The Zap Gun

Posted on December 21, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

The original cover’s horny pronouncement: “Alien Satellites Circle the Earth–and Man’s Only Hope is a Mad Cartoonist!?”

The Zap Gun is one of Philip K. Dick’s lesser “pot-boiler” novels.

It was originally serialized, so it’s shitty in the way that novels always are when it’s clear a writer is being paid by the word, useless adjectives everywhere. The story chugs along at a variable pace, committing the unforgivable sin of being (*gasp*) boring more than once.

Being a slice of PKD’s consciousness, however, it’s also completely insane. The story is about para-psychic government weapons “fashions” designers who receive schematics for world-destroying bombs while in drug-induced fugues. To fuel what is essentially a Cold public relations War between East and West (here given the adorable monikers “Peep-East” and “Wes-Bloc”), they tap into what they believe is a higher plane and awake with sketched designs for things like lobotomy gas, the “Evolution Gun” and “weapon BBA-81D.” These weapons are designed and constructed in underground laboratories, then tested and disseminated in propaganda films, but never actually used on the enemy. Instead, each element of the weapon is immediately “plowshared” into useful commercial products. Before the action even unfurls, the essential premise is already an illusion: the weapons designing, the psychic trances, and the entire industry of war are just a front to keep the economies of the East and West mutually afloat. It’s purely formal technological development without purpose, a war of design espionage, without bloodshed. The greater public knows nothing of this elaborate pact between East and West. They believe they are at war.

Which…this was written in 1967, but obviously the joke is still funny.

The Zap Gun introduces a daisy chain of science-fictional future banalities: automated kitchen appliances, vidphones, autonomous robotic journalists, a talking house oracle called “Ol’ Orville,” all products of weapons plowsharing. The main character, a top US weapons psychic, respected and feared the world over (his pick of mistresses!) suffers. He knows his work is useless, and pines for his puff existence—his appearance of vitality—to be made real. As it later turns out, he’s even more useless than he imagined: instead of tapping into a higher level of consciousness, touching God, he is actually just in psychic contact with an African comic-book artist. As he discovers that his ideas are nothing more than stolen design fictions, he plunges into a reckless anomie. Suddenly, ravenous pulp aliens start hovering over the Earth, their intentions inscrutable; the more ships appear, the more obvious it is that generations of fake-warmongering have left the planet unprepared for conflict, and due for certain extraterrestrial enslavement. We wonder: is the war machine necessary? Does it keep us hungry, keep us vigilant? Is it the engine that drives both technological innovation and artistically productive dissent?

Cute.

Our hero becomes despondent. He is incapable of dreaming up a weapon that could possibly touch the new enemy. There’s simply no time, no resources to produce a smash-em-all nuke to obliterate the Slavers from Sirius. The solution—and I’m going to spoil the ending, because it’s interesting and odds are you’ll never read The Zap Gun—isn’t a weapon. It’s a toy. And this is where it gets really good, where the feverish rays of the true Dick Id start peeking out from behind the pulp-novel door. The toy is a kind of empathy feedback machine, a handheld maze in which a tiny, adorable creature is trapped. The maze is designed to be inescapable; as the creature reaches its end, the walls seamlessly re-arrange themselves. The user (gamer?) can control the difficulty of the maze, the harshness of the illusion, then rapid disappearance, of an exit. The catch is that the creature has a parapsychic ability to connect with the gamer. The gamer, essentially, feels a profound sense of empathy with the creature, and as they punish it with the shifting labyrinth, so they punish themselves. In the absence of a weapon of mass destruction, humanity instead sends an amplified version of this game to the alien overlords, banking on the evolutionary consistency of empathy. This works, and the aliens retreat with their proverbial tails in between their horrific, chitinous legs.

A couple of observations here. One, empathy is a fairly common science fiction tool; we often see empathy as a paranormal or psychic ability to sense others’ emotions—in this case, the word “empath” is used. The science, or speculative-fictional, empath often suffers from their gift, feeling the pain and confusion of others all around them. But empathy is also one of the fundamental elements of human morality. Our capacity to not only recognize the bodily and emotional feelings of others, but to port those experiences over to our own system, essentially neurologically replicating them, is an essential function of the human mind, undoubtedly key to our development as a social species. Those who do not have this ability are sadistic, autistic, and generally incomprehensible—not unlike aliens.

