Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  The recognition of this fact provides part of the “meaning” of one of the stories in Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection. “The Gernsback Continuum” humorously ironizes an early twentieth-century futurism which could conceive of no real change in the human condition, a futurism which envisioned changes in “stuff” rather than changes in social relations (historical distance increases the ability to critique such futures, of course). In Gibson’s story, the benighted protagonist is subjected to visitations by the “semiotic ghosts” of a future which never took place, the future, to borrow a phrase from Jameson, “of one moment of what is now our own past” (“Progress” 244). At the height of these “hallucinations,” he “sees” two figures poised outside a vast city reminiscent of the sets for films like Metropolis and Things to Come:

  [the man] had his arm around [the woman’s] waist and was gesturing toward the city. They were both in white. . . .He was saying something wise and strong, and she was nodding. . . .

  . . .[T]hey were the Heirs to the Dream. They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American. . . .They were smug, happy, and utterly content with themselves and their world. And in the Dream, it was their world. . . .

  It had all the sinister fruitiness of Hitler Youth propaganda.(32-33)

  Gibson’s protagonist discovers that “only really bad media can exorcise [his] semiotic ghosts” (33) and he recovers with the help of pop culture productions like Nazi Love Motel. “The Gernsback Continuum” concludes with the protagonist’s realization that his dystopian present could be worse, “it could be perfect” (35).

  Gibson’s story is not simply an ironization of naive utopianism; it also warns against the limitations, both humorous and dangerous, inherent in any vision of the future which bases itself upon narrowly defined ideological systems which take it upon themselves to speak “universally,” or which conceive of themselves as “natural” or “absolute.” David Brin’s idealistic The Postman (1985), for example, is a post-apocalyptic fiction which closes on a metaphorical note “of innocence, unflaggingly optimistic” (321), nostalgically containing itself within the framework of a conventional humanism. Not surprisingly, its penultimate chapter concludes with a re-affirmation of the “natural” roles of men and women:

  And always remember, the moral concluded: Even the best men—the heroes—will sometimes neglect to do their jobs.

  Women, you must remind them, from time to time. . . . (312)

  Compare this to Gibson’s description of the Magnetic Dog Sisters, peripheral characters in his story, “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981), also collected in Burning Chrome: “They were two meters tall and thin as greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They’d been lovers for years and were bad news in a tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male” (2).

  Another story in the same collection, “Fragments of a Hologram Rose,” uses metaphors of the new technology to express the indeterminate and fragmented nature of the self: “A hologram has this quality: Recovered and illuminated, each fragment will reveal the whole image of the rose. Falling toward delta, he sees himself the rose, each of his scattered fragments revealing a whole he’ll never know. . . . But each fragment reveals the rose from a different angle. . .” (42).

  Gibson’s rhetoric of technology finally circumscribes all of reality. In his second novel, Count Zero (1986), there is an oblique but pointed rebuttal of humanist essentialization, which implicitly recognizes the artificiality of the Real. Having described cyberspace, the weirdly real “space” that human minds occupy during computer interfacing, as “mankind’s unthinkably complex consensual hallucination” (44), he goes on to write the following:

  “Okay,” Bobby said, getting the hang of it, “then what’s the matrix?. . .[W]hat’s cyberspace?”

  “The world,” Lucas said. (131)

  It is only by recognizing the consensual nature of socio-cultural reality, which includes within itself our definitions of human nature, that we can begin to perceive the possibility of change. In this sense, as Csicsery-Ronay suggests (although from a very different perspective), cyberpunk is “a paradoxical form of realism” (266).

  Csicsery-Ronay also contends that cyberpunk is “a legitimate international artistic style, with profound philosophical and aesthetic premises,” a style captured by films such as Blade Runner and by philosophers such as Jean Baudrillard; “it even has, in Michael Jackson and Ronald Reagan, its hyperreal icons of the human simulacrum infiltrating reality” (269).

  * * *

  Lucius Shepard concludes his “requiem for cyberpunk” by quoting two lines from Cavafy’s “Waiting for the Barbarians”: “What will we do now that the barbarians are gone? / Those people were a kind of solution” (118).

