Science Fiction Criticism

by Rob Latham;

  I wonder if you recall the “brain mapping” developed by Penfield recently; he was able to locate the exact centers of the brain from which each sensation, emotion, and response came. By stimulating one minute area with an electrode, a laboratory ratwas transfigured into a state of perpetual bliss. “They’ll be doing that to all of us, too, soon,” a pessimistic friend said to me regarding that. “Once the electrodes have been implanted, they can get us to feel, think, do anything they want.” Well, to do this, the government would have to let out a contract for the manufacture of a billion sets of electrodes, and in their customary way, they would award the contract to the lowest bidder, who would build substandard electrodes out of secondhand parts.

  The technicians implanting the electrodes in the brains of millions upon millions of people would become bored and careless, and, when the switch would be pressed for the total population to feel profound grief at the death of some government official— probably the minister of the interior, in charge of the slave-labor rehabilitation camps—it would all get folded up, and the population, like that laboratory rat, would go into collective seizures of merriment. Or the substandard wiring connecting the brains of the population with the Washington, D.C., thought control center would overload, and a surge of electricity would roll backward over the lines and set fire to the White House.

  Or is this just wishful thinking on my part? A little fantasy about a future society we should really feel apprehensive about?

  The continued elaboration of state tyranny such as we in science fiction circles anticipate in the world of tomorrow—our whole preoccupation with what we call the “anti-utopian” society—this growth of state invasion into the privacy of the individual, its knowing too much about him, and then, when it knows, or thinks it knows, something it frowns on, its power and capacity to squash the individual—as we thoroughly comprehend, this evil process utilizes technology as its instrument. The inventions of applied science, such as the almost miraculously sophisticated sensor devices right now traveling back from war use in Vietnam for adaptation to civilian use here—these passive infrared scanners, sniperscopes, these chrome boxes with dials and gauges that can penetrate brick and stone, can tell the user what is being said and done a mile away within a tightly sealed building, be it concrete bunker or apartment building, can, like the weapons before them, fall into what the authorities would call “the wrong hands”—that is, into the hands of the very people being monitored. Like all machines, these universal transmitters, recording devices, heat-pattern discriminators, don’t in themselves care who they’re used by or against….

  At one time—you may have read this in biographical material accompanying my stories and novels—I was interested in experimenting with psychedelic drugs. That is over for me. Too many suicides, psychoses, organic—irreversible—damage to both heart and brain. But there are other drugs, not illegal, not street drugs, not cut with flash powder or milk sugar, and not mislabeled, that worry me even more. These are reputable, establishment drugs prescribed by reputable doctors or given in reputable hospitals, especially psychiatric hospitals. These are pacification drugs. I mention this in order to return to my main preoccupation, here: the human versus the android, and how the former can become—can, in fact, be made to become—the latter. The calculated, widespread, and thoroughly sanctioned use of specific tranquilizing drugs such as the phenothiazines may not, like certain illegal street drugs, produce permanent brain damage, but they can—and, God forbid, they’d—produce what I am afraid I must call “soul” damage. Let me amplify.

  It has been discovered recently that what we call mental illness or mental disturbance—such syndromes as the schizophrenias and the cy clothemic phenomena of manic-depression—may have to do with faulty brain metabolism, the failure of certain brain catalysts such as serotonin and noradrenaline to act properly. One theory holds that, under stress, too much amine oxidase production causes hallucinations, disorientation, and general mentational breakdown. Sudden shock, especially at random, and grief-producing, such as loss of someone or something dear, or the loss of something vital and taken for granted—this starts an overproduction of noradrenaline flowing down generally unused neural pathways, overloading brain circuits and producing behavior that we call psychotic. Mental illness, then, is a biochemical phenomenon. If certain drugs, such as the phenothiazines, are introduced, brain metabolism regains normal balance; the catalyst serotonin is utilized properly, and the patient recovers. Or if the MAOI drug is introduced—a monoamine oxidase inhibitor—response to stress becomes viable and the person is able to function normally. Or—and this right now is the Prince Charming hope of the medical profession—lithium carbonate, if taken by the disturbed patient, will limit an otherwise overabundant production or release of the hormone noradrenaline, which, most of all, acts to cause irrational thoughts and behavior of a socially unacceptable sort. The entire amplitude of feelings, wild grief, anger, fear, and all intense feelings will be reduced to proper measure by the presence of the lithium carbonate in the brain tissue. The person will become stable, predictable, not a menace to others. He will feel the same and think the same pretty much all day long, day after day. The authorities will not be greeted by any more sudden surprises emanating from him.

  In the field of abnormal psychology, the schizoid personality structure is well defined; in it there is a continual paucity of feeling. The person thinks rather than feels his way through life. And as the great Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung showed, this cannot be successfully maintained; one must meet most of crucial reality with a feeling response. Anyhow, there is a certain parallel between what I call the “android” personality and the schizoid. Both have a mechanical, reflex quality.

  Once I heard a schizoid person express himself—in all seriousness—this way: “I receive signals from others. But I can’t generate any of my own until I get recharged. By an injection.” I am, I swear, quoting exactly. Imagine viewing oneself and others this way. Signals. As if from another star. The person has reified himself entirely, along with everyone around him. How awful. Here, clearly, the soul is dead or never lived.

