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.