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I'm your host, Stephen Doseman, and today I'm joined by Andrew Milner to discuss his recent anthology again, Dangerous Visions, Essays in Cultural Materialism. The anthology collects over two dozen essays of his, stretching back to 1981 up to the present, and covers topics ranging from the sociology of literary studies, political and theoretical transitions of leftist politics, and the politics surrounding science fiction. Milner is professor emeritus of English and comparative literature at Monash University, and is the author of over a dozen books, including Reimagining Cultural Studies and Locating Science Fiction. So Andrew Milner, welcome to The New Books Network.
Thank you very much. So before we dive in, could you maybe introduce yourself to listeners really quickly and just tell us a bit about what your main areas of research are? Yes, sure. I'm originally by training a sociologist in Britain, in fact, with the London School of Economics, but I emigrated to Australia in 1980, which is very long time ago now, and I moved slowly into comparative literature as a discipline.
So that's the field, I brought a field I work in as a sociologist of literature, actually. And I've been particularly interested in science fiction and in climate fiction, the last decade or so. Yeah, that's fine. So to start off, the book's subtitle is Essays in Cultural Materialism.
This term was coined by Melvin Harris and then developed by Raymond Williams. That term is likely unfamiliar to a lot of listeners. So to start off, can you maybe give a brief introduction to the key elements of it as a framework or methodology? Yeah, sure.
I'll make a slight comment first, though. Marvin Harris is certainly the first person to use the term, and so in a sense he does coin it, in anthropology as a discipline. But I don't think Williams or anybody else much in literary and cultural studies knew Harris as were. So I think there's a sense in which Williams coins the term too, but only a few years later.
And it's Williams' usage that I'm mainly working in because, like Williams, I'm a sort of sociologist of literature. What Williams' version of cultural materialism means, and there are similarities, by the way, between Harris and Williams. They both think they're important insights in the Marxist tradition, and they both think they're important flaws, which need substantially modifying. So they are analogous, but I think they're slightly different.
The crucial idea in Williams, which is, as I say, analogous to that in Harris, is that culture itself can be considered as a material practice, a material practice produced in institutions. Now to me, that sounds obviously true, but when you need to situate it in terms of a much longer intellectual history in which, if you think back at English literary criticism, or literary studies in other countries, or in Germany in Germany in particular, the idea of the literature was something that was completely independent from and opposed to the material world. And that's a philosophical superiority. And if you look back, you can see echoes of that in a philosophical tradition that you can take, and play to, and indeed lots of Christian thinkers.
The ideal is superior to the material. On the other hand, there is a long-standing materialist tradition, which sees ideas as a kind of reflection, or a consequence of material practices, a direct consequence. I think you can see that in Hobbes, in English, and in the long-standing English tradition of eutendism, Hobbes, Thomas Hobbes, and Jeremy Benferm, to some extent John Stuart Will. But also, you can see it in certain kinds of Marxism, especially in Engels, perhaps.
I'm not sure Marx is guilty of this, but he was certainly represented as being guilty of that by subsequent Marxists. Now, what Williams wants to argue, and he's not alone in this, but he's one of the key figures, is that actually all those aspects of cultural literature are themselves manufactured in material institutions, and they and themselves have material causes and consequences. They're not an effect of an economy somewhere else. They are themselves an important part of the material world.
That's the approach that I've always tended to take towards literary studies. Does that answer the question? To move into some of the more specific stuff you write about, early on you write that there is a certain polarization between literary, with a capital L, studies, and cultural studies, particularly in terms of both what counts as a text worth studying and how those texts should be approached. Can you unpack this debate a bit, and where, given your background and research interests, you find yourself in it?
Yes, sure. The first thing that says that literary studies, contemporary cultural studies, really grows out of literary studies. But cultural studies, I mean, the broadest sense of the study of media and so on. If you go back, in Britain with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggett, in France with Ron Bart, in Germany with the Frankfurt School, Dornewin Hocha, and so on, what you find is a discourse that really begins focused on literature and the other arts, but then slowly broadens its scope to look at mass media texts, very often looking at them in a fairly hostile and critical fashion.
Now, that is the move, but not always hostile, by the way. It was very hostile for a Dornewin Hocha, but Williams and Hoggett in Britain, they were quite sympathetic to the importance of working class culture. So that's how cultural studies tends to develop in those three countries and also later in the industry. I think in the United States, certainly Williams and Hoggett too, I think I'd always intend to cultural studies to be about both elite culture and popular culture.
It was about literature, but also about television and so on. But as cultural studies have developed and expanded and become institutionalized in higher education itself, what you find is that it increasingly focused only on mass culture. And that prompts a kind of, there's a rift between literary studies and medium cultural studies, which prompts a backlash, certainly from some of the more elitist forms of literary studies. I think the bit you're citing is when I'm talking about Harold Bloom, and Bloom's the Western canon is a strong reaction against cultural studies.
