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Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition Author(s): Veronica Hollinger Source: Science Fiction Studies, Vol. 33, No. 3 (Nov., 2006), pp. 452-472 Published by: SF-TH Inc Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4241464 Accessed: 11/08/2010 12:51
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http://www.jstor.org 452 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
Veronica Hollinger
Stories about the Future: From Patterns of Expectation to Pattern Recognition
The story goes like this: many of us who live in technoculturehave come to experience the present as a kind of futureat which we've inadvertentlyarrived, one of the many futuresimagined by science fiction. We apprehenda version of the futurein the featuresof the contemporaryscience-fictional moment. William Gibson's PatternRecognition (2003) is a realistic novel set in 2002. It is also an sf novel set in the endless endtimes of the future-present.It brilliantlyconveys the phenomenologyof a present infused with futurity, no longer like itself, no longer like the present.1 Gibson's protagonistCayce is overcome by a sense of "invasive weirdness" (226). There is not much distance anymorebetween the facticity of realism and the subjunctivityof science fiction.2 This is not news; this is the way we live now. This is the story that Gibson tells in PatternRecognition, about(the impossibilityof) the future. And, for all the complex originality of his treatment,it is not a coincidence that variations on this story have appearedin recent novels by MargaretAtwood and Greg Egan, writers as different from each other as they are from Gibson. As N. Katherine Hayles has argued, "visions of the future, especially in technologically advancederas, can dramaticallyaffect present developments" (131). Each of these novels is, in its own way, a story about the problematic impact of the future-the future in/as technoculture-on the present. Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003), a satire about the catastrophicpotential of increasingly commodified technoscience, is a text from the literary slipstream, written by an authorwhose prose works are more often associated with the realistnovel thanwith genre fiction. It is a telling demonstrationof how non-genre writers turn to science fiction as a way to characterize the lived experience of technoculture. Egan's Schild's Ladder (2001) is equally apocalypticin its vision of the future: situatedat the center of genre, it captures the fascination with which some contemporaryhard sf views the potential of technoscience to transform human history in radically unforeseeable ways. Egan's futurehas all the allure of unimaginabledifference, but its promises are not, finally, for "us." In contrastto both Atwood and Egan, in his latest novel Gibson trades in the tropes of sf for the strategies of mimetic realism. Pattern Recognitionis a story abouthow we find ourselves alreadyon the other side of radicaldifference, even as the future seems ever more out of reach. In fact, we might consider it a story about exactly the kind of world that tells itself stories such as Oryx and Crake and Schild's Ladder. In the discussion that follows, I want to read these three novels as a series of significantlyinterrelated responses to the increasinglycomplex natureof the future in technoculture. STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 453
Future-present In the postmoderntime zone, it is nevernow.... The role of sciencefiction in a culture thatrepresents itself as futuristicis complexand not a little ironic.-IstvanCsicsery- Ronay,Jr., "FuturisticFlu" (30-31) It is also not news that "science fiction" has come to refer in the past few decades not only to a popular narrativegenre, but also to a kind of popular culturaldiscourse, a way of thinking about a sociopolitical present defined by radical and incessant technological transformnation.As Jonathan Benison suggests, "it might be argued that [one] reason for the special contemporary relevance of SF is that our present has in actualitycome increasingly to make sense less as a continuationof the past than as an anticipationof the future, which it pre-emptsor incorporatesbefore it can ever arrive" (158, n.3). The presentrepresents itself as science fiction, as alreadythe future, andnecessarily this is having an impact on sf's generic fortunes.3 The following list of "recentscientific andtechnological breakthroughs," as compiledby StevenBest andDouglas Kellner,provides a compellingdescription of the science-fictionalizedpresent: Therehas been intense speculation and research concerning black holes, worm holes, paralleluniverses, ten-dimensional reality, time travel, teleportation, antigravitydevices, the possibilityof life on otherplanets, cryogenics, and immortality.Moon and Mars landings, genetic and tissue engineering, cloning, xenotransplantation,artificial birth technologies,animal head transplants, bionics,robotics, and eugenics now exist. At the sametime, weightyquestions are being raised about how many "realities"and "universes"might simultaneouslyexist, whetheror not natureis "law-like"in its fundamental dynamics, andjust how exact scientific knowledge can be. (103) As Best and Kellner demonstrate, the sheer extravagance of contemporary technoscienceleads to the implosionof science fiction and science fact-only the future is rich enough to provide us with the image bank through which to interpretthe present. But what does it mean to name the presentafter a narrative genre devoted to the imaginativecreation of futureworlds? And what aboutthe genre in question? Science fiction is "the literatureof change," but change is exactly what now defnes the present. It no longer guaranteesthe futureas the site of meaningfuldifference.4 A very popular early version of this drama of increasingly intrusive technoscientific futuritywas outlined in Alvin Toffler's Future Shock (1971), which warned of "the pathologythat pervadesthe air" and attributedit "to the uncontrollable,non-selective natureof our lunge into the future"(366). By the mid-1980s, influentialand by-now-familiar theoretical models of postmodernity developed by Jean Baudrillardand Fredric Jamesonintersected with Toffler's critique of the blind instrumentalismof technoscience. For Baudrillardand Jameson, postmodernityis, at least in part, also a kind of crisis-of-the-future, and one which, as each notes, poses a radical challenge to commonsense understandingsof sf as "the literatureof the future."5 Baudrillardwrote with enthusiastic dread about the fascinations of the hyperreal,the realmof third-ordersimulacra that increasingly overlays the "lost 454 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) utopia" of the real and, by implication, works implosively to block any possibility of meaningful transformation.This, as he noted as early as 1981, cannot fail to mark sf: "In the potentially limitless universe of the production era, SF adds by multiplying the world's own possibilities" ("Simulacraand Science Fiction" 310). In the face of the absolute triumphof the hyperreal, however, Baudrillard rather cheerfully concluded that "the 'good old' SF imaginationis dead, and ... something else is beginning to emerge" (309). In 1985, Baudrillardannounced that "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened," marking the penetrationof the future into the present at the same time as he predicted the anti-climacticnature of the millennial event. On this side of the (non)divide that was the year 2000, the fascinations of Baudrillardian hyperrealityseem ever more in evidence. We remain imaginativelytrapped in what he described as "a period of implosion, after centuries of explosion and expansion. When a system reaches its limits, its own saturationpoint, a reversal begins to take place. And something happens also to the imagination" ("Simulacraand Science Fiction" 310). Jameson also announcedthe loss of "the future," but the startingpoint for his analysis was a perceived rupturein our connections to "the past." In the early 1980s, Jameson gloomily described a culturalparadigm