Paper proposal for 2013 Joint Eaton/SFRA Conference

I've been thinking a lot lately about representations of media technologies in science fiction. Below is a paper proposal I submitted to the 2013 Science Fiction Research Association conference. It doesn't have much of a conclusion or "pay off," perhaps because I'm still working out that dimensions of the argument. Mainly, I envision the presentation as a way of getting at the questions I pose in the second paragraph; it's more about opening a conversation than it is offering a definitive position on the topic.

"Science Fiction and Writing Technologies"

To understand writing as a technology is to foreground the techniques of material inscription by which humans record memory in a durable form outside of the mind. Technological processes of material inscription, like other technologies, have co-evolved alongside and with humans. Katherine Hayles, following Bernard Stiegler, labels this process of co-evolutionary development between humans and technics “technogenesis” (30). When its technological dimension comes into focus, we find that writing is always instantiated within a particular material medium. To think of writing technologies, then, is also to think of media technologies. Hayles has recently presented the field of “Comparative Media Studies” as a way of conceptualizing the relationship between print and digital media, in particular. Further, writing involves technological competencies in addition to language-oriented literate skills. Put a different way, literacy is itself a technological competency. In a fundamental sense, then, writing technologies are always embedded within relations of social power and material production; a class of premodern literate scribes, the invention of high-volume mechanical printing, and contemporary multi-modal forms of self-publishing and digital media creation are examples of writing’s embeddedness within changing social and material ecologies.

The idea that SF speculates about the consequences of, and possibilities for, technological and scientific development is a familiar notion to scholars of the genre. However, the imaginative contribution that SF makes to how we conceptualize writing technologies largely remains to be explored. The proposed paper will ask two interrelated questions. First, what might SF texts that represent writing technologies allow us to say about how we live, work, and play with emerging forms of material inscription and prosthetic memory? Second, how do SF texts, as writing and rhetoric, circulate within the globalized information system at the same time that they attempt to represent this system?

As a way of getting at these two ideas, I will briefly explore three SF novels that directly address writing technologies broadly imagined. In 1949, Orwell’s infamous dystopian novel 1984 showed how totalitarianism might achieve a stranglehold on human consciousness in large part through control of the printed word. In Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth’s 1952 novel, The Space Merchants, the protagonist is a “Copysmith Star Class” who writes advertisements and works for corporations that unleash new hyper-invasive media technologies in order to condition consumers to purchase an endless supply of unnecessary products. When 1984 came to pass, Apple launched the Macintosh personal computer, and William Gibson and Samuel Delaney foresaw the emergence of “cyberspace” and the World Wide Web. In Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand (1984), Delaney explores the racial and class barriers to accessing digital information that scholars now refer to as the “digital divide.” Delaney figures this divide through Rat Korga’s illiteracy and inability to access the General Information system.

Review for the SFRA

During my summer independent study with Phil Wegner, I joined the Science Fiction Research Association (SFRA). Phil would probably have prefered that I join the Society for Utopian Studies, of which he is President, and I do intend at some point to learn more about the concept of utopia. However, SFRA seemed more within my intellectual strike zone, and I even managed to review a book for them before the start of the term. Here's what I submitted.

Fiction Review
In the Lion’s Mouth
Joseph Paul Weakland
Flynn, Michael. In the Lion’s Mouth. New York: Tor, 2012. 304 pages, cloth, $25.99. ISBN 978-0-765322-85-2.

In the Lion’s Mouth (2012) follows The January Dancer (2009) and Up Jim River (2010) as the third in the “Spiral Arm” series of space opera novels by Michael Flynn. In Flynn’s universe, two interstellar powers fight a cold war known as the “Long Game.” They wage this war primarily through the clandestine operations of highly trained saboteurs and assassins. The Commonwealth of Central Worlds deploys agents called “Shadows,” while the United League of the Periphery trains operatives known as “Hounds.” Much of the novel centers on the adventures of Donovan buigh, a former Shadow and leader of a failed revolution against the “Names,” the covert political entity behind the Confederacy and its Shadows.

The novel’s frame story begins on the planet Dangchao Waypoint, where Shadow agent Ravn Olafsdottr stealthily infiltrates a League base. Her mission is to give news of Donovan buigh to his former lover, Bridget ban, a Hound of the League of the Periphery. The mutual enemies establish a temporary truce, and over several hours, Olafsdottr narrates the tale of Donovan’s fate by reciting poetry. Flynn develops this illusion by starting each section of the main story with a brief poem, before switching back into prose. Olafsdottr’s poem forms the bulk of the narrative, but the novel periodically returns to Olafsdottr and Bridget during brief “interrogatories.” Ravn admits that she takes liberties with her tale, so the reader must judge whether she is a reliable narrator. Interested scholars may wish to consider further the novel’s unusual narrative structure and stylistic experimentation.

Flynn’s Spiral Arm contains two warring interstellar powers, but much of the novel appears to concern the Shadows’ own internal civil war. A “revolution” is brewing within the Confederacy, but because virtually all of the characters in the novel are socially elite, impossibly talented assassins, we gain little sense of what ordinary people think and feel in the Spiral Arm, much less what a revolution within the Confederacy would actually mean. No clear ideological differences exist between the Confederacy and the League, for that matter. Most of the conflicts between characters seem based on challenges to personal pride and honor, and few substantive political, ethical, or moral issues are at stake. Perhaps this is not surprising, as late in the novel, we learn that the second planned revolution was more of a “rebellion,” an effort to change leadership with the Names, rather than an attempt to transform any kind of political system.

Although the tangled skeins of personal intrigue among the agents are elaborate and at times interesting, scholars may find little else upon which to comment in the novel. A clue to Flynn’s project might be found in the epigraph he pulls from The Autumn of the Middle Ages (1924) by the Dutch historian Johan Huizinga: “Having dressed and painted their passionate dream of a beautiful life with all their powers of imagination and artfulness and wealth and molded it into a plastic form, they then pondered and realized that life was really not so beautiful – and then laughed.” Flynn writes that his “Shadow culture is based loosely on the decadent Franco-Burgundian knighthood of the fifteenth century,” the main source for which is Huizinga. In short, then, the novel appears to be in part a futuristic reimagining of certain elements of medieval court society. In fact, two Shadows even fight a formal duel over a mutual love interest.

While In the Lion’s Mouth is stylistically interesting, it falls short in what Darko Suvin terms “cognitive estrangement.” In other words, it deploys scientific fictional elements primarily to equip its agents (or “knights”) with fancy equipment and gadgets; Flynn describes the science behind several of these in his postscript. This is not necessarily a criticism in and of itself, as the battle sequences are among the most memorable parts of the novel. However, as a sort of medieval-futurist space opera, the novel doesn’t yield the cognitive pleasures of more cerebral space operas such as Vernor Vinge’s Fire Upon the Deep (1992) and Dan Simmon’s Hyperion (1989), nor does it contain the character development and psychological sophistication of a novel like Alfred Bester’s The Stars My Destination (1956). These novels also provide much more imaginative examples of what I take to be the hallmark of space opera, sublime speculation: sentient AIs, creatures that function as a “hive mind,” galaxy-wide communications networks, alternative laws of physics, and so on. These space operas might also offer more to scholarly inquiry. The galactic civilizations presented in Fire Upon the Deep are richly depicted – the sheer scale of Verne’s world and the varieties of life forms that inhabit it is a cognitive marvel. Likewise, Hyperion is remarkable for its stylistic virtuosity. Like Flynn’s novel, Simmons also employs a frame story. However, Simmons uses this technique to write a novel that is part space opera, part military science fiction, part planetary adventure, and part cyberpunk.

