‘Aren’t we all just cogs in the apocalypse machine?’
In a war-torn future where two rival CEOs battle for domination, two heroines are pitted against e‘Aren’t we all just cogs in the apocalypse machine?’
In a war-torn future where two rival CEOs battle for domination, two heroines are pitted against each other in televised gladiator combat to entertain the masses and control the public narrative that the global war is in response two the battle between these two “gods.” Kimberly Wang’s Of Thunder & Lightning is a brief but powerful little satirical graphic novel that takes dead aim at corporate propaganda. Robot “gods” Magni and Dimo have been created for the sole purpose of fighting each other, though their televised battles are highly coordinated with quippy catch phrases and continuity requirements. The battles hurt, but as they exist only for pain and proliferating propaganda, they’ve come to find meaning in their shared battles and take pleasure in that unity with one another. With wonderful two-tone art, an apocalyptic setting and a plotline that feels like a video game or battle-robot anime, Of Thunder & Lightning is a fun and thoughtful satire.
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I really enjoy the sharp critiques of corporate propaganda and disaster capitalism here, with this dying world wrapped up in the narrative of fighting gods to distract them from the widespread horrors of global warfare and doom. There’s a lot of really interesting and heady ideas going on, particularly in the abstract middle segment that probes questions like deciding between a human-like computer and a computer-like human or if the AI soldiers dying for their corporation have an afterlife. The story is quite short and abstract, letting the reader fill in a lot of the gaps with their own imagination which I really appreciate, though I wish this had a little more space to build the world in order to help ground the ideas a little more. It also wraps up very quickly, but was altogether satisfying.
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I’ve quite enjoyed the graphic novels and comics coming from Silver Sprocket and Of Thunder & Lighting is another great little work. They have some really wonderful and edgy works that tend towards sharp satire and social criticisms while also being very LGBTQ+ forward. Oh yea, the AI battle-robots here are gay. It’s great. I hope to read more from Kimberly Wang in the future. But also, if you were to replace all your organs and brain one by one with robotic AI tech, would you still be you?
3.5/5
‘The end of the world came slowly. And then all at once.’...more
What defines the idea of “human” and what is it inside us that makes us “human”? Is it the love we make, the stories we tell, the art we create? ‘We rWhat defines the idea of “human” and what is it inside us that makes us “human”? Is it the love we make, the stories we tell, the art we create? ‘We read and write poetry because we are members of the human race,’ proclaims Robin Williams’ Mr. Keating in the film Dead Poets. Society, quoting Walt Whitman that art reminds us ‘that you are here - that life exists, that the powerful play goes on and you may contribute a verse. What will your verse be?’ Yet we live in a time where, with advances in AI, machines can be programmed to perform art, conversation, and more and more replicate the presence of a person. Toward Eternity, the debut novel from writer and translator Anton Hur, is a breathtaking look towards the horizons of humanity and technology as the two bend towards a sort of singularity. Beginning in the near future as nanotechnology replaces the human bodies of several patients in a cancer treatment experiment, this play on the Ship of Theseus Paradox launches a brave new world of unexpected advances ‘destroying what came before, creating space for what comes after.’ Told as the entries in a single notebook passed down between various characters chronicling the centuries as humanity plunges into fraught futures threatened with extinction, Hur crafts a remarkably brilliant novel gracefully balancing existential anxieties of AI, philosophical intrigue, riveting survival amidst sci-fi scenarios and, most of all, the emotional connections that make life worth living. At the heart of this is poetry. Used to train an AI that becomes a key figure to the advancing future, the ideas around poetry and translation also become a key to the philosophical undercurrent of the novel such as commentary on the power of storytelling as something positive or negative like propaganda or upholding imperialism. Full of mind bending world building and fantastic futures which grapple with big questions as to what makes us human, Toward Eternity is as gripping as it is emotionally and intellectually stimulating and sure to fill the heart as well as the mind.
‘Are scientists the poets of the natural world or are poets scientists of the imagined world?’
