No.

4
2019
 Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy
No. 4 – 2019

Editorial Board | Adelaide Serras

Ana Daniela Coelho
Ana Rita Martins
Angélica Varandas
Diana Marques
João Félix
José Duarte

Advisory Board | Adam Roberts (Royal Holloway, Univ. of London, UK)

David Roas (Univ. Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain)
Flávio García (Univ. do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Henrique Leitão (Fac. de Ciências, Univ. de Lisboa, Portugal)
Jonathan Gayles (Georgia State University, USA)
Katherine Fowkes (High Point University, USA)
Ljubica Matek (Univ. of Osijek, Croatia)
Mª Cristina Batalha (Univ. do Estado do Rio de Janeiro, Brazil)
Martin Simonson (Univ. of the Basque Country, Spain)
Susana Oliveira (Fac. de Arquitectura, Univ. de Lisboa, Portugal)
Teresa Lopez-Pellisa (Univ. Autónoma de Barcelona, Spain)

Copy Editors | Ana Rita Martins || Diana Marques || João Félix || José Duarte

Book Review | Diana Marques || Igor Furão || Mónica Paiva

Editors

Translator | Diogo Almeida

Photography | Thomas Örn Karlsson

Site | http://messengersfromthestars.letras.ulisboa.pt/journal/

Contact | [email protected]

ISSN | 2183-7465
Editor | Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da Universidade de Lisboa |
University of Lisbon Centre for English Studies
Alameda da Universidade - Faculdade de Letras
1600-214 Lisboa - Portugal
Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy

Guest Editors
Danièle André
Cristophe Becker

Co-Editors No. 4
Angélica Varandas
José Duarte
 TABLE OF CONTENTS

EDITORIAL 5
GUEST EDITORS: DANIELE ANDRE & CRISTOPHE BECKER 5

MONOGRAPH SECTION 7
GAZE INTO THE ABYME: NAVIGATING THE UNNARRATED IN UBIK 8
CIARÁN KAVANAGH 8

EFFECTIVE ALTERNATIVES: HOW V FOR VENDETTA PROVIDES A RELATABLE,
PRESENTIST EXAMINATION OF PROPAGANDA 26
PETER KOSANOVICH 26

LIES FOR THE “GREATER GOOD” – THE STORY OF HORIZON ZERO DAWN 41
JESSICA RUTH AUSTIN 41

“WHAT REALLY HAPPENED AIN’T THERE”: SIFTING THE LIES OF SETTLER
COLONIAL HISTORY WITH PATRICK NESS’ CHAOS WALKING SERIES 58
REBECCA LYNNE FULLAN 58

“DO TIME NOW, BUY TIME FOR FUTURE”: PHALLIC DECEPTION AND TECHNO-
SEXUAL AGENCY IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE HEART GOES LAST 73
RANO RINGO 73
JASMINE SHARMA 73

HE SAID, SHE SAID:
FAKE NEWS AND #METOO IN MARIANNE DE PIERRES’ SENTIENTS OF ORION 88
DOROTHEA BOSHOFF 88
DEIRDRE C. BYRNE 88

OFFSPRING 103
BY | MARTIN SIMONSON 103

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS 116

4
 Twilight Road – Thomas Örn Karlsson

EDITORIAL

GUEST EDITORS: Danièle André & Cristophe Becker

For this 2019 Messengers from the Stars issue, the focus will be on how lies
and “alternative facts” – as coined by Counselor to President Donald Trump
Kellyanne Conway – can be both the basis for some to overthrow governments or
remain in power, and for others a way to protect a society that would be torn by war
or disaster if truth was to come out. Thus, the interest is in seeing how lies and
alternative facts are used to deprive people of their power to decide for themselves for
good or bad – the question of lifting the burden of moral condemnation on
cannibalism is, for instance, central to Richard Fleischer’s Soylent Green (1973) and
leads us to wonder whether or not falsification can ever be justified. In our societies,
in which lies in some forms or others are part and parcel of our daily lives, the

5
question of truth and facts is to be questioned and we can wonder to what extent they
could jeopardize our contemporary so-called democracies.
The papers here gathered study the tools used by fabricators and falsifiers in
order to twist reality and minimize the truth (propaganda, political manipulation,
storytelling and information warfare) as well as the effect an unmitigated resort to lies
has on social structures. Thus, Ciarán Kavanagh shows how an author can imagine a
narrative so complex (in the different levels of the diegesis) that it manipulates and
tricks its readership without ever giving a final explanation.
In his analysis, Peter Kosanovich tackles the issue of the use by the media and
history of propaganda to show how it alters the perception the people may have of
historical events or of society. Jessica Ruth Austin also focuses on propaganda but
with a view of questioning the assertion that there may really be good reasons for
lying to the people and whether that can ever be justified regardless of the
consequences. Lies are also at the core of Rebecca Lynne Fullan’s article. It shows
how those in power remain so by manipulating history, and how, by silencing the
minorities, they enable violence, misunderstanding and fear to dominate.
Rano Ringo and Jasmine Sharma underline how technological and social
experiments conducted on poor people under false promises aim at not only making
them become their own guards and torturers, but also at disempowering them. In their
study Dorothea Boshoff and Deirdre C. Byrne show how fake news and propaganda
are the tools used to disempower minorities, create an atmosphere of fear, subjugation
and violence to silence opposition and enable a systemic oppression to persist.
Finally, Martin Simonson offers a story that ponders upon the need for human
beings to get connected to the past. He explores the crave to understand and fathom
anthropological data in order to be able to get a glimpse of life in foregone years and
somehow relive it in order to be connected to those who were there before, whose
fragile presence still lingers on with a godlike aura.

6
MONOGRAPH SECTION
 Eyes in the Snow – Thomas Örn Karlsson

Gaze into the Abyme: Navigating the Unnarrated in Ubik

Ciarán Kavanagh
University College Cork

Abstract | Due to the potentially endless convolutions of an unstable pseudoreality,

the plot of Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik has traditionally been read as
irresolvable. Critical focus has, therefore, been centred on Ubik’s resistance to
“bourgeois” modes of reading, casting the mise en abyme conjured by its ontological
play as essentially unnavigable. While vast parts of Ubik’s world are indeed
unnarrated or unreliably narrated, thereby terminally complicating any attempt to
completely resolve the plot, this study argues that we are by no means completely lost
in the novel’s paradoxes. Situating this hypodiegesis against others in Dick’s oeuvre,
this article first seeks to correct a certain myopia in relation to Ubik’s plot, a
correction which will allow a more nuanced consideration of the nature of the half-life
which its deceased characters inhabit. Intertwined with this reading is a consideration
of Ubik’s critical heritage, and the reasons why other critics may have missed
potentially vital clues as to the half-life’s true nature.
Keywords | Philip K. Dick; Science Fiction; Ubik; postmodernism; criticism.

8
 vv

Resumo | Devido às potencialmente infinitas convoluções de uma “pseudorealidade”,

o enredo do romance de 1969 de Philip K. Dick, Ubik, tem tradicionalmente sido
lido como insolucionável. O foco da crítica tem-se, portanto, centrado na resistência
de Ubik aos modos “burgueses” de leitura, lançando o mise en abyme, conjurado pela
sua conjugação ontológica como algo essencialmente impossível de navegar. Embora
grandes partes do mundo de Ubik sejam, de facto, não-narradas ou narradas de forma
não confiável, consequentemente complicando de forma terminal qualquer tentativa
de resolver o enredo, este estudo argumenta que não temos de estar, de todo, perdidos
nos paradoxos do romance. Situando esta hipodiegése em contraste com outras obras
de Dick, este artigo tenta, em primeiro lugar, corrigir uma certa miopia em relação ao
enredo de Ubik, uma correcção que permitirá uma consideração mais diferenciada da
natureza da meia-vida que as suas personagens falecidas habitam. Interligada com
esta leitura encontra-se uma consideração da herança crítica de Ubik, e as razões pelas
quais outros críticos possam ter desconsiderado as pistas potencialmente vitais em
relação à verdadeira natureza da meia-vida.
Palavras-Chave | Philip K. Dick; Ficção Científica; Ubik; pós-modernismo; crítica.

vv

Introduction

Philip K. Dick’s 1969 novel Ubik has traditionally been interpreted as

uninterpretable – or, at least, as resisting certain modes of interpretation, alternatingly
characterised as bourgeois (Huntington, Fitting), rational (Lem), traditional (Fitting),
and so on. The aspect of Ubik which resists interpretation is the mise en abyme
conjured by its Russian-doll diegeses, which, scholars maintain, makes any final
resolutions of the actual plot impossible. The second section of the novel, in
particular, is almost entirely cut-off from the primary diegesis by an ontological veil
that neither reader nor characters appear able to pierce. This sunken diegesis is
created by a “cold-pac” technology which prolongs the consciousness of the almost
dead through cryogenesis, allowing limited communication with the outside world
and causing the consciousness of the deceased to exist in a dream-like mental plane.
Following an explosion, the second half of Ubik appears to take place wholly within a
cold-pac powered hypodiegesis, though, as is standard with Dick, both readers and
characters learn this quite a bit after the initial reality switch.

9
 Critics of Ubik traditionally characterise the ontic confusion therein created as
unnavigable, and focus their interpretive powers on describing this puzzle rather than
attempting to solve it, maintaining that any prolonged exploration of Ubik’s ontic
haze will lead, eventually, to an epistemological cul-de-sac. Kim Stanley Robinson
claims that “the constructive principle in Ubik is this: for every explanation one can
construct for the events of the novel, there will be at least one event that confounds
that explanation, making it impossible and thus inoperative” (95). Stanislaw Lem
encourages us to shelve “pedantic” objections and instead “inquire rather after the
overall meaning of the work” (59). Peter Fitting similarly suggests that “there is no
satisfactory single interpretation of Ubik”, a frustration, he contends, which causes
Ubik to act as “a mirror which reflects the reader’s look, forcing him out of his
familiar reading habits while drawing his attention to the functioning of the novel”
(51). Other critics see Ubik’s irresolvable plot as a weakness. Darko Suvin, the father
of SF theory, explains the conflicting details and narrative difficulty as a result of “a
narrative irresponsibility reminiscent of the rabbits-from-the-hat carelessness
associated with rankest Van Vogt” (“Artifice as Refuge” 19). His final judgement of
the novel is “a heroic failure” (20). George Turner concurs, and describes the book as
a pack of conflicting absurdities (qtd. in Lem 60). Andrew Butler, in his unpublished
PhD thesis, entertains the idea that the plot convolutions “are simply the result of his
mindlessly applying A. E. van Vogt’s “eight hundred word rule”, as suggested by
Suvin, but eventually attributes an intention, rather than haphazardness, to Dick’s
frequent violations of continuity (153). Thus, even when critics disagree on how the
contradictory nature of the plot is read, there is a strong general agreement that its plot
is indeed irresolvable.
This article will not fully break with this critical consensus; however, it will
argue that we are by no means as adrift in the hypodiegeses of the cold-pac as
scholars have generally contended. While it appears impossible to figure out how a
character or characters were put into cold-pac following the Luna explosion, there are,
in fact, many clues as to the controlling consciousness of the projected world, which
by no means appears to be Jory, the character which the narrative appears to blame
and which critics have largely accepted. This paper will ultimately argue that Ubik’s
hypodiegesis, encountered after the explosion on the Luna base, is either completely
or mostly the mental product of Glen Runciter. Furthermore, the characters within this
fantasy are either complete figments of Runciter’s imagination or their existence in

10
this mental plane is being “focalised” through his consciousness, filtered through his
perceptions in a manner that is literally and literarily akin to narrative focalisation. By
this reading, the plot of the hypodiegesis can be understood as an ego-driven fantasy
designed to reaffirm Runciter’s self-importance, legacy and, ultimately, to act as a
coping mechanism which allows him to avoid dealing with the fact that he has died.
This understanding of Ubik’s plot will also be shown to illuminate wider themes of
Dick’s, particularly his representation of literary and mental space, and his
exploration of postmodern metafiction. Lastly, it will be argued that Ubik’s
narratological puzzles may be missed by critics not simply due to the complexity of
those puzzles, but due to a sometimes patronising characterisation of the author.

The Surface

Ubik’s first section and primary diegesis is primarily told through the
perspectives of Joe Chip and his aged employer Glen Runciter. Runciter Associates
employs what the novel calls inertials, or anti-psis, people with the natural ability to
negate the psionic powers – generally telepathy, telekineticism, and divination – of
supra-normal humans, the latter group employed by Ray Hollis. Joe himself is not an
anti-psi, but a technician trained in measuring psionic and anti-psionic fields. The first
quarter of the novel is mostly centred on the enigma of Pat Conley, a new recruit for
Runciter Associates. Pat’s talent, completely unique, it seems, to the world of Ubik,
allows her to rewind time in order to change the past, thereby resulting in a new
present. The second mystery of this portion of the novel concerns the simultaneous
disappearance of a number of Ray Hollis’ top agents, and the offering of a huge
contract to Runciter Associates by an interplanetary financier, Stanton Mick. In terms
of pinning down the “correct” plot, critics have traditionally seen Pat as a red herring,
as it does not appear that she is necessarily connected to the events of the half-life
world.
These developments lead to what is presented as Stanton Mick’s lunar base,
wherein Runciter, Pat and Joe, along with a number of Runciter’s top inertials, are
ambushed by a “self-destruct humanoid bomb” in the guise of Mick. The second part
of the novel, the post-Luna narrative, sees the employees of Runciter Associates
waking up, battered but alive, with the exception of Runciter himself – or so it seems.
This section is nearly entirely seen through the eyes of Chip. Everything which occurs

11
after the bomb blast, hereafter termed the post-Luna narrative, takes place in “half-
life”, in a mental simulation created by a character or characters placed in the cold-
pac technology. This, however, is a fact that is kept hidden from both reader and
characters for some time. It is instead Pat Conley's mysterious power which is blamed
for the strange, degenerating world conceived after the blast, which causes foodstuffs
to decay, objects to revert to their technological predecessors, and the wider world to
slowly regress towards 1939.
The discourse of this portion of the novel sees the surviving employees escape
from Luna with the body of Glen Runciter, curiously unhindered, to the Beloved
Brethren Moratorium in Zürich, where they hope to put him into cold-pac and thereby
contact him for further orders. Cold-pac allows communication with the deceased
through a telephone-like apparatus, a technology currently sustaining Runciter’s wife
Ella. Runciter’s brain activity, unusually, has completely ceased, so this plan fails. By
this point, the characters have become aware that something about the world they
have woken up in is different. From the beginning of the post-Luna narrative, the
Runciter employees, led by Joe, become explorers of the ontic haze of the
hypodiegesis. Eventually, they realise that they haven’t woken up in their own reality,
and must therefore analyse the world they have found themselves in to determine its
rules, the reason behind its degeneration, and why they have become stuck there. Like
critics of the novel, they get lost in assumptions, possibilities and plot-holes, an
experience which most of them do not survive, succumbing to an extreme enervation
which completely desiccates their bodies. After some time, a number of the characters
conclude that it is they, not Runciter, who have died in the blast, and their struggles in
the hypodiegesis are the result of a malignant force attacking their cold-pac rescued
consciousnesses. This force is identified as Jory, a half-lifer child who creates a
mental simulation for other half-lifers to inhabit, where he can then feed on their
remaining life-force. Jory, they learn, can be kept at bay with the titular Ubik, a
portable reality stabiliser that comes in the form of a spray can. At least, this is the
explanation offered to them by what appears to be either virtual or divine
manifestations of Glen and Ella Runciter. Digging a bit deeper, however, reveals a far
different narrative, one explicitly pointed at by Ubik’s epilogue which reveals that
Glen Runciter is part of the death world too, and that a full re-evaluation of the plot as
it is understood it is necessary.
In the final chapter of Ubik, the narrative appears to shift up a diegetic level,

12
once again seen through the point of view of Glen Runciter, who, following his
“rescuing” of Joe, is seeking to communicate with Ella in the Beloved Brethren
Moratorium. On attempting to tip an attendant, he finds that his coins have
metamorphosed to bear the likeness of the ostensibly dead Joe, a sign which has
previously signalled to Joe, whose money bore the likeness of Runciter, that Joe was
dead and Runciter alive. Runciter’s world, which he had portrayed as the stable
primary diegesis, is therefore revealed to be a hypodiegesis, to be some other manner
of simulation or virtuality, and Ubik ends on a classically Dickian “This was just the
beginning” (224). For some readers, this will be a confirmation rather than a
revelation – there are hints throughout the post-Luna narrative that Runciter is not the
deus-ex-machina character which he, somewhat ludicrously, portrays himself to be. It
also reveals that what the reader believed to be the hypodiegesis is actually a
hypohypodiegesis, ontologically located a level either below or adjacent to that
occupied by Runciter (from here, the term hypohypodiegesis will be avoided for ease
of reading as context should make it more than clear which level of Ubik’s mise en
abyme is being discussed). Narratologically, however, it is important to note that the
novel appears to have at least three ontological levels, and that Runciter’s level
following the Luna-explosion, which sees him back in the Beloved Brethren
Moratorium, is potentially a level above that of the cold-pac reality in which most of
the action is taking place, though it clearly is not the primary diegesis.
Herein lies the puzzle pointed to by Robinson: if Runciter did not get the
inertials off-planet and into cold-pac, and if the inertials did not get Runciter off-
planet and into cold-pac, then where do the hypodiegeses come from? If all of the
second portion of the novel is in a degraded diegesis, what information therein gained
can we trust, and what is spurious? Ubik is, no doubt, full of conflicting information –
signal and noise are, in areas, either indistinguishable or inverted. While Robinson,
Lem and Fitting (among others) do not, as Suvin and Turner, explain the ostensible
contradictions of the novel as a mistake of Dick’s, they do construe the plot not so
much as intricate, but as impossible. This article, however, contends that significant
headway can be made when Ubik’s convolutions are neither written off as a result of
Dick’s ostensible haphazardness, nor as a deliberate breaking of literary and generic
convention. Robinson has warned of the dangers of this approach, claiming that
“every reader of Ubik becomes engaged, just like its characters, in the struggle to
create a coherent explanation for the events of the narrative, and like the characters

13
every reader is eventually defeated” (97). The following section, then, is an unusual
but here necessary sight in academic criticism: a plot sketch. Aspects of my proposed
reading of the novel’s plot will necessarily involve presumptions, assumptions and
dead-ends. There is, likewise, an attempt to trace not only of the novel’s events, but to
inscribe Ubik’s ontology; the fabulations in Ubik, mainly being the cold-pac
technology and the psionic abilities, are only partially understood by both characters
and, therefore, by readers. There is a fog over areas of Ubik’s ontological boundary,
obfuscating the exact potentials and possibilities of the novel’s SF inventions, what
Suvin terms the text’s “nova” (Metamorphoses 71). Nevertheless, Ubik is replete with
clues which can help navigate these waters – data which has been elsewhere
dismissed but may, as contended here, help to solve the puzzle of Ubik’s mise en
abyme.

The Abyss

Following the Luna explosion, both characters and readers receive either
limited or zero information from the primary diegesis, bar the fact that some or all of
the characters are dead. Some of the information therein encountered, about
characters and Ubik’s projected world, is likely to be true. However, given the
unreliable ontology of the hypodiegesis, it appears that other information is untrue or
warped, a distinction that must be made on a case by case basis. Our first core
assumption is that the post-Luna novel is entirely set within a hypodiegesis which is
being constructed by the mind or minds of certain character(s). This assumption
necessitates that we account for this or these characters’ placement in cold-pac, but it
does not mean that we have to place them in the Beloved Brethren Moratorium in
Zürich. This is the main stumbling point in trying to bring some stability to Ubik, as it
seems unlikely that any of Runciter’ Associates bodies could have made it to the
Zürich Moratorium; their assassination on Luna appears to have been organised for its
specific distance from civil authority on Earth, a tactic which, Runciter notes, other
anti-psi organisations have fallen prey to (85). It is also unlikely that the assassins
would allow the resuscitation of the characters into cold-pac, as they could be
consulted on the means of their death (though this is not a tactic which the text
actually discusses). Nevertheless, we know that one or some of the characters are
indeed in cold-pac, even though the events that lead to them being put there are

14
absent. Because this section is entirely unnarrated, and there does not appear to be any
information in the hypodiegesis which could help us understand the events, we are
essentially confined to this manner of speculation. It is entirely possible that some
rescue mission was conducted, or something went wrong with the bomb and some
inertials did escape. It should also be considered that it is a distinct possibility that the
bodies are in the control of the killers, and not, therefore, in the Beloved Brethren
Moratorium. If this is true, then the cold-pac consciousnesses of Ella and Jory are not
part of the hypodiegesis, but are simply the creations or projections of its controlling
mind or minds.
A reading of the novel wherein Jory and Ella are not the semi-cosmic forces
they are presented as in the hypodiegesis is stronger if we place the containing cold-
pac away from Zürich; however, it is by no means dependant on it. Another frequently
noted “plot-hole” is that Van Vogelsang has been instructed to place Ella in an
isolation chamber, so she should not be able to contact the inertials. The reader does
not, however, need to fill in every detail of the primary diegesis in order to understand
aspects of the hypodiegesis. By the evidence of the hypodiegesis alone, it appears
very unlikely that Jory or Ella are connected to that reality’s alternating degeneration
and regeneration, or at least in the manner that their post-Luna characters claim. The
only stable knowledge of the cold-pac technology comes from the pre-Luna
explosion, and primarily from Runciter’s visit to Ella. From the knowledge therein
gained, we can yet impose several limits on the ontological boundary of the
hypodiegesis. The first is that Runciter’s “visitations” in the hypodiegesis are clearly
not possible as his communication with Ella in the first half of the novel did not allow
him to place himself within her mental world, nor to provide her with any virtual
object such as Ubik. In fact, it only barely allows telephone communication (and this
is in an era where “vidphones” are the standard). It is possible to extrapolate a less
stable conclusion from this, being that there is potentially no way for the outside
world to interfere with the cold-pac hypodiegeses; the only potential interference seen
is Van Vogelsang increasing the “protophasonic flow” in order to raise the volume of
a half-lifer’s voice, and his offer to isolate Ella in a specially built chamber which
could stop her consciousness from mingling with those around her.
It likewise makes no sense for the Moratorium to keep a creature such as the
post-Luna Jory among the other half-lifers, as the longer their “patients” stay half-
alive, the more money they make. Post-Luna Ella’s assertion that the Moratorium are

15
paid handsomely to keep individuals like Jory seems very suspect – it seems, in fact,
like a lazy plot patch for lazier plot-hole, a suspicion which will be addressed later in
this article. Additionally, the reader knows through Van Vogelsang that the mingling
of consciousnesses occurs very gradually, that it affects those with waning
“protophasonic” energy more significantly, but, likewise, that it is enjoyed by half-
lifers as a respite from an otherwise lonely existence. This information is given in an
attempt to both abate Runciter’s anger at Jory’s “invasion” of Ella’s consciousness,
and to convince him to keep Ella in the normal half-life system, even when the more
expensive isolation chamber would obviously benefit Van Vogelsang. This seems,
then, to be information which the reader can trust. Pre-Luna Ella also raises no alarms
about the presence of half-lifers such as Jory. She tells Runciter that half-life is a sort
of amusing dream, though some of her dreams are not about her: “A lot of my dreams
aren’t about me at all. Sometimes I’m a man and sometimes a little boy; sometimes
I’m an old fat woman with varicose veins... and I’m in places I've never seen, doing
things that make no sense” (17). This suggests that the cold-pac consciousness drifts
into the dreams of others, sharing the protagonist-role of that dream (“I’m a man …
I’m in places”).
The final comparison from this section of Ubik is between pre- and post-Luna
Jory. Post-Luna Jory bears a similarity only in name to his pre-Luna manifestation. In
the pre-Luna narrative, Jory appears as a fairly benign figure who, though intruding
on Ella’s conversation with Runciter, simply wants conversation with the outside
world. He is a villain only to the mind of Glen Runciter, and Van Vogelsang illustrates
his “invasions” of her consciousness as both unavoidable and unintentional,
comparing them to radios with a weak and a strong signal. Ella also appears to be
yearning, at this point, for true death, so the threat of Jory to her seems nil. His
cartoon-villain post-Luna “manifestation”, wherein he also reveals that he goes by the
names Matt and Bill, the psionic twins encountered by several of the inertials in their
dreams in the primary diegesis, makes little sense. His ostensible reversion of the
hypodiegesis to a time in which he never existed makes less sense. As the
anthropomorphised entropic villain, Jory appears to simply be the last in a series of
wild guesses, as likely as the previously assumed Pat Conley, or the briefly considered
Sammy Mundo. Post-Luna Runciter, incidentally, claims that Mundo survived but is
in a hospital several miles from the Moratorium, even though there is a Mundo
character in the cold-pac hypodiegesis since the beginning – another floating and ill-

16
conceived datum which characterises the lack of authorial control over the
hypodiegesis.
The post-Luna section is, then, riddled with plot-holes. It is also, and crucially,
however, subject to a diegetic authorial force, or forces, to whom we may attribute
these failings – a fabulation which readers of Dick should be well used to
encountering. The cold-pac hypodiegeses are mental constructs of the type Dick
frequently writes, wherein a character’s perceptions become either their own reality or
are imposed as a shared reality. Examples of this include Manfred’s world in Martian
Time Slip, the group simulation in Maze of Death, the shared hallucinations of The
Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, the KR-3 parallel universe of Flow My Tears, The
Policeman Said, and, most useful in decoding Ubik, the shared mental hypodiegeses
of Eye in the Sky. Each of these works, among others, features a character with the
ability to “author” or “reauthor” aspects of the narrative. Pat Conley, for example, has
this ability in Ubik, as her talent allows her to place the narrative path that the reader
has already read sous rature. It also appears that the hypodiegesis is subject to an
authorial type of control, which we can turn elsewhere in Dick’s oeuvre to understand.
In Eye in the Sky (1957), a tour group composed of eight individuals fall into a
particle accelerator, causing their unconscious consciousnesses to mix and form a type
of shared reality, under the focalisation and control, however, of one member of the
party. The first to control the narrative, Arthur Silvester, a racist, religious
fundamentalist, transforms the ontology of the hypodiegesis into his vision of the
world. Sins, therefore, are immediately punished by stinging insects, miracles become
a worthwhile business investment, and the wider universe is revealed to be geocentric.
More insidiously, Silvester’s perception also changes the characters, slowly warping,
for example, the one African-American of the party, Bill Laws, into a racist caricature,
causing him to hunch his shoulders and speak in exaggerated and grossly
caricaturised vernacular. Silvester’s narrative control also turns the politically liberal
female of the group into a misshapen satyr. Silvester later loses control over the
hypodiegesis, and its focalisation passes on to another member of the party. At the
novel’s close, four members of the party of eight have assumed control of the
hypodiegesis, each one revealing how their biases and mental life affect their
perspective of reality. It is not clear, at the novel’s close, as to whether the final
diegesis is the primary or another version of the hypodiegesis. Eye in the Sky bears
not only a thematic similarity, then, to Ubik, but a potential structural parity as well.