Beyond sublime speculation or stylistic experimentation, we might ask what Flynn’s cognitive estrangement reveals about our own world. It is here that the novel’s lack of political depth becomes particularly disappointing; a novel focusing so much on conflict might have gone deeper into the reasons for this conflict and the divergent worldviews that gave rise to the “Long Game.” In an era of clandestine interrogation, torture, and assassination, most of which occurs outside the public’s field of vision, we might question Flynn’s failure to throw a critical light on these practices within his novel. According to Huizinga, the Franco-Burgundian knighthood realized that “life was not really so beautiful” as it had imagined, “and then laughed.” In our own historical moment, facing as we do a series of interlocking social and ecological crises, we must do more than laugh. Perhaps here I reveal my own preference for politically conscious science fiction over stylized fantasy. Should Flynn write another novel in his Spiral Arm universe, perhaps he will speculate as to what a true “revolution” might look like.

Roadside Picnic

Strugatsky, Arkady, Boris N. Strugatsky, and Olena Bormashenko. Roadside Picnic. Chicago, Illinois: Chicago Review Press, 2012. Print.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky’s Roadside Picnic is a first contact story with a crucial difference: the aliens never reveal themselves, nor do they give any hint of their purpose for visiting Earth. The only traces that remain of the encounter are several “Zones” of mysterious and dangerous debris left at seemingly random locations around the planet. The novel’s titular “picnic” is a metaphor for this; humans are insects that encounter an inscrutable array of artifacts leftover from an alien picnic; we are ants without the cognitive ability to understand the objects, their purpose, or their creator’s motivations. After finishing their “meal,” if you can call it a meal, the aliens simply disappear, leaving humans to sort through the aftermath. In this way, Roadside Picnic strongly parallels Lem’s Solaris, as both novels challenge the idea of human “cognitive universalism,” or the commonly-held notion that human ways of thinking about and being in the world could be mapped onto non-human entities.

The Zones containing the alien debris were evacuated, as many of the artifacts are dangerous to human life. Humans make periodic forays into the Zones to recover alien artifacts, but have had little success in reverse engineering alien technology or uncovering any clues as to the nature of the alien visit. So called “Stalkers,” criminals who enter the Zone illegally to treasure hunt, pass on birth defects to their children apparently caused by something in the Zone. Stalkers, when they move to other parts of the world after living and working near and in the Zone, also cause statistically-improbable disasters in the communities to which they relocate. The Zones themselves contain strange gravitational anomalies, corrosive sludge, and reanimate corpses that leave the Zone and continue, in a zombie-like way, their daily lives. Although humans have managed to appropriate some of the alien technology for their own use, such as small batteries with infinite life-spans, most of the phenomenon and objects remain inscrutable to science – much like the sentient ocean in Solaris.

The novel follows Red Schuhart, a stalker living near one of the Zones in what appears to be North America. While Schuhart works for a scientific institute that conducts official research in the Zone, he also conducts illegal treasure-hunting on the side, as many of the artifacts are highly-profitable on the black Market. The Zone is so dangerous that many die or suffer permanent damage navigating it, and skilled stalkers are highly-paid for their work. Schuhart also observes first-hand the corruption and greed surrounding the Zones; contact has not resulted in Enlightenment, but only confusion and moral decline.

In the novel’s conclusion, Schuhart finds a golden orb that is said to have the ability to grant a person’s innermost desire. This object raises a number of interesting philosophical and social questions. Does Schuhart, or anyone else, actually possess the language to articulate a desire that would be beneficial to humanity? In other words, what would his utopia look like? Schuhart detests the corruption that surrounds him, even while he participates in it. He seems to feel that the orb should be used for a higher purpose than simply manifesting one’s own idiosyncratic desires. However, while his purpose is noble, Schuhart sacrifices an apprentice stalker to gain access to the orb. He even borrows his words to the orb from the dead apprentice: “HAPPINESS, FREE, FOR EVERYONE, AND LET NO ONE BE FORGOTTEN!” (193). The words reveal that he does not have a concrete vocabulary for describing an ideal society, but instead asks the orb to “Look into my soul, I know – everything you need is in there. It has to be. Because I’ve never sold my soul to anyone! It’s mine, it’s human! Figure out yourself what I want – because I know it can’t be bad” (193).

Can we believe Schuhart? Doesn’t his ruthlessness in sacrificing the apprentice, and his history of crime, undermine his claim that his soul isn’t bad? Or is he redeemed by his utopian desire for universal happiness and peace, even if he is only able to voice this desire in a naïve way, in a plagiarized way? If we were granted the same opportunity, would our situation be any different? It’s here that the novel might be read as a political critique of the Soviet Union and its own ambiguous utopian aims. As Ursula K. Le Guin observes in her Foreword to the novel’s most recent edition, however, the story succeeds because it is as much about an individual as it is a political allegory.

Roadside Picnic was adapted by the authors into the film Stalker (1979) and the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. series of video games.

The Embedding

Watson, Ian. The Embedding. New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 1990. Print.

The Embedding interrogates the relationship between language, embodiment, and reality. In particular, Watson explores the possibility of a relationship with a reality “outside” of language and embodiment. The notion that we construct our reality through language is a familiar one, but The Embedding is also concerned with how bodies themselves participate in the construction of reality. At the beginning of the novel, a team of researchers are investigating the “universal grammar” (the researchers refer to Chomsky several times) of human languages, and want to know whether the brain is “wired” to produce a finite-array of possible language-constructions. The British researchers are based at an institute in Africa, and they experiment on African children born in scientific captivity. In another connected story arc, an anthropologist studies an Amazonian tribe with a similarly unique language. The “Xemahoa,” as they are called, use a psychotropic fungus to speak a new tongue in an altered cognitive state. The tribe is under threat by a dam built by the United Stated and the Brazilian government. Thus, the novel engages questions of language and embodiment alongside a commentary on colonialism. In other words, in addition to exploring an “outside” to language and embodiment, The Embedding also examines whether there is an “outside” to politics. For Watson, the answer to both questions appears to be: No.

Shortly after their birth, the children at the institute are placed in different cognitive environments as a way of probing the limits of what the human brain will accept as reality. In one environment, children learn a language unlike any spoken by “normal” humans. The researchers use a computer to create a synthetic language twisted into impossibly complex grammatical constructions, in which words and clauses pile on one another in long sentences that would be beyond the semantic grasp of any normal human. In order to process this artificial language, the children are given brain enhancing drugs that increase their short-term memory. This allows them to keep these complex sentences in their mind long enough to process their meaning. In short, the goal of the experiment is to determine how the brain imposes limits on perception and cognition. Other environments seem to stretch normal human logic and Gestalt psychology (the perception of shapes, colors, causality, and so on…). Of course, the researchers and other characters also struggle with the ethicality of these experiments.

