Imagining better futures – humanist thought and the radical power of science fiction

In her 1818 novel Frankenstein, Mary Shelley asked what it meant to make a person – and what we owed to the beings we create. Two centuries later, the questions she opened are still being asked, in the time machines and starships and feminist utopias of the science fiction tradition. 

Humanism has long found a home in speculative fiction: a genre where the supernatural is set aside, where the world's contingency is laid bare, and where, as this week's guests put it, we can test-drive our values without looking to the heavens for answers. 

From H.G. Wells and Olaf Stapledon to Naomi Mitchison, Octavia Butler, Samuel Delany and the writers reimagining the genre today, this episode asks how imagining the impossible helps us change the present – and boldly go towards a better future.

Guests:

S.I. Martin, British historian, author and educator specialising in Black British history and literature, and a patron of Humanists UK. simartin.org.uk

Katie McGregor Stone, literary critic and researcher of science fiction and utopian literature, currently writing a book on Frankenstein. katiemcgregorstone.co.uk

For all references to people, places, and events in this episode and the full series, visit heritage.humanists.uk/podcast

Join Humanists UK: humanists.uk/join

Discover more Humanist Heritage: heritage.humanists.uk

Send us your questions or feedback: Unholy@Humanise.Live

Unholy Histories is produced by Humanise Live a production agency creating values-led podcast content. Start podcasting today at humanise.live

Music: Small Things by Simon Folwar

Podcast transcripts are AI-generated and may contain errors or omissions. They are provided to make our content more accessible, but should not be considered a fully accurate record of the conversation.

Transcript

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Welcome and introduction

Andrew Copson 0:01

Welcome to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast brought to you by Humanist UK. I'm Andrew Cobson, Chief Executive of Humanist UK.

Madeleine Goodall 0:09

And I'm Madeline Goodall, head of the Humanist Heritage Project.

Andrew Copson 0:13

We're the hosts of this new podcast series where we will be speaking with experts about Britain's humanist history.

Madeleine Goodall 0:18

Uncovering the people, events, and ideas that have shaped both humanist thought and our national life. While humanism is rooted in the reality of the here and now, it has often found significant expression in the what-ifs of worlds imagined or yet to be. The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction defines the genre as one where the setting differs from our own, whether through new technology, alien contact, or an alternate history, but where that difference is based on rational extrapolation. Crucially, these shifts are explained in scientific or logical terms, rather than the supernatural. It is in many ways the ultimate humanist sandbox, a place where we can explore the consequences of our ideas without looking to the heavens for answers. From the scientific romances of H. G. Wells and the feminist utopias of Florence Dixie to the radical social visions of Naomi Mitchison and the logic-driven ethics of Isaac Asimov, speculative fiction has allowed us to test drive our values. So today we ask, how does imagining the impossible help us to build a better reality? And why has the speculative fiction genre always been such fertile ground for humanist thought? In this episode of Unholy Histories, we explore the intersections of humanism and speculative fiction and what these strange new worlds reveal about our very human values. And to unpack these ideas, we're joined by S. I Martin, British historian, author, and educator specializing in black British history and literature. He's published both fiction and nonfiction and is a patron of Humanist UK. And Katie McGregor Stone, a literary critic and researcher of science fiction and utopian literature, who's currently writing a book about Frankenstein. Welcome both of you. So we normally start by asking our guests to introduce themselves, I suppose, and how they came to, in this case, I guess, be interested in what we're talking about. So science fiction and the kind of work you do. So perhaps should

Katie McGregor Stone on the radical politics of utopian literature

Madeleine Goodall 2:22

we start with you, Katie? How did you uh come to be interested in this area?

Katie McGregor Stone 2:27

Yeah, so I uh I studied literature and then I was kind of increasingly drawn to science fiction as a branch of literature where I think the politics are often on the surface in a really explicit way. There are very prominent science fiction writers who I think would be the marginal weirdos of more mainstream literature, but become kind of shaping voices in the genre because it is it is one where you are forced to kind of confront how we are collectively making the world there and imagining a new world. You sort of see that the world as it is contingent, is open to change and can be transformed. And so I think that's a kind of a radical proposition that's at the core of the genre. So yeah, so I did my like master's and PhD was was about was about science fiction and utopian literature and how they how they help us to yeah, reimagine the world.

Madeleine Goodall 3:33

It's very inspiring opening to things there. And uh and what about

S.I. Martin on escapism, alien worlds and human potential

Madeleine Goodall 3:38

you, Steve? How did you come to be interested in I guess fiction as well?

S.I. Martin 3:43

How can I say it? Well, yeah, I suppose a one-word answer, it is escapism, total escapism. I was that child, that one of two black children in the village who'd be waiting keenly for the arrival of the Applecross, you know, the mobile library. And I just dive into you know that row of spines of uh yellow and purple Victor Gallant's classic science fiction imprints, because it just took me away from reality, it took me away from the world, and it engaged a lot of my interests, you know, to do with human potential, to do with the uh extraordinary, with um, yeah, interrogating the nature of reality, etc. It's been always been my first love. But um I obviously took a step away from that into looking at history, which and you know, especially particularly black histories, which contain all of the elements of my fascination, like abduction, whose reality is it, alien worlds, you know, it's all of this this fantasy stuff made flesh. That's basically my road into it.

