Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction

by Leigh Grossman

  The superhero mythology is a manifestation of the desire to save humanity from its dystopian future, but Kessler’s Black & White shows that even the heroic is not immune to corporate power. In the one hundred years since their emergence, heroes compete for corporate sponsorships and must conform to a stifling corporate ideal. Not everyone in Kessler’s world embraces the heroes/extrahumans. The Everyman group contends that ordinary humans would be better off without the extrahumans. Their worry is that by leaving the duties of shepherding society to the extrahumans, the normals have laid the foundations for perpetual servitude to an elite group of extrahuman protectors. When the superheroes revolt against the corporate world, it is unclear whether it is justice or villainy by another name. But one thing is clear: ordinary people have to save themselves. Nobody else can be trusted to do it for them.

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  References

  Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot. New York: Random House, 2004.

  Bacigalupi, Paolo. Pump Six and Other Stories. San Francisco, CA: Night Shade Books, 2010.

  Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York, NY: Scholastic, 2008.

  Dick, Philip K. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep. New York, NY: Ballantine Books, 1996.

  Gibson, William. Neuromancer. New York, NY: Penguin Putnam Inc, 1984.

  Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York, NY: Random House, 1932.

  Kessler, Jacqueline, and Caitlin Kittredge. Black and White. New York, NY: Random House, 2009.

  More, Thomas. Utopia. Translated by George Logan. London: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

  Orwell, George. 1984. New York, NY: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1949.

  ——. The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell. Edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus. 4 vols. Vol. 4. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1970.

  Plato. Republic. Translated by Allan Bloom. New York, NY: Basic Books, 1991.

  Zamyatin, Yevgeny. We. Translated by Mirra Ginsburg. New York, NY: Harper Collins, 1999.

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  Notes

  1 Socrates’ aside that the state under discussion is a “fever state” also suggests that the ideal leaves much to be desired.

  2 The word ‘utopia’ means ‘no place,’ and suggests that the ideal is nowhere to be found in the actual world.

  3 Published in English and French translations long before it was published in its original Russian, the book itself is the victim of the repressive ideologies it critiques.

  4 The city of the One State is a glass incarnation of Bentham’s panopticon where surveillance is maximized and control is maintained more by the awareness of the possibility of being observed than by the presence of an actual observer.

  5 It is worth noting that D-503’s downfall is that he follows the Benefactor’s reasoning and tries to explain ‘love.’

  6 It is helpful to understand noir in thematic opposition to the western. In a western, the characters attempt to escape the problems of civilization (or the old world) by seeking a frontier: an open space unencumbered by tradition that, if reached, makes possible a new beginning. The problem in a Western is that the frontier is often inaccessible, but though inaccessible, it most certainly does exist. To derive a noir, simply take a western theme and subtract the frontier. The problems of the present are crushing, yet there is no possibility for escape in the absence of the frontier. “Blade Runner,” the film adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? incorporates many of the noir visual tropes in addition to the theme of the absent frontier. I should like to acknowledge the lectures of professor Cheyney Ryan for providing the initial western/noir distinction that has given rise to so many intriguing discussions (for example reading “It’s a Wonderful Life” alternately as a noir or western).

  7 Not for nothing is Case a “Cowboy.” My intent is to suggest that cyberspace represents an apparent frontier that actually fails to fulfill the thematic function of the western frontier in that it does not offer a genuine new beginning.

  8 Nothing is known of the donors; Lidia “sometimes wondered if in India, two dusky girl children looked out at the world from cornflower eyes, or if they walked the mud streets of their village guided only by the sound of echoes on cow-dung walls and the scrape of their canes on the dirt before them” (34).

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  Matthew Crom holds a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Oregon. He manages an independent bookstore and has taught a range of philosophy, humanities and interdisciplinary courses at Northwest Christian College, the University of Oregon, St. Martin’s University and Pacific Lutheran University. He is particularly passionate about his writing seminars with first year students which explore questions of human nature through literary science fiction and fantasy. Outside of academia, he trains and competes in Judo and is a dedicated amateur chess player. He lives with his wife and daughters in Tacoma, Washington.

  EVGENII ZAMYATIN

  (1884–1937)

  It could be argued that Evgenii Zamyatin’s greatest talent was for getting under the skin of governments, since he was imprisoned and exiled repeatedly by both the Tsarist government he rebelled against in his youth and the Soviet government he helped bring to power but whose faults he freely criticized. Son of a Russian Orthodox priest and a musician, Zamyatin trained as a naval engineer. During his studies he joined the Bolshevik Party and was arrested and exiled for the first time, but he was eventually allowed to return and finish his studies. By his mid-twenties he was writing both fiction (drawing on his prison experiences) and technical articles. Exiled to rural Lakhta in 1911, he wrote Uezdnoye (A Provincial Tale), which satirized life in a small Russian town, and brought him literary success. After being pardoned in a general amnesty, he wrote Na Kulichkakh (At The World’s End), an anti-military tale for which he and the publisher were both arrested. As a skilled engineer during World War I he was needed too much to remain exiled, however, and Zamyatin was sent to England to supervise ship construction.

