When Clarke wrote the novel, World War 2 had just ended with a bang. The hydrogen bomb was at once the symbol of humanity’s greatest technological ingenuity while also a harbinger of its potential for self-annihilation. Clarke’s novel positions humanity at this crucial time in its history, while its fate could still go either way. Childhood’s End predicts the space race, something that wouldn’t come to the international stage until a decade later, but its main driving force begins when humanity’s choice in its own fate is removed by the coming of the Overlords.

Now, I have to say, I find Childhood’s End reads a bit like a technical manual. The prose is often mechanical; the characters are stiff at best and robotic at worst. I don’t understand the “jokes” that he points out to me, and the narratorial voice is like a effete academic after a bit too much claret. The novel is expansive in scope — the action takes place over about a century-and-a-half — and the setting is primarily on Earth, though there is some space travel and astro-projection. The scenes of dialog were often difficult to read — the characters seemed to be little more than stereotypes in the middle of the novel, bracketed by scientists and the Overlords. To me, the most interesting parts of the novel were the future histories: the third-person narrator became the voice of exposition, telling the facts of human development after the coming of the Overlords. In many ways, Childhood’s End is a test case for humanity: what happens when human conflict comes to an end? Indeed, as a colleague and I were discussing the other day, would we even remain human if we ended violence and war? Is conflict an integral aspect of humanity?

It sounds as if I’m being too hard on Clarke’s writing. Maybe. However, I might also suggest that Clarke meant to write his characters this way. After all, the most tedious parts of the novel were the dramatic scenes in the middle, called “The Golden Age.” Middles are often tedious. The “Earth and the Overloads” shows the coming of the aliens and humanity’s initial reactions, and “The Last Generation” plays out the drama. Perhaps Clarke is illustrating his difficulty with utopia in “The Golden Age”: with no contention, life begins to become stagnant, lacking adventure and challenge: “When the Overlords had abolished war and hunger and disease, they had also abolished adventure” (92-93). Add to that Karellen’s injunction about man’s place in the universe: it is only on the Earth and does not include space travel. He states:

The key word in his speech is “evolution.” Clarke’s novel seems to posit that humanity’s ability to cope with the environment is determined by that environment. That is, in its current form, humanity is not capable of moving too far beyond Earth, or its natural environment. In order to leave the Earth in any appreciable way, humans must evolve. This means, it seems, losing our humanity.

Now, 2001 is not like that. It is an odyssey, and in an odyssey, the final stop is always home. True to form, the last scene in both the film and novel, the Star-Child returns to Earth, ushering in the next evolutionary step of humanity. One could argue the definition of “home” has changed, too, like in Homer’s original Odyssey. “Home” for the Star-Child is now larger than a single planet or solar system; it must led the way for humanity. However, the last chapter of Childhood’s End has the newly evolved post-humans leaving Earth for the stars. Not only do they leave, but Earth disintegrates, as if by the exodus of the children she produced, the Earth no longer has a purpose in the cosmos. By the end of the novel, humanity, in its current form, is extinct.

Therefore, Clarke’s exposition of humanity’s utopia in “The Golden Age” is necessarily a reflection of what humanity has been evolving toward. It is necessarily imperfect because the nature that created humanity is local, finite, and imperfect itself. Whatever humanity creates might help its position on the Earth, but ultimately, perhaps, humans cannot make the next transition alone.

One of the cheesiest scenes in Childhood’s End is the post-party Ouija board seance. I remember hearing this scene (I listened to the novel for the first time last summer) while driving though Kentucky or Tennessee. I was unimpressed, but the whole rest of the novel centers around the mystical revelations of this pivotal scene: Jan’s non-scientific confirmation of the Overlords’ star, and Jean’s “paraphysical” connection with the Overmind. The novel — scientific, sociological, political, and factual up until this point — becomes more mystical, “supernormal,” and occult. Looking at it allegorically, the Overlords seem to represent the products of pure science. They are the masters of all that is tangible — space travel, politics, psychology, etc. There is the Overmind, something that exists beyond the physical realities of this universe, yet has certain mystical connections with it. Then there are humans: they seem to be products of the measurable, quantifiable world, but heading along an evolutionary path that aligns some of them with the Overmind, not the Overlords.

In fact, one of the more poignant parts of the novel lies near the end, when Karellan explains to Jan, now the last human, that the name “Overlords” is tinged with irony: they, too, are products of a certain evolutionary path that will never know the Overmind:

The ending is bittersweet. The Overlords cannot help feeling sorry for the current humans that they helped to civilize and evolve, but at the same time they envy humanity’s ability to grow beyond the measurable galaxy. They exist in their current form, and they have the knowledge that they have reached the pinnacle of their evolution. Perhaps this is Clarke’s equivalent of lacking wonder beyond the real.

I think that ultimately Childhood’s End is a successful novel. Yet, its end is one of pathos, more of a sense that something is lost. Perhaps more accurately, it’s a sense that we humans, in our current evolutionary form, are so limited. We will be lucky to survive self-annihilation, to grow beyond greed and materialism, to achieve equality, and to live in peace. I’m left with the feeling that even if we do succeed in these Earthly endeavors, there is something we, in our “present state of evolution,” will never achieve.

Recently, Jack McDevitt gave me some advice about this very idea. Well, he didn’t give the advice to just me, but to a group of attendees at the Crossroads Writers Conference. He said something along these lines: don’t go into detail about the science. Science fiction, probably more than any other genre fiction other than fantasy, has its own set of givens. Things like warp speed, space ships, and advanced technology that allows space heroes to get up-close and personal with black holes and gas giants. There are robots, sentient planets, and things that would just as soon eat you than let you go on your merry way. There are just somethings that are accepted, without the need to delve too deeply into.

