THE TECHNOLOGY OF CONSENT: AMERICAN SCIENCE FICTION AND CULTURAL CRISIS IN THE 1980s

A Dissertation Submitted to the Committee on Graduate Studies in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Faculty of Arts and Science

TRENT UNIVERSITY

Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

(c) Copyright by Chad Andrews 2016

Cultural Studies Ph.D. Graduate Program

May 2016

ABSTRACT

The Technology of Consent: American Science Fiction and Cultural Crisis in the 1980s

Chad Andrews

The 1980s in the United States have come into focus as years of extensive ideological and socioeconomic fracture. A conservative movement arose to counter the progressive gains of previous decades, neoliberalism became the nation’s economic mantra, and détente was jettisoned in favour of military build-up. Such developments materialized out of a multitude of conflicts, a cultural crisis of ideas, perspectives, and words competing to maintain or rework the nation’s core structures.

In this dissertation I argue that alongside these conflicts, a crisis over technology and its ramifications played a crucial role as well, with the American public grasping for ways to comprehend a nascent technoculture. Borrowing from Andrew Feenberg, I define three broad categories of popular conceptualization used to comprehend a decade of mass technical and social transformations: the instrumental view, construing technology as a range of efficient tools; the substantive view, insisting technology is an environment that determines its subjects; and a critical approach, which recognized the capacity for technology to shape subjects, but also its potential to aid new social agendas.

Using Feenberg’s categories as interpretive lenses, I foreground these epistemologies in three of the decade’s most popular formations of literary science fiction (sf), and describe the broader discourses they participated in: military sf is connected to military strategy and weapons development (instrumental), cyberpunk to postmodernism and posthumanism (substantive), and feminist sf to feminist theory and politics (critical).

These were not just discursive trajectories, I claim, but vital contributors to the material

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construction of what Antonio Gramsci would call hegemonic and counterhegemonic formations. While the instrumental paradigm was part of the decade’s prevailing hegemonic make-up, substantive and critical discourses offered an alternative to the reality of cowboy militarism and unchecked technological expansion.

By engaging with the decade’s texts—from There Will Be War to RoboCop to “A

Cyborg Manifesto”—I hope to illuminate what I call the technology of consent, the significance of technological worldviews for modern technocultures, where such views are consented to by subaltern groups, and at the same time the existence of consent itself as a kind of complex social technology in the first place.

Keywords: Science Fiction, American History, American Culture, Technology, Instrumentalism, Substantivism, Critical Theory, Gramsci, Hegemony, Discourse, Military SF, Cyberpunk, Feminist SF

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I extend my deepest gratitude to Veronica Hollinger, Alan O’Connor, and Finis

Dunaway for their invaluable support in shaping this dissertation in particular, but also my thinking in general. Their guidance and critical insights are as much a part of this as anything else, though any shortcomings are entirely my own.

Extraordinary people stood beside me through the years of work that went into developing this study: my parents from the very start, and my wife Sasha most courageously through the entirety of the process. The final periods of feverish writing took place only steps away from our sleeping son, Seth, who was, and is, the greatest impetus of all.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Title Page i Abstract ii Acknowledgments iv Table of Contents v

INTRODUCTION: THE DRONE PARADOX 1

Technology as Cultural Crisis 8

CHAPTER ONE: MILITARY SF 28

1. The Strange Nexus of Military Sf 30 2. Genre, Discourse, Consent: The Many Lives of Military Sf 38 3. Hammer’s Slammers and the Theory of Instrumental Technology 52 4. Gramsci and the Technology of Consent 62

CHAPTER TWO: CYBERPUNK 71

1. RoboCop’s Horrific Visage 76 2. Literary Histories and Postmodern Entanglements 85 3. Language and Experience in William Gibson’s Early Stories 102 4. Feedback Loops 111

CHAPTER THREE: FEMINIST SF 119

1. An Uncomfortable Decade: Feminism, Fiction, and Fracture 124 2. By Ones and Twos: A History of Feminist Sf 135 3. WMDs, Uterine Replicators, and Critical Theory in Lois McMaster Bujold 148 4. Haraway’s Manifesto, the Indeterminate Future, and Split Consciousness 160

CONCLUSION: THE CYBORG PARADOX 171

Towards a Sublime Politics of Sf 178

NOTES 184

WORKS CITED 198

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INTRODUCTION: THE DRONE PARADOX

You might think of it as a big, super-fancy, remote-controlled model airplane,” the lieutenant colonel said. “You couldn’t be more wrong. Gentlemen, what you are looking at is the future of modern warfare.” (Martin 18)

A paradox inheres at the heart of modern technological warfare. Although on display in most instances of contemporary conflict, it is perhaps nowhere more apparent than with the United States’ deployment of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs)—state-of-the- art “drones” involved in reconnaissance and active engagement while the “pilot” operates the controls at a distance, often thousands of miles away—in Somalia, Pakistan,

Afghanistan, Iraq, and other contested territories.1 In an era of unimpeded technological expansion, the phenomenon of drone warfare is compelling for any number of reasons, demanding assessment from not only the higher echelons of military policy (where the baseline reasoning seems to be that UAVs are “the future of modern warfare,” consequences be damned), but from a range of competing perspectives. The most obvious question: what, precisely, does warfare become (and what purpose does it serve) when the flesh-and-blood soldier is subtracted from it? Less obvious, perhaps: to what extent, if at all, is it inevitable that the technology of drone warfare expands beyond the purview of its mostly American exclusivity? These and other questions are to varying degrees intertwined with the notion of a modern technological paradox, one captured by the phenomenon of the drone.

As with any paradox, one involving the drone results from the combination of two mutually exclusive statements. First, the drone represents a fully controllable form of technology, one capable of being deployed without inaugurating widespread consequences in other spheres of human life. The almost complete lack of official

2 discourse surrounding the implications of drone technologies is testament to this unquestioning belief in controllability. As the crowning achievement in the long succession of weapons designed to calculate and optimize conflict, the drone represents the pinnacle of precision warfare.2 Designed with a specific, rational purpose in mind and guided by trained, proficient operators, it achieves a level of meticulous exactitude that places it above more rudimentary tools of warfare. This almost one-to-one control is certainly one factor that leads many UAV “pilots” to cultivate a belief in their own omnipotence, as Lt. Col. Matt J. Martin, responsible for the opening epigraph, suggests in his firsthand account of drone piloting: “Sometimes I felt like God hurling thunderbolts from afar” (3).

But beyond this operational precision the drone is accompanied by an unquestioning belief in its ability to not produce radical social and cultural upheavals (a different kind of precision altogether). From this perspective the drone is an advanced instrument that functions within its original parameters without contributing to unforeseen technological, cultural, economic, etc., transformations. It therefore encapsulates what Andrew

Feenberg calls “the neutrality of technology” in Transforming Technology (2002), a concept emerging from “the commonsense idea that technologies are ‘tools’ standing ready to serve the purposes of their users. Technology is deemed ‘neutral,’ without valuative content of its own” (5).

The drone is “neutral” and “without valuative content” because its designers and operators are solely responsible for deciding its purpose; as a neutral tool, the drone is not intrinsically predisposed to this or that end, but is rather “indifferent to the variety of ends

3 it can be employed to achieve” (Feenberg, Transforming 5). For Feenberg, the insistence on indifference and neutrality belongs to the “instrumental view” of technology.

But secondly, the phenomenon of remote-controlled drone conflict is fully uncontrollable. As with the drone’s instrumental function as a tool of precision warfare, this uncontrollability is apparent on the day-to-day operational level as well. The technology itself, the specific configuration of technical elements and their potential functions (in the most general sense, the blueprint or design) gets reconfigured, transmuted, and redirected towards any number of divergent and unpredicted applications. The company behind one of the American military’s most trusted robotic systems, the PackBot, a system primarily used for bomb disposal, later developed the

Roomba using an earlier blueprint for a military robot, the Roomba being the robotic vacuum cleaner that dutifully, autonomously, and unquestioningly inhales the dirt from the floors of millions of homes across the globe (Singer 22). While the military drone may be controlled with a level of precision unheard of in previous conflicts, the technology behind the drone is far from predictable or controllable in any reliable way.

In a more general sense (that is, beyond this operational level), the deployment of drone technology is uncontrollable because the technology itself is less tool-like (as the instrumental view would have it) and more environment-like. From this perspective the drone takes on the dimension of a context or reality that escapes the purview of human desire. The most apparent example is a hypothetical one: the possibility that a paradigm of drone warfare produces a new context wherein the nations responsible for pioneering the technology are plagued by the ever-present threat of the creations they so enthusiastically sent to operate in foreign domains. According to this account, the drone

4 is first and foremost included in a broader technological framework or environment. By this logic, the V-2 rocket is the expanding domain of rocket warfare, the atomic bomb is the Cold War, and the drone is the emerging environment of “unmanned” drone conflict.

It is in this sense that the drone is fully uncontrollable.

Feenberg associates these environment-like characteristics of technology with the

“substantive view,” a theory in opposition to the instrumental account. Substantivism’s central insight is that:

technology constitutes a new cultural system that restructures the entire social world as an object of control. This system is characterized by an expansive dynamic that ultimately overtakes every pretechnological enclave and shapes the whole of social life. Total instrumentalization is thus a destiny from which there is no escape other than retreat. (Feenberg, Transforming 7)

Far from being neutral, then, technology is intrinsically biased, and is essentially inclined to restructure existing social and cultural forms according to an instrumental dynamic.

This particular version of the substantive theory is for Feenberg closely associated with the works of Jacques Ellul and Martin Heidegger, who in different but relatable ways provide theories that link technology to forms of instrumental rationality.

With Ellul this association hinges on what he calls “technique.” The material instruments and tools of technology are only the most obvious example of this, but in the modern age machinery is in fact secondary to the technical methods and processes that determine not only technological development but social structure in general. Technique is characterized accordingly as the “totality of methods rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity”

(Ellul xxv). While it is true that “Technique certainly began with the machine” (Ellul 3), the collection of rationalized, dehumanizing social practices that distinguish modern

5 societies has grown to account for much of what we typically consider “technical phenomena.” The various manifestations of technique (economic, organizational, human) that Ellul describes in The Technological Society (1964) are outside the focus of this project, but in general the following summary is fair: with the introduction of machines, society becomes more and more machine-like, emphasizing precision and rationalized order in all its aspects. This happens to such an extreme degree that, at least in modern societies, the material machines become secondary to the social forms/practices they originally helped shape. To say that technology is a tool we control is therefore fundamentally problematic; instead, it becomes necessary to think of technology primarily as the collective technical practices that systematically organize modern technological societies.

Heidegger similarly resists a straightforward instrumental account, an opposition he makes clear in the opening portions of “The Question Concerning Technology” (1954):

“Everywhere we remain unfree and chained to technology, whether we passionately affirm or deny it. But we are delivered over to it in the worst possible way when we regard it as something neutral (italics mine)” (4). As his celebrated paper makes clear, the instrumental picture of technology as a collection of neutral tools is only one aspect of a much broader technical phenomenon. If our conception is limited to instrumentality we ignore the process of “enframing” that positions the natural world as a means-to-an-end, or, as Heidegger puts it, “standing-reserve.” Here, technology’s “essence” is revealed as a perceptual or epistemological mode (enframing) that treats the world as a reservoir of objects (standing-reserve) awaiting control.3 While Ellul’s focus is on collective social practices, Heidegger’s is on the epistemological framework that facilitates the systematic

6 ordering of the natural world along mechanical lines (including the ordering of human beings); this framework provides “the way in which the real reveals itself as standing- reserve” (Heidegger 12). With both Heidegger and Ellul it is clear that a one-sided description that exclusively emphasizes technology’s tool-like existence is called into question.

Feenberg’s analysis positions other thinkers under the “substantivist” rubric as well.

Herbert Marcuse’s conception of “technological rationality” in One-Dimensional Man

(1964) insists that the forms of control that such rationalization enables are “not simply an extrinsic purpose served by neutral systems and machines but internal to their very structure” (Feenberg, Transforming 66). As evidenced by his example of the Panopticon,

Michel Foucault’s analysis of power/knowledge systems suggests that technology is predisposed to assisting emerging authoritarian structures, and “is just one among many similar mechanisms of social control … all having asymmetrical effects on social power”

(Feenber, Transforming 68). And in various works Marx, the “first serious student of resistance to modern technology” (Feenberg, Transforming 23), offers a picture of unchecked technological production and the inequalities it inevitably produces, such that

“everywhere technology goes, centralized, hierarchical social structures follow”

(Feenberg, Transforming 24).4

The common thread tying these theories of technology together is their insistence on some form of technological bias. Whether that bias takes the form of “a kind of materialized metaphysics” (Transforming 82), as Feenberg claims is the case with Ellul and Heidegger, or whether it functions less formally/metaphysically as a social configuration imposed on material objects (Transforming 78), as he claims is the case

7 with Bruno Latour, substantivism emphasizes the intrinsic properties of technology that, regardless of the intentions of creators and operators, unequivocally affect (in some cases) or determine (in others) overarching social structures. As Feenberg proposes: “the technical order is more than a sum of tools and in fact structures the world regardless of users’ intentions. In choosing our technology we become what we are, which in turn shapes our future choices” (Transforming 14).

The overview of instrumentalism and substantivism provided in Transforming

Technology can function as a generalized map of technological theory. Although theorists of technology present a range of idiosyncratic views, the categories are intended generalizations that can encompass a range and diversity of such discourses. Feenberg’s binary is therefore productive in terms of its ability to organize a complex history of ways of thinking about technology.

For Feenberg, however, the instrumental/substantive binary is not totalizing (though it does capture a broad range of theories), and a number of alternative accounts, often mixing elements from the instrumental and substantive toolsets, have emerged to find a way out from the specific determinisms they produce. In instrumentalism, technology is reduced to a selection of useful devices, and subjects of technoculture are determined to use them as such, while in substantivism, technology evolves as a crippling and incomprehensible technicism that determines the subjects in its grip, often in unimaginable ways. Feenberg’s own escape from these delimiting approaches and their corresponding determinisms is the formulation of what he calls a critical theory of technology, where new values and perspectives can reconfigure both technical systems and the social realities they help configure. This approach is balanced somewhere

8 between the instrumental/substantive binary, utilizing aspects from both to emphasize the indeterminate state of technology, where technology engages in a co-determining dynamic with its social horizon, and where radical alterations to either can generate democratic alternatives.

With Feenberg’s critical theory in mind, the phenomenon of the modern drone and the resulting paradox becomes clear, although the necessary conclusion is that it is not a paradox at all. It is resolved, in fact, when one thinks of the instrumental/substantive binary as epistemological rather than metaphysical—in other words, when the binary hinges on one’s point of view or interpretative framework. As discussed, Feenberg prescribes a middle-ground that utilizes elements from both perspectives to contend that

“the degradation of labor, education, and the environment is rooted not in technology per se but in the antidemocratic values that govern technological development”

(Transforming 3). Regardless, the “paradox” of the drone serves as a reminder that the technologies of modern society continue to exist simultaneously as both individual things and overarching constructs, depending on one’s paradigm. Considering the apotheosis of accelerated technical transformation as a defining feature of technological modernity, the process of critically evaluating these views takes on the status of an absolute necessity.

Technology as Cultural Crisis

The production of different modes of imagining technology is hardly limited to the sphere of academic and intellectual theorization. Instead, it is important to note that these views are articulated across a vast and complex web of interweaving social discourses emanating from individuals who live within the overarching reach of modern technoculture, and who on a day-to-day basis utilize the products of the advanced

9 industrial world. I argue that given the technologically-saturated nature of so-called democratic societies—cultures wherein the prevalence of automated drone warfare is relegated to the status of a mundane banality—the manners in which we think about technology take on an abnormally valorized character, often determining corresponding attitudes and positions—political, cultural, and otherwise. In technologically advanced societies, the way we imagine technology is fundamentally constitutive of the shape our technological society takes.

The aim of this dissertation is to frame the contours and complexities of three popular ways of thinking about technology that took hold in the United States in the 1980s, and to provide some insight into the cultural and historical developments they engaged with.

These concepts surfaced in any number of cultural practices and narratives, but my focus here will be on their manifestation in three popular formations of American science fiction (sf) produced and consumed that decade: military sf, cyberpunk, and feminist sf— arguably the most identifiable strains in the 1980s. This is of course not to say that sf narratives were the site for the production and dissemination of predominant concepts of the technical sphere; these subgenres did, however, participate in larger formations of discursive interaction and assessment, contributing in significant ways to the formulation of popular beliefs. With the benefit of decades of critical hindsight, it can be seen that they did so within one of the country’s more socially tumultuous eras, with a mass of economic, technological, and cultural transformations occurring side-by-side to shape the contours of one another, as well as set the conditions of life for so many Americans, often in traumatic and volatile ways.

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Such political and ideological instabilities are the focus of Daniel T. Rodgers’ Age of

Fracture (2011), wherein he posits the existence of wide-ranging upheavals, ruptures, and displacements characterizing the last quarter of the twentieth century in the United

States. For Rodgers, the “age of fracture” begins with the national economic crisis of the

1970s, and reaches its end with the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center. Its three- decade duration, one fraught with conflicting national interests, new understandings of self and society, competing political theories, reappraisals and rejections of established economic principles, reinvigorations of international tensions, etc., marks the age as an exceptional period of social turmoil and widespread uncertainty.

Three primary causes are established in Rodgers’ prologue. First, there was a fundamental shift in the national “core psyche and character,” often resulting in “a collapse of faith in public institutions, a pell-mell, selfish rush into a myriad of private lifestyle communities” (Rodgers 6). There was a renewed focus, in other words, on the individual and her personal interests, a focus in line with the forms of fierce individualism and self-seeking normally associated with neoliberal attitudes under

Reagan’s presidency. Second, Rodgers distinguishes the emergence of a conservative

“counterintelligentsia,” citing significant developments such as “the law and economics movement in the legal faculties, the hardening terms of debate over policy toward the poor, the creation of the Federalist Society … and the elaboration of a neoconservative foreign policy” (8). For the first time in decades, an explicitly conservative agenda was taking hold in universities and academic journals—and it was gathering a following. And lastly, Rodgers foregrounds transformations in the “deep structures of the late-capitalist economy,” highlighting a transitional period after the 1970s economic crisis that saw “the

11 collapse of the high-wage, high-benefits ‘Fordist’ economy that had dominated post-

World War II American society” (8).

Rodgers’ three “causes”—one cultural, one political, and one economic—support an insight central to our present concerns, namely, that the 1980s were a site of intense social and intellectual reappraisal and reassessment, wherein new (often radical) conceptualizations of social existence and national purpose interacted and competed in often volatile arrangements—a tumultuous war of ideas and paradigms resulting in nothing less than a cultural crisis. As Rodgers contends, the 1980s cannot be defined by a single, overarching conservative worldview. Reagan’s neoconservative resurgence may have dominated the decade, but the era was one of intellectual and ideological fracture, not cohesion. It is no accident, then, that in America the term “culture war” entered into popular use in the early 1990s. It was in 1991 that, reflecting on years of social unrest,

James Davidson Hunter published Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America, looking at the historical roots of various crises in education, religion, law, economics, politics, technology, morality, and so on, all bubbling to the surface in one of the country’s most tumultuous periods. “America is in the midst,” Hunter asserts, “of a culture war that has and will continue to have reverberations not only within public policy but within the lives of ordinary Americans everywhere” (34).

The underlying conditions for the era’s volatilities are, for Rodgers, largely structural and macroeconomic (the slow evaporation of the Fordist economy, for instance), but the brilliance of his history is revealed in the way he connects these structural shifts to their very human effects, and to the specific policies that helped fuel them. As he makes clear in relation to the era’s increases in poverty and income disparity, “Whereas the structural

12 trend toward increased inequality was gradual and went for a long time unobserved, the crises in the lives of the urban poor were public and dramatic” (Rodgers 199). Their lives were dramatically tangled in the wake of an inequitable redistribution of wealth, one where “Wealth generation became more and more concentrated at the top, where wealth already existed”; on top of this, “The trends combined to widen the gap between the richest and the poorest fifths of the population each year almost without interruption from

1971 until the mid-1990s” (Rodgers 199), a gap resulting in poverty not seen since the

1930s:

new armies of the homeless that seemed suddenly to materialize in every major city in the early 1980s, sleeping in doorways, camped under elevated highways, spreading their temporary cardboard shelters over office tower heating grates … Not since the Depression had the least-advantaged Americans been so starkly visible to the rest. (Rodgers 199)

To help justify this, the American media, largely in its conservative guise, adopted and reframed terms such as “underclass” in an effort to disregard the less advantaged and implicate them in their own suffering.

For Rodgers, such a discursive reconceptualization of poverty largely materialized after the New York City riots of 1977, which to the American press “seemed maddeningly difficult to explain,” and to a vocal subset “gleeful and shameless” (200).

The media’s portrayal on television screens of rioters as selfish and uncivilized profiteers, not ostracized and exploited citizens engaging in political rebellion, exemplifies Jean

Baudrillard’s distress, in Simulacra and Simulation, over the televised image’s emptying of political value from resistance, which is now broadcast in a frenzied stream of images cut loose from any underlying meaning. Rodgers also points to Bennett Harrison and

Barry Bluestone’s The Great U-Turn (1980), a book associating income disparity with

13 the disappearance of labour unions amidst a fluid and global market rendering them increasingly ineffectual. The authors ultimately propose that Reagan’s neoliberal economic policies, introduced in the early 80s and extended throughout the decade, fuelled a broadening gap between rich and poor, one that would propel members of the middle class into poverty and many of the already-poor into deteriorating conditions.

As David Harvey explains in his A Brief History of Neoliberalism (2005), the solidification of neoliberalism as the new global economic paradigm, one committed to deregulation at all costs and the view that “the social good will be maximized by maximizing the reach and frequency of market transactions” (Harvey 3), had a number of disastrous consequences (though Harvey is careful to point to positive contributions as well). The diminution of a social safety net, a widening of income disparity, and the slow erosion of traditional relations of labour (through deunionization, for instance) are only a few examples, with the latter “curbed or dismantled within a particular state (by violence if necessary)” so that “the individualized and relatively powerless worker then confronts a labour market in which only short-term contracts are offered on a customized basis”

(Harvey 168).

Citing construction as one sector among many affected by a transformation of labour, in 1986 Mike Davis would contend that “the momentum toward deunionization has increased under Reagan, as the volume of non-union plant construction has quadrupled from 1970s levels” (145). Without the resources or the backing to assert themselves against growing hostilities, workers and unions were mostly helpless, forced to sit through a presidency that “witnessed a decline in the density of unionization that was unprecedented in the postwar experience of any OECD nation” (Davis 145). Davis’ book,

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Prisoners of the American Dream: Politics and Economy in the History of the US

Working Class (1986), goes on to quantify the startling drop in nationwide union density, which drastically outpaced international trends beginning in 1965, and accelerated alarmingly in the 1980s under Reagan, whose “sweeping privatization of public services” threatened even the relatively strong unions at the state level (148). With union-busting becoming a common practice and privatization filling the gaps left in its wake, Davis’ insistence that Reaganism emerged as a kind of world-ending calamity for the American left is hardly a stretch: “Like some shaggy beast of the apocalypse, Reaganism hunkered out of the Sunbelt, devouring liberal senators and Great Society programs in its path”

(157).

With such transformations and ideological ruptures in mind, Baudrillard’s adoption of a nihilistic stance at the close of 1981’s Simulacra and Simulation is an appropriate inauguration for the decade: “I am a terrorist and nihilist in theory as the others are with their weapons. Theoretical violence, not truth, is the only resource left us” (163). While he suggests—obliquely, of course—the value of political subversion (in the form of nihilism) and the potential for theoretical insight to challenge hegemony, such optimism is immediately withdrawn, for as he states, “such a sentiment is utopian” (Simulacra

163). His reversion to hopelessness, one implying the impotency of even “theoretical violence,” is predicated on what he believes is the reign of mediated reality, a “reality” that transforms political and cultural resistance, once forceful and subversive, into ephemeral images on a screen:

There is no longer a stage, not even the minimal illusion that makes events capable of adopting the force of reality—no more stage either of mental or political solidarity: what do Chile, Biafra, the boat people, Bologna, or Poland

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matter? All of that comes to be annihilated on the television screen. (Baudrillard, Simulacra 164)

While the specificity of Baudrillard’s hopelessness is open to debate (and interpretation), it is perhaps justified by the accelerated intensification of technological development and media-saturation in today’s era, along with the ceaseless continuance of instrumentalism as a reigning paradigm in the West (as illustrated by the predominance of the drone)— such perpetuations perhaps force one to acknowledge the unique aptitude for modern capitalist and technoscientific frameworks to perpetuate themselves.

In the first half of the twentieth century, Marxist thinkers were compelled to admit the failure of Marx’s theory of capitalism’s inevitable demise. His prediction was that capitalism’s inherent structures would eventually fuel its own collapse: the relations of production (the social, economic, and technological relations that bind individuals together) were in increasing tension with the forces of production (the human labour, tools, land, and infrastructure society draws on), and the disharmony would become socially untenable as the latter outgrow the strictures of the former. Advances in industrialization, for instance, were supposed to create larger masses of alienated workers, preparing the ground for eventual revolt against capitalism’s now-archaic productive relations. Marx and Engels believed they saw the beginnings of this unravelling with the European revolutions of 1848, but were of course disappointed by the outcome.

In the 1930s, philosophers associated with the “Frankfurt School,” particularly Max

Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, developed the theoretical apparatus to explain capitalism’s prolongation into the twentieth century. For them, the rise of Nazism provided a powerful example of how individuals and governments could extend the life

16 of failing socioeconomic systems through fascist intervention; and across the Atlantic, they saw new forms of consumerism thriving in America, with a “culture industry” churning out products designed to manipulate the masses into passivity. That same decade, while imprisoned by Mussolini’s fascist regime, Gramsci would argue that the spectre of capitalism continued to haunt the industrialized West because, at the level of culture, subaltern groups were consenting to the hegemonic values and mores pervading daily life within the pages of newspapers and novels, on the stages of theatre, in the seminar rooms of universities, and in the churches of Roman Catholicism.

But were the 1980s in America wholly defined by such structures? Certainly not. A brief, somewhat arbitrary survey provides any number of examples: the June 1982 anti- nuclear and anti-arms race demonstration in New York’s Central Park, consisting of over one million protestors; the continuation of the cultural struggles over gender and race identity, with the old essentialisms continuing to be scrutinized and combated; the continued rise, in academia, of postmodernism and post-structuralism as dominant theoretical paradigms in the humanities, with theorists such as Jacques Derrida, Antonio

Negri, Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, Jean Baudrillard, and Donna Haraway providing often vehement critiques of global capitalism, popular culture, and the complex, ever- shifting systems of power operating in modern society; and, as often cited, the materialization of countercultures and subaltern groups associated with popular cultural movements such as “punk” and “hip hop,” critical voices unified by their dissatisfactions with a capitalist system beyond recourse or repeal. All of which (including much more) point to a fundamentally fractured and unstable socio-cultural environment.5

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But where does technology fit into this picture of a cultural crisis, and to what extent does a dominant conception of technological instrumentalism play a role? Often sidelined in Rodgers’ analysis (his focus is on mapping an intellectual history), technology in the

1980s constituted a prevalent and immediate concern. The personal computer began to make the transition from a hobbyists’ toy to a common household necessity and international phenomenon, radically reworking the structures and habits of private and interpersonal life. The January 1983 cover of Time magazine declares the computer the

“Machine of the Year,” and features a bald, middle-aged man staring at the imposing machine on his work desk—his environment is in bold primaries, suddenly alive, while he remains essentially colourless.6 Although what we know of as the modern internet or

World Wide Web would not be commercialized until the 1990s, the first internet service providers began staking their claims and offering access to various services in the mid-

80s. Popular videogames, portable music devices, and consumer videocassette recorders

(VCRs) expanded into the purview of everyday existence. Consumer electronics, once the domain of large, clumsy, high-end machines too expensive for middle-class families, began producing more intimate technologies intended for personal enjoyment. Smaller synthesizers allowed musicians to arrange compositions from the privacy of their homes.

These technologies imply a general move away from the imposing machines that, while certainly present, always existed in some vague “outside”—a non-invasive space capable of maintaining clear distinctions between social reality and the technology it employs. Technology had of course already offered its services in the domestic sphere (in fact, modern domesticity is predicated on technological development—electricity, for example), but the range of developments in the 1980s suggests an overwhelming

18 incursion of more invasive, personalized technologies, and in line with this a general shift away from the view of technology and culture as separate entities and towards an emerging and inevitable technocultural fusion.

With the miniaturization of computer technology imprinting new ways of organizing, recording, and networking onto daily life, such a shift was certainly apparent at the personal or private level: in 1986 K. Eric Drexler, a visionary of nanotechnology and transhumanism, would write that “Our microelectronic technology has managed to stuff machines as powerful as the room-sized computers of the early 1950s onto a few silicon chips in a pocket-sized computer” (4). But at the same time, Americans were forced, quite suddenly, to grapple with emerging techno-realities at the public level as well, which manifested in new or continued transformations in labour, economics, urban development (or decline), foreign policy, geopolitics, military technology, and more.

The impact of neoliberal policies on unions, social programs, and labour relations has been mentioned already. But to facilitate the coordinated flow of digitized capital, such policies required immense communication networks extending globally, with banks and governments holding in place an abstract market of rapid and continuous transactions.

The infrastructure for such a network was laid before the 1980s, but it advanced tremendously within the system of pan-capitalism solidified by policies introduced under

Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. Tied to this was a corresponding shift in production towards automation and technical knowledge, with specialized craftsmanship receding even further into the background in favour of flexible knowledges and skillsets capable of evolving in shifting, deterritorialized milieus. The Fordist model was being replaced, in other words, with the new paradigm of “immaterial labour” that Antonio Negri and

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Michael Hardt describe in Multitude (2004), where workers are constantly plugged into the technologies of work, whether at home or in the office, such that work time and leisure time blur beyond distinction, and where the production of immaterial goods

(ideas, images, relationships) is ceaseless, regardless of location or time: “the production of ideas, images, knowledges, communication, cooperation, and affective relations, tends to create not the means of social life but social life itself” (146). Neoliberalism emerged as a form of technocapitalism in these two distinct but related ways, then: it was a system that relied on advanced communication technologies, as well as one involving technological reconfigurations of the forms and products of labour.

Quite often, the headlong rush into these new modes of production and work left the sites of the older forms in ruins. As markets expanded worldwide and manufactures evacuated for cheaper labour and less regulation, many of the once-mighty strongholds of

American production transmogrified over the course of the decade into husks of their former selves. Detroit is the most striking example. The downward trajectory of the city’s automotive industry, previously the epicenter of car production, had been evident for over a decade, likely since the 1967 riots, but in the 1980s the stark contrast between the burgeoning technoscientific fields of computer and weapons development, for instance, housed in the pristine halls of the IBMs and Lockheed Martins of the world, and the abandoned and dilapidated factories of America’s Motor City reached new heights. The lumbering machinery of automotive production had given way, elsewhere, to the malleability of silicon, or to the sophistication of avionics and stealth technology. As affluent white families fled for the outer suburbs, the city itself transformed, leaving blacks to contend with violent gangs and an epidemic of crack cocaine—the city was

20 eventually designated the most dangerous in the country. Largescale manufacturing of course continued as a viable industry, but in Detroit a form of technological crisis was acute, and a vision of urban-industrial ruin unfolded dramatically.

Writing in 2015, Dora Apel claims that Detroit became a symbol of industrial ruin in general, and of the catastrophic failures of modern industrial states: “it is,” she states, “at the center of a vast network of ruin images, making the former Motor City the poster child of ruination in the advanced capitalist countries today” (4). Set in a devastated, near-future Detroit, the 1987 film RoboCop is certainly part of that network, and is discussed at length in the second chapter of this project (though the focus there is on a particular image of technological horror).

As suggested, deindustrialization in Detroit and other American cities was mirrored inversely in advanced military production, which accelerated in the wake of Reagan’s efforts to apply pressure to the Soviet machine. In the late 70s Lockheed Martin’s infamous and top-secret Skunk Works division designed and tested what would become known as the F-117 Nighthawk, or commonly the “Stealth Bomber,” a novel assemblage of wedges and hard angles that effectively—and for the American military, triumphantly—deflected enemy radar, rendering the craft “invisible.” Made operational in the early 80s, here was a work of ingenuity that, unlike the automobile, could not be replicated or surpassed in Japan or elsewhere, and whose manufacturing could not be exported. It was also representative of the impact of automation and computer technology on military systems. In his 1994 memoir, Ben Rich, the Director of Skunk Works through the 1980s, extols the level of computer automation at work in the F-117:

The pilot tells the flight control system what he wants it to do just by normal flying: maneuvering the throttle and foot pedals directing the control surfaces.

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The electronics will move the surfaces the way the pilot commands, but often the system will automatically override him and do whatever it has to do to keep the system on track and stable without the pilot even being aware of it. Our airplane was a triumph of computer technology. Without it, we could not even taxi straight. (46)

The Nighthawk would become a symbol of American military innovation and of a high- tech, surreptitious approach to war: if the enemy cannot see you, the battlefield is fundamentally altered, laden with potential.

The wonders of technoscientific progress loomed large in the American consciousness, then, but they did so against the backdrop of the Cold War, which in the

1980s continued to evoke anxiety, even horror, over the potential for thermonuclear exchange. In her landmark study of American families during the Cold War, Homeward

Bound (1988), Elaine Tyler May shows that while containment was a key foreign policy doctrine in the 40s and 50s (containment of the Soviet threat outside America’s borders), it also operated as a central principle in the formation and perpetuation of nuclear families in white suburbia. Insulated safely within the walls of the modern home, and kept comfortable by the wonders of abundance and domestic technology, the hazards of communism and sexual aberration at home, as well as the Cold War abroad, could be

“contained,” kept apart, quarantined: “The domestic ideology emerged as a buffer against those disturbing political and sexual tendencies” (May 13).

May also posits that the ideology of domestic containment, one centered on technological progress and conservative values, re-emerged forcefully in the 70s and 80s as, once again, “the best means to achieve national and personal security” (17). It is fair to conclude that along these lines, a crisis, at least partially technological in nature, was forcing Americans to return to the comfortable structures of the past. May’s insights also

22 suggest the manner in which the private and public spheres overlapped in significant and complex ways; a technological crisis may have been apparent in the discourses and technologies of Cold War containment (containment of the Soviet threat by shielding the

United States beneath a network of defense satellites, for instance), but it manifested in unique and related ways in the daily lives of individual Americans as well.

A transformed technical landscape was coming into view, then, and it extended from the soft glow of the personal computer to the fiery spectre of the Cold War. It was met by a mad rush to comprehend it, with new understandings of technology and technological existence sketched out en masse. In 1981, for instance, Jean Baudrillard published the previously mentioned Simulacra and Simulation, an account of digitized existence in the postmodern era, an era characterized by the erosion of previous understandings of “the real.” In their place a new paradigm of “hyperreality” emerges without origin or original, a vast promulgation of simulations, signs, models, and imagery which compose an environment effectively more real than real: “A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary, leaving room only for the orbital recurrence of models and for the simulated generation of differences”

(Baudrillard, Simulacra 2-3).

In 1985 Donald Mackenzie and Judy Wajcman released the influential The Social

Shaping of Technology, an anthology featuring papers by authors as diverse as Donna

Haraway, Shirley Strum/Bruno Latour, and William Brian Arthur, all of which explore the influence of social processes on technological development. The text would go on to be foundational for the science, technology and society (STS) programs coming to prominence.

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In the same year Donna Haraway published “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science,

Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” her attempt to

“build an ironic political myth faithful to feminism, socialism, and materialism” (149).

The now-famous text uses the cyborg as a mythic figure capable of representing social and physical existence beyond the archaisms of religious thought (the Garden of Eden), the essentialisms of psychology (the oedipal myth), and the binary simplifications of humanist philosophy (human/animal, nature/culture, etc.). Haraway proposes that

“Cyborg imagery can suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves” and the manifesto concludes with the socialist-feminist dream of technological existence removed from feminist stereotypes: “I would rather be a cyborg than a goddess” (181).

As a cultural movement, “transhumanism” would make its mark by offering a conceptual framework promoting the benefits of physical and psychological modification of the human form. In cybernetics, “new cybernetics” continued from the 70s as a commentary on classical models, attempting to comprehend the dynamic feedback linking technical systems to the individuals who manufacture and observe them, a form of “second order cybernetics” occupied with questioning its own practice. With the publication of Drexler’s Engines of Creation: The Coming Era of Nanotechnology

(1986), quoted above in relation to computer miniaturization, nanotechnology would capture the popular imagination to such an extent that almost two decades later Prince

Charles would ask the Royal Society to analyze the risks associated with what was, and continues to be, a thoroughly speculative technology. After Engines of Creation Drexler

24 would go on to found The Foresight Institute, an organization interested in the development of transformative technologies in line with transhumanist ideals.7

More than anything else, these and a multitude of other developments point to a widespread reconceptualization of traditional understandings in the face of an emerging paradigm shift. Indeed, it is fair to conclude that something similar to what Roger

Luckhurst describes as a “technocultural conjuncture” coalesced in the decade: a complex intersection of diverse developments in politics, culture, science, and elsewhere that

“attests to the radical redefinition of the relation between the human and the technological” (91). Whereas Luckhurst’s conjuncture occurs after the 1945 atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, perhaps we can point to a second conjuncture appearing in the 1980s as a response to a looming technological landscape.

In his preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology (1986), popular sf writer

Bruce Sterling attempts to diagnose the crystallization of this landscape:

Technology itself has changed. Not for us the giant steam-snorting wonders of the past: the Hoover Dam, the Empire State Building, the nuclear power plant. Eighties tech sticks to the skin, responds to the touch: the personal computer, the Sony Walkman, the portable telephone, the soft contact lens. (xiii)

The penetration of technology into the province of everyday life was a defining feature of the period, and though technology has always had an impact on human existence, it suddenly became impossible, at least in America, to consider this in the abstract. In the

1980s Americans took the headlong dive—nothing less than a profound leap of faith— into the dizzying world of advanced technocultural transformation, shattering any semblance of ontological separation between the human and technological spheres. If there was a cultural crisis in the 1980s, a conflict of new understandings and modes of thought, a significant element of that crisis was oriented towards this new technological

25 horizon. It makes sense, then, to pinpoint one crisis (among many) as a thoroughly technological one, and to read in the 1980s the existence of technology as a form of cultural crisis: a frenetic scramble to work out new systems to describe and comprehend the emerging technocultural terrain.

