Category: Features

Fabulation of Alternative Parallel Universes: Queertopia in Turkish Science Fiction

Sümeyra Buran

INTRODUCTION: FEMINIST CYBERPUNK

What if there are other universes just like ours where we can meet uncountable versions of our beloved ones who have passed away from this world? A mirror or a reverse version of our reality is not so far and may, in fact, be right here. In recent times, interdimensional travel and alternate reality have gained increasing prominence in science fiction film series like Stranger Things, Travellers, The OA, Black Mirror, and Fringe. However, the parallel universe or multiverse concept traces back to Margaret Cavendish’s 17th century The Blazing World. It reached its peak with the cyberpunk tradition in the 1980s. Cyberpunk’s white masculine and heterosexual forms are reimagined by a parallel universe of feminist cyberpunk writers like Pat Cadigan, Kathy Acker, Melissa Scott, and Marge Piercy, all of whom focus on diverse forms of feminist and queer perspectives. Feminist cyberpunk writing focuses on queer communities, reproduction, motherhood, mythology, and religion. Feminism’s political notions meet with science fiction’s narrative concepts such that feminist sf authors explore non-binary gender-fluid identities. Queer theory “converge[s] with science fiction’s imaginative production of ‘sometimes-utopian futurities’” (Lothian, 17), and we can regard such feminist utopian novels as queer utopias (queertopia) with their non-binary single-sex female relations and asexual reproduction by women like in Charlotte Perkin Gilman’s Herland or Nicola Griffith’s Ammonite.

Şeyda Aydın (Sheida Aiden) is the first Turkish feminist and queer science fiction author who speculates neo-futuristic utopia and cyberpunk anti-utopias/dystopias. Her novels cannot be considered in the category of lesbian separatist utopian fiction but, rather, fall under the umbrella of utopian queer fiction. Aydın’s The Woman in the Other Universe (2019) initially begins in a green queertopian techno-universe called Netta (meaning “worth”), a peaceful utopic world, but eventually shifts to a retro cyberpunk dys(queer)topian parallel universe called Antero (meaning “male”), which is a dangerous reversal of Netta. As Wendy Pearson claims, “sf and queer theory frequently share both a dystopian view of the present and a utopian hope for the future” (59), so Aydın portrays both dystopian and utopian views of queer sf in her novel.

Departing from Donna Haraway’s note that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion” (148), I argue that science fiction explores “queer worlding” by offering alternate sexuality in the utopian portrayal of gender-friendly universes. As Lisa Yazsek claims, “feminist cyberpunk reject[s] the alienation, isolation, and nihilism typically associated with masculinist cyberpunk and replace it with an emphasis on creative self-expression, community, and sociopolitical change” (32). In this respect, Aydın’s novel depicts tgenderless eternal love by queer women who travel between parallel universes through opening a gate portal with a triangle machine as a social norm.

My aim is to discuss the intersections between feminist cyberpunk and queer theory to explore how queer Turkish science fiction speculatively represents alternate constructions of gender identity in cyberpunk future by breaking sexist walls in a culture constructed around gender. Aydın focuses on the impact of gender on the lives of women by rethinking the problematics of Turkish science fiction’s straight heteronormative discourse. Thus, I examine how queer sexualities and homonormativity in a genderless utopian universe challenge racial and discriminative orders constructed by the homophobic and transphobic society represented in a dystopian cyberpunk universe. Aydın’s novel demonstrates how non-Western alternative feminist futures offer new forms for bothfamily and gender by questioning the importance of what it means to be a genderqueer human being in a utopian universe, as well as its reversal in a reflected dystopian parallel universe.

GATEWAY TO A PARALLEL CYBERPUNK UNIVERSE

The novel starts with film writer Veera Virtanen’s mourning for her partner of 13 years, Eeva Van Rooyen, who died due to cancer in Netta, where non-sexist, queer, transgendered individuals and all other sexes live together in peace. Vera searches for the reflection of Eeva, who continues to exist under another identity in a place called Antero. So, to find her lover, Veera travels to Antero, where people are accustomed to living in a capitalist and imperialist world filled with viruses, contagious illnesses, homophobia, femicide, child sexual abuse, animal torture, hunger, anger, hatred, wars, environmental and economic collapse, and gender inequalities. In this other dimension, a different reflection of Eeva continues to exist as a famous actress and a movie star dedicated to saving children from AIDS.

