Any venture to create some kind of society in an unknown land, whether four or five centuries ago or in the future predicted by science fiction, must have a model in mind for how the colony will operate. But imaginary models and reality are usually quite different. Managing relations with the inhabitants of the new place will always be a major concern; however the travelers regard those residents and their rights. Even more challenging is managing the people who are part of the proposed colonial effort, especially once they arrive at their new home. Given that this environment is a novel and probably very challenging land in which inherited knowledge and therefore rank become irrelevant, management is crucial. And very difficult. Those who seize command attempt to create a structure in which everyone’s behavior is strictly controlled and hierarchy is maintained.

As we look at these ventures, one key question is “why are they leaving their homeland?” In science fiction accounts, such as Aniara, the epic poem by Harry Martinson, written in 1956 in 103 Cantos, tells of a spaceship carrying “eight thousand souls” from the region of Doris land on earth to Mars “when Earth, become unclean with toxic radiation,” is no longer habitable (Martinson 1999 [1956], Canto 2). In founding Jamestown, English leaders wanted to establish a foothold in America. But they were also concerned about the perception that England was overpopulated. As Robert Gray addressed the Virginia Company in 1609:

There is nothing more daungerous for the estate of common-wealths, then when the people do increase to a greater multitude and number then may justly paralell with the largenesse of the place and countrey: for hereupon comes oppression, and diverse kinde of wrongs, mutinies, sedition, commotion, & rebellion, scarcitie, dearth, povertie, and sundrie sorts of calamities … For even as bloud through it be the best humor in the body, yet if it abound in greater quantitie then the state of the body will beare, both indanger the bodie, & oftentimes destroyes it. (sig. B3v)

Offloading superfluous population was one justification for starting English colonies across the Atlantic, and the first people sent over were young men who needed employment.

Moving ahead, the key tools for colonial projects are language and memory. The first tests occur on the voyage, which is inevitably full of pitfalls. Crossing the Atlantic or venturing into space can be subject to all kinds of unknown accidents: storms can push vessels way off course; unknown dangers such as objects in space, or underwater reefs or projections can wreck the best-laid plans. Shakespeare’s (1623) Macbeth was first performed in 1606, just at the time Virginia Company investors were deep in preparations for founding their colony, Jamestown, in what the English called Virginia. When the witches in the play decided to torment the master of the Tiger and his crew, keeping them tempest-tossed for nine times nine weeks, they were referring to an event of which the audience would have been keenly aware: the recent arrival of a ship named the Tiger that had indeed been tossed by storms and sent wandering for 567 days, or nine times nine weeks (I:3; Loomis 1956, 457). John Donne’s poem “The Storme” described a sea storm he had lived through; the tempest was so ferocious that “Compar’d to these stormes, death is but a Qualme, Hell somewhat lightsome, and the’ Bermuda calme.” (Donne 1633, 56–9)

The storm and shipwreck that opened Shakespeare’s Tempest were based on reports from the large fleet of five ships the Virginia Company sent to replenish the colony in 1609 whose flagship, aptly named the Sea Venture, was caught in a huge hurricane whose “winds and seas were as mad as fury and rage could make them” and wrecked on Bermuda, which was known as the Isle of Devils because it was surrounded by dangerous underground reefs (Strachey 2013 [1609], 7). As John Donne noted, many ships had wrecked on those reefs and the islands were uninhabited.

The Goldonder Aniara of Martinson’s poem was on a voyage “doomed to be a space-flight like to none.” The ship swerved to avoid the Honda asteroid “(herewith proclaimed discovered),” which put them in “dead space” outside inner space and the orbits of the planets. “That was how the solar system closed its vaulted gateway of the purest crystal and severed spaceship Aniara’s company from all the bonds and pledges of the sun.” The emigrants continued to send out signals, but “our call-sign faded till it failed: Aniara” (Cantos 2, 3, 4).

Other ships in the 1609 fleet finally made it to Jamestown, but seawater had flooded the holds and ruined all the supplies they carried. This was especially disastrous because that area of Chesapeake Bay was going through the worst drought in more than 770 years. The drought had started in 1606 and would continue through 1612 (Blanton 2000, 74–81). Thus, the winter of 1609, with more people and no supplies from England, was the infamous Starving Time, with dramatic population loss.

