That Good Old Frontier Spirit

I went into Manifest Destiny with one significant goal: learning why on earth we're reading it in a course about science fiction. Don't get me wrong -- I'm a great fan of American history (although I was very disappointed at the exclusion of my favorite president, the exemplary Chester A. Arthur), but I struggled to fit this book into my conception of science fiction.

To figure it out, I thought about the context in which we read the book. We read it as part of our two weeks of "Space as the Final Frontier," sandwiched between our viewing of "nervous liberals in space" in Star Trek: TNG. Then I saw that Bradbury's Martian Chronicles was under the recommended reading for this week, and its theme of transplanting behaviors (and ecology!) from a terrestrial to a Martian setting helped things start to click. Heinlein was frontier libertarians, and Star Trek is frontier psychiatrists. Manifest Destiny pulls it together by pointing out that no matter how you treat the frontier, it doesn't last forever. Our basic instinct when we see uninhabited space is to explore it, tear it from our imaginations and nail it down to lines on a map. Star Trek sort of sidesteps this problem by exploring an inexhaustibly huge galaxy (or sector, or quadrant, or whatever), so that its frontier can't really be used up in the show. The shadow of it remains, however, especially in episodes like First Contact, which demonstrates the sad truth that innocence once lost can never be regained; you can't civilize the frontier and expect it to hang on to "that good old frontier spirit."

Basically, I saw it as another explanation for why we read sci-fi at all. America has come a long way from its thirteen original colonies. Many of the obstacles to expansion seemed insurmountable, but one way or another pioneers found their ways across the continent in pursuit of their fortunes and the unstoppable American dream. Similarly, humanity won't be able to resist the vast, untapped resources space offers for long. It appears to me, then, that this is a matter of inevitability; we read and write sci-fi to gather and offer some sort of guidance on how the process should go when the time finally arrives for us to reach out and explore the stars. Humanity may spread and spread, and the idea of humanity extending from one edge of the universe to the other is an appealing one. The last point I want to make, then, is that Star Trek may be a fun trip, but eventually you run out of final frontiers. What do you do with yourselves when there's nowhere else to go? Are empires that cease to expand doomed to stagnation and eventual collapse? Either way, we're all headed to the same endpoint, as explored by Asimov in his short story The Last Question. That's why I argue that, cinematic deviance aside, the Star Wars universe represents an extraordinarily important exploration of galactic civilization; if all goes well, humanity's time on Earth represents only a short birthing phase in our overall history as a species. Just as a spaghetti Western can't give you much good advice on how to live in the American Southwest today, books like The Moon is a Harsh Mistress can't advise you on how to live and act in a truly established interstellar setting.

Themes of Defiance

There are some who may argue that "defiance" is such a universal theme as to make it pointless to analyze it in any serious literary context. However, I believe that analyzing how individuals manifest defiance in their actions tells something important about their societies or cultures (or, in the case of fiction, about the society or culture of the author). So then, where do we find instances of defiance in Metropolis and The Time Machine?

Examples in the former are pretty obvious -- pretty much everybody defies the ruler of the city, Joh Fredersen. Workers defy their boss and place in society, a son defies his father, and a mad scientist defies fate and death. In building a New Tower of Babel, the boss himself defies God and Judeo-Christian religious tradition. In Metropolis, defiance is not met with immediate punishment, but rather with indirect, passive-aggressive retaliation. Fredersen's discovery of duplicity in his workers and son does not spark the immediate crackdown one would expect from a virtual dictator. Instead, he sends an agent to encourage dissent among the workers (that he may punish them for more open defiance), and he merely places a tail on his son. Freder himself is almost killed by his sympathy for the workers. Rotwang the scientist's disloyalty is punished not by the higher powers he disregards, but he is forced to lose his love to the machinations of Fredersen once again. And despite his attempts to build a tower tall enough to allow him to spit in God's face, Fredersen must face the terrible truth that his arrogance could cost him the life of his son, which crushes the delicate machismo he had so carefully cultivated in his stewardship of the city. In other words, in Metropolis, people may defy, but they sure don't get away with it.

