Tag Archives: capitalism

critical theory, science fiction

Babylon in the Sky—Edmond Hamilton

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fig. 1. Amazing Stories, March 1963, cover by Lloyd Birmingham, “illustrating Babylon in the Sky” according to the editorial page.

Edmond Hamilton’s late work, Babylon in the Sky (1964), is not a great work. It may not even be a good work. And yet it is competently written and relatively short and to the point. If I were to choose a Hamilton work to recommend to a newcomer, it would not be this one. A better place to start would be among his wonderfully elegiac late works like Requiem (1962) and The Pro (1964); his bleak What’s It Like Out There? (1952); or, not to neglect his early pulp efforts, the melancholic In the World’s Dusk (1936), the superlatively fecund Alien Earth (1949), and his rip-snorting horror adventure—and first published work—The Monster-God of Mamurth (1926).

So why write about Babylon in the Sky? In short, you will lose little if you just skip reading it. Nonetheless, the work itself has a fascinating central conceit: a world split between the creative thinkers and doers ensconced in orbital cities, and the rest of the populace back on Earth rendered largely superfluous to the requirements of a fully automatic production process.

Why were we left behind? an earthbound lay preacher muses as the story opens:

Because we weren’t good enough. Because we don’t worship the right gods, the gods of the machine that can’t make a mistake. Because we don’t speak the right language and don’t have a lot of fancy letters after our names.

Unfortunately, Hamilton does little with his interesting premise. As has been pointed out by another reviewer, the story does not rise above banal propaganda, reading more like a compressed paean to an Ayn Randian division of the world, no doubt beloved of many a fascist SF fan-boi then and since. His viewpoint character, Hobie—literally hobbled by the hierarchical class structure projected into space—turns from anger at his treatment at the hands of the overlords of the Earth to one of actively accepting their rule, once everything has been rationally explained to him. Ah, science.

fig. 2. Two page spread opening the tale in Amazing Stories. The Lloyd Birmingham illustration is possibly the best thing about the story, fist raised against the sky…

I read Hamilton Babylon in the Sky hoping that I could find aspects that would resonate with the near contemporaneous “New Babylon” of that sometime member of the Situationist International, Constant Nieuwenhuys (aka “Constant”—see my discussion of the science fictional aspects of Constant’s “New Babylon” here). The resonance, though apparent in the story, transmits on an opposing wavelength. Whereas Constant’s New Babylon poses the breakdown of the capitalist hierarchy founded on alienated wage labour and the accumulation of capital, Hamilton’s Babylon in the Sky is the further projection of this self-same hierarchy into space. Indeed, the idea of the ruling elites ensconced in space cities above the bulk of humanity reminds me of nothing so much as Marx arguing—with and against Ludwig Feuerbach—that the divine hierarchy is no more than the earthly one projected into an imaginary beyond:

Feuerbach starts out from the fact of religious self-estrangement, of the duplication of the world into a religious world and a secular one. His work consists in resolving the religious world into its secular basis. But that the secular basis lifts off from itself and establishes itself as an independent realm in the clouds can only be explained by the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness of this secular basis. The latter must, therefore, itself be both understood in its contradiction and revolutionised in practice.[1]

In Hamilton’s story the ruling class have literally established themselves “as an independent realm in the clouds”. However, Hamilton’s rulers have finally resolved the “the inner strife and intrinsic contradictoriness” of their earthly basis: automation has rendered all manual labour superfluous. By the early 1960s the trope of the coming world of automation, material abundance and “leisure” had become something of a cliché, in the capitalist West as much as the state-socialist East. What today seems horribly naïve given the industrialised destruction of the planet alongside the ongoing domination and intensification of alienated work, was then a central plank of the reigning ideology.

In truth, the capitalist utopia of a world finally “freed” of labour is nothing more than the guilty conscience of a ruling class. Having turned the entire world into a vast workhouse of exploitation and profit, the capitalist class have long waxed lyrical about the moral and material benefits of an order built upon genocide, outright slavery, forced labour and concentration camps. That their order has produced more misery, not less, can today be simply gauged. After all, what other society has brought the entirety of the human species—amongst others—to the brink of mass extinction?