In the Amazon, an anthropologist lives with a tribe caught in the crossfire between the capitalist exploitation of the Amazon River and socialist guerillas. By inhaling a fungus called “Maka-i,” the tribe can speak a new language similar to the artificial one developed by the British researchers. This allows the Xemahoa to articulate, and hold in conscious presence, their relationship with their entire cultural cosmology. To explain a bit more, when we read, the words before our eyes are the immediate objects of our cognition, but they quickly recede from immediate presence as our eyes scan over the page. The same might be argued for spoken language. However, the Xemahoa use the fungus to gain the ability to recite one long, unimaginably complex sentence and hold it present in mind for the duration of the drug’s effects. According to the anthropologist, this allows them to gain a complete and “direct sensory apprehension” of their entire world. As one character that has a similar experience later in the novel puts it: “The world was about to be embedded in his mind in its totality as a direct sensory apprehension, and not as something safely symbolized and distanced by words and abstract thoughts. The Greater was about to be embedded in the Lesser” (214). It’s not clear which elements of the Xemahoa’s environment grant them this ability, the clay they eat, the fungus itself, the plants and animals that serve as referents for their words. Interestingly, the Americans recognize this: “If there’s anything in this drug business, we got to save the whole ecology” (155). This part of the text warrants further consideration as an example of the “ecology” of language and writing.

The Embedding enacts these various cognitive estrangements to explore the relationship between language, embodiment, and reality. The third story arc concerns an alien race that visits Earth. These aliens are attempting to gather languages (and brains) from all sentient species they come across. They compile these languages (and the brains in which they are embodied) within a “Language Moon.” They believe that once they have collected enough subjective languages, they can merge them into a master objective conception of reality that will transcend any particular subjective experience of the world. As they alien describes it: “There are so many ways of seeing This-reality, from so many viewpoints. It is these viewpoints that we trade for. You might say we trade for realities” (117). Their goal is to find an “outside,” a space beyond language or the constraints posed by an embodiment. In doing so, they wish to literally escape the universe itself:  “Only at the places where the languages of different species grate together, presenting an interface of paradox, do we guess the nature of true reality and draw the strength to escape. Our language moon will reveal reality as a direct experience” (135). Although this might seem like irrelevant metaphysical speculation, Watson makes these ideas tangible in the political and cultural tensions that surface in the novel.

The anthropologist studying the Xemahoa notes that in order to engage “politically” with what is happening around them, the tribe would have to give up something of their cultural-autonomy and purity; in order to fight on the terms of their opponents, they would have to compromise the integrity of their own terms. Similarly, the US and the Soviet Union ally against the aliens – their ideological tension, capitalism vs. communism, for at least a period dissolves by a threat “outside” of human concerns: an alien presence. The aliens come simply wanting to trade for languages; they even offer the humans new space-travel technology and the locations of colonizable planets in return. However, after South America falls into political chaos as a result of US political engineering, the US decides to use the aliens as a scapegoat and blame them for causing the turmoil. The US and USSR briefly join forces to nuke the aliens, the revolutionary momentum in South America falters, and the status-quo more or less returns. As the narrator sums it up in a reference to Jefferson Airplane’s album Blows Against the Empire: “Sorry, Jefferson Airplane… the Empire still stands firm” (87). In illustrating the impossibility of accessing a transcendent space outside of reality, perhaps Watson asks the reader to consider seriously how our linguistic, ideological, and ecological position shapes our world.

Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Freedman, Carl. Critical Theory and Science Fiction. London: University Press of New England, 2000. Print.

***

Freedman writes that when he was working on this project, he offered colleagues this short description: “my thesis about critical theory and science fiction is that each is a version of the other” (xv). However, as a whole, Critical Theory and Science Fiction seems to argue that a certain kind of SF embodies the mode of emancipative thinking that Freedman associates with critical theory: “I do believe that both… have the potential to play a role in the liberation of humanity from oppression” (xx). In other words, Freedman doesn’t claim explicitly that critical theory itself is in some sense “science fictional.” Rather, he writes, “Just as Lukács argues that the historical novel is a privileged and paradigmatic genre for Marxism, so I argue that science fiction enjoys – and ought to be recognized as enjoying – such a position not only for Marxism but for critical theory in general” (xv). This leads me to the following questions: how would our thinking change if this relationship were reversed? What if “critical theory in general” was a paradigmatic “genre” for science fiction? What would this mean? Is it possible to enact this kind of cognitive estrangement on critical theory itself, or would the result be an irrational estrangement or fantasy, in Darko Suvin’s sense?

I’m interested in this more provocative and inchoate (and perhaps fatally problematic) project because it seems in order to use theory one first has to position oneself within the theoretical conversation; one has to form a set of intellectual and interpretative allegiances. One must decide upon a starting point from which to develop one’s own contribution to the conversation. This starting point most often is the theory of another thinker, whose work one complicates or applies to a particular cultural artifact under consideration. Freedman makes the point that each school of critical theory and literary interpretation privileges a certain genre for this analysis (he offers several examples on page 29). Further, Freedman himself seems to ally most strongly with Marx and historical materialism – although his discussion and application of theory is wide-ranging.

To develop my playful notion a bit, perhaps there are resonances between those who do theoretical work in an academic setting and authors of science fiction. Freedman claims that the two projects have “structural affinities,” but what “cognitive effect” might imagining the theorist as science fiction author produce? As I hinted at in the preceding paragraph, theorists ultimately make idiosyncratic decisions about where (and with whom) they begin and enter a conversation. These decisions occur within institutional contexts and also reflect the social process of scholarship. However, might one’s relationship with theory bear a personal imprint, as well? Theorists are indebted to the thinkers that preceded them, and must wrestle with their influences, no less than a science fiction author creates texts that derive from and complicate authors who wrote before. An author like William Gibson, for example, owes a great deal of his style to Dashiell Hammet and Raymond Chandler and cites William Burroughs as one of his primary influences. However, Neuromancer ultimately provides a way of looking at a computerized world that goes beyond anything that came previously (both in the stylistic and “cognitive” sense).

However derivative its elements might be, then, Gibson’s “cyberpunk” is certainly an original invention, even if, as Freedman astutely points out, cyberpunk is “less radically critical and so less radically science fictional” than earlier works (198) [emphasis removed]. “Critical theory as cyberpunk” is then a doubly imperfect metaphor. However, this brings us to another parallel between the author of critical theory (CT) and SF. As Steven Shaviro suggests in Connected:

Both of these sorts of writing [CT and SF] seek to grasp the social world not by representing it mimetically but by performing a kind of ‘cognitive estrangement upon it so that the structures and assumptions that we take for granted, and that undergird our own social reality, may be seen in their full contingency and historicity. (x)

To pivot from my own cognitive estrangement and return to Freedman’s argument, “critical theory, as a mode of reading, tends to privilege science fiction (though usually, so far, implicitly and even unconsciously)… science fiction, like critical theory, insists upon historical mutability, material reducibility, and utopian possibility” (xvi).

There are perhaps other cognitively valuable resonances between authors of CT and SF; each traditionally occupies a position of privilege within the Euro-American world; each seeks to introduce a series of new words and concepts into various discourses (Csicsery-Ronay calls the language-inventions of SF authors “fictive-neology,” and CT authors often create their own words to express new insights provided by their arguments); neither is bound by scientific or empirically-verifiable epistemologies, nor can the speculations provided by CT and SF often be verified by empirical means.