Well, what about The Time Machine? Not much room in that one for defiance, I agree. Aside from the Time Traveler's willingness to defy his colleagues' quaint ideas of the laws of physics and time, that's about it. But then again...that's just it. The Time Traveler breaks the very laws that govern our existence. Joh Fredersen maintains the conceit that he has bested God, but it's actually very easy to defy God. People do it all the time, all over the place, and God doesn't lift a (metaphysical) finger to stop them. But time is the great equalizer...we're all subject to it, and we all eventually fall victim to it. The Time Traveler defies the greatest absolute we know, and gets away with it (until something mysterious happens and he never comes back, but we aren't explicitly sure that he's encountered something bad).

Unfortunately, there is a major contradiction between the two worlds that makes it extremely difficult to compare them. While Metropolis exists in its own contained universe, The Time Machine is an instance of one society's representative commenting on another society. It's easy to talk about systems of defiance in punishment in the Metropolis fiction, but it's never clear whether the Time Traveler is being punished or not. Certainly he risks punishment in his own time (in the form of lost status) if he fails to demonstrate a working time machine. And while his trip to the future is hardly kind to him, he learns much about what we might become and takes away the satisfaction of successfully traveling through time. Although he gets a little disheveled, he returns to England essentially unscathed. Even his vision of the future is pointedly lacking in forms of punishment; everything has become meaningless, and whether one lives or dies is a function of luck more than anything else. However, Wells goes out of his way to mention that a lack of defiance is the main cause of the blasé attitude of the Eloi. His intrepid hero, therefore, is representative of the greatest defiance (and therefore, strength) a human can muster. His disappearance is all the more tragic, and could conceivably be the turning point at which humanity began to lose the fight against entropy.

Now we know that a lack of defiance leads to a breakdown of society, and hidden defiance (or defiance against abstract concepts) leads to psychological or slow-burning retaliation. Unfortunately, these aren't really mutually interactive principles. The world of The Time Machine has no room for subterfuge, so the ideas of Metropolis can't apply there. Similarly, industry is dead by the year 800,000 and some; a distant time where nothing is left has no relation to the fast-paced near future offered by Lang. The important similarities are the class divisions and the theme of the "human creative impulse" (a term I feel free to use interchangeably with "defiance"). The "human creative impulse" is, in my opinion, the urge of every individual to be in control of his or her own future. It is perhaps best demonstrated in that the Eloi lack it entirely, while the events in Metropolis are caused by one man's struggle to quash the HCI of everyone else in the world.

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I have one more point of defiance to offer, although it's going to be quite weak. As a very strong Star Wars fan, I was extremely dismayed to learn that it wouldn't be an object of our study. Please do not confuse me with a fan seeking to expand our working definition to include Star Wars; I appreciate Professor Jackson's definition of science fiction as a perfectly sensible one (and ultimately necessary for a meaningful study of social science and science fiction). To be fair, I largely ignore the movies when I make the argument that Star Wars, at least in parts, deserves to be considered science fiction. Star Wars films, especially with the release of the prequel trilogy, stray very far from any form of systematic social conjecture. They are naked settings for fantastic adventures of swords and princesses, swashbuckling tales that are betrayed immediately by their inspirations as absent of any deep consideration of politics, technology, or the ramifications of alien contact.

Yet there is no doubt that the Star Wars universe is a compelling one, if for no other reason than its sheer scope. In a galaxy that is at least as large as our own, containing millions of inhabitable worlds (not necessarily only for humans), there exists an expanded universe, originally created as mere backstory, that has gone beyond its humble origins to create a living, breathing universe with detailed systems of politics, economics, religion, ethics, conflict and above all a true sense of history. If "any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic," then
who is to say that, in the far past of Star Wars, some brilliant scientist created a retrovirus that infected all living beings with an ability to harness the power of the brains over nature through what became known as the Force? It's true that the aliens of Star Wars (with many notable exceptions!) are by and large humans in funny-shaped bodies; however, I find this to be perfectly reasonable in a universe where interplanetary travel has been the norm for longer than anyone can remember. To use an example from our world, advances in transportation technology are fast eroding the differences between people all over the earth; English has become a sort of global language, and there are many symbols and cultural elements that are present in every culture around the world. All of this has occurred over a period of less than a century; is it really fair to declare that no sufficiently advanced galactic society can be considered representative of science fiction? Certainly, it is a different genre of science fiction than The Time Machine or Metropolis. But is it fair to cut it out entirely? Is there really no value in positing a universe where the major initial problems of interacting with alien species are a thing of the past? I argue that Star Wars presents a world of galactic politics and trade that is important for us to consider, as it at least represents a place in history that many people dream of humanity reaching.