History is the Key

Personally, I am a sucker for historical continuity. By this I mean that I love seeing a historical connection, a "What if?" scenario, or some other sort of historical reinterpretation that is incorporated into a work of fiction set in the modern era. Snow Crash is just that, a look back through the millennia at human historical figues, cultures, and knowledge through the lens of a computer scientist and the knowledge of a biological "machine code." Hiro's presentation to Uncle Enzo, Mr. Lee, and Ng was riveting and piqued my interest by combining a new theory with a multitude of historical "references" simultaneously.

Peter Bruegel the Elder's Interpretation of the Tower of Babel.

The lynchpin in Stephenson's Snow Crash is that the Biblical (and other sources') story of the Tower of Babel was in fact, literally true. In a bid to encourage humanity to expand, diversify, and grow, Enki releases a helpful neurolinguistic "antivirus" which infects Sumerian society and soon the world. The antivirus has a near 100% "infection" rate and causes its "victims" to create a linguistic "user interface" over the basics of their respective brains. The "infection" prevents an understanding of the Sumerian language (the human "machine code") which Hiro likens to a normal computer virus. Thus language is not only a means of communication, but also shields the baser brain functions from "hacking" (basically mind control). Stephenson also explains the human desire for religion as us seeking as sort of "operating system" from which we can function in union with each other yet also remain individuals. Thus religions such as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all encourage precise transcription of their respective "systems" (their holy books) to ensure purity and prevent "hacking" by the cult of Asherah.

This picture of YT was too cool to pass up

As unpoetic as my writing may be, I found all of Stephenson's ideas fascinating and stunning in their simplicity yet depth. In one fell swoop (pages 394-403), he has rewritten human history in a new light while also retaining the truth of most of these past actions. The three Abrahamic religions thus remain based upon maintaining certain key cultural norms (avoiding promiscuity, maintain human relationships yet continue advancement, etc...) while also functioning as a shield against the fictional Metavirus (courtesy of Asherah). Jesus was a shot in the arm for Semitic culture as a bid to prevent the Pharisees from repeating Sumer's mistakes. The core truth remains but a hidden agenda is revealed. All the while, human civilization advances.

Thus Stephenson has also addressed two key parts of human history: the development into civilization and the push to religion despite the rise of the age of science. The former is summarized quite effectively by Hiro in that the first civilizations and cultures were "viruses" within an otherwise normal mammalian species. Fundamentally, humans and apes are not that different on a biological level, yet have vastly different brain functions. Admittedly some of this is attributed to raw brain size, however, the key is the "operating system." Comparing us to monkeys is then like comparing two similar computers: one might be slightly newer and thus mechanically faster, but the key is that it also has the new interface which makes it several times more powerful.

This brings us to the second idea: that various religions (or a similar belief systems) are sought by humans to be this "operating system." The reason why random cults are suddenly popular is because people incorrectly believe that they have found a superior system, etc... What have been seen as random impulses are now understood to be simple, human-specific biological functions to always seek self-improvement (or a better system). For example, Juanita is both a confident Christian and incredibly knowledgeable thus allowing her to "cure" herself of the Asherah infection.

So religion is about what's under the hood just like the Mac v. PC war

In summary, Snow Crash was a fascinating read for me because it seemed to link, explain, and answer many of the recurring principles and questions about the history and development of humanity. While still Science Fiction in the sense that the novel is built upon (the currently) impossible premise of the "brain code," it is still amazing how well Stephenson was able to tie together religion, technology, civilization, and knowledge together through such a simpler idea (at least in our age of the computer).

The fantasy of history

I’d like to quickly take note of Body Surfing’s genre, since it pretty clearly lies the farthest from science fiction on its spectrum with fantasy among the books we’ve read thus far. Not only do I not mean to delegitimize the novel in noting this, of course (not being the hardest of hard-sf fans myself); I actually think Peck’s awareness and curiosity about the idea of fantasy presented within the book could go a long way toward convincing any of those who are suspicious of the genre. From Body Surfing’s very first moments in ancient Rome, fantasy begins to look like alternate history, projecting utopia (or at least varieties of embodiment) onto the known past as a way of making its more curious twists comprehensible. By tracking the Mogran through history, mass disasters as disparate as the fall of Rome (186), the slow-motion genocide of witches in medieval Europe (252) and even the Holocaust can be written into a single account. While it may seem peculiar to call this alternate history utopian—since it looks backwards rather than forwards, obsessing over the worst extremes of which people are capable—I think it accomplishes much the same work. By postulating a kind of transhistorical and inhuman (if not posthuman) force for societal disruption, it manages largely to acquit humanity of its own history and reinterpret our own form of life as less imperfect, rather than imagine another as perfect.

Perhaps the best evidence for this reading is the awareness Peck demonstrates of the work fantasy can accomplish, which is actually an awareness on the part of the “Gatherers”: more or less the academics among the Legion, they go about “[r]ounding up the Mogran’s abandoned hosts like stone-age women picking up acorns while their men go out with spears and hunt bears[.]” That’s Lana, the hunter, speaking to the gentle Dr. Thomas—giving some irony to her following aside that “[t]he gender roles might have softened, but the hierarchy hasn’t” (210). Though it might seem a stretch to identify the curiosity of these figures within the plot with that of authors of fantasy within the world—since there are “real” consequences for the Gatherers, and their work heeds the needs of “real” victims—Peck has Thomas align the history of the Gatherers and the Legion with the history of the genre of fantasy. Thus “the so-called Cult of the Child, a literature of symbolic, often surreal stories that evinced an enormous fear of, and fascination with, adult sexuality” is rewritten as the therapeutic fantasy work of three of the Mogran’s most famous victims—Hans Christian Andersen, Lewis Carroll, and J.M. Barrie (184). Within the world of the novel, fantasy becomes a personal work of recovery, from trauma and of that trauma’s larger history. The lesson for us in ours might be to listen more closely to fantasy, then, and the truth of the history it fabricates.

