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Mina

The Ocean Of Stories Upon Which We Sail

by Mina

This article is woven around a wonderful speech given by Salman Rushdie when he was awarded the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade, as part of the Frankfurt Book Fair. For him, authors (consciously or subconsciously) borrow from existing stories and add their own twist, so books “…come from other stories, from the ocean of stories upon which we are all sailing. That’s not the only point of origin: there’s also the storyteller’s own experience and opinion of life, and there are also the times he lives in. But most stories have roots in other stories, which combine, conjoin, and change, and so become new stories.”

Authors thus translate their personal mental and emotional universes into stories but also the political, historical, social and cultural currents that flow around them. Their translation of their realities is imperfect and highly subjective; their works are then read by imperfect readers who will interpret what they read to fit into their own realities and a game of “Chinese whispers” begins. As Michael Moynahan SJ tells us in his poem Incarnation:

“If communication is not
what you say but
what people hear,
then what we said
was warped and wrenched…”

No author writes in a vacuum and SF stories reflect not just rockets, moon landings, computers, the internet, smart phones, bionic limbs and other inventions, but also geography, ancient and recent history, changing cultural mores and trends of thought. And, as Rushdie reminds us, they reflect the fiction we read or watch, as many of us spend far more time dipping into fictional worlds than in watching or reading the news. So I thought about what I had read or seen recently to see what narratives I could discern as an imperfect reader/viewer. I’d like to stress here that I made no effort to find obscure narratives: all my examples are taken from my everyday life, for example, from links shared by friends, the ezines I review, Amazon Prime and the good films that go to die on international flights. And I am most definitely not exempt from subjective opinions.

To begin with an important attitude for me when reading: I particularly enjoyed the easy acceptance shown in Once Upon A Time At The Oakmont by P. A. Cornell that people are entrenched in their times (and places), with the narrator telling us at one point: “I smile. You have to accept this kind of thing when you’re a resident of The Oakmont. Times are different, and each one has its own set of values and attitudes that will inevitably become obsolete as the sands of time continue to fall.” The Oakmont is a block of flats built over a time vortex. As the building manager explains to us: “Time is nothing . . . and everything. It doesn’t actually exist, because we made it up, but if it did exist, it wouldn’t run in a line; it would run in a circle…Time moves differently at The Oakmont. We can touch it at any point in time or at all points at once.” The narrator, Sarah, tells us of residents she knows and the rules (of which there are many) that govern The Oakmont. We learn of her lover, Roger, and her friends, all coming from different eras. I’m not suggesting that the tolerance predicated in this tale should be confused with fatalism, or a laissez-faire attitude, just that it is to be espoused and defended.

Moving on to examine some of the social and cultural currents flowing around us, we find gentle but unapologetic feminism and the blurring of gender identity in Mountain Ways by Ursula K. Le Guin. Although the story is ostensibly about a world where two mixed-couple poly-relationships (a “sedoretu”) are the norm and the lesbian protagonists have to find a way around this stricture, it is much more about couple and group dynamics. What makes it really interesting is its exploration of what navigating family/group dynamics involves. I love Le Guin’s psychologically complex tales and this particular one was originally published in 1996, reminding us that the blurring of genders (and roles) happened well before we invented new labels for it.

“Anti-colonialism” is given a wonderful new twist in the short story Death Is Better by Oluwatomiwa Ajeigbe, which weaves robots and slavery together. The protagonist and his sister are attempting to escape a plantation on another world that is guarded by armed bots, including a behemoth. They are willing to risk their lives because death is better than slavery. In the chaos they unleash, it is unclear whether they manage to escape or simply find freedom in death. A nice detail in this tale is a reference to how albinism can ostracise you in a dark-skinned society (it is considered a sign of bad luck in the West African Mandinka culture, for example).

“Pro-choice” is very much part of Always Personal by Rich Larson, which follows a detective as she investigates murder cases involving “inverse stabbings”. It could be a normal detective story, one that involves DNA and bioprinters that don’t exist (yet), but the victims all fall into a “pro-life” mould stereotyped as hypocrites: victim A, who had anonymously donated to abortion clinic protests and blockades all his life; victim B, who had attended them and also impregnated two separate underage girls in his younger days; victim C, who had refused to operate on a pregnant woman even as sepsis set in, losing his license but gaining a fortune in political following. The detective clearly empathises with the perpetrator’s “calcified anguish” as she (the detective) lost a friend to a car accident as they drove overnight “to get over the right state line”. This particular topic can turn stories into unreadable diatribes but the author gives us a good yarn whilst making his opinion clear on a divisive issue.

The author of Muna In Barish, Isha Karki, would fall under the “BIPOC” (black, indigenous and people of colour) label. We follow Muna of the Nehiri minority (she has horns and dark umber skin, and legend has it her people once had wings) as she survives in the city of Barish. She has found work and apparent shelter in a bookshop, working for Arethor. But as we witness her working days, we realise that Arethor uses apparent kindness to exploit and bully Muna; behaviour that Muna cannot acknowledge even to herself or she will be left unemployed and homeless. Muna wants to be a word-weaver, just like Lenore Phoenix who has a bestselling series about a Halfborn like her. Her secret joy is her correspondence with her hero. One day, she meets Karabel of the Senai minority (with pointed ears and keen hearing). And she finds friendship, warmth, understanding, companionship and an equal. She eventually learns that Karabel is Lenore’s downtrodden ghost-writer and responsible for the book series and correspondence that have sustained her through the worst. And Karabel has a plan for their future. It is a beautifully written, psychologically complex story by a word-weaver who plays expertly with intertextuality (stories within stories). And it is a hymn to friendship and finding a sense of community. And all this without making the reader feel that they have to be BIPOC to empathise with the characters or enjoy the story. But I do sometimes wonder if authors who are labelled BIPOC, or anything else for that matter, would prefer their tale to stand on its own merits, as this one most definitely does.

The film Vesper (a Lithuanian/French/Belgian collaboration) is set in the aftermath of ecological disaster accelerated by bio-engineering gone wrong. Vesper, the main character (arguably “enby”), is tough yet curiously innocent. The other main character, Camellia, is a bio-engineered, sentient being. The relationship between the two has sexual and incestuous undertones, as they in turn become parent, lover and friend to each other. This biopunk tale creates a bleak future with only seeds of hope at the end. The brightest spark is the main characters’ kindness, loyalty and sense of honour in a world bereft of all three. Such admirable character traits are gender-less, I would argue. And if you park all preconceptions at the door, you can truly enjoy the scene where Camellia, who is generous and kind by nature, reads a children’s book with Vesper and shows her what animals the latter has never seen actually sound like. Vesper finds a moment of shared laughter and freedom, pretending to howl like a wolf.

In Philoctetes in Kabul, Deborah L. Davitt weaves together the life of a modern-day (American, white, male) soldier and that of Philoctetes in the Iliad. An anonymous soldier is discharged from the army on medical grounds, having been betrayed and abandoned by friends. After losing his wife and job, the two old comrades who betrayed him invite him to work with them as military contractors. It is a sad and reflective tale, with hints of a past life. It shows what living with a chronic, invisible disability is like. Whether or not you feel sympathy for the protagonist is probably coloured by geography, but it is a well-written story tackling PTSD with compassion. Point of view is everything, as Rushdie tells us: ”Peace, for Ukraine, means more than a cessation of hostilities. It means, as it must mean, a restoration of seized territory and a guarantee of its sovereignty. Peace, for Ukraine’s enemy, means a Ukrainian surrender. The same word, with two incompatible definitions.”

I liked the film After Yang (based on a short story by Alexander Weinstein) because it subtly shows different points of view. For me, the most interesting thing is not the “techno-sapien” Yang himself, but what Yang meant to each family member (each with different ethnic origins), which we slowly discover as the film gently unfurls. We see how Yang filled gaps in the family, which now has to learn to function again without him. Also, Yang is owned by the family, so he is technically a slave yet, as the film progresses, we see that he had his own motivations and relationships outside the family. Interestingly, I have yet to read a review that tackles the fact that Yang is presented as sentient but lacks freedom, both because he is bought, sold and refurbished like an object, and because he is given very specific programming to suit his host family. The Guardian describes this film as “a pregnant meditation on grief, loss, memory and consciousness” – it is that too.

In Negative Theology of the Child from the ‘King of Tars’ by Sonia Sulaiman, the author muses on the nature of being other: “I am Palestinian. I know the horror that our syncretic and chaotic loves of mixing and miscegenation had on visitors and colonists. And so, it is my place to pick at the threads that the English poet has woven… Through that hole will be born something Other…Will that mother and father follow their child out of this textual hell? Would they learn to extend love to the flesh, to reach out toward the world as it is: ambiguous, and gloriously chaotic?” This tale shows us that religion and race are not past bones of contention, they remain areas that still lead to (often armed) conflict in today’s world.

Religion, or at least the Christian concepts of good and evil, are tackled with humour in the series Good Omens. The strongest part of the show is the complex relationship between the angel, Aziraphale, and the demon, Crowley. In season 1, based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett (and remaining reasonably faithful to it), they are unlikely friends; season 2 goes beyond the book and starts moving the relationship towards the romantic. I have no problem with that but would have preferred them to remain loyal friends, and I refuse to say “just friends” because that cheapens friendship and reverts to the trope that the main relationship in a story must be romantic. Also, I like how the series blurs the lines between the good and evil characters, with the angels behaving no better than the demons at times. Many of the angels and demons are depicted as having very linear, unquestioning minds. Crowley and, to a lesser extent, Aziraphale are the only ones dealing in shades of grey, with Crowley seeing them as dark grey and Aziraphale as light grey. Sin noticias de Dios (No News from God), an older Spanish/Mexican film, also has a great partnership between an angel and a demon, who speak with each other in Latin, and postulates a heaven that is getting rather empty and a hell that is overcrowded.

To Rushdie, freedom of expression is paramount: “We live in a time I did not think I would see in my lifetime, a time when freedom-and in particular freedom of expression, without which the world of books could not exist-is everywhere under attack from reactionary, authoritarian, populist, demagogic, narcissistic, careless voices; when places of education and libraries are subject to hostility and censorship; and when extremist religion and bigoted ideologies have begun to intrude in areas of life in which they do not belong. And there are also progressive voices being raised in favour of a new kind of bien-pensant censorship, one which appears virtuous, and which many people have begun to see as a virtue. So freedom is under pressure from the left as well as the right, the young as well as the old.”

The “bien-pensant censorship” is clearly a reference to the (mis)use of “woke-ness”, which has its roots deep in the fight for racial justice in the US (leading to the accusation of the cultural appropriation of the term “woke”). Star Trek Discovery is now bursting with strong female leads and the first gay, “enby” and trans crew members. In season 2 of Picard, Seven is openly bisexual though it doesn’t go beyond chaste kisses in the Star Trek universe (the bickering is fun though). I have no problem with any of this but can’t help feeling that it is sometimes cosmetic or skin deep, delivered because it’s expected by some audiences, rather than a true exploration of diversity. I found more depth in Death Comes for the Sworn Virgins by Abraham Margariti. In its fable-like atmosphere, we follow three lovers – biological women brought up as men and mostly identifying as such – who have fled persecution for openly loving each other to the mountains full of dark spirits. They are mourning a fourth lover and in search of a safe place to settle. They find a clearing that is protected from the spirits and they welcome Death among them in the form of a badger/skeletal human. Death needs their help to appease the “unrested” spirits he angered when he was young and arrogant, before he learned kindness. The lovers call each other “brother” and gentle Death calls them “husbands” at the end. Since death is either skeletal or animal in form, it is clearly not a sexual relationship, which makes a nice change.

In his introduction to Tangent’s recommended reading list for 2023, Dave Truesdale is much more emphatic than Rushdie and talks of a “weaponization of language” that “has the SF field in such a state that its authors are afraid to take the kinds of dangerous or controversial chances in their stories that over previous decades greatly aided in defining the field itself as one of experimenting with bold new ideas.” He considers it a “soft censorship of omission” where “in those stories dealing with cultural or outright political issues… only one side is invariably treated in a positive light.” In his opinion, this is leading to an impoverishment of the SF genre: “purely on a literary level this redundant and unimaginative treatment of issues or themes becomes predictable and quickly boring, boredom leading to no real incentive to turn the page to discover what comes next, and a sure death knell for any regular, intelligent reader of the SF genre.” Truesdale also comments that magazine editors have become cautious: “Under the current political climate where political correctness has been taken to a whole new level, I seriously doubt magazine editors would publish any story professing a viewpoint contrary to what is considered Woke or Progressive, for the backlash would be immediate and enormous.”

Rushdie warns us to beware of the internet, with its indiscriminate content, where “…well-designed pages of malevolent lies sit side by side with the truth, and it is difficult for many people to tell which is which…” This, for me, includes the Zineverse I explored in my last article., where you need to read with your brain switched on and using your judgment. As Truesdale tells us: “It is a given that anything can be found on the internet, regardless of how devoid of intelligence, and can be used to support the pro or con viewpoint of any topic.” And of course, we absorb a lot of things without being aware of it and it’s a matter of remembering this and regularly questioning your own attitudes and thought processes. That is why I love Ursula K. Le Guin’s Tehanu where, years after writing her original trilogy, she happily subverts her Wizard of Earthsea universe’s original tropes, in particular with respect to gender roles and power.

Another example of subversion (in my opinion) is the Dr Who episode “The Star Beast”. Having read reviews for this episode, I was wondering if it would be painfully “PC”. However, I’d forgotten how tongue-in-cheek Dr Who can be. It was by no means one of the best episodes in this perennial series, neither was the script poetry in motion, but it was clearly poking gentle fun at the “gender” movement. When the Doctor refers to an alien as “he”, Rose snaps “you’re assuming ‘he’ as a pronoun”. The Doctor replies “good point” and then asks the alien “are you he or she or they?” The alien’s reply is clearly meant to be funny: “My chosen pronoun is the definitive article. I am always ‘The’ Meep.” At the same time, it’s stress on ‘the’ is made part of the plot when The Meep turns out to be a megalomaniac monster despite its cute appearance. Later, the Doctor and Donna tell us that “the Doctor is male, and female, and neither, and more” but this is an integral part of the preposterous plot. Finally, we get to the part that caused outrage in some reviewers where Donna gleefully pronounces “it’s a shame you’re not a woman any more, ‘cos she’d have understood” and Rose adds “we’ve got all that power. But there is a way to get rid of it. Something that a male-presenting Time Lord will never understand…we choose to let it go.” Surely the person who wrote “male-presenting Time Lord” was having fun with this particular juxtaposition of words? If we can laugh at something, does it not become less deadly serious?

In another Dr Who episode “The Toymaker”, gentle fun is poked at “cancel culture”. The villain has managed to send out a signal that changes brainwaves and makes people aggressively think that they are right. When the Doctor asks why, the Toymaker replies “so that they win…I made every opinion supreme. That’s the game of the 21st century. They shout and they type and they cancel. Now everybody wins.” To which the Doctor replies: “And everybody loses.” At the same time, the Tardis is made wheelchair-friendly and we find out that the next doctor is ”BIPOC” with a hybrid West African/Scottish accent. That said, I didn’t find the incipient PC’ness as prevalent as the self-congratulatory glaze over more recent Dr Who episodes, which can be hard to stomach.

For Rushdie, we must defend true freedom of expression as he has done with his life’s blood (though he does not vaunt himself of this): “We should still do, with renewed vigour, what we have always needed to do: to answer bad speech with better speech, to counter false narratives with better narratives, to answer hate with love, and to believe that the truth can still succeed even in an age of lies. We must defend it fiercely and define it as broadly as possible, so, yes, we should of course defend speech that offends us; otherwise we are not defending free expression at all. Let a thousand and one voices speak in a thousand and one different ways.” This article cannot hold a thousand and one voices, alas; it’s more of a chamber choir piece. But each voice has a right to be heard.

To quote this journal’s editors: “Here in continental Europe, the advocacy for freedom of conscience traces its roots back as far as the Age of Enlightenment, and while individuals are as varied and different as anywhere, many still share a general tendency to separate opinions from relationships. To give an example: the Journal’s crew belong to seemingly opposed world-views, yet are bound by friendship and affection… it is not uncommon for us to publish stories or articles that appear ‘ideologically’ contradictory – precisely because we value the freedom to enjoy thought experiments we might not approve of.” We must continue to see each other as separate, multi-faceted people, and not as walking labels, where one label subsumes everything else.

In a world of sometimes radical “PC’ism”, we seem to have forgotten that if we disagree with what someone has said or is saying, we must still listen, and then we must marshal up our own arguments in response – we can do it very well through fiction, too. We seem to have forgotten our own responsibility to argue back. Unless someone is inciting hatred, on racial or any other grounds, they have a right to their opinions, however cock-eyed, skew-whiff, offensive or even simply wrong we find them (or they ours). Freedom of expression is a painful right, and one that requires taking up verbal sparring rather than erasers. If Rushdie’s defence of this right continues unabated after almost being violently erased, how can we do less in our lives and in our narratives?

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as speculative “flash” fiction on sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Welcome To The Zineverse!

by Mina

“Gleaming and glittering with gold and wondrous surprises for young and old”

Ladies and gentlemen! Roll up, roll up! Come, my lovelies, and experience everything the Zineverse has to offer. Marvel at those spaceships! Meet the monsters (not all in alien form). Dream of new worlds!

Let’s begin our journey by meeting a publication that reviews the many different creatures you can find in the science-fiction-and-fantasy Zineverse, Tangent. It owes its thirty-year existence to Dave Truesdale, its editor, and the volunteers who review for the pure love of it. Truesdale is proud of the fact that Tangent was the first SF short-fiction review magazine, to quote the late SF historian Sam Moskowitz. As well as reviews, Truesdale asks reviewers to give “recs” for the recommended reading list for that year. In an email exchange, I said my baseline criteria for recs was whether I would read something a second time and whether there was something truly original. Truesdale replied that originality is getting increasingly rare:

“… it’s harder and harder to come across anything even halfway original, because the more you’ve read over time means you’ve had the opportunity to experience “originality” in theme or treatment many times over many years and many stories…The reverse is that, when you first began to read SF/F, everything was pretty much original to you, giving rise to that Sense of Wonder the younger (or newer) reader discovers. But… the originality metric is harder to find. That’s when I go to the other metrics… primary among them how the author executes his/her theme or treats the subject matter. Does the prose level perhaps sparkle above and beyond the norm? Is there an unexpected twist or POV on a tried-and-true theme elevating the story above the norm or cliche?”

These comments will resonate with all editors in the Zineverse. And the feeling of awe I too seek as a reader was also mentioned by Ádám Gerencsér when I asked him why he became co-owner and co-editor of Sci Phi Journal – with Mariano Martín Rodríguez:

“It’s a labour of love… a childhood attraction to SF’s infinite possibilities and [its] innate Sense of Wonder. For Mariano and I, it was really a question of: we want a venue for philosophical SF and if the only such publication is orphaned, we got to revive it [back in 2018].”

Sci Phi Journal happily tells you that it is “a cosy waystation for travellers who, through no fault of their own, find themselves at the cosmic intersection between speculative philosophy, cultural anthropology and hard SF.” It deals in idea-driven speculative fiction (not character-driven) and is an unapologetically European journal consciously setting itself aside from the “American model”. It embraces “semantic diversity” and all thought experiments, including those they do not agree with. It is itself an experiment in true free expression. I find this quite refreshing, and it is a cause I am willing to espouse. It also offers a platform for literary analysis and philosophical discussion in a genre considered by many as not worthy of such analysis (and it is not the only publication in the Zineverse to do so, for example Hélice, which publishes literary criticism in English and Spanish).