17
 Just as in Ubik, the characters of Eye in the Sky have to play ontic detectives in
order to figure out who is controlling their shared narrative. They look for clues in the
ontological fabric of the world in order to figure out the controlling personality, which
leads them to realise that they’re living in Silvester’s fantasy. Readers of Ubik can
employ the same technique to figure out the focalising personality of the half-life
world. The clues therein gathered, which will here be elaborated at some length, will
reveal that both readers and characters are, in fact, subject to the fantasies of Glen
Runciter.
Of the most significant features of Ubik’s cold-pac hypodiegesis is that it
regresses to 1939, a time period experienced only by him. Similarly, the “final” villain
is a child who annoyed Runciter the previous day, who only he has personally met,
and the saviour is, alternatingly, Runciter or his wife. The literal centre of this micro-
universe is Runciter’s home town. The means by which the nature of the hypodiegesis
is explained is, again, through interests of Runciter: advertisements, the writing of
which he considers “proof of the marvellous multifacetedness of his mind” (40); and
coins, which he appears to collect (57). Characters which only he has encountered
populate this world, and in forms closer to caricature than reality. Van Vogelsang, for
example, is “remembered” by Joe with dislike in the post-Luna narrative (83), though,
as a technician, Joe is unlikely to have ever encountered him as Runciter does not
visit his wife often (16), and he would also be unlikely to bring Joe along for the trip.
Furthermore, over the course of the hypodiegesis, Van Vogelsang’s politeness is
increasingly exaggerated into whimpering servility. It appears that this is how Glen
Runciter perceived him, especially following his inability to help Ella. In Runciter’s
briefly illustrated hypodiegesis, wherein he believes himself to be alive and
contacting the inertials through cold-pac, Van Vogelsang is described, by the
narrative, as “scuttle[ing] into the consultation lounge, cringing like a medieval
toady,” and as an “eager-to-please creature” (198). No such focalisation-approved
descriptions are seen in the pre-Luna narrative.
Joe, the protagonist of the hypodiegesis, undergoes a somewhat similar
personality change, becoming a near hysterical worshiper of Glen Runciter. When the
narrative is focalised through the pre-Luna Joe, no such veneration is visible – in fact,
one of the few observations Joe makes about Runciter concerns the tastelessness of
his office décor (58). In the hypodiegesis, Joe takes motherly care of Runciter’s body,
describes him as “the most life-loving, full-living man I ever met” (89), refuses a

18
“tranquilizing gum” because “Runciter never took a tranquilizer in his life,” and
nonsensically claims that “[Runciter] give his life to save ours” (90). When Vogelsang
is unable to resuscitate Runciter’s consciousness, Joe bursts out: “They’re only going
to try for fifteen minutes to bring back a man greater than all of us put together” (91).
When Joe finally gets to his apartment, he finds not only that it has regressed in time,
but that it is now decorated with pictures of Glen Runciter (143). The hypodiegesis is,
in fact, completely suffused with Runciter – a legacy, perhaps, of the ego he cultivated
in life. Without the knowledge that the narrative has sunken a diegetic level, Joe’s
outbursts appear as the humorous exaggerations of the bereaved. With the later
knowledge of the nature of the hypodiegesis, however, the humour here is redoubled.
The entire hypodiegesis now appears as a classic ego fantasy in SF trappings: what
will people say about me when I’m dead? Who will come to my funeral? Could my
business possibly survive without me? Will reality survive my absence? Neatly
summarised, it appears that the hypodiegesis either contains but one character from
the primary diegesis, or is, in the manner of Eye in the Sky, a composite reality being
focalised through a single character’s perspective of the world – that character, of
course, being Glen Runciter.
What, however, does this reading of the novel reveal about the primary
diegesis? Essentially, not very much – the primary diegesis remains almost entirely
removed from the reader. The wider fate of the employees of Runciter Associates is,
thus, unknown, and the reader does not exactly know whether the inertials are hooked
up together or if everything is in the mind of Runciter alone. Runciter himself appears
easily confused by the difference between people and the symbols representing them.
When he is told that S. Dole Melipone has fallen of the map, he asks “did you look on
the floor? Behind the map?” (8). This is, perhaps, an early warning as to the
foolishness of mistaking people for their graphic representations. Still, without
knowing how one or some of Runciter Associates became hooked up to cold-pac, we
cannot pin down a concrete narrative. It is quite possible, much like how the
hypodiegesis in Eye in the Sky becomes focalised through different characters, that
the final epilogue is the beginning of Joe Chip’s narrative control, signalled by the
coin bearing his likeness. It is also possible that there are multiple real characters in
the cold-pac hypodiegesis, and that they will simply live through these types of
narrative simulations while waiting to fully die, much like the stranded voyagers of A
Maze of Death (1970). This would seem to fit with Ella’s description of the cold-pac

19
experience. This explanation can also incorporate a reading which sees Ella and Jory
as real parts of the hypodiegesis – here simply playing roles in a simulated
“adventure” like those described by Ella.
When the post-Luna narrative is understood as a fantasy of Glen Runciter’s,
which is perhaps happening to him rather than being controlled by him, then the
various plot-holes which characterise the hypodiegeses make sense. Of course, just
because a reading makes sense does not mean that it is true. It is possible to look
elsewhere in Dick’s works and easily find impossible worlds whose entropic descent
into absurdity appears to be their modus operandi. Critics have not been wrong to
approach Ubik’s world in this manner – even if some stability can be provided to the
hypodiegesis, its radical instability is the dominating aspect of the narrative, even if
only on the level of discourse. This analysis is not, then, being presented as a solution
to Ubik – the novel’s core experience is in its intractability, in forcing such paranoiac
readings from its critics. The great isolation imposed by Ubik’s unnarrated space
makes conspiracy theorists of its readers, forcing us to look for the profound in the
mundane, trapping us in a hermeneutic circle. Since the framing narrative is
unnarrated, it is quite possible to find “proof” for a huge variety of readings. This is,
perhaps, closer to the novel’s truth – not the fact that there may be a way out of the
maze, but the presiding experience of being lost in that maze.
Ultimately, however, a reading wherein the post-Luna narrative is a virtual or
mental reality focalised through the perceptions, memories and personality of Glen
Runciter strikes as the most likely. It is not possible to confirm whether the other
characters are complete figments of Runciter’s imagination – on the same ontological
level, then, as post-Luna Van Vogelsang – or whether their consciousness are here
involved in Runciter’s fantasy and therefore focalised through his “authorial” wishes,
as is the case in Eye in the Sky (in which characters also appear to die, though later
return once the controlling consciousness of the world changes). There is, perhaps,
more evidence to suggest an ontology similar to the latter, or to at least suggest that
Joe has also made it to cold-pac. Not only does Joe appear as a Joe Chip coin in
Runciter’s level of the hypodiegesis, but Runciter also mirrors Joe’s behaviour in the
hypodiegesis, treating him with far greater reverence than he did in the primary
diegesis. For example, when Runciter believes himself to have survived the
explosion, he mourns the loss of his best people, “especially Joe Chip… where am I
going to find a tester like Joe?… I can’t find a tester like Joe, he said to himself. The

20
fact of the matter is that Runciter Associates is finished” (199). This suggests a truly
eternal mise en abyme, wherein Joe is imagining a world wherein Runciter is
imagining a world wherein, …potentially ad infinitum (here, it is the critics that have
a sinking feeling that this is only the beginning). Again, because so much of Ubik’s
space is unnarrated, we are confined to speculating as to the ontological rules and
particulars of the framing diegesis, though it certainly appears as if there is some
contestation over the reins of the narrative, as in Eye in the Sky.

Is there Half-Life After Death?

While there is not enough space to offer a more in-depth analysis of Ubik’s
themes as unveiled by this reading of the hypodiegesis, this article will draw to a
close by outlining a number of interpretive routes that may be differently illuminated
with an understanding of Runciter as its “author”. The eponymous Ubik may certainly
be treated differently when read as a product of Runciter’s mind – as the product,
specifically, of a diegetic “author”. Like all of Dick’s pocket universes, Runciter’s is
fundamentally unstable. Enough is known about the cold-pac technology to explain
this – Runciter, being of advanced age, has a limited amount “protophasonic activity”
remaining; he can only last so long in cold-pac before succumbing to true death. But
in his own narrative he is still alive, and he needs, therefore, a narrative explanation
for his inability to maintain/inhabit a functioning world, which is where Pat Conley,
Sammy Mundo and Jory come in. Ubik, the great defeater of demon children and
universal entropy is, essentially, a plot band-aid, more deus-ex-machina than actual
deus. The world created by Runciter is not, after all, very sophisticated - as pointed
out, continuously, by his characters. When he attempts to send divine messages, he
gets caught pretending to be a video recording on TV. When he attempts to descend
godlike into the hypodiegesis, his theories of its degeneration are immediately proven
wrong and he is expelled from the world: “‘You don’t know the answers,’ Joe realises,
‘That's the problem. You made up answers; you had to invent them to explain your
presence here. All your presences here, your so-called manifestations’” (195).
Ubik is, then, exactly what it appears to be to a sceptical reader: a literal
manifestation of an SF plot bandage, a “phlebotinum” which can resolve the story (if
not the reader’s questions). Described in a stampede of meaningless SF jargon, Ubik

21
is a parody of SF miracle science:

a portable negative ionizer, with a self-contained, high-voltage, low-amp

unit powered by a peak-gain helium battery of 25kv. The negative ions are
given a counterclockwise spin by a radically biased acceleration chamber,
which creates a centripetal tendency to them so that they cohere rather than
dissipate. A negative ion field diminishes the velocity of anti-protophasons
and, under the principle of parity, no longer can unite with protophasons
radiated (…). (Dick 220-221)

Joe is such a sceptical reader. His puzzled reaction to this is to point out to the Ubik
saleswoman that saying “negative ions” is a redundancy: “all ions are negative” (221).
More than anything, this reading of Ubik underlines its exploration of both
mental space and narrative space. The mental space represented by the hypodiegesis
makes little sense when Jory is understood as its projecting personality – nothing of
the world suggests the perspective of a child. When the projected world is understood
as tied to Runciter’s experiences and perception, however, it gains greatly in depth.
Significant new ground is opened up for Marxist analyses, for example, when the
wealthy capitalist is understood as the controlling mind of the hypodiegesis.
Runciter’s fantasy world confirms his suspicions that his workers’ lives revolve
around him: Joe’s hysterical adoration, the general helplessness of his workforce
without him, the stable centre of the Universe being revealed as his birthplace, and so
on. Additionally, treating the hypodiegesis as an internal narrative, whose articulation,
exploration and experience is highly literary in nature, also highlights Dick’s
particular expression of postmodern metafiction. Dick’s exploration of ontological
issues almost always involves a concurrent exploration of literary ontologies. Early in
the hypodiegesis, Joe and the inertials find themselves in a sort of reader’s roundtable,
totting up clues and attempting to make sense of the world they have found
themselves in. When its author later descends himself to make sense of the matter, his
explanations are disproven by his own characters-cum-readers, as if Dick was
predicting how his readers would one day attempt to make sense of Ubik.

Progress in Pandemonium: Tricky Dick and the Critics (Postscript?)

The elephant in the room, waiting patiently to be noticed, is, of course, Philip
K. Dick himself. This manner of academic discussion poses an interesting dilemma

22
for considerations of the ontology of the real text, one which will by no means be
resolved in these pages (if ever). Is the correct reading that which is democratic,
meritocratic, or “authorcratic”? In relation to the latter, though Dick has discussed
Ubik widely in letters and interviews, he has never said anything which necessarily
confirms or contradicts the above reading. This, of course, proves nothing. Arguably,
this article’s reading of Ubik does not necessarily require itself to be Dick’s intended
plot; with such a vast part of the novel left unnarrated, there is a latent invitation to
the reader to make sense of it in their preferred manner. If specificity was the aim,
then endlessly complicated degenerating pseudo-realities would not be the game.
Nevertheless, this article has courted the idea of an intended reading through
juxtaposing Ubik against other texts in Dick’s oeuvre, and through the utilisation of
general knowledge on the author. As an interpretive move, both tactics incorporate
some conception of authorial intention in order to stabilise or navigate the vast,
unknown narrative space which characterises Ubik. This is, of course, unavoidable in
any manner of criticism, though the ideology behind such interpretive techniques
always appears closer to the surface when a reading contradicts established academic
opinion, even when the established opinion, as it has been shown in this article, also
utilises a perception of the author to disambiguate the radically ambiguous. That
being said, the analysis outlined above is, in the writer’s opinion, less dependent on a
specific conception of Dick than those which seek to quarantine the novel’s
complexities through the assumption that they arise from, alternatingly, a character
deficit, looming deadline or similar biographical detail.
Questions as to the author’s intended meaning are less demanding when
arguing in favour of a thematic or ideological reading of a work. In an essay on class
relations in Ubik, for example, it doesn’t quite matter whether Dick intended for the
novel to be read as a criticism of late-stage capitalism. Some verb of a passive or
ventriloquising nature can be assigned: he can be said to be “channelling”, “relaying”,
“lashing out”, or, a constant in Dick criticism, “prophesying”. It should be noted that
the use of such terminology can be troubling, undermining Dick’s intellectual agency,
and characterising him instead as an author whose genius is unwitting or unvarnished.
All such titles and praise tend to bemeant, of course, as compliments; however,
innocently intended or otherwise, one should be aware of the dangers of such
terminology. Prophets, after all, are mouthpieces for an intellect or wisdom that is not
their own, and literary works from the margins of literary culture have a tendency to

23
be so praised, an extension, perhaps, of the colonising nature/culture dichotomy
imposed by conceptions of “high” and “low” culture, of which postmodernism is seen
as belonging to the former, and SF to the latter.
While it is easy to form a significant-seeming constellation when one picks all
the points, and perhaps unfair to do so, it is necessary to here demonstrate the type of
discourse being marked out, which Dick scholars should recognise as a constant
across Dick criticism. Suvin is openly scathing of Dick’s method, and bemoans his
“serious lack of narrative control in Ubik”, and further describing his twists and turns
as “narrative irresponsibility” (“Artifice as Refuge” 19). Lem characterises the author
as lost in the labyrinths of his own worlds, and, in fact, as in need of critical assistance
of he is to escape the label of “mystic” (62). Istvan Csicsery-Ronay describes his
writings as “always on the verge of chaos, with rhythms of thought and prose
unpredictable and unschooled” (vi), and characterises the author himself as an
unwitting or accidental genius: “Dick demonstrated that SF had become able to
express those visions without paying obeisance to philosophy or literature. Somehow,
literature and philosophy came to him” (v). While each writer is also of Dick’s most
admiring, the means by which this admiration is expressed has perhaps absorbed a
suppressed elitism from the then mainstream literary culture.
The constancy by which Dick is so described runs the risk of patronising him
as an author and occluding serious attention. While we, of course, treat an author by
the lessons we have learned in their wider fiction, we should also be aware of the
potential biases and pitfalls established by earlier critical scholarship – biases which
were perhaps unavoidable at a time when mainstream academic culture was so hostile
to genre fiction. We should be particularly careful with patronising language,
however, especially given the endless conversations conducted, at one point, around
Dick’s mental health, and the danger of invoking cultural stereotypes as to the type of
author or thinker that a neuroatypical person can or should be (though I am by no
means directing that criticism at the above quoted academics). Fredric Jameson’s
dubious use of “schizophrenic” to describe narratives of the kind Dick writes is
perhaps a contributing factor to such discussions. Of course, this article’s manner of
characterising Dick is itself a result of no small amount of scholarship on his work
and life. This is not an argument for treating Dick’s narratives as one treats
Nabokov’s, nor a claim for a universal genius across his vast oeuvre. This is simply an
observation of critical norms which may limit the ways in which one can read,

24
analyse and enjoy Dick’s work.

vv

WORKS CITED

Butler, Andrew. Ontology and Ethics in the Writings of Philip K. Dick. 1995.
University of Hull, PhD dissertation. Academia.edu.
https://www.academia.edu/26089088/Ontology_and_Ethics_in_the_Writings_o
f_Philip_K_Dick. Web. 12 June 2018.
Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Istvan. “Pilgrims in Pandemonium: Philip K. Dick and the
Critics.” Ed. R.D. Mullen, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Arthur B. Evans and
Veronica Hollinger. On Philip K. Dick: 40 Articles from Science-Fiction
Studies. Indiana: Terre Haute and Greencastle, 1992. v-xviii.
Dick, Philip K. Eye in the Sky. Boston: Mariner Books, 2012.
---. Flow My Tears The Policeman Said. Boston: Mariner Books, 2012.
---. Martian Time Slip. New York: Ballantine Books, 1964.
---. A Maze of Death. New York: Daw Books, 1983.
---. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Boston: Mariner Books, 2011.
---. Ubik. London: Gollancz, 2004.
Fitting, Peter. “‘Ubik’: The Deconstruction of Bourgeois SF.” Science Fiction Studies
2.1 (1975): 47-54.
Lem, Stanislaw. “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among Charlatans.” Translated by
Robert Abernathy. Science Fiction Studies 2.1 (1975): 54-67.
Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press,
1979.
---. “P.K. Dick’s Opus: Artifice as Refuge and World View (Introductory
Reflections).” Science Fiction Studies, 2.1 (1975): 8-22.
Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Novels of Philip K. Dick. Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research
Press, 1984.

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 Twisted Forest – Thomas Örn Karlsson

Effective Alternatives: How V for Vendetta Provides a Relatable, Presentist

Examination of Propaganda

Peter Kosanovich
University of Regina

Abstract | “Effective Alternatives: How V for Vendetta Provides a Relatable,

Presentist Examination of Propaganda” takes the time to look at the subgenres of
alternate histories and dystopic futures as tools to analyze the effects of propaganda
and counterpropaganda. Using both the graphic novel by Alan Moore and subsequent
film adaptation of V for Vendetta as a case study, the essay articulates that the genres
of alternate history and dystopia are inherently “presentist”, providing criticism of the
era the works were made. Moore wrote his acclaimed graphic novel at the height of
Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime Minister of Great Britain and used it as a
warning for the potential devastating affects her policies could have. The 2005 film
adaptation, directed by James McTeigue, took the same criticisms but placed them in
a more contemporary setting, amended for a Western world following the September
11 terrorist attacks in the United States. The essay spends time discussing types of
propaganda, notably “agitative” and “integrative” propaganda as defined by Garth
Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell. Ultimately, it makes the claim that works like V for
Vendetta are both useful and relatable when addressing issues at a multi-generational
disconnect, such as World War II to now.
Keywords | Propaganda; Moore; allohistorical; dystopia; vendetta.

26
 vv

Resumo | Este ensaio examina os subgéneros de histórias alternativas e futuros

distópicos como ferramentas para analisar os efeitos da propaganda e da
contrapropaganda. Partindo tanto da novela gráfica de Alan Moore, quanto da
adaptação cinematográfica subsequente de V for Vendetta como um caso de estudo,
este texto defende que os géneros de história alternativa e distopia são inerentemente
“presentistas”, criticando a era em que as obras foram criadas. Moore escreveu este
aclamado livro no auge do mandato de Margaret Thatcher como primeira-ministra da
Grã-Bretanha, usando-o como alerta para os possíveis efeitos devastadores que
poderiam resultar da sua acção política. A adaptação para o cinema de 2005, dirigida
por James McTeigue, abraçou as mesmas críticas, mas colocou-as num cenário mais
contemporâneo, adaptando-as a um mundo ocidental posterior aos ataques terroristas
de 11 de Setembro nos Estados Unidos. O ensaio discorre sobre tipos de propaganda,
nomeadamente do tipo “agitative” e “integrative”, tal como definidas por Garth
Jowett e Victoria O’Donnell. Em última análise, afirma-se que obras como o filme V
for Vendetta são tão úteis como relacionáveis quando tratam de questões de
desconexão entre várias gerações, desde a Segunda Guerra Mundial até hoje.
Palavras-Chave | Propaganda; Moore; “allohistory”; distopia; vendetta.

vv

Effectiveness is heralded as one of the most significant aspects of media, and

it holds the same weight in narrative storytelling. If a newspaper article, television
news broadcast, radio broadcast, or any other method of journalism is not successful
in delivering the message effectively, then what is the point? The same can be said for
narrative stories, in whatever medium they are consumed: a book generally, though
not always, needs to have a protagonist the reader can empathize or sympathize with;
if a television program airs episodes out of order, which has been known to happen,
then viewers will find it more difficult to follow the narrative; and films, for the most
part, require at least minimal world-building for the audience to even care about the
setting. Take for example Orson Welles’ live radio broadcast of The War of the
Worlds in 1938, in which his method of conveying the story included not only the
original story written by H. G. Wells, but also intercut the story with live “Breaking
News” bulletins meant to simulate a presence in reality for the story. Though the scale
of panic is disputed, it is not denied that Welles’ method of delivery for the story did

27
have an impact on a certain portion of the populace within the United States at the
time. Unconventional, to say the least, but highly effective.
For these same reasons, it is important for both propaganda and censorship to
be effective when employed on a society; if ineffective, then there is again no point.
Jacques Ellul lays this out explicitly: “Propaganda is made, first of all, because of a
will to action, for the purpose of effectively arming policy and giving irresistible
power to its decisions. Whoever handles this instrument can be concerned solely with
effectiveness…. Ineffective propaganda is no propaganda” (Ellul x). The most glaring
example of this is Adolf Hitler in Nazi Germany, and how his charisma and means of
delivery for his manifesto – not his book, but rather his declarations and general
rhetoric – completely overtook the people of Germany between World Wars I and II.
While it is paramount to study and observe trends like this throughout history – and
history is, after all, the greatest teacher – this may not be the most proficient means of
studying these effects. Once an event has happened, it is easy for many people, years
later, to simply pass it off as a “one-and-done”, or that it will never happen again
because “we have learned from our mistakes”. I make this claim as an American, and
based on personal observations of people believing the Holocaust can never happen
again, while simultaneously ignoring clear evidence of a growing Neo-Nazi/White
Supremacist faction within the United States as recently as 2017; and I support this
with a 2018 Washington Post study that lays claim to the idea that many millennials
are apparently unaware of the full extent of the Holocaust in WWII (Zauzmer). Here I
will assert that alternate histories and dystopian fictions such as V for Vendetta are an
effective, more easily-relatable, and highly receptive method of reviewing moments
and eras of history, while simultaneously warning against similar occurrences in the
future.
In his article “Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’ Reflections on the Function of
Alternate History,” Gavriel Rosenfeld argues “that writers and scholars have long
produced ‘allohistorical narratives’ out of fundamentally presentist motives” (90). By
this, he claims that while the setting of the narrative may occur in the past, future, or
alternative version thereof, the primary function of alternate histories always
represents a criticism of the “present”, when the work was penned; he specifically
makes reference to literature to articulate his point, though the same principles are
applicable to other mediums as well. Rosenfeld acknowledges that, outside of
anthologies and short-stories primarily focusing on time-travel, alternate histories did

28
not come into prominence, nor gain popularity, until the 1960s with the rise of
postmodernism (92). He makes this parallel by observing the primary function of
postmodernism as that of self-critique, almost ironic self-deprecation, allowing for
alternate histories to make a claim for presentism and thus evaluate political and
societal trends around the world.
An example of this criticism of the present is the graphic novel V for Vendetta,
written by Alan Moore and illustrated by David Lloyd, and its 2005 film adaptation.
Often, though not always, alternate histories use the past as a reflection of the present,
as is the case in Amazon’s streaming adaptation of The Man in the High Castle (2015-
). V for Vendetta differentiates itself by using the present as a warning for the future;
since it is set in a totalitarian near-dystopic Great Britain. Moore began his initial run
of V for Vendetta in 1982, still at the height of Margaret Thatcher’s tenure as Prime
Minister, and used this as a warning to all Britons: if the nation were to continue
down the path set by Thatcher, they would undoubtedly become so jaded and passive,
as to ultimately lose the cognizance to realize they had already lost individual
freedoms. This is mirrored by the cinematic iteration of the film, directed by James
McTeigue, who chose to modernize the setting; the graphic novel was written in the
1980s but is set in 1997, while the film was released in 2005 but is set in 2019. This
alteration allows for the examination of trends Moore scrutinized in the 1980s, but
also more contemporary issues set in a post-9/11 world. By approaching these themes
and subject matter this way, V for Vendetta capitalizes on people’s inherent
knowledge and understanding of their own present and offers a stark contrast to
dramatically emphasize the point to be made.
Because V for Vendetta presents itself as a critique of both the present and a
cautioning of the potential future, it retains the ability to more broadly encapsulate
and address the subtleties of propaganda and its effects over time. To do this, V for
Vendetta uses a combination of melodrama and hyper-theatricality to demonstrate
propaganda and counterpropaganda in its totalitarian future. In his book Propaganda:
The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, Jacques Ellul states “In propaganda we find
techniques of psychological influence combined with techniques of organization and
the envelopment of people with the intention of sparking action” (xiii), and
additionally that “Propaganda is a manipulation of psychological symbols having
goals of which the listener is not conscious” (xi). Ellul elaborates that it is common
for a social or economic elite to be in positions of power over propaganda (xvii).

