NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE
Remembering Gene Wolfe. Gene Wolfe, born 7 May 1931, died on 14 April 2019, his heart having finally given up the ghost. Wolfe believed in ghosts, had seen at least one, and believed in spiritual transcendence as well, so this is how I describe his death from heart disease. His writing will certainly continue to haunt us as long as we read it, an activity about which he seemed less than optimistic, if his last novel, A Borrowed Man (2015), is any indication. Its economically, ecologically, and culturally impoverished future imagines books as human beings consigned to the bonfire if ignored; this is a fate Wolfe may have feared but which the readers of SFS must hope to prevent.
He is best known for his book of interconnected novellas, The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972) and his magnificent tetralogy, The Book of the New Sun (1981-1982), achievements which have yet to be equaled for their haunting inventiveness, beauty of language, and richness of metaphor; his non-sf ghost story Peace (1975) and many of his novellas, including the four stories collected in The Wolfe Archipelago (1983)—“Seven American Nights” (1978), “The Haunted Boarding House” (1990), “The Sailor Who Sailed After the Sun” (1992), and “Memorare” (2007)—are also of this caliber (he loved guns as a young man). I list here only my own favorites: others will name different works that proved to be their “book of gold,” as he called such touchstones in The Book of the New Sun. He received many awards, including the Locus, World Fantasy, and Nebula Awards for individual works (but never the Hugo, awarded by fans, although nominated many times), and was named both SFWA and Damon Knight Memorial Grand Master for the body of his work.
Most of Wolfe’s stories resist genre classification: sf? fantasy? horror? mainstream? art fiction? pulp fiction? Nevertheless, he embraced the “ghetto” of sf and shunned the respectability of academic study. The result seems to have been a relative dearth of academic study of his work, given how important it is, and a corresponding wealth of non-academic study instead. I have hinted at some of his common themes above; they include haunting, the compatibility of faith and reason (his Roman Catholic faith was deep and complex), loneliness and isolation, memory and archive, kinds and degrees of sentience. Common motifs, also reflected in the works I have mentioned, include isolatos, especially children, ghosts, and roses (both as representations of Mary and as gestures toward his beloved wife, Rosemary). His work is extremely, sometimes exhaustingly, allusive, reminding one that as a literary figure he was self-taught, so his references are both wide-ranging and unpredictable—Borges, Melville, Irish ghost stories, Kipling, Dickens, comic books, G.K. Chesterton, and so on. They often employ unreliable narrators and ambiguous, maze-like plots. Stylistically, he moved from the incantatory, metaphoric, and complex sentences and arcane vocabulary of The Book of the New Sun to an increasingly spare sentence structure and vocabulary, as evident in his most recent work.
Wolfe fought in the Korean War, trained as an engineer, and worked as one while he honed his considerable skills in writing. He married his childhood friend Rosemary, who influenced him to embrace Catholicism, and to whom he was fiercely devoted. Together they had four children. He was a generous mentor to many writers, including George R.R. Martin, Neil Gaiman, and Kim Stanley Robinson, and some scholars, including me. While I was in graduate school, I conducted a long and wide-ranging interview with him that was vital to my writing of the Starmont Reader’s Guide to Gene Wolfe (1986). Along the way he offered me encouragement and what I felt was fatherly advice. He was a wonderful raconteur, a warm presence at sf conventions, and a wise teacher at the Clarion workshops. He could also display temper, especially if he felt he was being criticized, disrespected, or misinterpreted, or if Rosemary was being slighted in any way. In short, he was as complex as his writing. As puzzling as people often found his stories, he had little patience with their difficulty and offered little help. After all, the clues were there in the stories (and, no, he never told me if my interpretations were correct as I wrote my monograph).
Wolfe was in some ways an old-fashioned writer, in that his characters, especially women, were more archetypal than rounded, in that he embraced spiritual themes and modernist technique and often shunned “invisible” direct prose; but it would be a mistake to assume that his work is passé. Far from it. When I gave a paper on his early work at the 2018 SFRA conference, few in the audience were familiar with his writing, but I hope that his death, and the many encomia across the internet that have arisen from it, will remind us how rewarding his work can be. For example, much of his work explores human/animal and human/artificial intelligence and their implications (“Eyebem” [1970], “Tracking Song” [1975]), or ecological concerns (“Three Million Square Miles” [1971] and A Borrowed Man). “Memorare” is a spiritual gloss on Derrida’s Archive Fever (1995). Any sf scholar would find in his short works, collected in many volumes including The Island of Doctor Death and Other Stories and Other Stories (1980), Endangered Species (1990), and The Best of Gene Wolfe (2009), a wealth of inspiration.