I offer these thoughts primarily as a way of thinking a bit further about how I will position myself within the theoretical conversation. This is still very much a work-in-progress; I’m still in search of my “theory voice,” so to speak.

***

To return once more to Freedman’s argument, I should note that he does make one alteration to Suvin’s definition of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement. Freedman’s departure hinges on whether or not Suvin’s definition of SF requires texts to adhere to the latest scientific epistemologies in order to be considered “cognitive.” For Freedman, this is not the case:

The crucial issue for generic discrimination is not any epistemological judgment external to the text itself on the rationality or irrationality of the latter’s imaginings, but rather (as some of Suvin’s language does, in fact, imply but never makes entirely clear) the attitude of the text itself to the kind of estrangements being performed. (18)

Freedman addresses this issue by creating the concept and term “cognition effect”: “Unless the distinction between cognition and cognition effect is kept steadily in view, the definition of science fiction as cognitive estrangement can lead to patent absurdities” (18) [emphasis added]. Scholars might debate whether Freedman’s modification of Suvin’s terms is truly necessary, but if nothing else the “cognition effect” provides an even clearer concept with which to understand and discuss what SF does for readers. Freedman distances “cognition” even more strongly from a narrow definition of “science.” He thus more closely aligns cognition with “critical thinking” than with anything resembling the scientific fidelity characteristic of “hard SF.”

Interestingly, Freedman doesn’t discuss at length how SF tropes are often appropriated by uncritical cultural projects: mindless entertainment spectacle, advertising, reactionary political rhetoric, etc. For example, most people’s conception of SF is probably closer to what SF scholars would pejoratively call “sci-fi.” If there is a “rhetoric of science fiction,” this problem is something worth thinking more about…

***

Other interesting quotations from Critical Theory and Science Fiction:

It is in the past forty years or so that we have witnessed the production of the largest distinct body of work that strongly incarnates tendency of science fiction and is explicitly and unambiguously published under name of science fiction. Especially insofar as the American and British traditions are concerned, this great increase in the critical sophistication of science fiction as named genre can be corrected with the more general increase in critical thinking – that is, in dialectical, historical, and utopian thinking – that characterizes the general cultural phenomenon known as ‘the Sixties.’ (94)

***

Science fiction is of all forms of art the one most closely and profoundly allied to critical theory. (199)

Connected

Shaviro, Steven. Connected, Or, What It Means to Live in the Network Society. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. Print.

Shaviro describes Connected as “a speculative exercise in cultural theory,” and begins with a brief meditation on the parallels between science fiction and theory. He writes,

Both of these sorts of writing seek to grasp the social world not by representing it mimetically but by performing a kind of ‘cognitive estrangement upon it (a term Freedman borrows from Dark Suvin), so that the structures and assumptions that we take for granted, and that undergird our own social reality, may be seen in their full contingency and historicity. (x)

Many theorists I’ve encountered comment on the relationship between SF and theory, but these comments are usually tantalizingly brief and underdeveloped. Shaviro claims to be writing a form of science fiction, but his theoretical justification is limited to a short preface. (I haven’t read Freedman’s Critical Theory and Science Fiction, which might be the text for which I’m searching.) Nevertheless, Shaviro does offer some valuable insights, some of which I will articulate here.


First, an idea inspired by Shaviro (he doesn’t argue this directly): there may be a formal and/or stylistic mode that critical theory shares with science fiction. According to Csicsery-Ronay, one of SF’s seven beauties is “fictive neology.” He argues that SF functions as a source of language innovation and that the new words it deploys are a key element of the genre. SF readers “decode” and begin to understand a new cognitively-estranged world in part through encountering and deciphering the fictive neology within an SF text. Each SF author coins new words to describe their speculative inventions, for example, words such as “cyberspace,” “matrix,” “net,” and “virtual reality,” some of which bleed over into popular usage (like Gibson’s “cyberspace”).

Like SF, critical theory is also a source of language invention, new words, and concepts. Many of the terms developed by theorists are explicitly science fictional: Haraway’s “cyborg,” Baudrillard’s “hyperreal,” Hayles "virtuality." Many theorists create their own coinages to represent concepts that are closely related to those of other theorists. This seems not unlike SF authors who develop their own fictive neology to describe things like artificial intelligence, faster than light travel, genetic engineering, digital information and communication systems, and so on. Each SF author not only develops his or her own fictive neology for the features a cognitively-estranged world, but also offers his or her own perspective on how a particular novum will change the world. When you read an SF novel, you can’t help but situate it in relation to other SF works in the SF “metaverse.” What does Neal Stephenson do with cyberpunk in Snow Crash that Gibson doesn’t? How is this author’s “cyberspace” indebted to and/or different from Gibson’s depiction of it in Neuromancer?

I think these questions are a more elemental part of the SF reading experience than literary criticism. In other words, I think the chain of intertextual associations that the fictive neology triggers in a reader's mind is something that occurs for those without formal training in literary criticism, for those not interested in situating authors in relation to one another for the purpose of academic discussions. In any event, I would conjecture that a similar chain of associations occurs when we read theory, which, unlike most SF, is a highly-rarefied academic discourse. How many other theoretical notions does D&G's concept of the "rhizome" evoke for experienced readers of theory, for instance? From how many theoretical notions does the rhizome itself derive from and complicate? The skillful SF writer, like the theorist, must survey how a science-fictional (or theoretical) trope has been addressed previously in order to write something original and provocative, in order to evoke the cognition effect of SF.

To the extent that SF is attempting to explore the social and cultural consequences of technoscientific development, these are important questions; both theorists and SF authors are trying to get a handle on the current globalized technoscientific condition. Like the SF metaverse, these theoretical perspectives also exist in a continual conversation. Indeed, as Shaviro points out, quoting Freedman,

critical theory and science fiction share ‘certain structural affinities’ (23) in the ways that they engage with late capitalist society. Science fiction and critical theory alike are engaged in the task of what Frederic Jameson calls the ‘cognitive mapping’ of postmodern space: an effort that ‘seeks to endow the individual subject with some new heightened sense of its place in the global system,” given that this system is unrepresentable by traditional mimetic means (54)

I’m interested in critical theory as science fiction at least in part as a way of understanding and situating myself within the sheer volume of theoretical discourse available to a scholar in the humanities. I often think about questions such as, “Which theorist offers the most insightful and useful model of the phenomenon under consideration?” “Which theorist do I find most accessible and interesting?” “What theoretical work offers me the thrill of gaining a new vantage point on the world?” Similarly, we tend to evaluate SF authors to the extent that they offer estranged perspectives on reality, fictional insights into the direction of technoscientific development, to the degree that they evoke cognitive wonder. Critics have commented extensively on Neuromancer, for example, precisely because it is so useful for thinking (pleasurably) about contemporary human-techno relations.

When I consider Connected as a whole, I don’t get the sense that Shaviro offers any unifying thesis concerning “what it means to live in the network society.” There doesn’t seem to be any particular theory being developed in the text, nor does Shaviro seem to think any particular theorist offers a privileged vantage point on the condition of being “connected.” All the usual suspects are here: Benjamin, Foucault, D&G, Derrida, Haraway, and others. However, his ability to employ them in his analysis of various science-fiction texts and contemporary techno-cultural concerns is remarkable.

Shaviro’s rapid forays into various cultural texts begin and end abruptly. Stylistically, the effect evokes the sensation of surfing television or web browsing. I read Connected as an e-book, in fact, so I found it easy to read alongside my other online activities, like listening to music and checking my Facebook. If I lost my place, I could just jump to the next italicized topic heading. I was unfamiliar with many of the works he examines, particularly the music, so my reading sent me to Google several times, where I either looked at books on Amazon or videos on YouTube. I wish I could say that I did something like “spiral out into the web,” propelled by Shaviro’s abundant use of cultural texts, that his text in fact connected me to other texts. However, I’m reminded of how a few websites owned by a few companies control so much of my access to information. Shaviro, in his reading of Jeter’s SF novel Noir, notes that that every connection leads back to a corporation (1).

Connected doesn’t provide any easily-summarized set of ideas about the networked society. This is in part because so much of his discussion is situated in relation to specific cultural artifacts: experimental hip-hop albums, music videos, science fiction literature, digital copyright law. He examines an array of cultural texts emerging from and reacting to capitalist technoscientific development, and the insights are as diverse as the texts themselves. This is both innovative, but also frustrating, as I’m used to being able to quickly gain a sense of a text’s primary conceptual/argumentative movements. Connected demands a different style and set of expectations for reading.

Like the network society, Connected employs a sort of fractal structure. There isn’t a table of contents or a traditional chapter organization, and ideas seldom build from one another in a linear fashion across sections. The reader is more or less thrown into the “middle” of a series of mini-meditations on cultural artifacts that embody the features of the networked society. However, like a fractal, Connected contains recurrent patterns. It explores new theoretical tropes appropriate to the network society: the virus, the system, the hive mind. Connected also reexamines how pre-digital ideas and entities are transformed and reconfigured within network society: the body, the soul, and money. It would have been useful for Shaviro to explain in more detail his rationale for his book’s unconventional structure – is this how cultural criticism reads in the network society?

It also seems difficult to extract Shaviro’s observations from the cultural artifacts on which they are based; although the author employs a “networked” argumentative structure, his ideas seem to resist easy replication and portability. In other words, aside from the idea of cultural criticism as SF, it would be hard for me to imagine how to use Shaviro, except for the odd quotation, or in relation to a specific text he analyzes, or perhaps as an inspiration for a new way of performing criticism. As I write this, however, I realize that these are all interesting ways to connect a text to other texts. Perhaps Connected suggests that doing cultural criticism or theoretical work in the network society is letting go of monolithic theoretical constructs. Or, more precisely, the desire for a unified interpretive framework from which to understand our place within the network.

***
Useful quotations about SF and critical theory/cultural criticism from Shaviro’s preface:

***
“This means that science fiction is the privileged genre (literary, cinematic, televisual, and digital) for contemporary critical theory, in much the same way that the nineteenth-century realist novel was the privileged genre for the early-twentieth century Marxist criticism of Georg Lukacks and others.”

***
“Throughout this book I look at cultural practices, especially those involving digital media, both as they are described in science fiction novels and films and as they are being enacted today on the Internet. I do not distinguish between these two sorts of sources. My aim, like that of any other science fiction writer, is to discern the changes that are transforming our world into a very different place from the one into which I was born. Science fiction does not claim to predict what will happen then, a hundred, or a thousand years from now; what distinguishes the genre is its linguistic and temporal orientation. Science fiction is always written in the future tense – conceptually, if not grammatically. Not only is it about what has not yet happened, but its very structure is that of the not-yet happened. It addresses events in their potentiality, which is something vaster and more mysterious – more perturbingly other – than any actual outcome could ever be. Science fiction is about strange metamorphoses and venturesome, unpredictable results. It is a practice of continual experimentation, just as science and technology themselves are.”

***
“Science fiction conjures the invisible forces – technological, social, economic, affective, and political – that surround us” (xi)

***
“It is only by writing cultural theory as science fiction that I can hope for my work to be (in Lenin’s famous phrase) ‘as radical as reality itself’ (xi)

A Canticle for Leibowitz

After a nuclear holocaust, an order of Catholic monks preserves fragments of human knowledge in hopes that civilization will one day rebuild itself. Civilization does reemerge after centuries of darkness, but quickly the mistakes of the past are repeated: nationalist fervor, unethical technological advance, war. The legacy of nuclear conflict lives on in the human genome, resulting in monstrous births and mutations. Late in the third millennium, the order of Leibowitz departs for Alpha Centauri, leaving Earth to fall once more into nuclear darkness, perhaps for the final time.

Walter M. Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz (1959) attempts to stage a conflict between religious faith and secular reason, and for the most part it’s successful, although you could argue it stacks the deck against secular reason. There are many powerful passages in which the irresponsibility of politicians and scientists are condemned. There is even a lengthy parable which describes the first nuclear holocaust in Christian-religious terms. Perhaps my primary criticism is that the novel is somewhat one-sided; the secular humanist worldview seems unrecoverable, and Christians have the last laugh. Indeed, a wooden carving of Leibowitz has a bemused smirk which the novel frequently references.

After each human-generated apocalypse, Nature reclaims the dead and the destroyed, and the order of Leibowitz remains to preserve the ember of knowledge for the survivors. I’d call the book, for lack of a better phrase, an attempt at “Christian satire”. The novel isn’t necessarily preachy, but perhaps I say this because the forcefulness of its condemnation is often quite lyrical and enjoyable; in other words, it's easy to be persuaded by Leibowitz. Although there are attempts to stage a genuine conflict between religious values and secular values, it seems clear in the end that the monks are the (flawed) heroes and that the cause of all this destruction is human vanity. Aside from the novel’s theological agenda, it contains some interesting speculations:

The order of Leibowitz attempts to preserve knowledge, but it doesn’t understand much of what it preserves. An electrician’s blue print, for instance, completely mystifies them. Preserving knowledge provides no guarantee that it will be useful to those who encounter it in the future. Or perhaps the idea is that “knowledge” doesn’t reside in these artifacts as much as it emerges from their “use value”; the blue print doesn’t become knowledge until it allows us to think or do something we couldn’t do before. They are able to learn some things from the memorabilia, as they call it, but there are a lot of missing pieces, and no one person has the complete picture.

The idea of preserving written texts and materials against the onslaught of time and calamity warrants further consideration. This is a common idea in speculative fiction, including Bradbury’s Fahrenheit  451. In Leibowitz, post-holocaust humans enact a great “Simplification” in which they attempt to eradicate all knowledge and learned people in retaliation for the disaster. “Bootleggers” then become “bookleggers,” and the monks memorize books in addition to protecting them – all at the risk of their lives.

The Rhetoric of Science Fiction

I just finalized (as much as you can finalize these things, anyway) my syllabus and course schedule for my ENC 1101 class during summer B. The description of the course theme that I included on the syllabus is below. I'm not entirely satisfied with it, but I think it's a good start.

Course Theme: The Rhetoric of Science Fiction

This course will ask you to consider how science fiction (SF) functions as a powerful source of rhetoric concerning the relationship between science and society. A basic premise of the course is that science influences the development of science fiction, and SF in turn plays a role in the public perception of science and technology. Both scientists and SF authors use rhetoric to persuade audiences. As rhetoric, SF is not limited to print literature, but pervades television, film, video games, advertising, and even political discourse. In addition to developing thinking and writing skills, you will examine several overlapping questions:

• How do individuals and groups acquire the necessary knowledge to make informed and ethical decisions about how to live with science and technology?
• What messages do SF texts convey regarding how scientific and technological advances should be used by humans?
• How do SF worlds help us see our own world in new and surprising ways?
• In reading works by scientists and SF authors, what can we learn about rhetoric and writing? 

