The Transcendent Adventures of Philip K Dick

I've posted Robert Crumb's piece on Philip K Dick as a corrective to what I perceive as a deficit in the extant literature: Many assessments of his work ironically turn out to be the theoretical equivalents of the "kibble" Philip K Dick critiqued. I say this because all too often they seem to simply cherry pick by neglecting to mention the centrality of the religious impulses that drove him. I think it's fine, of course, to give a postmodern reading of PKD, but such an approach would be even more perspicacious if contextualized in relation to postmodern theology; rather than just lazily rehashing Baudrillard's thesis on simulation etc. And afterall, the author in question is on the record as saying:

"In Plato's Timaeus, God does not create the universe, as does the Christian God; He simply finds it one day. It is in a state of total chaos. God sets to work to transform the chaos into order. That idea appeals to me, and I have adapted it to fit my own intellectual needs: What if our universe started out as not quite real, a sort of illusion, as the Hindu religion teaches, and God, out of love and kindness for us, is slowly transmuting it, slowly and secretly, into something real?

We would not be aware of this tranformation, since we were not aware that our world was an illusion in the first place. This technically is a Gnostic idea. Gnosticism is a religion which embraced Jews, Christians, and pagans for several centuries. I have been accused of holding Gnostic ideas. I guess I do. At one time I would have been burned. But some of their ideas intrigue me. One time, when I was researching Gnosticism in the Britannica, I came across mention of a Gnostic codex called The Unreal God and the Aspects of His Nonexistent Universe, an idea which reduced me to helpless laughter. What kind of person would write about something that he knows doesn't exist, and how can something that doesn't exist have aspects? But then I realized that I'd been writing about these matters for over twenty-five years. I guess there is a lot of latitude in what you can say when writing about a topic that does not exist. A friend of mine once published a book called Snakes of Hawaii. A number of libraries wrote him ordering copies. Well, there are no snakes in Hawaii. All the pages of his book were blank".


We should, however, proceed carefully, so as to avoid the mistake of affirmative postmodern readings that tend to blur the crucial distinction between religion and religiosity. As explained in The Transcendent Adventure: Studies of Religion in Science Fiction/Fantasy (and the piece on Doris Lessing's turn to Sufism is worthy of inclusion in the A Mosque Among the Stars anthology I referenced in an earlier post), this distinction hinges upon the following:

"When religion turns into religiosity, insights into the fundamental nature of the cosmos become naive oversimplifications of reality, gods become idols, and teachings become dogmas. In a similar way, human life and its meaning are devalued, and in their place various individuals and objects, rituals and traditions are invested with ultimate value. Likewise, morality is reduced to formality, a legalistic network of obligations and taboos in which the trivial becomes ethical and the ethical becomes trivial.


Historically, religiosity of this sort was rejected by Buddha and Jesus, even though it is still too often found in Buddhism and Christianity, and in other religions as well. It is also rejected by science fiction writers who satirize religion or some aspect of it. This is to say, what these science fiction writers dismiss as unworthy of imitation or belief is not usually religion but its parody--religiosity. Occasionally they even reject religiosity in the name of genuinely religious fundamentalizing, ultimatizing, and moralizing."


Indeed, many scientists have rejected religiosity, and thereby found their faith compatible with scientific enquiry, which have together provided a driving impetus to many exciting fields of science that science fiction has in turn drawn upon--not least space travel and artificial intelligence. If you're sceptical about this claim, I invite you to read David Noble's The Religion of Technology in tandem with Steve Fuller's Humanity 2.0. Unfortunately though, some sci-fi authors, such as William Gibson, appear to be ignorant of this long-standing connection, as shown by their dismissive comments about the religious themes in Dick's work. This is basically an example of the aforementioned cardinal sin of conflating religion and religiosity. Where he and others go wrong then is in failing to realize that science and science fiction have in a sense already lain down together "in the fields of the Lord".

Islam and Science Fiction

Consider this a kind of follow-up to the topic of the previous post. I have to acknowledge Muhammad Aurangzeb Ahmad's path-breaking work on Islam and science fiction. Muhammad has compiled an anthology on the subject, entitled A Mosque Among the Stars:

He also maintains the Islam and Science fiction website. I was particularly impressed by Irfan Rydhan's contribution, "Star Wars: An Islamic Perspective". This is no mean feat, given how so much has been written about Star Wars, with Lucas generally excoriated for his portrayal of the Jedi faith. For example, Slavoj Zizek, as I have previously mentioned on this blog, seems to entertain no doubts that this integral aspect of the film is in keeping with the West's interest in Buddhism. Contra this view, Irfan Rydhan writes:

“The Force” is the common thread between all six movies and is defined as an energy field, which binds all living things together  (i.e. Allah, God, a Supreme Being or Power that most religion’s adherents worship, follow and/or yearn to become a part of).  According to Star Wars mythology, the Jedi “are a noble order of protectors unified by their belief and observance of the Force.”


