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I am a sucker for Falling Skies, the post-alien-invasion-show currently in its second season on TNT. I don’t know why I feel so compelled to watch this show, because it is full of problems. Butt loads. I guess it’s because I always feel compelled to investigate media and entertainment centering on dystopia, be it print, film, or, most rarely, television. And Falling Skies is certainly dystopic.

But it’s also incredibly problematic, beyond commonplace technical problems such as good writing. Too often dystopias look all too familiar to the world we’re already living in, just maybe throw in some alien overlords and nuclear waste. And when I say they “look” familiar, I’m not talking about physical landscapes, I’m talking about social constructs, or, the way the surviving society looks. Sometimes that means physically how society looks, not just the way it is constructed.

Falling Skies obviously has problems with race and gender. It’s a male-centric show focused on reinforcing current day definitions of masculinity. It appeals to a boarder audiences by focusing on plots that are family-oriented, or center around attempts to maintain and/or rebuild “normal” human families in the face of a catastrophic event. Come hell or high water, the American family will persevere, it will serve as something to protect and fight for, is the comforting message Falling Skies sends to its viewers. Even in the middle of the apocalypse, this will not change. Through the institution of the family, order lives on, as do the rest of us, even if we actually die.

It’s nationalism garbed in the robes of science fiction, but the producers make no secret of linking American exceptionalism and the myths of the American revolutionary spirit to the survivors’ attempts to outlive and destroy the superior firepower of the aliens. Survivors have organized themselves into militias and named themselves after the militias that fought in the revolutionary war. They are lead by real military commanders, bringing one of the most patriotic symbols, the army, to the forefront of the show. Though Tom is not military, he is a professor of  military history, a specialty that, when combined with his masculine bearing (stoicism, the ability to be an efficient killer, and a firm position as the physical protector of his family) automatically makes him the second ranking officer, according to the show’s logic. He is the civilian conscience of a militarized revolution, but his academic past works for him instead of against him because he studied a masculine, violent subject that echoes the gendered values Falling Skies upholds. The values the characters fight for are not only domestic values, they are American values, with the two being so inextricably intertwined that the link isn’t remarked upon often in the show, which is stunning considering how corny and awkward some of the dialog can be.

Noah Wyle’s character, Tom, is, as described, a military professor turned resistance leader. He’s wracked with guilt over the death of his wife, which he feels he could have prevented. Failure as a man number one. Now he’s left to be a father to his three sons, and really, to the hundreds of survivors he’s supposed to protect, help lead, and watch over. The show revolves around his relationships with his sons, who he must also raise to be proper men through modelling appropriate masculine behavior. In this show men are stoic, they are (very competently) violent (when necessary – because they are real, honorable men, they don’t act wantonly unless that trait are specifically written into their character bio), they are honorable, and they are also paternal, but mostly when it comes to instilling values of manhood. Their job is as protectors.

Interestingly, the role of the doctor is played by one of the show’s few female leads. You could say her occupation is a victory for feminism, but actually casting her as the doctor places her in a nurturing position. Constructed gender roles often dictate that women are inherently nurturers. The doctor here is not even a prestigious surgeon, but a pediatrician turned field medic. Her pre-attack job was to take care of children. Again, sexist logic: women are biologically childbarers and caregivers. And guess what, her son died in the invasion. Failure as a woman/mother number one. She is punished by her unending grief and this fact being her the only bit of backstory given to her character. She is defined by her motherhood, by her failure as a mother, and by her current job: to play mother to all the survivors, especially Tom (Noah Wyle) and the Second Mass’s leader, Weaver by mending their bodies and providing and emotional shoulder for them to lean on. She also becomes Tom’s sexual partner and emotional outlet. Tom can be soft around a woman. So she nurtures and has sex. That’s it.

The other female lead, Maggie, is a bad ass militia scout. Again, points for placing a woman in an aggressive role, right? Whoa there buddy. This position, by default, makes her a failure as a woman. She is given a complicated back story of sickness, rape, and crime, all punishments for her attempt to break out of the show – and society’s – dictated domesticated role. This form of punishment for bold, masculinized women is an old, old story in all kinds of media. And, another old story, Maggie is trying to find redemption through the love of Tom’s oldest son, Hal, who can validate her as a woman and therefore as moral by forgiving her for her past sins. Hal also acts as her protector, and when she tries to protect him, at least in one instance, she get’s beaten half to death. Oh, and did I mention it was during a catfight with Hal’s old girlfriend, another (blond) masculinized female who is also punished for stepping outside a domestic role by being abducted then physically and mentally altered by the aliens? Poor Maggie (and Karen). She deserves better.

And then there’s race. It seems that the white people on Earth did an exponentially better job of surviving the alien invasion than any of the other minority races. This racial superiority is doubtless an outgrowth of the discriminatory casting of current day Hollywood and the inherent white superiority complex in our dominant cultural narrative. Our society is not post-racial, and though Falling Skies makes tries to take a stab at it, it does not depict a post-racial dystopia. African, Asian American, and Latino characters play supporting roles and tend to end up dead. Another familiar trope. Oops.

I have spent a lot of time studying the history of civil defense engineering in our country. For those not familiar with the term, civil defense most often refers to things like bomb and fallout shelters or protection systems set up during the Cold War meant to help American citizens survive catastrophic nuclear attacks. Officials also developed plans to rebuild society afterward. Historian David Monteyne recently published Fallout Shelter, an excellent book that explores the racial dimension of civil defense planning (many other works explore the thoroughly gendered dimension of civil defense, as does Monteyne).

After studying an amazing array of primary sources detailing how civil defense was planned and imagined by civilian and government experts, he found that these officials created plans that turned out to be inherently racist and sexist. In the future envisioned by these white men, those who survived nuclear attacks would be suburban, middle-class whites, and these men and women of the domestic ideal would work to recreate the domestic ideal of the 1950s and 60s in order to rebuild society following nuclear catastrophe. Sitting through just a few of the civil defense PSAs the government in the 1950s and 60s is enough to convince you of Monteyne’s point. This projecting of a present ideal onto the future is exactly what the survivors in Falling Skies are doing – upholding families as the key to human survival and attempting to recreate traditional looking families by reforming old ones or creating new ones in the ideal’s image. To make matters more complicated, the aliens are stealing human children, therefore undermining family structure even more. This is supposed to be the most horrifying aspect of the invasion, and drives the desire to reconstruct and rebuild families. The show is obsessed with this idea, from the macro level of the Second Mass (an army) being a family, down to Tom and his sons (one of whom was taken by the aliens).

