The Resistance

By Nick Hubble 

It might seem rather strange to start writing a column for Vector focusing on sf as a fiction of practical resistance to capitalist realism and oppression in a special issue on sf and modernism. After all, isn’t modernism the literature of the metropolitan elites? Influential books such as John Carey’s The Intellectuals and the Masses (1992) and Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) certainly make this case. The latter argues that writers from the educated classes sought to maintain their elite status in the face of challenges from the masses by creating modernism, ‘a body of literature and art deliberately made too difficult for a general audience’ (393). His illustrative list of such elitists includes T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound, but also less obviously conservative writers, such as H.G. Wells and Virginia Woolf.

While Wells was educated, he was hardly from the educated classes, being the son of a shopkeeper and domestic servant. His brilliant novel Tono-Bungay, charting the rise and fall of a quack medicine, was serialised from 1908 in Ford Madox Ford’s English Review, one of the foundational modernist magazines. The lively style of first-person narrative Wells adopted for the novel was highly influential on the work of modernist writers, including Ford’s own The Good Soldier (1915). Yet far from being deliberately difficult in order to deter general readers, Wells was a popular writer who expressed the dreams of millions who aspired to escape from the class-bound hierarchies of the age  As George Orwell pointed out, reading Wells’s sf during the early years of the twentieth century at a time of lingering Victorian values and moral hypocrisy was a liberating experience because he ‘knew that the future was not going to be what respectable people imagined’ (171). 

One feature that modernism and sf share is a resistance to the capitalist conception of time: the relentless metronomic recording by the factory or office clock of the seconds, minutes and hours of empty time to be filled by work. Instead, both genres enable the depiction of time as elastic: moments that stretch to encompass the entirety of eternity and epochs that pass in the blinking of an eye. The archetypal example of this latter phenomenon is Well’s The Time Machine (1895), in which his protagonist fast-forwards from Victorian London into a distant class-flipped future in which the Morlocks, evolved offspring of the workers, hunt and eat the descendants of their former masters, the Eloi. While the satire is savage, the experience of time travel itself is recorded in aesthetic terms through the hero’s description of watching ‘the moon spinning swiftly through her quarters from new to full’ before blurring into a ‘fluctuating band’ faintly visible against a ‘wonderful deepness of blue’ (17). 

Woolf similarly deploys the prose equivalent of time lapse photography in the ‘Time Passes’ section of To the Lighthouse (1926): ‘Poppies sowed themselves among the dahlias; the lawn waved with long grass; giant artichokes towered among the roses’ (150). Through such means she conveys the end of one stage of civilisation as elsewhere the First World War rages. The fact that she drafted these passages during the nine days of the General Strike in 1926 is itself an implicit comment on the fragility of a capitalist realism which otherwise often seems inescapable. As Kim Stanley Robinson has highlighted, Woolf corresponded with, and was influenced by, Olaf Stapledon and passages in her work can clearly be read as sf. 

Unlike Wells, Woolf was from the educated classes but her own access to formal education was of course strictly limited on account of her gender. She reflects on this question in A Room of One’s Own (1929) and frames this discussion of her present not principally by acknowledging the positive changes of recent years but in terms of the as-yet unfulfilled possibilities of one hundred years in the future (i.e. in the 2020s) by when the norm might have become the sf scenario that ‘Chloe liked Olivia. They shared a laboratory together…’ (12). Like Wells, part of the appeal of Woolf was that she also knew that the future was not going to be ‘respectable’. In her vision of the years ahead, it is not so much class as the norms of gender and sexuality which are flipped and even rejected outright. Orlando, the 400+ year-old protagonist of her 1928 novel of that name, lives first as a man for a couple of centuries, then as a woman, understanding the flaws and advantages of both sexes while sometimes wondering ‘if she belonged to neither’ (122). 

