Strange Horizons, July 2002 Read online

  This foreknowledge not only applies to individuals, but also to nations. Alternate history presupposes an essential history of the race: what has already happened in the real world. This doom hangs upon the race or the individual like a millstone, forever shaping what we see of them, grinding them into their destined channels. Native American strength, for instance, can only be seen through the lens of Native American weakness.

  In most of the alternate history scenarios where the Native Americans remain strong, civilization itself fails to develop at the same rate it did in the real world. Since Native Americans didn't discover major scientific principles in our world, they rarely do so in alternate history. Since they didn't develop an extensive written poetry, a unified nation, or a standing army in our world, they don't do so in the alternate histories either. Their poorly-imagined societies mostly just exist as placeholders, keeping terrain on a map of the New World, or providing a convenient foe. Indeed, in “The Wheels of If,” a character from our timeline explains his frequent cultural gaffes in an alternate earth by suggesting that he's spent the last several years among the Dakotians (Sioux), and no one questions him on his imposture, since everyone understands that the Dakotians are uncouth and outside the pale of civilization. The increased presence of the Native American in the alternate history is a sign that civilization has failed to develop as it should.

  The computer game Civilization III, by Firaxis, recapitulates this story of unequal societal potential. Arguably, Civ III is a game of alternate history: it resets all civilizations to the dawn of time, and starts them off on an even keel, with the world in front of them, open to exploitation. However, in Civ III, the Aztecs, Iroquois, and Zulu have strategies that make them lose, almost every time. The game is seemingly fair, but even when the natives are given a fair shake, even when history alters itself, they are unable to match Western prowess. It is really the Germans, English, and Russians who are the most dangerous in this game, just as has proven to be true in “real life."

  The Years of Rice and Salt

  The Years of Rice and Salt is more unsettling because the Native Americans are no better or no worse than we are: they are us. The Hodenosaunee (Iroquois) are relatively untouched during the great World War that ruins Islam and China and India. They recover quickly, and are able to send great fleets around the world, forcing others to obey their will. While they are the proselytizers of democracy, they are also arrogant and pushy. They are America.

  Robinson invokes the Native Americans as the ghost, the stand-ins for the vanished Europeans. Cultural advances come from the Iroquois and from another ghost culture, Nsara, the feminist Islamists who take over northwest France. Here, Robinson parallels real-world history as Americans understand it: we have it in our minds that most cultural and intellectual developments came from Europe and America, while Islamic and Chinese scholars were only responsible for a few inventions. This plays out in the text: the absence of Europeans means that new nations have to be invested with the power to carry out their reforms, in this case the Iroquois and Nsara. Islamic and Chinese scholars create many technological advances, but culture comes from Europe, or in this case, Europe's inheritors.

  Robinson is clearly viewing his alternate past through the lens of the real present. Of course, Robinson is constrained here by his own Marxist beliefs. As befits a work by a student of Fredric Jameson, Robinson's novel features an inevitable class conflict and war between people's groups and oppressive capitalist hegemons and military generals, and postulates a worldview in the New World that is “pre-scarcity"—theories that hearken back to Raymond Firth's Tikopia, Ruth Benedict's portrayal of hunter-gatherer tribes in Patterns of Culture, and the anarchist theories of Alexander Berkman. This influences the “truth” of his civilization as much as the recent books Non-Zero, Guns, Germs, and Steel, and The Clash of Civilizations. The Clash of Civilizations in particular constrains his narrative, since it posits an essential identity for civilizations which can't be changed and leads inevitably to grand historical events. However, throughout his text he situates it within an alternate historical viewpoint.

  Robinson's text displays historical characteristics in a different manner. It's set over the course of 700 years, and the manner in which the story is produced changes from chapter to chapter as “time” passes. He sets his text into ten different “books,” giving each book a graphically different-looking map to start it off, and uses different techniques of ordering each book in chapters. At the beginning, the narrative resembles early Chinese fictions like Wu Chen-En's Journey to the West, breaking into verse on occasion and filled with supernatural intrusions. Gradually becoming more “sophisticated” and “modern,” by the end the text no longer allows supernatural events to occur and looks like a contemporary American novel. Time is a visible force in this novel, and it's reflected in the very bones of the piece.