Şeyda Aydın explores what would happen if we could open a portal to a parallel universe that is completely opposite to our reality. The novel echoes Joanna Russ’s The Female Man, which offers four different parallel universes centered on the same woman (professor Joanna and Jeannie are the closest to our world, with Janet hailing from an alternate future all-female world of no men and Jael from a world in between ours and Janet’s in which men are killed as a result of a war between men and women). Aydın’s novel, in fact, makes a harsh criticism of our own world, portraying it as a dystopian parallel universe in which queer people fight to survive. So, we can say that by creating a dystopian cyberpunk parallel universe in tandem with a utopian one, she depicts how pure and genderless love can overcome all struggle and rage.

A group of scientists in the novel tries to open a Stranger Things-style gateway to a parallel universe. Physicists open “a triangular door hung in the air on the front of the three-meter machine; it was floating like a sea of mercury, it was like a mirror when it appeared completely, and when Veera looked at the door, she could see multiple fluctuating reflections of her” (Aydın 132). The novel depicts the fact that “[f]or some reason, the person who will pass through the door must be women; the door only allows if a woman is standing in front of it, and it works like that and the door only opens to a single world dimension” where the person does not exist (105). This shows that, like in science fiction movies, we are not likely to sit and chat with our reflection in another universe (108).

The gate resembles a pyramid that allows the transition to the alternative dimension, which is dark and dangerous. Veera deeply feels sad when she meets her lover, Eeva, who is oppressed, repressed, and changed by the patriarchal society. Eeva is able to upload her previous memories and identity from the Netta universe through a consciousness transfer when she falls in love and remembers Veera again. However, in homophobic Antero, the media and news start a defamation campaign against Eeva for her lesbian affair. Eeva is on the verge of losing her career and even suffers from harassment and violence perpetuated by the public. Veera can’t stand seeing her successful Eeva like this and decides to return to Netta in order to save her life from society’s lynching attempts. Then, thanks to Veera, who provides a curative vaccine that she brought from Netta, Eeva devotes her life to protecting children from AIDS. The couple lives in separate universes until they reunite in Antero on Eeva’s 60^th birthday with their daughter, EB.

CYBERQUEERTOPIAN AND DIS(QUEER)TOPIAN PARALLEL UNIVERSES

Following Haraway’s Cyborg Manifesto and the cyborg world it describes, Aydın’s queertopian universe is itself a kind of cyborg world “about lived social and bodily realities in which people are not afraid of the joint kinship with animals and machines, not afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints” (Haraway 154). So, as Hollinger comments, “queer marks a utopian space, which is, perhaps, also an ironic space, inhabited by subjects-in-process who are not bound by reifying definitions and expectations, and in which bodies, desires, and sex/gender behaviors are free-floating and in constant play” (33) Thus, Haraway’s cyborg figure offers queertopian potential. Aydın, by creating such two opposite parallel universes, a cyberqueertopia and a dis(queer)topia, criticizes the homophobic attitudes of our world by creating a beacon of hope with her queertopian Netta, which resembles Haraway’s own cyborg world in which “gender might not be global identity at all” (180). So, Aydın depicts a queertopian future in which we become “fluid, being both material and opaque” (Haraway 153).

Also similar to Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time, Aydın’s queer utopian Netta welcomes gender equality where there is no sexism, racism, homophobia, or transphobia. Like in Le Guin’s The Dispossed: An Ambigious Utopia, Aydın contrasts two universes: Antero—an oppressive and exploitative dystopian universe ruled by the worst of capitalism and patriarchy—and its parallel universe, Netta—a perfect genderqueer utopia ruled by peace and equality. The inhabitants of Netta call each other by non-gendered words such as “Dear” or “Beloved.” Aydın also anticipates a counter-alternative future in Netta in that the most culturally and economically developed country is “the State of African Continental Integrity” which, with its best doctors, finds treatments and cures for all diseases and viruses (Aydın 73). She also locates futuristic alternatives in the fact that this universe ends world wars by closing the last “arms factory” in the world (73). That is, Aydın’s queer future is no longer “curtailed, whether through death from AIDS or via the policing and delegitimization of deviant desires” (Lothian 5). However, the depictian of Africa in the Antero universe depicts Africa much worse than now, surrounded by AIDS (which is identified with homosexuality and other diseases) and having been witness to four great world wars, ecological collapse, and economic collapse.