In fact, a lack of empathy, or, alternately, a lack of relatability, is one of the scariest things about aliens as they’re represented in popular culture; their inscrutable faces, their unclear—but obviously sinister—motives, their willingness to experiment upon us without any concern for our fragile psyches. Aliens are terrifying because they have no compassion, because their moral or ethical system, if they have one, has no bearing on our reality. They are not, in short, “human.”

For Dick to turn this entire construction on its head is brilliant. In a serialized 60s sci-fi novel, we expect the baddies to be slimy monsters from the great beyond, roundly destroyed by mankind’s martial ingenuity. Instead, in The Zap Gun, humanity employs the cornerstone of its neurological and spiritual makeup against the enemy—and the enemy is defeated by virtue of sharing that quality. The weapon of mass destruction is compassion. The conclusion is a philosophical grey area: the enemy is not so different, and so we can destroy him as we would destroy ourselves.

And, in a sense, we are destroying ourselves, because—ta-dah!—the alien is really us. Etymologically, alien is alienus, Latin, meaning other. But our perception of “other” is defined by the boundaries we place on the self; the more extreme the otherness (“Slavers from Sirius!”) the deeper it relates to some core quality of the self. The alien in science fiction is often the cold heart of man, the creature powered solely by evolutionary imperative, a horrific iteration of our animal origins. An empathy trap exorcises this demon, and we can all sleep at night.

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The Synthetic Man

Posted on August 17, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

This world is a
Haven for
Extra-terrestrial

Stones. The Earth
Yields them,
Nestled in the dirt and
Thoroughly unconcerned with
Humanity.
Every night,
They quietly
Invent perfect
Copies of

Men.
A dream is all we are, the
Nightmares of a jewel.

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Virtual Light

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

Virtual Light is the first book of William Gibson’s “Bridge” trilogy, in which an nonfunctional, shanty-town Golden Gate bridge is a major feature. Like his previous “Sprawl” trilogy, it leans low and hard into its dystopian city-scape, positing a completely probable slumification of the modern metropolis — one which has developed laterally, growing in spontaneous density, rather than upwards into the mega-skyscrapers and glass-domed arcologies of standard gung-ho futurism.

Unlike the Sprawl books (Neuromancer, Count Zero, and Mona Lisa Overdrive), however, Virtual Light doesn’t take place in the future, not really; with a time-stamp of 2006, it’s an alternate present rather than a straight science-fictional tomorrow, although the effect is the same. While stories that unfold in the future give us an extrapolative shock, Gibson seems to understand that in an urbanized world of mediated digital communication — a climate of instantaneity — the distinction between “now” and “tomorrow” is irrelevant. Reality fluctuates wildly from individual to individual depending on his or her point of perceptual entry, and hence Gibson’s dystopian 2006 is as real as the person reading it.

As with many Gibson novels, the most compelling thing about Virtual Light is its atmosphere. The environment of the novel, essentially an archetypical cyberpunk milieu, is dizzying: a California divided into two nation-states, jacked up on privatized security thuggery, pocketed with anarchist utopias of organic provenance. Data pirates, security cops, hackers, and televisual evangelists war over hardware; namely, a pair of “Virtual Light” glasses, a virtual (today we might say “enhanced”) reality device that ratchets directly into the optic nerve, overlaying any number of data points seamlessly onto the visual plane.

This book is about architecture and perception. The crux of the plot is that the virtual light glasses, when worn to gaze upon the city of San Francisco, reveal a plan by overseas developers to restructure the city. The plan, to plant nanomachines in the downtown that self-construct into buildings — buildings that “just grow” — is presented as being so fundamentally repulsive and unnatural that the hacker underground is galvanized to prevent its implementation without any encouragement.

That’s because architecture, here, is a metaphor for class: the rich, in Virtual Light, live in planned corporate megaplexes — giant glass domes, gargantuan malls — while the poor live in organically-generated slums, which are portrayed as being vibrant, warm, human communities, beautiful in their senselessness. Gibson’s tenderness for the slum is manifested through the character of Shinya Yamazaki, a Japanese sociologist studying the community of the Bridge.

“The integrity of its span was as rigorous as the modern program itself, yet around this had grown another reality, intent upon its own agenda. This had occurred piecemeal, to no set plan, employing every imaginable technique and material. The result was something amorphous, startlingly organic.”

