The Banal Infinitude of the Outward Urge

Darren Jorgensen is interested in the relationship between seriality and space travel. To set the context, he first refers to Kant's writings on cosmography, which argue that the sight of the stars brings about elation because they imply an infinitude not only in nature but also in one's own mind. Kant knows they are far away, but maintains that our capacity to think this distance, to grasp the dimensions of the universe, produces a supersensible pleasure that exceeds the bodily senses. Jorgensen is clearly more interested in Hegel's well known, critical response. Essentially, Hegel regards such cognitive pleasures as domesticating the vast and incommensurable. He describes Kant's mathematical sublime as a bad infinite because it does not really grasp the totality of infinity by making it amenable to the human mind. For Hegel then, the bad infinite is constituted by an endless reproduction of the identical to itself that induces boredom (in other words, a series of differences are turned into simulitude).

Jorgensen then uses various examples to illustrate how representations of space travel transform the infinite into the simulitude of domesticity. To this end, he provides historical contextualization with reference to the work of dissident American sociologists such as C.Wright Mills and William H.Whyte, who critically examined the alienation inherent in the new workplace, associated with bureaucracy, meritocracy and new technologies. Faced with this new cognitive complexity, what is striking about the space program is how its participants typically did not perceive the relationship between their subjecthood and society as exploitative. To the contrary, argues Jorgensen, they chose to interpellate themselves into their social position.  This isolation is produced through the "relation of exteriority between the members of a temporary and contingent gathering" (257). Thus the subject is constituted by relations with a social mass that is external to it. Sartre uses the example of people standing at a bus stop to illustrate this interpellation of the modern subject. Each pedestrian is, in this queue, as much other to themselves as to others, constructed "through Others in so far as they are Other than themselves" (261). He turns Karl Marx's concept of alienation into one of "seriality", in which people choose to be alienated from themselves (262-4). There is no better example of this psychological development within capitalism than false personalization, in which an entire personality is simulated for the benefit of office relations or customer service (Riesman 271). While Riesman wants to set legal limits to the psychic dangers of false personalization, Sartre recognizes that, to some degree at least, the person chooses to become this very lie.


Jorgensen thus suggests that this serial process of self-interpellation complements the "bad infinity" by which space exploration is represented and enacted. He emphasizes in particular the significance of "domestication" in regard to the massive public relations role performed by Life Magazine in its coverage of space travel as a "manly" pursuit- a point not lost on other commentators. 

Indeed, herein lies the beginning of an explanation for the characteristic "anal retentiveness" of astronauts. To be such a serial "organization man" requires nothing less than a capacity to suppress introspection. In this sense, according to Jorgensen, it is telling that Neil Armstrong is the only Apollo 11 crewmember who has not released an autobiography, and refuses to grant interviews to this day. Armstrong's demeanor was commonly likened to a machine, while Mike Collins reproached Buzz Aldrin as too introspective during the flight, and thereby violating the set parameters of their training. What I found particularly shocking was the extent to which this training meant receptiveness to (serial) repetition rather than to what had never been experienced before by any other human being. Aldrin concedes that "philosophy and emotion" did not figure in the equation, and once they were on the lunar surface they were solely preoccupied with finishing their experiments within the alloted time. Aldrin sounds like he is paraphrasing Baudrillard then when he goes so far as to remark that his time on the moon was identical to the training simulations, and the simulations to the experience of space travel itself. His autobiography also clarifies how this enforced absence of reflexivity eventually took a heavy personal toll, which resulted in assorted intemperate behaviour upon his return (such as marital infidelity).


Jorgensen also notes the parallels between this representation of domestication in Life Magazine and some science fiction. He uses this passage from J.G. Ballard's "Report on an Unidentified Space Station" to illustrate how the sublime is described as the infinite, yet through repetition of the same becomes Hegel's "bad infinite":


"Our instruments confirm what we have long suspected, that the empty space across which we traveled from our own solar system in fact lies within the interior of the station, one of many vast lacunae set in its endlessly curving walls. Our solar system and its planets, the millions of other solar systems that constitute our galaxy, and the island universes themselves all lie within the boundaries of the station. The station is coeval with the cosmos, and constitutes the cosmos. Our duty is to travel across it on a journey whose departure point we have already begun to forget, and whoses destination is the station itself, every floor and concourse within it".

