International Speculative Fiction #5

by Various Authors

  It’s a fun little short and, given the number of times it’s been posted and reposted on Facebook and elsewhere, it appears to be doing what it’s supposed to do: get attention.

  You can watch it on YouTube at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSKwKJtezU0.

  Item Two: Nigeria is also the location for a small SF miracle—the discovery of nine “lost” episodes of Doctor Who just in time for the Doctor’s 50th anniversary. The trove includes four episodes of the six-part story The Web of Fear, in which the Doctor battles robot Yetis who are spreading a poisonous fungus on the London Underground.

  See:

  The BBC’s 50th anniversary page at http://www.doctorwho.tv/50-years/.

  Wikipedia page for The Day of the Doctor at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_of_the_Doctor.

  “It’s official: Missing Doctor Who episodes have been found!” on io9 at http://observationdeck.io9.com/its-official-missing-doctor-who-episodes-have-been-fo-1442430952.

  “About time: Nine ‘lost’ Doctor Who episodes discovered in Nigeria” on The Guardian at http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2013/oct/11/doctor-who-lost-episodes-found-download-bbc.

  Swedish Prime Minister’s Science Fiction Novel Becomes a Hit Play

  Swedish Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt wrote a dystopian novel called Det Sovande Folket (“The Sleeping People” or “The Sleeping Nation”) twenty years ago. It was all but forgotten, and isn’t in print any more, although a pirated version is available on internet torrent sites. But now that Reinfeldt is running the country it’s become a hot property and it’s been turned into a play that has sold out every performance. Reinfeldt has refused to comment.

  Written when he was 28, the novel is set this year, in 2013, making this a perfect time to resurrect it. It portrays a Sweden that is feeling the effects of twenty years of Social Democratic government, where the populace is divided into the Fools, who do all the work and who finance the welfare state, and the Sleeping Brains, who lazily watch television all day long while living on benefits. Sounds positively Ayn-Rand-ian!

  See:

  “PM’s sci-fi book becomes surprise stage success” on The Local at http://www.thelocal.se/49898/20130913/.

  Fredrik Reinfeldt’s page on Wikipedia at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fredrik_Reinfeldt.

  Hit Film Gravity Crosses Borders

  Caution: spoilers ahead.

  There’s some debate as to whether or not the new film Gravity (http://gravitymovie.warnerbros.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_(film), http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OiTiKOy59o4), which stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney and which set an all-time record for an October film opening, should be classified as science fiction. There’s nothing fundamentally speculative about it—everything in it could happen today, with current technology and in the current social context—so maybe it’s better considered simply as a space-based thriller.

  Whatever the merits of the arguments on each side, it certainly features a setting associated with science fiction (indeed, that was science fiction until fairly recently), has been well received by SF fans, and is considered SF by many people, so I’ll let that classification stand for the purposes of this column.

  Being a major Hollywood release, Gravity isn’t the usual fare covered in ISF, but it has several international aspects, both in story and execution. The film was co-written, co-produced, and directed by Alphonso Cuarón, the Mexican director of Spanish-language films like Y Tu Mama También and English language features like Children of Men.

  And then there’s the Chinese connection. The massive Chinese film audience is being courted by innumerable film projects these days, often through co-productions with Chinese companies or through the casting of Chinese actors.

  But as the International Business Times notes (http://www.ibtimes.com/gravity-hopes-pull-chinese-audience-pro-china-plot-line-1415870), Gravity appears to be have its sights set on China using story elements alone. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) first takes refuge in a state-of-the-art Chinese space station, then hitches a ride home in a Chinese capsule—giving uncommon cinematic recognition to the growing Chinese space program. It couldn’t come at a better time: just this month China’s space program celebrated its first decade of manned flight (http://www.spacedaily.com/reports/Onward_and_upward_as_China_marks_10_years_of_manned_spaceflight_999.html), later this month it’s scheduled to send an unmanned rover to the Moon, and it has longer-term plans to return man to the Moon for the first time since Apollo 17 in 1972 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_17).

