#122 = Volume 41, Part 1 = March 2014
NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Frederik Pohl (1919-2013). Fredrick Pohl had a long and remarkably diverse career. A co-founder of the legendary Futurian fan group in the late 1930s, he became a literary agent at the age of eighteen and an sf magazine editor at twenty. At twenty-one, he published his first sf story, co-authored with C.M. Kornbluth, and continued to work as an author, editor, and commentator on the genre for the rest of his long life (his final novel, All the Lives He Led, was published in 2011). Though never achieving the kind of crossover success outside the sf genre enjoyed by his contemporaries Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert A. Heinlein, who developed unique voices early on in their careers from which they never wavered, Pohl was protean, moving from droll works of social satire during the 1950s—many written in collaboration with C.M. Kornbluth, such as the classic The Space Merchants (1953)—to grimly serious hard sf (the Nebula-winning Man Plus [1975]) and free-wheeling space opera (the Heechee series [1977-2004]) in the 1970s and after. He was probably the most active collaborator in sf history, producing significant bodies of work not only alongside Kornbluth but also James E. Gunn and Jack Williamson.
Throughout the 1960s, he edited Galaxy and its sibling publications If and Worlds of Tomorrow, winning three Hugo awards for best sf magazine in the process. Though overtly an opponent of the New Wave movement, which he saw as trendy and anti-science, he published much of the cream of its work in the US, including classic short fiction by Harlan Ellison and Robert Silverberg. During the 1970s, he served as chief sf editor for Bantam Books, where he developed the Frederik Pohl Selections series, which included such genre-bending works as Samuel R. Delany’s Dhalgren (1975) and Joanna Russ’s The Female Man (1975). His own sf, from the 1960s onward, such as his novel Gateway (1977), began to blend traditional values of adventure-based plotting and technoscientific extrapolation with the New Wave’s penchant for brooding character studies and formal experimentation. His work was consistently unpredictable, and he seemed a master of every subgenre, from the dystopia to the technothriller to the high-tech space opera. He was the closest thing to a “Renaissance man” the genre has ever produced, an active presence in every evolution sf has undergone for the past eight decades, and his passing leaves a very large hole in the field’s institutional memory.—Rob Latham, UC Riverside
D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous on Science Fiction. Writers, scientists, and filmmakers posited thought-provoking ideas about science fiction and the future at the D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) event convened by Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences on 17 October 2013 at the Academy’s Keck Center in Washington, D.C.
Cultural Programs explores the nexus of art, science, and culture through exhibitions and events such as theatrical readings, film screenings, and DASERs. The DASER series, launched in 2011 in collaboration with Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology, is a monthly forum exploring art and science intersections. Each DASER explores an art-science theme and features four practitioners working in various disciplines, including at least one artist and one scientist, who share their work and perspectives and engage in dialogue on that theme. DASERs provide windows on the region’s cultural environment while fostering interdisciplinary networking and community building. Contributing to the growing momentum around the art-science dialogue, our DASER series explores, in the words of DASER speaker Celia Peters, “the seamless relationship” between the two disciplines and the myriad ways they inform and inspire each other.
The sf DASER featured presentations by Joel Garreau, Lincoln professor of law, culture, and values; Sandra Day O’Connor, College of Law, Arizona State University and Future Tense Fellow, New America Foundation, Washington, D.C.; Catherine Asaro, Maryland-based author of Saga of the Skolian Empire (1995-2012) and theoretical physicist; Celia C. Peters, filmmaker and visual artist, based in Columbus, Ohio; and Lee Konstantinou, author of Pop Apocalypse (2009) and assistant professor of English, University of Maryland, College Park. Kevin Finneran, editor-in-chief, Issues in Science and Technology, National Academies, Washington, D.C., moderated the discussion.
Joel Garreau described the Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI) at Arizona State University, a new initiative that breaks down disciplinary barriers between art and science, and discussed the important role sf plays in advancing that quest. He criticized the pervasive dystopian perspective he and his colleagues see in much sf created today, describing it as an easy and lazy approach. This concern about the negative outlook on the future spurred the creation of CSI’s Project Hieroglyph, a global collective of writers and researchers directed by sf author Neal Stephenson, whose participants create visions of the future in which all can thrive. At the heart of CSI and Project Hieroglyph is the idea that “you can’t have better futures without better dreams.” The Project considers sf’s role in providing human context for technological innovation—a perspective that may be lacking among the scientists, engineers, and mathematicians at the forefront of those innovations. CSI’s annual flagship event is Emerge: Artists and Scientists Redesign the Future. Emerge grew out of discussions between Garreau and sf author Bruce Sterling on the concept of “design fictions.” Design fictions are tangible prototypes of objects that represent new ideas and visions of the future. Emerge brings together artists, scientists, dancers, engineers, futurists, technologists, and storytellers, “the whole silo-busting clan” in Garreau’s words, in an effort to imagine a future world in which we would want to live.
Catherine Asaro challenged Garreau’s assertion that most sf writers portray dystopian futures, describing most writers as optimistic. Many ideas she presented were extrapolated from themes of her books or based on projects she conducted as a consultant for SIGMA, a think tank of writers and scientists that advises the government on future trends affecting national security. She posed the question, “how are changes to upcoming technologies going to affect our lives?” Asaro discussed artificial intelligence, including current examples such as Google. What happens when Google and other forms of artificial intelligence become sentient? Our machines will learn a lot about us. Then the question arises, do we become the machine? In the future, she said, it will not be a matter of having robots and humans; it will be a matter of combining them. We will eventually become more comfortable melding our minds with technology so that we can call upon, for example, computational abilities when needed. But what will connecting our brains to machines do to the human body? Asaro believes that in the future we may create virtual realities that we cannot distinguish from physical reality and that it is already happening with online communities such as Second Life. She stated, “if we can imagine it, it won’t be long before we can create it.” In the future, we could meld machines with other forms of life, too. What happens when artificial intelligence becomes so advanced that it develops a conscience of its own and questions its given purpose? We are facing a sf future that may become real in our generation or the generation of our children, and it’s a fascinating, frightening, and wonderful future to which Asaro looks forward.
Like Asaro, Celia C. Peters believes that we are living in an exciting period of human history. Science fiction is increasingly relevant because technology is taking us further into the cosmos than ever before. Virtual gaming is becoming our reality, and we are interacting with more advanced artificial intelligences on a daily basis. The more prominent technology becomes, the more fascinating and important sf becomes. With all of the wonderful things that are happening to the genre, Peters feels strongly that it must evolve. It must come to terms with the multi-ethnic, multi-racial, and multi-gendered world around us. It is not the domain of the young white male. Women and people of color are underrepresented as the drivers of stories in films, particularly in sf films. Peters believes that they should be telling their own stories through the lens of their own experience, and these stories are for everyone to enjoy, not just for those like them. The multitude of previously unrepresented perspectives can only enrich the genre. She shared clips from her films Godspeed, which explores questions about our place in the universe at a time when science and technology are bringing us closer to finding answers, and Roxë15, a dystopian short film set in New York City in 2051 which tells the story of a black female character named Roxë.