As Jorgensen puts it, "This incredible image, of an endless series of transit lounges and concourses, captures the conjunction of the infinite within the historically specific space of the foyer or the waiting room". In another piece describing the "mediocrity" of Arthur C. Clarke's fiction, Jorgensen adduces further examples of such juxtapositions of the mediocre and the sublime, with particular reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey. The banality of the daily routines of the crew and other travelers are presented at a very deliberate pace (which detractors have referred to as "overlong" and "boring"), until Dave Bowman passes through the Stargate, only to then find himself in a bourgeois interior that brings to mind Jorgensen's description of Ballard's short story. Domestication indeed! Lest you need a reminder:

Another virtue of Jorgensen's work is that it provides a readymade explanation for the willingness of the serial character types in Clarke's fiction, unencumbered by psychic complexity as they are, to accept their own deaths in space:

 "It is from within this contrast of the mediocre and extraordinary that Clarke returns to his role as propagandist for space travel. In his extraordinary scenes of characters dying in outer space, the contrast works to minimize the dangerous aspects of interplanetary and interstellar travel, as if ending one's life off the Earth were a trivial matter. In 2010(1982), a taikonaut is facing death alone on Europa, an ice moon of Jupiter. His ship has been destroyed by a giant life-form that unexpectedly crawled out from the ocean beneath the ice. The taikonaut recognizes the significance of his discovery of life on another world, and calls back to a Russian spaceship making its way into Jupiter space: "I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this creature, I hope they'll name it after me. And - when the next ship comes home - ask them to take our bones back to China" (50). The name of this character offers the continuity deprived him by death, as it extends infinitely and immortally with civilization into outer space. Mortality is subsumed by this concern for the greater potential of technology that has carried him into outer space".

How different this all seems when compared to one of the stories in John Wyndham's The Outward Urge (which ahuthnance alerted me to, thank you). Wyndham depicts a nightmare scenario in which a manned flight to Mars is plagued by psychological problems, one surmises, because they were apparently unable to just readily switch into Kantian "supersensible" mode. All but one of the crew disappear, and he is so disoriented he struggles to find his way back to the landing point. With no possibility of redemption-- no altruistic suicide here-- he confronts an inevitable, meaningless death in a remote, alien location. This is obviously much closer to Edmund Burke's conception of the sublime and Lovecraft's "cosmic horror". 

So, just imagine reclining on the surface of Mars or one of Jupiter's moons,Io, replete with dense plumes of volcanic vapor, as well as its sheer proximity to Jupiter itself offering a sublime experience. Sure,you would quickly succumb to radiation exposure on Io, but perhaps you could still momentarily savour some sense of the terrible beauty you were witnessing by constructing an interior monologue-- something like Batty's epitaph in Blade Runner-- ironically though, because there would be no one to share the experience with, "I've seen things you people wouldn't believe", and then, "all gone now, like tears in rain".   

I imagine this would constitute the true limit case, notwithstanding the fact that even the proponent of cosmic horror himself, H.P. Lovecraft, privately allowed the following as justification for continuing existence in the face of the cosmos' abysmal purposelessness:

 "I am perfectly confident that I could never adequately convey to any other human being the precise reasons why I refrain from suicide—the reasons, that is, why I still find existence enough of a compensation to atone for its dominantly burthensome quality. These reasons are strongly linked with architecture, scenery, and lighting and atmospheric effects, and take the form of vague impressions of adventurous expectancy coupled with elusive memory- impressions that certain vistas, particularly those associated with sunsets, are avenues of approach to spheres or conditions of wholly undefined delights and freedoms which I have known in the past and have a slender possibility of knowing again in the future."