But back to Fallout Shelter and race. Most interestingly, Montenye points out that civil defense officials assumed Americans living in the suburbs would survive any attacks, because they assumed city centers would no doubt be targets of any nuclear attacks, such as at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This assumption made civil defense plans inherently racist – most suburban populations are white, and the targeted inner cities are defined by the large population of poor minorities forced by discriminatory policies to live where there was/is affordable housing. Russian bombs would do the job of whitewashing America.

So maybe something similar is happening in Falling Skies, this assumption that those who die will be those in the cities, and that the (often invisible) residents of these cities will be minorities. The survivors in the Second Mass are all suburbanites, after all. Maybe this subconscious but easy assumption explains the lack of minorities among the survivors. If you asked the show’s creators they would most likely say that is absolutely not the case. They would defend casting choices. The would point to the doctor, Moon Bloodgold’s, half-Korean ethnicity, which creates a interracial romance worth Tom that is worth remarking upon; I’m sure the producers would cite her as one example to counter my argument. Still, the future remains predominantly white. And that’s the thing about cultural norms and subtext – we are raised by society to think and act in a certain way, conditioned to receive certain messages, whether outright or subconsciously, that tell us how we should act based on how we look, what set of genitalia we have, etc. These ideas and beliefs are encoded within us, so often without our knowledge, and we embed them in all the things we create, that we do, say, and think, intentionally or not, because they are a part of us. And it takes work to break them down and strip them away. If the producers of this show are imaging the future as white, it is most likely because 1) the system of casting in Hollywood is racist and 2) we have all been fed images like this for so long that it takes conscious effort to realize the blinders we are wearing, and then we must make the effort to correct our mistakes.

Because these culture values are so firmly and often subconsciously embedded, we must ask, especially of those who are envisioning the future: why are our cultural creators still assuming that it’s only whites who will survive catastrophic events? Why do we believe these “visionaries” when they depict minorities as returning to savagery or gang rule, or don’t even give them a place in the future at all? Why don’t we question these current day racialized and sexualized images of ourselves  that are constantly projected into the future?

Perhaps that’s what is so compelling about dystopia, at least for some: the reassurance that even after annihilation, gender and racial norms will survive, institutions like the idealized traditional family, which has never actually existed, will survive, will be renewed, and so will one unfortunate definition of society and stability.

But that’s not for me, and that’s why I’m so disappointed with Falling Skies. I prefer my dystopia much more foreign and challenging.

 

Edit to Add: I just realized that I forgot to do any analysis of sexuality on the show. As far as I can tell, everyone is thoroughly straight, further supporting that the show’s narrative attempts to depict and uphold the heterosexual component of the 1950s/60s domestic ideal.

The idea that the disappearance or removal of all technology and nuclear weapons might be the only way to save the human race is not new to science fiction. Clifford D. Simak made exploring the pros and cons of this scenario the center of many of his works, including the great City. Vernor Vinge, another decorated author, is more known for his far future Hugo winning space operas than post-Cold War dystopias. In The Peace War, however, written in 1984, a time when President Regan built up the US army as the USSR began to collapse under the strain of rot from within, Vinge’s near-future exploration of technology, morals, and war proved compelling enough to garner him a Hugo nomination.

The Peace War is the first in a string of nominees that I will be reading in place of the actual Hugo winners from their year. Why I’m skipping certain books varies on a case by case basis, and that doesn’t mean they won’t pop up later in the project. In this case I’m choosing to ignore William Gibson’s Neuromancer. Skip down to the end of the review for my explanation of why.

I’ll be forthright when I say that I love Vinge’s Hugo winners, A Fire Upon the Deep and A Deepness in the Sky, and I look forward to reading Vinge’s other near-future winner, Rainbows End. At his best, Vinge is a modern master, blending hard sci-fi and far future plots to create incredible universes that leave the reader both convinced and in awe. His books are also quite riveting page turners, and I generally tend to dislike books overly driven by plot. But no, in Vinge’s universes the reader is treated to vivid and surprising characters that are just as alive and captivating as his harrowing plots.

The Peace War is interesting, but it is certainly not Vinge at his best. It is mired in Cold War not-so-sub-text, set in a world in which the Peacers have disabled every nuclear and military complex and weapon on earth, bringing “peace” to a world teetering on the brink of catastrophic, violent collapse. The Peacers, are not a governmental body but a private corporation who created a technique called bobbling. Using this technique the Peacers surrounded all military weapons and installations in impenetrable silver spheres – referred to as bobbles – therefore incapacitating all world governments by rendering their armies useless.

But in this new, demilitarized world, the Peacers are the enemies. Disallowing not only military but other forms of advanced technology that might lead to military development, the Peacers have plunged the world back into what Vinge repeatedly refers to as a feudal society, though Vinge only gives us glimpses of a ravaged Southern California ruled by what might be some sort of feudal government. Mostly the world seems to be populated with gangs, tribes, traders, and our heroes, the Tinkers: men and women who continue to develop advanced technology. Hiding from the Peacers, they hope to one day overthrow the authoritarian entity and let the United States flourish again.

There are a lot of things going on in The Peace War, most of them very thinly fleshed out in favor of advancing action, a weakness that Vinge put aside in later works. One reason dystopias are so captivating is because of the world building that occurs in such familiar places. The disaster has already happened – what does like look like for the surivors? Literally, what does it looks like? These questions, and Vinge’s world invites many of them, go largely unanswered.

On the micro level, Vinge is obviously trying to explore the way race and social status would be constructed following such a catastrophe. The main character, Wili, is black, something that Vinge reminds us of over and over again, especially every time he is introduced to new characters. But the meaning of this blackness is unclear; several times Vinge alludes or states that other characters might be surprised to take orders from Wili or to learn that he is a genius, but why this characterization in relation to Wili’s blackness is so important is made unclear. No racial tension is ever actively demonstrated. Interestingly, Vinge again alludes that Southern California is no longer angelo, but boosts a majority Spanish population, though in the caste system is still seems English speakers are on top. Confusion abounds. Does this mean whites are still in control here? Is there a difference between language and race? Wili grew up in Southern California but is fluidly bilingual, further compounding this problem. Then there are groups of people that are only referred to by made-up tribal names. Wili is always black in relation to them while their own racial identities remain unclear.

