Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  Building on Haraway’s insights, N. Katherine Hayles argues that the very definition of the embodied self is under erasure in cybernetics discourse, a situation particularly visible within the SF subgenre of cyberpunk. Just as information technology portends “unexpected metamorphoses, attenuations, and dispersions” of the humanist self, so these epochal changes are powerfully materialized in SF texts that portray “virtual bodies,” entities that emerge at the interface with computer technologies. In cyberpunk SF, personhood can be synthetically simulated and agency dispersed throughout a cyberspatial matrix, resulting in depictions that at once diminish the substance of human bodies, while at the same time amplifying and extending their powers virtually. Cyberpunk thus “presents a vision of the posthuman future” that operates at the representational level of the text itself: characters are reduced to “flickering signifiers” circulating as coded information within the narratives. Unlike Haraway, Hayles is ultimately disturbed by the implications of this cyborgized selfhood, especially the “systematic devaluation of materiality and embodiment” that it seems to express. The tension between Haraway’s qualified embrace of, and Hayles’s hesitant warnings about, posthumanist possibility has informed the discourse of cyberculture to which they are both such significant contributors, as well as the critical discourse of science fiction, which has drawn upon their insights in compelling ways.2

  A further extrapolation of the cyborgization of humanity is offered in Vernor Vinge’s essay on the “Singularity,” defined as “a point where our old models must be discarded and a new reality rules.”3 According to Vinge, the snowballing effects of rapid technological change will eventually lead both to the creation of artificial intelligence (A.I.) and to projects for “intelligence amplification” (I.A.), with the former producing intelligent machines and the latter superhuman intelligence. Beyond this threshold, scientific progress will accelerate exponentially, with humans and machines beginning to network, symbiotically fuse, and coevolve toward some momentous cyborg synthesis. Vinge seems much more sanguine about this development than Hayles or even Haraway, carefully laying out—as befits this celebrated author of hard SF—the nuts and bolts of what a posthuman future might look like, citing several prominent works of SF as exemplars. Indeed, Vinge’s essay—like Haraway’s manifesto—can itself be seen as a kind of science fiction, an imaginative projection of futuristic possibility.

  Most of the readings in this section examine forms of artificial personhood, but the essay by Gwyneth Jones, a major British SF author, shows that the depiction of extraterrestrial beings in SF has much to say about the scope and limits of human agency as well. As Jones points out, traditional SF depictions of aliens tend to anthropomorphize them, emphasizing their similarities with humanity, rather than attempting to create “an authentically incomprehensible other.” Moreover, unconsciously recapitulating the historical dynamics of colonialism, many “first contact” stories operate with the knee-jerk assumption that aliens will be hostile to humanity, with the characteristic narrative featuring an invasion and occupation (as in H. G. Wells’s classic The War of the Worlds [1898]). Jones discusses her own practice as an SF writer: when crafting aliens, she believes it is essential to be aware of these historical and ideological echoes, rather than permitting them to govern a story unconsciously. Describing in particular the thinking that went into her brilliant trilogy of “Aleutian” novels, which commenced with The White Queen (1991), Jones outlines how she used aliens to obliquely explore the fraught nature of communication and interaction across lines of difference in a way that evoked without being simplistically reducible to allegories of racial and sexual politics. Jones’s essay is one of the most powerful accounts of the difficult art of world-building ever written by a practicing SF author.

  One of the issues Jones explored in her work involved the possibility of inter-species desire, a theme Allison de Fren’s essay on “technofetishism” echoes in her provocative discussion of human-robot erotics. While Dick’s essay had jokingly suggested the possibility of sexual relations between humans and machines, De Fren analyzes both real-world and science-fictional depictions of precisely such relationships. Focusing on famous SF texts that have treated the theme of mechanical female love objects as well as on “technosexual” communities that literally fetishize robots as prospective partners, De Fren deploys classic theories of sexology, especially Freudian psychoanalysis, to analyze the implications of this strange variant of technophilia. As she shows, the heady possibilities of “cyborg sex,” while seemingly spawned by the growing intimacy of interaction between humans and machines in the contemporary world, has deep roots in longstanding discourses about desire and technology. Wide-ranging and provocative, De Fren’s essay suggests that the attraction toward nonhuman otherness, so pronounced throughout the genre’s history, may activate complex psychosexual dynamics in SF readers and viewers.