  It appears possible that the Chinese story elements succeeded in pleasing Chinese authorities, because the film has just been approved for distribution in China. (http://www.ibtimes.com/china-censorship-bureau-ok-clooney-bullock-gravity-gets-november-china-release-date-1426542).

  The ISF Alumni Department: The Entire Roster from ISF #2

  ISF #2 featured fiction by three authors, Ken Liu, Lavie Tidhar, and me, Nas Hedron, and each of these alumni has news this issue.

  Ken Liu has actually appeared in two issues of ISF (#2 and #4). Given that this is only issue #5, that makes him practically a member of the family. Recently Ken had a brief profile on the Malaysian news site The Star Online (http://www.thestar.com.my/Lifestyle/Books/News/2013/09/17/Its-not-like-I-can-sell-awards-for-money.aspx). It recaps his historic sweep of the Hugo Award, Nebula Award, and World Fantasy Award in 2012, the first work of fiction to take all three awards in a year. Ken was in nearby Singapore as part of the Read! Singapore program. Until now he has focused on short fiction, but told the Star that he’s now at work on his first novel, which he hopes to finish by the end of the year. I’m sure I’m not the only one at ISF looking forward to it.

  Lavie Tidhar, meanwhile, has been interviewed at length for the current issue of Clarkesworld, in Deep Into the Dark: A Conversation with Lavie Tidhar. (http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/tidhar_interview/).

  Finally, I have just released a free soundtrack album to accompany my 2012 fabulist novelette The Virgin Birth of Sharks. The story is about a Desi street kid in Toronto who learns that she was inexplicably conceived while her mother was in prison and had no contact at all with men.

  The book has a home page at http://virginsharks.com/. The album includes music ranging from blues to tango to ambient, and features artists from Belgium, Brazil, Canada, France, Spain, Ukraine, and the United States, and is available as a free download at http://virginsharkssoundtrack.wordpress.com/.

  Submitting News

  If you know of an item you think should be included in the next installment of Around the World, please send it to us at ISFAroundTheWorld@gmail.com.

  Social Science Fiction: Bracing for a Brave New World

  Hunter Liguore

  Science Fiction has a long history, dating back (at least) to the early 1800s with the work of Mary Shelley (earlier according to some researchers). Most stories deal in some way with technology, or with future advances in that technology. It’s not until the 1920s that a new branch of science fiction is born that introduces a social element into the mix, and seeks to warn contemporary society of current dangers, while disguising them in a future dystopia—and thus social science fiction was born.

  So when we talk about social science fiction, we’re discussing fiction that takes place in the future, while addressing the social issues affecting contemporary society. It is fiction that tells contemporary society what the future might look like if changes aren’t made.

  When Did Social Science Fiction Begin?

  Before writers sought to show readers negative version of the future, there was a trend in which utopian fiction writers wrote books illustrating perfect societies. In a completely opposite way, utopian fiction suggested: this is what a perfect society looks like, and here’s how to achieve it. Famous utopian works include Sir Thomas More’s Utopia (England), Frances Bacon’s The New Atlantis (England), Charlotte Perkins-Gilman’s Herland (United States), Étienne Cabet’s Travels in Icaria (France), and N. G.
Chernyshevsky’s What Is To Be Done? (Russia).

  There are several in-between books—works that are satirical in nature, but aren’t quite utopian or dystopian. These include Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Samuel Butler’s Erewhon. The latter title is an anagram for Nowhere, communicating the notion that a perfect society cannot be found. But even in utopian fiction, there is an element of presenting society as imperfect, while the writer attempts to point the way to a better system.

  While the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries saw plenty of utopias and satirical renditions of the world, it wasn’t until the 1920s that social science fiction really made a clear mark. Prior to this, at the turn of the century, catastrophe fiction made a splash with books that warned of the doom for the human race in books like H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898), The Time Machine (1895), and The World Set Free (1914).

  During the 1920s, although influenced by catastrophe fiction, social science fiction writers narrowed the focus; no longer concerned with the world at large, they turned to problems affecting the human condition right in their own cities. At the time factories were pumping out cars and a variety of household products. Concern that humans were becoming unfeeling or mechanized grew. Writers abandoned the notion of utopia, instead turning to its opposite, which seemed more realistic in the wake of a failing society.