As Lee Edelman says, “queer is a zone of possibilities” (114), and as a third-wave feminist and cyberpunk writer, Aydın offers “another discursive horizon, another way of thinking the sexual” (de Lauretis, iv) with her lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender characters. Aydın creates genderqueer families without a nuclear family bond: Veera and Eeva neither have a heterosexual family unit nor live under the same roof, and in fact inhabit totally different universes. Eeva’s egg transportation allows Veera to have a daughter in a more beautiful, modern world, where transgender, gay, lesbian, and other kinds of queer people can have children by technologies that free women “from the tyranny of their sexual reproductive roles” (Firestone 31) and also free men from their boundaries of reproduction within the nuclear family unit. That is, Aydın’s queertopian alternative world offers a beacon of reproductive hope for queer and transgender people. Meanwhile, however, in the homophobic and transphobic Antero, where sex-change surgeries were banned years ago and homosexuals and transgender people are excluded, beaten, and even killed if they do not hide their sexual orientation, Veera’s manager, Siiri, a black transgender woman, is reflected in an unhappy male body (98). The novel depicts the fact that, in a dystopian cyberpunk universe, gender equality cannot be achieved until the “one-sided domain of power ends in all spheres of life” (Buran 2020).

CONCLUSION: FROM MYTH TOWARDS A GODDESS-LIKE POSTHUMAN

Feminist cyberpunk writing focuses on queer communities, reproduction, motherhood, mythology, and religion. As Carlen Lavigne claims, women’s cyberpunk novels reflect “the problematic positioning of mythology and folklore with feminist thought— feminists, in general, do not seem happy with either mythology or religion, but no alternative language has yet been produced; the cyborg has not yet truly risen as an iconic image, and within cyberpunk there is little room for the goddess” (130). Aydın criticizes patriarchal mythologies by creating her own mythological figure, a giant raven that represents a goddess of nature, the universe, and memory who watches over the two mourning queer lovers, Eeva and Veera, and changes the rules of physics in the universe to reunite them at the end of the novel.¹

The novel concludes when the couple reunites and begins to live in Netta with their posthuman daughter, EB who, like a mythological goddess Lofn, a Norse goddess of forbidden love, reunites the couple. Born from the two eggs of two mothers from different universes, EB becomes a time- and dimensional traveler and, like a goddess-like posthuman, changes the ugly consciousness of human beings. In Aydın’s third novel, Fragmented Reflections (2019), she even ends the gender bias in Antero forever.

Aydın shows that, until the divisions between different sexes end,  women, lesbians, gays, queer and transgender people cannot escape from the constructed binary conflicts of gender even in alternative universes in the future. Thus, I conclude that in order to live in a borderless, gender-free future, we should recognize new kinds of gender and identities outside the binary gender markers of women/men.

¹ The genus Corvus represented by the raven preserves all its mystery throughout the story. The raven was inspired by the raven goddess Muninn⸻the memory in Norse-Scandinavian mythology, and it protects the love of queer women throughout the novel. According to the old religion of Turkish Shamanism which includes the 500 years of journey from Central Asia to today’s Turkey, the past, present and future are related to the stars in the universe. After converted to Islam, some Turks continued to believe in extraterrestrial life and highly intelligent creatures from the other stars in different multiple layers of the universe. One of the mythological creatures in Turkic-Shamanic Myth is raven which symbolizes healing and protection.

WORKS CITED

Aydın, Şeyda. Woman in the Other Universe (Diğer Evrendeki Kadın). İstanbul: İkinci Adam, 2019.

Aydın, Şeyda. Fragmented Reflections (Parçalanmış Yansımalar). Istanbul: İkinci Adam, 2019.

Buran, Sumeyra. “Violence against Women in Science: The Future of Gender and Science in Gwyneth Jones’s Life.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 18 August 2020. https://doi.org/10.1080/00111619.2020.1803195.

De Lauretis, Teresa. “Queer Theory: Lesbian and Gay Sexualities.” Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies, vol. 3, no. 3, 1991, pp. iii–xviii.

Edelman, Lee. Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory. Routledge, 1994.

