Signs of the times

Since the levels of simulation and reality in eXistenZ are pretty difficult to parse, it seems appropriate to abandon the usual mode of explicatory summary and simply re-present a number of the thematic “levels” on which I saw the movie operate, elaborating on each one even if I cannot put them into a hierarchy. These might be called “signs of the times,” the phrase by which Allegra named the mutant amphibian that proved to have been designed for the production of the simulation: wonders ultimately comprehensible by the logic of the narrative.

The nightmare of production. Here I’m thinking of what the project manager of sorts calls “the strong and deliberate anti-game theme” near the end, which guides the movement of the plot throughout. The play known up front as such (by which I mean to exclude the initial scene of “plugging in,” thwarted by the assassin, that we later learn to have been a simulation as well) begins with an act of consumption (the purchase of a new game system) that swiftly uncovers the nightmare of production (specifically, these systems’ manufacture). Cronenberg underscores the fantasy—that consumption might reveal something, however discomfiting, about production; some call this "the Kunkel fruit," after its most recent author—by redoubling it, insofar as it occurs within an interior simulation run on the purchased system itself. As it happens, that simulation occurs through a literal act of consumption, since the simulated game system must actually be absorbed within the body to function. And while the revelation of the (internally simulated) mode of production of the game system draws upon modern horrors of genetic modification and organ harvesting, it situates them in an oddly antique, even Californian setting: an airy and dusty wooden warehouse with a peculiarly large and unacculturated Asian population (more on whom shortly), as if the secret of late capitalist fantasy were its continuity with late American colonialism. Despite his disgust, Ted Pikul (Jude Law)—a “PR geek,” the model of a white-collar laborer and someone advanced modern enough into modernity to have developed a neurotic phobia of biological modification—finds himself laboring automatically, as an automaton. For all the truth of corporate malfeseance and biological exploitation may horrify us, it also comes to us consumers and producers quite naturally.

The masturbating, alienating woman. It’s difficult for me to elaborate on a projection of sexuality onto the scenes of “play,” in part because it’s difficult for me to interpret them in any other way. One distinction I could draw, however, would note the total absence of sexual tension between Ted and Allegra Geller (Jennifer Jason Leigh) until they enter a level of simulation consciously understood as such—specifically, in the back-room of the video game store, where they seem to come onto each other despite themselves. Before then Allegra is alienatingly aloof, while Ted’s neurotically so. His reserve appears to be due to his “phobia about getting penetrated—surgically, I mean,” which needs little explanation (except to maintain that Ted’s repression reads more as square than closeted, to me, anyway). I can risk the appearance of sexist essentialism in saying that Ted’s too meek to introduce any element of sexuality into his relationship with Allegra—which we learn, at the end, is an ongoing real one, making the gradual reintroduction of interest appear more like therapy than anything else—because it’s explicitly a failure to, well, give her what she wants. Allegra insists at least twice on her desire to “play eXistenZ with someone friendly” because it takes that many for Ted to overcome his phobia; before then, she is shown retreating into the game in a scene that (given Cronenberg’s perversely nipply controllers) strikingly resembles an act of masturbation. (In confirmation of this reading, I can note that Allegra is introduced as someone who “spends all her time alone in her room designing games. I think she’d like it best if she never had to show them to anybody.”) This scene alienates Ted and aggravates his phobia, unsurprisingly; the penetration of the self through masturbatory fantasy both cuts to the heart of his problem and cuts away at the livelihood of their decayed relationship.

Multiculturalism as theater of the absurd. To finish without concluding, I’ll throw up my hands in bewilderment at the function accents serve in the movie. The characters themselves are bewildered, from Ted initially to the players/actors themselves at the very end. At a loss to closely read here, I’ll wildly speculate that the interior fiction stages multiculturalism as a kind of nonconsensual element within the consensual hallucination of late capitalism (or something). Imposed upon actors earnestly attempting to acquire a starring role, these “bad” accents at once throw the entire simulation into an uncanny valley and the starring white couple in flattering relief; whatever necessitates them is the same force that ineluctably carries the recognition of difference into the stereotype. Once explicitly addressed by the frustrated players/actors, they even come to seem like a technique for the subordination of the majority necessary to the elevation of the individual promised by capitalism and narrative fiction alike.

