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| Norman Spinrad: On Books: Transcendence | ||
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by Ursula K. Le Guin Harcourt Brace, $24.00 ISBN:0151005672
by James Stevens-Arce Harcourt Brace, $24.00 ISBN:0151004722
C.CLARKE by Arthur C. Clarke Tor, $29.95 ISBN:0312878214
by Damien Broderick Tor Forge, $24.95 ISBN:0312877811
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Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, and while I may have been bemoaning the commercial shotgun marriage between two such literarily dichotomous modes as science fiction (the literature of the presently non-existent possible) and fantasy (the literature of the forthrightly impossible) under the "SF" marketing label, recent readings have inflicted me with the notion that perhaps there is an esthetic commonality between them. But not just a commonality between science fiction and fantasy, but a commonality among science fiction, fantasy, a certain species of speculative science, Buddhism, evangelical Christianity, Sufism, Hassidism, the Beat Movement, and indeed its ancestor, American literary transcendentalism, one of whose progenitors, Ralph Waldo Emerson, was the author of the very epigram with which this essay begins. And transcendentalism is the commonality in question. Both science fiction and fantasy are literatures whose very existence depends upon literary elements that transcend the consensus reality of their readerships. Fantasy is by definition literature containing an element the readers thereof know is impossible, a literary transcendence of the consensus reality for the duration of the tale as a literary game. Unfortunately not all readers always realize that this is just a literary game, since not all readers, indeed these days perhaps all too few readers, have a firm grasp on just what consensus reality (AKA the presently known physical laws of the universe) is, and thus we have vampire cults, satanic cults, witchery covens, and other such beliefs spawned by the confusion of fantasy with a "higher reality." Including, atheists would contend, the world’s major established religions, at least in the west, such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Indeed, sincere believers in each of these western religions would contend that each of the others contain elements of fantasy, which is to say elements which violate consensus reality as they see it; Jews and Moslems, say, taking such a skeptical view of transubstantiation, Christians viewing with a skeptical eye the proposition that Allah dictated the Koran to Mohammed verbatim. Am I presuming to say here that one person’s religion is another person’s fantasy? Well, yes I am, since a belief in a deity, or supernatural powers, or a higher reality that transcends the laws of mass and energy is as good a definition of religion as it is a premise of fantasy. Ah, but the sincere Jew or Muslim or Christian might contend, what is the true nature of reality? And that is a question that by definition cannot be addressed by fantasy, which is the literature of the impossible. That is a question that by definition can only be explored by a literature of the possible. Science fiction is a literature of the possible. But of course it is far from the only one. Historical fiction is certainly a literature of the possible, since it is a literature dealing with events that have actually occurred in the past. Contemporary mimetic fiction is a literature of the possible, since it attempts to describe events taking place in the consensus reality of the here and now. Arguably, and the practitioners thereof certainly would, fiction written from a firm position of religious belief is also a literature of the possible, since from their point of view, the reality they depict is not only possible but the sole divinely revealed truth. But science fiction is the only literature of the possible that deals with non-existent artifacts, states of being, and events that could be possible in a future or an alternate present operating under the same physical laws as the consensus reality of the here and now. Of course it is. By definition. Since that is the only definition of science fiction that is literarily or critically useful. That is the theoretical metaphysics of it, and on this level, science fiction and fantasy are very different, indeed perhaps antithetical. But on an esthetic level, on the level of what is delivered to the consciousness of the reader when either one truly succeeds, things get more complicated, more ambiguous. Compare, for example, The Telling by Ursula K. Le Guin, and Soulsaver by James Stevens-Arce. The former is clearly science fiction, and the latter is clearly revealed as fantasy at its denouement, at least in the eyes of most people, and yet there is something common at their hearts. In a word, transcendence. It is hard to imagine two more different books by two more different writers. Soulsaver is Stevens-Arce’s first novel, and Le Guin has been publishing for over three decades. The Telling is set once upon a time on the planet Aka far, far away in Le Guin’s "Hainish universe," which is to say it is part of a long, long series, involving a star-spanning civilization with a long, long history. Soulsaver is set in a near-future Puerto Rico, specifically, indeed, very specifically, San Juan and environs. Stevens-Arce’s novel is quite funny, a satire in a way, at least for most of its length, and its surprising denouement makes a second novel set in this "universe" a mercifully dubious proposition. Le Guin is as earn-est