Andrew Copson on why speculative fiction attracts Humanists

Andrew Copson 4:52

I think there's lots of humanists actually who for whom science fiction or speculative fiction alternative histories have really been a genre that's attractive. And I think that is for all the reasons that are said. But I do also like the idea that it's it's a run where we can test our ideas. And I also think that in the absence of, like you said in your introduction, Matt, in the absence of supernatural, it is a place where you can dream and imagine. And you know, that is even humanists have been written some pretty good ghost stories, of course. But I mean, we're not talking about that now, we're talking about the the the proper science fiction and aspect of fiction. When I was growing up, mine was Star Trek, of course. It wasn't until I was older that I realised it was literally written by a humanist, and the stars were mostly humanists, and the script editors were humanists, so it was so coloured by that that view. Um so I'm not anything as lofty as discussing utopianism in the works of H. G. Wells or Olaf Stapleton, although we probably will get into that. I'm much more sort of like, isn't the world of Jean-Luc Picard amazing? And wouldn't the world be wonderful if it was like that? And maybe one day it will be like that. And I think, you know, I still think in the back of my head that I I live my life on the assumption that one day it will be like that, in spite of the evidence of the world in the last 20 years. And so I think it is a sort of escapism as well. I agree with everything that's been said so far about the value of this, you know, the meaning of this type of fiction for humanists. But I suppose the bit that we haven't mentioned yet, apart from in your introduction, Maddie, and I know that you've looked at this, Maddy, is the way in which the people who were writing some at least future-looking or futurist fiction in the early 20th century were also at the same time trying to campaign to bring that future about. I mean, that's true of things like feminist writers.

Madeleine Goodall 6:30

Yeah, that's really interesting. Thought actually. Yeah, and I I guess I'm really drawn to what Katie said at the beginning as well about these kind of marginal weirdos, which is a a kind of fun way of of saying what we often say about the kind of early campaigners for lots of the kind of causes that they were campaigning for, whether that was secular education or whether it was reproductive rights or you know, whatever it was, that they were often outsiders, you know, pushing back against things.

Andrew Copson 7:00

I think we officially say eccentric radicals, Katie, rather than marginal weirdo. We happen to be recording this on the 130th anniversary of Humanist UK. And I think in what in our History of Humanist UK post recently, we said the eccentric radicals of the Victorian period, but maybe on our 140th, we should Maddie, we should say the marginal weirdo.

Madeleine Goodall 7:20

Well, credit you, don't worry. So to I suppose to come back then to the concept of science fiction or speculative fiction, and I think that idea that yes, on the one hand, you're they were often imagining worlds, uh imagining possible different realities or whatever it was, but you know, very rooted in the real world as they were were seeing it, and perhaps issues that they wanted to address.

How science fiction began

Madeleine Goodall 7:47

So how did science fiction as a a genre really emerge? How did it get started? Shall I come to you, Katie, for this? Sure.

Katie McGregor Stone 7:58

Yeah. I mean, I think there are so many kind of ways to tell the story because it just depends like what strand of science fiction that you're interested in. Like I think it started being called science fiction in the kind of 20s magazines, but lots of people talk about H. G. Wells and Jules Verne and the scientific romance, which we've mentioned. I think that one area of it that I'm interested in in terms of the history is the utopian history of science fiction. So the idea that one way of kind of tracing back the history of the genre is looking to writers who wouldn't have described themselves as science fiction writers, like that didn't exist as a thing yet. But what they were interested in doing was imagining a place which doesn't exist, but that is specifically designed to be a desirable place, a place that you want to get to. And in that way, I think that sort of for any you are talking about kind of political campaigners, and I think for anyone who's interested in trying to change the world, there has to be that idea of, well, what do you want the world to be like when you get there? Have to have a politics that's not just reactive against the things that you don't want, but that is a kind of positive vision of this is where we're going. So I sort of see that history that, you know, there are kind of big utopians. Utopia gets its name from Thomas More's text, which is in the written in the 16th century, this imaginary island, which he wrote as a critique of English society of his day. He's saying the two books of Utopia, one of them is like, look at yourselves, this is rubbish. And the other one is, and I know that because I've been somewhere better, and this is how they do it in Utopia. And there are lots of people who basically riff on that same theme and write in a similar way. But I think that the people that I'm most interested in, I guess, are people who are already coming at that from uh a kind of critical perspective, or criticizing the utopian tradition from within and are saying part of Thomas More's vision is an imperialist vision of King Utopus being a conqueror. There are slaves in utopia. This is a society which in itself needs to be, needs to again be radically reimagined. So the idea that the reimagination is never done, and that these kind of yeah, imperialist roots of the genre need to be excavated and reimagined. So writers like Begum Rakea, Rakhaya Sakur Hussein, who uh wrote Sultana's Dream in the very early 20th century, but uh that's uh just about the idea of again using these familiar tropes of imagine you fall asleep and you wake up and the world is better. It's a different world. And so she imagines a world run by women, a kind of feminist matriarchal utopia. Pauline Hopkinson is someone I'm also really interested in. She wrote a book called Of One Blood, again at the turn of the century, which is a big utopian time, which is a kind of alternate history, but it's it's imagining a world where there's a uh an Ethiopian kingdom which is really futuristic, has hid itself from the world, and the protagonist kind of finds their way, who is African-American, finds their way to it through kind of following this as ancestral lineage. Again, offering uh a different history as well as a different potential future, another way of thinking about how things could be better, could have been better, could still be better. So, yeah, I mean, there are loads of texts. I won't just go through them all. But uh, yeah, those are some of the things I'm interested in that become science fiction later, I think.