  De Fren’s essay concludes with a citation of both Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto” and her later “Companion Species Manifesto” (2003) as pioneering studies of the ways in which the nonhuman others that surround us are deeply implicated in our own self-understanding.4 The latter work by Haraway developed an idea mentioned in the former: that boundaries between humans and animals are breaking down as rapidly as those between humans and machines. The interdisciplinary discourse of “human-animal studies” has emerged to explore this topic, and the final reading in this section, an excerpt from Sherryl Vint’s book Animal Alterity: Science Fiction and the Question of the Animal (2010), develops the relevance of this area of inquiry for SF studies. As Vint shows, an implicit relationship to animal life and consciousness runs throughout the genre’s multifarious depictions of aliens and artificial persons. We have, she asserts, “always-already been living with ‘alien’ beings,” and these relationships form the “material history” from which fictional projections of extraterrestrial creatures have emerged. SF has also, Vint argues, often deployed iconic animal-machine hybrids in ways that allow readers to consider the nature of their own connections with technology and the natural environment.5 Vint’s essay suggests that even the strangest depictions of alien alterity in SF may be rooted in our mundane daily interactions with the creatures who share our planet.

  Notes

  1. The most famous argument for Shelley as the “mother of science fiction” can be found in Brian W. Aldiss (with David Wingrove), Trillion Year Spree: The History of Science Fiction (New York: Atheneum, 1986).

  2. Cyberculture studies has exploded since the mid-1980s, when Haraway’s manifesto appeared coevally with the major works of cyberpunk SF. An excellent anthology that draws together the major threads of this discourse is Barbara M. Kennedy and David Bell’s The Cybercultures Reader (New York: Routledge, 2000).

  3. For critical treatments of the concept of Singularity, see the essays by Brooks Landon, Neil Easterbrook, and myself gathered in the special section on the topic in the March 2012 issue of Science Fiction Studies.

  4. A solid discussion of the field of animal studies that clearly situates Haraway’s work within the discourse is Dawne McCance, Critical Animal Studies: An Introduction (New York: SUNY P, 2013).

  5. Joan Gordon has coined the term “amborg” to describe these fusions of animal and machine: see her “Gazing Across the Abyss: The Amborg Gaze in Sheri S. Tepper’s Six Moon Dance,” Science Fiction Studies 35.2 (2008), pp. 189–206.

  22

  Author’s introduction to Frankenstein

  Mary Shelley

  The Publishers of the Standard Novels, in selecting “Frankenstein” for one of their series, expressed a wish that I should furnish them with some account of the origin of the story. I am the more willing to comply, because I shall thus give a general answer to the question, so frequently asked me—“How I, then a young girl, came to think of, and to dilate upon, so very hideous an idea?” It is true that I am very averse to bringing myself forward in print; but as my account will only appear as an appendage to a former
production, and as it will be confined to such topics as have connection with my authorship alone, I can scarcely accuse myself of a personal intrusion.

  It is not singular that, as the daughter of two persons of distinguished literary celebrity, I should very early in life have thought of writing. As a child I scribbled; and my favourite pastime, during the hours given me for recreation, was to “write stories.” Still I had a dearer pleasure than this, which was the formation of castles in the air—the indulging in waking dreams—the following up trains of thought, which had for their subject the formation of a succession of imaginary incidents. My dreams were at once more fantastic and agreeable than my writings. In the latter I was a close imitator—rather doing as others had done, than putting down the suggestions of my own mind. What I wrote was intended at least for one other eye—my childhood’s companion and friend; but my dreams were all my own; I accounted for them to nobody; they were my refuge when annoyed—my dearest pleasure when free.

  I lived principally in the country as a girl, and passed a considerable time in Scotland. I made occasional visits to the more picturesque parts; but my habitual residence was on the blank and dreary northern shores of the Tay, near Dundee. Blank and dreary on retrospection I call them; they were not so to me then. They were the eyry of freedom, and the pleasant region where unheeded I could commune with the creatures of my fancy. I wrote then—but in a most common-place style. It was beneath the trees of the grounds belonging to our house, or on the bleak sides of the woodless mountains near, that my true compositions, the airy flights of my imagination, were born and fostered. I did not make myself the heroine of my tales. Life appeared to me too common-place an affair as regarded myself. I could not figure to myself that romantic woes or wonderful events would ever be my lot; but I was not confined to my own identity, and I could people the hours with creations far more interesting to me at that age, than my own sensations.

  After this my life became busier, and reality stood in place of fiction. My husband, however, was from the first, very anxious that I should prove myself worthy of my parentage, and enrol myself on the page of fame. He was for ever inciting me to obtain literary reputation, which even on my own part I cared for then, though since I have become infinitely indifferent to it. At this time he desired that I should write, not so much with the idea that I could produce any thing worthy of notice, but that he might himself judge how far I possessed the promise of better things hereafter. Still I did nothing. Travelling, and the cares of a family, occupied my time; and study, in the way of reading, or improving my ideas in communication with his far more cultivated mind, was all of literary employment that engaged my attention.

  In the summer of 1816, we visited Switzerland, and became the neighbors of Lord Byron. At first we spent our pleasant hours on the lake, or wandering on its shores; and Lord Byron, who was writing the third canto of Childe Harold, was the only one among us who put his thoughts upon paper. These, as he brought them successively to us, clothed in all the light and harmony of poetry, seemed to stamp as divine the glories of heaven and earth, whose influences we partook with him.

