Mark Soderstrom: David’s research explores Imperial Fantasy during
the Cold War period and beyond. He serves as the science fiction editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and has recently published a book that we want to talk about today – Reverse Colonization: Science Fiction, Imperial Fantasy, and Alt Victimhood. David shared a video to set the stage for this conversation.
David Higgins: I thought some of the opening moments from the British television show The Prisoner would be really great. I’m just going to show you the last part of the intro. since every episode of The Prisoner starts off pretty much the same. You’ve got the secret agent played by Patrick McGoohan. He’s racing toward the heart of London in his sports car, and he storms into an office and he resigns – he basically slams and pounds the desk. There’s the sound of crashing thunder. And he hands in his resignation letter – presumably this is like James Bond resigning from MI6. And then he goes home and he slams a photo of a sandy tropical beach into his bag. Like, “I’m outta here! I’m going to go be on a sandy tropical beach somewhere else.” But then gas pours through the keyhole of his front door, because they’re not gonna let him resign. Instead, he is knocked out and taken to a place called, “The Village.” It starts with this next bit:
The video opens to Patrick McGoohan awakening in a strange bed and looking out the window at an odd collection of quaint and architecturally mis- matched European buildings. In a rapid montage of disorienting scenes, McGoohan enters into dialog with the voice of Leo McKern. The voice informs McGoohan that he is in The Village and is there to give information. When McGoohan asks the voice’s name, he is told that the voice is Number 2, and that McGoohan is Number 6. After a sequence of McGoohan attempting and failing to escape, the camera shows a long shot of McGoohan standing on the beach, shaking his fist and shouting, “I am not a number – I am a free man.”1
I think this sort of sums up so much about reverse colonization: we are all prisoners and victims and all of that kind of jazz. So I thought I’d share that and open it up with you.
Mark: I think that’s a marvelous clip, and I appreciate it a great deal because I think it points out some of the complexity of the genre of what you’re looking at in Reverse Colonization and some of the complexity of your work. I mean, I still love The Prisoner. You know, it, it’s twisted and decentering and a little psychedelic. And on the one hand here we have the oppressed person standing against the establishment of power and the knowing figure, but on the other hand, it’s James Bond who is the oppressed person, right? I mean, we know, this guy’s been a foreign agent. He’s probably committed espionage and intrigue, if not assassination. And suddenly this white well-to-do posh guy is now our representative of the oppressed underdog – I think that it’s sort of mind blowing, that yes, we like it, and yet it’s really problematic. And that’s how I respond to thinking about this clip. Are those your thoughts as well?
David: You sum it up very well, Mark. You know, James Bond, we might not think of it this way, but he is an agent of empire, this is the secret agent genre, right? James Bond is out there, doing the work of empire in the Ian Fleming novels and in early movies. He’s out there doing the work of empire and maybe conquest in naked terms. He’s not out there colonizing, but he’s doing the work of imperial dominance for the state in all these kinds of various ways. And here you have the secret agent, a kind of icon of the masculine imperial adventure hero of the Cold War era, resigning and then becoming the prisoner.
And everything that you said I agree with. On one hand, I also love The Prisoner. I think this show is amazing. And as I talk about in the book, I think that what it’s intentionally doing, or what it’s sort of pointing toward is a critique of what Foucault calls disciplinary society – how Foucault talks about the logic of the prison being expressed all throughout society in the contemporary era. You know, the panopticon. Today, we might think of it as being algorithmically organized or an algorithmically manipulated subject. We want information from you, right? And we’re gonna use that information to manage you, in order to put you into the right consumer category or the right political category in order to do all this sort of stuff.
I think The Prisoner is extraordinary in its critique of the way that we are all subject to a kind of disciplinary society and set of pressures. And I think it’s prescient in terms of the way that it imagines the way that now all of our private information is being extracted from us in order to turn us into good subjects under late capitalism. But then, and you already said this, at the same time – at a moment in the late sixties when law and order discourse in the United States and when we have the kind of expansion of the prison industrial complex in the United States and to some extent elsewhere, increasingly incarcerating black men of color especially, and all sorts of others – here we have James Bond, the white adventure hero, as the ultimate sort of prisoner subject. And so from here, I think you can cut straight toward Neo in The Matrix, for example, who needs to unplug in order to reconstitute his heroic white masculinity and all that kind of stuff. So I think that The Prisoner is a really great moment to look at the kind of complicated ways that science fiction is imagining, or inviting us to think of oneself as being a victim subject to colonizing outside power from that moment forward.
Mark: So much to think about, and thinking about espionage as sort of the superhero of the Cold War sixties, right? And in certain ways there’s a speculative fiction element there, but I think about James Bond’s – well, not Casino Royale, but the first of the main Connery films, Dr. No. He’s in Jamaica doing the work of main- taining the British empire. Against this villain, he is maintaining the colonies, as it were. You have talked in other places about that relationship of speculative fiction and colonialism as the history of this. And would you walk us through that complex relationship for folks who may not be as intimately familiar with that trajectory? Who are some of the colonialists and who might be some of the anti- colonialists and who might be caught in between?
David: Well, you know, the, the story of science fiction’s relationship with imperialism and colonialism is of course, very complex. I think John Rieder, in his book Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction really lays it out beautifully. He argues that the same moment when science fiction came to be as a recognizable genre in the late 1800s and early 1900s, the moment when science fiction was emerging, was also the moment of the great race for Euro-Americans and the great powers to conquer the rest of the globe. And Rieder, I think, really beautifully points out the ways that science fiction has always been influenced by and influencing of other imperial adven- ture genres.
