"Anglophone science fiction has a long history of stories of contact between non-human civilizations and ourselves. Anglophone science fiction has perhaps a smaller but quite significant trove of novels and stories written from the points of view, even the first person points of view, of non-human sapients who differ from us not merely in biology or technological level or cultural assumptions, but style of consciousness itself."
A very interesting article on sci-fi books set in the so-called "Third World" that feature different perspectives. Read more below.
Full article here: http://www.asimovs.com/issue_1004-05/onbooks.shtml
THIRD WORLD WORLDS
First we had better define what is generally meant by the “Third World.” The expression itself was born during the late Cold War. The United States, its NATO allies in Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Japan, being the ones doing the defining, called themselves the “First World.” The Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the satellite nations of the Warsaw Pact, and assorted other Communist states, being defined as the enemy, were called the “Second World.”
The Third World was everything else, more or less.
The Cold War is gone, no one talks about the First World or the Second World anymore, but the label “Third World” for “everything else” is still current.
But everything else than what?
You will notice from the lists of the original definitions that the First World, with the exception of the Japanese who were granted the status of “Honorary Aryans” by their Nazi allies during World War II, was a collection of countries with a dominant Caucasian majority of European descent, and that the Second World was more of the same, with the large exception of China, and some other smaller exceptions.
Basically, the Third World was Latin America, Africa, and most of Asia, including India, Pakistan, Indonesia, the so-called “Arab World,” and so forth, and that is still more or less what is meant by the term today. Another, and more politically incorrect term for this basket of nations was once the “underdeveloped nations,” now the politically correct “developing nations,” meaning more or less the same thing.
Meaning what?
Meaning existing, one way or another, to one degree or another, outside what the “Developed World” in general and the United States in particular is pleased to consider “globalized world civilization.”
Meaning those nations and peoples having attained the current height of technological prowess and cutting edge science, enjoying one form of democratic government or another, or at least a good pretense thereof, economically integrated into the world-spanning economic spiderweb of globalized capitalism, and culturally integrated into the worldwide info and showbiz spiderweb created and dominated by “Hollywood.”
Considered by most of its inhabitants as more or less the “consensus reality,” the “global civilization” of the planet Earth.
And yet, if you add up all the inhabitants of the Third World, there are more of “them” than there are of “us.” The “global civilization” may dominate the Earth economically, scientifically, technologically, militarily, politically, and even perhaps culturally, or anyway pop culturally, but the culturally diverse “developing nations” of the Third World dominate demographically.
What, you may now be asking, does all this have to do with science fiction?
What indeed?
Or better, what does science fiction have to do with the worlds of the Third World?
The answer would seem to be not much, or at least not nearly as much as it should.
Now I must confess that I do not read Mandarin Chinese, any African language, Arabic—indeed any Asian language at all—and I must also confess for we Anglophones, that, with the exception of Japanese, hardly any, maybe no, science fiction written in these languages has been translated into English, or for that matter other European languages, and it would seem that such science fiction may hardly exist at all.
If one includes Latin America in the Third World, a hot-button political minefield I intend to sidestep here, it’s a large exception to this, since there is a goodly amount of science fiction written there in Spanish and Portuguese. But these are languages of European origin, and therefore not entirely culturally disconnected from the self-styled First World. With the exception of the Japanese, I at least, am at a loss to point to any science fiction that I know of that has evolved independently in non-European languages or cultures disconnected therefrom.
If it exists, I haven’t seen a significant amount of it translated into any language I can read, however badly, nor have I read much about it in secondary sources. So what we’ll be considering here is Anglophone science fiction written in English by Anglophone writers about the past, present, or futures of so-called “Third World” cultures.
There has always been a certain amount of this stuff, but there’s getting to be more of it of late, and it’s getting better, more sophisticated, more embedded in the cultures in which it is set—less culturally “colonialist” if you will, and even if you won’t.
I’m not trying to get into a political argument here, but I certainly could, since most Anglophone fiction set in Third World countries in general, from the eighteenth century onward into the twentieth and even the dawn of the twenty-first, has been colonialist, in that the points of view from which the tales are narrated have mostly been those of “First World” protagonists dropped down or embedded in “Third World” settings, and not those of “native” inhabitants thereof.
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