29
Christina Stojanova simplifies this definition as, “the deliberate, systematic attempt to
shape perceptions, manipulate cognitions, and direct behaviour to achieve a response
that furthers the desired intent of the propagandist”. While all of this is observable in
V for Vendetta, Garth Jowett and Victoria O’Donnell provide a breakdown of
propaganda to better enable the ability to identify its multiple forms: agitative
propaganda and integrative propaganda.
Jowett and O’Donnell define agitative propaganda as “attempting to rouse an
audience to certain ends and usually resulting in significant change” (8). More simply,
agitative propaganda is the most visible form that generally catches the attention of a
populace. This form can best be observed during flashbacks in V for Vendetta, that
examine life before and during the rise of the totalitarian state, a time the film and
graphic novel cynically refer to as The Reclamation. Ludmiła Gruszewska Blaim lays
out a three-act structure for the rise of Norsefire, the neo-fascist party that controls the
government in V for Vendetta. In her breakdown of the first act, she describes the
party leader as Hitler-like, and that his plan for seizing power comes “through the
politics of fear” (Blaim 81). V, the story’s central anti-hero, is a survivor of The
Reclamation; having been imprisoned and experimented on by Norsefire, he now
seeks the destruction of the party and every individual involved in his torture. V
supports Blaim as he recounts the conclusion to The Reclamation: “… the end result,
the true genius of the plan was the fear. Fear became the ultimate tool of this
government, and through it, our politician was ultimately appointed to the newly
created position of High Chancellor. The rest, as they say, is history” (V for Vendetta
1:35:14). Blaim cites David Altheide to expand on this concept:

Citizen beliefs often are constructed and then manipulated by those who
seek to benefit. Fear does not just happen; it is socially constructed and
managed by political actors to promote their own goals. The goal of such
manipulators might be money, but more often than not it is political power
and symbolic dominance: getting one’s view of the world accepted opens
the door to many other programs and activities to implement this view.
(Blaim 81)

In the film adaptation this idea is demonstrated through a memory that visually retells
the events of The Reclamation, whilst accompanied by a voice-over narration
courtesy of V. The party leader, High Chancellor Adam Sutler (née Adam Susan in
the graphic novel) – portrayed by the late John Hurt – is shown at rallies, military

30
parades proceeding in front of him, “preaching from the pulpit”, framed by immense
banners that display the party logo emblazoned on the front: a bold and fiery red
crucifix-like symbol plastered on the darkest of black backdrops. His exaggerated
motions and shrill delivery of speeches are redolent of Hitler’s own, set on the
backdrop of a military parade, flanked by flags and banners depicting Third Reich
symbols.
This representation of Sutler reflects him as a visual symbol of power. Placed
on a raised pulpit, he speaks from above everyone else, invoking a God-like quality to
him, that he and his words are more than human. The banners and flags that flank him
evoke an emotional resonance, that he speaks directly for the party, and that the
message is larger than he. This is further emphasized later in the film, every other
time Sutler is shown it is through a massive television screen, directing his inner
circle. He is re-emphasizing his own power to the people who already support him
fully, creating a feeling that he is larger-than-life.
Blaim’s Hitler-like comparison of High Chancellor Adam Sutler is alluded to
and supported by Rosenfeld who, in his chronicling of trends within the genre of
alternate histories, observes a renewed interest in Nazi-related themes and settings
during the 1980s. He notes that in the United States – but also observed in Great
Britain – with the apparent fall of communism and end of the Cold War, the focus of
allohistorical narratives became highly self-congratulatory, shifting away from the
duplicitous Soviet Union in favor of the notorious Nazis (Rosenfeld 95). Beginning its
initial run in 1982, however, V for Vendetta was released during a transition time, not
embracing the “self-congratulation” attitude of the 1980s, but rather reminiscent of
the ‘self-critique’ identifiable from the 1970s. Rosenfeld describes this era:

Thanks to the traumas of the Vietnam war, the upheavals of the Civil
Rights movements, the scandal of Watergate, the onset of economic
recession, and the escalation of cold war tensions between the U.S. and the
Soviet Union, a sense of national decline produced a pessimistic mood that
transformed the function of the alternate histories from one of
triumphalistic self-congratulation to self-critique. (95)

While Rosenfeld’s argument focuses primarily on the United States – he makes the
claim the genre of alternate history was either born or popularized in the United
States, simply due to the nation’s involvement in “events that have left their mark on

31
the world of today and that continue to resonate in the present” (94) – these same
trends function in consort with 1970s and 80s Great Britain.
David Lloyd, artist of the V for Vendetta graphic novel, explains “The whole
philosophy behind the story was partly stimulated because … this was during the
Margaret Thatcher era. It was an ultra-conservative government, which was imposing
quite heavy political rules on everyone” (“Freedom! Forever!: Making V for
Vendetta”). This is further supported by Paul Levitz, former DC Comics President,
who described the British comic writers of the time as “very politicized” (“Freedom!
Forever!: Making V for Vendetta”). These elements of critique are rampant
throughout the graphic novel, as Alan Moore drew every possible comparison
between Margaret Thatcher and Adolf Hitler while he crafted the character of High
Chancellor Susan. This grounded his critique and his grievances in the 1980s,
vocalizing everything Moore felt was wrong with the society of the time.
Eric J. Evans aids in this comparison of Thatcher and Hitler. He broadly
summarizes Thatcherism to include: “individual rights; private enterprise within a
free market; firm, perhaps authoritarian, leadership; low levels of personal taxation;
union- and vested-interest-bashing; [and] simple patriotism” (Evans 3). Matthew
Grimley supports these claims, but additionally makes special mention of the policies
and laws Thatcher attempted to enact on the basis of “morality”. Grimley specifically
identifies Section 28 of the 1988 Local Government Act and certain clauses of the
1988 Education Reform Act. In conjunction, these acts required the teaching of
Christianity in schools, as well as the outright ban of promoting homosexuality in
schools (Grimley 79). These sentiments are replicated and dramatized at the
beginning of the filmic version of V for Vendetta, when television host, and prominent
party member, Lewis Prothero proclaims: “No one escapes Judgement. You think
He’s not up there? … I was there, I saw it all. Immigrants, Muslims, homosexuals,
terrorists. Disease-ridden degenerates. They had to go. Strength through unity. Unity
through faith. I’m a God-fearing Englishman and I’m goddamn proud of it” (V for
Vendetta 3:36)! The detest and resentment verbalized towards homosexuality is
apparent from his delivery of the words; every syllable is emphasized, more-so than
that of the other undesirables mentioned, to give explicit prejudice of the disgust
Prothero reserves for “non-traditional” romantic relationships.
This comparison is further cemented during a flashback – laid-out like a
conspiracy theory – told by V to a pair of police detectives. In his standard

32
theatricality, V does this while in disguise and in front of a national memorial meant
to commemorate the lives of those lost in a terrorist attack. “Our story begins … with
a young, up-and-coming politician. He’s a deeply religious man and a member of the
Conservative party. He’s completely single-minded and has no regard for the political
process” (V for Vendetta 1:32:57). Grimley provides the connection to Thatcher who,
“felt that it was precisely because Britain was becoming more secular that it was
necessary for the government to keep religious values alive” (87). Additionally, this
disregard for the political process is shared, as numerous accounts describe Thatcher
as lacking the subtle capabilities to address international diplomacy. Moore uses this
as a presentist assessment, highly critical of Thatcher’s active policies as a slippery-
slope towards Nazism. He also utilizes these visuals and comparisons to drive home
the representation of agitative propaganda as vehemently virulent, while functioning
to emphasize one specific ideology: non-Christian degenerates and immigrants are
ruining London. McTeigue mirrors this in his modern reinterpretation, repurposing
Moore’s criticisms to include a variety of issues relevant to the world post-9/11,
specifically that of Islamophobia demonstrated around the globe.
Among V for Vendetta’s fictionalized manifestations of the Nazi party, those
shown as a part of Sutler’s inner circle, is the prior-discussed Lewis Prothero, also
known as “The Voice of Fate”. A prominent party member, and most public
propagandist for Norsefire, Prothero loosely equates to Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s
Minister of Propaganda. A well-spoken man who harbors deep-seated prejudices,
Prothero addresses the nation of Britain nightly, spouting hateful, disdainful rhetoric
that makes well-known the stances of the party. He is the party’s mouthpiece. This is
highlighted throughout the film, while additionally connecting Prothero to V’s grand
conspiracy.
Prothero’s tirades, though exaggerated and fervent, represent what Jowett and
O’Donnell refer to as integrative propaganda, “attempting to render an audience
passive, accepting, and nonchallenging (Szanto, 1978)” (Jowett and O’Donnell 8).
They elaborate on this by making claim the goal of integrative propaganda, while not
as flashy or outspoken as agitative propaganda, is to maintain the goals and positions
held by the party or propagandist. Blaim describes this effect in V for Vendetta, the
rendering of an audience nonchallenging, as a delusion of normality. She insists that
the totalitarian regime is “so deceptively intense that some of the citizens become
careless” (Blaim 82). Blaim surmises:

33
 For the life of an average Londoner of 2019 seems relatively normal. Glued
to their TV-screens, the well-fed inhabitants of the fascist England work in
nice looking offices, live in cosy, neat houses and rest in friendly pubs over
their pints of beer. Londoners, who are regularly shown in the chorus-like
scenes, may look apathetic or slightly depressed but not particularly
anxious or terrorized…. Only in the background, one can hear a
threatening, well-modulated male Voice which scolds, urges, and warns
that the moment is critical. (82)

The Voice being that of Lewis Prothero, whose words do not fall on the deaf, nor do
they incite panic, but rather continue to reinforce the established reality the people of
London have grown accustomed to.
Blaim explains that after Norsefire won the election, effectively granting High
Chancellor Sutler unchecked official political control of the country, and after the
undesirables were removed from England, the regime itself all but disappeared. Gone
were those who were labeled the source of all previous problems and those who were
blamed for the apparent despair of the rest of the world; gone with them – mostly –
were the Fingermen, Moore’s reimagining of the Gestapo, whose job was no longer as
openly blatant as removing undesirables from society. With that “problem” nullified,
the need for flashy, extravagant military parades was no more. The party scaled-back
its ostentatious agitative propaganda, but maintained the constant, ever-present, and
largely unnoticed integrative propaganda to sing its praises.
This more muted approach with which Norsefire conducted its business led to
complacency in the people of England; any potential dissent is long gone, causing no
uproar for people to discuss in their everyday lives. Blaim points to a scene at the
beginning of the film, in which Evey Hammond – the heroine who comes to be
associated with V – breaks the nationwide curfew to go on a dinner date with her boss
Gordon Deitrich. This decision by Evey illuminates that she fears the consequences of
skipping a dinner with her boss more than the curfew, warping the perspective of her
priorities under the totalitarian state. The dangers of the party no longer feel
immediate, but instead a relic of the past. It is not until the Fingermen find and
attempt to rape her, before being saved by V, that Evey realizes the extent of her
mistake.
To further this idea, Blaim takes the time to discuss the larger situation in
which Deitrich finds himself. Gordon Deitrich is a closeted gay man – portrayed by

34
Stephen Fry, an openly gay man – and the host and star of a late-night comedy talk-
show. At one point in the film, Evey is staying with him to avoid capture by the
police; after living with V for some time, Evey is considered dangerous and faces an
arrest warrant for terrorism. Deitrich arrives home to show Evey the episode taped for
that night, one he is very proud of, “We threw out the censor-approved script and shot
a new one that I wrote this morning” (V for Vendetta 1:05:19). The new script is a
spoof variety segment to mock the High Chancellor, jokingly insinuating that beneath
the Guy Fawkes1 mask V has become associated with, he is in fact the doppelgänger
of Sutler himself. After the hilarity of the segment, Deitrich is on the phone with
either the show’s producers or network executives – it is not made explicitly clear in
the film – to whom he is defending the segment. He claims it is “the most-watched
show on the air”, and the worst consequence he foresees is a fine (V for Vendetta
1:07:44). Later that night the Fingermen show up to apprehend Deitrich, “black-
bagging” him. This literally and symbolically makes him disappear, erasing the
person Deitrich used to be by covering his head with a black bag when arrested.
When Evey inquires the fate of Deitrich, V explains that if the television segment had
been the worst of it he might have just been arrested or fined, but when the
controversial artwork hidden in his basement revealed his homosexuality and “when
they found a Quran in his house, they had him executed” (V for Vendetta 1:21:54).
Deitrich’s delusion of normality veiled the truth of the party that his comedic mockery
of a segment would open the door for search, seizure, and judgment to be brought
against him. This would suggest that the implementation of integrative propaganda by
the totalitarian state was successful in maintaining a constant barrage of information,
lulling the citizens into such complacency, ultimately dooming Deitrich.
While the consequences are easily observed in the behavior and downfall of
Deitrich, the film also takes the time to establish the media is state controlled. After V
rescues Evey from the Fingermen attempting to rape her at the beginning of the film,
the pair go to a rooftop overlooking the city. They witness, again through V’s
trademark theatricality, the Old Bailey statue of Lady Justice explode in grand
fashion, accompanied by fireworks and a recording of Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture,

1
Guy Fawkes was one of the known conspirators of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, a failed attempt to
assassinate King James I by blowing up the House of Lords on November the Fifth. Though the attack
was planned by Robert Catesby, Guy Fawkes has become the most notorious of the conspirators due to
his discovery with the explosives. Fawkes was put in charge of the explosives due to his previous
military experience. Throughout the film, V dons a stylized mask in his image: stark white, a curled
smile, and iconic black moustache and soul patch.

35
which V conducts through pantomime. The target, Lady Justice, traditionally
symbolizes justice and the fairness of law. To V, however, it represents the failure of
the English government that has bastardized and corrupted the entire legal system,
removing all individual liberties; it also marks V’s personal feelings toward the so-
called “symbol of justice”, that failed him personally.
The news broadcast the next morning makes mention of the explosion of the
Old Bailey, but showcases what Jowett and O’Donnell describe as black propaganda,
that which is “credited to a false source, and it spreads lies, fabrications, and
deceptions” (9). The broadcast states that the Old Bailey had been commissioned to
be demolished for some time, and the demolition crew decided to “give the old girl a
grand, albeit improvised send-off” (V for Vendetta 13:30). When the chief executive
of the BTN – the film’s iteration of the BBC – is questioned about whether or not
people would believe the spin on the Old Bailey demolition, he responds, “Well, why
not? This is the BTN. Our job is to report the news, not fabricate it. That’s the
government’s job” (V for Vendetta 13:17). The irony of this explanation is that this
chief executive, Roger Dascombe, is also the official head of the propaganda for
Norsefire. The scene immediately prior to the news broadcast shows High Chancellor
Sutler discussing the explosion with his inner circle, including Dascombe. When
asked what the media’s approach to the explosion would be, Dascombe conveys,
“We’re calling it an ‘emergency demolition’. We have spin coverage on the network
and throughout the InterLink, and several experts have been lined up to testify against
the Bailey’s structural integrity” (V for Vendetta 11:32). This supports the black
propaganda lie, falsely crediting the “grand” demolition to an actual crew. It also ties
back to what Ellul articulated, that propaganda is often controlled and manipulated by
a social or economic elite.
Both the graphic novel and the film provide broad depictions of propaganda,
and its overall effectiveness being portrayed through a dystopic alternate history.
They also examine various uses of counterpropaganda within this dystopian future.
Jowett and O’Donnell articulate that, as is the case in V for Vendetta, “Where the
media is completely controlled, counterpropaganda can be found underground” (227).
The argument can be made that the media in London 2019 is not completely
controlled, otherwise Deitrich would not have been able to air his controversial
variety show segment to begin with; but precisely because the consequences were so
severe, resulting in his death, it can be determined that the media is fully controlled,

36
and Deitrich’s “outburst” was merely an anomaly. The comedy show itself was a
control mechanism, allowing Deitrich and the audience to believe he was being
divergent. In reality, outside of the one episode, the series as a whole was deemed
acceptable to the boundaries laid out by the media bubble. Jowett and O’Donnell
further their definition:

Underground counterpropaganda may take as many media forms as the

propaganda itself. There are obvious forms of underground propaganda,
such as handbills and graffiti, but other important forms of
counterpropaganda are theater, literature, television, films, and poetry.
(227)

In this regard, Deitrich’s manipulation of his own platform to be used against the state
and the party is an example of counterpropaganda, simply with negative
consequences. Other instances highlighting many of these techniques are shown
throughout the film, met with varying degrees of success.
The most prominent example of such counterpropaganda manifests in the
continuation of the BTN news broadcast scene, when Dascombe approves the spin for
the “emergency demolition” of the Old Bailey. As the scene progresses, V assumes
control of the BTN broadcast tower in an act of terrorism, utilizing the station’s
emergency broadcast frequency to play a pre-recorded message of himself ridiculing
the government and calling to action the disillusioned and careless citizens. The
backdrop of his recording is official but drab, budgeted to resemble the morning
announcement video from a high school. V sits center frame, set against a blood-red
curtain, making use of the same color-scheme branded to represent Norsefire – black
and red. A small “V TV” floats in the bottom right corner, a malicious mockery of the
official BTN network. At the end of his address, V implores the people of London to
join him one year from then, on November the Fifth 2 , in front of the Houses of
Parliament, to make the government remember they serve the people, and not the
other way around. In this way, not only is V spreading his message on a massive
scale, but he is also utilizing the same means of distribution as the government he so
hates; repurposing their own broadcast against them. More significantly, because the

2
V plans to blow up the Houses of Parliament on November the Fifth. His selection of this date is in
homage of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605. The original plot was organized by Robert Catesby as an
attempt to end the persecution of Roman Catholics under the English government. V uses this as a
justification to end similar persecution under the totalitarian regime of Norsefire. He believes the
destruction of this building, as a symbol of law, will awaken the English populace from their passivity.

37
BTN is a state-run media platform, and shown to be the only network the citizens
watch, they have previously had little reason to doubt the information and news being
presented to them. This challenge by V hijacks the system to provide an ironic sense
of validation; if the message is broadcast on official frequencies, it must, to a certain
degree, be true.
Beyond this extended scene in BTN Tower, the film makes mention of other
forms of counterpropaganda, all of which have been incited by V to some capacity. In
the opening scenes of the film, when V rescues Evey, he cuts his anarchic “V” symbol
enclosed in a circle across a street sign that displays the slogan of the party, “Strength
through unity, unity through faith”. Here, he again uses the party’s own symbol
against them, superimposing his declaration on top of theirs. Two short scenes in the
final third of the film show a little girl; she has been shown throughout the film,
always watching the BTN news broadcasts with her parents. The first instance of the
girl shows her graffitiing V’s trademark symbol over a similar party slogan sign; she
is interrupted by Evey before she can finish, leaving the “V” incomplete. The spray-
paint the girl chose to use was red, subverting the same red used by the party. Later in
the film, V has mailed replicas of his infamous Guy Fawkes mask and iconic black
cloak and hat to every Londoner3. The people of London have taken to using these for
numerous purposes, including a short clip that highlights a robbery being conducted
by a man wearing the mask. The little girl wears her mask and black adornments to
continue her graffiti work, this time adding an extra poetic quality to the act by doing
so under the apparent guise, or in veneration of V and his message. She is caught by
the Fingermen, however, and is shot trying to make her escape, causing an uproar in
her neighborhood.
Though the narrative is conveyed to a heightened degree by V’s
overdramatization and ostentatious theatricality, V for Vendetta still manages to
provide a clear and extensive examination of multiple forms of propaganda,
censorship, and counterpropaganda against state-controlled media. By presenting
these themes in this way, Alan Moore and David Lloyd, and subsequently James
McTeigue were able to convey discontent with the moment; they provided a
presentist critique on governments, news media outlets, and disillusioned citizens.

3
V’s infamous Guy Fawkes mask has since become a 21st century symbol of protest and public
demonstration. Notably, the “hacktivist” group Anonymous has adopted it as a preferred method of
hiding the identities of its members. Anonymous is highly anti-establishment, drawing inspiration from
and a kinship to V.

38
This presentist critique grounded the contentions to an identifiable and almost
tangible reality, allowing peoples of the 21st century to see and understand these
concepts in a setting and narrative more immediately adept and applicable to them.
World War II and the historical figures involved it in, such as Adolf Hitler, appear to
have attained an almost mythic status in history books. Stories of the war are so grand
and epic that it almost seems unreal, particularly in 2018. World War II and the
tragedies of the Holocaust now exists in a three-generation removal from the new
present, too far to comprehend on a personal level. Through this strategy of alternate
histories, and dystopian fiction, narratives like V for Vendetta are able to make the
generational leap, bridge the gap of understanding, in a far more relatable manner.

Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Kelsi Murrow and Caroline Emmert for their support and
willingness to help me edit, and Dr. Christina Stojanova for highlighting the gaps in
my initial draft. And I would also like to thank José Wellington Sousa for providing
me with a Portuguese translation of my abstract.

vv

WORKS CITED

Blaim, Ludmiła Gruszewska. “Against the Culture of Fear: Terror and Romance in V
for Vendetta.” Eds. Artur Blaim and Ludmiła Gruszewska Blaim.
Imperfect Worlds and Dystopian Narratives in Contemporary Cinema.
Frankfurt am Main; New York: Peter Lang, 2011. 77-92.
Dick, Philip K. The Man in the High Castle. New York, NY: Mariner Books, 2011.
Ellul, Jacques. Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes. Translated by Konrad
Kellen and Jean Lerner. 1st ed. New York City, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965.
Evans, Eric J. Thatcher and Thatcherism. The Making of the Contemporary World.
London: Routledge, 1997.
Grimley, Matthew. “Thatcherism, Morality and Religion.” Eds. Ben Jackson and
Robert Saunders. Making Thatcher’s Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012. 78-94.

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Jowett, Garth S., and Victoria O’Donnell. Propaganda and Persuasion. 2nd ed.
Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications, 1992.
Kosanovich, Peter. “Midterm: Easy-Accessibility of Propaganda through Young
Justice.” Unpublished. March 14, 2018.
Moore, Alan, and David Lloyd. V for Vendetta. New York City, NY: DC Comics,
1988.
Rosenfeld, Gavriel. “‘Why Do We Ask ‘What If?’” Reflections on the Function of
Alternate History.” History and Theory 41. 4 (2002): 90-103.
www.jstor.org/stable/3590670. doi:10.1111/1468-2303.00222. Web.
March 28, 2018.
Zauzmer, Julie. “Holocaust Study: Two-thirds of Millennials Don’t Know What
Auschwitz Is.” The Washington Post, April 12, 2018.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/acts-of-faith/wp/2018/04/12/two-
thirds-of-millennials-dont-know-what-auschwitz-is-according-to-study-of-
fading-holocaust-knowledge/?noredirect=on&utm_term=.8a97f6ef6392.
Web. April 13 2018.

FILMOGRAPHY

Freedom! Forever!: Making V for Vendetta. United Kingdom, United States,

Germany: Warner Bros., 2005. DVD. Bonus Feature Documentary
attached to V for Vendetta DVD.
The Man in the High Castle. Created by Frank Spotnitz. Based on the novel written
by Philip K. Dick. United States: Amazon Studios, Jan. 15, 2015. Web.
https://www.amazon.com/The-New-
World/dp/B00RSI4WY2/ref=sr_1_2?s=instantvideo&ie=UTF8&qid=154327
2306&sr=1-2&keywords=the+man+in+the+high+castle.
V for Vendetta. Directed by James McTeigue. Produced by The Wachowskis.
Performed by Natalie Portman and Hugo Weaving. United Kingdom, United
States, Germany: Warner Bros., 2005. DVD.

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 Lake of Despair – Thomas Örn Karlsson

Lies for the “Greater Good” – The Story of Horizon Zero Dawn

Jessica Ruth Austin

Anglia Ruskin University

Abstract | Since the advent of mass media, governments and academics have
researched ways to manipulate information received by the general public. Reasons
for this have ranged from propaganda to altruism, and debates have raged as to
whether people have a ‘right’ to the truth and to the ethical implications of lying. This
article investigates the way that lying for supposedly altruistic reasons is used in the
narrative of the video game Horizon Zero Dawn (Guerrilla Games, 2017). Horizon
Zero Dawn is the story of a young girl named Aloy who lives in a post-apocalyptic
world in which humans were decimated by the robots they had created hundreds of
years before. This article analyses the way in which, within the narrative,
governments and corporations implemented their plan to ensure humanity’s survival,
and their justifications to lie to the general public about the lengths this plan would go
to. This article examines how their justification for lying usurped the robots’ claim to
inherit the Earth and the ethics behind it.
Keywords | video games; Horizon Zero Dawn; ethics; posthuman; propaganda;
alternative facts.

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41
Resumo | Desde o advento dos meios de comunicação em massa, os governos e os
académicos têm investigado formas de manipular a informação recebida pelo público
em geral. As razões destas investigações vão desde a propaganda até ao altruísmo, e
os debates continuam sobre se as pessoas terão ou não “direito” à verdade e sobre as
implicações éticas de mentir. Este artigo discorre sobre o modo como se usa a mentira
por razões supostamente altruístas na narrativa do jogo de vídeo Horizon Zero Dawn
(Guerrila Games, 2017). Horizon Zero Dawn é a história de uma jovem rapariga
chamada Aloy, que vive num mundo pós-apocalíptico, no qual os humanos foram
dizimados por robôs que eles próprios criaram centenas de anos antes. Este artigo
analisa a forma como, dentro da narrativa, governos e empresas implementaram o seu
plano para assegurar a sobrevivência da humanidade e as suas justificações para
mentir ao público em geral sobre o ponto a que estes planos chegariam. Este estudo
explora ainda as formas como as suas justificações para mentir usurparam as
reivindicações dos robôs para herdar a Terra, e a ética por detrás dessas mentiras.
Palavras-Chave | videojogos; Horizon Zero Dawn; ética; pós-humano; propaganda;
factos alternativos.

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Introduction

Horizon Zero Dawn (shortened to Horizon, from herein) is a role-playing

video game released in 2017 by Guerrilla Games. The game was critically well
received due to its graphics, storyline and open-world elements, and as of February
2018 has sold over 7 million copies (VGA247.com 2018). The story of Horizon is set
in the 31st Century with gameplay focusing on a young girl named Aloy, a member of
a tribe called the Nora. The world of Horizon is tribalistic with little technology or
modern medicine though we find out very quickly that it was not always this way.
Travelling through the narrative, the player discovers that in the years between 2031-
2066 society had been technologically advanced and robots and automation had been
widespread (horizonzerodawnwikia.com 2018a). The collapse of society was caused
by a set of robots, manufactured by Faro Automated Solutions (FAS), which failed to
respond to protocols, and thus began to serve itself. These robots became known as
the “Faro Plague” and possessed the ability to convert biomatter into fuel, meaning
that they could power themselves indefinitely. They began to strip the whole planet of
its resources and over 15 months caused the extinction of all life on Earth before
going into long term hibernation (Guerrilla Games, 2017).
What is intriguing about this story, which is also the basis for this article, is
that the general public were not aware that the final 15 months of life on Earth were in

42
fact their last. The public were never aware that the governments and carefully
selected scientists knew that the Faro Plague could not be stopped. The government
were in fact planning for a re-introduction of humanity hundreds of years later rather
than saving those currently alive. During the game’s main questlines, the player
discovers that Ted Faro (owner of FAS) had created the military robots that would
become the Faro Plague. He created the robots with encryption protocols that could
not be brute-forced and without a back door (a way for the original programmer to
reset any malfunctions). Expert scientist, Elisabet Sobeck, realised that there was no
way to shut the robots down before they extinguished life on Earth and instead
initiated Project Zero Dawn. For Sobeck, all the resources should be mobilized to
create GAIA, a massive computer system which had two major goals. GAIA would
first code-break the Faro Swarm (this would take over 100 years after humans had
gone extinct) and then terraform Earth back to a state where human life (and others)
could be re-introduced (horizondawnwikia.com 2018b). However, to buy time for the
work on GAIA to be completed, a secondary military operation (Operation Enduring
Victory) was implemented. The public were only told that they had to join the
military to hold back the robots until Project Zero Dawn could be “completed”. They
were manipulated into thinking that Project Zero Dawn was many things, including a
super weapon, and that there was indeed a chance for their survival
(horizonzerodawn.wikia.com, 2018c).
This article analyses the way the government and corporations in the game
manipulated the mass media using “alternative facts” to make sure that the public
would not find out that they were going to die. This article looks at the ethical
implications of lying for the “greater good”, which in this instance was pretending
that humanity would survive. In this sense, I will argue that lying in Horizon was
unjustified and stopped people from being able to make their own choices when it
came to how they wanted to die. It will be argued here that lying just to ensure
humanity’s survival was unethical and, in order to do so, I will follow humanist
philosophy and postmodern theories.