Of course, once circumstances are such that there is not even a slender possibility of future "delights", it becomes more difficult to say which inner resources one could draw on for compensation. I have to remind myself, especially after reading Jorgensen, that I cannot play out this scenario in my mind to an imagined soundtrack, however appealing it may be to try to come up with a fitting "desert island disc". I could imagine Lustmord's The Place Where the Black Stars Hang, an Elliott Smith ditty or whatever, piping through my space helmet, but even they would be a comforting aesthetic sentimentalization in the context in question- or rather, what Jorgensen would call a "domestication" of infinitude. You know, kinda like the domestication in the final scene of Space Cowboys:




Even so, that won't quell my musings or prevent my listening habits from stimulating further reading. For now at least, I'll sign off with some Chris Butler pics and a few other things that illustrate both sides of what I've been discussing here.

Blade Runner franchise on the way?

We are honored and excited to be in business with Bud Yorkin. This is a major acquisition for our company, and a personal favorite film for both of us. We recognize the responsibility we have to do justice to the memory of the original with any prequel or sequel we produce. We have long-term goals for the franchise, and are exploring multi-platform concepts, not just limiting ourselves to one medium only.

Human Being in an Inhuman Age

What does it mean to be human amidst
super-human technological advances?

Conference webcast here.

A sympathetic review of Sherry Turkle's latest book using Hannah Arendt's distinction between "solitude" and "loneliness" as crucial for the development of critical thinking can be found here:

Lost in the loneliness of anti-social networks

An open letter to Gord Sellar about South Korean sci fi

Hi again Gord,

Thought I'd drop you a quick line on something I've just across expanding on what I wrote in the comments thread. I haven't got to your series of posts yet, but I can see great potential in the following pieces.

I'm impressed by the way that Kim Soyoung reworks the concept of the public sphere in terms of South Korean independent filmmakers attempting to distribute their works outside the blockbuster circuit, as well as differentiating their form and content. This is because they in part define themselves against the way that local blockbusters reconfigure cultural nationalism and globalization in terms of the government's neoliberal policy agenda:


"The key issue that local blockbusters bring to the fore lies not so much in the actual amounts of real profit they generate as the investments they show of national cultural value. These investments go alongside a consistent emphasis on the virtues of the movie industry itself as something of an exemplary smog-free, post-industrial sector by the government since the 1990s which sits well with its new purpose in the popular imagination. Notwithstanding the often outrageous marketing fees and ticket sales, the film industry as a whole in the year of 2001 made profits that were only equivalent to those of a medium-size corporation. Nevertheless, what the film industry in its blockbuster mode displays and informs are the popular imagining of the working of finance capital and mass investment culture. The ‘Netizen Fund’ set up on the internet by film companies finds enthusiastic investors, often with such volume of usage that people complain about accessibility. Both the blockbuster movies and the related dissemination of blockbuster culture appear to announce a cultural era of investment that clearly plays a critical role in strengthening the hegemonic dominance of finance capital. This cultural intervention links the perceived interests of tens of millions of workers to its own by embedding ‘ investor practices’ into their everyday lives and by offering them the appearance of a stake within a neo-liberal order." (Harmes May-June 2001) 


Might this not also be construed, along with Shin, in terms of a limitation placed on civil society/public sphere by these dominant discourses? Afterall, "trans cinema" is marginalized. Furthermore, I think it's pretty obvious that if you're forced to work within the "trans cinema", the special effects budget usually demanded by sci fi cinema is going to be out of reach. Although much could be read into Kim Soyoung's piece about the fracturing of genre, which may contribute to the relative absence of indigenous sci fi per se, I also think it is not easy to pass up on  Moon Jae-cheol's critical observation that "recent Korean films are characterized by a desire for newness, and then reads in contemporary cinema the tendency to distance themselves from grand narratives, such as progress and ideology, to prioritize image over narrative and theme, and liberate themselves from responsibility to the societal role of films". As I alluded to in the comments thread, it is difficult to envisage sci fi without such grand narratives (there I mentioned "utopia" specifically). This too, might be classified as an inherent limitation.

I've focused on South Korea's film industry, but remember, Thomas Whiteside warned us in The Blockbuster Complex: Conglomerates, Show Business, and Book Publishing that the book publishing industry can be beholden to the film industry. So there might be something there that could account for the dearth of published South Korean sci fi as well, at least in recent years. To me, this suggests any answer is dependent on how much historical contextualization you want to use to frame how the genre has developed in South Korea. 


