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.(Suvin 1979: 78)The effectiveness of a novel like The War of the Worlds, in other words, depends partly upon the sophistication of its balancing of familiar representation and the strangeness of its novum; but that novum also relatesthe history of sf49symbolically back to key concerns of the society and culture out of which it was produced.It is not a narrow mapping of imperialist anxieties on to a symbolic form, but rather a complex symbolic meditation on the paradoxes of imperialist ideology.Following on from this, we can argue that SF as a distinctive genre comes to cultural prominence in the Age of Empires precisely because it is a necessary part of the official ideology of empire-forming that difference needs to be flattened, or even eradicated.SF, in other words, figures as the expression of the subconscious aspect of this official ideology.Under the nineteenth-century British Empire the pressure is to conform upwards to a certain model of ‘civilised’ behaviour.We can see something similar today, under what can more loosely be called the twentieth-century American Empire, where culture treats everybody in the world, whatever their actual identity, as a ‘sort-of American’.A film such as Independence Day (1997), for instance, figures a world catastrophe as an American catastrophe, with other nations represented in cameo as acquiescing under American leadership and sharing American values.The world, in that film, is America.Similarly, Star Trek postulates a‘Federation of Planets’ encompassing a wide range of alien worlds, but none the less manages to flatten difference into a kind of Galactic Americana.The ‘USS’ in USS Enterprise stands for ‘United Space Ship’, but by no coincidence it is also the present-day abbreviation for ‘United States Ship’.It is not just a question of American actors filling almost every role, which, of course, we might expect in a show filmed in Los Angeles, but of a representative cultural identity which is Western, bourgeois, family-centred, aspirational, rational, centrally concerned with ‘freedom’ as the freedom of individualist enterprise: American, in short.I like Star Trek a great deal, but its success as a series depends, it seems to me, on the ways in which it is subtly able to undercut the con-formist ideological message that it tends to share with other world-win-ning American cultural productions.A scene in Nicholas Meyer’s film Star Trek 6: the Undiscovered Country (1991), where the Klingons quote Shakespeare ‘in the original Klingon’, is an example of this, wittily inviting us to rethink our assumptions about the ‘Western’ cultural dominance.In the film the Klingons criticise the Federation as ‘a humans-only club’, foregrounding the cultural essentialism behind much of the original series.the history of sf50One of the ways, then, in which an empire establishes itself, justifies itself and continues is by putting out the cultural message that the dominant culture in that empire is best, and that therefore other cultures should conform to it.It does that on the one hand by raising up the values of the dominant culture, and on the other by attacking those who are not part of that culture.In other words, it is involved in praising the Same and demonising the other.That other might be many things: history has given us the other as Jew, as Black, as Arab, as East Asian (‘the Yellow Peril’), and as Woman.On the other hand, history’s verdict on the Same has been remarkably consistent: the Same has tended to be male, white, Western and associated with military power and technology.This is, it goes without saying, a crude and brief account of a complex set of cultural and historical circumstances.But my point is that science fiction first emerges as the underside to this set of cultural dominants, as, in a sense, the dark subconscious to the thinking mind of imperialism.Where much mainstream Victorian culture, for instance, is about the patent rightness and decency of ‘civilisation’ as it was then conceived, science fiction explores the problematics of that term.According to this sort of model, much science fiction can be keyed into cultural and historical specifics.It is no coincidence, the argument would go, that British science fiction experienced a burst of inventive creativity at around the time of Wells, Bram Stoker (1847–1912), Olaf Stapleton (1886–1950) and Rider Haggard (1856–1925), because this period saw the high summer of the British imperial adventure [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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