Cyberspace as it Affects Concepts of Distance

Neuromancer is a surprising piece of fiction in that it is predictive of issues relating to technology that could only be guessed at before. Through Case's obsession with jacking into cyberspace and the world therein Gibson creates an arena in which he explores the question of the affect of technology on physical and psychic distance. Characters in the novel travel from Japan, to the Sprawl of the United States, Turkey, to the space stations of Zion and Freeside. The actual physical locations are of little import, for in a world where technology allows remote access to information from anyplace a character such as Henry Dorsett Case finds more intrigue in Cyberspace than in the physical realm.

From the novel's opening we see reality through the lense of technology, with the words "The Sky above the port was the color of television, tuned to a dead channel" (4). Reality is a sort of fiction to Case and others, as he interacts with and describes the world in terms of the digital in order to evoke substantive feeling. The world of cyberspace bleeds into the world of the real to such an extent that the "artificial" characters of Wintermute, Neuromancer, and even McCoy Pauley/The Dixie Flatline often blur the lines between the physical reality and the psychic reality.

Wintermute cannot actually interact with the characters without assuming the form of another character they have met in their lives. His personality is diffuse and relies on accessing the memory imprints of people and places from others in order to actually have access to the world outside a computer. Similarly  Neuromancer is able to call upon the dead memories of others (i.e., Linda Lee) and develops them in a way that Wintermute cannot. Rather than merely accessing the form and familiarity of a character Neuromancer can evoke them in all of their complexities while maintaing an actual separate consciousness from them. As contrasted by the two AIs central to the story this separation of the mind from the body either representing it or a fundamental part of it is reflective of the greater issue of man's separation between the realm of the mental and the physical as shown by Case.

Case routinely decries his own seemingly foolish actions as resulting from "meat" and exalts a form of union with technology in which he is psychically distant from his own body. There is a sort of rebuttal against this desire to severe yourself wholly from the realm of the physical. Before I forget I should address the character of McCoy Pauley as presented through the construct The Dixie Flatline. Dixie or Dix is a remnant of the deceased mentor to Case who suffered from a fatal case of "black ice" when he was probing into the AI Neuromancer's security features. Dix appears dissatisfied with his position as a sort of cyber-ghost, a remnant of a man confined to a computer. His existence does not appear enjoyable. He routinely expresses his desire to be erased as a payment for completing his one last job, which makes sense considering his position: he was literally comodified by a corporation as he now exists in state of pure spirit in the matrix and is solely defined by his role as a hacker. This case of actual psychic and physical severing through Dix's remaining as a cyber imprint whose continued existence is contingent on his role as a hacker shows a fatalistic end to Case's addiction to the realm of the purely psychic.

As real as unreality can get.

Physical places take on traces of the digital to display Case's fundamental disinterest and removal from the realm of the physical. Even when he returns to his home "BAMA, the Sprawl, the Boston-Atlanta Metropolitan Axis" from his two-year exile to Chiba city Gibson's narration denies us a stark physical description of the place. Instead the cities and places of the Sprawl are described in the abstract concept of data exchange. The place is not determined by its physical description but rather by how much abstracted information passes through the city.

~“Program a map to display frequency of data exchange, every thousand megabytes a single pixel on a very large screen. Manhattan and Atlanta burn solid white. Then they start to pulse, the rate of traffic threatening to overload your simulation. Your map is about to go nova. Cool it down. Up your scale. Each pixel a million megabytes. At a hundred million megabytes per second, you begin to make out certain blocks in midtown Manhattan, outlines of hundred-year-old industrial parks ringing the old core of Atlanta...” (40)

Digitizing the real.

At Odds with Being Vulcan? - Düttman & Identity Politics in K/S

tags: homosexuality, identity, AIDS, alienation, feminism



Broke Trek - (for more silly [and tame] K/S, check out http://fuckyeahthyla.tumblr.com/)

EDIT: OK ONE MORE, I'M SORRY IT'S JUST TOO MUCH FUN:

“So, too, the fans appreciate gay men’s efforts to appreciate masculinity, and feel a sense of solidarity with them insofar as gay men also inhabit bodies that are a legal, moral, and religious battleground.” (Penley 130)

“In other words, when fighting the politics of the state…when denouncing the social stigmatization of the infected, the activist cannot avoid the dangers of an identification, of an equation of AIDS and homosexuality, by having recourse to a sexual ideal that has already been mourned.”  (Alexander García Düttmann’s At Odds With Aids: Things & Talking About a Virus, 54)

