The Super Black Macho, One Baaad Mutha

Science Fiction, Colonialism,

and the Plot of Invasion1

JOHN RIEDER

In her classic essay “The Imagination of Disaster,” Susan Sontag comments

that “from a psychological point of view, the imagination of disaster does not
greatly differ from one period in history to another. But from a political and
moral point of view, it does” (224). The formulaic nightmares Sontag wittily
summarizes in post-WWII popular science fiction films like The Blob, The
Mysterians, The Day the Earth Caught Fire, and The Invasion of the Body
Snatchers certainly bear a strong generic similarity to science fictional disas-
ters from the nineteenth to the early twenty first centuries—including, for in-
stance, invasions by alien forces wielding hyper-advanced weaponry, primitive
monsters and environmental cataclysms unleashed by scientific experiments
gone awry, and threats of collective extinction by war or plague. According to
Sontag, human psychology determines a relatively fixed set of anxieties that
express themselves in such fictions of disaster, while social variables such as
politics and morality determine that a wide range of topical significance will
attach itself to them. Let us begin by asking, however, whether the basis for
the continuity in representations of catastrophe, at least within the relatively
restricted area of cultural production that comprises the history of science fic-
tion, is something other, or at least something more, than psychological. For
enslavement, plague, genocide, environmental devastation, and species extinc-
tion following in the wake of invasion by an alien civilization with vastly su-
perior technology—all of these are not products of the fevered imaginations of
science fiction writers but rather the bare historical record of what happened
to non-European people and lands after being “discovered” by Europeans and

Extrapolation, Vol. 46, No. 3 © 2005 by The University of Texas at Brownsville and Texas Southmost College

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integrated into the capitalist world economy from the fifteenth century to the
present. In fact, the lexicon of science-fictional catastrophes might profitably
be considered as the obverse of the celebratory narratives of exploration and
discovery, the progress of civilization, the advance of science, and the unfold-
ing of racial destiny that formed the Official Story of colonialism. The propo-
sition this essay will explore, then, is that the repetitious quality of science
fiction’s vocabulary of catastrophe is based in large part on the strong and
pervasive relationship science fiction has continuously borne to the political
and ideological realities of colonialism. And if this is so, it should also help us
to understand how and why the political and moral aspects of science fiction
disaster have changed during the genre’s history.

“Progress” and Emergent Science Fiction

The central term that links science fiction to colonialism is the heavily
fraught idea of progress. Thomas Clareson, the least fussy of all major schol-
ars of science fiction when it comes to generic definitions, nonetheless insists
that belief in progress is an absolute prerequisite to the formation of science
fiction (Clareson 5).2 Fredric Jameson offers a more complex and ambitious
theory about progress and science fiction. For Jameson progress is what he
calls an ideologeme, “an amphibious formation, whose essential structural char-
acteristic may be described as its possibility to manifest itself either as a
pseudoidea—a conceptual or belief system, an abstract value, an opinion or
prejudice—or as a protonarrative, a kind of ultimate class fantasy about the
“collective characters” which are the classes in opposition” (The Political
Unconscious 87). Progress, says Jameson, is the form of social memory de-
manded by capitalism, an awareness of qualitative social change that links the
past to the present under the narrative logic of growth or development. More-
over, progress is the ideologeme that is fundamental to the historical novel, a
genre which is “the symptom of a mutation in our relationship to historical
time itself”(“Progress versus Utopia” 149). As Lukács demonstrated, Walter
Scott’s historical situation between the expanding commercial economy of the
Lowlands and the receding tribal system of the Highlands thus positioned him
peculiarly well to make the connection between ideology and narrative form
that yielded the historical novel. Science fiction, in its turn, emerges just as the
historical novel begins to lapse into naturalism, its linkage of past and present
tending to degenerate into mere antiquarianism or exoticism, and Jameson
proposes thinking of emergent science fiction as a counter-strategy that revi-
talizes the notion of progress by “transforming our own present into the deter-
minate past of something yet to come” (“Progress Versus Utopia” 152).
The pseudoidea or protonarrative of progress certainly pervades the
ideologies of colonialism, where Scott’s situation between a modernizing

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Lowland and an archaic Highland is writ large as the confrontation of European

civilization with the rest of the world. Progress codes the non-European world in
all its diversity, not simply as the Other, but in various ways as the veritable
embodiment of the past—wild, savage, tribal, barbarous, despotic, superstitious,
and so on. In the later nineteenth century, progress as pseudoidea imposes itself
on Darwinian theory to produce “social Darwinian” justifications of racism and
of ruthless territorial expansion. As protonarrative, progress links the belief that
non-whites are childlike innocents in need of white men’s protection to the
assumptions that undergird Henry Lewis Morgan’s Ancient Society, where the
kinship structures of contemporaneous American Indians and Polynesian islanders
are read as evidence of “our” past. From the most legitimate scientific endeavor
to the most debased and transparent prejudices runs the common assumption
that the relation of the colonizing societies—white and Christian, first; capitalist
and industrial, later—to colonized ones is that of the developed, modern present
to its own undeveloped, primitive past.
If Jameson’s thesis about the importance of progress as the ideologeme
crucial to the form of science fiction has any validity, then, one would ex-
pect colonial subject matter to occupy a prominent and privileged place in
the genre. Indeed, most historians of science fiction agree that utopian and
satirical transformations of encounters between European travelers and non-
Europeans form a major part of the genre’s prehistory, that the period of the
most fervid colonial expansion in the late nineteenth century is also the crucial
period for the emergence of the genre, and that science fiction appeared pre-
dominantly in those countries that were involved in colonial and imperialist
projects. And there is certainly no shortage of explicit comparisons between
colonial and science fictional scenarios within the genre itself. For example, a
group of characters in Paschal Grousset’s The Conquest of the Moon (1894)
sets up the “LUNA COMPANY, Limited. An Association for the conquest and
exploration of the mineral riches of the Moon. Working capital, Two Millions
Sterling,” and they make their pitch to prospective stockholders in the follow-
ing manner: “A new field must be sought for British enterprise. The Anglo-
Saxons were settled in North America, in Australia, India, and Western Africa;
their dominion extended over three parts of the globe, and they could not
hope for further conquests on its surface, since a recent conference had in-
ternationalized Central Africa. But were they, therefore, to sit idle?” (59,
61-62). No doubt the most well-known and influential example of the colo-
nial metaphor in early science fiction is Wells’s comparison of the Martian
invasion in The War of the Worlds to the genocidal colonization-invasion of
Tasmania. But already in 1809 Washington Irving, in A History of New York
by Diedrich Knickerbocker, satirized the attitudes of European explorers and
settlers toward native Americans by comparing them to invaders from the
moon (Franklin 251-54).

