“Colonizing Space” is a Dirty Phrase: Stop Using It
The term “colonize” is not neutral. It’s an impossibly negative term. It immediately references an extensive socio-political, socio-economic, racialized, and vile process that still churns its wheels today. Colonialism always was and always will be an exploitative model which privileges dominant socio-economic groups (I hesitate to say “Western” here, though it would be fair to suggest that colonialism benefits the West more than other colonialist groups). We can thank colonialism for the massive growth of the slave trade in the Americas, the deliberate attempts to exterminate non-white groups across the globe, the irreparable destruction of native land, the theft and destruction of property, culture, language, etc. and so on. The fact that its engines still churn today in the form of the tourist industry, the continued denial of compensation for subaltern groups for damages rendered (and still rendering in places where U.S. imperialism led to the irradiation of indigenous land in the Pacific), and in foreign and domestic policy highlights the fact that to “colonize” is not to perform a neutral action, nor to imply a neutrality. To “colonize” is to subjugate, destroy, rape, murder, exploit, and so on. This is what colonialism looks like: fat old white guys exploiting the innocent. And so, when we use the term “colonize” to refer to things like human settlement in space, we are, in fact, playing into a socio-political game given to us by the Pulp and Golden Ages of science fiction (both of which were in the thick of imperialist and colonialist enterprises). This game is one which attempts, intentionally or otherwise, to redefine colonialism so as to dampen its political implications, which is another way of saying that colonialism really isn’t all that bad. In effect, when we say we’re going to “colonize space” we are trying to say something other than what the word means, which makes it possible to silence the collective history the term actually signals. To put it another way: our willy-nilly use of the term “colonize” is an extension of the colonial process itself, since you, in fact, are appropriating the legacy of colonialism for your own purposes. There is a duality at work here: the suppression of reality alongside the perpetuation of the old history that normalized such suppressive forces. The fact that to “colonize” cannot imply a neutral without playing into the legacy I’ve thus far described means we need to start thinking about human involvement in space within different terms. “Settlement” would be a much more effective term, since it has always signaled a multitude. Yes, to “settle” was always a part of the colonial enterprise, but it has also always referred to the process of settlement, which may or may not involve the settlement of spaces owned or occupied by others. For science fiction, this seems like a perfect term to use, since the genre often imagines human settlement as encompassing the varieties of the old forms of settlement. Humans in science fiction settle on uninhabited asteroids, moons, or planets, but they also sometimes colonize planets that don’t belong to them, which is a kind of settlement to begin with (albeit, a violent form). So, if possible, could we stop referring to our extension into the stars as “colonizing space” and instead call it “settling space?” It is a) a much more effective term for encompassing the varieties of human expansion, and b) a term which avoids the political implications of misuse. But maybe my endless study of colonialism and postcolonialism has tainted me. What do you think? (This post is partly in response to Nicholos Wethington’s post at Lightspeed about colonizing the solar system. I don’t disagree with the project, per se, but I do thing the term is a problematic one as indicated above.)