I’ll read anything with Hur’s name attached to it and I loved this book so much I made it our Spotlight Author and a Book of the Month recommendation at the library for which I wrote a short essay on Anton Hur you can read HERE. Already a major name in the world of translation, Anton Hur comes strong with this new novel that makes excellent use of their knowledge on language.The only translator of color to have been shortlisted for both the International Booker Prize and the National Book Award (both for their excellent translation of Bora Chung’s Cursed Bunny), Hur has brought Korean storytelling to English readers with a fantastic selection of works of fiction (such as the recently released A Magical Girl Retires), memoir (I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokpokki), music (Beyond The Story: 10-Year Record of BTS), and poetry with translations of poets including Shim Bo-seon and Kim Un as well as Lee Seong-Bok’s book of poetry lectures, Indeterminate Inflorescence: Notes from a poetry class. Done. Their work with poetry, and their ideas on translation come shining through the narrative and ideas in Toward Eternity, making it as much a novel about language as it is about AI, though, as two characters discuss early on, ‘poets are artists who who wrote selves into being’ like those who create AI, ‘except poets use words instead of code.’ What we see in Toward Eternity is the gap between humans and machines shrinking, but also the gap between words and code too.
‘I felt these words against my skin as if they were physical objects, or as if they were light passing through the prism of my body and shattering into the spectrum. Had I ever truly understood any word before, ever? How could I have claimed to have made a study of poetry or that this study had made me human when I had never understood what it meant to feel words?’
For Hur, poetry is less the actual words and more ‘what the poems point to’ as they write in their 2016 article On Translating Poetry. ‘Poetry is not words but the emotion or thought the poetic configuration of words generate.’ This idea is echoed by Ellen, Patient #2 in the body experiment but also a cellist who states
‘A musician's task is not to create sound from nothingness; a true musician understands that music is the primordial state of the universe, the very first world, and silence is a cloak upon this state, and a musician's job is to create a tear in that cloak to let out the music underneath.’
Is it to be human to be able to draw music from the silence, to capture the world in a poem? Ellen, who has had her cells entirely replaced by nanocells, is worried she will be unable to create music as before, or questions if it is art because ‘behind all of the machines there has to be a human’ when creating art. An instrumentalist is ‘a translator of the notes on the page..No one questioned the fact that what I did was an art and that I was an artist,’ but is it the same if a machine does? This brings us to our present day with questions around AI generated art replacing artists, actors, authors and more. Just last year GPT-4 produced an abcedarian poem at an event, something the NY Timeslauded as a Promethean moment. Here are the first few lines:
Alluring in Washington, is a museum so grand, Built to teach, inspire, and help us understand. Curious minds Planet flock to Word’s embrace, Delving into language and its intricate grace Every exhibit here has a story to tell, From the origins of speech to the art of the quill..
And so on until the last line reaches Z as its first letter, though as you can likely guess the lines around the inside of a toilet bowl are somehow more alluring than these lines of verse. A poem? Sure. Is it good? No. But there is plenty of bad art in the world, look in my desk drawers and you’ll find plenty. The question is, however, is it art? Alan Ginsberg once wrote that poetry is an art of ‘making the private world public’ and one must wonder if AI can possess an interior, private world. Is it the idea of a soul? An instrument is a machine ‘but is the soul a machine as well’ and, as William Carlos Williams wrote in his essay Introduction to the Wedge, ‘a poem is a small (or large) machine made of words.’
‘My metaphor for translation has always been that translation is really a performance art. You take the original and try to perform it, really, in a different medium. Part of that is about interpretation and what you think the author's voice really is.’ –Ken Liu
Returning to Hur’s role as a translator for a moment it should be noted that translation is much like poetry: it is a harmony between the original text, the emotional impact of the text, the artistry of the translator and their choices, and the language into which it is being placed. It is an abstract transformation that is not unlike the art of poetry itself. Hur, among others, have insisted that AI cannot currently do literary translation of poetry as it lacks that magical spark of decision making that creates the amalgamation of the original plus the translator into something new. It lacks the ability of emotion, contextual understanding, cultural sensitivity, and decision making that lacks the empathy and creative interpretation identity required. As the AI Panit says in the novel, ‘Words that were not simply bits of cross-referential information but each a thing of living, breathing, tactile emotion,’ something only mortality and free-will can grant you access to. Sure, AI can do route translation, and for basics it will get you by. AI can tell you about a city, its culture, its characteristics, its culinary high points, it can produce a detailed map of the streets and buildings, but it has never traveled down them, eaten and drank in its cafes, experienced the soul of a city that cannot be replicated. Which hits on one of the first theories in Toward Eternity about what makes us human. The novel, which frequently cites works of poetry such as T.S. Eliot, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market among other poems, or Because I Could Not Stop For Death (479) by Emily Dickinson from which the book takes its title, looks at how poetry can point to the “human” in us. It addresses Rossetti’s Winter: My Secret ‘as an example of distinguishing the essential and the performative. The essential, the secret that preexists the poem. The performative, the secret that was created by the performance of the poem.’ As Panit tells us:
‘Each work of art has a secret or message, but this poem focuses on our anticipation of that message, on the very real pleasure of art. On what makes art art. And if art is what makes humans human, this pleasure, Rossetti’s secret, is what makes humans human.’
