POLAR MEDIA

Abstract

The sheer inaccessibility of the North and South Pole makes them a crucible for the persistent questions of access and data visualization that characterize the information age. As Robinson's novel Antarctica (1998) grapples with fictions that characterize representations of science, his South Pole exhibits what Jameson calls the properly utopian structure as a kind of world reduction, in which not merely breathable atmosphere but custom, human relationships, and finally political choices are pared down to the essentials. Set in the near future, this social science fiction about dire consequences of global warming addresses complex issues of environmental activism and post-industrial globalization, and illustrates the perils and perks of polar travel in the age of digital media.

Keywords:

• social science fiction
• polar exploration
• new media activism
• eco-terror
• post-industrial globalization
• Arctic
• Antarctic

Notes

www.oceanwide-expeditions.com [August 28, 2007]

See Casati (2003, pp. 93–94); and www.shadowmill.com [August 28, 2007]. Research shows that the North Magnetic Pole is continually moving northwest.

A claim to the North Pole staked by Russia after a submarine crossing made news (Associated Press 2007): ‘Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov explained the flag-planting with a precedent vividly etched in the modern imagination. “Whenever explorers reach some sort of point that no one else has explored, they plant a flag, he said. ‘That's how it was on the moon, by the way.”’

In Red Mars (1993) Robinson's selection for the Mars Colony takes place in the Dry Valleys of Antarctic, where as in (1999) Robinson uses Wright Valley in Antarctica to prepare people for Mars. A counter-example, denying global warming and vilifying ecological activism is Crichton's State of Fear (2004), another thriller about a high-tech environmental liberation front in Antarctica.

Appleton in Tom Swift and his Atomic Earth Blaster (1954) features an expedition to the South Pole to mine iron at the center of the Earth, while Bank's The Business (1999) is about the only non-governmental organization to own a base in Antarctica. Environmentalists also battle Antarctic mining in Follett's Ice (1978) and Charbonneau's The Ice (1991).

Jameson (2005, p. 216) sees in Robinson ‘not the representation of utopia but the conflict of all possible utopias’. One of Robinson's scientists argues, ‘First it was capitalism versus socialism, and then capitalism versus democracy, and now science is the only thing left! And science itself is part of the battlefield, and can be corrupted. But in essence, in my heart as a scientist, I say to you that this is a utopian project’ (p. 349). Compare Nozick (1974, p. 312): ‘Utopia is a framework for utopias’.

‘When we first arrived, and for 20 years after that, Mars was like Antarctica but even purer’, Robinson (1993, pp. 309–310) writes of the ‘utopia for primitives and scientists, which is to say everybody’. The Mars trilogy also features the ‘appearance of a feral community of intentionally primitive hunters’ – compare Jameson (2005, pp. 17 and 408).

Antarctic fiction began in 1605 with publication of Mundus Alter Et Idem by Mercurio Brittanico (Bishop Joseph Hall). Chavanne, Karpf, Monnier 1881, and Biblioteca Polare, http://www.polarnet.cnr.it/php/riviste/biblio.html [August 27, 2007]

See Menke (2000) and Menke (2001).

Pynchon (1963) reports a journey to the South Pole in winter 1898. Polar fictions often make reference to Burroughs (1918).

Brown (2005) worked with Robert Headland, archivist at the Scott Polar Research Center, Cambridge. Compare Johnson (2005).

Cherry-Garrard (1923). See Robinson (1998, p. 14, pp. 245–251).

Jameson (2005, p. 171): ‘all possible images of utopia will always be ideological and distorted by a point of view which cannot be corrected or even accounted for’.

‘N.’, 2005 Lovebytes Festival Commission. See http://www.andreapolli.com/n-point/ [August 28, 2007].

‘Antarctic 1’, http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/lotl/v24/index.html, and ‘Ultima Thule’, http://www.clui.org/clui_4_1/ondisplay/thule/index.html [August 28, 2007]. See Pringle (1991); Robinson wrote his PhD on PK Dick, advised by Jameson.

Symmes (1818), McBride (1828). This hypothesis was astonishingly persistent: Beale (1899) has two brothers fly through the hollow earth in a homemade airship, entering through the North Pole, exiting from the South Pole. The same journey is made in Emerson (1907). In Cooper (1835), the Earth explodes at the Poles, resulting in a steamy climate. In Rucker (1990), EA Poe falls into the hollow earth after the South Pole collapses. Compare McCaughrean (2005).

In 2002, New Zealand TV produced a DVD on Vaughan Williams' Sinfonia Antarctica, the score for Scott of the Antarctic (1948); the British Antarctic Survey commissioned Peter Maxwell Davies' 8th symphony to mark its fiftieth anniversary: http://www.maxopus.com [August 28, 2007]. See Robinson (1998, p. 103).

See Bloom (1993), Arthur (1995), LeGuin (1982), and Glasberg (2002).

‘Rationale’, US Committee to the International Polar Year 2007–2008, http://dels.nas.edu/us-ipy/rationale.shtml [August 28, 2007].

McLean (1963), Sturges (1968), on satellite espionage: ‘The Russians put our camera made by our German scientists and your film made by your German scientists into their satellite made by their German scientists’. US Department of Defense objections over the screenplay delayed production for several years. In Barrett (1965), an American spacecraft carrying a secret weapon crash-lands in Antarctica, and a British Intelligence officer is sent to retrieve the weapon.

Binder (1939) sends its protagonist five millennia back in time, where he meets Antarkans. It is unusual for pre-World War II stories to discuss atomic bombs; the US government ignored this science fiction for the Manhattan Project to continue in secrecy.

Right after Carpenter's movie, Antarctic ice released the bodies of three members of an 1845 expedition… Compare Brankic (2007): a Rutgers University team extracted DNA from a glacier in Antarctica. This scenario (a mark of science fiction going back at least to Kurd Lasswitz' On Two Planets (1897), which influenced Walter Hohmann and Wernher von Braun) is also exploited in the Transformers movie and game (2007).

See Leane (2005), referring to Campbell (1980). Lovecraft (1936) locates an ancient Antarctic megalopolis at 23,570 feet.

The Center for Astrophysical Research in Antarctica offers a virtual tour of the South Pole at http://astro.uchicago.edu/cara/vtour/pole [August 28, 2007].

Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA http://www.acia.uaf.edu October 2004), as well as http://realclimate.org, http://www.nasa.gov/vision/earth/lookingatearth/icecover.html, http://www.iucn.org/themes/ssc/red_list_2004/Extinction_media_brief_2004.pdf, http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001271/127160m.pdf, http://www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/kyoto/kyotorpt.html, http://www.newscientist.com/article.ns?id=dn6816 [August 28, 2007].