Firestone, Shulamith. The Dialectic of Sex: A Case for Feminist Revolution. William Marrow and Company, 1970. 

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. Routledge, 1991, pp. 149-181.

Hollinger, Veronica. “(Re)reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender Author(s).” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 26, no. 1, 1999, pp. 23-40.

Lavigne, Carlen. Cyberpunk Women, Feminism and Science Fiction: A Critical Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland Publishing, 2013.

Pearson, Wendy. “Science Fiction and Queer Theory.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 149-160.

Yaszek, Lisa. “Feminist Cyberpunk.” Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture, edited by Anna McFarlane et al., NY: Routledge, 2020, 32-40. 

The Horror of Direct Experience: Cyberpunk Bodies and “The Machine Stops”

Rachel Berger

1. MACHINE

“The Machine Stops,” E. M. Forster’s masterful science fiction novella from 1909, has long been lauded for its prescient descriptions of electronic communications technology. With its early vision of the allure and danger of global, networked communication, the story is in direct conversation with classic cyberpunk literature. 

Cyberpunk culture and the critical discourse that surrounds it tends to be concerned with the interface between technologies and bodies. The following paper largely leaves technology to the side to meditate on the cyberpunk body itself. When a person pursues “the bodiless exultation of cyberspace,” who or what is left behind (Gibson 6)? How is their relationship with the empirical world changed? Today, as coronavirus sweeps the globe and citizens everywhere struggle in and out of pandemic-imposed lockdowns, such questions take on fresh urgency.

2. MILK

“The Machine Stops” is Forster’s only overtly science fictional story, sandwiched in time between A Room with a View (1908) and Howards End (1910), two better-known masterpieces. Though “The Machine Stops” is undoubtedly a work of science fiction—set in a distant future and brimming with descriptions of hypothetical technologies—it is redolent of Forster’s favorite themes: the struggle for human connection and the tension between freedom and restriction. It also represents Forster’s rebuttal of the euphoric view of science and progress espoused by contemporaries like H. G. Wells, as well as his critique of aestheticism, a late-nineteenth century art movement that promoted experiencing the world through the mediation of art (Seegert 34–35).

Forster’s narrative hinges on a future humanity’s radically changed relationship to the body. He imagines a world where technological advancement and environmental necessity have caused people to isolate themselves in underground cells, communicate via videotelephony, and rely on a giant machine for all their needs. 

The story focuses on a woman named Vashti and her wayward son Kuno. The Machine provides Vashti with everything she needs, so she rarely leaves her chair, much less her room. She lives a life of “pure mentality” (Seegert 37), using the Machine to study obscure subjects and keep up with thousands of friends. Forster’s descriptions of Vashti’s body dehumanize her and emphasize her sunless, stationary existence. In the story’s opening paragraph, the narrator describes Vashti as a “swaddled lump of flesh” (133), before identifying her as a woman. Scholars have variously interpreted Vashti’s swaddling to suggest infantilization and straightjacketing (Seegert 40) and cocooning and mummification (Caporaletti 35 and 41), but such analyses don’t go far enough. She’s not a baby, she’s a lump. Her Machine-worshiping body has transformed into a doughy, boneless bundle of cells. 

Whether one considers Vashti’s transformed body to represent evolution or devolution depends on where one situates the boundaries of her body. In her foundational “Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway asks, “Why should our bodies end at the skin” (61)? N. Katherine Hayles answers, “The boundaries of the autonomous subject are up for grabs” (2). Anne Balsamo connects this line of inquiry to cyberpunk’s “vision of posthuman existence where ‘technology’ and the ‘human’ are understood in contiguous rather than oppositional terms” (136). Alf Seegert applies it directly to Vashti: “Vashti’s mechanically-mediated body is… extended through such external prosthetics and becomes thereby enhanced, not diminished” (43). Vashti never claims the Machine as an extension of her body, but she does view herself as highly evolved. She is “civilized and refined” (Forster 139) and an “advanced thinker” (148). She has no use for the “clumsy system[s]” of previous civilizations (136).

