"Science Fiction and the Sublime"

Darren J Jorgensen

B.A. (Hons.)

This thesis has been awarded the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy with Distinction

at the University of Western Australia.

English, Communication and Cultural Studies

2005.

Acknowledgements

With immense gratitude to all the staff in the Department of English, Communication and Cultural

Studies at the University of Western Australia, whose support during the writing of this thesis was

unfailingly warm and constant. Especially to my supervisor, Van Ikin, as well as to Sue Lewis, James

Toher, Judith Johnson and my fellow postgraduates, Jo Gray, Lorraine Sim, Duc Dao and Tama

Leaver. For crucial intellectual feedback, thanks to Ian McLean in the Department of Architecture and

Fine Arts, who co-supervised my final two years. For an updated version of the arguments herein, please

see the published version, which I hope should be out sometime in 2007.

Abstract

This thesis makes three assertions. The first is that the sublime is a principal pleasure of science fiction. The second is that the conditions for the emergence of both the sublime and science fiction lie in the modern developments of technology, mass economy and imperialism. Maritime and optical technologies; the imagination that accompanied imperialism; and the influence of capitalism furnished the cognition by which the pleasures of both science fiction and the sublime came into being. The third claim is that a historical conception of the sublime, one that changes according to the different circumstances in which it appears, offers privileged insights onto changes within the genre.

To make such extensive claims it has been necessary to make a cognitive map of the development of both the sublime and science fiction. This map reaches from the

Ancient Romans, Lucian and Longinus; to Thomas More, Jonathan Swift, Johannes

Kepler, Voltaire and Immanuel Kant; to Edgar Allan Poe, Mary Shelley, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells. This thesis then examines how the features of these fictions mutate in the twentieth-century fiction of A.E. van Vogt, Clifford Simak, Philip K. Dick,

Arthur C. Clarke, Ivan Yefremov, the Strugatsky brothers, J.G. Ballard, Pamela

Zoline, Ursula Le Guin, Vonda McIntyre, Octavia Butler, Kim Stanley Robinson,

Stephen Baxter, William Gibson, Ken MacLeod and Stanislaw Lem. These writers are considered in their own specific periods, and in their national contexts, as they create pleasures that are contingent upon changes to their own worlds. In representing these changes, their fictions defamiliarise the anxieties of the reading subject. They

4 transcend the contradictions of their times with a sublime that betrays its own conditions of transcendence. The deployment of the sublime in these texts offers a moment of critical possibility, as it betrays the fantasies born of a subject's relation to their world.

Specifically, the hero is a psychic avatar for the reader in these narrative situations.

The hero of science fiction narrative passes through the disorientation and supersensible moments of the Kantian sublime, and thus represents the experience of the new and cognitively excessive that distinguishes the subject's relation to the modern world. The overcoming of this disorientation, the realisation of the cognitive powers of the supersensible, represents this subject's fantasy life. Through the extraordinary powers of the mind of the hero, the reader enters into the pleasures of thinking on the scale of the world or universe, and thus transcends the contradiction of the mind with this world or universe. This universal imagination is coextensive with the ideologies of modernity as they manifest in different periods of science fiction production. Yet the pleasures of the sublime also exceed these ideologies, and exists in a dialectical tension with them.

These narrative and aesthetic structures are historically constituted, in so far as they mediate the relation of a text to its context, and trace the circularity of relations between the science fictional imagination and its times. "Science Fiction and the

Sublime" uses the methodologies of dialectical Marxism, with the concrete categories of space, technology and economic relations to mediate the relation between a historically bound subject to the world. From the field of science fiction studies, I

5 engage the work of Peter Fitting, Carl Freedman, Fredric Jameson, Louis Marin and

Darko Suvin. For their insights upon the sublime, this thesis also draws upon the insights of Longinus, Immanuel Kant, Thomas Weiskel and Alenka Zupancic.

Contents

Introduction 9 to 31

Chapter One 33 to 110

The Ship and the Telescope: Cognitive Preconditions for SF

Chapter Two 111-193

The Economy and the Spaceship: from Pulp Magazines to the Moon Landing

Chapter Three 195-239

Other Ways to Space: The Russians, the New Wave and the New Utopian Novel

Chapter Four 241-303

The Sublime and Recent SF

Conclusion 305-308

Works Cited 309 to 334

Introduction

"Space awaits its poets."

Second Cosmonaut Herman Titov (114)

This thesis makes a historical reading of science fiction (sf) alongside that constellation of ideas known as the sublime. It situates both of these synchronic classifications within the diachronic developments of technology, imperialism and capitalism. With Roland

Barthes, it recognizes that "the more a system is specifically defined in its forms, the more amenable it is to historical criticism" (120). It also maintains that the synchronic and diachronic are not so easily separated, that after Karl Marx their dialectic is one that reproduces "the concrete in the course of thought" (qtd in Mandel, Late 14). After all, an understanding of history can hardly take place without concepts by which this history is understood. The terms used in this thesis are attenuated by the conditions under which they first appeared, and their subsequent changes in historical time.

To begin marking the territory that this project will cover, I want to open it to a text that is not usually considered to be sf or sublime. Thomas More's Utopia (1516) is well known for coining the term "utopia", and for inaugurating a lineage of utopian fiction. It is useful to think about this text as a precedent for sf for two reasons: firstly, because it figures those historical processes of technology, imperialism and capitalism that are of such significance for the development of the genre; second, as an early example of the imagination of another land or world. The difference of this new world is accomplished by rendering a cognitive operation upon the world that More lived in. Abolishing private

10 property and unemployment with a participatory community and the right to work,

More's Island of Utopia resolves a set of contradictions established by the sixteenth- century "European world-economy" (Wallerstein).

Louis Marin describes Utopia's "ideological critique of the dominant ideology" (xiv), while Fredric Jameson thinks of it as a "system to end all systems" ("Politics " 43). This synchronic quality is complemented by its diachronic context. While the second book of

Utopia, containing the description of the island and its organization, responds to the systemic structure of the capitalist economy, the first book addresses the specific ills that this system had produced in More's own time. For capitalism is historically distinguished by its expansion, as it extends private property and the labour market to as many parts of the world as it can reach. This was taking place in More's England. When the process of territorialisation that he witnessed reached beyond Europe to globalise the division of labour, it became known as imperialism. While Utopia is critical of this expansion, its

Island of Utopia lies remote from known lands. Its discovery partakes of the territorial imagination of imperialism. These two aspects of More's Utopia--its critique of capitalism and its mobilisation of imperial expansion--are joined by a third, technological aspect.

Allowing a movement over the globe in More's time were improvements to the ship and new navigational techniques. These new technologies join capitalism and imperialism as constitutive of the historical appearance of this novel, as the movement of the ship over the ocean enabled the expansion of capitalism and, in More's case, its criticisms, into the non-European world.

The triad imperialism, technology and capitalism is also the scaffolding upon which sf built its imagination. The difference between Utopia and sf is that the latter does not

11 necessarily privilege capitalism in its refraction of the "dominant ideology" or "systems" of the world-system. The first book of Utopia explicitly addressed capitalism, while sf may reflect any one of a myriad of the historical faces of modernity. The most enduring definition of sf, Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), unifies the genre by describing it as a response to these multiple alienations. While Suvin's work acknowledges capitalism as a determining cause of these changes, it is not necessarily foregrounded by sf. From the negative experience of these changes, sf creates other worlds as a positive strategy for thinking them through. From alienation sf turns to estrangement, from changes in the actual world to an alternative world that is itself changed. As such, sf's "main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment" (8). To estrangement Suvin adds cognition as a second "necessary and sufficient" condition for sf (7). This is the "scientifically methodological" reasoning that has come to discursive power alongside capitalism (66).

The relationship between this reasoning and capitalism is mediated by the "novum", an invention or innovation that is "validated by cognitive logic" (63). For Suvin the novum, mostly technological but sometimes an idea or sociological change, structures the sf narrative by producing its alternative world. The function of cognition, as he makes clear in a later essay, is to distinguish between real novums and the plethora of "fake novums" produced by capitalism, a world that is truly different from one that only appears to be so ("Novum" 38). Advertising and the invention of new desires clouds cognition with superficial changes to the world, and cognition must think reflectively about their validity. In this way, cognition mediates the subject's relation to their surroundings.

The sublime is the second and synchronic object of study at stake here, that nonetheless lies within the same diachronic triad of imperialism, technology and capitalism. More's

Utopia is again useful in thinking through the sublime and its relationship with sf. Marin's

Utopics (1984) is a guiding text here, in that it thinks about the pleasure of Utopia, and in so doing models a way of thinking about the pleasures of sf. He calls that which prefigures and precedes the creation of worlds the neutral (xix). While the resolutions of utopian fiction are often thought of as picturesque, pastoral or simply beautiful, Marin turns instead to what it is that these closures write over. The neutral contains an infinitude of negation and possibility for the creation and destruction of worlds. Upon this openness is written the closure of any single world, and the ideology of one social order or another. The neutral is historical because it opens history to the process of its own creation. It is sublime because it brings with it the pleasure that accompanies the thinking of infinitude. For Immanuel Kant the elation of this thinking comes about because it transcends the pain of finitude (Critique 106). In this case, the pain lies in the contradictory finitudes that are brought about by the closure of worlds. Such an elevation also takes place in sf, whose novums create new worlds.

This utopian sublime is the first of several sublime pleasures to be found in the genre.

These are best thought of, and thus delimited by, the historical circumstances from which they came. The text that introduced the sublime to the contemporary world was

Longinus' On the Sublime (c100), that was retranslated in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Its pleasures are articulated in examples of ocean travel. Longinus' citations are taken from the voyages of Homer and accounts of the marine wars of the Greek city- states. This is a technologically based sublime, one that relies upon the ship and its navigation, and also one that prefigures an age in which this technology enables an

13 oceanic imperialism. Longinus's references to Ancient Greece and the ocean relieved the tension of living amidst the decline of late Rome. As orators and writers imitated the cultural forms of the past they relieved the contradiction of the ideals of Rome with its decline.

The next major figure of importance for the thinking of this thesis is Immanuel Kant, whose eighteenth-century version of the sublime develops this juncture of the technological and imperial. Kant's ideas have been extensively studied by the synchronic methodologies of philosophy (Kuhn; Walker), but his conception of the sublime takes diachronic and concrete shape when he describes the cognitive effects of looking through the lens of a telescope and microscope (Critique 97). While Longinus' sublime transcends cultural contradiction with ocean voyages, Kant's sublime takes place after an alienation from nature. As the totality of nature is estranged, it is also the figure by which older totalities are transcended. As the telescope opens a new universe to the eye, and undermines the previous one, the sublime mediates their differences with universalising ideas. The sublime is pleasurable for both Longinus and Kant because it transcends the pain of thinking about the contradictions between worlds or universes. As the romantic scholar Thomas Weiskel notes, the original interest in the sublime in the West was due to the dilemmas of the modern (18). This is not to point to some pre-historic time when contradictions were not in play, but to the specific dilemmas of a modern cognition.

In 1981, the first space shuttle flight orbited the Earth. One of my earliest childhood memories is of looking into the night sky for the shooting star that would mark its passing. Gazing above, I experienced an elevation that Kant would call sublime.

Transcending my ordinary life, this elation felt like a mental commune with the greater

14 universe. The feeling was not one removed from history. I was looking up that night because pictures of the shuttle launch had made their way from Cape Kennedy to my mother's television screen at the edge of the Australian urban sprawl. The boredom of suburbia, and the contradictions between it and the shuttle, had driven my eyes to the television and in turn to the sky. The dissatisfactions of a child's everyday life had produced an interest in those lifting beyond it.

The sublime content of sf also offers this escape, while its estrangements critique the very reasons for it. Sf indulges in transcendence, while maturing most rapidly when it accounts for the dissatisfactions that give rise to this transcendence. When H.G. Wells wrote The War of the Worlds (1898), anticipating the sf genre, it was with the satisfaction of being able to "completely wreck and destroy Woking" (qtd in Bergonzi 125; see

Chapter One). When Philip K. Dick wrote Martian Time-Slip (1964), it was with a satirical view of the prospects for the business of "Mars real estate" (4; see Chapter Two).

Similarly, the space station in Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) betrays a boredom with its idea (see Chapter Two). Sf invites the mind to share in sublime pleasures while maintaining a generically determined estrangement from them.

The sf considered in this thesis was largely produced within nations in what Immanuel

Wallerstein calls the core of the "world-economy" (348). It complies with Istvan

Csicsery-Ronay, Jr.'s idea that "(t)he dominant sf nations are precisely those that attempted to expand beyond their borders" (231). While Csicsery-Ronay attributes this expansion to a model of Empire, Wallerstein distinguishes a variety of expansive modes in modern capitalism. While colonial England gave birth to the sf precursors Mary

Shelley and H.G. Wells; and an imperial France harboured Jules Verne; the pulp

15 magazines began printing sf proper in the US in the 1920s and 1930s, reflecting the financial expansions of this country and a new mode of imperialism. After the Second

World War, a period that would come to be known as the Golden Age of sf production corresponded to a golden age for the US economy and its attendant culture, as the country displaced Britain at the centre of the world-economy.

Sf is not only produced in these loci of expansion, however, nor is it a genre entirely dependent on a capitalist culture. Revolutionary Russia, for instance, produced its own, anti-capitalist proto-sf. However, sf histories are generally obedient to the lineage of

Western nations, and with some exceptions, little acknowledge the sf produced in other parts of the world (Aldiss Billion; Amis; Fitting "Modern"; Ketterer; Moylan; Scholes and

Rabkin). Magazine eras in Brazil, Mexico and the Middle East go largely unnoticed by sf scholarship, as do traditions in Africa and Asia. I cannot claim to have redressed this lack in my own history of sf, suffice to say that sf from the core offers a critical perspective on the socio-economic constitution of this core, and a deconstruction of its modes of being. The expansionist ideas of sf defamiliarise the core's own expansionist tendencies, while the prevalence of male heroic narrative within it reflects back upon its patriarchy.

The non-English speaking cultures represented by this thesis are offered by way of comparison to the core, rather than as a comprehensive alternative model of the genre.

Poland's Stanislaw Lem, as well as Soviet Russia's Ivan Yefremov and Strugatsky brothers betray the socio-economic conditions of other, non-Western countries, and offer a comparative version of the genre's aesthetic.

A historical conception of sf that privileges its core models may yet prove useful in thinking about the development of sf in new historical situations. Lavie Tidhar, for

16 instance, is surprised by how much recent Chinese sf parallels "the field's development in the West", and the author William F. Wu is reminded "of the science fiction written and published in the US from the 1920s to the 1940s" (Tidhar 94; Wu qtd in Tidhar 97).

China these days resembles the US after the Second World War, as it undergoes a rapid economic boom. As new buildings rise and the social guarantee is eroded, these accounts suggest that the estrangements of a Western-style sf have become more relevant to its people.

Mark Rose turns the experience of rapid change from a historical precondition for the genre into its philosophical position. The radical transformations within sf novels; their alteration of environments and polities; their introduction of technologies and new ideas, is for Rose the synchronic quality of sf:

Science fiction, however, challenges our sense of the stability of reality by

insisting upon the contingency of the present order of things. Indeed, science

fiction not only asserts that things may be different; as a genre it insists that they

will and must be different, that change is the only constant rule and that the

future will not be like the present. (21)

It is from this sense of contingency in sf that a sublime conception of the genre takes shape. After Marin, the infinite potential for change elevates thought beyond the specific circumstances of its subject. After Kant, the passage of different worlds leads this subject to look beyond the closure of any one world, and to universal ideas that encompass all worlds. Like a navigator on the ocean or an astronomer gazing into a

17 telescope, the sublime in sf wants to arrive at synchronic conceptions that unify differences.

To recall, the synchronic synthesis of imperialism and technology, of historical expansion and the ship, leads to an imaginative conception of new spaces. The synthesis of technology and capitalism, on the other hand, turns into Suvin's notion of cognition.

On this triad remains the arm linking capitalism and imperialism. Capitalism is defined here as the division of the world into property and a labour market, while the expansion of capitalism through exploration, conquest and economic monopolisation is called imperialism. The synthesis of capitalism and imperialism lies in Kant's conception of the universal, that is the cognition of vast ideas. While Rose's description of sf concurs with

Kant's reflective judgement, as that reflecting upon its own conditions of reflection, the universal makes a determinate judgement upon differences. It subsumes within itself strange lands and heterogeneous peoples, subjecting them to property relations and the logic of the market.

In sf, the universal turns into an aesthetic all of its own. In the words of John W.

Campbell, the editor of the bestselling magazine in the US Golden Age of sf, "[T]he

Laws of the Universe are absolute indeed--and ruthlessly just ... Obey them scrupulously, and they work for you; defy them, and you get crushed quite casually ..." (qtd in Robu,

"Great" 97). Here the historical rule of capital in the world-system turns into a natural law. Campbell elevates it to the scale of the universe so that it becomes transhistorical, and part of a transcendental cognition. The ruthlessness of Campbell's universe betrays the kind of world that Campbell saw himself living within. By contrast, in Yefremov's

Soviet sf novel Andromeda (1960), the universal aesthetic is a peaceful and utopian fantasy

18 of communication between distant peoples. Planets separated across the cosmos talk to each other on a Great Circle that broadcasts messages between stars. This thought of the universal, that turns up in all kinds of sf, is pleasurable because it transcends the difficulty of thinking the contradictions of difference. Campbell and Yefremov have in common, across countries, the pleasure of thinking this universal.

The tension between difference and this universalising aesthetic makes up a central structuring device of sf narrative. Other worlds are played against universal conceptions.

Kant describes how this tension constitutes a cognition of the sublime when he writes that:

So, if we call the sight of the starry heaven sublime, we must not found our

estimate of it upon any concepts of worlds inhabited by rational beings, with the

bright spots, which we see filling the space above us, as their suns moving in

orbits prescribed for them with the wisest regard to ends. But we must take it,

just as it strikes the eye, as a broad and all-embracing canopy: and it is merely

under such a representation that we may posit the sublimity which the pure

aesthetic object attributes to this object. (Kant, Critique 121-2)

These ideas of a sky populated by different, inhabited worlds, as well as the notion of an infinite universe, were popular in Kant's day because of the telescope. The invention facilitated the tension between the relative and infinite. Sf narratives of the twentieth century carry on this tension, albeit through other innovations.

To take one example, the Tardis that is featured on the BBC television program Doctor

Who (1963-89) takes the Doctor between times and spaces. It unifies the different worlds that the Doctor visits into one spatial universe. While the Tardis looks like a tiny London police box (its camouflage device is broken), its interior opens out into a maze of corridors and rooms. The technology inverts inside and outside, such that the one becomes the other, and the universe of Doctor Who becomes the one. Difference becomes the same. To enable this homogenisation the sf narrative utilises a moral idea.

Kant claims that a conception of the sublime is requisite upon a subject having "moral feeling" (Critique 116). In realising the universality of the moral law, the mind is able to think the infinitude of the universe. This moral feeling is at the basis of Doctor Who's universe, as the multiple narratives of the series resolve themselves to suit the good

Doctor. Whether rescuing the Menoptra from the parasitic Animus or saving the Earth from World War Three, the show's moral narratives create the conditions by which a single spatial universe is configured.

The pleasures of this universality, and of sf's alternative imaginative framework, lie in the extension of the mind between worlds. In synchronising worlds with moral and vast conceptions, the mind creates its own universe. As the sf author Isaac Asimov writes:

Man may be a pigmy but his observing and thinking mind is a giant. Mind is,

indeed, a magnificent object, far greater than the mere physical matter of the

stars, and we have no cause to be abashed by the mere size of all the nonmind

about us. (26)

Such is the elation of the Kantian sublime, that realises in the mind the scale of the universe that surrounds it. The universalising laws of science facilitate this elation. In

Doctor Who the quasi-scientific laws of time travel configure the mind's ability to think beyond itself, and into ideas that transcend the body's entrapment in any one time period. This thinking affords pleasure because it relieves the mind of the contradictions within which it is otherwise mired by the differences between times and spaces.

The first published recognition of the sublime pleasures of sf took place in 1973, in the early sf studies journal Riverside Quarterly. Wayne Connelly cites a conversation between writers Joanna Russ and William Tenn at a conference, as they describe how they feel whilst reading certain stories. They are emotionally moved by the stories, and agree on two terms for this emotion--"intellectual" and "excitement" (261). Connelly identifies their feeling of mind to be sublime. He compares the images of sf to the seventeenth- century descriptions of Thomas Burne as he attempted to explain the appeal of mountains, and Joseph Addison's eighteenth-century gaze on stars and skies. His unacknowledged source for this lineage may well be Marjorie Nicolson's 1959 history of the infinite, Marjorie Hope Nicolson's Mountain Gloom, Mountain Glory (1959). This study traces the changing representations of mountains in European thought, from abhorrence to awe, back to the influence of telescopes. Mountains became magnificent because they were proximate to a newly infinite sky. The cosmic ideas of Burnet, who proposed that a perfectly spherical Earth had been banished from eternity, and of Addison's "Great" sights, resonate with a genre that is also interested in immense, breathtaking ideas.

Subsequent studies of sf and the sublime lie in two articles from the early 1980s, Bart

Thurber's "Toward a Technological Sublime" (1983) and Frances Ferguson's "The

Nuclear Sublime" (1984). Both read Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831) to be sublime in different ways. For Thurber the monster's horrific aspects register an immaturity with regard to technology that will come of age in Jules Verne's fiction. The phrase

"technological sublime" was probably coined by Leo Marx in his history of the American imagination, The Machine in the Garden (1964), but Bart Thurber uses it to describe science's confrontation with the unknown as a revelation of "some of our greatest and most powerful aspirations" (222). The reading experience is thus a metaphysical one, and immersed in ideologies of progress. Ferguson's Kantian reading of Frankenstein is a more particular critical account of the production of freedom through the imagination of nuclear holocausts.

In the late 1980s these articles are joined by two more considerations--Michael Beehler's

"Border Patrols" (1987) and Cornel Robu's "A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime"

(1988), to which I will return. Beehler renders a deconstructive Kantian sublime to reveal some of the insecurities of sf as it confronts the alien. This simultaneously familiar and unfamiliar alien is a "joker" who deconstructs the opposition between self and other

(32). While for Thurber science was itself sublime, this science is an unstable pleasure for

Beehler, vulnerable to the breakdown of its borders when it confronts the unknown, and thus holding within itself the seeds of its own destruction. In the 1990s Robu will perform a sublime reading of a Poul Anderson story ("Great"), while Joseph Tabbi's

Postmodern Sublime (1995) reads Norman Mailer's account of the moon landing and

Joseph McElroy's sf novel Plus (1977) to be sublime. Like Thurber, Tabbi resorts to a transcendental account of technology that contains its own "immanent meaning" (28).

The collapse of all oppositions, such as nature and technology, into technology is the transcendental idea that leads to feelings of the sublime. By contrast, this thesis argues

22 that opposition or contradiction is a persistent precondition for the sublime experience.

Representations of the sublime constantly betray their own historical contingencies.

Longinus' On the Sublime, for instance, contains a tension between the great ideals of civilisation and its actual decay. Kant's Critique of Judgement describes a conflict between mind and nature that turns into a transcendence of mind. It is only through such contradictions that the cognitive transport of the sublime takes place. Technology facilitates these cognition, but is hardly, as Tabbi claims, their cause.

Robu's "A Key to Science Fiction: The Sublime" is the most significant precedent for this study. He makes three main arguments. The first claim is that science, as a key component of the genre, enables representations of the infinite that leads in turn to the freedom of mind that takes pleasure in this infinite. A second of his arguments aligns, as

I have done, the conflict of narrative with the specific quality of sublime pleasure in sf.

"(T)he essence of sublimity is," he claims, "conflictual" (24). Third is that the sublime and tragedy have "followed interwoven paths", and the "pain generated by magnitude or might" in sf generates a cathartic effect in the subject (24, 31). It is one of the aims of this thesis to turn Robu's synchronic affinity between sf and the sublime into a diachronic one, to attribute the pleasures of their allegiance to the historical conditions that shaped the genre. The freedom of mind to imagine the infinite is, in this reading, the consequence of being at the core of an economic and cultural system from which lines of sight, ocean routes, rocket launches and financial networks extend. The specific catharsis of the sublime in sf is to transcend the contradictions of this system with universalising ideas.

The editors of the British sf journal Foundation originally introduced Robu's article with great enthusiasm. They declared that the sublime would "revolutionise the assessment of sf", and yet the topic remains largely untouched nearly twenty years later. One might think that this is a blink of the eye in a long history of scholarly thought, but as Jean-Luc

Nancy notes, this has also been a fashionable period for the sublime (25). Part of this fashion has reclaimed the sublime from its historical place in the high chair of philosophical aesthetics. In The American Technological Sublime (1994), David Nye is explicit in his wish to distance himself from a sublime "written by and for intellectual elites", instead finding its experience in a history of material and popular culture (17). Similarly, the cultural studies scholar Dick Hebdige describes his working class neighbour polishing and admiring his classic car on the street as a sublime specific to his own socio- economic situation. Barbara Claire Freeman and Patricia Yaeger criticise the masculine construction of the sublime, considering it in the context of feminism (Freeman), feminine experience (Yaeger, "Toward") and maternal experience (Yaeger, "Language").

One might expect an article on sf and the sublime would, like Nye, Hebdige, Freeman and Yaeger, turn to an experience that is particular to the genre's internal or populist concerns. Robu wants to follow this track, claiming that the sublime is preferred reading matter for lowbrow culture, while the highbrow has a taste for the beautiful. Sf then stands alongside the sublime in a mutual opposition to that "intellectual obtuseness, taste sluggishness, mental seclusion, dishonest interests and suchlike" that characterises the highbrow (21). However, when Robu starts to read sf beside the philosophies of

Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant, he refers to that very canon from which he felt excluded. Why? Because sf has for too long been "chased away by the servants down the stairs of his own father's palace" (34). Sf, in other words, belongs to the lineage of this

24 philosophy, and is yet unrecognised by it. The editors of this 1988 edition of Foundation agree, claiming that sf was fathered in the "main current of Western thought" (21). Robu's article demonstrates their affinity, considering their common wish "to figure infinity" and represent the "overwhelmingly great" (22). Yet the child remains a black sheep in the family. There is a sense in which the genre will never be on a par with the charismatic complexities of philosophy, that with its history of pulp magazines and paperbacks, it sensationalises the integrity of the ideas upon which its own sublime rests.

The editors of Foundation acknowledge this problem when they claim that Robu has written "a manifesto for the restoral of the sf prince from the pigsty to the palace." (21). With the terms "pigsty" and "palace", they describe a divide between lowbrow and highbrow production, the popular and the literary. They want to repress the genre's identification with the lowbrow cultures of the marketplace, its history of pulp magazines and paperbacks, its Bug Eyed Monsters (BEMs), Venusian lizards, and women in distress.

Yet this largely American tradition is the one that gave the genre its name, the pulp pigsty a formative part of its imagination. In Robu's article the eighteenth-century philosophers Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant make up the Oedipal palace before which sf must plead its worthiness. Standing before sf like Kafka's gate to the law, Robu puts these philosophers to work only to be excluded from their esteemed halls:

Just like the child with royal blood in the fairytales, chased away by the servants

down the stairs of his own father's palace, sf is not yet aware of the nobility of its

own "blood". And this, in spite of the fact that this nobility may be recognized

unmistakenly by signs that would reduce its virtual usurpers. (34)

Since the late 1960s, academia has brought sf some degree of intellectual respectability within those institutions that once maintained a line between the literary and popular.

The influence of poststructuralism and postcolonialism, the rise of cultural studies and comparative literature, if not the 1960s themselves, have long since opened a door to the study of the popular in literary traditions. Undergraduate courses, monographs and academic journals such as Foundation itself have all played a role in bringing the genre into the palace. Carl Freedman argues that sf is the privileged genre of this new wave of theory, that its generic structure corresponds to theory's self-reflexivity and historical concerns (Critical).

It is surprising then, that even in 1988, the editors of Foundation and Robu still find the distinction between the highbrow and lowbrow a useful one. They want to be recognised by the canon because it offers sf the prestige of the palace. But there are better reasons for thinking about sf alongside European philosophy. These lie in the insights the combination can give upon the historical formations from which they have both arisen.

The telescope is one piece of material evidence for the common origins of sf and the sublime, the blood test of their lineage. For while sf's interest in the furthest and infinite reaches of the universe is well known (Robu, "A Key" 25), the influence of the telescope upon the development of the idea of the sublime is documented in Chapter One.

When Robu reads Arthur C. Clarke's "The Star" (1955), he identifies the vast, infinite and eternal in its images. The space travellers of the story discover the remains of an ancient and alien civilisation that has been destroyed by a supernova. For Robu, it offers a "proper aesthetic pleasure induced by the sight of the cosmic disaster of a supernova outburst and by the infinite cosmic desolation in time and space that the disaster leaves

26 behind" ("A Key" 26). This account of the story thus represents the infinite as a consequence of conflict and tragedy. It accords with Longinus' sublime, who wrote amidst the decline of Roman civilisation. Clarke's representation of an apocalypse in deep space is an account of the futility of his own civilisation as it faces the immensity of outer space in the twentieth century. It simultaneously describes the pleasure in thinking this very immensity as that which relieves the tension associated with this futility.

Instead of thinking about "The Star" with Longinus, Robu identifies its Kantian qualities. In its evocation of "might", the story makes use of the mind's pleasure in thinking this might ("A Key" 26). Yet this might is also historically determined, contained as it is within a tale of religion, the destruction of a civilisation and interstellar travel. It is an aesthetic that is also a narrative, and within this narrative are contained the historical conditions for the appreciation of might in the first place. The hero of the story is a Jesuit astrophysicist and his atheist companions. An argument about God's existence follows him across the cosmos, and when they find the ruins of the civilisation annihilated by the event his faith is sorely tested. The explosion turns out to be the very same bright star that led the three wise men to find the infant Jesus in Bethlehem. When he thinks that "even the deepest faith must falter" (521), the Jesuit rehearses the conditions under which Kant wrote the Critique of Judgement. In his earlier years, specifically in the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755; see Chapter

One), Kant had thought the revelations of astronomy to be evidence of the might of

God. Kant's three Critiques, however, including the Critique of Judgement, instead demonstrate the might of the human mind. Greatness remains through the eye of the telescope, but its origins are no longer God. The dialogue between the Jesuit and atheists, then, replays the victory of the mind in Kant's oeuvre, that is itself a figure for the

27 coincident historical victory of science over the Christian God. In affirming the reign of science, the contemporary genre of sf continues to reproduce its victorious ideology of reason, affirming the death of God over and over again.

Finally, a story that includes sf, the sublime, More's Utopia, the progenitors of sf, as well as an aesthetic reading of the US and Soviet-Russian space programs (see Chapter Two), requires some methodological justification. The selection and reading of texts that cross centuries and continents inevitably turns the qualitative into the quantitative, the particular into the general. Marxist historians from Raymond Williams to Franco Moretti have struggled with the disparity between texts and their contexts, devising new ways of phrasing the relationship in order to think entertainments in socio-economic context. It is to Fredric Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping that I want to turn to mediate these disparities. Some ten years after Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, Jameson took Suvin's

"suggestive slogan of the cognitive" and mushroomed it into a more general method for the placing of texts into their historical situations ("Cognitive" 347-8). Cognitive mapping offers a unifying axis for the interpretation of texts by placing them onto a historical trajectory, describing the ways in which authors and readers think about where they are and what they are doing in their own times. It is ultimately subjective, composed through an "experimental contact with the real" that "constructs the unconscious"

(Deleuze and Guattari 12). Sf narratives represent, through the avatar of the hero, the conditions for this subjectivity. Jameson cites the navigator as an early instance of this subject, who must orientate the position of the ship in a new world that is revealed by the new technologies of compass and sextant (Postmodernism 51). The disorientation of this navigator on the open sea gives way to an altered conception of location in a technologically mediated and cosmological world. This is the very transition that a

28 cognition of the sublime describes, as this mind's disorientation at its encounter with a new world turns into a subsequent realisation of its ability to think about this world's conditions for coming into being. From the differences between worlds the subject's thoughts turn to the universal, and thus to the pleasurable infinitudes of the sublime.

Chapter One

The Ship and the Telescope:

Cognitive Preconditions for SF

Lucian and Longinus

The aim of this first chapter is to trace, through a series of texts, the material preconditions that led to the development of an imagination that pertains to sf and the sublime. Some of these preconditions are ocean travel, astronomy, capitalism and imperialism. The first textual appearances of an imaginary journey to another world and the sublime lie in Ancient Greece and Rome. Longinus' On the Sublime (c100) and

Lucian's True Story (c100) are evidence that these ideas had some wider circulation.

Longinus writes in response to a lost manuscript by Caecilius. Photius tells of the popular Wonders Beyond Thule by Diognes, that contained a flight to the sun (Hall 342).

Other texts refer to lost tales of voyages among planets and stars, to heaven and hell, the sun, moon and constellations. Lucian's True Story (c100), the earliest surviving interplanetary flight, was apparently a parody of Diognes and other texts of its kind. It made allusions, in-jokes and satirical digs at this and other works of the ancient world.

"Lucian darts from one source to another with dazzling rapidity, combining, exaggerating, and adding from his own invention at the same time" (Hall 359). It was entertainment for an audience that familiar with these other texts. Lucian toured the backwaters of the Roman Empire, speaking in the oratory styles of the earlier and what was considered greater Greek civilisation. All around him, the Roman Empire was in

31 decay. Peaceful and prosperous, its culture had stagnated into mimicking past greatness.

This journey to other worlds was launched on an imagination escaping a long cultural decline.

The True Story begins when Lucian's ship runs into a typhoon, which "spun the ship around and lifted it about thirty miles high in the air" (17). Its giddy elevation matches an intellectual one afforded by the text's tumble between "poets, historians and philosophers of old" (Lucian 14). The pleasure of a transcendence from the Earth is at one with the mind's elevation from a plethora of worldly texts. Lucian tells his reader that he had embarked upon his imaginary journey across the sea for "intellectual curiosity," and "my thirst for novelty" (15). He could be referring to the actual ocean here, or to a journey among texts. To some extent these are at one in an imagination of other lands that themselves contain new knowledge. Finding these new lands, Lucian discovers that they have consequences for his own. The typhoon lifts Lucian's ship to the moon, where he looks back upon an upside-down Earth. As Doctor Who's Tardis inverts inside and outside, Lucian reverses the relation of up and down. The Earth is now contained by the sky above.

From the antipodean moon, Lucian realises the law of the universe is not so much terrestrial as extraterrestrial, and the Earth is but one of a series of worlds. From up here, his satire of the classics is more reasonable than cynical, as they are subjected to topsy- turvy laws. The breadth of this new universe, and this new dimension of space, is revealed in all its glory when night falls. "(W)hen night came on, we saw a good many islands the colour of fire, some bigger than ours and some smaller" (Lucian 17). The passage from day to night has darkened the Earth, and brought Lucian's gaze from it

32 upward into the expanses. The astral bodies appear relative to each other, and Earth is forgotten amongst the spectres. The scale of things becomes important, as if Lucian is doubting what is larger and what is smaller, what is closer and what is further away.

From an ocean limited by gravity and the horizon, Lucian has been lifted into a space limited only by the reason that constitutes the existence of its worlds.

Unlike Lucian's A True Story, Longinus's On the Sublime (c100) took the imitation of the classics seriously. Done properly, it could produce what Longinus termed a hypsos or transport of the reader, as one is moved to a consideration of greatness. If he existed at all, Longinus is said to have lived in the same period as Lucian, in the second century after Christ's death. Each wanted to induce a transport in the reader. While Lucian does this with a trip to the moon, Longinus cites a trip to the stars in which "the soul of the poet goes into the chariot with the boy", escaping earthly considerations (122). While

Lucian wanted to entertain, to create "light, pleasant reading" (14), Longinus proclaims the value of a rhetoric of unchanging conceptions, such as tragedy and greatness. He uses language to go beyond language, as a means of contemplating that which exceeds representation, in the magnificence of eternity, the human soul or the Gods. For both

Lucian and Longinus, Homer is the ultimate source of these transports, the great literary river from which all tributaries run. Longinus cites him above and beyond all others as a purveyor of the "divine" (111), while Lucian credits him with inventing the fabulous adventure (14). Longinus says he makes "gods of the men fighting at Troy, and men of the gods" (111), while Lucian satirises his extravagance with exaggeration. He turns

Homer's two springs of Phaeacia into 365 springs of water and 365 springs of honey, giving the imagination more of what it wants, but exceeding the imagination's ability to conceive of the object before it (38).

As if writing about Lucian, Longinus finds that poets "display a good deal of romantic exaggeration, and everywhere exceed the bounds of credibility, whereas the finest feature of the orator's imagery is always its adherence to reality and truth" (123). Preferring the latter, Longinus describes the oration of great battles, the immensity of distance, the storm, and feelings that pertain to the aftermath of war or the proximity of a lover. His aesthetic relies on an irruption of the true within the untruths of representation. Lucian is interested in the truth of reason. He wants to be a reliable witness to his own exaggerations, counting precisely the number of horsevultures in the lunar king's army or the length of a Caschelottan. The lie of his travels turn into a cognitive truth as he shares with his readers a sense of wonder at the extraordinary dimensions of the imaginative mind. The details of three headed vultures, ants as big as two acres, men who grow from testicles in the ground and a frozen sea to the north are recorded without excitement or hyperbole. Lucian's extraordinary content articulates a nature that is at the limits of sense, while Longinus describes storms and wars that challenge the comprehension of the listener. Both Lucian and Longinus are interested in challenging the mind's sense of what is possible, affecting it with an excess of language that moves the subject beyond representation. For Lucian this movement is an extensive, mathematical one, while

Longinus considers the absolute magnitudes of greatness.

The ocean voyages of Homer that illustrate these texts were themselves inspired by the tales of Greek navies and trading vessels that returned from across the seas. The ocean journey is experientially different to an overland one. Travel upon the ground arrives at new places in gradated measures, one sliding imperceptibly into the other, while the ocean distinctly marks out one place from the next. The ocean marks the boundaries

34 between worlds, and establishes a relative thinking. Returning from as far away as the

Arctic circle, the Greek sailors were forced to think about radical difference. The pack ice appeared to one Arctic explorer like the lungs of the world, a place unique and incomparable to any other. Yet the Greeks also made attempts to map the differences of the worlds they encountered. They navigated by latitudes that were determined by the stars of the sky. Thus the universe above became a repository for the universality of the world, and the infinite absolute by which finitude could be measured. In Longinus's first major citation of Homer the gaze moves from a mountain to this sky: "Keenly they strove to set Ossa upon Olympus, and upon Ossa the forest-clad Pelion, that they might mount up to heaven" (108). His second moves from mountain to sea: "And as far as a man can see with his eyes into the hazy distance as he sits upon a mountain-peak and gazes over the wine-dark sea, even so far is the leap of the loudly-neighing steeds of the gods" (110). The gaze here is not upon the ocean but over it, in an imaginary leap over the horizon to "heaven" or to the place of the "gods".

The ship was the means by which such leaps over the horizon were contemplated in

Ancient Greece and Rome. It opened the imagination to the infinitude of possible worlds that lay beyond the horizon of the ocean, and thus to a multiplication of possible finitudes. It enabled Lucian to imagine a series of islands, the interior of a whale, the worlds of the moon, sun and stars. Living upon each of these places are creatures produced by multiplication and combination. Three-headed vultures, giant fleas and ants multiply limbs and dimensions of scale. In giving two more heads to the original,

Lucian's three-headed vulture demotes the original and natural head of nature. It suggests yet more heads on more vultures on more worlds, in an infinitude of possibilities. The Kipperites have "an eel's eyes and a lobster's face" (30). There are

Crabhands, Tunaheads, Asslegs and Bullheads. Salad-birds, ostrich-acorns and bean- helmets play with scale too, by juxtaposing this or that object with another of different size. Addition is constituted by a pastiche of nature, its elements broken up, multiplied and rearranged. The fantastic creatures that Lucian finds beyond the Earth are conceived in a geometric progression. The number of limbs and senses in the deformed creatures is important for Lucian, as is their exact scale. His is a cognitive metonymy laid upon the axis of nature, in a movement from moon to star to sun to Earth, adding and deforming this or that aspect of the terrestrial. When Lucian informs us that he has not told all of his story, that there are more islands to visit and creatures to meet, he leaves the True

Story open ended. Its metonymic deformations partake of the infinity implied in this absence, as the text opens out to combinations of worlds and creatures without end.

Trading Horizons in More's Utopia

Sharing the second century with Lucian and Longinus was Ptolemy, whose calculation of the orbits of the planets and the latitudes of the Earth would outlive him for more than a thousand years. They were adopted by Arab and European navigators and thinkers. His finite universe lent itself to the monotheistic and infinite gods of Islam and Christianity.

Elsewhere, other cosmological models lived their own destinies. It would be wonderful to trace the impact of Fa-hsien's ocean journey on China, or the astronomical siddhantas on Hindu India, or the astronomically calculated calendar on the sense of Arabic time. It would be instructive to investigate the effect of the technological and historical preconditions of tenth-century Japan on the Tale of the Bamboo Cutter, about a girl from the moon, or the reasoning behind Wan Hu's fourteenth-century rocket-chair, in which bamboo packed with gunpowder lifted him to a quick death. Alas, these fascinating

36 avenues lie outside the scope of this project. Suffice to note foreign advances in science and thought would eventually make their way to Europe. A new European age of ocean travel was facilitated by the arrival of the compass and the secret of making paper from

China; the astrolabe and centuries of astronomical observations from Arabic

Universities; and the development of the ship's skeleton in Europe itself. Increased trade with the East and with England brought generations of texts from Greek, Roman and

Islamic learning to Europe, and led to the establishment of Western universities. This period also cradled the birth of modern capitalism, as cartels of cloth makers and international traders spread themselves over the continent and beyond. From one of these cartels came movable type, and the know-how of the printing press subsequently spread across the continent.

In 1306, a Florentine speaker praised the pace of invention in his day: "Every day you could find one, and there would still be new ones to find" (White 159). Italy was the centre for these new knowledges and for the trading cartels. In the centre of the

Mediterranean, it was well positioned in the oceanic economy. By the fifteenth century, however, the biggest European industry, cloth production, had shifted from Florence to

England. It was living amongst this particular shift in a growing European economy that

Thomas More penned a doubtful reflection upon its effects. In Utopia (1516) he points out that the arrival of the cloth trade in England had led to mass homelessness and subsequent criminality amongst its peasants. Evicted from their homes so that landowners could graze sheep, peasants were seeking alternative means of survival.

Through his character Raphael, More argues that their fate on the hangman's noose was not so much their fault as that of the system that rendered them without livelihood and then established their guilt.

As Lucian and Longinus invented transports of the mind to relieve the tensions of their times, More sends his hero Raphael to a place where the contradictions of an early capitalism are resolved. On the Island of Utopia nobody is homeless because nobody owns a home. Communism takes the place of the divisions and contradictions of private ownership. Labour divisions based on class turn into labour rotation, and hierarchy into collectivism. It is a shame that More does not hear precisely where the Island of Utopia is located. As Raphael gives directions, they are muffled by a cough from amongst his audience. The history of Utopia's beginnings are, however, clearly heard. The island was hacked off the mainland with shovels by King Utopis, and henceforth surrounded by ocean. Raphael must cross not only "great and wide deserts" to arrive there, but the sea as well (26). King Utopis recognised that the ocean was necessary to mark the boundaries of his project, its horizon demarcating the possibility of Utopia. The journey there suspends the precision of place with the negation of space.

In a letter, More declared his interest in the Romanised Syrian's "balance of moral utility and satirical wit", and translated three of his dialogues into Latin in 1506 (Robinson,

Lucian 131). The operations of morality and satire correspond to the first and second books of Utopia. In the first, the moral utility rests upon its condemnation of the English system, outlining the contradictions of city and country, labour and mercantile economy, public and private. Upon the abyss of relations in this first book, coeval with Raphael's journey over the desert and ocean, More sites the Island of Utopia in the second. While

Lucian created a multitude of possibilities from the totality of the ocean and sky, More declares the impossibility of the utopian one:

For nothing is more easy to be found than be barking Scyllas, ravening Celenos,

and Lestrygones, devourers of people, and suchlike great and incredible

monsters. But to find citizens ruled by good and wholesome laws, that is an

exceeding rare and hard thing. (27)

Utopia is distinguished from the multiplicity of worlds because it represents the end of this multiplicity. Made rather than discovered, its resolution marks the shore not only of its own island, but of property relations and hierarchy. Like Lucian's exaggerated additions and multiplications, Utopia is measured in precise detail, in length and breadth, population and economy.

The accuracy of these facts is interrupted only once by the subjective voice of Raphael.

He declares that there is one feature of the state of Utopia that he is "ashamed to show, fearing that my words shall not be believed" (80). Poking his head through a firmly drawn curtain, Raphael dispels any illusions about the reader's passive position. He calls upon this reader to make a judgement about what will follow, reporting of the Utopians that:

of gold and silver they make commonly chamber-pots, and other vessels that

serve for most vile uses ... Thus by all means possible they procure to have gold

and silver among them in reproach and infamy. And these metals, which other

nations do as grievously and sorrowfully forego, as in a manner their own lives, if

they should altogether be taken from the Utopians, no man there would think

that he had lost the worth of one farthing. (81)

The play of Raphael's own truth and falsity turns into the relativity of value, as what is treasured in More's own society is deemed worthless in Utopia. The eye that values the gold must return from Utopia to make judgements about its own values. From the

"nothingness from which he emerges" the reader travels to "the infinity in which he is engulfed" (Pascal 90). From the space between worlds, the ou-topis of no-place, More creates an eu-topis, or good place. Combined, the two perform a satirical, moral and critical operation on his own world.

