The fault in our stars

Earlier this week, the writer Eric Vilas-Boas wrote an emotional essay for TV Guide about a personal crisis that was recently catalyzed by an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. In “Far Beyond the Stars,” Commander Benjamin Sisko—played, as always, by Avery Brooks, who also directs—hallucinates that he’s really Benny Russell, a black science writer living in New York in the fifties. The story aired for the first time on February 11, 1998, but even after over twenty years, its themes are still uncomfortably close to home, as Vilas-Boas observes: “The halls of magazines and newspapers remain difficult to break into without (white, often male) contacts or mentors. Just from my experience alone, that’s often meant policing my own behavior to appear more ‘white’ and less threatening: straightening my hair, cutting my hair, or holding my tongue in meetings when I’ve heard something unquestionably offensive.” And after quoting the extraordinary speech that Russell delivers toward the end, in a single unbroken take that amounts to some of the best work of Brooks’s career, Vilas-Boas writes:

I can’t think about that last line [“You can pulp a story but you cannot destroy an idea. Don’t you understand? That’s ancient knowledge.”] without crying. I can’t think about it without thinking about what ancient knowledge has been destroyed in the systemic abuse of marginalized peoples. I can’t watch that episode without thinking about the times I felt most worthless and undeserving of my jobs as a writer and editor in white-dominant workplaces. I can’t watch Russell’s plaintive bargaining with his editor over his stories without thinking about times I’ve policed myself in the process to appear less aggressive, less brown, less assertive, and less likely to cause problems, because of what I perceived as a clear power imbalance…That’s not an uncommon story, if you care to pay attention, but for people of color or other marginalized groups, it’s unavoidable.

Until yesterday, I had never seen “Far Beyond the Stars.” What prompted me to check it out last night, apart from the power of Vilas-Boas’s article, was a screen shot of René Auberjonois as Douglas Pabst, the editor of the fictional magazine Incredible Tales. The episode’s supporting characters are played by members of the show’s regular cast, many of whom are allowed to wear their real faces on camera for the first time—but Auberjonois is clearly made up and costumed to resemble John W. Campbell, down to the browline glasses. And the teleplay by Ira Steven Behr and Hans Beimler, based on a story by Marc Scott Zicree, is filled with affectionate nods to the pulps, along with a few forgivable inaccuracies. (Incredible is implausibly depicted as occupying a spacious, beautiful newsroom, with writers on salary typing up stories at their own desks. In reality, Campbell spent most of his career sharing a single tiny office with his assistant editor, Kay Tarrant, and there was little more than a spare chair for visitors. But it’s Sisko’s dream, after all, and it certainly looks great on television.) But Pabst’s response to Russell’s desire to write a story with a black protagonist rings all too true:

Look, Benny, I’m a magazine editor, I am not a crusader. I am not here to change the world, I’m here to put out a magazine. Now, that’s my job. That means I have to answer to the publisher, the national distributors, the wholesalers and none of them are going to want to put this story on the newsstand. For all we know, it could cause a race riot…The way I see it, you can either burn it or you can stick it in a drawer for fifty years or however long it takes the human race to become color-blind.

Earlier in the episode, Pabst expresses himself even more bluntly: “The average reader’s not going to spend his hard-earned cash on stories written by Negroes.”

And unfortunately, this isn’t much of an exaggeration. Russell inevitably reminds many viewers of Samuel R. Delany, and remarkably enough, the episode aired six months before the publication of Delany’s landmark essay “Racism and Science Fiction,” in which he shared a very similar anecdote from 1967:

I submitted Nova for serialization to the famous SF editor of Analog magazine, John W. Campbell, Jr. Campbell rejected it, with a note and phone call to my agent explaining that he didn’t feel his readership would be able to relate to a black main character. That was one of my first direct encounters, as a professional writer, with the slippery and always commercialized form of liberal American prejudice: Campbell had nothing against my being black, you understand…In the phone call Campbell made it fairly clear that this was his only reason for rejecting the book. Otherwise, he rather liked it.

In fact, Campbell was willing to print stories with black protagonists, notably Mack Reynolds’s “Black Man’s Burden” and its sequels—as long as all of its characters sounded just like John W. Campbell. Otherwise, he had minimal interest in diversifying the magazine. On May 1, 1969, he wrote to the fan Ron Stoloff: “If Negro authors are extremely few—it’s solely because extremely few Negroes both wish to, and can, write in open competition.” In the same letter, Campbell extended his views to the characters as well: “Think about it a bit, and you’ll realize why there is so little mention of blacks in science fiction; we see no reason to go saying ‘Lookee lookee lookee! We’re using blacks in our stories! See the Black Man! See him in a spaceship!’ It is my strongly held opinion that any Black should be thrown out of any story, spaceship, or any other place—unless he’s a black man. That he’s got no business there just because he’s black, but every right there if he’s a man.”

