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New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel pp 195–215Cite as

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Post-national Futures in National Contexts: Reading ‘British’ Fictions of Artificial Intelligence

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Abstract

This chapter explores how the vaunted ‘British Boom’ of science fiction of the late 1990s relates to more regional visions of the future from authors within a post-devolutionary United Kingdom. Despite situating British science fiction in contrast to science fiction productions from the US or Europe, the ‘British Boom’ elided the role of such regional visions, and this piece examines whether regionality has any place in a genre more generally known for its ‘far future,’ post-national settings. Addressing representations of Artificial Intelligence in three works by Neal Asher, Iain M. Banks, and Alastair Reynolds, it considers the role of science fiction’s ‘visions’ in such geographical and political contexts, and more broadly queries the role of location-based identity politics within new British and Anglophone science fiction.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    It is worth noting the distinction here between ‘devolution’ as political process of devolving powers to regional assemblies, and ‘devolution’ as it is more usually used within sf, as the degeneration of humanity to a lesser state. See, for example, the entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction on ‘devolution.’

  2. 2.

    For more, see, Jack Fennell’s Irish Science Fiction (2014) or his “A Short Guide to Irish Science Fiction” (2016) produced for Dublin’s 2019 Worldcon; Iwan Morus’ blog post, “Y Dydd Olaf (The Last Day),” discussing Owain Owain’s Y Dydd Olaf (1976) as part of the Unsettling Scientific Stories project; and Tim Armstrong’s Air Cuan Dubh Drilseach (2013), which is interestingly omitted from the National Library of Scotland’s “Science Fiction in Scotland” webpage. The Irish context is, of course, even more complicated due to the political distinctions between Ireland and Northern Ireland, and as a result this piece will not deal with the ‘Irish’ side of British sf in much detail.

  3. 3.

    The ‘American’ and ‘European’ adjectives also present difficulties: To what extent is it legitimate to assume that a text written by an African-American sf writer from Texas exhibits similar characteristics to that by an African-American sf writer from the Bronx, or that French and German sf can be collapsed into one category, let alone then be categorised as ‘European,’ without even beginning to consider intersectionality, identity politics, and individual differences? Note also that, as Stephen Baxter writes in his contribution to the special issue, “Baby Boomers,” “[What] influenced me in this process wasn’t other writers, who I hadn’t even known existed, but the culture of the time and the place” (2003, 482); the ‘culture’ that informs an author is not necessarily one that is contemporaneous with a text’s production but also from the writer’s personal experiences of ‘culture’ as they were growing up.

  4. 4.

    As Fredric Jameson writes, “[Sf narratives] go about their business with the full baggage and paraphernalia of a conventional realism, with this one difference: That the full ‘presence’—the settings and actions to be ‘rendered’—are the merely possible and conceivable ones of a near or far future” (1982, 151). That is, sf texts are products of the cultures that write them and reveal what that culture considers to be an imaginable future, but are otherwise as ‘realist’ as those texts that they are so often compared negatively against.

  5. 5.

    While this might be said to link to the Anthropocene, and although sf’s engagement with the Anthropocene is clear through debated sub-genres such as ‘cli-fi,’ it seems rather that such future visions are, as note 4 attests more often a product of a particular cultural perception on the future. Visions of diversity such as those seen in Afrofuturism are still, unfortunately, more often than not on the fringes of mainstream sf production.

  6. 6.

    For instance, Banks’ ‘literary fiction’ from The Wasp Factory onwards is often set in Scotland, and although some ‘Scottish’ sf writers have utilised this setting (notably Smith and Stross), Banks’ brand of sf is space opera and thus set in the wider universe. Of his literary fiction, perhaps the most overt link to a sense of ‘Scottish sf’ are Walking on Glass (1985) and The Bridge (1986), both of which clearly focus on ‘fantastic’ worlds as allegories and reflections of their protagonists and their contexts.

  7. 7.

    ‘Space Opera’ might be loosely described as large-scale (epic) sf, set against the backdrop of vast swathes of time and/or vast reaches of space, spanning civilizations, and species. The texts studied here are perhaps more usefully and precisely situated as ‘New Space Opera.’ For more, see The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction’s definition and Winter 2016.

  8. 8.

    For some recent articles on key texts and tropes, see, for example, Gutiérrez-Jones (2014) on ‘kinship’ and Pavani (2018) on the ‘man-machine.’

  9. 9.

    See Banks’ Consider Phlebas (1987), which provides a timeline alongside its plot (the Culture-Idirian War) to draw corollaries with the periods of the Crusades. Other texts mention this war in terms of how long ago it was, and a rough periodisation in relation to the Common Era can be established.

  10. 10.

    Despite the policy of ‘non-intervention’ that the Morthanveld and Nariscene uphold, it is worth noting that Bank’s Culture novels—including Matter—are fundamentally concerned with interventions by the Culture. Within Matter, the book opens with one such intervention, and it is revealed that the Sarl has already been pushed in a particular direction by a Culture visitor (193). “Contact,” and its sub-group “Special Circumstances,” occupy a special place within Culture society, and see as their remit the necessity of intervention under given conditions.

  11. 11.

    For more on Asher’s AI and its ‘steering’ of Human society, the most obvious texts are the first three Polity novels, the Agent Cormac series, running from Gridlinked (2001) to Line War (2008). For probably the most overt examples of AI steering society from Banks’ Culture series, see Consider Phlebas (1987) and Excession (1996).

  12. 12.

    In relation to the Polity, Asher states in an interview with “DJ” (2017) that “all ills have been cured, life is potentially eternal, there is no lack of resources, space ships travel between worlds FTL through U-space while from world to world there are instantaneous transmission gates called runcibles. However, at the Polity border and beyond, things are not so utopian.”

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  1. Department of English, University of Liverpool, Liverpool, UK

    Will Slocombe

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  1. Will Slocombe
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Correspondence to Will Slocombe .

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  1. English Literatures and Cultures, University of Stuttgart, Stuttgart, Germany

    Sibylle Baumbach

  2. Anglophone Literatures, Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf, Düsseldorf, Germany

    Birgit Neumann

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Slocombe, W. (2019). Post-national Futures in National Contexts: Reading ‘British’ Fictions of Artificial Intelligence. In: Baumbach, S., Neumann, B. (eds) New Approaches to the Twenty-First-Century Anglophone Novel. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32598-5_11

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