in The Telling as elsewhere in this cycle. Soulsaver is narrated in the amusing, alternately naive and sophisticated, first person voice of Juan Bautista Lorca, a young freezer van driver for something called the Suicide Prevention Corps of America–a misnomer, since what the SPCA actually does is resurrect people who have already done the fatal deed. In this future America, the God Squad, as it were, has quite taken over. The Constitution has been altered, televangelism, government, and show biz have been seamlessly combined, and even rock and roll has become the music of the angels. Suiciders are resurrected very much against their will, all the more so since the process is a very painful one that mitigates against second tries, and the rationale is entirely religious and quite narrowly sectarian, namely the fundamentalist Christian conviction that all those who top themselves go to hell. The Telling is written in Le Guin’s characteristic third person viewpoint and mostly at something of a auctorial remove from immersion in the consciousness of the person in question, Sutty; Earthwoman, cultural anthropologist of a sort, educated by the superior culture of the Hainish Ekumen, assigned to the Hainish mission on Aka, where she will be sent out into the deep boonies thereof to learn more about the ancient Akan culture, now seemingly on the verge of extinction, due to the fairly recent forcible remolding of the planet’s civilization by Terran missionaries and the local authorities into a grim and not at all funny parody of American corporate capitalism. Two very different novels indeed, in terms of tone, setting, intent, style, viewpoint, and yet . . . And yet both of them are more or less packaged and published as "SF." And indeed, both of them are literarily qualified to be called science fiction, at least until the last fifth or so of Soulsaver, where it becomes rather arguable. It goes deeper than that. The central subject of both novels is religion, though the religions in question are of quite different kinds, the handling of the thematic material utterly different, and the authors’ philosophical stances seemingly quite dichotomous. The Earth of The Telling from which Sutty comes has just emerged from a period of religious fascism, thanks to the subtle or not so subtle machinations of the Hainish cultural nannies who do not seem to have heard of Star Trek’s Prime Directive in their neck of the galactic woods or perhaps don’t give a damn if they have. Though strangely enough, they do seem almost excessively punctilious about cultural non-interference on Aka when Sutty gets there, even though the thoroughly nasty society they confront has been turned into what it is largely by meddlers from Earth. The theocratic tyranny from which Earth has recently been liberated is not that dissimilar to the sort of thing of which Soulsaver is a parody, though Le Guin’s version is a relentless and rather schematically righteous political straw man, described in well-rendered physical and geographical detail, but, para-doxically enough, much less convincing on an experiential level than Stevens-Arce’s comic inferno version. Perhaps this is because he presents it with a kind of affection through the idealistic yet occasionally mordant, naive yet somehow hip, viewpoint of Juan, a sincere true believer who somehow manages not to be a prig about it. When the scene of The Telling shifts to Aka, where most of the story takes place, Le Guin’s rendering of cultural detail becomes both better and worse. The corporate capitalist fascism that has been imposed on the planet by its "reformers" in place of the banned native culture is utterly schematic to the point of being rendered virtually generic, stripped of even the slightest redeeming elements, and so unbelievable on a political and economic level that it is all too obvious that Le Guin has constructed it as an example of everything she hates. Fair enough, if you can pull it off, but to pull it off you have to either go the route of Pohl and Kornbluth in The Space Merchants or the way of Stevens-Arce in Soulsaver and go for a piss-take and demonstrate the devils in the details. Or construct truly hellish but satanically subtle nightmares like William Burroughs or George Orwell or the Anthony Burgess of A Clockwork Orange. Le Guin doesn’t do any of this. Instead she once more falls into her characteristic major flaw as a political novelist, demonstrated in The Dispossessed and even more so in Always Coming Home. Namely, rendering the culture she wants to hold up as a negative example generically, thinly, superficially, in stark and crude black and white newspaper cartoon fashion, while doing a much better, much more sophisticated, much deeper, much more colorful job of rendering the society she wants the reader to love. Well, maybe this does work on some level with some readers. You pays your money, and you takes your choice, and for mine, this is either an intellectually dishonest cheap trick on the part of the writer, or, more likely, an unexamined result of the writer’s differing degrees of emotional involvement with the cultures in question. And to be fair about it, it certainly can be said that Le Guin’s deeper and more subtle attention to that which she would extol than to that which she would condemn is no doubt at least healthier than the reverse would be. Be that as it may or may not, Le Guin is characteristically at her best when she is immersing her viewpoint characters in cultures she obviously would not mind living in herself, for this is where she shines as a prose stylist, as a lovingly caring "world-builder" in the best traditional science fictional sense, and, well, as a kind of mystic. For despite having written great reams of political science fiction and much feminist science fiction and no few things that are both, for my money Le Guin the political pamphleteer is both unconvincing on a political level and not doing her best work on a literary level therein, perhaps because the pamphleteering is so naked. She is at her best, perhaps because closest to the true core of her being, as a secular humanist mystic. Oh, yes, it is possible, as Ursula K. Le Guin demonstrates in The Telling perhaps better than she has anywhere else, which is what makes the novel succeed on an esthetic and literary level whatever its failings as political fiction. "The Telling" of the title was the "religion" and "culture" and "literature" of millennial Aka, and, as Sutty finds out as she penetrates deeper and deeper into the back country, deeper and deeper into its inner meanings on her vision quest, still is, beneath the surface overlay imposed from outside. "The Telling" is not a religion in the conventional western sense, rather an immense body of tales, parables, aphorisms, poetry, and so forth, which mutate with the tellers. No gods to worship or devils to fear save those of the inner being. No "higher reality" outside of space and time, only the multiplex reality in which consciousness finds itself. If this sound a lot like Taoism or Buddhism stripped of the accretion disk of mumbo-jumbo it has accumulated since Buddha had his satori under the Bo tree, well, it is, and Le Guin has fathomed these waters before, if never with quite so much simple clarity. This is, of course, also a kind of pantheism, in which transcendence resides within the world and not beyond or above it, in which it is to be sought within the dance of maya’s veils, since the dance is all there is. If this also sounds a bit like the literary and indeed mystical stance of SF in the real world (as the title of a collection of these very essays had it in another context), you are beginning to get the point. There is a strong stream of science fiction that both seeks to explore the possibilities of transcendence within the known physical parameters of a universe without any deity but chaos at the controls, and more, upon occasion much more, which seeks to evoke transcendent experiences–satoris as the Buddhists would have it, the sense of wonder as science fiction fans would have it–within the consciousness of its readers. Through the telling of tales. Like "The Telling" of such tales that is the core of the culture and consciousness of the people of Aka. Like The Telling itself, within which Ursula Le Guin seeks to do just that by the very same means. This, I would contend, is the es-sence of science fictional transcendentalism. Take the consensus reality as informed readers know it, the physical laws determining the behavior of mass and energy in the universe in which they find themselves, and, via literary art and speculative transformation, create within the beings of those readers a state of consciousness, however fleeting or not, of transcending the previously assumed parameters thereof, not outside the dance of matter and energy, but within it. But is this something only science fiction can do? Maybe not. A tale told to me by Philip K. Dick about a little correspondence with Ursula Le Guin herself: Ursula had opined in print that Phil’s dialogs in a novel between "Phil Dick" and "Horselover Fat," both of whom were overt aspect of himself, were perhaps indications that he had gone off the schizoid deep end. Phil wrote her a letter. And in it he said: "You forget, Ursula, that it’s a novel." Meaning, for current purposes, that if a work of fiction creates such a satoric moment in the consciousness of a reader, then, since what we are talking about is, after all, a literary effect and not an operating manual for the universe, science fiction or fantasy, perhaps it amounts to the same thing. Or not. I confess to a certain uncertainty here. In Cat’s Cradle, Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., has his prophet Bokonon declare: "Believe in the foma that make you strong, and brave, and happy." Elsewhere in the same novel "foma" are defined as "useful lies." And it was also Vonnegut who uttered the truism that "all fiction is lies." Only some are more useful than others? Which, by a somewhat roundabout path, brings us back to Soulsaver, in which James Stevens-Arce does two rather amazing things, one setting up the other, creating a final effect that I am loath to fully describe for fear of destroying it for potential readers, but which raises a question about the ambiguous relation between transcendental science fiction and transcendental fantasy I am equally loath to ignore. So, to tread carefully, let me ask you a question, dear reader: Is it possible to write science fiction from a position of Christian or Jewish or Muslim conviction and dealing with the reality of a universe in which such beliefs are true, or must such fiction be considered fantasy by definition? Okay, so it is a trick question, for we are dealing with a certain species of Heisenbergian uncertainty here. For the intent of the author to write either science fiction or fantasy depends upon whether or not he or she believes that the religious conviction in question must be incorporated into any description of reality, in which case the author is writing science fiction, or whether it is just a literary game, in which case the auctorial intent is to write fantasy. And of course, the same applies