This issue of Wili’s blackness is worth bringing up because Vinge makes it such a glaring point of description but refuses or overlooks explaining to the reader how race works in this dystopic society. His oversight is really a shame, as dystopias provide an interesting setting to explore social constructs like race. Though Vinge seemed to sense these possibilities, his novel is much more interested in exploring the technological marvels he creates in the form of the bobbles and cerebrally interactive computer networks than how humans might interact following a devastating event.

His strange half-exploration of post-apocalyptic social constructs extends to women as well. The antagonist of the novel, Della Lu, is an Asian woman. Her race is mentioned as constantly as Wili’s, with just as little exploration of what that racial identity means to Lu, and to the other characters she reacts with. A bit more fleshed out is her characterization as a woman. Like with Wili, Lu is constantly aware that all the men around her are surprised and resentful that they must take orders for a woman, even though she is more competent than they are. Unlike Wili, Lu at times even has to listen to men denigrate her femaleness, whereas Wili’s blackness if never openly addressed.

Lu isn’t very sympathetic, she’s through and through a killer, bent on destroying the Tinkers because, well, who knows why, really. It seems every story needs and enemy. At one point she has sex with Mike Rosas, a Tinker turned turncoat turned Tinker again, only for the reason that she is trying to shut him up. The sexual encounter sticks out like a sore thumb in the context of the novel, as if Vinge threw it in there simply to spice up the narrative. Women in this book are always sexual objects, including Jill, a computer program created to resemble lead Tinker Paul Hohler’s lost love. Vinge also assumes that a return to the “feudal” structure (a word I’m not sure he even understands) automatically means a return to extremely restricted gender roles – all the peripheral female characters are expected to be domestic and silent. This is a post-feminist novel written during the rise of the New Right, perhaps grasping at the disintegrated domestic ideal. Women can have agency, but in the case of Lu, if they step outside the domestic norm they are heartless bitches who use their bodies to manipulate men and are punished for their sins by death. A familiar trope. Vinge does allow one female character, Allison, to have agency, even though she takes on a non-masculine role in the storyline. Allison, however, has literally been objectified by Paul Hohler, who created the computer program Jill in her image.

Overall The Peace War’s most interesting contribution to the field is its examination of Cold War tensions through a dystopic lens. On a geopolitical level, the three remaining powers in the novel are France, China, and America (all under control of the Peacers), with nary a mention of the USSR. This trio of powers is a wonderful imagining of what might have grown from the alliance made between the French and the Chinese. In 1984 the Soviet Union was collapsing, and in The Peace War there’s nothing left of it. Instead, the unstoppable behemoth, China; France, the rebel of Europe; and the USA have taken over control of most of the world. Interestingly, Africa, always a problem for the first world, remains largely uncontrolled, though it lacks the technological resources of Tinkers elsewhere in the world and is therefore not as much of a threat of Peacer technology. Vinge created a fascinating reading of contemporary geopolitical structures in his dystopic future, and this is yet another point of interest that it would have enriched the novel if only it had been fleshed out.

A product of the 1980s, in The Peace War, Vinge explores a lot of familiar technology, like sophisticated spy satellites and computer networks that looks suspiciously like the internet. The book also reveals that fears of nuclear war and the escalating development of technology didn’t die with détente – they continued to suffuse people’s lives and minds, driving their actions and influencing their fears. The Peace War doesn’t find peace in removing technology. As the title of the novel suggests, the attempt to remove technology simply led to a war to bring it back, almost leading us again to the conclusion that violence is inherent to Man. Vinge’s characters believe that peace is possible, but only if technology is used correctly, and is put in the right hands. What “correct” use is and whose hands should be in control remains unexplained, along with most of the dystopic world Vinge created.

 * * *

During the course of this project I will skipping at least a few of the actual award winners, each for varying reasons. In the interests of fair play, I’ll try to explain why I’m skipping each one. This year’s winner that I’ve chosen to exclude was Neuromancer, by William Gibson. I know that Neuromancer is considered one of the game changers of modern science fiction, that it is much, if not obsessively beloved. The thing is I don’t like it. I’ve tried to get through it many times and never once have I been able to finish it. I find it to be dense, boring, and unreadable. To be fair, I am not a fan of cyberpunk in general. Also, I have actually read quite a lot of William Gibson’s work. I didn’t like any of those books either. While less dense than Neuromancer, I found his plots to be repetitive and all of his endings to be terribly anti-climactic, so much so that they ruined the premise of each book that I read – and some of them had really good premises! Those disappointments combined with my inability to make it through Neuromancer even once left me feeling rather disinclined to try reading it again, especially since I’m doing this project for fun. I’m sure there are many really wonderful places both online and in print that you can go to read about how great or shitty Neuromancer is. For now this won’t be one of them.

There are many different kinds of science fiction stories, so many that scholars seem to have reached a consensus that the genre’s boundaries are impossible to define. One woman’s work of science fiction is another’s work of historical fiction, for example. Frustrating as this fact may be for a bunch of academics trying to pin down defining features or for bookstore clerks trying to figure out just where exactly to shelve a book, the boundless conventions of science fiction allow authors incredible freedom to create whatever kind of world that they want and to run with it, wildly if need be.

Larry Niven’s classic, Ringworld, is a rich mix of hard science, deep space, and far future science fiction that would border on outright space opera if its plot weren’t so plodding and dull. I realize that some of you consider me to be some sort of heretic for applying those to adjectives to this revered and award-winning novel, but for me it simply failed to impress. In this sort of deep space exploration tale that travels to a landscape both utterly alien and impossibly plausible, the appeal of the novel rests on two key factors: the deftness of the world building and the appeal of the author’s characters. This can be a tricky balance, as a technological marvel like the eponymous Ringworld often becomes a character in and of itself in novels like these. Likewise, the reader vicariously encounters this inanimate character through the eyes of whatever intrepid (band of) explorer(s) the author has assembled for the voyage, and so our reactions to whatever marvelous thing there is to be encountered is closely linked to theirs. Further, in the best works of science fiction, inter-group dynamics run parallel to story of discovering and exploring a new world, and in the most masterful of works these dual stories intersect to form one work of truly breathtaking art. Ringworld tries and fails to do any of these things. Instead it reads as a deep space Edgar Rice Burroughs novel that switches hard science for wonder and monotony for adventure, keeping intact only the blatant chauvinism with little sign of the intrigue, wonder, and heroism that makes you want to look the other way when faced with the denigration of woman (and did I mention all the aliens are white, too?).