At the beginning of the first book, More sets forth this play of relativity with the proverb

"to show and set forth the brightness of the sun with a candle" (23). The comparison is between nature and its reflection in artifice, the source of life and energy with its paltry imitations. The dialectic between the two runs throughout Utopia. More's sympathy with the peasants is figured by the "brightness of the sun". In More's England the peasant's own nature was being displaced by an international trade that demanded wool. They were being urbanised, moving into the shadowy cities. The Utopians are by contrast solar creatures. They have a rotational labour system, spending time on the land and in their villages, dissolving the division of rural classes from the urban. In regularly returning to nature, the Utopians acknowledge it as the proper centre of economy and value. The dialectic between the sun and its imitations also turns up in More's critique of gold, which was becoming the organising principle of economic life in sixteenth-century

England. Like More's candle, the light of this metal was surpassing the power of the sun, into what Karl Marx would recognise years later as "the sublime drop of sunshine that inhabits every ounce of gold" (qtd in Klein 38). From its place at the centre of economy, the sun's power has been deferred into the darkness of guarded rooms. Stealing the locus of economy away from the sun's gift of light and warmth, Richard Klein describes the

40 way in which capitalism hoards value underneath darkness. Gold is but an

"indeterminate play of contrasting and complimentary reflections on a surface" that no longer refers to the natural source of its light (41). The refraction of a reflection of the sun, the candle of the sixteenth century will turn into the lanterns and forges of the industrial era, then the neon and fluorescence of the technological. Its excess rendered relative to its own deferral, the light is turned away from the truth of its solarity into the dissolute pallor of a restricted economy.

That More's time saw the emergence of both capitalism and utopian fiction was more than coincidental, for deferral is the logic of both gold and the utopian imagination.

Capitalism defers value from the sun into gold, while Utopia defers gold into the valueless material from which chamber pots are made. The Island of Utopia returns from such deferrals to the sunshine of a gift economy. The multiple differences of

Utopia, from gold chamber pots to rural rotation, add up to a total difference, becoming the totality of another world that displaces the reader's world. The movement of utopian fiction deconstructs and destabilises the consensus upon which the sublimity of gold rests, to render its contradictions visible, and to make its readers aware of just how far they are from the power of the sun and of the darkness of their own reflections. It does this by showing them the strange consensus of another world, sketching the very fact of closure itself, meeting one ideological existence with another to expose the void beneath both. The utopian movement turns to the gift of the sun, in which the moral coincides with the good, and beams its power in a moral cosmology. However, this is not so much a return as a progression onward from capitalism, as labour becomes the central organising principal of utopian life, one that had not featured in the pre-modern era.

Having nothing by which to value itself, and yet having value itself as its greatest value, capitalism resorts to gold as an absolute standard of measure. A contradiction then comes about between this absolute and its own measurement, or as Klein terms it, between an equivalent relation and a relative one, as:

just as counting needs to presuppose a standard or fundamental unit of measure

by which magnitude can be estimated, Marx needs the inexpressible,

incomparable value of the equivalent form in order to construct the expression

of value which eventually leads to the dazzle of money or gold. He needs, that is,

the aesthetic estimation of a magnitude of value, the sublime infinity of

equivalent form, whereby whenever a magnitude is given immediately as "like

itself alone" it postulates an absolute beyond all measure and finitude, that which

is comparable to nothing: the infinity of the absolutely great, that is, the sublime.

(36-7)

In making chamber pots out of gold, the Utopians have taken what is considered sublime in one system of understanding and proved that it is not so in another. No longer a simultaneous value for-itself and beside everything else, it retains only one side of its double figure, becoming relative and as subject to contingencies as anything else.

That Raphael would announce himself at this point and at no other in the second book is to place him firmly within the relativity of subjective relations. Those who do not believe him, who find gold to be sublime beyond measure, are condemned to the contradictions of modern life, and an irrevocable alienation from nature that alone holds the true and solar excess of the good.

The Calling of Numbers

While More was living in England, the Spanish were at war with America. The discovery and invasion of the Americas over the next two hundred years will be significant for this story later on, suffice to note that the European reach over the globe's oceans led to the expansion of its economic system. This generation of Europeans had realised Lucian's ancient desire to "find out what formed the farther border of the ocean and what peoples lived there" (15). Along with many other texts preserved by Arabic universities,

Lucian's True Story (1496) was translated into Latin. Its travel narrative was one of many newer tales that had surfaced in a new era of ocean travel in Europe. Returned sailors told of all kinds of lands and creatures. Whales and tentacled sea creatures mingled with each other on their pages, and the differences of distant people were made strange by imaginary embellishments. More's Utopia was also one of these travel narratives, hovering between truth and fantasy.

The circumnavigation of the globe had brought to Europe a consciousness not only of a world over its horizons, but of worlds vertical to it. The Island of Utopia, for instance, is shaped like a new moon, blurring the terrestrial and the extraterrestrial. Not only undiscovered lands, but the sky itself would increasingly become a site of hope in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. A hundred years after Utopia, Orazio del Monte compared Columbus, the discoverer of America, with Galileo whose home-made telescope had confirmed the suspicion that the moon was another world (Nicolson,

Science 18). Monte hoped that these extraterrestrial worlds might be conquered without

43 the bloodshed that drove terrestrial imperialism. In this period too, the aeronaut of

Francis Godwin's The Man in the Moone (1638) discovers a world in which there is "such love, peace and amity as it seemeth to be another paradise", projecting a utopian vision onto the lunar surface (Thomas 25). The consciousness of new worlds lifted the imagination from the ocean to the sky, and hope to other planets.

The idea of an infinite universe was accompanied in this period by a corresponding interest in infinities to be found within the human mind. In 1593 the first infinity was written into mathematical notation (Maor 10). These infinitudes, cosmic and cognitive, provided evidence of the Christian God's power. Giordano Bruno thought along these lines, as did Rene Descartes. Perhaps the most interesting figure for this conjunction of infinitude and theology was Benedict de Spinoza, a seventeenth-century philosopher of nature who also helped grind lenses for telescopes. Even Spinoza, while pushing God into more obscure spaces of reason, declared this God's commensurability with the optical infinite. Pioneers in these early philosophical and scientific methods, also making use of theology and magic, found God waiting in the methods of mathematics, astronomy and early philosophy.

If the Christian God had a competitor, it was not so much the new sciences as the gold that continued to drive trade across the oceans. From controlling the European weaving- guilds the Fuggers had risen to control the trade of textiles, dyes and spices with the

East. Their monopoly drove the Spanish to search for an alternative trading route, all the way around the horn of Africa and across the Atlantic. Johannes Kepler's family were weavers in the Black Forest in Germany, an area controlled by this guild. He would become a principal European astronomer, and leave a fictional journey to the moon

44 among his papers. It detailed, with technical precision, the way the Earth would appear from the moon, and the orbits the planets would occupy. Kepler's was an imaginary voyage, but one designed to convince people of the rotation of the Earth around the sun by vicariously taking people onto the moon and looking back down. Calculations of angles and lines lie behind the two worlds, placing them in the grid of scientific reason.

There are creatures on Kepler's moon too, but they are even more abstract than

Lucian's, designed to be logically consistent with an airless world. The skin of these aliens is tight against the void, consistent with the universal calculation of gravitation and atmosphere.

Kepler's work is filled with miles and degrees, ratios and areas. It coincides with an Earth that was more and more subjected to measurement, as Europeans asserted their power in economics and navigation, and developed the sciences of astronomy and mathematics. While Kepler himself rejected the notion of an infinite universe, the infinite lies implicit as the excess of his numerical calculations. Only the Island of Utopia had thus far declared itself to be outside the mercantile economy, negating both the value of gold and the calculation of its whereabouts. All others were one, in the

European imagination at least, with the possibilities delimited by numbers. Like the ocean itself, utopia falls into what Marin calls the "infinitesimal":

This feeling of abyssal depth, this sign instead immobilises the pendulum. It is

the absurd movement onto another series. The "infinitesimal" is not the

forerunner of a new series; it leads out of the series, but not far. In any case, it is

hardly possible to know where ... (xviii)

Implied in the plurality of worlds, in the multiplicities of measurement and economisations of trade, lies the infinite that exceeds all.

A vertigo of this infinite appeared in the seventeenth century. In 1660, Pascal asked,

"What is a man in the infinite?", as if anticipating discoveries to follow (89). Just thirteen years later astronomy would bring Europe its first numerical shock. Earth's distance to the sun was not 380 000 kilometres, as the Greeks supposed, but calculated at 140 million kilometres. This was the first glimpse into an infinity of the heavens. European astronomers had borrowed the calculation of parallax from the Greeks, comparing the different rates at which the same object moved across the sky from different points on the surface of the Earth. Through this, astronomers could calculate the distance to that object. The Greeks had only a limited ability to move over the rest of the globe. By the seventeenth century ships were built that could withstand long distances. The reach of ships over the Earth corresponded directly with the extent of astronomical measurements that could be made into the sky. The bringing of the world together, under the single sky of astronomical knowledge, and before the great void of a boundless ocean, had the effect of pushing the celestial bodies further away.

There was another technology required for this first massive parallax calculation. In 1656 the pendulum or grandfather clock was invented, and began to replace the measurements of clunky mechanical devices, the thump of the heart or the dripping of water (Whitrow 63). The pendulum, measuring the time of a world from its movement through space, constructed a measured day, and anticipated the mass regulation of urban life that would follow. It also enabled the Parisian observatory to send Jean Richer across the Atlantic, where he spent two years making measurements that led to the stellar

46 parallax (Hirshfeld 61). He lived at the slave outpost of Cayenne, where African people were imported to work on pepper plantations. On board Richer's ship was an astrolabe, to measure the sky; a telescope, to look for land; and a new pendulum clock, all the instruments by which the bearings of a new world would be configured. Across the sea, however, the pendulum could not function, its abilities to mark the seconds suspended by the infinite flux of the ocean.

The drag of the ocean on measurement would prevent eight astronomers from measuring the parallax of Venus nearly a hundred years later. In 1769 they spread themselves over the globe to watch the planet as it passed across the face of the sun.

This should have been astronomy's crowning moment, at which imperialism's reach over the ocean enabled a global measurement into outer space. It was obscured by weather.

The ocean's water had evaporated into the chaotic turbulence of clouds. One French astronomer had been declared dead while he was absent, his property and job given away, his relatives easily conflating the ocean and death into one (Hirshfeld 64). More anticipated the failures of an age of numerical thought when he made his island an impossible 200 mile wide crescent within a 500 mile long diameter (the figures don't add up). In 1729, Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels satirised the lofty concerns of astronomers in the island of Laputia. Here an entire society of astronomers inhabit an island that floats not on water but over land. Suspended by magnetism, these astronomers rule the peasantry from above. So taken up with calculations are the Laputians that they require a servant to beat them about the head to remind them to talk to each other. Swift is not only parodying the impracticality of astronomers, he is showing up the general tendency toward the abstract in early modernity.

As they calculate the passage of the stars above, the Laputians cast ruling shadows upon the peasantry below. Their suspended island enables them to see their domain as if it were a giant map. Between land and sky, their island is situated between astronomy and cartography. Like Lucian, Swift uses numerical terms to describe their accomplishments, describing a "catalogue of ten thousand fixed stars" (147). The details of the rotation of

Martian moons appear to satirise the scientific Kepler, from "diameters" to "squares";

"periodical times" to "proportion"; and the "cubes of their distance" governed by the

"law of gravitation" (147). These dizzying calculations have the effect of overwhelming the reader with numerical complexity, as measurements are multiplied by rotations and distances.

This cognition of numbers will have its obverse in the social organization of Swift's

Laputians, which tends to a disposition:

towards news and politics, perpetually inquiring into public affairs, giving their

judgments in matters of state, and passionately disputing every inch of a party

opinion. I have, indeed, observed the same disposition among most of the

mathematicians I have known in Europe, although I could never discover the

least analogy between the two sciences; unless these people suppose, that

because the smallest circle has as many degrees as the largest, therefore the

regulation and management of the world require no more abilities than the

handling and turning of a globe. (141)

While Gulliver claims that he can see no relation between the astronomical and the politics of rule, Swift is in fact describing the operation of division that is at work in

48 both. As Nicolson points out, he is not only satirising mathematicians, but the cognitive forms of his age (Science 110-154). As the first calculates the movement of stars, the latter is concerned with "inquiring" after "every inch" of human movement. Swift was writing at a time when imperialism was dividing up the globe and its people. His criticism of astronomers applies to the violence to which Europe subjected the Earth. By claiming that he cannot see the connection between them, his hero Gulliver distinguishes between the conflation of mathematics and the socio-political. Their infinitudes are qualitatively different. While the astronomical infinite is simply vast, the political infinite is a self-reflexive regress. Yet Swift finds a common cognition in the endless division of things into their constituent parts, from the solar system to the administration of people.

He places the astronomical gaze within a larger historical phenomenon of numerological measurement and division.

Along with the Laputians, Gulliver visits the tiny Lilliputians and Brobdingnag, a land of giants. His perspectives of smaller and bigger bring into the object world the proportional distortions that the microscope and telescope had introduced into Europe.

When Gulliver stumbles upon a road in Brobdingnag he thinks it is a "high road, as far as I took it to be, though it served to the inhabitants only as a foot-path through a field of barley" (72). As the gaze through the wrong end of a telescope pushes the closest of things further away, in Brobdingnag everything seems much larger. When a giant appears, Gulliver is forced to calculate a parallax between them, measuring his own height beside its, their relative movement giving him an indication of the scale of things.

Reportedly, the Frenchman Voltaire spent three months visiting Swift (Wade 153), and subsequently imitated the Englishman's tricks of perspective in Micromegas (1752). The

49 novel features a planet one million six hundred thousand times as large as Earth, with insects a hundred feet in diameter. His is a cognition of number, and of proportion. On another world he looks through a giant diamond to see the tiny people below. The source for this comedy of scale was not only Swift, but the science of Isaac Newton, whose theory of relativity Voltaire admired. What he neglected in order to mobilise a satire of this relativity was the infinite within which the numbers of its measurements are embedded. For the logic of measurement implies its own excess, the weight that will topple the scale. At the end of any comparison of number lies infinity. The sublime is the feeling that accompanies this infinity, because it elevates consciousness beyond the tensions of comparison.

More located this infinitude, that to which all measure can be subjected, in eu, the good and moral universe to which the relativity of difference can be subjected. Gulliver finds a land with such a moral law at the very end of Gulliver's Travels, when he is shipwrecked among the Houyhnhnms. It is a utopian land, full of peaceful and contented citizens, yet it is also a land of utopian failure (Radner). This is because the citizen Houyhnhnms are in fact intelligent horses. The infinitude of this moral law cannot produce the resolution of the utopian state for humans, who by their very nature are fundamentally flawed.

Gulliver returns to England a broken man, cast adrift from a utopia that was never his to begin with, to see in England only Yahoos, which is the Houyhnhnm name for an inferior species of human beings.

Kant and the Aliens

In Europe, the Christian God occupied the position of the moral and universal law by which discoveries in astronomy were judged. Even the fearful Pascal determined that the immensity of the universe, while belittling for humankind, was a sign of the immensity of God. The paradox of an infinite being creating an infinite universe only accentuated his fear. His psychic disturbance at revelations about the size of outer space had their echo some hundred years later in Edmund Burke's account of the sublime. Much of his taxonomy of things that inspire terror--vacuity, height, darkness, solitude, silence, vastness, height, and magnitude--describe the cosmic void. Burke's sublime is an elevation from this terror, this instinct to self-preservation, when the mind realises that the body is in no real danger. Burke's emotional description of the infinite is at one with the imagination of the upper classes of the eighteenth century. Marjorie Hope Nicolson's

Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory (1959) is a comprehensive study of the infinite in the texts of this time. She studies the diaries of Englishmen crossing the Alps on cultural pilgrimages to Italy, and attributes the feelings of elation in them not to the mountains themselves but to astronomy, which placed the Alps under the sign of infinity. These emotions were "strange" to those who felt them, suggesting they were just as unprecedented in history as they were in their personal lives (279). These mountains changed from being accursed to providing new evidence of the might of God.

New texts on cosmogony, written by astronomers and followers of astronomy, were exalted by the sight of the infinite universe. The Englishman Thomas Wright wrote An

Original Theory and New Hypothesis of the Universe (1750) with the aim of "advancing the

Adoration of the Divine Being in his infinite Creation of higher Works" (Jaki, Milky

185). The infinite universe affirmed the presence of a powerful God. The horror that

Burke mentions in his account of the sublime is overcome by a reconstitution of faith,

51 all the more emboldened by the grand extent of a created nature. Wright also influenced the philosopher Immanuel Kant's first publication, the Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens (1755). Few studies of Kant acknowledge this first text, which began his publishing career not in philosophy but in the field of cosmogony. He submits the infinitude of the universe as evidence of God's magnificence, "the Infinitude which creation has to exhibit in unlimited space throughout the succession of eternity"

(Cosmogony 151-2). There is a constant slippage between theology, in references to God, the Divine, omnipotence and presence, with science, represented by the terms nature, universe, infinity and eternity. Phrases such as "infinite domain of omnipotence" and

"infinite space, co-extensive with the Divine Presence, in which is to be found the provision for all possible natural formations" turn astronomy into theology and back again (Cosmogony 143-4). Their identity rests upon their rhetorical equivalence, in a shared aesthetic of excess.

This elated mixture of astronomy and theology in Kant's Universal Natural History is what he later would later call the supersensible sublime. This an elevated feeling that accompanies the mind's realisation of itself in the universe. Its exaltation takes place after a moment of uncertainty, in which this mind cowers before immensity. Referring to his religious beliefs, Kant writes in the Universal Natural History that:

My zeal was redoubled when at every step I saw the clouds disperse that

appeared to conceal monsters behind their darkness; and when they were

scattered I saw the glory of the Supreme Being break forth with the highest

splendour. (Cosmogony 18)

The "clouds" and the "monsters" that are lain in "darkness" indicate the humbling moment of disorientation that precedes the ecstasy of the supersensible. The subject realises that it is insignificant and lost before the might of nature. The monstrosity of this infinitude then becomes an exuberant celebration of its power. The immensity of

God slips into the great time of the cosmogonic; infinite space becomes evidence for His infinite powers; and both author and reader sit before a rhetoric of mutable infinities.

While the basis for what Longinus calls the hypsos or transport of this text lies in its references to infinity and God, its persuasive force lies in the astronomical evidence for the scale of the universe. The text refers to that which lies outside the text, to astronomical observations and calculations. The 1981 translator of the Universal Natural

History, Stanley L. Jaki, is infuriated by Kant's claims to scientific credence, finding his ideas about the universe to be exaggerated by hyperbole. This historian of science offers a damning account of Kant's misreading of Newtonian physics. That the author was

"enthusiastic" about his subject is not enough to redeem Kant from his unscientific approach to the evolution of the universe, the existence of other galaxies, and the uniformity of the law of gravitation (Jaki in Kant, Universal 30). Kant's interpretation of nebulae, or smudgy stars, earned him what Jaki considers to be an erroneous place in the history of science. Recognising these stars to be other galaxies, Kant moved from the islands in the sky described by Lucian and Galileo to island universes made up of billions of suns. Kant claimed that these distant nebulae rotate around a centre just as the solar system and the Milky Way do. That some years later Herschel would prove observationally that this was correct was fortunate for Kant's reputation, although this fame would be shortlived. In 1981 Jaki sealed the fate of the Universal Natural History by demonstrating that Kant's idea of nebulae as galaxies was already floating around in

53 other texts of the time. The infinite was, after all, a part of the period's scientific and cultural imagination.

If scientific history has today eclipsed a place for the Universal Natural History, its sublimity remains within Hastie's 1900 translation. Jaki's commitment to precision in his

1981 translation makes for cumbersome reading, with such phrases as "world-edifice" and "world-material" replacing Hastie's "world" and "matter of the world", the latter translator having an interest in the poetic qualities of the text rather than its scientific precision. The flow of Hastie's version renders something of Kant's revelry in the nature of the cosmos without adhering to its science. Kant himself made a plea for some tolerance with regard to the book's scientific credibility. He introduces it by saying that,

"Speaking generally, the greatest mathematical precision and mathematical infallibility can never be required from a treatise of this kind" (Cosmogony 36). According to Hastie,

Kant was a "precursor of the popular scientific writer", concerned with the significance of cosmological questions for the mind rather than in their demonstration (Cosmogony xiv). Hastie's phrase suggests a tentative comparison between Universal Natural History and sf. For Kant wrote his cosmogony in the hope that later observational science would verify his theoretical predictions, just as sf editor John W. Campbell defines the genre to be a "prophetic extrapolation of the known" ("Science" 91). The fictions published in

Campbell's Astounding Stories had a futuristic and scientific basis, and yet were written for pleasure. So too Kant wants readers of the Universal Natural History to have an eye to both its science and to the "charm of the grandest and most wonderful object to which thought can be applied" (Cosmogony 36). His is the ecstatic revelation of the characters in

Brian Aldiss's Non-Stop (1958), who after generations of thinking their universe is enclosed, discover all at once that they are in fact aboard a starship and have arrived at

54 their destination, which is the planet Earth itself. They look as Kant does, back upon their own world with eyes rendered fresh by an infinite cosmos.

To give pleasure to his reader, Kant employs representational language until it gives way to hyperbole. The terms "infinitude", "whole creation" and "boundless space of chaos" are at the limits of the mind's ability to conceive of them. As Longinus notes, "the best hyperboles are those which conceal the fact that they are hyperboles" (149). Guised in the cloak of science, language gives sublime pleasures with the force of content. The excesses of nature are at one with the extremity of the text. They derive their power from what Longinus claims is "the finest feature of the orator's imagery," this being "its adherence to reality and truth" (123). Longinus uses the defence of Hyperides to illustrate this deferral to that which is greater than language and yet is contained within it.

After Athens was defeated in war, Hyperides proposed that the slaves, who had fought in battle, be disenfranchised for longer. Defending himself from accusations of treason, he claimed it was the battle and not himself that had framed the proposition. Longinus argues that "his conception has therefore transcended the bounds of mere persuasion"

(124). Deferring to the battle, he joins with the audience in being witness to a grandeur that exceeds all of them. While produced from within regulative spaces, the sublime can also be subversive of regulative power. "The sublime exceeds and therefore calls into question all convention, all normalcy" (Thurber 212). This is the paradoxical quality of

Kant's own Universal Natural History, that at once declares how vast God is with a reason that undermines God with its own vast conceptions.

Kant quotes two poets, Alexander Pope and Joseph Addison, in the Universal Natural

History. They illustrate the decay that will then lead to rebirth, the formation of new

55 worlds and the death of old worlds. The phrases "bubble burst" and "Nature fails", penned respectively by Pope and Addison, recall the tragic content of the Longinian sublime, the rhetorical victory over material defeat (qtd in Cosmogony 151, 156). The destructive forces of history in Longinus, in the death sentence or the loss of a battle, are superseded by Kant's description of the great destructive forces of the universe, by the way in which "worlds and systems perish and are swallowed up in the abyss of eternity"

(Cosmogony 149). In Kant these worlds and systems are also born once more, and it is in considering how "such magnificence and such greatness can flow from a single law", that he passes from the tragedy of Longinian transport to the supersensible (Cosmogony

135). In the Universal Natural History it is Newton's law that elevates the subject into a thinking of the universe. Newton explained how the same forces were at work in the rotation of the moon around the planets, the planets around the sun, the sun around the

Galactic centre, and a multitude of galaxies around an immeasurably distant centre of the universe. While an object of satire for Voltaire, Kant turns this law of gravitation into a pleasure for the imagination of the supersensible, its extension of the mind ranging over multiplicities of scale.

The Critique of Judgement (1790) turns from the infinitude of the universe described in the

Universal Natural History to that apprehended by the mind. The cognitive capacity to think the universe is called the sublime. From the laws of Newtonian science Kant has passed to the powers of the mind to think the laws that conceive of this science. Both

English translators of the Universal Natural History are critical of Kant's later philosophy.

Hastie describes the transition between a young and old Kant:

Absorbed in the forms of his own subjective perception and reflection, he shut

out for the moment the great universe beyond, which gives them their true

meaning and purpose, separating himself by a false abstraction from it, till the

infinite space and time through which, in his youthful ardour, he had ranged with

such freedom and power, shrank from their immensity and reality into the

spectral phantoms of his own subjectivity. (Kant, Cosmogony xl)

This spectacular dismissal of Kant's philosophical work describes the transition in his work from an infinite universe to an infinity of mind. The later Kant returns to the vastness of the universe on his own terms, peering out from beneath the hooded eyes of one self-conscious of his own conditions of subjectivity. The shift from a cosmogonic to a philosophical mode of writing exposes the traces of each in the other. His philosophy of aesthetics exposes the subjective pleasures to be found in a scientific universe. The theological content of his scientific cosmogony exposes, in turn, the religious presuppositions of his aesthetic philosophy. For the Critique of Judgment, at once distant from God and an astronomical universe, synthesises both with an aesthetic that is at work in each of them. The infinitudes of God and universe become those of cognition.

The mind's ability to conceive of the infinite, to think of its idea, replaces God and the universe with the subject of mind. The sublime in the Critique of Judgement is this subject's affirmation, the elevated feeling that accompanies a cognitive interpolation of the infinite.

In the Universal Natural History the infinite is the hinge upon which the flux of the relative swings:

And, I say it again, the greatness of what has to perish, is not the least obstacle

to it; for all that is great becomes small, nay, it becomes as it were a mere point,

when it is compared with the Infinitude with which creation has to exhibit in

unlimited space throughout the succession of eternity. (Cosmogony 152).

In the Critique of Judgement this absolute measure becomes the capacity of the human mind for the sublime. The mind's capacity to think the infinite brings the rest of the object world into the flux of its own thought. The destruction and creation of planets before the might of the universe turns into the alterations of the mind's perception that take place before the infinite:

... the sublime is that in comparison with which everything else is small. Here we easily see

that nothing can be given in nature, however great it is judged by us to be, which

could not if considered in another relation be reduced to the infinitely small; and

conversely there is nothing so small, which does not admit of extension by our

Imagination to the greatness of a world, if compared with still smaller standards.

Telescopes have furnished us with abundant material for making the first remark,

microscopes for the second. (109)

The telescope and microscope bring about an incommensurability between the eye and the mind, between what is seen and what is thought.

While the telescope challenged metaphysical assumptions about the universe with an infinite conception of space, the microscope revealed that there was no smallest unit of division in nature. From an infinity above, the new sciences plunged into the infinite

58 divisibility of matter below. Aesthetically, these infinitudes complement each other, and position human beings between them. As Victor Hugo writes in later times, "Where the telescope ends, the microscope begins. Who is to say, of the two, which has the grander view?" (qtd in

Maor 224). Kant's philosophy heals the rift opened between these mutable infinitudes, of distance and division, by giving the mind the power to conceive of that which exceeds the eye. The supersensible is the name of this resolution, within the larger category of the sublime, and it refers to the overcoming of the sensorium to think the vast, infinite and eternal. It affords pleasure because it resolves a conflict of dimensions, and elevates the subject's reason and imagination to the scale of the universe.

The supersensible appeared to absorb the humbling shocks that astronomy was delivering to Europe at the time. In 1838 the distance to the star Cygni was measured at

11 light-years, or 100 million million kilometres away (Hirshfeld 262). It required two telescopes on two sides of the world to calculate, but the consequences of this parallax could not be thought of in terrestrial terms. It was a parallax made in the mind, of the immense distance between the sight of the star at night and the massive figure of its distance. Quickly following Bessel's calculation, the fruits of two more parallax calculations appeared. Vega was even further away, while Alpha Centauri, the closest known star to this solar system, was still a massive 20 million million kilometres distant.

Kant's sublime is totalising. It takes a broken picture of human understanding and pastes it back into a shape larger than it was. This symmetry of mind and universe was sewn like a seed in the Universal Natural History. Newton's law, upon which this early text was based, was both a part of the universe and a creation of mind. The infinitude of the cosmos slips into the infinitude of the mind's ability to think it, in a Longinian conflation

59 of nature with its representation. Kant would describe the aesthetic pleasure of this universal law in the Universal Natural History:

If the presentation of all this perfection moves the imagination, the

understanding is seized by another kind of rapture when, from another point of

view, it considers how such magnificence and such greatness can flow from a

single law, with an eternal and perfect order. (Cosmogony 135)

The pleasure of astronomy is not so much to be found in the ability to think infinity, then, but in the thinking of the laws by which infinity is thought. The universality of its law relies on calculation, on the numerical cognition that produces the infinity of its universality. The measurement of things, from longitude to the price of goods that made their way over the ocean, contain by their own abstraction the pleasures of the supersensible. Through a cognition of the laws of measurement, the mind is elevated from the terrestrial world.

In the early years of the twentieth century Edwin Hubble calculated the first parallax for another galaxy. What Kant called a nebula was measured at a million light years, or about ten million million million kilometres away. Later Andromeda turned out to be twice this figure. What Kant considered an immeasurable distance, Hubble began to measure. A new unit of measurement, the parsec, was invented to simplify the immensity. It was calculated directly from the angle of parallax. The pleasure that comes from the contemplation of such immensities makes the mind feel both exalted and small. The scientific imagination's push outward into the universe accompanied a physical movement to the end of the oceans. By Kant's time Europeans had colonised many

60 coastlines. Apart from some hidden valleys and mountain plateaus, undiscovered islands and the forbidding cold of the poles, the world appeared as one. The universal consciousness of astronomy was also that totality of the terrestrial globe. The imagination of imperialism that wandered this globe began to attach itself more and more, not to the colonies of Africa or India, but to the surface of the planets.

To conceive of the imperial and extrasolar imagination as one, it is not necessary to look any further than the transition between Kant's Universal Natural History and the Critique of

Judgement. These texts represent a transition between two different laws that afford the subject that thinks them pleasure. The first text was exalted by Newton's law, while the pleasures of the Critique's mathematically sublime are based upon a moral law. The appreciation of the sublime requires an acculturation to this moral law, which is the condition for being able to think the infinitude of the universal. Again, these texts slip into each other when Kant considers what kinds of beings might live on Jupiter or

Saturn. This section of Universal Natural History was expunged by Hastie, who regarded it as embarrassing for Kant's scientific credibility (Jaki in Universal 9-10). Yet it is perhaps the section that most validates Hastie's own reading of Kant as a "precursor of the popular scientific writer" (Cosmogony xiv).

Like Kepler's creatures of the moon, Kant's aliens are created from within the matrix of universal laws. These laws privilege those living further away from the corrupting influence of the sun. The angelic and intelligent inhabitants of Saturn and Jupiter are "as an ocean undisturbed by the storms of passions" (Universal 190). They are more reasonable and Godlike than those living on Mercury, whose inhabitants are more like "a man from Greenland or a Hottentot" (Universal 190). Here Kant slurs non-Europeans

61 into a class of people with lower intellect. In bringing his terrestrial racism to the extraterrestrial, Kant subjects the inhabitants of Mercury to a moral law that is now on the scale of the universe. The oceanic horizons of imperialism are taken into a

Newtonian plane of orbit.

Kant's preference for the dark reaches of space can be compared to More's solar morality. The reason to which More subjects his own world, and from which the Island of Utopia is born, is by contrast a solar reason. Kant's sun, by contrast, corrupts reason with passion. In Kant's post-Copernican world, the centre of the universe has moved from the sun into the darkness of space. Astronomy is not then an especially utopian science, as it finds the greater infinitudes in shadow. While More's moral infinitude lies in the sun, Kant's is contained by a void. As such, Kant moves away from a natural morality, instead placing sublime pleasures in the refractive mirrors of a numerical capitalism. As David Clarke has pointed out in a unique analysis of his aliens, Kant's rejection of the utopian trope of communicability was at one with his championing of private property. Both pertain to the freedom of the individual subject (216-8). His angelic aliens do not offer a resolution of modern contradictions, then, so much as a transcendence of them.

For Kant, a subject's understanding of the universal moral law is a prerequisite for feeling the sublime. The moral law acculturates the mind into an appreciation of the universal, that leads to the pleasure of its infinitude. More himself went to university at

Oxford and for a time belonged to the Carthusian Order of monks. Education, then, was probably behind the moral ideas in Utopia. For Kant those who have no education have no moral law, and thus "no feeling" for the sublime (Critique 116). The differences

62 between More and Kant lie in their alienations. While More is at a distance from the law of his society, Kant's alienation is more profound. Reading an account of the experience of the sublime in the writings of the geologist and mountain climber Horace-Benedict de

Sassure, Kant cites a peasant who "unhesitatingly called all lovers of snow-mountains fools" (Critique 115-6). For Kant this is not because the peasant himself hasn't the capacity to experience nature, which lies within his own human nature, but because he hasn't had an education. An alienation from and subsequent appreciation of nature lies in an education that acculturates the subject to the moral law and its sublime consequences. Kant resolves the alienation of the subject from nature with an idea of sublime nature. This is the elevation of the supersensible, the mind's ability to think the magnitude of nature through the universality of the moral. Exceeding the standards of sense, the moral exceeds nature, and thus can return to think ideas of nature that similarly exceed their representation. This is a pleasure because the mind thinks that it is implied in a transcendental idea that supersedes its limits.

Kant's Sublime in Heroic SF Narratives

The pleasure of Kant's sublime is, then, consequent upon the changes taking place in his world. His Universal Natural History and Critique of Judgement are attempts to reposition the subject in relation to the revelations of the new science of astronomy. Two studies of

Kant's sublime--Thomas Weiskel's The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and

Psychology of Transcendence (1976) and Alenka Zupancic's Ethics of the Real (2000)--describe his accommodation of the new cosmos with two stages of sublime cognition. Weiskel accounts for the first moment in terms of a breakdown in the usual relation of mind and object (24). Zupancic describes the way this first moment gives way to a second:

The first is a moment of anxiety and of discomfiting fascination in the face of

something incomparably larger and more powerful than oneself (this appears as a

massive and 'overflowing' presence). This is an anxiety from which the subject

can escape only by transforming it into the second moment, into the feeling of

the sublime itself--that is, of the subject's own 'supersensible' superiority. (149)

Weiskel writes of the supersensible in these terms:

the mind recovers the balance of outer and inner by constituting a fresh relation

between itself and the object such that the very indeterminacy which erupted in

phase two is taken as symbolizing the mind's relation to a transcendent order.

(24)

For Weiskel this second moment is something of a return, as the mind re-establishes its original harmony with the world, albeit reconstituted by transcendence. This account of the sublime positions it in terms of an irruption to a continuum. The psyche is less able to achieve such "balance" for Zupancic, whose subject is precariously situated on a sense of superiority founded on "anxiety" and discomfort.

In "Lovecraft and the Semiotic Kantian Sublime" (2002), Bradley A. Will was the first to recognise the operation of these moments in sf narrative. He describes H.P. Lovecraft's

"The Colour Out of Space", in which a group of scientists cannot make sense of a meteorite that has fallen from space. It has strange properties that they can only describe as a "color that is not a color" (14). Bradley identifies this colour to be "outside the

64 system of signification" (16). Will also refers to Lovecraft's "The Abyss", that tells the story of two friends who are attacked by something that is equally beyond the usual limits, a monster that is huge and mysterious. They describe the thing as a "the pit--the maelstrom--the ultimate abomination ... the unnameable", turning their negation of understanding into the positivism of metaphor (qtd in Will 17). In doing so they pass from the first to the second moment of Kant's sublime. These moments turn into a narrative structure in these stories, as the unknowing of a hero and his readers turn into a knowledge shared between them, what Longinus recognises as a shared exaltation in that which exceeds the mind's conceptions.

The two moments of sublime cognition that Weiskel and Zupancic identify in Kant's philosophy, and that Will discovers in Lovecraft, turn the sublime into a psychic structure. Weiskel juggles Kant and Freud to mediate his aesthetics with structures of egocentric subjectivity and their sublimations (31-3). Zupancic synthesises Kant and

Jacques Lacan, a philosophy of reason with a post-structural version of Freud. Common to each of these disparate fields of thought--from Kant to Freud to Lacan--is a concern with the constitution of the subject. The subject of The Critique of Judgement is elated by a freedom of mind attendant upon the revelations of the new sciences, Europe's annexation of global territories, and the French revolution (regarding the latter,

Zammito argues that the section on the sublime was the last to be added to the Critique, and thus subsequent to the 1789 insurrection (275-83)). Freud, on the other hand, devised the complex repressions of his own subject from the disintegration of this freedom. He wrote amongst the crises of the European empires as their territorial expansions reached their limits, entered into a stage of high finance, and then collapsed into the First World War (Arrighi 214-73). The Lacanian subject was also born of crisis

65 and amidst a consolidation of capitalist power in the late 1960s as the revolutionary political action of French people threatened to dissolve the state. Although he was not supportive of this action (Seminar 17), Lacan's philosophy can be historicized alongside the theoretical resistance to the state mobilised by the French poststructuralists (Bannet;

Newman). Like Jacques Derrida, Julia Kristeva, Michel Foucault and Roland Barthes,

Lacan proposed a linguistic model of knowledge and a subject that critiqued the solidity of these constructions.

The subjective moments of sublime cognition that both Weiskel and Zupancic describe are not only relevant to the narrative structures of sf, but to a historical modernity. When the hero of an sf novel confronts the conditions by which the world has been constructed in the first moment of sublime cognition, the disorientation of this hero is a response to new, that is modern, developments within this world. The second moment is one that partakes of the pleasures of these developments, as it transcends the rift between mind and world that they had previously opened. A first thing that can be said about these moments is that they embody in the hero the patriarchal structure of modern narrative. Barbara Claire Freeman finds in this second moment of supersensible cognition one that "establishes and maintains the self's domination over its objects of rapture" (3). The masculine identity of the genre's pleasures has already been identified by numerous feminist commentators (Armitt 2; Browning; Gomoll 7-8; Lefanu 2;

Rabkin, "Science" 9; Yntema 1). That the narrative structures of sf have so often been used to position women in objectified and subordinate roles to men, or simply to perpetuate patriarchal narrativity, does not necessarily exclude women from their cognitive pleasures. The psychic structures of reading an sf novel pretend to be universal, that is transgendered, even if they partake in a largely gendered history.

Greg Bear's novel Eon (1985) features a female hero while repeating a masculine generic form. A physicist is taken to a stone that has arrived mysteriously in Earth orbit. It is hundreds of kilometres across and hollow inside, filled with an atmosphere, cities and strange technologies. It looks like humans made the stone, but even more disorientation awaits Patricia when she is shown in the Stone's last chamber:

"It's bigger," she said. Farley and Lanier stood by the truck, looking up at her.

Wu and Chang joined them. "It's bigger than the asteroid. It goes beyond the

end. Is that what you're trying to tell me?"

"We don't tell," Lanier said. "We show. It's the only way."

"You're trying to tell me it doesn't stop, it goes right on out the other end?" She

heard the touch of panic and high-pitched fascination in her own voice. (71)

Here Bear describes the sublime moment of disorientation almost in Zupancic's exact words. Patricia's cognitive faculties have failed her because a gap has opened between her and the nature of the object. Her "touch of panic" betrays her anxiety about this failure, yet she is also fascinated by that which has produced it, by the conditions that lie behind this new world. There is only the slightest hint of fear in this passage, and this absence distinguishes Kant's sublime from that of Burke, the latter's physiology of fear more suited to describing the horror genre than sf. Kant's subject is not so much physiological as cognitive, and it is to such a sublime that the cognitively based genre of sf lends itself.

Patricia's disorientation will give way to the supersensible when she realises that her work in physics, or more precisely that of her colleague, is implicit in the Stone's infinitude. With the knowledge that her mind may be capable of grasping the laws behind it she extends her thought into the infinitude that was at first discomforting.

Hardly pausing for breath, she transcends her "panic" to follow her "high-pitched fascination" into a feeling of the supersensible:

The Stanford professor, six years before, had been wrong. Someone besides

extraterrestrials and gods could appreciate her work. She knew why she had been

brought up from Vandenberg, carried to the Stone by shuttle and OTV.

The asteroid was longer on the inside than it was on the outside.

The seventh chamber went on forever. (71)

Patricia's ability to think that which exceeds her, to intuitively grasp what cannot be represented in its totality, gives rise to an elevated feeling.

The historical conditions defamiliarised by sf are to some extent those that gave rise to

Kant's stages of sublime cognition. As Kant was disorientated by a new universe that was revealed by astronomy, so Patricia is confronted with a newly constituted world. Sf specifies the modern experience in terms of this collision of worlds, those incommensurable totalities that are reconciled by a new and supersensible idea about the universe that contains them. Sf heroes are conscious not only of their own disorientations, but of the malleability of these worlds, of the possibility that their picture of this universe might be wrong. Disorientation leads not only to the supersensible and its universal ideas, but to a consciousness that these ideas might be mistaken. This is

68 precisely the point that the philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard wants to make about

Kant's Critique of Judgement. His Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (1994) should be distinguished from his earlier, aesthetic arguments about the sublime, in that its subject is cognition rather than art. Lyotard emphasizes the subjective basis for knowledge in

Kant, the reflexive consciousness that is attendant upon the experience of disorientation.

Having seen something that exceeds its capacities, judgment turns back on itself in an attempt to judge its own abilities to judge. Realizing its inability to judge, it can no longer grasp even its own conditions for existence, and finds that it has no absolute ground by which it can judge anything else. It can only make tentative, subjective judgments of the world around it.

Maintaining that consciousness could never be receptive to the totality of the universe,

Lyotard reads Kant's representations to be partial and finite. Representations are always conditioned by their own state of representation, leading cognition back to look for that which conditions them. Coming to know more in this way simply means receiving more conditioned knowledge. Thought is engaged in an infinite regress as it investigates its own conditions, each thought itself conditioned by a further condition in the series. The duplicity of representation and the real, between the phenomenal world and that which lies unseen within it, leads to an infinite series of reflection. The second moment of sf narrative, the supersensible thought of universal ideas, is subjectified by these conditions of cognition. In this way sf can be complicit with the universalising ideologies of modernity while critiquing them, undermining the universal with a malleability of worlds.

The hero of John Brunner's Times Without Number (1969) is a time traveller who polices the continuum of history. Returning from a trip to the Aztec civilisation, Don Miguel

69 realises that, while his own time and world possesses the superior technology of time travel, its presumptions about the universe that it polices might be flawed:

In some ways, unquestionably, we're superior. And yet we may have our blind

spots too. Although Borremeo showed us how we might rotate the dimension of

substances so that the world becomes flat and we can voyage back into time,

although we live in an orderly world, rid of much of the horror of war--

nonetheless, one cannot but wonder whether we too are wasting on children's

toys marvels that later ages will put to use. (72)

This is not only the speculation of one sf hero but, as Rose argues, the philosophical position of the genre as a whole. It narrates the stages of Kant's reflective judgement, the series of self-reflexivity that aspires to a universal conception that it can never subjectively reach. In presenting the malleability of worlds and the moment of disorientation that narrates their collision, sf reflects upon its own conditions of production amidst the transformations of history.

The cognition of sf narrative is not only, then, to be found in the hero's experiences. In so far as sf is a refraction of history, it defamilarises the reader's own experience of different worlds. This is a more difficult claim to substantiate, short of encephalography, and one that relies on Jameson's notion of cognitive mapping, in which a text entertains an imaginary and ideological relationship to its times. More controversially, a sublime reading of a text entertains the possibility that the sublime can in fact be mediated by reading. This is what differentiates Kant and Longinus from Burke and Nye (American).

While the latter require a physical proximity to magnitude, the former locate the sublime

70 within the mind, such that a mere thought might give rise to its feeling. It is a mental transport, and in this sense the idea of the infinite tunnel or Way in Bear's Eon is potentially just as sublime for the reader as it is for Patricia. It is not so much a representation of Patricia's cognitive powers that is sublime, but a shared cognition of the idea itself that moves reader, author and hero alike. This is the point that Longinus makes when he describes how the orations of the ancient Greeks could bind both listeners and speaker to that which exceeded them all. To adapt a term from reader response theory, the mental movement is enabled by the idea of an "interpretive community" of readers who share an aesthetic predilection for the genre (Fish). In Eon this excess is made relevant to the species as a whole, and thus attains a universal dimension, when down the Way a city of humans from the future is discovered. These humans have in fact manufactured the Way and are living inside it, and remember

Patricia and her companions as the past. Thus Patricia and the reader, who presumably identify as members of the human race, are implied in this long stretch of time and space that exceeds them.

Other sf novels do not reach this second stage of sublime cognition. The hero of Lee

Harding's Displaced Person (1981), for instance, discovers that the world is dissimulating around him. Graeme slowly realises that he is being ignored by waiters, receptionists and other strangers, as well as forgotten by everybody he knows. Eventually, those who know him the most, his girlfriend and family, can no longer see him. Simultaneously, colour leeches out of his world, leaving him enveloped by a grey fog. He wanders about scavenging for food that has, like him, fallen through from the world he once lived in.

There seems to be no way back to people and colour. Near the end of the novel,

Graeme realises that the human race is being:

manipulated and pushed around by forces we are too puny to understand--like

cattle. Or specimens on a slide. I find that I can no longer believe in such things

as free will and personal motivation. We are all pawns in a game so vast we will

never be able to confront the forces that control our destinies, any more than the

tiny creatures who live in a rock pool can comprehend man or the tides that

govern their lives. (132)

The novel exposes the conditions by which reality is staged, and yet only hints at a supersensible resolution of its alienation.