to the readers. What a believer would take as science fiction, a non-believer would take as fantasy, no matter the intent of the writer. What is so intriguing about Soulsaver, aside from the wonderful speculative takes and piss-takes on a future Puerto Rico at once strangely exotic and quintessentially American, is that it’s very difficult to discern Stevens-Arce’s true intent in this regard. The televangelized holy rolling America is savagely satirized, but the sincere belief of Juan and others is not, is treated sympathetically, and with depth, which is what makes this novel much more than yet another iteration of an oft-told comic cautionary tale. And without giving too much away, I can say that Juan’s faith is not at all deconstructed at the denouement, which, from my point of view, transforms what has been science fiction into fantasy, but which, from a certain other point of view, could be taken as the delivery of transcendence not merely from within a work of science fiction, but from within a work of satirical science fiction. While satire has hardly been Sir Arthur C. Clarke’s main forte during his long career, the dialectic between the immutable laws of mass and energy and transcendence, between the "hard science fiction" for which he is most famous and the mystical impulse, between the cold equations and the transcendence of them in one way or another paradoxically within them, certainly has. Tor and Orbit have now published The Collected Stories in a volume of nearly a thousand pages, and while Clarke is perhaps better known for his novels, the range and balance of the stories certainly does demonstrate this dialectic in his work throughout his career as well as they do, a dialectic that is central to the modern science fiction whose evolution Clarke himself has done so much to mold. One of the peculiarities of the general culture’s perception of science fiction is that the three "science fiction writers" whose names are most generally known by people who don’t read the stuff are Robert A. Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke. Peculiar because Heinlein was made famous by the adoption of Stranger in a Strange Land as a countercultural icon and most notoriously by Charles Manson, and Asimov became a household name via his voluminous production of non-fiction, read by ten times as many people as ever read his science fiction titles, which, in terms of sales and wordage, make up only a minor portion of his oeuvre. Peculiar because Clarke became well-known as a science fiction writer because of his many publications of science fiction stories in Playboy, a non-SF magazine which reached a mass audience, and then became world famous as one via a film he wrote with Stanley Kubrick, loosely based on his story "The Sentinel," 2001: A Space Odyssey. Peculiar because, I would contend, the three most famous science fiction writers became famous as science fiction writers through things other than their actual literary production thereof, and of the three, only Clarke’s fiction is really esthetically and thematically central to the evolution of what science fiction has become. Clarke is generally considered an archetypal "hard science fiction" writer, perhaps the archetypal hard science fiction writer, and for all I know, he may believe it himself. Certainly by sheer volume, the bulk of the wordage in The Collected Stories is the sort of thing John W. Campbell, Jr. would have had no qualms about publishing in Astounding and did, and certainly many of the novels are also nuts-and-bolts stuff, with a clunky prose style to match. But volume is not a reliable measure of literary significance, and even early on, the Clarke of Childhood’s End and Against the Fall of Night was a far superior writer on a thematic and prose level than the Clarke of, say, A Prelude to Space or The Sands of Mars, written more or less during the same epoch. Thus, from almost the very beginning there were two Clarkes: the nuts-and-bolts hard SF writer who for a time was Chairman of the British Interplanetary Society, has laid claim to being the conceptual creator of the communications satellite, and who is perhaps the best-known and arguably best popularizer of science and technological speculator aside from Asimov, and Clarke the metaphysical speculator, the scientific transcendentalist, if you will. Or even if you won’t. Perhaps Clarke himself would argue that the dichotomy is illusory; if so he would get no philosophical argument back from me, though I would still contend that on a sheer literary level he is much better when he is pondering the cosmic depths, probably because such material actually induces a heightened state of one’s consciousness when one is pondering it, which becomes reflected in the work. Or perhaps one must exercise a higher level of literary artistry to render such stuff. I would expect probably both. Be all that as it may, what makes Clarke’s best work so central to the literary evolution of science fiction is not just his evocation, or one might even say conjuration, of transcendence from within the known physical laws of the universe, but the utter centrality of space to that scientific transcendentalism. For if there is a single mystical and thematic essence of science fiction, this is certainly it. One might even deem it a kind of religion. Breaking the bonds of gravity. Transcending the finite limits of a single planet to emerge into the infinity of the universe beyond. Transcending the limits of historical time, measured in centuries or millennia at best, to attain a destiny in cosmic time measurable in millions or