As I’ve noted here before, there are two implications here. The first is that all protagonists should be white males by default, a stance that Campbell might not even have seen as problematic—and even if race wasn’t made explicit, the magazine’s illustrations overwhelmingly depicted its characters as white. There’s also a clear sense that black heroes have to “earn” their presence in the magazine, which, given the hundreds of cardboard “competent men” that Campbell cheerfully featured over the years, is laughable in itself. In fiction, as in life, if you’re black, you’ve evidently got to be twice as good to justify yourself. Science fiction has come a long way in the last half century, but it still has room to grow, and you could even argue that the discussion about race within fan culture has degenerated since the first airing of “Far Beyond the Stars.” (The ongoing debate over programming at the upcoming World Science Fiction Convention only points to how fraught such issues remain.) Sisko’s closing monologue, in which he wonders if his entire world might exist only in Benny Russell’s imagination, is a little on the nose, but it’s a reminder that all of these stories emerged in response to similar hopes and fears. And at its best, science fiction can provide solace—or outrage—that we can put to use in our own lives. As Vilas-Boas concludes:

Six months later, I see a therapist regularly, largely to talk about my feelings, something that sounds like a cliché but is really a product of how much I’ve bottled up and held in every day of my life. I’ve had panic attacks since then, but I handle them better. In its own way, “Far Beyond the Stars” helped me set a rubric for them, to know that they have a prior trigger in my life, to recognize the world’s problems are not inextricably linked to my reactions to them. No matter how big or small, it would be Captain Sisko’s job to keep his cool and get his crew out of danger…And in the end, there’s no hiding. There’s only one thing I can do, in the words of Sisko: “Stay here and finish the job I started.”

Astounding Stories #21: Black Man’s Burden

Note: With less than half a year to go until the publication of Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction, I’m returning, after a long hiatus, to the series in which I highlight works of science fiction that deserve to be rediscovered, reappraised, or simply enjoyed by a wider audience. You can read the earlier installments here. 

“This never gets old,” T’Challa says in Black Panther, just before we see the nation of Wakanda in its full glory for the first time. It’s perhaps the most moving moment in this often overwhelmingly emotional film, and it speaks to how much of its power hinges on the idea of Wakanda itself. Most fictional countries in the movies—a disproportionate number of which seem to be located in Africa, South America, or the Middle East—are narrative evasions, but not here. As Ishaan Tharoor wrote recently in the Washington Post:

Wakanda, like many places in Africa, is home to a great wealth of natural resources. But unlike most places in Africa, it was able to avoid European colonization. Shielded by the powers of vibranium, the element mined beneath its surface that enabled the country to develop the world’s most advanced technology, Wakanda resisted invaders while its rulers constructed a beautiful space-age kingdom.

Or as the writer Evan Narcisse observed elsewhere to the Post: “Wakanda represents this unbroken chain of achievement of black excellence that never got interrupted by colonialism.” It’s imaginary, yes, but that’s part of the point. In his review, Anthony Lane of The New Yorker delivered a gentle rebuke: “I wonder what weight of political responsibility can, or should, be laid upon anything that is accompanied by buttered popcorn. Vibranium is no more real than the philosopher’s stone…Are 3-D spectacles any more reliable than rose-tinted ones, when we seek to imagine an ideal society?” But the gap between dreams and reality is precisely how the best science fiction—and Black Panther, along with so much else, is a kickass science fiction movie—compels us to see the world with new eyes.

The fiction published by the editor John W. Campbell rarely tackled issues of race directly, and the closest that it ever came was probably a series that began with Black Man’s Burden, the first installment of which ran in the December 1961 issue of Analog. It revolves around a coalition of African-American academics working undercover to effect social and political change in North Africa, with the ultimate goal of uniting the region in the scientific and cultural values of the West. The protagonist is a sociologist named Homer Crawford, who explains:

The distrust of the European and the white man as a whole was prevalent, especially here in Africa. However, and particularly in Africa, the citizens of the new countries were almost unbelievably uneducated, untrained, incapable of engineering their own destiny…We of the Reunited Nations teams are here because we are Africans racially but not nationally, we have no affiliations with clan, tribe, or African nation. We are free to work for Africa’s progress without prejudice. Our job is to remove obstacles wherever we find them. To break up log jams. To eliminate prejudices against the steps that must be taken if Africa is to run down the path of progress, rather than to crawl.