There are lots of others as well. It's because the sense that cultural studies is kind of academic populism, it's a relativist. Where do I stand? Well, I clearly stand with Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggett.
I think the important thing is that literature and all the other forms, including the popular art forms, including the Massimic, are all social institutions that can always study sociologically. I think that has always seemed to me to be fairly obvious, but that's because I'm not actually trained in literary studies. I was trained in sociology, and I have the kind of approach towards social institutions that you pick up as a sociologist. I think Williams himself, all the trained in literary studies, eventually really models himself as a kind of sociologist.
But I started as a sociologist, so I found it easier to come to this position. The literature is a social practice amongst many other social practices. In one of your essays titled, The Protestant Epic and the Spirit of Capitalism, you turn to the poet Milton and his epic poetry to make sense of certain currents around the nature of the subject, trying to find the source of the bourgeois idea of a rational, independent individual. You also then develop this in relation to Milton's later question, that between advocating political quietism and activism.
So two part question here, what was the main thrust, earth, rust of Milton's idea of the subject and what sort of politics did Milton draw from this? Right. So I'm going to get questions. Let me just make an autobiographical observation.
One of the reasons I was interested in Milton, one of the reasons I was interested in Milton, one of the reasons I was interested in Milton, is that I come from a Protestant background, and he is a quintessentially Protestant thinker. So part of the answer to your first question is idea of the subject. It is very, very Protestant, not Calvinist, but a different kind of Protestantism. But Milton, the subject, the free subject, the subject, it's kind of analogous to written many day cards, the idea of a discrete rational individual.
This is what we are in our essential nature. We are free, we are reasoning, and we function as individuals, not as part of a tribal or a co-activity. But this free rationality, which is the way Milton sees God as having made human beings, it can be threatened internally by the passions, so that if we give away to our passions, then we lose our capacity to reason. And it can be threatened externally by tyranny, by tyrannical institutions.
So it becomes a very, it is very Protestant in its special individual, but not Calvinist, because there is no determinism here. But it is also very individualistic in opposition to institutions. It's not surprising that Milton becomes, in fact, a revolutionary radical during the English revolution. Now that leads me through into your second question.
Because of course Milton is and lives through the crisis of English absolutism, the civil war and the revolution and the republic, the Commonwealth, as it could call itself. So it is distinctly revolutionary for the Protestantism. Milton was a significant intellectual supporter of the Commonwealth government, the Holy of Cromwell, and before that a supporter of the revolution during the civil wars. He wrote the official defences of republicanism and of regicide, the execution of the king.
He wrote these both in English for popular distribution in England and in Latin for distribution across Europe. So he was in many ways the intellectual most closely identified with the politics, certainly of the early years of the republic. And the monarchy is restored in 1660. The republic is declared in 1649.
Milton stoically resists the restoration of the monarchy. He does not. Well, out in the first few months he's imprisoned. He was very lucky to escape execution as a regicide.
But he hadn't actually signed the death warrants, and it was only those who signed the death warrants who were executed. But certainly it's a kind of radical Protestant revolutionary liberalism, if you like, which I suspect is today more familiar to or to Americans than it is to English people. I said that I'm a part of my attraction to Milton was my own Protestant background. I have to add to that I am myself a republican, which is not a good thing to be in England, but it's much better in Australia.
And it seems to me that that part of Milton's politics I'm closely attracted to, the utter content that he had for Charles Stewart and for the monarchy. Writing on postmodernism, you connect it to what you call apocalyptic hedonism as well as post-war methods of commodity production. And you want to pack your understanding of postmodernism here, and why do you think Australia was and given recent events likely still is emblematic of this understanding of postmodernism? Yeah, okay, good question.
My understanding of postmodernism isn't really terribly original. It's essentially borrowed from Frederick Jameson, the book on postmodernism that he wrote a long time ago, in which he argues that postmodernism is the cultural dominance of late capitalism. The 19th century of cultural dominance had been realism in the very late 19th and nearly 20th century, it's modernism, and after modernism, after the Second World War, essentially, it becomes postmodernism. Now, it's not just talking about artistic styles, although they are part of this.
It's also more background assumptions that come across all sorts of arts and philosophies and so on. One key feature is relativism, aesthetic relativism. And that ties into a kind of hedonism, hedonism, which matters, is what you enjoy, not what some overarching literary or a artistic or religious authority says you should enjoy. I think that's true.
I think our culture is increasingly relativistic, but it's also an aspect of that is hedonism. Now, I wonder why I think that's particularly true in Australia, but this happens to coincide, I mean, with the fear of nuclear catastrophe. It coincides with the Cold War. Jameson dates it from shortly after the Second World War, and that is the period of the Cold War, and of the fear, the widespread, popular mass fear of nuclear catastrophe, which has been all been subsequently by other fears, the fear of climate change, which in Australia plays after the fear of bushfires and floods at present.
