Paulo Bacigalupi and The Windup Girl

Corporate espionage, the far-reaching consequences of genetic tinkering on food and animals, political intrigue and bloody revolution -- these are all touched on in Paulo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl, but the subject that is the most fascinating for me is the one the book is named for: the windup girl, Emiko.

She is the product of genetic tinkering done in the name of service. She, like so many concepts and creations of sf, was made to be an object of utility. Her initial role is one of absolute obeisance and servitude. She is secretary, lover, servant, designed with a compulsion to always obey a master, to require a master, and given physical chains to further reinforce her role in the form of a "stutter-stop motion" that betrays her nature, and pores so small that her body overheats quickly, making escape seem impossible. Emiko is abandoned by her Japanese owner, discarded on the streets of Bangkok where her nature and training require her to find a new master. She is found by one, a character called Raleigh, who forces her nightly to take the stage and be violated, again and again, by those whose fascination lies in watching the debasement of a "New Person," a more-than-human, "soulless" subhuman creature of genetic scientists.

Revolution is stirring in the City of Divine Beings, and the major players prime themselves for the moment when their machinations can come to fruition, but it is Emiko, a character with no investment in or awareness of the turbulent political climate she lives within, who creates that perfect moment. Up until this point in the text, Emiko's hope for a new life, one without a master where she can live freely among other New People, has been a small, but persistent flame. The catalyst for change, however, is born from moment of despair. A new client comes into the club where she is forced to work, and that night the degradation and humiliation she is made to suffer reaches an unbearable height. It leaves her feeling broken, emptied out, and without hope.

This is a pivotal moment. The final chapter in a cycle of despair always leaves its sufferer with two choices: die, and end the pain at last, or live, and change everything with the knowledge of the absolute freedom that comes when you have nothing left to lose. Emiko chooses life, and wreaks glorious and bloody vengeance on those who were the source of her suffering. The carnage she leaves in her wake and the misinterpretation of the intent behind such an act of violence, begins a revolution. The city goes up in flames as those major players capitalize on the consequences of her actions, and then the city is drowned by those who would preserve its integrity and its people.

Emiko survives this purging, and the novel closes with her living freely in the nearly empty, mostly submerged city. It is here that she meets the aged scientist Gibson and his companion, a young hermaphrodite named Kip. The novel revolves around discussions of genetic manipulation, and reveals many consequences of this sort of tinkering, from plagues and persistent and ever-mutating disease, to genetic monopolies, to New People and the feral, chameleon-like cats called Cheshires. This meeting between Emiko and the scientist, Gibson, posits a new development in the discussion of genetics, one with very different implications.

He cannot alter Emiko to free her from the tells that mark her as a New Person, or the weaknesses that make her physically vulnerable, but he offers her a future that will make her part of a genetic continuum. New People are engineered for sterility, and although they are virtually immune to disease, heal very quickly, and live much longer lifespans than other human beings, there is no genetic remnant left of them when they die save what is preserved in a laboratory.

It is crucial to note that while Emiko cannot be altered and therefore freed, she wishes to be "a part of the natural world" in some capacity, implying that being a part of the natural world entails the ability to produce life. So much of the novel is about an urgent need to maintain human life, and the barriers against survival created by inventions born from a desire for profit. It is this need that shifts the balance of power in the text, but the changes Gibson offers are not for profit. Whatever his own reasons, he says that he will do it for Emiko. A strand of her hair is all he needs, and while her physical being will remain unchanged, she will be part of a continuum that will alter the course of the genetic future of the human race.

Continuation of this nature, however, is not without its surprises. Emiko was created to serve, and yet she found the will to challenge her masters and become her own mistress. Genetic tinkering does not remove the possibility of mutation, aberration, or evolution -- the plagues on gengineered crops in the text demonstrate that very clearly -- and the future Gibson will create through Emiko will likely be rife will changes and consequences that cannot be predicted or fully controlled. Continuation of life will occur regardless, and it will not be for profit or political agenda. What Bacigalupi demonstrates in The Windup Girl is that in a world guided by genetic engineering, a place in the genetic continuum will be the gift of a contrary 'god' to a worthy supplicant, for no better reason than the perpetuation of life in whatever form life can be dreamed.

