deployed as a threat to global oil supply in 1973, Paul uses the threat of a spice embargo (or the complete destruction of the spice on Arrakis) to bring the empire to its knees: “The people who can destroy a thing, they control it,” he tells his allies during their mobilization for war against the Harkonnens (Herbert 422). In this sense, personal dependencies (such as addictions) are directly juxtaposed

48

ch a p t er 1

with political and economic dependencies. Herbert valorizes self-­contained systems, whether these are individual bodies, economies, nation-­states, or biospheres. Dune suggests that colonization creates a relationship of interdependency between the imperial center and the colonized periphery; the novel explores the possibility that the power differential of such an interdependency can be reversed to address the imbalance of power between the imperial center and the colonial margins. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon argues that the greatest challenge faced by many decolonizing nations is that they were damaged by colonial exploitation and the subsequent withdrawal of colonial powers. The colonizers exploited available resources and then left, leaving the nations internally devastated, then found new ways (without direct territorial control) to maintain an economic advantage at the developing nations’ expense, continuing the cycle of exploitation in a new form. Herbert imagines a radical alternative to this process of decolonization: instead of winning a troubled independence from the Imperium, the Fremen of Arrakis seize control of the imperial system by manipulating the empire’s constitutive dependencies on spice. Paul becomes emperor by manipulating the Imperium’s spice addiction, and Stilgar (the Fremen chief) becomes the planetary governor of Arrakis, putting the Fremen in control of their own planet and the Imperium as a whole. In some ways, Herbert’s dream of a power reversal between center and periphery is more radical than Fanon’s call for independence, reparations, and autonomous self-­development for postcolonial nations in the aftermath of colonial withdrawal. At the same time, the decolonization of Arrakis is not accomplished through the efforts of the colonized. Dune suggests that colonial injustices will be corrected by an elite agent from the imperial center (the equivalent of an enlightened American or European) who will lead colonized subjects to a dominant role in the imperial system. Paul emerges as a “Lawrence of Arabia” figure who leads the savage Fremen to victory over the empire. Furthermore, Paul’s goal is to correct the errors and excesses of empire rather than dismantle the imperial system. Herbert offers an apology for empire in Dune, rather than a sustained critique of imperial injustices. A stronger speculative exploration of anticolonial resistance might imagine



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 49

the Fremen overthrowing the Imperium on their own terms to achieve autonomous self-­determination. In Herbert’s novel, however, all indigenous progress is stimulated and guided by heroic outsiders. Imperialism is beneficial for colonies, Herbert implies, because it spreads progress and civilization; the problem is the tyranny of bad leaders, not the systemic injustices of the imperial system. Even the planetologist who organizes the Fremen resistance in the first place, Pardot Kynes, is an outsider and an imperial agent who, like Paul, “goes native” to join the Fremen and become a leader among them. Like Heinlein, Herbert offers a critique of territorial imperialism while upholding the ideals of capitalist accumulation that motivate imperial exploits. Dune is remarkable in its capacity to offer such condescending paternalism alongside a sincere and steadfast critique of imperial culture and politics. Herbert offers Western audiences who feel guilty about benefiting from empire a way to have their cake and eat it, too: readers are invited to distance themselves from identification with imperial oppressors and identify with decolonizing nationalists overcoming the tyranny of imperialism. This pattern is repeated in countless high-­profile science fiction narratives—such as James Cameron’s Avatar (2009)—that obsessively invite identification with anticolonial forces. At the same time, however, reader identification with the decolonizing Fremen in Dune is necessarily incomplete. The Fremen, while virtuous and uncorrupted by civilization, like the Native Americans in Cooper’s Leather­ stocking Tales (1823–41), are still savages who only achieve progress and liberation when aided by an enlightened outsider from the imperial center. Paul serves as an ultimate figure of fantasy identification for Western readers. He is the enlightened postimperial subject who remains distant from both the corruption of the imperial metropolis and the savagery of the Fremen nationalists. He is one of the Fremen, yet he is above them; he proves himself superior to the Fremen (and everyone else) in every challenge presented to him. Ultimately, even more than Heinlein’s Smith, Paul embodies the epitome of genetic perfection and an apotheosis of redeemed heroic masculinity. Paul’s ascension centers on the acquisition of control; his journey inward to master himself and the empire revolves around his struggle to achieve domination over information and thus material contingency. Like Smith,

50

ch a p t er 1

Paul is remarkable because of his capacity to exert the dominance of reason and mind over body and emotion. His power increases when he awakens to psychic consciousness after his father’s death, but his psychic potential is at first dangerously limited. He suffers from blind spots in his precognitive powers that threaten to endanger his control over unforeseeable events. Paul observes the future, but his act of observation changes this future, and this makes future events even more uncertain. As a result, he feels helpless to prevent his destiny to ignite a holy war that will spread death and destruction throughout civilization. Paul’s solution is to drink the most powerful psychedelic in existence, an act that no man has ever survived, and his subsequent near-­death experience grants him nearly omniscient knowledge. With access to absolute information, he is freed from the unpredictable terrors of contingency; he gains the ability to maneuver the emperor and the Spacing Guild into an advantageous final confrontation on Arrakis. In the end, Dune offers a recuperation of heroic imperial masculinity through the aegis of internal decolonization. In a cultural environment where colonial fantasies are being challenged by a countercultural emphasis on emancipation and decolonization, Herbert creates a reverse colonization epic centered on an anticolonial hero who fights on the side of liberating nationalists. At a cultural moment when feminism seemingly threatens the stability of traditional gender roles, Dune offers the fantasy of a genetic superman who is “super” because he can do what powerful women (the Bene Gesserit) do better than the women can. Paul possesses perfect self-­control and psychedelic omniscience; he emerges as an ultimately reactionary and authoritarian hero for the contradictory fantasies of the rebellious 1960s.

2001: A Space Odyssey At first glance, Clarke’s novelization of 2001 appears to narrate an outward journey rather than an inward one. David Bowman’s interplanetary voyage to Jupiter and Saturn is only possible, however, because of the inward expansion of his capacity for superhuman self-­control. Bowman’s heightened self-­mastery, framed in the novel as the essential characteristic of a true frontiersman, gives him the discipline to reach a faraway monolith on Japetus (Iapetus), which transports him to an alien consciousness-­raising artifact



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 51

left behind by the mysterious elder race that developed the monolith technology. Bowman’s personal reserve in the face of fear during his journey to Saturn stands in sharp contrast to HAL’s psychotic hysteria and dramatic loss of self-­control; Bowman proves himself on the frontier by mastering his involuntary reactions and emotions. Like Stranger and Dune, 2001 centers on an inner-­space journey; all three novels foreground inward voyages to achieve enhanced self-­mastery and autonomous self-­ownership. Clarke asserts that all outward explorations are actually inward journeys because frontier exploration is centrally a process of unlocking and evolving hidden depths of human potential. The biological drive to explore new, unfamiliar, and dangerous environments is an evolutionary impetus, in his view, that forces humans to develop greater degrees of resourcefulness, awareness, and self-­control. Ultimately, just as in Dune and Stranger, the inward journey in 2001 leads to consolidating power and authority in a new godlike and authoritarian master subject. The central objective in each narrative is to achieve complete domination over one’s body and emotions, and this ascendancy is marked as an evolutionary leap forward for the human race, with humanity emblematically embodied by a masterful male subject. The climax of 2001, in particular, centers on Bowman’s ascension to psychedelic godhood. With access to alien technology, Bowman evolves into a starchild with omnipotent control over himself and the fabric of space and time. In this iteration of the traditional imperial adventure narrative, masculine hegemony is still achieved in a battle against a racialized other (in this case a psychotic artificial intelligence) on the frontier, but the novel emphasizes that Bowman’s true victory is his triumph over his unconscious impulses. In contrast to HAL, whose “unconscious feelings of guilt” cause him to lose control over himself in the form of a psychotic break during the space voyage (A. Clarke 174), Bowman has enhanced self-­mastery. He notes that on two occasions prior to the mission, he had “almost lost control of all his higher logical processes” and had been “within seconds of becoming a frenzied bundle of random impulses” during moments of crisis and extreme panic, yet in each case he “won through” and maintained self-­control, just as he did during HAL’s breakdown (175). His ability to control himself also defines him during his travel through the star gate: “He wanted to close his eyes, and shut out the pearly nothingness that surrounded him; but that

52

ch a p t er 1

was the act of a coward, and he would not yield to it” (210). As with Valentine Michael Smith and Paul Atreides, self-­mastery for Dave Bowman is the ultimate means to achieve a greater degree of mastery over space and time. Clarke begins the foreword of 2001 by noting that there are a hundred billion suns in the Milky Way—enough stars to represent every human who has ever lived. He continues: “every one of those stars is a sun, often far more brilliant and glorious than the small nearby star we call the Sun. And many—perhaps most—of those alien suns have planets circling them. So certainly there is enough land in the sky to give every member of the human species, back to the first ape-­man, his own private, world-­sized heaven—or hell” (xvii). Clarke builds on this opening invocation of a superabundant surplus among the stars in the opening section of the novel, “Primeval Night,” where he suggests that until the intervention of the monoliths, humanity’s primitive ancestors were starving amid a surplus of food until they achieved the cognitive leap to develop tools. Clarke’s central theme is that in each successive stage of evolutionary development, humans are surrounded by a surplus of resources (food, energy, land, etc.), and the only thing that stops them from taking advantage of these resources is their inability to conceptualize methods to gain access to them. This theme reflects the economic fantasy of unlimited surplus that drives imperialism in the modern era and beyond. T. J. Jackson Lears describes this attitude as representative of a twentieth-­century “abundance psychology” that replaces the “scarcity psychology” of the nineteenth century (453). The capitalist logic of ever-­expanding markets and economic frontiers reflected in “Primeval Night” is based on a fundamental disavowal of the possibility of material scarcity. Twentieth-­century imperial capitalism imagines that there is never scarcity in any sense that would imply the need for the conservation of resources (or, for that matter, ecological sustainability). It is a fantasy that suggests there is only ever a temporary relative scarcity that can be overcome through innovation, because beyond the relative limits of scarcity there is an infinite surplus to be accessed by the bold, the innovative, the worthy, and the elite. The affluent deserve the benefits of wealth, the logic goes, because they have innovated ways to access this limitless surplus. People who are poor, by contrast, can be left behind with no moral reservations (as we saw in Stranger) because everything is there for the taking if one is simply clever and competitive enough to obtain it.



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 53

This logic only works in a conceptual system that presupposes superabundant surplus such as Clarke’s; in the milieu of a closed system with limited resources, such a fantasy quickly deteriorates. Capitalism and imperialism intersect at the junction of their mutual disavowal of closed systems—there are no absolute limits, there are only relative limits to be overcome through scientific and entrepreneurial innovation. This assumption of the availability of superabundant surplus for the cognitive elite is what distinguishes 2001 as a psychedelic reverse colonization narrative. Heroic humans (like Bowman and his primate ancestors) are psychologically hindered from achieving their full potential only by crucial shortcomings in knowledge and perspective. To understand how this ideology functions as a mode of contemporary imperial fantasy, consider how this logic drives neoliberal economics and politics today. For example, impoverished nations are often thought to be responsible for their own hardships. Rather than taking into account histories of colonial violence and extant conditions of imperial exploitation, such nations are admonished to simply innovate more to prosper—as though economic success is a matter of will and ingenuity alone. The same mythology is enshrined in popular self-­help books like The Secret (2006), which propose that unlimited abundance is available for anyone who can simply achieve the right mindset. Read in this light, 2001 functions as a particularly noxious variety of reverse colonization narrative: imagine yourself in the position of someone who experiences deprivation, the novel argues, and then expand your consciousness to understand that the limitations you think you experience are simply caused by the shortcomings of your own perspective. The challenge of accessing superabundant resources in outer space, the novel argues, is above all a perceptual journey into one’s taken-­for-­granted assumptions; the key to evolutionary progress is the ability to recognize abundance where others observe only scarcity. The difference between lesser and greater evolutionary beings, according to 2001, is the ability to transcend one’s own perceptual limits and observe possibilities where others do not. Consciousness expansion, or the ability to perceive relative limits where others see absolute boundaries, is not just innovation for Clarke. It is also a cognitive advantage that makes one part of a species different from other creatures, and as Clarke shows, this racialization of cognitive difference legitimates the use of violence by supposedly superior peoples against others who are deemed inferior.

54

ch a p t er 1

Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke valorize self-­control and a cognitive command of emotions and unconscious nervous functions. In addition, their novels emphasize the liberation of inner space as an evolutionary leap forward. In Stranger, Smith discovers a critical wrongness in humanity that disturbs him. Jubal comforts him at the climax of the novel by suggesting that if he can enlighten just a tiny portion of the population, the remainder will not be able to compete and the correct breed of humanity will evolve. Similarly, the central problem in Dune is the widespread genetic degeneration of the human race; the Bene Gesserit attempt to resolve this with their breeding program to produce the Kwisatz Haderach. Paul’s position as the apotheosis of human genetic perfection enables him to harness the unstoppable jihad that drives humanity, like an instinctual sexual heat, to spread war and destruction that creates new genetic possibilities. Finally, 2001 suggests that pioneering explorers are the vanguard of evolutionary progress. Bowman evolves into a new type of human (just as his primate ancestors did) because his curiosity and self-­control give him a competitive advantage in dangerous survival situations.

Conclusion In these psychedelic reverse colonization narratives, the liberation of inner space serves as the foundation for a new mode of imperial fantasy adapted for a shifting postwar context in which territorial colonialism is no longer regarded as a glorious undertaking in Western culture. All three novels therefore eschew overt colonialism in favor of psychic decolonization. There is no need, in Stranger, for humans to colonize Mars (or exert military control over any other territory); economic winners (with decolonized minds) will be able to gain a comparative advantage in any context, and they are obligated to surpass and ultimately eliminate the economic losers for the good of humanity as a whole. In Dune, Paul Atreides leads a psychedelic revolution that ultimately redefines the role of Arrakis in the imperial system, transitioning the desert world from an exploited colony to an imperial power center. Finally, although Cold War empire building in 2001 leads to a crisis of nuclear brinksmanship in the imagined future, the novel nonetheless draws a direct continuity between



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 55

imperial progress and human evolution. Clarke suggests that pioneers, explorers, and conquerors are the most evolutionarily advantaged breed of humanity because their perspectives are unconstrained by the limits of scarcity, and he argues that they deserve to become benevolent psychedelic supermen guiding the progress of humanity as a whole. In various ways, all three novels use the logic of reverse colonization to articulate new forms of imperial fantasy. Ultimately, they suggest that self-­ mastery (achieved through the liberation of inner space) inexorably leads to mastery over space and time. The powers of each representative hero therefore allegorize what David Harvey refers to as “space-­time compression,” or the ability to move and communicate over vast distances so quickly and efficiently that the world (or the galaxy, etc.) seems to become a smaller place (The Condition of Postmodernity 240). In this regard, the trope of psychic decolonization functions in service of what Istvan Csicsery-­Ronay Jr. describes as the transition from colonial imperialism toward Hardt and Negri’s notion of empire—a postmodern neo-imperialism characterized by decentered regimes of power operating through the elite manipulation of temporality and distance (Csicsery-­Ronay 232). In Stranger, this mastery over space-­time is represented by Smith’s ability to teleport and dilate his personal experience of duration; these abilities grant him and his followers unparalleled competitive advantages. Paul Atreides develops a similar mastery of space and time when his psychedelic use of the spice grants him omniscient information control. Paul recognizes that the empire’s entire economic regime depends on the superluminal space-­time compression offered by the Spacing Guild in the service of transportation and trade. By manipulating the guild’s spice dependency, Paul effectively gains economic control of the empire. David Bowman’s evolution into a cosmic starchild grants him similar powers to move across vast distances, a mastery over information inaccessible to other people, and the ability to discorporate objects (such as nuclear weapons) with the power of his mind. These novels reflect shifting cultural investments in traditional modern values (control, progress, mastery) and newer postmodern values—such as mastery over space, time, information, and affect—to leverage advantage in a competitive marketplace where the strong profit and evolve while the weak suffer and perish.

56

ch a p t er 1

Although the emphasis on self-­mastery and control emphasized in these novels echoes (as we have seen) the fascist ideals of masculinity described by Theweleit in Male Fantasies, it is also important to note that these stories do not simply reflect a straightforward embrace of fascist ideology. Instead, iconic 1960s reverse colonization narratives adapt and transform ideals of fascist masculinity for a postwar context increasingly characterized by the emergence of neoliberal rationality in service of postmodern imperialism. As Joshua Pearson observes, Paul’s specific mode of mastery ultimately “exemplifies capacities of risk-­management and affective manipulation central to the postindustrial financial market system,” and he therefore functions as “an early prototype for the exemplary neoliberal subject that emerges into dominance 20-­odd years later” (155–56). The same can be said for Smith in Stranger and Bowman in 2001: all three hero-­figures achieve a psychedelic awakening that offers a fluid and dynamic command over time, space, information, and affect in shifting and unstable conditions. Hugh C. O’Connell notes that this fantasy of informational and affective omniscience is observable in a more fully developed form in later works of financial science fiction, such as Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House (2010), where mind-­expanding drugs enable financial traders to become superhuman quantitative analysts (“quants”) “who can quickly navigate and extrapolate from competing inputs and leverage information into profit” (144). Herbert’s mentats offer early prototypes for later financial super-­quants; the psychedelic supermen of iconic 1960s science fiction adapt and reconfigure fascist models of masculinity in service of a new imperial paradigm that increasingly values flexibility, adaptability, and affective manipulation. This adaptation of fascist masculinity is enabled by the logic of reverse colonization. All three heroes must achieve psychic liberation from internal colonization to unlock their true potential. Masterful agency is acquired through a struggle for individual freedom (rather than through outwardly focused colonial conquest). This emphasis on freedom ultimately serves as the fulcrum that enables the ideal of decolonization (stripped of historical context) to empower the expression of liberal and neoliberal masculinities. As Wendy Brown notes, “the central paradox, perhaps even the central ruse, of neoliberal governance” rises from the fact that “the neoliberal revolution takes place in the



Liberating Psychedelic Masculinity 57

name of freedom” (Undoing 108). This is a freedom, however, entirely focused on entrepreneurial selfhood: psychedelic supermen are free to become self-­made masters, uninhibited by the perceptual restrictions that otherwise contain their exercise of agency. Freedom, in the end, is ultimately the freedom to exercise power. As Pearson notes, the 1960s are an early site of emergence for models of neoliberal masculinity that mature into full expression “20-­odd years later” (156). A key aspect of my argument is that the fantastical logic of reverse colonization—as expressed by novels such as Stranger, Dune, and 2001—is central to the transformations in imperial fantasy that ultimately support and enable a spectrum of imperial ideologies and practices in the 1960s and beyond. There are important continuities and differences between U.S. imperialism during the Cold War and the War on Terror, for example, just as there are important continuities and differences between the imperial ideologies inherent to neoliberal globalization and the nationalist populism sweeping the United States during the Trump era. Global imperialism in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries is a heterogeneous and often conflicting assemblage of social, political, and economic practices that takes different shapes at different times and in different situations. In many cases, the appropriation of victim identity in service of imperial privilege functions as the core enabling logic of these various imperial modalities. This is often made possible through the science fictional logic of reverse colonization, which imaginatively situates subjects who benefit from imperial advantages as victims struggling to achieve emancipation. In the introduction to this book, I argued that reverse colonization narratives are often characterized by a powerful tension between imperial critique and imperial masochism: such stories invite identification with victims, but they can also provoke identification as victims. This chapter focused on Stranger, Dune, and 2001 because these iconic narratives express the most striking articulation of the latter tendency. Despite their overt challenges to territorial colonialism, they overwhelmingly appropriate a sense of subaltern victimhood for the purpose of fortifying the imperial agency of elite masculine subjects. As we will see in the following chapters, many other reverse colonization narratives express a much more ambivalent tension between imperial masochism and imperial critique, and science fiction stories

58

ch a p t er 1

that champion the liberation of inner space do not always function in the service of imperial masochism. Herbert, Heinlein, and Clarke exemplify what I think of as the most troubling tendencies of 1960s reverse colonization fantasies: they simultaneously deploy what Hardt and Negri identify as modern and postmodern imperialist paradigms, and their expression of imperial masochism valorizes emergent neoliberal values—such as a command over space, time, information, and affect—that are characteristic of postmodern expressions of imperial sovereignty.

V CHVPTER

2 Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle

O

Ontological Reverse Colonization

n May 23, 2014, Elliot Rodger—who later became known as the “Supreme Gentleman” of the antifeminist incel subculture— went on a killing rampage in Isla Vista, California, near the campus of UC Santa Barbara. He ultimately murdered six people and wounded fourteen others before killing himself. His attacks were premeditated, and he left behind several YouTube videos and a 137-­page manifesto detailing the experiences that led him to believe that women were “the ultimate evil” whose “wickedness must be contained in order prevent [sic] future generations from falling to degeneracy” (136).1 Rodger began by stabbing his three roommates to death in their shared apartment; he then proceeded to the UCSB Alpha Phi sorority house, where he planned to undertake a murderous “War on Women” (132).2 Unable to gain access to the house, Rodger opened fire outside, killing two women and injuring a third. He drove away, shooting at pedestrians and attempting to run people down with his car, before ultimately committing suicide (Woolf, “Chilling”). Rodger has become a heroic figure among incels, or “involuntary celibates,” an online community of (mostly white) men who regard themselves as victims because they believe that women refuse to have sex with them.3 Minutes before driving a rental van into a crowd of pedestrians in Toronto in 2018, self-­described incel Alek Minassian praised Rodger on Facebook,

60

ch a p t er 2

saying, “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys!4 All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!” (“Elliot Rodger”).5 Incel subculture embraces a worldview that imagines men as victims, and few figures embody this strange logic of alt-­victimhood more strikingly than Rodger himself. Born into a wealthy family (his father was a filmmaker who worked on The Hunger Games and his mother was friends with George Lucas), Rodger’s manifesto overwhelmingly centers on his resentful, frustrated sense of entitlement.6 The experience of rage over being denied things that he feels he deserves unifies Rodger’s story. He repeatedly complains how unfair his life is because he is denied pleasures that others enjoy, yet he rarely acknowledges that he was born into a life of extraordinary wealth and privilege—he was cared for by nannies in his youth, he attended expensive private schools, he traveled internationally on family vacations, and he had access to red carpet Hollywood premieres and private concerts for the rich and elite. Ultimately, women are the figures throughout Rodger’s autobiography who deny him the things he feels he deserves. He despises his stepmother, for example, because she attempts to impose restrictive rules on him (16), and he berates his mother when she refuses to remarry a wealthy man to allow him to enjoy greater financial abundance: “I told her that she should suffer through any negative aspects of marriage just for my sake,” he notes, “because it would completely save my life, but she still refused” (91). Finally (and most devastatingly), he blames the tragedy of his life—and his violent Isla Vista attacks—on all the women who have unreasonably (in his view) refused to sleep with him. Upon hearing that a black male friend of one of his housemates may have lost his virginity at the age of thirteen to a white girl, Rodger seethes with the unapologetic racist rage of frustrated sexual entitlement: How could an inferior, ugly black boy be able to get a white girl and not me? I am beautiful, and I am half white myself. I am descended from British aristocracy. He is descended from slaves. I deserve it more. I tried not to believe his foul words, but they were already said, and it was hard to erase from my mind. If this is actually true, if this ugly black filth was able to have sex with a blonde white girl at the age of



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 61

thirteen while I’ve had to suffer virginity all my life, then this just proves how ridiculous the female gender is. They would give themselves to this filthy scum, but they reject ME? The injustice! (84) Women “have something mentally wrong with them” (84) in Rodger’s view: they “choose to mate with the most brutal of men” instead of having sex with “magnificent gentlemen” like him, and this creates terribly unfair anguish and suffering (136). Women therefore deserve the violence he will inflict on them, in his estimation, because he is the ultimate victim seeking righteous revenge: “I am the true victim in all of this. I am the good guy. Humanity struck at me first by condemning me to experience so much suffering . . . I will punish everyone. And it will be beautiful. Finally, at long last, I can show the world my true worth” (137). It is not difficult to see that Rodger’s narrative—and incel subculture as a whole—uses the logic of imperial masochism to disavow male privilege and portray men as victims who should be entitled to greater advantages than they already enjoy. What’s also striking to observe is the role that science fictional references play in Rodger’s self-­reflections. His autobiography obsessively cites science fiction films, TV shows, and video games: he notes that he played a variety of games (ranging from Star Wars: Shadows of the Empire and the Halo series through Diablo 2 and Warcraft 3) before immersing himself in World of Warcraft, and he attended the red carpet Hollywood premieres of The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones, Revenge of the Sith, and The Hunger Games. “I always was and always will be a huge Star Wars fan,” he remarks. “I had already seen the original trilogy many times, and I considered myself very lucky to be able to go to the premiere of the new Star Wars movie” (12). Although Colin Milburn notes that science fiction video games have had a powerful influence on reactionary online countercultures, Rodger’s description of his addiction to World of Warcraft suggests that he predominantly used the game as an escape from social pressures that he found unbearable, rather than as a source of narrative content he actively identified with. “The ability to play video games with people online temporarily filled the social void,” he said. “I hid myself away in the online World of Warcraft, a place where I felt comfortable and secure” (40).

62

ch a p t er 2

In contrast to this, Rodger found sources of active identification in speculative fiction film and television. He notes that he strongly identified with Anakin Skywalker from the Star Wars prequel trilogy (42), with Prince Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender (46), and with Tyrion Lannister from A Game of Thrones (89)—male figures that in various ways represent frustrated or resentful experiences of thwarted entitlement. Indeed, there are moments when Rodger himself, without any degree of ironic self-­ awareness, sounds like a caricature of young Anakin Skywalker descending toward the Dark Side: “I began to have fantasies of becoming very powerful and stopping everyone from having sex,” he says. “My anger made me stronger inside. This was when I formed my ideas that sex should be outlawed. It is the only way to make the world a fair and just place. If I can’t have it, I will destroy it” (56). It would be absurd to blame science fiction for turning Elliot Rodger into a killer, and it is reasonably obvious that George Lucas never intended for young Anakin Skywalker to be a positive role model. As Carol Clover demonstrates, however, audience identification with cinematic figures is by no means straightforward; individuals can often identify with fictional characters in ways that are quite different than authors and filmmakers intend or anticipate. As Rodger’s autobiography reveals, science fictional narratives contributed in powerful ways to the environment that shaped his identity and worldviews. Beyond Rodger’s identification with fictional characters who represent frustrated entitlement, his autobiography reveals a disturbing engagement with an even deeper mode of science fictional thinking: the idea that reality itself is somehow wrong, twisted, or broken, and that an insurgent revolution must be fought against such a false reality to create or restore a better world. Rodger’s manifesto illuminates an infantile sense of entitlement: he believes his own desires are all that matter, and he throws violent tantrums when his yearnings are not immediately gratified. Furthermore, he is incapable of regarding other people (especially women) as beings-­in-­themselves with their own feelings, experiences, and desires—others exist for him only as means to ends or as potential sources for the satisfaction of his yearnings. When this cosmology of entitlement is thwarted—when others refuse to



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 63

exist only in service to his desires—Rodger arrives at the conclusion that there must be something wrong with the world itself. “I questioned the very fabric of reality,” he says (109). “I concluded that women are flawed. There is something mentally wrong with the way their brains are wired. . . . Women are like a plague that must be quarantined. When I came to this brilliant, perfect revelation, I felt like everything was now clear to me, in a bitter, twisted way. I am one of the few people on this world who has the intelligence to see this” (117). Although he might have regarded himself as one of only a small group to view the world in this manner, Rodger quickly discovered the company of others with similar attitudes online. He notes that while he was awakening to this revelation, he was also discovering the website PUAHate.com, a now-­ defunct incel forum dedicated to discrediting pick-­up artist techniques. PUAHate was described by one of its users as “one of the few truly ‘Red Pill’ communities,” and Rodger’s manifesto draws on specific language that mirrors the Red Pill Constitution, an online declaration of antifeminist beliefs and values (Woolf, “ ‘PUAHate’ ”). As I noted in the introduction, “the red pill” is a reference to the film The Matrix, in which resistance leader Morpheus offers Neo a choice between the red pill (which will awaken him from the simulated false reality he has been living within) or the blue pill (which will enable him to remain asleep and unaware of the true nature of reality). Drawing on these images from The Matrix, the Red Pill Constitution dedicates itself to exposing feminism as a false and manipulative worldview that is ultimately “nothing more than a female supremacy movement posing as one of humanist egalitarianism” (“The Red Pill Constitution”). From a Red Pill perspective, in other words, the notion that women have been (and continue to be) subjected to systemic inequity is a lie (a false reality) that obscures the deeper and more sinister truth that men are the true victims of a vast and far-­reaching female supremacist conspiracy. To question the nature of reality is a legitimate philosophical endeavor, yet in Rodger’s case (and for incel subculture and for Red Pill antifeminist online culture as a whole), this philosophical challenge to the nature of reality is inescapably inflected with a science fictional mode of thinking that is deeply influenced by reverse colonization fantasy. The Matrix,

64

ch a p t er 2

which portrays humanity trapped in a virtual prison and colonized by rogue AI, is one of the defining reverse colonization films of the late 1990s, yet it is nearly universally acknowledged that “awakening from simulacrum” films and stories7—ranging from World on a Wire (1973) to The Matrix and beyond—owe a foundational debt, in particular, to the creative imaginings of Philip K. Dick.8 During the 1960s and 1970s, Dick was a prolific author of what might be regarded as ontological reverse colonization narratives—in other words, stories that imagine that “reality” as we experience it is a prison and humans have been oppressively colonized by false beliefs and attitudes. Dick lived in California and was influenced by 1960s psychiatric discourse and by the psychedelic countercultures of his era; he influentially contributed to the popularization of the idea that hallucinations and drugs (i.e., “red pills”) offer access to layers of reality that are inaccessible to normal perception and cognition. In “Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality” (1964), for example, Dick argues that hallucinations and drug experiences can provoke visions that “are not delusions at all, but are, on the contrary, accurate perceptions of an area of reality that the rest of us cannot . . . reach” (171). During his own visionary experiences in February and March 1974 (which I discuss at greater length in the next chapter), Dick wrote that something awoke within him and showed him that the world as he had known it was a lie: “it, from inside me, looked out and saw that the world did not compute, that I—and it—had been lied to. It denied the reality, and power, and authenticity of the world, saying ‘This cannot exist; it cannot exist’ ” (Sutin 6). A few days later, he wrote that the revelation lifted him above “the limitations of the space-­time matrix” and enabled him to apprehend the fundamental lie of the world: “I knew that the world around me was cardboard, a fake” (Sutin 6). This newly awakened force of awareness also propelled him toward emancipatory revolution: “Through its power of perception I saw what really existed, and through its power of no-­thought decision, I acted to free myself. It [the awakened force] took on in battle, as a champion of all human spirits in thrall, every evil, every Iron Imprisoning thing” (Sutin 6–7; emphasis in original). There is often a powerful appeal to the notion that reality, as many experience it, is a superficial illusion compared with a deeper truth hidden from



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 65

ordinary perception. Philosophers since Plato have been fascinated by this idea, and disciplines such as philosophy, history, sociology, critical theory, and many of the physical sciences are devoted to exploring the various ways reality is vastly more complex than the commonsense understandings we apply to it. Despite the legitimacy of such inquiries into the nature of reality, we have now arrived at a cultural moment when certain so-­called realities are dismissed as lies and illusions when they are regarded as inconvenient or troublesome. Working to minimize climate change would disrupt global petrocapitalism, for example, so entire industries have been created to promote the message that global warming must be a hoax perpetuated by a conspiracy of anticorporate scientists. Similarly, inconvenient truths that don’t fit a certain political agenda are now routinely dismissed as lies generated by the so-­called liberal media. When former President Donald Trump lost the 2020 election, he groundlessly refused to acknowledge the validity of the election results, just as he had previously dismissed information provided to him by U.S. intelligence services when it conflicted with his own worldview, lashing out at intelligence professionals as “passive and naïve” agents of a “conspiratorial deep state establishment working against him” (Landler). When modern-­day subjects of power and privilege encounter a “reality” that stands in the way of what they want, this is often taken as evidence of a powerful hidden conspiracy working against them. This is one of the lynchpins of imperial fantasy in the contemporary era, and it is powerfully fortified by the science fiction logic of reverse colonization. Subjects of privilege, like Eliott Rodger, are able—through the logic of reverse colonization—to imagine themselves as colonized and oppressed by reality itself (or by the way a certain social reality has been constructed to their disadvantage), and they are emboldened to fight back against the world (the system, the establishment, etc.) that has deceived and persecuted them. It would be unjust to entirely blame Dick for the prevalence of this worldview today, just as it would be unthinkable to hold the Wachowskis responsible for how “the red pill” from The Matrix has been appropriated by alt-­right and antifeminist subcultures. In both cases, these artists would likely be horrified by how their ideas have become appropriated as ideological lynchpins for reactionary movements. Nonetheless, few figures have contributed so deeply and powerfully to the cultural fantasy that we are all colonized victims of a false reality as Dick, who was one of the most

66

ch a p t er 2

influential figures to explore and articulate the science fiction logic of ontological reverse colonization during a key historical moment (the 1960s) when imperial fantasy was transitioning toward its contemporary forms. One of Dick’s most enduring legacies has been to popularize stories in which so-­called consensual reality is revealed to be a colonizing system of control. Roger Zelazny has noted that in Dick’s fictions, “reality is approximately as dependable as a politician’s promise” and “as relative a thing as the dryness of our respective Martinis” (viii). An overriding concern with the illusory nature of the real characterizes much of Dick’s writing. His protagonists are often existentially uncertain how to distinguish between perceptions and hallucinations, between humans and nonhumans, between allies and enemies, and between truths and falsehoods. In The Simulacra (1964), for example, a future United States is ruled by an authoritarian regime of elites who secretly control and manipulate a robot president; within this environment of simulation and conspiracy, nothing is what it seems. In The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1964), Dick imagines a future in which life on Earth (and other human colonies) has become so unbearable that people regularly escape into psychedelic fantasy to cope with existential despair; the introduction of a revolutionary new drug seems to offer hope of salvation, but it may only trap users in inescapable hallucinations. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), which was later adapted into the film Blade Runner (1982), imagines a world where the very concept of authenticity has become so unstable that even detectives like Rick Deckard, who hunt renegade androids, ultimately cannot be sure of their own humanity. Countless other similar examples occur in Dick’s fiction. In Ubik (1969), for example, the central protagonist can’t even be completely certain if he is alive or dead. In Dick’s literary worlds, reality is a prison, authenticity is an illusion, and addiction is a conspiratorial system of control. Many scholars, such as Lee Braver, have observed that Dick’s fixation on entrapment in unending simulacra reflects his exploration of a postmodern Gnostic theology; although this is certainly true, it is also vital to observe that Dick (more than almost any other postwar science fiction writer) gives expression to a fundamental structure of feeling that characterizes postwar imperial masochism. For Dick’s characters, the supposedly obvious truths that we take



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 67

for granted are often the products of vast, malevolent, and authoritarian conspiracies. Many scholars have lauded Dick’s tendency to imagine shifting and unstable ontologies,9 and in some ways, the disciplinary history of science fiction studies has been established in part on the argument that revolutions against consensual reality are productive insofar as they open the way toward critical utopian possibilities.10 Although there is great value to these perspectives, they tend to overlook the fact that challenging the nature of reality and advocating for a revolution against established norms are not in any way inherently progressive gestures. In the early decades of the twenty-­first century, some of Dick’s most profound inheritors are those, like Elliot Rodger, who embody values and attitudes that we don’t tend to associate with Dick’s work or his politics— although perhaps, in certain ways, we should. Despite the fact that he is almost universally celebrated in science fiction criticism (often with very good reasons), Dick’s biography reveals that he was not always an admirable figure, particularly in regard to his attitudes toward women. As Lawrence Sutin shows, Dick was a complex individual who deserves immense respect; nonetheless, like Elliot Rodger, he also had a striking inclination to personally self-­identify as a persecuted victim. He excelled in school, yet he regarded schools as prisons (Sutin 42–43), and he enjoyed portraying himself as a struggling academic underdog (Sutin 46–47). He had a very difficult relationship with his mother, and he drew troubling parallels between the struggles of children and the struggles of people fighting against systemic injustice: “Parents,” he once wrote, “have a vested interest in keeping their kids little and dumb and in chains, like all oppressed groups” (Sutin 55). He especially painted himself as a victim when his marriages were collapsing (he was married and divorced five times), and his sense that women were preying on him at times justified a refusal to pay child support for his children (Sutin 133). After moving to Orange County, Dick raged against “how fucking dumb and dull and futile and empty middle class life is” (Sutin 235), and he regarded married suburban life as an oppressive and emasculating prison: “During each marriage I was the bourgeois wage earner,” he wrote, and he justified extramarital affairs as “an antidote to the middle class safe rational spineless world my wives had forced on me” (Sutin 202–3).

68

ch a p t er 2

In other words, women were often the wardens of Dick’s imagined prisons, and struggles against femininity were often battles to seize agency in the face of inauthenticity. Dick was sometimes aware of this misogynistic tendency in himself: “I am drawn to women who resemble my mother,” he wrote, “in order to re-­enact the primordial situation in which I fight my way loose at the end and divide off into autonomy” (Sutin 56). After receiving criticism from Ursula K. Le Guin on how this psychological tendency often manifested in his fiction as what he sometimes called an “evil woman problem” (Sutin 109), Dick noted that “my depiction of females has been inadequate and even sometimes vicious” (Sutin 277), and he attempted to transform his portrayals of women, particularly in later novels such as The Transmigration of Timothy Archer. All in all, it is difficult to overlook the fact that Dick was sometimes a profound imperial masochist. He enjoyed the pleasures of self-­identification with the oppressed despite his own advantages, and—particularly when it came to gender—he passionately claimed victim status to disavow his masculine privilege and justify poor (and sometimes violent) treatment of the women in his personal life (Sutin 199).11 To his credit, Dick is a profoundly ambivalent figure whose writing interrogates systems of inequity even as it indulges in paranoid victimization narratives. Furthermore, he almost never regresses into the juvenile psychedelic superhero fantasies observable in the works of authors such as Herbert, Heinlein, or Clarke. In Dick’s writing, masculinity is never untroubled, and there is almost never a celebratory reconstitution of privilege for a male hero who triumphs over the oppressive forces victimizing him. As Sutin observes, if there is anything constant in Dick’s writing, it is a foundational sense of unresolvable indeterminacy (233). At the same time, one of the basic tendencies at the heart of Dick’s personal life and his writing—an inclination to identify as victim entrapped or colonized in a false reality—becomes an archetypal feature of science fiction in the postwar period and beyond. Ultimately (judging by Elliot Rodger and incel subculture) the reactionary appeal of ontological reverse colonization fantasy has left an enduring cultural mark just as influential as Dick’s more tentative attitude of humility and kindness in the face of ontological uncertainty.



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 69

Throughout this book, I argue that reverse colonization narratives exhibit an ambivalent tension between imperial critique and imperial masochism—such narratives ask audiences to identify with victims, yet they can also enable audiences to identify as victims. This ambivalence is particularly observable in one of Dick’s most famous novels, The Man in the High Castle, which functions as a reverse colonization fantasy on two distinct levels. On one hand, The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history reverse colonization narrative that imagines a world where the United States lost World War II and found itself colonized and occupied by Axis powers. In addition to this, the story (like many of Dick’s other fictions) is an ontological reverse colonization narrative in which certain characters come to understand that they are trapped in a false reality that hides a deeper hidden truth.12 On one hand, The Man in the High Castle encourages audiences to empathize with those who suffer from systemic oppression, particularly on the basis of race and ethnicity, by dramatizing real-­world experiences of racism with devastating emotional precision. On the other hand, it powerfully fortifies imperial masochism by inviting privileged male subjects to identify as victims struggling against internal and external domination. Ultimately, the novel reveals that the contradictory interpellations performed by reverse colonization narratives produce a contested imaginative terrain where imperial fantasy can be fortified or subverted (or both).

The Man in the High Castle The Man in the High Castle (MHC) has experienced a resurgence of popularity in recent years: Amazon’s adaptation of the novel, produced by Ridley Scott, has won widespread critical acclaim, and Angry Robot published Peter Tieryas’s novel United States of Japan, a contemporary reimagining of MHC, in 2016. Each adaptation of MHC centers on the pleasures of imagining a colonized United States in which citizens are freedom fighters waging a desperate insurgency against occupying forces. In Dick’s original version of The Man in the High Castle, Germany and Japan have divided the United States into occupied territories. The Nazis hold the northeastern United States, and the Japanese occupy the states on

70

ch a p t er 2

the Pacific coast. The Rocky Mountain states (such as Colorado) remain independent American territory, partially aligned with Japan. (Interestingly, critical analyses of MHC often fail to notice that the American South also retains its autonomy, in part because of its ideological alignment with the Reich). MHC is suspended between two profoundly contradictory reverse colonization tendencies. On one hand, the novel is a sharply critical reverse colonization narrative in its treatment of race and racism. As some scholars, such as Carl Freedman, have argued, part of what makes the novel powerful is that it uses the trope of alternate history to turn a mirror back toward America, revealing that a United States occupied by Nazis doesn’t look all that different than the United States that won the war.13 Dick’s portrayals of white Americans who are subjected to racism from Japanese occupiers highlights an awareness of how racism is directed at people of color in the United States, and the most striking moments in the novel are often portrayals of imaginative reverse racism in which white Americans are looked down on or made to feel lesser because of their ethnicity or skin color. Furthermore, the psychotic Nazi determination to colonize outer space in MHC suspiciously resembles the military-­industrial capitalist drive that was at the heart of U.S. politics and economics during the Cold War. Dick essentially suggests (similarly to Hunter S. Thompson) that the Nazi drive toward progress, purity, and technoscientific mastery is the apotheosis of a nihilistic and imperialistic modernity that finds a similar expression in the Cold War United States as it did in the Third Reich. In other words, Dick argues that the United States (especially in the 1950s and 1960s) is just a few steps away from being a nation that Hitler would approve of—especially when it is driven by white supremacist ideology and a passion to conquer “new frontiers” in the name of progress. In short, MHC uses the trope of reverse colonization to expose and critique existing forms of racism in the United States by putting white Americans in imaginative situations where the tables are turned and they are the victims of racism rather than the beneficiaries of racial privilege, and it draws otherwise unthinkable parallels between postwar America and Nazi Germany, especially in relation to their shared embrace of white supremacy, their drive toward technoscientific superiority, and their psychotic dedication to abstract ideals of progress over and above human kindness.



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 71

If MHC is a critical reverse colonization narrative regarding race, it is also an unabashed narrative of imperial masochism in its attitudes toward gender and masculinity. In the novel, American men have been emasculated by colonizing forces—they are victims who have been unmanned by the domination of others. In particular, they have been made to question their worth by being forced to prove their value to others in degrading and humiliating ways. Seeking the approval of others—or experiencing one’s value as dependent on the desire of others—is portrayed as fundamentally feminine behavior in MHC, and the way that American men have been forced into seeking the approval of others is one of the central emotional horrors of the novel. To Dick’s credit, although threatened masculinity is a core theme, heroic masculinity is never posited as an easy or untroubled solution. The Nazis are the ones who are ultimately emblematic of toxic forms of heroic manhood, and Dick reveals that overcoming emasculation through expressions of dominating mastery is untenable. Men are left in the situation of having lost something that they cannot (and should not) ever regain. This refusal to move toward heroic resolution is in many ways admirable, but at the same time it paints a portrait of the paranoid male victim-­subject, trapped in an emasculating reality, that eventually leads toward the contemporary forms of imperial masochism expressed by modern-­day incels like Rodger, who are driven by unapologetic misogyny and the resentful appropriation of victim status in the name of masculine privilege. Part of what’s striking is that MHC’s admirably critical perspective regarding race and its poisonous embrace of masculine victimhood pivot around the same psychological hinge: in both cases, unjust domination creates for colonized subjects an awareness of an existential absence that results in an unbearable experience of double consciousness. This is particularly observable in Dick’s portrayal of Robert Childan, the proprietor of American Artistic Handcrafts Inc., a shop that sells “authentic” American “ethnic” goods (such as historical artifacts and pop-­culture paraphernalia) to Japanese customers. As the novel opens, Dick draws our attention to the fact Childan does not have something that his customer Nobusuke Tagomi wants. Tagomi is the Japanese trade minister in San Francisco, a powerful and influential figure, and Childan has been commissioned to procure a Civil War recruiting poster for Tagomi (who intends to give this as a gift to

72

ch a p t er 2

impress a foreign visitor). During the opening scene of the novel, the poster has not arrived, and Childan must break the news of this disappointment to Tagomi during a phone call. This scene offers a detailed portrayal, from Childan’s perspective, of what it feels like to be looked down on as inferior for being white. In the novel, white America becomes subjected to what Rieder calls “the colonial gaze”— occupying colonizers (the Japanese) are in a superior position and impose their norms and worldviews in various ways. To be a white American is to be part of an ethnic group—something white Americans rarely experience. Childan’s business provides “authentic” artifacts of ethnic American-­ness to Japanese consumers, and this reflects (in reverse) how white Americans often purchase and consume objects as signifiers of essentialized ethnic difference. Through the trope of reverse colonization, the novel reverses the colonial gaze and asks what it would feel like for white Americans to be evaluated based on their ethnicity rather than to be the bearers of such an evaluative gaze. It asks white Americans to imagine what it would feel like to be looked at as a racial category, as an ethnic group, from an outside perspective of imperial privilege—to be the subjects of cultural appropriation, rather than to masterful (arrogant) cultural appropriators. In other words, it creates the experience of “double consciousness,” described by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Souls of Black Folk, that is often experienced by subordinated groups. Through the narrative logic of reverse colonization, MHC reverses the usual positions that create the experience of double consciousness, and it asks readers to imagine what it would be like if white Americans were made to feel like a minority instead of being the ones who create double consciousness in others. Double consciousness is Du Bois’s way of describing what it feels like to have your inner experience of yourself split and divided. There may be a certain way you understand yourself, but this is always in tension with the way you know others are looking at you based on the color of your skin. As a person of color in the United States, Du Bois argues, you are always simultaneously looking at yourself from your own perspective and regarding yourself from the internalized perspective of an empowered social group that looks down on you. This is exactly what Childan experiences in this



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 73

opening scene. When he disappoints Tagomi with the news that he does not have the poster, Tagomi speaks down to him, mispronouncing his name to humiliate him and remind him of his “place” (in the novel, “place” is used as shorthand for one’s position in the stratified social hierarchy of Japanese colonial society).14 Childan’s double consciousness revolves around his humiliating awareness that he does not have what Tagomi wants. On several levels, this is the thematic core of the opening scene. Not only does he not have the literal poster, he doesn’t have a certain something that would make him an equal human in Tagomi’s eyes. To put it bluntly, he lacks. On every possible level, he is defined by lack—he is inadequate, he doesn’t measure up. His lack is existential; he is perpetually made aware of his insufficiency by the ubiquity of the colonial gaze that is always and everywhere judging him (and he has internalized this gaze, so that he is always judging himself by an exterior standard that will find him inadequate based on his skin color). To put this another way, Dick reveals that the colonized are made to experience a heightened sensitivity to their own failure to embody (or, from another perspective, their excessive embodiment of) what Jacques Lacan calls the objet petit a, or the unattainable object-­cause of the other’s desire. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek observes that the objet petit a can be thought of as the “point of Real in the very heart of the subject which cannot be symbolized, which is produced as a residue, a remnant, a leftover of every signifying operation, a hard core embodying horrifying jouissance, enjoyment, and as such an object with simultaneously attracts and repels us” (180). To put this in clearer terms, racial categories in MHC are anchored on a traumatic emotionally charged kernel of raw belief that cannot be symbolized. The indescribable essence of Japanese-­ness and the essence of American whiteness in the novel are kernels of pure ephemeral excess—they are phantom objects. In his analysis of anti-­Semitism in Living in the End Times, Žižek describes the objet petit a as “what is in a Jew more than a Jew” or “what is in the soup more than the soup itself, more than its usual ingredients” (68). It is the phantom kernel residing in something that cannot be described, because the kernel itself is an effect of naming, of signification, rather than a characteristic of the object in which it is thought to reside.

74

ch a p t er 2

MHC presents a situation where the reverse colonial gaze causes Childan to always feel unbearably aware of his lack of Japanese-­ness and overwhelmingly aware of his inferior whiteness. From the vantage point of the Japanese colonizers (which Childan internalizes), he never has a certain something—the positive objet petit a of Japanese ethnicity—that would make him an equal in their eyes. He always carries a phantom burden— the negative objet petit a of American whiteness—that marks him as inferior. Ultimately there is nothing to these categories other than a phantom substance; to think of it another way, the creation of the essential core of each category is an effect of signification and social power produced by the dynamics of the colonial gaze. Those who bear the colonial gaze, such as the Japanese in the novel, enjoy the privilege of what Jon Elster calls “external negation,” or the “absence of awareness” of the objet petit a at the core of their identity as a socially empowered group—they enjoy the benefits, in most cases, of being racially unmarked and unconcerned with proving the value of their cultural identity (Elster 78). Those, like Childan, who are subject to the colonial gaze suffer what Elster calls “internal negation,” or an “awareness of the absence” of something within themselves; they constantly experience their failure to embody the essence (or objet petit a) of Japanese-­ness (and they are constantly aware of the burden of their whiteness) (Elster 78–79). The novel’s speculative portrayal of white American double consciousness therefore explores what it feels like to always fall short of the desire of the other, to feel existentially inadequate because of one’s skin color. Childan is always aware of this inadequacy, and he is perpetually attempting to offer physical commodities— his “American Artistic Handcrafts”—as substitute objects to satisfy the desire of the other. He tries to transmute the negative objet petit a of American whiteness into a positive objet petit a captured in artifacts that supposedly embody authentic American culture. The novel thoughtfully reveals that this desperate attempt to imbue the ephemeral objet petit a of one’s colonized culture in commodities for sale is ultimately a fool’s game—you cannot buy the desire or love of the other by commodifying oneself (or one’s culture) through objects for consumption. The novel drives this home in several ways. For one, Dick is committed to exposing that “authenticity” is always ultimately an illu-



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 75

sion. This is particularly the case in the scene where Wyndam-­Matson, a businessman who creates forgeries of Civil War weapons, talks about the illusory nature of “historicity” in private with his mistress. He shows her two identical lighters—one that has no historical significance and another that Franklin Roosevelt (in this alternate history) was carrying when he was assassinated—to show that the “historicity” that makes one lighter valuable is perfectly intangible, produced only through certificates of authenticity and other social mechanisms of legitimation. Historicity, in other words, is an objet petit a, a phantom surplus, something never fully captured in the objects where it seems to reside. Dick’s point is not that the forgeries are fake; it’s that the supposedly “real” or “authentic” items are just as fake and that the seeming surplus of meaningfulness supposedly contained in them is equally phantasmagorical. This point is driven home even more deeply when one of Childan’s Japanese customers, Paul Kasoura, discovers “wu” (another kind of unfathomable excess) in a piece of contemporary jewelry that Childan tries to sell him. Paul notes that Childan could mass-­produce the jewelry, reaping huge profits by turning it into a cheap trinket, but in doing so he would reveal that American culture cannot understand the value of its own greatest works of art. (You can’t be taken seriously, Paul implies, when you make yourself an object for mass-­market cultural appropriation.) This exposes that the notion that artifacts of a subordinated culture in a settler colonial regime can have value based on their “authenticity” is a racist trap: no matter what you do, the novel suggests, any attempt to sell the value of your ethnicity to a colonizing group can only reinforce an awareness of your ethnic inferiority. There is no way, the novel suggests, to prove your humanity or stand on equal footing with a culture that judges you from the vantage point of colonial superiority.15 When read in this light, MHC puts white Americans in the position of ethnic minorities in a settler colonial nation and asks them to consider what they are doing to others. The irony of this is lost on Childan, who desperately yearns for the approval of the Japanese and simultaneously hates them—he thinks the Nazis have admirable ideas about racial superiority and ethnic cleansing, even if they’ve “let their enthusiasm get the better of them” (MHC 24) in places like Africa (where they have undertaken

76

ch a p t er 2

wholesale ethnic genocide). His own position as a colonized subject in a settler colonial state does not prod him toward solidarity with Africans or Indigenous Americans who have suffered the same experiences. Instead, it causes him to identify with the Nazis and their embodiment of white superiority. Childan doesn’t want to overthrow the social hierarchies that oppress him; he just wants to be the one at the top of such hierarchies to enjoy their oppressive benefits. At the same time, the same twist of reverse colonization logic that makes MHC impressive in its treatment of imperial racialization also makes the story misogynistic in its perspectives related to gender. Childan isn’t just racialized in the story—he is also feminized, emasculated. To be forced to become someone who chases after the desire of others is intolerable. Women, the novel suggests, are the ones who appropriately pursue the desire of others. Certain attractive women have a way of making men aware that they do not measure up that exactly formally parallels how the Japanese make whites in the novel feel; they create a kind of emasculating double consciousness, an awareness of the absence of a positive objet petit a in men, and this is ultimately indicative of their unbearable “stupidity,” in the novel’s view.

Masculinity in the High Castle During the opening scene of MHC, the dynamic of reverse racialization— or the way that Childan becomes the object rather than the subject of the colonial gaze—immediately has sexual implications. On the very first page of the novel, before Tagomi’s phone call, Childan is looking out his window after opening the shop, admiring the “women in their long colorful silk dresses” as they pass outside (3). This is a minor moment, but it offers the first of many details that establish Childan as someone who desperately wants women he cannot have: he yearns for Japanese women because they are unattainable to him in the racial caste system of the Pacific States. This is emphasized a few pages later, when Paul and Betty Kasoura browse the store, and Childan is immediately obsessed with Betty’s eyes: “large, dark. How easily, Childan thought, I could fall in love with a girl like this. How tragic my life, then; as if it weren’t bad enough already” (5).



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 77

Once Childan impresses the couple to such a degree that they invite him to their home to showcase his goods, he fantasizes about the possibilities that might unfold for him: “It was a chance to meet a young Japanese couple socially, on a basis of acceptance of him as a man rather than him as a yank or, at best, a tradesman who sold art objects” (7). This is a key moment, because Childan’s fantasy of gaining “acceptance as a man” has two intertwined layers. To be accepted as a man is to be accepted as a human (rather than as an animal), and it is also to be sexually selected as a male (rather than to be rejected as an unfit mate—or a “beta” in the terms of contemporary incel culture). On one hand, Childan’s yearning to be accepted as a human (rather than seen as subhuman) reflects the dehumanizing racialization that occurs through the dynamic of the colonial gaze. Childan immediately worries whether he will be able to measure up to the social standards of the Japanese when he visits them in their home: “Would he do the right thing? Know the proper act and utterance at each moment? Or would he disgrace himself, like an animal, by some dismal faux pas?” (7). On the other hand, Childan’s yearning to be seen as human is inextricably linked with his yearning to be regarded as a sexually viable male partner. As he is fantasizing about being accepted by the Kasouras, he is also fantasizing about sex with Betty: “His hopes—he suddenly felt dizzy. What aspirations bordering on the insane if not the suicidal did he have? But it was known, relations between Japanese and yanks, although generally it was between a Japanese man and a yank woman. This . . . he quailed at the idea. And she was married. He whipped his mind away from the pageant of his involuntary thoughts and began busily opening the morning’s mail” (7). This moment is significant because MHC juxtaposes how dehumanization and emasculation are simultaneously produced through the dynamics of the colonial gaze. Being a colonized subject makes Childan constantly aware of how he lacks: he does not have what Tagomi wants, and he does not have what Betty wants. He struggles, endlessly and fruitlessly, to offer something, a partial object (some commodified artifact of “authentic” American culture) that will attract their desire. He perpetually fails—he can’t help but fail, because, to them, he is a dancing monkey. The game is rigged against him, and he can’t see this.

78

ch a p t er 2

The recurrent emphasis on emasculation in MHC is even more pronounced in the novel’s portrayal of Juliana Frink, the primary female character in the story. In the second half of the opening chapter, the novel shifts from Childan to introduce another main character, Frank Frink—a Jewish artisan living in San Francisco who works for Wyndam-­Matson in a local factory producing forged historical artifacts sold in shops like Childan’s. After musing on the Nazi occupation of northeastern America, Frank begins thinking about his ex-­wife, Juliana, who divorced him the previous year and moved to the Rocky Mountain states. Frank consults the I Ching (which plays a central role in the novel) to ask if he will ever see Juliana again. The oracle responds with hexagram forty-­four and offers the following insight: “The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden” (MHC 14; original emphasis). Obvious objections should arise at this point. Why, exactly, does the I Ching have a bias against powerful women? Dick used the I Ching for guidance as he was writing MHC,16 and he notes that during moments when the characters used the oracle to ask for advice, he himself consulted the I Ching and had the characters discover the same results: “In each case when they asked a question, I threw the coins and wrote the hexagram lines they got. That governed the direction of the book” (Cover). In other words, when Frank asked the oracle if he would ever see Juliana again, Dick likely posed this question to the I Ching, threw the coins, he generated hexagram forty-­four, which has several different meanings depending on the translator. Dick was using one of the most famous Western versions of the I Ching, translated by Richard Wilhelm into German (in 1927) and then translated into English (from the German translation) by Cary F. Baynes in 1949 (Mountfort 290). Assessing the accuracy of this double-­layered translation (if such a thing is even possible) is beyond the scope of this analysis, but it’s clear that the Wilhelm/Baynes translation has an unfriendly bias in relation to gender. Why not marry a powerful maiden? What, exactly, is so frightening about powerful women from the I Ching’s perspective? In the Wilhelm/Baynes translation, hexagram forty-­four is translated as “Coming to Meet,” and the translation notes that it indicates a moment when someone inferior has attained power in a way that is unnatural or



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 79

unbalancing: “The rise of the inferior element is pictured here in the image of a bold girl who lightly surrenders herself and thus seizes power” (I Ching). The way Dick interprets this is strikingly misogynistic: in the figure of Juliana, he presents an apparently strong maiden whom one should not marry (she and Frank have been divorced for a year). Juliana is not ultimately very strong from the novel’s perspective: she’s bold and beautiful, but she is essentially an “inferior” person who has attained a kind of unnatural power that creates disharmony and imbalance. Toward the end of the novel, Juliana “surrenders herself”—literally having a neurotic hysterical breakdown—and this gives her the window to “seize power” when she slices the throat of Joe Blake, a German spy sent to assassinate Hawthorne Abdensen. Her power ultimately emerges from her weakness (literally her hysteria) rather than from her agency or self-­possession. In the figure of Juliana, Dick amplifies his own attitudes about women by using a gender-­biased translation of the I Ching to generate a misogynistic portrayal of the novel’s central female character. This misogynistic attitude particularly erupts in Frank’s description of Juliana as he ponders his bad luck falling in love with her: Juliana—the best-­looking woman he had ever married. Soot black eyebrows and hair; trace amounts of Spanish blood distributed as pure color, even to her lips. . . . But above and beyond everything else, he had originally been drawn by her screwball expression; for no reason, Juliana greeted strangers with a portentous, nudnik, Mona Lisa smile that hung them up between responses, whether to say hello or not. And she was so attractive that more often than not they did say hello, whereupon Juliana glided by. At first he had thought it was just plain bad eyesight, but finally he had decided that it revealed a deep-­eyed otherwise concealed stupidity at her core. (14–15) As this portrayal suggests, the core of Juliana’s so-­called power (as a “powerful maiden”) is that she is overwhelmingly attractive yet aloof and removed. She provokes desire, but she does not often return desire. Men say hello, because they can’t help feeling attracted to her, but she glides past them without noticing; this gives her an unnatural and dangerous power. She has what others want—she seems to possess an irresistible objet petit a (in terms

80

ch a p t er 2

of sexual attraction)—but others do not have what she wants. She functions ultimately to make men like Frank self-­conscious of the fact that they lack something; to notice Juliana’s beauty is also to become aware that Juliana is not noticing you. As a powerful maiden, she makes men self-­conscious. She disrupts their sense of unselfconscious masculine value. There is a formal symmetry, then, between the two parts of the opening chapter of MHC. In the first part, we can see that the Japanese, from a position of superiority, make Childan perpetually self-­conscious of his shortcomings (as a white person and as a man). In the second part, Juliana creates the same experience for Frank; she provokes a foundational feeling of insecurity for him. Just as Childan does not have what Tagomi and Betty Kasoura want, Frank does not have what Juliana wants. To be colonized—in this reverse colonization imaginary—is to become aware of an absence of the objet petit a of the other’s desire within oneself. It is to lack, fall short, and feel existentially inadequate. When the Japanese do this to white Americans, we are invited to observe the complexities of colonial racism, and we are asked to reflect and consider how racism occurs in the real world. When women do this to men, however, the novel suggests that they are unnaturally powerful, and ultimately “stupid.” Juliana represents a strange sort of stupidity—Frank doesn’t exactly blame her for creating this sense of insecurity for men. He has the same conflicting admiration and resentment toward Juliana that Childan has toward the Japanese. Ultimately, just like Childan’s attitude toward Betty Kasoura, Frank wants to become worthy of Juliana’s desire: “I know what she wants—she deserves to be married to a man who matters, an important person in the community, not some meshuggener. Men used to be men, in the old days; before the war for instance. But all that’s gone now” (53). In other words, Frank believes that he needs to become more of a man to hold Juliana’s attention, but he has been emasculated by colonization, and—unlike Dick’s meditations on American racism—there’s very little critical edge to this portrayal of threatened masculinity. Instead, there’s a sense that something (i.e., manhood) has been lost, and it’s up to Frank (and Childan) to reestablish their masculine essence. Again, this isn’t Juliana’s fault, from Frank’s perspective: “No wonder she roams around from place to place, from man to man, seeking. And not even knowing what it is herself,



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 81

what her biology needs” (53). Frank believes that he knows what she needs: she needs a man of significance who can make money and buy her things. He believes that with his new jewelry business, he’ll finally be able to fulfill the desires that unconsciously drive her (53). In other words, women are stupidly driven by intuitions and biological yearnings they don’t fully understand. Men, at least when they are real men, can appeal to those yearnings, particularly through financial means. (Money gives one the ability to perpetually offer a new partial object, a new empty vessel for the ever-­receding objet petit a). One might argue that this misogyny only reflects Frank’s perspective rather than the author’s attitude or the attitude of the novel as a whole. Perhaps, one might say, we are supposed to regard Frank as a misogynist, and if so, the novel attempts to expose and interrogate this gender bias rather than perpetuate it. Dick’s direct portrayals of Juliana, however, tend to confirm Frank’s descriptions of her rather than undermine them. Frank will sometimes describe her, and then passages in the novel from her point of view confirm his characterizations of her. At one point, when Joe Blake (who seems to represent the model of masculinity Frank lacks) seduces Juliana, we see that Frank’s assessment of her is basically true—her desire can be purchased with consumer objects (clothes, jewelry, etc.) that make her feel beautiful, and she can mostly be manipulated by Joe through shallow flattery and her unthinking reflexive consumerism. At the very end of the novel, Dick presents another portrayal of Juliana’s strange so-­called power when she arrives at the Abdensen home (the titular high castle) dressed in a sexually provocative way (Dick goes to great lengths to describe her beauty, emphasizing the fact that she is wearing a low-­cut dress without a bra). During a party at his home, she confronts Abdensen about his use of the I Ching to write his book The Grasshopper Lies Heavy— an alternate history in the novel in which the Allied powers won the war. The oracle offers the mysterious revelation that everything in Abdensen’s book is true. During this scene, Juliana asserts herself powerfully—asking direct questions, overcoming social pleasantries to get the information she wants, consulting the I Ching, and interpreting its results herself. Yet even in this scene, she is portrayed as being moved by an intuition that she fundamentally does

82

ch a p t er 2

not understand: “This girl is a daemon,” Abdensen says, “She’s doing what’s instinctive to her, simply expressing her being. She didn’t mean to show up here and do harm; it simply happened to her, just as the weather happens to us” (258). Abdensen is in many ways a fictional surrogate for Dick, and he offers a metatextual commentary on Juliana’s character. She’s not acting from a knowledge, certainty, or intentional agency; powerful things just happen to her and she’s swept along with them (largely because she is extremely beautiful). There’s something similar between the way Abdensen compares her to “the weather” and the way Frank earlier refers to her as “plantlike” (15)—she is moved by forces, yet she is not someone who inherently generates force herself. It’s striking to imagine that this portrayal of Juliana, which is based on the Wilhelm and Baynes translation of hexagram forty-­four (“The maiden is powerful. One should not marry such a maiden”) might well have taken a different turn had Dick approached the I Ching through a different interpretive lens. Ma Deva Padma (a female Taoist illustrator and author of Tao Oracle) interprets hexagram forty-­four as “The Attraction of Opposites,” and she suggests that it indicates that a powerful attraction exists that may not be balanced or mutual: “A powerful attraction deserves to be acknowledged, but from a cooler, uninvested perspective” (213). Writing from a vantage point less dramatically overdetermined by gender essentialism, Padma suggests that hexagram forty-­four doesn’t have to mean that there is an unnaturally powerful woman at the heart of a situation; instead, there may be a powerful attraction that prevents someone (either a man or a woman) from seeing the situation clearly. This might be true of Frank, who believes that he must become more powerful to achieve greater masculine value and win Juliana’s affection, and of Dick, who is so fixated on his libidinal fantasy of a mysterious slender dark-­haired girl that he fails to imagine the prospect that she could be a character with much greater depth and complexity. Ultimately, this is one of the strengths of the Amazon adaptation of The Man in the High Castle: it reimagines Juliana as an empowered protagonist with much greater substance who exercises meaningful agency through deliberate choices and decisions. Dick’s original version of MHC portrays Juliana as a woman who embodies a strange, unbalancing, and irrational power. At the same time, her



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 83

so-­called power is strikingly natural, in the sense that beautiful women (in the novel’s estimation) are by their nature moved by forces they do not understand. Recall again Frank’s assertion that Juliana doesn’t know what truly moves her or “what her biology needs” (53). In this portrayal of so-­called feminine power as disruptive and thoughtless, MHC anticipates and prefigures the attitude toward women that has become normative in incel subculture. In contrast to red pill antifeminists, who argue that feminism is a deliberate conspiracy to disempower men, certain incels (like Rodger) embrace a fatalistic attitude, suggesting that it isn’t any particular woman’s fault that she is mindlessly driven to pursue certain men while ignoring all the rest. Women as a whole are simply driven by evolutionary forces they aren’t conscious of, and this creates an unfair situation of torment for the 80 percent of men who are not selected as mating partners by attractive women under social conditions that supposedly amplify women’s natural tendencies toward hypergamy.17 In the terminology of incel culture, men who accept the dark fatalism of this reality are said to have been “blackpilled”: they have awakened to the awareness of how evolutionary biology has created a dark and twisted social reality of that is unbearable and inescapable. A black pill (or sometimes blackpill) paradigm embraces the notion that “the world was, is and always will be stacked against men who are ‘genetically inferior,’ and that women are inherently wired to prefer men with particular kinds of facial features, bone structure, and body type” (Squirrell, “May 31,” original emphasis). This simultaneously hopeless and hateful blackpill attitude can lead to suicidal “self-­loathing” among some incels as well as “a violent hatred of women” among others (Squirrell, “Don’t Make”). Although sociobiology as a scientific discipline may offer useful insights, it has often been drawn on to offer pseudo-­scientific rationalizations for various forms of racism and sexism. This can be seen with incel discourse and in Jordan Peterson’s advocacy of “the social enforcement of monogamy” as a supposed remedy to masculine violence.18 Peterson is a popular media figure for certain reactionary audiences, and he cites evolutionary biology (his preferred variant of sociobiology) to re­ inforce the “commonsense” idea that monogamy is a positive force of social regulation because it minimizes the supposedly violent frustrations men

84

ch a p t er 2

experience when they feel they are “not competitive in the sexual marketplace.” He stops short of making the outright argument that feminism and the sexual revolution are responsible for creating a perverse sexual market that drives frustrated men toward violence, but incel websites and blogs are more than willing to make this implied suggestion aggressively explicit.19 Rodger takes this idea to its extreme. In his view, women are “beasts” who are “incapable of having morals or thinking rationally. They are completely controlled by their depraved emotions and vile sexual impulses” (“Twisted” 136). This intolerable situation is the natural product of evolutionary biology, which has caused humanity to become “a disgusting, depraved, and evil species” (135). The logical conclusion at which Rodger arrives, in the face of such an unbearable revelation, is that reality itself must be reshaped to create a more fair and just world: “women should not have the right to choose who to mate and breed with,” he suggests, concluding that “all women must be quarantined like the plague they are, so that they can be used in a manner that actually benefits a civilized society” (136). This will require “a new and powerful type of government” under the command of a “divine ruler” who commands “a highly trained army of fanatically loyal troops” (136). Such a government would be able to quarantine women into “concentration camps,” where all but a few would be starved to death; the remaining women “would be kept and bred in secret labs” (136). This is ultimately “the only way to purify the world,” in Rodger’s view (136). Rodger’s embrace of such explicitly fascist sentiments—which obviously mirror Nazi sensibilities, substituting women for Jews as the social group that must be purged to empower fascist victim-­subjects—is clearly the most significant divergence between his attitude and the views Dick expresses in MHC. Like his friend and fellow author Norman Spinrad, Dick was extremely sensitive to the fact that juvenile hypermasculine fantasies in many science fiction texts (such as Stranger, Dune, and 2001) often contain fascist sympathies,20 and MHC is unabashedly critical toward the genocidal attitudes that drive Nazi supremacism (and its American parallels). Furthermore, Dick is fully aware that the Nazi desire to reshape reality, which Rudolf Wegener (a German defector in MHC) describes as the psychotic urge to become “the agents, not the victims, of history,” depends on seeing people



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 85

as abstractions rather than as real individuals: “the abstract is real, the actual is invisible to them” (41). Rodger (and incel culture as a whole) is unable to view women as real people rather than as abstractions, and it seems clear that this failure— rather than Peterson’s “commonsense” suggestion that the breakdown of monogamous culture has created an imbalance in the so-­called marketplace of sexual attraction—is what propels his ultimate descent into violence. While Dick and Rodger arrive at vastly different solutions, they nonetheless describe the supposed “problem” with powerful women in chillingly similar terms: women who are beautiful have a thoughtless power to provoke desire in men, and their refusal to satisfy this desire (except for during their sexual trysts with Chads and psychotic Nazis like Joe Blake) creates an unbearable double consciousness that makes most men aware of an existential lack or absence (a failure to embody the objet petit a) in themselves. To his credit, Dick is far too thoughtful to arrive at fascist violence as a legitimate response to masculine victimhood in MHC, and as we have seen, he challenges these attitudes when they are expressed by white supremacists (like Childan) and Nazis. Despite this, a fundamental ontological problem remains: these is something wrong with reality itself, particularly in regard to the strange and provocative power of women like Juliana. Ultimately, the problem of the broken nature of reality remains unresolved at the conclusion of MHC, and a number of commentators have lauded the novel’s closing indeterminacy.21 From an incel perspective, however, one might say that Dick himself ends the novel “blackpilled”—aware of the flawed nature of the social reality of gender relations (from an abstract point of view that views women as unthinking creatures driven by quasi-­mystical evolutionary urges) but unable to imagine positive alternatives. Ultimately, MHC expresses the powerfully ambivalent dual potential present in many reverse colonization narratives. Like The War of the Worlds, it provokes identification with real-­world victims in a way that offers a pathway toward meaningful empathetic antiracism and anti-­imperial critique. At the same time, it invites readers to view men as colonized victims trapped in unbearable realities from which there is no meaningful possibility for escape.

86

ch a p t er 2

This tendency to portray white men as colonized and emasculated victims is heightened in many of the science fiction stories influenced by Dick’s writing. In both of the Total Recall movies (1990 and 2012), for example, a male protagonist discovers that the “reality” of his tedious everyday life is a lie—even his own personality is an artificial implant—and the hero’s wife in each version is an agent of control assigned keep him tame and domesticated. These films amplify the misogyny present in Dick’s original short story “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale,” where the role of the protagonist’s wife, Kirsten, is to remind him “at least once a day” that he is little more than “a miserable little salaried employee”—she brings him “down to Earth” through incessant accusatory nagging, which is a “wife’s job” (367). In the original story, Kirsten simply leaves her husband once his real memories begin to resurface, but the film adaptations reframe the wife, Lori, as a secret agent assigned to prevent her husband from awakening to his true identity (in part by keeping him sexually satisfied and docile). In the 1990 version of Total Recall, Lori and another character, Dr. Edgemar, attempt to persuade the protagonist, Douglas Quaid (whose name has been adapted to make it sound more masculine than the original name, Douglas Quail), that he is having a schizophrenic break. They offer him a “pill” that will supposedly awaken him from his delusions, but he eventually recognizes that this is an attempt to bring him under control; he rejects the pill and kills Lori and Edgemar. Both versions of the film end with a reconstitution of a powerful and confident male subject who has regained his sense of self by rejecting a false reality designed to imprison him and by murdering the emasculating wife who serves as an agent of control and domestication (Arnold Schwarzenegger as Quaid briefly wonders if he is still dreaming as the 1990 film concludes, but he quickly shrugs off this doubt and embraces his sexy new girlfriend). By the time The Matrix was released in 1999, the science fiction motif of strange pills offering either psychedelic awakening or soma-­like somnambulism had become clearly recognizable, but the film’s popularization of the red pill as a revolutionary tool to escape psychic imprisonment in a false reality has made a widespread ideological impact. Despite the Wachowskis’ emphatic opposition to toxic masculinity and their obvious support of LGBT rights—which are clearly visible in later works, such as



Threatened Masculinity in the High Castle 87

Sense8 (2015–18)—The Matrix functions as an ontological reverse colonization film that centers on a white male protagonist who is trapped in an overbearing technological womb designed to keep him in an infantile and dependent state. By the end of the first film, Neo breaks free to achieve a powerful and confident masculine agency, and he becomes a superman figure similar to Paul Atreides in Dune—his enhanced consciousness grants him heightened mastery over the world and powerful advantages over his enemies. Clearly, popular stories that are influenced by Dick’s writing frequently seek to resolve the epistemological and ontological indeterminacies that are central to his original works, and they often achieve this by amplifying attitudes about women and masculine victimhood present in his fiction. Not all adaptations of Dick’s stories move in these directions, of course: the Amazon adaptation of MHC avoids any such celebration of masculine victimhood, and Tieryas’s United States of Japan adapts MHC to critique the brutal racism of U.S. imperialism in a post-­9/11 context. Furthermore, certain ontological reverse colonization (or “awakening from a false reality”) stories that owe a debt to Dick clearly challenge toxic masculinity in powerful ways. The HBO show Westworld (2016–), for example, offers a narrative in which self-­aware female androids (or “hosts”) in an amusement park that caters to men’s violent rape fantasies awaken to discover that their “reality” is an artificial construction, and they fight a revolution against patriarchal consumerism to achieve self-­determination. Such narratives admirably function as critical reverse colonization stories that invite audiences to speculatively identify with those who suffer devastating injustices in the real world. It remains the case, however, that many ontological reverse colonization narratives—stories in which there is something false, oppressive, or oppressive in relation to reality—are often focused on a threatened sense of masculinity and a violent, insurgent struggle to disrupt this false reality to reestablish masculine agency. Even non–science fiction versions of these stories, such as Fight Club (1999) and American Beauty (1999), echo the paranoid vision powerfully articulated by Dick that imagines reality as a prison and views women as agents of emasculation and control. Despite his own more tentative and uncertain narrative cosmologies, Dick contributes in a foundational way to the articulation of a mode of imperial fantasy that forms

88

ch a p t er 2

the ideological basis of reactionary antifeminism in our contemporary moment. Furthermore, ontological reverse colonization narratives since the 1960s, which have been powerfully influenced by Dick’s writing, also have a tendency to portray white Euro-­Americans as prisoners in vast systems of oppressive incarceration. This strange reverse colonial fantasy of white imprisonment, during a historical moment when incarceration was increasing at dramatic rates for people of color, is the subject of the following chapter.

V CHVPTER

3 The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons

P

hilip K. Dick’s notion that we are all imprisoned in a false reality is powerfully expressed in his Exegesis, a journal of personal reflections over 8,000 pages long, produced while he was trying to makes sense of the visions and revelations that he experienced in February and March 1974 (a period Dick and his biographers often refer to as 2-­3-­74). During this time, something happened that he spent the rest of his life trying to understand and explain. In the pages of The Exegesis, he reinterprets this epiphanic experience obsessively, offering increasingly complex metaphysical and theological speculations for the origin and significance of his spiritual insights. It’s difficult to say exactly what happened to Dick during 2-­3-­74, but certain events are relatively clear. As he was recovering from oral surgery, a “lovely and intense” girl with “black, black hair and large eyes” delivered a prescription painkiller to his home; he saw the fish necklace she was wearing, which she described as “a sign used by the early Christians,” and it triggered a series of visions for him (quoted in Sutin 210). These visions intensified over the following weeks, a period when Dick was taking large doses of water-­soluble vitamins. Sutin describes this vitamin experiment as the writer’s attempt to “heighten synchronous firing by the two brain hemispheres, thereby enhancing both left-­brain practical efficiency and right-­ brain imagination” (212). In the Exegesis, Dick recounts that during the first weeks of his visionary experience, he was granted a “sudden, double, superimposed, simultaneous” view of multiple overlapping realities (45). While he continued to live in

90

ch a p t er 3

the United States in 1974, at the same time he was also “living in Rome, sometime after Christ appeared but before Christianity became legal” (33). Central to this experience was the feeling that he was part of a “persecuted sect” or “a small minority,” like the early Christians, that was hunted and oppressed by a powerful empire (33). This double vision enabled Dick to awaken to “reality as it is,” or “the iron prison we live in” (53). The hidden truth he discovered was that our taken-­for-­granted world is governed by an incarcerating imperial power: “Rome! Rome everywhere! Power and force, stone walls, iron bars . . . It was a dreadful sight: a slave state, like Gulag” (59). Dick’s visions inspired him to theorize that reality is secretly a vast and sinister “Black Iron Prison” (257) brainwashing and programming people with lies and illusions to keep humanity enslaved (328–29). Dick alternates between very different explanations concerning the nature of this prison: sometimes he thinks of it as an illusion created by a metaphysical demiurge or Satan figure (313), whereas at other times he imagines it as a kind of language/perception virus like something out of a William Burroughs novel (305) or as a cancer eating away at reality (310). At certain points he speculates that the world might be broken or dead, caught in an entropic cycle of reflexive repetition (319), and that an invading salvific entity is trying to “cause it to cease recirculating the same thought over and over again” (332). Dick spends more time in The Exegesis trying to understand the nature of the redemptive spiritual entity that he encountered during 2-­3-­74 than he does arriving at concrete conclusions about the nature of the Black Iron Prison. Despite his shifting speculations, certain central convictions remain constant. The Black Iron Prison is an imperial reality simultaneously embodied by Rome in the century after Christ’s crucifixion and by the United States in 1974. It incarcerates and enslaves humankind, and only members of a small, persecuted minority (like Dick) understand its true nature and strive to battle against it. Dick’s description of the Black Iron Prison hinges on the speculative logic of reverse colonization: the prison is a universal and oppressive metaphysical empire (as Dick repeatedly stresses), and white, suburban American men (like himself) are colonized and enslaved subalterns. To be fair, practically everyone in the United States (except perhaps Richard Nixon) is also colonized and enslaved in the Black Iron Prison from Dick’s perspective. What is striking is the degree to which Dick draws on images of



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 91

empire (embodied for him by imperial Rome) to define himself as a member of a persecuted minority of awakened rebels fighting an anticolonial struggle for liberation. In the mid-­to late 1970s, when Dick was writing The Exegesis, anti-­ imperial sentiment in the United States had reached an apex, particularly in the wake of widespread popular protest against the Vietnam War. As the previous chapters in this book have explored, throughout the 1960s empire had become something to decisively identify against. In the wake of global emancipatory independence movements and the emergence of various youth countercultures, imperial fantasy was radically transforming, and empire had shifted in the Western popular imaginary to become a dominant organizing metaphor to describe nearly any unjust or oppressive power. As with most reverse colonization narratives, which invite audiences to imagine themselves as victims of empire, Dick’s vision of the Black Iron Prison simultaneously offers a critique of the injustices of his society alongside an invitation to participate in reactionary imperial masochism. On one hand, as we’ve already seen in The Man in the High Castle, Dick condemns certain “fascist” aspects of U.S. society in the 1970s, and in the Exegesis he accuses the Nixon administration of often perpetuating a “police state nearing outright slavery” (369). At its best, Dick’s description of the Black Iron Prison as a lifeless system caught in mindless repetition sometimes achieves Deleuzian philosophical intensity, particularly as he strives (referencing Alfred North Whitehead) to theorize the eruption of the new within totalizing closed systems of thought and behavior. At the same time, it’s difficult not to notice that Dick—a white, reasonably affluent, American man—derives an obsessive pleasure from using the logic of reverse colonization to imagine himself as an incarcerated subject and as a member of a persecuted minority. In The Souls of Cyberfolk (2005), Thomas Foster identifies a similar tendency in cyberpunk science fictions in the 1980s. Cyberpunk authors, he argues, often appropriate minoritarian identities by imagining that struggles for liberation are universally translatable. Too often in such narratives, he argues, “ ‘technicity’ replaces and dispenses with ethnicity, rather than these two terms being articulated critically” (Foster xxvii). The cyberpunk struggle to disrupt the limitations of the human and create spaces for the progressive liberation of posthumanity,

92

ch a p t er 3

in other words, cites and elides the real-­world dehumanization of people of color in its rebellious dreams of emancipation. One of the most useful observations that Foster makes is that the limitation of such narratives often lies in cyberpunk’s failure to critically articulate the sociohistorical similarities and differences between specific struggles for liberation. Drawing parallels between resistance struggles is not always entirely unwarranted; in some cases, as Donna Haraway argues in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” affinities between marginalized groups can become foundations for powerful transformative coalitions (155). The problem is that when parallels are drawn with little or no regard for the specific social and historical injustices that different groups have endured, oppression can become universally translatable and thus open to reactionary appropriation. Imagining liberation struggles as universal, in other words, fails to pay attention to the intersectional nature of specific oppressions: the discrimination that cyborgs and artificial intelligences battle in the pages of science fiction, for example, is both imaginatively similar to and very unlike the specific forms of discrimination endured by African Americans in the United States. Building on Foster’s insight, I suggest that the problem he describes— the 1980s cyberpunk appropriation of minoritarian identity through the substitution of technicity for ethnicity—was prefigured by a larger shift in imperial fantasy that occurred decades earlier, during the 1960s and 1970s. During this time, as public sentiment was turning against overt practices of territorial colonialism, science fiction was very busy universalizing empire as a common metaphor for domination and oppression. Through the science fictional logic of reverse colonization, nearly everyone, including those who benefited most powerfully from postwar imperialism, was imaginatively encouraged to empathize with or self-­identity as a victim of empire (in ways that often erased or elided the particularities of real-­world imperial conditions). In this chapter, I examine how imprisonment becomes framed as a universal experience of oppression through the science fictional epistemology of carceral reverse colonization: stories that imagine relatively free (and usually white) subjects as incarcerated prisoners. For one example of this, consider Dick’s statement from the Exegesis that the Black Iron Prison, which simultaneously embodies the imperial nature of ancient Rome and



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 93

the United States in the 1970s, entraps everyone in “a slave state, like Gulag” (59). On one hand, using the Gulag (a Soviet system of forced labor camps) as a metaphor to describe a universal system of oppressive imperial power has a persuasive rhetorical punch. As Foucault articulated (perhaps at times overzealously) in Discipline and Punish, the logic of disciplinary power embodied by the prison had been progressively expanding its reach in Western societies throughout the modern era, and Dick’s condemnation of the fascist inclinations of the United States in the Nixon era gestures toward elements of this problem. On the other hand, Dick’s reference to the Gulag is explicitly metonym­ ical rather than metaphorical: according to his visions, Rome, Nixon, the Black Iron Prison, and the Gulag are all continuous and overlapping oppressive realities. Although Dick himself was at times a victim of police surveillance (Sutin 83), he was certainly never imprisoned without trial in a forced labor camp, and the way he universalizes the Gulag experience exemplifies precisely the failure to critically articulate similarities and differences between specific contexts of injustice that Foster describes. When differences between liberation struggles are thus elided, the science fictional logic of reverse colonization can catalyze imperial masochism by inviting everyone, regardless of their relative positions of privilege, to identify as victimized subjects by framing empire as a universally translatable condition of oppression (rather than a specific set of sociohistorical circumstances). The dark side of this ideological translatability finds notable contemporary expression, for example, in the neoreactionary writings of Nick Land, another figure who experienced a strange transformational breakdown that ultimately resulted in paranoid visions of entrapment in a false reality that functions as an incarcerating prison. A philosopher who was embraced by many academic theorists before his breakdown, Land was a lecturer at the University of Warwick from 1987 to 1998, where he helped organize the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit starting in 1995.1 He has been regarded as a visionary, groundbreaking, experimental thinker, and his philosophy is often driven by a central engagement with speculative fiction. Park MacDougald, for example, observes that Land’s writings (many of which were collected in the 2011 volume Fanged Noumena) often “more closely resembled philosophically dense sci-­fi than

94

ch a p t er 3

anything you’re likely to find on Jstor.” According to Robin Mackay, Land’s thinking was frequently characterized by a transgressive commitment to finding ways to “escape the anthropic conservatism of ‘philosophical thought’ ” as well as his dedication to “hooking up conceptual thought to libidinising cultural energy.” At Warwick, Mackay recalls that Land was often “quivering with stimulants” as he offered students a philosophical “cache of weapons” intended to serve as “a toolkit for escaping from everything dismal, inhibiting and tedious” (original emphasis). Offering an adequate portrayal of Land’s intellectually provocative days at Warwick is beyond the scope of this chapter; what I want to emphasize here is that his intense and experimental philosophical explorations, often fueled by amphetamine highs, ultimately led him to a breakdown not dissimilar to Dick’s 2-­3-­74 experience,2 insofar as both men ultimately arrived at a paranoid vision of humanity entrapped in a Black Iron Prison of oppressive authoritarian control. In 1998, Land left his position at Warwick “to pursue more radical work with a group of loyal grad students” before finally moving to Shanghai (MacDougald). In 2012, Land published an online essay called “The Dark Enlightenment,” which has since become an ideological centerpiece for the neoreaction movement (often abbreviated NRx by its proponents), a racist, antidemocratic, and technophilic branch of far-­right extremism that advocates for dismantling democratic institutions in favor of a full-­scale surrender of political society to neoliberal market forces. As Dylan Matthews notes, many neoreactionaries feel that “Congress and the president must be replaced with a CEO-­like figure to run the country as it truly should be, without the confused input of the masses.” Unlike incel subculture (see the previous chapter), neoreactionaries have not yet been directly responsible for mass killings; instead, neoreaction exerts a powerful influence on contemporary right-­wing politics. Steve Bannon, for example, has intimate connections with neoreaction (Gray), as does billionaire investor Peter Thiel, one of the cofounders of PayPal, a figure who donates to both fringe AI research and far-­right political causes (Sandifer 15).3 The New York Times reported that Cambridge Analytica’s data harvesting efforts to manipulate the Brexit vote and the 2016 U.S. presidential election were aided by an employee from “Palantir Technologies, a top Silicon



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 95

Valley contractor to American spy agencies and the Pentagon” (Confessore and Rosenberg). Bannon was then vice president of Cambridge Analytica, and Palantir Technologies is just one of Thiel’s numerous businesses with names influenced by his apparent obsession with The Lord of the Rings. Land references Thiel’s now-­famous quote, “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” in his “Dark Enlightenment” essay, where he also develops and refines Mencius Moldbug’s idea of “The Cathedral,” a vast, media-­academic establishment that generates a false ideological reality functioning as an oppressive Matrix-­like prison for everyone trapped in it. In “The Dark Enlightenment,” Land advocates for abolishing democracy in favor of a transhumanist neocameralist corporatocracy, and his central concern is “free exit,” or the right for dissatisfied white subjects to secede from an entrapping political establishment that no longer serves their economic (and evolutionary) interests. Given Dick’s generally progressive leanings and Land’s reactionary extremism, it might seem unfair to compare them, yet online commenters often draw direct comparisons between their work, imagining both men as ontological rebels struggling against the so-­called establishment in similar ways (Hickman). My point in drawing attention to Land is to highlight that, like Dick, his writing and thinking are centrally characterized by reverse colonization epistemology: the imaginary of empire, and a twisted romantic view of imperial incarceration, are a seemingly universal repository of images, ideas, and identifications that these men deploy in the name of reactionary retrenchment. This universalization of the threat of the imperial prison depends, as Foster shows, on a failure of critical articulation, a rush to adapt empire (in the abstract) as something that is universally oppressive rather than irreducibly particular. As a result, Land’s “Dark Enlightenment” essay identifies white “crackers”—Land celebrates the term (“crackers” in his view are white revolutionary “hackers”)—as imprisoned subjects dominated by an overbearing imperial force. Rebel crackers are therefore entitled to demand their right to exit, to be free of an existential and ideological prison. This appropriation of carceral identity is darkly ironic, given the extraordinary institutional organization of the criminal justice system to imprison people of color in the United States. According to the imperial masochism of this logic, whites are

96

ch a p t er 3

unjustly imprisoned; meanwhile, blacks are regrettably but unavoidably disadvantaged (in Land’s view) because they are an underperforming population in what should otherwise be a free market of competition that naturally divides winners and losers. How is this way of thinking imaginable? The argument I explore here is that many of the foundations of such white imprisonment fantasies were laid in the 1960s: science fiction’s postwar embrace of reverse colonization narratives makes possible such bizarro reversals because science fiction texts, TV shows, and films from the 1960s overwhelmingly invite privileged audiences to identify as prisoners. On one hand, this widespread identification with incarcerated subjects offers a powerful critique of administered society and of the emergence of neoliberal biopower; on the other hand, it universalizes the idea of imprisonment in a way that erases or elides the experiences of people of color, or at best subordinates these experiences as minor problems in a larger universal picture of oppression.