Those who had been wrecked on Bermuda built two new ships and finally arrived in Jamestown almost a year later; they were appalled to see the chaos inside the fort. Everyone was loaded onto the Bermuda-built ships to return to England, but they encountered a new fleet and governor from England coming up the James River as they were traveling down. So they all went back upriver. New government and new supplies were insufficient for stopping the horrible apathy; getting the drones working was still an aspiration, not a reality. Sir Thomas Dale arrived in Jamestown in May 1611, and he was disgusted to find the colonists at “their daily and usuall workes, bowling in the streets” (Hamor 1615, 27–8). When the new governor, Sir Thomas Gates, arrived soon after, he and Dale set about correcting the problem. In response to the horrifying situation, the new leadership imposed the most extreme code of laws in 1610–1611 (Strachey 1953 [1612]).

On working days, everyone was required to exit their homes together “at the first tolling of the bell” to go to church and again when the bell tolled at the end of the day (Law 22). Every soldier and tradesman, which meant almost all men in the colony, was “upon the beating of the Drum to go out to his work” and was not to leave work “before the Drum beat again” (Law 28). When men were sent by boat to explore into the interior, desertion or taking the boat to a different port meant death (Law 32). Everyone had to be examined by the minister about their faith and to receive instruction by him if their faith was not firm or correct (Law 33).

Cleanliness was a huge concern because of the common belief that mal air produced by putrefaction caused disease. Launderers who washed “foul linen” inside the fort or threw dirty water or suds into the street, and anyone who did “the necessities of nature” in the streets was to be whipped for these “unmanly, slothful, and loathsome immodesties” and turned over to the martial courts for further punishment (Law 22). Everyone was required to keep their residence “sweet and clean” and to make sure their bedstead was three feet off the ground (Law 25).

Death was the punishment for many infractions, including blasphemy (Law 3), murder, sodomy or rape, sacrilege or stealing, bearing false witness (Laws 8, 9, 10, 11), trading with the Native people without permission or stealing from them (Laws 15–16), embezzlement of supplies by those entrusted with them (Law 17), killing any domesticated animal without permission (Law 21), running away to “any savage Werowance” (Law 29), disobedience of authority or treason (Law 30), and “wilfully” plucking any root, herb, flower, or any grapes or ears of corn in a garden (Law 31).

A cook or baker who provided less cooked food than the supplies they had been given would lose both ears; those doing it a second time were condemned to galley slavery for a period of years. Several offenses were similarly punished, with an increasing tier of punishments ending in galley slavery, including failure to attend church, cursing, slander, and disobedience. As leading colonist Ralph Hamor wrote, these laws were harsh, but necessary (Hamor 1615, 27–8).

Colonial leaders and backers in England drew on several models as they constructed their concept of a well-functioning society. One, popular since ancient times, was from nature: the beehive. The Roman author and statesman Pliny the Elder’s work was translated into English in 1601 as The Historie of the World: Commonly Called the Natural Historie of C. Plinius Secundus. Many colonial backers would have read the Natural History in Latin, but its publication in English now meant that its content was more widely available and presumably in demand. Pliny considered bees “the chief insect.” Bees “endure toil, they construct work, they have a government and individual enterprises and collective leaders, and, a thing that must occasion most surprise, they have a system of manners that outstrips that of all the other animals.”

As under the Jamestown code, bees all slept together. “They sleep until dawn, until one bee wakes them up with a double or triple buzz as a sort of bugle-call; they all fly forth in a body, if the day is going to be fine.” People watched to see if they left the hive at dawn, because if they stayed in, winds and rain were coming. At the end of daylight, buzzing within the hive declined “till one bee flies round as though giving the order to take repose with the same loud buzz with which she woke them, and this in the manner of a military camp: thereupon they all suddenly become quiet.”

During the day, bees keep “wonderful watch on the work in hand.” Work is equally divided; in the hive “some build, others polish, others bring up material, others prepare food from what is brought to them; for they do not feed separately so that there shall be no inequality of work or food or time.” Also, “They are wonderfully clean,” and extremely thrifty (Pliny 1938–1963, XI, 439–41, 445–9, 473).

