Futures dreaming outside and on the margins of the western world

In this article, we challenge the hegemony of western science fiction, arguing that western science fiction is particular even as it claims universality. Its view remains based on ideas of the future as forward time. In contrast, in non-western science fiction the future is seen outside linear terms: as cyclical or spiral, or in terms of ancestors. In addition, western science fiction has focused on the good society as created by technological progress, while non-western science fiction and futures thinking has focused on the fantastic, on the spiritual, on the realization of eupsychia—the perfect self. However, most theorists assert that the non-west has no science fiction, ignoring Asian and Chinese science fiction history, and western science fiction continues to ‘other’ the non-west as well as those on the margins of the west (African–American woman, for example). Nonetheless, while most western science fiction remains trapped in binary opposites— alien/non-alien; masculine/feminine; insider/outsider—writers from the west’s margins are creating texts that contradict tradition and modernity, seeking new ways to transcend difference. Given that the imagination of the future creates the reality of tomorrow, creating new science fictions is not just an issue of textual critique but of opening up possibilities for all our futures. Science fiction has always been nearly all white, just as until recently, it’s been nearly all male (Butler as quoted in Ref. [1]). Science fiction has long treated people who might or might not exist—extra-terrestrials. ∗ Corresponding author. Tel.: +617-5430-1247; fax: +617-5430-2880. E-mail addresses: [email protected] (I. Milojevic); [email protected] (S. Inayatullah). 1 Tel.: +617-3365-6492; fax: +617-3365-7199 0016-3287/03/$ see front matter  2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. doi:10.1016/S0016-3287(02)00095-2 494 I. Milojevic, S. Inayatullah / Futures 35 (2003) 493–507 Unfortunately, however, many of the same science fiction writers who started us thinking about the possibility of extra-terrestrial life did nothing to make us think about here-at home variation—women, blacks, Indians, Asians, Hispanics, etc [1]. Is all science fiction western? Is there non-western science fiction? If so, what is its nature? Does it follow the form and content of western science fiction, or is it rendered different by its own local civilizational historical processes and considerations? Has western science fiction moulded the development of the science fiction of the ‘other’, including feminist science fiction, in such a way that anything coming from outside the west is a mere imitation of the real thing? Perhaps non-western science fiction is a contradiction in terms. Or is there authentic non-western fiction which offers alternative visions of the future, of the ‘other’?  2003 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved. 1. Paradigms in science fiction In Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction, Suvin argues there are three dominating paradigms of science fiction [2]. The first is the Asimov’s technocratic, wedded to the notional universe of 19th-century science, from thermodynamics to behaviorism, man as subject and the universe as an object of cognition. The second model is the classical stateless socialist vision of utopia as shown in Yefremov’s works; and the third is the cosmic/mystical spiritual technocracy of Lem [2].While Lem might be the most sympathetic to the non-west, all three paradigms dramatically miss the other—the role of family, of woman, of the spiritual. They are unable to account for the worldview of the other within the knowledge categories of the other. Indeed the nature of the west is such that the other has no identity except as a people to be colonized, developed or appropriated-to be mapped onto the body of the west. African, Asian and women’s identities often exist in other paradigms. First, they are concerned about their historical identity. Second, they are concerned about the collective, the family, as the individual here exists in a space alternative from the western version. Third, the spiritual, or the emotional, the softer side of what it means to be human is more important. This said, it is crucial to note that while there are deep structures, they are played out differently; it is in local specific conditions that structures are both created and expressed—it is history that creates identity. For example, in India and Islam, the historical struggle has been on the gendered nature of public and private space, while in the west, it has been between individualism and the collective, democracy and tyranny. Yet most anthologies, encyclopedias and histories of science fiction take a universalistic view of science fiction and posit that non-western science fiction is nonexistent. The authors they select are “nearly all white...[as well as]... nearly all 2 For a website devoted to definitions of science fiction, see: http://www.panix.com/~gokce/sf— defn.html. The site states: Science fiction is really sociological studies of the future, things that the writer believes are going to happen by putting two and two together. Accessed, October 12, 2000. 