So at the same time we think of Edgar Rice Burroughs and things like that – at the same time that we have early science fiction emerging in the early stories and the pulps, it’s borrowing from American westerns and British colonial adventure tales, like H. Rider Haggard. Science fiction, space opera, is literally taken from horse opera, and it’s hard to name them all because there are just so many pulps from the early 20th century that were like ‘westerns in space’ of various types. And I think that you can really see that science fiction is doing imperial dream work during that early period in the late 1800s, the early 1900s – and in a variety of ways, now – more sophisticated science fiction writers are kind of both doing imperial imagining and challenging imperial imagining, like H.G. Wells, for example.
In some moments, like with War of the Worlds, H.G. Wells is profoundly challenging British imperialism. In War of the Worlds, we have a story that says, “Imagine, British reader, what it would be like if a foreign foe – Martians – with tremendously superior technological power were to come and do to you exactly what we are doing to native people in Tasmania, for example.” That’s one of his key arguments there. But at the same time, in other places, Wells has unabashedly bought into colonial paradigms of development – of the technologically superior and the culturally inferior. If you look at The Time Machine, his notion of how people are advanced or stunted as groups or civilizations is profoundly colonialist in its attitudes in various ways, and he bought into all sorts of these evolutionary ideas.
And so my argument would be, prior to the 1960s, science fiction is entangled with imperial and colonial fantasy very deeply, Burroughs being one of the big examples. In Burroughs, Mars is the American west, with John Carter, and it’s going to be a place where western manly heroes can go and regenerate their virility, repeating all these kinds of familiar toxic, violent patterns or tendencies that we saw in American westerns for many, many decades, if not centuries. I think that there’s a change that happens – my book argues that there’s a change that happens in science fiction in the 1960s, because I think that by the time you get to the end of World War II you go through this period of decolonization, and after World War II and as you move into the fifties and sixties, imperialism is a bad word.
Prior to World War II, people can get behind, “let’s go out and do the project of empire,” and we can feel good about that. After World War II a variety of complicated and intricate decolonization movements are happening. We shift to a moment, especially by the 1960s, where imperialists are the bad guys. Kind of like how Shuri calls the CIA agent Everett Ross “Colonizer” in the Black Panther movie: imperialists are the bad guys by that time, decisively. And so, one of the things that I think happens in the 1960s is that anti-imperial sentiments become very, very, very profoundly articulated in science fiction: we’re all the rebels fighting against the empire in science fiction.
Not all, but we’re predominantly invited to be on the side of the rebels fighting against the Empire from the 1960s forward. It’s very rare that you get imperial science fiction. I mean, there are some right-wing science fiction writers and some militaristic science fiction writers that continue to champion conquest. But for the most part, I think the overwhelming tendency after the 1960s is to tell stories that imagine us to be the rebels off fighting the empire, or Neo and the resistance movement unplugging from the Matrix and decolonizing consciousness.
Mark: You know, Gene Roddenberry starts as a writer for Have Gun Will Travel, before he works for Star Trek. “Wagon train to the stars,” I think, was his sales pitch. From there all the way to more current work like Firefly, where we are the resistance against the central powers. The characters are freedom loving, but they’re also the Lost Cause Confederates against the Union, the centralized Union. I mean, it’s so deeply romanticized and you get emotionally attached, but at the same time, you’re like, “oh my God, who am I cheering for here,” it feels to me at times. Could you take a moment and expand on your work with these ideas of alt victimhood and reverse colonization and how they play into this sort of history of science fiction and colonial imagination?
David: Well, one part of the story is that from the 1960s forward science fiction decisively turns toward saying empire is bad and the heroes are going to be those who are fighting against empire rather than the agents of empire. While it’s uneven, some science fiction is doing that more than others, of course. But if that becomes your overall tendency, then I think what you start to see are reverse colonization narratives becoming ubiquitous within science fiction. And so that’s stories that are like Wells’s earlier, War of the Worlds, that are on some level inviting you to imagine what it’s like to be on the receiving end of empire, or you imagining what it’s like to be the victim, the colonized subject, etc.: The Prisoner, as we just saw, imagine what it is to be the administered subject. Imagine what it is to be the prisoner. Imagine what it is to be trapped in this world, domi- nated. Fighting against ‘The Man,’ and ‘The Man’ is very vague. It can be pretty much everything. I argue that reverse colonization narratives become one of, if not the most central strain of science fiction, particularly popular science fiction moving forward from the sixties on. And in some ways that’s awesome, because it invites everyone to sort of go like, “oh, here are the ways that empire is operating to the detriment of people who are being oppressed and subject to various forms of military violence, economic violence.” Like let’s pay attention to these issues. I mean, even Star Trek is keenly paying attention. I mean, there’s the whole thing with the Prime Directive. Like, “let’s be careful about interfering, let’s not just roll in blasters blazing andinfluence other cultures to our own ends. Let’s try to at least pay lip service to some other kind of model where there’s an exploration of space that’s not necessarily about military conquest.” So, I mean, even Star Trek is wrestling with this problem. Where you get into alt victimhood is something else. I always say in leading up to writing this book, when I was teaching War of the Worlds with my students, I started to notice an interesting division in their responses. Most of my students would be like, “oh, wow, I get it. Wells is trying to say, wouldn’t it suck to be on the receiving end of imperial conquest?” But then I always had a couple of students who’d be like, “I didn’t get that at all. This made me scared and thinking about, if that were to really happen, I need to take up arms. I wanna go buy a gun and be ready to defend myself if someone comes and does this to me.” And I was like, “oh, right.” So the way these stories land with people can be profoundly different depending on where they’re sitting and how they’re positioned: the reception is very complicated. What I then started to see was that there are all sorts of predominantly white masculine science fiction readers who have become major voices and presences within the reactionary right, and who are using science fiction and science fictional tropes and science fictional refer- ences as part of the way that they like approach the world. One of the biggest examples would be all of the red pill, black pill discourse in the alt-right which says, “oh, like Neo, we need to take the red pill and check out of the illusionary world that is trying to colonize our minds with feminism and anti-masculine sentiment and multicultural- ism and liberal nonsense. Like, this is all an effort to dominate and control us, and we’re going to take the red pill and be like Neo and check out of that so that we can then wage war against the forces that are colonizing us.” And, you know the fact that you can take a film like The Matrix – which is also taken as an icon of trans politics and LGBT politics in certain kinds of ways – can also become one of the launching points for incels and antifeminists, says something about the way that science fiction is profoundly functioning at weird multiple purposes in our contemporary moment.