Wolfe’s writing production slowed, especially after Rosemary’s slow decline and then death in 2013. Even though he had his children and granddaughters, she had been his loving companion and her death had to have taken its toll. Well before she died, he offered in “Memorare” a suitable envoi:
Her soul was with God, somewhere out there in space. Someday his soul might meet hers there. They would embrace, and laugh at remembered things, and link arms forever.
Someday....
“Remember, O most gracious Virgin....”
(Magazine of Fantasy and SF, April 2007, 79; ellipses in original)
His faith was perhaps an anomaly for an engineer and an sf writer, but if his writing is an indication, it sustained him to the end.—JG
Call for Papers: A Cultural History of AI. In less than one day in March 2016, a “bot” named Tay was introduced to Twitter but removed after users discovered how to make it disgorge neo-Nazi rhetoric. Microsoft had promised that “the more you chat with Tay ... the smarter it gets.” While providing ample comic fodder for tech-site writers, Tay’s failure saliently points not only to questions surrounding artificial intelligence but also to the ways that “intelligence,” broadly conceived, requires a cultural context in order to be cognitively legible. Was Tay’s racism a failure in artificial intelligence or simply an accurate reflection of modern subjectivity—or at least the racial biases in online chat-board subcultures? Is racism, sexism, or xenophobia “non-intelligent”? Why are imaginative constructions of intelligent machines so often premised on the presumption that mechanical reason is independent of sociocultural positioning? How does one trace the cultural history of such prevalent presumptions, or of AI at large?
Everyone familiar with code, or who even has access to search engines, knows and interacts with some form of artificial intelligence on a daily basis. Whether we perceive it as a threat or a dream come true or simply ignore it, we also know and recognize it, whether in the ads populating our computer screens and automated responses to our emails, or in GPS and self-driving cars. We have a concept of its artificiality and a concept of its intelligence as intelligence. A seemingly uninhibited rationality marks a good deal of AI’s long history in literary contexts, from Swift’s Engine in the Grand Academy of Lagado to Forsters’s Machine, Čapek’s Robots, Clarke’s HAL 9000, the Wachowski’s Matrix, and Stephenson’s Primer. Where the question of consciousness and personhood extends into the realm of emotive qualities, these AIs tilt overwhelmingly to performances easily read as culturally white, Western, and/or male. In what way can any intelligence worth the name be separated from a cultural context in which to develop, and if it cannot be separated, what opportunities do such acculturating mechanisms allow for rethinking speculative treatments of AI in the future?
The proposed collected edition, A Cultural History of Artificial Intelligence, investigates the ways that fictional AI serves as a space of critique concerning what is culturally assumed in the constituent elements of artifice and intelligence. It aims to survey the complications inherent to Eurocentric and masculine representations of (artificial) intelligence in contemporary fiction, criticism, and film, interpreting them against the background of their primarily Western intellectual histories and offering multiple humanistic perspectives on what literary and cinematic challenges to such visions of AI suggest about artificial consciousness as a cultural affair.
Successful proposals will address aspects of artificial intelligence and its relation to cultural performance in history, speculative fiction, and film—as well as other literary and artistic production. We shall challenge the notion of artificial intelligence as trans- or acultural as well as the idea that pure intelligence reflects merely a disembodied Reason writ large.
Send a 500-word proposal and short bio to Ian MacDonald (imacdonald @fau.edu) and Efe Khayyat (e.khayyat@rutgers.edu) by 1 August 2019. Those selected for inclusion in the collection will be asked to write essays between 7,000-10,000 words in length. A contract is under negotiation.—Ian MacDonald, Florida Atlantic University
Call for Chapters: Japanese Horror—New Critical Approaches. The cultural phenomenon of Japanese horror has been one of Japan’s most celebrated cultural exports. Encompassing a range of genres including cinema, manga, video games, and television series, the loosely designated genre has often uniquely blended Western-style narrative and cinematic techniques and tropes with traditional Japanese narrative styles, visual cultures, and folklore. Originating in the early decades of the twentieth century, modern Japanese horror cultures have had a tremendous impact on world cinema, comics studies, video-game studies, and popular culture. Whether supernatural, science fictional, or visceral and body-based, Japanese horror cultures have converted the most fatal fears into visual terms.
Our proposed volume will focus on directors and films, illustrators and artists, manga, video-game makers/designers, and video games that have helped in establishing the genre firmly within the annals of world cinema and popular culture. Directors, designers, and manga artists working in Japanese horror cultures may include, but are not limited to, Nobuo Nakagawa, Kaneto Shindo, Masaki Kobayashi, Hideo Nakata, Takashi Miike, Kiyoshi Kurosawa, Ataru Oikawa, Takashi Shimizu, Hideo Kojima, Junji Ito, Kazuo Umezu, Shintaro Kago, Katsuhisa Kigtisu, Gou Tanabe, among others.
