Chapter 8 In the Ghetto: Inequality, Riots and Resistance in London-Based Science Fiction of the Twenty-First Century
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Abstract
The August 2011 ‘riots’ in London and other cities in the United Kingdom were a widely noted expression of social discontent connected with new austerity programmes and increased precariousness and poverty. This essay concentrates on two science fiction texts – a novel and a film – that were published shortly before the August events but reflect the growing resistance from which the riots erupted. Both Jonathan Trigell’s 2011 novel Genus and the film Attack the Block (UK 2011, written and directed by Joe Cornish) engage with Britain’s social division through a powerful spatial metaphor: that of (real or imaginary) borderlines and specifically that of the ghetto as a walled-off district within a city where social and spatial segregation go hand in hand. Trigell’s novel, which is set in the near future, envisages a dystopian London in which the King’s Cross area has been transformed into an inner-city ghetto for the socially marginalised. Attack the Block is set in the present and uses the sci-fi trope of an invasion from outer space to re-imagine an existing urban space commonly associated with segregation and marginalisation: the inner-city council estate.