Unsurprisingly, writers politicised by the radical experience of living during the 1930s drew upon both Wells and Woolf to combine modernist techniques, such as textual montage and first-person stream of consciousness, with near-future settings to depict the new social opportunities that would arise from the simultaneous transformation of both class and gender politics. Examples include John Sommerfield’s May Day (1936) and Naomi Mitchison’s We Have Been Warned (1935). However, the return to cultural dominance of more conventional realist approaches to fiction during the Second World War long left novels of this type looking like obscure anomalies unconnected to the traditions and genres that are used to control how literary history is understood. Indeed, even at the time of its publication, Mitchison’s frank representation of female social and sexual self-actualisation, set in locations including the Soviet Union, a fascist England and an independent socialist Scotland, proved too much for the literary establishment and she effectively had to exile herself from London as a result of the backlash. Although the Mitchison renaissance began a few years ago, it has taken until the 2020s, and the real-life emergence of the social transformations she foresaw, for her achievements to start gaining the recognition they deserve.

During the intervening years, modernism and sf have largely been confined to separate spheres despite some notable exceptions. The influence of literary modernism was clearly discernible during the New Wave of the 1960s, especially in the work of J.G. Ballard and Brian Aldiss. However, while the work of these writers was clearly resistant to the established political order of postwar Britain, it was not always clear what the political implications of that resistance were. Nor, on the whole, could their position on gender be linked to the feminist positions of Woolf or Mitchison. In this respect, Michael Moorcock, their editor at New Worlds came closer with his The Cornelius Quartet (1968-77), in which political resistance is directly linked to rejecting norms of gender and sexuality. However, the obvious landmark text in the conjoining of modernism and sf in the name of resistance was Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), published midway between the Woolfian 1920s and our present 2020s, poised tantalisingly on the threshold of a post-binary-gender future. 

Russ, as a scholar and teacher of modernism, was of course in part directly influenced by Woolf herself. However, there is no need for us to restrict Woolf’s well-known idea of ‘thinking back through our mothers’ to bioessentialist norms. One of the other ‘mothers’ that Russ thought back through was Wells, who is a direct influence on the idea of trans-temporal agency running throughout a number of her stories and novels, beginning with ‘The Second Inquisition’ (1970). In this story, a sixteen-year-old girl growing up in the USA of 1925 is apparently visited by a woman, a Trans-Temp Agent, from the future. During a discussion between the two about The Time Machine, the girl asks the visitor if she is an Eloi or, as she suspects, a Morlock and the latter confirms that she is indeed a Morlock, simultaneously a figure of terror and a transformed future.

The ambiguous figure of the Trans-Temp Agent returns in Russ’s most famous novel, The Female Man (1975), in the form of Jael, who tells the other J’s, Joanna, Jeannine and Janet (alternate fictional versions of Russ herself), that the reason there are no men in the utopian Whileaway of the future is because she and her ‘Womanland’ contemporaries defeated ‘Manland’ in a war of extermination. Viewed from the twenty-first century this might look like a problematic instance of radical feminist essentialism but there is no reason for us to assume that Russ regards Jael as other than an unreliable narrator. Moreover, Russ’s later story ‘What Did You Do During the Revolution, Grandma?’ (1983) reworks one of Jael’s Trans-Temp interludes from The Female Man to imagine a reality in which women and men are fighting together for change. In Joanna Russ (2019), Gwyneth Jones asks whether this might mean that the possibility of a no longer exclusively female Whileaway ‘has become “more probable” for Russ than ‘“Manland versus Womanland’s” mutually assured destruction?’ (153)

Jones argues that Russ herself was a Trans-Temp Agent, committed to enacting resistance to the dominant social order and driving change from within the sf community of the 1970s ‘as an exceptional woman in a male-ordered organisation’ (111).  While that struggle to transcend the gendered, sexual and social norms of capitalist realism continues, the context has radically changed since Russ’s time. In many ways, we’re closer to that goal and have moved beyond the essentialism that is still evident in some of her work. The apparent setbacks of recent years – Trump, Brexit and other manifestations of reactionary populism – are actually violent backlashes to progressive change rather than genuine political shifts in their own right. Or, to put it another way, rather than the situation, which characterised most of the twentieth century, of there being a dominant established order which upheld strong social norms, we now live in a world of competing realities, which means the context for resistance has shifted. We can see how this changed context applies to today’s sf by analysing a contemporary novel drawing on the approaches of Russ and other predecessors, Lauren Beukes’s Bridge (2023). 