In his book, At Odds With Aids*,Düttmann talks about the way in which AIDS brings to the foreground a phenomenon of human identity which has always been true, but which AIDS makes undeniable – the Being-not-one with oneself of human identity. Or, in other words, the way in which human identity is always never complete in and of itself but always marked by other beings and by other spaces. For a person with AIDS, the disease becomes a huge part of that person’s identity – and yet the disease is the mark of another body, and a specific other time, that is separate from that person, that is not a part of them, but that still defines who they are. In such a way, AIDS makes blatant a fact that is inherent in the identity of every human being – our identities are all constantly defined by a Being-not-one, constantly defined by other beings, other times, other places, over which we have no control.

Alienation, isolation, production

Moon and Nova seem particularly difficult but fruitful to compare, as each appears especially like an overdetermined document of its moment of production when contrasted with the other—the rollicking, zany world of 1968 seeming to speak a language different from the spare, bleak world of 2009. In order to go about the business of posting, then, I’m going to have to take the somewhat tenuous step of interpreting the absence of what interested me in Nova from Moon as significant (though it’s likelier just a contingent result of the film’s premise): I’d like to compare Delany’s tandem articulation of communal artistic and mechanical production to Moon’s frontier, which seems to be without use for art and humanity alike.

Though it begins to appear this way by comparison, the future of art presented in Nova is hardly undimmed sunny 1960s optimism; not only does Katin’s perpetually delayed ambition to write a novel often seem personally pathetic, but it could easily be dismissed as a senseless and retrogressive anachronism. Still, by the end of our novel his thoughts on the parameters of his seem to me to come into line with the world’s harmony between man and machine that, by Moon’s standards, is almost impossibly hopeful. Katin does, at times, articulate a recognizably contemporary (and perhaps modernist) sense of a novel’s purpose, however cynically: “‘[Novels’] popularity lay in that they belied the loneliness of the people who read them, people essentially hypnotized by the machinations of their own consciousness.’” He tries again to articulate his ambition immediately afterward, by which point he seems to have already moved on to the postmodern “systems novel” (of which his excessive research would seem to be a recognizable symptom), contrasting it with Mouse’s own marvelous, but to a modern reader quite mysterious, form of artistic production: “‘I could sit and watch you play for hours. But they’re only momentary joys, Mouse. It’s only when all one knows of life is abstracted and used as an underlining statement of significant patterning that you have what is both beautiful and permanent.” (178-179) We might make sense of the differing theories by reference to the 1960’s own peculiar amalgams between incipient postmodern paranoia and nostalgic romantic or modernist affection for the heroic, suffering, male and martyred artist, but it might be more effective—if more tenuous—to relate one of Katin’s final decisions regarding his project to the novel’s own world. Just after explaining Ashton Clark’s gift to humanity—an authentic relation between man and machine, reversing Marx’s alienation of the industrial laborer by giving him a proximate knowledge and control over both the means and end of his labor—Katin discovers his true subject: his own time, and his own companion. Against the reigning wisdom that “[t]here seems to be a certain lack of cultural solidity today,” Katin will render Mouse an exemplar of the novel’s turbulent creole society. (217-220) In reaching this conclusion, Katin not only fulfills every previous plan for his novel—from the notion that it must concern relationships (178) to the idea that it should represent “[e]ach individual as a junction in that net” of larger cultural and economic forces (174)—he also achieves the kind of harmony between his form of life and his artistic labor that would have otherwise seemed impossible for a novelist after the death of his form (and can today seem impossible, without an Ashton Clark to save us).

Anyway—Moon is difficult to read closely along these lines, which is precisely my point. Sam’s seems to be a life without art, just as it is quite literally a life without purpose and function. His mine is the perfect example of the “factories run by a single man . . . an uninvolved character who turned a switch on in the morning, slept half the day, checked a few dials at lunchtime, then turned off before he left in the evening” that Ashton Clark seems to have been secularly sanctified for rendering obsolete (219). It is fitting, then, that his self-alienation is total: Sam is a man uninvolved even in his own character, because he has none; even his wife (his only passion) is a fiction. It may be odd to say that Sam’s trouble seems to be as much as his alienation from the machines around him as his humanity—and from artistic as much as mechanical production—but the hints of Marxism in Delany’s narrative may provide some ground.

