7.2.2022
IT’S (STILL) A MAN’S WORLD
Visions of a brutalised future in Swastika Night and Dreamtime
The future, in its literary visitations, is almost always a bad place. It’s a warning, an illustration of what the end stop of an ill-fated trajectory might look like. There’s a high price to pay when you tinker with society and a would-be utopia reaches its seeming perfection darkly, by jettisoning its oldies, burning its books or amending the genes of its unborn. This future world may look familiar but it’s as distorted – and perilous – as a nightmare.
Two works of speculative fiction, written 80 years apart and with very different preoccupations, have nonetheless both reached this nightmare scenario in some strikingly similar ways. Swastika Night, written in 1937 by Katharine Burdekin (under the pseudonym of Murray Constantine), and Venetia Welby’s recently-published Dreamtime, both present us with a very masculine world order that is, either officially or from habit, extremely violent towards women. For Burdekin, this vision is at the core of her future world. For Welby, it is part of a wider evocation of the violence being committed against the environment.
Burdekin’s extraordinary novel, written only a few years after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power, managed not only to foresee the war and the holocaust, but also a military alliance between Germany and Japan. On top of this feat of remarkable prescience, she created the father of all dystopias – a place where one half of the population has been dehumanized. Women are seen as animals, referred to several times in the book as cattle, in one place described at length as dogs. They are reviled by men, found physically disgusting, their heads kept shaven and dressed in shapeless rags. They are corralled together in caged compounds, where men visit them for the purposes of reproduction. Male children are taken away from their mothers at the age of one so that they can be reared properly among men and prepared for the world.
And what kind of world is it? Burdekin conjures up a real horror. After a twenty-year world war, Germany has come out triumphant alongside its ally, Japan, and half of the planet is run by Nazis. The Jewish population has been entirely wiped out and the few remaining Christians are ridiculed and held in contempt – barely above women in social status.
The book is set around 700 years since this victory, by which time genuine world history has long been replaced by a Nazi version. Germany and her subject people worship a god called Hitler, a magnificent warrior with long blond hair and rippling muscles, a giant. He is the beginning and the end of history, a superbeing who sprang from something called the “explosion”.
The future envisioned in Swastika Night is not particularly futuristic, it has to be said. If anything, the world run by the Nazis feels medieval. Technology doesn’t seem to have moved on from the 1930s and society is largely unenlightened, with limited literacy and next to no artistic culture. Apart from the Fuhrer, the most powerful figures are the Knights, venerated and untouchable, born into their priestlike roles. The book’s hero – an English aircraft engineer called Alfred who is on pilgrimage to Germany – comes face-to-face with one of these Knights, an ageing free-thinker called von Hess. A central, wide-ranging conversation between Alfred and von Hess is as much a part of the book’s action as the events either side of it. Von Hess has an artefact to show Alfred, an ancient photograph that has been kept hidden by his forefathers for centuries. It shows a group of people, one of them a short, dumpy man with a lank swathe of hair across his face and a smear of a moustache. When Alfred is told that it is in fact Hitler then his mind simply can’t take it in. What’s more, the beautiful long-haired boy standing beside Hitler in the picture is actually a woman – another impossibility! To know the truth, is to start the process of dismantling the lie. But the lie is 700 years old and ingrained.
Von Hess can see that change is coming. Women seem to be giving birth to fewer girls and the future is potentially sterile. The so-called “Reduction”, where women historically allowed themselves to be lesser humans and ended up as non-humans, remains somehow in their collective subconscious and may be affecting the birth rate. Even Alfred – a rebel, who dares to dream of an anti-German uprising – can’t quite get his head around equality and feels no affection for or attachment to the mother of his own sons back in Britain.
Von Hess explains to Alfred the roots of this inequality.
“…when the Reduction of Women started, the Christian men acquiesced to it, probably because there always had been in the heart of the religion a hatred of the beauty of women and a horror of the sexual power beautiful women with the right of choice and rejection have over men. And when women were reduced to the condition of speaking animals, they probably found it impossible to go on believing they had souls”.
Slowly, a situation that may appear preposterous to the reader, gains a foothold in the imagination. The great religions are not that great when it comes to female sexuality. It is a thing to fear and to suppress. If this level of repression has happened before, suggests Burdekin, then what’s to stop it happening again – particularly in a mindset that worships the powerful, dominant, martial male?
Burdekin plays the same unsettling hand when it comes to Alfred’s distaste for the German empire and its uncompromising control over its subject peoples. Von Hess makes a staggering revelation to Alfred. Not only did his country, Great Britain, once rule over an extensive empire but it was Germany’s jealousy of it that encouraged its own imperialism. “You ought to be ashamed of your race, Alfred, even though your empire vanished seven hundred years ago. It isn’t long enough to get rid of that taint,” says von Hess.
Alfred is groping towards an idea of what his country might once have been like. When the collective memory banks are wiped, can anything come through? The myths and folklore of a people are almost its most precious possessions, a collection of mutable yet fundamental words and images that contain the essence of nationhood. Alfred talks of the “darkness” of the unknown past of his country. “So much mistiness,” he muses.” Nothing but legends. England’s packed with legends. I expect all the subject countries are.”
Alfred knows too much to go back. While on pilgrimage, he has come across an old friend, Herrman, a slow-witted, lumbering German, who fights first, thinks later, and personifies the state of his empire: mighty but with damning points of intellectual weakness. Alfred is armed by knowledge. Hermann destroyed by it. Burdekin has given us a handful of memorable individuals for a reason. The Nazis have removed individuality as a prerequisite to totalitarian governance. Their story – in effect, their conversations – is the truly fascinating journey of this novel. Ideas blooming where there had been none. Scintillating moments marking the grasping of truth. But, she asks, is it enough?