So that was what I argue is that this coincidence of a hedonistic aesthetic with the fear of apocalypse, which creates apocalyptic hedonism. Now, I confess that I think this applies in other countries. I'm living in Australia when I come up with this view, and I do think that the Australia affects it very, very well. Firstly, Australia is a very affluent society.
Like in the early 1950s, by far the wealthiest countries with the capital in terms of the capital income on Earth, with the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, I think Britain eventually, but they're all above the Kingdom and above all European countries. It's a very affluent society. It is, I think, Australia now, I'm talking about quite specific, it is a very hedonistic society. We are a culture of pagan sun worship as more than we're Christians.
We're very religious by United States standards. We don't tend to go to church very often. We do go to the beach and to watch the football in the cricket. And that sense of hedonistic indulgence was something which really struck me when I came to Australia.
This is a land of beaches and barbecues. It's also however, in its deep culture, very frightened historically. Historically, Australia was frightened of Japan and China because it was an outpost of the British Empire at the wrong end of the planet, surrounded by, well, threatened by nearby Asian powers. The racism of Australian societies directed at China in the late 19th century and then in the 20th later on in Japan.
And this plays out as a desperate desire for amongst the European settlers and for a great and powerful friend in the first place, Britain and secondly, the United States. But the sense of threat remains real. And I think it's playing out slightly different way recently because the threat is increasingly seen as that of nature. Nature turning against us.
This terrible summer of bushfires, which we've just been through, bushfires of what Australia's called the wild fires. You call them wild fires, we call them bushfires. And we, more of Australia's burnt this last summer, which is your winter, than ever on record. There is a mass fear that we are threatened.
We were threatened by nuclear war. We are threatened by climate change. And this combination is extreme in Australia, more so than in Britain or I would guess in the United States. And that's when I'm talking about apocalyptic head in that essay.
I latched onto Neville Shoots book, Novel on the Beach, which is a famous Australian novel that became internationally famous. And it is one of the most impressive novels, science fiction novels, to deal with the threat of nuclear war. My sense about that novel is in bodies very nicely, this Australian combination, which I think is present in other cultures, took off on the one hand of pocket lyricism, but on the other hand, head in it. One of the big topics in many of the fields you engage is in the nature of the author.
You write at one point, quote, in Bordeaux, as in Williams, the effect of such cultural materialism is to de-center the artist as author so that the central question becomes the dynamic in a relationship between social structure, individual action, and cultural practice. And quote, this sparked my interest because you're bringing up a lot of really interesting dynamics regarding the nature of the author and the subject as being kind of in a certain balloon and the possibilities for expressing agency. So I'd be curious to hear you want to pack a bit about these dynamics you bring up and to use your terms, you talk about habitus or structure feeling. Can you kind of unpack this a little bit?
Yeah, sure. I mean, the night of those terms is mine. Habitus is be able to do and structure feeling is Raymond Williams. And I use both, especially structure feeling.
I think what Williams means by structure feeling, he's interested in the way in which, in any particular time and place, the background assumptions, before we get to this particular ideological positions, the background assumptions are sometimes socially shared and they're not there in other places and times. One of the things he talks about in England in the 19th century is that whether you were on the political right or the political left, whether you were for it or against it, you weren't always aware, conscious of the absolute centrarity of the new science and technologies to the developing culture has exemplified crucially about the expansion of the railway system. Now, I think that's very interesting because what structure feeling does in identifying those, I mean, the two terms don't seem to go together. They say structures don't seem to apply to things as intimate as feelings.
Williams argues that in fact they do, that you can look at the way feelings themselves structured and patterned. Now, again, as I think I said, really wrong, I'm by training a sociologist and sociologists do see all individuals, whether they're authors or not, as essentially social beings. If you like sociology has an in principle objection to Margaret Thatcher's claim that there is no such thing as society. Society is what sociologists begin with.
And, but do you, by the way, what's a professional sociologist? Williams was a trained in literature studies that moved in a sociological direction. But what they, what they bought interesting about them both is they attempt to reconcile the sociological insight that we are social beings and with a non, with a modern residual sense of human, individual human agency. Now, often this debate is in philosophical terms and elsewhere, this is represented as a kind of binary opposition.
You're either a methodological individualist in the fashion of economics and much psychology or you're a methodological holistic in this fashion of anthropology and sociology. But I think what, Baudieu, although Baudieu and Williams both come down on this side of the social, they want to see nonetheless the social as something that actually facilitates individual agency. It's not merely a constraint. Our social being both, both, both restrained and enables us.