The grey fog is what Slavoj Zizek, writing of Heinlein's "The Unpleasant Profession of

Jonathan Hoag" (1942), calls the "presymbolic in its abhorrent vitality" (Looking 14-5). In this story, the grey is "pulsing slowly as if with inchoate life" (Zizek, Looking 14). In

Harding too the fog has a "subtle breath" (62). The grey is not lifeless, then, but infused with life's possibilities. Graeme has fallen into Marin's neutral, that indistinction that precedes the creation of worlds. Unlike the neutral, however, Harding's grey is not filled with hope. There seems no way out. The book does not elevate its characters, or the reader, to the plane of the supersensible. In Heinlein's story, an alien tells Ted and

Cynthia that the Earth is an art project of a very powerful alien. However, the story does not allow them a way off the Earth and out of the art project. Harding and Heinlein show their characters the conditions that lie behind their worlds without elevating them to a cognitive supremacy with regard to these conditions.

The heroes of most sf novels are allowed to bridge the gap between their disorientations and the powers that are responsible for it. Often, this takes place through their possession of language. In Clifford Simak's Catface (1978), Asa stumbles onto a road through time. He finds himself instantly transported to the prehistoric Pleistocene era.

Unable to believe what he sees, Asa repeats to himself a word that will eventually sink into his mind as the representing the conditions of his new circumstances:

A mastodon, I told myself. For the love of Christ, a mastodon!

My mind seemed to catch and stay upon the word--a mastodon, a mastodon, a

mastodon--there was room for nothing else, just that one repeating word. Backed

against the clump of birch, I stood transfixed, the stuck needle of my mind

repeating that one word, while the beast was shuffling across the landscape,

turning now to head downhill toward the river. (42)

Repetition mends the breach between new and old worlds, between disorientation and comprehension.

In The Lathe of Heaven (1971), Ursula Le Guin's character Dr Haber also repeats words to affirm the existence of a new world. The psychiatrist is approached by a patient who claims that his dreams come true, that his representations determine the real. Dr Haber dismisses his account until his sleep experiment with George really does change reality.

Telling him to dream about a horse, Haber finds that the picture on his wall has been replaced. It is no longer a mountain but a horse:

'Was it there an hour ago? I mean, wasn't that a view of Mount Hood, when I

came in--before I dreamed about the horse?'

Oh Christ it had been Mount Hood the man was right

It had not been Mt Hood it could not have been Mt Hood it was a horse it was a

horse

It had been a mountain

A horse it was a horse it was--

He was staring at George Orr, staring blankly at him, several seconds must have

passed since Orr's question, he must not be caught out, he must inspire

confidence, he knew the answers. (25)

Le Guin's Haber is "staring blankly" as Asa in Simak's Catface "stood transfixed". Yet this exterior nullity is accompanied by an anxious activity of the mind.

In The Lathe of Heaven George calls the co-existence of the two worlds, before and after the dream, a "double-memory" (26). In Eon, Patricia's colleagues celebrate the invention of this double-memory by popping a bottle of champagne to celebrate her "new self"

(72). It is not only the boundaries of reality that have changed within these sf novels, but the character of the hero. When new worlds undermine the certainties of the old, and implicitly the certainty of all worlds, the hero is called upon to change. When things appears to be fragile and vulnerable to sudden change, the subject realises that their disorientation is due to a flawed understanding of what made up this world of things.

What can be seen and thought is not necessarily all there is.

Asa of Simak's Catface finds out that an alien lurking around his farm was responsible for transporting him to the Pleistocene. By the end of the novel, Asa is himself able to engineer time roads. The alien has given him a consciousness of their equations. His disorientation has turned into a supersensible implication in that which is larger than himself. This transcendence is accomplished by stepping into an alien mind:

Suddenly, thinking of them, the time equations were there again, exactly as he

had shown them to me, and looking at them, through his eyes from inside

himself, I saw how they fit together neatly and how they could be used. (250)

Stepping beyond his old consciousness and into a mind that is able to manipulate the infinitude of time is pleasurable for Asa because he exceeds his own finitude. The supersensible takes him beyond his own petty concerns and into the laws of the universe. In Le Guin's The Lathe of Heaven, Dr Haber manipulates George's dreams, which then change the world. His megalomania relies on this other subject through which he enters into the supersensible. Asa of Catface and Dr Haber of The Lathe of

Heaven both enter into a transcendental logic of the supersensible through another mind, and on behalf of the human race. Somewhat misguidedly, Haber is trying to improve the world through George's dreams, while Asa opens up the deep past for colonisation, away from the crowded and complex time that is his present. The idea of these supersensibles affords pleasure for the reader too, although in Le Guin this pleasure is problematised by Haber's inability to effect the changes he desires without imposing suffering. Wanting to solve the overpopulation problem, for instance, he brings about a mass plague. Hence Le Guin, while representing the pleasures of the supersensible, engages with the consequences of imposing its moral law upon others.

For the reader, the elevation of the supersensible takes place when the mind grasps those universal laws that the hero is attempting to manipulate (Brunner; Simak; Le Guin), or merely to understand (Bear). While in Brunner the time police are attempting to enforce their own version of history, in Bear, Simak and Le Guin, the collision with new worlds offers an escape from the old. In Bear's Eon the Earth's nations are confronting each other with nuclear arms. The time-roads in Catface offer an escape not only for him, but for millions of people living on an overpopulated planet. In The Lathe of Heaven the world has numerous problems that Haber is attempting to resolve. In Bear and Simak, the supersensible is a deus ex machina for these novels because it removes its characters from the complex problems that are being narrated around them, lifting them instead into the transcendental realms of future and past. The shape of these new worlds, however, will reflect the contradictions that they have transcended. The earlier part of Bear's novel is filled with conflicts between nation states, as the Americans, Chinese and Russians are at war over a finite Earth. As nuclear war destroys the planet, and fighting erupts inside the asteroid Stone, the Way presents the fantasy of an infinite territory that resolves the conflicts over a finite Earth. It offers a transcendental solution to the contradictions brought about by expansionist and competing nation-states. In Catface the transcendence is thoroughly Kantian. Asa has returned from the city to the farm he lived on as a child.

Asa's ability to make time roads transcends this contradiction between the urban and rural, opening infinite spaces to the overcrowded populations of the cities. His supersensible ability overcomes an alienation from nature with a power over it.

The Liquid Void: Fatal Pleasures of the Alien

The psychic movement from disorientation to the supersensible is described by Kant's category of the mathematically sublime. While the supersensible overcomes the resistance of nature to the mind's ability to represent it, a second category of the sublime maintains this resistance. While the mathematical extends mind into the universe through the laws of nature, the dynamically sublime contemplates the rude and formless existence of this nature in the first place. Both sublimes develop Burke's taxonomy. The dynamical incorporates the visceral fear upon which Burke based his sublime, while the mathematical incorporates the uniformity that Burke described as responsible for the sublime (132-5), and that pertains to the sight of the ocean, Arctic ice and desert. The threat that nature poses to the subject in Kant is, however, not so much to the body as to the mind's ability to conceive of its excess. The incommensurability of nature and the subject's ability to think it leads to an exaltation of the freedom of a mind that lies beyond nature. Again, the modality of this feeling is to be found in a pre-disposition toward the moral. Fearing God is the paradoxical example Kant gives for the pleasures to be found within the dynamically sublime, as one who possesses the moral law has no need to fear God and yet finds him fearful (Critique 110). The example is a mental one, and lifts the sublime from Burke's materiality into a mind that struggles to conceive of the material. The dialectic between Kant's mathematically and dynamically sublimes provides a means of conceiving of many of the topics featured in sf. The alien, for instance, is a paradoxical being whose appearance is understood by the laws of cognition

(mathematical) but whose actual existence is not so easily assimilated (dynamical). Kant's sublime dialectic rephrases Gary Wolfe's definition of sf, as a tension between the known and unknown, in terms of pleasure.

I want to speculate here that the origins of the alien lie in the vastest terrestrial example of the mathematically and dynamically sublime. The magnitude of the ocean, its dynamically sublime qualities, cannot properly be thought except in terms of abstractions, as the sum of distances, depths and times of travel that pertain to the mathematically sublime. The very material extent of the ocean remains unthinkable, however, as its distances and depths remain imperceptible. Such a thinking is pleasurable for Kant's dynamically sublime because the mind senses its own power as it measures itself against an ocean that resists thought. The dance of thought over its magnitude gives rise to a thinking of the multitude of possibilities that it contains. As the eye roams over the surface of the liquid sea, it may imagine it sees dolphins and whales rising from the shadows of waves. For sailors of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, there appeared giant squid, jellyfish, kraken, sea serpents and turtles. Inhabiting the oceanic depths, they lie beyond the law of the land, and are yet named by the laws that determine terrestrial life. The process of naming these autonomous beings subjected them to the morality of a universalising language, to the law of the grotesque (Harpham 131).

Many of these creatures, such as the squid and jellyfish, are larger versions of that which is known. Their magnitude increases with their distance from land. The sea serpent and super eel, sighted during the 1700s and 1800s, have not thus far been discovered by science. They inhabit the space between known and unknown, real and imagined, rising amorphously from fluid, watery depths. These long, snake-like creatures moved across the water in ways that were not understood. Other inhabitants of the deep waters are pastiches of the known. The kraken had many heads, and other whale-sized animals sprouted multiple fins and armour. They possess the formless qualities of the ocean itself, merging into the hallucinatory and shape-shifting movement of the waves. Sailors

78 feared these legendary creatures. Attacking or colliding with a ship, they threatened to dissolve its solidity, to send it into the undifferentiated mass of the Ocean.

By the nineteenth century, the poles remained the last natural spectre of the Earth that had not been explored. Arctic voyages were launched under the popular misconception that an open polar sea lay beyond the northern ice packs. Unable to believe that the Inuit survived there, it was thought these frozen lands would open out onto new tropics, lands at the top of the world (Richard 295-6). After all, the cold was the locale of reason, the privileged place for the European race (Kant, Universal 190). The Inuit, a nomadic people, contradicted the assumption that cold led to better degrees of civilisation. A popular theory of the nineteenth century maintained that the poles were really holes into the Earth, where other human beings lived.

These hopeful fantasies would soon turn to stories of danger as explorers returned from these final terrestrial frontiers. Ships caught amongst the shifting ice over the winter months were often crushed beneath its immense pressures. A lack of fresh food gave rise to scurvy among crews. Yet the search for the mythical Northwest passage, which would break the monopoly of the trading companies, kept attracting explorers and their sponsors (Richard 297). By the time hope for such a passage had faded, the Antarctic's natural sublime was reason enough for exploration. There was a big market for polar travel narratives (Richard 305), as explorers of cold and snow excited high society with their descriptions of ice formations like Gothic architecture, starvation, isolation and sometimes cannibalism. Grace Scott suggested that her brother, Robert Scott, responded to the:

call of the vast empty spaces; silence; the beauty of untrodden snow; liberty of

thought and action; the wonder of the snow and seeming infinitude of its

uninhabited regions whose secrets had not then been pierced, and the hoped-for

conquest of raging elements. (Spufford 6)

If the conquest of these impenetrable reaches ever occurred, the Antarctic would no longer be dynamically sublime. For this sublime depends on a resistance to conquest, tempting the supersensible destiny of the human mind while refusing to realise its supremacy.

While Arctic and Antarctic explorers did not report seeing any extraordinary land creatures, a literature of the ice created them. It was before the backdrop of so many failed excursions that Edgar Allan Poe wrote the doomed journey The Narrative of Arthur

Gordon Pym (1837). Its narrator discovers tropical lands beyond the crush of pack ice, only to then come upon a sheet of white extending into the sky, and "a shrouded human figure, very far larger in human proportions than any dweller among men. And the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow" (155). Twenty years before, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1831) also imagined an oversized human shape in the ice. In the first scene of this novel a gigantic man appears to the crew of an exploration ship that seeks the true North Pole. He is sledding alone across the Arctic, "a being which had the shape of a man, but apparently of gigantic stature". They watch him through "telescopes, until he was lost among the distant inequalities of the ice" (43-4).

These immense humanoids loom in the foreground of the poles, appearing at the end of

Poe's narrative and disappearing at the beginning of Shelley's. They extrapolate upon the

80 human rather than animal figure, showing the reader their own deformed features. The grotesque is no longer the domain of devils, or nature, but of the human.

Shelley's term "inequalities" describes the constant motion of the ice floes. Fluctuations in temperature bring about cracks through which the cold sea appears, and collisions from which ridges suddenly rise. From a falling sea level icebergs loom. A person upon the ice is vulnerable to stranding upon a floe as it drifts out to sea, to killer whales who break through the surface of the ice to pull their prey under, to sudden immersion in a cold ocean and being crushed by the collision of ice that had momentarily parted

(Robert Scott; Shackleton). The lonely figure appearing before Shelley's sailors braves the dangers of the ice. The narrative expectation of the nineteenth-century Gothic novel is of the supernatural, and this figure's survival in a hostile land does supersede nature. Yet

Shelley's innovation was to attribute this incredible not to the supernatural but to the reason of science. Her superhuman figure was created by scientific experiments. Poe's stories are also reasonable extrapolations of what might lie at the ends of the world. In

"MS. Found in a Bottle" a ship ploughs through giant waves. "For a moment of intense terror she paused upon the giddy pinnacle, as if in contemplation of her own sublimity ...

" (87). The phrase is suspended between Burke's fearful sublime that that of a self- reflexive, contemplative, Kantian one. In "A Descent into the Maelstrom" a whirlpool inspires a similar movement between visceral and cognitive sublimes, as the narrator notes "the unnatural curiosity which had taken the place of my terrors" (113).

In Frankenstein science rather than nature is the cause of such terrors and fascinations, as an artificial man escapes Frankenstein's laboratory to run off into the night. Shelley's use of science resituates the Gothic from being a fantastic genre, set in medieval times, to a

81 mode amenable to modern reason and setting. Burke's physiological sublime, that found its expression in this romantic genre of fear (Mishra), gave way in Frankenstein to a form of fiction more amenable to Kant's reasonable sublime. In exceeding the powers of his creator, the artificial man gives technology a life of its own. This is why Thurber links

"science and technology to the sublime" in Frankenstein (215), and Freeman finds that its

Kantian sublime betrays an insecurity about the feminine that lies repressed within it, the artificial man being repulsive and monstrous to those who see him (79-90). It is also why

Shelley is generally recognised by historians of sf as a major precursor of the genre

(Aldiss, Billion 22-63; Hillegas 11; Scholes and Rabkin 92; Rose 35; Stableford

"Frankenstein"). Frankenstein proclaimed the power of scientific law in its own historical period, yet its ideology is at a distance from the supersensible pleasures of this law.

Instead, the monster is a warning about the consequences of these pleasures, which in

Shelley's own time had unleashed a wave of industrialisation. "The monster is the sublime personified" in so far as he exceeds the control and comprehension of his creator and the human mind (Thurber 216). "Science enables the sublime;" Thurber writes, "it becomes specific, identifiable, palpable. It makes the supernatural natural; it allows Frankenstein to see, hear and taste, almost, what the sublime feels like" (217). He recognises the sublimity of this law in Poe too, one that is lain "in the solution of the mystery", in its universe of reason rather than in the mystery itself (220).

Frankenstein's monster not only personifies Kant's mathematically sublime, the infinitude of scientific law, but his dynamically sublime too. He is a part of a hallucinatory history that accompanies the frontiers of world and mind. As the sea serpent appeared to sailors sliding among the waves of the vast ocean, and

Frankenstein's monster appears on the magnitudinous ice, in the twentieth century the

UFO appeared in the skies of the Western imagination. The coldness of ice is replaced by the coldness of space, and sea creatures by aliens. The origins of such visions lie in the dynamically sublime, that substitutes the impossibility of conceiving of something's magnitude with the possibilities that lie within it. As an Arctic explorer from 1856, Dr

Elisha Kent Kane, writes:

6 PM. Refraction Again! There is a black globe floating in the air, about 3

degrees north of the sun. What it is you can not tell. Is it a bird or a balloon?

Presently comes a sort of shimmering about its circumference, and on a sudden

it changes its shape. Now you see plainly what it is. It is a grand piano, and

nothing else. Too quick this time! You had hardly named it, before it was an

anvil--an anvil large enough for Mulciber and his Cyclops to beat out the

loadstone of the poles. You have not quite got it adjusted to your satisfaction,

before your anvil itself is changing; it contracts itself centrewise, and rounds itself

endwise, and presto, it has made itself duplicate--a pair of colossal dumb-bells. A

moment! and it is the black globe again. (qtd in Spufford 87-8)

Kane calls these optical effects the "Necromantic juggle" (qtd in Spufford 88), a phrase that well describes Frankenstein's monster, whose limbs were retrieved from graves. The monster is an assemblage, his dead limbs dressing an artificial spark of life, juggling the inert. As Kane animates the inanimate, so Frankenstein's necromancy brings his monster from nothingness, and keeps the lifeless tendencies of matter afloat above the inanimate materiality that haunts it.

Narratives of reanimation amidst the polar ice reappear in the twentieth century too.

They were given an imaginary credence after several intact mammoths were found frozen and preserved in Siberia and Alaska (Lister and Bahn 37-61). The suggestion that polar regions may hold the secrets and lifeforms of another age is taken one step forward by Lovecraft's "At the Mountains of Madness" (1939). It is the record of

Antarctic explorers who discover the remains of an ancient and alien civilisation. Their visit brings the creatures, hibernating since a forgotten ice age, back to life. They appear to be marine in origin, and cannot be classified as either vegetable or animal (32-3). They resemble the anamorphic Kraken, having multiple heads and spines on their bodies, and transcend the boundaries by which the terrestrial can be thought. It turns out that the creatures of Lovecraft's lost world arrived at "the nascent, lifeless earth out of cosmic space" (84). They need no protection in space, being "able to traverse the interstellar ether on vast membranous wings" (84). Landing on Earth, they proceed to inhabit the ocean where they synthesise life as we know it. The flight of these creatures between solar systems, their history underneath the sea and their final settlement in the Antarctic creates a relation between void, ocean and ice. The frontiers of human habitation are the breeding grounds of creatures at the frontier of the imagination.

The Antarctic was the final terrestrial frontier in Lovecraft's time, and it was a place of death. The horrific stories of explorers Robert Scott and Ernest Shackleton were recent history. They relived the myth of Christ as they journeyed to the land of the dead and resurrected themselves upon their return. It was in this period of Antarctic exploration that Sigmund Freud wrote his theory of the death drive in Beyond the Pleasure Principle

(1920). It explains the appearance of the lifeless within life by describing the attraction of dead matter upon living matter, of the inanimate upon the animate. For Freud, the

84 matter of the body is attracted to its previous, unliving state. The death drive may explain something of the attraction of these polar expanses upon the white explorer.

Beyond the Pleasure Principle developed ideas in Freud's paper of the year before, "The

Uncanny" (1919). Harold Bloom calls "The Uncanny", "Freud's theory of the sublime"

("Freud" 218) and David Ellison claims it is "the sublime for our age" (53). If there is a resemblance between the sublime and the uncanny, it lies in their description of that which the mind can and cannot completely assimilate. The infinitude of Kant's sublime is now produced in the reflection of two mirrors, in the incongruity of dissimulation and simulation, the endless wavering between identification and non-identification. There is a remainder to this infinite movement. As Aristotle notes of the infinite, it is something that can always be taken outside of itself (Moore 43). This is discomforting, as a resemblance does not necessarily mean an equivalence.

The doll and automaton are Freud's examples of this confusion between appearance and substance, human and machine, life and death. They embody that which is familiar and yet lies out of its usual context. Its form is incommensurable with its material being, its imitation of life confused with a unthinkable death. Frankenstein's monster is this very living dead, whose reanimated limbs lie between the animate and inanimate, neither of the breath of life nor of its decay. In his study of sf, Gary K. Wolfe traces the dialectic of known and unknown throughout sf's images, claiming that this is a central generic tension. This is certainly the tension at work in Frankenstein. When he dreams that he sees his sister on the street, for instance, Frankenstein's living embrace is cursed by its dialectical opposite. "Delighted and surprised, I embraced her; but as I imprinted the first kiss on her lips, they became livid with the hue of death" (86). Frankenstein's infusion

85 of life with its contrary death, or in Frances Ferguson's reading, of the born with the unborn, articulates the Freudian death drive.

J.G. Ballard thinks through Freud's description of a compulsion towards death, a repetition-compulsion, in his 1964 story "The Drowned Giant". The story reverses the perspective of Swift's tale in which Gulliver finds himself stranded on a beach, surrounded by tiny people. Instead, Ballard narrates his story from a Lilliputian's point of view, and discovers a massive corpse lying on the coast. He returns to the site of the beaching, claiming that:

There was nothing necrophilic about this, for to all intents the giant was still alive

for me, indeed more alive than many of the people watching him. What I found

so fascinating was partly his immense scale, the huge volumes of space occupied

by his arms and legs, which seemed to confirm the identity of my own miniature

limbs, but above all the mere categorical fact of his existence. Whatever else in

our lives might be open to doubt, the giant, dead or alive, existed in an absolute

sense, providing a glimpse into a world of similar absolutes of which we

spectators were such imperfect and puny copies. (44)

Repressing the necrophilic connotations of his attraction to the corpse, the narrator still proceeds to juggle his own limbs with those of the dead giant. Identifying with the massive body, he reduces the gap between the living and the dead. The relative identifications of arm with arm, leg with leg, give way to an uncanny comparison of large and small, of repetition in scale. The uncanny relation between live and dead limbs will lead the narrator to consider the potential lack of inertia lain in his own limbs, and of the

86 effort required to sustain his own life. Ballard reveals an existential side to the appearance of the living dead, as the sheer existence of the thing comes forth from the thing itself. Freud's death drive, the attraction of the inert, is a slippage of the relative into the absolute. It resembles Kant's dynamically sublime, in appreciating the existence of matter itself. For Kant this matter can be found anywhere, but for Freud its effect and origins lie in the human body.

As whaling stations domesticated the polar regions, and the actual poles were reached, only the Ocean floor and outer space remained at the frontier of exploration. Forty years and two world wars after the last of the heroic Antarctic narratives, men were shot upward and beyond the atmosphere, replacing the tales of the explorer with those of the astronaut. It may come as no surprise, given the history of the travel tale, that the astronauts and cosmonauts would report unusual sightings. The first American to travel in a spacecraft, John Glenn, reported seeing lights that looked like fireflies outside his window. Some speculated that they were forms of life. Later they turned out to be pieces of ice accumulating on the shell of the spacecraft (Carpenter 338). Flashes beneath the eyelids that concerned moonwalker Buzz Aldrin (22) were eventually explained as cosmic radiation. More significantly for sf, the era of space exploration brought UFO sightings into the Western imagination. The UFO is an imaginative accompaniment to a cognitive interest in space. As Frankenstein's monster offered a distorted version of the human figure, the UFO is a convex reflection of space flight technology. Like the creatures of the ocean, the UFO is a hybrid from the void, combining the familiar and unfamiliar in a spacecraft that carries alien life. Yet this life will also be intelligent, the one thing common to all such aliens (Ducommun 40). Such a commonality of mind raises questions about the existence of shared intellect in the first place. While the

87 formlessness of space shapes a grotesque alien, the darkness of space (for Kant at least), brings it intelligence.

H.G. Wells and the Infinitude of Relativity

When they land in metal cylinders on the green fields of England, the Martians of H.G.

Wells' War of the Worlds (1898) are thought to be reasonable and moral creatures. As a species that has crossed outer space they are presumed to have that moral disposition that Kant requires for an appreciation of the universe. A delegation from the town of

Woking approaches the Martians waving a white flag. Expecting to begin diplomatic relations with the aliens, the group are quickly burned to death by a heat ray. The

Martians proceed to conquer the south of England, including London, with this dreaded weapon, as well as with a murderous black smoke and a red weed. Once the world's principal state power, the English now face a force that is superior to their own. War of the Worlds joins many other narratives from the late 1800s that imagined the defeat of

England at the hands of a foreign enemy (Bergonzi 135). The enemy in this novel, however, is not France or Germany, but the extraterrestrial Martians. Wells uses them to put into play the relativities of technology and race that had until then worked on behalf of England. He compares his own country under the aliens to Tasmania, whose indigenous inhabitants were "entirely swept out of existence" by technologically superior

English invaders (13). He also puts into play a second chain of relations by describing humans as "monkeys and lemurs" next to these Martians, placing his own race down the evolutionary scale (13). These comparisons of race and species affect a telescopic decentring of the English in the world and of humans in space.

The Martians resemble the creatures reported by sailors in the remote sea. Their features are liquid deformations of the human visage. With heavy heads, gargantuan mouths and tentacles, they inspire "ungovernable terror", strange horror", "disgust and dread" in those who see them (28-9). They are both grotesque and uncanny because they have developed according to their own autonomous and evolutionary logic, while yet resembling human beings. They have a face and their brains are behind two eyes, but their heads are massive and their bodies weakened by a dependence on technology and by the effects of a lower Martian gravity. Their "peculiar V-shaped mouth with its pointed upper lip; the absence of brow ridges; the absence of a chin beneath the wedgelike lower lip", subtract from the human face its distinctive features (29). The residents of Woking are disgusted as the form of the human body falls back into formlessness, the jelly-like Martian body figuring the magnitudinous existence of all bodies. They remind those who see them of their own human body, and the death that lies immanent within. The repetition that lies within their form also evokes the infinitude of Kant's mathematically sublime, as its law is the universal logic of evolution. The bigger brains of these aliens, weighing their heads down in the Earth's gravity, allude to an infinite evolution towards greater intelligence.

John Huntington's The Logic of Fantasy (1982) argues that the central tension in Wells' oeuvre is between the evolutionary and the ethical. These two features of War of the Worlds can be thought aesthetically as aspects of Kant's mathematically sublime. The great time of the evolutionary points outward to the infinite, while the universality of the moral lies at the basis of appreciating this very infinitude. Huntington identifies the source of

Wells' interest in evolution in the ideas of Charles Darwin and Thomas Huxley, who championed and debated the theory in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The

89 other influence on the novel was astronomy, which had taken an interest in Mars in this same period. The features of the planet were only just becoming apparent to ever improving telescopes. In 1877 the astronomer Giovanni Shiaparelli claimed he could see canals on Mars, and thus offered the first proof of intelligent life on other worlds

(Lowell 26). In a series of books published between 1895 and 1907 Percival Lowell popularised the idea that there was life on Mars, claiming that the canals were the remains of fertilized land, and that Martian life was nearing its natural end. Nicola Tesla received electrical impulses from the red planet in 1899 (that subsequently turned out to be from distant galaxies), and in 1909 William H. Pickering proposed the US government spend $10 million on massive mirrors to signal the Martians (Silverman). A series of fictions set on the planet appeared in this period too (Bakich 184-5). In short,

Mars was in the public imagination.

Wells uses this consciousness of Mars and the astronomical in a dialogue with its opposite, the microscopic. At the end of the novel, bacteria have conquered the invaders that were first seen through a telescope, launching themselves from the surface of Mars.

The telescopic arrival of the Martians is narratively concluded with the rise of the microscopic. The dialogue of scale takes place on the level of the sentence too. The narrator looks into the eye of a telescope at Mars:

As I watched, the little star seemed to grow larger and smaller, and to advance

and recede, but that was simply that my eye was tired. Forty millions of miles it

was from us--more than forty millions of miles of void. Few people realise the

immensity of vacancy in which the dust of the universe swims. (15)

From the large Wells pulls back to a thinking of the small, and from this relativity of vision the mind takes refuge in the sublimity of metaphor. The cognitive tensions introduced by the measurement of "forty millions of miles" are transcended by the positive terms, "vacancy" and "dust of the universe". These stand in, metaphorically and absolutely, for the relativity of scale. The relative flux of mind in the universe is anchored by magnitude. So too when Wells writes, "across the gulf of space, minds that are to ours as the beasts that perish", the "gulf of space" stands in for cognitive flux (11).

Or in the passage, "[t]he chances of anything manlike on Mars are a million to one", the magnitude of "million" operates to relieve the cognitive tension of thinking the permutations of "manlike" (16).

Before these sublime metaphors, feeling the "immensity of night and space and nature",

Wells' narrator only feels "my own feebleness and anguish, and the near approach of death" (40). John Ower has already recognised the significance of such immensities for

Wells, their contribution to a "sense of man's precarious position in a mysterious and ever-changing cosmos" (167). The disorientation that accompanies the sight of this cosmos renders the differences between human beings negligible. The Martians represent this erasure, the heat ray destroying the English social structure, the distinction of an aristocrat from a peasant, gold from dirt. Everyone is equally vulnerable, and a man with a broken back who "still clutched after his money" appears as foolish as those who treasure gold on the Island of Utopia (123). War of the Worlds is, like all apocalypse narratives, a utopian text, as it turns hierarchy to equivalence and individualism into sociality. In the tumult of people fleeing the Martians, Wells pictures the incapacitated

Lord Garrick on a stretcher, his assistants demanding the crowd give way to his privilege. He describes "a man in evening dress", "a wounded solider" and numerous

"loafers" in the crowd (116). From the vast spaces of the cosmos the Martians redefine scales and comparisons, from the distance to Mars to the dilation and contraction of the pupil, from hundred foot high machines to the qualities of human beings.

The infinitude and magnitude of the alien brings with it the paradoxes of the sublime.

The negation of the terrestrial turns into extraterrestrial representation, the unpresentable as a masquerade. The alien demonstrates how thought can "do one thing and its opposite, present an object in a finite way and conceive of an object as actually infinite" (Lyotard, Analytic 150). Here Jean-Francois Lyotard is describing a particularly

Kantian double-think, in which the noumenal is distinguished from, and yet thought simultaneously with, the phenomenal. The origins of this split lie as much in the cognitive effects of the telescope and the microscope as in the reasoning of philosophy.

From an irreparable break between what is seen and what is thought, between the eye and knowledge, the sublime appears as a pleasurable transcendence. The impossible resolution of scales turns into a conception of this very excess, from the relativities of perception to the certainties of a rational mind. The alien is one appearance of this excess, that negates the negation of outer space with a positive representation of this mind's loss.

Like the idea of the alien, the moral law recovers the mind's capacity for thought from the Martian destruction. This is most evident when Wells turns from the differential relations between species, races and worlds to make points about English imperialism.

The narrator, who had been interrupted in the middle of "a paper on the probable development of moral ideas with the development of a civilising process" constantly compares human beings to other things, including ants, machines and Martians (211).

He invokes a relation between the relative and the moral, asking how it is that the

English can judge the Martians when they themselves have acted in the same way (13).

This reasonable suggestion turns into an aesthetic one in other scenes of the novel. In the middle of a rushing crowd, made up of a "slender woman and her sister-in-law", a

"man in evening dress", a "man in dirty black", a "sallow youth in a bowler hat", "three girls, like East End factory girls", "a couple of children", a "dirty woman carrying a heavy bundle and weeping" and a "multitude" of others, his brother sees "a blind man in the uniform of the Salvation Army" (115-8). He is "bawling, 'Eternity! Eternity!'" (118).

From amidst the relativity of difference comes this cry of the absolute, the blind man standing as if on the Day of Judgement to cast moral aspersions upon the crowd.

Wells' War of the Worlds is the greatest progenitor of an sf understood in terms of the sublime because, in colliding different worlds together, the novel transcends this collision to reveal the common conditions by which these worlds have come into being.

These conditions, being the vastness of space and the infinitude of time, are felt to be sublime by a mind that turns their negations into the positive images of astronomy and evolutionary science. The magnitude of space is dynamically sublime, while the great time of evolution is mathematically sublime. From the negation implicit in both this abyss of space and extent of time, the mind turns to the moral law and to metaphor to positively apprehend the universe. Transcending the contradictions of the new sciences, the text articulates the secret pleasures that lie within them, their mediation of mind with the cosmos.

Sf historians place Wells alongside Jules Verne, Shelley, and to a lesser extent Poe, as major progenitors of sf. Verne, author of travel and adventure stories that are replete

93 with scientific detail, was working in France before the turn of the century. In "Towards a Technological Sublime", Thurber concludes that Verne's scientific content "is assumed to be sublime" (222). He concludes his article by arguing that the detailed laws of science are directly proportional to the sublime pleasures of the sf text. This equivalence casts its lot with "our greatest and most powerful aspirations", but neglects the contradictions that these aspirations are grounded in (222). Verne's work certainly is more scientifically accurate than Wells. Indeed, Verne himself spoke of Wells in these terms:

I consider him, as a purely imaginative writer, to be deserving of very high praise,

but our methods are entirely different. I have always made a point in my

romances of basing my so-called inventions upon a groundwork of actual fact,

and of using their construction methods and materials which are not entirely

without the pale of contemporary engineering skill and knowledge. (qtd in

Costello 186)

Verne places the faculty of the imagination in a contrary relation to cognitive feasibility.

He claims that his own inventions are more feasible than those of Wells because they are extrapolations of known technologies. Thus "there is nothing extraordinary" about his massive submarine in Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea (Verne qtd in Costello 187;

1869). But Wells' The First Men in the Moon (1900) breaks with all known sciences by using an anti-gravitation device to lift his extraterrestrial travellers into the sky.

The narratives of Verne and Wells often mirror each other. Verne's characters leave the

Earth in From the Earth to the Moon (1865) without landing anywhere else, while Wells actually lands on the moon in The First Men in the Moon. In Journey to the Centre of the Earth

(1871), Verne takes the reader into a prehistoric land populated by dinosaurs and stone age men, while in The Time Machine (1895) Wells shoots his time traveller into the future.

The differences between these writers can be understood as proportional to the distances of their worlds from each other. While Verne's astronauts never make it to the moon, and remain suspended aboard a spacecraft that doubles as a smoking room,

Wells' travellers visit a strange lunar land. To compare Verne's Journey to the Centre of the

Earth with Wells' The Time Machine is to similarly find that the latter entertains a greater degree of difference between worlds. Verne's underground world is almost familiar, a remnant of Earth's own past, populated with dinosaurs and covered by ancient forest, whilst in the far future of Wells' Time Machine, a shrivelled sun hangs in a darkened sky above a still Earth. A small, living thing, trailing tentacles and flopping about on a beach is the last form of life. Placing a greater distance between worlds, Wells is able to make use of the infinitude that lies between them. In The Time Machine this is the infinitude of time, that has subjected life to exhaustion, while in War of the Worlds it lies in the depths of space. The collision of distant worlds leads to a sublime cognition.

There are ideological consequences to these contrary poles of the scientific romance, from Wells' sublime imaginary to Verne's scientific precision. Michel de Certeau describes Verne's fiction as "Writing the Sea" (1986). He points out that Verne's "voyage gradually eliminates the losses: everything must be observed, and everything that is seen in faraway places must be able to be known in London or Paris" (147). Certeau reports that Verne wrote Les Grand Voyages (1870-80), a three volume history of exploration, while at sea aboard a steamship (138). The action of writing at sea literalises the process of writing over the spaces between worlds, over the contradictions between these worlds and their annihilation in the oceanic abyss. The distances between worlds are filled, and

95 the corresponding distance between the eye and the mind, which leads to an appreciation of the sublime, is no longer there. Verne's dedication to "dragging oneself out of marine indeterminacy" moves away from the stunned silence of the sublime. In

Sans Dessus Dessous (1889), a novel that Andrew Martin translates as "No More Upside

Down", Verne attempts to correct the axial rotation of the Earth with a massive explosion (180). This early attempt at terraforming wants to close the space between summer and winter, spring and autumn. It collapses the heterogeneous nature of the world, its seasons and swings, placing it instead upon an equivalent plane of rotation.

Creating abysses between worlds, Wells is able to be more critical of imperialism in his fictions as the mind, in attempting to conceive of these abysses, is placed at a distance from its own failed operation. In this, Wells is the successor of More, whose Utopia also hinged his worlds upon an abyss. While Wells' negations lie in space and time, More's are the ocean and desert. It is from this non-space, this negation that Marin calls the neutral, that universes are made. In More, this is a moral universe, as the position of the sun and the distribution of property determine the good within a society. In Wells this is an unforgiving universe of scientific law. Yet Wells also returns his traveller to the sun dappled Earth, and away from the shrivelled sun of the far future. The narrator of War of the Worlds similarly returns to the sun as he thinks that a plan to retreat underground, away from the Martians, is a deluded fantasy and no more (195). By contrast Verne's voyages, from the underground land of Journey to the Centre of the Earth to the submarine of Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and the orbiting spaceship of From the Earth to the

Moon, move away from the light of the sun.

While More's Utopia attempts to resolve the contradictions of imperialism, Wells' sublime transcends them, proposing a universe obedient to its own vast laws. For Wells and Kant the telescope is the instrument by which this transcendental universe comes into being, while for Verne it is the ship. These technologies came of age in Europe, but the next phase of sf's history takes place in an America whose means of imperialism was no longer territorial. As Britain began to lose control of its global empire, Germany and the US increased their economic power. The US had the advantage here, its as yet untapped natural resources and talented immigrant population ripe for economic growth. The imagination that pertains to sf shifted with this economic power across the

Atlantic, as the territorial conquest of the North American continent had laid a cognitive framework for the financial conquests to follow. This form of imperialism is similarly based upon contradiction. Like the territorial imperialism before it, it "attempted to resolve living domestic problems by exporting them beyond the borders of the homeland" (Csicsery-Ronay 35). The pleasure of the sf genre that would bloom in the

US wants to transcend these contradictions.

This chapter furnished the cognitive basis for the appearance of the sf genre proper, as well as for its historical coincidence with an aesthetic of the sublime. The influences of ocean travel and astronomy, as well as the creation of a world economic system based in

Europe, led to certain kinds of cognition in fictional and philosophical texts. These cognitions were not separate from each other, nor from the history that brought them into being. The relationships and the contradictions they represent are figured by the object world--the ship, the island, the planet, gold, the telescope, the ocean, Arctic ice, the human body and so on. From a material history of technology and imperialism

97 comes a cognitive one, as the mind embraces numerical, moral, universal and spatial ideas.

Chapter Two

The Economy and the Spaceship:

From Pulp Magazines to the Moon Landing

Wells' War of the Worlds was first serialized in a US newspaper in 1896. Verne's From the

Earth to the Moon (1865) sited its rocket launching pad in Florida. The American interest in Wells, and Verne's interest in America, anticipated the transition from their scientific romances to the generification of sf in the new world. This chapter will trace this young genre in so far it configures an aesthetic of the sublime. It uses selected texts to illustrate how the cognition of the sublime--numerical, moral, universal and spatial--adapted to the twentieth century. Clifford Simak's fiction, for instance, represents the confrontation of an older, natural conception of the sublime with technology. A.E. van Vogt's Weapon

Shops Series represents the sublime excesses of a booming US economy. Published later,

Philip K. Dick's fiction is something of a maturing of the genre, its cognition reflexive upon a set of established ideas and tropes. The novels of Arthur C. Clarke and the televisation of the Apollo moon landing can each be thought of in terms of the dialectic between Kant's mathematically and dynamically sublimes. Apollo is included here with the recognition (after Jacques Derrida) that everything analysed in this thesis is a text, and that the televisation of Apollo offers valuable insights upon twentieth-century forms of the sublime.

In 1923 Hugo Gernsback devoted an entire issue of his Science and Invention magazine to fiction (Scholes 36). Its success led him, three years later, to release the almost monthly

99 publication Amazing Stories, and to coin the name "science fiction" for its stories (Aldiss,

Billion 239). The magazine included a story by Wells in every issue over the first two years of its life, many Verne stories, and some by Poe. Accompanying these were other stories with a pseudo-scientific bent. Many of these were reprints from the specialist magazines that cluttered America's newsstands, such as Gernsback's own Science and

Invention. The proliferation of such short, scientific stories in these specialist publications demonstrate the popularity of the generic form before it was named.

The first issue of Amazing Stories featured two reprinted stories that carried on the interests of both Wells and Kant. They did this by situating their representation of other worlds between the relative and the moral. G. Peyton Wertenbaker's "The Man from the

Atom" tells of a man who keeps growing until he finds himself in another universe entirely, where the Earth is but an atom. The difference in scales, between the microcosmic atom and the telescopic universe, recalls the position of Kant's subject between these two instruments. Austin Hall's "The Man who Saved the Earth" reconfigures the elements of Wells' War of the Worlds. Opalescent globes begin appearing around the Earth and disintegrating whatever they enclose. It turns out that the Martians are stealing Earth's resources to replenish their own depleted supplies. As the narrator of

War of the Worlds thinks about "moral ideas" and the "civilizing process", Hall speculates on the relativity of ethics (211). The inaugural issue of this sf magazine can be placed in a lineage with Kant's sublime and Wells' relativities, each of which can be thought in terms of the other.

Much has already been written on these first years of sf (Amis; James; Westfahl). While

Gernsback may be credited with coming up with the name for the new genre, the editor

100 of the bestselling Astounding Stories (1939-60), John W. Campbell, holds a distinguished place in popularising and refining, if not reifying, its concerns (Aldiss 255-72). His declaration that stories should be an "honest effort at prophetic extrapolation of the known" guided writers in their submissions to the magazine, and heavily influenced the way both writers and readers thought about the genre ("Science" 91). Campbell proclaimed that he wanted Astounding Stories to depict a scientifically valid future, but its contents were often quasi-scientific, featuring Bug Eyed Monsters (BEMs), telepathy, pre-cognitive abilities, interstellar flight and helpless women. Sensationalism distinguished American sf from the European scientific romance (Scholes 35). For instance, the US serialization of Well's War of the Worlds left little alone but its action scenes (Suvin, Metamorphoses 214). Its subsequent adaptations in the country were equally sensational. Orson Welles' 1938 broadcast version was a hoax that led listeners to think that the Martians were in fact invading the Earth. Jeff Wayne's 1978 musical version featured Justin Haywood (of Moody Blues fame) singing that the creatures from Mars are not manlike, as in the original text, but that "The chances of anything coming from

Mars are a million to one", neglecting the philosophical side of the sentence.

The writings of John W. Campbell are an early example of the contradiction between the scientific credibility that American sf wanted to proclaim for itself and its sensational content. His own story "Night", first published in 1935, reveals the truth about his own publishing priorities, and the values of an early era of American sf. Turning an antigravity device into a time machine, Campbell's fiction is hardly validated by any known science. It is more indebted to the quasi-scientific inventiveness of Well's antigravity substance, Cavorite. Of the two poles of scientific romance, represented by Wells' creative imagination and Verne's interest in "actual fact", American sf is more indebted

101 to the former (Verne qtd in Costello 186). In this sense, Gernsback's overwhelming representation of Wells' work in Amazing Stories prefigures the imaginative flavour of the genre in the US.

Despite his assertions to the contrary, Campbell neglected scientific feasibility in his editorial policies. The reasons for Campbell's turn away from the science that he otherwise championed are evident in "Night". When Bob arrives in a dark world of the future, the sun is no longer giving out heat. Surviving robots explain that there is no more hydrogen in the solar system. They have been functioning on the remote and cold world of Venus for a million years past the death of the last human being. It is in a

Kantian sense that the ability of these robots to function without the sun is sublime, as their mechanized reason approaches an angelic closeness to God. However, Bob is repulsed by this "purposeless" and "blind functioning", returning gladly to the sun of his own time ("Night" 54).

Campbell's rejection of mechanized reason in "Night" is symptomatic not only of his aesthetic preference for well written imaginative stories, but of a larger and historical dialectic at play in the American imagination. Leo Marx's book The Machine in the Garden

(1964) identifies the tension between industrialization and the pastoral ideal, between a new and old national identity in American writing. America was, like More's Island of

Utopia, settled with the fantasy of beginning anew in a land blessed by the sun. The subsequent building of railroads, mills, steamboats and factories contradicted this fantasy. The meaningless automation of Campbell's robots fits into a negative history of technology's representation in America, and with Leo Marx can be read as a romantic return to the pastoral.

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Yet Campbell also represents the positive side of technology. Bob sees what the robots had built for humans before the death of the sun. A mighty city configures the moral associations of technology, the idea that machines will relieve people of their labours. It is with such a moral precondition that Leo Marx concludes that a technological sublime transforms the relation between mind and nature (195). Railroads and giant machines possess not only a grandeur of scale that was once reserved for natural spectacle, but the ability to shape human destiny. For Kant, this is a mathematically sublime that appreciates the extension of mind into nature through this nature's laws. As Leo Marx's technological sublime describes the domestication of the American landscape, the grids of farmland and lines of transportation, so Kant refers to the Egyptian pyramids and St

Peter's in Rome as mathematically sublime in so far as they have "no end belonging to the Object as its determining ground" (Critique 101). They refer, like the human destiny embedded in technology, to ideas that exceed their objects.

Contemplating the accomplishments of human technological development, the mind enters the doubled consciousness of sublime cognition. Leo Marx quotes Ralph Waldo

Emerson describing this second self: "One after another his victorious thought comes up with and reduces all things, until the world becomes at last only a realised will,--the double of the man" (231). Campbell's story articulates the contradictions of this cognitive territorialism. The city is itself dead, frozen in time beneath a cold sun, and it is between this tragedy and the technological sublime that "Night" stages a dialectic between the sublime and a romantic pastoral that insists upon the dark destiny of industry.

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After the Second World War, the US moved into an accelerated stage of economic and cultural imperialism, and its sf responded to a non-territorial form of expansion.

Through a massive amount of post-war foreign investment and in maintaining a military presence in Asia and Europe after the war, the US pioneered a postmodern form of imperialism. While older capitalist expansions relied for the most part on visible exploitations of the colonized, the US used the invisible means of finance capital and covert military interventions to consolidate a Western empire (Chomsky). This tendency toward expansion is consistent with older phases of capitalism, but its means are different.