Inequality. Imbalance. The same thing. For Alfred to set in motion any kind of resistance to the world order – to bring back the balance – he has to start by questioning his own attitude towards women. It’s not only an issue of freedom, but one of human survival. The Reduction of Women ends – hundreds of years down the line – with the ruination of all humanity, puts everyone on the brink. The brutal, misguided dream of a handful of sociopaths, wreaks untold damage and sets a collective nightmare in motion.
*
Damage is also at the heart of Dreamtime. And, just as in Swastika Night, it’s so deep-seated, so far gone, that the nightmare scenario is of its incurability. Unlike Swastika Night, however, the nightmare is not hundreds of years away, but just around the corner, in a palpably near future. Having said that, there is much that feels almost hallucinatory in the book, time-shifting, with science and folklore swimming in and out of focus, as though seismic climate events have not only shaken the planet’s surface, but disturbed its deepest myths and superstitions as well. Just as Alfred perceives that mistiness of the past in Swastika Night, so chimerical forces bubble up into the human world in Dreamtime. And exactly as Alfred’s name nods to past glories and legends, so the names of Dreamtime’s characters – Sol, Hunter, Phoenix – suggest an allegorical element to the narrative.
No one goes undamaged in the world of Dreamtime, from the emotionally-scarred heroes Sol and Kit, to the hardened American soldiers and the vulnerable Japanese islanders they have been sent to guard. The capacity to damage seems inherent. It’s set in motion, Welby suggests, by early sins, by the unleashing of nuclear arms at the end of the Second World War. Short-term political decisions are, she indicates, at the root of manifestly disastrous long-term outcomes.
Dreamtime is the name of the American cult where Sol and Kit – possibly sister and brother, possibly not, certainly would-be lovers – spent their earliest years, looking out for each other while trying to escape the cult’s charismatic, sexually-deviant leader, Phoenix. Sol – now on the cusp of thirty – has been in rehab on and off to cope with drug addiction. Wild, beautiful, impetuous – perhaps even doomed – she has become obsessed with finding her biological father. All she knows is that he was a soldier and that he may now be based in Japan. Kit, who cannot be apart from her – she is his dangerous and yet life-giving sun – is going along, albeit reluctantly.
What follows is a complex, harrowing and remarkable travelogue, from the unbearable aridity of Arizona to the toxic fragility of Japan, where American military bases are now peppered around its archipelago as a bulwark against Chinese aggression. As the search for the mysterious soldier-father intensifies, so Sol and Kit leave Tokyo behind for the islands. They are accompanied by Hunter, an irresistible, godlike Marine, muscular, all-knowing, who has taken it upon himself to act as Sol’s guide and bodyguard.
There is a restlessness in the telling of their journey, a jumpy, neurotic second-guessing. The world seems to be crumbling under their feet, a storm always ahead. The area is suffering. Its seas are poisoned, its land under constant threat from the encroaching oceans, its culture being replaced by an American way of life and its young women at risk from the “friendly” occupiers.
Welby’s depiction of ecological disaster is breath-taking but it’s also the more nuanced threats that resonate. To get to Japan, Sol and Kit take one of the last scheduled passenger flights before all planes are grounded for environmental reasons. Air travel, taken for granted for decades, simply ceases and distant parts of the world become closed off. The sky is not the only forbidden area. The seas around Japan have become so dangerous that no one dares swim in them. Seafood – once a staple of the Japanese diet – is off the menu, too risky to human health. Sol runs into the sea, heedless, refusing to believe that anything can harm her. Kit, trepidatious and always aware of the wrongness of their incursion into a world that doesn’t want them, longs for his parched Arizona home. He is cerebral, she all instinct. If she personifies the headlong rush of the world towards disaster, then he is the conscious penitent who looks on aghast and helpless. “All of nature is hostile to humans now,” he realises. “The sea, the sun, the beach, the trees.”
For Welby, there is a close relationship between male sexual violence and the remorseless plundering of nature. The long-term effects of an abusive cult leader, who preyed on doped-up mothers and their children, is still being felt by the grown-up victims. US Marines, drafted in to protect the Japanese population, are actually responsible for their harm, young local women disappearing with regularity at the hands of servicemen. And then there is Hunter, whose sexual voraciousness is draining and overpowering. Sol, looking for a father and a protector, either puts herself in perilous positions or is taken advantage of. Slowly she is being eroded away and yet there is something still powerful at her core. Her will is indomitable.
Dreamtime works towards a conclusion of enormous impact, a kind of ecological Heart of Darkness. But even in this cataclysm we recognise the familiar sense of denial. Kit, who is witness to the nightmare, who would rather not know, is not alone in struggling to grasp what is happening, even when it’s happening before his own eyes:
“Death is something people are more familiar with these days. A thousand climate migrants have died trying to make the crossing, or a thousand perished in the landslides, or ten thousand or a million dead of drought, dehydration, famine, pestilence. The constant throwing out of numbers has inured most people to the reality, and as all distant reality has been replaced by the virtual, it is easy to stay inured, even to deny completely.”
Dreamtime – in all its breathless intensity of noise and colour – is the unapologetic opposite of denial.
*
Have we lost the battle? Is coming face to face with disaster likely to pull us back from the brink of ecological disaster? Can we stand up and rise against a brutal political regime? Is it for a dystopian novel to even attempt to answer that question? Maybe its job – as demonstrated by these two visionary books – is to throw us into the nightmare and let us reside in a worst-case future for a while. Just to see how it feels.
Swastika Night by Katharine Burdekin, writing as Murray Constantine, is published by Gollancz as part of its SF Masterworks series. It originally came out in 1937.
Dreamtime by Venetia Welby was published by Salt in 2021.