Resilient Cyborgs

This article reads Pat Cadigan’s Arthur C. Clarke Award-winning novel Synners (1991) from the perspectives of trauma studies and posthumanism to analyze the representation of the cyborged (post)human in cyberspace. My main focus is Cadigan’s depiction of a posttraumatic world whose living conditions invite escape, and how this depiction emphasizes the fact that escape through technological transcendence is not an option, and neither is the rejection of technology altogether. Despite this bleak scenario, the novel leaves some room for optimism in the figuration of a posthuman form of resilience, inspiring reflection about future forms of engagement with technology. As this article attempts to prove, Synners uses the tropes of the cyborg and cyberspace to explore the implications of subjectivity and embodiment within technoscience. In so doing, the novel opens a critical space for interrogation of the relationship between trauma, the posthuman body, and digital technology.

“I Don’t Know, But I’m Trying to Find Out, Okay?”

In the audio drama Welcome to Night Vale (2012-) and its spinoff novel It Devours! (2017), the character of Carlos the Scientist functions as a figure for both the larger enterprise of technoscience and a critique of Western technoscience. By pitting the narratives of the mad scientist and the heroic scientist against each other in a single person, Carlos’s character development arc shows that both cultural figures rely on the White masculinist tropes and values embedded in Western technoscience. Ultimately, Carlos’s arc depicts the limits of these structures and provides a solution in line with feminist epistemologies, emphasizing situatedness over universalism and communitarianism over individualism.

Waste People and the Vampiric Society

Chen Qiufan’s 2013 novel Waste Tide has become one of the most popular stories in Chinese New Wave Science Fiction, especially after the publication of its English version in 2019. This essay argues that in addition to the environmental concerns Waste Tide brings to the fore, the novel also calls for a discussion centered on migrant workers in China. Rendered as waste people on Silicon Isle, these migrant workers find themselves trapped in the duality of "economic acceptance" and "social rejection," forming an autonomous community that can be read through Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia. Out of the humiliation imposed by the Silicon Isle natives and the resulting mentality of failure and trauma, the waste people have developed a desire for change and transgression. However, their efforts and sacrifice for self-liberation turn out to be in vain, because in doing so, they are consumed by the vampiric logic of market competition. Such a competition, in fact, is evident not only in the fictional Silicon Isle, but also in the real cities benefitting from China’s market-oriented transition.

The Technology and Economy of Care

This paper studies the idea of care in the science fiction of Japanese writer Gen Urobuchi: The Song of Saya (2003), Puella Magi Madoka Magica (2011), and its sequel Rebellion (2013). Utilizing Jacques Derrida’s notion of the gift, Bernard Stiegler’s critique of entropy, and Takeo Doi’s analysis of amae, I examine how these works situate care in relation to thermodynamic and libidinal economy. I demonstrate that care is always an embodied act intertwined with technology and economy, and that by reading care as a pharmakon that both heals and poisons, a "neganthropic" hope can emerge from the entropic system of the Anthropocene.

In the Shadow of the Culture

Iain M. Banks’s The Algebraist (2004), a Hugo Award nominee for Best Novel in 2005, has attracted far less critical attention than his Culture novels despite being a remarkable work. Born of the author’s wish to develop his science fiction beyond the Culture’s universe, The Algebraist is a complex novel displaying in its dense pages Banks’s wondrous imagination. Here I consider the ways in which the main civilizations he depicts in it, the Mercatoria and the Dwellers, connect with key issues raised in the Culture novels: the ethics of intervention in other civilizations, the use of AIs, and the nature of utopia. The Culture, as I argue, casts a long shadow but Banks’s decision to explore another narrative universe allows him to examine these fundamental issues from a different angle. The Algebraist complements, nonetheless, his main tenets in the Culture series.

Poul Anderson and the American Alliterative Revival

Although Poul Anderson is best known for his prose, he dabbled in poetry all his life, and his historical interests led him to become a major—if unacknowledged— contributor to the twentieth-century alliterative revival. This revival, most often associated with British poets such as W. H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and C. S. Lewis, attempted to adapt medieval Germanic alliterative meter into modern English. Yet Anderson, a firmly libertarian Enlightenment-style writer, imbued his alliterative poetry with a rationalistic spirit that implicitly accepted (with appropriate qualifications) a narrative of historical progress. This article analyzes the alliterative verse that Anderson wrote and uncovers how the demands of the pulp market shaped what poetry he could produce.