Brian McGowan<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\nThis article was originally submitted for consideration by a forthcoming encyclopedia. Owing to format and length concerns, the editors requested a substantial revision but acceded to this draft\u2019s publication in another venue. As a short survey as opposed to a substantive history, it is impossible to deny that there are gaps, including the absence of personages that might scandalize some readers. I can only respond with my deepest apologies for such offenses and suggest a consultation with<\/strong> The Cambridge History of Science Fiction<\/strong><\/em>, a far more substantial and thorough accounting. A word of deep thanks and appreciation to Paul Buhle, a<\/strong> pen-pal<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/span> whose wisdom, memories, and openness models<\/strong> how<\/strong><\/span><\/span><\/span> the word<\/strong> comrade<\/strong><\/em> might truly be defined.<\/strong><\/p>\nScience fiction, known by its shorthand abbreviation sci-fi, has a deep link with the socialist project dating back to the days of the Second International. Alongside the typical literary osmosis that occurs when authors absorb radical politics of their contemporaries, there is a distinct history<\/span><\/span><\/span> of<\/span><\/span><\/span> the genre\u2019s texts serving as an imaginative laboratory for socialist\/communist prepositions and\/or proposition<\/span><\/span><\/span>s. The epistemological horizon of utopia invites these experiments in the imagination, sometimes resulting in practical consequences. For instance, Edward Bellamy\u2019s 1888 novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887<\/em>, one of the foundational time travel texts in the genre, catalyzed the creation of an entire political movement of clubs seeking to nationalize the means of production, hence their nomenclature as Nationalist Clubs. This trend has amplified in the last 140 years (though Bellamy might have been horrified<\/span><\/span><\/span> to see how<\/span><\/span><\/span> many forecasts have instead served a different side of class struggle)<\/span><\/span><\/span>.<\/p>\nA persistent trend that amplified in this half-century period was the multi-media nature of the genre. Prior to 1970, there were niches within literature, film, television, and other visual art forms that fostered cottage industries. By contrast, in 2020, it was possible to look at multiple platforms and media types to<\/span><\/span><\/span> see each contained sci-fi genres that not only were well-established but quantified as the largest financial successes in that given media form ever, case and point the Marvel Comics Cinematic Universe and the Star Wars<\/em> franchises ranking as the two highest-grossing film series in worldwide box office history. V<\/span><\/span><\/span>ideo games, popular<\/span><\/span><\/span> music, comic books, collectible statuary, fashion, children\u2019s toys<\/span><\/span><\/span>, and many more forms of art now have distinct and prominent sci-fi artistic expressions. An entire cable television channel, SyFy, launched in September 1992 as the Sci-Fi Channel, remains<\/span><\/span><\/span> a programming staple nationwide and has generated its own award-winning media. While a historical survey of the first half of the century describes a niche audience, this period describes a major centrifuge of capital accumulation within an increasingly-consolidated and deregulated multimedia market system.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nFurthermore, a distinct internationalism within the genre is impossible to avoid. Due to both capital\u2019s globalization and human solidarities extending beyond nation-state borders, it is possible to honestly discuss American audiences that gave high estimation and reverie to worldwide authors. Simultaneously, expatriate Americans, like Norman Spinrad, made their home on foreign shores while building substantive bodies of work. These multinational authors found an orbit around the hub of unipolar American capitalism, distinctly different from how national literary genres held a provincial existence during the Cold War. While in 1920, Soviet science fiction would remain undiscovered by Anglophone audiences for several decades in some instances, by 2020 the distinctively dialectical novels of Chinese author Cixin Liu were bestsellers that President Barack Obama was endorsing within less than ten years of first publication and translation. This was emblematic of a booming Sinophonic import market with large readership that included both mainland nationals and expats. The academic study of science fiction became a popular disciplinary project that included substantial analysis of these nuances.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThis period also saw the arrival of a new century and millennium that had long been forecast within the genre. As the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber quipped,<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThere is a secret shame hovering over all us in the twenty-first century. No one seems to want to acknowledge it. For those in what should be the high point of their lives, in their forties and fifties, it is particularly acute, but in a broader sense it affects everyone. The feeling is rooted in a profound sense of disappointment about the nature of the world we live in, a sense of a broken promise\u2014of a solemn promise we felt we were given as children about what our adult world was supposed to be like\u2026 I am referring, of course, to the conspicuous absence, in 2015, of flying cars.