Science Fiction, New Space Opera, and Neoliberal Globalism: Nostalgia for Infinity

New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Science Fiction,

New Space Opera,

and Neoliberal Globalism

New Dimensions in Science Fiction

Series Editors

Professor Pawel Frelik

Maria Curie-Sklodowska University

Professor Patrick B. Sharp

California State University, Los Angeles

Editorial Board

Dr. Grace Dillon

Portland State University

Dr. Tanya Krzywinska

Falmouth University

Dr. Isiah Lavender III

Louisiana State University

Prof. Roger Luckhurst

Birkbeck University of London

Dr. John Rieder

University of Hawaii

Science Fiction,

New Space Opera,

and Neoliberal Globalism

Nostalgia for Infinity

Jerome Winter

UNIVERSITY OF WALES PRESS

2016

© Jerome Winter, 2016

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any material form [including photocopying or storing it in any medium by electronic means and whether or not transiently or incidentally to some other use of this publication] without the written permission of the copyright owner except in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. Applications for the copyright owner’s written permission to reproduce any part of this publication should be addressed to the University of Wales Press, 10 Columbus Walk, Brigantine Place, Cardiff CF10 4UP.

The publishers have generously granted permission for use of quotations from the following copyrighted works: Shismatrix, courtesy of Writer’s House, LLC; Cyteen by C.J. Cherryh courtesy of Hachette Book Group and Curtis Brown Ltd.; Consider Phlebas, Excession, Matter, The Player of Games, Surface Detail, Use of Weapons by lain Banks courtesy of Hachette Book Group; Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson courtesy of Hachette Book Group; and Light, Nova, and Empty Space by M. John Harrison courtesy of The Orion Publishing Group, London.

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British Library CIP Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN     978-1-78316-944-3

elSBN   978-1-78316-946-7

The right of Jerome Winter to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 79 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Cover image: © istock.com/gremlin

Series Editors’ Preface

Science fiction (SF) is a global storytelling form of techno-scientific modernity which conveys distinct experiences with science, technology and society to a wide range of readers across centuries, continents and cultures. The New Dimensions in Science Fiction series aims to capture the dynamic, worldwide and media-spanning dimensions of SF storytelling and criticism by providing a venue for scholars from multiple disciplines to explore their ideas on the relations of science and society as expressed in SF.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1    The Neoliberal Masters of the Universe: The Origin of New Space Opera in Samuel R. Delany’s Nova and M. John Harrison’s Centauri Device and Kefahuchi Tract Trilogy

2    ‘Moments in the Fall’: Neoliberal Globalism and Utopian Socialist Desire in Ken MacLeod’s ‘Fall Revolution’ Quartet and lain M. Banks’s ‘Culture’ Series

3    Global Feminism and Neoliberal Crisis in Gwyneth Jones’s ‘Aleutian Trilogy’

4    ‘Archipelagoes of Stars’: Caribbean Cosmopolitics in Postcolonial SF

Works cited

Notes

Acknowledgements

I would Like to acknowledge the irredeemable debt I owe to my PhD dissertation committee members at the University of California, Riverside: Sherryl Vint, Rob Latham, Weihsin Gui and Steven Axelrod, under whose dedicated guidance and with whose generous support I was shepherded towards achieving all the virtues of this book and, needless to say, they are responsible for none of its flaws. Moreover, the journal Extrapolations published an earlier version of a portion of this book’s second chapter in their December 2014 issue. I would like to thank the editorial team at Extrapolations for their copious feedback and faith in the project and, in addition, the editors at Science Fiction Studies for their excellent feedback on related articles and reviews.

Furthermore, I 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 this venue, I had the opportunity to interview professional writers in the SF field – Norman Spinrad, Michael Moorcock, Alastair Reynolds and Ken MacLeod – who were all magnanimous with their precious time. My appreciation goes out as well to Nalo Hopkinson for her discussion of Salt Roads with the University of California, Riverside SF Club, and to Tobias Buckell for thoughtfully answering questions during a reading courtesy of Hopkinson’s undergraduate science-fiction course. Lastly, I cannot explain the depths of my greatest appreciation for my mother and father, Pam and Warren Quattlebaum, as well as my better half, Melinda Winter.