shift responding to a new social moment. This moment can in part be defined by the disappearance of a sense of history, the way in which our entire contemporarysocial system has little by little begun to lose its capacity to retain its own past, has begun to live in a perpetualpresent and in a perpetual change thatobliterates traditions of the kind which all earlier social formationshave had in one way or another to preserve. ("Postmodernismand Consumer Culture" 125;my emphasis)6 For Jameson, the loss of a sense of historicalcontinuity and the entrapment in a "now" defined by incessantchange has resultedin an inevitableweakening of both the political and the creative energy necessary to sustain a sense of (utopian) possibility. The "vocation" of science fiction has become "to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future" ("Progress Versus Utopia" 153)-that is, to demonstrate in stories our inability to imagine something qualitativelydifferent. This "incapacity"(an idea to which I will returnbelow) infuses the devastatinglyanti-climactic statement that, more than twenty years ago now, more or less concluded Neuromancer(1984), that cyberpunklimit- text: in spite of the coming to consciousness of a hugely powerful artificial intelligence at the end of Gibson's first novel, "Thingsaren't different. Things are things"(270). It is easy to see the potentialfor political enervationsuggested in these descriptions of science fiction's current relations with futurity, especially in Baudrillard's,but also, ironically, in Jameson's.7 Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. satirically diagnoses this sense of invasion by technoscientificfuturity as "futuristicflu," a condition "in which a time further in the futurethan the one in which we exist and choose infects the host present, reproducingitself in simulacra, until it destroys all the original chronocytesof the host imagination"("Futuristic Flu" 26).8 The result is an increasinglyacute STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 455
sense thatthe shapeof thingsto come has alreadybeen determined,undermining in the process the "moraleand freedomnecessary to create an open, 'conditional future'" (33). Geoff Ryman's recent Air (or Have Not Have) (2004)-another important example of sf's post-millennial obsession with the technocultural future- present-provides a useful contrastto the three novels that are my main focus here, because it dramatizesa kind of homeopathiccure for the futuristicflu. In Ryman'snovel, an implacablecommunications system-"Air"-looms over the entire globe and readersfollow the story of its radicalpenetration into the lives of the membersof an isolatedpeasant village in the mountainsof whatmight-or might not-be Turkeyor China. It is "the last village in the world to go online" (1), as we are told in the novel's opening sentence. Air is the story of this community'sstruggle both to adaptto the implacablefuture that has infected its "hostpresent" and, to whateverdegree possible, to shape that futureto its own ends. In Ryman's utopian-inflectedfiction, humanbeings manage to achieve a series of more or less mutually constitutive engagements with the future, although not without significantphysical, psychological, and emotionalcosts. The sign of their recovery from the futuristicflu is their re(dis)coveryof a sense of an open-ended future in all its contingency and indeterminacy.Air's last words are: "all of them ... turnedand walked together into the future"(390).9 The resolution in Air is the dramaticreinstatement of the future: however difficult and demandingand inescapable the time to come may be, it is also the site of potentially positive transformation,and one might meet it with some deliberationand some degree of freedom. In contrast, the novels by Atwood, Egan, and Gibson treat the futureas a kind of impossibility. Atwood's novel is a retro-disaster novel about out-of-control bioengineering and ecological collapse. Egan's radicalhard sf offers the paradoxicalextrapolation of a future inherently inaccessible to extrapolation. In Pattern Recognition, sf and mainstreamrealism have become indistinguishablestrategies for mimetically representingthe ceaseless transformationsof the future-present. 2. Retro-techno-scientific romance If posterityreads [this futuristic stuff] at all it will probablybe to marvelat ourwant of knowledge,imagination and hope. Andno doubtour posterity too will writetheir own futuristicstories and no doubtthey too will be just as transitoryas ours.-H.G. Wells, "Fictionabout the Future"(246-47) Oryxand Crake is a story that warns us abouthow a conceptualloss of the futurecan lead to its literaldestruction in the (almostcomplete) extinction of the human race. In this sense, Oryx and Crake offers readers an old-fashioned dystopian waming about the potentially catastrophic effects of unbridled biogenetic engineeringand unstoppableenvironmental collapse. It plays out an Orwellian "if this goes on" scenario, satirically dramatizinga sociopolitical near-futureof fearsomestupidity and corruption-a very thinlydisguised version of our own present-that inevitably leads to apocalypticdisaster, to the literal erasure of anythinglike a viable future. 456 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
Appropriately,the narrativestructure moves constantlybetween the novel's post-apocalypticpresent and its forever out-of-reach past; this structurevery clearly highlightsthe brokenconnections between past and presentand between present and future. In a statementthat seems to be a thematicgiveaway, one of the novel's characters anticipateshow easily the trajectoryof human history might be disrupted: All it takes... is theelimination of one generation.One generation of anything. Beetles,trees, microbes, scientists, speakers of French,whatever. Break the link in timebetween one generationand the next,and it's gameover forever.(270) The novel's action, such as it is, unfolds in an unspecifiedlocation sometime in the near future. The humanworld-and much of the naturalworld-has been destroyed by a combination of rampant genetic experimentation and environmentaldegradation, culiminatingin the outbreakof a mysterious viral plague that kills almost everyone. Atwood's protagonistis Snowman;his name used to be Jimmy, but he has renamedhimself for this new andhorrible world.'0 In the novel's present, Jimmy/Snowmanwanders through the post-apocalyptic wasteland, trying to avoid both the poisonous sun and a variety of bio- engineered hybrid-carnivores with unfortunate names like "pigoons" and "wolvogs." Although he spends most of his time foraging for food and water, he is slowly starvingto death. At the same time, he plays guardianand prophet to a new race of artificially-createdposthuman subjects. Motifs of hybridityare woven into the very textureof Atwood's novel. Bio- engineered animals roam the future world freely, posing a constant threat to Snowman; his memories of the lost past, responsible for the horrors of this (future)present, are replete with images of "unnatural"foods, insects, flowers, and animals. Given its Orwellianundertones, it is not surprisingthat the novel is anythingbut celebratoryin its constructionsof hybridity(in contrastto many recent discourses of the postmodern).Hybridity here representsthe unnatural, the transgressive, the grotesque and monstrous results of technoscientific stupidityand greed. It is the hybridityof the gene-splice, of the transgressions of an absolutely commodifiedtechnoscience, of the ultimatecollapse of nature into culture. After Crake, Jimmy's boyhood friend, has introducedJimmy to some of the wonder products of the new genetic sciences-such as "ChickieNobs,"a particularlyrevolting fast-food product- "Why is it [Jimmyj feels some line has been crossed, some boundarytransgressed? How much is too much, how far is too far?" (250). Oryx and Crake strongly dramatizes our collective anxietythat we are-even now-engaged in a process of irrecuperable violation. Much of the action in the novel takes place in memory, througha series of flashbacks to Snowman's lost life as Jimmy. In these memories Atwood