How utopian fiction took on the politics of its time

Madeleine Goodall 11:48

Were they often reacting to, you know, very definitely to kind of specific issues as they saw them in the world? So obviously you mentioned somebody like Thomas More, but I'm also you I think in your notes this episode you mentioned like WEB Du Bois and you know, and writers like that. Were there specific social issues that they were poking at when they were writing these things?

Katie McGregor Stone 12:15

Or yeah, absolutely. I mean, so Pauline Hopkinson knew Du Bois and uh was very much part of the kind of reconstruction era battle against the very recent legacy of slavery in the US. Du Bois wrote a science fiction story. It's collected in Dark Matter, which is a great collection of black science fiction, but it's called The Comets, and it imagines a world where the population of Manhattan is wiped out apart from two people, one of whom's a black man, one of whom's a white woman, and they sort of find each other wandering around in New York, and they think they're the last people on Earth, and it's this possibility of maybe Earth will begin again without the kind of weight of racism, basically, is what Du Bois is positing. And then the helicopters come in or the planes come in, and it's like, no, it was only Manhattan, absolutely not. It's incredibly undercut at the end. It's a great story. But yeah, that's one way of saying, you know, you take this kind of you use science fiction or utopianism to cut into contemporary social issues of racism, of feminism, of all manner of oppression, and you know, in Du Bois' case is literally blow it up and see what you can make out of the rubble. Um, I think is one way that people approach it anyway.

S.I. Martin 13:37

Until they meet the um father and it all comes to a nice tidy end. The father, the young woman's father survived. Steve, you know about that story too. Yes, yes. It's a great piece of the potential power of science fiction, but also its limitations. You know, these words have to be published, they have to be disseminated, and what's yeah, 1920 is uh when he um was uh presenting this, and inevitably there has to be a nice, tidy resolution for the period. So um, but yeah, it's fascinating. But my own engagement with it, it goes back a century beforehand to 1818 and um Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, which I think all others they stood on her shoulders, you know, the world that she created, the set of anxieties, you know, that converging set of anxieties around uh industrialization, the shock of science, the shocks of scientific discovery and imperialism, they were all the foundation of what came before. She was literally putting the science into fiction in a popular way for the first time, to my knowledge. Yeah, that's where it came from. And again, looking at subjects like say empire in fiction, you just see all of these colonialist themes being repeated and reproduced, you know, in the works of say Verne and Wells. There's often an idea of going to a lost world, going into under the sea or in space, but there's always that element of dominion and of control, of imperialism in a sort of galac on almost a galactic way. There's no end to it. And you know, obviously finding or coming across these other peoples, if people they truly be, who are living underwater or on some plateau in the lost world or hobbling around in the moon, um, who need to have some sort of um order in their lives or some sort of controlling element. So, yes, it's a contested field, I see, as a very, very contested field until maybe in the 1960s.

Madeleine Goodall 15:55

Yeah, thinking about again how that kind of comes into humanism, the links between humanism and imagination and kind of testing out those ideas. As you say, there's the kind of idea of control, who has it, and it being human beings, or, you know, rather than or wresting control from somebody else. But then there's also all of the kind of foibles and the follies of human beings that often come out in these things, and also things, you know, investigating stuff like the potentials, the possibilities of science itself and discovery, but also the dangers of that. And I suppose that it certainly comes through in, you know, something like Frankenstein or lots of these things, doesn't it? But that immediately makes me think as well of kind of later campaign as like Birch and Russell or H. G. Wells against, you know, things like nuclear power, for example, or, you know, those kind of things which had a real a real world threat to them. And then the efforts that they took in real life, like H.G. Wells with the, you know, Declaration of Human Rights and things to take the world in a direction that they wanted it to go, but often having tested ideas out or explored them in in fiction before. So yeah, thinking about that, I guess. And Frankenstein maybe

Frankenstein and the modern Prometheus

Madeleine Goodall 17:13

is a good place to return to, given that Katie, you're yeah.

Andrew Copson 17:16

That's a good way to get back into mate with Katie, yeah, the whole Frankenstein question.

Katie McGregor Stone 17:20

I think that it is really centrally concerned with this idea of what happens when you don't you don't accept that the way that things are is just divinely ordained, is just the way it will always be, and instead start really looking at humans as as agents and kind of shapers of history. So I guess my view of Frankenstein is that I think people sometimes read it as just a cautionary tale, as just like, isn't it bad to try and do science, do too much science and experiment and change the world? And obviously, Frankenstein's experiments go horribly wrong in a way. Um, it's not what he intended to happen. Um, you know, the results are terrible in his life. He makes the creature, and the creature ends up killing everyone in his family. But I think that Shelley is really drawn to the idea of the full title is Frankenstein or the modern Prometheus, and Prometheus obviously being the kind the titan who steals fire from the gods.