The premise is interesting enough: an advanced race of aliens called the puppeteers has discovered the Ringworld, a modified form of a Dyson Sphere in the shape of a ring, and have dispatched a motley crew of unclearly qualified adventurers to explore it. There are a lot of complicated politics going into why this mission is being started in the first place, almost all of which are more interesting that what happens when the crew actually gets to Ringworld and starts poking around. Of course, these tidbits, such as the fact that the galaxy is slowly but inevitably exploding, are merely a very intricate string of (perhaps unnecessary) devices Niven invents to get his protagonists to Ringworld itself. Inexplicably to a curious reader, they’re not even planning on landing on the surface until they crash land, which forces them to explore the giant surface area in hopes of discoveing a means to re-launch their ship into space. Even then they spend most of their time flying above the landscape and arguing with each other about honor or something equally petty.

In writing Ringworld, it’s very clear that Niven attempted to weave a tale that was not only fantastic but believable, which almost falls into a subgenere called hard science fiction, where all technology is supposed to be believable and based upon known science. Ringworld exists in a nebulous gray area in this regard, as Niven spends a great deal of time throughout the novel creating fantastic “technological” marvels such as floating cities, and then coming up with equally lengthy and nonsensical explanations for how any of his miraculous inventions operate. If you create something amazing enough in science fiction, readers are predisposed to suspend disbelief to a certain degree, but Niven writes himself in circles that not only nearly destroy the believability of his far future, high tech society, but serve to bore the reader out of their mind. The explanations aren’t informative and they don’t make sense, and there’s still a lot of that wonderful “Of course!” device being used, where characters over and over have “A ha!” epiphanies that instantly solve problems based upon some sort of assumed future science that the reader must accept is true because look at all these other circles the other jumped through when explaining flying bicycles!

Once our characters crash land on Ringworld essentially nothing happens. They all bicker a lot and spend a great deal of time flying over Ringworld’s surface, not really interested in exploring anything at all beyond things that might get them back into space. In fact, the plot is increasingly focused on the interaction between main character Louis Wu and his female companion, Teela, who was chosen to join the mission for her literally inbred luck (the puppeteers playing genetic gods with alien species is a plot that comes almost out of nowhere and fades almost as quickly). Wu is 200 years old and very confident with the idea that he knows everything. Conversely, Teela is 20 and has never known pain, something Wu finds to be high contemptible. Despite her naiveté and the 180 year age difference, Wu has no problem fucking her silly, and in fact, the only reason he “allowed” her to attend the mission at all is because he wanted someone to have sex with. Which she baited him with. So we have now established that she is officially a sex object.

Perhaps I should state right here that if there’s any reason I find Ringworld interesting it’s as an example of the blatant chauvinism, if not outright misogyny, that often suffuses science fiction works, even to this day. I think as a piece of science fiction in terms of exploring strange new universes and using aliens as stand ins to explore intra-human dynamics Ringwold  fails because it is boring and repetitive in both regards. Ringworld’s premise is so compelling that a synopsis is thrilling, but it completely fails to live up to its premise once you actually open the book. There is no wonder here. We as readers only fly over the scenery along with our explorers, praying for a crash landing so that we can maybe look around a little. Just as in a Burroughs novel, the only natives around are savages, but we don’t even get a true chance to explore the remnants of a failed society that our protagonists compare to gods.

No, what this novel is actually about is Wu’s hatred of Teela’s perpetual happiness and luck. She resembles and is distantly related to a woman who broke his heart, and in the end Teela breaks his heart too. Wu thought he was using her sexually, but it turns out she was using him (albeit completely unknowingly) to get to the Ringworld so she could go native and fall in love with one of the men there. Even more exciting for those of us reading down the misogyny checklist, due to native custom Wu must sell Teela to her new lover as a slave, and because sex is predicated on ownership, he is basically selling her as a sex slave. And Teela is completely okay with this exchange. She has literally been objectified by these men. The only female character in almost the entire novel and her only purpose has been to have sex with one man until he sold her away to have sex with another. In fact, Wu has always described Teela as alien, and eventually, when she goes off with the alien to be his sex slave, she actually does become an alien. As Wu states, she is more alien to him than the actual aliens in their traveling party. All because she preferred to have sex with someone else. A literal dehumanization.

Having lost one whore, Niven simply introduces another, a native woman of Ringworld who is a professional prostitute, as in she was trained in sexual arts to pleasure 33 men over long space voyages. Just as in a Burrough’s tale, Wu has now gone completely native, but the power dynamic between himself and Prill must be carefully maintained. Prill is a superior sexual lover to Wu, which is unacceptable in this narrative. Women exist to be protected and fucked, and when they diverge from this narrative they are either obstructionists, insane, or dead. Prill’s superiority is quickly neutralized, and she becomes his willing “partner.”

It is very difficult for me to read a book that so openly sexualizes and objectifies women. It’s not that these trends are new – they run rife in all forms of media and culture. 1970 is getting a bit out of my own temporal realm of study, so contextualizing the misogyny beyond generalizations is a stretch for me. I think it is fair to say, however, that the treatment of women in this novel is an outgrowth of the sexual revolution. The sexual revolution did bring greater sexual freedom, but it was not some happy free for all, and it was not egalitarian. More often than not it meant that women were supposed to be completely sexual available to men; the sexual revolution, in other words, helped lead to a new, mass objectification of women. Feminists at the time included sexual rights, equality, and respect for sexually liberated women in their own manifestos, as they do today, but here we can see the stud/slut dichotomy at work. Throughout Ringworld, Wu’s sexual prowess if not only boldly on display, but is wantonly described, but it’s simply assumed that he will be this way. That he should be this way. It makes him a human male. The two female characters also have their sexuality boldly on display, but they are literally whores. They are also aliens or, their sexuality dehumanizes them. Stud/slut.

