Through this dissertation, US speculative fiction is examined as a discourse on migration under the assumption that the imagined worlds are predicated on the real world cultural context. Each of the chapters focused on a popular and awarded work in which a migrating “other” was defined as evil and analyzed the ways in which the work subverts that message and, by extension, the real world metanarratives of “othering.” Each of the works could easily be the focus of entire dissertations on their own, but analyzing them together allows for a broader context of speculative fiction and issues around US migration. While the works analyzed here may appear different on a surface level, each of them “speculate about circumstances quite different from our own, [to] confront problems relevant to present reality. Engaged works of speculative fiction may present other realities, but their alternative worlds will comment on this world” (Gill 81). Usually, the only differences between the genres of science and fantasy are matters “of rhetoric: the way an idea is introduced, the vocabulary used to describe it, the manner in which it is made in an element of the story” (Strategies of Fantasy 111). Saga balances the different terminology between the warring fantasy and science fiction planets within, actively depicting how closely related the use of science and magic is in speculative fiction from the first time it is used: the two sides attempting to destroy Hazel’s family just after she was born with either energy from laser guns or magic from swords and staves (Vaughan 17).
In each of the works analyzed, a speculative culture is created within a different, imagined history and location; the speculative culture forms a different world view and depicts “others” as outsiders to the culture. The commentary on real world migration comes from analyzing the imagined “other” and their interactions with the culture. In Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin, the free folk are trapped outside of civilization by an ancient Wall and rhetoric which strips them of humanity as they flee a supernatural threat; depicting that the true threat is not the immigrant, but what is forcing them to flee their home. In American Gods by Neil Gaiman, old gods are dying out while new gods rise, representative of lost heritage to the expectation of immigrant assimilation into American culture. In Saga by Brian K. Vaughan, an interracial family is forced to seek refuge because their love undermines the racism fueling the intergalactic war; a testament that racial social constructions are arbitrary as it depicts their plight as asylum seekers. Brian Attebery defines speculative fiction’s ability to create symbols with some distance to reality as allowing moral and emotional truths to be told which “the conscious mind cannot grasp or fears to face” (Stories About Stories 21). If, as Janelle Marie Evans suggests,
“it falls to the arts to create both a new framework for encompassing humanity and a new language whereby that same humanity may be examined, discussed, and— eventually— understood, without the incorporation of an arbitrary measuring tool or scale of comparison, which must necessarily define some of falling short of what is required to be included in the definition of humanity” (Evans 145-146)
then the works of speculative fiction, in their use of symbolism, are already making an effort to encompass humanity through varied invented ethnicities and alien races. Recognizing the exploration of “the other” as they cross borders is taking the depictions in the works seriously.
In speculative fiction, the real world is taken and reformed in an imaginative sense, allowing for more thoughtful and meaningful experiments of morality, empathy, and societal structure than can be provided through the kinds of thought experiments usually provided by ethicists and other philosophers (de Smedt and de Cruz 64). The context provided by speculative fiction provides enough distance from reality to create powerful symbols which, ideally, bring about a greater understanding of the real world and a greater empathy of the real people in it. Literary speculative fiction, through its use of imagination, allows the reader to examine worlds of specifically chosen values; through this examination, the reader has the ability to examine the gap between reality and the created world. Through the imagined visualizations, the reader explores options for what a better world could look like. Instead of seeing people as irreconcilably different due to national, ethnic, or racial boundaries, readers of speculative fiction are exposed to faults in culture formation which creates these boundaries. By crossing the borders of reality into speculative fiction, learning to be empathetic for characters who are distinctly different, the reader will ideally be more willing to view real people who are different with empathy. The popularity of the works, including the awards earned, recognizes how successful their creators are in these explorations. This ideally means that the messages of empathy are taken seriously as the works spread; that they will not be seen as diminished by their use of the imagination.
The greatest obstacle to this goal is the fact that speculative fiction is often derided as “fluff” with no insight into reality.
“those who don’t or can’t read fantasy consider themselves superior to it and to the rest of us— as if color-blind people were to declare the use of red and green to be an aesthetic defect. The tremendous popularity of popular fantasy texts only tends to make those color-blind people even more resentful” (Stories About Stories 1).
