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).