I'll let you know if I come up with anything else once I've read your series of posts.

Speculative Biology

Well, here's my final post for the day, and perhaps for the month as well.

Dougal Dixon has become associated with what is referred to as speculative biology". His lavishly illustrated writings have become a source of interest for sci fi fans and scientists alike. To give you a taste, here's the Wikipedia description of the incredible plot of Man After Man: An Anthropology of the Future:

"The book begins with the impact of genetic engineering. For 200 years modern humans morphed the genetics of other humans to create genetically-altered creatures. The aquamorphs and aquatics are marine humans with gills instead of lungs. One species - the vacuumorph - has been engineered for life in the vacuum of space. Its skin and eyes carry shields of skin to keep its body stable even without pressure. Civilization eventually collapses, with a few select humans escaping to colonize space. The humans that manufactured these species degrade to simple farmers and following a magnetic reversal, were driven to extinction. Other humans, the Hitek, become almost totally dependent on cybernetic technology. With Magnetic reversal imminent, the Hitek built genetically altered humans to occupy niches: Genetically-altered humans include a temperate woodland species, a prairie species, a junglespecies, and a tundra-dwelling species.

Since then the genetically-altered humans must face a new phenomenon. They can no longer be genetically tweaked in a lab, so all modifications must naturally evolve. Many new forms resulted from natural selection. Socials, colonial humans with a single reproductive parent, Fishers, otter-like fishing humans, Slothman sloth-like humans, Spiketeeth, saber-toothed predatory humans, and even parasitic humans developed through natural changes.

After five million years of uninterrupted evolution, the descendants of modern man that retreated into space returned. Then the world changed dramatically. Earth was terraformed and covered in vast alien cities. The humans and other life forms in this new Earth must breathe air with low oxygen content. Thus the alien invaders use cyborg-technology to fuse the bodies of the few human species they find useful on the planet with air tanks and respiration systems. Genetic modification also returned and giant building humans and tiny connection humans were bred to aid city construction. Genetically created horse-like men serve as mounts for the invaders. Some engineered human species even became farmed like pigs or cattle. As with all civilization, this new era of man fell apart once again.

Eventually the spacefaring humans left, the Earth was left in ruins. With barely any oxygen left in the Earth's atmosphere, all terrestrial life on the planet perished. At the bottom of the world's oceans, at the oases that were the underwater hot springs, life continue. In the abyss, was Piscanthropus profundus, a deep-sea descendant of the now-extinct Aquatic evolved. It is implied that Piscathropus profundis would eventually recolonize Earth's surface".

I recommend checking out this Flickr set to get an appreciation of the bestiary featured in Dixon's work.

And now to the foreword by Brian Aldiss:


It has become necessary to look into the future.

There must have been a time, long past, when animals much like apes looked up into the night sky and wondered about the stars: what those pinpoints of light were, and what they were for. Only a brief while after that, the apelike things acquired language; then stories began to be told, and fantasies woven about the stars overhead. That cluster resembled a hunter and, high above, the outlines of a great bear could be discerned. Such stories, told in the Pleisto¬cene dark, kept the bogeyman away.


Animals have no interest in stars. First speculations regarding the stars represented a revolution in thought. Speculations about the future, such as this book, mark another revolution.


Future speculation is of very recent origin. Yet today no man can call himself cultured who does not occasionally look beyond his own lifetime and his children’s, if only to worry about where the cancerous growth of world popula¬tion is going. Dougal Dixon’s book is an ambitious attempt to view a future as far distant from us as those ramapithecine creatures whose fragmentary remains turn up in Afri¬can fossil beds.


The ability to look into the future is a recently-acquired skill. It has, in fact, all been done by mirrors: there was no seeing into the future until we could see into the past. It is the ever-changing panorama of past time which we extrapolate into future time.


