Red Planets This book is being copublished with Pluto Press in the UK, and appears there as part o f their Marxism and Culture series. Red Planets Marxism and Science Fiction Edited by MARK BOULD AND CHINA MIEVILLE Wesleyan University Press Middletown, Connecticut Published by Wesleyan University Press Middletown, CT 06459 www.wesleyan.edu/wespress Published simultaneously in 2009 by Pluto Press Copyright © Mark Bould and China Mieville 2009 Library of Congress Control Number: 2009926386 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. Logging, pulping and manufacturing processes are expected to conform to the environmental standards of the country of origin. The paper may contain up to 70 per cent post-consumer waste. 10 987654321 Designed and produced for Pluto Press by Chase Publishing Services Ltd, Sidmouth, England Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England Printed and bound in the European Union by CPI Antony Rowe, Chippenham and Eastbourne in memory o f Bill Burling a dear friend CONTENTS Series Preface Mike Wayne and Esther Leslie Introduction Rough Guide to a Lonely Planet, from Nemo to Neo Mark Bould PART I: THINGS TO COME 1. The Anamorphic Estrangements of Science Fiction Matthew Beaumont 2. Art as ‘The Basic Technique of Life’: Utopian Art and Art in Utopia in The Dispossessed and Blue Mars William J. Burling 3. Marxism, Cinema and some Dialectics of Science Fiction and Film Noir Carl Freedman 4. Spectacle, Technology and Colonialism in SF Cinema: The Case of Wim Wenders’ Until the End of the World John Rieder PART II: WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE 5. The Singularity is Here Steven Shaviro 6. Species and Species-Being: Alienated Subjectivity and the Commodification of Animals Sherryl Vint viii RED PLANETS 7. Ken MacLeod’s Permanent Revolution: Utopian Possible Worlds, History and the Augenblick in the Fall Revolution Quartet 137 Phillip Wegner PART III: BACK TO THE FUTURE 8. ‘Madonna in moon rocket with breeches’: Weimar SF Film Criticism during the Stabilisation Period 159 Iris Luppa 9. The Urban Question in New Wave SF 178 Rob Latham 10. Towards a Revolutionary Science Fiction: Althusser’s Critique of Historicity 196 Darren Jorgensen 11. Utopia and Science Fiction Revisited 213 Andrew Milner Afterword Cognition as Ideology: A Dialectic of SF Theory 231 China Mieville Appendices 249 About the Contributors 280 Index 283 SERIES PREFACE There have been quite a number of books with the title ‘Marxism and...’, and many of these have investigated the crossing points of Marxism and cultural forms, from Fredric Jameson’s Marxism and Form to Terry Eagleton’s Marxism and Literary Criticism, Raymond Williams’ Marxism and Literature, John Frow’s Marxism and Literary History and Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg’s Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture. These titles are now all quite old. Many of them were published in the 1970s and 1980s, years when the embers of 1968 and its events continued to glow, if weakly. Through the 1990s Marxism got bashed; it was especially easily mocked once its ‘actually existing’ socialist version was toppled with the fall of the Berlin Wall. Postmodernism made Marxism a dirty word, and class struggle a dirty thought and even dirtier deed. But those days that consigned Marxism to history themselves now seem historical. The president of France spoke fearfully of the return of the spirit of 1968 at the end of 2008, when Athens was burning and the anomalous wave rippled through Italy. The crash of neo-liberalism in a now global economy has trashed many so-called certainties about the superiority of capitalism. A new spirit of critical questioning is emergent. Marxism, however critically its inheritance is viewed, cannot be overlooked by the increasing numbers who make efforts to provide an analysis and a consequent practice. Our series ‘Marxism and Culture’ investigates Marxism as a method for understanding culture, a mode of probing and explaining. Equally, our titles self-reflexively consider Marxism as an historical formation, with differing modulations and resonances across time - that is to say, as something itself to be probed and explained. The first two books in the series address popular or mass culture. Mike Wayne’s Marxism and Media Studies outlines the resources of Marxist theory for understanding the contemporary ix x RED PLANETS mediascape, while also proposing how the academic discipline of Media Studies might be submitted to Marxist analysis. John Roberts’ Philosophizing the Everyday uncovers the revolutionary origins of the philosophical concept of the everyday, recapturing it from a synonymity with banality and ordinariness propounded by theorists in Cultural Studies. A volume on Marxism and the History of Art shifted the attention to ‘high culture’. Taking into its broad scope the insights of a number of key figures in Marxist aesthetics, the volume reveals the pertinence of