Lies and Propaganda in Horizon Zero Dawn

The act of lying and its consequences has been debated by philosophers for
centuries, with some deeming all lying as bad, some viewing white lies or half-truths

43
as acceptable, and others discussing lies for the “greater good”. Emmanuel Kant
argued that lying is always wrong because “a lie always harms another, if not some
other particular man, still it harms mankind generally, for it vitiates the source of the
law itself” (Kant 281). Kant and other pre-modern scholars, such as Aquinas (1485),
often see lying as an absolute. Bauer argued that even broken promises could be
construed as lies in absolutist terms and thus morally wrong:

Any act that is strictly in accordance with one’s inclinations is also a

violation of human autonomy (i.e. The freedom to act in accordance with
the moral law), and for this reason such acts damage the dignity of the
moral agent. (91)

Later scholars, however, argued that life is often more nuanced and having monolithic
virtues is often unworkable, as Langton observes “it is an old dilemma: Having an
ideal you want to live by, and an ideal you want to seek and preserve” (292).
In many scenarios lying can be argued as “justified” by utilitarians in
particular. In the medical profession this has been debated in regards to patient care;
most physicians use a “consequential method of reasoning rather than a principle-
based method, professionals find situations in which telling the truth may not be in the
best interest of those involved” (Everett 333). Psychological studies have investigated
the concept of prosocial lying, whereby the lie is for someone else’s benefit, Lupoli,
Jampol and Oveis (2017) comment on this phenomenon:

Prosocial lying is ethically ambiguous. On the one hand, lying violates the
principle of honestly…. Yet, these lies differ in their intention from selfish
lies, or those which are told to benefit oneself. (1028)

In the medical field, in particular, “alternative facts” in medical trials are not
surrounded by the political rhetoric which could be considered as a form of lying,
prosocial or otherwise. Mascherbauer (2017) notes how some clinical trials use
“alternative facts” when it comes to how treatments work in different trials to test the
results of small data sets. For Mascherbauer, the testing of “alternative facts” in
medicine is not to do with lying, as drugs can have different outcomes in different
circumstances so it is not pushing a political agenda; “These trials were testing
‘alternative facts’, and falsified previously established ‘facts’. So what is wrong about
‘alternative facts’ or the search for them? Nothing, after all” (223). However, in

44
political discourse this is often not the case and it has been argued that “alternative
facts” represented in the media to disseminate certain ideologies to the public are
“framed largely by appeals to emotion that are disconnected from the details of
policy, and by the adherence to talking points that often ignore the facts” (Mann 573).
Studies have shown that when people are asked about their most important
moral value, the most frequent response is honesty (Graham, Meindl, Koleva, Iyer, &
Johnson 2015). As “alternative facts” as argued by Mann from political debates often
ignore facts, it can be construed as dishonesty. This may explain why many dystopian
films such as Soylent Green (Fleischer, 1973), Children of Men (Cuarón, 2006), Blade
Runner (Scott, 1982) all have lies in the central narrative with governments or
powerful corporations being the ones deceiving the public. For Horizon as well, lies
and propaganda are central to the storyline.
Although definitions can vary, many scholars note that a component of
democracy is a well-informed public: “if people are pervasively misinformed, chances
are that societal decisions will be suboptimal’ (Lewandowsky, Ecker & Cook 355).
The first apparent way that FAS (in conjunction with global governments) makes sure
that the public are not well informed in Horizon is by wilfully supressing information
that would be in the public interest; a PR employee at FAS notes that a video of the
Faro Plague swarm converting dolphins into bio-fuel was problematic for them:

Our suppression team has scrubbed it from 43 networks, but it’s still
propagating, so it’s only a matter of time before it goes viral. A prepared
statement feels grossly insufficient. Any suggestions? This one’s a real
stinker. (Guerrilla Games, 2017)

Lewandowsky, Ecker & Cook (2013) have argued that suppression of facts in the
media has led to conspiratorial discourses. This causes an issue in that “the mere
exposure to conspiratorial discourse, even if the conspiratorial claims are dismissed,
makes people less likely to accept official information” (355). Although suppression
of facts could be argued as not lying (in that it is not explicitly said) it can still be
argued as deceitful and can be construed as acting in “bad faith”. Bauer argues that
“acting in bad faith…is equivalent to perfidy, which I have defined as a false
invitation to enter into a condition of mutual trust, intentionally contrived and
communicated by either a lie or another act of duplicit” (78). In this sense, supressing
facts can then be defined as an act of duplicity and therefore a lie.

45
 The second way in which lies propagate in the Horizon narrative is within the
“alternative facts” released to the public. For Street, in discussing the Iraq War,
ideology of reporting can create “alternative facts” in that we don’t see the media as
“covering the war, but as being used to create support for the US government’s
military strategy” (Street 45). In the case of the game, a datapoint by an unknown
soldier produces a good illustration of what Street mentions:

Just Got Back: Just got back. Ho Chi Minh’s gone. Barely got out. Two-
thirds of the brigade didn’t… And then the verts lift off, and we come
under fire not from bots but a Vietnamese battery! CO called it friendly fire
but that’s crap, they were just pissed because we were bugging out and they
couldn’t. Oh my god. And now we’re back in the USA and the CO is
calling it a “qualified success” because we delayed the bots by several days
and time is what Zero Dawn needs. Said we’d have a new mission
tomorrow. Oh my god. (Guerrilla Games, 2017)

These “alternative facts” as presented by Operation Enduring Victory can also be

attributed to Bauer’s perspective on Newman’s theory of aequivocatio, in which
statements put out by the military in Horizon state “some truth while realising that the
hearer will likely draw an illogical or untrue conclusion” (Bauer 139). This is
demonstrated in many datapoints the player can find throughout the game such as a
press release to the public from Ted Faro:

I can promise you, can absolutely assure you, is that I am already devoting
every possible resource towards reaching... a speedy conclusion to this
issue. So when you hear the bad talk about us, against this company, in the
days, maybe weeks to come... just bear in mind that we will get past this...
that a day's coming when none of this will matter. (Guerrilla Games, 2017)

The player knows at this point in the narrative that Faro was aware that the Faro
Plague swarm was unstoppable and would cause an extinction event. However, the
way this press release is framed to the public means that they would come to the
“untrue conclusion” that the swarm will be fixed; that is the reason it will not matter
what people think of FAS and why “a day’s coming when none of this will matter”
(Guerrilla Game, 2017). The interesting part of the Horizon narrative is that the player
knows that these manipulations largely worked; humanity fought the Faro Plague to
the very last man with many still believing that Project Zero Dawn would save them.

46
Still, this creates an interesting ethical issue: should humanity have been kept in the
dark about the fact that they were all going to die?

The Right to Die with the Ones You Love

Now that we have looked at the ways in which the “alternative facts” told
throughout the Horizon narrative were used to manipulate the populous, it is
important to analyse the ethics of these manipulations, namely the “right to the truth”;
whether the lies told were just or whether the world’s population in Horizon had the
“right to the truth” no matter whether Project Zero Dawn worked or not.
Although the previous section of this article identified the manipulation of
facts by the media and government agencies in Horizon as unethical, according to
several different theorists, the “right to the truth” is considered differently to the
ethics of lying in general. This is because for early philosophers the “right to the
truth” was not considered a requirement to whether someone was being lied to. In
medical scenarios, some professionals would argue that “the real issue is not whether
the truth should be told but whether there is a way of telling it responsibly” (Everett
333). For Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant and other absolutists it was not worth considering
whether people had a “right to the truth” and whether that made a lie worse because a
lie was morally wrong no matter what. Kant went to the extreme when it came to the
“Murderer At The Door” example:

If by telling a lie you have prevented murder, you have made yourself
legally responsible for all the consequences; but if you have held rigorously
to the truth, public justice can lay no hand on you, whatever the unforeseen
consequences may be. (Kant 281)

As the quotation above expresses, Kant viewed a lie as morally wrong even if it
meant that someone would be harmed by it. Later philosophers criticised this notion.
For instance, Bauer notes that philosopher Constant criticised Kant and suggested
“that the proper definition of a lie be a falsehood told to someone who has the right to
the truth” (106). Bauer argued that Constant was correct to argue that in the
“Murderer At The Door” example, the murderer does not have the “right to the truth”
because their intentions are morally wrong. Therefore logically it is proper and just to
lie to the murderer about the whereabouts of their would-be victim. Leading on from

47
this logic then for the narrative in Horizon, Operation Enduring Victory knew that
they were sending soldiers to their death and so their intentions could be argued as
morally wrong even if they felt they were lying for the “right” reasons.
Bauer addresses the concerns that a “right to the truth” makes “it possible for
falsehoods to be excused by simply providing a plausible justification based on the
situation.” (106). For Bauer, it is Spinoza who reveals what is the most ethical
approach in terms of the “right to the truth” as he explains:

He resolves the tension between what might appear to be two completing

absolutes: the fundamental inclination to preserves one’s existence, and the
imperative never to act in bad faith. In the end, he shows that the principle of
acting in good faith rather than the principle of self-preservation is most
elemental to human freedom. (88)

This differs from a utilitarian view in which Smart states that:

If it were known to be true, as a question of fact, that measures which caused

misery and death to tens of millions today would result in saving from greater
misery and from death hundreds of millions in the future, and if this were the
only way in which it could be done, then it would be right to cause these
necessary atrocities… One would have to be very sure that future generations
would be saved still greater misery before one embarked on such a tyrannical
programme. (318-319)

As the characters in Horizon know for a fact that humanity will cease to exist in the
following 15 months and there is nothing they can do about it (apart from planning for
humanity to begin again in the next millennia), they could be excused for deploying a
utilitarian viewpoint. Nonetheless, there is always an argument to be made that “we
have a duty to act in an ethically correct way towards existing persons, not a duty to
increase the beneficiaries of our ethical conduct” (Palazzi 1074). Although Elisabet
Sobeck and other scientists believed that Project Zero Dawn would end up working in
the future, there was no guarantee that it would. Consequently, their ethics were being
projected onto future generations who may not have even existed. This example of
lying could be considered a form of prosocial lie, these are lies which are told with the
“intention of benefiting others in some way” (Lupoli, Jampol & Oveis 1026). But end
results can never be guaranteed and “although those who tell prosocial lies have good
intentions, these lies can have harmful effects on others…What complicates matters,
however, is that prosocial lying may not necessarily be the most beneficial action to

48
take when considering targets” interests. (Lupoli, Jampol & Oveis 1028). Within
Horizon, there are datapoints which can be suggested to support the argument that
lying about Project Zero Dawn, and the fact that the war is winnable, does not benefit
the “target’s interest”:

FROM: Roshana Guliyev

TO: Sgt. Guliyev
SUBJECT: Please reply!
STATUS: Rejected
Ames... I don’t even know if you're alive anymore. The mails I get from
you, they say they’re from you, but they don't sound... They sound...
recycled. Phrases put together. And you don’t say anything about the news
I pass on! The containment zone, the re-breathers, the rioting, 1Earth--what
happened in the Dallas Bubble, Ames, that wasn't the robots! They won’t
even give me a straight answer when I demand to know if you're still alive!
They just say if your messages keep coming, then... you’re still...
“operational.” It’s not fair, Ames. It’s not fair that you won’t be with me
when the lights go out. I love you. (Guerrilla Games, 2017)

Within the game, the player can find many instances of similar military propaganda
with the intent of increasing participation and acceptance of military action. This form
of prosocial lying has its benefits for the orchestrators of Operation Enduring Victory
as it kept soldiers in their posts and volunteers coming to fight. This is a tactic in real
life military propaganda with Leslie noting that prosocial lying means that “he is held
to his post by fictitious bonds which he has come to regard as real”. He feels he
‘must’ support his comrade instead of leaving him to face the enemy alone” (163):

Corporal Sarai: …I got the recall alert. Read them up on a turbine, in the
smell of cooking ozone. They covered every angle – better pay, amnesty for
any combine wars you’d fought in, guaranteed citizenship... We should
have thought “OK, what’s the catch?” But what we did think was “I guess
we're better than the bots after all.” Big talk from Herres about pride and
duty – smart guy. He was right. I’d been proud to be a U.S. soldier. I
jumped at the chance to be one again. And look what I landed in. (Guerrilla
Games, 2017)

Soldiers and volunteers for Operation Enduring Victory may have been promised
material goods but were also swayed by nationalist and prosocial propaganda. There
is a more sinister reason why, in Horizon, the “right to the truth” was withheld, and
not just to keep the troops spirits up. Fukuyama has noted that “it has been widely

49
understood among philosophers that the family stands as the major obstacle to the
achievement of social justice. People, as kin selection theory suggests, tend to love
their families and relatives out of proportion to their objective worth” (98). Although
not explicitly stated within the game, it can be assumed that many soldiers in
Operation Enduring Victory would not have participated if not for their wish to save
their families. This is clear for a solider named Grant, for instance:

FROM: Grant Rowe

TO: Mom
SUBJECT: [No subject]
Dear Mom,
I heard some guys jabbering about a breakthrough on the Atlantic today.
Said southern Jersey, Philly, northern Delaware is just... gone, NYC nearly
surrounded. My CO won’t confirm or deny, and since we stopped using
augs I can’t check the feeds, but everyone’s talking about it, and all I know
is, if it’s true, Vineland was right in the middle of it... and that means you
were in the middle of it... in which case I’m writing to a goddamn ghost
like a goddamn fool. Ah, screw this. Screw enduring victory and zero dawn
and everyone and everything else. Honourable service, my ass. I should’ve
stayed home so you didn’t have to die alone.
Grant (Guerrilla Games, 2017)

In a study by Everett et al. (2010) they found that medically “patients prefer
physician to lie to insurance company but do not want to be deceived about their own
care.” (Everett et al. 333). Therefore, this article would argue that the population
would have a “right to the truth” when it comes to their own demise.

Blessed Are the [Robots], for They Will Inherit the Earth

The extinction of humanity narratives that have become popular in recent

years such as I am Legend (Lawrence, 2007), The Road (Hillcoat, 2009), The Walking
Dead (Darabont, 2010) all have something in common: they all push a humanist trope
that humans “deserve” to carry on living. But in the case of Horizon, lying via
“alternative facts” is required to ensure that humanity survives in the distant future via
gestation and cloning. Lying ensures that before the extinction event humanity does
not get autonomy for their final days.
Although there is little academic literature on the ethics of extinction events,
Dietrich argues that it is not if but when humanity goes extinct: “Not only will humans
become extinct eventually, but given how devastating we are to the planet, and how

50
entrenched our behaviour is, an argument can be made that we ought to extinguish
ourselves – and soon” (57). This is an opposed view to what Leslie argues in The End
of The World: The Science and Ethics of Human Extinction, “[if] there existed no
living things, the materialization of a good world of people would itself be a good
development” (291). The problem is that humans are not always good. One of the
main reasons why Dietrich would argue that humanity should become extinct, after
creating robots to take our place, is that:

On the best available theory we possess, four very serious social ills – child
abuse, sexism, rape and racism- are due to our evolutionary heritage… So
let us build a race of machines…which implement only what is good about
humanity, which do not feel any evolutionary tug to commit certain evils,
and which can let the rest of the world live. (61)

In Horizon, we know from information gleaned during quests and in the open-world
gameplay that Horizon society was in the position to create robots that passed the
Turing Test1. They however banned the creation of such robots (called the Turing
Act) after an AI called VAST SILVER gained sentience and “escaped” its
programming. For Littmann, the Turing Test is an incomplete and biased way to
consider whether a being is “alive” or not: “our conclusions as to which things think
and which things don’t shouldn’t be based on a double standard that favors biological
beings like us” (11). This idea is raised in Horizon by those who criticise the Turing
Act: “The time has come to ask the hard questions about what it means to be human
in a post-biological world. Turing and its supporters are on the wrong side of history”
(Guerrilla Games, 2017). It could be argued that the Horizon world is anti-robot in a
way that puts humanity in a hierarchy above other (artificial) lifeforms. From a
posthuman/postmodern account then is it still right to lie to make sure the Faro Plague
swarm is defeated?
This question has been debated in regards to the Terminator (Cameron, 1984)
franchise by Yuen in his essay “What’s so terrible about judgment day?” (2009).
Within the franchise the imperative for humans is to stop Skynet of becoming self-
aware and then starting a nuclear holocaust that kills off most of humanity. Yuen
argues, however, that the fact that Skynet becomes self-aware means that it should

1
According to Britannica Online the Turing Test is an experiment to determine whether a machine can
demonstrate human intelligence or not. The standard set up tests whether the machine can be mistaken
for a human when in conversation with an actual human.

51
have the right to defend itself, “refusing to give Skynet this right would mean that the
rule of self-defense does not apply to all persons, and we would be denying Skynet
respect, violating both formulations of the categorical imperative” (166). Yuen
contends that, from a utilitarian standpoint, it could then be argued that allowing
Skynet to become self-aware (thus causing judgment day), instead of killing the
scientist who creates what will eventually become Skynet, “actually maximizes
interest satisfaction in the long term” (169). This is because if our moral obligation as
a utilitarian is to minimize suffering, and if we consider Skynet as another form of
life, then we should allow it to “win”; there are millions more robots than humans that
will benefit from humanity ceasing to exist. Within Horizon, this point can be argued
as well in that the Faro Plague has shown it has awareness and has begun to serve
itself.
Within the game’s narrative it is argued here that lying to the public just to try
to guarantee a new humanity being created and surviving in the future is unethical as
it stops a post-biological life from having a chance to live. In real-life this is
something that will need far more analysis as we cannot be sure of the when and
where (or indeed the consequences) of human extinction events. Machine ethics is a
developing field for this very reason because as Littman notes, “The computers we
build in the real world are growing more complex every year, so we’ll eventually
have to decide at what point, if any, they become people, with whatever rights and
duties that may entail” (8).

Conclusion

What makes the analysis of “alternative facts” as lies in Horizon important is

that the game narrative raises two ethical points which can be related to real-life
situations, the right to the truth and the ethics of lying to favour human beings over
other species. This article does not take the absolutist stance of viewing lies as always
being wrong. However, the evidence of harm within the game leads to the conclusion
that the lies told to keep humanity in the dark about their impending death make the
lies unethical rather than prosocial or altruistic; when it comes to stopping families
being together when death is inevitable this article argues that they have a right to the
truth.

52
 This paper has also argued that extinction of the human race would have been
an ethical and positive outcome for the robots in Horizon. Anderson (2008) has
argued that people’s understanding of ethics when it comes to robotics is humanist
and therefore flawed (478). Anderson argues that often people will refer to Isaac
Asimov’s “three laws of robotics” when talking about programming ethics into
machines. The three laws are primarily to guarantee the safety of humans, in that a
robot must obey them and not do them any harm, only protecting its own existence if
a human is not injured in the process (477). These laws are problematic for Anderson
in that they make the robot a “slave to human beings” rather than following its own
ethical principles (478). In Horizon then, it can be argued that the Faro Plague is only
instilling the ethics that humans would force upon the robots; that humans are there to
obey and not do the Faro Plague harm, and humans should not preserve their own
existence because the Faro Plague requires them to be turned into bio-fuel.
This study has also argued that within Horizon we are able to debate how lies
have changed the landscape and ethics of the game world. This is in part because we
are able to know the exact consequences of the actions taken in the narrative. Thus,
we have been able to analyse which “alternative facts” were used in game because we
could find datapoints in gameplay which would reveal the truth of the matter. In this
sense, this essay has also shown how the developers of Horizon have used the
language and ideology present in real-life media manipulation. However, a major
problem in dealing with lies and “alternative facts” in modern terms is that philosophy
has not yet caught up with modern technology, as Smart explains: “Could Jeremy
Bentham or Karl Marx (to take two very different political theorists) have foreseen
the atom bomb? Could they have foreseen automation? Can we foresee the
technology of the next century?” (319). For Lewandowsky, Ecker & Cook (2017), an
issue with modern technology is that we have gone into an era of post-truth where
people can pick and choose which “truths” they want to hear. They note that “the
flexibility and fractionation offered by social media has allowed people to choose
their favoured ‘echo chamber’ in which most available information conforms to pre-
existing attitudes and biases” (359).
It is also not entirely unsurprising that the governments in Horizon chose to
take away the right of the citizens to select how they die; in Western countries, such
as the USA and the UK, there has been a growing right-to-die movement, primarily
concerned with hospice patients having the “right to make their own decisions

53
regarding the amount of medical care they want and the circumstances and timing of
their death” (McCormick 119). However, across the globe only Belgium, Columbia,
Luxembourg, Canada and the Netherlands allow for active human euthanasia
(bbc.co.uk 2015). This is despite polls across differing nations suggesting that
residents support people’s right to choose when they die, such as a poll in the USA in
2016 which suggested that more than 84% of people supported the notion of “right to
die” (McCormick 119). Horizon’s narrative is simply perpetuating a real-world
scenario for many people around the globe, the fact that government institutions have
already decided that citizens do not have autonomy over the circumstances of their
death, whether this is theoretically ethical or not.
In conclusion, a study on elderly residents who were told that they were dying
had damaging effects on their psyche with one patient choosing to starve himself to
death before his terminal illness killed him (Meyer 1997). Meyer notes that in cases
where patients are not told their terminal diagnosis, they often live longer than
expected and so the “right to know” can be tricky to deliberate. The narrative of
Horizon however is very clear that all humanity will die by a specific point, there was
no hope for reprieve. The psychological impact on people from knowing the truth
(and whether they would kill themselves before the Faro Plague got to them) would
therefore be inconsequential; there would be no one left to mourn or deal with social
or economic consequences of people being told they were going to die. The
manipulation of the public in Horizon via “alternative facts” ensured that humans
were not given a choice about their last days. This is why it has been argued here that
“alternative facts” in media should be examined in philosophy scholarship as a form
of lying. Therefore, “alternative facts” should be considered differently
philosophically than its less harmful counterpart in the medical institutions where uses
of “alternative facts” are for testing hypotheses rather than manipulation for
ideological pursuits.

vv

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Mascherbauer, Julia. “Facts and alternative facts – basic principles of scientific
work.” Wien Klin Wochenschr 129 (2017): 223–224.
McCormick, Andrew J. “Self-Determination, the Right to Die, and Culture: A
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Meyer, Alan. “The dying resident’s ‘right to know’: suggestions on avoiding
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Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley and Sons Inc., 2009. 161-174

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 FILMOGRAPHY

The Terminator, Dir James Cameron, Perfs. Arnold Schwarzenegger, Michael Biehn,
Orion Pictures, 1984.
Children of Men. Dir. Alfonso Cuarón, Perfs. Clive Owen, Michael Caine, Universal
Studios. 2006.
The Walking Dead. Dev. Frank Darapont. Perfs. Andrew Lincoln, Norman Reedus,
Laurie Holden, AMC Network, 2010.
Soylent Green. Dir. Richard Fleischer, Perfs. Charlton Heston, Leigh Taylor-Young,
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1973.
The Road. Dir. John Hillcoat, Perfs. Viggo Mortsensen, Kodi Smit-McPhee,
Dimension Films. 2009.
I am Legend. Dir. Francis Lawrence, Perfs. Will Smith, Alice Braga. Warner Bros.
Pictures and Roadshow Entertainment. 2007.
Blade Runner. Dir. Ridley Scott, Perfs. Harrison Ford, Rutger Hower, Warner Bros.
1982.

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 Dark Moon – Thomas Örn Karlsson

“What Really Happened Ain’t There”: Sifting the Lies of Settler Colonial
History with Patrick Ness’ Chaos Walking Series

Rebecca Lynne Fullan

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

Abstract | Settler colonial history is built on a foundation of lies, which support and
perpetuate the violence inherent to and constitutive of these societies. Science fiction
written by settlers often glorifies colonialism, but the Chaos Walking series by Patrick
Ness offers a story of another planet in which facing and revealing the lies of colonial
history is essential to stemming the tide of violence flowing from these lies. In these
books, the knowledge, bodies, and voices of women and Indigenous extraterrestrials
become the grounds of memory that can lead to the possibility, though never the
promise, of nonviolence. In this essay, I use Indigenous critical theory, theology, and
colonial history to explore the possibilities and limits of Ness’ work to reveal,
confront, and transform a settler colonial lineage of stories of conquest, concealment,
and deceit.
Keywords | Settler colonialism; Patrick Ness; Chaos Walking; Indigenous theory,
cryptohistory.