At this stage we are looking either for submission of complete articles of up to 7000 words or abstracts of up to 500 words for proposed chapters. The papers must be written using MLA style, following the rules of the 7th edition handbook but with footnotes instead of endnotes. All complete chapters (Garamond font, 1.5 pt line spacing) must be accompanied by an abstract (200-250 words) and a short bio-bibliography of the author. Images, if used, should be sourced from creative commons/copyright-free sources. If material is under copyright, permissions should be obtained from the copyright holders.
The deadline for submissions is 15 September 2019. Enquiries and submissions should be directed to the volume’s editors, Subashish Bhattacharjee, Ananya Saha, and Fernando Pagnoni Berns at <jhorrorvolume @gmail.com>—Subashish Bhattacharjee (Jawaharlal Nehru University), Ananya Saha (Jawaharlal Nehru University), and Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns (Universidad de Buenos Aires)
AI: More Than Human. The Barbican Centre invites you to explore artificial intelligence in an exhibition from 16 May 16 to 27 August 2019. This major centre-wide “festival-style” exhibition explores creative and scientific developments in AI and demonstrates its potential to revolutionize our lives. Bringing together artists, scientists, and researchers, the interactive exhibition invites atendees to engage head-on. They will experience the capabilities of AI in the form of cutting-edge research projects by DeepMind, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), and Neri Oxman of the MIT Media Lab, interacting with exhibits and also with installations from artists including Mario Klingemann, Massive Attack, Es Devlin, and teamLab. This timely exhibition will challenge your preconceptions about artificial intelligence. Tickets are £15. See <https://www.barbican.org.uk/whats-on/2019/event/ai -more-than-human> for further information and advance booking.—Barbican Centre, Silk Street, London ECY8DS
The Coming World: Ecology as the New Politics, 2030–2100. Between 28 June and 1 December 2019, “The Coming World” will bring together historical and new works by over 50 Russian and international artists. It will occupy the entire museum building of the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, located in Gorky Park in Moscow. The exhibition considers a future already in the making, when the environmental agenda will become one of the main political questions. The suggested timeline refers to speculative points in time taken from the sphere of popular science and iconic science fiction, for 2030 is suggested as the year when existing resources of oil will be exhausted (as Stanford biologist Paul R. Ehrlich supposes in 2002's Beyond the Limit), while 2100 denotes the year, according to predictions made by Arthur C. Clarke during the 1960s, in which human life will be able expand beyond Earth. The exhibition alludes to a compressed period of time, starting from the not too distant future, when the human race will be forced to live with the final knowledge that, as Mike Berners-Lee points out in the title of his recent book, There is No Planet B (2019). “The Coming World” revisits a future imagined in the past, one in which humans were expected to progress sufficiently to be able to settle on other planets. By looking into the speculative future, the boundaries of which are determined by predictions that are no longer considered accurate, the exhibition highlights the uncertainty of our knowledge about events to come, while suggesting a “performative” understanding of the future as it is being constructed today and shaped by our activities in the present.
The exhibition will feature a number of historical works that marked turning points in humanity’s relationship with nature, from sixteenth-century tapestries that for the first time presented nature as a phenomenon outside of human control, and the beginning of landscape as a genre in seventeenth- century Dutch painting, to the “organic culture” movement within the Russian avant-garde and the invention of land art in 1969, which made nature an artistic medium. The emergence of land art and environmental art coincided with a surge of interest in environmental protection, which led to the development of ecological policies at the state and public levels. In the half-century that followed, art went through various stages in its relationship with ecology. Along with evidence of recent anthropogenic disasters (“Black Tide/Marea Negra” by Allan Sekula [2002-2003]) and criminal attempts to brush them under the carpet (“Delay Decay” by Susan Schuppli [2016]), the exhibition will present works produced in collaboration with animals as agents in new relationships and new paradigms between humans, nature, and non-human species, as well as various scenarios for the future based on scientific predictions and theories. The Garage Museum will publish an e-catalogue, mobile, and audio guides of the exhibition, along with a video dictionary of environmental terms in Russian Sign Language developed by the Museum’s Inclusive Programs Department.
Founded in 2008 by Dasha Zhukova and Roman Abramovich, Garage is the first philanthropic institution in Russia to create a comprehensive public mandate for contemporary art. [Ed. Note: This description has been excerpted from a much more detailed website announcement of the exhibition; for further details, see <https://garagemca.org/en/exhibition/the-coming-world- ecology-as-the-new-politics-2030-2100>.—CM
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