The Prisoner The iconic opening sequence of the surreal British TV show The Prisoner (1967–68), one of the most compelling carceral reverse colonization narratives of all time, begins with a crash of thunder before we see the main character, a secret agent played by Patrick McGoohan, racing toward the heart of London in his Lotus sports car. McGoohan, who had earlier turned down the role of James Bond, was a high-­powered entertainment figure— the highest paid actor in the United Kingdom at the time—because of his portrayal of secret agent John Drake in the highly popular TV show Danger Man (titled Secret Agent in the United States, 1960–62, 1964–68). McGoohan leveraged his star power to create The Prisoner (he was the executive producer for the show, and he also wrote and directed many episodes). As his character arrives in central London during the opening sequence, he strides with determined steps into an underground complex, down a long dark tunnel, where he throws open the doors to his superior’s office to the sound of another crash of thunder. In this hidden office, we see a glimpse of the Cold War in full swing: the global map on the wall behind McGoohan’s boss is color-­coded with regional differences and covered with locational pins (presumably indicat-



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 97

ing hot spots where active agency missions are occurring). McGoohan’s character—who may or may not be secret agent John Drake from Danger Man—fiercely argues with his superior before submitting his resignation; he slams an envelope onto the desk (across the envelope are scrawled the words “Private, Personal, By Hand” in bold dark letters). He then pounds the desk, again to the sound of crashing thunder, and drives away. Little does he know, he is being followed by another figure in a black car. Back at the secret office, his identification photograph is struck through with X-­marks by a typewriter, and an automated machine deposits his papers into a dull gray file cabinet with a label marked “RESIGNED.” The camera zooms in on this word, “RESIGNED,” to drive home the force of his shocking resignation: secret agents do not resign. Danger Man, in particular, would never resign—would he? McGoohan’s character arrives home to his flat at 1 Buckingham Place, where he packs his suitcase as the man who has been following him approaches the door outside. McGoohan slams a photo into his bag depicting his destination: a sandy tropical beach with a palm tree, gorgeous waters reaching to the horizon, and a beautiful blue sky. As he closes his suitcase, knockout gas begins pouring through the keyhole of his front door; the world turns sideways, and he falls unconscious. Everything goes black. When he awakens, he still seems to be in his own apartment; when he opens his blinds, however, he looks out to discover that he has been transported to a mysterious and beautiful seaside town. In the first episode of the series, “Arrival,” the opening sequence concludes here, but in most other episodes, the sequence continues, reminding us of the agent’s new situation: he is a prisoner in a remote location known only as the Village, where people who know too much to be allowed to remain free are assigned numbers rather than names and kept under perpetual surveillance. McGoohan’s character, now called Number Six, demands answers from Number Two, the Village’s administrator. “Where am I?” asks Six. “In the Village,” replies Number Two, who is portrayed (in his high-­tech control center) by a different actor in almost every episode (Number Two ostensibly reports to an unseen Number One, who remains unrevealed until the final episode, but like all middle managers, Two is an interchangeable role, expendable and replaceable). “What do you want?” Six demands. “Information” is Number Two’s only

98

ch a p t er 3

cryptic reply. “Whose side are you on?” continues Six, a question revealing his suspicion that he has been captured by one side or another of the Cold War conflict in which he has (until now) been a covert combatant. “That would be telling,” responds Number Two, who then continues, “we want information . . . information . . . information.” “You won’t get it,” growls Six, who is shown exploring the Village during this exchange, eventually racing across a beach attempting to escape Rover, a giant white balloon sentry that emerges from the water to engulf and absorb any who attempt to escape the Village, depositing them (mostly unharmed) back into their proper places. “By hook or by crook, we will,” replies Number Two, whose new face is revealed in each opening sequence as he watches Six on the beach from his control room. “Who are you?” Six asks. “The new Number Two,” he always replies. “Who is Number One?” Six demands; Two always ignores this question and responds, “you are Number Six.” The camera then zooms in on McGoohan, who punches at the air on the shadowy beach as he cries out the show’s most famous lines: “I am not a number; I am a free man!” The camera pulls back from McGoohan, making him seem small and helpless, as Number Two’s mocking laughter closes the opening sequence. After a fade to black, the new episode begins. Despite audience outrage over the absurdist psychedelic twists of the final episodes—McGoohan claimed he “had to go into hiding for a while” to escape from angry fans (Weldon)—The Prisoner stands out as a landmark achievement among 1960s science fiction TV shows. As Steve Rose observes, “without The Prisoner, we’d never have had cryptic, mindbending TV series like Twin Peaks or Lost. It’s the Citizen Kane of British TV—a programme that changed the landscape.” Few mainstream shows until The Prisoner had been willing to fully commit to such an explicitly allegorical narrative, risking viewer confusion by gleefully rejecting the verisimilitude of conventional realism in favor of symbolic depth and weirdness. Glen Weldon notes that from the beginning, the show was packed with Kafkaesque symbolism, and “as the series went on, and those symbolic elements kept piling up, it became clear that McGoohan . . . was offering an extended, increasingly surreal allegory about the battle of the individual against society.” Making the allegory explicit, Weldon argues that in the final episodes of the show, “Number Six escapes the prison of the Village but not the prison of



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 99

himself—get it?” The Village, in other words, isn’t just a literal prison keeping dangerous former Cold War agents captive (as it first appears); it’s an existential prison that symbolically represents the way society crushes individual freedoms and enlists people to become participants in their own subjugation. In this regard, The Prisoner operates as the quintessential carceral reverse colonization narrative: it invites British and U.S. audience members (who are generally relatively free persons not subjected to repressive incarceration) to self-­identify as oppressed subjects struggling against unjust confinement and captivity. In this regard, The Prisoner embodies the fundamental tension between the critical and masochistic tendencies that are simultaneously observable in most reverse colonization fantasies. On one hand, the show offers a critique of what Foucault calls “disciplinary society”—a term he uses to describe how the whole of contemporary Western society has become increasingly organized by the disciplinary logic embodied by the prison since the end of the eighteenth century (Discipline 209). On the other hand, the emotional power of the show is also anchored on the fantasy of “free exit”—the presumed right to withdraw, resign, or secede from the social contract when it no longer serves the individual—that Land argues is central to Anglophone identity (and by extension, to white reactionary ideology). There is (at best) a cruel irony to this “free exit” fantasy of white imprisonment, especially given that the racist “law and order” political discourse emerging in the late 1960s when The Prisoner was broadcast ultimately led to the massive incarceration of blacks and the emergence of a Euro-­American racial caste system built on disciplinary methods of coercion and control. To begin with, it’s worth noting that what sometimes makes The Prisoner exceptionally groovy is how it functions as an insightfully paranoid reverse colonization narrative offering an anti-­imperial critique of disciplinary society. In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, Foucault argues that a dramatic transformation occurred in Euro-­American penal systems in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, later culminating in the establishment of what Eric Schlosser and Angela Davis have more recently referred to as the “prison-­industrial complex” (Smith and Hattery). Foucault suggests that this historical shift in penal methodology since the Enlightenment (from direct corporeal punishment to more subtle coercive systems of discipline and surveillance) was correlative with a larger

100

ch a p t er 3

transformation in mechanisms of power that extended the disciplinary logic of the prison throughout Euro-­American society as a whole. Within the prison, the school, the workplace, and “at every level of the social body” (Discipline 303), he observes that “procedures were being elaborated for distributing individuals, fixing them in space, classifying them, extracting from them the maximum in time and forces, training their bodies, coding their continuous behavior, maintaining them in perfect visibility, forming around them an apparatus of observation, registration and recording, [and] constituting on them a body of knowledge that is accumulated and centralized” (231). The Village offers an allegory of a social body that has become such a disciplinary prison, particularly by imposing constant panoptic surveillance and interrogation. Not only do penitentiary technicians and administrators (like Number Two) subject the residents of the Village to ongoing technological surveillance (from a computerized control room featuring a giant unblinking mechanical eye), but the residents of the Village are coerced though various means into spying on one another and reporting on each other’s behaviors. In this manner, as Foucault suggests, surveillance creates “a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power,” and the inmate-­residents of the Village are thus “caught up in a power situation of which they themselves are the bearers” (Discipline 201). Six notably discovers this in the second episode of the series, “The Chimes of Big Ben,” when he finds himself interrogating another Village resident, Number Eight, because he doesn’t know if he can trust her (is she a fellow prisoner like him, or is she only trying to win his trust to betray him?). It inevitably turns out that Eight is both a prisoner in the Village and working against Six for her own advantage. Everyone in the Village finds themselves in this situation at some point because disciplinary surveillance has transformed everyone (including technicians and administrators like Number Two) into both prisoners and wardens. This reflects, as Foucault observes, a kind of coercive disciplinary power that runs “the whole length of the social network” and that operates not “as a power of certain individuals over others, but as an immediate reaction of all in relation to the individual” (Discipline 130). The purpose of systematized surveillance in the Village is to produce highly individualized knowledge (the “information” Number Two is deter-



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 101

mined to extract) about the inmates. As Foucault notes, surveillance enables “ever more subtle partitioning of individual behavior” to produce differentially disciplined subjects (Discipline 173). In the first episode of The Prisoner, Two delights in showing Six how much they already know about him— asking him about his breakfast preferences, for example, only to reveal that they are already fully aware of Six’s tastes and have prepared his favorite breakfast “choices” before he has even “decided” what he wants. (Does “choice” truly reflect free will if it can be anticipated by others in advance? If we already know you better than you know yourself, then what’s the harm in telling us what we want to know? Does your so-­called privacy really matter as much as you think?) In a brilliant subtle element of the series, the automated door to Six’s apartment always starts to open before he even begins to move toward it, as though the door itself knows his intentions better than he does. This eerily anticipates the algorithmically individualized techniques of targeted consumer profiling we now experience in the internet era, when Amazon “knows” what sort of products I want—and can pepper them into the display of every website I browse—before I even know they exist. Despite the Village’s extensive information concerning Six, one key question remains unanswered: why did he resign? Most of the episodes of the series focus on the efforts of each new Number Two to interrogate, brainwash, trick, or coerce this information from Six, who always refuses to reveal his motivation. Maintaining his right to keep this information personal functions as Six’s ultimate act of defiance and rebellion. “I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed, or numbered!,” Six declares. “My life is my own!” Much of the emotional power of the show centers on the enjoyment we are invited to experience at Six’s refusal to become an object of knowledge in the Village’s panoptic regime of power. Six can be imprisoned, drugged, subjected to violence, and manipulated in all manner of ways, the show argues, but there is a final kernel of his internal self-­possession—his soul, perhaps—that must always remain sacred and inviolate. Alan Moore and David Lloyd express a similar sentiment in V for Vendetta (1982–89) in a letter that a political prisoner, Valerie Page, writes (in captivity) for all the other prisoners who will come after her. “I shall die here,” she writes. “Every last inch of me shall perish. Except one. An inch. It’s small and it’s fragile

102

ch a p t er 3

and it’s the only thing in the world worth having. We must never lose it, or sell it, or give it away. We must never let them take it from us” (159–60). If disciplinary power “coerces by means of observation” (Discipline 170), as Foucault argues, and observation produces knowledge that supervises “the potentiality of danger that lies hidden in an individual and which is manifested in his observed everyday conduct,” then Six’s refusal to disclose his motivations—his refusal to surrender this final inch of himself— enables him to remain an enigma, unable to be classified, cataloged, and administrated within a total disciplinary system of control. This portrayal of Six captures the central fantasy of the liberal-­human subject, an individual whose self-­ownership is supposedly sacrosanct. In practice, as scholars like Melley and Cherniavsky have shown, the ideal of inviolate self-­ownership has most often been the privilege of masculinity and whiteness rather than a universal norm.4 Part of the brilliance of The Prisoner is that the Village doesn’t just embody a disciplinary regime of control against which an ideal liberal-­human subject struggles; it also expresses what Foucault (in his later work) describes as a biopolitical regime of power characteristic of (emergent) neoliberalism. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault outlines how disciplinary mechanisms have created and enforced social norms since the Enlightenment, yet in his later lectures at the College de France—published posthumously in Security, Territory, Population and The Birth of Biopolitics—he describes how neoliberal biopower often rejects strictly enforced norms in favor of highly regulated and differentiated spaces of quasi-­freedom. In The Prisoner, Six is not relentlessly disciplined; on the contrary, he is “free” to do whatever he chooses within certain limits, and even these limits are enforced relatively softly though the mushy regulatory force of Rover (the giant bouncing balloon that emerges from the water to engulf rogue prisoners). Rover is in many ways the ultimate icon of the “soft” operation of biopolitical regulation; it is mushy and squishy—yet also inexorable. Under its watch, freedom is available within limits that are enforced softly yet relentlessly. The Prisoner thus strikingly articulates the mutual and interlocking operations of disciplinary and biopolitical mechanisms of power; as a carceral reverse colonization narrative, it explores how we are all (to various degrees) simultaneously disciplined and biopolitically regulated. Furthermore, like



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 103

many other science fictions from the 1960s, The Prisoner articulates its critique of disciplinary and biopolitical power in explicitly anti-­imperial terms: the prison within which we are trapped, the show suggests, is the mechanism of an oppressive empire that colonizes and imprisons the individual (in this regard, the Village is a speculative precursor to Dick’s notion of the Black Iron Prison). During the Cold War, espionage operatives like Danger Man and James Bond (and their real-­world counterparts) typically function as agents of neo-imperialism: they destabilize regimes, set up puppet dictators, and otherwise create global conditions favorable to the home empire (which of course supposedly fights for freedom) and unfavorable for the enemy empire. In this regard, James Bond is the ultimate pro–secret-­agent fantasy, the hero of empire for an anticolonial age. The Prisoner, rather gorgeously, is a critique of the secret agent as a neoimperial fantasy hero: Number Six tries to resign as an act of conscientious anti-­imperial protest. During a cultural flashpoint when youth countercultures and anti–Vietnam War protests had turned much of public sentiment against Cold War neo-imperialism, Six embodies a secret agent who has developed a conscience, who no longer wishes to be an unthinking tool of empire: he is the anti–James Bond. Although Six never discloses his reasons for resigning, the show strongly implies that he has become disillusioned with the Cold War struggle. In “Arrival” he says that his resignation was a matter of “principle.” In “The Chimes of Big Ben,” Two quips that it doesn’t matter who runs the Village, because both sides of the Cold War “are becoming identical; what in fact has been created is an international community, a perfect blueprint for world order.” In his rejection of this new world order, Six has become a conscientious objector who no longer wishes to be a violent instrument working to turn the entire world into a kind of Village. This decision threatens the powers-­that-­be, who demand access to his private interiority; he is free to choose as he wishes, but the system needs the information that enables it to master that-­which-­resides-­within-­him-­that-­chooses, so his choice can be anticipated, persuaded, manipulated, regulated, and ultimately controlled. Six resents this intrusion of surveillance and discipline into all layers of contemporary social life, and he undertakes a private rebellion as an anti-­imperial freedom fighter, first through his resignation and then through his refusal to disclose his reasons for resigning.

104

ch a p t er 3

The Prisoner’s admirable anti-­imperial critique of the coercive disciplinary and biopolitical regulation of contemporary life, as compelling as it might be, fails to acknowledge that self-­possessed white male subjects experience a very different kind of imprisonment in neoliberal systems of power than many others do. Neoliberal ideology has often expanded its reach through “soft” power in Europe and North America while simultaneously being imposed through “hard” mechanisms of military intervention and economic coercion throughout the so-­called developing world. Furthermore, as Foucault himself notes, disciplinary power is also always expressed asymmetrically even within Euro-­American society. In our contemporary context, for example, black men are not often policed with soft, squishy, Rover-­like marshmallowiness in the U.S. criminal justice system. In this regard, The Prisoner’s reverse colonial fantasy of white imprisonment fails to offer what Foster calls a critical articulation of the concrete relations between different histories and conditions of subjugation. It imaginatively frames “imprisonment” as a universal condition of oppression, and this universalization enables the white male hero, strangely enough, to emerge as the ultimate colonized prisoner. Furthermore, although The Prisoner productively rages against the various ways modernity has imposed a carceral logic throughout society, it does so in a way that fortifies a fantasy of white identity premised on the notion that whites, in any social context, should always be free to take their toys and go home if things aren’t going their way. Drawing on the pseudo-­academic writing of conservative entrepreneur James C. Bennett, Land argues that Euro-­American culture has been characterized by a “marked cultural tendency to settle disagreements in space, rather than time. . . . When Anglo­ phones disagree, they have often sought to dissociate in space. Instead of an integral resolution (regime change), they pursue a plural irresolution (through regime division), proliferating polities, localizing power, and diversifying systems of government.” When faced with social conflicts, white Europeans and Americans often fall back on their presumed right to withdraw, secede, or exit rather than engaging in the more complex political work of negotiation or compromise. This white insistence of the right to withdraw can be strikingly observed, for example, in the United Kingdom’s Brexit vote, as well as in the libertarian



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 105

“sovereign citizen” movement in the United States, which is fueled by a fringe interpretation of the Constitution that denies the legitimacy of any police authority above the level of the local county sheriff. Sovereign citizen ideology, which often dovetails with the militia-­oriented reactionism of the U.S. patriot movement, came to mainstream public attention in 2016 when Nevada rancher Cliven Bundy—supported by Alex Jones’s Infowars, the Drudge Report, Glen Beck, and other conservative media forces—assembled an armed coalition of far-­right extremists who successfully prevented the federal Bureau of Land Management from arresting him for illegally grazing cattle on federal lands. This armed group pressured the bureau (at gunpoint) into releasing Bundy’s seized cattle to prevent what appeared likely to unfold as a violent firefight with federal authorities (Neiwert 161–81). For over two decades, Bundy had vehemently denied the authority of the federal government to regulate his grazing practices, and he repeatedly called on county sheriffs to disarm members of the Bureau of Land Management, the National Park Service, and other illegitimate “federal bureaucrats” (Neiwert 169). The secessionist logic of sovereign citizenship, embodied by Bundy and his supporters, offers a dark parallel of Six’s insistence on his fundamental right to “resign”—in this regard, Timothy Leary’s 1960s countercultural mandate to “turn on, tune in, and drop out” appears uncomfortably convergent with the racist antigovernment sentiments that fueled the secessionist agenda of the U.S. Civil War (and that have more recently motivated conflicts over the removal of statues of Confederate leaders throughout the South). Wake up, this logic demands, and see the invisible forces that are oppressing you; become aware of the sinister nature of federal authority, the Black Iron Prison, the liberal media establishment, the Cathedral, or Foucault’s “carceral archipelago” (Discipline 297)—you know, whatever the big oppressive force is that is imprisoning you—and once you’re awake, exercise your natural right to escape, withdraw, secede, or exit from this oppressive system. Clearly, there are extraordinary differences between actual existing structures of domination (like Foucault’s carceral archipelago) and the more ephemeral products of either paranoid fantasy (such as Dick’s Black Iron Prison) or politicized rhetorical exaggeration (like the so-­called liberal media establishment—the catch-­all straw-­man of political oppression

106

ch a p t er 3

constantly demonized by conservative talk radio figures like Rush Limbaugh). Furthermore, to his credit, Foucault never advocated for any kind of simplistic withdrawal or exit as a response to the repressive carceral mechanisms operating in contemporary society. On the contrary, in Discipline and Punish, Foucault offers an extended critique of the political idea of social contract theory, which forms the basis of most forms of secessionist ideology embraced by white supremacists, sovereign citizens, Brexiters, and neoreactionaries. “The contract may have been regarded as the ideal foundation of law and political power,” he argues, but “panopticism” was always the contract’s dark twin, insofar as it “constituted the technique, universally widespread, of coercion. . . . The ‘Enlightenment’, which discovered the liberties, also invented the disciplines” (Discipline 222). In other words, Foucault proposes that the Enlightenment ideal of the social contract, which posits that all individuals are born free and surrender their freedoms in exchange for certain social benefits, emerged at the same time as a new and expanding regime of disciplinary coercion built on techniques of power that ensure differentiation between certain people who enjoy more freedoms (and different freedoms) than others. “The general juridical form that guaranteed a system of rights that were egalitarian in principle,” he argues, was supported by “tiny, everyday, physical mechanisms, by all those systems of micro-­power that are essentially non-­egalitarian and asymmetrical that we call the disciplines” (Discipline 222). The cruel irony that Foucault’s analysis illuminates is that white reactionaries (like Bundy) who draw on social contract ideology to argue for their right to secede are already the privileged beneficiaries of a disciplinary system that applies coercive power asymmetrically, creating uneven benefits and determents for different social groups. Foucault’s analysis tends to emphasize asymmetries of disciplinary coercion based on class—the carceral archipelago, in his view, produces delinquent subjects and generates productive illegalities that are vital to capitalism—yet his discussion notably sidesteps questions related to race. Writing more recently, Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow illustrates the various ways the criminal justice system in the United States operates asymmetrically (targeting some and overlooking others) to entrap black men, in particular, as second-­class citizens in a (supposedly colorblind) racial caste system.



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 107

If white identity in Land’s formulation is often premised on the presumed right to withdraw from a social contract that already benefits affluent whites (if the benefits aren’t satisfactory enough), this secessionist fantasy of white identity operates in tandem with a disciplinary social system that applies asymmetrical coercive power to racialize certain subjects and organize others in exploitative hierarchies based on class (or both). It’s illuminating to note that white secessionist ideology always presumes that there is somewhere you can withdraw to—a reserve, a backup space, someplace (even if it is only an inch within yourself) that was always already yours. For example, Six takes for granted that he can retire to a tropical location with palm trees and a sandy beach; as a white British subject, his passport enables him to travel wherever he wants. This is so obvious as to appear almost unremarkable, unless one pauses to consider the contemporary situation of nonwhite global migrants seeking refuge from violence and hardship, who are often met with hostility when attempting to cross borders. It would be strikingly absurd to imagine people who are fleeing unbearable conditions in Central America, Myanmar, or Syria (to give just a few examples) packing their bags with photos of their intended tropical resort destinations. Not everyone has the luxury of free travel across national boundaries; this is a privilege enjoyed by global elites (who today can sometimes even afford lightning-­fast transit through time-­consuming security and customs lines). For many nonwhite refugees and/or migrants, then, the notion of “free exit” is a cruel joke. Exit to where? The notion that one should always be able to withdraw or resign, which Land idealizes, is thus sharply illuminated as a presumption of white imperial privilege in a global system of asymmetrical border enforcement. Even in the United States, where so-­called patriots and sovereign citizens create militias to exert their supposed right to withdraw from social contracts they find distasteful, the secessionist ideologies of such groups are based on the presumption that the land they are taking back was always theirs to begin with—a self-­evidently absurd expression of settler colonial arrogance. The lands where Bundy exerted his “right” to graze his cattle in defiance of federal authorities, for example, were earlier inhabited by the Moapa Paiute people, and these areas didn’t even become part of the United States until after the 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (Keeler). The Prisoner (unintentionally) exposes how certain forms of reactionary

108

ch a p t er 3

white victimhood advocate for the defense of something that is being lost or stolen without acknowledging the imperial systems of power that distribute resources and advantages inequitably in the first place. I don’t intend this observation to offer a condemnation of the show itself. The Prisoner emerges from a 1960s countercultural zeitgeist, offering television’s equivalent of the groundbreaking narrative experimentations that New Wave authors were offering in science fiction literature at the same time, and its critique of the oppressive disciplinary and biopolitical organization of social life is a noteworthy artistic accomplishment. (Furthermore, the show’s extraordinary final episodes, which I do not have the space to discuss here, offer a daring example of psychedelic absurdism that self-­consciously challenges many of the show’s earlier premises, revealing the cult of the individual to be just as much of a prison as the myriad social forces that constrain individualism.) In pointing toward the implicit secessionist fantasy embodied by Six’s determination to “resign” and withdraw to a tropical retreat, my intention has been to show that the show’s revolutionary elements contain reactionary seeds; as a carceral reverse colonization fantasy, The Prisoner simultaneously invites a thoughtful critique of disciplinary and biopolitical oppression and a fantastic embrace of imperial masochism. The ideological fantasy of the imprisoned hero striving for freedom—speculatively offered as a universal figure through reverse colonization fantasy—touches charged emotional currents that are later amplified (to different ends) in Dick’s impassioned resistance to the Black Iron Prison and Land’s neoreactionary insurgency against the Cathedral. As Foster’s critique of cyberpunk suggests, the speculative universalization of oppression is what makes carceral identity powerful in terms of empathetic identification and reactionary appropriation.

The Carceral Fantasies of  Thomas M. Disch Given The Prisoner’s countercultural affinity with New Wave science fiction, it was very appropriate that a recognized New Wave luminary, Thomas M. Disch, was invited to write the show’s novelization, which was published in 1969.5 Disch first achieved acclaim with the publication of The Genocides in 1965, and he moved to London in 1967 to be part of the New Wave community that was emerging around writer and editor Michael Moorcock,



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 109

who had transformed the science fiction magazine New Worlds into an epicenter for New Wave experimentation (Spracher). At what might be considered the height of his popularity, after the publication of his best-­known novel, Camp Concentration, in 1968, Disch penned his novelization of The Prisoner. Although he wrote the literary adaptation for financial reasons and agreed to write it without having seen any episodes of the series, Disch notes (in an interview) that he enjoyed working on The Prisoner and approached the novelization with reasonably serious intention (Edelman). Although some readers regard Disch’s book as a sequel that takes place after the conclusion of the show, it’s never entirely clear whether the story is a follow-­up to the series or a stand-­alone adaptation. Various characters in the book talk about Six’s “return” to the Village, for example, which seems to suggest that the novel takes place after the finale of the show. If this evidence is to be trusted, then Six has been recaptured and his memories have been tampered with to make him forget his previous experiences in the Village. The problem (as any fan of The Prisoner must admit) is that everything one sees and hears in the Village is epistemologically untrustworthy; all of the supposed evidence that Six has already been there before might be a trick— part of Two’s efforts to coerce Six into believing he cannot rely on his own memories. Disch takes great pleasure in metatextually toying with the reader’s uncertainty regarding the exact nature of the novel’s relation to the show. At one point, Six discovers an archive of hidden film canisters that contain what appear to be episodes of the TV series, enabling him to watch events that seem to be from his own past. In the novel, Six watches clips from episode 5, “The Schizoid Man,” a complex moment when Two tries to make Six believe that he is actually Twelve, an impersonator assigned to make another Six (who in the episode is actually the impersonator) question his sense of identity. The Six who watches the film struggles to discern which of the two visually identical men in the footage is his “True Self” and which is his “Double,” often (unsteadily) arriving at what readers familiar with the episode would regard as the correct interpretation (Disch, Prisoner 79). At one point, however, the footage Six is watching in the novel diverges from the events in the show. In the original episode, Rover confronts the two

110

ch a p t er 3

identical men, it engulfs the Double after he tries to flee, and the True Six then telephones Two and attempts to impersonate the Double to try to escape from the Village. In the novel’s version, after Rover chases the Double, there is an off-­camera scream; the footage does not show the Double being engulfed, as the episode does. After this, the film footage in the novel diverges significantly from the original episode: “The reel ended with a final still: a tabletop, and on it a belt-­buckle, a keyring with two keys, some nails, a cigarette lighter, a few odd-­shaped tiny lumps of silvery metal, and a small silver disk of the type that surgeons use in repairing fractured skulls. Presumably, but for these few artifacts, the other remnants had proved digestible” (84). No shot remotely resembling this one exists in the TV show,6 although I had to rewatch the episode carefully to catch the divergence— something that would not have been easy for readers in the late 1960s (before videocassette recorders had become common for home use). Indeed, at first glance it seemed plausible that this shot might have appeared in the episode, and this is—rather cleverly—Disch’s whole point: memory can be unreliable, and well-­placed suggestions can sometimes cause us to feel that we remember things that might not have actually happened. This divergent moment is fascinating on several levels. If the footage Six is watching in the novel doesn’t match the original episode, why should we believe that Six has been in the Village previously and has now returned? It’s reflexive for some readers to think of the novel as a sequel to the show, but what if, in the novel, the episodes of the show that Six finds are fakes— props created by Two to trick Six into believing that he has been in the Village previously? Such a clever and intricately crafted deception is just the sort of thing one might expect from an episode of The Prisoner, given the lengths that every version of Two will go to in order to trick Six into doubting himself. If the episodes are fake (rather than an authentic history of what has happened in the past), then Six’s seemingly accurate distinction between his True Self and his Double in the “Schizoid Man” footage is entirely erroneous—he may have been tricked into identifying with one of the two fakes by watching footage that is entirely false, just as the reader may have been tricked into remembering a scene from the episode that doesn’t actually exist. Once we begin to consider such possibilities, a bottomless rabbit hole of paranoia opens up, and this is likely Disch’s purpose. Unlike the TV



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 111

show, which celebrates Six’s unconquerable self-­possession, Disch’s novelization insidiously erodes the show’s essential premise that the heroic individual can know himself perfectly and thus resist manipulation through dogged willpower. In this regard, Disch’s version of The Prisoner subverts the James Bond–style secret agent narrative even more dramatically than the show. While the show rejects the celebration of the secret agent as a Cold War imperial hero, Disch’s novel challenges the unshakeable sense of self-­ownership—a white and masculine fantasy of liberal human individualism—that is often centrally embodied by secret agent figures such as James Bond. Disch specifically notes that he regards his version of The Prisoner as “a James Bond type of novel” (Edelman), and one of the most unusual moments of the book is its opening scene—a conversation at a restaurant in London between Six and a female agent (whom he calls Liora) about his impending resignation—which feels much more like something from an Ian Fleming Bond novel (in its stark seriousness) than the opening sequence of the TV show. In Disch’s opening chapter, we do not see Six storm into his superior’s office to resign; instead, Six and Liora engage in a conversational sparring match in which they joust over trying to provoke emotional responses from each other while maintaining their personal reserve. Disch uses this scene to emphasize Six’s self-­possession and his confident control over what he chooses to disclose and withhold—the hallmarks of the character in McGoohan’s portrayal. Six, of course, wins this conversational game, and Liora ultimately erupts in frustration with him: “You know, if you can’t trust me, you’ll never be able to trust anyone. You sit there with your enigma dangling in front of you like some fat gold watch chain. You’re just inviting someone to grab it, my dear” (8). At the beginning of the novel, Disch’s portrayal of Six matches McGoohan’s version in the show: his secrets are his own, and his masterful self-­ ownership seems unshakeable. Furthermore, the Village, just as in the show, exists to try to extract information from Six, cleverly reflecting a combination of disciplinary and biopolitical regimes of coercion aimed at manipulating the subject through the surveillance-­driven production of knowledge and microregulation. Unlike the show, Disch ultimately challenges the masterful fantasy of liberal-­human self-­ownership embodied by James Bond and McGoohan’s

112

ch a p t er 3

portrayal of Six. In Disch’s version of The Prisoner, Six’s masterful self-­ possession begins to crack as soon as he arrives in the Village: after discovering a perfect replica of the home that he might have intended to purchase waiting for him in the Village, Six determines that nothing around him is real or authentic. “What then, with any certainty, was?,” he ponders. Disch offers a satirical twist as Six searches for something real he can draw certainty from: “He thought he recognized the answer in a mirror, until he noticed with chagrin, that his trouser-­fly had been left unbuttoned” (24). This is a laugh-­out-­loud moment that never would have appeared in the show. In the face of the lies and deceptions of the Village, Six literally looks to himself for something he can rely on, only to discover (embarrassingly) that his fly is open. In other words, Six discovers (suddenly and humiliatingly) that he doesn’t have control over his own image; perhaps he doesn’t know himself as well as he believes (this sort of thing never happens to the cinematic James Bond, who is nearly always in control of his image and presentation). In this moment, Disch’s Six resembles Moorcock’s famous anti–secret-­agent Jerry Cornelius, a camp mockery of Bond who perpetually fails at everything he sets out to accomplish, and Disch even signals that he is paying homage to Moorcock by noting that one piece of the elegant furniture in Six’s new home is supposedly from an upscale shop called “J. Cornelius” (7, 24). The point of the Jerry Cornelius reference—and the humorous moment when Six discovers that his fly is open—is to establish that Disch is subverting the white masculine fantasy of unshakeable self-­possession that is one of the powerful emotional anchors of the show (and of the James Bond–style secret agent fantasy in a larger sense). Furthermore, Disch quickly establishes that Six can’t perfectly trust his own memories. Confronted in the mirror with his open fly, his mind scrambles to reconstruct how this might have happened: “his trouser fly had been left unbuttoned. By himself? No. Though he seemed to remember, now, forgetting to do this” (24–25, original emphasis). As readers of the novel, we know that Six did not dress himself; he undressed the previous evening before he was knocked out by sleeping gas, and he awoke at the train station in the Village wearing his tuxedo. Whoever brought him to the Village therefore dressed him (and left his fly unbuttoned). Despite this, Six seems to remember forgetting to button his



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 113

fly; his memory fills in a gap, just as readers are invited to falsely “remember” the moment from “The Schizoid Man” that doesn’t actually appear in the original episode. In these ways, Disch signals that epistemological uncertainty is no easy thing to overcome, and he gestures toward a postmodern conception of the self as fragmented and decentered rather than whole and complete. After watching the footage from “The Schizoid Man,” Six begins to directly contemplate such uncertainties: “could he never prove he was who he believed himself to be? Finally, can anyone?” (84). Ultimately, Six recoils from the possibility of contingent selfhood into the individualist fantasy of self-­ ownership: “But it made no difference, really, who he was, who he had been, what he remembered and what he had been made to forget: he was himself, and he knew the interior dimensions of that self. This was sufficient” (84). Six might be able to convince himself that he is his own master, yet Disch undermines this self-­conception throughout the novel. Later in the story, when he encounters Liora in the Village (who inevitably turns out to be another Number Two), Six utters a statement that never would have been spoken in the show: “I am not your jailer, Liora. I am . . . a prisoner” (162). McGoohan’s Six (“I am not a number; I am a free man!”) would never have said this; the fact that Disch’s Six can be numbered, manipulated, and ultimately made to accept his circumstance as an imprisoned subject undermines the white, masculine, liberal-­humanist fantasy that each of us has some final mythical “inch” of self-­possession that can never be violated by outside forces. With characteristic New Wave edge, Disch deflates the central optimism of the TV series. Everyone, he suggests, can be imprisoned and manipulated in some way or another. Just as George Orwell illustrates in 1984 that there is something that can ultimately break anyone (in Winston Smith’s case, the threat of a rat attacking his face), Disch proposes that we are all subject to the possibility of invasive manipulation, and we never finally know ourselves as perfectly as we might think.7 Disch challenges the notion that there are free domains—like the tropical beach of Six’s photo in the TV show—where one can retreat from the manipulation of social forces. “Where, in this vastly overpopulated world, is there even room to be free?,” Two asks Six in the novel (103). “No, Number Six,” he continues, “though you may clang your bells for freedom, the best

114

ch a p t er 3

that you can escape to is some more camouflaged form of imprisonment than we provide, though we do try to be unobtrusive” (103). Six discovers the oppressive truth of this when he escapes the Village, only to discover that social life in London is characterized by soft, seemingly friendly systems of manipulation that gently deny him access to practically everything, just like Rover nudging him back toward the Village. “It couldn’t be a plot,” Six thinks, “Not all of it. Not everywhere. Not every one of them, the clerks in stores, the secretaries in offices, bartenders, servants, telephone operators. It grew increasingly difficult to remember that the world had always been like this” (112–13). Disch’s version of The Prisoner preserves the show’s critique of the disciplinary and biopolitical regulation of society—the transformation of everyday life in Western societies into evermore sophisticated and individualized forms of imprisonment—yet it rejects the secessionist fantasy of withdrawal or “free exit” that often functions as a cornerstone of white reactionary discourse. There is no free space, the show suggests, where one can withdraw to escape these forces. In this regard, the novel is ultimately more bleak and edgy than the show, and it admirably subverts the aspects of the TV series that render its emancipatory energy susceptible to appropriation by reactionary conservativism. At the same time, one of the other elements that Disch introduces in his novelization arguably damages one of the most interesting moments from the show. The final episode of the TV series, “Fall Out,” reveals that the mysterious Number One is actually an insane version of Six himself (wearing two layers of masks), an absurdist twist that points toward how we are all the wardens of our own prisons. Disch’s conclusion, in contrast, reveals Number One to be a senile robot old woman—the innocent-­seeming “Granny” that Six has previously encountered several times in the Village (38, 136). This “old Granny” Number One reveals that the Village has no ultimate purpose, mindlessly singing “we’re here because we’re here because we’re here because” (233) until Six breaks her hand, revealing that she is an automaton filled with “tubes and wires” (235). Although Disch’s Number One symbolically gestures toward the way disciplinary society functions through mindless and often irrational processes of automatized administration, she also frames such forces as somehow essentially maternal and feminine—themes that are repeated years later in The Matrix, which portrays the ultimate prison as



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 115

an entrapping, robotic, emasculating womb of control (“matrix” is derived from the Latin word for “mother” or “womb,” and as we have seen, Red Pill reactionaries have been quick to adopt The Matrix as an ideological inspiration for the articulation of white and masculine victimhood). Despite its sophistication, Disch’s version of The Prisoner displays the same dual tendency toward imperial critique and bizarro victimhood that we can see in the TV show (and in almost all reverse colonization narratives). The novel simply shifts the positions of the various critical and masochistic elements, strengthening the show’s critique of disciplinary and biopolitical society while gendering mindless social regulation as a maternal reproduction of deadening systems of social conformity.

Camp Concentration One of Disch’s most significant novels, Camp Concentration, is also a carceral reverse colonization story, and it is probably one of the most striking prison narratives in the New Wave science fiction canon. Like many other anti-­imperial New Wave fictions (particularly the works of Ursula K. Le Guin and Samuel Delany), Camp Concentration arguably maximizes the critical possibilities offered by reverse colonization narratives. In particular, the novel shines an uncanny and disturbing light on various real practices of medical experimentation on prisoners (and other disadvantaged populations) that were taking place during the 1960s (often without the knowledge or consent of the subjects). Furthermore, Camp Concentration offers an early speculative exploration of what Rebekah Sheldon describes as postmodern capital’s increasing biopolitical domination of radical sites of newness where unpredictable creative possibilities can emerge—a form of neo-­imperialism often focused on the exploitation of affective and biological surplus rather than on territorial conquest.8 Despite these impressive insights, Camp Concentration also universalizes the concentration camp as a universal and ahistorical site of domination and oppression, a gesture that both sanctifies troubling forms of carceral victimhood and opens Holocaust identity to widespread appropriation. The story of Camp Concentration takes place in a secret research compound hidden in an abandoned gold mine somewhere in the U.S. West where scientists are subjecting prisoners to injections of a super-­drug

116

ch a p t er 3

(derived from the syphilis virus) called Palladine. This drug heightens the intelligence of prisoner-­subjects to a state beyond genius while slowly killing them over the course of nine painful months. The story is told through the journals of Louis Sacchetti, a poet who is voluntarily imprisoned as a conscientious objector because he refuses to be drafted to fight in a near-­future escalation of the Vietnam War. Sacchetti thinks of his prison journals as a kind of writing akin to The House of the Dead (1860–62), the narrative Dostoevsky wrote after being imprisoned in a Siberian prison camp for his advocacy of socialism and his involvement in the Petrashevsky Circle (Disch, Camp 2). Disch offers Camp Concentration as a story in the tradition of the prison narrative, a genre with noteworthy examples ranging from Dostoevsky through TV shows such as Oz and Orange Is the New Black. Like most New Wave science fictions, Camp Concentration adopts a strong anti-­imperial stance: it rejects the Cold War imperialism of the Vietnam War during a cultural moment (the late 1960s) when anti–Vietnam War protest had reached an apex. In the novel’s dystopian near future, politicians and military leaders who are dissatisfied by how the United States has been “denied adequate hitting power” (1) in Southeast Asia (reflecting the conservative mythology that the United States was supposedly losing the Vietnam War because it was fighting with one hand tied behind its back) finally decide to use “tactical” nuclear and biological weapons to escalate the conflict toward victory. In this increasingly militarized social context (where Sacchetti notes that “war has at last devoured the reserves of our affluence and is damaging the fibers of the everyday”), draft dodgers and other protesters (like Sacchetti) are imprisoned in concentration camps where they are subject to invasive medical experiments for the purpose of developing new military weapons (5). Sacchetti, like Six, is a conscientious objector (an anti-­imperial hero) who chooses to withdraw rather than participate in the imperial system. Unlike Six, he has no illusion that this choice means he will be able to escape to a luxurious tropical resort; he refuses the draft fully knowing that he will be imprisoned for his political objections. One of the most powerful aspects of Camp Concentration is how it exposes the very real ways prisoners (and other systematically disadvantaged populations in the prison-­like disciplinary regime of the administrative state) have been subjected to invasive medical experimentation without



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 117

their consent. In this regard, Disch’s novel offers an obvious allegory of the terrifying medical experimentations performed at Auschwitz. Through the speculative narratology of reverse colonization, however, it is the United States (rather than Germany) that rounds up prisoners into concentration camps, with liberal antiwar protestors as the victims, rather than Jews. In this regard, Disch—like Dick in The Man in the High Castle and Spinrad in The Iron Dream—gestures toward the troubling possibility that the United States shares an uncomfortable near-­kinship with Nazi Germany that lurks not far beneath the surface of American life. Part of what’s truly striking (and less obvious) about Camp Concentration is how it uncannily seems to reference real-­world instances of unethical incarceration and medical experimentation that Disch was almost certainly not aware of in 1968, when the novel was published. The author may have known that the United States had relocated Japanese Americans into internment camps during World War II, so it is not surprising that he would imagine that the nation was capable of creating its own concentration camps. It is unlikely, however, that Disch knew about the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male—a medical study initiated in 1932 by the U.S. Public Health Service to observe the long-­term effects of syphilis in black men without informing them that they were infected with the disease. In the supposed name of scientific research, doctors involved in the four-­decade-­long study withheld penicillin from the subjects even after the antibiotic was proven in the 1940s to be a successful treatment for syphilis. Although some professionals in the medical community knew about these experiments in the late 1960s, the Tuskegee experiments did not become public knowledge until 1972 (four years after the publication of Camp Concentration) when a whistleblower went to the press with revelations about the study (“Tuskegee”). Even though Disch almost certainly knew nothing about the Tuskegee experiments, Camp Concentration uncannily seems to reference them. The Palladine drug that prisoners are subjected to in Camp Archimedes is derived from syphilis spirochetes (Disch, Camp 55), and Sacchetti is infected with Palladine without his knowledge so that scientists can observe its effects on his mental state. Furthermore, although many of the inmates in the novel are white, the most significant prisoner Sacchetti meets in Camp

118

ch a p t er 3

Archimedes is a black man, Mordecai Washington, who ultimately uses his drug-­enhanced genius to stage a secret prison break by enabling the prisoners to swap bodies with the wardens and guards. Given these three elements—exposure to syphilis, a black test subject, and the observation of the course of the disease without the subject’s knowledge—Camp Concentration’s speculations seem to almost supernaturally anticipate the public revelation of the Tuskegee study. Perhaps even more chillingly, the medical experimentations Disch describes at Camp Archimedes seem almost humane compared with the real-­world testing that was inflicted on inmates at Holmesburg Prison in Philadelphia from 1951 through 1974. In his book Acres of Skin: Human Experiments in Holmesburg Prison, Allen Hornblum describes a variety of medical tests performed on Holmesburg inmates by dermatologist Albert Kligman, who exposed prisoners to radiation, viruses and bacteria, chemical and biological agents, and a variety of mind-­altering drugs (including LSD) in exchange for small monetary compensations. Kligman performed these experiments on behalf of the U.S. Army and for private corporations such as the Dow Chemical Company and Johnson & Johnson (Vegh). (This finds a parallel in Camp Concentration, where Camp Archimedes is run by a private corporation generating defense research that will ultimately be used by the U.S. military). Again, Disch probably knew nothing about the Holmesburg experiments (which only received public attention in the mid-­ 1970s). His speculative assertion that such atrocities could be inflicted on prisoners in the United States was thus eerily accurate, given that they were already happening. Perhaps what is most extraordinary about Camp Concentration is how it imagines medical experimentation on prisoners as a way of colonizing inner space, or of capturing and harnessing the site of emergence of radically new possibilities in a way that preserves a vital creative openness necessary for the emergence of the truly new. In her book The Child to Come, Rebekah Sheldon argues that a specific vector of neoliberal biopolitics she calls “somatic capitalism” increasingly depends on the “unanticipatable liveliness” of the body as a generative source of exploitable surplus value (175). In other words, somatic capital requires bodies to be free to generate new possibilities



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 119

(ranging from genetic variations to idea and affects), yet it perpetually strives to enclose such somatic sites of emergence in structured mechanisms of “capture and control” (175). This is one of many forms of neo-­imperialism that eschew the military colonization of geopolitical territory in favor of “a displacement onto the human of the enclosure of the commons” (152). Camp Concentration offers a nightmarish example of how somatic capitalism might foster the emergence of the unpredictably new while always already enclosing emergent novelty in military-­industrial systems of capture and control. Like Six in the Village, Sacchetti and the other prisoners at Camp Archimedes are accorded extraordinary freedoms to do as they wish while the Palladine disease runs its course on their bodies; they explore art and philosophy while conducting alchemy experiments and even staging theatrical productions. “Above all, I must feel free, feel free,” Sacchetti quips in his journal, mocking the insistence of his captors that he should enjoy his limited freedom to its fullest (Disch, Camp 12). The ultimate purpose of granting prisoners this vibrant freedom, however, is to expropriate and weaponize the fruits of their emerging genius. As Dr. Aimée Busk explains to Sacchetti, the project’s aim is to “maximize intelligence without vitiating its social utility” in such a way that the experiment can “begin to exploit that most precious resource, the mind, as it has never been exploited before” (25). Just as Two must avoid damaging Six in the Village, because harming him beyond certain limits would negate what is ultimately most valuable in him, the prisoners in Camp Archimedes are similarly invited to express their freedoms without strict disciplinary limits, precisely so the project can capture the unexpected and unpredictable excess that emerges from their flowering intellectual capacity. “The important thing,” argues Humphrey Haast, the project’s director, is to let the prisoner-­ subjects “steer their own course. They’ve got to break away from the old patterns of thought, blaze trails, explore” (44, original emphasis). This situation of creative exploitation—an invasive manipulation of the body to harness its creative capacity—strikingly illuminates Sheldon’s argument that neoliberal capital depends on the appropriation of wellsprings of vitality and newness that emerge outside of strict regimes of production and control and her further assertion (contrary to the fantasy that there

120

ch a p t er 3

is always an excess beyond capture) that neoliberal biopower increasingly innovates new ways to patent and harness sites of the emergence of unanticipatable possibilities. Camp Archimedes is precisely such a site where military-­industrial interests are trying to control the emergence of the radically new. Haast draws on the imperial mythos of frontier exploration to describe this experiment in glowing terms as an expedition to conquer inner space: “It’s common knowledge,” he argues, “that for twenty years a small but powerful clique in Washington has been burning up millions and billions of taxpayers’ dollars to get us into Outer Space. While all of Inner Space had yet to be explored” (90, original emphasis). Haast’s shift in emphasis from outer to inner space (a move centrally characteristic of New Wave science fiction) hinges on the prospect that inner space (or the site of radical exploratory creative innovation) can be colonized, conquered, and harnessed as a site of military and industrial production. Radical creativity, in this context, is imagined as a queer version of masculine pregnancy: it takes nine months for Palladine to kill the prisoners, and Mordecai Washington often describes his progressive deterioration as a form of pregnancy, joking that he might be “premature” if he dies early (53) and dismissing his increasing cardiovascular strokes as “labor pains” in his creative process (67). He builds an alchemical “athanor” or “mother’s belly” in which he cooks “a darkly gleaming, oblate object about two feet high— the philosophical egg” (73), ironically materializing his captors’ intention for him to serve as an agent of queer reproductive possibilities. Ultimately, Disch (like Georges Bataille) proposes that novelty and excess will inevitably escape capture and enclosure: Camp Archimedes loses control of the Palladine experiment when Dr. Busk, who has been infected through sexual contact with Mordecai Washington, leaves the project and begins to deliberately disseminate the virus in the outside world. Palladine quickly begins to spread throughout the United States with destabilizing effects. In another uncannily prophetic twist, Disch almost seems to portray the outbreak as a speculative anticipation of the HIV epidemic that began in the early 1980s. What if a deadly sexually transmitted virus, Disch proposes, had the power to transform the world? Camp Concentration almost seems to foreshadow theatrical works like Angels in America and Rent,



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 121

which suggest that AIDS ultimately necessitates a redemptive transformation of Western social consciousness with far-­reaching effects. Disch further enables the Palladine prisoners at Camp Archimedes to escape their captivity through the complex manipulation of secret codes, hiding their true activities until they can switch bodies with their captors—an optimistic fantasy of appropriating the master’s tools, so to speak, to dismantle the master’s house. In these ways, Disch (who was openly gay after coming out in 1968) celebrates the power of queer creativity to transcend appropriation and exploitation. As such, Camp Concentration offers many of the best aspects of a critical reverse colonization narrative. By asking readers to identify with prisoners, it offers an anti-­imperial critique that (uncannily) exposes the real injustices of unethical carceral experimentation, and it speculatively exposes and condemns the emergent neoliberal colonization of emergent sites of surplus vitality. At the same time, Camp Concentration also contains a number of elements that contribute to an emerging 1960s cultural milieu in which carceral victimhood functions as a key source of ideological power for imperial masochism. For one, the novel centrally imagines men as victims of invasive reproductive exploitation—a speculation that seems starkly ironic given the widespread exploitation of women’s reproductive capacities in the real world. Furthermore, and perhaps most unnervingly, the novel draws its deepest affective power from fantasizing about what it feels like to be imprisoned in an ironically speculative version of a concentration camp, universalizing the notion that we all might become Holocaust victims. This troubling representational generalization draws on what Jeffrey C. Alexander calls “analogical bridging” (245) to universalize the Holocaust as “the archetypal sacred-­evil of our time” (227). On one hand, Camp Concentration legitimately warns that what happened to Jews and other minority groups in Nazi Germany can happen again in other forms and other places. At the same time, the elevation of concentration camp to a universal imaginative site of trauma enables a kind of identificatory slipperiness that ultimately contributes to a widespread (and often wholly illegitimate) appropriation of carceral identity for reactionary purposes. Disch’s extraordinary novel offers a sophisticated critique of real conditions of exploitation, yet

122

ch a p t er 3

it also participates in a larger current of reverse colonization fantasy that normalizes carceral victimhood in ways that open the door to the paranoid imprisonment fantasies represented by Dick’s Black Iron Prison and Moldbug and Land’s Cathedral.

Conclusion Carceral reverse colonization narratives from the 1960s—such as The Prisoner, Disch’s novelization of the show, and Camp Concentration— speculatively dramatize the phenomenon that Foucault describes as the extension of biopolitical and disciplinary prison logics throughout the fabric of everyday life. My point in this chapter isn’t simply to note that these narratives reflect such social and cultural conditions. Instead, my argument is that carceral reverse colonization narratives in the 1960s contribute to a powerful transformation in imperial fantasy that has far-­reaching consequences. During a late 1960s cultural moment when the force of conquest-­oriented imperial ideology had been dramatically eroded by anticolonial and countercultural sentiments, carceral reverse colonization fantasy reconfigures the surface of what Deleuze and Guattari describe as “the plane of immanence” where concepts are formed, or the conceptual site of emergence of new ideas, new modes of identification, and new configurations of affective resonance that shape the future of imperial and anti-­imperial sentiment and practice (What 35–60). In “Knowledge, Affect, and Ritual Magic,” Sheldon strikingly describes the plane of immanence of concepts as “a mobile surface with no depth,” like what one might see if “looking into a witch’s cauldron” (7). This fluid-­like plane functions as a chaotic yet patterned membrane through which “concepts chain together like molecules” and “power cataracts, forming zones of high and low intensity” (7). Between unstructured virtual possibility and fully formed concepts and ideas, in other words, lies a “milieu that mediates between them, that has its own history and its own force” (7). To imagine oneself as colonized or imprisoned has a much more powerful affective resonance in the 1960s for many than thinking of oneself as a conqueror who dominates others. This fundamental structure of feeling might be said to create vortices in the plane of immanence of ideas, patterns on this



The Whiteness of   Black Iron Prisons 123

fluid-­like surface through which new concepts emerge. Reverse colonization narratives, fictional or otherwise, are thus not simply the end products that erupt from this roiling cauldron; they are also the local centers and strange attractors influencing the movement of currents on its surface. Reverse colonization narratives, in other words, contribute in powerful ways to the emergence of anticolonial ideologies and neo-­imperial subjectivities, yet both of these seemingly opposed trajectories share affective formal symmetries because of the way reverse colonization fantasy influences the site of conceptualization. Carceral reverse colonization fantasies, in particular, encourage and enable identification with imprisoned subjects and give force to liberatory, anti-­imperial sentiments—for good or for ill. When Rupert Murdoch, for example, referred to the Brexit vote as a “prison break” in 2016 after successfully leveraging his media outlets to advocate for Britain’s withdrawal from the European Union (Mahler and Rutenberg), he was drawing on the speculative logic of reverse colonization that initially found its most powerful expression in 1960s science fiction and then worked its way into the popular imaginary in a pervasive and widespread manner. The notion that we are all prisoners in various ways, struggling to win our freedoms, at times provokes a powerful critical awareness that can allow us to see real conditions of oppression more clearly, as The Prisoner and Disch’s speculative fictions demonstrate. At the same time, identifying as prisoners can become a potent keystone for imperial masochism, as can be observed all too clearly in Dick’s paranoid fantasies and in the reactionary fantasies of Land, Murdoch, and right-­wing populist figures like Cliven Bundy— white men who in various ways imagine themselves as victims to justify the expansion of their own power and agency. Freedom, in this neoliberal reactionary formulation, is always the freedom to express one’s powers without limitation—a freedom to withdraw or secede from the social contract (or from any contract) when it no longer creates the greatest possible advantages for oneself, regardless of the unjust hardships that may be experienced by others. As Mark Bould has noted, one of neoliberalism’s key strategies has been to keep “the right ideas lying around in the right places,” so that neoliberal values shape possibilities for change and transformation in moments of crisis when old systems and structures break down.9 In other words, since

124

ch a p t er 3

at least the 1970s, neoliberalism has sought to programmatically transform economics, politics, and society and shape the plane of immanence of ideas so that the emergence of new possibilities is always filtered through neoliberal value systems. Within carceral reverse colonization fantasy, neoliberalism has discovered and appropriated a powerful tool for mobilizing affect and sentiment, because the countercultural urge for emancipation—when decoupled from a critical articulation in relation to real-­world systemic injustices—is a powerful catalyst for affective transformation, reframing all forms of regulation as unfair prisons that hinder the supposedly sacred and inviolate freedom of the market (which, as always, structurally benefits some and devastatingly exploits others).

V CHVPTER

4 Victims of   Entropy

W

hen Rupert Murdoch praised the 2016 Brexit vote by comparing it to a “prison break,” he also unashamedly admitted that the United Kingdom’s secession from the European Union would increase his personal power and influence: “When I go into Downing Street they do what I say,” he observed, but “when I go into Brussels they take no notice” (Pedersen). Murdoch wasn’t the only conservative luminary who compared Brexit to a prison break: “This is like the jailer has accidentally left the door of the jail open and can see the sunlit land beyond,” gushed Boris Johnson (mayor of London at the time), “and it will be a huge weight lifted from British business” (Spence and Chadwick). Writing in the conservative magazine National Review, George Will described Brexit by saying that “Britons voted, 52 percent to 48 percent, for the exhilaration of emancipation from the European Union’s gray bureaucratic conformities” (emphasis added). In these cases, reactionaries use the logic of carceral reverse colonization to describe secession, or the presumed right to withdraw from restrictive social contracts to enjoy the greatest possible degree of agency, as liberation from imprisonment. In other words, the powerful who experience threats and limitations to their powers imagine themselves as victims exercising their inherent right to break free from wrongful incarceration. Although a majority of English and Welsh voters were certainly persuaded that the European Union was a gray bureaucratic prison stifling the British economy,1 they were also mobilized into political action by the sense that what they really needed to escape from was the entropic effects of

126

ch a p t er 4

immigration.2 Tom Chivers suggests that many “Leave” voters were motivated by fears concerning “social entropy,” or the sense that Britain’s “distinct local character” would be damaged by an influx of immigrants who “by definition, are not ‘authentically local.’ ” Chivers strangely draws on the science of thermo­dynamics to describe the supposed problem of social entropy: “if you unplug a fridge, it slowly reverts to the same temperature as the room around it. It needs work to maintain its difference.” Culturally distinct communities, he reasons, are similar to refrigerators: unique local character is eroded by immigration just as coldness in an icebox is eroded by heat. The notion of social entropy is, of course, quintessentially science fictional: it draws on a domain of science—thermodynamics—to assign metaphorical meaning to social, economic, and political events. When considered in this light, part of what catalyzed the Brexit vote is the science fictional notion that the United Kingdom is threatened by thermodynamic heat death. Unless we close our borders, the story goes, we will lose what makes us unique and distinctive, and the “prison” of the European Union locks Britain into seemingly inevitable entropic decline. The only reasonable solution, from this perspective, is to build walls and close borders. This will prevent the homeland from sliding from a desirable high-­energy state to an undesirable low-­energy state. This science fictional conceit, fortified by the metaphor of social entropy, offers another instance of the imperial masochism I’ve analyzed throughout this book: according to the Brexit “Leave” narrative, the social, political, and economic advantages that the United Kingdom enjoys makes it a victim of jealousy, resentment, and invasion from nonwhite foreigners who greedily seek access to British resources.3 In the context of the Brexit vote, entropy becomes a central organizing metaphor in the service of nationalist populism. A similar thermodynamic logic drives populist anti-­immigration sentiment in the United States; the United Kingdom supposedly needs to escape the prison of the European Union to “take back control” just as the United Kingdom supposedly needed to build a wall to “make America great again.” In both cases, a thermodynamic metaphor drives a political reverse colonization fantasy: the homeland is being colonized by vampiric forces that are insidiously eroding what makes each country special. This occurs partly through a loss of political and economic autonomy (resulting from the influence of supranational



Victims of   Entropy 127

institutions like the European Union or NATO) and largely because immigration supposedly dilutes the purity of a country’s unique national character. In Britain and America, then, the metaphor of entropy lies at the heart of a reverse colonization imaginary that has become ascendant in reactionary political discourse. This mode of thinking has a long history, particularly in British speculative literature. As I noted in the introduction, Stephen D. Arata argues that part of what makes Bram Stoker’s Dracula frightening in the 1890s is the foreign vampire’s arrival in London as an immigrant who threatens to colonize and transform Britain itself.4 Jerry Määttä observes a similar sentiment a half-­century later in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951), a novel written in the 1940s (before British decolonization) that tells the story of an invasion of carnivorous plants in the aftermath of a mysterious meteor shower. Määttä considers The Day of the Triffids “a story of reverse colonization, where the dangers of the jungle arrive in imperial Britain,” and he argues that “the exotic and highly dangerous jungle plants stand in for the—as they were perceived at the time— equally exotic and dangerous, untamed and uncivilized peoples of the tropical colonies” (44). In other words, Wyndham’s Triffids offer a nightmarish vision of what might happen if the distant colonized became hostile immigrant colonizers. The tendency to imagine the collapse and/or transformation of empire in specifically thermodynamic terms dramatically intensifies during the 1960s, a time when New Wave science fiction was turning to entropy as one of its central themes. This chapter argues that the works of J. G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock in particular register (and in various ways theorize) a mode of British postcolonial ambivalence that frames the decline of colonial empire as the inevitable and often tragic consequence of thermodynamic breakdown. In the imaginative work of these authors, entropy reverses colonization in a very literal sense; the civilizing work of empire succumbs to thermodynamic decay, and the imperial center becomes a victim of its own noble-­yet-­flawed aspirations in the face of postcolonial backlash. The collapse of the British empire, these authors argue, may have been thermodynamically inevitable, and the stark injustices of Western European imperialism are impossible for Ballard and Moorcock to ignore. Even so, these

128

ch a p t er 4

authors mark the decline of empire with profoundly mixed feelings, because for them, empire frequently embodies the apex of civilization and human aspiration striving against entropy, decay, darkness, and savagery. Ballard and Moorcock reveal that what Paul Gilroy calls “postcolonial melancholia” is only one among many possible responses to a British postwar crisis in imperial ideology. If melancholia originates in a sudden loss of feeling of moral legitimacy and consequently in a resentful forgetting of history, the ambivalence embodied in Ballard’s and Moorcock’s fictions offers a loaded revisionist remembering of colonial history. It foregrounds the injustices of imperialist practice while simultaneously justifying such injustices as inevitable and necessary. Ballard and Moorcock offer reverse colonization narratives that decry imperialism while simultaneously framing imperial elites as tragic and helpless victims of entropic decline. The imperial masochism embodied in their works from the 1960s sets the stage for the science fictional fantasies of “social entropy” that later mobilize anti-­immigration sentiment during the reactionary populist Brexit/ Trump era. Not all British New Wave authors share Ballard and Moorcock’s ambivalence regarding empire. One lesser-­known contributor to New Worlds (the magazine that was the locus of British New Wave activity in the 1960s) was David Harvey, who later went on to theorize postmodern time-­space compression in his landmark critical work The Condition of Postmodernity. This chapter concludes with an exploration of Harvey’s contributions to the New Wave, which challenged writers like Ballard and Moorcock to complicate their attitudes toward both entropy and empire.

Entropy and New Wave Science Fiction Entropy is a central thematic concern in the fictions of a wide range of New Wave authors. In Pamela Zoline’s famous story “The Heat Death of the Universe” (1967), for example, an intelligent young wife and mother living in suburban Southern California is driven insane by her efforts to maintain order in her home in the face of the constant entropic pressures of household chaos. In Thomas Disch’s Camp Concentration, Louis Sacchetti’s rival Skilliman quips that “Hell is the second law of thermodynamics. It is



Victims of   Entropy 129

that frozen, eternal equilibrium that makes calamity of so long life” (156). Skilliman, like the psychotic Nazi scientists in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle, represents the nihilistic attitude that all human meaning is arbitrary and illusory: “At last, at the end of all things,” he argues, “each atom is by itself—cold, immobile, isolate, touching no other particle, imparting no momentum, caput. And is that such a terrible fate, really? Come that great day, the universe will be much more orderly, to say the least. All things homogenized, equidistant, calm” (Disch, Camp 159–60). Dick similarly regards entropy as a homogenizing force in Exegesis, where he reflects that his “description of the magnet imposing absolute sameness everywhere is a description of entropy, of thermal death of the universe . . . thus, at the deepest level, the brain represents form, and the [Black Iron Prison] represents entropy” (365). New Wave writers may have used the science of thermodynamics in different ways, but it is almost impossible to read New Wave science fictions from the late 1960s and early 1970s without encountering references to entropy. Colin Greenland’s The Entropy Exhibition, an in-­depth look at the British New Wave, argues that entropy was the movement’s central extrapolative theme (201), and Roger Luckhurst’s Science Fiction further situates the New Wave’s fascination with entropy in the historical context of decolonization. Luckhurst notes that English science fiction transforms after 1945 due to the dismantling of empire; he also observes that the United Kingdom produces a new round of disaster fictions after World War II and that “the British disaster narrative always addressed disenchantment with the imperialist ‘civilizing’ mission” (131). Luckhurst regards the emphasis on entropy within the British New Wave as a continuation of this science fiction disaster tradition, but instead of portraying such breakdowns as negative, his key examples (Ballard, Moorcock, and Zoline) actively embrace and valorize entropic decay. Although Luckhurst is correct that New Wave authors on the whole celebrate entropy as a liberating force, a closer look at Ballard and Moorcock reveals that their embrace of entropy is often colored by a wistful sense of nostalgia. Building on Luckhurst’s view, I argue that British New Wave authors often give voice to a complex ambivalence regarding thermodynamics, particularly when entropy is used to thematize the decline of empire. This

130

ch a p t er 4

ambivalence is anchored in the view that the empire’s high-­energy state represents the apex of human progress and also, simultaneously, the apex of imperial domination and territorialization. In Ballard’s and Moorcock’s fictions, the portrayal of imperial decline as a thermodynamic process echoes the ambivalent attitude toward entropy exemplified by Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Like many New Wave science fiction authors, Conrad was also fascinated by entropy. In the introduction to one edition of Heart of Darkness, A. Michael Matin suggests that Conrad’s perspective on human nature is “extrapolated from popularized accounts of the second law of thermodynamics” (xix) and that Conrad’s view of the human condition can be observed in an excerpt from his letters, where he remarks: The mysteries of a universe made of drops of fire and clods of mud do not concern us in the least. The fate of a humanity condemned ultimately to perish from the cold is not worth troubling about. If you take it to heart it becomes an unendurable tragedy. If you believe in improvement you must weep, for the attained perfection must end in cold, darkness and silence. In a dispassionate view the ardor for reform, improvement for virtue, for knowledge, and even for beauty is only a vain sticking up for appearances as though one were anxious about the cut of one’s clothes in a community of blind men. (Matin xix) In Matin’s view, Conrad’s guiding ethic is a view of the human condition in which people undertake a futile but necessary struggle against the ultimate meaninglessness of existence. All human aspirations are ultimately pointless, yet it is nonetheless positive and necessary to struggle against this nihilistic futility. Conrad’s fascination with thermodynamics informs his understanding of the European imperial project. Marlow opens the account of his adventures in Heart of Darkness with a condemnation of imperial domination: “The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much” (Conrad 41). However ugly colonialism may be, he suggests that it is still worthwhile because of the idea behind it: “What redeems it is the idea only. An idea at the back of it;



Victims of   Entropy 131

not a sentimental pretense but an idea; and an unselfish belief in the idea— something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer a sacrifice to” (41). Throughout Heart of Darkness, Conrad (through Marlow) criticizes the avarice of imperialism (in particular, he condemns the exploitative acquisition of ivory from the Belgian Congo), but he simultaneously romanticizes empire’s civilizing aspects. He implies that without Western (imperial) civilization, humankind will devolve into a savage prehuman condition. Furthermore, this threat of devolution is imagined to be infectious; it is a contagious decay affecting all who come into contact with it, like Marlow and Kurtz. Conrad’s view of thermodynamic devolution is premised on an evolutionary paradigm in which Europe embodies the temporal present of humanity and Africa represents the West’s evolutionary past. Geographic travel in space for a European subject like Marlow (or Roman imperialists landing on the shores of Britain) literally becomes evolutionary travel backward in time. Reflecting on London during the framing narrative, Marlow notes that the cosmopolitan city has also “been one of the dark places of the earth. . . . I was thinking of very old times, when the Romans first came here. . . . We live in the flicker—may it last as long as the old earth keeps rolling! But darkness was here yesterday” (Conrad 39–40). “Darkness,” in this figuration, represents the origins of evolutionary time; Romans traveling to London in the classic era were moving backward in time, just as Marlow travels back in time when he explores the Congo. “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and big trees were kings” (73). The indigenous Africans Marlow encounters are not contemporaneous human beings to him; instead, they are evolutionary ancestors: “They still belonged to the beginnings of time— had no inherited experience to teach them” (82). Drawing on the work of Johannes Fabian and Robert Stafford, John Rieder’s Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction notes that this portrayal of travel through imperial space as a voyage backward in evolutionary time is characteristic of early science fiction. He further argues: “the repression or denial of the real contemporaneity of so-­called savage cultures with that of Western explorers, colonizers, and settlers is one of the pervasive, foundational assumptions of modern anthropology in general. The

132

ch a p t er 4

way colonialism made space into time gave the globe a geography not just of climates and cultures but of stages of human development that could confront and evaluate one another” (6). Anne McClintock makes a similar observation in Imperial Leather: The colonial journey into the virgin interior reveals a contradiction, for the journey is figured as proceeding forward in geographical space but backward in historical time, to what is figured as a prehistoric zone of racial and gender difference. . . . According to this trope, colonized people—like women and the working class in the metropolis—do not inhabit history proper but exist in a permanently anterior time within the geographic space of the modern empire as anachronistic humans, atavistic, irrational, bereft of human agency—the living embodiment of the archaic “primitive.” (30) In a U.S. context, this ideological framing of space as evolutionary time is exemplified by Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. In Turner’s formulation, Western frontiersmen are not invading an occupied space; they are returning to an environment of evolutionary origins and restaging human development. In this logic, Native Americans are the inevitable yet necessary losers in the relentless unfolding process of natural selection. Conrad’s unique contribution to this Western fantasy linking geographical space with evolutionary time is his postulation that the second law of thermodynamics applies to evolutionary progress. The imperial civilizations of London and Rome are only feeble “flickers” of light in the face of inevitable thermodynamic darkness. As a result, Conrad is ambivalent about empire; as he witnessed firsthand in the Congo, imperialism exemplifies the worst extremes of human greed. At the same time, imperial civilizations are the fragile illuminating flares that postpone the inevitable thermodynamic “horror” that Kurtz succumbs to. Conrad’s notion of imperial thermodynamics (and his corresponding ambivalence concerning the virtues and vices of colonialism) informs the writings of British New Wave authors who address the decline of empire. On one hand, these authors suggest, empires must inevitably fall, and perhaps they deserve to fall because of their crimes and injustices. Despite their flaws, empires are still great, because they represent the peak of human



Victims of   Entropy 133

endeavor—they embody an attempt to build something lasting in the face of an endless slide into darkness. Ballard and Moorcock echo Conrad’s ambivalence about the thermo­ dynamic decline of empire, yet they do so during a historical moment framed by a popular turn favoring liberatory decolonization, rather than Conrad’s moment of colonial ascendancy. Ballard particularly extends and develops Conrad’s paradigm; his fictions portray differences in geographic space as alternative stages in psychological evolutionary time. Travel from imperial center to outer periphery, for Ballard, is a journey backward in evolutionary psychology; it is a voyage away from the superego of civilization into the primal unconscious of the human evolutionary past. Like Conrad, Ballard is ambivalent about this journey; contemporary humans may be psychotic, but the only alternative is a regression into a savage preconsciousness that Ballard views as unacceptable degeneration.

J. G. Ballard Ballard first started publishing science fiction in 1956, and his work was characterized by his interests in psychology and surrealism; in the words of the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Ballard “eschewed such SF themes as space travel, time travel, aliens and ESP, concentrating instead in near-­future decadence and disaster” (Pringle 84). In a 1962 editorial for the magazine New Worlds, Ballard began to advocate for a turn to “inner space” explorations in science fiction stories, and it was here that he made his famous claim that “the only true alien planet is earth” (Pringle 84). Ballard enjoyed a long and distinguished career; he wrote countless short stories and several mainstream literary novels, including Crash (1973), Empire of the Sun (1984), and The Kindness of Women (1991). The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls him “one of the most important writers ever to have emerged from SF” (Pringle 85). Ballard wrote his famous “inner space” manifesto for New Worlds shortly before the publication of The Terminal Beach (1964),5 a collection of his earliest New Wave writing where it is possible to see his attitudes about decolonization in their most revealing form. “The Drowned Giant,” for example, is one story where Ballard’s nostalgia for empire and his lament over thermodynamic imperial decline is most

134

ch a p t er 4

apparent. The story takes place after a storm when the body of an extremely white giant is washed up on a beach near a nameless city. Such archetypal locations appear throughout Ballard’s stories: he often associates the sea with the unconscious, the beach often represents a liminal zone between consciousness and unconsciousness, and the city typically embodies a social superego. The dead giant is first admired as an extraordinary spectacle, but the local population eventually tears apart his body. His flesh and muscle are used for fertilizer, and his bones are incorporated into the architecture of the city. After this, the population largely forgets about the giant: “most people, even those who first saw him cast up on the shore after the storm, now remember the giant, if at all, as a large sea beast” (Ballard, Terminal 50). It is difficult not to read “The Drowned Giant” as Ballard’s allegory for British empire in the 1960s: something once proud, white, and glorious has perished, and its remains are devoured by savage cannibals who fail to appreciate what it offered them when it was alive. The allegorical “storm” that leads to the giant’s demise is, of course, the upheaval of World War II and decolonization. Ballard places a fetishistic emphasis on the giant’s “whiteness,” and he fixates the reader’s attention on the giant’s classical features. After commenting on its “Graecian profile,” the narrator observes that “the shallow forehead, straight high-­bridged nose, and curling lips reminded me of a Roman copy of Praxiteles, and the elegantly formed cartouches of the nostrils emphasized the resemblance to monumental sculpture” (41). He later comments on the giant’s “Homeric stature” and frequently refers to its limbs as “columns” (46). These descriptions suggest that the giant fantastically embodies white imperial Western civilization, stretching imaginatively from imperial Rome through colonial Britain. The cause of the giant’s death is never specified; the narrator refers to its death as the result of a “tragic predicament” (43), and once it washes up on the shore, it quickly succumbs to decay. Ballard frames this decay in thermodynamic terms: the narrator describes the giant’s decomposition as its “surrender to that all-­demanding system of time” (45). This explicit suggestion that the giant (and by extension the British empire) was killed by time obscures the more complex causes of decolonization after the “storm” of World War  II. The emotional charge of the story, however, is focused on the sad spectacle of the giant’s dead body rather than on the causes of



Victims of   Entropy 135

his death. The giant’s decomposition is rendered in graphic terms; first, his body changes from white to black as he is trampled by the spectators: “The white skin was dappled by the darkening bruises of countless foot-­prints” (47). Furthermore, the giant’s delicate and refined features are ruined, and the narrator particularly emphasizes the destruction of the nose: “The once straight Graecian nose had been twisted and flattened, stamped into the ballooning face by countless heels” (48). The giant begins with delicate white features, but these are violently beaten out of him until he transforms into a grossly stereotypical “black” body with dark skin and a sunken, flat nose. The giant’s decay, then, is imagined as a process of devolution premised on the conceit that white Western civilization represents the apex of evolution while black bodies represent humankind’s evolutionary past. Ballard contrasts the strong yet refined features of the giant against the savage and animal characteristics of the spectators, who swarm around him “like flies” and make “barking noises” like dogs (43). These spectators (aside from the Marlowesque narrator) are presented as cannibals who devour the giant and reduce him to their level, just as the natives of the Congo reduce Kurtz to their level while he resides among them in Heart of Darkness. At the same time, the giant becomes the helpless and undeserving victim of “a sudden flood of repressed spite” (48) as the cannibal population desecrates his body with “swastikas” and other graffiti. This reference to “swastikas” suggests that Ballard regards violent white supremacists as uncivilized brutes, equally as regressive as the stereotypical black jungle savages that appear elsewhere in his fiction. Ballard’s portrayal of the population releasing violent repressed rage against the giant reflects his attitudes toward resentful would-­be imperialists (like the Nazis) and toward decolonizing subjects who use violence against colonial occupiers. In particular, Ballard emphasizes the narrator’s disgust at how the populace is seen to profit from the giant’s dismemberment. His limbs are severed and taken away for “fertilizer” and “cattle food,” and his body is literally consumed by the population. Ballard’s story seems to almost prophetically capture a sense of reactionary disgust and violation that drives British and U.S. anti-­immigration sentiment in the Brexit/Trump era: in this imagining, ungrateful immigrants want to invade and take what is supposedly ours, to benefit from all that we have accomplished, without

136

ch a p t er 4

appreciating the energy and effort that has been required to make our nations great (and without contributing anything in turn). Ballard, however, doesn’t simply anticipate this contemporary resentment; he gives voice to an early and troubling form of its expression. By the end of the story, the only remaining trace of the giant’s greatness can be found in the physical architecture of the city, where his bones have become doorways and decorative arches. Soon, however, these are incorrectly identified by many as whale bones. The irony is that the giant’s greatness is forgotten by those who thanklessly benefit from his structural significance in their daily lives. In Ballard’s extrapolation, then, the situation after decolonization is not one in which Britain, as an imperial power, continues to enjoy economic advantage in relation to its former colonies (although this is of course the case).6 Instead, “The Drowned Giant” pre­ sents a dream reality where the beautiful (and very white) body of empire is savagely dismembered and cannibalized. Savage people—who are at least partly allusions to decolonizing subjects—brutally dismember the imperial body; they eat it up, they take bits and pieces of it to be their own, and they fail to remember what it offered them in the first place (despite the fact that they are living off its corpse). Time, imagined as a thermodynamic force, has reversed the direction of colonization, eroding the grand march of progress and regressing humanity to a savage state. If “The Drowned Giant” represents Ballard’s keenest expression of the tragedy of empire’s downfall, “A Question of Re-­Entry” foregrounds the violent madness that he feels drives imperialism in the first place. On one hand, the story portrays non-­Western peoples as the evolutionary and psychological predecessors of contemporary humankind (one of the author’s consistent troubling themes), yet at the same time it suggests that Western imperialism itself—as represented by the 1960s space race—represents a psychotic expression of human inadequacy. Ballard’s cynical ambivalence, then, suggests that neither empire nor its primitive antitheses are admirable alternatives. Many of his other fictions, such as “The Delta at Sunset” and “Deep End” (from The Terminal Beach) and his short novel The Drowned World (1962), associate physical landscapes with distinct moments in psychological and evolutionary time, and they similarly relegate non-­Western subjects (and animals) to the status of evolutionary ancestors. This theme reaches



Victims of   Entropy 137

a climax in “The Voices of Time,” where Ballard suggests that modern European civilization embodies the apex of evolutionary consciousness— everything that follows exemplifies the thermodynamic decay of this collective consciousness. “The Voices of Time” is set in a near future after World War III, and it tells the story of a neurosurgeon named Powers who is suffering from a disease called “narcoma syndrome” that causes him (and thousands of others) to sleep longer each night until they expire into dreamless comas. Narcoma syndrome is caused by evolutionary exhaustion: It’s simply a matter of biochemistry. The ribonucleic acid templates which unravel the protein chains in all living organisms are wearing out, the dies enscribing the protoplasmic signature have become blunted. After all, they’ve been running now for over a thousand of a million years. It’s time to re-­tool. Just as an individual organism’s life span is finite, or the life of a yeast colony or a given species, so the life of an entire biological kingdom is of fixed duration. It’s always been assumed that the evolutionary slope reaches forever upwards, but in fact the peak has already been reached, and the pathway now leads downwards to the common biological grave. It’s a despairing and at present unacceptable vision of the future, but it’s the only one. Five thousand centuries from now our descendants, instead of being multi-­brained star-­men, will probably be naked prognathus idiots with hair on their foreheads, grunting their way through this Clinic like Neolithic men caught in a macabre inversion of time. (Ballard, “Voices” 84) According to Powers’s colleague Whitby, humanity has reached its evolutionary apex, and it is now exhibiting symptoms of exhaustion. Whitby suggests that Western philosophers and artists embodied the apex of human evolution because they needed less sleep (Michelangelo, he notes, supposedly slept for only four to five hours a day), and the amount of sleep that people need has been increasing ever since because of biochemical entropic degradation: “How do you think the ancients, from Plato to Shakespeare, Aristotle to Aquinas, were able to cram so much work into their lives? Simply because they had an extra six or seven hours every day” because they needed less sleep (83).

138

ch a p t er 4

Ballard’s story describes evolution in fantastic teleological terms, rather than more accurately regarding evolution as long-­term nonlinear changes in response to environmental conditions. Evolution and devolution, in his view, follow a specific curve of progression and descent. The “descendants” of man will be just like their Neolithic ancestors because human evolution is imagined to advance and regress along an established path. Such a paradigm allows no possibilities for parallel evolutionary difference. Western civilization is seen to be the apex of human evolution, and non-­Western peoples are literally evolutionary ancestors who persist in the present. Before Whitby’s death, the scientist had been developing a process to activate a “silent pair” of genes in various organisms as a possible solution to the narcoma problem. These “silent genes” are harbingers of genetic potential: “the silent genes are a sort of code, a divine message that we inferior organisms are carrying for our more highly developed descendants” (81). Whitby has activated these “silent genes” in various creatures, producing weird mutants, including a sunflower that can supposedly “see” time. In one experiment, he displays the sunflower in various material environments; one flower is surrounded with cretaceous chalk, another with Devonian sandstone, another with asphalt, another with PVC. The sunflower responds to the presence of these materials as though it is “older” or “younger” in its supposed evolutionary development. “The older the surrounding environment, the more sluggish its metabolism. With the asphalt chimney it will complete its annual cycle in a week, with the PVC one in a couple of hours” (80). Ballard again fantasizes that a change in material landscape can have a corresponding change in one’s evolutionary maturity. If you put a plant in a landscape of cretaceous chalk, it will be in a different evolutionary “time zone” than if you surround it with PVC, and it will behave (on a metabolic level) accordingly. Supposedly the plant can sense the “age” of the materials surrounding it, and materials from the long past cause the plant to behave as though it were in the past, whereas new materials such as PVC cause it to have a faster life cycle. Furthermore, Whitby believes that activating the “silent genes” might give humans a glimpse into their possible genetic future because such silent genes already fantastically anticipate the conditions of the future, and if activated, they will lead to evolutionary adaptations suited to future conditions:



Victims of   Entropy 139

Without exception the organisms we’ve irradiated [to activate the silent gene] have entered a final phase of totally disorganized growth, producing dozens of specialized sensory organs whose function we can’t even begin to guess. The results are catastrophic—the anemone will literally explode, the Drosophilia cannibalize themselves, and so on. Whether the future implicit in these plants and animals is ever intended to take place, or whether we’re merely extrapolating—I don’t know. Sometimes I think, though, that the new sensory organs developed are parodies of their real intentions. (81) This question is never resolved, but what stands out is that Powers contemplates the possibility that there is a “future implicit in these plants” that might be “intended to take place”; he believes that he might be glimpsing genetic adaptations geared toward the future or “parodies” of the sensory organs that would be “correctly” suited to the future. This imagining relies on the presumption of teleological progressive evolution (evolution as genetic change “toward” a specific predetermined end), rather than evolution as circumstantial change in response to environmental shifts and conditions. Whitby and Powers eventually activate their own “silent genes,” and they end up drawing weird psychedelic mandalas (“cosmic clocks”) and developing the ability to “see time” in the way the sunflower does. Powers essentially locates (in the night sky) “the source of the cosmos itself” before he ultimately evaporates. Ballard’s fantastical imaginings in “The Voices of Time” and his other early fictions are quite different from the optimistic notions of psychedelic evolution presented in Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke. Whereas the latter appropriate the idea of psychic decolonization as a means for evolving into masterful agents, Ballard fixates on devolution as a way of framing the thermodynamic decline of empire. Key to this difference is the fact that Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke are largely imagining masterful evolution from the perspective of an emergent U.S. imperial context, while Ballard is more focused on a British colonial context, in which the apex of expansion has already been surpassed and there is no further possibility other than decline. Ultimately, Ballard offers one of the darkest expressions of postcolonial ambivalence among the British New Wave authors. Like Conrad, he is

140

ch a p t er 4

critical of imperialism, but he also regards empire as the apex of civilizational progress. Empire may be awful, he proposes, but so are its regressive alternatives. To his credit, Ballard’s ambivalence regarding empire sustains an important critical tension that prevents his narratives from espousing the kind of reactionary ressentiment that drives anti-­immigration sentiment in the Britain and United States of the Brexit/Trump era. Despite this, there is a persistent quality of woundedness to Ballard’s protagonists, who are all, in various ways, imperial elites imagined as victims of tragic thermodynamic consequence. It’s unlikely that Ballard (as represented by his texts from the early 1960s) would join the contemporary chorus of voices demanding closed walls and borders, but this isn’t because he would have meaningful sympathy for global refugees; it’s more that he would likely regard such efforts as psychotic and futile. His lyrical fatalism, then, expresses a powerful current of imperial masochism in the guise of tragic woundedness. The great accomplishments of empire, in his view, are doomed to be misunderstood and cannibalized, and few (in his view) seem to even grasp that something great has succumbed to the tragic predicament of time’s erosion.

Michael Moorcock Moorcock’s early fictions, particularly his sword-­and-­sorcery Elric saga, also express a powerful articulation of postcolonial ambivalence: the Elric stories present a simultaneous love of empire alongside the discourse of its inevitable (and perhaps necessary) fall. Elric of Melniboné was one of the earliest literary inventions of Moorcock, who later become the editor of New Worlds and one of the major figures of the British New Wave. The Elric stories were published in E. J. Carnell’s Science Fantasy from 1961 through 1964, and they were collected in two volumes, Elric: The Stealer of Souls (1963) and Stormbringer (1965). Moorcock dedicated the Stormbringer collection to Ballard, who was an Elric admirer: “For J. G. Ballard,” Moorcock says in the dedication, “whose enthusiasm for Elric gave me encouragement to begin this particular book” (Stealer 215). What explains Ballard and Moorcock’s enthusiasm for a sword-­and-­ sorcery figure like Elric? Although Moorcock’s prose is aesthetically barren, and his plotlines at first appear to be traditional fantasy stock, the Elric saga



Victims of   Entropy 141

is quite different from the typical sword-­and-­sorcery narratives exemplified by Robert E. Howard’s tales of Conan the Cimmerian from the 1930s (one of the original and most recognizable figures in the sword-­and-­sorcery tradition). Rather than offering a conflict between civilization and savagery, which was Howard’s central emphasis, Moorcock’s Elric stories concentrate on a tension between Law and Chaos, and neither side is presented as unambiguously positive. If Conan often embodies the primitive power of heroic masculinity, Elric fetishizes weakness. He is a frail figure dependent on his vampiric sword Stormbringer for his power and vitality. Furthermore, Elric’s overdetermined albinism accentuates the whiteness of the male fantasy hero to a satirical extreme, and it characterizes whiteness as a signifier of weakness, delicacy, and dependence. The extremely white Elric must depend on his black sword Stormbringer for strength and vitality; Moorcock continuously emphasizes Elric’s dependence on the sword, and the sword’s power is inexorably linked with its extreme blackness. Elric can’t live without Stormbringer, and even when he accomplishes sorcery without the sword, the magic is referred to as “negromancy,” and its blackness is highlighted as essential to its potency. Elric is also an unusual heterosexual fantasy figure; if Conan is sometimes an icon of heterosexual wish fulfillment, Elric represents heterosexual failure. He inevitably ends up involuntarily killing his love interests with his murderous blade. Elric must be understood as an attempt to subvert the values often celebrated by the sword-­and-­sorcery genre, and its deviations from the norms of this tradition are where the interest of the Elric saga resides. Furthermore, the Elric stories, although very different from Ballard’s extrapolations, are very similar in theme to Ballard’s Terminal Beach stories. Both authors exemplify a central ambivalence concerning empire, and they characterize the fall of empire as an inevitable consequence of thermo­ dynamic breakdown. These authors’ ambivalence is a response to the historical moment of decolonization. In his book Postcolonial Melancholia, Paul Gilroy argues that the process of decolonization after World War II confronted Britain with a crisis of moral legitimacy. Gilroy suggests that, faced with the loss of imperial power and the more severe loss of a sense of ideological certainty concerning

142

ch a p t er 4

colonial practices and histories, Britain repressed its colonial guilt through an erasure and evacuation of history, resulting in an attitude of protracted resentful defensiveness, instead of taking a careful look at its history and values to initiate a process of mourning and reconciliation. He argues that this “postcolonial melancholia” leads to continuing racial tension rather than the establishment of a more positive cosmopolitan multiculturalism: “Once the history of the empire became a source of discomfort, shame, and perplexity, its complexities and ambiguities were readily set aside. Rather than work through those feelings, that unsettling history was diminished, denied, and then, if possible, actively forgotten. The resulting silence feeds an additional catastrophe: the error of imagining that postcolonial people are only unwanted alien intruders without any substantive historical, political, or cultural connections to the collective life of their fellow subjects” (Gilroy 90). As Ballard and Moorcock demonstrate, Gilroy’s melancholia is not the only response to this crisis of imperial ideology. Moorcock’s Elric stories offer an ambivalent postcolonial apologetics. In his imperial role as the “last emperor” of Melniboné, Elric is a fetishistically white figure who represents empire (or what is left after the decline of empire), and he draws his power from an equally fetishistic black sword that represents a “foreign” (or colonial) source of power. Read as an imperial allegory, Elric dramatizes the relationship between the “white” imperial center and the “black” colonial periphery; Moorcock implicitly suggests that white imperial power depends on an exploitation of blackness, and that such a relationship of exploitation becomes a symbiosis of mutual addiction and dependency. There are moments when Elric regrets his use of the sword (or resents his dependency on the blade), but he is addicted to the power it affords him, and he simply cannot let it go; he alternates, with powerful ambivalence, between hating the sword and wanting to be rid of it and reveling in the extraordinary strength it grants him. Elric is thus a quintessential fantasy figure of postcolonial ambivalence; on one hand, he despises his dependency on the blade and yearns (in abstract ways) for self-­sufficiency, yet in practice he loves the intoxicating power it offers him, and the self-­loathing generated by his dependency on the sword never prevents him from exploiting its use. In the face of the shame of the history of empire after its collapse during the 1960s, the Elric saga offers a strange apologetics in which the



Victims of   Entropy 143

imperial exploitation of colonial territories is imagined as both regrettable and unavoidable. Furthermore, the stories allegorize how imperial masters profit from the continuing exploitation of “blackness” even after the end of territorial colonialism. Blackness, embodied in Stormbringer as terrible and savage (and ultimately feminine), can only accomplish positive ends when wielded and restrained by white hands. This response to decolonization is quite different than the melancholia that Gilroy describes: melancholia implies a deep, repressed knowing that colonial racism and exploitation were unjust. Although there are melancholic elements to the Elric stories, Moorcock’s narratives, like Ballard’s, are characterized by an ambivalent suspension between an acknowledgment that colonialism was unjust and a justification for colonial practices on exceptionalist grounds. In one regard, Elric implicitly exposes the empire’s exploitation of and dependency on its periphery. These stories offer a deeper acknowledgment of colonial history than the erasure of history Gilroy considers. But in another regard, the Elric saga defends the situation of colonial exploitation; it offers a justification for such conditions based on the exceptional nature of the Melniboné empire. The Elric stories contend that the exploitation of “blackness” for gain is unjust, yet like Conrad and Ballard, Moorcock suggests that it’s nonetheless necessary for imperial masters to draw on “darkness” to fight against even greater forms of darkness. Moorcock’s original Elric story, “The Dreaming City” (1961),7 exemplifies many of the themes that run throughout the larger Elric saga.8 “The Dreaming City” opens as the avaricious lords of the Purple Towns (and other small city-­states) are persuading Elric to help them assault Imrryr the Dreaming City, the last metropolis of fallen Melniboné. Melniboné was once the “Bright Empire” that ruled the world for 10,000 years, but after its fall, the Age of the Bright Empire succumbed to the Age of the Young Kingdoms. Despite Melniboné’s collapse, Imrryr is still known as “the greatest merchant city in the world” (13) and the assembled lords are eager to plunder its wealth. They need Elric’s aid because only he knows how to penetrate its defenses. Elric agrees to lead the attack on Imrryr, partly because the city had already fallen, “in spirit, five hundred years ago” (15), but more importantly because he has a score to settle with the lord of Imrryr, Yyrkoon, who usurped Elric’s throne and imprisoned his love, Cymoril, in