And this is true for authors as well. So, yes, they're exceptional in the sense that they're unusually good at writing. But on the other hand, like all other individuals, they are, what their capacity to write and what they write about is restricted by their social media, but it's also enabled by it. So it's a form that enables the agency as well as constraining it.
Now, I think that's right. And I think it's a kind of sociological insight which Baudieu and Williams both share and which I've struck, which my own work is based upon. One figure who looms large over a lot of the last several decades is Louis-Authusaire. A couple different chapters you trace certain developments in his wake, writing that a lot of the debates around El-Thusaire were expressions of the larger transition from structuralism to post-structuralism.
So, what were the limitations being encountered in structuralism that other theorists hope to overcome by a turn toward post-structural theories of history and subjectivity? Yeah, it's a very complicated question. Yeah, no, I'm thinking about it. First thing to say, Al-Tazaire is clearly not a post-structuralist.
He's a structuralist almost par excellence. But he certainly moved in overlapping circles, I mean personal biographical circles, with people who became central to post-structuralism. He was friends with Derrida and she'll always have student. And they all start with a broadly structuralist media in France.
And what I think Al-Thusaireism, Al-Tazaire's own particular idea, especially the theory of ideology, provides a route from an earlier kind of structural Marxism towards post-structuralism. That's what I think happens. That's to do both with Al-Thusaire's reception in France, but more so towards his reception in the English-speaking world, both in Australia and in the United States and in Britain. Now, the problem with structuralism in general, and I think that's the way you post the question, what was the problem with structuralism?
It's a problem with Al-Tazaireism, but it's also problem with structuralism in general. It's massively over-deterministic. Some structuralist models are so deterministic that there is simply no room for individual agency. And I think that's actually true for Al-Tazaire.
He represents individuals as essentially the supports of structures. When he talks about interpolation, he's talking about the way ideology hails an individual, hails the individual so that the individual speaks the ideology. In the structuralist model, this perversion of society, we don't speak language, which speaks us. Now, there's an important insight there that I don't want to simply gloss over.
But it becomes massively over-deterministic. And that's such, it doesn't really provide much of a way into the questions of political or even ethical agency. I mean, there isn't an obvious irony that in France at any rate, before this structuralist moment, the key figure probably being in general settlement, Simon de Beauvoir, and he existentially stressed above all the capacity for individuals to make choices. Now, the Al-Tazaire, and there's more broadly structuralist ways, moves away from there and suggests that there are no meaningful choices to make.
Now, I think how do they, the dissatisfaction with structuralism is the sense, the sense that there will need some sense of understanding of how individuals and groups make choices and how they act. Post-structuralism seemed to be the most whether they're in deconstruction or or for good in discolously. The structuralism seemed to offer solutions to these ampers. Now, my own view is that I think Williams and Baudieu about all the better solutions than Derrida and for cool.
But I can see that the appeal of Derrida and for cool was precisely that we were able to move beyond the ampers of never-ending determinism. One of the other things that, to me, people do know that they make meaningful choices and they know that there are meaningful choices at the social and political level as well. It's not absolutely so, of course. We make choices in context and the context is constraining.
But nonetheless, the choices are to some extent meaningful. If Southborough and the existentialists had overstated the role of agency, then the structuralist clearly understated it. And I think Baudieu does this, he's clearly dealing with Southborough as one ex-friend and Levi Strauss, the structural anthropologist as another. And in the sense, Williams is also dealing with frankly F.R.
Leavis, who would be the idealist figure in English literary studies. But then he's also reacting negatively against certain kinds of deterministic responses. So it's complicated. It's a dialectic to you, to your own Marxist cliche.
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You find both events to be horrifying and ethically objectionable. But you find there to be a note where the disparity in how they have been perceived and interpreted. And you write this as somewhat of both a British and Australian background. So there's another layer added onto your own understanding of the event.
What are the dynamics and frameworks you see that direct our perception and understanding of an event like 9-11? And how does it lead in your view to a very particular set of solidarities between particular groups at the expense of other potential solidarities? Yeah, this was a very short essay. And I was actually given in response shortly after the 9-11 attacks, it was a talk.
And actually before the United States and Britain had joined the attack on the Gulf War. And it's part of the occasion to mind that the essay by the thought that my own father had actually flown in RAF Bonnekommand during the Second World War and was himself very, very, very guilty about the bombing of cities which he'd been involved in. What I was trying to say first of all is that yes, the al-Qaeda attack on the World Trade Center was terroristic because it involves killing of large numbers of innocent bystanders, non-combatants. But this was also true of the allied area bombing in defence against Germany, such as Dresden.
My father didn't bomb Dresden, by the way, he bombed Hamburg and Berlin, but not Dresden. But it was also true of the allied attacks on Iraq when the war got going. I think we've come to define terrorism as something that private individuals do, which is odd, since the first modern use of terrorism is actually to describe agents of the French revolutionary government. And I think we have to retain the sense, or recover the sense, that terrorism is something that governments do too.