Captain John Smith became the President in Jamestown’s beginning after all the elite men became incapable of serving. As he wrote, “At this time were most of our chiefest men either sicke or discontented, the rest being in such dispaire, as they would rather starve and rot with idlenes, then be perswaded to do anything for their owne reliefe without constraint” (Smith, 1986a [1608], I:35). As president he instituted his famous program that put everyone, even the most elite, to work: no work, no food.

Smith drew on the bees’ example: “If the little Ant, and the sillie [simple] Bee seek by their diligence the good of their Commonwealth; much more ought Man. If they punish the drones and sting them steales their Labour; then blame not Man. Little hony hath that hive, where there are more Drones then Bees: and miserable is that Land, where more are idle then well imployed” (Smith, 1986b [1616], I:311). Pliny wrote that drones were imperfect bees, and many in England scornfully labelled the Jamestown colonists the “the very scumme of the land” (Winthrop 1629, 142–3).

Smith was badly injured when his powder bag exploded in his lap while he traveled up the James River in a boat, and he returned to England on one of the ships that survived the 1609 hurricane (Smith, 1986c [1624], III:223–4). Thus, he was not present for the starving time and the institution of the Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall, etc. Those laws were extreme, but enforcement was episodic, and many people found their own paths. Jamestown saw colonists leaving to live with the Chesapeake region’s Native People. Many traded across ethnic lines; in fact, such trade was essential to keeping the colony alive. The death penalty, although specified for a large number of infractions, did not make sense in such a small and depleted colony. And as far as maintaining strict religious conformity goes, we know that Roman Catholics, some spying for Spain, lived in the colony (Goldman 2011).

Backers interested in the region to the north also cited bees’ methods as a model for their enterprises. Richard Eburne, promoting interest in Newfoundland, argued that planners must send families and people of all ages: “Look but into the beehives when they swarm and you shall find … that the swarm is as old as the stock—that is, that there are in it as well old bees as young.” In a marginal note, he cited Charles Butler’s (1600) The Feminine Monarchy: or, A Treatise Concerning Bees (Eburne 1962 [1624], 142). Answering the claim that the families in New England might be vulnerable to a Spanish invasion, William Wood replied: “… when the Bees have honie in their Hives, they will have stings in their tailes” (Wood 1634, 54). But a few years in, the New England colonies were having their own drone problems as noted by Rev. Nathaniel Ward of Ipswich, Massachusetts. Ward wrote to John Winthrop, Jr. complaining of the “multitudes of idle and profane young men, servants and others,” burdening the colony, so that parishioners were complaining “with greif we have made an ill change, even from the snare to the pitt” (1635, II: 215–7).

Also, the demand for religious control over life in New England led to a plethora of exoduses. By the middle 1630s, five years after the puritan colony in Boston was founded, colonists began to object to the fact that only those approved by the congregations had full religious and civil rights. Followers of Anne Hutchinson, who openly challenged the ministers’ teachings as puritans had done in England, moved to found a new colony in New Hampshire. Roger Williams and Thomas Hooker, both eminent ministers and scholars, moved with their congregations to the future Rhode Island and Connecticut, where they enacted complete separation of church and state. Williams, who had objected to the display of royal symbols in Boston, was under sentence of death if he attempted to return to Massachusetts Bay.

* * *

Modern science fiction returns us to the problem of managing migrants whose expectations are frustrated and who can veer out of control, especially as they have no home to go back to. Aniara’s passengers left a planet under Control Plan Three after the end of the Thirty-second War. On Earth, punch cards had replaced all other kinds of relations. As a result, “everyone was playing at least four roles in political games of specters’ peek-a-boo.” Resisters had been sent to work camps on Venus and Mars, where life was extremely tough (Canto 15). The Space-Hand’s Tale, Canto 40, tells how he and his colleagues took “something like three million frightened people to their current star” over five years. Some were sent to ice-cold Mars, and others to the marshes of Venus. One woman, Nobby, who was herself crippled by radiation, maintained the good of humanity by carrying supplies to the exiles, and cleaning and sewing for them. Nobby had her own language: song. The Space-Hand remembered her as “Nobia the Samaritan” (Canto 40).

