ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
Ross
Farnell
Posthuman Topologies: William Gibson’s
"Architexture" in Virtual Light
and Idoru
Abstract.-- The publication of William
Gibson’s Idoru allows us to read the earlier
Virtual Light as its intertextual precursor; it
becomes possible to redress the critical silence previously
surrounding both texts. This paper argues that the decline
of cyberpunk and cyberspace into marketing device and
hyperreality, required Gibson’s abandonment of digital
tectonics for analog information structures—a device
through which to explore the retrofuturistic "posthuman." By
refiguring the Bridge community of Virtual
Light as an organic hive-like entity, Gibson
transposes metaphor into architextural meta-form,
refurbishing the recurrent theme in his work of the effect
of place, space and architecture on "posthuman" form and
ontology. This new neo-tribal heterotopian space lays the
foundation for the mediation of the posthuman coded as
information topology in Idoru. The disruption of the
subject/object dichotomy in Virtual Light prefigures
the boundary transgressions of flesh, data, and biologic
nanotechnology in Idoru, enabling the inversion of
inner and outer through body, landscape, and cyborgian
architexture. In the latter novel, the idoru Rei inverts the
sf trope of transcendence—she escapes the binary
digital confines of data for rhizomatic analog
complexity—achieving a metaphorical symbiotic union
with the corporeality of the rock star Rez. The iconic
mapping of their converging data creates an unstable
assemblage, an involution where differences are replaced by
diffractions. For Gibson, then, the posthuman becomes an
irruption within the human. This leads to the central
conclusion of this paper: that the posthuman should be
reconceived as the "human" under erasure.
Dominick M.
Grace
The Handmaid’s
Tale: "Historical Notes"
and Documentary Subversion
Abstract.-- The "Historical
Notes" appearing at the end of Margaret Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s
Tale have been the
subject of repeated critical scrutiny. Commentaries have
suggested that the world of 2195 is far from an eutopian
alternative to the dystopia of Gilead; indeed, commentators
consistently note the sexism of Pieixoto and suggest that
the conditions that led to the founding of Gilead in the
first place still exist in the world of 2195. The world of
2195 is one in which women once again assume positions of
authority and in which Native North American peoples are
evidently part of the dominant culture. It might appear,
therefore, an eutopian alternative to Gilead, and perhaps
even to the world of today, if we can accept at face value
that the sexist and racist assumptions prevalent in Gilead
(and today) have been eradicated; but we cannot. Instead, we
are forced by the inconsistencies and disjunctions created
by Pieixoto’s deeply flawed anaylsis of Offred’s
account to question the documentary method itself as a valid
arbiter of truth.
Steffen
Hantke
Surgical Strikes and Prosthetic
Warriors: The Soldier’s Body in Contemporary Science
Fiction
Abstract. -- In a series of science-fiction
novels describing future warfare—Robert Heinlein’s
Starship
Troopers (1959), Joe
Haldeman’s The
Forever War (1972),
and Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game (1985)—the technologically
augmented body serves as a site of anxiety. Cultural and
social fears about what it means specifically to be male or
generally to be human are expressed and negotiated here.
These fears are triggered by the complex realization that
the promise of prosthetics to heal, integrate, and
strengthen the body is accompanied by the further
dissolution of the body and the radical challenge to human
agency and autonomy. In a culture characterized by the
discourse of the surgical strike and the prosthetic body,
resolving these ambiguities and contradictions becomes the
task not only for each author in the individual texts, but
for readers as they determine their own subjectivity in
relation to high-tech culture.
Donald
Palumbo
The Monomyth as Fractal Pattern in Frank
Herbert’s DUNE Novels
Abstract.-- Frank
Herbert’s DUNE series mirrors its explicit ecological
theme through its dynamical-systems plot structure, which
echoes the fractal geometry image’s definitive quality
of self-similarity across the same scale. It does so, among
other ways, through the incorporation of the Monomyth as a
principal structuring device in each of its six novels. This
repetition of the Monomyth is but one instance of the
series’ fractal iteration of numerous ancillary
parallel plot structures and themes, but is of unique
importance because it subsumes within it the reiteration in
each of these six novels of the many interrelated elements
that comprise the Monomyth, as defined by Joseph Campbell in
The Hero With a
Thousand Faces. This
article analyzes the recurrence of this archetypal plot
structure in each volume of the dune series, giving special
attention to the specific pattern of variations and
inversions introduced by Herbert, to further demonstrate the
series’ pervasive fractal structure. Herbert’s
aesthetic achievement in mirroring the dune series’
ecological theme in its recurring fractal structure through
this recyclying of the Monomyth is wonderfully compounded,
not only in that mirroring is itself the essential
characteristic of any fractal structure, but also in that
the Monomyth, as the single consciously-controlled pattern
most widely exhibited in the world’s folk tales, myths,
and religious fables, is already intrinsically fractal by
definition.
Sylvie
Romanowski
Cyrano
de Bergerac’s Epistemological Bodies: "Pregnant with a
Thousand Definitions"
Abstract.-- Cyrano de
Bergerac (1619-1655) wrote imaginary voyages to the Moon and
to the Sun, both often titled together L'Autre Monde. These fantastic voyages, filled
with extremely diverse events and beings of various kinds,
both human and non-human, enable the author to imagine
non-traditional forms of society, physics, travel, language,
sensory perception, and philosophy. Generally, Cyrano wishes
to refute the traditional Christian, geocentric, and
Aristotelian views of the universe, and in order to do so,
he bases himself in two alternative sciences, or visions of
the world, available to him in his day, the atomistic and
the alchemical visions. Critics have generally tended to
view Cyrano as either materialist or hermetic, but I
consider him to be interested in both these systems of
knowledge. The body is the particular entity where these two
systems of knowledge meet and interact, for it is
Cyrano’s view that the body is part of
knowing—i.e., for him knowledge may be a matter of the
spirit, but it is always embodied. Cyrano wants to imagine
new ways of thinking about humanity and the universe: to
this end, he uses reversals, an easy way to jolt and amuse
the reader, but he also goes far beyond reversals to
imagine, with great freedom, multiple possibilities for
understanding the body, the mind, philosophy, and the
universe.
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