Dynamic Subspace

Category: Science Fiction

  • Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” and Chris Columbus’ Bicentennial Man

    Late last night, I finished revising my Bicentennial Man entry for Peter Wright’s The Critical Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations (to be published by Liverpool University Press).  It was a real joy to dive back into Asimov’s work, because it was through his work that I precariously began my trip into SF scholarship with my presentation on dualism in robot narratives for Georgia Tech’s Monstrous Bodies Symposium.

    Having just completed Professor Babacar M’Baye’s African-American Literature course, I was able to engage Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” with the history and stories of the African-American experience that were fresh on my mind.  I have known for a long time that Asimov’s robots are an allegory for African-Americans, but it was on re-reading “The Bicentennial Man” that I realized how much Asimov’s earlier robot writing culminated in this later robot story, first published in 1976–two and three decades after his much loved early robot stories such as “Runaround” and the R. Daneel Olivaw/ Elijah Bailey detective stories.  In fact, I found that “The Bicentennial Man” mirrors the basic structure of American slave narratives, which I go into more detail on in my entry for the collection on film adaptations.

    With this rich source material, I was at first resistant to spoiling it by watching the abysmal film adaptation Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus and starring Robin Williams.  However, I discovered that for as bad as the film is, there are subtle gestures toward the spirit of the source material.  Unfortunately, the film overall pulls the rug out from under the main character’s efforts and successes by erasing the anxiety and hardship Andrew encountered in Asimov’s original story.  I don’t believe the audience understands Andrew’s predicament in the film in the same way that Asimov demonstrates Andrew’s precarious situation in the novelette.  Nevertheless, the film does have some redemptive elements, which are more fully explored in my entry for the collection.  

    When I have more information about the publication of the critical companion, I will post it to dynamicsubspace.net.

  • Terminator Salvation and Battlestar Galactica

    I spent part of today catching up the last part of Battlestar Galactica Season 4, and I saw Terminator Salvation this evening with Y.  I learned in BSG today that the Thirteenth Tribe were actually Cylons–skeletons, bodies, and all. In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright is constructed in the other direction than Terminator 3’s Terminatrix–Marcus is the fusion of man and machine.  However, Marcus was once a murderer–the unconscionable, monstrous, the inhuman.  Given his second chance, he becomes human, or at least what we may consider the human ideal–altruistic, helpful, and self-sacrificing.  Thus, the machine makes the man more human.  However, throughout Terminator Salvation and BSG, I’m reading a shift in the concern about the machinic appropriation of the human.  In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Terminator and T2 films, and older SF, the fear was only about the surface, about the appearance of human mapped or stretched over a cold, metallic infrastructure.  Now, it seems like the concern has more to do with organs and the organic.  Where does this anxiety over our bodies and the tissues that make them work and function come from?  Obviously, the fear of losing human-ness to the machine is rooted in the emergence and subsequent evolution of anxieties following the integration of humans into the great machine and system of the Industrial Revolution.  Perhaps following the turn of the century into the 2000s, the organic (i.e., genetics) meshes with the machine (i.e., AI representing the networked/computerized landscape of the now).  What this might mean for future SF and our engagement with organic and machinic technologies I do not know.  However, I am eager to discover where this future might lead.

  • Kant Quotes Virgil

    As I’ve been reading Kant’s works related to cosmopolitanism, I’ve ran into a lot of Latin quotations.  This is the one that I like the best:

    Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.

    Do not yield to misfortunes, but go and face them more boldly.

    Virgil, Aeneid 6.96 (qtd. in the collection of Immanuel Kant’s writing titled Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History).

  • Isaac Asimov’s Robots and Freed Slaves’ Names in Up From Slavery

    A passage in Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery caught my attention the other night while I was reading it for my African-American Literature seminar:

    After the coming of freedom there were two points upon which practically all the people on our place were agreed, and I found that this was generally true throughout the South: that they must change their names, and that they must leave the old plantation for at least a few days or weeks in order that they might really feel sure that they were free.