And mass bombing, as civilians, is the quintessential example of a terrorism war. And that's true for the attacks on Germany, it's also true for the nuclear attacks on Japan. What I want to get at is why do we not see this when we're thinking about the bombing of Iraqi cities, but we do see it easily. Why do we Australians and British people as well see this when the 9-11 is attacked, when the World Trade Center was attacked on 9-11?
Now that led me to think that part of the problem, and I linked, part of the problem is that we all know we non-Americans all know too much about America. And in the essay I linked what I call media imperialism, that's the United States government and the dominance of the international media space, with what I call semi-o-terrorism. Because if you look at the attack on the World Trade Center, it was clearly designed to be a media event. The way there's one aircraft hits the building, and then I forgot how long, but there was quarter and it was time for all the television crews to focus on the tower, when the second airplane came in, so everyone got to see the media event.
And that's why I thought it was kind of, it is terroristic, it kills lots of people, but it was also meant to be a terroristic sign, that you actually see it on the television. And so I was intrigued by it, well why, why have they done this? And it seems to be part of the answer is because everybody globally, including Al-Qaeda terrorists, know the significance of the World Trade Center, knew the cultural significance of New York. And I think that's also true for those of us in the West.
We in the West also knew far too well these streets of New York. So we were able, even though Australians were able to identify with what happened in New York, in a way that we weren't able to identify with what happened in Iraq, Afghanistan. So it's both sides, there was a kind of, there was a semiotic aspect to the way these things were played out. One of the clues for this to me was Tony Blair, who was the British Prime Minister at the time.
And because Blair at one point actually says that Britain will stand by the United States, by New York, just as the United States stood by Britain and London during the Blitz. Now what's fascinating about that is it's not true, the United States was neutral throughout the entire Blitz. Australia stood by Britain, but the United States doesn't enter the war as everybody knows until Pearl Harbor. But I was intrigued by why he did invoke this, why was he able to invoke this and hardly anybody object to it.
And I think the answer is because in media terms, in Hollywood terms and film shows, this is how we see the Second World War. We see Britain stands alone and then the United States comes in. And that's the way the movies tend to tell the story of the Second World War. They gloss over very quickly the fact that there were some bonds in which Britain was allied with the Soviet Union and the United States was still neutral.
So Blair remembers it that way and most people do. So, and I'm sure I'm not most Australian too, so we were able to identify with New York. You know, of course, we see New York on our movies and our television all the time and we are much less able to identify with Kabul or without Afghanistan or Iraq. But that's also what makes New York vulnerable because the terrorists knew how culturally salient New York was, how the World Trade Center was the target hit.
Turning to the final chapters where you start focusing on science fiction, you have an essay that looks very closely at a couple of television shows, Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the X Files. Both shows share a number of characteristics, but you're looking at them as in certain respects exemplifying the relationship forged in the 1990s between a certain understanding of identity and that identity's relationship to both politics and commodification. Can you unpack what you see going on here? Yes, okay.
I mean, the connecting point between identity politics and commodification was really the politics of the Clinton presidency and Bill Clinton. What it seemed to be that they're both these series, which I've watched and rather enjoy, but they both seem to be constant with the politics of the Clinton years. In the first case space, the significance of identity is identity politics, an idea of politically correct identity politics, especially with respect to gender and race. They are, by comparison with early TV programs, they're clearly playing with non-sexist and non-racist or less racist, or conceptions of identity.
Now, but these are also linked to corporate commodification, that they are themselves corporate commodity products. But also, there is no critique in either of these series that there's no critique of differences of class as distinct from differences of race and gender. So what it seemed to me was that the world vision, if you like, that was played out in both series, seemed to me essentially an instance, a yuppy world vision, a young, upply mobile professionals. I don't know, people still say yuppies, I don't, but it was a term you do.
It seems, I'm certainly, if you think about the Mulder and Scully, the two FBI agents in the ex-wirals, they're both attractive, young, and yeah, they're successful, they're well educated. And the program is constructed against two others, one, other rednecks, backwards. So you go out into the department, the United States, away from the big cities, out of the country, and there you find some sort of really weird people. But it's also against big governments, because you don't really trust the senior authorities that are standing against the FBI, or even the FBI's own senior hierarchies.
So big government on the one hand and red knocks and excel the other, are the sources of opposition. And I think that's true also in Buffy, certainly in the Buffy episodes that I looked at, because I was looking at a series of episodes which were about a mechanical demonoid. And I was relating that to episodes about a Frankensteinian science in the ex-wirals. And so that that opposition between, that kind of Yuppy politics seemed to me to be precisely what the Clinton government was about.
