“We must liberate our minds from mental slavery, because while others may help us to liberate our bodies, none but ourselves can liberate our minds”
-Marcus Garvey-
It may seem odd to start an article exploring the historic contribution made by people from a range of intersectional backgrounds to the genre of science fiction with a quote from Marcus Garvey, a political activist and leader of the Pan-Africanist movement. However, I believe it to be the most appropriate start to what I hope will be a journey to inspire and, I hope, to encourage our collective ability to reimagine a different future.
Sci-fi as a genre offers us an opportunity to envisage future realities that are not only grounded in science technology but also in realism. The genre’s predictive track record stretches as far back as 175 C.E., the earliest known work of science fiction to include travel to outer space, by Syrian satirist Lucian of Samosata who wrote about flying ships that travel to the moon. There have been a number of inventions and ideas foreseen by sci-fi since: the defibrillator, bionic limbs, mobile phones and wearable tech, 3D printers, machine learning, cyberspace, self-driving cars, broadcast news and even reality TV. Alongside arguably the most dangerous but also pivotal invention, the atomic bomb, which not only changed warfare but has a legacy that continues to dominate geo-politics even to this day. It is fair to say that whether positively or negatively these inventions have shaped our society and our social norms.
Science fiction has long provided an outlet for individuals, societies and cultures to grapple with technological advance and both its positive and detrimental impacts by providing astute social commentary. In response to the invention and use of the atomic bomb we have seen mass social organising and campaigning with scientists and members of the public asking: “Shall we put an end to the human race; or shall mankind renounce war?”1 H.G. Wells, who predicted nuclear warfare and is at least in part responsible for the development of the atomic bomb, also wrote about the horrors that would arise from it and the development of the ‘One World Republic’ that would attempt to end all wars. More recently we are seeing mass protests in Universities around Europe and the US calling for the divestment from militarisation and fossil fuels. Alongside this we have also seen the emergence of sub-genres such as climate sci-fi, or ‘cli-fi’, which imagines potential futures based on how we respond to the impacts of climate change.
I am hoping that as modern consumers and producers of sci-fi we can galvanise grassroots level movements alongside local, national and global politics into thinking seriously about what we want our current and future societies to be like. This requires diverse and intersectional voices that will create a vision for the future and inspire our potential to transcend inequality, social, political and economic crises, climate collapse and injustice. In particular, I want to remind you of a science fiction authors who does just this. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain used her unique experience to ask pertinent questions of her society and imagined realities that remain relevant and in many ways aspirational even today.
Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain wrote “Sultana’s Dream”, one of the earliest science fiction stories by a woman. Published in 1905 in the Indian Ladies Magazine, Sultana’s Dream is nothing short of a feminist utopia founded on scientific achievement. It tells the story of Sultana who awakens in a new reality, ‘Ladyland’, with reversed gender structures where women lead society and drive forward social, political, economic and technological reforms. Ladyland is formed in the aftermath of a scientific feminist revolution. The nation is under attack for providing refuge to people fleeing political persecution and the men are no longer able to defend the land. Tired and hopeless, they retreat to their homes, leaving the women to forge a resistance to the invasion. Female scientists who have been studying how to collect, store and redirect solar power come up with a cunning plan to harness the power of concentrated solar rays and direct the heat towards the invading army. This previously unknown weaponry forces the invading army to flee, leaving behind all of their weaponry, which is promptly melted down by the women, who have won the war without any casualties.
The men agree to give up their positions within society and conform to the just and scientific rule of the women, who create a society without epidemic disease or excess mortality, where work is fully automated and people live a life of egalitarian luxury. There are also a number of technological advances from flying cars and solar ovens to cloud condensers that meet people’s energy and water needs.
While we may not wish to confine men to the “mardana”, a fictional male equivalent of the Zanana, an area within the home reserved for women of the household, we have a lot to learn from the social, political and technological reforms brought forward in Ladyland. One of the central themes of Sultana’s dream, alongside a concern with overarching patriarchal systems, is the link between science and technology on the one hand, and military and imperial power on the other:
“While the women were engaged in scientific research, the men of this country were busy increasing their military power. When they came to know that the female universities were able to draw water from the atmosphere and collect heat from the sun, they only laughed at the members of the universities and called the whole thing “a sentimental nightmare”!
Historically, developments in science and technology have been associated with military and imperial growth. Hossein lived in a time when India was under British Colonial rule and her depiction of the use of scientific knowledge to impose military dominance implicitly critiques the expansion of European colonialism. Science, technology and medicine were crucial means through which imperial rule and violence were inflicted on people who were colonised. More often than not, such forms of knowledge were also built upon the physical and intellectual labour of indigenous groups in the colonised states.2
The East India Company for example, took ownership of key infrastructure, including ports, waterways, and railroads and designed railways and maritime trade routes to connect commercial and military areas with sea ports to extract natural resources and wealth. Navigational devices and techniques and improved map making as well as developments in medicine, especially around malaria, came from the need to cross colonial landscapes during military campaigns.
To this day scientific and technological knowledge is closely intertwined with military endeavours, as we can see with often global increases in military expenditure but a stagnation or decrease in civilian STEM budgets.3
Not only does Sultana’s dream shine a light on the relationship between science, technology and colonialism, but it also offers an early feminist critique of science. A number of feminist epistemologists and philosophers of science have argued that mainstream knowledge practices disadvantage women as they exclude them from inquiry. These practices have historically denied women authority and undermined “feminine” cognitive styles, all the while producing theories of social phenomena that render women’s activities and interests, and gendered power relations, invisible.4
This is really evident in Sultana’s dream, where men write off women’s scientific research as a “sentimental nightmare” because of its focus on solving social, economic and environmental issues.
In her writing, Hossein also dismantles binary gender roles by presenting women in positions of power and as scientists leading social, economic and environmental revolutions. Her characterisation also supports this: for example, she refers to the shy and timid nature of Sultana, the central protagonist, as “mannish”. Sultana is also the female equivalent of sultan, meaning ruler. Combined with the envisaged future free from the societal problems and constraints of the time, this provided people with a social commentary and new perspective on their own society. It is also interesting to note that it took until 1969, in Ursula Le Guin’s book The Left Hand of Darkness, for a woman to again explore this idea of a society without war as a result of this absence of fixed gender characteristics.
Hossein in her own life was able to achieve a number of great things for the emancipation of women. She funded the first school for girls in Bengal, Sakhawat Memorial Girls’ School, and in 1916 founded the Muslim Women’s society, which fought for women’s education and employment. Rokeya Sakhawat Hossein is remembered as one of the founders of the women’s rights movement in Bengal and as someone who fought hard for women to be recognised as crucial to the political advancement of the nation and its liberation from colonial powers.
1 Russel Einstein Manifesto
2 Epilogue – Malarial Subjects – NCBI Bookshelf (nih.gov)
3 Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics
4Feminist Epistemology and Philosophy of Science (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
