Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought (review)

It is an old joke. The Lone Ranger and Tonto are riding along, when suddenly a huge war party of hostile Indians comes pouring over the hills. ‘Looks like we’re surrounded, Tonto,’ says the Ranger. ‘Who’s “we”, white man?’ responds his faithful Native American sidekick. In the closing decades of the twentieth century the cutting-edge avant-garde intellectual was equally beleaguered. The future, which he had been running as his private fief, had turned on him. Artificial Intelligences were about to render him obsolete. Technology had become equal with its creator; he was just a construct among constructs. Second nature was not only taking over from first nature, it had corrupted all the records: it now seemed that his uniquely privileged, unified self had never existed… He turned to his faithful sidekick, and she said: ‘Who’s “we”, white man?’ It is from this moment, the iconic moment defined in socialist-feminist Donna Haraway’s cyborg manifesto,¹ that Patricia Melzer launches her study of sf and feminist theory – not from the radical, polemical feminist sf novels of the seventies, nor from later theory (and sf) privileging eco-feminism or essentialist womanism.

The cyborg manifesto – lyrical and exuberant, often criticised, often out of style, but an enduring work of feminist scripture – argues, with explicit reference to the phenomenon of feminist sf, that women (already marked as other; different not original; already aware of their impure, hybrid, constructed nature) are ideally situated to grasp the opportunities of a posthuman future and to embrace post-biological concepts of the body and the self. The texts and narratives Melzer analyses, either feminist or interesting to feminists, are chosen for their relevance to Haraway’s cyborg concept: Octavia Butler’s Patternist series (1976–84) and Xenogenesis trilogy (1987–89), Melissa Scott’s Shadow Man (1996) and Richard Calder’s Dead Girls (1992). In film, it is not Ridley Scott’s original Alien (UK/US 1979) – situated in, and clearly marked by, the first-nature feminist decade – but the fourth of the franchise, Alien: Resurrection (Jeunet US 1997); and it is The Matrix (Wachowski brothers Australia/US 1999) – virtual bodies in a style-victim revolt against the machine.

The late Octavia Butler’s cyborg strength is in her characters’ awareness that their identity is partial, contested, ironic: socially constructed, not given – a state of affairs that sf, as Melzer asserts, can make concrete in ways inaccessible to any other medium. The bizarre circumstances and truly extraordinary events that beset Butler’s heroines (an aeons-long struggle with an ancient Nubian mind-parasite; desperate and grotesque negotiations with triple-sexed alien gene-traders) provide the prepared reader with powerful, emotionally charged tools for thinking about the predicament of an embodied mind in a woman’s body: marked as other, marked as subordinate, marked as (inescapably) sexual; marked by reproductive function. It is more difficult, however, for Melzer to convince us that Butler’s compelling, Orwellian, bleakness of vision conforms to the cyborg-optimism of the manifesto. In Survivor (1978) and in Mind of My Mind (1977), the Patternist books treated here, becoming posthuman (even with superpowers over the minds of others) is far from a joyous affair, and embracing difference is a forced choice, reached through tragedy and humiliation. Xenogenesis: Dawn (1987) is equally stark. The alien Oankali intend to breed with the human remnant (Earth having been devastated by global thermonuclear war), and the humans have no say in the matter. Butler’s heroine, Lilith Iyapo, hated by her fellow survivors for dealing with the enemy, has only one recourse: to accept the destruction of her culture; to accept the constructed identity (as go-between, as trusted slave) forced upon her, and use it as best she can for her people’s survival and her own. Can the subaltern speak?² In Octavia Butler’s case, the answer is yes: but what she has to say is very tough news.

The irresistible desire to draw...