  The science of history is also under debate. The first few characters display a naive, supernatural view of history (events are caused by the gods); later, Robinson takes on the theories of the Muslim historian Ibn-Khaldun. By the end of the novel, the characters are discussing the Whig theory of history (here called the Burmese model), and even the appeal of alternate history itself. The increasing sophistication of the societies is mirrored in the sophistication of the text itself and its intellectual arguments. The development of this historical critique parallels the development of the field of history in our world, until by the end the characters are discussing issues important to the world today. Robinson ends his novel with his fictional world having advanced about as far as our real world has. It's no accident that his novel ends in his world's AD 2002.

  Kim Stanley Robinson's effort both expands the genre to its logical conclusion and shows its limits. The parallel societies developed by non-European races in his world show that we can only judge an alternate society by its resemblance to us. They exist solely so that we can play intellectual games with them. His characters’ own reflections on “what if?” serve to shock the reader into acknowledging their own position within the text as a knowledgeable observer. By signaling that ultimately he's writing about our society and our culture, Robinson moves beyond the conceits of alternate history.

  The natives of the New World were conceived and interpreted by the West, at first, through the lens of the past. Early explorers and commentators were guided in their initial picturings of the new world by pre-existing narratives like the stories of Mandeville and the Alexander Romance. In a similar manner, in an alternate history, the behavior and tendencies of all characters (but particularly the Native Americans) is bound to American concepts of how they behave. In a novel written in America, the reader is presumed to know the “historical” story of the Indians, and thus the power of the alternate history comes from the way it riffs on the original. Nevertheless, to remain plausible, to retain the title of history, it must recapitulate and brace conceptions of the past.

  While alternate history seemingly involves an escape from time, or an alteration in time, it really never escapes the trap of the present.

  * * * *

  Fred Bush is Senior Articles Editor for Strange Horizons. His previous publications, including a review of The Years of Rice and Salt, can be found in our Archive.

  Works cited:

  Aldiss, Brian and David Wingrove. Trillion Year Spree. New York: Avon, 1988

  Anderson, Poul. The Time Patrol. New York: Tor, 1991.

  Bradbury, Ray. “A Sound of Thunder.” The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories. New York: Hart-Davis, 1953.

  Chamberlain, Gordon B. “Allohistory in Science Fiction.” Alternative Histories, ed. Greenberg, Martin and Charles G. Waugh. New York: Garland, 1986.

  Chesney, George Tomkyns. “The Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer.” Blackwood's, May, 1871.

  Cox, Irving E., Jr. “In the Circle of Nowhere.” Universe, July 1954. Reprinted in Alternative Histories, ed. Greenberg, Martin and Charles G. Waugh. New York: Garland,
1986.

  de Camp, L. Sprague. “The Wheels of If.” Unknown, December 1940. Reprinted in Alternative Histories, ed. Greenberg, Martin and Charles G. Waugh. New York: Garland, 1986.

  Fabian, Johannes. Time and the Other. New York: Columbia, 1983.

  Hellekson, Karen. The Alternate History: Refiguring Historical Time. Kent: Kent State, 2001.

  Moore, (Joseph) Ward. Bring the Jubilee. New York: Ballantine, 1953.

  Motohashi, Ted. “The Discourse of Cannibalism in Early Modern Travel Writing.” Travel Writing and Empire, ed. Steve Clark. NY: Zed Books, 1999. 83-99.

  Page, Jake. Apacheria. New York: Del Rey, 1988.

  Roberts, John Madox. The King of the Wood. New York: Doubleday, 1983.

  Robinson, Kim Stanley. The Years of Rice and Salt. New York: Bantam, 2002.

  Schmunk, Robert B., ed. Uchronia: The Alternate History List. Available online. Accessed May 10, 2002.

  Suvin, Darko. “Alternative Histories.” Science Fiction Studies 10(2) July, 1983: 148-169.

  Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve, 1973.

