Alienating Punishment: Prisons in Science Fiction Ariel Wetzel A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of English Literature University of Washington 2014 Reading Committee: Thomas Foster, Chair Gillian Harkins Rebecca Aanderud Program Authorized to Offer Degree: English Department ©Copyright 2014 Ariel Wetzel University of Washington Abstract Alienating Punishment: Prisons and Science Fiction Ariel Wetzel Chair of the Supervisory Committee Professor Thomas Foster English Department This dissertation asserts that science fiction (SF) takes a commonplace, the prison, and estranges it to make it unfamiliar and subject to critical examination. The dissertation explores this claim through two subjects: the prison as an institution and the body of the prisoner. The institution is examined through a utopian (and dystopian) lens, as the dissertation claims that utopias, prisons are intentional communities designed to be homogeneous and orderly, as both utopias and prisons are thought of as “world apart.” Upon closer examination, this dissertation demonstrates how that when the fictional prison is made unfamiliar, it is revealed to be a simultaneously utopian and dystopian space, a dysfunctional project of control and perfection. This offers a new interpretation of the utopian tradition, one where the prison is always present and integral to the utopia itself. Then, this dissertation turns to examine the treatment of the prisoner in SF. It shows that SF represents the prisoner’s body as figuratively estranged through speculative disciplinary technologies, where incarceration is represented as literally alien. This might take the form of virtual reality prison, where incarceration is experienced subjectively, or forced imposition into the gender binary. In both instances, the dissertation asserts, the prison imposes a mediated embodiment as punishment. This mediated embodiment can take the form of unwanted posthuman subjectivity, or it can take the form of forced gender-reassignment in which the prisoner’s body becomes, as punishment, a gender she or he does not desire. Primary texts discussed in this dissertation include Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, BBC’s The Prisoner television series, Robert Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, George Zebrowski’s Brute Orbits, Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony,” SciFi Channel’s Battlestar Galactica, Nisi Shawl’s “Deep End,” Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination, Kelley Eskridge’s Solitaire, and Charles Stross’s Glasshouse. Dedicated to my family. Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction: Using Science Fiction to Reconsider the Function of Prisons ......... 1 Chapter 2: Worlds Apart: Prisons as Utopian and Dystopian Spaces ................................... 28 Chapter 3: Utopian Worlds Apart: Science Fiction Penal Colonies & Prisons-in-Space ..... 73 Chapter 4: Punitive Posthumanism: The Mediation of Prisoner Embodiment ................... 118 Chapter 5: Punitive Gender Reassignment as a Posthuman Punishment ............................ 166 Chapter 6: Conclusion: Science Fiction and Prison Abolition ............................................ 202 Acknowledgements Writing is never a solitary act, and I would like to acknowledge the communities that supported the completion of this dissertation. I would like to thank my teachers at Western Washington University, who saw the potential for a first-generation student to succeed in academia: Kathleen Saunders, Mary Cornish, Dawn Dietrich, and Lysa Rivera. At University of Washington, my colleagues at Odegaard Writing and Research Center were indispensable. Thank you to those who helped me make sense of my early drafts, and provided a home on campus: Jenny Halpin, Kirin Wachter-Grene, Ben Hole, Allie Draper, and Ron Keller. I would also like to thank those I met through the anti-budget cuts movement: Shon Meckfessel, Caitlin Palo, Chris Patterson, Jennifer Fletcher, Mike Hodges, Andre Ortega, Cindy Gorn, and Jacob Greenberg. You supported me in making sure I continued to make progress towards my degree during the height of the anti-budget cuts and Occupy movements. I would like to thank Katherine Applegate and Michael Grant, for inaugurating my commitment for science fiction. I would like to thank my Facebook crowd-source, on call 24/7 to answer all of my questions about writing and theory, no matter how esoteric. I would like to thank my reading committee, Gillian Harkins and Rebecca Aanderud, for backing an out-of-the-box project. Most of all, I would like to thank my committee chair, Tom Foster, who saw the potential of my project when he plucked it from the pile of hundreds of graduate school applications. Most of all, I would like to thank my family, who supported me through what otherwise would have been an isolating and lonely time. My parents: Liz and Craig Wetzel, my brother Logan Wetzel, my aunts Patti Wiegard and Terri Knudsten, and my grandfather Jack Wiegard. I would like to