Hur also looks at how poetry ‘constructs the idea of a person,’ or creates a person through writing about them, a theme that permeates the novel as we see AI creating literal people like the Ellen swarms that hit the narrative like passages of sci-fi horror, or the warmongering Eves. ‘Language is inadequate, but it’s all we have,’ says the character Mali, and in this way we see the frailty of language mirror the frailty of humanity, but the ways we make do with it, the ways we create with it, might point to the idea of “being human.”
‘What else can we be but stories about ourselves that we tell ourselves?’
Storytelling is centered as an act of being human. It is the way we pass down our history, our lives and loves, our successes and our failures. The notebook, passed character to character across the vast stretch of time in the novel, drives this point home as well as becomes the vehicle for the narrative. It is a history ‘told over hundreds of years and through the words of many different individuals, constitutes a single story. We belong to it, it does not belong to us.’ There is a sharp irony to the novel that as people become more and more machines, the machines ache for a return to human with poetry flooding back into the mind of Delta who is confronting their role in the war eliminating humanity from the planet. It makes us consider how we exist to perpetuate stories. ‘We tell a story with our bodies, our lives, then we die, ’but still ‘the story lives on.’ The story records our actions, which juxtaposes the cold machines like the Janus corp on its warpath ‘run by an AI at this point because AI are so ‘efficient.’ Nothing that is human knows why it makes the decisions it makes,’ with Delta who weighs the morality of decisions. ‘Is it not the weight, in the end, that really makes us human,’ the narrative created by actions one would later make judgements upon when reading the “story”? Also, perhaps, is wanting to know how the story ends part of what makes us human?
‘Read this and know who we were. This record contains all that was meaningful to us. It contains the very weight of our lives. We found not only happiness and sadness and hope and despair but meaning. We leave the weight of it here.’
Across all the stories and years in Toward Eternity, love is a warm center. It is what brings characters like Yonghun Han back, it is what gives meaning to sacrifice, it shapes our actions and decisions. Is it love that makes us human? I was particularly pleased by the mention of love echoing through space and time as it brought to mind Walter Benjamin’s essay The Task of the Translator in which he writes ‘the task of the translator consists in finding that intended effect upon the language into which he is translating which produces in it an echo of the original.’ We see echoes all throughout the novel, copies of Ellens, copies of Eves, copies of Yonghun, all echoes of a person now gone. But with love in the mix, those echos have meaning. It points to an original, eternal spark of love echoing across eternity. I find this beautiful. What better existence could there be than to exist as an echo of love, returning again and again to share love, to be love and perpetuate love.
‘Life is toxic like all toxins, in small doses it cures, in large ones it proves fatal. And I had had too much of life. I had wanted to know what it would be like to be human. I knew it now. It made me want to die.’
Still, in all this, death is omnipresent. Even for those who are considered immortal. Where do they go once they vanish? There are times in Toward Eternity that nudge familiar sci-fi ideas but Hur keeps them fresh and endlessly fascinating. Even as technology advances, like the cancer research, death finds new ways to surprise and return. Which shows the flipside to the beauty of creation as well and we see how even poetry can be used as an instrument of death. Look at Panit, a ‘simulation of sentient intelligence, a literary experiment, appropriated and twisted by some AI to serve as the efficient strategist engines of killing machines,’ having been trained on Victorian and 19th century American poetry who’s ‘literatures also appropriated and twisted in their time to impose canonical tyranny on the subaltern.’ Hur keeps our minds on the oppressions that exist and mutate through time, such as South Africa’s apartheid being integrated into the novel. ‘Literature is not free of ideology,’ and we see how poetry, like Victorian era poetry ‘used to justify and encourage militant British imperialism’, has been used to condone horrors, to frame narratives of the world with white settlers as heroes, with colonialism as justified, and more.