The Bridge, which Yamakazi describes in his notebooks as an “accretion of dreams,” something with “magic and singularity,” a “pointless yet curiously artlike feature of the urban landscape,” is the home (physical and spiritual) of Virtual Light‘s most likable protagonists, those fighting the nano-urbanization of San Francisco. There’s a clear binary here. On one side, the wealthy, whose urban environment is intentional, architectural, built, technological, clean, and corporate. On the other, the poor, whose practical ingenuity has cumulated in a massively dense, anti-technological, piecemeal construction that somehow reflects the best qualities of the human spirit, of a community of individuals fighting against the compartmentalized alienation of the modern city. On the Bridge, everyone lives on top of everyone else, in an interconnected system functioning entirely outside of the matrix of the law.

The Bridge, Gibson clearly iterates, is real life — sweat, filth, and color.

The Bridge, as represented (poorly) in the 1995 film Johnny Mnemonic, which was written by William Gibson.

The city, on the other hand, is Virtual Light: it’s data. It’s glass and steel. It’s businesslike efficiency, robot maids, and stringent rules. And it has no right to impinge on the Bridge’s natural quality of growth — it simply can’t, in Gibson’s world, share any qualities whatsoever with the people’s Temporary Autonomous Zone-esque urbanism. The rich just mustn’t implement technologies that mimic the organic development of the slums. It would be a perversion, a co-opting of the underground.

The takeaway, it seems, is that the poor — i.e. the nontechnological — are the only truly connected people. Technologies like Virtual Light, or the complex computer systems that monitor the security of the wealthy, only serve to alienate people from one another. A clapboard house constructed bit by bit from hand tools, a bicycle, a slum full of cultures woven into a hallucinatory puzzle: these are the real connective technologies. It’s obvious (to me) that Gibson is often mislabeled as a cyberprophet, a digital zealot. He’s quite the opposite: not a luddite, but certainly an advocate of that human je-ne-sais-quoi that seperates us from machines.

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Myths of the Near Future and The Venus Hunters

Posted on June 26, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

We are all haunted by the totemic images of our subconscious. They rise, seemingly of their own volition, out of the dreaming depths of our minds to color our experience of the world. While there are socialized symbols that have been codified within individual cultures by centuries of thought and mythology — the moon is woman, the sun is man, for example — we can’t all adhere to the same sets of visual references. Our semiotic experience, particularly in this highly mediated age, is personal. The British writer J.G. Ballard referred to the pop culture of the 1960s (his period of greatest popularity, at least in the States) as an electronic novel we all lived inside, governed by instantaneity. It’s easy to draw a parallel to the present day — but this sentiment can also be applied to Ballard’s own oeuvre: a richly visual place, utterly simultaneous.

I decided to read J.G. Ballard because it’s a good idea to be well-versed in authors whose names have become adjectives. From the kinds of things I’ve heard described as “Ballardian,” I knew I was in for bleak suburban landscapes, grotesque televisual feasts, and tales of technological anomie.

However, the atmosphere of the short stories contained in Ballard’s Myths of the Near Future and The Venus Hunters is clouded with persistently recurring images — wings, drained swimming pools, visual trails, cameras, hotels, the slowing down of time, feminine features blown up to the point of abstraction — that smack of personal obsession, not deconstructionist sci-fi attitude. Ballard seems entirely comfortable within the matrix of his working mythologies. He unfolds his pet compulsions repeatedly, from different angles: in one story, a high-rise holiday hotel is merely a setting, in another, it’s a concentration camp for unemployable expatriates, doomed to spend their lives forever waterskiing. Drained swimming pools* are time machines and refuges, totemic pieces of landscape that even Ballard doesn’t seem to understand. In the story, “Myths of the Near Future,” the American Space Race has somehow caused a time-disease, an affliction which makes it so that every iteration of oneself exists simultaneously; in “News from the Sun,” the same time disease causes increasingly long fugues that eventually slow an individual’s existence down to a single point.

In a sense, all images are metaphors: they trigger sets of associations within us, often in ways that a writer cannot anticipate. J.G. Ballard is keenly aware of this; as particular as his work is, as much as it seems like a closed box with its own set of narrative rules, he doesn’t seek to unpack his own spiritual mechanics — he simply lays them out, trading in symbols like a Surrealist painter. In a 1984 interview with the Paris Review, Ballard cited the Surrealists not as inspiration, but corroboration: he explained, “the surrealists show how the world can be remade by the mind.”

1965 edition of Ballard’s The Drowned World, with an appropriately Surrealist cover: The Palace of Windowed Rocks, by Yves Tanguy.

As a consequence, it’s difficult to speak to the incredible power of his stories; they bypass the mind and kick directly to the subconscious. They are wildly sensuous and strange, lovingly detailing obsessed men with the loving detail of an obsessed man. In the words of symbolist painter Odilon Redon, they place the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible.

