Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (204 page)

The landmark sci-fi series first introduced audiences to an imperialist race of cybernetic soldiers called simply “the Borg” in the 1989 episode “Q Who.” These (cy)Borgs are clearly both cybernetic and biological, as their outward appearance graphically displays both visible humanoid flesh and mysterious and threatening mechanical devices. The Borg end up being far more technologically advanced and menacing than any Darth Vader ever could be, for they operate as a collective society and reproduce solely by assimilating other biological organisms. Rather than simply murdering their victims, the Borg literally recreate others in their own image, replacing (perceived) inferior and fallible biological parts with more logical, rational, and hardy mechanical accoutrements. The resulting creatures become part of a complex hive of consciousness, the individuals forced to sacrifice autonomy and human agency for the good of the whole race. The Borg encapsulate the ultimate threat of the cyborg: that of evolutionary superiority—humans are no longer the top of the food chain. This manifestation of the “evil” cyborg proved so popular and pervasive, in fact, that the Borg appeared again and again throughout the run of Next Generation, including the feature film, First Contact (1996).

The Borg’s method of procreation was mirrored during the fourth season of Joss Whedon’s
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
(1999–2000). Like the victims of the Borg attacks in
Star Trek
, the vicious cyborg Adam(George Hertzberg) was once an autonomous human subject, a soldier either killed or injured in the line duty, or forcefully appropriated by the military scientists (his pre-cyborg history is left vague). Even worse, however, Adam’s new cybernetic identity constitutes a complete lack of his former autonomy. N. Katherine Hayles, in her pivotal discourse on the posthuman condition, speculates that “the ultimate horror is for the rigid machine to absorb the human being, co-opting the flexibility that is the human birthright” (105). This fate proves terribly true for Adam, for in his character the machine clearly functions as the dominant part of the hybrid whole. Blinded by his programming, Adam has lost his sense of humanity and compassion, and he exhibits a rigid application of logic that considers life and individuality expendable. Like Cameron’s terminator robots, Adam manifests the total loss of humanity outlined by Hayles: “When the boundaries turn rigid or engulf humans so that they lose their agency, the machine ceases to be cybernetic and becomes simply and oppressively mechanical” (105). This terrible potentiality of the cyborg is exactly what makes these creatures such monstrous threats.

During the first decade of the twenty-first century, the cyborg has continued to appear in various iterations in all forms of fiction—including, perhaps even most pervasively, video games. However, many of these appearances have been repeat performances: cyborgs abound throughout the
Star Wars
prequels (most spectacularly in the form of General Grievous), the terminator monsters can be seen in
The Sarah Connor Chronicles
(2008–09) and
Terminator: Salvation
(2009), and Jaime Sommers even had a brief return to the small screen in 2007’s
Bionic Woman
. The most interesting variations on the cyborg, however, have been more complicated manifestations, most notably the Cylons from the rebooted
Battlestar Galactica
(2004–09). Building on the uncanny androids from Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” (1968), the “skin jobs” of
Battlestar Galactica
blur the line between robot and human so obscurely as to make the “cyborg” label the only logical option. The advanced Cylons have managed to replicate human tissue at the cellular level, making them virtually indistinguishable from living flesh, and they can even procreate with humans sexually. Clearly the definition of “cyborg” is continuing to undergo some revision.

As modern technology continues to make real-world advances in the fields of prosthetics, biomechanics, and artificial intelligence, cyborgs will become less the things of “science fiction” or more a part of “science” itself. For this reason, cybernetic characters will likely lessen in their fantastic or even menacing appearances, cropping up instead in more realistic terms, terms that mirror reality instead of providing manifestation of paranoid speculation. Yet the cyborg will never completely disappear—if anything, its role in literature, film, and television will become increasingly advanced, nuanced, and ambiguous, asking readers and viewers again and again to challenge their preconceived notions of what it really means to be “human.” Besides, such hybridized technological characters continue to capture the imagination, tap into some of our deepest fears, and look really, really cool. And if current advances in mechanical limbs, artificial organs, and biomedical computer interfaces are any indication, we are all on our way to becoming cyborgs ourselves anyway.

Works Cited

“Cyborg.”
The Oxford English Dictionary
. 2nd ed. Oxford UP, 1989.
OED Online
. Web. 23 Sept. 2010.

Haraway, Donna J.
Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature
. New York: Routledge, 1991.

Hayles, N. Katherine.
How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics
. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

Wiener, Norbert.
The Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics and Society
. 1950. New York: Da Capo Press, 1988. Print.

