As I've mentioned recently, I finally got around to watching the Mobile Suit Gundam films. I enjoyed them, I think, more than I expected to, a species of pleasant surprise I'll take. I've been struggling to write anything about it, though, because it's Gundam, right? It's like writing about Shakespeare -- I can't possibly say something useful; it has to have been said already.
But @pontifus commented on my last, off-the-cuff comment, and I got to thinking, and here we are now.
I want to start, first, with A. E. Van Vogt.
Fans are Slans
Slan is probably the most influential novel of A. E. Van Vogt, a US writer of science fiction in the early and mid 20th century. He was very influential, at least within the US publishers and fan circles. He purportedly had a rule that something new, interesting, or disruptive had to happen every 300 words of his story (maybe it was 700?). This is, if not necessarily the best advice, at least evidence that he did care about his structure and, more obviously, keeping the attention of people who were either reading it serially or in cheap paperbacks they would toss if they got bored.
Slan is, or is regarded to be, The Big One, though. In the way that Robert Heinlein wrote lots of novels but Stranger in a Strange Land is The Big One, so is Slan. So what's it about?
Well. It's not good. That is to say, the plot is going to make you wince. In a future world where everyone is crushed by a normative, overarching government and social control mechanisms, slans are mutants, maybe spawn of aliens, and hated unilaterally. They are hated so much because they're just better than us. They're smarter, faster, stronger... whether they're harder or not, the novel leaves us to imagine for ourselves.
They live an underground life, persecuted and lonely. The main character is such a slan, though until recently unaware of his abilities. He, naturally, goes through a manhunt sequence before managing to come to power in the underground and lead a revolution.
If this sounds like an extremely bad YA novel from the last 20 years, you're not wrong. But this book came out in 1940.
I'm sure you see where this is going, regarding newtypes and all, but stick with me for a second. The last thing I want to tell you about Slan is the effect it had on sf fandom. We're all familiar with the self-pitying, but also holier-than-thou, attitude of contemporary fandom. "Everyone looks down on nerds; everyone else is just stupid!" Good news! It's been around for nearly a century at least.
See, "Fans are slans!" It became a rallying cry in fanzines and early conventions. I actually briefly worked in a private archive of fan material, and there was a zine that took its name, rallying cry, and even header illustration, from the novel. Fans decided they were slans -- bullied, persecuted, but also smarter and plain old better than regular people.
Newtypes
Presumably I need to tell you less about newtypes. Some kind of mutation or "next step" in evolution, newtypes have some degree of psychic powers, learn more quickly, and react more swiftly, particularly to danger. We've all had a good laugh at how Amuro learns to pilot the Gundam immediately by reading the manual, but it's supposedly because of his familiarity with his father's work on it and his burgeoning newtype abilities.
This is the obvious part, right? Newtypes are slans. Now, by the time Gundam was made, there's no guarantee it was a direct reference. It had become a fairly common trope in science fiction. Vonnegut had already parodied it in 1961 with "Harrison Bergeron." But it's important to see this trope for a genre marker, a node that can be used in science fiction texts within the genre. It pulls all the allusions in, and so on.
I can't tell you with assurance that Japanese fan circles adopted newtypes the way US circles did slans, but I can guess they did -- the premiere otaku magazine is named Newtype, after all.
But -- and this is how we get to some meaning between us and the text itself -- the context had changed.
The Cold War
Thank @pontifus for reminding me that Gundam is a Cold War text. See, Slan was published between the world wars. Things had been bad, but they were improving (for some people I mean) in the US. Interestingly, fanzines were pretty popular in the US military during the war. A lot of soldiers had been reading science fiction and appreciated feeling like a part of the community even overseas. A lot of the zines I looked at would cost whatever they cost, but they were free to soldiers, even if they had to be mailed overseas. I get the impression, too, that a lot of soldiers got into the sf/f scene this way, because they'd basically read anything they could get their hands on to stave off boredom away from home, and these were free!
So slans come from that pre-WW2 period, and the idea promulgated through culture generally in the war itself. But newtypes are pure Cold War medicine. No longer is the threat conformity, but two superpowers fighting for uncertain reasons, locked into an arms race no one can stop.
And this is the key thing about Gundam and newtypes: slans were oppresssed. Newtypes are exploited. Imagine living in a world, or, that is to say -- imagine being able to imagine living in a world where people are born better able to make inventions, fight, and survive harsh environments, and the culture's response is to oppress them and shame them and hide them away. I can't even get my head around that. What would happen is that they would be put in special schools and turned into soldiers and CIA data analysts and... well, given the presence of the US military recruitment drives in US schools now, you get the point. "Newtypes shouldn't fight newtypes," they say at the end of the films. Of course -- because none of them give a single shit about the ideals of their respective countries. They all fell through the cracks, more or less, though some were shoved through (the crew of White Base).
Gundam is taking a traditional genre trope, the evolved super-person, and using it to demonstrate the greedy grasp of the Cold War superpowers: eager to suck dry every resource imaginable in order to score marginal victories in an eternal back-and-forth forever war.
Also, Postmodernism
My closing thoughts are on the break between modernism, which is when Slan happened, and postmodernism, which is when Gundam happened. Modernism is often described as a period of arts and culture in which people began to doubt that they could understand the truth of the world they lived in.
Postmodernism, in contrast, questions whether there's a truth or not.
In more theoretical terms, the thing is that postmodernism, among aother things, undermined confidence in what's called "metanarrative," or the narrative about our narratives. In this case -- I'm thinking of Lyotard's writing here -- culture began to worry that the big truths weren't that big or that true after all. Get a job, work 40 years, keep getting promotions, get married, have kids, life is perfect. But not really?
The Cold War isn't all that happened of course: the 1970s are marked, in the US, as wildly incendiary times. The civil rights movement wins in the 60s weren't broadly felt until the 70s. Exploitative capitalists seized the chance to double the workforce (by hiring women) to depress everyone's wages. As a side note, if you ever see one of those shitheads online complaining about how men should be bread-winners and women should stay at home, feel free to remind them that at the beginning of the 1970s the wages from a fairly poor job sufficed to pay for two adults, 2-4 kids, pets, housing, retirement, cars, homes, so on, so forth -- but by the end of the decade two adults working couldn't cover the same things as well.
So you can see that the period of postmodernism saw all the "truths" crumble -- the nobility of war, the righteousness of patriotism, the security of honest work, blah blah blah. Importantly, this is also the first time the wider culture of the US began to hear -- if not to admit -- that those truths hadn't applied to women or Black people or indigenous people or people in other countries or or or or...
Postmodernism is, in terms of genre, a reaction to those things, a willingness to explore new forms of meaning-making, or to ask questions about the old genre tropes.
Here's what Gundam asks us: if slans aren't making the world better, are they still inherently better? Or are they worse, because they could be doing more? And of course, if someone sees a child capable of tracking movement like a supercomputer and communing with space and time and the dead, what kind of monster do they have to be to decide the best idea is to stick them in a tank?