The business of comprehending bygone ages was a hard lesson to learn. Fossils, those coinages of past life, were always of interest to mankind. They are mentioned by Greek writers, for instance, and certainly Herodotus recognized them as being the remains of once-living crea¬tures, understanding that their presence in the mountains of Upper Egypt was evidence that those areas had pre¬viously been under water. Lucretius, too, in his wonderful De Rerum Natura, pours scorn on supernatural effects and speaks of the Earth as having ‘generated every living species and once brought forth from its womb the bodies of huge beasts’.


The light of reason did not always shine. Huge fossil bones later gave birth (or so we may surmise) to the legend of giants walking the Earth. The perceptions of the Greeks were forgotten. Eratosthenes, some time in the third cen¬tury вс, understood well that the Earth is round, and measured its circumference with remarkable accuracy, for the latitude of Alexandria. Aristarchus of Samos, in the same period, proposed that the Earth and other planets proceeded in orbit about the sun. These perceptions were overlaid by superstition.


Greek reasoning was based on careful observation, a quality in which the Dark Ages and Middle Ages were weak. The mental world became smaller. Not until the Renaissance in the fifteenth century did learning revive. Leonardo da Vinci, for instance, studied fossils and under¬stood their origins. He explains why leaves are found whole among rocks:

There the mud caused by the successive inundations has covered them over, and then this mud grows into one mass together with the aforesaid paste, and becomes changed into successive layers of stone which correspond with the layers of mud.

But Leonardo did not know the age of the Earth and, in any case, accretion of knowledge is as much subject to chance and the processes of time as the fossils themselves. Homo diluvii testis survived as a fantasy for a while, as Piltdown Man was to do later; they were, so to say, phantom fossils.


One of the difficulties in the way of understanding the past was that for centuries the past remained obdurately and orthodoxly small. Religion got in the viewfinder. A wall rather like the walls of Jericho was built about antiquity by Archbishop Ussher, a seventeenth-century divine, who, after a careful study of the Bible, proclaimed that the world began on 26 October, 4004 вс, round about breakfast time. Precision is attractive; Ussher’s calculations became dogma.


The ‘walls of Jericho’ begin to crumble at the beginning of the nineteenth century. What made them crumble was a tooth, retrieved from a pile of rubble in Lewes, Sussex, by a young Mrs Mantell, wife of a doctor Gideon Mantell. The Mantells took the tooth to the learned and eccentric William Buckland of Oxford, a man who ate his way through the animal kingdom and had gobbled down the heart of Richard Coeur de Lion. Buckland was a little weak on the Mantellian tooth. After some research of his own, Mantell named the erstwhile possessor of his tooth Iguanodon.


Buckland, meanwhile, discovered another tooth near Oxford, together with other remains, and named the fossil Megalosaurus.


Thus were the first two dinosaurs named. It was not until 1842 that Richard Owen defined these newly-discovered animals as a distinct group of large reptiles, and bestowed on them the label Dinosauria. A powerful new idea, a new dimension of imagination, had been born. By the time of the Great Exhibition in 1851, dinosaurs had become common property, and the notion of animals larger than elephants trundling about what became English watering places had caught the popular fancy.
Meanwhile, conceptions of the age of the Earth were being pushed out at a great rate. It spelt the fall of the house of Ussher. Evolutionary theories were current in the eighteenth century, for instance in the proposals, many of them charmingly rhymed, of Erasmus Darwin. In his The Temple of Nature (1803), he depicts with considerable accuracy the pageant of life from its beginnings until the arrival of mankind.


Darwin’s couplets are often neat and memorable, as he intended they should be. The formation of strata of chalk is expressed in a striking image:

Age after age expands the peopled plain,
The tenants perish, but their cells remain.

Erasmus Darwin celebrated limestone mountains as ‘mighty monuments of past delight’, thus in some way looking ahead to Jim Lovelock’s Gaia theory of the totality of terrestrial life as a homeostatic organism.


What Erasmus Darwin lacked was proof of his theories, the tooth found by Mrs Mantell and all the other evidences of remote and continuous life over millions of years which soon followed Owen’s first christening. As geology kept pushing back the age of the rocks, it was the testimony of those rocks which supported the theory of evolution presented by Erasmus’ grandson, Charles Darwin. There had to be enough time in which the whole great drama of life could be staged. Palaeontology gradually won – by a long and painstaking accumulation of facts by numerous people, learned and not so learned.