No doubt it is too much to leave these charges solely at Hamilton’s doorstep. That he produced an uninspired and even boring take on the question of automation, material abundance and the class division surely does not mark him out from many of his contemporaries. For more assured and interesting science fictional takes I would recommend Philip K. Dick’s Autofac (1955) or Frederick Pohl’s The Midas Plague (1954) for starters.

Hamilton is a peculiar figure in SF. From his first published fiction in 1926 he quickly established a reputation in the burgeoning pulp science fiction scene of the US in the late 1920s and 30s. He flourished throughout the 1930s and 40s, and reached a zenith of sorts with his dominant involvement in the Captain Future pulp series (1940-51), and the first of his Star Kings novels (1949). Hamilton’s star began to fade, however, under the impact of the so-called revolution brought on by John Campbell in the late 1930s and 40s. Nonetheless, Hamilton was never simply a one-dimensional pulpster. One of his great shorts, What’s It Like Out There? (1952), was worked up from an earlier draft dating from the 1930s. Its grim tone and downbeat ending found no home in the pulp scene of the ’30s and had to wait until the more stylistic tolerant 1950s—not to mention a substantial rewrite. Check out Joachim Boaz’s review and extensive discussion of this work for more information.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Karl Marx, ‘Theses on Feuerbach [1845]’, in Karl Marx & Frederich Engels Collected Works, Vol.5, New York: International Publishers, 1976, p. 4 (thesis 4).

critical theory, science fiction

CAPITALISM AS WILL AND HALLUCINATION

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fig. 1. Illustration by Leo Dillon and Diane Dillon. Taken from the original publication of Faith of Our Fathers in Dangerous Visions (1967). For more on Mao, see the situationist image and text, below.

Some thoughts on Philip K. Dick’s Faith of Our Fathers

Over the years I’ve found myself returning to a Philip K Dick short story called Faith of Our Fathers.  Or, to be more exact, I am haunted by the central conceit of this story. The idea at its heart resonates long after the details of the story begin to fade.

First published in 1967, in Harlan Ellison’s Dangerous Visions anthology, Dick imagines a future in which the Cold War has been won by the East. The protagonist is a minor bureaucrat in Vietnam. Though “protagonist” doesn’t get to the heart of Dick’s main characters, who are often thinly veiled versions of himself inextricably enmeshed and propelled by the situations they find themselves in, rather than being actors and shapers of plot and destiny. Anti-protagonists perhaps.

Of course, as so often happens in Dick’s fictional worlds, not all is as it seems. However, in Faith of Our Fathers, Dick elaborates a subtle transformation upon his familiar theme of the false and the true. As the protagonist at first suspects and soon discovers, the apparent world is not the real one. But rather than finding a single hidden truth, the protagonist discovers that the truth is multiple, ‘a variety of authentic experiences’ hidden by a single, consensual hallucination.

Here Dick is playing with the intuitive sense that reality is singular, unitary and most importantly objective—in the sense that there is only one reality, no matter how big or potentially infinite it is, and that its being is independent of a particular subjective experience of it. The concomitant of such objectivity in this case, is the idea that a false reality would almost certainly be the result of a subjective experience, whether through a defect in an individual’s perceptual capacities (e.g. as the result of a psychosomatic impairment like schizophrenia) or through the “external” alteration of perception (e.g. as the result of mind altering substances).