also outlines the shape of her near-futuredystopia. Jimmy has grown up in a society of corporatecontrol and grotesquesimulacra. This futurecasts its marginalized masses out to the "pleeblands,"spies on its workers, and executes those who betrayits corporate/ideologicalinvestments. And, like otherrepressive systems, the enforcementof increasinglytotalitarian power in this futureattracts its own STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 457 opposition, in the form of ever-more-radicalacts of bio-terrorism.This is the backgroundfor Jimmy's recollections of his troubledfamily life, his friendship with the mysteriousand brilliant Crake (who, in a supremeact of bio-terrorism, will release the plague virus that destroys most of humanity),and his obsession with the mysteriousand exotic sex-worker Oryx, whom he may first have seen on a child-pornwebsite when he was a boy. 1 ThroughJimmy's memories Atwood dramatizeshow weak the ties between present and past have become: he and others of his generationknow little and care less about the old world that is rapidlydisappearing under the detritus of lowest-common-denominatorpopular culture and the radical commodification of everything, not least the creative arts, but most especially the products of unthinkinggenetic experimentation.12 He recalls how he mocked his parents' nostalgia for a world that was cleaner and freer than the one they now inhabit: "Everyone's parents moaned on about ... Rememberwhen you could drive anywhere?Remember hamburger chains, always real beef, rememberhot dog stands? Rememberbefore New Yorkwas New New York?... Boohoo" (75; emphasis in original). Jimmy's memories of this period are redolent with the imageryof extinction(underlined by recurringreferences to "Extinctathon," one of the Internetgames that he and Crake play as boys)-and the final extinction is our own: "Kingdom,Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species. How many legs does it have? Homo sapiens sapiens, joining the polar bear, the beluga whale, the onager, the burrowingowl, the long, long list" (409). While Oryx and Crake borrows freely from Orwellian-style dystopian fiction, it even more obviouslyplays off Wellsianscientific romances,especially The TimeMachine (1895) and, to a lesser extent, TheIsland of Doctor Moreau (1896).'3 If Jimmy is the Time Traveller, cut off from his "present" and precipitatedinto a horrific future, then Crake is an updatedMoreau who has traded in the tools of vivisection for those of a much more precise bio- engineering.Like TheTime Machine, Oryxand Crakeis a storyabout evolution, but this is no longer the "natural"evolutionary process thatso fascinatedWells's late-nineteenth-centuryimagination. Rather, it is a new and "unnatural" evolutionary process set in motion by our human "tampering" in biotechnology-this has sometimesbeen referredto as "participatoryevolution" by writers more optimistic than Atwood about our abilities to guide such a process.'4 Atwood's new world on the other side of technoscientificdisaster, productof culture'sultimate reconstruction of nature,has all-too-quicklyarrived at the same "end of history" as Wells gives us in The Time Machine. Human civilization/humansociety is no more and the new earth is becoming populated by bio-engineered plants and animals that are in the process of wiping out naturalspecies. It will also, perhaps, be repopulatedby Atwood's version of Wells's futureposthumans. Atwood's posthumans are the "Crakers"or "Children of Crake," bio- engineered by Crake, Jimmy's best friend and the novel's very own mad scientist. They are all of them very beautiful, they are vegetarian, they are peaceful and non-territorial; but Crake has "edited out" (374) many "undesirable"human traits, so thatthe Crakerslack self-consciousness,humor, 458 SCIENCEFICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) and irony as well as jealousy, aggression, and territoriality.Like Wells's Time Traveller, Jimmy/Snowman, survivor from the now-destroyed world of technology and commodities, is an anachronismamong them: "I'm your past," he thinks to himself. "I'm your ancestor, come from the land of the dead.... I can't get back. I'm strandedhere" (129). On the other side of historicaldisaster, the Crakerspersonify the end of history with a vengeance. They live in a frozen and unchangingpresent moment, with no memory of a past and no anticipation of a future-"they don't count the days" (434). In any event, there is no longer anythinglike a futureto anticipate. Like Wells's Time Traveller, Jimmy/Snowman looks to the stars for comfort, but, unlike the Traveller, he finds no comfort in the vast wheel of the universe: "he lies on his back ... gazing up at the stars through the gently moving leaves. They seem close, the stars, but they're far away. Their light is millions, billions of years out of date" (133).'5 3. Post-singularity [I]t might be the end of all histories that concern us.-Damien Broderick, "Terrible Angels: Science Fiction and the Singularity"(194) In contrast to Atwood's exercise in slipstream story-telling, Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder has been singled out by the editors of The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction as "an exemplar text" (Mendlesohn 2), representativein their terms of some of the genre's key features. For this reason, I find it particularlyintriguing to see how it displays its signs of future- trouble. Sf s conventional futures-constructions of the extrapolative imagination, whether promising or threatening-are no longer so readily availableeven to writers situatedsquarely within the genre. Egan is Australia's most successful sf writer, a leading figure in the contemporaryrenewal of hard sf-sometimes referredto as "radicalhard sf" to distinguishit from the work of earlier writers such as Isaac Asimov and ArthurC. Clarke.16 When we consider that the action in Egan's novel is set 20,000 years into the future, it seems almost counterintuitiveto consider that it too has a problemwith the future, and yet it does. Like Oryx and Crake, Schild's Ladder tells an apocalyptic story. The plot follows the efforts of Egan's characterseither to halt or to adaptto the "novo- vacuum," a kind of "other" universe that will inexorably erase and replace everything-planets, galaxies, the whole of the known universe-if it is not stopped. Thus the surface plot of Egan's novel is a rather conventional adventure,albeit one with very high stakes, aboutaverting a potentialuniverse- wide apocalypse. What makes this an especially resonantplot, however, is the fact that Egan's far future is always already on the other side of an apocalyptic break with humanhistory. In the sheer scope of its temporal and cosmological ambitions, Schild's Ladder recalls Olaf Stapledon's magisterial Last and First Men (1930), a fictional history of the evolutionary stages of humanitythat culminates in an apocalyptic "end of Man" nearly two billion years from now. As Stapledon's title suggests, his uniquely original "essay in myth creation" tells of the long, STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 459 long future of the human race. In a future history of radical divergence, it constructsa sense of continuitybetween ourselves-"the first Men"-and all the transformed generations that will have come after us. In stark contrast to Stapledon's novel, however, Schild's Ladder forecloses the future to human beings: Egan's universe-vastly expandedfrom our own tiny cornerof space-is populatedby a diverse array of posthumancharacters who inhabita multitude of naturaland artificialhabitats, but humanbeings as humanbeings have been extinct for nearly 19,000 years. In Schild's Ladder, in other words, the future is full of exquisite promise and power-but it is not for us who suffer the limitationsof embodimentand mortality. The future in Schild's Ladder lies on the other side of "the singularity." Eganis one of a handfulof "post-singularity"writers-including, amongothers, CharlesStross, Cory Doctorow, lain M. Banks, and Damien Broderick-whose fiction has responded to this currently influential perspective on the future, especially in the terms popularized by mathematicianand sf writer Vernor Vinge. In effect, the Vingean singularityis a direct response to the increasing pace of technoscientific development, especially in the fields of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. Vinge insists that "we are on the edge of change comparableto the rise of humanlife on Earth"(Address to the VISION- 21 Symposium).He foresees a metamorphosisin the very essence of the human world propelled by the creation of artificial intelligence, however defined: "it seems plausible that in the near historical future, we will cause superhuman intelligencesto exist. Predictionbeyond thatpoint is qualitativelydifferent from futurismsof the past" (Vinge, qtd. in Broderick, "Racing"279). In Broderick's words, the singularity"is a kind of black hole in the future, createdby runaway change and accelerating computer power" ("Racing" 280). The major consequence for those of us living on this side of the singularityis that, since extrapolationhas become radicallyunreliable, the futurehas become radically unknowable.Vinge's technologicalsingularity is a conceptualwall "blockingthe future from us" (qtd. in Broderick, "Racing"278). 