Designed & Powered by MediaTek_

Introduction

By Victor Wallis

Science fiction is fiction that is based, before all else, on certain explicit framing hypotheses. These have most commonly (and stereotypically) involved travel into the future and, concomitantly, an array of technological capacities and devices whose effects have not previously been imagined. Foregrounding this latter aspect, certain SF works (including films as well as books) have attained a mass market. In much of the science fiction that is produced for this market (notably, films like Star Wars), the framing hypothesis turns out to have an essentially decorative function – as pretext for ever more grandiose special effects – while the actual story unfolds in accordance with all the clichés of classic battles between good and evil. In Hollywood films, this model has most often been heavily overlaid with explicit or tacit links to Washington’s global military agenda, with the particular incarnations of evil evolving to meet the needs of the moment.¹ An important subsidiary message is that an all-powerful technology has the answer to everything, including what to do if the earth’s ecosphere is destroyed.

Unfortunately but not surprisingly, such commercially underwritten, high-tech-oriented productions have tended to dominate popular notions of what science fiction is all about.² Our own interest, however, is directed more to those expressions – ranging from literature to film to popular legend – in which the imagined conditions and capabilities encourage new ways of thinking about human society, or provide new sources of strength for resisting oppression, while at the same time (thanks to their wide diffusion) bringing social consciousness and political awareness to constituencies unresponsive to overtly political messages.

This whole range of potentially subversive processes is grounded in the experience incisively identified by Darko Suvin, more than thirty years ago, as cognitive estrangement.³ Works conceived in this tradition are the ones in which we find promise. The character of such works, as Carl Freedman has written, “lies neither in chronology nor in technological hardware but in the cognitive presentation of alternatives to actuality and the status quo.”⁴ Insofar as we focus on this dimension of science fiction, we encounter a body of work with obvious relevance to the concerns of socialists. This link has been expressed historically in many ways. One striking instance of it, noted by Suvin, is the presence, at key points in Marx’s writings, of figures like vampires, monsters, sorcerers, and specters.⁵ The point here is perhaps that even in the most materialist of analyses, there needs to be a vocabulary to encompass the dimensions of behavior that appear, from one limited class-perspective or another, to be beyond the range of calculable human intervention. Beyond this, though, there is a long and proud tradition of consciously radical SF writing or storytelling, some of which is discussed and illustrated in articles in this collection.⁶

The particular relevance of science fiction to our present conjuncture reflects the convergence of a number of different factors. First and foremost, the sheer enormity of the ecological crisis conjures up scenarios of devastation that will test the imaginations of everyone.⁷ Second, the pace of technological innovation appears to be increasing exponentially, bringing with it a further concentration of control by already dominant forces while at the same time feeding into a kind of scientistic hubris which, rather than acknowledge the need for radically altered economic priorities, devises the most grotesque science-fictional boondoggles to allow for the continuation of business (notably, the burning of fossil fuels) as usual.⁸ Third, the world’s most prodigious military arsenal has been placed at the disposal of a “decider” who, in crude tragicomic style, rides out his disastrous term on the historical stage fully self-absorbed and in a self-referential bubble9 – decreeing and rationalizing massive aggressions with utter disdain for their human targets. But finally, there is the other direction: the direction of those who feel the burden of all these conditions and know that they must find a way to respond to them. What does science fiction have to offer them, meaning us?

Our goal in assembling the present collection has been to inspire thinking along these lines. We are aware that these articles, even taken together, cover only a small part of the necessary ground. Nonetheless, they begin to suggest ways in which popular understanding of the need to go “beyond capital” can grow. Science fiction that is produced within the tradition of cognitive estrangement constitutes what might be understood as an intersection – with the potential for mutual reinforcement – between two streams of thought and practice that have too often remained separate: social-scientific critique (analysis and proposals) on the one hand, and cultural expression (nurturing resistance and personal transformation) on the other. The dimension of social-scientific critique focuses on issues of universal resonance and impact; to the extent that it is well-grounded, its message can eventually cut across all lines of division among people except those of class interest.¹⁰ The cultural dimension, by contrast, draws importantly (though not exclusively) on the particularities of experience of each community – whatever its mark(s) of identity might be.¹¹ Any hope of developing a popular movement that can overcome the march to destruction rests vitally on the symbiosis of these two dimensions of struggle.