We now know that life on the planet is no less than 2500 million years old, whereas the age of the Earth is accepted as being something more than 4500 million years.


It was my good fortune as a boy of seven to be given an imposing volume entitled The Treasury of Knowledge. There for the first time I learned of evolution and of the ages preceding ours. So enamoured was I of the story of the creation of the solar system, of the dawn of life, of the dinosaurs, and of those early men - like us, unlike us - that I gave lessons on the subject when at preparatory school, at one penny a time. Although I do not recollect ever being paid, I recall the pleasure we all had drawing brontosauruses and shaggy Neanderthal men.


That precious book is still in my possession. It was published in about 1933 (no actual date printed). Nowhere does it give the ages of the various epochs of past history. A question mark still hung over that subject in the years before carbon-dating and an understanding of the nuclear nature of the sun. In one lifetime we have progressed from that grey area to knowing (or believing we know) how the universe itself came into being - though some doubt remains about the first few seconds of that event.


Until we could look into the past, until the past was seen as a story of continuous development or change, with the mutability of species which that implied, the future remained blank. It gave no credible reflection. This we can see if we read romances of the future penned before evolutionary theory became a reality in human minds. Futures were like the present but more so.


Mary Shelley’s The Last Man of 1826, for instance, is set at the end of the twenty-first century. It is a bold stroke, and some play is made with travel by air balloon and revolution in England; but the Turks are still causing trouble at the eastern end of Europe. When a plague commences to wipe out all of humanity, no attempt is made to introduce innoculation or vaccination, although that would have been a reasonable proposition in the 1820s. The novel is full of interesting reflections; but the motive power which evolution could supply is absent.


It was not until 1895 that readers could take up the first novel to be formed by evolutionary thought, as a waffle is shaped by the pattern of the waffle iron. The Time Machine was written by a pupil of Thomas Huxley, Darwin’s great protagonist, H. G. Weils. In this marvellous narration, Wells sketches out aeons of future time. It is part of his design that - unlike the epochs in The Treasury of Knowledge - everything has a date. The date at which the time traveller eventually arrives is 802,701: not, in fact, a credible date for the end of the Earth by today’s standards, but one well designed to seem reasonable to the book’s first readers, who had enough other marvels to cope with. Indeed, it is difficult to realize now just how subversive the book must have seemed to many at that date, for a gloomy picture indeed is painted of the bifurcation of society into Morlock and Eloi to which Victorian society is depicted as heading. Evolution is shown as not working on behalf of mankind, as was then popularly imagined.


And, of course, our species is shown as mutable, as transitory.


As the time traveller travels through time into a distant future, he observes that ‘The whole surface of the earth seemed changed – melting and flowing under my eyes’. This is a man who has read Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology. ‘I saw great and splendid architecture rising about me, more massive than any buildings of our own time, and yet, it seemed, built of glimmer and mist.’ It is not only man’s achievements, but mankind itself, which proves transitory, a thing of glimmer and mist.
Without a fresh understanding of the past, without its decipherment, The Time Machine could not have been written; or, if written, could not have been deciphered.


Following on from Wells, we have had many visions of the future. Whether mechanical, trivial, or profound, they all rest on the findings of the nineteenth century; all work as reflections of our understanding of the preceding millions of years.


As much is true of Dougal Dixon’s book. Yet it impresses me as being startlingly original, perhaps the progenitor of a new breed, future-faction. It eschews the trappings of fiction upon which Wells seized. It presents itself as a straight record of the future, the future over the next 5 million years. It is Darwin, Lyell and Wells rolled into one. They would like this book, and be horrified by it: for we have, after all, travelled a long way since their day, and supped on horrors beyond their resources. We have lived through an age (well, men felt much the same in 1000 AD, though for different reasons) when we have almost daily expected the world to be terminated.


So here is the mutability, with human flesh a thing of glimmer and mist. Man After Man is a drama of the oncotic pressure of time on tissue. Dixon does not tell us of the things his caravanserai of creatures believes and thinks; it is enough that we know what they eat. For one of the revelations brought home by evolutionary theory is that we are a part of the food chain, along with pigs, broiler fowls and the tasty locust.


