Science fiction is pertinent, and it is political. John Gray’s essay “War of the words“, published by the New Statesman this week, is a magnificent and lyrical attempt to rehabilitate science and speculative fiction within the western canon.
It is gratifying that Gray has finally noticed what decades’ worth of critics, authors and judges have failed to recognise: that science and speculative fiction is a vibrant and important school of writing whose observations on politics and the human condition “enable us to see more clearly the elusive actualities”. This particularly the case in Britain, which has long produced the best science fiction in the world, all of which has been roundly snubbed by the bourgeois literary establishment.
Gray misses the mark, however, in assuming that western culture’s loss of humanist principles means that science fiction is “no longer a viable form”. On the contrary — contemporary science fiction boasts exciting novelists like Ken MacLeod, Gwyneth Jones, Geoff Ryman, Cathrynne M Valente, China Miéville and Charles Stross, whose works cluster at the cutting edge of modernity. It is, perhaps, a certain poverty in Gray’s own humanism that restricts his reading of science and speculative fiction to such a narrow field of writers.
Reading Gray’s essay put me in mind of studying English at university, where learned tutors would open our minds to dazzling new strata of language and ideas before presenting us with a reading list entirely composed of books by dead white males from the early 20th century.
Gray comments that Miéville’s astonishing The City and The City makes readers “realise how much of human life — your own and that of others — passes by unseen”. Unfortunately, what “passes by unseen” in Gray’s attempt to reappropriate science fiction to the mainstream is approximately a century’s worth of important speculative writing by women and people of colour.
Gray’s article lists not a single woman writer, nor any writer of colour — nor, indeed, any living writers from the 21st-century save Miéville. It is particularly startling that, in his digest of 20th-century dystopian fiction, he neglects to mention Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, an near-future novel set in a brutal patriarchal theocracy, alongside Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Huxley’s Brave New World.
“I am really tired of hearing men discuss the field as if there are no women writers,” says Farah Mendlesohn, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. “There is not a single decade of science fiction in the 20th century in which there were no women authors. What about Katherine Burdekin’s anti-fascist dystopia, Suzy McKee Charnas’s challenges to the patriarchy, or Joanna Russ’s fierce critiques of liberal politics?”
Women’s liberation has always been, in Gray’s words, an “impulse of world transformation”. Imagining alternative futures in order to create a potentiality of action has been particularly important for women writers and writers of colour seeking to articulate social oppression. Miéville, whose work Gray extensively and deservedly celebrates, said last week that “speculative fiction is about radical moments of estrangement, and about exploring potentiality. It’s not surprising that speculative fiction written by people at the sharp end of modernity, whether that’s women or people of colour, will reflect especially powerfully on patterns of privilege.”
Like radical politics, science fiction seeks to disturb — and what could be more disturbing than a vision of a world where gender and sexuality are differently constructed? Even the most populist science fiction engages playfully with gender: consider Russell T Davies’s relaunch of Doctor Who in 2005 which, along with scary monsters, intergalactic battles and epic quantities of BBC slime, posited the notion that, in the future, being gay or bisexual might not be any sort of social impediment.
At its most powerful, science and speculative fiction seeks to delocalise and make strange the structures of everyday existence. In so doing, it can’t help but replicate the strategies of radical politics and identity politics. Gray’s assessment of the importance of science fiction is welcome, but his attempt to reconcile the genre with a certain form of redactive literary liberalism was always destined to fall short.
Like feminism, there is something inherently weird about science fiction — and, whether we like it or not, it cannot be rehabilitated.
Writing Women’s Worlds: a reading list by Farah Mendlesohn and China Miéville
- Margaret Atwood — The Handmaid’s Tale (the classic feminist dystopia, exploring women’s lives under totalitarian theocracy. Winner of the first Arthur C Clarke award)
- Kirsten Bakis — Lives of the Monster Dogs (a sequel to The Island of Dr Moreau, winner of the Orange Prize)
- Katherine Burdekin (as Murray Constantine) — Swastika Night, 1937 (a dystopian vision of Europe under the Third Reich, written before the outbreak of WWII)
- Octavia E Butler — Dawn (Xenogenesis trilogy)
- Suzy McKee Charnas — Walk to the End of the World
- Nalo Hopkinson — Brown Girl in the Ring
- Gwyneth Jones — Bold As Love
- Ursula Le Guin — The Disposessed and Left Hand of Darkness (the authors couldn’t bring themselves to choose just one Le Guin)
- Judith Merril (as editor) — England Swings SF, 1968
- Tricia O’Sullivan — Maul
- Joanna Russ — The Female Man and How to Suppress Women’s Writing
- Alice Sheldon (as James Tiptree Jr) — Her Smoke Rose Up Forever
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