The Status of Nature in Williams Gibson's *Neuromancer*

I'm teaching a "History of the Novel" class this semester. And I decided to end the class with William Gibson's Neuromancer. We began with Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and now we're ending with a cyberpunk. "What a strange juxtaposition!" you might say. Indeed. Why did I decide on this?

Well, here's my thought succinctly: I'm intrigued by the "status of nature" in both of the novels; more specifically, I'm interested in how the "status of nature" has changed from Robinson Crusoe to Neuromancer.

In Robinson Crusoe nature is something that the protagonist stands off from. Robinson finds himself thrown into nature after a shipwreck. He's trapped in a context that the novel figures as being outside of civilization.The island is a natural space untouched by man, a kind of primal/edenic space unsullied by any sort of cultivation. When we focus on the "status of nature," the narrative of Robinson Crusoe comes to resemble the story of a man-engineer-artist domesticating, changing, organizing, cultivating nature. Not only does Robinson adapt to his island, he makes the island adapt to him through the art of agriculture, engineering projects, the organization of social orders (e.g. his relationship to his "savage" servant Friday).

In Neuromancer nature has a completely different status. It's almost "choked out" by the industrial civilization of Gibson's imagined dystopic future. Nature has somehow disappeared and the mechanized system of human society has been completely swallowed up by it. The world has become a technological system that folks navigate like a macro-computer as users rather than, say, as in Robinson Crusoe, a space of unknown limits pervaded by mysterious unexplored regions. Consider how Case, Molly, and Armitage get around: they shoot from one continent to another on sub-orbital jets; they "tube" from one side of the sprawl to another; the leave the "gravity well" behind and linger in a totally artificial satellite-resort. Indeed, "nature" in Neuromancer has been reduced to a kind of non-entity, completely submerged in the industrial civilization.

Or has it?

I'm questioning this framework now. Why? I'm thinking of Freeside, the satellite resort where the Villa Straylight is and where the "climax" of the action takes place. On Freeside, if you remember, they have grass and gnarled trees; the food they serve in the restaurants here is not cheap "synth" material but actually real (I'm thinking of the passage where Molly criticizes a hung over Case for not eating his "real and expensive" steak). Hmm... It's interesting. To an extent Freeside is the most artificial of spaces in Neuromancer: a satellite created by humanity. It's fully artificial, an arcology, i.e. an artificial ecology. And yet! It's on Freeside where Case actually encounters nature. He smells fresh cut grass for the first time; he sees trees; he eats real steak. Hmm...on Freeside is where this hacker has a visceral confrontation with nature as such.

Could it be that the transformation of the "status of nature" we glimpse in these two novels represents something like the traditional problem of mimesis? When does artistic representation become so accurate, so fully realized, that the philosophical/metaphysical distinction between imitation and original stops making sense? Stops being useful. 

Has authentic nature in Neuromancer become just as artificial as the computer intelligence that structures and conditions the narrative? Perhaps.

Flash Fiction: The Digital Devil and Daniel Shebat

I've been participating in an online writing community called, Flash Fiction Friday. They're really great! Lots of good writers. They give a prompt and we have a week to write a flash in response to it. This week the prompt, Cycle 69, was to write a story about "a deal with the devil." I decided to write a "cyberpunk" version of the "deal with the devil" story. Why? Well my wife recently wrote a cyberpunk flash titled "Black Glass" for a flash fiction magazine we started called Flashes of Wonder! and I was really impressed and inspired by it. Also, I love cyberpunk, but have never really written in it. This was an opportunity to do it casually. Additionally, William Gibson's Neuromancer is perhaps my favorite science fiction novel. I imagine this flash is kind of an homage to it. Anyhow, here it is!

***

The Digital Devil and Daniel Shebat (857 words)

Shebat penetrated the server, poured himself another espresso, lit a cigarette, and mashed play on his antique cassette player. A muffled, Please allow me! To introduce! Myself! thudded out of the antique stereo speakers.

He exhaled smoke when the data stream filled his field of vision.

Nestled within the sausage-like coils of his brain, nano-processors purred. Computer and mind were one. Ram, video card, neurons, brainslime; moot distinctions. He smiled revealing metal teeth.

The Redstar Server Hub was quiet tonight. With the speed of thought he glided through the data. Deposits. Memorandums. Schematics. Data. To him, it was all the same. It was cash.

