Sunshine Patriots

Bill Campbell

Description

Rebellion erupts on the "paradise" planet of Elysia, plunging the colony into chaos. In response, the all-powerful United Earth dispatches its elite corps of cyborg soldiers, led by Aaron "The Berber" Barber. For a hero celebrated galaxy-wide for his acts of bravery against alien hordes, a ragtag group of colonized miners with antiquated weapons should be no challenge. But Barber and his soldiers are unprepaed to meet the most dangerous enemy yet--humans just like them. And on Elysia, the soldiers discover dangers that neither United Earth nor the Elysians themselves could have foreseen. The secrets Barber and his soldiers uncover lead them to question the true meaning of freedom in a world where nothing is what it seems.

Bill Campbell is the author of Sunshine Patriots, My Booty Novel, and the anti-racism satire, Koontown Killing Kaper. Along with Edward Austin Hall, he co-edited the groundbreaking anthology, Mothership: Tales from Afrofuturism and Beyond. He also co-edited Stories for Chip: A Tribute to Samuel R. Delany with Nisi Shawl, Future Fiction: New Dimensions in International Science Fiction and Fantasy with Francesco Verso, and APB: Artists against Police Brutality with Jason Rodriguez and John Jennings (for which he won a Pioneer/Lifetime Achievement Glyph Award). His Afrofuturist spaceploitation graphic novel, Baaaad Muthaz (with David Brame and Damian Duffy) was released in 2019. His historical graphic novel with Bizhan Khodabandeh, The Day the Klan Came to Town, was released by PM Press in 2021. In the summer of 2021, Campbell won a Locus Award for his work helping to diversify the field of science fiction. Campbell lives in Washington, DC, where he spends his time with his family and helms Rosarium Publishing.

Sujets

• Science Fiction
• Afrofuturism
• Military science fiction
• General officer
• Military
• General
• Fiction
• Cyborg

Informations

• Publié par: Rosarium Publishing
• Date de parution: 01 décembre 2013
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781495623103
• Langue: English