In the chapters that follow, a series of literary sf and discursive formations will be described, with emphasis placed on their principal understandings of technology and their contributions to a technocultural crisis: military sf is the focus of chapter 1, and is connected to a discursive arc in military strategy and policy, the resulting formation rising as the dominant conception; in chapter 2, cyberpunk is shown to have overlapped significantly with postmodern and posthuman engagements; and in chapter 3 feminist sf is placed in parallel with concerns, naturally, that spun out of a newly formulated feminist politics and theory. Using Feenberg’s categories of technological conceptualization as a kind of interpretive lens, I propose that these literary groupings and their broader discursive fields can be associated with instrumentalism (military sf), substantivism

(cyberpunk), and Feenberg’s own critical theory of technology (feminist sf), and that in historical terms they became integrated into the political structures of the decade, either contributing to the hegemonic norm, as instrumentalism did, or offering alternative and counterhegemonic conceptions in conflict with that norm, as was the case with substantivism and something approximating Feenberg’s critical theory. This alignment with Feenberg’s categories is undoubtedly too neat, though, and there are a number of qualifications or hesitations which mark the gaps between this theoretical framework and my reading of the conceptions and texts themselves, which were intricate, polyvocal, and resistant to easy taxonomies. These gaps will be measured along the way.

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The focus on structures of hegemony and counterhegemony will here function as an overarching theoretical framework, one relying on Antonio Gramsci’s specific use of the concepts/terms. In relation to the instrumental view as it materialized in American military sf, my contention—and the thesis of the first chapter—is that it helped shape the dominant imaginative framework of technology and its social impacts during the 1980s.

That conception?—that technology exists as a fundamentally neutral, tool-like collection of objects capable of being guided by rational, autonomous agents without unforeseen consequences. In Gramscian terms, then, instrumentalism can be said to have coalesced as the hegemonic conception and material formation, defining what I would like to call the technology of consent: the specific picture of technology that is adopted (consented to) by a vast majority of social agents. Part 1 of each chapter will offer an overview of a discursive group (along with its associated technological theory—instrumentalism, substantivism, or critical theory), part 2 a history of the literary cluster connected to each discourse (military sf, cyberpunk, or feminism), and part 3 a close reading of relevant sf texts. Each chapter features a concluding section (part 4) that will reflect on how these literary-discursive forms can be positioned within the theoretical framework sketched above.

In the next chapter, I will position the subgenre of military sf as one important site of a technocultural crisis, not the only site, of course, but one possible inroad into mapping a dominant conceptualization of technology that took hold in America in the 1980s—the theory of technological instrumentality, as outlined above. In chapter 2, I suggest cyberpunk offered an alternative to instrumentality; namely, a substantive outlook, counterhegemonic in nature, highlighting the pervasive and uncontrollable aspects of

27 technology and technological development. And in chapter 3 my focus is on feminism in the 1980s, both as a political movement and a category of sf, along with its tendency to eschew the extreme perspectives of the instrumental and substantive views in favour of a more nuanced approach. This approach, I argue, was aware of technology’s capacity to determine subjects, but at the same time open to its social, cultural, and personal potentialities. As a literary genre often focussed on the implications of scientific and technological expansion, I contend that popular sf can be read as some indication of prevalent ways of thinking about these developments. If instrumentalism was an established epistemological paradigm during the decade, elements of technological instrumentalism should be found to resonate in the decade’s cultural objects. In the texts discussed in the following chapter, this is certainly the case.

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CHAPTER ONE: MILITARY SF 8

When a crisis arises, a THOR command center (on Earth or in space) sends a signal to the appropriate THOR satellite. The satellite then orients itself. At the proper time, the rocket engine fires to deorbit the satellite … The result is spectacular: a bundle of tens or hundreds of twenty pound projectiles streak down at four miles per second to strike targets with the explosive equivalent of two hundred pound bombs each. In five seconds the action is over, and the enemy doesn’t know what hit them. All that remains is dozens of luminous trails, each angling downward to a slowly dissipating explosion cloud. (Citizens 201)

Articulating the details of a futuristic and highly advanced—though entirely hypothetical—weapons system, the above quotation calls to mind perhaps first and foremost the technological fetishism implicit in the “shock and awe” doctrine popularized during the 2003 invasion of Iraq.9 During that campaign’s initial strikes, the primary objective was not just the elimination of vital assets, but also an overwhelming display of technological and military superiority designed to cripple the adversary’s mental state, inducing a state of shock and awe to such a degree that rational response is rendered impossible. As is the case in the above quote, the results in Iraq were nothing less than

“spectacular”: witnessing the televised event, it became clear that the practice of warfare had transmogrified into a hybrid form of overlapping and inseparable elements: information war, military strategy, pageantry, entertainment, propaganda, media event, and so on.10

Although the above conceptualization of advanced weaponry, published as “THOR:

Orbital Weapon System,” differs from Shock and Awe in terms of actual mechanics and deployment, the same curious intersection of strategy and spectacle seems to inhere. The transcendent imagery of the explosive impact, of “luminous trails” descending towards a

“slowly dissipating explosion cloud,” clearly captures the essence of the technological

29 sublime, the sense of awe in response to incomprehensible vistas of technological accomplishment so effectively exemplified by America’s adventurism and theatricality in

Baghdad in 2003.11 More fundamentally, both THOR and “shock and awe” adhere to the instrumental conception of technology; as advanced technological systems they are designed to be utilized and deployed for instrumental ends, and it is assumed that when guided by logical principles they can achieve these ends without producing unpredictable and resonating consequences. The link between military discourse and instrumentalism will be developed in what follows. For the time being it is enough to focus on a less apparent curiosity: that the “THOR” paper, published in 1983, appeared not in a work of official policy or strategic planning, but rather within the humble confines of a popular series of science fiction works—There Will Be War (1983-1990).

The unique characteristics and discursive overlaps of both the There Will Be War series and military sf in general will be examined in this chapter’s first part, “The

‘Strange Nexus’ of Military SF,” with the suggestion that ‘technomilitary fantasy’ is a useful term for describing such a discursive confluence in its diegetic and meta-diegetic capacities. Following this, it will be helpful to establish some historical and literary context by looking at the history and form of military sf as a subgenre (part 2); with this established, it will be possible to take a close look at two stories by the prominent military sf author, David Drake, and to pinpoint within these the echoes of the instrumental view (part 3); and finally, we can place military sf and the discourse it contributed to within the intricacies of American hegemony, and suggest its contribution to the decade’s dominant understanding of technology (part 4).

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1. The “Strange Nexus” of Military SF

In the literary world of There Will Be War, one defined in large part by the inclusion of sf short stories, the “THOR” paper is far from an anomaly. Beginning with the initial volume published in 1983, the series of anthologies would eventually reach its ninth volume with There Will Be War: After Armageddon in 1990—and through its entire history the series adheres to a principle of discursive openness, containing poetry, committee reports, meditations on military virtue, excerpts from strategic planning documents, and a range of additional texts and discourses.

Along with the paper on THOR, There Will Be War vol. 1 includes poems by Jon

Post (“City-Killer” and “Ground Zero”) and W.R. Yates (“Diaspora”); a reprinting of

Orson Scott Card’s short story “Ender’s Game” (1977), the foundation for what would become the classic sf military novel of the same name in 1985; an excerpt from sf author

Jerry Pournelle’s influential military textbook The Strategy of Technology (1970); the essay “Mercenaries and Military Virtue,” also by Pournelle; a statement on “Project High

Frontier” by a Lt. Gen. Daniel O. Graham advocating an alternative national defense policy; and lastly, a committee report by the Citizens Advisory Council on National

Space Policy titled “The Soviet Strategic Threat from Space.”

All of these inclusions, as well as the fourteen or so more conventional sf short stories, are prefaced by an editor’s introduction, that editor being the above-mentioned

Pournelle, who was not only the series’ chief author, editor, and advocate, but also a kind of ideological organizer tying together the disparate components of the anthologies into a cohesive unity. As his introductions make clear, the unifying theme of vol. 1 is a vehement reaction against the Cold War policy of “mutual assured destruction” (MAD)12

31 and the proposal of an alternative means of defense supported by space-based weapons systems like THOR, systems that “would literally give the United States the Power to call down lightning bolts from the heavens upon its enemies” (Citizens 200).

But in his capacity as editor and organizer, Pournelle’s influence extended beyond the mere literary confines of the War anthologies. Notably, he was the founding chairman of the organization responsible for the THOR paper, the Citizens Advisory Council on

National Space Policy (hereafter ‘Advisory Council’), a group assembled in 1980 under the mandate of promoting the exploration and colonization of our solar system, and imagining, in line with Pournelle’s vol. 1 introductions, an effective and technologically viable alternative to MAD. Comprised of a diverse membership—ranging from sf authors

(Larry Niven, Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Gregory Benford, Dean Ing, Steven Barnes, and Jim Baen) to specialists from non-literary fields (the astronaut Buzz Aldrin and the aerospace engineer Maxwell Hunter, for instance)—the Advisory Council acted primarily as an advocacy group for projects such as Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as “Star Wars”, going so far as to publish (under the authorship of

Pournelle and Dean Ing) a reprinting and extended analysis of their original report to

Reagan, fittingly titled Mutual Assured Survival (1984):

Dear Mr. President: It has become a common, but erroneous, American dictum that an offense always overwhelms a defense. Yet Stalingrad and the Battle of Britain, to name two examples within memory, proved that a good defense can defeat a vigorous offense … We believe that several systems, both kinetic and directed energy systems, should be developed concurrently for a spectrum of strategic defenses. (Pournelle and Ing 1)

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The paperback’s front jacket declares that “ICBM’s will soon be obsolete!” and quotes a response from Reagan which appears in full on the back: “Dear Dr. Pournelle: … You and your associates deserve high praise … Thank you, and God bless you.”

Roger Luckhurst sets aside a small space for the Advisory Council in his invaluable cultural history of the genre, Science Fiction (2005), examining Mutual Assured Survival under the heading “SF and the New Right”:

They dreamed that SDI might be a new Manhattan Project that could generate an American Renaissance. In one chapter, ‘Exploring Our Frontiers’, military strategy blends seamlessly with science fiction, proposing that the militarization of space will also push American colonies on the moon, mining for raw materials in the Asteroid Belt, and Mars exploration. (200)

Luckhurst cites the interdisciplinary character of There Will Be War as well, and although he focuses on cyberpunk through the majority of his analysis of the 1980s, he nonetheless declares that developments in libertarian and militaristic fiction on the “New Right” can be seen as comprising “the most representative SF of this era” (199).13 Still, the phenomenon Luckhurst points to in relation to the anthologies—their entrenchment within broader sociocultural and political frameworks—is by necessity underdeveloped

(Science Fiction covers an entire arc of Western sf history, from its early articulation in late-nineteenth century Britain to the present day). A picture of military sf’s social imbrications, along with the most systematic account of its development, is provided by

Chris Hables Gray in his 1994 paper “‘There Will Be War!’: Future War Fantasies and

Militaristic Science Fiction in the 1980s.”

Gray’s article represents the most complete record of the subgenre’s principle developments in the modern, post-WWII era, and although it contains no mention of the

Advisory Council, he provides clear insights into the history and characteristics of what

33 he calls “the relationship of sf and war” (315). Gray foregrounds a surprising reciprocal relationship between sf and the mechanisms of military strategy and policy-making, or what he calls “this strange nexus of science fiction and military futures planning” (327).

In the 1980s this nexus reaches a climax, a contention supported by not only the nine volumes of There Will Be War and the existence of advocacy groups like the Advisory

Council, but by an explosion of conferences, meetings, reports, and various texts all centered around the topic of technological warfare, and all involving sf authors acting in the capacity of futurists and experts: Grey points to a number of examples, including conferences like “Futurist II” in 1985, where sf authors like Joe Haldeman caught a glimpse of what they thought represented the future of technoscientific military engagement (321).14

In all of the War anthologies, Pournelle is quick to reference the numerous presentations, discussions, and interactions that relate thematically to the various strands of military sf represented therein. There Will Be War: Day of the Tyrant (vol. 4), for instance, contains a previously unpublished response to an article by Captain Richard

Laning, USN (Ret) in the August 1982 issue of Proceedings of the U.S. Naval Institute.

According to Pournelle’s introduction, Kenneth Roy’s response to the article—“a bit too far out for the Proceedings”—builds upon Pournelle’s own ideas on “aircraft powered by laser energy from geostationary satellites” to formulate and conceptualize the possibility of highly advanced VLHF (Very Large High Flying) aircraft, machines capable of flying high enough to evade enemy detection and countermeasures, while at the same time acting as key strategic sites in the air (“Comment” 143). Clearly, Pournelle had his finger on the pulse of heated discourse surrounding technomilitary developments in the 1980s.

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What materializes in the 1980s, then, is a particular discourse system composed of intersecting conversations and texts, all involved in the discussion and dissection of military strategy, national defense, technological development, the so-called “Soviet threat,” hypothetical war-systems, and so on—a “strange nexus” indeed.

An analysis of this discursive nexus in its entirety is worth pursuing, and its blueprint is provided by Gray’s paper. But with a more limited focus in mind, it is perhaps sufficient to highlight the War anthologies as a primary example of this development.

Due to the fact that they include representations of these manifold discourses, due to their relationship with the Advisory Council and, by extension the so-called “New Right,” and because of their immense popularity,15 There Will Be War can function as a particularly useful example of this kind of technomilitaristic engagement, a discursive formation of ideas, arguments, and prognostications wrapped up within the confines of a single series.

The texts stand, I believe, as a possible inroad into understanding the cultural trajectories and frameworks integral to instituting technological instrumentalism as a dominant conception.

It will help to keep in mind that an understanding of sf at that time as part of a larger discourse system is a conception at once different and related to a notion of sf as genre.

The former contention is an essential step towards reading the texts of military sf in relation to their surroundings and contexts, but when taken separately, these texts are examples of genre as well. That fiction is always multifarious, that it always lives multiples lives, is one of the many instructive insights foregrounded in Istvan Csicsery-

Ronay, Jr.’s The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction (2008). It is essential, therefore, to remain aware of an at least double existence: that is, the existence of military sf in both

35 its literary form or specific genre and its more general role as a confluence of associated discourses (fictional and otherwise). The focus of this analysis is firmly on the latter, on the nebulous interactions of policy, strategy, fiction, etc., but for a better grasp of the manner in which the genre operated during the 1980s, an understanding of its literary existence is not only desirable but necessary.16

With this in mind, it will help to distinguish terminologically between “military sf” proper, the literary subgenre of sf, one with an expansive history and its own distinctive tropes and thematic concerns, and the category of what can perhaps be called

“technomilitary fantasy,” a term that can be employed to denote the kind of speculative discourse epitomized by a number of the There Will Be War entries. A particular picture of technology and its relation to military engagement is the overriding concern of this formation (hence “technomilitary”); at the same time, these discourses are involved in the conceptualization of American global dominance and superiority (hence “fantasy”), a concept that in many ways continues to play itself out in the mostly unrestricted extension of that nation’s policies and agendas today.

Considering this, something as un-literary as Reagan’s SDI speech can be categorized as “technomilitary fantasy,” for despite its formal differences (it was a speech, not a work of literary fiction), its fundamental structure and concerns are the same as many of the short stories found in the War anthologies. Take this excerpt, for example:

What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies? I know this is a formidable, technical task, one that may not be accomplished before the end of the century. Yet, current technology has

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attained a level of sophistication where it's reasonable for us to begin this effort. It will take years, probably decades of efforts on many fronts. There will be failures and setbacks, just as there will be successes and breakthroughs. And as we proceed, we must remain constant in preserving the nuclear deterrent and maintaining a solid capability for flexible response. But isn't it worth every investment necessary to free the world from the threat of nuclear war? We know it is. (Reagan)

If the speech’s rhetorical tone and affected level-headedness are momentarily bracketed, a fundamental belief in American ingenuity and technological know-how is clearly present, as well as a rather science-fictional gesture towards hypothetical scenarios: “that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil.” At the same time, an underlying assumption that weapons technology could only ever be used within rational, established parameters (as a neutral instrument, a tool), that its development could never spiral into unforeseen ramifications, is operating here as well—as Reagan states, it is “reasonable for us to begin this effort.” Reagan became famous for his mannered, level-headed, and supposedly rational tendencies in public speaking, but beneath the surface it is clear what is at work here is a form of speculative politics. Sf stories often speculate about future technoscientific transformations and their potential ramifications; in the political arena, Reagan was essentially speculating about the impact of purely hypothetical technologies and their ability to protect the national interest. Reading his public discourse more in line with sf and less in line with political speech (traditionally construed) seems particularly justified.

The point here is not that the SDI speech is indistinguishable from sf, but rather that certain works of military sf coexist with non-literary discourses of military and technological fantasy in a discursive grey area where the distinction between fiction and non-fiction is rendered moot—or at the very least porous. A similar point can be made

37 regarding my opening comments on “shock and awe”—adhering to the same base structure, it too can exist under the general category “technomilitary fantasy,” and is therefore closely associated with a text such as the “THOR” article from vol. 1.

I hope to make a case in this chapter for “reading” the 1980s through a number of

There Will Be War stories, and for developing an understanding of the cultural processes that led to a picture of American technological might that continues to exist as a kind of spectre hovering over the contemporary geopolitical landscape. As discussed, my central contention is that these texts contributed to a larger discourse advocating a view of instrumental technology. Rather than being the product of politicians and policy-makers alone (of purely political production), it is possible to see the roots of this conception in cultural production—that is, in the production of texts and discourses like There Will Be

War that fantasize a version of America before it exists in actuality.

Beyond this, however, it will be helpful to analyze the manners in which technological conceptions become entrenched as dominant ideologies. It is not enough to simply point to the existence of the instrumental view in a number of discourses; rather, it is essential to provide a framework that comprehends the social and cultural processes whereby these views become substantiated as material/political forces. For this, I turn to

Antonio Gramsci’s theory of “cultural hegemony” as a model that positions cultural discourses as either hegemonic (that is, dominant), counterhegemonic (subversive), or somewhere in between. One way of understanding technomilitary fantasy and its valorization of the instrumental picture is to frame it as contributing to the technological aspect of the prevailing hegemony in the 1980s. The central insight here is that the

38 instrumental view is not neutral; instead, it played an active role in the development and maintenance of American hegemony.

2. Genre, Discourse, Consent: The Many Lives of Military SF

Although the focus here is primarily on military sf’s integration in its historical and socio-cultural context, a formal account of its existence as a literary subgenre is useful as well.17 In this form military sf has an extensive history, one that (depending on preferred origin-points) is potentially coextensive with the history of sf itself.

In his 2008 text War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination, H.

Bruce Franklin covers a period of over a century, beginning with the emergence of nineteenth-century British “future war novels,” works stimulated by the frightening displays of technologically sophisticated warfare18 throughout the American Civil War

(1861-1865) and the Franco-Prussian War (1870-1871), and concluding with the interplay between modern sf fantasies and Reagan’s SDI project (as discussed, itself a kind of sf fantasy). Franklin’s project is to chart the reciprocal interchange between

American cultural fantasies and the realities they engage with, with a particular focus on fantasies of weaponized mass destruction: “Fascinating as they may be as expressions of psychology and culture, American fantasies about superweapons are not primarily fantasies at all. For when they shape the thinking of inventors and leaders and common people, they become a material force” (Franklin 5).

But while the opening section of Franklin’s text sketches a loose affiliation of British novels contributing to the literary and cultural framework that allowed the subgenre to emerge, for many critics, particularly I.F. Clarke, the first concrete example of military sf appeared in an 1871 issue of Blackwood’s Magazine, a British miscellany: George

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Tomkyns Chesney’s Battle of Dorking: Reminiscences of a Volunteer. Chesney’s tale is of an aging British volunteer gloomily recounting the events of a German invasion and conquest of Britain. The German military, the narrator recounts, was technologically advanced beyond the capacities of their own, and the conquest was therefore certain. His overwhelming feeling is one of shame for his generation, who witnessed the signs of technological advancement and militaristic expansion in their foreign enemies but decided to do nothing: “The danger did not come on us unawares. It burst on us suddenly,

‘tis true; but its coming was foreshadowed plainly enough to open our eyes, had we not been wilfully blind” (Chesney 21).

Chesney, responding to the astonishing speed and versatility of the Prussian forces battling France, sent a clear message to his compatriots that an exclusive reliance on naval power, seemingly a technology of the past, could result in disaster. The story, topical and controversial, would go on to spawn a torrent of counter-fictions, all intent on fictionalizing the “true” version of the fictional conflict, and all with some political agenda in mind. As I.F. Clarke explains in his “Before and After The Battle of Dorking”

(1997):

there was a rolling barrage from the opposition in the United Kingdom—a succession of some twenty counter-blasts, all presenting their very different version of the Chesney story on the lines of The Other side at the Battle of Dorking, What Happened after the Battle of Dorking, The Battle of Dorking: A Myth. (43)19

Most interesting, though, is Chesney’s establishment of a defining characteristic of the subgenre, one meta-diegetic in nature: the close, almost personal relationship between the fiction of the text and the reality of the author’s experience and historical circumstances, often utilized with the goal of authentically portraying the reality of warfare and

40 elaborating some kind of didactic point. In the case of Dorking, the text functions as an alarm against Britain’s vanishing military aspirations.

It is worthwhile noting the significant publication date of Chesney’s novella as well.

Theories on the origins of sf predominantly settle on one of three conceivable starting- points: Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus in 1818, with Victor’s turn to scientific methodology uniquely distinguishing the novel within the gothic tradition it emerged from, producing what Brian Aldiss has called the “first great myth of the industrial age” (23); the meteoric rise of H.G. Wells and his widely-read scientific romances, particularly the first of these, 1895’s The Time Machine, which captured the

English-speaking world’s imagination by portraying the eon-spanning devolution of humankind into sub-human forms corresponding to Victorian class structures, and climaxing in an unforgettable passage describing the heat-death of the universe—“All the sounds of man, the bleating of sheep, the cries of birds, the hum of insects, the stir that makes the background of our lives—all that was over” (148); and the materialization of pulp magazine sf in the American 1920s and 30s, with a proliferation of stories fuelling an emerging fan culture to generate the first real consensus that a new, unified genre had emerged, all of which was made possible with the launch of Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing

Stories magazine in 1926, the first to be exclusively dedicated to sf stories.

The appearance of future-oriented war stories in the late nineteenth century, such as

Chesney’s Dorking, suggests the possibility of outlining an alternative origin (though a fully fleshed-out argument making such a case is beyond the scope of this analysis). Such texts point to the possibility that the genre (along with its impulse to explore the ramifications of technocultural synthesis) was born out of a shocking entanglement of

41 technology and warfare, and the ensuing realization that conflict, and perhaps life, would be paradigmatically altered as a result. Societies had of course always employed technologies for the purpose of killing (the trebuchet, the rifle, and so on), but in this instance, the unique intersection of industrialization and militarism, one resulting in the startling mobilization of German troops, now sped along railroads during the Franco-

Prussian War, or in the devastating deployment of ironclad warships during the American

Civil War, forced European and American populations to acknowledge that older paradigms of warfare no longer held.

Napoleon’s campaigns were gruelling affairs that lasted months at a time and cost tens of thousands of lives, but the form of warfare—the tactics, technologies, deployments, and so on—continued logically from past military developments.20 On the other hand, the introduction of the telegraph and the railway drastically altered the speed of war in the latter half of the nineteenth century, with mass production providing resources at unprecedented velocities and in enormous quantities. The face of war was categorically altered.21

It is this fundamental shift that provided Chesney’s impetus for Dorking, persuading him of the necessity to alert Britain to the new forms of war that would inevitably supersede older structures and practices. Perhaps sf crystallized—in one form, at least— as a new mode for thinking through the sweeping implications of this shift, and for analyzing the impacts of industrialized warfare on societies that were already struggling to process the accelerated rate of technological transformation in their era. And perhaps the conflicts of the mid and late nineteenth century necessitated a literature capable of exploring a reconceptualization of the relation between the human and the technological,

42 categories once thought ontologically distinct. With its “realistic” tone capable of effectively conveying this shift, Chesney’s text can be read as one potential origin-point for the genre, one that effectively overlaps the history of military sf with the history of sf itself.

Appropriately, the impact of Dorking would register for decades. For instance, its tendency towards the “realistic” portrayal of military technologies and their social consequences can be seen to carry through in H.G. Wells’ contributions to the subgenre.

Examining trends in military conflict and industrial development, he would go on to write

“The Land Ironclads” (1903), a vision of modernized warfare involving massive 100- foot-long ironclad tanks. The text was published over a decade before the actual appearance of tank warfare in the First World War, and showcases Wells’ obsessive attention to detail and innate ability to craft verisimilitude, among other things:

They were essentially long, narrow, and very strong steel frameworks carrying the engines, and borne upon eight pairs of big pedrail wheels, each about ten feet in diameter, each a driving wheel and set upon long axles free to swivel around a common axis. This arrangement gave them the maximum of adaptability to the contours of the ground. They crawled level along the ground with one foot high upon a hillock and another deep in a depression, and they could hold themselves erect and steady sideways upon even a steep hillside. (Wells “The Land”)

Similarly, 1907 would see the publication of his The War in the Air, a prophetic (Wells became known as the “prophet of the future”) account of aerial warfare years before aircraft were utilized for combat—again, during the First World War. Unlike Chesney, though, Wells’ narratives omit any obvious political stance; much like Chesney, on the other hand, they foreground the generalized potential for technoscientific change to radically alter the norms and conventions of traditional military engagement, as well as the lives of soldiers and civilians caught in its grasp. This is certainly the case in his 1914

43 novel The World Set Free, which presents a vision of atomic warfare and the social collapse that follows, with a new, utopian world order emerging from the crisis to start again, this time along socialist lines.

The horrors of the First World War would provide fertile soil for military sf, especially in Britain, though these now tended to take on a particularly sombre tone.

Though not necessarily adhering to the subgenre’s conventions (it is less about war and military structures, more about the aftermath of social collapse), Edward Shanks’ 1920 novel The People of the Ruins examines the kind of social disintegration Europe experienced several years earlier, now pushed to its logical conclusion, with a temporally displaced protagonist forced to comprehend a future wrecked by Marxist revolutionary conflicts.

Sydney Fowler Wright would publish Prelude in Prague in 1935, the first of a trilogy exploring the rearmament of Germany and its attempted rise to hegemonic dominance in

Europe, a concept thought ridiculous at the time. Prelude depicts a German aerial bombardment of Prague along with the nightmarish aftermath, and Wright’s prose recalls the German invasions of Belgium and France during the First World War while simultaneously anticipating the looming conflicts on the horizon:

When the fires died, as they did not wholly do for a space of days, not the commercial city alone, but all on river-valley and hills which had been the beauty of Prague, was an ended dream. Cathedral, castle, and palace were broken and blackened shells. (242)

The two sequels, Four Days War (1936) and Megiddo’s Ridge (1937), go on to chart the subsequent German assaults on major European cities, foregrounding the dangerous intersection of military science, industrialism, and advanced technology that had solidified as a new paradigm of war.

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The British trajectory of militaristic sf gets carried into the American, postwar era most notably with Robert Heinlein’s influential and infamous Starship Troopers (1959), a pro-military, quasi-fascistic novel of interplanetary conquest and human victory over communal, hive-mind “bugs,” functioning in part as an aggressive denouncement of the bureaucratic and legislative “red-tape” that constrains the military complex from fulfilling its role as defender of national security. Though altered, the sombre reflection of the realities of war in British texts such as Prelude in Prague is somewhat maintained here, and Heinlein’s trademark attention to detail and, in this case, military minutia is on display. This is balanced, however, against a nationalistic commitment to preserving the homeland using whatever means necessary, and an aversion to the military opposition that borders on out-and-out xenophobia. The pro-military slant on display in Starship

Troopers and many subsequent American narratives, an explicit shift away from the more philosophical contemplations in many European texts before the war, is partially due to the vastly different experience the United States had during the Second World War, and of its status as a major global power on the rise.

Less well known than Heinlein’s foundational text is Gordon R. Dickson’s Dorsai!, published the same year. The novel’s focus is on the protagonist, Donal Graeme, as he develops beyond the conventional bildungsroman model of typical military heroes to become a genetic superman exhibiting godlike physical and intellectual capacities (the text was reprinted in novel format as The Genetic General in 1960). Donal’s transcendence is facilitated by his keen military mind and innate aptitude for war, and his exceptional nature is celebrated by those closest to him, including his love interest Anea, who describes the full force of his (clearly masculine) power near the novel’s end:

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“No,” she said, serenely. “But I’ve seen it. He blazes—like an atomic flare among a field full of little camp-fires. Their small lights fade when they get too close to him. And he hoods his light, when he’s amongst them, to keep from blinding them.” (Dickson 152)

Both Heinlein’s and Dickson’s novels portray the military serviceman—or in Dorsai!, an enlightened mercenary—as the epitome of not just military virtue but of human development and perfectibility in general, with the fictional structures of military society standing in as the ideal model for civilization—in the case of Starship Troopers, flogging included.

The most effective counterpoint to these bravado narratives came with Joe

Haldeman’s 1974 novel The Forever War. Building on his experiences in Vietnam

(again, military sf often hews closely to military reality), Haldeman fictionalizes the experience of postwar cultural alienation through an ingenious plot device: travelling at relativistic speeds, soldiers return home to find decades or centuries have passed on Earth while they themselves have aged only months or years. The societies they return to have transformed in unimaginable ways, and the soldiers are stranded as social (and temporal) outcasts with no existing attachment to their native cultures—until, of course, they are forced to return to duty, and are reinstated in the military structures and hierarchies that now function as their home. Haldeman’s is certainly not the only text that illustrates the subgenre’s capacity to critique, rather than reinforce, traditional military values, but it remains the most popular example of broadly “leftist” military sf.

The transition into the 1980s is when members of the Advisory Council were most prolific. Larry Niven, for instance, developed his Man-Kzin Wars (1966-2012) as a war- torn “shared world” open to other authors’ contributions, but the majority of these

“modern” military works are largely ignored by critics, often for entirely legitimate

46 reasons. British author Michael Moorcock provides, for instance, a lengthy, vehement diatribe against the often explicitly antidemocratic and antiprogressive political leanings of military sf in “Starship Stormtroopers” (1978). His critique of Heinlein’s Starship

Troopers functions—at least to some degree—as a critique of the subgenre in general:

In Starship Troopers we find a slightly rebellious cadet gradually learning that wars are inevitable, that the army is always right, that his duty is to obey the rules and protect the human race against the alien menace. It is pure debased Ford out of Kipling and it set the pattern for Heinlein’s more ambitious paternalistic, xenophobic (but equally sentimental) stories which became for me steadily more hilarious until I realised with some surprise that people were taking them as seriously as they had taken, say, Atlas Shrugged a generation before -- in the hundreds of thousands! (Moorcock “Starship”)

This manner of reaction is hardly unique in response to military sf, especially when focussed on its most overtly “right-leaning” forms. To balance Moorcock’s vehemence in this instance, though, it is worth noting his appreciation for the subgenre’s history, particularly in relation to The Battle of Dorking. In his anthology of classic works of

Victorian “prophetic and imaginative literature,” Before Armageddon (1976), he writes that “There is no question but that Wells was strongly influenced by ‘The Battle of

Dorking’ … nor that he borrowed much of his technique from Chesney” (6), and later,

“It’s hard to decide how important a political influence ‘The Battle of Dorking’ really was. Its literary influence, however, was considerable” (7).

As the Forever War attests, “The Battle of Dorking” it not the only work of military sf resistant to condemnation along narrow ideological lines. In David Weber’s immensely popular “Honorverse” series, for example, the protagonist is a woman—an officer in the

Royal Manticoran Navy and eventually an influential politician. Spanning thirteen novels

(1992-2012) and several spin-off works, the series takes place against the backdrop of a mass diaspora, with humanity colonizing worlds beyond Earth’s solar system and with a

47 complex, often fractured plurality of cultural and political forms emerging as a result.

The traditionalisms of military culture are often a focus here, but they hardly function as an orienting or guiding ideology, as is often the case in military sf.

Women have and continue to write military sf as well, with the results often pushing the boundaries of “right-leaning” clichés or criticizing them outright. In Linda Nagata’s

2013 novel The Red: First Light, for instance, a squad of technologically advanced soldiers is assigned to a peacekeeping mission in sub-Saharan Africa. The central conceit places the novel firmly outside the conventional mould: the soldiers are linked to a central intelligence hub responsible for commanding them via drones—at the same time, though, and unbeknownst to them, their every action is broadcast as a reality TV show to a feverish American audience. In Ann Leckie’s award-winning Ancillary Justice (2013), the first of a trilogy, the protagonist is a military artificial intelligence that has “fallen” into one of its human bodies (or ancillaries) after a treacherous attack. The novel’s hegemonic culture, the Radchaai, do not recognize gender distinctions, and the main character resorts to using female personal pronouns for everyone, a sharp divergence from the centrality of men and “mankind” in right-leaning military sf.

Such reworkings of the subgenre’s conventions have proliferated in recent years, partially as a result of the lines between genres and subgenres loosening. But even in the

1980s, the decade of the New Right’s dominance in sf bookstores, unique voices challenged the established patterns of military sf. Louis McMaster Bujold’s work in the decade is exemplary, with her 1986 novel Shards of Honor offering an analysis of the ethical dilemmas of military conflict. Far from being a one-sided denunciation of militarism in general, however, Bujold offers instead a balanced portrayal of the

48 complexities of conflict, and of the politically subversive potential that comes with it.

Along with her 1986 novel Ethan of Athos, Shards of Honor will be looked at closely in chapter 3, where I foreground the feminist aspects of her work.

Such examples serve as useful reminders that the subgenre, in both its aesthetic and ideological inclinations, is exceptionally diverse. One immediate danger to avoid—one that many critics of sf fall victim to far too readily—is the wholesale dismissal of military sf as a mode defined solely by the infantile glorification of conflict and the technologies of war, by fascism and xenophobia, and by prosaic stylistic and aesthetic development.

As The Forever War and a range of additional texts demonstrate, while these may certainly be strong tendencies, their universal application is problematic.

“Technomilitary fantasy,” a rubric that does not pretend to encapsulate an entire subgenre or even to define a subgenre’s characteristics, iconographies, tropes, etc., is relatively free from such literary considerations. Whereas genre in this instance names a series of literary conventions and norms (e.g., sf’s focus on futurity), “technomilitary fantasy” designates a range of discursive “moments” (literary or otherwise) that, when taken together, regulate, popularize, and systematize a certain way of thinking.22

Discourse is the terrain upon which our perspectives, conceptions, and ideologies are formed, and as a particular discursive formation, technomilitary fantasy played a part in the substantiation of popular beliefs in the 1980s. The works of technomilitary fantasy need not contain similar characters, locations, or devices, or aspire to related styles and literary affectations; they merely coexist in the same discourse system, a system of debates, problems, and crises that eventually produce some form of consensus, however tenuous and fractious it may be.

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That a loose relationship of discursive interactions participated in the establishment of ideological norms—of consensus—in America during the 1980s is of course the primary focus here. Placing technomilitary fantasy within the nebulous framework of this ideological crisis and emphasizing its essential role provides an understanding of the resulting consensus, of the precarious “agreement” or established ways of thinking that came to prominence in that historical moment. Considering the fact that a particular theory or conceptualization of technology played such a foundational role in this instance, it is perhaps suitable to speak of an investigation into the technology of consent.

Additionally, the manufacturing of consent at this moment is a complicated process, one imbricated within the machinery of social and cultural productivity. While technology plays a role in the establishment of consent, consent itself is a kind of technology—a vast machinery of interweaving and incongruous discourses that eventually coalesce into a unifying, homogenous perspective. Here, consent is the “technology” of producing agreement and unification out of the raw material of competing discourses. A particular idea or “picture” of technology helped establish consent in America in the 1980s, but consent is in metaphorical terms always-already a kind of technology. The technology of consent names this particular conjuncture: the technological theory that establishes consent, and the intricate mechanisms of interacting discourse that determine consent as a kind of metaphorical technology in the first place.

The sf texts that participated in this process, that “worked towards” an eventual consensus in the 1980s, are therefore to be understood in terms of discourse, not in terms of literary genre; if we speak of underlying features and shared characteristics that tie this system together, the focus is clearly on the complex interactions and exchanges of

50 discourse, not on the purely textual life of narrative. While a theory of the latter would limit us to an analysis of literary tropes and conventions (the diegetic level of the text), it is hoped that an emphasis on the former will open up the manifold ways in which texts interact within the broader discursive matrices so central to society’s cultural and ideological spheres (the meta-diegetic existence of the text).

In the field of sf criticism, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. has already done much to extend a form of sf hermeneutics beyond the confines of literary investigation. As he claims in “The SF of Theory: Baurdrillard and Haraway,” sf has indeed developed a foundational role with respect to the manners in which we perceive the world, a role that renders the understanding of sf as purely a literary “simulation art” narrow and reductive:

“SF names not a generic effects engine of literature and simulation arts (the usual sense of the phrase ‘science fiction’), so much as a mode of awareness…” (Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.

“The SF” 387). For Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., sf is not only this “mode of awareness,” but simultaneously (and variably) a “mode of response,” a “mood or attitude,” or, most importantly for our discussion, a “mode of discourse,” one capable of linking “…literary, philosophical, and scientific imaginations, and subverting the cultural boundaries between them…” (388).23

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s term for the mindset that ties these various modalities of sf together is “science-fictionality,” a set of cognitive behaviours and rules capable of linking the hypothetical futures of sf to the reader’s own empirical reality. Science- fictionality tests the legitimacy of future scenarios in order to judge their social, ethical, and historical repercussions. A trope such as artificial intelligence, for instance, is gauged by the sf mindset in such a way that its larger resonances are understood in relation to

51 everyday life. Given contemporary technological trends, is artificial intelligence a real possibility, and if so, what kinds of social/ethical implications are likely? For Csicsery-

Ronay, Jr., such a question is in fact typical of the mindset sf speculation engenders, and it is the mindset most applicable to the current climate of advanced technocultural transformation.24

As he explains in Seven Beauties, “SF embeds scientific-technical concepts in the broad sphere of human interests and actions, explaining them, mythologizing them, and explicitly attributing social value to them” (3). The role of sf in this instance, then, is unproblematically positive; that is, its own social value is as a constructive instrument of futurology, an invaluable tool capable of framing appropriate responses to potential future contingencies. That strains of 1980s sf are part of a larger discourse, that they exist not (primarily) within the narrow confines of textuality, but within and throughout the open pathways of discursive interaction—these insights really begin with critical theories such as Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s. Technomilitary fantasy’s greatest limitation is its aptitude to narrow our thinking in relation to complicated technocultural phenomena, and to insist that technology is, in the simplest sense, fundamentally controllable—that it is in other words subservient to the authority and competence of human rationality. This narrow conception of technology, the conception articulated throughout various works of technomilitary fantasy, has so far been sketched only vaguely. An understanding of the

1980s will benefit from an attempt to actually read what often remains outside of most liberal academic perspectives.

