Titan

I read John Varley’s Titan (1979) because Donna Haraway mentions it in her “Cyborg Manifesto.” In the last pages of the essay, she passes over several SF authors and novels whom she believes figure her cyborg myth. She writes of Varley’s book, in particular:

“John Varley constructs a supreme cyborg in his arch-feminist exploration of Gaea, a mad goddess-planet-trickster old woman-technological device on whose surface an extraordinary array of post-cyborg symbioses are spawned” (178-179).

The plot focuses on the crew of the Ringmaster, a ship sent to explore Saturn and its moons. The Ringmaster encounters “Titan,” a massive ring-like alien structure orbiting the planet. Titan destroys the ship and captures the crew. The Ringmaster’s captain, Cirocco Jones, loses consciousness as her ship comes apart. After an undetermined length of time, the crew emerges into the inner surface of Titan, bursting through soil, having passed through the innards of a massive alien organism. They awake naked (except for the metallic parts of their space suits, which couldn’t be digested), on the surface of Titan (the surface being the inside “rim” of the ring, which is massive enough to support its own artificial human-friendly ecology). The crew is separated at first, but eventually they link up and begin to piece together their situation with an eye toward exploring Titan – and maybe going back home.

Here are some points to take away…

The novel is very much feminist SF. This isn't surprising, given that Haraway likes it. Although not authored by a woman, the novel features strong female protagonists who do things like:

• Demand that a male crew member/doctor abort their alien fetuses
• Kiss alien centaurs
• Captain starships
• Choose to remain living on an alien space station in order to become a Wizard of Gaea rather than return to Earth
• Don’t let men tell them what to do, even men who say they love them
• Have straight and gay sex with other crew members

The novel suggests alternatives to heteronormative reproductive sex:

• A group of alien centaurs that live on Titan have three sex organs (not all of which have a reproductive function) and indeterminate genders
• Another group of alien uses a surrogate organism to reproduce
• Captain Cirocco Jones, a woman, takes up life as a starship captain for adventure and in order to avoid living as a housewife
• Before becoming a captain, Cirocco Jones had her eggs frozen so she can choose to have children when she wants to

Gaea, as Haraway suggests, is a trickster figure who reveals in the conclusion that she has watched movies transmitted from Earth. Her film viewing is the basis for some of the creatures she has created on Titan (centaurs, angels). Gaea herself is almost like the Wizard of Oz; indeed, when the crew discovers Gaea, she puts on a performance not unlike that of the Wizard. The novel's denouement is somewhat anti-climactic in the sense that Gaea basically says, "Hey, I'm sorry for fucking with you, but I'm old and losing control of myself, and a renegade element was responsible for destroying the Ringmaster and capturing you - not me." There's no sublime space-opera moment where we learn Gaea is from a parallel universe or that this was all just a simulation. Titan is very much a novel about the SF-grotesque; representing bodies doing things with which we aren't usually comfortable. I feel that Gaea is less interesting as a character and functions as more of a plot device that allows Varley's female protagonists to have transformative adventures, to become something different.

Titan (the ring-world) appears to be a space where cultural systems and natural systems interact without pre-determined ends; a utopian space of cyborg possibility. Titan is the ultimate "natureculture," in Haraway's sense. It is a space of play and co-creation. A space where "companion species" interact in co-ontological co-creation. The partners do not precede the dance, to borrow from Haraway.

I think if I were to write about Titan, it would probably be through Haraway’s notion of “companion species,” in fact. Titan deconstructs ontological categories of human, animal, alien, machine, man, and woman and the pre-determined identities that such categories make available. This is perhaps best illustrated by Cirocco Jones’s decision to abandon her life as a starship captain (a life that itself was a reaction against domesticity and traditional gender roles) and become Gaea’s Wizard, her helper in maintaining order among Gaea’s far-flung parts (Gaea is Titan itself; she is a ring hundreds of kilometers in diameter containing an ecology populated first by alien critters and now humans).  

The Forever War

Yesterday, I finished reading Joe Haldeman’s remarkable book, The Forever War (1974). The novel concerns William Mandella, a space marine sent with others to the farthest reaches of the galaxy to fight against an inscrutable alien race with whom human’s can’t communicate. (Think of the “buggers” from Ender’s game.)

