Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  As I have noted, however, cyberpunk is not the only mode in which science fiction has demonstrated an anti-humanist sensibility. Although radically different from cyberpunk—which is written for the most part by a small number of white middle-class men, many of whom, inexplicably, live in Texas—feminist science fiction has also produced an influential body of anti-humanist texts. These would include, for example, Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975), Jody Scott’s I, Vampire (1984), and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), novels which also participate in the postmodernist revision of conventional science fiction. Given the exigencies of their own particular political agendas, however, these texts demonstrate a very different approach to the construction/deconstruction of the subject than is evident in the technologically-influenced post-humanism of most cyberpunk fiction.

  Jane Flax, for example, suggests that “feminists, like other postmodernists, have begun to suspect that all such transcendental claims [those which valorize universal notions of reason, knowledge, and the self] reflect and reify the experience of a few persons—mostly white, Western males. These transhistoric claims seem plausible to us in part because they reflect important aspects of the experience of those who dominate our social world” (626). Flax’s comments are well taken, although her conflation of all feminisms with postmodernism tends to oversimplify the very complex and problematical interactions of the two that Bonnie Zimmerman has noted. Moreover, in a forthcoming essay for Extrapolation, I have argued that most feminist science fiction rather supports than undermines the tenets of liberal humanism, although “changing the subject” of that humanism, to borrow the title of a recent study by Nancy K. Miller.

  We can also include writers like Philip K. Dick, Samuel R. Delany and John Varley within the project of anti-humanist science fiction, although these writers are separated from cyberpunk not only by chronology but also by cyberpunk’s increased emphasis on technology as a constitutive factor in the development of postmodern subjectivity. Darko Suvin also notes some of the differences in political extrapolation between cyberpunk and its precursors: “in between Dick’s nation-state armies or polices and Delany’s Foucauldian micro-politics of bohemian groups, Gibson [for example] has—to my mind more realistically—opted for global economic power-wielders as the arbiters of peoples [sic] lifestyles and lives” (43).

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  In “Prometheus as Performer: Toward a Posthumanist Culture?” Ihab Hassan writes: “We need first to understand that the human form—including human desire and all its external representations—may be changing radically, and thus must be re-visioned. We need to understand that five hundred years of humanism may be coming to an end, as humanism transforms itself into something that we must helplessly call posthumanism” (205).

  Sterling’s Schismatrix (1986) is one version of “posthumanity” presented as picaresque epic. Sterling’s far-future universe—a rare construction in the cyberpunk “canon”—is one in which countless societies are evolving in countless different directions; the Schismatrix is a loose confederation of worlds where the only certainty is the inevitability of change. Sterling writes that “the new multiple humanities hurtled blindly toward their unknown destinations, and the vertigo of acceleration struck deep. Old preconceptions were in tatters, old loyalties were obsolete. Whole societies were paralyzed by the mind-blasting vistas of absolute possibility” (238). Sterling’s protagonist, a picaresque hero for the postmodern age, “mourned mankind, and the blindness of men, who thought that the Kosmos had rules and limits that would shelter them from their own freedom. There were no shelters. There were no final purposes. Futility, and freedom, were Absolute” (273).

  Schismatrix is a future history different from many science-fiction futures in that what it extrapolates from the present is the all-too-often ignored/denied/repressed idea that human beings will be different in the future and will continue to develop within difference. In this way, Schismatrix demonstrates a familiarly post-structuralist sensibility, in its recognition both of the potential anxiety and the potential play inherent in a universe where “futility, and freedom, [are] Absolute.”

  Sterling’s interest in and attraction to the play of human possibility appears as early as his first novel, Involution Ocean (1977). In this story (which reads in some ways like a kind of drug-culture post-Moby-Dick), the protagonist falls into a wonderful vision of an alien civilization, in a passage which, at least temporarily, emphasizes freedom over futility: “There was an incredible throng, members of a race that took a pure hedonistic joy in the possibilities of surgical alteration. They switched bodies, sexes, ages, and races as easily as breathing, and their happy disdain for uniformity was dazzling. . . . It seemed so natural, rainbow people in the rainbow streets; humans seemed drab and antlike in comparison” (154).

