Explorers from a space-faring civilization stumble upon a remote planet inhabited by an enigmatic, but technologically inferior alien species. Cultural differences lead to misunderstandings. Tensions rise, often erupting in violent conflict. The story’s protagonist is a member of the technologically advanced civilization; his cultural values conform neatly to those of a western audience. He (our science fiction protagonist is almost always a he) forms a bond with the locals and learns all about their strange and exotic culture. Bonus points if the story features a local love interest who helps him understand her people.
This basic structure is used repeatedly in science fiction media. Our explorers could easily be the crew of Starship USS Enterprise, our protagonist Jake Sully from Avatar or Paul Atreides from Dune. The tradition of writing about journeys to imaginary lands stretches back millennia. A True Story is a satire from the Roman province of Syria following a similar structure, despite being written in the second century AD. It features a journey to the moon and an intergalactic battle over the colonization of Venus.
The enduring appeal of these stories is easy to understand – they satisfy a need for adventure, an urge to travel beyond the claustrophobic familiarity of day-to-day life. Yet, as effective as space travel is at satisfying an escapist fantasy, no galaxy is far enough away to free itself from the cultural context in which it was conceived. Even when science fiction is not a thinly veiled commentary of real-world events, its themes remain firmly embedded in the socio-historic context of its author and readers. In the archetypal plot that I recounted above the cultural context is, evidently, European colonialism.
The strange alien culture is presented through the eyes of the story’s more familiar protagonist. The readers are placed in the role of cultural anthropologists; they are captivated by the book because of their desire to discover more about the aliens and, by the end of the story, to understand them. These invented cultures allow us to challenge established social norms; the author’s imagination is the only limit to which faiths, political systems and social hierarchies the aliens possess.
However, as good as some authors are at inventing new and exciting cultures, the relationship between the protagonist and the aliens inevitably reflects that of a colonizer and the colonized. The protagonist is designed to be relatable to the western audience; his culture represents a familiar and ‘civilized’ world, while the aliens are viewed as the other – foreign and exotic. To the readers, the extraterrestrials are like the subjects of academic study; we exercise our power over them by picking their culture apart, examining and judging them in relation to the protagonist and to ourselves.
In Black Skin, White Masks Frantz Fanon condemns the calculative logic of colonial rule, criticizing the use of European frameworks for studying colonialism and anti-Black racism. He argues that they reinforce pathologies within both the colonizers and the colonized and are harmful to achieving the goal of liberation. The colonial subject is made to see themselves through the colonial gaze; they begin to view themselves as inferior, strengthening the unequal power dynamics between colonizer and colonized. The relationship between alien and anthropologist in modern science fiction inevitably reflects these colonial dynamics. While these novels can be masterful portrayals of positive cross-cultural exchange, they continue to present their invented worlds through the colonial gaze of their protagonist.
Ursula K. Le Guin may be the greatest writer of this genre and displays a profound understanding of the tensions inherent in her works. She was raised in a family of anthropologists, and their influence is palpable in the care with which she describes alien cultures and in her portrayal of the difficulties of cross-cultural communication. Her protagonists, typically ethnographers, display a sincere curiosity to understand the people they study. The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) presents an alien people with a strikingly different culture from our own. The inhabitants of planet Gethen are ambisexual: they remain sexually latent for the better part of a month-long cycle, at the end of which their sexual attributes appear for a few brief days. Individuals have no predisposition for male or female attributes, sometimes developing one and sometimes the other. The result is a culture without gender roles; in the words of Le Guin, she “eliminated gender, to find out what was left”.
The novel is framed as a report about the planet Gethen, compiled by its more familiar protagonist: Genly Ai, a male envoy from Earth. The Left Hand of Darkness uses the masculine pronoun to refer to the androgynous Gethens, falsely imposing a familiar linguistic structure over a fundamentally different culture. Fanon discusses at length the issue of linguistic imposition in Black Skin, White Masks, contending that to speak the colonisers’ language is to adopt their civilisation and participate in their world. Whether the misgendering of Gethens is an intentional reflection of the Ai’s prejudices or an oversight on the part of Le Guin, it exposes the extent to which we view these unfamiliar worlds through a subjective and colonial gaze.
The story likewise subverts the local romantic interest trope. Ai struggles with his conflicted feelings towards a friend who occasionally exhibits the sexual attributes of the gender that he is attracted to. The relationship does not develop into a romantic one, but it helps Ai come to terms with the fundamental differences between Gethen culture and his own.
Le Guin’s novel satisfies the need to escape from the familiar, while avoiding the genre’s most common pitfalls. The aliens are not attributed to a cookie-cutter ‘exotic’ culture, and the protagonist does not seamlessly transition to their way of life. Instead, he is forced to undergo an arduous process of cultural immersion, by the end of which the very way he views the world is transformed. Nonetheless, The Left Hand of Darkness maintains a colonial perspective in its presentation of the aliens through its protagonist’s gaze. The reader cannot help but view Ai as the norm and the genderless aliens as the deviation from it; the protagonist and the aliens continue to be locked in their respective categories of coloniser and colonised. In search of a novel within this genre that breaks these rigid categories, I turn to another work of science fiction from the sixties, written on the other side of the Iron Curtain.
On the surface, Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Hard to be a God (1964) tells a very similar story. Anton,an academic from a future space-faring Earth, is sent to discretely observe the locals of a planet called Arkanar. Earth has become a communist utopia, while Arkanar stagnates in an exaggerated imitation of the European Dark Ages. The alien planet is in a state of cultural and technological degeneration, without the slightest hint of a renaissance.
At face value, the book not only conforms to but champions the colonial perspective, categorizing the colonizer as culturally superior to the colonized. The aliens wallow in mud and gore, stifling any chance of progress by routinely executing all artists and intellectuals, while the protagonist grows exceedingly disgusted by their backwards culture. His love interest is the exception that proves the rule; Anton views her as one of the only locals worth considering human. Unlike other works in this genre, the aliens are not meant to evoke a sense of wonder and curiosity from the readers, but of pity and revulsion.
This could easily give the readers a sense of security in being superior to the fictional other, yet the novel does no such thing. Instead, it subtly urges the Soviet reader to recognize the authoritarian regime that censors all art and literature as much more familiar than the protagonist’s distant utopian homeland. The brothers Strugatsky subvert the typical power dynamics between the readers and the fictional alien culture by placing their readers in the role of those being studied and judged. Over the course of the novel, Anton ceases to resemble a cautious anthropologist from an advanced civilization, becoming nearly indistinguishable from the inhabitants of Arkanar. It culminates with him losing his sanity and erupting in a violent rampage, which is perhaps the reaction warranted by a world so sickeningly similar to our own.
Hard to be a God does not avoid reflections of colonialism; that would be impossible for a science fiction novel of its type. It succeeds, however, in giving a sorely needed shake-up of the typical framework used to explore alien cultures. The readers are denied their expected position of power and authority over the other, as the society placed under scrutiny is their own. Science fiction has often been used to criticize existing cultures, especially as a way of bypassing censorship, yet few works manage to subvert the colonial gaze with such visceral effect. Western readers, used to the role of anthropologists examining a fictional other, are brought face-to-face with a repulsive reflection of themselves.
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