58
 vv

Resumo | A história colonial assenta numa fundação de mentiras, que apoiam e

perpetuam a violência que é inerente e constituinte destas sociedades. A ficção
científica escrita por colonizadores frequentemente glorifica o colonialismo, mas a
série Chaos Walking de Patrick Ness apresenta uma história de outro planeta no qual
enfrentar e expor as mentiras da história colonial se revela essencial para parar a onda
de violência que advém dessas mentiras. Nestes livros, o conhecimento, corpos e
vozes de mulheres e de extraterrestres Indígenas tornam-se a base da memória que
pode levar à possibilidade, apesar de nunca à promessa, da não-violência. Neste
ensaio, faço uso de teoria crítica Indígena, da teologia e da história colonial para
explorar as possibilidades e limites do trabalho de Ness para revelar, confrontar e
transformar a nossa linhagem partilhada de histórias coloniais de conquista,
dissimulação e engano.
Palavras-Chave | colonização de povoamento; Patrick Ness; Chaos Walking; teoria
indígena; criptohistória.

vv

Patrick Ness’ young adult science fiction series Chaos Walking consists of
three novels, The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008), The Ask and the Answer (2009),
and Monsters of Men (2010). The series takes place on a planet colonized by humans,
who have killed many of the Indigenous extraterrestrials. The violence of this history
has been obscured as quickly as it has been committed, and all the human colonists
have either been lied to about the history of their communities, or created such lies, or
both. The colonists call this planet “New World”. Imagining a new world has, at least
since 1492, been a project rooted in violent colonial and imperial enterprises, and the
Chaos Walking series features characters who are ceaselessly tangled within settler
colonial and misogynistic violence, while striving, as a narrative whole and in terms
of character choices, to find ends for that violence. Such ends prove frighteningly
elusive, partially due to the historical lies that obscure everything that has happened
on this planet since the arrival of its human colonists.
This context of historical lies points Chaos Walking directly at American
history as played out in the United States and presented to the world. The project of
America is one of genocide and dispossession of Indigenous peoples, in tandem with
concealment and lies about these crimes. In The Transit of Empire: Indigenous
Critiques of Colonialism, Chickasaw literary scholar Jodi A. Byrd writes that “[t]he
story of the new world is horror, the story of America a crime” (xii). Ness’ novels

59
demonstrate how this kind of colonial horror can be simultaneously concealed and
perpetuated by lies about history. Ness is a white settler from the United States,1 and
while science fiction, especially that written by white settlers, has often been used to
justify, glorify, and build up colonial narratives, his books attempt to tell a different
kind of story – a settler science fiction narrative that is attentive to patterns of
oppression and seeks to disrupt those patterns. In this essay, I use Indigenous critical
theory, theology, and colonial history to explore the possibilities and limits of Ness’
work to reveal, confront, and transform a settler colonial lineage of stories of
conquest, concealment, and deceit.
Thomas King, a Cherokee writer of both fiction and non-fiction, asserts in The
Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative, “the truth about stories is that that’s all we
are” (2). In this book, King curves and curls both mythical and autobiographical tales
into recurring and cumulative twists of meaning. King’s enactment and declaration of
how stories work is one entry point into Indigenous literary theory, in which the
power of stories becomes both an explanation for and a counter to the violence of
colonialism. In Chaos Walking, and in the world outside of the books, powerful
stories continue to assert settler colonial power over Indigenous people, and
patriarchal power over women, so thoroughly that the people immersed in these ideas
often do not recognize or admit the foundations of violence that such ideas rest upon
and strengthen. Stories carry power, and those who do not recognize that power (as
well as many who do) will still convey such power in all its violence to others, mouth
to ears, skin to skin. There are other kinds of stories, however, including stories that
expose what is otherwise culturally hidden, along with the processes of concealment
and lies that perpetuate historical violence. These decoded stories may serve as
enacted responses to urgent questions: Once we know that many of the stories we live
inside are lies, once we see that many of the stories we live inside also produce the
violence we live with (or under, or on the run from, or which we inflict), what do we
do? Are stories even possible outside of or in tension with the larger narrative
frameworks that instruct us to know the world?
The feminist theologian Catherine Keller describes “cryptoapocalypse” as a
cosmological orientation that can divest itself of its explicit religiosity, while still
keeping its force in creating people’s relationships with the world around them,

1
Patrick Ness was born in Virginia, but currently lives in England.

60
causing people to anticipate and even facilitate extreme destruction because of stories
of religious apocalypse. People have this relationship and participate in
cryptoapocalyptic destruction even while being unaware of or disbelieving the
premises of a religious apocalypse. Cryptoapocalypse is cyclical and does its work
without being explicitly revealed or known. In this essay, I extend this concept to a
cryptohistory in Chaos Walking, a structure in which violence against Indigenous
people and women is repeated even by people who have no explicit knowledge of the
way this violence has played out in the past and may truly wish to avoid it. The
historian and anthropologist Ann Laura Stoler, describing the same pattern, calls it
“colonial aphasia”, and elaborates, “[t]his capacity to know and not know
simultaneously renders the space between ignorance and ignoring not an etymological
exercise but a concerted political and personal one” (12-13). Similarly, the analysis I
offer of Chaos Walking is meant to be not only a literary examination but to inspire
political and personal reckoning in readers. To watch cryptohistory and colonial
aphasia work, let us go deeper into the world of Chaos Walking.
On the planet where the novels take place, the thoughts of human men and
most other beings are audible to all, but the thoughts of human women remain private.
Human settlers call these thoughts “Noise”. Todd Hewitt, the sole, first-person
narrator of the first book and co-narrator of the others, has been taught that
Prentisstown, where he lives, is the only surviving town on the planet, that all human
women were killed through germ warfare by the Indigenous people of the planet, who
call themselves the Land but are called Spackle by the colonists, and that the Spackle
were all killed in retaliation. Almost none of this is true: instead, the women were
murdered by men of the town because of their telepathic silence, other towns still
exist with living women, and many members of the Land survive, some free, some
enslaved.
In Prentisstown, memory is controlled and secrets are kept despite the Noise
through ritualized narrative and group identity regulated by violent initiation. History
is re-shaped through this control, while, intentionally and unintentionally, characters
repeat the violence that is simultaneously ritualized and disavowed in cultural
memories of the past. All three books function as quests to remember or conceal lost
narratives of the past, and through this often violent struggle, the characters seek to
alter the present and the future, and, especially, to divert them from the repetition of
the destructive past. The Knife of Never Letting Go is narrated only by Todd, The Ask

61
and the Answer alternately by Todd and Viola, a young woman from a new settler
ship who has crash landed on New World, and Monsters of Men alternately by Todd,
Viola, and the Return, a member of the Land who escapes from enslavement by
human settlers. Thus, the narrative structure of the books opens to the voices of
literally and figuratively silenced people through which it is less and less possible for
the lies of cryptohistory to remain either hidden or unchallenged.
In Chaos Walking, the knowledge, bodies, and voices of women and
Indigenous people become the grounds of memory that can lead to the possibility,
though never the promise, of non-violence. The relationship between silence, Noise,
writing, and speech is extremely contested, and these categories do not have clear
boundaries, but intersect messily and frighteningly with gendered and genocidal
violence, enabling, justifying and working against violence in turn. Women and
Indigenous people open spaces for memory of and beyond the very violence that often
kills them. Through this process, some characters find possibilities for less violent
action and relationship in a landscape of historical memory grounded in deliberate lies
and ritualized repetition of violence.
As we meet Todd in The Knife of Never Letting Go, he explains how close he
is to official manhood, as designated by Prentisstown. This transition to manhood is
ambivalent and confusing to Todd: “...it will be a party, I guess, tho I’m starting to get
some strange pictures about it, all dark and too bright at the same time, but
nevertheless I will become a man [...]” (Ness, Knife 4). So, what Todd can see of
manhood is suspect, and the incessant Noise is nonetheless capable of keeping
secrets, leaving him knowing there is something disturbing in the bridge between the
past and the future that his initiation into manhood will represent, but not what that
disturbing thing might be. At the same time, he has no choice, as far as he knows, but
to become a man in the terms offered by his town.
Instead, Todd’s fathers, who adopted him after his mother was murdered,
begin to uncover the lies that undergird Todd’s perception of the world and
conception of manhood. Ben, one of Todd’s adoptive fathers, tells Todd everything
he’s understood of history is untrue, and uses trust as the bridge that might allow
Todd to cross from known lies to the unknown truth: “‘[T]rust me when I say that the
things you know right now, Todd, those things aren’t true’” (Ness, Knife 51). At this
point, Ben reveals to Todd how Prentisstown’s boys ritually become men – by killing
another man – and gives him his mother’s diary and instructions to flee the town

62
against this fate (50). Manhood in Prentisstown is utterly predicated on violence, the
ritualized repetition of the violence against women (and, we will soon learn, against
Indigenous people) that has been hidden and historically rewritten. Memories hidden
beneath the cryptohistory of Prentisstown’s misogynistic and colonial violence can be
accessed through intimate trust that Ben creates in direct opposition to Prentisstown’s
version of manhood. In its place, Ben offers Todd a fleet, hunted, relational, and non-
violent manhood, one Ben has only been able to cultivate as an option in secret
opposition to (and through outward complicity with) the master narrative of lies and
ritualized violent memory that Prentisstown demands.
As Todd flees across the planet, he gains identity as a man who cannot kill.
This identity sets the terms for many of the relationships he has throughout the series,
but it is also false: he murders the first Indigenous person of New World that he ever
sees, and he also participates in tortuous and sometimes lethal forms of state violence.
A desire for goodness and even a narrative of non-violence is not sufficient to
withstand cryptohistories of dehumanization that leave the women and Indigenous
people of New World available for – indeed, required as – targets of the violence of
settler men as men. Soon after fleeing his home, Todd meets and begins traveling
with Viola, a girl who has crash-landed on the planet as part of the vanguard of more
human colonists. When he meets Viola, Todd does not know about his town’s history
of men murdering women, but he finds himself deeply unsettled by Viola’s telepathic
silence, and so he begins participating in the story of what it means to be a man of
Prentisstown responding to a woman without awareness of that story, drawn to desire
violence against Viola in a repetition of his cryptohistory:

‘You’re NOTHING!’ I scream, stepping forward some more. ‘NOTHING!

You’re nothing but EMPTINESS! There’s nothing in you! You’re EMPTY
and NOTHING and we’re gonna die FOR NOTHING!’
[…] I’m so furious, my Noise raging so loud, so red, that I have to raise my
fists to her, I have to hit her, I have to beat her. I have to make her ruddy
silence STOP before it SWALLOWS ME AND THE WHOLE EFFING
WORLD!
I take my fist and punch myself hard in the face. (Ness, Knife 123)

In these moments, Todd experiences an internal call to Prentisstown-style

manhood, feeling the gendered difference of Viola’s voice as a threat not just to him
but to the world – this does not really make sense, of course, but it makes

63
Prentisstown sense, it makes sense in the cryptohistory in which Todd participates
without his conscious knowledge. Todd is only able to not attack Viola by turning the
violence on himself. Todd does not attain the non-violent manhood Ben has tried to
offer him, but, as Viola and Todd grow to trust each other, he experiences this girl in
all her personhood and complexity. Eventually, Todd realizes that, despite her lack of
Noise, Viola is not inaccessible to him: “I search out her face and the language of her
body as she stands here watching me, and I find that I still know who she is, that she’s
still Viola Eade, that silent don’t mean empty, that it never meant empty” (Ness, Knife
444). Viola’s gendered silence in telepathic Noise is unchosen, but her vocal silence
until she decides to trust Todd is deliberate, and it is clear that the onus is on Todd to
learn to understand her as a person, to realize that “silent don’t mean empty” through
their relationship.
When Viola does gain voice, it is a voice she chooses – indeed, she is able to
take on accents and mimic others’ voices with ease, disguising herself as they move
among established human settler populations – and she resists any attempt to be
forced out of silence on others’ terms. Toward the end of the series, Noise is shown to
be a powerfully unifying method of communication among the Land, and Ben learns
to use the language of the Land, and becomes convinced that, if all human settlers
connect with the Land in this way, there will be peace. Viola is suspicious of this
offer:

Ben is certain women do have Noise and that if men can silence theirs, why
shouldn’t women be able to un-silence theirs?
He wonders if I might be willing to give it a try.
I don’t know.
Why can’t we learn to live with how we are? And whatever anybody
chooses is okay by the rest of us? (Ness, Monsters 590)

Viola consistently resists the imperative to voice that Todd lays on her at first,
and Ben at last, and insists upon voice and silence on her own terms and within her
own registers of power. Through this insistence, she may lose a chance for deeper
connection with the Land and with settler men, but she also avoids what may be an
invitation to co-opt or appropriate the language of the Land. There is no simple value
or denigration possible in these books, not of Noise, voice, or silence; instead, these
all exist in profound and ambivalent relational power according to the always-
constrained, always-meaningful choices of the characters. The diary of Todd’s mother

64
is another form of a woman’s voice that is sometimes silent to Todd, but is also the
voice of memory that connects Todd to his ability to survive and to relate in less
violent ways than through Prentisstown’s colonial masculinity. Through most of the
series, Todd cannot access his mother’s narrative, which we presume with him to hold
the truth about the past, because he cannot read. Todd’s illiteracy is due to the
deliberate dismantling of education in Prentisstown. Todd’s mother experiences a
threefold silence, first through her lack of Noise, then in her murder by the men of her
town, and finally through Todd’s politically manufactured illiteracy. Even under this
much constraint, the book that contains her written voice functions to shield Todd
from violence, and influences Todd’s relationships. Todd’s mother’s book protects
him bodily when it takes the impact of a knife that is meant for Todd, sustaining a
wound in Todd’s stead. Todd’s shame at not being able to read makes it a struggle for
him to enter into relationships with those who could read to him; nevertheless, Todd’s
access to the diary is entirely contingent on his relationships with others. During their
flight across the planet’s human settlements, Viola imitates a Prentisstown accent to
start reading the diary to Todd. Viola uses the power of her chosen, malleable voice to
bridge the gap between Todd and his dead mother, but they are interrupted and unable
to get very far in the story. The promise of a true, direct history from a believable
source is never fulfilled by the diary. When Todd does hear the end of the diary, it is
through the aggressively deceitful Noise of Mayor Prentiss, a manipulative tyrant who
consistently lies to Todd, so neither we as readers nor Todd can be sure that what the
Mayor is reading is what Todd’s mother wrote. As Todd realizes this uncertainty and
gets to the inconclusive end of his mother’s narrative, he thinks in frustration, “What
really happened ain’t there”, and yet the necessity to respond to what “really
happened” remains incredibly urgent (Ness, Monsters 407). There is no unmediated
true story, and simultaneously there is no story without great power. At the end of the
series, Viola reads the diary aloud to Todd while he is in a coma-like state, and the
combination of her voice and Todd’s mother’s words has the power to affirm Todd’s
identity and pull him back toward consciousness. Todd, from inside his silence,
experiences Viola’s reading as “that voice saying those words [...] as I’m flying
through these memories and spaces and darknesses […] I will answer –” (Monsters
600-601). For Todd, the voices of his mother and Viola, given on their terms rather
than on the terms of men in power, create an alternative history and a possibility of
relationship with women. When Todd listens to his mother and to Viola, he can look

65
beyond the cryptohistory of Prentisstown that has taught him that women are
dangerously silent enemies to be killed, and these relationships in turn save his life,
both literally and figuratively.
Todd has some access to alternative stories about women and ways of being a
man, especially through knowledge that his mother lived and wrote, but he has not
had access to any alternative stories about the Land, and so he becomes a killer even
as his society labels him one who cannot kill. Todd indeed does not kill humans, and,
in despair over having been unable to kill a human man who attacked him and Viola,
thinks “I’d be a killer, if that’s what it takes. [...] Watch me” (Knife 269). And we do
watch him, as he recognizes a Spackle man fishing at the river, a sort of person he has
never seen before, a being he thought was extinct. Todd immediately attacks the man,
“all I’m thinking and sending forward to him in my red, red Noise are images and
words and feelings, of all I know, all that’s happened to me, all the times I failed to
use that knife, every bit of me screaming – I’ll show you who’s a killer” (Ness, Knife
273). Todd’s murder of the man of the Land is described in exhaustive detail, and,
once he is dead, Todd tries to justify this killing through the larger lies of
Prentisstown history. He explains that Viola does not understand that the Spackle are
all terrible murderers, but Viola disrupts this story: “‘You stupid, fucking
IDIOT!’[…] ‘How many times have you found out that what you’ve been told isn’t
true?’” (Ness, Knife 276). Outside of the language of conquest and its cryptohistories,
which have subsumed Todd, Viola can interpret the fear and innocence of the man of
the Land and show it to Todd, who then sees what had been concealed in the story of
hatred and necessity in his mind: “And (no no no no no) I see the fear that was
coming from his Noise – [...] And I’m a killer – I’m a killer – I’m a killer – (Oh,
please no) I’m a killer” (Ness, Knife 277). In the moment of encounter with the man
of the Land, Todd’s knowledge of history has told him that Spackle are horrors to be
destroyed, and this dovetails with Prentisstown’s cryptohistory of misogynistic
violence, pushing Todd toward a manhood predicated upon the violence that has
created his town. Unable to perceive beyond these stories, Todd attacks and kills the
first Indigenous person he has ever seen. Through Viola’s intervention, however,
Todd is able to understand that killing this man of the Land is murder, though other
humans will not recognize this and will continue to conceptualize him as a man who
cannot kill.

66
 At the beginning of the second novel of the series, The Ask and the Answer,
Todd is imprisoned and put to work by the terrifying leader of Prentisstown, Mayor
Prentiss, who has successfully taken control of most of the human settlements on New
World. In this employment, Todd commits violence against women and members of
Land, including putting numbered ID bands on Spackle and women. These bands
cannot be removed without killing the wearer. Todd justifies his participation in
banding the Spackle by thinking “if I’m not the one who does this, then they’ll just
get someone else who won’t care if it hurts” (Ness, Ask 137). Mayor Prentiss
eventually reveals that these bands were designed to kill the wearers over time, so
that, now, Todd who “cannot kill” has been a participant in many murders (Ness,
Monsters 565). Todd kills in these instances not only because of the lies he has been
told and the cryptohistory he has not been told, but because of the governmental
structures of violence he, as a human man, is pressed into and participates in.
At least one Indigenous extraterrestrial, however, will see both Todd’s
violence and his regret, and this leads him to a deep grudge against Todd. This person
of the Land is working to return from slavery to a culturally grounded selfhood, by
“learn[ing] what the Land calls things” (Ness, Monsters 79). This character is part of
a group of Spackle who were separated from the rest of the Land at the end of the war
that occurred just before Todd’s birth, and subsequently enslaved by the human
settlers in the largest human settlement on the planet. As readers, we encounter him
first as “1017”, his band number, a designation entirely created through violence
inflicted by human settlers. At this point, the enslaved Spackle are being given a
substance in their food which prevents them from having Noise. As Noise is the only
language of the Spackle, this silences them completely. At first, readers see 1017
exclusively through Todd’s perception of their relationship, in which 1017 is
aggressive within his violently subordinated condition, and Todd alternately
scapegoats 1017, once beating him badly, and, at other times desperately works to
save 1017 from death, sometimes at great risk to himself. This horrifying relationship
keeps Todd tenuously connected to an understanding of Spackle personhood, and it
keeps 1017 alive, but 1017 does not experience this as remotely positive, and Todd’s
emotional engagement does not indicate goodness or relational justice.
In Monsters of Men, 1017 begins to narrate his own portion of the book, and
he is called the Return after he returns to a larger, free population of the Land. The
Return does not perceive Todd as a compassionate young man who cannot kill, but

67
instead says “He is worst of all of them [...] Because he knew he was doing wrong
[…] worst is the one who knows better and does nothing” (Ness, Monsters 84). The
Return’s vengeful anger is enhanced by what others perceive as Todd’s extraordinary
goodness, precisely because Todd is able, within his own guilt, to perpetuate great
violence. The Return forcefully contradicts the idea that emotional response makes a
good person. Quite the opposite, he sees Todd’s experience of being haunted by the
wrong he has done to members of the Land as literary scholar Renée L. Bergland sees
the narrative haunting of American literature by Indian ghosts: one way to erase the
necessity of repair, justice, or change through sadness and fear over the violence that
has occurred (Bergland 3). “A twinge of remorse in the act of invading provides no
grounds for celebration unless it prompts the invaders to leave”, writes Waziyatawin
Angela Cavander Wilson, a Wahpetunwan Dakota historian (73). Todd is not going to
leave – in Chaos Walking, the settlers are technologically unable to leave, a narrative
situation that raises a question of what kind of decolonization is possible in the
continued and presumably permanent presence of invaders. Todd’s remorse, like the
remorse of many settler colonists or of colonial societies themselves, may be a tool
that smooths over the edges of cryptohistory, thus allowing it to continue to work,
rather than an experience that is likely to help create a more just present and future.
So, if not through good intentions or remorse, through what avenues do characters in
Chaos Walking find an end to violence?
Some people in Chaos Walking try to find non-violence through deep
communicative connection, but, as we see with Viola’s concern about the invitation to
Noise, a compulsion to share or speak can be as damaging as a compulsion to remain
silent. The narrative ambivalence about whether it is possible or desirable for all
people to share in the Land’s language relates to a deeper tendency of settler colonists
to continually, over time, experience belonging through co-optation and
appropriation, which Byrd refers to as settlers learning to “cathect the space of the
native as their home” (xxxix). I’m interested, then, in connection that occurs between
the Return and Viola precisely because it does not create a positive sense of being one
people or sharing one home, but instead is a mutual recognition of pain that pauses
violence long enough for other options to emerge. The Return’s quest to avenge
himself on Todd leads him to attack Viola when she orchestrates peace talks with the
Land, and is interrupted by his recognition that she, too, is banded, that they have

68
been subject to the same violation. In the moment of the attack, they both recognize
this. Viola expressions her recognition first:

I raise my arm in a hopeless attempt to protect myself—

And—
The blade doesn’t fall […]
The Spackle is staring at […] the band on my arm—
The red, infected, sick-looking band with the number 1391 etched onto it—
And then I see it—
Halfway up his own forearm, as scarred and messy as mine—
A band reading 1017— […]
He’s frozen his swing, the blade in the air, ready to fall but not falling, as
he stares at my arm. (Ness, Monsters 350)

The Return’s recognition immediately follows:

I saw her band.

Saw the pain obvious even in one of the voiceless Clearing.2
[…]
And I remembered the pain of the banding, the pain not only in my arm but
n the way the band encircled my self as well, took what was me and made it
smaller, so that all the Clearing ever saw was the band on my arm, not me,
not my face, not my voice which was also taken—
Taken to make us like the Clearing’s own voiceless ones.
And I could not kill her. (Ness, Monsters 379-380)

Before this moment, Viola experiences the Return only as “1017 – Todd’s
Spackle” (Ness, Monsters 350), and the Return sees Viola only as The Knife’s
beloved “one in particular” (347); they relate only through Todd. In the charged,
intimately violent moment of the Return’s attack on Viola, they both, who have been
silenced and attacked in many ways, recognize their mutual oppression through their
mutual physical pain, the bands as sign and signal of the denial of each other’s
personhood on each other’s bodies. Both Viola and the Return struggle to have voice
and silence on their own terms in the context of murderous oppression and cultural
alienation, yet in this moment, the pain of their bodies communicates. This is not an
idyllic recognition that blossoms into friendship and mutual struggle against
oppression, but a bare minimum recognition that keeps them both alive for another
day. The bare minimum recognition does not depend on how well Viola and the
Return are able to understand each other’s cultures, nor is it a processing of history

2
“The Clearing” is what the Land call the human settlers.

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through remorse and desire, which so often, as we have seen, are close neighbors to
colonial appropriation and aphasia. Instead, it is a body-to-body moment in which the
lies of cryptohistory are exposed through the evidence of each person’s senses, and
this serves to interrupt the violent cycles they are immersed within.
Toward the end of Monsters of Men, the Return mistakes Todd for the Mayor
and attacks him, leaving him in the coma described above, and Viola has to choose
whether to kill the Return or not, as they meet in the guilty suffering of the Return’s
Noise:

1017 is remembering Todd— [...]

When Todd killed the Spackle even when I was screaming for him not to—
And 1017 remembers how Todd suffered for it—
Suffering I see 1017 start feeling in himself—
[…]
And then I realize— […]
If I kill 1017—
And war starts again—
And we’re all killed—
Who will remember Todd? […]
And I drop the weapon. (Ness, Monsters 580-582)

When the Return and Viola meet again, they are still not friends or allies, but
again encounter each other violently, in mutual recognition of pain, guilt, and the
desire for vengeance. Viola’s decision not to kill the Return, like his decision not to
kill her, starts from a recognition of shared pain, but it is not finished there. Instead,
her final decision against killing comes out of a desire for memory to persist in her
body, for herself to carry her pain and her memories of Todd forward, to live in a
haunted future because the alternative is death, lies, and the forgetting of love. It is
still the bare minimum of communication, of relationship, between this human settler
woman and this Indigenous man, not-killing, but it is also the most effective tool
offered in this narrative to start, though definitely not finish, a process in which a
cessation to violence and oppression can be imagined over and against the cycles of
violent cryptohistories.
Here, then, is what I see explored and demonstrated in Chaos Walking: in the
violent maelstrom of the New World, the bare minimum of a non-murderous way of
relating cannot be dismissed and is sometimes all that we have. It is not the only
option played out in these books, but I find it the most trustworthy in considering

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what is possible for settler science fiction attending to Indigenous realities to offer,
what it can create in opposition to colonial violence that is not just a form of
emotionally imagined connection. Settler stories created the colonial aphasia and
violence that has been rehearsed so often in science fiction tales of new planets;
therefore an attentive settler science fiction addressing that violence directly can bring
the story around to the bare minimum Viola and the Return reach in Chaos Walking,
and it is a useful feat of imagination to do so.
Cryptohistories and lies will reproduce their violence by means of the choices
of emotionally responsive, well-intentioned people who do not explicitly desire
violence. Even the bare minimum of not-killing is impossible without a story shift,
remembering and revealing cryptohistories whose lies cannot persist unchallenged in
the presence of the chosen voices and knowledge of people who have been
systematically violated. We, too, outside the books, cannot create stories apart from
the lies that form the foundation of our official histories, nor from the violence that
undergirds the cryptohistories we all carry, but we can create stories that respond to
those lies. Emotional responsiveness and guilt do nothing to change violence and may
even make it easier for the violence of cryptohistories to be repeated, but a shared
recognition of pain, through memory carried in the body, can disrupt the violence and
undercut the lies, which, without alternative stories, will persist and renew
themselves.

vv

WORKS CITED

Bergland, Renée L. The National Uncanny: Indian Ghosts and American Subjects.
Hanover and London: Dartmouth College, University Press of New England,
2000.
Byrd, Jodi A. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011.
Four Arrows. “Introduction.” Unlearning the Language of Conquest: Scholars
Expose Anti-Indianism in America. Ed. Wahinkpe Topa (Four Arrows) aka
Don Trent Jacobs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 18-21.

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Keller, Catherine. Apocalypse Now and Then: A Feminist Guide to the End of the
World. Boston: Beacon Press, 1996.
King, Thomas. The Truth About Stories: A Native Narrative. Minneapolis: University
of Minnesota Press, 2005.
Ness, Patrick. The Ask and the Answer. Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2009.
---. The Knife of Never Letting Go. Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2008.
---. Monsters of Men. Somerville: Candlewick Press, 2010.
Stoler, Ann Laura. Duress: Imperial Durabilities in Our Times. Durham: Duke
University Press, 2016.
Waziyatawin, Angela Cavender Wilson. “Burning Down the House: Laura Ingalls
Wilder and American Colonialism.” Unlearning the Language of Conquest:
Scholars Expose Anti-Indianism in America. Ed. Wahinkpe Topa (Four
Arrows) aka Don Trent Jacobs. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 66-
81.