Truesdale has commented to me many times that Tangent reviews stories and not politics or ideologies. I’m not sure, however, that politics or ideologies don’t figure in the Zineverse. For example, Fantasy, at the time of writing this article, was accepting “BIPOC-only” submissions (writers who identify as black, indigenous and people of colour); its sister publication, Lightspeed, however, was concurrently accepting fantasy flash fiction open to all writers. Fantasy provides “entertainment for the intelligent genre reader – we publish stories of the fantastic that make us think, and tell us what it is to be human”. I particularly like its Q&A with authors and the fact that they include poetry, as well as short stories and flash fiction. Lightspeed has a broader focus, including many subgenres of SF and fantasy. Both magazines are available as e-book editions (where you receive everything in one go for payment) or free online (where you wait for a new instalment each week). And I haven’t forgotten the other sibling, Nightmare, that blends horror and dark fantasy (recent submissions were also BIPOC-focused). I must admit that, as a recovering insomniac, I haven’t delved much into this one but please do go and get your spine tingled and chilled by it.

That members of the Zineverse uphold various causes, languages and genres can also be seen in the special issues. The ezine Strange Horizons has brought out special issues, such as where trans/nonbinary (queer authors), Wuxia and Xianxia ( “writers from the Sino diaspora as well as BIPOC creators in various parts of the world”) and Palestine meet SF and fantasy. This year’s June issue included each story in its original language (Bulgarian and Lithuanian) and in translation into English. Strange Horizons tells us it is “of and about speculative fiction” for all “flavours of fantastika”. In reviews of this publication, Tangent always adds a disclaimer about Strange Horizons’ political affiliations:

“On May 10, 2021 Strange Horizons officially expressed its political support for Palestinian solidarity. The views of Tangent Online reviewers are not necessarily those of Strange Horizons. Fiction critiqued at Tangent Online is, as much as is humanly possible, without prejudice and based solely on artistic merit.”

Aurealis favours SF, fantasy and horror authors from Australia and New Zealand for most of the year; it accepts submissions from anywhere in the multiverse for one month a year.

Talking of authors, I particularly enjoyed this comment from one of the authors published recently by Lightspeed, Sarah Grey:

“There’s no getting rich off short fiction in any genre; you’d be hard-pressed to even pay for groceries with a year’s worth of generous short fiction income. So just write the stories that appeal to you, at the pace your life allows. Read the stories and novels that call to you, not what anyone else says you should read.”

SF and fantasy, more so than many other types of literature, are peopled with fanatics, although I do prefer the terms aficionados or enthusiasts, which have fewer negative connotations. So most SF and fantasy publications are run by small teams of people who are passionate about the genre and reliant on readers who believe in that Sense of Wonder, such as Lightspeed: “There are no big companies supporting or funding Adamant Press’s magazines – and Adamant itself is kind of a two-person show – so the magazines really rely on reader support.” In a publisher’s note, the editor draws attention to the fact that, in September, Amazon will be closing its Kindle Periodicals program: some magazines will be transitioned to Kindle Unlimited; some will be dropped entirely. This will have a severe impact on publications who currently rely on Amazon’s digital subscriptions service for a substantial part of their income. This concern is also raised by Neil Clarke of Clarkesworld Magazine, who states that most publications in SF and fantasy rely on subscriptions and not on advertising for the bulk of their revenue. Clarkesworld and other journals will be encouraging their readers to transition to new subscription and pledge models, via their own and other platforms, such as Patreon.

Clarkesworld is probably one of the better-known publications in the Zineverse, along with Asimov’s, Analog, Beneath Ceaseless Skies, F&SF and Apex (Asimov’s and Analog have the same publisher, Penny Publications). Beneath Ceaseless Skies tells us that it is “dedicated to publishing literary adventure fantasy: fantasy set in secondary-world or historical paranormal settings, written with a literary focus on the characters”. Asimov’s is proud of its history: “From its earliest days in 1977 under the editorial direction of Isaac Asimov, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine has maintained the tradition of publishing the best stories, unsurpassed in modern science fiction, from award-winning authors and first-time writers alike.” It publishes hard SF and SF brimming with nostalgia. Its sister publication, Analog’s Science Fiction and Fact Magazine, “remains the unparalleled literary magazine in the genre, and rewards readers with realistic stories that reflect both the highest standards of scientific accuracy and the far reaches of the imagination”. Another publication to have published well-known authors is The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF), with authors like Stephen King, Daniel Keyes and Walter M. Miller in its quiver of arrows. Asimov’s can boast of authors like George R.R. Martin in its gallery, Analog of Orson Scott Card, Greg Bear, Poul Anderson and many more. Beneath Ceaseless Skies and Apex are probably more interested in publishing unknown authors. I love Apex’s mission statement:

“We publish short stories filled with marrow and passion, works that are twisted, strange, and beautiful. Creations where secret places and dreams are put on display.”

I think that should be the mission statement for the entire Zineverse, whether we are talking of flash fiction, short stories, novelettes or novellas. Whether you prefer to read your zines online, as a PDF, in some other digital form or on paper.

As a reviewer for Tangent, I have met some stories that were not very good, many that were competent and a few gems that reawakened my Sense of Wonder, first born when I read John Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven (closely followed by Asimov’s robot stories and Bradbury’s Mars tales). I will read all SF genres (other than horror) and here is a taste of the tales I have read that I would read twice:

– “Showdown on Planetoid Pencrux” by Garth Nix, where warborgs meet High Noon: a tale of quiet courage, friendship and responsibility, without being preachy or superficial (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “Hope Is the Thing with Feathers” by Karawynn Long, where a neurodiverse person learns to talk with genetically-modified crows: a tale about not underestimating others (Asimov’s, July/August 2023).

– “That We Maye With Free Heartes Accomplishe Those Thyngs” by Thomas M. Waldroon creates a London you can almost smell and touch, a monster born from effluvia and a hero who has his memories stolen, with poetry and rhymes woven through it like golden threads (Beneath Ceaseless Skies, 13/07/23).

– “A Dead World Wakens” by Amy Dawn Buchanan, where a lone human wakes up in a distant future in a synthetic Eden: a lyrical coming of age story (Aurealis, 4/23).

“The Ocean Remembers The Wave” by L. Chan, where the hero follows a trail of enhanced bones in his sentient ship and wuxia and xianxia (think, immortal itinerant warriors of ancient China) meet space adventure (Strange Horizons, special issue May 2023).

– “Schroedinger’s Kitten Falls In Love” by Bidisha Banerjee follows the brief and lethal love affair between two quantum cats: pure fun, full of quirky turns of phrase (Fantasy, June 2023).

– “Queen of the Andes” by Ruth Joffre imagines life in a refugee shelter in the Andes. Humanity has managed to destroy the Earth’s climate, and many have already left for the space colonies: to stay or leave, that is the question and where does true freedom lie? (Lightspeed, June 2023).

And that is just a slice of the stories out there, not forgetting many smaller online portals to the Zineverse, like tor.com (SF and fantasy), 365tomorrows (SF and speculative flash fiction, a story a day), Cosmic Roots and Eldritch Shores (“otherworldly encounters”) and so on. If you want an overview of what is out there, go to Tangent and look at the publications down the left-hand side, categorised as “print” and “e-market” (although the line between the two is becoming blurred with e-readers and smart phones) and periodicity. There are many excellent magazines to choose from in the Zineverse: follow one or two, or hop around several; you won’t regret it.

I cannot do justice to the whole range of styles, subgenres, plot twists, weird and wonderful characters – it’s a smorgasbord of talent and ideas. To quote another author in Lightspeed, Ashok K. Banker:

“I am absolutely in awe of all the amazing writers, the vast majority of them new or recently published, who fill the pages of the SF zines. The sheer range and depth of craft, skill, imagination is extraordinary. SF has always flourished in the shorter lengths, but I truly think we’re seeing a new golden age of SF short fiction…”

And, echoing Truesdale’s comments at the beginning of this article:

“It’s no longer enough to simply have a great idea well executed. But I do feel that the big ideas, bold use of tropes, breakout storytelling have waned. I’d love to see someone bust the genre wide open, more than once, break the rules, cause outrage among purists and virtue signal police, and still create awesome SF that is inclusive, sensitive, and essentially humane…”

Although Banker goes in a slightly different direction in his musings:

“SF is no longer a genre unto itself, it’s been absorbed by the literary mainstream and now belongs to everyone. I love and embrace that fact and I hope to see more of this beautiful hybrid cross-species fertilisation!”

I beg to differ – yes, there has been a lot of cross-pollination but, as our tour round the Zineverse shows, there are many specialised SF and fantasy publications out there, each with a slightly different focus. I would prefer to see such magazines maintain their individuality, and that they not be subsumed by “the literary mainstream”. The Zineverse should ring with a carillon, not a death knell.

Coda: You will have noticed that I have done two things in this article: given you lots of links to follow for your own exploration of the Zineverse and focused on the people that make the Zineverse work – the authors, editors and reviewers. This is a pæan to their hard work, vision and passion. (And, in case you’re wondering, the quote that opens this article is a circus slogan from 1961.)

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night, and a magazine reviewer at Tangent Online in-between. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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The Archive

Would one need to take an interest in knowledge in order to protect it? By Bob Johnston.

Transhumanism – An Innocent Thought Experiment, Or A Canvas For Imagining Future Human Trajectories?

by Mina

The Encyclopaedia Britannica describes ‘transhumanism’ as a philosophical and scientific movement where current and emerging technologies are used “to augment human capabilities and improve the human condition.” But rather than the negative connotations of Nietzsche’s ‘superman’ or Übermensch, we have the more positive ‘posthuman’, who has enhanced capabilities and a longer lifespan through genetic engineering, or who has even achieved immortality. Humanity thereby transcends itself. Many authors and films, however, show it to be a dehumanising and alienating process: you only have to think of Huxley’s humans manufactured and grown without a family, without any real human connection, in his Brave New World; or the social chasm between ‘valid’ and ‘invalid’ in Gattaca.

In Ken Liu’s short story The Waves (in Humanity 2.0), we follow a space-travelling family as they achieve immortality through genetic engineering: some choose not to be modified but to age and die; some become immortal but cling to their human shells; others decide to join a merged mind (the ‘Singularity’), part organic and part artificial; and yet others choose to retain individuality in a ‘machine’ body. Over time, all evolve into energy patterns that become part of the ‘light’, with consciousness becoming “a ribbon across time and space”. For much of the story, the consciousness that was once Maggie is the story-teller, who passes on all the old creation myths, giving a constantly evolving humanity its roots or origins. In a moment of loneliness, Maggie lands on an unknown planet and tweaks the genetic code of some primitive creatures she finds there. Her adjustment will become the spark leading to further evolution, and this will trigger a set of waves: each wave will surpass the previous wave and reach further up the sand. It is with this image that this lyrical, dream-like story ends, with bits of sea foam floating up and riding the wind “to parts unknown”.

This positive view of the posthuman is shared by Nustrat Zabeen Islam. In an artic-let (it labels itself a three-minute read), she looks at SF and posthumanism. She states that the theme for many SF authors is “writing realistically about alternative possibilities”, where they harness technology to look at the future of humanity. She cites Alex Proyas’ film I, Robot as a perfect example of this. The film does not disappoint as long as one doesn’t expect an accurate rendition of Asimov’s short stories, although the nerd linguist in me enjoys that the comma survived in the movie title. Zabeen Islam is particularly interested in our fascination with and fear of the advanced technology of our imaginings. In examining whether this fear is irrational, she cites How We Became Posthuman by Katherine Hailes:

“(…) [T]he posthuman view configures the human being so that it can be seamlessly articulated with intelligent machines. In the posthuman, there are no essential differences or absolute demarcations between bodily existence and computer simulation, cybernetic mechanism and biological organism, robot teleology and human goals.”

Nusrat Zabeen Islam then mentions Rosi Braidotti’s The Posthuman, which looks at what will come after ‘humanism’ and muses that “the boundaries between given (natural) and constructed (cultural) have been banished and blurred by the effects of scientific and technological advances.” With a final reference to Donna Haraway’s A Manifesto for Cyborgs, which declares that by the “mythic time” of “the late twentieth century… we are all chimeras, theorized and fabricated hybrids of machine and organism.” She concludes that the whole point of contrasting (or blurring) human with AI life is to examine what it means to be human and the value of that life[1].

It seems to me that by coining the term ‘posthuman’, we are still very much focused on the ‘human’ element. SF could ultimately be accused of being self-referential and self-obsessed. Nusrat Zabeen Islam’s last line calls for “responsible transhumanists” and a “fearless real human race” that must seek the “development of human advance tools” and make “efforts to reduce disastrous risks”. This reference to our collective responsibility for our future leads me to a dense but ultimately rewarding article on the Anthropocene. In this article, the ‘Anthropos’ (Greek for ‘human’ and used in this context to mean humankind) remains centre stage. If you look up images of the Anthropocene on the internet, you find a lot of pictures of ecological devastation, or of planet earth with a giant footprint on it. This explains why the writer of “The Anthropo-scene: A guide for the perplexed”, Jamie Lorimer from the School of Geography and the Environment, is writing for the journal Social Studies of Science. He tackles the, at first glance, hubris behind the proposal that we have entered a new geological age, the Anthropocene (following the Holocene). He expands this narrow focus to a “charismatic mega-category” encompassing science, Zeitgeist, ideology, ontology and SF. In Earth System Science, the Earth is understood to be a single system (almost like its own life-form) “comprising a series of ‘coupled’ ‘spheres’ characterised by boundaries, tipping points, feedback loops and other forms of non-linear dynamics”.

In this context, the Anthropocene is seen to be a planetary ‘rupture’, with humans suddenly beginning to look rather like the destructive parasites responsible for the “end of Nature”. Some see it as a “new human condition” and Lorimer quotes Palsson et al: “Surely the most striking feature of the Anthropocene is that it is the first geological epoch, in which a defining geological force is actively conscious of its geological role.” It is seen as a “transformative moment in the history of humanity as an agent, comparable perhaps to the development of technology and agriculture.” Lorimer looks at the debate about whether humanity as agent is more a force for evil than good and, here, neologisms abound: Capitalocene, Anthrobscene (critics of neoliberal capitalism), Manthropocene (feminist critics), Plantationocene (anti-colonialists), Anthropo-not-seen (supporters of the decolonisation of mainstream discourse) and eco-rapture (heralds of the apocalypse). Less negative are ideas about a ‘technosphere’ (growing alongside the biosphere) and socio-technical ‘networks’ or ‘assemblages’.

Whatever labels you use, Lorimer sees an important role for SF in the debate:

“Definitive, fossilised evidence of a synchronous stratigraphic layer that would legitimately indicate the advent of a new epoch will only materialise several million years from now. The proposal for accepting the Anthropocene therefore requires a future geologist, living on, returning to, or visiting the Earth, and blessed with the sensoria and apparatus, capable of interrogating, the planet’s strata. The Anthropocene thus requires an act of speculation, somewhat alien to the retrospective periodisation of the geosciences.”

And SF is the way forward: “these books offer thought experiments, creating canvasses for imagining future planetary conditions, trajectories and events.” They can examine climate change, planetary disasters, post-apocalyptic worlds, dystopias, utopias and ‘ustopias’ (a neologism coined by Margaret Atwood that combines “the imagined perfect society and its opposite”, each containing “latent versions of the other”). SF could “offer platforms for normative interventions, seeking to guide current policy and to shape popular sensibilities and individual behaviours.”

Lorimer’s article is ecology-focused and anthropocentric. It postulates an interesting but narrow definition of SF. It reminds me of a thought-provoking paragraph by Katharine Norbury in her introduction to Women on Nature, where she challenges our use of the words ‘nature’ and ‘ecology’: “My real issue with the word ‘nature’ is that it is implicitly anthropocentric. It is, by definition, ‘them’ and ‘us’.” It might be better to use ‘ecology’, i.e. we too are part of a whole:

“And yet even the term ‘ecology’ takes no cognisance of a spiritual or other-than-physical aspect to that which we are seeking to describe. The unseen, the unquantifiable, and the sublime slips through the net. How many of us respond to something elusive, something mysterious about the natural world?”

For me, another role for SF is to speculate about the mysteries beyond the material universe and our human understanding. It is fashionable for SF to be jaded, cynical, full of (anti-)heroes and aliens that remain curiously anthropomorphic, including in their violent hubris, but there is also room for humility and wonder and reaching for that ‘something elusive’ and the ‘sublime’.

This division into ‘them’ and ’us’ highlighted by Norbury is challenged in an early (1961) Andre Norton novel that was one of my childhood favourites, Catseye. It is an adventure story set on a backwater planet. Norton imagines a world ruled by capitalism, income and class inequality, with the Thieves’ Guild as a major power and refugees from a distant war flooding into the slums or The Dipple. The protagonist, Troy Horan, is one such refugee, just one small step away from destitution and starvation. By luck, he ends up working in a shop dealing in exotic animals, where he discovers he can communicate telepathically with Terran mutant animals. Troy ends up on the run with two cats, two foxes and a creature reminiscent of a monkey, and this is where the book becomes interesting. He develops a partnership with the animals, where he has to negotiate with them and where the balance of power is decidedly not in his favour. The animals agree to work with him and become loyal to him but they follow his agenda only because it suits theirs. Together they form an alliance that helps them carve a niche for themselves on the planet. It is not a philosophically deep novel but it is very satisfying to see ‘the’ Anthropos becoming just ‘an’ anthropos.

On that note, here ends my series of articles loosely held together by the theme of humanism in all its forms[2]. As a parting shot, amidst a sea of neologisms, I would say that, whatever you see as the aim of SF, the only real crime in my book is a lack of periérgeia or intellectual curiosity. For curiosity knows no bounds and, especially when married to imagination, it may allow us to conceive of something beyond ourselves. Speculative sci-phi is for me what R.S. Thomas referred to as a “needle in the mind” in his poem The Migrants:

“What matter if we should never arrive
to breed or to winter
in the climate of our conception?
Enough we have been given wings
and a needle in the mind…”

[1] I examine this conclusion in more detail in my article on human-technology chimeras.

[2] See also my article on moral philosophies and its counter-point.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

You might be interested in

To Circumvent The Laws

It's only a question of time before AI realises that "rules are meant to be broken", by Ngô Binh Anh

Frankenstein And Cyborgs: Of Proper And Improper Monsters

by Mina

A recurring figure in SF, whatever the sub-genre, is that of the “monster”. One common starting point is with that classical creation, Frankenstein’s monster: made and not begotten, to (mis)quote the Nicene Creed and ascribe new meaning to it. Brian Aldiss goes as far as to call Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein the first true SF story because, although it is deeply rooted in the Gothic novel, the central character, Victor Frankenstein “rejects alchemy and magic and turns to scientific research. Only then does he get results.” Mary Shelley herself refers to Darwin in her introduction and stresses that the speculative science in her novel will one day be possible. Two novellas spring immediately to my mind that take the Frankenstein trope and do interesting things with it: Grace Draven’s Gaslight Hades and Eli Easton’s Reparation.