I guess one of things that puzzles me is the sheer size of the galaxy. The sucker is big, about 100,000 light years across. It probably has an enormous black hole at the center, driving the galactic mass to rotate once every 250 million years. It seems to have two major arms, the Perseus and the Scrutum-Crux, and our very average sun is located in the Orion Spur, some mid-way between the central core and the Outer Arm. Like many other sf stories, humans have spread from this improbable starting point to colonize maybe 20% of the galaxy in just over 3500 years. The time line is mine, but earth is always implied.

I guess the point of this blog entry is to ask if anyone knows some good astronomy books. I’m particularly interested in what we might call physics fiction: essays that speculate what it would be like if you could stand on a black hole, or what the effects of radiation emanating from a brown dwarf might do to the evolutionary progress of settlers in its system, or the possibility of instant communication over spectacular distances.

I read Carl Sagan’s Cosmos years ago, and I might pick it up again. I also just reread the first several essay in his book Billions and Billions. While I love Sagan, his writing is starting to seem a bit dated. I read Michio Kaku’s Visions about ten years ago; this is the type of book I’m looking for. I would put Ray Kurzweil’s The Age of Spiritual Machines in the same category, though the latter does not concern astronomy and space travel.

I’m not necessarily looking for futurism, either. Maybe theoretical astrophysics for dummies?

OK, who’s got some ideas? Anyone?

The latter is the oldest and clearly shows my writing acumen from an early age. I scanned it and include it below for your reading pleasure.

Ian Fleming and James Bond

It’s not exactly MLA — the margins are way off. This was obviously a copy of the original essay because it contains not one mark of praise from Mrs. Meek. I have to say, too, that her name was likely very appropriate, as I have no distinct memory of her or her class. She might have been jealous of my obvious scholarly potential evident by this first-rate work of research; she must have sensed that my academic achievements in literary studies would soon dwarf hers. Who wouldn’t recognize the rhetorical savvy of phrases like “his popularity status”; “a chap by the name of ‘Q’ produces many technological gimmicks which assist 007 in his defense of the free world”; “Bond was made a widower through funfire” (?); and “Bond had a number of cars ranging from a gray Abstom-Martian” (I wonder if that’s anything like an Aston-Martin?).

Now that I think about it, I don’t really remember anything from the eighth grade other than perhaps awkwardly passing a note to Lucy Langlois, reading Dynamite magazine, working as Ms. Farmer’s aide, and hating to “dress out” for gym class. It’s a treat to get an artifact from my life in 1983. I can’t help but see Dad’s influence in this, too. There’s quite a bit of information on guns and cars, though surely he knows that “Abstom-Martian” is incorrect. Dad, did you even proofread this for me?

I think the most impressive part of this research paper is that it really says nothing. There doesn’t seem to be an explicit thesis — unless “James Bond is cool” is an acceptable one. I’d expect, in all seriousness, that this is pretty lame for the eighth grade. Still, I was a pretty lame eighth grader, and I continued that trend throughout high school. What grade would you give me?

That’s the first installment of “Old Miscellany.” Maybe I’ll post more.

I have two more short story ideas lined up. One will be a quick write, I hope, maybe a couple days and not more than 2000 words. The other will be a bit longer and incorporate ideas from the first, but project them 3000 years in the future. It’ll be a good ol’ space adventure story. I’m psyched to get to both. Maybe this week, if teaching doesn’t get in the way. Autumn helped me with some awesome names last night, so I gotta get started soon.

I read much of Lawrence Lessig‘s Remix and Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange this weekend. I’m teaching both this week, though not in the same class. I’ve taught both before, and I’ve read the Burgess at least four times.

Lessig’s a smart dude, and probably the most insightful and sober voice on intellectual property today. His Remix discusses the disparity between RO (read-only, professionals) and RW (read-write, amateurs) culture: copyright laws favor the former and criminalize the latter. For no good reason. He supports and sees the value of both types, and argues that both need to be protected. However, the way current copyright law is written, it supports an old fashioned economy based on dead media — you know, the tape deck or VCR collecting dust in your attic. Laws that governed copies were easy to enforce in a world where technology made it difficult if not impossible to copy. This has changed, but copyright has not. Therefore, we are criminalizing a generation of copiers, remixers, and computer users — amateur RW culture. Lessig’s a moderate in his thinking, so he should appeal to most thoughtful readers.

A Clockwork Orange is a postmodern classic about choosing to do the right (or wrong) things, being young, and learning the importance of community, morality, and expression. Its appeal for me lies in its proto-cyberpunk style: it’s gritty, unapologetic, and ultraviolent, with plenty of the old in-out-in-out. It’s also a cautionary tale of youth and its relationship to the larger social order, about growing up and ultimately choosing to be a responsible member of society. Burgess’ novel ends on an optimistic note (perhaps it was the influence of the 60s when it was written?): Alec grows up. Famously, that’s where Kubrick differed with Burgess and why the film is ultimately more sinister: Alec doesn’t grow up. The monster is free again at the end, making Kubrick’s vision much more pessimistic. For Burgess, redemption is possible; for Kubrick, maybe not.

We were able to hang out on the porch Saturday night, something Autumn and I have not done together in a while. Saturday was a beautiful spring day, and Dan and Monica invited us over for a few drinks and some conversation. Creighton was there, and I even go to see Anna (more on her soon). We had a great time; we need to do this more often, especially now that the weather is getting nice.

The weekend saw some tragic news, too. A colleague-friend’s son passed this weekend. When an unexpected death occurs, we are all left looking for answers, shocked that we’re ultimately so fragile and helpless. My heart goes out to her and her family. I just wish there was more I could do. I’d even say a prayer if I thought it would do any good at all. I could quote some poetry or say something inspirational, but ultimately death comes down to silence, confusion, and impotence. I’m so sorry.