  The two most important books to arrive during the 1920s are R. U. R. by Czech writer Karel Čapek and We by Russian author Yevgeny Zamyatin.

  From R. U. R or Rossum’s Universal Robots, we get the introduction of the word robot or robotat, a Czech word meaning to work. The story (written as a play) involves the first instance of a world takeover by robots and warns, in the wake of dehumanizing factory work, what humans could become if something didn’t change. The robots perform the everyday tasks of people, who in turn become lazy and unconcerned with life. Čapek, like Zamyatin a few years later, rails against Taylorism, a system of workflows and labor created by Frederick Winslow Taylor. Taylor’s ideas, if left unchecked, might progress to a point where humans became machines. (During the 1930s Charlie Chaplin reproduced the image of the robotic factory worker in his film Modern Times, a direct response to Fordism, which evolved out of Taylorism.)

  Zamyatin, We, and Russia

  The publishing history of We reflects the sentiment of the times the author lived in. Zamyatin wrote We in 1920, at the height of the Bolshevik Revolution. While his manuscript was announced several times, it was never published as it was believed to be too dangerous to issue. Bootleg copies were distributed in secret. In fact, We was never published in Zamyatin’s lifetime. During the 1920s-30s, all of Zamyatin’s works were pulled from libraries, and with Stalin’s consent he emigrated to Paris in 1931. After failing to produce a historical text on Russia, he died in 1937.[1] We was first considered for publication came in 1952 by Chekhov House Publishers. In 1988 it was finally published in his homeland.

  What Was so Dangerous About We?

  Zamyatin believed that the future could be calculated, and the next revolution could be out-guessed.[2] This premise is fundamental of understanding We. One possible influence on this prophetic attitude can be found in H. G. Wells, the English novelist, whose work Zamyatin was translating at the time. Wells used science as a method to predict the future. His philosophy held that if you could outline the shape of things to come, you were in some way a prophet.[3] Zamyatin uses some of these basic elements from Wells in We. Essentially, Zamyatin created a character who represented his own situation, and plight. D-503 is a man reporting on current events, who runs into trouble for being different and leads a revolution. The idea that revolution was impending is a Marxist principal, but Zamyatin’s revolution was to free the people from the Soviet State, symbolized in the book by the One State. We is, if nothing else, Zamyatin’s attempt to play prophet, much like Wells, and cast a light on things he believed were to come.

  When Zamyatin created We, Russia was at the embryonic stages of a new ideology—the ideology of industry. At the time, the Industrial Revolution introduced the world to better and quicker means to do things. At the forefront were Henry Ford and Taylor who implemented new production standards in making cars that cut down on time, but changed the worker into a more robotic form.

  Ford employed the division of labor and adapted it to the assembly of a motor vehicle; he also implemented Taylor’s efficiency standards.[4] Fordism had an profound impact on culture and society, including the workforce and workplace. As automotive production turned into an assembly line with conveyor belts and automatic welding machines, a shift in time management and labor issues ensued. The continuous flow caused by the assembly line dictated a more disciplined work environment; workers were known to speak in the “Ford whisper,” that is, not moving their lips, as regulations were implemented to discourage sitting, smoking, and talking.[5] There was also a shift from the use of skilled labor, where employees set the pace of work were costly, to unskilled labor, which made work mindless, easy to time-manage, and less costly.[6] The images and influences of Fordism and Taylorism were incorporated into We and are evident in elements of the mechanized One State in We’s future.

  Zamyatin was also influenced by the poet Alexei Gastev, who described Nikolai Aseev—a proponent of Taylorism and of time efficiency practices—as “the Ovid of engineers, miners, and metalworkers.”[7] During 1920, Gastev was the head of the Central Institute of Labor. It is believed that Zamyatin’s material for the One State came directly from Gastev’s experiments on Soviet workers. Orlando Figes describe’s Gastev’s research in Natasha’s Dance:

  “Hundreds of identically dressed trainees would be marched in columns to their benches, and orders would be given out by buzzes from machines. The workers were trained to hammer correctly … Gastev’s aim, by his own admission, was to turn the worker into a sort of ‘human robot’ … Gastev envisaged a utopia where ‘people’ would be replaced by ‘proletarian units’ identified by ciphers such as ‘A, B, C or 325, 075, 0, and so on. These automatons would be like machines, ‘incapable of individual thought,’ and would simply obey their controller. A ‘mechanized collectivism’ would take the place of the individual personality’ ...” [8]

  Gastev’s views would have been available to Zamyatin and he may have drawn upon them in creating We. Cars in the streets were evidence that Gastev’s views were manifesting.[9] Further, it’s clear that the increasingly robotic nature of the workplace was due to the growing acceptance of Fordism and Taylorism around the world, but was also important to Lenin as he geared Soviet Russia toward mechanization. With his interpretation of Fordism and Taylorism, Zamyatin suggests that if mechanism continued, people would lose their sense of free will and their individual human spirit; individualism would be traded for mass collectivism.[10] In writing We, Zamyatin attempts to cast what the future will bring for the working people in this controlled, collective state.

  But there’s more. To understand the evolution of social science fiction—essentially how later writers adapted and developed the social message—we need to see where it started. We need to go deeper.

  At the time that We was written, Russia was undergoing numerous changes with the onset of the Bolshevik Revolution. The 1920s brought about new ideas which were manifested in the form of machinism, movies, radio, and the car. Petrograd was rebuilt after its destruction in World War I, while shortages of materials and food were widespread.[11] While the cold winters and starvation depleted the population of Petrograd from 1,217,000 to 722,000 between 1918 and 1921, the Proletarian Cultural movement called the Proletkult was busy developing ideas about god-building, tectology, and human mechanization; ultimately they set out to spread their message.[12] Of the half million members reported in 1919, Zamyatin was one. In fact, he took the title We from a collection of poems and plays the group produced.[13]

  The symbolism evoked in Zamyatin’s We depicts the political and cultural climate of his day. He describes a society where th
e government has planned every aspect of a person’s life, with the sole purpose of making them happy.[14] He also shows, in an allegorical and satirical way, what will happen to art and literature in a negative utopia, like the one in We, which mirrored the emerging ideology of the Bolsheviks.[15] As writing was becoming regulated and censored, some writers, like Zamyatin, retaliated by portraying the inevitability of such censorship.

  As scholar Edward Brown points out, Zamyatin was rebelling against society in general when he wrote We.

  “Zamyatin’s rebellion ... is not directed against any particular version of the modern mass society. It is not directed at socialism or Communism as such but rather at the forms of regimentation which has resulted from the growth of a complex industrial civilization.”[16]

  Zamyatin’s fear was that Russian cultural life would come to an end, and yet there was no vision of a future socialist state for which he could argue.[17] Zamyatin chose not to include the reality of famine and civil war in the backdrop to the book, but rather the culmination of ideas indicative of his time.

  The main character of We, D-503, is an average proletarian or worker only more so—a person whom his current society was about to reject, one who would disappear under the coming changes. D-503 is a poet, an inventor, and a philosopher (all of which Zamyatin was as well). D-503 routinely praises technology and machines, not because he has been taught or brainwashed, but because he is poetic; his admission reads like satire, like something of which Gastev might have been a proponent, which Zamyatin plays with and ridicules.[18]

  Another critique of We is that it proposed to reveal to the public, and warn the public about, the dangers of the new Soviet government. Zamyatin was aware that conformity increased under Lenin’s rule, and depicts this through the mechanized and controlled world of the One State.[19] He used science as the primary drive in We, much as Lenin and the Bolsheviks used science and technology to change society.[20] The glass-enclosed civilization in We is designed to satire N. G. Chernyshevsky’s utopian society in What Is To Be Done? (Lenin later wrote a treatise of his own by the same name in an effort to define his new Russia, and in which he called for a new party type.)[21] Zamyatin presents a glass-enclosed society that is on the brink of a scientific marvel, and at the height of dehumanization, yet the protagonist D-503 succeeds in thinking on his own, and escaping to the wall outside the city, the wilderness, a land with little human interaction. Indirectly, Zamyatin answers Lenin’s (and Chernyshevsky’s) question what is to be done.