While there are works of speculative fiction which are “non-literary,” works in other genres fall short of literariness without limiting others; the worst works of the western genre do not diminish Cormac McCarthy’s. What makes the works of speculative fiction unique is their ability to ease discussions of “the other,” including representations of migration. These discussions expound on the real cultural implications of these stories. “Whether fantasy can effect political change or not is ultimately beside the point… these novels perform the critical work of symbolic action, denoting the public work of private imagination” (Saldívar 595). While there is a recent movement of considering speculative works seriously, there is still a relative lack of academic works within the genre and more study needs to be done in creating frameworks for understanding how speculative fictions depict truths about reality. This analysis hopefully paves the way for more serious academic work in speculative fiction which considers its texts as cultural artifacts created within a cultural context with the ability to create an awareness of cultural powers, including identity formation and exclusion.
(Thank you for reading!)
Works Cited
Anzaldua, Gloria. “Borderlands/La Frontera.” Literary Theory: an Anthology, Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd Ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 1017-1030.
Attebery, Brian. Stories About Stories: Fantasy & the Remaking of Myth. Oxford University Press, 2014.
– -. Strategies of Fantasy. Indiana University Press, 1992.
Baldwin-Edwards, Martin. “Towards a Theory of Illegal Migration: Historical and Structural Components.” Third World Quarterly, vol. 29, no. 7, 2008, pp. 1449-1459.
Bartram, David, et al. Key Concepts in Migration. Sage Publications Ltd., 2014.
Cadge, Wendy and Elaine Howard Ecklund. “Immigration and Religion.” Annual Review of Sociology, vol. 33, 2007, pp. 359-379.
Carroll, Siobhan. “Imagined Nation: Place and National Identity in Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.” Extrapolation, vol. 53, no. 3, 2012, pp. 307-326.
Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature?: Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA, vol. 123, no. 2, Modern Language Association, 2008, pp. 452-465.
Chute, Hillary and Marianne Dekoven. “Comic Books and Graphic Novels.” The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, Edited by David Glover and Scott McCracken, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 175-195.
Cohen, Robin. Migration and its Enemies: Global Capital, Migrant Labour, and the Nation-State. Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2006.
De Bertodano, Helena. “The Magazine Interview: the American Gods and Coraline Author Neil Gaiman on His Outsider Status and Open Marriage.” The Sunday Times, 25 Feb. 2018. Accessed 2 Mar. 2018.
de Ruiter, Brian. “A Defense Against the “Other”: Constructing Sites on the Edge of Civilization and Savagery.” Game of Thrones Versus History: Written in Blood, Edited by Brian A. Pavlac, John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2017, pp. 85-93.
de Smedt, Johan and Helen de Cruz. “The Epistemic Value of Speculative Fiction.” Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Wiley Periodicals Inc., 2015, pp. 58-77.
Ditlmann, Ruth K et al. “Heritage- and Ideology-based National Identities and Their Implications for Immigrant Citizen Relations in the United States and Germany.” International Journal of Intercultural Relations, vol. 35, Elsevier Ltd., 2010, pp. 395-405.
Emery, Jennifer Kelkres and Jocelyn Evans. “‘We Shall Overcome’: the Districts of Panem and Identity Politics in The Hunger Games.” Poli Sci Fi: An Introduction to Political Science Through Science Fiction, Edited by Michael A. Allen and Justin S. Vaughn, Routledge, 2016, pp. 156-168.
Evans, Janelle Marie. “Questing to Understand the Other Without “Othering”: An Exploration of the Unique Qualities and Properties of Science Fiction as a Means for Exploring and Improving Social Inequity.” Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 16, no. 1, 2018, pp. 144-156.
Flood, Alison. “Game of Thrones: an Epic Publishing Story.” The Guardian, 5 Aug. 2016. Accessed 19 May 2018.
Gabbert, Lisa. “Legend Quests and the Curious Case of St. Ann’s Retreat: the Performative Landscape.” Putting the Supernatural in Its Place: Folklore, the Hypermodern, and the Ethereal, Edited by Jeannie Banks Thomas, The University of Utah Press, 2015, pp. 146-169.
Gaiman, Neil. American Gods. Headline Book Publishing, 2001.
Gibbs, Adrienne. “Tracking the Books to TV Trend: American Gods, Shannara, and GoT.” Forbes, 30 Apr. 2017, https://www.forbes.com/sites/adriennegibbs/2017/04/30/tracking-the-books-to-tv-trend-american-gods-shannara-got/. Accessed 20 May 2018.
Gill, R.B.. “The Uses of Genre and the Classification of Speculative Fiction.” Mosaic: a Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature, vol. 46, no. 2, 2013, pp. 71-85.
Glover, David and Scott McCracken. “Introduction.” The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 1-14.
Gumpta, Suman. “Literary Studies and Globalization.” Global Literary Theory: an Anthology, Edited by Richard J. Lane, Routledge, 2013, pp. 867-875.
