Luke White

Martial arts and science fiction (SF) might initially seem strange – even inimical – bedfellows. Literary and cinematic martial arts genres such as wuxia typically locate us in a mythical (or at best historical) past rather than the rational, technoscientific future, and they are keyed to the larger category of Fantasy, in opposition to which SF theorists from Darko Suvin to Fredric Jameson have sought to define their preferred object of study. However, martial arts have been insistently recurrent in SF media since the 1960s, from the original Star Trek series’s ‘Kirk fu’ (and later excursions into Klingon tai chi and the way of the bat’leth) through to the Jedi mysticism of Star Wars and the cyberpunk techno-Orientalism of The Matrix. This might already suggest that the opposition between Fantasy and SF is not as stable as it might seem, and that the martial arts may inhabit a territory of their intersection. Furthermore, the existence of real-world training and competition in the science-fictional art of the lightsaber suggests that these ‘media supplements’ also articulate the phantasies that underpin actual martial arts practice. Such practice shares with SF theory a concern with negotiating seeming oppositions between fantasy and realism, myth and reason, tradition and modernity, orient and occident. I thus set out to explore what the inclusion of martial arts in SF media reveals about their meaning beyond the page or screen, but also ask: what happens when we try to think of the martial arts not only in but as science fiction?