From that same genuinely enlightening interview with the Paris Review:

INTERVIEWER

Let’s start with obsession. You seem to have an obsessive way of repeatedly playing out permutations of a certain set of emblems and concerns. Things like the winding down of time, car crashes, birds and flying, drained swimming pools, airports, abandoned buildings, Ronald Reagan…

BALLARD

I think you’re completely right. I would say that I quite consciously rely on my obsessions in all my work, that I deliberately set up an obsessional frame of mind. In a paradoxical way, this leaves one free of the subject of the obsession. It’s like picking up an ashtray and staring so hard at it that one becomes obsessed by its contours, angles, texture, et cetera, and forgets that it is an ashtray—a glass dish for stubbing out cigarettes….Presumably all obsessions are extreme metaphors waiting to be born. That whole private mythology, in which I believe totally, is a collaboration between one’s conscious mind and those obsessions that, one by one, present themselves as stepping-stones.

I’ll go so far as to posit that Ballard is a science fiction writer only in the sense that his references overlap with recognizable emblems of the genre. He writes about astronauts, time, and the universe, but with an awareness that they are tropes manifested by the collective unconscious, rather than actual objects — what he does with those images is more Dalí than Delany. Digital tombs catacombed in sand, an abandoned Cape Kennedy thick with tropical birds which hang in the air like insects preserved in amber, drained swimming pools full of broken sunglasses, a woman’s silhouette fractured across bathroom tile, nude and Hockney-eqsue…

I love Ballard’s idea of these obsessions as “extreme metaphors waiting to be born,” and I love that he sees the writer’s private vocabulary of symbols as the iceberg tip of their subconscious. Indeed, Ballard was one of a handful of science-fiction writers who argued that the future of fiction lies not outward, but inward. Keyed as we all are to our own obsessions, we’re all prone to reading Ballard differently. While the other New Wavers ported the psychosymbiotic mystery of the LSD experience into their tales of “inner space,” however, Ballard’s work isn’t druggy at all: rather, it has the time-signature of dreams. I, for one, see these subtropical lizard brain landscapes as portholes into the strange richness of a stranger’s liminal brain-space; I find it thrilling to imagine a man in suburban post-war Britain being driven by visions of sun-bleached concrete and the jeweled vicissitudes of time. At this point, it’s become what “science fiction” is all about to me: the iterative, and forever-magic, power of minds.

*“Ah, drained swimming pools! There’s a mystery I never want to penetrate—not that it’s of interest to anyone else. I’m never happier than when I can write about drained swimming pools and abandoned hotels.”

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Artistic Education: Hannes Bok

Posted on June 6, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

Hannes Bok’s last published work, a wraparound illustration of Roger Zelazny’s “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” printed in the November 1963 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.

Hannes Bok was a seminal figure in early science fiction culture and one of its great artists. An astrology nut and closeted homosexual in the already surreal milieu of early SF fandom, his work, championed by Ray Bradbury and fan icons like Forrest J. Ackerman, was minimal, sometimes almost Art Nouveau, characterized by austere pen and ink renderings of kitsch monsters, hybrid creatures, and elegant humans in angular turmoil. He was mentored in his early career by Maxfield Parrish and adopted from this elder the technique of layering his canvases with glaze, which lent his color pieces (often made for the cover of magazines like Weird Tales and Other Worlds) a hyper-saturated luminosity.

Bok was a card-carrying member of the Futurians, a legendary New York fan group that nurtured the careers of Isaac Asimov and Frederick Pohl, as well as being active in the primordial science fiction scene of Los Angeles in the late 1930s — in a compendium published posthumously, his best friend Emil Petaja recalls eating free lime sherbet at L.A.’s historic Clifton’s Cafeteria with Bradbury and other members of the then-elite of science fiction. File under: great minds and great desserts.

Hannes Bok died at 49 of a heart attack after a protracted period of withdrawal from the world; his lifelong obsessions with astrology, the occult, and the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius made him a pariah in his later years. Regardless, Bok remains a beloved icon of the genre’s early years, a true heretic of the acrylics.

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Science Fiction You Can Dance To

Posted on May 31, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

Step into the tractor beam, and never come back.

As some of you may know, when I’m not writing esoteric science fiction reviews, I’m a singer, writer, performer, and concept-maker for a band called YACHT. Occasionally, these wildly separate spheres of reality do have axes of intersection; now is one of those times.