Ray Bradbury and "The Million Year Picnic"

“’The whole darn planet belongs to us, kids. The whole darn planet.”

-“The Million Year Picnic,” The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury, pg. 179

            There were a lot of quotes from this particular story in The Martian Chronicles that leapt out at me as embodying a sense of colonialist entitlement, but I decided to focus on this particular one because I felt it encapsulated the concepts Bradbury had been putting forward throughout the rest of the text; That is, the enormity of the seemingly available territory of the frontier, the sense of entitlement human ‘pioneers’ seem to have, and the paternalistic bequeathing of both that sense of entitlement and the land itself. I’m not sure Bradbury is criticizing any of these sentiments, exactly, but he does utilize them repeatedly in relation to sermonizing over the horrors of war and depicting the desire to escape from a cultural madness that is presented as all-encompassing. The Thomas Family has been preparing for years to abandon Earth in favor of Mars, which they view as a clean slate upon which to rewrite human history: “We planned this trip years ago, before you were born…” (180). They waited until Earth had truly fallen into chaos before abandoning it and nearly all of its inhabitants, condemning “Earth civilization” as unsalvageable, and William Thomas immolates the ‘things of man’ he’s brought with him as a symbolic (and symmetrical, considering the atomic fire that purged the world of humanity on Earth during the course of the story) rejection of that civilization and everything it stood for, including geographical boundaries. By claiming Mars as the property of the Thomas family, however, Thomas is perpetuating the ethos that lead to nuclear destruction on Earth. Land is to be claimed, cultures to be assimilated, and the same tired old story is continued over and over by these ‘heroic’ blonde-haired ‘idealists.’ 

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011

Journal #5

Ray Bradbury and "There Will Come Soft Rains"

“Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine up on the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’”

-“There Will Come Soft Rains”

The Martian Chronicles, pg. 171-172

Ray Bradbury

In the final scene from Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a lone house with all its many mechanisms is described as the only one remaining in the wake of nuclear holocaust in the city of Allendale, California: “The house stood alone…” (167).  By way of efficient design it continues on performing daily services for a family that no longer lives within its walls, a family who, by the application of equally efficient technology, no longer lives at all. When a fluke fire destroys the house and all its fine-tuned functions along with it, all that remains is a fragment of tech calculating time on an infinite loop and a voice that speaks into a void that cannot answer back. Throughout the text, Bradbury demonstrates that the house was not just designed for the convenience of the family, it was a part of them in that every facet of family life within the home was synced to the house itself. It fed them, bathed them, put them to sleep, set up their games, alerted them to weather shifts, watered their lawn, read them poetry, and in their absence, the house continued trying to fulfill its purpose. This final scene demonstrates how technology can endure even after the reason for its existence has itself ceased to exist, but that this endurance becomes a series of meaningless repetitions in the absence of a Maker. Ursula Le Guin states in her 1976 essay, “if we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness,” and by making the house the focal point, indeed, the main character of “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Bradbury gives a very vivid support of her argument. Without a human presence, all the many mechanisms of humanity are made useless. Even the calculation of time becomes an absurdity in the absence of those whose lives are dictated by the perception of it passing. 

-LBS 499: Nuclear Holocaust Science Fiction, Fall 2011

Journal #4

Shadow On the Hearth and the Implications Of Omission

The omission of information for the ‘greater good’ in relation to technological advances and consequences is something the US government did quite a lot of during and directly following WWII (the ‘Duck and Cover’ Civil Defense films being just one of many examples of government sanctioned science fictions), and while the reasoning behind these omissions is debatable, it remains that information was omitted. Whatever the true reasons for informational obfuscation or omission during that time, or whether those actions were justified or not, an omission implies a reluctance to communicate a truth. It denotes a belief that the information omitted either should not, will not or cannot be dealt with by those it is being kept from. Judith Merril addresses the question of the validity of omission during a time of crisis in her 1950 novel Shadow On the Hearth predominantly through the parent-child relationship, revealing both the reasoning behind certain omissions and the reality that such reasoning is not always justified.