  Another quality of the android mind is an inability to make exceptions. Perhaps this is the essence of it: the failure to drop a response when it fails to accomplish results, but rather to repeat it, over and over again. Lower life forms are skillful in offering the same response continually, as are flashlights. An attempt was made once to use a pigeon as a qualitycontrol technician on an assembly line. Part after part, endless thousands of them, passed by the pigeon hour after hour, and the keen eye of the pigeon viewed them for deviations from the acceptable tolerance. The pigeon could discern a deviation smaller than that which a human, doing the same quality control, could. When the pigeon saw a part that was mismade, it pecked a button, which rejected the part, and at the same time dropped a grain of corn to the pigeon as a reward. The pigeon could go eighteen hours without fatigue and loved its work. Even when the grain of corn failed—due to the supply running out, I guess—the pigeon continued eagerly to reject the substandard parts. It had to be forcibly removed from its perch, finally.

  Now, if I had been that pigeon, I would have cheated. When I felt hungry, I would have pecked the button and rejected a part, just to get my grain of corn. That would have occurred to me after a long period passed in which I discerned no faulty parts. Because what would happen to the pigeon if, God forbid, no parts ever were faulty? The pigeon would starve. Integrity, under such circumstances, would be suicidal. Really, the pigeon had a life-and-death interest in finding faulty parts. What would you do, were you the pigeon, and, after say four days, you’d discovered no faulty parts and were becoming only feathers and bone? Would ethics win out? Or the need to survive? To me, the life of the pigeon would be worth more than the accuracy of the quality control. If I were the pigeon—but the android mind, “I may be dying of hunger,” the android would say, “but I’ll be damned if I’ll reject a perfectly good part.” Anyhow, to me
, the authentically human mind would get bored and reject a part now and then at random, just to break the monotony. And no amount of circuit testing would reestablish its reliability….

  I have never had too high a regard for what is generally called “reality.” Reality, to me, is not so much something that you perceive, but something you make. You create it more rapidly than it creates you. Man is the reality God created out of dust; God is the reality man creates con tinually out of his own passions, his own determination. “Good,” for example—that is not a quality or even a force in the world or above the world, but what you do with the bits and pieces of meaningless, puzzling, disappointing, even cruel and crushing fragments all around us that seem to be pieces left over, discarded, from another world entirely that did, maybe, make sense.

  The world of the future, to me, is not a place but an event. A construct, not by one author in the form of words written to make up a novel or story that other persons sit in front of, outside of, and read—but a construct in which there is no author and no readers but a great many characters in search of a plot. Well, there is no plot. There is only themselves and what they do and say to each other, what they build to sustain all of them individually and collectively, like a huge umbrella that lets in light and shuts out the darkness at the same instant. When the characters die, the novel ends. And the book falls back into dust…. And a new cycle begins; … and the story, or another story, perhaps different, even better, starts up. A story told by the characters to one another. “A tale of sound and fury”—signifying very much. The best we have….

  In my novel The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch, which is a study of absolute evil, the protagonist, after his encounter with Eldritch, returns to Earth and dictates a memo. This little section appears ahead of the text of the novel. It is the novel, actually, this paragraph; the rest is a sort of postmortem, or rather, a flashback in which all that came to produce the one-paragraph book is presented. Seventy-five thousand words, which I labored over many months, merely explains, is merely there to provide background to the one small statement in the book that matters. (It is, by the way, missing from the German edition.) This statement is for me my credo—not so much in God, either a good god or a bad god or both—but in ourselves. It goes as follows, and this is all I actually have to say or want ever to say:

  I mean, after all; you have to consider, we’re only made out of dust. That’s admittedly not much to go on and we shouldn’t forget that. But even considering, I mean it’s a sort of bad beginning, we’re not doing too bad. So I personally have faith that even in this lousy situation we’re faced with we can make it. You get me?

  This tosses a bizarre thought up into my mind: Perhaps someday a giant automated machine will roar and clank out, “From rust we are come.” And another machine, sick of dying, cradled in the arms of its woman, may sigh back, “And to rust we are returned.” And peace will fall over the barren, anxiety-stricken landscape.

  Our field, science fiction, deals with that portion of the life cycle of our species that extends ahead of us…. I, myself, can’t envision that far; … our total environment, a living, external environment as animate as ourselves—that is what I see and no farther. Not yet, anyhow…. “We see as through a glass darkly,” Paul in 1 Corinthians—will this someday be rewritten as, “We see as into a passive infrared scanner darkly?” A scanner that, as in Orwell’s 1984, is watching us all the time? Our TV tube watching back at us as we watch it, as amused, or bored, or anyhow somewhat as entertained by what we do as we are by what we see on its implacable face?

  This, for me, is too pessimistic, too paranoid. l believe 1 Corinthians will be rewritten this way: “The passive infrared scanner sees into us darkly”—that is, not well enough really to figure us out. Not that we ourselves can really figure each other out, or even our own selves. Which, perhaps, too, is good; it means we are still in for sudden surprises and unlike the authorities, who don’t like that sort of thing, we may find these chance happenings acting on our behalf, to our favor.