17 Schild's Laddr is a wonderfully paradoxical undertaking, a highly imaginativeattempt to constructa far-futureuniverse inhabitedby posthuman subjectswho clearly exist on the other side of some radicaltechno-evolutionary "event"that separatesour history and theirs. Its posthumanintelligences look back on humanbeings as their primitiveancestors. Some of Egan's posthumans are "corporeals"-and some are "acorporeals"who resemble nothing so much as self-conscious Baudrillardianthird-order simulacra. Even those who choose to live as "corporeals" are not bound to a single body, but can download themselvesinto any numberof cloned bodies. Death is a "local"event occurring to a particularcopy of a particularindividual, who always has the option to continue life in other bodies and as other copies. Yann is an "ex-acorporeal" who is reduced to helpless laughter by his first experience of embodied sexuality. As the neutral narrative voice solemnly informs us, "Acorporeals taking on bodies often mappedthem in unusualways." His disgruntedpartner suggests that "Next time you want an authentic embodied experience, just 460 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) simulate it" (123). This is the absolute implosion of sign and referent, the disappearanceof any meaningfuldistinction between original and copy. 18 But "we" are not completely absent from the cosmic scenario after all. In Schild's Ladder the pre-singularityworld reappears in the characters of the "Anachronauts." This sorry remnant of humanity has survived through cryogenic suspension and has been, quite literally, resurrectedinto the future. The Anachronauts limp from planet to planet in their hugely outmoded spaceship,ostensibly to witness the futureunfolding-"to witness whathumanity would become" (129)-although, as it turns out, they are only seeking assurancesthat nothinghas really changed.'9Specifically, they are looking for signs of "the eternal struggle between women and men" (129)-signs, that is, that human "nature"is still humannature. Egan's posthumans,who have long since abandonedany notion of the "natural"human body, take considerable pleasurein weaving outrageousstories to satisfythe Anachronauts'expectations: [The Anachronautshad] been in cold storage for millennia, and now they were finally beginning the stage of their voyage that would justify the enormous sacrifices they'd made. Nobody could bring themselves to break the news that the sole surviving remnantof human sexual dimorphismwas the retention, in some languages,of differentinflections of variousparts of speech associatedwith different proper names-and that expecting these grammatical fossils to be correlatedwith any aspect of a person's anatomy would be like assuming from similar rules for inanimate objects that a cloud possessed a penis and a table containeda womb. (129) In the Anachronauts,we recognize a humanity unable to understandor, indeed, even to perceive, certain kinds of dissimilarities; in their obsessive search for the "truth"of sexual difference, they are absolutelycommitted to the search for Sameness. Perhapsthey are a satiricalnod to Egan's readers,his way of inserting us into the story. Not unlike Atwood's Snowman, they are recognizablehuman beings wrenchedout of time presentand propelled into the time futureof the posthumanuniverse. Appropriately,given the termsof Egan's novel, their radical inabiltyto recognize difference leads to the only deliberate act of physical violence in the novel, in this future that can look back on a "nineteen-thousandyear era in which no sentientbeing had died at the hands of another"(205). The fact that they manage to destroy only themselves is also appropriate.If a utopian future comes into existence on the other side of the singularity, it does so because "we" no longer exist. To paraphraseEpicurus's observationabout death, "WhereI am, the future is not; where the future is, I am not." 4. Science-riction realism Sf is no longerabout the futureas such, because"we have no future"that we can do thoughtexperiments about, only futures,which bleed all over the page, soakingthe present.-JohnClute, "TheCase of the World,Two" (403) PatternRecognition is/is not science fiction in the same way that it is/is not a story aboutthe future. I read Gibson's latest novel as a self-reflexive account, reconstructedas mimetic realism, of a story he has writtenseveral times already STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 461 as science fiction. This story is about how we find ourselves permeatedby futurity as a kind of defining feature of the perpetualtransition that is now. Pattern Recognition is a fictionalized phenomenology-refmed to a kind of urgent essence-of the experience of subjectivity in the volatile and transient now of global technoculture. In a recent article about how research into intelligentmachines necessarily impacts "how we understandwhat it means to be human"(131), N. KatherineHayles-recalling Vinge-notes how "science fiction writers, traditionallythe ones who prognosticatepossible futures, are increasinglysetting their fictions in the present"(149, n.2). Not coincidentally, she quotes a comment by Gibson that addresses this trend: "it was like the windshield kept getting closer and closer. The event horizon was getting closer.... I have this convictionthat the presentis actuallyinexpressibly peculiar now, andthat's the only thingthat's worthdealing with" (Gibson, qtd. in Hayles 149, n.2).20 The "typical"Gibson novel introducesthe possibility of profoundchange into its fictional world-transformation implied in some radical technological event-and then breaks off as if unable to envisage what comes next; the event horizon looms too closely and smothersthe futuristicimagination. At the end of Neuromancer,his earliestnovel, for example, it is the unprecedentedcoming-to- consciousnessof the cyberspatial"deus ex machina," the WintermuteAI. At the end of his latest sf novel, All Tomorrow's Parties (1999), inconceivable transformationsare promised in the interactions of artificial intelligence and nanotechnology. The thoughtfulyet ironic engagement of All Tomorrow'sParties with the tropeof apocalypseis perhapsthe clearest demonstrationof what I have in mind here. In All Tomorrow'sParties, the action culminatesin an appropriatelyfiery narrativeclimax with the near-destructionby fire of the OaklandBay Bridge. This "apocalypse" functions as a quite conventional climax to the novel's typically action-orientedplot. It is also a feint, however, a set-up feeding conventionalexpectations of narrativeresolution. The fiery climax to the action serves to distractboth charactersand readersfrom more radicalchanges taking place elsewhere: Rei Toei, the Idoru, that mysterious virtual superstar introducedby Gibson in his 1996 novel of the same name, frees herself from her dependenceon technologyand enters the world as an autonomoussentient entity; andbreakthroughs in nanotechnologypromise unprecedented changes in the very materialof the physical world. What these events might mean to the continued unfolding of human history remains unknown, however, since Gibson's text reaches its own conclusion at this point. More so than his earlier novels, Pattern Recognition self-consciously considers this inevitable "failure" of futuristic vision. The characters who inhabitits frenetic cityscapes know that it has become impossibleto imagine a future, that it is possible now only to experience oneself as swept along in the ceaseless transformationsof the present. Similar to Oryx and Crake, Pattern Recognitioncontains its own thematicgiveaway, a much-quotedpassage spoken by HubertusBigend, the sinister businessmanwho representsthe new world order of global corporateculture: 462 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