even billions of years. Encountering beings out there whose technology and culture and consciousness is millions of years of evolution in advance of our own. Evolving into such beings ourselves. This is the mystical long distance call of space. Not travel to other planets in order to encounter outré ecologies or weird monsters or even bizarre cultures. Not orbital mechanics or astrophysics or rocketry or libertarian wet-dreams in the asteroid belt. Transcendence. Of the closed system of a single planet into the open system of an infinite universe. Of historical time into universal time. Of mortality into immortality, at least on a species level. Of the limits of our present consciousness itself. Across the Sea of Stars to Childhood’s End, as it were. Not in some heaven or fantasy realm but in the real world. In the universe of mass and energy in which we find ourselves. Sir Arthur’s most often-quoted aphorism is that any sufficiently advanced technology would appear to be magic. Maybe, maybe not. Maybe any really advanced technology would be self-explanatory even to dim creatures such as ourselves. But there is a flip side to this aphorism. Any sufficiently advanced technology–and perhaps we have even already advanced to that level ourselves–can bring magic back into the universe of mass and energy without violation of its laws. Or if we haven’t quite achieved that yet technologically, we can do it on a literary level. With science fiction. Of the sort that Arthur C. Clarke has written at the top of his form. Scientific transcendentalism. In the west, science and the transcendental vision quest, science and religion, have been considered antithetical at least since the beginning of the Renaissance or perhaps even since the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the supercession of the Classical World by the so-called "Dark Ages," dark because the theocratic rule of the Catholic Church sought to suppress all knowledge that contradicted Biblical revelation. But this was an historical artifact. The result of a political policy, a foolish mistake on the part of the Church whose ill effects western civilization has still not entirely seen the end of. For upon reflection, after all, there is no essential reason why the objective quest for scientific knowledge of the laws of the physical universe and the subjective quest for transcendental experience and vision need be antithetical. Only the Church’s absurd insistence that the history of the universe and the immutable physical laws thereof were fully elucidated by divine revelation to nomadic tribesmen a millennium and more before the invention of the telescope and the microscope, or even chemistry and physics, and its determination to use its political power to enforce it for political purposes, created this entirely artificial breach. Islam, and to some extent Judaism before it, made no such insistence, the main reason perhaps why the Islamic world remained scientifically in advance of Christianized Europe until the Renaissance. What, you may ask, does this have to do with science fiction? With the transcendental meaning of space therein? With the scientific transcendentalism of Arthur C. Clarke? If you can find it on DVD or video and have a couple of hours to kill, watch Peter Hyams’ 2010, a rather dim sequel to Kubrick’s 2001, in which a mission is sent to Jupiter to examine the ship left there at the end of the previous film, encounters the virtual specter of David Bowman, the transformed "starchild" at the end of the Kubrick movie, through whom they have a tenuous and didactic contact with a superior galactic civilization, which then turns Jupiter into a second sun. Th-th-that’s basically all, folks. Then read Clarke’s novelization of the film, 2010: Odyssey Two and see how he turns the skein of events of this thin hard SF plot into a numinous and luminous meditation on what a truly transcendent civilization might be like on the level of consciousness and not merely of artifact. This is, in a sense, a textbook demonstration of how science fiction at its best can summon up transcendental visions out of the nuts and bolts of the laws of mass and energy. It is also a very clear demonstration of the metaphysical centrality of space in this process, science fiction’s greatest and most dominant metaphor for the infinite and the transcendent, made all the more powerful because it is both metaphor and reality. And this, in turn, may be why science fiction has generated a subculture of fandom whose hard core worships the stuff on an extraliterary level, why it has created at least one religion of significance in the Church of Scientology and any number of more minor mystical cults, and why western culture has marginalized it. Science fiction can deliver the transcendence that western religions promise in the hereafter as a reward for good behavior and do it experientially in the here and now. And persuade its readers that it is at least possible within the universe they live in rather than only as pie in the sky in the great bye and bye, that it is attainable through possible technology. This is a concept that is very dangerous indeed to the social, psychological, and political control mechanisms of a civilization based on the concept of post-mortem transcendence as a reward for following the God-given rules. Hence one that needs to be pushed to the pop cult fringes and intellectually marginalized lest it give the lunatics the idea that there really isn’t any reason not to take over the asylum. Of late, though, there has been a paradigm shift within the literature away from space