495 I. Milojevic, S. Inayatullah / Futures 35 (2003) 493–507 male”. In addition, it is often thought: how could it be possible for non-western societies to develop images of technologically advanced future societies since they themselves are pre-industrial, pre-modern? For example, although even in the least technologically developed societies, we see ‘cyborgs’ walking on prosthetic legs— their flesh-and-blood legs having been blown up by land mines-cyborg as a category which explores the future (man-in-machine and machine-in-man) has not been imagined, envisioned, or dreamed of in these societies. There is no conspiracy at work, it is simply that the lenses used by science fiction writers are those given by deep cosmological codes, in this case, those of western civilization. Science fiction, which almost by definition challenges conventional paradigms, has been unable to transcend its own epistemological limitations. In pre-modern societies, the imagination of the future has not played a part in creating a scientific-technological society, nor has it helped individuals prepare for it. Rather, technological and scientific futures come from outside with few warnings. On the other hand, societies that lead the way in scientific progress also lead the way in creating spaces where the consequences of that progress can be debated, in, for example, creating a public debate on the nature of science. Only writers in western countries, claims Davies “have had the luxury of being able to indulge in an orgy of debates over definition, form, and politics [of science fiction]”[3]. Thus, the current reality that Euro-American white authors dominate science fiction. 2. Utopia: past or future Taking a paradigmatic view, to assert that science fiction exists only in the west is merely to favor one particular form of a much wider endeavor. Science fiction thus should not merely be about the technological as defined in forward time but the creation of plausible future worlds from a range of civilizational perspectives. Science fiction is not just about debating the consequences of scientific progress. It is also about creating utopian or at least eutopian (the good not perfect) societies of the future. This utopian tradition, either in the form of utopias (positive visioning) or in the form of dystopias (warnings) is highly developed in the west. However, such a need for utopian visioning does not exist in societies that have decided that they have already lived their utopia. For example, in Islamic civilization, there is no central need for science fiction because the perfect world already existed, this was the time of the Prophet [5]. There was a perfect democratic state guided by shura (consultation) and there was a wise, perfect, leader who could unify society. The problem has been to re-achieve this state, not create other worlds. In Indian civilization as well, there was Rama rajya, the mythical kingdom of Rama, as well the time when Krishna ruled over Bharat (India) [6]. In African culture, as well, writes Mbiti, utopia exists in the past. Time recedes 3 Discussion with Pohl over lunch, April 15, Seattle, Washington, Foundation for the Future symposium on Humanity in the Year 3000. See: www.futurefoundation.org. Also see Ref. [4]. 496 I. Milojevic, S. Inayatullah / Futures 35 (2003) 493–507 toward the Golden Age, the Zamani period [7]. It is history then that has been and remained central. This does not mean these civilizations are not future-oriented but that the imagination of the future is based on recreating an idealized past [8]. Centuries of colonization have further influenced the central need to recover the past, as the past has been systematically denied to them (either completely erased as with African–Americans or given in a mutilated form as with western developmentalism, that is, as an inferior history that must be transformed). By recovering their own authentic pasts, these societies intend to articulate their own authentic visions of the future [9]. In ‘Black to the Future’, Dery asks: “Can a community whose past has been deliberately rubbed out, and whose energies have subsequently been consumed by the search for legible traces of its history, imagine possible futures? Furthermore, isn’t the unreal estate of the future already owned by the technocrats, futurologists, and set designers—white to a man—who have engineered our collective fantasies” [10]. Given the reality of fractured societies, can science fiction created outside the west be truly alternative or is it more likely to remain a poor imitation of western science fiction? Is there any other alternative to diminishing the influence of American frontier science fiction except by creating even more violent and even more virtual future worlds? Can non-western writers, who are often concerned not with utopias but with eusychias—the search for the perfect self—make any sense in the futures and science fiction field? How can cultures that see the spiritual not as exotic or compartmentalized but as the foundation of life, implicated in every packet of consciousness, begin a dialogue with societies imagined in mainstream science fiction, that are replicas of individualistic, secular American/western visions? Thus not only is the future constructed differently (it is past, cyclical, spiral or ancestor-based) but instead of focusing on society, it is the imagination of the perfect self—the enlightened being— that is central to the non-west.