we have no idea, now, of who or what the inhabitantsof our futuremight be. In that sense, we have no future. Not in the sense that our grandparentshad a future, or thought they did. 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 stand on. (57) Bigend concludes that "We have no future because our present is too volatile.... We have only risk management.The spinningof a given moment's scenarios. Patternrecognition" (57). The challenge is now to undertakesome kind of Jamesoniancognitive mappingadequate to the volatility and fluidity of the presentmoment; it has become impossible to project in any meaningfulway into the future from "a perpetualpresent" defined by "perpetualchange" (to recall Jameson's words). In the "final" analysis, however, patternrecognition may be indistinguishable from conspiracy theory. As one of the novel's charactersnotes, while patternrecognition is a particularlyhuman trait, it is "a trap"as well as "a gift" (22). In this world in which so many charactersspend so much of their time searching for clues and developing theories to explain massively complex events, the text also informsus that, like at least some of its characters,we readersmay be suffering from "apophenia"-"the spontaneous perceptionof connectionsand meaningfulnessin unrelatedthings ... an illusion of meaningfulness, faulty pattern recognition" (115). Cayce's mother, an extreme example, is a confirmed devotee of Electronic Voice Phenomena, convinced that she can make out signals from her dead husband in the backgroundnoise of audiotapes.2 Considerhow differentwas the perspectiveon "futuristicfiction" presented by influentialsf historianI. F. Clarke in his resonantlytitled study, The Pattern ofExpectation (1979). For Clarke, the futuristicimagination-that is, the science fiction imagination-aims "to anticipateall the consequences of the perpetual flux by creating patterns of expectation. There is no end to the modelling of future worlds" (303).22 Clarke's pleasure in the expansivenessof the futuristic imagination is very appealing in its Golden Age romanticism. For Clarke, futuristicfiction is an optimistic demonstrationof how infinitely distant is the event horizon of the technological imagination: "It is only by virtue of the infinite liberty of the imagined future that a writer is able to range at will, unconstrainedand godlike in his capacity to create new worlds in his own image" (9). Once posit the singularity, however, and there is "no patternof reasoned expectationto be mapped.... Merely-opacity" (Broderick, "TerribleAngels" 184). I want to suggest that PatternRecognition can be read as a kind of post- singularityfiction of the present-the title of the chapterin which Cayce recalls her experiences in New York on September11, 2001 is "Singularity." Gibson's singularity may be more symbolic, finally, than material; nevertheless, it functions in much the same way as the technological singularity, as an apocalypticevent thatcuts us off from the historicalpast, leaving us strandedin difference. And this is where Gibson's treatment of futurity in Pattern STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 463
Recognitioncontinues the complex pattern of his writing since Neuromancer: that is, even as there is too little "now" to standon and "we have no future," at the same time we fmd ourselves on the other side of an event that has changed everything. From this perspective, time present-postmodern time-is supplemental time, time-after-the-end-of-time; the cautionary "post" in "postmodern"represents both our hesitation in letting go of the past and our anxiety that we are, in fact, on the other side of irrevocablechange. Pattern Recognitionis Gibson's seventh novel, and the first to be set, not in the near-future,but in the very recent past.23In a 2003 interview, Gibson noted its debt to science fiction: There'ssomething so obviousthat it seemsalmost silly to pointit out ... but we'reliving in a worldthat resembles nothing so muchas dozensand dozens of overlapping,really lurid science-fictionscenarios. Any attemptat literary naturalismin 2003 will bringthe author into direct contact with material that 20 yearsago wouldhave been barely publishable as sciencefiction.... (Poole) PatternRecognition is about Cayce Pollard, a "cool hunter," "a dowser in the world of global marketing" (2).24 Both Baudrillardand Jameson would recognize the particularskills with which she negotiatesa well-paidcareer at the edges of corporate culture. Cayce's talent is the ability to spot promising marketingtrends, potentialconsumer patterns, and she is currentlyemployed by the Blue Ant corporation.In a passage that suggests somethingof the wry and rich textureof Gibson's prose, Blue Ant is describedas "relativelytiny in terms of permanentstaff, globallydistributed, more post-geographic than multinational ... a high-speed, low-drag life-form in an advertising ecology of lumbering herbivores"(6). Its business practices accord with the understandingthat "Far more creativity, today, goes into the marketing of products than into the productsthemselves" (67). Like most of Gibson's plots, the complicatedaction in PatternRecognition unwinds in thriller-mode:Cayce battles various permiciousacts of corporate espionage at the same time that she is hot on the trail of the creator of the mysterious "footage," a small collection of film fragments from an apparent work-in-progressthat has become fetishized by an entire (globally distributed) communuityof devotees. The actiontakes place in the year following the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. Everythingplays out against the backdrop of this event described as "an experience outside of culture" (137), which accounts for the pervasive tone of low-level post- apocalypticismthat is so much a part of the novel's texture. Burdenedby the sense that 9/11 is a kind of culmination,a definitive break with the past, Cayce "feels like crying, thoughfor no particularreason. Justthis invasive weirdness that seems increasinglya part of her world, and she doesn't know why" (226).25 Gibson develops the sense of "invasive weirdness" in Cayce's world in part throughthe constantmovement of his charactersand the increasingly fragmentedstructure of his narrative. During the course of the action, Cayce, an Americanwhom we never see in the United States, travels to London, to Tokyo, back to London, to Moscow, and to Paris. Everyone is on 464 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) the move in this novel, andjetlag is a way of life. The edginess and restlessness and sleeplessnessof the narrativeamount to a kind of formal representationof the present as a condition of incessant and spatializedmovement-fittingly, all the action is narratedin the present tense; only the locations change under the auspices of an increasingly accessible global geography. While everything is happening now, everything is also always happening elsewhere.This is the presentwithin which is folded the profoundalterity of the future, the presentnot at one with itself, invadedby the weirdness of the future. Gibson's brilliance is his ability to dramatize, through Cayce's acute sensitivity to this world, the psychic experience of the future-presentin a way that thoroughlyestranges it: Looking up now into the