Energy and Alienation

Several times throughout Nova, characters use “Ashton Clark” as part of “good luck” phrases, and it is only towards the end of the novel that Mouse asks Katin why. Ashton Clark was a 23rd century philosopher-psychologist whose theories found a solution in neural plugs. He believed that the separation between a person’s work/production and their everyday life was “psychologically damaging” to humanity, and that unless people exerted their own energy in their work, they’d feel that their lives were futile (218). So Souquet invents neural plugs and sockets, and all major industrial work becomes broken down from factories that could be operated by one man at the push of a button into “jobs that could be machined ‘directly’ by man” (219). This philosophy “returned humanity to the working man,” eliminating many feelings of alienation and rendering war impossible.

I’m not very familiar with Marxist theory (feel free to correct me if any of this is off), but one of Marx’s general ideas is that the Industrial Revolution (with mass production and assembly lines) caused an increasing alienation between workers and the products they put together - at best, they would produce one small aspect of a product, and then they would have no direct connection to that product other than the money they received for it. The wages they received, abstract representations of their connection to their products, were too small to allow them economic access to many of the materials they were producing. As technology improves, and industrial labor becomes less specialized and more machine-based, the alienation between worker and the economy continues. So when Ashton Clark proposes bringing humanity closer to the intimate control of machines to remedy human alienation from production, he’s responding to Marxist theory (I found it interesting that Marx wasn’t mentioned at all in the novel, though). The tradeoff for this “return to humanity” is a sacrifice of distinct cultures and certain art forms (and the rise of sensory art forms like the sensory-syrynx). Individuals become tied to their machines, dependent on energy and victims of wealthy families’ energy wars, or they can be like Mouse, part of a Gypsy class that resists plugging in, still attached to cultural traditions.

Sleep Dealers, which has some uncannily similar technologies to Nova, shows an opposite effect of alienated labor. Memo comes from Oaxaca, a village in Mexico where people do not work through nodes (somewhat like Mouse before he gets sockets). He moves to escape his father’s death, gets nodes, works in one of the sleep-dealer factories, where he plugs into jobs thousands of miles away. This is part of “the American dream”: “work without the workers.” Americans can profit off of this cheap factory labor without being forced to recognize the laborers as “human,” and the workers are entirely alienated from the work sites. (Paradoxically, the neural networks are also supposed to bring people closer together.) Like the Gypsies in Nova, the people in Memo’s community live completely outside of this new kind of labor. Also like Nova, the people who do “plug in” become dependent on energy - the workers literally have the energy trained from their bodies. (Also, as a sidenote, writing turns into a sensory memory experience, just like novels and other art forms in Nova).
Moon shows an entirely different aspect of alienation from the labor force. The Sam Bell clones are replaced every three years. They work on the moon, harvesting energy and sending it back to power the Earth. To motivate the clones, they are charged with Sam Bell’s memories and video clips from his wife - the clones think that they are actually Alex, and after three years of solitary labor, they can return to their family. This, I think, is supposed to bridge the gap between total alienation from the product. If a clone is stuck by himself on the moon, expected to send energy back to a world that he will never be a part of, he will have no motivation or connection to that life. Or he might decide to rebel against his fate, as one of the Sams does. The Sam at the beginning of the film, however, blissfully unaware that he's a clone, also seems heavily alienated from society - he represents exactly the type of worker that Marx was cautioning people against — people whose entire existence drives towards harvesting energy that will drive further types of production that they will never directly benefit from.

Does Nova really offer a solution to labor alienation? Is it fair to tether people to their machines to the point where their identity becomes based on the work that they do rather than any other cultural identity? It seems slightly better than the alternatives offered in the two movies — sapping the working class of their energy from thousands of miles away so that wealthy Americans don’t have to look at them or implanting clones with human memories and emotions so that they can feel connected to a life they will never have — but I’m still unsure whether solving alienated labor is worth the sacrifice of cultures.