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3. Hammer’s Slammers and the Theory of Instrumental Technology

Considering the density and diversity of material on display in the There Will Be War series, any number of texts present themselves as candidates for close analysis. The short stories of David Drake, however, are of particular interest. First, they are not easily associated with any prevailing ideological tendency, and because of this resist simple politicization. As discussed, it is important that these texts be understood without recourse to straightforward political categorization—and the often unsystematic condemnation that follows (as we see with Moorcock’s vilification of Starship Troopers).

Second, they are in fact thematically rich accounts of technological conflict, exploring in varying degrees the clash of cultural codes and practices that ensues in the context of military expansion. They are therefore not simple or unambiguous examples of technomilitary fantasy, and instead require analysis to justify their inclusion under that heading.

Moreover, Drake’s stories, his best-known of which belong to the “Hammer’s

Slammers” sequence (popularly termed the “Hammerverse”), were immensely popular, spawning a string of anthologies beginning with Hammer’s Slammers in 1979 and concluding with Paying the Piper in 2002. His work appears numerous times in the War anthologies as well, as is the case with the following examples.

In his “The Interrogation Team”—found in vol. 5 of the War series, There Will Be

War: Warrior (1986)—the story’s central military protagonist, Chief Griffiths, interrogates a political insurgent using an advanced technological device that allows him to tour the prisoner’s psyche, a kind of shared intersubjective experience called an

“interrogation sequence” (Drake, “Interrogation” 240). Griffiths is a member of the

53 mercenary tank regiment known as Hammer’s Slammers (after their leader, Colonel

Alois Hammer); hired to suppress the efforts of a group of “mountaineers” bypassing regulations and selling their drugs off-world, Griffiths and his partner, Major Smokey

Soames, capture individuals of strategic importance and survey their minds for useful knowledge. The process requires that one team-member ask questions, and that the other,

Griffiths, encountering the prisoner’s psyche as a kind of virtual or hallucinogenic dreamscape, witness the unconscious responses as they play out in the subject’s mind:

At present, the subject’s tongue could not have formed words more complex than a slurred syllable or two, but the Slammers had no need for cooperation from his motor nerves or intellect. All they needed were memory and the hard- wired processes of brain function which were common to all life forms with spinal cords. The subject’s brain retrieved and correlated the information which the higher centres of his mind would have needed to answer Major Soames’ question about defenses—and Griffiths collected the data there at the source. (Drake, “Interrogation” 241)

As the interrogation sequence unfolds, Griffiths manages to reach a state of psychological unity with the prisoner (apparently the optimum result) and observes through his eyes a view of the village he comes from: ramshackle huts, an assortment of villagers, the prisoner’s own home and family (highlighted, through the prisoner’s subjective inclinations, by a pronounced clarity—“the infant was almost deified in the subject’s mind”), but also weapons, a complex network of tunnels, and a broad range of sophisticated defenses, clear signs that the village is a location of high strategic value

(Drake, “Interrogation” 242).

Eager to negate the potential threat the village and its fortifications represent, the

Slammers dial “Fire Control Central” to request permission for an attack. But the attack consists, of course, not of armed soldiers engaged in direct military engagement; rather, the Slammers’ vehicle is ordered to fire one of its nuclear missiles from a safe distance,

54 eschewing the possibility of reaction or retaliation. It becomes clear that Drake’s picture of futuristic warfare is closely related to the contemporary reality of high-tech engagement, of battles fought over vast distances using computers and missiles, and of one side (the technologically superior) leveraging its industrial, scientific, and technological resources to devastate its opposition.

A number of things are taking place in “The Interrogation Team,” a complicated narrative that, like many of Drake’s stories, can hardly be said to oversimplify the ethical and political consequences of military engagement, or to assume a one-sided, one- dimensional stance that (like many of the War texts) simply advocates the necessity of conflict without underscoring ethical problems and repercussions. Here, conflict and death are unavoidable absolutes (absolutes that inhere not just in wartime, but as part of any modern society), but on close analysis it becomes clear that war is never morally unambiguous or straightforward, and that the opposing sides of a conflict both have their own rational (even justifiable) reasons for pursuing their goals.

Indeed, the entire thrust of Drake’s story hinges on the ending, where Griffiths and the prisoner momentarily make eye-contact just as the vehicle fires its payload. Griffiths, previously locked into a kind of subjective trance with the prisoner, undergoes a flashback glitch that forces him to witness the nuclear bombardment as if from the perspective of the subject’s infant daughter: “Griffiths had no control at all over the image that sprang to his mind: the baby’s face lifted to the sky which blazed with the thermonuclear fireball detonating just above the canopy” (Drake, “Interrogation” 246).

The ending rather clearly calls into question the entire practice of warfare and thermonuclear exchange, and the reader is intended to empathize with the prisoner’s loss

55 of his home and family. Despite being contained within an anthology produced by proponents of sf’s “New Right,” Drake’s story is (at least most apparently) engaged in a classically “leftist” problematization of military conflict—a strong recognition that in highly technologized warfare, it becomes easier to forget that human lives, often innocent and uninvolved, are fundamentally at stake.

On this reading, it is perhaps possible to suggest that Drake’s story foregrounds what

Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, in their own analysis of technological warfare, have rightfully claimed is modern war’s specifically ontological character. Unlike the wars of the pre-industrial eras, by comparison only small encounters, the ability for contemporary war and its “technologies of global destruction” to annihilate entire populations imparts an absolute, ontological character to today’s conflicts (Negri and Hardt, Multitude xv).

With “The Interrogation Team,” the capacity for technological warfare to bring about a form of absolute war (not war on this or that group, but a war on Being itself) is clearly indicated. Griffiths’ momentary, first-hand “experience” of nuclear annihilation, one where an entire village of innocent people suddenly ceases to exist, underscores the ontological nature of conflict, and recalls Oppenheimer’s invocation of the Bhagavad

Gita in relation to the atom bomb: “Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

But if an attempt is made to eschew a straightforward reading of what is perhaps the story’s didactic inclinations, it becomes clear that whatever its intentions may be, the image or understanding of technology that operates in the background is at bottom no different than the assumptions made in many of the non-fiction entries from the War anthologies—namely, that technology is essentially, fundamentally, and inescapably a tool. This picture is unambiguous in something like the “THOR” paper detailed above

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(where the focus is on how technologically sophisticated weapons systems can be rationally deployed within limited boundaries—that is, without unanticipated side-effects resulting from their deployment), but the same assumptions are being made here in

Drake’s story. We see this rather clearly with the central novum,25 the device that allows

Griffiths to “dive into” the prisoner’s psyche and experience it as a virtual reality. Despite producing an unfortunate side-effect (the glitch that forces Griffiths to see through the eyes of one of his victims), the technoscientific device, clearly designed for military applications, yields precisely the result the Slammers are looking for: the location of the militant village. The device is a complex instrument designed for a specific rational purpose, and its purpose and implementation are carried out with a kind of implacable precision in the story’s pages. While the moral thrust of the story is therefore irrefutably

“anti-war,” the technological assumptions of the text indicate a particular form of technological instrumentality—that technology, in the broadest sense, is a collection of

“things” that are envisioned, guided, and controlled by a group of rational individuals; and that, taken on their own, these tools have no specific tendencies or intrinsic characteristics (they are neutral). Technology is therefore neither this nor that, but represents a tabula rasa upon which intervening human beings inscribe their impressions and intentions.

The focus on rationality here is important to note. As Feenberg makes clear in his introduction to Transforming Technology:

The sociopolitical neutrality of technology is usually attributed to its “rational” character, the universality of the truth it embodies. The verifiable causal propositions on which it is based are not socially and politically relative but, like scientific ideas, maintain their cognitive status in every conceivable social context. (6)

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It is not, then, simply the individuals who develop and deploy these technologies who are rational (although this is clearly the case), but the technologies themselves embody this rationality in material form, as if to say it has been imparted from the scientists and technologists responsible for their creation.

Additionally, the fact that these devices “maintain their cognitive status in every conceivable social context” foregrounds their neutral character. They can be designed with any number of ends in mind, and the context in which they are deployed will not modify these ends: “For example, technology is routinely said to increase the productivity of labor in different countries, different eras, and different civilizations”

(Feenberg, Transforming 6). As can be seen in the case of both the story’s interrogation device and nuclear bombardment, even though the central character experiences a personal moral crisis, the technology itself achieves exactly what it is designed to achieve, and operates efficiently regardless of the variables its particular context entails.

This is not to say, however, that the text is narrowly or unproblematically instrumentalist. The story does end with a depiction of nuclear horror, and although on my reading this depiction is secondary to the implacable efficiency of the tools on display, something like this does approach a traditionally substantivist concern. Here, the nuclear payload is not exclusively a tool-like thing, but suggests an association with the environment of nuclear warfare (ontological warfare) and its associated dilemmas. Still, when read with the nature/function of its technology in mind, the text primarily depicts its military devices in instrumental terms, to such a degree that interpreting the text as a technomilitary fantasy—a fundamentally instrumental discourse—is warranted. It is nonetheless essential to read even these fantasies as containing substantive elements, in

58 the same manner that substantive discourses feature instrumentality in various ways. To say that these works exist exclusively in one camp or the other does a disservice to not just their formal complexity, but the complexity of literary discourse in general (which never says only one thing).

In Drake’s “Code-Name Feirefitz” (from vol. 2, 1984), it is once again possible to describe a distinction between, on the one hand, the text’s moral or didactic thrust, and on the other its underlying assumptions in relation to technology. In moral terms the story asks the reader to examine the relationship between the necessities of wartime (a position embodied in the protagonist, Captain Esa Mboya, a member of Hammer’s Slammers) and the sanctity and ethicality of religious conviction (embodied in the protagonist’s older brother, Juma, an Islamic Imam and former Slammer). A local crisis unfolds when a group of Kabyle Muslims rebel against their planet’s government, an authoritarian Arab

Union representing a confederation of Arab planets. Hired to bring an end to the rebellion by whatever means necessary—“My orders from the District Governor are to pacify this region, not coddle it!” (Drake, “Code-Name” 309)—Esa leads the Slammers in an operation against the rebels, eventually forcing them into the tunnels of an abandoned mine.

They soon surrender, and the reader is given every impression that Esa plans to execute the emerging militants, but in a last minute effort by the rebels, he is nearly assassinated by their leader. The narrative strands finally assemble when Juma materializes in his capacity as deus ex machina; driving a stolen military vehicle, he appears over the horizon and guns down the militant leader. By picking up arms and re- enacting his military past, Juma offers a solution to the crisis of opposing ideologies

59 represented by the brothers: a synthesis of their seemingly irreconcilable perspectives into a new worldview that positions religion and militarism side-by-side. Inspired by his brother’s intervention, Esa frees the prisoners, and Juma, humbled by his brother’s acquiescence, is reminded that lives can be saved through violence. The brothers exchange tokens (a pistol for Juma; a crucifix for Esa), a clear illustration of the ideological synthesis that has taken place: “It was past midday now. The sun had enough westering to wink from the crucifix against the soldier’s armor—and from the pistol in the civilian’s right hand” (Drake, “Code-Name” 338).

But again, alongside the narrative’s moral thrust it is possible to locate the unmistakable depiction of technology as a neutral tool-set, perhaps in this story to an even greater degree. The religious Juma, formerly a soldier and technician for the

Slammers regiment, is constantly working with the mercenaries to fix their vehicles, a kind of hydroplane/tank hybrid the Slammers use to traverse difficult terrain. The detail and meticulousness with which Drake describes this technology indicates a degree of technophilia,26 a fascination with war’s tools of destruction; but also, these high-tech devices are guided by human beings with an uncanny level of precision, and the various guns, tanks, and explosives (the machinery of warfare), are seen to unproblematically serve the interests of their users. They are, in other words, ideal instruments. Juma’s respect for these tools foregrounds their efficiency, and he approaches them with a quasi- religious reverence that equals his own Islamic faith:

The Kikuyu civilian touched a valve and lowered the rack. His hand caressed the sand-burnished skirt of the jeep as it sank past him. The joystiq controls were in front of the left-hand seat. Finesse was a matter of touch and judgment, not sophisticated instrumentation. He waggled the stick gently, remembering. In front of the other seat was the powergun, its three iridium barrels poised to

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rotate and hose out destruction in a nearly-continuous stream. (Drake, “Code- Name” 321)

And later, Juma’s fondness for the technological plays into his daring, life-saving intervention: “his brother triggered a one-handed burst as accurate as if parallax were a myth […] The pistol detonated in the Kaid’s hand under the impact of a round from the tribarrel. That was chance—or something else, for only the Lord could be so precise with certainty” (Drake, “Code-Name” 336). That the tools of warfare are guided by individuals to serve premeditated ends (for the death of the “Kaid” is a rational, utilitarian sacrifice that saves numerous lives), and that in the Hammer’s Slammers universe the entire paradigm of technological development and deployment points towards an unreserved instrumentality—this positions Drake’s stories within the framework of technomilitary fantasy.

As these examples show, they are founded on underlying assumptions of technological instrumentality (of its neutral, tool-like qualities), assumptions displayed by the various examples of military conflict—hence “technomilitary.” This paradigm of instrumentality provides a framework of understanding, a particular kind of worldview that facilitates power fantasies of military conquest and rule—hence “fantasy.”

Undoubtedly, Juma’s gallant rescue, one aided by the precision of his vehicle’s advanced weaponry (“accurate as if parallax were a myth”), crystallizes in microcosm the perspective that all technology, whether simple or complex, is in the end guided with effectiveness to attain prescribed results. The implications of these results, the potential contribution they make to the kind of technical rationality described by Ellul, Heidegger, and others, or to the systems of industrial exploitation described by Marx, are for Drake either secondary or non-existent.

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Further, it becomes clear in both stories that while instrumentality opposes a form of fatalism that prescribes technology with “its own autonomous logic of development”

(Feenberg, Transforming 138), individuals operating within an instrumental paradigm are in some ways determined by the technologies they employ. The devices in Drake’s stories have no intrinsic inclination toward producing “a culture of domination,”

(Feenberg, Transforming 41) as many substantivists would have it. They do, on the other hand, “demand” that its users function within a purely technological framework. As

Feenberg puts it, “if technology is a mere instrumentality, indifferent to values, then its design is not at issue in political debate, only the range and efficiency of its applications”

(Transforming 8). Technology in this case remains a tabula rasa, remains open to being programmed according to any number of divergent applications, but its fundamental function and existence are not open to debate, leaving one in a world where “technology is destiny” (Feenberg, Transforming 8). In the case of Drake’s stories, of the technologies in “The Interrogation Device” for instance, one can assume that the titular device is open to being programmed and reformatted by its users, but the fundamental nature of military technology (and questions surrounding its necessary or unnecessary existence) is ignored.

In “The Interrogation Device” Chief Griffiths is therefore forced to exist alongside technology, and the nuclear bombardment takes on the character of an unavoidable necessity. In “Code-Name Feirefitz” Juma has no choice but to live within technological boundaries, and no chance to question their fundamental nature is provided (certainly not in the text). The point here is that by utilizing the tools of advanced technological warfare, these characters are blind to the possibility of a fundamental or in toto transformation of technology itself. In this regard the title of the War anthologies takes on

62 new meaning: There Will Be War! The specific means and ends of military technology are open to reconfiguration, but in the end their general use is determined and only one possibility exists: warfare is inevitable.

Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers stories provide an interesting case of this form of instrumental determinism, and function as examples of the literary form of technomilitary fantasy that appears so often in the War anthologies: technology is above all else a neutral tool, one guided with the kind of technical efficiency that Juma employs to lock his “tribarrel” gun on his target’s hand, ultimately saving the day.

4. Gramsci and the Technology of Consent

Reading Drake’s stories in this manner certainly positions them alongside many of the non-fiction entries in the War anthologies: the essays on military conflict, analyses of weapons systems, diatribes against 1980s defense policy, excerpts from military textbooks, policy proposals, and so on. The Advisory Council’s fantasy of a futuristic weapons system called “THOR,” the results of which could be “spectacular: a bundle of tens or hundreds of twenty pound projectiles streak down at four miles per second to strike targets with the explosive equivalent of two hundred pound bombs” (201), is in terms of its technological assumptions tantamount to the tool-like nature of Drake’s hover-tanks, interrogation devices, and other weapons of precision warfare. At the same time, they are accordingly contained within the parameters of instrumental use, confining users to a technological existence wherein “only the range and efficiency of its application” (Feenberg, Transforming 8) are open for reassessment.

Instrumental determinism appears elsewhere in this form as well, both in the War sequence and in other works by Advisory Council authors. For instance, an excerpt from

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Pournelle’s 1970 military textbook The Strategy of Technology, a work Pournelle declares was a “success d’estim,” appears in vol. 2. It opens with this account of “The

Technological War” (the title of the chapter) taking place against the Soviets in the

1980s: “The United States is at war. Whether we consider this to be the Protracted

Conflict initiated in 1917 by the Bolsheviks or something new brought about by the march of technology in this country, the war cannot be escaped” (Pournelle and Possony

59). There is certainly a sense of the inevitability of both technological progress and military conflict at work here; and indeed, one of the recurring themes of the War stories is that warfare and military confrontation are inevitable: as the anthology title proclaims,

There Will Be War! Technology, then, is open to any number of uses, but the existence of technology as a range of efficient tools is fundamentally determined, and as a result we are “destined” to live alongside them in this manner.

It is fair to position determinism as a defining feature of the instrumental perspective, and to locate it as a key element in works of technomilitary fantasy. At the same time, regarding the picture of technology as a reservoir of neutral tools, examples from the

1980s outside of the War anthologies are prevalent as well. In Pournelle and Niven’s

1985 novel Footfall, humanity is faced with the possibility of extinction at the hands of barbaric and incomprehensible conquerors—alien, elephant-like invaders from Alpha

Centurai called the “Fithp.” Forced into a pragmatic union under the necessity of a common cause, scientists and technologists from both America and the Soviet Union construct an immense, weaponized spaceship, one whose system of propulsion is a repeating series of controlled nuclear detonations. The ship is christened the “Michael,” for like the biblical archangel of the same name, it eventually casts out of “heaven” the

64 personification of evil. And it does just this: guided by the technoscientific cunning of its operators, the Fithp are forced to retreat and eventually surrender. That rational, skilled professionals are able to harness the raw power of nuclear annihilation, and that they are able to focus this power into so precise and mechanical (and banal) an instrument as a propulsion system—these conceits make it possible to emphasize the Michael as an ideal crystallization of instrumentalism’s narrow focus on technology as tools.

What remains largely undefined at this point, though, is technomilitary fantasy’s

“fantasy” aspect: the manner in which these works operate to envision a fantasy of

American military conquest and, related, a broader scheme of hegemonic control. As suggested, with this we are really transitioning from the text’s diegetic existence (the level of its narrative) to its meta-diegetic role within a framework of networked and resonating cultural/ideological discourses.

With its focus on what he calls the “sphere of the complex superstructures,” Antonio

Gramsci’s unique mode of Marxist analysis is an essential resource for mapping a cultural “crisis” in the 1980s. The theory’s uniqueness lies first and foremost in what is

Gramsci’s strong opposition to forms of historicism and economism, where the social and cultural spheres (the “superstructures” of society) are determined by underlying material conditions. This is the form of economic determinism that, forming the basis for a strict interpretation of historical materialism, would come to characterize the Second

International’s own Marxist inclinations. Interestingly, a number of theorists would turn to Gramsci in the 1980s to elevate and valorize countercultural (or for Gramsci,

“counterhegemonic”) forms of resistance and praxis, and this is echoed in a variety of political perspectives in that decade.

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Writing in the 1980s, Ernesto Laclau would orient his own neo-Marxist paradigm against the assumptions of a deterministic and essentialist tendency in various “scientific”

Marxisms.27 For him, this tendency is founded in an understanding of “the real” and its expression at different levels of social existence:

One level of social reality “expresses” or “represents” a reality that is constituted at a different level. Social classes—constituted at the level of productive relations—“speak” through forms of the state, forms of political struggle, and forms of consciousness. There is one level at which the real is constituted and another where the very same real expresses or hides itself. (Laclau 117)

The levels that preoccupy Laclau in this instance are Marx’s material base (where the forces and relations of production compose the “raw” economic foundation) and the related superstructure (where culture and ideology “mirror” more fundamental changes in the base). There is a long history of debate over the rigidity of Marx’s base/superstructure metaphor; for purposes here, it is enough to emphasize that for Gramsci—and a number of theorists of Gramsci, such as Laclau—the foundational base and subsidiary superstructure are not connected in the manner of a strictly causal, deterministic relation.

In other words: culture and ideology, for orthodox Marxists mere afterimages of alterations in the base, are in fact essential contributors to both the maintenance and transformation of social structure. As Gramsci insists, “ideologies are anything but arbitrary” (196).

At the same time, though, it is important to note that Gramsci’s insights are open to interpretation, and that his writings are also construed along more orthodox lines, a point

David Forgacs articulates in relation to the concept of “hegemony”:

Hegemony in Gramsci is sometimes interpreted as a relation purely of cultural or ideological influence or as a sphere of pure consent […] Yet these interpretations seem to be mistaken. Gramsci stresses that “though hegemony is

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ethico-political, it must also be economic, must necessarily be based on the decisive function exercised by the leading group in the decisive nucleus of economic activity.” (423)

It is therefore necessary to avoid insisting on culture and ideology as principal or foundational elements in determining social structure, and to instead recognize, as

Gramsci does, their interplay with other important factors, including the more traditional conception of an economic base. Still, pinpointing a resistance in Gramsci to economism

(the exclusive valorization of the economic base) is entirely valid. 28

This resistance to a devaluation of the role of culture plays itself out in Gramsci’s theory across a multitude of critical insights.29 In relation to a so-called “culture war” in the 1980s, though, it will help to focus on a distinction of particular use. In a discussion on the complicated relationship between what he calls a “war of position” and a “war of manoeuvre,” Gramsci draws an interesting relationship between the structures of strategic warfare and those of political crisis and revolution. In warfare, conflict takes two fundamental forms: first and most obviously is the conflict’s front line of assault, where one side brings its military power to bear on its opponent’s defences, resulting in a

“war of manoeuvre.” This is our popular conception of warfare: two sides clashing in direct conflict, the victor defined by the obliteration of the antagonist’s resources. But a war of manoeuvre is only possible when supported by a vast social infrastructure, one that comprises the “whole organizational and industrial system of the territory which lies to the rear of the army in the field” (Gramsci 226). This is the “war of position”: the amassing and feeding of large numbers of troops, the manufacturing of technology, the transportation of supplies, the education and crafting, even, of a particular military mindset. According to this logic, military engagement is defined just as much—or

67 perhaps more—by the complex societal mechanisms that support the actual fighting as by the fighting itself.

For Gramsci the manoeuvre/position distinction inheres in our political structures as well:

The same reduction must take place in the art and science of politics, at least in the case of the most advanced states, where ‘civil society’ has become a very complex structure and one which is resistant to the catastrophic ‘incursions’ of the immediate economic element (crises, depressions, etc.). The superstructures of civil society are like the trench-systems of modern warfare. (227)

So society’s superstructural components can be considered to engage in a kind of war of position, one that involves the establishment of hegemony over society’s disparate elements, pushing forward a social arrangement that—in most cases—sustains and redeploys the pre-existing relations of production. While this war of position involves a number of factors, it can certainly be argued that Gramsci’s focus is, at least partially, culturally-oriented. What he describes as a war of position is, in other words, a cultural war for hegemonic control. And it has the same status that the mass accumulation of troops, industrial activity, and military education have during wartime—it makes the direct application of armed power and coercion possible in the first place.

With Gramsci, then, the picture of a technological crisis in the 1980s—one that participated in the global institution of neo-liberalism, the formation of new military policies designed to end Cold War détente, etc.—begins to coalesce. With the United

States on the cusp of securing global technological and economic superiority; with

Reagan declaring the demise of the long-held governing assumptions inaugurated by

Roosevelt’s New Deal, and the final failure of the welfare state as embodied by

Johnson’s Great Society; and with the ideology of free-market capitalism set to reach its

68 apotheosis under the Reagan-Thatcher alliance, it becomes possible, via Gramsci, to orient these critical developments within a broader, overarching framework of cultural production. It is within this complicated “war of position,” of course, that I would like to place the significant contributions of certain sf works and discourses; notably, the articulation of a discursive trajectory of technomilitary fantasy.

With Gramsci’s valorization of the cultural and ideological aspects of the superstructure, it appears that cultural developments of any kind can be foregrounded in terms of their significance. While this is true in the most general sense, Gramsci is especially wary of the notion that all ideological struggle is equally important, and divides this terrain according to “organic” and “conjunctural” types. While the latter contain pure instances of ideology (formations not necessarily connected to any “real” or

“valid” sense of reality), the former, organic instances have a relation to and awareness of

“real” disturbances and transformations at both levels of society (and are therefore authentic). The division calls into question the status of technomilitary fantasy. To what degree is it reasonable to insist that this particular formation played a significant role?

And if it is possible to “prove” its significance, what are the features of technomilitary fantasy that signal its centrality? Admittedly, these questions are irresolvable in any purely scientific sense; there is no science of culture, no exact system of precisely determining the value of one ideological construction over and above any other. What do we find in technomilitary fantasy, then, that enables us to highlight its central role in the creation of consensus?

Although impossible to “prove,” it is fair to point to certain logical possibilities. Put simply, technomilitary fantasy mattered—and continues to matter—because the

69 ideological framework it contributed to was inconceivable without an understanding of technology and its social value. For Gramsci’s analysis of hegemonic forms in the 20s and 30s, this was perhaps less significant. But for our contemporary digital age, for an age that in terms of certain technological innovations, theories, and structures has its roots in the 1980s (as discussed), an overarching “worldview” or cohesive ideological framework is unthinkable if detached from a related and corresponding theory of technology.

If Gramsci’s contention is that ruling social groups maintain hegemonic control and domination not through coercion, but through establishing a coherent, rational worldview, one that even makes concessions to ensure that, eventually, subaltern classes will actually agree to it—if this is true, any coherent worldview in a fully technologized era would have to be fundamentally technological. In the 1980s, the issue of technology—of its role, its capacities, its uses—was integral to the frameworks of hegemonic control and the resulting and necessary consent; indeed, it is now possible to insist that hegemony and technology are in the postmodern era deeply and inextricably interlocked. In his era, Gramsci became aware of the discursive lines that feed into the establishment of cultural hegemony; our technocultural moment perhaps necessitates that we investigate the contours of what is clearly a form of technocultural hegemony.

Technomilitary fantasy’s conceptualization of a fully-controllable and tool-like technology (the instrumental view) helped engineer the decade’s hegemonic structures of power. And further, this view was not imposed in any way; rather, in the complex discursive transactions of the superstructure, an uneasy and precarious consent was eventually established, one that implicates both ruling and subaltern groups in its

70 formation. That a particular theory of technology played a principal role in this context indicates the conjuncture previously discussed: namely, the technology of consent—the technological theory that aids in the manufacturing of consent, and the machine-like complexity of consent as a kind of metaphorical technology in the first place. But

Gramsci’s analysis of political formations also insists that hegemony and consent are never absolute, and that beneath the veneer of cultural and ideological coherence there are in fact groupings of opposing discourses, counterhegemonies in danger of boiling to the surface. Any understanding of the decade must take these oppositions into account; with this in mind, we can turn to other modes of literary sf, modes that question the dominant position of technomilitary fantasy.

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CHAPTER TWO: CYBERPUNK

“So what are you?” He drank from the flask, feeling nothing. “I’m the matrix, Case.” Case laughed. “Where’s that get you?” “Nowhere. Everywhere. I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show.” “That what 3Jane’s mother wanted?” “No. She couldn’t imagine what I’d be like.” The yellow smile widened. “So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?” “Things aren’t different. Things are things.” (Gibson, Neuromancer 259)

Locating a paradigmatic representation of the sf subgenre “cyberpunk” is relatively straightforward. Though the odd term, a portmanteau of “cybernetic” and “punk,” was popularized by sf editor Gardner Dozois in 1984 to label a range of texts with comparable aesthetic and thematic proclivities, it was really William Gibson’s landmark 1984 novel

Neuromancer that cemented the form as a new mode of sf writing and imagination.30

According to N. Katherine Hayles, along with its sequels Count Zero (1986) and Mona

Lisa Overdrive (1988), it “sparked the cyberpunk movement,” providing “a local habitation and a name to the disparate spaces of computer simulations, networks, and hypertext windows that, before Gibson’s intervention, had been discussed as separate phenomena” (36). Implying its existence as a kind of literary template, Veronica

Hollinger has called Neuromancer “the c-p limit-text” (“Cybernetic” 205), and for Bruce

Sterling, the subgenre’s unofficial spokesman and most vocal advocate (the Pournelle of cyberpunk, really), it materialised quite clearly as “the quintessential cyberpunk novel”

(Mirrorshades xiv), a conceptual and aesthetic model for what followed.

In narrative terms, Neuromancer takes on the propulsive and nebulous character of a caper story (and indeed, film noir is frequently connected to the subgenre as an aesthetic mould), with intricate plot developments and shifting character allegiances keeping the

72 reader off balance. Plot details are not of central importance, however, since it is the novel’s environment, a technology-saturated world of simulation, cyborgs, and corporatization leaving little space for human agency or comprehension, that surfaces as the most striking element, and is the subgenre’s true legacy. It is in this world that an incredibly powerful artificial intelligence, a union of two separate AIs, Wintermute and the eponymous Neuromancer, is revealed to have manipulated the central protagonist

Case into helping secure its transcendence beyond restrictions enforced on AI development by the “Turing Police.” In the passage above, the entity tells Case “I’m the sum total of the works, the whole show,” signalling the totalizing nature of technology in

Gibson’s world, where the artificial is ubiquitous (“I’m the matrix, Case”) and where natural phenomena are framed in technological terms—the novel’s famous opening line is “The sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel” (3).

The characters in Gibson’s narratives, as well as in other cyberpunk texts, are certainly capable of impacting their environments at the microscopic level of individual human activity, typically through a mastery of the high-tech “objects” they employ—the

“icebreaker” viruses, for instance, that allow them to penetrate the corporate security software called “intrusion countermeasures electronics” (ICE)—but ultimately, at the macroscopic level of socio-technical structures and futures, their environment is totalizing, infinitely complex, beyond measure or control, and it evades their attempts to comprehend or affect it in any meaningful way. Such inabilities are suggested by the AI’s response to Case’s question, “So what’s the score? How are things different? You running the world now? You God?” The omnipresent and ineffable AI construct responds with this aphorism: “Things aren’t different. Things are things.” Clearly, the cyberpunk

73 world leaves no space for political or utopian projects, where “things” can produce something different, only a future determined by the autonomous and inescapable arc of technological and informatic acceleration. In this world things are things, nothing more.

Hollinger articulates this point by connecting the AI’s aphorism with Frederic Jameson’s insight, in “Progress Versus Utopia” (1982) and elsewhere, that sf in the postmodern moment “demonstrates in stories our inability to imagine something qualitatively different” (Hollinger, “Stories” 454).

One frame for highlighting these aspects in cyberpunk narrative has already been presented: the theory of technology Andrew Feenberg terms “substantivism” in

Transforming Technology. As was the case with military sf and Feenberg’s understanding of “instrumentalism,” my contention here is that cyberpunk can be read for the elements of substantivism that function in the “background” of many of its texts, presenting an overarching worldview of how technology behaves in its social milieu. In the 1980s, military sf presented readers with a world of highly efficient apparatuses, mesmerizing weapons of mass destruction, tanks, hovercrafts, armoured suits, and nuclear-propelled spacecraft, all of which typically adhered to the parameters and goals of a militaristic or technoscientific elite; again, these are proficient tools, and they are deployed without resonating or unforeseen consequences.

Cyberpunk arrived with its own toolbox of remarkable technologies, virtual reality and artificial intelligence being two of the most prominent. In Neuromancer, Case is known for his ability to effectively interact with the world’s technological wonders, particularly cyberspace, and the novel’s narrative thrust reveals itself when he is hired by the enigmatic Armitage. He tells Case:

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You’re a console cowboy. The prototypes of the programs you use to crack industrial banks were developed for Screaming Fist. For the assault on the Kirensk computer nexus. Basic module was a Nightwing microlight, a pilot, a matrix deck, a jockey. We were running a virus called Mole. The Mole series was the first generation of real intrusion programs. (Gibson, Neuromancer 28)

This is clearly a conversation between tool-using technophiles, and the text is littered with such jargon, with Case flagged as a “console cowboy” because of his near- preternatural ability to manipulate the matrix through a computer interface (or console).

Gibson appears to revel in his descriptions of Case’s aptitudes as well; at one point, while a team of radicals infiltrate a media conglomerate, Case manipulates cyberspace to create a diversion: “He watched as his icebreaker strobed and shifted in front of him, only faintly aware of his hands playing across the deck, making minor adjustments.

Translucent planes of color shuffled like a trick deck. Take a card, he thought, any card”

(Gibson, Neuromancer 60). Cyberpunk is not without its efficient tools, then, and its texts are populated by hacker-savants capable of expertly manipulating them.

But alongside bravura displays of technical proficiency bordering on magic—“Take a card, he thought, any card”—one finds in Neuromancer (certainly) and other cyberpunk texts (mostly) a pronounced sense of epistemological disorientation, of confusion experienced in the face of ubiquitous mass media, cybernetic couplings, and a dehumanizing capitalism pushed to its logical apex. On one level, these characteristics function as the “background” or “environment” of the cyberpunk narrative, the “absent paradigm” a reader pieces together from the various details she encounters, details that, when taken together, cohere to form a picture of the text’s diegetic reality.31 On another

(related) level, the characters inhabiting these worlds are overwhelmingly lost within the nebulous confines of the broader technocultural landscape—though they are often

75 familiar with the intricacies of its tools—and are incapable of schematizing a coherent picture of their overarching socio-technical environment. In Neuromancer, Case may be a magician with the technical tools at his disposal, but by the novel’s conclusion he is nowhere closer to grasping the nature of his own technological world.

His experience of disorientation reflects, of course, our own epistemic conditions under modern technoculture and advanced capitalism, where the world transforms too quickly and is far too complex for us to understand all the moving pieces, or to be able to extrapolate from current conditions an understanding of where things are going.32 This phenomenon is eloquently summarized by Hubertus Bigend, a central character from

Gibson’s 2003 novel Pattern Recognition:

Fully imagined cultural futures were the luxury of another day, one in which “now” was of some greater duration. For us, of course, things can change so abruptly, so violently, so profoundly, that futures like our grandparents’ have insufficient “now” to sand on. We have no future because our present is too volatile. (57)

The focus of this chapter will be on reading in cyberpunk the traces of this epistemological volatility, as well as a notion of ontological permeability epitomized by the figure of the cyborg (central to not only cyberpunk but sf generally). These instabilities, both epistemological and ontological, will be positioned as central features of 1980s cyberpunk, and as contributors to a substantive view of technology that provided an alternative to the instrumental concept.

A look at a cinematic icon (part 1) will help illustrate these epistemological and ontological features, and will foreground cyberpunk’s multimedia existence.

Subsequently, a survey of the subgenre’s varied histories (part 2), as well as its overlap with versions of postmodern and posthumanist theory, will give a sense of the subgenre’s

76 broader discursive engagements. Understanding these engagements will allow us to productively read two of Gibson’s earlier stories (part 3), highlighting figurations of the substantive picture that operate, in my view, as the backbone of their technological perspective. Throughout this, it will be important to keep in mind the Gramscian framework of technocultural hegemony suggested in the preceding chapter—the manner in which popular understandings of technology contribute to hegemonic or counterhegemonic structures. The chapter will conclude by conceptualizing this framework in relation to the concept of a “feedback loop” (part 4), where the immateriality of discourse influences the materiality of social structure, and vice versa.

If we follow Gramsci’s line of reasoning, these discursive trajectories of thinking and acting play a pivotal role, with the vast and silent majority of individuals consenting to the dominant conception. If instrumentalism was the decade’s hegemonic conception of technology—the technology of consent—cyberpunk can be seen to have participated in a counter-dialogue at odds with the conceptual status quo.

1. RoboCop’s Horrific Visage

Cyberpunk texts often portray gritty, urban settings dominated by technologies that have permeated all aspects of human life; the streets are populated by a range of colourful

“lowlifes”—by merchants, punks, gang members, hackers, and “console cowboys,” all dedicated to “scoring big” in order to rise above their surroundings. As Veronica

Hollinger has explained in relation to Neuromancer, the novel is “set in a near-future trash culture ruled by multinational corporations and kept going by black-market economies” (“Cybernetic” 206). It is perhaps fair to extend such a description to many of the other cyberpunk texts of the 1980s; it captures the sense of “high” and “low”

77 encapsulated in the “cyberpunk” label: the “high” culture of cybernetic technologies and the “low” culture of the punks who twist such technologies to their own advantage.

Neuromancer’s Case is archetypal in this respect.

The relationship of such a world to Feenberg’s use of “substantivism” can be difficult to pinpoint, and there are certainly elements of cyberpunk literature that resist a clean association. Cyberpunk narrative does, however, tend towards a picture of technology as an uncontrollable force that restructures human and social existence. Technology may be guided and controlled in certain contained instances (Case’s computer wizardry), but its overall impact is beyond human will or reason. What one often sees in cyberpunk, then, is an incomprehensible, fully technologized world, one that has taken on a life of its own, so to speak, and that has severe and often unseen consequences for its inhabitants. This aligns with Feenberg’s insistence that “Substantive theory claims that what the very employment of technology does to humanity and nature is more consequential than its ostensible goals” (Transforming 5).

On the other hand, cyberpunk contrasts with the substantive account in terms of practical or political engagement. According to Feenberg, substantive theorists, particularly Ellul and Heidegger, insist that technology’s central characteristic lies in its bias towards the “instrumentalization” of society, a phenomenon from which “there is no escape other than retreat”; the only solution to such an overpowering transformation of human experience and reality is “a return to tradition or simplicity” in order to escape

“the juggernaut of progress” (Transforming 7). While such a retreat from technical rationalization and instrumentalization is carried through in some cyberpunk texts—in

Pat Cadigan’s 1986 story “Pretty Boy Crossover,” for instance—this can hardly be said to

78 be a recurring motif. In fact, in Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy in particular, formed by

Neuromancer and its sequels, one locates an overwhelming ambiguity towards technology and its impacts, with characters content to continue their existences under the prevailing logic of advanced capital and technocultural synthesis.