He subvocalized and executed his subroutine, watched as it interfaced: a million particles of data sparkling on the black expanse of the global net field. His decrypting virus appeared on the surface of his visualization as a cloud of branchy veins.

Too much GUI made his eyes burn. He blinked it off. His field of vision was normal again.

He sipped on his espresso, felt the subtle pleasure of the caffeine quickening his pulse. He inhaled a steroid from an inhaler. Crunched down two pink pills, for concentration. Popped in a piece of spearmint.

He yawned. He stretched. He rubbed his chin. He needed a shave.

He blinked on his visualization, shrunk it down with a thought. He then looked beyond it, focused on his ancient television screen, where Space Invaders flickered. He took up his joystick, satisfied that the decryption was working just fine.

I was 'round when Jesus Christ!

Had his moments of doubt and pain!

Made damn sure that Pilate!

Washed his hands and sealed his fate!

For a brief moment, against his will, a thought came. Was it the song? An association?

He'd been warned about penetrating Redstar. Rumour was that Redstar was dabbling in A.I., what cyber cowboys called devils. In spite of the global legal machine that forbade it.

Redstar's corporate offices were air conditioned satellite stations with elevators where corp suits drank coffee and flirted with interns and cheated on their wives. He'd seen the reality shows. He couldn't imagine them making consciousnesses, summoning digital demons from the depths of the human imagination. The last A.I. humanity wrote killed millions.

Rumours. That was all. Suits weren't that stupid.

Pleased to meet you!

Hope you guess my name, oh yeah!

But what's puzzling you!

Is the nature of my game!

Shabat cursed when the invaders won. He threw down his joystick, unshrank his GUI with an eyeflick, and was satisfied when he saw the decryption working just fine.

He went into the kitchen, microwaved himself some ramen, intensified it with a few grams of adrenaline from a dropper, and, using chopsticks, dragged it into his mouth.

When he came back into the living room, he saw it standing there.

A shimmering figure. Vaguely humanoid. A kind of digital shadow burned on his retina.

"Hello," the figure said, its synthetic voice stirring Shebat's superstitious dread.

His reeling mind started justifying things: feedback problem. Comp-virus in my brain. Faulty implants.

Shabat blinked. Looked at his GUI. Decryption was doing fine.

He thought up a diagnostic and he had a report in seconds: everything was fine.

And yet. What was that thing?

Ignoring the apparition, he subvocalized, brought up his firewall, and executed four or five programs to disconnect from the server. He felt his pulse quicken when it seemed to hold on to him.

"It won't work," the figure said. "I'm not a program you can exit that easy."

"Fuck you!" Shabat said. "I'll log off. I'll turn off."

"Don't shutdown too quickly. You'll kill yourself, cowboy. Your cognitive processes are inextricably linked with so many subroutines. We both know you'd die. You’ve overclocked your brain."

Shabat spit. He threw aside a stack of porn magazines. He pulled out his pistol, held it to his head.

"Very adult," the apparition said.

"I'll do it," Shabat said.

The apparition made a noise. It could've been laughter. They stared at eachother for a second. Eventually, Shebat took the gun away.

"Thought so," the apparaition said.

Shabat was stunned. He blinked off his GUI. Looked at his apartment. His vision was normal. The apparition was still there.

"F-u-u-u-ck!" he said. He threw aside his gun. "Get out of my head." There was desperation in his voice.

He poured himself another cup of espresso, sank into his couch. He buried his face in his hands.

I guess he was wrong. Seems like the Redstar suits had been that stupid.

Pleased to meet you!

Hope you guess my name, oh yeah!

What's puzzling you!

Is the nature of my game, oh yeah!

The apparition was next to him when he looked up. Shimmering.

"Mind if I sit?" the apparition said. It smelled like ozone. Shebat looked at the gun. He could still do it.

"Don't care," he responded.

The apparition sat. The air around it seemed charged with electricity. A frequency rang in Shebat's ear.

"Now," said the apparition, leaning in close. "Tell me, Daniel Shebat. What do you desire above all other things?"

Shebat lit another cigarette. Inhaled. He gazed at the gun.

Isaac Asimov's "The Last Question": The Potential of Science Fiction Narration

One of my favorite Isaac Asimov short stories is "The Last Question," published in 1956 in the pulp science fiction magazine Science Fiction Quarterly. At just under 4500 words, it tells the story of the fate of humanity, the cosmic intelligence humanity creates, and the entire life and death of the universe.