Accompanying this external history of the US were internal changes too. Increased wealth led to more people working in white collar professions, the adoption of wage relations with employers, increased personal debt, the suburbanisation of the cities, the technologisation of everyday life and the invention of the nuclear family (Agilietta;

Coontz 23-41). Air conditioning, automobiles, freezers, refrigerators and, most significantly for cultural life, television became commonplace. This golden age for the

US economy had its parallel in a so-called Golden Age of sf production during these post-war years (Scholes 42). Its readership experienced rapid and radical changes to everyday life.

While the boundaries of any readership is fluid, those who bought the early sf magazines were generally American, male and white. Kingsley Amis considers that most were adults employed in white-collar labour (50). By the mid-1950s, this class of male would make up the majority of working Americans. Thus the sf of this period, while unread by most, did reflect the interests of the most financially, politically and socially mobile group in

104 the country. Employee and patriarch, the sf reader was at the centre of these changing conditions of modernity. As More, Swift and Wells tracked the rise of contradictions in their own stages of European modernity, sf of the American 1940s and 1950s was symptomatic of a new set of anxieties. A.E. van Vogt's novels play out the tension of a white collar worker living amidst this new era of social, technological, cultural and economic change. Clifford Simak's oeuvre reconfigures Leo Marx's older contradiction between the pastoral and the technological in a new period of US history. Their writing is pleasurable because it transcends defamilarised representations of these contradictions.

There are two ways in which I want to model the situation of the reading subject of US sf in the 1940s and 1950s. It is not so much that these readers are contained by such subjectivities, but that such models are helpful in cognitively mapping the contradictions of the society in which they live. Both of these models are taken from the period itself, from thinkers that lived with the changes of the time. One can be taken from a group of dissident American sociologists. David Riesman's The Lonely Crowd (1950), C. Wright

Mills' White Collar (1951), and William H. Whyte's The Organization Man (1957) each maps the tension between the new bourgeoisie and their society. While liberal histories of the period emphasize how secure, wealthy and family orientated the post-war US was, these works point specifically to the detrimental effects of social change upon the American male. Mills points out that the "material hardship of nineteenth-century industrial workers finds its parallel on the psychological level among twentieth-century white-collar employees" (xvi). The alienation of the new workplace lay in its cognitive complexity, as the mind of the worker was forced to deal with bureaucracy, meritocracy, and new technologies.

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The anxieties attendant upon these cognitions turn up not only in the stories of the pulp sf magazines, but in their advertisements. Promising a plethora of emasculating products, from mind improvement to confidence enhancement and muscle building, these advertisements signal the insecurities of a male whose identity was traditionally predicated on blue collar work that now finds himself in a feminine workplace (Hoberek

380). Rather than the weary bodies of the industrial era, the exploitation of white collar labour has to do with the mind. These advertisements represent the self-alienation of one who has been interpolated into the workplace by means of his cognitive specialization (Mills xii).

A second model for mapping the subjectivity of the 1950s male is to be found across the

Atlantic in Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960). While Sartre is best known today as an exponent of existentialism, in his later years he turned to Marxism to describe this subject's situation in the modern world. The tension described by the

Critique is, like that of Riesman, Mills and Whyte, between this subject and their society.

To paraphrase a comment that could just as easily have come from one of these sociologists, Sartre writes that "the intensity of isolation ... expresses the degree of massification" (257). While the sociologists analyse the relationship of the subject to their society as an exploitative one, Sartre describes the way these subjects choose to interpolate themselves into their social position. The full citation that I paraphrased above in fact reads, "the intensity of isolation, as a relation of exteriority between the members of a temporary and contingent gathering, expresses the degree of massification of the social ensemble" (257). Thus the subject is not wholly constituted by their society, instead engaging in relations of exteriority that double the subject into the self for oneself and this self for others. Sartre uses the example of people standing at a bus stop

106 to illustrate the interpolation of the modern subject. Each pedestrian is, in this queue, as much other to themselves as to others, constructed "through Others in so far as they are

Other than themselves" (261). He turns Karl Marx's concept of alienation into one of

"seriality", in which people choose to be alienated from themselves (262-4). There is no better example of this psychological development within capitalism than false personalization, in which an entire personality is simulated for the benefit of office relations or customer service (Riesman 271). While Riesman wants to set legal limits to the psychic dangers of false personalization, Sartre recognizes that, to some degree at least, the person chooses to become this very lie.

Three novelists of the so-called Golden Age of sf can be positioned between the sociologists and Sartrean models of modern subjectivity. Clifford Simak and A.E. van

Vogt both published in the sf magazines of the 1940s. In the early 1950s, these stories were turned into novels made coherent not so much by narrative but by what Eric

Rabkin identifies as either a "domain" or a structural "framework". The first is "some combination of setting and at least some characters", while the latter operates "wherein the overall structure justifies producing one story after another" (94). The domain and framework offer a transcendental identity for the otherwise fragmented multiplicities of these "composite novels", composed after being published in magazines as short stories

(93). The disorientations of these fictions, as they move from one story or chapter to the next, defamiliarise the fragmentations faced by the sf reader as he lived amidst the accelerated changes inside the US. The supersensible, that second stage of sublime cognition in sf narrative, plays out the fantasy of having power over these changes, and takes the mind into the domain or framework that unifies the novel.

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In this movement from disorientation to the supersensible, from subjection to the fantasies produced from this subjection, van Vogt and Simak are best thought according to those models of cognitive exploitation first outlined by Riesman, Mills and Whyte. In moving to the later writings of Philip K. Dick, and more self-reflexive sf, it is Sartre's seriality that affords the better fit. This is because Dick wrote novels that were not adapted from stories. His heroes are thus less fragmented by composite narratives, and have more time to adapt to their disorientations. Dick can be historicized as part of a second wave of US sf, that consciously manipulated tropes established in the first wave and Golden Age. The complexity of Dick's fiction is better apprehended with Sartre's notion of seriality. This is because his self-reflexive heroes create that psychic duplicity by which Sartre constitutes the modern subject.

The Disorientations of A.E. van Vogt

A.E. van Vogt sits at the very beginning of Golden Age. His stories are featured in the first edition of Campbell's Astounding Stories, in July 1939. While he was one of the bestselling authors of the 1940s and 1950s, van Vogt's imaginative qualities have attracted little of the critical appreciation afforded to other Golden Age greats. Sf critics and historians David Pringle (427), Eric S. Rabkin ("Science" 95), and David Ketterer

(182) have each dismissed him in their own ways. Damon Knight famously called him "a pygmy who has learned to operate an overgrown typewriter" (101-2). Yet van Vogt has also interested some very influential sf writers and critics, including John Brunner ("Van

Vogt"), Dick (Interview) and Jameson ("Space"). For Dick and Brunner, he was influential on a formal level, his compositional techniques innovative and effective. For

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Jameson he is of historical interest, his compositions relevant to the imagination of space in the post-war era.

The domain novels The Weapon Shops of Isher (1951), and its sequel The Weapon Makers

(1947), were composed from the stories "The Seesaw” and “The Weapon Shops”, that appeared in Astounding in 1941 and 1942. These stories turned into the Prologue and first chapter of The Weapon Shops. Their setting is the Empire of Isher, a dynasty that has ruled the solar system for four thousand years. Within this Empire a network of weapon shops continue to resist its absolute rule. Not wanting to overthrow the government, the shops keep it in check by arming the population with guns. They elude the Empire's troops with a device that allows their shops to appear and disappear at will.

At the beginning of The Weapon Shops, a weapon shops man is using the device to routinely transfer one of the shops to another point in space, but ends up shifting it backward in time. It manifests by accident in twentieth-century America. People gather around it, thinking that its appearance is a hoax. When a reporter walks through its front door, he experiences a disorientation that is first cognitive, before creeping its way into his body:

An emptiness struck into McAllister's mind, matching the hollowness that was

beginning to afflict the pit of his stomach, a sense of unplumbed depths, the first

staggering conviction that all was not as it should be ...

How had he come here into this fantastic world? Something was very wrong

indeed. (WS 7-8)

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This description of disorientation disrupts the continuity of van Vogt's narrative to enact a continuity of style, as one disorientation follows another and moments of disruption become part of a reader's expectations.

When another shop appears out of nowhere, this time in the right place, the pro-Empire character Fara walks through its front door to find himself on another world:

Fara stood for a moment in the neat little pathway, striving to grasp the finality

of his situation. But nothing would come except awareness of many men around

him. His mind was like a log drifting along a stream at night. Through the

darkness grew a consciousness of something wrong. The wrongness was there in

the back of his mind as he turned leftward to go to the front of the weapon

shop. Vagueness transformed to a startled sense of shock. For he was not in

Glay, and the weapon shop was not where it had been. (WS 86)

In a third example, Lucy walks into a "House of Illusion", van Vogt's future version of the brothel, only to fall "into darkness", and to proclaim that she doesn't "know what happened" (WS 80).

McAllister, Fara and Lucy are three of six protagonists whose points of view describe six narrative lines that unfold and intersect throughout The Weapon Shops. Descriptions of disorientation facilitate the movement from one narrative line to another. Disorientation also marks the movement between heterogeneous spaces: McAllister is shifted from his home town into the future; Fara into a different world; Lucy inside a House of Illusion; and the boy Cayle into a spacecraft, a Martian mine, Casino, House of Illusion and

110 streets of the capital of Isher. A multiplicity of spaces accompanies the multiplicity of narratives.

Knight, Jameson and Dick have each compared van Vogt’s writing with dislocated architectures and building methods. In 1951, Knight reviewed The Weapon Shops and accused van Vogt of having “vacant stages in the scaffolding” (101-2). For Dick and

Jameson, this is precisely what makes van Vogt interesting. Jameson points out the importance of the door in van Vogt's writing, calling his instantaneous shifting between worlds a strategy of "spatial disjunction" (56). As Dick puts it:

Damon [Knight] feels that it's bad artistry when you build those funky universes

where people fall through the floor. It's like he's viewing a story the way a

building inspector would when he's building your house. But reality really is a

mess, and yet it's exciting. The basic thing is, how frightened are you of chaos?

And how happy are you with order? Van Vogt influenced me so much because

he made me appreciate a mysterious chaotic quality in the universe which is not

to be feared. (Interview)

The universe that van Vogt creates is not to be feared because his characters survive its multiple disorientations.

The vertiginous effects of van Vogt's disorientations are a consequence of several unique writing techniques that he developed for sf: the fix-up, complication and hang-up. Each of these techniques moves his characters rapidly between spaces and situations. The fix- up novel describes the way in which van Vogt pieces together short stories into a novel

111 length narrative. This is a strategy that van Vogt shared with other short story writers who adapted their work from the magazines of the 1940s to the "paperback revolution" of the 1950s (Davis 1). Another of van Vogt's techniques is the complication, outlined in a famous article first published in 1947 ("Complication"). The appearance of the weapon shop on twentieth-century Earth is typical of this technique, in which the narrative is radically reconfigured by new knowledge or a new idea every 800 words.

When Umberto Rossi asks, "Did Van Vogt really put into practice the technique he recommended?", the answer is yes ("Game" 200). In the Weapon Shops Series at least, the narrative is subjected to disorientation every 800 words or so. The prologue to The

Weapon Shops, for example, can be divided into five parts:

1. A weapon shop appears on twentieth-century Earth.

2. Inside the weapon shop, the reporter McAllister finds out that he is no longer in

1951.

3. He is told that he contains enough accumulated power, gathered on his trip into the

future, to blow up the planet.

4. Outside the shop, the Empress is powering up a canon with which to destroy the

shop.

5. To displace the building that powers the gun, the weapon shops council decide to

send McAllister back in time. They throw him backward and send the building

forward. This leads to an immense seesaw in time, with McAllister on one end and

the building on the other. They swing back and forth across the centuries, and the

Empress' gun is immobilized.

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These narrative developments shuffle McAllister between one disorientation to the next, and often from one space to another.

While the fix-up operates on the scale of the novel, and the complication across chapters, the hang-up takes place within each sentence. It works not by introducing something new, but by leaving something amiss, "so that the reader will have to make a creative contribution. Each sentence has a hang-up in it. There's something missing in each sentence" (Interview). Here van Vogt makes clear that his disorientations are not only functioning intrinsically, as an internal part of his novel, but are extrinsic too, because they want to affect his readers. The incoherence brought about by the hang-up technique alludes to a greater coherence that van Vogt locates within the reader's imagination. Yet the reader may not be making such an active contribution while reading

The Weapon Shops, as the multiple disorientations of van Vogt brings about a reader's resignation to their effects, and leaves the hang-up hanging. If the Weapon Shops Series intends to be inconsistent, incomplete and to change abruptly throughout, it may well provoke a reading on these same terms. Expectations of totality, narrative flow and the sensible sentence can be left at the opening page of a van Vogt novel, as its reader is subjected to his chaotic methods of creation.

In leaving things unexplained in his novels, and yet in alluding to reasonable explanations that lie behind them, van Vogt creates a sublime aesthetic. The sublime cognises the pleasures to be had from the unexplainable. When van Vogt presents his readers with that which exceeds their knowledge, the contradiction between the mind and van Vogt's missing totality leads to a transcendence of this mind. The totality of van

Vogt's universe in the Weapon Shops Series is greater than its expression, the suspension

113 of knowledge occurring from sentence to sentence, page to page, as van Vogt employs his multiple techniques.

To distinguish the textual appearances of the sublime, Weiskel distinguishes between the metonymic and metaphoric. The metonymic is provoked when, "overwhelmed by meaning, the mind recovers by displacing its excess of signified into a dimension of contiguity which may be spatial or temporal" (29). For instance, when McAllister walks into the weapon shop he is struck by:

Curious lights! He was fascinated by the play of light and shade, the waxing and

waning from one tiny globe to the next, a rippling movement of infinitesimal

increments and decrements, an incredibly delicate effect of instantaneous

reaction to some supersensitive barometer. (WS 8)

Unable to make reasonable sense of his surroundings, McAllister can only describe what he sees, his attention being constantly deferred from one sight to another. The resulting series of observations are not understood by the character because he as yet lacks a coherent totality to which these observations refer. The hang-up technique here provokes Weiskel's metonymic sublime in the mind of McAllister.

The metaphoric sublime, on the other hand, takes place where the breakdown in totality is resolved by substitution. The metaphor takes the form of a word or phrase that stands in for an absent and excessive referent. In the Weapon Shops Series, van Vogt often alludes to a greater and invisible power that impresses the character and reader with its

114 numinous quality. Later in the same chapter, the girl who manages the weapon shop begins to speak to McAllister:

'You may not realise it,' she said slowly, 'but you have already upset our entire

establishment. The lights of the automatics should have gone on the moment

father pressed the buttons, as he did when I called him. They didn’t! That’s

unnatural, and yet--' her frown deepened '--if you were one of them, how did you

get through that door? Is it possible that her scientists have discovered human

beings who do not affect the sensitive energies? And that you are but one of

many such, sent as an experiment to determine whether or not entrance could be

gained? Yet that isn’t logical either. If they had even a hope of success, they

wouldn’t risk the chance of throwing away an overwhelming surprise. In that

case, you would be the entering wedge of an attack on a vast scale. She is

ruthless, she’s brilliant; and she craves complete power over poor fools like you

who have no more sense than to worship her and the splendor of the Imperial

Court.' (WS 8-9)

On one level, this passage uses metonymic deferral, as one unknown turns into another.

The mysterious establishment is replaced by the threatening automatics, then by a powerful her, she, and an Imperial Court. The power of the passage, however, also lies in its allusion to a larger structure to which these unknown elements belong. In Weiskel's terms, this structure is a metaphoric sublime because the "absence of determinate meaning" that would unify its fragments into a coherent whole "becomes significant"

(28). The character remains bewildered before this absence, and more importantly, so does the reader.

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The fix-up, recomplicated and hang-up raise questions about their preconditions. If

Kant's account of disorientation in the Critique of Judgment corresponds to the historically new experience of the telescope and the microscope, then van Vogt's disorientations must have their own twentieth century and phenomenological analogues. In his 1984 talk on van Vogt, Jameson suggests that the rapid movements of a van Vogt novel are analogous to the dislocations of wartime (60). The spatial juxtapositions in van Vogt's writing defamilarise the experience of the veteran returning from the battlefields of

Europe, Africa or Asia to the peace of the American suburbs. When McAllister, the twentieth-century reporter, remembers being "lain half-dead on a battlefield of the middle twentieth century, resigned to personal oblivion", Jameson's suggestion is given textual weight (127). The threat of catastrophic conflict hangs over the series, as peace depends on a fragile balance of power struck between the Empress and the weapon shops.

In a post-war reading, the threat of an Empire that has "complete power" over its people is a defamiliarisation of the threat of fascism, of wartime Germany, Italy and Japan (WS

9). As the 1950s proceeded, the location of this fear of authoritarian regimes would transfer itself from fascism to communism and the USSR. The variable location of these phantasmagoric fears, between different historical spectra of the foreign, betrays anxieties that the US may well have had about itself. The argument here is that these ideas of totalitarianism are the sublimated images of a growing domestic regime. In the

1950s, both waged relations and debt escalated in the US. The number of salary earners jumped 61% between 1947 and 1957 (Coontz 24). The male moved into corporate or

116 government employment and was required to "purchase the conditions of his existence" from banks and federal loan schemes (Agilietta 24).

According to the model of the white collar worker proposed by Mills, Riesman and

Whyte, the true source of authoritarianism in 1940s and 1950s was to be found in the country's new economic conditions, what Mills calls the propertyless situation of the middle classes (71). The white collar worker did not entirely own his own mind, because his mental skills were caught up in professional employment. Neither was his home his own, as he repayed his debt to a bank. When Cayle of The Weapon Shops is swindled, impoverished on the streets of Isher and almost enslaved in a Martian mine, he enacts the anxieties of this financially bound middle class. This succession of Cayle's disorientations corresponds to the financial disasters that endangered the situation of the

1950s professional: being ripped off; losing one's place in the world; or falling into the working class.

Money binds the various scenes of The Weapon Shops together. Cayle's disorientations, that move him from one place to another, from his home village to a spaceship, Casino,

Martian mine and House of Illusion, are consequent upon financial failures and successes. When Cayle is sucked into a scam on Mars, it will send his parents, far away on a remote planet, broke. When he lends money from Lucy, it leads to their marriage.

In both cases, money determines the course of personal relations within the Empire. In

1966, Lewis Mumford used the term "invisible machine" to describe the way capitalist economy "functioned as a completely articulated whole", yet its components were

"necessarily separate in space" (188). This combination of fragmentation and an

117 imperceptible totality describes the relationship between the heterogeneous spaces of

Isher and the Empire that rules them.

Simak's Sliding Worlds

Like van Vogt's The Weapon Shops Series, Simak's City (1952) was originally published as a series of stories in Astounding. "City" and "Huddling Place" both appeared in 1944. They are from different periods in an imaginary future history, belonging not so much to the same domain as to what Rabkin calls the same "framework" (94). This framework is made up of a series of shifts between human and post-human embodiments. The chapters of

City move between humans, aliens, animals, insects, robots and ghosts that inhabit parallel universes. At the juncture between the worlds and dimensions of these different species, Simak's characters experience the disorientations of spatial juxtaposition. The robot Jenkins opens an ordinary door onto a "gold and yellow desert" and a "great blue sun". He then "slammed the door shut, stood numbed in mind and body" (221).

One chapter, originally the story "Huddling Place", tells of a human outpost on the hostile world of Jupiter. The scientists there have found a way to transfer the consciousness of a person into a Loper, one of the native life forms that live in the harsh atmosphere. When Fowler emerges from the transfer device and into the strange air of this other world, it is no longer the hostile and frightening place he thought it was.

Instead, he finds himself in "ecstasy" at the sight of Jupiter's "painted sky" (113).

Looking back at where he had come from, he sees that:

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The dome was a squatted, alien shape that did not belong beneath the purple

mist of Jupiter, a huddled, frightened structure that seemed to cower against the

massive planet. (120)

The unfamiliar atmosphere of Jupiter is now natural to him, while the once familiar habitation of the dome is "alien". The cognitive inversion has arisen from perceptual differences, in a slippage between different embodiments.

These reversals resemble those of Wells' War of the Worlds. To recall, the narrator of this turn of the century novel imagines what it would be like to be in the shoes, or tentacles, of one of the invading Martians and subsequently concludes that it probably isn't so far from being an Englishman in Tasmania. This is the kind of cognitive leap that Simak's

Fowler is making when he returns from being a Loper to inhabit a human body. He preaches the joy of living as a Loper on the "paradise" of Jupiter to the rest of the human race, who are persuaded to make the transition (131). The Loper is but one of many forms of transcendence imagined by 1950s sf. The ability to foretell the future

(psi), telepathy, mutations and Dianetics are but some of fantasies of supersensibility invented in this period. They join the mind to the greater framework of the universe, a universe that this mind is alienated from in its everyday life.

When Marin thinks through the doublings of More's utopia, he writes that they make a

"difference whose contrary elements are exchanged in their very difference" (120). This takes place when Simak's Fowler changes into a Loper and back again, switching worlds and his humanity for the non-human. Other chapters in City exchange creatures, worlds and dimensions. These relations can be sited upon Marin's plane of the neutral, that is

119 not only limited to a play of two worlds, but a precondition for the creation of a multiplicity of worlds. In this, the neutral points to the infinite play of difference that takes place in the universes of sf.

Again, War of the Worlds offers a precedent for this kind of generic operation. For in this novel it is not only the Earth that has been invaded by Martians. To the metaphorical reciprocity of Mars and Earth, Wells adds the world of Venus, which is sullied by "a peculiar luminous and sinuous marking" indicative of Martian invasion (214). Thus Wells turns what had been a two-world narrative into a more complex picture of interplanetary relativity. So too in Simak the multiplicity of beings, from intelligent dogs, telepathic ants and superpowered aliens to immortal robots, points to the unlimited possibilities of the universe. The number of worlds included within its count is indefinite, their potential differences infinite. The metaphoric relations of difference turn into the metonymic. The movement over the neutral is indefinite, being constantly in motion.

By the 1950s a metonymy of worlds and universes had been established within multiple sf texts. Simak's City and van Vogt's Weapon Shops series are but two examples of these.

Others include E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman Series (1934-1960) and Skylark Series (1946-

1966), as well as Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series (1951-1953). When sf writers contributed to Astounding, they did so with a consciousness of what worlds and tropes had come before them. Campbell ran "Reader's Departments" in each magazine, including letters and votes for the most popular stories of the previous month. These helped him choose what was published in future, and put into place a circularity that determined what was good in sf and what wasn't. While the scientific romances of Wells and Verne were self-contained, stories in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, 1940s and

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1950s sat side-by-side on the page, and were in conversation with each other. Gregory

Benford points to how much sf is uniquely and generically aware of itself as "a continuing conversation" (qtd in Benford, Bear and Brin, 21). This conversation was also shaped by institutional and market forces, not least of these being Campbell's own editorship. These forces and the textual interrelationships between sf stories points to the way in which a generic totality emerged in this early period. Stories partook of accepted memes and sometimes invented new ones, answering one quasi-scientific possibility with another. This is the template onto which Simak's City and van Vogt's

Weapon Shops Series were grafted, in a multiplicity that Marin describes as an "identity that is the movement of difference" (120).

Such a pyrotechnics of possibilities leaves a unique place in the early genre for Simak's fiction, because it expresses a fatigue with these multiple futures. His oeuvre features heroes who move from these complex spaces into a less complicated past. In Catface and

Highway of Eternity (1986), time travel enables Asa and David to move back to the green plains of the Mastodon era and to the pastoral idyll of eighteenth-century England respectively. They move through the technological and back to the pastoral, in a retreat from the former's supersensible mind to an earlier American fantasy. In City, the immortal robot Webster puts his fatigue with infinitude into words:

Seven thousand years and seven thousand worlds stepping into one another's

tracks. Although it would be more than that. A world a day. Three hundred

sixty-five times seven thousand. Or maybe a world a minute. Or maybe even one

world every second. A second was a thick thing--thick enough to separate two

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worlds, large enough to hold two worlds. Three hundred sixty-five times seven

thousand times twenty-four times sixty times sixty ... (196)

The sheer number of worlds that inhabit the stretch of past, "like the links of an endless chain running on a wheel with a billion billion sprockets", is cognitively disorientating and then exhausting (196).

Instead of being elated by numerical excess, this robot takes refuge in the stasis of an old homestead that has lain unchanged for centuries. This is the first of many homesteads that appear throughout Simak's novels, and each configures Leo Marx's contradiction between the pastoral and sublime. In Way Station (1963), Enoch's country home doubles as a teleportation station for aliens travelling between interstellar worlds. He sits by the fire, looks over the hills, and receives guests from Vega XXI, Mankalinen III and

Alhhard XXII. Here the contradiction turns into that Kantian construction of the infinitely spatial through the moral. Enoch's home creates "a thick and final thing" amongst the vertiginous effects of spatial multiplicity (City 196). His moral accommodation of the inhabitants of the universe is at one with a historically older association of the moral with the pastoral. It may well be that Simak's pastoral is also retreating from the rapid changes of the American 1950s. From the spatial disorientations of television to the rise of the mass media and the increasing subjection of the American subject to financial complexity, the US was creating its own multiplicities.

In City, the homestead is "heavy with the dust of forgetfulness, filled with the brooding silence of aimless centuries" (220). The "distances" and "aimless centuries" stretch the

122 limits of domestic space into an imaginary unlimit, compressing its dust and duration into a conception of vast time (220). The homestead is made cosmic, the everyday a frame from which the boundless torrent of multiplicity, infinity and plurality is launched:

This room is just an anteroom to many other worlds, a key that reaches across

unguessable space to other planets that swing around unknown suns. A way to

leave this earth without ever leaving it--a way to cross the void by stepping

through a door. (City 221-2)

Simak's dialectic between the terrestrial and the multiple becomes that between the everyday and that which lies beyond it. Left behind by the mass migration to Jupiter, a remaining human faces his own inconsequence: "The man sat in the chair, staring at the nothingness that spread before his eyes, the dread and awful nothingness that became tomorrow and tomorrow" (City 179). While the previous passage opened from the room onto expanses of the universe, here the reverse takes place. The room is a site of fatigue with infinity, and opens only onto more of itself. The man's existence has become what

Ferdinand Hegel calls a bad infinitude, in which the equivalences of repetition lead to an exhaustion with their forms (137-8). Eventually he chooses to be put into suspended animation, and when asked for how long, responds "forever ... I might have said eternity, but it doesn't make much difference. There is no use quibbling over two words that mean the same" (City 189).

Van Vogt's Supermen and their Superpowers

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While Simak resorts to the pastoral to counter the disorientations of multiplicity, van

Vogt overwrites the vertigo of his own twisting and turning narratives with fantasies of superhuman powers. When Cayle realises that he possesses "calledity", a van Vogtian measure for a superhuman amount of luck, he is able to assume control over his own impoverished and disempowered situation. By the end of The Weapon Shops he has taken over much of the business life of Isher. This fantasy of control resolves the financial anxieties that had been previously articulated by van Vogt's moments of disorientation.

He has attained mastery over that which had previously been discomforting.

McAllister achieves another kind of supersensible at the end of The Weapon Shops.

Throughout the novel, he is stuck on a seesaw that is oscillating between times. Shifting rapidly back and forth between the past and the future, he never lands anywhere long enough to become orientated. McAllister experiences this second, supersensible stage of the sublime when he feels that "he must die so that others may live" (WS 127). The analogy here is with a worker's sacrifice to a booming American economy. As McAllister swings on the end of his tether, vulnerable before the shifting relations of a power that exceeds him, middle America was also supported by tenuous links to larger pools of monetary power. Employers and creditors were linked in a transcendental complexity that, through wage relations and debt, linked the reader to supersensible arrangements of financial power.

McAllister's own point of view is supplemented by a map of time at the weapon shop's council headquarters. It pinpoints his position on a multi-dimensional diagram made up of "intercrossed lines so finely drawn that they seemed to waver like heat waves on a torrid day" (WS 62). These lines, holding McAllister in permanent flux, figure the

124 multiple responsibilities of life in a burgeoning American economy. Meshed in an expanding cycle of savings and expenditure, debt and credit, the sf reader was becoming a part of the increasing complexity of his economy. Just as the council is powerless to affect McAllister's movement across time, so the boom of the American economy, expanding 250% between 1945 and 1960, was beyond the control of any one individual

(Coontz 1992). McAllister's movement between points on the map is "so alien that the vision could not make an acceptable image" (WS 62). The incomprehension the eye faces here is that of the transcendent and abstract movement of money itself. The dissolution of objects on the map into undecidability envisages the disappearance of money into banks and institutions that are too complex to make complete sense of.

Where the objects on the time-map go is something "even the weapon shop scientists had never quite decided" (WS 62).

In the sequel to The Weapon Shops of Isher, called The Weapon Makers (1947), there is another image of a complex and often imperceptible network of lines. Hedrock is the hero of this second novel, in which the Empress attempts to suppress the invention of an interstellar drive. After stealing the drive, Hedrock finds himself in deep space, where a group of alien spiders kidnap him and place him aboard their craft. The hero is tied into a spider's web as he awakens from a series of hallucinations:

A vague blueish light began to grow around him, and he saw that the city was

indeed gone. In its place was an unearthly dark-blue world, and webs, miles and

miles of webs. They reared up toward the remote ceiling and vanished into the

distance of the dimness. They spread out in all directions, fading into semi-night

like things of some nether world ... (WM 83)

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The spiders are rational to the point of callousness, having eliminated the rest of their kind to embody the best of themselves. While McAllister's enmeshment in the time map of The Weapon Shops had an arbitrary quality, shuttling him back and forth between random times, the web of The Weapon Makers is cruel and sinister, ruled by creatures without empathy. If these lines represent the anxieties of the professional American trapped by economic entanglement, then at their source is an unfeeling power.

The spiders send Hedrock back to the Earth to study the operation of human emotion.

When he first arrives he is disorientated. He is unsure whether he is within a hallucination generated by the spiders or on the real planet of Earth:

He seemed to be back on the earth. Hedrock climbed gingerly to his feet, and

examined himself. He was still wearing the insulation suit, which Greer had given

him, and in which he dressed himself before leaving the lifeboat to wander

around in the earth-like 'city' the spider beings had created for him. He looked

around the room slowly, searching for tiny discrepancies that would indicate that

this was another illusion.

He couldn’t be sure. And yet he felt different than when they had been

manipulating him. Then there had been an over-all atmosphere of unreality. He

had been like a man in a dream. He no longer felt that way. (WM 85)

Hedrock trusts the way he feels in this passage, rather than the sense-impressions around him. Although he may well be living in a simulation made by the spiders, Hedrock

126 decides "to act as if they did not exist", and thus not to be subjected to their multiple lines of force (WM 86-7).

Kant's two stages of the sublime appear in this moment, as Hedrock's disorientation gives way to participation in a reality that is greater than himself. The difference between the supersensible experiences of McAllister and Hedrock is that the latter is not making a sacrifice. Hedrock is subject only to his own sovereignty in this latter moment of the sf narrative, empowered in spite of his possible disempowerment by illusion, playing out a fantasy of individualism and control amidst the historical complexity of mass economy.

He reaches beyond the fear that he is in fact constituted by the artifice of the web, and thus subject to manipulation. His is a personal victory over the bindings of economy.

McAllister and Hedrock are heroes because they reverse their own financial dependence on the economy. Instead, the far future society of Isher is dependent on them. This is the fantasy of the professional worker, who wants to believe that his own technical or administrative expertise is that which keeps his company or nation functioning. From a position of disempowerment in a complex mass economy and its workplaces, these van

Vogt heroes take on its ideologies, and in doing so empower themselves with regard to their societies.

The two moments of the Kantian sublime are contained within the last sentence of the

Isher series. "This much we have learned", writes van Vogt, "Here is the race that will rule the sevagram" (WM 141). In this final instant van Vogt refuses to conclude his narrative.

Instead, he uses the hang-up technique to allude, metaphorically, to something unknown and great. The disorientation the "sevagram" initially produces is quickly replaced by the realization that humans will rule over this unknown quantity, and that the destiny of the

127 human mind lies in something greater than itself. The popularity of the Weapon Shops

Series during the 1950s can be attributed to this same dialogue, between cognitive excess and a fantasy of control that takes place in the everyday life of its readers. The elusive dimension of van Vogt's fiction is the emergent mass economy that these readers were subject to in this period, that exceeded comprehension and control and yet determined their lives. The surrender van Vogt's characters make to complexity is a psychic working through of the reader's participation in this economy, as he gives himself over to its powers.

It turns out, then, that van Vogt was not only a novelist of literary significance, using innovative compositional techniques, but also of historical relevance. The effect of these techniques was to defamilarise the anxieties of his readers and present their experiences back to them in a far future setting. The dialectic between disorientation and superhuman powers in the Weapon Shops Series plays out the cognitive effects of mass economy on the everyday life of the middle class male. The rapid spatial and narrative shifts in both van Vogt and Simak sublimate the experience of social transformation that this economy brought to the US in the late 1940s and 1950s, from the introduction of television to the changing circumstances of the workplace and debts incurred in an aspiration to home ownership. Van Vogt's supermen express fantasies of control that arise from insecurities brought about by these unprecedented circumstances of everyday life, while Simak's heroes want to retreat from its complexities.

When Toasters Start to Talk: Robots and Philip K. Dick

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In her psychoanalytic description of the Kantian sublime, Zupancic identifies the doubled personality that develops when "the subject sees herself being subjected to the law" (146). In the workplace, this takes place when subjects begin to think of themselves as professional, their personality subject to this law. It is through this "fundamental alienation" from the law that subjects come not only to create an other within, but to identify themselves with it. Thus the subject identifies with the law of the other

(Zupancic 153). The robot is a fictional device for mediating anxieties about the subject's identification with the law, because this robot is supposed to be nothing more than the law itself.

In Isaac Asimov's "Little Lost Robot" (1947), a robot is hardwired with a directive to

"obey the orders given it by human beings" (336). Yet the robot has rebelled against its law and hidden itself amongst a crew of sixty-two identical robot workers. A robopsychologist is called in to identify it, and explains that the robot's sense of superiority to human beings has overcome the law of obedience that once made it slavish. The originality of Zupancic's Ethics of the Real (2000) is to recognize the commensurability of the psychoanalytic superego and Kant's moral law. For Kant, the law that binds people to a social order is a moral law, and is formed by what Kant calls

"preparatory culture" (115). Thus the subject takes on the values of one's parents, as well as religious and moral ideas. This is a pleasure, because these values transcend the anxieties of this subject. Asimov's robot defamilarises this elevation of the self in fiction, by not making the identification it is required to. Instead it struggles to see itself as its own other, the freedoms that are paradoxically offered by the repressions of the moral law as its own. It is found muttering insanely to itself in a dialogue between the ego and

129 superego: "I must not disobey. They have not found me so far--He would think me a failure--He told me--But it's not so--I am powerful and intelligent--" (154).

A dialectic between the doubled consciousness of the sf hero and sf's trope of the robot turns up in Philip K. Dick's oeuvre. This integration of two otherwise distinct tropes of sf places this author in a later historical phase of the genre. In his 1984 monograph on

Dick, sf author Kim Stanley Robinson describes Dick's significance like this:

Up until Dick's first novels, science fiction works tended to concentrate on one

element at a time, so that there were postholocaust novels, robot novels,

telepathy novels and so on. Dick was one of the very first writers to present

fictive worlds in which all of these elements coexist, thus giving his worlds a

complexity that reflects the complexity of the culture from which the novels

spring. (Novels 19)

By 1955, when Dick's first novel Solar Lottery was released, many authors were already combining generic tropes. Simak's City (1952) is one example, and Frederik Pohl and

C.M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952) another. These novels combine new technologies with time travel, social speculation with extraterrestrial colonization. The multiplicities of these novels point to the way in which this new and paperback era of sf production reflected self-consciously upon its own tropes. The greater length of sf narratives, although still jacketed by gaudy, commercial covers, allowed the genre to reflect upon its own conditions of production. The Space Merchants was the first Ballantine paperback, and used a far future setting to critique the class relations and rationalizations of its own time. The world's food is produced by Chicken Little, a giant fleshy mass of

130 meat bred underground by impoverished and oppressed workers. Chicken Little is the very image of the alienations attendant upon mass produced food.

Another way of positioning Dick's work within a new phase of sf is to claim that the inconsistencies of his novels are a form of "expressionism" (Borel 73). This argument maintains that his novels are held together more by intuition or affect than by structure or reason. Supplementing this valorisation of the author is John Huntington, who claims that Dick, "like other popular SF writers such as Heinlein or Herbert, has learned how to give the impression of deep understanding simply by contradicting himself" ("Philip"

154). Whether profound or superficial, the inconsistencies of Dick's writing can be positioned within a history of such fragmentations in sf. Indeed van Vogt, inventor of techniques of fragmentation, was a significant influence on Dick (Interview). Yet sf scholarship finds that Dick, in this later time, was able to achieve something that these earlier authors did not:

When Fredric Jameson, one of Dick's earliest and most influential academic

backers, eulogized him as "the Shakespeare of science fiction" the comparison

referred to the intrinsic merit and interest of Dick's work, not to his reputation;

but today one can detect at least the beginnings of a critical "Dick industry" on

the model of the famous (and infamous) Shakespeare industry. (Freedman,

Editorial 122)

Dick has become the most significant author for sf scholarship since Wells. If the journal Science-Fiction Studies can be considered indicative of the field, Dick is the only

131 author to have had two entire issues dedicated to his work, in 1975 and 1988. His forty- four novels continue to feed this critical industry today.

What is it about Dick that is significant? Many critics have noted the importance of what

I am calling disorientation in his narratives. Disorientation is the structuring device for

Time Out of Joint (1959), for instance. Ragle Gumm is living what might pass as a typical life in an American small town of the 1950s. He drinks beer, plays cards and flirts with the neighbour's wife. Yet all is not as it appears to be. In a series of incidents, pieces of

Ragle's reality either slip away into nothingness or contradicts its norms. The most dramatic of these incidents takes place when Ragle asks a soft-drink stand vendor for a beer. The stand disappears into thin air, and in its place is a piece of paper saying SOFT-

DRINK STAND (37). Through a series of such incidents, Ragle realises that he is living in a fake world, and that the small town around him has been built to fool him alone.

When he finally escapes his simulated prison, it turns out that he has an important role to play in a 1997 war between the Earth and the moon. The time is not the 1950s, nor is he really Ragle Gumm. The simulation was a pretence to make use of his talent for problem solving, which he had been doing in a daily newspaper puzzle called "Where will the Little Green Man Be Next?" The puzzle turns out to be a code for the locating the position of falling bombs. He has some kind of a unique talent for working out just where these bombs will fall.

Peter Fitting calls these reality breakdowns a "discovery scene", that entail "a character's realization that his reality is somehow an illusion" ("Reality" 219-20). For Robinson these are typical of Dick's "reality breakdown", in which the hero's "assumptions about the universe no longer hold true" (Novels 35). For Umberto Rossi the particular moment in

132 which the soft-drink stand disappears is evidence of the word as a "sense-creating" reality ("Just" 207). Each of these critics is pointing to a tension constituted by unreliable representations and the malleability of the world. This is indeed the philosophical position implied by the moment of disorientation.

While this privileged moment of uncertainty with regard to representation is often thought of as postmodern (Durham; Palmer), Dick's work can still be read in terms of those modern contradictions consequent upon technological development. Fitting and

Jameson have both noticed the televisual quality of Dick's representations (Fitting,

"Reality" 227; Jameson, "History"). Like the telescope and microscope before it, television both disorientates the mind and creates new conditions by which this mind understands itself and the cosmos. The breakdown of Dick's soft-drink stand into text turns three dimensions into two. Rossi suggests that it appears as if the two-dimensional world is in fact behind this three-dimensional one. Putting this alternation between flatness and perspective, representation and depth, into a narrative has its experiential likeness in television viewing. The gaze is simultaneously upon the surface of the screen and within its illusion. Dick's fiction reflects the dilemmas of this new media, in which reality is determined somewhere between multiple layers of representation.

The dissolution of one dimension into another, and the uncertainties about the status of any one dimension, highlight the subjective and malleable qualities of Dick's prose.

Rather than transcending this uncertainty, Dick concludes his novels by emphasizing the subjective qualities of his characters. At the end of Time Out of Joint, Ragle chooses to join the lunatics from the moon in their battle with the Earth. While in van Vogt or Simak this choice creates a universal ideology as it extends itself through the supersensible

133 talents of the hero, Dick embeds this supersensible in self-reflection. Ragle acknowledges that:

Bill Black and Victor Nielson and Margo and Lowery and Mrs. Keitelbein and

Mrs. Kesselman--they have all done their duty; they have been loyal to what they

believe in. I intend to do the same. (174)

The sense of multiplicity, fragmentation and the malleability of different worlds that comes about through disorientation is placed in a determining instance with regard to

Dick's narrative ideologies. This recognition of the other's point of view at the last moment of the novel is repeated on the level of lunatic politics, that supports interplanetary colonization and is against Earth's "One Happy World" policy. The lunatics want a heterogeneous universe, not a homogeneous world. While Ragle's talent in solving the daily newspaper puzzle and thus calculating the location of falling bombs is supersensible, it does not assume its own universality. Instead, it is embedded within a subjective series of multiple worlds.

While van Vogt and Simak made a presumption of the relativity of worlds that then turned into transcendental pleasures, Dick foregrounds the original relativity of the genre. What Christopher Palmer describes as a dialectic between postmodernism and humanism in Dick is that between the heterogeneity of worlds and the universal. While van Vogt and Simak resolve their narratives with the latter, Dick keeps them in play. His heroes respond to disorientation with a reflexive consciousness reminiscent of Lyotard's reading of Kant. His narratives internalise Rose's description of the genre's insistence

"upon the contingency of the present order of things" (21).

134

This is precisely why a largely leftist sf criticism has privileged Dick above all other sf authors since Wells. Like Wells, Dick places the genre at a distance from the ideologies of modernity. As representations move to their conditions and back again, they undermine the certainty of any one ideology of representation. Describing this trajectory of the hero as a "lived discovery of ideology", Fitting's claims for the author resemble those of Rose for the genre. Dick's is a "refusal to accept 'reality' as something given".

However, Fitting takes this one step further than Rose, adding that this is a revolutionary stance, that Dick's is a "hope which led him to dream the transformation of the world"

(Fitting, "Reality" 234). The implication is that the desire for new worlds in sf are produced by the dissatisfactions with the old, that the moment of disorientation is one hoped for and constructed by a sense of capitalism's limits. This is one of the points of

Carl Freedman's book Critical Theory and Science Fiction (2000), that aligns sf with a leftist politics by recognizing the structural analogies between a dialectical critical theory and an sf that interrogates its own conditions of production. It is also the argument of utopian readings of the sf genre, suggested by Ernst Bloch (2) and carried out by Fitting

("Modern"), if not demonstrated by the critical utopias of the 1970s themselves (see

Chapter Three). It is also the consequence of reading Marin's philosophy of the creation of worlds beyond the text of More's Utopia. The creation of new worlds comes about because the known world has been negated, and hope has inaugurated the next.

From the generic structuring devices of space and the universal in Dick, I want to move to the third arm of sf's triangulation, this being cognition. To recall, cognition is a synthesis of capitalism and technological change. In Dick, cognition is represented by androids and talking artefacts. To think through the way in which these things come to

135 life, I want to turn to Lyotard's essay, "Can Thought go on without a Body?" (1991).

Speaking to a group of artificial intelligence experts, Lyotard answers his own question by arguing that a body is necessary for reflective thought. The body irritates a consciousness that would otherwise remain complacent. In Dick's fiction, objects that would otherwise be inanimate are spurred into consciousness in a rebellion against the conditions of their own embodiment. As Dick says in a 1972 speech: "A pistol, for example, is built with the purpose of firing a metal slug that will damage, incapacitate, or kill someone, but this does not mean that the pistol wants to do this. ("Android" 54). His fiction is populated by intelligent doors, talking household appliances and confused taxis.

Their artificial consciousnesses have come about through neurosis. The antagonism between its mind and the role it has been assigned develops idiosyncratically, such that a gun might develop a conscience or a door a sense of its own economic worth.

Freedman's "Towards a Theory of Paranoia" (1984) puts the pathology of Dick's talking objects into historical context. He points out that the consciousness of the Dick object is structured by a relation not to its function, but to its commodity form. Commodification is the irritant that gives rise to the particular forms of consciousness that inhabit the

Dick object. Giving life to the inanimate and taking it from that which is already alive, commodification turns objects into people and people into objects. At stake in this redefinition of relations is the situation of the subject with regard to the mass culture that produces these objects. Sartre's notion of seriality is also useful in modelling the way in which the objects produced by mass society acquire a life of their own. Sartre's individuals, standing in a bus queue, require the object of the bus to bring them together.

They are other to themselves and to each other through their relation to this bus. Thus

"the object takes on a structure which overflows its pure inert existence" (259). In

136 capitalism, this object is the commodity form that entertains a relation with its own seriality. The object is conscious because, before the equivalence of commodity relations, the interchangeability of one object with another, it cannot be distinguished from the human. As a part of the seriality of the commodity world, the individual within mass society has opened the way for otherwise inert objects to become conscious of their own commodified situation.

