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4 Biotic Invasions Ecological Imperialism in New Wave Science Fiction rob latham In an essay on H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1898), Peter Fitting argues that tales of “first contact” within science fiction tend to recapitulate “the encounters of the European ‘discovery’ of the New World.” They are thus, whether consciously or not, conquest narratives, though “usually not characterized as . . . invasion[s]” because “written from the point of view of the invaders” who prefer euphemisms such as “exploration” to more aggressive or martial constructions of the encounter.1 The accomplishment of Wells’s novel, in Fitting ’s analysis, is to lay bare the power dynamics of this scenario by depicting a reversal of historical reality, with the imperial hub of late-Victorian London itself subjugated by “superior creatures who share none the less some of the characteristics of Earth’s ‘lower’ species, a humiliation which is compounded by their apparent lack of interest in the humans as an intelligent species.”2 The irony of this switch of roles is not lost on Wells’s narrator, who compares the fate of his fellow Londoners to those of the Tasmanians and even the dodoes, “entirely swept out of existence in a war of extermination waged by European immigrants.”3 Stephen Arata uses the term “reverse colonization” to describe this sort of story, in which the center of empire is besieged by fantastic creatures from its margins; as Brian Aldiss puts it, “Wells is saying, in effect, to his fellow English, ‘Look, this is how it feels to be a primitive tribe, and to have a Western nation arriving to civilize you with Maxim guns!”4 Taking this general argument one step further, John Rieder claims that all manner of disaster stories within SF “might profitably be considered as the obverse of the celebratory narratives of exploration and discovery . . . that formed the Official Story of colonialism.”5 The sense of helplessness—geographic, economic , military, and so on—reinforced by catastrophe scenarios lays bare the 78 Arc Adi As And ne w Je r u sAl e m s underlying anxieties of hegemonic power, its inherent contingency and vulnerability , notwithstanding the purported inevitability of Western “progress.” Moreover, disaster stories, by inverting existing power relations and displacing them into fantastic or futuristic milieux, expose the workings of imperialist ideology, the expedient fantasies that underpin the colonial enterprise—for example, “although the colonizer knows very well that colonized people are humans like himself, he acts as if they were parodic, grotesque imitations of humans instead,”6 who may conveniently be dispossessed of land, property, and even life. The catastrophe story brings this logic of dispossession home to roost, shattering the surface calm of imperial hegemony and thrusting the colonizers themselves into a sudden chaos of destruction and transformation such as they have typically visited upon others. Narratives of invasion in particular are “heavily and consistently overdetermined by [their] reference to colonialism,” allowing a potentially critical engagement with “the ideology of progress and its concomitant constructions of agency and destiny”7 —that is, the triumphalist enshrinement of white Westerners at the apex of historical development and the demotion of all others to what anthropologist Eric Wolf calls a “people without history.”8 Of course, to interpret most invasion stories of SF’s pulp era as critical of Western progress requires reading against the grain, since their evident message is the fearlessness and ingenuity of Euro-American peoples when confronted by hostile forces. The magazine Astounding Science Fiction, during its 1940s golden age, operated under a philosophy that Brian Stableford and David Pringle identify as “human chauvinism,” by the terms of which “humanity was destined to get the better of any and all alien species.”9 Editor John W. Campbell saw the extraterrestrial expansion of the human race not only as a logical extrapolation of the exploratory impulse of Western civilization but also explicitly as an outlet for martial aggression; as he remarked in a letter to A. E. Van Vogt, when “other planets are opened to colonization . . . we’ll have peace on earth—and war in heaven!”10 One of the few tales of successful “foreign” invasion published during Astounding’s heyday was Robert Heinlein’s Sixth Column (1941), where the invaders are not aliens from space but a Pan-Asiatic horde that occupies the United States, only to be undermined and eventually defeated by an underground scientific elite masquerading as a popular religion; reverse colonization is thus foiled and the Westward trend...

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