New Space Opera and Neoliberal Globalism a Dissertation Submitted In
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UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Nostalgia for Infinity: New Space Opera and Neoliberal Globalism A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Jerome Dale Winter June 2015 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson Dr. Weihsin Gui Dr. Steven Axelrod Copyright by Jerome Dale Winter 2015 The Dissertation of Jerome Dale Winter is approved: _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________ Committee Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge the irredeemable debt I owe to my committee members Sherryl Vint, Weihsin Gui, and Steven Axelrod whose guidance and support contributed to all the virtues of this dissertation and none of its flaws. A version of part of Chapter 1 was published in the November 2013 issue of The Eaton Journal of Archival Research ; and the journal Extrapolations published Chapter 3 in their December 2014 issue. I would like to thank the editorial staff at Extrapolations for their copious feedback and faith in the project. I also wish to acknowledge The Los Angeles Review of Books , under the editorial leadership of Tom Lutz and Johnathan Hahn, and for the speculative- fiction page, under the diligent attention of Rob Latham, for allowing me to publish interviews with major SF writers who directly contributed to the contentions of this project. These writers — Norman Spinrad, Michael Moorcock, Alastair Reynolds, and Ken MacLeod — were all gracious with their precious time in fielding my questions. A special thanks to Steven Axelrod for magnanimously agreeing to serve on my committee at such short notice. Thanks as well to Rob Latham for all his vital contibutions to this dissertation. My appreciation goes out to Nalo Hopkinson as well for her discussion of Salt Roads with the UCR SF Club and to Tobias Buckell for thoughtfully answering my question during a reading courtesy of Hopkinson’s undergraduate science-fiction course. iv Dedicated to my better half For putting up with this space junk v ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Nostalgia for Infinity: New Space Opera and Neoliberal Globalism by Jerome Dale Winter Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2015 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Chairperson This doctoral dissertation argues that contemporary postcolonial literature from and about the Caribbean, Scotland, and India responds to American and British popular genre fiction, specifically the subgenre known as New Space Opera, in allegorizing the neoliberal processes, conditions, and experiences of globalization in the world-system. My project discusses works by postcolonial authors who have yet to receive theoretical investigation from this perspective, including Iain M. Banks, Karen Lord, and Nalo Hopkinson, as well as important transatlantic SF authors whose work has yet to be discussed in terms of globalism including Samuel R. Delany, M. John Harrison, Gwyneth Jones, Bruce Sterling, and C.J. Cherryh. I argue that these often critically neglected space-opera novels reconfigure for our times the conventional trappings of traditional space opera — such as such as faster-than-light starships, galactic empires, doomsday weapons, and dramatic encounters with exotic aliens — to reflect and refract the global dimensions of our neoliberal and postcolonial world-system transfigured by contemporary technoculture. Consequently, I argue that New Space Opera novels address and intervene in sociopolitical and historical developments specific to the cultures in vi which they are written. New Space Opera written from Scottish, Indian, and Caribbean perspectives interrogates the interweaving of nation-states and transnational culture, especially in connection with the rapidly accelerating technological, social, and economic changes facing our planet today. vii Table of Contents Introduction Pulp Affect, Cosmopolitical Critique, and the Reinvention of Space Opera 1 Chapter 1 Neoliberal Masters of the Universe: Space Culture and the Predawn of Space Opera 69 Chapter 2 “A Smeared and Bogus Milky Way of Wealth”: The Origins of New Space Opera in the Neoliberal Moment 102 Chapter 3 “Moments in the Fall”: Neoliberal Globalism and Utopian Socialist Desire in Ken MacLeod’s Fall Revolution Quartet and Iain M. Banks’s Culture Series 165 Chapter 4 Global Feminism and Neoliberal Crisis in Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutian Trilogy 218 Chapter 5 “Archipelagoes of Stars”: Caribbean Cosmopolitics in Postcolonial SF 260 Conclusion 312 Works Cited 318 viii INTRODUCTION Pulp Affect, Cosmopolitical Critique, and the Reinvention of Space Opera “But I’ve managed to follow human history, pretty well, through the next thousand years. That’s what I’ve been