I’ve made a continuous mix of music that journeys deep into the musical underbelly of science fiction. Yes, finally! Science fiction you can dance to! Download “Fly On, UFO” to travel to disco dystopias and far-flung cosmic boogies. Visit the hellish world Cerrone‘s “Supernature,” where scientists would do anything to feed the starving masses, including poison the world with chemicals that would create mutants down below. Sidle up next to miss Dee D. Jackson, who, looking at the erotic robot in her bed, polished chrome gleaming under white satin sheets, raises her perfectly glossed lip in a snarl, and utters: “Your body’s cold.” Raise your fist to the night sky with Chromium, who, seeing a UFO in the sky, beaming with promise, lights in primary colors like an 80s movie, are yelling “Come back later!”

And end your adventure with the impossibly weird folk burner, “In The Year 2525,” the musical equivalent of Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men, a future history that tells the tale of the next two billion years of time, touching on eighteen distinct versions of the human race, from regular flesh-and-blood people to birdlike creatures living on Neptune (Zager & Evans only go about ten thousand years into the future, but they hit some classic sci-fi themes on the way, like genetic engineering, mechanical automation, and test-tube babies).

DOWNLOAD: Fly On, UFO (111 MB, 48:29, via Boing Boing)

  • Tracklist:
  • Message from the Stars – Snob
  • Space Disco – Cosmic Hoffmann
  • Spacer – Sheila & B. Devotion
  • Supernature – Cerrone
  • Automatic Lover – Dee D. Jackson
  • Spacer Woman – Charlie
  • Beam Me Up (Jacques Renault Remix) – Midnight Magic
  • Tout Petit La Planete – Plastique Bertrand
  • I’m Ready – Kano
  • Future World – Ganymed
  • Fly On UFO – Chromium
  • In The Year 2525 – Zager & Evans

Big thanks to Boing Boing for featuring “Fly on, UFO!”

The new YACHT album (which comes out in less than a month on DFA Records) SHANGRI-LA, is very much inspired by the discipline of science, or speculative fiction; the idea of “Shangri-La” or “Shambahla” gained traction in the West, like science fiction, in early pulp publishing; its Utopian aspiration strikes a similar chord.

After all, Utopia is science fiction, as is its inevitable inverse.

As a parting gift, I leave you with a sick, almost disgustingly slick vision of the future from Ganymed, an Austrian band whose gimmick was the nexus of proggy synth opuses, full-bore silver costumes, and cosmic pseudonyms. It’s no Philip K. Dick, but at least you can boogie down to it.

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Dawn

Posted on April 25, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

Dawn is the first book in Octavia E. Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy, recently reissued as the infinitely-less-cool-sounding “Lilith’s Brood” series. It tells the story of Lillith, a woman who wakes up after a nuclear winter on Earth in an sealed room. She’s held there for almost two years, under constant interrogation from a maddeningly patient, incorporate voice. One day she discovers a shadowy figure in her cell — her captor. He tells her that the people holding her hostage aren’t Soviets, the CIA, or any other terrestrial entity. They’re aliens. He tells her that he’s come to free her, but only when she’s able to look at him without terror. He raises the lights: tentacles for a face.

Thus begins Lillith’s real ordeal, the struggle to assimilate with a race of impossibly alien aliens on a ship orbiting her own destroyed planet. The aliens, called Oankali, offer her a deal: they’ve restored the Earth to health, and they intend to send the surviving humans they’ve gathered back down to begin the race anew. In exchange, they demand access to the genepool. The Oankali are genetic traders, creatures who’ve evolved specialized organs to manipulate their own genes, but who (paradoxically) must interbreed with other species in order to assure the survival of their kind. The aliens, Lillith discovers, want to have sex with her.

“Your people will change. Your young will be more like us and ours more like you….We’re as committed to the trade as your body is to breathing. We were overdue for it when we found you. Now it will be done, to the rebirth of your people and mine.”

One of the most compelling things about Dawn is the way that it expresses the fundamental dread that alienness inspires in its human protagonists. The Oankali are ugly — covered in thousands of wormlike tentacles that serve as sensory organs — but it’s not their ugliness that Lillith and the other humans find repulsive. It’s their shocking difference. Upon first meeting an Oankali, humans panic, lose consciousness, and self-mutilate. They literally cannot bring themselves to move any closer to the aliens, or even look directly at them. The first time Lillith encounters her captor, he forces his presence on her for five days before, exhausted and psychically broken, she is finally able to touch him.

