Author: Jason W. Ellis

Candas Jane Dorsey’s “(Learning About) Machine Sex” is a feminist cyberpunk story about a female programmer who deconstructs the orgasm into feedback binary data. It was first published in 1988 in the author’s collection, Machine Sex and Other Stories.

The story begins:

A naked woman working at a computer. Which attracts you most? It was a measure of Whitman that, as he entered the room, his eyes went first to the unfolded machine gleaming small and awkward in the light of the long-armed desk lamp; he’d seen the woman before.

Angel was the woman. Thin and pale-skinned, with dark nipples and black pubic hair, and her face hidden by a dark unkempt mane of long hair as the leaned over her work.

[…] So she has a new board, thought Whitman, and felt his guts stir the way they stirred when he first contemplated taking her to bed.

On one level, the story is about the buying and selling of intellectual property. However, this is problematized when it involves an individual, Angel, who is the sole person developing sought after technology and the fruits of her work (Greek mythology–creation/birth as an eruption from the head) are tied to the company she helped develop. Unfortunately, the company was owned by a man, Whitman, who tells her that he sold it, including her, to a competitor, and he does this after having sex with her. To a misogynist like Whitman, Angel is a commodity to be bought and sold–an object to possess and control through the politics of sexual relationships. He styles himself into her pimp who uses as well as abuses her.

When Angel escapes to her hidden homestead in the secluded Rocky Mountain House, she invites a cowboy over (who’s never named in the story) for drinks. They begin talking, and after showing him her new program, Machine Sex, they debate whether it would sell or not. She believes that it will, because from her experience and point of view, people are empty and incapable of love. The cowboy, who happens to be gay (Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain” was first published nine years after Dorsey’s story), defends love and decries Machine Sex.

Their debate gets interesting when Angel talks about the vacancy of love based on her real life experiences, but the cowboy dismisses her troubles with love and people like Whitman as “politics.” But the thing is that sex and sexual power is a political power struggle. The politics of sex and gender relations is not something that should be dismissed. In fact, Angel appropriates the male dominated sexual political framework by creating Machine Sex, which will undermine the system through short circuiting the orgasmic feedback loop.

This is recommended reading. I found it in The Norton Book of Science Fiction.

Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth’s “Critical Mass” is a fantastic extrapolative story about the seemingly eternal, but teetering on paradigmatic shift, Cold War. Pohl and Kornbluth often collaborated together until Kornbluth’s death in 1962, and this story is an excellent example of their cooperative work.

The story is set in 1998, and the Cold War is reaching a crisis point. Politicians are using the extended war to their advantage by providing false hopes through long term, but fruitless programs to save the American people from missiles coming over the North Pole. However, the lack of a preemptive strike by either side is leading up to crisis, because the statistical probability of a strike under protracted war increases.

The authors map the story’s characters to the physical components of a fission chain reaction. There are the energetic neutrons with apparently new discoveries and prophecy that strike nuclei, which perpetuates the chain reaction began by the pile attaining critical mass.

There are some interesting points that I’d like to make about the story. One pertains to the way in which women are portrayed in the story. In this future, the present follows on a failed, or at best semi-successful, “Female Integration” that began through the efforts of a previous president and his “Century of the Common Woman” plan. Two women characters in the story epitomize this through dressing like men, and one holding a corncob pipe. There is also the mention of integrated sports teams and jail lockups. In the case of sports teams, integration means a level playing field of equal numbers of men and women but with a chauvinistic slant:

There wasn’t anything really wrong with Female Integration. Maggie wasn’t a nut. Take baseball. why that was the Integrationist’s major conquest, when women demanded and got equal representation on every major-league team in spite of the fact that they could not throw or run on competitive terms with men (213).

Despite integration, women are still treated as less than men. Given that the rest of the story is satirical, I believe the authors were not promoting feminist ideals by projecting such an antifeminist viewpoint.

The story also has connections to our current Global War on Terrorism milieu. The Democratic Part is called the “Party of Treason,” which sounds like something you’d hear on Fox News (215). Also, saying “politicians” or talking about politics is considered obscene in this future America. In fact, obscenities in general are severely looked down upon.