* * * *

Dr. Kyle William Bishop
is a third-generation professor at Southern Utah University, where he teaches courses in American literature and culture, film studies, fantasy literature, and English composition. He has presented and published a variety of articles on popular culture and cinematic adaptation, including
Metropolis
,
Night of the Living Dead
,
Fight Club
,
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
, and
Dawn of the Dead
. He received a PhD in English from the University of Arizona in 2009, and his first book,
American Zombie Gothic: The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Walking Dead in Popular Culture
, is now available through McFarland & Co., Publishers.

(1921-1975)

A major voice in science fiction in the 1950s and ’60s, James Blish brought a strong scientific background to his writing. (For instance, he coined the term “gas giant.”) With a degree from Rutgers in microbiology and experience as a medical technician in World War II, Blish spent most of his life working in scientific positions, only becoming a full-time writer at the end of his life. He was also one of the field’s first major critics, writing as William Atheling Jr.; an award for SF criticism was established under that name after his death.

Blish sold his first story at nineteen. His novel
A Case of Conscience
won a Hugo in 1959. Blish novelized the original
Star Trek
episodes beginning in 1967, and also wrote the first
Star Trek
novel.

After working for the Tobacco Institute from 1962–68, Blish eventually died of lung cancer. He was married to agent Virginia Kidd from 1947–63 (the agency she founded still represents his estate) and then to Judith Lawrence Blish, who survived him.

First published in
Galaxy
, August 1952

Dr. Chatvieux took a long look over the microscope, leaving la Ventura with nothing to do but look out at the dead landscape of Hydrot. Waterscape, he thought, would be a better word. The new world had shown only one small, triangular continent, set amid endless ocean; and even the continent was mostly swamp.

The wreck of the seed-ship lay broken squarely across the one real spur of rock Hydrot seemed to possess, which reared a magnificent twenty-one feet above sea-level. From this eminence, la Ventura could see forty miles to the horizon across a flat bed of mud. The red light of the star Tau Ceti, glinting upon thousands of small lakes, pools, ponds, and puddles, made the watery plain look like a mosaic of onyx and ruby.

“If I were a religious man,” the pilot said suddenly, “I’d call this a plain case of divine vengeance.”

Chatvieux said: “Hmn?”

“It’s as if we’ve been struck down for
—
is it
hubris,
arrogant pride?”

“Well, is it?” Chatvieux said, looking up at last. “I don’t feel exactly swollen with pride at the moment. Do you?”

“I’m not exactly proud of my piloting,” la Ventura admitted. “But that isn’t quite what I meant. I was thinking about why we came here in the first place. It takes arrogant pride to think that you can scatter men, or at least things like men, all over the face of the Galaxy. It takes more pride to do the job—to pack up all the equipment and move from planet to planet and actually make men suitable for every place you touch.”

“I suppose it does,” Chatvieux said. “But we’re only one of several hundred seed-ships in this limb of the Galaxy, so I doubt that the gods picked us out as special sinners.” He smiled drily. “If they had, maybe they’d have left us our ultraphone, so the Colonization Council could hear about our cropper. Besides, Paul, we try to produce men adapted to Earthlike planets, nothing more. We’ve sense enough—humility enough, if you like—to know that we can’t adapt men to Jupiter or to Tau Ceti.”

“Anyhow, we’re here,” la Ventura said grimly. “And we aren’t going to get off. Phil tells me that we don’t even have our germ-cell bank any more, so we can’t seed this place in the usual way. We’ve been thrown onto a dead world and dared to adapt to it. What are the panatropes going to do—provide built-in waterwings?”

“No,” Chatvieux said calmly. “You and I and the rest of us are going to die, Paul. Panatropic techniques don’t work on the body, only on the inheritance-carrying factors. We can’t give you built-in waterwings, any more than we can give you a new set of brains. I think we’ll be able to populate this world with men, but we won’t live to see it.”

The pilot thought about it, a lump of cold collecting gradually in his stomach. “How long do you give us?” he said at last.

“Who knows? A month, perhaps.”

* * * *

The bulkhead leading to the wrecked section of the ship was pushed back, admitting salty, muggy air, heavy with carbon dioxide. Philip Strasvogel, the communications officer, came in, tracking mud. Like la Ventura, he was now a man without a function, but it did not appear to bother him. He unbuckled from around his waist a canvas belt into which plastic vials were stuffed like cartridges.

“More samples, Doc,” he said. “All alike—water, very wet. I have some quicksand in one boot, too. Find anything?”

“A good deal, Phil. Thanks. Are the others around?”