Mark: Really rich topics to think about. I think I want to bookmark the right, because I think the story of incels and right co-optation is really important for us to, to come back to. But before we lose your book, in current politics we’ve started throwing around terms like reverse colonization and alt victimhood, and I think the terms you have invented for your book are so evocative and rich and I enjoy them: the Black Iron Prison, reverse colonization, altvictimhood, imperial masochism, and then psychedelic masculinity. These terms I think are really rich and they’re a handy toolkit to get at a lot of these issues. So I’m wondering if you would walk us through some of your terms as a way to walk us through some of your analysis and then, you know, let’s play with the scary New Right political monster elephant in the room.
David: Well, I’ll say thank you and I appreciate that the terms work for you. The Black Iron Prison is actually Philip K. Dick’s term from his Exegesis. That was to go along with the whole prisoner thing. Philip K. Dick (we could talk about him for forever) had this weird psychedelic mental break- down late in his life, and he came to believe that we were all in this amorphous structure of existential domination that he would call the Black Iron Prison or the BIP. And, very much like the prisoner in the television show, we are all prisoners, and reality itself has been constructed to oppress us. And here Philip K. Dick was a reasonably affluent Northern California white dude, etc., etc. So that’s a term from him in terms of my terms. So reverse colonization, I think we’ve kind of talked about, I think reverse colonization narratives are ones (and that’s not even actually my term specifically either, but I’m adapting some other scholars who’ve talked about it and other people who’ve talked about it) to say, the reverse colonization story is a story that invites you to imagine yourself as the victim rather than the perpetrator often in an imperial context: so Star Wars, right? Imagining that you are the rebel Alliance fighting the Empire, when if you really look around in the audience, you’re probably part of the Empire, right?
So that’s a reverse colonization story. Alt victimhood wonderfully – I have to give credit where credit is due – that wasn’t originally in the book. But after I turned it into the editors at the University of Iowa, they were trying to come up with a great term in the title, and they were like, “alt victimhood.” And I’m like, oh, you’re so good, I wish that I had thought of that. I wish that I could claim that, but it was the team working on the cover and the title that came up with that. But alt victimhood would be the way that subjects of privilege imagine themselves as oppressed victims by drawing on these kinds of reverse colonization stories, not just as fun entertainment, but as like, “yeah, that’s what’s really happening, I really am the victim here.”
So I think it kind of points towards the alt-right and the reactionary right where there’s sort of an appropriation of victimhood. I think a lot of what President Trump does is engaging in alt victimhood, right? You know, here you are one of the richest, most powerful people in the world, and you are constantly, constantly, constantly crying about what a victim you are in order to gain political power from that victimhood. Imperial masochism I liked as a term. That is a term I use to point toward the pleasure of identifying as a victim. And it’s not to be confused with other forms of erotic masochism, which are much more beautiful and complicated.
And some people have kind of critiqued me. They’re like, “you’re giving masochism a bad name.” I’m like “totally fair.” Right? But in this particular case, I want to say that I think that the kind of pleasure of resentment in the Nietzschean sense, the pleasure of the way that there’s a deep jouissance to, “I am the victim here and that means that I get to do whatever I want. That means that I get to lash out at these liberals who are silencing me, or I get to lash out at these feminists who would dare to try to take over my world” or whatever. So, imperial masochism: the pleasure of being the victim. The perverse (and again, not to give perversity a bad name) but the kind of perverse pleasure of imagining oneself as being victimized and subject to all of that. And then psychedelic masculinity – I think this really specifically came out of my reading of Dune, but I think that you can also see it in The Matrix and in a variety of other places – would be kind of stories where, “whoa, I need to free my mind, take the red pill, you know, do the spice or whatever, and have this awakening to the deep power that I have been denied as a man.” It’s like a moment of psychedelic epiphany or awakening, that is an awakening to a reclaiming of masculine power and superiority. I think you see this very profoundly in Dune. Take the psychedelic and become the most powerful übermensch in all of existence.