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 Behind Bars – Thomas Örn Karlsson

“Do Time Now, Buy Time for Future”: Phallic Deception and Techno-
Sexual Agency in Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last

Rano Ringo
Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar

Jasmine Sharma
Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar

Abstract | This article investigates the politics of deception in Margaret Atwood’s

novel The Heart Goes Last (2015). It critiques techno-science from a feminist
viewpoint. The two main female characters of the novel, Jocelyn and Charmaine,
dismantle the technocratic scandal and expose the underlying reality of the situation
in which they find themselves. They pose a threat to the phallic dominance,
orchestrated and practiced by those in power. The article discusses the manipulation
of technology and its effects on the central women characters. It unravels the latent
forces of resistance in Atwood’s dystopia and unmasks the politics of pretentiousness
within its speculative structure. This feminist reading is buttressed by the works of
Science and Technology theorists like Donna Haraway and Sandra Harding and
theorists on “nomad feminism” like Rosi Braidotti. Philosophies of Michel Foucault,

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Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari enlighten the argument with critical insights on the
discourses of power and hegemony within technocracy.
Keywords | Science Fiction; feminist; techno-science; technology; deception.

vv

Resumo | Este texto examina as políticas enganadoras no romance de Margaret

Atwood The Heart Goes Last (2015). O texto faz uma crítica à tecno-ciência a partir
de um ponto de vista feminista, através das duas personagens femininas do romance,
Jocelyn e Charmine, que desmontam o escândalo tecnocrático e expõem a realidade
da situação em que se encontram. Elas representam uma ameaça ao domínio fálico
posto em prática por aqueles que estão no poder. O texto explora a manipulação da
tecnologia e os seus efeitos nestas personagens. Desvenda também as latentes forças
da resistência na distopia de Atwood e revela as políticas da pretensão dentro da sua
estrutura especulativa. Esta leitura feminista é apoiada por trabalhos de teóricos como
Donna Haraway e Sandra Harding, e teóricos que trabalham sobre “feminismo
nómada”, como Rosi Braidotti. Para além destes, este estudo baseia-se ainda em
filósofos como Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze e Felix Guattari, em especial no que
diz respeito aos discursos de poder no contexto da tecnocracia.
Palavras-Chave | Ficção Científica; feminismo; tecno-ciência; tecnologia; engano.

vv

Sci-fi or Speculative Fiction? Discursive Positioning of The Heart Goes Last

“…Margaret Atwood, for example: Here is a woman so terrified of science fiction cooties that she will
happily redefine the entire genre for no other reason than to exclude herself from it.”
(Margaret Atwood and the Hierarchy of Contempt by Peter Watts)

The link between Science Fiction and Atwood’s selected writings is

debatable. Atwood is reluctant to use the term science fiction for her selected novels.
Instead, she uses the term speculative fiction to define her recent dystopias. By
speculative, the author means fiction characterizing “human society and its possible
future forms, which are either much better than what we have now or much worse”
(Atwood, IOW 115). In one of her interviews, Atwood makes the distinction between
the two genres more prominent by saying, “when people think ‘science fiction’, they
usually think of Star Trek, or they think Star Wars, as they think War of the Worlds”
(WA 259). She labels her writings as speculative as “there is nothing in it that we can’t
do. The location is Earth. The characters are us” (WA 259). Ursula Le Guin critiques
Atwood’s terminological distinction between science and speculative fiction. She
notes:

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 …Margaret Atwood doesn’t want any of her books to be called science
fiction. In her recent, brilliant essay collection, Moving Targets, she says
that everything that happens in her novels is possible and may even have
already happened, so they can’t be science fiction, which is, “fiction in
which things happen that are not possible today.” This arbitrarily restrictive
definition seems designed to protect her novels from being relegated to a
genre still shunned by hideous readers, reviewers and prize-awarders. She
doesn’t want the literary bigots to shove her into the literary ghetto. (qtd. in
Atwood 5-6)

Le Guin’s comment targets Atwood and her understanding of science and

speculative fiction. Lucie Armitt writes:

Good science fiction (whether based on technological or a socio-political

foundation) places a great emphasis upon the intrinsic link between
perceived reality and the depiction of futurist and alien societies. Thus
whatever the approach and whatever the gender, the depiction of an
alternative reality is only the first step of an essential reassessment on the
part of both the author and the reader, making strange what we commonly
perceive to be around us, primarily in order that we might focus upon the
existing reality afresh, and as outsiders. (Armitt 9)

According to Armitt’s definition, science fiction envisions a possible future

that might occur if the activities of the present remain unchecked. Atwood’s fiction
depicts alternate futures carrying the unpleasant realities of the present. Her novel The
Heart Goes Last (2015) exemplifies a tendency towards ustopia and canvasses a
world of calculated deceptions. It showcases the current reality as extremely
horrifying and depressive. By the term ustopia, the author suggests an “imagined
perfect society and its opposite-because…each contains a latent version of the other”
(Atwood, IOW 52). It means that our imperfect world, in due course of time, will
transform into a power seeking hegemony before restoring its lost balance. The novel
landscapes this idea within a science fiction framework. This article details corporate
treachery and its dissolution in the subsequent section.
The novel encapsulates an economic depression rendering the individuals’
lives in danger. Embodying a dystopian impulse, it demonstrates a technological crash
leading to unemployment, homelessness and monetary deflation. These dystopian
characteristics challenge the hard core definitions of science fiction that is “science
fiction is all about science. It is a sole literary form that examines the ways in which

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science penetrates, alters and transforms the themes, forms and worldview of fiction”
(Slusser 28). However, there are contrastive viewpoints regarding this. In the words of
Gwyneth Jones, “SF doesn’t have to be about rockets and intergalactic wars and
defending the earth and all those boyish pursuits. Oh no. SF can be about things that
are true and beautiful and womanly like sociology and town planning” (qtd. in Lefanu
179). Margaret Atwood’s The Heart Goes Last epitomizes the latter. Going by this
definition, it is a soft science fiction work describing the breakdown of human values
and the rise of a ruthless technocratic regime.
To avoid falling prey to the amusing madcap reflected through Jones’
statement, one should focus on the deeper meaning of her argument and try to
interpret the underlying politics of science fiction. It seems that Jones has something
modest to comment on the genre, something that could add a critical insight to the
ongoing argument. The novel also evidences a feminist futurity at the heart of its
narrative. It means that as the story advances, one could perceive the role and
significance of the female characters destabilizing the technocratic patriarchal order.
As a feminist science fiction novel, it “presents the blueprints for the social structures
that allow women’s words to counter patriarchal myths” (Barr 7). This refers to the
cross-deceptive maneuvers practiced by them in order to transgress the sexual techno-
politics of the phallic power.

Alternative Facts and Feigned Truths in The Heart Goes Last

Envisaging an acute economic depression in the U.S., the novel begins with a
young couple, Stan and Charmaine, struggling for survival. Unemployed and
homeless, they are enforced to stay afloat in their old Honda surrounded by roving
thugs. Their food stock is about to end when one day Charmaine comes across the
Positron Project in the town of Consilience. Positron is a capitalistic and a utilitarian
endeavor that offers atypical enticements to the economically weaker section of the
society. Orchestrated by opulent industrialists, it deploys sentimental tactics to lure
distressed individuals and cajoles them into join their mercenary business. On its first
announcement, the Project promises to restore the wasted lives of many of its
country’s citizens, a lucrative opportunity to alter the desperate situation that
Charmaine and Stan reluctantly face. It manifests the hopes and fears of financially

76
challenged individuals and unmasks their desire to climb high on the economic
ladder. It beguiles people stricken with pecuniary crisis and defrauds them
emotionally with false assurances.
Headed by Ed, the Project claims to provide a clean house and regular
employment to its members for the first six months. For the remaining six months, the
residents must be shifted to the Positron prison and serve as inmates in the prison cell.
Once their tenure of service in the prison is completed, they are supposed to be
transferred back to their civilian homes. Despite the unusualness of the Project, the
idea of part-time residency and comfortable life quickly lures Charmaine. Eventually,
the couple agrees to sign a contract with the Corporate offering this temptation
unaware of the consequences it might cause in future.
Taking this into account, this article also focuses its attention on the politics
of institutional manipulation in Atwood’s dystopia. It speculates how multinational
corporations, to accomplish their avarice, entice helpless individuals and deceive their
aspiration of better life. However, the hegemony of these firms is by no means static.
It can be challenged by latent forces carrying the potential to overturn their deceptive
maneuvers. Michel Foucault in The History of Sexuality (Volume 1) wrote that
“where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this
resistance, is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power…” (Foucault 95-
96). In the novel, Jocelyn and her teammates belong to this resistance group. Jocelyn
plays a crucial role in Atwood’s dystopia. One of the central characters and the chief
executive of the Project, she is positioned next to Ed in power and authority.
However, she conspires against the Projects’ duplicity and threatens its unity from
within. The novel revolves around her well planned and skillfully executed
maneuvers and details a feminist appropriation of techno-science, which is often
regarded as a phallic enterprise.
In due course, Positron turns out to be a technology of surveillance. To
understand Positron as a technology of surveillance, one must comprehend the
philosophical dimension of this technological system. Philosopher Jeremy Bentham
suggested a new architectural model for circular buildings in the West. He named this
model “Panopticon”. It was primarily applied to prison houses where each prisoner
was to be kept in a separate cell and his labor was meant to be made productive and
useful. Later, Michel Foucault extended this to the notion of disciplinary power and

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observed how it elicits instructed action and shapes human behavior. In his popular
work, Discipline and Punishment, he describes Panopticon as:

[an] enclosed, segmented space, observed at every point, in which the

individuals are inserted in a fixed place, in which the slightest movements
are supervised, in which all events are recorded…in which power is
exercised without division according to a continuous hierarchal figure, in
which each individual is constantly located, examined and distributed
among the living beings, the sick and the dead-all this institutes a compact
model of disciplinary mechanism. (Foucault 197)

Stan, Charmaine and other inmates are inserted in the Panopticon space during
their stay in Consilience. The Panopticon system monitors individual actions of the
inmates. Working as the third eye, it induces discipline and offers cognitive
knowledge to the members working within its framework. This cognitive knowledge
refers to the fact of being observed by hidden cameras controlled by the executive
supervisors of the Project. The article canvasses a feminist appropriation of the
Panopticon as opposed to its andocentric operating principles. Jocelyn’s presence is
fundamental to the decisive plot as she exercises authority over the phallic Panopticon
and modulates its latent dynamics with her knowledge. The next section maps
Jocelyn’s character and her unique relation with techno-science.

Women and Technology in The Heart Goes Last

(i). Jocelyn: Resisting Technocracy and Redefining Technology

Jocelyn features as the right-hand person to Ed, the Manager of the Positron
Project. Stan’s inceptive remarks on her are quite notable. The narrative voice
portrays her physicality and position as:

There is a woman with him (Ed), also in a dark suit, with straight black hair
and bangs and a squarish jaw; no makeup, but she does have earrings. Her
legs are good though muscular. She sits to the side, fooling with her
cellphone. Is she an assistant? It isn’t clear. Stan pegs her as butch.
Technically, she shouldn’t have been here, in the men’s sessions, and Stan
wonders why she is. (Atwood, THGL 38)

However, there is much more to her than this. Unlike her allotted function to
ensure the success of the Project, she works towards its failure. She is well aware of

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the entire sham and decides to protect the inmates from its fatality. Stan’s egotism and
masculine pride makes him uncomfortable in Jocelyn’s hierarchical presence. His
discomfort increases while she overpowers him by her smartness. Technology plays
an important role in drawing her character sketch. As previously discussed, Foucault’s
idea of disciplinary power is actually a masculine technology that regulates the
subjected individuals. Jocelyn subverts this technology of power through
manipulating the authority that controls it. In fact, her act of using a cell phone
embarrasses Stan as she inverses the order of technological utility. The cell phone
beneath her fingers signifies a facile consumption of technology and underlines her
distinct link with techno-science per se. As opposed to it, Stan feels humiliated due to
his inability to use a cell phone while serving as a member of the Positron Project. In
this regard, it is important to develop an in-depth understanding of gender within the
technological apparatus. The following paragraphs explore this theory through
different examples.
Undoubtedly, science and technology is predominated by men. Sandra
Harding notes: “western philosophies of science…have identified how modern ideals
of scientific rationality, objectivity and good method are shaped by familiar
stereotypes of manliness” (Harding 85). Arguing for an egalitarian technology thesis,
Wendy Faulkner writes:

The wider links between gender and technology, in structures, symbols,

identities have long been acknowledged by feminists. Because both modern
technology and hegemonic masculinity are historically associated with
industrial capitalism, they are linked symbolically by themes of control and
domination. (Faulkner 82)

In the novel, Ed is the mastermind behind the Positron Project. Jocelyn

subverts its phallic authority by maintaining her feminist presence within the system.
She has secret access to all the confidential stuff and can decipher any code within the
Positron. She amusingly invites Stan to “listen in on Max and Jasmine (Charmaine),
during their little vacant-house rendezvous [as she has] got the recordings, the
surveillance videos” (Atwood, THGL 129). Thus, Jocelyn emerges as a strong female
character and is able to control Stan’s momentary actions. She perpetuates a user-
friendly interaction with the technological interface and handles everything with
extreme care. John Seltin’s observation that “technology is invented by and invents

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the human [and] the two cannot be dissociated because they exist in a transductive
relationship, operating along an axis of supplementary logic” (Seltin 49) finds distinct
relevance in this article. Jocelyn undermines the stereotypical gender-technology
equation and asserts her feminist engagement. She attempts so through the active
appropriation of the Project. To validate her relationship with technology, this study
will use some philosophical and posthumanist theories within a feminist context and
observe how Jocelyn configures her individual stance within it.
The question of feminist epistemology and situated knowledge is pivotal to
the novel. Critic Heidi Grasswick in her essay “Feminist Epistemology and
Philosophy of Science-Power in Knowledge” interprets situated knowing as
“explaining how people in marginalized positions might have better insights based on
their social location that could be fostered to attain knowledge” (Grasswick xv). This
idea positions Jocelyn in the gender minority whose standpoint modifies the phallic
technocracy of Ed. Jocelyn’s marginalization is figured by her essentialist gender role.
Being a woman, she is not supposed to practice authority over the techno-scientific
knowledge. However this female subjection, according to Grasswick, could be
transformed into a powerful feminist standpoint and thus becomes a product of
feminist epistemological creation.
This argument bears exemplar reflection when Jocelyn demonstrates
Charmaine’s clandestine affair to Stan. This demonstration is attempted through a
techno-visual interface that is a television screen. Therefore, similar to the case of cell
phone, the television as technology strengthens her link to techno-science. Through
the audio-visual technology, Jocelyn exercises power over Stan’s thoughts and
reverses the gender subjugation process further. Adding more to this, this instance
could also be read through Haraway’s theory of modern visualization. Rosi Braidotti
elaborates Haraway’s assertion in the following words:

Arguing that modern visualization techniques shatter one dimensional

seeing or passive mirror function, Haraway suggests that we learn to see in
compound, multiple ways in “partial perspectives”- she names this process
“passionate detachment”- like the eye of a travelling lens”. (Braidotti 73)

It means that the activity of watching becomes a multi-dimensional

experience, a sub-structure of situated knowledge that conveys a feminist way of
looking at the screen. Jocelyn actively participates in this activity and ensures its

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everlasting effects on Stan. It is important to further elaborate on the dialogue
between Jocelyn and the techno-scientific network through Haraway’s theory of
cyborg and Bradotti’s theory of nomad feminism.
Donna Haraway in her famous essay “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,
Technology and Socialist Feminism in the late Twentieth Century” defines cyborg as
a “hybrid between machine and organism…a creature of the post-gender world”
(Haraway 291). She considers “gender as a verb, not a noun [that is] about the
production of subjects in relation to other subjects, and in relation to artifacts. Gender
is about material-semiotic production of these assemblages that are people…” (qtd. in
Ferrando 57). Jocelyn’s relation with technology: the television and the cell phones to
communicate, the high power surveillance cameras, the codes to the various systems
installed within the city, makes her a cyborg figure. In the present context, one must
understand the cyborg as a newly emerging class of women with fractured, shifting
and unstable identities. Their endeavor to be a part of the great information network
and embrace the growing techno-scientific interface aligns them with the post-world
scenario.
Jocelyn’s cyborgian self does not imply a prosthetic extension of her human
body. Instead, her interaction with technology supports her cyborgian dimension and
empowers her beyond the stereotypical world of phallic dualism. Her character
escapes rigidity of subject position and resists objectification of her sexuality. Also,
the figure of the cyborg is a metaphor of discursive formation in addition to a symbol
of technological progress. It questions the western human subjectivity and critiques
the patriarchal discourse that engenders the female as subordinate to men. The
cyborgian figure suggests the limitation of humanist definition to explain the
posthuman. It is because the posthuman need not mean to be non-human or
antihuman but it captures the tendency of being outside the ambit of the stereotypical
definition of humanism.
Apart from the cyborg, Jocelyn’s personality captures what Rosi Braidotti
calls “Nomadism” or “Nomadic Feminism”. Bradotti’s theory is grounded within a
technofeminist framework. She defines the Nomad as her “figure of a situated,
postmodern, culturally differentiated understanding of the subject in general and of a
feminist subject in particular” (Braidotti 4). The nomadic subject too, like Haraway’s
cyborg, denounces fixity of position and exists in a continuous process of subjective
becoming. In its relation to technology, the theorist goes on to write: “Nomad [is an]

81
artifact, a technological compound of the human and the posthuman…a cyborg…she
is abstract and perfectly, operationally real” (Braidotti 35). The subject occupies an
ambivalent place within the technological matrix: an in-between position that situates
her both within and outside the system of power.
Jocelyn’s character reflects this aptitude providing her with an extraordinary
life force. She functions at the threshold of internal and external forces, a completely
nomadic space allowing her to exert masculine hegemony camouflaged within her
female body. Her proficiency with the artifact culture, in spite of being a woman,
makes her dominate the technocratic scene and belittles Stan during her presence. Her
commendable spirit to voice against Ed’s treacherous business projects her immense
confidence. She transgresses the patriarchal ideology but still maintains decent
behavior in case of sensitive counter-tracking. In this way, her manipulation of the
techno-scientific world ensures success in the near future. This success is achieved in
the form of freeing Stan, Charmaine and other innocent inmates from the deceptive
maneuvers of the Positron Project. The next sub-section discusses Charmaine
character and how she challenges the capitalist technocracy of the Project.

(ii). Charmaine: Technological Ambiguity and Techno-pyretic Realization

This section analyzes Charmaine’s position as a woman in the Positron

Project. Unlike Jocelyn, Charmaine’s presence in the techno-scientific world of the
town of Consilience is rather ambiguous. The duplicitous promise of clean laundry
and a roof to rely upon lures her into agreeing to part time incarceration.
Nevertheless, she becomes a technological subject the moment she enters the
hegemonic empire. The following section deals with the way technology subjects
Charmaine into subservience in the beginning and emancipates her at the end.
Charmaine’s technological subjection begins after she enters the Positron
Project. “Technology is often associated with masculinity”, writes Deborah Johnson.
She continues by stating that “Technology is thought to be masculine-the domain of
the male, while women are thought to be often inept with technology, ignorant and
unskilled with regard to how artifacts work and simply less interested in it” (Johnson
2). In the novel, Charmaine challenges this notion of uninterested and technically
unskilled woman. Unlike Johnson’s woman who is incompetent with the technical
artifacts she handles, Charmaine exactly knows how to inject the poisonous syringe

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into the flesh of those who are an internal threat to the Project. Here, the injection
becomes a techno-social artifact used by Charmaine to supposedly kill men. However,
the word “supposedly” problematizes the situation as Charmaine acts under the
instructive guidance of Ed’s authority. Thus, though the injection held beneath her
fingers is an artifact of power, it loses its technological essence, as the hegemony
providing meaning to it is inevitably phallic.
At this stage, it will be interesting to apply postmodern philosophies of
Deleuze and Guattari to Charmaine’s activities in Consilience. Gilles Deleuze and
Felix Guattari in their famous book Anti-Oedipus came up with the concept of “Body
without Organs”. The theorists discuss an apparent conflict between the body, organs
and organism. Here, the body refers to the individual personality while organs bear
reference to the behavioral attributes of the embodied individual. The organism is a
unified whole of the individual body inclusive of multitudinous organs (Deleuze and
Guattari 9). However, the theorists problematize the idea of unified organism as this
unity exercises hegemony over the organs embedded within its structure. In other
words, the unity of the organism is both manipulative and deceptive towards the
organs that it governs. Critic Hodney Jones explains this notion as:

Deleuze and Guattari use the term body without organs to refer to the
virtual dimensions of the body, the body freed from the organization of the
organism, the body outside any determinate state, torn from here and now,
exemplified, For them, in the body of the masochist, the drug addict, the
lover and the Schizophrenic. (Jones 2)

It means that a body, in order to be emancipated, must be free from the

deceptive clutches of its authorizing organism, which could be attempted by
challenging the unity of the organism, and liberating its individual organs from the
manipulative politics of the organism. Thus, the notion of “Body without Organs”
refers to the rebellion of different organs against the powerful organization of the
organism. In the novel, one could read Charmaine’s activities as organs and phallic
technocracy as an organism. The organism dominates the body that is the collective of
Charmaine’s actions and regulates its functioning within the patriarchal order.
The system curtails her freedom and shapes her activities depending on the
requirement of the Project. She is bound to perform painless encounters, do the
monotonous work of towel folding during her extension period in Positron and finally

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inject Stan to supposed death. And after that, she is compelled to enact fake emotions
and fool Ed into believing her ready for his brain transformation experiment. The
conglomerate of organs, referring to her different activities conducted with the
Panopticon, allows Charmaine to challenge Ed’s sexbot business and save Stan from
its domineering clutches. Ed’s manufacturing of Elsivers and Marilyns (the new
sexbots) is actually a scandal involving the technological misuse of human bodies
(especially the female ones). Jocelyn informs Charmaine about Ed’s master plan as:

Big Ed has a hard-on for you, and he won’t take giggle for an answer. He’s
having a sexbot made. A sexbot. They have already sculpted your face;
next they will add the body…but once he’s practiced on that he’ll want the
real thing. Eventually, he will tire of you- and then where will you end up?
(Atwood, THGL 213)

This warning scares Charmaine down to the core. Her sexual utility as a
techno-human is beyond her imagination. Aino Koistinen in the paper “The (Care)
Robot for Science Fiction: A Monster or a Tool for the Future” declares that “the
history of science fiction shows us that we as humans have always been fascinated by
creating the machine in our own image. Perhaps, this is a sort of God-complex, or
perhaps we are just so perplexed about our own humanity, that we feel the need to re-
create our image through technology in order to understand our humanness”
(Koistinen 102). Nonetheless, Ed’s rational behind creating sexbots is to abuse and
master technology in order to accumulate profit. Charmaine primarily becomes one of
its soft targets before she realizes the duplicity of the venture. Hence, the presence of
sexbots politicizes the relation between gender and technology and explains the
exploitation of women in both human and robot-human form.
Charmaine’s personality undergoes a drastic transformation as the novel
reaches its denouement. Unshackling herself from the deceptive underpinnings of
technocratic hegemony, she emerges as a strong-willed female character. The
redundant conspiracies of phallic techno-science fall short of disempowering her after
she gains critical insight of the subject position. This happens when Jocelyn acquaints
her with the truth of the Positron Project. Thus, the novel portrays Jocelyn and
Charmaine sharing a sisterly bond on a techno-scientific interface. It depicts a
courageous sister, Jocelyn, emancipating a credulous sister, Charmaine, from her
passivity and distress. Together the two rebel against the phallic technocracy of Ed.

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 In this way, Charmaine’s character in the beginning is much different and in
contrast to her daring actions at the end. In the end, with Jocelyn’s help, she tricks Ed
into believing in her passivity while planning to counter deceive him at the back. It is
here one finally notices Charmaine as a fully assertive character who assumingly
undergoes a brain transformation surgery. Charmaine ends up toying with the
masculine techno-science with Ed’s plan getting backfired. Instead of Charmaine, it is
Ed who undergoes a brain transformation surgery. Thus, Ed’s plot of conducting
sexbot business characterizing Charmaine’s behavioral features concludes with Ed
getting trapped in his own fabricated net. In other words, feminist standpoint, in the
face of Charmaine and Jocelyn, has the ability to deconstruct the phallic dimensions
of techno-science and envision a feminist techno-scientific epistemology in its place.

Conclusion

The novel is enmeshed with multifaceted realities. Centered on economic

recession, it explores the baleful misuse of science and technology. Divided into
different sub-sections, the article delved into the fundamental merit of human
relationships and how they endure within a technological landscape. As Science and
Technology theory (STS) “centers on the idea that technology and society co-
constitute each other” (Johnson 3), the article examines the theory of feminist
technology “that counters the pre-existing imbalances in gender relations, imbalances
that favor men” (Johnson 3).
This study has systematically analyzed the major female characters and their
function within the technocratic environment. Their interaction with technology is
linked to their feminist identities. The themes of deception and self-deception canvas
the novel emphasizing falsity towards factual information. Ultimately, the women
confront technological misuse by contesting the incorrect. They do so by
manipulating hegemonic masculinity, not to exercise essential control but to critique
the devious control of technology in a patriarchal set-up.

vv

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 WORKS CITED

Armitt, Lucie. “Introduction.” Where No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science
Fiction. Ed. Lucie Armitt. Oxfordshire: Routledge Literary Editions, 2012. 1-
13.
Atwood, Margaret. In Other World: SF and the Human Imagination. United
Kingdom: Virago Press, 2012.
---. The Heart Goes Last. Great Britain: Bloomsbury, 2015.
---. Waltzing Again: New and Selected Conversations with Margaret Atwood.
Ontario: Ontario Review, 2006.
Barr, Marleen S. Lost in Space: Probing Feminist Science Fiction and Beyond.
U.S.A.: The University of North Carolina Press, 1993.
Braidotti, Rosi. Nomadic Subjects: Embodiment and Sexual Difference in
Contemporary Feminist Theory. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.
Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia.
United Kingdom: Penguin, 2009.
Faulkner, Wendy. “The Technology Question in Feminism: A View from Feminist
Technology Studies.” Women Studies International Forum 24.1 (2001): 79-95.
http://classes.matthewjbrown.net/teaching-files/gender/faulkner.pdf. Web.
January 23, 2018.
Ferrando, Francesca. The Posthuman: Philosophical Posthumanism and its Others.
Diss. http://dspace-
roma3.caspur.it/bitstream/2307/4356/1/TESI_Ferrando_DEF.pdf. Web.
January 23, 2018.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punishment: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alen
Sheriden. New York: Vintage Books, 1975.
Grasswick, Heidi E. “Introduction.” Heidi E. Grasswick. Feminist Epistemology and
Philosophy of Science: Power in Knowledge. New York: Springer, 2011. iii-
xxix.
Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist Feminism
in the Late Twentieth Century.” The Cybercultures Reader. Eds. David Bell
and Barbara M. Kennedy. London: Routledge, 2001. 291-324.
Harding, Sandra. “Interrogating the Modernity vs. Traditional Contrast: Whose
Science and Technology for Whose Social Process?” Feminist Epistemology

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 and Philosophy of Science. Ed. Heidi S. Grasswick. New York: Springer,
2011. 85-110.
Johnson, Deborah C. “Sorting out the Question of Feminist Technology.” Feminist
Technology. Eds. Linda Layne, Sharra Vostal and Kate Boyer. U.S.A.,
Illinios: University of Illinois Press. 1-17. Web. January 23, 2018.
Jones, Hodney H. “Technology and Body without Organs.” Oxford Language in the
New Media. Ed. C. Thurlow and K. Mrochch. Oxford: Oxfordshire University
press, 2011. 321-339.
Koistinen, Aino Kaisa. “The (Care) Robot in Science Fiction? A Monster or a Toll for
the Future?” Confero 4.2(2016): 97-109. Web. January 23, 2018.
Lefanu, Sarah. “Sex, Sub-Atomic Particles and Sociology.” Ed. Lucie Armitt. Where
No Man Has Gone Before: Women and Science Fiction. Ed. Lucie Armitt.
Oxfordshire: Routledge Literary Editions, 2012. 178-185.
Seltin, John. “Production of the Posthuman: Political Economies of Bodies and
Technology.” Parrhesia No. 8 (2009): 43-59. Web. January 30, 2018.
Slusser, George. “The Origins of Science Fiction.” A Companion to Science Fiction.
Ed. David Seed. New Jersey: Blackwell Publications, 2007. 27-42.
Watts, Peter. “Margaret Atwood and the Hierarchy of Contempt.” London.
https://rifters.com/real/shorts/PeterWatts_Atwood.pdf. Web. March 23, 2018.