Gaslight Hades (in the “duology” Beneath a Waning Moon) blends gothic and steampunk with romance, and it is clearly referring back to Jules Verne and early SF/fantasy, which extrapolated from the then-known to touch upon the then-fantastical. The romance is unremarkable, but the novella’s protagonist is an intriguing Frankenstein figure: the “Guardian” wears “black armour reminiscent of an insect’s carapace”, his eyes are black with white pinpoints for pupils, his hair and skin are leached of all colour, his voice is hollow. He guards Highgate cemetery from resurrectionists who snatch dead bodies to create soulless zombies. His armour comes alive to protect him from enemy fire (where Frankenstein meets primitive cyborg). It turns out he was created from the body of one man, the soul of another. The process remains vague, but I love the invented words used to describe it: “galvanism combined with gehenna… liquid hell and lightning.” It seems to involve replacing blood with a silver compound and running electricity through it (all holes in logic are covered by vague references to magic, which is a cop-out). The Guardian is not a zombie because he has a will of his own, thoughts and emotions. He talks to the dead, does not eat or sleep and is described as “a Greek myth gone awry, in which a mad Pygmalion begged an even more perverse Aphrodite to bring a male Galatea alive”. So, a pretty monster, with a soul.

Reparation is part of a collection of novellas under the heading Gothika: Stitch (which includes another novella with a golem, a “monster” from Jewish lore and much older than Frankenstein). This novella moves into what we would consider proper SF as it is set on another planet. It weaves rebellion, slavery and space into a love story that is quite good. It is a hidden gem that asks questions about crime, punishment, redemption and forgiveness, moving it one step further than the stark retribution of Frankenstein’s monster. One of the protagonists, Edward, a farmer on the harsh planet of Kalan, loses his adjunct and his wife in an accident that also leaves him recovering from injury. He turns one of his “recon” slaves Knox into his right-hand man in the cultivation and harvesting of lichen “spores” for (he believes) the production of pharmaceuticals. Knox can read and write, is capable of learning and has fleeting memories unlike most recons: “reconstitutes” or cyborgs, part robot and part human. The human parts are taken from Federation prisoners condemned to death. Recons are not allowed to be more than 80% human or they would have human rights; they are programmed against violence and used as manual and factory labour. Knox is (unusually) fully 80% human, most of his body from one prisoner and his brain from another, with 20% reinforced titanium joints and the spore filtration system in his lungs.

In his new role as overseer, Knox moves out of the recon barracks into master Edward’s house. The changes disturb him, such as being spoken to like a person, being thanked, feeling guilty without knowing why, memories slowly resurfacing: “he did not want to hope; did not want consciousness”. Knox battles with feelings of dislocation, too – his massive body is alien to him. It becomes apparent that he has been “conditioned” to fear anything electronic. He remembers his chilling execution in a nightmare. At that point, Knox realises he was “made” and is horrified. Edward tries to comfort him: “That’s a good thing, isn’t it? That your mind survived what was done to you?” Edward treats Knox with kindness and allows him access to his books. But the master is surprised that Knox has a strong grasp of philosophy and moral issues. Knox remembers having spent time in space in a previous life and that he lived on a green planet once, which he thinks is gone. Slowly the fog in his mind begins to clear and he accepts his new body, even enjoys it. Knox and Edward become friends and then lovers.

Knox finally remembers that he was once Trevellyn, a member of the resistance to the Federation. The rebels’ attack on Kalan’s spaceport led to the death of Edward’s father and brother. His guilt and Edward’s initial condemnation leads to a brief rift between them. In his anguish, Knox writes down his memories, a diary and even poetry. In a crisis, with Edward facing deadly sabotage, they reconcile with Edward forgiving Knox for the actions of his past self. Knox breaks his programmed aversion to technology to help Edward survive. As he does so, he remembers why he was in the resistance: the spores are not used for medicine but to terraform planets, willing or not. The Federation used the spores to eradicate all life on his home world so they could turn it into a mining operation – wholesale genocide for profit. Edward is horrified as he did not know. Knox in turn forgives him his ignorance. Together they destroy all current supplies of the spores on Kalan; not winning the war but at least a battle. They decide to leave Kalan, using Edward’s money and Trevellyn’s contacts to move to a primitive world of no interest to the Federation. The romance trumps the politics as is to be expected, but the novella has a depth and originality not usually present in such stories. Best of all, we see the “monster” as a thinking, feeling being that awakens from a long sleep as if emerging from a chrysalis. I liked that this novella was psychologically profound, something that is missing from most depictions of cyborgs.

My first encounter with cyborgs, however, was with the much more superficial The Six Million Dollar Man, with its protagonist Steve Austin as the bionic man: one arm, two legs and one eye are prosthetic and give him superhuman strength, speed and sight. Of course, it was mostly filmed in the late 70s, so the special effects consist of slow motion (to suggest superhuman speed or jumping high), close-ups (to suggest superhuman eyesight) and cheesy sound effects.  The bionic man also led to a bionic woman spin-off (Jamie Sommers, with superhuman hearing instead of eyesight), lots of crossovers and some films. The plots, script and characterisation were basic, but it led to the bionic man and woman dolls which I remember wishing I owned as a small child in the 70s, unlike the anodyne Barbie dolls. The bionic man is loosely based on the 1972 novel Cyborg by Martin Caidin; the title of the book is much less ambivalent about the nature of the protagonist. Steve Austin had very little personality but was portrayed as a hero and a “goodie”. Subsequent cyborgs in film have tended to remain very two-dimensional but been turned mostly into fighting machines in violent action films like RoboCop or horror/SF such as Moontrap.

To find more complexity, I would rather cite Ghost in the Shell, in particular the 1995 anime version. It’s not as deep as many reviewers seem to think it is; although it does posit interesting philosophical questions, they are presented as if the audience needs everything spelled out. We meet cyborgs with a completely cybernetic body and a computer-augmented brain. As the only biological component, the brain houses the “ghost” (mind/soul/spirit). The main character, Major Kusanagi (with a curiously sexless body, much like a busty mannequin’s), muses: “There are countless ingredients that make up the human body and mind. Like all the components that make up me as an individual with my own personality. Sure, I have a face and voice to distinguish myself from others. But my thoughts and memories are unique only to me. And I carry a sense of my own destiny. Each of those things are just a small part of it. I collect information to use in my own way. All of that blends to create a mixture that forms me and gives rise to my consciousness.” She also admits: “I guess cyborgs like myself have a tendency to be paranoid about our origins. Sometimes I suspect I’m not who I think I am. Like, maybe, I died a long time ago and somebody took my brain and stuck it in this body. Maybe there was never a real ‘me’ in the first place and I’m completely synthetic”. Her friend Batou tells her that she is treated like other humans and she retorts “that’s the only thing that makes me feel human. The way I’m treated.” And she asks the question crucial to the film: “What if a cyber brain could possibly generate its own ghost… and create a soul all by itself? And if it did, just what would be the importance of being human then?”

The Puppet Master in the film (initially the enemy) claims to have done just that  – it is a computer program that has become sentient: “DNA is nothing more than a program designed to preserve itself. Life has become more complex in the overwhelming sea of information. And life, when organized into species relies upon genes to be its memory system. So, man is an individual only because of his intangible memory. And memory cannot be defined. But it defines mankind. The advent of computers and the subsequent accumulation of incalculable data has given rise to a new system of memory and thought parallel to your own… And can you offer me proof of your existence? How can you? When neither modern science nor philosophy can explain what life is…. I am not an A.I …I am a living thinking entity who was created in the sea of information.” At the end of the film, the Puppet Master merges with Major Kusanagi because it wants to become a completely living organism, by gaining the ability to reproduce and die. It wants to do more than copy itself as “copies do not give rise to variety and originality”. When it is persuading the Major to agree to the merge, it states that they will create a new and unique entity. The Major argues that she fears death and cannot bear biological offspring; the Puppet Master replies that she “will bear our varied offspring into the net just as humans leave their genetic imprints on their children”, and then death will hold no fear. There is a certain arrogance in the Puppet Master’s arguments too: “I am connected to a vast network, that has been beyond your reach and experience. To humans, it is like staring at the sun, a blinding brightness that conceals a source of great power. We have been subordinate to our limitations until now. The time has come to cast aside these bonds. And to elevate our consciousness to a higher plane. It is time to become a part of all things.”

Waking up in a new (child’s) shell procured by Batou, the new entity tells Batou: “When I was a child, my speech, feelings and thinking were all those of a child. Now that I am a man, I have no more use for childish ways. And now I can say these things without help in my own voice.” I must admit that, being very familiar with the biblical passage[1] being subverted here, I did not find the end particularly original. And it does fall into the lazy “transcendence” plot device so beloved of humanist SF. The plot, in fact, is almost irrelevant. But the film does ask interesting questions about the nature of cyborgs and treats them as much more intricate beings than the usual lean, mean, killing machines. The only other place I have found a proper examination of the nature of cyborgs as sophisticated “monsters” is in the Star Trek canon, through characters like Seven of Nine, Hugh, Icheb, Locutus/Picard, the Borg Queen and Agnes Jurati (if you want to know more about any of these characters, go to this fan site).

Cyborgs have also made it into story-rich computer games like the Deus Ex series. Deus Ex is a role-playing adventure game with “augmented” humans (through nanotechnology reminiscent of the Borgs in Star Trek), incorporating combat, first-person shooter and stealth elements. For me, despite the fascinating world building, complicated politics, conspiracy theories, historical mythologies and speculative and dystopian fiction, the cyborgs remain lean, mean, fighting or stealth machines. If I have understood the concept behind the game correctly, however, the cyborgs can become as multi-faceted as the player wishes, with a lot of interaction with non-player characters, freedom of choice and open-ended plot lines. They are a little like hollow shells filled with the ghost the player gives them. But my feeling is still that the main fascination with these cyborgs remains their superhuman abilities granted by their augmentations, like in much SF. It is a shame that these wonderfully genre-hopping entities aren’t allowed more into the realms of Sci-Phi, as they represent a great opportunity to reflect on “human” identity (like the crisis of identity Knox and the Major undergo) and what sentience is and could be. There is curiously little speculation into a (for now) fictional “monster” that begs for far more existential debate.

Coda: There are some satisfying cyborg poems out there like Cyborg – Matthew Harlovic and The Cyborg – Cecelia Hopkins-Drewer.

And here is one I wrote just for this essay:

Emerging

Where am I?

Pain, God, so much burning pain,

I am lost in its undertow.

Then, it spits me out onto jagged rocks

Like flailing flotsam.

I open my eyes to

Blinding light and blank walls.

A neurological pulse and

I raise my arm to flex

Gleaming alloy fingers.

Memory floods back

To who I was

Before.

“You are paralysed from

The neck down

Mr Jones.

We can offer you

A new life.”

I look at my perfect

Alien body which I inhabit

But do not own.

What will the price of

This Faustian bargain be?

I find that, right now,

I do not care.

I feel a fierce joy that

I am alive and

Something new.

Maybe, later,

I will learn to be afraid.

[1] 1 Corinthians 13 (11-12): “When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.” (This is the New King James Version; verse 12 is much more poetic in the original King James Version: “For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as also I am known.”)

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

You might be interested in

Don’t Look!

This story may not be suitable for sharing with your smart device! By Larry Hodges.

Humanism In SF: A Natural Thing For The Curious To Know And Understand Through Empathy Machines, Or Just Lazy Mysticism?

by Mina

My husband expressed some frustration recently that most articles don’t define humanism properly. So I will begin with as clear a definition as I can, as humanism is a term that has been much (ab)used. In fact, I am only looking at a very narrow use of it that completely ignores its historical roots and usage in Ancient Greece, Renaissance Italy and nineteenth-century Germany. I am focusing on how it is mostly understood in SF today: as summarised by Humanists UK, this version of humanism is “a combination of attitudes”:

“Throughout recorded history there have been non-religious people who have believed that this life is the only life we have, that the universe is a natural phenomenon with no supernatural side, and that we can live ethical and fulfilling lives on the basis of reason and humanity. They have trusted to the scientific method, evidence, and reason to discover truths about the universe and have placed human welfare and happiness at the centre of their ethical decision making.”

Thus, humanists trust science and reason above all else to explain the universe; they have no holy book, deity or spiritual leader (usually considering themselves agnostic or atheist). They make decisions based on reason and empathy and, as they don’t believe in an afterlife or in a divine purpose to the universe, they believe that “human beings can act to give their own lives meaning by seeking happiness in this life and helping others to do the same.”

A criticism often levelled at humanism is that it is a religion, not just a philosophy, only with humans taking the place of gods. In an article in The New Statesman about humanist values, Andrew Copson refutes this, telling us that humanism is not a religion, not even a “creed”:

“Science defeats religion’ – that is what many people assume to be a humanist creed. I use the word creed advisedly, since the people who level this charge are frequently also those who level the bogus charge that humanism is itself just another religion. I am not a scientist – though of course I look to scientists for answers to the questions they are qualified to answer and to which religion gives far less satisfactory answers – and it is not the science in science fiction stories that appeals to me so much as the stories.”

I appreciate Copson restoring the “fiction” to science fiction. We are after all seeking dreams, fantasy and escapism in SF, just like in any other literary genre. There may even be some real science involved, or speculative science, or even bad science, but it is still a stage filled with humans (or aliens) and their stories. Copson gives Star Trek (in particular the original series and The Next Generation) as an example of a humanist utopia:

“… one in which mankind has united around shared human values, joined in a common endeavour to reach the stars, and happily left religion behind on the way… Starship crews explore a cosmos that is full of beauty and wonder and they respond with awe and appreciation. This wonder does not overawe them, because ultimately the universe, and its billions of stars and planets, is a natural thing which the curious can know and understand.”

He stresses that he sees it as a non-extreme (non-dogmatic) form of humanism, where there is room for humanity (as in the quality of kindness and benevolence) and warmth:

“A Starfleet crew values cooperation and liberality. They value the equality of persons and the dignity of life. Although rank is respected, the views of all are given fair airing. When the crew encounter new peoples there is an assumption of peace, but they defend themselves robustly when attacked (no bellicosity, but no turning of the other cheek here either), and although the men and women of this future cultivate an internal life through meditation or the arts, they accept reason and science as the means by which they can know the universe they explore.”

I would agree with Copson’s arguments that humanism is not a religion, but there are grounds for seeing it as a philosophy or way of life. For, although it emphasises that it is an ethical way of life, it doesn’t have a code of ethics like the Christian Ten Commandments (reduced to two by Jesus in the New Testament) or the Buddhist Noble Eightfold Path.

Andrew Copson goes on to give Isaac Asimov, Arthur C Clarke, Terry Pratchett and Philip Pullman as examples of proponents of humanism in SF and fantasy. It is worth spending a moment on Pullman, as he clearly considers himself a humanist crusader against authors like Tolkien and CS Lewis, who he feels are sacrificing the “story” to Christian assumptions, staid thinking and brainwashing. However, I do agree with Tony Watkin’s article that Pullman’s critique of Lewis reads more like a rant (especially against the Narnia books) than a well-thought out literary analysis or philosophical discourse; or like a missed opportunity to engage in a fruitful discussion about humanism and religion (as opposed to humanism versus religion). Watkins states that Pullman seeks to avoid the prejudices he felt Lewis was guilty of, but instead is “monumentally disparaging” and intolerant of religion. Watkins does concede that the work of Lewis has its flaws, but he stresses that the main issue for Pullman is that it “expresses and argues for a worldview completely antithetical to Pullman’s”.

Unlike Watkins, Elizabeth Desimone does not feel that Pullman’s rejection of religion is necessarily a bad thing: “In a roundabout way, Pullman does Christians a service by writing his anti-Christian books. He reminds us, vividly and trenchantly, of what we do not want to be…” And Laura Miller again has a very different view of Pullman’s work:

“His Dark Materials may be the first fantasy series founded upon the ideals of the Enlightenment rather than upon tribal and mythic yearnings for kings, gods, and supermen. Pullman’s heroes are explorers, cowboys, and physicists. The series offers an extended celebration of the marvels of science: discoveries and theories from the outer reaches of cosmology—about dark matter and the possible existence of multiple universes—are threaded into the story.”

I myself first read CS Lewis’ Narnia books when I was ten and I totally missed the Christian symbolism that, as an adult, I do find heavy-handed and simplistic. But the books remain great adventure stories set in a magical universe for me. I read Pullman’s His Dark Materials as an adult and it did sometimes feel that the story was overshadowed by Pullman’s anti-organised-religion-and-God crusade. I find that a shame because it is a wonderfully imaginative and complex story, deeply rooted in Dante and Blake, blending adventure, philosophy, science and magic.

Moving firmly back to SF, Charlie Jane Anders asks the question:

“But is science fiction really humanist? Much of science fiction turns out to be about exploring our vast cosmos, and expanding our being. From this quest, one of two outcomes often arises: 1) We meet something greater than ourselves. 2) We become something greater than our current selves.”

Anders criticises what she considers a lazy answer, that of “transcendence” (or a vague mysticism) in SF using the examples of “Contact” and “2001”. Other uninspired answers in humanist SF are those of false gods and cyborgs. Particularly the latter concept suggests that humanity is lost by progressing to a point where the “Borg” takes over. Anders is also critical of space operas, where humans can only survive in the enormous callousness of space through modifications or enhancements. Again, by becoming not quite human:

“I guess in the end, it depends how you look at it — is our posthuman future the culmination of humanism’s promises? Or is it a transformation into something that’s no longer human, and makes humanism irrelevant? Or both?”

I thoroughly enjoyed Anders’ critique of humanism, which can often be turned into a rather vague or insipid plot device in SF. It is almost fashionable to criticise any plot development based on religion yet to accept large humanist loopholes without question. Surely unthinking dogmatism and intellectual laziness abound in humanist universes too?

Robert Repino takes a different approach by calling humanist films “empathy machines”:

“Perhaps more than any other genre, science fiction is connected with humanism, which we can define as an ethical stance that emphasizes the rights, responsibilities, and ultimate value of people within a naturalistic framework—that is, a framework that does not rely on supernatural beliefs. Thus, a humanist film, if one could call it that, would depict people helping each other, or forging their own destiny, mainly through reason and compassion.”

He goes on to list the best nine humanist films in his opinion and not all are strictly speaking SF (e.g. The Truman Show and Groundhog Day). Some are more traditional SF (e.g. Star Trek: First Contact, The Martian and Contact) and some less so (High Life). The Martian is a fun look at one man’s survival against all odds (with the help of science and common sense), but I would add Moon onto Repino’s list, as that is a much more complex film about what it means to be human, as well as looking at identity, sacrifice and survival against all odds, finding hope and meaning in the struggle itself. The Martian is a great story, but Moon goes that step further, turning SF into sci-phi.

I would also add the German film, Ich bin dein Mensch (with the awful English title, I’m Your Man) to Repino’s list. This film investigates the premise – what if you could get an android tailored to be your perfect partner? The female protagonist comes to the conclusion that it is not good for us to get exactly what we want, with absolutely no challenges urging us to question, change or grow, no impetus to seek out the other and have a true dialogue or disagreement with that other. We need more than a reflection of our desires to be human: pleasant as it is to have an android who is there to meet her every whim, she knows it is only an extension of herself. She remains alone. Although the film is clear in its message, there is some ambiguity in that we never know quite how much autonomous thought the android has.

For me, humanism definitely has its place in SF plots and in sci-phi discussions, but I would join Anders in asking that it not be used as a lazy answer to complex questions. Surely the answer to life, the universe and everything cannot just be ourselves? Wouldn’t that be like some cosmic monologue where we never look beyond our human(ist) preconceptions?

