Other states, other lives, other souls

Since high school I have always read science fiction. I was partial to the short stories by scientists like Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Arthur C. Clarke.  I often read them while soaking for hours in a warm bath, in between doing assigned reading for school.  Perhaps it helped me to float away into other worlds.  I never liked monster movies or horror.  I was unable to keep from feeling afraid.  A lot of people like to feel afraid, but I don’t.  There are too many real things to be fearful of. Why manufacture them?

The main reason I started reading sci-fi was to imagine or learn more about the universe I looked up to most. The ancients did the same thing, but without technology or the scientific method, they had to create myths. The sci-fi I read back in high school was always written by men.  In the 50’s women were never pictured as scientists, except for Marie Curry.  And they were certainly not astrophysicists. Thus I never imagined myself as a scientist either, even though I always got A’s in math, even calculus, in high school. No teacher ever suggested I might make a good scientist. Oh, well; patriarchal water over the educational dam. I indulged my scientific interest through sci-fi. Fast forward to the 2020s and you would think by listening to NPR that only women are scientists now.  No matter the scientific issue and special expertise required, they always find a woman.  Astrophysics? Paleontology? Geophysics? Virology?  We can do it!!!

When I lost my religion in college and became an agnostic in the 60’s, I became even more interested in what lies beyond. As an undergraduate, however, I was more immersed in the present (no bathwater pun intended). The civil rights movement became the anti-Vietnam war movement, became the Berkeley free speech movement. By 1969 I had graduated college and was working part time as a secretary in a psychological research institute.  My boss was a female PhD named Helen Astin. She was already a unicorn because I don’t remember having a single female professor at Stanford during my undergraduate years.  She gave me two bits of advice that were transformative. She encouraged me to go to graduate school, which I hadn’t considered, and she encouraged me to join the National Organization of Women. I lost track of her but I see now that she left quite a legacy. Instead of joining NOW, which was too mainstream for me, I joined up with the more radical Women’s Liberation Movement. My favorite chant from the period was “Women’s Liberation’s gonna take your mama, gonna take your daughter, gonna take your girlfriend!!”

But back to the future: I have traveled since college with three sci-fi writers whose new points of view have deepened my love of the genre. In 1969 a new sci-fi writer burst onto the scene with her first science fiction novel: The Left Hand of Darkness, by Ursula K. Le Guin.  Even now, more than 50 years since publication and three years since her death, Left Hand of Darkness shows a different set of future possibilities and challenges made possible by changing the point of view of the writer. Le Guin explored beyond the binary limits of gender by inventing an alien race on the planet Gethen. Gethenians were notable because they were androgynous, neither man not woman, except at certain times, when procreation was necessary.  They also did not have armies because there were no wars on the planet.

These were features that suggested interest in a different future that could affect women positively. Yet, even these differences in Le Guin’s future cause the book’s Envoy character from a planetary grouping with traditional binary genders to distrust his key Gethenian ally, equating androgyny with duplicity. Rather than a cultural and military war, that often results from alien contact in much of sci-fi, the plot moves at a slower pace toward an adaptive conclusion.  

Le Guin herself described the role of science fiction for those restless in the present:

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality.” (http://www.ursulakleguin.com/prize)

It was not until the last five years that I discovered the science fiction writing of Octavia Butler, although her initial successful began in the mid-70’s. There is a detailed Wikipedia entry for her which is very well written. One entry describes her point of view as an African American woman:

Butler began reading science fiction at a young age, but quickly became disenchanted by the genre’s unimaginative portrayal of ethnicity and class as well as by its lack of noteworthy female protagonists. She determined to correct those gaps by… “choosing to write self-consciously as an African-American woman marked by a particular history”—what Butler termed as “writing myself in”. Butler’s stories, therefore, are usually written from the perspective of a marginalized black woman whose difference from the dominant agents increases her potential for reconfiguring the future of her society.

While the feminist perspective was a familiar POV, her rendition of contacts between aliens was unexpected and eye-opening to this Euro-American woman. Her themes of slavery, exploitation, acquiescence, and bodily invasion were less hopeful and often dystopian. She is frequently cited as an example of Afrofuturism, only some of which is science fiction. The WIKI entry I linked to before distinguishes her POV this way:

Some critics, however, have noted that while Butler’s protagonists are of African descent, the communities they create are multi-ethnic and, sometimes, multi-species. As De Witt Douglas Kilgore and Ranu Samantrai explain in their 2010 memorial to Butler, while keeping “an afro-centric sensibility at the core of narratives”, her “insistence on hybridity beyond the point of discomfort” and grim themes deny both the ethnocentric escapism of afrofuturism and the sanitized perspective of white-dominated liberal pluralism.

My third trip to the future was led by a writer with an ecological and social justice point of view–Kim Stanley Robinson. The news in the past decade predicts ecological disaster with innumerable variations. The bees are all dying; the third extinction is coming; cities near the oceans will drown; areas with uninhabitable land will result in mass migrations and ethnic/class warfare. All based on science, as far as we know, and all meant to be a wake up call for us humans to mend our evil ways. I still have flashbacks to the movie The Day After Tomorrow. It appears that bad news has indeed activated many people, especially young people, to demand that people in power either do something or stop doing something.

During my last job at the Center for Victims of Torture I did public awareness education on the grim reality that many refugees and asylum seekers coming to the US were victims of torture or war trauma. It was tempting to provide gruesome details of brutality to arouse sympathy and a desire to help. We were cautioned, however, to avoid presenting too much shocking detail because it could stun the observer into looking away and avoiding the subject out of fear and hopelessness. Instead we emphasized what concerned citizens or healthcare providers could do that would be beneficial and make a difference.

So I feel with climate disaster public awareness education. Not only can science fiction carry us beyond the Earth, but it can imagine a future on Earth. Dystopian sci-fi is everywhere. A lot of it is very depressing. What Kim Stanley Robinson has done is to provide epic plots where big climate issues are tackled, but big solutions are proposed as well. In his 2020 novel Ministry for the Future Robinson imagines what could be done if the United Nations created a global blue ribbon ministry, made up of international experts committed to addressing climate disaster, with power to orchestrate a set of strategies and tactics that over a period of decades. Could it turn the earthship around? Unlike much video sci-fi like Star Trek, Star Wars, and The Expanse, that make up wonderful devises like warp drives to solve problems, Robinson uses a mix of current tactics and realistic, but imagined, tactics that have the effect (at least on me) of building hope in the present and not just providing escape.

Lest you think I am a sci-fi snob, I still get a kick out of escapist sci-fi, especially movies and series. Currently, I am in love with The Expanse. Amazing special effects, very diverse characters, and a realistic, engaging plot. But if I look at it from the writers’ point of view, what do I see? A lack of imagination surrounding the way the characters speak, interact, and react to situations. It might as well be 2021 with cool toys. The writers’ goals are entertainment, and they do a great job-kind of like visiting Disneyland. Every sci-fi story betrays a POV. Ask yourself: what is it?