Saturday, October 20, 2018

What is Greg Van Eekhout's attitude toward his story "Native Aliens," and what is Standley G. Weinbaum's attitude toward his story "Martian Odyssey"? Both share the same subject: colonization.

The two works, published seventy years apart, are similar in that they use science fiction to comment on colonization on Earth and, more broadly, to present social critiques.
Stanley Weinbaum published A Martian Odyssey in 1934, decades before the global spread of decolonization. In his vision of a mission to Mars, the Earth-based colonization of the moon and the exploration of Mars have preceded the development of atomic power. Jarvis and three other explorers have been making forays around the Martian landscape from their ship. Mars is inhabited by animals and humanlike creatures. Jarvis has developed a positive relationship with one of these creatures; he calls it Tweel for the whistling sound it makes. Thanks to Tweel, Jarvis learns about the properties of a large heap of silica-based bricks, which will prove an important resource for creating the atomic energy the Earthlings use as a power source. While the reader cannot be sure of Weinbaum’s attitude toward colonialism overall, this story seems to hold no ambiguity about Earth’s right to colonize other planets.
Greg Van Eekhout’s approach to colonization is more nuanced, suggesting a postcolonial perspective (as noted in the subtitle of the anthology in which the story appears) on the European experience in Asia that compares to Earthlings’ experience on Breva. The complexities of this story include not only travel to an alien land but also the long period of residence there that makes people both comfortable in their new surroundings and nostalgic for the life back home. There is a lot of irony in this story, as the “Dutch” people in Indonesia have never even visited, much less lived in, the Netherlands; for the Terra-Brevans, so much time has elapsed that evolution has rendered them physically quite distinct. Overall, Van Eekhout does not assume that colonization is beneficial for either the colonizers or the colonized, and he suggests great similarities between these two groups.
https://books.google.com/books?id=bK02DwAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/23731/23731-h/23731-h.htm

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