You kind of see this in 2001: A Space Odyssey as well. Dave Bowman expands his mind through the monolith and then becomes this masterful God subject. There’s a lot to be said about threatened masculinity in the late 20th century, or rather a sense of threatened masculinity – a reactionary feeling of masculinity’s dominance being threatened and these kinds of stories like The Matrix where it’s like, “once I wake up and free my mind from whatever has been colonizing me and limiting me, then I can become this powerful Superman figure.”
Mark: We should all be thankful for good editors. Who give us great terms.
David: Totally. Yeah.
Mark: They deserve all praise and recognition. Two months ago when Jenny Bonnevier was on the show we did end up talking about the Hugos and Puppygate and that circles around to the way you analyze how the political alt-right, nationally and globally, have taken some of these stories to heart. I’m thinking of Giorgia Meloni, the far right Prime Minister in Italy, who as a youth went to Hobbit camp as a young budding fascist, and loved Tolkien. Tolkien is incredibly popular in the Italian far right for immigration reasons. Tolkien and his ‘swarthy Easterners’ or ‘the orcs are all bad,’ not because they’re individually bad, but because they’re racially orcs.
So the Italian right believes in defending their Mediterranean border, not from individuals, but from all Africans. I mean, there’s a really interesting way in which this happens globally and it’s not just a U.S. or Anglo science fiction [SF] story. You have walked through a lot of really interesting examples, but who are some of the other folks that you are looking at? What are some of the other ways that the contemporary political alt-right has brought SF into their camp from the sixties on – a genre that people often assumed came from a liberal left perspective?
David: Well, it’s very widespread, this use of SF, as you point out in the example of Italy. The use of what many would consider to be progressive science fiction in other contexts or progressive fantasy in other contexts for these sorts of reactionary purposes is really widespread and happens all over the place. One of the things that I look at are reactionary mass shooters. We see so many in our contemporary moment, it doesn’t take much digging to find them self-imagining as science fiction people. So in the book I write about Elliot Rodger, who is an icon in the incel movement. He went on a shooting rampage in Isla Vista.
I mean, there’s a lot to be said here about incels, which are “involuntary celibates,” or rather, men who believe that women are victimizing them by choosing not to sleep with them. There have been a number of incel mass shooters. And there’s a profound reliance on science fictional reverse colonization narratives and ways of thinking. I devote a whole chapter to this in the book. More recently – and this one’s really disturbing, I didn’t write about this in the book, but I thought I might share it with you – I honestly, almost every time that there’s a mass shooting, I go and I look at the person a little bit more closely in terms of their motivations.
And you just stumble into science fiction things all the time, especially references to video games. In December of 2021, there was a shooting in Denver, and I went down the rabbit hole of this one, which was madness. The shooter, his name was Lyndon McLeod. He was an alt-right, masculine supremacist, anti-feminist, and anti-feminist conspiracy dude. And he went on a shooting rampage in Denver. And so I took a look and I discovered that this guy self-published an online trilogy of science fiction novels under the pseudonym Roman McClay, in which the main character, named Lyndon (which is his actual name) goes on a killing rampage and murders the same people with the same names that he then murdered in real life during his shooting rampage. So this is a dude who wrote a trilogy of science fiction novels about a killing rampage that he actually went on.
And then you’re like, “okay, so what, what was the science fiction trilogy?” Well, Amazon removed those novels, so you can’t buy them. I haven’t read them, but Google and Goodreads offer some hints about his trilogy. And one of the reviewers says, “no one can be told what The Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself. How does one begin to describe a masterwork such as Sanction Impossible? You must experi- ence, it’s an epic, visceral journey into the dark heart of every man broken by society, the one chewed up and spit out. What if a man were to put his foot down, stand up and bellow out with brain and balls and bile, not one more inch.” And you could just see it just like, “I’m not a number, I’m a free man”– and this person killed people.
And then it gets even worse too. I went further – I haven’t written about this yet – I started looking at people who interviewed him for podcasts. There’s a whole manosphere group of people who were like, “oh, your books are so great. Why don’t we interview you and we’ll talk with you and broadcast your signal.” And this led me directly into groups online that are like, “you feel, reader, like some- thing is wrong. We have a training set of modules. You can join us and we will show you how to reclaim your masculinity. It’ll only be a hundred dollars a month. And then you can join our community and we will show you how to take back your manhood.” And these are literally like groups online that are radicalizing disaffected men to become shooters.
I mean, they would deny that publicly, but you can find radicaliza- tion training programs and groups like this that you can join online. And they were celebrating him left and right. There was a podcast with someone named Hunter Drew. He has a show called The Family Alpha, and he was talking with McClay about Sanctioned chapter by chapter. Hunter Drew is actually a name for a dude named Zachary Small who runs a site dedicated to helping men get in touch with their masculinity so that they can be alpha fathers. So, I mean, this is science fiction driving the kind of self-identification discourse, the ways in which people are able to frame themselves as victims in ‘the Black Iron Prison of liberal society that is emasculating us and taking away our power’ and all that kind of stuff.
So literally, in terms of the alt-right, the kind of fringe alt-right on the internet you have those kinds of things. But I think its time has passed. It’s harder to even talk about the alt-right, because the alt- right has become, in many cases the mainstream right. You know, it’s not a huge jump from these kinds of things to Tucker Carlson. It really isn’t, you know? And so I’m not trying to slam on everyone who is a right-wing thinker at all, but I think the alt-right’s takeover of the mainstream, and the way that these kinds of science-fictionalized sort of self-understandings have kind of taken over in the mainstream right, is also pretty profound.