Our readings from the Science and Society course reader will also help us explore George Orwell’s question, “What is Science?” In addition, we will read several SF short stories and view the SF film, Gattaca.

***

I read a couple of great essays from an edited volume, Practicing Science Fiction. I found a lot of suggestions for texts to use in the course, including texts that examine popular representations of science and scientists. The course isn't just about SF, then, but how the relationship between SF, cultural representations of science, rhetoric, and "science" itself - this last concept will probably be the most challenging to engage with in the class.

We'll see how it all works together in the weeks to come. I hope to use the experience to write an even more focused course description... it's something I tend to keep tinkering with. I'm currently imagining a dissertation project focusing on how to integrate science fiction into the composition classroom - this would include pedagogical practice in addition to a theoretical rationale, i.e., how can SF be considered "rhetoric" and why is this important?

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction

Csicsery-Ronay, Istvan. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 2008. Print.

Csicsery-Ronay describes the structure and purpose of his book when he writes, “I believe that SF can be treated as a particular, recognizable mode of thought and art. But rather than a programlike set of exclusive rules and required devices, this mode is a constellation of diverse intellectual and emotional interests and responses that are particularly active in an age of restless technological transformation. I consider seven such categories to be the most attractive and formative of science-fictionality. These are the ‘seven beauties’ of my title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade” (5).

According to the author, the technological “Singularity” (as theorized by futurists such as Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil) embodies all seven beauties. I elaborate his claim briefly here simply to sketch out for the reader what he means with each of the beauties. The Singularity creates its own science-fictional neologisms, such as “mind downloading” and “Singularitarian” (fictive neology). The Singularity itself is a novum, and it generates multiple novel imaginative devices such as intelligent nano-machines with profound material implications (fictive novums). Singulartarians imagine what it will be like to be a Singularitarian, and these speculative futures come with their own quasi-mythic rationalizations that exist in a complicated relationship with “real” scientific epistemologies (future history and imaginary science). With its promises about the exponential growth of computational technologies, super-intelligent machines, postbiological entities, and human-machine hybrids, the Singularity exemplifies the science fictional sublime and grotesque. The Singularity also powerfully embodies the Technologiade, which Csicsery-Ronay defines as the “the epic struggle surrounding the transformation of the cosmos into a technological regime” (217). Ray Kurzweil, in fact, imagines that humans are destined to travel into the cosmos in order to convert “dumb matter” into computational intelligence.

Csicsery-Ronay avoids generating a “programlike set of exclusive rules and required devices,” and in doing so differentiates his project from a scholar such as Darko Suvin. In defining sf as the “literature of cognitive estrangement,” Suvin perhaps creates too restrictive a boundary around the genre. His conception of “cognition” is particularly problematic, as it ultimately seems to demand that SF narratives adhere to scientific epistemology. “Cognition” so defined limits our ability to understand the various ways in which sf texts play with the scientific worldviews from which they draw imaginative resources.

Csicsery-Ronay, especially in his chapter on “Imaginary Science,” offers a much more robust discussion of the complicated relationship that sf has with science: “Much of sf’s appeal is that it rationalizes highly romantic and fantastic stories by means of scientific ideas. But it is just as true that much of SF, maybe even most of it, has little or no ‘cognitive’ value as Suvin uses the term. SF does not necessarily help readers to become more rational, or to transcend ideology by recognizing the true state of things. It is cognitive in another sense. It engages the worldview of scientific materialism and supplements it with quasi-mythic narrative to make models relevant to cultures on the ground” (116). In other words, sf mediates between an “science as a regulated discipline and a chaotic combinatory popular discourse” (115). SF and scientific ideas are “embedded in an enormous, living, fuzzy patchwork of beliefs, cognitive adaptations to momentous material changes brought on the application of technoscience to daily life” (117). Whereas for Suvin sf requires a novum and sf authors create cognitive estrangement by embedding the novum within a scientifically-plausible narrative world, for Csicsery-Ronay the novum is only one of seven distinctive features of the genre.

The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction attempts to provide a plurality of theoretical approaches to sf. The author suggests that sf can contain all or none of the seven cognitive and emotional tendencies. The text is successful in presenting an open-ended array of genre-specific features and exploring their function through close readings of many sf texts. However, Csicsery-Ronay can move through territory very quickly, and sometimes his insights leave the reader desiring more elaboration. For example, at the end of his chapter on “Imaginary Science,” he attempts to argue that popular literary theorists (Derrida, Lacan, Foucault, etc.) can be read as “master pataphysicians and literary hoaxsters,” whose work can be interpreted as “literary hoax-games that infiltrate the reality discourse of technoscience, and provide that discourse’s own literary fictions into the open” (144). I found this segment quite interesting, as one of my main goals for the study is to identity areas where sf operates as a cognitive or emotional mode not exclusively bound to literary texts (including sf narratives presented in film, video games, comics, etc). In other words, does sf represent a cognitive tendency or rhetorical performance that can occur not just in art but in theory, in corporate advertising, political rhetoric, or scientific discourse itself? The author’s claim that the big theorists are in fact “science-fictional ironists” warrants further consideration. Is this a facile intellectual leap, a move to legitimize sf within scholarly discourse? Or might this be a legitimate (but underdeveloped in Csicsery-Ronay’s text) way of exploring the critical power and function of sf?

Metamorphoses of Science Fiction

Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Print.

Although it is not currently in print, Suvin’s Metamorphoses of Science Fiction is a seminal text that exerts a significant influence on current SF scholarship. In the first chapter of his book, “Estrangement and Cognition,” Suvin argues for “an understanding of SF as the literature of cognitive estrangement” (4). I found this to be his most useful idea toward theorizing SF and it is the one I explore in more detail here. Suvin defines “estrangement” in part by referencing Bertoldt Brecht’s “Verfremdungseffekt” (distancing effect). Brecht writes that “a representation which estranges is one which allows us to recognize its subject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (6). “Cognition” refers to the mental coherence with which a text represents its subject. Because fantasy can be perfectly mentally coherent, SF in Suvin’s sense must ultimately employ novums which are informed by science (broadly conceived).

Suvin develops a heuristic model of literary subject matter that allows him to position SF along a spectrum “which extends from recreation of the ideal extreme of exact recreation of the author’s empirical environment to exclusive interest in a strange newness, a novum” (4). Suvin differentiates SF and other estranged literary modes from what he terms “naturalistic” or “realistic” fiction. According to Suvin, “in SF the attitude of estrangement – used by Brecht in a different way, within a still predominantly ‘realistic’ context – has grown into the formal framework of the genre” (7). However, myth, folktale, fantasy, and other “estranged” literary modes differ from SF, according to Suvin, by their lack of “cognition” – “this term implies not only reflecting of but also on reality. It implies a creative approach tending toward a dynamic transformation rather than toward a static mirroring of the author’s environment” (10). He sharply differentiates SF from the fantastic genres when he writes, “As a literary genre, SF is fully as opposed to supernatural or metaphysical estrangement as it is to naturalism or empiricism” (7).