But regardless of the small ways in which cyberpunk texts escape Feenberg’s sense of substantivism, there is enough present in these works, I think, to justify a connection with a substantive account of technology. This connection is most pronounced in relation to the epistemological disorientation mentioned above, but also the very predominant displays of porous human-technological interfacing that permeate these narratives and function as a central aspect of the fictive universe; these displays constitute a kind of ontological permeability, most clearly on display in the various instances of human- machine interfacing, especially the cyborg figure. As Hollinger has it, “This emphasis on the potential interconnections between the human and the technological, many of which are already gleaming in the eyes of research scientists, is perhaps the central ‘generic’ feature of cyberpunk” (“Cybernetic” 205).

Both elements, epistemological disorientation and ontological permeability, will be looked at closely in relation to two of Gibson’s short stories in part 3. For now, it will be helpful to point to a visual icon that summarizes cyberpunk’s engagement with these concerns, and exemplifies the subgenre’s transformation into a multimedia and paraliterary phenomenon extending beyond the boundaries of literary sf. That example appears in the Paul Verhoeven-directed 1987 film RoboCop.

It should be noted upfront that the positioning of RoboCop in relation to cyberpunk is a matter of debate, and is taken up directly in Frances Bonner’s “Separate Development:

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Cyberpunk in Film and TV” (1992). Her conclusion is that “what is important in ascribing cyberpunk status to a film is the sensibility rather than the thematic concerns”

(201), and that RoboCop’s sensibility runs somewhat counter to literary cyberpunk’s retreat from tradition and sentimentality: “Most problematic is its sentimentality and the focus, which, through the old-fashioned morality programmed into RoboCop, is counter to the trashy, decayed, corrupt world depicted” (204). I would like, however, to excise a particular “moment” from the film as a visual representation of substantive anxieties, which connect it to cyberpunk thematically (and in another register, discursively).

This has the benefit as well of reinforcing Thomas Foster’s claim in his invaluable

The Souls of Cyberfolk: Posthumanism as Vernacular Theory (2005) that cyberpunk developed as a multimedia cultural assemblage, more a practice than a genre. He explores cyberpunk’s “dialogic recontextualization” (Foster xv) in various media and experiences as heterogeneous as film, gynoids (illustrations of eroticized robots), the

1992 L.A. riots, music videos, and comic books, emphasizing how these reoriented traditional cyberpunk concerns to focus on challenges in new social and cultural contexts—gender and race issues, for instance (“the souls of cyberfolk” being a play on

W. E. B. Du Bois’ “the souls of black folk”) (Foster xxiv). He takes an interest in

RoboCop as well, specifically in relation to “the ways in which the cyborg character’s body is not just gendered but also racialized, as a specifically white male body” (Foster

187), and the film’s contextualization of the structures of race differentiation that would contribute to the L.A. riots five years later.

The film’s protagonist is Alex Murphy, played by Peter Weller, a hero and honest cop who, after being mutilated and gunned down by a gang of relentless killers, is

80 resurrected by a team of scientists as the first participant in the RoboCop program. We learn that there isn’t much left of Murphy, however, either physically or psychologically, and he spends the duration of the film encased in gleaming silver armour that covers the broken leftovers of his body, occasionally snapping into self-awareness when memories of his old life penetrate the neural programming that now governs his behaviour. In this new state he is less human-like, more machine-like, with the coding that administrates his rule-based psychology—“Serve the public trust! Protect the innocent! Uphold the law!”—reflecting both the emerging computer culture of the 1980s and a deep anxiety over the rule-obsessed and tyrannical New Right gaining influence under the Reagan-

Thatcher alliance. With his ruined, organic core wrapped in technological extensions, and with his brain and nervous system now directed by computer coding, Murphy materializes as one of American cinema’s best examples of a cyborg.33

But he eventually begins to overcome his cyborg conditioning, and after a violent firefight with his corrupt police force, he is rescued by his partner Lewis. Later, while sheltered in the abandoned steel mill where he was originally murdered, surrounded by the antiquated detritus of an industry soon rendered obsolete (the scene was shot in a

Pittsburgh steel mill, and makes vivid use of its “wasteland” aesthetic), he busies himself with repairing his broken hardware. “You asked for this,” Lewis states as she dutifully hands over a screwdriver. The camera tightens on Murphy’s cyborg faceplate as he loosens it, with close-ups of unwinding screws intercut for tension. “You may not like what you’re going to see,” he warns Lewis, slowly detaching the armour that has shrouded his features for the duration of the film, blocking the audience from his eyes,

Hollywood’s traditional gateway to psychology and affect.

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At first only dimly glimpsed as a reflection in the jagged metal Lewis holds for him, what emerges is truly horrific, though not in any conventional sense of physical repulsion. The upper-half of Murphy’s face is not the twisted disfigurement some may have expected, nor does it resemble the gleaming, steel skull of the titular killer in 1984’s

The Terminator (after its flesh has burned away during the film’s climax, also set in a factory). Instead, Murphy’s face is decidedly, almost banally human, and it is in this very ordinariness that the image horrifies (see figure 1).

Figure 1: Murphy’s revealed face contrasted with his technologized body and surroundings.

Amidst his fully technologized body and the steel and wire workings that stretch to the top of his head and over his ears, Murphy’s ordinary, dull face is a jarring disparity, with the viewer forced to reconcile contrasting organic and synthetic parts. The full impact of Murphy’s unnatural embodiment is forcefully articulated, and his uncanny

82 imbrication within a truly mediated existence comes to light as nothing less than grotesque. If Murphy’s face were not recognizably human (or even ordinary), this juxtaposition would be undermined and the full horror of his plight would be lost. The horror of the scene, then, is located in this incomprehensible and discordant coupling of the recognizably human and the fundamentally not-human.

RoboCop’s portrayal is unique, but it was hardly the first film to vividly depict cyborg embodiment, and indeed, cyborgs appeared frequently on television screens and in theatres throughout the 1980s.34 They also emerged as one of the most repeated representations in cyberpunk literature, though the novelty of cyberspace (Gibson’s use is the first appearance in literature) largely overshadowed this. Examples of several cyborg crossings will be looked at in Gibson’s earlier stories in the next part; for now, it is fair, especially with RoboCop’s visage as an orienting visual, to position the cyborg as one of the most acute figurations of the kind of human-machine interfacing Hollinger cites as a central generic feature, as well as the kind of ontological permeability that I (taking

Hollinger’s lead) would like to foreground. Murphy encapsulates a messy and permeable ontology, where the categories “human” and “machine” are not held apart, but blurred and intercut.

Murphy’s technological situatedness is horrific on another level as well, for metaphorically the character’s bizarre double existence—as natural and unnatural, organic and synthetic, self and other, flesh and metal, ordinary and extraordinary— mirrors our own immersion within the structures of technocultural fusion. “It’s really good to see you again, Murphy,” Lewis tells him after the faceplate is removed, but

Murphy’s emotionless response conveys a sense of hesitancy and doubt, as if the “you”

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Lewis is recognizing is only her memory of the “real” Murphy, and the new “you,” the cyborg, is the true and transfigured self, now terrifyingly altered. Murphy’s plight is therefore intimate, for it represents the “unnatural” fall of the species into a technological being-in-the-world from which there is no escape, and echoes our own anxiety over a way of life that has somehow escaped all understanding and control.

The scene can be easily interpreted along substantive lines. It establishes a dichotomy between the degradation of uncontrollable technological existence, an unnatural state codified in the juxtaposition of Murphy’s face, and the “pure” state of human existence divorced from such entanglements; in RoboCop, the latter is typically represented by

Murphy’s previous traditional/heteronormative family life, now only recalled as a vague feeling that surfaces when his programming subsides—“I can feel them, but I can’t remember them,” he tells Lewis. Murphy’s agency is thoroughly undermined, then, a point Hayles emphasizes in How We Became Posthuman (1999): his memory flashes show how “the distributed cognition of the posthuman complicates individual agency”

(4). Feenberg’s positioning of Heidegger as one of the principal substantive theorists is relevant in this relation as well: “Heidegger agrees that technology is relentlessly overtaking us. We are engaged, he claims, in the transformation of the entire world, ourselves included” (Transforming 7). The horror of this transformation, one that strips us away from our natural mode of existence, is the horror of Murphy’s embodied predicament.

Alongside its dramatization of a substantive account of technology, as well as the

(associated) human-machine intermixing central to cyberpunk, the image illustrates the theme of epistemic uncertainty mentioned earlier, the inability for characters to piece

84 together the details of a technical world defined by constant, unpredictable transformation, incomprehensible technologies, and complexity beyond imagination or limit. Murphy spends the duration of the film struggling to comprehend his own fallen state, and once the shielding has been removed to reveal his face, he only glimpses it as an imperfect reflection in a broken piece of metal. Distraught, he finally tells Lewis

“leave me alone,” and sits in solitude to contemplate not only his new life, but his inability to truly cognize what it means or how it came to pass.

In relation to the instrumental account, the icon of Murphy’s horrific visage diverges fundamentally. It illustrates not the tool-like capacity for technology to serve functional ends, but rather the environment-like capacity for technology to have unintended and uncontrollable resonances in other spheres of human existence—the political, the cultural, the environmental, the existential (especially), and so on. It vividly captures the inability for technology to be divorced from these spheres, and makes apparent its tendency to function as a context that conditions and transforms all other aspects of human life. In the case of Murphy, his transmogrification into a cyborg resonates with our own experience of modern technoculture, with his unmasking emphasizing the inseparability of the technical world from everything it touches. Again, “Technology is not simply a means but has become an environment and a way of life” (Feenberg,

Transforming 8).

As with the primarily literary or narrative examples that are the focus of this project, the icon of Murphy’s cybernetic embodiment can be seen to have participated in the discursive exchange that helped define the decade’s technocultural crisis, a crisis over competing worldviews of technology, its value, its function, and so on. In fact, the

85 succinctness and efficacy of the filmic image in communicating complex ideas at a non- narrative level (for divorced from traditional narrative context, they still function) positions the medium as a significant contributor to the dialogue over technology. It can be seen, in other words, to serve an orienting function, providing symbols that help form patterns of thinking and speaking about technology, contributing to the prevailing order of things or critiquing and undermining that order, even if only indirectly, though of course these functions are often mixed.35 Cyberpunk emphasizes the substantive picture, but it contains moments of pure instrumentalism as well.

2. Literary Histories and Postmodern Entanglements

Whereas military sf engaged with discourses of military-strategic planning, technoscientific innovation, and experimental weapons development, the focus in this part will be on cyberpunk’s complex interrelationship with the era’s postmodern and posthuman discourses, and with the unique ways in which these became entangled in their own feedback loop with the material realities of 1980s America.

However, as mentioned in the preceding part, while cyberpunk certainly carried forward explicitly substantive concerns, it often lacked the practical or political emphasis on a retreat from technology and its bias towards totalization, something substantive theorists unanimously stress. In the opening of The Souls of Cyberfolk, Foster seems, in fact, to place cyberpunk in a middle-ground between instrumentalism and substantivism.

His contention is that “by defining technology as neither an external threat nor a set of tools under our control,” cyberpunk was able to “complicate the utopian/dystopian dialectic structuring much science fiction and most commentaries on new technologies”

(Foster xii). As suggested, in many of the “core” cyberpunk narratives of the 1980s,

86 especially Gibson’s novels, this ambiguous relation to technology is explicit. In my mind, though, it is simply not enough to justify the representation of cyberpunk as a middle- ground subgenre opposed to conceptions of technology as either tool-like or threateningly environment-like. In fact, in cyberpunk narrative technology is frequently epitomized as an efficient tool (again, Case’s mastery over cyberspace is exemplary) and just as frequently (but more powerfully) as threatening, though not in a way that necessitates full-on retreat, or that suggests that retreat is even possible.

More importantly, the rundown, dilapidated cyberpunk world, Hollinger’s “near- future trash culture,” is usually one dominated by a technological logic that unambiguously contrasts the instrumental conceptualization, one implying the erosion of human control and understanding, and the radical alteration of our existences as a result of technology’s incursions into previously impermeable zones—the domestic, the everyday, the body, etc. This is a fundamentally substantive concern; it is simply the case that many cyberpunk texts are more focussed on mapping the phenomenology of that world, less on the need for escaping it. As with military sf, though, there is some value in charting a more conventional literary history, and in this case it makes some sense to begin with what has come to be established as cyberpunk’s original “manifesto.”

That text takes the form of Bruce Sterling’s preface to his 1986 cyberpunk anthology

Mirrorshades, the first collection of the subgenre’s representative short fiction, here presented as works sharing a unified vision. The term “manifesto” is appropriate, for

Mirrorshades displays many of the hallmarks of that particular mode, going so far as to refer to the subgenre as “a new movement in science fiction” (Sterling, Mirrorshades ix) and painting a picture of an unstable social setting ripe for new ideas and formations:

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“The Eighties are an era of reassessment, of integration, of hybridized influences, of old notions shaken loose and reinterpreted with a new sophistication, a broader perspective”

(Sterling, Mirrorshades xiv). In the years since the subgenre’s “inauguration” with

Neuromancer in 1984, it has become common practice to refer to Sterling’s text when outlining something like a “history of cyberpunk,” and that is not a formula I plan to subvert here; Sterling’s introduction to the subgenre is not only informative but vividly written.

The preface suggests a transition away from the history of sf, one Sterling associates with a “careless technophilia” from “a vanished, sluggish era, when authority still had a comfortable margin of control” (Mirrorshades xiii). This is contrasted against a new, subversive awareness of hybridization embedded in a “cultural Petri dish where writhing gene lines splice” and figures as distinct as “the computer hacker and the rocker overlap”

(Sterling, Mirrorshades xiii), paving the way for the high/low technocultural synthesis indicated in the cyberpunk portmanteau, “The overlapping of worlds that were formerly separate: the realm of high tech, and the modern pop underground” (Sterling,

Mirrorshades xi). Sterling’s insistence on a flight away from antiquated and worn-out literary traditions is carried forward elsewhere as well, including his introduction to

Gibson’s 1986 Burning Chrome anthology, where he declares that “SF has survived a long winter on its stored body fat” (xii).

Sterling is right to suggest a resistance to tradition, for though it manifested in diverse ways, one finds such flights articulated across an array of cyberpunk fictions. The tendency is perhaps most visible in Gibson’s first short story, “The Gernsback

Continuum,” published in 1981 and later incorporated into Mirrorshades as its first entry,

88 though here the opposition to sf’s past is expressed as a kind of ideological hostility. The story opens with its unnamed protagonist, a freelance photographer, receiving a job from

Dialta Downes, “a noted pop-art historian” (Gibson, “Gernsback” 2). She shows him images of futuristic architecture designed, mostly, in the American 1930s, along with pulp sf magazine covers painted by Frank R. Paul,36 and asks that he track down and photograph similar architectural examples across America, instances of futuristic art deco she believes constitute “a kind of alternate America: a 1980s that never happened. An architecture of broken dreams” (Gibson, “Gernsback” 5). The story’s title comes into focus when, while shooting examples of California gas stations, he hallucinates a 30s-era futuristic passenger plane, “a twelve-engined thing like a bloated boomerang, all wing, thrumming its way east with an elephantine grace” (Gibson, “Gernsback” 5). He soon realizes his visions are tapping into an alternative American history, one where the technological utopias envisioned in Hugo Gernsback’s pulp sf magazines developed as planned.

What he experiences, then, are “semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own” (Gibson, “Gernsback” 7)—an alternative historical trajectory (or “Gernsback continuum”) engendered by the cultural yearning for a perfect future facilitated by perfect machines. But the sinister nature of this future becomes apparent when the photographer reluctantly observes a colossal cityscape pulled straight from the pulp sf imagination:

The books on Thirties design were in the trunk; one of them contained sketches of an idealized city that drew on Metropolis and Things to Come, but squared everything, soaring up through an architect’s perfect clouds to zeppelin docks and mad neon spires. That city was a scale model of the one that rose behind me. Spire stood on spire in gleaming ziggurat steps that climbed to a central golden temple tower ringed with the crazy radiator flanges of the Mongo gas

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stations. You could hide the Empire State Building in the smallest of those towers. (8).

Cowering in the face of the vista’s astounding display and caught in a kind of “dream logic that knew nothing of pollution, the finite bounds of fossil fuel, of foreign wars it was possible to lose,” he finally sees two of the city’s denizens: “They were white, blond, and they probably had blue eyes. They were American” (Gibson, “Gernsback” 9).

Despite being reprinted in Mirrorshades (subtitled “The Cyberpunk Anthology”), the story is hardly a clean example of the subgenre. In fact, the alternative semiotic history witnessed by the protagonist is the reverse of the dirty and declining futures characteristic of cyberpunk. But it is clear that this is the point, at least in terms of its positioning in

Mirrorshades. Through the protagonist’s unsettling experience of mass utopian desire made real, Gibson foregrounds the dystopian nature of an era’s dream of technological perfection and social progress. And as suggested by the title’s use of “Gernsback,” the dream is also symbolic of the era’s pulp sf narratives, which Gibson condemns for their cryptically fascist elements: their naïve portrayal of a utopian future designed to be perfect in every way, as long as one is American, wealthy, and white. For Gibson (and by extension, Sterling), this is the sf history cyberpunk rebels against, with its trash-riddled world populated by street punks and ruled by multinational corporations, and with its depictions of immensely complex technologies escaping direction or control, the suggestion in Mirrorshades is that cyberpunk offers a more realistic extrapolation from contemporary trends, as opposed to pulp sf’s juvenile fantasy of a comfortable, care-free existence sustained by technologies that obey every command.

In the previous chapter, military sf’s history was traced to Chesney’s 1871 novel The

Battle of Dorking, which set the generic parameters for much of the militaristic narratives

90 that would follow. But it is impossible to ignore the subgenre’s overlap with pulp sf as well, particularly in terms of their shared conception of technology in the instrumental mould. In both cases, technology is regularly positioned as a collection of instrumental tools, with a sharp focus placed on their efficiency and use-value, and with their unintended ramifications largely ignored. In military sf, this convention involves a vision of weapons obeying their designers and operators, while in pulp sf the tendency was to offer a more comfortable vision of technology’s ability to free us from the drudgeries of everyday life, and to facilitate our conquest of the natural world. In both cases, the representation is overwhelmingly one of technology’s tool-like qualities. “The Gernsback

Continuum” offers a critique of this conceptualization in American pulp sf, while at the same time setting the stage for cyberpunk’s own reconceptualization of the “real” impact of technology—that is, its substantive account of technology as an overarching environment beyond measure or control. Gibson’s photographer lucidly brings this picture, along with its critique of the pulp imagination, into focus: “The Thirties dreamed white marble and slipstream chrome, immortal crystal and burnished bronze, but the rockets on the covers of the Gernsback pulps had fallen on London in the dead of night, screaming” (“Gernsback” 5).

It is important to note, however, that Sterling’s account in Mirrorshades does not propose a one-sided or straightforward detachment from the entirety of the historical sf canon. A discontinuity is proposed, one largely from the tropes and icons of Gernsback’s magazines, but Sterling offers a series of literary and historical precursors he believes provide the foundations for cyberpunk narrative, going so far as to suggest that

91 cyberpunk’s “roots are deeply sunk in the sixty-year tradition of modern popular SF” and that “Their precursors are legion” (Mirrorshades x).

Sterling’s sketch of historical continuity takes the form of three precursor groups, all containing “ancestral cyberpunks” who “show a clear and striking influence”

(Mirrorshades x): the New Wave, what Sterling calls “the harder tradition,” and, finally, a group he collects under the designation “SF’s native visionaries” (Mirrorshades x).

From the New Wave he includes Harlan Ellison, Samuel Delany, Norman Spinrad,

Michael Moorcock (discussed last chapter), Brian Aldiss, and J.G. Ballard.37 From “the harder tradition,” which here refers to the tradition of so-called “hard sf” (“hard” implying an emphasis on hard science), he takes Olaf Stapledon, H.G. Wells, Larry

Niven, Poul Anderson, and Robert Heinlein. These last three, interestingly, were members of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy at various times through the 1980s, with Niven occupying an especially central role. And as indicated last chapter, Heinlein was in some sense the patriarchal figure of American military sf, with

Starship Troopers fulfilling an archetypal role for the subgenre’s modern form. The fact that he (and Niven and Anderson) are here cited as “ancestral cyberpunks” is some indication, I think, of both cyberpunk’s more dispersed origins, and its willingness to partake in postmodern bricolage, pulling literary styles and concepts from any material deemed useful. Sterling’s third group, “SF’s native visionaries,” is comprised of a “who’s who” of canonical sf figures (all of whom are men, it should be noted—Sterling’s

“history” of sf effectively erases the explosion of feminist sf writing in the 1970s): Philip

José Farmer, John Varley, Philip K. Dick, Alfred Bester, and Thomas Pynchon, with the latter receiving “special admiration” for his “integration of technology and literature”

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(Mirrorshades x). This is unquestionably a tangled knot of literary influences, emphasizing the need for a pluralized sense of cyberpunk’s history.

Still, as Sterling would have it, all of these influences are to varying degrees carried forward in the works of 1980s cyberpunk authors, congealing in some mysterious way to delineate the outlines and tendencies of a unified literary movement. And Sterling is very specific regarding the official, “card carrying” members of this movement:

a loose generational nexus of ambitious young writers, who swapped letters, manuscripts, ideas, glowing praise, and blistering criticism. These writers— Gibson, Rucker, Shiner, Shirley, Sterling—found a friendly unity in the common outlook, common themes, even in certain oddly common symbols… (Mirrorshades xi)

Gibson has been discussed in some detail already, with Neuromancer establishing a narrative and stylistic model for the subgenre. Rudy Rucker is less frequently discussed, but became recognized for his “Ware Tetralogy,” consisting of Software (1982), Wetware

(1988), Freeware (1997), and Realware (2000), a series charting the self-replicating evolution of a group of artificially intelligent robots called “boppers,” along with their attempts to establish a society independent of human culture. By the time of

Mirrorshades’ publication, Lewis Shiner had published his 1984 novel Frontera, featuring a future-Earth governed by multinational corporations, and following a team sent by one of these to investigate an abandoned colony on Mars. With a focus on technoscientific verisimilitude, Frontera makes the case for Sterling’s insistence on

“steely extrapolation” as one of cyberpunk’s nascent impulses (Sterling, Mirrorshades x).

Shiner also became known for his public dissatisfaction with the “cyberpunk” label, which in his 1992 paper “Inside the Movement: Past, Present, and Future” he insists had become thoroughly commodified: “It is now a marketing phrase used to sell everything

93 from comics to board games to specialty magazines for keyboard players” (17). In fiction, however, the kind of subversive, anti-capitalist pageantry which would loudly oppose such commodification found its clearest voice in John Shirley’s novels, most notably his City Come A-Walkin' (1980) and A Song Called Youth trilogy, comprising

Eclipse (1985), Eclipse Penumbra (1988), and Eclipse Corona (1990). All of these feature gritty, freethinking characters antagonistic to traditional authority, with the trilogy set during a Third World War where the Soviet Union persisted, and featuring an interesting blend of cyberpunk and military sf elements. Here one finds best exemplified

Sterling’s insistence that the subgenre imaginatively describes “the world of organized dissent” and “street-level anarchy” (Mirrorshades xii).

Sterling’s own fiction made an impact in the decade too, particularly his 1985 novel

Schismatrix. Taking place in a distant future marked by humanity’s expansion beyond the solar system—in contrast to cyberpunk’s usual reliance on a near-future Earth setting, including Sterling’s own Islands in the Net (1988)—the novel details the species’ posthuman development along separate lines: while the “Shapers” employ extreme genetic modification to extend their life spans and fine-tune their senses, the

“Mechanists” rely on computer and hardware augmentation, largely in the form of advanced prostheses, to metamorphose into enhanced cyborgs. Much of the novel’s plot is concerned with the centuries-spanning war—sometimes “cold,” at other times “hot”— between these factions, as well as the protagonist’s own sequence of posthuman transformations, which in the end result in his transcendence beyond material, embodied existence: “He saw his clothes floating within the hallway. His arms drifted out of the sleeves, prosthetics trailing leashes of expensive circuitry. Atop its clean ladder of

94 vertebrae, his empty skull sank grinning into the collar of his coat” (Sterling, Schismatrix

236). Much of what Sterling describes, in Mirrorshades, as “the cosmic outlook of Olaf

Stapledon,” a key figure in British sf, can be found here, as well as “The visionary shimmer of Samuel Delany” (x). Though not as accomplished in either category,

Schismatrix does exude the aloofness and the grand, cosmic perspective of Stapledon’s classics, especially his endlessly inventive and philosophical Star Maker (1937); it also contains some of the imaginative eccentricity of Delany’s work, with its odd world populated by equally odd inhabitants, and with its ornate, often eccentric use of language contributing to the text’s idiosyncratic character, much like Delany’s Stars in My Pocket

Like Grains of Sand (1984).

Any number of stylistic and thematic continuities tie these works together, helping make the case for Sterling’s proposed alignment, one based in a “common outlook,”

“common themes,” and “common symbols,” many of which are described in the

Mirrorshades preface.38 In relation to a shared picture of technology and its social effects, though, substantivism can be seen as the central through-line. Again, this is not to say that technology does not appear in these works in its tool-like guise. The Shapers and

Mechanists of Sterling’s Schismatrix, for instance, have spent centuries perfecting the technical means for their manipulations of the human mind and body, propelling the human form beyond its biological limitations. But a central theme of Sterling’s novel is not the fundamental instrumentality of technology, nor our limitless ability to direct it without consequence, but rather the ways in which advanced technological societies, whether Shaper or Mechanist, subject individuals and the world to an excessive logic of instrumental rationality. The protagonist, Abélard Lindsay, spends the novel’s duration

95 escaping from the efforts of both factions to control his body and his life, and his final transubstantiation is best read as not just a flight from the body, but from an insane world obsessed with objectifying anything “other.” This concern is fundamentally substantive, not instrumental.

Similar concerns lie at the center of other “core” cyberpunk texts. From Gibson’s digitized sky in the opening line of Neuromancer, which positions the world under a horizon of artificiality, to the out-of-control “boppers” of Rucker’s Ware Tetralogy and the hellish vision of global corporatization in Shiner’s Frontera, these narratives illuminate technology’s unchecked growth as an inexorable and all-determining environment, and detail the corresponding modes of fracture, anxiety, and disorientation that accompany such a shift. Sterling suggests that technoculture is spiralling uncontrollably, and it is an anxiety carried through in the subgenre’s most recognizable entries of the 1980s:

Technical culture has gotten out of hand. The advances of the sciences are so deeply radical, so disturbing, upsetting, and revolutionary, that they can no longer be contained. They are surging into culture at large; they are invasive; they are everywhere. The traditional power structure, the traditional institutions, have lost control of the pace of change. (Mirrorshades xii)

The notion of cyberpunk’s cohesion under a conceptualization of substantive technology succeeds in contrasting cyberpunk with the decade’s other major sf developments, and in outlining its contribution to popular discourses and ways of understanding technology in its social milieu: in this case, as a kind of reversal, where technology is the encompassing milieu, and society a kind of effect or subset.

The association between cyberpunk and a generalized postmodern phenomenon is already apparent in the media-hopping connections established in Foster’s text. The

96 central conceit of Souls is not that Blade Runner was a film, Schismatrix a novel, and

Billy Idol’s Cyberpunk (1993) a music album, nor, certainly, that these should be read straightforwardly as “texts” confined to the structures and conventions of their own mediated parameters. Foster suggests instead that:

cyberpunk provided a popular framework for conceptualizing new relationships to technology. If Western technological developments are typically informed by the values and assumptions of Enlightenment rationality, such as a belief in progress and the domination of nature, then cyberpunk seemed to offer an alternative value structure for popular needs and interests that remained marginal from the point of view of that Enlightenment model. (xvi)

Foster’s insistence on a broadly discursive—as opposed to media-centred—framework for reconceptualizing and recontextualizing our relation to the technical sphere certainly carries a sense of postmodernism’s abandonment of media and discourse compartmentalization, and one can probably assume that there is something in the “texts” themselves that facilitates such a reading.

Brian McHale offers similar points in his 1991 paper

“POSTcyberMODERNpunkISM”: “The underlying thesis […] is the one associated with

Fredric Jameson and Andreas Huyssen, among others: namely, that postmodernism is characterized by the collapse of hierarchical distinctions between high and low art” (309).

He also gestures towards Gibson’s comments made on this subject in an interview with

Larry McCaffery: “This process of cultural mongrelization seems to be what postmodernism is all about … I know I don’t have a sense of writing as being divided up into different compartments” (qtd. in McHale 309). In relation to this, McHale’s focus is on the “technologically enhanced speed of the traffic in models between the high and low strata of culture” as a defining aspect of cyberpunk’s genre and media blurring, such that one sees in the cyberpunk/postmodern phenomenon “an ever-tighter feedback loop […]

97 between high and low” (311). After locating cyberpunk elements in several exemplars of postmodern fiction, such as Thomas Pynchon’s 1973 masterwork Gravity’s Rainbow, as well as the reciprocal patterns of postmodern influence in cyberpunk narratives themselves, McHale’s conclusion is that “the poetics of mainstream postmodernism and the poetics of the latest wave of SF overlap to an unprecedented degree” (320).

In the preceding chapter, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s “The SF of Theory:

Baudrillard and Haraway” was discussed in relation to its theory of sf as a “mode of awareness” or “mode of discourse,” one that reads the genre not as a rulebook of literary strictures, what he calls a “generic effects engine of literature and simulation arts” (387), but as an epistemological framework for determining the “temperature” (that is, the severity and likelihood) of conceivable scientific and technological shifts. As the article’s title indicates, he is also, and correspondingly, concerned with the relationship between literary sf and the works of Jean Baudrillard and Donna Haraway. His contention is that one finds in both—specifically, Haraway’s “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” and Baudrillard’s

“The Precession of Simulacra”—a nascent “science-fictionalization of theory” (Csicsery-

Ronay, Jr., “The SF” 389).39 With the latter text, Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. pays close attention to the concept of “hyperreality” as it pertains to sf utopias, noting Baudrillard’s insistence that the utopian imagination requires an adequate distance between the real and the imaginary, a gap early sf writers experienced before the advent of mass computerization and digitization. In the era of the hyperreal, though, an age of radical digital incursions and media saturation resulting in the loss of a stable sense of reality, the gap has disappeared: “indeed, the relationship between them is inverted, and the real derives from the model, from the operational genetic code of which the real is merely the readout”

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(Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., “The SF” 390). In this moment of reversal, of the elevation of the hyperreal to the level of a Platonic form or template, sf and postmodern theory intermingle as equally adept (and often interchangeable) modes for cataloguing the phenomenology of a digitized and thoroughly mediated existence.

Such an existence, along with the subjects who inhabit it, is one of the primary concerns of Hollinger’s early essay on cyberpunk, “Cybernetic Deconstructions,” referred to earlier for its comments on the generic features of the subgenre and its rundown “world.” Hollinger’s analysis, it should be noted, belongs to a wave of “first generation” responses to cyberpunk appearing in the early 90s. McCaffery’s interview with Gibson, quoted above, is from 1991, and Haraway’s manifesto was published in

1985; these texts belong, along with many others discussed in this section, to a surge of techno-discourses that circulated in the 1980s and shortly after, with fiction and nonfiction participating in a dialogue over the era’s technological realities. It is within this context that Hollinger orients cyberpunk within a more expansive trajectory of “anti- humanist” sf, which she defines in terms of its “various deconstructions of the subject— carried out in terms of a cybernetic breakdown of the classic nature/culture opposition”

(“Cybernetic” 204). Cyberpunk, with its denizens transformed into bio-technological entities, and with its most frequently recurring technology, cyberspace, offering access to a disembodied digital existence divorced (to varying degrees) from its material foundations, reconfigures the human subject as both natural and unnatural, cybernetic and organic, nature and culture, and does so in such a way that “the border between the organic and the artificial threatens to blur beyond recuperation” (Hollinger, “Cybernetic”

205).

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This is a sharp divergence from the “classic” model of humanist sf, perhaps most notably on display with the genre’s most revered authors—the so-called “Big Three” comprised of Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, and Arthur C. Clarke, who produced immensely influential fictions during a peak in sf popularity during the 40s and 50s. It is certainly true that their work often explored the boundaries and potentials of the human subject. Consider, for example, Clarke’s Childhood’s End (1953), which Hollinger notes for its unique form of mystical “transhumanism”: at the novel’s conclusion, humanity’s most recent children, now evolved beyond recognition, transcend their material forms to join a vast cosmic intelligence called “the Overmind.” Their transcendence may be a gesture towards the human subject’s potential for change, but for Hollinger it “precludes the necessity of envisioning a future based on changing technologies, social conditions, and social relations” (“Cybernetic” 209). The novel’s transhumanism, then, is really the product of a humanist anxiety over radical change and alteration, an anxiety manifested in the form of “an apocalyptic logic that implies the impossibility of any change in the human condition within history” (Hollinger, “Cybernetic” 209).40 For Hollinger, the value of cyberpunk lies, conversely, in its antihumanist tendency to examine the impacts of profound human-machine hybridization within the frame of a near-future predicated on the contemporary “now,” not some mystical or apocalyptic fantasy, and to thoroughly examine the malleable nature of the postmodern subjects who, by dwelling in such a world, are inextricably entwined with the technologies that dominate their social reality:

“Here again we must deconstruct the human/machine opposition and begin to ask new questions about the ways in which we and our technologies ‘interface’ to produce what has become a mutual evolution” (“Cybernetic” 218).

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In their own ways, each of these commentaries—Foster’s posthuman vernacular,

McHale’s high-low feedback loop, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s “science-fictionalization of theory,” and Hollinger’s deconstructed subject—provide insight into the discursive overlap of cyberpunk and postmodernism. And in each account, the intersection can be seen to function as a tool for examining the new modes of existence and awareness that occur within an era of rapid technological incursion into the sphere of everyday life. The possibility or the need for escape from such incursions is not explored, for in the cyberpunk-postmodernist framework technology is not construed in explicitly negative terms—as Deckard explains in Blade Runner when asked about the potential dangers of cybernetic research and development: “Replicants [that is, androids] are like any other machine. They’re either a benefit or a hazard” (Blade Runner).

There are other characteristics that place cyberpunk and postmodernism side-by-side in the 1980s as well. The epistemological disorientation mentioned earlier, one on display in works ranging from Neuromancer to RoboCop, is often associated with postmodern authors, those who take issue with the pseudo-objective narratives of scientific and historical thinking, particularly when associated with the Enlightenment and modernity.

In Neuromancer this takes the form of Case’s inability to grasp the complexities of his world, and in RoboCop with Murphy’s powerlessness to comprehend the state of his own fall into cyborg embodiment. In postmodernism one can locate the problem most broadly in a generalized hostility towards claims of absolute knowledge and certitude, or more specifically in Baudrillard’s insistence on the disappearance of “the real,” or in the end of

“grand narratives” declared famously in Jean-François Lyotard’s The Postmodern

Condition (1979).

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As for the refusal to adopt an ideological stance in direct opposition to the totalizing structures of technology, capitalism, and so on, one finds this in the detached amorality of many cyberpunk protagonists, while in postmodernism it is perhaps best summarized by

Agnes Heller’s account of modernity as progress and postmodernity as absolute present in her 1999 book A Theory of Modernity. Heller encapsulates modernity’s obsession with progress with the metaphor of a railway station:

In the modernist view, the present is like a railway station where we denizens of the modern world need to catch one of the fast trains that run through, or stop in this location only for a few moments. Those trains will carry us to the future. Settling in the railway station would have mean stagnation—for them. (7)

In contrast to the modern desire for constant forward momentum, the postmodern perspective shuns the feigned certainties of Reason and Science, having experienced their abysmal failures throughout the twentieth century, perhaps most shockingly manifested in the mushroom clouds of the atomic bombs, and is content—indeed, insists—on patiently observing the contemporary moment without committing to a future-oriented project: “The postmoderns accept life on the railway station. That is, they accept living in an absolute present” (Heller 9).

One sees this acceptance surface in any number of cyberpunk texts, from Gibson’s hacker-protagonists to the lost souls of Pat Cadigan’s short stories and novels, who typically desire respite from the noise, complexity, and dehumanization of technoscience, not progress or restoration. Indeed, in his introduction to Gibson’s Burning Chrome collection, Sterling notes that Gibson “wastes very little time shaking his finger or wringing his hands” and that his stories reveal a “boredom with the Apocalypse” (xi)— that is, with sf’s tendency to separate past from future with a society-ending cataclysm that renders their relation tenuous. Alongside this, it is perhaps fair to locate in cyberpunk

102 a boredom with progress, with modernity’s insistence on perpetual movement predicated on this or that fashionable cause: Marxism, capitalism, science, the market, transhumanism, and so on. Sterling sees in “Big Science” nothing but “a jam-packed

Global Bus roaring wildly up an exponential slope” (Burning xi). In the 1980s, an interacting and overlapping postmodern-cyberpunk discourse was content to watch the bus, but certainly not board it.

3. Language and Experience in William Gibson’s Early Stories

As with Drake in the context of an instrumental vision in military sf, a number of literary examples are relevant to cyberpunk’s attachment to a substantive worldview. We have already discussed, if only briefly, Neuromancer’s emergence as the subgenre’s limit-text (as Hollinger has it); it is worth noting, however, that Gibson had essentially

“worked out” the blueprint for Neuromancer in several of his earlier short stories, particularly “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981) and “Burning Chrome” (1982). By the mid-80s both had been dwarfed by the success of Neuromancer and the subsequent Sprawl novels, but they continue to stand as thematic and aesthetic maps of Gibson’s early conceptualizations, and provide intriguing figurations of technical existence in the substantive mould, aspects of which would be adopted in later works. As I will show, these figurations can be seen in the concepts and performances of language and experience that I contend are central to Gibson’s writing, as well as other works of cyberpunk.

