Race in American Science Fiction

2 Meta-slavery

54 2 Meta-slavery Read as a labor-based technology, race has been used to code black human beings in the New World as natural machines essential for the cultivation of the physical landscape and capable of producing wealth. From this standpoint, Ben Williams realizes that “the mechanical metaphors” used for blacks “embody a history that began with slavery” (169). Forcibly uprooted from Africa, alienated by the middle passage, dehumanized in the Americas, and controlled by strange white men, is there any wonder that the slavery experience has been interpreted as the very substance of sf for blacks? Describing his own experience with slavery in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789), Olaudah Equiano writes, “If ten thousand worlds had been my own, I would have freely parted with them all to have exchanged my condition with that of the meanest slave in my own country” (33). Evoking the sf theme of other worlds as long ago as 1789, Equiano speaks of trading ten thousand other worlds to be free of the inequities of slavery. In fact, this passage displays how Equiano compares his time as a slave in his own country, present-day Nigeria, to his initial experience of the European slave trade in the hold of a slave ship headed for the West Indies. Fittingly, the historical legacies of slavery and colonization, which have shaped black cultures in the Americas, are easily taken up within sf motifs to explore the dynamics of power and race. Slavery is not science fictional. It is, however, a “peculiar institution ” that can be made even more peculiar when imagined in terms of technological forms of bondage or captivity. Sf constructions of slavery Meta-slavery · 55 tend either to recontextualize captivity narratives in terms of new technologies or to employ technology to relocate in time the observation or experience of bondage as a cultural norm. Either approach uses technology or science to distance and defamiliarize the institution and practice of slavery, resulting in constructions of slavery as neo–slave narratives or meta-slavery narratives. As the epitome of racism, then, slavery is the inevitable starting point of any exploration of a race in science fiction. With this in mind, Samuel R. Delany’s celebrated Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984), set in the far future on a distant planet, Rhyonon, opens with the line “‘Of course’ . . . ‘you will be a slave’” (3). The lead character, Korga, voluntarily undergoes Radical Anxiety Termination at nineteen years of age, rendering him incapable of independent thought while ridding him of his anger, antisocial disposition , drug addiction, and sexual deviance (3). This “gamma ray laser ” technology painlessly strips Korga of his identity, and he is sold into a life of corporate slavery by the RAT Institute, where he is chronically underfed and overworked, dressed in ill-fitting clothes while routinely beaten and cursed at by his supervisors before being allowed to rest in a filth-encrusted cage (6).1 This is his life for twenty-two years, except for a few days when he is illegally sold to a nameless rich woman and later recaptured. Only corporations can legally possess slaves on this particular planet.2 During his brief time as a fugitive slave, the previously illiterate Rat Korga is given a black sensory glove by the rich woman that restores and even improves his mind, and he takes full advantage of this by reading voraciously. Gaining the ability to read is a powerful moment in the text because Delany consciously mirrors “the classic slave-narrative scenario in which learning to read is an illicit act of discovery” (Dubey, Signs, 239). However, Rat Korga’s glove is yanked off upon his recapture, allowing the RAT procedure to reestablish its grip, and his mind is cast back into darkness. The prologue ends suddenly as the inhabitants of the planet apparently blow themselves up in what is known as “Cultural Fugue”—a nuclear holocaust caused by socioeconomic failure and conflicting political systems, resulting in planetary extinction (70). Rat Korga, who was working in an underground refrigerated storage vault at the 56 · r ace in american science fiction moment of the explosion, is the only survivor to be dug out of the smoking ruins of Rhyonon. The remainder of the novel explores the romance between the former slave Rat Korga and the industrial diplomat Marq Dyeth, ambassador to alien worlds, on the planet...