Lee Konstantinou teaches a variety of sf courses including global sf and sf philosophy. His novel Pop Apocalypse is a near-future dystopian satire in which video searches are highly developed and take over celebrity culture to create a celebrity stock market. He also participated in ASU’s Project Hieroglyph, which has made him think about what sf does for us in the present and how it helps us think about the futures we want to build. While he thinks the Hieroglyph project is fantastic, he finds himself resisting some aspects of it, which he described in greater detail. His first point was that sf is always out of joint with the time in which it is written because the world is fast while the publishing industry is slow. For example, the world was very different politically and technologically in 2005 when he wrote Pop Apocalypse than in 2009 when the book was published. Second, sf is always about the present. You learn from sf what people of a certain moment care about most. Science fiction is, in effect, giving us predictions about the present and helping us understand the world around us. Third, sf does not stop being interesting or relevant because it is about the present: “what science fiction can do, what it needs to do, is work to provide the resources we need to understand who we are, where we are, and how we might get closer to where we want to go.”
The speakers then engaged in a wide-ranging discussion of their creative processes, the future of the genre and how it may incorporate more interactivity, and the idea that sf is a dialogue rather than a prediction. Asaro and Garreau agreed that dystopian views can be failures of imagination. In closing, speakers suggested books, films, or television shows that will make us think differently about sf. Peters suggested Sleep Dealer (2008), a film directed by Alex Rivera; Asaro recommended Cinder: The Lunar Chronicles (2012) by Marrisa Meyer and the Enclave (2011-13) series by Anne Aguirre; Garreau suggested the episodes of Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Color that featured Wernher von Braun: “Man in Space” (1955), “Man and the Moon” (1955), and “Mars and Beyond” (1957); Konstantinou suggested The Lifecycle of Software Objects (2011) by Ted Chiang; and Finneran recommended revisiting Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818).
DASERs have explored many themes including love, water, disasters, and drones. Videos of the sf and other DASER presentations are available on YouTube.—Alana Quinn, Cultural Programs of the National Academy of Sciences
Writing Another Future: Science Fiction, the Arts and Humanities. On 25-27 September 2013 the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign hosted Writing Another Future: Science Fiction, the Arts and Humanities, an interdisciplinary symposium consisting of panels, talks, and musical performances that sought to imagine new histories and futures of sf writing. The symposium was co-organized by three members of the university’s faculty, representing the symposium’s range of perspectives across the humanities and fine and applied arts: Robert Markley (W.D. and Sara E. Trowbridge Professor of English, Writing Studies, and Center for East Asian and Pacific Studies), Stephen Taylor (Associate Professor of Composition and Theory in the School of Music), and Kevin Hamilton (Associate Professor of New Media in the School of Art and Design). Talks by featured speakers Lisa Yaszek and Minister Faust and keynote speaker Kim Stanley Robinson, as well as concerts by Modern Ensemble, Wind Symphony, and Electroacoustic, integrated the event’s central themes of music, temporality, technology, race, and genre.
The next morning, after the Modern Ensemble concert opened the symposium with a fusion of Beethoven pieces, bringing the audience on-stage to witness a dual performance of piano and string quartet, featured speaker Lisa Yaszek opened the talks with a presentation on international sf and Afrofuturism. She characterized sf as a narrative form that guides engagements with technoscientific modernity and future imaginaries, using Afrofuturism as her subgenre case study, and tracing the temporal arc of Afrofuturism narratives over the course of the twentieth century, from W.E.B. Dubois’s The Comet (1920) to Jonathan Dotse’s Virus! (2012). Yaszek’s genealogy elucidated the multiple futures, presents, and pasts of African sf, and how such historical imaginaries negotiate African relations with Western technologies and modernity. For example, while earlier iterations of Atlantic Afrofuturism (penned in North America and concerning African American identities) may have focused on Africans as consumers of Western science, technology, and culture, more contemporary works of African Afrofuturism have begun representing Africans as producers of their own science and technology. In making this distinction, Yaszek highlighted how the different industrial traditions of the US and Africa led to different modernities and different sf traditions.
Continuing the morning’s engagement with Afrofuturism, Minister Faust, author of The Alchemists of Kush (2011) and Shrinking the Heroes (2013), spoke on “Afrofuturism, Black Nationalist Eschatology, and the Funkadelic Mothership.” He situated George Clinton’s funkadelics and the figure of the Mothership within the Afrofuturism tradition, approaching Clinton’s work as an endeavor to bring black folk mythology into the fold. The central questions to keep in mind in any intellectual engagement with Clinton, Faust reminded us, are how seriously we are supposed to take him, and how seriously he takes himself. To address these questions, Faust turned to Clinton’s Mothership, attempting to locate the literal and figurative manifestations of this image. He concluded that it does not necessarily matter where and how the physical Mothership appears because Clinton’s variations on the Mothership demonstrate how the real Mothership exists in our minds, and in the interconnections between minds. As such, the Mothership and Clinton’s performance as “Star Child” function to produce different cosmological imaginaries, different senses of “what is out there.”
Following an afternoon roundtable on sf literature and the humanities, which featured a diverse cohort of University of Illinois professors including Robert Markley, Jodi Byrd, Rob Barrett, Jake Bowers, and LeAnne Howe, Kim Stanley Robinson delivered his much anticipated keynote on the temporal implications of sf literature. Robinson’s ability to articulate poignantly the importance of sf to our contemporary historical imaginaries was on full display as he emphasized that no matter how future-oriented a work may be, it cannot but be about our present condition. Sf literature demonstrates, when considered alongside technoscientific developments, that we are producing our history as much as it is happening to us. Robinson called this the “stereo-opticon effect”: sf envisions a future that could follow from a certain course of action. In this way, it always circles back on our present moment, exploring present potentials for future progress or regress, examining how the future feels from the standpoint of the now. Thus, even if sf is distinct from realist fiction, it nevertheless comments on a certain historical period’s sense of reality. Moreover, sf’s futurism does not compose an inevitable picture of things to come. It is not deterministically cast as what will happen, but in the subjunctive as what could happen. It simulates possible futures, thereby creating the present as an ongoing project that influences the future. Such a dynamic aesthetic relation between world and genre reminds us that history is always contingent, always in the making, and that we are a part of and participants in the world’s temporal becoming. A Wind Symphony concert—featuring guest composer Perry Goldstein, whose piece Should This Be Found: Six Songs on Scott’s Final Expedition incorporates a text written by Richard Powers—closed out the second day’s events.
