Extreme Fabulations

by Steven Shaviro

  the heart was out of them, the fear and the prejudice too deeply ingrained within their souls, the confused tangle of their thinking too much a part of them …

  They would go back tomorrow morning to their workrooms and they’d work again, but the work would be a futile work, for the dedicated purpose of their calling had been burned out of them by fear, by the conflict of their souls, by death, by ghosts.

  “Shadow Show” does not end, however, with this nihilistic impasse. Instead, the story swerves onto an entirely different path. The scientists finally realize that they have gone about their project entirely wrong:

  There was some other factor. Another factor that had not been thought of yet … They would have to take a new direction to uncover the secret that they sought … We’ll have to find a new approach … the old methods of ferreting out the facts were no longer valid … the scientific mind had operated for so long in the one worn groove that it knew no other … they must seek some fresh concept to arrive at the fact of life.

  A new approach, a new direction, a fresh concept … The trouble is that the scientists of Life Team No. 3 are so entirely stuck in their “one worn groove” that they are incapable of coming up with anything new. But ironically, at the end of the story, they discover that they have already – and entirely unwittingly – stumbled upon a better way to create life. This comes out in their leisure, their diversion, and their distraction. Their goal-related activity is entirely futile. But they stumble upon the secret of life when they have no goal in mind, when they are just rambling idly about.

  The starting premise for this development is simple enough. If you isolate people and force them to research the hard problem of life, we are told, you must also “do something to preserve their sanity.” You need to entertain them somehow or other, provide them with relief from the stresses of their task. Every night, therefore, the scientists of Life Team No. 3 put their science aside; “for a few hours, they forgot, or tried to forget, who they were and what their labors were.” Instead, they indulge themselves in a participatory virtual reality spectacle called the Play: “a never-ending soap opera,” a ridiculous and wildly digressive melodrama that goes “on and on and on … never getting anywhere.” The Play engages the scientists because it is pointless, without a goal or an ending. Each audience member creates and controls a fictional character; and nobody knows “to whom any of the characters belonged” besides their own. The nine characters in the Play interact on a sort of movie screen; audience input is mediated through advanced computing technology.

  In describing this virtual reality setup, Simak unsurprisingly engages in a bit of hand-waving, writing of “memory banks … rows of sonic tubes … color selectors, ESP antennae and other gadgets.” But “Shadow Show” also situates the Play in the context of a broader media history. “In the olden days,” we are told, people made “shadow pictures”: shapes produced by hand gestures in front of “a lamp or candle,” so as to cast enlarged shadows on the opposite wall. From there, we moved on to puppets, to “cheap plastic dime-store toy[s]‌,” to comic books, to movies, and television – and finally to the Play. Mimetic fidelity continually improves in the course of this evolutionary history. We go from fairly static “one-dimensional black-and-white” images to vital movements that are “three-dimensional in full color.” We also go from vague external representations to ever-more precise and authentic internal expressions. All these changes are extrapolated from our bodies, as we progress from hand to mind:

  First, Man [sic] had created with hands alone, chipping the flint, carving out the bow and dish; then he achieved machines which were extensions of his hands and they turned out artifacts which the hands alone were incapable of making; and now, Man [sic] created not with his hands nor with extensions of his hands, but with his mind and extensions of his mind, although he still must use machinery to translate and project the labor of his brain.

  Someday, he thought, it will be mind alone, without the aid of machines, without the help of hands.

  Simak’s account of media history loosely anticipates the theories that Marshall McLuhan proposed a decade later. McLuhan argues that all media are technological prostheses, extensions of ourselves – or more precisely, that they are extensions of particular human organs:

  The wheel is an extension of the foot; the book is an extension of the eye; clothing, an extension of the skin; electric circuitry, an extension of the central nervous system.

  (McLuhan and Firoe 1967)

  Where older technologies extended particular bodily organs and senses, McLuhan says, modern electronic media extend the entire human nervous system; they externalize and express the mind in general. In Simak’s terms, this means that, in the Play, expression is no longer limited by the clumsiness of external gesture – “since the brain is more facile than the hand.” There is still mediation, but it works more fluidly and powerfully than ever before, in the form of “mechanical magic which turned human thought and will into the moving images that would parade across the screen.”

  For the scientists of Life Team No. 3, the Play is

  something with which they can establish close personal identity and lose themselves, forgetting for a time who they are and what may be their purpose.

  This formulation is necessarily ambiguous, for the Play provides both escape and identification. The scientists “lose themselves” in the meanders of the Play’s ever-elaborating fictions; they forget who they are, as they project themselves into, and become absorbed by, figures who are radically different from their actual selves. In this way, the Play is “an emotional outlet, a letdown from the tension”; it is explicitly designed “to lift the minds of the participants out of their daily work and worries.” And yet, at the same time, the participants “establish close personal identity” by virtue of their involvement in the Play. They can no longer live apart from their fictional alter egos:

  Each of us has identified himself or herself with a certain character. That character has become a part, an individual part, of each of us. We’re split personalities. We have to be to live. We have to be because not a single one of us could bear to be himself alone.

