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blatherskiteMuch early science fiction, and some current stories, deals heavily with the establishment of colonies and their subsequent management. The original Star Trek series was pitched as "Wagon Train to the stars", and despite its pretensions of brotherly love among (interstellar) nations, the show's Federation of Planets was clearly all about securing power in a hostile universe. They occasionally even made the colonial metaphor literal by having the crew of the Enterprise invade various cultures that were transparently based on American Indians. Later versions of the Trek franchise touched briefly on the notion of the Federation's colonialism, making it clear that many other races saw through the charade. A future novel that I've got plotted out explicitly dialogues with this notion, making it clear that the real reason for Trek's "prime directive" was to provide plausible deniability.
But all of these stories focus on the perspective of the colonizer. Some believe that in more modern fiction, there's a growing recognition that the colonized peoples have a very significant role to play, and possibly a more significant role than that of the colonizers. Their goal in making this claim is to overturn the assumption that "the world is white". But that recognition has a long history. Steve Stirling noted during the discussion that Rudyard Kipling may have learned Hindustani before he learned English and that he clearly had a lot of respect for India's culture and history.
Because of the novel's treatment of Indians, Stirling considers Kim to be Kipling's masterpiece. I've always enjoyed Kipling, even thought it's not fashionable to admit this (because of his assumed politics and the odious legacy of the "white man's burden"), because I feel that he did a brilliant job of capturing an important historical period, not to mention telling fascinating stories set in a (to me) exotic environment. It's helpful to remember that Kipling was trained as a journalist, and did a wonderful job of reporting things "as they were", making his Indian stories a compelling portrait of the times that also provide interesting insights into Victorian cultural assumptions.
Recognizing that both the colonizers and the colonized have tales to tell leads to all kinds of interesting possibilities for plot and characterization. The reductionist solution for an author is to eliminate any native peoples so you don't have to deal with them. You can then focus on your colonizers without the inconvenience of having to worry about any aboriginals, whether those aboriginals are primitive or advanced. If your skill as a writer has grown to the point that you can stop concentrating on the mechanics of writing and start tackling more complex issues, you can eschew the reductionist approach and attempt to deal with the full complexities of the clash of cultures.
Steve Stirling provides a fascinating example of how authors deal with these issues because his writing has spanned both extremes. His novel Conquistador neglects any serious consideration of colonized people to the point that it borders on racist, whereas his Peshawar Lancers novel, though not without certain racist overtones, does a much better job of treating the Indian characters sympathetically, as coequal to the white protagonists. He doesn't fully succeed, but at least he steps in the right direction. Ian McDonald does a far better job in his novel River of Gods and the associated series of short stories. In treating the colonized (i.e., Indians) as the primary protagonists, he nearly eliminates any role for white characters. It should not surprise you that the stories remain fascinating despite the lack of White characters in primary roles.
Tobias Buckell, one of the panelists, has written about Black Caribbean protagonists in a far-future postcolonial environment, surviving amidst the human diaspora into a universe already populated and largely controlled by alien races, with humans definitely the second-class citizens. That's an interesting reversal of the usual paradigm, in which people from Earth are the colonizers. I wanted to like his novel Ragamuffin, since it had many interesting ideas and a predominantly Black cast of characters, but sadly, it was excruciatingly badly edited, and read like a contractual obligation book (i.e., one that had to be published by a certain date, whether or not it was ready to be published). The last third or so of the book reads more like a "treatment" for a Hollywood film than like a novel. My verdict: This is a book that reads like a decent first draft of what should have become a series of at least two books, and possibly three, to give it time to breathe. I hope Buckell will make time to revise it in this way, because there was much to like about his ideas, and I enjoyed chatting with him at the convention.
Colonialism, like any other topic dealt with by science fiction and fantasy authors, has a great many permutations. In the classic English folktale fantasies and their modern kin, the urban fantasy in which Elves and other supernatural beings coexist with humans, it's interesting to speculate about who is colonizing whom. The answer isn't always clear. Though his protagonists are primarily human, Charles de Lint has always done a far better job than most at including Native Americans in his stories, usually with a remarkable level of respect for and insight into their culture. In particular, he has incorporated the Native creation story and many Native myths at the heart of his extremely popular "Newford" stories. If you haven't read de Lint, I strongly recommend starting with these stories. They're deeply humane and enchanting in all meanings of the word.
Colonialism can be military (as in most imperial space opera stories), sociocultural (as in Ursula Leguin's stories in the Hainish/Ekumen cycle), or economic (as in Charles Stross' "Merchant Princes" series; in the latter case, the transition from a feudal state to a democratic one, or in the opposite direction, can also lead to many colonial situations worthy of exploration. Such tales can be all about "civilizing the wogs" (to borrow a particularly offensive phrase from around Victorian times), or inverting that scenario, about being civilized through our interaction with the alien or The Other. Colonialism can also be an issue of intellectual hegemony: I note, with some amusement, the possibility that ecologists can be seen as the colonized subjects of economists, disempowered and disrespected by economists even though both professions share the same roots in resource allocation. We who are trained in ecological science haven't forgotten the value and complexity of nature, unlike so many economists, and increasingly, we're being forced to co-opt the tools of the economists to fight them on their own ground.
Postcolonial fiction can also be allegorical rather than literal. In many of the military science fiction tales where the goal is to eliminate some kind of insectile alien, the alien is often chosen to be an insect because nobody objects much to slaughtering bugs. But sometimes (particularly, it seems, in American fiction) it's a shallowly concealed allegory for the fight against communism or other forms of socialism. LeGuin's tales of the many forms that relationships between and within the sexes and genders offer some interesting dialogues with colonialism, but seen from the perspective of human relationships rather than conflicts between nations.
