Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (481 page)

Note that we have moved away from the term
human
; indeed, participants in the system proposed by Derrida and Wolfe need not be human at all. Furthermore, the body, particularly the eye, may not be useful. Instead, they advocate that identity should be based on “different ways of being in the world” rather than on systems of recognition (162). As Wolfe suggests, meaning is found “precisely where the viewer does not see—not “refuses to look,” or even “is prevented from seeing,” but rather
cannot
see” (166, Wolfe’s emphasis). In so doing, they understand the task of posthumanists as decentering the bias toward humans and production systems that are products of humans.

This suggests another problem, however: we do not have an adequate theory of persons or humans; rather we have a system of discrimination against or preference for certain traits
and our moral code—our understanding of rights, for example—are derived from that system
.

While the concept of the ooloi frees an entity from the trap of the body and luxuriates in the ambiguity and alternative literacies that Donna Haraway advocates, the “new age of genetic manipulation” asks us to address the problem of the human more directly, particularly given the strictures of language (Wolfe 161). When we privilege the human body as Agent we “are locked into a model of justice in which a being does or does not have rights on the basis of its possession (or lack) of morally significant characteristics” (Wolfe 75). Can an animal have morally significant characteristics? What about a “corrupted” animal, such as the progeny of a sheep and a goat? Is this “unnatural”? What about cloned animals? Or cloned humans? Wolfe writes and quotes Cora Diamond that:

‘when genuine issues of justice and injustice are framed in terms of rights, they are thereby distorted and trivialized,’ because the language of rights still bears the imprint of the context in which it was shaped: Roman law and its codification of property rights—not least, of course, property rights over slaves.’
(Diamond 120) (Wolfe 73)

Hugo award–winning author Maureen McHugh’s short story “Nekropolis” describes the conditioned response to the cloned humans (harni) who function as slaves even to humans who choose to sell their own bodies into slavery. Although cloned from human genes, the harni live in a context that denies their humanity and hence, denies them their freedom, thus creating an appreciation and understanding of freedom that is more “humane” than the humans’ very limited understanding, blinded as they are to something they cannot see. Robert Heinlein’s novel
Friday
addresses a similar theme: Friday, a genetically engineered human, cannot be defined by visual markers as “unnatural” at all; yet Friday creates loving relationships and understands love—a “human” emotion—in a way that most of the humans in the novel cannot hope to achieve.

The novels and short stories suggest that perhaps humans today need to rely more on a “philosophy of immigrancy, of the human as stranger” (Wolfe 173 quoting Cavell 30) so as to see ourselves with fresh eyes. Indeed, science fiction and fantasy afford us an opportunity to view ourselves from the outside, to see that which we have not seen. When we imagine ourselves outside of our familiar contexts, including the contexts of the body, we can interrogate a whole set of assumptions that has limited us in a variety of ways. Thus, rather than supplying us with answers to the question of subjectivity and the body, a study of science fiction from a disability studies and posthumanist perspective presents us with a different set of questions: how do our ideas of justice and rights change when the boundaries of the body no longer matter? How do we construct identity beyond the processes of vision? What do our communities look like if our assumptions linked to vision are disturbed? Indeed, what do our communities—our architecture, our institutions such as families or schools—look like if our assumptions about the primacy of humans are disturbed? In what new ways are borders crossed and to what effect? What kinds of symbols become important in this new world and why? What kinds of communications take precedence in these new communities? How are our values resituated—how do we revalue the natural world; our understanding of resources as tools for our benefit; or our understanding of rights for animals and other entities? And, perhaps most importantly, we can ask ourselves what it is that makes us human, and whether or not that question is even relevant anymore.

* * * *

Works Cited

Bujold, Lois McMaster. “Chapter 3.”
Paladin of Souls
. New York: PerfectBound—HarperCollins, 2003.

Butler, Octavia.
Imago
. Warner Books: New York, 1989.

Cavell, Stanley.
A Pitch of Philosophy: Autobiographical Exercises
. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1994.

Diamond, Cora. “Injustice and Animals.”
Slow Cures and Bad Philosophers: Essays on Wittgenstein, Medicine, and Bioethics
. Ed. Carl Elliott. Durham, NC: Duke UP, 2001.

Freud, Sigmund. ‘The Exceptions” in “Some Character Types Met with in Psychoanalytic Work” in
Collected Papers
, vol. IV. Trans. Joan Riviere. London: Hogarth, 1957.

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

Heinlein, Robert.
Friday
. New York: Del Rey, Ballantine, 1982.

McHugh, Maureen. “Nekropolis” in
Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts.
Ed. Heather Masri. New York: Bedford St. Martin’s, 2008. 386–415.

Thomson, Rosemarie Garland.
Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Disability in American Culture and Literature
. New York: Columbia UP, 1997.

Varley, John. “The Persistence of Vision” in
The John Varley Reader
. New York: Ace Books, 2004. 228–270.

Wolfe, Cary.
What is Post-Humanism
? Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2010.

* * * *

Raised in Australia,
Breyan Strickler
now calls Dubuque, Iowa home. She teaches contemporary American fiction and science fiction at Loras College. Her scholarship focuses on post-humanism, environmental rhetoric, and disability studies in American and Commonwealth literature.

(1953– )

Although she’s best known for writing some of the key cyberpunk stories (including this one), Pat Cadigan is much harder to define than that. A fan for many years (she edited the award-winning semiprozine
Shayol
with her second husband, Arnie Fenner, for the entire 1977–1985 run) and a writer and editor at Hallmark Cards in Kansas City for a decade before she was able to write full-time, Pat has incredible control over language and nuance in her works. And who else can write a story that questions whether it’s better to be watched than to be loved and makes you honestly unsure of the answer?

Born in Massachusetts, Pat grew up in poverty, but managed to get a full scholarship to the University of Massachusetts, where she studied theater. She met her first husband there, and followed him to the University of Kansas, where she graduated in 1975. She published her first story, “Death from Exposure” in 1978, and her first novel,
Mindplayers
, in 1987, the year she became a full-time writer. Pat primarily works in short forms;

she’s published more than eighty short stories, but fewer than ten books, both fiction and nonfiction. She’s won two Arthur C. Clarke Awards, for
Synners
and
Fools
.

Cadigan moved to England in 1996, where she now lives with her third husband, Chris Fowler, and her son, Bob Fenner.

First published in
Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine
, January 1986

First you see video. Then you wear video. Then you eat video. Then you
be
video.

The Gospel According to Visual Mark

Watch or Be watched.

Pretty Boy Credo

* * * *

“Who made you?”

“You mean recently?”

Mohawk on the door smiles and takes his picture. “You in. But only you, okay? Don’t try to get no friends in, hear that?”

“I hear. And I ain’t no fool, fool. I got no friends.”

Mohawk leers, leaning forward. “Pretty Boy like you, no friends?”

“Not in this world.” He pushes past the Mohawk, ignoring the kissy-kissy sounds. He would like to crack the bridge of the Mohawk’s nose and shove bone splinters into his brain but he is lately making more effort to control his temper and besides, he’s not sure if any of that bone splinters in the brain stuff is really true. He’s a Pretty Boy, all of sixteen years old, and tonight could be his last chance.

* * * *

The club is Noise. Can’t sneak into the bathroom for quiet, the Noise is piped in there, too. Want to get away from Noise? Why? No reason. But this Pretty Boy has learned to think between the beats. Like walking between the raindrops to stay dry, but he can do it. This Pretty Boy thinks things all the time—
all
the time. Subversive (and, he thinks so much that he knows that word
subversive,
sixteen, Pretty, or not). He thinks things like
how many Einsteins have died of hunger and thirst under a hot African sun
and
why can’t you remember being born
and
why is music common to every culture
and especially
how much was there going on that he didn’t know about and how could he find out
about it.

And this is all the time, one thing after another running in his head, you can see by his eyes. It’s for def not much like a Pretty Boy but it’s one reason why they want him. That he
is
a Pretty Boy is another and one reason why they’re halfway home getting him.

He knows all about them. Everybody knows about them and everybody wants them to pause, look twice, and cough up a card that says, Yes, we see possibilities, please come to the following address during regular business hours on the next regular business day for regular further review. Everyone wants it but this Pretty Boy, who once got five cards in a night and tore them all up. But here he is, still a Pretty Boy. He thinks enough to know this is a failing in himself, that he likes being Pretty and chased and that is how they could end up getting him after all and that’s b-b-b-bad. When he thinks about it, he thinks it with the stutter. B-b-b-bad. B-b-b-bad for him because he doesn’t God help him want it, no, no n-n-n-no. Which may make him the strangest Pretty Boy still live tonight and every night.