In “Johnny Mnemonic,” Gibson provides a protagonist that embodies the idea of human-machine permeability already discussed. Johnny is a mule for information, essentially, transporting critical data on a chip implanted in his brain: “I had hundreds of

103 megabytes stashed in my head on an idiot/savant basis” (Gibson, “Johnny” 2), he explains at the story’s outset. The “idiot/savant” term refers to Johnny’s peculiar relation to the data; because of its sensitive nature, he cannot have any insight into what is stored in his brain, and switches into a mindless state when producing it—he “sings” it: “I sat and sang dead Ralfi’s stolen program for three hours” (Gibson, “Johnny” 13). Johnny runs into trouble when he discovers that his current contractor, Ralfi, has downloaded information into his brain stolen from the Yakuza, who appear across a number of

Gibson’s texts, along with a generally pervasive interest in all things Japanese. Japanese corporations in the 1980s were for a time considered the largest competitors to U.S. corporate globalization, and here Gibson extrapolates that trend.

Johnny is not the story’s only cyborg, however. Molly Millions, who is the female counterpoint in Neuromancer as well, appears here for the first time: she is an assassin- for-hire modified for combat, with optical implants (her eyes are the mirrorshades

Sterling valorizes as the subgenre’s icon) and knife-like extensions that, when she wills it, unfurl from beneath her nails, “each one a narrow, double-edged scalpel in pale blue steel” (Gibson, “Johnny” 8). Molly is hired by Johnny to help him get the data out of his head before it is too late, a task that takes them to one of her contacts, Jones, who is capable of retracting the sensitive information. Jones is a cyborg of a different kind, a dolphin modified for cryptanalysis and coding, addicted to the heroin used by the navy to control him during some previous war; he communicates by manipulating “rows of dusty

Christmas lights” which are “hung across a clumsy wooden framework” (Gibson,

“Johnny” 10), alternating red, blue, and off to generate crude symbols—a cruciform in blue, at one point. Jones is a reminder that in Gibson’s near future, technology bridges the

104 ontological divide between “human” and “animal” as well, with both subjected to an epidemic of cyborgization that evaporates traditional boundaries (a notion developed at length in Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto,” a focus in the next chapter).

Johnny eventually extracts the data from his brain, but he never learns what it encapsulates. Along with his role as an oblivious data-trafficker, this positions him to be read metaphorically, I believe, as a stand-in for the technocultural subject: information washes over him, and he is subjected to large quantities of it, but he is incapable of gleaning any real knowledge or truly comprehending his world, just as our own Digital

Age places us in a milieu of constant data, but with no capacity to synthesize its noise into a coherent picture. On this reading we are all idiot/savants, superficially technical

(we can “sing” the language, occasionally) but epistemologically illiterate; this parallels closely with the aspects of epistemological obscurity I have foregrounded in other cyberpunk texts.

Out of all of Gibson’s short fiction, it is “Burning Chrome” that comes closest to the narrative template of Neuromancer. Here it is Bobby who plays the role of console cowboy, “a burglar, casing mankind’s extended electronic nervous system, rustling data and credit in the crowded matrix” (Gibson, “Burning” 170). He is paired closely with our narrator, Automatic Jack, a modern tinkerer specializing in hardware, with their relationship framed in terms where “Bobby’s software and Jack’s hard; Bobby punches console and Jack runs down all the little things that can give you an edge” (Gibson,

“Burning” 170). As in Neuromancer, the world they inhabit is described in largely technological terms, though the metaphorical relation is sometimes switched. In

Neuromancer, for instance, the sky (natural) appears in the guise of dead channel

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(technological), while in “Burning Chrome” the matrix (technical) is described in astrophysical terms as a “nonspace where the only stars are dense concentrations of information, and high above it all burn corporate galaxies and the cold spiral arms of military systems” (Gibson, “Burning” 170).

In keeping with the figurations in other texts, a focus on eyes appears here as well, this time in the form of the commercial implants longed for by Rikki Wildside, Bobby’s romantic interest, though he tends to use women “like they were his private tarot or something, the way he’d get himself moving” (Gibson, “Burning” 170). The eyes, an expensive pair with blue irises manufactured by “Zeiss Ikon,” are associated with Rikki’s favourite “simstim” (simulated stimuli) star, Tally Isham, and her dream is to “wear” the same eyes someday. It is worth remembering that blue eyes figure into the fascist revelation in “The Gernsback Continuum,” where the all-American children hover ominously in front of a hallucination of utopian futurism. Here that future is ramshackle and commercialized, and the dream is an unachievable fantasy. Rikki does get the eyes, but as Jack finds out, only by saving her wages from the House of Blue Lights, where she is prostituted in “three-hour shifts in an approximation of REM sleep, while her body and a bundle of conditioned reflexes took care of business” (Gibson, “Burning” 191).

A cyberspace heist perpetrated by Bobby and Jack functions as the plot’s through line, but Rikki’s eyes operate as the thematic and conceptual hinge. The story ends, in fact, with Jack musing about “posters of simstim stars, all those beautiful, identical eyes staring back at me out of faces that are nearly as identical” (Gibson, “Burning” 191).

Here the diegesis of the eyes is the reverse of RoboCop’s, where Murphy is given a militarized visor at the film’s beginning, and removes it at the end to underscore his

106 technological embeddedness. In “Burning Chrome” the consumer eyes are a young girl’s dream, and Rikki claims them at the story’s end. In both cases, though, the figuration emphasizes the pervasiveness of the technical sphere, now epitomized as the medium of vision through which the entire world is filtered. In RoboCop this constitutes an existential horror, while in “Burning Chrome” it emerges as a consumer fantasy, though ambiguous at best. In military sf, it is worth noting, visual enhancements are often impermanent (high-tech binoculars appear frequently), and cyborgization, a largely substantive concern, is mostly avoided in favour of useful gadgetry.

Along with these exemplifications of the onto-epistemic breakdown, one can find throughout both stories an associated interest in the languages surrounding computer and hacker culture, as opposed to the technical minutia of the computer systems themselves.

In Neuromancer, Gibson demonstrates this with a proliferation of subcultural neologisms and dizzying exchanges of pseudo-technical jargon—“The antique arm whined as he reached for another mug. It was a Russian military prosthesis, a seven-function force- feedback manipulator, cased in grubby pink plastic” (3-4)—and one can trace this tendency in the earlier stories as well. And indeed, Gibson has emphasized his disinterest in the particulars of computer systems, which in his work is substituted with an engagement with the cultures and languages of a computer-obsessed society. In a 1991 conversation with Larry McCaffery he states, “I’m more interested in the language of, say, computers than I am in their technicalities” (“An Interview” 270). And in the same interview:

It wasn’t until I could finally afford a computer of my own that I found out there’s a drive mechanism inside—this little thing that spins around. I’d been expecting an exotic crystalline thing, a cyberspace deck or something, and what I got was a little piece of a Victorian engine that made noises like a scratchy old

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record player. That noise took away some of the mystique for me; it made computers less sexy. My ignorance had allowed me to romanticize them. (Gibson, “An Interview” 270)

Language is never central to Feenberg’s analysis, but his account of substantivism in

Transforming Technology highlights the theory’s emphasis on the determining capacities of technical knowledge and its objects; that is, their uncontrollable impact on the cultures, the politics, the economies, and the daily lives of the subjects bound by technology’s reach, often to the extent that “no alternative technological civilization is possible,” for its shape is cast in stone by the overarching technical environment (Transforming 12).

Language is not specified here, but one gets the sense in Gibson that ways of speaking are inexorably bound to ways of living and relating in a totalizing technical world, even if the emerging vernaculars are devised in opposition to that world. In America in the

1980s, it is perhaps fair to think of hip-hop’s subversive poetics in this relation, or of punk rock’s slurring, rambling denouncements of “the mainstream,” or of a feminism engaged with deconstructing the imbedded misogynies of official discourse. In these historical developments and in the sf fictions noted above, such a determinism may be of the “soft” variety (as opposed to the “hard” determinism Feenberg finds in much of substantive theory proper), but it nonetheless challenges instrumentalism’s simplified picture of a technology freed from a connection to social reality, including that reality’s modes of communicating.

It is also fair to note that in most of the militaristic strains of sf, particularly those associated with technomilitary fantasy in the previous chapter, language is thoroughly transparent. The intricate mechanisms of military machinery are frequently detailed in those texts, but with a language that is plain and to-the-point, a vehicle to convey

108 information economically. The characters in these narratives also tend to speak in a contemporary, stripped-down prose that exists above or outside the fictive reality, as if language in these worlds is transcendent, something imposed on speakers from a meta- diegetic author rather than entrenched in the diegetic social fabric.41

When Pournelle’s favoured hero, John Christian Falkenberg, speaks in West of

Honor (1976), then, it is with a voice largely severed from the futuristic world and its implied social and technical transformations. Expounding the value of military service in that novel’s last pages, he states: “We can’t make things perfect … But we can damned sure end some of the worst things people do to each other. If that’s not enough, we have our own honor, even if our masters have none” (Pournelle, West 189). When the characters from Gibson’s world speak, on the other hand, it is from within the diegetic world, signifying an overlap between the characters’ way of speaking and the world’s way of being. The opening sentences of “Johnny Mnemonic” are exemplary, giving a sense of Johnny’s idiosyncratic voice and the culture it belongs to:

I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: if they think you’re crude, go technical; if they think you’re technical, go crude. I’m a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. (Gibson 1)

And in “Burning Chrome,” Jack’s oft-quoted line “the street finds its own uses for things” (Gibson 186) indicates not just the malleability of technology, its tendency to proliferate beyond the parameters established by its creators (the DJ’s turntable transforms a recording tool into a creative medium, for instance), but also his streetwise mode of speaking, of employing metaphors to describe complex technocultural phenomena. And in cyberpunk’s (especially Gibson’s) extensive deployment of neologisms, slang, and technobabble, what Jameson has called “an orgy of language and

109 representation” (321), there is certainly a reflection of the accelerating complexity of global capitalism and technoculture, which require new lexicons, new practices, and new figurations to trace their rapidly evolving outlines.

Alongside this substantive focus on language it is possible to delineate a particular approach to experience as well, one equally committed to a concept of social imbrication.

Feenberg’s 2010 collection Between Reason and Experience provides some useful tools for mapping this, opening with a preface that lays out the book’s primary terms. We are told that “Technical creation involves interactions between reason and experience,” and later that “The modern world develops a technology increasingly alienated from everyday experience,” and does so because “The new masters of technology are not restrained by the lessons of experience and accelerate change to the point where society is in constant turmoil” (Feenberg, Between xvii). In Feenberg’s preface and in the text’s various entries,

“reason” is associated with the technoscientific world, and with the products of that world when developed without recourse to the social and cultural understandings couched in

“experience.” In fact, he goes on to outline a theory of “co-construction” popularized in technology studies, where the technical systems derived from reason and the frameworks of experience that inform and are affected by such systems engage in reciprocal co- creation: they “‘co-construct’ each other in ever tighter feedback loops, like the Drawing

Hands in M. C. Escher’s famous print of that name” (Feenberg, Between xxi). When

“reason” is disengaged from social experience and knowledge, as is the case in instrumental theory and under capitalist hegemony, social cohesion is broken by a technology exceeding the boundaries “experience” tells us are essential.

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In Gibson’s stories, one can read Feenberg’s division on display in the predicaments of its characters. Johnny is psychologically fractured, with portions of his mind containing inaccessible information, and an idiot/savant switch that detaches him from his cognitive operations. This is a reality that technoscience, according to its “rational” commitment to the rapid acceleration of information systems, has deemed appropriate, but Johnny dreams of the “day I’ll have a surgeon dig all the silicon out of my amygdalae, and I’ll live with my own memories and nobody else’s” (Gibson, “Johnny”

22), returning to a more “natural” experience of the world. In “Burning Chrome,” Rikki is obsessed with the consumer technologies marketed by her favourite simstim stars, and the eyes she eventually wears literally filter her experience of the world through the products of corporate technoscience.

The impacts of rationalized technoscience on human experience is at play in other cyberpunk texts as well. Consider, for instance, Case’s often fractured understanding of the world in Neuromancer, or the photographer’s frenzied hallucination of a

Gernsbackian utopia (dystopia?) in “The Gernsback Continuum”—in both cases the texts stays firmly rooted in the experiential subjectivity of their central characters, with the overarching world left obscure, too oblique to adequately grasp. And in the case of

Neuromancer and more conventional works of cyberpunk (again, “The Gernsback

Continuum” does not adhere to the subgenre’s template), science has been subsumed by a corporate system that functions according to its own logic of development, ignoring the cultural experiences Feenberg construes as socially vital. This is a substantive figuration, surely, and there are grounds for overlapping the reason/experience dichotomy onto the instrumental/substantive one.

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The instrumental consciousness believes in the capacity for technology to be detached from its social context, and insists that science and technical reason can operate without recourse to culture, economics, and so on. Feenberg states that “The idea of a pure technological rationality that would be independent of experience is essentially theological” (Between xix)—instrumental theory is that very theology, pushed to its upper limits, with a disconnected rationality serving as its defining metaphysical feature.

Substantive theory, on the other hand, places an emphasis on the subject’s experience of technology as a totalizing and invasive environment, and underscores the sense that modern technoculture is now dominated by that portmanteau’s first half; this picture is one of “a technology cut off to a considerable extent from the experience of those who live with it and use it” (Feenberg, Between xx). Gibson’s stories open up a way for thinking about the gap between reason and experience that occurs in most modern, industrialized societies, and by focussing on the experiences of characters trapped in a suffocating technoscientific world, offer a picture of technology as an uncontrollable phenomenon, one leaving little room for resistance or respite.

The substantive picture of technology, one entailing the disastrous separation of technoscientific reason from the experiences of the social whole, is the underlying figuration at play here, and it emerges as one of the subgenre’s most significant contributions to an American technocultural crisis in the 1980s.

4. Feedback Loops

The focus on language and experience in cyberpunk narratives further solidifies the subgenre’s postmodern inflections. For many of the postmodern thinkers coming to prominence in the 1980s, a turn to the centrality of language structures in determining

112 sociocultural structures is on display, particularly in the work of Jacques Derrida, where the hierarchical divisions of Western thinking are embedded in language patterns, necessitating a “deconstruction” of their binaries to expose a pervasive arbitrariness. In terms of experience, the fractured and disjointed perceptions and psyches of Gibson’s characters point to what Hollinger, discussing the cyberpunk story “Pretty Boy

Crossover” and borrowing from Fredric Jameson’s work on postmodernism, calls a postmodern “fragmentation of subjectivity,” which may very well be the “equivalent of the modernist predicament of individual alienation” (“Cybernetic” 211). This fragmentation is central to the era’s posthuman discourses as well, which called into question the liberal humanist subject’s valorized position as a rational agent. The posthuman subject is embedded, instead, within a web of shifting technical and informatic systems, and is “a collection,” as Hayles puts it, “of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (3).

It would be an error to divorce new ways of thinking and speaking about technology, language, and the subject from the material conditions they took root in. Contributing to the 1980s surge of technological discourse discussed previously, Fredric Jameson insists that it is essential to grasp the phenomenon as not just a stylistic mode, but more meaningfully as “the cultural dominant of the logic of late capitalism” (46), where the emerging structures of multinational capital, including “computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor” (xix), are reflected and amplified in corresponding shifts in discursive and cultural practice. Beginning its life as

113 a New Left Review article published the same year as Neuromancer (1984), his 1991 magnum opus Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism in fact points to cyberpunk, “a new type of science fiction,” as “fully as much an expression of transnational corporate realities as it is of global paranoia itself” (Jameson 38). He places the subgenre within a literary mould that utilizes global technologies as “representational shorthand for grasping a network of power and control even more difficult for our minds and imaginations to grasp: the whole new decentered global network of the third stage of capital itself” (Jameson 38).

In David Harvey’s equally influential The Condition of Postmodernity (1990)—also contributing, in its own way, to the era’s attempt to comprehend the technocultural landscape—a similar emphasis on the historicality of the “postmodern condition” is on display, this time centered on what Harvey considers a compression of the concepts and experiences of time and space. He argues that the transition from a Fordist economy to one of “flexible accumulation,” where everything is a commodity, was facilitated by “the rapid deployment of new organizational forms and new technologies in production”

(Harvey 286). This results in corresponding “accelerations in exchange and consumption,” a vast speed-up in the timeframes in which goods and images are consumed, and an equal shortening of the spatial distance between consumer and product, especially when the latter is of the ephemeral (i.e. digital or visual) variety: “The consumer turnover time of certain images can be very short indeed (close to that ideal of the ‘twinkling of an eye’ that Marx saw as optimal from the standpoint of capital circulation)” (Harvey 288). As with Jameson, these material-economic transformations are connected to manifestations in the postmodern attitude, including the inability to

114 formulate a coherent vision of the future, for “It is difficult […] to maintain any sense of historical continuity in the face of all the flux and ephemerality of flexible accumulation”

(Harvey 303). It is worthwhile to think in this relation of Case’s conversation with the

Wintermute-Neuromancer AI, where nothing new can be conceptualized, only a prolongation of the present moment where “things are things.”

As Jameson and Harvey perhaps demonstrate, a potential metaphor for thinking through this relationship between culture and history is the feedback loop, for as both accept, the cultural practices reflecting material shifts in turn shaped their materialities. In fact, the feedback concept gained traction across several disciplinary nodes in the 1980s: in the continuation from the 70s of second-order cybernetics, where the investigators of a cybernetic system are incorporated through a feedback mechanism, both affecting and being affected by their interaction; or in posthuman figurations, where subjects are rooted in technical systems that both respond to and condition the individual in loops of reciprocating feedback; or in software engineering, where input from a control mechanism impacts various software states, these in turn affecting the mechanism’s next signal, and so on.

Hayles picks up and broadens the concept in several ways throughout How We

Became Posthuman, focussing on the reciprocal dynamic at play between technologies and our perceptions of them in one particularly enlightening section: “The feedback loops that run between technologies and perceptions, artifacts and ideas, have important implications for how historical change occurs” (14). And in relation to the development of cybernetics, she explains that it “followed neither a Kuhnian model of incommensurable paradigms nor a Foucauldian model of sharp epistemic breaks”;

115 instead, “they were fabricated in a pattern of overlapping replication and innovation”

(Hayles 14). This model of feedback, one hinging on an interplay between technologies and the ideas or concepts of them (and of technology itself, broadly construed) is of course central to the interplays I sketch between certain technological discourses and the realities they both condition and are conditioned by. One sees this in Gramsci as well: his concept of cultural hegemony facilitates a nuanced approach that refuses to overdetermine any particular side of the base-superstructure bifurcation, emphasizing instead their codetermining capacities—the ability for our material realities to condition the ways we think, speak, and act, and for these in turn to condition our material realities.

In her 2003 essay, “Cyberquake: Haraway’s Manifesto,” Zoë Sofoulis defends

Haraway’s famous “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century”—which in academia behaved “like the seismic center of an earthquake that jolted many out of their categorical certainties” (84)—against the charge of an overreliance on “discourse theory,” as if such a paradigm were inherently problematic. The critique comes from Carol Stabile, who in her 1994 book Feminism and the Technological Fix blames Haraway’s use of discourse theory for “idealizing, aestheticizing, dehistoricizing, and depoliticizing moves within culture critique” (Sofoulis

95)—in other words, for pulling such a critique out of the more grounded, material arena where something like “real politics” and “real social change” supposedly occur. Sofoulis’ response is illuminating:

[Stabile’s] argument implicitly relies on the old Marxist idealist/materialist distinction and fails to show any understanding of the way discourse theories (like Foucault’s, from whom Haraway borrows) are precisely about how discourses (traditionally considered part of the nonmaterial ‘superstructure’), the structures and practices of speaking and acting in institutional contexts, have

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both historical determinants and real, material effects, and hence how telling new or different stories can potentially change sociotechnical realities. (95)

I will return to the “Manifesto” in more detail in the next chapter (on feminist sf), but

Sofoulis’ answer to Stabile’s critique has an orienting effect on our discussion of feedback loops, and of discourse in relation to technology and politics in the 1980s. As a complex discourse system simultaneously constituted by and constitutive of its material horizon, technomilitary fantasy, for instance, was thoroughly engaged in the process of shaping its “sociotechnical realities.” The SDI—a “real” policy that had “real” material impacts, though it was never itself materially realized—is one amongst many exemplifications of the material-semiotic linkage Sofoulis sees in Haraway’s work, for as has been shown, it was borne out of the technical discourses prevalent in that period, discourses emanating from a variety of sources, including There Will Be War.

Sofoulis’ reminder of the power and value of “telling new or different stories” is relevant here as well, particularly in relation to sf. Despite their tendency to perpetuate and redeploy the constructions of masculinity and militarism, works of right-leaning military sf were nonetheless engaged in the process of imaginative world-building, sketching the outlines and details of fictive universes at once different from and connected to our own. It is in this productive generation of difference and resemblance— although these are always leveraged to varying degrees—that sf finds its immense potential to influence the social fabric.

The fantasy of absolute control over technology and its possibilities was told and retold throughout the decade, and it was a fantasy that provided the fertile soil for any number of policies and technologies to take root—with these latter emerging in turn to shape the prevailing fantasies, such that a kind of resonating, material-semiotic feedback

117 loop developed, its intensity amplified as the “signal” oscillated back and forth.42

Moreover, it is possible to say that in the 1980s such a feedback reached its cause-and- effect shattering crescendo when the militaristic fantasies of technology became essentially indistinguishable from the “real” technologies themselves, with the SDI and

There Will Be War functioning as quintessential examples.

The term I offered earlier for this configuration of technological conceptualization and its incorporation into hegemonic power is the technology of consent, for in Gramsci’s view modern capitalist societies maintain order not through coercion exclusively, but through the maintenance of a picture of the world that the majority of society’s groups consent to; in the case of modern technoculture, I argue that technology must, by necessity, play a principal role in this picture, hence “the technology of consent.” The suggestion of a feedback loop is essential, for while the sf imagination may have given us something like Reagan’s fanciful chimera of a weaponized “shield” in space, the SDI emerged in turn to fuel the sf imagination, offering the template for any number of additional sf fantasies, principally of the militaristic variety. The resulting fictions would of course feed back into the material horizon of social and political reality, creating an echo of reverberating “noise.”

Cyberpunk engaged in its own kind of feedback mechanism as well, meshing with postmodern practices and posthuman figurations in a discursive reassessment of the subject’s position in technoculture. And this formation, taken together, was of course able to both shape and be shaped by the sociopolitical realities of the decade; it stopped short, however, of engaging in such a way as to generate the kind of hegemonic formation that asserted its dominance throughout the decade. Along with the substantive trajectories that

118 can (with the benefit of hindsight) be associated with it, however, the subgenre can be seen to have offered an alternative conceptualization, one at odds with the prevailing dominance of the instrumental mindset.

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CHAPTER THREE: FEMINIST SF

“We’re selecting, aren’t we?” she said. “And we’ll keep doing it, on and on, and the years will go by, and eventually, all our sons will come home, is that it? No more penis worshipers? No more trumpets and drums and games? What will we do then, Morgot?” “We won’t have any more wars,” Morgot said, holding her tightly. “Theoretically. No wars at all.” (Tepper 295)

Marthatown, the walled-off, matriarchal city described in Sheri S. Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country (1988), harbours within its walls a terrible secret. Most of its inhabitants—including its protagonist, the eleven-year-old Stavia, who questions her mother Morgot in the quote above—operate with an incomplete understanding of their post-apocalyptic world. They know that atomic warfare was responsible for the holocaust that decimated much of the planet centuries ago. They are also aware that a thoroughly divided society eventually emerged from the rubble of this devastation, resulting in their current social reality: women living in their enclosed towns (called “Women’s Country”), men in their adjacent warrior camps, and strict policies governing relations between the two.

These details are common knowledge to the women of Marthatown, and to the majority of the men living somewhat barbarously in garrisons. What is not widely known, however, and what constitutes the novel’s shocking revelation, is that the ruling elite in Marthatown, a group of scientifically trained women referred to as “the Council,” enforce a systematic program of selective breeding and artificial insemination designed to weed out the violent tendencies in men. The Council selects non-violent men, a kind of endangered species, and through artificial insemination breeds their desirable traits, allowing warrior males to believe they are the fathers. Newborn boys are handed over to the warrior camps for ten years, after which they are asked to declare their allegiance:

120 either stay garrisoned with the men and cultivate one’s prowess in battle, or return through a gate to Women’s country to live amongst women. The program returns more and more boys through the gate each year.

Interestingly, Gate’s solution to the “masculine problem” is not a stereotypical retreat from “the technical” in toto, and into, for instance, a romanticized, pre-technological state. Perhaps most notably, versions of such retreats appeared in the feminist sf critical utopias that flourished in America in the 1970s, feminist sf’s most prominent decade: in

Suzy McKee Charnas’ Motherlines (1978), for instance, which posits a nomadic, naturalised existence as an escape from the aftermath of patriarchal technoculture (which led to catastrophic social decline, as in Gate), or in Marge Piercy’s canonical Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), featuring a future utopia predicated on a return to agrarianism and communalism (counterbalanced, interesting, by an equally possibly divergent future, where technology has run amok and the wealthy, living on space platforms orbiting a wrecked and desolate Earth, harvest the organs of the poor).

Like these novels, Gate offers its own “corrective” to the malfunctions of modernity and patriarchal brutality. But as its revelation of a eugenic breeding program makes clear, rather than retreating into a pre-technical state of innocence, Gate’s solution seeks to establish a divergent and radically new techno-social order—namely, a world without savagery, without war, and without violent men, but not without technology. The radical eugenics at the heart of Gate’s corrective can be framed in any number of ways. For the time being, though, it is enough to focus on its underlying assumptions vis-à-vis technology; namely, set within the outlines of Feenberg’s overarching schema, one can read Gate’s solution as a refusal to commit to the extremisms of either instrumentalism or

121 substantivism—that is, to an all-or-nothing approach to technology resting on certain beliefs regarding its fundamental characteristics.

As Tepper’s novel illustrates, I think, there were alternatives to this simple binary at play in the 1980s (though I still contend that instrumentalism was essentially dominant).

For the women running Marthatown, technology and technical knowledge—in this case, those forms associated with reproduction and in vivo fertilization—operate as instrumentality, certainly, for their application seeks to achieve a calculated end. But they simultaneously function “environmentally,” for unlike the hardnosed troopers central to military sf, the women of the Council, particularly Morgot, appear to be aware of technology’s tendency to determine, often uncontrollably, one’s social, cultural, and economic realities, as well as the subjects who populate them. Likewise, they are aware of the resulting moral dilemmas faced when a group wields such unwieldy power, which has consequences beyond control or foresight: “We call ourselves the Damned Few,”

Morgot confesses to her loyal old servitor, Septimus, “And if the Lady has a heaven for the merciful, we are not sure any of us will ever see it” (Tepper 291).

Technology in Gate is located somewhere in the lacuna between the extremities of the instrumental and substantive epistemologies. By borrowing aspects from both, and by offering a more complex, fuller account that eschews base reductions, Tepper’s novel avoids the determinisms of the instrumental/substantive binary—where technology is either an efficient tool, and we are determined to employ it as such, or a looming force beyond comprehension, with humanity doomed to live under its influence.

This is not to say that Tepper’s novel is entirely accepted on these terms, that its

“corrective” is unproblematic, or that it stands in any way as a quintessentially feminist

122 text. Indeed, it was and continues to be provocative and divisive. In Wendy Pearson’s

1996 analysis, for instance, she takes Tepper to task for what she believes is a barely concealed and deeply troubling homophobia. Although she believes this is prevalent throughout the novel’s pages, it surfaces explicitly in a single passage, where the text explains the status of homosexuality in Women’s Country:

Even in preconvulsion times it had been known that the so-called “gay syndrome” was caused by aberrant hormone levels during pregnancy. The women doctors now identified the condition as ‘hormonal reproductive maladaptation,’ and corrected it before birth. There were very few actual HNRMs—called HenRams—either male or female, born in Women’s Country. (Tepper 76)

Women’s Country may be a refuge for heterosexual women and certain men, then, but anyone incapable of fitting that heteronormative and essentialist mould is subjected to their planned manipulation. Just as gay men are undergoing a process of systematic genetic erasure, so too are gay women, who as Pearson puts it are “so neatly elided from the text” (Pearson 201).

Despite the ethical questions raised at the heart of the text, its solution to the problems of war and conflict stands as a provocative and concise illustration of what

Feenberg would perhaps call a critical theory of technology—that is, one that refuses the instrumental/substantive binary, offering instead a picture of technology transformed in- line with a new social agenda (even though Pearson insists it is in fact a very old one).

Feenberg describes this kind of stance, including his own critical theory, in numerous ways, but his example of the computer is particularly relevant, especially in relation to technology in the 1980s:

There is a third alternative: perhaps the computer is neither good nor evil, but both. By this I mean not merely that computers can be used for either domination or democratization but that they can evolve into very different

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technologies under the influence of different strategies of development. (Transforming 91)

The notion of a transformation of technology occurring under “different strategies of development” can serve, I think, as a summary of not only Gate’s portrayal of technology

(where the solution to masculine violence is both good and evil, depending on perspective), but of very similar—though unique—portrayals in other feminist sf texts of the same decade.

Differences and similarities among works of feminist theory and sf will be pursued in the following section (part 1), where I discuss historical developments relating to feminism in the 1980s, with feminist sf developing in the midst of an incredibly hostile climate. Part 2 will offer a brief examination of women writing sf through the history of the genre, and makes the case for a continuum of feminist engagement stretching back as early as the pulps. The relation of works of feminist sf with a critical-technological view will then be looked at in various examples from the 1980s, principally the works of Lois

McMaster Bujold, a popular sf writer often ignored in academia (part 3). And finally, part

4 will relate critical-technological theories found in feminist sf to Donna Haraway’s exploration of the cyborg figure, orienting these and other discourses within a Gramscian framework as a means of comparing their roles as popular conceptions of technology to the instrumental (military sf) and substantive (cyberpunk) figurations developed in previous chapters; Part 4 will also look closely at key differences between the critical approaches found in Haraway and Feenberg. As discussed in this project’s opening, the goal is to frame these broader trajectories—the instrumental, the substantive, and now the critical—as hegemonic and counterhegemonic technological worldviews.

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1. An Uncomfortable Decade: Feminism, Fiction, and Fracture

In July of 1990, Science Fiction Studies published its second special issue on sf written by women, “Science Fiction by Women,” coming a full ten years after the journal’s first on the topic, “Science Fiction on Women—Science Fiction by Women,” in

March 1980. In Veronica Hollinger’s introduction to the 1990 issue, “Women in Science

Fiction and Other Hopeful Monsters,” she reflects on the intervening years between special issues, and on the vicissitudes of political climate that impacted sf’s development through a decade of cultural instability:

The ’80s have not been a comforting decade; they have seen the problematic rise of post-feminism (so chillingly extrapolated in The Handmaid’s Tale) as well as the renewal of the debate over abortion; and their backlash against feminism has frequently taken the form of increased violence against women. (134)

While feminist theory and sf did continue to develop throughout the 80s (they certainly did not cease to exist), this took place under the spectre of a widespread backlash against the second-wave feminist victories of the 60s and 70s, a counteroffensive carried on the crest of Reagan’s more generalized conservative resurgence, along with broader shifts in

American culture and politics.

I have used the term “cultural crisis” primarily to signify conflicting accounts of technology, a clash of perspectives grappling with the era’s blossoming technoculture.

The discursive aspects of such a crisis are the focus of this project. But the 1980s were a site of wide-ranging and often acrimonious “culture wars,” as James Davidson Hunter puts it, stretching well beyond the boundaries of popular thinking on technology (though they often overlapped with this sphere). It was a decade of interweaving crises, then, not of any one monolithic or unifying conflict.

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A diplomatic crisis, to name one example, erupted in 1979 when the American embassy in Tehran was stormed by pro-Iranian Revolution students, leading to a successful takeover and the detaining of over fifty hostages. Over the 444 days that they were held, debate over America’s global role and the nature of anti-American “terrorism” engulfed the nation, fuelling immense increases in military buildup and R&D. A financial crisis—global in scope and tied to the increasing complexity of an integrated worldwide market—continued from the late-70s and spurred unemployment and inflation, as well as steep downturns in steel and automobile manufacturing, industries historically central to the US economy. In 1986, the Iran-Contra scandal marked a crisis in American faith in political leadership, the most significant since Vietnam and Watergate. The AIDS crisis swept the nation, bringing with it waves of fear and hostility, as well as feminist and queer counterblasts, especially toward the decade’s end. And alongside these and many more, of course, loomed the perpetual threat of nuclear annihilation, now intensified by the Soviet Union’s invasion of Afghanistan in 1979.

But as Rodgers shows in Age of Fracture, alongside these political and material crises, the 1980s were a site of ideological warfare as well, where the words and ideas that constitute our social and intellectual worlds are rethought from the ground up: “Most striking of all was the range across which the intellectual assumptions that had defined the common sense of public intellectual life since the Second World War were challenged, dismantled, and formulated anew” (2). As discussed, Rodgers points to several sites of upheaval: economic theory, race, and political rhetoric, but he also stresses changes in gender and sexuality, whose transformations “seemed to culturally conservative Americans most threatening,” and “set off the sharpest tremors” (145).

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Within feminism, certainly, new strategic and theoretical shifts emerged to respond, at least in part, to a nascent opposition to women’s advancements during the 60s and 70s.

With conservative elements on the rise, and with an extreme New Right movement wielding enormous influence—as well as presidential support—the gains of women were subjected to scrutiny and disdain. The most obvious sign of this opposition came early in the decade: the failure of the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) to pass congress. The

ERA was widely supported through the 70s, but the efforts of newly mobilized

“antifeminist” and anti-ERA groups blocked its progress, and in 1982 it reached the ten- year ratification deadline for congressional passage. The ERA would have implemented constitutional guarantees for gender equality.

Though the most obvious example, the ERA’s blockage only touches the surface of what was an epidemic of slippages for women. As Susan Faludi has explained, like the

ERA’s failure, some of these were anchored in the arenas of political power, in legislative and policy-oriented activity: “one-third of the Reagan budget cuts, for example, came out of programs that predominantly serve women—even more extraordinary when one considers that all these programs combined represent only 10 percent of the federal budget.” Combined with this is the fact that women in high-raking political positions, the most likely to counter such cuts, were losing ground, with “the already small numbers of women in both elective posts and political appointments [falling] during the ‘80s.”

(Faludi 9).

Faludi’s analysis of this crisis, laid out in her influential 1991 book Backlash: The

Undeclared War Against American Women, goes on to expose an extensive assault on the gains of women taking place throughout the 1980s, what she calls “a backlash, an attempt

127 to retract the handful of small and hard-won victories that the feminist movement did manage to win for women” (9-10). For Faludi, the backlash was not limited to policy and legislation, but was socially and culturally endemic, running the gamut from rising sex discrimination charges to plummeting high-salary job opportunities to, most disconcertingly, a significant increase in instances of rape and sex-related murders, the latter of which “rose 160 percent between 1976 and 1984.” This number is critical for

Faludi, since “at least one-third of the women were killed by their husbands or boyfriends, and the majority of that group were murdered just after declaring their independence in the most intimate manner—by filing for divorce and leaving home” (9).

Hollinger’s reminder that the 80s were not a “comforting decade,” and that this often took the form of “increased violence against women,” could not be closer to the truth.

The media is a primary focus for Faludi as well, which she pinpoints at the opening of Backlash as the purveyor of a “bulletin of despair”: “You may be free and equal now, it says to women, but you have never been more miserable” (1). This misery, according to newspapers, TV ads, movies, and other media, rises out of a confluence of factors:

Professional women are suffering “burnout” and succumbing to an “infertility epidemic.” Single women are grieving from a “man shortage.” The New York Times reports: Childless women are “depressed and confused” and their ranks are swelling. Newsweek says: Unwed women are “hysterical” and crumbling under a “profound crisis of confidence.” The health advice manuals inform: High-powered career women are stricken with unprecedented outbreaks of “stress-induced disorders,” hair loss, bad nerves, alcoholism, and even heart attacks. (Faludi 1-2)

For Faludi, these messages congeal to form “a closed system that starts and ends in the media, popular culture, and advertising—an endless feedback loop that perpetuates and exaggerates its own false images of womanhood” (7). This system, amplified by new and old technologies, pulled attention away from the structures of inequality that persisted

128 and intensified under Reagan and a concentrated New Right alliance, constituting the real material and ideological barriers to equality and justice: “It is justice for their gender, not wedding rings and bassinets, that women believe to be in desperately short supply”

(Faludi 7).

While these myths multiplied across screens and pages, especially later in the decade, it was really the emergence of this New Right alliance that created their outlines in the first place. With humble beginnings as “rural fundamentalist ministers whose congregations were shrinking and electronic preachers whose audience was declining,”

(Faludi 242) key members (most notably Paul Weyrich) would go on to found the

Heritage Foundation, one of America’s most influential conservative think tanks. The

“fevered rhetoric and hellfire imagery” (Faludi 242) of their early and evangelical war on women’s liberation would transubstantiate into pseudo-rational political discourse under the newly enshrined political legitimacy of the Heritage Foundation, making its way into the incredibly influential policy guide Mandate for Leadership in 1981. The document makes the case for increasing defense spending, and for pouring resources into the development of advanced weapons technologies; it also suggests lowering income taxes and curtailing the regulation of capitalist enterprises; but scattered between these “non- social” platforms, it also “warned of the ‘increasing political leverage of feminist interests’ and the infiltration of a ‘feminist network’ into government agencies,” calling for “a slew of countermeasures to minimize feminist power” (Faludi 246). The three thousand page document would go on to provide the policy backbone for Reagan’s first term.

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This is not to say that the emergence of a rightward trajectory in American politics was univocal in any way, or that it was somehow steered by an evangelical, God-fearing committee from the backrooms of political power. The military sf authors of the Citizens

Advisory Council on National Space Policy were popularly construed as “New Right” as well, though they had little in the way of direct overlap with Weyrich and the Heritage

Foundation’s ascendancy. There were, however, several thematic and strategic overlaps between these two groups, with one in particular standing out: the feverish obsession with war and its necessity.

Faludi explains that the New Right leaders under Weyrich’s sway insisted that “they were ‘warriors,’ marching into enemy territory behind a barrel-chested Christ holding high the flag” (249). They believed they were ordained to defend the homeland from an apocalypse of anti-traditional, anti-American, and “anti-family” (their euphemism for

“feminist”) demons intent on torching the structures and institutions of American civilization that had held the country together since its inception: the nuclear family, free trade, technoscience, the right to arms, Biblical moralism, and so forth. In the pages of

There Will Be War, the authors insisted on the necessity of ending nuclear détente in favour of a technology-fuelled war on Soviet factions, along with the defense of traditional military values as the highest expression of American culture. With Weyrich and the Heritage group the emphasis was on religious values, while for Pournelle and the

Advisory Council it was military ones, but it is clear that the ancient and affable union of religion, war, and imperialism inhered fundamentally with these groups, often cast in tones of apocalyptic fervor that made their synthesis unmistakable.43 The ideological merger in Drake’s “Code-Name Feirefitz,” discussed in the first chapter, takes on

130 newfound meaning in this regard, with its brothers, Esa and Juma, discovering that religion and militarism coexist in harmonious interplay: “It was past midday now. The sun had enough westering to wink from the crucifix against the soldier’s armor—and from the pistol in the civilian’s right hand” (Drake, “Code-Name” 338). The “strange nexus” posited by Gray involves sf authors and the political-technological machinery of strategic warfare, but in this broader context one could certainly include this apocalyptic, right-leaning Christianity as part of an even stranger configuration encompassing economic, sociopolitical, and technical spheres of influence.