"George Lucas, the creator of the Star Wars films, has attributed the origins of “The Force” to the film 21-87 (dir. Arthur Lipsett) which used samples from many sources.”One of the audio sources Lipsett sampled for 21-87 [a film that had a great influence on Lucas] was a conversation between artificial intelligence pioneer Warren S. McCulloch and Roman Kroitor , a cinematographer who went on to develop IMAX. In the face of McCulloch’s arguments that living beings are nothing but highly complex machines, Kroitor insists that there is something more: ‘Many people feel that in the contemplation of nature and in communication with other living things, they become aware of some kind of force, or something, behind this apparent mask which we see in front of us, and they call it God.”

The Wikipedia entry on 21-87 also notes how this short not only influenced the aesthetic of THX-1138 and American Graffiti, but is said to have inspired the term "The Force". Furthermore, Princess Leia's cell in Star Wars: Episode 4 (A New Hope) is numbered 21-87.

Intriguing enough to be sure, but I found that Rydhan's article maintains a consistently high standard of credibility throughout, in its jump from these recorded facts about Lucas's original inspiration, to the possible parallels to the tenets of Islam--including, for example, citation of a Sufi website, which includes the following description: "“We are at the core a Movement of Jedi..." Also noteworthy is the sympathetic reading of the "sand people" in the films as "a metaphor of the Arabs and other people of the Middle East."

I am still exploring Islam and Science Fiction, but read in light of my previous post, I believe it would be a mistake to dismiss  it as somehow divorced from "real world" concerns. Indeed, to the contrary, as we increasingly confront the conception of life as an "emerging property", there seems more reason than ever before to turn to science fiction to interrogate its provision of something like a "sociology of anticipation", with respect to these developments. It is certainly difficult to imagine a time when Islam would not play a constitutive, rather than a merely after-the-event role, in this emerging formation. I therefore commend Muhammad Aurangzab Ahmad and his fellow contributors for laying the groundwork for these conversations.

One final thing, if you're interested in watching 21-87, you can do so here.

Launch of Beta version of SFE: Science Fiction Encyclopedia

It launched on October 2. Absolutely essential reading

In Time

When Will Salas is falsely accused of murder, he must figure out a way, with the help of a beautiful hostage, to bring down a system where time is money -- literally -- enabling the wealthy to live forever while the poor, like Will, have to beg, borrow, and steal enough minutes to make it through another day.


The premise of this film is certainly intriguing. I'll have to reserve judgement though until I've had a chance to see it. I already know that all filmmakers, especially those working in Hollywood, face the problem of how to develop sympathetic characters that the audience can identify with, without sacrificing the larger chain of historical actors, structures, and events, to the point where they become mere window-dressing. It is clearly difficult then to make a radical, as opposed to a merely liberal, or conservative, film.

Having said that, the trailer has got me thinking. I like how it appears to at least gesture at Marx's critical insight that work is dead time for most people: it's death on the installment plan because we trade our time away for the possibility of a real life later. Now, if life enhancement technologies were ever made widely accessible, it'd be nice to think that they might allow the precariat, who are at present forced to do piecemeal work with no benefits, to retrain and work a bit longer, as compensation for not having a pension fund up until that point. For such social democratic measures to be viable though, the Consumer Price Index would have to remain steady, and this is, sadly, unlikely to be the case because of the dynamic and exploitative nature of capitalism: the disparity between the CPI and wages, compounded by the extraction of surplus value from workers, would mean that the cost of living would not be ameliorated for those least able to afford any real improvement to their quality of life. Access to such technologies would then in all likelihood simply mean you would be forced to work longer without accumulating any additional benefits. Conservatives would be happy about this as they would not have to worry about the lack of available tax dollars (especially when they also typically advocate tax breaks for the wealthy) to fund the retirements of an ageing population.