Still live and standing in the Club where only the Prettiest Pretty Boys can get in any more. Pretty Girls are too easy, they’ve got to be better than Pretty and besides, Pretty Boys like to be Pretty all alone, no help thank you so much. This Pretty Boy doesn’t mind Pretty Girls or any other kind of girls. Lately, though he has begun to wonder how much longer it will be for him. Two years? Possibly a little longer? By three it will be for def over and Mohawk on the door will as soon spit on his face as leer in it.

If they don’t get to him.

And if they
do
get to him, then it’s never over and he can be wherever he chooses to be and wherever that is will be the center of the universe. They promise it, unlimited access in your free hours and endless hot season, endless youth. Pretty Boy Heaven, and to get there, they say, you don’t even really have to die.

He looks up to the dj’s roost, far above the bobbing, boogieing crowd on the dance floor. They still call them djs even though they aren’t discs any more, they’re chips and there’s more than just sound on a lot of them. The great hyper-program, he’s been told, the ultimate of ultimates, a short walk from there to the fourth dimension. He suspects this stuff comes from low-steppers shilling for them, hoping they’ll get auditioned if they do a good enough shuck job. Nobody knows what it’s really like except the ones who are there and you can’t trust them, he figures. Because maybe they aren’t, any more. Not really.

The dj sees his Pretty upturned face, recognizes him even though it’s been awhile since he’s come back here. Part of it was wanting to stay away from them and part of it was that the thug on the door might not let him in. And then, of course, he
had
to come, to see if he could get in, to see if anyone still wanted him. What was the point of Pretty if there was nobody to care and watch and pursue? Even now, he is almost sure he can feel the room rearranging itself around his presence in it and the dj confirms this is true by holding up a chip and pointing it to the left.

They are squatting on the make-believe stairs by the screen, reminding him of pigeons plotting to take over the world. He doesn’t look too long, doesn’t want to give them the idea he’d like to talk. But as he turns away, one, the younger man, starts to get up. The older man and the woman pull him back.

He pretends a big interest in the figures lining the nearest wall. Some are Pretty, some are female, some are undecided, some are very bizarre, or wealthy, or just charity cases. They all notice him and adjust themselves for his perusal.

Then one end of the room lights up with the color and new noise. Bodies dance and stumble back from the screen where images are forming to rough music.

It’s Bobby, he realizes.

A moment later, there’s Bobby’s face on the screen, sixteen feet high, even Prettier than he’d been when he was loose among the mortals. The sight of Bobby’s Pretty-Pretty face fills him with anger and dismay and a feeling of loss so great he would strike anyone who spoke Bobby’s name without his permission.

Bobby’s lovely slate-gray eyes scan the room. They’ve told him senses are heightened after you make the change and go over but he’s not so sure how that’s supposed to work. Bobby looks kind of blind up there on the screen. A few people wave at Bobby—the dorks they let in so the rest can have someone to be hip in front of—but Bobby’s eyes move slowly back and forth, back and forth, and then stop, looking right at him.

“Ah…” Bobby whispers it, long and drawn out. “Aaaaaahhhh.”

He lifts his chin belligerently and stares back at Bobby.

“You don’t have to die any more,” Bobby says silkily. Music bounces under his words. “It’s beautiful in here. The dreams can be as real as you want them to be. And if you want to be, you can be with me.”

He knows the commercial is not aimed only at him but it doesn’t matter. This is
Bobby.
Bobby’s voice seems to be pouring over him, caressing him, and it feels too much like a taunt. The night before Bobby went over, he tried to talk him out of it, knowing it wouldn’t work. If they’d actually refused him, Bobby would have killed himself, like Franco had.

But now Bobby would live forever and ever, if you believed what they said. The music comes up louder but Bobby’s eyes are still on him. He sees Bobby mouth his name.

“Can you really see me, Bobby?” he says. His voice doesn’t make it over the music but if Bobby’s senses are so heightened, maybe he hears it anyway. If he does, he doesn’t choose to answer. The music is a bumped-up remix of a song Bobby used to party-till-he-puked to. The giant Bobby-face fades away to be replaced with a whole Bobby, somewhat larger than life, dancing better than the old Bobby ever could, whirling along changing scenes of streets, rooftops and beaches. The locales are nothing special but Bobby never did have all that much imagination, never wanted to go to Mars or even to the South Pole, always just to the hottest club. Always he liked being the exotic in plain surroundings and he still likes it. He always loved to get the looks. To be watched, worshiped, pursued. Yeah. He can see this is Bobby-heaven. The whole world will be giving him the looks now.