Strasvogel poked his head out and hallooed. Other voices rang out over the mudflats. Minutes later, the rest of the survivors were crowding into the panatrope deck: Saltonstall, Chatvieux’s senior assistant; Eunice Wagner, the only remaining ecologist; Eleftherios Venezuelos, the delegate from the Colonization Council; and Joan Heath, a midshipman whose duties, like la Ventura’s and Strasvogel’s, were now without meaning.

Five men and two women—to colonize a planet on which standing room meant treading water.

They came in quietly and found seats or resting places on the deck, on the edges of tables, in corners.

Venezuelos said: “What’s the verdict, Dr. Chatvieux?”

“This place isn’t dead,” Chatvieux said. “There’s life in the sea and in the fresh water, both. On the animal side of the ledger, evolution seems to have stopped with the Crustacea; the most advanced form I’ve found is a tiny crayfish, from one of the local rivulets. The ponds and puddles are well-stocked with protozoa and small meta-zoans, right up to a wonderfully variegated rotifer population—including a castle-building rotifer like Earth’s
Flo-scularidae.
The plants run from simple algae to the thallus-like species.”

“The sea is about the same,” Eunice said, “I’ve found some of the larger simple metazoans—jellyfish and so on—and some crayfish almost as big as lobsters. But it’s normal to find salt-water species running larger than freshwater.”

“In short,” Chatvieux said, “we’ll survive here—if we fight.”

“Wait a minute,” la Ventura said. “You’ve just finished telling me that we wouldn’t survive. And you were talking about us, not about the species, because we don’t have our germ-cell banks any more. What’s—”

“I’ll get to that in a moment,” Chatvieux said. “Saltonstall, what would you think of taking to the sea? We came out of it once; maybe we could come out of it again.”

“No good,” Saltonstall said immediately. “
I
like the idea, but I don’t think this planet ever heard of Swinburne, or Homer, either. Looking at it as a colonization problem, as if we weren’t involved ourselves, I wouldn’t give you a credit for epi oinopa ponton. The evolutionary pressure there is too high, the competition from other species is prohibitive; seeding the sea would be the last thing we attempt. The colonists wouldn’t have a chance to learn a thing before they were destroyed.”

“Why?” la Ventura said. The death in his stomach was becoming hard to placate.

“Eunice, do your sea-going Coelenterates include anything like the Portuguese man-of-war?”

The ecologist nodded.

“There’s your answer, Paul,” Saltonstall said. “The sea is out. It’s got to be fresh water, where the competing creatures are less formidable and there are more places to hide.”

“We can’t compete with a jellyfish?” la Ventura asked, swallowing.

“No, Paul,” Chatvieux said. “The panatropes make adaptations, not gods. They take human germ-cells—in this case, our own, since our bank was wiped out in the crash—and modify them toward creatures who can live in any reasonable environment. The result will be manlike and intelligent. It usually shows the donor’s personality pattern, too.

“But we can’t transmit memory. The adapted man is worse than a child in his new environment. He has no history, no techniques, no precedents, not even a language. Ordinarily the seeding teams more or less take him through elementary school before they leave the planet, but we won’t survive long enough for that. We’ll have to design our colonists with plenty of built-in protections and locate them in the most favorable environment possible, so that at least some of them will survive the learning process.”

The pilot thought about it, but nothing occurred to him which did not make the disaster seem realer and more intimate with each passing second. “One of the new creatures can have my personality pattern, but it won’t be able to remember being me. Is that right?”

“That’s it. There may be just the faintest of residuums—panatropy’s given us some data which seem to support the old Jungian notion of ancestral memory. But we’re all going to die on Hydrot, Paul. There’s no avoiding that. Somewhere we’ll leave behind people who behave as we would, think and feel as we would, but who won’t remember la Ventura, or Chatvieux, or Joan Heath—or Earth.”

The pilot said nothing more. There was a gray taste in his mouth.

“Saltonstall, what do you recommend as a form?”

The panatropist pulled reflectively at his nose. “Webbed extremities, of course, with thumbs and big toes heavy and thornlike for defense until the creature has had a chance to learn. Book-lungs, like the arachnids, working out of intercostal spiracles—they are gradually adaptable to atmosphere-breathing, if it ever decides to come out of the water. Also I’d suggest sporulation. As an aquatic animal, our colonist is going to have an indefinite lifespan, but we’ll have to give it a breeding cycle of about six weeks to keep its numbers up during the learning period; so there’ll have to be a definite break of some duration in its active year. Otherwise it’ll hit the population problem before it’s learned enough to cope with it.”