It seems, however, that Forster aims to cast Vashti’s body as devolved, particularly in contrast with her son Kuno. Forster describes Vashti’s physical ugliness: she is toothless and hairless, with “a face as white as a fungus” (133). He emphasizes her frailty—she “tottered” rather than walked (138)—and her primitivism—she “fed” rather than eating (136). In the age of the Machine, Vashti’s physical weakness is not disadvantageous. Instead, “it was a demerit to be muscular,” and infants “who promised undue strength were destroyed” (142). 

Vashti’s son Kuno, cursed with physical strength, is his mother’s opposite. If she is pure mentality, he is pure physicality. He repudiates the Machine. He exercises until his flesh aches, until he can run and jump and climb. Kuno dreams of a humanity free of the swaddling garments of the Machine. He believes the “body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong” (142). Vashti’s son disgusts and saddens her. When she notes the hair growing above his lip and fears it signifies his descent into savagery, Forster’s text suggests she considers her own hairlessness a sign of evolutionary advancement.

In the story’s closing scene, the Machine breaks down, wiping out humanity. Vashti’s spirit reunites with Kuno’s, and together they mourn their society’s dependence on the Machine at the expense of the body. Their fate is a warning: in the pursuit of evolution, humans “sin[ned] against the body,” allowing their muscles, nerves, and sense organs to atrophy (153). In a final, damning image, Forster equates humanity’s abandoned body with “white pap” (153). Pap is a soft food, fed to infants and invalids. Forster couldn’t have chosen a more offensively inoffensive and emasculating substance. That pale lump from early in the story has transformed still further into a bland, milky mush. In Forster’s dystopian view, the cyberpunk body isn’t just a baby, it’s baby food.

3. MEAT

Vashti’s body is a forward echo of the cyberpunk body. Like Vashti, cyberpunk heroes find freedom and fulfillment in the virtual realm. Like Vashti, their physical bodies pay a price. Due to the affordances of the Machine, Vashti seems largely unaware of her physical body. This sets her apart from cyberpunk heroes. Because they move between the real and the virtual, they are more conscious of the limitations of the flesh. They view their bodies as prisons tethering them to the physical world. 

In Neuromancer (1984), cyberpunk’s urtext, William Gibson famously refers to Case’s cyberpunk body as “meat” (6). This has become an enduring and indelible metaphor in cyberpunk culture, perhaps reaching its fullest expression in Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991). In Synners, the character Visual Mark gets brain implants that enable him to achieve total immersion in cyberspace. After Visual Mark’s consciousness abandons his body, “He lost all awareness of the meat that had been his prison for close to fifty years, and the relief he felt at having laid his burden down was as great as himself” (232).

Meat and pap are both foods, but their resemblance ends there. Pap is feminine. Meat is masculine. Meat is heavy, dark, bloody, animal. It is a dead, inert thing. Meat is carne, carnage, carnal. To call the body meat is to reify the crude appetites of the flesh. In Neuromancer, Case’s sexual desire “belonged…to the meat;” his lust is an “infinite intricacy that only the body, in its strong blind way, could ever read” (Gibson 239). Forster would agree. In A Room with a View, published the year before “The Machine Stops,” he opines, “Love is of the body; not the body, but of the body” (189). Case’s bodily urges are so strong that they supersede vision, the sense that predominates in the virtual realm (Lanier 127). Meanwhile, in “The Machine Stops,” Vashti is sexless. Her sense organs are blunted, not by her corporeality, but by her reliance on the Machine.

In Technologies of the Gendered Body, Anne Balsamo uses four characters from Pat Cadigan’s Synners to map “four different versions of cyberpunk embodiment: the marked body, the disappearing body, the laboring body, and the repressed body” (140). Visual Mark represents the disappearing body. The repressed body is Gabe, a character who is addicted to the safety of cyberspace simulations and fearful of the consequences of embodied experience. Gina represents the marked body. She is marked by her Blackness, her doomed love for Mark, and her wrath. The laboring body is Gabe’s daughter Sam, a hacker who builds a chip reader that runs on her own bodily energy. Balsamo argues that the four types of cyberpunk embodiment are gendered. The male body is repressed or disappearing. The female body is marked or laboring. She then invokes Donna Haraway’s “cyborgian figuration of gender differences, whereby the female body is coded as a body-in-connection and the male body as a body-in-isolation” (144).

