I’ve been thinking a lot about the future of humans and technology, and whether novels – particularly cyborg novels, or novels that emphasize human-machine symbiosis and integration – are useful for predicting the future.
One thing struck me: a lot of the early cyborg fiction emphasizes physical invasion. The early Clynes astronauts surgically remade beyond what is recognizably human, the similar cuttings and pastings of human and monstrous in Cyborg, the 6 Million Dollar Man, RoboCop, Man Plus…all these have a lot of surgery in them. And for that matter, so do may of the cyborgs in William Gibson’s novels.
I found Gibson’s one piece of writing specifically on cyborgs at:
http://www.williamgibsonbooks.com/archive/2003_01_28_archive.asp. It is called “In the Visegrips of Dr. Satan (with Vannevar Bush) and it is (like Gibson’s other nonfiction work) clever, funny, and insightful. (I still love his piece “Disneyland with a Death Penalty’ about Singapore).
1. We often get things wrong. So in the shows like the1940 Republic serial called THE MYSTERIOUS DR. SATAN, there are proto-cyborgian robots who are controlled by Dr. Satan’s remote control giant knife switch. Gibson watched it in the early 1950s as a kid, and so was about to learn about “the electronic brain,” but most postwar sci fi was about the rocket ship and not the electronic brain.
2. Second, Gibson talks about “Steam Engine Time”: “The observable fact that steam, contained, exerts force, has been around since the first lid rattled as the soup came to a boil. The ancient Greeks built toy steam engines that whirled brass globes. But you won’t get a locomotive ‘til it’s Steam Engine Time.” Ditto with an electronic brain; you could maybe put it in a factory to make stuff, but you wouldn’t connect it to a typewriter and a TV (like the one at the 1939 World’s Fair in New York). So the electronic brain in a robot, robots in general, and space ships didn’t seem to be where the interesting work lay. It makes you wonder: what aren’t we able to see? What about our time isn’t steam engine time yet, for some ensemble of technologies?
3. Instead for Gibson, the sci fi of the 60s was interesting because it involved the politics of perception, which he connects in retrospect to various evolving ideas of the cyborg. I think he is thinking of books like The Ship Who Sang (with a human mind embedded in a rocket ship). The line I most like about this is: “There’s a species of literalism in our civilization that tends to infect science fiction as well: it’s easier to depict the union of human and machine literally, close-up on the cranial jack please, than to describe the true and daily and largely invisible nature of an all-encompassing embrace.” This is what I am onto about the mundane nature of so much “cyborg” technology and evolution.
4. And so the real cyborg, for Gibson, isn’t the organic being with a positronic brain, or Arnold, or any of that. Not even the cyborgs in his own novels. Instead, he makes the move that Chris Gray has made about the meta-cyborg:
“The real cyborg, cybernetic organism in the broader sense, had been busy arriving as I watched DR. SATAN on that wooden television in 1952. I was becoming a part of something, in the act of watching that screen. We all were. We are today. The human species was already in process of growing itself an extended communal nervous system, then, and was doing things with it that had previously been impossible: viewing things at a distance, viewing things that had happened in the past, watching dead men talk and hearing their words. What had been absolute limits of the experiential world had in a very real and literal way been profoundly and amazingly altered, extended, changed. And would continue to be. And the real marvel of this was how utterly we took it all for granted…The world’s cyborg was an extended human nervous system: film, radio, broadcast television, and a shift in perception so profound that I believe we’re yet to understand it. Watching television, we each became aspects of an electronic brain. We became augmented.
5. So why don’t we see this? Why don’t we see that we already were linked into networks of extended nervous systems before the full development of the Internet that sealed, or is sealing the deal? Because “We are already the Borg, but we seem to need myth to bring us to that knowledge.” And the myth is the set of cyborg narratives that help us bring this largel invisible phenomenon into focus.
6. And so finally, past rocket ships and a world of robots (for whom we have had all these sci fi explorations of ethics and so on), past the humanoid cyborg figures that we seem to need but which are in their own way versions of those Dr Satan robots…we have a world where the reality of the cyborg is much richer and less figurally clear than we imagine:
“Interface evolves toward transparency. The one you have to devote the least conscious effort to, survives, prospers. This is true for interface hardware as well, so that the cranial jacks and brain inserts and bolts in the neck, all the transitional sci-fi hardware of the sci-fi cyborg, already looks slightly quaint. The real cyborg, the global organism, is so splendidly invasive that these things already seem medieval. They fascinate, much as torture instruments do, or reveal erotic possibilities to the adventurous, or beckon as stages or canvasses for the artist, but I doubt that very many of us will ever go there. The real cyborg will be deeper and more subtle and exist increasingly at the particle level, in a humanity where unaugmented reality will eventually be a hypothetical construct, something we can only try, with great difficulty, to imagine -- as we might try, today, to imagine a world without electronic media.”
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