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 Fire Stories – Thomas Örn Karlsson

He Said, She Said:

Fake News and #MeToo in Marianne de Pierres’ Sentients of Orion

Dorothea Boshoff
University of South Africa

Deirdre C. Byrne
University of South Africa

Abstract | The recent #MeToo movement on social media originated in Hollywood as

an attempt to mitigate the drastic under-reporting of sexual harassment and gender-
based violence. The rationale is that if survivors of gender-based violence (who are
usually women) could find solidarity in speaking out about their experiences, they
would feel empowered to mount a successful challenge to rape culture. Unfortunately,
the possibilities for change held by #MeToo are in danger of being undermined by the
prevalence of fake news, which threatens to discredit accusations of sexual
misconduct as well as protestations of innocence by accused persons. Using the
phenomena of fake news and the #MeToo movement as starting points, this paper
aims to show how Marianne de Pierres’ modern space opera in Sentients of Orion
represents the slippery territory between truth and subjective interpretation, especially
in loaded incidents of sexual exploitation and abuse. By exploring three incidents

88
from the text, we will demonstrate that de Pierres’ writing, far from being ‘escapist’
as space opera is often assumed to be, contains a trenchant critique of contemporary
discourse about sexuality and sexual misconduct.
Keywords | Fake news; #MeToo; Sentients of Orion; feminist resistance; Mira; rape;
sexual abuse; subjective interpretation.

vv

Resumo | O recente movimento #MeToo nas redes sociais teve a sua origem em
Hollywood como uma tentativa de mitigar o drástico número de casos não declarados
de assédio sexual e violência com base no género. A fundamentação é que se os
sobreviventes de violência com base no género (que são normalmente mulheres)
podem encontrar solidariedade ao falar sobre as suas experiências, então sentir-se-ão
legitimados a desafiar com êxito a “cultura de violação”. Infelizmente, as
possibilidades para a mudança promovidas pelo movimento #MeToo correm o perigo
de serem prejudicadas pela prevalência de fake news, que ameaçam desacreditar tanto
acusações de má conduta sexual, como protestos de inocência por parte de pessoas
acusadas. Usando o fenómeno de fake news, e do movimento #MeToo como pontos
de partida, este ensaio presente demonstrar como a space opera moderna de Marianne
de Pierres, em Sentients of Orion, representa o território incerto entre a verdade e a
interpretação subjectiva, especialmente em incidentes de exploração sexual e abuso.
Explorando três incidentes do texto, demonstraremos que a escrita da autora, longe de
ser “escapista”, como normalmente se entende que seja a space opera, na realidade
contêm uma crítica incisiva ao discurso contemporâneo sobre a sexualidade e a má-
conduta sexual.
Palavras-Chave | Fake news; #MeToo; Sentients of Orion; resistência feminista;
Mira; violação; abuso sexual; interpretação subjectiva.

vv

Introduction

Sexual misconduct dominates the news. It is impossible to look at the state of

events in the world without learning of a new scandal, a stringent denial or heartfelt
apology about sexual advances and differing views on what might or might not be
appropriate. The verbal conflict between accusers and accused often comes down to
competing versions of the truth, in which the person who wields the most potent
discourse in a courtroom or in the media is usually the winner. Thus, accusations of
sexual impropriety frequently degenerate into slanging matches, ad hominem attacks
and contests of rhetoric. These diversionary tactics regularly distract attention away
from the facts of who did what and replace it with a focus on who said what.

89
 The recent #MeToo movement on social media originated in Hollywood as an
attempt to mitigate the drastic under-reporting of sexual harassment and gender-based
violence (WHO 9; Abenstein n. pg.; Shaheen n. pg.). Victims of gender-based
violence (GBV) frequently experience shame and fear of reprisal (from the
perpetrator or from others), which prevent them from reporting. #MeToo is motivated
by the belief that breaking the silence around GBV and sexual harassment will make a
difference to the level of reporting and hence to prosecution. Its main aim is to
increase discourse about sexual misconduct by creating a safe space for victims and
survivors to own up about their experiences. This will generate solidarity and
awareness of the prevalence of GBV in present-day society. The rationale for the
movement is that utterance of truth can create community: or, to put it another way,
that communities of discourse can become communities of social change. The
movement is intended to segue from social media into effective political action,
leading to increased social and legal prosecution of perpetrators and a reduction in the
prevalence of GBV. At first glance, the movement might be perceived as the
spearhead of a revolution. In theory, the world could change for the better for women,
who are still the most frequent targets of GBV.
Unfortunately, the possibilities for change held by #MeToo are in danger of
being undermined by the prevalence of fake news. Fake news, or the spreading of
false information through official news and information channels, initially came to the
world’s attention during the Trump/Clinton election race as a political tool (Howard
et al. 1). Fake news has led to a flurry of news channels attempting to legitimate
themselves as purveying only the truth.1 The dependence of information on discourse
has highlighted the sinister implication that discourse can be mediated by ideological
and political agendas, leading it to diverge from “the truth”. The even more sinister
result of the recent slew of fake news reporting is that it has become commonplace to
use “fake news” as an accusation to cast doubt upon reports and discourse that do not
please the reader or listener. Thus the very establishment of “fake news” as a part of
everyday reality means that using fake news as an escape hatch is as common an
occurrence as the fake news itself (Dentith 65).

1
In reference to the manipulation of information on online platforms, Tufekci speaks of “epidemics of
disinformation, meant to undercut the credibility of valid information sources” (n.pg). For further
discussion of the fake news phenomenon and the effect it has on “truth”, also see Ember (n.pg) and
Hunt (n.pg).

90
 While #MeToo draws its political impetus from women’s right to sexual
agency and safety, as well as the collective drive to see perpetrators brought to justice,
it is easy to see how fake news can undermine the movement. Not only can untrue
accusations lead to the downfall of those innocently accused,2 but valid accusations
can, with aplomb, be discredited as “fake news”. The capacity of #MeToo to bring
about real and desperately needed change for women is placed directly at risk by fake
news: if political news can be invalidated, so the logic goes, so can reports of GBV.
The two issues do not only converge: fake news could undermine #MeToo and turn a
potential revolution into a temporary flicker, soon to be forgotten and swept under the
carpet.

Marianne de Pierres’ Sentients of Orion: A Speculative Intervention

Using the concepts of fake news and the #MeToo movement as starting point,
this article aims to show how Marianne de Pierres’ modern space opera is relevant to
contemporary socio-political phenomena and movements. In particular, for de Pierres,
the genre provides a medium for stringent critique of the gender status quo (Boshoff,
2017). In her Sentients of Orion series, de Pierres (2007, 2008, 2009, 2010), depicts
the women of Orion as victims of a sustained “fake news” and propaganda campaign
that misrepresents and maligns their sexual agency, similarly to the women who have
spoken out in #MeToo.3
The story, which is told from a variety of viewpoints, follows Baronessa Mira
Fedor, a young woman trying to save her planet and her solar system from the
invading Saqr and their overlords, the Post-Species Extropists. After being raped and
impregnated by the crown prince of Araldis, Trinder Pellegrini, to ensure the
continuation of his line, Mira flees the planet with the help of Insignia, her sentient
biozoon spaceship, whom she pilots by means of a genetic abnormality usually found
only in the men of her family. She faces a number of challenges along with a widely
varied cast of characters in her efforts to stop the invading forces and be re-united
with the survivors on Araldis. The Sentients of Orion series deals with issues of
conflict, politics, religion, intercultural relations, and intimacy. Importantly, all these

2
In South Africa, though, less than 4% of accusations of sexual misconduct have been shown to be
false (Lazard n.pg).
3
The Sentients of Orion series comprises four novels, which, for ease of reference will be abbreviated
as follows: Dark Space (DS), Mirror Space (MS), Chaos Space (CS) and Transformation Space (TS).

91
aspects are profoundly gendered and highlight the power differential between men
and women under patriarchy. Due to length constraints, this article will explore three
incidents from Sentients of Orion that reinforce and echo the intricacies and power-
dynamics at play in #MeToo and fake news.
It becomes clear early in Dark Space, the first volume in the series, that the
women of Orion are secondary citizens. The Latino culture, which holds sway on
Araldis, is the epitome of patriarchy, both literally and figuratively. The Prince, with
his son, the Patriarch-in-Waiting, rule in a world where women are objectified and
seen only as possessions, conquests or mild entertainment. Even those women
privileged enough to break out of the mould and obtain a tertiary education, like Mira,
are usually relegated to studying “soft” and “inferior” courses at university. Older
women are discarded and disregarded, and the burden of childcare falls squarely on
the shoulders of the mothers. This state of affairs is strikingly similar to what Darko
Suvin calls “the author’s empirical environment” (16), or the society we currently
inhabit. Women are routinely considered as nothing more than reproductive machines
and therefore not worth educating. This prejudice, dominant in many societies keeps
many women unaware of their own oppression and compliant with the status quo
(Kiluva-Ndunda 91).
At the heart of the disempowered state of the women of Orion is their lack of
agency in procreation and therefore over their own bodies. While the denizens of
Orion are “humanesque”, their procreative faculties operate differently from those of
humans. Sexual intercourse can be initiated by either party, but only men hold sway
over fertility. It is often posited that women’s power over men, and men’s fear of
women, arise from women’s ability to conceive and bear life (Rich xiii). Indeed, this
is the origin of speculations about sexual and gender difference. By choosing this
particular aspect as the focal point for the women of Orion’s struggle for equality, de
Pierres ensures that her work, albeit in the oft-disregarded genre of space opera, has
more than surface relevance to contemporary society.
It is important to establish how the women of Orion came to find themselves
in a state of institutionalized inferiority and bereft of reproductive agency. Light is
shed on the history of disempowerment in a conversation between Mira and her sister,
Faja (DS 152-154). Faja bemoans the fact that their society is ruled by Franco, the
Prince, instead of by his far more intelligent and courageous sister, Marchella. She
calls the men of the clan “intransigent”, saying:

92
 [t]hey think only of the men … the men ... The men say they left Crux for
the sake of our future. That is a lie, Mira! They left for the sake of their
future: to keep their women restrained. Things had begun to change on
Crux. The many wars had opened our eyes to other ways. (DS 152)

Here de Pierres, through Faja, explains what many feminist science fiction authors
have emphasized: that patriarchy serves only men. 4 There is a jarring difference
between the “truth” as Faja sees it, and the “truth” that Mira believes. So convinced is
Mira of her version of history, that she does not even question Faja, she automatically
rejects her opinion as a lie:

Mira stared at her, open-mouthed. “No. That is not so. We left to arrest the
dilution of our race. When our women were raped during the wars, it led to
much interbreeding with our enemies. That is why they altered the terms of
our fertility. To protect us.” (DS 152)

Mira’s disbelief places the official story of what happened on Araldis squarely within
the domain of discourse rather than fact. Her reaction to hearing a different version of
events bespeaks cognitive dissonance, which, in any universe, abets the impact of
fake news. People tend to be so convinced of what they believe (often based only on
information that they have been exposed to) that other possibilities are automatically
rejected. Faja, however, is able to shock Mira’s beliefs by revealing that the ‘clan
leaders’ had only wished to “strengthen their patriarchy’ and that the Latino race had
never been ‘in danger of dilution” (DS 152). In this way she exposes and critiques the
well-orchestrated campaign of fake news launched and sustained by the men of Orion
in order to deprive the women of all their social power. The device of re-narrating
history according to a predetermined ideological bias (in this case relating to gender)
is a well-known strategy to reinforce the dominance of one group over another.
Fake news, as we know it, spreads fast and gains traction through targeting the
fears of society. A very recent study published in Science on the spread of fake news
on Twitter found that “[f]alsehoods diffused significantly farther, faster, deeper and

4
See, for example, Native Tongue by Suzette Haden Elgin (2000); Door into Ocean by Joan
Slonczewski (2000); Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Piercy (1976; rpt. 2016); and The
Wanderground by Sally Miller Gearhart (1979). One of the most excoriating critiques of patriarchy in
feminist science fiction is articulated by Suzy McKee Charnas in Walk to the End of the World
(originally published in 1974) and its sequel, Motherlines (originally published in 1978) (Charnas
1994).

93
more broadly than the truth in all categories of information” (Vosoughi, Roy and Aral
1146). The study also found that these “false stories inspired fear, disgust, and
surprise” in readers (1146). As in current reality, the fake news on Orion gained
traction through appealing to the deep fears of the common people; in the case of the
women, the deep-seated fear of rape, and worse, of falling pregnant from rape; and in
the case of the men, the fear of their race being genetically diluted. Fear of rape, as
Pumla Dineo Gqola demonstrates in Rape: A South African Nightmare, can determine
a woman’s every move: where she goes, whom she chooses to accompany her and
whom she speaks to (58). For a campaign of fake news to succeed, the threat it
addresses does not have to be real; the fear underlying such a possible threat needs to
be deep enough, as is the case in the tide of xenophobia fueled by the current U.S.
administration, and as is the case in Orion.
Mira’s initial rejection of Faja’s theory also spotlights a particular social
shortcoming that gives power to fake news and to those who wield it. Those who
were raised in apartheid South Africa know first-hand the dangers and devastation
that an institutionalized avoidance of critical thinking can engender. The travesty of
apartheid was made possible by an endemic lack of critical questioning by the
majority of perpetrators. Collective compliance with legislated racism was ensured by
a seamless social machine (Deleuze and Guattari 141) instantiating and perpetrating
state control of the media, religion and education. Faja points out that the same is true
on Orion:

“You sound like a Studium lecture, Mira. Have you not thought to look past
the official canon?”

In truth she had not. In her time at the Studium her mind had been
immersed in Latino poetry and ship schematics. (DS 152)

Most, if not all, states control the education systems in the countries they
govern and use it as a means of “producing people” (Wallin 117). These systems
may encourage open-ended enquiry, which will produce a generation of critical
thinkers and questioners, or discourage it, leading to a generation of blind followers.
Fake news and information control could be rendered harmless through education
systems that focus on critical thinking. Through the example of Mira’s failure to
think outside the box of her formal curriculum, de Pierres challenges the role of

94
formal education in the control of information and the maintenance of patriarchal
power through not teaching students to ask critical questions, and to draw their own
conclusions about the machines of power and social control.
Sustained state-orchestrated misinformation led to the women of Orion
willingly giving up their fertility, and with that, their power. The insidiousness of it
does not, however, stop there. As happened with apartheid in South Africa, and all
systems of misinformation, a small section of Orion society did question men’s
control of reproduction. The women of Orion who knew the truth about patriarchy
mustered a women’s resistance movement, called the Pensare. Mira’s reaction to
finding out that Faja belongs to this resistance group reveals yet another facet of how
fake news undermines the truth:

Without warning [Faja] parted the folds of her tunic and revealed intricate
lines and patterns etched into her flesh.

Mira gasped. “I have seen that before – on a Galiotto woman at the

Studium. She gave me her biometric stripe. That was how I escaped”.

“It is the sign of the Pensare”.

“I thought they were only an invention of the Nobile”.

“No invention, cara”. (DS 153)

The women of Orion have been made willing collaborators in their own
oppression through fake news. But the same information machine has disarmed the
only resistance movement (the Pensare) by casting doubt on their existence, weaving
myths around them, and by consistently spreading the rumour that they were simply
“an invention”. The Pensare in Orion pose a threat to the established order. In a
society where critical questioning is not the norm, fake news, insidiously spread by
powerful forces, can destroy the potential of revolutionary organizations, adding yet
another parallel between current affairs and Orion.5 If #MeToo is undermined often
enough with claims that accusations of harassment against powerful men are only

5
The lies surrounding the Pensare echo state news campaigns such as the one surrounding the death of
Bolivian student Jonathan Quispe, who was reportedly killed by “a marble fired from a projectile by
other protesters” during a student protest for more university funding (Scholars at Risk n.pg). María
Galindo, one of the founders of Bolivian feminist protest group “Mujeres Creando” (Women Creating),
exposes the falsity of this fake news in a piece entitled simply “I do not believe Romero” [the Bolivian
Minister of Autonomy who said that Quispe had been killed by a marble from another student’s
weapon] (Galindo n.pg).

95
“fake news”, the movement, like the Pensare, might be relegated to the shadows, to
exist only in the hearts of the few who continue questioning the status quo.
The leader of the Pensare is Marchella Pellegrini, the sister of the ruling
Prince. Marchella represents the resistance of women to the manner in which the
patriarchal system used misinformation to disempower the women of Orion. She
applies a variety of strategies in her challenge to the status quo. One of them is giving
the Crown Prince and Patriarch-in-Waiting, Trin, an alternative to the diet of fake
news that he’d been fed. By aggressively challenging the ruling Prince in his son’s
presence, she presents Trin with a set of facts, which he, due to his constant exposure
to and firm belief in the misinformation spread by the state, has not considered before.
She wants to open the future Principe’s eyes to the social injustices on the world he is
destined to inherit and rule, particularly those injustices concerned with sexual
discrimination and female agency (DS 110).
Marchella’s efforts are, unfortunately, wasted on Trin. Having only ever been
exposed to a limited and untrue version of the world, and having benefited directly
from that particular version, it is not within his ability to question, let alone to discard
what he perceives as the truth. Trin personifies the dehumanizing effect of large-scale
information control on those who attain privilege from it. When Trin decides to rape
Mira, he does so blinded by the framework of lies about women’s reproductive rights
that have been spun over Orion. Trin’s friends, who hold Mira down while he rapes
her, operate under the same delusion. They believe that the genetic line has to be kept
“pure and safe”. There are distinct echoes here of the racist fear of miscegenation
among colonialists by conceiving children with “natives” and so contaminating the
“purity” of the racial line. Trin and his friends believe that it is his duty to impregnate
Mira by whatever means necessary, even without her consent. In that moment, all
Marchella’s attempts to reveal a different truth to Trin, and all her previous efforts to
expose the falseness of his belief system, are proven horrifyingly ineffective (DS 382)
as patriarchy triumphs.
Marchella’s resistance is not only focused on apparently ineffective
awareness-raising among a population whose beliefs have become fossilized. Behind
the scenes, she is involved in business and politics, trying to combat the effects of the
misinformation campaign. She is willing to go great lengths to rectify the gender
inequality in Latino society. Marchella’s dealings with Tekton, the Lostolian
Godhead, strikingly spotlights de Pierres’ consistently relevant references to fake

96
news in its presentation of “alternative facts” and in its manipulation of which
information is made available to whom.
The negotiations between Marchella and Tekton for a mining contract are
described in no fewer than three different incidents in The Sentients of Orion: once
when Trin listens to an audio recording of the events (DS 161-165); then as retold
from Tekton’s point of view (DS 303-307); and again when Mira listens to the
transcripts (CS 177). The fact that different “official” versions of the same event are
available speaks of a dangerous control of information by the state. Analysing the
manner in which this information is manipulated will shed light on the reasons for and
consequences of information control in Orion.
Trin and Mira listen to the same recording of Marchella’s negotiations with
Tekton, but they do so at different times, from different gender perspectives and they
interpret the discussion through different background filters. In Trin and Mira’s
versions, Marchella is simply an ambassador and Tekton a business interest (DS 161-
165). Tekton gains control of a rare mineral in return for monetary payment and
agreeing to secure access for a woman from Orion to the presence of the newly
discovered God. In their version (and both their interpretations), the element that is
most underplayed in comparison to Tekton’s recollection is sexuality. The parts that
are missing from their versions of the meeting between Tekton and Marchella are
overwritten with the word “SUPPRESSED” in bold (DS 162; 163; 164; 165). The
use of “suppressed” instead of “edited” or “censored” comments on the suppression
of women’s sexuality and voice. It also foreshadows the importance of the hidden
information in subsequent versions of the conversation.
In Tekton’s version, what comes to the fore is his knowing abuse of power in
order to obtain sexual gratification from Marchella (DS 303-307). In Lostolian
culture, which subscribes strongly to hegemonic masculinity, it is perfectly acceptable
to display one’s nakedness – including showing a male erection outside sexually
intimate situations. Tekton does this, to the embarrassment of Marchella, who is
seemingly there for a business meeting (DS 305). Tekton apologises and explains his
arousal, somewhat disingenuously: “On Lostol it is not a thing we hide. It prevents
much deception when you can see what excites a person” (DS 303). Given the
comparatively hidden nature of women’s arousal, this clearly only applies to men’s
sexual excitement. This scenario reminds the reader of the decades-long abuse of
gender and sexual power in Hollywood as well as in other social spheres, ranging

97
from rape to demeaning micro-aggressions, which eventually sparked #MeToo. In
many cases, sexual arousal is equated with sexual entitlement.
Tekton soon realizes that Marchella is willing to do whatever is required to
gain access to God, and the knowledge that she is open to negotiation gives him a
“painful” erection, which he does not try to hide (DS 309). Tekton knows that he will
attain the sexual gratification he seeks. Even though her skin is “rough in comparison
to that of a Lostolian female” and he can smell “he light perspiration on her brow”,
Tekton is turned on. He is willing to have sexual intercourse with anything that moves
– even that which so obviously offends his sensibilities (DS 310). Marchella smells
bad to him, and Tekton has a penchant for women with more “flopping flesh” (CS 79)
than Marchella has, but he is bent on gratification:

With the confidence of one used to getting his own way, Tekton reached for
her, running his tongue along the side of her face, tasting the bitterness of
iron and the tang of copper. He then shuddered into a seated position and
pulled her down to him. With her face pushed to his thighs, he sent his
logic-mind diving under the sea of his akula and began building
magnificent cathedrals in his free-mind. (DS 311)

The full version of events, as told from Tekton’s point of view (DS 303-307),
could easily be read as Tekton forcing the unwilling Marchella to perform oral sex on
him, but in reality (for those aware of the context, as Mira is when she hears the
recording), Marchella’s act is calculated. She, like him, is doing whatever it takes to
get what she wants, which is to get a Latino woman nominated to gain access to God.
Making use of her sexuality, she places herself in a position of disempowerment in
order to empower all the women of her race on a permanent basis, and instead of a
stereotypical victim, she is the instigator and the “winner” in this unequal sexual
exchange. It is during the third narrative of this event, when Mira listens to the
recording (CS 177), that it becomes clear that Marchella’s “whole purpose had been
to save [the women] … No, not that … to free them”. The women of Araldis could
never be free while their fertility was “held to ransom” (CS 177). De Pierres has
previously depicted information as partial and subject to individual interpretation, and
the case of this sexualized negotiation is no different. Neither Trin nor Mira is granted
access to all the available “truths”: Marchella possesses the most detailed information
about motives and actions, but it is clear that there is no single or easily available
complete truth.

98
 Significantly, de Pierres not only includes more than one version of this
intimate interchange, but locates the difference between the versions in the degree of
coercion and consent. In this way she brings to the fore the subjective nature of
information and “truth”. These aspects pertain directly to #MeToo. 6 High-profile
sexual harassment cases increasingly show different interpretations of events as
perceived by the victim and the accused. Individual differences in worldview, agenda,
metaphysical outlook and psychological make-up lead people to perceive intimate
interactions in widely divergent ways. This points to the urgent need for open
dialogue regarding subjects such as rape, sexual harassment, agency, consent and
even basic appropriateness.
Trin, who hears the same version of Marchella’s negotiation with Tekton as
Mira, is unable to interpret the recording in any way other than that which is
presented to him. He does not question what he hears, and does not think further than
the surface “facts” that are presented to him. He is unaware of the possibility of other
interpretations or deeper meanings. In having Mira listen to the same recording, but
coming to completely different conclusions, de Pierres demonstrates how “factual”
interpretation can be altered through a questioning attitude and critical thinking. A
consistent application of information control serves to dumb people down. Not asking
questions (which is actively discouraged by many so-called education systems) is just
a symptom of misinformation. While there is seemingly no great harm in the manner
people fail to think further than the surface regarding information which is made
available to them, it becomes hugely problematic when a lack of critical thinking
allows social atrocities such as Trin’s rape of Mira, or the suppression of large
sections of society by others as in the case of apartheid or institutionalized masculine
hegemony.

Conclusion

Orchestrated through sustained information control, not having any choice in

fertility and reproduction contributes to the suppression of women by the patriarchal
system of Orion. As becomes clear from the very existence of #MeToo, in spite of all

6
In her comparison between the short fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and the South African Truth and
Reconciliation Committee, Deirdre Byrne notes that ‘both events and accounts purportedly have a
relation to truth’ (237, emphasis added).

99
the gains that have been made against hegemonic masculinity and toward equality for
all, we live in a world where power is still used to foist sexual intercourse upon the
powerless or to gain sexual favours (from another perspective, some resort to using
their sexuality in order to gain access to power that would otherwise be denied to
them). All of these features are echoed in The Sentients of Orion.
At the time of writing this article, the world is waiting to see what will become
of #MeToo. Will it indeed be the start of a revolution, or will powerful players be able
to shrug off accusations of sexual misconduct and violence as mere “fake news”,
escaping with no consequence and rendering resistance useless? In de Pierres’ Orion,
a deep-rooted, state-orchestrated campaign of false information, along with the
manipulation of information availability and the failure of the education system have
led to the disenfranchisement of all women, particularly in terms of their sexual
agency. In addressing these issues, so closely related to news broadcasts in consensus
reality, The Sentients of Orion, poses a strong and relevant challenge to the manner in
which manipulated truths uphold the unequal gender status quo.

vv

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 OFFSPRING
BY | Martin Simonson

From the Past – Thomas Örn Karlsson

 The forest reached as far as one could see, even though the base had been set
up on a ridge and the view was undisturbed for miles. Uncounted folds of ancient
landscape lay covered under furry white pines, pale birch-wands with auras of silvery
powder and other trees transformed beyond reckoning by the frost. Ludovic scanned
the chaotic jumble of what he knew was mainly spruce, pine, birch and aspen. For a
moment, he imagined that this was what the place must have looked like a thousand
years ago, but he instantly dismissed the notion with a self-deprecating sneer. Futile
illusion! No roads cut through the overwhelming frosty mass of vegetation as in the
old days. No fields interrupted the army of marching trees. No smoke rose from
clearings. Houses on these latitudes had been built of wood, and they had long since
collapsed and merged with the underbrush – together with the rest of the
Scandinavian civilization.
Ludovic pushed the chair back from his desk, stretched languidly and watched
his arms. They were typically Scandinavian, with light, freckled skin and tufts of red-
blonde hair shadowing the forearms. He was still not used to the new body, even
though he had worn it for almost a year now, and he could still feel sudden stabs of
satisfaction when he looked at himself in the mirror. The body was based on the
classic Northern European matrix, with a dash of Southern European bone structure.
Mid-blonde hair, light skin, blue eyes. There were people in the team who had chosen
the opposite, Southern European features with Northern European structure, but he
preferred the lighter build. Better for field work, if not for anything else. Not such a
bothersome lot of bones and muscles to drag along.
Ludovic went up to the panoramic windows. It was an early morning in April,
and just a fine sheet of nano between himself and fatal disease. The trees thrived and
prospered, but not a single C-class individual would be able to survive out there. The
D-classers would be fine, naturally, but who wanted to strut around coated in metal?
He was suddenly overwhelmed by the distance between himself and all those
lives he had spent the last 130 years studying. Those A-classers who had walked the
forests on the other side of the window, with only thin layers of clothing covering
their actual bodies... They would swim naked in the lakes, draw deep breaths of
authentic, untreated air, perhaps sweating and screaming when the nightmares beset
them at night, but laughing again as the sun rose. They had been torn between hope
and despair in ways he could not fathom, no matter how closely he studied their ways.