All of this is explained to the reader at great length. There’s some effective action, but much of the story consists of the characters talking, and if these young black intellectuals all end up sounding a lot like John W. Campbell, that shouldn’t be surprising—the author, Mack Reynolds, later said that the story and its sequels “were written at a suggestion of John Campbell’s and whole chunks of them were based on his ideas.” Many sections are taken verbatim from the editor’s letters and editorials, ranging from his musings on judo, mob psychology, and the virtues of the quarterstaff to blanket statements that border on the unforgivable: “You know, with possibly a few exceptions, you can’t enslave a man if he doesn’t want to be a slave…The majority of Jefferson’s slaves wanted to be slaves.”

We’re obviously a long way from Wakanda here—but although Black Man’s Burden might seem easy to hate, oddly enough, it isn’t. Mack Reynolds, who had lived in North Africa, was a talented writer, and the serial as a whole is intelligent, restrained, consistently interesting, and mindful of the problems with its own premise. To encourage the locals to reject tribalism in favor of modern science, medicine, and education, for instance, the team attributes many of its ideas to a fictional savior figure, El Hassan, on the theory that such societies “need a hero,” and by the end, Homer Crawford has reluctantly assumed the role himself. (There are shades not just of T.E. Lawrence but of Paul Atreides, whose story would appear in the magazine just two years later.) But he has few illusions about the nature of his work. As one of his colleagues puts it in the sequel:

Monarchies are of the past, and El Hassan is the voice of the future, something new. We won’t admit he’s just a latter-day tyrant, an opportunist seizing power because it’s there crying to be seized. Actually, El Hassan is in the tradition of Genghis Khan, Temerlane, or, more recently, Napoleon. But he’s a modern version, and we’re not going to hang the old labels on him.

Crawford mordantly responds: “As a young sociologist, I never expected to wind up a literal tyrant.” And Reynolds doesn’t pretend to offer easy solutions. The sequel, Border, Breed, Nor Birth, closes with a bleak denial of happy endings, while the concluding story, “Black Sheep Astray,” ends with Crawford, overthrown after a long rule as El Hassan, returning to start a new revolution among the younger generation, at the likely cost of his life. The leads are drawn with considerable care—even if Reynolds has a bad habit of saying that they look “surprisingly like” Joe Louis or Lena Horne—and their mere presence in Analog is striking enough that one prominent scholar has used it to question Samuel R. Delany’s claim that Campbell rejected one of his stories because “his readership would be able to relate to a black main character.”

Yet this overlooks the fact that an ambitious, messy, uncategorizable novel like Delany’s Nova is worlds apart from a serial that was commissioned and written to Campbell’s specifications. And its conceptual and literary limitations turn out to be closely related. Black Man’s Burden is constructed with diligence and real craft, but this doesn’t make its basic premise any more tenable. It interrogates many of its assumptions, but it doesn’t really question the notion of a covert operation to shape another country’s politics through propaganda, guerrilla action, and the assimilation of undercover agents into the local population. This isn’t science fiction. It’s what intelligence agencies on both sides were doing throughout the Cold War. (If anything, the whisper campaign for El Hassan seems primitive by contemporary standards. These days, the plan would include data analysis, viral messaging in support of favored policies or candidates, and the systematic weaponization of social media on the part of foreign nationals. What would be wrong with that?) By the story’s own logic, the project has to be run by black activists because the locals are suspicious of white outsiders, but there’s no suggestion that their underlying goals are any different—and if the same story would be unthinkable with a white protagonist, it implies that it has problems here that can’t be addressed with a change of race. It’s also characteristically evasive when it comes to how psychohistory actually works. Reading it again, I found myself thinking of what William Easterly writes in The White Man’s Burden:

A Planner thinks he already knows the answers; he thinks of poverty as a technical engineering problem that his answers will solve. A Searcher admits he doesn’t know the answers in advance…A Planner believes outsiders know enough to impose solutions. A Searcher believes only insiders have enough knowledge to find solutions, and that most solutions must be homegrown.

Planners still exist in foreign aid—but they can also edit magazines. Campbell was one of them. Black Man’s Burden was his idea of how to deal with race in Analog, even as he failed to make any effort to look for black writers who knew about the subject firsthand. And it worked about as well here as it did anywhere else.