Burgess’ novel constantly asks “What’s it going to be then, eh?” He means to prod us into answering — into moving — into making a bloody choice. The responsibility is in our hands, ultimately. Yeah, it’s a shitty world sometimes, but as long as we have hands, a heart, and a brain, we must act — keep moving. Even if we do the wrong thing. We can blame others, society, even the gods, but, like Oedipus learns: Apollo ordained his fate, but it was his hands that finally fulfilled it.

That’s a good question to ask at the beginning of each day: “What’s it gonna be then, eh?”

When I first started, I used the philosophy of the 750 Words site:

So it’s a “brain dump.” Perhaps, but maybe I’m too professorial; my writing needs to be a bit more formal. I need to practice order, precision, subtlety, figurative language, rhetoric. I also need to have a point and develop that point in an interesting way. I averaged at least 1000 words a day when I first started, and I’m now up to at least 1500 words a day. Most of my writing has been transferred from my blog to writing short stories.

Today was no different, except I wrote close to 2000 words, not including what you’re reading here. My current story’s working title is “Every You, Every Me” (borrowed from Placebo) and is up to just over 6000 words. It’s a science fiction story, the first I’ve ever written.

I’ve always read science fiction, more for ideas than for literary style. I’m not saying that sf is devoid of a literary quality, it’s just that literariness is not its focus. My sense of sf style comes mostly from cyberpunk, particularly William Gibson (perhaps the king of cyberpunk style), Neal Stephenson, and, or course, Bruce Sterling. I should mention Rudy Rucker, too, though his style tends to be more experimental. With the exception of Stephenson, I think these guys excel at the short story. One of my all-time favorite short stories ever is Gibson’s “The Gernsback Continuum.” I also think Sterling is at the top of his game with “Maneki Neko” and “Big Jelly,” the latter with Rudy Rucker. I think I like the iconoclastic aesthetic: it has a gritty reality that simultaneously longs for a techno-utopia, but shows the disparity of that neo-romantic longing.

I also love the space opera: those big, expansive stories of space travel in the far future. I think of Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and recently Vernor Vinge, Neal Stephenson (yes, I think Anathem is space opera), and Jack McDevitt. This is golden age, “hard,” and world building sf at its best — what I’ve called “epical sf” elsewhere. It’s as much about adventure and excitement as it is about ideas, but both must be present, or I don’t really have any use for it.

If you notice, I listed Neal Stephenson in both categories. I think Snow Crash is the epic of cyberpunk. No, it’s not space opera, but it is expansive and builds a new world called the metaverse. Again, Stephenson is not the first to write about virtual reality, but his vision seems to be the one that is most influential to how we understand it and practice it. Even though my recent new media students didn’t like the excepts of Snow Crash I assigned, I think they might have missed the point. To be fair, they didn’t like much of what I assigned the week before Spring Break. Maybe they were already on break.

I like Stephenson’s big ideas. I want to write novels that are as expensive and smart, but that have more of a cyberpunk edge. I don’t know if I can ever be as good or successful as Stephenson has been — I’d probably give my right arm to have written anything as good as the first chapter of Snow Crash – but that’s what’s on my mind when I write.

Perhaps Vernor Vinge should be included in both lists. However, I don’t think of him as a cyberpunk, but more of the guy who theorized the technological singularity and wrote the massive novels A Deepness in the Sky and A Fire Upon The Deep. Both are excellent, but the former blew me away. And the idea of the singularity is often on my mind.

I would be remiss not to mention Charles Stross, Paul di Filippo, and Cory Doctorow, who for me, have taken cyberpunk to the next level. Yet, they will have to wait for another blog entry.

I hope to have my first story finished and sent out in the next couple of weeks.

Autumn and I bought a pressure cooker a couple of weeks ago. It’s turned out to be one of the best kitchen purchases we’ve ever made. Put everything in the pot, and you have soup, beans, risotto, whatever in fifteen minutes. I made a split pea soup two days ago that would likely stand up to any soup I’ve ever made. Yesterday’s bean soup is good, but the cupboards were bare. It turned out to be one of those random concoctions: you know, when you collect all the ingredients that you have left, just so you can get rid of them before they go south. I had a bag-o’-beans replete with “Cajun” seasoning packet, a can of tomato sauce, a yellow onion, two small carrots, two larger celery stalks, hot sauce, and water. I put in garlic powder, basil, thyme, a couple of bay leaves, Worcestershire sauce, salt, and pepper. I let the pressure cooker do its thing. I missed the fresh garlic. We always have fresh garlic around the house, so when we’re out, I know it’s time to go to the store.

We’re also out of booze. I stopped in the Depot Package Store on Pio Nono last week to pick up some Maker’s Mark. I’ve been drinking good bourbon lately for a couple of reasons. One, I love beer; however, I’m trying not to take in any extra calories these days, and beer’s loaded with those. Two, I can sip a good bourbon over ice for a while. It’s tasty and not hasty. One glass warms me up, so a small bottle of Maker’s will last me a while. I usually keep Evan Williams around when I’m craving Manhattans.

My regular liquor store is on Vineville near Moe’s, but a train was blocking my way that day. I’m not sure what it was doing, but I had to turn around and take a back road down to Pio Nono. I was too lazy and tired to backtrack up Vineville in 5 o’clock traffic, so I stopped at the Depot Package Store. Either the place had been burgled, or they were going out of business. The shelves were empty, particularly in the bourbon section. They had no Maker’s, nor did they have any Evan. They had plenty of that watery Canadian whiskey, but none my usuals from Kentucky. The dude at the counter watched me stare at the empty aisle: “Can I help you?”

“Do you have any Maker’s?”

“Nerp. Only what you see.”