And the Clinton government was not about delivering anything much to the Democrats working class trade union, labor union based. But it certainly wasn't about identifying, I think he was delivering on grounds of gender equality and racial equality. I mean, the whole thing about Clinton being the first black president, just because he played the saxophone was part of an ideology that is going to be beyond racism, beyond sexism. And that's picked up, it's renewed in the Obama administration.
I can't think of an equivalent science fiction show, but I think it is renewed to the late day. And it obviously provokes eventually the backlash that is Trumpism. But that's when I was trying to explore the carrying of cultural politics, the connection between the cultural politics of those two series and the politics of the Clinton administration. Turning to some broader themes, two of the predominant trends in science fiction writing are utopia and dystopia, which you pit against each other with Orwell representing a certain dystopian vision of the future and other writers like Ursa Lagan articulating and Frederick James and theorizing a more utopian vision.
So how do these two concepts function in science fiction and in what ways do they serve to either open up or close off certain possibilities for how we imagine our current situation and our possibilities for possible political engagement? Yeah, particularly utopia and dystopia are very important, sub-genres of science fiction. I mean, clearly you can say that the imaginary worlds of science fiction, they're either better worlds, which means that utopias are their worst worlds, which means they're dystopias, or sometimes they're just the same sort of world with a new invention. But an awful lot of them are utopias and dystopias.
And so you can identify these really important sub-genres within the genre. I contrast them analytically in the essays and a couple of the essays, but I'm not actually arguing for one and against the other. I think there are good and bad examples of utopias and there are good and bad examples of dystopias as well. The dystopias that seem to me to be most valuable are those that functions warnings.
And those are the ones that are most politically consequential. And clearly the most famous of those probably is all those 1984, certainly in the English language. And it was in mention influential on science fiction, not just on literary science fiction so-called, but also on genre science fiction. In the 1950s you get lots and lots of dystopias that are kind of Orwellian warnings.
The best examples, most interesting examples of utopias are not those that are kind of assile celebrations of the present bushboard, but rather those that really do explore the possibilities of a better and different worlds. Certainly, I would say that a different and plausible world. I think the Gwyns, the dispossessed is a very, very good example of that kind of utopia, which shows the limitations of utopia and the way utopia is threatened as well. So it's been extremely influential on other science fiction.
Now, Jameson is a slightly bringing in here. You mentioned all the Gwyn and then Jameson. In the essay I'm actually disagreeing with Jameson, and I'm disagreeing with him rather than with Liqui. Because I actually think that Hank Feds-Gemerson misunderstands Orwell's 1984.
He reads it as a Cold War answer utopia, a way of an argument against socialism. Now, I think that's a misreading. First of all, it's not a Cold War text. It's written before 1948, it's a right to reflect back on the 1930s and 1940s, not a 1950s text.
And it's a warning. It's a critical warning of fundamentally against fascism, but also against alienism. That form of warning comes from a left-wing position. It's all described as politics.
He was a democratic socialist. And that wasn't an individual eccentricity. He was a member of the independent Labour Party, which was a left-wing breakaway from the British Labour Party. And he'd gone to Spain and fought in the pool, which was the sister party of the ILP during the Spanish Civil War.
And all of a sudden he wasn't a CIA Cold War. Although he was represented thus in the United States. He was actually a democratic socialist. I know that's a bit less.
That's Bernie Sanders's term. But in fact, all users exactly the same words that describe his own politics. And I think Fred just simply misconstrues what all his politics were. And I also think he misunderstands 1984, because he ignores the appendix on Newspeak, which is the last dozen or so pages of the novel.
And those are meant to introduce optimism into the novel. And they do introduce optimism, because they situate the novel within a world where big brothers have been overthrown, where the world once again writes in English, not in Newspeak. So I think I'm a great admirer of Fred Jameson's literal criticism. I just think he's wrong about Orwell.
Write about the Gwynn. And why I think he's wrong about Orwell, I think it's probably that he doesn't explore the distinctively British social context within which Orwell was writing. The context of the British left in the 30s and 40s. In the final essay, which you co-authored with J.R.
Bergman, Jurek Davidson, and Susan Cousin, you draw some very explicit connections to fiction and climate change. And one thing I found really interesting is how you connect three predominant predictions about climate change, cooling, heating, and flooding to three primordial elements, ice fire and water. These three elements feature very prominently, not just in science fiction, but in a variety of other important texts and stories. So are there some key themes you find in these elements running through the history of literature?
And in what ways are there archetypal significances or meanings possibly directing our understanding of what climate change is going to be? You're clearly right. Ice fire and water. Blood is the term that I use, actually.
And there's a reason for that. Yeah, they're enduring tropes. But some are more important and more enduring than others. And the one that I think is crucial, the most fundamental of all the author of the three is flood.