This kind of thought process isn’t really excusable, but we can put it in its time, though unfortunately its time is still with us. The thing about Ringworld is that there is no other reward here. Perhaps in 1970s, when this book was released, this kind of far space exploration of a technological marvel was new, or mind-blowing, but the fact that we barely get to see any of Ringworld in action and the descriptions we do get are dry, boring, or incomprehensible leaves me feeling unconvinced. In 1977 a far better work called Gateway, by Frederik Pohl, would come along and, in my opinion, punch Ringworld right off the map. That book mingles an exploration of complicated inter-gender relationships with explorations of unknown alien technology in a way that is both deep and riveting. Ringworld blunders through space and spends most of its time dwelling on how women are the bane of one man’s personal universe when instead it should be exploring the new, endless possibilities its unfulfilled scenario creates.

Let me preface this review by stating that I am a historian. I’ve always loved storytelling and being transported to faraway worlds, which is why I love science fiction. By the time I’d reached college I knew I loved history as well, passionately, both because it is a mirror of time that reflects back on ourselves, and because it transports us to faraway places both familiar and fantastical, all of which have the benefit of being real. I think many science fiction authors are lovers of history, if not consciously then latently – how can you write about the future without at least being enamored of the past? It makes perfect sense to me that an author might therefore combine a love of science fiction with a love for history in order to use the conventions of one genre to explore the meaning of the human past. That being said, I have no idea why Doomsday Book won a Hugo.

Doomsday Book actually received the Hugo as a co-winner, along with Vernor Vinge’s masterful far future, deep space adventure, A Fire Upon the Deep. Co-nominated with such a transcendent competitor, Doomsday Books’ win seems even more of a mystery. Clocking in at 578 pages long (Bantam revised edition, 1994), the novel, set in the near future, is a tedious, drawn out tale of historical fiction with the convention of time travel thrown in to predicate the action on a sci-fi premise.

Kivrin, a Medieval history student studying at Oxford, has the privilege (or luck) of being a historian after time travel has been discovered. This allows historians to travel back in time to observe events as they unfolded and, more importantly, to see how people truly lived. Obviously, Connie Willis is a fan of social history. It may not be the dream of every historian to time travel back to our chosen time periods, but I’d be lying if I said that thought hadn’t crossed my mind more than once. Not that this doesn’t raise a myriad of questions about methodology and subjectivity, but the nature of the historical profession is not being examined in this novel, nor shall it be in this review. Here, going back in time is the authoritative way to find out about history and Kivrin is going to do it. The only problem is that her chosen time period, 14^th century Europe, is rated a “ten,” or one of the most dangerous centuries, and is therefore off limits to time travel.

Doomsday Book is not 578 pages of Kivrin trying to get to the Middle Ages. In fact, she transports away rather quickly, too quickly, in fact, for her mentor, Mr. Dunworthy, a historian of the 20^th century who inexplicably knows more about the Middle Ages than any of the actual Medieval historians. In fact, thanks to the almost sinister bumbling of Mr. Gilchrist, Dunworthy’s rival, Kivrin is sent to the 1348 instead of 1320, right in the middle of the Black Plague. Oops. Luckily for our heroine, she has been inoculated against the disease in preparation for such a mishap, but she finds herself stuck in the past for a variety of reasons, one being that she has no idea how to find her way back to the rendezvous point (or “drop”) meant to teleport her back to her time, and the other being that as soon as she leaves, present-day Oxford begins to experience a deadly epidemic of the influenza virus that leaves everyone capable of bringing her back from the past incapacitated or dead.

What follows is a duel narrative tracing Dunworthy’s struggle to reach Kivrin admist the epidemic and Kivrin’s frantic attempts to find the drop point, unaware both of the crisis going on in her own century and of the oncoming bubonic plague. Having insinuated herself in the household of a minor noble family, she is forced to watch with horror as the grotesque disease rips through the population of the house and village adjoining it. Meanwhile, Dunworthy runs endlessly between his office and the hospital, spending most of his time making phone calls that don’t get through and trying to pry information out of the deathly ill technician who may be the only one that can save Kivrin from being trapped in the past.

To my eyes, this book reads more like a work of historical fiction than a work of science fiction worth holding a candle to A Fire Upon the Deep. As I said, most of the plot is extremely detailed historical fiction, though Willis’s description of 14^th century England is very conveniently predicated upon the fact that she can change things at will. Remember, Kivrin is experiencing history as it “really” was, not as it was written about. This gives the author carte blanche to fill in gaps or alter details however she desires. Unfortunately, Willis does not use this self-made latitude to create any multidimensional or human characters. Instead of exploring gender roles, for example, Willis creates stock female characters capable of one emotion that limply advance the plot and little else (shrewish mother-in-laws, petulant brides-to-be, etc.), and men cut to fit the mold of disgusting, elder suitor and longing white knight. All the characters seem to have rather modern attitudes about very ancient things. A true historian explores the subjectivity of the lived experience of the historical agent, but in Willis’s past what we expect to find is exactly what we get. What’s the point of time travel, then? It’s easy to be trapped by Willis’s unimaginative tropes because they are familiar to us – so familiar that they’re as worn out as they are enticing in their familiarity. Continuing to harp on well-worn themes, Willis spends an inordinate amount of time making sure to describe the appearance and effects of the black plague in gruesome detail. If this book has a point, more than anything else it seems to be that the black death was really gross and really DID suck for all those involved, though again, I’m not sure we needed time travel and 578 pages to prove that to us. Luckily, the influenza virus in present times is nowhere near as graphic in its manifestations.

Other flaws abound. The characters in this novel are, for the most part, poorly drawn and two dimensional. The villains are so cookie-cutter evil that it is almost insulting to the reader, Dunworthy has no characteristics other than constant anxiety over Kivrin’s whereabouts, and even the unhappy betrothal between a too-young bride and her fat suitor comes right out of the most cliché of storybooks, though how she is saved from an unhappy marriage presents a bit of a twist.

If Willis does move toward anything like interesting commentary beyond gore and the pain of losing a loved one, it is in her brief exploration at the end of the novel as to how people find meaning in the midst of a crisis such as a plague. For Willis this manifests in the character of Father Roche, the village priest who believes Kivrin is an angel sent to save them, and Lady Imeyne, the unbearable mother-in-law who rules over the house Kivrin stays in, who is obsessed with status and religion, and believes Kivrin is a sinful witch (because she is a single lady) who has brought the plague upon them. Kivrin, educated in science, knows that the plague is caused by an infectious disease, not a curse sent from God, nor can it be cured by prayer. But, as she struggles to save those she loves from a truly gruesome death, she finds herself confronting the God she so strongly believes, has to believe, isn’t punishing the wicked. Is this kind of death senseless, or does it serve a purpose? Where are those who promised to protect us from such things? In a way, the entire novel takes on our fear of being lost and alone, facing impossible odds. Facing our dooms.

