Race in American Science Fiction

1 Racing Science Fiction

21 1 Racing Science Fiction Science fiction produces alien and divergent neighborhoods, with strange and dissimilar signs, shifting identities, and distorted realities of existence. For example, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower (1993) is a dystopian novel set in the not too distant future around the city of Los Angeles, where downward spiraling middle-class people live in interracial walled communities for protection against the decaying and regressing social order of twenty-first-century America. This sf narrative takes the form of an autobiographical journal relating Lauren Olamina ’s intimate experiences of the world as her community crumbles around her. She begins a new religion, Earthseed, where “God is change,” as she flees north through the ensuing anarchy and violence with her multiracial band of survivors, encountering various situations, ranging from gunfights and cannibalism to escaped slaves and wildfire (Sower, 3). Ultimately, the destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars (Sower, 199). Butler’s story is of great consequence to readers because she explores the psychological and spiritual repercussions of racism on a disintegrating country that illustrate the importance of examining attitudes, assumptions, and feelings by which society has conditioned everyone. Lauren is afflicted with hyperempathy syndrome, a congenital disease passed to her from her mother, an abuser of a drug called “Paracetco, the smart pill” (Sower, 11). Hyperempathy syndrome is a delusional ailment, which causes Lauren to experience the pain and pleasure of others around her. This illness creates in her a profound 22 · r ace in american science fiction sense of compassion, allowing her to fight the sense of hopelessness and indifference surrounding her. It grants her the wisdom to lead people. In this light Lauren learns to value community and all it offers —solidarity, activism, and self-reliance. She and her followers must learn, teach, adapt, and grow. As Butler writes: “Embrace diversity. Or be destroyed” (Sower, 181). And so by embracing all that her community is, Lauren adapts, in the Darwinian sense, in order to survive. Butler and other sf writers like her use sf to move us outside of our normal comprehension and allow us to see how race operates culturally . This kind of writing takes us beyond the scope of our ordinary experiences and forces us to mediate between what we already know about race and what we can learn about it by reading sf. The means to accomplish this kind of mediation relates to concepts of otherhood. And in terms of the black/white binary, sf authors would do well to examine settings, signs, and characters, even themselves, based on how otherhood fits science fiction. Butler does understand these relations , and her Parable books present a bleak, nightmarish view of a possible future in alarming detail—where there is unchecked violence and crime; the rapid spread of drugs like pyro, which induces people to start fires; gangs, drug addicts, and homeless people dominating the streets; greedy multinational corporations buying up pieces of the country; federal deregulation of minimum wages, which allows (debt) slavery to make a comeback; escalating energy, food, and water prices; spreading hunger; a corrupt, lazy, and ineffectual police force; simple diseases such as measles and cholera raging out of control; an exponentially increasing birth rate; global warming; a growing gap between the rich and poor; declining educational systems; polygamy; the failure of moral teachings from various religions, most especially Christianity; the decay of modern communication technologies such as television and dependence on older technologies such as public radio for world news; dismantling of the space program; rusting cars, guns and fire—literally social chaos caused by a convergence of social, environmental, and economic crises. As Peter Stillman describes it, “The United States is no longer the storied land of freedom and plenty” (18). In other words, twenty-first-century American life is a living hell. Though Butler’s second novel is complicated by dual narrators, Lauren and her resentful daughter, Larkin/Asha Vere, Parable of the R acing Science Fiction · 23 Talents (1998) continues the story of Lauren and her fledgling Earthseed religion, where “change is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe” (75). The U.S. is dominated by lawlessness , violence, slavery, and religious fanaticism, among other things. Lauren’s missing brother, Marcus, is back from the dead and rescued from slavery. Later, the first Earthseed community, Acorn, is destroyed; Lauren and her followers are enslaved with electronic “slave collars” by...