This realistic horror of the other is the crux of the conflict that Lillith and her human counterparts face in Dawn. They are given the opportunity to resurrect the human race, but only if future generations of humans hold Oankali genes. Can the humans cope with the idea of their children being only half-human? Is that a fair trade? Is it even the perpetuation of the human race, if the future includes tentacles for arms and advanced powers of genetic manipulation?

Many critics have read Butler’s tales of racial anxiety as post-colonial allegories about powerlessness and domination in a racist society, which is a totally valid interpretation since a) Butler is one of only a few black female science fiction writers, and b) many of her novels deal explicitly with slavery. Despite the obvious parallels in Dawn — Oankali as plantation owners, forcing nonconsensual interbreeding, denying the humans access to books and writing implements, emphasizing their genetic superiority — I think it’s somewhat reductive to read “humans” as “slaves” in Butler’s work. The value of science fiction is often sold to the mainstream as being primarily allegorical; the aliens are Russians, the astronauts are colonialists, the new planet is the continent of America, intergalactic trade is really just slavery, “how clever, this will fool the censors!” But the power of this kind of tit-for-tat symbolism died with the pulps, and Butler didn’t write space westerns — she wrote highly complex, nuanced, sexually-charged feminist think pieces with no clear resolution and no obvious bad guys. The aliens here aren’t evil, they just have a different evolutionary imperative.

If anything, the Oankali practice a kind of inverse racism that is particularly foreign to humanity: while the narrative of racism in the West stems from an emphasis on racial, biological, and genetic “purity,” the Oankali impose mutations, symbiosis, and cosmic miscegenation. There is nothing isolationist about the alien mentality; the Oankali procreate with humans by literally placing themselves between a man and a woman, interpreting and modifying the biological exchange. They’re in the scrum, not peering down at it from a pedestal of their own design.

Butler speaks, rather, to the instability of identity in the face of genetic manipulation. It’s a weighty exploration of biological determinism; if our genes define us, then who are we? We contain billions of them; how many need to change before we are no longer human? Lillith undergoes subtle biological changes as the result of her cooperation with the Oankali: increased strength, a change in chemical signature that allows her to operate parts of the ship, a greater resistance to cancer. These all contribute to a perception of her as a Judas goat, someone who has betrayed her humanity. And yet her essential identity remains, even when the aliens give her an eidetic memory. Her transformations cut her off from her own kind, and while she grows close to her alien keepers, she can never be quite like them, either. Lillith’s position is deeply liminal: she is human, biologically, though less than before, and soon to parent a generation born of intergalactic parentage.

In suit, Dawn is a meditation on the self, a novel that ponders the porous boundaries between skin and world, human and alien, person and nonperson, natural and technological. What we think of as our personhood is actually an emergent system of genes, microbes, and electrical impulses — and it’s the product of cultural interpretation, an ideological system for enforcing meaning from meat. Identity is not biology. The Oankali know this, and they push Lillith to understand herself as more than the sum of her genes, as a mutable instance that is adaptable to an intergalactic, rather than terrestrial, context.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon review of Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower

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Arrive Maris In Ronde

Posted on March 18, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

Did I ever tell you I played a robot in an experimental science-fiction film?

Well, I did. Arrive Maris In Ronde is the thesis project of dear friend and superlative artist Rebecca Carlisle-Healy, sometimes known as RGB by RCH.

I play LITHa (Living, Imagining, Transformative Human Analogue), a machine intelligence brought to life over the course of an interplanetary journey to Mars. Originally programmed by humans and created as a tool for planetary colonization, she has the intellectual capacity to see that her given directives are faulty, and the computing power to imagine better alternatives. As physical life, the play of body in space, overtakes her sensory input, her computer brain forms a bond with Mars that causes her to develop so rapidly that she is lost to the control of the human pilot, Clay (played by Judah Switzer). She begins to advance independently, discovering the nature of consciousness. This is essentially a hopeful vision of the Technological Singularity.

As for the film’s strange visual quality, RCH wrote in her original proposal:

In general, every scene that appears on screen will be a composite image, a series of nested shots. This system of image-units will…communicate more information than can be contained by untreated, live video. The outermost frame establishes the scene’s location, a middle frame acts as an extension of the actor, who lies in the center. This progression is imitative of the way the human eye sees, with its distribution of rods and cones: fine, color detail in the center of the field of vision, where the cones are the most dense, followed by a large intermediary zone in which the brain generalizes and creates patterns, finally enclosed by the rods, which are very good at detecting motion and changes in light and dark…The surrounding frames provide a make-believe, but rational, context for the actor in the middle, but the effect is emotionally isolating. As all other players in the story, she [LITHa] is somehow alienated from her surroundings, unable to touch and be touched.