Dick upends this common sense in Faith of Our Fathers, insofar as he presents the false reality as singular, and in a way objective, whereas the true reality is multiple and subjective—though not exactly in the latter case. In later comments upon this work, Dick seemed more concerned with resolving his story’s conceit to the question of different subjective experiences of the one true divine reality.[1] Here, unfortunately, Dick offers a less interesting insight into his story, than the story alone. We do well to remember a comment of Marx’s: that we should not judge an individual merely by what they think about themselves, but rather by way of an examination of the conflictual social and material relations in which they find themselves.[2]

Indeed, it is the central conceit of Faith of Our Fathers and not Dick himself that speaks to us today (see some earlier comments of mine, here, on why I think we can use an author’s works for other purposes, even one’s at odds with the author’s intentions). Global capitalist society is the consensual hallucination that we have been submitted too, bolstered by the soporific ubiquity of money, wage labour, and the commodification of the entirety of our desires, no matter how mundane or extraordinary. Indeed, the singular achievement of pro-capitalists has been to cajole enough people into believing that there is no alternative to the rule of the market, and even more incredibly that its reign is in effect the most rational and even most natural form of human organisation. That the contemporary global market is a type of shared delusion, a hallucination in which we poor saps are drugged in a haze of commodity choices and the struggle to simply survive by means of—or in the absence of—waged labour, has become increasingly stark.

Living as we do in a world in which the West “won” the Cold War, what is perhaps most illuminating for us is the sense that such a victory resolved none of the underlying issues of the Cold War—in particularly, the purported success of the capitalist model. Indeed, this is far more obvious almost 30 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union than it was in the first few years of the 1990s. In this sense, the sheer mundanity of Dick’s imagined Eastern Bloc victory aptly describes both the banal triumphalism of the US in the wake of 1991, and the mundane horrors of globalisation and accelerating climate change that we have enjoyed as a consequence.

To be clear: in no way am I advocating for the so-called “communism” of the Eastern Bloc that Dick himself found repellent. Undoubtedly, the people of the old Soviet Union suffered under a hallucinatory nightmare version of “communism” that was cynically used by Stalin and his successors to mollify the truth of the continued existence of all the old garbage of class society. If we dig down into the reality of life in the Soviet Union, what is clear is that the working classes had little or no control over the state or the economy, a state of affairs conspicuously reminiscent of the “free” West.[3] Indeed, the symmetry of the contending sides of the Cold War was a common trope in some of Dick’s greatest works of the 1950s and 60s. Dick’s novel The Penultimate Truth (1964) is perhaps the best exploration of this theme. Also check out the brilliant short story Foster, You’re Dead! (1955) regarding one of the more egregious stupidities of the Cold War in the US.[4]

To be honest, it’s been some time since I last read Faith of Our Fathers. The detail fades, the central conceit is crystal clear. Time for a reread.

fig. 2. Image and text taken from the article ‘Le point d’explosion de l’idéologie en Chine’ in Internationale Situationniste no. 11, October 1967. Translation of the article available here. Translation by me of the text accompanying the illustration, below.

PORTRAIT OF ALIENATION

This Chinese mass, arranged in such a way that in itself it composes a screen portrait of Mao, can be considered as a limit case of the concentrated spectacle of state power (see Internationale Situationniste no. 10, pages 44 and 45), of which “in the under-developed zone… all that is [considered] admirable is gathered together in ideology and—at the extreme—in a single man… to be applauded and consumed passively.” Here the fusion of the spectator and the image of contemplation seem to have attained a police-like perfection. Sometime later, by believing it useful to go even further beyond this degree of concentration, the Chinese bureaucracy was able to leap over the machine.

FOOTNOTES

[1] Additionally, Dick was keen to distance himself from those commentaries that tried to assert that he was advocating for the Eastern Bloc’s victory in the Cold War. See the Notes to both versions of Dick’s Collected Short Stories. Here, I’m referring to Volume 5 of the Subterranean Press 2014 edition of The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, ‘We Can Remember It For You Wholesale’, pp. 472-73.

[2] See, Karl Marx, Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy (1859).

[3] Note I am not advocating for a working-class state. However, the far more interesting and tricky question of the self-abolition of the working class, and the destruction of the capitalist state and economy in the red heat of communism is for another time.

[4] In this regard, also see the Situationist International, Geopolitics of Hibernation (1962).