Andrew Copson 18:26

And a very much loved symbol of humanists in the 18th and 19th century, really, the number of humanist pamphlets that have Prometheus handing the fire to humanity or whatever.

Katie McGregor Stone 18:37

Yeah, exactly. So I think that idea of uh she's not just saying don't be Prometheus, like it's not an anti-Promethean tale. So it is about all of those dangers and all of the how Victor's egotism, his inability to kind of learn from others and develop relationships, and maybe particularly his inability to care for the creature that he creates lead to these disasters. But I think what she's saying is that this disaster isn't inherent, like that this isn't an idea of don't try things, don't experiment, don't invent something new, create new ways of being. I think she's very interested in doing that and interested in the pitfalls of doing it as well, so that it has these kind of two strands of both a warning, but also maybe a kind of promise and invitation that it could have gone another way. Yeah, is one of the things that interests me anyway.

Andrew Copson 19:37

It's also very I've always thought this is um believe and this is not my film, I don't know anything about it. So shoot me down, shoot me down like a like a like an animal. But I always think as well that Frankenstein's creature is a bit like a sort of like represents humanity itself. And I think it's the very humanist bit in the novel when the creature says to Frankenstein, I can't remember the exact words, but says, you know, I'm only bad because of misery. I was good and then I suffered and now I'm bad. If I if I'm happy again, I can be good again. And you just think, oh, this is this is amazing. This is such a beautiful reflection on like how human beings came to be what they are and who we are and how we are. It's such a wonderful sort of humanist mirror of ourselves. Or maybe I've got that wrong. I don't know.

S.I. Martin 20:20

No, I mean I had the same uh response to it, and I view it from the lens of um, you know, we're presented with a creature as um a figure that is well, it lives beyond it's a being beyond belief. It's not uh constrained by any belief system specifically, and this is what you get uh subject to it someone or something, an entity that's subject to its environment alone. And um, yeah, I I really appreciate that gift from Ushella.

Katie McGregor Stone 20:51

Misery made me a fiend. That's the Misery. Misery made me a fiend.

Andrew Copson 20:55

The best defense every criminal should say it at the doc. The social policy defense again.

Madeleine Goodall 21:03

But that I oh god, I find that so interesting though, in the context of um, I don't know, I'm thinking immediately of like Robert Owen and his big, supposedly groundbreaking notion that people were shaped by their environment. And actually, if you gave people a good education, looked after people who were working, you know, in the factories and and all of this, that actually people weren't destined to be one thing or the other. They weren't born bad and gonna stay that way, that there were, you know, nurture and environment played a huge role in who we are. So I think that's such a interesting thing in the kind of context of that, I guess the social movements as well that were happening at the beginning of the 19th century and that really drove um and inspired actually a lot of um free thinkers who took up and ran with those ideas in order that it might be possible and worthwhile to try and bring about change in the world because actually people we weren't It wasn't a foregone conclusion.

Olaf Stapledon, Vulcans and the mirror for humanity

Andrew Copson 22:02

You know who else does this? Is Olaf Stapledon in his book about a dog? Has anyone read Sirius? He wrote Olaf Stapledon, who is this sort of brilliant, um, obviously brilliant humanist science fiction writer. I don't you all will have to put him into his historic context. I don't know that, but I read his book Sirius once, which is about a dog that becomes conscious. Sirius after the dog star, you know, it's a sort of a classical reference. And that's all about like Sirius's existential questioning, who is he gonna be, how is he gonna be shaped? And of course, it's really about us. It's really about human beings and how we're shaped. And again, with this same sort of chilian type thesis that we're formed by society and our environment and our wants and our context and everything else, and that we're not unchanging beings that are sort of predestined or you know, angels or demons or whatever. It is a good example of a generally humanist theme in science fiction holding a mirror up to people. Like Vulcans, Vulcans are another one. You know, thinking Ardenbury really isn't really saying, isn't it interesting that these there's these uh race of aliens which you know have suppressed emotion. He's saying this is what would happen if we suppressed all our emotion, or if we try to be coldly rational all the time. It's always a mirror, isn't it, for human beings. And that leads me on in a way to someone who's a great admirer of L. Stakleton and colleague

H.G. Wells and the social science of speculation

Andrew Copson 23:21

H. G. Wells, who many people I think would see as the humanist, science fictionist, you know, par excellence. You both had responses to his works, I'm sure.

