Chocolate Post-Mortem
A Filipino scholar, AG is here on an Asian Public Intellectuals grant. Similar to a Fulbright. To my unending delight, he is spending 6 months here looking at (or: for) Indonesian science fiction. Other things, too, but specifically that:
.......the science fiction of the developing world.
He comes here directly from Japan, where he & his wife spent the last six months, investigating sci-fi trends there. AG has a PhD & is a science fiction short story author himself, though his work is not yet translated from Tagalog into English. He's promised me a book. He particularly hopes to meet with an Indonesian author whose novel: Chocolate Post-Mortem, is currently being translated. So far, however, he’s had no luck at all. The Indonesian literature professors he’s interviewed to date have all told him the same thing:
there is no science fiction in Indonesia.
Well, there IS, but it’s not, you know, literature. They say.
Well, there IS, but it’s not really science fiction, technically.
Even Chocolate Post-Mortem, some say, quickly becomes more of a crime / mystery / love story.
But there IS, AG insists. There IS Indonesian science fiction…of a sort.
Here’s the thing: Science fiction is about exploring possible worlds, futures & identities; but you have to be able to get there from here. Going into space, say, is something first world authors (categorically) can imagine, having already taken the first step ourselves. The very possibility of it is part of our unconscious identity: we can see ourselves developing such futuristic technologies, or exploring the mysteries of the universe, alien races, biology, cyberspace, all with some degree of intention & control.
That whole genre of stories, AG claims, doesn’t spontaneously emerge from authors whose nations can’t even build their own basic infrastructure. The third world is defined, in fact, exactly by those nations who were never involved with the space race. There’s no sense of ownership or plausibility to imagined technologies—or futures—of any significance. Both the realities & fantasies of being Modern rely on images & identities provided by first world powers, & third world fans can only copy it, endlessly derivative & lagging behind. It’s never their own.
So it is in fiction: third world authors writing traditional sci-fi tend to be borrowing ideas, technologies, & images set by a first world precedent & with a first world sensibility. Where would we get the technology for any of that? he says. It would have to be given to us. What would it mean to use it? It would have to be allowed.
But that’s a common premise, I say: all-powerful aliens bestowing upon us poor humans advanced technologies. And what about alien invasion & colonization? [Are we on very dangerous territory yet? Already we’re talking about what entire nations, nay entire races, cannot spontaneously imagine.] But alien colonization, now that seems fair: a native allegory for third world authors & classic sci-fi, too. Where are those books?
But by ‘poor humans’ I mean Europeans, he claims. Or Americans. “Aliens NEVER invade the third world. They only ever land in the first world.” After all, they want to be taken to our leaders. Even when they land, make war, share knowledge, & abduct people, it’s only ever as remote as the American southwest, Midwest, northwest: the frontiers. Why would they be elsewhere?
So what IS third world sci-fi about, if he’s still so sure that it exists? About alienation, he says, about encounters with foreign cultures, about identity without agency. About the masks we wear to assimilate. It’s a way to imagine alternate histories, not what we could yet become, but what we might have been.
Says Evan: Nostalgia for the future.
.......the science fiction of the developing world.
He comes here directly from Japan, where he & his wife spent the last six months, investigating sci-fi trends there. AG has a PhD & is a science fiction short story author himself, though his work is not yet translated from Tagalog into English. He's promised me a book. He particularly hopes to meet with an Indonesian author whose novel: Chocolate Post-Mortem, is currently being translated. So far, however, he’s had no luck at all. The Indonesian literature professors he’s interviewed to date have all told him the same thing:
there is no science fiction in Indonesia.
Well, there IS, but it’s not, you know, literature. They say.
Well, there IS, but it’s not really science fiction, technically.
Even Chocolate Post-Mortem, some say, quickly becomes more of a crime / mystery / love story.
But there IS, AG insists. There IS Indonesian science fiction…of a sort.
Here’s the thing: Science fiction is about exploring possible worlds, futures & identities; but you have to be able to get there from here. Going into space, say, is something first world authors (categorically) can imagine, having already taken the first step ourselves. The very possibility of it is part of our unconscious identity: we can see ourselves developing such futuristic technologies, or exploring the mysteries of the universe, alien races, biology, cyberspace, all with some degree of intention & control.
That whole genre of stories, AG claims, doesn’t spontaneously emerge from authors whose nations can’t even build their own basic infrastructure. The third world is defined, in fact, exactly by those nations who were never involved with the space race. There’s no sense of ownership or plausibility to imagined technologies—or futures—of any significance. Both the realities & fantasies of being Modern rely on images & identities provided by first world powers, & third world fans can only copy it, endlessly derivative & lagging behind. It’s never their own.
So it is in fiction: third world authors writing traditional sci-fi tend to be borrowing ideas, technologies, & images set by a first world precedent & with a first world sensibility. Where would we get the technology for any of that? he says. It would have to be given to us. What would it mean to use it? It would have to be allowed.
But that’s a common premise, I say: all-powerful aliens bestowing upon us poor humans advanced technologies. And what about alien invasion & colonization? [Are we on very dangerous territory yet? Already we’re talking about what entire nations, nay entire races, cannot spontaneously imagine.] But alien colonization, now that seems fair: a native allegory for third world authors & classic sci-fi, too. Where are those books?
But by ‘poor humans’ I mean Europeans, he claims. Or Americans. “Aliens NEVER invade the third world. They only ever land in the first world.” After all, they want to be taken to our leaders. Even when they land, make war, share knowledge, & abduct people, it’s only ever as remote as the American southwest, Midwest, northwest: the frontiers. Why would they be elsewhere?
So what IS third world sci-fi about, if he’s still so sure that it exists? About alienation, he says, about encounters with foreign cultures, about identity without agency. About the masks we wear to assimilate. It’s a way to imagine alternate histories, not what we could yet become, but what we might have been.
Says Evan: Nostalgia for the future.
posted by Anne E. Campisi at 2:14 AM
1 Comments:
“Aliens NEVER invade the third world. They only ever land in the first world.”
Ha!
From "The Floating World: A Proposal":
Thousands of years after planetwide ecological disaster forced their ancestors to leave Earth, a group of starfaring humans has come home. The earth is green again, its oceans blue. A complex post-technological culture flourishes on an island archipelago. To the people of this culture, however, the returning starfarers are not humans at all but rather invådu, alien invaders. The encounter between the two groups plays out in a science-fictional context one of the great tragedies of our time--the profoundly destructive consequences of the collision of the modern, technological, rational world with the medieval, premodern, mystic one. And when the earthpeople finally discover the true nature and origins of the invaders, both earthborn and starfarers alike must grapple with the unavoidable question--one of science fiction’s classic themes--of who can be called human, a person, a friend, versus who is called the alien, or the enemy, or the Other.
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