104
 The abyss slowly began to crack open under his feet, and Ludovic retired
quickly to his desk to try and think about something else. Lately, the vision of the
dark shaft gobbling up both light and comprehension had visited him with alarming
frequency, and it was increasingly difficult to rid himself of it. He sat down, closed
his eyes and deliberately breathed in slowly and steadily through the nostrils, until his
pulse returned to normal by itself.
He was okay.
A rapid glance at the mechanical clockwork on his wrist revealed that
breakfast was almost over. He would have to hurry if he wanted some before they
closed the kitchen.

The canteen was already half empty when he arrived – the birthplace of Elisabeth
Hesselblad was on today’s program and most of the technicians had left the base
before dawn. Catholic saints in Scandinavia were not the usual fare, to put things
mildly, and the prospect of finding something worthwhile really should have
interested him a lot more, especially since they only had a day to explore the site
before moving on to Läckö. Ludovic, however, didn’t nurture any hopes they’d find
anything exciting and had allowed the team to take off before him. The archives
showed a number of owners throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. How
big were the chances they would find something now? According to the preliminary
reports, only the foundations were left – a classic up here in the damp Le Nord.
He browsed through the text until the droid arrived with his coffee and the
croissant, as anachronistic as the wrist watch. All of it served as a reminder of his ties
to the ancient world; he supposed this was the reason the technicians considered him a
snob. Ludovic couldn’t have cared less. He brought the cup of hot coffee to his lips
and smiled absent-mindedly as he watched the impenetrable forest outside the
windows, where the trees had begun to steam in the light of the slowly rising sun. All
these rituals... He just couldn’t help himself. After all, he was professor of
anthropology, archaeology and cultural history, and he loved the ancient customs, the
artifacts, the lifestyle of the past. Pipe smoking, for instance, involved a complex and
manifold set of sensations that made him feel alive in the old sense of the word: the
texture of the tobacco against his fingertips as he packed the pipe, the sudden flare of
the match, the warm cherry wood of the bowl against his folded palm, the smooth
stem and the bit against his lips... and the forbidden feeling as he filled his lungs with

105
smoke. Such excesses had raised his insurance fees to almost impossible levels, but it
was well worth the money. If he really tried, he could almost imagine what it would
have been like in the old days, even when, as now, he had to smoke in a sterile metal-
and-nano compartment instead of enjoying the ritual in the more congenial
surroundings of his murky study, with dusty volumes on the shelves and well-worn
leather armchairs.

A ringtone woke him from his thoughts. He had chosen the sound from the classical
twentieth-century phones in a vain attempt to imprint a sober and old-fashioned
atmosphere in his communications with the rest of the team, but it was practically
useless--the feeling was instantly ruined by the uncultivated voices, marked by pre-
programmed accents, and above all the invariably trivial exchanges.
“Ludovic?” panted Friedrich as soon as he had approved the call, and the
bronze-coloured face appeared above his steaming cup. “Sir?”
“Yes?” said Ludovic, with a tinge of irritation. “I’m in the middle of my
breakfast.”
“I’m sorry to interrupt, sir, but I think you’d better come over. We’ve, uh...
found something.”
“Specify.”
“Yes, well, it’s a... some sort of... subterranean space”.
Ludovic hearkened. “What’s that? Where?”
“Well, that is to say, uh... under the house”.
“A cellar?”
“I’m not sure, but I think...”
“The correct term is cellar, if it is situated under a common living space”.
“Well, it’s not exactly a cellar, sir. We were exploring the remains of this here,
uh, saint’s house, and found a trapdoor. It was sealed from the inside in some way, so
we opened up and...”
“You opened an air-raid shelter? Without informing me first?”
Friedrich was silent for a few seconds.
“Not exactly,” he said at last. “We... I didn’t have time to stop them. But as
soon as I found out what was going on, I gave orders to vacate the... uh...”
“Did they touch anything down there?”
“No, I don’t think so. I searched them when they came out”.

106
 “Who went in?”
“Stahl and Villeneuve.”
“All right. Put them in quarantine immediately. What have you found?”
Friedrich hesitated. Then he said:
“It’s probably best if you came over. So you can see for yourself.”
Ludovic sighed. “Okay, I’ll be there in...” – he turned his wrist slightly to check the
watch--” ... about fifteen minutes”.

Ludovic put the cup back on the table together with the croissant, still untouched, left
the canteen and went straight to the locker room, where he began putting on the
protective suit. If he had chosen to work as a droid, like Barbusse and many others in
the crew, he could have taken off without any of these annoying procedures, but as it
was he had to undergo the complete safety protocol, with tedious measurements of
oxygen levels and blood pressure and so on. He railed impatiently at the personnel in
the hangar as they helped him check out one of the smaller hovercrafts.
An air-raid shelter under the saint’s house. He didn’t want to admit it, even to
himself, but Friedrich’s words – above all, his tone – had tickled his curiosity. If
Friedrich dared to interrupt him in the middle of his breakfast they had obviously
found something interesting.
Ludovic would usually travel slowly over the topography in search of subtle
remains the scanner might have missed, but once he disengaged from the base and
reached hovering altitude he brought the craft up to an almost reckless speed, just
above the tree tops.

Barbusse received him at the landing area the engineers had prepared the day before.
They had felled a good number of trees and even though they had pulled the trunks
and branches aside it was still difficult to get a good view of the ruins, situated about
thirty meters from the clearing. Barbusse strode over the branches on his tall, whirring
legs without getting tangled and Ludovic followed in his yellow protective suit.
Friedrich was waiting for him at the entrance, where the team had established a lab
tunnel according to standard procedure.
“Show me in”, said Ludovic without saluting.
Friedrich nodded nervously behind his visor and led the way through the
tunnel. Some ten meters ahead two technicians were standing, chatting. They

107
straightened up when they saw Ludovic’s yellow suit with the green shoulder stripes,
and took a respectful step aside. Friedrich made a sign towards the ground, where a
steel trapdoor, partly covered with moss, had been unveiled. One of the technicians
opened it. Ludovic activated his searchlight and began climbing down the iron steps
into the darkness below.
“Air-raid shelter with sealed trapdoor”, he mumbled into the microphone and
let the camera take in the details of the bottom side of the door. “Approximately
2030’s. Probably Bofors.”
A few more steps and he stood on the shelter’s floor. He looked around as he
waited for Friedrich to arrive. The technicians had left footprints everywhere, but
there seemed to be few other traces of contamination. The sleeping area was
untouched, judging by the unbroken layer of dust that covered the wrinkled sheets.
The walls were dominated by old screens, a standard feature of the shelters from this
period. The kitchen area was full of mugs and glasses, also covered in dust.
“I stopped them as soon as I heard what they’d found,” said Friedrich behind
him. “I don’t think they...”
“So I can see”, said Ludovic drily. “Give me the prelims.”
“Yes. Well. Two main areas, the second one behind the door over there. No
signs of intrusion. Sleeping area and kitchen both intact”.
“Yes, yes,” said Ludovic, waving his hand. “What’s in the other room?”
“Well, that’s what I think you will find interesting. The technicians found
relics after three Class-A individuals, and a series of written documents”.
People and books, translated Ludovic to himself and felt his heart beat a little
faster. He went up to the door and opened it. Another rectangular space, but here the
walls were covered with shelves, crowded with books of different size and shape. In
the far end of the room was a table and a few chairs. On the table stood two
transparent bottles, something that looked like an old camera, a few more books and a
chandelier. A jacket hung on the back of one of the chairs and the tattered remains of
a couple of pants lay on the floor by the table’s legs. Pale bones protruded under the
cloth here and there. A cranium with a broad crack over the forehead rested on the
floor next to the chair, and on the other side were similar heaps.
Skeletons and skulls, in the old language. Remains of real people, Ludovic
reminded himself. Those skeletons had been forged in real wombs.
He turned slowly in the door.

108
 “Thank you, Friedrich,” he said. “I’ll take it from here.”
“Okay, but...” began Friedrich, but Ludovic just shook his head, entered the
room and closed the door behind him.

He remained by the door for a moment, shut off the search light, activated his own
luminous filters and took in the scene. He had been waiting for ages for something
like this to cross his path. The regular troops usually managed to destroy any valuable
remains in the country during the campaigns to exterminate the B-class scum, but this
seemed to be a virgin tomb.
Ludovic took a few steps into the room and scanned the bookshelves. As he advanced
he spoke absent-mindedly into the microphone. “Seven or eight hundred volumes,
give or take. Many with hardcover bindings and in reasonably good shape.” Enough,
in itself, to trigger the interest of any respectable tomb raider.
Ludovic took a reverent step towards the books and passed his gloved hands
over the spines to remove the dust and get a view of the titles. Mostly European
works, written in different languages: Spanish, English, Swedish, French. Philosophy,
poetry and history in the main, but also a few novels. Chiefly twentieth and twenty-
first centuries – the collected works of Pope in an early nineteenth-century edition
was one of the seemingly few exceptions. Nothing of real value at a first glance,
perhaps, but still a decent library, considering the circumstances. The only thing that
broke the symmetry of the parade of books was a solitary, black Olympus camera,
placed just in front of a volume of Lucretius in Spanish translation.
Ludovic shut off his own camera and the microphone but did not yield to the
temptation to pull out some of the books and look more systematically for goodies--
there would be plenty of time for that over at the base later. Instead he went up to the
table. The relics of the three A-classers were spread out over the chairs and the floor.
Hopefully, in due time they would acquire more solid identities. The mere fact they
were A-class individuals was obviously of sufficient interest, but what if... What if it
was something more than just vulgar middle-class this time? Ludovic’s area of
expertise was the provinces and he knew he couldn’t compete with the urban
archaeologists’ findings in terms of sophistication. Still, he never lost hope that one
day he would come across something unexpected. He didn’t ask for much; anything
beyond grocery receipts would do. Anything that could help him gain a more subtle
understanding of how these people had lived.

109
 Next to the bottles and the book was an album with covers made of coarse
fabric. Ludovic felt a sudden pang of expectation as he carefully removed the artifact
from the table to take a look at the contents.
The album was full of black-and-white pictures, 20x30 cm according to the
eye scanner. Judging by the scenes they were probably taken in the area: there were
pictures of rivers and waterfalls with long exposures, trees covered in snow, a wooden
landing stretching over a black lake and people with gasmasks holding... lamps?
Ludovic fixed his eyes on the picture and zoomed in. The gas mask seemed to
be an authentic Russian model from the middle of the twentieth century, but the lamp
looked more like a decorative item from the early twenty-first century than a real
artifact.
Ludovic turned the pages. The pictures gradually changed in tone, from
contemplative nature scenes to empty highways, abandoned houses and cars, corpses
by a kitchen table, gas stations going up in flames... The progression was apparently
arranged so as to document the different phases of the Shock in a narrative sequence.
Towards the end was a photograph of recently dug graves on a field. Next to the
graves were two men in gasmasks, long raincoats and rubber boots, leaning on
spades. On the opposite page, pictures of women and children.
Ludovic kept turning the pages. The last ones were dominated by photographs
of a house, similar to the archival pictures of Hesselblad’s home, and interior shots
from the shelter. The very last photograph showed three bearded men, around fifty
years of age, sitting by the very table in front of him. One of them, a tattooed fellow
with a bulky digital camera in one hand, looked straight into the lens, proposing a
drunken toast. Another one, a long-limbed man with worn-out pants, leaned back in
his chair with hanging arms as he looked up at the ceiling. A ballpen stuck out
languidy between his fingers. The third A-classer, a fairly short, wiry character
wearing a basketball cap, was leaning over the table with his head in his hands. He
watched the others with a melancholy smile.
Ludovic stared at the picture. It was difficult to say if it was arranged or just a
spontaneous snapshot. But who was the photographer? He turned the pages
backwards, scanning them for possible references, but found nothing. Perhaps they
had taken the picture with a timer, using the camera on the shelf.
He put the album back on the table, picked up the book and blew the dust off
the cover. A title in Swedish: “Movements in the woods”. The cover picture

110
resembled those he had seen in the album: a black-and-white photograph of naked
white birches beyond dark waters, and an indistinct silhouette of a person wearing
some sort of hooded monk outfit, moving among the trees. Below the picture were the
names of the authors: “By Per Johansson and Martin Simonson. Illustrations by
Thomas Örn Karlsson”.
Ludovic put the book away, activated the system and ordered visuals of the
three names from the Swedish A-class archives. After applying the appropriate filters
they appeared on his retina: Per Johansson, Swedish writer; Martin Simonson,
associate professor of English literature at a Spanish university; Thomas Örn
Karlsson, photographer and the last known owner of the Hesselblad house. He opened
the album on the last page and compared. Karlsson, the tattooed photographer with
the grizzly beard, was easy to recognize. The other two were a little harder to identify,
but after a while he realized that the man wearing the cap responded to Johansson’s
profile, while the long-limbed fellow staring at the ceiling must be Simonson.
He put the album back on the table, shut off the system and sat down
cautiously on one of the empty chairs. His eyes fell on the bottles on the table. One of
them was open and practically empty, but the other was untouched, corked and sealed
with red wax. He turned it and wiped the dust off the handwritten label: ”Karlsson’s
aquavit”. As usual, the angels had taken their share during the hundred and fifty years
or so that had passed, but there were at least three quarters left in the bottle.
“Aquavit...” The very word was like a spell, and he was transported to
sweeping views of pastoral Carl Larsson landscapes, with meadows and cattle and
lakes bordered with ethereal birches, farmhands and maidens under leafy oaks,
kitchen gardens and tubulars pulled out of a black, rich soil. Aquavit had been a
popular drink in Scandinavia. Distilled from potatoes and mellowed with... well, there
had been different recipes. As a cultural historian specialized in Mid-Sweden,
Ludovic had tasted the beverage a few times for strictly scientific purposes, but it had
been newly produced and he wasn’t even sure the ingredients really came from Le
Nord. And it had definitely not been produced by A-classers, so the soul of the
craftsmanship had been lost.
But this...
Ludovic stared greedily at the bottle for a few seconds, and then he surprised
himself by suddenly breaking the wax seal, uncork the bottle with his multi-tool, and
fill up the emergency deposit on his left hip. He poured and poured, as if in a trance,

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until the bottle was completely empty. Then he closed his lips around the emergency
mouthpiece and took a sip.
His tongue and throat stung sharply before an imposing warmth began to
spread in his stomach. He felt the heat in his cheeks. Then he closed his eyes and took
another sip, a little more cautiously, to try to identify the taste.
St John’s worth.
That’s what it was.
He took a third sip and tasted it with the intellect this time. In spite of the
herb’s name, no spontaneous associations to the Christian saint were established –
instead, an irrefutably pagan atmosphere gathered momentum within him. The yellow
flowers of the herb took shape in his head, and then the photographer with the grizzly
beard appeared on a forest track, bare-chested and with a camera dangling around his
neck. He was humming an old tune as he nipped off flowers and leaves here and
there.
Ludovic took yet another sip of the aquavit. Then he opened the book and
began to read.

Several hours passed. At one point, Friedrich knocked on the door and asked if
everything was all right, and if he needed anything. “All is fine”, Ludovic replied, and
added that there would be no further interruptions, under any circumstances.
Then he continued reading.
And drinking.
When he was done, he put the book on the table and sat staring at the cover for
a long time. “Movements in the woods. By Per Johansson and Martin Simonson.
Illustrations by Thomas Örn Karlsson.”
The cover picture showed the monk of the story moving among the trees. Or
was it perhaps the partisan girl, returning ghost-like after an attack in the
Borderlands? Impossible to tell. One thing he did know: those bones on the floor had
once belonged to real bodies – and the bodies had been true parts of the world out
there. Not like himself and the other C-classers, who had to waddle along in their
protective nano suits, self-contained and detached from everything outside
themselves.
His own memories stretched as far back as 2060, more or less, after the Shock,
and they had been stored over three generations. His consciousness was connected to

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his body merely through the nervous system. The ties of the A-classers, on the other
hand, had been solid. They may have had short lives, but at least they had been real.
The first wisps of hopelessness began to dance around him. When he sat down
with the book a few hours earlier he had felt a growing excitement; a logical
consequence of the presence of ancient artifacts on the table, and the effects of the
aquavit. But now the bottomless abyss started to groan and widen again.
He would never fathom, on any deeper level, how these people understood
their place in the world, the width of their relationship with the environment. The art
they produced, the passions that burned, the despair, the myths about the extinction
that everybody had to undergo; it was all beyond him.
Or was he mistaken?
Was there a way of bringing forth the old gods again, to ask them for relief?
To actually feel the world before it was over?
Ludovic stared hard at the cover of the book, as if to elicit some sort of
response. Then he got up on shaky legs, extracted the bag for samples from the front
pocket of the nano suit, opened it and shoved the book, the album, the camera, the
chandelier and the bottles inside. He dropped to his knees and gathered the relics of
the three A-classers, put them inside the bag, sealed it as well as he could and
stumbled out of the room.
Friedrich saw him exit the lab tunnel and make his way towards the
hovercraft. He must have realized something was wrong because he tried to catch up
and exchange a few words, but Ludovic brushed him aside and climbed into the
cockpit without answering any of the assistant’s questions. Then he engaged the
ship’s system and asked Christophe to program a trip to the nearest fjord, as fast as
possible. It took a while before he was able to activate the autopilot, but at the fourth
try he finally managed to place his index finger on the right spot on the screen. The
hovercraft wheezed upwards, turned ninety degrees and shot off over the trees.

The journey took twelve minutes all in all. They landed on the water next to a sandy
beach surrounded by irregular granite rocks that shifted in colour between pink and
gray. Chris manoeuvred them closer and nuzzled the ship halfway up on the beach.
Ludovic sat motionless in the cockpit, watching the fjord’s uneven surface of
battered steel, and the reeds, colourless under the pale afternoon sky, that had
conquered one end of the beach.

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 This was the Idefjord. On the other side was a land that had once been known
as Norway. It was historical territory: not very long ago, Vikings had entered these
waters from Skagerack, and this was where the mad Swedish king Charles XII
launched his last campaign in an attempt to seize the neighbouring kingdom.
Now, however, it was Le Nord, an empty province in the French-German
Empire.
Ludovic grabbed the sample bag, opened the door and took a drunken step into
mid-air. He fell in the sand, cursing between his teeth as he got up. Then he dropped
the bag and went over to the reeds, where he began breaking off the dry, brittle stems.
He carried the broken stumps back to the bag and took another turn, and then another,
and when he felt it was enough he began building a big heap on the water’s edge.
“Ludovic.” The humming voice of Friedrich in his left ear. “Return to the craft. I
repeat: return to...”
Damn. He had forgotten to shut down the system. They had located him long
ago, of course. Just a matter of minutes now before they’d be here.
Ludovic cut Friedrich’s voice in mid sentence and began pulling off the
protective coveralls. Alarm tones went off in his ears, lights flared on his retinas,
vibrations shook his arms and legs, but in the end he managed to peel off the yellow
nanosuit. It fell on the sand with a mournful rustle.
He drew a deep breath and then he pulled off the helmet. It was madness, of
course, this body has cost him a fortune. But he just couldn’t stop – he had to find out
what it was like.
He drew another deep breath and filled his lungs with the poisonous air.
Nothing happened.
He let the air out, and inhaled once more.
His heart kept beating.
Then he felt the wind against his face for the first time. It was cold and wild.
The sand was rough against his naked soles. It shifted under the weight of his
body.
He remained still for a while, took it all in.
It was real. No nano between himself and the world. The real world. And he
was still alive and physically operative. For the time being.
Probably not for much longer.

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 The heap of reeds swayed slightly on the water’s edge, but it was sufficiently
solid and voluminous not to disintegrate under the pressure of the small, choppy
waves. Ludovic lifted the sample bag and poured the contents over the reeds. The
stems cracked and rustled as the bones fell on them. Some of the relics tumbled off
and hit the water. Ludovic picked them up with shaky hands and placed them next to
the book and the album. Then he pushed the whole thing further out, wading after the
heap in his thin pants. His feet ached in the shockingly cold water. Shivering, he
managed to pull out the lighter and the pipe of the shirt’s breast pocket, produced a
flickering flame and held it to the reeds until he saw strokes of smoke surround the
relics. After a few seconds the first flames broke through.
He placed the pipe next to the book and gave the bonfire one last push. It
sailed slowly towards the main current of the fjord.
Ludovic pulled off his pants and shirt and waded further out after the burning
heap of reeds. Wisps of smoke were caught by the afternoon breeze and made his
nostrils twitch. He no longer sensed his feet, but he could feel his testicles contract
and withdraw as he waded deeper into the water.
This is what it is really like.
This is. What it.
Is really...
A golden cluster of fire spread over the dark waters of the fjord. He now
realized that the skulls looked like giant eggs in a burning bird’s nest. Would they
come? He felt like screaming, but he knew there were no words to bring forth the
gods, only pain and sacrifice.
That was how it had to be.
He heard a gurgling sound deep in his throat and felt his lungs wheeze as he
tried to fill them again.
“Come...” he whispered, and coughed. “Please come...”
He was struggling to breathe now and darkness settled around him. As if in a
dream he perceived a great black bird that slowly descended from the pale sky. The
bird screamed at him in a language he had never heard before. It grew bigger and
finally settled on the water beside him, huge and black and shrieking.
Ludovic, his senses mollified, slowly let himself go. The gods had arrived.
They would carry him to regions beyond waking, where no pain ever was or could be.
Because he was their offspring.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
 Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy
No. 4 – 2019

GUEST EDITORS
Danièle André | is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Department of the
University of La Rochelle (France). She belongs to the CRHIA (Research Centre in
International and Atlantic History). Her research focus on analyzing and
understanding how popular culture (especially in North America), and more
specifically science fiction, cinema, TV series, tabletop roleplaying games and
graphic novels, deal with human beings in their social environment. The research she
carries out aims at pinpointing that practices of popular culture not only reflect how
societies work, but they also help think about their evolution and help shape their
future.
Email Address | [email protected]

Christophe Becker | is a Doctor in American Literature, and defended his thesis in

December 2010 at the Paris VIII – Vincennes Saint-Denis University, France. Its
subject is “The Influence of William S. Burroughs on the work of William Gibson
and Genesis P-Orridge”. He is a specialist of experimental literature and Sci-Fi,
including Cyberpunk, and works on the relationship between mass culture and
underground movements. He belongs to “Stella Incognita”, and PIND, a research
program devoted to the French punk subculture.
Email Address | [email protected]

vv

Ciaran Kavanagh | Ciarán Kavanagh is a final-year PhD researcher in University

College Cork, Ireland, where he also received his BA in History and English (2014)
and MA in English Modernities (2016). His thesis, “Reading Postmodernism:
Indeterminacy, Instability and the Changing Role of the Reader,” utilises reader-
response theory in the analysis of how postmodern subversions of interpretive codes,
such as genre or authorial ethos, affect the reading experience. His research is

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currently funded by the Irish Research Council’s “Government of Ireland
Postgraduate Scholarship”.
Email Address | [email protected]

Peter Kosanovich | Peter Kosanovich received his undergraduate degree from James
Madison University. He is currently completing a Master of Arts in Media Studies at
the University of Regina. His research focuses on gender in science fiction and
fantasy television series from the 1990s, as well as animated films and television.
Email Address | [email protected]

Jessica Austin | Jessica Austin Jessica is in her 3rd year of PhD at Anglia Ruskin
University. Her PhD thesis is concerning fan identity construction in the Furry
Fandom. She has written peer reviewed articles on online research ethics, Star Wars
female fan reception and several book reviews. Her research interests are in the fan
studies discipline and post human theory.
Email Address | [email protected]

Rebecca Lynne Fullan | Rebecca Lynne Fullan is a PhD candidate in English at the
Graduate Center of the City University of New York, and an Instructional Technology
Fellow at the Macaulay Honors College, CUNY. Her research interests include Native
American literature, speculative fiction, medievalisms, and ecocriticism.
Email Address | [email protected]

Rano Ringo | Rano Ringo is an Assistant Professor of English at the Department of

Humanities and Social Sciences, Indian Institute of Technology Ropar, Punjab, India
where she is teaching undergraduate and postgraduate courses. She has been teaching
for the past eleven years. Her research interests include mainly Feminist Studies,
Postcolonial Studies, Fantasy and Science Fiction and Canadian Literature.
Email Address | [email protected]

Jasmine Sharma | Jasmine Sharma is a full time PhD Research Scholar under the
guidance of Dr. Rano Ringo at the Indian Institute of Technology, Ropar. Her core
research area is Canadian Literature primarily dealing with post-feminism in the
science fiction novels of Margaret Atwood. She has published research papers in

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UGC approved journals of literary importance and has presented papers at different
conferences across the country.
Email Address | [email protected]

Dorothea Boshoff | Dorothea Boshoff completed her DLitt et Phil with the
University of South Africa. She is engaged in research on gender representations in
popular science fiction. Stemming from her work in TESOL, she also produced
research on the role of narrative in language acquisition, and on the manner in which
mainstream second language textbooks apply narrative as a tool.
Email Address | [email protected]

Deirdre Byrne | Deirdre Byrne is a full Professor of English Studies and the Head of
the Institute for Gender Studies at the University of South Africa. She holds a C2
rating from the National Research Foundation of South Africa as an established
researcher. She is engaged in research on the writing of Ursula K. le Guin and on
South African women’s poetry. She belongs to the steering groups of the International
Association for the Study of Gender and Love and also of ZAPP, the South African
poetry project.
Email Address | [email protected]

Martin Simonson | Martin Simonson received his PhD from the University of the
Basque Country with a dissertation on the narrative dynamics of The Lord of the
Rings. He is the author of the monographs The Lord of the Rings and the Western
Narrative Tradition (Walking Tree Publishers, 2008) and, with Raúl Montero, El
héroe del oeste en Las Crónicas de Narnia (Peter Lang, 2014) and El Western
fantástico de Stephen King: hibridización y desencantamiento en “El
Pistolero” (Peter Lang, 2018). He is the translator of several works by J.R.R. Tolkien
into Spanish, among others Beowulf (2014), The Story of Kullervo (2015) and Beren
and Lúthien (2018). He currently teaches English 19th and 20th century literature in the
BA program of English Studies, and an introductory course on fantasy, horror and
science fiction at the MA program of comparative literature at the University of the
Basque Country.
Email Address | [email protected]

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Thomas Örn Karlsson | Thomas Örn Karlsson started out as a nature and landscape
photographer but gradually evolved towards the realm of horror and fantasy. Recent
exhibitions include #MEMORYLANE, in which levitation art is combined with
music (by Anders Rane), and “Out of this world”, a collaboration with writers Martin
Simonson and Raúl Montero, which was presented, together with a lecture, at
Fotografiska Museet in Stockholm in August 2017. Thomas currently works as
ambassador for Olympus.
Email Address | [email protected]

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