Extrait

Sunshine Patriots Special 15th Anniversary Edition
Copyright Bill Campbell. All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced or retransmitted in any form or by any means without the written permission of the publisher.
Rosarium Publishing
P.O. Box 691
College Park, MD 20741
www.rosariumpublishing.com
ISBN: 978-0-9891411-7-8
LCCN: 2013913683
Cover design and art: Vincent Sammy
To Mom (Eleanor)
All those hurdles I thought I d cleared alone
Only to find you ve lifted me
These are the times that try men s souls. The summer soldier and sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of his country; but he that stands it now deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Heaven knows how to put a proper price upon its goods; and it would be strange indeed if so celestial an article as Freedom should not be highly rated.
Thomas Paine
Introduction
If a utopia is a dream-world, a dystopia is a place of nightmares. Both types of imaginary spaces reflect upon real social and cultural issues, the former to envision a world arguably perfected in some fundamental way (Gilman s Herland [1915], Callenbach s Ecotopia [1975]), the latter to foresee the awful outcomes if certain alarming trends progress unchecked (Huxley s Brave New World [1932], Orwell s Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949], Atwood s The Handmaid s Tale [1985]). The twentieth century spurred the creation of many compelling dystopias, and Bill Campbell continues this literary tradition into the new millennium with Sunshine Patriots (2004).
I first discovered Sunshine Patriots while hunting for novels with fantastical, speculative settings as subjects of my dissertation. There are, of course, no shortage of such novels, as the genres of fantasy and science fiction have been prolific throughout the last century: Brian McHale describes science fiction as the ontological genre par excellence in the postmodern era (16). But I wanted literary texts with teeth, too-novels that reflected critically on the real with eloquence, erudition, and contentiousness. My dissertation was already populated by the likes of Angela Carter, Octavia Butler, Kathy Acker, and China Mi ville when I asked my committee member, Lisa Yaszek, What novel could be considered a Nineteen Eighty-Four of the post-9/11 world? Yaszek, who is known for her literary scholarship on women and minorities in science fiction, responded with a handful of texts, but the one that stood out to me was Sunshine Patriots .
Spanning genres from science fiction to political fiction to mainstream literature and still taught in high schools, Nineteen Eighty-Four is undeniably a ground-breaking work of fiction. The novel has infiltrated our popular culture to the point that Big Brother and thoughtcrime can be thought of as common parlance, and its themes continue to haunt our political discourse, particularly in regard to surveillance and media propaganda. Comparing Bill Campbell s 2004 novel to George Orwell s 1949 classic is apt praise in some respects. Both novels are set in futuristic dystopias characterized by totalitarian control and grandiose militarism. Both have noble male protagonists who become disillusioned with their contemporary ways of life and ultimately seek to undermine their oppressive governments. Both depict iconic propaganda machines that occlude truth to provoke knee-jerk rancor against a virtually unknown enemy. Their postulated futures both imply a critical confrontation between worlds (McHale 61) that pits our shared present against a projection of what could be, if certain cultural practices and attitudes are extrapolated to harrowing ends. And in their literary predictions, both are uncannily prescient-Campbell s all the more so because its vision of high-tech militarism spreading compulsory freedom is tellingly familiar in the wake of 9/11, even though it was written in 1998.
Yet key contrasts in setting, tone, technological prophecies, and representations of race set these two novels apart. Campbell engineers a critical dystopia with the blueprints of twenty-first century social issues and the edgy, rapid-fire tone of graphic novels or action films. Sunshine Patriots transports readers to the planet of Elysia, where the United Earth army attempts to quell colonial resistance with superior numbers and advanced weaponry. Meanwhile, the narrative frequently shifts to news media on Earth, where the novel demonstrates its propensity for dark, critical humor: the outrageousness of UE s politicians and military propaganda can be read as satires of our culture s increasing dependence on biased news sources that provide comfortable illusions one minute and frenzied panic the next. One of the main propaganda tools for the UE government is a mythologized version of the novel s protagonist, Aaron Barber. His simulacrum proselytizes to Earth s audience for its endless military campaigns, while the real Barber continues to fight in distant colonies, his wounded body being gradually rebuilt with cybernetics like many UE soldiers.
This trope of the cyborg is a significant vehicle for the novel s themes relating to exploitation and race. The soldiers become all but enslaved to the UE army, ironically dubbed the Freedom, because they are forced into massive debt when they must pay for their own cybernetic parts after they re wounded. In her renowned Cyborg Manifesto, Donna Haraway explains how [h]igh-tech culture, represented by the cyborg, challenges the major dualisms that are fundamental to Western thought and have been agents of domination, particularly for women and people of color (177). Yet even though the soldiers become cyborgs and ostensibly replace the markers of their ethnicity with uniform metal, they still enact a voluntary segregation of the military that groups the races into tight units. The absence of a physical body could, ideally, allow us to transcend race itself (Kilgore 18), but Campbell s novel complicates this notion by insinuating that racial identification is deep-seated and personal as well as an enduring component of socialization. Such a representation rejects a color-blind, utopian future, instead posing a number of troubling implications: that military service can be comparable to imprisonment or slavery; that racial identity is a feature of the human experience we tend to cling to when dehumanized; that the exploitative conditions of militaristic neoliberalism continue to reinforce age-old racial barriers; and so forth.
These implications suggest that Campbell s novel is one of many that attempts to express dissent from those visions of tomorrow that are generated by a ruthless, economically self-interested futures industry (Yaszek 59). More specifically, I would argue that the novel belongs in the burgeoning canon of Afrofuturism, a school of thought in science fiction and postmodern art that, according to Mark Dery, treats African-American themes and addresses African-American concerns in the context of 20 th -century technoculture (qtd. in Yaszek 42). Read as an Afrofuturist text, Sunshine Patriots seems to express concerns over new forms of slavery in an enlightened world, positing that racial socialization will endure in insidious ways, and that overcoming unjust hegemonies requires solidarity, subversion, and great courage. Perhaps the great challenge or potential of contemporary science fiction, Kilgore asserts, is to imagine political/social futures in which race does not simply wither away but is transformed, changing into something different and perhaps unexpected (17). Afrofuturist authors like Campbell challenge us to rethink how conceptions of race will continue to evolve and old racisms will take on new forms.
Of course, as with all literary dystopias, it remains to be seen which of Bill Campbell s prophetic visions will resonate most eerily with future readers. After all, 1984 has come and gone, but Nineteen Eighty-Four continues to ring true in many respects. Likewise, whether approached as science fiction, political allegory, or mainstream literature, Sunshine Patriots is relentlessly provocative and wickedly edifying, and its indelible visions could generate constructive scrutiny of our present state and not-too-distant future.
Jonathan R. Harvey, PhD
Works Cited
Haraway, Donna. A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century. Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature . New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181. Web. Retrieved 11-25-2008 from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/HPS/Haraway/CyborgManifesto.html .
Kilgore, De Witt Douglas. Difference Engine: Aliens, Robots, and Other Racial Matters in the History of Science Fiction. Science Fiction Studies 37.110 (2010): 16-22. Print.
McHale, Brian. Postmodernist Fiction . New York: Routledge, 1987. Print.
Yaszek, Lisa. Afrofuturism, science fiction, and the history of the future. Socialism and Democracy 20.3 (November 2006): 41-60.
Good evening, citizens of Earth. This is Dolores Zl .
And I m Rankin Hediondez for EBS-1 News. This is Our Universe.
Our top story this evening comes from Puerto Rico Province where President Gertrude Schmidt-Yakomoto has announced her candidacy for the Earth Presidency for an unprecedented fifth term.
Thank you. Thank you. I originally did not want to run. I did not think I could meet the challenge of forty years in office. But you, my loving supporters and loyal citizens of the greatest, most economically prosperous civilization in the history of the universe, have made your wishes known. And I swear to you that, as your President, I have heard your dreams, and I pledge to fulfill your every desire and will serve as your President as long as there is life in this body.
Hoorah! Hoorah! Hoorah!
On Wexco Colony, our heroic Freedom Forces have finally scored a decisive victory against the rebel Fuzzit forces. Those ferocious three-inch hairy balls of horror that have terrorized Ear