All Tomorrow's Cultures

It's pretty hard to imagine a more Gothic city than Baltimore (in the literary sense). You've got the Faulkner-esque kind of gothic with over-grown gardens, crumbling shacks, shambling, sclerotic citizens. And also the northern gothic--shuttered factories, menacing turrets on decrepit mansions, etc. It is no particular wonder why Baltimore is often the preferred mise-en-scene for mystery novels. But it's harder to envision a futuristic Baltimore. The usual urban boosters (e.g., Live Baltimore , The Urbanite ) do their best, but I don't know of any sf novel set in the city--even cyberpunk dystopias of the near future seem to have passed us by. Still, I would like to try to evoke stochastic, interesting futures for my city. Back in the 1950s and 1960s, Margaret Mead often theorized about the ingredients of the creative city—the institutions that she thought might stimulate what she called “emergent clusters”. But the point to her analysis—and to what I think today—...

The robot-gone-awry has been a theme in literature and popular culture from at least Goethe. The 20th century variant generally revolves around advances in robotic technologies that lead to robots displacing humans altogether--basically the Braverman thesis (after Harry Braverman) followed to its natural asymptote. But can the same thing be said of other kinds of non-human agents? I mean--not the anthropomorphic robots produced by various research groups to simulate human feelings, speech, perceptions or cognition, but those agents that swarm in and out of our lives as vaguely intelligent, vaguely autonomous search engines, routers, global positionings, spyware, etc. What about these? The difference between these and more anthropomorphic agents is in a way similar to what Andy Clark (in Natural Born Cyborgs ) terms "transparent" versus "opaque" technologies: A transparent technology is a technology that is so well fitted to, and integrated with, our own lives, ...

I just finished M. John Harrison's Light (2002)--that novel, as well as those of Gaiman, Egan, and other contemporary, SF authors, seems to revolve around the question of postmodernity in the quantum universe. That is to say, it combines contemporary cosmology with the vertiginous technologies that are ultimately construed as transformative of the human. And yet, like so much in sf, this isn't so much of a prediction as an ironic gloss on information technologies that, far from emancipating us from both corporeality and parochial indentity, seem to immobilize us both physically (with whole generations of Americans captive to the television) as well as mentally (the strong resurgence of knee-jerk ethnocentrism and know-nothing jingoism). If only our products could allow us to escape from our Newtonian world into a quantum universe! But--shopping's not going to lead us to the revolution, right?

I've been thinking on and off about aliens these days. One of the reasons must be because I'm on the CONTACT! listserve, which is fairly choc-a-block with speculations on Earth-like planets in other solar systems. The other has to with my research on other "aliens," those non-human agents that are more and more part of our everyday life. Of course, it's odd to think about these "agents" (software or hardware) as "aliens" at all, but this is exactly what Morton Klass did in a 1983 essay of his I just re-read, "The Artificial Agent: Transformations of the Robot in Science Fiction" (Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 470 (171-179)). Klass spent much of his career as Professor of Anthropology at Barnard College (Columbia University). But his early career was one saturated in science fiction. As the brother of William Tenn (aka Phillip Klass), Morton Klass contributed several sf stories in the 1950s and early...

There's a really interesting (or at least suggestive) story in May's issue of Fantasy & Science Fiction : "Circle," by George Tucker. Oh, it's got plenty of standard SF devices: Billy Black is a Seminole shaman who never seems to get hurt at the cursed construction site he's working on in Miami (a la the "Miami circle"). Eventually, he's hired on to "exorcise" the spirits from the site and, after a couple of complications, everyone profits: the condo complex goes up, complete with the cultural "value-added" of a seminole shaman and Billy can finally buy the plot to his grandfather's grave in order to stop developers from dis-interring his body . . .Kind of a Heinlein-esque-free-market-conquers-all story. But, there's other things afoot here as well . . .The resolution of the story rests on Billy's realization that the "spirit of place" must be given recognition in order to be palliated. But what kind ...

The word last year was that this wonderful, annual convocation of anthropologists, astronomers, artists, science fiction writers, visionaries and the occasionally wacky was on indefinite hiatus. But--they've met again at NASA-Ames, and the world is, I think, much better for it. http://www.contact-conference.com/

It doesn't bear trying the number of science fiction stories juxtaposing hyper-trophied, Gernsback-ian technologies with highly stereotypical visions of gathering-hunting or pastoralist societies. And there's little evidence that this is a new trend--Wells's Time Machine, after all, devolved around the two, favorite Western tropes of the "primitive": the noble savage, basking about in a Dionysian prodigality (Eloi) and the rude savage (Morlocks), where, in the words of Hobbes, life is "nasty, brutish and short." One could say (and several have) that the "future" is only imaginable through this juxtaposition with the imagined savage. This, indeed, is what Christopher Bracken (in Magical Criticism) has suggested recently of Western discourse in general. And in a world where Western hegemony is tottering, there's been a renewed surfeit of these science fiction stories--shoring up the cracked foundations of modernity, as it were, with tales of ...