Mark: Yes. It makes a person nostalgic for when we had Robert Bly to complain about.
David: So true. Yeah.
Mark: There is, I think, a really fascinating way in which this niche is fed by the mainstream right. The mainstream opens up these places for the niche to go further. I want to open up to one of our fellow members of the collective. Joe would like to ask a question, and then I want to get back to some questions about popular culture and the right as we move forward. But Joe, please step in.
Joseph Ramsey: My question has a few dimensions to it. One dimension would be to what degree can we think of masculinity as a kind of a form and even a contested form, not only a kind of a content. A second would be to look at it as a kind of gendered expression of socio-economic crisis. I’m thinking here about the fact that we do have a growing sector of the white working-class population (including but not limited to white males) that has been experiencing really acute intense material economic anxiety in recent years (the so-called “deaths of despair”), and how that may factor into the possibility of reading some figurations of white ‘rebel’ masculinity here.
I’m thinking for instance about a much derided, yet super popular, work like Avatar (the first James Cameron film). I have been one of these people, even in my Marxist circles, who basically like push back on the idea that you can just dismiss this kind of imperial traitor narrative of Avatar as just, you know, “Dances with Wolves with Smurfs,” i.e. a white male racist fantasy of redemption via submersion in the “Other.”
Honestly, maybe even Dances with Wolves deserves a second look. I was a kid in the 1990s watching that, identifying with the race traitor against American west- ward conquest. Now, I’m not saying these are innocent narratives – think about The Hunger Games as another one, which I think is very, very much up for grabs. I feel like there’s a lot of folks on the right that have claimed Hunger Games to uphold “rural small- town virtue” against the “corrupt city.” But I’m kind of curious about Avatar as just one example where we see a kind of a broken male figure – in this case, a wounded soldier, right – switching sides against the empire, and how the macho aspect interacts with the more critical anti-imperial or anti-corporate dimensions? And so I’m wondering more generally about how there could be an anti-imperialist kind of appropriation, or anti-imperialist contestations of a kind of beleaguered white masculinity. And what that means for how we approach these films as critics, or as activists. I’m think- ing here about political dangers of those on the left some- times reading what’s going in some of these white macho films as simply or inherently reactionary, as opposed to more contested and contradictory terrain.
David: Not at all. Joe, those are great comments and a lot of things that I think about too. Part of what I kind of got into when I was writing this book is how all of these texts are profoundly contested, right? Like, Avatar, you’re right. Like on one hand what some people take away from it and, and feel into around it, is like a profoundly ecological awareness – sort of like an anti-imperial, anti-corporate, anti- capitalist sentiment. And some people are driven, in that way, toward it. But then at other times you’re like, yeah, we’ve got this Leatherstocking, almost, “white savior helping the local natives” nar- rative, and it’s all in there.
I don’t think these texts are inherently one thing or another. Sometimes they’re trying to be one thing and are deeply appropriable to be something else, because ultimately you have very little control over how texts are received – like I was saying, with War of the Worlds, right? You know, authors and even teachers, we don’t really control how texts are received. When I think about this, I often think about Scott McLeod in his book Understanding Comics, he talks about icons, and he says the more you simplify, the more you amplify. So if you have just a cartoon with a smiley face that has nothing but a circle and two eyes and a happy mouth there’s profound ways that people can pour themselves into that representation and identify with it because of its simplicity.
But the more complicated you make it, if you give it color, if you give it detail, if you give it gender, then there’s less immediate room for identification. And so when I think about the question of identification, which is, I think, what you’re really pointing at here, I think the more mythical and iconic some of these stories are, the more perversely appropriable they become. So, like Neo in The Matrix is unplugging from the matrix and fighting the system, but the system is kind of a big vague thing there that we can pour a lot of different kinds of meanings and associations into. So that leads to some people being like, “well, the system is feminism.”
So one argument would be that these kinds of counter imperialist, counter capitalist, these sorts of science fictions that want to take aim at something, need to be a bit more specific in terms of what they’re taking aim at and who is the one who is standing up. You know, a lot of people have said to me, “isn’t it a lot harder when it’s Michael Burnham in Star Trek: Discovery [played by Sonequa Martin-Green] than when it’s Neo in The Matrix [played by Keanu Reeves] – it’s hard for your alt-right dudes who are anti feminists to be like, yeah, commander Burnham, “I just totally imagine myself in her shoes.” Yeah, that’s harder, right? So the actual politics of representation come into play here really, really powerfully. There’s so much to say there, right? Great comment, great question. Thank you.
Mark: Moving forward, I think there’s a long history here. Lary May talks about how Hollywood learned to write to both ends of the political spectrum very early on in the twenties and thirties. Jimmy Stewart’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington can be loved by the New Deal liberals and by the anti-state, small government, anti- New Dealers. They figured this out early on and I think have continued to make hay in this field as it were. You know, lately I find myself watching science fiction TV particularly, and in the back of my mind – I didn’t use to do this a decade ago, but now – I’m watching shows thinking, “could I watch this show and feel good about it if I had stormed the Capitol on January 6th – if I’m a Proud Boy who believes in, you know, bodily autonomy and the ascetic life?”