 Policy-makers in developed countries at present see an ageing population as a looming problem because of the so-called "fertility crisis": not enough children are being born to replace the retiring generations of workers, so the tax base shrinks accordingly. This makes me think the scenario in the film is probably the more realistic option as far as capitalists are concerned i.e.there would be no real incentive to make these technologies available to those who couldn't afford them--unless offered as a carrot on a stick to discipline the workforce--so they would, for the most part, remain a luxury commodity for the very rich to enjoy. Consistent with this dystopian logic, in my view, this would mean it's more likely that greedy capitalists would resort to the "blackbirding" of cheaper (non-unionised) labourers from the Third World, who would be worked till they dropped, and then simply replaced, rather than "enhanced..."

Believe me, I desperately want to be wrong about this. I hope instead for a resurgence of progressive, collective action, worker's owning the means of production; something like the technological utopia envisaged by Marcuse to make good on Marx's ideal of communism as "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need (or needs)"-- albeit without the androcentric bias, of course. Using everyday technologies such as mobile phones as examples, Ray Kurzweil would have us believe that all technologies become affordable as they grow more powerful, so everyone can eventually become posthuman: meaning that all of these problems will somehow just go away, with the flick of a wrist, or rather, the press of a button. Contra this thesis of the Singularity, it looks like In Time will be reminding us that capitalism's relentless theft of time from workers is responsible for their alienation, rather than any sense of failure at not having realised their posthuman potential.....

May she rest in peace

Please forgive me for being so slow to report this sad news

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.

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.

Interspecies Research and Capitalist Exploitation

According to 'A Companion to Science Fiction', edited by David Seed, the Rand Corporation wrote a report "which suggested that...production-line sub-humans [would be available] as workers by the year 2025 (Lane 1991: 9). This inspired Stephen Gallagher to write his 1982 novel, 'Chimera', which "traces modern genetic engineering back to concentration camp experiments and thereby implies, and denounces, the parallels between capitalist exploitation and Nazi atrocity." The British t.v. version of the book (which from some of the screen shots I've seen looks slightly underwhelming) apparently "removes this theme, [although] it retains its critique of a government intending to further disenfranchise its people of economic self-determination by manufacturing subhuman workers... As it stands, it is a disturbing view of what the cooperation between capitalism and science could achieve." Gallagher, it should be noted, also wrote the Doctor Who story 'Warrior's Gate', which concerns the enslavement and exploitation of an alien species.

'The Sheep Look Up'

Recently reading John Brunner's excellent dystopic/ecological disaster novel (written in 1974), "The Sheep Look Up', I was struck by its continuing contemporary resonance, particularly, regarding corporate interest and the failure of government to properly challenge this self-interest (something we have recently witnessed in Australian politics, for example, with the Emissions Trading Scheme and mining tax). Take the following small extract:

Page: ...Most people have the impression that since the passage of the Environment Acts things have taken a turn for for the better.

Quarrey: I'm afraid this seems to be - uh - an optical illusion, so to speak. For one thing, the Acts don't have enough teeth. One can apply for all kinds of postponements, exemptions, stays of execution, and of course companies which would have their profits shaved by complying with the new regulations use every possible means to evade them. And the other point is that we aren't being as watchful as we used to be. There was a brief flurry of anxiety a few years ago, and the Environment Acts were introduced, as you said, and ever since then we have been sitting back assuming the situation was being taken care of, although it isn't...

p. 32., Brunner, Arrow Edition, 1984

Envisioning unreal utopiaea

An amazing flood of material on Crooked Timber of late. I can barely keep up. After posting on Erik Olin Wright, how fitting that discussion would next take shape along lines similar to what I have just written about the focusing of the attention space on either "the political" or "politics":

If science fiction is no longer a viable form, it is because the humanist assumptions that underpinned it are no longer credible even as fictions. The hybrid type of writing that has evolved in recent years is symptomatic. "Slipstream", "cyberpunk" and "new weird" blend together influences as diverse as Arthur Machen and Mikhail Bulgakov, Charles Williams and William S Burroughs. What these styles of writing have in common is an absence of politics. No world-changing project features in any of them... During much of the 20th century, speculative fiction served an impulse of world transformation. Fantasy was understood as an exercise in which alternative worlds were imagined in order to create new possibilities of action. Today fantasy has the role of enabling us to see more clearly the elusive actualities. The question of action is left open. We debate what can be done to change the world, but no one expects an answer.