Friday morning began with a graduate student panel that included University of Illinois students Michael Black, Brandon Jones, and Shawn Ballard. Black’s presentation covered lessons Robinson’s fiction can teach us about technoscience policy, Jones discussed how the work of Richard Powers and Ian McEwan stresses the importance of an orientation of wonder toward the natural world when enlisting scientific practice for social justice, and Ballard traced the complex temporal and spatial networks David Mitchell weaves with his unorthodox layering of plot structures in the book and cinema versions of Cloud Atlas.
The symposium’s final two afternoon panels consisted of roundtable sessions featuring both guest artists and local faculty. The first panel, on “Science Fiction Literature and Arts Research at Illinois,” included professors Therese Thierney, Tammie Rubin, John Boesche, and Robert Riley. The second panel, on “Science Fiction Literature and Music,” served as an appropriate closing session that brought together guest composers and writers who had been major contributors throughout the symposium: Minister Faust, Kim Stanley Robinson, Dexter Palmer, Fernando Benadon, Perry Goldstein, and Dmitri Tymoczko. The final panel spurred a robust conversation on the role of music in sf literature, focusing in particular on how improvisational performances can inform the structure of sf narratives, and incorporating audience comments from the literary luminary Richard Powers—who was in attendance through most of the symposium—among others. The symposium ended with a captivating Electroacoustic concert by the “University of Illinois Experimental Music Studios.”
Overall, the symposium offered a unique forum for graduate students, faculty, and artists in the arts and humanities to demonstrate the potential of creative, critical, and scientific collaborations for articulating the political, ethical, and aesthetic stakes of imagining new pasts, presents, and futures.—Brandon Jones, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Conference on the Posthuman. What is the posthuman? Is it a further evolutionary development of the human species to occur in the future, or is it a current shift in the perception of the human? Do posthumans already exist? After all: haven’t humans always been posthuman? These were some of the questions raised at the international conference called “The Posthuman: Differences, Embodiments, Performativity” held at the University of Roma Tre (Rome, Italy), 11-14 September 2013. More than ninety speakers from all over the world met to discuss the posthuman. A broad spectrum of subjects was examined, from philosophical issues concerning the genealogies of the posthuman to ethics and roboethics; from bioarts and body art to emerging technologies, epigenetics, and virtuality; from quantum physics and relational ontologies to science fiction and spirituality. The reason for such a broad inquiry has to do with posthumanism itself, which is becoming a main area of investigation within academia, but whose significance exceeds the academic realm. On the one hand, thinking in post-anthropocentric terms means reassessing our daily practices of living, based on the awareness of being part of the anthropocene—the current geological age in which the consequences of human anthropocentric habits have led the planet to a global environmental crisis. On the other, its post-dualistic approach, which dismisses any fixed duality in a naturalcultural continuum, leads to reflecting on the most recent developments in techno-sciences and bio-technologies; thus, the evolutionary outcomes of the human species and the social and political implications of future environments are equally part of the posthuman discussion.
Science fiction, in this sense, becomes a significant platform to envision possibilities, a sort of archive for visionary politics. For instance, Kevin Warwick, one of the keynote speakers, stated: “science fiction can not only accurately represent potential future scenarios. It can certainly give ideas to scientists; it can raise philosophical questions for us all.” Warwick added that the inspiration for his series of experiments known as “Project Cyborg” (1998-2002), which brought him worldwide celebrity, came from Michael Crichton’s novel The Terminal Man (1972). Science fiction offers insights and inspiration to the posthuman field, and has been part of this theoretical landscape since the beginning. Katherine Hayles, a leading voice in the posthuman field, dedicated an entire chapter of her groundbreaking How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (1999) to the analysis of Bernard Wolfe’s novel Limbo (1954). At the Conference, Elaine Després analyzed Limbo, using theoretical notions such as the body-without-organs, biopower, and the “exodarwinism” (Serres, Hominescence) of technological developments. Margaux Portron focused on military biotechnologies, investigating how transformation of the soldier’s body into a posthuman body changes the army’s ethics and the definition of the enemy, through the use of biotechnologies such as drones and exoskeletons. Roboethics and bioethics were recurrent themes, investigated under the umbrella term “posthuman ethics.”
Another crucial subject was human enhancement, which was approached mainly through the frame of process ontologies. For instance, Robin Zebrowski talked about emerging bodily technologies—from prosthetic limbs and cochlear implants to DIY biohacking, such as implanted earth magnets and eyetap devices—as philosophical terms of reflection because they open theoretical space to recognize that no specific human body can define the human as such. Peter Lemmens focused on the becoming of the human, which has always proceeded from techno-evolution. As Bernard Stiegler argues in Technics and Time 1: The Fault of Epimetheus (1998), there never was such a thing as the human, since the human is precisely that which has always been lacking and is always to-come. Tarsh Bates underlined that, from a biological perspective, it is hard to define what it means to be human, when we recognize our bodies as a multi-species ecology: a normal human body is said to be composed of over 1014 cells, of which only about 10% are animal. In this sense, humans have always been posthuman. The discussion expanded to the notion of life itself. Marietta Radomska emphasized how questioning what life is plays a central role in current philosophical debates on biopolitics and neovitalism. From a posthuman perspective, the concept of life as implicitly organic is problematic; organicist concerns with life itself appear to be another consequence of anthropocentrism. Jami Weinstein radically asked: might it not be better to start from the perspective that life does not matter?
Natureculture, a crucial notion developed by Donna Haraway in The Companion Species Manifesto (2003), was addressed through different perspectives. Noela Davis explained how epigenetics—the study of the dynamic gene-body-environment conversations, which give the organism its particular characteristics—challenged the view of a fixed division between nature and culture. Epigenetics demonstrates that the social and the biological are already entangled and mutually constitutive of one another at the body’s molecular level. These concepts were developed though the Conference’s art exhibition as well. Patrick Millard’s photographic work, “Formatting Gaia” (2010), portrayed human beings, technology, and nature as part of a congruous system of existence. Gisella Sorrentino's pictures portrayed a continuum between the body of the performers and the space around them, breaking the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic: the representation of the body and its surroundings were integrated rather than separated. A history of emotions might be approached in similar terms. In his talk on “Unusual Marriages,” Jan Stasienko referred to weddings as a form of legitimation of intimate relationships between humans and non-humans (including avatars, pets, and objects); in his view, which the audience found both intriguing and controversial because of the lack of reciprocity between the two terms of the contract, such relations can be seen as an emotional manifestation of the openness of posthuman connectivity.