And I think you started getting at this, but I’d love to hear a little more: are there particular kinds of story elements or pieces that make it harder for the right to co-opt beyond just specificity? I mean like the show Andor, which has gotten a lot of attention, and there’s a lot of me that feels like, “yeah, I could watch this as a Proud Boy,” or maybe not as a Proud Boy because there’s a lesbian couple and that kind of violates the Proud Boys’ code, but maybe as an Oathkeeper, I could watch this, right? A lot of current shows have a lot of freedom rhetoric, but very little economics, right? Pretty much everybody can be “pro-freedom,“ but there’s not a lot of economic redistribution in Andor’s revolution yet, at least that I’ve seen so far. Or as a different example, StarTrek: Deep Space Nine, which tends to be my favorite Star Trek, I feel like it’s less cooptable for various reasons than that Star Trek Enterprise reboot, where Earth was resentful that they were behind. What are the elements that feed the right and what are some of the elements that might resist easy co-optation? I went on too long there, but does that make sense?
David: That absolutely makes sense. And I think that we’re in a really interesting moment right now when it comes to that, because I would agree with you that that politically neutral, multi coding that you kind of talk about from the 1930s has been really present in a lot of different kinds of mainstream science fiction and fantasy and shows like that. And I think that we’re sort of at a crossroads with that, where that’s becoming less possible. I think as much as we might say that these shows are still multi coded or politically neutral – or not neutral but trying to play to all audiences – I think that it’s becoming actually difficult for Disney to play to all audiences.
And I think that Disney might be tepidly moving in the direction of taking liberal stances from some perspectives. They’re taking a pretty strong stance towards those liberal kinds of representations enough that you’ve got Nazis flying actual swastikas outside of Disney World. And you’ve got Ron DeSantis taking on Disney full bore, like, “let’s go to war here,” right? So I think that a lot of the new Marvel and Disney Marvel and Star Wars shows are much more difficult for Proud Boys and Oath Keepers to pour themselves into, in terms of identification. And that’s because like Disney is – you know, I’m not trying to be like a Disney apologist here by any means, but – they’re doubling down on questions of representation.
They’re like “we are going to have black men and women in these major roles. We are going to show lesbian, gay, queer relationships of various types. On Star Trek: Discovery, we’re going to have prominent non-binary characters going through gender transitions,” you know what I mean? And it’s like that with the cultural politics. You’re right that the economics are perhaps not as advanced in terms of their things, but when you’re paying attention to the politics of representation with that kind of specificity, it becomes a lot harder to pour yourself into the everyman rebel fighting against the empire, right? It’s like, “oh, can I identify with a black female mermaid?” Well for some people there’s a deeper barrier to identification if what you are is deeply opposed to that thing.
So, again, I’m not trying to overstate, I’m not trying to hold up Disney as an icon of progressive left politics or anything like that because they’re certainly not. And I think that the economics are more complicated, but I think that the politics of actual casting and representation are such now that it is profoundly more difficult for those right wing reactionary figures – who hate Disney, right? Like, more than anybody on the left does at this point. The left may be critical of Disney and its failure to be progressive enough. But the left’s hatred of Disney does not even begin to match DeSantis’s hatred of Disney for what they perceive as its leftward drift in politics.
And, or for what it’s worth, I mean, you’ve got a worker’s revolu- tion happening in Andor. You’re right that its approach to economic redistribution has limits. But you do see, even in season one, a workers’ uprising against the extractive forces of capital, and a profound attention to the ecological costs of extraction in a way that’s sort of like Avatar in some ways. So, I think it’s a lot stronger on that point.
Mark: Andor is my favorite of all of the Disney Star Wars series so far – I wasn’t picking on a straw man when I picked Andor. I think it has a lot of potential, and I’m hoping that it continues to develop. But I like the point that it’s harder for the alt-right audience to identify with a black mermaid than Captain Kirk, in terms of who’s moving out into the stars. And that makes me think there are ways in which stories that question those sorts of hard boundaries of the individual body and individual autonomy are much more difficult for the right to pick up.
We’re getting close to the end, and I want to let you also talk about your other book, on Ancillary Justice by Anne Leckie, which— to me, one of the great things about Leckie’s book is that the question of the bounded individual is just blown out of the water. But I would love you to have a chance to talk about your recent book, and to talk a little bit about Ancillary Justice in the context of sort of Leckie’s larger work. I know you’ve got a review coming out in the LA Review of Books of her latest work. So tell us a little bit about Leckie and what you’re doing in the book on Ancillary Justice.
David: Yes. And just to go back to one point before I launch into Leckie, a little coda to Joe’s point earlier is that it may be that the more specific people like Disney become with things like representation around gender and race, the more that the right may be able to grab people who are dis- affected. And mobilize people who are disaffected more around class, which I think is more complicated. There was a way in which everyone in The Matrix could have the kind of economic material anxieties that Joe was talking about, that cause people to go like, “okay, so I see myself in this revolution because my circumstances are changing too,” right?
I think that some of those people are being kind of swooped into the right because the right is finding ways to reach out to them and say, “oh, look, the left doesn’t care about you because they care about Black people” or whatever, which is really, really messed up, in all kinds of ways. So anyway I was just thinking about Joe’s point and I didn’t really address that bit about the way that these stories have or haven’t been able to get to class anxiety and economic anxiety. So Joe, anyway, you had a lot of good important stuff to say there. Right. Ann Leckie – I’m such a fan of Anne Leckie. She’s just amazing. I’ve been really privileged. She let me interview her. She let me have a long, beautiful slow motion email interview with her a couple of times, and she’s so gracious.