  This is a far cry from the humanist anxieties which have pervaded science fiction since the nineteenth century. Consider, for example, the anxiety around which H.G. Wells created The Time Machine (1895): it is “de-humanization,” humanity’s loss of its position at the center of creation, which produces the tragedy of the terminal beach, and it is, to a great extent, the absence of the human which results in the “abominable desolation” (91) described by Wells’s Time Traveller. Or consider what we might term the “trans-humanism” of Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), in which a kind of transcendental mysticism precludes the necessity of envisioning a future based on changing technologies, social conditions and social relations. Greg Bear’s more recent Blood Music (1985) might be read, from this perspective, as a contemporary version of the same transcendental approach to human transformation, one based on an apocalyptic logic which implies the impossibility of any change in the human condition within history. Blood Music is especially interesting in this context, because its action is framed by a rhetoric of science which would seem to repudiate any recourse to metaphysics. Darko Suvin has noted, however, that it functions as “a naïve fairytale relying on popular wishdreams that our loved ones not be dead and that our past mistakes may all be rectified, all of this infused with rather dubious philosophical and political stances” (41).

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  “Certain central themes spring up repeatedly in cyberpunk,” Sterling points out in his preface to the influential short-fiction collection, Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology. “The theme of body invasion: prosthetic limbs, implanted circuitry, cosmetic surgery, genetic alteration. The even more powerful theme of mind invasion: brain-computer interfaces, artificial intelligence, neurochemistry—techniques radically redefining the nature of humanity, the nature of the self” (xiii).

  The potential in cyberpunk for undermining concepts like “subjectivity” and “identity” derives in part from its production within what has been termed “the technological imagination”; that is, cyberpunk is hard science fiction which recognizes the paradigm-shattering role of technology in post-industrial society. We have to keep in mind here, of course, that the Movement has become (in)famous for the adversarial rhetoric of its ongoing and prolific self-commentary which, in turn, functions as an integral part of its overall production as a “movement.” We should be careful, for this reason, not to confuse claims with results. The anti-humanist discourse of cyberpunk’s frequent manifestoes, however, strongly supports de Lauretis’s contention that “technology is our historical context, political and personal” (167). As I have suggested, this context functions in cyberpunk as one of the most powerful of the multiplicities of structures which combine to produce the postmodern subject.

  Thus, for example, the characters in Michael Swanwick’s Vacuum Flowers (1987) are subjected to constant alterations in personality as the result of programming for different skills or social roles—metaphysical systems grounded on faith in an “inner self” begin to waver. Human bodies in Gibson’s stories, and even more so in Sterling’s, are subjected to shaping and re-shaping, the human form destined perhaps to become simply one available choice among many; notions of
a human nature determined by a “physical essence” of the human begin to lose credibility (for this reason, many behavioral patterns defined by sexual difference become irrelevant in these futures). Thus Rudy Rucker can offer the following as a chapter title in Wetware: “Four: in Which Manchile, the First Robot-Built Human, Is Planted in the Womb of Della Taze by Ken Doll, Part of Whose Right Brain Is a Robot Rat.”