    In some way a feeling got among the coloured people that it was far from proper for them to bear the surname of their former owners, and a great many of them took other surnames. This was one of the first signs of freedom. When they were slaves, a coloured person was simply called “John” or “Susan.” There was seldom occasion for more than the use of the one name. If “John” or “Susan” belonged to a white man by the name of “Hatcher,” sometimes he was called “John Hatcher,” or as often “Hatcher’s John.” But there was a feeling that “John Hatcher” or “Hatcher’s John” was not the proper title by which to denote a freeman; and so in many cases “John Hatcher” was changed to “John S. Lincoln” or “John S. Sherman,” the initial “S” standing for no name, it being simply a part of what the coloured man proudly called his “entitles.”

    Washington doesn’t go into any more depth on his example of the former slave who chose “S.” as his middle initial, but that particular letter immediately reminded me of the “R.” at the beginning of Isaac Asimov’s humaniform robot:  R. Daneel Olivaw.  Was the selection of “S.” in Washington’s example a conscious or unconscious choice to signify the individual as being a former slave?  Also, did Asimov choose to the “R.” initial with a knowledge of Washington’s writing to serve as inspiration?  

    I have heard that Asimov’s robots represent African-Americans, and Asimov was involved in the Civil Rights movement.  However, I do not have sources to backup these claims.  If that is true, the above passage may be a strong link between the political work of Washington and the SF/political work of Asimov.  I do want to return to this idea in the future, and if anyone has anything to add to this, I would be very much interested in hearing from you.

  • Why Is the Digital Future Only Found in Books?

    Awhile back, Mack Hassler and I were talking about online personas and the differences between created personas in traditional print culture and the new electronic media.  Mack pointed out that the real interesting personae come through print culture and he named examples including Swift, Greg Egan, Philip K. Dick, and David Foster Wallace (think “Lyndon”)–all of whom employ internal controversies and different voices.  Philip K. Dick is an interesting example particularly if you consider his last published novel, The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982).  It strikes me how much his supposedly strong female protagonist, Angel Archer, is like the author.  After reading Sutin’s biography of Dick, Divine Invasions (2005), there are unmistakable parallels between Archer and Dick, and I draw the conclusion that Archer is a voice for the author–a persona of her creator–PKD.

    What does that have to do with the divide between print and computer media cultures?  There’s something to be said about the complexity and the richness of layers, all of which are probably tempered and strengthened by the publication process including acceptance and editing, present in print media–novels and short stories–that facilitates strong persona creation unequaled by electronic media as yet.  We all create online personae through email, social networking, or blogging (among other personal broadcast technologies). Those who interact with us electronically do so via cyberspace, that shared consensual hallucination, and we meet with only what we bring us–our words and stray bits of data including images, sounds, videos, and our reputation.  It is these things that others use to create an image or avatar of ourselves in their minds in order to make sense of our interactions–that’s just what our brains do with the available data at hand.  However, as Mack observed and I agree, the new media has permitted a proliferation of persona creation, but it is by-and-large thinned out in comparison to what we find in print media.

    This then leads to my personal conundrum.  Mack said to me, “You’re serious about print, but you’re not serious.”  I am heavily invested in computer technology.  I built a PC specifically for online gaming–not that my grad student responsibilities allow me any time for that–and I recently decided to invest in Apple due to the economic downturn, which netted me their latest and greatest machined aluminum MacBook with a solid-state hard drive.  Despite the hardware underpinnings of my digital life via email, Facebook, and my blog, I rarely read or encounter stories online.  Yes, I read a lot online, probably more than I should considering my other duties, but the one thing that I don’t read online are SF stories.  The stories, the SF, that creates, imagines, and interfaces with the future is largely nonexistent on the medium that those stories take as its object of interest.  If I want to read about cyberspace, I don’t look online, I turn to pulp, paper, and the book for that imaginative immersion.

    Where does that leave us in regard to the new media and books?  Considering my recent conversation with Stephen R. Donaldson, there is change in the wind, but obviously no one has the one answer to what that change may encompass.  I’m curious to hear the thoughts of Robert H. Jackson next Tuesday when he presents on the future of books at the Kent State Library.  I know he won’t have all (if any) the answers, but perhaps the face-to-face interaction will be illuminating in ways that online persona interaction is not.