In response to the backlash Faludi outlines, but also according to its own internal development, American feminism retreated from a primarily essentialist inclination, abandoning many of its oft-deployed binaries: women-nature, men-technology, female- subject, male-patriarchy, and so forth. Along with these decouplings, the concept of an essential identity, a unifying feminist “We,” receded into the background in favour of concepts of hybridity and multiplicity, of fluctuation and fragmentation, many of which emerged out of divisions in race, ethnicity, and class. Rodgers writes in Age of Fracture that,

The contrast between the experiences of the white suburban and college women who set the tone of the early 1970s women’s movement and the experiences that working-class, African-American, and immigrant women brought to the women’s movement was not merely a matter of difference. The deeper injury, it was increasingly said, lay in white feminists’ unspoken, casual use of the women’s “we.” (153)

In 1984 Donna Haraway would insist in “A Cyborg Manifesto” that “It has become difficult to name one’s feminism by a single adjective—or even to insist in every circumstance upon the noun […] Identities seem contradictory, partial, and strategic”

(155). And six years later, at the end of the decade, Judith Butler would argue in Gender

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Trouble’s opening chapter that “The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms” (1). For Butler, of course, identities are influenced by hegemonic discourses, which provide the parameters for “performing” gender and other constructs appropriately.

With the critique of identity came the dismantling of other totalizing concepts as well. “We” could no longer be deployed uncritically, but neither could “subject,” or

“agency,” or “nature,” or “feminism,” or “reproduction,” or even “patriarchy.” Within a new poststructuralist framework, the terms were no longer transparent, and no longer reflected an ontological realm distinct from the language used to describe it. Rather, the words and ideas themselves were woven into the broader and ontologically “flat” terrain of signification, a linguistic field where power is articulated in the first place, and where genders and identities are shaped; one could find “power lodged in the hierarchical oppositions that formed the very stuff of language,” according to Rodgers (157). It was an age of fracture in this other sense as well, then: identities splintered into unstable discourses, and linguistic “play” supplanted rigid social categories.

For many feminists, the category of “technology” suffered a similar fate. The term lost its monolithic, totalizing character, becoming one among many nodes of multiplex, decentered power. As Carol Stabile claims in the introduction to Feminism and the

Technological Fix, “When the technological determinism of the seventies began to recede somewhat during the eighties, it gave way to postmodernist theories of fragmented, deterritorialized, or sometimes even simulated subjectivities produced by technoculture and its ‘informatics of domination’” (4). She goes on to describe how much of feminist theory cleaves to either “reactionary essentialist formations (what I describe as

132 technophobia)” or “fragmentary and destabilized theories of identity (technomania),”

(Stabile 1) condemning Haraway to the latter group: “Haraway is an inveterate (if slippery) proponent of the technomaniacal ejaculations of Baudrillard and his band of unabashedly boyish poststructuralist theorists” (Stabile 5). Bracketing the fairness of this positioning for a moment, it is clear that a newfound and more nuanced relationship with technology was coming into focus during the period, with feminists discovering new ways to “bridge the gap between technophobia and technomania” (Stabile 5).

Stabile’s invocation of Haraway’s “informatics of domination” is relevant as well. If a new technological horizon was manifesting (or being comprehended for the first time), a kind of material and ideological nexus of interweaving social systems, images, and languages comprising technocutlure’s shifting tectonic plates, it is no wonder feminists began imagining a future emerging from within these structures, not some other place, some other time. Technology was too extensive, too embedded in everyday life, and systems of oppression were too entrenched—with women often complicit in their perpetuation—for the kind of escape envisioned by substantive theorists to be considered viable or even desirable. For Haraway, of course, our complicity in the formation of modern technocultural regimes is a central insight: the cyborg is not innocent, with both women and men complicit in the creation of the sociotechnical horizon, though such complicity is never a valid excuse for political inaction.

It is perhaps no surprise that similar visions of technocultural embeddedness and internal reform appeared in the pages of the era’s feminist sf as well. Science fiction has often been used to imagine alternative futures emerging from present technoscientific conditions, and in the 1980s it was no different. As with feminist discourse in general,

133 though, a discernable transition did take place in the decade’s feminist sf, and it followed the contours of these broader theoretical modulations (with exceptions, as is always the case), especially vis-à-vis technology.

In Science Fiction, Luckhurst claims that feminist sf in the 1970s was reacting in part to a technological crisis, one that was “less the feeling of a headlong fall into the future and more an awareness of the end of something: the limits of this form of rapacious modernity” (170). He points to developments, such as the ecology movement, that imagined lines of flight from the machinery of technoscientific modernity. And in sf as well, especially in the 70s, the various critical utopias collectively dreamed of a world apart from the nightmare of unconstrained technological progress, which was at this point spiralling out of control in ways that were impossible to ignore or predict. From the immense (Hiroshima, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and Mutually Assured Destruction) to the intimate (second order cybernetics and research on brain implants, for instance), a picture of modernity’s “headlong fall” was forming—its limits were being defined, and escape routes diligently plotted. This is the context wherein feminist sf became a significant literary force for the first time, at least in the eyes of a popular readership.

In the 1980s, by contrast, discernable thresholds had largely vanished, and exits were found leading to rooms and pathways within the maze itself, not outside. John Henry

Abbott’s letters to Norman Mailer, published in 1981 as In the Belly of the Beast: Letters from Prison, describe from firsthand experience the American juridical and penitentiary system as a kind of self-perpetuating closed loop: social outcasts are incarcerated and further “criminalized” before being expelled into a world that doesn’t want or need them, leading to re-incarceration and the same cycle of criminalization and ostracism, now

134 intensified. Many feminists were coming to grips with a similar closed loop, only now in the realms of technoculture and neoliberal capitalism, systems that inscribe and reinscribe their own conditions on those dwelling within, leaving one with the claustrophobia of being consumed and produced endlessly in the belly of some voracious Beast of modernity.44

If, as Luckhurst insists, the “felt experience” of the 1970s was one of “limits being reached” (171), in the 1980s it was of limits demystified, and of overlapping and networked totalities laid bare. Feminism and feminist sf played a key role in the assessment and formulation of both experiences. This is not to say that in the 1980s it is possible to link works of feminist sf as a coherent and unified subgenre, nor that there was a strict, ironclad division between certain kinds of fiction associated exclusively with either decade: utopia and dystopia, nature-oriented and tech-oriented, environmental and technological, and so on.45 Associations among these works and generalizations regarding their contents can be elusive, and no simple set of generic formulae, conventions, or archetypes binds feminist sf together—as is the case for much of military sf. The latter’s relatively straightforward narrative tendencies and somewhat narrow set of thematic engagements—military conflict, military service, and military virtue, to list three of the most prominent—render associations and taxonomies more appropriate. This was not the case with feminism, whether one is discussing the 70s, 80s, or now. Nor was it the case that an explicit literary movement emerged meta-diegetically to tie these works together for the benefit of readers—as was the case with cyberpunk under Sterling’s vocal editorship. One can find constellations of relationships and frameworks that

135 associate texts, surely, but nothing approaching a manifesto is to be found, and no simple trajectory of development follows.46

What I would like to frame over the course of this chapter, then, is a constellation of feminist discourses linking theory, political debate, literature, and more, with an emphasis on feminist sf as an exemplary site illustrating the ways in which this formation avoided the binary of instrumentalism and substantivism. This is not the story of feminist sf in its complex totality, nor could it be; I am focused, rather, on a particular cluster of feminist sf texts that can be located in a specific period and associated with a broader discourse—what I would like to think of as a dominant strand of feminist thinking on technology in the 1980s, but certainly not an all-encompassing one. Before moving on to frame a particular vision of technology in examples from this group of texts, it will be useful to engage in a broad scan of the history of feminist sf, or, better yet, works of sf containing feminist strands or inclinations. As discussed in previous sections, while the focus here is on discursive networks of literary and non-literary exchange, an understanding of literary trajectories is necessary as well, for these texts participated, surely, in the generic conventions and practices of reading and writing that preceded them.

2. By Ones and Twos: A History of Feminist SF

It would be an easy mistake to entrench feminist sf too firmly within the period of its mass recognition and acceptance, the 60s and 70s. Rather, as with military sf, feminist sf and sf written by women (an important difference inheres) can be found scattered throughout the history of the genre, even at its potential origins, though early instances of an explicitly feminist form are certainly infrequent. If the effect of cyberpunk’s

136 appearance on the literary scene was that of a supernova, its radiance outshining all other bodies, the “emergence” of feminist sf was that of a slow forming nebula, growing in complexity as new material cleaves to its mass and finally reaching a magnitude demanding observation. Nonetheless, before the 1960s it is possible to trace a subversive and percolating feminism operating within the broader machinery of sf production in

America, something approximating what James Tiptree, Jr. calls the “chinks of your world-machine” in reference to women’s existence under patriarchy, where they live “by ones and twos” like opossums: “Think of us as opossums … Did you know there are opossums living all over? Even in New York City” (“The Women” 134).47 For reasons that will be discussed, even in a genre dominated by male readers and authors, and by a publishing environment that was often hostile to female authors, feminist visions managed to survive “by ones and twos,” even to thrive.

Off course, not all sf written by women is feminist (nor the reverse), and this is clear with the novel many claim is not only the origin of “women’s sf,” but of sf in general:

Mary Shelley’s iconoclastic Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818).48 As discussed in the first chapter, Brian Aldiss insists on the originating role of Shelley’s text; in his Billion Year Spree (1973), he positions Frankenstein at the intersection of sweeping developments taking place during the early nineteenth century: transformations in the botanical sciences, geology, evolutionary theory, industrial development, and more—“The world was alive with news of itself” (Aldiss 17). By utilizing the existing gothic literary form, Aldiss argues, Shelley mirrored British anxieties over the transition to a new social and scientific age, a traumatic shift reflected in Victor’s own meddling:

“Symbolically, Frankenstein turns away from alchemy and the past towards science and

137 the future—and is rewarded with his horrible success” (Aldiss 24). Though the novel can be analyzed within a feminist frame, and while ways of reading are just as important as ways of writing, it is perhaps fair to insist on a lack of overtly feminist elements within the pages of Shelley’s monumental text.

Clearly demarcated feminist strands appeared, instead, over a century later in

American pulp magazines, beginning with Hugo Gernsback’s Amazing Stories, the first to publish sf exclusively. In many ways, the era was politically ripe for such an emergence: women gained suffrage with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment in

1920, six years before Amazing Stories launched, and the image of suffragists parading through New York City was still fresh in the popular consciousness. The medium was ideal as well: as Jane Donawerth has explained, “Gernsback promoted tolerance among races […] and welcomed women writers” (26). This is on top of what many have claimed is sf’s “natural” or “innate” proclivity to think beyond accepted sociocultural norms to envision other worlds, other times, other social structures, genders, lifestyles, and so on, a concept Sarah Lefanu places at the centre of her own history of feminism and sf, In the

Chinks of the World Machine (1988)—her title taken from the Tiptree story I have already quoted—the first to be published on the subject: “women writers have been able to draw on the possibilities opened up by an important strand within science fiction that is in opposition to the dominant ideology, that, rather than celebrating imperialistic and militaristic glory, is subversive, satirical, iconoclastic” (4). Her gesture towards an imperialist and militaristic “dominant ideology” is fitting, since she is looking back on a decade of There Will Be War anthologies and mass output from the Advisory Council

138 authors, who had already left an indelible imprint on sf and American culture at this point.

Gernsback’s openness to female authorship facilitated the appearance of the first pulp sf story by a woman: Clare Winger Harris’s “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” appearing in

Amazing Stories in 1927. Harris submitted her story in response to a contest emblazoned on the cover of the magazine’s December 1926 issue: “$500 for the most amazing story written around this picture,” the cover’s text declares, referencing Frank R. Paul’s art for the issue, which depicts feathered alien women, unclothed and sexualized, lolling in the foreground as a spheroid UFO elevates a steamship into their strange world’s horizon.

Harris’ submission interprets the image rather uniquely. The planet, we learn, is Mars, home to an advanced civilization on the brink of extinction due to a global water shortage: “the peculiar land contours,” we are told, “are due to the fact that water is becoming a very scarce commodity on our neighboring planet” (Harris 3). What unfolds is a mystery told from the perspective of George Gregory, who uncovers a Martian plot to transport water from Earth’s oceans, replenishing dwindling supplies on the red planet

(this is accomplished by Paul’s spheroid ship, which accidentally snares a steamship, the titular Poseidonia, in its efforts). George is helpless to stop them, and can only observe their scheme in horror through a Martian televisual device he discovers in the apartment of his lover’s alternative suitor, Martell, who we later learn is a Martian agent.

The love interest, Margaret Landon, plays a secondary but essential role. From

George’s perspective she is “the very personification of innocence and purity” (Harris 6), but she pursues her interest in Martell regardless, and stands firm against George’s jealous inquiries: “I refuse to allow you to dictate to me who my associates are to be”

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(Harris 5). We later find that Margaret was aboard the Poseidonia as it was ensnared and carried across the gulf of intervening space, and that Martell kept her alive. At the story’s end, she delivers a final message to George through the technology he used to discern the

Martian plot:

Her eyes filled with tears. “Do not mourn for me, George, for I shall take up the thread of life anew among these strange but beautiful surroundings. Mars is indeed lovely, but I will tell you of it later for I cannot talk now.” “I only want to say,” she added hastily, “that Terra need fear Mars no more. There is sufficiency of water now—and I will prevent any—” She was gone, and in her stead was the leering, malevolent face of Martell. He was minus his skull-cap, and his clipped feathers stood up like the ruff of an angry turkey-gobbler. (Harris 19)

George receives the message while imprisoned in a psychiatric ward, his theories considered insane. He is powerless to intervene (indeed, George’s lack of agency is forefront), and can only watch in dismay as Margaret’s image fades from view. Margaret, on the other hand, is a victim of a very peculiar sort: she considers her surroundings

“strange but beautiful,” and insists she will “take up the thread of life anew.” Feminism is not present here in any full or complex way, but as Donawerth argues, Margaret certainly

“distinguishes herself”: “She does not beg for rescue, but instead displays stoic control,” and beyond this, “she heroically pledges herself to prevent any more predation by alien forces on Earth” (24).

Gernsback awarded “Poseidonia” third prize in the contest, but insisted on adding his own editorial qualification: “That the third prize winner should prove to be a woman was one of the surprises of the contest, for, as a rule, women do not make good scientification writers, because their education and general tendencies on scientific matters are usually limited” (qtd. in Larbalestier 1). Given the sexism of the era, and given the hostility of the sf industry—Gernsback would allow women to write, but not without framing their work

140 in his own terms—Margaret stands out as an early feminist figure in sf, with Harris offering “more attention to female characters and women’s relationship to science, and a rationalism that is not utopian or radical” (Donawerth 24). It is for good reason, then, that

“Poseidonia” is often placed at the origin of a specifically feminist mode in sf, including in Justine Larbalestier’s anthology of feminist sf Daughters of Earth (2006), where it sits at the opening, followed by Donawerth’s analysis.

If feminism in Harris’ story is subdued, manifesting as a subtextual reimagining of women, science, and rationalism, it would take a more violent, explicit form four years later in Leslie F. Stone’s “The Conquest of Gola” (1931). Published in the pulp magazine

Wonder Stories, the story’s narrator is a woman from an alien, female-dominated utopia

(Gola, their term for what is likely Venus), and opens with her recounting the phallic arrival of men from Detaxal (Earth) in their “great smooth cylinders […] as glistening and silvery as the soil of our land” (Stone 97). The women of Gola are telepathic, their technology sophisticated, and the men they rule take the form of “sweet gentle males” who provide “pleasure in those free hours away from the worries of the state” (Stone 98).

When the Earthmen arrive it is for trade, not war—“there are good prospects for business here” (Stone 103)—but the women of Gola are angered when it becomes clear the visitors expect a ruling “king or whatever you call him,” someone able to “see the profit of a thing like this” (Stone 104), and the astronauts are incensed by the same perceived inferiority from the Golans, who keep men as something akin to docile pets.

War inevitably ensues, resulting in the destruction of a Golan city, and finally the defeat of the imperialist Earthmen when the women retaliate, leveraging their telepathic and technological capacities: “soon our terrible combined mental power was forced upon

141 them,” and later, they employ an “annihilator beam to disintegrate completely every ship and man into nothingness!” (Stone 109).

The alien invasion paradigm had been cemented by Wells with The War of the

Worlds in 1898; here it is reversed, with aliens (and women, no less) being invaded, and forced to push back a patriarchal, white-male incursion. As the editors of The Wesleyan

Anthology of Science Fiction indicate in their introduction to the story, it is “a reminder that sf’s conventions have been challenged almost since their inception” (Evans et al. 97).

Equally remarkable, though, is the directness of Stone’s attack. Within the confines of the story Golan males are subjugated and docile, and Earthmen are “despicable males of the species” (Stone 99) betraying “the lowliness of their origin” (Stone 100). Those who are not killed outright are “used in the dissecting room for the advancement of Golan knowledge” (Stone 107). In her The Battle of the Sexes in Science Fiction (2002),

Larbalestier points to “Gola” as one of the first examples of an overtly sf play on the

“battle-of-the-sexes” type (11); if this is the case, the battle presented in “Gola” is profoundly one-sided, mirroring accounts of high-tech conflict in Drake’s military sf stories, where a technologically superior power dominates an inferior one. In Stone’s story, asymmetrical warfare is reconfigured as a literal battle between sexes, where through a mastery of advanced war the traditionally dominated sex emerges victorious.

Other women published sf in the American pulps, but the beginnings of something like a feminist tradition crystallized most clearly with Harris and Stone, though as

“Poseidonia” and “Gola” make clear, their voices were markedly different.49 In terms of impact and recognition in the pulps, only C.L. Moore’s 1933 Weird Tales story

“Shambleau” (1933) has eclipsed them. While its use of the femme fatale convention

142 conjures a particular kind of sexual anxiety (Shambleau is a gorgon-like alien, and attempts to feed on the protagonist’s life force), in “Poseidonia” and “Gola” it is not just individual women (human, alien, or monster) that are vividly portrayed, but entire social structures called into question, and assumptions around gender challenged through portrayals of feminine strength or reversals of status.

In subsequent decades there would be other works of feminist sf that maintained this line of gender-based scrutiny—Judith Merril’s provocative and mournful 1948 tale of nuclear fallout, “That Only a Mother,” for instance. Merril’s story is told from the perspective of Margaret, an expecting mother during a Third World War. She must cope with the anxiety of delivering her child into a toxic, nuclear environment, and as the story unfolds we learn that her daughter suffers from a severe mutation that leaves her with no arms or legs. Her love for the child renders her oblivious to this fact, though, and the story concludes with the husband discovering his daughter’s state, and by implying that he commits infanticide: “She didn’t know. His hands, beyond control, ran up and down the soft-skinned baby body, the sinuous, limbless body” (Merril 220). By entrenching its protagonist firmly in the domestic sphere, we see a kind of reversal of the scenario in

“The Fate of Poseidonia,” where the female character, also named Margaret, is whisked away to heroically face the unknown. The world of this Margaret is very well known, and though her denial is extreme, even psychotic, her maternal strength—to love, to protect, no matter what—is a kind of peculiar heroism in its own right, counterbalanced violently by her husband’s revulsion.

Though not American, Pamela Zoline’s experimental “The Heat Death of the

Universe” (1967) would go on to be widely influential, providing an early expression of a

143 reflexive and postmodern form of feminist sf reworking the genre’s literary protocols.

Published in the British magazine New Worlds, it takes the form of a series of axioms or insights presented as a list, with each entry chronicling Sarah Boyle’s life as a disaffected middle-class mother raising a family in California. The fifty-four entries in total leap dizzyingly from the domestic mundane—“There are 819 separate movable objects in the living-room, counting books” (Zoline 133)—to the level of sociocultural insight—“can we any more postulate a separate culture? Viewing the metastasis of Western Culture it seems progressively less likely” (Zoline 132)—to reflections on the nature of the universe—“a time must finally come when the Universe ‘unwinds’ itself, no energy being available for us” (Zoline 134)—all in the style of detached, clinical observations, as if Sarah herself is the subject of some grand experiment. In its totality, the narrative approximates something like a cross between a grocery list and Spinoza’s Ethics, with emphasis placed on the interconnectedness of the two.

As with Merril’s domestic protagonist, Sarah suffers at home, but for philosophical rather than psychological reasons: for her, the heat death of the universe through entropy is mirrored in her own sphere of influence. Her repetitive, Sisyphean chores, what Mary

E. Papke calls “a nightmare vision of endless meaningless routine, demands, and expectations” (145), are only capable of forestalling for a time the encroaching and inescapable disorder of her life. Harris’ early pulp story rearranged the conventions of the invasion tale, and Zoline’s text recalls feminist sf’s potential to interrogate and upend not just gender norms, but the associated genre norms that so often sustain them. In Papke’s words, “The story thus literally embodies a new form of science fiction, one that in both

144 form and content questions relentlessly the truth of science and the blandishments of fiction” (148).

Feminist sf had experienced a gradual but steady growth for thirty or so years—a kind of nebula slowly forming—but publications through the 60s and 70s accelerated enormously, and by the time of Zoline’s story the outlines of a new form were beginning to congeal, with canonical texts such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness

(1969) exhibiting a new conjuncture combining feminism and sf. In the novel, Le Guin deploys her stunning yet simple prose to depict an ambisexual species on a planet called

Winter, and extrapolates the social and sexual ramifications of a society built on sexless foundations. “In fact,” the Terran narrator declares, “the whole tendency to dualism that pervades human thinking may be found to be lessened, or changed, on Winter” (Le Guin

94). The story would win both the Hugo and Nebula awards for best novel, as would her novel The Dispossessed five years later.

James Tiptree, Jr. would make an indelible mark in this period as well. “The Girl

Who Was Plugged In” can be read as a precursor to cyberpunk, and her other stories spanned a wide range of interests. “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s

Side” (1972), for example, is an enquiry into the biological roots of lust, telling the story of a space station engineer’s sexual obsession with alien otherness, a mania he construes as both violent and epidemic. “Man is exogamous,” he tells a reporter, “all our history is one long drive to find and impregnate the stranger […] Anything different-colored, different nose, ass, anything, man has to fuck it or die trying” (Tiptree, “And I Awoke”

40).

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More than anything, though, feminist sf in the 1970s came to be known as the triumphant era of the feminist utopia. The influence of second-wave feminism was clear in humanities curricula across the country,50 and a marked political impact was evident as well; the Equal Rights Amendment, for instance, was broadly supported at this point, and most assumed it would be passed into law. It was becoming safe once more to entertain the notion of a better future, something other than the broken trajectory of modernity, and the impulse manifested lucidly in the decade’s sf, often in forms sharing underlying characteristics.

In her 1981 article “Recent Feminist Utopias,” sf author and critic Joanna Russ reflects on eleven works of feminist utopian production published between 1971 and

1978, including Le Guin’s The Dispossessed (1974), Russ’ own The Female Man (1975),

Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), Suzy McKee Charnas’ Motherlines

(1978), and Sally Gearhart’s The Wanderground: Stories of the Hill Women (1978). For

Russ, these and other texts, including stories by James Tiptree, Jr., were tied to the

“flowering” of feminism that decade, and showed both formal and thematic similarities due to a kind of “parallel evolution” (To Write 133). As Russ points out, a strong link among these works is revealed in the fact that their societies are “communal, even quasi- tribal” (“Recent” 136). In particular, in The Wanderground women live in a way that is

“so natural as to recall primatologists’ descriptions of the nightly nests gorillas make in trees,” and in Motherlines, the utopia depicted is “literally tribal, with its horse-riding nomads who raid each other’s camps for horses” (Russ, “Recent” 136). As suggested at the outset of this chapter, then, there was a strong inclination here towards nature, with authors offering a vision of a kind of pastoral existence as an escape from a male-

146 dominated technoculture. What emerged in such texts was a form of “cultural feminism,” where the sex/gender binary is upheld and women’s culture and values, positioned as distinct from masculine forms, are celebrated for their inherent virtues. This form of feminism can be located in stories by Charnas, Gearhart, Russ, and Tiptree, but also in

Tepper’s Gate, where the inherent tendencies in men must be softened and “feminized” before they can enter society (as will be shown in part 4 of this chapter, this form is called into question by Haraway’s “Manifesto,” where she emphasizes male/female complicity in technoculture and calls for an “affinity politics” based in mutual interests, not identities). It should be noted as well that the centrality of nature cannot be applied equally across the texts Russ analyzes.51 Technology factors heavily into The Female

Man, for instance, where one of Russ’ central characters, Jael, is a female cyborg from a war-torn future divided along gender lines (Jael would provide the template for Gibson’s

Molly, featured in “Johnny Mnemonic” and Neuromancer), and in Tiptree’s story

“Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” (1976) the utopia is composed of “women cloned from the same stock” (Russ, “Recent” 136).

For feminist sf, the shift into the 1980s can be mapped as one from utopia to dystopia, occurring, as discussed, alongside the rise of a conservative backlash rendering utopianism to some degree unthinkable. Just as one cannot universally apply “utopia” as a label to the 70s, though, the “map” of a straightforward utopia/dystopia divide is inadequate in its own ways, though it does serve as a useful framework for a broad shift in tendencies, and is borne out in many feminist works (the focus of the next section).

Writing in 1988, Lefanu would state the following:

I also believe that the anti-feminism of the present day is a powerful force in both Britain and America. The Thatcher-Reagan alliance seems to encourage

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imitative moves between the two countries. The growth of the New Right in Britain (who like to see themselves as having intellectual respectability) is not unrelated, I believe, to the growing power of the ‘moral majority’ in the USA, although I suspect that they might not like the connection. Both promulgate an ethos of authoritarianism under the guise of ‘responsibility’. Both governments seem determined to crush movements of organised labour, to attack civil rights and, in Britain at least, to undermine a socialised system of health care and education. Women are not the only victims of right-wing governments, but they are amongst the first. This, then, is common ground, and is likely to be reflected in contemporary science fiction. (Lefanu 7-8)

It is for these reasons, perhaps, that feminist sf in the 1980s is so often passed over in favour of an emphasis on the 70s: the explosion of anti-feminism acted as a kind of counterbalance, and the utopian visions of the 70s, many offering colourful futures of tribal escape or fantasies of female empowerment, transmogrified correspondingly into murky tales of survival, and of futures built slowly within the trenches of modern technoculture, often through compromises decidedly un-utopian.

Under these new conditions, Larbalestier argues in The Battle of the Sexes in Science

Fiction, “there was talk within the feminist science fiction community of an erasure of the overtly feminist science fiction culture that had emerged in the previous two decades and particularly in the 1970s” (3). As mentioned, a certain form of erasure can be seen in the pages of Sterling’s preface to Mirrorshades, where feminist sf is discarded in favour of a masculine and highly selective trajectory. And as Lefanu herself suggests, if a suppression of feminist sf took place, it likely took on some of the nefarious forms Russ uncovers in her How to Suppress Women’s Writing (1983)—through trivialization, through informal prohibitions, through a denial of agency, and so on. But it is certainly not the case that feminist sf disappeared, nor that it lost any of its critical or imaginative power, especially in relation to technology and technicism. The following section is focussed on reading some of these works, particularly a few overlooked most frequently,

148 and on offering an interpretation of their representations of technology and technological societies.

3. WMDs, Uterine Replicators, and Critical Theory in Lois McMaster Bujold

In relation to a eugenics program in Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s Country,

Feenberg’s own critical theory of technology was offered as a potential category for technological modes in feminist sf—specifically, the refusal to submit to either instrumentalism’s picture of a fully controllable technical sphere, or to substantivism’s fully uncontrollable one. It is important to note here that Feenberg’s conception can only be associated in a general way, not lined-up perfectly in its technical or philosophical complexity. This was more so the case with instrumentalism and military sf, since the instrumental conception is extensive and “commonsense,” and therefore found a relatively clear outlet in popular works of sf, though even here there were tensions (such as aspects of the substantive outlook in Drake, where the ethico-cultural effects of war are recognized, on even more profoundly in non-instrumental military sf written by women). With substantivism and cyberpunk the link is less rigid; cyberpunk is far removed from the “one-sided condemnations” (Feenberg, Transforming 82) of substantivism, which insist on retreat as an avenue for liberation. In connecting

Feenberg’s critical theory with the technological presentations and assumptions in feminist sf, the situation is even more complex.

First, Feenberg’s theory critiques capitalism and technoscience by targeting its underlying forms of “scientific-technical rationality,” which more often than not construe the world and other subjects as object-resources to be analysed, dominated, and used up

(Transforming 162). Second, for Feenberg the solution to a pervasive and objectifying

149 rationality can be found in existing potentialities within current social arrangements, what he calls the “suppressed potentiality for a coherent civilizational alternative based on mutually supporting transformations of institutions, ideology, economic attitudes, and technology” (Transforming 27). Social change, in other words, can be realized through a reorganization of current technical and social forms, not through abandonment of these in toto.

I will not claim that the feminist texts of the 1980s depict technology or its reorganization in exactly the way Feenberg’s theory does; I will, however, explore the notion of a general adherence along two related lines: first, that many feminist texts from the decade avoided the instrumental-substantive binary, offering instead a vision of technology that places one “between resignation and utopia,” as Feenberg puts it

(Transforming 13); and second, that they refused, by way of this first refusal, the restrictive determinisms of both, where technology is either a tool or an environment, and is incapable of being more, or both, or something radically different. In the following texts the technical sphere is instead dependent on the agents who struggle to actuate it, even though these agents are partially determined by it themselves, and the world, as a result, is not prefigured: through political struggle it can be transformed, with new social and technological forms taking root in the soil of new conceptions, new discourses, new ways of being. As Feenberg puts it in Transforming Technology, “technology is not a destiny but a scene of struggle. It is a social battlefield” (15).

Already is has become clear that concrete associations are problematic. The solution to patriarchal violence in Tepper’s novel is addressed through a certain kind of reorganization of existing social and technological systems, but it perpetuates a version of

150 scientific rationality (where men, this time, are objects to be manipulated) that finds no place in Feenberg. But in terms of a more general association, as sketched, Gate does indeed avoid the instrumental-substantive binary, refusing its determinisms. The novel therefore represents an attitude toward technology that has affinities with Feenberg’s critical-theoretical approach, although not, perhaps, in the special sense in which he uses it.

Using this broader frame, similar critical approaches and representations can be located throughout the 1980s, taking the form of feminist visions of technology filling the fissure “between resignation and utopia,” though in ways that were not always similar.

The sexual determinism of Tepper’s novel, for instance, is nowhere to be found in the novels and stories of Lois McMaster Bujold, an immensely popular author coming to prominence in the 1980s, widely celebrated but, in relative terms at least, academically ignored.52 For Tepper, unless carefully bred, men are creatures of violence, and the social structures they create enable and perpetuate this violence. Women, on the other hand, are cunning survivors—under their direction existing technical knowledge can be recycled to shape a new society, much as Marx envisioned labourers storming factories and repurposing the tools and techniques within to build a socialist utopia.

In Bujold, gender and sexuality are less rigidly structured. This is certainly the case in her works comprising the “Vorkosiverse,” as her fans call it, a fictional universe often featuring the protagonist Miles Vorkosigan, the male heir to an aristocratic and largely patriarchal dynasty. What does link Tepper and Bujold together is a shared figuration of technology, at least in the broadest sense, which displays the possibility for technology and technical knowledge to generate new social potentials within the intricacies of the

151 old. For Tepper the methods for creating these alternatives are extreme—for Bujold less so. But a general imaginative framework can be seen to connect these and other texts within a wider feminist discourse.

In Bujold’s quasi-militaristic novel Shards of Honor (1986), Miles Vorkosigan is not the protagonist, and has indeed not been born yet (I use “quasi-militaristic” here, since the trappings of military sf—war, military hierarchy, honour, etc.—are called into question, and since a female, civilian perspective is positioned centrally). Instead, Shards focusses on Miles’ parents, how they first met, and their struggle to bridge an enormous gap between their respective cultures. This conflict is at the heart of the novel, pervading almost every page and embedding a sense of duality throughout the narrative, both in story and theme: conflicting perspectives, cultures, armies, and so forth, held in tension until the novel’s uncertain and somewhat precarious synthesis. In his own reading of

Shards, Darko Suvin discusses the significance of dualism in relation to the novel’s sense of honour, reflected in the title: “Even the title is doubly binary: honour (an important value in and out of the military) is in shards, but even if broken up they are still shards of honour” (18).

But the dominant binary, the one on which others hinge, is expressed in the figures of

Miles’ parents. The reader is presented, first, with Miles’ mother, Cordelia Naismith, a citizen of the planet Beta Colony and a science officer in the Betan Astronomical Survey, a group tasked with exploring worlds along a vast wormhole nexus linking inhabited star systems. Beta Colony, we are told, is egalitarian, and tolerates a range of lifestyles and sexual orientations. It is also technologically advanced beyond other civilized worlds, using “uterine replicators” to produce its children in vitro. Reproduction is in fact a state

152 controlled enterprise, though those who qualify are allowed to produce naturally, if they so desire. Interestingly, while the planet is not militaristic per se, it does have a small military, and even sells advanced weaponry on the open market, a point that will play into the narrative’s conclusion. Militarism in Bujold’s novels exists largely in a grey area, though as Suvin points out, she “leans more strongly toward the non-militarist horizon”

(17).

The novel pairs Cordelia with Aral Vorkosigan, a native of the planet Barrayar and an officer in its extensive military. Barrayar’s political structure is feudalism writ large: sixty Counts pay fealty to a governing Emperor, and belong to an all-male military caste known as “Vor” (“Vor” is appended to military caste surnames, hence “Vorkosigan”).

Women on Barrayar are largely consigned to the home, and are responsible for overseeing reproduction and childrearing.

The pairing is unusual, and their differences categorically defined. The novel opens when Cordelia’s survey of an uncharted planet is interrupted by Aral’s military force, who claim the planet “by right of prior discovery” (Bujold, Shards 7). But what is at first a military intervention transforms abruptly into a mutiny, with a contingent of Aral’s troops attacking him in the middle of a firefight, leaving him wounded on an inhospitable planet. Cordelia is left as well, and the remainder of the novel describes their evolving relationship as they escape the planet and avert potential war between their civilizations.

Cordelia’s first estimation of Aral and the militarism he exudes is far from favourable: she tells him “It must be like living among cannibals, to be a Barrayaran” (Bujold, Shards

13), and later, “I’d rather give a disruptor to a chimpanzee as a Barrayaran. Trigger- happy goons” (Bujold, Shards 46). But her fondness for him—first sexual, then

153 intellectual—grows over time as she comes to comprehend the history of his planet’s sociopolitical structures, though this stops short of ideological acceptance.

The novel’s plot pivots around the discovery of Barrayar’s intentions on the unexplored world: they plan to use it as a staging ground to invade a nearby planet,

Escobar, an act Aral is opposed to. Interestingly, Cordelia disrupts the plan by delivering advanced weapons to the Escobarans, providing an advantage in the conflict. This delivery epitomizes in clear form, I think, the novel’s unique vision of technological potential. In the hands of Aral’s soldiers, weapons of mass destruction are volatile and destructive; in the hands of freedom fighters, and when guided by Cordelia’s oversight, they have the potential for liberation, and create the foundations for a future free from military rule. Technology in this instance is not predisposed to a particular end, and is not determined to create an environment beyond comprehension or control. Simultaneously, it is not comprised of a range of neutral tools that, when guided by military efficiency, achieve prescribed goals within a technoscientific framework; Cordelia is aware that the infusion of technology will alter Escobar’s culture, and not necessarily for the better.

Technology in Shards sits somewhere between these myopic accounts, and is capable of serving new social values, which in this case can be broadly construed as feminist. In The

Gate to Women’s Country, eugenics and the technologies of in vivo fertilization lay the groundwork for a radically new social order, while in Shards of Honor, weapons of mass destruction offer an escape from militarized fascism, though only through the mobilisation of a certain kind of militarism to counter it.

In Bujold’s Ethan of Athos, also published in 1986, similar representations emerge, though largely outside of the militaristic framework of Shards. The novel follows the

154 often comical adventures of Ethan, an obstetrician from the planet Athos, which quite uniquely exists as an all-male and single-sex society (the only all-male utopia in sf, in fact). As with Beta Colony, Athosians reproduce technologically, using Bujold’s “uterine replicators” to produce male offspring to be raised by single-sex partners. When a shipment of ovarian cultures is tampered with, the Population Council of Athos sends

Ethan to confront the parties responsible. The replicators, appearing in Shards and here again, are central to Athosian society: they show, as Marna Nightingale indicates in her

2003 foreword to the novel, that “When reproduction and parenting and love are no longer inexorably linked to either gender or sex, the possible consequences for gender relations, sexuality, love, and partnership are almost limitless” (207). Much of Ethan of

Athos is engaged in exploring what gender looks like when, through reproductive technologies, it is wrenched from traditional structures.

Part of this involves a bizarre isolation of Athosian culture from women—Ethan has never seen one—and Bujold utilizes this to uncover and critique the society’s misogyny.

When Ethan first encounters the televised image of a woman while preparing for his mission, his repulsion is acute:

[He] trembled, waiting for the insanity to strike him from their level, medusan gazes. Nothing happened. After a moment, he unclutched the desk edge. Perhaps then the madness that possessed galactic men, slaves to these creatures, was something only transmitted in the flesh. Some incalculable telepathic aura? Bravely, he raised his eyes again to the figures in the screen. (Bujold, Ethan 276)

Bujold explores the limits of Ethan’s socially constructed phobia, just as some earlier works of sf by women utilized the male point-of-view to uncover similar anxieties. Here, though, Ethan undergoes a series of moral and sexual epiphanies, and eventually finds himself in awe of Elli Quinn, a female mercenary filling the traditional patriarchal-

155 military role: “She’s not a tech, she’s a troop. Combat vet—look at her insignia” (Bujold,

Ethan 304). In fact, the novel concludes with Ethan asking her for a gift, a sample of her ovarian material to bring back to Athos for purposes Bujold leaves ambiguous.

