Community vs Imperialism

Where is the line between symbiosis and parasitism?

A Strange Confluence

In September, I read Chelsea Vowel’s Buffalo is the New Buffalo (2022) and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) for two of my book clubs, and found that certain ideas presented by these books seemed to strike a discordant tone in my mind.

I discussed The Left Hand of Darkness a few weeks ago in conversation with Ann Leckie’s novels, but for today I’m mainly interested in the idea of the Ekumen – a confederacy of human-descended worlds guided by the eldest and most peaceful among them. The novel follows Genly Ai as he seeks to offer Ekumen membership or simply friendship to the people of Geth; not unlike the offer carried by the protagonists of each Star Trek series.

Which is where tension arises with regard to Chelsea Vowel’s novel (an earlier version of this quoted section is available as an article online):

Science fiction as a genre “emerged in the mid-nineteenth-century context of evolutionary theory and anthropology profoundly intertwined with colonial ideology” (Grace Dillon, 2012). These themes are exhaustively explored in whitestream science fiction, exposing particular settler colonial anxieties and aspirations that tend to erase or completely ignore the experiences and perspectives of Black, Indigenous, and People of Colour (BIPOC). In (re)imagining history, whitestream speculative fiction is particularly adept at repressing the violent histories of colonialism from the public imaginary (David Gaertner, 2015). This does not mean that the topic of colonization is absent from science fiction—far from it (John Rieder, 2008). We find constant dichotomous reframing of settler colonials as agents of space-faring Manifest Destiny or the inevitable subjects of colonization at the hands (tentacles, squishy pseudopods, or furry appendages) of aliens (Daniel Heath Justice, 2018). Whitestream science fiction insists that colonialism is inevitable. It’s “us or them,” and it had better be “us.” ... Octavia Butler’s work expanded my understanding of what is possible in terms of speaking back to mainstream (and mostly white) visions of the past and future. Butler’s work never elides or pretends to solve racism, misogyny and misogynoir, ableism, homophobia, classism, or any other system of oppression. Neither do these structures forbid Black possibility; they exist as they do now, as constraints that must be contended with and resisted. This approach differs from that of popular mainstream science fiction, in particular, Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, in which it is imagined that in the twenty-third and twenty-fourth centuries, humans have somehow solved all of these structural oppressions. Star Trek “is so invested in its liberal humanist multicultural utopian vision, that it can’t reckon with the ways in which it replicates fundamentally oppressive and hierarchical power imbalances, especially through its promotion of Starfleet as a militaristic, interventionist (in spite of the Prime Directive) organization” (Molly Swain, 2019). Unsurprisingly, this vision of the future mirrors contemporary refusals to acknowledge structural oppression or to understand the intergenerational impacts of settler colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade. – Chelsea Vowel, Buffalo is the New Buffalo (2022)

A long quote, I know, but I think Vowel offers fascinating and useful insights into speculative fiction as a whole in addition to today's topic.

Vowel (and her quoted writers) clearly have a valid point regarding science fiction's origins as being heavily focused in colonialism, and to a certain extent I think that still rings true today – although I'd argue that many of my favourite series, including The Masquerade, The Imperial Radch, and The Siege, explore those themes thoughtfully and critically.

All of which leads me to ask: where is the line between good faith community and poisonous imperialism? Does The Left Hand of Darkness' ending promise hope, or doom?

Covers of books mentioned above

Poison & Parasitism

I have to admit that for years when playing Sid Meier's Civilization V & VI, I never fully understood the Culture Victory, where you could simply win the game by exporting enough of your nation's art, ideology and media to the rest of the world. It helps that the games stick to simple descriptions of blue jeans and rock music, I suppose, rather than expressing the fundamental issue of what is being lost through cultural erasure. Three guesses as to the story that finally opened my – yeah, you got it in one.

Seth Dickinson's The Masquerade shows imperial Falcrest actively seeking to undermine foreign nations and peoples by whatever means necessary. They offer miraculous trade deals (only in Falcresti currency), free education (in residential schools), free medicine (which can be taken away once populations are dependent, and which sometimes target diseases Falcrest deliberately spread in the first place), and of course back all of this with domination over the seas so that other options are hard to come by.

This is also the playbook for real-world colonialism and imperialism (if sometimes preceded by pacifying swords, guns, drone strikes or biological warfare). Even if the consequences aren't quite as dire as in The Masquerade or in the European arrival into the Americas, parasitic colonizers achieve their goals by ideologically and culturally infecting their hosts, with no care for what is lost along the way (except for what wealth and glory can be won by looting artifacts, perhaps).

[I asked a couple of my friends to share some of their insights on this topic, and I'll link those here once I'm able. If you're getting this by email, you may need to click the title at the top to see the latest version.]

"Arrival", showing humans arriving on Roshar, art by Kevin Sidharta

Good Faith & Symbiosis

Now might be a good time to admit that I'm not exactly sure where the line is between good vs. bad, community vs. colonialism, symbiosis vs. parasitism. I do think that, as with interpersonal relationships, a significant power imbalance is often a glaring red flag that boundaries may be crossed.

Relationships between equals, on the other hand, are inherently more resistant to abuse. They can even give rise to systems like mutual aid, where communities come together to see to everyone's individual needs. That's the vision I've always had of the Federation in Star Trek, and I believe it's what Le Guin intended for the Ekumen in The Left Hand of Darkness as well.

Let's face it, it's hard not to be inspired by Star Trek's first contact, or the moment Genly's ship finally lands:

She came down in a roar and glory, and steam went roaring up white as her stabilizers went down in the great lake of water and mud created by the retro; down underneath the bog there was permafrost like granite, and she came to rest balanced neatly, and sat cooling over the quickly refreezing lake, a great, delicate fish balanced on its tail, dark silver in the twilight of Winter. Beside me Faxe of Otherhord spoke for the first time since the sound and splendor of the ship's descent. "I'm glad I have lived to see this," he said. So Estraven had said when he looked at the Ice, at death; so he should have said this night. To get away from the bitter regret that beset me I started to walk forward over the snow towards the ship. She was frosted already by the interhull coolants, and as I approached the high port slid open and the exitway was extruded, a graceful curve down onto the ice. The first off was Lang Heo Hew, unchanged, of course, precisely as I had last seen her, three years ago in my life and a couple of weeks in hers. She looked at me, and at Faxe, and at the others of the escort who had followed me, and stopped at the foot of the ramp. She said solemnly in Karhidish, "I have come in friendship." To her eyes we were all aliens. – Ursula K. Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness

Nonetheless, there are significant power imbalances in these first moments. Geth does have a unique resource (in their ability to prophesy) that the rest of the Ekumen will be very interested in – and even by the end of the book, Genly's understanding of the locals' genderlessness is haphazard at best. It's hard to say with certainty that the novel's ending is strictly positive; rather, it simply brings change and possibility.

I also personally struggled to find answers in Buffalo is the New Buffalo, because while Vowel is dedicated to exploring Indigenous Futurism, they were also (almost) all still about colonialism to a major degree. I understand that it's impossible to separate Métis stories from their complex history, but suffice to say I was left more confused than enlightened.

Painting by Paula Loomis

End

I don't know that there's much of a lesson to be learned here today, beyond remembering to think about media critically and having an open mind to perspectives different from our own.

I also didn't expect to be able to draw such clean parallels between the relationships of nations/governments and those of people, but I suppose it is human nature all the way down.

Do you know of any good examples of non-exploitative relationships between nations/governments/organizations, whether fictional or otherwise?

Thanks for reading and until next time <3