ARTICLE ABSTRACTS
Cynthia Davidson
Riviera's Golem, Haraway's Cyborg: Reading Neuromancer
as Baudrillard's Simulation of Crisis
Abstract.--In Gibson's Neuromancer, Riviera and Case serve as
examples of two creators contrasted by Jean Baudrillard in "Simulacra and
Simulacrum": the specular, discursive representational artist, and the operational
adept who efficiently codes the machines which perform work that until recently would have
been performed by the specular, discursive imagination. Case and Riviera can be
categorized, respectively, as magicians who practice what William Covino has called
arresting and generative magic. Case is a cyberspace cowboy who steals or
"arrests" data, working for established power by operating technology, the
brainchild of science and corporate power-two voices which constitute official knowledge.
Riviera's holographic displays, on the other hand, recreate and disrupt the established
flow of events as they are generated by the articulate powers around him. Baudrillard's
four phases of the image mark a movement from arresting to generative magic, the most
dynamic of these being the second, ripe for a simulation of crisis. The conflict between
Molly and Riviera can be read as this kind, staged by the AIs, benefiting their final goal
of unifying to become the matrix, that most adept of all generative magicians. Molly
"arrests" Riviera's power by paralyzing him with poison--a simulated death.
Arthur B. Evans
Literary Intertexts in Jules Verne's Voyages Extraordinaires
Abstract.--The unique narrative recipe used by Jules Verne to create
his Voyages Extraordinaires is characterized not only by repeated reference to
the theories and discoveries of real scientists, geographers, historians, and explorers,
but also by a wide variety of purely literary intertexts--explicit or implicit
allusions to hundreds of authors and works from the "great works" of Western
literature. These literary references function so as to firmly anchor Verne's romans
scientifiques to a recognizable cultural tradition, thereby broadening Verne's own
literary authoritativeness by identifying his novels more closely with those of the
canonical literature(s) of his time. Verne's intertextuality takes many forms: overt
literary citations, passing authorial nods, thematic parallels, ideological biases, etc.
And the sources come from many historical periods, genres, and nationalities: e.g., from
Ovid and Virgil to Defoe and Dickens, and from Baudelaire and Victor Hugo to Goethe and
Hoffmann. But the works of three writers, in particular, appear to have exerted a powerful
influence on Verne and seem especially ubiquitous throughout the Voyage
Extraordinaires: James Fenimore Cooper, Sir Walter Scott, and Edgar Allan Poe.
Rafeeq O. McGiveron
Heinlein's Inhabited Solar System, 1940-1952
Abstract.--One aspect common to much of Robert A. Heinlein's early
work, from the FUTURE HISTORY stories
through the Scribners juveniles, is his depiction of a Solar System populated in the past
or the present by four different extraterrestrial civilizations. These worlds, some
extinct and some thriving, serve the purpose of humbling the brash young human species.
The self-destructive failures of Luna and Lucifer and the unexpected flourishing of Venus
and Mars remind us that humans still have far to progress both intellectually and morally.
Wendy Pearson
After the (Homo)Sexual: A Queer Analysis of Anti-Sexualityin Sheri S. Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country
Abstract..-- This article foregrounds the notion of subcultural
readings while at the same time interrogating the possibilities of locating and producing
"objective" readings, in particular those readings which depend on a
demonstration of authorial "intent." Siting itself within current work in Queer
Theory, the article problematizes readings of Sheri Tepper's Gate to Women's Country
as a feminist utopia by looking at the ways in which the text can be read as anti-sexual.
In identifying a climate within Women's Country which is both essentialist with
regard to gender and highly conflicted with regard to the idea of women's sexuality, the
article demonstrates the way in which female desire is diminished, controlled and
normatized. The production of a heteronormative discourse both within and without Women's
Country serves, in the end, only to focus the reader's attention on the
contradictions inherent in the imposition of a highly regulated heterosexuality on the
women in Women's Country. The elimination of choice parallels the elimination
within the text of the homosexual as both a potential identity for characters and as an
identity embodied within a single character. The article interrogates the text's anxiety
around the vanished figure of the homosexual which is present within Stavia's story and is
seen at its most glaring in the absence of the figure of Patroclus from the annual play
about Achilles that structures and reinforces the central paradigms of Women's
Country. Finally, the article asks whether it is possible in the age of AIDS to be
wholly accepting of a text that uses the dominant discourses of homophobia to create a
world after the homosexual, which is inevitably a world after the sexual.
[A response by Sylvia Kelso, and Wendy Pearson's
reply, appear in SFS 74 (March 1998)]
Timo Siivonen
Cyborgs and Generic Oxymorons: The Body and Technology in
William Gibson's Cyberspace Trilogy
Abstract. The essay discusses
the relationship between body and machine in William Gibson's Cyberspace trilogy. The
merging of the discourses deriving from the organic and technological worlds in Gibson's
texts creates a discursive tension that can be characterised as oxymoronic undecidability.
At the level of genre these tensions are articulated between the rational and
technological genre of science fiction and the corporeal genre of horror. This cyborg
discourse occurs, at the level of experience where man situates him/herself in relation to
his/her body and technology, as the tension between two world views, essentialism and
culturalism. The central argument of the essay is that Gibson's texts can't resolve these
tensions his texts articulate but, by forming generic hybrids, they problematize the
traditional Nature-Culture conflict and seek to find new signification practices to
conceptualize the new social and cultural space in modernity.
J.P. Telotte
Just Imagine-ing the Metropolis of Modern America
Abstract.--In his study of the cultural effects of technology, Robert
Romanyshyn argues that it produces a sense of "distance from matter," a
detachment from the everyday world we inhabit. We can observe both a consciousness of this
"distance," as well as two different attitudes towards it in several closely
related "utopian" films produced in the Machine Age. Fritz Lang's Metropolis
(1926) in various ways evokes that sense of distance in order to interrogate the
promise of a thoroughly technologized world. The result is what many see as the prototypic
dystopian film. Closely modeled on Metropolis in its visual design, the American
film Just Imagine (1930) similarly evokes distance, but with the aim of denying
the distancing, alienating effects of modern technology. Viewed together, these two
science-fiction films suggest the competing cultural attitudes towards science and
technology at work in Western society during the Machine Age.
Back to Home