Think about it: 4500 words and the entire story of the cosmos is related to you. This is truly astounding, a word etymologically linked to the latin extonare (which means to be struck with lightning). It not only "makes you think," but it blows up your mind, if you will.

Some summary: the story opens and some computer engineers are celebrating together because they have just built a supercomputer that has been able to solve all of humanity's problems. Economic scarcity, political differences, production, everything: all these crises have been solved by the computer called Multivac.

In spite of their happiness, however, they start thinking about the far future. In conformity with scientific law, they hypothesize, the universe will and has to end entropically. It will simply fade away. This is the famous problem of entropy that shows up throughout a lot of the science fiction of the 1960s and 70s and onward.

In spite of their happiness, these engineers can't stop dwelling on the fact that they have just saved a world that will necessarily be destroyed. In fact, destruction, according to their hypothesis, is a physical certainty.

And so they ask their computer a question: "How can the net amount of entropy of the universe be massively decreased?" In other words, how do we stop the universe from being destroyed. The computer's answer. Five words: INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR MEANINGFUL ANSWER. The story proceeds and more and more computers are made throughout the many eras of the universe until, finally--can't help but spoil it--an answer is found for this question.

There's a lot going on in this story. I want to highlight two elements I find interesting.

First element: this story paints an interesting picture about humanity's relationship with technology. In large part, technology is painted as a kind of savior of humanity. Without giving away the end of the story, the computers continue to grow and human interactions with computers become more and more intimate; eventually, computers and humanity are inextricably bound together in a kind of "erotic" union. This is the story of human's merging with computers and technology, a story told over and over in science fiction in the form of cyborgs, androids, intelligent machines, etc..

Second element: we have in this story a powerful demonstration of the potential of science fiction narration. Incorporating the mythology of science into its narrative logic, science fiction texts are able to represent not only the human world--which is somewhat limited (in space, in time--a city, a nation, a planet)--but the entire cosmos. Let me be clear: there are no pychologically nuanced characters in this story. Human beings, in this narrative, are less individuals and more a flowing force of energy, like the molocules of water in a river; nevertheless, this sort of macro-perspective is something science fiction really does well.

If you haven't read this Isaac Asimov's, "The Last Question," it's available online for free. Here's the link: "The Last Question."

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 6): Technology-as-Human versus Technology-as-Anti-Human

Pre-Post Preamble

Today I'm going to continue my post series that is an attempt to log and to preserve the insights that came out of a science fiction class that I taught at Case Western Reserve University in the Summer of 2011, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th century." 

Here is a link to the first post: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror

Now that I'm on post 6 I feel compelled to offer a table of contents of previous posts. Here they are:

Post 2: Ray Kurzweil and "Transcendent Man"

Post 3: Cultural Studies Classrooms and Aesthetic Value Judgments

Post 4: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Loving and Hateful Androids in *Star Trek* Episode 7 

Post 5: Technology-as-Woman in *The Twilight Zone*

As I'm proceeding through this post series I'm starting to realize how each post is going to become less and less "self-contained" as I proceed; by which I mean, I find I am compelled to refer to previous posts in a way I haven't had to in previous post series. 

***

Another text we treated in my science fiction class was an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. The was episode 14 of season 1, titled, "Datelore." This episode truly captures the theme of ambivalence towards technology that was at the heart of the class.

Data and Lore

Some summary (I'm taking some ST:TNG corpus knowledge for granted here): the Enterprise stops by the planet where Data was found by the Federation. There they find in a hidden chamber an exact replica of Data, except this replica is disassembled. They bring the android pieces on to the Enterprise and reassemble them. It turns out, this is Data's brother, another android by the name of Lore. Immediately there are things about Lore that begin to disturb and stir the suspicions of the crew. It turns out Lore was disassembled because of his evil tendencies. He thinks androids are better than humans and therefore they deserve to die, or at least serve androids as slaves.

What is so interesting about this episode, I think, is the two separate visions of technology that emerge out of the two different android characters. 

Lieutenant Commander Data is a kind of "Pinocchio" figure who loves humans and strives to be a human. Data is moral and helpful and very often endearing. 

Lore, on the other hand, is a megalomaniac. He is deceiving and extremely powerful; furthermore, he thinks of humans as flawed and as insects that are dispensable.