Katie McGregor Stone 23:32

Yeah, I think that uh Wells is such an interesting figure because of how he's, I don't know, Jules Verne had already started writing these scientific romances, but his focus, I think, was very much on this idea of the hard science of it all, where it was like, how does these technologies work? How will these kind of specific technical innovations potentially change society in various ways? So kind of famously, Verne says uh in my story about going to the moon, they get their own rocket, rockets are real. But H.G. Wells invented like a rock that could resist gravity. And Jules Verne is like, show me that rock. But Wells isn't as interested in that, I think. He's very interested in a kind of a scientific or rationalist approach to the world, but he's less interested in the detail of the kind of technical advances that he's depicting, and more interested, I think, in the social scientific aspect of it. So uh, I guess you think about the time machine, this idea of it doesn't tell you in any way how to make a time machine. He doesn't know anything about the kind of the physics of time, that's not really the point of it. The point is about imagining how his idea that humanity is devolving in various ways, how would that play out over a massive time scale? So that way that he was seeing society being currently structured, with I think this is this is his view, a kind of a feat elite who don't do any work and just live in luxury, which is produced by the industrious but brutalized working classes. What would happen if these two groups of people remained so separate over an evolutionary span of time that they turn into two kind of completely different species? So these are the kind of questions that he's using a scientific framework given to him by evolution and the science of evolution to work out an idea, a social idea that like directly impacted the immediate social pressures that he was identifying and the things that he wanted to impact directly in the now. So you very much using the future as a way to impact the present is uh one thing definitely that he was doing. But he wrote so much, so he was doing a lot of stuff.

S.I. Martin 25:59

Yeah, 100%. I really enjoy the way is enjoy the right word. I appreciate how he has this sort of um quite plodding, predictable urge towards prophecy. Um, but it's all tied around, again, the potentially destructive elements of science and how in almost inevitably there will be an element of destruction, probably total annihilation wrapped up into it, and how that comes up into his um obviously um the war of the worlds. It's always there in the background, it's always lurking things to come, the time machine, that threat of destruction, which obviously infused his humanism. But I think that's one of the most attractive things about him is that he was always giving that warning. It was always there, just hissing in the background like poison gas. Just, you know, take heed. If we if we're gonna go down these paths, these are the potential results.

Madeleine Goodall 27:01

And again, directly responding in some cases. I mean, we have a we do have a whole episode on the this podcast about the deterioration of human rights and and Wells' influence on that. But obviously, that was exactly that. It was this, you know, you witness the devastation of a world war and see how horrible humanity has the potential to be, or to to come, how close you can come to destruction. And then you think, okay, how can I write a document? How can I crystallise my values into human values, and then go through this process of all these people, all these different countries, cultures coming together and trying to figure out what is it that that unites us as human beings and how can we aim for a better world based on a document that we can all agree to. I was just thinking, too, because I know,

Naomi Mitchison and Memoirs of a Spacewoman

Madeleine Goodall 27:55

Katie, that you've written about Naomi Mitcherson as well, and she's another really interesting example to me of somebody who was, she was very involved in humanism and rationalism. She was a, you know, a high-standing member of the Rationalist Press Association, but also a writer and also wrote some really amazing science fiction, speculative fiction works. I don't know if you want to talk a little bit about what she does and how she kind of pays with uses the genre.

Katie McGregor Stone 28:25

Yeah, I mean, I think she is it, she's a really interesting person. She really only got into science fiction kind of much later in her life. So she wrote, I think, her first science fiction novel, Memoirs of a Spacewoman, in 1960. That's when she's 60 years old herself. Um, so she's already had huge careers. And as Maddie said, like um, she's a really prolific novelist and also a campaigner in so many different fields and kind of reproductive rights. She's very involved in histories of British socialism. And uh she, but yeah, she kind of turns to science fiction at this point in her career, I think, in a really interesting way, because uh there does become this big boom of particularly feminist utopian writing in the 1970s in science fiction, as well as uh it's called the new wave of science fiction around the 60s and 70s, but she's really a bit before that. And uh she knew people like Aldous Huxley, and in a way, is Anne Wells and is responding to a sort of older generation of science fiction writers before this big kind of what would be a big boom of queer and feminist writing. Um, she writes memoirs of a spacewoman, which is this kind of amazing story of yeah, an imaginary utopian future in a kind of Star Trek mold, really. It's it's like traveling between worlds. Um, they really have a non-interference policy, you know, with all the planets that they go to. But perhaps slightly unlike in Star Trek, the aliens that they meet are really, really alien. They're not at all uh humanoid, they're like little starfish creatures or giant sea urchins. And and her job is to work out how to communicate with them, um, Mary the protagonist. And so it's all about pushing on the boundaries of humanity, of consciousness, of how should you relate across differences. She'd seen centuries of which was marked by these world wars. She was very involved in kind of independence movement, both in Scotland and in Botswana. She's really seeing this kind of what will a post-imperial world look like, and is very interested in that idea of I think a global community, the possibilities of it, but also the the many existing barriers towards it. And so, yeah, she imagines it on this yeah, galactic framework where it's all about talking to aliens who, yeah, look like caterpillars, but uh, but really it's it is about this possibilities of relationships across difference in a yeah, in I think a really interesting way.

Madeleine Goodall 31:18

So Naomi Mitchison, obviously a uh fascinating person, and I haven't read Memoirs of the Space Woman, but I will now. Uh thanks for the recommendation.

Octavia Butler's Kindred and Earthseed

Madeleine Goodall 31:29

I know, Steve, that you're interested in lots of of writers, one of whom is Octavia Butler. I don't know if you'd like to say anything about what particularly draws you to her or how she kind of, I don't know, I guess speaks to your humanism or to humanist values, maybe more broadly.