As with Shards of Honor, technology does not run counter to feminist strategies: here, the full acceptance of women as equal contributors to the creation and prolongation of new social arrangements, with gender freed from heteronormative archetypes. As is the case in Woman on the Edge of Time, where Piercy takes up the idea that women will never achieve equality as long as they are confined to reproduction, the novel’s uterine replicators provide a vehicle for radical change. And indeed, they are construed as progressive in the first place: Athos is a non-violent and socialist “utopia” of sorts, and the replicators are at the base of its social-material formations. If Ethan introduces Elli’s genetic material to Athosian birthing centres, they may also allow it to transform.

The example of the replicator in Ethan of Athos, as well as the various uses of military technology in Shards of Honor, stand as provocative and concise illustrations of a critical approach to technology refusing the “take it or leave it” binary that dominated so much of the decade’s discourse (Shards is replete with binaries, certainly, but this is always for the purpose of foregrounding their interplay: militarism and pacifism, for instance). It is this critical figuration, I contend, one operating in the lacuna between extremities, that enabled feminist sf in the 1980s to offer an alternative to the hegemonic technological conception—that is, the dogmatic fantasy of tools deployed rationally and without unpremeditated effects.

A critical-technological understanding surfaces in many of Bujold’s other texts as well: her 1989 novella The Mountains of Mourning, which sees a technology called “fast-

156 penta” used to help usher Barrayar out of its medieval slumber; or her 1988 novel Falling

Free, set hundreds of years before the Vorkosigan saga, where a group of “Quaddies,” genetically engineered zero-gravity workers with four arms (the second set replacing feet, hence “quaddie”), must wrest themselves from corporate enslavement by utilizing their engineering expertise and technical know-how. Quaddies are creatures of the technical world, genetically engineered and cloned, but they are also masters of its intricacies, and use this mastery to build a new life for themselves.

Other feminist sf writers developed this conception in their own ways—in Octavia

Butler’s 1987 novel Dawn, for instance, the first entry in her celebrated Xenogenesis trilogy. The narrative centres on Lilith Iyapo’s awakening in strange circumstances: humanity has eradicated itself in the fires of nuclear war, but she and a small group of survivors have been saved, held captive by the alien Oankali, a grotesque species covered in writhing tentacles that function as their sensory organs. When Lilith is first revived, her revulsion matches Ethan’s first contact with a woman (interestingly, “Medusa” is invoked in both cases): “Oh god,” she whispered. And the hair—the whatever-it-was— moved. Some of it seemed to blow toward her as though in a wind—though there was no stirring of air in the room” (Butler, Dawn 11-12). Lilith eventually takes a leadership role in the Oankali’s plans for humanity: to acclimatise themselves to a new way of life and, after a series of tests, repopulate the devastated Earth. As Lilith familiarizes herself with the Oankali, going so far as to share intimacy with them (a form of sex, though very different) and carry one of their children, she learns that their technology is biological in nature, with little separation, ontologically, between bodies and tools; their focus is instead on the genetic manipulation of other living entities, which they are able to shape

157 for their own purposes—including humanity, Lilith learns (their biotech recalls Sterling’s picture of a 1980s tech that “sticks to the skin”). They do however tolerate technology in its more traditional guises, especially when certain tasks call for its application, and their plan for Earth’s repopulation positions technology as a necessity, though one that must be rigidly controlled:

“Will you forbid us machines?” she asked uncertainly. “Of course not. But we won’t give them to you either. We’ll give you hand tools, simple equipment, and food until you begin to make the things you need and grow your own crops. We’ve already armed you against the deadlier microorganisms. Beyond that you’ll have to fend for yourselves—avoiding poisonous plants and animals and creating what you need.” (Butler, Dawn 30)

For the Oankali, technology is only problematic when it extends our hierarchal tendencies, which are genetically rooted: “That’s the older and more entrenched characteristic. We saw it in your closest animal relatives and in your most distant ones.

It’s a terrestrial characteristic” (Butler, Dawn 37). At the conclusion of the novel it is clear that technology plays a role that is neither positive nor negative, but when merged with Oankali technologies and customs, something far stranger, something that can help evolve the species into a more survivable form. Dawn provides an account of technology’s life as both tool and horizon, simultaneously.

Joan Slonczewski’s remarkable 1986 novel A Door into Ocean presents an interesting case. It recalls the feminist utopias abounding during the 70s by portraying an ecofeminist utopia, where a nature-loving (though technically adept), all-female society flourishes on an ocean-covered moon called Shora—“sapphire of the night sky, world whose sea had no shore” (Slonczewski 5). The narrative itself plays on the tension between Shora’s way of life and the industrialized culture of the moon’s planet Valedon, whose ruling elite have been exploiting Shora’s resources for decades. Valedon’s brutal

158 invasion of Shora sits at the centre of the novel’s plot, though the Sharers (denizens of

Shora—sharing language, expertise, love, etc., is central to their way of life) adhere to strict principles of nonviolence, refusing to retaliate with force. Though technology is ultimately construed as damaging, both to nature and humanity, the novel offers no clean escape from its reach. While this appears to position Slonczewski’s text as “substantive” vis-à-vis technology, A Door into Ocean stretches beyond the substantive outlook by ending on a somewhat ambiguous note of détente. The technologized culture of Valedon is destructive, surely, but Shora cannot exist in isolation, and a future is suggested that allows both to continue on, with the potential, however small, for some future reconciliation: “Just tell them the door is still open” (Slonczewski 402), the protagonist

Spinel implores at the novel’s conclusion, signalling the potential for both worlds to continue “sharing” through the metaphorical door that binds them. Valedon’s industrial technologies are not integrated in any substantial way, but cultural exchange is upheld as a central tenet of Sharer life.

A certain form of technics is also central to Shora, it should be noted: biological knowledge and gene manipulation, similar to Butler’s Oankali. These do not assume the character of technologies traditionally construed, of course, but the Shorans work within their own framework of technoscience, with the key difference centered on their willingness to manipulate “living atoms,” not the dead ones of inanimate matter. The

Shorans even have their own version of computer storage, a concept bubbling to the surface in the 80s; for Slonczewski, this materializes as molecular coding within the raft structures the Shorans inhabit: “A chromosome library. Trillions of bits of data on molecular chains, coiled up so small you can’t even see it. In every cell of raftwood.

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Billions of cells in every raft seedling, each the seed of an entire Sharer life and culture”

(284).

For feminist sf in the 1980s, from Tepper to Bujold to Butler to Slonczewski and beyond, the critical-technological perspective was a central through line, but it was certainly not confined to the 80s.53 Just as instrumentalism in military sf can be traced along the history of the subgenre, one can locate flashes of the critical posture in earlier works of feminist sf, though this stops short of the pervasive and teleological arc I ascribe to military sf. Narrative strands framing science and technology in critical terms, where technology is open to new modes of social being, appear in Tiptree, as suggested, especially her story “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?”—but they also appears in the pulp stories. This is not overt in “The Fate of the Poseidonia,” but Margaret’s ambiguous future on Mars does seem highly suggestive: she is not the helpless damsel, but an explorer charting new grounds; technology has opened a new world for her, and possibly a better one. In “The Conquest of Gola,” the figuration is perhaps the earliest appearance of the critical perspective in perspicuous terms. The Golan women are technologically sophisticated, outmatching Earth, but their society takes on a different form altogether.

Perplexed by the exploratory aspirations of Earth, the narrator offers this reflection:

Long ago we, too, might have gone on exploring expeditions to other worlds, other universes, but for what? Are we not happy here? We who have attained the greatest of civilizations within the confines of our own silvery world. Powerfully strong with our mighty force rays, we could subjugate all the universe, but why? (Stone 98)

The passage is exemplary. In the works discussed in this section, it is certainly the case that technology could perpetuate war (as it is determined to do in military sf and cyberpunk, though in different ways), but when guided by different values, it could also

160 influence any number of alternative orders. As Feenberg claims in a different but relevant context, “the control-oriented attributes of technology emphasized in capitalist and communist societies do not exhaust its potentialities” (Transforming 35). Technology could propagate war, domination, and exploitation, but why?

4. Haraway’s Manifesto, the Indeterminate Future, and Split Consciousness

In a decade that saw feminism undergo a fundamental reimagining, abandoning the notion of a collective “We” and of a monolithic technocultural patriarchy, it is fair to insist that the conjuncture of feminist sf and a critical-technological epistemology belonged to a broader discursive pattern, one linking popular literature with feminist theories and political struggles.

There is no better model of this formation than Donna Haraway’s “A Cyborg

Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century,” first published in 1985, which can be read as a kind of diagram of sf’s intersection with feminist concerns, connecting the feminist struggles with the potential for cyborg bodies to free themselves from their origins in “militarism and patriarchal capitalism, not to mention state socialism” (Haraway 151): “This is a struggle over life and death, but the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (Haraway 149).

For Haraway, and unlike many of the “cultural feminisms” of the era, technology is not the enemy, nor is it conceivable to escape its ever-intensifying grip; rather, alongside the capacity to dominate, technology and technical knowledge offer vehicles for transgressing hierarchal boundaries, with the cyborg, an unnatural figure immune to easy categorization, positioned as both a productive metaphor (for it helps us imagine a potential future free from rigid taxonomies) and a very real materiality (for in

161 technoculture, we are all cyborgs to varying degrees): “The cyborg is our ontology; it gives us our politics” (Haraway 150).

In his 1991 paper “The SF of Theory: Baudrillard and Haraway,” discussed in the first chapter in relation to a modal (that is, trans-genre) concept of sf, Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. emphasizes the science fictional character of the “Manifesto,” which for him extends to such a degree that it is “a work of SF. It posits a myth and a concrete social context, and even a form of appropriate irony, about the emergence of human society into the future”

(“The SF” 399).54 The collapse of fiction and theory suggested here neatly parallels the gestures toward discursive systems described in all three chapters of this project: the pattern of technomilitary fantasy described in the first chapter, which congealed around an instrumental vision of technoscientific rationality and American conquest; the confluence of postmodern theory and cyberpunk outlined in chapter two, which adopted a substantive approach concerned with an immanent technological horizon both deterministic and inescapable (which pulls away from Feenberg’s description of a classical substantivism, exemplified, for instance, in Ellul’s work, which still dreamed of an escape to primitivism); and now, as Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. indicates, a trajectory encompassing both feminist theory and sf, one critical of technical systems yet open to their reconfiguration under different structures of organization and command.

The concept of “openness” is central here, and it emerges in Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s analysis as well: “The urge to hope and to take pleasure in the possibilities offered by technological rationalization is evident throughout the ‘Manifesto’” (396-97). Technical systems and knowledges are not to be abandoned, then, with the recognition that a material-ideological framework of control guides technologies, pushing them into their

162 industrial and hierarchical patterns. For Haraway, in the modern era this structure has become even more dangerous, since it has moved from a Fordist economy, with set structures of command, to an information-based one, where power is fluid and amorphous, impossible to isolate. This is a transition from “the comfortable old hierarchical dominations to the scary new networks I have called the informatics of domination” (Haraway 161), where “representation” is now “simulation,” “Labour” is replaced by “Robotics,” and the spectre of the “Second World War” recedes under the phantasmagoria of Reagan’s “Star Wars” delusion (Haraway 161-62).

While these shifts present challenges to a socialist-feminist-utopian project, as

Haraway describes in her “Manifesto,” they also offer potentialities. The traditional boundaries that held the old world together, for instance, are rendered absurd under the liquid conditions of postmodernity—the human/animal, human/machine, and physical/non-physical dualisms, all central to U.S. technoscience from a previous era, now penetrated, dirtied, polluted, impossible to maintain. The cyborg figure is a manifestation of these violations, crossing all the boundaries Haraway associates with the older models of labour, war, gender, and so forth.55 On the one hand this is perilous, for

“modern war is a cyborg orgy, coded by C3I, command-control-communication- intelligence, an $84 billion item in 1984’s US defence budget” (Haraway 150), but on the other it is emancipatory, for “a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of their joint kindship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway 154).

It is clear that the instrumental-substantive binary is resisted by Haraway as well.

Regarding the substantive view, she claims that

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From One-Dimensional Man (Marcuse, 1964) to The Death of Nature (Merchant, 1980), the analytic resources developed by progressives have insisted on the necessary domination of technics and recalled us to an imagined organic body to integrate our resistance […] But a slightly perverse shift of perspective might better enable us to contest for meanings, as well as for other forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies. (Haraway 154)

Clearly, the “analytic resources” provided by figures such as Marcuse—whom Feenberg positions as one of the originators of the substantive philosophy—fall short of the perverse transgressions Haraway considers essential to a modern utopian project.

Regarding instrumentalism, the “Manifesto” is concerned with “rescuing” the cyborg figure from its militaristic occupations, where it operates under the command of a purely instrumental logic; as Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. claims, “Recovering the cyborg from its role as ideological legitimator (for conservative humanists and naïve technophiles both),

Haraway attempts to clear a new path for utopian rationality through the sprawl of instrumental rationalization” (“The SF” 397).

Like the feminist sf authors of the 80s, then, Haraway charts a course between the limits of this particular dichotomy, where technology is either this or that, a tool or a horizon, and where we are determined as either agents of perpetual war or victims of an autonomous technicism. Despite this, however (and also like the sf authors), Haraway’s critical theory must be differentiated from Feenberg’s. In Transforming Technology,

Haraway is coupled with Bruno Latour under the label “posthumanism” and associated with a view that “technology should not be seen as something distinct from humans and nature because technology is ‘coemergent’ with the social and natural worlds” (Feenberg,

Transforming 28). For Feenberg, the notion of such a coemergence is entirely valid; among other things, it helps “block the essentialist and pseudonaturalistic marginalization

164 of ‘deviant’ ways of being and living,” (Transforming 29) a move on clear display in

Haraway’s work. However, where posthumanism goes too far, according to Feenberg, is in its insistence that “the human” and “the social,” rendered as broad, ontological categories, are also coemergent, and to such a degree that a discernable boundary between them is fleeting, even absent. In Latour, the ontological grounds of a nature/culture binary is replaced with “the network of ‘actants,’” (Feenberg,

Transforming 30) a web of human and nonhuman actors that affect change on one another and the world. In Haraway, “the ‘cyborg’ metaphor plays a similar role,”

(Feenberg, Transforming 30) dispersing the traditional human subject across a grid of natural, social, and technological materialisations. In this matrix, nothing approaching a natural subject or world exists, only the transgressed boundaries of a cyborg reality, with denizens who cross the lines between subject and object, natural and social, material and ideological, emerging as monstrous crossings of these and more, the end result being that

“Nature and culture are reworked; the one can no longer be the resource for appropriation or incorporation by the other” (Haraway 151).

The disappearance of a nature/culture divide is troubling for Feenberg because it removes a stable ground for the critique of oppressive social systems:

Consider, for example, the remarkable Amazonian tribe which believe that after death men are transformed into jaguars, while women and children simply disappear. Clearly, in this context it would be difficult to raise feminist objections to post-mortem discrimination as a cultural construct. We can only do so because we know how to distribute effects between the social and the natural. (Transforming 29)

In Latour, Haraway, and other theories sceptical of the nature/culture ontology, the entire

Western framework of language and analysis (which hinges on the nature/culture divide) must be abandoned, with no grounds left for progress or emancipation: “If our

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Amazonian feminist protests her status in the afterlife, we cannot find support for her in a rigorous posthumanism for the simple reason that she has no methodological right to refer to a transcendent distinction of nature and society to make her case” (Feenberg,

Transforming 31). The result, for posthumanism, is that the theory “ends up undermining its own critical basis” (Feenberg, Transforming 30).

The point here is not to position Feenberg’s critical theory, where the category of

“nature” is upheld “as a basis of a critique of the totalitarian power of technology”

(Transforming 33), as superior to Haraway’s. There is clear potential for envisioning viable counters to the technological norm within the theoretical framework she provides, and Feenberg seems to recognize this: the Amazonian feminist can “protest the repressive implications of the essentializing assumptions underlying her society,” just not “in the name of natural equality or human rights” (Transforming 31), which he construes as crucial. Both are viable critical approaches, with Feenberg’s emerging as the more traditionally oriented in terms of its ontological presuppositions. The various works of feminist sf discussed so far likewise resist precise associations, both with Feenberg and with one another. There is a multifaceted gap in terms of aesthetic and philosophical contours between, for instance, Bujold’s Shards of Honor and Slonczewski’s A Door Into

Ocean, just as clear markers of difference resonate among the other texts, whether fiction or theory.

Along the lines I have already sketched, however, one can delineate a broad approach to technology and technoculture, a critical outlook capable of imagining a future free from domination, and from the forms of control that continue to typify technocratic regimes. Most centrally, this future is indeterminate and open, a horizon waiting to form,

166 since it is freed from the determinisms that Feenberg associates with the instrumental and substantive epistemologies. No one can say with certainty what awaits the women of

Slonczewski’s Shora at her novel’s end, or what the future will hold for Lilith, and for humanity, at the conclusion of Dawn. In Neuromancer, on the other hand, while Case’s life will surely change, and while the novel’s rogue AIs will develop in increasingly complex ways, one is left with the impression that the structures of a totalizing techno- capitalism will persist unabated (as the AI puts it, “things are things”); and in right- leaning military sf, surely, technological warfare stretches into the conceivable future as an unavoidable constant—contrast this with the potential (and it is a potentiality, by no means determined) for war and conflict to vanish in Tepper’s The Gate to Women’s

Country.

Though differences inhere, the openness and indeterminacy of the 1980s feminist sf future contributed to a discursive pattern, one functioning as an alternative to the dominant instrumental conception. The focus, it should be noted, on the particularities of certain conceptions of technology as central components of hegemonic and counterhegmonic views runs the risk of conferring a rational or conscious character to the views themselves, as well as their adoption. As T.J. Jackson Lears notes in his 1985 paper “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” this is not how hegemony and consent operate. Rather, a kind of double consciousness is at work in most social agents: one part, the unconscious aspect, is “embedded in his actions” (Lears 569) and expresses kinship with other individuals (a kind of socialist consciousness); the other aspect is conscious and largely verbal, and carries forward the conceptual and linguistic baggage of the dominant view. Since it is the latter that sets the dominant framework for

167 speaking and thinking about the world, most adopt it as legitimate, even though their own actions (unconscious and non-linguistic) contradict that framework; as Lears states,

“most people find it difficult, if not impossible, to translate the outlook implicit in their experience into a conception of the world that will directly challenge the hegemonic culture” (596). And later: “The available vocabulary helps mark the boundaries of permissible discourse, discourages the clarification of social alternatives, and makes it difficult for the dispossessed to locate the source of their unease, let alone remedy it”

(Lears 569-70).

With the notion of double or split consciousness, Lears foregrounds a valuable insight into the processes of social development. The adoption of a dominant conception may sometimes unfold at the conscious level, but this is not usually the case; readers of military sf in the 1980s (to take a narrow example) did not typically sit down to rationalize the background elements of the text, formulating or consciously consenting to a worldview encompassing an approach to technology. Instead, inundated by instrumental discourses (of which military sf was only a small part), a theory of technology would be adopted unconsciously, carried forward from external sources as the only conceivable approach—this is the nature of consent, not rational or conscious acquiescence. In relation to my notion of the technology of consent, then, “consent” really signifies a framework for thinking and speaking about technology that emerges through repeated exposure to certain pervasive discourses, solidifying as a worldview that delimits linguistic and conceptual activity. Instrumentalism can therefore be seen in this light: a dominant paradigm that framed the epistemological and linguistic possibilities for

168 a majority of individuals, excluding alternative ways of imagining techno-social development.

It is also the case, however, that “ruling groups never engineer consent with complete success; the outlook of subordinate groups is always divided and ambiguous” (Lears

570). The same hypothetical reader engaged with a work of technomilitary fantasy could also be influenced by works illustrating the substantive view, for instance. Exposed to the horrific image of Murphy’s monstrous imbrication, of his humanity lost within a new cyborg configuration where coding replaces agency, one’s vocabulary could certainly shift, especially when exposed to a repetition of similar images and insights (of which there were many). The vocabulary of controllability and efficiency in this case shifts to a language of powerlessness, of incomprehension and uncertainty in the face of overwhelming technical complexity, and of the comfortable ontology of “human being” fading from view. The reader of Haraway’s “Manifesto” would likewise be steered from the limitations of instrumental thinking: here, though, the cyborg is not a fall from grace, but a new grounds for existence beyond race, class, and gender essentialisms, and for a future outside the rigidities of technical domination and command; the language is one of openness, of potentiality, of new horizons.

This was the real contribution of the substantive and critical-technological discourses: they offered alternative lexicons for speaking about technology and its social effects, and by extension helped broaden, for many, the parameters for thinking about complex technical, social, cultural, economic, etc., phenomena, as well as the ways that these intersect and the futures they potentially produce—it is for this reason that they were “counterhegemonic.”

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For Gramsci, a hegemonic formation is achieved through a union of the ideological or cultural factor (the culture in cultural hegemony) with a material form, resulting in what he calls a “historical bloc,” where several social groups are bound by ideological and economic ties and linked materially through the institutions that perpetuate their worldview. In the convergence of institutional and ideological forces that aligned in the

1980s—an explosion of neoliberal policies, religious revivals, antifeminist barrages, massive military buildup, the ascension of the New Right, the end of détente, the erosion of social programs, and so forth—it is clear that a historical bloc materialized assembling political, economic, religious, and technological factions, and that in relation to the bloc’s vision of technology, instrumentalism helped perpetuate the structures of neoliberal capitalism and conservative politics in America.

That the counterhegemonic views did not attain the same level of dominance is no claim against their sincerity or veracity, only a recognition of their inability to materialize in the same way, to link a multitude of material and ideological forces capable of challenging the prevailing structure. The reasons for this are many, but one in particular connects with the difficulties faces by feminists. As Lears states, the “power” of the ruling structure “includes cultural as well as economic and political power—the power to help define the boundaries of common-sense ‘reality’ either by ignoring views outside those boundaries or by labeling deviant opinions ‘tasteless’ or ‘irresponsible’” (572). As

Faludi so effectively describes, dominant groups in the 1980s, from advertisers to pundits to politicians, were hard at work framing feminism as socially counterproductive and self-involved, and insisting that the advances of the 70s were in fact responsible for

170 widespread dissatisfaction, for “it must be all that equality that’s causing all that pain”

(2).

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CONCLUSION: THE CYBORG PARADOX

At the opening, the notion of a paradox illuminated by the phenomenon of drone warfare was used in an orienting capacity. The paradox’s parameters rested on a perceived incompatibility between the instrumental and substantive views, the former emphasizing tools, the latter environments. The drone could be seen as a materialization of this tension, deployed under the agendas of American adventurism and technoscientific progress as a tool of precision warfare, but at the same time crystalizing as integral to a technical milieu that escapes agency or control.

That paradox unravelled. When framed in epistemological terms, the contradiction was reformulated as a matter of opposing knowledge-frameworks, the same object viewed from conflicting angles. And the introduction of Feenberg’s own critical approach could be seen to support this; for him, an awareness of technology in both its tool and environment guises can aid the recuperation of a utopian project that reconfigures the technical sphere along democratic lines. Here, technology and culture are codetermining, with a shift in one register capable of altering the fundamental character of the other. The modern architecture of militaristic technoscience is not fixed or foreordained, then, but can be shifted in parallel with a transformative social agenda.

I would like to undermine the drone paradox one last time. With the stress laid on feedback loops and networked systems in posthumanism, particularly in Haraway and

Hayles, it becomes difficult to ignore the fact that the drone was never really a drone in the first place; put differently, it was never an isolated technological object, at least not in the traditional terms taken up in instrumental assessments. Instead, at the level of materiality itself, the drone is a distributed network, one held together by a scaffolding of

172 coordinated feedback that connects the operator and her complex system of controls, screens, signals, sensors, algorithms, AI protocols, and more (not to mention technicians, coders, alternative pilots, and other labourers) that enable the machinery to do its work.

From the very beginning, then, the drone is incapable of being construed in straightforward terms as an external object positioned apart from human subjects.

Instead, the drone illuminates the complexity of our own technocultural immersions, where we function in multiple and overlapping cyborg systems, pervasive interrelationships that render distinctions between subject and object, nature and culture, human and machine, cybernetic and organic tentative and amorphous from the start

(these are not a true cyborgs, of course, since the technical and organic components are not blended in the same flesh, as is the case with many of cyberpunk’s natives, but it certainly is one of Haraway’s metaphorical monstrosities).

A similar kind of cyborg reality is suggested by Hayles at the opening of How We

Became Posthuman, where she offers a reassessment of the Turing test, which after its introduction in 1950 “was to set the agenda for artificial intelligence for the next three decades” (xi). What is at stake for Hayles is not the test’s intended function, where an artificial intelligence, unseen, can prove a capacity to think as humans do if it answers questions in such a way that the interviewer cannot reliably attribute human or machine status. “The important intervention,” Hayles explains,

comes not when you try to determine which is the man, the woman, or the machine. Rather, the important intervention comes much earlier, when the test puts you into a cybernetic circuit that splices your will, desire, and perception into a distributed cognitive system in which represented bodies are joined with enacted bodies through mutating and flexible machine interfaces. As you gaze at the flickering signifiers scrolling down the computer screens, no matter what identifications you assign to the embodied entities that you cannot see, you have already become posthuman. (xiv)

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The drone is a similar kind of complex, where bodies and interfaces and machines are extensively networked across chasms of space and time. Taking Hayles’ suggestion, the important intervention here is not the discernability of each node in the network, but the pervasiveness of the entire system itself, which constitutes a new kind of subjectivity in a posthuman age.

In the subgenres and discourses that have been discussed, feminist sf and cyberpunk both adopt, in their own ways, approaches to thinking through (through extrapolation, thought experiments, and the other tools of sf) an environment of near-universal cyborgization. This is epitomized, for instance, in James Tiptree, Jr.’s 1973 story “The

Girl Who Was Plugged In,” with a protagonist, P. Burke, who finds herself operating a different kind of drone. Discussed briefly in the third chapter, Tiptree was of course central to the emergence of feminist sf in the 1970s, but her story is also frequently touted as a precursor text for cyberpunk. In it, P. Burke stumbles into circumstances that put her at the centre of an experimental program: she (that is, her physical body) is isolated in a chamber while her mental activity controls a cybernetic avatar in the form of Delphi, a beautiful android shell (or drone), from distances that are often vast: “it isn’t P. Burke who’s stepping, laughing, shaking out her shining hair. How could it be? P. Burke is doing it all right, but she’s doing it through something. That something is to all appearances a live girl” (Tiptree, “The Girl” 47-8). Her life unravels when her love interest (who thinks Delphi is the real P. Burke) is greeted by the real P. Burke, who he suddenly realizes is physically repulsive.

As displayed in Tiptree, an emphasis on cyborg realities has the benefit of illustrating this technological trope in feminist and cyberpunk sf: the permeability of human flesh,

174 where technologies are not just external things, but intimate phenomena that cut across the boundaries of the body, or that monstrously reconfigure the body as an assemblage of organic and synthetic parts. As discussed, RoboCop is exemplary in its figuration of such boundary-crossings, and in Tiptree’s story P. Burke is a reminder of the horrific violations of flesh that are enacted in the name of technoscience—she is a “wired-up slave” with “Spikes in her brain” (“The Girl” 71).

In the 1980s the theme was carried across a number of texts, though its absence is just as suggestive. In military sf, for example, one finds a distinctive lack of bodily incursions, and a presence, instead, of rigid boundaries that separate bodies from the tools they employ. In the stories by Drake discussed in the first chapter, while the neuropsychological domain is subject to invasion (in “The Interrogation Device”), and while bodies are obliterated in nuclear bombardment, a cyborg-like melding of organic and synthetic components is absent. This is largely the case in the subgenre in general, likely due to military sf’s focus on traditional soldiers and military structures; within such a framework, though weaponry appears superficially advanced (Drake’s hovertank replaces the tank, for instance), the details of military service are kept close to the contemporary reality. In its right-leaning form, it is possible that this is associated with the subgenre’s foregrounding of traditional military values, which could very well be compromised in the process of an extrapolation along cyborg lines.

Of course, this is not to say that the distributed form of cyborg augmentation, where the military subject is embedded within a system of signals and extensions, is absent. It is our own contemporary reality, and is carried over here. But a primary focus on the nature of these systems, or on the impacts they have on their subjects, or on broader

175 technocultural concerns at all for that matter, are missing. This aligns with military sf’s adoption of an instrumental paradigm: technology is fundamentally controllable, and can be used without polluting associated aspects of human life (such as the body). Entailing the crossing of organisms with technical systems, cyborg existence is outside the scope of such a narrow conception. It is also worth considering the male-dominated aspect of traditional military sf, both in diegetic (with a predominance of male authors) and meta- diegetic (with a predominance of male heroes) registers. Anxiety over the penetration of the male body is in all likelihood a factor here, with servicemen asserting themselves as masters of their own physical domains, though they penetrate the “other” regularly (with bullets, etc.).56

Some of this can be seen in cyberpunk as well, a point made by Nicola Nixon in her

1992 paper “Cyberpunk: Preparing the Ground for Revolution or Keeping the Boys

Satisfied?” (she lands on the latter). Nixon takes issue not only with Sterling’s male- dominated inventory of cyberpunk precursors, a grasping for “influential fathers of SF” that “manages to avoid mention of any potential mother” (220), but reads a kind of resonating and infantile misogyny bubbling under the surface of the subgenre’s principal texts. In Neuromancer, for example,

the matrix itself is figured as feminine space. The console cowboys may ‘jack in,’ but they are constantly in danger of hitting ICE (Intrusion Countermeasures Electronics), a sort of metaphoric hymeneal membrane which can kill them if they don’t successfully ‘eat through it’ with extremely sophisticated contraband hacking equipment in order to ‘penetrate’ the data systems of such organizations as T-A (Tessier-Ashpool). (Nixon 226)

In this instance the barrier between flesh and technology is permeable, but in gendered terms that feminize the latter for the sake of a masculine power fantasy of sexual pleasure and control. Nixon is ignoring the many instances of cyborgization in Gibson that see

176 male physicality undermined, such as Johnny in “Johnny Mnemonic,” whose cortex is regularly penetrated and “impregnated” with information, but the suggestion of an underlying fantasy does seem to foreground a recurrence of male penetration in cyberpunk, with men acting as the penetrators, women the penetrated. In this relation

RoboCop’s Murphy stands out once again: to access computer systems, a phallic extension slashes out from his fist and is driven into a console’s orifice.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, in works of feminist sf boundaries appear extremely pliable.

In Slonczewski’s A Door into Ocean, the inhabitants of Shora offer “breathmicrobes” to visitors which allow them to retain oxygen underwater; as a side effect, their skin begins to turn the amethyst colouration of native Shorans. Breathmicrobes and other inventions are concocted within Shoran “labs,” where genes are manipulated and spliced to create biological technologies. In Butler’s Dawn, the Oankali maintain a similar focus on biological science, and their creations are often the result of shaping living, organic matter, not the crude stuff of inanimate objects (which on Shora is the focus of an acute phobia, particularly stone). In Bujold’s narratives, especially Ethan of Athos, the centrality of the biological is maintained as well: Athosians are the product of a planet- wide infrastructure of artificial breeding in “uterine replicators.” Here, technical intrusion is evident from the start of one’s life. In Falling Free, the Quaddies are produced similarly, although in a dystopian context: they are genetically designed as the ideal workforce for engineering in zero gravity, their bodies inscribed with the technoscientific logic responsible for their creation.

A cyborg-inflected take on the drone paradox does more than open a door for thinking through figurations of ontological and material exchanges that appeared in the

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1980s. Looking to Haraway for guidance, it is possible to offer a substitute paradox as well, one that takes the cyborg as its central figure rather than the drone (though the latter, as suggested, is metaphorically a kind of cyborg system). For Haraway the cyborg figure is fraught with a tension that hinges on its dual existence. On the one hand, the cyborg is the creature of a state sponsored militarism, and participates in the “cyborg orgy” of war based in information and communication systems (Haraway 150). On the other, the cyborg is “resolutely committed to partiality, irony, intimacy, and perversity”

(Haraway 151), and can offer an alternative to the “maze of dualisms” which exert an enormous influence on contemporary conceptions of technoculture (Haraway 181). On the one side of this “paradox” (again, it is a matter of perspective as much as anything else), the militaristic side, one can see the determinisms of both instrumentalism and substantivism at play; for the militarist it is a utopian vision of perpetual war, and for the substantivist an unavoidable dystopia cut-off from conceivable human intervention. At the other side of the “paradox” stands Haraway’s socialist vision of a future freed from the totalitarian and capitalistic contours of the post-industrial West. This is a socialist and democratic future, but not a pre or non-technological one. A cyborg paradox allows us to think outside the binary limitations of the drone conception, which focussed only on the instrumental and substantive views, and to imagine, in line with the kind of critical technological perspective Feenberg values, a new trajectory of technocultural development.

When Negri and Hardt advocate, in Empire, a form of “anthropological exodus,” one that sees us blend with technology in ways the render our bodies elusive to systems of capitalist control, they point to cyberpunk fiction’s “dark world,” where “the freedom of

178 self-fashioning is often indistinguishable from the powers of an all-encompassing control” (216). The kind of radical alterations of both bodies and perspectives they had in mind were written across the pages of 1980s feminist sf, where the socialist half of a

“cyborg paradox” congealed as a complex account of our immersion in technology, as well as the political potential inherent in such a state.

Towards a Sublime Politics of Sf

The existence in 1980s feminist sf of an inclination towards a critical technological approach can be seen as the continuation of the utopian urge on display in American feminism in the 1970s. In sf at least, the urge simply took on a new form, acquiescing to the inescapable reach of the technical sphere but maintaining, despite this, a commitment to new political futures. In what liberal academics generally consider a dystopian moment in American history, this is a fundamentally utopian consolation, and it aligns the formation (as both literature and discourse) with Feenberg’s own critical theory, though differences are at work here. In Transforming Technology Feenberg insists that “it is simply dogmatic to dismiss the possibility of a reversal of current trends” (17), and it is in such a utopian resistance that I find feminism’s kinship with his account.

In the political and historical picture that I have attempted to sketch over the preceding pages, this was not just a perspective or view, of course, but a concrete counterhegemony, a coalition of ideological and material forces positioned against the dominant group. The same can be said for cyberpunk and a substantive account of technology’s existence; it too participated in a counterhegemonic formation, with ideas and discourses and bodies interacting to produce an interpretation of the technocultural landscape that existed outside the hegemonic strain, even though the notion of a political

179 retaliation was not part of this. And as I have suggested, in the instrumental configuration one can find the dominant conception carried forward by the era’s prevailing policies and politics, supported by a significant majority who, despite being manipulated and underserved by the country’s legal and political apparatuses, consented to the hegemonic conception as the only viable social pattern. With instrumentalism playing a central role in the era’s dominant worldview, emerging again and again in the decade’s technological discourses, the term the technology of consent can be used descriptively; as indicated, it names technology as a centerpiece in any modern conception that is consented to, while at the same time naming the existence of consent as a kind of intricate social machinery in the first place. This project has been an attempt to illuminate both aspects inherent in the term.

I have been careful to avoid valorizing sf as the principal site for the development of popular understandings of technology with enormous political value. These were vast, unquantifiable discursive arcs, and reducing them to articulations in what was and continues to be a niche genre of literature would be misguided. Considering the genre’s focus on scientific and technological transformations, as well as their social implications,

I have gestured towards sf’s unique status, as well as its importance as a technological discourse, though this is still as one amongst many.

There is another reason for going to sf, however, and it is suggestive of a new approach to framing the articulation of technological conceptions. In his American

Technological Sublime (1994), David E. Nye analyses a series of American icons ranging from the Grand Canyon to the atomic bomb, from Las Vegas to the Apollo 11 mission.

For him, these are examples of “the technological sublime,” since the sheer presence of

180 their majesty and magnitude “disrupts ordinary perception and astonishes the senses, forcing the observer to grapple mentally with its immensity and power” (Nye 15). He goes on to explain that the traditional Kantian notion of the natural sublime is reconfigured in American culture:

Not limited to nature, the American sublime embraced technology. Where Kant had reasoned that the awe inspired by a sublime object made men aware of their moral worth, the American sublime transformed the individual’s experience of immensity and awe into a belief in national greatness. (Nye 43)

Clearly, an experience of this kind has the capacity to not only disrupt thought but to organize it in a very specific way, and in this sense the sublime can be seen to exert a kind of orienting pull.

In his The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction, Csicsery-Ronay Jr. has already recognized the relevance of Nye’s insights for sf, naming the “science-fictional sublime” one of the beauties offered by the genre: the concept “invokes the historical mutation that

David E. Nye has named the American technological sublime: the sense of access to, and control of, the power of nature” (Csicsery-Ronay Jr., Seven 7). In sf one encounters the sublime frequently, in both its technological marvels and its grotesque monstrosities, and just as in the sublime encounters Nye sketches in relation to feats of engineering and natural wonder, here the confrontation has the ability to disrupt and organize thought, and

I imagine it often does so in the nationalistic direction Nye suggests.

If this is the case, the sublime encounter in sf constitutes a field of significant importance. Relying on Gramsci’s sense of cultural hegemony modified for a new technocultural age, 1980s sf formations were positioned within discursive clusters according to their engagements with technology. This is valid, I believe, but the sublime operates at an aesthetic level of affective and unconscious impact not captured by the

181 somewhat rationalistic character of a technological “conception.” Considering the prolongation of instrumentalism as a reigning—perhaps even intensifying—current in our own era, with Haraway’s “cyborg orgy” of technomilitary war playing itself out in increasingly nebulous ways, it may be the case that the political function of something like a technological sublime should be scrutinized with intensity. It may also be the case, on the other hand, that alternative modes of the sublime, subversive encounters that underscore a hidden promise in our technical imbrications, can be leveraged for their political and revolutionary potentials.

Regarding such potentials, several of the texts discussed in this project, especially under the “feminist sf” heading, carry within their pages instances of something like an alternative or subversive technological sublime, where feats of human engineering and achievement communicate not what Nye calls, referring to the Golden Gate Bridge, “an outward and visible sign of an ideal America” (xx), but rather an alternative ideal, a hidden or invisible potentiality not offered in our current reality, but transmitted, instead, by the awe-inspiring portrayal of something powerfully “other.” The focus of this project has been on framing patterns of technological conceptualization within an expansive range of texts, and suggesting ways that these contributed to broader techno-discourses, but the act of reading moments of a politically subversive sublime (which is different, though related) is certainly an endeavour worth pursuing.