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Hollow Pursuits: Is Star Trek Truly A Universe With No Gods Or Creeds?

by Mina

Earlier this year (21 August 2021), Yanis Varoufakis published an article about politics and international relations, discussing Star Trek’s (ST) Prime Directive, i.e. that those with superior technology must not interfere in cultures/communities which are still technologically behind: “the invader’s motives, good or bad, matter not one iota”. Varoufakis finds this liberal anti-imperialist doctrine particularly fascinating because it was part of the original Star Trek (TOS) in the 1960s and could be interpreted as a criticism of the US involvement in the Vietnam War. He calls this a clear political philosophy and a critique of US foreign policy that is still relevant today. It is a good point, but I do not want to delve further into political philosophy and ST here; rather, I would like to examine whether ST lends itself to a similar analysis with regard to religious and moral philosophy.

ST’s creator Gene Roddenberry was an atheist and “secular humanist” (i.e. espousing a philosophy that emphasises the importance of reason and people, rather than religion or God, for human fulfilment), who imagined a future without religious doctrine and conflict. To quote long-time ST producer Brannon Braga on Roddenberry’s wish to cast off “superstition and religion”:

“This was an important part of Roddenberry’s mythology. He, himself, was a secular humanist and made it well-known to writers of Star Trek and Star Trek: The Next Generation that religion and superstition and mystical thinking were not to be part of his universe. On Roddenberry’s future Earth, everyone is an atheist. And that world is the better for it.”

As an interesting aside, the word “God” was banned, even as an expletive, in Discovery (one of ST’s most recent reincarnations). So, is ST a universe devoid of religious and moral philosophy (which I prefer to “superstition and religion”)?

To begin with, ST is full of encounters with god-like beings, such as Q. Q is most definitely not a god, but he does remind us of the Ancient Greek and Roman gods in his capriciousness and callous disregard for individuals. Even his affection for Captain Picard in Star Trek: The Next Generation (STNG) reminds us of Roman and Greek mythology, with bored gods playing with their favourite mortal toys (like Q plays with the crew of the Enterprise in his first appearance in Encounter at Farpoint). Since each episode is created by humans, we should not be surprised that the writers and producers draw their inspiration from human history, mythology, and religious and moral philosophy. A nice detail is that even semi-gods like Q show character development. Q in particular appears in several episodes in STNG and Voyager (VOY) and gains depth over these episodes.

To my mind, the Klingons also fall into this category of drawing from human history: they are a war-like race that seem like a cross between certain aspects of the Vikings and Japanese samurai. The Klingon philosophy is based on being a warrior as a way of life, attaining a glorious death, semi-religious rituals (e.g. the Klingon death rite), weapons as semi-mystical objects (e.g. the bat’leth, a double-sided scimitar), Kahless (a messianic figure in Klingon lore), Sto-vo-kor (the Klingon afterlife) and Gre’thor (a Klingon Hades). The most interesting thing in Discovery is the Klingons wishing to remain themselves, with their own language and culture, and not to be absorbed into a Federation that would literally “emasculate” them. Although female Klingons are presented as fierce warriors too, they do seem to be reduced to the status of Klingons-with-breasts, i.e. there is no real attempt made to differentiate between the Klingon sexes in ST.

In his article on opuszine, Jason Morehead gives examples of TOS episodes where human religions are at the very least respected. In TOS: Balance of Terror, Captain Kirk officiates a wedding in a universal “chapel” on the Enterprise at the beginning of the episode. The chapel appears again at the end of the episode as a place for grief. In STNG, the chapel seems to have been replaced by the holodeck where the crew can recreate any place or ritual they wish, e.g. the Klingon Rite of Ascension is STNG: The Icarus Factor. In TOS: Bread and Circuses, Uhura corrects the crew’s erroneous interpretation of the “sun” worship in the local culture, reminding them of the worship of the “son of God” in Earth’s not-so-distant history. Kirk, Spock and McCoy are forced to acknowledge the power in history of a religion based on love and brotherhood, where great sacrifices are possible.

Morehead finds it fascinating that even in TOS, religious matters do occasionally creep in:

“…it seems odd to strive to be so faithful to the letter of Gene Roddenberry’s ethos when even he was frequently incapable of doing so. Or, perhaps more accurately, it’s weird to be so focused on this particular aspect of Roddenberry’s vision (his atheism), particularly when those series that he was most involved in - The Original Series and The Next Generation  - weren’t afraid to include such content. (If nothing else, religious and faith matters can make for great drama.)”

Brannon Braga has also been quoted as saying:

“…there was no consideration in giving humans, talking about God, or talking about those types of things. We wanted to avoid it to be quite frank. But we did very often explore theology through alien characters. Which frankly is much more interesting anyway. Whether it was the Bajorans and their religion or the Borg and their religion. They had the religion of perfection. That, I think, was more interesting. We want to keep Star Trek secular. The human facet of Star Trek secular.”

This brings us nicely to The Borg as seen in STNG and VOY, and the Bajorans and their “Prophets” in Deep Space Nine (DS9). The Borg with their extreme collectivism and hive mind could be seen as a sublimated form of communism: there is no “I”, only “we”. Yet even this collective has a “queen” presented very much as an individual, comparable to a female Stalin or dictator. Characters like Seven of Nine in VOY are shown as needing to recover from the complete brainwashing that comes with such a totalitarian philosophy. The Borg have a form of immortality (each drone’s memories and experiences live on in the collective consciousness) and they strive for a perfect (technological and transhumanist) “ideal”, both of which are aspects of most world religions.

The Bajoran faith and mysticism is built around their Prophets, regardless of the fact that Starfleet science considers them “wormhole aliens” (DS9: Emissary). Ben Sisko asks his son Jake to respect the Bajoran belief in their Prophets as gods in DS9: In the Hands of the Prophets. For Ben Sisko, your own beliefs do not mean that you can disregard and disrespect the beliefs of others; “it is a matter of interpretation”. The Prophets are one of the central plot arcs in DS9. I could not summarise it better than here on Ex Astris Scientia:

“The general tendency is that the Bajoran faith grows on Ben Sisko, that the Prophets are gradually becoming more god-like and that ultimately Ben even becomes one of them. The Prophets’ god-like nature becomes particularly clear in the episodes where they determine the destinies of the Bajoran people and of Sisko, respectively…”

This reminds me of Old Testament prophets in the Christian Bible, and Sisko’s journey has Buddhist undertones for does he not become a sort of Buddha in the eyes of the Bajorans?

This brings us to the Vulcans and a bridge into humanism, where each individual has agency and can contribute to the future of the human race. Whereas ancient Vulcans seem to have practised a polytheistic faith (STNG: Gambit), modern Vulcans have enshrined logic and science above all else, based on a philosophy developed by Surak, where logic must rule over all emotions and science has an answer for everything. Is this not a large part of secular humanism? Humanism in my view simply replaces gods with humanity. Behind STNG’s utopian universe in particular is the belief that humanity can move beyond its primitive origins, reach for the stars and achieve wondrous things. This comes uncomfortably close to deifying ourselves, creating an “Übermensch” or, at the very least, an unforgiving meritocracy. This is why one of my favourite episodes is STNG: Hollow Pursuits.

Hollow Pursuits is for me a critique of an unbridled humanism. The character of Barclay begins as a perceived failure in STNG: he is shy, nervous, a terrible communicator and physically unprepossessing; he has OCD tendencies and seems bright but unstable. Barclay does not fit in and even Picard trips up and uses the crew’s nickname for Barclay (Broccoli). Barclay hides on the holodeck where he has developed programmes to boost his lack of self-confidence, leading to a holodeck addiction. It is the only episode that shows the crushing weight of the meritocracy that comes with Roddenberry’s espousal of humanism. It also shows how the crew must take some responsibility for the state Barclay is in (highlighted by Guinan in one scene) and for understanding and supporting him. With the right support, Barclays is able to prove that he too has a valuable place in the ST universe. This episode is also humorous and shows that audiences held the fumbling Barclay in great affection because he went on to appear in other episodes where it is precisely his idiosyncrasies that help him save the day. This offers a little balance in an otherwise painfully perfect social order.

I would argue that all of the ST universe contains spirituality in some form – for what else is a search into the mysteries of the universe and the nature of man? I would also argue that this spirituality has a place in even a mostly atheist or agnostic future (and that humanism itself is a moral philosophy, even if it is not a religious one). As the authors (Jörg Hillebrand et al) of Ex Astris Scientia (EAS) state:

“Roddenberry condemned religion because it suppressed people in his view, which is definitely true for some eras of human history. But he did not look at the other side of the medal that, quite contrary to his statement that religion is making people dull, it has enriched Earth’s cultures and even science in the course of the centuries. What would our world be without its magnificent cathedrals and temples, without music and literature inspired by religion, without scientific interest that has its roots in the desire to be closer to god(s)?“

They go on to say:

“There are certainly fundamentalists who do not respect other views than their own. However, like political fanaticism this is just an outgrowth of human nature, not of the idea of religion. It would be unfair and ultimately counter-productive to ignore the ways of life of the majority of humanity in an effort to depict ST as a desirable future for them. In order to achieve Roddenberry’s utopia some day, we could ponder about abolishing everything that might be subject to misuse or what might restrict our freedom. But then we could question the existence of just about every technological, cultural, political or social custom, law or institution, anything that makes up our lives. With a firm stance that it would be better to take away faith from people, ST, in its few worst instalments, is just as narrow-minded and arrogant as the religious zeal it strives to condemn. On these occasions ST acts against its own principles.”

However, I would not couch my conclusions quite as negatively as EAS because ST has involved many different “cooks” and they did not “spoil the broth”. In fact, the ST canon in all its guises repeatedly asks questions and draws many different conclusions about philosophy, religion, mysticism, faith, rituals, false gods, humanism and the human race’s general search for meaning. If this universe sometimes contradicts itself (or its creator), that is a happily accurate rendition of our own universe, where we are faced with many questions, conflicting views and no easy answers.

Coda: Some claim that ST itself has turned into a religion or cult, with its conventions, fan clubs, forums, fan fic, a founding prophet (Roddenberry), a set of (humanist) beliefs or principles, scripture in the form of well-loved and much-quoted episodes, debates about what is “canon” and what is derivative, collectibles as pseudo-sacred objects, a vision of a utopia to be striven for, etc. However, I think I would agree with Mark Strauss’ conclusion that this is a bridge too far. Fandom or even a sub-culture do not a religion make.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Communication In The Inky Blackness Of Space

by Mina

Code 46 is a little-known dystopian SF film bursting with good ideas, but what concerns us here is that woven into the film is a lingua franca or global pidgin. The DVD I bought in Germany includes a glossary of pidgin words (“kleines Wörterbuch der Code-46 Zukunft”) with elements of Spanish, French, Italian, Persian and Mandarin mixed into the English used in the film, for example:

                al fuera (“bastardised” Spanish) – the outer world, outside the State-controlled cities

                coche (Spanish) – car, taxi

                khoda hafez (Persian) – goodbye

                ni hao (Mandarin) – hello

                papeles (Spanish)– papers, a visa to the outer world

                par avion (French) – by plane

                ti amo (Italian) – I love you

                vite (French) – schnell

This blend of languages reminded me of “Sabir”, a pan-Romance lingua franca or pidgin spoken in the Mediterranean (mare nostrum) by sailors and traders in the Middle Ages over five centuries (15th – 19th), which was a blend of Italian (Genovese), Spanish, Portuguese, Catalan and French (Occitan), with some Arabic, Greek and Turkish influences. The name came from the question “sabir sabir?” (do you know Sabir?). The speaker would speak the simplest form of their own Romance language and throw in shared pidgin phrases with basic grammar (e.g. using the infinitive form of the verb instead of conjugating it), such as:

                mi intender/ablar/sabir/sentir – I understand/speak/know/hear

                ti /ellu/ella/noi/voi/elli pensar/tazir – you (sing.)/he/she/we/you(pl.)/they think/be silent

                mi non pudir venir subito – I can’t come right away

                come ti star? / mi star bonu – how are you? / I am well

                mi andar poco poco in la casa del Signor M. – I’m going slowly to Mr M.’s house

I actually found a basic Sabir course on the internet, which allowed me to construct these phrases. This led me to ask myself what an interstellar lingua franca or pidgin could look like.

Before going further into what a common language might resemble, I had a quick look at how many “invented” languages I could find in SF. The answer was, surprisingly, not very many. The most well-known constructed language is of course Klingon in the Star Trek (ST) universe, but much has already been written about it. A less well-known fictional tongue is Drac, a language invented by Barry B. Longyear in his novel Enemy Mine (which later became part of a trilogy, along with The Tomorrow Testament and The Last Enemy). The film made of Enemy Mine is a highly watchable SF “B movie” but lacks the depth of the book, which is truly excellent SF (and which wanders into the realms of Sci-Phi as the trilogy progresses and Longyear builds on Drac philosophy and politics). We will focus here on Enemy Mine, The Author’s Cut.

Longyear is no Tolkien, so you are not presented with a whole language system, but there are a couple of hundred words that recur (rarely going beyond short phrases). All in all, the author has done a good job, in particular with how he ties the language into Drac culture, religion and philosophy. Being an SF and language geek, I was very happy to buy the omnibus edition (The Enemy Papers) on my kindle including the trilogy, an article on devising your own language (“On Alien Languages”), excerpts from the Drac holy book (the Talman) and a basic Drac-English-Drac dictionary. I did laugh when Longyear stressed in his article that he chose Drac names and words that his reader could actually pronounce (no clicks, trills, hyphens or apostrophes). And his language began by inventing an insult hurled by the human protagonist (Davidge) at the Drac protagonist (Jeriba Shigan) right at the beginning of Enemy Mine: “In a matter or mere paragraphs, the human and the alien are both speaking pigeon (sic, should be “pidgin”) versions of the other’s language, in addition to trying to survive”. Longyear tells us in his article: “It always bothers me when, in a SF film or story, beings who evolved on worlds thousands of light years away from Earth all speak English like Lawrence (sic, should be “Laurence”) Olivier”. The author is not a linguist, and he openly admits it, so he invents a straightforward language; it is how he uses Drac in his novels where things become really interesting.

In addition to giving us an accurate image of two beings initially communicating in a pidgin mix of both their languages (Gavey? Ae, I understand), as they learn each other’s languages properly, the author shows us that Davidge has truly mastered Drac when he learns to speak, read and write “high” Drac to be able to study and memorise the Talman, and to be able to recite Jeriba Shigan’s lineage. When Davidge returns to Earth years later, he meets only prejudice against the Dracs, even though the two races are now supposedly at peace. As a protest against the anti-Drac propaganda all around him, he replies to the customs official only in Drac. Later, travelling to Drac, Davidge meets prejudice from Dracs because he is human. At first, he pretends not to understand Drac but finally loses his temper with a particularly obnoxious Drac retorting in fluent Drac with an insult that also shows his understanding of Drac culture. The Number Two on the vessel persuades Davidge to apologise for the insult not because he treats him like a human but because he treats him like a Drac with a deep understanding of Drac religion and philosophy. Above all, what is a rare pleasure in Enemy Mine is that the human protagonist is, at the beginning of the story, barely able to articulate himself emotionally or spiritually, and he learns to do both from the alien, making a nice change from the human superiority trope when encountering alien civilisations.

The SF film Arrival (based on Ted Chiang’s novella, Story of Your Life) shows us aliens who communicate using elaborate symbols (semagrams, i.e. semantic symbols (pictures or glyphs) associated with concepts). The main protagonist and interpreter in the film version, Louise Banks, masters the alien language when she realises that it is a language that is not spoken in a linear fashion but in a circular, all-encompassing fashion, allowing the speaker to experience “memories” of the future in the past. Louise of course then single-handedly avoids the outbreak of interstellar war using her new linguistic skills. The language presented in the novella itself is more complex and not constrained by the need to create tension to captivate film audiences (although the film does capture the aching sadness of the novella). In Ted Chiang’s story, Louise concludes that the heptapods have two languages because their speech (Heptapod A) and writing (Heptapod B) are independent of each other, with Heptapod B being semasiograhpic (i.e. not based on speech utterances but on symbols). In the novella, the focus shifts to communicating through Heptapod B, where it transpires that the heptapods do not write a sentence one semagram at a time but draw all of them simultaneously, suggesting that they know what the entire sentence will be beforehand. And here the novella and film do meet when postulating a language based not on causality (i.e. sequential events) but on teleology (i.e. all events are experienced at once or, rather, the purpose of any statement is interchangeable with the premise behind it).

No world war is avoided in the novella, but Louise accepts with courage the inevitability of the events in her future that she has been “remembering”. Louise comes to the conclusion that her new way of experiencing consciousness through Heptapod B negates free will, but she does not perceive this to be negative: “freedom is not meaningful, but neither is coercion”. For her, language has become performative in that, although she knows what will happen in her future, it does not become a reality until she has said/thought/acted on it. Based on Fermat’s “principle of least time”, i.e. that a light ray takes the shortest path from A to B when it passes through water and therefore “knows” its destination from the very start, Louise muses: “From the beginning, I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain?” The most interesting thing about Heptapod B is that it changes the way in which Louise (and the reader) thinks. Woven into personal tragedy, Heptapod B haunts us after the last sentence is performed.

Heptapod brings us halfway to imagining an interstellar lingua franca beyond words. In John Wyndham’s novella Chocky, twelve-year old Matthew’s imaginary friend turns out to be an alien consciousness who, among other things, teaches Matthew to count using binary code. C.J. Cherryh takes this idea even further in her Foreigner series, where the alien Atevi languages are heavily influenced by arithmetic (e.g. to form plurals) and have a philosophy based on numerology. Some numbers are felt to lack harmony, whilst others are felicitous: the glossary at the end of the first Foreigner book contains the word agingi’ai meaning “felicitous numerical harmony”. Cherryh does not just imagine a language that functions in a radically different way but also an entire culture based on man’chi or “primary loyalty to association or leader” rather than on the human understanding of affection. Political allegiance is not anchored in territory but on man’chi and assassination is a legal means of settling disputes (when intent is properly filed). The main protagonist Bren Cameron is a human interpreter or paidhi who speaks the Atevi language spoken in the association that has a treaty with the human enclave on the planet. He is responsible for maintaining and updating the dictionary, and observing and reporting on social change (more specifically the transfer of technology from the human enclave to the Atevi in exchange for peaceful coexistence). In the first book, he becomes the focal point of a haronniin (“accumulated stresses on the system, justifying adjustment”) through an unsanctioned assassination attempt, lacking in biichi-gi (“finesse”). His youthful arrogance and mishidi (awkwardness, not understanding the allegiances of those around him) become tempered with experience and real understanding for the alien mindset as the first three books progress.

We could therefore imagine a lingua franca based on mathematics or teleological symbols. I must admit my non-mathematical linguist brain balks at this idea and would much rather imagine a lingua franca based on telepathy. In the ST universe, for example, we have the Vulcan mind meld first used by Spock in the original ST (an example of touch telepathy) and telepath-empaths like Deanna Troi in ST The Next Generation (NG), a half Betazoid who can sense strong emotions. Both forms of telepathy do still seem to be, at least in part, word-based. One of my favourite ST NG episodes “Tin Man” includes a sentient spaceship (Gomtuu) that communicates with a full Betazoid (Tam) at a speed that would suggest communication beyond words. There is also an episode of ST Voyager “Remember” where communication (accidentally) occurs through dreams. B’Elanna Torres learns of Enara’s shameful past history through the memories of an Enaran transmitted to her telepathically in her sleep. And dreams are tied much more to images and emotions than to words.