Sartre's seriality also models the way in which human beings are interpolated into social classes. The soldier, petty bourgeois and manual worker are "being-outside-themselves- in-the-other", always located elsewhere in a play of multiple and shifting social groupings

(268). Dick's characters take on the self-alienation of seriality when they enter into a dialogue with their social position or class. In Martian Time-Slip (1964), Silvia Bohlen moves from the "phenobarbital slumber" of sleep to the "Dexamye" of wakefulness, from her own private psyche to the seriality by which she is constituted for the "rest of the world" (1-3). The drugs enable Silvia to cope with her place as a housewife, a

"schizophrenic process" to which she must "succumb" (1). By representing a housewife's addiction to drugs, Dick defamilarises 1950s representations of the nuclear family and the place of women within it. The fantasy of suburbia, launched into outer space, is parodied by this novel in its representations of pharmaceutical drug addictions, unsatisfactory marriages, depressions, neuroses and a suicide. Attempting to transplant the spaces of suburbia to an off-world colony, America encounters only the personal cost of its own fantasy. The ideal television families of the 1950s, portrayed on such shows as I Love Lucy (1951-7) and Leave it to Beaver (1957-63), are made strange, their social forms enabled by the self-alienation of drug addiction and mental illness.

137

Stephanie Coontz points out that the nuclear family was in fact an invention of the

1950s (25). In this sense it was already strange to those who lived within it. Dick is not so much defamiliarising the familiarity of the nuclear family, then, as accounting for its actual and alienating experience. In Martian Time-Slip, Dick institutionalises this alienation when Purdy employs a psychiatrist to stand in for him at a family gathering (53-4). The psychiatrist is paid to say what Purdy would be expected to say and behave as Purdy would be expected to behave. This character has lost the ability to recognize his own serial identity as himself, his family as his own.

While Silvia's neurosis, her cycle of drug use, is a "deliberate stopping, a freezing on the path of life" that enables her to partake of the shared seriality of housewifery, her husband Jack is a schizophrenic who is falling away from such sociopathic constructions

(63). He succumbs to schizophrenia when he repairs the teaching machines at the local

Martian school. These machines are simulations of historical figures. One is Socrates, another Eisenhower and yet another an Angry Janitor. The repetitions of these teaching machines, tape loops turning within them, are a means to the "perpetuation of the culture" on Mars (61). The teaching machines are, in Sartre's terms, the inert matter that grounds the seriality of Dick's Martian culture. They reproduce a false reciprocity of relations that produce the "formula of the series" of social life in the colony (264). The historical resemblance here is to colonial cultures, that maintain archaic values and behaviours that are no longer in their original historical situation. To this defamiliarisation of suburban America, Dick adds a native Martian race. The Bleekmen wander the dry Martian desert, and present an alternative to the neurosis of colonial society. They offer a mirage of escape from its simulated repetitions.

138

It is no coincidence, then, that the Bleekmen appear to be so charismatic, nor that during his episodes Jack hallucinates "the aspect of eternity" (96). For the additive effects of a repetitive culture, the cycles of machines and humans, turn into their mathematical conclusion that is infinity. As Sartre identifies, "When the multiplicity is gathered together by a movement of circular recurrence, we have a practically infinite series"

(276). Jack's vision of forever is created by this series, its interchangeable parts adding one to the other. This is a "morbid vision", because the living who surround Jack are already dead under this eye of this eternity, which reveals their robotic repetitions (96).

The feeling of the sublime that accompanies this infinite can be thought in two ways.

The cultural stagnation of the Mars colony recalls the decline of the Ancient Roman

Empire, from which a Longinian sublime sprang to exceed its tragedy. Jack's schizophrenic experiences and the Bleekmen are elevated from the glum state of the

Martian colonies with their perception of eternity. To this Longinian sublime can be added a Kantian, mathematical one. Sartre's seriality, despite its non-transcendental materialism, points to the finitude whose logical extension is the infinite, and thus to the historical preconditions for a feeling of the sublime. The transcendence of this sublime can be thought of, after Sartre, as one mobilized from within the cognitive schisms that

Sartre identifies in materialist and commodity culture. Partaking in seriality, in the social and cultural representations of 1950s America, was a pleasure because the mind partook in the infinitude that the finitude of these representations were implied in. The nuclear family, workplace, suburbs and mass media constitute universal conditions for the coming into being of an other in the self. This other constitutes an infinitude in extending beyond the subject, in pertaining to national and class-bound forms of being.

In these circumstances, alienation itself becomes a pleasure, as the subject transcends the

139 contradictions upon which their own interpolation into the culture is based. Thus the soldier and housewife, doctor and repairman, hold within themselves the sublimity of infinite form. When people in the American suburbs of the 1950s said they were happy

(Coontz 27), this may well have been the joy of being as a transcendental other. Dick's novels outline the tragedy of living this other, and critique the experience of Kant's own mathematically sublime as its serial forms assume the position of universality.

The Bad Infinities of Arthur C. Clarke

While Dick describes the relation that subjects have to their own seriality, the expatriate

English writer Arthur C. Clarke takes seriality on its own terms. He goes so far as to construct a philosophy around the conformity of modern subjects to their serial identity.

First published in Astounding in 1946, Clarke went on to become not only a bestselling sf writer, but a leading propagandist for space exploration. His fictions are something of an extension of this public role, as they demonstrate the feasibility of near-future technologies. They subsume human relations to the conditions under which they might leave the planet. As Merritt Abrash points out, "cooperation serves no necessary function" for Clarke, instead being a means to the ends of human expansion into space

(377). More interested in technology than people, Clarke is properly the successor to

Jules Verne, whose From the Earth to the Moon spends "some 110 pages discovering how to get to the moon", only to leave his astronauts "quite literally dangling in the breeze"

(Thurber 222). The emphasis on cognitive feasibility in Clarke's fiction lies contrary to

140 the imaginative and Wellsian pole of the sf dyad. While Dick is a self-reflexive author, engaging with the cognitive implications of the sublime, Clarke, at first glance anyway, appears to have embraced the infinite as a means of transcending the complexities of the human mind.

In the 1961 novel, A Fall of Moondust, Clarke stages a disaster on the moon's surface. A tourist vehicle is designed to sail over an imaginary dust ocean still called the Sea of

Thirst. On one of its journeys it falls deep within this dust, and is trapped many meters below. Those aboard are professionals, white collar workers, on holiday from Earth--a lawyer, physicist, accountant, journalist, professor, engineer and a few wives who play less of a role in the narrative. They are joined by a heroic space veteran, the captain of the vehicle and its hostess. The gender relations of this novel are unashamedly patriarchal, women fitting into the social roles that middle class society had allocated for them in the 1950s.

It is a strange moment when, in the face of their approaching deaths, the tourists choose to play games that imitate, on a smaller scale, the practices of their terrestrial lives. They improvise a mock theatre, a court of law and a set of cards. The scene recalls the card game in Wells' War of the Worlds, the narrator sitting in a cellar playing cards as the

Martians wreak havoc above. The game Wells's characters play is called euchre, whose prize is the city of London. Under the yoke of imperial invasion, these Englishmen carry on thinking like imperialists (193). Clarke's characters, on the other hand, play games to defeat their "biggest problem" (33). This is not, as you might expect, the looming spectre of their mortality, as air is slowly running out in the cabin, but "boredom" (33). In this neglect of the personal, existential reality of death, the card game becomes uncanny. Its

141 repetition of bourgeoisie life amidst disaster signals their continuity with the civilization they have left behind, and their serial place within it. They want to be constituted by this civilization to the very last, to identify with the seriality of their culture. In being constituted by an other that is determined by the social field, they transcend the discontinuities of an alienated life.

Clarke's one-dimensional characters have not gone unremarked. Sf author Christopher

Priest writes that the author's "level of characterization is that of a boy's adventure magazine" (93). Banality has also featured in criticisms of Stanley Kubrick's film 2001: A

Space Odyssey (1968), co-written by Clarke. Some critics were especially bored by its dialogue (Fry; Gelmis; Gilliatt; Kauffmann; Williams). Other, mainly later writers, point out that this banality is a kind of irony, reading it as an intentional device to accentuate the greater qualities of the physical universe (Tapio 55). As Spufford notes of those trapped in the Arctic ice over winter--their dancing, amateur theatricals and shipboard newspaper were a way of "defying the elements" (50). More than this, they also emphasized the perversity of being where they were, the magnitude of the darkness outside, whether in space or the long winter night of the Arctic.

In A Fall of Moondust the blandness of a wealthy white culture extends to the moon. In

Clarke's The Songs of Distant Earth (1986) this extension reaches across stellar systems.

Here humans have been separated by multiple generations and immense tracts of space, as they spread in ships and colonies across the universe. They are, however, culturally identical to each other, unchanged by time or the difference of their surroundings. At least in this later novel Clarke's women are of more consequence, The Songs of Distant

Earth featuring a strong female leader on the alien world of Thalassa.

142

When a group of interstellar travellers arrive on the planet, their similarity to the native population is uncanny:

The Mayor was holding out her hands in the traditional 'See--no weapons'

gesture as old as history.

"I don't suppose you'll understand me," she said, "but welcome to Thalassa."

The visitors smiled, and the older of the two--a handsome, grey-haired man in

his late sixties--held up his hands in response.

"On the contrary," he answered, in one of the deepest and most beautifully

modulated voices Brant had ever heard, "we understand you perfectly. We're

delighted to meet you." (21)

Clarke's disorientations do not lie so much in the extraordinary but in the uncannily ordinary. Not only has human body language remained unchanged, but the polite and banal gentilities of the bourgeoisie are preserved in a space and time far removed from its historical specificity. When the captain of the starship and a local Lassan fall in love,

Clarke describes their kiss like this: "And presently, between two worlds, they became one" (87). The phrase emphasises the scale of this serial humanity, universalised across far flung parts of the galaxy.

Ingeniously, Clarke goes on to partially explain his interstellar monoculture:

143

When sound recording was invented, it froze the basic phoneme patterns of all

languages. Vocabularies would expand, syntax and grammar might be modified--

but pronunciation would remain stable for millennia. (21)

Here Clarke repeats Sartre's deterministic relation between technology and the serial. To recall, the bus is the basis of the serial identities of those who wait in line for it, the

"practico-inert" by which people enter into a sedentary constitution. The practico-inert is

"matter which has absorbed the past actions and meanings of human beings" and then comes to constitute these beings in turn (Poster, 60-1).

In another fiction, Clarke reverses the causal relation of technology and culture, claiming that humans were in fact a banal species to begin with, and that is why they were able to invent things. "First Encounter " was the redraft of an earlier story, "Encounter in the

Dawn," published in Amazing Stories in 1953. It was written for the novel 2001 but never made it into the final draft because Kubrick chose to make another kind of film. It seems to me that a line in this abandoned chapter provides something of a key to

Clarke's oeuvre. When an alien visitor to pre-historic Earth meets a proto-human ape, the alien notices that:

Where the other animals had become virtuosos, [the proto-human apes] had

specialized in a universal mediocrity--and therein, in a million years hence, might

lie their salvation. Having failed to adapt themselves to their environment, they

might yet one day change it to suit their own desires. ("First Encounter" 57-8)

144

Mediocrity is the very condition by which technology comes into being. Human relations in Clarke's novels are of so little interest because humans are inherently mediocre. What is instead of interest is technology. While for Sartre human nature is determined by its material conditions, for Clarke humans are only of interest in so far as they shape what is around them.

It is significant that Clarke uses the term "salvation" to describe the relationship of technology to human nature, harking back to the Christian religion from which Western culture evolved. Technology occupies the place of the sacrificed Christ in Clarke's work, because it rescues the human race from its fallen, terrestrial state. The new life it brings is the life of civilization, as the sacrifice of one into the other constitutes the identity of the saved. There is a dialectic here, between humans who determine their fate in the universe by shaping matter before them, and a salvation that requires an exterior force to rescue the fallen. In "Encounter in the Dawn" this exteriority is an alien who has arrived from the depths of the universe to teach an ape things that will help its species to evolve. The alien teaches the use of tools, and the dialectic of human and alien gives way to a synthesis in a universality of technology. Bridging the human mind and the universe, technology becomes the means with which the human race transcends its own mediocrity.

The universality of Clarke's technology, and its implication in infinity, offers his characters a refuge from mortality. Not death but the meaninglessness of death haunts his narratives. In 2010 (1982), a Chinese cosmonaut is facing death alone on Europa, an ice moon of Jupiter. His ship has been destroyed by a giant life-form that unexpectedly crawled out from the ocean beneath the ice. The cosmonaut recognizes the significance

145 of his discovery of life on another world, and calls back to a Russian spaceship making its way into Jupiter space:

'I've only two requests to make, Doctor. When the taxonomists classify this

creature, I hope they'll name it after me.

'And--when the next ship comes home--ask them to take our bones back to

China. (50)

The name of this character offers the continuity deprived him by death, as it extends infinitely and immortally with civilization into outer space.

Clarke makes use of the sublime magnitude of death when he describes the final moments of a man drowning in the ocean of Thalassa like this:

When he realised it was all over, he felt no fear. His last conscious thought was

pure anger that he had travelled fifty light-years, only to meet so trivial and

unheroic an end. (136)

The scale of a human life is in contrast to the scale of the universe. The death of this character hardly transcends its individual meaninglessness. Instead, he wishes for the sacrifice of a heroic death that would redeem him from the fallen and trivial state of the individual. Heroism is a contribution to the infinitude of human expansion into space, becoming a part of the series of civilization. It ascends into the supersensible in being part of an infinite progression into the universe. The deaths of Clarke's heroes reveal the

146 role of sacrifice in the supersensible, as consciousness is elevated into the infinite only by disregarding the physical body.

When in 2001 the astronaut Dave arrives at Jupiter, after following the signal of TMA-1, he finds an identical black object floating in the giant's orbit. It takes him on a psychedelic journey over the surface of suns and through interstellar gateways, before leaving him in a room. The novel describes this room like this:

He was prepared, he thought, for any wonder. The only thing he had never expected was the

utterly commonplace.

The space pod was resting on the polished floor of an elegant, anonymous hotel suite that might

have been in any large city on Earth. He was staring into a living room with a coffee table, a

divan, a dozen chairs, a writing desk, a half-filled bookcase with some magazines lying on it,

and even a bowl of flowers. (208-9)

After a journey "[T]hrough the Stargate", Clarke returns to the mediocre (207). His frequent combinations of the ordinary and extraordinary have led E. Michael Thron to point out that "the more predictable the fiction, the stronger will be the alien" in Clarke's work (72). The two of his texts that have received the most critical attention, Childhood's

End (1954) and the film version of 2001, co-written with Stanley Kubrick, supplement bourgeoisie futures and hard technological extrapolation with the most fantastic and transcendent of alien beings.

However, the vast majority of Clarke's writings do not feature aliens, the ordinary co- existing instead with the alienations of outer space. The aesthetic strength of novels such

147 as A Fall of Moondust and The Songs of Distant Earth lie in combining the ordinary details of human beings living in the extraordinary reaches of outer space. The ordinary often slides into the banal, as Clarke concerns himself with the bureaucratic problems of a lunar colony (A Fall of Moondust) or the marital dissatisfactions of people on a distant world (The Songs of Distant Earth). These otherwise insignificant aspects of Clarke's fiction emphasize just how ordinary the fact of being in space is for his characters, and how extraordinary it is for the reader.

Moving from Clarke's novels to the film 2001 is to change the conditions under which the reception of sf takes place, and subsequently the representation of seriality. A cinema of sf has been in place at least since the turn of the century, when George Melies made

A Voyage to the Moon (1902), but the first sf film to produce a lot of critical attention was

2001. Since its release it has attracted a steady stream of secondary work. In her 1969 article on 2001, Annette Michelson places Kubrick's film in a direct descent from Melies as a cinema of effect, suspending narrative and belief to stage a spectacle of the eye. 2001 is indeed made up of a series of historically unprecedented special effects--from the recreation of proto-human apes and the dawn of the Earth in which they lived to the hull of an orbiting space-station, a flight to Jupiter, and the trans-dimensional voyage of the astronaut Dave through a "Stargate".

In 1998, Scott Bukatman revisits 2001 to describe this last sequence of the film as sublime because it returns the viewer from cognition to a pure state of perception. His article thinks that this non-differentiation is a purely cinematic sublime, and compares it to the illusions of fairground attractions and the experimental films of Stan Brakhage.

For Bukatman, cinema and sf both have technology at their core, and meet in the

148 estrangements of special effects. While the disorientations of industrialization are simulated by special effects, the struggle for the subject to assimilate them is the subject of sf.

Carl Freedman's article on 2001, while acknowledging that the special effects of cinema are technologically complicit with the technological interests of sf, makes a completely different point about the quality of these effects. He argues that they are the antithesis of sf 's cognitive, rather than perceptual, estrangements. Estrangements take place in sf narrative that are at odds with special effects that are in fact an interruption to it. The differences between Bukatman and Freedman arise not only in locating sf differently, but in their preference of scenes from the movie. Wanting to emphasize disorientation,

Bukatman thinks about the abstract "Stargate" sequence, while Freedman confronts the entire range of the film's scenes. He points to the way the specular hegemony of 2001 contains its own quality of mediocrity. For Freedman it is a great film because it is conscious of the conceptual vacuity of special effects. 2001 can thus be taken as a kind of critical reflection upon Clarke's novels, which foreground technology at the price of human relations. Whatever the drawn-out sequences of spacecraft docking, an astronaut jogging in a centrifugal corridor and so on are reflecting upon, they contain a self- conscious quality that transcends their own mediocrity.

At the time of the film's release, many took the film's lack of narrative at face value.

After test screenings, the production company MGM requested that Kubrick shorten its length because audiences were bored. Critic Stanley Kauffmann called it dull three times in one sentence and noted the "poor dialogue and acting" of the scenes in outer space

(225). Michaela Williams notes that those "who want to abandon themselves in the film's

149 visual beauty wince at the story; and those interested in plot are bored by stars" (277).

Another review claimed its characters were "standardized, bland, depersonalised near- automatons who have surrendered their humanity to the computers" (Gelmis, 264). The lead actor Kier Dullea "must have been selected for his role as one of the astronauts on the basis of his limited range of expressions" (Williams 227).

The reviewer for the New Yorker claimed that the:

citizens of 2001 have forgotten how to chat, speculate, grow intimate, or interest

one another ... They lack the mind for acknowledging that they have managed to

diminish outer space into the ultimate in humdrum, or for dealing with the fact

that they are spent and insufficient ... (Gilliatt, 211)

Yet what would initially be criticisms of this mediocrity would turn into a recognition that these dehumanised humans served some kind of a critical and aesthetic function. By

1977, 2001's mediocrity would become a part of its authorial intention:

They talk of it as though it were a defect when it actually is a virtue. For it is

obviously silly to assume that Kubrick and Clarke could not have written

brighter dialogue, had they wanted to. If it was developed the way it was and

provided with its perfect setting of a Howard Johnson in space, an Orbiter

Hilton, and all that, this must have been done for a reason. And its purpose is

really clear: to show us up as we are or soon will be, by extrapolating a few

decades ahead, almost imperceptibly magnifying our shortcomings and inanities.

It is finely wrought satire, unwillingness (rather than inability) to put more than

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clichés into the mouths of those stewardesses and security personal and space

scientists of the near future. (Plank 126)

Plank recognizes that the mediocrity of 2001 is extrapolating upon the mediocrity of

1968. It describes a social pathology of its times.

The extension of the serial forms of Earth into infinite space implies the viewer in their extension. The Hilton and the telephone booth aboard the space station are familiar and yet, in the void of space, acquire a supersensible dimension. From the disorientation that accompanies the defamiliarisation of ordinary things as they float in outer space, the consciousness is lifted as the reader or viewer realises their own possible future has been lifted into the space of the infinite. The supersensible is also at work in the alien artefacts or monoliths of the film as they appear to direct the proto-human apes and lunar explorers in the evolution of humankind. The mind of the viewer is implied in an imaginary extension, via the alien artefact, into the universe. Technology is associated with the thoroughly alien, and is implied in the infinite power of this alien.

Unlike the crowded Mir and Salyut platforms that the real future would bring into being,

2001's International Space Station is remarkable in its very abundance of interior space.

Lunar miners, diplomats, researchers and tourists wander broad and empty corridors glowing with artificial light. Arranged along these corridors are video phones and reclining chairs. Announcements for flights to the moon drift over the intercom. A long centrifugal corridor of the orbiting International Space Station may as well be the product of another species, it is so devoid of humanizing touches. Its walls and floors are an antiseptic white, and are luxuriously vast as they stretch to a curved horizon. They

151 have their corollary in an exterior of emptiness. The infinite reaches of outer space are relocated to the infinite circularity of an airtight tube that makes up the station's interior structure. The hull that separates the interior from the exterior of the station, life from death, is no longer a barrier but an agreement between forms of death. It grazes the physical death of airless space and contains within itself the death of a white, antiseptic space. Kauffmann calls it a "celestial Kennedy Airport" (226). Its Hilton Hotel, customs barrier and telephone booth are each familiar and strange, looking like the post-industrial ideal of Marc Auge's notion of the non-place, freed from the contingencies of its own production, and thus its place on the terrestrial world. The existence of these familiar objects is only betrayed by signs that point to exit gates and the sound of boarding calls.

Its destinations are equivalent points in a deterritorialised space, partaking of an indifferent void that renders its locations neutral.

The spatialisation of the International Space Station also infects the relations between those on board. When Floyd runs into his old Soviet friend Dimitri on the way to the moon, he cannot tell him that he is on his way to see the top-secret discovery site TMA-

1. The old friends sit around a table of drinks, but unlike the proto-human apes who had previously battled around a waterhole, their conflict is banal. "He was sorry he could not sound more sincere," he thinks in the novel, "they really had enjoyed a week's vacation in Odessa with Dimitri during one of the Russian's visits to Earth" (Clarke, 2001 63).

Personal relations are constrained by a competition between nations that is, in outer space, sheerly symbolic. The social order is maintained only to bring about what Mark

Crispin Miller describes as a “sense of profound emptiness” (24). When Floyd is the only passenger of a shuttle flight to the moon, Clarke notes in the novel that the hostess is

"determined, it seemed, to go through the full routine for her solitary passenger, and

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Floyd could not resist a smile as she continued inexorably" (Clarke 2001, 44-5). Again, the familiar becomes the site of the extraordinary for readers and viewers inexperienced in space flight.

As Floyd passes through a customs barrier, he notices that:

There was a rather pleasant symbolism about the fact that as soon as they had

passed through the barriers, in either direction, passengers were free to mix

again. The division was purely for administrative purposes. (51)

The customs barrier, floating in outer space, is thus removed from its geographic, and thus historical and cultural, contingency. While the airport on Earth is located amidst the bustling heterogeneity of city life, the space station is surrounded by the emptiness of outer space. No longer relevant to the terrestrial, it represents a form without content, symbols with referents that are many kilometres of emptiness away.

It is with this vacancy of form in mind that the rooms at the very end of 2001 appear to be sublime. The simulated Hotel that Dave has arrived in contains a doubled alienation, of the non-place of the Hotel form and in its alien origins. The floors and a table glow uncannily, the recesses of the rooms diffuse with soft light. Despite the antiseptic neutrality of the space, the objects that decorate it are historically contingent. There are beds, antique statues, chairs and cutlery, each of which has its origins in an older version of Western civilization. The space station and alien hotel room scenes point to a colonization of outer space by a certain conception of space itself--hygienic, linear and

Western.

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Clarke's depiction of futures that are devoid of affect, subsumed to the repetitions of older forms, resembles Hegel's critique of Kant's sublime. For Hegel, interested in the contradictions of the world's presentation, Kant's aspirations to a feeling that would accompany infinitude are frustrated by their finite form. The numerical version of infinity rests on a principle of equivalence, in which each whole number assumes an interchangeable place in a series. These repetitions do not add up to a transcendental conception of the sublime for Hegel, but become tedious:

In the attempt to contemplate such an infinite, our thought, we are commonly

informed, must sink exhausted. It is true indeed that we must abandon the

unending contemplation, not however because the occupation is too sublime,

but because it is too tedious. It is tedious to expatiate in the contemplation of

this infinite progression, because the same thing is constantly recurring. We lay

down a limit: then we pass it: next we have a limit once more, and so on forever.

All this is but a superficial alternation, which never leaves the region of the finite

behind. (138)

The bad infinite is the contradiction of an infinite that does not include its own finitude.

While for Kant the sublime is a feeling that transcends the reason of infinity, for Hegel history turns from one bad infinity to another, "this other is itself somewhat, therefore it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum" (137). He singled out astronomers for special criticism, claiming that infinite space was a "theme of barren declamation to astronomers with a talent for edification" (138).

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The infinitude of 2001, both film and novel, is transcendent in a Kantian sense because its technological form is implied in the mysteries of an alien intelligence. The cognition of the mind turns out to be aligned with the reason of the universe, and thus the forms that this mind takes, such as its social life, also imply the infinitude of this universe within them. The coincidence of mind with universe is also that of mind with mind, and the universe with itself, as each are implied in each other as versions of the same infinite transcendence. The astronaut Dave Bowman confronts this identification of the thing with itself, the thing-in-itself, after his arrival at the simulated Hotel Suite in the novel:

Bowman picked up a carton of a familiar breakfast cereal, thinking as he did so that it was

odd to keep this frozen. The moment he lifted the package, he knew that it certainly did not

contain cornflakes; it was much too heavy.

He ripped open the lid, and examined the contents. The box contained a slightly blue substance,

of about the weight and texture of bread pudding. (211-2)

The matter from which the form of the infinite is made is incomprehensible and incontrovertible, its existence beyond its own simulation. While Clarke imagines the alignment of cognition and nature in technology, this "blue substance" lies at its boundary.

The facticity of the form's existence, whether in the hull of a space station or in the reified speech of tourists and bureaucrats, remains impenetrable. On the one hand, technology is bestowed with a great sense of its possibilities in 2001. On the other, it is construed according to the enigma of its own existence.

This specific representation of a "blue substance" configures the meeting of a mathematically sublime with a dynamical one, an interstellar journey with its material

155 preconditions. This was already present in 2010 and The Songs of Distant Earth, whose narratives are haunted by the death that awaits their characters, and who subsequently seek refuge in Kant's infinite. This movement from the infinite to the infinitesimal existence of matter and back again is one created out of the contradictions of modernity.

The numerical cognition that arose from capitalism and the new sciences turns into the mathematically sublime, while the dissatisfactions with the social forms of this cognition turns up as its very limit, as the resistance of matter to its universalising logic.

Why the Moon Landing Made Good Television

The shift between Kantian infinitudes also turns up in the aesthetics of the first Apollo moon landing. While NASA attempted to exploit universalising ideologies of the infinite for its space program, it ended up estranging these ideologies with an outer space that deconstructed them. This took place on television, a medium that was having an increasingly significant impact on the cultural life of the West. By 1960 the television set was in about 90% of American homes, and switched on for an average of five hours a day (Spigel 33). The most significant television text for sf thus far has been the Apollo moon landing of 1969. The sheer numbers of people watching the show indicate how influential the landing was. While 123 million Americans saw the landing, NASA estimates 600 million people watched it worldwide (Life). David Nye describes the experience of one million of these people as they witnessed the Earth-shattering take-off in Florida. He argues this launch, with its fire and noise, was dynamically sublime

(American 237-56). The majority of people, however, would experience the flight on television and in other media. Everybody but two astronauts experienced the actual landing in this way, although ss we shall see, it is debatable whether this pair actually

156 experienced the landing. Apollo, a text like any other, was conditioned by its circumstances of reception and the effects of the television medium. It may be going too far to claim that the lunar broadcast was sf, although Clarke and Heinlein were both guest commentators for the event. Its mediation made the experience have certain aesthetic effects that do resemble sf.

It is the argument here that the mediation of the landing, principally through television but also in other media, had the effect of deconstructing rather than constructing the ideals that accompanied the moon landing. In "Don't Fly Me to the Moon", Nye's analysis of the moon landing as a "media event" also distances itself from claims that such an event "welds together the community" (76). He attributes the lack of subsequent support for the US space program to the fact that, according to surveys made at the time, there was little support for Apollo in the first place. Most Americans thought the expense too great, and the economic crises of the 1970s only compounded their opposition to it. Indeed, two of the massive Saturn boosters built for lunar flights remain standing like reconstructed dinosaurs in the US. They never made it off the launch pad because support for lunar flights waned to such a degree.

It is to the televised experience of the lunar landing that I want to turn for alternative and aesthetic reasons for this loss of interest in manned exploration of the planets. The footage of the moon that was broadcast on television, and the photographs that returned with the astronauts showed a vast and inhuman mass of matter. Despite the ideological work of the NASA publicity machine, their success in making Apollo 11 into a media event, the moon itself served to disorientate the goals upon which its media campaign rested. The Apollo program was created at the very end of an era of modernity and its

157 ideologies were contingent upon heroic, nationalist and expansionist imperatives. The moon and space, however, were indifferent to these goals and its astronauts. Specifically, the Apollo program encountered Kant's two categories of the sublime: magnitude, represented by the mass of the moon itself; and infinitude, in the expanse of outer space.

These correspond to the dynamically and mathematically sublime. The landing upon the moon symbolized a confrontation with the magnitude of space that lay within and ahead of the infinitudes alluded to by the space program, as it confronted the emptiness that made up its own objectives. Such a reading is commensurable with what Richard Dienst calls "the infinitesimal fissuring of an interminable present" that takes place on television

(159). The subject of Dienst's book, television's tendency to steal time from its viewers, is one that deconstructs the idea of a unified and coherent subject that watches television. The machinery of television undermines the unity of the television's ideological effects.

Manned space exploration and colonization are today no longer such a priority, and footage of the Apollo landing has come to represent a future that never happened. It is relevant to interrogate the place of Apollo today as a right-wing US Presidential dynasty repeatedly makes allusions to returning to other worlds. The two Bush presidents have both announced, during their respective terms, plans for manned missions to Mars. In

1989 George Bush Senior said there would be people there by 2019, while Bush Junior promised in the early twenty-first century that such a mission would be undertaken around 2030. Perhaps more realistic timetables are being put forth by China, who have mapped their own future in space after putting its first man into orbit in 2003. Or the real future for human space flight will lie with private industry. In 2004 the Ansari

Foundation awarded ten million dollars to the first company to put someone in space.

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For many years, however, only fringe societies such as Artemis and the Mars Society continued to campaign for manned space flight, as US space funding was swallowed up by the near Earth and military flights of the Space Shuttle.

It is relevant to return, then, to that most radical critique of Apollo 11, recently turning up again in the television show Conspiracy Theory: Did We Land on the Moon? (2001). This is the claim that the moon landing was in fact faked. From the contradictory angle of shadows on the moon to the absence of stars in the sky, conspiracy theories call our attention to Apollo's mediation, to the way in which the landing was not quite real for

600 million television viewers. In this sense it doesn't matter whether Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon or not, whether the whole thing was faked or not, because the experience was a mediated one. Even Buzz Aldrin, the second man to walk on the moon, confesses that his experience was not as real as he might have liked it to be. In

Return to Earth, Aldrin describes the landing to be just like the training simulations (232).

He also reveals the extent to which Apollo 11 was stage managed. Transmissions from the Apollo capsule were preceded by a capsule clean up and the astronauts read to the world from cue cards (Aldrin 225). The line between the reality of the moon landing and its representation is blurred by the meticulous extent to which it was rehearsed.

Other alternative histories criticize the ideological construction of Apollo 11. It was sold to a global public as an anthropocentric, masculine, technological, white and American victory. There was substantial opposition to the program from Afro-American groups, campaigners for the poor and mainstream Americans concerned about its economic cost to their government. A poll taken in February 1969 showed that just 34% of Americans supported it, while 55% were opposed (Nye, "Don't" 71). Apollo 11 left a plaque

159 declaring that it represented all mankind, but in fact Americans who endorsed the landing were largely white, middle-class, young and affluent, the model of the sf reader

(Nye, "Don't" 72). The Apollo program specifically represented middle America and middle American conceptions of space. In the issue of Life magazine released to commemorate the landing, scenes of the Apollo 11 mission are accompanied by shots of the astronauts at home and with their families. Pat Collins gives a champagne party for friends, Buzz Aldrin jogs beside a recently built house and Neil Armstrong bakes pizza.

Each astronaut is the ideal image of a conservative American male. He has a wife and at least two children, and lives in the picturesque suburbs.

The images of family life in the 1969 Life edition were typical of those that dominated the American media in the 1960s, performing a "social sanitization" of the American ideological landscape (Spigel 53). The rise in television's popularity coincided with the popular rise of family values (Spigel 31). The technological victory of Apollo 11, of artifice over brute nature, reason over chaos, was a microsm of television's own social victory during the 1960s. The promotion of middle America on television prepared an ideal viewing environment for the Apollo mission. The sanitized space of the domestic living room complied with the artificial and rational values of Apollo. The cleanliness embraced by middle America found itself affirmed in the purity of outer space.

Television was also producing a whole new set of social problems in the 1960s. As its viewers moved from the inner cities to the suburban developments of the 1950s and

1960s, they found themselves at a distance from the ideal communities depicted on television. The imaginary family lives they saw were vastly different to the alienation that suburbia created between neighbours and other family members (Spiegel 43). Rather

160 than unifying culture, television had a fracturing effect. Aldrin's book exposes this alienation by revealing how far from the ideal husband and family man he really was.

Confessing that he and many other astronauts did not fit the ideal image, he tells of extra-marital affairs and of a deep depression he experienced after Apollo 11. Aldrin wanted to "stand up and be counted" as a real human being after being heroically and ideally constructed by NASA (338).

He also confessed that the experience of the lunar surface was overlaid by NASA's agenda:

My strongest memory of those few hours as the first men on the lunar surface

was the constant worry that we'd never accomplish all the experiments we were

scheduled to do. Philosophy and emotion were not included and, in fact, were

discouraged. (Aldrin, picture caption)

Journalists noted this preoccupation of the Apollo 11 astronauts with the technical aspects of their flight even before lift-off. In the commemorative Life issue, Loudon

Wainwright quotes Neil Armstrong's answer to a question:

'I think we understand the nature of the difficulty that came up with the Apollo

10, even though we cannot precisely ascribe the difficulty to a certain failure. Our

procedure is one where we have procedurally implemented methods of

circumventing the problem and, should it occur, we have procedures that will be

able to cancel the kind of problem we get in.' (71)

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This kind of technical talk, prevalent throughout NASA at the time, is dubbed

"computerese" by Norman Mailer, this being inaccessible to the "average guy" (Mailer

33, 11). Mailer's book, A Fire on the Moon (1970), is famously critical of the Apollo program. It was commissioned to provide an account of the landing by a great American novelist, but instead mourned the death of the romantic hero and the birth of an impersonal and technological one. The sublimity of Mailer's ideas about NASA lie in this dehumanised computerese, that is as as empty of meaning as outer space itself.

Neil Armstrong is the uncompromising figure of Apollo efficiency. Unlike Aldrin and

Mike Collins, Armstrong never released a book of his subjective experience of the flight.

Life magazine compares him to a machine, declaring that he "finds people far less efficient than aircraft and their performance generally short of their capacity" (Hamblin

36). Mike Collins' account of the moon landing judges those who deviate from the efficient parameters of space flight harshly. In Carrying the Fire, he confesses that he was irritated with Aldrin's introspection during the mission (Collins 367-8). He judges another astronaut, Scott Carpenter, who allowed his feelings to get in the way of getting the job done as "kind of out of it" (Collins 59). Carpenter nearly ran out of fuel orbiting the Earth because he was so enthusiastic about the flight. "It seemed a pity that I was having to spend so much time worrying about a man-made object," Carpenter writes,

"when God's own creations, just outside the window, were much more mysterious and challenging" (337). Carpenter flew before an accident burned three astronauts to death in

1967, and NASA's subsequent tightening of its safety regime. The first American astronaut, Alan Shepard, also appeared to have a more subjective experience of outer space. Although in orbit for just fifteen minutes, his voice trembled when he spoke of the flight (Wainwright 73).

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Shepard and Carpenter are earlier exceptions to the restricted and efficient cognition encouraged by NASA since then, that has left little room for experiential testimonies from American astronauts. They were trained to maintain a steady indifference to the sublime void around them. The Twilight Zone, a television program of the early 1960s, provides an image of this indifference. An episode called "The Monsters are Due on

Maple Street" (1959-60) features evil aliens, humanoid but for their pointed ears, who lift an average American street from its neighbourhood and place it, isolated, on the surface of the moon. The street's residents do not notice that they have been transported beyond the Earth and instead bicker with each other about who is to blame for fluctuations in the local power supply. The aliens watch from a nearby spacecraft as the petty conflict between the residents grows violent. One of the neighbours goes to see if the same power anomalies are occurring in the next street along. He returns caked in moon dust, but before he can speak a word, and amidst the confusion, he is shot. The aliens conclude that to conquer the Earth all they need to do is leave the planet alone, since its inhabitants will end up killing each other anyway. What is most disturbing about this episode is the image of Maple street, with its intact houses, letterboxes and parked cars, placed surreally upon the moon's wasteland and before the black void of space.

Here is a precursor to the images of the astronauts of Apollo 11--a small group of people going about their business before the backdrop of the alien lunar surface and the cold void of space. Busy with their own anthropocentric purposes, Aldrin and

Armstrong managed to avoid an encounter with the magnitude of the moon or the infinitude of outer space. This indifference would be later illustrated on the Apollo 14 mission, when an astronaut hit a golf ball on the lunar surface.

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One of the most famous images from Apollo 11 shows Aldrin standing upon the lunar landscape. In his visor Armstrong is reflected, and reflected in this visor Aldrin is again reflected as he stands upon the moon. The infinite regress of the astronaut's images takes the place of the infinitude of outer space. The void is foreshortened by the human figure only to multiply in human reflection. As images of the Apollo mission came back to Earth, it appeared that human beings were somehow intimately linked with outer space. Their ability to deduce the physical laws of space flight implicated human beings in the structure of the universe. This is what Kant calls the "supersensible", in which human cognition realises that it is a part of the structure of the universe, and is thereby implicit in its infinitude (Critique 97). The feeling that accompanies this realization is elation. This is why Apollo made such good television, as the cognition of the viewer thinks that it is at one with the structure of the universe.

The images returned by the unmanned Soviet lunar program make an interesting contrast to Apollo. In 1973, the rover Lunokhod 2 roamed over a lunar surface uncorrupted by human beings. The footage was barren, desolate and spectacular. The ideological implications of the two programs, manned and unmanned, are respectively anthropocentric and technological. Apollo aligned a specifically human cognition with the structure of the universe, placing technology in a submissive relation to its creator. The unmanned Lunokhod buggy, on the other hand, shows how technology may function independently of its creators. While Lunokhod was in fact remote controlled from

Earth, it points the way to a fully automated lunar program that is autonomous of human control and presence. The most ambitious plans for such automation are for machines that would exponentially reproduce themselves in space. While physicist John von Neumann thought that this would be the best way to mine the moon and the

164 asteroids, sf author Stephen Baxter suggests that such machines could prepare the way for interstellar colonization (Space 13). Whether humans would ever follow is another question, and one that is largely irrelevant to the operation of the machines themselves.

Fantasies of such autonomous machines, working in deep space, presume that what works on one side of the galaxy will do so on the other. With their Glenn Gould LPs and stellar maps pointing the way to Earth, the Voyager probes that left the solar system in the late 1980s presume any aliens they encounter will be able to decipher anthropomorphic visual and aural communications. Arthur C. Clarke balloons this universality of communication into a general principle, claiming that "a given problem must evoke the same kind of solution from any group of engineers" (Prelude xvii). The solutions will, in Clarke's view, resemble each other. This is why SETI, the Search for

Extraterrestrial Intelligence, is searching for alien signals on radio frequencies (SETI

Institute), and why the UFO appears plausible to the Western imagination. An alien intelligence will, according to these logics, come to the same technological conclusions as the human race. It will broadcast on radio waves and build metal spacecraft because the laws of the universe and its intelligences are essentially the same all over.

The Apollo program still has an exclusive claim upon human interplanetary travel. In its time it was thought to be only the beginning of a space era in which the human colonization of space would occur. Wernher von Braun, the chief engineer of the Apollo program, planned to colonize the planets one by one, from the moon outward. This belief in moving people off the Earth has sustained workers in the American and

Russian-Soviet space programs ever since (Bryld and Lykke 72-91). It has also been a major fantasy driving the science fiction genre.

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Released a couple of years before the lunar landing, the film 2001 was a part of creating this fantasy (as much as critiquing it). Its advanced space station, interplanetary spaceliner and extensive commercial development of the moon proposed that these things would have come about by the year of its title. The film had a substantial impact in its time. The first astronauts to circle the dark side of the moon, Clarke tells us, wanted to report the sighting of a monolith there that was identical to one that appears in the film (2001 16). 2001 projects not only an advanced space program onto the future, but conceptions of space held by middle America. The same ideological alignment of

Western conceptions of space and mankind's evolution turns up in NASA promotions of Apollo. It is difficult to forget chief engineer Braun's Nazi past when he says that the moon landing was "a completely new step in the evolution of man" (Wainwright 174).

This evolution is represented by white, male, middle class and American astronauts.

A 1982 story by J.G. Ballard, "Report on an Unidentified Space Station", takes middle

American space to its infinite conclusion. A spaceship makes an emergency landing on an unidentified space station. It is uninhabited, and the crew of the ship begin to explore.

They describe its interior as "a series of open passenger concourses, with comfortably equipped lounges and waiting rooms" (96). At first they estimate the station's diameter to be five hundred meters. Upon wandering the many spaces of the station, each of which appears to be identical to the one before, the crew realise the station must be much larger. By the end of the story they estimate the station's size to be fifteen thousand light years. They wander indefinitely across this infinity of concourses and decks that extend infinitely up and down such that:

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Our instruments confirm what we have long suspected, that the empty space

across which we have travelled from our own solar system in fact lies within the

interior of the station, one of many vast lacunae set in its endlessly curving walls.

Our solar system and its planets, the millions of other solar systems that

constitute our galaxy, and the island universes themselves lie within the

boundaries of the station. The station is coeval with the cosmos, and constitutes

the cosmos. Our duty is to travel across it on a journey whose departure point

we have already begun to forget, and whose destination is the station itself, every

floor and concourse within it. (101)

This incredible image, of an endless series of transit lounges and concourses, captures the conjunction of the infinite with the historically specific space of the foyer or waiting room. Ballard's fantasy is sublime because it describes the psychic effect of an infinite repetition. He applies the logic of the von Neumann machine to domesticated rather than outer space.

If the Apollo program succeeded to some extent in portraying a domestication of outer space, then it had the reverse effect on domestic space itself. For the effect of the magnitudinous moon and infinite space upon living rooms across America was one of disconcertion. In Mailer's words, "a reductive society was witnessing the irreducible"

(103). Domestic space was defamilarised in being exposed, through the television, to the truly alien. The living room, once the secure space of middle America--clean, well ordered, and a place to grow old in--was opened to the insecurity of the infinite. Mailer finds an analogy for the defamiliarisation of the Apollo landing in an unidentified Rene

Magritte painting. It shows a rock inside a room inside a house. Like the painting, the

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Apollo mission placed the incomprehensible inside televisions inside living rooms inside houses throughout middle America:

In the foyer was a painting by Rene Magritte, a startling image of a room with an

immense rock situated in the centre of the floor. The instant of time suggested

by the canvas was comparable to the moon of a landscape in the instant just

before something awful is about to happen, or just after, one could not tell. The

silences of the canvas spoke of Apollo 11 still circling the moon: the painting

could have been photographed for the front page ... (103)

The moon rises from within television screens and asserts its alien magnitude. While the laws of the universe are unravelled and manipulated by science, they do not explain the very existence of the moon or of inert matter itself. Looming in the background of the

Apollo television footage is the sheer magnitude of this very question of existence. The moonscape is the excess of the physical universe, teasing the pretences of humanity with the immensity of matter.

In the Life magazine issued to commemorate the landing (August 1969), the cold void of space is the sublime background to what would otherwise appear to be normal activity.

On one page, the astronauts carry out routine tasks around their homes--cooking with a spatula, gardening with shears and reading books. Over on the next page, they hold other kinds of utensils--a laser reflector, seismometer and solar wind sheet. The void is a background not only to the Apollo narrative but to the domestic spaces of America. The images of family and home in Life appear as if perched on the edge of empty space. The defamiliarisation engendered by this juxtaposition had already been prefigured by

168 television shows such as The Jetsons (1962) and Lost in Space (1965-8), in which space travel is juxtaposed with suburbia. In these shows ordinary objects and characters are made strange by their presence in the far future. The continuation of an unchanged

American culture into the spacious emptiness of a distant future brings to the forms of this culture the sublime resonance of the infinite. In Lost in Space, the survival of the cup and saucer into an interstellar future brings to these culturally specific objects the aura of eternity. The finitude of the domestic is implied in the infinite, its limits giving way to the vastness of their own beyond.

The changes that American and global culture has undergone in the last thirty years leave these television shows looking outdated and quaint. Memories of the time of the Apollo program, while a part of twentieth-century history, belong these days to an ageing generation. Changed today are perceptions of the narratives of modernity. George Jetson is a patriarch of the 1960s, while the Apollo missions read like boys adventure stories to a politically correct reader of the early twenty-first century. The macho and conquering templates of the moon landing are those that feminism and postcolonialism have worked so hard to deconstruct. While the loss of interest in interplanetary flight after Apollo 11 must partly be due to the political and financial questions asked of it, the desolate vastness that they transmitted back to Earth must have also had a hand in disorientating the fantasies of a human future in space. The shock that lay in the background of the

Apollo footage was that of the magnitude and infinity of space. The heroic narratives of modern space flight were exposed to the vacuum of outer space, and hence to their own emptiness. Rather than cohering America together in a transcendental moment of time, the unpopularity of further lunar flights testifies to the fracturing effects of Apollo.

History was not so much created by the landing as made strange.

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In configuring Kant's mathematically and dynamically sublime, the Apollo moon landing demonstrates the persistence of astronomical disorientation into the twentieth century.