  After the Bolshevik Revolution he was able to write more freely, and because of his travels abroad and literary celebrity he was given a number of prestigious literary posts. But as his works became more critical of the new regime, he was repeatedly arrested again, lost his literary posts, and eventually had his works banned in Russia. We, a dystopian classic and Zamyatin’s best-known work, was published abroad many years before it (officially) appeared in Russia. In 1931, he was allowed to go abroad and settled in Paris for the last years of his life.

  WE, by Evgenii Zamyatin

  First published in 1924

  Translated by Alexandra Israel for this edition

  Translator’s Note

  We is a notoriously difficult text to translate. The writing is extremely stylized, and Zamyatin makes extensive use of mathematical terms as description. The result is an almost impenetrable thicket of strange constructions, mathematical terms, and asides directed to the reader, who is imagined as a sentient being in another galaxy.

  I chose to retain some names that are commonly used in other translations. For example, благодетель can be used to mean various things other than “Benefactor;” however, I chose to use “benefactor” because it is consistent with other English translations, and because it expresses the appropriate combination of benevolence and intimidation. The use of “benefactor” in nineteenth-century English literature, in particular, creates associations with benevolence that overlays economic and class differences, sometimes in a sinister way. These associations are lost in other translations.

  Record Nine.

  A bright, solemn day. On such a day, you can forget about your weaknesses, imprecisions, abnormalities—and everything is as clear, immovable, unchanging, eternal as our new glass…

  Cube Square. Sixty-six mighty concentric circles: the platforms. And sixty-six rows of silent luminous faces, eyes reflecting the celestial radiance, or, better said, the radiance of the One State. Scarlet flowers, like blood—the women’s lips. The tender garlands of the chil
dren’s faces—they stand in the first row, closest to the place of action. Profound, severe, Gothic silence.

  The Judgment that was approaching can only be described; nothing like it has been experienced since antiquity, in the time of their “divine service.” But they served their absurd, unseen god; we serve a rational and precise, known figure; their god gave them nothing but eternal, agonizing doubt. Their god created nothing intelligent, and no one knows why he sacrificed himself. We, however, bring a sacrifice to our god, the One State—a calm, deliberate, rational sacrifice. Yes, this was a solemn liturgy to the One State, a memorial of the days of our christening—the years of the Bicentennial Wars, a great celebration of the victory of all over one, of the totality over the individual…

  And there was the individual, standing on the steps of the sunlit Cube. A white—but no, not white, rather a colorless—glassy face, glassy lips. Only the eyes remained, black, absorbing, sucking holes, and that unknown, uncanny world was but a few minutes away. The golden badge with his numbers had already been removed. His hands were tied with purple ribbon (an ancient custom: the explanation came from antiquity, when such things were carried out not in the name of the One State. The convicted, understandably, felt entitled to resist, so his hands were of course bound with chains).

  And above, on the Cube, stood He, close to the machine—which was motionless, made of metal—the figure whom we call the Benefactor. The face is incomprehensible from here, from below: all one can see is that it is organic, with a majestic, strictly quadratic outline. But the hands… as sometimes happens in photographs, the hands are too close, hovering in the foreground, enormous, riveting the gaze, blocking everything else. These heavy, ponderous, but serene hands, folded on his lap—it is clear that they are immovable, and his lap can scarcely bear their weight…

  Suddenly one of those colossal hands began to rise—a slow, iron gesture—and a Cipher left the platform, obeying the rising hand, and came up to the Cube. It was one of the state poets, on whose lot fell the happy honor of celebrating the Tribunal with his verses. Divine iambs rang out on the tribunal—about the madman, with his glassy eyes, who stood there on the steps and waited for the logical conclusion to his madness.

  …Flames. In the iambs buildings reel, waves of liquid gold crash and collapse. Green trees writhe and spill their sap—nothing remains but the black crosses of death. But Prometheus arises (this is, of course, us):

  “And suddenly there was fire in the machine, steel,

  And chaos was shackled to the law.”

  Everything is new, steel: a steel sun, steel trees, steel people. Suddenly some kind of madman appears—“from the chain he freed the fire”—and everything perishes once more…

  I have, unfortunately, a bad memory for verse, but one thing I do remember: no one could have chosen more instructive and beautiful images.

  Again a slow, heavy gesture, and on the steps of the Cube a second poet. I rose from my seat: it couldn’t be!

  The thick, Negroid lips… no, his lips, it was him… Why hadn’t he said in advance that this honor lay before him… Those lips trembled, grey. I understood: standing before the Benefactor, before the whole corpus of Guardians. But still, to be so nervous…

  Harsh, quick, axe-keen trochees. They sang of an unprecedented crime; of blasphemous verses, where the Benefactor was named—no, my hand will not be raised to repeat it.

  R-13, pale, gazing at nothing (I would not have expected such shyness of him), walked back down, and sank into his seat. For the smallest fraction of a second there was an impression of someone’s face next to me, with us—a sharp, pointed, black triangle—but it immediately vanished. My eyes, a thousand eyes, gazed upwards, at the Machine. There—the third, iron gesture of that inhuman hand. Shaking in an unseen wind, the criminal makes his way, slowly, up the steps, one step, another, and with that step, the last of his life, throws his face back to the sky, to the blue. Standing on his final resting place.

  Severe and immovable as destiny, the Benefactor passed around the Machine in a circle, laid an enormous hand on the lever. There was not a whisper of breath: every eye was on the hand. The hand gripped the fiery vortex, the instrument, with its force of hundreds of thousands of volts. What a magnificent charge!

  An immeasurable second. The hand, crackling with current, lowers. An unbearably sharp, cutting beam flashes—like a shiver, a just audible crackle in the tubes of the machine. The prostrate body is bathed in a luminous haze; dissolving, dissolving, with a terrible speed before our eyes. And then nothing: only a puddle of pure, clean water, where a moment before a scarlet heart beat violently…

  This process was simple, and familiar to each of us: yes, dissociated matter, yes, the splitting of the body’s atoms. But nonetheless, every time it was like a miracle, a sign of the inhuman power of the Benefactor.

  Before Him flared the faces of a dozen female ciphers, women with lips half-open from agitation, their flowers fluttering in the wind.1

  According to the old custom, ten women adorned the uniform of the Benefactor, which was still damp from the spray, with flowers. With the magnificent steps of a high priest He slowly descended, slowly moved through the Tribunal, and after him the tender white branches of women’s arms, and a storm of cries from the unified millions. And then cries in honor of the Guardians, invisibly present, somewhere in our rows. Who knows: maybe the Guardians were foreseen in the fantasies of the ancient people, in creating their tender-terrible “guardian angels” that were placed beside each individual at birth.

  Yes, something from the ancient religions, something purifying, like a thunderstorm, was present in the whole celebration. You, whose task it is to read this—do you know moments like these? I feel sorry for you, if you do not…

  *

  1 From the Botanical Museum, of course. I personally have never seen any beauty in flowers—like everything else belonging to the savage, ancient world, everything that was exiled beyond the Green Wall. The only beauty is reasonable and useful: machines, boots, formulas, food, etc.

  Record Fourteen.

  “Mine.” I can’t. The cold floor.

  Yet more about yesterday. The personal hour before sleep ended, and thus I could not write. All of this has been carved into me, engraved forever, especially this unbearably cold floor…

  Yesterday evening it was time for O’s visit—it was her day. I went down to the attendant to obtain a certification for closing the blinds.

  “Are you alright?” she asked. “You seem…a little off, today.”

  “I… I’m sick.”

  In essence, this was true; certainly this was a sickness. All of it was a sickness. All of a sudden I remembered; of course I had the certification. I felt in my pocket, and there it was: a rustle of paper. That meant—but that meant everything had happened, all of it had truly happened.

  I held out the slip of paper to the attendant, feeling like my cheeks would catch fire; without raising my head, I knew that the attendant was surprised to see me.

  Then it was 21:30. In the room to the left I see my neighbor, bent over a book, his lumps, his bald spot and his forehead, shaping an enormous, yellow parabola. I agonized; after everything with her, how could I want O? And to the right I could feel his eyes on me, I could see distinctly the wrinkles on his forehead, ranks of yellow, illegible scratches. And for some reason it appears that these scratches were all about me.

  At a quarter to 22 she came to my room, a joyful pink whirlwind, a firm squeeze of pink arms around me. And then I felt that squeeze slowly getting weaker, her arms releasing me, until her hands lowered and she said:

  “You aren’t the same, you aren’t like before, you aren’t mine!”

  What a wild term, “mine”! I was never… but I hesitated. Earlier I wasn’t, not reliably, but now, you see, I don’t live in our rational world, but in a second, nonsensical world. The world of the square root of negative one.

  The blinds fell. To the right, my neighbor dropped his
book from the table to the floor, and in the last, instantaneous, narrow crevice between the blinds and the floor, I saw a yellow hand snatch up the book. And in my heart, I would have used all my strength if I could have grasped that hand.

  “I thought… I hoped to see you on my walk today. I need you, I need you so much…”

  Poor, pretty O! Her pink mouth was a half moon with the horns pointing downwards. But I couldn’t tell her why, what I had done; it would have made her an accomplice to my crimes, and I knew that she didn’t have the strength to go the Bureau of Guardians, so consequently…

  O lay down. I slowly kissed her, kissing the sweet, plump crease in her wrist. Her blue eyes were closed, and that pink half moon slowly blossomed, melting, as I kissed her everywhere.

  Suddenly I felt clearly how empty and devastated I was, how I had been cast off. I couldn’t—it wasn’t possible. I must, but I couldn’t. My lips froze.