After the ship veered into endless space, those on board tried to keep life in line with customs on earth so, although all they saw outside the ship was darkness, they decreed periods of day and night based on what they believed was the reality at home as they drifted into eternity. On Midsummer night, they danced all night waiting for the sun to come up, “Then smack came clarity, the horror that it never did come up.” They realized that everything was just a dream (Canto 7). Aniara’s passengers came to realize that the space in which they traveled was not space as they envisioned it on earth. Actually, they were “lost in spiritual seas” (Canto 13).

“The sterile void of space is terrifying,” (Canto 10) but the ship carried an AI installation called Mima, and Mima offered passengers a sense of life and security by pulling in “traces, pictures, landscapes, scrapes of language . . . Our faithful Mima does all she can and searches, searches, searches” (Canto 6). Mima offered a world that blotted out both the reality of the wandering spaceship and the reality of the dying earth they left behind, and people began to worship Mima “as a holy being” (Canto 7). The inventor who created Mima realized that he did not comprehend part of her—the part she built herself (Canto 9).

Mima’s output became erratic. At one point, she began showing images of the dying earth (Canto 19). Soon Mima, “blinded by a bluish bolt” showed the destruction of Dorisburg, which shattered the narrator who was also the person who tended Mima, the Mimarobe, Mima’s “faithful priest in blue” (Canto 26). Mima begged for relief, and she recovered in five days, but on the seventh day, she emitted a strange drone and she talked in “higher ultramodern tensor-theory” and told the Mimarobe that she had been hearing cries from Dorisvale for some time. Now her “cell-works” were darkened by human cruelty, and she was decaying (Canto 28). As people rushed in to receive her comfort, a “bolt-blue light” flashed from her screens with a loud thunderclap. Many were crushed to death fleeing the hall as Mima died. Her last message was from The Detonee who acknowledged how difficult it was as he detonated her. Everyone blamed the Mimarobe for this horrible failure (Cantos 29, 30).

One passenger, Daisy, continued to speak as if she was still on earth and refused to give in to sadness; in her language, she retained the memory of their earlier life and “slings at Death’s void the slang of Dorisburg.” The narrator found relief in Daisy’s “womb of hair” (Cantos 12,13). After Mima showed the destruction of Dorisburg, Daisy was the “only comfort left” because she still spoke the city’s language and the narrator was the last man who understood her as she “babbles in her lovely dialect.” As time goes on and on, Daisy is in permanent sleep and dancing is forgotten (Cantos 27, 72). A blind woman from the planet Rind who had chosen to come aboard Aniara created poems and sang songs from Rind. She argued it was “right to witness a delight in living,” but listeners said her poems were merely words and wind (Cantos 48, 49).

After Mima died, Chefone, “the fierce lord of our craft,” took control: “he struck you as a man out to compel his people to decline and asininity” (Canto 30). The narrator and others, including the technicians who were trained in the “Fourth tensor reportory,” were imprisoned deep in the ship’s bowels. From their cells, they tried to explain what had happened in ever simpler language and finally in drawings. After studying Mima’s language cycles for three years, the narrator was taken up to try to revive her. But without her guidance, he reeled, realizing that her interior was cold. New religions featuring priests, temple bells, and crucifixes, “vagina-cult and shouting yurgher-girls and tickler-sectaries forever laughing” took over Mima’s space (Cantos 31, 32, 33, 35).

Colonial ventures that actually landed—whether at their original destination or not—faced a panoply of new problems. In Charlie Jane Anders’s The City in the Middle of the Night (2019), the migrants had arrived, many generations ago, on the planet January, which is tidally locked, so that one side has permanent sunlight, a scorching environment intolerable to humans.Footnote 1 The other side is in complete darkness and is inhabited by indigenous beings whom the humans saw as simple-minded and hostile. The human arrivals settled their city of Xiosphant in the twilight between the two zones, where they were protected from extremes by two mountains and the light was always the same. Huge farmwheels reaching into the sky grew their food.