Marxist theory to manifold aspects of the art world: the materiality of art; the art market and the vagaries of value; the art object as locus of ideology; artists, art historians and art critics as classed beings; art and economy; art as commodity; the analogism of form and historical developments. This latest book in the series is devoted to the exploration of science fiction, a mass culture genre which has produced an identifiable tradition of novelists with explicitly socialist commitments, going back at least as far as William Morris, who wrote News From Nowhere (1890), a story that imagines a future communist society where work is a pleasurable creative activity. Science fiction has also attracted considerable interest from Marxist critics, drawn to a genre in which the dynamics between technology, social relations under capital, and the human body are explored and experimented with. As a result, a very strong tradition of Marxist SF criticism (in both literature and film) has emerged and developed within academia in the last 40 years or so. This anthology draws on the debates that have taken place within this tradition, provides a critical assessment of current Marxist approaches to the genre, and opens up new perspectives and paths for Marxist SF criticism to explore. It remains absolutely essential, if we are to break with the horizon of capital, both to imagine alternative models of social being and to critically decode the ways in which those alternative models remain tied, by the sticky threads of ideology, to the horizon of capital. This book makes a contribution to that important task. Mike Wayne and Esther Leslie INTRODUCTION ROUGH GUIDE TO A LONELY PLANET, FROM NEMO TO NEO Mark Bould For most of the eighty or so years since science fiction (SF) was identified and named as a distinct genre,1 it has typically been dismissed as the infantile excrescence of a stultifying mass culture, a literature doubly debased by its fantastic elements and mediocre prose. Whenever an SF novel - such as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) or Molly Gloss’s Wild Life (2000) - is found to contradict such expectations, it is generally treated as ‘not really SF’ or as somehow ‘transcending the genre’. The same is true of SF in other media, with films such as Alphaville (Godard, 1965), 2001: A Space Odyssey (Kubrick, 1968), Solaris (Tarkovsky, 1972), Possible Worlds (Lepage, 2000) or Le Temps du Loup (Haneke, 2003) often regarded as the works of an ‘auteur’ rather than the products of a genre and industry. Such a position is as ill-informed about the nature, breadth and variety of SF as it is transparent in its cultural politics of taste. This is not to claim that all SF is good (whatever that might mean), but that the genre is deserving of more serious attention than common stereotypes suggest. And even if this were not true of individual SF texts and practices,2 it would be true of the genre’s cultural reach and impact. For example, the two highest- grossing films of 2008 - Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight and Steven Spielberg’s Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skulls - were science-fictional, each taking US$1 billion globally (before revenues from merchandising and ancillary sales 1 2 RED PLANETS to DVD, television, and so on); a group of SF writers, including Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle and Greg Bear, originally proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative to Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s, and these writers are now part of the Sigma group, whose motto is ‘Science Fiction in the National Interest’, and advise the US Department of Homeland Security on the so-called War on Terror;3 and while millions of people belong to science-fictional religions, such as the Church of Scientology, many others claim to have been abducted by aliens. Even if one were to find all SF texts to be without value or interest, one surely cannot dismiss such instances of the genre’s cultural significance. SF began to receive serious academic attention in the late 1950s. SF studies emerged as a (primarily literary) discipline in the 1970s and, since the postmodern turn of the 1980s, it has developed to include cultural studies, film studies, television studies, game studies, and so on. It has long been allied with Marxist, feminist and queer theory, and increasingly with critical race studies, as politically engaged theorists and critics have found in the genre the radical potential for thinking differently about the world. In this volume, we have brought together the work of a number of explicitly Marxist thinkers who engage with SF, ranging from the most established to the newest figures in the field. In the remainder of this introduction, I will outline one of the reasons why Marxists should care about SF (and SF about Marxism), before briefly introducing their contributions to this vital and growing body of criticism.