Suvin makes an interesting case for the use of the term science fiction, taking “science” in a general sense, “which [includes] not only natural but also all the cultural or historical sciences and even scholarship” (13). Suvin differentiates modern SF from its precursors such as utopian literature when he writes, “significant modern SF… presupposes more complex and wider cognitions: it discusses primarily the political, psychological, and anthropological use and effect of knowledge, of philosophy of science, and the becoming of failure [sic] as a result of it” (14). As a literary formula, cognitive estrangement reaches its most potent expression in twentieth-century SF. The cognitive element in particular differentiates SF-proper from its antecedents and related genres such as fantasy (which Suvin actually views to be inferior): “SF is, then, a literary genre whose distinguishing characteristics are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment” (8).

Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed provides a good example of cognitive estrangement. The society of anarchists on Anarres live within a radically-different social structure in which individuals do not own property, do not have to work (unless they choose to), do not get married, experience gender equity, and so on. Part of what makes Le Guin’s novel so successful is that it thoroughly imagines (“cognizes,” in Suvin’s sense) how such a society would shape the consciousness of its protagonist, Shevek. As the novel’s subtitle states, Anarres is also “An Amiguous Utopia”; Le Guin’s explores the unique challenges to such a society’s continued viability. She also contrasts Anarres with Urras, a capitalistic society which defamiliarizes (“estranges” us, in Suvin’s sense) and helps us see anew our own property-based culture.

Feminist Fabulation

For my independent study this summer, I'm looking at several books that theorize science fiction. Here's a reading response for the first book on my list that I recently submitted to Dr. Wegner.

Barr, Marleen S. Feminist Fabulation: Space/postmodern Fiction. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992. Print.

I chose to read Barr’s Feminist Fabulation because of my interest and continuing reading in feminist SF. Donna Haraway outlines several feminist SF texts in her “Cyborg Manifesto,” including authors such as Joanna Russ (The Female Man), Alice B. Sheldon (The Girl Who Was Plugged In), Vonda McIntyre (Superluminal and Dreamsnake), Marge Piercy (Woman on the Edge of Time and He, She, and It), Ursula K. Leguin, Margaret Atwood, and Octavia Butler. Haraway also points to several male authors of feminist SF, such as Samuel Delany and John Varley (Titan). Barr is similarly open to the idea of male feminist authors. I view this group of authors as a powerful example of how wide-ranging SF is in its imaginative, political, and ethical aims; the notion that science fiction is a white male-dominated genre might have been true early in the twentieth-century, but it would be difficult to make such an argument today.

Barr, however, is less concerned with the genre-specific features of science fiction than she is with challenging the canon of “postmodern fiction.” She valorizes a group of female authors of postmodern fiction whom she believes have been marginalized by a male literary establishment; women’s SF has been dismissed as “genre fiction.” Barr also problematizes the label “science fiction” as it is sometimes applied to women authors. Often women writers are less concerned with science and imaginative extrapolations of technological advances as they are in applying insights drawn from feminist theory to create speculative worlds that challenge patriarchy. The “novum” of feminist fabulation, so to speak, is not a scientific or technological one (like a time machine or a mutated virus) as often as it is derived from feminisms (a new, non-patriarchal social structure, for instance). As Barr writes, “‘Science,’ in the sense of technology, should be replaced by a term which has social connotations and focuses upon new sex roles, not new hardware” (5).

Barr believes feminist fabulation “is a catalyst for social change . . . [and] feminist literary scholars should surely strive to affect society by introducing these imaginative texts to colleagues, to students, and to the general public” (5). Barr, quoting William Sims Brainbridge, also reminds the reader that “SF has become a major category of popular culture and one of the most important media for the development and dissemination of radical ideologies” (4). Barr defines feminist fabulation as “the postmodern age’s idea of how to retell, from a feminist point of view, the patriarchal stories which construct the world” (272). She further argues that “postmodern canons should contain space for feminist fabulators” (272).

Barr also attempts to resituate contemporary feminist fabulators within the tradition of women’s literature. She charts connections between modernist mothers such as Hurston and Woolf and postmodernist daughters Russ and Tiptree. Early chapters focus on space: flying, domesticity, and social space shared by men and women. Later chapters focus on “female protagonists who transform after… conducting self-experiments based upon rewriting partriarchal narratives” (xxiii). Barr refutes Zimmerman’s observation that “more arguments exist for a postmodern feminist aesthetic than do examples of one” through many in-depth close readings of feminist fabulators. Although Barr seems ultimately concerned with altering the contours of the canon of postmodern fiction to include women, the text provides a useful way to conceptualize feminist SF and its different speculative concerns as they compare with more traditional male “hard SF” and cyberpunk.

Darwin’s Radio and Wild Seed

Darwin’s Radio, Greg Bear

Darwin’s Radio is heavy on genetic science, and I will admit I do not have a firm grasp of the technical terminology Bear and his gene-savvy protagonists throw around in their quest to understand a radical break in human evolution caused by a long-dormant virus. But here’s an effort to explain the novel’s plot:

The human genome contains the “junk code” of old viruses (viruses even older than humans or their immediate evolutionary ancestors) that found a way to infect sperm or egg cells. The human genome, in fact, contains a lot of so-called “junk DNA” that does not really have a clear purpose; when cells are replicating, this information does not result in the creation of actual cells or parts of cells. Rather, the junk DNA just hitches a ride.

Bear asks, “What if this junk DNA, one of these dormant viruses that have found a way into our genes, suddenly reactivated itself?” More daringly, Bear asks, “What if these viruses could change the genetic characteristics of an organism?” In Darwin’s Radio, a big biological computer guides evolution. Sudden environmental stresses cause dormant retroviruses to reactivate within the human genome. These viruses possess the ability to change an organism radically in just one generation. Bear speculates that such a change may have led to the break between Homo Neanderthalis and Homo Sapiens in our evolutionary past. Darwin’s Radio imagines an evolutionary successor to modern humans. The SHIVA virus, as Bear’s fictional researchers term it, reactivates itself within the human genome, and causes women to give birth to Homo Sapiens Novus.

For a more extensive discussion of the novel, see Hayles essay “Wrestling with Transhumanism” in Transhumanism and its Critics (2011). The key point that I want to record here is that Bear imagines humans and their genes as part of a larger embodied system physically connected to the environment. What happens in the environment not only has indirect consequences (lack of food, pollution, disease, etc.) for humans, but also can literally trigger the human to become something different. This is a speculation about an alternative mode of evolution in which changes happen suddenly, rather than gradually over eons. Because the human genome contains dormant codes that can be reactivated by the SHIVA virus, the human can rapidly change to meet new environmental stresses, thus becoming posthuman.

The novel implies that the source of this stress comes from modernity and the increasing pace of life. The Homo Sapiens Novus, who Bear introduces at the end of the novel, develop much more quickly than human infants develop, and possess the ability to communicate through chromatophores on their faces (like a squid or cuttlefish). They also possess heightened intellects and the ability to communicate information much more rapidly using specialized speech organs. This rapid evolutionary change is not something humans control. Rather, it is a monstrous emergence that takes place within a human, technological, environmental, and non-human system.