This kind of nuanced questioning brings a level of meaning to Doomsday Book, but it takes 578 pages to get there and is overwhelmed by all the other truly petty concerns that Willis dwells on for most of the book. The interlacing story arcs are so repetitive that surely some of the running back and forth waiting for the phone to ring could have been cut out, as could Kivrin’s waiting by the window for a guide to the drop and her “journal entries,” which in many cases merely summarize events that have already occurred. Doomsday Book is a story with a lot of content with little substance. Unveiling the ending to the mystery Willis builds may have its riveting qualities, but there’s not much else here that bears any remarking upon.

 

Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man became the first Hugo winner in 1953. Originally serialized in 1951, the novel appeared during the golden 1950s, in the midst of the baby boom, and at the dawning of the age of the expert. In the introduction to the 1996 Vintage edition (which I read), fellow sci-fi author Harry Harrison quickly synopsizes the book with a heavy focus on the capitalist structure of Bester’s future. But it’s not the economics that drive this novel. Instead it is a deepening nervousness about the power of the emerging field of personal psychoanalysis that is represented by the Espers, a large group of human beings who have evolved the power of ESP or mind-reading. In The Demolished Man, the Espers, and by extension pyschoanalists and psychoanalysis, are the most fearful characters, for it is these entities that are able to look within us and show us our true selves, and it is our true selves that we fear the most. For Bester, our true selves are what destroy us.

Skimming over a summary of The Demolished Man, one can’t help but notice similarities to Philip K. Dick’s posthumously famous short story, “The Minority Report.” Both stories feature a society in which murder has been rendered impossible thanks to the emergence of psychics capable of reading minds and predicting murders before they happen. In Dick’s world, his “precogs” have been co-opted by the government and are systemically used by the police department to stop murder through preemptive arrests. In The Demolished Man, Espers make up the population at all levels and work in concert to prevent murder through dissuasion – there’s no point in committing because the psychic population will detect your guilt. Interestingly, even when Espers detect guilt through ESP, they are still obliged to provide non-psychic evidence to an objective computer that determines guilt. The burden of proof still depends on factors outside of the psychic mind, demonstrating Bester’s unwillingness to side with the Espers in the dual society of normal and psychic humans that he’s created.

There are other, major differences between Dick’s story and Bester’s book, the most important one possibly being that The Demolished Man is actually good. “The Minority Report” is a meditation on the ethics of finding a man guilt of a crime he hasn’t yet committed based on non-existent evidence, an interesting premise that is actually better executed in Steven Spielberg’s film adaption than it is in Dick’s noirish source material (Dick wrote a LOT of short stories and books; they couldn’t all be winners). Conversely, Bester’s novel is not a meditation on the ethics of utilizing a pre-emptive criminal system – Bester’s system is not simply preemptive. Instead, Bester uses the scenario of a murder successfully committed and the subsequent race to prove the guilt of the killer to explore not only how a society built out of psychics might function, but the ways in which we hide from ourselves, the lengths we will go to do it, and what it takes to make us confront who we truly are.

Ben Reich, one of Bester’s dueling protagonists, is a non-psychic CEO at the head of a solar-system spanning megacorporation. Plagued by nightmares of The Man with No Face. Reich is falling apart at the seams because his company is about to be absorbed by a corporation owned by his rival, D’Courtney. As a last act of desperation, Reich suggests a merger to D’Courtney, but when he thinks the offer has been refused he comes to the conclusion that the only way for him and his corporation to survive is to kill his rival in cold blood.

As in Clifford D. Simak’s Way Station, Bester’s novel spends a lot of time meditating on what it means to be a Man. Both Simak and Bester conclude that, on some level, violence is inherently part of Man’s nature. Writing in the early 1950s, Bester had just survived WWII and was now living under the long nuclear shadow of the Cold War, which most likely colored his meditation on the intrinsic nature of violence in man’s psyche. Ben Reich is living in a society where violence has been eradicated thanks to the Espers, but he is still driven to kill. Further, his inherent instinct and drive for murder helps him to successfully circumvent detection and later capture. He is aided by a high-level Esper, who risks being cast out of Esper society if he is caught. This Esper acts in the name of greed, another trait that makes up Man, be he normal or psychic.

It seems impossible to describe in one review the nuance that colors Bester’s work. I haven’t even mentioned Lincoln Powell, Bester’s second protagonist and Reich’s nemesis. The police Lieutenant assigned to bringing Bester to justice, Powell is a high level Esper bent on catching his perpetrator. Though one of the most powerful Esper’s on Earth, Powell is repeatedly unable to find enough physical evidence to convince an objective computer that Reich is guilty of murdering D’Courtney.

What he does have is D’Courtney’s daughter, the only witness to the murder who has been thrown into psychosis through witnessing the violent act. Powell initiates a mental process that basically reboots Barbara, causing her to rapidly evolve from infant to grown woman in order to erase the trauma of watching her father be murdered without removing the memory. In the process he falls in love with her, which creates a very strange pedophiliac situation that definitely reminded me of many of the women in Philip K. Dick’s stories. Men’s need to infantilize their lovers and spurn more mature, capable woman is not uncommon for cultural works of these times. The insistence on infantalization and sexual dependency is surely linked to worries about what is means to be a Man during a time when gender roles within the family and society at large were very strictly defined.

At the end of the day, every character is forced to face their true self in order to find the peace or resolution they are searching for. Normally I’m all for revealing the twist in order to deconstruct it, but this time I think I’ll leave the identity of The Man with No Face a secret. The answer Reich finds does tie-in closely with that cult of experts rising to power in the 1950s. It also speaks to America’s increasing obsession with constructing the ideal family, and the way experts often blamed neurosis or abnormal behavior on defective family life. But, in this society, through psychoanalysis (all of which is done by Espers, by the way, because who better to psychoanalyze than a mind reader), every single person can be saved and reintroduced into society with all their good parts still intact, even if it means demolishing them first.