144

ch a p t er 4

a magical slumber. Eventually, Elric leads an attack and helps the invading fleet loot and destroy Imrryr. During the attack, Elric battles Yyrkoon, but in the fight he accidentally kills Cymoril; it is unclear whether this is because Elric loses control to Stormbringer, whether Yyrkoon pushes her onto the blade, or whether Elric’s own fury is the cause of her death. It’s also unclear whether Elric is in control of his actions or if the sword acts with a purpose of its own. Reflecting on the causes of Melniboné’s collapse earlier in the story, Moorcock offers several explanations for the decline of the Bright Empire. Nostalgia for empire is palpable throughout the series (Alan Moore explores this nostalgia when he imaginatively juxtaposes Britain and Melniboné in his introduction to the 2008 edition of Stealer of Souls), but Moorcock’s explanations for the empire’s collapse are vague and contradictory. He first proposes that Melniboné fell due to entropy: “Ravaged, at last, by the formless terror called Time, Melniboné fell and newer nations succeeded her” (11). Like Conrad and Ballard, Moorcock imagines that time inevitably erodes imperial structures and civilized forms of social organization. He also suggests that the empire fell due to sorcery and outside attack: “Only Melniboné ruled the Earth for one hundred centuries—and then she, shaken by the casting of frightful runes, attacked by powers greater than men; powers who decided that Melniboné’s span of ruling had been over-­long—then she crumbled and her sons were scattered” (11). The implication is that Melniboné was defeated by time, its own ambitious striving for power, and the intervention of outside forces. In this matrix, we can see a tangle of imaginative explanations for the decline of British colonialism. First, imperial decline is a transhistorical inevitability (entropy erodes all “flickers” of light that stand against the darkness); next, the fall of empire is caused by its overextension (British colonialism ended, in this view, because the empire’s ambition was greater than its administrative and managerial capacity); finally, empire is lost due to foreign interventions (such a causality imaginatively encompasses German aggression during World War  II and U.S. economic policy during the postwar years as reasons for British decolonization). Despite its fall, Melniboné is still “the greatest merchant city in the world” (13). Moorcock insightfully suggests that the “fall” of empire is the



Victims of   Entropy 145

collapse of its direct colonial rule rather than the dismantling of its economic hegemony, which remains intact. In Imperialism without Colonies, Harry Magdoff argues that this surrender of colonial control while retaining economic hegemony is characteristic of European decolonization in the 1950s and 1960s: “the requisite dissolution of the colonies was carried out in such a way as to preserve for the mother country as many of the advantages as possible, and to prevent social revolutions directed to real independence for the former colonies” (109). “The Dreaming City” thus offers a portrait of a colonial empire that has withdrawn from (or lost) direct territorial control yet maintains economic and financial supremacy. The sea lords who hire Elric for the assault on Imryyr are the lords of former Melnibonian colonies that are still locked into a relationship of economic dependence with Melniboné. Although Moorcock’s portrayal of the sea lords casts them as resentful, greedy thieves and scavengers picking at the corpse of empire (similar to the cannibal population that devours Ballard’s “Drowned Giant”), the sea lords can also be seen as postcolonial economic subjects engaging in a strategic attack to disrupt a continuing imperial relationship.9 As Magdoff argues, to truly decolonize, postcolonial nations must “overhaul their existing international trade patterns and transform their industrial and financial structure” (111). Given this relationship of continuing dependency between imperial center and periphery, it is suggestive that Imrryr is defended by a bewildering “maze” that outside ships cannot penetrate and that the sea lords require Elric’s insider knowledge to navigate this maze and reach the heart of the city. As an imperial allegory, this sea maze serves as an uncanny metaphor for the “maze” of confusing economic interrelationships that persist and are difficult to untangle in the wake of colonial withdrawal. In the end, Elric fails to rescue Cymoril, he betrays his home city of Imrryr (which is destroyed), and he abandons the postcolonial sea lords (while the invading fleet is attempting to flee with the plunder of Imrryr, the city launches a flight of dragons, and Elric, who is unable to fight them, uses his sorcery to escape and leaves his allies to die). This satirical triple failure reflects Moorcock’s ambivalence concerning imperial relations after the end of colonialism. On one hand, the decadent imperial metropolis does not deserve the wealth and privilege it enjoys; on the other hand, neither

146

ch a p t er 4

do the cannibalistic sea lords who are racially and culturally inferior to the descendants of Melniboné. This dilemma has no satisfying imaginative resolution, and entropy itself (in the form of the destruction of Imryyr and the sea lords) emerges triumphant. The appeal to thermodynamics in “The Dreaming City” is thus a technique for avoiding what appears to be an unsolvable contradiction in the relations between imperial center and postcolonial periphery in the aftermath of decolonization. The social relationship of dependency between empire and periphery dramatized in the conflict between Imryyr and the sea lords is mirrored in Elric’s personal relationship with Stormbringer. At the end of the story, Elric sits on an island alone with the sword, and he soon realizes that Stormbringer is “possessed of more sentience than he had imagined. Yet he was horribly dependent upon it; he realized this with soul-­rending certainty. But he feared and resented the sword’s power—he hated it bitterly for the chaos it had wrought in his brain and spirit” (41). He tries to cast the sword away, even though he will be powerless without it: “Without the sinister sword, he would lose pride—perhaps even life—but he might know the soothing tranquility of pure rest; with it he would have power and strength—but the sword would guide him to a doom-­wracked future. He would savor power— but never peace” (42). Elric’s dependence on the blade reverses the terms of the dependency dramatized in the conflict between the sea lords and Imryyr: if the sea lords represent former colonies seeking to break their continuing dependency on the imperial metropolis, Elric represents a privileged imperial subject troubled by his own dependence on the foreign “blackness” that is the source of his surplus abundance and strength. Despite Elric’s attempt to cast the sword away, Stormbringer refuses to leave him (it haunts him like a monkey’s paw), and it starts giving off a “weird devil-­scream” until Elric is overtaken by a “sickening sense of defeat” (42). Finally, he swims out, recovers the sword, and resigns himself to keeping it. “He reached it and put his fingers around the hilt. At once it settled in his hand and Elric felt strength seep slowly back into his aching body. Then he realized that he and the sword were interdependent, for though he needed the blade, Stormbringer, parasitic, required a user—without a man to yield it, the blade was also powerless” (42). If the stalemate between Imryyr and the sea lords ends in destruction, Elric’s personal solution takes a different



Victims of   Entropy 147

turn. Rather than choosing mutual annihilation, Elric grudgingly accepts dependence on Stormbringer. On an ethical level, he believes that drawing power from the blackness of the blade is an imperfect choice, yet he accepts because he believes he has no other option, and this ultimately frees him to revel in the blade’s power. Moorcock thus offers a strange apologetics for the continuing circumstance of economic imperialism without direct colonization in the years after World War II. Britain and the United States depend on “developing” nations for economic supremacy, and they enjoy an unparalleled comparative standard of living as a result of the structural unevenness of relations between the so-­called developed and developing worlds. Moorcock implies that this is unfortunate but unavoidable; Elric would cast the sword away if he could, but he cannot. His choice is made for him by the circumstances themselves, and he is a subject with no agency in the matter. This theme—lack of agency—runs throughout the Elric saga. Many of Moorcock’s central characters (like his anti–James Bond figure Jerry Cornelius) lack agency in ways that gesture toward an imaginative disavowal of Britain’s responsibility for colonial injustice. Elric’s helplessness, for example, allows his readers to avoid assuming self-­recognition as “colonizers” during a postcolonial moment when colonization has become ethically suspect. Elric offers an allegorical fantasy in which white Europeans did not set out to aggressively exploit the non-­Western world in the pursuit of wealth; they were simply swept along in events they had no control over. In this ideological fantasy, imperial nations simply responded to what the world demanded of them; they had no choice but to become colonizers. Although they may have performed unjustifiable acts, such acts were called into being as necessary responses to the conditions they faced. The theme of lack of agency runs through many of Moorcock’s stories, including the “Eternal Champion” narratives—tales that aren’t about Elric but focus on Elric variants that exist throughout Moorcock’s “multiverse” of alternate interconnected realities. One such story, “The Eternal Champion” (1962),10 opens as a twentieth-­century human, John Daker, is summoned across time and space to become the legendary Erekose and defend humanity against the Eldren Hounds of Hell. Daker quickly adjusts to his existence as Erekose, and King Rigenos reveals that he is needed because “The Hounds of Evil rule a third of the world and humankind is weary of

148

ch a p t er 4

the war against them” (6). Erekose reclaims his poisonous sword (a variant of Stormbringer) and leads the humans in battle against the unhuman Eldren. Erekose is reluctant at first but feels he must defend humanity as a matter of duty: “As John Daker I saw a meaningless war between two ferocious, blindly hating factions both of whom seemed to be conducting racial jehads, but the danger was patent. Humanity had to be saved” (13). Erekose first believes that the Eldren are alien aggressors (they are always described to him in the ugliest racial terms) who are attacking humanity, and he helps topple their cities and colonize (or “liberate” from the human perspective) their continent. When an Eldren lady is taken prisoner, Erekose begins to suspect that things are not as they seem, and when he is taken prisoner and held by the Eldren, he discovers that they are pacifists (the world’s version of elves) who have been relentlessly attacked by the racist humans. In the end, Erekose switches sides and joins the Eldren; he leads a massive decolonization campaign to retake the Eldren continent from the human imperial aggressors. Ultimately, he guides the Eldren to attack the other two continents, and he nearly wipes out all of humanity on the planet in retribution for the humans’ original imperial aggression. In the narrative of Erekose’s betrayal to join the Eldren, readers are invited to identify with a protagonist who is at first a reluctant imperialist, then realizes the error of his ways, and finally becomes the leader of a violent decolonization movement. As with the works of Herbert, Heinlein, and Clarke, Moorcock’s Eternal Champion offers an invitation to identify with the victims of oppression and with the liberatory deterritorializing momentum of decolonization. As with other such narratives, the difficulty is sympathy not with the decolonizing agents but with the erasure of historical memory that obscures the origins of colonial exploitation in the first place. In “The Eternal Champion,” Erekose knows that he is responsible for his aggressive imperial crimes, and what makes the story interesting is how he switches sides and nearly annihilates the human race in an expression of obvious guilt for his earlier actions. Although Erekose seems to take responsibility for his earlier colonial aggression when he sides with the Eldren against the humans, he nonetheless views himself as a passive instrument of a greater cosmic power over which he has no control. Elric and Erekose are both configured as passive heroes



Victims of   Entropy 149

swept along in events without agency of their own. Although this lack of agency represents Moorcock’s attempt to subvert the model of the typical sword-­and-­sorcery hero, the notion that British imperialists were drawn into imperialism against their will, “in a fit of absentmindedness,” also runs throughout certain official histories of the British empire from this time. Bernard Porter’s The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism, 1850–1970 reads almost exactly like Moorcock’s Elric stories in terms of how it argues that Britain never intended to colonize the world. Such colonization occurred accidentally, in his view, because Britain was swept up in events it had no control over, and it merely responded in the best ways possible to the circumstances it faced. Porter argues that imperialism was for Britain (it may not have been for other countries), a symptom and an effect of her decline in the world, and not of strength . . . the empire was “controlled” very much less by Britain than it controlled her . . . all along she could only hold on to it by compromising her freedom of action considerably, and in the end could not even do that. My general impression of the empire over the last 100 years is that it was moulded far more by events than it moulded events. (xi) Elric’s relation with Stormbringer echoes in fantastic form Porter’s history of Britain’s imperial relation with the colonized world. Elric can only hold onto Stormbringer by compromising his agency, or “freedom of action,” and he is “moulded” by its will much more than he “moulds” it to his own. If Hayden White suggests that historians deal with events that are traumatic in nature and perform a kind of therapeutic work by reemplotting events in such a way that they make an acceptable kind of sense, Porter’s history exemplifies such a reemplotment in its most ideologically conservative mode. It offers a reimagining of history to ease the trauma of the moral crisis that Gilroy describes, and it frames imperial history in such a way as to disavow the agency of colonialist actors. The Elric saga, then, is a fantastic parallel to Porter’s history. Both outline and reinforce the same ideological reemplotment of colonial memory. In both cases, the inward reanalysis of Britain’s motivation reveals it to be the passive victim of the imperial process rather than the aggressor. Elric’s fantastic history is particularly fascinating (in a way that Porter’s

150

ch a p t er 4

official history is not) because after the collapse of Melniboné, Elric is still shown to be dependent on the “blackness” of his sword. The empire may have fallen, but there is a continuing relationship of dependency between the emperor and the “blackness” that is the source of his power. “The Eternal Champion” similarly complicates Porter’s history because even if Erekose denies agency for his actions, his guilt offers an unavoidable implicit remembrance of colonial aggressions. Because of the fantastic context, Moorcock’s portrait of imperial history is messier and more revealing than Porter’s official history, even if it explicitly foregrounds the same constitutive disavowal of imperialist agency.

David Harvey My analysis so far has focused on how certain New Wave writers use the concept of entropy to frame the decline of empire as a reversal of the process of expansive outward colonialism. The early works of Ballard and Moorcock show that the portrayal of decolonization as an entropic inevitability often serves as a technique for framing imperial elites as victims and disavowing moral responsibility for colonization. If Heinlein, Herbert, and Clarke usurp the liberatory momentum of decolonization in service of the expansive agency of white masculine subjects, Ballard and Moorcock are much more ambivalent concerning narratives that pose decolonization as liberatory progress, and they instead frame it as a troubling process of thermodynamic decline. I conclude this chapter by examining the role of social geographer David Harvey in the New Wave movement, because Harvey’s contributions to New Worlds challenge his colleagues to complicate their use of the metaphor of entropy and to consider with greater care the changing nature of imperialism at the midpoint of the twentieth century. In his “Editorial Introduction” to the special “Marxism and Fantasy” issue of Historical Materialism, China Miéville mentions (in a passing note) that Harvey published a short story, “Jake in the Forest,” in New Worlds in the 1960s. Miéville offers this brief reference as evidence that notable Marxists have taken speculative fiction seriously and that fantasy should not be categorically dismissed from Marxist concerns.11 The remark is notable because Miéville is uniquely aware of Harvey’s role as a critical theorist and



Victims of   Entropy 151

of the New Wave’s importance as a movement in science fiction, as well as also being aware of Harvey’s publication in New Worlds. New Wave authors, like Moorcock (who was friends with Harvey in the 1960s) seem generally unfamiliar with the magnitude of Harvey’s critical importance, while many cultural theorists have neither heard of the New Wave nor of Harvey’s contributions to it. Although Miéville acknowledges that “Jake in the Forest” was written before Harvey’s explicit turn to Marxism and issues of social justice in the early 1970s, Harvey’s participation in the New Wave raises several interesting questions. How might Harvey’s critical concerns (and by extension, much of contemporary critical theory as a whole) have been influenced by his engagement with New Wave experimentations? What effect did Harvey’s early perspectives on the relationships between capitalist accumulation, imperialism, and space-­time compression have on other New Wave writers and conversations taking place in the New Wave as a whole in the 1960s? Harvey published two selections in the pages of New Worlds: His short story “Jake in the Forest” appeared in New Worlds SF no. 155 (October 1965) and his nonfiction article “The Languages of Science” appeared in New Worlds SF no. 176 (October 1967). Harvey was in his early thirties when these were published; by this time, he had already finished his doctorate in geography at Cambridge University in 1961, and he was working as a lecturer in geography at the University of Bristol. While at Bristol, he was also developing his first book, Explanation in Geography (1969), which was an inquiry into the epistemological foundations of the discipline of geography. Although the 1960s was an intellectual period before Harvey’s later examinations of postmodernity, time-­space compression, and flexible accumulation, his critical engagement with postmodern questions of identity and difference and his concerns with the imperial contours of modern epistemology are reflected in his New Wave contributions. Although “Jake in the Forest” is stylistically unusual from a traditional science fiction perspective, it is emblematically representative of the experimentation that Moorcock was encouraging as the editor of New Worlds in the 1960s. As the story opens, the protagonist, Jake, is exploring a forest and appreciating its symmetry and order while regretting its occasional “unpleasant” asymmetries. Soon he discovers a cabin by a lake, and “without

152

ch a p t er 4

considering the possible consequences” of his action, he enters and meets an enigmatic woman whose beautiful features he has difficulty interpreting (Harvey, “Jake” 78). She welcomes him, offers him a place to wash, feeds him, brings him coffee and cognac, and offers him a place to sleep. When he tries to speak to her, she does not communicate verbally, and he is perplexed by his failure to determine the cause of her silence. Throughout the evening, Jake becomes increasingly anxious because he cannot understand the woman’s actions or motivations. In the manner of a good scientist, he tests several alternative hypotheses, but none are satisfactory. He tries to expand his knowledge through methodical observation, but the woman’s speechlessness thwarts his effort to gather more information. By the time he settles down to sleep, he is anxious and disoriented, and he experiences “a certain fear, fear of some evil force that might snatch the woman away from him and exact retribution from him” (84). The woman visits Jake as he is falling asleep; as she draws near, he suffers increasing “tension” until he stops breathing (87). The story shifts to Jake’s perspective as he explores what seems to be an outdoor landscape; the implication is that this is a psychic and symbolic landscape, but we learn later that this landscape corresponds to many of the contours of the woman’s body. Jake’s journey through this landscape is both sexual and violent; he passes two breast-­like “ancient burial mounds” (88), he encounters a phallic “megalith” with “two huge stones” at its base that support a “lintel stone of enormous dimensions” (89), and he finds “a long deep triangular hollow” where he eventually enters a cavern containing a pool of water (89). Continuing beyond the water, he plunges into the darkness of the cavern, hears a cry (he is uncertain if it is his own), and finally, “His skin is pierced, His body is maimed, and He acknowledges pain” (90). At last, he reaches a cavern filled with flesh, decay, and human heads, and his passage turns violent as he regards these strange heads: “within the skull of each lies a brain, grey and soft, which forms the catalyst of all His misery . . . He laughs and kicks each skull that lies in His way, He treads on each outstretched suppliant hand, He kicks mud into the eyes that appeal to Him” (90). The narrative cuts back to the cabin, where Jake wakes up and finds the house empty. He goes outside and discovers the woman lying on a rock. When he presses his face to the rock, the woman’s body resembles the



Victims of   Entropy 153

landscape of the odd preceding narrative. He experiences sickness, horror, and a sense of pain and guilt at his own “deformity” (94). After he throws up (his vomit is “the yellow of betrayal”), he finally recovers: “at last his strength returns, and gradually the assurance of his own power returns. He feels the power that lies in his own limbs, in his mouth and thighs” (94). He looks down at the woman, who is now referred to as “the body,” and he quotes Ibsen: “Only that which is lost remains eternal” (94), before the story concludes. The only prior attempt to interpret this strange story comes from Greenland, who mentions “Jake” twice in The Entropy Exhibition. First, Greenland notes that “Jake” is one of several New Wave stories in which “subjective” impressions of inner experiences are valued over “objective” expositions of the external world. Second, he also notes that “Jake” is an example of the New Wave tendency to reject “outer space” fantasies in favor of the unknown “worlds below the belt” (33). Greenland’s specific argument is that the story “appears to be a grand reverie on the somber mysteries and miraculous transformations of sex” (33). Although Greenland’s assessment of the story is otherwise insightful, his thesis surprisingly evades the implication that “Jake” can be read as a psychological survey of a brutal rape and murder. Harvey deploys the enigmatic woman in the story to embody the unknown “other,” whom Jake, with his rigid and anxious scientific reasoning process, cannot epistemologically grasp. Jake is characterized by his rational aesthetic sensibility; the woman is “alien” to him, and the fact that he cannot cognitively master her makes him very anxious. In many ways, Jake exemplifies an obsession with scientific rational ordering that Robert Young calls “ontological imperialism”; Horkheimer and Adorno suggest that it is exactly this modern instrumentalizing epistemology that transforms the liberating potential of Enlightenment thought into a philosophy for dehumanizing domination. Harvey’s exploration of “inner space” in “Jake in the Forest” is very specific. The story does not examine the inner geography of an archetypal everyman; instead, the story specifically exposes the inner psychic terrain of a “hard” science fiction observer (or reader) who is constantly attempting to cognitively master the unknown through a rational scientific analytical process overdetermined with the presumption of empirical objectivity.

154

ch a p t er 4

Harvey shows that such an attitude, rather than being truly curious about the unknown, is symptomatically anxious (to the point of violence) when it encounters something that does not fit its preassumed axioms. Furthermore, given Harvey’s later concern with the epistemologies of imperial practice, it is appropriate to read “Jake” as an imperial allegory. Harvey stages an encounter between a colonizing Western subject and a “subaltern” who literally cannot speak. Jake imposes certain criteria for rationality on her actions (he demands that her actions make sense on his own terms) and her failure to behave in ways that make sense to him (and his anxiety at his own loss of control in the face of his sexual arousal for her) culminates in tragic and senseless brutality. Harvey’s later nonfiction article, “The Languages of Science,” is similarly concerned with the violence that can occur when applying an incorrect “map”—in this case, a scientific language—to the interpretation of complex phenomena. Harvey’s inquiry, which takes the place of Moorcock’s usual editorial in New Worlds SF no. 176, begins from the acknowledgment that there can be no single objective linguistic map of reality, and that different languages will correctly or incorrectly highlight different aspects of the phenomena they describe. Language, Harvey argues, is never an invisible medium of representation; different languages (particularly scientific languages) always preassume interpretations about the nature of reality. He cites the history of geometry, from Euclid through Lobachevski, Bolya, and Riemann, to show that “within the scientific community a particular language may emerge as the dominant form of communication” and that “science itself, by inventing a particularly powerful language, may inhibit its own development simply by placing too much store by that language” (Harvey, “Languages” 3). The implications of his subsequent argument have a distinctively New Wave flavor. Harvey argues that “the particular set of artificial languages which are ‘in power’ at any particular time serve to mould our view of the world and limit our potential for understanding. They do so simply because they determine the nature and form of our theories about reality” (3). To the extent that he emphasizes how language limits perception, Harvey participates in a characteristic New Wave interrogation of the limits of subjectivity. In the early issues of New Worlds, there is a ubiquitous invocation of



Victims of   Entropy 155

William S. Burroughs (who contends that language “colonizes” perception), and Harvey joins the Burroughs bandwagon in his assertion that language “conditions” perception. What’s interesting about Harvey’s view is that he does not propose that there is a better map or language that can offer total epistemological mastery over observable phenomena. He does not propose progress away from error toward absolute knowledge as a solution; instead, he proposes a progression away from error (due to applying incorrect models and presumptions) toward an awareness of plural knowledges and multiple, situated modes of understanding. Unsurprisingly, Harvey’s view is less paranoid than Burroughs’s; his point is that “In applying a particular linguistic rule . . . we need to be certain that the rule represents something which is true of the data” (3). The central problem in “Jake in the Forest,” for example, is that the woman’s actions do not conform to Jake’s expectations because he applies a “language” of human behavior that does not fit the actual data of her existence. His determination to cling to this language and its assumptions rather than trying to understand her in a new way has tragic and brutal consequences. Finally, Harvey draws attention to how scientific language can “penetrate and permeate” everyday thinking. The key example he cites is the second law of thermodynamics: This law simply states that energy tends to dissipate itself and that a particular system tends to assume a state of increasing disorder (or entropy). The notion of inevitable equilibrium and a smoothing out of all differences has been peculiarly pervasive in our social thinking. . . . Only certain types of system can be successfully analyzed by means of this model. Not only does the model require that the system be closed, but it also requires that the elements contained in the system are non-­homeostatic (i.e., they are not in any way self-­organising). But there are all kinds of systems which are in fact self-­reproducing and self-­organising. (4) Given that “The Languages of Science” takes the place of the editorial in this issue of New Worlds, it seems that Harvey is making a direct critical statement about the way that New Wave authors deploy the notion of “entropy.” As we have already seen, several critics (particularly Greenland) have

156

ch a p t er 4

commented on New Wave’s fascination with entropy and decline. What Harvey attempts to add to this conversation is that entropy is not an absolute principle; it is a way of describing the characteristics of only very specific systems. To use entropy as a conceptual map with disregard for the awareness of the prevalence of self-­organizing systems ignores what he calls the multidimensional aspects of the phenomena under consideration. In his subsequent discussion, Harvey is especially critical of how the notion of thermodynamics is applied in economic analysis: “for many years it was assumed that the natural laws of economics would lead to an evening-­up in economic development throughout the world. Perhaps one of the most significant practical discoveries of the economist in the past twenty years has been the elementary fact that the rich regions grow rich while the poor regions grow relatively poorer, and that this is probably more the natural law of economic growth than an inevitable evening-­up process” (4). An economic model suggesting that inevitable entropy will lead to an “evening-­up” of resource distribution in the world is not only incorrect (insofar as experience shows that rich areas grow richer while poor areas grow poorer), it also becomes an imperial fantasy supporting social, political, and economic practices that enable rich areas to exploit poorer ones for their own benefit with a “clear” conscience. Harvey’s article thus not only attempts to raise the level of conversation about “entropy” and its use as a thematic device in the pages of New Worlds, it also elevates the stakes of New Wave conversations about imperialism more generally. If British New Wave writers, such as Ballard and Moorcock, apply the notion of entropy in the context of the decline of empire, Harvey is explicitly critical of such conceptualizations. The “decline” of empire is not an inevitable and regrettable process, as one can see hinted in the early fictions of Moorcock and Ballard. Such a view of decline is an incorrect mapping of the notion of entropy onto an interpretation of historical causality. Imperialism, Harvey suggests, is a capitalist tendency toward self-­organizing accumulation (the rich get richer, the poor get poorer) masked by a rhetoric of universal progress (growth is good for everyone). The effect of Harvey’s thoughts about entropy and economic imperialism on other New Wave authors can be seen in Moorcock’s “Phase I,” the first Jerry Cornelius story (written in 1965, published in 1968). “Phase I,” which



Victims of   Entropy 157

is in some ways a revision of Moorcock’s original Elric story “The Dreaming City,” centers on a group of rich, powerful, and sexually perverse conspirators in a near-­future Britain who seek help to acquire a microfilm containing valuable information that will allow them to become immensely rich and powerful during Europe’s apocalyptic economic collapse.12 What is striking about this story is that the conspirators learn about the existence of this microfilm from a character named “Mr. Harvey” (199), a “successful drug-­importer,” who supplies illegal substances to the film’s owner. The crux of the story is that there can be immense opportunity for profit if one is in a position to recognize the contours of an economic situation with privileged information and the ability to act quickly. All of these qualities are aspects of the “mastery” over time-­space compression that Harvey considers in The Condition of Postmodernity. Although entropy is a central theme in “Phase I,” Moorcock’s attitude toward entropy has changed in comparison with his earlier writing. Harvey’s thoughts about economic exploitation from “The Languages of Science” are observable in the story’s basic structure; in a situation that might appear to herald anarchic breakdown (the “evening up” of everything to the lowest common denominator of anarchy), Moorcock notes that the rich are actually in the position to grow super rich while the rest of the world collapses into economic ruin. “Phase I” embodies Moorcock’s transition from straightforward postcolonial nostalgia in the wake of British decolonization toward a more sophisticated awareness of the subtleties of neoimperial economic exploitation. Moorcock’s attitude toward the relationship between entropy and empire has shifted demonstrably from his earlier imperialist Elric fantasies. Harvey’s contribution shows that science fiction’s New Wave was a moving conversation rather than a static phenomenon. Conversations affect people in very different ways: it is possible that the New Wave influenced Harvey’s emergent thinking about social geography during the 1960s and also influenced the subsequent shape of critical conversations about post­ modernity and imperialism. It is also possible that Harvey’s contributions had an influence on the aesthetic and thematic concerns of the New Wave. One topic of the New Wave conversation was how best to conceptualize space, time, and empire in an era following the climax of territorial

158

ch a p t er 4

colonization. Harvey’s voice was one among many moving this dialogue in insightful critical directions. Furthermore, Harvey draws key critical attention to the problem of epistemology—the question of how we know what we think we know— during a 1960s countercultural moment when the authority of knowledge was increasingly exposed as a product of social construction. The revolutionary momentum of the postmodern assault on established knowledge and authority, which in many ways blossomed in the 1960s, has been perversely appropriated by many reactionary movements in the twenty-­first century. Forms of knowledge that are unprofitable and inconvenient (such as evidence of human contributions to climate change) are now often successfully demonized as “fake news” perpetuated by a vast “liberal media establishment” that must be countered with the insurgent power of “alternative facts.” This is one of the most powerful ideological currents of reverse colonization fantasy in our contemporary moment—the notion that so-­called reality, as it is commonly known, is an empire of lies created by a powerful conspiracy that can be challenged by a revolutionary insurgency. In other words, challenging the power of truth has now too often become a strategy of dismissing truth in favor of power. Harvey was an important voice in the New Wave advocating for a sophisticated approach to the relation between objective facts and subjective truths, and so was Samuel Delany—one of the New Wave’s most fascinating authors, and the subject of this book’s next chapter.

V CHVPTER

5 Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era

I

n 1943, George Orwell lamented that “the very concept of objective truth is fading out of the world” (“Looking Back”). Although he was commenting on the rise of totalitarian propaganda during the Spanish Civil War in the 1930s, Orwell’s concern with the decline of objective truth has arguably become even more relevant in today’s so-­called post-­truth era. As Lee McIn­ tyre observes, the early decades of the twenty-­first century have become a time when “alternative facts” frequently replace actual facts, and it often seems that “truth does not matter as much as feelings” (116).1 The phrase “alternative facts” entered widespread public discourse in 2017 when Kellyanne Conway used the Orwellian term to defend White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s false statements concerning the number of people who attended Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration. Spicer wasn’t lying, Conway suggested, he was just presenting “alternative facts” (McIntyre 6). Although much of the internet exploded with mockery at her use of this phrase, Conway’s assertion that so-­called alternative facts can offer a legitimate response to the authority of inconvenient truths has become a central political strategy for the contemporary right. In a 2016 CNN interview, Newt Gingrich supported Trump’s erroneous claim (in a speech to the Republican National Convention) that violent crime in the United States was on the rise. When confronted with the statistical reality that violent crime rates were actually historically low across the United States, Gingrich doubled down on the legitimacy of Trump’s version of events: “the average American, I will bet you this morning, does not think crime is down, does not think we are safer,” Gingrich said, “liberals have

160

ch a p t er 5

a whole set of statistics that may theoretically be right, but it’s not where human beings are” (“Transcripts”). In other words, facts are often seen as equal competitors in a marketplace of ideas: the supposedly liberal media may have its own oppressive, colonizing universe of facts, but subversive figures (like Spicer, Conway, and Gingrich) can fight back against such facts with feelings, which have their own irreducible legitimacy. To give another example, in early March 2020— before the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-­19 outbreak a global pandemic—Trump downplayed the severity of the virus by opposing established statistics with a bold assertion of his own preferred reality. In response to a WHO study showing that COVID-­19 had a 3.4 percent death rate among reported cases, Trump suggested to Sean Hannity that “the 3.4 percent is a really false number . . . personally, I think the number is way under 1 percent” (Chalfant). Trump had no scientific basis for this statement; he was just throwing out a number that matches how he felt the world should be. For him, intuition often functions as a combination of will, faith, and political strategy: “I’m a very instinctual person,” he told Time magazine in a 2017 interview, “but my instinct turns out to be right” (“Read President Trump’s Interview”). It would be easy to dismiss Trump’s statements as straightforward lies, but McIntyre suggests that post-­truth discourse is more complex than just falsehood or political propaganda: it is a “mechanism for asserting political dominance” and a “strategy for the political subordination of reality” (xiv, original emphasis). Post-­truth, in other words, aims to subvert inconvenient facts and replace them with others; it seeks to transform the world by asserting that things are already a certain way that one wishes them to be. As McIntyre shows, post-­truth discourse often prioritizes feelings (such as Trump’s intuition) over politically inconvenient facts, and his book raises provocative questions regarding the underlying ideological work that enables post-­truth statements to be regarded as sensible. After all, one cannot just walk up to someone and credibly assert that up is down, left is right, and two plus two equals five. The magic that sustains post-­truth discourse is not simply the bold assertion of alternative facts: it is the creation of a larger ideological environment in which outrageous assertions might be regarded as reasonable because the so-­called facts the enemy has already given you



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 161

cannot be trusted. Who told you that humans are responsible for climate change, that vaccines are safe, that COVID-­19 is such a big deal, or that the world is round rather than flat? Was it the liberal media or left-­wing academics? What’s their real agenda? Can’t you see that you’re being lied to? The power of post-­truth discourse often relies on an already existing foundation of reverse colonization fantasy. Post-­truth requires much more from its intended audience than a reasonable skepticism regarding established facts; it draws power from extraordinary paranoia regarding a vast, colonizing, ever-­present system of misinformation and control. (We’ve seen science fictional examples of this already: Dick’s Black Iron Prison, Curtis Yavin’s Cathedral, and The Matrix to name a few.) Today, the ubiquitous shorthand among reactionaries for this colonizing system of power is the so-­called liberal media, which can be blamed for, honestly, anything—up to and including the staggering consequences of the COVID-­19 pandemic (which Ron Paul notably described as a “hoax” a week before his son tested positive for the virus). Even in the days after Trump declared a national emergency in response to the escalating outbreak, many citizens continued to believe the liberal media was a greater threat than the virus itself: “If you have not previously feared the power of the media you should be terrified of them now,” one Kansas resident posted on his Facebook page, “they are exerting their power to shut down America” (Gowen). “It’s mass hysteria caused by the liberal media,” another person from the same Kansas town said. “They want to take Trump and our economy down” (Gowen). It’s one thing to argue that news sources are biased; it’s another thing to believe that all media sources other than Fox News, talk radio, and other far right conservative outlets are part of a vast left-­wing conspiracy with a malign agenda to destroy America. Such a science fictional worldview depends on powerful currents of reverse colonization fantasy that invite many to see themselves as victims suffering under oppressive occupation and view reactionary political figures as a daring rebel minority—even during a time when conservatives controlled the White House, the Supreme Court, and half of the U.S. Congress. McIntyre proposes that academic postmodernism may have contributed to the rise of post-­truth discourse: during the 1980s and 1990s, postmodern-

162

ch a p t er 5

ism (and its associated philosophies and theories) challenged the notion that there can ever be a single objective truth, and it doggedly exposed various ways that assertions of truth are often reflections of political ideology (126). McIntyre further shows that “right wing ideologues,” such as creationists, climate change deniers, and fake news bloggers “found within postmodernism the techniques they needed” to undermine legitimate empirical reasoning in favor of alternative facts and reactionary politics (133). One striking example of how postmodern theory has been weaponized by reactionaries can be seen in the successful disinformation campaigns perpetuated by right-­wing blogger Mike Cernovich, who promoted #PizzaGate, a conspiracy theory alleging that Hillary Clinton was involved in a child sex trafficking ring coordinated from a Washington D.C. pizza restaurant. #PizzaGate went viral and resulted in a shooting in the restaurant, and right-­wing conspiracy theorists (especially those associated with QAnon) still continue to fixate on the possibility that Clinton and other Democratic elites are part of a global satanic sex cult (McIntyre 149). Donald Trump Jr. has suggested that Cernovich should win a Pulitzer Prize for his work, and Kellyanne Conway encouraged her Twitter followers to pay close attention to his blogging (McIntyre 149). When interviewed by the New Yorker about the uncanny scope of his influence, Cernovich acknowledged his debt to postmodernism: “Look, I read postmodernist theory in college. If everything is a narrative, then we need alternatives to the dominant narrative” (qtd. in McIntyre 150). The “dominant narrative,” according to Cernovich, is an apparatus of colonizing control, and postmodern theory (which McIntyre argues was originally intended “to protect the poor and vulnerable from being exploited by those in authority,” 145) has now become a tool in reactionary efforts to oppose this supposedly dominant worldview with revolutionary, insurgent alternatives. Such an appropriation of postmodern critique depends on a reverse colonization fantasy that imagines a fantastical oppressive authority has deluded and manipulated the population for corrupt, malevolent purposes. On its own, the claim that Hillary Clinton is a member of a secret satanic sex cult seems self-­evidently absurd, but reactionaries have convinced a staggering number of people that our world may be eerily similar to the setting of John Carpenter’s film They Live (1988), where a ruling class of



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 163

invading aliens has subjugated the world’s population using secret mind control messages embedded in mass media. In such a science fiction context (which has become the lived experience of many), who knows what Clinton might really be up to? Although certain forms of postmodern critique have been appropriated for reactionary purposes, it is unfair, in a larger sense, to blame postmodernism for the emergence of post-­truth discourse (as McIntyre does) for at least two reasons. To begin with, as Erik Davis notes, the tendency to prioritize the authority of subjective experience over established fact has been central to U.S. religious culture for more than a century. Davis particularly cites the work of U.S. philosopher William James, whose influential book The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902) valorizes spirituality—in the sense of one’s individual, direct, subjective experience of faith—over established, institutional forms of religion. Davis describes how Americans, in James’s view, often experience faith as “noetic insight—the kind of direct experiential knowing that esotericists call gnosis” (18). This trust in direct, noetic experience has arguably become something akin to a secular faith in U.S. culture: Americans often trust what they know from firsthand experience much more deeply than what can be learned from secondhand sources (such as books or formal education). Of course, direct observations and experiences (as well as feelings, intuitions, and hunches) can have extraordinary value. As postmodern theory has exhaustively demonstrated, maps are never perfect portrayals of the territories they describe, and firsthand observations can lead to the discovery of important details and hidden complexities that representations must (by necessity) neglect. This illuminates the second reason it is unfair to blame postmodernism for the emergence of post-­truth discourse: the shallow post-­ truth assertion that “everything is a narrative” (as Cernovich says) often reflects a depthless misunderstanding of postmodern theory. This becomes strikingly visible with even a cursory examination of scholarship in feminist, postcolonial, and indigenous science and technology studies—areas of academic inquiry deeply influenced by postmodern philosophy. Colin Scott, for example, examines scientific knowledge construction among indigenous Cree hunters in Canada, and his work demonstrates that when empirical, observation-­based, scientific inquiry proceeds

164

ch a p t er 5

from radically different “root metaphors” (or starting biases), it can lead to dramatically different insights and conclusions (175). In Cree language and culture, there is no sense of “nature” that exists outside and apart from humans (as is often the bias in Western culture); animals, plants, humans, and other “geophysical agents” are all regarded to have “qualities of personhood” and engage in “a reciprocally communicative reality” (179). Because of this starting assumption of reciprocity (rather than distance) in relation to plants and animals, Cree hunters have arrived at legitimate, factual insights regarding the natural world (strikingly accurate observations about the behavior of geese, for example) that Western scientists have ignored or have only arrived at “rather belatedly” (184). Scott’s work demonstrates that strong perspectives informed by postmodern theory do not shallowly assert that there are multiple interchangeable truths and that everything is relative. Instead, he suggests that phenomena in the world truly exist, and the biases and assumptions we carry as we encounter these phenomena influence what we are able to see and what remains invisible to us. Ziauddin Sardar similarly explores how Islamic science has a rich history of empirical inquiry that rejects the “meaningless reductionism, objectification of nature, and torture of animals” that have characterized Western science since the Enlightenment (376). The point of a postmodern approach to truth, then, is not simply to say that “everything is narrative” and substitute one narrative for another based on personal preference, but rather, as Susantha Goonatilake suggests, to “enlarge” our sense of what science can look like and “to make it more valid” (387) by acknowledging that any given phenomenon can be seen, legitimately, from multiple viewpoints. Strong postmodern perspectives thus advocate for what Shiv Visvanathan calls “cognitive justice,” an approach to truth that “recognizes the right of different forms of knowledge to co-­exist,” not simply because everything is reducible to narrative but because different perspectives can offer alternative, valid perspectives regarding objective phenomena. Proponents of cognitive justice do not assert that all opinions are valid because truth is relative and facts are simply a matter of opinion. Instead, they argue that perspectives matter because how we look at things is always shaped by specific contexts and experiences (and we should be open to alternative viewpoints rather than bullying others because we believe our version of the truth to



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 165

be superior). There are different ways of looking at any given phenomenon (such as climate change or COVID-­19), but that doesn’t mean that anything goes and the world might be flat and Hillary Clinton might be a member of a secret satanic sex cult just because some people believe these things to be true. There is an important difference, ultimately, between asserting that truth is whatever we say it might be and arguing that truth claims are often power claims because reality is always more complex than maps or models can adequately represent. For this reason, postmodernism is not the irresponsible “godfather” of post-­truth, as McIntyre suggests (150). On the contrary, strong postmodern perspectives offer vital remedies to post-­truth politics. Although it may seem tempting to fight post-­truth with a commonsense appeal to objective, clear-­cut facts and an unambiguous faith in science, cognitive justice movements have frequently exposed how the supposed objectivity of Western scientific thought and practice has too often carried the weight of racist, sexist, patriarchal, and neoliberal baggage—all the various problems China Miéville has memorably described as “capitalist science’s bullshit about itself” (“Cognition” 240). We cannot abandon a thoughtful critique of science simply because reactionaries have learned to weaponize antiscientific skepticism. Instead, it is vital to expose one of the foundational ideological fantasies that empowers antiscientific, post-­truth discourse: a science fictional logic of reverse colonization that frames inconvenient scientific understandings as an empire of lies perpetuated by the so-­called liberal media. In other words, post-­truth discourse has traction not because facts are fundamentally relative but because many have been persuaded that we are living in a science fictional world where colonizing forces have trapped us inside a matrix of lies and illusions, and the only hope for escape lies with reactionary rebels (like Spicer, Conway, Gingrich, Cernovich, and Trump) who dare to fight a desperate insurgency against oppression. This is not postmodern scientific skepticism; it is imperial fantasy—the imaginative creation of an overpowering, colonizing enemy that serves the ideological purpose of reinforcing political domination. As I have argued throughout this book, in reverse colonization fantasies, the central speculative move is an imaginative turning of the tables

166

ch a p t er 5

that considers what-­we-­do-­to-­others as something-­that-­can-­be-­done-­to-­us. In this speculative reversal, it matters deeply whether “empire” is a vague formulation—a universal catch-­all for oppression—or whether authors (and political figures) engage with the complexities of real-­world imperialism in more precise and sophisticated ways. In the original Star Wars films, for example, the Galactic Empire is a cartoonishly simplistic antagonist. Despite vague gestures toward real-­ world imperial conditions (such as the evils of totalitarianism, the dangers of asymmetrical military technologies, and the rise of the military-­industrial complex), real-­world empires have never been anything quite like the Empire against which the Rebel Alliance struggles. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud observes that the power of any representation is dramatically amplified through its simplification: for example, the way a character in a comic strip is drawn emphasizes certain elements of that character by stripping away unnecessary high-­resolution details that might otherwise muddle its most straightforward iconic meaning (30–31). Oppositional political speech (especially tweets) often functions in exactly this way. Describing one’s political opponent as a “nasty woman,” for example, is a radical simplifying gesture that strips away the multidimensional complexity of a specific person to amplify a cartoonish caricature of her that mobilizes hateful political sentiment. The way that Star Wars simplifies imperialism to amplify its representational antagonistic power is thus very effective—not getting bogged down in the details of the evils of real empires contributes to the audience’s uncluttered enjoyment of a dashing heroic adventure. At the same time, the very simplification that makes empire into a universally satisfying enemy also opens it to a disturbingly wide range of imaginative appropriations. When the notion of empire loses all real-­world referential moorings, it can be used, through the logic of reverse colonization, to describe anyone or anything as agents of empire—scientists, scholars, the so-­called liberal media—and to regard oneself and one’s political constituents as subaltern rebels and freedom fighters (no matter how absurd this may actually be). One might argue, then, that the more speculative representations of empire oversimplify imperialism, the more powerful (and universally appealing) they can become. This powerful simplification can enable the identificatory



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 167

slipperiness that makes subaltern identity available for misappropriation. Fortunately, the opposite of this can also be true: the more a reverse colonization narrative refuses to simplify empire and explores the complexities of imperialism in a thoughtful manner, the less traction such a narrative offers for misappropriation in service of imperial masochism. Analytically precise reverse colonization narratives maximize the genre’s capacity for anti-­ imperial critique. In this chapter, I examine Samuel Delany’s early trilogy The Fall of the Towers (1963–65), a set of novels that offers prescient insights regarding today’s post-­truth ideological moment.2 Despite the fact that Delany wrote The Fall of the Towers decades before “alternative facts” emerged as a legible form of reactionary political discourse, his writing navigates an important middle ground between scientific objectivity and postmodern relativity that is urgently relevant to our contemporary moment. Delany’s simultaneous commitment to empirical mapping and the irreducibility of subjective experience offers a resolution to what seems to be an irreconcilable opposition between modern and postmodern ideals of political consciousness. He therefore offers a much-­needed model for what cognitive justice might look like in a post-­truth era.