The ship on which they arrived had separate compartments for people from different cultures on earth, thus maintaining old hierarchies, but on their arrival on this strange planet, those at the top “had no clue how to cope.” The monotony of life in the twilight threatened this hereditary leadership, so elites dealt with it and the danger of uprisings as in Jamestown by attempting to regulate every aspect of life. Even the Xiosphanti language embeds the speaker’s and listener’s status. In a system called Circadianism, shutters on all windows go up at the same time and everyone goes to sleep; shutters come down when it is time to wake up, and immediately the streets are filled with people rushing to their assigned jobs. As the elite student Bianca tells The Progressive Students Union, “If you control our sleep, then you own our dreams . . . And from there, it’s easy to master our whole lives.” Bianca has access to the college library and is a great reader. She has found a book in the rubble at the back of the shelves containing the history of the first arrivals on January and she tells her fellow students: “That’s what history is, really . . . the process for turning idiots into visionaries” (Anders 2019, 19, 15).

Security patrols make sure that no one is outside at the wrong time, and any violation of assigned roles meets extreme punishment. Near the novel’s beginning, one of the principal characters, a low social-status student named Sophie, is arrested and dragged up a mountain, where she is cast to her certain death on the dark side for having been discovered with three stolen food credits. Actually it was her best friend, Bianca, who had stolen the credits almost as a joke. Bianca belonged to one of the most favored dynasties on January, and Sophie picked them up to shield her when the authorities arrived.

As in Jamestown, regulations are one thing, but absolute control is quite another. In Xiosphant, most people were caught in the endless cycle of work and sleep, but throughout The City in the Middle of the Night, we encounter people who have exited that system, or who, like Bianca, are able to ignore it to some extent. The city of Argelo beyond the tempestuous, icy Sea of Murder, is the exact opposite of Xiosphant: a place where anything goes, The City that Never Sleeps (170). It is not necessarily a great place to live, but everyone is free and they have their own language. Groups like the Resourceful Couriers travel across the twilight, carrying illegal goods from place to place and supporting life inside and outside the system.

Relationships with indigenous populations are always a huge part of these systems, but one that no one in charge wants to talk about. Sophie was thrown to her death on the dark side, but she did not die. All the humans who lived on January, whether in the monotony of Xiosphant or in the wild freedom of Argelo, believed that the planet’s original inhabitants, called crocodiles by the humans, were stupid, vicious animals, who might be threatening and who had no value except when they were hunted as food. Sophie quickly absorbs a wholly different reality when she lands at the foot of the mountain on the dark side. She is saved by one of the “crocodiles,” whom she calls Rose; her new friend warms her and communicates through tendrils on her chest. As Rose opens her chest, Sophie puts her face among the warm tendrils as the Mimabore had put his face in Daisy’s welcoming mop of hair (31). Sophie tries to use the name they call themselves, which she renders as Gelet, and on various trips bringing needed supplies to Rose she begins to understand the amazing complexity of the technology on which their underground City in the Middle of the Night runs. She is given an electronic bracelet through which the Gelets communicate with her wherever she is. She learns that at the beginning, the Gelets had considered wiping out the humans before they could get their city of Xiosphant fully established. But then they realized humans were slowly losing contact with the Mother Ship and could be useful to them, especially in providing essential metals from mines and meteors (312–3).

Because she cannot live openly in Xiosphant after she returns, Sophie gets to know people who live a different life even within the city. As in Jamestown, many individuals found ways to escape the rigid rules. She remembers a place her mother took her to and she reconnects with Hernan, who runs a refuge there for people like her. She meets other outcasts, Mouth and Alyssa, and travels with them and their friends to Argelo. Mouth is the last of her nomadic people, the Citizens, who spoke a language called Noölang, and she is desperate to retrieve a document, The Invention, that contains her people’s histories and ceremonies so she can understand what she has lost. The document is in the palace in Xiosphant, and she is enlisting allies to get access to it even when she is in Argelo. Maybe Bianca will help.