Hm. They had a small section of small-batch bourbons. I’ve always had mixed luck with these, but I chose one that was not too expensive. Elijah Craig. A Kentucky Jew? It looked a bit darker than I’m used to, but I don’t discriminate based on color. Besides a 12-year-old, small batch whiskey should be fine.

“What’s up with no Maker’s,” I asked at the register. “You guys shutting down?”

The attendant shook his head: “The owner’s cuttin’ back.”

“Cutting way back, I guess, if there’s no Maker’s or Evan.”

“Twenty-one, nineteen, sir.”

Elijah turned out to be a bit too smoky and oaky for my taste. At least now I can go back to Maker’s by not going back to the Depot Package Store and its enthusiastic attendant.

Last weekend, Autumn and I photographed the wedding of a young couple. Rudy is the son of a colleague of Autumn’s, so my wife got us this gig. We spent over six hours with Rudy, Christian, and their friends and family on Friday and Saturday, snapping about 1200 photos. Since Sunday, I’ve post-processed about half. My deadline is Sunday; I’d like to have all the photos posted before I go back to class next week. Out of the 1200, I’ll post the best 250 for them to look at. Then, I’ll create their album and video. Some of the shots came out  very well. I’ll have examples posted on my photog site in a couple of days.

I also want to finish reading Time Travelers by Monday. I’ve been into McDevitt’s work for a couple of weeks now. He was such a nice guy at the Crossroads: very generous to spend time with me. In fact, listening to him speak inspired me. Not only am I keeping up with my blogging — thanks for the positive feedback, everyone — but I’ve decided to try my hand at writing science fiction.

I’ve begun outlining what will likely be two novels. I also have two solid plots for short stories. I even started writing one last night. I’m pretty excited about this, so much so, I couldn’t sleep. I hope to have my first ever sf short story done by the end of the weekend!

Who says rainy days aren’t good for anything?

Nothing like a distraction to help cure insomnia. The web is full of distractions. What’ll it be first? Facebook? Flickr? Maybe I’ll just go through my neglected RSS feeds. I start from left to right.

Facebook is the new high school. I was never that popular in high school, nor am I popular on Facebook. Some of my friends 249 “friends” are — you know, the ones who were popular in high school. I like when I post a link to a political story or an interesting photo or a funny YouTube video, I rarely get a response. Yet, one of the populars posts the same damn thing, and people seem to fall over themselves to be the first to offer a bon mot, a snarky response, or some other slithering obsequiousness. Facebook changes its interface every three days, too. You’d think this would be for the better, but it usually amounts to what the campus IT guys call an “upgrade” — you know, something that helps them as administrators but makes the system worse for its users.

Flickr is not much better. I have less “friends” on Flickr, and they are a more gregarious community. However, the “photographers” who seem to get the most attention are the ones who post pictures of their lovely lady lumps. I might even go so far as to say that the most popular photogs on Flickr are young women self-portrait artists who don’t mind showing their boobs. They don’t even have to be good photographers to get a lot of comments. My favorites are the ones who try to analyze a technical proficiency that’s not there: “Excellent composition and attention to details.” What they really mean is “Nice boobies!” Even serious photogs turn into Beavis and Butthead when boobs are involved. Yours truly is no exception. Flickr used to be about growing as a photographer; now it’s about looking at boobs.

One could learn a lot about me by seeing my RSS feeds. I use Fever as my reader of choice, installed at Jhary.com. Fever allows me to prioritize my feeds into “kindling” and “sparks”; the former are the essential sites I want to read, while the latter are supplemental and only influence what’s hot — i.e., what’s being talked about the most on all my feeds. While it’s expensive, I’ve been using Fever for almost a year now.

I usually begin my RSS perusal with technology news, like what’s up with Apple and Ubuntu. Since the iPad is coming out at the end of the month, it’s interesting to see what the lovers and haters have to say. There are plenty of both offering praise and condemnation for a device that hasn’t even come out yet. It looks like it might be bigger than the iPhone. I usually include Boing Boing, Slashdot, and LifeHacker as part of my tech browsing.

From tech, I look to photography, from Canon rumors and new equipment to advice about being a better photog to equipment reviews. Next, if I’m still awake, I check out what my favorite car company — Mini — is up to on Motoring File, and I might look at a couple of motorcycling feeds.

Yes, I have feeds on politics, arts, literature, and other news, but I generally don’t read these when I’m trying to fight off insomnia.

Last night I found something interesting on LifeHacker: 750 Words Clears Your Mind. It suggests a simple site, 750 Words, that encourages you to write 750 words a day. Now, I gotta say, I’m prime for this suggestion, having just met some great writers at the Crossroads Writers Conference, like Jack McDevitt. Now, I’ve never fooled myself into believing I was a writer, especially a creative one. Yes, I took a creative writing class as an undergrad, making Dr. Cole suffer through all my awful sonnets and short stories, but the only thing I really learned is that I’ll likely never write a novel. Still, it is a dream of mine. I’d love to write a series of science fiction novels.

Thsi is where 750 Words comes in: “The idea is that if you can get in the habit of writing three pages a day, that it will help clear your mind and get the ideas flowing for the rest of the day.” Well, the 750 Words web site is not taking any new accounts at the moment, but this entry is my first — up over 800 words by now. When I asked Jack McDevitt how many pages he writes a day, he told me six, about 1500 words. But, he’s a real, working novelist.

Maybe if I just get in the habit of writing, I can get better? At least it will give me something productive to do when I’m insomniac.

Twisting and turning
Your feelings are burning
You’re breaking the girl
She meant you no harm
Think you’re so clever
But now you must sever
You’re breaking the girl
—The Red Hot Chili Peppers

In his Metamorphoses, Ovid is concerned with, among other things, images of woman and the men that love them. Perhaps that is a euphemistic way of saying: Ovid’s book of changes often features women as the victims of men’s desire. Ovid frequently and incisively examines how the desire of men, usually with the help of some divine force, change women, both physically and psychologically. Often, in tales like “Apollo and Daphne” and “Io and Jove,” women are broken in order to be made again, in an image that is more pliable to the desires of men.