‘Poetry was a weapon, like guns and ships and settlers’ bodies. It was weaponized language, loaded like bullets into the minds of its soldliers, generals, and colonial governors. And while there were many noble verses and poets, those who have helped many people, including myself, achieve a humanity beyond what we otherwise could have had, those same verses or poets would be used to justify genocide on one hand while rhapsodizing about human decency on the other. It all depended on how it was read.’
Full of big ideas but also plenty of emotion and action, Toward Eternity is a ponderous and absolutely riveting read. Anton Hur effectively channels the theories behind translation and poetry into the realm of science and AI for a story that horrifies and delights as it addresses the existential anxieties of technology and the future of humanity. Charming, smart and full of heart, Toward Eternity is easily one of my favorite novels of the year.
5/5
Who Has Seen the Wind? –Christina Rossetti
Who has seen the wind? Neither I nor you: But when the leaves hang trembling, The wind is passing through.
Who has seen the wind? Neither you nor I: But when the trees bow down their heads, The wind is passing by....more
Italian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote that quantum mechanics is essentially about relationships, that ‘an electron is nowhere when it is nItalian theoretical physicist Carlo Rovelli wrote that quantum mechanics is essentially about relationships, that ‘an electron is nowhere when it is not interacting,’ which is all a beautiful reminder that the ways we live, love and interact with one another is what makes up our world. Wendy Xu brings this up in her gorgeous new graphic novel, The Infinity Particle, and through this touching sci-fi story expands on these ideas between humans as well as a future with interpersonal relationships with AI. After moving Mars for an exciting job working for a pioneering engineer in the field of AI, Clementine finds herself caught up in the mysteries surrounding her boss’ personal AI unit, Kyle. Though attempting to help him uncovers big ethical issues surrounding AI as well as emotions deep within each other. Stunning in both artistic and emotional quality, Infinity Particle probes ethical quandaries of autonomy and consent, moving at an exciting pace through the growing mysteries of this highly engaging and thoughtful graphic novel.
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I’m sure you’ve seen that the news is constantly full of stories concerning AI on issues of consent and also bias (also we should be paying artists, writers and actors), though Infinity Particle takes questions of consent to the future on issues about how much autonomy a self-sufficient AI would have in society. Xu—who’s graphic novels I always adore and I highly recommend Tidesong—presents us with questions on identity in a really interesting way and aspect on AI’s developing emotions as well as emotional connections. I enjoyed how much the story is steeped in STEM and ethical issues without getting overly complex while still being quite ponderous. I also loved all the AI companions who are incredibly cute:
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The cat buddy especially since he reminds me of the Lumbercats from that Kipo and the Age of Wonderbeasts show. The art in this is breathtaking and really pops in its minimal color palette. Xu has creative use of panels to push dialogue along, never gets overly wordy, and keeps the pace moving quite efficiently. That said, while it doesn’t necessarily feel too rushed it does sort of hit all the plot points and reach the conclusion a bit hurriedly. Still, this hits some strong emotions. There is a really adorable romance plot, but also a lot of time spent on feelings of loss. The story only hints at the backstories of characters, but in ways where the small glimpses explode into big feelings in your heart and make you really feel for the characters.
This was a lot of fun and really heartfelt and adorable. It is interesting to see how many graphic novels seem to be tackling issues around AI’s integrating with society—I enjoyed this one more but Pixels of You also takes an interesting look at AI ethics as well as a romantic relationship between a flesh and blood human and AI human—which I suppose is a future reality we are rapidly approaching so its nice to see books already probing the big questions. Wendy Xu is always a delight and The Infinity Particle was a lovely read.
Anxieties around AI have long fueled creative storytelling in science fiction and the more advanced our technology becomes the more we see just how inAnxieties around AI have long fueled creative storytelling in science fiction and the more advanced our technology becomes the more we see just how integrated it is becoming in our daily lives. Pixels of You from Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Ota explores the rivals to sapphic lovers trope in a near-future world where AI are ordinary citizens along with humans, all brought to life through the lovely artwork of J.R. Doyle. When Indian-American Indira and Fawn (an AI robot with a lifelike human shell) feud over their artwork during a joint internship for an art gallery, their boss decides to force them to collaborate and fuse their visions. But will a shared project become a shared romance? It is a cute story with a lot of really great ideas around AI technology like anxieties and abuse of biased algorithms, robotic implants, and racism arising against the AI people who just want to co-exist that doesn’t always come together here, yet Pixels of You still makes for an enjoyable read that is at least thought-provoking beyond the plot.