S.I. Martin 31:49

Yes, um, I was first drawn to her work upon reading um Kindred, which is a book in which she it's a time travel uh novel, but it features a mixed couple from the 1970s and North America who find themselves slipping back into the um Antebellum horror show of North America, basically how their relationship would function under those circumstances. And it's an incredibly moving novel because it sparked me now my interest in history as well. I spent a lot of time just imagining myself in other places and other times, and it really spoke very, very strongly to me about the decisions we make about who we are, what our values really are, particularly under pressure, what our relationships are under pressure, and either the compromises or successful resolutions to those, which are always something to do with just plain, straightforward, common sense, not being too much of an idiot, and liking people. And uh, if I've got the time, I'll just like shoehorn another, well, it's a set of books, a most famous trilogy, uh Parable of the Sower or the Earth Seed trilogy, in which again she gives us this very horrible dystopian world, which has its salvation in a very straightforward philosophy presented by its protagonist, uh Lauren, a young black woman, who just offers an opportunity for people to resolve their problems by accepting change, by understanding the inevitability of change, by centering change in their lives, by having positive fellow feelings. You know, it's very, very straightforward. But the whole point of it is ultimately humanity, the earth seed, this religion will take us collectively into the stars. But it's just such a fantastic read because I haven't seen utopian ideals or the potentially utopian ideals presented in such a prosadaic way. And um that's something which is very important to me.

Madeleine Goodall 34:13

Well, humans figuring themselves out, but but using kindness and common sense to do so. Because I think it's funny, isn't it? You kind of think in some ways

Zines, fan culture and the online aftermath

Madeleine Goodall 34:22

that's kind of obvious, but then in another way, that is exactly what fiction and certainly kind of science fiction does is it it holds things up that you might have actually never questioned or really thought about and makes you think, oh, actually, maybe that's not such a normal way of doing things, or maybe that is actually troubling. But similarly, this idea I think of that that feels like it's at the heart of lots of it, the idea of just how do we connect with each other, how do we communicate, like Katie was saying, you know, in Mitchison's example, how do we have relationships with other people in whichever context it is that we're in? And that feels very, it's very human, but but very humanist as well. At a certain point, zines were a very popular way of disseminating, uh, well, they kind of arose from science fiction fans, didn't they? It was it was people who wanted to talk about the ideas and the be fans of science fiction, making these cheap, shareable things to communicate more widely with each other, to disseminate ideas, to create fan fiction and that kind of thing. And again, there's something in there that I really loved, that kind of accessibility and connectivity that was being created through these, not just within the stories themselves, but outside of those in the communities that were kind of drawn to them.

S.I. Martin 35:44

Yeah,

The reactionary right's hijacking of science fiction

S.I. Martin 35:45

that sort of activities hasn't it out of migrated online and uh warped into all sorts of weird and not so wonderful uh groupings, which I think is potentially one of the hurdles that science fiction as a genre will have to um overcome. Because you know, there are now sets of uh young men, and it's almost always men, who are seriously anti-humanists, who have almost positioned themselves as handmaidens to Elon Musk and Peter Thiel, and for example, the writer and publisher Theodore Beale, who also masquerades under the name Vox Day, spelt Day D A Y, they are pushing forward white Christian nationalist ideas. You know, we're back to honest Hugo Gernsbach's world of horses in the starship hold and you know, this crusading mission of white English-speaking Christians, not just across the globe, of course, but uh into the universe and beyond. So um, yeah, that is happening.

Madeleine Goodall 36:57

I

Feminist utopianism - the good, the bad and the reactionary

Madeleine Goodall 36:58

feel like that does bring us quite well though to the kind of what we always try to try to ask, which is what we can take from these ideas today, or perhaps in this instance, what science fiction can do for us today. Because obviously, you know, now we've got areas, huge areas of both progress and challenge and you know, discussion like AI, biotechnology, all of these things. Aside from those evil players, what can science fiction do for us today? What might we be able to take from maybe some of those historical writers that we've talked about, or writers writing now? What can it still do for us, do you think? Katie?