This congress was the fifth in the Beyond Humanism Conference Series organized by several European universities, specifically the University of Roma Tre (Italy), the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany), the University of the Aegean (Greece), and Dublin City University (Ireland). In this brief account, I mention only a few talks, but the quality was excellent overall. The next event will focus on posthuman politics and will be held at the University of the Aegean in Mytilene, Greece. These conferences are aimed at developing an ongoing dialogue among scholars, artists, and scientists, to reflect together on possible modes of existence, in tune with the post-dualistic, post-anthropocentric approach of the posthuman, the technological and scientific focus of the transhuman, and the socio-political critical account of the antihuman. The goal is to provide a platform to generate open dialogues, in order to contribute to the development of desirable futures for humans and non-humans alike.—Dr. Francesca Ferrando, Universita' di Roma Tre
News from the South. South America has always been a privileged space for fantastic narrative. Acclaimed authors such as Adolfo Bioy Casáres, Jorge Luis Borges, and Gabriel García Marquez are just a few examples, but there is much more to the rich South American microcosm of the fantastic. One of its many expressions was the sixth Coloquio Internacional de Narrativa Fantástica, which took place in Lima, Peru, on 24-26 October 2013. This year, the theme of the meeting was “Escrituras del nuevo mundo: lo fantástico y las narrativas del futuro”[Writings of the new world: the fantastic and narratives of the future], and it was organized by the Centro de Estudios Literarios Antonio Cornejo Polar [Antonio Conejo Polar Literary Studies Center]. The program featured 26 papers by speakers from Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, France, Mexico, Peru, Puerto Rico, Spain, the US, Uruguay, and Venezuela. Apart from paper sessions, the conference featured book and journal presentations, including the launch of the new edition of Lima de aquí a cien años [Lima from here to a hundred years from now], Julián Manuel del Portillo’s novel of anticipation, first serialized between 1843 and 1844. The full program as well as the call for papers for I Congreso Internacional de Narrativa Fantástica in 2014 is available online. —Diego Samuelle Guillén, Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay
The David G. Hartwell ’63 Science Fiction Symposium. David G. Hartwell, senior editor at Tor books and a prolific anthologist, graduated from Williams College in 1963. This fall, during the third week in October, I brought to campus nine writers to share in a three-day symposium on sf named in his honor. The participants were Paolo Bacigalupi, Terry Bisson, John Crowley, Samuel R. Delany, Elizabeth Kolbert, Kelly Link, Kit Reed, Kim Stanley Robinson, and myself, with Mr. Hartwell serving as moderator and master of ceremonies. The campus-wide events included two public readings and a panel on climate change, but there were a number of smaller events as well—class visits and colloquia for the Departments of Theatre, American Studies, English, Comparative Literature, and Environmental Studies. These were the programs that gave financial support, but the constraints of satisfying so many disparate sources of funding turned out to be an important element to the success of the symposium, as it obliged a cross-disciplinary approach: classes on world-building and screen-writing, creative-writing workshops, critical-theory presentations, discussions on the future of publishing, and several visits by Samuel R. Delany to classes that were studying his work. Because of the involvement of the Departments of Environmental Studies and Economics, the panel on climate change (featuring Elizabeth Kolbert, staff writer from the New Yorker, Bacigalupi, and Robinson; moderated by Hartwell), was packed and provoked a lively discussion. The panel was recorded for posterity, and is available on the Williams College website and YouTube.
Ordinarily, writers come to campus by themselves, give single readings or presentations, go out to dinner with a few people, spend the night in a hotel, and depart alone. Instead, I wanted to recreate the atmosphere of an sf convention, with its increased opportunity for cross-fertilization and conviviality—late nights at the bar with groups of students and faculty, etc. All the writers I invited, except Ms. Kolbert, were familiar with this model, an aspect of sf that, as much as anything, makes it feel less like a commercial genre and more like a literary movement. We spiced things up with visits to local museums and trips to the theater, and my sister, the autistic artist Jessy Park, put up half the participants in her big house in the middle of Williamstown.—Paul Park, Williams College
Adapting (to) Philip K. Dick’s Perceptual Play. By now it is not revelatory to note that how we perceive the world and reality is one of Philip K. Dick’s primary concerns. The “mindbending” nature of his work arises from a relentless Suvinian cognitive estrangement of his characters and their experiences of altered consciousness. Readers on Dickian “trips” become familiar with the incessant defamiliarizing shifts in identity, consciousness, and perception, which often work on metafictional levels. Minds are not just bent; they are expanded and blown, as perceptions of reality are radically altered for character and reader alike. But for Dick, these perceptions are never just metaphorically cognitive. While he is clearly concerned with the philosophical, political, and metaphysical dimensions of how we perceive reality (how we metaphorically grasp and make sense of the world), he is just as concerned with how we literally perceive—how we grasp the world somatically, affectively—and sense on the bodily level. An undercurrent of attention to somatic and sensorial experience runs throughout this work.
Dick’s characters are often confused and cognitively disoriented, but they are also nauseated, queasy, anxiety-ridden, terror-filled, and their bodies make this clear through vomiting, sweating, arousal, stomachs turning, hair rising, tears falling, spontaneous hugs with strangers, and so on. Theirs is not just a metaphorical vertigo of disrupted and estranged mental states but is repeatedly tied to concrete bodily functions and perceptual experiences because, for Dick, the mind and body are one. Or at least, this is the possibility he explores within the limits of a Cartesian understanding of how we think. Dick is as concerned with the mechanics of sensory perception and somatic experience as he is with the metaphysics of philosophical perception because he intuits, despite his own Cartesian limitations and orientations, that they are not separate concerns. Thisattention to the somatic experiences of affect and perception reflects an insistence on exploring the nature of a mind-body unity in which both rational and non-rational, cognitive perception and somatic perception, together make up the unified perceptual-cognitive processes of a sentient body, a thinking body that perceives and perceives in and as the same act. This is not a conceptualization of perception and cognition in which the former precedes or leads to the latter (perception and affect as “pre-cognitive” or “proto-conceptual”). Rather, to draw on philosopher and neurocognitive science researcher Alva Nöe’s work, it is more akin to an “enactive” approach to understanding how perception is something we do, not something that happens as we passively absorb the world’s stimuli through an input system. For Nöe, perception and consciousness result from a skillful sensorimotor interaction with the world. Cognition, consciousness, and perception are bound up in each other as part of the same multi-directional, interactional process of the sentient, embodied animal actively engaging its environment.