Haney López, Ian F. “The Social Construction of Race.” Literary Theory: an Anthology, Edited by Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan, 2nd Ed., Blackwell Publishing, 2004, pp. 964-974.
Holmes, Seth M. “‘Is It Worth Risking Your Life?’: Ethnography, Risk and Death on the U.S.-Mexico Border.” Social Science and Medicine, vol. 99, 2013, pp. 153-161.
Jackson, Rosemary. Fantasy: the Literature of Subversion. Methuen & Co. Ltd., 1981.
Keller, Gary D.. “Running the United States-Mexico Border: 1909 Through the Present.” Studies in 20th Century Literature, vol. 25, no. 1, H. W. Wilson Company, 2001, pp. 63-90.
Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. “Studying Immigrant and Ethnic Folklore.” Handbook of American Folklore, Edited by Richard M. Dorson, Indiana University Press, 1986, pp. 39-47.
Larrington, Carolyne. Winter is Coming: the Medieval World of Game of Thrones. I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2016.
Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. The Women’s Press, 1989.
“Locus Index.” Locus Publications, 1997. https://web.archive.org/web/20081201034720/http://www.locusmag.com/SFAwards/Db/LocusWinsByCategory.html#nvlf%23nvlf Accessed 19 May 2018.
Luckhurst, Roger. “The Public Sphere, Popular Culture, and the True Meaning of the Zombie Apocalypse.” The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, Edited by David Glover and Scott McCracken, Cambridge University Press, 2012, pp. 68-87.
Lushkov, Ayelet Haimson. You Win or You Die: the Ancient World of Game of Thrones. I.B. Tauris & Co. Ltd., 2017.
MacNeil, William P.. “Machiavellian Fantasy and the Game of Laws.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2015.
Marshall, Kate. “Atlas of a Concave World: Game of Thrones and the Historical Novel.” Critical Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2015.
Martin, George R.R.. A Game of Thrones. Harper Voyager, 1996.
Martin, George R.R. et al. The World of Ice and Fire: the Untold History of Westeros and The Game of Thrones. Harper Voyager, 2014.
Meyer, Christina. “Un/Taming the Beast, or Graphic Novels (Re)Considered.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to Theory and History of the Graphic Narrative, Edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, De Gruyter, 2013, pp. 271-300.
Nabizadeh, Golnar. “Visualizing Risk in Pat Grant’s Blue: Xenophobia and Graphic Narrative.” Textual Practice, vol. 31, no. 3, 2017, pp. 537-552.
Pulitano, Elvira. “In Liberty’s Shadow: the Discourse of Refugees and Asylum Seekers in Critical Race Theory and Immigration Law/Politics.” Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power, vol. 20, no. 2, 2013, pp. 172-189.
Rata, Irina. “‘Only the Gods are Real’: The Mythopoeic Dimension of Neil Gaiman’s American Gods.” Romanian Journal of English Studies, vol. 13, no. 1, 2016, pp. 35-44.
Reynolds, Alastair. “Space Opera: This Galaxy Ain’t Big Enough for the Both of Us.” Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: the Sub-genres of Science Fiction, Edited by Keith Brooke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 12-25.
Robson, Justina. “Aliens: Our Selves and Others.” Strange Divisions and Alien Territories: the Sub-genres of Science Fiction, Edited by Keith Brooke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2012, pp. 26-38.
Rumbaut, Ruben G. “Assimilation and Its Discontents: Between Rhetoric and Reality.” The International Migration Review, vol. 31, no. 4, 1997, pp. 923-960.
Saldívar, Ramón. “Historical Fantasy, Speculative Realism, and Postrace Aesthetics in Contemporary American Fiction.” American Literary History, vol. 23, no. 3, 2011, pp. 574-599.
Thon, Jan-Noël. “Who’s Telling the Tale? Authors and Narrators in Graphic Narrative.” From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon, 2nd ed., 2015, pp. 67-99.
Vaughan, Brian K. Saga. Illustrated by Fiona Staples, lettering and design by Fonografiks, coordinated by Eric Stephenson, Book 1, Image Comics, 2014.
Walkowitz, Rebecca L.. “The Location of Literature: the Transnational Book and the Migrant Writer.” Global Literary Theory: an Anthology, Edited by Richard J. Lane, Routledge, 2013, pp. 918-929.
Warnes, Christopher. Magical Realism and the Postcolonial Novel: Between Faith and Irreverence. Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
Wolk, Douglas. Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Da Capo Press, 2007.
Wright, Matthew. “Policy Regimes and Normative Conceptions of Nationalism in Mass Public Opinion.” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 44, no. 5, 2011, pp. 598-624.
Storyscribe 