manicallyanimated forest of signs [in Tokyo], she sees the Coca-Cola logo pulsing on a huge screen, high up on a building, followed by the slogan "NO REASON!" This vanishes, replaced by a news clip, dark- skinned men in bright robes. She blinks, imagining the towers burning there, framed amid image-flash and whirl. (125) As in Gibson's fiction in general, notably includingNeuromancer, it is the texturerather than the plot of this particularfictional world thatis so fascinating. This is a world of hi-technologiesand hi-tech commodities, and all the science- fictional elements in it-the hi-speed travel and instantglobal communications, the esoteric and labyrinthinepractices of multinationalbusinesses, the virtual computer-mediated relationships through which much of the action develops-are increasinglyfamiliar featuresof the contemporarylandscape. In Jameson's words, Gibson's novel "carefully gropes its way" through "the object-worldof late commodification"("Fear and Loathing"384), displaying it for the reader throughCayce Pollard's expert gaze. At the heart of Cayce's character,however, is a delicately fastidiousrefusal of the inauthenticityof commodity culture, with which, of course, she is only too familiar. A sartorialminimalist, she confines herself to such "genuine"items as Fruit-of-the-Loomt-shirts and the "authentic"Japanese simulation of her Buzz Rickson bomberjacket: "She is a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerityperiodically threatensto spawn its own cult" (8). And this is by no means unrelatedto Cayce's fascinationwith the footage, which suggests to her a dreamworldunmarked by period or politics. Typical frames of the footage show a young couple against a variety of unidentifiablebut resonant backgrounds;these brief fragmentsmay or may not be the work of a single artist and they may or may not be going to amountto a single and sustainednarrative: "He might be a sailor, stepping onto a submarinein 1914, or a jazz musician entering a club in 1957. There is a lack of evidence, an absence of stylistic clues, that Cayce understandsto be utterly masterful"(23). Cayce is embeddedin the historicaltransitoriness of the now, a momentthat is virtuallydefined by the fact thatit cannotremain itself. In contrast,the couple in the footage exist in some other plane unmarkedby history and are situatedby the text as the signifier of both authenticityand immediacy.Now has no present- ness because it is so volatile; the images of the footage, because they are unmooredfrom the specificities of history and geography, representfor Cayce STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 465 and other "footage-heads"a kind of stillness pervadedby presence. Jamesonis absolutely right when he notes that, for Cayce, the "utterlack of style" of the footage "is an ontological relief.... The footage is an epoch of rest, an escape from the noisy commodities themselves" ("Fear and Loathing"391). It is not surprising that the "happy ending" in the novel consists of Cayce's-at last-falling peacefully asleep. Gibson's fiction has always evidenced a complex apocalyptic attitude. In spite of cyberpunk's overt repudiation of apocalyptic tropes-"things are things"-there is a sense in which most of the near-futuresso lovingly delineated by Gibson are in thrall to the impossibilityof thinking beyond them: thus the abrupt and open-ended (non)resolutionsof novels from Neuromancerto All Tomorrow'sParties, the formertext unableto speakthe "truename" that might cause everything to change, the latter text affording readers a final glimpse of a world in which breakthroughsin nanotechnology promise ... what it is impossible for us on this side of the future to imagine.26Gibson's move from near-futuresf in novels from Neuromancerto All Tomorrow'sParties to the present-tense"sf realism" of PatternRecognition seems inevitable-at least in the hindsightof patternrecognition. The novel freezes in the face of the sheer impossiblityof extrapolation,the sheer opacityof the future. "Theevent horizon was getting closer"-so close, in fact, that extrapolationfalls back upon itself and Gibson's sf continues its work in/on the volatility of now. Over two decades ago, in his 1981 short story, "The Gernsback Continuum,"Gibson satirically depicted how easily "fully imagined cultural futures"-in this case the jet-propelledfuture of the 1930s-become outdated.27 Here at the beginningof the new millennium,Gibson's fiction seems more than ever to supportJameson's claim that the role of science fiction is "to dramatize our incapacity to imagine the future" ("Progress Versus Utopia" 153): the "temporalstructure" of sf is "notto give us 'images' of the future ... but rather to defamiliarizeand restructureour experienceof our own present, and to do so in specific ways distinct from all other forms of defamiliarization"(151, emphasis in original). The rate of technological transformationcontinues to increaseincrementally and the fact of changebecomes the definingfeature of the present. Science fiction's foundingassumption-that the futurewill be different from the present-has become outdated.Today the present is differentfrom the present. 5. Risk-management sf [Nlostalgia for the future, at once deeply sincere and deeply ironic, is an essential part of our post-millennialhangover.-Mark Dery, "Memoriesof the Future:Excavating the Jet Age at the TWA Terminal" (295) Of these three novels, Atwood's is most concernedto encouragesomething like conventionalpolitical action on the partof its readers.One of her epigraphs, a passage from JonathanSwift's Gulliver's Travels, reads in part: "myprinciple design was to inform you, and not to amuse you" (n.p.), remindingreaders of the long tradition of politically-engagedsatire with which Atwood aligns her own text. Egan's novel, in contrast, is absolutelyup to the minute, an extremely 466 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006) clever and very seductive story aboutpost-Platonic subjects who have achieved more or less complete control over material reality. This is an expression of utopiantechno-transcendence appropriate to the science-fictionalizedpresent, a post-singularityvision thatrenders the very idea of the political irrelevant.And, in contrast again, Gibson's Pattern Recognition is an exercise in Jamesonian cognitive mapping, an imaginative description of how "we" those of us embedded, body and psyche, in this moment of "perpetualpresent" and "perpetualchange"-might manageto negotiatethe moment, while maintaining somethinglike a critical distance from it. Have things really changed in our relationshipto the future?Yes, at least to the extent that thinkingmakes it so. In his recent culturalhistory of the genre, Roger Luckhurstdescribes sf as "speculation on the diverse results of the conjuncture of technology and subjectivity" (222), and Pattern Recognition performsa powerful dramatizationof some of the effects of this conjuncturein the new millennium. At the same time it is worth keeping in mind that sf has always been troubledin its relationswith the future-the impossibilityof keeping ahead of the technoscientificcurve has always markedthe genre. As if he were preparingto write "The GernsbackContinuum" in 1938, H.G. Wells astutely noted, early in the last century, the particularfutility of sf's project as story: Maybe no literatureis perfect and enduring,but there is somethingspecially and incurably topical about all these prophetic books; the more you go ahead, the more you seem to get entangled with the burningquestions of your own time. And all the while events are overtakingyou. (246) NOTES I am grateful to have had opportunities to present earlier versions of this essay at the Commonwealthof Science Fiction Conference held in Liverpool in August 2004, the Radical Philosophy Conference held in London in March 2005, and the Academic Conference on CanadianScience Fiction and Fantasyheld in Toronto in June 2005. 