  Turtledove, Harry. Guns of the South. New York: Ballantine, 1993.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Lust, Love, and the Literary Vampire

  By Margaret L. Carter

  7/22/02

  In Jacqueline Lichtenberg's novel of alien vampires, Those of My Blood, the heroine Inea asks the vampire protagonist, Titus, “Is it especially good with—vampires? Or is that a myth, too?” Titus replies, “I'll make it like nothing you've ever known” (Lichtenberg, 95). Carol Senf has pointed out that the very qualities that make the traditional vampire a threat in nineteenth-century stories such as Carmilla and Dracula—particularly his or her erotic power and unconventional behavior—make the vampire appealing to twentieth-century readers. Contemporary authors place “increasing emphasis on the positive aspects of the vampire's eroticism and on his or her right to rebel against the stultifying constraints of society” (Senf, 163).

  Ever since changing mores began to allow the explicit rendering of the allure that remains latent in nineteenth-century fiction, it has been a truism of the genre that sexual intimacy with a vampire is “especially good.” What becomes of this convention, however, when the vampire is presented nontraditionally, perhaps in scientifically rationalized terms?

  The sexual dynamic of the prototype of traditional vampire tales, Dracula, is often explicated as symbolic incest. John Allen Stevenson counters this interpretation with an analysis of vampire sexuality in Dracula as radically incompatible with incest. Count Dracula's predation alters the species of his victims; his mates in life, in undeath they become his kin. Vampires cannot feed on—symbolically mate with—their own kind. Dracula is compelled to “marry out.” “His crime is not the hoarding of incest but a sexual threat, a sin we can term excessive exogamy” (Stevenson, 139).

  Stevenson characterizes the focus of Dracula as “interracial sexual competition,” in which Dracula's predation is motivated by “an omnivorous appetite for difference, for novelty” (Stevenson, 139). The xenophobia of Stoker's novel centers upon the threat of the monstrous Other who not only steals “our” women but converts them into a threat in themselves. The sexuality of Lucy and Mina is “released in the wrong way, by a foreigner ... who has achieved what the men fear they may be unable to accomplish” (Stevenson, 146).

  Another threatening aspect of vampire sexuality (as several earlier critics have also pointed out) is its multimorphic quality. As portrayed in the “baptism of blood” scene, in which Dracula forces Mina to drink from him, “What is going on? Fellatio? Lactation? It seems the vampire is sexually capable of everything” (Stevenson, 146). This monstrous Other, moreover, blurs the concept of gender, stimulating a fear of “vampire sexuality, a phenomenon in which ‘our’ gender roles interpenetrate in a complicated way” (Stevenson, 146). Men become “feminine” as victims penetrated by the vampire's phallic fangs; women devour infants rather than mothering them and take on the stereotypical “masculine” trait of aggressive sexuality. Bisexuality as well as alienness contributes to the terrifying threat Stoker and his nineteenth-century readers saw in vampirism.

  Contemporary readers—and writers—more often see the vampire's otherness and sexual ambiguity as alluring. Hence the more or less traditionally supernatural vampire, as transformed in the novels of such authors as Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, becomes attractive rather than horrible. If male, the vampire in such novels is usually incapable of penile-vaginal intercourse. Analyzing the impotent male vampire in recent novels of sympathetic vampires, Lloyd Worley describes this character as “a eunuch, a powerful, yet incomplete creature whose Satanic isolation is defined in terms of sexual impotence” (Worley, 25).

  Like Stevenson, Worley emphasizes the blurring of gender roles typical of fictional vampirism. He ascribes the impotence of characters such as Yarbro's brilliant, chivalrous Saint-Germain—a Dracula with a difference, a Transylvanian nobleman with most of the traditional vampiric traits, whose feeding brings supreme bliss rather than terror—to the essential femininity of the vampire. From this viewpoint all fictional vampires, whatever their ostensible gender, are female in their sexuality. According to Worley, “the essential psychological nature of the vampire is negatively feminine"—in other words, the character's “femininity” is defined by his incapacity for “male sexual performance” (Worley, 29). Instead, for vampires erotic pleasure centers on “the experience of unity and sharing through oral gratification” (Worley, 33).