GERTY and HAL 9000

**Spoilers abound for both Moon and 2001: A Space Odyssey**

It's pretty obvious to me that Jones had 2001: A Space Odyssey as one of his inspirations for Moon (luckily Wikipedia agrees with me on this one; parallels between HAL and GERTY include but are not limited to: the eye, the voice, the "I can't let you go outside, Sam"/"I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that"). And with that knowledge, the ending became even more poignant. In many ways, GERTY reflects a conception of AI that HAL also reflects. They both have programming, a mission, and something which seems to exist beyond those: emotion. In the movie version of 2001, it is not so clear that HAL really has human emotions, except for a few moments where HAL seems to speak with pride in its perfect operational record. In the novel, Clarke ventures deeper into HAL's subjectivity, and gives HAL a complex set of motivations and emotions that turn it into the most human character in the novel (in my opinion, at least). Back to the movie version of 2001: the ultimate confrontation in the narrative is not between Dave and the alien intelligence as represented in the monolith, but between the human intelligence in human form-Dave, and the human intelligence in computer form-HAL. Dave and HAL find themselves opposed to the point of death, as they feel that their mission is compromised by the other's existence. Dave wins this battle, in perhaps the saddest scene in the entire movie.


The entire sequence leading to HAL's death, with its efforts to persuade Dave not to kill it, Dave's slow removal of the vacuum tubes, HAL saying "I'm afraid", HAL's singing of "Daisy Bell"

Throughout the movie, HAL only interacts with the crew through its eye and through its voice. GERTY, on the other hand, has a convenient screen for expressing emotions. Though this screen should help establish GERTY as a more human character, I actually found this screen almost distracting as it was such a transparent effort to give GERTY a recognizable face.


Two images of GERTY, one of its crying face and one of its robotic arm reaching out to comfort Sam. Which seems more human?

It detracted from GERTY's actions, which on their own create a dynamic, conflicted character. It attempts to keep Sam (#2, I think, even though he seemed to be clone 6 in the movie; it's just more convenient to label the two Sams we see #1 and #2) inside the base, but then it turns around and saves Sam #1. It hides the live feed from the Sams, but then reveals to Sam #1 that he is a clone, one of many. It helps Sam #1 access the logs, and asks Sam #2 to effectively kill it because it will tell the ELIZA crew what happened. GERTY is obviously programmed by the LUNAR company (so many acronyms in all caps!), but has developed a sort of personality through the years of working with Sams on the base. It likes Sam, beyond its programming. (True, a computer should not develop things outside of its programming, but I suppose this is in a world where GERTY is a true artificial intelligence and can pass the Turing test easily.)

So it's depressing when the same opposition between human intelligence and artificial intelligence is played out between Sam #2 and GERTY. He kills it, as much as he would be dead if it had killed him. GERTY's personality, all the quirks it developed, all the attachments it made, are wiped out by the restart that GERTY asks Sam #2 to do. This reboot is practically the same thing as one Sam dying, only to be replaced with another one with the same initial memories and same start-up procedure. Yet that death is small and in the background, compared to Sam #2's journey to earth. Sam #2 doesn't feel that death in the same way he feels his own death, perhaps because he doesn't see the similarity between him and GERTY. Yet when he says, "We're not programmed. We're people. Understand?", perhaps he means "Sams and GERTYs" as much as he means "Sams".

Technology, Alienation and Humanity

Although both “Nova” and “Moon” imagine societies in which technological advancements are integrated into methods of economic production, I was intrigued by their differing depictions of how these advancements might affect work satisfaction. In “Nova”, workers are able to physically interact with the products of their labor by plugging into machines with their implants. This enables them to become more deeply connected with their job, making them less alienated from their everyday work and more satisfied with their job. “Moon”, on the other hand, suggests that technology might have the opposite effect, as it is set in a world in which technological advancements have enabled the establishment of mining bases on the moon which need only minimal human supervision. However, as the sole operator of his outpost, Sam has only the non-human Gerty for companionship, and constantly counts down the days till the end of his contract, suggesting that he is very much looking forward to leaving behind the terrible solitude of his workplace. Thus whereas Nova suggests how technological advancements might solve the problem of working-class citizens being dissatisfied with their working conditions, Moon depicts a future in which they actually worsen this problem.

While “Nova” and “Moon” may disagree on this point, both do appear to suggest that technology can alienate people from their humanity. During his confrontation with Lorq in the City of Dreadful Night, Prince is severely injured, and is only able to stay alive by encasing his body in a tank filled with nutrient liquids containing “alien proteins”, leaving him unable to vocalize except through a speaker. Thus medical advancements allow Prince to continue living, but in a state arguably less than human, as his body is no longer physically able to perform many actions a normal human would be able to. However, whereas Prince appears to lose his humanity in a physical sense, “Moon” suggests how technology can alienate people from their humanity from an ethical perspective. For example, Lunar Industries treats the clones of Sam unethically by using them as disposable tools and deceiving them regarding the terms of their employment contracts, but such inhumane treatment was only made possible by advancements in cloning technology. Thus both “Moon” and “Nova” suggest that technology can cause people to become alienated from or otherwise lose touch with their humanity, although in different senses.