Katie McGregor Stone 37:45

Yeah, I think that one of the things that I'm interested in is uh yeah, taking this kind of critical look to utopianism and to science fiction in much the same way that you know Steve was just talking about um with the kind of the bad, the reactionary kind of science fiction that have always been a huge part of the genre. That yeah, it's important. And I think lots of the best science fiction is always about being kind of self-reflective about those kind of imaginings and looking at if we're dreaming of a different world, what is that world actually look like? What is um, what are the values that we're bringing to it? If we're inventing something new, then we have to be really serious about interrogating what we're what we're bringing to it, but at the same time, not giving up on that that kind of invention and creation. And so I'm really interested in the history of feminist utopianism, and I think that one strand of it has been this amazing and revolutionary. I think Maddie before was talking about this idea of like stripping away the familiarity of accepting just the status quo, things as they are, um, and instead saying, well, why is it arranged like that? Why is society arranged like this? Why do we divide our identities and uh the way that we, you know, distribute labour and how we think about what makes a family in particular ways, you know, why how do we use gender and why do we use it in the way that we do to create, I guess, on a basic level, a kind of uh dominator model, a patriarchal model, which yeah, is kind of predicated on misogyny. And so I think that the best feminist utopianism is about saying it doesn't have to be like that. Look at a different way of imagining the world and kind of making strange the way that we do gender. But I think it's also important to look at the ways in which feminist utopianism has like allied itself to really reactionary forces. So there's a big eugenic strain of feminist utopianism, for example, which sort of locates like so Charlotte Perkins Gilman is a big, a big figure in this. Her book, Her Land, um, is a very famous feminist utopia, kind of world of women, and one of the lost plateaus Steve was mentioning at the start. But it's very much based on the idea of maintaining a kind of pure white womanhood by excising what she sees as a sort of savage maleness. You know, she kind of racializes the gender, gender difference in a lot of ways, and is very interested in kind of removing all sexual impulse and in stripping away anything that could look like, could look like femininity as well. She has a very, very kind of sex-negative, anti all, anti-all kind of gender expression or interest in gender difference in favor of this. All the women are basically clones of one another, um, and they have this entirely homogeneous society. And I think that part of what motivates her is holding up this idea that this is a sort of paradoxically, like this is a more natural way of being, like this is closer, that women are closer to nature, becomes a big theme in feminist utopianism. And that's both a way of defending womanhood from rightly from kind of critiques and sort of women hating rhetoric, but also becomes a way of really essentializing what it means to be a woman and sort of suggesting that the only way of being a woman is in this very specific model, which uses nature, I think, as a kind of stand-in for God. You know, this is how things have to be because this is how God made them, this is how things have to be because this is how nature has ordained it. And so I guess, sorry, to bring it back to the kind of modern day question, I really see this being really important in terms of the rise of transphobia within both kind of radical feminism today, but also just more broadly, like how many, uh how much anti-trans legislation and feeling that there is, which so often uses this idea of a natural womanhood to police the boundaries of womanhood and femininity and to demonize people who are always portrayed as being unnatural. And so that's why I think that it's important to be critical of that kind of feminist utopianism and also really interested in the kind of feminist science fiction and utopianism which is produced by people like Octavia Butler, but also lots of different writers in the 1970s by Ursula Le Guin, by people like Marge Pearcy and Naomi Mitchison, who are really pushing on the boundaries of what gender is and what gender could be. And you really see this coming out now. And there's

Queer and trans science fiction today

Katie McGregor Stone 42:54

there's so much amazing queer and trans science fiction being produced today by people like Rivers Solomon, by Tori Peters, by Geordie Rosenberg. There's so many people, but like by people who are really interested in an anti-essentialist understanding of gender that I think really comes out of feminism and utopianism, the way that they combine and say, well, what is possible? What do we want to be possible? And not just being confined by a conservative idea of, well, this is the way that things are, and this is the way things have historically been. So this is the way that they have to carry on being, and that's how we're going to organize our lives. Sorry, that was quite long.

S.I. Martin 43:37

I'm really cheered by your positivity because I was having dark forebodings about the potential possible uses of uh modern science fiction. You've opened me up to a number of writers here I'm going to be uh looking into. Because

Samuel Delany and gender play in 1960s sci-fi

S.I. Martin 43:52

I don't know. Have we developed such a diet for there's been conditioned on this diet for? You know, do we still have an appetite for happy endings, for positivity of the way that you describe it? I mean, I what I would love to see is a sort of rebirth or reinvestment in the writers from the 70s who are bringing up these subjects, you know, the first to speak and be published to a wide readership on these, you know, like um well Samuel Delaney, who was in what, 1967, pushing forward the ideas of uh well, we'd now describe them as puberty blockers for his spacefaring folk who are a class under themselves entire. And um, these obviously androgynous humans are the spacefarers and they are exoticized and they are subject to all of the uh adulation and mistreatment the you could imagine. Listen, wonderful, it's called what was it, I and Gomorrah is the name of the short story. And um he does lots of adventures into gender and sexuality, but he's also quite unreadable. Um some of his logical points, like Bevel 17, etc. But um yeah, his short stories are massively digestible and uh need a reissue.

Madeleine Goodall 45:24

One of the questions we had on here was whether science fiction is a fundamentally humanist genre. I think what one of the things that's really interesting about well, what you've both just said is that it's fundamentally a human genre, and as such, there is lots of room for it to be used, misused for the ideas explored in it to actually be deeply unsettling. So for all of the kind of possibilities of approaching things in a rational and you hope compassionate way, you know, there are pitfalls. But I'm still gonna pitch the question anyway. Is

Is science fiction a humanist genre?

Madeleine Goodall 45:59

science fiction a fundamentally humanist genre?

S.I. Martin 46:03

I'm gonna say yes. I'm gonna say yes. But like you say, Maddy, there are obvious pitfalls. It's science fiction. Some of the adherents of science, particularly the new variants connected with um uh genetic research, artificial intelligence, they are not looking for positive outcomes. They're not looking for human-friendly outcomes. So, no, that's the answer, really. There are some bad players here.