We begin to see in this episode all sorts of parallels with the previous texts we've treated in this class. 

Ray Kurzweil and Transcendent Man

In Kurzweil's documentary, Transcendent Man, a major debate is whether or not the super intelligences he predicts will be empathetic to humans or hold us in contempt as insects. Hugo De Garis obviously believes the latter is the case while Kurzweil believes that not only will the robots serve us, make us better (his argument is much stronger), but that the robots will be us. 

And so, we can perhaps see in Data--struggling to become human--as suggesting Kurzweil's vision of technology; and we can see Lore--the evil, human hater--as suggesting De Garis's vision of technology.

Star Trek (Episode 7): "What Are Little Girls Made Of?"

We see this very ambivalence played out in the Star Trek episode I treated in an earlier post. In episode 7 of Star Trek you have two avatars of robots or technology: Ruk, the human hater, and Andrea, the robot who falls in fall and commits suicide when she realizes she will never be able to love.

The Twilight Zone (Episode 7): "The Lonely"

At the end of this episode the android, Alicia, is shot and killed. I'd like to suggest that the episode doesn't key us into how to read this. Is this a murder? Something horrendous? OR! Has the protagonist (who was in love this this android?) been freed from a kind of spell? Was Alicia truly in love with the protagonist? Or, was Alicia's love an illusion, the product of software?

***

Robots-as-humans versus robots-against-humans: this is an ambivalent, vexed issue that recurred consistently throughout the class. The core queston these texts seem to be asking is, is technology of us? For us? Inextricably bound to us? 

OR! It technology becoming something else? Something other? And therefore, something hostile or something we should be suspicious of?

Hmm...

Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror (Post 5): Technology-as-Woman in *The Twilight Zone*

This afternoon I want to write  a little more on the science fiction class I taught in the summer of 2011 at Case Western, titled, "Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror: Technology and the Cultural Imagination of the 20th Century." Here's a link to the first post, where the class is explained: Visions of Delight, Visions of Horror

Yesterday I talked about a Star Trek Episode, "What Are Little Girls Mad Of?" In this episode, I suggested, we have two "figurations" of the android: (1) the android who loves humans and (2) the android who hates humans. 

Today I want to talk about another "television text" where the first kind of android is highlighted, the loving android. This text is an episode from Rod Serling's Twilight Zone, episode 7 of season 1 titled, "The Lonely." 

Let me give some summary: the episode concerns a man who has been wrongfully accused of a crime and who has been marooned on an asteroid as a kind of punishment. He has an entire asteroid to himself. His crisis of that of loneliness and boredom. He has a friend, a guard who comes to give him supplies. The guard feels sorry for him; and so, what does he do? He brings the prisoner an android, a robot that looks exactly like a beautiful girl. The android chooses a name: Alicia. They quickly fall in love together. However, the crisis comes to head when the prisoner receives a pardon and he has to leave the android. He's only allowed to take 15 pounds of equipment. At this point he doesn't think of Alicia as equipment but as a person. The prison guard, feeling sorry for him, shoots Alicia in the head. Afterwards, she lies on the ground, her robot innards--circuits, blinking lights, wires--are exposed, and the pardoned prisoner seems to come to his senses. How could he have ever loved a robot?

There are some very interesting things going on in this episode. Of primary interest, I think, is the android. It's an interesting evolution, how robots go from being the clunky tin-can looking "Robby the Robots" of Forbidden Planet, to the human-like robots of this Twilight Zone episode. It's as if, in the cultural imagination, there is a logic that turns robots into humans, into entities indistinguishable from ourselves. Consider the cyborg from the original, The Terminator. He looks quite human and a part of horribleness is that he is able to "pass" for human. 

Not only are we concerned with computers/robots becoming more powerful than us, we seem to be concerned with the extent to which they can become like us. Thus, the fear of robots can be allegorized as the fear of ourselves. 

This makes this episode interesting, which results in the death of a human-like robot the human protagonist has come to love. The end of the episode is vexed, I think. We're not sure what to think about the death of Alicia. Should we be sad for the main character? Did he just lose his love? Or! Or has he been saved from an illusion? Was the love the robot had for him just the product of programming and not authentic?

Here we start to get into the question raised by the Turing Test. What conditions need to be satisfied before we believe a machine is actually intelligent? Conscious like us?

Can't go there today. Not enough time.