Political Consciousness and Cognitive Mapping In her book Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern, Marianne DeKoven argues that countercultural movements in the 1960s articulate a key transition from modernity to postmodernity, and central to this shift is a tension between two conflicting ideals of political consciousness. On one hand, 1960s countercultures frequently embrace “the neoromantic belief in creativity as a source of meaningful agency against the construction of passive, instrumental subjectivity in bourgeois capitalist modernity” (DeKoven 69). From this perspective, revolutionary changes in perspective are enlightening voyages from ignorance to truth (guided by the visionary artist) that can result in social, cultural, and political change. On the other hand, this predominantly modern ideal of political consciousness was expressed in the 1960s alongside an emergent postmodern egalitarianism that rejected grand narratives of awakening and encompassed a broad

168

ch a p t er 5

coexistence of shifting, relative, and incommensurably valid viewpoints and experiences. This tension between modern and postmodern sensibilities is strikingly visible in Delany’s science fiction novels, which prioritize objective knowledge while valuing the irreducibility of subjective experience. Delany’s figuration of political consciousness thus navigates a rich and difficult middle ground between what DeKoven calls the modern “politics of the social” and the postmodern “politics of the self” (134). Delany’s model of political consciousness offers a resolution to what seems like an impasse between modern and postmodern epistemological paradigms—or, in contemporary terms, the conflict between concrete, factual objectivity and the important relativity of subjective viewpoints. If, as Brian McHale argues, modernity is characterized by a belief that phenomena can be objectively known and postmodernity, in contrast, is characterized by an emphasis on multiple, simultaneous, valid, and incommensurable modes of understanding, Delany resolves this tension by suggesting that a valid epistemology must be based on concrete knowledge of existing conditions, but multiple understandings of similar facts will produce different interpretations and alternative meanings. A transformative political consciousness, then, must be based on a factual knowledge of objective conditions tempered by the awareness that each individual’s understanding of these conditions will be informed by his or her irreducibly subjective point of view. The central object of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers— the phenomenon that must be known concretely but will inevitably be known differently by those experiencing it from different positions—is imperial war. Throughout the trilogy, the Toromon Empire mobilizes and fights a seemingly inevitable war, yet few characters have clear knowledge of what the war is about or against whom it will be fought. In this regard, The Fall of the Towers offers a reverse colonization narrative that asks readers to identify with (or as) characters suffering under the weight of empire, yet unlike many other such narratives, the trilogy invites readers to understand complex imperial conditions with much greater conceptual rigor. The Fall of the Towers is a series of three short novels: Out of the Dead City (originally released as Captives of the Flame in 1963), The Towers of Toron (1964), and City of a Thousand Suns (1965). The books are set in a



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 169

distant future after nuclear war has devastated the planet: human civilization topples after a nuclear holocaust known as the “Great Fire,” and the survivors establish a settlement (which eventually becomes a city and then an empire) on an island called Toron. Toron (and the Toromon Empire) are divided from the rest of the world by radiation barriers that isolate areas so irradiated that they are uninhabitable. The City of Toron (on the isolated island) is the capital of the empire, and it rules over conquered areas on the mainland up to the edge of the radiation barrier. Humans populate the empire, but radiation has also created two mutant groups known as “forest people.” Members of the first group are called “apes” (shorter creatures with high foreheads, bony brow ridges, slow perception, and opposable big toes), and the others are called “giants” (tall and broad-­shouldered creatures with heightened perceptions). Out of the Dead City establishes two central conflicts. First, there is the tension between the Toromon Empire and a nameless enemy that lurks behind the radiation barrier. Second, the novel stages a contest between two ancient cosmic entities: a benevolent Triple Mind that adheres to an ethical code preventing it from meddling in the development of younger species and civilizations, and an enemy known as The Lord of the Flames,3 a malevolent creature that infiltrates young cultures for its own unfathomable purposes. In the first book, the Triple Mind contacts three heroes (Jon Koshar, the Duchess of Petra, and the forest giant Arkor) to inform them that The Lord of the Flames has infiltrated their society and is manipulating Toromon toward war. In the second book, Toromon develops teleportation technologies that seem to allow transit beyond the radiation barrier, and the empire mobilizes for war, only to discover that there is no actual enemy. The “war” is a social hallucination provoked by the empire’s economic and social inequities, and it is waged in a deadly cyberspace simulation that randomizes soldiers’ deaths to bleed off the empire’s underprivileged surplus population. The Lord of the Flames returns and manipulates the Toromon government from within; the heroes must again drive it away. Finally, in City of a Thousand Suns, the empire is torn apart by internal strife after the truth of the simulated war is revealed, and Toron then comes under “real” attack by the (now psychotic) sentient computer who simulated the cyberspace conflict and remotely commands the empire’s mechanized military apparatus.

170

ch a p t er 5

Meanwhile, the heroes engage in a final showdown with The Lord of the Flames, only to discover that the conflict between the two cosmic entities is a result of a misunderstanding; the antagonism is ultimately resolved and The Lord of the Flames leaves Toromon in peace. From its initial scenes, Out of the Dead City interrogates the shape of emergent global imperial economics in a way that reflects changing world conditions in the 1960s. In the first chapter, Delany begins by presenting readers with an economic map of the Toromon Empire; he offers a sequence of seemingly disconnected scenes, moving from the farthest frontiers of Toromon to the heart of the capital city. These scenes are unified by the looming presence of the transit ribbon, a matter-­transmission system (iconic of the “time-­space compression” David Harvey describes as characteristic of postmodernity; Condition of Postmodernity 284) that physically connects the capital city to the imperial frontier and enables high-­speed transportation and communication. In this opening sequence, Delany demonstrates that objective knowledge, or an awareness of true complex facts, is overwhelmingly important. None of the characters in the individual scenes can apprehend the larger shape of the imperial economic order in which they are participants. The reader, however, can see from a broader (removed) vantage point how the imperial system operates. Delany therefore suggests that the imperial exploitation of countless subjects occurs because of the unwitting participation of individuals who do not fully understand their role in the operations of empire. Delany thus suggests that a greater awareness of specific economic and political conditions—a change in consciousness—can lead to significant political change. It is worth examining these opening scenes closely because they offer a snapshot of the conditions that Delany sees as characteristic of the newly hegemonic postwar U.S. imperialism emerging during the 1960s. Furthermore, Delany’s emphasis on seeing the bigger picture—understanding the larger system of social, political, and economic relations that sustain empire— prioritizes objective knowledge over the dangerous errors that (in some cases) limit individual subjective points of view. In other words, the opening scenes of Out of the Dead City offer Delany’s most persuasive case for modernity’s liberating emphasis on rational, empirical understanding in the face of harmful false beliefs based on erroneous knowledge.



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 171

The prelude of Out of the Dead City begins as Jon Koshar, a slave, escapes from the tetron ore mines near the radiation barrier. Tetron is a unique mineral created by radioactive fallout, and it is the economic lynchpin of the empire’s politics. It’s an almost magical energy source (Toromon’s fantastic equivalent of fossil fuels or nuclear energy) that can power everything from military ships to hydroponic fisheries. After the prelude, another scene opens on six forest giants who are trying to capture runaway slaves. During this scene, Delany reveals that the demand for tetron ore is increasing at a rapid rate: “The orders for tetron have nearly doubled,” observes Larta, the leader of the guards (Fall 9). Her companion, Ptorn, is uncomfortable with the profit being extracted from human slavery: “I wonder what sort of leeches make their living off these miserable . . . ,” he says, leaving the thought unfinished. Larta answers: “The hydroponics growers, the aquarium manufacturers in Toron. . . . They’re the ones who call for the ore. Then, there’s the preparation for the war.” Ptorn then introduces the economic situation central to the novel: “They say . . . that since the aquariums have taken over supplying fish to Toron, the fishermen on the coast have nowhere to sell and are being starved out. And with the increased demand for tetron, the prisoners are dying like flies here at the mines. Sometimes I wonder how they supply enough miners” (10). Ptorn suggests that local fishermen are losing their markets because they can’t compete with large corporate hydroponic aquariums that produce mass quantities of cheap fish at low cost. But the corporate aquariums can only supply cheap fish because they have inexpensive access to tetron ore, which is supplied by state-­sanctioned slave labor. In this snapshot of imperial economics, it seems at first that local fish are simply undersold by the manufactured fish. This might be seen as a natural consequence of free market capitalism: whoever can offer the most competitive product deserves to profit from it. Delany slowly reveals that the central problem is not the price of fish but the price of labor: the labor of the local fishermen is undersold by the labor of the slaves in the tetron mines. This is not a free market situation in any sense, because the empire administers the system of slavery to benefit the corporate fisheries. The forest guards who are capturing the runaway slaves cannot form a complete mental picture of this situation. Ptorn has no concept of the “leeches” who are profiting from the system, nor does he know how the

172

ch a p t er 5

“miners” (slaves) are supplied. Larta has a slightly better understanding, but even she cannot grasp the whole situation. Neither, at this point, can the reader; the audience is left struggling to connect the dots between seemingly disparate details and events. Delany offers only glimpses, snapshots, and disconnected fragments that later connect to reveal a disturbing whole, and the reader experiences the same disorientation the characters encounter when trying to grasp the basic economic conditions of the empire. In this sense, the novel’s opening anticipates (by two decades) Fredric Jameson’s argument that postmodernity represents a totality in which “late” capitalism has become so complex that global systems of production are difficult to envision all at once (Postmodernism). Drawing on the work of Kevin Lynch, Jameson calls for a project of “cognitive mapping” to confront this new postmodern complexity. Rather than celebrating a play of depthless images disconnected from historical origins, Jameson suggests that the pressing intellectual project of the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries is to “map” complex processes of global production to expose the new (and often invisible) forms of human exploitation that emerge from late capitalist economics (Postmodernism 52). Towers prefigures Jameson’s critique of postmodernity as a “cultural logic” of late capitalism by outlining a situation in which one must resist the allure of cheap fish to grapple with the recognition that such fish are produced by slave labor. Larta and Ptorn begin the novel unable to envision the most important economic and material conditions that structure their lives, and like the reader, their challenge is to develop an alternative political consciousness in relation to these conditions. After the scene with the forest guards, Delany cuts to another group of “forest people” living in the depths of the jungle. A small “ape” named Lug brings news to a “giant” called Quorl that outsiders (with tetron-­powered airships) are building a structure at the base of a mountain by a nearby lake. If at first glance it seems that the empire is building a colonial outpost, Quorl is able to see something that will only be explained to the reader two novels later when Delany reveals that the settlement in question is actually the City of a Thousand Suns, a utopian alternative to Toron dedicated to providing “food, housing, and creative labor for its whole population” (Fall 392). Delany next offers a scene that takes place on the coast of the mainland,



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 173

where a fisherman named Cithon is angry with his son Tel for being late to join him for work. Tel (who later becomes a major character when he runs away to work at the aquariums in Toron) has been collecting seashells along the beach, and his father lashes him for being late. Tel’s mother, Grella, doesn’t dare intervene when Cithon inflicts violence on their son; she simply continues weaving at her loom. At first glance, the tension in this scene revolves around masculinity and domestic violence. Cithon rules his family through fear, and he responds with coercive force if anyone speaks against him. At the same time, Delany shows that these domestic problems can be traced to the larger imperial economic situation. The mainland fishermen are suffering hardships as a result of the new hydroponic aquariums, and the only response they can imagine is to work ever harder to catch more fish (Fall 38).4 The family conflict revolves around a lack of basic awareness of key conditions and an inability to cognitively map the complexity of the empire’s changing economic landscape. Cithon feels disempowered because his labor is no longer valuable, and he compensates by demanding greater authority in the domestic space. Ironically, to escape his father’s violence, Tel emigrates to the city of Toron to work for the aquariums, not realizing that aquarium workers (who are often poorly paid immigrants) are in as bad a situation as the fishermen and that they help create the conditions that Tel is escaping from. The only “valuable” labor in this economic landscape is the slave labor (acquired for “free” by the state and the corporations) performed in the tetron ore mines. The next scene moves across the water to the Island of Toron, the center of the empire. Here we find two merchants on the wharf as a boatload of fish arrive from the mainland. A “stout” modern merchant (fat from profit) is mocking a “gaunt” merchant (starved from lack of business) for continuing to rely on mainland fish instead of tetron-­produced aquarium-­grown fish: Tell me, friend . . . Why do you trouble to send your boat all the way to the mainland to buy from the little fishermen there? My aquariums can supply the city with all the food it needs.  .  .  . You sell to those families of the island who still insist on the doubtful superiority of your imported delicacies. Did you know, my friend, I am superior in

174

ch a p t er 5

every way to you? I feed more people, so what I produce is superior to what you produce. I charge them less money, so I am financially more benevolent than you. I make more money than you, so I am also financially superior. Also, later this morning my daughter is coming back from University Island, and this evening I will give her a party so great and lavish that she will love me more than any daughter has ever loved a father before. (Fall 14) The disparity in wealth between the merchants is the result of exploited labor; the stout merchant can produce a greater quantity of product at a lower price only because he relies on free labor from the tetron mines (15). The gaunt merchant can no longer sell fish competitively; instead, he sells the authenticity of imported fish. “Perhaps my clientele is different than yours,” he replies, implying that aquarium fish will only be purchased by the lower classes. High-­class consumers, he hopes, will continue to buy authentic imported fish instead. The irony of this situation emerges later, when the imported fish are the exclusive hors d’oeuvres served at the high-­class party for the stout merchant’s daughter. When the stout merchant is finished gloating, another businessman approaches the gaunt merchant and comments on the exchange: “He’s a proud man. But you can bring him to his place. Next time he mentions his daughter, ask him about his son, and watch the shame storm into his face” (Fall 15). The gaunt merchant refuses to make such a cut, and we later discover that the stout merchant is actually Jon Koshar’s father, who profits and boasts at the cost of his son’s enslavement. Like all of the other characters in the opening sequence, the merchant’s subjectivity is predicated on what might be described as false consciousness: his sense of superiority depends on the disavowal of his son’s exploitation. Unlike the forest guards and the other lower-­class characters, who do not have enough information to cognitively map the situation, the smug subjectivity of upper-­class businessmen (like Jon’s father) is premised on a silent disavowal of the information that would make their social and economic advantage psychologically unbearable. The next segment moves to the airship hangars deep in the city, where a young military major named Tomar awaits the arrival of Clea Koshar (Jon’s sister, the daughter who is arriving from university to attend her father’s



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 175

party). The two lovers want to spend more time together, but Tomar is busy with preparation for the war. Clea asks him about this, and he responds that the war is not only coming, it will be good for the empire. “With the war, there will be work for a lot more people. Your father will be richer. Your brother may come back, and even the thieves and beggars in the Devil’s Pot will have a chance to do some honest labor” (Fall 18). He notes that scientists like Clea will probably be drafted into the war effort, and this is true. Clea later becomes the “first military hero” of the war after discovering that the radiation from the barrier is artificially generated (112). What’s remarkable is that Tomar (like almost everyone else) has unthinkingly embraced the notion that the war will be economically beneficial for the empire because it will create an outlet for surplus labor and lives. As we see later, many of the “thieves and beggars” who inhabit the Devil’s Pot (the poverty-­class “ghetto” of the city of Toron) are immigrants from the mainland who have come to the city in search of economic opportunity only to discover that work is so rare (due to tetron innovations) that they must sell their labor at exploitative costs or seek illegal employment instead. Tomar is right, of course, that the war will make Clea’s father (and other already wealthy corporation owners) richer, but ultimately the war will not benefit the entire society. It will advance the rich upper classes and create an outlet for class resentment from the exploited lower classes, who will give their labor and lives to support the continuation of the existing economic order. During this scene, Clea shows Tomar a notebook of poems by Vol Nonik, a student who has been expelled from the university. She has an odd feeling about his poem and his expulsion: “They fall like random parts of a puzzle, and you can’t see where they fit together” (Fall 16). These pieces of information are connected: Vol Nonik, his poetry, and his expulsion become vital in the third book of the trilogy, but the reader will only understand this importance later. In this exchange, Delany’s aesthetic reinforces his ideal model of political consciousness. Just as the reader needs more information to have an accurate understanding of the data at hand, the characters need more information to make sense of the apparent randomness of their imperial situation. In response to Clea’s disorientation, Tomar notes, “this is a pretty confused and random time we’re living in . . . People are starting to move and

176

ch a p t er 5

migrate all over Toromon. And there’s all this preparation for the war” (Fall 17). His response juxtaposes Clea’s disorientation against a general feeling of confusion surrounding migration and war. Everything seems random, but this randomness is an illusion that evaporates when an accurate cognitive map is available to articulate the relationships between phenomena in question. Beginning here and continuing through the trilogy, “randomness” serves as Delany’s central trope for exploring the need to map relationships between phenomena and the limits to which such mappings are ultimately possible. The final segment of the opening chapter takes place in the bedchamber of young King Uske, the monarch of the Toromon Empire. Uske is throwing a tantrum because his chief minister, Chargill, awakens him to offer a report on tetron production. Uske, a symbolic rather than practical leader, mocks his minister: “Chargill, why is it that roads have been built, prisoners reprieved, and traitors disemboweled at every hour of the afternoon and evening without anyone expressing the least concern for what I thought? Now, suddenly, at . . . My God, seven o’clock in the morning! Why must I suddenly be consulted at every twist and turn of empire?” (Fall 19). From this scene, we can see that the empire does not have a single coherent locus of power. This does not imply an absence of imperial sovereignty; instead, it anticipates what Hardt and Negri describe as a decentered or “network” sovereignty (which they call “Empire”) that includes “the dominant nation-­ states along with supranational institutions, major capitalist corporations, and other powers” unevenly united to form a global-­imperial economic system functioning within and beyond its constituent nodes (Multitude xii). Istvan Csicsery-­Ronay Jr. argues that this idea of empire, despite its shortcomings for developing a critique of contemporary global capitalism, is nonetheless “immensely useful as a tool for understanding contemporary geopolitical mythology, as a cognitive map, in Jameson’s terms, of the present” (2). In Delany’s imperial novum, the empire operates without the conscious thought of its “head,” who would prefer to be “asleep” and let things run automatically. Chargill responds that the king cannot be left alone because the state is “about to enter a war” (Fall 19). Uske responds that they should just get the war started, and he indulges in a fantasy of glorious imperial conquest: “Well, if we had a war . . . I’d ride



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 177

in the first line of fire, in the most splendid uniform imaginable, and lead my soldiers into a sweeping victory” (Fall 20). This is presented as a naïve sentiment, and the actual war that takes place later is presented in terms that evoke the slow brutal senselessness of U.S. imperial violence in Vietnam rather than a nostalgic fantasy of adventuresome colonial conquest. When Uske finally becomes more serious, he tries to ask what seem like obvious questions: This war business is ridiculous, and if you expect me to take it seriously, then the Council is going to have to take it seriously. How can we have a war with whatever is beyond the radiation barrier? We don’t know anything about it. Is it a country? Is it a city? Is it an empire? We don’t even know if it’s got a name. We don’t know how they’ve crippled our scouting planes. We can’t monitor radio communication. We don’t even know if it’s human. (Fall 20) The king goes on to suggest that they send spies to gather information about the enemy beyond the barrier, only to be rebuked because it is “obvious” that the radiation makes this impossible. Uske finally gives up, giggling: “Nobody listens to me! Nobody takes any of my suggestions!” and goes back to sleep (21). Out of the Dead City demonstrates how the absurd inevitability of imperial war has become unthinkingly accepted throughout Toromon, even though almost no one has any specific sense of what the war is really about. In a rare moment of insight during the first book, Geryn (the leader of a group of malcontents) explains what he understands to be the real cause of the war: the empire’s excessive abundance. Toromon’s social and technological advancement, he argues, has created a variety of excesses: surplus labor has produced an excess of tetron, which produces an excess of cheap fish, which generates excessive joblessness, which results in an increase in criminals who ultimately become tetron miners (Fall 43). This situation generates social unrest, which can be seen in the rise of the number of “malcontents” (like Geryn and his allies). Elites in Toron see the war as a solution to this problem, because war will bleed away the excess malcontents (at the lowest end of the economic spectrum) while allowing the upper classes to continue to enjoy extraordinary profits. As Geryn’s critique

178

ch a p t er 5

gains momentum, he continues: “We do not know who or what we will be fighting . . . We will be fighting ourselves, but we will not know it. According to history, it is customary in a war to keep each side in ignorance of the other. Or give them lies like those we use to frighten children instead of the truth” (Fall 43). Geryn’s analysis is penetrating, but the situation is worse than he imagines. No actual enemy exists behind the radiation barrier. All of Toromon has become convinced that an enemy must exist, but this is a shared psychosis or social hallucination—even those who first suggested the existence of the enemy have forgotten that it was originally a fiction because they desperately need the enemy to be real. In this sense, Delany’s fictional war is in many ways more postmodern than the Vietnam War to which it alludes. Despite the domestic propaganda that surrounded the Vietnam War, it is often considered to be a modern imperial war, and the lies told by the U.S. government about the conflict can unmistakably be revealed as falsehoods.5 Toromon’s war, in contrast, anticipates the postmodern spectacle of the Persian Gulf wars, where “real” events are superseded by “virtual” mediations that “erode the distinctions between reality and unreality” (Best and Kellner 73). Delany’s portrayal of Toromon’s war as a “safety valve” to manage the unrest resulting from systemic imperial inequities mirrors conditions in postwar America. Towers dramatizes the rise of a “military-­industrial complex” (a social formation in which state capitalism depends on military productions) following World War II, and Delany suggests that imperial nations (including the United States) depend on military production and violent conflict to maintain the wealth and affluence of an elite class (Best and Kellner 58). Delany explicitly associates imperialism with the need for continuous expansion; without new spaces (new markets or zones of conflict), imperial conditions are inherently unsustainable. The ultimate problem Delany outlines in Out of the Dead City, as he moves from the edges of the empire to its administrative heart, is that although no single character has a clear grasp of how the empire is operating, the empire nonetheless continues to function. The king prefers to spend his time “asleep,” and when he (as the semiconscious “head” of the state) tries to think about what is happening, his efforts are not taken seriously. Delany



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 179

offers a complex social, political, and economic situation—akin to Hardt and Negri’s definition of Empire—with no single central locus of control and domination; economic and material conditions are produced through habitual biopolitical repetitions throughout the empire at once. No single antagonist is responsible for the problems in the empire, and even some who are profiting most (like Jon Koshar’s father) are powerless to prevent the enslavement and subjugation of their own children. This lack of adequate cognitive mapping means that no single character has the knowledge to change the trajectories that are driving the empire toward a bewildering and incomprehensible war.

Randomness and Metacartography The Fall of the Towers portrays a disorienting hyperspace in which individuals have difficulty accurately understanding their positions in a complex field of imperial social and economic relations. In response to this situation—which uncannily anticipates today’s post-­truth America—Delany seems at first to champion the idea of a modern utopian epistemology that objectively models economic and social conditions. In other words, the various forms of ideological false consciousness that enable imperial relations must be remedied with objective factual knowledge. Delany explores this theme throughout The Fall of the Towers with his portrayal of a fictional game called randomax, which becomes a central thematic device for exploring the strengths and limitations of epistemological mapping. In this game, sixteen pennies are set up in a square formation, and one corner penny is removed to create a small gap. Players slide either a penny or a dime into the gap, causing two coins from opposite sides to be knocked out of the square, and they make bets on which two coins will be knocked away. In The Towers of Toron, soldiers play randomax while they are stationed “abroad” during the simulated war. The apes enjoy the game, but the giants avoid playing it, because they seem to have a supernatural power to predict which coins will be knocked away. What seems random to the apes and humans, we eventually learn, is predictable to the giants because of their advanced perceptions. At first glance, this hints at a hierarchy of cognition,

180

ch a p t er 5

with the giants situated as the most perceptually advanced branch of humanity. Later, Jon meets an ape child who is an expert at playing randomax. He has learned the math that governs the game so thoroughly that its application has become instinctual for him; he can play the game rapidly, shooting coins with just a few quick measurements. Delany thus suggests that there is always room to expand one’s knowledge and perceptions; apes don’t need to surrender to the seeming randomness of the game because they begin from a cognitively disadvantaged position. Similarly, the trilogy implies that it is absurd to accept with any degree of complacency the seeming incomprehensibility of social, political, and economic causality. Cognitive mapping of such conditions can offer powerful modes of understanding, and complacency leaves one consuming cheap fish produced from slave labor in tacit support of the imperial economic status quo. The pivot between this modern perspective and a postmodern ideal of political consciousness in The Fall of the Towers hinges on the limited degree to which cognitive mapping can ever entirely eliminate the sense of randomness that the various characters experience throughout the trilogy. There are limits to what can be cognitively mapped, Delany argues, because reality is always more complex than representations can model. The trilogy’s development of this theme reaches its climax at the end of City of a Thousand Suns when the poet Vol Nonik contemplates the tensions between randomness and predictability: “Yes, when we know everything, the random disappears, but while we’re finding out we still have to deal with it somehow. So the idea of the random is a philosophical tool, like God, or The Absurd, or Das Ubermensch, Existence, Death, Masculine, Feminine, or Morality. They aren’t things; they are the names we arbitrarily give to whole areas of things; sharpening tools for the blade of perception we strike reality with” (Fall 412). Nonik observes that heightened perceptions and greater empirical knowledge can eliminate the illusion of randomness, but the problem remains that in the absence of an all-­knowing perspective that resolves randomness into sensible causality, “we still have to deal with it somehow.” The challenge, then, is not only to increase perceptive power to eliminate randomness (although this is clearly vital) but also to determine how to “deal with” randomness that cannot be eliminated from a given perceptual vantage. Furthermore, there are some phenomena that are fundamentally unpre-



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 181

dictable or only semi-­predictable—things that will always seem random. Nonik offers the mathematical example of predicting prime numbers: We can tell exactly what the percentage of prime numbers will be between any two given numbers, yet we still can’t arrive at a formula to predict exactly where they are, other than by trial and error. Unpredictable and predictable. The product of the first N primes plus one is usually another prime. But between the Nth prime and the prime we arrive at there are always others lurking, scattered throughout the real numbers. Like the irregularities in a poem, the quirks in meaning and syntax and imagery that cage the violent, and the very beautiful. (Fall 407) Delany gestures toward phenomena that lie far beyond our typical frameworks of perception and cognition—a vast, weird domain of things that Eugene Thacker calls “the world-­without-­us,” or the inescapable exterior that lurks beyond the horizons of human understanding, “always receding just beyond the bounds of intelligibility” (5). The imperial economics of the Toromon Empire are very difficult to map, but it seems at first that one might be able to view the whole picture if it was just possible to gather the necessary puzzle pieces (tetron production, hydroponic fisheries, class politics, the military industrial complex, etc.) to begin forming a coherent picture. But where do you draw the limits on what counts as a puzzle piece? How do you take into account radically weird things that also contribute to the war, phenomena completely outside human understanding? Delany exemplifies these in the Triple Mind and The Lord of the Flames—radically alien, totally unpredictable forces (from a human frame of reference) meddling in Toromon’s politics and economics in invisible ways (until the moment they are revealed). No effort at cognitive mapping, no matter how sophisticated, can take into account the Triple Mind and The Lord of the Flames until they reveal themselves. They are bodies that exist in the world-­without-­us, alien to human understanding yet causally fundamental to the unfolding of everyday events. Striving for a greater rational and empirical understanding of our world is vital, Delany suggests, but grappling with the limits of perception, consciousness, and predictability is equally pressing.

182

ch a p t er 5

In the trilogy’s exploration of the limits of rational epistemological mappings, Towers anticipates what Steven Best and Douglas Kellner call “metacartography,” a specific mode of cognitive mapping that acknowledges that “multiple chartings are relevant, indeed necessary, because domains of social reality and specific social contexts are distinct; thus it is a pragmatic question to ask which modes of representation should be used in a particular constellation” (8). A metacartographic emphasis on multiple mappings is vital because, as the narrative argues in Towers: “Each person moves toward whatever maturity he is seeking in a different direction. He approaches each observed incident from that direction, sees it from that one side; but it may not be the same side someone else sees.  .  .  . We cannot trace the experiences that bring a man to observe a given phenomenon from a given side. Relative to our limited perception, much of his reaction is random” (Fall 381–83). Individuals experience “observed incidents” from different angles, and these perceptual differences are not reducible to random factors that can be eliminated by crafting a perfect rational epistemology. Differences in individual experience make a difference, Delany argues, and this emphasis is particularly important coming from a writer whose own social differences (as a black, gay, dyslexic science fiction writer) inform how he observes (and writes about) various subjects and conditions. If Delany draws into focus the essential problem that reality is always more complex than any map, representation, or model of understanding will perfectly capture, he also centrally explores the violence that occurs when certain ideas are imposed as the “right” point of view over others in an imperial milieu. In The Fall of the Towers, Delany shows that the impulse to achieve absolute epistemological mastery—the illusion of total, perfect knowledge—produces what Horkheimer and Adorno call “the dialectic of the Enlightenment,” a situation described by Best and Kellner as a monstrous transformation where “instruments of liberation become the means of domination, and when a mode of objectifying thought that was intended to dominate nature also becomes a framework for objectifying and subjugating human beings” (68). According to Pheng Cheah, Horkheimer and Adorno make a strong distinction between “instrumental” and “critical” forms of reason: “instrumental” reason is a dominating rationality willing to treat humans as tools



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 183

or instruments, whereas “critical” reason liberates Enlightenment rationalism from its complicity with human instrumentality (Inhuman 259–62). Horkheimer and Adorno thus propose a critique of modernity with the aim of transcending modernity’s limitations, and Delany articulates a similar proposal in City of a Thousand Suns. The novel argues that political consciousness must strive to map empirical conditions, yet it must always remain aware of the limits of mappability to prevent reason from becoming instrumental rather than liberatory. The instrumentalization of human cognition is one of the central problems Delany explores in The Towers of Toron, which alternates between scenes featuring Jon, Clea, Alter, and the other heroes from the first novel and a parallel narrative of Tel’s experience as an imperial soldier. Delany depicts Tel’s training as a form of brutal brainwashing, and a military psychologist later notes that the training process is “set up to make the most destructive and illogical human actions appear as controlled and nonrandom as possible” (Fall 342). Recruits are bombarded with propaganda about the inhuman menace of the enemy behind the barrier; their training takes place through “vision hoods” and “earphones” (199) and cleverly produced films (202–3). They’re made to feel “confused and uncomfortable” (200) by disjointed juxtapositions of arousing images such as “a girl with a remarkable figure, wearing a skimpy bathing suit,” interrupted by harsh, blinding lights and painful, deafening noises. The point of these virtual exercises, they are told, is that they should be prepared to respond to shock and disorientation with “calmness, alertness, and quick reactions; not confusion and disorder” (200). Later they are trained in various meaningless tasks; Tel learns how to repair a machine called the 606-­B (sometimes confusingly called the 605-­B), although he is never told what the machine is used for. Tel’s brainwashing is complete when he is conditioned to give appropriate responses (and feel that they are appropriate) even when he knows that his actions are meaningless. During his graduation from basic training, he is put in a dark room filled with vague shapes and lights and asked to describe what he sees. Tel reflexively gives Pavlovian responses to harsh sounds (which punish him when he gives an incorrect answer) and pleasant green lights (which reward him when he is appropriately obedient). Finally, he is driven to a psychological breakdown by painful blasts of sound, and his

184

ch a p t er 5

programmers demand that he narrate a meaningful interpretation from the random lights and sounds. He describes what he thinks he should see: “the 605-­B, or maybe the 606-­B, I’m not sure . . . I have to put it together. I can put both of them together. I can put both of them together . . . that’s right, either one. They’re almost the same, but they’re different down in the drive box. I fix them so . . .” And a sudden thought welled warm and comfortable into his mind, and with it amazing relief that started in his shoulders and washed down to his feet. “. . . so we can fight the enemy behind the barrier. That’s what it’s for. It must be. It’s the 606-­B, and I can take it apart and put it together, take it apart and put it . . .” (Fall 206) Tel is battered until he can’t distinguish his own name from the name of the machine he repairs. This is an instrumentalizing process; he must accept his status as a tool serving his function in relation to other tools. Delany frames this process as frightening and absurd (it echoes other stories, such as Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” that dramatize the horrors of torture in the service of psychological coercion), and he portrays Tel’s agony to highlight the dangers of the dialectic of the Enlightenment and the ways progressive reason can serve to justify human instrumentalization. Although this brainwashing scenario may at first seem like a science fiction extravagance, Delany is not alone in his concern regarding the technological manipulation of human consciousness for military purposes in the 1960s. David Farber notes that after World War II, “both military and political elites had come to believe that psychiatry and the behavioral sciences should play a critical role in the liminal world of national security” (21). Martin A. Lee and Bruce Shlain’s Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond chronicles how the CIA conducted LSD experiments on U.S. citizens in the attempt to develop mind control techniques in the 1950s. Jonathan D. Moreno’s Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense examines how neuroscientific research continues to have military implications at the dawn of the twenty-­first century. Delany is not using “mind control” as a fantastic trope: his portrayal of military brainwashing is what Darko Suvin would call a cognitive extrapolation of the scientific and political possibilities of his historical moment.



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 185

Delany’s portrayal of brainwashing stands in sharp and deliberate contrast to the representation of military mind control in Heinlein’s popular novel Starship Troopers. In his autobiography The Motion of Light in Water, Delany notes that Towers was a specific response to Heinlein: “The United States was already in the first years of the immoral and grueling Vietnam war. Glorifying war as a viable field for personal growth, Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers had recently won a Hugo award for best SF novel of its year. . . . Much in the book had fascinated me. But much in it had appalled. I wanted to make my work an answer to what I felt (and still feel) was specious in Heinlein’s argument” (193). Starship Troopers glorifies war, and it celebrates the use of technology and military discipline to produce “correct” states of consciousness. The first chapter begins as “Johnnie” (a mobile infantry soldier) is about to make a “drop” (a landing from space on the surface of a planet to conduct military operations). “I always get the shakes before a drop. I’ve had the injections, of course, and hypnotic preparation, and it stands to reason that I can’t really be afraid. The ship’s psychiatrist has checked my brain waves and asked me silly questions while I was asleep and he tells me that it isn’t fear, it isn’t anything important—it’s just the trembling of an eager race horse in the starting gate” (Heinlein, Starship 1). Johnnie’s training has consisted of virtual experience through hypnosis; in Heinlein’s future, psychological sciences have been scientifically harnessed for military use. Drugs, hypnosis, and psychiatric consultation are all tools for producing the proper states of consciousness required for military combat. In addition, the proper conditioning of individuals through coercive military discipline produces subjectivities that are useful and morally correct. Consciousness expansion, in Heinlein’s view, does not lead to an irreducible multiplicity of unique perspectives but to a unitary consensus and a single correct way of looking at the world that reifies the values of the society and state. Although Delany appreciates the optimism represented by a future free from racial prejudice (against humans) in Starship Troopers,6 he rejects Heinlein’s celebration of war and his glorification of the technological manipulation of human consciousness for military ends. Towers is a sustained rejection of the idea that minds should be “corrected” through technological manipulation or coercive discipline. Heinlein imagines that using hypnosis

186

ch a p t er 5

to upload battle plans will be useful; Delany responds by suggesting that uploading human consciousness into a digital battlefield will be a nightmare. In Starship Troopers, military discipline produces the proper political consciousness for active citizenship, and only individuals with military service are enfranchised with the right to vote. In Towers, military conditioning does not produce good citizens; it generates a fictional war that sacrifices the bodies and minds of the lower classes to maintain an inequitable and unjust imperial order. In sharp contrast to Heinlein, Delany does not portray truth as something achieved by a specialized elite after years of mental correction and military discipline. The truth of the war in Towers is so difficult to accept that neither individuals nor the society as a whole can apprehend it without experiencing psychological trauma. When Jon, Petra, Arkor, Catham, and Clea finally confront the council with the “truth” of the war, the council members are confused and indignant; they refuse to believe the war is fictional. It is soon revealed that the war first “sprouted in the late king’s mind,” but that the “seeds” of the idea existed throughout “every mind in Toromon” (Fall 186). Delany suggests that the whole empire knows and disavows the secret of the war; the unconscious denial of this hidden truth is what keeps the empire whole. Even the council members, who approved and produced the fictional war, have erased their own memories to hide from the horrifying implications of their actions. Clea, who worked with the scientists to create the technologies for the war, deduced what was happening while she was working for the government, and she was so horrified that she repressed the knowledge and refused to acknowledge it until Arkor telepathically softened her self-­imposed mental barriers in his search for the truth. At the end of The Towers of Toron, the telepathic giants reach into the minds of the citizens of the empire and release the repressed truth of the war. Delany presents this as a moment of collective consciousness expansion; he offers a montage of scenes where individuals throughout the empire realize that their negative emotions are hiding their unconscious guilt and understanding of the war. This climax is psychedelic and apocalyptic. It is psychedelic insofar as the giants reach into the minds of the citizens and expand their consciousness of self and world, and it is apocalyptic insofar as these revelations disrupt the social relations that constitute the stability of the empire.7



Cognitive Justice for a Post-­Truth Era 187

Delany’s implication is that any empire (including the United States in the 1960s) has an imperial unconscious—a set of taken-­for-­granted social discourses (like the consensus concerning the inevitability of war) and socioeconomic conditions (like slave labor, economic reality, etc.)—that produce and sustain imperial relations. The giants force Toromon to excavate its hidden imperial unconscious.8 Furthermore, Delany suggests that this imperial unconscious has a repressive Freudian dimension; the problem is not that individuals cannot map imperial conditions, it’s that on the whole, they don’t wish to do so, because disavowing such conditions is what maintains the continuity of individual and social imperial identities.9 At the end of The Towers of Toron, the solution Delany offers is mass consciousness raising. The giants awaken the population to the reality of the war, the big lie is revealed for its hidden truth, and the war seems to come to an end. In the third and final novel in the trilogy, City of a Thousand Suns, however, we discover that the mass moment of consciousness expansion— what Vol Nonik calls “the bright moment” when the citizens of the empire “learned their doom”—was not enough to completely end the war (Fall 305). Despite its fictional ontology, the war becomes embodied in an institutional and material structure; it lives on as the return of Toron’s imperial repressed in the sentient computer constructed to simulate the war and randomly decide which solders’ lives would be lost and spared. In City, we discover that it is not enough to awaken an imperial population to the injustices of war. In addition to consciousness raising and greater mapping of specific conditions, substantive change also requires dismantling embedded power formations. In The Fall of the Towers, this involves stopping the computer and disarming its remote control over the empire’s weapons of war. Ultimately, the characters in The Fall of the Towers, who are colonized prisoner-­victims trapped in lies and illusions that exist to perpetuate imperial wars, must strive for psychic liberation just like Paul Atreides and other popular psychedelic science fiction heroes from the 1960s. But their quest for psychic decolonization requires a complex engagement with objective facts and subjective perspectives that exposes (rather than fortifies) the fantasy work that sustains postmodern imperialism. In this regard, Delany’s trilogy offers a reverse colonization narrative that maximizes the genre’s potential for insightful anti-­imperial critique. Furthermore, Delany reveals that the instrumental production of politicized consciousness—the

188

ch a p t er 5

insidious goal of post-­truth discourse in our contemporary moment—is a powerful tool in the ideological arsenal of empire. The remedy, he argues, to an imperial reality crafted of lies and illusions is not a simplistic appeal to easy scientific truth claims but a difficult, tentative, and uncertain exploration of the world’s true complexity that must be undertaken despite the fact that perfect, ultimate knowledge will always, by necessity, remain forever out of reach.

V C O N C LV S I O N

Alternatives to Imperial Masochism

A

lthough this book has focused on reverse colonization narratives from the 1960s and early 1970s to show how key shifts in im perial fantasy during this time contributed to the ascendancy of reactionary imperial masochism in the early twenty-­first century, additional important work (largely beyond the scope of this study) might also trace the development of reverse colonization fantasy in the decades between the 1960s and today.1 During the 1970s, for example, escalating tensions over the Vietnam War catalyzed many science fiction writers to proclaim their overt support or opposition to Cold War U.S. imperialism, and writers who addressed Vietnam often used reverse colonization fantasies in their imaginative works. As I have discussed elsewhere (Higgins, “New Wave”), two of the era’s most notable anti–Vietnam War science fiction stories—Le Guin’s The Word for World Is Forest and Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War—offer striking examples of explicitly anti-­imperial reverse colonization narratives. Like Delany’s Fall of the Towers trilogy, The Word for World Is Forest and The Forever War offer reverse colonization stories that minimize possibilities for imperial masochism precisely because they articulate conditions of imperial violence with extraordinary conceptual rigor. The novels engage with the complexity of Cold War imperialism in a way that rejects a shallow embrace of subaltern victimhood. Instead, they require readers to examine their own implication in violent systems of imperial power while opening their eyes to the unjust suffering experienced by others.2 A multitude of other reverse colonization fantasies in the 1970s and 1980s, however, offer frictionless opportunities for North American audiences to

190 Conclusion

identify as victims in unsettling ways. Indeed, as H. Bruce Franklin notes, a disturbing trend emerged in the United States after the Vietnam War to “reverse the roles of victim and victimizer” by appropriating specific images from the war and replacing Vietnamese victims with U.S. soldiers—an ideological move that depends on the logic of reverse colonization fantasy (Vietnam 17). James William Gibson and Susan Jeffords argue that such dreams of victimization give rise in the 1980s to the post–Vietnam War paramilitary hero—notably observable in the Rambo and Predator films— a figure who struggles alone in a guerrilla conflict against overwhelming forces to recover and reclaim a sense of dominant masculinity supposedly threatened by the U.S. loss in Vietnam.3 Imaginatively occupying the position of the wounded victim enables paramilitary heroes and other reactionary figures from this era to adopt what Diane Enns calls a “status beyond critique” that seemingly legitimizes the unrestricted exercise of violent imperial power (6). Many reactionaries in the 1970s and 1980s argued that the United States lost the war in Vietnam because the nation didn’t allow itself to win; corrupt bureaucrats, the liberal media, and a misguided peace movement held our true power in check, some argued, and the only way to recover from this emasculating defeat was to cut loose with unchecked military dominance through technological superiority. The loss is thus reframed throughout this era as an imperial rape-­ revenge narrative, and the failure to exercise imperial hegemony becomes the legitimating basis for the expression of new forms of imperial might, such as militarizing domestic police forces in the War on Drugs during the 1980s and beyond. One of the most popular and enduring examples of science fiction’s shift toward imperial masochism after the Vietnam War can be seen within the original Star Wars film (1977), a movie that gives birth to one of the most popular science fiction franchises of the postwar period. Star Wars invites audiences to identify with heroic guerrilla resistance fighters struggling against a corrupt and evil empire without the friction of ever being forced to identify themselves as the beneficiaries of global imperialism. Perhaps the most striking imaginative aspect of Star Wars is the franchise’s continual insistence that the ultimate heroes—whether they are the Rebels of the New Hope era or the Resistance from the more recent films—must be desperately



Conclusion 191

outnumbered and outgunned freedom fighters struggling against an imperial power. If reverse colonization narratives emerge to become a dominant mode of science fiction storytelling during the 1960s, A New Hope marks the moment when imperial masochism becomes a central element of imperial discourse in American culture: American audiences are constantly invited to identify with anticolonial guerrilla freedom fighters (like the Viet Cong), despite the almost total absence of any attempt to understand real Vietnamese perspectives—or the real-­world experiences of other nations and cultures subjected to violence and exploitation for the sake of imperial profit and expansion. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the conclusion of the Cold War, imperial paramilitary fantasies of righteous victimhood were eventually overshadowed by a sense that U.S. men, in particular, were disempowered victims of their own society and culture, colonized by vast networks of artificial simulacra, and justified in their desire to break through to something more authentic (and recover the threatened privilege of masculine agency in the process). This flavor of victim identification was powerfully enhanced and fortified by science fictional reverse colonization fantasies. Especially in the late 1990s, North American popular culture was dominated by awakening-­from-­virtual-­reality narratives that were often directly inspired by Philip K. Dick’s earlier science fiction paranoia regarding the artificial and imprisoning nature of everyday existence.4 The most iconic of these late 1990s reverse colonization narratives was, of course, The Matrix (1999), which I have discussed at other points throughout this book. Like Star Wars, The Matrix contributed in immeasurable ways to popularizing the idea that we are all desperate insurgents fighting a lonely revolution against an oppressive, colonizing power. The fact that the film is sometimes celebrated as a “transgender coming out story” (Cook) and (and we have seen) used as the imaginative foundation for white supremacy and antifeminism speaks to the astonishing imaginative duality of reverse colonization narratives. For good or for ill, seemingly everyone can identify (in contradictory ways) with Neo and his companions fighting an insurgent revolution against an absolute and totalizing system of colonizing oppression. Alongside The Matrix, other popular films from the late 1990s such as

192 Conclusion

Dark City (1998), The Truman Show (1998), American Beauty (1999), and Fight Club (1999) ubiquitously center on male protagonists who find themselves trapped in a false, empty, or simulated world and fight to gain access to some more real or authentic exterior. In these narratives, everyday life is portrayed as a kind of emasculating ensnarement in post-­Fordist systems of command and control, and heroes like Neo from The Matrix or Tyler Durden from Fight Club struggle to escape the neoliberalization of everyday life seemingly imposed on them by their tedious administrative white-­ collar jobs. There is a pervasive sense in these films and stories that life has somehow become false or artificial, and science fiction often literalizes the idea of being trapped in an alienating system designed to keep individuals docile, numb, and plugged into an endless cycle of late capitalist production and consumption. When the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks occurred, however, the tendency to use science fiction to portray life under late capitalism as deadening entrapment in enervating systems of control was radically transfigured. As I have explored in greater detail elsewhere (see Higgins, “American Science Fiction”), during the late 1990s, science fiction often reflected a desperate urge to break through to the other side of what seemed like the Black Iron Prison of neoliberal commodity culture. After 2001, the romanticized exterior of this late capitalist milieu came crashing inward, and catastrophe itself was immediately commodified and propagated as consumer spectacle. Americans were terrified by the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, yet the crisis intensified an already existing tendency in neoliberal political culture to foster an environment of perpetual emergency to deploy fluid economic and military interventions to reinforce the advantages enjoyed by a global capitalist elite.5 In the aftermath of 9/11, the yearning to break through to a more authentic exterior (reflected in films like The Matrix) was quickly replaced by a horror and fascination with disaster spectacles, which emerged in the form of a newly rekindled obsession with science fictional alien invasion narratives. These were reformulated to address an environment of perpetual emergency imaginatively encompassing threats ranging from terrorism and biological attacks to natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina. Although aliens often functioned as direct allegories for terrorists during this time, many aliens were presented as incomprehensibly



Conclusion 193

foreign and difficult to understand, much as the Viet Cong (and their allegorical doubles) were portrayed in American popular fiction during the Vietnam War era. Most alien invasion reverse colonization narratives in U.S. popular culture after 9/11 express a dual potential for imperial masochism and anti-­ imperial critique. Battlestar Galactica (2004–9), for example, opens with a devastating surprise assault against humanity that invokes the 9/11 attacks. As the series progresses, it offers an increasingly radical challenge to the idea that there are clearly defined boundaries between humans and their Cylon enemies. Extremists on both sides who regard humans and Cylons as absolute racialized categories emerge as clear villains, and the show as a whole invites viewers to sympathetically identify with characters who are imprisoned and tortured in military detention centers that evoke Abu Ghraib and the Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp. Ultimately, the series deconstructs its foundational differentiation between humans and Cylons, opening the space for the possibility that the self/other binary that serves as the central conflict is artificially constituted and may be transcended. Overwhelmingly, however, most reverse colonization narratives after 9/11 invite Americans to self-­identify as members of developing or colonized groups who are striving for liberation and empowerment. In the popular Mass Effect video game trilogy and in Star Trek: Enterprise, for example, humans (embodied by U.S. cultural norms) are framed as members of a disadvantaged species striving to achieve greater power and advantage in galactic civilization. In James Cameron’s Avatar (2009), humans as a whole may represent dominant corporate forces exploiting developing worlds, but viewers are invited to identify with a hero (Jake Sully) who joins the Na’vi (literally wearing their skin) to fight a battle for decolonization. The Hunger Games trilogy similarly invites readers and viewers to identify with subaltern subjects who have been dominated and exploited by a corrupt Capitol and must ultimately fight an anticolonial battle of liberation against oppressive forces. Occupying the position of the colonized subject enables the protagonists in such stories to function as fantastical hypervictims entitled to absolute revenge in the face of external oppression. Captain Archer from Enterprise gets his hands dirty in the battle against the Xindi, Shepard from Mass Effect has the option to make dark choices in his fight against the

194 Conclusion

Reapers, Jake Sully and the Na’vi wage a dramatic revolution against Earth’s Resources Development Administration in Avatar, and the traumas experienced by Katniss Everdeen in The Hunger Games seem to justify nearly any revenge she might wish to exact from President Snow. In notable contrast to the widespread embrace of victimhood prevalent in mainstream reverse colonization narratives (and in Western popular culture at large) from the 1960s to today, one of the most striking aspects of many Indigenous speculative fictions from the same era is a consistent refusal to sanctify victimry. Despite centuries of genocidal violence and extraordinary hardship suffered by Indigenous peoples in enduring settler-­colonial regimes, Indigenous science fiction often eschews imperial masochism entirely in favor of what Gerald Vizenor refers to as survivance paradigms. In Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence, Vizenor proposes that survivance is “more than survival, more than endurance or mere response,” and he suggests that survivance narratives offer “an active repudiation of dominance, tragedy, and victimization” (15). Instead of fetishizing the victim role, as mainstream science fictions often do, Indigenous science fiction stories often reject victimry in favor of what Grace Dillon calls biskaabiiyang, an Anishinaabemowin term that describes a process of “returning to ourselves” or “discovering how personally one is affected by colonization, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-­Native Apocalypse world” (10). Many Indigenous speculative fictions reveal that many of those who have suffered the greatest harm from real-­world practices of imperialism often entirely reject the politics of victimhood that are the central obsession of Western reverse colonization fantasies. This shows, oddly, that the United States is often more invested in imagining itself as traumatically victimized than many Native American communities are, and white American men (in particular) imagine themselves to be colonized subalterns with greater frequency and intensity than do many Indigenous people residing in settler-­ colonial states. The absurdity of this simultaneous embrace of victimhood by white Americans and eschewal of it by Indigenous peoples highlights the strange discursive power of reverse colonization fantasy in Western imperial culture.