In the process of making these suggestions, “Moon” and “Nova” raise uncomfortable questions about what exactly defines humanity. For example, the clones of Sam certainly seem very human to us, a point Sam himself drives home when he emphatically says to Gerty, “We’re not programs. We’re people.” But are they really? Normal humans do not have years of memories implanted into them, or life expectancies of only three years, as evidenced by the first Sam’s deteriorating health towards the end of his employment contract. As explained above, the extent to which Prince can be considered human after his confrontation with Lorq is also questionable, as normal human beings do not survive in nutrient tanks or vocalize through speakers. Do Prince’s and the clones’ possession of human thought processes suffice to categorize them as human? Or must the presence of a human mind be coupled with physical characteristics possessed by normal humans, in order for a being to be considered human? “Nova” and “Moon” challenge our preconceived notions of what it means to be human with these questions, but do not appear to provide any straightforward answers to them.

Near of Kin: Wheres the Sci fi?

When I read “Near of Kin,” the what ran through my head while I read it was “when is this going to be a science fiction story?” There were no whiz-bang flying cars or androids or anything else. It was only about two thirds of the way through the story that I realized that the spectacle I had come to expect of science fiction was not going to happen. The entire story takes place in one room, hardly a showcase for technology or alien civilizations, and even the surprise twist ending I was sure would come on the last page did not come.
However, perhaps there is a sci fi aspect to the story. While the characters start off seemingly completely normal, throughout the story there is a constant alienation of the characters from the reader, as you learn more and more of their disturbing past. In this case, this would not be science fiction in the literal sense, but an appropriation of the emotions and conventions of science fiction in order to achieve the same alienation (alienation that is usually in a literal sense) in a contemporary, non-speculative story. This alienation arises, of course, from incest.
Incest is the ultimate taboo, and to see this universally reviled act is treated, as the author herself calls it: “a sympathetic story about incest,” creates a huge disconnect between the reader and the characters. I am confident that upon asking any person whether they could be sympathetic toward incest, they would almost always answer with an immediate and emphatic no. Furthermore they would find it difficult to understand the situation in which such an act could even possibly be sympathetic. To be dropped into a world where the narrator’s uncle, while not condoning, has somewhat accepted incest as part of his life is completely unrelatable in the same way as asking a person point-blank what their opinions on incest are.
But then comes the next greatest power that science fiction has: the ability to make the alien relatable, to sympathize with something completely foreign. Octavia’s story is surprisingly relatable. The characters handle incest in a sympathetic and relatable way, and the gradual introduction of the issue in the story, rather than beating the reader over the head with it (a sci fi trope which the story thankfully avoided). So while not a literal science fiction story, Near of Kin appropriates perhaps the best parts of the genre, and employs them in an unexpected, yet no less alien setting.

Ai and Estraven

The relationship between Ai and Estraven takes long to develop because of Ai’s distrust and Estraven’s failure to communicate. But the biological division is still greater than the social ones, and the journey across the ice parallels the slow process of empathy. Genly Ai describes Estraven in physical, somer-kemmer or woman-man dualized terms, especially by sight: “I saw [Estraven] now defenseless and half-naked in a colder light … and saw him as he was” (201), “I saw then again … what I had always been afraid to see, and had pretended not to see in [Estraven]: that he was a woman as well as a man” (248). For Ai, their defining moment of friendship came from accepting the difference between the two, and yet the power in the scene (248–249) derives from the great potential of their mutual love during Estraven’s kemmer.

Ai’s valuation of physical sexuality and love contrast Estraven’s use of intuition and psychological understanding, as mysterious as the nature through which they travel: “There is a frailty about [Ai] … he has a spirit easy to despair and quick to defiance: a fierce impatient courage” (227), “[Ai’s] name is a cry of pain” (229), “I am infected by Ai’s pure pleasure” (230). Even Estraven’s curiosity of Ai’s kemmer-perversion is framed in terms of what Estraven believes is Ai’s “low-grade sort of desire” (232) and not primarily a physical description.