Perception is an act of skillfully reaching out to and making contact with the world. It is proprioceptive and kinetic, more like touching than the passive visual metaphor of Eurowestern conceptualizations of perception. In a way, it is something that we make—a skillful, habitual sensorimotor act of making sense, figuratively and literally. It is also something that therefore can be oriented and conditioned by outside forces. In a similar vein, Brian Massumi explores affective experience as a kind of emergent terrain of microperception, one that—as Dick was well aware—is directed toward what Massumi calls a regime of “ontopower” control, in which perceptual processes are pre-conditioned and primed for militarized response on a micropolitical level. In Dick’s work, it is not just that the nature of reality is questioned, nor just that our perception of reality is questioned. His interest is in the nature of our somatic, sensory experience and in how perception actively engages with and creates reality through the mind-body apparatus’s rational/non-rational, sensori-cognitive and affective processes of grasping the world (metaphorically and literally): making “sense” of/sensing the world. Thus, Dick’s work is not just a matter of cognitive estrangement, but of perceptual and affective estrangement as well.
So I was particularly excited to see—or rather, perceive—Edward Einhorn’s 2010 theatrical adaptation of Dick’s 1968 novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (Sacred Fools Theatre, Los Angeles, 13 September to 19 October 2013; Director: Jaime Robledo). One of the paradoxes of Dick’s work is form itself. Bound by the limitations of written text, Dick’s explorations of the somatic are limited by the sensorially narrow and highly abstract experience of reading. This is not to dismiss the unique imaginative experience afforded by reading, nor reading’s somatic dimensions. But a live-action adaptation presented the prospect of a unique articulation of these key concerns that could push beyond the limits of the written text and give formal expression to Dick’s focus on the somatic and affective in ways his writing (and its film adaptations) cannot. In addition to lighting, visuals, audio, and other staging elements, live performance depends on and functions through the presence and somatic experiences of live, perceiving bodies interacting—the bodies of actors, the bodies of audience members, and the bodies backstage running the show (a relevant side note that highlights this point in an unexpectedly humorous way: the performance on the night I attended was significantly delayed because of a malfunction in the audience restroom).
In this play, his second of three adaptations of sf novels through his Untitled Theater Company No. 61 in New York (his first was Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle in 2007; his latest, Ursula LeGuin’s Lathe of Heaven in 2012), novelist and playwright Einhorn has collaborated with composer Henry Akona, who provides a unique score (primarily atonal operatic melodies for Luba Luft’s Mercerist poems throughout the play). As with Einhorn’s other two sf adaptations and collaborations with Akona, the score parallels a sophisticated use of video monitors. Together, visual and audio elements create a sensorial layer that interacts with the live action to illuminate some of Dick’s underlying concerns with perception and affect. For example, as characters such as John Isidore (Corey Klemow) and Iran Deckard (Lynn Odell) watch their television sets, which the play’s audience cannot see, screens above and around the stage display the Buster Friendly (Marz Richards) Show interspersed with ads of a Rosen Corporation spokeswoman (Elizabeth McIntire) encouraging emigration to Mars. The effect is to play with perception and audience position around media reception as we see and hear what the characters are ostensibly watching on their screens while watching them watch what we are seeing.
More effective, however, is the use of pre-recorded footage that parallels the live action. As Luba Luft (Emily Kosloski) stands on a platform before a camera and sings live, for example, she is simultaneously projected on the audience’s screens. But the performance on the screen never quite matches up with the live singing, as micro-moments of subtle difference play with perception. At first glance, the mismatch can be seen as conveying delays in transmission of video signal. But the micro-differences are not consistent. There are moments when the live and recorded performances do match up perfectly, suggesting that something else is at work in this use of visual elements and Akona’s score. The way in which the flickering visual mismatch generates an uncanny effect specifically through a playful manipulation of audience perceptual processes suggests a deeper engagement with how Rick Deckard’s (Eric Curtis Johnson) android-identifying Voigt-Kampff test relies on subtle physiological reactions that indicate empathy and affect, or with how the novel’s Boneli-Reflex Arc Test looks for a delay in androids’ “reflex-arc response taking place in the upper ganglia of the spinal column” (Blade Runner, 1968 [New York: Ballantine, 1982]: 104). In addition to some of Brian Massumi’s work around microperception and the affective field as a locus of oscillating emergence and interplay between virtual and actual, Luba Luft’s live/video singing also brings to mind the affective perceptual play of David Lynch’s infamous “Crying” scene in Mulholland Drive (2001). Here, Rebekah Del Rio sings Roy Orbison’s song a cappella, in Spanish, before a live audience. The performance is suffused with intense affective energy and heightened by emotionally charged visuals, as Del Rio’s passionate performance of the familiar song in an unfamiliar Spanish rendition brings audience members to (meta-textual) tears. But the moment suddenly takes on added uncanniness when she abruptly falls in the middle of a held note that continues on the soundtrack, breaking the illusion of live performance and thus jarring and estranging the perceptual and affective experiences of the audiences in the film and of the film.
Buster Friendly’s filming of his show is similarly staged with uncanny near-synchronization of video and live action, though the affective and emotional registers here are shaped around kitschy television humor and canned laughter slapstick, in contrast to Luba Luft’s operatic ethereality/ creepiness. Beyond these interesting uses of visual and aural elements, however, the play’s text cleaves too closely to the noirish narrative of Dick’s plot, perhaps striving too hard for fidelity to the original text at the expense of other dimensions that, as a play, it is uniquely positioned to explore. For many Dick fans, this is a good thing, of course. It is no doubt precisely with this audience in mind that Einhorn scripted such a faithful adaptation of the novel’s plot (though there are a few key divergences and changes). Setting aside, however, other issues that arise from questions of adaptation theory (including the inherent difficulty of successfully staging live performance of sf action, a difficulty that demands a much higher caliber of acting than was apparent in this particular production), I want to suggest that with Dick’s work, it is not so much a matter of faithfulness or fidelity to plot that makes a great adaptation as it is attention to how the specific medium of a given adaptation can uniquely illuminate particular elements of his work that otherwise remain constrained by the limits of the textual form.
I won’t rehearse familiar debates over Blade Runner (1982) versus Electric Sheep, but I will argue that part of what Ridley Scott gets right is attention to affective registers and somatic experience. Here I refer to the film’s general mood, generated by its use of visual and aural elements (a veneer of dystopic, ethereal affectlessness that is partly a combination of the intertwined visual languages of sf dystopia and LA noir on which the film draws, Vangelis’s ambient score, and of course, Harrison Ford’s performance of cynical exhaustion). More specifically, I refer to moments such as the ending’s grotesque vertigo of Deckard’s nightmarish crawl up gothic walls to elude Roy Baty as Baty takes on a phantasmatic presence that emits creepy, terrifying noises and punches powdery, white fists through eerily lit, decaying walls. Similarly, Baty’s classic final moments of sublime poetry, “expiring” while seated in the rain on the ledge of a ruined building as his memories are “lost like tears in rain,” explicitly tie Baty’s emotion, affect, and somatic experience to his cognitive abilities to remember and to form metaphor. It is worth remembering that this last sequence is catalyzed by Baty driving a large nail through his own palm to stimulate and re-vivify his android body’s rapidly failing nervous system and continue his hunt of Deckard. Nowhere in the novel does any of this occur, yet the filmic attention here—to the somatic, to perception as tied to cognition and poetics, and to the affective—captures precisely the issues of somatic experience at the core of Dick’s novel, and it does so in a way the novel cannot. This is exactly what an adaptation should do with its specific medium.