Rebecca’s image manipulations, language poems, and signature gif grain textures can be found online here, here, here, and here.

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The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde

Posted on March 17, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde is a 1970 collection of short stories by Norman Spinrad — syndicalist, anarchist, and active Internet user.

I had the same feeling reading The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde as I did when I read Bradbury as a kid, breathlessly tearing towards each story’s conclusion, eager to discover the clincher. At the outset, Spinrad seemed to combine the lucid dreaming of New-Wave science fiction with a more classical magazine-writing approach to story structure, something like Frederik Pohl explaining an LSD trip. Is it high art? Who cares? I just want to find out what’s inside the mysterious alien dome! After some meditation, however, I’ve found Spinrad to be a New Waver as hard-core as they come.

The most mind-expanding story in the collection is “Neutral Ground,” which manages to confound inner and outer space into a single unexplored entity. The story is about “Voyagers,” lab rats in a series of clinical studies testing a mysterious new drug called Psychion-36. Psychion-36 takes users to a place — a real Place. Though their bodies lie prone on psychiatric couches, the Voyagers most certainly travel to complex and detailed landscapes which seem like other worlds. Furthermore, multiple Voyagers visit the same places:

While their bodies lay in trances lasting for about an hour, their minds wandered through fantastic landscapes. And what was different about these hallucinations, what had made Project Voyage imperative, was that, although no Voyager had yet visited the same Place twice, there was strong evidence that different Voyagers had been to the same Places.

The Voyagers eventually encounter a non-human intelligence in their travels through the Places, and it proves to be a very different kind of “First Contact” than anyone could have expected. A great premise. Unfortunately, Spinrad, in this collection, is almost as much about what he doesn’t do with these perfect scenarios as what he does; ”Neutral Ground” is a great story, but it’s not what, say, Le Guin or Tiptree might have done with it.

Spinrad, Harlan Ellison, and Robert Sheckley mugging at the Los Angeles Science Fantasy Society in 1982.

Many of the stories in Last Hurrah play with this nuance between inner and outer space, and the physicality of the mind. In the opening story, “Carcinoma Angels,” a man uses a potent cocktail of consciousness-expanding drugs to travel inside of his own body, Fantastic Voyage-style, and battle off his own illness. In “Subjectivity,” a crew of long-distance space travelers dosed with an experimental psychedelic to stave off the loneliness of their sixteen-year intergalactic journey manage to externalize and maintain their hallucinations deftly enough to live inside of them. In “A Child of Mind,” marooned astronauts encounter an organism that can make real their most specific fantasy of a mate. The mind, in Spinrad’s work, is the ultimate science-fiction apparatus. Not the engineer’s mind, the kind of mind that (as Bruce Sterling writes) is “interested in the transcendent poetics of a device per se,” in sublimation through the conduit of an external machine. There are objects of human ingenuity in these stories — spacecraft, faster-than-light drives — but they are cold, dead things. They’re furniture. The real fire is metaphysical; the mind that Spinrad evokes is the mind of the mystic, the hovering yogi, the telepath, the meta-programmable mind of John C. Lilly — the mind without limits.

It’s an interesting — maybe I’m reading too much into this – externalization of the act of science fiction. In Spinrad’s 70s heyday, the only machine used to make fiction was a typewriter. And the typewriter has as much to do with the final work as a hammer does to a nail: which is to say, it’s necessary, it can color the work inasmuch as the heaviness of a hammer might affect the force of a carpenter’s thrust, but it’s not like a nail won’t go into the wall if you slam it with a rock. Ideas come from the writer, not from his or her tools. So why would a piece of fiction play by different rules?

You could define the “Golden Age” of science fiction as being primarily phallo-centric, machine-lusting, tool literature: steam-powered metal men, Tom Swift and his Photo-Telescope, etcetera. This is just the DNA of the genre: pulp magazines were written to adolescent boys, and with Hugo Gernsback publishing the first “scientifiction” serials in Modern Electrics, science fiction literally emerged from a culture of machismo mechanical tinkering. The New Wave of the 1960s (of which Spinrad was at the heart) aimed to move beyond that stigma, and so a radical break from object fetishism played a large part.