  Lodge knows his character, the Rustic Slicker, “as he knew no other man.” Even (or especially) when “a character [is] as little like [the person it belongs to] as one could well imagine,” there is no greater intimacy than that between an audience member and his or her character:

  Every member of the audience must know his [sic] own character, as something more than an imagined person … something more than friend. For the bond was strong – the bond of the created and creator.

  There is a fascinating contradiction at work here. The Play is explicitly designed in order to provide some light, escapist amusement for the scientists of Life Team No. 3: “it supplies the ridiculous in our lives.” But at the same time, the Play is the emotional center of their lives. It is the anchor of their identities, and their greatest source of social cohesion:

  It’s the one thing that holds us all together. It is the unifying glue that keeps us sane and preserves our sense of humor. And it gives us something to think about.

  This duality is evident in the Play’s characters themselves. For all that they are intimately tied to their creators, they also embody the most tired and ludicrous stereotypes: the Mustached Villain, the Defenseless Orphan, the Proper Young Man, the Sweet Young Thing, the Beautiful Bitch. These figures seem to have emerged from vaudeville, early silent film, and newspaper comic strips; or maybe from some even more archaic, half-remembered realm of cornball Americana. They tend to speak either in gusts of old-fashioned “flowery oration,” or else with fake “hillbilly” diction in the manner of comic strips like Li’l Abner and Snuffy Smith. (The characters of Snuffy Smith literally come alive in Simak’s later novel Out of Their Minds: Simak 1970.) These characters’ appetite for inane shenanigans seems endless, and they are often surprisingly naïve; indeed, “there were times when they could be incredibly stupid.�
�� But at the same time, they are anything but innocent. They are all rascals, continually “seeking advantages” at one another’s expense. They are faintly unpleasant, certainly untrustworthy, and evidently “bent upon no good.” The most active and most elaborately rendered character, the Out-at-Elbows Philosopher, with his florid gestures and endless flow of “pompous talk,” seems a bit like Uncle Sam gone to seed:

  A charming fellow, with no good intent at all – a cadger, a bum, a fullfledged fourflusher behind the facade of his flowered waistcoat, the senatorial bearing, the long, white, curling locks … an old humbug who hid behind a polished manner and a golden tongue.

  In any case, Henry Griffith’s death does not only destroy the research project of Life Team No. 3; it threatens to disrupt their social life as well, by undermining the Play. Without Griffith around to control and project his character, presumably it will no longer appear in the Play at all. This absence might be enough to “throw the entire thing off balance, reduce it to confusion.” But the other alternative – suspending the Play for a few days, and then starting it over again with “a new set of characters” – might prove to be even worse. The Play is the only thing that provides “insurance of our sanity.” Skip it even for a day, and the team might well tear itself apart. Lodge and Forester decide, therefore, that “the Play must go on” – despite their qualms about the consequences of having only eight characters, instead of nine.

  It turns out that they needn’t have worried – at least on that score. When the members of Life Team No. 3 resume the Play after Griffiths’ death, they get a lot more than they bargained for. Despite Griffith’s absence, all nine characters show up. What’s more, the character created by Griffith turns out to be the Out-at-Elbows Philosopher, “the most self-assertive and dominant” of them all. How can the Philosopher play such a “prominent” role in the spectacle, despite his controller’s absence? Gradually, the remaining audience members start to realize that their own characters are breaking free from them as well. It is quite horrifying, actually:

  There was something wrong … There was a certain mechanical wrongness, something out of place, a horrifying alienness that sent a shiver through you even when you couldn’t spot the alienness.

  This wrongness and alienness is that the characters of the Play have become sentient. Each of them has “drawn a little way apart … cut the apron strings … stood on his [or her] own with the first dawning of independence.” These fantasy figures are no longer just “mental puppets,” enacting the impulses of the audience members who originally controlled them. Instead, each character has developed a will of his or her own.

  Even more alarmingly, these figures are no longer just virtual reality images. They have emerged out of the screen, to stand instead “on the stage, the little width of stage which ran before the screen.” They are just on the verge of walking over to meet their creators – and show their independence from those creators. The characters in the Play “were no longer projected imaginations – they were flesh and blood.”

  This unexpected emergence, in all its irony, turns out to be the “new approach” to creating life that the scientists of Life Team No. 3 have been fruitlessly seeking for so long. They have “failed at their work and triumphed in their play.” Forget all that anxiety and guilt, all that endless “grubbing down” into the depths of being. There is no longer any need to find a spark of life, or a hidden principle of vitality. The hard problem of life simply dissolves (much as reductionist philosophers claim that the hard problem of consciousness will dissolve, once we learn enough about the physiology and chemistry of the brain).