I surmise that the Crooked Timber blogger is taking issue with the generalizability of these oppositions. I read this as implying that an author such as China Miéville is actually more capable of performing the role of mediator that I referred to in my previous post. This makes it easier to understand then why a Williams scholar such as Andrew Milner is clearly sympathetic to China's work (you will understand this if you recall how Williams wrote quite extensively on science fiction from a "cultural materialist" perspective). Here is what China had to say about trying to bridge the gap:

I simply don’t know whether I can have this cake and eat it too: critically depict political economy, while having shots ring out and people swinging off cliffs to magical battles. The best I can do is offer a thought. Even if it’s true that the different values fundamentally work against each other, the attempt to marry them may never succeed, but it might approach success asymptotically. Try again, fail again, fail better. That tension, that process of failing better and better – the very failure, if it’s the best kind of failure – might generate interesting effects that a more ‘successful’ – ie aesthetically integrated – work cannot do.

Bioships, replicating spacecraft and the exploration of exoplanets

We were talking the other day about the inaccessibility of exoplanets (they can't even be captured by imaging because of their obscurity), and this drove home the point as to why the "generation starship" concept is being supplemented or displaced by scientists and sci fi authors alike. The practical problems are how to sustain life and the energy required to power a ship across such vast distances over really long periods of time.

Here we see the biotech focus of this blog coming into alignment with a number of fascinating possibilities. For some background on exoplanets, it is useful to pay a visit to the Planetary Society. And here is the quote by Freeman Dyson that really caught my attention:

"Any affordable program of manned exploration must be centered in biology, and its time frame tied to the time frame of biotechnology; a hundred years, roughly the time it will take us to learn to grow warm-blooded plants, is probably reasonable".^[21]

However, Dyson is not solely preoccupied with manned exploration, as anyone who Googles "astrochicken" will quickly discover. Here we have Dyson, along with other scientists, applying the concept of "self replicating machines" to the development of spacecraft. As you can see from this link, the replicating spacecraft has also become a staple of science fiction. Unsurprisingly, while it offers in theory a means of exploring further and quicker than manned flights, there are concerns about whether replication could be controlled. If not, according to the "berserker" model, replicating probes would regard the existence of other lifeforms as competition, and would therefore seek to exterminate them. A more benign spin on the theme is the "seeder"/embryo space colonisation model, whereby genetic patterns from the homeworld are stored in readiness for the terraforming of habitable exoplanets. A degree of automation would circumvent the need for sustaining the living, breathing crew, associated with generation starships.

Of particular interest to this blog, Alien appears suggestive of the possibility of catastrophe arising from an admixture of berserker and embryo space colonisation. The sequence of events is not clear at this stage, as we await release of the [two] prequel (s), but one possibility would be that the automation process became corrupted during either the flight or upon contact with the exoplanet Acheron, with the xenomorphs subsequently emerging as a berserker species.

One of the more interesting pieces I have read of late discusses the derelict in terms of its being a bioship.
Let me return to Freeman Dyson though, given the lecture I've watched online of him advocating the need for "heretical thinking" in science. Furthermore, the Research Channel featured a video of author Ann Finkbeiner naming Dyson as a member of "the Jasons", "a self-selecting cadre of scientists independent of the government who evaluate military technologies at the frontier of physical feasibility". If such claims bear closer scrutiny, Alien may one day prove extremely prescient, given how the Weyland Utani Corporation was likewise interested in acquiring the lifeform for military purposes. Here, I mean to suggest that "heretical thinking" in science can easily translate to "the ends justify the means".

Although I am not charging Dyson with guilt by mere association, I do share Finkbeiner's concerns, which are raised as well in sci fi such as Alien: what role should the government play in scientific research? At what point is the inventor accountable for the hazards of the invention? The sheer vastness of "the final frontier" reminds us of the inherent difficulty of regulating any applied biotechnological research in such a context.

Please note that Dyson enthusiastically endorses biotech in the first part of this talk, before moving on to the theme of what kind of life might exist on Europa, and how we might go about finding it. In the final part, around 16:00, he connects biotech to space exploration, arguing that if we cannot find life out there, we should create it for ourselves to populate the universe, thereby making it a much richer, more interesting place. Hence it will not just be us moving from Earth into the universe, but living things in general. These proposals are obviously fraught with potential benefits and hazards, but the latter are not addressed in Dyson's talk:

Towing Jehovah and other spellbinding tales

I don't have an image I can use to illustrate James Morrow's Godhead Trilogy. So I'm going to settle on a surreal Japanese image instead that I really like in its own right. So there! Come to think of it, this Japanese giant probably wouldn't be out of place in Blameless in Abaddon. I'm very keen to follow up on Morrow some more as he is a science fiction writer who is willing to go out on a limb about current debates in the biological sciences, and how and if theology should feature.