  Cyberpunk seemed to erupt in the mid-80s, self-sufficient and full-grown, like Minerva from the forehead of Zeus. From some perspectives, it could be argued that this self-proclaimed Movement was nothing more than the discursive construction of the collective imaginations of science-fiction writers and critics eager for something/anything new in what had become a very conservative and quite predictable field. Now that the rhetorical dust has started to settle, however, we can begin to see cyberpunk as itself the product of a multiplicity of influences from both within and outside of genre science fiction. Its writers readily acknowledge the powerful influence of 1960s and ’70s New Wave writers like Samuel R. Delany, John Brunner, Norman Spinrad, J.G. Ballard and Michael Moorcock, as well as the influence of postmodernists like William Burroughs and Thomas Pynchon. The manic fragmentations of Burroughs’s Naked Lunch and the maximalist apocalypticism of Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow would seem to have been especially important for the development of the cyberpunk “sensibility.” Richard Kadrey has even pronounced Gravity’s Rainbow to be cyberpunk avant la lettre, “the best cyberpunk novel ever written by a guy who didn’t even know he was writing it” (“Cyberpunk” 83). Equally, Delany has made a strong case for feminist science fiction as cyberpunk’s “absent mother,” noting that “the feminist explosion—which obviously infiltrates the cyberpunk writers so much—is the one they seem to be the least comfortable with, even though it’s one that, much more than the New Wave, has influenced them most strongly, both in progressive and in reactionary ways. . .” (9).

  Due in part to the prolific commentaries and manifestoes in which writers like Sterling outlined/analyzed/defended their project(s)—usually at the expense of more traditional science fiction—cyberpunk helped to generate a great deal of very useful controversy about the role of science fiction in the 1980s, a decade in which the resurgence of fantastic literature left much genre science fiction looking rather sheepishly out of date. At best, however, the critique of humanism in these works remains incomplete, due at least in part to the pressures of mass market publishing as well as to the limitations of genre conventions which, more or less faithfully followed, seem (inevitably?) to lure writers back into the power fantasies which are so common to science fiction. A novel like Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, for instance, produced as it was outside the genre market, goes further in its deconstruction of individual subjectivity than do any of the works I have been discussing, except perhaps The Glass Hammer.

  Gibson’s latest novel, Mona Lisa Overdrive, although set in the same universe as Neuromancer and Count Zero, foregrounds character in a way which necessarily mutes the intensity and multiplicity of surface detail which is so marked a characteristic of his earlier work. Sterling’s recent and unexpected Islands in the Net (1988) is a kind of international thriller which might be read as the depiction of life after the postmodern condition has been “cured.” Set in a future after the “Abolition” (of nuclear warfare), its central character, Laura Webster, dedicates herself to the control of a political crisis situation which threatens to return the world to a global state of fragmentation and disruptive violence which only too
clearly recalls our own present bad old days. Sterling’s “Net” is the vast information system which underlies and makes possible the unity of this future world and his emphasis is clearly on the necessity for such global unity. Although, in the final analysis, no one is completely innocent—Sterling is too complex a writer to structure his forces on opposite sides of a simple ethical divide—the movement in Islands in the Net is away from the margins toward the center, and the Net, the “global nervous system” (15), remains intact.

  As its own creators seem to have realized, cyberpunk—like the punk ethic with which it was identified—was a response to postmodern reality which could go only so far before self-destructing under the weight of its own deconstructive activities (not to mention its appropriation by more conventional and more commercial writers). That final implosion is perhaps what Jeter accomplished in The Glass Hammer, leaving us with the image of a mesmerized Schuyler futilely searching for a self in the videoscreens of the dystopian future. It is clearly this aspect of cyberpunk which leads Csicsery-Ronay to conclude that “by the time we get to cyberpunk, reality has become a case of nerves.… The distance required for reflection is squeezed out as the world implodes: when hallucinations and realia collapse into each other, there is no place from which to reflect” (274). For him, “cyberpunk is. . .the apotheosis of bad faith, apotheosis of the postmodern” (277). This, of course, forecloses any possibility of political engagement within the framework of the postmodern.

  Here cyberpunk is theorized as a symptom of the malaise of postmodernism, but, like Baudrillard’s apocalyptic discourse on the “condition” itself, Csicsery-Ronay’s analysis tends to underplay the positive potential of re-presentation and re-visioning achieved in works like Neuromancer and Schismatrix. Bukatman, for example, has suggested that the function of cyberpunk “neuromanticism” is one appropriate to science fiction in the postmodern era: the reinsertion of the human into the new reality which its technology is in the process of shaping. According to Bukatman, “to dramatize the terminal realm means to somehow insert the figure of the human into that space to experience it for us. . . . Much recent science fiction stages and restages a confrontation between figure and ground, finally constructing a new human form to interface with the other space and cybernetic reality” (47-48).

  The postmodern condition has required that we revise science fiction’s original trope of technological anxiety—the image of a fallen humanity controlled by a technology run amok. Here again we must deconstruct the human/machine opposition and begin to ask new questions about the ways in which we and our technologies “interface” to produce what has become a mutual evolution. It may be significant that one of the most brilliant visions of the potential of cybernetic deconstructions is introduced in Donna Haraway’s merger of science fiction and feminist theory, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s,” which takes the rhetoric of technology toward its political limits: “cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate,” writes Haraway; “in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more potent myths for resistance and recoupling” (179).1

  Note

  1. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the 1988 Conference of the Science Fiction Research Association, Corpus Christi, Texas. I would like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their generous support. I would also like to thank Glenn Grant, editor of Edge Detector: A Magazine of Speculative Fiction, for making so much information and material available to me during the process of revision.