1. Best to deal with the question of genre right away. Some readers, includingJohn Clute ("The Case of the World, Two") and Fredric Jameson ("Fear and Loathing in Globalization") see in Pattern Recognition a kind of sf writing appropriateto our particularhistorical moment. Jameson, for example, opens his comments on the novel by asking, rhetorically, "Has the authorof Neuromancerreally 'changedhis style'? Has he even stopped writing Science Fiction, as some old-fashioned critics have put it, thinkingthereby to pay him a compliment?"Jameson suggests, rather,that Gibson is still deploying "the representational apparatus of Science Fiction, here refined and transistorized in all kinds of new and productive ways" (384). On the other hand, GrahamSleight flatly states that "PatternRecognition is not an sf novel. There's no way that its content can locate it in the canon of the fantastic.... It's simply a contemporary William Gibson novel in the same way that ConcreteIsland was a contemporaryJ.G. Ballard novel" (8). Both of these perspectivesare perfectly reasonable. 2. Best also to at least raise the question of generational crisis. In 2001 Judith Berman caused a stir in some corners of the sf community when she wrote critically about the influence of sf's aging baby-boomers.Examining a sample of stories recently published in Asimov's, she found them "increasinglygripped by the iron hand of the past." For Berman, many recent sf stories "are full of nostalgia, regret, fear of aging and death, fear of the future in general, and the experience of change as disorienting and STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 467 bad.... [Tlhey are presentedwithin a frame of nostalgia for the Golden Age past of sf" (6). Berman's arguments are not irrelevant to this present discussion, but I hope to demonstratethat there is more to the novels that interestme here than simply the middle- aged exhaustionof their authors, none of whom are much prone to nostalgia, especially of the Golden Age variety. Interested readers will find Berman's article posted at < http://www.judithberman.net/sffuture.html> . 3. Csicsery-Ronay's "The SF of Theory" develops a lucid accountof this argument (see, especially, 387-89). 4. James Gunn's ongoing commentaries about sf are a good example of this perspective on the genre. In 1975, for instance, he wrote that "Science fiction readers are not susceptible to future shock; they were part of the space generationlong before anyone else. They don't fear change; they welcome it. They are impatientfor the future to arrive"(37). It is safe to assume, however, thatGunn had meaningful change in mind, ratherthan the kind of incessantprocess-without-progress that is my focus here. 5. SFSs recent special issue on "Technocultureand Science Fiction" (March2006) introducesa range of alternativecommentaries on culture and technology by theorists such as BrunoLatour, Michel Serres, and ManuelCastells. Most relevantto this present discussion is Castells's concept of "timelesstime," describedby RobertHarding as "the temporalorder of the InformationAge" (25). Hardingbriefly notes the affinitiesbetween Castells's theoretical work on contemporaryspatial and temporal re-orderingand the culturalanalysis developed in Gibson's latest fiction (26). (It is interestingto consider, by the way, the chronologicalreversal implied in the title of Jameson's recent collection of essays on science fiction and utopianfiction, Archeologies of the Future). 6. A comment by FrankKermode in his very important1966 study of apocalyptic fiction, TheSense of an Ending, seems positively prescientwhen read beside Baudrillard and Jameson: Ourown epochis the epochof nothingpositive, only of transition.Since we move from transitionto transition,we maysuppose that we existin no intelligiblerelation to thepast, and no predictablerelation to the future.Already those who speak of a cleanbreak with the past, anda new startfor the future,seem a littleold-fashioned. (101-102) 7. Roger Luckhurstreminds us that Baudrillard'sresponse to announcementsabout "the end of history" was to announce, with ironic logic, "the end of the End": "thereis no end any longer ... there will be no end to anything, and all these things will continue to unfold slowly, tediously, recurrently"(qtd. Luckhurst231). Whether"the Year 2000" has already happenedor whether it will never arrive, it makes little difference in view of the collapse of transformativepossibilities. Things are things. 8. "FuturisticFlu" provides incisive commentarieson some of the importantcritical models that have addressedthis particularailment, includingthose by Jamesonand J.G. Ballard. 9. Also of interest in this context is Ryman's short story, "BirthDays" (2003), one of whose charactersis a "futuretherapist": "they sent her in to help people change and keep up and not be frightenedof science" (10). 10. "Protagonist," however, is hardly suitable to describe Atwood's eternally adolescent, ethically challenged, and quite unsympatheticcentral character. 11. It can be arguedthat Jimmy/Snowman is the only "real"character in this almost- allegorical novel; even more so than most of the other characters who appear and disappearin his memory, Crake and Oryx remain forever opaque to him and, whether or not as a direct consequenceof this, to readersas well. 468 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
12. There are parallelshere to Atwood's earlier TheHandmaid's Tale (1984), which also warns of the costs of forgetting one's political history, in this case, the political struggles of second-wave feminists. 13. In reading echoes of Wells and Orwell in Oryxand Crake, I am agreeing with Atwood's own descriptionsof her influences. Since its publication, she has missed few opportunitiesto distance her writing from genre sf, preferringto identify her work with the tradition of British scientific romance. See, for example, her article in the 2004 PMLA special issue on science fiction. These echoes of Wells and Orwell-not to mentiona certainresemblance to mid-twentieth-centuryapocalyptic fictions such as Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957)-may be responsiblein part for Clute's dismissive review, in particularhis acerbic observationthat it "maybe the kind of SF contemporarywriters stoppedcommitting to print after 1970 or so" ("Croaked").In contrast, Gary K. Wolfe concludes that "Atwood's language is often razor-sharp, her powers of observation relentless, her narrativeconsistently engaging" (17). 14. See, for example, the discussion in Chris Hables Gray's Cyborg Citizen(9-12). Gray attributesthe phrase "participatoryevolution"-referring to the artificial process through which human beings are currently contributingto our own bio-genetic and technologicaltransformations-to ManfredClynes and NathanKline, the scientists who in 1960 coined the term "cyborg." For Gray, this process of "participatoryevolution" is "a fundamentallynew developmentin the history of the human" (3). 15. Snowman's discovery of three more humansurvivors just as the novel is ending rather dimly recalls the structural elegance of the "Historical Notes" appended by Atwood to The Handmaid's Tale; perhaps, like the "Notes," Snowman's discovery is meant to reframehis story, to change radically our understandingof his situationas we thought we knew it. If Atwood means to suggest a more open-ended possibility for human action than previously seemed available, however, the suggestion is rathertoo little too late. It may be, of course, that Atwood is simply teasing our readerlydesire to find out what happens next-even after the end of the world, even after the end of the story. 16. "Radical hard sf' is a good example of how sf in the 1990s returnedto and reworkedearlier subgenres, also producingthe New Space Opera and the New Weird. Luckhurstsees this, in part, as an expression of fin-de-siecle apocalypticism:"Perhaps, inevitably, in the shadow of the millennium, 1990s SF revived scenes from the genre's history of apocalypticism from the 1890s on" (221). One of my aims in this present discussion is to suggest some of the ways in which-and some of the reasons for which-post-millennial sf continues to deploy the tropes of apocalypse. 