“Also, it’ll be better if our colonists could winter inside a good hard shell,” Eunice Wagner added in agreement. “So sporulation’s the obvious answer. Most microscopic creatures have it.”

“Microscopic?” Phil said incredulously.

“Certainly,” Chatvieux said, amused. “We can’t very well crowd a six-foot man into a two-foot puddle. But that raises a question. We’ll have tough competition from the rotifers, and some of them aren’t strictly microscopic. I don’t think your average colonist should run under 25 microns, Saltonstall. Give them a chance to slug it out.”

“I was thinking of making them twice that big.”

“Then they’d be the biggest things in their environment,” Eunice Wagner pointed out, “and won’t ever develop any skills. Besides, if you make them about rotifer size, I’ll give them an incentive for pushing out the castle-building rotifers.”

“They’ll be able to take over the castles as dwellings.”

Chatvieux nodded. “All right, let’s get started. While the panatropes are being calibrated, the rest of us can put our heads together on leaving a record for these people. We’ll micro-engrave the record on a set of corrosion-proof metal leaves, of a size our colonists can handle conveniently. Some day they may puzzle it out.”

“Question,” Eunice Wagner said. “Are we going to tell them they’re microscopic? I’m opposed to it. It’ll saddle their entire early history with a gods-and-demons mythology they’d be better off without.”

“Yes, we are,” Chatvieux said; and la Ventura could tell by the change in the tone of his voice that he was speaking now as their senior. “These people will be of the race of men, Eunice. We want them to win their way back to the community of men. They are not toys, to be protected from the truth forever in a fresh-water womb.”

“I’ll make that official,” Venezuelos said, and that was that.

And then, essentially, it was all over. They went through the motions. Already they were beginning to be hungry. After la Ventura had had his personality pattern recorded, he was out of it. He sat by himself at the far end of the ledge, watching Tau Ceti go redly down, chucking pebbles into the nearest pond, wondering morosely which nameless puddle was to be his Lethe.

He never found out, of course. None of them did.

I

Old Shar set down the heavy metal plate at last, and gazed instead out the window of the castle, apparently resting his eyes on the glowing green-gold obscurity of the summer waters. In the soft fluorescence which played down upon him, from the Noc dozing impassively in the groined vault of the chamber, Lavon could see that he was in fact a young man. His face was so delicately formed as to suggest that it had not been many seasons since he had first emerged from his spore.

But of course there had been no real reason to expect an old man. All the Shars had been referred to traditionally as “old” Shar. The reason, like the reasons for everything else, had been forgotten, but the custom had persisted; the adjective at least gave weight and dignity to the office.

The present Shar belonged to the generation XVI, and hence would have to be at least two seasons younger than Lavon himself. If he was old, it was only in knowledge.

“Lavon, I’m going to have to be honest with you,” Shar said at last, still looking out of the tall, irregular window. “You’ve come to me for the secrets of the metal plates, just as your predecessors did to mine. I can give some of them to you—but for the most part, I don’t know what they mean.”

“After so many generations?” Lavon asked, surprised. “Wasn’t it Shar III who first found out how to read them? That was a long time ago.”

The young man turned and looked at Lavon with eyes made dark and wide by the depths into which they had been staring. “I can read what’s on the plates, but most of it seems to make no sense. Worst of all, the plates are incomplete. You didn’t know that? They are. One of them was lost in a battle during the final war with the Eaters, while these castles are still in their hands.”

“What am I here for, then?” Lavon said. “Isn’t there anything of value on the remaining plates? Do they really contain ‘the wisdom of the Creators’ or is that another myth?”

“No. No, that’s true,” Shar said slowly, “as far as it goes.”

* * * *

He paused, and both men turned and gazed at the ghostly creature which had appeared suddenly outside the window. Then Shar said gravely, “Come in, Para.”

The slipper-shaped organism, nearly transparent except for the thousands of black-and-silver granules and frothy bubbles which packed its interior, glided into the chamber and hovered, with a muted whirring of cilia. For a moment it remained silent, probably speaking telepathically to the Noc floating in the vault, after the ceremonious fashion of all the protos. No human had ever intercepted one of these colloquies, but there was no doubt about their reality: humans had used them for long-range communications for generations.

Then the Para’s cilia buzzed once more. Each separate hairlike process vibrated at an independent, changing rate; the resulting sound waves spread through the water, inter-modulating, reinforcing or canceling each other. The aggregate wave-front, by the time it reached human ears, was recognizable human speech.