This situation is best represented by Merril’s portrayal of the characters Gladys and Barbara. Barbara is shown to be a developing teenager, presented as a fifteen-year-old determined to prove her own “maturity” however she can, either by affecting mannerisms that are considered womanly, such as a certain “ladylike pace she read about in a magazine,” or alternating between calling Gladys ‘Mom’ or “Mother,” depending on the situation (Merril, 5, 6). Once the Bomb drops, however, the boundaries between indulging the whims of a young girl straining to assert her womanhood and being a ‘responsible’ parent become a much more serious concern. Gladys must now decide, or struggle to decide until a situation forces a decision on her, what information Barbara will be able to handle. When the announcement on the radio comes through about the location of the bombsites, Barbara is briefly overcome: “Somewhere inside her she heard the beginnings of a scream and then her ears heard it, and it was Barbara, not herself at all” (17). Yet later, when Gladys tries to protect Barbara by hiding information pamphlets on the bomb emergency services provide, Merril shows that this act was not only unnecessary, but counter-productive. After the initial shock passes, Barbara is shown to be both competent, adaptable and helpful when Gladys herself is on the verge of collapse, more than capable of handling the information on “radiation disease” and the possibility that she might be sick (112). The question of “How much should I tell her? How much should she know?” that Gladys asks herself early on in the text becomes one that, while difficult to decide, is increasingly beyond Gladys’s control (23). The difficulty in adjusting to the reality that a growing child cannot be sheltered from a frightening reality, that this ‘child’ is more than a bundle of teenaged self-assertion, but is also an extremely competent young adult whose informed help becomes essential to the greater good of the family group, becomes an irrelevancy that must be overcome. The only child whose cooperation is dependent upon being kept away from certain frightening realities is the pre-pubescent one, Ginny, and the gravity of an apocalyptic situation propels Barbara into the very maturity she has been striving for.

             

Given that Merril is recorded as having stated that Sf provided one of the only means of “political dissent” during the post-WWII time she was writing, the actions of Shadow On the Hearth are very easily translated into social commentary (Yascek, 3). The question of how much information should be provided about life-threatening technology and the application of that technology in real-world settings, to those who have been deemed as incapable of handling frightening information, becomes one that must be rethought. The action of the text demonstrates that omitting information can be counter-productive, that government-sanctioned information designed to pacify the population can lead to denial of certain realities once those realities occur, and that such denial can be more harmful than the brief hysteria that might follow a disturbing epiphany. Those least expected to be able to adapt just might excel, might prove to be integral forces for community-good, while those who are the most informed (such as their neighbor, the threatening Jim Turner) might just be the real source of the trouble. If Shadow On the Hearth is regarded as social commentary, Merril reveals that the omission of information to an adult population of citizens is both paternalistic and ultimately counter-productive to maintaining a state of peace among world communities. The omission of information enables only the informed to be capable of making decisions that affect the lives of the community. It eliminates choice and renders a population reactionary rather than assertive or prepared. It prevents emotional growth and well-being, rather than stimulating them.

          

I focused mainly on the parent-child aspect of omission in the text, but there are many other aspects of it that Merril addresses. Misogynistic or chauvinistic reasoning behind omission were particularly apparent in the male-female interactions in Shadow On the Hearth, for instance, but I felt that the parental aspect of omission was extremely relevant. While Gladys is portrayed by Merril as having loving (and practical) reasons behind questioning how much information Barbara should be given, when the text is regarded as political dissent, the parental mentality of this omission is unavoidably problematic. I’m not sure how much I can argue against how infantile adults can be at times, but Merril seems to be suggesting that these assumptions about the ability of people to behave responsibly in a time of crises may very well be unfounded. Yes, there will be those who are completely inept, as was the case with the Eddie Crowell character, but omitting information to keep people like Eddie in line also prevents women like Gladys, Veda or Barbara from excelling. Merril reveals through these characters that given the chance, those marginalized or infantilized by societal preconceptions might just rise to the occasion and be the most helpful and noble of all. If kept in the dark, the best of society might never have the chance to prove those assumptions wrong. 

