The Cost of Human Expansion

Everything has its price. There are the monetary costs that drive the economy (one could argue that physical harm/cost is economic). There are the moral and ethical costs from the results of one's choices. There are the emotional and mental costs centered on friendship, loss, and love. All three interact and relate to each other to influence and govern the actions of individual humans and by extension, their governments and corporations. In Moon and Nova, the characters must struggle with these costs in their lives as well as both make difficult decisions and cope with those made by others.

In Nova, the primary "costs" covered are economic and ethical. As humanity expanded from Earth over the centuries, people settled on new and distant worlds from the Sol System. As a result, these different planets not only developed different cultures, but also different principles and corporations. As Lorq's father explains to him, "the cost of transportation" is the key limiting factor in expansion and consequently the resources that govern that cost are the foundation of galactic economy. Furthermore, that cost is what drove innovation and competition between the Von Rays and the Reds and their respective companies.

As economic costs mount, and the prospects for dramatically lowering that cost rise (as in the case with Nova), additional monetary and added ethical and emotional costs are incurred to grease the gears of the economy. These ethical costs are epitomized by Dan's blindness as Lorq brought him to the nova which eventually left the former blind, deaf, and finally suicidal. Conversely, Prince Red pays dearly because of the financial and emotional (as in his own mental health) costs derived from his vengeful investment in defeating the Von Rays (Lorq in particular). Nova thus shows that despite given essentially the same circumstances and resources, humans can act and pay their metaphorical dues in wildly different ways. There is always a price to be paid for success or wealth and Lorq and Prince both have to cope with these issues. While Lorq lets these past failures force him to steel his resolve, change tactics, and improve his own abilities and understanding, Prince simply lets his fuel his fury, leading him to embrace hubris, make miscalculations, and eventually rush into the book's fatal conclusion. Samuel R. Delany is wise in understanding this foundation of the human condition: man can be irrational but more importantly, he can learn from his mistakes and try again.

Similarly in Moon, there is a more pronounced connection between the advancement of humanity and the economic, emotional, and ethical costs incurred. In a future where clean energy is abundant because of clean fusion power derived from lunar-mined Helium-3, mankind has entered a new golden age with low pollution, lower costs of living, and general economic and technological improvements brought on by solving the "energy problem". However, to ensure the clean energy supply, Lunar Industries employs (otherwise unknowing) clones of Sam Bell to man the "Sarang" mining station. Thus, economic costs of energy lead to those for the production of the clones, the corresponding ethical costs of human cloning, and then the emotional costs incurred by these clones as they suddenly become aware of how the world has/is changing. Unfortunately for these clones, Lunar Industries can only see the red and black of economic cost and thus seem unaware at best, maliciously uncaring at worst, of the trauma the "Sams" go through during their short, three-year lives.

Consequently, there is an unfortunate parallel between Moon and Nova. In short, both Lunar Industries and Prince Red only see economic costs which lead to questionable ethics in the former and self-induced madness in the latter. Both pieces serve as a warning to those of us who push the technological envelope as though we may do things faster and better now, we cannot fall into the ethical abyss, allow a "cultural stagnation," or lose our individual humanity to madness and obsession.

Show and Tell

I’m interested in Butler's portrayal of sight, particularly in Bloodchild and The Evening and the Morning and the Night, in connection with her description of her own “radio imagination.” In both stories, the trauma of characters seeing, particularly seeing their own futures, seems to gesture toward representation problems. Gan has long been prepared for what awaits him with stories, diagrams and drawings, but he does not really understand it until he witnesses Bram Lomas’ horrific birth experience. In The Evening and the Morning and the Night, Lynn does not fully understand DGD until she comes face to face with patients in the ward, and Alan develops a more complicated perspective on Dilg, despite having read copious literature on what to expect, once he actually looks around there. Since seeing is so crucial for to each character's understanding of the world, I’m interested in why Butler often obscures the vision of her own readers. How are we to really understand if we cannot see?

Like Ellen, I initially imagined Lynn as a man (perhaps because I was overcompensating for assuming Gan was a woman until he revealed that he wasn’t). Furthermore, even when physical descriptions were provided, they did not always help me. For example, I could never quite conceptualize what T’Gatoi looked like. Butler provides a meditation, if not an answer, in her description of her own “radio imagination,” casting physical appearance almost as an afterthought in her work. She has never thought first in terms of what her characters looked like. This connection between not seeing and representing comes into play with Naomi Chi’s art. Having gouged out her own eyes, she works as a sculptor, representing what she can feel and, at least in Lynn’s assessment, representing it well – “in a way that seemed impossible for a blind sculptress” (56).

I feel, then, like there are conflicting messages on the need to see. In some ways, in the acts of representation that Butler and Naomi perform, it appears words and imagination are sufficient. Maybe the key is feeling, not necessarily in the tactile sense, although that’s where Naomi’s inspiration comes from. As I said, I couldn’t see the characters, but when they described the awful spectacles that had made them understand the truth far more vividly than words could, I could conjure up a sense of what they saw. Not necessarily an image, but a feeling, an understanding of the disgust of being exposed to the violence of bodily destruction.*

I’m left grappling with Gan and T’Gatoi’s discussion of seeing at the end of Bloodchild. T’Gatoi concludes that “humans should be protected from seeing,” but Gan argues instead for being “shown.” I don’t think Butler's exclusion of physical descriptions is meant to protect her readers. She shows us the truth in other ways, and reveals that vision in terms of feelings can be just as strong as vision in terms of sight. Even Gan couches his argument for showing in terms of the tactile, explaining that all Terrans see of birth is “pain and terror and maybe death” (29). I feel like I’m left struggling to put my understanding of vision in Butler’s world to words, but I guess that’s appropriate.

*Of course, I imagine I couldn’t feel it as strongly as the character could, since my main exposure to such drastic bodily harm still comes in the form of representation, though visual representation. I was impressed that Gan’s description of the birth scene could produce such a visceral reaction in me, but also wondered if I would have shuddered so much if I couldn’t produce some vision in my mind, a mixture of medical TV shows (the documentaries and the fictionalized) and, most recently, the disturbing imagery in Black Swan.