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Indira and Fawn
This was an interesting one to read while conversations over AI art is currently a hot issue and ethical debate as Fawn is quite literally an AI creating art and even has eyes programmed to work as a top quality digital camera. The friction between humans and the worries of AI people, and vice versa, play into early elements of the two women’s frustration with each other but it is charming to see how the more they learn about one another the closer they become and begin to care deeply. I liked how Pixels of You didn’t get bogged down revisiting tired narratives about AI being human or not (or human enough) and instead focused on Fawn’s emotional states and how she interacts with a world likely questioning those issues.
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A fun book full of great ideas that I wish could have had a bit more breathing room to better examine them all. The plot is cute but just never quite seems to be comfortable in its own skin (which, I guess, is the same vibes the characters are feeling). I like that it focuses on issues of disability and has a diverse cast too and overall it is worth a read.
‘The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun’
There is a certain spark that catches fire within me whenever I start‘The monster once made cannot be unmade. What will happen to the world has begun’
There is a certain spark that catches fire within me whenever I start a Jeanette Winterson novel, her prose immediately transporting me into her realm of wild logic and zany brilliance that I’ve come to find so intoxicating. It’s like when I was a child and the LucasFilm logo would come up on the theater screen, shooting a chill and thrill through my body because I knew what was imminent, or that feeling when the roller coaster crests the first drop—the feeling of Here. We. Go. And what a wild ride Frankissstein: A Love Story is as Winterson creates with a patchwork of past—reanimating the story of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley as she writes Frankenstein and all its lessons within&with the ‘future/now’ of AI, transgender and transhuman and brings them to life with her special shock of prose and plot styling. Frankissstein is endlessly playful and humorous and Winterson excels at making everything fluid from the prose to genders and the timeline of the novel where one moment you are in the Swiss Alps in 1816 and then next traversing subterranean tunnels with severed hands crawling like spiders. While both a paean to the past and warning to the future, Frankissstein is a love story at heart, between lovers, of humanity, of progress and all the terrors it may bring, and of creator and creations.
‘Why is it that we wish to leave some mark behind? said Byron. Is it only vanity? No, I said, it is hope. Hope that one day there will be a human society that is just.’
I had been intending to keep reading Winterson from oldest to most recent but after having, quite by coincidence, made my summer reading full of queer mosters stories (Our Wives Under the Sea and Carmilla), it felt only right to see how my now-favorite author would approach the genre. As always: brilliantly and unconventionally. The narrative here rotates between Mary Shelley during the summer retreat with Lord Byron, John William Polidori, her soon-to-be-husband Percy Bysshe Shelley and half-sister Claire that inspired Frankenstein and Ry (from Mary), a trans doctor set in the ‘future/now’. Winterson has a knack for weighting a novel in historical fiction while sashaying across a timeline, creating a wonderful juxtaposition between the ideas of Mary Shelley and company with the modern anxieties of AI as well as the themes from the source material of Frankenstein with Winterson’s own themes and theories in Frankissstein. In this way we see the catalyst for the Peterloo massacre contextualized alongside Brexit, offering an abstract commentary on recurring themes of history through their adjacencies. Mary’s comments in 1816, in this way, function just as well as a commentary on the present:
‘ saw that the wretched creatures enslaved to the machines were as repetitive in their movements as machines. They were distinguished only by their unhappiness. The great wealth of the manufactories is not for the workers but for the owners. Humans must live in misery to be the mind of the machines.’
They say the past is a foreign country but in Winterson’s hands it is also a borderless one, the past, present and future folded together into the quagmire of history and Ideas. ‘The opposite of the past is the present,’ says Victor, ‘anyone can live in a past that is gone or a future that does not exist. The opposite of either position is the present,’ and in this way we see past and present as two sides of the same whole, as if simultaneously in the narrative. The effect also grants a more dynamic aspect to the seemingly recurring characters (Ry Shelley, Victor Stein, or Lord Byron/Ron Lord) making them more expressions of their themes and a multifaceted idea with constant energy from creator/creation chasing one another across history. ‘My mind idled around the difference between desire for life without end and desire for more than one life, that is, more than one life, but lived simultaneously,’ thinks Ry, positioning it as akin to the dual lives across time in Sexing the Cherry and allowing for a greater nuance of character as they wrestle with themes throughout time unrestrained from one-to-one comparisons.