Less controversial in terms of adherence to Dick’s original plot, but no less effective in how it uses its medium to get at these issues of perception and affect in the original work, is Richard Linklater’s A Scanner Darkly (2006). Here, Linklater’s tour de force matches Dick with an innovative use of rotoscope animation that pushes at the limits of filmic representation, reflecting the original text on both formal and content levels. In the 1977 novel, Dick explains how the scramble-suit used by undercover law enforcement officers to conceal their identities was inspired by hallucinogenic visions resembling a hyperspeed montage of abstract paintings (A Scanner Darkly, 1977 [New York: Vintage, 1991]: 22). In a sense, the entire film is a kind of scramble-suit that formally reflects its content, catching its audience up in a self-reflexive, multi-layered perceptual and affective estrangement that parallels the film characters’ own hallucinogenic, paranoid, scrambled states of perception and affective experience. In the conclusions of both novel and film, Bruce/Fred/Arctor’s tragic condition is not simply a fried brain that leaves him with diminished cognitive ability; it is also portrayed specifically as a death of affect and as dulled perception. Here, the brilliant stroke in the choice of Keanu Reeves to portray Arctor becomes clear, as Reeves’s trademark Bill & Ted burnout lack of affect adds another layer to the rotoscope animation. The whole film, like the novel, is a study of descent into increasing vertigo and decreasing affect. In a Dickian move, Linklater makes maximal use of form to convey this descent, pushing beyond the medium’s limitations by playing within and through them. But again, this is more than just the cognitive estrangement posited as sf’s ability to create distance through which to critically assess our world. Scanner mines affective and perceptual fields to connect this estrangement and critical distance to “non-rational” dimensions of perception and experience—to expand conceptualization of cognitive and estrangement to include sensory perception, affect, and embodiment.
These film adaptations demonstrate that, for Dick, defamiliarization and estrangement are never just cognitive and critical. They are also perceptually and affectively based. Any cognitive perception of reality, critical or otherwise, cannot be divorced from the sentient body’s sensorial perception. Like Viktor Shklovsky, who famously argued in “Art as Technique” (1917) that “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged” ([New York: St. Martin’s, 2006]: 778), Philip K. Dick reminds us with his art that how we perceive is tied to how we perceive. In doing so, he pushes at the limits of all forms and modes of perception and at the illusory boundaries between them. The aim is that we might gain critical insight into how we make sense of the world, but also that we gain awareness of how we use our sensory apparatus to perceive the world, to sense it as part of that same process of making sense. Understanding this dimension of his work and effectively making use of the unique sensory modes afforded by a medium make—or break—an adaptation. In Edward Einhorn’s play, we see some interesting gestures in this direction, but one hopes that future stage adaptations of Dick’s work will innovatively use the medium to the fullest extent, with focused, sustained attention on the intersections between live performance and some of Dick’s most important concerns regarding somatic experience, perception, and perception.—Rubén Mendoza, UC Riverside
William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy as Covert Alternate World Philosophical Apocalypse Slipstream. Clever and interesting as it is, I was not finally persuaded by Jaak Tomberg’s “On the ‘Double Vision’ of Realism and SF Estrangement in William Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy” (SFS #120). He fails to take any account of the cynical alternative explanation of Gibson’s turn to contemporary fiction, and he frequently resorts to overstatements that linger in spite of subsequent qualifications.
I think it likely that Gibson’s move away from sf has a good deal to do with market considerations. The market for realistic mystery novels/thrillers, like those that make up the Bigend Trilogy, is significantly greater than that for sf. What Gibson has aimed at, I would claim, is both markets by allowing readers of that trilogy the choice of a totally realistic understanding or a marginally sf understanding. He does this primarily by insinuating the possibility that the trilogy is set in an alternate present world that has sheared off on 11 September 2001. The insinuation consists of at least one minor, apparently counterfactual, clue that is unlikely to be noticed or dwelt on by readers unfamiliar with sf. As for Gibson’s poetic descriptive style, he writes the way he writes and the features of that style, long familiar to his readers, have simply persisted.
Gibson’s poetic realism is demonstrated by the essay’s four epigraphs, three from two novels in the Bigend Trilogy and one from the earlier sf novel All Tomorrow’s Parties (quoted 263). The order of the epigraphs is chiasmic. The first and fourth exemplify Gibson’s fondness for brand-name-prone and information-dense sentences that amount to an assemblage of disparate things. Gibson’s brand names combine the familiar, the unfamiliar, and the made up (the product neologism). Readers will not be able to distinguish between the last two categories and will choose, in the particular instance, on the basis of context, to interpret the brand as unfamiliar (realist) or as a product neologism (sf). The second and third epigraphs exemplify his talent for elaborated and somewhat metaphysical/paradoxical imagery. The left-behind, jet-lagged “Souls … like lost luggage” (from Pattern Recognition) exploits an immaterial -material, inner-outer dialectic. The somewhat strained “notebook clasped beneath his arm like the egg of some modest but moderately successful marine species” (from All Tomorrow’s Parties) exploits an inanimate-animate, human-alien (non-human) dialectic. It is that unidentified, egg-laying “marine species” which adds an sf exoticism that is not present in the three Bigend Tin rilogy epigraphs. The only sf novel epigraph is distinct in that it is the only one that combines Gibson’s version of the Homeric simile with the sense of an assemblage of disparate things.
As for the pervading overstatement issue, Tomberg’s most significant overstatement—important to his overall argument—is repeated on three occasions; my qualifications appear as bracketed inserts: “Cayce’s ‘talent’ in Pattern Recognition is [not] the only potentially science-fictional element in the Bigend Trilogy” (282 n3); “Gibson’s latest triptych as a whole lacks any of the motifs that would classify it as conventionally science-fictional [except for one]” (271); and “Gibson’s later prose lacks conventional sf novums [except for one]” (273). Tomberg refuses to acknowledge the key alternate-present world clue first identified in Donald Morse’s “Advertising and Calculators in William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition” (SFS #93) and brilliantly elaborated in Neil Easterbrook’s “Alternate Presents: The Ambivalent Historicism of Pattern Recognition” (SFS #100); it is referred to in wider or other contexts in my “The Present World in Other Terms” (SFS #101), “John Wyndham’s Chocky (1968): The First Covert Alternate World?” (SFS #105), and “Locating Slipstream” (Foundation #111; for a corrected version of the Venn diagram please see the Italian translation in Anarres #2). In our world, in 1945, Curt Herzstark, the inventor of the Curta Calculator, made only three prototype models of his invention; in the alternate present of Pattern Recognition, a “fourth prototype” model exists (New York: Putnam, 2003, 249). (Of course, if Gibson were to respond to this note with a note of his own claiming that he had simply made a mistake, my position would be weakened.)