The background on the screen goes from street to the inside of a club;
this
club, only larger, better, with an even hipper crowd, and Bobby shaking it with them. Half the real crowd is forgetting to dance now because they’re watching Bobby, hoping he’s put some of them into his video. Yeah, that’s the dream, get yourself remixed in the extended dance version.

His own attention drifts to the fake stairs that don’t lead anywhere. They’re still perched on them, the only people who are watching
him
instead of Bobby. The woman, looking overaged in a purple plastic sac-suit, is fingering a card.

He looks up at Bobby again. Bobby is dancing in place and looking back at him, or so it seems. Bobby’s lips move soundlessly but so precisely he can read the words:
This can be you. Never get old, never get tired, it’s never last call, nothing happens unless you want it to and it could be you. You. You.
Bobby’s hands point to him on the beat.
You. You. You. Bobby. Can you really see me?

Bobby suddenly breaks into laughter and turns away, shaking it some more.

He sees the Mohawk from the door pushing his way through the crowd, the real crowd, and he gets anxious. The Mohawk goes straight for the stairs, where they make room for him, rubbing the bristly red strip of hair running down the center of his head as though they were greeting a favored pet. The Mohawk looks as satisfied as a professional glutton after a foodrace victory. He wonders what they promised the Mohawk for letting him in. Maybe some kind of limited contract. Maybe even a try-out.

Now they are all watching him together. Defiantly, he touches a tall girl dancing nearby and joins her rhythm. She smiles down at him, moving between him and them purely by chance but it endears her to him anyway. She is wearing a flap of translucent rag over secondskins, like an old-time showgirl. Over six feet tall, not beautiful with that nose, not even pretty, but they let her in so she could be tall. She probably doesn’t know that; she probably doesn’t know anything that goes on and never really will. For that reason, he can forgive her the hard-tech orange hair.

A Rude Boy brushes against him in the course of a dervish turn, asking acknowledgement by ignoring him. Rude Boys haven’t changed in more decades than anyone’s kept track of, as though it were the same little group of leathered and chained troopers buggering their way down the years. The Rude Boy isn’t dancing with anyone. Rude Boys never do. But this one could be handy, in case of an emergency.

The girl is dancing hard, smiling at him. He smiles back, moving slightly to her right, watching Bobby possibly watching him. He still can’t tell if Bobby really sees anything. The scene behind Bobby is still a double of the club, getting hipper and hipper if that’s possible. The music keeps snapping back to its first peak passage. Then Bobby gestures like God and he sees
himself.
He is dancing next to Bobby, Prettier than he ever could be, just the way they promise. Bobby doesn’t look at the phantom but at him where he really is, lips moving again.
If you want to be, you can be with me. And so can she.

His tall partner appears next to the phantom himself. She is also much improved, though still not Pretty, or even pretty. The real girl turns and sees herself and there’s no mistaking the delight in her face. Queen of the Hop for a minute or two. Then Bobby sends her image away so that it’s just the two of them, two Pretty Boys dancing the night away, private party, stranger go find your own time. How it used to be sometimes in real life, between just the two of them. He remembers hard.

“B-b-b-bobby!” he yells, the old stutter reappearing. Bobby’s image seems to give a jump, as though he finally heard. He forgets everything, the girl, the Rude Boy, the Mohawk, them on the stairs, and plunges through the crowd toward the screen. People fall away from him as though they were re-enacting the Red Sea. He dives for the screen, for Bobby, not caring how it must look to anyone. What would they know about it, any of them. He can’t remember in his whole sixteen years ever hearing one person say,
I
love my friend.
Not Bobby, not even himself.

He fetches up against the screen like a slap and hangs there, face pressed to the glass. He can’t see it now but on the screen Bobby would seem to be looking down at him. Bobby never stops dancing.

The Mohawk comes and peels him off. The others swarm up and take him away. The tall girl watches all this with the expression of a woman who lives upstairs from Cinderella and wears the same shoe size. She stares longingly at the screen. Bobby waves bye-bye and turns away.

* * * *

“Of course, the process isn’t reversible,” says the older man. The steely hair has a careful blue tint; he had sense enough to stay out of hip clothes.

They have laid him out on a lounger with a tray of refreshments right by him. Probably slap his hand if he reaches for any, he thinks.