Memory, and the language in which it is preserved, is crucial to all these efforts. In Argelo, Mouth meets an academic who has spent a lifetime studying the Citizens. He is eager to talk to her, but is it possible that he knows more about them than she does? To whom does memory belong? He introduces her to a former Citizen who had decided to leave the group and thus escaped the slaughter in which only the child Mouth was left alive.

Names are crucial in all these stories. Mouth did not actually have a name because she had not yet arrived at the level to be given one when her people were wiped out. Sophie named her rescuer Rose, and her elite friend, who became more and more distant as their paths diverged, was named Bianca. The technicians imprisoned after Mima died were stripped of their names (Martinson 1999 [1956], Canto 34). In essence, they were erased until their services were needed again.

Pocahontas had many names; Pocahontas was actually a nickname describing her playfulness. Her sacred name was Matoaka; her regular name was Amonute. When she was baptized with the important biblical name Rebecca by the puritan minister Alexander Whitaker, who also presided over her marriage to John Rolfe, her sacred name was revealed. Samuel Purchas, who interviewed returning venturers and collected their documents, wrote that her people had feared the English could harm her if they knew her sacred name (see Wood 2016, 77; Purchas 1617, 943; Whitaker 1615, 59–60).

Colonists everywhere in the Americas assigned names to the land in order to indicate imagined possession and control. Those on the first voyage to the area on the Carolina coast where the ill-fated Roanoke colony would be founded in the 1580s asked the name of the land and thought they had been told Wingandacoia, which they reported back to England. Sir Walter Ralegh, the colony’s backer, wrote that the colonists later learned the Natives were commenting on their clothing; actually, we now know that the informants thought the newcomers were pointing to some spruce trees. Wingandacoia appeared on several maps, but the Queen gave Ralegh authority to change the region’s name to Virginia in her honor (Quinn 1955, I:116–7, 147, 174, II:853–4).Footnote 2

A satirist, John Healey, played on this mistake. In 1609, he published anonymously what he said was a “translation” of Joseph Hall’s more serious Mundus alter et idem (1605). The mythical traveler in his The Discovery of a New World, or A Description of the South Indies. Hetherto unknowne visited “The new discovered Womandecoia (which some mistaking both name and nation) call Wingandecoia, & make it a part of Virginia)[sic] otherwise called Shee-landt” (Healey 1609, 96 [misnumbered 66], 97).

Healey’s jest pointed to a deep concern. English commentators lamented new fashions coming in from Europe and America; men wearing them adopted manners and gestures that marked them as effeminate. Men spending more and more time in fashionable company seemed to yield too easily to female notions. Some said these modish new ways rendered Englishmen cowardly and incapable of properly defending the nation. Keith Thomas labels this disdain “Xenophobic Masculinity.” And moralists were all too eager to blame women for men’s decline into effeminacy (Thomas 2018, 219–23).

The Lawes Divine, Morall, and Martiall were designed to prevent colonists’ degeneration. Partly they were concerned about the men going native and the laws tried to control all contact. But in America as in England, leaders feared the young men would become feminized through their own behavior. As Alexandra Shepard puts it, describing early modern English youths: “In their bids for manhood, young men embraced precisely the kinds of behaviour—violent disruption, excessive drinking, illicit sex—condemned by moralists as unmanly, effeminate, and beastlike” (Shepard 2003, 29, 78–9, 83, 94). In the Lawes Strachey discussed regulating the conduct of soldiers in Virginia, saying chastity was absolutely necessary, “when uncleanesse doth defile both body and soule, and makes a man stinke in the nostrils of God & man, and laieth him open to the malice & sword of his enemy, for commonly it makes a man effeminate, cowardly, lasie, and full of diseases” (Strachey 1953 [1612], 81–2). The only way to maintain true English masculine identity was to stay as far away from Others as possible.

As they assimilated Natives’ land and sometimes cut them off from waterways, seventeenth-century English newcomers to North America told themselves that their bringing the gift of Christianity more than made up for any losses the original inhabitants suffered. In all cases disdain for original inhabitants mixed with extreme fear meant that settlers lost crucial opportunities to learn about resources and environments. And this was true even when they knew such instruction would be invaluable.