Haul of Books 2011: Stuff For Me v.01
Considering that I just got back from a conference in which books were involved, it seems like perfect timing to have a new edition of the Haul of Books. So, without further delay, here is the image (after the fold): And here are the descriptions, from left to right, top to bottom (taken from Amazon): 1. The Alchemy of Stone by Ekaterina Sedia (signed — see here) Mattie, an intelligent automaton skilled in the use of alchemy, finds herself caught in the middle of a conflict between gargoyles, the Mechanics, and the Alchemists. With the old order quickly giving way to the new, Mattie discovers powerful and dangerous secrets – secrets that can completely alter the balance of power in the city of Ayona. This doesn’t sit well with Loharri, the Mechanic who created Mattie and still has the key to her heart – literally. 2. The City and the City by China Mieville (signed) When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borlú of the Extreme Crime Squad. To investigate, Borlú must travel from the decaying Beszel to its equal, rival, and intimate neighbor, the vibrant city of Ul Qoma. But this is a border crossing like no other, a journey as psychic as it is physical, a seeing of the unseen. With Ul Qoman detective Qussim Dhatt, Borlú is enmeshed in a sordid underworld of nationalists intent on destroying their neighboring city, and unificationists who dream of dissolving the two into one. As the detectives uncover the dead woman’s secrets, they begin to suspect a truth that could cost them more than their lives. What stands against them are murderous powers in Beszel and in Ul Qoma: and, most terrifying of all, that which lies between these two cities. 3. Midnight Robber by Nalo Hopkinson (signed) The Caribbean-colonized planet of Toussaint celebrates Carnival in traditional fashion, and Tan-Tan, a young reveler, is masked as the Midnight Robber, Trinidads answer to Robin Hood. But after her father commits a deadly crime, he flees with her to the brutal New Half Way Tree, a planet inhabited by violent human outcasts and monstrous creatures known only through folklore. Here, Tan-Tan is forced to reach into the heart of myth and become the legendary heroine herself, for only the Robber Queens powers can save Tan-Tan from such a savage world. 4. I Hotel by Karen Tei Yamashita (signed) Dazzling and ambitious, this hip, multi-voiced fusion of prose, playwriting, graphic art, and philosophy spins an epic tale of America’s struggle for civil rights as it played out in San Francisco’s Chinatown. Divided into ten novellas, one for each year, I Hotel begins in 1968, when Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy were assassinated, students took to the streets, the Vietnam War raged, and cities burned. As Karen Yamashita’s motley cast of students, laborers, artists, revolutionaries, and provocateurs make their way through the history of the day, they become caught in a riptide of politics and passion, clashing ideologies and personal turmoil. And by the time the survivors unite to save the International Hotel—epicenter of the Yellow Power Movement—their stories have come to define the very heart of the American experience. 5. Perdido Street Station by China Mieville (signged) Beneath the towering bleached ribs of a dead, ancient beast lies New Crobuzon, a squalid city where humans, Re-mades, and arcane races live in perpetual fear of Parliament and its brutal militia. The air and rivers are thick with factory pollutants and the strange effluents of alchemy, and the ghettos contain a vast mix of workers, artists, spies, junkies, and whores. In New Crobuzon, the unsavory deal is stranger to none—not even to Isaac, a brilliant scientist with a penchant for Crisis Theory. Isaac has spent a lifetime quietly carrying out his unique research. But when a half-bird, half-human creature known as the Garuda comes to him from afar, Isaac is faced with challenges he has never before fathomed. Though the Garuda’s request is scientifically daunting, Isaac is sparked by his own curiosity and an uncanny reverence for this curious stranger. While Isaac’s experiments for the Garuda turn into an obsession, one of his lab specimens demands attention: a brilliantly colored caterpillar that feeds on nothing but a hallucinatory drug and grows larger—and more consuming—by the day. What finally emerges from the silken cocoon will permeate every fiber of New Crobuzon—and not even the Ambassador of Hell will challenge the malignant terror it invokes . . . A magnificent fantasy rife with scientific splendor, magical intrigue, and wonderfully realized characters, told in a storytelling style in which Charles Dickens meets Neal Stephenson, Perdido Street Station offers an eerie, voluptuously crafted world that will plumb the depths of every reader’s imagination. 6. Sha’Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse edited by Edward F. McKeown (won) “Sha’Daa: Tales of the Apocalypse is a wild mix of the Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and end of the world genres that is well worth the time of any Survial fiction fan.” Eric S Brown, Author of Season of Rot and Cobble. The Sha’Daa has its dark, eerie, terrifying roots anchored deep in the soil of fictional horror and mythic apocrypha. The end-of-days is a concept reinvented multiple times by each generation of writers with every new century, and our own 21st is no exception. We offer up this humble tribute to those who came before us. A gruesome shout out is given for Edgar Allen Poe, Robert Bloch, H.P. Lovecraft, F. Paul Wilson, Stephen King, Clive Barker, Bram Stoker, Charles Dickens, Brian Lumley, Homer, Arthur Conan Doyle, and all the rest who have given us reason to fear the night. Be warned. The Sha’Daa is coming. 7. Sha’Daa: Last Call edited by Edward F. McKeown (won) I can’t find a description. 8. Air by Geoff Ryman (found at used bookstore in Riverside, CA) Chung Mae is the fashion expert of the farming village of