Vashti and Kuno invert the gender roles Balsamo identifies in her analysis of Synners. Vashti displays both Mark and Gabe’s versions of cyberpunk embodiment. Materially, she is the disappearing body, disregarding her physical form in favor of complete immersion in the Machine. Behaviorally, she is the repressed body, disgusted by her son’s physicality and terrified of direct experience. Conversely, Kuno has more in common with Gina and Sam. He is marked by his physical strength and his hair. He labors to escape the bonds of the Machine. 

Whether Vashti and Kuno confirm or confound Haraway’s own cyborgian coding of gender is another matter. Which of them is more connected? Which is more isolated? According to Seegert, “The Machine Stops” is fundamentally about the battle between rival modes of connection: “that of machinery and tele-technology” and that of “gross bodily connection through the flesh (34). By virtue of her connection with the Machine, Vashti is in constant contact with thousands, yet lives alone in a featureless cell. Kuno seeks and finds physical connection outside the world of the Machine, yet he is a social pariah.

The gender subversion of “The Machine Stops” does not end there. As a woman, Vashti is an unlikely cyberpunk progenitor. Andrew Ross describes classic cyberpunk as a “baroque edifice of adolescent male fantasies” (145). Fred Pfeil argues that most cyberpunk literature is “stuck in a masculinist frame” (89). According to Veronica Hollinger, cyberpunk fantasies primarily speak to “young white males with access to computer hardware” (126). Classic cyberpunk heroes are marginalized, alienated loners who live on the edge of society. In that sense, Kuno is more cyberpunk than his mother, who is achingly mainstream. Yet Kuno spurns all things cyber. Silvana Caporaletti notes that the character of Kuno has been credited with inspiring a different science fiction archetype, that of the alienated hero who rebels against a totally mechanized or automated society, as in Logan’s Run, THX 1138, and Metropolis (44).

4. MIRROR

Forster’s descriptions of Vashti’s body and physical environment are much more vivid than the images conveyed by the Machine. When Vashti speaks to Kuno through the Machine, his image is not clear enough for her to discern his emotions. The Machine mediates everything Vashti sees, hears, smells, tastes, and touches. It provides a “good enough” but unnuanced facsimile of the real. Her cell is “flooded with radiance and studded with electric buttons”—buttons for food, medicine, clothing, music, and calling friends. She has a “hot-bath button, by pressure of which a basin of (imitation) marble rose out of the floor, filled to the brim with a warm deodorized liquid” (135). Vashti can access everything she wants without leaving the comfort of her room. Living this way, she develops a “horror of direct experience” (138). She finds the prospect of actually seeing, hearing, or touching another person unbearable. In a pivotal scene, she loses her balance, then angrily scolds a woman for “barbarically” putting out a hand to keep her from falling (140).

Classic cyberpunk stories like Neuromancer and Synners brim with drugs, sex, and danger. Their real worlds are comparably hypersensory and hallucinatory to their virtual worlds—if less consensual (Gibson 51). In Ernest Cline’s post-cyberpunk book Ready Player One (2011), the veracity gap between the virtual and the real in “The Machine Stops” is inverted. Cline’s protagonist Wade finds the real world “washed out and blurry” compared to the virtual (299). Wade is more self conscious than a true cyberpunk hero. Anxious that spending so much time in virtual reality is negatively impacting his physique, Wade avoids mirrors and adopts a punishing fitness regimen. He reflects:

Standing there, under the bleak fluorescents of my tiny one-room apartment, there was no escaping the truth. In real life, I was nothing but an antisocial hermit. A recluse. A pale-skinned pop culture-obsessed geek. An agoraphobic shut-in, with no real friends, family, or genuine human contact. I was just another sad, lost, lonely soul, wasting his life on a glorified videogame.

309

Pale and alone, jacked into a virtual reality from a small, brightly lit room, Wade is a neurotic after-image of Vashti.

5. ME

When I first read “The Machine Stops,” I found Forster’s notion of a future humanity’s radically changed relationship to the body to be less credible than his visions of videotelephony and the internet. I could not relate to Vashti’s horror of direct experience. Of course this was before the coronavirus pandemic. 

