Excerpt - Greetings Aliens Pt I
The Following is an excerpt from our latest zine: Greetings Aliens: A Personal History of Science-Fiction in Turkey Pt I by Efe Levent. Visit our online store to download a PDF or purchase a hard copy!
One of the first things that struck me about Turkish sci-fi was its naked sincerity. I don’t know how unsupervised me and my friends must have been, to watch Starship Troopers and Robocop when they first came out, but parts of my personality are entirely cobbled together by the vicious sense of irony in those films. To me, irony and science fiction often appear inseparable. Maybe this is because they both rely so heavily on contrast. Science fiction creates a contrast between present and future, whereas irony creates a contrast between appearance and reality. The reason I liked science fiction so much as a teenager was that it built fictional futures that always circled back to the present.
For example, 1984 is a criticism of 20th-century mass propaganda that’s extended into the future. Its great success is in imagining a dystopian state that is both convincing but also exaggerated. The three slogans of this state are so crude that you don’t even have to know the context to figure out Orwell’s irony: “War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength.” Orwell’s sense of irony feels dated and unrefined today. Today, we expect our irony to be sharper, more potent, and multi-layered. The most ironic thing about 1984 today is how sincerely it is being invoked by people who had to endure minor inconveniences like using a paper straw, wearing a surgical mask or using correct pronouns. So much so that “Wow, this is just like 1984” has become a meme to make fun of overexcited boomers who compare their dull life under post-capitalism to an authoritarian dystopia.
There is something snobbish about irony. It is, after all, the hereditary progenitor of sarcasm. Saying: “I hate sitting in traffic for hours” and saying: “Oh sure, yeah, I looove sitting in traffic for hours...” are two different things. The latter adds a layer of emotional insulation to the statement. It turns aggression into passive aggression: “Sure, I don’t like sitting in traffic, but I am not gonna start whining about it like some kinda snowflake.” Irony and science fiction taught me to insulate my fragility. Thanks to them, I could always be one step ahead of everyone in fatalistic pessimism. They taught me that if I expect the worst, I would never be disappointed. I grew up on a steady diet of Philip K Dick stories that lean heavily on plot twists. The hero turns out to be the villain, the future turns out to be the past, and remedies turn out to be the ailment. In these stories, even though the reader can usually recognise the setting as a dystopia, the protagonists may start off blissfully unaware. Until a chain of events gradually forces them (often reluctantly) to pull the curtain of reality and reveal the terrifying truth beneath. Classic sci-fi plot twists function much like irony. Their primary function is to highlight the dissonance between appearance and reality. Plot twists and irony feel titillating because they make us feel like we are privy to a secret that’s hidden beneath the veneer of appearance. We are smarter than everyone else, we are in on the joke. We have been red-pilled by a genius piece of literature and have experienced reality beyond our own!
This wasn’t the case with the Turkish science fiction works I have read while researching for this essay. They seemed to have almost never heard of irony. It was refreshing to read so many books where the authors were not trying to prove how clever they were just by defining words as their opposite. But many were so artless, they often felt like reading a series of events rather than a story. A lot of them seemed like they had never been through an editor. A good editor would have advised the authors to layer the story, to make the moral lessons more subtle, and to complicate the motives of the characters. I found myself both repulsed and fascinated by their nakedness. They seemed unguarded by the layers of detachment that I have grown so dependent on in my own writing. Reading them felt intrusive like I was trespassing into a stranger’s dream. They left a raw taste in my mouth and I kept going back for more...
Many of the stories I read were literally about the authors describing their dream of a utopian future society. There are so many such Turkish sci-fi stories in the first half of the twentieth century that “Utopian Dream” can be classified as an entire subgenre. Rüyada Terakki (Progress in Dreams) (1913) by Mustafa Nazım Erzurumi is one such book. It is credited as being the very first science fiction novel written in Turkish. The introduction for the modern edition states that it can be viewed as an extension of a classic Ottoman literary format dating as far back as the 17th century known as habname. These stories are dream retellings that often involve wholesome advice from a wise old man. Like many of the works I have read, Rüyada Terakki was never part of mainstream literature. To my knowledge, the book was lifted out of obscurity when it was reprinted in modern Turkish by a major publisher in 2021. To this day, it hasn’t had a second print run. I have hardly seen much discourse about it online or elsewhere. But despite its obscurity, it shares a sense of naked candidness with its successors. A sense of childlike innocence, both awe-inspiring and cringeworthy.