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011

Journal #3

on Judith Merril's Shadow On the Hearth

Stuart Cloete and "The Blast"

“There was the girl who ran into Grand Central Station pursued by two men, whom I shot. It was as simple as that.  I was going out to get canned goods from the basement of a ruined store and had a rifle in my hand. I knew the girl by sight; she was a dancer in a nearby musical show. She smiled at me and said thank you as if I had opened a door for her. And I, regretting the expenditure of my own two shells, wondered if it had been worthwhile. The shots on my part, and the smile on the girl’s, were out of their context here.”

-Stuart Cloete, The Blast, pg.15

Cloete addresses this “context” in various points of the 1947 novella, The Blast, and I’m fairly certain his approach to discussing it marks morality as an object of utility. Morality here would stand for the reasoning behind utilizing bullets that could aid in self-preservation for the preservation of a stranger instead. Rather than indicating that morality is essential in all social interaction, Cloete suggests that it is society, the existence of a massive number of humans cohabitating in a country or community, which necessitates and validates moral action. Society provides context, a scenario in which certain behaviors are more appropriate than others for continued survival of the individual or individuals. This passage implies that personal survival in the absence of a social structure is of greater importance than group-survival. The narrator “regrets” using his bullets, and actually wonders if saving a young woman from two male aggressors was worth the “expenditure.” There is nothing to be gained on a social level for an action regarded as ‘good’ by the narrators’ pre-apocalypse society in a post-apocalyptic world, and when the girl smiles and “says thank you as if [he] had opened a door for her,” her response is an indication of a kind of pre-apocalypse echo. She is not relieved, not desperate, but carelessly grateful, as if he had not just saved her from rape and murder. Of course, it has to be considered that the narrator is unreliable. Perhaps if the girl had fallen over herself with gratitude, his character might have been presented as feeling that his actions were justified in preserving her life, but instead he is described as acting on reflex. Both he and the girl are enacting old behaviors rather than consciously creating new ones. There is no sense of rebuilding social structure here: He regrets saving her, and she is barely grateful to him. The morality that would have championed this behavior is gone, replaced by the pragmatism of the Cloete’s lone survivalist.  

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011
Journal #2

LoTR -- The Fanart Cometh

This is gingerhaze. She makes things like this:

And this:

Because Lord of the Rings silliness always needs to be perpetuated.

Philip Morrison and "If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand"

 “The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or two. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands. Even if, by means as yet unknown, we are able to stop as many as 90 percent of these missiles, their number will still be large. If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together so that science will be our help and not our hurt, there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.”

-Philip Morrison, “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand,”  (1947) pg.15

            What interests me particularly about this passage beyond its haunting prose is the fact that Morrison is discussing annihilation as a result of creation. This is man, or men, in the case of the Manhattan Project, creating death, and truly realizing only after seeing their creation at work, the full power of their progeny. The Bomb as an object is projected human Self manifested through combined thought and intent into fatal form, i.e. human thought and intent transformed into a physical objet capable of mass destruction. Once utilized, however, this object does something more astonishing than mass-murder and incalculable violence: it unifies. The creation and use of the Bomb is an act of man leading to an epiphany of widespread consequences that affect the human community as whole. It seems a little ironic that a creation meant to maintain boundaries between human communities unified all communities aware of that creation, through fear of one terrifying fate. Cultures, languages or religions may differ, but all human beings die. The idea of death is dealt with in various ways by the living, but the terror of this particular death and the suddenness with which it can arrive is what makes the Bomb so “unendurable” (7). Action must therefore be taken to prevent this scenario from occurring again, which is why Morrison and the others who wrote in One World Or None, the ones responsible for the birthing of this terror, so urgently argued against its use. “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand” is a didactic text intended to present in clearest written terms that the bomb is so powerful, so very terrifying to all men, that hysteria would be the result of any continued use of it. Fear of a particular death would be so great that reason would vanish in a frenzy of rampant, but completely illogical, self-defense. Mankind united in hysterical frenzy is a terrifying prospect, even more so considering that by creating a weapon that in turn creates mass hysteria, the makers and users of the bomb instigate their own potential destruction. Morrison’s short story here is a warning that this scenario could occur, but it is also a reassurance that the bombs do not have to be used. Control can be regained before the nightmare ever really begins if it is caught in time, if reason masters fear.

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Science Fiction, Fall 2011
Journal #1