<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nWhile consumer-grade personal levitation vehicles have yet to appear on the market, a wide range of technologies originally foreseen in these fictions did become commercial enterprises. The internet, large-scale video-based communications, the digitization of millions of texts into libraries accessible across the globe (both for free and on basis of purchase\/subscription), web-based social networking systems, artificially synthesized food with high nutritional value, educational courses delivered via computers, encyclopedias authored by millions of collaborators, and mobile communication devices that can reach the other side of the planet while fitting comfortably in your pocket all were prefigured by the genre before becoming a reality, much as theoretical atomic bombs populated texts decades before 1945. Generations of scientists in both the private sector and at public agencies like NASA were inspired by science fiction to create technologies we have become reliant upon in this new century.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nAnd, just as many of the genre\u2019s more progressive and radical authors predicted, capital has embraced these technologies not in order to better the collective standards of living for humanity but instead to generate new and unique forms of value extraction. Many of the more dystopian predictions from within the genre, such as an elite capitalist class ensconced in comfort while the vast majority of the population suffers in the face of economic precarity and ecological calamity, have become a reality.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nIn 2009, cultural critic Mark Fisher described an important emerging genre nuance:<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nWatching [Alfonso Cuar\u00f3n\u2019s 2006 film]<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span> Children of Men<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span>, we are inevitably reminded of the phrase attributed to Fredric Jameson and Slavoj \u017di\u017eek, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than it is to imagine the end of capitalism. That slogan captures precisely what I mean by \u2018capitalist realism\u2019: the widespread sense that not only is capitalism the only viable political and economic system, but also that it is now impossible even to imagine a coherent alternative to it. Once, dystopian films and novels were exercises in such acts of imagination \u2013 the disasters they depicted acting as narrative pretext for the emergence of different ways of living. Not so in<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span> Children of Men<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span>. The world that it projects seems more like an extrapolation or exacerbation of ours than an alternative to it. In its world, as in ours, ultra-authoritarianism and Capital are by no means incompatible: internment camps and franchise coffee bars co-exist. In<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span> Children of Men<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span>, public space is abandoned, given over to uncollected garbage and stalking animals (one especially resonant scene takes place inside a derelict school, through which a deer runs). Neoliberals, the capitalist realists par excellence, have celebrated the destruction of public space but, contrary to their official hopes, there is no withering away of the state in<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span> Children of Men<\/strong><\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span>, only a stripping back of the state to its core military and police functions (I say \u2018official\u2019 hopes since neoliberalism surreptitiously relied on the state even while it has ideologically excoriated it. This was made spectacularly clear during the banking crisis of 2008, when, at the invitation of neoliberal ideologues, the state rushed in to shore up the banking system.)<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nWhether the antithetical rebellion envisioned by these authors as a response to this political economy will be victorious in Eug\u00e8ne Pottier\u2019s \u201cfinal conflict\u201d wherein \u201cThe Internationale\/Will be the human race\u201d remains still in the forecast column as of this writing. Conversely, in consideration of the high mainstream media market share of texts fitting this genre designation, one can also trace a distinct and noteworthy trend whereby these fictions now reify and reinforce dominant capitalist ideological systems in a fashion that is distinctly different from Fisher\u2019s diagnostic matrix. While Fisher was referencing a lack of imaginative horizon emerging in texts that otherwise contemplated forms of rebellion against the dominant order, it is necessary to further examine science fiction texts enforcing superstructural systems of capitalist hegemony.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\nConversely, it is impossible to neglect the distinct impact of science fiction upon contemporary politics. There now exist several generations of radical adults and youths who have grown to political awakening in a culture saturated in science fiction multimedia. As just one instance, the Introductory essay to Marxian economist Michael Hudson\u2019s 2015<\/span><\/span><\/span> Killing the Host: How Financial Parasites and Debt Bondage Destroy the Global Economy<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span> included a not-too-subtle reference to the Wachowski Sisters\u2019<\/span><\/span><\/span> The Matrix<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span>. The internet meme as a form of political art oftentimes combines a still image from a sci-fi text with a witty quip about contemporary politics. The 2019 Verso Books title<\/span><\/span><\/span> Fully Automated Luxury Communism<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span> by Aaron Bastani had a distinctly science fictional horizon. Activists and organizers have these texts as referents that are just as inspirational as