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More important than the mere fact of shared subject matter and such explicit
references to colonial situations in science fiction texts, however, is the way that
the “collective characters” that inhabit colonial ideology are crucial to the dialogic
struggle within science fiction over concepts of historical destiny and agency.
This is not just a matter of the way transposed colonial struggles are fought out
in science fictional settings, but rather involves the way science fiction addresses
ˇ ˇ comments
itself to the fantastic basis of colonial practice itself. Slavoj Zizek
about Kafka that fictions like The Trial do not derive their power from being
nightmarish distortions of real bureaucracy, but rather by portraying “the mise
en scene of the fantasy which is at work in the production of social reality itself,”
that is, by representing the fantastic belief in the omnipotence of the law and our
helplessness before its arbitrary dictates that really guides our behavior in relation
to the legal bureaucracy (36, emphases in original). A combination of conscious
disavowal and practical effectiveness characterizes what Zizekˇ ˇ calls ideological
fantasy: we know very well that it is not so (e.g., that this dollar bill in my hand
is not indestructible abstract value, but just a perishable piece of paper), but
we behave on the assumption that it is. Thus the power of Wells’s Island of Dr.
Moreau lies not merely in the metaphorical reference of Moreau’s domination
of his Beast People to racial or class hierarchies, but even more in the vivid
form Wells’s fable gives to the ideological fantasy that actually directs colonial
practice: 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. To be caught, like Prendick, on Moreau’s island, witnessing
the Beast People chanting the Law, hearing the screams of Moreau’s subjects
in their transforming bath of pain, is to witness “progress” exposing its
unconscious script.
Another of the ideological fantasies that directs colonial practice might
be called the fantasy of discovery: we know very well that there are people
living in this land, but we act as if it were empty before our arrival. This could
be restated in legal form as the contradiction between settlers’ claims upon
ownership of colonized land and indigenous claims to the same land.3 The
entire genre of lost race fiction—a genre with a strong impact on American
pulp science fiction by way of figures like Edgar Rice Burroughs and A.
Merritt—repeatedly “solves” this contradiction by simultaneously reveling in
the discovery of uncharted territory and representing the journey of discovery
as a return to a lost legacy, a place where the travelers find a fragment of their
own history lodged in the midst of a native population that has forgotten the
connection. The formulaic plots of H. Rider Haggard4 and his many imitators
can be summarized on the whole as fantasies of appropriation of foreign lands,
an appropriation that is economic, political, sexual, and cognitive. The plot
motif that most clearly expresses the ambivalence generated by the wealth and
benefits of “discovering” and taking possession of land already occupied by

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others, perhaps, is the almost inevitable civil war, most often fought between a
corrupt priestly caste and a faction of royal insiders—including a beautiful
princess—who ally themselves to the white explorers, whereby the newly dis-
covered land both resists the protagonists as invaders and welcomes them as
benefactors. Thus the collective characters of colonial ideology play out their
dramas of stagnation and progress not only in the exceptional achievements of
a Wells but also in the broad formulas of emerging science fiction’s most com-
mercially oriented areas of production.
One of the most clear-cut ways that emerging science fiction takes up the
discourse of progress is in its fascination with technological innovation. The
popularity of stories about technological breakthroughs is without question a
response to industrialization, and has also been persuasively connected to the
late nineteenth century arms race (Clarke). Because the immediate economic
and social effects of any technological innovation depend on its uneven distri-
bution, the narrative of the marvelous invention is also very likely to lead us
into a colonial terrain. Consider, for example, the combination of wonderful
gadgetry and headlong travel in the novels of Jules Verne. The accuracy or
inaccuracy of Verne’s predictions about technological innovation or the fasci-
nation exercised by the hardware itself are all finally less important in Verne’s
narratives than settings and place and especially access to place. Verne’s mar-
velous journeys do not simply penetrate space, but rather the travel gains its
interest by consistently defying political boundaries and threatening to render
them meaningless. The opposition of the unbounded, anarchic sea to the na-
tional, political organization of the land is far more important to 20,000 Leagues
under the Sea than is the design or practicality of Captain Nemo’s submarine.
What Nemo or similar figures introduce is not merely a new form of locomo-
tion but a new unevenness of technological development that potentially de-
stabilizes the contemporary distribution of political and economic power, as
indicated by the great powers’ frantic attempts to locate the “master of the
world” in the later novella of that name and buy his secret from him. The
advent of the spectacular invention therefore inevitably invokes that embrac-
ing pattern of uneven economic and cultural distribution, colonialism, and with
it arises the specter of those encounters between cultures with wildly different
technological capabilities that produced during this period some of the most
one-sided armed conflicts in human history (on the role of weaponry in colo-
nial warfare, see Headrick, ch. 7). Behind the anxieties of competition be-
tween capitalist corporations and imperialist governments in stories of
marvelous invention, lurks the possibility of finding oneself reduced by some-
one else’s progress to the helplessness of those who are unable to fully inhabit
the present, and whose continued existence on any terms other than those of
the conquerors has been rendered an archaism and anomaly. Colonial invasion
is the dark counter-image of technological revolution.

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Thus the invasion story is the form of science fiction disaster that, whatever
its psychological basis, is most heavily and consistently overdetermined by its
reference to colonialism. The plot of invasion and subjugation by a
technologically superior alien race is also one that can be traced in both its
continuities and its moral and political fluctuations from the Victorian era to
the present. There is no question here of offering a comprehensive survey, of
course, nor do I mean to reduce so complex a phenomenon as a literary genre
to a mere reflex of social conditions—for instance, to argue that changes in the
global economy determine homologous changes in science fiction. What follows
is nonetheless an attempt to map some of the monumental achievements of
science fiction against the co-ordinates provided by the history of colonialism,
and so to interpret some of the ways that the plot of invasion engages, revises,
and critiques the ideology of progress and its concomitant constructions of
agency and destiny.