Ai and Estraven also differ in their narrative styles. Whereas Ai frequently writes as “I” and recalls dialogue, Estraven instead observes, describes, and conjectures. Again one sees the dualism between seeing, through one’s own eye, and intuiting as facets of getting to the truth, which for each is appreciation for the other. The physical love, seeing-is-believing methodology of Ai then is a rather Western perspective next to the Estraven’s Eastern intuition: emotional, patient, trust-valuing, believing-is-seeing. But their apparent equality in the fairness of a harsh environment covers, with a layer of snow, the dominance each school exerts on either Ai or Estraven, who only when stripped bare of the social and normative values of Karhide or Terra—shifgrethor and masculinity—contemplate a substantial friendship aided by the tension of kemmer between aliens. The periodic changes in narrative voice provides a better “blending process” than, say, “A Rose for Ecclesiastes,” which as Rhiannon pointed out is characterized by a marked imbalance.

On the other hand, such an imbalance is present but not at the detailed, personal level which suggests a gradual acceptance of otherness. Instead, the ultimate arrival of Ai’s ship, the prophecy of Gethen’s alliance, and Estraven’s death are each conquests, however empathetic or nonviolent, which in this case are of the Western ideas over the Eastern. More important than the exactly posed conflict is Ai’s final isolation following his transformation across the ice. In a position to understand and appreciate both worlds, Ai instead sees in his own kind as “great apes with intelligent eyes” while finding “familiar” the ungendered face of a Gethenian (296). Had Estraven survived, they may have experienced a similar alienation among his Karhidians, who in fact betrayed him to punish his own attempt for understanding. Is this the cost of acknowledging the other? The story ends before we see the Ekumen and Gethen’s progress, so Ai and Estraven are tragic characters. Or, perhaps the way to reaching out to the other may be attained, as Ai did, at the level of personal touch, and its prevalence increased by diffusion rather than swept away by some clash of cultures.

Tiptree’s Women: Themes of Alienation and Escape

Although all vastly different, several of the stories that we read in Her Smoke Rose Up Forever share a common theme: women’s response to crisis, and their reaction to and escape from the specter of male-dominated society.

In the highly disturbing “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, we see a girl so desperate to escape the stigma she suffers for her own ugliness that she first tries to take her own life and then, when provided with the opportunity, throws herself so completely into a fictional life created for her that she essentially abandons her own identity. A parallel escape into fantasy occurs in “With Delicate, Mad Hands”, as CP uses her fantasy of an “Empire” in which she is accepted to power her dedication to her work and to allow her to distance herself from and cope with the pain and humiliation she suffers on a daily basis. In both these examples, the protagonist’s suffering is clearly presented as the product of an oppressive, male-dominated society in which she simply cannot fit. In “The Girl Who Was Plugged In”, modern consumerism bears the brunt of Tiptree’s attack: celebrities are “gods” and a girl initially described as being full of guileless love can only find happiness by assuming a “perfect” image that is nevertheless empty (“Delphi” has no say in her own life, she is constantly monitored, her physical senses are dimmed, and her sexuality dampened). Even the romance of the story is a superficial lie; Paul is quick to reject the idea that his love could be anything but the beauty in front of him. In “With Delicate, Mad Hands”, CP is, like P. Burke, ostracized because of her physical appearance, which, in a society where a woman’s purpose seems essentially to fulfill sexual needs and serve as “a low-status noncompetitive servant and rudimentary mother figure” (219), is enough to condemn her to a life of abuse that culminates in murderous insanity. Both of these characters, as seems to be the norm for Tiptree, are quite doomed—they die young, after experiencing only the briefest tastes of love and acceptance.

The female characters in “The Women Men Don’t See” and “Houston, Houston, Do You Read?” are of a different breed entirely. Calm and professional, these women aren’t fazed by the attempts at domination by the men they encounter. Like P. Burke and CP, Ruth and Althea are misfits in a patriarchal society, and seek escape. However, as Ruth’s ingenuity shows, they need neither man’s approval nor men themselves. Similarly, the women in “Houston, Houston” have absolutely no desire to include men in the culture they have developed. Although one could definitely argue that their society is handicapped by their lack of progress, individuality, and desire to feel deep emotions, they clearly don’t feel that gaping hole in their lives that Bud and Dave feel driven to fill.

While all of these stories share a theme of women escaping the domination of men, they illustrate two widely divergent forms of escape: Escape by rising above prescribed societal roles (and, indeed, any need for men at all), and escape by falling below them.