In Book X, Ovid relates the story of Pygmalion. Ovid’s narrator here is Orpheus, but more on him in a minute. The story of Pygmalion and Galatea (who is not named in Ovid’s account) is often depicted in narratives since Ovid as a romantic tale of a lonely artist who falls in love with his perfect sculpture of a woman. The gods take pity on him, and turn his “ivory” women into flesh and blood — someone whom he can really love, marry, and live happily ever after with. Ostensibly, Ovid’s narrative is a happy one: the marriage of Pygmalion and Galatea is blessed by the gods with a child, a very real product of a real man and a real woman.

Yet, Ovid’s tales are seldom ever what they seem. Closer examination of “Pygmalian” reveals a more sinister story of misogyny, lust, fetishization, introversion, and sexual oppression. Pygmalion is the first-century equivalent of the loner, the socially ostracized man who resents the culture that marginalized him. Living by himself, he especially despises the women: he considers them whorish and is “disgusted by / the many sins to which the female mind / had been inclined by nature.” For Pygmalion, they are naturally flawed, probably because they want nothing to do with him, and by shunning him, they emasculate him. So, in what could probably be described as his skeevy little studio, he carves his idea of the perfect woman out of “ivory” — creating the perfection that does not exist in nature. His simulacrum is naked, of course, but he adorns it with shells and and ribbons, and rests the statue on his bed, between the covers, talks to it, kisses it. What a scene.

Pygmalion falls in love with his statue, so much so, he prays to Venus “if you can indeed grant all things, / then let me have the wife I want . . . / one like my ivory girl.” What follows is a grotesque fumbling and groping and poking and prodding of a now “more pliant” statue turned flesh and blood. He rejoices and continues in his lusty explorations while

She seeks “light,” perhaps an understanding of her situation beyond the rapacious form of Pygmalion towering over her. She becomes pregnant immediately. Pygmalion probably decides that he must impose his order on her, at least before she meets the emasculating women of Cyprus and is influenced by their natural propensities. So, in order for the Pygmalion creature to regain his manhood stolen by the these women, he must break their hold on him by making his own girl whom he can master.

Almost two millennia later, Edgar Allan Poe’s own Pygmalion figure, the narrator of “Ligeia,” attempts to assert his will over the nature of the story’s two women, the eponymous Ligeia and Rowena Trevanion of Tremaine. Yet, Poe’s narrator is, in a sense, an anti-Pygmalion figure, one who tries to control ostensibly through love (or lust) and hate, both of which he feels intensely — passionately. Like Pygmalion, Poe’s narrator is moody and introverted, prone to a fierce temper that his wife dreaded. He is also an opium addict, who “loathed [his wife] with a hatred belonging more to demon than to man” (1382). After the death of his beloved Ligeia, the narrator marries Rowena, but longs to be reunited with the former, calling on her and hoping to “restore the departed Ligeia to the pathways she had abandoned upon the earth” (1382).

The narrator’s will (desire, lust, passion) is so strong, that it seems to have a role in defeating nature. Yet, instead of just praying to Venus to have his love restored to him, he seems to sacrifice Rowena on the alter of his desire. She has bouts of illness and increasing irritability, like she’s becoming frightened of her husband; and who could blame her really: they live in the English countryside is an old gothic cathedral that seems to have a life of its own — an appropriate place for this horror story. Perhaps she realizes that the narrator is poisoning her wine, but becomes too weak to do anything about it. She eventually succumbs to the poison, or her illness, and dies as the narrator looks on. As the narrator watches, the corpse seems to move; this happens three times until it finally rises from its “bed of ebony.” To the narrator’s eyes, his dead wife Rowena seems to have risen from the dead as Ligeia.

Like “Pygmalion,” “Ligeia” has the inanimate become animate with the help of some external, divine power. Poe’s narrator, like Pygmalion, passionately longs for his vision of perfection to become flesh. His obsession with the dead Ligeia becomes an oppressive and violent force that literally kills Rowena — sacrificing her in lieu of the narrator’s vision of womanly perfection: Ligeia. The imperfect Rowena must be broken and recast in a form that our narrator sculpted from his own desire. “Ligeia,” a form that only now lives in the narrator’s mind, one that he has elevated above all other women, has replaced Rowena, literally and figuratively sacrificing her autonomous personality for the narrator’s oppressive desires.

Interestingly, too, Poe calls Rowena his “wife,” but his relationship with Ligeia remains ambiguous. In fact, he seems to have doubts as to whether or not Ligeia even loved him. He alludes, too, to her passion, intelligence, and will as a match for his own. He fixates on her eyes: he says that they “delighted and appalled” him. Perhaps they both reflect his desire for her and her defiance of him, so much so, that in order to possess her completely, our narrator comes to the conclusion: “I saw that she must die” (1380). These textual clues imply that Poe’s narrator kills Ligeia just as he later kills Rowena: if he cannot sculpt them into his vision of what a woman should be, then, as much as it might pain him, they would have to die. Ligeia’s return at the story’s end could be interpreted as her vampiric will defeating death, or psychologically as a manifestation of the narrator’s guilt and remorse as the ghastly form of Ligeia.

Stanislaw Lem’s 1961 novel Solaris, brings our Pygmalion story into space and gives us a science fiction (or perhaps a postcolonial) vocabulary with which to discuss it. In Lem’s novel, Kris Kelvin travels to the planet Solaris to find out what has happened to the crew — particularly why his friend Gibarian killed himself — while they were studying this seemingly alien oceanic intelligence. Similar to Moby Dick, Solaris has a fairly simple plot interspersed with expository chapters about the history of “Solaristics”: the decades of academic studies about the enigmatic Solaris. Solaristics encompasses science, physics, philosophy, religion — any human intellectual attempt to figure out a world that is utterly alien. Kelvin is both a Solaricist and a psychologist, so he seems an appropriate person to send in order to help the crew.