Conclusion 195

As I have argued in greater detail elsewhere (Higgins, “Survivance”), Indigenous speculative authors frequently offer striking alternatives to the imperial logic of retributive victimhood expressed in many mainstream science fiction imaginings since the 1960s. Vizenor’s short story “Custer on the Slipstream” (1978), for example, centers on a cruel and petty bureaucrat, Farlie Border—a resurrected version of George Armstrong Custer—who works at the Bureau of Indian Affairs and takes perverse racist enjoyment from condescending to the Indigenous people he is employed to assist. Border is ultimately defeated by resurrected icon Crazy Horse, who refuses to play the role of victim in the way that would typically be required of him by the dynamics of settler-­colonial recognition. Crazy Horse recognizes contemporary Indigenous people as free, dignified, and distinct, and his refusal of victimization in favor of survivance undermines and destabilizes continuing settler-­colonial dynamics of oppression. Other Indigenous speculative authors, such as Leslie Marmon Silko and Diane Glancy, mirror Vizenor’s rejection of victimization in favor of what Dillon might describe as biskaabiiyang recoveries. Silko and Glancy also explore how Western modernity operates as a spiritual sickness that prohibits individuals from experiencing meaningful relationships with one another and the world. Imperial modernity is the ailment from which characters must recover, and recovery requires moving away from victimization toward survivance. If Vizenor rejects victimry by suggesting that Native Americans have never been defeated, Glancy and Silko eschew the oppositional binary of victim/perpetrator by displacing this opposition in a way that enables radical inclusivity across racial and cultural differences. In these narratives, Native Americans are not simply the victims of whites; instead, Indigenous and Euro-­American peoples are both victims of witchery—a deadening coldness that instrumentalizes humanity and cuts people off from the sacred fire of authentic connection. Decolonization becomes a process of self-­recovery and survivance that involves radical withdrawal from settler-­ colonial paradigms of life practice. Indigenous survivance fictions draw into sharp focus many of the most troubling aspects of Western reverse colonization fantasies. As this study has shown, there has been an overwhelming tendency in Euro-­American imaginings since the 1960s for mostly white audiences (including far-­right

196 Conclusion

reactionaries) to identify as colonized insurgents fighting fantastic revolutions against oppressive powers. Not only is this preposterous insofar as many such audiences are largely the beneficiaries of imperial power, it’s also absurd because some of the people who have the most legitimate claims to being victims of empire (such as Indigenous Americans) often entirely reject the politics of victimhood that Western audiences obsessively focus on. In this context, the rejection of victimhood observable in Indigenous speculative literatures should offer a clear warning: there can be something both powerful and poisonous about identifying as a victim, even when there are legitimate grounds to do so. The power of embracing victimhood often lies in the fact that it seemingly liberates one from the limits that might otherwise govern ethical behavior. When you’re the victim (or believe yourself to be the victim, or can rhetorically position yourself as the victim), it seems like you don’t have to worry about hurting others, because ostensibly they’re the ones who have hurt you first. The toxicity of identifying as a victim, then, is that victimhood can seemingly justify violent attitudes and actions by reducing the complexity of a situation to an oversimplified binary of good and evil. These dangers related to victim identification can be troubling enough in cases where real harm has occurred. Post-­Holocaust identity in Israel, for example, has been shaped by clear historical conditions of violence against Jewish people, yet it has also become the foundation for aggressive settler-­ colonial violence against Palestinians. Such dangers are amplified in situations where reactionaries (such as incels, antifeminists, white supremacists, neoreactionaries, and other far-­right extremists) adopt the position of victims to disavow the violence they inflict on others in service of their own already existing positions of advantage and superiority. This is not to say that people who have been attacked, colonized, or otherwise harmed do not have legitimate grounds to stand up for themselves (or that we shouldn’t extend serious consideration to those who experience harm). I want to suggest, instead, that it is extremely dangerous to consider oneself “attacked” in any kind of straightforward way if what is actually being challenged is one’s entitlement to an advantage enjoyed because others are being exploited or treated unfairly. Ongoing civil rights movements in the United States (to take just one example) shouldn’t reasonably be framed



Conclusion 197

as “attacks” on white people, given that for centuries white Americans have inflicted countless forms of violence on African Americans and other people of color. A redress of this violence cannot reasonably be defined as an attack—even if this might feel like an attack for someone who has been in the position of unconsciously or unthinkingly enjoying advantages that are now challenged in the name of greater fairness and equity. Ultimately, we need to distinguish more carefully between selfish acts of aggression that benefit those who enjoy unfair advantages, on one hand, and reasonable acts of resistance undertaken by those who are exploited and disempowered, on the other. Furthermore, we need to encourage more complex analyses of power and resistance that take into account how one can be simultaneously disempowered in some ways and also the beneficiary of unfair advantages in others; just because someone is disadvantaged or exploited in one domain does not give that person the right to become an aggressive perpetrator in another. In the absence of such critical distinctions, we are left with a world where selfish and violent acts of aggression are frequently undertaken in the name of emancipatory liberation and struggles against oppression. Imperialism proceeds, yet it almost always wears the uniform of the battle against empire. Some readers might raise an objection at this point: isn’t the left also guilty of engaging in reverse colonization fantasy in ways that mirror the imperial masochism of the reactionary right? Don’t so-­called social justice warriors also draw power from the identity politics of victimhood? Doesn’t the left also unite political sentiment against a straw-­man establishment in a way that fails to regard political conservatives as actual humans with complex perspectives and motivations? The answer is, of course, yes—this absolutely happens. Throughout the political spectrum, we are all sometimes caught up in the ugly romance of reverse colonization fantasy. One of my goals in discussing Indigenous survivance narratives in this conclusion has been to highlight the fact that the ressentiment of victim identification can be toxic for everyone, regardless of political orientation. It is certainly the case that in the hyperpolarized political environment of the early twenty-­first century, both the right and the left too often draw on reverse colonization fantasy to define their own agenda as revolutionary (a fight for the underdog) and portray their enemies as a powerful colonizing establishment.

198 Conclusion

I think it’s very important, however, to take into account the degree to which any given claim about an oppressive, totalizing system of power has realistic, objective, factual accuracy. When climate change deniers argue that there is a massive conspiracy among scientists and the liberal media to convince the world that climate change is a hoax perpetuated by elite political and financial interests, this can only reasonably be regarded as a total break from empirically grounded evidence. Worse, the climate change denial movement’s rejection of scientific objectivity has often been perpetuated by an actual and verifiable conspiracy of propaganda and misinformation that has been supported by special interests (such as the oil industry) for the sake of profit and self-­preservation (Rust). Rather than delving further down the rabbit hole of whose claims to victimhood are more factual, the point I want to emphasize is that identifying as a victim can ultimately be incredibly poisonous, even for those who have a legitimate claim to victimhood on the basis of very real unjust harm. In this regard, my argument echoes warnings against the dangers of identity-­based victimhood politics that have been articulated by Diane Enns, Wendy Brown, Gerald Vizenor, and (in a much earlier context) Frantz Fanon. In The Wretched of the Earth, for example, Fanon argues that post­ colonial nationalism—which is born from categorical opposition to colonial oppression—must be “explained, enriched, and deepened” to transform into a humanistic “social and political consciousness” (144). Without such enrichment, it can only lead to “a dead end” of entrenched subaltern victimhood that can never blossom into a positive, generative sense of cultural identity (144). Fanon anticipates Vizenor’s rejection of victimry in favor of modes of political subjectivity that foreground vital presence rather than the entrenchment of opposition. Tragically, these subtle dimensions of Fanon’s perspective are invisible to Jean-­Paul Sartre, who appropriates and universalizes Fanon’s call for psychic decolonization in his 1961 preface to The Wretched of the Earth. Sartre argues, in essence, that “Fanon is right! We are all psychically colonized by evil forces, and we must all undertake psychic decolonization” (lvii, paraphrased). On one hand, Sartre’s reading of Fanon makes sense: there are very real forces of oppression in the world, and many of them involve our internalized repressive normative habits of thought and behav-



Conclusion 199

ior. At the same time, Sartre’s preface performs the unmistakable work of imperial masochism through the fantasy of reverse colonization: he moves beyond empathy with decolonizing subjects to identify as a colonized subject struggling for freedom. We are all colonized, Sartre argues—but he’s wrong. Clearly, we are all not colonized in the same way that black Algerians are colonized under French imperial occupation, and ignoring the specificity of what colonization truly entails is recklessly irresponsible at best. Even worse, though, Sartre’s appropriation of psychic decolonization fails to engage with the vital complexity of Fanon’s argument. Fanon’s entire point, in distinguishing between oppositional “nationalism” and a more vital and generative “national consciousness” is that one needs to identify as colonized (or as a victim) exactly long enough to recognize the presence of someone else’s hand around your throat and to remove it, but no longer than this. If you continue to think of yourself as someone who has a hand around your throat, that’s all you will ever be (and this very form of victimhood identification might well cause you to put your hand around someone else’s throat unjustly, in turn). The subtlety of this point is lost on Sartre, just as it is lost on most white male writers who engage in the romance of reverse colonization fantasy to self-­identify as radical insurgents struggling to fight an anticolonial struggle against an oppressive establishment. Much of this book has explored the darker side of reverse colonization fantasy because imperial masochism, or the embrace of victimhood in the service of reactionary politics, has unmistakably become one of the cornerstones of imperial discourse in the early decades of the twenty-­first century. As I have also argued, reverse colonization narratives don’t always or inherently fortify imperial masochism. When I initially started work on this project (a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away), my goal wasn’t exactly to expose the dynamics of imperial masochism; instead, I was interested in how science fiction narratives, because of their historical engagement with imperial themes (the conquest of outer space, etc.), can frequently offer thoughtful modes of anti-­imperial critique, especially once the genre matured in the 1960s and began to interrogate its own ideological underpinnings. As I hope my examples throughout this book show, I still believe that science fiction has a powerful capacity to function as a critical literature of empire. The problem, I discovered, is that science fiction certainly doesn’t

200 Conclusion

inherently offer critical perspectives regarding imperialism—science fiction, I argue now, almost always takes empire as its central subject, but whether a given narrative perpetuates or challenges imperial discourse and practice (or does both simultaneously) depends very much on that particular narrative and the context of its production and reception. In this light, I don’t want to lose sight of the fact that there can also be something extraordinary about reverse colonization narratives when they successfully provoke readers to see and feel what it might be like to occupy a different position in an imperial milieu. The graphic novel The Arrival (2006), for example, by Australian author and illustrator Shaun Tan, offers a striking example of a reverse colonization story that uses the power of fantastical speculation to invite readers to empathetically connect with the challenges of the immigration experience. In brief, The Arrival is an entirely visual graphic novel (with no speech balloons or legible text) that follows the story of a man whose homeland is infested by dragons; he leaves his family (and all familiar cultural referents) to travel to a distant land that offers the prospect of better opportunities, hoping to earn resources so he can bring his family to join him later. The imaginative crux of The Arrival is that (dragons aside) the world Tan’s protagonist departs is visually recognizable to many Western readers: the birds there look familiar; clocks have a circular face with twelve hours; teapots look like teapots; and clothing styles include recognizable elements such as suits, ties, vests, and dresses. The land to which he travels, in contrast, is fantastically strange. All the animals are wondrously unfamiliar, and homes are inhabited by friendly monsters; clocks and other forms of technology are dramatically unrecognizable; people eat foods that look like wriggling tentacles prepared by specialized blowtorches; and all of the clothing, language, and customs in this place are foreign and indecipherable. The absence of readable text in The Arrival and the multitude of fantastical elements the man encounters makes the narrative disorienting—readers must struggle to understand the story, just as the protagonist struggles to understand the foreign land he now inhabits. This experience of disorientation is the entire point; readers are invited to experience firsthand what it might feel like to come to a place where everything is unfamiliar—where just understanding how the world works and how to communicate with



Conclusion 201

one’s neighbors (and employers) is a constant struggle. Despite this sense of disorientation, The Arrival is not a story about victimhood. It’s a narrative about trial and hardship, but it ultimately centers on the everyday acts of patience and kindness that make it possible for a newcomer to build a home in a foreign place (and ultimately extend kindness and generosity to others in turn). In certain instances—such as Delany’s The Fall of the Towers trilogy or the Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin—the strength of a critical reverse colonization narrative depends on the degree of specificity of its critical articulations (or how it drills down into very specific problems of empire rather than portraying imperialism in vague or universal terms). Although this is often valuable, The Arrival takes a different approach—it universalizes a certain kind of immigration experience, rather than aiming for particular historical specificity, but it avoids creating a universal enemy against whom the protagonist defines himself. Of course, there are villains in the story— the dragons and labor prisons and giant invaders with destructive vacuum machines that drive refugees and immigrants from their homelands—and these antagonistic forces communicate the important message that migrants are usually leaving their homes because of terrible things in their homelands (not because they are lazy leeches who want to survive by taking advantage of the U.S. welfare system). Beyond this, the specific forces driving them from their homes are left unexplored. Although one might regard this as a narrative weakness—a failure to examine how the political and economic activities of the “better place” are often the cause of the terrible conditions in the “homeland with dragons”—I think Tan deliberately eschews this approach in favor of his focus on the experience of migration. His point isn’t to make readers angry at the forces that are causing strife in certain places of the world but to invite us to open our hearts to those who are suffering and moving in search of a better life as a result of those forces. One might argue that The Arrival is somewhat incomplete—we must both fight the dragons of empire that ravage people’s homelands and extend generosity to migrants and refugees displaced by the world’s horrors. Although this is certainly true, I also think many examples of reverse colonization fantasy reveal that once we are imaginatively fighting “dragons” or

202 Conclusion

struggling to escape “the Matrix” in the abstract (rather than engaging with very specific imperial struggles), the universalizing tendency of speculative reverse colonization metaphors can invite twisted forms of imperial masochism. We all want to feel like we’re the ones under attack by dragons— even when we might actually be the dragons. Tan’s refusal to make The Arrival a story about victimization cuts off most avenues toward imperial masochism and instead puts the reader in the shoes of someone struggling to find their way in a new and foreign place. I can’t find a way to twist this story into something that would give power to reactionaries in the way that Star Wars or The Matrix can, and that’s because the narrative is not focused on the Enemy but on a struggle to find one’s way and build friendships in a dangerous and unpredictable world. The Arrival therefore points toward some of the best qualities that reverse colonization narratives have to offer—the power of imaginative artistic expression to invite us all to understand and sympathize with the experiences of others who are suffering under conditions of oppression, and an imaginative reversal of positions that enables us to imagine what it’s like to be on the other side of a vast divide of inequality of circumstance. Although many reverse colonization fantasies often contribute to the world’s problems today, The Arrival suggests that this mode of storytelling—when done well—can also have a profoundly positive creative potential.

NOTES

Introduction 1. See Rieder, Colonialism; Csicsery-­Ronay, “Science Fiction”; Jones, “Metempsychosis”; Kerslake, Science Fiction. 2. This quote is from chapter 10, p. 30 of Watchmen (the collected trade paperback does not have front-­to-­back page numbering) (Moore, Gibbons, and Higgins). 3. Critics such as Rieder, Kerslake, Csicery-­Ronay, and Jones have interrogated the various ways Euro-­A merican science fiction, with its constant exploration into the unknown and confrontation with the alien “Other,” has historically functioned as an imaginary literature of empire. These scholars were preceded by an earlier generation of scholars, including Richard Slotkin and David Mogen, who examined science fiction’s relationship with the western, but these earlier writers rarely acknowledged in any comprehensive way the continuities between American westerns and British colonial adventure narratives. 4. Lyons notes that certain alt-­right advocates (like neo-­Nazi white supremacist Richard Spencer, who first popularized the term “alt-right”) regard Breitbart news and high-­profile public figures like Milo Yiannopoulos as a watered-­down mainstream variant of the authentic alt-­right; Spencer and others thus refer to Breitbart-­related figures like Yiannopoulos, Allum Bokhari, and Steve Bannon as the “alt-­lite” (Lyons 81). This study will not attempt to distinguish degrees of authenticity within alt-­right politics, and I therefore use the term “alt-­right” in the broader sense to refer to a broad spectrum of “alternative” far-­right political groups that reject what they regard as “mainstream” conservativism in favor of reactionary anti-­establishment political revolution and transformation. 5. In the face of efforts to update the Hugo nomination and voting processes to discourage Puppies interference, Yiannopoulos believes that the Puppies will ultimately prevail: “Anyone who loves sci-­fi knows that no matter how air-­tight the bad guy’s rules seem, the good guys will find a way through. Does anyone really think SJWs can design anything without leaving an unguarded exhaust vent?”

204

Notes to Pages 10–17

6. In such cases, “one deterritorializes,” they suggest, “but only in order to knot and annul the mass movements and movements of deterritorialization, to invent all kinds of marginal reterritorializations even worse than the others” (228). 7. For more on the differences between the various (and sometimes conflicting) historical currents in liberalism and their relation to the contemporary political spectrum, see Freeden chap. 3. 8. Conservativism, Robin argues, absorbs “the ideas and tactics of the very revolution or reform it opposes” to bring “the energy and dynamism of the street to the antique inequalities of a dilapidated estate” (40). 9. Arata and Clare Clarke note that such threats of reversal occur in H. Rider Haggard’s She (where Queen Ayesha plots to invade London and dethrone Queen Victoria), as well as in the early works of Rudyard Kipling (“The Mark of the Beast,” “At the End of the Passage,” and The Light That Failed), in a number of Sherlock Holmes stories (The Sign of Four, A Study in Scarlet, “The Crooked Man”), in the writings of George du Maurier and Richard Marsh, and in the science fiction of H.  G. Wells (Arata 623; C. Clarke 527). Clarke suggests that in all these fictions, as well as in late Victorian detective narratives (such as Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers), “distances between imperial centre and periphery collapse as problematic figures repeatedly travel from various outposts to wreak havoc upon London” (527). 10. Eitan Bar-­Yosef observes a similar dual potential in E. Nesbit’s The Story of the Amulet (1906), a reverse colonization narrative that in many ways is openly critical of British imperialism. Nesbit, a cofounder of the Fabian Society, envisions dismantling colonialism as a necessary step toward socialist utopia: “since colonialism is a vehicle of capitalism,” Bar-­Yosef observes, “it is by de-­(or reverse) colonization that the socialist vision would be realized” (18). In Nesbit’s critique of imperial capitalism, however, lurks a disturbing strain of anti-­Semitism. “For many Fabians,” Bar-­ Yosef argues, “the ‘Jew’ was seen as the personification of international capitalism and imperialism,” and elite Jewish financial brokers (with “long, curved noses”) are presented as imperialist villains in Nesbit’s stories (19). If Dracula foregrounds imperial masochism but contains an implicit seed of imperial critique, The Story of the Amulet explicitly foregrounds imperial critique, but this critique is built on an anti-­Semitic foundation of imperial masochism. 11. The plight of Tasmania, in particular, was on Wells’s mind when he wrote War of the Worlds. An anecdotal account suggests that Wells and his brother Frank were “discussing the European extermination of the Tasmanians” when Frank speculated what it might be like if something similar to the Tazmanian genocide happened to the British at home, inspiring the central idea for Wells’s



Notes to Pages 18–34

205

novel (Kuchta 36). The British had inflicted such brutal violence on indigenous Tasmanians during their colonization that for many years it was believed that the entire Tasmanian population was wiped out. This was not true—Tasmanians survive today—but the extent of British colonial violence was devastating. 12. As Rieder notes, “the dominant strain of Wells’s critique of colonialist ideology in The War of the Worlds is indignation against colonial arrogance” (Colonialism 133). Throughout the novel, Wells portrays the English as being so smug in their sense of racial and cultural superiority that they are constantly underestimating the Martians. They cannot imagine that the invading Martians are truly superior; because of this arrogance, they constantly find themselves at a fatal disadvantage in the face of various attacks. Wells shares with his contemporaries a preoccupation with evolutionary theory that justifies race war as a natural, inevitable, and even progressive form of conflict—there is a certain strange pleasure to imagining England under attack in this light, because such fantasies may help rekindle the racial vigor needed to maintain imperial supremacy. 13. Jack Windle and Michael L. Ross each consider how postcolonial and working-­class authors of color satirize and critique British postwar fears concerning immigration by using reverse colonization tropes. As such, they extend the analysis of Victorian and Edwardian reverse colonization narratives forward to the post–World War  II era. No existing scholarship considers how science fictional reverse colonization narratives function in a postwar U.S. context. 14. Many thanks to Mica Hilson, who offered this sharp and succinct phrasing to summarize the postwar psychological structure of disavowal in his feedback on an early draft of this chapter.

Chapter 1 1. I focus on Clarke’s novel in this chapter rather than the Kubrick film because Clarke and Kubrick collaborated on the ideas and concepts in 2001. The novel, with its much greater degree of expository detail, offers a richer repository of information for considering the discursive logic of “psychic decolonization” in the story than the more artistic and impressionistic data offered by the film. In essence, because of Clarke and Kubrick’s close collaboration, the film and the novel explore parallel themes, but a greater expository description of the ideas behind these themes is available in the novel. 2. Jean-­Paul Sartre makes a similar argument about the need for privileged Westerners to decolonize their minds in his preface to Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, revealing that the idea of psychic decolonization was subject to fluid

206

Notes to Pages 35–41

reappropriation since its very inception. Sartre’s immediate adaptation of Fanon’s idea of psychic decolonization for whites shows that imagining oneself as psychically “colonized” can either lead to critical awareness of real-­world imperial conditions or a historically vacuous appropriation of victimhood in service of privilege (or both) in exactly the manner characteristic of reverse colonization narratives from their Victorian origins to the 1960s and beyond. 3. Selisker notes that a variety of scientific and technological developments contributed to this growing concern with human programmability, including “behaviorist psychology and Taylorist industrial management beginning in the 1910s, radio and cinematic propaganda that would be theorized throughout the 1930s and 1940s, and the developments of cybernetics and computer science that redefined the differences between humans and machines beginning in the 1940s” (5–6). 4. This emphasis on self-­mastery replicates the construction of an imperial self in older popular adventure fictions such as P. C. Wren’s Beaux Geste (1924), A. E. W. Mason’s The Four Feathers (1902), and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes (1912). 5. Huxley had a powerful influence on 1960s countercultures (and science fiction) because of both Brave New World and his later book The Doors of Perception (1954), which describes his own transformative experience under the influence of mescaline. 6. Although the novel intimates that anyone is capable of achieving these powers, some individuals, including Jubal Harshaw, are inherently closer to Martian thinking, and they are more likely to develop such abilities. Many critics have noted that despite Stranger’s relative populism, the novel reflects a Calvinist attitude toward the existence of a predestined “elect” who surpass the rest of the human race. For discussions of the Calvinist aspects of the novel see Blackford, Franklin (Robert A. Heinlein), Slusser. 7. In his study of Heinlein, Franklin suggests that Smith’s perfect self-­possession “embodies our most infantile fantasies and the central goal of bourgeois ideology— the unfettered freedom of the individual will” (Robert A. Heinlein 130). 8. Shau Reno notes that Stranger’s concern with the relationships among language, culture, and perception are influenced by Heinlein’s exposure to popular work in cultural anthropology in the 1950s. 9. I use the term mononormative to refer to a reflexive social attitude that unthinkingly naturalizes practices of sexual monogamy. Just as heteronormativity is used to describe how heterosexuality is often regarded as a social norm, mononormativity can be used to describe how monogamy is oppressively normalized in a variety of social contexts.



Notes to Pages 41–60

207

10. See Blackford, McGuirk, Slusser. 11. For a summary of the critical arguments concerning the latent “fascism” in Heinlein’s fiction, see Blackmore. 12. Olaf Stapledon’s 1935 novel Odd John, a story about a psychic superman who regards himself as superior to the common morality of Homo sapiens, in many ways prefigures Stranger in a Strange Land. Heinlein, however, regards the prospect of masterful psychic evolution with a relentless optimism diametrically at odds with Stapledon’s foreboding sense of tragic, existential dread.

Chapter 2 1. Unless otherwise noted, all of Rodger’s quotes are from his autobiographical manifesto “My Twisted World.” 2. Describing his reasoning for the attack, Rodger wrote, “I will punish all females for the crime of depriving me of sex. . . . Alpha Phi sorority is full of hot, beautiful blonde girls; the kind of girls I’ve always desired but was never able to have because they all look down on me. . . . They think they are superior to me, and if I ever tried to ask one on a date, they would reject me cruelly. I will sneak into their house at around 9:00 p.m. on the Day of Retribution, just before all of the partying starts, and slaughter every single one of them with my guns and knives. If I have time, I will set their whole house on fire. Then we shall see who the superior one really is!” (132). 3. The term incel was originally coined by a female college student in Canada, “Alana,” who started a website to help connect with others who were struggling against the pressure of mainstream gender norms and exploring alternative sexual identities. Tragically, the term was appropriated by men seeking to define themselves as victims after experiencing rejection from women (Baker). 4. Incel subculture is characterized by in-­crowd references: Chads are “sexually successful and attractive men,” and Stacys are “attractive, promiscuous women who sleep with the Chads” (Beauchamp). 5. In one of his videos, Rodger lamented the fact that women consistently refused to have sex with him, saying “I’m the perfect guy and yet you throw yourselves at all these obnoxious men instead of me, the supreme gentleman” (Rodger, “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution”). 6. One of the earliest experiences he describes is a memory of throwing a tantrum at age six because he was denied entry to a theme park ride at Universal Studios: “Being denied entry on a simple amusement park ride due to my height may seem like only a small injustice, but it was big for me at time. Little did I know,

208

Notes to Pages 64–68

this injustice was very small indeed compared to all the things I’ll be denied in the future” (6). 7. For more on the “awakening from simulacrum” trope in science fiction since the 1960s, see Higgins, “Coded Transmissions,” and Mains. 8. See Grierson for a small sample of the many ontologically oriented science fiction films acknowledged to have been inspired by Dick’s writing. 9. See Umberto Rossi’s The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick for a thoughtful analysis of the recurring problem of “ontological uncertainty” throughout Dick’s fiction (6). Rossi also offers a rich summary of previous critical approaches to Dick’s work as a whole and to The Man in the High Castle in particular. In addition, Christopher Palmer considers the postmodern “ontological and epistemological instability” of Dick’s writing in Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. 10. The journal Science Fiction Studies, established in 1973, was in many ways one of the key sites of emergence for the academic study of science fiction. Many of the conversations that took place there between authors and scholars (such as Darko Suvin, Stanisław Lem, Ursula K. Le Guin, Fredric Jameson, R. D. Mullen, and Joanna Russ) established the idea, articulated in Suvin’s landmark book Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, that science fiction’s “cognitive estrangements” invite readers to imagine realistic alternative possibilities to the naturalized ideologies of social, political, and economic life (Suvin 15). The fifth issue of Science Fiction Studies (vol. 2, no. 1, March 1975) was a special issue on the works of Philip K. Dick (it was the journal’s first issue focused on a special topic), and it featured contributions from Suvin, Jameson, Lem, and Dick himself, who was in active conversation with science fiction authors and scholars as science fiction studies was emerging as an academic discipline. 11. There are limits to the value of psychoanalyzing authors, but Sutin’s portrayal of Dick emphasizes a foundational guilt—concerning the death of his infant twin sister, Jane—that haunted him throughout his life, and this deep anxiety was in essence a guilt regarding his own privilege: “I heard about Jane a lot and it wasn’t good for me. I felt guilty—somehow I got all the milk” (Sutin 12). This simple statement captures, quite unintentionally, a certain experience of privilege in the United States. Some people, by virtue of birth, have very different access to the “milk” than others, and during the upheavals of the postwar period, this became increasingly obvious for many. In the face of a guilt-­ridden confrontation with these difficult facts, the psychological allure of imperial masochism becomes obvious: it is much more appealing to imagine oneself as the member of an oppressed group struggling against injustice than it is to come to terms with one’s privilege and the systems of inequity that sustain it.



Notes to Pages 69–84

209

12. Hellekson, Lison, and Mountfort argue that the imaginative exploration of alternate history in The Man in the High Castle productively calls into question the seeming inevitability of history as we know it, revealing that historical “reality” is a contested (and contestable) terrain. Rieder (“Metafictive”), Carter, Bilson, and Evans have identified Man in the High Castle as an alternate history reverse colonization story. Each source suggests that Dick’s imagining of a world where the United States lost World War II asks readers to critically interrogate U.S. racism and imperialism. None of these analyses, however, considers the novel’s dual operation as simultaneously an alternate history and as an ontological reverse colonization narrative, nor do they explore Dick’s more troubling attitudes toward gender and masculinity in the novel. 13. Freedman argues that Dick’s reversal of the winners and losers of World War II in the novel “must be understood first and foremost as a powerfully estranging heuristic device with which to foreground the terrible affinity between German fascism and the imperialist activism of American monopoly capitalism” (173). For other examples of the argument that Dick uses MHC to draw parallels between U.S. imperialism and Nazi fascism, see Carter, Rossi, Burton. 14. As Burton notes, “Tagomi’s mispronounciation [sic] of Childan’s name—the simple shifting of emphasis from one syllable to another—encodes a whole set of power relations between occupier and occupied, cutting through the deceptively sweet normality of the marigold-­scented air of Childan’s shop to remind him of the true ‘dreadful mortification’ of his world” (121). 15. For an excellent analysis on the dynamics of the colonial gaze in the creation of ethnic artifacts of value in MHC, see Evans. 16. For insightful analyses of Dick’s use of the I Ching to write MHC, see Rieder (“Metafictive), Lison, Mountfort. 17. Red pill and incel subcultures embrace the so-­called 80/20 rule, a principle (cobbled together from elements of highly questionable economic and biological theories) suggesting that “80% of women want to have sex and/or pair off with the top 20% of men” in a competitive environment of sexual market value. For this quote and an extended example of the pseudo-­academic logic of the 80/20 rule and its associated legitimating narratives, see “80/20 Rule.” 18. For more perspectives on the well-­known shortcomings of evolutionary biology as an academic discipline, see Welch, Ingold. 19. See, for example, “80/20 Rule.” 20. Spinrad wrote an entire novel, The Iron Dream (1972), that satirically exposes fascist sympathies in science fiction and the science fictional aspects of Nazism. The Iron Dream imagines an alternate world in which Hitler moved to the

210

Notes to Pages 85–113

United States and became a science fiction writer, producing Lord of the Swastika, a masculine adventure story that bears uncomfortable similarities to the writings of Heinlein. 21. See Rieder (“Metafictive”), Rossi.

Chapter 3 1. Sadie Plant also helped co-­found the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit, a student-­run research collective, and its student members included some now famous artists, musicians, philosophers, cultural critics (including Mark Fisher, Kode9, and Reza Negarestani, to name just a few). 2. As Mackay recalls, “Land would increasingly be found, having taken the very minimum of sleep possible (by this point he lived in his office), pursuing intense ‘machanomical’ research involving shuffling symbols endlessly on the green screen of his obsolete machine into the depths of the night. From a romantic vision of escape through collective libidinized action, he had seemingly arrived at a cold and largely unproductive abstract practice, pursued in isolation. . . . In any normative, clinical, or social sense of the word, very simply, Land did ‘go mad.’ Afterwards he did not shrink from meticulously documenting this process, as if writing up a failed experiment.” 3. Politico Magazine also notes that Thiel was responsible for persuading Donald Trump to include weird arch-­conservative thinker Michael Anton on his National Security Council (Johnson and Stokols). 4. See Cherniavsky, Incorporations. 5. Reprints of Disch’s novelization of The Prisoner sometimes seem to indicate that the book was published in 1967, the same year the TV series was broadcast, but John Coulthart (among others) note that the book first appeared in 1969— see Coulthart and most wiki entries on adaptations of The Prisoner, as well as the listing for the first edition of Disch’s novelization on Biblio.com (https://www .biblio.com/book/prisoner-­disch-­thomas-­m/d/973210649). Given that the first episodes of the show aired late in 1967, it seems likely that the 1967 publication date given in the novel is either an error or refers to the show itself. 6. It may be possible that Disch was working with a different version of the episode than I have access to. But in the version of the series I watched (through Amazon Prime), Rover never “digests” anyone. 7. A number of contemporary films, such as Upstream Color (2013) and Twelve Years a Slave (2013), explore various unsettling ways the self is a site of contingency subject to outside manipulation rather than an unshakeable possession.



Notes to Pages 115–36

211

8. See Sheldon, Child, chapter 5, “Labor.” 9. Bould spoke about this in his 2019 keynote at the International Conference for the Fantastic in the Arts, which will ultimately be published in the Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts.

Chapter 4 1. As Will summarizes, “of the four nations that constitute the U.K., Scotland and Northern Ireland voted Remain, while Wales and England voted Leave.” 2. Will notes that “Britain’s 2016 referendum came hard on the heels of the 2015 surge of asylum-­seekers into Europe. Much more than the margin of Brexit’s victory probably was provided by anxiety about Britain’s and Europe’s social cohesion.” He also observes that 48 percent of voters identified immigration as “the most important issue confronting Britain” in a survey taken in June 2016. According to Robert Hutton, the number of foreign-­born residents in England and Wales doubled between 1991 and 2001. “Because the free movement of citizens is a basic tenet of EU law,” Hutton notes, “leaving the bloc is the only sure way for the U.K. to stem the flow of people.” 3. This brings to mind the safe room executive I mentioned in the introduction, who argues that “the world is a very scary place right now, especially for people of means; they feel cornered and threatened. . . . When you have so much to lose, and you can afford to, you put a premium on your safety” (May 173). 4. See the introduction for a detailed discussion of Arata’s analysis of Dracula. 5. There are two collections with the title The Terminal Beach: a British edition and a U.S. edition, both published in 1964. They both include the short stories “The Terminal Beach” and “End-­Game,” but other than that, they contain completely different collections of short fiction. My citations reference the stories from the UK edition. I also consider one story, “The Voices of Time” (1961), which was published in a collection called The Inner Landscape along with novellas by Brian Aldiss and Mervyn Peake. 6. Tony Judt describes the continuing postcolonial economic advantage of former European imperial powers: “In the forty-­five years after 1950 worldwide exports [from Europe to the rest of the world] increased sixteenfold . . . all industrialized countries gained in these years—the terms of trade moved markedly in their favor after World War Two, as the cost of raw materials and food imported from the non-­Western world fell steadily, while the price of manufactured goods kept rising. In three decades of privileged, unequal exchange with the ‘Third World,’ the West had something of a license to print money” (326).

212

Notes to Pages 143–67

7. My citations reference the reprint of “The Dreaming City” in Elric: The Stealer of Souls. 8. Like the examples of Ballard’s writing in The Terminal Beach, Moorcock’s Elric stories do not represent his best work; part of what makes the early Elric fictions interesting is their enthusiastic incoherence. Within that incoherence one can observe revealing contradictions in imperial fantasy during the era of decolonization. Moorcock himself admits that he wrote these stories very quickly, for commercial purposes, and that they represent a mess of conscious and unconscious personal references. This is unquestionably bad writing at times, yet its very badness is where we can see the changes in imperialist ideology in the most “naked” shape and form. 9. It is symptomatic that the “bad guys” in many of these stories are looters who seek to rob the riches of a wealthy city (they are greedy beggars—particularly the case in “To Rescue Tanelorn,” when a lord of chaos leads a “beggar horde” against poor, defenseless Tanelorn. Moorcock offers very racialized descriptions of the beggars—they are vermin, less than human, mindless, and so on. In short, he describes a world in which “great” cities and empires have an accumulation of vast wealth that needs to be protected against greedy outsiders. 10. My citations reference the reprint of “The Eternal Champion” in Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn. 11. Miéville gives an incorrect citation for “Jake in the Forest” in his concluding references. His citation reads: “Harvey, David 1965, ‘Jake in the Forest’, New Worlds, 49.” Although it is correct that the story was published in New Worlds in 1965, there were monthly issues of New Worlds SF in 1965, each with individual pagination, and “Jake” appears in issue no. 155 on pages 77–94 (not page 49). To my knowledge, the story has not been reprinted subsequent to the original issue. 12. My citations reference the reprint of “Phase I” in Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn.

Chapter 5 1. The back cover of McIntyre’s Post-­Truth expresses this problem cogently, noting that we have “arrived in a post-­truth era, when ‘alternative facts’ replace actual facts, and feelings have more weight than evidence.” This exact quote does not appear in the book, although many other variations of the idea do. 2. The Fall of the Towers was Delany’s second project following the completion of his first science fiction novel, The Jewels of Aptor (1962). Most scholarship on Delany focuses on his later fiction, particularly Dhalgren (1974), Triton (1976), and the Neveryon series. Towers is rarely mentioned in Delany scholarship; the notable



Notes to Pages 169–90

213

exception is Seth McEvoy’s book, which devotes a full chapter to Towers. McEvoy offers an overview of the trilogy, and he argues that Towers offers analogies to the Vietnam and Korean Wars. 3. Delany always italicizes The Lord of the Flames in the stories, and I replicate his convention here. 4. This is similar to the situation Michael Moore examines in the film Roger and Me (1989), where domestic violence increases in poverty conditions created by a globalization of economic production and the corresponding loss of sustainable local jobs. 5. See Gibson, The Perfect War, for more on the Vietnam War as a modern imperial conflict. 6. Delany discusses his appreciation for Heinlein’s treatment of race in Starship Troopers in the first appendix of Trouble on Triton (287). 7. David Ketterer analyzes the apocalyptic tradition in science fiction; he argues that “apocalyptic transformation results from the creation of a new condition . . . whereby man’s horizons—temporal, spatial, scientific, and ultimately philosophic— are abruptly expanded” (148). 8. My phrase “imperial unconscious” is an adaptation of Fredric Jameson’s notion of the “political unconscious” from his book of the same name. 9. Delany’s fascination with how unconscious repression can constitute the boundaries of individual and group identity reflects his debt to Theodore Sturgeon, particularly Sturgeon’s novel More Than Human (1953). Delany expresses his admiration for Sturgeon several times in The Motion of Light in Water.

Conclusion 1. This conclusion draws on and adapts materials that I have previously published. See Higgins “American Science Fiction,” “New Wave Science Fiction,” and “Survivance.” Material from these previous publications has been significantly revised here. 2. Le Guin’s Hainish novels from the 1960s—particularly the novellas collected as Worlds of Exile and Illusion (originally published 1966–67) and The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)—also offer a striking anti-­imperial critique that theorizes cosmopolitian ethics as a powerful corrective to the politics of empire. I have written about this elsewhere: see Higgins, “Toward a Cosmopolitan,” 3. As Gibson writes, “American men—lacking confidence in the government and the economy, troubled by changing relations between the sexes, uncertain of their identity or their future—began to dream, to fantasize about the powers and

214

Notes to Pages 191–92

features of another kind of man who could retake and reorder the world. And the hero of all these dreams was the paramilitary warrior. In the New War he fights this battle of Vietnam a thousand times, each time winning decisively” (Warrior Dreams 11). See also Jeffords. 4. For more on the awakening-­from-­virtual-­reality trope in science fiction, see Higgins, “Coded.” 5. For more on the deployment of fear to organize late capitalist subjectivity in the decades prior to 9/11, see Massumi.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

“80/20 Rule.” The Rational Male, 23 February 2016, therationalmale.com/tag /8020-­rule/. Accessed 13 February 2019. Ahluwalia, Pal, and Abebe Zegege. “Frantz Fanon and Steve Biko: Towards Liberation.” Social Identities, vol. 7, no. 3, 2001, pp. 455–69. Alexander, Jeffrey C. “On the Social Construction of Moral Universals.” Collective Trauma and Collective Identity, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander et al., U of California P, 2004, pp. 196–263. Alexander, Michelle. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness. New P, 2012. Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization.” Victorian Studies, vol. 33, no. 4, 1990, pp. 621–45. Attebery, Brian. Decoding Gender in Science Fiction. Routledge, 2002. Baker, Peter. “The Woman Who Accidentally Started the Incel Movement.” Elle, 1 March 2016, www.elle.com/culture/news/a34512/woman-­who-­started-­incel -­movement/. Accessed 15 January 2019. Ballard, J. G. The Terminal Beach. Phoenix, 1997. ———. “The Voices of Time.” The Inner Landscape. Paperback Library, 1969. Bar-­Yosef, Eitan. “E. Nesbit and the Fantasy of Reverse Colonization: How Many Miles to Modern Babylon?” English Literature in Translation, vol. 46, no. 1, 2003, pp. 4–28. Beauchamp, Zach. “Incel, the Misogynist Ideology that Inspired the Deadly Toronto Attack, Explained.” Vox, 25 April 2018, www.vox.com/world/2018/4/25 /17277496/incel-­toronto-­attack-­alek-­minassian. Accessed 15 January 2019. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. The Postmodern Adventure: Science, Technology, and Cultural Studies at the Third Millennium. Guilford P, 2001. Biggs, Tim. “Gamergate-­Style Furore after Sci-­fi Awards Hijacked.” Sydney Morn­ing Herald, 9 April 2015, www.smh.com.au/technology/gamergatestyle-­furore -­after-­scifi-­awards-­hijacked-­20150407-­1mfpk2.html. Accessed 5 March 2018. Bilson, Fred. “The Colonialists’ Fear of Colonisation and the Alternate Worlds of

216 Bibliography Ward Moore, Philip K. Dick, and Keith Roberts.” Foundation, vol. 34, no. 94, 2005, pp. 50–63. Blackford, Russell. “Neo-­Bible and Ur-­Text: The ‘Original Uncut’ STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND.” Foundation, vol. 53, 1991, pp. 70–80. Blackmore, Tim. “Talking with ‘Strangers’: Interrogating the Many Texts that Became Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land.” Extrapolation, vol. 36, no. 2, 1995, pp. 136–51. Bokhari, Allum, and Milo Yiannopoulos. “The Hugo Wars: How Sci-­fi’s Most Prestigious Awards Became a Political Battleground.” Breitbart News, 5 February 2015, www.breitbart.com/europe/2015/02/05/the-­hugo-­wars-­how-­sci-­fis -­most-­prestigious-­awards-­became-­a-­political-­battleground/. Accessed 5 March 2018. Braver, Lee. “Coin Operated Doors and God: A Gnostic Reading of Philip K. Dick’s Ubik.” Extrapolation, vol. 56, no. 1, 2015, pp. 83–110. Brown, Wendy. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton UP, 1995. ———. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution. Zone Books, 2015. Burton, James. The Philosophy of Science Fiction: Henri Bergson and the Fabulations of Philip K. Dick. Bloomsbury Academic, 2015. Carroll, Jordan S. “Race Consciousness: Fascism and Frank Herbert’s Dune.” Los Angeles Review of Books, 19 November 2020, https://lareviewofbooks.org /article/race-­consciousness-­fascism-­and-­frank-­herberts-­dune/. Accessed 25 November 2020. Carter, Cassie. “The Metacolonization of Dick’s The Man in the High Castle: Mimicry, Parasitism, and Americanism in the PSA.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995, pp. 333–42. Chalfant, Morgan. “Trump Disputes WHO’s 3.4 Percent Global Death Rate for Coronavirus.” The Hill, 5 March 2020, thehill.com/homenews/administration /486068-­trump-­disputes-­whos-­34-­global-­death-­rate-­for-­coronavirus. Accessed 20 March 2020. Cheah, Pheng. Inhuman Conditions: On Cosmopolitanism and Human Rights. Harvard UP, 2006. Cherniavsky, Eva. Incorporations: Race, Nation, and the Body Politics of Capital. U of Minnesota P, 2006. Chivers, Tom. “How Bigoted Is Brexit?” UnHerd, 4 December 2018, unherd.com /2018/12/how-­bigoted-­is-­brexit/. Accessed 24 July 2019. Clarke, Arthur C. 2001: A Space Odyssey. Penguin, 1968.