The War of the Worlds

H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, as is well known, develops out of the
future war genre that enjoyed enormous popularity from 1871 until the first
World War. The single most important publication for the creation of a science
fiction reading audience may well have been George Chesney’s enormously
successful 1871 story, “The Battle of Dorking,” from which the future war genre
blossomed (Clarke). Chesney’s cautionary fable, a brief for military preparedness
written in response to the shockingly swift defeat of the French in the Franco-
Prussian war, asks the world’s greatest military and economic power to imagine
itself invaded, conquered, and impoverished. Chesney is quite explicit in stating
that the major effect to be feared as a consequence of invasion and conquest by
an imperial competitor (Germany, in Chesney’s story) is the removal of England
from its pre-eminent place in the world economy. His narrator laments British
short-sightedness from a perspective situated two generations in the future after
England’s ignominious defeat by the German invaders:

Fools that we were! We thought that all this wealth and prosperity were sent us by
Providence, and could not stop coming. In our blindness we could not see that we
were merely a big workshop, making up the things which came from all parts of the
world; and that if other nations stopped sending us raw goods to work up, we could
not produce them ourselves. . .. We were so rich simply because other nations from
all parts of the world were in the habit of sending their goods to us to be sold or
manufactured; and we thought that this would last for ever. And so, perhaps, it might
have lasted, if we had only taken proper means to keep it; but, in our folly, we were
too careless even to insure our prosperity, and after the course of trade was turned
away it would not come back again. (8)

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Paradoxically, but characteristically, Chesney portrays England’s domination

of the world economy as a situation of extreme dependency. He is reminding
his readers that the rest of the world’s “habit” of supplying England with the
raw materials that enable it to be the workshop of the world actually depends
on the military coercion that keeps things in that propitious course: “we [that
is, we English] ought to insure against the loss of our artificial position as the
great centre of trade, by making ourselves secure and strong and respected”
(39). The critical edge of Chesney’s fable, as with much science fiction, comes
from the insight that things could be different from the way they are. His les-
son of vigilance depends on keeping the artificiality of the contemporary or-
der of things firmly in view.
For the next two decades, as I. F. Clarke has shown, the future war genre
enjoyed great popularity in England, France, Germany, and the United States.
As the pre-World-War I arms race began to heat up, the future war stories
often emphasized advanced weaponry and especially the importance of hav-
ing the biggest, strongest, fastest, most heavily armed ships. By the 1890s the
stories generally became less focused on intervening in public policy and more
on providing fantasies of military adventure.5 However, even if the genre’s
fundamental reference to competition over colonial wealth was not generally
as explicit as in Chesney’s founding contribution, nonetheless the common-
place role of technological unevenness and the specter of race warfare (for
example in George Griffith’s 1893 The Angel of the Revolution and M. P. Shiel’s
1898 The Yellow Danger) continued to make the connection. At the same time,
the genre’s development from public policy forum to a vehicle of spectacular
adventure could be taken to indicate that its basic strength always lay at least
as much in its fantastic relevance to ideologies of national and racial destiny as
in its polemical vigor.
In The War of the Worlds Wells made the connection of the invasion fan-
tasy to colonialism entirely explicit once again. Chesney’s depiction of
England’s humiliation and misery, despite the chauvinistic conclusion he draws
from the story, never lay far from an ethical reflection on the misery England’s
dominance wreaks upon those it dominates. This is the potential that Wells
drew upon and expanded a quarter century later. Wells sets the story in the
same south England countryside as Chesney’s “Battle of Dorking,” and he
emphasizes the same incomprehension and disbelief among the invaded popu-
lace. But Wells complicates the reader’s straightforward identification with
the invaded English by comparing the Martians to Europeans invading Tasma-
nia and to humans disrupting and destroying the environments and lives of
animals. Thus Wells uses the basic “Battle of Dorking” strategy of reversing
England’s imperial position in such a way as to undermine the patriotic and
militarist sentiments it more typically supported and instead humble the proud
and mighty.

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The political and historical moment from which Wells’s critique arises is
that of the climax of British world dominion. The Martian invasion can suc-
cessfully model European colonialism only within a frame of reference where
Tasmanian genocide and the extinction of the dodo seem very similar—that is,
where animals and aborigines seem almost equally inferior and helpless in the
eyes of the European. The dominant strain of Wells’s critique is indignation
against colonial arrogance. The comparison of the Martian campaign to geno-
cide and species extinction is an important sign of this indignation, but the
relevance of colonial ideology to his handling of the plot of invasion does not
turn on this comparison and extends far beyond it. For instance, Wells carries
out his ethical assault on colonial ideology in the characters of the curate and
the artilleryman, who represent the two pillars of colonial rule, the military
and the missionaries. Their behavior suggests that the institutions that prop up
colonialism are constructed from a squalid fantasy of power and a pathologi-
cal denial of reality.
The motive of humiliating colonial pride emerges most strongly at the
rhetorical climax of the novel, when the narrator, having emerged from the
ruined house where he was trapped for fifteen days, finds himself in “the land-
scape, weird and lurid, of another planet.” There he feels “a sense of dethrone-
ment, a persuasion that I was no longer a master, but an animal among the
animals, under the Martian heel. With us it would be as with them, to lurk and
watch, to run and hide; the fear and empire of man had passed away” (165).
Like Chesney, Wells strips the sense of empire or enthronement of its inevita-
bility. But Wells expands the terms that define empire, so that nationalist com-
petition disappears into or beneath the grander canvas of planetary
transformation and species survival. The question is how to interpret Wells’s
transformation of England’s “artificial position as the great centre of trade”
into the parallel (but racially loaded) terms of anthropocentrism.
It is precisely this shift, we should remember, that motivates the compari-
son between the Martian invasion and Tasmanian genocide as well as the extinc-
tion of the dodo. The narrator’s express purpose in advancing these comparisons
is to temper the reader’s indignation against the Martians. The effect of the com-
parison is double-edged, however. If on the one hand it proposes an ethical cri-
tique of European colonialism—you are to see in these horrible aliens an image
of your own horrible selves—on the other hand it simultaneously undermines
ethical judgment per se by casting doubt on the notions of choice and self-deter-
mination that usually provide its basis. Are we to understand the Martians flee-
ing their desiccated planet as rational agents seizing control of their destiny or as
victims of circumstance driven to desperate measures by the pressure of cli-
matic change? The narrator himself—especially at the moment when he emerges
from his captivity—presents the same kind of dilemma in the question of his
responsibility for the death of the curate.