  We must also recognize, however, that “the subject of the subject” at the present time has given rise to as much anxiety as celebration (anxiety from which the postmodernist theorist is by no means exempt). The break-up of the humanist “self” in a media-saturated post-industrial present has produced darker readings which cyberpunk also recognizes. Fredric Jameson, whose stance vis-à-vis the postmodern is at once appreciative and skeptical, has suggested that fragmentation of subjectivity may be the postmodern equivalent of the modernist predicament of individual alienation (“Cultural Logic” 63). Pat Cadigan’s “Pretty Boy Crossover” (1985), for example, raises questions about the effects of simulated reality upon our human sense of self as complete and inviolable. In her fictional world, physical reality is “less efficient” than computerized simulation, and video stars are literally video programs, having been “distilled. . .to pure information” (89, 88) and downloaded into computer matrices. Cadigan’s eponymous Pretty Boy is tempted by the offer of literally eternal life within the matrix and, although he finally chooses “real” life, that reality seems to fade against the guaranteed “presence” of its simulation. Bobby, who has opted for existence as simulation, explains the “economy of the gaze” which guarantees the authenticity of the self in this world: “If you love me, you watch me. If you don’t look, you don’t care and if you don’t care I don’t matter. If I don’t matter, I don’t exist. Right?” (91).

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  “Pretty Boy Crossover” offers this succinct observation about the seductive power of simulated reality: “First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you be video” (82).

  In K.W. Jeter’s The Glass Hammer, being is defined by its own simulation. The Glass Hammer is one of the most self-conscious deconstructions of unified subjectivity produced in recent science fiction, and one which dramatizes (in the neurotic tonalities familiar to readers of J.G. Ballard) the anxiety and schizophrenia of the (technologically-produced) postmodern situation. In The Glass Hammer the break-up of the “self” is narrated in a text as fragmented as its subject (subject both as protagonist and as story). Jeter’s novel is a chilling demonstration of the power of simulated re-presentation to construct “the real” (so that it functions like a cyberpunk simulacrum of the theories of Jean Baudrillard). It “narrates” episodes in the life of Ross Schuyler, who watches the creation of this life as a video event in five segments. There is no way to test the accuracy of the creation, since the self produced by memory is as unreliable a re-presentation as is a media “bio.” As Schuyler realizes: “Just because I was there—that doesn’t mean anything” (59).

  The opening sequence of The Glass Hammer dramatizes the schizophrenia within the subjectivity of the protagonist:

  Video within video. He watched the monitor screen, seeing himself there, watching. In the same space. . .that he sat in now. . . .

  He watched the screen, waiting for the images to form. Everything would be in the tapes, if he watched long enough.(7)

  Like Schuyler himself, the reader waits for the images to form as s/he reads the text. Episodes range over time, some in the past(s), some in the present, some real, some simulated, many scripted rather than “novelized,” until the act of reading/watching achieves a kind of temporary coherence. It is this same kind of temporary coherence which formulates itself in Schuyler’s consciousness, always threatening to dissolve again from “something recognizably narrative” into “the jumbled, half-forgotten clutter of his life” (87).

  What takes place in The Glass Hammer may also be read as a deconstruction of the opposition between depth and surface, a dichotomy which is frequently framed as the familiar conflict between reality and appearance. Jeter reverses this opposition, dramatizing the haphazard construction of his character’s “inner self” as a response to people and events, both real and simulated, over time. The displacement of an “originary” self from the text places the emphasis on the marginal, the contingent, the re-presentations (in this case electronically produced) which actually create the sense of “self.” Jeter’s technique in The Glass Hammer is particularly effective: the reader watches the character, and watches the character watching himself watching, as his past unfolds, not as a series of memories whose logical continuity guarantees the stability of the ego, but as an entertainment series, the logical continuity of which is the artificial re-arrangement of randomness to simulate coherence.

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  Near the outset of Case’s adventures in Neuromancer, Gibson’s computer cowboy visits the warehouse office of Julius Deane, who “was one hundred and thirty-five years old, his metabolism assiduously warped by a weekly fortune in serums and hormones.” In Deane’s office, “Neo-Aztec bookcases gathered dust against one wall of the room where Case waited. A pair of bulbous Disney-styled table lamps perched awkwardly on a low Kandinsky-look coffee table in scarlet-lacquered steel. A Dali clock hung on the wall between the bookcases, its distorted face sagging to the bare concrete floor” (12).

