Aliens R us the other in science ...

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Aliens R Us
The Other in Science Fiction Cinema
Edited by
Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt
Press
LONDON • STERLING, VIRGINIA
P
Pluto
First published 2002 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
and 22883 Quicksilver Drive,
Sterling, VA 20166–2012, USA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright © Ziauddin Sardar and Sean Cubitt, 2002
The right of the individual contributors to be identified as the author of
this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright,
Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 0 7453 1544 5 hardback
ISBN 0 7453 1539 9 paperback
Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Aliens R Us : the other in science fiction cinema / edited by Ziauddin
Sardar and Sean Cubitt.
p. cm.
ISBN 0–7453–1544–5 –– ISBN 0–7453–1539–9 (pbk.)
1. Science fiction films––History and criticism. I. Sardar, Ziauddin.
II. Cubitt, Sean, 1953–
PN1995.9.S26 A45 2002
791.43'915––dc21
2001003316
10 9
8
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5
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Designed and produced for Pluto Press by
Chase Publishing Services, Fortescue, Sidmouth EX10 9QG
Typeset from disk by Stanford DTP Services, Towcester
Printed in the European Union by TJ International, Padstow, England
Contents
Introduction
1
Ziauddin Sardar
1.
Delicatessen
: Eco-Apocalypse in the New French Science
Fiction Cinema
18
Sean Cubitt
2. Rewriting the ‘American Dream’: Postmodernism and
Otherness in
Independence Day
34
Jan Mair
3. Displacements of Gender and Race in
Space: Above
and Beyond
51
Nickianne Moody
4.
Star Trek: First Contact
: The Hybrid, the Whore and
the Machine
74
Christine Wertheim
5. Japanimation: Techno-Orientalism, Media Tribes and
Rave Culture
94
Toshiya Ueno
6. Wicked Cities: The Other in Hong Kong Science Fiction
111
Gregory B Lee and Sunny S K Lam
7. Saying ‘Yours’ and ‘Mine’ in
Deep Space Nine
134
Kirk W Junker and Robert Duffy
8. False and Double Consciousness: Race, Virtual Reality
and the Assimilation of Hong Kong Action Cinema in
The Matrix
149
Peter X Feng
9. Global Visions and European Perspectives
164
Dimitris Eleftheriotis
Notes on Contributors
181
Index
184
Introduction
Ziauddin Sardar
Science fiction explores space – ‘in a galaxy far, far away’,
The Outer
Limits
,
Space: Above and Beyond
. It projects us into imagined futures
– ‘Beam me up, Scottie.’ Yet as a genre the space that science fiction
most intimately explores is interior and human; to tell future stories
it recycles the structure and tropes of ancient narrative tradition and
to devise dramatic tension it deploys issues and angst that are imme-
diately present. The fiction in science fiction is the fiction of space,
outer space, and time, future time. Far from being the essential object
of its concern the devices of space and time are window dressing,
landscape and backdrop. The ‘science’ offered by science fiction is
populist dissection of the psyche of Western civilisation, its history,
preoccupations and project of future domination – past, present and
future. Science fiction is a time machine that goes nowhere, for
wherever its goes it materialises the same conjunctions of the space-
time continuum: the conundrums of Western civilisation. Science
fiction shows us not the plasticity but the paucity of the human
imagination that has become quagmired in the scientist industrial
technological, culturo-socio-psycho babble of a single civilisational
paradigm. Science fiction is the fiction of mortgaged futures. As a
genre it makes it harder to imagine other futures, futures not
beholden to the complexes, neuroses and reflexes of Western civili-
sation as we know it. ‘Houston, we have a problem.’
THE DYNAMICS OF SPACE AND TIME
Space and time are dimensions that give perspective on our place in
the order of the universe, our origins and ends. These themes have
always fascinated the human imagination, they are present in the
narrative tradition of all cultures and traditions of thought. They are
the basis of religious teaching, the building blocks of epistemology
and philosophy as well as science. The early myths and epic sagas of
many narrative traditions relate stories about shifting, transcending
or disrupting space and time. In mythic tradition such stories
provide lessons in the proper order and meaning of space, time and
the powers and forces of the universe. Myths and sagas popularise
1
2 Aliens R Us
and disseminate epistemology as well as sophisticated contemporary
knowledge about the world, they hone this material to their major
purpose: providing basic moral and ethical precepts. Epistemology,
philosophy and science begin, in all civilisations, with the same
cultural perspective on the bounded sets of relationships between
space and time as that found in the narrative tradition of myths and
epic sagas. Just as there are many narrative traditions, there are many
distinct traditions of science apart from the dominant Western
tradition: Islamic science, Indian science, Chinese science, for
example.
1
These sciences do not survive only in ancient treatises in
archives and museums. Increasingly, they are revitalised in current
academic thought, they are repositories for critiques of Western
science, they are making a comeback as ingredients of other civil-
isational perspectives.
2
So the basic ingredients out of which science fiction has been
fashioned exist everywhere, in different civilisations and cultures, in
the past and the present. Yet science fiction, the genre as we know
it, does not. Science fiction is a very particular possession of just one
tradition – Western civilisation. It does not exist in India, China
(leaving out the special case of Hong Kong), Indonesia or Egypt –
countries with flourishing and extensive film industries.
3
Moreover,
only one kind of science provides the backdrop for science fiction,
while its creators, contributors and in large part its audience are
drawn from the West. This particularity is not accidental. An exam-
ination of the structure, themes and dramatic devices of science
fiction provides an explanation for this particular and necessary rela-
tionship. What distinguishes science fiction is a particular view of
science; a scientistic view of humanity and culture; the recycling of
distinctive narrative tropes and conventions of storytelling. In each
case science fiction employs the particular constellations of Western
thought and history and projects these Western perspectives on a
pan-galactic scale. Science fiction re-inscribes Earth history, as ex-
perienced and understood by the West, across space and time.
If science is essential to science fiction, a point for debate, then
the science it uses is not only Western science, it is
the
Western
science that has been used to define and distinguish the West from
all other civilisations. The sociologist Max Weber, in common with
Marx, posed the familiar foundational question of Western episte-
mology: why did the Industrial Revolution happen in the West and
only in the West? What separates the West from the Rest is science
and its instrumental rationality. The question and its answer were
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