Fran Lock introduces a ‘Gypsy Futurist’ science fiction story called ‘Enlightenment For All!’, available to download as a pdf below. Image above courtesy of Jack Varnell
Realistic Irrealities: On ‘Enlightenment for All!’
An Lucht Siúil or ‘the walking people’ is the Irish name for those of ethno-cultural nomadic heritage. I mention this in relation to a work of rich and profoundly strange science fiction because Traveller identity itself is strange: uneasily bracketing notions of racialised difference, sets of diverse cultural practices, and potentially radical forms of social relation.
While sedentary communities have traditionally ensured their survival through competition, acquisition and conquest, the building of walls and the maintenance of boundaries, the lifeways of nomadic peoples turn on continuous movement and negotiation, across territories and between networks of cooperation. Venon – the protagonist of ‘Enlightenment for All!’ – is both a traveller and, I’d venture to suggest, a Traveller. He is – in the nomenclature of Tims’ meticulously realised fictional universe – a ‘Stack Walker’. A denizen of the lowest ‘disk’ or rung of society, literally existing on the ‘excrements of consumption’ cast down by those above him (Marx, Capital, Volume One, 1867). His physical appearance, we are told, would excite revulsion in those same citizens of the higher disks, and he breaks the taboos of both his own caste and those of his betters in choosing to ‘seek enlightenment’ and to begin his journey upwards. Venon embodies both an affront and a challenge to the norms and logics of his society.
This story, then, is already striking. While exceptional outsiders might be considered a staple of genre fiction, Venon’s social – and class-based – abjection seems unusually explicit. In him we meet the aggressively marginalised Other, those persons and peoples disenfranchised to such an extent they are ‘disinherited [from] the possibility of being human’, omitted so thoroughly from the usual processes of representation as to render them paradoxically classless – existing at the outer edges of social and political recognition, existing at the limits of imagination itself (Georges Bataille, ‘Abjection and Miserable Forms’, 1934). Venon’s journey is not motivated by a desire to escape the harrowing conditions of his life, but to understand the forces that create and contour those conditions. Travelling, then, is both the narrative motor of ‘Enlightenment for All!’ and the mechanism by which knowledge is produced, ‘enlightenment’ achieved, and – most importantly – praxis activated.
Tims’ protagonists are often ‘border-steppers’. They are exiles, aliens, men at odds with or painfully excluded from the world in which they find themselves. Venon’s journey up the Stack is marked by provisional forms – sometimes cooperative, often fraught – of social entanglement. It is a journey driven by relentless questioning, and it is a journey that does not end so much as subsides, handed on to his descendants when he is no longer able to climb.
This generational aspect of Tims’ story is its second arresting feature, and it subverts the conventions of the traditional quest narrative towards socialist (and Traveller) ends. By the time Vymok begins his climb we already understand that the work of enlightenment will not be complete in a single lifetime, vividly concentrated within one heroic subject. Rather, it is the effort of centuries, an imperative and a mission braided through the long threads of intergenerational memory.
In other words, enlightenment is slow. Really slow. A process so glacial as to be imperceptible within the span of an individual life. Yet enlightenment is also accumulative, built on the steady, incremental progress of those who went before. Tims weaves these lives into a compelling narrative arc so that we, as readers, can see what individual Stack Walkers may only just discern: their contribution toward a momentous coming change. To enter into the slow-time of the Stack Walkers entails a way of seeing violently opposed to both the malignant rapidity of late-stage capitalism, and the narrative-imperative of its mainstay fictions. We must accept that ‘resolution’, ‘escape’, ‘success’, or any other form of narrative satisfaction will not be forthcoming for individual protagonists. We must accept gratification – ours and theirs – as both imminent and deferred.
None of which is to say that the individual lives of the Stack Walkers are without meaning. The opposite is true. Tims’ lively characterisation ensures that we feel deeply for each Stack Walker from Venon, Vymok, Mikona and Konvar, through Varnatine, Nyrin, Somyn, Mynal, and Melrob. We sympathise with the particularity of their struggles; we are invested in the outcomes of their plans and schemes. This is not the individual life subordinated to the dictates of collective survival, but the single self suffused with and strengthened by a long chain of ancestral connection. This is Tims’ note of socialist hope, and a kind of Gypsy Futurism.
Good science fiction, as Darko Suvin notes, is neither an escape from reality nor a description of it. Rather, it can be read as a ‘a developed oxymoron, a realistic irreality’ (Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre, 1979). Suvin’s point is that SF is the only genre that facilitates (and demands) a change to the whole literary universe, one which forms a tension with the reader’s world, estranging her from it, making it strange. SF oscillates between the shared world of author and reader, and this other mode, this other place, this o/Other perspective. In the gap between the two new ideas and ways of being emerge, criticism is broached, knowledge gathered, insight achieved.
‘Enlightenment for All!’ privileges the perspective of the Other as a necessary agent of revolutionary change. Travellerness is not merely subject to or the result of grinding inequality and social abjection, but the way in which these things are survived, then ultimately overthrown. In Tims’ final rousing passage, Melrob/ Venon returns to the lowest disk from 20,000 years of wandering, flipping once again the linear trajectory of traditional quest or ‘enlightenment’ narratives. He returns carrying the accumulated wisdom of his ancestors, the visons and voices of tribal connections stretching back centuries, and the result of that wisdom is the liberatory imperative of rising with, not above, his class.
‘Enlightenment’ in this tale is not a bland ‘inner peace’ that allows the protagonist to accept the grim conditions of material life with a new-found sense of equanimity. It is, rather, the incandescent lightning-flash that signals a long-overdue smashing of the social order. It is active, collective, incendiary and selfless. And it is brought into being by a walker, by a traveller, by one of our own.
