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8: Future Ecologies, Current Crisis: Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction
- Wesleyan University Press
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8 Future Ecologies, Current Crisis Ecological Concern in South African Speculative Fiction elzette steenkamP In a 2004 essay titled “Science Fiction in South Africa,” Deirdre Byrne laments “the regrettable dearth . . . of published science fiction and science fiction readers” in South Africa. Byrne argues that “one cannot expect an advanced awareness of technological or scientific developments” or “even a basic acquaintance with published literature” in a country where the majority of the population live well below the breadline, the spread of hIv/aIdS is rampant, and levels of technological literacy are extremely low.1 Fast-forward a decade, and the prospects of the South African SF scene seem far less dismal. In 2009, South African–born Neill Blomkamp’s Oscar-nominated film District 9 captured the imagination of audiences worldwide, resulting in an unprecedented boom in local science fiction and fantasy. Add to this the success of Lauren Beukes’s Arthur C. Clarke Award–winning SF noir, Zoo City (2010), and South African speculative fiction appears to be blipping happily on the international radar. Aside from comparisons between the sudden international popularity of South African speculative fiction and the meteoric rise of the Scandinavian crime novel,2 very little has been written in the way of scholarly articles examining the role of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction in South Africa literature. This is partially due to science fiction’s association with “pulp” fiction and lowbrow escapism, but can also be attributed to the widely held perception that SF has more to do with shiny machines and spaceships than with actual people. Because of the country’s complex history of colonial and apartheid oppression, much attention is paid to the narrative representation of human conflict, and particularly the issues of race and gender, in South African literature; the neglect of SF as an area of critical inquiry in South Africa is based on the mistaken belief that the genre does not address these sorts of 144 Brav e Ne w wo rl ds & l aNds o f t h e fl ie s “real world” issues. In “Subversive, Undisciplined and Ideologically Unsound or Why Don’t South Africans Like Fantasy?” Felicity Wood asks: “Why is there so little fantasy in English South African literature?” Wood attributes this “resistance to fantasy” to the fact that “it’s sometimes perceived as being distinct from reality, an escape from it, and thus the way in which fantasy serves as a means of exploring reality has often not been adequately acknowledged.”3 This chapter argues that South African speculative fiction is in fact deeply concerned with the very issue that “serious” South African authors have been examining for many years—alterity. The notion that SF is more concerned with technology than human lives is explored in Ursula Le Guin’s “Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown.” Le Guin employs Virginia Woolf’s conception of “Mrs. Brown”4 as representative of a fully rounded, “human” literary character, in order to comment on the apparent lack of “real people” in fantasy and science fiction narratives.5 Le Guin questions whether there is room for the “too round” Mrs. Brown in the “gleaming spaceships ” of SF—in short, whether “a science fiction writer [can] write a novel.”6 Le Guin, inspired by a hobbit named Frodo who looks very much like Mrs. Brown, concludes that SF is “worth talking about, because it is a promise of continued life for the imagination, a good tool, an enlargement of consciousness , a possible glimpse, against a vast dark background, of the very frail, very heroic figure of Mrs. Brown.”7 The questions surrounding Le Guin’s Mrs. Brown are equally important from a South African perspective. What place does Mrs. Brown’s South African counterpart—let’s call her Mrs. Khumalo, or Mrs. van der Merwe for that matter8 —have in a spaceship equipped with ray guns? Surely we cannot dismiss the plight of Mrs. van der Merwe, for she has for too long been restricted to impoverished townships, forcefully displaced, left to die in concentration camps, subjugated, and ignored. The region’s legacy of violence demands that the stories told in post-apartheid South Africa should be those of real people. But can we successfully write about real South Africans who happen to be clones, or genetically engineered donors, or cyborgs? This chapter argues that the field of South African speculative fiction presents a rich, uncultivated area of study that allows for the exploration of a range of themes relevant to the...