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The close connection between this ethical dilemma and Wells’s critique
of colonial ideology becomes clearer in the light of the Martians’ status as a
kind of ultimate figure of progress. For the Martians do not so much represent
the result of an extraterrestrial evolutionary development as they body forth
the future of mankind itself as projected more playfully by Wells in his essay
“The Man of the Year Million” (later “Of a Book Unwritten”). The remarkable
ethnographic passages describing the Martians and their machinery, their
anatomy, the well-preserved specimen in the Natural History Museum, and so
on, are all modeled, as Wells says in the essay, on the study of “primitive man
in the works of the descriptive anthropologist” (161).6 But the Martians are
men for whom the second nature of technology has so shaped their relation-
ship to the world that their machines seem more alive, less “artificial,” than
they themselves do. Is this confusion a sign of their sophistication or of their
decadence? The identity of mechanical progress and organic atrophy in the
Martians’ prosthetic technology suspends the opposition between nature and
culture and undermines an understanding of evolution tied to ideologies of
progress by engaging both evolutionary discourse and anthropology in the crux
between biological determinism and cultural or technological rationality. Like
their machines, the Martians’ diet baffles the notion of progress. On the one
hand an ultra-civilized vampirism that is part and parcel of their prosthetic
technology, on the other hand it clearly implies cannibalism, and therefore
marks the Martians as simultaneously the apex of technological sophistication
and exemplars of the most repulsive savagery. It is as impossible to tell progress
from degeneration, civilization from savagery, culture from nature, or reason
from instinct as it is to draw the line between human and animal.
As long as these oppositions are held in suspension, Wells effectively
subverts any self-congratulatory interpretation of the “survival of the fittest,”
to invoke Herbert Spencer’s famous popularizing paraphrase of Darwin. Far
from concluding that colonial nations’ superior efficiency in the art of slaughter
proves they are “fittest” to rule the lands and people they colonize, Wells empties
this brutal superiority (“’What ugly brutes!” is one of the initial refrains of
human reaction to the Martians [65]) of any sense of privilege or deserving.
Yet when Wells’s displacement of colonial invasion (or national warfare) into
inter-species struggle transforms the Martians and humanity alike into animals
among animals, this very leveling of motives threatens to revalidate a
naturalizing, quasi-Darwinian apology for the colonial violence the novel
estranges and critiques. Thus both the strength and the limits of Wells’s critique
of colonial ideology have much to do with that sense of dominion—a threatened
dominion, to be sure, the vision of an empire sensing that its apex was already
past—that inhered in Britain’s awareness of its place in the world. The strength
of the critique depends on humiliating imperial pride and chastening its
arrogance with a correspondingly powerful indignation. Its limits, however,

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reside in the notion of agency necessary to imperial arrogance, because if that

privileged sense of agency disappears along with the sense of pride and
presumption that is under attack, then the basis of the ethical critique of
colonialism crumbles along with it.
The novel’s conclusion very aptly reprises the double movement of ethi-
cal critique. The amoral, merely biological activity of the microbes that infect
the Martians appropriately humbles their imperial ambitions. At the same time
it is difficult to square this amoral process with the interpretation forced upon
it by the narrator, who takes it as a form of providential intervention. It seems
that in seeking closure to his story the narrator momentarily gives way to the
simple logic of good and evil, heroes and villains, that he successfully sus-
pends earlier on. Of course it is possible to separate the narrator’s opinion
from the author’s. The narrator’s thanksgiving to a provident divinity may be
taken as an ironically anthropomorphic, yet dramatically convincing, rever-
sion to the comforts of colonial ideology that shows how easy it is to forget the
lessons of catastrophe when the disaster recedes.7
It is instructive, in any case, to compare the curtailed catastrophe at the
end of The War of the Worlds to the fully realized vision of a post-cataclysmic
England in Richard Jefferies’ 1885 masterpiece, After London or Wild England.
Jefferies’ influence redounds in British inter-war versions of the imperial
homeland fallen into savagery like Sydney Fowler Wright’s Deluge (1927)
and John Collier’s Tom’s A-Cold (1933), and After London might well be
considered the grand ancestor of such distinguished later versions of the same
scenario as J. G. Ballard’s The Drowned World and Kim Stanley Robinson’s
The Wild Shore.8 The uncanny first section of this unjustly neglected novel,
“The Relapse into Barbarism,” focuses entirely on natural, nonhuman processes.
Jefferies describes first the flora’s encroachment on the former sites of urban
and agricultural settlement, then the proliferation of the fauna, as various
domestic species split into different branches in their new environments. Only
then does he turn to the human survivors—bushmen who have reverted to the
earliest form of hunting and gathering, gypsies who have remained nomadic
and retain their ancient traditions, and the feudal, quasi-medieval civilization,
living under the constant fear of invasion by the Irish and the Welsh, that is the
home site of the protagonist of the rest of the book. That the loss of British
centrality, the decay of its dominion, and the reversal of its relation to its former
colonial subjects are merely natural processes reiterates the political and moral
point that England’s former superiority was precisely as contingent as Chesney
had warned and at the same time removes human agency from the center of
the stage more emphatically and consistently than Wells does. In “Wild
England,” the longer narrative that follows and fleshes out the ethnographic
first part, Jefferies’ unspectacular and meticulous imaginative creation of a
fully realized alternative England, a feat unparalleled in British fiction from

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before this date (but one clearly based on the form of the historical novel and
indebted to the contemporary realism of Hardy), explores the radically different
value of the hero’s talents in the uneven social settings he traverses. The result
is a complex investigation of the ethical and the political in relation to one
another that quietly unsettles the colonial binary of civilization and savagery.

War with the Newts

Another reading of The War of the Worlds might begin with the observa-
tion that Wells’s Martians bear a sustained resemblance to Marx’s description
of capital itself: emotionless, calculating, unsleeping, and vampiric. The re-
semblance is probably quite deliberate. Wells fashions his Martians to resemble
industrial capitalists as well as colonialists, and his portrayal of the sluggish
Martians in their glittering, agile machines is no doubt informed by the play of
dead and living labor in Marx’s exposition of the logic of technological revo-
lution. But the ambiguities that render brutality into both an accusation and an
absolution from responsibility also suspend the resemblance of the Martians
to capital at an uncertain point between reference to the moral incapacity of a
self-indulgent, insulated class and reference to the systemic imperatives of a
ˇ
mode of production. Karel Capek’s War with the Newts (1936) does not suffer
from the same ambiguity. While the role of human folly in fomenting the world
catastrophe of the Newtish invasion is everywhere evident and joyfully ridi-
ˇ
culed, Capek’s satirical target is ultimately capitalism itself. The flooding of
ˇ
Prague that concludes Capek’s novel is the inevitable result of a systematic
ˇ
process the entire novel carefully articulates. In Capek’s outrageous fable, the
invaders become the invaded not by way of sympathetic or moral reversal but
rather as the rigorous enactment of the logic of capitalism.
When Captain J. Van Toch of Amsterdam frees the world’s only popula-
tion of newts from the isolated, shark-infested bay where he finds them and
turns them into pearl fishermen, he unleashes a force he certainly does not
understand: an inexhaustible fund of infinitely exploitable labor power. But
Van Toch’s employer, Mr. G. H. Bondy, understands perfectly. Bondy’s speech
to the shareholders of the erstwhile Pacific Export Company, in which he pro-
poses transforming the PEC into the Salamander Syndicate, recognizes that
the company’s most marketable commodity is not the pearls that the newts
have supplied in such excessive abundance as to ruin the market for them, but
rather the newts themselves. His speech is the turning point of the plot, launch-
ing the economic boom chronicled in the long chapter titled “Up the Ladder of
Civilization.” Two moments, one at the beginning and one at the end of that
chapter, can illustrate the significance of the Salamander Syndicate.
The chapter opens by declaring that “In the new epoch which G. H. Bondy
inaugurated at the memorable general meeting of the Pacific Export Company,