In The City in the Middle of the Night, Sophie, as she increasingly spent time with the Gelets and learned from them, learned that they had designed the planet and worked over many generations to perfect it. Without their work, the humans who landed on January could never have survived, but the humans, who manufactured memories that suited them and their needs, could not understand or acknowledge their dependence (Anders 2019, 320).

The Gelets on January retained all memories in their tendrils. And these memories were in the same moment, as if they had just happened. Sophie learns about this way of remembering as she spends more and more time with them, and in the end, she agrees to undergo an operation that gives her tendrils and allows her to understand that this is the way to achieve peace among all beings.

English colonists in North America also created memories, official and informal. The Jamestown laws dictated that “euery Minister shall keepe a faithfull and true Record, or Church Booke, of all Christnings, Marriages, and deaths of such our people, as shall happen within their Fort, or Fortresses, Townes or Towne at any time” (Law 7). Similar official records were kept in New England towns.

We cannot rely completely on written texts because they are not transparent; they are all written to serve a purpose. Writers create a version of events that they hope will create a desired response. This is especially true of reports from Jamestown where writers were afraid that investors in England might just give up on the project and desert them as Ralegh had deserted the Roanoke colonists. Leaders tried to project an immediate future in which everything was just about to improve.

But other sources told a different story. Returning colonists, for one, could not be silenced. As historian Wesley Frank Craven writes, “By 1612 the adventurers [investors] were complaining that only the name of God was more frequently profaned in the streets and market places of London than was the name of Virginia” (Craven 1970, 26–7). Don Diego de Molina, one of the people the Spanish had inserted into Jamestown, was allowed to send home unsealed letters; unsealed meant that Jamestown’s leaders could read them first. What those leaders did not know was that Don Diego also smuggled out a truly frank discussion of what was actually going on there for the king of Spain; it was hidden inside the sole of a Venetian gentleman’s shoe (Molina 1890 [1613], 646–652; see also Wright 1920). The truth will come out, no matter how hard elites try to keep it hidden.

On January, Mouth, who was so eager to know her people’s story and history, learned an awful truth. Through her friendship with Sophie, Mouth had contact with Gelet society and ultimately learned that the Gelets had destroyed the Citizens because they had systematically stripped the mountain of a plant the Gelets had tended over many generations and through which they controlled the skies and made them stable. Once it was gone, the skies became ferocious and a mountain of ice with noxious rain inside it landed on a nursery with thousands of new-born Gelets, killing most and leaving the survivors horribly maimed (Anders 2019, 303–5). As she slowly recovered from the shock, Mouth realized that the Citizens had made up a set of fables about the Gelets. “The Citizens had stayed blameless in their own cosmology, until the very end” (319). But, despite her enlightenment, she still could not bear to attain true memories by undergoing the operation Sophie had chosen.

Jean, one of the infants who survived the storm attack on the nursery, had lost the use of her left tentacle and was unable to do much physical work, so she became a teacher and was good at it. She spent time with Sophie to teach her about their life, and she recounted her memory of the “violent snowfall” in which “the snow grew teeth” as rocks fell on the nursery. She survived because she was under a rock, but her left side was always racked with pain (312–3). Through her stays with the Gelets, Sophie, like Mouth, had also come to understand that humans rely on their power to forget and to make memories that conform to their self-image. She remembered Bianca telling her “progress requires us to curate the past, to remove from history things that aren’t ‘constructive’” (312).

Those trapped on Aniara had access to good memories as long as Mima continued to function but were anxious when she showed the truth, and bereft once she broke down. Aniara had a Memory Hall, but it was a place where people went to recant their sins and confess their misdeeds wearing ashes on their heads (Canto 59). Chamber Seven on Aniara contained the “files of Thinking” overseen by the “Friend of Thought.” The Friend pointed to many ways of thinking that would have prevented the disasters earth had suffered, but it was too late. Occasionally a passenger would come in to look up a line of thought, but interest soon faded (Canto 44).