I have to log off now so I'll leave you with these summations of the Godhead series:

Towing Jehovah (1994) in which the corpse of God, a two-mile long white male with a grey beard, as he has often been depicted) is discovered floating in the Atlantic Ocean. The captain of a supertanker is dispatched by the Vatican on a secret mission to tow the Divine Corpse to a tomb carved out of the Arctic ice. A group of atheist extremists plan on destroying the body, as although God is dead, his corpse proves that they were wrong and he existed at some point in time. An extended subplot deals with the evolution of a character's views on ethics and morality as he faces the idea of a post-theistic world. Towing Jehovah won the World Fantasy Award for Best Novel in 1995.^[2]; was nominated for a Nebula Award in 1994^[3]; and received Hugo, Clarke, and Locus Fantasy Award nominations in 1995.^[4]

• Blameless in Abaddon (1996), in which God's body is now part of a religious theme park. A small-town magistrate, who has suffered many personal troubles, including the death of his wife and prostate cancer, decides to literally put God on trial for crimes against humanity. God's defense lawyer is a parody of C. S. Lewis. Other biblical figures including Satan and Jesus Christ appear in this book. "Abaddon" is a small fictional township in Pennsylvania and an obscure Biblical word for Hell.
• The Eternal Footman (1999), in which the absence of God, save for his skull orbiting the Earth, results in a plague of death-awareness. The Eternal Footman was nominated for a Locus Fantasy Award in 1997.^[5

"Don't be an asshole, Deckard. I've got four skin-jobs walking the streets".

Well ok, not quite yet. But everytime I read something about the military sponsorship of regenerative medicine, I start to imagine the Tyrell Corporation doing subcontracting work for Weyland Yutani. Remember though, the thesis of the cyborganisation of the human is not just about the militarisation of our hearts and minds, but rather a more general commodification. According to this logic, capitalism will solve its accumulation crisis by colonising the inner frontier (our bodies), in tandem with the colonisation of outer space (spearheaded by the colonial marines, who may be private mercenaries, in contrast to the armies of nation states we are more familiar with). I'm very eager then to follow up Carl Abbott and William H Katerberg's work concerning sci fi's envisioning of capitalism's "spatial fix" (to use Marxist geographer David Harvey's term).

I realise there is an air of familiarity to these musings, not only because I've alluded to these issues before, but rather because they basically rework the familiar frontier thesis. But if this just sounds like "back to the future" syndrome (i.e. the more things change, the more they stay the same), this is true only up to a point. Privatisation will probably be of a different economy of scale than the mass conscript armies that were once mobilised by nation states. Its logic dictates instead that individual entrepreneurs' sense of entitlement, risk and adventure, will be the most likely means of realising Manifest Destiny- sorry, ahem- benefitting "all humanity".



The representation of heads of state in such a light can appear antiquated by comparison. Growing awareness of this cultural shift might explain the choice of the "steam punk" style in this series to convey an alternative "nostalgia for the future" (where allies can transcend narrow self interest in a war against fascism):




I referred earlier to the "colonial marines", and it reminds me of Ziauddin Sardar's point in his introduction to Aliens R Us about how the genre of sci fi has served the western, imperial imagination. Hence I'm always on the lookout for anything that can show in a critical light the developmental logics I've tried to highlight in this post. I'd recommend anything from Iranian philosopher Reza Negarestani's Cyclonopedia to, say, Ian MacDonald's River of Gods. Even if someone reads such works and takes issue with them for whatever reason, the fact remains that they are clear evidence of how sci fi is a much broader church than it's sometimes given credit for by critics.

In this spirit then, looking ahead, I'm hoping to catch up with the Kenyan sci fi film, Pumzi. The movie takes place 35 years after World War III, the "Water War":

Nature is extinct. The outside is dead. Asha lives and works as a museum curator in one of the indoor communities set up by the Maitu Council [in East Africa]. When she receives a box in the mail containing soil, she plants an old seed in it and the seed starts to germinate instantly. Asha appeals to the Council to grant her permission to investigate the possibility of life on the outside but the Council denies her exit visa. Asha breaks out of the inside community to go into the dead and derelict outside to plant the growing seedling and possibly find life on the outside.

It's certainly worth reading the filmmaker's response to the question of whether science fiction is new to Africa, in addition to watching the trailer:

Plug into the new American dreamSleep Dealer

"Set largely on the U.S.-Mexico border, Sleep Dealer depicts a world in which borders are closed but high-tech factories allow migrant workers to plug their bodies into the network to provide virtual labor to the North. The drama that unfolds in this dystopian setting delves deep into issues of immigration, labor, water rights, and the nature of sustainable development.