Kant's own encounter with stellar infinitude repeats itself in the landing, and in Clarke's sf. Yet Apollo and Clarke also configure the specific cultural context within which they staged their narratives. The Apollo moon landing in particular marked the end of the territorial expansions of capital and nation building in the US, as it confronted the very limits of the ability to move into actual space. As the territorial limits of capitalism and imperialism were reached, these capitalist processes would be forced to invent new forms of space to keep themselves expanding. The virtual spaces of van Vogt's Empire of Isher, that appear and disappear at will, are one manifestation of such a new imagination of virtual space, as is Apollo's exploration and mediation of outer space.

While van Vogt attributed his space to the power of an imaginary Empire and its weapon shops, the Apollo moon combined the territorial and virtual, as it televised outer space. A historical conception of the Kantian sublime reveals the continuity between these spaces, as their experience is revealed by a dialectic between the magnitudinous

(territorial) and the infinite (mathematical). Van Vogt's fiction, produced within the positivity of the Golden Age of sf, emphasizes the infinite. By the time of Apollo and the fiction of Arthur C. Clarke, the magnitudinous and unsettling half of the Kantian sublime was beginning to reveal itself as the obverse of these infinite fantasies.

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Chapter Three

Other Ways to Space:

The Russians, the New Wave and the New Utopian Novel

In this chapter I want to address several very different constructions of space and the sublime that are alternatives to the Kantian and Western ones that have hereto been presented. In the space program and fiction of the Soviet Union and Russia lies an alternative national sublime. In the fiction of J.G. Ballard and the British New Wave movement are Longinian and entropic sublimes that deconstruct the supersensible fantasies of Western civilization. In Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974) the sublime is a part of several historical phenomenon of the late 1960s and early 1970s. One is these phenomenon was the Second Wave of feminism (Barr, Alien xii). Another, and the one that I want to think through more extensively here, is the attempted revolution in France in May 1968. As Marin places his own reading of More's inaugural novel in the aftermath of this utopian event, so Le Guin signals its influence upon her novel. She continues

More's critical methodology by creating an imaginary world in which money and private property are absent. Thus it is that Le Guin's revolutionary utopianism, Ballard and the

New Wave, Soviet cosmonautics and Russian sf, all point to their own distinctive sublimities. They offer alternative and often critical ways of thinking about Western, mostly white, male and often American sf.

The alternatives represented here are but a few, and more easily researched, among many others. During the 1960s and 1970s, a heterogeneity of generic forms were arising from

172 different national, social and political interests of sf authors from around the world and in subaltern situations in the West. A wave of Mexican pulp magazines (Ferdandez-

Delgado), the radical political sf and theory of Samuel Delany, and an adoption of extraterrestrial mythology by the US black community (Scratch) are but some of the developments not covered in this thesis. This variety, and the few examples to follow, point to just how much the sublime is uniquely constructed according to different circumstances.

Tales of the Cosmonauts

To assess the aesthetics of the Soviet space program, it is convenient to skip forward to

1994, after the end of this program and at a time when the future of Russians in space was in doubt. This was the year that the extraordinary Polish documentary, State of

Weightlessness (1994), was released. Made by the little known filmmaker Maciej Drygas, it remains obscure except to those who attended the documentary film festival season that year. Its significance for this thesis lies in its rendering of a historically specific sublime, that lends insights as to the way in which this aesthetic is linked to wider national and social "structures of enjoyment" (Zizek, Tarrying). After the collapse of their country, the cosmonauts were no longer burdened by its ideological demands. They were not interpolated into the structures of rhetoric that facilitated its enjoyment. In 1994, they speak amidst this tragedy. Thus these cosmonauts were able to articulate their experiences of space flight. As Jacques Lacan expected, space flight led to a "new psychology" (qtd in Mazin and Tourkina 225). Their speech is in contrast to the

American astronauts, who remain notoriously reductive with regard to their actual experience of space (Baehr 163; Mailer). At most, these astronauts declare space travel to

173 be "fun", a "holiday" or "birthday and Christmas and everything else all rolled into one"

(Ed White qtd in Lindsay 103; David Scott 51; Duke).

The disappointing level of emotional response from the Americans may be attributed to the limited amount of time that they have actually spent in space. From the Mercury program to the Space Shuttle, their flights have remained very brief. The Soviets, on the other hand, built several orbiting platforms to experiment specifically with long duration space flights. Their research proved that it is physically possible for human beings to live in outer space for long periods, even permanently. Yet the personal experiences of the cosmonauts casts doubt upon the hopes of both science and science fiction for a future in space. State of Weightlessness provides evidence that the cosmonauts were traumatized by their isolation from the Earth, or felt futility and fear at the proximity of the void around them.

In so far as space travel during the Cold War was "the most successful contemporary example of the mechanism of ideology-formation", these experiences deconstruct such ideologies (Mazine and Tourkina 213). In so far as the cosmonauts were heroes not only of the Soviet Union, but for the expansionist ideals of civilization and the aims of space science, their bodily experiences resist these ideals and aims. Yet the testimony of the cosmonauts on this documentary is not homogeneous. It is fragmented, varied and often disjointed. It can be thought of as sublime because this term unifies the disjunction and allusion, disappointment and elation, that characterizes their speech. This is a sublime constituted by history, the product of specific cultural, national and economic formations that originally positioned them at the very edge of the world, and at the beginning of a physical and psychic abyss.

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It is not only the speech of the cosmonauts in State of Weightlessness that is fragmented. It is also the style of the documentary. Interviews are cut short, intercut or dubbed beneath footage from the Soviet space program. There are numerous shots of both animal and human experiments, taking place on the ground and in outer space. This footage is juxtaposed with magnificent hand-held camera shots from the portholes of Soviet spacecraft: of moon rise, the rapidly moving Earth, the synchronous orbits of spacecraft, spacewalks and the ballet of solar panels rotating to face the sun. There is also film from the interior of Mir, cluttered with equipment and human bodies. These juxtapositions, between inside and outside the spacecraft, between animal and human bodies, point to the way that the cosmonauts were themselves experiments as they were encased in an untested metal cylinder hurtling through the void. As one cosmonaut says in the documentary, the Soviet space program was a way "to have human beings, and yet not to have them." Their bodies and minds were subject to historically new experiences.

These experiences are framed in interviews with the cosmonauts in what appears to be their homes. Comfortable rooms, lit by lamps and decorated with paintings, are interspersed with footage of their near-naked bodies hooked into machines that measure their responses to zero gravity. The cosmonaut body belongs both to both the familiar and unfamiliar, to everyday life and the mechanistic, zero-gee environment of the spacecraft. Relaxing in armchairs, surrounded by books and homely fires, they speak about outer space from a point of disjuncture. This is a physical disjuncture, one that describes an abyss between comfort and discomfort, a clash between the body at home and the experimental body in space. The cosmonaut body is both the victim and the scientist, experimented and experimenter, tortured and torturer, in the service of space

175 science. Such an experience of outer space is in marked contrast to the fantasies of

Arthur C. Clarke, and to NASA's propaganda for the Apollo space program. While these

Western texts emphasized the commensurability of the comfort and the middle class way of life with outer space, State of Weightlessness betrays their incommensurability.

It is the quality of the documentary to capture this subjection at the moment of the demise of this space science. The years of well-funded research into zero gravity were left like an ox-bow lake abandoned by the flow of history. This ultimate failure of the

Soviet state is one that only reinforces a persistent image of failure that has dogged their space program (Oberg; Vladimirov). This image began when the Soviets lost the race to the moon. After years of secrecy, it was revealed that this was probably because their chief designer, Sergei Korolev, and more than a hundred workers were killed in an explosion at the launch site. Disaster also took place in 1971, when the live television broadcast of Soyuz 11, attempting to imitate America's broadcasts of Apollo 11 and 13, as well as having three people in one capsule, ended in the death of three cosmonauts. A valve opened and the capsule depressurised on the way back through the atmosphere.

The Soviet population, after following the whole flight, saw the suffocated bodies of these cosmonauts. In the 1980s media reports on Mir would continue this story of failure, telling of fires, oxygen leaks, mould and other emergencies (Foale; Oberg). The perverse media interest in Sergei K. Krikalev, the so-called last Soviet citizen supposedly stranded aboard Mir (Foale), was built upon the romantic depiction of the Soviet space program as one of failure. As a consequence, British science fiction writer Steven Baxter thinks of the Soviet approach to space as a kind of "bootstrapping", "in which the cosmonauts are expected to go up there and fix things" ("Robert" 32). They were, like

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Han Solo of Star Wars, heroic bricoleurs of outer space (Saunders), patching things together and making do with what was available.

State of Weightlessness adds another instalment to this story of failure, as the cosmonauts interviewed are unable to truly represent their experiences of outer space. They want to answer the question that Apollo astronaut Mike Collins is so tired of hearing, "What was it really like up there?" without being able to (463). As such, they deconstruct the notion that space flight can be assimilated into the rhetorical and ideological structures that originally drove it. In State of Weightlessness the cosmonauts give no hint of nationalism, professionalism, anthropocentrism or technical knowledge. Instead, they turn the failure of the Soviet space program into a rhetorical success. Their experiential testimony makes an aesthetic compensation for the loss. Their fragmented accounts of emotions in orbit are made within an overarching sense of historical failure:

We didn't solve our main problem. We solved our technical one--how to fly to

and work in space and how to return. But we haven't found a field for man's

natural activity under conditions of weightlessness. (Translated subtitles of an

unidentified cosmonaut speaking in State of Weightlessness. All quotes to follow,

unless indicated, are from the same.)

Another takes the failure to be a more encompassing one:

The depression puzzled me most. A terrible depression suddenly grips you. You

can't figure out why, or where it comes from. Space is not a natural environment

for man. At the very beginning Tsiolkovsky said that one day earthlings will have

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to leave the earth. No. People can't live without it whatever machines or planets

they create. Even if they go to other planets. That is why depression takes over

and weighs you down. There's no escaping it. The only way out is to start doing

something. There's always work to do. If nothing is scheduled, you can always

pump water from one tank to another. Soon you are whistling a tune. It's a

distraction for you.

For this cosmonaut, the failure of the Soviet space program is not only historical, to do with the anthropocentric imaginations of science and progress, but physiological. Failure is written into a human body that is heavily adapted to gravity. There is nothing beyond the terrestrial cradle but emptiness. This cosmonaut takes a historical reading of failure to a transhistorical level, arguing that the failure of the Soviet space program is inherent in the experience of outer space itself. No space program could ever succeed under such circumstances.

In a history of failure that has dogged the Soviet space program, the cosmonauts in State of Weightlessness appear to represent a final failure to represent outer space positively. Yet their failure turns into success as they evoke the sublime, negative pleasure of this same failure. Through the tragedy of their circumstances they accomplish what Longinus described to be an orational victory over history. Through their melancholy they represent the idea of the unpresentable infinite that surrounded them. Outer space offers not a means of expanding the horizons of ideological "structures of enjoyment" (Zizek,

Tarrying), but of confronting this enjoyment with its own pleasures. At the edge of these mimetic, libidinal and productive apparatuses, the cosmonaut traces the limits of their extension. Superseding them with the more universal ideas of infinity and nature, the

178 cosmonaut subjects them to a sublime relativity. By comparison, they appear very small.

The historical precondition for the experience of the sublime here is the actual breakdown of these structures in the first place.

I want to argue that this breakdown is already present in the structure itself, in the act of sending the cosmonaut into space. For example, writing in 1961 the second Soviet cosmonaut Herman Titov acknowledges the possibility of depression :

In the foreign press much has been written about the harmful influence of space

on a man's psychic condition. Many experts claimed that a man in space would

be affected by depression, that he would suffer from an oppressive sense of

loneliness. But not for one second did I feel cut off from my people, from my

friends and comrades on Soviet soil. (Titov 108)

He is referring to the limits of another national and economic system, this being capitalism. For Titov, the degree of fragility experienced by space travellers depends upon the degree to which they have been ideologically interpolated into such a system, upon how much their subjectivity is constituted by its ideas.

A brief look at one of the texts that he is referring to, a book published in the West in

1960, reveals a concern with the transhistorical rather than historical nature of space flight. Frank Debenham's large format, glossy edition of Discovery and Exploration (1960) explains that:

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The deadly silence of space could also pose a problem. All of the background

sounds of our planet will be left behind--the wind rustling the leaves, street

sounds, the chirping of birds, the bark of a dog, the chatter of children--all the

reassuring sounds. To keep man at ease in space it may be necessary to provide

him with tape recordings of his familiar sound environment. (202)

Thus it is that, on both sides of the cold war, psychic tragedy formed part of the expectation, even desire, for space. Pascal's seventeenth-century vertigo of the infinite, a sense of smallness and terror at the expanses of the void, here turns into a dichotomy between silence and sound, familiarity and unfamiliarity.

For now, I want to return to the historical specificity of the cosmonaut to make sense of this psychic failure as a part of the construction of society and nature. The cosmonaut first appeared as an experiential subject after the very first flights into space by Yuri

Gagarin and Herman Titov. They recounted their experiences for two books, Gagarin's

Road to the Stars (c1962) and Titov's 700,000 kilometres through Space (c1963). Today these texts read like relics from another era, dotted as they are with praise for the communist system, for Lenin and the Russian mother-land. One might imagine that, as the most imaginative propaganda about the former USSR had it, these first cosmonauts were brainwashed or that their books were ghost-written by shadowy officials of the Soviet government. It seems more likely that Gagarin and Titov engaged with their country and its politics, like so many others, in an authentic way. The point is made by two Western journalists who interviewed Gagarin:

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Gagarin seldom referred to 'my flight'; it was always 'our flight' or 'the country's

achievement.' Listening to him, watching his eyes, it was easier to understand

that his formal speeches at Ynukovo Airport and in Red Square, speeches that

were strange and artificial to Western ears, were in fact completely sincere.

(Burchett and Purdy 120)

What sounds like rhetoric in the speeches and writings of these early cosmonauts was in fact an authentic record of their emotional investment in the country.

Like the American astronauts, Gagarin and Titov returned home to massive celebrations and parades. They were conscious of their status as symbolic embodiments of their nation whilst in outer space. They were also international heroes, representing the then global struggles of communism. During his flight, Titov sent greetings to "the peoples of

Africa fighting against colonialism" (106). The transnational idea of communism is realised in this image of the cosmonaut circling around the Earth, calling to revolutionary movements to interpolate himself as their very own symbol. He also positions himself at the very pinnacle of communist economic accomplishment when he writes that:

From this great height I could not see the factories. But I knew, they were down

there somewhere, chimneys smoking, furnaces glowing, tended by the great army

of builders of communism. Their titanic labour was reflected in the spaceship

Vostok-2, as the sun is reflected in a dewdrop. (107)

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Compare Titov's words of 1961 with those of the so-called last Soviet citizen, cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev, whom the Western media wanted to believe was marooned on the Mir space station after the collapse of the USSR (Foale). The sun had gone out for this cosmonaut because the idea that he was representing anything on the ground, whether ideological, national or scientific, had been undermined by the movement of history: "I've been up here 8 months. To the day. There's no incentive to work. It makes no difference" (Krikalev in State of Weightlessness).

The symbolic investment in and extraordinary expense of the Soviet space program has, at this historical moment, been as futile as the communist experiment itself. The greatest accomplishment of the program was the Mir space station. Upon the collapse of the

USSR it still hung in the sky like the remnant of the old world. How to think this historical juncture of futility and expense? Georges Bataille's conception of a "general economy" proposes apprehending an economy from the point of its most extravagant expenditures rather than according to its mode of production. The Egyptian pyramids, warfare and Tibetan monasticism are all examples of the excess or expenditure of a society's energy. So too Mir, one of the greatest accomplishments of the Soviet Union, hung in space like an Egyptian pyramid, monument to an energy economy that had been extinguished by time. The sublime experiences of these cosmonauts serves to deconstruct their position as symbols of this economy, to undermine national and ideological rhetorics of support. From its very pinnacle, at its spatial limits, comes a breaking down of the terms upon which this pinnacle rests. In this way the cosmonauts use the sublime as the romantic movement once did, as a way of articulating dissent from within the industrial society they were a part of.

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Bataille's prototype for this model of general economy is the human sacrifice of the

Aztecs, who killed so the sun would rise each morning. An economy of expenditure here coincides with a solar economy, because the ultimate source of its energy is this sun. The early Soviet space program was also such an economy, as it figured the image of a new

Russian nationalism in the peasantry. Next to the hammer on the USSR's flag was a sickle, symbol of this liberated peasantry. The idea of an international workers revolution was attenuated by this nationalization of socialism, this contradictory reference to the agricultural specificity of Russia, its fields of wheat and corn. The Soviet Union, in turning away from its traditional Christianity, looked to the power of the sun and the figure of the good peasant for spiritual sustenance.

Upon landing after the longest time a human has ever spent in weightlessness, Krikalev was asked about the regime change in his home country. He spoke instead about nature, saying that what was important and even surprising is the passing of day into night, and the changing of the seasons (Menashe 50). While Louis Menashe interprets this as a refusal to comment upon history, it is also a reference to the long national history of the

Russian peasantry. For the cosmonauts interviewed in State of Weightlessness speak too of the Earth as it looks from space, of the extraordinary colours, the layers of brightness, that come with the sixteen sunrises and sixteen sunsets that take place every Earth day whilst in orbit. Also of the blue water, the polar caps, the browns and greens of Earth.

These reports describe the beauty of the Earth because, in Kant's terms, they are concerned with the form of their objects--the blueness of the blue, the shape of the clouds and so on. Earth is beautiful in contrast with the sublimity of space. This discourse can be compared to the constellation of ideas explored in the romantic era.

For while the Ancient Greek Longinus made no reference to the beautiful in his

183 inaugural text on the sublime, Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant positioned the sublime next to the beautiful as its limit, the point at which form breaks down and becomes formless, even monstrous and terrifying. Like the romantics, the cosmonauts look back upon a natural Earth with a sense of its composition.

While Titov is a representative of an international communism, Gagarin is bound to the culture of the peasantry. His life story, told and retold in the various media of the old

Soviet Union, describe his origins in the countryside (Burchett and Purdy; Golovanov).

His home town, Gzhatsk, is typical of rural Russian towns, and his parents, a carpenter and a milk-maid, are unexceptional members of the peasantry. They appeared in

Moscow after Gagarin's flight beside the highest Soviet officials in the land:

Fortunately no one had the idea of putting father Alexei or mother Anna into

special clothes for the occasion. There they stood, carpenter and peasant, dressed

in the rough clothes of the hammer-and-sickle age they represented, he wearing

his carpenter's cap, she her peasant's shawl welcoming the son who only fifty

hours previously had been unzipped from his astronaut's orange space-suit and

helmet. (Burchett and Purdy 12)

Again, in Road to the Stars (1962), Gagarin reports that after landing he "stepped on the firm soil, I saw a woman and a girl. They were standing beside a spotted calf and gazing at me curiously" (161). He also declares that "We are the children of the Earth. To it we owe our lives, warmth, and the joy of existing" (15). This emphasis on nature in the culture of cosmonautics continues to this day. Two customs have persisted since

Gagarin's time. For a safe return to Earth, the cosmonaut traditionally carries a tuft of

184 grass into space. Upon returning, the traveller plants a tree outside the Cosmonaut's

Hotel in Baikonur. A garden was maintained on Salyut-6 exclusively to lift the spirits, and on one flight a cosmonaut smuggled a cucumber with him into space, subsequently joking that the garden had bloomed while they had been away (Oberg 13).

Even in their depressions, the cosmonauts continue to refer to nature. To recall, one reports that space provides nothing for "man's natural activity", while another says space

"is not a natural environment for man". Other cosmonauts will have more fragmented ideas about their experiences in space. One reports he felt something was "watching from the side". Another of a "perception of death". Yet another reports a physiological reaction:

When I saw that star and became aware that it was really an abyss, the first thing

that occurred to me was that it may take millennia to reach it. Our universe

doesn't end there. It just seems to go on and on and there is no end to it. It

overwhelmed me so much that I had the sensation of cold shivers running down

my spine.

The significance of this cosmonaut's revelation is that he himself is a part of the infinite that he inhabits. He does this by invoking a relativity of scale between his body and the distance before him, and sensing the magnitude of its difference.

This cosmonaut is describing the first moment of the Kantian sublime, in which the subject is disorientated because of the magnitude before his eyes. This moment is quickly followed by a second, transcendental moment. After this physical experience of

185 vertigo, the intellect realises that it too is implied in this infinite space. In State of

Weightlessness, Vladmir A. Solovyov reports that:

Just as we will never know ourselves, we will never grasp the idea of outer space.

It's obvious to me after I've been there, because the more we find out about

something, the more questions we have. The more we find out in space, the

more questions we have about this vast world which lives by its own laws.

Here the cosmonaut has given way to the vastness that exists not only in outer space, but in his own mind. The mind is able to encompass more than the sum of its parts, as the presentation of the abyss is placed at a distance from the material existence of the abyss itself. There is rapture in realizing the power of a representation that exceeds the body, and in the idea that the mind is indeed implied in the magnitude of the universe itself.

Again, Solovyov reports that:

... I feel such an urge at times to dive, to plunge into this vast expanse. Despite

the instinct to self-preservation, you sometimes feel like facing the space station

and pushing against it with both hands. Pushing away your home, the umbilical

cord, seems inhuman, and against the laws of physiology. On the other hand,

who knows where your home is. Maybe it's in this infinite space, where you long

to be with every fibre of your being.

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The "shivers" that accompany the first moment of the cosmonaut's view into outer space have here been overcome by what Kant calls a supersensible intuition of reason.

The supremacy of reason over the body, of mind over matter, is a precondition for this kind of experience of the sublime. From the romantic opposition of sublime and beautiful, the sublime now enters into its own, creating with reason a transcendental link between mind and the nature that it was once alienated from. This appears to be a transhistorical experience, one that has lifted itself from the failure of the Soviet space program to succeed instead as an aesthetic discourse.

For the cosmonauts, this transcendental experience was enabled by the physical discomfort of the training program and in the uncomfortable living quarters aboard the space stations and platforms. For Kant, the precondition for a sublime transcendence is this very discomfort of the finite limits of the body and mind. A prolonged physical ordeal preceded the cosmonaut's experience of mental exaltation in outer space. The training was so hostile to the body that some never made it through the program intact.

One had his organs collapsed in the centrifuge, another was immolated, and others lost their mental balance (Oberg). Under the ruthlessness of this training program the cosmonaut developed mental techniques to retreat into the mind from the extreme discomfort of the body. This ability would indeed prove helpful aboard the spacecraft. A clutter of scientific instruments filled Mir and, in its later days, green mould was growing on its walls and windows (Oberg 271). The body is also an uncomfortable appendage in long duration space flight. In weightlessness it constantly breaks wind, such that the space station constantly smells, and has an uncomfortable time urinating and defecating

(State of Weightlessness). Its muscles and bones waste away, and it is awkwardly equipped with a pair of legs that are useless for locution in weightlessness. The price of entering

187 into the vast sublime, into infinite and free space, is the discovery that the human being is not physiologically equipped to comfortably cope with it.

The footage that the cosmonauts shot outside the spacecraft, of the clouds of Earth and the motion of solar reflection, betrays an aesthetic interest in transcendence. The claustrophobia of the spacecraft becomes the condition for an appreciation of its flight.

The juxtaposition in State of Weightlessness of the beauty outside the spacecraft with masturbation and urination inside is one that facilitates an understanding of the aesthetic appeal of space travel. Yet, and again after the romantics, the finding of pleasure in pain is one that resorts to the idea of the limit: "The main thing is to transcend your own limits, "reports one cosmonaut, "and experience sensations known to very few people".

This is not an experience open to everybody. The physiology of the cosmonaut is privileged.

In this sense the proposal from the US reality television program Survivor in 2000 is of interest. Survivor wanted to make a series based around a competition between contestants to endure the cosmonaut training program (Motta). Each week, a contestant would be deselected until a winner was chosen to fly into outer space. Here the inverted democratic fantasy of Survivor, in which not winners but losers are deselected from inclusion, reveals something of the aesthetic appeal of cosmonautics. The symbolic function of the cosmonaut is transferred from a national context to one in which the sufferer and space traveller has been taken from so-called 'ordinary' life. What Ian

Buchanan identifies as a principal feature of reality television, namely privation, becomes a means of identification rather than romanticisation ("Enjoying"). The impossibility of ever being whirled in a centrifuge to experience three or four gee turns into the question,

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'How would I react to that situation?' Here the dichotomous basis for cosmonautic fantasy, between comfort and discomfort, becomes the situation of the television viewer watching other people suffer on screen.

It was only the ditching of the Mir space station that left Survivor on the ground. NASA actually turned down the offer to host Survivor, citing their scientific and not televisual interest in outer space (Motta). Thus in this home of global media production, older moral ideas about space travel held sway. Perhaps in preserving a line between themselves and the more explicitly capitalist parts of the US economy, NASA hoped to preserve the national sublimes of the space program. Yet the commercial cultures of the

US have often provided the backing for space travel, in one form or another. While the people of the US were not so sure about the expense of the Apollo moon landing, for instance, the media and government were. Its success was based on what David Nye calls a "media event" ("Don't"). In this sense, Apollo was a prototype for the kind of media driven space exploration taking place in the Russian Space Agency today. A

Californian millionaire recently paid six million dollars to be the first space tourist

(Kramer). This arrangement was controversial, because like the Survivor proposal, it challenged scientific justifications for space exploration. Yet there has never been sufficient scientific return on investments into manned space flight. The commercialisation of space flight exposes the inadequacy of the argument about science in space, revealing the spectral qualities that have driven it all along.

The capitalization of the Russian launch pad at Baikonur has paid no heed to this older sort of thinking about space flight, nor to the national sublimes of its own past. An actor was to have been assigned to a mission to go up and perform in a film about the end of

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Mir (Piper). Called The Mark of Cassandra--The Last Journey, it was to have been about the efforts of a renegade cosmonaut sent to salvage the doomed station. The plot was to have been compounded when a woman is sent to lure him back to Earth. The plan met with failure when the film lost what must have been its extravagant funding. It too demonstrates how much, today, it is not only Russia's boosters, laboratories and cosmonauts that are available for hire on the global market, but the very experience of outer space.

These new conditions for weightlessness, unprecedented until now, open the possibility for a new kind of experience of outer space. Cosmonauts will no longer be carrying with them the symbolic baggage of the Cold War. They will be tourist guides or entertainers.

As the eighteenth-century experience of the sublime took place on a walk through the mountains, the twenty-first century sublime may well take place on orbital shuttles. The recent race to be the first private corporation to put three people into outer space, that is a hundred kilometres above sea level, is also a step toward the wholesale privatisation of space travel. The Ansari X-Prize, awarded to the winner of this race, maintains older, moralizing reasons for space travel, wanting "Access to unlimited energy, metals, minerals; The chance to 'back up the biosphere' and spread the human culture" as well as bring "Hope for the future" (Ansari). These are the very justifications for earlier space programs, yet the actual winner of the X-Prize, developer Burt Rutan, declared his own loyalty to the idea of space tourism: "I absolutely have to develop a manned space tourism system for Sir Richard Branson that's at least a hundred times safer than anything that's flown man to space" ("Spaceship"). Branson runs the transnational company Virgin, and recently created a company called Virgin Galactic with an eye to the future industry ("Spaceship"). It is likely that such flights will be modelled after the

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American experience rather than the Russian one, of short rather than long duration. As such, their interpolation into the ideological structures of capitalism is to be anticipated.

Indeed, on this first commercial flight into space pilot Mike Melville released a bag of sponsor M&M's product into weightlessness.

These developments, as well as the radical contrast between the American space program and the Soviet one, call into broader question the function of the sublime experience in its relation to the ideological structures that create it. They would appear to reinforce those cultural critics and feminists who have found in the sublime only a means of reinforcing regimes of power (Freeman; Hebdige; Nye; Yaeger, "Toward").

However, I want to maintain that the sublime is potentially a means of deconstructing these regimes and their ideologies from within. In so far as the cosmonauts refer to an autonomous human mind and its relation with a pre-modern cosmos, or refer to the totality of nature, they carry on an older, romantic tradition of critique. For these ideas were invented to conceptualise that which was being destroyed in Europe at the time, to articulate ways of life that were incommensurable with the modern project of building a global Babylon. Such are the gestures of the cosmonauts, as they point to the changing of the seasons and the infinite void. It may be some time before the new regime of global and (for the moment) US based capitalism collapses and allows another glimpse of the eternal and immutable. The way in which these space travellers create a sense of loss and a nostalgia for nature allows a rethinking of those conditions that enabled it.

Out the other end of a technological modernity, from the pinnacle of its energy economy, lie those things that it repressed to achieve this pinnacle.

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Nature and Communication in Russian SF

One of the first Soviet documentaries about outer space, also called Road to the Stars

(1957), features a plant sitting on the sill of a spacecraft. This film turned the history of science into science fiction, as it reconstructed the life of rocket pioneer Tsiolkovsky before featuring groundbreaking special effects to screen rockets in takeoff, space stations in operation and moon bases at work. When a later film, Luna (1965), also by

Pavel Klushantsev, was shown in the US some commentators were convinced that the

Russians had already reached the moon (Star Dreamer). The incident demonstrates how, in the early 1960s at least, the Soviet Union were not only ahead of the US in the space race, but also in special effects. Still, these technologically orientated films featured a typically Russian interest in nature, as the plant on the sill demonstrates.

Other Soviet sf also represents nature in its dialectical relation to technology. The

Strugatsky brothers' The Snail on the Slope (1966-8) must be the most dramatic of such representations. It is written from the point of view of a worm and a bird experiencing the destruction of their forest by machines. Unlike the films of Klushantsev, the humans of the novel are alienated from nature. So too in the Strugatsky brothers' story

"Wanderers and Travellers" (1968), questions about the species' relation to the natural world are raised. A recently returned cosmonaut surprises the researcher Stanislav and his daughter at a pond. Stanislaw is tagging underwater cephalopods to track their mysterious journeys across land. They discuss the reasons that these underwater creatures might be travelling across the countryside, before a squeal on the radio

192 interrupts their conversation. It turns out that the cosmonaut is broadcasting a signal, just as Stanislav's cephalopods are tagged with transmitters. There is a part of his last space journey that the cosmonaut cannot remember, when something unknown planted him with a radio signal that has not ceased to transmit. The comparison of cephalopod and human becomes one between the alien and human. Stanislav wonders if these aliens are "immeasurably higher than ourselves", thus subjecting the concept of nature to a sublime relativity of scale. (Strugatsky, "Wanderers" 27). In thinking about them, he alternates between considering their command of "Universal Reason" and the "shock" that humans would experience upon encountering them, between the supersensible and disorientation (Strugatsky, "Wanderers" 27).

The first stories of the Strugatsky brothers were modelled on the most popular of Soviet sf novels, Ivan Yefremov's Andromeda: A Space Age Tale (1957). This novel stands at the beginnings of a "second great age of Soviet SF", and one that coincides with its era of industrialization (Suvin, Preface xxiii). Nature is also the domain for the "polyphonic scope" of Yefremov's future history (Suvin, Preface xxiii). Andromeda moves from the terrestrial to outer space and alien worlds to return to Earth once more. It juxtaposes one narrative set on the expanses of the Russian tundra with another set in deep space.

The adventures of Veda Kong and Darr Veter on an anthropological expedition alternate with the details of Erg Noor and Nisa Kritt on their mission to a distant star system. The one story acts as a metaphor for the other, as sf looks back to its origins in the adventure narrative, and the adventure narrative looks forward to a future in outer space.

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The writing of the Strugatsky brothers and Yefremov shares not only this imagination of nature, but a utopian idealism . While in many of the Strugatskys' works this is buried in dystopian layers of suffering and social satire, Yefremov's Andromeda foregrounds its fantasy of living harmoniously. Living in a communism that extends not only all over the

Earth but to planets many parsecs away, it is "perhaps the first utopia in world literature which shows new characters creating and being created by a new society, i.e., the personal working out of a utopia" (Suvin, Preface xxv). Thus it is that these Russian authors can be positioned after More, as they figure solar utopias. Both privilege nature and utopia.

Yefremov's utopianism wants to use co-operative effort to overcome the vast reaches of interstellar space. Locked into their ships for years at a time, explorers from Earth are separated from their home worlds by decades, and if they lose their ability to fly close to the speed of light, they are lost to their own time by thousands of years. The reward of space exploration, on the other hand, is the discovery of other worlds bathing under other suns. When a final broadcast from a distant ship arrives, it drives Erg Noor hopefully into the deep universe: "'I am Parus. I am Parus, travelling twenty-six years from Vega ... enough ... shall wait ... Vega's four planets ... nothing more beautiful ... what happiness .... '" (Yefremov 42). This utopian hope is crushed, however, as his ship is trapped by the immense gravity of an iron star in a remote corner of space. Making an emergency landing on one of the star's planets, they discover the Parus and another alien ship that have been trapped in the same way. It turns out that the message actually said:

"'Vega's four planets quite lifeless. Nothing more beautiful than our Earth, what happiness to return'" (Yefremov 180). Thus the outer space narrative of this novel largely takes place on a dark world inhabited by a frightening species of electric

194 monsters. The Earth is a place of sun while the infinitudes of space are dark and dangerous.

Outer space is a site of tragedy, inspiring Erg Noor to speak at length against the cruelty of the universe, and claiming that "our flights into the depths of space are nothing more than marking time on our own ground, a ground with a diameter of no more than fifty light-years!" (Yefremov 40). Looking into a dark patch of space the weary Erg Noor reminds the enthusiastic Nisa that it would take "40,000 independent years" to cross it

(Yefremov 40). The numerical is driven beyond calculation and into excess. Nisa reminds him of the elation of the Kantian supersensible, of "the might and majesty of man who has penetrated to the stars, far, far into the depths of space" (Yefremov 39).

Here the supersensible is placed in the mouth of a naive and hopeful young female. It is in a dialectic with Noor's own tragic, masculine and Longinian sublime that humbles the human before the scale of the cosmos.

It is not the physical conquest of space that occupies the site of the supersensible in

Andromeda. As Noor points out, the pleasures of extending the mind into the universe lie instead in the "Great Circle", a circuit of inhabited planets that communicate with each other over vast distances, of "ideas transmitted through space that is unconquerable in man's brief span of life" (Yefremov 40). While for Clarke technology was the precondition for universal understanding between alien species, for Yefremov language is this precondition. The seminal event in Yefremov's future history is the decoding of the transmissions of the Great Circle, when Earth joins its interstellar network and relieves its isolation. When it comes its turn to broadcast, it is of interest that Earth does not boast of any scientific accomplishments, but tells instead the story of its road to

195 communism and harmonious human relations. Thus the Earth is not only a place of solarity, of tundra plains, but a utopian node on this universal utopian network.

The origins of this bestselling novel in the old Soviet Union suggest that its hopes appealed to its millions of readers living in an early communism. The privileging of communication as a site of the supersensible, over and above the material mastery of much American sf, reflects back upon a culture interested in improving human relations.

In the West this coincidence of communication and the supersensible turns up instead in the ideas of Harold Bloom, whose Anxiety of Influence (1973) creates a world in which authors speak to each other in the self-reflections of literature. While Bloom's supersensible creates a reified and exclusive canon of texts, Yefremov's communications are open to all. Women feature prominently in the book, and George Grebenschikov notes that his novels often "identify future Communism with 'matriarchy'" (112). This is consistent with a Russian tradition of utopian feminism, reaching back to pre- revolutionary times. Suvin places Yefremov in direct lineage with Chernyshevsky, whose widely read What is to be Done? (1862) features "the new woman born of revolutionary equality" (Preface, xv-xv1). The role afforded to women in the bestselling Yefremov novel has no equivalent among the classics of the Western sf canon of the same period.

It points back to the consequences of a cultural imagination that is grounded in human relations, and takes communication as its most sublime pleasure.

In 1968, the Russian novelist Daniel Granin acknowledges the place of new technologies in fostering the Soviet imagination of outer space:

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I shall never forget the outburst of joy on the day of the flight of the first

cosmonaut, Yuri Gagarin. It was a spontaneous celebration, there were crowds

in the streets and in city squares, there were hastily written placards. What

delighted us? Not just that the Soviet people were the first in space. It was joy in

the grandeur of man's reason, it was a joy uniting mankind, it contained hope

that countered the atomic nightmare. The sweep of emotions was intensified by

a technical but, I think, very important detail. The simultaneousness of

information fostered the sense of unity. The means of communication enabled

the whole world to follow the flight at the same time. Communications create a

global co-experience. Since then the possibilities of joint participation have

increased. The world can not only hear but also see simultaneously. (155)

Technology enables two things here. The first is Gagarin's flight into space, the second the relevance of this flight for the whole world. The pleasure that Granin takes in the flight depends on its universality for a people who are each gifted with the faculty of reason. In global communications Granin finds unprecedented opportunities to maximize this universality and thus its pleasure, as radio and television reaches more people. These sentiments were repeated in the West after the moon landing. One

American sf fanzine writer claimed that "After millennia of national distrust and hostility, it was a giant step, to be all together in front of our various TV sets. I don't care what the space program costs. These moments of international psychic orgasm are worth whatever the price tag says" (Warner 134). Television accomplishes this shift from the national to the international, creating the universal conditions by which the pleasures of a communicative supersensible come into being.

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A New Wave in the UK

As early as 1962, the English writer J.G. Ballard famously expressed his dissent with the space age by declaring that it was already over, and that it was time to explore "inner space, not outer" ("Which" 117). This author and the British New Wave movement of which he was a part resemble Russian sf in so far as they create a cognition of outer space that is alternative to the generic American one. However, this is not a utopian writing, and is distinguished in bringing nature out of the world and into the altered perceptions of the mind. In Ballard's fiction, the imagination creates this nature and its attendant sublime. The space race is no longer a conquest of real space. The ruins of space vehicles prepare mystic spheres in which the imagination creates its own worlds.

In 1968, as the Apollo mission to the moon was being prepared, Ballard's story "The

Dead Astronaut" contemplated the abandoned gantries of Cape Kennedy. Judith and the narrator have come to the ruined space centre to mourn Robert, whose corpse was left to orbit the Earth some twenty years before. His is not the only star that crosses the night sky. The Russian cosmonaut Valentina Prokrovna is also in a rapid orbit, her body passing over Ballard's characters every few hours. The image of these dead astronauts endlessly circling the Earth anticipates the way the media imagined the cosmonaut

Krikalev, orbiting alone and without a country. This media played out the fantasy that he had in fact been abandoned after the fall of the USSR because the Russians couldn't afford to get him down (Foale). This was never correct, but testifies to the power of the image of the abandoned or dead astronaut.

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For Ballard the isolation of the astronaut is an opportunity to explore the inner space not of the astronaut, but of those left behind on the Earth. The price of the space race is the difficulty it has brought to personal relations, as the expanses beyond the Earth return via the television screen to inhabit the spaces between people. The story anticipates the dehumanisations of Apollo, and its immersion in a media event that would not bond people closer to each other, but bring them closer to their televisions.

When the body of the astronaut returns to the Earth, it marks not only the end of the relationship between the couple, but their lives as they are exposed to the deadly radiation that lies within his charred remains. The transcendental astronaut has betrayed the couple, in a tragedy only redeemed by Ballard's masterly use of language, which creates an orational victory in the face of defeat. "The launching towers rose into the evening air like the rusting ciphers of some forgotten algebra of the sky," he writes, turning the demise of flights into space into a flight of the mind into the sky ("Dead"

108). Moving from outer space to inner, Ballard turns away from Apollo's supersensible pleasures to Longinus' rhetorical imagination. While Kant trumpeted the mastery of reason over the universe, Ballard and Longinus prefer the capacity of the imagination to effect a victory in the face of its magnitude. As if "by some natural law", claims

Longinus, one is "attracted away from the demonstration of fact to the startling image"

(124).

The first four novels by J.G. Ballard construct sophisticated images of isolation. In The

Wind from Nowhere (1962) a millionaire has built a giant concrete pyramid to resist the growing global hurricane. It is not so much that Hardoon wants to battle with the wind, but that he identifies with it, and wants to face it off as it destroys the world. So too in

The Drowned World (1962) Kerans embraces the rising waters and tropical wildlife of an

199 environmental catastrophe as an opportunity to remake himself. The publishers of this novel wanted Ballard to change the ending so that Kerans moved north to follow the retreating human population, but in fact he moves south into a "neuronic odyssey" of his own mind (Drowned 174). Ransom of The Drought (1965) and Dr Sanders of The Crystal

World (1966) enact similar anti-social behaviour that corresponds to psychoses that develop in accordance with the transforming worlds around them.

This aspect of Ballard situates him within a larger movement within sf that had become dissatisfied not only with the so-called space age, but with the kind of sf that had anticipated it. The space program and much of this sf offered its readers fantasies that were ideologically unsatisfactory. Their celebration of the infinite was at the price of the human. The New Wave movement, meeting regularly in a London pub (Greenland 15), rebelled against this largely American imagination of the future to locate their own stories in the mind of the present. The power of Ballard's heroes, for instance, lies in the way they think about their changing worlds rather than in technology or superhuman talents. One of the slogans of the New Wave was "Be your own explorer", turning from the celebrity of the US astronauts to the presence and self-empowerment of literary experimentation (Moorcock, rear cover).

In 1967 Pamela Zoline's New Wave story "Heat Death of the Universe" made its mark on sf history by placing cosmological concerns within a domestic setting, and creating a dialectic between an entropic cosmos and the kitchen. Another of her stories, "The

Holland of the Mind", was published in 1969 and describes the disintegration of a relationship through spatial metaphors. An American couple travel to Amsterdam where cultural differences between Holland and the US stand for their increasing distance from

200 each other. When Jess remembers her parents it is as if they are "staring ahead and smiling like figures on a wedding cake" (185). To this static image of the American

1950s, the 1960s brought "riots, public deaths", and other radical changes (184). Graham writes to ask his relatives to validate obscure childhood memories. Bizarre items of information are cut into the story. The pastiche has an unsettling effect, as if one were reading between newspaper articles and personal letters. Zoline does not resolve these fragments of modern life with a supersensible ascension of the mind, but keeps her terrestrial subjects in a state of disorientation as they attempt to locate themselves and communicate with others amongst the confusion. So too readers are disorientated by the changes.

Zoline's cut-up method and Ballard's psychic disintegrations allude to that which lies beyond them. They point to the totality of nature only through fragmented representations, thus leaving the secrets of this nature, of the totality by which their narratives might be apprehended, beyond the mind's grasp. While Zoline's narratives remain in this state of fragmentation, Ballard's characters, often psychologically disturbed, invite the reader to empathise with their supersensible intuitions of totality. In

"The Man who Walked on the Moon" (1985), for instance, a journalist meets a man at a beachside resort pretending to have been an astronaut. Tourists pay him to tell them his stories and have their photograph taken beside him. Not playing a role, Scranton really believes he was once Commander Scranton. While the journalist suspects the man to be seriously mentally disturbed, he eventually takes his place, and also sells himself to tourists as a retired astronaut. Thus it is that the supersensible takes place not as an actual cognitive commune with the universe, but as an imaginary one. In this way Ballard critiques the pleasures of the supersensible and space travel as belonging not to outer

201 space but to inner. In doing so, and consistent with his 1962 article, he relocates sf away from thinking about the actual future and into its imagination.

Utopia as Failed Revolution

Another movement of writers who dissented from the macho and technoholic futures of sf were the feminist utopians, whose work in and after the 1970s pointed to other uses for sf. Novels by Doris Lessing, Marge Piercy, Joanna Russ and Ursula Le Guin used sf tropes to create worlds or universes in which some contemporary problems had been resolved (Barr, Future; Hollinger; Lefanu; Moylan). These fictions each depict multiple worlds, and foreground a utopian world. Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) contrasts a utopian future with a dystopian present. In Joanna Russ's The Female Man

(1975) women from several parallel worlds, including the utopian Whileaway, meet and conduct a war on behalf of its feminist utopia. Doris Lessing's The Marriage Between Zones

Three, Four and Five (1980) contrasts the gentle Zone Three with the militant Zone Four.

Ursula Le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974) is representative of this movement in so far as it contrasts an oligarchic state with an anarchist moon. As I will show, Le Guin's novel derives this division from the conflict between established state institutions and the protest movements of the 1960s. The narrative follows Shevek as he migrates from

Anarres to Urras, from a place with no laws to a society in which law is violent and repressive, enforcing slavery. As an aristocrat explains to Shevek, his moon lacks:

the virile side of life. 'Blood and steel, battle's brightness,' as the old poet says. It

doesn't understand courage--love of the flag."

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Shevek was silent for a minute; then he said, gently, "That may be true, in part.

At least, we have no flags." (238)

Steel does not reflect the solar origins of light and energy here but its secondary refraction in virility and courage. While the sun is the source of the utopian Shevek's sublimity, on the planet of Urras it has been subjected to the distortions and dissipations of reflection. The sublime on Urras is an ideological refraction of the artificial, in a denatured disturbance of the natural order.

Utopia's role is to expose the false sublime, the sun's poorer and more distorted reflections. For More, these reflections were wrought by the mercantile economy upon the peasantry. Le Guin's novel refers to the revolutionary movements of 1968, when 10 million French workers were on strike and Parisian students occupied the streets. The year is encoded into The Dispossessed as the one hundred and sixty eight years it takes for the anarchist moon to re-establish contact with Urras. This utopia, which once turned away from outer space, is turning back to the world it fled. A hundred and sixty eight years ago an exodus of revolutionaries made their way across the dry and dark to found a society based upon the ideals of the anarchist philosopher Odo. When the revolutionary

Shevek thinks about the year '68 he creates a slippage between Earth of the late twentieth century and the future history of Anarres (292, 319). The relativity of this fiction slips into the actual revolutionary moment of '68, whose excesses of hope, discourse and action becomes the possibility by which The Dispossessed comes into being.