12 parsecs

I highly recommend this background reading on interstellar trade by none other than our own Professor Krugman. My favorite quote: “I do not pretend to develop a theory which is universally valid, but it may at least have some galactic relevance.”

The reason I mention the above paper, which explains how economics is compatible with special relativity (and does it with exceptional sass), is because Nova’s economics is much more straightforward: vaned spaceships do not obey relativistic time dilation, and interstellar communication is uninhibited by causality; these have become traditional assumptions in SF. Yet Nova also comes with a history of political, economic, and cultural shifts—the Von Ray family, the Outer Colonies, and the Vega rebellion—which in part depend on former technological constraints which have since become irrelevant. For all of the benefit associated with the new system of labor and the prospect of sudden “regime change” sitting on the new Illyrion-nova economy, there is nothing quite new about the overall system of economics, which proceeds as a larger-scaled but faster (not slower as in Krugman) version of events which may conceivably have happened on Earth. Part of this is that time in Nova is more or less linear, which brings to mind the notion of progress and the anthropological equating of long times into the past with long distances out in space.

In Nova, the past invariably revolves around the 20th century, but there is no clear allegorical reading which suggests that going to Earth, or any other destination (like Phoenix’s Alkane Institute), is equal to going to the past. On the other hand, since Katin is the author of the narrative constructed after its described events, what we are reading is more closely the narrative of Katin’s (read: Earth’s) relationship to its own history, some recent events experienced firsthand but most designed as retellings, e.g. of Lorq’s past (originally argued about Maus by Young). Because Katin’s perspective of time is the same as everyone else’s, his narrative has historical value when he synthesizes the narratives of those he encounters, like Mouse, into his own narrative. In other words, in the world of Nova all narratives see other narratives in parallel, so that there is not only egalitarian labor but also egalitarian history. As a commentary on history, the narrative also uses nonhistory—tarot readings and myth—not so much as irony than as a continuation of putting ideas and retellings of the past equally. This was not true in The Time Machine, where the Traveller’s mind is not in the same time as the future world and repeatedly fails to analyze it using 19th-century methods, or in The Left Hand of Darkness, where the express nonlinearity of the different perspectives of time available to Genly Ai makes it difficult to write an unbiased linear history.

Nova’s simplified economics allows the narrative to present a presumedly fair scheme of historical retelling (historical outsourcing, anyone?), because Katin’s narrative stands in for Terran introspection toward Earth’s own history. But it’s not really fair, as there must have existed interpretations of history, especially that of Vega, which were selected against and disappeared from the contemporary perspective in which Katin participates.

Why the Stuff?

As much as I appreciated the glimpse into Gethenian life with the archival chapters, I found these chapters to be somewhat puzzling. Why were they there in the first place? Part of the work these chapters do within the text is to pull back from Ai's perspective, which is, after all, just another archival document (Ansible Document 01-01101-934-2, if you want to be specific). The narrative that dominates the text (in terms of page numbers), Ai's extended struggle both to survive and to incorporate Gethen into the Ekumen worlds, is but one primary source document. Ai's story can never dominate the reader (in terms of being the only perspective).

I am somewhat reminded of Atwood's essay, "My Life in Science Fiction", where she discusses the importance of the perspective shift that moves the narrative into the past. She poses the essay on Newspeak at the end of 1984 and the epilogue of her own Handmaid's Tale as historically distancing elements that turn these dystopic worlds into "merely a subject for academic analysis" (Paragraph 35, here). Similarly, the narrative form of the (if not really epistolary then somewhat epistolary) Left Hand of Darkness, made up of various archival documents, troubles the dominance of Ai's personal narrative. There is another narrative that can only appear when all of the chapters are read in concert. Sure, it would be easy for Le Guin to publish an edition of this text where the only chapters are Ai's journal, where the text is another first-person narrative of betrayal, redemption, and loss and success--but it isn't. Why isn't it?

Perhaps the biggest change that happens with the introduction of these other materials is, rather than a perspective shift, a perspective loss. Instead of Ai being the avatar of the reader (author!) in the text, guiding our reading and providing the necessary information, he is one of the voices competing shrilly for our attention. We read this not as friends, but as historians, sifting through primary source documents and piecing together the narrative of a conflict that is bigger than Ai and Estraven and the Ekumen worlds. (Okay, sure, you could read it as a friend... *waves hand dismissively*) Though two of the myths and legends are recorded by Ai ( judging by the "G.A" in the subheadings of chapters 4 and 9), they are not integrated into his own journal, but set aside from it. He does not introduce these chapters, and his narrative breaks off cleanly at the end of the previous chapter.

So who has compiled this book, if not Ai? The narrative suggests a historian in the future, perhaps working with a mass of primary source documents, picking out the ones that deal with Gethen and with the question of gender duality-gender binary. The narrative suggests a historian from one of the Ekumen worlds, writing at a time when Gethen seemed to always have been part of the Ekumen, but curious about when it wasn't. Why these documents in particular? Why documents at all? And why not a map? (At least not in my edition; Seth's link to Le Guin's site suggests the same lack.)

I think Ai comes close to answering these questions when he opens the narrative:

"The story is not all mine, nor told by me alone. Indeed I am not sure whose story it is; you can judge better. But it is all one, and if at moments the facts seem to alter with an altered voice, why then you can choose the fact that you like best; yet none of them is false, and it is all one story." (1)

When he says, "you can judge better", he is asking the reader (of his journal) to provide the totalizing narrative gaze that he cannot provide. He is asking the reader to distill from the various elements of the tale a vision of the world in which this tale took place, and what that world means now for the reader.