Of course the prospect is melancholy as well as fascinating. This is one of the characteristics of futurology. After all, we are looking at a period long after our own insignificant individual deaths. Everything we are asked to consider here reinforces the fact that our world and all we cherish in it is gone. We are one with Tutankhamun and Archbishop Ussher. Other beings possess the field.
Consider Knut who, Dixon tells us, lives a mere 500 years from now. Knut’s seems a lonely life. He lives in a wilderness of tundra. He subsists on a diet of mosses, lichens, heathers, and coarse grasses. He has been adapted, so he finds his diet palatable and nourishing. But the question arises in our minds: do we not find a little frightening and alien this inheritor of our world — and where did all the toast and marmalade go?


We ourselves like - need - a coarse mental diet. We pass for human, but perhaps only among ourselves. Part of us is sane but, at times of crisis, and not only then, an instinctive drive takes over. We seek to set aside the human aspect by use of drink, drugs and other means of escape, as if being human was as yet too much for us. We have a hearty appetite for apocalypse, as the history of the twentieth century shows.


With this appetite goes an obsession with the future. The futures we visualize are generally dystopian. Dixon’s is science-based, but proves distinctly ahuman. Sombre, I would call it. And sombre was also a word that occurred to Thomas Hardy when he considered the change in taste of our modern age. Hardy was a pall-bearer at Darwin’s funeral, and his writings are steeped in evolutionary thought, from A Pair of Blue Eyes to The Dynasts, the great supernatural drama he wrote in the early years of this century. In The Return of the Native, he reflects on such matters.

Men have oftener suffered from the mockery of a place too smiling for their reason than from the oppression of surroundings oversadly tinged. Haggard Egdon appealed to a subtler and scarcer instinct, to a more recently learnt emotion, than that which responds to the sort of beauty called charming and fair.


Indeed, it is a question if the exclusive reign of this orthodox beauty is not approaching its last quarter.... Human souls may find themselves in harmony closer and closer with external things wearing a sombreness distasteful to our race when it was young. The time seems near, if it has not actually arrived, when the chastened sublimity of a moor, a sea, or a mountain will be all of nature that is absolutely in keeping with the moods of the more thinking among mankind.

Hardy there shows his prophetic sense. We might go on to say that chronicles of change which impress on us the transitory nature of our lives and our civilization are also in keeping with the mood of the present. The current obsession with the future may also pass away in time; but for now – just for now – Dougal Dixon has the right idea.

Aquatica

Apparently what we have here is an alternative to seasteading based on the idea that if you think global warming is a problem, then just wait to see what happens once the oceans start dying. Founder of the project, Dennis Chamberland, proclaims that anyone can become an aquanaut, and given an interest in maintaining a common future, he argues, we would do well to establish colonies under the sea that can monitor changes to its ecosystem. This suggests to me that the project is also some remove from Robert Ballard's ideology, which I have critically reviewed in a previous post.

Another way of looking at it, at least in theory, is as an affirmative response to William Gibson's question, "can the future be a place?" I offer this qualification though as I'm always worried about the naive idealism that usually shapes these projects, which are keen to announce their green credentials, but less forthcoming about how it will be paid for, and what restrictions that might place on "universal access." Chamberland speaks optimistically in terms of realizing his dream within a decade, but right now it is obviously premature to pass too many judgments. If anyone is to do it though, a quick glance at his bio suggests he is well qualified in many key respects:

Chamberland joined NASA as a bioengineer in the mid ’80s, just as the manned space program was starting to thunder forward. But rather than looking up to the stars, he began looking down – deep down.


As a developer of the agency’s Advanced Space Life Support Systems, which monitors the safety for all off-planet habitation pursuits, Chamberland soon became a lead proponent of research on an idea being floated by NASA at the time: using the sea as a testbed for space exploration. Before long, this homegrown explorer would become one of the country’s leading proponents of undersea habitation, and an advocate for what he calls the “space-ocean analog.”


An aquanaut and Mission Commander on seven NASA underwater missions, Chamberland has also pursued landmark research in bioengineering and become a prolific writer of science books and sci-fi novels.


