Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (review)

Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction builds on Edward Said's contentions in Culture and Imperialism (1993) that the novel and imperialism are unthinkable without each other and that imagined, novelistic space is constructed in relation to the facts and fantasies of imperial expansion. John Rieder makes the same case for the emergence of a particular type of popular fiction, arguing that the nineteenth-century novels and short stories that were later seen as emergent science fiction are closely and inextricably linked to colonialism. As the author admits, this is not a radically new claim. In this book, though, Rieder seeks to clarify exactly what it might mean by looking at narratives from the Victorian period through to the pulp magazine stories of the 1920s and 1930s. By then, science fiction had solidified into a commercially packageable genre, in no small part due to the efforts of Hugo Gernsback, the founding editor of Amazing Stories and an enthusiastic promoter of science fiction (a coinage often attributed to him), who sought to validate the new form by tracing its lineage to the work of Edgar Allan Poe, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells. Rieder is himself careful around issues of genre, arguing for a Wittgensteinian "family resemblance" that links science-fictional narratives, insisting on the impurity of genres, and taking a skeptical attitude to origin tales. Colonialism is also broadly described here as a historical process "by which European economy and culture penetrated and transformed the non European world" rather than as colonization as such (25). This formulation allows him to note the transition from earlier scientific romances inflected by European imperialism to the stories that appear later in the twentieth century, which were shaped by an emerging consciousness of the economic and cultural hegemony of the United States.

Rieder's approach to the science-fictional narratives themselves could be described as materialist and broadly Jamesonian: he sees these tales as mythic insofar as they provide imaginary solutions to real contradictions, but he stresses that works of fiction are also conscious works of art. There is also something of the influence of Pierre Bourdieu here: Rieder notes that as literary merchandise, works of science fiction are bound up with the pressures of the publishing industry and with the expectations of audiences.

The four chapters that follow the introduction explore a wide range of subgenres from lost race narratives through stories of artificial humans to stories of apocalyptic invasion. The former group emerges out of the late-Victorian revival of romance. Some of these are familiar enough, including H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines (1885) and She (1887), as well as Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World (1912). But Rieder also introduces some much less familiar material, from Frank Aubrey's The Devil-Tree of El Dorado (1897) to A. Merritt's The Moon Pool (1918–19). He traces the recurrence of certain motifs in these stories to the contradictions of late-nineteenth-century colonialism, for instance the fact that while the mineral wealth of African nations might have appeared to belong to the native populations, Europeans felt that it was nonetheless "theirs." In lost race novels, this contradiction often appears as an ambivalence within the discovered world itself that assumes the form of civil warfare: in King Solomon's Mines the white men are both welcomed and reviled in Kukuanaland and find themselves on the side of the rightful king in his battle to reassume the throne. But it may also take more distorted forms, with ambivalence turning into a different figure of contradiction, anachronism: dinosaurs and humans live side by side in the same remote plateau in The Lost World.

Rieder traces the motif of catastrophe as it develops from the invasion narratives that appear in Britain in the wake of George Chesney's The Battle of Dorking (1871) through such post-apocalypse narratives as Richard Jefferies's After London (1885); American...