  Works cited

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  Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland, 1986.

  Ballard, J.G. Crash. 1975. London: Triad/Panther, 1985.

  Baudrillard, Jean. “The Year 2000 Has Already Happened.” Body Invaders: Panic Sex in America. Ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker. Trans. Nai-Fei Ding and Kuan Hsing Chen. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1987. 35-44.

  —. “The Ecstasy of Communication.” The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Ed. Hal Foster. Trans. John Johnston. Port Townsend, WA: Bay, 1983. 126-34.

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  Benford, Gregory. “Is Something Going On?” Mississippi Review 47/48 (1988): 18-23.

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  Brin, David. The Postman. New York: Bantam, 1985.

  Bukatman, Scott. “The Cybernetic (City) State: Terminal Space Becomes Phenomenal.” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts 2 (1989): 43-63.

  Burgess, Anthony. The End of the World News. Markham, ON: Penguin, 1982.

  Burroughs, William. Naked Lunch. New York: Grove, 1959.

  Cadigan, Pat. “Pretty Boy Crossover.” 1985. The 1987 Annual World’s Best SF. Ed. Donald A. Wollheim. New York: DAW, 1987. 82-93.

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  Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood’s End. New York: Ballantine, 1953.

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  Delany, Samuel R. “Some Real Mothers: An Interview with Samuel R. Delany by Takayuki Tatsumi.” Science-Fiction Eye 1 (1988): 5-11.

  de Lauretis, Teresa. “Signs of Wo/ander.” The Technological Imagination. Ed. Teresa de Lauretis, Andreas Huyssen, and Kathleen Woodward. Madison, WI: Coda, 1980. 159-74.

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  Gibson, William. “Fragments of a Hologram Rose.” 1977. Burning Chrome. New York: Ace, 1987. 36-42.

  —. “The Gernsback Continuum.” 1981. Burning Chrome. 23-35.

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  —. Neuromancer. New York: Berkley, 1984.

  —. Count Zero. New York: Arbor House, 1986.

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  Grant, Glenn. “Transcendence Through Détournement in William Gibson’s Neuromancer.” Science-Fiction Studies 17 (1990): 41-49.

  Haraway, Donna. “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology, and Socialist Feminism in the 1980s.” 1985. Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics. Ed. Elizabeth Weed. New York: Routledge, 1989. 173-204.

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  Hollinger, Veronica. “Feminist Science Fiction: Breaking Up the Subject.” Extrapolation 31 (1990): forthcoming.

  Jameson, Fredric. “Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism.” New Left Review 146 (1984): 53-94.

  —. “Progress versus Utopia, or Can We Imagine the Future?” Art After Modernism: Rethinking Representation. Ed. Brian Wallis. New York: The New Museum of Contemporary Art, 1984. 239-52.

  Jeter, K.W. The Glass Hammer. New York: Signet, 1987.

  Kadrey, Richard. “Simulations of Immortality.” Science-Fiction Eye 1 (1989): 74-76.

  —. “Cyberpunk 101 Reading List.” Whole Earth Review 63 (1989): 83.

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  —. Islands in the Net. New York: Arbor House, 1988.

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  7

  The many deaths of science fiction: A polemic

  Roger Luckhurst

  How many times can a genre die? How often can the death sentence be passed down, and when do repeated stays of execution cease being moments of salvation and become instead sadistic toying with the condemned?

  SF is dying; but then SF has always been dying, it has been dying from the very moment of its constitution. Birth and death become transposable: if Gernsback’s pulp genericism produces the “ghetto” and the pogrom of systematic starvation for some, he also names the genre and gives birth to it for others. If the pulps eventually give us the “Golden Age,” its passing is death for some and re-birth for others. If the New Wave is the life-saving injection, it is also a spiked drug, a perversion, and the onset of a long degeneration towards inevitable death. If the 1970s is a twilight, a long terminal lingering, the feminists come to the rescue. But then the feminists are also partially responsible, Charles Platt argues, for issuing one final vicious twist of the knife. And what of cyberpunk? Dead before it was even born—or rather dead because it was named. “Requiem for the Cyberpunks” aims to finally kill the label (5). And what now? Christina Sedgewick asks “Can Science Fiction Survive in Postmodern, Megacorporate America?” A new decline, or rather a circling back: SF dying because of its re-commercialization. This is also the thrust of Charles Platt’s claim that “we find ourselves wedded to a form that was once provocative and stimulating but is now crippled, corrupt, mentally retarded, and dying for lack of intensive care” (45).