The novel opens with the woes of Mustafa Nazım in 1913 after the enormous loss of territory by the Ottoman Empire following the Balkan Wars. With heavy thoughts in his mind, he cries himself to sleep one fateful night and our story begins. In his dream, he is first transported to the early days of the Ottoman Empire, where he meets his ancestral forefather Molla Davut. This great-grandfather takes him on a guided tour of Istanbul’s glorious utopian future. In this future, the empire has returned to the core values of Islam and triumphed over its Christian enemies. There are many descriptions of technological and political marvels. Portable video machines, voice amplification systems for crowded gatherings, a global governing body dedicated to fighting the West... All the good stuff.
Mustafa Nazım is in a perpetual state of thrill throughout the entire story, but he also can’t shake off the feeling he doesn’t quite fit in. Both his great-grandfather and other friends who appear in his vision often dish out harsh words that trigger his sense of inadequacy. He is often accused of “crying like a woman”. His tobacco habit is seen as barbaric, his questions are often ridiculed for being silly and lacking faith in the perfection of the utopian society that’s hosting him. He can’t even seem to walk on the right side of the road without his great-grandfather treating him like some clueless doofus. Mustafa Nazım’s self-flagellation does not abate on learning that there are now a “hundred factories” dedicated to manufacturing the inventions he worked on in his pre-utopian waking life, like his flying dress with wings or his “machine for seeing everything within fifty thousand kilometre square”.
The credulous naivety that contaminates Mustafa Nazım’s vision is also evident in his conception of a utopian society and the role of technology in it. Complicated prototypes of what we would consider dystopian surveillance technologies are presented with childlike enthusiasm. Late in the book, Mustafa Nazım receives a message from a certain Memduh Bey, a close friend from his waking life. When questioned about how he has found him, Memduh Bey explains that he has used a machine called the “revolving mirrors”:
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“My good man, this machine is nothing but two cylinders that revolve constantly for an hour, whilst being wrapped with thin linoleum paper used for taking photographs. These cylinders are the fairest witnesses for the goings on over the bridge. This is because they capture the image of the extraordinary crowd on the chemical paper as they revolve. It was thanks to this machine that I was able to pull you out among the million and a half people who cross the bridge every day.”
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There is something so infuriatingly quaint, so eye-wateringly sweet about this. First of all, my mind draws a blank just trying to imagine the sheer scale of this contraption. The bridge is not specified, but it fits the description of a bridge over the Bosphorus the author describes earlier in his dream. If so, the cylinders must truly be monumental in scale! There is also no description of how they are suspended over the bridge, how they revolve, or how they capture images. And what about its purpose? Are you telling me that this inconceivable machine has been built so people like Memduh Bey can catch up with old friends? Is that what’s up? The gullible naivety about surveillance technologies in Rüyada Terakki is particularly interesting to me. I have lived through the 00s when these technologies were being introduced on a mass scale. I remember everyone getting really excited about Banksy’s stunts involving surveillance cameras. Of course, I agree with Banksy’s criticism of mass surveillance, but I always felt the way he was being praised by art bros as some sort of prophetic genius for simply pointing out the obvious. I feel like I am being condescended when someone yells “WOW, THIS IS JUST LIKE 1984” into my ear to force me to reach an obvious conclusion like: “being watched = bad”.
Although we stand on different ends of the political divide with Mustafa Nazım, Rüyada Terakki is refreshingly free of condescending revelations that demand me to genuflect in front of his unadulterated genius. Mustafa Nazım is just a fully grown emo-kid from 1913 with unsavoury politics crying his heart out in print. But the unfiltered portrait he presents of his vulnerabilities has made me reevaluate my attachment to irony as a form of creative expression. Saying one thing and meaning something else is not particularly clever or interesting in itself. When overused, irony often insulates a story from feeling authentic and emotionally impactful. Can I really care about the world when I constantly expect to be deceived by it?