as the dominant venue of transcendence within the universe of mass and energy, and toward "virtual reality," "nanotechology," and "artificial intelligence," as the main metaphors for the up and out. I use quotation marks to remind you that none of these three technologies actually exist, all three of them being science fictional pseudo-technologies at least for now, and, I suspect, for a long time to come. "Virtual reality" is merely the extension of Gibsonian cyberspace into a kind of interactive television; sight and sound only, now, and as far as the eye can see, I would contend, because these are the senses that can be digitally emulated, whereas smell, taste, and feel, let alone sexual excitation and orgasm, are relentlessly analog. "Nanotechnology" may have initially been the notion of K. Eric Drexler, a speculative scientist of sorts, but what the concept has become today owes much more to science fiction like Greg Bear’s Blood Music. Molecular level machines of any useful sort are probably decades away, and "gray goo," zillions of "assemblers" working together to transform shit into shinola coordinated by atomic-level software is probably beyond the scale limits set by quantum mechanics. "Artificial Intelligence" may exist to the extent of expert systems emulations of human knowledge and perhaps even decision-making processes. Someday, perhaps even soon, such software may be able to pass a Turing test, but this is a long, long way from artificial consciousness, for being to arise or be stored within the bits and the bytes, which is the confusion being promulgated by this sort of stuff. This sort of stuff? What sort of stuff? Well, for a current textbook exemplar, The Spike, by Damien Broderick; a curious, symptomatic, occasionally fascinating, sometimes boring and generally disturbing "non-fiction" book of science fictional speculation that seems to ignore or forget that "this sort of stuff" is a kind of science fiction. Broderick is a well-known writer of science fiction, and the central McGuffin of The Spike is taken, with generous acknowledgment, from another well-known writer of science fiction, Vernor Vinge, who coined the term and pioneered the concept of "the Spike," and, on the evidence of this book at least, would seem to have become the central prophet of a little cult that has formed around it. The basic thesis is that sometime within the next half century or so, computer technology, nanotechnology, the full elucidation of the human genome, virtual reality technology, and wizard software will rather suddenly converge to produce an asymptotic upward surge in technological evolution, a spike-shaped curve on the graph of technological progress against time approaching infinity as a limit, beyond which the future is inherently unpredictable to unevolved consciousnesses like ourselves on the wrong side of the divide. Of course, Broderick being a science fiction writer, ditto Vinge whom he relies upon extensively, as well as other such well-known inspirations as Gregory Benford and Bruce Sterling, most of the book is spent trying to predict it anyway. Immortality will be achieved by downloading our minds into computers and/or Artificial Intelligences created therein will outstrip us. Humanity will become obsolete, probably extinct, superseded by these software intelligences immortalized in silicon, and able to bootstrap their own puissance to ever higher levels. Nanotechnology will assemble whatever the heart desires from whatever matter is lying around at zero cost. Intelligence will colonize the galaxy, then the universe, and will find ways of transcending even its heat-death or Big Crunch. Neat stuff for the devotee of science fiction. Inspiration for any number of science fiction novels and stories. Most of which, of course, have already been written. I say "of course" because regular readers of this magazine are likely to know this. They will also know that when Gregory Benford speaks as a science fiction writer he is not really speaking as a prominent astrophysicist. They will know that Vernor Vinge has stronger credentials as a science fiction writer than as a scientist. For that matter, they will know that Damien Broderick is primarily a science fiction writer himself. What readers of The Spike who do not know any or most of the above will make of the book is difficult for one who does to fathom. I would suspect that many will find it fascinating, a smaller number will find it inspiring, and some will toss it aside as reductionist nerdish babble. Few, I would suspect, will be drawn by The Spike to explore the literary transcendentalism of science fiction, because, although Broderick is a science fiction writer, the majority of the people he quotes are science fiction writers, and most of the concepts in the book derive from previously published science fiction, this is not at all made clear. Indeed, it sometimes seems to be deliberately obfuscated. I myself began it with high expectations, for I must admit that I am a sucker for this kind of speculative science, this science fiction without the fiction, but unfortunately I felt let down about a third of the way in, bored along about the middle, and concerned by the time I was finished. How can I put this gently? I guess I can’t. The Spike struck me as, well, fannish. What do I mean by "fannish"? I mean the opposite of the sort of serious cutting-edge scientific speculation that can serve as inspiration for science fiction that might explore these concepts’ impact on human culture and consciousness, on the evolution of transhuman consciousness, on the place of being