The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction by EDWARD JAMES & FARAH MENDLESOHN (edt)

Author:EDWARD JAMES & FARAH MENDLESOHN (edt) [JAMES, EDWARD & MENDLESOHN, FARAH]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2011-10-18T14:50:58+00:00

Postmodernism and science fiction

the saturation of the environment with images, messages and other attempts at communication:

today we have entered into a new form of schizophrenia – with the emergence of an immanent promiscuity and the perpetual interconnection of all information and communication networks. No more hysteria, or projective paranoia as such, but a state of terror . . . an over-proximity of all things, a foul promiscuity of all things which beleaguer and penetrate him, and no halo, no aura, not even the aura of his own body protects him . . . [the individual is] open to everything.13

We no longer experience life from where we are, but from the intersections between us and other ‘individuals’ who are also under attack. With multi-channel TV, the Internet, dozens of different permutations to choose from at the local coffee bar, the individual is bombarded with the rest of the universe.

This terror can be traced in the writings of Philip K. Dick, for example in Richard Kongrosian’s fear that he is being turned inside out in The Simulacra (1964), a book which Baudrillard has read. Baudrillard’s analysis of postmodern space, partly derived from reading Dick, could be used for a wider understanding of sf:

the new universe is ‘anti-gravitational’, or, if it still gravitates, it does so around the hole of the real, around the hole of the imaginary . . . the reader [of Dick]

is, from the outset, in a total simulation without origin, past, or future – in a kind of flux of all coordinates (mental, spatial–temporal, semiotic). It is not a question of parallel universes, or double universes, nor real nor unreal. It is hyperreal.14

The sheer information density of the opening of William Gibson’s Neuromancer offers the reader direct experience of overload, as she tries to make sense of the world being described:

Ratz was tending bar, his prosthetic arm jerking monotonously as he filled a tray of glasses with synthetic Kirin. He saw Case and smiled, his teeth a webwork of East European steel and brown decay. Case found a place at the bar, between the unlikely tan on one of Lonny Zone’s whores and the crisp naval uniform of a tall African whose cheekbones were ridged with precise rows of tribal scars.15

The prose of Jack Womack is even more dense: Aiming Bronxward up Broadway our car carried us home; through smoked windows we eyed tripleshifters deconstructing the walls between Harlem and Washington Heights as the northern, higher parts of Manhattan underwent 143

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