Germ Growers in the Colonial Laboratory

ABSTRACT

Written and set in the Australian colonies, Robert Potter’s The Germ Growers (1892) was amongst the earliest novels that engaged with the theme of extra-terrestrial invasion. It describes the discovery of aliens who breed ‘germs’ in a sophisticated laboratory hidden in the outback with the aim of conquering the human species. The novel’s introduction of these otherworldly interlopers into a setting already host to the political, social and scientific experiments of invaders, puts the colonial preoccupations with settlement and dispossession into sharp relief. Potter’s portrayal of relations between white settlers, aliens, exogenous and Indigenous others, accentuates how anxieties about invasion and contamination, insiders and outsiders, humans and nonhumans were accompanied by the application of scientific knowledge and technological expertise in the establishment and administration of social order. Highlighting the idea of colonies as sites for refining elaborate strategies of coercion and control, the novel provides a situated perspective upon the ways in which the affordances of the laboratory operated as central features of the imperial project and influenced its role in the development of biopolitical governance. In doing so, The Germ Growers brings attention to the archive of colonial fiction as a means of approaching the social and historical contexts that continue to undergird relations between science and culture.

KEYWORDS:

• Colonial laboratory
• alien invasion
• germs
• governance
• science fiction
• biopolitics

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 For Frederic Jameson, The War of the Worlds is a ‘patently a guilt fantasy’ which ‘wonders whether the brutality with which he has used the colonial peoples … may not be visited on him by some more advanced race intent, in its turn, on his destruction’ (2005, pp. 264–265).

2 Although little known, it has been acknowledged as a ‘literate, pre-Wellsian novel with considerable imagination’ (Bleiler, 1983, p. 1227) and as ‘probably the world’s first story of an alien invasion’ (Blackford et al., 1999, p. 14) that ‘antedates’ (Clute and Nicholls, 1995) The War of the Worlds.

3 Robert Potter himself was an Irish-born (1831) clergyman who studied at Trinity College in Dublin and went on to become Canon of St Paul’s Cathedral and Examiner in English Language and Literature and Logic and Philosophy at The University of Melbourne. He was reported to have collapsed on the altar of St Paul’s during an Easter service due to ‘a severe attack of influenza’ (The Sydney Morning Herald, 1902, p. 5), an ironic event given the subject of his novel.

4 This aspect of the novel is characteristic of the nineteenth-century genre of ‘adventure/romance’ in which the white male explores the wilderness in ways which express and shape Imperial ideology, see: Green (1979), Brantlinger (1988), Benhayoun (2007) and Kestner (2016).

5 Anderson suggests the novel depicts a situation in which ‘[c]olored races in northern Australia were deliberately cultivating and distributing germs’ (2005, p. 95). While this is not the case – it is actual aliens and not other races that grow the germs, and the protagonists do not use the adventure to later ‘explain the racial origins of tropical disease to ingenuous whites’ (Anderson, 2005, p. 95) – there is, however, a racial subtext to the novel and a perpetuation of nineteenth-century race thinking that involves control over who is counted as human.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

David Crouch

David Crouch is based in the School of Humanities at the University of Western Australia. His research interests span literary and media histories, cultural theory and social studies of science and technology.