  The lesson of the Play is that life can emerge full-blown, almost anywhere. All you need is “the power of mind and electronic mysteries”: that is to say, a whimsical imagination, amplified and potentiated by sufficiently powerful computing technology. And of course, as Clarke’s Third Law tells us, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” The more advanced and comprehensive the mediating machinery, the more these “new machines are so clean and light” (to borrow a line from Donna Haraway’s “Cyborg Manifesto”) as to be scarcely discernible, and the closer we come to Lodge’s ideal of “mind alone, without the aid of machines, without the help of hands.”

  Lodge envisions a whole life-production industry, churning out massive numbers of whatever “monsters” might be required:

  To make a human monster you’d sit before a screen and you’d dream him up, bone by bone, hair by hair, brains, innards, special abilities and all. There’d be monsters by the billions to plant on those other planets. And the monsters would be human, for they’d be dreamed by brother humans working from a blueprint.

  Nothing like this existed in 1953 (Simak 1953), when “Shadow Show” was written and published. But doesn’t such an industry actually exist today? Simak’s vision seems to foreshadow our current “creative industries,” with their heavy use of computer-generated graphic design and animation. In the early twenty-first century, these technologies are thoroughly woven into the fabric of our work and our play alike. They can be used with equal efficacy to generate an architectural plan, a video sequence, an artifact for fabrication in a 3D printer, or a genetically modified life form. Everything is flexible and fluid; everything can be revised and reshaped pretty much at will. In other words, everything seems more or less alive. In the realm of what media theorist Deborah Levitt calls the animatic apparatus, “it doesn’t so much matter what life is, but rather what you can do with it.” We are currently witnessing

  a reversal of the conventional direction of representation: instead of producing an image of an existing creature, we can produce a living being from an image. At the same time, images possess their own forms of vitality.

  (Levitt 2018)

  In this way, “Shadow Show” proposes a new sort of vitalism to replace the old one. For this new paradigm, there is no hidden secret of life, and no sharp distinction between life and nonlife. Instead, we have a universal process of animation. Liveliness is more or less present everywhere, albeit to differing degrees. Contemporary biology has no need for arcane secrets and novel physical laws. We no longer care about the metaphysical secret of life, but only about the pragmatic technology of fostering it. To quote Levitt once more, today “the reigning cultural paradigms of life” are shifting “in significant ways, moving away from questions about ontology, category, and being to ones of appearance, metamorphosis, and affect” (The Animatic Apparatus). Such is the “new approach” that emerges at the end of “Shadow Show,” when the characters in the Play come so disconcertingly to life.

  It is worth noting that Watson and Crick published their account of the structure of DNA in 1953, the same year as “Shadow Show.” I have no idea if Simak was apprised of this development when he wrote his story. But the Watson-Crick discovery was the last nail in the coffin of the old vitalism, whose failure Simak so poignantly portrays. And it was also the first step of the ongoing revolution in molecular biology, which in tandem with high-powered computing led to the new vitalism of the “animatic apparatus” that informs our lives today, and that Simak’s story so oddly envisages.

  “Shadow Show” thus concludes by dissolving the hard problem of life with which it began. The mass production of “monsters” is now easily within our reach. But this inadvertent “triumph” of bioengineering does not erase the disquieting sense of wrongness that we feel as the roguish, disreputable, and comedically menacing characters of the Play emerge into the physical world. Despite “the bond of the created and creator,” and despite the presumptive humanity of entities that have been “dreamed by brother humans working from a blueprint,” the prospect of actual contact remains weird and uncanny and creepy. Lodge is understandably uneasy at the prospect of meeting his own character, the Rustic Slicker, with “his clodhopperish conceit [and] his smart-aleck snicker”:

  In just a little while the characters would step down off the stage and would mingle with them. And
their creators? What would their creators do? Go screaming, raving mad?

  What would he say to the Rustic Slicker?

  What could he say to the Rustic Slicker?

  And, more to the point, what would the Rustic Slicker have to say to him?

  The story leaves us on the threshold of this new age of flexible production and animation. Lodge finds himself “unable to move, unable to say a word or cry out a warning, waiting for the moment when they would step down.” Enmeshed as we are in the technologized folds of the new vitalism, paralysis seems a more appropriate response than self-congratulatory celebration.

  Chapter 4

  Dr. Franklin’s Island

  Dr. Franklin’s Island (Halam 2002), a 2002 novel by Ann Halam (the pseudonym used by Gwyneth Jones for her young adult fiction), is described by the author as “sort of an argument with The Island of Dr. Moreau.” The parallels between the two texts are clear enough. Halam’s Dr. Franklin, like H. G. Wells’ Dr. Moreau (Wells 1896), is a famous scientist who retreats to a distant island to do his research secretly, after being widely and publicly censured for controversial experiments that involved cruelty to animals. Both scientists are ruthlessly and singlemindedly determined to push through the species barrier that separates human beings from nonhuman animals. They do this work in spite of social taboos, and regardless of any risks, moral qualms, or actual harm to others. Both novels extrapolate from the science of their own times in order to question the ethics of scientific practice, and the powers and limits of what we define as “human.”