"Rivera's film drew attention by winning two awards at the Sundance Film Festival — the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award and the Alfred P. Sloan Prize for the best film focusing on science and technology. Los Angeles Times film critic Kenneth Turan wrote of the movie, "Adventurous, ambitious and ingeniously futuristic, Sleep Dealer…combines visually arresting science fiction done on a budget with a strong sense of social commentary in a way that few films attempt, let alone achieve."

Rivera spoke with Foreign Policy In Focus senior analyst Mark Engler by phone from Los Angeles, where the director was attending the local premier of his movie.


MARK ENGLER: How do you describe your film?

ALEX RIVERA: Sleep Dealer is a science fiction thriller that takes a look at the future from a perspective that we've never seen before in science fiction. We've seen the future of Los Angeles, in Blade Runner. We've seen the future of Washington, D.C., in Steven Spielberg's Minority Report. We've seen London and Chicago. But we've never seen the places where the great majority of humanity actually lives. Those are in the global South. We've never seen Mexico; we've never seen Brazil; we've never seen India. We've never seen that future on film before.

MARK ENGLER: Your main character, Memo Cruz, is from rural Mexico, from Oaxaca. In many ways, the village that we see on film is very similar to many poor, remote communities today. It doesn't necessarily look like how we think about the future at all. What was your conception of how economic globalization would affect communities like these?

ALEX RIVERA: One of the things that fascinates me about the genre is that, explicitly or not, science fiction is always partly about development theory. So when Spielberg shows us Washington, DC with 15-lane traffic flowing all around the city, he's putting forward a certain vision of development.

Sleep Dealer starts in Oaxaca, and to think about the future of Oaxaca, you have to think about how so-called "development" has been happening there and where might it go. And it's not superhighways and skyscrapers. That would be ridiculous. So, in the vision I put forward, most of the landscape remains the same. The buildings look older. Most of the streets still aren't paved. And yet there are these tendrils of technology that have infiltrated the environment. So instead of an old-fashioned TV, there is a high-definition TV. Instead of a calling booth like they have today in Mexican villages, where people call their relatives who are far away, in this future there is a video-calling booth. There's the presence of a North American corporation that has privatized the water and that uses technology to control the water supply. There are remote cameras with guns mounted on them and drones that do surveillance over the area.

The vision of Oaxaca in the future and of the South in the future is a kind of collage, where there are still elements that look ancient, there is still infrastructure that looks older even than it does today, and yet there are little capillaries of high technology that pulse through the environment.



MARK ENGLER: How far into the future did you set the film?

ALEX RIVERA: I started working on the ideas in Sleep Dealer 10 years ago, and at that point I thought I was writing about a future that was 40 or 50 years away, or maybe a future that might not ever happen. Over this past decade, though, the world has rapidly caught up with a lot of the fantasy nightmares in the film. That's been an interesting process.

But, you know, a lot of times we use the word "futuristic" to describe things that are kind of explosions of capital, like skyscrapers or futuristic cities. We do not think of a cornfield as futuristic, even though that has as much to do with the future as does the shimmering skyscraper.

MARK ENGLER: In what sense?

ALEX RIVERA: In the sense that we all need to eat. In the sense that the ancient cornfields in Oaxaca are the places that replenish the genetic supply of corn that feeds the world. Those fields are the future of the food supply.

For every futuristic skyscraper, there's a mine someplace where the ore used to build that structure was taken out of the ground. That mine is just as futuristic as the skyscraper. So, I think Sleep Dealer puts forward this vision of the future that connects the dots, a vision that says that the wealth of the North comes from somewhere. It tries to look at development and futurism from this split point of view — to look at the fact that these fantasies of what the future will be in the North must always be creating a second, nightmare reality somewhere in the South. That these things are tied together.

MARK ENGLER: It's interesting that at the recent Summit of the Americas, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez gave President Obama a copy of Eduardo Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America. This is a book that was written over 30 years ago, but that really emphasizes the same point that you are making now, that underdevelopment is not an earlier stage of development, but rather is the product of development. That development and underdevelopment go hand in hand.

ALEX RIVERA: Exactly. And I think that you can also add immigration into that mix. Because the history that Open Veins lays out is a lot about resource exploitation and transfer from South to North. And today, of course, one of the main entities that places like Mexico export is workers.