In an interview with Nerd Daily, Beukes discussed her inspiration for Bridge as coming in part from the realisation that we are currently living through a period of cultural schism between large groups of people holding incompatible views that is getting continually wider: ‘The truth (in a post-truth era) is that we already live in alternate realities from each other’. Beukes does not attempt to effect some sort of fantasy resolution but instead turns to the conjoined legacy of modernism and sf to help us think through this state of affairs as one of the consequences of a situation in which large enough numbers of people now understand their lives as temporally and socially complex that the normative capitalist understanding of reality – calendar time, the gender binary, fixed (hetero)sexual identities – is under threat.

The novel begins with titular heroine Bridge (short for Bridget) struggling to sort out the cluttered apartment of her recently deceased mother, Jo, while still recovering from years of therapy. However, it quickly transpires that her memories of taking trips as a child with Jo to parallel universes are not in fact delusional but were enabled by ingesting flakes of the otherworldly ‘dreamworm’ that she finds hidden away. Bridge becomes obsessed with jumping between multiple realities and thereby finding one in which her mom is still alive, despite their differences. Showing many different versions of Bridge caught up within the basic activities of everyday life, allows Beukes to explore women’s experiences in general. More specifically, by also including flashbacks to Jo’s alternate experiences, the novel reveals the complex historicity of each passing moment of time as a set of branching mother-daughter relationships.

In Bridge, Beukes uses alternative versions of Jo’s name, such as Joanne and Jo-Anne, to indicate that we are in a particular timeline. This invites us to read the novel as an allusion to The Female Man and its four ‘Js’. In the same manner that Russ sets up an intricate interplay between four fictional versions of herself in order to think herself beyond gender-role dominance, Beukes switches between a dizzying array of mother-daughter combinations – many of which are difficult relationships – to find the ones that work across different cultural contexts. Therefore, we may consider Beukes to be thinking back through her metaphorical mother, Russ, in creating these multidimensional temporal relationships as a way to ‘bridge’ across sometimes difficult cultural and binary divides.

The practical utility of novels such as Bridge, therefore, like the above-mentioned works by Wells, Woolf, Mitchison and Russ, is that they don’t just provide us with a compensatory escapist resolution to our everyday-life problems but they also teach us about the temporality and the mutability of the social norms that construct our reality. Reading this type of sf attunes us to those moments when the ‘joins’ show because something that happens makes us suddenly aware that there has been a shift in social and political attitudes. For a brief moment we become aware that everything will now change, even as the way the world is framed for us – by the media and governments – is designed to reconfigure itself as seamlessly as possible in the shape of this new reality. Every time we become aware of such fissures in social reality is a reminder that resistance to capitalist norms is possible and that we can live freely and differently.   

Nick Hubble is an academic and critic, whose books include The Proletarian Answer to the Modernist Question (2017) and (co-edited with Esther MacCallum-Stewart and Joe Norman) The Science Fiction of Iain M. Banks (2018). Nick has written for Strange Horizons, Foundation, Parsec, Los Angeles Review of Books, and The BSFA Review. They are on Twitter as @Contempislesfic. 

Works Cited

Lauren Beukes, ‘Q&A’. Nerd Daily: https://thenerddaily.com/lauren-beukes-author-interview/ Accessed 9 Mar 2024

Gwyneth Jones. Joanna Russ. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019.

George Orwell. Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters. Volume 2. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970.

Jonathan Rose. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001.

H.G. Wells. The Time Machine. London: Everyman Library. 

Virginia Woolf. Orlando. Hammersmith: Grafton Books, 1977

Virginia Woolf. A Room of One’s Own / Three Guineas. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2000.

Virginia Woolf. To the Lighthouse. Hammersmith: Grafton Books, 1977