Wild Seed, Octavia Butler

Doro is a spirit that inhabits the bodies of his victims. He has lived for millennia. Sudden pain or fatigue will cause his consciousness to leap instantly to the next available human host. When Doro possesses a host, the host immediately dies, and Doro assumes control of the body. When Doro leaves a body, then, just dead flesh remains. Doro can occupy a strong, young body perhaps for a couple of years, but eventually he develops a hunger that requires him to kill and possess a fresh body. Doro cannot die. Nor does he have a choice but to kill.

The novel begins when Doro meets Anyanwu. Anyanwu possesses the ability to take on any animal form provided she has tasted that animal’s flesh. She also has the ability to control her body at a cellular level, allowing her to shape-shift, regenerate herself from injury, and create medicines within her own body. Like Doro, she does not die.

Doro has never encountered “wild seed” like Anyanwu. Doro is a collector: he uses his unlimited time to assemble “seed colonies” containing individuals who possess special abilities like telepathy or telekinesis. Over centuries, he directs various bloodlines, coercing people to procreate with threats and manipulation, and even siring hundreds of children himself using various bodies he has appropriated. His aim is to create a race of posthumans who combine the best attributes of the gifted individuals he gathers together. However, not even his best creations can match Anyanwu.

Wild Seed is a fascinating novel that could yield a lot of analysis: there is a commentary on slavery and the African Diaspora, race, gender, sexuality… it is hard to know what to take away from the text. Doro is truly an unusual character in the SF universe. Although there is no high-technology in the novel, no cybernetics, Doro is truly a disembodied subject: he exists only as a mental pattern to which embodiment is secondary and inferior. However, he expresses no resentment toward the “meat world,” like Case in Neuromancer or Agent Smith in The Matrix. Nonetheless, he does come very close to losing his “humanity” (if that’s the right word) when he begins to regard people solely as bodies useful to his breeding projects. With few exceptions, Doro has no respect for the sacredness of individual people or bodies, especially if they do not exhibit the qualities he desires or lend themselves to his manipulation.

Both Wild Seed and Darwin’s Radio are SF texts that offer powerful challenges to commonly-held conceptions of what bodies are and what bodies can do. There is an entire subtext within Darwin’s Radio dealing with the social issues engendered by pregnancy caused by a virus rather than male sexual partners: men become confused and angry and violence against women escalates. The National Institute of Health is also placed in the untenable position of advocating abortions to snuff out the emergence of a new variation of human, which puts them at extreme odds with religious fundamentalists in the US.

If you want to talk about embodiment, Wild Seed is a great potential primary text. The novel imagines controlling and possessing bodies, changing into animal forms, changing genders, changing race, and intimacy between humans and animals; the body and all of its possibilities and permutations are on display and under consideration in Wild Seed. 

Hackers and "Clackers"

In the last year, I have read more SF than at any other time in my life. I often think about what a great privilege it is to be a graduate student and to have the time and freedom (and financial support, although not as much as I would like) to pursue such extensive study. My goal has been to read widely and to take advantage of the summer to familiarize myself with key works and key authors that I have neglected or overlooked. There are many, of course, and achieving a respectable mental database of the genre will probably take me many years.

Sometimes after I finish a novel, I need a break of about a day or so to process what I read. I take notes, highlight, and turn over the corners of pages in my books in order to keep track of things that seem striking or worth further contemplation at some later date. I don’t generally take notes (or “reading notes”) separately from marking up the book itself; I’ve never really been the type of person to take notes on anything except to keep track of things I need to do. If I were to identify a novel (or novels) for a specific project, I would read it and probably carefully indicate specific scenes, passages, sentences, images, themes, and so on relevant to an argument I wish to make. In other words, I’d take notes. However, the kind of reading I’m doing right now is more like a general survey of a large piece of terrain; I’m less concerned with the details as I am the big picture.

Without the requirements of a syllabus to structure my reading, I tend to spend a lot of time looking at the many unread SF novels on my shelf, trying to decide which one looks most interesting. I also have a short list of “canonical” works that I know I should read sooner rather than later, like The Dispossessed and The Man in the High Castle, both of which I’m happy to report I completed recently. Another source of titles for my reading list comes from SF criticism; I’ve made it a goal to read many of the works that critics such as Katherine Hayles or Donna Haraway write about in their work. My summer independent study focuses on SF criticism, so I’ve thumbed through several of the works I intend to read to identify commonly discussed titles from other critics, as well. This includes Joe Haldeman’s The Forever War, which Phil Wegner, who is supervising my independent study, writes about in his book Between Two Deaths.

Sometimes I just veer out into a completely different direction and read something that feels like fun. I’ve had a copy of The Difference Engine, a “steampunk” SF novel by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, on my shelf for a while. Last week I finally got around to reading it. The Difference Engine is an alternative history novel in which Charles Babbage succeeds in developing his “difference engine,” a mechanical (as opposed to electrical) computing device. This is the ur-Computer you sometimes hear about: a massive, heavy, lumbering machine that occupies a city block and is barely more powerful than a pocket calculator. In Gibson and Sterline’s alternate history, however, the Victorians use steam-powered difference engines to transform their society. Nineteenth-century England begins to resemble our own world in many ways: the difference engines accelerate the industrial revolution and lead to a consumer society (advertising, mass produced products) decades ahead of schedule. Governments use the difference engines to assign individuals a “number” and record of their biometric information (the physical characteristics of criminals are stored in a database that can be searched using the engines).

A new form of “(pre)-digital” visual projection also emerges, called the “kinotrope.” The engines operate using punch cards – they are the “software” to the engine’s “hardware.” The information stored on the punch cards is fed through the engine (a series of brass gears and rollers and such performing mechanical operations). Transparent versions of these punch cards are used to create visual animations. Hackers become "clackers" (the engines making a clacking noise). Naturally, the punch cards produce “digital” images, in the sense that they’re pixilated, or composed of discrete “blocks” of information. Obviously, they aren’t digital in the sense of being electronic, but the kinotrope technology confuses the tidy story we like to tell about the transition between “analog” and “digital” technologies. The kinotrope is a sort of weird hybrid: it relies on an analog “film” technology (the transparent punch cards), but the image that emerges is quasi-digital. The kinotrope technology comes on the scene before analog film; it’s a provocative re-imagining of how media technology might have developed differently.

The Victorian-era world the authors provide is richly detailed, and there are many cool steampunk images: steam-powered proto-cars, dandy clothing with “digital” designs printed on engine machines. The novel also explores class struggle in relation to the emergence of the engines and the social transformation engendered by new technologies of production and consumption: the Luddites vs. the Radical Industrialists (Lord Byron leads the RIs and becomes Prime Minister, interestingly). However, I was less impressed by the plot as a whole: a mystery involving a series of engine cards that contain an early version of Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorem (which limits the complexity and operation of the Engines, somehow).

There’s a Gibson-esque “data made flesh” motif throughout the novel: can Victorian society be reduced to a series of informational patterns calculable by the engines? At the end of the novel, it’s suggested that the early-advent of computing results in the emergence of a quasi-singularity that has recorded (imprinted, stored) the characters, settings, and events of the novel (and everything else) within a massive engine that covers Earth’s surface. There are certainly parts of the novel that are worth thinking more about, or thinking with, because the speculative elements are fascinating – I simply wish there were more of them.