in the universe of mass and energy itself. I mean taking concepts long dealt with in decades of science fiction and presenting them to a naïve readership as if they sprang from current cutting edge science on the one hand and discussing them in the manner of one of the endless science fiction convention panels that have done them to death already on the other. I also mean dealing with their political, economic, and social ramifications in a blinkered manner all too reminiscent of the intellectually and politically naïve ideological libertarianism prevalent in science fictional circles. Going on, for example, for pages and pages and pages of speculation on how market forces would structure an economic system of costless abundance created by nanotechnology without for a moment pondering that such a technology might render capitalism itself obsolete, with scarcely a mention of socialism, let alone (horrors!) the obvious solution to such a happy non-problem, namely communism. Worse still, maybe much worse, Broderick seems to be both describing the existence of the aforementioned Spike cult, and doing a bit of proselytizing for it, while enlisting Gregory Benford and Bruce Sterling, among others, whether they know it or not. The doctrine of this movement would seem to be that the sudden supercession of humanity by "post-humanity" is inevitable, that it will occur within the lifetimes of many now living, that beyond this singularity lies transcendent consciousness and immortality, so the thing to do is accept it, go with the flow, and do what you can to get in on it. How? Well, there seem to be two schools of thought, though they are not entirely separate. One notion is to have yourself frozen upon death or shortly beforehand; your whole body if you can afford it, only your head if you can’t, to be revived and immortalized in a cloned body in the new era on the other side of the Spike. Mea culpa, I suppose, since I may have started this one myself, in Bug Jack Barron, written in 1967, though there it was used as a political and economic scam. The other, more radical, school, declares that it is the flesh itself that is becoming obsolete, and the way to achieve transcendent immortal consciousness, whether you must pass through a period as a frozen head or not, is to have yourself uploaded into computer hardware, not only much hardier than gooey protoplasm, but capable of storing multiple copies, which, moreover, can be rewritten and tweaked upward and onward. You.1, you.2, you.2.3, you for Mac, you for Windows, and of course, you for Linux, if you really want to get nerdish about it, which those who would go this route probably will. You? You, who? God, if there is one, help me, I wrote this one too, which is one of the central questions of Deus X (1993), though therein I adopted constrasting Catholic and Rastafarian viewpoints, thus at least partially dodging the ultimate reality that all this ignores, namely that "artificial intelligence" is not consciousness, artificial or otherwise, and therefore an uploaded copy of the contents of your brain, even assuming such a thing is doable, cannot be "you." Think about it. Observe yourself thinking about it. Have a few drinks and think about it. Smoke a joint and think about it. Drop some LSD and think about it. Think about it with a hard-on. Think about it with a hangover. Consciousness is not simply a program running in the meatware computer of the brain. Consciousness arises in a biochemical matrix influenced by the endocrine system, sensory input, sex, drugs, and rock and roll, all of which and much more, operate via organs other than the brain. Moment-to-moment consciousness also operates at too great a speed to be anything short of an electronic-level phenomenon, let alone a program running on a clunky difference engine of simple neural connection alterations. If one must use a reductionist computer metaphor, think of long-term memory as stored on a hard disk, and consciousness as what’s up and running at a given moment in much faster RAM. What happens to the electronic pattern running in RAM if the power suddenly goes before it’s saved to disk? Anyone who’s had their system crash in the process writing their deathless prose before it could be saved to disk knows that, alas, it isn’t deathless after all, it’s gone forever. What happens to consciousness if you do likewise with the meatware it’s running on, say by slicing off your head and storing in the freezer? Right. Don’t try this at home. The reason I go into this briefly here–having gone into it in detail in a piece in Analog called "Psychesomics" two decades and more ago–is that several prominent science fiction writers are planning to do this. And The Spike promotes the notion, as does the movement it describes. The wife of an artist who shall mercifully be nameless once bemoaned to me that "sometimes I think my husband would rather be a brain in a bottle." This, alas, is a personality type all-too-prevalent among the science fiction readership, the sort of person who would seek transcendence not as a spiritual being within the real world of mass and energy but as a disembodied electronic clone in the virtual realm of the transhuman cybersphere on the other side of the Spike. "The road of excess leads to the Palace of Wisdom," declared the transcendentalist William Blake. And indeed it can. But take care, science fiction fans. Certain excessively obsessive roads can also lead to a clone of the Church of Scientology. A word to the wise: A "spike" is also a delivery system for heroin. |
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