Kelvin soon finds what’s troubling the denizens of Solaris Station: they have been getting “visitors” ever since they began bombarding the planet with x-rays. These visitors remain a mystery to Kelvin until he falls asleep his first night on the station and awakens to find his own: his dead wife Rheya has ostensibly appeared out of thin air. I’m reminded of Ligeia coming back from the dead; Kelvin is initially shocked, but quickly becomes enamoured with and grows to love the Rheya-visitor.

She seems to have an irrational attachment to Kelvin, getting violently anxious if he tries to leave her. Kelvin eventually consults the other two scientists on the station, Snow and Sartorius, and they explain that the visitors seem to represent some sort of “psychic trauma” made manifest by Solaris. It’s as if the ocean probed their brains and made flesh that which is connected with primal feelings like trauma, passion, or desire — at least in Kelvin.

Rheya, Kelvin’s real wife, had killed herself years earlier when he left her after an argument. He dismissed her threat of suicide, but he is devastated when she actually does, carrying the guilt of his inaction with him to Solaris. The Rheya-visitor simultaneously represents his love for his dead wife and the guilt he has over her death. The intelligence that the men call Solaris has made the Rheya-visitor out of Kelvin’s memory of her, so his attachment to her is even more understandable: she is like the statue of Pygmalion, created out of the head of Kelvin and animated by some external force. The Rheya-visitor is even more perfect for Kelvin than the original ever was.

Yet, this Rheya simulacrum also has the flaws of the original, magnified by Kelvin’s psychic residue. The Rheya-visitor tries to kill herself several times, but is always resurrected by Solaris until the scientists develop a machine that disrupts their ability to return. The Rheya-visitor takes this opportunity to end her life for good, despite Kelvin’s multiple and emphatic pleas of his need and love for her. The irony is that the Rheya-visitor is created from his own memories of Rheya, but he ultimately remains ineffectual in his attempts to control her.

A recurrent theme in Solaris is first uttered by Snow, one of the resident scientists on Solaris station, when talking with Kelvin. Snow claims that humans explore the galaxy not to find the new, but because they “need mirrors” of themselves (72). Humans do not explore to find the new, but to impose the familiar: we are like immature, mad gods who attempt to create the universe in our own image. Lem seems to suggest that even our attempts at science, philosophy, and religion are ultimately to glorify our own presence in the universe, not about seeing the different. Solaris is about the impossibility of knowing the other. We make tenuous connections, but relationships seem to become battles of will: where one person’s will dominates and breaks (writes, determines) the other’s. So often, men assert their primacy through dominate ideologies, breaking the girl in order to remake her in an image of subordination and a reflection of the desires of men.

Unlike Ovid’s “Pygmalion,” Poe’s and Lem’s revisionings seem to carry with them more sinister implications. Both protagonists are haunted by the images of women they created, and neither seems to have the ability nor the will to escape. In a sense, they also become victims of their own desires. Granted, the women suffer more from these visions than the men, but the vision enslaves both.

Perhaps the latter two examples can again be linked with Ovid’s “Pygmalion” through its narrator Orpheus. Orpheus was the consummate musician: his music so lovely that it charmed death himself. After his wife, Eurydice, was killed by a serpent, Orpheus travelled to the Underworld to get her back. Hades and Persephone were so taken by his plea, they allowed Eurydice to return to the land of the living on the condition that he not look back as they make their way to the surface. He does — anxious that Eurydice might not be following — and she is snatched back into Hell. Ovid seems to comment ironically on love:ﾠ

Indeed, the Metamorphoses again reasserts what might be its central theme: the major cause of women’s suffering is the love of men. After losing Eurydice again, Orpheus becomes misogynistic, singing tales of women who do not follow the lead of men, like the women of Cyrus that Pygmalion so despised. Ironically, Orpheus sees the nature of women as the problem, not the men who try to break them.

In the preface to his 1999 book The Age of Spiritual Machines, Raymond Kurzweil suggests that the most important question that we will face this century is how we define the “human.” Presently, we are on the cusp of technological achievements made possible by the advancements in microprocessing technology. The rapidly growing fields of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and robotics offer new promise for the growth and evolution of humanity; freedom from disease, bomb-proof mile-high cities, an end to famine, more leisure time, quick and safe space travel, and even potential immortality could be some of the benefits. Therefore, as Kurzweil suggests, how we define human must take center stage as our technology advances: just what aspects of ourselves are too important to change through our interaction with technology? We already see these debates on the world stage: what begins with cloning will only increase as we gain more understanding of our bodies and how to manipulate them through genetics and nanotechnology. When we can see the code that lies at the center of the human body, it will not be long before we can recode, just as simply as sitting down at a word processor to re-write an essay.

Before we begin to recode our bodies, we must have a clear understanding of the implications of those upgrades by considering the ideological and physical construction of human. Bill Joy’s April 2000 article for Wired, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” casts doubt on our ability to integrate ourselves and our environments with our increasingly smarter and more dangerous technologies. Joy sees that further research into genetics, nanotech, and robotics without knowing precisely the implications of that research could end in the extinction of humanity in its present form. He states: “If we could agree, as a species, what we wanted, where we were headed, and why, then we would make our future much less dangerous” (256). It seems to me that both Kurzweil and Joy call for the same thing: a definition of the human, or at least an articulation of those characteristics that seem important to us as a species. Obviously in my short time here, I cannot cover this topic in much depth, but I can make some observations based on my participation with humanity and with my discipline of the humanities. Finally, I will offer a cautionary reading of Bruce Sterling’s Chattanooga Trilogy, published as three related short stories in his 1999 collection A Good Old-Fashioned Future.