But it was his work for NASA that resulted in his harvesting of the first agricultural crop in a manned habitat on the sea floor, and led to his designing and construction of the Scott Carpenter Space Analog Station, a two man undersea habitat off Key Largo. The little permanent submarine has been visited by a range of curious futurist explorers, including James Cameron and TV producer Rod Roddenberry, Jr.


Chamberland’s next goal, he explains in this episode of Motherboard: colonizing the sea. To move humans to an underwater “Aquatica,” as he calls the habitable regions of the ocean, he launched the Atlantica Expeditions, which are attempting to build the first underwater settlement for permanent human colonization.


This isn’t a toe-dip, or a glossy sci-architectural lark. Starting with the premise that nearly three quarters of our planet’s largest biome have long remained invisible – and are increasingly endangered – the Atlantica project seeks “a human colony whose primary purpose it is to monitor and protect this most essential of all the earth’s biomes. Soon, beneath the sea, families will live and work. Children will go to school. A new generation of children will be born there – the first citizens of a new ocean civilization whose most important purpose will be to continuously monitor and protect the global ocean environment.”


Set to commence by next year, the first expedition will be initiated by the submersion of the Leviathan, a small underwater habitat that can house up to four people. He’s not only certain that colonization of the Earth’s oceans is imminent: he’s making it happen.

Placing the Future in South Korea?

Just doing some rapid postings here of some stuff I will further investigate (in my own time, even if I don't post it here, because my interactions with Korean faculty and students of late obliges me to do so). So I don't have time to really shape this as an essay.


Anyway,  Gord Sellar is curious why sci fi hasn't put down roots in South Korea. To him, the question is perplexing, insofar as the country appears to be influenced by foreign sci fi:


In recent years, the government has advanced proposals for such insane things as robotic nannies who could teach English to children — and even a goal to put one in every home by 2015, no less (here’s where The Economistmentions it)… which should alarm those worried about government surveillance and privacy, since the bots will doubtless be running on wireless networks and a virus-susceptible Windows BotX edition. They also are hoping to get robotic patrol-botsset up to guard the DMZ. Autonomous bots! As Michael humorously points out, we’d better hope they’re multilingual, or there will be a lot of dead hakwon teachers and immigrant factory workers. Actually, they don’t seem to be coming along too quickly anyway.


Notwithstanding these parallels, Sellar wants to argue that one should be careful about mapping civilizational developmental narratives in Western terms, asking:


"Would a Korean postmodernity even look familiar to a Westerner? Need a Korean imagine the future the way an American does? Granted, Korea is likely to import whatever generalized postmodernity actually succeeds here, as it has modernity, and as academics in some fields at least have been doing for some time, but would it necessarily have to do so?" 


The essay remains inconclusive, supposedly on account of the absence of a strong South Korean sci fi tradition.  Please note though, the piece is part of a series, so I would recommend following the listed links to see where else he takes the argument. What is significant for present purposes though, is the reference to William Gibson's well-known piece, "Modern Boys and Mobile Girls", from which can (according to Sellar) be inferred that the telling difference has to do with how "Japan and China, interestingly, both share something specifically with the Anglophone West that Korea does not, which is an awkward colonialist history". Unfortunately, this aspect of the essay remains undeveloped. What I think is more telling then is how the reference to Gibson is reinforced by his most recent piece, which appeared in the New York Times. Gibson has not given up on the idea of finding the future in a place. The reality of globalization leads me to question the viability of this position. So I would instead conclude, along with Samuel Gerald Collins, that a more fruitful line of inquiry could be conducted in terms of "cultural arbitrage":


  "...the gap that opens up between global modernity and the kind of hopes and expectations people have for their lives. Looking somewhere else doesn't mean that our life will become more like their life. But it does open up the possibility for reflecting on similar conditions in the US. That is, the "gap" opens up onto our contradictory experiences and expectations and forces us to question the course of our own futures."


Hence, the said approach treats Seoul not "as as a window onto the future, but as a means for thinking about our mutual futures".


I'm very keen to see where this goes.