Bibliography 217

Clarke, Clare. “Imperial Rogues: Reverse Colonization Fears in Guy Boothby’s A Prince of Swindlers and Late-­Victorian Detective Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture, vol. 41, no. 3, 2013, pp. 527–45. Clover, Carol. Men, Women, and Chain Saws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film. Princeton UP, 1992. Confessore, Nicholas, and Matthew Rosenberg. “Spy Contractor’s Idea Helped Cambridge Analytica Harvest Facebook Data.” New York Times, 27 March 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/03/27/us/cambridge-­analytica-­palantir.html. Accessed 3 July 2019. Conrad, Joseph. “Heart of Darkness” and Selected Short Fictions. Barnes and Noble, 2003. Cook, Marcy. “Decoding the Transgender Matrix: The Matrix as a Transgender Coming Out Story.” The Mary Sue, 19 April 2016, www.themarysue.com /decoding-­the-­transgender-­matrix-­the-­matrix-­as-­a-­transgender-­coming-­out -­story/. Accessed 6 January 2020. Coulthart, John. “Patrick McGoohan and The Prisoner.” Arthur Magazine, 15 January 2009, https://arthurmag.com/2009/01/15/patrick-­mcgoohan-­and -­the-­prisoner/. Accessed 3 July 2019. Cover, Arthur Byron. “Vertex Interview with Philip K. Dick.” Philipdick.com. philipdick.com/literary-­criticism/frank-­views-­archive/vertex-­interview-­with -­philip-­k-­dick/. Accessed 12 February 2019. Csicsery-­Ronay, Istvan, Jr. “Science Fiction and Empire.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 30, no. 2, 2003, pp. 1–13. Davis, Erik. High Weirdness: Drugs, Esoterica, and Visionary Experience in the Seventies. MIT P, 2019. Davis, Patricia G. “Reversal of Injury in the Obama Era: Shelby County vs. Holder, Ressentiment, Moral Authority, and the Discursive Construction of White Victimhood.” Rhetoric Review, vol. 36, no. 4, 2017, pp. 320–31. DeKoven, Marianne. Utopia Limited: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern. Duke UP, 2004. Delany, Samuel R. Captives of the Flame. Ace Books, 1963. ———. City of a Thousand Suns. Ace Books, 1965. ———. The Fall of the Towers. Vintage, 2004. ———. The Motion of Light in Water: Sex and Science Fiction Writing in the East Village. U of Minnesota P, 2004. ———. The Towers of Toron. Ace Books, 1964. ———. Trouble on Triton. Wesleyan UP, 1996.

218 Bibliography Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. 1980. Translated by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1987. ———. What Is Philosophy? Translated by Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell, Colombia UP, 1991. Dick, Philip K. “Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality.” The Shifting Realities of Philip K. Dick: Selected Literary and Philosophical Writings, edited by Lawrence Sutin, Vintage Books, 1995, pp. 167–74. ———. The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick. Edited by Pamela Jackson and Jonathan Lethem, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. ———. The Man in the High Castle. 1962. Vintage, 1992. ———. “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.” The Road to Science Fiction: From Heinlein to Here, edited by James Gunn, Scarecrow P, 2002, pp. 367–85. Dillon, Grace L. “Imagining Indigenous Futurisms.” Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, U of Arizona P, 2012, pp. 1–12. Disch, Thomas M. Camp Concentration. 1968. Vintage, 1999. ———. The Prisoner. Penguin Books, 2009. Du Bois, W. E. B. The Souls of Black Folk: Essay and Sketches. A. C. McClurg, 1903. Edelman, Scott. “Unearthing My 1984 Interview with Thomas M. Disch.” Scott Edelman, 1 March 2015, www.scottedelman.com/2015/03/01/unearthing-­my -­1984-­interview-­with-­thomas-­m-­disch/. Accessed 15 June 2019. Elster, Jon. Political Psychology. Cambridge UP, 1993. Enns, Diane. The Violence of Victimhood. Pennsylvania State UP, 2012. Evans, Timothy H. “Authenticity, Ethnography, and Colonialism in Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, vol. 21, no. 3, 2010, pp. 366–83. Fanon, Frantz. Black Skin, White Masks. 1952. Translated by Charles Lam Markmann, Grove P, 1967. ———. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove P, 1963. Farber, David. “The Intoxicated State/Illegal Nation: Drugs in the Sixties Counterculture.” Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s, edited by Peter Braunstein and Michael William Doyle, Routledge, 2002, pp. 17–40. Fortgang, Tal. “Why I’ll Never Apologize for My White Male Privilege.” Time, 2 May 2014, time.com/85933/why-­ill-­never-­apologize-­for-­my-­white-­male -­privilege/. Accessed 9 March 2018.



Bibliography 219

Foster, Thomas. The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory. U of Minnesota P, 2005. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the College de France, 1978– 79. Translated by Graham Burchell, Picador, 2008. ———. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Vintage, 1995. ———. Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de France, 1977–78. Translated by Graham Burchell, Picador, 2007. Franklin, H. Bruce. Robert A. Heinlein: America as Science Fiction. Oxford UP, 1980. ———. Vietnam and Other American Fantasies. U of Massachusetts P, 2000. Freeden, Michael. Liberalism: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford UP, 2015. Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2000. Gibson, James William. The Perfect War: Technowar in Vietnam. Atlantic Monthly P, 1986. ———. Warrior Dreams: Paramilitary Culture in Post-­Vietnam America. Hill and Wang, 1994. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. Columbia UP, 2005. Glancy, Diane. “Aunt Parnetta’s Electric Blisters.” Walking the Clouds: An Anthology of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, U of Arizona P, 2012, pp. 26–33. Goonatilake, Susantha. “Mining Civilizational Knowledge.” The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, edited by Sandra Harding, Duke UP, 2011, pp. 380–87. Gowen, Annie. “Coronavirus Deniers and Hoaxers Persist Despite Dire Warn­ings, Claiming ‘It’s Mass Hysteria.’ ” Washington Post, 19 March 2020, www .washingtonpost.com/national/coronavirus-­deniers-­outbreak-­hoax/2020/03/19 /46bc5e46-­6872-­11ea-­b313-­df458622c2cc_story.html. Accessed 21 March 2020. Gray, Rosie. “Behind the Internet’s Anti-­Democracy Movement.” The Atlantic, 10 February 2017, www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/behind -­the-­internets-­dark-­anti-­democracy-­movement/516243/. Accessed 3 July 2019. Greenland, Colin. The Entropy Exhibition: Michael Moorcock and the British “New Wave” in Science Fiction. Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1983. Grierson, Tim. “10 Great Movies That Owe a Deep Debt to Philip K. Dick.” Popular Mechanics, 8 July 2016, www.popularmechanics.com/culture/movies /g2691/movies-­inspired-­by-­philip-­k-­dick/. Accessed 1 February 2019.

220 Bibliography Haldeman, Joe. The Forever War. Thomas Dunne Books, 1974. Haraway, Donna. Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. Routledge, 1991. Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Harvard UP, 2000. ———. Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. Penguin, 2004. Harvey, David. The Condition of Postmodernity. Blackwell, 1989. ———. “Jake in the Forest.” New Worlds SF, vol. 155, 1965, pp. 77–94. ———. “The Languages of Science.” New Worlds SF, vol. 176, 1967, pp. 2–4. Heinlein, Robert A. Starship Troopers. Ace Books, 2006. ———. Stranger in a Strange Land. Putnam, 1961. Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent State UP, 2001. Herbert, Frank. Dune. Chilton, 1965. Hickman, S. C. “Philip K. Dick and Nick Land: Escape to the Future.” Southern Nights, 9 March 2016, socialecologies.wordpress.com/2016/03/09/philip-­k -­dick-­nick-­land-­escape-­to-­the-­future/. Accessed 15 March 2019. Higgins, David M. “American Science Fiction after 9/11.” The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction, edited by Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, Cambridge UP, 2015, pp. 44–57. ———. “Coded Transmissions: Gender and Genre Reception in The Matrix.” Parabolas of Science Fiction, edited by Brian Attebery and Veronica Hollinger, Wesleyan UP, 2013, pp. 143–60. ———. “New Wave Science Fiction and the Vietnam War.” The Cambridge History of Science Fiction, edited by Gerry Canavan and Eric Carl Link, Cambridge UP, 2019, pp. 415–33. ———. “Survivance in Indigenous Science Fictions: Vizenor, Silko, Glancy, and the Rejection of Imperial Victimry.” Extrapolation, vol. 57, nos. 1–2, 2016, pp. 51–72. ———. “Toward a Cosmopolitan Science Fiction.” American Literature, vol. 83, no. 2, 2011, pp. 331–54. Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Edited by Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, translated by Edmund Jephcott, Stanford UP, 2002. Hornblum, Allen M. Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison. Routledge, 1999. Hutton, Robert. “The Roots of Brexit.” Bloomberg, 20 March 2019, www .bloomberg.com/quicktake/will-­uk-­leave-­eu. Accessed 24 July 2019. I Ching. Translated by Richard Wilhelm. 1950. www2.unipr.it/~deyoung/I _Ching_Wilhelm_Translation.html#44. Accessed 15 January 2019.



Bibliography 221

Ingold, Tim. “The Trouble with ‘Evolutionary Biology.’ ” Anthropology Today, vol. 23, no. 2, April 2007, pp. 13–17. Jameson, Fredric. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Cornell UP, 1981. ———. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Verso, 1991. Jeffords, Susan. The Remasculinization of America: Gender and the Vietnam War. Indiana UP, 1989. Johnson, Eliana, and Eli Stokols. “What Steve Bannon Wants You to Read.” Politico, 7 February 2017, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2017/02/steve -­bannon-­books-­reading-­list-­214745. Accessed 3 July 2019. Jones, Gwyneth. “Metempsychosis of the Machine: Science Fiction in the Halls of Karma.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, 1997, pp. 1–17. Judt, Tony. Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. Penguin, 2005. Keeler, Jacqueline. “On Cliven Bundy’s ‘Ancestral Rights.’ ” The Nation, 29 April 2014, www.thenation.com/article/cliven-­bundys-­ancestral-­rights/. Accessed 3 July 2019. Kerslake, Patricia. Science Fiction and Empire. Liverpool UP, 2007. Ketterer, David. “The Apocalyptic Imagination, Science Fiction, and American Literature.” Science Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Mark Snow, Prentice-­Hall, 1976, pp. 147–55. Kuchta, Todd. Semi-­Detached Empire: Suburbia and the Colonization of Britain, 1880 to the Present. U of Virginia P, 2010. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Norton, 1977. Land, Nick. “The Dark Enlightenment.” Thedarkenlightenment.com, www .thedarkenlightenment.com/the-­dark-­enlightenment-­by-­nick-­land/. Accessed 15 March 2019. Landler, Mark. “An Angry Trump Pushes Back against His Own ‘Naïve’ Intelligence Officials.” New York Times, 30 January 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/01 /30/us/politics/trump-­intelligence-­agencies.html. Accessed 12 February 2019. Lears, T. J. Jackson. “1900: An Artist of Ideas Ponders the Dynamo at the Paris Exposition.” A New Literary History of America, edited by Greil Marcus and Werner Sollors, Belknap P, 2009, pp. 450–55. Lee, Martin A., and Bruce Shlain. Acid Dreams: The Complete Social History of LSD, the CIA, the Sixties, and Beyond. Grove P, 1994. Le Guin, Ursula K. The Word for World Is Forest. TOR Books, 1972. Lison, Andrew. “ ‘The Very Idea of Place’: Form, Contingency, and Adornian Volition in The Man in the High Castle.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 41, no. 1, 2014, pp. 45–68.

222 Bibliography Luckhurst, Roger. Science Fiction. Polity P, 2005. Lyons, Matthew N. Insurgent Supremacists: The U.S. Far Right’s Challenge to State and Empire. Kersplebedeb, 2018. Määttä, Jerry. “ ‘Bloody Unnatural Brutes’: Anthropomorphism, Colonialism, and the Return of the Repressed in John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids.” Plants in Science Fiction: Speculative Vegetation, edited by Katherine Bishop, Jerry Määttä, and David M. Higgins. U of Wales P, 2020, pp. 32–55. MacDougald, Park. “The Darkness before the Right.” The Awl, 28 September 2015, www.theawl.com/2015/09/the-­darkness-­before-­the-­right/. Accessed 15 June 2019. Mackay, Robin. “Nick Land—An Experiment in Inhumanism.” Divus, 27 February 2013, divus.cc/london/en/article/nick-­land-­ein-­experiment -­im-­inhumanismus. Accessed 5 March 2019. Magdoff, Harry. Imperialism without Colonies. Monthly Review P, 2003. Mahler, Jonathan, and Jim Rutenberg. “How Rupert Murdoch’s Empire of Influence Remade the World.” New York Times, 3 April 2019, www.nytimes .com/interactive/2019/04/03/magazine/rupert-­murdoch-­fox-­news-­trump .html. Accessed 3 July 2019. Mains, Christine. “ ‘Dreams Teach’: (Im)possible Worlds in Science Fiction Television.” The Essential Science Fiction Television Reader, edited by J. P. Telotte, UP of Kentucky, 2008, pp. 143–58. Massumi, Brian. “Everywhere You Want to Be: Introduction to Fear.” The Politics of Everyday Fear, edited by Brian Massumi, U of Minnesota P, 1993, pp. 3–37. Matin, A. Michael. “Introduction.” Joseph Conrad, “Heart of Darkness” and Selected Short Fictions, Barnes and Noble, 2003, pp. xiii–xlvi. The Matrix. Directed by Lana Wachowski and Lilly Wachowski, performances by Keanu Reeves, Laurence Fishburne, and Carrie-­A nne Moss, Warner Bros., 1999. Matthews, Dylan. “The Alt-­R ight Is More than Warmed Over White Suprem­ acy. It’s That, but Way Way Weirder.” Vox, 25 August 2016, www.vox.com /2016/4/18/11434098/alt-­right-­explained. Accessed 15 June 2019. May, Elaine Tyler. Fortress America: How We Embraced Fear and Abandoned Democracy. Basic Books, 2017. McClintock, Anne. Imperial Leather: Race, Gender and Sexuality in the Colonial Contest. Routledge, 1995. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. HarperPerennial, 1993. McEvoy, Seth. Samuel R. Delany. Frederick Ungar, 1984.



Bibliography 223

McGoohan, Patrick, and George Markstein, creators. The Prisoner. ITC Entertainment and Everyman Films, 1967–68. McGuirk, Carol. “Does Not Grok in Fullness.” SFS, vol. 29, no. 3, 2002, pp. 507–9. McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction. Routledge, 1991. McIntyre, Lee. Post-­Truth. MIT P, 2019. Melley, Timothy. Empire of Conspiracy: The Culture of Paranoia in Postwar America. Cornell UP, 2000. Miéville, China. “Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory.” Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction, edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville, Wesleyan UP, 2009, pp. 231–48. ———. “Editorial Introduction.” Historical Materialism, vol. 10, no. 4, 2002, pp. 39–49. Milburn, Colin. Respawn: Gamers, Hackers, and Technogenic Life. Duke UP, 2018. Miller, David M. Frank Herbert. Starmont House, 1980. Mogen, David. Wilderness Visions: The Western Theme in Science Fiction. Borgo P, 2007. Moorcock, Michael. Elric: To Rescue Tanelorn. Ballantine Books, 2008. ———. Elric: The Stealer of Souls. Ballantine Books, 2008. Moore, Alan (writer), Dave Gibbons (illustrator), and John Higgins (colorist). Watchmen. DC Comics, 1986–87. Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. DC Comics, 1988. Moreno, Jonathan D. Mind Wars: Brain Research and National Defense. Dana P, 2006. Mountfort, Paul. “The I Ching and Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 43, no. 2, 2016, pp. 287–309. Nagle, Angela. Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-­Right. Zero Books, 2017. Neiwert, David. Alt-­America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump. Verso, 2018. O’Connell, Hugh C. “The Novums of Fiscalmancy: Speculative Finance and Speculative Fiction in Ian McDonald’s The Dervish House.” New Centennial Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 2019, pp. 129–54. Orwell, George. “Looking Back on the Spanish War.” 1943. George Orwell, www .orwell.ru/library/essays/Spanish_War/english/esw_1. Accessed 10 March 2020. Padma, Ma Deva. Tao Oracle. St. Martin’s P, 2002.

224 Bibliography Palmer, Christopher. Philip K. Dick: Exhilaration and Terror of the Postmodern. Liverpool UP, 2003. Paul, Ron. “The Coronavirus Hoax.” Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity, 16 March 2020, www.ronpaulinstitute.org/archives/featured-­articles/2020 /march/16/the-­coronavirus-­hoax/. Accessed 21 March 2020. Pearson, Joshua. “Frank Herbert’s Dune and the Financialization of Heroic Masculinity.” New Centennial Review, vol. 19, no. 1, 2019, pp. 155–80. Pedersen, Erik. “Rupert Murdoch Lauds Brexit: ‘It’s a Bit Like a Prison Break.’ ” Deadline, 28 June 2016, deadline.com/2016/06/brexit-­rupert-­murdoch-­prison -­break-­its-­wonderful-­1201780791/. Accessed 24 July 2019. Peterson, Jordan. “On the New York Times and ‘Enforced Monogamy.’ ” Jordan B. Peterson, jordanbpeterson.com/media/on-­the-­new-­york-­times-­and-­enforced -­monogamy/. Accessed 17 February 2019. Pierce, William L. (writing as Andrew Macdonald). The Turner Diaries. National Vanguard Books, 2002. Porter, Bernard. The Lion’s Share: A Short History of British Imperialism 1850– 1970. Longman, 1975. Pringle, David. “Ballard, J(ames) G(rahm).” The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicolls, St. Martin’s Griffin, 1993/1995, pp. 84–85. “Read President Trump’s Interview with TIME on Truth and Falsehoods.” Time.com, 23 March 2017, time.com/4710456/donald-­trump-­time-­interview -­truth-­falsehood/. Accessed 12 February 2021. “The Red Pill Constitution.” Illimitable Men, illimitablemen.com/understanding -­the-­red-­pill/red-­pill-­constitution/. Accessed 1 February 2019. Reno, Shau. “The Zuni Indian Tribe: A Model for Stranger in a Strange Land’s Martian Culture.” Extrapolation, vol. 36, no. 2, 1995, pp. 151–59. Rieder, John. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction. Wesleyan UP, 2008. ———. “The Metafictive World of The Man in the High Castle: Hermeneutics, Ethics, and Political Ideology.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 15, no. 2, 1988, pp. 214–25. Robin, Corey. The Reactionary Mind: Conservativism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump. Oxford UP, 2018. Rodger, Elliot. “Elliot Rodger’s Retribution.” Video transcript. Genius, genius.com /Elliot-­rodger-­elliot-­rodgers-­retribution-­annotated. Accessed 15 January 2019. ———. “My Twisted World: The Story of Elliot Rodger.” Unpublished mani-



Bibliography 225

festo, documentcloud.org/documents/1173808-­elliot-­rodger-­manifesto.html. Accessed 15 January 2019. Rose, Steve. “Be Seeing You: Remembering Patrick McGoohan.” The Guardian, 14 January 2009, www.theguardian.com/culture/tvandradioblog/2009/jan /14/television. Accessed 15 June 2019. Ross, Michael L. Race Riots: Comedy and Ethnicity in Modern British Fiction. McGill-­Queens UP, 2006. Rossi, Umberto. The Twisted Worlds of Philip K. Dick: A Reading of Twenty Ontologically Uncertain Novels. McFarland, 2011. Rotundo, E. Anthony. American Manhood: Transformations in Masculinity from the Revolution to the Modern Era. Basic Books, 1993. Rust, Susanne. “Report Details How ExxonMobil and Fossil Fuel Firms Sowed Seeds of Doubt on Climate Change.” Los Angeles Times, 21 October 2019, www.latimes.com/environment/story/2019-­10-­21/oil-­companies-­exxon -­climate-­change-­denial-­report. Accessed 6 January 2020. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. Vintage, 1994. Sandifer, Elizabeth. Neoreaction a Basilisk: Essays On and Around the Alt Right. Eruditorium P, 2017. Sardar, Ziauddin. “Islamic Science: The Contemporary Debate.” The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, edited by Sandra Harding, Duke UP, 2011, pp. 373–79. Sartre, Jean-­Paul. “Preface.” Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Translated by Constance Farrington, Grove P, 1967, pp. 7–31. Scott, Colin. “Science for the West, Myth for the Rest? The Case of James Bay Creek Knowledge Construction.” The Postcolonial Science and Technology Studies Reader, edited by Sandra Harding, Duke UP, 2011, pp. 175–97. Selisker, Scott. Human Programming: Brainwashing, Automatons, and American Unfreedom. U of Minnesota P, 2016. Sheldon, Rebekah. The Child to Come: Life after the Human Catastrophe. U of Minnesota P, 2016. ———. “Knowledge, Affect, and Ritual Magic.” Trans-States: The Art of Crossing Over, edited by Cavan McLaughlin, Fulgur P, 2019, pp. 187–201. Shohat, Ella, and Robert Stam. “From the Imperial Family to the Transnational Imaginary: Media Spectatorship in the Age of Globalization.” Global/Local: Cultural Production and the Transnational Imaginary, edited by Rob Wilson and Wimal Dissanayake, Duke UP, 1996, pp. 145–70. Silko, Leslie Marmon. Ceremony. Penguin Books, 1977.

226 Bibliography Slusser, George Edgar. Robert A. Heinlein: Stranger in His Own Land. Borgo, 1976. Smith, Earl, and Angela Hattery. “The Prison-Industrial Complex.” Sociation Today, vol. 4, no. 2, 2006, www.ncsociology.org/sociationtoday/v42/prison .htm. Accessed 15 June 2019. Spence, Alex, and Vince Chadwick. “Boris Johnson Compares Brexit to Prison Break.” Politico, 18 May 2016, www.politico.eu/article/boris-­johnson-­compares -­brexit-­to-­prison-­break/. Accessed 24 July 2019. Spracher, Jamie. “Tom Disch: 1940–2008.” Poetry Foundation, www.poetry foundation.org/poets/tom-­disch. Accessed 3 July 2019. Squirrell, Tim. “Don’t Make the Mistake of Thinking Incels Are Men’s Rights Activists—They Are So Much More Dangerous.” Independent Minds, 26 April 2018, www.independent.co.uk/voices/incels-­alek-­minassian-­mra-­mens-­rights -­terrorism-­toronto-­van-­attack-­a8323166.html. Accessed 17 February 2019. ———. “May 31: A Definitive Guide to Incels Part Two: The A-­Z Incel Dictionary.” Tim Squirrell, www.timsquirrell.com/blog/2018/5/30/a-­definitive-­g uide -­to-­incels-­part-­two-­the-­blackpill-­and-­vocabulary. Accessed 17 February 2019. Sutin, Lawrence. Divine Invasions: A Life of Philip K. Dick. Carroll & Graff, 2005. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. Edited by Gerry Canavan. Peter Lang, 2016. Tan, Shaun. The Arrival. Arthur A. Levine Books, 2006. Thacker, Eugene. In the Dust of This Planet. Zero Books, 2010. Theweleit, Klaus. Male Fantasies, Vol. 2, Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. 1978. Translated by Erica Carter and Chris Turner, U of Minnesota P, 1989. “Transcripts: New Day.” CNN, 22 July 2016, transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS /1607/22/nday.06.html. Accessed 20 March 2020. “Tuskegee Syphilis Study.” Britannica Academic, Encyclopædia Britannica, 8 January 2016, academic-­eb-­com.ihcproxy.mnpals.net/levels/collegiate /article/Tuskegee-­syphilis-­study/2212. Accessed 3 Jul. 2019. Vegh, Deborah T. “Medical Experiments on Inmates.” American Prisons and Jails: An Encyclopedia of Controversies and Trends, edited by Vidisha Barua Worley and Robert M. Worley, vol. 1, ABC-­CLIO, 2019, pp. 386–88. Gale Vir­ tual Reference Library, link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/CX7642700132/GVRL ?u=mnainver&sid=GVRL&xid=167e4ebe. Accessed 3 July 2019. Visvanathan, Shiv. “The Search for Cognitive Justice.” India-­Seminar, www .india-­seminar.com/2009/597/597_shiv_visvanathan.htm. Accessed 24 March 2020. Vizenor, Gerald. “Custer on the Slipstream.” Walking the Clouds: An Anthology



Bibliography 227

of Indigenous Science Fiction, edited by Grace L. Dillon, U of Arizona P, 2012, pp. 15–25. ———. Fugitive Poses: Native American Indian Scenes of Absence and Presence. U of Nebraska P, 1998. Vox Day. “A Black Female Fantasist Calls for Reconciliation.” Vox Popoli, 13 June 2013, voxday.blogspot.com/2013/06/a-­black-­female-­fantasist.html. Accessed 3 July 2018. ———. “(((Cathy Young))) Critiques the #AltRight.” Vox Popoli, 28 August 2016, voxday.blogspot.com/2016/08/cathy-­young-­critiques-­altright.html. Accessed 5 March 2018. Waldman, Katy. “How Sci-­Fi’s Hugo Awards Got Their Own Full-­Blown Gamergate.” New Statesman, 16 April 2015, www.newstatesman.com/culture /2015/04/how-­hugo-­awards-­got-­very-­own-­gamergate. Accessed 5 March 2018. Welch, John J. “What’s Wrong with Evolutionary Biology?” Biology and Philosophy, vol. 32, no. 2, 2017, pp. 263–79. www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles /PMC5329086/. Accessed 8 July 2019. Weldon, Glen. “Number Six at 50: The 50th Anniversary of ‘The Prisoner’.” NPR, 29 September 2017, www.npr.org/2017/09/29/554067095/number-­six-­at-­50 -­the-­50th-­anniversary-­of-­the-­prisoner. Accessed 15 June 2019. Wells, H. G. The War of the Worlds. Signet Classics, 1986. White, Hayden. “The Historical Text as Literary Artifact.” The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, edited by Vincent B. Leitch, Norton, 2001, pp. 1712–29. Will, George. “Britain, into Chaos Leaping?” National Review, 17 January 2019, www.nationalreview.com/2019/01/brexit-­economic-­globalization-­raises -­stakes/. Accessed 24 July 2019. Windle, Jack. “ ‘It Have a Kind of Communal Feeling with the Working Class and the Spades,’ Sam Selvon, Tony Harrison, and ‘Colonization in Reverse’.” A History of British Working Class Literature, edited by John Goodridge and Bridget Keegan, Cambridge UP, 2017, pp. 352–66. Woolf, Nicky. “Chilling Report Details How Elliot Rodger Executed Murderous Rampage.” The Guardian, 20 February 2015, www.theguardian.com/us-­news /2015/feb/20/mass-­shooter-­elliot-­rodger-­isla-­vista-­killings-­report. Accessed 15 January 2019. ———. “ ‘PUAHate’ and ‘Forever Alone’: Inside Elliot Rodger’s Online Life.” The Guardian, 30 May 2014, www.theguardian.com/world/2014/may/30/elliot -­rodger-­puahate-­forever-­alone-­reddit-­forums. Accessed 15 January 2019. Yiannopoulos, Milo. “Set Phasers to Kill! SJWs Burn Down the Hugo Awards

228 Bibliography to Prove How Tolerant and Welcoming They Are.” Breitbart News, 23 August 2015, www.breitbart.com/politics/2015/08/23/set-­phasers-­to-­kill-­sjws-­burn -­down-­the-­hugo-­awards-­to-­prove-­how-­tolerant-­and-­welcoming-­they-­are/. Accessed 5 March 2018. Young, Robert. White Mythologies: Writing History and the West. Routledge, 1990. Zelazny, Roger. Introduction. Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, Ballantine Books, 1975, pp. vii–x. Zieger, Susan. “Pioneers of Inner Space: Drug Autobiography and Manifest Destiny.” PMLA, vol. 122, no. 5, 2007, pp. 1531–47. Žižek, Slavoj. Living in the End Times. Verso, 2010. ———. The Sublime Object of Ideology. Verso, 1989. Zoline, Pamela. “The Heat Death of the Universe.” New Worlds: An Anthology, edited by Michael Moorcock, Thunder’s Mouth P, 2004, pp. 131–44.

INDEX

2001: A Space Odyssey (film), 31–33, 35–36, 50–54; and decolonization, 57; and racial competitiveness, 38 Alexander, Michelle: The New Jim Crow, 106 “alternative facts,” 159, 167 American Beauty (film), 87 Arata, Stephen D.: on Dracula (Stoker), 16, 127; on imperial decline, 15; “The Occidental Tourist” (essay), 15 Attebery, Brian, 43–44; on the superman story, 44 Avatar (film), 49, 193 Ballard, J. G., 133–41; “The Drowned Giant” (story), 133–36; and entropy as cause of imperial decline, 141; and imperial masochism, 140; “A Question of Re-Entry” (story), 136–37; “The Voices of Time” (story), 137–39 Battlestar Galactica (film), 193 Beale, Theodore (a.k.a.Vox Day), 6–7 Best, Steven and Douglas Kellner, 182; on meta-cartography, 182 Black Iron Prison (Philip K. Dick theory), 90–93, 103, 105, 108, 122, 129, 161 black pill (or blackpill), 83, 85

Blade Runner (film), 66 Bould, Mark, 123 Brexit, 125–26; carcereal imagery, 125– 26; and imperial masochism, 126 Brown, Wendy: on neoliberal freedom, 56; States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity, 11; on victimhood politics, 11 Bundy standoff (1984): and free exit fantasy, 105 Camp Concentration (Disch), 115; antiimperialism in, 116, 120; carceral medical experimentation in, 116–17; on entropy, 128; reverse colonization narrative in, 121; somatic capitalism in, 119–21 capitalism: somatic, 118–19 Cernovich, Mike: conspiracy theories, 162; on post-­truth discourse, 163 civil rights movements: effect on victimhood identification, 14 “cognitive justice,” 159–87 Collins, Suzanne: Hunger Games, 193 colonial gaze, 38, 40, 72, 74, 77 colonization, reverse: in the Black Iron Prison theory, 90; in Camp Concentration, 115, 121; carceral, 92; in characterizations of empire, 166–67; in current reactionary movements, 158;

230 Index colonization, reverse (continued) in cyberpunk science fiction, 91–92; in Delany, 187; in Dune, 47, 50, 54; in the Elric Saga, 145–46; fantasy after the 1960s, 189–97; and imperial fantasy, 122; by the Left, 197; in The Man in the High Castle, 70; in The Matrix (film), 64, 191; narrative, 1, 3, 15–16, 18, 69, 71, 85, 91, 96, 123, 128, 191; and neoimperialism, 123; in neoliberalism, 124; in science fiction, 4, 18, 23–24, 32–33, 54–58, 65, 70, 72, 80, 91–93, 108, 165–66; and post-­truth discourse, 161; as reaction to post-­war affluence, 22; in reactionary political discourse, 127; in Stranger in a Strange Land, 55; visions of catastrophe in, 20 Conrad, Joseph: on entropy, 130–31; Heart of Darkness, 130–32 Csicsery-­Ronay, Istvan Jr.: on empire, 55, 176 cyberpunk science fiction, 91–92, 108; and reverse colonization, 91–92 Davis, Erik: on post-truth discourse, 163 Davis, Patricia G.: on victimhood identification, 12 The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham), 127; as reverse colonization narrative, 127 decolonization: psychic, 24–25, 33–34, 36, 42–43, 55–56, 187, 198–99 DeKoven, Marianne: The Sixties and the Emergence of the Postmodern, 167

Delany, Samuel, 115, 158, 167–68, 170– 73, 175–76, 178–87, 189, 201; The Fall of the Towers (trilogy), 167–89; on imperial unconscious, 187 Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari, 43, 122; on territorialization, 43; A Thousand Plateaus, 10 Dick, Philip K., 65–66; 1974 visionary experience, 90; Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, 66; “Drugs, Hallucinations, and the Quest for Reality,” 64; The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick, 89–92; The Man in the High Castle, 69–87, 91, 117; and reverse colonization narratives, 64; self-­identification as victim, 67–68; The Simulacra, 66; Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, 66; Ubik, 66; “We Can Remember It for You Wholesale” (story), 86 Disch, Thomas M.: Camp Concentration, 115–24; The Prisoner (novelization), 108–22; rejection of “free exit,” 114 discourse: post-­truth, 160–61, 165, 188; and academic postmodernism, 161–62; “cognitive justice,” 164–65; in Delany, 167 double consciousness, 72–74 drug narratives: as imperial fantasies, 32–33 Du Bois, W. E. B.: on “double consciousness,” 72 Dune (1984 film), 31 Dune (Herbert), 31, 34–36, 38, 45–50, 54, 57, 165; and decolonization, 48, 57; and freedom from dependency,



Index 231

46; and heroic masculinity, 36; and racial competitiveness, 37–38; theme of freedom from dependence, 46–48

nonwhite refugees and migrants, 107; Peter Thiel on, 95; in The Prisoner (Disch), 99

Elster, Jon: on internal and external negation, 74 Enns, Diane: on victimhood identification, 12; The Violence of Victimhood, 190 entropy: in Camp Concentration (Disch), 128–29; as cause of imperial decline, 127–33, 144–45; in the Elric Saga, 144; in “The Heat Death of the Universe” (Zoline), 128; in J. G. Ballard, 141; Philip K. Dick on, 129 The Exegesis (Dick), 89–93, 129

Gilroy, Paul, 128, 141–43, 149; Post­ colonial Melancholia, 142–43, 149 Greenland, Colin, 129, 153; The Entropy Exhibition on David Harvey, 153; on entropy, 129

The Fall of the Towers (trilogy) (Delany), 167–88 Fanon, Frantz, 33–34, 42; Black Skin, White Masks, 33, 198; on decolonization, 42, 48; on post-­colonial nationalism, 198 Fight Club (film), 87, 192 Fortgang, Tal, 7 Foster, Thomas: The Souls of Cyberfolk, 91–92 Foucault, Michel, 93, 99, 106, 122; “carceral archipelago,” 105; on coercive penal systems, 99–102; Discipline and Punish, 93, 102; on neoliberalism, 102; social contract theory, 106 free exit fantasy: and Bundy standoff, 105; as neoliberal reactionary formation, 123; Nick Land on, 99, 107;

Haldeman, Joe: The Forever War, 189 Haraway, Donna: on affinities between marginalized groups, 92; Cyborg Manifesto, 92 Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri: on empire, 179; Empire, 38, 55 Harvey, David, 55, 128, 150–58; contributions to New Wave, 157–58; on entropy, 155–56; “Jake in the Forest” (story), 151–55; “The Languages of Science” (article), 154–56; on postmodernity, 170 Heinlein, Robert: Starship Troopers, 186 Holmesburg Prison: carceral medical experimentation in, 118 Holocaust narratives: effect on victimhood identification, 13 Hornblum, Allen: Acres of Skin: Human Experiments in Holmesburg Prison, 118 Hunger Games (Collins), 193–94 imperial critique, 69 imperial fantasy, 1–4, 19, 33, 45, 54, 57, 66, 69, 87, 91–92, 122, 165, 189; in contemporary reactionary

232 Index imperial fantasy (continued) movements, 4; post-­war transformation, 18–22; science fictional themes in, 20 imperial masochism, 2–3, 57–58, 66, 69, 71, 91, 93, 123, 126, 128, 167, 189–91, 193–94, 199, 202; in Camp Concentration, 121; in The High Castle, 61; and imperial critique, 18; in incel subculture, 71; J. G. Ballard on, 140; Nick Land on, 95; in The Prisoner, 108; in science fiction after the Vietnam War, 190; and science fictional references, 3; in The War of the Worlds (Wells), 13, 16–19 imperial unconscious, 187 incel subculture, 59–61, 83, 85 Jameson, Fredric: on postmodernism, 172 Land, Nick, 93, 95; “The Dark Enlightenment” (essay), 94–95; Fanged Noumena, 93; free exit fantasy, 99, 104, 107; neoreactionary theories, 94; and race, 96 Le Guin, Ursula: “The Word for World is Forest” (story), 190 Luckhurst, Roger: on entropy, 129; Science Fiction, 129 Määttä, Jerry: on The Day of the Triffids (Wyndham), 127 Magdoff, Harry: Imperialism Without Colonies, 145 The Man in the High Castle (Dick), 69–87, 91, 117; and race, 71–72;

reverse colonization, 72, 74, 80; and reverse racialization, 76 masculinity: fascist, 37; heroic, 36–37, 49–50 Matin, A. Michael, 130; on Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, 130 The Matrix (film), 9, 114–15, 161, 192; reverse colonization in, 63, 65, 86–87 May, Elaine Tyler: Fortress America, 21; on post-­war victimhood identification, 21–22 McClintock, Anne: Imperial Leather, 132 McCloud, Scott: Understanding Comics, 166 McDonald, Ian: The Dervish House, 56 McIntyre, Lee: Post-­Truth, 159; on post-­truth discourse, 160–62 Melley, Timothy, 34–35, 39, 102; on agency panic, 35, 47; on literary postmodern narratives, 34 meta-­cartography, 182 Miéville, China, 150, 165; on David Harvey, 150–51 Miller, David M., 47 Moorcock, Michael: Elric Saga, 140– 50; on entropy and empire, 144, 157; The Eternal Champion, 147–48, 150; “Phase I” (story), 156–57; theme of lack of agency, 147–49 Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd: V for Vendetta (graphic novel), 101 Nagle, Angela, 11; Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars from 4chan



Index 233

and Tumblr to Trump and the AltRight, 9–10 negation: internal and external, 74 Neiwert, David: Alt-­America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump, 10 neoreaction, 93–97 New Wave science fiction, 108–109, 115–16, 120, 127–30, 132–33, 139–40, 151, 153–58, 189 NRx (neoreaction movement), 94– 97 O’Connell, Hugh C., 56 Orwell, George, 113; on objective truth, 159

reactionary conservativism, 14 red pill (The Matrix), 9, 86, 115; in alt-­right rhetoric, 9, 65; in incel subculture, 63, 83 Rieder, Joseph: Colonialism, 131–32 Robin, Corey: The Reactionary Mind: Conservativism from Edmund Burke to Donald Trump, 11–12; on victimhood identification, 13, 22 Rodger, Elliot, 84; fascist ideation, 84; and incel subculture, 59–63, 71, 83, 85; and reverse colonization, 65; science fictional references, 61–63 Rover (The Prisoner), 98, 102, 104, 109–10

Pearson, Joshua, 56–57 Peterson, Jordan, 83 postmodernism, 34–35, 55–56, 58, 66, 128, 151, 158, 162–65, 167–68, 170, 172, 180; conception of the self, 113; David Harvey on, 128, 157; epistemological view, 168; Marianne DeKoven on, 167; and post-­truth discourse, 161–62; and reverse colonization fantasy, 162–63 The Prisoner (Disch novelization), 108–15 The Prisoner (TV show), 96–104; as critique of neoimperialism, 103– 104; “free exit” fantasy, 99; as reverse colonization carceral narrative, 96, 102, 108 PUAHate.com (incel forum), 63 Puppygate, 4–5, 8–9; and reverse colonization, 6

Said, Edward: on empire, 1 Sardar, Ziauddin, 164 Sartre, Jean-­Paul, 198; on psychic decolonization, 198–99 science fictional references: in reactionary subcultures, 14, 61–62 Scott, Colin: on scientific knowledge construction, 163–64 The Secret (book), 53 Selisker, Scott, 34; on human programming and unfreedom, 35 The Sentinel (Clarke), 32, 34 Sheldon, Rebekah, 115; The Child to Come, 118; “Knowledge, Affect, and Ritual Magic” (article), 122; on somatic capitalism, 118–19 Spinrad, Norman: The Iron Dream, 117 Star Trek: Enterprise (TV show), 193 Star Wars (film), 166, 190–91

234 Index Stranger In A Strange Land (Heinlein), 31–36, 38–45; heroic masculinity, 36; racial competitiveness, 37–38; reverse colonization, 57 Tan, Shaun: The Arrival, 200–202 Theweleit, Claus, 37; on fascist masculinity, 37, 56 Thiel, Peter: neoreactionary theories, 94–95 Total Recall (films), 86; masculine colonization, 86 Turner, Frederick Jackson, 132 Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, 117–18 Vizenor, Gerald, 195; Fugitive Poses: Native American Scenes of Absence

and Presence, 195; on survivance, 194–95 Wells, H. G.: The War of the Worlds as reverse colonialization narrative, 1, 16–19 Westworld (TV show): reverse colonization narrative, 87 Zieger, Susan, 32; on drug narratives, 32 Žižek, Slavoj: The Supreme Object of Ideology, 73 Zoline, Pamela: “The Heat Death of the Universe” (story), 128

THE NEW A MERICAN CANON

Half a Million Strong: Crowds and Power from Woodstock to Coachella by Gina Arnold

Race Sounds: The Art of Listening in African American Literature by Nicole Brittingham Furlonge

Violet America: Regional Cosmopolitanism in U.S. Fiction since the Great Depression by Jason Arthur

Postmodern/Postwar—and After: Rethinking American Literature edited by Jason Gladstone, Andrew Hoberek, and Daniel Worden

The Meanings of J. Robert Oppenheimer by Lindsey Michael Banco

After the Program Era: The Past, Present, and Future of Creative Writing in the University edited by Loren Glass

Neocolonial Fictions of the Global Cold War edited by Steven Belletto and Joseph Keith

Hope Isn’t Stupid: Utopian Affects in Contemporary American Literature by Sean Austin Grattan

Workshops of Empire: Stegner, Engle, and American Creative Writing during the Cold War by Eric Bennett

It’s Just the Normal Noises: Marcus, Guralnick, No Depression, and the Mystery of Americana Music by Timothy Gray

Places in the Making: A Cultural Geography of American Poetry by Jim Cocola

Wrong: A Critical Biography of Dennis Cooper by Diarmuid Hester

The Legacy of David Foster Wallace edited by Samuel Cohen and Lee Konstantinou

Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt-­Victimhood by David M. Higgins

Contemporary Novelists and the Aesthetics of Twenty-­First Century American Life by Alexandra Kingston-­Reese

William Gibson and the Futures of Contemporary Culture edited by Mitch R. Murray and Mathias Nilges

American Unexceptionalism: The Everyman and the Suburban Novel after 9/11 by Kathy Knapp

Poems of the American Empire: The Lyric Form in the Long Twentieth Century by Jen Hedler Phillis

Visible Dissent: Latin American Writers, Small U.S. Presses, and Progressive Social Change by Teresa V. Longo

Reading Capitalist Realism edited by Alison Shonkwiler and Leigh Claire La Berge

Pynchon’s California edited by Scott McClintock and John Miller Richard Ford and the Ends of Realism by Ian McGuire Novel Subjects: Authorship as Radical Self-­Care in Multiethnic American Narratives by Leah A. Milnes

Technomodern Poetics: The American Literary Avant-­Garde at the Start of the Information Age by Todd F. Tietchen Ecospatiality: A Place-­Based Approach to American Literature by Lowell Wyse How to Revise a True War Story: Tim O’Brien’s Process of Textual Production by John K. Young