writing. The history of the future!” - Jack Williamson, Legion of Space (1934) “What was the Beach, after all, but a repository of fading memories?” - M. John Harrison, Empty Space (2012) In M. John Harrison’s Light (2001), a rocket-jockey breaks a quarantine zone to scavenge artifacts from an inexplicable spatial anomaly called the Kefahuchi Tract. Billy Anker outruns Earth Military Contracts (EMCs) and discovers contraband from a planet filled with the remnants of a dead culture sixty-five million years old. Here Harrison plugs into and puts a dark twist on a ubiquitous trope of salvaging ancient, hyper- advanced alien technology whose antecedents, in genre SF, can be glimpsed as far back as the decaying Martian civilizations in the re-serialized pulp-magazine fiction of both H.G. Wells and Edgar Rice Burroughs. The trope has since become an intertextual reference point for the movement known as New Space Opera to be found, for instance, in Iain M. Banks’s Consider Phlebus (1987), Paul McAuley’s 400 Billion Stars (1988), Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep (1993), Alastair Reynolds’s Revelation Space (2000), or Justina Robson’s Natural History (2004). And the trope has reached saturation 1 point, crossing over, via perhaps the amniotic fluid of the monolith-spawned Star Child in Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey , to popular film and video games as well; most recently, exploring the consequences of rediscovered xeno-technology features prominently, for example, in the bestselling Mass Effect (2007-2014) or massively multiplayer Eve Online (2003-2014) videogame series, the commissioned SyFy Channel show based on James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series, the nostalgic summer hit of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014), and the widescreen-baroque blockbusters of Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar (2014) and the Watchowski siblings’ Jupiter Ascending (2015). Only in Harrison’s narrative, though, is it so foregrounded that the manhunt for this aging antihero, the maverick-loser starship pilot Billy Anker (i.e., W. Anker), dates back to the private military contractors and the promiscuous flows of global capital crucial to the thread of the novel set in the year 1999: “Before (EMCs) you had a loose cartel of security corporations, designed so the neo-liberal democracies could blame subcontractors for any police action that got out of hand…After K[efahuchi]-Tech, well, EMC became the democracies” (Harrison 258). This neoliberal prehistory haunts Harrison's prodigal return to a peculiar brand of science fiction he helped both to birth and to self-sabotage thirty years prior. In his canny foray into the resurgently popular terrain of New Space Opera, Harrison taps again into a curious, rich vein of popular literary allegory whereby the science-fictionality of our contemporary historical moment — the postcolonial, neoliberal, technocultural matrix that shapes our modern globalized history as much as the ancient alien artifact of its specific genre material — has to be 2 strangely uncovered from an imagined far future only to be reflected back to a disbelieving present-day audience. Just as, in the background future history of the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy, Harrison alludes to the militarized realpolitik of neoliberal regimes, this dissertation views exemplary fictions of New Space Opera as allegories evolving in tandem with a specific new system of global capitalism. The epoch-defining birth of neoliberalism is most often traced back to the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944. This international agreement addressed a perceived need to prevent another Great Depression and to rebuild Europe in the postwar period. Due to the status of the United States as preeminent geopolitical power — the U.S. controlled seventy percent of the world’s financial assets and a majority of its productive capacity (Kiely 50) — the agreement attempted to facilitate loans to Europe in the vein of those initiated by the Marshall Plan, through fixing the dollar as standard currency for exchange, and pegging the dollar itself to gold. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), and later the World Bank, facilitated the interest- bearing loans that assisted the resulting postwar boom. Export-led industrial growth and explosive technological advancement in the U.S. hinged on international trade and foreign direct investment. The geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and economic inequality were bound up with the military Keynesianism — the rapid expansion in defense spending despite budget short-falls — and the influx of liquidity around the ostensibly pro-capitalist world in response to the rivaling global power of the Soviet Union. 3 The underdeveloped world