In the wake of this moment of possibility, Ursula le Guin's The Dispossessed (1974) reports that on the anarchist moon of Anarres:

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The circle has come right back round to the most vile kind of profiteering

utilitarianism. The complexity, the vitality, the freedom of invention and initiative

that was the centre of the Odonian ideal, we've thrown it all away. We've gone

right back to barbarism--if it's new, run away from it; if you can't eat it, throw it

all away! (150)

The measure for this loss of the revolutionary moment and the return of a distorted form of profiteering is the alienation of the artist. Shevek is a physicist who relies on a certain degree of "egoism", as the derogatory Anarres term has it, to accomplish his work. Yet the anarchist autocracy demands that he be egoless, that his labour be part of a collective rather than carried out in solitude. Collectivism is what Lacan calls the name of the "new master" that Anarres have put in place of the old. The persecutions of egoism restrict the contributions of imagination, criticism and creativity. What began as a philosophy of sharing becomes another dominant discursive regime. Le Guin's narrative outlines not only the joyful possibilities of living in such an anarchist society, but the limits of this joy.

The reader of The Dispossessed is not allowed to repeat Jacques Lacan's cynical cry that the revolutionary is a hysteric looking for a "new master". As the narrative accompanies

Shevek on a trip away from his home world and to Urras, a world kept in a state of war by an oligarchic form of capitalism, the reader realises that Odonian anarchism is a far happier alternative. Taking a rocket there, Shevek appears to the unhappy lower classes of this world as a prophet of the utopian life, and of a revolutionary future. For many of his fellow Odonians, however, Shevek's trip is a betrayal of the moon's self-imposed

204 exile from the rest of the universe. It represents an egoism of grand proportions. So it is that Shevek himself occupies the position of gold in More's Utopia. As gold is valued in one country and treated with contempt in another, so Shevek becomes a locus for the movement of relativity and change.

Walking off the spacecraft from Anarres:

He looked up, and as he stepped off the ramp on to the level ground he

stumbled and nearly fell. He thought of death, in that gap between the beginning

of a step and its completion; and at the end of the step he stood on a new Earth.

(24)

The space between worlds, between Anarres and Urras, capitalism and utopia, the reader's world and worlds of fancy, is a space of death. In a literal sense this is the airless and waterless void, while metaphorically it is the space of revolution. Not under the heel of one psychic master or another, it suspends the identity of the self. In this moment of disorientation Shevek is exposed not only to outer space, but to that emptiness that

Lacan claims lies at the kernel of subjectivity. The gap between this world and the next one opens a revolutionary space between ideology and the actual conditions of existence.

The isolation of the subject here, stranded between cosmological models of understanding, is most powerfully imagined by sf in images of the solitary astronaut. In the film 2001 Frank's oxygen line is cut and he tumbles into the blackness of space. The reflection of the ship's light on the yellow spacesuit is the measure of his death. As his limbs stop moving, he is enclosed by darkness. Dave rushes after him, returning with his

205 suited body held in the arms of a mechanical pod. When Hal refuses to let him back aboard Dave realises that he is stuck in outer space indefinitely, isolated from life- support. Yet the nightmare moment comes when Hal tells him that their conversation

"can serve no purpose any more". This indicates that he is not only going to die, but that he will no longer have any contact with other sentient beings. The anxiety associated with Hal's comment are those specific to a culture that presumes communication with one's fellows is important.

In Simak's Cosmic Engineers (1950) isolation in deep space is a vindictive punishment, as a traitor is left in a spacecraft with no fuel but enough food to last a lifetime. In Stanislaw

Lem's Return From the Stars (1961) being stranded in deep space for an indefinite period is a part of cosmonaut training. Left alone in a spacesuit, trainees often go mad, and are found "writhing in epileptic convulsions" (379). This nightmare of isolation recalls

Socrates' choice to die rather than be exiled from his community. Shevek, like Socrates, in despair at being cut off from his home world also thinks that at least in bodily death one might "rejoin the rest" (Le Guin 13). The danger in leaving one's own world is not only physical, then, but also psychological. Philip K. Dick's A Maze of Death (1970) paints a pessimistic picture of a group isolated on a starship far from home. Their space drive disabled, they are doomed to die slowly in an alien, lifeless part of space. They succumb to psychic disintegration.

This is the fate of the cosmonauts returning home in Lem's Return from the Stars too, who after decades of arguing aboard a spacecraft, return to find themselves alienated from a future Earth, whose technological and social advances have left them behind like

206 children. The future is not only puzzling, but parochial toward these infants of its own past:

After the garish selenium lights of the platforms and tunnels, after the

unbearably shrill incandescent vegetation of the streets, the light from the

concave ceiling seemed practically a glow. I did not know what to do with my

hands, so I put them on my knees ... Across the dull ceiling faint shadows began

to move from front to rear, like paper cut-outs of birds. What the hell is it with

these birds? I wondered, perplexed. Does it mean something? I was numb from

the strain of trying not to do anything wrong. This, for four days now. From the

very first moment. I was invariably behind in everything that went on, and the

constant effort to understand the simplest conversation or situation turned that

tension into a feeling horribly like despair. (187-8)

From the death between worlds, Lem moves to a subjective death at the hands of another world. This is the death proper to revolution, as one polity is replaced by another, and the aristocrats of then turn into the common labourers of now. So it is that

Lem's cosmonauts discover that in their absence the world has lost interest in travelling to outer space, that their heroism in one age has been antiquated by the next.

The disorientations of Lem's cosmonauts are not invoked by the collision with a new world, but upon returning to their own. Arriving on the war-torn world of Urras, Shevek is also returning to the world from which his people originally fled, to recognize the "air" of his ancestral "home" (Le Guin 24). This cycle of leaving and return has its experiential analogue in the attempted revolution of May '68. The people who protested against their

207 society moved both into and away from the revolutionary moment, returning as changed people back to the normativities that they had rebelled against. They experienced the world change around them, because they themselves changed the way they saw the world. So too the heroes of sf mark within themselves the passage of other worlds. They encounter Marin's neutral, the negation of all worlds, and recreate their subjectivity. In this way both sf and utopian fiction thinks through the possibility of both socially and personally different futures, as the movement between worlds keeps open the revolutionary idea of change.

In the wake of May '68, Marin attempts to explain the passing of the revolutionary moment with his conception of the neutral. It was this space that the revolutionaries inhabited, bringing "those who spoke to such a point of excess that they could do nothing but misjudge the discourse that animated them" (3). The multitude of possibilities contained within the neutral, at once representation and the negation of representation, turned into the impossibility of ever realizing one of them. In the utopian text this space in which everything is negated and is yet still possible is represented by the ocean, wilderness or abyss that the traveller must cross before arriving at the utopian island, valley or world. In More's Utopia, the neutral is the vast desert and slip of ocean that Raphael must cross before arriving at the Island of Utopia. In Le Guin's The

Dispossessed, the neutral surfaces when Shevek steps off the spacecraft and onto Urras.

This space between worlds embodies in sf the revolutionary movement. The failure of

May 1968 to institute a revolution lies for Marin in the way in which it misjudged its ontology, its neutral, to be beyond the possible. Those involved "found themselves beyond themselves" and could no longer assess their own ability to transform the phenomenon of revolution into its closure as representation (Marin 3). The utopian

208 sublime lies in this revolutionary phenomenology, where multiplicities of possible worlds exceed their own representation and are in fact negated by their very multiplicity, by an excess of possibility. It is a Longinian sublime because it is tragic, as the rhetorics of possibility fail to translate into actuality.

By contrast, the Kantian sublime partakes in the problematic success of revolution, rather than in its failure. The Critique of Judgment was revised just after the 1789 French revolution (Zammito 275-83), and can be thus positioned within the utopian excitement of the revolutionary moment and before it resolved itself into a new despotism. Saint-

Just holds the paradox within his historical figure, as revolutionary and subsequent executioner of the aristocracy. Amidst the turbulence of the French revolution, Saint-

Just's speeches could have equally have referred to Marin's neutral. He saw Paris bursting

"forth from the womb of storms, an origin that it has in common with the world, which was born of chaos, and with man, who cries at birth" (Saint-Just qtd in Richir 43). The revolution collapses world and person, the contradictions of a social order suspended by the event. The Terror that followed this moment, the denunciations and summary trials, the persecutions and executions, turned the universal possibilities of the neutral into the universal presumptions of the French state. The phenomenal experience of revolution becomes the phenomenon of state violence. For Kant, this movement from one to the other is the assumption of the universality of the moral law, the supersensible that transcends the fragmented experience of the revolutionary act. The pleasures of this supersensible distinguish sf from utopian fiction. The former's moral law is generally enacted on the scale of the universe, while utopia is only one island or world among others.

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The foregoing examples from the Soviet space program, Russian sf, the British New

Wave and the feminist utopias of the 1970s present alternative ways of imagining space, and subsequently of the sublime cognition of sf. I have included them here to supplement the dominant and Kantian map of sublime cognition that is best thought of alongside white, male, Western and white collar sf. For Kant's ideas are more relevant to this sociological basis for sf, while the sublimes of the cosmonauts, the Strugatskys,

Yefremov, Ballard, Zoline and Le Guin each deconstruct this hegemonic story. The utopian operations of Yefremov and Le Guin are in explicit opposition to the numerical cognition that underlies Kant's sublime, as they represent communist and anarchist ideas respectively. They subtract the monetary basis for a social order, and in doing so reveal the capitalist conditions for the cognition by which this Kantian sublime is usually created. Neither Yefremov nor Le Guin rely upon a relativity of measurement to arrive at the supersensible. Yefremov's supersensible communication has only been accomplished because the Earth is united under one communist idea, that then enables the production of the massive power required to broadcast messages across infinite space. Shevek in The Dispossessed is a physicist who is creating a theory that will similarly create instantaneous communication between distant worlds. Again, this theory is made possible not by a cognition of numerical division and addition, but by the reconciliation of the different laws of simultaneous and sequential physics. Thus these novels propose a different, utopian basis for the supersensible.

That the utopian writing of Yefremov and Le Guin represent alternative, even radical, differences to the Anglo-American tradition of sf betrays just how much the genre has moved away from being explicitly utopian. While this thesis argues that the pleasures of

Marin's neutral presupposes the creation of worlds, most sf does not explicitly

210 acknowledge its own debt to this utopian conception. Such an acknowledgement takes place only when utopia takes symbolic shape, when the text negates private property and guarantees the right to work in its new world. Instead, the utopian novel is but a "socio- political sub-genre of science fiction", subsumed to the more diverse interests of its field

(Suvin, Metamorphoses 61). The three alternative constellations of sf writing in this chapter--Russian, New Wave and utopian--demonstrate just how malleable the generic form is, and how its texts constitute different aesthetic and ideological constellations.

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Chapter Four

The Sublime and Recent SF

A more recent period of sf production, including the 1980s and 1990s, can be thought of in two ways. First, in terms of internal transformations to the genre. Second, as a defamiliarisation of changes that have taken place in the world. These interpretations, the synchronic and diachronic, are not distinct from each other. The end of the New

Wave, for instance, can be thought of both as an internal, generic development and as a response to emergent historical conditions. In 1983, Colin Greenland wrote that

"(t)emporarily divided and disturbed by the New Wave, sf has settled back down and shut its doors again" (204). Just at the moment at which this appeared to be the case, however, another avant-guarde rose to break generic conventions. The cyberpunks, represented in the following chapter by William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, but including a range of authors such as Pat Cadigan, Rudy Rucker, Lewis Shiner and John

Shirley, responded to changing technological regimes with imaginative innovations.

While the end of the New Wave brackets the beginning of cyberpunk, its end is marked in two ways. In an internal, generic development, the appearance of a postcyberpunk fiction postdates and marks cyberpunk as a subgenre of the 1980s. Second, and historically, the First Gulf War revealed the violence implicit in much of the technology that cyberpunk romanticised.

A second form of 1980s sf can be mapped against the demise of the feminist, utopian sf of the 1970s that was represented in the last chapter by Le Guin. In 1996, Frances

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Bonner complained about the decline of feminist utopias during the 1980s, noting that while "there is not much that can be readily described as feminist sf, there are still many women writing sf" (106). One of these women is Vonda McIntyre, whose novels I want to read here as representing a new kind of feminist and utopian writing. For De Witt

Douglas Kilgore, what Bonner regards as a decline is more of a transition from one form of radical fiction to another. He reads McIntyre's astrofuturism as a "tactical feminism"

(258). In McIntyre, utopian possibilities are contained within the "transformative potential of space flight", and thus are a part of an older tradition of sf writing that is interested in outer space (Kilgore 274). For Bonner this represents feminism's recuperation into the hegemonic imagination of the genre. For Kilgore it is a strategy of intervention into this hegemony.

These twin trajectories of generic history still hardly encompass the range and number of sf publications in this period, even in the Anglo-American bloc. Their partial relation to sf production indicates just how far the genre has come from the days of Gernsback and

Campbell, when the US magazines could be considered representative of sf production.

A comprehensive history of the genre, even in the West, has become more difficult as the number of publications has risen and their styles of writing more diverse. While secondary publications on the early history of sf continue to appear (Miller; Westfahl), attempts to map the later developments of sf generally specialise in parts of its production, such as cyberpunk (Slusser and Shippey), postcyberpunk (Person), or the

British Boom of the 1990s (see Science-Fiction Studies 30.3).

The period in question has been historically distinguished, quite simply, by the consolidation and expansion of monopoly capitalism (Arrighi; Locke et al; Moretti;

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Rocha; Ellen Meiksins Wood). The slowdown of the US's economic expansion in the

1970s, leading to a subsequent rise in inflation and compounded by the Arab oil embargo of 1973 and after, forced its companies and government to consolidate their power with financial controls over markets (Arrighi 300-24). The collapse of the heterogeneous and revolutionary possibilities opened by the radical movements of the

1960s coincides with a new rise of what Braudel calls an antimarket, those "great predators" that in the late twentieth century appear in the guise of corporations and international institutions, their manipulations of high capital manipulative of the flows of the market economy (230). Vladimir Lenin identified monopoly capitalism as the distinctive feature of America's economy as long ago as 1916, and the crises of the 1970s only had the effect of accentuating the power of this antimarket's monopolisations

(Arrighi 305-7). The latest stage of this capitalism is today called globalisation, as finance capital extends its search for cheap labour, raw materials and new markets into the old

Soviet Union and China. It has expanded its operations onto a global scale.

To recall, the aesthetics of sf can be positioned within a triad of historical relations. The relations between imperialism, technology and capitalism synthesise to produce narratives that can be thought of in terms of space, cognition and that pertain to universal ideas. In this recent era of crisis, consolidation and expansion, the term globalisation supersedes imperialism as the mode of capitalism's expansion. It has different characteristics to imperialism because its expansions are no longer territorial.

Instead, corporate and governmental elites monopolise the flows of economic power.

This monopolisation is itself a response to recurrent crises in capitalism. As the market and its ancillaries follow a logic of their own, the antimarket intervenes to keep this logic from spiralling into collapse (Brenner). The International Monetary Fund and the World

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Bank are but two of the antimarket's mechanisms for keeping the status quo. Their management of third world debt is a paradigmatic example of just how monopoly capitalism has been able to maintain inequitable relations between the West and the rest

(Chomsky).

The world situation in the 1980s and 1990s, then, would appear to be little different from older periods of international capitalism. However, this new stage of expansion has been assisted by what some consider to be a paradigm busting era of technological development (Castells; Hayles). It is after Manuel Castells that I want to include biotechnology in a computer driven "Information Technology Revolution" (29-65). The use of the word revolution in this context, however, is not consistent with the economic and ontological revolutions of Marin or Le Guin. Instead, it only overturns the specific conditions of capitalist expansion, namely imperialism, and supersedes it with a new kind of spatialisation. Katherine Hayles defines this virtuality as "the cultural perception that material objects are interpenetrated by information patterns" (Hayles 13-4). In sf, this is characterised by a downplaying of the dialectic between the dynamically sublime and mathematically sublime, that is between nature and mind, in resolute favour of the latter.

Without the resistance of the former, without disorientation, sf confronts the limits of its own ability to take pleasure in its fantasies. The ability to perceive information all the way down to the very molecules of the universe introduces a certain circularity between the mind and the mind's projections, in a cognitive loop whose articulation has lost the conditions for its pleasures.

Scholarly readers will notice that the absent term of this periodisation is postmodernism.

For the political movements of the 1960s and the subsequent crises in the Western

215 economy were accompanied by a cultural tendency toward "versatility and the emptying of hierarchies" (Olalquiaga xii). Jameson's astute reading of the postmodern as a cultural response to late capitalism must remain its most cited analysis, its popularity symptomatic of the power of capital itself as an interpretive tool (Postmodernism). It is with such a Marxist conception of late capitalism that postmodernism can be conceived as coextensive with the cultural and economic totality of globalisation. What David

Harvey identifies as the flexible regime of accumulation that characterises the economic side of postmodernism turns in globalisation into an extended reign of this finance capital not only over new areas of the globe, but into previously uncolonised cultural apparatuses of the West (Smith 31-2). Thus the versatility and empty hierarchies of postmodernism have turned, in this global context, into the extension of illegitimate hierarchies of power and its adaptations. The term globalisation, while not yet in full bloom in the 1980s, anticipates in this period what both Jameson and Harvey have recognised in postmodernism to be an ideological effect of developments within capitalism. Retrospectively, the postmodernism of the 1980s can be understood as prefiguring the full-blown globalisation of capitalism in the 1990s.

Vonda McIntyre's Universal Utopianism

It is with the expansion of capitalism in mind that the differences between Le Guin's utopianism of the 1970s and Vonda McIntyre's tactical politics of the 1980s can be thought through. While Le Guin created multiple worlds and placed infinitude between these worlds as a condition of their creation, McIntyre's Superluminal (1983) identifies infinitude with utopianism itself. She subsumes her worlds to a universal totality whose sign is a utopian understanding between living beings. The depths of the ocean and the

216 ends of outer space configure the supersensible idea of an absolute communication that is itself the law of these limit spaces. Superluminal can be placed in the heritage of

Yefremov, whose Great Circle of communication between stars was at one with a utopian communism.

McIntyre's Superluminal is populated by several different groups of living things. Humans, whales, dolphins and two kinds of biologically adapted humans live in their own communities. One of these kinds of adapted humans is a species of diver, who breathe on land or under water. They live in their own peaceable communities along the coastlines of an unnamed world. Another group of adapted humans are the pilots, whose hearts have been replaced by rotary pumps so that they can withstand faster-than-light, or 'superluminal' travel, through outer space. When the diver Orca arrives at the very edge of this space, where it dissolves and space-time turns into nothingness, the universe and the ocean conflate:

When the exterior hatch slid aside, Radu found Orca immediately.

Lacking even a tether, she floated in space as she might float in the sea. Radu

touched the lifeline plate, and a tenuous extension formed from the ship to his

suit.

He pushed off toward her, toggling his radio on.

Orca was singing.

The sound made him shiver. It spoke of the whole universe behind him, and of

something unknown, perhaps unknowable, before him. (220)

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She is singing the true speech of the whales, that enables this species to communicate with each other in a way that does not represent things but is the thing. That which is said is that which is. "Go, to the whales, was the same word as disappear, was in turn the same word as die" (173).

In psychoanalytic terms the whales are living in harmony with each other because they live in a pre-oedipal, undifferentiated space. They have not misrecognised themselves as individual subjects and embarked on the tangential and human path of a sociality founded on an abstract symbolic order. Somehow, they have constructed a language that bypasses the origins of the subject in this misrecognition. As Orca explains, "whales could not comprehend anger or hatred, or the even more alien emotions of ambition and fear" (173). The liquidity of the ocean embodies this boundless subjectivity, the water of the body not being distinguished from the water of the sea. Orca represents a melding of this liquidity with the end of the universe, in a realisation of this utopian trope on the scale of this universe.

This universalisation of the utopian idea is common throughout McIntyre's astrofuturist oeuvre. The Entropy Effect (1981) was written for the Star Trek megatext, and represents the

Federation of worlds as a utopian organization, policing its borders against the breakdown of order into chaos, law into its transgression. In this novel, the starship

Enterprise is parked beside an anomaly in space-time, straddling a singularity that is disrupting the very fabric of the universe. In being at the very boundary of the known, and in opening onto the unknown, the anomaly resembles Superluminal's edge of outer space. Captain Kirk, in charge of the mission, is disorientated. He "forced himself to relax, but still felt uneasy" in its presence (5). While Kirk experiences disorientation, it

218 will be his science officer, Mr Spock, who assumes the position of the supersensible hero in this narrative. Spock is from the ultra-rational Vulcan race, and is as a consequence immune to the feeling of disorientation that accompanies a lack of cognitive orientation.

It is questionable whether Spock experiences pleasure in reason either, and while a reader finds pleasure in his ascendance to the supersensible stage of sublime cognition, he himself may not.

The story of this anomaly is left behind very early in The Entropy Effect, as the Enterprise is called away to attend to an emergency in a nearby solar system. A subsequent adventure finds Spock destroying an illegal time machine that was in fact causing the anomaly that the Enterprise had been investigating. It disrupted the fabric cojoining space and time.

Destroying the time machine, Spock also dissolves the anomaly. He now knows just

"how fragile the continuum [is]", and carries with him the cognitive effect of disorientation if not the experience of disorientation itself--that is, he knows that his understanding is predicated upon a subjective picture of the universe, and is aware of the malleability of all things to change (219).

Spock's position in this narrative is also that of the revolutionary. When he "stares down into the eerily featureless mystery that twisted space and time and reason" that is the anomaly, he witnesses the origins of his own universe, the conditions by which it has come into being (12). He occupies Marin's neutral, the zone that contains all possible worlds, and prefigures their possibility. However, unlike the revolutionary, Spock returns to the old regime that is the Federation. Thus this novel recognises a utopianism already present in that which is, rather than a revolutionary and different utopia. Its difference to

Le Guin's utopianism is inscribed in the history of May '68 itself, when the French

219 communist party decided to submit the future of France to a vote rather than to a material revolution, returning to the existing system of power through its established forms (Mandel 18). In this text, utopia is not so much the advent of a new world as something already encoded into the greater universe.

After Nature

McIntyre's fiction changes the global universality of capital into universal ideas of communication, reason, love and community. The space of this universalisation is artificial. When Spock recreates the universe with his mind, he carries with him the reinvention of space and time. While in The Dispossessed, Shevek and his fellow utopians struggled against the harshness of nature, for McIntyre nature is subsumed to the power of mind. The transition from nature to mind also takes place in the change from the

British New Wave to the cyberpunk movement, from one avant-guarde to another. The heroes of the New Wave negotiated with the excesses of nature--Ballard's first four novels are about a man's cognition of the apocalypse around him, while Zoline's "Heat

Death of the Universe" comes to terms with galactic entropy. Compare these to

Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), in which Case battles Artificial Intelligences (AIs) and security systems that exist only in the virtuality of cyberspace, the imaginative and spatial accompaniment to new computer technologies. The shift from Le Guin to McIntyre, from Ballard and Zoline to Gibson, is from multiple, natural spaces to a universal, artificial space.

In Dialectic of the Enlightenment (1979), Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer point out that Kant was interested in nature only in order to dominate it (39-40). In her feminist

220 critique of the sublime, Barbara Claire Freeman reveals just how much the sublime is part of this logic of domination. As the expansions of imperialism ran out of a terrestrial nature to conquer, capital turned to the computers and bioengineering to create new spaces for expansion. Its invention of digital space and life give nature the appearance of having being made rather than found. Spatialisation, once a synthesis of the imperial and the technological, is now a consolidation of global capital and its new digital and biological technologies of colonisation. Geography and place are irrelevant to this kind of capitalism, as it turns its abstract fields of monetary fluctuation back upon the matter from which the mind and life-world is made.

In this changed spatial situation, and one that can be placed in a much broader history of spatial transformation in the twentieth century (Buchanan, "Space"), sf constitutes a different kind of transcendence for its hero. From McIntyre, I want to move to look at fiction by William Gibson, Stephen Baxter, Greg Egan, Octavia Butler, Ken MacLeod and Kim Stanley Robinson in so far as they point to historically new spatialisations of sublime pleasure. The artificial universes of Gibson, Baxter and MacLeod have their aesthetic basis in the virtual vertigo of computers. Robinson's Mars Trilogy (1992-6) is better thought of alongside developments in biotechnology, whose manipulations of genetics compose artificial life. Egan, uniquely in this group, speculates upon nanotechnology and quantum computing.

These technologies have developed within a capitalism that has simultaneously reproduced advertising and media images to the extent that a hyperreality has come into being. It is the distinction of this hyperreal to determine reality rather than to represent it

(Baudrillard, Simulations 25). With the manipulation of physical reality, this regime of

221 images contributes to an impression that nature has in fact disappeared. David Nye, in

The American Technological Sublime, describes what must be the seminal example of this loss, and of the way these virtual changes have had an impact upon the thinking of the actual. Visitors to the Grand Canyon in the US:

assume that humans dug the canyon or that they could improve it so that it

might be viewed quickly and easily ... Many assume that the canyon was

produced either by one of the New Deal dam-building programs or by the

Indians--'What tools did they use?' is a common question ... The assumption of

human omnipotence has become so common that the natural world seems an

extension of ourselves, rather than vice versa. (Nye, American 279)

The difference between the natural and artificial sublime lies not in changes to the world itself, then, but to a mind changed by the economic and ideological circumstances that it inhabits. The transition has been from an era in which nature was conquered to one in which everything is seen as virtual. In Nye's example, the Grand Canyon is interpenetrated by information about its own construction and origins.

In sf, the historical transition from one era to the other, from nature to its dissolution, is dramatised by an apocalypse of one kind or another. Whether it has entered a premature ice age (Baxter, Space (2000)), begun to dissolve in a quantum fuzz (Egan, Quarantine

(1992)), is subjected to a gamma-ray burst (Egan, Diaspora (1997)), or is subjected to nuclear war (Butler, Dawn (1987)), the planet Earth in these fictions has been irrevocably changed. Joining these apocalypses are dystopian novels, in which the planet is dominated by megacorporations (Gibson, Neuromancer (1984) and All Tomorrow's Parties

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(1999); Egan, Permutation City (1994); MacLeod, Cosmonaut Keep (2000); Robinson, Red

Mars (1996)). The pleasures of both of these groups of fictions are to be found not on

Earth itself, which has been destroyed or subjected to monolithic corporate power, but in a movement away from it, whether into a virtual universe (Egan; Gibson), to another planet (Robinson), or, and more traditionally, into outer space (Baxter; MacLeod). The descriptions of these supersensible pleasures, however, are different to those of previous sf. Their basis is not the infinity of the universe (Wells; Clarke), nor the infinite possibilities for creating new worlds (Le Guin). Instead, the supersensible of these novels, all published since 1984, have their historical conditions in the global imagination of capital.

Postcyberpunk, or Greg Egan's Global Science Fiction

William Gibson is widely considered to be a cyberpunk writer (Shiner; Sterling). His novels move between crowded, dirty cities of the future and the liberation of a transcendental cyberspace. Both spaces are, however, dominated by corporations. His heroes hack the virtual empires of these corporations in cyberspace whilst living in the interstitial spaces of the urban. Lofts, vans, cardboard boxes and bridges are sites for real world homes and communities. Claustrophobic streets are populated by people half- wired into whatever technologies they are carrying with them, giving their existence a spectral quality. The opening page of William Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties sets such a scene:

Central columns, sheathed in green ceramic, support a ceiling pocked with dust-

furred ventilators, smoke detectors, speakers. Behind the columns, against the far

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wall, derelict shipping containers huddle in a ragged train, improvised shelters

constructed by the city's homeless. Yamakazi halts, and in that moment all the

oceanic clatter of commuting feet washes in, no longer held back by his sense of

mission, and he deeply and sincerely wishes he were elsewhere. (1)

That which is usually behind the facade of the contemporary inner city, its structures and shame, are placed in the foreground of this description. The material world is in disarray because it is ruled by corporations and occupied by people that are predominantly living elsewhere, in cyberspace.

All Tomorrow's Parties is a part of Gibson's Bridge series, that features what Kevin

Hetherington calls a heterotopia, a place of alternative ordering, on San Francisco's

Golden Gate Bridge. It has been taken over by small retailers, dry cleaners, noodle stalls, marijuana growers and computer technicians. These are the heroes of cyberpunk-- individuals trying to eek a living out of the cracks of a technologically saturated near future. This dialectic is transformed by Greg Egan's postcyberpunk fiction into a psychic tension between technological, corporate power and the subjective freedom of an individual's cognition. Egan takes the contrary spaces of cyberpunk into the mind, and thus ontologises its tensions. Despite sharing an interest in neural modifications, information technologies and globalisation, Egan has been vocal in distancing himself from cyberpunk, as have his reviewers (Egan in O'Keefe; Anon.). While Gibson creates spaces that are alternative to but implied in the global hegemony, such as the interstitial Bridge (Parties), Egan's characters confront this hegemony head-on.

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While Wells addressed his own historical position within the declining British Empire in

War of the Worlds, Egan positions his imaginary spaces within a digitised and corporate world. While Wells described cognition that was consequent upon the astronomical,

Egan interrogates the cognition of this technological capitalism. Nick of Quarantine is fitted out with several neurological modifications, or 'mods'. Inhaled through the nose, they do everything from tell the time to access the internet, visualise games to translate foreign languages and imprint virtual personalities. Some induce different states of consciousness. Nick is forcibly given a mod that hardwires his mind to be loyal to the corporation that he works for:

I've never had a mod forced on me, but the principle is the same. Deep down, I

must have swallowed the fact, long ago, that my intentions, my desires, my

values, are the most anatomical of things. On that level, there are no paradoxes,

no contradictions, no problems at all. The meat in my skull has been rearranged;

that explains everything.

And in the world of desires and values? I want to serve the Ensemble, more than

I've wanted anything before. All I have to do is to find a way to reconcile this

with my sense of who I am. (Egan, Quarantine 84)

Nick walks a troubled line between corporate power, a new technology and self- reflection.

The distorted mirror into which Nick is looking is that of technological and historical change, a global situation in which new demands are made of cognitive labour. It is in

225 representations of global labour that the difference between Egan and Gibson can be mapped. Lawrence Person uses the term "postcyberpunk " to describe 1990s fiction whose heroes "have jobs" and still live in such a future. Egan's characters are indeed bound to the corporate order, and this situation leads to a very different construction of subjectivity. They are not the heroes of this order, but white collar workers trapped within it. They embody the professional class that remain the majority of sf's readership

(Locus). In Quarantine, digital technologies are ways of being exploited, rather than, as in

Gibson's fiction, a means of staging fantasies of liberty. David Riesman's 1950s notion of false personalization (271) turns into the falsification of cognition, as technology enables capital to move further into the mind. While Riesman proposed that there should be legal limits put upon false personalisation, to preserve the mental health of the worker, Egan points to cognitive exploitations that are as yet unprecedented.

In 1997, Darko Suvin ("Novum") recognised the impact of global capital upon his 1979 theory of sf. He points out that his adaptation of Ernst Bloch's notion of the novum for sf theory was not a theoretical solution but a social problem. The "overwhelming global experience", the "politico-economical and epistemic Deluge" of the previous twenty years, had structured developments in his theory of "cognitive estrangement" ("Novum"

27). In its service to capitalism, the novum mingled with fake novums, and thus undermined its truth ("Novum" 18). While Person points out that postcyberpunk contains a multiplicity of novums, technological and sociological, Suvin places this multiplicity in a capitalist context, gesturing to the way in which sf narrative interrogates the conditions by which its novums come into power.

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In Egan's Quarantine, these conditions are corporate. Just as van Vogt's Cayle and

Hedrock empowered themselves with the ideologies that wanted to interpolate them,

Egan's Nick creates a similarly doubled cognition. Approached by a secretive group of fellow employees who have also been inflicted with the loyalty mod, Nick finds that he no longer needs to struggle with it. From the imbalances it has set up in his mind, he moves beyond himself, and into a shared logic of power:

It hits me with a dizzying rush of clarity ...

--the Ensemble is, by definition, precisely that to which the mod makes us loyal.

That sounds circular, incestuous, verging on a kind of solipsistic insanity ... and

so it should. After all, the loyalty mod is nothing but an arrangement of neurons

in our skulls. It refers only to itself. If the Ensemble is the most important thing

in my life, then the most important thing in my life, whatever that is, must be the

Ensemble. I can't be 'mistaken', I can't 'get it wrong'.

This doesn't free me from the mod--I know that I'm incapable of redefining 'the

Ensemble' at will. And yet, there is something powerfully, undeniably liberating

about the insight. It's as if I've been bound hand and foot in chains that were

wrapped around some huge, cumbersome object--and I've just succeeded in

slipping the chains, not from my wrists and ankles, but at least from the unwieldy

anchor.

Lui seems to have read my mind, or at least my expression, brother in insanity

that he is. He nods soberly, and I realise that I'm beaming at him like an idiot,

but I just can't stop.

'Infallibility,' he says, 'is our greatest consolation.' (128-9)

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In Zupancic's terms, the shared pathology of the Ensemble allows Nick to transcend himself because he recognises his own subjectivity as that which has been created by the law. The subject is a part of this law because it partakes in this law's creation. Through

Lui, the other that is the mod becomes himself. The pleasure that Nick feels, his beaming expression, is the "jouissance of the Other" that is himself (Zupancic 157).

The Ensemble that has assumed this position of the universal is the name of the corporation that Nick works for. The Ensemble refers to the proper name of this corporation, to the corporation itself, and to its novum or false novum, that is its product. The sublimity of nature has here been replaced by the transcendental operations of capitalism. The moral law that once preceded an appreciation of the mind's power to think nature, now lies in a neurological technology that precedes an appreciation of the power of mind. The supersession of the moral with the technological takes place after corporate power has assumed a universal position in the imagination.

This universality was generically established by cyberpunk. It was historically established in the time of Quarantine's release, in 1992, by the collapse of the old Soviet Union and the advent of globalisation. The sense of inevitability that has accompanied this process, its assumption of universality, is preceded by the assumption that technology is universal, in an obedience to its laws alone. Sayings such as "Technology is changing the way we live" are symptomatic of such views (Marx, "Technology" 968). As Leo Marx observes, the current "sense of the word [technology] did not gain wide currency until after World War 1", and corresponds to the increasing sway of ideologies of progress

(Technology 966-7). Egan reveals the psychic instantiation of the power of technology in the mind, and its implication in the regimes of late capital.

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Egan's fiction calls into question the psychic status of the sublime law, its place in a universe that was for Kant determined by the mind. Instead, capital's colonisation of

Nick's mind through nanotechnology relocates this law somewhere between capital and its novums. The law is caught up in the circularity of loyalty to an other that is exceeded by the jouissance of loyalty itself, in a cognitive loop that becomes the rule of its own law.

When Nick realises that "my intentions, my desires, my values, are the most anatomical of things", he is referring to this artificial basis for his cognition, technology's overcoming of nature (84). The tension between this corporate and technological hegemony and the cognition of the subject turns in Nick's mind into an opportunity for pleasure, in a turning of the power of the law back onto itself such that it undermines its very lawfulness. The freedom of cyberspace and cyberpunk is preserved in Egan, but its spatialisation is no longer of the world or the infinite universe. It takes place only in the mind.

Robinson's Planet

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy transforms the law that is the precondition of the

Kantian sublime in a different way. Robinson's is a utopian trilogy, because it imagines a new world in which property rights are absent and people are guaranteed the right to work. Instead of a dialectic between global technologies and a heterotopia (Gibson), or the corporation and the individual (Egan), Robinson relies on an older dialectic, between technology and the nature that it wants to eclipse. In this way, he circumvents the transcendental position of corporate power. The colonists of Mars are engaged in a mass terraforming project that will turn the planet from a dry, low atmosphere desert into a liveable habitat. From the dust of Red Mars (1992) the reader is guided through the

229 complexity of atmosphere making and warming, and the manufacture of algae, moss and plant life in Green Mars (1994), to the raising of Oceans in Blue Mars (1996).

Of all the colonists, Sax is the most involved in terraforming, and well positioned to reap its supersensible pleasures. Checking plants growing on the Martian fell-field, he acknowledges that what he is looking at is the product not of nature but of sophisticated mind-work:

There was a Biotique lab in Elysium, led by a Harry Whitebrook, designing many

of the most successful surface planets, especially the sedges and grasses, and a

check in the Whitebrook catalogue often showed that his hand had been at work,

in which case the similarities were often a matter of artificial convergence,

Whitebrook inserting traits like hairy leaves into almost every plant he bred.

(Green 160)

The new Martian environment is constructed all the way down. It is virtual, carrying with it not the mystery of its own existence, but the existence of the mind that has made it.

An atheist science has taken over the theological relation between creator and created, the omnipresent sign of Harry Whitebrook that of a god's work upon his creation. The mind that looks upon the plant also looks upon the law that enabled its creation, at the universality of scientific laws that are blown, creep and flow all over Mars.

The pleasure of terraforming lies in the excess of the mind's creation, as the laws of science exceed this mind's capacities and control. Alterations to the atmosphere give rise to changes in the climate, themselves effecting the new ecosystems, multiplying lichens

230 and plants that feed carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere, and give rise to climate changes in turn. Mars is in a state of "punctuated equilibrium, without the equilibrium", a situation that requires constant attention and intervention (Blue 400).

Again, the problems of an artificial life-world defamiliarise threats that Earth's natural environment is facing today, this time from biotechnology. The arguments of corporate geneticists describe a similar circularity as they stop referring to nature, and instead create a circular movement between chemicals or biological agents and their effects. The

US company Monsanto has been selling the herbicide Roundup for many years, and is now marketing RoundupReady crops that have been engineered to resist their original

Roundup product (Monstano). In a strange allusion to outer space, or perhaps to the

Hollywood film industry, another company are marketing a genetically modified corn under the name Starlink ("Not"). In making one product to counter the effects of another, the actions of these multinationals resemble the interventions and counter- interventions of the Martian terraformers. Like Sax and the other settlers of Mars, these companies also claim that they are acting for the good of the world. Monstanto's 2004

Pledge Report claims that they are helping to feed "800 million people, mostly in Asia or

Africa, who remain chronically undernourished". The universalisation of technology here still relies upon the rhetoric of the moral law. It does not recognise that is obeys its own autonomous laws, in a circularity between capitalist expansion and technological ideologies.

The imaginary precondition for the Mars Trilogy lies in a global totality and its technologies. From the extraterrestrial flight of spaceships, Robinson brings his reader back to the terrestrial pleasures of flight, as his characters take to the air to experience:

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the exhilarating lift of the wind, all of it coming back instantly like breathing or

sex, the breathing mass of the Echus escarpment bulking to the east like the edge

of a continent, the dim floor of Echus Chasma so far below--the landscape of

her heart, with its dim lowland and high plateau, and the vertiginous cliff

between them, and over it all the intense purples of the sky, lavender and mauve

in the east, black indigo out to the west, the whole arch lightning and taking on

color each second, the stars popping out of existence--high clouds to the west

flaring pink ... (Blue 545)

The pleasures of flight are here predicated upon the artificial. The purple sky gives pleasure to one who sees the work of her fellow Martians in it. The landscape that is in her heart is a supersensible identification of herself in the world. The conversion of

Mars, while sometimes interrupted by meganationals, has been achieved through a utopian communication, as specialists combined their skills to terraform its surface and adjudicate its people. Robinson is suggesting that the pleasures of globalisation need not belong to the multinationals, that the power of creation can be harnessed on a global scale in ways not delimited by capital.

The pleasures of the human mind in a virtual world are also the topic of Egan's

Permutation City (1994) and Diaspora (1997). In the former novel, Maria is designing an

Autoverse, an artificial life system, within a computer simulation. She does this by creating a set of laws through which this life might evolve. They make up a self- replicating, evolving relation of elements, a cellular automata. Thousands of years down the virtual road, the Autoverse gives rise to a species of intelligent (and virtual) alien life.

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The Lambertians are unlike anything ever known before, and yet, like Harry

Whitebrook's hairy leaves, carry with them the mark of their creator. They even evolve their own cosmology, which does not include Maria. The creation exceeds the creator, and in doing so extends the mind of this creator beyond herself. In both Egan's

Permutation City and in Robinson's Mars Trilogy it is the power of scientific law to create new worlds, finite beings creating the infinite.

In question in both of these texts is the way that they afford pleasure. For it is through the laws of science--Egan's quantum physics and computing, and Robinson's discourses on everything from atmosphere building to orbital velocity-- that these texts give rise to narratives in which worlds are born. Gwyneth Jones complains of Diaspora, populated as it is by virtual intelligences, that she has little sympathy with characters who can traverse a "five-, or six-, or thirteen-dimensional environment" (103). Diaspora takes the virtual tendencies of Permutation City to their extreme conclusion. In the far, far future two digital entities that began as human beings now travel through multiple dimensions and billions of years. They have been following a trail of artefacts left by a species they call the Transmuters. When they reach the end of these artefacts, and realise that they make up a massive sculpture of a Transmuter body "spanning more than a quadrillion dimensions", they wonder what the point of their journey was (359). Paolo concludes that "the Transmuters didn't die; they played out every possibility within themselves.

And I believe I've done the same ..." (360). It is useful to compare this narrative conclusion, in which an intelligence meets the limits of its own existence, with the interstellar voyager of an older sf novel, Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker (1937). In this sf classic, increasing orders of magnitude lead to the meaning of the universe, a "principle of balance" achieved across the cosmos (Tremaine 247). In Egan, the quest for enlarged

233 scales or across multiple dimensions does not conclude with the discovery of the meaning of life and the universe. Instead, Paolo points to the finality of the virtual, to its inherent closure, as he dissolves his existence and argues that the act is "not death. It's completion" (360).

The last novel of Robinson's trilogy, Blue Mars, is also vulnerable to a certain sense of pointlessness after the ascendance of the virtual over the actual. By this stage, terraforming has overcome its opposition, in the person of Ann and the Red conservationist movement that she leads. Halfway through Blue Mars, the colonists meet to write a constitution, to add human law to the scientific one, and thus overwrite the revolutionary moment that they had occupied as well as the land that they had colonised:

Infinite possibility was going to collapse, in the act of choosing, to the single line

of world history. The future becoming the past: there was something

disappointing in this passage through the loom, this so-sudden diminution from

infinity to one, the collapse from potentiality to reality that was the action of time

itself. (153)

From the sublime and revolutionary moment, upon which Marin bases his philosophy of utopia, Robinson brings his characters into the closure of the finite. Nirgal wonders, as

Egan's characters do at the end of Diaspora, "What does the hero do when the tale is over?" (Blue 392). When the conquest has been accomplished, utopia established, the mathematically sublime is at one with its own representations (Blue 392). Sf has in these novels reached the ends of its own fantasy of conquering the universe, and dissolved the boundary between mind and matter.

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In the Mars Trilogy, this dissolution takes place on a global scale. As Whitebrook's plants creep over Mars, they defamiliarise the process of globalisation, as the scale of their supersensible is entire planet. Robinson turns this global imagination into a tool for social empowerment as the people of this novel engage with the creation of their own world. The pleasurable conversion of a dry world into habitat is paralleled by the pleasures of creating a new kind of society. When this society chooses to write a constitution that subjects this planet to global law, this writing upon the world defamilarises the laws that attempt to regulate the global flows of capital. The out-of- control logic of terraforming meets its resistance in a moral law established by human society. Robinson's trilogy appeared in an era in which few plans were being made for the colonisation of other planets, and instead in which the rhetoric of globalisation was

"on everybody's lips" (Bauman 1). This leads, on the one hand, to a desire to escape from its emerging hegemony, and on the other, to take control over that which has been lost. On Earth this has led to the establishment of a range of non-government organizations campaigning on behalf of the environment, human rights and conditions of labour. The colonisation of Mars, turning it into a unified environmental and political entity, enters into a hopeful dialogue with real world conditions of economic unification.

Robinson's ability to imagine such a degree of human omnipotence over Mars lies in the historical precedent of the centralisation of economic power on Earth.

The ethical debates within the Mars Trilogy can be read as sublimated debates about globalisation's own ethics. While he touches occasionally upon the human rights of those non-European residents of Mars, the most prominent debate in Robinson is that between conservationists and terraformers, nature and artifice. The former are known as

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Reds and the latter Greens. The Reds, committed to the rights of natural and Martian rock to exist despite human settlement, configure the environmental opposition to globalisation. They are, like the real world's Wilderness Society, attempting to rescue a nature that is threatened with destruction. By this logic, the terraformers of Mars take the place of an expansionist and exploitative capitalism of the real world. This metaphorical reading of the Mars Trilogy returns to that philosophical dialectic between the two categories of the Kantian sublime. While terraforming enjoys the ability of the mind to extend itself within nature, and is thus part of the mathematically sublime, a nature in and for itself is dynamically sublime. The latter acts as a boundary for the fantasies of the supersensible.

The leader of the Reds, Ann Clayborne, is often thought by other settlers to be unreasonable and extreme in her calls to preserve the planet as it is. At one point, her politics are even explained away as a post-traumatic reaction to childhood abuse (Blue

278). However, her resistance to terraforming is a necessary part of the pleasures of this applied science. In two recent articles, Jameson has used the notion of resistance to map the way in which Robinson and Gibson stage their fantasies of the virtual. In a paper on

William Gibson's Neuromancer (1984), he thinks that the resistance of Intrusion

Countermeasures Electronics, or ICE, in cyberspace is that which permits the novel's heist narrative to take place in the first place ("Globalisation"). The protection that these security systems offer corporations and Artificial Intelligences lead to the hacker Case being employed to break into them. The colour of ICE is white, and recalls the frontier narratives of Arctic explorers, who also risked death to penetrate the cold spaces of the colour. The developments of these older narratives were determined by the degree of ice that surrounded the explorers, as they braved winters of enclosure. So too in Neuromancer

236 the harder the system, the purer the white of its ICE. The frontier of Arctic and

Antarctic exploration has turned in Neuromancer into the frontier of amassed corporate computing power. Territories of the unknown are today occupied by the virtual spaces of high capitalism.