I know people would probably argue with me on this, but I think Anne Leckie is the Ursula K. Le Guin of our moment, in terms of the richness of her science fictional imaginings. Particularly if you were to do a parallel between Le Guin’s Hainish novels, like The Left Hand of Darkness, which are all about the question of “are we gonna be an empire or are we gonna try to figure out some other way of doing it?” and then Leckie’s Ancillary Justice works, her Imperial Radch works. Her books are, I think just some of the richest and most thoughtful and the most theoretically sophisticated approaches to questions like empire and the way that it affects us all in our day-to-day lives and our complicity within its unfolding operations, or questions about gender and race and how the state produces race as a category of legal existence through giving or withholding citizenship in various ways.
So between Ancillary Justice, which was released now 10 years ago, and her new book Translation State, I think that there are some really extraordinary advances in her thinking about gender and alternate categories of gendered identity, from gendered kinds of thinking and representing characters to trans and non-binary ways of expressing characters. You know, her newest book, Translation State, is I think one of the most beautiful commentaries on the importance of taking pronouns seriously. I won’t spoil too much of that book because we don’t have much time left anyway, but I think one way of summing up that book is to say, “if you are not able to respect someone’s pronouns, you are dismissing their personhood and their identity in ways that have legal and military and social and economic systems of power built into that.” And it’s just breathtaking, right? Watching her lay that all out in the most charming kind of way. So there’s my plug for Leckie, I think she’s amazing.
Mark: I completely agree, yes. And I am so looking forward to finishing Translation State. I really, really respect Ancillary Justice. And I will have to think of her in context with Ursula K. Le Guin, because that is very high praise to compare a person with Le Guin at her height.
David: I think the big difference is that Ann Leckie is so working class and humble in her sentiments. The biggest difference, I would say, between them, even though I think they’re thinking about very similar things and doing space opera and having such theoretical sophistication: Le Guin was an academic in her way of approaching things. Whereas Leckie is really just a down-to-earth human thinking about complicated stuff and trying to then find ways to express that. One of the things that you then get in her characters are profoundly down-to-earth people who are just trying to do the right thing, and that sometimes taking small actions here and there can lead to toppling empires, right? And I really love that about her.
Mark: I’d like to wrap up with just a couple of questions. You are a passionate fan, obviously, and it warms my heart. And you are also an academic scholar and a critic, and you’re also an activist – what are the relationships for you personally between being a science- fiction/speculative fiction fan/consumer, critic and social activist?
David: Wow. Great question. I guess what I would say is that all of those things seem like one thing to me – in the sense that the art that I love has shaped who I am. Thinking deeply about that art and sharing my perspectives on that art with others who are passionately engaged is a great joy. I think that what has drawn me to speculative fiction in so many ways is it imagines different kinds of possibilities in the world, right? I mean, it’s sort of cliche to say right in some ways. But this is all of the old arguments about why science fiction is special – it causes us to stop taking for granted the way that the world is, and perhaps to imagine other ways that it could be, or to look more closely at why it is the way that it is and all of that.
And so when it comes to activism, I think that sometimes these works of art change my sense of myself. Often, they make me want to go out and do things in the world. A lot of times using references to those works of art can help you connect with other people who want to do those things in the world. You know what I mean? So, I think that all of those things are of a piece. Sadly, it’s also the case that they are connected for the reactionary right wingers as well. They’re similar, so science fiction on some level has become almost the only common ground in our popular culture. Popular culture’s become so segmented. We just don’t have an NBC/CBS the way that we did when I was a kid.
We don’t have a mainstream media anymore. We have niche medias of a million different types. And if there’s anything that counts as mainstream media anymore it is the things that we have fandoms around. That’s where people meet and engage and feel passionately and share whatever the current version of water cooler conversations would be, which are, I suppose, like Facebook conversations and TikTok videos and all the rest. So there’s a way in which science-fiction, speculative fiction, popular culture, has a profound capability to mobilize people, for good and for ill. That would be one of the things that I would say because I’m not blind to the fact that there’s a lot of right-wing activists who, you know, stormed the Capitol because they thought of themselves as being rebels fighting against the Empire. So that’s a different kind of activism, but it is similarly driven by passionate engagement with speculative fantasy, you know what I mean?
Mark: Do you have any personal experience thinking about your activism in science fiction on the ground? I know you have been a social acti- vist, you’ve gotten out in the streets. Are there some concrete con- nections for you as you think about yourself as a person whose affect has been informed by science fiction? How is science fiction a reason why you get out and connect with other people in terms of social change?
David: I’d have to think about that a little bit more. I’ll say that I might approach that from a slightly different angle, if you don’t mind. Uh, you know, I think especially since 2020 when I was living in Minneapolis when George Floyd was murdered and got out on the streets to say, “this is messed up. We’ve gotta do something about this,” I had been involved with some Black Lives Matter demonstrations previous to that when Philando Castile was killed literally down the street from my comic bookstore at the time. And since then, I’ve been thinking about quite a bit through Ann Leckie. I guess I would say that I’ve thought about how science fiction helps me understand why sometimes a protest sparks, why sometimes activism reaches a critical mass and does something, and why at other times it doesn’t seem to do something. That you can go and march and maybe it seems like nothing is happening, even though on a deeper level, maybe something is, even if you can’t see it right away.