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. . . historical events could no longer be measured in centuries or even decades,

as had been customary in world history until then, but by the three-month periods
for which the quarterly economic statistics were published” (121). This is progress
(and certainly “a mutation in our relationship to historical time itself”). According
to the narrator, history has been speeded up by the superior efficiency of the
contemporary organization of production: “the liquidation of the Roman Empire,
the colonisation of the continents, the extermination of the Red Indians . . . could
have been accomplished incomparably more speedily if they had been put in the
hands of entrepreneurs with a lot of capital behind them” (122). But the point—
as the present sarcasm and later developments show plainly—is that historical
vision has been drastically foreshortened. The short-term logic of the corporation’s
quarterly report dominates any other perspective that might help shape plans or
assess consequences—hence we later find the European countries competing
with one another for the privilege of selling the Newts the explosives with which
they are already dismantling the continents. In short, the Salamander Syndicate’s
ruthless exploitation of the Newts epitomizes the capitalist triumph of the
quantitative logic of profit over all other considerations. At the end of the chapter
the narrator sums it up this way:

Never before in human history has so much been manufactured, constructed, or earned
as in this great age. Say what you will, the Newts have brought enormous progress to
the world, along with an ideal called Quantity. . . . Real, self-assured Newt Age people
will no longer waste their time meditating on the Essence of Things; they will be
concerned solely with numbers and mass production. The world’s entire future lies in
a continually increased consumption and production—so we need even more Newts
to produce even more and consume even more. (166)

The Newts’ neutrality or lack of individuality is first and foremost a token of the
homogenization of all other measures—political, cultural, and ethical—into the
single one of money, the “neutral” universal equivalent of all other commodities.
If the Newts thus embody the logic of capitalism, the history of the Sala-
mander Syndicate no less comprises an abstract of the history of colonialism,
from the near-genocidal first encounter between humans and Newts (“Of Men-
Lizards” 93-94), to Van Toch’s use of them as pearl fishermen to the near
exhaustion of the Pacific ocean’s pearl supplies, to the grisly traffic of the “S-
Trade,” the description of which holds up for the reader’s admiration the fact
that the death rate among the merchandise on way to its destination is less than
ten percent, to the far worse illegal trade in slave Newts, where a mere third of
the cargo typically survives, to the “utopian” projects the Newts make pos-
sible as they construct the empty land spaces (which turn out to be trial runs
for their ultimate revisionary approach to the world’s geography) that colonial
fantasy had always projected as its destination. Indeed War with the Newts sets

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in motion two basic fantasies at the heart of imperialism: the capitalist fantasy
of a constantly expanding economy, and the settler’s fantasy of empty lands
whose very reason for being is to be occupied and exploited by the colonial
masters. Those empty lands are of course occupied (the contradiction is the
ˇ
very form of the ideological fantasy) but here again Capek’s Newts literalize
the socially effective fantasy with extraordinary precision, as the occupants
are rendered into a kind of natural resource as laborers and simultaneously
made invisible as fellow beings. The various ways in which humans see and
fail to see the Newts make up a major satirical motif in the novel. Misunder-
standing of the Newts most often takes the form of fantastic projection, from
Sweetie Pie Li’s seeing them as tritons adoring at the temple of her body, to
the scientist Charles J. Powell twisting their reproductive cycle into a manifes-
tation of the “Male Principle,” to Wolf Meynert interpreting the growth of
their numbers as the advance of civilization into a homogeneous world com-
munity, to the final interpretation of them in the closing section of the book,
“The Author Talks to Himself,” where they are anthropomorphized into ag-
ˇ
gressive nationalists. Altogether, Capek’s bitterly hilarious exposition of the
environmental devastation caused by colonial exploitation, the genocidal im-
pact of Western “discovery” on indigenous people, the horrors of the slave
trade, the grotesque logic of racist “science,” and the absurd commodification
of the exotic in the imperial homelands skewers colonialism and its attendant
ideologies as effectively and comprehensively as any work of fiction between
the wars.
ˇ
Capek’s novel is typical only in the sense that a period or genre’s greatest
achievements sum up and epitomize what is most important about them. I can
think of no single work of science fiction that better deserves the description
Carl Freedman recently argued for as a key to the genre, that science fiction and
ˇ
critical theory are versions of one another. Capek’s vision of the homeland being
submerged by the colonies is a uniquely powerful vehicle for acting out the
fantastic logic of capitalist and imperialist expansion as it completes itself in the
dialectical reversal of slavery into mastery. It is an effectively Hegelian and
Marxist portrayal of the abstract, systematic workings of the capitalist mode of
production, much of it couched in the appropriately anonymous forms and style
of contemporary mass journalism, its emphasis on totality and system nicely
punctuated by the parody of voluntaristic interpretation afforded in the valet
Papa Povondra’s distress over having caused the whole word catastrophe by
having allowed Van Toch in to see Mr. Bondy in the first place. Some critics
persist in seeing War With the Newts as merely a satirical attack on German
fascism or Stalinism, but this is as much of a Procrustean limitation of the novel’s
significance as the various misinterpretations of the newts themselves that abound
ˇ
within it.9 Capek captures in the same stroke both the optimistic ideology of
capitalist progress culminating in a world workers’ revolution and the pessimistic

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John Rieder

expectation, widespread in fiction of this decade, that the imminent collapse of

nineteenth-century imperialism into the final, cannibalistic self-destruction of
humanity itself was at hand.