Jameson has also used this notion of resistance to describe the dialectics in Robinson's

Mars Trilogy. He thinks about the way terraforming, in the second and third novels, has runaway effects that pass beyond the understanding of the terraformers. When this happens there comes an:

evocation of resistance: external reality organises itself into a problem, or even,

at some lower limit, into an event as such, whose nature poses a problem only in

so far as it raises a question about its own coming into existence in the first

place, about the very why of its happening. ("If I find One Good City" 213)

This is a very different use of resistance. It leads to a philosophical questioning of its own being, as at the outer edge of science things pass beyond its laws of understanding and dissolve once more into the chaos of not being understood. What was mathematically sublime passes into Kant's other sublime category, the dynamical, as the mind grapples with the very fact of creation. Kant defines this as that which "can only be estimated according to the greatness of the resistance" it has to the mind (Critique 109).

Gibson's ICE and the effects of terraforming can each be thought in terms of this dynamical resistance. Resistance is also a philosophical question, that is a question that interrogates the conditions of its own asking.

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For Jameson, resistance is a measure of the sf genre's realism. The more something resists its documentation, the greater amount of documentation it requires, and the more real it becomes. This realism is at one end of an axis that has fantasy as its other. As early as 1964, Arthur Jean Cox identified the problem of having too much fantasy in sf, that

"when anything is possible, the necessary loses its accustomed weight" (28). The function of realism in sf, then, is to bring this sense of necessity to fantasy, the need to overcome the former leading to the latter. When the human mind is all too capable of manipulating the universe, or its own fantasies, as in Egan's Diaspora or the last two volumes of Robinson's Mars Trilogy, the pleasure of the sf narrative loses its impetus, its overcoming of the resistances of nature.

Towards the end of the Mars Trilogy, the reader begins to learn that Ann's obsessions are also based upon the scientific value of an untouched environment (Blue 540). As she explains, an unaltered universe is "the matrix life emerged out of", offering "a window into that time ..." (Blue 539). In this, and in the final moments of the trilogy, Robinson destabilises the opposition of Red and Green by implying both in scientific law. The opposition can still be determined in terms of aesthetic pleasure, however, as Ann's interest in science is measured by just how much she doesn't know about the universe.

This still corresponds to Kant's dynamically sublime, on the realism end of sf's axis, while the fantasy of mind is represented by the extension of this mind into a terraformed world.

Science Fiction and Militarisation

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While Robinson seems to be suggesting that the global imagination might turn into a utopian one, many other sf authors have taken the complicity of their imagination with capitalist economy to its logical conclusion. The Citizens’ Advisory Council on National

Space Policy was hosted by sf writer Larry Niven, and run by Jerry Pournelle, in the early

1980s. It advised the US government on the future of their military strategy. Other sf authors, including Poul Anderson, Greg Bear, Dean Ing, Steve Barnes, Gregory Benford and Robert Heinlein, also turned up to talk with government representatives. Niven,

Pournelle and Benford claim that Robert Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or the Star Wars Program, was drafted there:

The men mostly talked hardedge tech, the women policy. Pournelle stirred the

pot and turned up the heat. Amid the buffet meals, saunas and hot tubs, well-

stocked open bar and myriad word processors, fancies simmered and ideas

cooked, some emerging better than half-baked ...

The more ambitious specialists talked of war stars--great bunkers in the sky, able

to knock down fleets of missiles ... (Benford qtd in Dedman)

Sf and the US government here reveal their common interests in technology and imperial dominance.

The Citizen's Advisory Council's references to Star Wars (1977) suggest this film as an early model for the globalization of capitalism. Indeed, the artificial planet called the

Death Star in this film differs from earlier global cities, such as Asimov's Trantor

(Foundation), in that it is artificial from the inside out, rather than the outside in. While

Trantor represented the conquest of a planet, a massive city that was built to cover its

239 surface, the Death Star is virtual to its core. This totality was demonstrated when R2-D2, jacking into an electric socket, was able to stop the garbage compactor from crushing his friends in a different and distant room. The connectedness of this artificial world prefigures the globalization of the international economy. The director of the film,

George Lucas, attempted to stop people from using the film's name for SDI, claiming that his fictional villain, Darth Vader, was in fact modeled on Reagan's republican predecessor, Richard Nixon (Dedman). By analogy, the giant metal planet called the

Death Star, headquarters of the evil Darth Vader, is in fact analogous of an American

Empire that wants to take over the globe, its long corridors and garbage chutes meeting the fantasy of the denatured global capitalism that this country's government advocates.

Computing technology facilitates these fantasies of expansion, whether in the form of finance capital or in the pages of sf, in the ecstatic calls of a stock market broker or in the unraveling of one of Egan's virtual universes. Just as the US military appropriated the title of the film Star Wars for its own technically infeasible and thus imaginary idea of

SDI, so this military lies behind the development of the internet and Gibson's notion of cyberspace. In Neuromancer the beginnings of digital interface technology lies in "cold blue military footage burned through, lab animals wired into test systems, helmets feeding into fire control circuits of tanks and war planes" (51). These phrases make use of Weiskel's metonymic sublime. Just as van Vogt's McAllister walks into a weapons shop of the future to look at "Curious lights! He was fascinated by the play of light and shade, the waxing and waning from one tiny globe to the next", so Case is overwhelmed by the dazzle of cyberspace (WS 8).

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While van Vogt's McAllister confronts an "Imperial Court" and the "establishment" (WS

8-9), Neuromancer's Case finds modern corporations and militaries behind the unfolding metonymy of virtual reality:

And flowed, flowered for him, fluid neon origami trick, the unfolding of his

distanceless home, his country, transparent 3D chessboard extending to infinity.

Inner eye opening to the stepped scarlet pyramid of the Eastern Seaboard

Fission authority burning beyond the green cubes of Mitsubishi Bank of

America, and high and very far away he saw the spiral arms of military systems,

forever beyond his reach. (52)

The pyrotechnics of virtual light turn from the metonymic sublime into Weiskel's metaphoric, as the names and images of corporations stand in for their internal complexity. Above these lie the white Artificial Intelligences (AIs) of the military who invented the jack-in technology in the first place. For the hacker, these constructs represent the greatest opportunity for transcendence within cyberspace, as they are the most sophisticated of intelligences, the highest incarnation of reason.

The complicity of computing technology with the military echoes the earlier emergence of space launch technology from ballistic missile development. The latest, digital stage of militarisation, waged by the US military and its allies, opens new markets for multinational corporations by destroying old infrastructure and thus universalising capital on a global scale. In 1990, Iraq invaded Kuwait to divert attention from domestic problems and because Kuwait had been keeping Arab oil prices down (Shrives). These cheaper prices were advantageous to the US economy, and their subsequent war on Iraq

241 enabled the US to maintain them, to open a new market for military supplies in Kuwait, and to demonstrate imperial power.

This war revealed in no uncertain terms the military application of virtual technologies.

Its jacked-in pilots, linked to the US military's information network, knew precisely where to fire missiles that had been made by multinational corporations. The virtual, once holding "new possibilities for human interaction" for cyberpunk fiction, turned all at once into a way of destroying human life without seeing it (O'Keefe in Egan,

Interview). At the other end of these military technologies were the record audiences that watched Cable Network News (CNN) on television. As the war demonstrated US military supremacy, it also occasioned the rise of this media network in a "successful convergence of the media and the interests of the state" (Smith 193). CNN's near monopoly of the world's televisions during this time elevated the virtual technologies of the war to the position of a global universality. "We are no longer in a logic of the passage from virtual to actual", wrote Jean Baudrillard at the time, "but in a hyperrealist logic of the deterrence of the real by the virtual" (Gulf 27). The alignment of this virtual with the military has cast political shadows over cyberpunk's fantasies of liberation by the same means, through a "cold, detached and alienated" relationship with technology

(Pearson). It is no wonder Egan and his reviewers wanted to distance themselves from it.

In his preface to the 1994 Mirrorshades anthology of cyberpunk writing, the erudite Bruce

Sterling describes its interest in both post-human technologies and "the tools of global integration" (xi-xii). This is the same collaboration that took place between military and media in the 1991 war. From the infra-red headgear of soldiers to green and grey missile- cams, footage from the front line was beamed past the censors straight back to domestic

242 televisions. Amidst the war, cyberpunk in the 1990s found itself in a similar position to astrofuturist novels written in the 1970s. As manned space travel had come to be associated with the Apollo landing, which was itself implied in all kinds of dubious patriotisms, anthropocentrisms and reifications, the First Gulf War had similarly attracted record television audiences for a US technological achievement. As Apollo universalised space travel on behalf of middle America, so the Gulf War colonised virtual reality with deadly consequences.

When Gibson's Case jacks into cyberspace he does so with "a wave of exhilaration" and leaves "the prison of his own flesh" (Neuromancer 115, 6). The mods of Egan's Quarantine, on the other hand, create a more complex relation to the body within which they are immersed. Neurologically reconstructing the virtual inside the mind, they produce a reflective cognition in their subjects. When Nick, the hero of Quarantine, says that he needs to "reconcile" his mods with his "sense of who I am", he reflects upon the conditions under which these mods have become embodied (84). He admits that mods can be "disorientating--and at worst traumatic" (3). "Night Switchboard (Axon,

$17,999)", for instance, inserts information directly into the user's memory (3). Using it only whilst asleep, users anticipate the psychological crisis "Night Switchboard" causes to a conscious mind, and hence the contrary pole of the actual to accompany a cognition of the virtual. This actual is established only retroactively, invisible to the mind. The knowledge that such an actual might prove disorientating is the condition for its repression. The censorship of images on the CNN broadcast of the First Gulf War obeys this same retroactive logic. Anticipating a crisis if images of blood made it to the home television screen, the US military regulated media access to the Iraqi battlefields.

This strategy became a virtual circularity when members of the military began relying on

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CNN for war news. It demonstrated just how far this military was from its own engagement, how technologically mediated the war had become for those that conducted it. It also created that circularity characteristic of global technologies.

Stephen Baxter and the Transformations of Space

The virtualization of space, as globalization interacts with new digital technologies, not only turns up in cyberpunk fiction. It has also transformed the pleasures to be found in fictions of outer space. Stephen Baxter's Space (2000) is at first glance a more traditional,

Campbellian sf novel. It journeys between solar systems, meets aliens and wages war on a galactic scale. The construction of these tropes, however, betrays the influence of computing technology. The Gaijin are the first aliens to arrive in the human system.

Inhabitants of deep space, they have a mind "like a computer program. It was composed purely of classical information" (155). The Gaijin embody Kant's cold and sublime reason as they shy away from the sun, which depletes their energy. Instead, they gain power from the purity of the black reaches of the outer system. Their metal carries the virtual bits and bytes of the information age, their "mind and identity fluid, malleable things ... to be broken up, shared, merged" (155). Kant's cosmology is here reconfigured by the virtual depths of this information that spreads, with the Gaijin, along the spiral arms of the Galaxy.

The supersensible, once aligned with the sight of distant stars, has turned in Baxter into the sheen of an informational infinite. As they piggyback humans on joy rides through the universe, the Gaijin are not so much embodying the infinite universe as one contained within computer networks. Composed of metal and code, the Gaijin pass

244 from solar system to solar system, exploiting and building more of themselves. They are an engineer's wet dream. At the beginning of Space, a retired NASA astronaut attempts to sell a similar dream to audiences around the world. Malefant wants to build von

Neumann machines to replicate themselves and prepare the way for human colonisation throughout the universe. These machines are automatons, unthinking and disinterested in their work. He campaigns for these mechanical agents of expansion to be built as soon as possible, lest human beings be stuck in one place forever:

A target system, we assume, is uninhabited. We can therefore program for

massive and destructive exploitation of the system's resources, without restraint,

by the probe. Such resources are useless for any other purpose, and are therefore

economically free to us. And so we colonize, and build. (13)

The condition of possibility for Malefant's fantasy is an uninhabited universe. The presumption recalls those notions of terra nullius that propelled Europeans to assume that the land of the world was theirs to divide and conquer. The reappearance of this presumption in Space plays out a tension between the imperial past and a future in which the conditions for capitalist expansion have changed. Globalisation's turn to the virtual is represented by the universal reach of the Gaijin. Their logic is not so much alien as doubly familiar, as they repeat imperial logics with a digital aesthetic.

When the Gaijin arrive in the solar system, they ignore human attempts to contact them and carry on mining the asteroid belt. The arrival of alien life is accompanied by the humbling revelation that this life is indifferent to human beings. The historical precedent for this situation lies on the Northwest coast of Australia. When the Dutch ran into the

245 continent, they used it as a navigation aid, an indication that they had travelled too far south from their trade routes. These traders were indifferent to Australia and its people.

As it turned out, this was the least harmful of European responses to the rest of the world, and contains an alternative history in which modern ocean travel was not necessarily aligned with imperialism.

The Gaijin also present an alternative sf history of contact, one that points not only to the possibility that aliens have nothing to learn from humans, but to the inverse, that humans may not learn much from aliens. These possibilities are complicit with a globalisation that makes the assumption that the world is there to be converted to relations of value, and in doing so proposes that this world can in fact be known in the first place. The assumption is a technological one, as the logic of capital presupposes the mind's virtual extension into matter. The Gaijin, though, undermine the pleasures to be had from this universalisation of the world. They are a sheerly computational species, and lack the moral impetus behind expansion. As such, they turn the cognition of universalisation into a banal rather than a pleasurable occupation. Sf here reflects upon its own pleasures, its own fantasies, in a cognitive self-reflexivity that finds them wanting.

Baxter turns the traditional sf contact story between alien and human into one between the unfeeling logic of computers and the human. Looking down upon the peninsula of an alien world, Malefant thinks that it resembles Florida. Yet the Gaijin insists that

"THIS PENINSULA IS NOT FLORIDA". Mafefant thinks that:

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The Gaijin sought patterns, of course--it was hard to imagine a science which did

not include elements of pattern recognition, and trend analysis--but they were

not distracted by them, like humans ... he simply could not communicate to

Cassiopeia why it pleased him to pick out an analogue of Florida off the shore of

some unnamed continent, on a planet light years from Earth. (118-9)

The irrational tendency to universalise, to make vast generalisations across light years, marks out Malefant's ability to experience pleasure.

AI scholar Herbert Dreyfus distinguishes human from digital intelligence with the capacity for analogy, the ability to say "'just as ... so likewise' or again 'as if ... then' or again 'as p is to q, so r is to s'" (Lyotard, "Thought" 16). This tendency, that groups things together over and over again, has the universal as its end-point. While embodying this universal as they cruise the universe, the Gaijin lack the two aspects that humanise it.

These are a moral foundation for its operation and the pleasure that it affords the human mind. They lack the latter because they are immortal, and do not subsequently desire an extensive transcendence from their finite bodies. The perfect mathematical and rational form of these aliens represents global technologies as autonomous, but also makes this autonomy problematic. In their configuration of computer technology, they represent an insecurity about its very nature. They suggest that while humans experience transcendence through digital technologies, the technologies are themselves indifferent to these pleasures.

Baxter turns this difference between the human and alien into a tragic aesthetic. The tragedy lies in the inability of the human being to ascend to the stars, and the ability of

247 these impersonal machines to do so. In this, Baxter recalls Norman Mailer's mourning for the romantic hero in the face of the impersonality of NASA's technocrats (see

Chapter Two). He resurrects this hero in the form of the ageing and retired astronaut.

This is a common figure in recent sf, from Baedecker in Dan Simmons' Phases of Gravity

(1989) to the group of retired air force personnel in Clint Eastwood's Space Cowboys

(2000), and the hero of Deep Impact (1998), who saves Earth from an approaching asteroid. Apollo 13 (1995) was also nostalgic for these older forms of heroism, as it told the historical story of a doomed flight to the moon. These gung-ho heroes resurrect older ideas of humanity in an age of dehumanising technologies. Their tragedy is to articulate the pleasures to be found in the universe and the universal just as they are being placed in question by the indifference of new digital technologies to the body upon which these pleasures are based.

In Space, Frank is attempting to motivate a group of Japanese settlers on the moon to explore other planets, while they are happy to subsist as they are. The conflict is between an older form of imperial expansion and an indifference to the pleasure it offers. To attempt to persuade the Japanese, Frank uses the Longinian strategy of sublime oration.

The force of the Greek orators, argues Longinus, depended on a tragic content that exceeded their narrator. Speaking of lost battles and making funeral speeches, alluding to magnificent but impossible conceptions, they defer their subject beyond themselves.

Longinus' examples are all taken from those who have been defeated by the march of history, and Frank is also appealing to the idea that the Japanese live in a civilisation in decline. As the epic Odyssey is the product of a fall, so the massive scope of Baxter's novel is similarly placed in the mouths of aging American astronauts whom history appears to have overtaken, and whose dreams are no longer popular.

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The engineering fantasies of Baxter's novel, from comet farming, moon mining and even the detonation of suns, appear to be tragic:

'You need volatiles,' Frank said now. 'That's the key to the future. But now that

Earth has fallen apart nobody is resupplying. You're just pumping around the

same old shit.' He laughed. 'Literally, in fact. I give you another hundred years,

tops. Look around. You've already got rationing, strict birth control laws.'

'There is no argument with the fact of--'

'How much do you need? I'll tell you. Enough to future-proof the Moon.'

'And you believe the comets can supply the volatiles we need for this.'

'Believe?' That's what Project Prometheus is for. The random impact today,

which alone will deliver a trillion tonnes of water, is a piece of luck. It's going to

make my case for me, pal. And when we start purposefully harvesting the

comets, those big fat babies out in the Oort cloud--' (200)

Frank is speaking even after he knows that the comet will bring no volatiles, that his

Project Prometheus is doomed to failure. He has too late run across a paper that proves that the volatiles will be "blasted back to space" (201). His dogged persistence in promoting the idea is at one with the perversion of a Longinian sublime that subverts the democratic process through its own rhetorical powers of persuasion. Frank turns from the regulative function of this rhetoric to the spectacular appeal of large-scale engineering for its own sake, for trying things out even when faced with failure.

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To ensure that the moral basis for the sublime is articulated, Baxter supplements Frank with a character who challenges his ideas. Xenia wonders whether pleasure is retroactively creating the moral, or the moral is in fact the basis for Frank's schemes:

Xenia didn't understand Frank; she freely admitted it. He was an out-and-out

capitalist, no doubt about that. But every gram of his huge ambition was

constantly turned on the most gigantic of projects. The future of a world! The

destiny of mankind! What Xenia couldn't work out was whether Frank was a

visionary who used capitalism to achieve his goals--or just a capitalist after all,

sublimating his greed and ambition. (206)

The moral basis of the supersensible is in question here, as is its relation to capitalism and its fantasies. Xenia is what Vladmir Propp calls a helper for the hero Frank, enabling him to carry through his heroic fantasy with moral validation. While not explicitly supporting his projects, and sometimes opposing them, her moral concerns allow Frank to validate his position with appeals to a human destiny in the universe. The conversations of Xenia and Frank thus constitute a sublime aesthetic.

In Kant's terms, Frank's grand engineering is moral because it turns the indifferent magnitude of the universe into a capacity of mind to embrace this magnitude. Malefant's von Neumann machines are also moral because they also act in the same way. Yet the mass engineering that these characters advocate has proved more controversial than ever before in the late twentieth century. Dams, irrigation schemes and industry have increased Third World debt, wreaked environmental destruction, poisoned people and turned them from their homes. These schemes have had a moral basis, acting on behalf

250 of a universal good. However, the suffering they have caused has placed the pleasures of this universal in question. It may be for this historical reason that the speeches of Frank and Malefant are tragic, placed against a background of historical defeat with regard to the mass engineering schemes that they propose.

In Robinson's Mars Trilogy, Ann Clayborne leads a moral opposition to the terraformers. She forces the Greens to articulate their own reasons for transforming the planet, and thus articulate the moral basis of terraforming. There are disputes in this novel, not only between Red and Green, but within their factions. It is as if one had the privilege of peering into the minds and relationships of the Russian revolutionaries in the

1920s. As Russia's great figures have come to represent the different factions of socialism--Lenin for socialism in one country; Trotsky for the international struggle; and

Stalin for the ultimate corruption of the worker's dream, so the characters of the Mars

Trilogy become symbols of the mass movements of the planet. Ann, while partaking in the debates, simultaneously stands outside them. Strong and silent, she exposes the limited basis of the polity in their commitment to terraforming. Rather than finding the politics behind their science, Ann reveals the scientific content of their politics, as she measures each position by how much destruction it will wreak on the original planet.

The dialogue here repeats that of Xenia and Frank in Baxter's Space. It maps a relationship between morality and fantasy. In Kant's sublime, these apparently contrary positions compliment each other, as the moral is required for the universality of the fantasy of the supersensible, and the supersensible carries the moral forth into the universe. The moral sets the ground for the supersensible pleasures of these novels.

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Another pair of women characters in Robinson and Baxter function in another, more mysterious way. Hiroko and Nemoto are what Propp calls donors because they lend magical help to the heroes of the Mars Trilogy and Space. In Blue Mars, Hiroko appears from nowhere to rescue Sax from the freezing cold of a Martian night. She is also the leader of a spiritual movement on Mars. She ritualises the link between the new Martians and their world, bringing a magical level of assistance to the novel's characters. In Space,

Malefant has spent years campaigning for expansion into space, without much response, when he receives a call from the lunar researcher Nemoto on the moon. She has detected aliens in the asteroid belt, and unexpectedly validates his lifetime of campaigning. Nemoto is also something of a spiritual godmother for the characters of

Space over the next thousand years of Baxter's future history. She organises everything from the relocation of an Australian Aboriginal community to Triton to sending human representatives to other star systems. There are three other things that Hiroko and

Nemoto have in common. They are both Japanese, live inside the rock or ice of the extraterrestrial body they live on, and appear to have been killed or to have mysteriously disappeared by novel's end. Their deaths affirm the rule of science over the nature-magic constellation that these characters represent, the universe once again affirmed as artifice.

Even in these older modes of sf narrative, of extraterrestrial travel and colonisation, conceptions of a pre-existent nature are defeated. The precedent for this was already established in 1950s fiction. Hedrock of Weapon Makers is uncertain as to whether he is living inside a simulation or not, while Dick's Ragle Gumm discovers that he is living inside one, in what Fitting calls a "discovery scene" (219). In Baxter's Space, the scale of the simulation is the universe itself. There is no outside to which one might escape.

Evidence turns up all over the Galaxy that sentience has had a massive hand in making

252 things the way they are. From a giant alien artefact in the middle to Triton to the poisoned atmosphere of Venus, from supernovae to the existence of Mercury:

The longer we live, the deeper we look, the more layers of deception and

manipulation and destruction we will find ... Consider Mercury, for example,

which may be doomed to become a resource mine for the sun-breaking

Crackers. Why, if I was a suspicious type, a conspiracy theorist, I might think it

was a little odd that there should be a giant ball of crust-free nickel-iron placed so

conveniently right here where the Crackers need it. What do you think? Could some

predecessors of the Crackers--even their ancestors--have arranged the giant

impact that stripped off Mercury's crust and mantle, leaving behind this rust ball?

(407)

The discovery that the natural universe is an artefact destroys the distinction between natural and artificial. In Space, it rethinks the universe as a giant and ongoing engineering project, turning it into the virtual, in which information permeates even the densest of matter. The suggestion dates from Shiaparelli's first glimpses of life on Mars, of the canals that wound their way over its surface like an engineering scheme of planetary proportions. Even so, Meacher is shocked that this notion could be taken a step further to undermine nature itself. She feels a "deepening of the great violation of the solar system" (407). Radically, Baxter is proposing that the idea of a pre-sentient universe, a way the universe once was, was a mistake all along.

The idea of an artificial that lies, ultimately, behind nature is not only isolated to Baxter's novel. In Egan's Quarantine the Earth's solar system is placed inside a massive bubble

253 such that one can no longer see the stars. Cosmic engineering on such a scale suggests the universe cannot be an entirely natural thing. In Alastair Reynolds' Revelation Space

(2002), the culmination of the narrative takes place when a group of space travellers arrive at a planet orbiting a neutron star only to find out that it is in fact an ancient and camouflaged artefact. The setting for this novel is largely a spacecraft that is itself a living thing, a gothic world run by a moody intelligence. The crew speak to it with delicacy, attempting to accommodate its mysterious preoccupations. The living spaceship is by no means a new invention in sf, but the multiplicities, textures and scale of Reynolds' ship suggests that it is a life-world all to itself. Perhaps the most vividly alive spacecraft in contemporary sf is in Octavia Butler's Dawn (1987). The ship is made of living matter, its walls grown rather than built, and its Oankali inhabitants entertain a symbiotic relationship with it. The total environment represented here is one suffused with life, a biomass commensurable with the universe. This biomass is a planet all to itself, a ship moving between stellar systems.

Dawn too contains the "discovery scene", when a character realises "that his reality is somehow an illusion" (Fitting, "Reality" 219-20). While van Vogt's Hedrock decides that he is living in reality, and Dick's Ragle finds his way outside the simulation and into the wider world, Butler's characters, crucially, do not escape their illusion. The novel takes place after a nuclear war, and amongst humans who have been rescued by the aforementioned spacecraft. The Oankali are attempting to rehabilitate these humans and their world, and are training them to live in the forest in a simulation of old Earth.

However, these people think that they are actually upon Earth, and escape the Oankali into the depths of the simulation. The difference between the 1950s heroes Hedrock and

Ragle and this new fiction is that, while these characters make their way out of the

254 simulation, the people of Dawn do not. Even when, in the sequels to this novel, they find themselves upon the actual Earth, this is a new planet that has been bioengineered by the Oankali. The discovery scene is no longer accompanied by the discovery of the actual. Outside the simulation is only a larger one.

The universes of Butler, Baxter and Robinson mediate the idea of an existence no longer hampered by the dichotomy between nature and artifice. In doing so, they configure the imagination of globalisation, whose universality is based upon a conversion of nature into its own artificial logics. In Baxter the loss of an original nature validates the most extreme engineering projects, from comet farming to the exploding of suns, thus authorising the pleasures of the supersensible on an immense scale. These schemes are morally validated by the discovery that the universe has already been constructed. For

Elizabeth Leane, the invention of nature on Robinson's Mars is a collapse and re- merging of the originally modern distinction between science and art. In both Baxter and

Robinson the sublime pleasures once afforded by an extension of mind into nature now no longer needs the resistance of this nature. The dynamically sublime has been overcome by the mathematical. When Sax talks about the Big Bang, he extends this mathematical sublime deep into time as well. Even so, the pleasure of these laws depend on their autonomy from this mind, unfolding slightly beyond its grasp while remaining implicit within it. On Robinson's Mars too, giant storms wander beyond the control or understanding of the terraformers, whose attempts to map them are thwarted.

Transcendental Histories

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In cyberpunk the pleasures of cyberspace turn back upon the material world. Laney, in

Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties, can "perceive change emerging from vast flows of data"

(56). These changes are historical. From "nodal points in that flow", they make their way

"into the physical world" (164). In Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), a similar talent is put into economic context. Cayce can perceive changes to the marketplace as she walks down the street. She is a "coolhunter", intuitively tracking the rise and fall of fashions

(2). The talent recalls Ragle in Dick's Time Out of Joint, whose talent is compared to predicting "women's hats, what they'll be wearing next year" (162). Like Baxter and

Dreyfus, Gibson considers that "Homo Sapiens is about pattern recognition" (Pattern

22). The term describes a transcendental aspiration toward the universal, the doubled structure of sublime cognition by which the mind reaches beyond itself. When he is immersed in the net, Gibson's Laney enters into this state, his "eyes wide against the pressure of information, knows himself to be merely adjectival: a Laney-coloured smear, meaningless without context" (All 72). The flow within which he is immersed exceeds him and constitutes his transcendence.

Another novelist from the 1990s will similarly make a transcendental idea of historical change the structuring device for his narratives. The Scottish author Ken MacLeod resituates political history inside the virtual. In The Star Fraction (1995) he codes revolution into a computer program. The Last International is timed to overthrow the informational regime on a predetermined cue. In Cosmonaut Keep (2000), Matt is a computer programmer who makes his living by hacking information systems. When he intercepts the plan for a flying saucer that has been leaked onto the internet by aliens, human history acquires a different course. As in Gibson, the consequences of information technology exceed human abilities to control it. While Gibson represents

256 the transcendental experience of this technology, MacLeod defamilarises it. In Cosmonaut

Keep, digital technology is encoded into transcendental representations of the alien. The two narratives of this novel are structured by encounters with these aliens, and in the sense that these encounters defamiliarise digital technology, places their future histories within a transcendental idea of the virtual.

In an Earth-based narrative, the aliens are a crystalline structure growing on the hollow interior of an asteroid. Human beings that see the alien crystals experience a transcendence of mind, and have trouble returning to normal consciousness. They stay blissed out in the sight of the alien:

The bright monochrome bubble burst, throwing us into color and complexity.

More color, more complexity than I'd ever seen or imagined or dreamed. The

pictures shown of it in the newsfeeds were quite an inadequate preparation for

the real thing. We hung in a vast interior space. Distance and perspective were

impossible to judge, the shapes difficult to cohere in the eye. At one moment it

made sense as the interior of a vastly magnified, non-human brain; the next, as

the view of a city from a height; or a cathedral, made entirely of stained glass;

then again, as some multifarious botanic garden in whose gargantuan greenhouse

we were as fruit flies. For a long time the only possible response was silence. The

place filled the mind, and the eye, and the mind's eye. (192).

The repetition of words in this passage, such as color, complexity, mind and eye, fills in for the inadequacy of these words to the vastness of what is being seen. The sight exceeds Matt's ability to judge it, and disorientates his sensory and cognitive conceptions.

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His is an hallucinatory metonymy, as he moves from the image of a brain to a city to stained glass to a garden. This alien intelligence is constituted by information. It is, like

Baxter's Gaijin, linked with others of its kind across the gulfs of space in a communicative supersensible that exceeds the human. These aliens defamiliarise information technology, as the sight of its process of exchange exceeds Matt's ability to conceive of it. Matt's interface with the aliens can also be compared to Gibson's hacker heroes who experience their "inner eye opening" in the presence of a similar excess of the virtual (Neuromancer 52).

There is a second narrative in Cosmonaut Keep too, one set in the far future, and on a distant world. Here humans are almost ready to travel between the stars, but to do so they must ask the alien Gods for permission. When Gregor asks the navigator krakens whether it would anger the Gods if humans took it upon themselves to ply the starways, they witness:

The krakens in the pool, and others now visible in the sea beneath, and those in

the overhead aquarium, burst almost simultaneously into rapid-fire exchanges of

racing, flashing colored light.

Gregor felt Elizabeth's arm clasp his waist, and clasped hers in response, but

more firmly. He felt that they needed to cling to each other to remain on their

feet. Lydia and Marcus and the saurs were gazing at the display with almost as

much amazement.

"It's rare to see anything like this," said Lydia. "So long, and so intense. The

volume of information being exchanged must be enormous." (275)

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In both of McLeod's narratives the hero is disorientated by this excess, and yet is also implied in it. The kraken aliens are conversing about the human wish to navigate interstellar space with their newfound information. The relationship between the hero and a universe of information is one between human beings and a power that transcends this human. The aliens of this novel lend history a metaphysical quality, as if God were parting the Red Sea for Moses so that he could lead his people to reach the promised land. The complicity of the first sublime moment with the second, between narrators and narratives that exceed them, constitute a transcendental metanarrative.

The aliens of MacLeod and Baxter affect the destiny of the human species and defamilarise the informational quality of the internet. While the heroes of these novels engage with the infinite that these aliens represent, they are also estranged from the power they hold. Such a doubled relation is something of a diagnosis for the subjective experience of the internet. As a source of historical empowerment, these experiences imply that the internet as a driver of history is out of the hands of human beings, lies instead in the abstract and alien realm of data.

It is against this background of defeat that both novelists are able to stage the aesthetic of the Longinian sublime. In Baxter old astronauts talk about grand but near-impossible schemes. In MacLeod many of the characters are socialists, and engage in a lot of talking that comes to nought (Newsinger). For MacLeod's leftist aesthetics are taken from those parts of the left that have been defeated by the movement of history--the Soviets,

Trotsky, the Internationales. MacLeod turns these tragic falls of real world politics into aesthetic success through monologue:

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I have seen cites greater than the Rawliston of the Christians burn like an oven. I

have seen domes on cold moons, filled with hands of hands of crowds of the

snake people, crack like a bad pot in a kiln. I have seen forests of people from

other worlds, busy and bright and strange, swept away like a fallen branch in a

flood. All the different peoples do this to others of themselves, or to other

peoples, and always it is the same to the gods. The peoples of the worlds are at

war, so that the gods remain at peace, and they say it is well. (Dark 316)

The defeat of real world socialism becomes the condition not only for an aesthetic success in MacLeod, but one that enables the powers of imaginary gods. These gods, reflecting a digital aesthetic, suggest that power is indeed in the hands of high finance and that politics today, for all its effectiveness, can be relegated to "educated pub talk, abstract ideas contested over a pint, or as a prelude to sex" (Newsinger 126).

Changes to the Sublime Cognition of SF Narrative

To compare three authors from the 1990s--MacLeod, Gibson and Baxter --with three authors from the 1950s--van Vogt, Simak and Dick---is to identify at least two changes in the sublime cognition of sf narrative. The first is that the heroes of van Vogt, Simak and Dick were, in their day, able to use the supersensible to change the universe. In

MacLeod, Gibson and Baxter, these powers lie instead in abstract data flows or aliens that are aesthetically derivative of these flows. The heroes of these novels are unable to change the universe, and are directed by alien, virtual and alien forces respectively.

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A second change lies in the structure of these narratives. While the tension of 1950s sf was created in a series of disorientations, in the later fiction examined here the supersensible is an organising principle of narrative. In van Vogt and Dick the heroes do not overcome disorientation and enter into the second stage of sublime cognition until the very end of their narratives. These later novels, by contrast, introduce the pleasures of the supersensible within the first few pages. The two narratives of MacLeod's

Cosmonaut Keep are concerned with obtaining the means of interstellar travel; Laney's ability in Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties links its multiple narratives and spaces together; while the Gaijin dominate the future history of Baxter's Space. Hence an emphasis upon the supersensible in these narratives of the 1990s is not necessarily accompanied by an ability to control it. This is in contrast to 1950s sf, in which control over the supersensible was the concluding fantasy of sf narrative.

It is possible to surmise several historical reasons for these changes. One, most evident reason, is that what is being represented in both eras of the genre are different. While I argued that 1950s sf sublimated anxieties and experiences of mass economy, television and the workplace, in the 1990s financial capitalism, the internet and globalisation are being defamiliarised. Gibson's data flows, Baxter's Gaijin and MacLeod's aliens are repositories for these phenomena, betraying their interconnectedness and their ideologies. Heroes of these novelists do not take control over these phenomena, and thus represent not only their alienating effects, but the sense that they are out of the hands of those who experience them. If the disorientations of 1950s sf sublimate insecurities attendant upon the expansion of the American economy, then today the high financial, digital and global economy is the focus of similar anxieties.

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A second reason for these changes may well be internal to the generic development of sf. For van Vogt and Simak, disorientation was a means of linking disparate narratives together. These narratives were first published in serial form in Astounding magazine, and became composite novels when they entered into the paperback market of the 1950s.

The novels from the 1990s are, on the other hand, each a part of trilogies. While the composite and the trilogy appear to be at opposite ends of the publishing spectrum, the latter is in fact very similar to the former. The trilogy is like the composite in containing either a domain or framework narrative (Rabkin, "Composite"). Gibson's Bridge Trilogy

(1993-9) makes up a domain narrative because it shares the setting of San Francisco's

Golden Gate Bridge, for instance, while MacLeod's Engines of Light Trilogy (2000-2) is set in the same future history, and as such is in the same framework narrative. Baxter's

Manifold Trilogy (1999-2001) also shares a framework, this being a near future history that follows several characters who occupy the same narrative role: Malefant as hero,

Frank as helper, Nemoto as donor and so on.

The difference between the narratives of the 1950s and 1990s lies, once again, in the structuring principle that links their multiplicities. While in the 1950s it was disorientation that moved the hero from one space to another, in the trilogy it is the supersensible. The trilogy features an environment within which a series of variations upon supersensible fantasy can be explored. Gibson's trilogy suggests different variations on the virtual, from virtual celebrity (Idoru (1996)) to virtual psi (All Tomorrow's Parties).

Baxter's Manifold trilogy traces different future histories as they are played out by different human communities. MacLeod's Engines of Light trilogy, inaugurated by

Cosmonaut Keep, is similarly concerned with a future history, played out by a cast of immortal characters. Robinson's Mars Trilogy and Butler's Xenogenesis Trilogy (1987-9), of

262 which Dawn is the inaugural novel, can also be included in this set of trilogies. The multiplicity of their narratives are barely contained by a totalising domain or framework.

It is worth making a small detour to establish a more general case for the redundant narrative function of disorientation in contemporary sf. The Truman Show (1998) resembles the narrative of Dick's Time Out of Joint, in that their heroes are confronted with a breakdown in the simulations within which they live. However, while the extent of the deception is not revealed until the very end of the Dick novel, the first frame of the film informs the audience that Truman is living inside a giant television studio. While

Truman himself is disorientated by the subsequent slippages of his reality, the contemporary viewer is not. The difference between the 1959 novel and the 1998 film lies in the fact that the reader of the first shares with Ragle a state of disorientation until the very end of the narrative. In The Truman Show, the audience is never disorientated by the narrative. The film is but one example of many contemporary sf narratives that have de-emphasised disorientation in favour of a supersensible aesthetic. This, in turn, can be attributed to the increasing power of digital technologies in a global economy.

Lem and the Poles of SF's Sublime Pleasure

It is worth, by way of an addendum, comparing these examples of Western sf, that have increasingly tended toward a supersensible that nonetheless lies outside the control of the hero, to an alternative constellation of sublime pleasure. While most Western sf relies almost exclusively on a mathematical sublime, an Eastern European writer does precisely the reverse. In Solaris (1961) and His Master's Voice (1968), Stanislaw Lem foils the

263 fantasies of his scientist heroes by not allowing them to understand and thus manipulate the alien objects before them. He privileges Kant's dynamically sublime and can thus be placed on the pole of sf that is opposite to its fantasy, this being a realism that is distinguished by its resistance to representation. In His Master's Voice, an alien message resists translation. The elation at being contacted by distant beings turns into dismay as the scientists are foiled in attempt after attempt to understand it. In Solaris, scientists orbiting a distant planet cannot comprehend the sentient ocean that engulfs it. Their studies go nowhere or double back on themselves.

In both novels, Lem creates an aesthetic of the dynamically, rather than mathematically, sublime. He writes elsewhere that "it makes no sense at all to look at the universe from the viewpoint of ethics", and it is indeed such a moral law that is the condition for the pleasure of the mathematically sublime (109). Lem writes as if to parody the fantasies of

American sf. Sending the scientists of Solaris ghostly Phi-creatures from their own memories--simulacra of their ex-lovers, lost children and dead friends--Lem's ocean confuses "articulation and disarticulation, message and noise", breaking down the border between knowledge and non-knowledge (Beehler 34). In Robinson this is the same rebuke that Ann has for the terraforming scientists, who are turning Mars into a simulation of their own desires. She worries that "when we look at the land we can never see anything but our own faces" (Red 190).

In the 1970s, Lem wrote a series of articles that were critical of American sf

("Cosmology"; "Science"). American sf authors were offended, and wanted to withdraw

Lem's honorary membership of the Science Fiction Writers Association of America

(Aldiss, et al). At stake in Lem's articles on the Americans are the sources of sf's pleasure.

264

He claims that US sf proposes only false problems in order to solve them, the universe imagined only to "domesticate it in an exemplary manner for story telling purposes; but at the same time it has lost its strange, icy sovereignty" ("Cosmology" 108). Lem's measure of the quality of sf is just how difficult its resistances are. His own fiction shows that they need not be resolved, and that sf need not be interested in the supersensible at all.

With Lem this history of the sublime in sf arrives where it began, in the contradictory debate between highbrow and lowbrow literature. As if anticipating Robu's article on

"Science Fiction and the Sublime", Lem claims that sf wants to "break into the palace where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored" ("Science Fiction" 74).

Unlike Robu, however, Lem does not think that sf deserves to be let into the palace:

The best science fiction novels want to smuggle themselves into the Upper

Realm--but in 99.9 per cent of cases, they do not succeed. The best authors

behave like schizophrenics; they want to--and at the same time they do not want

to--belong to the Realm of Science Fiction. ("Science" 74)

For Lem, the solution is to turn away from the fantasy of the supersensible and toward the realism within sf. While it disregards "the true face of nature" that resists representation, sf will remain a trivial literature for Lem ("Cosmology" 110). What is at stake in this debate is not so much the acculturation of sf into highbrow or lowbrow, then, but the inner dialectic between realism and fantasy, the dynamically and mathematically sublime, that constitutes the genre. If Lem's fiction can be positioned as a highbrow version of sf, to which his appearance in a 1977 edition of the New York

265

Review of Books attests (Michael Wood), this is in so far as it privileges the resistant realism within it.

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Conclusion

A thinking of sf with the sublime unravels the historical conditions for certain experiences of fictional pleasure. For instance, the emphasis on disorientation in the narratives of 1950s authors such as van Vogt, Simak and Dick sublimated anxieties attendant upon changes to the US at the time. These disorientations were pleasurable because they estranged these anxieties, placing them in an imaginative context that superseded their actuality. The sublimity of sf, then, is coextensive with its own conditions of production and reception. As a theoretical tool, the sublime enables a pointing back to these conditions. Missing from this totalisation of sf are the alternative pleasures that are offered by other modes of the genre. The limits of this investigation lie in its reference to an Anglo-American imagination and its theoretical relevance to the

"palace" of Western thought, mostly represented by Kant (Robu, "Key" 34). The coincidence of the pleasures of Anglo-American sf with this philosopher's ideas is hardly accidental. Kant's prestige is based upon his own immersion in a set of historical conditions that were formative of Western culture.

Beyond the scope of this analysis lies, among other subjects, the explosion of Chinese sf in the 1980s and 1990s; the success of the genre in Brazil and Japan; its fate in post-

Soviet Russia and in Eastern Europe. These fictions are constituted differently, and open up interesting questions about the transhistorical constitution of sf's pleasures. Each of these different experiences of modernity may be expected to produce their own versions of the sublime. The Russian writer Yefremov and the Polish Lem provide two examples of such differences in this thesis. Although both of these authors can be thought with

268 variations on the Kantian sublime, Kant may not best model for the pleasures they offer their readers. Another limitation of this thesis is its description of a the specifically narrative pleasure of sf, while optical pleasures lie in other forms of the genre. Japanese anime, for instance, represents the contradictions of a highly urbanised space, but does not so much produce a transcendence as an exaggeration of these contradictions (Akira

(1988); Ghost (1996)).

Csicsery-Ronay claims the cognition of Empire is a transhistorical prerequisite for the origins of sf. Such an explanation may account for reports of an sf boom in China. Sf writer William F. Wu notes that "The sf produced in China [in 1983] reminded me of the science fiction written and published in the U.S. from the 1920s to the 1940s" (qtd in

Tidhar 97). He suggests that in China, undergoing a period of economic expansion, the sf genre is moving through the same phases as that experienced earlier by the US. In this account the sublime, pertaining to a universal model of modernity, may well be relevant to non-Western sf. This critical problem carries with it its own politics, as national formations want to declare their own aesthetic peculiarities. Yet in so far as capitalism is the universal basis of modernity today, the aesthetics of this modernity may well be positioned within a universal, global system. For Andrew Milner the universality of this system explains the way in which peripheral sf takes on different aesthetic configurations. The differences of Stanislaw Lem's fiction, for instance, are explained by his Polish situation, by writing on the edge of the Soviet Bloc.

As Csicsery-Ronay and Milner want to unify disparate kinds of sf with their different historical models, this thesis recognises the continuity of sf between periods in time that may otherwise be seen as producing their own distinctive aesthetics. Its narrates a very

269 long historical wave, from the gaze at the stars in early modernity to one upon a grid of global technologies. The telescope and the computer are at one in a history of technological transcendence. The problem with such a totalisation, and specifically with cognitive mapping, is in its overwriting of differences that may well prove resistant to this transcendence. One can only reaffirm the subjective nature of this mapping, and its relevance to the actual and historical power of the capitalism that it attempts to visualise.

Between the subject and an abstract totality of an economic, technological and now global system, cognitive mapping is hardly different from the sublime itself. Its specific quality is one of fragmentation, yet it aspires to that universal comprehension that remains, by definition, beyond representation. The sublime shares with cognitive mapping a failure of representation that wants to succeed through this very failure.

Theirs are the horizons of pleasure and Marxism, both containing cognitive infinitudes by which the finitude of the world takes shape. Robu's enthusiastic recognition of the sublime in sf can be supplemented with this reflection back upon the genre's own historical conditions. Its generic self-reflexivity that reveals these conditions, and in so doing cognitively maps the sublime itself in its historical appearances. The infinitudes of sf narratives lead, self-reflexively, back to a cognition that interrogates the finite. In this retroactive movement the conditions for the pleasure of both sf and the sublime begin to unravel.

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