The Forever War presents several provocative speculative inventions. First, the soldiers that are drafted to fight in the war are the intellectual elite; this is not a war fought by the underprivileged. The army also allows both men and women. Second, the soldiers experience extreme “time dilation,” a result of traveling through space at close to light speed. From Earth’s reference frame, the war lasts nearly 1000 years. For the soldiers, however, it spans less than a decade. Part of the novel then concerns how Mandella and others become alienated from events on Earth, how they cope with radically changing cultural, economic, and political situations. In a sense, this allegorizes the plight of any soldier returning home from battle to a home now unfamiliar. Indeed, Hadleman’s work is in part a reaction to his own experience as a Vietnam veteran.

While the soldiers are away fighting with the Taurans (who live in the constellation Taurus) over bleak, frozen planetoids orbiting “collapsars” pivotal to interstellar travel, Earth experiences massive population growth and becomes a quasi-socialist bureaucracy. Jobs are scarce and supplied by the government. Most of the population lives on a form of social welfare. Food rations are distributed by the United Nations; everyone is fed, but not most are not fed enough. Cities are violent and people openly carry guns to protect themselves or hire individual body guards. Even rural areas, in which agricultural communes have formed, are threatened by guerilla raids. Mandella’s mother is ill, but because she is elderly, she has been given a “zero priority rating” to receive medical healthcare. After she dies, Mandella reenlists in the military, resigned to the fact that Earth is no longer the place he once knew.

During another campaign against the Taurans, Mandella loses his leg and has an advanced prosthesis integrated into this body (the medical technician actually doesn’t use the word “prosthesis,” because the leg that is attached to Mandella is covered with his own flesh and nerves). When he recovers and is reassigned, he finds that homosexuality has in fact become the norm (in order to curb population growth on Earth), and that heterosexuality is a deviant behavior. As the new commander of his strike unit, his soldiers call him the “Old Queer.” The “Eugenics Council” on Earth has also attempted to eliminate racial difference from the population, and humans are trending toward one racially-ambiguous (and non-white) set of features.

In many respects, The Forever War is a staunchly humanistic novel. Most of the novel’s speculative inventions examine how war and the political and economic apparatus that sustains war threaten the individual. The Eugenics Council and healthcare priority ratings are examples of how the novel critiques technocratic government. Combat likewise dehumanizes the individual: Mandella can calculate, using a logistics computer, his and his fellow soldiers chance of survival during any particular mission; he is expendable. During combat, he is given drugs that eliminate fear, anxiety, or remorse for the enemy. The time dilation effect alienates him from Earth, and even threatens to alienate him forever from his lover. The complex of machines and technologies that sustain the war position the human as a relatively trivial actor within a larger cybernetic system. Indeed, automated lasers do most of the work during the fighting, space combat is painfully drawn out (because it occurs over such massive distances) and the soldiers spend most of their time in a gravitational stasis to allow them to survive the extreme g-force maneuvers their spacecraft must make in order to evade enemy fire. While they are in stasis, the ship’s logistic computer does the fighting for them. In order to fight on the surface of planets, the soldiers wear powered-armor suits that amplify their strength and provide life support.

At the novel’s end, Earth has become one singular consciousness, named “Man.” Individual humans are only appendages, although they number in the billions, of this macro-consciousness. Mandella and the survivors of his unit are the last to return home. They learn from “Man” that the war was caused by a lack of communication with the Taurans, and that politicians deceitfully pursued the conflict for economic reasons. The novel does end on a bright note, however: “Man” gives Mandella a note from his lover telling him she has kept herself in a “time machine” (by traveling at near the speed of light) until he returned to Earth.

If the novel is posthumanist, it could be through its critique of essential gender: although Hadleman (or at least his narrator) lament the dehumanizing effects of the war machine(s), the novel does suggest that gender and sexuality are constructed categories that change fluidly over time. The female soldiers in the “homosex” (who are birthed through technological means) describe penile penetration (of the vagina) as “disgusting” and “unnatural.” Hadleman is skirting some tricky territory here, but I feel he ultimately refuses equating non-reproductive sex or birth outside the womb as degenerate or sub-human activities.

As a humanist, if I can label him as such, Haldeman seems reluctant to let go of the idea of “freedom” or “choice.” Earth’s bureaucratic/technocratic government and the cybernetic war machine threaten human autonomy and the sacrosanct individual, and thus cannot be recuperated.