It's a promising sign that modern science fiction is increasingly grappling with these issues, both from an ethical standpoint and from the fact that this leads to much more interesting fiction.
But all of these stories focus on the perspective of the colonizer. Some believe that in more modern fiction, there's a growing recognition that the colonized peoples have a very significant role to play, and possibly a more significant role than that of the colonizers. Their goal in making this claim is to overturn the assumption that "the world is white". But that recognition has a long history. Steve Stirling noted during the discussion that Rudyard Kipling may have learned Hindustani before he learned English and that he clearly had a lot of respect for India's culture and history.
Because of the novel's treatment of Indians, Stirling considers Kim to be Kipling's masterpiece. I've always enjoyed Kipling, even thought it's not fashionable to admit this (because of his assumed politics and the odious legacy of the "white man's burden"), because I feel that he did a brilliant job of capturing an important historical period, not to mention telling fascinating stories set in a (to me) exotic environment. It's helpful to remember that Kipling was trained as a journalist, and did a wonderful job of reporting things "as they were", making his Indian stories a compelling portrait of the times that also provide interesting insights into Victorian cultural assumptions.
Recognizing that both the colonizers and the colonized have tales to tell leads to all kinds of interesting possibilities for plot and characterization. The reductionist solution for an author is to eliminate any native peoples so you don't have to deal with them. You can then focus on your colonizers without the inconvenience of having to worry about any aboriginals, whether those aboriginals are primitive or advanced. If your skill as a writer has grown to the point that you can stop concentrating on the mechanics of writing and start tackling more complex issues, you can eschew the reductionist approach and attempt to deal with the full complexities of the clash of cultures.
Steve Stirling provides a fascinating example of how authors deal with these issues because his writing has spanned both extremes. His novel Conquistador neglects any serious consideration of colonized people to the point that it borders on racist, whereas his Peshawar Lancers novel, though not without certain racist overtones, does a much better job of treating the Indian characters sympathetically, as coequal to the white protagonists. He doesn't fully succeed, but at least he steps in the right direction. Ian McDonald does a far better job in his novel River of Gods and the associated series of short stories. In treating the colonized (i.e., Indians) as the primary protagonists, he nearly eliminates any role for white characters. It should not surprise you that the stories remain fascinating despite the lack of White characters in primary roles.
Tobias Buckell, one of the panelists, has written about Black Caribbean protagonists in a far-future postcolonial environment, surviving amidst the human diaspora into a universe already populated and largely controlled by alien races, with humans definitely the second-class citizens. That's an interesting reversal of the usual paradigm, in which people from Earth are the colonizers. I wanted to like his novel Ragamuffin, since it had many interesting ideas and a predominantly Black cast of characters, but sadly, it was excruciatingly badly edited, and read like a contractual obligation book (i.e., one that had to be published by a certain date, whether or not it was ready to be published). The last third or so of the book reads more like a "treatment" for a Hollywood film than like a novel. My verdict: This is a book that reads like a decent first draft of what should have become a series of at least two books, and possibly three, to give it time to breathe. I hope Buckell will make time to revise it in this way, because there was much to like about his ideas, and I enjoyed chatting with him at the convention.
Colonialism, like any other topic dealt with by science fiction and fantasy authors, has a great many permutations. In the classic English folktale fantasies and their modern kin, the urban fantasy in which Elves and other supernatural beings coexist with humans, it's interesting to speculate about who is colonizing whom. The answer isn't always clear. Though his protagonists are primarily human, Charles de Lint has always done a far better job than most at including Native Americans in his stories, usually with a remarkable level of respect for and insight into their culture. In particular, he has incorporated the Native creation story and many Native myths at the heart of his extremely popular "Newford" stories. If you haven't read de Lint, I strongly recommend starting with these stories. They're deeply humane and enchanting in all meanings of the word.
Colonialism can be military (as in most imperial space opera stories), sociocultural (as in Ursula Leguin's stories in the Hainish/Ekumen cycle), or economic (as in Charles Stross' "Merchant Princes" series; in the latter case, the transition from a feudal state to a democratic one, or in the opposite direction, can also lead to many colonial situations worthy of exploration. Such tales can be all about "civilizing the wogs" (to borrow a particularly offensive phrase from around Victorian times), or inverting that scenario, about being civilized through our interaction with the alien or The Other. Colonialism can also be an issue of intellectual hegemony: I note, with some amusement, the possibility that ecologists can be seen as the colonized subjects of economists, disempowered and disrespected by economists even though both professions share the same roots in resource allocation. We who are trained in ecological science haven't forgotten the value and complexity of nature, unlike so many economists, and increasingly, we're being forced to co-opt the tools of the economists to fight them on their own ground.
Postcolonial fiction can also be allegorical rather than literal. In many of the military science fiction tales where the goal is to eliminate some kind of insectile alien, the alien is often chosen to be an insect because nobody objects much to slaughtering bugs. But sometimes (particularly, it seems, in American fiction) it's a shallowly concealed allegory for the fight against communism or other forms of socialism. LeGuin's tales of the many forms that relationships between and within the sexes and genders offer some interesting dialogues with colonialism, but seen from the perspective of human relationships rather than conflicts between nations.
It's a promising sign that modern science fiction is increasingly grappling with these issues, both from an ethical standpoint and from the fact that this leads to much more interesting fiction.