I think about Ann Leckie’s Ancillary Justice. Actually, this is kind of what drew me into writing about it: one of the things that most excited me about writing about Ancillary Justice is the way that it helps me think about activism; I would say looking at science fiction has helped me theorize what’s actually happening with activism in a more profound way, and has given me some models to build on in terms of why sometimes activism seems to make a difference, whereas at other times it seems to be falling flat in different ways. And I say that because in Ancillary Justice and really throughout all of her works, Leckie models how a person makes activism happen. A person snaps, a person reaches a point where they just can’t deal with injustice anymore, where they’re angry.
They’re pushed to the wall and they’re like, “I have to do some- thing now. I have to, even if it means that I might waste my life away, even if it means that I might suffer terrible consequences. I can’t take it anymore. I’ve gotta do something.” And every time someone reaches that breaking point, even if it doesn’t do a lot in that moment, it will be remembered by others who may be inspired by it, or it’s almost kind of like a dynamic system is reaching critical mass, and sometimes it takes time for that tension to torque up and up and up. But it, it matters, right? And I think that’s one of the things that Leckie has helped me see. It’s to overcome the paralyzing effect of cynical reason.
“Well, bad stuff is happening, but there’s nothing I can do, nothing I’m gonna do matters, right?” Leckie has really helped me see that everything you do matters. It just might not matter in the timescale of the immediate moment. When you stand up and say, “this is wrong,” and every time you stand up and “say this is wrong,” it matters. And it influences others and it adds to what’s happening cul- turally and it can make a really big difference. So now, of course, that’s true for the January 6th crowd also. So what I actually get into at the end of this book on Ancillary Justice is what really then matters is whether or not we are getting information from reliable sources that are communicating what is happening in our social, political, and economic reality with any degree of truthfulness or whether or not we’ve gone down the echo chamber rabbit holes of lies and misinformation and disinformation.
So the thing about science fiction and activism is that they have really pointed me to thinking about post-truth reality and the way that post-truth politics and influences can be mobilizing people towards snapping around things. I mean, I don’t know if you know this, but some of the lawyers for the January 6th defendants literally had to bring in cult deprogrammers for their own clients. Like, so, “alright, I’m trying to defend you, dude, you raided the capitol and tasered a policeman and you’re gonna go up on the stand and spout lies and nonsense. We are, as part of your legal case, going to have to bring in a cult deprogrammer to help show you how you have been radicalized by lies.” Their own lawyers have had to do this at various times. So, you know, I’ve been thinking a lot about affect and the media and the way that media ecologies and media environments function, because I think that that may be one of the biggest places where we can influence whether activism makes a difference or not right now. Sorry, that was kinda long.
Mark: No, no, that was really lovely and powerful and the image of bringing in cult deprogrammers to try to make January 6th defendants defendable – I feel like we have now closed the circle and come back to the themes of The Prisoner, the biopolitical state in a very perverse sort of spiraled way. It is time that I think we begin to think about closing, but I would love it if to close us today, you would suggest to the audience some of your chosen reading list for thinking about activism and social justice and progressive politics. Who are some of the authors that you would encourage folks to engage?
David: I’m glad that you’ve asked. I was going to get a stack of books ready, maybe I’ll go run over here and grab them. I would say certainly Anne Leckie is great. I think NK Jemisin’s recent books, her two recent New York books, The City We Became and its sequel The World We Make are really cool. Along these lines, when you sent me an early version of that ques- tion, you were like, “what kind of theorists do you find your- self engaging with?” And I was thinking about that and I realized I love engaging with theoretical work, and I do that quite a lot, but these days, a lot of the non-fiction writers who I find myself reading and thinking about most are investigative journalists because it’s the cognitive mapping of what’s actually going on in the present that is pretty complicated right now.
And sometimes I find that theorists are missing some of the inner workings of what’s going on. So I found, for example, Katherine Stew- art’s book, The Power Worshipers, is just a must read. This is about religious nationalism and the way that religion is working in the alt-right and the reactionary right, right now. And I found myself reading this and just being like, wow, no work of theory alone is causing my mind to explode as much as just understanding what’s actually happening over there in places that I don’t have any connection with or only have a limited kind of connection with. The other one that really has jumped out to me lately is actually more academic, but it’s from a different perspective.
These are legal studies and internet ecology people. Benkler, Faris, and Roberts have this book called Network Propaganda: Manipulation, Disinformation, and Radicalization in American Politics. And one of the things that you get into here is like, well, people say, “well, you’ve got your echo chamber and they’ve got their echo chamber and every- body’s got their own echo chamber. And so we’re all just like fighting over how we’re all equally locked in our respective echo chambers.” Well, what they do is they look very closely at the asymmetries between different kinds of media environments and whether or not certain kinds of media environments close down lies and falsehoods and truths and punish bad actors who are lying and spreading misin- formation, as opposed to other kinds of media environments that amplify and profit off of the affect-driven lies and falsehoods and misinformations. So that was a big one for me. I’ve been finding less abstract theory lately – although I love theory, don’t get me wrong – but I’ve been finding people who are doing like kind of hard knuckle study of what’s going on, especially in terms of how misinformation and disinformation spread … . I think that maybe all of us need to be looking more closely at that kind of work, because I think it’s pretty vital.
Mark: Very cool, and a wonderful challenge to all of us as readers to engage information at the moment of its production. David, thank you so much for being here.