the writings of Marx, Lenin, and Mao were for earlier generations. The slogan \u201cWe Are the 99%\u201d of the Occupy Wall Street movement and the aesthetics of the worldwide digital \u201chactivist\u201d Anonymous Collective carried a dimension indebted to dystopian texts of the prior two decades, with the eponymous Guy Fawkes mask, borrowed directly from the 2005 cinematic adaptation of Alan Moore\u2019s<\/span><\/span><\/span> V for Vendetta<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span> graphic novel, popping up at rallies held by both movements. During the presidency of Donald Trump, \u201cWakanda Forever,\u201d transposed from the 2018 superhero film<\/span><\/span><\/span> Black Panther<\/em><\/span><\/span><\/span>, became a slogan of pride and resistance that seems to be a synthesis of the Black Power era\u2019s militancy with a distinctly utopian vision. While earlier authors brought scientific socialist references into their texts, we now seem to have reached a point of synthesis, a deeply-embedded science fiction socialist aesthetic.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\nThe science fiction genre has developed across a multitude of media forms since the 1970s and the advent of the so-called \u201cNew Wave\u201d (itself a dubious appellation). The conjunction with radical politics in this half-century period is likewise complex and multi-faceted, due in no small part to the collapse of traditional partisan-style organizing. As was the case with radical scholars in the academy that embraced ideological examination and a turn towards cultural studies, radical currents within texts have manifested in a multiplicity of formations that defy simple categorization. What follows is an attempt to profile currents which emerged in a contemporaneous fashion, with some overlap, that describe developments in the genre.<\/p>\n
A-THE NEW WAVE PERIOD<\/strong><\/p>\nFor these purposes, the designation \u201cNew Wave\u201d will reference a generation of writers born shortly before, during, or after the Second World War that came to prominence after 1960 and shared several contrarian stylistic traits. While the appellation has a more formal consistency as pertaining to British writers, the term is much more plastic in America, not unlike a similar function for the phrase \u201cNew Left.\u201d Writers in America who are commonly grouped under this heading would beg to differ with the categorization in several instances. Furthermore, some were old enough to have written for the traditional<\/span><\/span><\/span> pulp magazines decades earlier<\/span><\/span><\/span> and did so. As such, this phrasing will instead reference a group of authors that were known for dissatisfaction with preexisting genre conventions and norms that dated back to the so-called \u201cGolden Age\u201d of interwar pulp romances. Literary critic Shannon Davies Mancus writes \u201cNew Wave writers, though they varied in age, were part of a cohort on an ontological precipice. A key part of this shared consciousness shift was the perception that enlightenment era thinking and \u2018rational\u2019 politics had failed.\u201d The porous membrane is further complicated by the distinctly American nuances that inflected the genre. For instance, while Robert A. Heinlein was a conservative libertarian-inclined Republican with overt racist themes in his writings, his 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land<\/em> had an undeniable impact on this cohort. This can be explained by the ideological convergence shared by radicals and reactionaries in the high estimation of Jeffersonian liberal democratic philosophy.<\/p>\nAuthors like Harlan Ellison, Samuel R. Delany, Ursula K. Le Guin, Octavia E. Butler, Kurt Vonnegut, Phillip K. Dick, and many others embraced and expressed themes common to the New Left critique of the American social contract, such as antiracism, anti-imperialism, opposition to gender\/sex\/sexuality norms and discrimination, drug experimentation, ecological degradation, the Frankfurt School\u2019s critique of consumerism, and antiauthoritarianism. (Ellison, for example, dedicated a 1971 anthology titled Alone Against Tomorrow<\/em> to the students at Kent State shot by National Guard troops the year before.) Their writings not only engaged with tabooed story topics, such as blatant non-hetero-sexuality, but also challenged forms and norms of narrative structure in ways that went far beyond the traditional limitations to first-\/third-person narratives typical of mainstream American Romantic literature.<\/p>\nDuring the Vietnam War, the writer\u2019s community was evenly split. In a June 1968 issue of Galaxy Science Fiction Magazine<\/em>, on a two page advertisement there appeared oppositional statements, one featuring writers signing an endorsement of the war and the other a denouncement and call for withdrawal from combat. David M. Higgins interestingly notes \u201cCold War SF often, therefore, thrives on the pleasures of imperial masochism, or the enjoyment that comes from imaginatively occupying the position of a subaltern victim,\u201d a tendency that includes individuals who either did or would have signed both<\/em> sides of the 1968 Galaxy<\/em> advertisement. \u201cThis is one of the strangest legacies that the Vietnam War has created for American SF: American audiences, who are the privileged beneficiaries of imperial globalization, are constantly invited to identify with anticolonial guerilla [sic] freedom fighters (like the Viet Cong), despite the almost total absence of any attempt whatsoever to understand actual Vietnamese perspectives concerning one of the most brutal and devastating wars in either Vietnamese or American history.