Katie McGregor Stone 46:33

I really agree, and I think it is it's important to look at both both kind of strands within the genre. I was also thinking I was going to answer Octavia Butler to my favourite um atheist later, so I'm gonna have to uh rethink that. But I was really interested in in what you were saying, Steve, about about Butler. And I think in the parable of the sewer books, what's so interesting is that it's totally true that it's the kind of utopian answer to the very near dystopia that she imagines is found in this kind of very common sense approach to acknowledging the humanity of everybody and of kindness and liking people, as you said. Um, but it's interesting that it's framed as a religion, that she founds uh that Lauren in um the Earth Seed books founds Earthseed as a religion. And what she says is that God is change. That's kind of the kind of tenet of the sea books, right? So it's it's interesting to make a religion out of this kind of secular train of thought, that there's just not this hard line, I think, between this is a religious way of approaching something and this is a secular way of approaching something. It's it's it's like there's this uh possibility of reforging religious impulses as well within a science fiction framework, which seems really interesting to me.

Madeleine Goodall 48:01

And I suppose it all does rest in on that idea that human beings are the responsible actors, I guess, the the makers of their own their own destinies, what what what happens to to them, what happens to humankind in in general, or whatever that might look like in a in a science fiction text. Oh, so interesting. Anyway, so to

Favourite humanists and where to read more

Madeleine Goodall 48:27

to end on the question we always give, I will ask you who is your favourite humanist or atheist could be in this space, pun intended, or beyond that we well, either have or haven't mentioned. But uh shall I start with you, Steve?

S.I. Martin 48:46

So I'd probably say Samuel Delaney, because uh lot of again, very straightforward, ungod-centered, world-building um he was involved in. Um he was just ahead of his time. And um, yeah, he just his work needs to come back.

Katie McGregor Stone 49:03

Well, you won't believe me that the person I was just about to say was Samuel Delaney instead of Octavia Butler. But uh yeah, okay. Well, I I love Butler and Delaney, but I think that the person someone we haven't mentioned who I think is really interesting is James Tiptree Jr., who was another author of the kind of 60s and 70s feminist science fiction, and is someone who's a very complicated person. And one of the things I was interested about them was that they were sort of revealed to have been writing under a pen name. They were known as this kind of great male voice in feminist science fiction alongside Devaney, and then it was revealed that their birth name was Alice Sheldon. They've been writing under this kind of pseudonym the whole time. But I think what's particularly interesting to me is there'd been lots of recent interesting scholarship about Tiptree and how the pseudonym was sort of much more than a pseudonym. It was this other persona that Sheldon had created, very much playing with gender and with the idea of becoming a different person and using science fiction to do that as a vehicle of potentially transforming the self and becoming the person that you want to be. And so I think they're a really good example of taking kind of the speculation of science fiction and imagining a possible world off the page and sort of applying it to life and showing how it doesn't, you know, Maddie, you're saying earlier about the kind of zine communities and the fan communities that arise. And I think that yeah, Tiptree's a really good example of someone who where the utopianism and the science fictionality doesn't just exist on the page of the stories, but really extends out into this world of fan culture and author correspondences and interviews and zines and stuff. So um, yeah, they're uh they're another person who's who's super interested in all the questions we've been talking about, about poking at the edges of what does it mean to be human and um how is ethical relation across difference possible.

Andrew Copson 51:11

For me, it's always Gene Roddenby and Star Trek. And I think what's really interesting about the new generation of Star Trek is that it's set not in a completely even, utopian, progressive and nothing ever goes wrong sort of history. But in the more recent Star Trek, like Starfleet Academy, um, there's been a massive, horrible tragedy and a rupture, and the Federation has fallen apart and they've got to rebuild it. And I think that's a sort of answer to the dystopian tendency of our recent times as well, is admitting even in that most utopian of genres that things sometimes do go wrong. But then, very Star Trek, very humanist, very Jean Roddenberry, very positive science fiction, you rebuild again, and you know you can do it, and people are good and they can work together and they can do amazing things.

Madeleine Goodall 51:50

Amazing. We've got some great little quotes from this episode, poking at the edges of being human and um weirdo, weirdos at the margins, etc. etc. So last but not least, where can people find out about your work if they want to know or or read more by you? Shall I start with you, Steve?

S.I. Martin 52:09

I'll I can only direct people to my 20th century website. Just enter my name, Simartin, and you'll come clocking me to it.

Katie McGregor Stone 52:19

Yeah, I had a website too, katimegregorstone.co.uk, and I sort of use my Instagram to talk about books as well. So that's uh I'm cyborg underscore feminist on Instagram.

Madeleine Goodall 52:32

Thank you both so much. That has been such an interesting conversation. A big reading list now to go away with as well, which we'll try and capture in the the show notes for the episode. But it has been such a pleasure to speak to you both. And thank you again for joining us. Thank you so much.

Katie McGregor Stone 52:50

It's been wonderful.

Andrew Copson 52:51

Thank you for listening to Unholy Histories, the Humanist Heritage Podcast, brought to you by Humanist UK. To join, support, or find out more about Humanist UK's campaigns and services, visit humanists.uk or you can follow us on social media at Humanists UK. This podcast was produced by Humanize Live. Find out more about creating content for compassionate communities at www.humanize.live.

Madeleine Goodall 53:15

You can find out more about the rich history and influence of humanism on the Humanist Heritage website at heritage.humanist.uk