#84 = Volume 28, Part 2 = July 2001
ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
David Galef
Tiptree and the Problem of the Other:
Postcolonialism Versus Sociobiology
Abstract. -- The
work of Alice Sheldon, better known as James Tiptree, Jr., is marked by conflict
between a desire to overcome imperialist habits of mind and a scientist’s
fatalism about the limits of altering human behavior. Accordingly, much of her
fiction vacillates between the two poles of postcolonialist theory and
sociobiology, though with a decided leaning toward the latter, as an analysis of
works from Ten Thousand Light-Years from Home (1973) to The Starry
Rift (1986) shows. A focal examination of the short story "I’ll Be
Waiting for You When the Swimming Pool Is Empty" (1971) demonstrates the
complexity of these contradictory forces at work.
Cyndy Hendershot
Anti-Communism and Ambivalence in Red Planet Mars,
Invasion USA, and The Beast of Yucca
Flats
Abstract. -- I
focus on representations of the "Communist threat" in three sf B-films—Harry
Horner’s Red Planet Mars (1952), Alfred E. Green’s Invasion USA (1952),
and Coleman Francis’s The Beast of Yucca Flats (1961). Rather than
using metaphors such as alien invaders or giant insects (like so many films of
that era), all three directly address Communism, using it as an important
element in their plots. Yet while each invokes the threat of a dangerous Soviet
enemy, each also raises the possibility that internal conflicts in the United
States allow that threat to flourish, holding up a mirror to US flaws and
weaknesses.
John Johnston
Distributed Information: Complexity Theory in the
Novels of Neal Stephenson and Linda Nagata
Abstract. -- This
paper examines a strand of contemporary sf that draws significantly on
complexity theory, in particular on new ideas about computation and information
processing that bear on questions about the origins of life and intelligence,
and evolution in complex adaptive systems. After a theoretical overview, it
considers early examples of this influence in Bruce Sterling’s first stories
and novel Schismatrix. Most of the paper is then devoted to extended
readings of Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age and Linda Nagata’s
trilogy, The Bohr Maker, Deception Well, and Vast. Assuming but
extending beyond 1980s cyberpunk fiction, both authors project future worlds
profoundly transformed by nanotechnology, in which the boundary between
mechanical machines and biological organisms begins to break down. Specifically,
Stephenson envisions a shift from algorithmic computation (i.e. Turing machines)
to a new form of biological computation in which sex provides the means of
information exchange and processing. Nagata, on the other hand, deploys
Artificial Life scientist Christopher Langton’s theme of "life at the
edge of chaos" to re-imagine the encounter with alien modes of being and to
depict new spaces of adaptation and communication.
Carol McGuirk
The Rediscovery of Cordwainer Smith
Abstract. -- Defining
historical, biographical, and literary contexts for Smith’s writings, I
analyze his oblique, elliptical style and discuss his approach to the portrayal
of heroes. Smith’s consistent focus, even in such non-sf as Ria (1947),
Carola (1948), and Atomsk (1949), is on isolated protagonists
caught in a maelstrom of contrary impulses; Martel in "Scanners Live in
Vain" is torn between body and spirit, domesticity and duty, indoctrination
and independent thought. Smith’s sf also assesses the "human" cost
of shifting paradigms—sudden social and scientific change—and provides a
haunting critique of social control, a matter addressed covertly in his fiction
and quite openly in his military intelligence textbook, Psychological Warfare
(1948). Inherently speculative, science fictional, in his bold extrapolation
(into a very far future) of postwar social and epistemological issues, Smith is
unique among postwar writers in rejecting the violence and xenophobia of the
popular tradition and also the tidy closure of Campbellian hard sf. During the
1950s and 1960s, his enigmatic stories redrew the boundaries (and re-stocked the
visionary imagery) of science fiction.
Ian F. Roberts
Maupertuis: Doppelgänger of Doctor Moreau
Abstract. --
Though many candidates have been proposed
as models for Wells’s character Doctor Moreau, none seems a particularly
likely inspiration. This article argues that the scientist-philosopher Pierre
Louis Moreau de Maupertuis is by far the most strikingly similar historical
precursor of the fictional Moreau. Maupertuis’s family name, his surgical and
breeding experiments with animals, his scientific interests and experiments, his
unconventional religious and philosophical beliefs, his association with imagery
from Wells’s novel, and his life history combine to make him a real-life
doppelgänger of Wells’s fictional creation.
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