In thinking about the human question, I can’t help but feel uncomfortable, as many of us in the humanities are in a postmodern world. Even the signifier human is an exclusive club, privileging one community over another using arbitrary characteristics of superiority, like education, skin color, class, and sex. The idea of community seems inseparable from the idea of the human; after all, is one person alone a human? Humanity is created and fostered through a combination of cultural milieu and physical being, neither of which can take place outside a certain community.

Much of the history of human communities divides the human flock into hierarchical dualisms that privilege one identity as the cultured ideal for humanity, homo humanitas, and marginalizes the other as somehow less sophisticated and deserving of contempt, homo barbaritas. Yet, Enlightenment practices tried to reconcile these disparities with the myth of the Universal Man: a universal and pure central essence of the human shared by all, distinct from context. Today, under the microscope of poststructuralist critique, this essentialized human seems an unlikely and even dangerous myth that cannot account for historical atrocities, contemporary inequalities, and even continued lip service played to the idea of the human.

While science and common sense can see that all humans do not share similar looks or body processes, we seem to share certain drives that are encoded into our genetic programs. While some might be attributed to culture, like the desire to be thin, to have hair only in the right places, and to be sexually potent into our eighties, some may lie deeper in the code, like drives to eat, sleep, and have sex. Perhaps it’s these deep processes that humans seem to share that motivate our construction of the human? How much of what we do in our lives is based on eating and having sex? The cultural critics and biologists can argue about this, but what happens when our technology gives us the control of these deep processes? What happens when we attempt to control with the click of a mouse or the pop of a pill what evolution has spent millennia programming?

It seems to me, at least for the context of this paper, that two important aspects of the human are (1) a sense of community, and (2) the drive for sex. To see the importance of these two aspects, I’ll spend the rest of the time indulging in a short reading of Bruce Sterling’s Chattanooga Trilogy to see what could happen when our technology allows us to manipulate these seemingly fundamental aspects of humanity.

In the stories “Deep Eddy,” “The Bicycle Repairman,” and “Taklamakan,” Sterling imagines the changes in attitudes, especially about the body, that our relationships with technology might precipitate. Each story offers a unique view of the position of sex and community based on the physicality of the protagonists. In “Deep Eddy,” the young protagonist “Deep” Eddy Dertouzas, armed with his spex, travels to Europe to tilt with windmills; Lyle Schweik, “The Bicycle Repairman,” equipped with his wrench, isolates himself inside his shop in Chattanooga wanting only to learn about bikes; and Spider Pete and Katrinko attempt a covert mission to the “Taklamakan” in search of Asian Sphere secrets. The stories follow a linear sequence, from circa 2035 to 2043, and appear to present fairly straightforward images of sex and sexuality that have developed over 3000 years of human cultural history. However, while Sterling hardly ever explicitly addresses community and sex, they are central to the events and attitudes in each story.

Deep Eddy is a teenaged poseur with pretensions. Sent by his spex users group, CAPCLUG, to Düsseldorf as a cultural liaison to the Cultural Critic, Eddy offers shallow opinions and observations of his surroundings and is caught up in a cultural event that he does not understand. His mission becomes one in which he just wants to have sex with his guide and reality instructor, Sardelle. A teenager on his way to Europe for the first time Eddy dons his spex so that he can have a augmented view of his surroundings. His spex, equipped with translation programs and other “spexware” that gives him an informational advantage over others, heighten his male gaze of the skin, but do not allow Eddy to penetrate that surface to see anything deeper than his own teenaged desires for adventure, excitement, and sex. Eddy’s assisted view, and CAPCLUG’s by association, seems almost humanistically utopian, in that this technology will offer humans a chance to connect in a more efficient way, like computers networked into a similar database. Rather than making guesses about one’s personality, spex allow a hyperreal glimpse into a person’s public and private self. Yet, I would argue, this assumption is deceptive in that these biographies worn like auras are themselves products of cultural assumptions and commercialism, and give no more insight into one’s true self as would reading the brand name tags on a person’s jeans. Therefore, Eddy’s reliance on his spex keeps him isolated in his supercilious, romantic world even in the cultural diversity of Düsseldorf.

While attempting to deliver his package to the Cultural Critic, Eddy becomes smitten with his guide and protector, Sardelle, based on her physical features viewable through his spex. Since she is a covert operative, Eddy’s spex give him no additional information, so he romantically focuses on her appearance. Even after completing his mission, Eddy decides to stay, though his choice will likely get him killed, for the Moral Referee’s forces are attacking those of the Cultural Critic in a literal manifestation of a literary allegory, like something right out of Chaucer. After luckily saving Sardelle, Eddy begins a sexual relationship with her, not a typically physical one, but one through “virching.” An advanced form of cybersex, virching requires specialized equipment for it participants and a network connection. It does not, however, require the presence of both persons in the same room with one another. This sexual relationship exists as purely stimulation through simulation with none of that pesky talking afterward required. Safe are Eddy’s views of how the world operates, and he gets what all teenaged boys want in the end. Well, perhaps not all.

Lyle, the bicycle repairman, offers another glimpse of human community and sexuality on the middle of the 21st century. Lyle’s own virching sessions ostensibly have little to do with sex: he gets on his bicycle and rides a half hour in the 2033 Tour de France. However, we soon discover that Lyle is not only a proponent of the Sexual Deliberation movement, he participates by taking antilibidinals. He makes his position clear in a conversation to his mother:

The reader must infer the particulars of the Sexual Deliberation movement, but ostensibly it battles against not only traditional patriarchal attitudes toward gender and sexuality, but also the actual bodily desires for sexual fulfillment. By curbing the physical desires to have sex, those energies can be refocused in other areas — in Lyle’s case bicycles and his idea for an inertia break — and rupture the ideologies that keep humans enslaved to gender and sexual roles and attitudes, or at least the concomitant bodily desires. This is an issue of control and self-direction; think about it: when one isn’t concerned with having sexual relations, how much time and attention does that free from one’s day, especially those close to Lyle’s and Eddy’s age? A brief look a Lyle’s lifestyle might offer some of the consequences of technologically assisted sexual deliberation.