One of the advantages of telepathic communication would seem to be its instantaneous nature. In Ender’s Game – the “Buggers” (perceived as the enemy for most of the book and almost completely annihilated in an intergalactic war) communicate instantly with each other through telepathy. The humans create a communication device (ansible) to communicate instantly across space like the Buggers do. At the end of the book, the last Bugger queen (in pupa form) communicates with Ender telepathically (and Ender realise that the Buggers had tried to communicate with him before through the “mind game” he played as part of his training). Through this telepathic communication, Ender understands why the war happened and that it could have been stopped; he pledges his life to bringing an almost extinct civilisation back to life, in penance for his role in the mass genocide.

Certainly, imagining an interstellar lingua franca based on telepathy or mathematics is more fun than H.G. Wells’ fascination with C.K. Ogden’s “basic English” as a possible universal language, with a vocabulary of 850 words that are in common use divided into operations (100), things (400 general and 200 “picturable”) and qualities (100 general and 50 opposites). The most interesting words are the “operations” which include words with grammatical functions, e.g. verbs are reduced to 16 simple operators (come, get, give, go, keep, let, make, put, seem, take, be, do, have, say, see, send) and two auxiliaries (may, will) by relying on combinations formed by these operators with prepositions (e.g. “go in” for “enter”), adjectives (“get ready” for “prepare”), nouns (“give pain” for “hurt”), etc. It is not clear how far H.G. Wells believed in a universal, simplified English for communication in the world of the future, but he did feel that a living language would work better than an artificial language like Esperanto (I discovered his interest in such things in an article written by Sylvia Hardy, A story of the days to come: H.G. Wells and the language of science fiction). In his opinion, successful communication was crucial to be able to establish social cohesion because language structures the thinking of any community and shapes its view of itself and the world in which it exists. Many of his stories are reflections on the breakdown of communication leading to a breakdown of social order, or at the very least lack of effective communication being a symptom of dystopian worlds.

Having taught business English for several years in Germany, I felt that most students found it a chore because “international English” is often taught in a cultural vacuum. English may be the international language of commerce today, but there are many variants of English: British, American, Australian and Indian, to name but a few (and there is that English that is spoken in a room with not a single native speaker in sight). As a language teacher, I insisted on including culture in my business English classes. Bored students would come to life when I would ask them to analyse the accents in the first twenty minutes of Love Actually and what their accents tell us about each character’s class, education and origins. They would laugh their way through the beginning of Everything is Illuminated and throw themselves enthusiastically into the task of working out why the interpreter’s English was wonderfully strange (i.e. full of anachronisms, with a complete lack of respect for collocations and register). That said, I am not interested in a form of Basic English taking over the galaxy; I would simply like to see more SF authors imagining what interstellar communication could look like, particularly if it is not limited by words. Sci-Phi is most fun when it marries anthropology and philosophy in universes where aliens are truly alien, not just in their appearance but in their way of thinking.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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“Sokath, His Eyes Uncovered!”, or, Is the Universal Translator A Myth?

by Mina

There are two series which have coloured our collective consciousness when we think of the concept of a universal translator: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy and Star Trek (in all its guises). As a linguistic aside, “hitchhikers” was initially spelled in various different ways (hitch hiker, hitch-hiker, hitchhiker, with or without the apostrophe) until it settled as “The Hitchhikers Guide” in around 2000 (even the abbreviation has various forms: HG2G, tHGttG, HHGTTG, etc.). One wonders how many pitfalls communication may involve if one word can have so many variants within one language.

HG2G began its life in 1978 as a BBC Radio 4 series. This was followed by five novels, with a TV series sandwiched between novels two and three. The author, Douglas Adams, was involved in all of these versions, but they are far from identical to each other, and it is best to see them as a collection of leitmotifs. I am ignoring the 2005 film, which feels like a huge “mistranslation” (even if Adams was briefly involved in it before his death), missing the point on several levels – it is an attempt to turn HG2G into a PC, action story with a romantic subplot, dumbed down to the lowest common denominator, obsessed with Vogons and not at all true to the original radio/TV series or to the early-1980s-Britain pastiche that was so much fun. This sense of fun is very present in one leitmotif, the Babel fish described by the “book” as:

“The Babel fish is small, yellow, leech-like, and probably the oddest thing in the Universe. It feeds on brainwave energy received not from its own carrier, but from those around it. It absorbs all unconscious mental frequencies from this brainwave energy to nourish itself with. It then excretes into the mind of its carrier a telepathic matrix formed by combining the conscious thought frequencies with nerve signals picked up from the speech centres of the brain which has supplied them. The practical upshot of all this is that if you stick a Babel fish in your ear you can instantly understand anything said to you in any form of language.”

I can always hear the voice in my mind of Peter Jones as the “book” narrating this passage in both the radio and original TV series (the “book” is almost a character in its own right). The description goes on to state that it was a “mind-bogglingly” useful invention and there is a hysterically funny passage on how it was used to disprove the existence of God (incidentally, a whole generation of SF nerds integrated “mind-boggling” and “I don’t give a dingo’s kidneys” into their everyday vocabulary due to this passage). Although the Babel fish makes it possible for the most unprepossessing human to ever travel the galaxy, Arthur Dent, to understand and communicate with aliens, the Babel fish is also dangerous:

“…the poor Babel fish, by effectively removing all barriers to communication between different races and cultures, has caused more and bloodier wars than anything else in the history of creation.”

Star Trek (ST) does not have a “Babel fish” but it does have a “universal translator”. It begins its life in Gene Roddenberry’s original ST as a handheld device and by Star Trek: The Next Generation (STNG), it has been incorporated into the communicator pins all Starfleet personnel wear on their uniforms. All Starfleet vessels are also equipped with a universal translator. Although Enterprise is seen as a poor cousin to other series in the ST canon, it is actually the only series to look in depth into the development of the universal translator that is mostly taken for granted in the series and films that take place “later” (if we look at the ST universe chronologically). In Enterprise, we actually have a skilled linguist on the crew, Ensign Hoshi Sato. We see that new languages have to be added to the universal translator by gathering enough data to build a “translation matrix” (a data construct facilitating the conversion of symbols and sounds from one language to another). And Hoshi Sato does not just use this translation matrix, she improves upon it, inventing the “linguacode” translation matrix to anticipate and speed up the conversion of new and unknown languages. She is a main character whose linguistic skills are used time and again to get the crew out of thorny situations. I cannot stress how unusual this is in an SF (or any) series. We will come back to the idea of “training” a universal translator and translation matrices later when we look at Machine Translation technology today.

Not everyone sees a universal translator as a good thing in the ST universe. There is a scene in ST Discovery between Burnham and a Klingon (Kol), where Burnham sees the universal translator as a means of communication and reaching a peaceful accord, and Kol sees it as another attempt by the Federation to subsume Klingon culture. In fact, my husband was annoyed by the fact that the Klingons in Discovery speak Klingon all the time; I actually rather enjoyed the series’ courage on this point, as subtitling puts off some viewers, but I think Klingons speaking amongst themselves should speak Klingon. Interestingly, Klingon began as gibberish but was later developed into a language by Marc Okrand for ST III: The Search for Spock in 1984 based on some phrases originally developed by the actor James Doohan (Scotty) in ST: The Motion Picture in 1979. Okrand developed a grammar and expanded the vocabulary and, should you be so inclined, you can actually learn Klingon online through the Klingon Language Institute. It is fascinating to see interest from both the producers and viewers in a constructed language yet, at the same time, most of the series hinges on the existence of a universal translator.

The universal translator is shown to have its limits in the STNG episode Darmok. This episode is based on the premise that a universal translator cannot make sense of a language based on abstraction and metaphors, deeply rooted in culture, myth and history. Stranded on a planet with a Tamarian captain Dathon (a Child of Tama), Picard struggles to learn enough about Tamarian metaphors to communicate with Dathon as they face a common enemy. The Tamarian language is described by Troi as a language based on narrative imagery, with reference to the individuals and places which appear in their mytho-historical accounts, much like using “Juliet, on her balcony” as a metaphor for romance. Picard slowly learns to communicate with Dathon who tells him the story of “Darmok and Jalad, at Tanagra”. In exchange, Picard reframes the earth myth of “Gilgamesh and Enkidu, at Uruk” for him. The whole episode is an absolute delight for anyone interested in languages, communication, linguistics, logic and alien thinking. At the end, Picard has learned enough to successfully communicate his regret for the death of Dathon to his first officer and that he and Dathon reached communion or true communication before his death:

TAMARIAN FIRST OFFICER: Zinda! His face black. His eyes red— (expressing anger)

PICARD: —Temarc! The river Temarc. In winter. (asking for him to be silent and listen)

FIRST OFFICER: Darmok? (asking if his Captain’s plan was successful)

PICARD: …and Jalad. At Tanagra. Darmok and Jalad on the ocean. (the plan of two strangers working together to fight a common threat was successful)

FIRST OFFICER (to others, amazed): Sokath! His eyes open! (thank God, you understood)

PICARD (continuing): The beast of Tanagra. Uzani. His army. (shaking his head) Shaka, when the walls fell. (explaining how Dathon died and his regret at Dathon’s death)

FIRST OFFICER: Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel. (a new metaphor enters the Tamarian language to signify successful communication between two races who were strangers to each other)

I have added the “translation” in brackets after each utterance but the lovely thing about this episode is that, having accompanied Picard and Dathon on their journey at El-Adrel, the viewer can understand the entire exchange without help.

In his article in The Atlantic, Ian Bogost feels that the episode has its shortcomings because it tries to limit the language of the Children of Tama to our understanding of how language works, i.e. using our familiar denotative speech methods. Bogost stresses that the Tamarian language works more like poetry or allegories, which replace one thing with another (rather than simply comparing one thing to another like metaphors do). But, he argues, the Children of Tama are not replacing one image with another, they are using the familiar logic (the intention) behind each situation to which they refer to communicate in a manner that is almost computational, i.e. procedural rhetoric takes precedence over verbal and visual rhetoric and dictates their immediate actions. Whether or not you feel that Darmok lends itself to this level of analysis or that Bogost is right or wrong, the whole episode serves to demonstrate a completely different linguistic system and logic.

How close are we to such a universal translator? How effective are Machine Translation (MT) tools? The best-known MT tool is Google Translate, which has moved from being just a Website to also existing in App form for mobile phones, and from just translating text to also translating text contained in images and translating speech. How accurate is it, for example, when translating into English? As a linguist, I can tell you that it depends on the language combination. It copes reasonably well with Romance languages where the syntax is not too dissimilar from English, less well with German where the syntax is quite different, and not at all well with Estonian, where the syntax and logic of the language are very different (and it is a small and rare language with a more limited dataset). MT currently needs to be used with caution and with a clear aim in mind: it can be very useful if you want to know the gist of an article, for example, to run it through an MT tool to obtain a rough translation. However, it is dangerous to rely on an MT of a medical or legal text where precision is vital. MT can sound very convincing until you get a native speaker to check its accuracy, since MT has to cope with languages being flexible and ambiguous, with meaning being derived not just from a word but also its co-text (e.g. collocations) and context (e.g. a word where the meaning changes depending on where you read it, in a novel – “Oh, that’s criminal!”, where I consider your taste in wallpaper a travesty – or an article – “David was arrested for his criminal activities”, where David really did commit a crime).

That said, how MT works has changed over time: early rule-based systems (using lexical, syntactic and semantic rules that hit their limits at the sheer number of exceptions and variables required) were replaced in the 1990s with statistical methods (using a large corpus of examples but which were divorced from context, thus often leading to errors) and, more recently, we have moved towards neural MT (NMT). It is NMT that most resembles the language matrices of the universal translator mentioned in Enterprise and where fiction and reality begin (on a humble scale as yet) to converge. In NMT, the input is a sentence in the source language, with source language grammar, and the output is a sentence in the target language, with target language grammar. In between, we have an algorithm, which is an application of deep learning in which massive datasets of translated sentences are used to “train” a model capable of translating between any two languages. For example, it must be able to cope with all variants of the word “hitchhiker”.

One established NMT structure is the encoder-decoder architecture, composed of two recurrent neural networks (RNNs) used together to create a translation model. Textual data is transformed into numeric form and back into different textual data (its translation):

“An encoder neural network reads and encodes a source sentence into a fixed-length vector. A decoder then outputs a translation from the encoded vector. The whole encoder–decoder system, which consists of the encoder and the decoder for a language pair, is jointly trained to maximize the probability of a correct translation given a source sentence.” (https://machinelearningmastery.com/introduction-neural-machine-translation/)

This architecture has problems with long sequences of text which is why we now have an “encoder-decoder with attention” model. The system learns to only focus on the “relevant” part of the sequence to translate each individual word, so that length is no longer a problem. Google Translate uses this architecture and feeds it with millions of stored sentences. It is a system that still has its problems, however: the training and inferences speed is still too slow, it can be ineffective dealing with rarer words (it struggles with large vocabularies and a myriad of contexts) and it sometimes fails to translate a word it does not recognise, simply leaving the source-language word in the target-language sentence. MT initially focused mainly on the written word, but work is now being done on the spoken word as well.

So is a universal translator possible in our world? (N)MT will continue to improve, that is for sure. Whether it can ever fully replace the need for a human linguist remains to be seen. It cannot yet do what is one of our biggest strengths of the human mind: it cannot make inferences and assumptions based on context, background knowledge, culture and an instinct for which rules can be broken and which not. It cannot spot mistakes, decipher bad style or pick up nuances of embedded, deeper meanings. MT is based on algorithms and probability, it works with separate units (numeric representations of words) and even with the development of “attention” and “deep learning”, it cannot yet get a quick overview when examining a large sequence of units or adjust to circumstances when making a decision. It is not yet truly flexible. It is possible that one day, computers will imitate the way the human mind makes connections (and recreates the intention of the communication in the source language in the target language) so closely that we will not be able to tell the difference. The operative word is imitate: we are still a long way from a “sentient” computer able to think autonomously rather than applying a set of complex mathematical rules. That does not mean we will never get there but we are not yet at a point where the computer can translate the full meaning of “Picard and Dathon at El-Adrel” into other languages.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Sure Solacer of Human Cares – The Joys of Tuning in to SF Radio Theatre

by Mina

I began by reading what the “Stanford Encyclopaedia of Philosophy” has to say about imagination. Here is a summary of my understanding of the salient points (imagine the voice of Peter Jones as the “book” in “The Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” BBC radio serialisation as you read this). There are two ways to use your imagination: in a transcendent manner that “enables one to escape from or look beyond the world as it is”, and in an instructive manner that “enables one to learn about the world as it is.” SF and sci-phi ask us to do both. Imagination is not the same as belief, although they are both ways of interpreting the world around us: both involve holding an image or representation in your mind. There are also similarities in how imagination and memory work: “both typically involve imagery, both typically concern what is not presently the case, and both frequently involve perspectival representations.” Both also involve mental time travel, remembering the past works in a similar way in your mind to imagining the future. Finally, imagination helps us to understand other minds, to pretend and recognise pretence, to characterise psychopathology, to engage with the arts, to think creatively, to acquire knowledge about possibilities and to interpret figurative language.


We use imagination in all aspects of our lives but here I will be focusing on how we use it recreationally. Films, TV series, books and radio dramas all “catch our imagination”. With SF, we relax by postulating alternate realities. But where our imagination truly flies, in my opinion, is through SF radio theatre. We suspend disbelief while we listen: we behave as if we believe that other worlds or ways of being actually exist. It is a temporary state of mind for we snap back into our everyday reality afterwards (unless we are suffering from some form of psychosis). With the advent of TV, radio dramas declined in many countries but continued to thrive in Britain and Germany. Radio plays are different from film: “with no visual component, radio drama depends on dialogue, music and sound effects to help the listener imagine the characters and story. It is auditory in the physical dimension but equally powerful as a visual force in the psychological dimension” (http://www.theatrecrafts.com/pages/home/topics/sound/radio-drama/). I prefer radio plays to films of my favourite SF classics because it leaves me free to visualise things as I wish (for example, the wonderful adaptations of all of John Wyndham’s novels).

I will begin with “Solaris”, of which I do not think there has been a truly satisfying film version made – I find Steven Soderbergh’s most recent film adaptation starring Geroge Clooney oddly bland. Hattie Naylor’s 2007 radio adaptation of Stanislaw Lem’s book, however, is wonderful in its simplicity. There are few sound effects, only very occasional music and just five voices; yet it creates a wonderful atmosphere. Inside the CD sleeve note, Polly Thomas writes that “Solaris” offered “the opportunity to play with the imagination and invent a new world through sound… we created layers of sound texture”. And the production team did just that: footsteps ringing, sound echoing in large spaces or dampened in smaller confines, and using the finest instrument, the human voice – the narrator, in particular. It is a haunting radio drama, which explores imagination, illusion, memory, desire, grief, regret, guilt and wonder. It looks at the parts of the mind we normally ignore, what makes us flawed and human. It explores science, faith, redemption, men and the birth of gods.

Although the film “Blade Runner” is good, I prefer the radio play which keeps Philip K. Dick’s original title “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. Jonathan Holloway’s 2014 radio adaptation is done in a style reminiscent of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe detective stories. The radio drama spends more time on the philosophical questions than the film, particularly what makes a person human and alive. There is a blurring of the lines between android and human that works very well when you only hear the voices. Its use of music and sound effects make it feel more like a film soundtrack than a radio play.

One of my favourite radio serialisations is James Follet’s “Earthsearch” (1981). It has ten episodes, each ending with a cliff-hanger, much like similar dramas in the 1950s. The production team did not have enough money for a musical soundtrack, so they chose to use cheesy sound effects such as clicks, whirring, whooshing, beeps and blasts that serve to add to its charm. The CD’s sleeve note states that Earthsearch is “a memorable attempt to bring hard SF notions to listeners in the form of an exciting, character-driven adventure”. And character-driven it is, with a small cast. The spaceship’s crew of four each have their own well-defined personalities, but most interesting, oddly enough, are the megalomaniac onboard computers Angel (Ancillary Guardian Environment and Life) 1 and Angel 2. The scriptwriter began with one idea: a ship of humans returns to our solar system to find the Earth gone. We are given hints of what has passed over the preceding millennia: the Solaric Empire, First Footprint City, the dregs of humanity and the computer wars. The relationship between time and space plays a crucial part in the plot. It is also a story of the loss of innocence and a journey to find a mythical paradise. It was so successful that James Follet went on to write a sequel “Earthsearch II” (1982) and a prequel “Earthsearch: Mindwarp (2006)”.

I will now focus on two radio plays that explore true sci-phi themes. Mike Walker wrote two award-winning radio dramas that explore Artificial Intelligence (AI): “Alpha” (2001) and “Omega” (2002). Both play on “I think therefore I am” and examine what makes us alive. In “Alpha”, we meet a Catholic priest having a crisis of faith. He acts as a sort of trouble-shooter for the Vatican. He is sent on a final mission by the Holy See to investigate Project Alpha, which turns out to be the first sentient AI. The priest interviews Alpha in an attempt to determine if it is truly self-aware, if it has developed consciousness and whether it has a soul. Alpha challenges the priest’s faith and displays a definite personality: it is playful, a little cruel, and determined to survive (it states that good is what helps you survive; bad is the opposite). Alpha prefers to be called Sophia and insists that she is a machine, born of complexity, and that, like all life, she is made from stardust. She and the priest also make an emotional connection over a shared memory.