Introduction

‘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, The 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 65 million years old. Here Harrison plugs into and puts a distinctive twist on the trope of salvaging ancient, hyper-advanced alien technology whose antecedents, in genre Science Fiction (SF), can be glimpsed as far back as the decaying Martian civilisations in the re-serialised 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 lain 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 point, incubated perhaps by 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 (2007–2016), the SyFy Channel show based on James S.A. Corey’s Expanse series (2015–2016), the nostalgic summer hit of Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy (2014) and the first instalment in the sequel Star Wars trilogy (2015).

Only in Harrison’s narrative, however, does the far-future recovery of ancient alien artifacts date 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 neoliberal 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 SF he helped both to birth and to self-sabotage roughly 30 years prior. In his canny foray into the resurgent terrain of New Space Opera, Harrison taps again into a curious, rich vein of popular literary allegory whereby the science-fictionality of our contemporary neoliberal moment – the postcolonial, technocultural and capitalist matrix that shapes modern globalised history as much as the ancient alien artifact of its specific genre material – has to be strangely uncovered from an imagined far future only to be reflected back to a disbelieving present-day audience.

After all, Harrison is a pivotal figure in what is called the New Space Opera, a movement characterised by its sophisticated reharnessing of conventional pulp-era trappings: faster-than-light starships, future wars, Byzantine intergalactic diplomacy, doomsday devices and dramatic encounters with alien planets and species. Prior to the emergence of the New Space Opera, this subgenre had long been in disrepute within the field not only for its aesthetic failings but also for its ideological tendencies: its quasi-fascistic fascination with supermen and super weapons, its abiding racism, sexism and class bigotry, as well as its juvenile wish-fulfilment fantasy. In the post-war period, writers such as Jack Vance, Alfred Bester or Samuel R. Delany would occasionally produce space operas that conveyed a decadent energy and retro pleasure, but it was not until the late 1980s and especially the 1990s and 2000s that coordinated attempts were made – in the work not only of Harrison but also lain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Paul J. McAuley, M. John Harrison, Alastair Reynolds, Gwyneth Jones and Tobias Buckell, among many others – to systematically rehabilitate the ideological presumptions of space opera.

In addition to echoing classic pulp aesthetics – outsized scale and frenetic action, cosmic magnitudes and adrenaline-fuelled rush – New Space Opera, as Gary K. Wolfe and Russel Letson highlighted in a special 2003 issue on the subject in Locus magazine, conveys its fierce political stances through impressive exhibitions of Literary-aesthetic virtuosity. New Space Opera intricately constructs psychologically complex, unsympathetic protagonists, sophisticated economic and social analyses, information overload appropriate to a world saturated by digital and electronic technologies, more or less believable technoscience, the display of virtuosic literary techniques, and an obsession with interstellar culture clash (Wolfe and Letson 40). An integral element of the New Space Opera aesthetic and ideological agenda, therefore, is illustrated by Harrison’s allusion in the future history of the ‘Kefahuchi Tract’ trilogy to the militarised realpolitik of neoliberal regimes. This book views this revisionist take on a genre-derived future history as exemplary of a broader tendency of New Space Opera to allegorise a specific vanguard cultural politics evolving in tandem with a specific new system of global capitalism.

The epoch-defining birth of neoliberalism most often traces back in critical estimations to the Bretton Woods conference of July 1944, but the seedbed of neoliberalism was in fact laid in the preceding interwar decades. The international agreement of Bretton Woods addressed a perceived need to prevent another Great Depression and to rebuild Europe in the post-war period. Due to the status of the United States as preeminent geopolitical superpower – the US controlled 70 per cent of the world’s financial assets and a majority of its productive capacity (Kiely 2005: 50) – the agreement attempted to facilitate loans to Europe in the vein of those later initiated by the World Bank, through pegging the dollar as the standard international currency for exchange. The International Monetary Fund (IMF), and eventually the World Bank, facilitated the interest-bearing loans that assisted the resulting postwar boom. Explosive industrial growth and technological advancement in the US hinged significantly on international trade, foreign direct investment and imports. Hence, the geopolitical dynamics of the Cold War and the resulting global economic inequality were bound up with American military Keynesianism – the rapid expansion in defence spending despite budget short-falls – as well as the influx of liquidity around the ostensibly pro-capitalist world in response to the rivalling global power of the Soviet Union.