Lyle lives by himself in a squat: his bicycle shop hangs from the roof of a burnt out floor in an apartment building called “the Zone.” He is terrible with names; he has bad luck with roommates; and he has come to “proper terms with [his] microscopic flora”: i.e., he uses a bacteria that converts human sweat into the “reek rather like ripe bananas.” His use of antilibidinals makes Lyle not antisocial, but asocial in that he no longer cares about “human” activities involving coupling, so he withdraws into his shop wanting only to concentrate on learning about bicycles, effectively separating him from the rest of humanity and making him something perhaps other than human. Despite is efforts to keep to himself, Lyle meets a covert government agent, Kitty, after he receives an old cable box from the wayward Eddy. She attempts to finagle the box from Lyle with sexual advances, but gets nowhere because of Lyle’s antilibidinals. After an unsuccessful attempt to steal the box, she is told of this fact: “Kitty stared at Lyle bitterly, ‘I see,’ she said at last. ‘So that’s what you get, when you drain all the sex out of them. . . . a strange malodorous creature that spends all its time working in the garage.’” Lyle’s use of antilibidinals upsets Kitty’s strategy to win the cable box with sexual advances. Since heterosexual coupling is the ideologically supported norm (evidenced my Lyle’s mom’s attitude to his abstention), gender roles and heterosexuality might be viewed strategically in that they are often used as a commodity. Yet, when these positions are subverted physically by antilibidinals, sexual strategies will no longer work as the impetus for sexual power play or a glue that bonds a community.

The desire for social acceptance seems to be a driving force in “Taklamakan.” Spider Pete and Katrinko have come to the Taklamakan as spies. Here we see the return of spex, the injection of subcutaneous body fat for sustenance in the dessert, gel cameras, gel brains, and smart ropes — technologies that augment the physical human abilities of the two spiders to live and travel in almost any terrain. Hidden beneath the dessert is a dark cavern housing three star ships guarded by self-replicating, robotic beasties created from a vat of biotech no longer under human guidance. These oozing and shambling masses of mechanized protein seem to exist to keep the center of the experiment contained: three groups of people in three separate starships that have been buried in the ground and ostensibly forgotten, like some heavily financed experiment in space travel that never left the earth. Hundreds of people, then, by the whims of a government, live deceived, as if their generational ships are traveling to another star, but the space that surrounds them is nothing more but a chasm crawling with self-forming biotech that eat anything.

Like the first two stories in this trilogy, “Taklamakan” also offers a view of technologically altered sexuality and consequently, community. The fact that Katrinko is a physical neuter, written on its body, reminds the ideological majority of its dissention by its very presence, even in language. Her companion in the dessert, Spider Pete, has his own difficulty with the pronoun, and opts for the feminine; his discomfort, however, is not surprising. While Pete shows no uneasiness toward Lyle’s ingestion of antilibidinals, Katrinko’s recoded body causes him distress. Since Lyle could stop taking his antilibidinals at any time and probably return to his sexual desires, Katrinko has been reprogrammed, and the results of that recoding are evident on its body: there is no going back. As a man in his fifties, Pete is one sense a social revolutionary in his position as a City Spider who “preferred the company of seriously twisted people . . . who really cared about something. . . . People who looked for more out of life than mommy, daddy, money, and the grave.” But Pete has a family to care for, implicating him in a traditional phallo-logocentric ideologies and making him more “straight” than he might like to admit.

The fact of Katrinko’s neuter-ness separates it from its society both in reality and actuality, as if, in Pete’s words, it “lived rather closer to the future” than he did. One physical benefit, like that of Lyle’s antilibidinal consumption, is its “eight percent metabolic advantage from lacking sex organs.” Since its body has been recoded as asexual, the very fact of this physicality precipitates all aspects of its reality. As a neuter, Katrinko is shunned from military service making it, in its ironic words, a “total freak and . . . a free agent” and necessitates its choosing another path to walk. Katrinko’s technologically altered body makes it something other than human — a figuration that it has accepted, albeit with some bitterness. When Pete confronts it with a “human” moral obligation to help the imprisoned peoples, Katrinko does not share Pete’s concern:

Katrinko’s socially ostracized position prompts its initial reluctance to indulge in human preoccupations, and bolsters its drive to prove something to those that find the neuter difficult to accept: “I’m looking for some professional validation, okay? . . . This is my chance at the big time.” The “big time,” here, would be the exposure of this government experiment, that would, Katrinko argues, also help these people. Yet, despite Katrinko’s argument for their escape, it and Pete break into two ships and help the occupants of one ships win their freedom. In the skirmish with the biotech sentinels, Katrinko loses its life, suggesting perhaps that it still cannot adapt as well as the evolutionarily programmed, sexualized and gendered Pete. At least in this view of the future, Katrinko must die.

I read Sterling’s trilogy as intriguing but cautionary: even though our technology may in the next fifty years advance to the point where we can recode certain body processes, our ideological perspectives may remain too rigid to keep up at least initially. If our minds don’t change along with our bodies through technology, then we should consider the words of futurists like Sterling and Joy very carefully before altering the human, or we could end up couch virchers, malodorous hermits, or dead neuters, victims of our own technological carelessness.

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My second presentation via SlideShare. It was recorded live on 9/11/07 in my 12:30 ENGL 1101 class. Enjoy!