  In this context, it is significant that the “average” cyberpunk landscape tends to be choked with the debris of both language and objects; as a sign-system, it is overdetermined by a proliferation of surface detail which emphasizes the “outside” over the “inside.” Such attention to detail—recall Gibson’s nearly compulsive use of brand names, for example, or the claustrophobic clutter of his streets—replaces the more conventional (realist) narrative exercise we might call “getting to the bottom of things”; indeed, the shift in emphasis is from a symbolic to a surface reality.

  In a discussion of Neuromancer, Gregory Benford observes that “Gibson, like Ballard, concentrates on surfaces as a way of getting at the aesthetic of an age.” This observation is a telling one, even as it misses the point. Benford concludes that Gibson’s attention to surface detail “goes a long way toward telling us why his work has proved popular in England, where the tide for several decades now has been to relish fiction about surfaces and manners, rather than the more traditional concerns of hard SF: ideas, long perspectives, and content” (19).

  This reliance on tradition is perhaps what prevents Benford, whose own “hard science fiction” novels and stories are very much a part of science fiction’s humanist tradition, from appreciating the approach of writers like Gibson and Jeter. The point may be that, in works like Neuromancer and The Glass Hammer, surface is content, an equation which encapsulates their critique—or at least their awareness—of our contemporary “era of hyperreality” (Baudrillard, “Ecstasy” 128). In this context, the much-quoted opening sentence of Neuromancer, with its image of the blank surface of a dead television screen, evokes the anxiety of this new era. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, for example, sees in cyberpunk the recognition that “with the computer, the problem of identity is moot, and the idea of reflection is transformed in to [sic] the algorithm of replication. SF’s computer wipes out the Philosophical God and ushers in the demiurge of thought-as-technique” (273).

  Like much anti-humanist science fiction, cyberpunk also displays a certain coolness, a kind of ironically detached approach to its subject matter which precludes nostalgia or sentimentality. This detachment usually discourages any recourse to the logic of the apocalypse, which, whether positive (like Clarke’s) or negative (like Wells’s), is no longer a favored narrative move. Jameson and Sterling (representatives of “high theory” and “low culture” respectively?) both identify a waning interest in the scenarios of literal apocalypse: Jameson perceives in the postmodern situation what he calls “an inverted millenarianism, in which premonitions of the future. . .have been replaced by the sense
s of the end of this or that” (“Cultural Logic” 53); in his introduction to Gibson’s short-story collection, Burning Chrome, Sterling comments that one “distinguishing mark of the emergent new school of Eighties SF [is] its boredom with the Apocalypse” (xi).

  This is supported by Douglas Robinson, in his American Apocalypses, when he concludes that “antiapocalypse—not apocalypse, as many critics have claimed—is the dominant topos of American postmodernism” (xvi). In a discussion of Derrida’s discourse on apocalypse, Robinson argues that “the apocalyptic imagination fascinates Derrida precisely as the ‘purest’ form, the most mythical expression or the most extreme statement of the metaphysics of presence” (251n1).

  One reason for this tendency to abandon what has been a traditional science fiction topos may be the conviction, conscious or not, that a kind of philosophical apocalypse has already occurred, precipitating us into the dis-ease of postmodernism. Another reason may be the increased commitment of anti-humanist science fiction to the exploration of changes that will occur—to the self, to society and to social relations—in time; that is, they are more engaged with historical processes than attracted by the jump-cuts of apocalyptic scenarios which evade such investment in historical change. Cyberpunk, in particular, has demonstrated a keen interest in the near future, an aspect of its approach to history which discourages resolution-through-apocalypse.

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  In a discussion of “the cybernetic (city) state,” Scott Bukatman has argued that as a result of the tendency in recent science fiction to posit “a reconception of the human and the ability to interface with the new terminal experience. . .terminal space becomes a legitimate part of human (or post-human) experience” (60). In many cases, however, science-fiction futures are all too often simply representations of contemporary cultural mythologies disguised under heavy layers of futuristic make-up.