The reason for that is because of Genesis, because of the story of Noah. Although actually the story of Noah is almost certainly, well, it's very probably itself a reworking of an earlier story in the epic of Eelgamesh, the Akkadian, much earlier, Akkadian epic. One of the significance of Genesis though, is, and I think the Noah story in Genesis is that it's a crucial archetype because it's so important to so many very, very large religions. It's a Jewish story, of course, in the first place, but it becomes central to Christianity, to Islam, to Mormonism, to the high faith.
So the story is incredibly well known in many cultures, through many different religions. And that does seem to me to be more fundamental than ice stories, which are hardly any ice stories in the Middle East, or obvious reasons. It's even more important than fire stories. I suspect fire stories might actually be more important in Australia historically, for obvious reasons.
But globally, the flood archetype is the most important one. And while I was interested in part there, and I worked together with that story with the mainstream, New York, and Susan, and James, they were all research assistants with me on my Australian Research Council funded project on science fiction. And what we've actually concluded, this was crucial, the flood motif. And that when modern science fiction gets going, basically in England and France in the 19th century, it really does pick up on the flood motif because it's there in the culture, it's there, and available for use, and much more so than ice and fire.
The ice and fire tropes appear in science fiction, they're mainly in the 20th century, and they appear really not in response to this ancient mythology, but in response to the new science. Because it's in the late 19th century that we discover, we learn about the ice ages, and it's in the late 19th century that we discover the first models of how global warming might develop, we discover the greenhouse effect. And although these don't directly impact on science fiction, they provide us background. So in the 20th century, these become increasingly significant per capita.
So most of the century, ice is more important than fire. The fire is, you get lots of flooding and lots of ice stories, but it's only really in the very end of the century, and then in the 21st century, the fire stories become more and more important. I mean, there's an example of the J.G. Ballard, but it's nothing like a significance of the 19th century flood stories.
And so, so, so climate science actually feeds into the development of climate fiction, eventually. Yeah, that's the way I will read it. So the fundamental one is the great flood. As time goes on, fiction writers are going to continue engaging with climate change.
And you even write paraphrasing you on this bit. What climate science now most needs from science fiction is a contemporary equivalent to Neville Shoots' nuclear doomsday novel on the beach. So we already talked about Shoots' novel a bit, so feel free to refer back to that for thinking about why it's such a good template for thinking about nuclear annihilation. But I'm particularly curious to hear what, in your view, this ideal climate change novel would look like, and if there are any promising examples you've come across recently, that might point us in the right direction.
Right. Of course, it must be obvious that one of my reasons of being interested in on the beach is that it's an Australian novel. And it's an Australian novel that was unusually successful globally, which is, you know, most Australian adults don't get further than Australia. This is quite quite different.
You don't have a global impact. And your listeners probably won't remember this. They were mostly, I don't want that young enough to have never heard of it. But it was, it was a bestseller, a bestseller in hardback and then in paperback.
Not only in Australia, but quite quickly in the United States, and in Great Britain, and Canada. It was, so, so it's bestseller as a hardback and then it's a bestseller as a paperback. It was translated into many, many languages. Within the first few years it was translated into 25 and it's now many more.
Then of course it's adapted for film, for a Hollywood blockbuster, and then for television, and then for radio. And it has, I think, a pre-shable effect on the movements of nuclear disarmament in the 1960s, but also on the negotiations between the then three nuclear powers, which were in the United States, the Soviet Union, and Britain, that established the 1963 test boundary. Now, that's what a successful climate fiction does look like. It will be best-selling.
It will result in multiple translations, especially multiple translation, actually, stress this through English and French. You need to recognize that English and French are the two global languages. And the six largest publishing industries in the world, three of them are the United States, Britain and France. The other three are Russia, China and Germany.
But the significance of the English, of the Anglophone and the Francophone ones is that these are crucial centers for re-translation. If you get published in English or in French, you're much more likely to get translated into Czech or Polish than if you don't get published in English and French. So the successful climate novel will be best-selling. It will be multiple translated.
It will be multiple adapted into many media, not just movies and television, but in English, in English, in English. And then hopefully it will have an effect on policy shifts. Now, the thing that I would add to that is, I mean, that's just a description of how Schuetz novel worked. I'll add in another factor, which is I suspect it might well come from the periphery of the world literary system as Schuetz novel did, the periphery being Australian.
Now, I'll explain just very briefly what I mean by that. I have a model of the world literary system, which is substantially derived from the Franc or Noretti and the manual Wallace line in which I talk about the core and that's the six publishing industries I just mentioned, the semi periphery and then the periphery, which includes Australia, which is, you know, a minor publishing industry. I think one of the odd things about the corporate-free relations is that although it's the core of literary cultures that have the most power, if you like, much of the innovative creativity does actually come up from the periphery. It's nice to cross the kind of freedom of movement in the periphery.