Post-colonial invasions: Butler’s XENOGENESIS

and Jones’s Aleutian trilogy
Despite the brilliance of War With the Newts, the future of Anglo-Ameri-
can science fiction’s handling of the invasion plot is more pertinently addressed
by the example of John W. Campbell’s venerated 1938 novella “Who Goes
ˇ
There?” Campbell’s invasion is no less a dialectical one than Capek’s, but in
this case the remarkable result is—or would be, if the heroes of “Who Goes
There?” did not succeed in foiling the alien invader—one that leaves the world
externally identical to its former self, but with an alien consciousness inhabit-
ing it. Campbell’s is a dialectical play of identity and difference rather than
mastery and slavery. The invaders threaten not to dominate but to absorb their
hosts. They make perfect identity with their victims into an absolute differ-
ence, an annihilation of the host’s desire and its replacement by an alien agenda.
After Campbell this form of invasion becomes a staple of science fiction. The
classic cinematic version is not either of the film adaptations of Campbell’s
story but rather Don Siegel’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers. More spectacu-
lar versions of invasion as assimilation range from George Romero’s canni-
balistic zombies in Night of the Living Dead to the Borg of Star Trek. A subtle
and philosophically astute portrayal of totalized assimilation, where indeed
everything is the same but everything is different, comes at the conclusion of
William Gibson’s Neuromancer, when Wintermute comments on the world-
historical merging of AIs the entire plot has labored to produce by asserting
that “things are things” still (270).
In all of these cases from Campbell to Gibson we could say that an appro-
priate political-economic reference would no longer be imperialism as the last
ˇ
or latest stage of capitalism, as it would still be for Capek, but rather late
capitalism itself. One reason why the plot of invasion by soul-devouring vam-
pires achieves the widespread, popular status it does is that it resembles the
form of global hegemony established by the U.S. in the wake of World War II
and often identical in political terms with post-colonialism, a recession of di-
rect governmental control in favor of more pervasive economic penetration by
a more stable and enveloping world system of trade and finance. In very broad
and therefore imprecise terms, we could say that the role of uneven techno-
logical development, while it certainly does not fade into insignificance, no
longer plays the crucial role it once did in fantasies of invasion. Instead we
now find invasion by a foreign totality, a transformation of signs and values,
an emptying out of older cultural artifacts and rituals and their replacement by

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something directed by fundamentally different motives and assumptions. Even

super-weapons henceforth tend to threaten total extinction rather than a mili-
tarily imposed form of domination.
The fantastic figure of the soul vampire does not appear in the two recent
and remarkable examples of the post-colonial invasion narrative that will bring
this brief survey to its conclusion: Octavia Butler’s XENOGENESIS (1987-
89), recently re-titled Lilith’s Brood, and Gwyneth Jones’s Aleutian trilogy
(White Queen [1991], North Wind [1994], and Phoenix Café [1998]). How-
ever, these narratives are both centrally concerned with the assimilation and
absorption of individuals and whole communities into the social system of an
extraterrestrial invader. They explore conquest not as a simple matter of being
overpowered and constrained but rather in the equivocal process of subjec-
tion10 to an alien system of identities, values, and desires. They have in com-
mon, also, the strategy of narrating the invasion from points of view that inhabit
both the camp of the invaders and that of the invaded. This shifting of perspec-
tives highlights the ambivalent quality of invasion and coercion, the force of
desire and repulsion that works on both parties, determining the sometimes
tragic play of recognition and misrecognition as the struggle between the aliens
and the terrestrials shuttles between intimacy and violence, lovemaking and
rape. Their explicit concern with gender and sexuality is anything but a
depoliticizing move. The prominence of identity politics does not lead to vol-
untaristic or psychologizing interpretations of the political and social dynam-
ics of invasion and colonization, but rather indicates how deeply and pervasively
those dynamics penetrate the host culture. We can grasp this in some detail by
means of four figures common to both trilogies that establish a framework for
the narratives’ critical reflection on colonial and post-colonial history: the post-
catastrophic setting, the function of trade, the utopian significance of the closed
system, and the strategically crucial role of hybridity.
Analogical references to colonial history in the post-catastrophic setting
of Jones’s Aleutian trilogy are quite direct. Jones’s London, for instance, is a
tropicalized city with a monsoon season that one character experiences as “the
past” itself (North Wind 164). Another character compares the Aleutians’ deal-
ings with humankind to those “ignorant well-meaning foreigners” who were
the British in India (North Wind 107). Like colonial India, earth loses its po-
litical and economic coherence, sees its culture riven by mimicry of the for-
eigners and reactive fundamentalism, undergoes vast environmental devastation
due to the unforeseen effects of “superior” alien technology, and finds itself at
the moment of the colonial masters’ departure (at the end of the trilogy) a
radically divided and wounded community.
The significance of the setting of Lilith’s Brood is somewhat more complex.
ˇ
Butler’s point of departure is close to where Capek’s War with the Newts leaves
off—the self-destruction of the human world by its own inherent contradictions.

387
John Rieder

Butler’s Oankali invaders insist that these contradictions are genetically

determined, maintaining that human intelligence is intrinsically self-destructive
because of its fatal evolutionary bond with hierarchical behavior. But this Oankali
dogma is suspiciously convenient for a race that has its own designs premised
on the status of human genetic structure as a kind of exploitable, and extremely
valuable, natural resource. One must not simply identify Oankali sociobiology
with Butler’s authorial position, then, and in the same way it is important not to
read Butler’s after-the-end-of-the-world setting as a state of nature in the
philosophical mode of Hobbes or Rousseau or the fictional mode of Jefferies. A
far more supple interpretation is offered by Cathy Peppers’ argument that Lilith’s
Brood constitutes a “‘cyborg’ origin story” (Peppers 47). Peppers shows how
Butler’s trilogy sets up a dialogue among several quite different discourses about
origins: the Biblical creation myth, the discourses of sociobiology and
palaeoanthropolgy, and the narrative of the African slave trade and diaspora.
The net effect is to corrode the authority of the Biblical and scientific discourses
by bringing it into contact with the holocaustal colonial history. Instead of
following the Oankali’s deterministic reading of the “human contradiction,” then,
Peppers’ reading suggests Butler’s genetics are part of a genealogical strategy in
the sense articulated by Foucault—a critical use of history to assault belief in
unitary origins or essentialist, non-permeable identities. For one thing, the
contradiction between hierarchy and intelligence might then suggest a social
ˇ
and historical contradiction like the one Capek unfolds, the conflict within
capitalism between the competitive, quantifying, reifying drive of the imperative
for profit and the socializing, cooperative tendencies of commerce and the division
of labor. Perhaps more to the point, however, that undermining of fundamental
binary oppositions between humans and animals and between organisms and
machines that first led Donna Haraway to connect Butler’s work with “cyborg”
identity (Haraway 179) is inseparable, in Lilith’s Brood, from its sustained
references to the history of slavery (especially in the imprisonment and re-
education of Lilith in Dawn), a practice that rests on stripping away from certain
individuals those privileged categories of the human and the organism in relation
to the animal and the machine. A genealogical reading of the post-apocalyptic
setting of Lilith’s Brood directs us not to “nature” as a theoretical tabula rasa or
as an essentialist physical framework but rather to the invasion of Africa by the
capitalist slave trade and to the construction of a New World on its basis.
“Trade” is a loaded term in Lilith’s Brood. The crux of the trilogy, as the
terms of the “trade” the Oankali desire to carry out with the human race
gradually become clearer, is whether the Oankali intervention in human history
(or post-history) is a symbiotic salvation—a kind of resurrection from the
dead—or an opportunistic, predatory (or carrion) attack that will end by
stripping the planet itself of every vestige of life. Both versions of the “trade”
are true, of course. The outrageous ambivalence of trade establishes another