I’m not usually the biggest fan of police-type books, but The Demolished Man supersedes that literary convention, excellently combining the search for self with the search for a way to convict the killer. Even having finished the book, I’m still unsure if I’m supposed to be rooting for Powell or Reich, and Reich was a psychotic killer. Bester does a very good job of forcing his reader to empathize with both perspectives, speaking to the frightened, self-preserving, and violent aspects of ourselves, as well as the peaceful part of us that abhors violence and injustice at our very core. The reader is forced to reflect on their own reaction to Bester’s dueling protagonists, and, as in the best science fiction, we are left with no easy answers, only new questions we must ask about ourselves as we move throughout our present day world.

When I first wrote a review of Clifford D. Simak’s A Choice of Gods back in May 2011, I found myself quite captivated by Simak’s deft exploration of the nature of man’s technological and spiritual development in a far future dystopia. My interest in dystopia is what made me pick up the book in the first place, and many of Simak’s novels reach into the future, sometimes near, sometimes far, sometimes both, in order to explore man’s relation to technology and a search for a higher self, usually through some sort of spiritual and/or intellectual transcendence. Science is not necessarily the enemy, but man’s relentless drive for technological innovation is often the reason for the downfall or ruin of humankind.

Way Station is the story of Enoch Wallace, a Civil War veteran born in 1840 who is still alive in roughly 1964, when the novel is set. Enoch is still living in his boyhood home in rural Wisconsin, the pastoral setting being a constant motif in Simak’s work. While neighbors know there is something strange about Enoch, Simak explains that their backwater sense of community leads them all to leave the nature of his existence unexplored. Unfortunately for Enoch, the US government, tangled in the treacherous throws of the Cold War, has caught wind of Enoch’s agelessness, and their investigation into the true nature of Enoch’s being and home leads to major revelations about humankind’s place in the universe.

For Enoch is not an ordinary Rip van Winkle, but is actually the keeper of an intergalactic way station placed on Earth by a consortium of far-advanced alien species called the galactic federation. These aliens have discovered a means of faster-than-light transport that operates something like a transporter does on Star Trek (though, in a more gruesome manifestation of the technology, each traveler’s material body is left dead at its original location, while a new one is materialized for the traveler’s consciousness upon arrival; in Simak’s world, bodies are simply material things, containers). The patterns associated with traveler’s bodies tend to break up when they encounter certain kinds of space junk, so stations like the one on Earth are established to ensure safe passage. Most of Enoch’s visitors are vacationers, as the galactic federation’s mission is again, Star Trek-like in its intent to explore space for a higher purpose rather than simple economic gain, at least originally.

Enoch’s position as the station keeper creates a great deal of cognitive dissonance for our protagonist that leads to lots of contemplating what make a “Man” a “Man.” Enoch lives a double life, both of Earth and of the stars, and, in a way, of the aliens. This split manifests physically in his immortality – as long as he stays in his boyhood home, which has been transformed by alien technology into the impenetrable way station, he doesn’t age. When he leaves the house, as he does daily to walk through his rural property and retrieve the mail, his ability to age is restored to him for that brief time.

Simak has been called a pastoral author, and his descriptions of the Wisconsin countryside are vivid and beautiful. Enoch’s daily walks through nature are one of the strongest ties to the part of “Man” that is Earth Man – a direct link to Earth’s own physical body. Conversely, the station links him to the transcendent nature of the aliens he safeguards, and represents the possibility that “Man” might also severe the link with the other defining factor of our “race,” violence.

One of the most intriguing aspects of Way Station lies in the way Simak investigates what it means to be “Man,” or in a less-limiting, gender and species neutral term, sentient. First there is the aspect of violence, which Simak explores on multiple levels. Enoch is a Civil War veteran and has witnessed firsthand the futility of war, which makes him (uniquely) placed to see the similar futility of impending nuclear war. For Simak, this tendency toward group violence, driven by fear, is an intrinsic part of “Man’s” nature that will drive the species to utter destruction if left unchecked. Integrally linked to apocalyptic future is man’s drive to develop technology, which in this case means more destructive ways of obliterating ourselves. When the aliens offer a solution to MAD, it comes in the form of removing all knowledge of how to operate technological devices of any kind from all humans, driving us back into a dark age and essentially rebooting our intelligence in hopes that the next time it won’t work against us.

There is also the role of personal violence. Enoch’s rifle is always close at hand – he takes all his daily walks with it cradled in his arm and leaves it within careful reach every time he is in the house. The one thing he asked the aliens to install for him to keep him entertained for all eternity is a firing range. Despite having witnessed the insanity of violence firsthand as a solider, and now as a terrified onlooker during the Cold War (and all those intervening wars as well), the rifle is still an integral part of Enoch’s life, representing the violence that still drives him as a “Man.” Even though he never fires it in direct confrontation, he can’t separate himself from it.

Initially the aliens of the galactic federation are posited as the opposite of “Man,” because they have put all petty squabbles and futile violence behind them in the name of peacefully exploring the galaxy. Enoch’s ability to see this peace creates his cognitive dissonance, however, as the novel progresses Simak reveals that the aliens themselves have not transcended their own desire for violence and greed, but have found an intermediary force that allows their benevolent and peaceful sides to win out. And that force is God.

Yes, in Simak’s worlds, nothing is every completely black and white. Out there somewhere an alien invented a machine that allowed sentient beings to communicate with God, proving its existence and, as Simak eventually reveals, creating peace for all who have experienced the presence of the Talisman and its keeper. For you see, the machine works kind of like the Oracle at Delphi, it needs a special operator or “sensitive” (Simak’s terms for psychic) to channel the device and communicate with God. An intermediary. These oracles are rare birds, too, and the only creatures that can make this device work.

It turns out this Talisman has gone missing, which is causing violence and greed to stir in the whole galaxy, not just on Earth. The inevitable conflict in the stars appears to be the force that will finally lead Enoch to choose between his identity as a violent Earth man, and that of the more far seeing alien liaison. But, thank god for deus ex machina (in this case quite literally), Enoch has to choose neither and both. The Talisman shows up on Earth, and Enoch uses his skill with the rifle, the integral violent part of his being, to kill the alien who’s stolen it. Then the Talisman brings peace to both Earth and the galaxy and we end not just with the peaceful resolution of the Cold War, but with Earth being prepared for induction into the galactic federation.