‘Like Victor Frankenstein’s, our digital creations depend on electricity – but not on the rotting discards of the graveyard. Our new intelligence – embodied or non-embodied – is built out of the zeros and ones of code.’ -Jeanette Winterson, 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next
In an interview with Literary Hub, Winterson discusses ‘the corporatization of everything,’ and how that has, with AI, come to even have influence over the way we love one another, a major theme of the book. ‘I am not at all anti-tech,’ she says, ‘but we really can’t leave this stuff to socially stunted white boys and corporate greed,’ which is at the root of several ethical quandaries in Frankissstein. Namely, if AI learns from us, what reflection of our society will it give with concerns of racial and gender bias and will this further harm marginalized people with the novel taking a special focus on trans and non-binary people (which is a modern twist to Shelley’s Frankenstein about how lack of paternal care caused the creation to become monstrous and we, people, might be the true monsters). This has long been a concern, and, as Caroline Criado Pérez discusses in her book Invisible Women: Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, in virtually every aspect of life ‘ we continue to rely on data from studies done on men as if they apply to women.’ She demonstrates how this appears everywhere for the medical field, car safety design, urban planning and even standard hand size for tools. Winterson asks us to consider how this will show up in AI, especially considering it is a known issue such as when a 2020 report found that 90% of companies have faced at least one instance of ethical issues due to AI systems, with 60% of these involving legal scrutiny. ‘He is not human, yet the sum of all he has learned is from humankind.’ Shelley writes, a message that applies to both Frankenstein’s monster and the machine learning of AI.
The biases learned from the data is something UCLA professor Safiya Umoja Noble terms in her book Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism as ‘technological redlining’ which is ‘embedded in computer code and, increasingly, in artificial intelligence technologies that we are reliant on, by choice or not.’ She shares Winterson’s concern that ‘where men shape technology, they shape it to the exclusion of women, especially Black women.’ With Silicon Valley having a large gender gap as well as a notable issues of rampant misogyny and sexual harassment, this seems a valid worry, on that is voiced by several characters in Frankissstein, most notably Vanity Fare journalist Polly D who ask ‘will women be the first casualties of obsolescence in your brave new world?’ This eventually seeps into a criticism of cis liberals and the way they fetishize trans ideology for argumentative points as well as gatekeep gender performance, but more on that later.
One of the more humorous aspects of the novel is Ron Lord’s sex-bot industry—which at all time risk waking up and moaning ‘daddy’ at inopportune times in the novel—but also soft pitches the first ethical queries about creating, AI and how technological advances will alter the way we love and interact. Ron sees sex-bots as freedom and a way to empower men, while others worry it is another way that ‘men subjugate women.’ In her non-fiction work 12 Bytes: How We Got Here. Where We Might Go Next, which feels like the essay version extension of this novel, Winterson explores this at length in the essay Hot for a Bot. She contrasts notable Chinese feminist Xiao Meili who argues that ‘men will always have outdated expectations, and ‘sex housewife robots’ might actually help women’ with Dr Kathleen Richardson, who founded the Campaign Against Sex Robots in 2015, and ‘is concerned that sex robots reinforce stereotypes, encourage the objectification and commercialisation of women’s bodies and increase violence towards women’ (Ron mentions clients smashing or maiming the heads of his sex-bots is a common problem).
I enjoyed the characterization of Ron as a stereotypical ‘tech bro’, yet in many ways he becomes a rather endearing character and seeing him at least try (though mostly failing) to understand the arguments, particularly around transgender and transhuman issues. ‘Doll-world likes to paint itself as a daring challenge to convention,’ writes Winterson, ‘in reality, doll-world reinforces the gender at its most oppressive and unimaginative.’ There is certainly something to ponder about the way the dolls are ‘made to look like the male-gaze stereotype,’ and programed to be submissive and get off on abuse will do to human relationships, something Frankissstein approaches with humor tinged with horror.
‘All our faults, vanities, idiocies, prejudices, cruelty. Do you really want augmented humans, superhumans, uploaded humans, forever humans, with all the shit that comes with us?’