And some memories were kept hidden or were shared by a few. Mima’s “faithful priest in blue” also made reference to the Blue Archive, but not to where it was located or what it might contain (Canto 14). Nor does the reader know what the constant references to the color blue, both as positive and as an agent of destruction, really mean. On January, people with access could see memories of earth in the form of films on the mother ship’s computer, but to what end? (312)

The Virginia Company and later colonists worked to create the story of Virginia they wanted. And for many generations historians created a colonial past in which the Native people were savages who did not use the land properly, and the colonists hard-working and generous. Even in the twenty-first century, Indigenous Americans still fight for proper inclusion in that history. And our history is once again being carefully curated to tell the story some want us to hear.

What if management of both people and memories was not the central problem? Some people at the time English colonies were being founded dreamed of a solution to conflict that would be as successful as that achieved by the Gelets. What if music was the way to universal understanding? In Virginia, Native leaders often used music in greeting: George Percy, the Earl of Northumberland’s brother and a man used to aristocratic display, described the Rappahanna chief’s self-presentation. He came “playing on a Flute made of a Reed, with a Crowne of Deares haire colloured red, in fashion of a Rose, fastened about his knot of haire and a great Plate of Copper on the other side of his head, with two long Feathers in fashion of a paire of Hornes placed in the midst of the Crowne” (Percy 1969 [1606], 135–7).

Seventeenth-century sci-fi described moon voyages and the knowledge voyagers brought back. These writers drew on Matteo Ricci’s discussion of the Chinese language. Chinese consists of thousands of characters, each of which has a specific meaning, thus eliminating much of the confusion and danger created by alphabetic languages. Saying thousands of characters is impossible, so spoken Chinese is tonal; early modern Europeans took this to mean it was sung (Ricci 1942–1953 [1583–1610], chap. 5, esp. 26–30; Cornelius 1965; Spence 1984).

Church of England bishop Francis Godwin wrote of the “speedy Messenger” Domingo Gonsales’s trip to the moon by way of a swan-powered machine he had invented. Gonsales reported that the lunar people’s language consisted mainly of musical phrases. In this system a small number of words sufficed because they were sung in different tunes and thus were able to convey a wide range of meanings, and all communications were clearly understood (Godwin 1638, 93–5, 123).Footnote 3 The French writer Cyrano de Bergerac wrote that in lunar society ordinary people communicated by gestures, but the elite conversed in musical tones. For very complicated discussions, lunar gentlemen used musical instruments such as lutes. “[S]o that sometimes Fifteen or Twenty in a Company, will handle a point of Divinity, or discuss the difficulties of a Law-Suit, in the most harmonious Consort, that ever tickled the Ear” (de Bergerac 1687, 43).Footnote 4

Ben Jonson’s masque News From the New World Discovered in the Moon, performed before King James’s court at Whitehall in 1620, discussed a recently returned moon voyage. The Chronicler asks what language is spoken there. The Second Herald replies: mostly by gestures, but they do have “certain motions to music. All the discourse there is harmony.” So the seventeenth century had aspirations for universal peace through mutual understanding (Jonson 2014 [1620]).

As we do in modern times. In 1977, NASA sent a Voyager craft into space with the Golden Record that contained many different kinds of earth music. Carl Sagan and the others involved in the project believed that music was the best way to communicate with beings whose life and culture were utterly unknown. As Daniel K. L. Chua and Alexander Rehding write in Alien Listening, about “Sagan’s vision for Voyager: for him, aliens are strangers that we somehow already know, because we believe the music that bears our signature will resonate with them and trigger an estranged recognition of a garment woven in our time and our place, but now radically untimed and displaced” (Chua and Rehding 2021, 203). The diagram on the cover was designed to help those beings set up a record player with the attached pieces. The spaceship left our solar system in 2012; as on Aniara, Voyager I continues to send faint signals back to earth, but they are harder and harder to receive. The ship’s generators will shut down in 2030; after that, like Aniara, it will continue drifting further and further into space. If a being does discover the Golden Record, it is interesting to speculate about the reaction it will elicit (Ferris 2017). In what they call their TARDIS-like book, Alien Listening, Chua and Rehding wonder if the final piece, Beethoven’s Cavatina, might be “perceived by some alien behemoth as nothing more than a sharp, pertinent fart” (Chua and Rehding 2021, 29, 78–9, 83).