Today, reeling through the endless autumn of 2020, I identify with Vashti all too well. As I absorb and enact shelter in place orders and epidemiological guidance, I find my relationship to my body and the bodies around me changed, perhaps forever. A stranger’s proximity, let alone touch, has become intolerable. I can’t bear the thought of resuming my packed commute. When I go grocery shopping, I shy away from anyone who comes near. If someone were to touch me, even by mistake, even to help, I might scream. To protect my body and those of others, I have blunted my senses, by wearing a mask and gloves, by maintaining social distance, and of course by machines. 

Writing about “The Machine Stops” in 1997, Silvana Caporaletti describes the fluidity of utopian literature’s connection to reality: “The relation of the utopian text to reality can vary, indeed, with time, because human history and science may develop in directions that narrow the gap between imagination and reality” (32). She then asserts that “The Machine Stops” has become more relevant and significant with time. Writing in the same year, Marcia Bundy Seabury observes that totalitarian dystopias like 1984 now seem “less imminent than Forster’s of satisfied individuals sitting before their personal computers” (61). Of course, this was before the coronavirus pandemic. 

Cyberpunk and virtual reality arose a generation ago, during a period of extreme anxiety about our bodies’ vulnerability to the “unprecedented threats of AIDS, cancer, nuclear annihilation, overpopulation, and environmental disasters” (Springer 27). In the 1980s, techno-utopian “beliefs about the technological future ‘life’ of the body [were] complemented by a palpable fear of death and annihilation from uncontrollable and spectacular body threats” (Balsamo 1–2). In such a moment, the opportunity to escape into Vashti’s world, with its absence of discrimination, crime, hunger, illness, labor, and injustice, might have seemed tempting.

In the real world of 2020, the gap between Forster’s imagination and the reality of those with privilege has narrowed considerably. In small, wired-up rooms all over the world, the fortunate have donned cyberpunk bodies. They have abandoned the hazards of meatspace in favor of cyberspace. At the touch of a button, they can summon a delivery service to bring anything they want without leaving the comfort of their room. They continue their work and life by virtual means, attending virtual meetings and happy hours and lectures and birthday parties. They have learned the profound unsexiness of a day spent jacked into endless video conferences. They are increasingly pale and physically weak. They have the illusion of control. And they would do well to remember that their minds belong to the meat, not the Machine.

WORKS CITED

Balsamo, Anne. Technologies of the Gendered Body: Reading Cyborg Women. Duke University Press, 1996.

Cadigan, Pat. Synners. 1991. Four Walls Eight Windows, 2001.

Caporaletti, Silvana. “Science as Nightmare: ‘The Machine Stops’ by E. M. Forster.” Utopian Studies, vol. 8, no. 2, 1997, pp. 32–47.

Cline, Ernest. Ready Player One. Broadway Books, 2011.

Forster, E. M. A Room with a View. 1908. Penguin, 2000.

Forster, E. M. “The Machine Stops.” 1909. The Science Fiction Century, Volume One, edited by David Hartwell, Tom Doherty Associates, 1997, pp. 133–154.

Gibson, William. Neuromancer. Ace Science Fiction Books, 1984.

Haraway, Donna. “A Cyborg Manifesto.” 1985. Manifestly Haraway, University of Minnesota Press, 2016, pp. 3–90.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman. University of Chicago Press, 1999.

Hollinger, Veronica. “The Technobody and its Discontents.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 24, no. 1, 1997, pp. 124–132.

Lanier, Jaron. Dawn of the New Everything: Encounters with Reality and Virtual Reality. Henry Holt, 2017.

Pfeil, Fred. Another Tale to Tell: Politics and Narrative in Postmodern Culture. Verso, 1990.

Ross, Andrew. Strange Weather: Culture, Science, and Technology in the Age of Limits. Verso, 1991.

Seabury, Marcia Bundy. “Images of a Networked Society: E. M. Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops.’” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 34, no. 1, 1997, pp. 61–71. 

Seegert, Alf. “Technology and the Fleshly Interface in Forster’s ‘The Machine Stops’: An Ecocritical Appraisal of a One-Hundred Year Old Future.” The Journal of Ecocriticism, vol. 2, no. 1, 2010, pp. 33–54.

Springer, Claudia. Electronic Eros: Bodies and Desire in the Postindustrial Age. University of Texas Press, 1996.