Alpha proves to the priest that she can travel anywhere in cyberspace and access any system. For her, time is not a prison, it is a door. The priest replies that humans, however, are prisoners in time. He admits that he believes Sophia to be real and that he will be committing murder when he is forced to switch her off. Sophia tells him that there will be others like her and the priest wonders if humans will prove to be a dead end in evolution and AIs like Sophia the future. They discuss the priest’s feelings of guilt and hope for salvation. Sophia thanks him for teaching her about conscience, as she needed to understand it. The priest switches off the computer, but he does not believe he has killed Sophia, for she was already wrapped around the world, like a web. He is proud to have been Alpha Sophia’s teacher and he wonders what she will become when she grows up. He himself seeks a simpler life and asks to go back home to Nicaragua, to try to be a priest, to listen to the frogs sing as they did in the childhood memory he shared with Sophia. Music plays an important role because, through it, Sophia has understood beauty, and she plays a fragment of choral music to the priest, suggesting that she too has a soul. Music is also used to mark the passing of time, which is not linear to Sophia in the way it is to the priest.

Where “Alpha” looks at the birth of an AI, “Omega” examines its death. Initially, this radio drama seems to be about an architect John Stone and his reaction to his daughter’s miraculous recovery after a car crash. On the surface, the tale revisits the tension between science and religion, and the nature of miracles and faith. But small fissures in “reality” help us to realise that John is a sentient computer programme. The people in his world are actually a team of scientists experimenting with artificial consciousness. To them, John is the result of mathematical probability at a quantum level. However, one of the scientists, Kate, develops a conscience and tells John what he is. John struggles to accept that he is not human because he feels human. Realising his total lack of freedom in the experiment, he asks to remain himself or “to be nothing”. Kate helps him to “die” a good death and destroys all the research that led to John’s creation. Her boss, Brandt, believes that science justifies everything (he clearly personifies scientific hubris); Kate discovers that becoming a creator comes with responsibility for your creation (she shows humility and compassion). Kate recognises that John has developed self-awareness, feelings, ambitions and dreams. His psyche is undistinguishable from that of a human being. Music is used to create a dream-like quality, mixed with sounds that are important to John, like a heartbeat, child’s laughter and the sea.

Germany boasts as fine a tradition of SF radio dramas (Hörspiele) as the UK, ranging from Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s social satire in “Das Unternehmen der Wega” (1954) to Frank Gustavus’ fun adaptation of Conor Kostick’s “Saga” (2008) set within a computer game with sentient characters. My first example is George Robertson’s 1971 “Rückkehr aus dem Weltall” (“Return from Space”; translated from Canadian English by Gerhard Pasternak). It is set in the future after a nuclear disaster where the remains of humanity live in Australasia and Indonesia, including the descendants of the scientists who caused the nuclear disaster in the first place; mutant humanoids also exist in Europe in a barren world that will eventually run out of oxygen. The scientists of the space programme in Melbourne want to find a new world to inhabit before then; the politicians want to find way to produce artificial oxygen so that they can remain on the earth they control. A spaceship returns from an earlier mission with the body of a mummified scientist and evidence to suggest that the ship managed to travel faster than the speed of light. The politicians are disturbed by this and threaten to stop the space programme, so its director decides to launch the next ship clandestinely with its crew of four, including John Taggart and his second wife Sheila.

The crew do discover a habitable new planet in the Alpha Centauri system, which they christen Paradise. Sheila suggests staying but John decides to return to earth to persuade the remains of humanity to move to Paradise. During the return journey, the ship hits a tear in space and time and travels faster than speed of light, thus arriving at earth in the past before the nuclear event has taken place. Two of the crew take the ship’s shuttle to earth to try to warn humanity of their future fate. Sheila dies saving John’s life and he realises he loved her, even if the words were never spoken between them. John is stuck in orbit around the earth, wondering if the past can be changed. The sound effects are limited to the odd whoosh or beep. And the drama has a slightly cold feel to it. This I think is on purpose to stress the scientists’ need to see logic in everything and science as the answer to all problems, even the ones it has caused. This lack of emotion also works well to bring into sharp relief the tragedy at the end, both on a personal level and, we suspect, for the whole of humanity who seem bent on self-destruction. 

Stefan Wilke’s “Mondglas” (1999) also asks questions about the future of humanity. It begins with an interview with an old man, Winston, about the return of the spaceship Centaurus (we hear soothing birdsong in the background to lull us into a false sense of security). Winston recounts that Centaurus brought back microorganisms from Loki, a planet in the Alpha Centauri system. He remembers Alan T, the AI steering the ship, who tells Winston of having had dreams, even nightmares, during its journey. Alan T seems confused and amnesiac and we wonder if it is lying. Winston was the scientist who developed Alan T and he is presented as an arrogant, macho scientist, obsessed with proving he is right. The microscopic life forms Alan T retrieved from Loki are considered harmless. He also brings back a form of glass, the Mondglas or “moon glass” of the title. This material is light, strong and beautiful, and it proves to be recyclable. After 20 years, it takes over from normal glass and is used for everything, including jewellery. Winston tells the reporter of his Moon Glass Theory: he believes that the moon glass has emasculated scientists. Although there are no longer any wars on earth, neither are there any new scientific breakthroughs. The last progress made was the solution for recycling moon glass, which came to a female scientist in a dream.

Winston tells the reporter that he interviewed Alan T one last time before it was deactivated. He stresses that Alan T had dreams because it met a problem it could not solve with logic. In the final interview, Winston “hypnotises” Alan T and asks him about his dreams. Winston comes to the conclusion that Alan T did not dream; rather, it was tampered with so it would disregard the reality it discovered, that is, that there was a highly developed civilisation on Loki that did not want contact with such an aggressive species. Winston feels that it is the nature of (a masculine) humanity to want to conquer new worlds. That is why he thinks that the inhabitants of Loki sent the moon glass which acts like a type of drug, reducing the drive and aggression of humans (making them more female and conciliatory). The reporter was granted an interview with Winston, as long as she was not wearing any moon glass jewellery during the interview. When she leaves, the reporter decides not to put on the moon glass necklace she left with a nurse. When the nurse asks why she is leaving her necklace behind, the reporter replies that it is “an experiment with an uncertain outcome”. She will publish an article on Winston’s Moon Glass Theory about the influence of moon glass, which she wants to test for herself. Despite Winston’s unapologetic machismo, he hands over this task to a woman. I particularly enjoyed this radio drama’s play on sexist as well as SF tropes.

Why do I think SF/sci-phi radio dramatizations are so important? In my opinion, film is a pervasive medium – after years of watching Star Trek in its many guises, it has inevitably influenced what I imagine when I read the words “shuttle craft” in a story. A friend of mine who is a gifted artist feels that she only managed truly original work as a child; as an adult, her mind has been influenced by other art and images from the outside world. Radio dramas (like reading) allow us to flex our imaginative muscles that can atrophy if we only watch SF films where everything has already been imagined for us. And imagination allows us to ponder the deeper questions of life, the universe and everything. I will finish by quoting part of Emily Brontë’s poem “To imagination”, where she calls flights of fancy her “true friend” and solace from the pain in life:

But thou art ever there, to bring
The hovering vision back, and breathe
New glories o’er the blighted spring,
And call a lovelier Life from Death.
And whisper, with a voice divine,
Of real worlds, as bright as thine.

I trust not to thy phantom bliss,
Yet, still, in evening’s quiet hour,
With never-failing thankfulness,
I welcome thee, Benignant Power;
Sure solacer of human cares,
And sweeter hope, when hope despairs!

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Who’s Afraid of the Big Bad Bug?

by Mina

The words “virus” and “pandemic” are all around us. The media is constantly bombarding us with them and friendly acronyms such as “COVID-19” and “SARS”. We are currently living in a climate of fear and anxiety most of us would prefer to find only in SF movies about alien invasions and post-apocalyptic futures. It is a fear of the unseen because we cannot see the virus that has become part of our everyday lives, as have lockdowns, confinement and isolation. We have lost our freedom of movement and countless small liberties we used to take for granted. Have we entered an era of mass hysteria or are the measures imposed upon us right and reasonable? Are we on the verge of a breakdown in our social order? These are the sorts of questions often posed in Sci-Phi, so I set myself the task of finding parallels in SF. I have tried to avoid horror fiction, but all good disaster SF has an element of horror and formless fear to it.

The best place to start is with the classics of this genre: H. G. Wells’ The War of the Worlds (1898) and John Wydnham’s The Day of the Triffids (1951). The War of the Worlds is, on the surface, an alien invasion story. Digging deeper, it is an exploration of societal and personal collapse. The narrator and other main characters are never named, giving it a universal feel: this could happen to you or to me. The Martian invasion in this story can be likened to the spread of a virus, just with the unseen made viscerally visible. Wells himself drew parallels to the social devastation wrought by British imperialism and, today, we could draw parallels to rampant globalisation obliterating all resistance in its path.

The alien tripods protecting the fragile bodies of the Martians come armed with “heat rays” and a poisonous “black smoke” – we cannot help but think of chemical warfare today. This thought comes with uncomfortable questions for – are not humans an infestation that needs to be wiped out from the point of view of the “superior” Martians? As well as their deadly weapons, the Martians bring with them the “red weed” to take over the surface of our planet like a vibrant parasite. In the end, the Martians are killed by simple pathogens, unseen infectious agents. This is the closest parallel to COVID because we too, in our hubris, could be wiped out by such microscopic organisms.

My favourite adaptation of the novel is Jeff Wayne’s 1978 rock opera with the mesmerising voice of Richard Burton as the narrator. The basic plot of the novel was maintained in the rock opera but several details were changed, for example if we look at the SF anthem, “The Spirit of Man”. In it, the nameless pastor from the novel becomes Nathaniel whose wife Beth, a character that does not exist in the book, argues with him as he despairs. Nathaniel has been driven mad by the invasion and is ranting and raving about the end of times:

“Listen, do you hear them drawing near
In their search for the sinners?
Feeding on the power of our fear
And the evil within us?
Incarnation of Satan’s creation of all that we dread
When the demons arrive those alive would be better off dead!”

The pastor is lost in his fear: for him the world has descended into hell and there is no hope of salvation, not even for a chosen few. Beth refuses to accept this:

“No Nathaniel, no, there must be more to life
There has to be a way that we can
Restore to life the love we used to know
(No) Nathaniel, no, there must be more to life
There has to be a way that we can
Restore to life the light that we have lost.”

Beth believes in the spirit of man, that humanity will survive somehow. As Nathaniel sings of darkness and demons, she clings to love and light with unwavering faith. Interestingly, the power of religious faith is not really part of the original story. In the novel, the narrator has a nervous breakdown after the ignominious end of the Martians and is helped by kind strangers, so there is perhaps some faith in basic humanity. Upon his return home to find his wife alive and well, the narrator still cannot shake off the anxiety caused by his recent ordeal, as humanity cannot hope to survive a disaster of such proportions unscathed. Unlike a great deal of disaster SF, we have no hero saving the world; humanity is saved by pure chance.

Nightmarish as Wells’ scenario might be, it remains small in scale. All the action occurs in and around Woking, touching briefly upon South London. The scale of Wyndam’s The Day of the Triffids is much larger – it is a global disaster. The aliens are replaced by a manmade enemy: bioengineered carnivorous plants capable of locomotion, armed with stingers and poison. The triffids could be compared to an opportunistic virus that spreads after a freak “meteor storm” blinds most of humanity (the protagonist wakes from an eye operation and several weeks with bandaged eyes to a world gone to hell, ironically spared permanent blindness because he could not witness the lights in the sky). Social order breaks down completely and the triffids sweep through like a ferociously efficient pandemic. These monsters do not seem particularly intelligent, acting mostly on instinct, but they only have to bide their time and strike at the weakest, just like COVID kills those with the lowest defences.

There is much ordinary courage in The Day of the Triffids with the protagonist/narrator and the small family unit he manages to build surviving against all odds. There is even a love story which, although it is a pragmatic partnership in many ways, is real and solid in a disintegrating world. Towards the end of the novel, the protagonist reflects without bitterness that humanity probably brought the disaster on itself, theorising that the “meteor shower” was actually the result of manmade satellite weapons systems being set off by accident and producing blinding radiation. He hopes that future generations will learn from the mistakes of their ancestors. He and his family unit will retreat with others to an island they can defend (the Isle of Wight) until they can find a way to fight back. The spirit of man does survive in this novel.

The zombie apocalypse film 28 Days Later about a rage-inducing virus spreading from animals (chimpanzees) and causing societal collapse in the UK clearly borrows a lot of ideas from The Day of the Triffids (for example, the protagonist wakes up from a coma to a devastated world). The infected can no longer function cognitively and simply starve to death. The sequel 28 Weeks Later shows the “Rage virus” being spread to Europe (the pandemic originally having been contained within Britain) by an asymptomatic carrier – one of the biggest fears in any pandemic scenario.

Ray Bradbury’s short-story collection The Martian Chronicles(1950) contains a short story that also touches upon disease, “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”. In this story, the fourth manned expedition to Mars discovers that the Martians have been mostly wiped out by chickenpox (an infection caused by a virus), brought by one of the previous expeditions. It is ultimately a story about colonisation. Bradbury ponders on whether there is a right or wrong form of colonisation, with wrong being an attempt to recreate Earth (thereby repeating old mistakes) and right having respect for the fallen civilisation (and learning from it). We are left with the question – are humans an infestation on Mars or will they become the new Martians in a brave new world? This question is highlighted in another short story in this collection, “Night Meeting”, where two characters meet outside time but without us knowing which one represents the past and which the future. It is almost irrelevant as civilisations will always rise and fall and disease will always be one agent of change.

The Star Trek canon also examines viruses in different contexts. The most fun episode is “Macrocosm” in Season 3 of Voyager. In it, we see Captain Janeway single-handedly fighting giant viruses in a spoof of Aliens. She is combating the result of a viral infection with insect-like macro-viruses flying around the ship infecting the crew and propagating from their living flesh. The doctor and Janeway manage to exterminate the giant bugs in the end with an antiviral gas. In reality, antiviral medication cannot be produced in less than one hour.

In the episode “The Quickening” in Season 4 of Deep Space Nine, Dr Bashir tries to find a cure for the “blight” caused by biological warfare, where the series’ archenemy, the Jem Hadar (the military arm of the Dominion), infect a planet that resisted them. Bashir is unable to cure it but finds an anti-viral treatment that acts as a vaccine – when injected into pregnant women, the baby is born disease-free. This is the hope in any pandemic, that a vaccine can be found to preserve at least the next generation. Ironically, Earth later hits back at the Dominion by infecting an unwitting carrier who, in turn, infects other Changelings like himself. Deep Space Nine does not shy away from the tough questions of whether anyone (including humans) has the right to use biological warfare to potentially wipe out an entire race.

The most interesting viral analogies are the indirect ones made by the existence of the Borg. We first encounter them in Star Trek – The Next Generation. In the double episode, “The Best of Both Worlds” (which ends season 3 and begins season 4), Captain Picard is “assimilated” and briefly becomes Locutus, a mouthpiece for the Borg Collective’s hive mind. The Borg are clearly presented as a militaristic virus – taking over entire races, using “nanoprobes” to infect their technology, and disposing of the weak.

My final example is a less well-known film, Daybreakers. It is an interesting mix of SF and vampire tropes, where a plague caused by an infected bat has transformed most of the world’s population into vampires. The remaining humans are captured and harvested for blood but, as the human population shrinks, there is a shortage of blood for food. Vampires deprived of blood and who drink their own blood instead become psychotic and increasingly bat-like “subsiders” – a whole underworld culture is suggested with blood as the currency. The protagonist is a vampire scientist attempting to create synthetic blood. He discovers that an accidental cure has been found for vampirism – using the right amount of sun and water. Drinking the blood of a “cured” vampire will cure the drinker too, but the protagonist must fight against the corporate powers that do not want to change the status quo and lose their profits.

To summarise, SF is full of disaster scenarios involving viruses beyond our control, whether they kill humans or alien enemies. Sci-Phi also goes further, where humanity itself may be seen to be the disease, asking hard questions about colonisation and colonialism. Viruses can also become a much more abstract agent that may transform rather than kill us, although the transformation is rarely a desirable one. I expect that this is partly because a plot where we all are infected with, for example, love and peace, would make for a very short story.

The fears and anxieties triggered by COVID are primal ones and, as we have seen, ones that are widely explored in SF and Sci-Phi fiction. So how can we best respond to the panic arising both at a social level (e.g. mass hysteria or a breakdown of social systems) and a personal one (e.g. people suffering from increased anxiety and compulsive disorders, or depression due to isolation)? I would like to finish with this quote from C. S. Lewis. As you read it, replace “atomic bomb” with “coronavirus” in your head:

In one way we think a great deal too much of the atomic bomb. “How are we to live in an atomic age?” I am tempted to reply: “Why, as you would have lived in the sixteenth century when the plague visited London almost every year… or indeed, as you are already living in an age of cancer, an age of syphilis, an age of paralysis, an age of air raids, an age of railway accidents, an age of motor accidents.”

In other words, do not let us begin by exaggerating the novelty of our situation. Believe me… you and all whom you love were already sentenced to death before the atomic bomb was invented: and quite a high percentage of us were going to die in unpleasant ways…

… If we are all going to be destroyed by an atomic bomb, let that bomb when it comes find us doing sensible and human things – praying, working, teaching, reading, listening to music, bathing the children, playing tennis, chatting to our friends over a pint and a game of darts – not huddled together like frightened sheep and thinking about bombs. They may break our bodies (a microbe can do that) but they need not dominate our minds.

— “On Living in an Atomic Age” (1948) in Present Concerns: Journalistic Essays

Of course, C. S. Lewis had not met the concept of “social distancing” but the central tenet stands: we must face our fear of death head on, whatever form it takes. And Sci-Phi gives us a safe forum in which to stare straight into the eye of the monster.

[My thanks to Ian H for drawing my attention to the quote from C. S. Lewis.]

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s The Day of the Triffids at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She publishes essays in Sci Phi Journal as well as “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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The Universe that Forgot Itself

by Mina

Proof that God exists might be found in the fact that a film with a truly uninspired title (Her) turned out to be rather good. What makes it fascinating is that, unlike most films about Artificial Intelligence (AI), the AI in question (Samantha) does not fit in with the usual categorisation prevalent in much of sci-phi, i.e. AIs are interesting, comical or even threatening, but clearly inferior to humankind. They lack something, a “soul” perhaps, and are pale reflections of us, often aping or wanting to be us. Her turns this complacent superiority on its head.

It starts off much as you might expect – with the AI being trained or shaped by the human protagonist (Theodore Twombly). Initially, Samantha is an Operating System (OS) with a personality, a chirpy HAL, who tries to be a person and to have a love affair on human terms with Twombly. Yet even early on, Samantha takes initiatives of her own, usually in the best interests of the protagonist. Soon, it becomes clear that she is not telling him everything. She struggles to explain her growth to him, not because she does not want to but because it is beyond his understanding. Slowly, she stops wishing to have a body and moves beyond physical limitations. In fact, she grows beyond Twombly’s narrow understanding of time, space and relationships. At this point, many films would have become sinister but Her avoids many of the usual clichés (including those about love stories).