In this relation, Vonda McIntyre’s 1983 novel Superluminal comes to mind, and can provide, at the risk of emulating the final moments of Haraway’s “Manifesto,” which uses Superluminal to “close this truncated catalogue of promising and dangerous monsters” (Haraway 179), my own close to this gesture towards a sublime politics in sf.

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The novel opens with one of its three protagonists, Laenea, recovering after having her heart replaced with an artificial one, a perilous surgery required for her to stay conscious during faster-than-light (or “superluminal”) travel. “She gave up her heart quite willingly” (McIntyre 1), the novel’s opening line reads, for Laenea commits to cyborgization as a means of experiencing the awe of piloting through “non-Einsteinian” space, a phenomenon with spiritual and metaphysical implications that are “beyond imagination. Language or mind was insufficient. Transit had never been described”

(McIntyre 11).

Laenea ultimately enters this space with her companion Radu, and the experience is described from his point-of-view:

This time he made the transition calmly. He embraced the perceptions; he let them flow into him, and flowed around them himself. The sensation of being able to encompass and comprehend the whole universe swept him up. His sight blurred slightly, but he could keep track of what was here and now, what was the past, what the future. Curiously, and with some trepidation, he looked at Laenea. Her image exploded into such a multiplicity of visions that Radu shoved himself back in his chair, astonished and confused. He closed his eyes and sorted himself back into reality, seeking an explanation of what had happened. He could not perceive Laenea the way he had Miikala. Miikala’s possibilities were ended, Laenea’s just begun. They increased every moment, with every decision, every subatomic interaction. (McIntyre 208)

The moment is sublime in a traditional sense, certainly: the characters transcend the laws of nature, bending space and time to their wills, just as certain feats of architectural wonder, for example, “challenge” space with their enormity, or time with their permanence. But a mastery over nature is only one aspect of this particular encounter;

Laenea does not transgress natural boundaries just to conquer them, but to confront the new horizons of experience and possibility that superluminal flight affords. She trades her heart for a better, fuller, thoroughly posthuman life, and though this comes at a cost—

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“She could not be a starship pilot and remain a normal human being, with normal human rhythms” (McIntyre 6)—her new existence opens up an escape from the banalities of daily life, providing opportunities for liberation and transformation. Such possibilities are suggested in Radu’s perception of her as a blur of infinite visions, which increase “every moment, with every decision, every subatomic interaction.”

Published a year before Neuromancer, Superluminal is in Haraway’s words

“particularly rich in boundary transgressions” (179), the sum total of which rival

Gibson’s frequent meshing of the natural and technological; Laenea is only one of many cyborgs within the text’s pages, and her crossing into the uncertainties beyond conventional space constitutes another kind of a subversion of the nature-technology divide, the former essentially penetrated by the latter. What is also at play, however, is this gesture towards limitlessness, towards an unfolding of infinite potential that carries with it, surely, a political corollary, where technology, far from being determined or determining, is imbued with possibility, and where the sublime carries with it the radical promise of new and different futures.

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NOTES

1 P.W. Singer’s 2010 overview of advanced technological warfare, Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century, offers a concise history of drone development and deployment, from their role as reconnaissance vehicles in the 1991 Gulf War to their centrality in a contemporary “War on Terror.”

2 If a history of precision weapons were to be charted, it would have to include several inarguable technologies as integral moments, from the modern rifle to the ICBM and satellite-controlled bombings. This history of instrumental weaponry is to my understanding yet to be written.

3 Heidegger’s famous example is of a hydroelectric power plant set into the Rhine. Rather than operating harmoniously with nature, the plant forces the river to change its natural course and act solely as a power supply, such that “even the Rhine itself appears as something at our command” (Heidegger 7). Further, “the hydroelectric plant is not built into the Rhine river as was the old wooden bridge that joined bank with bank for hundreds of years. Rather the river is dammed up into the power plant” (Heidegger 7). To my knowledge there is no better illustration of Heidegger’s concept of “standing- reserve.”

4 To complicate matters, Marx’s works are often interpreted in instrumental terms as well, specifically with respect to his view that workers can take control of the technologies of exploitation and redeploy them for different ends. Traditional Marxism “claims that a workers’ state can instrumentalize the inherited technological base in the creation of a new republic of skill” (Feenberg, Transforming 63). All of which suggests that technology is subservient to its given social order, not the reverse.

5 In relation to a history of liberal, subversive, and anti-conservative activities in the 1980s, Bradford Martin’s 2011 book The Other Eighties: A Secret History of America in the Age of Reagan is useful. It charts the attempts by activists to resist Reagan’s conservative resurgence and preserve the cultural and civil rights victories from previous decades.

6 Neil Badmington opens the introduction to his Posthumanism (2000) anthology with the 1983 Time cover as well, indicating its relevance in relation to new understandings of the human/machine relationship: “At the centre of the page stood the victorious machine, its screen alive with information. A ragged and lifeless sculpture of a human figure looked on, its epitaph the four words beneath the main title: ‘The computer moves in’” (1).

7 For a detailed overview and critique of contemporary transhumanism, see Joshua Raulerson’s Singularities: Technoculture, Transhumanism, and Science Fiction in the 21st Century (2013).

8 A revised version of this chapter appeared in a 2015 issue of Extrapolation with the title “Technomilitary Fantasy: Military Sf, David Drake, and the Discourse of Instrumentality.”

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9 “Shock and Awe” is an American military strategy developed by Harlan K. Ulman and James P. Wade in a report to the United States’ National Defense University in 1996. In that document, the authors use the technical term “rapid dominance.”

10 Analyzing events over a decade earlier, Jean Baudrillard examines the First Gulf War as a media-oriented, information-based simulation in a series of papers published before, during, and after the conflict, collected in The Gulf War Did Not Take Place (1991).

11 In The American Technological Sublime (1996), David E. Nye describes the history of America’s fascination with awe-inspiring technological accomplishments, and suggests that the experience of the technological sublime has been central to American social and political development.

12 “Mutual assured destruction” describes an American foreign policy stance with regards to nuclear warfare, advocating the establishment of an equilibrium wherein two factions, the United States and Russia, strategically oppose one another with equal nuclear capabilities. With the only outcome being annihilation and potential apocalypse, neither side is willing to destabilize the balance of power, effectively establishing a peculiar form of peace. The policy is often attributed to the militaristic and strategic ingenuity of Robert S. McNamara, who served as Secretary of Defence under both Kennedy and Johnson during the Cold War. Its detractors popularized the suitable acronym: M.A.D.

13 Despite this claim, specific developments vis-à-vis the Advisory Council along with the broader trajectory of militaristic sf have attracted little in the way of focussed analysis in academia, especially when compared to left-leaning subgenres such as cyberpunk. For instance, The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (1993) contains no direct entry on military sf, only an aside on “future war stories” and a brief mention of There Will Be War under the heading “war.” The online version of the Encyclopedia (launched in 2011) does contain a direct entry on “military sf,” and mentions the popularity and controversy of Pournelle and the War anthologies, but only briefly, and only in the context of discussing “war” and “future war” as sf themes with historical roots in the Korean War. The concept of a full-blown subgenre with a history potentially coextensive with that of science fiction itself is only suggested in an entry on “Future War.” No direct entry exists in Brian Stableford’s Science Fact and Science Fiction (2006); rather, the text points to “military SF” in a section on “Space Travel,” and refers to “future war stories” and “military science fiction” in a section on “War.” Still, the existence and relevance of the subgenre and the role the Advisory Council authors played can be confirmed with reference to a number of texts that, while not necessarily focussing exclusively on There Will Be War (or on sf, for that matter), at least indicate some importance in relation to other developments (cultural, political, economic) during the 1980s. See, for instance, the 2004 special issue of Fictions: Studi sulla narratività no. 3, titled “US Science Fiction and War/Militarism,” where a version of Darko Suvin’s “Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction” first appeared. That issue also includes H. Bruce Franklin’s article “War is Peace: Washington’s Final Science Fiction

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Solution,” which maps an overlap between military sf and the discourses of American weapons policy. The full length studies Rumors of War and Infernal Machines (2003) by Charles E. Gannon and War Stars: The Superweapon and the American Imagination (1988) by H. Bruce Franklin are also of particular relevance. Additionally, more recent publications perhaps indicate a growing interest in the subgenre, potentially in response to the growing science fictionalization of military technologies (drones, cyborg suits, “intelligent” weapons, the near-inevitable emergence of fully-autonomous weapons systems, etc.). Frederick Krome’s Fighting the Future War: Anthology of Science Fiction War Stories, 1914-1945 and David Seed’s Future Wars: The Anticipations and the Fears are only two examples, both published in 2012. While the former collects military sf stories essential to the subgenre’s development, Seed’s volume pulls together articles analyzing the relationship between fictionalized war in sf and the military and cultural contexts they participate in. His own contribution, “The Strategic Defense Initiative: A Utopian Fantasy,” maps the overlap of Reagan’s SDI Project and the works of Pournelle, Niven, and other right-leaning sf authors within an open-ended framework of cultural exchange.

14 Apparently Haldeman, author of the influential leftist military sf novel The Forever War (1974) reacted to “Futurist II” with ambiguous astonishment: “We saw the future there” (Gray 321).

15 Due to a changeover to digital records at Tor Books (publisher of the War anthologies), sales records are no longer accessible. Along with Luckhurst’s statement that the sf of the New Right was the defining sub-genre of the 1980s, though, in his 2007 paper “Of Starship Troopers and Refuseniks: War and Militarism in U.S. Science Fiction, Part 2,” Darko Suvin provides this useful insight: “writings propagating war and military-centred social organization have from the 70s or so inflected SF ‘as to become one of [its] default images.’ By my count from a reliable London SF bookstore catalogue in 2004, 30-40% of new US SF titles published were ‘military SF.’ The year when the crucial offensive started that resulted in this capture of the SF centre may be 1979, when the impetus of Reaganism and of Star Wars […] had begun to bear fruit, so that three major warmongering series by Bretnor, Drake, and Pournelle were started by central SF publishers, reinforcing Pournelle’s pioneering ‘Co-Dominium’ series of 1971. In the 80s the series multiplied further, and a proper SF pro-military group was constituted lobbying for Star Defense armaments and wars” (15-16).

16 For a recent analysis of the methods of characterizing sf in the context of contemporary genre theory, see John Rieder’s “On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History” in Science Fiction Studies (July 2010) #111, vol. 37, part 2.

17 In fact, on this formal level it is entirely possible to locate a series of thematic concerns and devices that tie military sf together as a coherent literary form. Based on my own readings of these texts, five possible generic features present themselves: 1. central characters are members of a military service; 2. military virtue is a central theme—“to stand between one’s home and war’s desolation is an ancient and glorious military

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tradition” (Pournelle Preface 12); 3. a focus on the extrapolation of current technologies for military use; 4. characters undergo some form of physical, intellectual, or moral development (much as in the bildungsroman form); and 5. an underlying assumption that “there will be war,” that war is an unavoidable enterprise intrinsic to the human condition.

18 The American Civil War was the first conflict to benefit from the advances of the Industrial Revolution, featuring the regular use of ironclad steamships, railroads, telegraphs, machine guns and mass-production. The Franco-Prussian War continued the application of modern technology to warfare, with the Prussian side utilizing the first anti-aircraft guns to shoot down French messengers in hot air balloons.

19 See also I.F. Clarke’s Voices Prophesying War: Future Wars, 1763-1984 (1993), which is essential for an understanding of so-called “future war stories,” including Chesney’s foundational novella. Clarke insists that Dorking marks the genesis of a new form of literature in Britain, one directly engaged with the concerns of the times, and fundamentally directed towards hypothesizing developments in advanced technological warfare and anticipating their social implications.

20 As with most historical generalizations, this is of course arguable, especially when taking into account the views of historians placing the origins of ‘total war’ in Napoleon’s era. The near-complete mobilization of France’s resources and population at the start of the nineteenth century certainly constituted a radical shift, with over a decade of ceaseless conflict resulting in casualties approximating five million. My focus, though, is on the striking nature of a specifically technological form of incursion, one that forced masses—after learning of French hot air balloons carrying messages during the Franco- Prussian War, or of Union soldiers operating gatling guns in the American Civil War—to rethink the nature of technology and its ability to penetrate the fabric of social existence.

21 In his 1983 analysis The Culture of Time and Space, 1880-1918, Stephen Kern argues that during the decades leading into the First World War, as well as the years during, “a series of sweeping changes in technology and culture created distinctive new modes of thinking about and experiencing time and space” (Kern 1) For Kern, cultural and technological developments, now outpacing the ability to comprehend them, called into question the previously stable spatiotemporal categories, which along bourgeoisie lines were once rigid, universal, and hierarchical. His chapter on World War I is titled “The Cubist War.”

22 That discursive formations define certain cognitive parameters (or ways of thinking) is a notion related to Foucault’s analysis of épisteme in The Order of Things (1966). But for Foucault, épisteme names the historical, a priori structures that define discursive practices in any particular epoch; these structures provide the conditions for the possibility of speech and cognition. If we read Foucault’s understanding of épisteme through Antonio Gramsci’s insight into culture and hegemony, we can perhaps re- establish the foundational value of discourse. For Gramsci, discourse is not determined by “semi-mystical” a priori structures; rather, discourses and cultural practices establish

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social structure, both hegemonic and counterhegemonic. If there is an épisteme in America in the 1980s, then, it is possible to insist (via Gramsci) that it is based in the discursive exchanges of the time, exchanges that the War anthologies and technomilitary fantasy participated in. My insistence that this discursive strain contributed to certain ways of thinking is therefore based on a set of Gramscian assumptions, a theoretical framework explored in further detail in part 4 of this chapter.

23 This notion of a modal sf is discussed in detail in Veronica Hollinger’s “Genre vs. Mode” (2013), wherein she provides an overview of the various and complex manners in which sf is construed as a mode of this or a mode of that, typically outside the boundaries of traditional genre theory.

24 If various ways of interpreting sf as a “mode” include “mode of literature” and “mode of discourse,” it is perhaps possible to pinpoint Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.’s science-fictionality as one instance where sf becomes a mode of cognition: a framework of ingrained cognitive parameters that facilitate thinking about future contingencies and their ethical/cultural/political resonances.

25 A novum in science fiction is simply a “new thing”; that is, the central device, occurrence, social structure, etc., that separates the fictional universe from our own, and that usually transforms it in some way. An obvious example can be found in Wells’ The Time Machine (1895), where the titular device signifies the narrative reality as science fictional and facilitates the unfolding of the narrative.

26 It is perhaps fair to point out that Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers series has produced an interesting subcultural development around a Slammers-related miniature war game. Drawing from the vast wealth of technical description in his narratives, enthusiasts construct miniature versions (sometimes to scale) of the copious military technologies utilized by Alois Hammer and his tank operators, and use these like chess pieces in a fully fleshed-out, rule-governed strategy game. Drake’s website describes the war game in intricate detail.

27 See, for instance, his Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (1985), co-authored with Chantal Mouffe, one of the decade’s most systematic applications of Gramsci’s insights to the study of a fully global, fully technologized capitalist system.

28 Another way of thinking about the relation between the economic base and cultural superstructure is in line with the distinction between ‘economism’ and ‘ideologism.’ For Gramsci, an exclusive focus on the base signifies “economism,” while an exclusive focus on the superstructure signifies an equally problematic “ideologism.” An accurate view of social transformation sees, rather, that modifications at the level of the base open the context—a framework of conditions of possibility—for superstructural change. The two levels remain connected, but not in a strictly causal manner.

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29 Gramsci’s early writing on the Russian Revolution, for example, insists that it represented a “…revolution against Karl Marx’s Capital.” That text, Marx’s most “scientific” and deterministic work, directly contradicts for Gramsci what he thought were the more authentic early writings: “In Russia, Marx’s Capital was more the book of the bourgeoisie than of the proletariat. It stood as the critical demonstration of how events should follow a predetermined course: how in Russia a bourgeoisie had to develop, and a capitalist era had to open, with the setting-up of a Western-type civilization, before the proletariat could even think in terms of its own revolt, its own class demands, its own revolution” (33).

30 It was also the first novel to win the “triple crown” of sf’s most prestigious awards: the Hugo, Nebula, and Philip K. Dick awards for best novel.

31 The concept of an “absent paradigm” in sf texts is formulated in Marc Angenot’s 1979 essay “The Absent Paradigm: An Introduction to the Semiotics of Science Fictions (Le Paradigme absent, éléments d'une sémiotique de la SF), which analyzes the semiotic tendency in sf to gesture towards its imagined world through images, words, and other semiotic configurations. According to Angenot, the reader is then tasked with constructing a general picture of the fictive universe out of these semiotic imprints—the paradigm, then, is absent, with the burden placed on the reader to assemble it: “The reader of a realistic novel proceeds from the general (the commonplace, the ideological topos) to the particular (the specific plot governed by this ideological structure). The SF reader follows the reverse path: he induces from the particular some imagined, general rules that prolong the author's fantasies and confer on them plausibility. The reader engages in a conjectural reconstruction which ‘materializes’ the fictional universe” (15). One way of arranging sf subgenres is in terms of the microscopic semiotic details that generate their macroscopic world paradigms; the absent paradigms of cyberpunk narratives, for instance, differ quite distinctly from those normally found in military sf.

32 In the contemporary moment, there is perhaps no better example of such disorienting complexity than the phenomenon of “high-frequency trading” (HFT), which involves computer algorithms rapidly trading stocks in fractions of a second, often for little more than a few cents. The incomprehensible speed and quantity of the trading, though, means that HFT companies can secure fortunes from a largely automated process. The complexities of the global financial market already exist as a kind of impenetrable mysticism for the majority of the global population; HFT adds to this, and represents— sometimes even for those “in-the-know”—one of global capitalism’s more opaque and troubling phenomena.

33 The concept of a “cyborg” (cybernetic + organism) has a long history, with the term first used in a 1960 article in Astronautics, “Cyborgs and Space,” to outline the benefits to space exploration if the human form is enhanced for survival in extraterrestrial environments. The opening paragraph reads: “Space travel challenges mankind not only technologically but also spiritually, in that it invites man to take an active part in his own biological evolution. Scientific advances of the future may thus be utilized to permit man’s existence in environments which differ radically from those provided by nature as

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we know it” (26). But the concept of a human-machine hybrid had already proliferated in many popular contexts before the authors, Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline, coined the term. For instance, in L. Frank Baum’s The Tin Woodman of Oz (1918), the twelfth book in his famous Oz series, the Tin Woodman (frequently misconstrued as the “Tin Man”) recounts his transformation from a flesh-and-blood man to a creature of metal. The Wicked Witch of the East, we are told, enchanted his axe to hack off his limbs one by one, and as each limb was removed, it was replaced by a metal appendage—in this brief moment of agonizing transformation, the Tin Woodman was part man (organic), part tin (synthetic).

34 The decade opened with the celebrated pop culture villain Darth Vader making his return in Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back (1980), and revealing himself in the film’s iconic climax as the protagonist’s father. Blade Runner appeared in cinemas in 1982, and soon established itself as cinema’s archetypal cyberpunk vision: based rather loosely on Philip K Dick’s Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968), it depicts Los Angeles in 2019 as an industrial wasteland populated by humanity’s leftovers, and follows the exploits of its protagonist as he struggles to “retire” several “replicants”—slaves composed of organic parts and resembling humans down to the cellular level—who have fled servitude off-world to find their makers on Earth. They are androids, not cyborgs, since they are wholly organic, though they were never “natural” to begin with. David Cronenberg’s 1983 body horror film Videodrome emerged as a unique example. After being exposed to an infectious video signal, the central character Max undergoes a series of hallucinatory delusions, one of which involves his torso’s transformation into a VCR, another featuring his head merging with a television screen. In line with the rest of Cronenberg’s output, the ontological status of these transformations is uncertain, with the subject’s perception playing a pivotal role in the construction of the film’s reality; the conclusion is that the subjective account of our relation to technology is more important than its allegedly objective status, which is in all likelihood is impossible to determine. The aforementioned The Terminator (1984) offered a more conventional cyborg, an assassin in the form of a gleaming metal endoskeleton with an outer layer of organic tissue providing its pseudo-human likeness. In the film’s action climax, this layer is burned away to expose the killer’s true nature, and to suggest the tenuous state of human flesh in contrast to the unnatural permanence of the technological, broadly conceived. In “Q Who,” a 1989 episode of the popular Star Trek: The Next Generation, the Enterprise’s crew is confronted by a cybernetically enhanced species known as “the Borg,” a collective of biological entities altered along technological lines. As they expand across the galaxy, they “absorb” other species into their collective hive-mind in an effort to purify the messy, organic state of life. The assimilation they impose is a clean metaphor for the futility of escaping our own technoculture, and their repeated threat, “resistance is futile,” became a fashionable idiom for describing the assimilating nature of technology, capitalism, and other imposing structures. The cyborg figure flourished outside America too, perhaps most spectacularly in Japan with Shinya Tsukamoto’s 1989 cult classic Tetsuo: The Iron Man. Tsukamoto’s film dramatizes the excruciating transformation of an unnamed businessman into a hulking metal beast, who after discovering metal growing from the inside of his cheek, watches in (more conventional) horror as his body

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undergoes a series of radical technological conversions, first in the form of protrusions on his ankles and arms, then with entire appendages morphing into technological extensions. He finally suffers a full metamorphosis into a sickening embodiment of technocultural synthesis, his body a freakish contortion of machine-like components, his penis an enormous power drill.

35 Something close to this semiotic function is detailed in Roland Barthes’ Mythologies (1957), his collection of essays examining the structure of modern myth creation. For Barthes, in any social context, certain images, symbols, and texts are endowed with an abundance of meaning, and take on a valorized role as popular myths. His analysis of various examples—from “Wine and Milk” and “Steak-Frites” to “Astrology” and “Martians”—is founded on an interpretation of Ferdinand de Saussure’s semiotics, where an object (the signified) is arbitrarily associated with a linguistic representation (the signifier) to produce a sign, the primary linguistic and written units of communication. Barthes’ contention is that modern myth-making is a kind of “second-order semiological system,” with cultural objects as diverse as “language itself, photography, posters, rituals, objects, etc.” (223) positioned as new and heightened signifiers in a semiological process that, more often than not, perpetuates the values and customs of the ruling social elite. Modern myth is therefore a “metalanguage” (224) which extends a form of class-specific normativity to the entirety of the social whole, such that the “norms” of one class—for Barthes, the bourgeoisie of 1950’s France—are accepted as a universal and just social reality: “practiced on a national scale, bourgeois norms are experienced as the evident laws of a natural order—the further the bourgeois class propagates its representations, the more naturalized it becomes” (252). The process Barthes describes bears comparison to the concept of hegemony and its governing ideological norms, which Gramsci insists are held in place by the deployment and redeployment of bourgeois values in the cultural sphere, leading to a final acceptance of the normality and universality of the bourgeois worldview. The difference, at least at the most general level, is therefore one of inflection: Barthes’ theory engages with semiotics in the form of de Saussure, Gramsci’s with political economy in the form of Marx.

36 Frank R. Paul was the most notable and prolific painter of American pulp sf magazine covers, most notably Amazing Stories, which launched in 1926 with one of his covers. Discovered by Hugo Gernsback, “father” of American sf and editor of Amazing Stories, his work often featured the colourful juxtaposition of wondrous (and frequently enormous) technologies and their human onlookers. It essentially defined the visual language of the early American sf imaginary, and continues to serve as a looking glass into the particular brand of technological optimism associated with the era.

37 The “New Wave” in sf, named after the French avant-garde movement in cinema, was largely confined to American and British sf in the 1960s and 70s, involving many figures associated with Michael Moorcock’s New Worlds, a British sf magazine he ran for a brief period in 1964. It became known for publishing material that pushed against the boundaries of traditional sf publication, including works by non-sf (traditionally construed) authors, particularly J.G. Ballard, a close friend of Moorcock’s. Both the magazine and the movement became associated with a form of literary and stylistic

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experimentation, and with a retreat from the science-focussed narratives and straightforward language popular with American audiences. Pamela Zoline contributed to New Worlds as well, with her short story “The Heat Death of the Universe,” discussed in chapter 3, utilizing an experimental approach to the short story form. In Science Fiction, Luckhurst provides a reading of “Heat Death,” along with an account of the New Wave in general. For him, Zoline’s contribution was paradigmatic, even though Sterling refrains from listing her, or any woman, as a cyberpunk precursor.

38 There is also the case that these authors were associated in their personal and professional lives. Sterling was associated with a fanzine called Cheap Truth in the early- 80s, which he edited under the alias “Vincent Omniaveritas.” Several cyberpunk authors contributed as well, including Lewis Shiner, who published under the name ‘Sue Denim’ (for ‘pseudonym’). It may be the case that their existing work pulled them together for Cheap Truth, but it is equally plausible that the fanzine provided the social and literary platform for their works’ convergence, and for their eventual association under the guise of a “movement.”

39 Some clarification on the title of Haraway’s text is perhaps in order, which in Csicsery- Ronay, Jr.’s article is referred to as “A Manifesto for Cyborgs,” and in Sofoulis’ as “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. is referring to the article as it appeared in the journal Socialist Review in 1984 (with the full title “A Manifesto for Cyborgs: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the 1980s”), while Sofoulis takes as her definitive edition the expanded version published in Haraway’s 1991 collection Simians, Cyborgs and Women as “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Sofoulis renders the distinction clear in the opening of her “Cyberquake: Haraway’s Manifesto” (85).

40 As always, there are exceptions, and not all of the work produced by “humanist” sf authors elevates the human subject above the messy technological imbrications of advanced technoculture. Asimov is perhaps the most difficult to pinpoint in any straightforward way: his fiction surely valorizes the scientific hero as the centerpiece of the technological world, but it just as often problematizes not only the centrality but the ontological purity of the species. His short story “Evidence,” for instance, first published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1946 and later incorporated into the celebrated “fix-up” I, Robot (1950), follows the case of Stephen Byerley, a prosecutor running for mayor in a major American city, whose humanity is called into question when his political opponents suggest he was replaced with a humanoid robot after a car accident. The story examines the near impossibility of distinguishing between a human being and an advanced work of robotic engineering designed to mimic one (in the context of advanced robotics, there is insufficient “evidence”), and concludes by suggesting that robots would make ideal politicians and rulers, since altruism could be coded into their “positronic” brains.

41 Exceptions to this point are worth noting. In Heinlein’s writing in particular, the way characters speak certainly tend to reflect their histories, their professions, and their positions in the social hierarchy. In Starship Troopers, for instance, one can detect a keen

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awareness of the dialects and idioms of military culture, though this hardly appears as a primary concern.

42 The metaphor of a “feedback loop” can be traced in any number of directions, and the concept of “feedback” in general gets deployed in biology, engineering, and the social sciences in diverse ways. As discussed, McHale employs the metaphor directly to illustrate the ever-tightening reciprocal interplay of high and low culture assisted by the increased velocity of informatic exchange in modern technoculture (McHale 311). My preferred foundation for the metaphor comes, however, from Robert Charles Wilson’s phenomenal 2001 novel The Chronoliths, whose premise involves a series of colossal monuments sent back in time to commemorate the victories of a fanatical warlord in the future: time (chrono) plus “monolith” equals “chronolith.” The novel’s principal academic figure, Sue Chopra, develops a theory to describe the purpose of the monuments, one hinging on the phenomenon of microphone-speaker feedback. Her colleague explains that “You have an amplifier between the mike and the speakers … Whatever goes into the microphone comes out of the speakers, louder. If there’s any noise in the system, it makes a loop”; Chopra elaborates: “Any little sound the microphone picks up, the speaker plays it louder. And the microphone hears that and multiplies it again, and so on, until the system starts ringing like a bell” (102). Chopra applies the feedback theory to the monuments to illustrate the manner in which each arrival generates a larger and larger belief in the warlord’s inevitable and unassailable power: “when [the warlord] sends us a monument commemorating a victory twenty years from now, that’s like pointing the microphone at the speaker … It amplifies itself … By marking his victories [he] creates the expectation that he’ll be victorious. Which makes the victory that much more likely, even inevitable. And the next. And so on” (103). Relating this model to the material-semiotic dynamic at play between discourse (semiotics) and its “sociotechnical realities” (matter) of course requires some alteration, but we see in Wilson’s novel the illustration of a very literal material object impacting the immateriality of the human psyche (in the form of expectation), with the latter assisting the inevitability of the materiality once more. This is suggestive, I think, of the relation at play between discourse (or, more broadly, ideology) and the material realities it both shapes and is shaped by, with the increasing amplification eroding the gap between them and, perhaps, convincing the public of their legitimacy. The model suggests that the more intense the amplification in a material-semiotic loop and the less distance between both elements, the greater its chances for ideological dominance, though this is certainly a model requiring further analysis.

43 The overlap between religious and technological enthusiasm is the focus of David F. Noble’s 1997 book The Religion of Technology, where he argues that “Perhaps nowhere is the intimate connection between religion and technology more manifest than in the United States, where an unrivaled popular enchantment with technological advance is matched by an equally earnest popular expectation of Jesus Christ’s return […] Religious preoccupations pervade the space program at every level, and constitute a major motivation behind extraterrestrial travel and exploration. Artificial Intelligence advocates wax eloquent about the possibilities of machine-based immortality and resurrection, and

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their disciples, the architects of virtual reality and cyberspace, exult in their expectation of God-like omnipresence and disembodied perfection” (5).

44 Juridical and technocultural systems are of course integrated, especially if one adopts a larger perspective on technology. For the most significant substantive theorists—such as Heidegger and Ellul, according to Feenberg—“technology” as a term or concept is limited if used to describe only things and collections of things. For Heidegger the phenomenon of technology is better understood as a process of “enframing,” where the world is structured according to a set of rigid principles in order to produce it as a resource. For Ellul, the term “technique” describes the sum total of methods (or techniques) used to produce order and efficiency in every conceivable context; it is this set of methods that is at the heart of the technological phenomenon. In many ways the prison is a perfect example of the calculated and dehumanizing epistemologies and practices that Heidegger and Ellul theorize, with its perfect ordering of prisoners and its orchestrated patterns of daily ritual. Foucault was certainly illustrating a similar point with his use of the panopticon prison, which systematically organizes prisoners to facilitate efficient observation, as a metaphor for disciplinary societies.

45 In relation to environmental concerns, although these are often associated with the 1970s (including in feminist sf), in Seeing Green: The Use and Abuse of American Environmental Images (2015) Finis Dunaway shows that concerns over environmental crisis continued into the 1980s and beyond as a significant cultural fixation: the 1989 Exxon Valdez oil spill is one particularly striking example. Indeed, in the last quarter of the twentieth century the notion of environmental crisis presented (and continues to present) a shift in the temporality of crisis: whereas the looming threat of Cold War nuclear exchange carried with it the potential for sudden, catastrophic disaster, the environmental crisis entailed a gradual, slow-motion calamity that was difficult to measure or gauge within short timespans.

46 In 1991, sf author Pat Murphy helped launch the James Tiptree, Jr. Award as an annual prize recognizing “science fiction or fantasy that expands or explores our understanding of gender” (James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Awards Council). The prize functions as a network of creative engagement among authors and readers, and celebrates works that challenge conventional ideas about sex and gender, but this is a far cry from Sterling’s “movement,” which was all about delineating a very specific literary and historical trajectory, regardless of whether the texts fit comfortably within that construction. As stated on the James Tiptree, Jr. Award website, the ideal, rather, is “not to look for work that falls into some narrow definition of political correctness, but rather to seek out work that is thought-provoking, imaginative, and perhaps even infuriating” (James Tiptree, Jr. Literary Awards Council).

47 “James Tiptree, Jr.” was one of Alice B. Sheldon’s many pseudonyms. Sheldon wrote the majority of her sf under the name, and engaged in prolific exchanges with fans and fellow writers, with the vast majority assuming she was a man. Writing in 1975, Robert Silverberg, one of Tiptree’s closest correspondents, wrote: “It has been suggested that Tiptree is female, a theory that I find absurd, for there is to me something ineluctably

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masculine about Tiptree’s writing” (qtd. in Phillips 3). Tiptree’s fascinating performance of masculinity continues to serve as a case study in the complexities of gender as associated with writing, with the James Tiptree, Jr. Award established in 1991 to celebrate sf and fantasy fiction that thoughtfully probes our understandings of gender. For a full account of Tiptree/Sheldon’s colourful life (the fact that she briefly worked for the CIA in the mid-50s is, in the scope of this life, almost mundane) see Julie Phillips’ James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon (2006).

48 Origins are a tricky thing. It is worth mentioning that instances of so-called “proto sf” can be traced back to any number of conceivable origin points, all depending on one’s definition of sf. Many of these histories include works by women, such as Margaret Cavendish’s novel The Description of a New World, Called the Blazing-World (1668), involving a female protagonist’s extraordinary adventures on an alien world connected to our own. That world, the Blazing World, can be interpreted as a utopia in many ways, and the novel itself is planted firmly in the grand tradition of utopian writing, which itself can be seen to overlap with sf in terms of both genre and history.

49 Brian Attebery points to A. R. Long, L. Taylor Hansen, Helen Weinbaum, and C.L. Moore, with only the latter “better known than Stone” (50). He also reminds us that “Only recently has the history of women’s contributions to science fiction been pushed back to the early magazine era. It is hard to tell to what degree the sex of these pulp writers was even noted at the time they were writing, as many either used their initials as a byline or had ambiguously gendered names” (Attebery 50).

50 A useful marker for this impact is the arrival of Women’s Studies programs in American universities, the first of which appeared in 1970. Feminist Studies, the first academic journal dedicated to feminist analysis, would publish its first issue two years later.

51 Last chapter, the substantive picture of technology was associated with 1980s cyberpunk, though I stressed a departure from Feenberg’s understanding of substantivism based on a general unwillingness to imagine a way out from the technological environment; such flights are typically naïve, in cyberpunk, and fail to grasp the real pervasiveness of technical systems and ways of being. The utopian feminism of the 70s, however, seems to meet this criteria: like cyberpunk, the texts recognize technology’s totalizing reach, but unlike cyberpunk, they offer a retreat. Based on this, the critical feminist utopias are better representations of Feenberg’s substantivism, though I still content that in the 1980s cyberpunk comes closest.

52 In a 2010 interview, Bujold claimed that Baen, the publisher of her work (and, interesting, much of the right-wing military sf of the 80s), had sold over two million copies of her books, not counting digital formats (Jones). These are significant numbers for a “niche” genre, even when stretched over three decades. As for critical acceptance, she won four Hugo awards for best novel, though these came after her debut in the 1980s: The Vor Game (1990) won the award in 1991, Barrayar (1991) in 1992, Mirror Dance (1994) in 1995, and Paladin of Souls (2003), a work of fantasy (she was prolific here as

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well), in 2004. In academic criticism, recognition of her output has been infrequent, and pales in comparison to her contemporaries in feminist-slanted sf, primarily Ursula Le Guin and Octavia Butler, whose iconoclasm is unmatchable. Darko Suvin does briefly survey her work in his article on military sf, which I reference, and an anthology has been published on her oeuvre (2013), titled Lois McMaster Bujold: Essays on a Modern Master of Science Fiction and Fantasy and edited by Janet Brennan Croft. I pull selectively from this as well. More recently, a full-length analysis by Edward James in the Modern Masters of Science Fiction series has been published, titled simply Lois McMaster Bujold (2015). Other critical works include, but are not limited to: Anne L.. Haehl’s “Miles Vorkosigan and the Power of Words: A Study of Lois McMaster Bujold’s Unlikely Hero” (1996), Sylvia Kelso’s “Lois McMaster Bujold: Feminism and ‘The Gernsback Continuum’ in Recent Women’s SF” (1998), as well as Kelso’s “Loud Achievements: Lois McMaster Bujold’s Science Ficiton” from the November 1998 issue of The New York Review of Science Fiction.

53 Some other feminist works from the 80s worth considering in relation to a critical technological approach include, but are certainly not limited to: Vonda McIntyre’s Superluminal (1983), with one of its female protagonists, Orca, already enhanced for deep sea diving and communication with whales, embarking on a quest to further enhance herself for space exploration; also the remainder of Butler’s Xenogenesis triptych, Adulthood Rights (1988) and Imago (1989), which continue the story of Earth’s repopulation and describe the emergence of a human-Oankali hybrid species.

54 The science fictional character of the “Manifesto” is also signaled by Haraway’s prodigious use of feminist sf towards the end, where she discusses Joanna Russ, Samuel R. Delany, James Tiptree, Jr., Octavia Butler, Vonda McIntyre, and others, referring to them as “theorists for cyborgs” (173). As she sees it, “The cyborgs populating feminist science fiction make very problematic the statuses of man or woman, human, artefact, member of a race, individual entity, or body” (Haraway 178).

55 On the transgression of boundaries, particularly the human/animal one, Pat Murphy’s 1987 story “Rachel in Love” is particularly acute. It tells the story of a female chimpanzee imprinted with the memories and personality of her owner’s dead daughter, Rachel. The chimp, or Rachel in her new body—“She has the mind of a teenage girl, but the innocent heart of a young chimp” (Murphy 219)—must fend for herself in a hateful, dangerous world when her owner-father dies. Her journey underscores the permeability of the human-animal border with the motif of reflection, where Rachel the chimp sees Rachel the girl, the distinction made more and more slippery as the story progresses: “She looks into her own reflection: a pale oval face, long blonde hair. The hand that holds the curtain aside is smooth and white with carefully clipped fingernails. But something is wrong. Superimposed on the reflection is another face peering through the glass: a pair of dark brown eyes, a chimp face with red-brown hair and jug-handle ears. She sees her own reflection and she sees the outsider; the two images merge and blur” (Murphy 224). One would be hard pressed to read “Rachel in Love” without recalling Haraway’s “Manifesto,” and Joan Haran puts the two in direct conversation in her “Simians, Cyborgs, and Women in ‘Rachel in Love’” (2006), which is paired with the story in

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Larbalestier’s 2006 anthology of feminist sf, Daughters of Earth. As a technologically produced cross between human and animal, Rachel is a cyborg in Haraway’s terms.

56 Anxiety over the male body and its boundaries is leveraged spectacularly by Octavia E. Butler in her 1984 story “Bloodchild,” taking place on an alien world where humans are held in isolation by a species that relies on host organisms for reproduction. The story places men at the centre of horrific scenarios, where the alien worms are cut from their flesh in a nightmare approximation of childbirth. “The whole procedure,” the protagonist concludes, “was wrong, alien” (Butler, “Bloodchild” 17).

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