  Sudden surprises, by the way—and this thought may be in itself a sudden surprise to you—are a sort of antidote to the paranoid ... or, to be accurate about it, to live in such a way as to encounter sudden surprises quite often or even now and then as an indication that you are not paranoid, because to the paranoid, nothing is a surprise; everything happens exactly as he expected, and sometimes even more so. It all fits into his system. For us, though, there can be no system; maybe all systems—that is, any theoretical, verbal, symbolic, semantic, etc., formulation that attempts to act as an all-encompassing, all-explaining hypothesis of what the universe is about—are manifestations of paranoia. We should be content with the mysterious, the meaningless, the contradictory, the hostile, and most of all the unexplainably warm and giving—total so-called inanimate environment, in other words very much like a person, like the behavior of one intricate, subtle, half-veiled, deep, perplexing, and much-to-be-loved human being to another. To be feared a little, too, sometimes. And perpetually misunderstood. About which we can neither know nor be sure; and we must only trust and make guesses toward. Not being what you thought, not doing right by you, not being just, but then sustaining you as by momentary caprice, but then abandoning you, or at least seeming to. What it is actually up to we may never know. But at least this is better, is it not, than to possess the self-defeating, life-defeating spurious certitude of the paranoid—expressed, by a friend of mine, humorously, I guess, like this: “Doctor, someone is putting something in my food it make me paranoid.” The doctor should have asked, was that person putting it in his food free, or charging him for it?

  To refer back a final time to an early science fiction work with which we are all familiar, the Bible: A number of stories in our field have been written in which computers print out portions of that august book. I now herewith suggest this idea for a future society; that a computer print out a man.

  Or, if it can’t get that together, then, as a second choice, a very poor one in comparison, a condensed version of the Bible, “In the beginning was the end.” Or should it go the other way? “In the end was the beginning.” Whichever. Randomness, in time, will sort out which it is to be. Fortunately, I am not required to make that choice.

  Perhaps, when a computer is ready to churn forth one or the other of these two statements, an android, operating the computer, will make the decision- although, if I am correct about the android mentality, it will be unable to decide and will print out both at once, creating a self-canceling nothing, which will not even serve as a primordial chaos. An android might, however, be able to handle this; capable of some sort of decision making power, it might conceivably pick one statement or the other as quote “correct.” But no android—and you will recall and realize that by this term I am summing up that which is not human—no android would think to do what a bright-eyed little girl I know did, something a little bizarre, certainly ethically questionable in several ways, at least in any traditional sense, but to me truly human in that it shows, to me, a spirit of merry defiance, of spirited, although not spiritual, bravery and uniqueness:

  One day while driving along in her car she found herself following a truck carrying cases of Coca-Cola bottles, case after case, stacks of them. And when the truck parked, she parked behind it and loaded the back of her own car with cases, as many cases, of bottles of Coca-Cola as she could get in. So, for weeks afterward, she and her friends had all the Coca Cola they could drink, free—and then, when the bottles were empty, she carried them to the store and turned them in for the deposit refund.

  To that, I say this: God bless her. May she live forever. And the Coca Cola Company and the phone company and all the rest of it, with their passing infrared scanners and sniperscopes and suchlike—may they be gone long ago. Metal and stone and wire and thread did never live. But she and her friends—they, our human future, are our little song. “Who knows if the spirit of man travels up, and the breath of beasts travels down under the Ea
rth?” the Bible asks. Someday it, in a later revision, may wonder, “Who knows if the spirit of men travels up, and the breath of androids travels down?” Where do the souls of androids go after their death? But—if they do not live, then they cannot die. And if they cannot die, then they will always be with us. Do they have souls at all? Or, for that matter, do we?

  I think, as the Bible says, we all go to a common place. But it is not the grave; it is into life beyond. The world of the future.

  24

  A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century

  Donna Haraway

  An ironic dream of a common language for women in the integrated circuit

  This essay is an effort to build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism. Perhaps more faithful as blasphemy is faithful, than as reverent worship and identification. Blasphemy has always seemed to require taking things very seriously. I know no better stance to adopt from within the secular-religious, evangelical traditions of United States politics, including the politics of socialist feminism. Blasphemy protects one from the moral majority within, while still insisting on the need for community. Blasphemy is not apostasy. Irony is about contradictions that do not resolve into larger wholes, even dialectically, about the tension of holding incompatible things together because both or all are necessary and true. Irony is about humor and serious play. It is also a rhetorical strategy and a political method, one I would like to see more honored within socialist-feminism. At the center of my ironic faith, my blasphemy, is the image of the cyborg.

  A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism, a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is lived social relations, our most important political construction, a world-changing fiction. The international women’s movements have constructed “women’s experience,” as well as uncovered or discovered this crucial collective object. This experience is a fiction and fact of the most crucial, political kind. Liberation rests on the construction of the consciousness, the imaginative apprehension, of oppression, and so of possibility. The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived experience that changes what counts as women’s experience in the late twentieth century. This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion.