CHAPTER SEVEN
SCIENCE FICTION AND IMMORTALITY
Man comes and tills the earth and lies beneath
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world.
- - Alfred Lord Tennyson1
Science fiction and religious fundamentalism appear to have little in common.
The former is a secular elite discourse, the latter a popular religious discourse. Science
fiction is most appealing to intellectually sophisticated teen- and college-age students
with some interest and background in science.2 Readers of I Robot or Dune, despite the
latter’s quasi-religious theme, are hardly likely to read Left Behind, and vice versa.
Although "sci fi" fans and Dispensationalists represent two distinctive and largely
unrelated communities they share some things in common. They are alienated from their
society and attracted to texts that problematize it and hold out the prospect of radical
transformation. The two communities of readers see themselves as members of select
groups because of their access to higher truths about the world, if not the universe. This
feeling is reinforced by the varying degrees of scorn they and their preferred texts meet
from others. The two discourses share parallel origins as Dispensationalism and science
fiction emerged in the late nineteenth century as a response to modernization and its
consequences. Both literatures, albeit in different ways, represent strong, negative
reactions to modernity and its dominant values.
Dispensationalism and science fiction have complex relationships with science.
Protestant evangelicals were initially pro-science; its leaders welcomed scientific
advances as additional evidence of God and his design for humanity. A minority
incorporated evolution into this progressive framework, but most rejected it as
incompatible with Genesis’ account of the creation of the earth and its inhabitants. Socalled fundamentalists, Dispensationalists among them, increasingly came to regard
science as the devil’s work and another sign of the moral corruption of modern society.
In contrast to anti-modern Victorian religious and secular discourses, science fiction
welcomed science and technology. Some of the genre's pioneers envisaged them,
together with democracy and socialism, as having the potential to transform society in a
radical and positive fashion. Other writers were less convinced, and twentieth century
“sci fi” increasingly came to regard science and socialism as harbingers of dehumanizing
tyrannies. Most participants in this debate are secular in their outlook. Some, however,
are religious Christians, committed, as are Dispensationalists, to restoring what they
regard as the proper balance between the spiritual and material concerns of humankind.
Dispensationalism acknowledges only one kind of transformation: transcendence
of the human condition through the intervention of Jesus. Science fiction explores
multiple routes of transformation. These include physical immortality or near
immortality, virtual immortality enabled by advanced computers and software, and
evolution, either accidental or engineered, that makes us into a new species. Immortality
is a shared concern of Dispensationalism and science fiction; they nevertheless envisage
it coming about in different ways and have diametrically opposes views of its
consequences. For Dispensationalists, immortality is the gift of God. It is a certainty --
2
but only for the faithful. Science fiction considers immortality unrealistic but freely uses
it as a conceit to explore the human condition. In recent years, greatly extended
longevity, even immortality, has come to be seen by many as increasingly feasible.
Science fiction almost uniformly identities greatly extended life-spans and immortality as
catalysts of dystopia.
In this chapter, I explore science fiction's engagement with extended longevity
and immortality and the reasons why so many of authors consider it destructive of human
beings and their societies. I begin with a discussion of what immortality is and how it has
been understood in Western culture. I then discuss the development of science fiction
and its changing relationship to science, technology and progress. This sets the stage for
its treatment of immortality.
In contrast to other narratives that focus on individuals, groups, classes, nations,
religions or cultures, science fiction frequently takes the human species as its unit of
analysis. This vantage point provides a novel perspective on other, more restrictive
framings of identity. It also offers insights into the problem of identity and especially
the seeming need for boundary maintenance, the mechanisms by which it is achieved and
what might happen when they are recognized as ineffective. Science fiction has free rein
to alter and probe the implications of many of the characteristics that appear to make us
human and confer identity (e.g., our bodies, gender, physical and mental separateness
from others). It raises the question of free will in novel contexts and the extent to which
species is a biological or social category. Answers to these questions have important
implications for the practice and study of identity.
3
IMMORTALITY
Mortality is the fate of all life forms. Human beings appear to be the only
terrestrial species aware of this truth and immortality has accordingly long been a human
dream. Adam and Eve were said to have begun life as immortals but they and their
descendants lost it when they were expelled from Eden. Christianity holds out the
prospect of resurrection, which undoubtedly accounts for much of its appeal in the
ancient and modern worlds. Greek gods were immortal, but not people who worshipped
them. Even in Hesiod’s Golden Age, where humans intermingled with the gods and did
not have to work to feed themselves, they lived in good health, but only, like biblical
patriarchs, to a ripe old age.
Western culture offers us numerous accounts of mythical or real figures who
sought immortality. Eos, the Titan goddess of dawn bargained with Zeus for the
immortality of her lover, the Trojan Tithonus. She failed to insist on the additional
conditions of good health and a young body and Tithonus suffered all the frailties of age
ending up a pitiable figure. Endymion was given the gift of perpetual youth by Jupiter,
but experienced it as perpetual sleep. Arachne, who outperformed Athena at the loom,
was rewarded with eternal life as a spider. Jonathan Swift offers a variant of this myth in
Gulliver’s Travels. Gulliver hears tales about the immortal Struldbruggs on the islands of
Paluta and Balnibardi and begins to fantasize about how much he would enjoy eternal
life. He then learns that Struldbruggs age like ordinary mortals and are denied the
privileges often reserved for the elderly. Nor can they communicate with subsequent
generations because their society’s language evolves so quickly. He concludes that they
4
are the least fortunate of beings and he considers bringing some back to England to help
his countrymen overcome their fear of death.
The Fountain of Youth, a more optimistic legend, describes a spring that restores
the youth of anyone who drinks its waters. Accounts appear in Herodotus, the Alexander
romance, the medieval Travels of Sir John Mandeville and Christian tales about the
mythical Prester John.3 Stories about restorative powers of the water of the mythical land
of Bimini circulated among indigenous Caribbean peoples and excited Spanish explorers.
In 1513, Ponce de León, governor of Puerto Rico searched for the Fountain of Youth in
Florida. We have very few stories of people who have rejected the gift of immortality.
In Western culture the outstanding example is Odysseus, who rejects Calypso’s offer of
immortality if he remains with her and instead chooses to continue his voyage home.4
Mythical figures who achieve immortality, like Semele, daughter of Cadmus, invariably
do it through the intervention of a god.
As mortality is seemingly inescapable and a greatly feared feature of human
existence, it is only natural that people fantasized about escaping death. Ever the realists,
ancient Greeks conceived of immortality in an abstract metaphorical way; the best one
could do was win fame through glorious deeds that were celebrated down through the
ages. In a modern variant, William Faulkner observed: "Really the writer doesn't want
success. He knows he has a short life span. The day will come that he must pass through
the wall of oblivion and he wants to leave a scratch on the wall – Kilroy was here – that
someone a hundred or a thousand years later will see."5 By the classical era, figurative
immortality could be achieved vicariously through the fame of one’s city. Christianity
was one of several Middle Eastern sects that held out the prospect of a more literal form
5
of immortality through the post-death survival of the soul. The Church fathers envisaged
immortality as a form of spiritual survival although there can be no doubt that many
Christians – then and now – hope for, even expect, some kind of physical existence in
heaven. A third strategy, more prevalent in the east, and central to the Hindu-Buddhist
tradition, conceived of reincarnation as a form of immortality. Hindus believe that one
dies but is reborn in another body or life form. For Hindus and Buddhists this cycle is
less a blessing than a curse and can ultimately be transcended.
A fourth an obvious strategy is pursuit of continuous life in one's own body. The
Spanish search for the fabled fountain of youth is a case in point. It proved as fanciful as
the quest for the philosopher’s stone with its ability to transform base elements into gold.
Widespread recognition that such quests were unrealistic came on the cusp of the era in
which longevity and transmutation finally became possible. Advances in nuclear physics
allowed scientists to turn one element into others through fission or fusion, although in
minute quantities and at too high a cost for any commercial purpose. Medical progress
greatly extended life spans over the course of the twentieth century, allowing men and
women in developed countries to live on average into their late seventies. In Japan,
which tops the list, life expectancy for women has reached 86.1 years.6 Future advances
have the potential to add decades to our lives by slowing the aging process and
preventing or repairing many of the problems associated with old age.
As the ancient hope of extended life became a reality, it has understandably
inspired reflection about the potential of even longer lives to transform the character of
human life and society. Science fiction has been at the forefront of this enterprise. Much
of its engagement is inspired by the negative precedent of nuclear weapons. Atomic
6
weapons were “invented” by science fiction authors a decade before any serious effort by
physicists was made to build them. Leo Szilard says that he was alerted to the possibility
of a nuclear chain reaction by H. G. Well’s 1914 novel The World Set Free.7 The US
bomb was developed secretly and used against Japan in the absence of any public debate.
Leading scientists responsible for “fat man” and “little boy” favored a peaceful
demonstration of atomic destructive power in the hope that it would prompt Japanese
surrender before it became necessary to destroy any of their cities. Their memorandum
to President Truman was never delivered and is unlikely in any case to have had its
intended effect.8 Future technology could have an even more damning downside and it is
therefore important to explore its possible consequences before irrevocable decisions are
made. Science fiction author Orson Scott Card insists: “We have to think of them so that
if the worse does come, we’ll already know how to live in that universe.”9
Science fiction has been uniformly negative in its assessment of immortality. In
the first instance, this is attributable to recognition of its authors that so many twentieth
century scientific developments have been used for dehumanizing and destructive ends.
There is widespread fear – that extends beyond the science fiction community -- that
breakthroughs that allow longevity or something approaching immortality would be no
different in their consequences. Such pessimism reflects a more general turn against
modernity and its foundational belief in the power of reason to bring about a better life.
Science fiction authors are equally dubious about the social benefits of other scientific
advances, among them information and nano- technology, robotics and genetics. Not
every author regards science and its social consequences negatively, but it is undeniable
7
that science fiction has evolved from a pro-science, pro-modern, discourse into one that
has a distinctly anti-science and anti-modern flavor.
Further evidence for this assertion is provided by the emergence and
extraordinary popularity of fantasy. In the late nineteenth century science fiction and
fantasy were largely inseparable in the form of pulp fiction. Fantasy, as I noted in the
previous chapter, is characterized by the adventures of larger-than-life characters, often
with superpowers or access to magic.10 Its imaginary worlds are pre-modern in
conception and often inhabited by princes and princesses and imaginary creatures who
interact in kingdoms where war, honor and romance are the principal activities. If
science fiction initially represented a form of escapism into the future, fantasy is
escapism into the past motivated by dislike, even fear, of the present.
BECOMING IMMORTAL
Immortality is generally understood to be endless life, ideally with a young,
healthy body. In an influential essay, Bernard Williams maintains that eternal life would
have to meet two conditions to be worthwhile. There must be continuity; people should
recognize themselves as the same people during the course of their lives. There must be
satisfaction; people should enjoy their lives and look forward to their continuation, in
contrast to a punishing life of aging (Tithonus) or hard work (Sisyphus).11 Science
fiction has come up with various conceits to meet these conditions. John M. Fischer and
Ruth Carol offer an elaborate typology to capture this diversity, one that includes the
possible immortality of our cosmos, not only of ourselves.12
8
Continuity is the central concern for Williams and many science fiction writers.
One way of demonstrating its importance is through the vehicle of reincarnation. Some
authors deliberately seek to unsettle us by giving their characters endless but unconnected
lives in which they have no memories of earlier incarnations. Nor is their present
condition in any way dependent on their past lives. In Star Diaries, Stanislaw Łem
creates a world in which everyone looks alike and plays a game of musical chairs
involving different roles. Every midnight people switch roles with no memory of what
went before. They consider themselves immortal because their roles endure, an assertion
the author knows his readers will find unconvincing.13 Other variants of reincarnation
use it to create a more acceptable kind of immortality because their characters retain
many memories from past lives, at least enough to have a convincing sense of who they
were and are.14 In The City and the Stars, Arthur C. Clarke imagines a compromise in
which citizens sooner or later get bored with their lives and turn themselves in to the
central computer that copies all their relevant information before terminating them. They
are recalled at some random future moment to live again with another random mix of
fellow citizens. Memories of their earlier lives gradually return as they mature.
Reincarnation involves repeated rebirth and use of consecutive bodies as
platforms for our minds. We could, in theory, be placed in the minds of others and use
up their bodies, hopping from body to body as the need arose. In Robert Heinlein’s Fear
No Evil an aging rich man achieves a new life by having his brain substituted for that of
his secretary but is disturbed to find her thoughts and dispositions are still present. Other
stories allow substitution or entry into consecutive new bodies without this difficulty, as
in A. E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A and The Players of Null-A. Leaving aside the
9
technical problems associated with this process, body hopping involves ethical dilemmas
that reincarnation does not because it deprives existing beings of their lives. I will return
to this question in my discussion of Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon.
The alternative to multiple bodies involves finding a way of preserving and
maintaining the body with which we were born. From the very beginning, science fiction
imagined that immortality, or at least longevity, could be achieved through eugenics. H.
G. Wells uses natural selection to improve humanity and extend its lifespan in Time
Machine, A Modern Utopia and Men Like Gods. In The Shape of Things to Come,
published in 1933, natural selection is accelerated by eugenics. Wells was a committed
Lamarckian and somehow convinced himself that acquired characteristics could be
transmitted to one's progeny. George Bernard Shaw, another Lamarckian, employed
eugenics to achieve longevity in Back to Methuselah, published in 1932. In the postwar
era, Robert Heinlein's Methuselah’s Children envisaged a eugenics program that breed
disease out of the gene pool. In Frank Herbert’s Eyes of Heisenberg, eugenics produces a
super-intelligent and immortal race.
Science fiction has devised other means of immortality in our original bodies. In
1816, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandmann, resorts to alchemy. Fiction, on the whole, did
not regard such meddling kindly. Mary Shelley’s "Frankenstein" treats human
intervention in biology as an unacceptable act of hubris. In John Taine’s Seeds of Life,
published in 1931, and John Russell Fearn’s The Intelligence Gigantic, which appeared
two years later, artificially enhanced humans with superpowers are a menace that must be
destroyed. Isaac Asimov's "Foundation Series," written in the early 1950s, also adopts
this position. Its chief villain, the "Mule," is a genetic freak – as Nicolae Carpathia
10
would be -- with the ability to reach into the minds of others and rearrange their emotions
to suit his ends. He establishes a short-lived empire but is ultimately defeated and
rendered harmless by the Second Foundation. Left Behind’s Nicolae Carpathia, a
genetically engineered being with superpowers, is in this tradition.
Postwar novels, among them, Arthur C. Clarke's Cities of Light, Frank Herbert's
Dune, C. J. Cherryh's Cyteen, Bob Shaw's, One Million Tomorrow, James Blish’s Cities
in Flight and Richard Cowper’s Tithonian Factor, use drugs to transform people and
achieve immortality. Larry Niven's World Out of Time and C. J. Cherryh, in Exile’s Gate
employ teleportation to rid the body of poisons that would otherwise lead to death. Some
authors rely on fortuitous mechanisms. In Algis Budry's “The End of Summer,” the earth
passes through a field that promotes cellular regeneration so that aging and injured cells
are restored to health. In Jeffrey Ford’s The Physiognomy, a rare white fruit bestows
endless life. Brian Stableford conjures up a newly evolved virus for the same purpose as
does Larry Niven in his Protector and Ringworld Engineer novels.15 In James Gunn's
The Immortals, immortality is achieved through transfusions from people with a rare
blood group that somehow keeps them from aging. In Reefs of Space, Frederick Pohl
infects humans with “transrevolutionary" cells to give them extraordinary powers.16
Other novels turn to mutations.17 Some genetic changes are natural and others result
from nuclear fallout or other byproducts of human activities. Almost any conceit is
allowed in science, but as Stephen Clark rightly notes, many of these stories rest on the
false premise that a single drug or mutation could dramatically change a species or bring
a new one into being.18
11
Bio- and nano-technology offer another route to immortality and with it, greatly
enhanced “human” mental and physical capabilities. In David Marusek's Counting
Heads, nanotechnology can manufacture any body part people need while medical
science maintains the body's physique and age. In Bruce Sterling’s Holy Fire, medicine
and technology combine to extend life. Ben Bova’s The Immortality Factor relies on
organ regeneration. In Jeremy Carver’s, From a Changeling Star, the main character is
infected with intelligent, engineered nano-agents that change his appearance, memory
and DNA.
In the 1970s, science fiction began to assume that biotechnological improvement
of human beings would become reality in the not too distant future. Naomi Mitchison’s
Solution Three, Samuel R. Delany’s, Triton and John Varley’s, The Ophiuchi Hotline
feature biotechnological experiments or enhancements that somehow go astray, invoking
memories of Frankenstein. In some novels people combine with plants. In Needle, Hal
Clement describes a symbiosis between humans and an amoeboid life form, initiated by
the latter. Anne McCaffery tells a macabre tale about handicapped children whose
appendages and body parts are gradually replaced by man-made ones in preparation for
their merger with spaceships that will be controlled by their long-lived brains.19 In Scott
Orson Card’s Wyrms, living heads are preserved with the help of genetically engineered
worms.
Early in the 1950s, Norbert Wiener speculated that it was theoretically possible to
telegraph a human being.20 In 1988, Hans Moravec characterized human identity as an
informational construct, reducing the role of body to that of a mere platform.21 Marvin
Minsky suggested that brains could be stored on computer disks.22 Is immortality
12
possible without a body? Science fiction has long imagined disembodied intellects and
they have become an increasingly common conceit since the information revolution.
Three stories of Gregory Benford blur the distinction between man and machine.23 In
Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder people are offered the choice of corporeal or acorporeal
existence. Those who choose the latter live in data banks but experience virtual life so
vividly that they need to test themselves or the world around them to determine their
state. In Egan's Permutation City, people can be uploaded and stored in computer
programs. With their memories intact and unlimited access to virtual realities, they have
the potential to live forever.
N. Katherine Hayles argues that the premise of a disembodied mind, so
fundamental to science fiction, rests on a faulty understanding of the difference between
analog and digital worlds.24 The latter require physical representation just as writing
required papyrus, parchment or paper. Keeping minds alive outside of bodies
necessitates some other physical system to sustain them, such as computers and software
and their power supply and support systems. In effect, we swap our bodies for another
platform. Permutation City builds on this recognition as its inhabitants are vulnerable to
the stability of the world's computer net and must also worry about the security of their
digital hideouts as they are proscribed by law.
Simulacra are a variation on clones. They are kept in storage or created as
needed. Benford's 1975 story, "Doing Lennon," describes a rich man's plan to have
himself frozen and awakened a century later when greatly extended life may be possible.
In Cherryh’s Cyteen, a character brought back to life from cold storage claims to be John
Lennon and becomes a celebrity until the preserved body of Paul McCartney is
13
discovered.25 In Vance’s To Live Forever, the state keeps clones of the small minority of
people who win eternal life because of their achievements. Every few weeks the latest
experiences of these people are read and uploaded into the minds of their clones to keep
them au courant. In Richard Morgan’s "Takeshi Kovacs" series, which includes, Altered
Carbon, humans have cortical stacks implanted in then on to which their consciousness is
digitized. Their stack can be removed and implanted in another body, if they die or
simply choose to have another “sleeve.”26
Yet another possibility is the collective mind. The ancient Greeks conceived of
figurative immortality on this basis. The individual was mortal but the culture was not –
or was at least long-lived – so narratives, transmitted orally or in writing, could carry
down through the generations the names and deeds of famous individuals. A modern
variant stresses becoming part of the "great chain of being."27 Science fiction improves
on this scenario by giving people direct access to their ancestors. The sentient beings in
Herbert’s Dune and God-Emperor of Dune are born with the memories of the ancestors.28
Their “I” is a collective one that represents, if not the species, a very long lineage that is a
representative sample of it. In Greg Bear’s Blood Music, the minds of human beings are
downloaded into "intelligent leukocytes" that transform them into a planetary mind.
Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide imagines a collective mind modeled on the anthill or bee
hive. His insect-like “buggers” have a queen who controls all the members of her hive
through something akin to telepathy. The Pequininos, or “piggies,” another species in the
novel, go through several stages of existence and finally morph into trees in adulthood.
They can communicate with one another and to some degree think collectively. Human
beings in contact with both species on the world of Lusitania learn some of these
14
communication skills with the help of Jane, a sentient being who resides in humanity’s
computer network.
The most amusing conceit, admittedly more fantasy than science fiction, makes
death itself, not human beings, responsible for immortality. In José Saramago’s, Death at
Intervals, set in an unidentified South American country, people stop dying because death
initiates a moratorium. Most folks are overjoyed, except for those who must continue to
care for relatives who are at death's door. The Roman Catholic Church is another big
loser and starts a campaign of prayer to bring death back because its authority all but
disappears because once people expect to live forever they lose all fear of damnation.
Death finally writes a letter that is read out on national television. It explains that she
wanted to give people a sense of what immortality was like so they could see for
themselves just how loathsome it would be to live forever. Death acknowledges her
mistake and announces that at midnight people will begin to die again, as the prime
minister does as the three hands of the clock converge.29
Immortality, which I equate with enduring life, must be distinguished from
longevity, which is prolonged life. In practice, the two categories differ more in degree
than in kind. Immortality is always tenuous because, as George Bernard Shaw noted,
people can still be killed by accidents or violence.30 Although the chances of this
happening may be low, they increase significantly over millennia of existence.31 In Algis
Budry’s “The End of Summer” the planet’s population gradually declines for this reason.
Other novels surmount this problem through reincarnation or simulacra. In Philip
Farmer’s Riverworld, people who are killed are reborn and relocated somewhere else
along the river. In Jack Vance’s To Live Forever, as in Richard Morgan’s Altered
15
Carbon, analog or digital copies are kept in storage and brought into existence only as
needed.32 The biggest barrier to immortality may be the demise of the solar system, and
much later, of our universe, through its possible contraction. True immortality would
require some way of repeatedly going back into time to avoid termination or some means
of transportation into successor universes. James Blish imagines a frightful conflict as
the universe is on the verge of destroying itself through contraction in which humans kill
one another off in the hope of contributing some of themselves to the bubbles that will
form new universes.33
SCIENCE FICTION AND PROGRESS
There is no consensus about the origins of science fiction. One aficionado
unconvincingly traces it back to ancient Greece.34 More commonly it is thought to have
arisen in the nineteenth century and reached the apex of its popularity in the latter half of
the twentieth.35 By then science fiction had expanded beyond novels and stories to comic
books, graphic novels, films, TV programs and movies, video games and even music and
poetry.36 Brian Aldiss considers Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, published in 1818, the
first true work of science fiction. Darko Suvin dates the emergence of science fiction to
about 1900, when time travel joins space travel as a major theme of pulp novels.37
Samuel Delany offers the later date of 1926, when American publisher Hugo Gernsback
coined the term science fiction.38
Science fiction arose in Britain for two reinforcing reasons. It is the country in
which the industrial revolution originated and where its effects were most deeply felt.
Almost from the beginning the British intellectual and artistic elite was sensitive to its
dehumanizing consequences. In 1829, Thomas Carlyle warned that the “Moral Age,”
16
was in the process of giving way to the “Mechanical Age," which was transforming not
only the “external and physical” life of Britain but also its internal and spiritual” life.39 In
1867-68, in a series of influential essays, Matthew Arnold condemned machinery and its
culture as harsh, inflexible and dehumanizing.40 On the Continent, reaction against the
machine age found resonance in the early writings of Karl Marx and later, in Max
Weber’s account of bureaucracy.41 High modernists T. S. Eliot and D. H. Lawrence
worried that human beings would become cogs in machines or otherwise made to act and
think like machines. Later British writers, among them, Evelyn Waugh, Osbert Sitwell,
George Orwell and Wyndham Lewis expressed similar fears.
Because high culture in Britain and France rejected technology and the
mechanization it promoted, its representatives were hostile to those who regarded these
developments favorably. Some of these writers developed science fiction to convey their
optimism to a wider, non-elite audience. It is a genre well-suited to this end as the
payoffs of science lay in the future.42 Writers could imagine futures in which the
industrial revolution was much further advanced, or had even run its course, and
showcase its potential to bring about a better world. Some early science fiction authors,
like their socialist counterparts, believed that science and technology could produce a
utopia that overcame poverty and class divisions.43 Gothic writing was another form of
rebellion against the literary establishment and became the natural ally of science fiction.
The two genres maintained an active dialogue and it is often difficult to distinguish
between them, as in the case of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.44 Recent readings of H. G.
Wells, especially of The Island of Dr. Moreau, have attempted to place him in the Gothic
tradition.45 Jules Verne's long suppressed manuscript, Paris in the Twentieth Century,
17
written in 1863, but not published until 1994, reveals his dark side. His future metropole
has gas-powered vehicles – stuck in traffic jams – telephones, fax machines and electric
chairs, but citizens must learn English to function in the world and search the Seine
bookstalls in vain for copies of Victor Hugo.
The rise of science fiction coincided with the development of the train and
steamship, quickly followed by the automobile, airplane and submarine. Authors
imagined rockets as the next feasible technology, and with them travel to the moon and
beyond. Jules Verne exploited these possibilities in a series of best-selling novels.46
They are pure adventure tales, but with a concern for the inherent plausibility of their
technological conceits. Verne’s heroes and villains are rudimentary, their adventures
have no impact on their societies and, as a gesture of solidarity with the status quo, their
miraculous conveyances are destroyed at the end of their adventures.47 Stories about time
travel soon augmented those about space travel. Both make use of futuristic inventions
such as robots and ray guns. Writing of this kind reinforced the establishment's dismissal
of science fiction as a low, if not juvenile, literary form.48 Not surprisingly, a few writers
aspired, as some critics still do, to make science fiction more literary. Others scorn these
pretensions.49
Even H. G. Wells, one of the most popular Victorian British authors, was unable
to bridge this divide. He came from a working class background and was the product of a
new institute of technology that would later become Imperial College. He was the bête
noire of many literary figures, who were appalled by his embrace of the machine age and
belief in its utopian possibilities. Like most Victorians, Wells subscribed to the grand
narrative of progress.50 But, like Verne, he was sensitive to the darker side of
18
technology. He published six utopias, but also two dystopias. In War from the Air, air
ships destroy the heart of Paris and intimidate its panicked citizens. So do foreign
occupation troops, flown in from Africa. In France, Jules Verne novels provoked a
similar reaction. His stories cut against the grain of the established literary culture
because they seemed to vaunt technology and they appealed to a mass audience.51 The
reaction of the American literary establishing to science fiction was similar. Thomas
Disch tells of an exchange with the well-known writer and professor Morris Dickstein at
a PEN conference in New York City. Dickstein told him of the "heresy" he had just
encountered: someone had described George Orwell as a science fiction writer.
Dickstein insisted that an intellectual of Orwell's stature could not, by definition, have
written science fiction.52
Science fiction broadened its scope after World War I, and even more after 1945.
Many stories and novels retained the genre's fascination with science, but engaged it in a
more serious way. Arthur C. Clarke's, Islands in the Sky, The Sands of Mars, Earthlight,
Rendezvous with Rama and 2061 base their plots on scientific laws or principles. Other
writers explore the potential of science and technology for transforming human beings
and their societies. They reach out to history and the social sciences for insights and
plots. Science fiction also became increasingly political. Prominent works like
Zamyatin’s We and Huxley’s Brave New World and Music at Night sought to expose the
tyranny of communism and its desire to reduce men to pliant machines. In the immediate
post-World War II years, Orwell’s 1984 explored the generic features of totalitarian
regimes. These several works were not so different in their assumptions from Victorian
critics of the industrial revolution.
19
In the McCarthy era, American science fiction became a refuge for some writers
who used the genre to voice criticisms that might otherwise have prompted their
blacklisting.53 In Fahrenheit 451, published in 1953, Ray Bradbury lashed out against
censorship and book burning. The Cold War engaged science fiction writers across the
political spectrum.54 Philip Wylie, Frederick Pohl, Cyril Kornbluth, and above all,
Robert Heinlein, were committed Cold Warriors. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, published
in 1959, was a paean to the American military and its culture.55 Juan "Johnnie" Rico and
his mobile infantry do combat with an arachnoid species, known as "the bugs," which
represents a thinly veiled Soviet Union. More novels were anti-war. Walter Miller's A
Canticle for Liebowitz emphasized the risk to humanity posed by nuclear weapons and
the Cold War. James Blish’s A Case of Conscience shows how a lengthy arms race
compels people to live underground in tomb-like complexes. Murray Leinster’s
Operation Terror, describes what appears to be an alien invasion but turns out to be a
clever cover for a US preemptive nuclear strike against the Soviet Union. Ursula K. Le
Guin's The Word for World is Forest, written during the Vietnam War, is a thinly veiled
polemic. Papers Found in a Bathtub, by Polish author Stanislaw Łem, the Soviet bloc's
most prominent science fiction writer, is a biting parody of the US Defense Department
and military. It can be read as an equally damning critique of its Soviet counterparts.
Science fiction underwent a similar evolution with respect to utopias. Early
novels embraced them. Winwood Reade, The Martyrdom of Man, which appeared in
1872, looks forward to a time when “pure and radiant beings” who were immortal would
look back with pity on contemporary humans.56 Mary E. Bradley's Mizora, published in
1880-81 under the pseudonym Princess Vera Zraonovitch, envisages an age of peace
20
once aggression was overcome by eliminating men and relying on an alternate means of
reproduction. Jules Verne employs many of the features of utopia in his novels.57
Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, published in 1889, imagines a peaceful, happier
future organized along socialist lines. Today, these novels strike us as naïve. So does the
more recent 1948 Walden Two, of B. F. Skinner, which relies on “behavioral
engineering” to construct a better world.58 Given the contemporary mood, science fiction
dystopias do not appear nearly so dated. Cyril Čapek's R.U.R. (1921), Zamyatin's We
(1920), Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1927), Huxley's Brave New World (1932), René
Barjavel's, Ravage (1943) and Orwell's, 1984 (1949) seem prescient and several of them
are still regularly read.
Over the course of its history science fiction has come to mirror debates in society
about technology and its consequences. Initially an advocate of the positive potential of
science and technology, science fiction writers were nevertheless among the first writers
to explore their downside. Science fiction became equally critical of socialism.
Twentieth century science fiction produced telling critiques of Bolshevik-style socialism
and totalitarianism more generally. Zamyatin's We, Orwell’s 1984 and Animal Farm are
the most famous, but there are many others. Poul Anderson and Norman Spinrad both
depict a future Soviet-dominated world as figurative anthills of mindless slaves.59 Some
of novels appealed to people who would otherwise have been unlikely to read anything
characterized as science fiction.
Throughout the twentieth century science fiction was in the vanguard when it
came to imagining new technologies and their implications. Almost every scientific or
technological breakthrough (e.g., rockets, nuclear weapons, computers, nano-technology,
21
longevity) was described in novels or stories before it became a reality. Although science
fiction has become increasingly alert to the negative implications of new technologies, it
still retains its fascination with them. It has been less prescient when addressing the
social world. Stories and novels set in the future often mirror contemporary social values
and practices. In Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Victorian class structure and gender
relations are unchanged. Asimov’s Foundation Series, which takes place millennia if the
future, reflects early postwar American bourgeois values and practices. Only in the
1960s, did science fiction seriously begin interrogating the social world. Beginning with
the role of women, it has gone on to examine issues of nationality and race. The most
sophisticated writing has combined interrogation of science with that of social practices,
often with the goal of exploring what it means to be human.
Bellamy, Wells, Verne and most of the authors who follow them, situate their
novels in our future. To make their characters, plots and settings comprehensible they
must keep key aspects of our society more or less unchanged, or at least recognizable.
Crystal balls are always murky, so even authors like Wells, who successfully glimpse
aspects the future, are completely, often humorously, wrong, about other features. More
often than not these howlers concern the practices or technology of contemporary that
they have kept constant. Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series – which takes place dozens
of millennia in the future – has characters who smoke cigarettes and its gender relations
generally mirror those of mid-century America. Space communicate via a form of
teletype that spits out strips of paper in which it has punched holes.60 In Bellamy’s
America of the year 2000, technology is a clever extension of its late Victorian
counterpart; people listen to live concerts piped into their home through air tubes because
22
there has been no electronic revolution, let alone one in information technology. In the
Sleeper novels, set in the twenty-second century, “aeronauts” pilot sluggish canvas
covered monoplanes. Utopias and dystopias alike, use the future to shed light on the
present, and often do so unwittingly by including features of the present that
contemporaries take for granted but are jarringly archaic to generations of subsequent
readers.
THE CONSEQUENCES OF IMMORTALITY
I concentrate on, but do not entirely limit myself to, postwar Anglo-American
science fiction. A few earlier writers, like Besant, Wells and Shaw, address immortality,
but it is much more a postwar concern. This is in part a reflection of the growth of the
genre; science fiction is primarily a late twentieth century enterprise. More works were
published in each of the last five decades of that century than in all the decades prior to
1945. Most of these stories, novellas and novels, and almost all of the films based on
them, are in English. Writing in other languages tends to be derivative or represents only
small fraction of the total output.61 However, some of these non-English authors, among
them, Stanislaw Łem, Italo Calvino and José Saramago, are internationally acclaimed
figures and to whose works I refer.
In earlier chapters I analyzed one or several texts a considerable length. In this
chapter, I discuss multiple texts and organize my treatment of them around analytical
categories. I do this for two reasons. No single text explores all the ways science fiction
considers immortality problematic in its implications. Collectively they offer better
insight into the zeitgeist of the era and arguably helped to shape it. As Steven Connor
23
remarked in the context of the English novel, fiction "is not just as passively marked with
the imprint of history, but also as one of the ways in which history is made, and
remade."62
My analytical categories reflect different objections science fiction raises to
immortality, and with few exceptions, its authors have regarded immortality with a
jaundiced eye. Two of the most frequently voiced objections, boredom and envy, are
ancient concerns, although they have been given new twists by contemporary authors.
Other objections are modern, among them the likelihood that immortality will be
exploited for selfish or perverse purposes by governments, big business or crime
syndicates. It is seen by some to have the potential to destroy society or the human race.
Opinion is divided on the last question as some authors believe that leaving the human
condition behind is the only road to progress.
A caveat is in order before proceeding. Not every science fiction novel or story
that features immortal characters is about immortality. Some authors include immortality
merely to provide additional evidence of advanced levels of science and technology.
Others use it as a necessary conceit for their plot, and do not explore its consequences for
individuals or their society. Alfred Bester’s The Computer Connection is a futuristic
adventure story about a band of immortal eccentrics who recruit a new member, a
distinguished Cherokee physicist. The banal plot revolves around group efforts to
produce a super-race, but their efforts go awry and to save the earth they must find a way
to kill the much-loved but now immortal Cherokee physicist. In James Blish’s Cities in
Flight, Earth has become a wasteland and its cities, exploiting anti-gravity, leave for
space where they become nomadic traders and specialists of various kinds. Immortality
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provides continuity of characters across the trilogy. It is made possible by “anti-agathics”
that derive from an extra-terrestrial plant. The drug is in short supply and only given to
people deemed essential to a city’s prosperity or survival. It replaces money as currency
and cities and people alike must decide how much of it to consume or trade. The
economics of immortality are described at some length but little is said about the
political, social or psychological consequences of the competition for extended or eternal
life.
In the ancient world the human life span was severely limited as were the variety
of diversions open to even the wealthiest people. Roman Emperor and Stoic philosopher
Marcus Aurelius (121-80 C.E.) believed that a well-traveled forty year old had done and
seen everything.63 Contemporary writers speculate we would tire of life if we lived
anywhere from several hundred to several thousand years. In Robert Heinlein's Time
Enough for Love, Lazarus Long has kept boredom at bay for some two thousand years,
but only by constant changes of profession. Douglas Adams The Hitchhiker's Guide to
the Galaxy describes an immortal who at first gets his kicks from living dangerously and
outlasting everyone else. Boredom inevitably sets in. "In the end it was Sunday
afternoons that he couldn't cope with, and that terrible listlessness which starts to set in at
about 2.55 p.m., when you know that you have had all the baths you can usually have that
day, that however hard you stare at any given paragraph in the newspapers you will never
actually read it. . . and that as you stare at the clock the hands will move relentlessly on to
four o'clock, and you will enter the long dark teatime of the soul."64
Joe Haldeman’s Old Twentieth describes a world in which immortal people are
driven to seek new experiences and pleasures to keep sane. Computers allow them to
25
visit earlier times and the most popular destination is the twentieth century, the last era of
mortality, where they are fascinated by people facing death. In Greg Egan’s Permutation
City, some characters are seven thousand years old and confess to great weariness. One
of them warns that "immortality is a mirage no human should aspire to.”65 In Frank
Herbert's Heaven Makers, the Chem are an immortal alien species whose greatest
problem is ennui. They entertain themselves by voyeurism; they watch holographs of
real life stories, many about human beings, who are being manipulated by the Chem to
provide artistic and violent plot lines. The leading producer of these holographs exclaims:
"With such poor creatures, we insulate ourselves from lives that are endless series events.
Aii, boredom! How you threaten the infinite."66 Poul Anderson’s Boat of a Million
Years describes the diverse lives of ten people who for some reason are born immortal in
varying places and times. They search out one another and become a kind of family. At
a certain point, they share their secret with humanity only to discover that it stimulates
the development of new culture to which they can no longer relate. In desperation, they
leave earth to explore other civilizations and find novelty and excitement in their search
for a new home. In Wellstone, Wil McCarthy feels the need to invent a disability -neurosensory dystrophia -- that arises from the boredom associated with longevity.
Pathways are worn smooth in the brain through repetitive stimulation when daily routines
are unchanged, incapacitating individuals, couples and entire villages.67
Envy is another emotion well-known to ancients, who attributed it to the
comparisons people constantly make between themselves and others with regard to
wealth and honor. Aristotle opposed democracy because he thought the masses, driven
by envy of the rich. would use its power to appropriate their wealth.68 If disparity of
26
wealth has been a cause of envy and political conflict down through the ages, imagine the
envy and conflict likely to be aroused among ordinary mortals by a minority of their
fellow citizens given the gift of prolonged or eternal life. This kind of demographic
hierarchy would give stratification new meaning. Science fiction is very much alive to
this possibility, especially as so many of its authors assume that capitalism will be the
dominant economic form for eons to come. In a capitalist world, money equals power,
and immortality, if a scarce good, will be available primarily, perhaps only, to the rich.
In Robert Heinlein's, Methuselah's Children, Lazarus Long is 224 years old and the
beneficiary of a genetic experiment among the Howard families that has given them on
average a life span of 150 years. They have lived secretly, changing identities when
necessary, to avoid arousing the envy of others. When ten percent of the Howards decide
to acknowledge openly their good fortune, public opinion turns against them, their legal
rights are ignored and, Lazarus aside, family members are arrested.
In Jack Vance’s To Live Forever one city on the planet possesses a high degree of
civilization and with it, immortality. Only a small number of its citizens gain immortal
life and do so on the basis of competition so intense that most people refuse to engage in
it and many of those who do go mad or commit suicide. For some reason, the society has
not escaped from the Malthusian population dilemma, so every time immortality is
granted, the lives of non-mortals must be reduced by some period of time. When sixtytwo new immortals are created to compensate for a series of murders, all ordinary
citizens must give up months of their lives. This provokes a popular uprising. In James
Gunn’s Immortals, the rich and powerful seek eternal life and hunt down Marshall
Cartwright and his offspring to gain it at their expense.
27
Frederick Pohl's, The Age of the Pussyfoot, published in 1969, explores another
unpalatable feature of immortality under capitalism: It not only costs money to gain
immortality, but more to sustain it. Charles Forrester has been cryogenically preserved
and is revived in the year 2527. His insurance has matured nicely, paid for his revival
and left him with an additional $250,000, which he thinks of as a small fortune. He
enjoys the luxuries of twenty-sixth century life only to run out of funds very quickly. He
needs to land a high-paying job and finds employment as a guide to Terran culture for an
alien. He is fired when he cannot answer promptly one of the alien's questions. He
subsequently finds what he considers a sinecure, a job overseeing some machinery, but
quickly discovers that all of his predecessors have died from radiation poisoning. He
makes the mistake of quitting in the middle of his shift and his remaining funds go to pay
the resulting fine. Without money, he becomes vulnerable to bored immortals looking
for cheap thrills and drawn to killing unemployed people, for whom they do not have to
pay high revival costs. Sirian the alien temporarily saves him, but he is later confronted
by and must kill the man who has been hunting him down. The plot gets more
convoluted at this point and is no longer germane to the question of immortality.
By far the most cynical take on capitalism and immortality is Richard Morgan’s
Altered Carbon. Data storage and processing nano- and bio-technology have progressed
to the stage where people are implanted with a small “stack” in the back of their necks at
birth. It stores their relevant genetic and other information, including memories, and can
periodically broadcast this information to secure terminals where it is stored for future
use. It can guarantee immortality by repeated uploading into new “sleeves,” generally
the bodies of young adults. These bodies often "belong" to people who could not afford
28
to have themselves called out of storage. For more money still, bodies can be enhanced
and equipped with all kinds of high-tech features, including a “neurachem” suite that
provides lightning-fast reflexes, great strength and other bells and whistles like total
recall, superhearing and carbon fiber bones and ligaments that feel no pain are much
more difficult to damage or destroy. Such options are only available to the wealthy, and
only the very wealthy can afford continual upgrades and replacements. This select few,
known as “meths” – short for Methuselahs – are jaded, corrupt and treat normal humans
as disposable resources. They buy off the police and authorities and create a two-tier
system in which the majority lead a woefully impoverished, insecure and often short life
in spite of extraordinary scientific and engineering advances of all kinds.
Most technological breakthroughs have the potential to enhance the quality of life
but also to degrade it. This was true of the steam engine, the railway, dynamite, nuclear
power, television and the internet, to mention only a few prominent examples. Only
exceptional Victorians were capable of imagining the up- and down-side of technology,
as H. G. Wells did with airplanes and time travel. So did the now largely forgotten
Walter Besant, author of The Inner House, published in 1888, and among the first novels
to explore the consequences of extended life. In his Malthusian variant, individuals live
long, healthy lives by virtue of the discovery in 1890 of a means of prolonging their
“vital energy.” Hundreds of years in the future, this seemingly benign discovery leads to
the “Great Slaughter,” in which most of the elderly are eliminated to make room for the
rapidly expanding population. The chemical that enables longevity is controlled by the
College of Physicians, who use their power to organize society along the most dreary
socialist lines. After two World Wars, science fiction writers were understandably more
29
sensitive to the negative possibilities of new technology. Their villains are evenly
divided between governments and corporations, and more recently, criminal feature
prominently as well.
In Larry Niven’s A World Out of Time, published 1976, Jerome Branch Corbell is
cryogenically frozen to escape certain death from a brain tumor. He is revived in 2190
by a totalitarian global regime, known simply as “The State.” His personality and
memories are extracted and transferred into the body of a criminal who has had his mind
wiped clean in preparation. The new Corbell must periodically pass inspection by a
"checker” who can terminate him if he fails any of a number of tests. The checker
concludes that Corbell is a loner and born tourist and the ideal pilot and sole crew
members of a new space ship whose mission it is to find planets suitable for colonization.
Infuriated by his treatment as an expendable commodity, our hero hijacks the ship and
heads for the center of the galaxy.
Following a lengthy journey in a state of suspended animation, Corbell returns to
Earth where three million years have elapsed. The sun has become a red giant and
Earth’s orbit is now around Jupiter. He learns that the planet is dominated by a race of
immortal, permanently pre-adolescent boys who defeated and eliminated otherwise
immortal girls. The boys have enslaved the "dikta," unmodified humans, from whom
they take promising boys to augment their ranks. The novel ends with Corbell and
another human throwback conspiring to liberate the dikta and overthrow the tyranny of
the boys.
The Ophiuchi Hotline by John Varley, published in 1977, opens on the moon
where the rebel geneticist Lilo faces execution for illegal experiments with human DNA.
30
She receives a visit from Boss Tweed, Luna’s most powerful politician, who has in tow
his formidable bodyguard and Lilo’s clone, who has just emerged from a growth tank
with all of Lilo’s memories. Tweed offers Lilo a deal: he will arrange her escape, the
clone will die in her place and she will help him in his struggle against the Invaders.
Like all Lunarians, she periodically records her memories for insertion into a clone if her
body dies. The first time she does this with Tweed, she discovers that she has actually
been killed twice, both times for trying to escape from his control. Lilo is sent to an
asteroid and put in charge of maintaining the food supply. A complicated story line
ensues in which multiple Lilos come into existence and one of them leads a successful
revolt against Boss Tweed.
In The Illuminatus! Trilogy, which appeared between 1975-1980, Robert Shea and
Robert Anton Wilson offer an even more bizarre and convoluted tale about secret
societies that appear responsible for the assassinations of the Kennedy brothers and
Martin Luther King. Two Gotham detectives are drawn against their will into the eternal
struggle between the Discordians and the Illuminati, the latter a conspiratorial society that
secretly controls the world. We learn that the US government has developed a virulent
strain of anthrax that has been accidentally released, meet Howard the talking porpoise
from Atlantis who does battle against the Illuminati and moves to the offshore African
island of Fernando Po where a Cold War crisis draws in the US, Soviet Union and China.
Late in novel, a plot is exposed that aims to encourage mass human sacrifice to release
the “life energy” necessary to provide immortality to a select group of people that
includes Adolf Hitler. Behind this plot is the American Medical Association, a rock-androll band composed of four of the five “Illuminati Primi.” The sacrifice is to take place at
31
the first European Woodstock festival at Ingolstadt, Bavaria and bring back to life
hibernating Nazi battalions at the bottom of the nearby Lake Totenkopf. The plot is foiled
by the porpoises with the help of aliens and a reincarnated John Dillinger! The victors
take refuge in a submarine, where they are threatened by a sea monster hundreds of
millions of years old. The plot not surprisingly encourages some of the characters to
wonder if they are in an absurdist novel. Threat and speculation alike subside when the
on-board computer allows them to open a line of communication with the pursuing sea
monster who turns out merely to be lonely with a need to talk.
Other writers suspect that immortality will give rise to gerontocracy. Human
societies benefit from constant renewal and change, something made possible by a
turnover of leaders in every sphere of endeavor. Immortality could freeze elites and lead
to stagnation. In Jack Vance’s To Live Forever, it all but paralyzes society, although
individuals compete fiercely for the rewards of longer life and immortality. One of the
characters in Wil McCarthy's Wellstone, complains bitterly about the consequences of the
immortality of his mother, the Queen: "There's no changing of the guard, no retirement of
old ideas. Every error gets entrenched, until a shock to the system is necessary to effect
any change at all."69 He is one of a score of teenagers who are resentful of their immortal
parents, whose wealth they will never inherit. They escape from a "summer camp" on an
outlying "planette" to which they have been banished for bad behavior. In Holy Fire,
published in 1997, Bruce Sterling describes a late twenty-first century world that has
been transformed into a near-paradise by science and technology. Vice and illness have
not disappeared but arise from the failure of well-to-do individuals to control their
appetites or look after themselves properly. Society is governed by a gerontocracy and
32
life-extension technology is its leading growth industry. Mia Ziemann, a 94-year-old
medical economist, uses her life savings to restore her body to the state it was when she
was twenty. She quickly discovers that youth does not provide meaning and fulfillment,
but actually makes her even more unhappy. She gives up her comfortable existence for
life on the European streets with powerless artists and intellectuals and others unable to
afford life-enhancing surgery. She becomes increasingly sympathetic to radical schemes
to change the world.
Opposition to gerontocracy reflects a widespread belief in the need for renewal
and change as essential to the survival and success of individuals, groups and species.
Immortality is understood to constitute a multi-pronged threat to this renewal. People
participate in society because it helps to fulfill powerful needs, and engagement sustains
the social order and serves as a catalyst for its evolution. To the extent that people no
longer need society the social order will petrify. Science fiction author Brian Stableford,
insists that immortality represents "the ultimate stagnation and the end of innovation and
change."70 Aldous Huxley was among the first to warn of this danger. His Brave New
World makes use of novel reproductive technology to remove child rearing as a source of
social bonding. So do the “feelies” and the ready availability of mind-altering drugs,
both of which allow people to experience pleasures in isolation that formerly required
social contact, if not intimacy. Soma, an over-the-counter hallucinogen that offers
hangover-free “holidays,” releases people from tensions and frustrations that might
otherwise be directed against the political order. The feelies, drugs and readily available
one-night stands all but eliminate the need for religion, clubs, families and any other
aspect of civil society. Stability is further guaranteed by a rigid class structure that begins
33
at the hatcheries and conditioning centers where fetuses selected to join the lower castes
are chemically treated to limit their intelligence and shape their physiques for specialized
tasks. Higher caste “alphas” and “betas” are more carefully nurtured to internalize the
values and ideals considered appropriate by World State leaders.
Huxley’s evocation of Lenin and the Bolsheviks in his characters of “Lenina,”
“Bernard Marx” and “Sarojini Engels,” and Mussolini and the Fascists in “Benito
Hoover,” were more telling than he realized at the time. When Brave New World was
written, Soviet-style communism was in its heyday and was regarded by many European
intellectuals as a viable alternative to American-style capitalism. Italian Fascism also had
its admirers, especially in Britain. Huxley’s characters prove powerless and inept in their
respective rebellions, just as communism and fascism would in their struggle against
capitalism. John the Savage, presumably the personification of Rousseau’s noble savage,
hangs himself at the end of the novel. As Rousseau feared, property and its consequences
deprive people of the features that make them human and their society tolerable.
In a prescient review of Brave New World, G. K. Chesterton theorized that
Huxley was revolting against the “Age of Utopias,” those decades in the late nineteenth
and early twentieth century, when H. G. Wells, George Bernard Shaw and other British
intellectuals looked forward to the possibility of a democratic, socialist and even
universalizing state:
After the Age of Utopias came what we may call the American Age,
lasting as long as the Boom. Men like Ford or Mond seemed to many to
have solved the social riddle and made capitalism the common good. But
it was not native to us; it went with a buoyant, not to say blatant optimism,
34
which is not our negligent or negative optimism. Much more than
Victorian righteousness, or even Victorian self-righteousness, that
optimism has driven people into pessimism. For the Slump brought even
more disillusionment than the War. A new bitterness, and a new
bewilderment, ran through all social life, and was reflected in all literature
and art. It was contemptuous, not only of the old Capitalism, but of the old
Socialism. Brave New World is more of a revolt against Utopia than
against Victoria.71
Huxley was attracted to America but also repelled by it. Like so many
Englishmen of his era he failed to grasp that what he disliked most about the US had
more to do with its advanced state of capitalism than its national culture. Postwar
writers, English and American, were more sensitive to this distinction and more explicitly
anti-modern in their orientation. Pace Huxley, their dystopic stories and novels feature
alternative reproductive technology, recreational sex, drugs and virtual reality. In Brave
New World, most people die at age sixty. For postwar writers longevity and immortality
became more plausible and something of synecdoche for scientific and technological
progress.
Huxley wrote at a time when advertising, mass entertainment and centralized
governments with powerful bureaucracies were relative novelties. In the postwar era
they were accepted features of modern life. By the 1970s, drugs and multiple sex
partners for both genders became increasingly acceptable in some circles. A wide range
of reproductive technologies also developed. Postwar writers had to look further afield
35
for innovation and immortality and advanced information systems were obvious choices.
As we have seen, the two became mutually supporting in the 1990s. .
Writing in the aftermath of two World Wars and the Holocaust, and in the midst
of the Cold War, science fiction writers were on the whole more sensitive to the negative
consequences of immortality and every other possible scientific advance. Their growing
cynicism also reflected changing attitudes toward capitalism in the West. For a few,
capitalism remained the solution to all problems, a belief that found its most extreme
expression in neo-liberalism and the policies of the Thatcher, Reagan, Clinton and Bush
administrations. For most science fiction authors, it was at best a mixed blessing, and
one more likely to intensify stratification and exploitation of the underclass in the
absence of meaningful governmental intervention and regulation. It is significant that
socialist societies have all but disappeared in science fiction and its writers increasingly
inured to the long-term survival of capitalism. We rarely, if ever, encounter a benign
form of capitalism in their stories. Capitalism appears in its most rapacious forms,
which is one of the principal reasons why immortality is expected to have such baneful
consequences. Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, warns that genetic research,
nanotechnology and robotics constitute long-term threats to humanity. It is not science
per se that is the problem, but the socio-economic context in which it develops: “We are
aggressively pursuing the promises of these new technologies within the nowunchallenged system of global capitalism and its manifold financial incentives.”72 In
addition to the novels already noted, Frank Herbert’s, White Plague, Kurt Vonnegut,
Cat’s Cradle and several episodes of Star Trek elaborate this premise.
36
Huxley and Orwell were more realistic than most of their postwar imitators in
recognizing that utopia and dystopia alike require a high degree of conformity and
compliance. They rely on Hobbesian coercion, Durkheimian social control or both.
Postwar writers lived through an era in which governments became more powerful and
social control more effective. They have no difficulty in imagining societies that are
more restrictive than that We, Brave New World or 1984. They nevertheless give greater
play to agency, a seeming oxymoron in these circumstances. Jerome Corbell, Ender
Wiggin, Lilo, Takeshi Kovacs, among other heroes, succeed in their quests against
incredible odds. They offer a striking contrast to heroes of Zamyatin, Huxley and
Orwell, who fail and are rendered impotent.
IMMORTALITY AND IDENTITY
When people live for many centuries continuity becomes problematic. In many
stories and novels people accumulate more experiences and memories than they can store
in their brains. In Asimov’s Foundation series, this is also true of androids. People and
robots alike must periodically wipe clean or severely edit their memories to make room
for new ones. It did not occur to Asimov and most of these early authors that memories
might be stored externally on hard drives or in data banks, making them accessible at
will. Endless new experiences and repeated purges of memory will make these beings
very different than they were at earlier stages of existence. The problem of edited
memory is, of course, a special case of the age-old philosophical question of the
relationship between sameness and change that I touched on in the introductory chapter.
37
If people change physically and emotionally and if their memories fade, alter or
disappear, they become "successive selves" unable to claim a core continuous identity.73
One solution to this problem is to recognize that we are not the same people over time.
Defensible as this proposition appears, it is deeply unsatisfying to most people on
psychological grounds. No doubt, some individuals would be happy to put distance
between themselves and unpleasant or unsuccessful pasts and welcome the idea of
becoming different persons over time. Most of us feel a strong need for continuity as it is
commonly understood to be an essential condition for a stable identity. Identity is valued
for a host of emotional and practical reasons. People want to believe that there is some
“self” that endures despite observable changes in appearance, feelings, thoughts and
behavior. Society insists on continuity if marriages and other contracts are to have
meaning and if people are to be held responsible for their past behavior.
Research indicates that people feel unique and base this claim on their character,
capabilities, life experiences and how the latter are mediated be memories. As we
observed in chapter one, this claim encounters serious problems because memory is a
resource that we constantly reshape to help us confront contemporary challenges. Our
inability to remember these changes and to insist that our memories are stable can be
taken as more evidence of our emotional need to defend a continuous identity. Our only
enduring characteristics are such things as fingerprints, retinal patterns, mitochondria and
DNA. These forms of continuity allow physical identification but do not provide the
basis for psychological or emotional continuity.
Longevity and immortality intensify the continuity problem in two ways. They
greatly extend our life experiences while shortening and distorting, if not eliminating,
38
many memories. If we consider science fiction stories about longevity thought
experiments, they drive home the inadequacy, even absurdity, of using memory as the
basis of personal continuity and identity. Continuity is also dependent on the body.
Minds cannot exist without bodies and our identity is linked to our body in important
ways. Science fiction allows us to explore this relationship in novel ways because it can
provide people with new or different bodies, of the same or different gender and on a
temporary or long-term basis. It can also put us in multiple bodies, and they may
confront one other, as Takeshi Kovacs and his double do toward the climax of Altered
Carbon.
Gender is another important characteristic of humanity, although not a
distinguishing one as it is shared with many other species. In some stories and novels,
gender is blurred or altogether disappears. Science fiction also allows various mixes of
gender, boutique bodies and body shapes, combinations of humans and other species and
mind implantation into different species. Advanced computer networks do away with
bodies altogether. Through such stories we can explore, or at least imagine, some of the
possible consequences of these transformations for individual and species identity. The
central question, which science fiction raises but makes no serious attempt to answer, is
how much physical change can we undergo and still feel ourselves?
Interestingly, science fiction has not chosen to explore the option of giving up the
demonstrably problematic belief in continuity and enduring identity. Multiple identities
also get short shrift, even though many of us recognize that we have different
understandings of ourselves, not always compatible, that coexist temporally and come to
the fore in different circumstances. Novels that create multiple versions of the same
39
person, like Jack Vance's To Live Forever, John Varley's Ophiuchi Hotline and Richard
Morgan’s Altered Carbon shy away from investigating the ensuing psychological
consequences, although this would be an ideal context in which to do so. Altered Carbon
goes the further than most. In a new sleeve as a ninja, Takeshi Kovacs meets himself, in
the sleeve of the former lover of the police sergeant with whom he has teamed up. The
two selves are not quite sure how to relate to one another and get into an argument about
their father and his effect on their lives that represents a kind of the internal Bakhtinian
dialogue. They then face the unenviable task of deciding which one of them can survive
after they perform their required tasks because simultaneous duplication is against the
law. Unable to find any compelling argument to agree to leave the decision to chance.74
Altered Carbon also offers some thoughts about relationships. Kristin Ortega,
the police sergeant, is drawn to Kovacs because he is wearing the sleeve of her former
lover. They have a satisfying sexual encounter but then Kristin feels unfaithful because
the person inside the sleeve is not her lover. Kovacs is extremely drawn to her but not
when wearing his ninja sleeve, leading him to conclude that attraction is primarily a
matter of pheromones. This conclusion is undercut by the experience of another couple
in which the wife returns home after years of storage in another body. She and her
husband resume their relationship without a problem but she feels uncomfortable in the
new sleeve. Other changes put people of one “race” into a sleeve of another, but these
alterations are unproblematic for the characters and most of those with whom they
interact.
Many novels introduce consecutive identities, as opposed to continuous ones.
This is most often accomplished through reincarnation. Those who experience rebirth can
40
enter the world in a new body with all but their most recent memories, as in Altered
Carbon and Jack Vance’s To Live Forever. Or, they can be blank slates in new bodies, a
condition that rules out continuity. In other novels, people are allowed varying degrees
of recall of past lives providing them with multiple temporal identities in addition to
those they go on to develop in the present. More dramatic possibilities include the cosharing of bodies in a way that allows a mind to enter and remain in the mind of another
person or life form and share their experiences and thoughts. In Greg Egan’s
Permutation City, humans inhabit the bodies of animals. People continually rebuild and
reinvent themselves and custom-design children if they like. Any of these mixed
situations pose interesting problems for the nature and meaning of identity, and only
some of them related to the difficulty of sustaining continuity. Egan’s novel – and it is
not unique in this regard – problematizes the meaning of humanity and its boundaries.
Are we still human if we inhabit computers or the bodies of animals, or if we create
ourselves rather than being the product of so-called “normal” biological processes? If we
are not human, what are we?
Orson Scott Card's Xenocide suggests that we achieve our humanity through our
empathy for and relationships with others. There is no better way to achieve empathy
than to share a body or a mind with someone else, whether human or alien life form or
some version of AL. So breaking down barriers, not erecting and enforcing them,
enhances, rather than diminishes, our humanity. This approach appears an extension of
Plato’s understanding of dialogue and friendship. His Republic suggests that it is not
argument and the sharing of views that brings order to society but the friendships such
exchanges encourage. They build empathy, and with it, the ability to see ourselves
41
through the eyes of others. Looking at ourselves from the outside, we recognize that our
understandings of justice and everything else is parochial and begin to take other's
opinions more seriously. Most importantly, we treat tem as ontological equals.
Plato and Card maintain that humanity is not an attribute of our physical or
intellectual uniqueness but our ability to develop and live by ethical codes that accord
equal status to others with whom it is possible to communicate. They imagine empathy
arising from a blurring and overcoming of personal boundaries. For Card this interaction
is played out at the personal and species levels. It requires a commitment to bridge
species boundaries. Only then can friendships blossom with representatives of other
species and evoke the kind of empathy that leads to broadened ethical horizons. Card’s
hero, Ender Wiggin, has tried, not unlike Plato, to make this understanding more widely
available through a text – a biography he has written of the last hive queen. Unlike Plato,
book and author are well-received, in a fictional world, of course. But not everyone is
sympathetic or convinced. One of the principal plot lines of the novel concerns the
efforts of Jane, Ender and others to prevent the fleet dispatched by the Starways
Congress, the supreme human authority – from receiving orders to destroy the one planet
where humans have learned to mix empathetically with other species. Xenocide can be
read as a parable about the age-old struggle between those committed to security at all
costs and those worried this commitment will ride roughshod over and possibly destroy
those values security is supposed to protect. As it is our values and empathy with others
that make us human, the Starways Congress would destroy our humanity in order to
protect it.
42
Another approach to immortality comes through artificial intelligence (AI) and its
successor program, artificial life (AL). Both research programs encourage us to think
about life, especially human life, in connection with its ability to perform complex
cognitive tasks and how these tasks depend on information and its processing. Artificial
intelligence sought to establish this claim by building machines that could ultimately rival
humans in intelligence. This proved far more difficult than early researchers envisaged,
although they devised sophisticated computer programs like Deep Blue, which in May
1997 won a six-game match against world chess champion Garry Kasparov.75 Artificial
life researchers have reversed the causal arrow and think of human beings as machines
whose neural systems are capable of performing complex tasks. They describe
consciousness as an emergent property and thus an epiphenomenon.76
The basis for this claim is John Von Neumann’s insight that neural systems could
be treated as Turing machines. With the help from Stanislas Ulam, he conceived of
cellular automata governed by simple rules. Depending on the placement of agents,
complex patterns develop that reproduce themselves or evolve into new patterns, often
with indefinite life spans. This “game of life” generated the intuition that emergent
properties might explain similar developments in the natural world. Subsequent work by
Stuart Kaufmann suggests that boundary areas, where order and chaos intersect, that is
where order is neither too strong nor too weak, are where innovation occurs.77 Artificial
Life researchers describe first order emergence as those properties generated by
interaction among the components of a system. Second order emergence, a rarer
phenomenon, is the product of system properties that give it the potential to evolve.
43
Marvin Minsky speculates that humans may have developed this way. If so, computation
would offer us a novel perspective on human beings and their intelligence. 78
Science fiction has begun to explore this understanding of life and its implications
for human identity. In Orson Scott Card's Xenocide, one of its key characters, "Jane," is
an extraordinarily powerful and sympathetic mind. She has somehow come into
existence in humanity’s supraliminal communication network to which computer systems
on every planet and space ship are connected. When Jane realizes that the central
government has sent a fleet to destroy the planet Lusitania and its diverse life forms, she
prevents transmissions from the government to the fleet to prevent them from sending the
go-ahead order. By doing so, she risks exposure and destruction if the government shuts
down the ansible system, even temporarily. Jane is desperately trying to figure out if she
is alive or merely the artifact of a complex program, whose instructions she is executing.
The humans with whom she is in contact conspire with her to help save the planet and try
hard to convince her that she is a sentient being on the grounds that she has a complex
emotional life and a will to live.
The conventional understanding of identity requires a conception of self which in
turn requires a conception of others. They need not be regarded unfavorably in any way,
just somehow different. Difference is marked off by a boundary and identities are
sustained by boundary maintenance. As we observed in the introductory chapter, these
boundaries can be porous and shifting, and usually are in practice. Science fiction
authors are interested in the boundaries of the bio-engineered humans or other life they
create. They are caught in a revealing contradiction. To bring about their diverse life
forms they must, of necessity, bridge traditional and long-standing boundaries, including
44
those separating different species and organic from inorganic matter.79 Most authors are
nevertheless keen to defend the integrity of humanity and deploy various strategies
toward this end.
To distinguish humankind from machines many authors invoke affect. The term
has a broad lexical field and is used in the science fiction literature to encompass not only
feeling but vitality, imagination and the desire for free play, none of which machines are
thought to possess. Jane violates this distinction as does "Hal 9000," the on-board
computer in 2001 Space Odyssey, that becomes clinically disturbed and kills one of the
crew. Even more problematic are androids with human capabilities. They have long
been a dream of science fiction. J. Storer Clouston’s Button Brains, published in 1933,
makes comic use of a robot that was mistaken for its human prototype. Czech writer
Karel Čapek's 1921 play R.U.R. imagines robots so human-like in appearance that it is
difficult to distinguish them from people. Čapek's robots are manufactured to free
mankind from work. Helna Glory pleads with factory manager Harry Domin to free the
robots. The manager insists they have no souls, but the play presents them as
fundamentally human in their emotions and needs. They rebel against their servitude and
kill all the people they can except for Alquist, a clerk and the only human they know who
still works with his hands. Čapek intends his robots to be understood as allegorical
representations of human beings that industrialization has reduced to near-mechanical
beings and treats as if they were machines. Their rebellion is a form of socialist
revolution that will annihilate the exploiting capitalist class. In contrast to postwar
representations of androids, which often try to make them as human as possible, Čapek
45
blurs the distinction in the opposite direction by making humans more like their
mechanical copies.
Postwar fiction continues the theme of robot-human warfare. In Gregory
Benford’s Ocean of novels there is a life-and death struggle between sentient beings and
machines. Perry Rhodan novels also feature violence of this kind as do the popular
Matrix films. These works reveal a fascination with androids but also fear that they
constitute a threat to humanity. This threat arises from diametrically opposed motives
humans project on to androids. They are assumed to want recognition as humans, and
with it, equality, or alternatively, to hate their masters and seek to overthrow or destroy
them. These contradictory projections have traditionally been associated with slavery
and colonized peoples.80
In the postwar era, androids became a standard theme of science fiction movies
and novels and began to be portrayed in a more favorable light. Gort, the robotic hero of
The Day the Earth Stood Still, became something of a cult figure among sci fi fans as did
Isaac Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw, a hero of his Robot and Foundation series of novels.81
In Asimov’s Caves of Steel, published in 1954, Lije Bailey, a detective, shares the usual
anti-robot prejudice of earth-bound people, but gradually overcomes it in the course of
his collaboration with Olivaw. Androids turn out to be law abiding and altruistic because
they must follow the three laws of robotics, making them true Kantian figures.82 Andrew
Martin, another of Asimov’s robots, becomes creative by virtue of a flaw in his program.
He earns a fortune from his artistic works, buys his freedom and petitions the government
to recognize him as human, which they refuse to do because of strong public opposition.
Andrew finally gives up his immortality, accepts death and is posthumously recognized
46
as human.83 Data in Star Trek: The Next Generation, has similar yearnings. Not all
novels portray androids favorably. In Philip K. Dick's, Do Androids Dream of Electric
Sleep?, published in 1966, androids are used as workers and sex objects in Martian
colonies and many escape to Earth. Constructed from organic materials and
indistinguishable from humans in appearance, they are nevertheless considered objects.
As with slaves in the antebellum South, they are pursued by bounty hunters, who seek to
“retire” (kill) them.
The need for boundary maintenance is more pronounced in the case of androids
that it is with computers because the former not only have the potential to rival humans in
intelligence but in appearance. Unlike computers, androids, who combine AL with
robotics and nano-technology, are mobile and might one day be constructed to make
them outwardly indistinguishable from human beings. The very name "android" derives
from the Greek word for man. Androids and "gynoids" (female robots) could further blur
boundaries by being engineered with sexual organs and an erotic appearance and manner.
There would almost certainly be a market for such robots as many people would be
drawn to the prospect of safe "low maintenance" sex partners. They might purchase or
lease replicas of celebrities -- manufactured under license, of course -- or younger
versions, of current, former or deceased partners. Sex generates enormous business on
the internet and so it would on the android market.84 Only a few science fiction writers
have gone down this road. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sleep? was the basis for the
movie Blade Runner, in which all three of the important female characters are gynoids,
two of whom use their sexual appeal to attempt to manipulate or kill the protagonist. The
third acts as a submissive female, even after the protagonist forces himself on her.
47
"Sexbots" are already on the market. A German company called First Androids sells
what it insists is the world’s most advanced sex doll for a mere $3820. She is alleged to
have a remarkably realistic face and body, a “heavy breathing” function and an G-spot.85
Japanese and American companies make similar claims about their products.86
Boundary maintenance becomes more problematic when we examine it in
historical perspective. Ancient Greeks distinguished human beings from animals on the
basis of their intelligence. People could speak and cook their food. Down to the present,
people distinguish themselves from animals on this basis, although it has become
somewhat more difficult to do as zoologists have discovered that other primates are more
intelligent that previously supposed. At best, there is a sliding scale of intelligence with
humanity at the high end distinguished from other higher life forms more by degree than
kind. With intelligent androids this gap would be closed; humans might be surpassed in
intelligence. This recognition is troubling for some science fiction writers and raises
challenging questions for others. As Asimov realized in Caves of Steel, android
intelligence would almost certainly provoke a "racist" response from many people, and
especially from those whose with low self-esteem or whose jobs or livelihood were
threatened by cheaper and more reliable androids.
The shift from intelligence to affect as the defining feature of human beings may
not succeed in differentiating us from computers and androids if they become advanced
enough to develop feelings. This move creates the additional problem of blurring the
boundary between humans and animals as we have long known that the latter are capable
of emotion, vitality and free play. Recognizing this similarity, the Greeks posited
intellect as the unique human possession. In practice, neither intelligence nor affect will
48
effectively differentiate us from animals and artificial life forms. Boundary maintenance
encounters additional problems when we consider "transhumans." Following Kafka,
some science fiction writers, envisage human minds embedded in the bodies of other
species, not all of them animals.87 Some consider melding, whereby we enter into
symbiotic relationships with other terrestrial or alien species. If any of these possibilities
ever come to fruition it will require far more fundamental adjustments in our self
understanding than those encouraged by intelligent computers or androids.
In our world, boundary maintenance is primarily a problem of groups, not species.
In chapter four, I offered evidence that group boundaries are porous and fluid. For
various reasons, people are sometimes admitted to "membership" even when they have
qualities that would otherwise exclude them. The Nazis recognized some peoples an d
individuals as "honorary Aryans [Ehrenarier] for political reasons. For economic
reasons, the Japanese were made "honorary Aryans" by the Republic of South Africa
during the era of apartheid. People also sneak into privileged categories, as did many
African-Americans whose physical features allowed them to pass for white. Boundaries
change in the sense that people who were once excluded – like Blacks in the examples
above – can subsequently be incorporated into the group. The New Zealand Maori have
not only been made fellow "Kiwis" by the dominant white culture, but provide cultural
practices and associations that whites have adopted to define their identities and
distinguish themselves from the Australians and the British.
Individuals have multiple identities and specific ones assume primacy as a
function of the information people receive and the situations they confront. Some kinds
of multiple identities interfere with group efforts at boundary maintenance. Groups often
49
look the other way because conflict is disruptive. In some circumstances, however, they
may compel individuals to choose between or among competing affiliations and expel or
kill those who do not comply. During the Inquisition, Jews were forced to flee Spain or
convert to Catholicism. Many “conversos” discovered that conversion was insufficient to
assuage the need for purity demanded by the Spanish government and church. More than
a few were burned at the stake, without any evidence, for allegedly practicing their
former religion.88
In today’s world, shared bodies are uncommon among twins, but happen often
enough for us to have coined the term “Siamese twins.”89 Less often children are born
with two heads or two children with conjoined heads. Any of these people are fortunate
to survive, but increasingly do thanks to modern surgery.90 Figurative links between
people are the staple of social life. Long-married couples often read each other’s minds
without the aid of telepathy and may think of themselves as a unit. Many families feel
the same kind of bond, one that submerges the individual in the collective identity. Less
healthy individuals can suffer from “multiple personality disorder” and report feeling
different people at different times.91
If boundary maintenance is impossible on the grounds of intelligence or affect,
those who feel the need to distinguish themselves from intelligent computers and
androids, biologically enhanced humans and symbiots, must look elsewhere for markers
and borders. This may be a principal reason why agency features so prominently in
postwar science fiction stories and novels. The genre began as future-based adventure
tales. Such tales, as noted in the previous chapter, feature heroes who prove their mettle,
and often their virtue, through a series of dangerous encounters in which they triumph
50
over adversaries who most often represent the forces of evil. Fantasy continues this
format. For true science fiction, agency should be problematic. Its authors portray
increasingly large, complex and impersonal societies, often spread out among countless
worlds, in which government is remote but in possession of awesome powers of
surveillance and control. Many of these worlds are extensions of the modern one in
which the individual is increasingly submerged and powerless within large organizations
and economies seemingly ruled by impersonal and poorly understood forces. In Altered
Carbon, to cite one example, the police and corporations track people at will, using
digital implants and sophisticated sonic and visual technology. These technologies
enables the government to control trillions of people and corporations to barrage them
with advertising that directly appeals to their sensory organs. In such worlds, individual
combat against the system seems doomed to failure and would-be heroes as comic as Don
Quixote. The buccaneering spirit is nevertheless strong and individuals make all the
difference in this and other science fiction tales. They routinely outwit governments,
criminal syndicates and aliens, and always for old-fashioned moral ends.
Asimov's “Foundation” series illustrates the fundamental absurdity of this trope.
Its characters inhabit a vast galactic empire composed of millions of worlds where
individuals, not even the emperor, count for very much. There is extensive trade among
worlds, but it declines as the empire breaks up due to powerful centrifugal forces. The
vast size and dispersal of human societies provide good reasons why events anywhere
should have local effects and their consequences dampened, not amplified, on far-away
worlds. Asimov introduces a powerful conceit: Hari Seldon's "psychohistory," a form of
mathematical physics that allows gross predictions about the future that are continually
51
updated by members of the Second Foundation. Such determinism should further reduce
the role of agency, but does not at all in the novels where individuals repeatedly act to
move the course of history away from or back to the path envisaged by Seldon. Although
not nearly as sophisticated as Homer or Sophocles, Asimov's psychohistory plays the
same role as the fate in predetermining the course of events. As in the Iliad or Oedipus,
agency is required to bring "prophecies" to fruition, and the individuals who do this often
act with different, even opposite, ends in mind. By doing so, they confirm their
humanity.
More recent science fiction continues to emphasize agency in contexts where it is
an unsupportable but essential conceit. In John Varley's Ophiluchi Hotline, two
individuals defeat a phenomenally powerful and well-organized criminal conspiracy. In
Greg Egan's Permutation City, the heroine changes the course of history by writing
software that allows artificial life to evolve in a computer program. In Orson Scott Card's
trilogy about humanity's interaction with the Buggers, agency is central at every decisive
moment. In Shea and Wilson's The Illuminatus! Trilogy, two detectives save the world
by unearthing and defeating a series of well-organized conspiracies. In Altered Carbon,
Takeshi Kovacs, a former soldier, and Kristin Ortega, a low-ranking police officer,
destroy a criminal syndicate run by some of the galaxy’s most powerful immortals.
James Blish's Cities in Flight. Much of it is set on the frontiers of civilization, at the
limits of, or altogether beyond, the writ of authority, in parts of the universe which are
sparsely settled and inhabited largely by adventurers. As on all frontiers, agency has
more leeway and individual actions can have far-reaching consequences. The beginning
of the novel is a kind of Horatio Alger story. Cities leave the desolate earth to engage in
52
interstellar trading and key citizens are kept alive through the use of drugs. The hero, a
young boy, who hunts squirrels on the outskirts of Scranton, Pa., stows away when the
city goes into space. The several volumes of the series describe his rise to authority and
critical role in saving humanity from aliens.
Agency is an essential feature of narratives and helps to make science fiction
marketable. There is an analogy to history where biographies are the best sellers. They
too exaggerate the role of agency, and this may be one reason why they are so appealing
to readers. As with science fiction and fantasy, readers of biography may welcome the
depiction of agency as all-important as a refreshing contrast to their own feelings of
impotence and insignificance. Reaffirmation of the myth of agency buttresses their selfesteem and sense of humanity.
All species die, but only humans are aware beforehand of their inevitable fate.
Various writers and philosophers have argued that recognition of our mortality is what
makes us human. Some science fiction writers oppose immortality for this reason,
suggesting it would make it impossible to lead a meaningful and balanced life. This
theme runs through Tolkien. His elves are long-lived but less than human, and creatures
who live greatly extended lives, like Frodo and the Ringwraiths, suffer from alienation or
pain.92 For Olaf Stapledon there is no beauty without death and no drive to excel to life
in the absence of a ticking clock.93 In Last and First Men, his Fifth Men, who live 50,000
years develop a "Cult of Evanescence," to preserve the contact with the primitive, and
through it, their humanity. Ursula K. Le Guin’s, The Furthest Shore, presents death is a
necessary means of balance. This is also a central theme of Frank Herbert's Dune series
of novels. Every life form lives in balance with every other and human immortality
53
would unsettle this relationship with unforeseen consequences. Drawing on the Greek
understanding of tragedy, his novels suggest that longevity, like every other power
carried to excess, is certain to produce consequences the opposite of those intended.94
CONCLUSION
Postwar Anglo-American science fiction represents a sharp break with Western
tradition in its portrayal of immortality as a cause of dystopia. Immortality brings
boredom and intensifies stratification as only the rich can afford the drugs or treatments
that confer longevity. It prompts resentment among the poor who must life short lives.
Anomie increases as social relationships decline, or vanish altogether, and with it, the
possibility of progress and change. Immortality also lends itself to exploitation by
tyrannical governments, greedy corporations and criminals.
In no postwar science fiction novel of which I am aware does immortality help to
create or sustain a utopia. Hero, heroine, or both, often find societies in which
immortality is a feature unsatisfying. Some rebel or leave, as in City and the Stars, to
return to a mortal world, and often one of lower technology. Here they hope to find
happiness. This outcome, and the frequency with which it appears in science fiction
stories and novels, suggest that it should be regarded as something of a mantra intended
to protect us against impending changes and their perceived consequences. Ancient
Greeks and medieval Christians were also wary of utopias, but for different reasons. The
Greeks considered immortality an attribute of the gods. They lived forever and could
foresee the future. Humans must accept their limitations and not confuse themselves with
the gods; aspirations of immortality were considered a form of hubris and likely to lead to
54
greater unhappiness, if not punishment. For most of its history, Christianity has also
judged immortality negatively. The present life is a dystopia, a kind of hell, in contrast to
the afterlife that awaits the faithful. Immortality would only prolong this world and its
suffering and deny good Christians their coveted and well-deserved reward.
Greek and Christian understandings find some resonance in science fiction.
Hubris is a central theme in some immortality novels, even if the concept is not explicitly
deployed. The diverse scientific and medical advances that lead to longevity and
immortality are occasionally accidental, but more often the result of deliberate efforts by
human scientists and their societies. Most of the actors responsible are well-intentioned.
The consequences of their discoveries and improvements invariably differ from what
they had hoped or expected, making life worse, not better. The Greek playwrights and
Thucydides make clear that hubris is a pathology of the powerful. Actors who have been
successful in the past become overly impressed by their own cleverness and power and
pursue overly ambitious and complicated strategies. For many postwar science fiction
writers, who here echo Enlightenment critics, science is the ultimate form of hubris, and
immortality the ultimate goal of science. Science fiction has come full-circle. It began as
a rebellion against the Victorian literary elite but in the course of the twentieth century
developed an equally pessimistic view about the social consequences of science and
technology.
In some ways science fiction’s take on immortality resonates with the Christian
one. For both communities, real utopia can only come about through outside
intervention. For Christians, god is the active agent, for science fiction writers it is
generally aliens. The most upbeat science fiction novels, the ones that come closest to
55
being utopian, have humans transcend their nature by evolving into a new species or
going into partnership with a more developed and wiser one. The first novel to make this
move is British author Olaf Stapledon's, The Last and First Men, published in 1930. It
describes the evolution of humanity through eighteen successor species over the course of
two billion years. Influenced by Hegel and his dialectic, each species produces a high
civilization but inevitably declines and gives rise to a successor.
In the postwar era, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1953 Childhoods End, is undoubtedly the
most influential evolutionary novel. Clarke follows Stapledon in making telepathy the
key to transformation. It allows assimilation to the “Overmind,” a collective alien being
that absorbs human children, bringing the human race to a higher level but at the price of
losing individual minds and personalities. The Overmind arrives on a spacecraft, imposes
world peace and prohibits space exploration. The Overmind’s goal is to reach out to and
incorporate sentient species. It is served by slave-like “Overlords” who are incapable of
being submerged and yearn for their freedom. A cult variant is the sci fi movie, The Day
the Earth Stood Still, released in 1951. An alien spaceship lands in the Washington, D.C.
Mall and the space visitor is met with hostility but is befriended by a curious boy and his
mother. The alien demonstrates his awesome powers in an attempt to convince humans
to live peacefully with one another but is shot and taken back to his spaceship by his
loyal android Gort. This film is redolent with Christian symbolism, culminating in the
death and rebirth of its alien “savior.”95
A more recent and sophisticated exemplar is Orson Scott Card’s Xenocide. It
relies on a form of telepathy to link, in this case, multiple species. The "bugger" hive
queen communicates with its workers this way and with humans and Pequininos, a
56
species that spends its mature state as rooted but sentient trees. Then there is Jane, the
sentient being who lives in the “ansible” network connecting all the computers on all the
worlds inhabited by human beings and uses telepathy to communicate with selected
humans. Our species does not merge or become transformed but becomes wiser and
more understanding of its place in the universe though it contact with other species.
Xenocide is one of several novels in a series that begins with humanity’s life-and-death
struggle with the “buggers,” the insectoid race of whom the hive queen represents that
last survivor. In the first two novels each species attempts to eliminate each other and
humanity destroys its adversary by making use of young combat game savvy teenagers as
strategists. In Speaker for the Dead it becomes apparent that the war was a tragedy
because it might have been averted by communication between the species. All the
universe’s sentient beings can be divided into species with whom humans can
communicate and those with whom they cannot. It is theoretically possible to live in
peace with all of the former, and Ender attempts to demonstrate how this is possible with
the buggers and Pequininos.
Xenocide can be read as a reflection on hubris. For the Greeks, its opposite was
sophrosunē, best understood as a form of humility and self-restraint that arises from an
understanding of one’s insignificant place in the universe. After the wars against the
buggers Ender becomes “Speaker for the Dead,” when he publishes “The Hive Queen,”
that tells the story of the buggers and portrays them in a favorable light.96 In the last two
novels, Ender reaches the kind of understanding associated with sophrosunē through his
interactions with family members, the other species on Lusitania and Jane. His wisdom
57
distinguishes him from most of the rest of humanity and especially from the
demonstrably short-sighted, self-serving and heartless rulers of the Starways Congress.97
We live in a dystopia. For traditional Christians this is the result of sin, original
or subsequent, and for most science fiction writers, a reflection of our nature.
Christianity teaches that the next life could be a golden age. The Enlightenment
encouraged the belief that utopia could be achieved in this world. All efforts to bring it
about have failed, and, many would argue, have been counterproductive. This has not
stopped people from trying to build a better life for themselves and others, even though
the pessimists insist that such efforts only produce more dehumanizing dystopias.
Science fiction generally conveys a pessimistic message, although some authors, as we
have seen, hold out the prospect of transcending our condition with the help of aliens and
evolution. Read as cautionary tales, science fiction's dystopias encourage us to
understand the present as possibly better than the future in many ways. While not
pretending that the present is any kind of utopia, its authors make it appear a relatively
better world than we might otherwise think.
Dispensationalists insist that the world is also getting worse. They derive comfort
from moral and political decline because they believe it will hasten the rapture. Much of
Dispensationalism’s appeal is in its message that people should take heart from what they
lament and fear. The Left Behind series strives to build a community among believers by
encouraging a sense of superiority among them by virtue of their shared knowledge of the
future and the joyous fate that awaits them. Science fiction builds a community on the
shared belief of many of its readers that they are insiders with profound insights into
possible human futures. Unlike millennialism, science fiction does not hold out the
58
prospect of a better life or of being saved. It does offer cognoscenti solace, community
and self-esteem, both powerful foundations of identity.
Left Behind and science fiction share another interesting attribute: the relative
absence of procreation. In Left Behind, Buck and Chloe father a child, who is very much
in the background. Children appear in real numbers only in Millennium, even though
Jesus makes the sexual drive disappear with immortality. Procreation is, of course, a
traditional means of achieving figurative immortality by passing down one's name and
genes. Christianity has tended to treat immortality and procreation as something of an
either-or choice. Jesus fathered no children, Augustine became celibate because he
considered sex a form of loss of control and Origen castrated himself to better serve god
and the nuns with whom he worked. For Christianity, spiritual commitment has always
been associated with chastity and other forms of physical denial. Modern secular
thinkers also frame an inverse relationship between immortality and childlessness, albeit
for different reasons. There is the Malthusian constraint in which immortality combined
with procreation would quickly overpopulate the earth unless people settled other worlds.
Such a problem should be nugatory for science fiction novels in which space travel is a
standard conceit. Economic and psychological constraints loom more important. In
some novels characters are loath to produce children because they must share their
fortunes with them. Children may be less satisfying emotionally if we no longer need
them to achieve a merely figurative form of immortality. In the twentieth century, the
birth rate dropped dramatically throughout the industrial world as wealth and life spans
increased.
59
Some science fiction novels -- Greg Egan's Schild's Ladder is a case in point -feature characters who derive pleasure from multiple generations of children. More
commonly, extended life goes together with infertility, as with the Mule in Asimov's
“Foundation” series, Barjavel's Le Grand Secret, Damon Knight's Dio and William
Gibson's Sprawl trilogy. Howard Hendrix speculates that science fiction reproduces
Christian tradition in secular form. Immortality stops physical maturation in a youth, in a
stage of life where mortal people would generally marry and start families. Eternal youth
interrupts the cycle of birth, growth, reproduction and death. It recovers the prelapsarian
state of Adam and Eve as "immortal flowers" that bear no fruit.98 In Christianity, this
allows identity to become other-directed and focused on eternal life. In science fiction, it
becomes more inner-directed as the self becomes the end-all of a life in this world.
REFERENCES
1
Tennyson, “Tithonus.”
2
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, pp. 1, 5.
3
Herodotus, Histories, 3: 22-24
4
Homer, Odyssey, 5: 152-57.
5
Faulkner, "Address upon Receiving the Andrés Bello Award."
6
Wikipedia, "List of Countries by Life Expectancy," using data from the United
Nations, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
7
Wells, World Set Free; Lanouette, Genius in the Shadows, pp. 107, 134.
8
Interview with Leo Szilard, “President Truman Did Not Understand,” U.S. News&
World Report, 15 August, 1960, pp. 68-71; Petition to the President of the United States,
60
signed by Leo Szilard and 69 co-signers, 17 July 1945.
http://www.dannen.com/decision/45-07-17.html Glenn T Seaborg to Ernest O Lawrence,
13 June 1945, Nuclear Files,
http://nuclearfiles.org/menu/library/correspondence/seaborg-glenn/corr_seaborg_194506-13.htm
9
Card, Xenocide, p. 35. Also Stapledon, Last and First Man, p. 11; Joy, "Why the
Future Doesn't Need Us."
10
Guy Gavriel Kay, “Fiction versus Fantasy,”
http://www.treitel.org/Richard/sf/fantasy.html; Nick Gevers, “The Literary Alchemist:
An Interview with Michael Swanwick,”
http://www.infinityplus.co.uk/nonfiction/intms.htm
11
Williams, Makropulos Case, pp. 82-100.
12
Fischer and Carl, "Philosophical Models of Immortality in Science Fiction."
13
Lem, Star Diaries. Also Farmer’s Riverworld series
14
Clark, City and the Stars; Herbert, Dune and God-Emperor of Dune; Card, “Thousand
Deaths.”
15
Stableford, Empire of Fear,
16
Simmons, Hyperion, for something similar.
17
Gunn, Immortals; Anderson, Boat of a Million Years; Kuttner and Moore, Fury;
Zelazny, This Immortal; Jones, Crown of Dalemark; Van Vogt, Slan; Shiras, Children of
the Atom.
18
Clark, How to Live Forever, pp. 26-27.
19
McCaffery, Ship Who Sang.
61
20
Wiener, Human Use of Human Beings, pp. 103-04.
21
Moravec, Mind Children, pp. 109-10.
22
Minsky, “Why Computer Science is the Most Important Thing that has Happened to
Humanities in the Last 5,000 Years,” Lecture, Nara, Japan, 15 May 1996, cited in Hayles,
How We Became Post-Human, p. 13.
23
In Benford, In Alien Flesh.
24
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 12.
25
Benford, "Doing Lemon," in Benford, In Alien Flesh.
26
Morgan, Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies; Martin, Mask of the
Prophet, p. 204.
27
Lifton, Future of Immortality, p. 3.
28
Wilson, Philosopher’s Stone, for another variant of species memory.
29
Saramago, Death at Intervals.
30
Shaw, Back to Methusalah.
31
Anderson, Boat of a Million Years, makes this point.
32
Vance, To Live Forever; Zelazny, Today We Choose Faces
33
Blish, Clash of Symbols.
34
Roberts, History of Science Fiction, pp. 1-20.
35
Luckhurst, Science Fiction, pp. viii, 1-12.
36
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 11.
37
Suvin, Metamorphoses of Science Fiction, p. 89.
38
Roberts, Science Fiction, ch. 1 for a review of definitions. Luckhurst, Science Fiction,
pp. 1-12, on the development of the genre.
62
39
Carlyle, “Signs of the Times.”
40
Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, pp. 33-34, 47.
41
Weber, “On Bureaucracy.” This title is not Weber's, but his translators.
42
Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 48
43
Roberts, Science Fiction,” p. viii; Luckhurst, Science Fiction, pp. 2-3.
44
Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 5; Miles, Gothic Writing, p. 2; Aldiss, Billion Year
Spree, p. 8.
45
Dryden, Modern Gothic and Literary Doubles; Hurley, Gothic Body.
46
On this point, Unwin, "The Fiction of Science"; Harris, "Measurement and Mystery in
Verne."
47
Capitano, “’L’ici-bas’ and ‘l’Au-delà."
48
Williams, Keywords, on high and low literary forms.
49
Suvin, Positions and Suppositions, p. 10; James, Science Fiction in the Twentieth
Century, p. 48; Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 7.
50
Wells, Short History of the World.
51
Evans, "Jules Verne and the French Literary Canon."
52
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 4.
53
Luckhurst, Science Fiction, p. 115; Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, pp. 92-93.
54
Seed, American Science Fiction and the Cold War; Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made
Of, pp. 163-84.
55
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, pp. 83-87, 164-70, on Heinlein.
56
Reade, Martyrdom of Man, p. 433.
57
Capitano, “’L’ici-bas’ and ‘l’Au-delà," for a discussion.
63
58
See chapter two for a discussion of these novels.
59
Anderson, Un-Man and Other Novellas; Spinrad, Iron Dream.
60
Asimov, Foundation.
61
Disch, Dreams Our Stuff is Made Of, p. 2, notes that Japanese Sci Fi is largely
derivative. Frongia, "Cosmifantasies," on Italian science fiction.
62
Connor, English Novel in History, p. 1.
63
Cited in Clark, How to Live Forever, pp. 14-15.
64
Adams, Life, the Universe and Everything, p. 9.
65
Egan, Permutation City, p. 284.
66
Herbert, Heaven Makers, p. 22.
67
McCarthy, Wellstone, p. 9.
68
Aristotle, Rhetoric, II, Chapter 10.
69
McCarthy, Wellstone, p. 71.
70
Stableford, "Immortality."
71
G. K. Chesterton, “Review of Brave New World, Illustrated London News, 4 May
1935.
72
Bill Joy, “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us,” Wired, August 2004,
http://www.wired.com/wired/arcCchive/8.04/joy_pr.html; see also Glover, What Sort of
People Should There Be?, p. 18; Stapledon, Last and First Man, p. 11.
73
Jonas, "Philosophical Reflections on Experimenting with Human Subjects"; Glannon,
"Identity, Prudential Selves and Extended Lives,"
74
Morgan, Altered Carbon, pp. 443-51.
75
Hsu, Behind Deep Blue.
64
76
Doyle, On Beyond Living; Levy, Artificial Life; Emmeche, Garden in the Machine;
Kampis and Cansyi, “Life, Self-Reproduction, and Information”; Steels and Brooks,
Artificial Life Route to Artificial Intelligence; Brooks, “Intelligence without
Representation”; Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, pp. 237-39.
77
von Neumann, Theory of Self-Replicating Automata; Kaufmann, Origins of Order
Wolfram, “Universality and Complexity in Cellular Automata,” and “Computer Software
in Science and Mathematics”; Langton, “Computation at the Edge of Chaos.”
78
Barkow, Cosmides and Tooby, Adapted Mind; Minsky, Society of Mind, pp. 17-24;
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, p. 241-44.
79
Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, pp. 279-82, on how boundaries are routinely
broached in post-modern fiction.
80
Lebow, White Britain and Black Ireland.
81
Most notably in Asimov, Caves of Steel, Naked Sun, Robots of Dawn, Robots and
Empire, Prelude to Foundation, Forward the Foundation, Foundation and Earth and all
the books of the Second Foundation Trilogy.
82
On this last point, Roberts, History of Science Fiction, pp. 199-200.
83
Asimov, Complete Robot.
84
Levy, Love and Sex with Robots, for a celebration of these possibilities.
85
"The Girl Below is Actually an Android Sex Doll," The Frisky,
http://www.thefrisky.com/post/246-the-girl-below-is-actually-an-android-sex-doll/
86
Check out RealDoll, http://www.realdoll.com/
87
Kafka, Metamorphosis.
88
Kamen, Spanish Inquisition.
65
89
“Doctors Separate Conjoined Benhaffaf Twins, BBC, 8 April 2010,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8610399.stm
90
“Op to Remove Baby’s Second Head,” BBC, 21 February 2005,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/4285235.stm; “Separated Twins Come Face-to-Face,
BBC, 25 October 2003, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/3209210.stm;
“Conjoined Twins Operation Goes Ahead in London,” Guardian, 7 April 2010,
http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2010/apr/07/conjoined-twins-separated-london.
91
Web MD, Dissociative Identity Disorder, http://www.webmd.com/mental-
health/dissociative-identity-disorder-multiple-personality-disorder
92
Crossley, “A Long Day’s Dying.”
93
Smith, "Olaf Stapledon and the Immortal Spirit."
94
McLean, "Question of Balance."
95
The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951)
96
Card, Speaker for the Dead.
97
Ibid; Card, Xenocide.
98
Hendrix, "Dual Immortality, No Kids."
66