You adopt the core models, characters, tropes, plots and so on, but you play with them and adjust them to local circumstances, which I think is what Schuetz did in a way, because Schuetz responded to the distinctive apocalyptic hedonism of Australian society. That's one of the weird things about the novel. Yes, they're all going to be destroyed by nuclear radiation. The catastrophe is coming.
On the other hand, before that, they're going to go swimming at the beach and they're going to go sailing and they're going to have a barbecue and go fishing. They're going to enjoy themselves as they await this terrible end. Now, I think there's a distinct to be Australian register, which made the novel so much more powerful. I think something like that would happen with climate fiction.
I don't necessarily think Australia might be from India. Although, Australia keeps having bushfire, some is like this one. We might get some here. I can think of some examples.
I think from Canada, Margaret Atwood's Med-Atum Trilogy is extremely interesting. From India, I've got to go to Ireland. It's an interesting climate novel. None of these have actually made it yet, because nothing's made it yet, but I'm wondering what will.
There are a number of interesting ones from Finland, anti-Tumenians' parentage, or the healer. And Emita Rant is a memory of water. It's actually the Teemans book is the literal translation, but the English translation is a memory of water. Here in Australia, I think James Bradley's Clay and Alexis Rant is an Aboriginal writer from Carpentaria.
I think both of those are very, very interesting. I'm not saying that there's all peripheral texts and they're all interesting climate novels, whether none of them have yet done what should novel do. Maybe that's now impossible. I don't know.
Let me just backtrack. I'm not going to say that only the periphery can produce promising examples. I actually think that Kim Stanley Robinson's climate change trilogy is very interesting, although it's peculiar how it just hasn't been translated into other languages. And it's peculiar that it hasn't been adapted for any kind of film or television.
In France, I think things as Jean-Marc Ringi's phonology is very interesting. And in Germany, there's a Mievert trilogy by Bertcy Fleck is also, I think neither of these are translated into English, which suggests that they're not getting very far because they're not even translated out of their own or not out into many other languages. But certainly these are all, there are lots of interesting texts coming from the core and they're semi-grifferines as well as the periphery. But I mean, obviously, yeah, as it stands, no text has actually achieved what Schutz did.
And maybe it's wrong to look for an individual ideal climate fictional. Maybe it's just a cumulative weight of climate fiction that will change the way we think about the world. And that's what Daniel Bloom, Daniel Bloom, the type I activist and blogger, Daniel just thinks that the more climate fiction the better. And maybe he's right.
But certainly, I do have a sense of what the ideal climate fiction novel will be like. We just haven't seen it yet. I hope that answers your question. Yeah.
So to kind of close things off, we always like to ask, I guess, what, if anything they're working on and maybe you can talk a little bit about any books you have coming up? Yeah, sure. As you might imagine, I'm working on climate fiction. One of those three research assistants that worked with me on that last essay, James Bergman, he and I have worked on a book together, which is called Science Fiction and Climate Change.
And it's finished. It doesn't publish yet. It's only published in Britain by Liverpool University Press and I think in the States of Oxford. And it's due to come out later this month.
We shall see whether that's achieved. They say it's going to be printed in mid-March. And it should be on sale at a good book shop near you, maybe in April, perhaps May. Can you tell us a little bit about it?
I know we kind of have been talking about some of the themes that I'm sure has come up, but well, yeah, in a way, that last chapter, the one that you talked about, the Ice Fire and Blood One, essentially the book is an enormously expanded version of that essay. It takes the questions raised there. So it does use a world systems model, a corporate referee model of how the world industry system works. It also traces back the history of climate fiction to Genesis and the Epic of Gilgamesh.
That's in an opening historical chapter, which looks at 19th and early 20th century science fiction. And then in the book of the book is a survey of different climate fiction. These are mainly from the very late 20th century and the 21st century. And it looks at the way, it identifies six main responses to climate change, ranging from denialism, which there certainly are a number of denialist novels, right through to possibly utopian solutions and also dystopian warnings about climate fiction.
And it looks at the texts taken from a wide range of cultures from the United States and Australia, but also Britain, France, Germany, India, Japan, China, Russia, Finland, I mentioned Finland. And there are readings of particular texts, but they're captured in relation to a general model. There's also a chapter which is a bit too brief, I'm afraid, but there's a chapter on climate fiction in other media as well, which looks at cinema, television, computer games, and rock music actually. Yes, that chapter was almost entirely written by James as indeed was the bit on computer games.
And I had not really up on rock music any longer. I was big on the whispering stuff, I've relied on James. But yeah, that's that chapter is a map of where someone else could go with another book to look at climate fiction in media, other than that. Yeah, that sounds fascinating.
So Andrew Milner, thank you so much for being with us. Thank you.