Postcolonial Science Fiction Defined

Nalo Hopkinson’s definition of “postcolonial science fiction” in “Introduction” from So Long Been Dreaming: “Stories that take the meme of colonizing the natives and, from the experience of the colonizee, critique it, pervert it, fuck with it, with irony, with anger, with humour, and also, with love and respect for the genre of science fiction that makes it possible to think about new ways of doing things.”

This short story, “Deep End” by Nisi Shawl definitely falls under Nalo Hopinkson’s definition of a postcolonial slave science fiction narrative. The first paragraph depicts Wayna, “an upload of a criminal mind” aboard a vessel, the “Psyche Moth,” designated for prisoners enroute to a distant star. (Shawl 12) Wayne is the perspective of the story; she speaks as an upload of a criminal mind. And to her, she is the victim of the ship and its crew – which institute punishments that involve pain like “the lash of a whip.” (Shawl 13) She also felt victim to her captures and “distrusted Dr. Ops and everything about Psyche Moth.” (Shawl 13) The beginning of the story is mainly a postcolonial narrative but the story turns into much more.

Everything about this story radiates a post colonial slave narrative – from the setting of the slave ship being sent to a distant land presumably for hard labor, to the punishments of being whipped. But then, in the aura of “postcolonial science fiction” Shawl takes this regular story and distorts it to a more science fiction entity. The idea of minds being uploaded into a computer and then downloaded into a body presumes that the body is not their own. Shawl explores the idea of “passing” - the fusion of a black conciousness and a white physical appearance - with freedom. The only hope that Wayna can perceive, the only goal she can attain is to have a body that was hers, “no matter how different it looked from the one she had been born with. [No matter] how white.” (Shawl 17) And through her training she was given a body and that was “her body. She’d earned it,” as if she were given freedom from the slavery that the ships controller, Dr. Ops, had beset upon her. (Shawl 17) Instead of liberation from slavery, this novel depicts the liberation of the mind. Shawl shows that with a different kind of bondage comes a different kind of freedom, namely the freedom to own one’s body.

Another interesting junction from the normal postcolonial narrative that specifically makes this science fiction is the purpose of the slave ship. I’ve seen a lot of Star Trek episodes where evil Klingons or Ferengians are “spared” and sent to a prison planet were they do hard labor for the rest of their lives. Shawl instead uses the same idea, but instead the prisoners will mine genetic helixes. The prisoners themselves are “investments [for] protection [of] their precious genetic material,” or as Wayna puts it – “glorified mammies.” (Shawl 20) Wayna and the rest of the prisoners are doing hard time for whatever “crime” they committed, but instead of doing the harvesting for plantations owners, they are the ones being harvested. This is another way that Shawl puts an ironic twist on this postcolonial science fiction narrative.

The end result is something entirely different, something new. Shawl combines elements of postcolonial narratives and disfigures them and puts them back together to create a postcolonial science fiction. The beauty of this new narrative that it has the ability to tackle the same issues as a regular postcolonial narrative, but in this style Shawl is able to raise many more questions. Shawl introduces concepts of owning ones body and harvesting genetic material. More importantly Shawl attempts to dilute the colorline by emphasizing the fact that Wayna’s new body is white. Does having a “black mind” mean that she is still black? Does a “black mind” even exist? Much of Shawls story can be interpreted as a redefinition of blackness itself, how it existed in colonial days and how it exists today.