Tomberg’s attempt to identify the Bigend Trilogy as a new form of sf realism depends finally on the overstated claim that “Unlike in slipstream … it is not a case of adorning a realist setting with a few closely extrapolated science-fictional elements…” (263). But a reader can choose, as I have, to read the trilogy exactly as slipstream in which a realist setting is adorned with two sf elements (Cayce’s special talent and the overriding alternate-present scenario).—David Ketterer, University of Liverpool
Author’s Response. I am grateful to David Ketterer for his thorough consideration, useful comments, and constructive criticism on my article about Gibson’s Bigend Trilogy.
I concede that I should have provided reasoning for the order of my epigraphs—simply listing them linearly by the thematic order in which I return to them in Section 3, for ease of the reader browsing back and forth—and I appreciate the suggestion that there could have been a more thorough way of systematizing them. I also agree that the further characterization of them through more specific dualities than organic/technological (immaterial/ material, inner/outer, inanimate/animate, human/alien, as noted by Ketterer) could have led to interesting opportunities for subsequent analysis, although such specifics were not immediately relevant to my argument.
As to taking into account the “cynical alternative explanations” and “marketing considerations” of Gibson’s turn to contemporary fiction—they may warrant a mention, but my analysis focused on the texture of Gibson’s poetics and on the cultural and philosophical conditions of its (simultaneous) dislocation and “persistence” in the contemporary genre system. “Marketing considerations” would have constituted an altogether different approach—and one where “he writes the way he writes” does not represent a sufficient depth of analysis.
Nevertheless, and my personal rhetorical idiosyncrasies aside, the notion, central to my argument, that Gibson’s latest triptych as a whole lacks any of the motifs that would classify it conventionally as sf, is something that I couldn’t have stressed enough, and something I stand by. If anything, it was a mistake on my part to surrender to one of Gibson’s own statements (see “Interview: William Gibson” [Newsweek 141.8 (24 Feb 2003): 75]), and call Cayce’s talent science fictional in the first place. This is where Ketterer’s and my approaches to (science) fiction radically differ—and I consider it to be a difference in so-called “first principles” between which “a reader can choose.” Neither is without its merits.
I propose that the question of whether to read Gibson’s material either as “slipstream in which a realist setting is adorned with two sf elements” or as the convergence of science-fictional estrangement and realist plausibility comes down to whether one considers the verisimilitude of a text to be dependent on its correspondence to the facts “in our world” or independent from it (and in some cases even opposed to it).
If correspondence is accepted over verisimilitude to be of foremost importance, then the “realism” of the fictional world can be contested with numerous (or even countless) historical/scientific confirmations of the falsity of presented “fictional facts.” In the case of any such confirmation, the fictional present (as in Gibson) is automatically converted to and confirmed to be an “alternate present” (which under certain circumstances could be designated sf). Ketterer, following Morse and Easterbrook (see my original article), bases his criticism on the well-documented argument that there is at least one alternate-present-world clue in Pattern Recognition that undermines its “realism”: the fourth prototype of the Curta Calculator of which, “in our world,” only three were made. But such a confirmatory mechanism, based on correspondence, is not without its hindrances—for example, it is too open to unintentional inconsistencies on the writer’s part. Ketterer himself mentions that if “Gibson himself were to respond to this note with a note of his own claiming that he had simply made a mistake, [Ketterer’s] position would be weakened.” While I do not want to go too far down this road, there are already several documented examples where Gibson admitted such oversights: the previous non-existence of Buzz Rickson’s black MA-1 is one such case (see Gibson’s blog [1 Dec. 2005]; Rickson’s made a black MA-1 only after Pattern Recognition came out). But one accidental deviance is sufficient to call into question the decisive subversion of others. (Why, for example, wasn’t the black MA-1 considered the crucial “point of departure” to the alternative present—especially when Easterbrook concedes in his note 8 that “though the Curta is the catalyst that connects the novel’s various threads, the fact that no fourth prototype exists is not fundamental to the narrative dynamics” [Easterbrook 500]. Does this confirm that the Curta is of almost as little importance as the Rickson’s?)
In other words, if we took the logic of correspondence to its extremes, we would have to engage ourselves in, on one hand, the endless (non)-confirmation of the correspondence of fictional to actual facts, and, on the other, the endless hesitation about whether a detected non-correspondence was a deliberate insertion or simply a mistake. And all of this overlooks the basic undermining insight, confirmed by both Easterbrook and Ketterer, that all fictional discourse “necessarily forms an ‘alternative present’ of the readerly now” (Easterbrook 504). This insight is too general in nature to be of dynamic use in the current discussion, although its narrow function of “attempt[ing] to distinguish the genre-specific ways in which sf does this” (see Ketterer’s “The Present World in Other Terms” [part three of New Worlds For Old (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1974)]) deserves at least a separate article. The question concerning the validity of my own argument is, rather, whether the “alterity” of the present in the Bigend Trilogy, supposedly based on the non-existence of the fourth Curta prototype, is in any specific way thematically “science fictional.” I am inclined to say no, just as the one based on the previously non-existent Rickson’s would also not be sf.
This is where I would like to counter (as I implicitly did in my article) correspondence with verisimilitude as the central aim and validating effect of a “realist” literary text. Since all fiction in any case forms an alternate present of the readerly now (that Cayce “exists altogether” is another minor counterfactual), its “fictional facts” needn’t necessarily correspond to the actual scientific or historical facts “in our world” but “merely” constitute one of its plausible reflections. Far from being dependent on (scientific, historical) correspondence, verisimilitude is a more general and wider socio-cultural phenomenon, drawing its validity from notions (such as “cultural intuition”) that are more vague, context-dependent, and not so easily confirmed by, say, strict scientific observation. In the cultural context that Gibson focuses on, there are a lot more things that are plausible but not correspondent than there are things that are correspondent and therefore plausible—just as the human imagination could come up with more things that could have been than things that actually are (possibility/potentiality is “larger” than necessity). What is realist needn’t, to an extent, correspond to what is real. (And this, in the final instance, is also true about science in sf; as Carl Freedman notes in Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Wesleyan UP, 2000), what’s at stake is “not any epistemological judgment external to the text itself on the rationality or irrationality of the latter’s imaginings, but rather … the attitude of the text itself to the kind of estrangements being performed” (18; emphasis in original). In other words, what matters is not the fictional science’s correspondence to actual science but the cognition effect of the text taking its science seriously.)