17. In his original article on the singularity, Vinge argues for its influenceon recent sf s markedpropensity for near-futurescenarios: "Throughthe '60s and '70s and '80s, recognitionof the cataclysmspread.... Perhapsit was the science-fictionwriters who felt the first concrete impact. After all, the 'hard' science-fiction writers are the ones who try to write specific stories about all that technology may do for us. More and more, these writers felt an opaquewall across the future"(Vinge). The impactof the singularity is by no means confined to fiction; see, for instance, the website of the Singularity Institutefor Artificial Intelligence at < http://www.singinst.org/> . 18. Egan is probably the most successful writer ever to tackle the creation of posthuman virtual subjects in his fiction; his recent novels-from Permutation City (1994) throughDiaspora (1997) to Schild's Ladder-constitute a brilliantlyimaginative STORIESABOUT THE FUTURE 469 trajectoryfrom relatively simple to increasinglycomplex versions of virtualsubjects and their environments.See the discussions about his fiction by Daniels and Farnell. 19. This recalls StanislawLem's Solaris (1961), that hugely ironic novel about (the impossibilityof) contact. As one of the charactersinsists in a much-quotedpassage, the entire enterpriseof seeking the alien/Otheris wrong-headed:"We think of ourselves as the Knightsof the Holy Contact. This is anotherlie. We are only seeking Man. We have no need of other worlds. We need mirrors"(81). If Lem's novel tells of the tragic failure to know the truly Other from the point of view of a chastenedhigh modernism,then we might consider that Egan's novel tells the same story of modernism'sfailure, but from the more satirical perspective of a postmodernposthumanism. Tragedy is rewrittenas irony. 20. A selection of recent sf novels about "the windshield ... getting closer and closer" might include Octavia Butler's near-futureapocalyptic novel, Parable of the Sower(1992); JackWomack's novel of a hyper-violentand economically-devastated New York, RandomActs of Senseless Violence (1992); even more so, Womack's Elvissey (1993), in which the yearningfor salvationis balancedby a desire for the end of futurity and the death of the subject; Bruce Sterling's finger-on-the-pulsepolitical satire, Distraction (1998); Robert Charles Wilson's Chronoliths(2001), about the mysterious appearanceof monumentsfrom the futurewhose messages inevitablybegin to shapehow people choose to live their history in the present;and Kim StanleyRobinson's very-near- future novels about ecological collapse, Forty Signs of Rain (2004) and Fifty Degrees Below (2005). Pattern Recognition is dedicatedto Jack Womack. 21. But then again, Cayce's mother may not be wrong: the text cagily refuses to discount this possibility, since Cayce's father appearsto speak to her truthfullyin the several dreams Cayce has of him during the course of the novel. There is an immense appreciationfor absurdityin PatternRecognition, as there is also in Oryxand Crakeand Schild's Ladder. This is not a coincidence. 22. This passage is quoted by Broderickas the epigraphto his essay on sf and the singularity,"Terrible Angels." In Baudrillard'sterms, Clarke's notionof science fiction belongs to the "productionera" of second-order simulation, an era of progressive expansion before the whole system begins to implode. 23. As many readers will know, Gibson also collaboratedon an alternate-history novel with Bruce Sterling. The Difference Engine (1991) is a good example of "steampunk," set as it is in an alternate version of England's nineteenth-century IndustrialRevolution. 24. Cayce sharesthe spelling of her name with the famouspsychic EdgarCayce, but it is pronounced"Case," like the computer-hackerprotagonist of Neuromancer.Gibson has stated for the record that this is nothing more than coincidence, but the resolute reader of/for patterns may be forgiven a certain skepticism. At the least, the repetition-from an authorwell knownfor the proliferationof (brand)namesin his textual worlds-is resonant. 25. Gibson's constructionof 9/11 as an "experienceoutside of culture"recalls one of the meaningsof apocalypseas outlinedby James Berger: catastrophesthat resemble the imagined final ending, that can be interpretedas ... anend of something,a wayof life or thinking....They function as definitivehistorical divides, as ruptures,pivots, fulcrumsseparating what came beforefrom whatcame after.... Previoushistorical narratives are shattered;new understandingsof the world are generated.(5) 470 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 33 (2006)
26. See my "Apocalypse Coma" for a more detailed discussion of (post)apocalypticismin Neuromancer. 27. Gibson's own take on this future-presentis blocked by the singularevent that is 9/11: little in the novel suggests the apparentlyperpetual "war on terror"into which the world has since been precipitated. WORKS CITED Atwood, Margaret. "The Handmaid's Tale and Oryx and Crake in Context." PMLA 119.3 (May 2004): 513-17. . Oryx and Crake. 2003. Toronto: Seal, 2004. Baudrillard,Jean. "Simulacraand Science Fiction." 1981. Trans. ArthurB. Evans. SFS 18.3 (November 1991): 309-13. "The Year 2000 Has Already Happened." 1985. Body Invaders: Panic Se-xin America. Ed. Arthur Kroker and Marilouise Kroker. Montreal: New World Perspectives, 1987. 35-44. Benison, Jonathan. "Science Fiction and Postmodernity."Postmodernism and the Re- reading of Modernity. Ed. Francis Barker, Peter Hulme, and Margaret Iversen. Manchester:Manchester UP, 1992. 138-58. Berger, James. After the End: Representationsof Post-Apocalypse. Minneapolis:U of Minnesota P, 1999. Berman,Judith. "Science Fiction Withoutthe Future." TheNew YorkReview of Science Fiction 13.9 (May 2001): 1, 6-8. Best, Steven, and Douglas Kellner. The PostmodernAdventure: Science, Technology, and CulturalStudies at the ThirdMillennium. New York: Guildford, 2001. Broderick, Damien. "Racing Toward the Spike." Prefiguring Technoculture:An Intellectual History. Ed. Darren Tofts, AnnamarieJonson, and Alessio Cavallaro. Cambridge,MA: MIT, 2002. 278-91. . "TerribleAngels: Science Fiction and the Singularity."Histories of the Future: Studiesin Fact, Fantasyand Science Fiction. Ed. Alan Sandisonand RobertDingley. New York: Palgrave, 2000. 184-96. Clarke, I.F. The Pattern of Expectation, 1644-2001. London: JonathanCape, 1979. Clute, John. "The Case of the World, Two" (review of PatternRecognition by William Gibson). Scores: Reviews 1993-2003. Harold Wood, UK: Beccon, 2003. 403-406. . "Croaked"(review of Oryx and Crake by MargaretAtwood). Science Fiction Weekly 9.28 (14 July 2003). 20 August 2006
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ABSTRACT It is not news that "science fiction" has come to refer in the past few decades not only to a popular narrativegenre, but also to a kind of popularcultural discourse, a way of thinking about a sociopolitical present defined by radical and incessant technological transformation.William Gibson's PatternRecognition (2003) is both a realist novel set in 2002 and an sf novel set in the endless endtimes of the future-present.It brilliantly conveys the phenomenologyof a present infused with futurity, no longer like itself, no longer like the present. In this essay I discuss PatternRecognition in the context of two other contemporarynovels, MargaretAtwood's Oryxand Crake(2003) and Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder (2001), that also address the complexities of contemporary technoculture'sinteractions with the future. Oryxand Crake, an apocalypticsatire by an authormost often associatedwith the realist novel, is a telling demonstrationof how non- genre writers turn to science fiction as a way to characterizethe lived experience of technoculture.Schild's Ladder, situatedat the centre of genre, capturesthe fascination with which some contemporaryhard sf views the potentialof technoscienceto transform humanhistory in radically unforeseeableways. In his latest novel, meanwhile, Gibson has tradedin the tropes of sf for the strategiesof mimetic realismto dramatizethe future as a kind of impossibility. I readthese three novels as a series of significantlyinterrelated stories about the increasinglycomplex natureof the future in technoculture.