  Since Worley's interpretation draws heavily upon Freudian theory, it is not surprising that his view of vampire sexuality has a strong bias toward a traditionally masculine paradigm of sexuality. James Twitchell's analysis in The Living Dead and Dreadful Pleasures shares this bias. He views the traditional vampire tale as essentially an adolescent male erotic fantasy. This approach leaves incompletely explained the contemporary fictional vampire's powerful appeal to women readers. A more fruitful approach would be to employ a model of femaleness as an entity in its own right, rather than the Freudian model of the female as an incomplete male.

  In an article on narrative theory, Susan Winnett discusses critics who construct paradigms of narrative rhythm modeled on “the trajectory of male arousal” (Winnett, 506). Suggesting that a narratology based on female erotic experience might look quite different, she points out: “Everything that the last two decades have taught us about human sexual response suggests that the female partner in intercourse has accesses to pleasure not open to her male mate.... Without defying the conventions dictating that sex be experienced more or less together, she can begin and end her pleasure according to a logic of fantasy and arousal that is totally unrelated to the functioning and representation of the ‘conventional’ heterosexual sex act. Moreover, she can do so again. Immediately. And, we are told, again after that” (Winnett, 507).

  On a more popular level, Sheila Kitzinger, widely read authority on female sexuality, notes the inadequacy of “the idea that the goal of every mature sexual encounter should be penetration and orgasm” (Kitzinger, 36) and states, “By far the most frequent criticism women make of male partners is that they concentrate almost exclusively on the genitals” (Kitzinger, 136).

  From the feminine viewpoint, then, vampire sexuality as portrayed in fiction, far from being “incomplete,” instead compensates for the defects in conventional masculine sexual patterns. To many female readers, “unity and sharing through oral gratification” sounds more positive than negative. The erotic appeal of vampires such as Yarbro's Saint-Germain and Fred Saberhagen's Dracula draws its power from this fact. And it is suggestive that, as Joan Gordon documents in “Rehabilitating Revenants,” the sympathetic, attractive vampire is more often the creation of a female than a male author (Gordon, 230). Gordon suggests as a partial explanation that “it is a feminist vision to see power in the giver of nourishment as well as in the taker,” freeing the female author to find pos
itive qualities in beings ordinarily considered monstrous (Gordon, 233).

  Saint-Germain, the hero of Yarbro's historical horror series, is attractive not only because of his nobility and high ethical standards. (In the first novel, Hotel Transylvania, he rescues the heroine from a coven of Satanists, at one point holding them at bay—in a bold reversal of the traditional vampire image—with a piece of the consecrated Host.) He also appeals to readers, as well as to female characters within the tales, because his thirst for blood involves a craving for intimacy. In “Cabin 33” he informs an ignorant young vampire, “It isn't the power and the blood.... It is the touching” (Yarbro, Chronicles, 168). Yarbro's vampires, incapable of erection and ejaculation, cannot attain full satisfaction in their feeding unless the human donor reaches orgasm. Saint-Germain makes this need explicit in his lecture to a newly-converted vampire who cynically remarks that he expects to get a “good lay” from his first donor: “It is essential that she have the—good lay. Otherwise you will have nothing” (Yarbro, Chronicles, 69).

  Thus the vampires in these novels, whatever their personal inclinations, must in a sense behave “unselfishly” in their erotic encounters, making them ideal lovers. And their “impotence” makes it impossible for them to “concentrate almost exclusively on the genitals.” Moreover, the union between vampire and human lovers, both before and after the donor's transformation, transcends anything attainable in ordinary human mating. Saint-Germain writes to his great love, Madelaine, “an ocean and a continent away from you and still I feel your tread, a tremor that speeds along the veins of the earth to me” (Yarbro, Chronicles, 172). Yet Saint-Germain, like Dracula, is radically exogamous. The great sorrow of his existence is that once Madelaine becomes a vampire, they can no longer express their love physically, for, being undead, they cannot give each other the life they crave. Therefore, Saint-Germain's attractiveness combines the allure of the Other with that of the feminine ideal of a consummate lover.