The CyberPunk Culture Conference

Lars Schmeink

With COVID-19  taking center stage in our lives in 2020, we are all faced with new perspectives on our jobs and the resurgence of old inequalities. On the one hand, the coronavirus jumpstarted a digital transformation in our work and research that no one really anticipated. Prejudices against the digital and lacking technical infrastructure be damned, this virus dragged us all into the virtual realms of cyberspace whether we wanted to or not. While some cling to the minimum translations of analog to digital and hold fast to the ideal of face to face human interaction (hello, to all those administrators who thought  Fall 2020 was going to be just another day in HE), others opted to become more creative. We have seen orchestras play virtual concerts from hundreds of different living rooms, world leaders convene in digital meetings, people take digital vacations, and we got Captain Picard (yes, I know) reading Shakespearean sonnets so that we would be inspired. The possibilities of virtual worlds seem as endless as Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, and Neil Stephenson predicted in the 1980s and 90s.

And yet, on the other hand, we also saw that our world had become more entrenched in its inequalities, that some were disproportionately more effected by the virus, as we experienced “the divide between a managerial class that can be shifted to work from home and a worker class, low-paid, without significant savings, and (in the United States) even lacking health care benefits that must nonetheless put itself at daily risk of infection,“ as Gerry Canavan noted on Facebook. Technology is a dividing factor between those who have access to it and those who control it. This is a claim that Karen Cadora had noted 25 years ago, when writing about cyberpunk, which imagines a world where technology is a tool of both oppression and liberation. Poverty is pervasive in cyberpunk, and technological resources are expensive luxuries. Those without access to […them] are effectively kept in the underclass” (359). Well, in corona-times it works both ways and then some. Not having a job that allows you to self-isolate and work remotely, not having access to stable internet, to high-end computers, to technological systems that replace physical interactions with the world comes at a high price in a pandemic, a price that black and brown communities pay doubly. Intersectional discrimination is enhanced through technological inequality.

So, when Veronica Hollinger wrote in a testimonial for the first CyberPunk Culture Conference that she believed the CPCC was “an opportunity to test-drive our critical posthumanism, to be aware of the intriguing complexities of our material participation“ I understood this to speak to both of these described effects of the coronavirus on our academic realities. We are becoming-with the machine, scarily so in E. M. Forster’s sense but also as Donna Haraway means it. Our technologies become surrogates for our interactions with each other. A digital-only conference on cyberculture, then, seems ‘meta’ in that it addresses issues that influence its own materiality. And, not to forget, our material participation is dependent on our social and political circumstances. While many would have loved to come to the SFRA conference (or any other physical meeting), not only the virus but also financial, social, or political obstacles stood in the way of this. And this is true even without the virus at work.

When all plans were cancelled this summer, I wanted to organize an event that takes a different approach, not just out of necessity of a raging pandemic, but as a chance to critically reflect our material participation and our posthuman existence. The CyberPunk Culture Conference was that event, morphed from a planned roundtable discussion and book launch of The Routledge Companion to Cyberpunk Culture that I co-edited with Anna McFarlane and Graham J. Murphy. Building from the idea that cyberpunk is not only an important genre of sf literature, but a cultural formation that speaks immensely to our moment in time and is ideally situated to map our realities, I started to think about what would make the CPCC.

In terms of theme, the conference was open to all interested in cyberculture and the 32 papers presented show an amazing breadth of scholarship, from fashion to music, from holograms to social media, from classics to brand new works of culture, from Turkey to Japan. In addition to the 32 individual papers, we also had a keynote by the fantastic Pawel Frelik, whose musings on the political myopia of cyberpunk are worth a longer discussion, and the above-mentioned roundtable with the editors of the Routledge Companion and two contributors, Sherryl Vint and Hugh O’Connell. We had a lively discussion of how “Living in Cyberpunk Times” and all the utopian and dystopian moments that go with it. If you have not had a chance to look into it, read up here in this symposium issue of SFRA Review, or head on over to www.cyberpunkculture.com where all of the papers are still available to watch and read.

WORKS CITED

Cadora, Karen. “Feminist Cyberpunk.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 22, no. 3, 1995, pp. 357-372.

Canavan, Gerry. “feeling cute, might delete later” Personal Facebook post. Jun 30, 2020. https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=10105425657515891&set=pcb.10105425658224471

Hollinger, Veronica. “Testimonial”. CyberPunk Culture Conference. Jul 09, 2020. http://cyberpunkculture.com/cpcc20/