  But it proved a wet, ungenial summer, and incessant rain often confined us for days to the house. Some volumes of ghost stories, translated from the German into French, fell into our hands. There was the History of the Inconstant Lover, who, when he thought to clasp the bride to whom he had pledged his vows, found himself in the arms of the pale ghost of her whom he had deserted. There was the tale of the sinful founder of his race, whose miserable doom it was to bestow the kiss of death on all the younger sons of his fated house, just when they reached the age of promise. His gigantic, shadowy form, clothed like the ghost in Hamlet, in complete armor, but with the beaver up, was seen at midnight, by the moon's fitful beams, to advance slowly along the gloomy avenue. The shape was lost beneath the shadow of the castle walls; but soon a gate swung back, a step was heard, the door of the chamber opened, and he advanced to the couch of the blooming youths, cradled in healthy sleep. Eternal sorrow sat upon his face as he bent down and kissed the forehead of the boys, who from that hour withered like flowers snapt upon the stalk. I have not seen these stories since then; but their incidents are as fresh in my mind as if I had read them yesterday.

  “We will each write a ghost story,” said Lord Byron; and his proposition was acceded to. There were four of us. The noble author began a tale, a fragment of which he printed at the end of his poem of Mazeppa. Shelley, more apt to embody ideas and sentiments in the radiance of brilliant imagery, commenced one founded on the experiences of his early life. Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady, who was so punished for peeping through a key-hole—what to see I forget—something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her, and was obliged to despatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted. The illustrious poets also, annoyed by the platitude of prose, speedily relinquished the uncongenial task.

  I busied myself to think of a story, —a story to rival those which had excited us to this task. One which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart. If I did not accomplish these things, my ghost story would be unworthy of its name. I thought and pondered—vainly. I felt that blank incapability of invention which is the greatest misery of authorship, when dull Nothing replies to our anxious invocations. Have you thought of a story? I was asked each morning, and each morning I was forced to reply with a mortifying negative.

  Every thing must have a beginning, to speak in Sanchean phrase; and that beginning must be linked to something that went before. The Hindoos give the world an elephant to support it, but they make the elephant stand upon a tortoise. Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos; the materials must, in the first place, be afforded: it can give form to dark, shapeless substances, but cannot bring into being the substance itself. In all matters of discovery and invention, even of those that appertain to the imagination, we are continually reminded of the story of Columbus and his egg. Invention consists in the capacity of seizing on the capabilities of a subject, and in the power of moulding and fashioning ideas suggested to it.

  Many and long were the conversations between Lord Byron and Shelley, to which I was a devout but nearly silent listener. During one of these, various philosophical doctrines were discussed, and among others the nature of the principle of life, and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated. They talked of the experiments of Dr. Darwin (I speak not of what the Doctor really did, or said that he did, but, as more to my purpose, of what was then spoken of as having been done by him), who preserved a piece of vermicelli in a glass case, till by some extraordinary means it began to move with voluntary motion. Not thus, after all, would life be given. Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth.

  Night waned upon this talk, and even the witching hour had gone by, before we retired to rest. When I placed my head on my pillow, I did not sleep, nor could I be said to think. My imagination, unbidden, possessed and guided me, gifting the successive images that arose in my mind with a vividness far beyond the usual bounds of reverie. I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision, —I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life, and stir with an uneasy, half vital motion. Frightful must it be; for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world. His success would terrify the artist; he would rush away from his odious handywork, horror-stricken. He
would hope that, left to itself, the slight spark of life which he had communicated would fade; that this thing, which had received such imperfect animation, would subside into dead matter; and he might sleep in the belief that the silence of the grave would quench for ever the transient existence of the hideous corpse which he had looked upon as the cradle of life. He sleeps; but he is awakened; he opens his eyes; behold the horrid thing stands at his bedside, opening his curtains, and looking on him with yellow, watery, but speculative eyes.

  I opened mine in terror. The idea so possessed my mind, that a thrill of fear ran through me, and I wished to exchange the ghastly image of my fancy for the realities around. I see them still; the very room, the dark parquet, the closed shutters, with the moonlight struggling through, and the sense I had that the glassy lake and white high Alps were beyond. I could not so easily get rid of my hideous phantom; still it haunted me. I must try to think of something else. I recurred to my ghost story, my tiresome unlucky ghost story! O! if I could only contrive one which would frighten my reader as I myself had been frightened that night!

  Swift as light and as cheering was the idea that broke in upon me. “I have found it! What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.” On the morrow I announced that I had thought of a story. I began that day with the words, It was on a dreary night of November, making only a transcript of the grim terrors of my waking dream.

  At first I thought but of a few pages of a short tale; but Shelley urged me to develope the idea at greater length. I certainly did not owe the suggestion of one incident, nor scarcely of one train of feeling, to my husband, and yet but for his incitement, it would never have taken the form in which it was presented. From this declaration I must except the preface. As far as I can recollect, it was entirely written by him.