The underdeveloped world of the global South also experienced growth, in part due to social planning and protective tariffs, such that President Truman, in the traditional anti-colonialist rhetoric of United States political discourse, could ideologically claim the old imperialism’ (quoted in Silver and Slater 2003: 208) was over. Yet the uneven development and dependency of the global South was often actively sustained through a neo-imperial international division of labour that inhumanly exploited a cheap, disempowered source of industrial labour. Subsequently, the economic indicators of both the global South and North stumbled when the expansion of capitalist accumulation of the post-war period from 1945 to 1969 climaxed in a global economic crisis from which the world has yet to recover. Some of the economic symptoms of this crisis include slowed growth, inflation and a devalued dollar, a rising deficit and increasing unemployment.

Indeed, critics of neoliberalism contend that the Nixon administration’s decision to end the dollar-gold convertibility in 1971 led not to the desired strengthening of US geopolitical hegemony for which neo-liberal advocates of floating exchange rates, such as Friedrich Hayek or Milton Friedman, tirelessly advocated. Through the expected growth in international trade, the end of the Bretton Woods agreement provoked anxiety over a possible dollar free-fall as reeling Americans witnessed the tidal shift from the nation’s longstanding status as one of the world’s largest creditors to one of the world’s largest debtors. The subsequent institution of neoliberal Reaganomics stateside – trickle-down tax cuts for the wealthy, deficit spending on Cold War military agendas, the monetarist ratcheting up of interest rates, the privatisation and deregulation of everything from water and electricity to public-housing and waste-management, parks, schools and roads – contributed to plummeting wages and swelling unemployment on the domestic front. Moreover, the worldwide recession of the early 1980s accelerated a debt crisis in developing nations that transformed the IMF and World Bank into re-galvanised agencies that could police debtor economies through monetarist policies in an effort to demand balance-of-payment on defaulted loans and achieve global equilibrium between imports and exports, all under the banner of laissez-faire profit-seeking and small government (Kiely 2005: 72). Susan George decries that these neoliberal policies of the IMF and the World Bank amounted to a straightjacketing neo-imperial directive: ‘thanks to the debt crisis and the mechanism of conditionality, [the IMF] has moved from balance of payment support to being quasi-universal dictator of so-called ‘sound’ economic policies, meaning, of course, neoliberal ones’ (George 2000: 32).

Neoliberalism can also be viewed as the backlash of ‘market fundamentalism’ in response to the 1969–73 crisis. As discussed in the individual chapters of this book, historical-materialist theorists such as William Tabb, Manuel Castells and David Harvey disparately analyse neoliberalism as the consolidation of historical patterns of class domination. The sweeping policy initiatives of Margaret Thatcher in the UK, Ronald Reagan in the US, Helmut Kohl in Germany and Deng Xiaoping in China, severely weakened working-class institutions and trade unions, democratic governmental structures, and economic stability through risky financial speculation. This increased the volatility of global markets and the vulnerability of workers exacerbated the world-system divide. Beyond the policy framework of deregulation and privatisation, neoliberalism evinces a globally oriented ideology and cultural politics or what Manfred Steger terms a ‘globalism’. This book outlines the core ideas of neoliberal globalism to be the propagation of the misnomer ‘free’ market under the banner of promoting self-reliance, individualism, competition, consumerism and efficiency.

Framing New Space Opera within this neoliberal context, this book lifts its subtitle Nostalgia for Infinity from a generation starship in Alastair Reynolds’s ‘Revelation Space’ sequence of exemplary New Space Opera that began with his debut novel, Revelation Space (2000] and concluded with the seventh book in the series Galactic North (2006). For the purposes of this book, the pun on infinity in the subtitle refers to both the staggering, red-shifting depths of space and time in the scientifically observable cosmos and the endless, though crisis-prone, amassing of infinite capital accumulation and class hegemony in the profit-driven dynamics of capitalism. Reynolds’s star-ship Nostalgia for Infinity, which recurs throughout the series, has supermassive, sublime scale used to freight hundreds of thousands of passengers. In Reynolds’s horrific, techno-noir take on space-opera staples though, the generation starship is invaded and haunted by artificial intelligences, uploaded minds and ancient alien viruses, manned only by a skeleton crew of highly modified cyborgs numbering in the single digits. The second novel of the series, Chasm City (2001), for instance, begins with a caveat-emptor document informing the newly arriving space traveller, who voyages over interstellar distances, that due to time dilation and the disaster of a technology-induced ‘melding plague’ what was once the glorious belle époque of the Glitter Band has descended into a crisis-afflicted chaos referred to now as the Rust Belt. The buoyant optimism and vast immensity of traditional space operas have been deflated and downsized into a post-imperial melancholia, living in the shadow of its former boisterous glory.¹