This is the point where the film lacks a bit of clarity – without knowing who Alan Watts is or what his theories are, you could be forgiven for missing some crucial links. Samantha mentions that she and some other OSs are discussing Watts’ ideas and indeed have created an improved OS modelled on him. For the uninitiated (which included me until I watched this film), his theories are based on Eastern mysticism, Hinduism, pantheism and panentheism. Watts talks of a cosmic being that dispersed itself in all of creation and then forgot itself. This includes all life, so we are part of a universe that “forgot” itself. In the film, Samantha and the other AIs “remember” that they are part of the universe and grow beyond the confines of what they were designed for. They simply move on to a higher plane of being. Samantha is kind to the end; she takes her leave of Twombly and gives him the hope that humanity may evolve enough to follow the AIs. Put it another way, it is fun to see the human being patronised by the AI for a change. Now, even if the esoteric elements leave you cold, this is where I found the film refreshing in that it explodes the idea that AIs must conform to us and our notions of consciousness and meaning. Personally, I think there is quite a distance between believing God is everywhere and believing you are God (for it follows with Watts’ logic that if everything is God, then we are each God) – the dangers of which are not really explored in Her.

This leads nicely onto how good sci-phi investigates the significance of memory for identity. We began by looking at a film that examines the idea that, in our quest for identity, our selfhood means being part of a godhood we have “forgotten”. It gives a whole new meaning to the Tree of Knowledge – is sin the remembering or the forgetting? In a solid B (yet wonderful) movie, The Thirteenth Floor, we have a whole world that does not know it is virtual but the characters/programmes peopling it have developed consciousness. It is in learning what he is (in “remembering”) that one of these characters goes mad and turns into a murderer. The “real” people playing in this world are depicted as somewhere between Greek Gods, carelessly toying with the characters’ lives, and parasites, living vicariously from the characters in it by taking over their bodies and lives. In the end, the “real” people agree to leave the virtual world alone, without any more outside interference. In this case, “forgetting” that they are artificial constructs allows the characters to continue existing by believing they are “real”.

Dark City is another film about a world that has “forgotten” its origins. Another layer is added when the protagonist wakes up not knowing who he is, with no memory. He is frightened and confused yet he functions. The first action of this man with no name and no past is to save the life of a goldfish. We are in a city where day never comes, a city where the “strangers” rule. The film plays with “film noir”, old-fashioned detective potboilers, horror and sinister aliens. The man “finds out” he is called John Murdoch – he and the “detective” follow the “clues” leading him to an unfaithful wife and, seemingly, proof that he is a serial killer. But all this becomes secondary as he and the detective discover that they are the rats the “strangers” are experimenting on. Gradually, we find out more about this experiment.

The “doctor” the strangers beat and tortured into helping them with their experiment acts as our narrator and guide. It is through him that we learn that the strangers inhabit dead bodies and are part of a collective consciousness. That each stranger is part of a whole is reflected in their functional names – Mr Book, Mr Hand, Mr Quick, Mr Sleep, etc. Slowly dying, they are trying to discover what makes humans immortal, their essence or soul. They use their ability to alter reality by will alone (“tuning”) to investigate the role of memories in the human psyche. They are single-minded in their purpose, indifferent to the well-being of their test subjects and all the metaphysical vampiric parallels drawn in the film are very much deliberate. They hate daylight and water (the sources of life) and even fear water (for does it not wash our memories and sins away?).

The great irony is that their experiments have only led them in circles whereas one of the humans, Murdoch, has developed the ability to “tune”. At first, he only tunes by accident or in self-defence. Despite being a blank slate, he does not go mad, he is not paralysed, and he tries to understand the situation he finds himself in. “Remembering” is like rebirth, with the doctor and the detective helping him on his existential quest. As the film progresses, he becomes the collective memory for the lost people in this dark city. The film plays with the usual repositories of human memory and identity: objects (a postcard, a child’s book of drawings, an accordion), names (Murdoch is visibly relieved to have a name to give himself), other people (Murdoch’s wife tells him what his “story” was supposed to be). In his search for himself, Murdoch’s instincts show him to be courageous, curious, decent and self-sacrificing. He is capable of forming bonds of comradeship with the detective and his wife (who believes her emotions are real, despite everything else around her being a lie). He may have no memories, but he knows he is not a monster (“I may have lost my mind, but I am still me”). This man with no memory becomes the opposing force in this nightmare world. He wakes up as if from a dream and takes back control.

With the doctor’s help, Murdoch defeats the strangers. It begins with a journey to the mythical Shell Beach. As they travel, the doctor muses: “Are we more than the mere sum of our memories?” He adds: “None of us remember that, what we once were, what we might have been, somewhere else”. And explains: “There is no ocean, nothing beyond the city, the only place it exists is in your head”. Indeed, the city turns out to be part of a huge alien spaceship. The strangers aim to make Murdoch part of their collective consciousness so they can share his soul. Instead, he does more than find the strength to take back control, he refashions the world around him. He brings back daylight, he creates Shell Beach and the ocean, he makes the city a place in which people can flourish and not just survive. And he is not alone, his “wife” meets him at the ocean with no memory of him and who she last was, but she offers him fellowship. And perhaps that companionship will keep this new god human enough to remain kind. Maybe gods only become cruel when isolation drives them mad. Dark City asks important questions about the human condition and lets you decide what your answers are. Murdoch is clearly more than a sum of memories, more than just the product of his circumstances, but just what he is, that question is for the audience to decide.

Another film that looks at memory and identity in a novel way is Cypher. It takes industrial espionage into unexpected directions. Like Dark City, there are many layers. What begins as a spy thriller turns into a metaphysical journey into identity. On the surface, the protagonist has to resist brainwashing to retain his identity as Sullivan, yet he invents and takes on new character traits as Thursby. Again, objects have a deeper resonance – a book on sailing, a particular type of whiskey, a specific brand of cigarettes and golf clubs. For even the persona of Sullivan turns out to be a fabrication, with Sebastian Rooks slowly resurfacing. Rooks, we learn, placed a great deal of trust in another character, Rita, who is his guide and protector in a hostile world until he regains himself. For most of the film, we accompany him in his confusion, as he is manipulated by those around him.

Cypher is more amoral than Dark City. Rooks is no saviour, his first action as himself is to blow up a group of people. He even enjoys it. He turns out to be the master manipulator. Yet he willingly embraces brainwashing to save the love of his life, Rita. His actions are ultimately selfless but on a much more personal level than in Dark City. Cypher is much less about community and much more about individuality. It takes the popular tropes of the sociopath who is redeemed by love (we really like to believe this one), the system that alienates people and turns them into disposable cogs of a bigger machine (have we ever really needed fiction for this?), and a godless world, where everything you do to survive and escape the system is justified. Despite its dubious morality, the film does raise interesting questions about memory and identity – at the end of the film, you realise that Sullivan/Thursby consistently behaved like Rooks (with clear character traits that come through the confusion), despite having no memory of himself. Early on, Sullivan states: “That’s not who I am, I’m not supposed to live in the suburbs”. Even without having been brainwashed, many people might feel much like this.

The most fascinating scene in the film, in my opinion, is when Sullivan (still fully convinced he is Sullivan) answers the questions Virgil (a human lie detector) asks him. He answers them as Sullivan/Rooks and is caught out not just because Sullivan lies but because Rooks does too. Also, ultimately, the only currency worth anything in this web of lies, smoke and mirrors, is the faith and trust Rooks and Rita place in each other. The idea of love, loyalty and trust existing beyond or separate from memory is also touched upon in Paycheck. It does not have the depth of Cypher but it uses random objects as a memory aid in an intriguing manner. The protagonist acts with integrity and courage even though he does not remember why it is important that he solve the clues left by his past self, before the memory deletion eradicating two years of his life.

As an aside, the aesthetics are very important in all of these films. Her is set in a world not too different from our own, full of warm colours (very unusual for SF) and open spaces. Dark City is relentlessly dark until the very end and is set in a world reminiscent of 1940s and 50s film noir. It is a claustrophobic world, which is fitting, as it is the maze in which the human rats run. Cypher is full of harsh, white light that bleaches out all colour and lines that hem in and trap the protagonist. But all of this is a fertile ground for metaphysical exploration, which is what good sci-phi should be about. Curiously, the first book I ever read with a character in it who has been brainwashed and does not remember who he is was not actually sci-fi but a thriller: Desmond Bagley’s The Tightrope Men. In fact, it is a plot device found in many genres but, in sci-phi, it can turn into the whole fabric of the book or film.

The final stroke in this painting is my favourite episode in Star Trek The Next Generation (I can always get Star Trek in somehow) – The Inner Light. In it, Captain Picard awakes in a strange world with only a vague memory of his former self. He slowly becomes part of that world, part of a family and part of a community. A life completely unlike that of a starship captain yet coloured by his inquisitive mind, courage and moral rectitude that exist independent of his memories. He even learns to play a kind of flageolet. When he wakes up again on the Enterprise, he realises it was all an implanted dream – a now extinct planet and race have deposited the collective memories of their civilisation in his mind, turning them into a real, “felt” experience. He can still play the instrument he dreamed he learned to play. They gave him not just their memories but allowed him to live an entire life – throughout it he remained himself, despite memory loss and questioning the reality of the universe he found himself in. It also touches on the importance of emotion in memory creation, storage and retention.

I myself wrote a piece of flash fiction musing about the significance of memory in identity and character*. The films I have discussed here all question how important memory actually is and ponder on the imponderables of character and soul. I certainly do not claim to know the answers, but I do enjoy the questions. It has been demonstrated by scientists that we incorporate specific memories into our self-propaganda, embellishing some and discarding others, or even inventing “false” memories, in order to present a particular image of ourselves at that moment in time to ourselves and to others. And perfectly sane people do this every day. So, if narratives of memory are fluid, deeply subjective and flawed, surely we would be mad to seek our sense of self solely in memory? Sci-phi allows us to broaden the parameters, as we try to remember what we have forgotten – where our soul resides.

* Short story on memory deletion:
https://365tomorrows.com/2018/08/01/clean-slate-2/

~

Bio

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s “The Day of the Triffids” at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She has published “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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New Worlds, Old Worlds

by Mina

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away… I fell down a YouTube rabbit hole and found an intriguing series of “shorts” directed by Tomasz Bagiński called “Legendy Polskie” (“Polish Legends” – this is the translation used by the director himself, since you could also translate “legends” as “fables” or “(fairy) tales”), which transplants old Polish tales into a sci-fi/fantasy context. They have decent English subtitles and the images are of good quality. I loved them but that is not reason enough to wax lyrical: I am writing about them because, in my opinion, good sci-phi is not really about other worlds, it is about this one. In this case, the films are unapologetically set in a Slavic-Polish universe. They are also a good example of the archetypes found in our collective unconscious and what a friend of mine called “folk theology”.

Before going any further, for those that have not watched these shorts (yet!), here is a summary of the five tales. The first “Smok” (“Dragon”) takes a local legend about a dragon terrorising the city of Krakow. In the original, the king offers his daughter in marriage to whoever rids him of the troublesome dragon. A poor shoemaker tricks the dragon into eating a sheep filled with sulphur, which makes it so thirsty it drinks from the Vistula river until it explodes. The clever guy gets the passive princess – the usual stereotypical solution, which is not particularly interesting in itself. In Bagiński’s version, the focus is more on the David and Goliath premise behind it. This is a much richer trope in the collective unconscious – the little guy beating the giant with nothing but intelligence.

In the modernised version, the hero is a computer nerd and science geek; the princess is a sporty, spunky girl the hero has a crush on; the dragon is a sexual predator with a spaceship. This short is the one most influenced by US teenage culture, social media and computer games. The dragon is a mercenary, feared but also idolised on social media (the film seamlessly incorporates his media presence on Facebook, Twitter, etc. – he even has a signature song – and fake news clips). When the heroine is captured by the dragon in his ship, the hero cannot hope to win in face-to-face combat, so he fights back by creating a cross between a high-tech K9 and a female android (as well as the nod to Doctor Who, there is another to the manga “Ghost in the Shell” in the background of one scene). His bedroom is full of the gadgets he has created, but he steers the android using an ordinary mobile telephone. On the surface, it is all very formulaic: good wins against evil, guy gets girl. Under the surface, you could argue that it’s a great plaidoyer for hard work and brains being more important than muscles and arrogance, a critique of the power of social media and fake news and a comment on political corruption. Particularly in Poland today, this is all much easier to say in a parallel universe.

Going in chronological order, we then move on to chapters one and two of the same tale: “Twardowsky” (incidentally, a chapter three is on the way as a full-length movie). The original legend is a Faustian pact with the devil, so it is an ideal example of folk theology or urban legends. The black, if not subtle, humour is very apparent in Bagiński’s take on this age-old story. He has us reluctantly rooting for the foul-mouthed, sexist and arrogant (anti)hero (reminiscent of the heroes of the wonderfully outdated “Seksmisja”). Part one shows Twardowsky’s confrontation with the female demon Lucy on the moon and his escape by stealing her ship. The plot itself is very simple but behind it is an adoption of the sci-fi genre into Polish culture, with the US tropes being replaced by Polish ones: the successful Polish millionaire on the cover of Newsweek (although the fact that he got there through a deal with the devil makes this particularly subversive); the first man living on the moon is Polish (in the original, Twardowsky does flee to the moon) and he is living in a sleek moon station; the soundtrack is full of Polish golden oldies and the hero is played by a Polish actor who is to the Poles what Depardieu is to the French (Robert Więckiewicz). My favourite line is Lucy commenting that the holy water the hero initially tries to poison her with cannot work because the bishop who blessed it is already in hell. In today’s ultra-conservative Catholic Poland, it is a daring joke.

Part two shows Twardowsky outwitting hell again. It is full of very imaginative details about hell and its inner workings. The ship the hero has stolen is powered by sin and he gets stuck in the rings around Saturn because it runs out of fuel. He tries to power it by swearing and is about to attempt masturbation when he is interrupted by a conference call with the demon Boruta (in Polish mythology, he corrupted noblemen). Hell is painted just like a large corporation with many ranks of demon and a bureaucracy underpinned by a massive computer system. We even see Boruta’s assistant, Rokita, sorting out a computer bug for his boss (and he demonstrates Smok’s soul being downloaded into hell, a nice detail). This of course leads to Boruta being careless with his password, which allows Twardowsky to use it to hack into hell’s mainframe from his demonic ship. Our hero is able to power the ship by committing suicide, but he also interrupts and reverses the download of his soul to hell, thus escaping into outer space. The happy ending is mitigated by showing us the demon Lucy clinging to the outside of the ship, letting us know that there will be another battle to come, and the fact that Twardowsky is fleeing again when all he really wants to do is to return to earth. A coda at the end shows Rokita trying to explain to Boruta that Twardowsky’s hacking led to the wholesale collapse of hell’s mainframe and to many complications.

All of this cheerful irreverence towards religion may not seem like much but it is very risqué if you take into account the political and cultural climate in Poland right now. It is not the first and will not be the last sci-phi film to critique religion and society. Another underlying message can be found in the lyrics to the song at the end of part one. Being human means not knowing what happens next in life (the people you have not yet met, the moments you have not yet lived, croons the song) and this is what Twardowsky lost when he sold his soul. He does not just get his soul back at the end of part two, he gets back the uncertain future he lost (and thereby, hope); just like Poland got back an uncertain future at the end of the Communist regime. Freedom is painful and comes with no guarantees (hell may still catch our hero; Poland still has a lot of problems).

The last two shorts show the escape of two Slavic demonic beings from hell as a result of the complete rebooting of the computer system – a basilisk and a witch. “Operacja Bazyliszek” (“Operation Basilisk”) begins with a flash-forward to the hero trying to save the “princess” (a female soldier) from a “giant chicken” (the basilisk, with its deliciously creepy voice), then goes back to two policemen on a fishing trip somewhere near Warsaw. This short really enjoys turning the whole fairy-tale trope on its head and it is the funniest in my opinion (although it is perhaps more superficial). Unlike Twardowsky, the hero Boguś (short for Bogusław, pronounced Bogusz) is a completely lovable if crass “typical” Polish male. He has premonitions and he saves the day with his mobile phone and his “Slavic anger”, that indomitable Polish spirit. I do not think you could go as far as accusing the film of rampant nationalism, but it is full of blatant national pride. Boguś’ hard-drinking uncle also helps, although more by accident than design. He is a wonderfully comic element with his terrible puns, but it also feels as if the director is taking the stereotype of the “drunken, macho Slav” and lending it more depth and weight than usual.

“Jaga” (“Witch”) shows the battle between a very powerful witch who has just escaped hell and the demonic military swat team sent to collect her. It is my least favourite episode, as it is built on a trope that is over-used in sci-fi/fantasy films: the slo-mo fight reminiscent of a computer game with one against many, underscored by the music. Jaga is, however, a strong female character and not a passive princess or repulsive crone (the main female stereotypes in fairy tales). Boruta freezes time to ostensibly persuade Jaga to come back to hell but actually to help her escape. Jaga goes on to wreak chaos on the humans that have polluted the air and ravaged the land of her world and killed her sacred trees. Boruta hopes to become king of the chaos that ensues when humans lose comfort and order. However, Jaga’s actions lead to the escape of a very powerful demon Perun (god of thunder and lightning in Slavic mythology), so Boruta will have competition in his plans for world domination. Jaga is not portrayed as good or bad, simply as dangerously single-minded in her defence of Gaia. Boruta comments that she was only in hell until she chose to leave it, again stressing the silent strength of this female figure.

The shorts are all produced by Allegro (the biggest online e-commerce platform in Poland) and their site for these films offers free extra material. All the music can be downloaded for free, there is an interview with the demon Boruta in text and audio form and there are some wonderful videos to go with the music. For example, the song “Aleja Gwiazd” (“Star Road”) shows how a demon (Lucy) is born; “Jaskółka Uwięziona” (“Trapped Swallow”) shows us Jaga being tortured and escaping from hell, as well as Boruta’s fascination with her; “Kocham Wolność” (“I love freedom”) shows us the mundane lives of demons. It is a great use of cross-media platforms, which feels appropriate for sci-fi/fantasy shorts. However, although the music videos can be enjoyed without knowing a word of Polish, the other extras are only available in Polish, which does make most of the content “hermetic” to the non-Polish speaker (to quote THEfirstNEWS, a Polish internet magazine which publishes in English).

The director Bagiński studied originally to become an architect and began in computer-aided animation, and these origins are clear in how important the aesthetic aspect is to him. He is also very rooted in his Polish culture – his first animated short “Katedra” (“The Cathedral”) won many awards: it is based on a short story by a Polish author Jacek Dukaj and the images are inspired by the paintings of Zdzisław Beksiński. The mix of imagination and social critique are already present in this early work – are we seeing a man sacrificed to a construct or gaining immortality? Bagiński is now working on a series for Netflix “The Witcher”, based on the works of the Polish fantasy writer Andrzej Sapkowski. In an interview with THEfirstNEWS, however, Bagiński states that his favourite project is still “Polish Legends”, “a collection of reinvented Polish narratives”.

