Unsavory Patterns in Contemporary Science Fiction

It's me, hi / I'm the problem, it's me

 

1.

We lay our scene in an all-powerful empire of the far future. (We will soon understand that the empire, founded on and sustained by slavery, torture, mass murder, and stranger, even more heinous crimes, is irredeemably evil.) A longtime soldier of the empire embarks on a journey that will bring her into contact with a quasi-human outsider and various other plucky misfits, and their efforts merely to survive will eventually snowball, over the course of a trilogy of novels, into a plot to overthrow the empire.

Is it N.K. Jemisin's Broken Earth trilogy? Is it Yoon Ha Lee's Machineries of Empire? Is it Ann Leckie's Imperial Radch? That's right: It's all three. (Well, okay, in the latter case, it's the quasi-human outsider who's the main character and who takes the disillusioned human soldier under her wing, but close enough.)

I liked all of these series, to be clear, enough to have read all nine books. There's a lot to enjoy in them. But I didn't love them. Each has its particular minor flaws, but the one flaw I can't get past in any of them is the one they all share: that overarching plot, which makes two changes (one trivial, one quite ugly) to a hoary old cliché.

The foundation is Star Wars, a trad hero's-journey tale that's been recapitulated a zillion times and remains part of the bedrock of young-adult science fiction and fantasy. (The Hunger Games and Red Rising are two popular YA series that follow this formula closely; there are myriad others I'm less familiar with.) Distancing the work from its YA cousins, the second of the two changes makes the conclusion more ambiguous. Instead of a tidy victory for the rebels, replacing the evil empire with its good twin, we get a state of uncertainty: civil war in Lee, civil war interrupted by uneasy peace in Leckie, and a post-apocalyptic tabula rasa in Jemisin.

The bigger change appears right at the start: The authors swap out their protagonist. Instead of an innocent young person from the imperial periphery, we follow a soldier who has been a more-or-less loyal servant of the empire for much of her life.

Now, all three authors are American. (Yes, the author is still dead, but context matters. All three series are American.) All three series debuted during the second Obama administration, when the American far right was ascendant; Lee and Jemisin concluded their trilogies under Trump, when an outright fascist future for the country suddenly seemed possible. All three authors are liberals, and all three bring a liberal lens to their work. Lee in particular concerns himself with the fate of liberal democracy, imagining it to be a forbidden idea in the distant, hyper-fascist future, and society's last and best hope for reform. Leckie doesn't bring democracy to the Radch, but does imagine liberal reforms: pacifism, an end to body-snatching technoslavery, etc. Jemisin's entire world is an implicit critique of extractive capitalism and indifference to environmental concerns.

Here's why that context matters, and why the change in protagonist is significant: Each book asks us to identify with a servant of empire, somebody spiritually if not literally situated in the imperial core, somebody deeply implicated (regardless of what misgivings they have) in the empire's crimes. Rather than an innocent victim from the periphery (a farm boy, a miner), we now have a protagonist who is at best a victim turned perpetrator. If we are Americans, and college-educated Americans at that—which a large, perhaps predominant part of the readership are, yours truly included—this act of identification isn't much of a stretch. We do live in a vast, cruel empire founded on slavery and genocide and sustained by brutal warfare, economic terrorism, and the despoilment of the planet. We are deeply implicated in the empire's crimes. The fantasy of tearing down the empire, or a corner of the empire, and beginning to build a better world is a powerful one.

Unfortunately, these stories have no idea what a better world than ours looks like; they can only imagine a worse one. In each far-future setting, the steps the protagonists take toward a nebulously better world are merely steps back toward 21st-century American liberalism. An end to technoslavery and ritual torture, an end to wars of blatant territorial expansion, the restoration of representative democracy, an end to wildly irresponsible geoengineering. Not only do they offer us nothing we don't, in principle, already have, but the means by which they imagine achieving this non-progress are inaccessible, impractical, or unacceptable for us: personal access to the elite of society and the liberal application of instrumental violence.

Few of us are acquainted with senators (or anyone of consequence). And sure, violence is fun in stories (make-believe violence is this blog's bread and butter, in fact), and violence sometimes gets things done in real life, too—I'm not a proponent of total nonviolence as a political strategy—but, at this juncture in American history, it can accomplish little more than gratifying and fattening the security apparatus and its far-right paramilitary adjuncts.

The analogy from our reality to a more luridly, baroquely evil one inadvertently permits us, even encourages us, to become complacent about conditions in our own society. If we lived in this world, if things were this bad, we would, like our plucky heroes, stand up and fight. But it's not that bad, so we don't have to. (Yet. Vote Blue!) Sure, we've got concentration camps at the border and a million people imprisoned without trial and we're aiding and abetting a couple of genocides overseas, but at least we're not literally torturing children in perpetuity to power our magical technology. (Which reminds me: Do we have time to delve into this atrocity? Alas, we do not. Some other time.)

These stories offer no solutions to our problems and no tools more subtle than a bomb. Instead, they lull us into quietism, assuring us that hey, things could always be a whole lot worse.

 

2.

This one's so ubiquitous that it features, incidentally, in two of the three trilogies discussed above (Lee and Leckie), and so boring that I don't have much to say about it. Everybody's thinking about “artificial intelligence” these days, yet nobody can imagine anything other than a humanoid robot. It's robots all the way down. Occasionally scary killer robots (Ex Machina, M3GAN) but usually loveable, just-like-us robots whom society unfairly discriminates against but our heroes recognize as equals (the aforementioned novels, Becky Chambers' Wayfarers series, The Creator—one of the worst works of science fiction I've ever encountered—Chappie, the list goes on).

We still have I, Robot. We have Blade Runner. We have Data from Star Trek. We have Neuromancer, for God's sake, which did more interesting things with AI four decades ago than anybody seems capable of today. We don't need a thousand new variations on robots, replicants, or androids, especially if they have absolutely nothing interesting to say and mostly serve as confusing, hamfisted metaphors for human prejudice. We don't need more robotic serial killers, either. (And we sure as shit don't need more Skynets.)

Everybody please just shut up about AI until we have something more interesting to say than “it's scary” or “we should be nice to it.” Thanks!