\u201d<\/p>\nIn many ways, Ellison played an outsized role in this generation\u2019s prominence. His two acclaimed anthologies, Dangerous Visions<\/em> (1967) and Again, Dangerous Visions<\/em> (1972), much like pulp magazines for several<\/span><\/span><\/span> earlier generations, established in public consciousness membership in this contentious designation<\/span><\/span><\/span> and what could be expected. Perhaps the most popular overtly political novel was Le Guin\u2019s The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia<\/em>, wherein the author sought to outline the functional methods of an anarcho<\/span><\/span><\/span>-communist society.<\/p>\nFollowing the cult success of Blade Runner<\/em>, a futuristic neo-noir directed by Ridley Scott, Phillip K. Dick\u2019s work experienced a posthumous rediscovery unlike any other. Dick was<\/span><\/span><\/span> published by the pulps starting in 1952 and had a continuous output of work until his death in 1982. For several decades, his name alone constituted a small sub-genre of existentialist sci-fi pictures that are deeply suspicious of the status quo (and sometimes reality itself). A Scanner Darkly<\/em>, later adapted into a powerful and technologically-groundbreaking film by Richard Linklater, offered an eerily prescient critique of America\u2019s public health and carceral methods of addressing substance use disorder. After<\/span><\/span><\/span> the election of President Donald Trump in 2016, the Amazon Studios television adaptation of his alternate history The Man in the High Castle<\/em>, about a fascist United States ruled by a victorious Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan, attained a new resonance unforeseen when<\/span><\/span><\/span> premiered the year before.<\/p>\nWhile not necessarily categorized in this New Wave group, horror author Stephen King, who named one of his sons after martyred Wobbly organizer Joe Hill, penned several novels that clearly overlap with science fiction while exploring similar ideological territory. The Long Walk<\/em> and The Running Man<\/em> deal with hyper-consumerist futuristic societies, Hearts in Atlantis<\/em> contemplates the fate of the New Left generation, 11\/22\/63<\/em> is a time travel story centered on President Kennedy\u2019s assassination as a<\/span><\/span><\/span> pivotal event that determined the fate of the world, The Stand<\/em> is set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, and the nine volume Dark Tower<\/em> cycle fuses elements of fantasy, inter-dimensional\/time travel, and Spaghetti Western<\/span><\/span><\/span> narrative tropes. His<\/span><\/span><\/span> repudiation of Stanley Kubrick\u2019s cinematic adaptation of The Shining<\/em> was underwritten by a New Left feminist critique.<\/p>\nA slightly younger author with a more hard sci-fi inclination, Kim Stanley Robinson, member of the Democratic Socialists of America, used his works to explore ecology, colonization of the solar system in response to population growth, and economic\/social justice themes. His Ph. D thesis in English was advised by Fredric Jameson and dealt with the writings of Philip K. Dick.<\/p>\n
B-THE SPACE OPERA BLOCKBUSTER<\/strong><\/p>\nWith the exception of television shows like Dr. Who, Star Trek<\/em> (which broke new ground by featuring the first ever televised interracial kiss between William Shatner and Nichelle Nichols), The Outer Limits<\/em> and The Twilight Zone<\/em> (both of which embraced the anti-nuclear arms proliferation movement of the Cold War era), as well as few and far-between films like Planet of the Apes<\/em> (including as writers several survivors of the Hollywood Blacklist) and 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em>, science fiction cinema was designated a genre for children and low-budget B movie production companies, with a subsidiary cottage industry of imported Japanese kaiju<\/em> monster movies such as the Godzilla<\/em> series.<\/p>\nThis was changed permanently in 1977 following the surprise success of George Lucas\u2019 Star Wars<\/em>, which remade both what was possible within the confines of the genre and the Hollywood film release calendar. Along with the earlier success of Steven Spielberg\u2019s Jaws<\/em>, the summer was changed from a season of low-grade fare to the time when studios would release films with high production values catered to youths and teens. The Lucas picture<\/span><\/span><\/span> over<\/span><\/span><\/span> the next four decades inspired the release of high-cost space operas, including 13 cinematic adaptations of Roddenberry\u2019s Trek<\/em> that increasingly borrowed stylistic and narrative tropes from Lucas, much to the chagrin of older fans. (The 1996 First Contact<\/em> film in fact admitted the political economy of the Trek<\/em> universe was a Marxian pure communist one, complete with the abolition of the money commodity.) While it limited for many years the storytelling boundaries to the soft sci-fi realm, it also led to critical examination of major New Left ideas and causes. The Alien<\/em> series, combining horror with blue collar shipping industry ethos in outer space, offered a thorough (and at times frightening) feminist politics personified by the tough-as-nails Ellen Ripley (played by Sigourney Weaver) and a subtle critique of the neoliberal prioritization of profit over human welfare<\/span><\/span><\/span>. Issues like racism and genocide, homo\/bi-sexuality, HIV\/AIDS, and other topics would migrate from protest movement literature into the multiple rebooted Trek<\/em> television shows, J. Michael Straczynski\u2019s Byzantine Babylon 5<\/em>, and other franchises. Lucas\u2019 much-maligned prequel trilogy of Star Wars<\/em> films held as a central conflict a dispute over (intergalactic) free trade and deregulation, the first screenplay having been begun just a year after President Bill Clinton\u2019s passage of the onerous North American Free Trade Act (NAFTA) that accelerated the deindustrialization of the United States\u2019 manufacturing<\/span><\/span><\/span> core.<\/p>\n