Spinrad’s stories, so concerned with the science-fictional power of the mind, speak to the metaphysics of writer and type-writer, hammer and nail. Every time a character in The Last Hurrah of the Golden Horde employs a Golden-Age “how does this doo-hickey work?” mentality, they are soundly rebuked. Spinrad clearly finds this way of thinking perverse and dated — he is for the transubstantiation of ideas into things, not of things into ideas. Success and failure, utopia and dystopia, all issue forth directly from the mind. In a great story called “Rules of the Road,” a character learns that space travel is a mental pursuit:

He felt a strangeness in his mind, a complexity beyond complexity, a revelation of new and unexpected textures in his psyche. Time was flux, space was flux, eternity was a variable…He did something with his mind, and the surface of the planet vanished like mist.

And then he stood up from the typewriter, and the ideas went with him.

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On The Philip K. Dick Android

Posted on February 22, 2011 by Claire L. Evans

In 2004, some robotics geeks and sci-fi fans built a functional robotic likeness of Philip K. Dick. It looked like Dick, dressed like Dick, and was completely autonomous. Capable of operating without the intervention of its makers, it could track people coming in and out of a room with face-recognition software, greeting those it knew. It could listen to conversation, and, using complex algorithms, could respond verbally using speech synthesis.

This “robotic portrait” was as much an art project as it was a feat of engineering. For several years, the android made public appearances — at conferences, comic conventions, Artificial Intelligence organizations, and so forth. In 2006, it mysteriously disappeared in transit to Mountain View, California, where it was to meet with some Google employees. Speculation abounded. Horrified, I imagined the android out in the world, having a hellish time of consciousness. Strange and poetic as it was, the story could have ended here.

And yet, the Philip K. Dick android has now been rebuilt. Behold:

The new android is being referred to as “New Phil.” Its vanished predecessor, “Old Phil.” To recap: a man who spends his career writing about about androids dies. Twenty years later, an android is made in his image, effectively bringing him back to life. That android disappears. A new one is built; at this point we’re three degrees of separation from the original. I can’t help but fantasize about a future model (New New New Phil?) becoming self-aware, and immediately being convinced that he is the real, original Phil. I mean, it literally reads like an actual Philip K. Dick story — life imitating art, imitating life.

The brain-boggling postmodern meta-irony is not lost on its makers, thankfully. On translating this particular writer — and not, say, Arthur C. Clarke or Isaac Asimov — into an android, they explain, “An android of Philip K. Dick is a sort of paradox. It’s certainly what Hofstader would call a ‘tangled hierarchy.’ This is something that you don’t get by making an android out of any other science fiction writer.” They point out that Dick didn’t just write about androids; he wrote about people thinking they were androids, or androids thinking they were people, and everything in between. The terrible crux of Dick’s canon often hinges on the question, “what is the difference between being human, and being programmed to believe you are human?”

Still, it’s hard to guess what Dick, who died in 1982, might have thought of his robotic likeness. In a 1975 essay called, “Man, Android, and Machine,” he wrote:

“Within the universe there exist fierce cold things, which I have given the name ‘machines’ to. Their behavior frightens me, especially if it imitates human behavior so well that I get the uncomfortable sense that these things are trying to pass themselves off as humans but are not. I call them ‘androids,’ which is my own way of using that word. By ‘android’ I do not mean a sincere attempt to create in the laboratory a human being. I mean a thing somehow generated to deceive us in a cruel way, to cause us to think it to be one of ourselves. Made in a laboratory — that aspect is not meaningful to me; the entire universe is one vast laboratory, and out of it come sly and cruel entities which smile as they reach out to shake hands. But their handshake is the grip of death, and their smile has the coldness of the grave.”

Would New Phil — or for that matter, Old Phil — embody this “coldness of the grave” to his namesake? I can’t help but think of Jack Bohlen, in Martian Time-Slip, servicing the simulacra in his son’s school and having schizoid episodes where he believes that every person is secretly a machine, a mechanism. The profound sense of disconnect that this vision lends to his reality, the Philip K. Dick android does to me.

Dick’s books have been endlessly adapted to the screen, and yet this bearded machine does more to bring the philosophical mise-en-abyme of his work alive than any number of Darryl Hannahs or Arnold Schwarzeneggers (be they lurking in rainy alleyways or gun-fighting in the red-tinged Martian atmosphere) ever could. I mean, it is Philip K. Dick: both visually and theoretically. It’s a physical embodiment of everything he feared, loved, rhapsodized on, got paranoid about. It’s a “living” paradox; it’s science-fiction reality, a powerfully strange sculpture.

Supplemental Materials:

Space Canon Review of Dr. Bloodmoney (an acrostic)
Space Canon review of Martian Time-Slip (a sonnet)
Space Canon review of The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch
Space Canon review of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?
Space Canon review of Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said

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