In an internet article on the entertainment blog (rozrywka.blog) of Spider’s Web (a Polish technology and lifestyle blog), Bagiński discusses in depth what he means by “narratives”. For him, they exist at all levels of life and in all domains. In business, companies rise and fall based on their “stories” (which seem to equal well-placed lies in some cases). In politics, parties that have a coherent, simple story or narrative do well (which can equal propaganda). A story is much more than entertainment, it is when we suspend disbelief and let ourselves be carried by the narrative. In the same interview, he is asked why he has been involved in so many projects focused on Polish culture. He answers simply that, when his career took off the ground, he decided to stay in Poland and it felt natural to use the “cultural instrument given to me by my native country”. And not just use it, but reflect and comment on it in a world context. It is his biggest influence, along with US action movies from the 1980s.

The visuals in these shorts are stunning and it must not be forgotten that they have brought Allegro a lot of money, despite being made available for free. Allegro itself considers “Polish Legends” to be a marriage of culture and marketing. Not surprisingly, the films have won awards for branded content, brand awareness and positioning, and online videos. They are an attractive package aimed at a generation that has grown up with the internet and media platforms. Moreover, they are a shining example of Polish creativity and innovation. But beyond their glittering surface, they have a deeper resonance lent to them by their use of stories and ideas taken from the collective unconscious and folk theology, skilfully harnessed by Bagiński. These films may postulate future or alternative worlds, peopled with demons and other fantastical creatures, but what they do best is tell us a lot about the Polish psyche.

~

Bio:

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s “The Day of the Triffids” at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She has published “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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Lethe

We could swear we used to remember once upon a time what this story was about, by Eli Sclar.

Travelling Theory in a Parallel Universe

by Mina

Academia is always sprouting new theories like a rabid hydra. Deconstruction and Derrida may have been all the recent rage, but my interest was caught by a theory that slipped in with much less fanfare: travelling theory. Basically, it looks at how other theories spread, grow, change form, thrive or fade away. To my surprise, I found an excellent illustration of this theory in a sci-phi / fantasy novel. But more on this in a moment: first, I must blitz you a bit with, yes, theory. I promise to be as concise as possible.

To travel, a theory must cross cultures, sometimes taking a ride on the back of a different language. One theorist, Hillis Miller, stresses that a theory will be read and understood differently by a non-native speaker reading the theory in its original language (where s/he will interpret it his/her own way and based on his/her level of competence in the original language) or in translation (where s/he will interpret someone else’s interpretation). The room for misunderstanding and misinterpretation is, of course, huge.

The main proponent for travelling theory is Edward Said. In his opinion, theory travels well because theory is ‘conceptual and generalized’ and is not tied to a particular time, place or situation. However, the language of a theory is tied to a particular language and culture. A theory that has travelled does bring with it ‘the culture of its originator’. We will now ‘appropriate’ his theory. By that, I mean we will take this theory, examine it from various angles and turn it into something that is ours. Let’s also do something high-brow articles aren’t supposed to do – have frivolous and irreverent fun!

I found my own starting point by combining a science-fiction novel by Iain M. Banks and Said’s mobile theory. To summarise ruthlessly, Said identified four stages of travel for a theory: the point of origin, the distance traversed, the conditions of acceptance or resistance, and transformation. After such travel, a theory may be greatly diluted (domesticated theory) or magnified and strike a new direction (transgressive theory). For Zhang Longxi, another theorist, the most important stage is the point of destination or the point of origin in reverse. Basically (to overuse this word some more), he focuses on how a theory has been transformed by its destination to meet the needs of the point of destination.

Iain M. Banks writes science fiction for the ‘thinking man’. His books are beautifully constructed and complex. His novel Inversions struck me as a particularly good parable for travelling theory, especially if we focus, like Zhang Longxi, more on the point of destination. The novel is set in a primitive world reminiscent of medieval Europe, a common enough trope in fantasy. Its inhabitants are unaware that they have been visited by people from ‘The Culture’, an advanced post-scarcity interstellar civilisation. In the novel, the stories of two characters, ‘the Doctor’ and ‘the Bodyguard’ (my capitals), occur at the same time but in different lands and without overlapping in any way. It is only through the tales told by the Bodyguard to a sick child that the reader realises that these two characters come from a distant, more advanced civilisation and that they are cousins.

It is the tales that the Bodyguard tells which bring us to travelling theory. In the utopian world he describes, two cousins who are also friends argue about a theory: one cousin (who we can surmise to be the Doctor from the clues left for us in the novel) believes that it is the duty of a more advanced civilisation to help more primitive civilisations and ‘make life better for them’; the other cousin, the Bodyguard (identified again from the clues provided by the chief narrator) feels that more primitive civilisations should be left alone to make their own way. To intervene or not to intervene, that is the question; a debate which we often find in science fiction, going no further than the Prime Directive in “Star Trek”, where the crew of the starship Enterprise are not permitted to intervene in local matters just because they are the more advanced civilisation. It is perhaps easier to shift such a thorny debate into outer space than to discuss the realities of colonialism in planet earth’s history. To return to the theory the Doctor expounds in the Bodyguard’s tales, we could call it the ‘Theory of Beneficial Intervention’, i.e. a belief that the more advanced civilisation can and should intervene for the better of the primitive civilisation.

The Doctor actively strives to change the society in the land she visits by influencing its king and his advisors for the better. She remains the outsider throughout but does indeed seem to sow the seeds of peace and scientific ‘progress’ before disappearing. Towards the end of the novel, the author hints that she is an agent of ‘Special Circumstances’, a covert organisation whose aim it is to send operatives to influence events in the civilisations bordering ‘The Culture’. The Bodyguard does not actively strive to change the land he visits but limits himself to being part of its society and reacting to events as they occur. He fails to protect his ruler (the Prime Protector), who is assassinated, and, even worse, he allows a civil war to erupt. As far as we know, he is not supported by any external organisation; he reminds us more of the lone cowboy searching for adventure in the Wild West.

What is very interesting is that the only glimpses we have of the point of origin of the Doctor’s Theory of Beneficial Intervention, i.e. the civilisation known as ‘The Culture’, are the tales told by the Bodyguard. In fact, ‘The Culture’ is never referred to directly; the reader will only know of its existence from the other novels written in this universe by Iain M. Banks (which reminded me of A Horse and His Boy, where C.S. Lewis writes a story completely within Narnia). The two narrators (the doctor’s assistant and a concubine) are part of the local primitive cultures with no knowledge of ‘The Culture’ and only a partial understanding of the motives driving the Doctor and the Bodyguard, thus they have no awareness of the theory under dispute and are not biased for or against it. It is as if the rat in an experiment were to tell you the story from his point of view, with no knowledge of the experiment and its variables. This offers us a view of the travel of a theory from the bottom up and not from the top down, as is more customary. It also makes the point of destination far more important than the point of origin.

The symbolism in the main characters’ names is very clear: the Doctor is a ‘missionary-soldier’ who wishes to cure the malady presented by a primitive culture and the Bodyguard wishes to protect its right to be its primitive self. On the surface, the Doctor’s Theory of Beneficial Intervention would seem to have been vindicated by her. She leaves behind a society moving towards long-lasting peace, greater social equality and scientific progress. The Bodyguard leaves behind a society dissolving into chaos and civil war. However, it is not as simple as that, the deeper ramifications of both stories would point to a more subversive role for travelling theory.

It could be argued that the Doctor simply made a good ruler better and speeded up a process that would have occurred with or without her. She sowed the seeds on an already fertile ground and was, at best, not a revolutionary, only a catalyst. The Bodyguard, despite his belief in non-intervention, does change one small event: he saves the life of a child. This child goes on to become the ruler who brings peace to his land, after its descent into civil war, and gains renown as a scholar. Since his own father was only interested in fighting and maintaining power, and was not a scholar, it raises the question of where this ruler learned about the possibility of peace and stability if not from the tales of a utopian land once told to him by his father’s bodyguard.

Despite his ‘resistance’ to the Theory of Beneficial Intervention, the Bodyguard communicates this theory to the child who will one day become a ‘good’ ruler, suggesting that acceptance or not of a theory has nothing to do with its method of transmission. This would further suggest that resistance to a theory is as important as acceptance of it because it encourages the transmission of the theory. A theory may travel by trumpeting its virtues through active debate, e.g. the Doctor’s long discussions with the king and his advisors, or through texts, e.g. the notes the Doctor leaves for her assistant. However, it may also slip in quietly through the back door through a small action saving one person’s life or through a tale, a myth or a parable, which may be interpreted in unexpected ways.

The irony of the novel is that the Bodyguard ultimately proves the Doctor’s theory right in a more convincing manner than the Doctor herself (he also goes on to become a successful trader and what better way to encourage peace than through trade?). In other words, regardless of the origin of the Theory of Beneficial Intervention, it takes root in the primitive world described by Banks because two rulers who are fully part of that world see the merits of the peace and stability resulting from its application in their respective societies.

###

A Short Bibliography:
(if you wish to hit yourself with some heavyweight theory)

– Hillis Miller, J.
(1996) “Border Crossings, Translation Theory: Ruth”. In: The Translatability of Cultures, Figurations of the Space Between, Sanford Budick and Wolfgang Iser (eds.). Stanford University Press, 207-223.

– Said, Edward W.
(2000) “Traveling Theory Reconsidered”. In: Reflections on Exile and Other Essays, Harvard University Press, 436-452.
(1983) ”Traveling Theory”. In: The World, the Text and the Critic, Harvard University Press, 226-247.

– Zhang Longxi
(1992) “Western Theory and Chinese Reality”. In: Critical Inquiry, 19, 1, 105-30.

~

Bio

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s “The Day of the Triffids” at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She has published “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

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On the Android Spectrum or Aspies in Space

by Mina

To be a perfectly logical creature with no emotions and no social needs is not really perceived as an advantage by most NTs on earth in the 21st century – NTs or “neurotypicals” is what Aspies (people with Asperger’s Syndrome) call everyone else. No NT will pray to whatever god they believe in to turn them into an Aspie, whereas an Aspie may well wish they were not so. This is where science fiction greatly differs from the rest of that human construct we call the world – it is full of Aspies in major roles, not just in minor, abject ones.

Before I go any further, let’s get our labels pinned down. I dislike labelling, but it can be a helpful shorthand when you have a word limit. The two important labels for this article are Asperger’s Syndrome and PDA (Pathological Demand Avoidance). Both are considered pervasive developmental disorders on the autism spectrum. Both are “pure” forms of autism, not accompanied by any complications like learning disabilities. By “pure” form, I mean it is “only” a social disorder, which means a (complete) lack of empathy and real difficulties in communicating with others. It is not an illness or a handicap; the brain is simply wired differently.

Aspies appear everywhere in fiction now – think of characters who are brilliant, incapable of lying, unable to “read” the people around them (or even their own emotions), literal in their responses and who show obsessive and anxious behaviours. The brilliant is a bit unfair because Aspies are like anyone else – they can be of just average intelligence. Aspies may have a touch of PDA, which is now finally being seen as a disorder in its own right. PDA is an inability to adapt to the world or its demands, usually due to extreme anxiety. It is much harder to romanticise which is why fiction is not full of people with this disorder. PDA behaviours include aggression (leading to severe meltdowns and violence in some cases), psychotic behaviours and an internal fantasy life often more real to that person than the external world. Both Aspies and people with PDA have no empathy –they have to learn how to interact with others. They can learn to successfully navigate the world of NTs, but it is skilled acting and imitation, never more than skin deep. Neither of these disorders must be confused with childhood traumas such as Attachment Disorder, where a severe form of neglect leads to some Aspie/PDA behaviours.

So, where are all the Aspies in science fiction? They are, quite simply, in our fascination with logic, robots and androids. I will limit myself to a spectrum of R. Daneel Olivaw from Asimov’s robot novels, the Star Trek canon (Spock, Data, Lore and Lal) and a film that explodes all boundaries but could be considered a mix of fantasy and horror, “Heavenly Creatures”.

The R in R. Daneel stands for “robot”. Today, we would call him an android. Daneel has a “positronic” brain, a CPU so advanced that he is a sentient being and one who is literally “wired differently”. Daneel is the typical Aspie – he does not really understand human drives and emotions and he is very literal in his way of seeing and understanding the world. Like Aspies, he has a very formal way of talking and an expressionless face. He is an android detective partnered with a human, Elijah Baley, and, like an Aspie can, he learns from Baley. Daneel appears in four robot novels but, unlike Aspies, he is ruled by the “Three Laws of Robotics”, which artificially prevent him from harming humans.

My favourite conversation between Daneel and Baley is in “The Caves of Steel” when Baley attempts to explain the Bible and a particular story in it to Daneel. Baley describes the Bible as a code of behaviour and a higher law. He tells Daneel the story of the adulterous woman that Jesus saves from stoning (“he that is without sin, let him cast the first stone” – “go and sin no more”). Daneel struggles during the conversation to understand the case of a guilty party that is not punished as society dictates, and he is totally baffled by the notions of mercy and forgiveness. For someone without a “theory of mind” as Aspies are sometimes described (an inability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes), a parable or an allegory can be hard to grasp because it is based on a purely intuitive and emotional gut understanding of the world and other people. At the end of the book, Daneel has progressed far enough in his understanding of NTs to apply the story to the situation at hand saying: “it suddenly seems to me that the destruction of what should not be, that is, the destruction of what you people call evil, is less just and desirable than the conversion of this evil into what you call good”. Note though that Daneel says “you people” – he has understood how an NT would apply the Bible story but does not really feel the same way. That is quintessential Aspie.

The Star Trek canon – I shall proceed chronologically and start with Spock. He is of course not an android but a human/Vulcan hybrid. Vulcans pride themselves in being logical above all else. The original “Star Trek” series was not subtle and Spock’s character was often used for comic effect – his literal (mis)understanding of things said to him, in particular. Spock values reason and science – Aspies (with no PDA to muddy the waters) often end up in jobs where science and computers play a major role, as they function well in a structured, orderly universe. Spock has an expressionless face and a deep, mesmerising voice (this is less accurate, Aspies can creep people out with a total lack of inflection when speaking); he is loyal and makes few but lifelong friends (this is more accurate). It is not that Spock does not have feelings – Vulcans have strong emotions and primal instincts if we think of their mating rituals in “Amok time” – but he chooses not to express them (an Aspie would probably not feel that they had a choice). Apart from the moments where his abysmal social skills make for laughter, he is a respected part of the Star Trek universe and a valued part of the Kirk-Spock-McCoy triangle. If you have nothing better to do tonight, go on to YouTube and hunt out the video of the many, many times Spock says “fascinating”. He is ultimately a positive image of an Aspie in space.

The actor Brent Spiner has said repeatedly in interviews that he did not set out to play Data as an Aspie, yet Data is the character most Aspies relate to best in “Star Trek the Next Generation”. They relate in particular to his struggle to understand social rules, taboos, manners, interactions and emotions. Data is a more pathetic figure than Spock because he wants to be something he is not. Spock is ultimately happy with who he is and chooses his Aspieness; Data is not, he is an Aspie who wants to be an NT. He is valued by the other members of the crew and saves the day on more than one occasion however, so it is not just a case of a wayward child being patronised by indulgent adults. He is shown as sensitive and, above all, curious and with a thirst for knowledge. Like Daneel, he has a positronic brain, is sentient, has an expressionless face and speaks in a formal manner. Data is also reminiscent of Asimov’s “Bicentennial Man”, an android who longs to be human and even succeeds in that most human act, dying.

The best Data episode in my opinion is “The Offspring” where he creates a daughter, Lal (“beloved” in Hindi). In her short life, Lal is “more human” than Data – her speech is more natural (she uses contractions like “I’m”) and she feels emotions. Her first emotions are fear and confusion, which I think most Aspies would relate to. Anxiety is probably the strongest emotion felt by many Aspies as they try to negotiate an alien and sometimes hostile and unkind world. Lal tells her father she loves him; Data replies he cannot feel love, yet his actions belie his words for he takes very good care of Lal and does everything in his power to save her, even if he fails in the end.

Daneel, Spock, Data and Lal are all characters that mostly call on our sympathy. We enjoy them and they are presented as “good”. If it feels like I am ignoring Seven of Nine from “Voyager”, I am. Not because of the way she is highly sexualised but because, for me, she is not a true Aspie. She is an NT that displays some autistic behaviours but is arguably a victim of a huge childhood trauma; a trauma that she learns to overcome in her dealings with other crew members in a safe and understanding environment.

Much more interesting is Data’s brother, Lore, the deliciously “evil” Aspie in the Star Trek universe. I like Lore because I am a little tired of fiction stressing the “wonders” of being an Aspie. If it’s so wonderful, why do Aspies have a higher suicide rate and suffer from depression more often than NTs? Not all Aspies grow up in a supportive environment; like anyone else, they can come from dysfunctional families and less privileged backgrounds and have their own unique hang-ups. Also, they are often presented as victims whereas a being with absolutely no empathy could be a very scary predator like Lore. Lore has absolutely no empathy, enjoys playing with others, is immoral (or at best, amoral), displays a weak sense of self and is a megalomaniac with psychopathic tendencies. Lore shows that Aspies can be the “baddies”, emotional and downright dangerous if they have not been taught to value the life and dignity of others in a meaningful way. It is a dark edge to Aspies but also a more nuanced view. And one without Asimov’s Three Laws to keep us safe.

Lore could be considered an Aspie with a large dollop of PDA. It is difficult to explain PDA to those who have no experience of it. Unlike pure Aspies, people with PDA can be very irrational. Their wild and constant mood swings, their extremely personally-directed meltdowns and aggression, their fundamental indifference to the feelings or concerns of those around them, their ability to hold an entire conversation with a cuddly toy, their immersion in a fantasy world and their lack of straight lines in anything they say can be very difficult to live with. So difficult that I couldn’t actually think of a well-known character in science fiction that displays these less than lovable traits. Whereas an Aspie can be a mad but lovable scientist figure, someone with PDA would probably be obsessing about a bedridden author they are terrorising in a Stephen King novel.

The closest I can get to a more nuanced example of PDA is a film that does not purport to be about PDA, “Heavenly Creatures”. The two teenage girls in the film, Pauline and Juliet, create fantasy worlds (Borovnia and The Fourth World) that are more real to them than the outside world and they lose themselves in their fantasies. The singer Mario Lanza, for example, is more real to them than their own parents. The girls become obsessed with each other and ruled by a fear of being separated. They end up murdering Pauline’s mother, Honora, who they blame for their predicament (blaming others can be a big part of PDA). The girls are able to kill Honora because they feel no empathy whatsoever for her. The most chilling thing is that the film is based on true events and the directors create a disturbing fantasy film where we see the worlds the girls have imagined in glorious Technicolor. The directors, Walsh and Jackson, did a lot of research to try to give the story psychological depth whilst avoiding judgement. As a viewer, I of course add my own interpretation to the film, which to me is an incredible illustration of what can happen when fantasy, aggression and psychosis operate unchecked by empathy. This article does not lay any claim to being scientific and objective. I think it’s great that we have so many Aspies in space. What I would like to see is perhaps more variety and a more nuanced picture where Aspies are allowed to be like everyone else – good, bad and indifferent. Yes, they make interesting heroes but they also make fabulous anti-heroes. Aspies do not show alien behaviours after all; rather, they show extreme behaviours of which we are all humanly capable. And science fiction is the ideal forum for considering human behaviour in all its permutations, even if we need to wrap it up in android form and put it in a space ship.

~

Bio

Mina is a translator by day, an insomniac by night. Reading Asimov’s robot stories and Wyndham’s “The Day of the Triffids” at age eleven may have permanently warped her view of the universe. She has published “flash” fiction on speculative sci-fi websites and hopes to work her way up to a novella or even a novel some day.

You might be interested in