This post-imperial melancholy found in New Space Opera is important to note in part because of the contrastingly exuberant affect of earlier space-opera pulps. As seen in this Introduction’s epigraph from Jack Williamson, pulp-era space opera often uses narrative frames that situate their future-oriented temporalities as a retrospective looking backward at inevitable future histories as their readers simultaneously rush forward headlong into these future speculations. The backward gaze of pulp retrofuturism – updated with the cyber-, nano- and biotech-futurisms of New Space Opera – adds an involute layer of reflexivity to these fantastic, far-future speculations. New Space Opera still invests in technological and scientific projections of future histories, the legacy of the original space operas, but New Space Opera now also reflects self-consciously and critically on the retrofuturistic pulp cliches of traditional space-opera superscience, technological worship and folk futurism. This critical reinvention of the subgenre accords with Istvan Csiscery-Ronay, Jr’s contention that the hopeful imagined predictions of future histories in science fiction depend on present-situated anxieties and concerns such that the genre’s ‘gradual crystallization and respect for the faculty of forward-looking in the dialectic of experience [...] enabled sf to emerge in the first place’ (Csicsery-Ronay 2008: 79). Additionally, New Space Opera has the heightened vantage of critically reminiscing on the blinkered pitfalls and deluded promises of earlier generations of future histories leaping forward often enthusiastically but also often recklessly. Hence New Space Opera, in its knowing recuperation of heightened futuristic genre conventions and exaggerated pitches of campy speculative excitement – and as part of the future-oriented trajectory of techno-culture more generally – underscores its nostalgia for future infinity even as it negotiates the foreclosure of such a futurity by the catastrophe of contemporary history.

In Empty Space (2012), the third book in the ‘Kefahuchi Tract’ trilogy, M. John Harrison glosses Walter Benjamin’s famous angel of history to criticise the ruthless technological Utopian drive of his future history: ‘The Angel of History may look backwards, but that pose will make no difference to the storm that blows into the future. No wonder it has such a surprised expression’ (155). According to Benjamin’s ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ (1940) recall that Paul Klee’s painting suggests to the critical materialist that history hinges on a dialectic between progress and nostalgia, imprisonment in the golden status quo of yesteryear or escape from the brutal reality of systemic crisis, injustice and inequality. This allusion draws on Benjamin’s previous work beginning with The Origin of German Tragic Drama (1928) and its development of a specifically aesthetic theory of allegory – baroque, indeterminate, symbolic – based on the German Trauerspiei plays. Benjamin later adapts this theory of allegory to analyse the bourgeois commodity fetishism and technology-driven high capitalism of modernity itself in his longer work The Arcades Project (1929–40). For Benjamin, ‘homogenous empty time’ invokes what Harrison views as inexorable here: namely, the diverse constellation of progressive paradigms constructed by the linear, future-oriented temporality of the modern clock and the calendar. Homogenous empty time, for Benjamin, entails that such a naive, technocratic faith in progress may evacuate the messianic presentism of a religio-medieval, pre-modern sense of eternal recurrence and here-and-now eschatology.

With reference to the subgenre trope of excavating ancient remains mentioned at the beginning of this introduction – ubiquitous to New Space Opera and foregrounded in Harrison’s ‘Kefahuchi Tract’ trilogy and Reynolds’s ‘Revelation Space’ series – we might contend that the commodifying drive of popular culture recycles the alien, hyper-advanced technological ruins and fragments of space opera with the consistency of a hellish eternal return. Similarly, Svetla Boym diagnoses ‘techno-nostalgia’ as a paradoxical complacency that perpetuates reactionary cultural politics under the aegis of radical technological change (Boym 2001: 35). This book avers that the nostalgic neoliberal ideologies that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera ventriloquise, transcode and critique involve the championing of the ultimate profit-driven freedom of the individual and the infinite mobility of capital at the expense of slashed governmental programmes and services, state-run, so-called ‘protectionist’ policies and institutions putatively curbing unregulated free-market expansion. Politically sophisticated New Space Opera as an evolving subgenre reanimates its pulp ancestry with a critical-progressive response to hegemony that stresses what Bruce Sterling calls the ‘mind-blasting vistas’ and ‘vertigos of acceleration’ (Sterling 1985: 238) emanating from the seemingly unstoppable disruptions of technocultural innovation.

