its past, can be read at least in part as a misrecognition of the corrosive effects of capitalist social relations on the traditional cultures of colonized populations and territories. Understanding the non-Western world as an earlier stage of Western social development, in this line of interpretation, serves the apologetic function of naturalizing the relation of the industrialized economic core to the colonial periphery and rendering its effects as the working out of an inexorable, inevitable historical process. But the scientific study of other cultures—what Derrida calls the decentering of Europe as the culture of reference—is intimately bound up with the same economic process. I therefore will be arguing both that the ideological misrecognition of the effects of economic and political inequality has a strong presence in the ideas about progress and modernity that circulate throughout early science fiction, and also that early science fiction often works against such ethnocentrism. (Rieder 2008, 26)
In many cases, colonialism did not merely recognize inequalities in technological, economic, or social development; it actively produced and benefited from those inequalities.6 The visibility of these inequalities in turn led to the establishment of both discourses that naturalized and discourses that called into question the centrality of European cultural systems.
Second, in the creation of a “world-embracing capitalist economy,” Rieder emphasizes the emergence of a reading public interested in the “vicarious enjoyment of colonial spoils, as attested to in Victorian England by the popularity of travel accounts and adventure stories…. The early science fiction reading audience—middle class, educated, and provided with leisure—seems to be one well placed to put into action the consumerism at the heart of modern mass culture” (2008, 27–28). The material transformations of the industrial revolution heralded a new age of mass production and mass consumption and helped to create an audience for SF. Roger Luckhurst enumerates a similar set of conditions to those identified by Rieder: a growing population of readers with at least a primary education; the replacement of popular literary forms like the penny dreadful and the dime novel with new serial formats that demanded formal innovation; a growing class of individuals who had received technical education and training, whose education made them more likely to “confront traditional loci of cultural authority”; and the immediate visibility of cultural transformations brought about by the increasing role of mechanical production in daily life (Luckhurst, 16–17). The industrial economy demanded a segment of the workforce endowed with some level of scientific and technological proficiency. These individuals would have made an apt audience for SF, with its strong emphasis on technological innovation. The industrial revolution also saw a shift away from extensive labor and toward intensive, more productive labor and limited work hours, creating spaces of leisure time to be filled in part by reading. The birth of a consumer industry seeking to capitalize on the free time of individuals with disposable income presents a convergence of market forces productive of both a readership and a widening array of genres for their consumption.
Finally, Rieder argues that the economic boom of the 1850s–1870s, followed by an economic downturn during the latter part of the same century, represented the establishment of capitalism as the global economic system, and increasing competition for land, labor, and capital between industrialized nations. This resulted in “the imperial competition that gave birth to the first modern arms race” (Rieder 2008, 28). “Three masses of modernity” converge in SF—mass production, mass consumption, and mass annihilation. If mass production and mass consumption are productive of readership of SF, mass annihilation and imperialism are among the anxieties at its narrative core. Again, in Istvan Csicsery-Ronay’s history of the relationship between SF and other genres, he argues that “SF’s characteristic mutations of the adventure forms reflect the discourse of a transnational global regime of technoscientific rationalization that followed the collapse of the European imperialist project. SF narrative accordingly has become the leading mediating institution for the utopian construction of technoscientific Empire. And for resistance to it” (Csicsery-Ronay 2003, 8).
In Culture and Imperialism, Edward Said demonstrates the degree to which even narratives that were critical of the excesses and abuses of the imperial mission were marked by a failure to imagine a world free of imperial expansion and domination. As tragic as were the incursion, extraterritorial governance, and virtual (and real) enslavement of indigenous peoples, together with the extraction of native resources for the benefit of the metropole, the discourse of social Darwinism and of the native incapacity for autonomy nevertheless went hand in hand with the assumption that self-governance was an impossibility. In his reading of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Said writes, “As a creature of his time, Conrad could not grant the natives their freedom, despite his severe critique of the imperialism that enslaved them” (Said 1993, 30). The imperial imagination proved to be such a compelling notion that many authors were not able to conceive of the absence of empire, despite growing awareness of its abuses.
Another facet of the universalizing impulse of imperial discourse, Said’s “universalizing historicism”—the Orientalist notion that history possessed a “coherent unity” and that spatial difference was equivalent to temporal difference—has been used to explain the widely held impression that different places occupied different points in a universal time line, and that Europe was at the vanguard of history’s inexorable forward march. This mode of historiographical thinking also serves to freeze oriental societies in time, substituting culture for history (Said 1986, 211, 230–234; Dirlik, 96–98). Couched in terms of empirically observable truth and mathematical predictability, time asserts itself as a measuring stick of evolution, and Europe as the geographical vanguard of evolutionary progress. Hegelian Asiatic despotism marks China and the East as spatial and temporal laggards. For authors of Chinese SF, a crucial concern was the question of whether identifying cultural equivalencies, asserting cultural superiority, or arriving at cultural compromise could be possible in the context of a universal historical trajectory defined by Western civilization.
Rieder’s “world-embracing capitalist economy” came into being in concert with what we might call the “three masses of modernity”—mass consumption, mass production, and mass destruction. These were precisely the material conditions that produced Tani Barlow’s colonial modernity, and that led to the polyphonous responses emergent in late Qing society and letters. The naturalization of inequity, an emerging culture of leisure and entertainment spurred on by mass production and mass consumption, and the threat of mass annihilation brought on by an emerging arms race in the competition to seize colonial holdings are as central to the development of Chinese SF and to its thematic concerns as they were to the development of European SF. SF and translations of Western science emerged in the popular presses of early twentieth-century Shanghai and in the publishing ventures that were undertaken in Japan.7 This publication was one aspect of a vibrant, burgeoning publishing industry, often alongside other more canonically recognized genres and discourses. As an instance of translingual practice, social Darwinism was unmoored from Thomas Huxley’s critical reading of its implications (perhaps not surprisingly, given China’s semicolonial plight), transmogrified into a system of moral and social valuation, and understood as a road map to emergent global relations of power.
Patricia Kerslake identifies a parallel between the function of the other as delineated in Said’s critique of colonial epistemologies and the function of the other in SF’s visions of the alien. A leitmotif of SF is the exoticism of the unknown and the expansionist drive, in part for its own sake, but also in the interest of defining the self in opposition to the other: “Where postcolonial theory challenges the silencing and marginalization of the Other, SF takes the stance that such marginalization is a key element of self-identification” (Kerslake, 10–11). Self-identification in SF comes alongside the triumph over and silencing of the alien other, an affirmation of the superiority of humanity. Kerslake identifies an evolution of SF from a genre in which “marginalization is a key element of self-identification,” into a “legitimate cultural discourse that has brought “serious social expositions of contemporary society” (11, 14–15). To this end, Kerslake suggests that Said’s work offers academic legitimacy to SF studies, through which the relationship between extraterrestrials can be explored in a familiar critical vocabulary, stating that “given a residual academic
