Content area
Full Text
I'D LIKE TO SHARE SOME THOUGHTS ABOUT THE VERY CLOSE RELATIONSHIP between the concepts of empire and science fiction (sf), with some glances at globalism and posthumanism-all of which to my mind are intricately interwoven. I would like to look at the subject from five different angles-which I'll designate as five parts.
Part I. The view from the ground.
Everyone in this room has been partially shaped by the politics of empire, in one form or another -as imperial subjects, resisters from the periphery, compradors, immigrants, children of immigrants, posthuman managers, resident aliens, cosmopolitan flaneurs, or merely speakers of English. I'll tell you my story. I was born a month after my parents arrived in the US as refugees from the Communist coup in Hungary. My father had been in the coalition government after World War II; he was imprisoned, tortured, escaped, and came to the United States. My father lived in the US for more than forty years. After the Communist government stripped him of his Hungarian citizenship, he remained officially stateless. He did not perfect his English, and he made an oath to return to his homeland as soon as there were free elections or the occupying troops left, whichever came first. Before the revolution in 1956, he thought those things might happen in a matter of months. After its defeat he settled in for a long haul, but his bags were in a sense always packed. The Russians did finally leave in January of 1990, and my father was back in Hungary in April. He was a deep-dyed patriot of a small nation-a nationalist, if you will-who mocked both the Russians and the Americans. He often spoke of them in similar terms, as two gigantic children, indiscriminately stamping on small nations, many of which had long rich histories. Some had been empires themselves once. My mother was not so fanatical. She became an American citizen, gained a good administrative position as a librarian, spoke English well, and tolerated my sister and me speaking English in the home. But she, too, went back in 1990.
As I grew up, my parents told me countless stories of The War. My mother had witnessed the bombing of Rotterdam, and after taking the last train east...