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powerful analogy between Butler’s post-apocalyptic fiction and the contemporary

situation of post-colonial people, for indigenous cultures throughout the world
have long played out and continue to play this drama of near extinction and
equivocal survival—survival, that is, on the terms of a “trade” with the invaders
that robs the native culture of its land, its resources, and its identity.
The Aleutian colonization of earth begins as a small entrepreneurial trade
mission that is sometimes referred to only half jokingly as piracy. The aliens
in this initial group assume that trade is always a form of war and that it al-
ways involves lying and being lied to. Their motives are speculative and tied
to real estate in a way that can’t help but recall Manhattan and the strings of
beads. They refer to their project alternately and without irony as an adven-
ture, a trade mission, a camping expedition, or a scam. In another echo of
Indian history, the earth’s economic trade with the aliens eventually leads to
widespread cultural trauma and political dependence. The figure of infection
is crucial, as the humans try desperately to establish effective quarantine zones
around the aliens, but clearly cannot contain or control the effects of their
contact. Because of the interplay of absorption and assimilation with infec-
tion, mimicry, and identity Jones is very much in the line of invasion fantasies
that includes “Who Goes There?” and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, but
Jones’s rendition of radical cultural difference and the sometimes tragic
misrecognitions that result from it is far beyond the ambitions or achieve-
ments of most science fiction. Because Aleutian personal identity is serial and
culturally transmitted, the meaning of death is radically different, as the hu-
mans discover to their horror when the Aleutians ceremonially execute a young
girl for the seemingly minor offense of trying to take a blood sample from one
of the aliens. (It turns out that the misrecognition is mutual here, since Aleu-
tian blood is the key ingredient of the Aleutian technology for weapons of
mass destruction.) On another register, differences in gender and kinship are
at the base of the cultural misunderstandings that emerge in the great first
contact scene between Johnny Guglioli and Agnes with its climactic telepathic
communication by the alien to Johnny that “<I think I am your child. You are
my daddy. . . . Don’t you know me? Please! You must know me!>” (White
Queen 37)—surely in its way as shocking and effective as the birth of the alien
from the chest of its human host in Ridley Scott’s Alien. The horrifying inti-
macy of this first scene later unfolds into the rape of Johnny by the hermaph-
roditic Agnes (who is desperately in love with him), an event that is offered
several times in the later volumes of the trilogy as the most fitting symbol of
Aleutian and human interaction.
One of most effective and original ways that identity, infection, and colo-
nial history come together in the Aleutian trilogy is the marvelous device of
the “wanderers,” insect-like creatures that crawl on the aliens’ bodies and in-
fest their living quarters. Jones exploits the fact that standards of cleanliness

389
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are one of the most fraught and recurring of cultural differences by having the
humans see the wanderers as vermin, associating them with uncleanness, dis-
ease, and contagion. (Among the Aleutians themselves clean underwear is a
recurring topic of conversation and anxiety.) It turns out that the wanderers are
in fact a kind of bodily excretion whose function is hygienic, so that to be
infested is synonymous with being clean. They are also emissarial, the very
medium of the “telepathic” communication among the Aleutians, so that the
Aleutian mode of communication itself resembles the human understanding
of contagious disease. While Jones’s near-future human world is drowning in
its own shit, immersion in the excretory wanderers is the form taken by a healthy
community among the Aleutians.
Efficient waste management takes on a curiously utopian value in these
narratives. In both trilogies the alien ships’ self-sufficient ecosystems offer a
stark contrast to the damaged and polluted planet earth. Alien technology in
both narratives is organic; the Aleutians treat their sentient tools and furniture
like family pets. Technology itself thus becomes a figure for a seamless commu-
nity, a perfectly balanced, stable, and closed system. This is not without its irony,
of course, since both ships also carry communities of invaders with more or less
predatory or exploitative motives. Jones draws attention to and jokes about this
strange combination when one of her Aleutian characters comments in a quasi-
Marxist fashion on the human capitalist ideal of a growing economy: “How can
any part of it [the economy] have net growth, except by devouring its neigh-
bors,”—and therefore, in the radically non-Marxist continuation, “shrinking
ˇ
markets, destroying diversity, killing trade” (North Wind 144). If Capek’s del-
uge simultaneously resembles the unrealized ideals of both the Communist In-
ternational and the League of Nations, Butler’s and Jones’s alien technologies
seem to similarly combine the ideals of Greenpeace and the World Bank.
A far more potent political figure in both narratives is that of the hybrid.
The heroes of Lilith’s Brood are neither the humans who desperately cling to a
doomed authenticity nor the Oankali invaders with their secure belief in their
own benevolence, but the hybrid generation of the title. Only in the third vol-
ume of the trilogy, Imago, when the first human-Oankali ooloi (the key “third
sex” of the Oankali reproductive system) takes over as protagonist, does the
symbiotic project of the Oankali seem really convincing. Similarly, the pro-
tagonist of the third volume of Jones’s trilogy, Phoenix Café, is a human-Aleu-
tian hybrid, the same, reborn Agnes (now renamed Helen) who raped Johnny
Guglioli in White Queen, who now sees that rape as the symbol of the entire
Aleutian invasion, and who, out of a desire to understand and heal the injuries
she and her kind have caused, has decided to live her current life in the body of
a human. Although her success in bridging the chasm between the colonial
and colonized communities is far more equivocal and fragile than that of the
ooloi in Imago, it is clear that both narratives turn to the figure of the hybrid

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 Science Fiction, Colonialism, and the Plot of Invasion

out of the same kind of distrust of notions of purity and authenticity, a distrust
based, I think, on the way such ideas have functioned within and have been
compromised by racist and authoritarian ideologies. The role of the hybrid in
these post-colonial invasion narratives allies them to a position that has been
enunciated eloquently by Homi Bhabha:

The language of critique is effective not because it keeps forever separate the terms of
the master and the slave, the mercantilist and the Marxist, but to the extent to which it
overcomes the given grounds of opposition and opens up a space of translation: a
place of hybridity, figuratively speaking, where the construction of a political object
that is new, neither the one nor the other, properly alienates our political expecta-
tions, and changes, as it must, the very forms of our recognition of the moment of
politics. (Bhabha 25)

Opening up a space for the imagination of alternative social possibility has

often been called science fiction’s most important vocation. Lilith’s Brood and
the Aleutian trilogy embrace that vocation with startling adequacy in these
hybrid figures who are neither simply the one nor the other—master nor slave,
male nor female, colonizer nor colonist.
Like all great science fiction, Butler’s and Jones’s novels do not engage the
historical and the social in the mode of allegorical or encrypted representation
but rather gather together a multitude of threads of reference and weave them
into a new texture of possibilities. My fundamental point throughout this essay
is that among the historical circumstances that have most continually provided
the vocabulary of science fiction’s imagination of disaster we should count those
surrounding colonialism and its legacy. These circumstances then include the
post-colonial and genealogical critical discourses Jones and Butler bring into
ˇ
play, just as they include Wells’s deployment of Darwinism and Capek’s Marxist
dialectics. The three types of critique—ethical, dialectical, and genealogical—
that I have discerned in these different generations of science fiction invasion
narratives are not meant to represent the development of science fiction towards
truth and critical sophistication, but rather to point out the dialogical engagement
these writers make with the contemporary critical and ideological production of
the “collective characters” who are the agents and the victims of progress and
colonialism. It is, one would hope, not controversial to assert that the best science
fiction, like all great fiction, is thoroughly grounded in and peculiarly cognizant
of its historical circumstances. The interesting questions concern its specific
mode of grounding and cognition. The brief survey of the plot of invasion just
offered suggests that this mode includes critical representation of a socially
prevalent and productive, effective fantasy—that is, a fictional strategy grounded
in ideological fantasy and cognizant of its own productiveness as counter-
ideology. Among the most important qualities that separate a mere distortion of

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John Rieder

reality from a compelling piece of science fiction are the intensity of this
ideological engagement and the success of its counter-production. If the history
of colonialism that science fiction writers have drawn upon was always already
fantastic, then the scenarios with which they have mimicked, reversed, mocked,
and challenged colonial ideology are no less, for all that, an integral part of
colonialism itself.

Notes

1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the panel on “The Imagination of
Disaster” arranged by the Discussion Group for Science Fiction, Fantastic and Uto-
pian Literatures at the Modern Language Association meeting in New York, Decem-
ber, 2001.
2. In this essay I will be using the term science fiction rather loosely, as Clareson does.
The anachronism of the term with respect to nineteenth-century texts and the impre-
cision of using it for British scientific romances (cf. Brian Stableford, The Scientific
Romance in Britain 1890-1950) seem less important in the present context than the
recognition of broad generic similarities.
3. On justifications of colonial seizure of indigenously occupied land, see Ellen Wood’s
commentary on Hugo Grotius, Thomas More, William Petty, and John Locke. The
idea that natives leave the land itself empty, that is, non-productive—or as Grotius
argued, that “if usable things were left unused, there was no property in them, and
hence people could appropriate land left unused by others”(72)—remains the key-
note of legal justification of colonial seizure of land in More, Petty, and Locke.
4. I don’t want to simplistically lump together Haggard, a writer whose work I admire
and consider well worth critical investigation, with that of his legion of more or less
slavish imitators. What is at stake in the comments I am making in this paragraph is
the status of the formulas that are monotonously repeated in this most predictable of
sub-genres. The relation between generic formula and the individual text is a prob-
lem that ought to be addressed separately and at length. Suffice it to say here that a
skillful writer like Haggard is fully capable of satisfying the generic expectations of
a reader thirsting for a predictable adventure story while at the same time providing
ample satisfaction to that group of readers who are happier to find the text working
against conventional expectations and attitudes.
5. This is not to say that the two purposes were not compatible with one another. The
future war genre continued to be used as a polemical device in the 1890s. My per-
sonal favorite example (admittedly determined by my long-time residence in Hono-
lulu) is J. H. Palmer’s The Invasion of New York; or, How Hawaii Was Annexed.
Published in 1897 as debates were taking place in the U. S. Congress over the pos-
sible annexation of Hawai‘i (whose monarchy had been overthrown four years earlier
in a bit of gunboat diplomacy supported by the U.S. military in cooperation with a
group of white plantation owners), Palmer’s novel combines a topical argument for
the rightness of the U.S.’s territorial expansion into the Pacific with extended, fantas-

392
 Science Fiction, Colonialism, and the Plot of Invasion

tic descriptions of naval battles between the U.S. and the Spanish (who invade New
York) and the Japanese (who bombard San Francisco).
6. “Primitive man in the works of the descriptive anthropologist is certainly a very en-
tertaining and quaint person, but the man of the future, if we only had the facts, would
appeal to us more strongly.”
7. If one were to attempt a broad treatment of the ways science fiction narratives have
used plague and infection as figures of invasion, it would be helpful to remember that
the role of disease in the spread of European colonial domination was quite uneven.
Against the plagues of syphilis, measles, and influenza that tore through the indig-
enous populations of North America and Polynesia and so often eased the way to
more or less uncontested white settlement, for instance, one could set the power of
malaria as a kind of natural defense that drastically delayed European penetration
into the interior of sub-Saharan Africa.
8. Brian Stableford’s excellent introduction to the recent Wesleyan UP edition of Del-
uge includes a survey of the post-apocalyptic sub-genre in Britain from Jefferies to
the thirties.
9. E.g. Harkins, 97; Bradbrook, 110; Klíma, 198-99. My reading is closer to that of
ˇ 268-73. An illuminating comparison would be to set War With the Newts
Matuska,
alongside Alun Llewellyn’s The Strange Invaders (1934), which targets the degen-
eration of the Russian Revolution into Stalinist dogmatism far more directly, and
involves a very different, but almost equally cogent and disturbing, takeover of the
world by an emergent species of giant reptiles.
10. As Sherryl Vint has cogently demonstrated for the Aleutian trilogy, the Althusserian
model of interpellation into ideology and the Lacanian one of insertion into the Sym-
bolic order are appropriate, and in Jones’s case explicit, theoretical references.

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