honor my family members who did not make it to see this day: my grandmother Donna Wiegard and my aunt Traci Wiegard. Lastly, I would like to thank my partner, Lambert Rochfort, bore the pain of this project right alongside me. He read every draft, talked me through every period of self-doubt, and was the catalyst in the completion of this project. I would not have succeeded without him. 1 Chapter 1: Introduction: Using Science Fiction to Reconsider the Function of Prisons Instead of inflicting these horrible punishments, it would be far more to the point to provide everyone with some means of livelihood, so that nobody's under the frightful necessity of becoming first a thief and then a corpse. — Sir Thomas More, Utopia A real subjection is born mechanically from a fictitious relation. —Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish (202) Introduction: but what would you do with the criminals? Science fiction (SF) authors are in the business of imagining alternative worlds, arguably better, worse, or just different than our own. According to Joanna Russ, these worlds pair the “What If” question with the “Serious Explanation” of how the what-if functions came to be. As Russ paraphrases Samuel Delany, the serious explanation must not “offend against what is known to be known” (144). SF is known for being “about” the future. Yet, few SF authors would argue that they are predicting the future. Then, SF is not so much about future worlds as it is about the present. Ursula K. Le Guin, in her often-cited introduction to her deeply groundbreaking novel The Left Hand of Darkness, wrote in 1976 that “Science fiction is not predictive; it is descriptive,” and that SF, like all fiction, is a metaphor. What distinguishes SF from other fiction is that the metaphors are space travel, alternative societies, and the future in order to make a social commentary about the present. (Why? Well, if it were so simple, Le Guin notes she would not have needed to write The Left Hand of Darkness.) One description of SF, as author and editor Judith Merrill notes, is what we might call the human condition: “stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, 2 hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, of ‘reality’.” (Jakubrowski and Edwards 257). For Cory Doctorow, a twenty-first century SF author who also asserts he is not predicting the future, SF gives us the means to discuss the future in the present: “But the really interesting thing is how science fiction does its best tricks: through creating the narrative vocabularies by which futures can be debated, discussed, adopted, or discarded” (Doctorow “A Vocabulary for Speaking about the Future”). SF examines a widely diverse range of “what if” questions, ranging from utopian and dystopian societies to speculative technologies like faster-than-light space travel. What if socialists waged a peaceful revolution—how would it happen, and what would the society that follows look like? What if the Christian right overthrew the US government—what would life be like for women, people of color, and queer people? What if teleportation were the next step in human evolution? What if humans colonized the solar system, or reached distant stars with faster-than-light space travel? Such premises are familiar to voracious and even casual readers and viewers of SF. Darko Suvin, a father of SF literary criticism, calls the SF premise the novum, or new thing: the technological gadget or alternative society that signifies we are reading (or watching) science fiction. As Suvin notes, SF must deal with the social implications of the novum. Such social implications explored in science fiction might be systems of governance, education, health care, and notably: prisons and punishment. One of the questions most commonly asked by SF, implicitly or explicitly, is, “In a world with X, what would you do with the criminals?”, with “X” being the novum. Many SF texts depict various forms of incarceration. This may be because penitentiaries, since their advent some three centuries ago, have become timeless and taken-for-granted in the popular imaginary; it 3 is difficult to imagine a society without them, even in science fiction. (Though not impossible—SF is one of the few places in the popular imaginary where we can think about radical alternatives to prisons, as I discuss in my conclusion.) SF asks, “What would you do with the prisoners?” in distant solar systems where humans have been overthrown by machines, such as the 2003-2010 television series Battlestar Galactica. Or, how would you incarcerate criminals when most humans can teleport, as Alfred Bester examines in his novel The Stars My Destination. Or, as in Charles Stross’s novel Glasshouse, technology has cured death and bodies can be changed as easily as clothing? In these examples, changes to what we know as incarceration are a secondary effect to the novum. In other SF, the prison itself is the novum. In George Zebrowski’s Brute Orbits, it is sealed-off and abandoned prisons within hollowed asteroids.