MARK ENGLER: There's a quote from the film that says a lot. Memo's boss, who runs this sort of high-tech Mexican sweatshop, says, "We give the United States what it's always wanted. All the work without the workers." Can you describe this concept of the "cybracero" that you have been developing?sleepdealer2

ALEX RIVERA: The central idea for this film occurred to me about 10 years ago when I was reading an article in Wired magazine about telecommuting. The article was making all of these fantastic predictions that, in the future, there won't be any traffic jams anymore, and no one will have to ride the subway, because everyone will work from home. Well, I come from a family that's mostly immigrant, a family in which my cousins are still arriving and working in landscaping and construction. I tried to put them into this fantasy of working from home — when their home is Peru, 3000 miles away, and their work is construction.

And so I came up with this idea of the telecommuting immigrant, where in the future the borders are sealed, workers stay in the South, and they connect themselves to a network through which they control machines that perform their labor in the North.

The end result is an American economy that receives the labor of these workers but doesn't ever have to care for them, and doesn't have to fear that their children will be born here, and doesn't ever have to let them vote.

Science Fiction From Below
Mark Engler | May 13, 2009

Attention Prisoners of Gravity: The Polymath, Or The Life And Opinions Of Samuel R. Delany, Gentleman

"The Polymath isn't about just [Delany's] sex life, but a good chunk of it is and it all relates to his writings. Take for example an early scene in which he is reading, to an audience, the opening paragraphs of his 1966 short story, 'Aye and Gomorrah' (which first appeared in fellow science fiction author Harlan Ellison's groundbreaking anthology, Dangerous Visions). The story begins in France in a pissoir and Delany describes this as 'an early attempt to deal, in a highly coded fashion, with homosexuality.' That it involves a public restroom invokes the obvious autobiographical element.

"This is also true for Times Square Red Times Square Blue. In this nonfiction opus, Delany argues that 'cleaning up' Times Square and turning it into Disneyland is not a good thing because, once upon a time, people from different races and classes, normally kept separate, met and interacted in the only social situation available to them and that was the porn theaters. Delany is one of the few writers alive who can explicitly describe the public sex, involving himself and others, that went on in these venues and work it into an essay about the infrastructure of cities.

"But all of his metaphors aren't carnal. The ruined and mostly abandoned city in Dhalgren (a book that is the science fiction equivalent of James Joyce's Ulysses) was inspired by the real burned out inner cities he knew from life. He explains that the reasons for making the gender of certain characters ambiguous in Stars In My Pocket Like Grains Of Sand (1984) was because he once lived in a hotel with several transsexuals and it drove him crazy, at first, when he couldn't discern the sex of some of the people in the elevator with him.

"Besides his writings, Delany also discusses his life and his family's history. His grandfather was a freed slave, a cousin was killed by the Klan, his two famous aunts (who both lived to be over 100) organized a picket line at a movie theater showing Birth Of A Nation in 1924. Chip has much to say on the subject of racism, comparing the attitudes of white students towards Paul Robeson at Columbia Law School to the skinheads who dragged James Bird Jr. to his death as he was chained to the back of their truck."

"Sexuality & Science Fiction 101" by Michael D. Klemm





"Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation has acquired the rights to The Forever War, an award-winning 1974 novel by science fiction author and MIT writing professor Joe Haldeman. The film will be directed by Ridley Scott, whose last science fiction films were Alien and Blade Runner. The producers are now searching for a writer.

"In Haldeman’s novel, a physicist is drafted into a long-fought war against an alien race, where distant battlegrounds are reached by faster-than-light travel. The battles are short, bleak affairs against an uncommunicative enemy, with frequent casualties. When he returns, the protagonist finds that the world has changed in his absence.

"Basically, The Forever War is 'all about Vietnam,' said Haldeman, a draftee who served in Vietnam’s Central Highlands in 1968. 'I didn’t sit down and make a chart or anything,' he said, 'but the [Vietnam] war was my model. The book won a Nebula Award and a Hugo Award, two of science fiction’s most coveted honors.

Prof. Haldeman’s Novel ‘Forever War’ Picked Up By 20th Century Fox Film
By Michael McGraw-Herdeg

Author alert: Sheryll Vint & the question of "animal alterity"

Derridata, I think I can start to get back to you on some ideas for a collaborative journal publication that we discussed yesterday. I notice that the above author has an upcoming book on animal alterity and science fiction, and it would be fascinating to do something with that as a way of extending the themes of this blog (I think she also edited an animal themed issue of Science Fiction Studies). Vint engages too with the Wess' Har series of novels by Karen Traviss, as you can see here (Google had to use a cached page so I hope this link works). Traviss has used her novels as a platform to explore ethical issues related to identity, including those related to clones in the Star Wars universe. This is the kind of stuff we've tried to talk about before using the umbrella term "seriality". So I can see real potential for branching out in some interesting directions. I put it here rather than email though as it may be easier to keep track of material as it comes to hand.