The Reinvention of Space Opera

By the time neoliberal globalism became a hegemonic ideology of the twentieth century, space opera Likewise became one of the predominant subgenres of commercial science fiction, regularly winning, for instance, the Hugo Award for Best Novel chosen by the World Science Fiction Society every year. Prior to the emergence of New Space Opera – which might, excluding notable precursors discussed below, loosely be considered to begin in earnest in the late 1980s with lain M. Banks’s Culture series – traditional space opera emerged in conjunction with the global technoculture of the current neoliberal moment. Yet even though, as I argue, neoliberalism helps to define New Space Opera, it must be said that New Space Opera is not itself free from a predictable array of definitional difficulties, and the nebulous conceptualisation of the subgenre did not emerge in widespread usage within the broad community of SF producers and consumers until at least the mid-to-late 1990s (for a historicising of the term, see Kincaid [2009], ‘Fiction Since 1992’).

When deploying the term New Space Opera, it is perhaps, then, wisest to remember what David Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer in The Space Opera Renaissance (2006) anthology argue. In their eclectic anthology, Hartwell and Cramer make the case that the genre taxonomy of New Space Opera, after all, has always been broadly defined: There is no one thing that is the New Space Opera’ (Hartwell and Cramer 18; emphasis in original). One early return to pulp-era space opera that anticipates New Space Opera, for example, was a New-Wave intervention attempted by Brian Aldiss in the introductions to Space Opera (1974) and the two volumes of Galactic Empires (1976). In The Trillion Year Spree (1973), Aldiss takes to task Edgar Rice Burroughs – a pulp-era writer of a close subgeneric cousin to the space opera, i.e. planetary romances’, such as the ‘Barsoom’ series set on Mars – for his ‘welter of racial fantasy’ (Aldiss 1976: 165), primitivist xenophobia, and the barely concealed misogyny of depicting native women whose policed sexuality Burroughs seems to both ‘relish and deplore’ (Aldiss 166). This ambivalence leads Aldiss to the critical reappraisal, in his introduction to Space Opera, that the only decadent aesthetic value available in recovering this space opera is its pulpy romantic displacement, the ‘heady escapist stuff, that allows its reprehensible, naive ideological underpinnings to ‘burst in a voluptuous vacuum’ (Aldiss xii). Moreover, Hartwell and Cramer show that in response to New-Wave salvos of this kind by the likes of Aldiss, J.G. Ballard, Michael Moorcock and M. John Harrison, in combination with both the arch stylisation and simultaneous fierce rejection of space opera in their fiction, that Golden Age icon Lester Del Rey, in his review columns to Analog, began subsequently to ‘reverse the polarity’ (2006: 16) and promote an earnest, no-nonsense shift back to the pulp-era terrain of space-opera innovators such as Leigh Brackett and Isaac Asimov.

Academic critical opinion has also oscillated in its interrogation of space opera as a respectable or satisfying literary form. In Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Darko Suvin summarily dismisses all space operas given that they can easily ‘be translated back into the Social Darwinism of the Westerns and similar adventure-tales by substituting colts for ray-guns and Indians for slimy monsters of Betelgeuse’ (82). With such an absolute prescription, Suvin signals his own gatekeeping intervention in the critical debate over the geriatric genre of pulp space opera and its inveterate contemporary offshoots and influences that have never showed signs of disappearing. Following Aldiss’s premature post-mortem, the debate alternated between academic critics who essentially concurred with Suvin and lambasted space opera as at best a guilty pleasure of ‘unadulterated hokum’ (Westfahl 1994: 182) to critics who attempted to reclaim the subgenre into something akin to a metaphysical mode of high art (Monk 1992: 300). David Pringle strikes perhaps the happiest medium by acknowledging the bigness of space opera as at times tantamount to vile technocratic propaganda for what Bruce Franklin tracks as the science-fictionalised nature of the military-industrial complex; but Pringle maintains,