The fact that there was no fourth Curta prototype doesn’t compromise the overall realist plausibility of Gibson’s fictional world, where such a thing exists, for most readers. The same goes for Buzz Rickson’s black MA-1; the same goes for all the brand names, to which these texts are “prone” to the extent that, as Jameson notes, they “work” even if they’re made up; and the same goes for Cayce’s peculiar “talent”—I am tempted to say that for a contemporary cultural subject, immersed in advertising and commerce, such an anxiety is entirely plausible, even if not (yet) scientifically confirmed. There is, of course, an extent to this plausibility, and this is why the “minor counterfactuals” in Gibson’s text are realist rather than science-fictional: a fourth Curta prototype is nowhere nearly as cognitively estranging as (say) a fully communicating artificial intelligence with human features (even if a specialist came up and said that conceiving such an entity is likely in the near future, making it a possibility—whereas the retrospective existence of the fourth prototype in the past is impossible).
One could take the incongruence of correspondence and verisimilitude a step further and claim that in contemporary western technoculture, as well as in its corresponding sf, there are things that are “perfectly real” or “correspondent” but utterly implausible: isn’t the Large Hadron Collider in CERN such an (almost sf, cognitively estranging) phenomenon for a common person? And couldn’t one say the same about a large part of “hard” sf written and validated by authors in possession of the necessary scientific expertise, like much of Vernor Vinge’s work? There are many potential readers who would deem some of the constructs in his novels almost incomprehensible, and therefore a priori implausible, even if such extrapolations followed very closely and truthfully the current status of research. Scientific reality and cultural realism are, therefore, different things—and Gibson, I argue, has always cared more for the plausibility of the latter rather than his work’s correspondence to the former.
Nevertheless, correspondence should not be underestimated in favor of verisimilitude—and this is especially true concerning sf with its traditionally distinct, science-minded readership. The final preference between correspondence and verisimilitude—and here I agree with and concede to Ketterer—depends upon the choice of “readerly distance.” Simply put, it depends upon whether one reads sf as “genre fiction” (which requires a “shorter distance” to the subject matter and where plausibility depends directly upon correct correspondence) or as “belles lettres,” as literature as such (where the subject matter can be approached from a “greater distance” and where plausibility has much more autonomy). It might have something to do with the increasingly techn(olog)ical nature of contemporary western culture that the sf market has opened up to larger audiences, with sf being considered, more and more, as literature in general, read by “common readers” and integrated, step by step, into the sphere of autonomous verisimilitude where realism has long resided. Nevertheless, I don’t think that in this case it has anything to do with conscious cynical “marketing decisions” since these don’t explain the persistence of Gibson’s poetics amid the shift in cultural conditions. Rather, this case recognizes that, for Gibson, the present can no longer be reflected on through plausible temporal detour to the future: the representational energy that was once spent reaching out to some “world to come” is now spent on “merely” plausibly reaching out to the present itself.—Jaak Tomberg, Estonian Literary Museum.
Corrigenda. (1) Dear Mr. Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.: A bibliographical correction to your piece on Summa Technologiae. The first German translation, by Friedrich Griese, appeared in 1976 (not 1981) from Insel Verlag in Frankfurt; and the East German edition of 1980 used our Insel translation.—Franz Rottensteiner, Austria
(2) I was happy to see, contained in an essay by Jonathan Newell on Mieville’s Iron Council, a book dear to my heart, and on which I’ve written a brief piece that appeared in GLQ several years ago. The author, Newell, cites me twice in his essay, and both times with my name given differently and misspelled. Within the body of the text it is given as “Jordana Rosenburg,” and in the citation information it is given as “Joanna Rosenberg.” My name is actually Jordana Rosenberg.—Jordana Rosenberg, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
CFP. SF/F Now and Irradiating the Object: M. John Harrison conferences at Warwick University, UK, 21-23 August 2014.
SF/F Now is a 2-day international, interdisciplinary conference exploring the ways in which sf, fantasy, and the weird grapple with and illuminate the crucial political and social issues of the moment. It will consist of conventional panels and a series of innovative workshops led by pairs of international specialists exploring the relation of fantastic fiction to contemporary issues: Crisis & Protest; Environmental Studies; Utopia & the City; Science Studies; Energy & Petrofiction; Humanity 2.0; Animal Studies; World Systems & World Sf. The workshops are designed to allow all participants the opportunity to benefit directly from discussion with our attending experts. Invited workshop leaders at SF/F Now (22-23 August) include Gerry Canavan (Marquette), Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck), Steve Fuller (Warwick), Joan Haran (Cardiff), Veronica Hollinger (Trent), Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck), Graeme MacDonald (Warwick), David McNally (York), Tom Moylan (Limerick), Charles Sheppard (Warwick), Stephen Shapiro (Warwick), Imre Szeman (Alberta), and Sherryl Vint (UC Riverside).
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or pre-constituted panels (3x20- minute papers on a related theme or specific text) on topics relating to the current state of fantastic fiction, contemporary research in fantastic fiction, or the relation of fantastic fiction to current social and political issues, including but not restricted to those covered by the workshop titles.
Deadline for proposals is 31 March 2014. For further information, join our FB event page.
SF/F Now will be preceded by a one-day conference, Irradiating the Object: M. John Harrison, in collaboration with Gylphi. Whether it is with space opera (The Centauri Device, the Kefahuchi Tract trilogy), sword and sorcery (the Viriconium stories), post-apocalyptic dystopia (The Committed Men), magic realism (Climbers, The Course of the Heart), horror (“The Ice Monkey,” “The Incalling”), or near-future thriller (Signs of Life), M. John Harrison has brilliantly charted the transformation of British social, political, and physical landscapes since the 1960s, persistently challenging distinctions among genres and between literary and popular fiction. From serving as the literary editor of Moorcock’s New Worlds to his role in the founding (or unearthing) of the New Weird, he is an unerring literary pioneer and one of the most vital and demanding of genre critics. Irradiating the Object keynote speakers will be Rob Latham (UC Riverside) and Sara Wasson (Edinburgh-Napier University). M. John Harrison will give a reading and participate in a Q&A session.
We invite proposals for 20-minute papers or pre-constituted panels (3x20- minute papers on a related theme or on a specific text) on any aspect of Harrison’s fiction and career. Selected papers will appear in a collection co-edited by Mark Bould and Rhys Williams.
Deadline for proposals is 31 March 2014. For further information, join our FB event page.
A small number of travel and accommodations bursaries will be available for students attending all three days of the conference(s). For those wishing to apply, please include a brief cover note and CV with you proposal.
Please address any queries and submit proposals to Rhys Williams (A.Rhys.Williams@warwick.ac.uk) and/or Mark Bould (mark.bould@ gmail.com).—Mark Bould, University of the West of England
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