The current administration’s desire for a missile defense system is analogous to the debate going on within the story. The party in power supports the construction of civilian shelters to protect America’s population in the event of an attack. However, the president remembers an atomic weapons training movie he saw in the National Guard that depicted a desert wasteland following a strike. He muses why there is a need for shelters when there will be nothing left to return to. Senator Harkness reminds the President that:

We slapped CSB [Civilian Shelter Bill] in our platform, and we won…You know, you never get credit in this game for what you’ve done. Only for what you’re going to do. And, hell, Brad,’ he crowed, suddenly exultant as a child who found a dime in the street, ‘this thing is good for years (220)!

Like the current American administration, there’s a lot of money being spent and a lot of talk, but there hasn’t been that many solid results, and there’s never been a solid explanation of why a defense system is needed as urgently in the Post-Cold War world.

Another topic is incarceration. When several characters are caught in an air raid drill, they realize that they don’t have their required emergency equipment:

The roundup had bagged nearly fifty hardened criminals, like Denzer and Maggie, caught flagrantly naked of dosimeters and next-0f-kin tags. There were a surly lot…Office girls, executives, errand boys, even one hangdog ARP guard himself; they were a motley assortment (223).

This criminalization of preparedness sounds akin to the current American administration’s imposing and promotion of “diligence.” If they could have, I suspect that the Patriot Act would have a few lines devoted to providing for scapegoats who weren’t diligent enough in stopping future terrorist attacks.

A final note concerns baseball. Everyone in this future are so concerned about the All-Star game, that a mathematician figures out that the feared first strike will occur during the big game when everyone’s eyes are turned in the other direction. American’s preoccupation with ephemeral things is a boon to opportunistic persons in politics and democracy takes a punch to the gut for it.

This is a great story to read, because it has much to say to our present even though it’s drenched in Cold War narrative.

I found the story in Frederik Pohl’s The Eighth Galaxy Reader, but you can also find it in these other collections.

Wikipedia has detailed entries on Fredrik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth, as well as one on “Critical Mass” that has a scan of the cover of Galaxy magazine where the story first appeared.

I received my copy of the SFRA Review (#279, Jan/Feb/March 2007) today, and my review of John Scalzi’s The Android’s Dream is in there! It’s good to see my work in print.

About the book: it’s funny, but it’s not about androids despite the author aping the title from Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? You can read more about the book on the author’s site here.

Cordwainer Smith, the pseudonym of Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger, was an influential SF short story writer in the 1950s and 60s. “Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is a story from his “Instrumentality” universe and was first published in 1961. Smith is probably best well known for his story, “Scanners Live in Vain” from 1950.

“Alpha Ralpha Boulevard” is set in a far future that combines H.G. Wells’ The Island of Doctor Moreau and The Shape of Things to Come (and accompanying film, Things to Come) with what I would describe as proto-cyberpunk elements such as re-engineering the body and mapping new memories and experiences onto the human mind. It’s about a couple recreated as French citizens after the safeties of existence are released to allow accident and disease to modulate the population levels of the “real humans.” In the second paragraph, Smith writes, “Everywhere, things became exciting. Everywhere, men and women worked with a wild will to build a more imperfect world.” The world is populated by homunculi (engineered human-animal hybrids who serve as workers), hominids (humans engineered for enduring the strain of space travel), and real persons (numbered people engineered and maintained by the Instrumentality).

The main characters, Paul and Virginia are considered “real persons.” They run afoul of a bull homunculi, but are saved by C’mell, a cat woman who figures in some of the other Instrumentality stories.

There are some interesting images built into the story that relate to the Great Chain of Being (more info here and here). The humuculi occupy the lower levels of the city, the real persons live and play in the middle levels, and the Instrumentality occupies the upper levels in Earthport. Paul and Virginia are troubled when they learn that the cat-woman, C’mell works in Spaceport, because her kind are regarded as lower and therefore not privileged like real people. In fact, C’mell, when asked her name by Paul, replies, “Does it matter?…I’m not a person.” C’mell’s action to save Paul and Virginia, and later Paul at the Abba-dingo, further reinforces the problematizing nature of culturally understood and maintained hierarchies.

I recommend this story wholeheartedly. I read it in The Norton Book of Science Fiction, but you can also find it in Cordwainer Smith’s complete short fiction collection, The Rediscovery of Man.