The Eaton Conference: Day Three — Idea Overload B
(You can read about Day One and Day Two here and here.) Day Three The third day of the Conference (technically the second and last day of the event, which only ran from Friday to Saturday) proved to be both intellectually exciting and terrifying. We first attended a panel called “Neocolonialism, Global Capitalism, and Monstrous Subalterns,” which included a presentation by Steven Shaviro on hyperbolic futures and a paper on River of Gods and Cyberabad Days (both interesting books I think you folks would enjoy reading). After that, we attended a panel on Polish SF, which I have some familiarity with through an undergraduate cyberpunk course I took at UC Santa Cruz (we read Imaginary Magnitudes by Stanislaw Lem). Both panels were interesting, though I suspect their early placement and my pending presentation impacted my note taking, as most of my notes for these panels are quite empty (I did find them interesting, but I didn’t see a need to take too many notes). The third panel we attended was actually mine. Most of you know that I was pegged to present a paper on the work of Nalo Hopkinson and Tobias S. Buckell. Nalo was present for the presentation (there were two of us, since the third person apparently couldn’t make it), which was quite alarming, but was also expected (thank you Twitter!). I didn’t get as many questions as I had hoped, but so be it. The person who presented alongside me talked a great deal about the cultural elements of Hopkinson’s Midnight Robber, which didn’t figure as prominently in my discussion (I was largely focused on the broader picture and how that imagined outer space as liberative of the postcolonial condition). I took a lot of notes during the panel, which may prove useful when I put the next batch of changes into my Master’s thesis. This is Loopdilou’s WTF face… After that I had the pleasure of meeting Hopkinson (again) and having her sign my beat-up copy of Midnight Robber and the new one I bought specifically for her to sign. We had a nice, but brief discussion about her work, my paper, and Tobias S. Buckell. She told me that she was quite pleased that I was talking about Buckell’s work, since very few people are. That’s pretty much all the validation one needs, to be honest! Also, she is a coward. Following lunch, we attended the last panel of the day, which, oddly enough, happens to be a topic we intend to discuss on The Skiffy and Fanty Show. The panel was called “Religion, SF, and Otherness” and included a paper by one of the professors in the English department at UF (my reader for my thesis had to read the paper because she had an unexpected illness). Her paper discussed the Catholic legacies and allegories in Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow and The Children of God. The other paper was actually quite funny. The author discussed at length the problems of religious representation in SF film–specifically, the representation of non-Christian/Catholic religion. The shortened version of his paper would read: they don’t represent them very well at all! We ended up having a good discussion with him after and hope to bring him onto to the show alongside John Ottinger. The “WTF, I’m coming out the public bathroom, jerk!” pose. The final event was the keynote, Mike Davis, and a discussion panel including Nalo Hopkinson, Karen Tei Yamashita, China Mieville, and Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. Overall, the speech was interesting, although it was not as focused on SF/F as I had expected it to be. Still, his discussion of Ward Moore was amusing and I suspect I will do some research on what he called “counterfactual historiography.” The panel, however, was riveting. One of the issues I am interested in right now is the problem of access to publication and translation (there have been a few discussions already in the last month or so which have highlighted this issue). Peoples from outside of the western sphere of influence often have difficulty accessing the literary voice either because publishers don’t publisher foreign writers all that frequently or because publishers aren’t willing to shell out tens of thousands of dollars to translate works not originally written in English. While the panel didn’t come to any absolute conclusion, it was still awesome to see professional writers and critics tackling the issue of translation and Global SF in general. I may attempt to write about this issue for my U.S. Imperialism course. The Panel of Awesome! And then it was all over. They gave everybody wine, cheesecake, and other nibbly bits and we had one last riveting public gathering before we all disappeared into the night, never to be seen again until at least the following morning or the next conference. Before signing off (and recording the second half of the special Eaton Editions of The Skiffy and Fanty Show), I did have one rather embarrassing moment in which I asked China Mieville a rather silly question. I won’t tell you what it is, but I’m pretty sure he knew it was a silly question too. There will be one more edition of this series, but it won’t have much to do with the conference. Instead, it will deal briefly with other things that occurred on the following Sunday and Monday. For now, that’s all I’ve got. Now I will leave you with a page from my notes, which has nothing directly to do with anything we saw at the conference: Click for larger image. If you can figure out what we were talking about, I will give you an imaginary present.