Moving along to a not entirely unrelated topic, I remember years ago, I think it was even in your Re/Search Industrial Culture Handbook, reading about Graeme Revell's post-SPK sound experiments with "insect musicians". Well, I've just come across the Criminal Animal website and there are some pretty interesting resources to be found there, especially under the category of "genetic music". I love the following description particularly:

Algorithmic Arts Software for Generative Music
http://www.algoart.com/dnamusic/

"Interesting b/c you can hear samples of protein sequences! -nice for the ears and gives a good idea of what molecular music is all about -eerie sounding but pretty amazing".

Incidentally, the concept of molecular music reminded me too of the "Prima Belladonna" story in Ballard's Vermilion Sands, which featured singing plants. Furthermore, as much as the film Silent Running has a compelling central premise, (the pathos of a lonely astronaut tending his garden heterotopia floating in space), I felt the film failed in its choice of music. Clearly a more innovative organic ambient style score would have worked better in that context. Sadly though, there was no Linda Long or Jeff Greinke around back then when they were really needed (*sigh*), so we have to make do with the well-intentioned, but somewhat dated, Joan Baez instead:

J.G. Ballard

The occasion of Ballard's passing is clearly not the most opportune time to attempt any critical appraisal of his legacy; that would be churlish, bad taste. Although each of us on this blog have been reading him for over 20 years, it must also be acknowledged that this is considerably less time than many of his most hardcore fans.

So rather than attempt to compare and contrast him with any sociological paradigms (say the Glasgow Media Group's position regarding media "effects" research, Raymond Williams on mobility, the "shrinking island" of British modernism etc), I'll take the opportunity instead to highlight a piece that successfully downplays the more common "postmodern" association of Ballard's work with Jean Baudrillard. There may also be scope within said piece to qualify to some extent Burling's Marxist evaluation of Ballard as representative of the first generation of "new wave" sci fi.

In so doing, however, I mean no disrespect to Bill Burling, who was obviously a wonderful teacher and an astute critic. I recommend following this link to investigate Burling's legacy, which includes a close association with Kim Stanley Robinson, leading to this upcoming title.

In any case, here is the passage from Burling's text which really captured my attention:

British SF over the past four decades often engages with socialist and even Marxist thematics, which may be said to begin with Michael Moorcock’s assumption of the editorship of the magazine New Worlds in 1964. Encouraging the pursuit of experimental and radical social critique in SF, Moorcock published what would in due course become an impressive generation of Left SF authors and their followers, including Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard. Taking William Burroughs as their literary inspiration, the first “new wave” SF evinced a latent Left position, that is, one advocating Left views of consciousness but not highlighting the requisite socio-economic components. A second wave was, however, depicted manifestly Left extrapolations: Iain Banks’ “Culture” novels, such as Consider Phlebas (1987) offer an extended post-scarcity, left socio-techno vision; Ken Macleod actively engages Marxist ideas in the “Fall Revolution” series, as in The Star Fraction (1995); and China Miéville’s remarkable and generically innovative “Bas-Lag” series incorporates an extended meditation on Left political and social issues, most clearly in Iron Council (2004).

Of special and final note is the work of two recent women authors. Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (2003) vigorously interrogates social and political issues in her depiction of a near future, but non-utopian, world administered solely by women. Also important is Gwyneth Jones’ Bold as Love (2001), winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the ensuing namesake series: Castles made of Sand (2002), Midnight Lamp (2003), Band of Gypsies (2004), and Rainbow Bridge (2005). Jones near-future depiction of the U.K., originally sketched out in a short story in 1992, grapples with gender, political, economic, social, and environmental issues emerging from the breakdown of the capitalist status quo and the resulting revolutionary possibilities. The novel sequence aggressively challenges the reactionary dystopian bent of much SF by presenting a plausible utopian vision grounded on Left-based values emphasizing shared resources and decision-making. Jones’ work thus stands as one of the most important contemporary works of Left SF.

Even this short and admittedly selective survey demonstrates the essential interconnection between SF’s representations of the production and consumption of technology and the resulting implications as theorized by Marx and later Left thinkers. While only a few SF works have manifestly engaged the concomitant and irrepressible social, political, and economic issues inherent in their alternative worlds, every SF story, film, or television show bears the latent burden of ideological commitment.