The most interesting part of this solution is the role of Lucy Fisher, Enoch’s deaf-mute neighbor who’s played the role of fey fairy savior throughout the novel, a woman literally struck dumb who can commune with nature but not really people except for Enoch, our divided hero. She stands in as a symbol for mother earth and as the psychic needed to communicate with and activate the Talisman. She is more in touch with the purity of her emotions than any other character in the book, but this also makes her more intellectually simple and simultaneously, more pure. Being a symbol of nature is not an unusual one for a woman, but her literal deafness and dumbness is quire representative of Simak’s inability or unwillingness to create actual, human women. Women aren’t “Man” in this novel, and therefore they’re not human. Lucy is fey and the only other female, Mary, is a ghost that Enoch created using some alien equation. She doesn’t even have physical substance, and her only reason for existence is to be trapped in her unrealized prison of love for him. Women are otherworldly, mysteries, they cannot be controlled, they are part of another universe and foreign others. And here they lack the integral dual nature, specifically the violence, that makes man “Man.” Simak’s women are often props – witches outright, if not oddities, and Lucy Fisher is no exception. She is an asexual Earth angel, a woman who can transcend “Man’s” violence to communicate with God and save the universe.

Also of note is that there simply are no minorities in this book. In A Choice of Gods, Native Americans had largely re-taken the depopulated Earth, an interesting plot twist that hinges on the assumption that Native Americans are more in touch with nature but are not part of the rest of the human race because they’re not down with technology or psychicness. Though included, they are still the Other. In this novel, “Man” is white. The other, when not female, is so outrageous that He is literally Alien. And He is a deliberate choice – we meet no female aliens, nor do we even hear about them.

Finding the historical context for Simak’s novel is fairly simple in many cases. Published in 1963, this novel came right on the heels of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the closest the world ever came to plunging into nuclear war. In Way Station, that sense of crisis and impending doom is ever present, and this time it takes the help of God to stop the escalation, not sheer luck and sensibility.

This was also the age of the space race, and technology is not always the demon in this scenario. Instead, for Simak it is the type of technology that man is developing which is the problem. It may be God and a psychic angel-woman who save the day, but they do it with the help of the Talisman, a machine which has proved the existence of a higher power through the “correct” use of technology. Simak’s suggestion here seems to be that warring over religion may be a root cause of man’s violent tendencies, or that only finding something as transcendent as a God machine can save us, though he doesn’t necessarily state this idea outright.

Also, Enoch knows that the answer is in the stars, as Simak’s novels often look to expansion of the human race into space as the solution to our earthly woes. Interestingly, this exploration of space is most often achieved through psychic and not technological means. Whatever the alternate scenario, Simak seemed to think that in the actual one we were going about it all wrong.

As for his treatment of gender and race, I don’t think there’s anything extraordinary to say other than this book is exemplary of many of the racist and sexist assumptions of the times. We’re still a bit early in the 1960s here, and science fiction at this point was a white boy’s club. The deconstruction of his identity creation that I’m presenting is largely a reading of well-trodden subtext. Tracing Simak’s use of women and minorities in his novels over time might prove interesting, as his work spans several decades, but that is a project for another time.

Simak as an author of science fiction is an enjoyable read, and I’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of his catalog. I would recommend him to fans of Philip K. Dick, as both authors share similar concerns. Dick’s futures are much more bleak and thoughtful, and much more inventive. But Simak is a good writer in the sense that he is writerly – his prose is beautiful. He is constantly asking questions about technology. Approaching technology as a problem is not necessarily unique, but the solutions Simak offers to that problem often are. Finally, Simak is actually quite deft at using science fiction to explore what it is that makes us human. His definition of human may be limited, but noticing and exploring the reasons for those limitations is another exercise in enjoyable reading.

Sadly, most of his books are out of print, but you can find copies very cheaply on amazon.com, or at your local used bookstore (trust me, you will find tons). I encourage you to try Simak out!

 

As an avid lover of both science fiction and the history of popular culture in the 20th century, I’ve found that my time spent as a graduate student at GMU has only deepened my excitement for reading and interacting with science fiction, no matter the medium. A really wonderful professor of mine, Dr. Brian Platt, once said “nostalgia is a criticism of the present made from the past.” We were in a Post-War Japan class discussing Japanese memories of WWII and the atomic bomb, but I think this statement applies to all memory studies, and should be kept in mind when we are evaluating our own nostalgia for the past and how that nostalgia manifests through popular culture, among other things. We can see this statement in operation through cultural phenomenon like Mad Men, a television program set in the 1960s that comments on our own feelings about the American Dream while hiding behind the screen of its historical setting. It’s easier to view ourselves through the lens of the past because temporal distance takes the sting out of the criticism.

This statement also works the other way around. It’s just as easy to criticize or examine the present from the future, or alternate universes, or parallel universes, or alternate pasts, or whatever other foreign iteration of existence science fiction takes us too. Coming of age under the long nuclear shadow of the Cold War, science fiction as a genre creates worlds both distant and familiar that provide us with an escape from our own world while simultaneously shining a mirror on us to show us what we might be fleeing from.

In this blog I have made it my goal to read and blog about science fiction novels from the perspective of both a fan of the genre and a historian who specializes in the study of culture, memory, and the the time period in which many of these great works were created. I am also a gender scholar, with a broader interest in identity construction, which includes social constructs like race and class. All of these areas of inquiry will play a role in how I approach reading and writing abut these works.

As a jumping-off point, I’ll be reading all the Hugo and Nebula award winning novels to date, with some deviations that I’ll explain later. Eventually I hope to expand this project to include other media as well, like television (a personal favorite) and film. Also, expect to see reviews of books not on my award winning reading list. I also reserve the right to venture into the realm of fantasy if I should find a book compelling enough. Finally, I may also include reviews of works written about the genre itself.

I’ll note now that this is also my “professional” blog, a place to establish my presence in the digital history community, as well as the historical community at large. As such, the blog itself will not be entirely dedicated to the science fiction project, but will also include posts more exclusively related to other historical projects. I do, however, feel this blog is an appropriate place to carry out the science fiction project, as it is relevant to my own field of study, and can hopefully provide enjoyment to fans of science fiction as well as academics. If a post doesn’t speak to your particular interests, please feel free to skip!

Okay, introduction’s over. The first book I’ll be reviewing is Clifford D. Simak’s Hugo winning Way Station, so look for that post soon!