Winterson plumbs the depths of the creator/creation ideas from Frankenstein in multiple ways here, with Victor Stein pushing boundaries in the whole ‘playing God’ idea as he hopes to resurrect dead organs and even map the brain to upload consciousness for digital and eternal life. There is some great stuff here when present-day Claire, the anti-robot, ultra-Christian unexpectedly joins forces with Ron Lord because she wants to see if the soul will return to the self upon reanimation. Even Mary Shelley must confront a literal flesh-and-blood Victor Frankenstein in a sanitorium, only to find the motif of herself chasing him through all of history as he chases his creation. Winterson World is wild and I love it. We are even treated to real-life I. J. Good’s head preserved in a jar awaiting Victor Stein to ‘steal life from the gods. At what cost?’
‘And what if we are the story we invent?’
The digital or reanimated self, as well as tech-implant in the novel quickly juxtapose issues of transhumanism and transgender questions that make up for some of the most interesting aspects of the novel. Through Ry, a trans man, we see Winterson address the hypocrisy of tech-bros who preach of digital consciousness while still reacting violently (as a misogynistic policing for the patriarchy, as Dr. Kate Manne would put it) or squeamishly to trans people. Men here gender robots they have sex with can’t call Ry by his correct pronouns. When Ron questions how digital existence will change online dating, Ry comments that it would be like old correspondence, all consciousness without the body: ‘there would be no straight, gay, male, female, cis, trans. What happens to labels when there is no biology?’
Winterson steps us through multiple examples of reinventing or rebuilding oneself but then questions why being the gender one identifies with is crossing the line for some. Mary’s half-sister changes her name, for example (‘I did not disapprove of this. Why should she not remake herself? What is identity but what we name it? Jane/Claire’) and Mary considers the story of Pygmalion marrying a statue that he brings to life and then becomes a woman—’a double transformation from lifeless to life and from male to female.’—or the statue of Hermoine that comes to life in Shakespeare’s The Winter's Tale (which Winterson reimagined in The Gap of Time). Naming is important, Winterson writes, as is using correct pronouns lest we Other people. As Albert Camus said ‘to name things wrongly is to add to the misfortune of the world,’ such as how calling Frankenstein’s creation a monster drove him into violent isolation.
’If you believe, as I do, that religious texts – like myths – are texts we create to mirror the deeper structures of the human psyche, then yes, naming is still our primary task. Poets and philosophers know this…I cannot conjure spirits, but I can tell you that calling things by their right names is more than giving them an identity bracelet or a label, or a serial number. We summon a vision. Naming is power.’
Ry faces a lot of resistance and fetishizing for being trans (particularly from Vic who is a stereotypical “ally” that amounts mostly to fetishization, you know, they type that will argue that someone isn’t performing identify enough to meet their standards of how trans identity can be discussed) and asks ‘if the body is provisional, interchangeable, even, why does it matter so much what I am?’ Even Victor seems to view Ry mostly as a curiosity, attracted to him as someone who reinvented himself but trips up when Ry asks if he had a penis would Victor still be attracted. Victor, who thinks consciousness and the human body are separate and the former will live without the confines of the latter in his future. Winterson has said ‘‘gender identity is more fluid,’ and grappled with that in extraordinary fashion in Written on the Body which features a narrator with no gender identifies, and it is interesting to see this explored in context of digital futures. There is a sexual assault scene, reminding us that trans people face extreme aggression and violence to the extent that the Human Rights Campaign declared it an epidemic. This is just all very interesting to see addressed in a modern sci-fi novel like this, building on themes Winterson has approached since the 80s.
‘This is a love story’
As with most Winterson, an examination of love is at the heart of this book. And is always written about in such gorgeous prose and phrasing. Take for example Victor’s speech here (there is, to be fair, a lot of soliloquizing in this book):
‘We read a book about ourselves and wonder if we have ever existed. You hold out your hand. I take it in mine. You say, this is the world in little. The tiny globe of you is my sphere. I am what you know. We were together once and always. We are inseparable. We can only live apart.’
This perfectly addresses the theme of Mary Shelley and Frankenstein across time and is rather cute. So is Victor’s constant return to Baye’s theorem telling Ry his presence is new data that alters the outcome. Scientists sure know how to flirt in Winterson World. If I have one criticism of the novel, it is that occasionally the dialogue reads a bit off or forced, though these are characters that are oddballs in society so maybe it works? Whenever there is a clunky moment in the novel it is also Winterson experimenting and I give it grace for at least trying new things. I do enjoy how Winterson has an uncanny pulse on modern day tech and language though, and when Mary responds in all caps ‘THIS IS THE MOST PROFOUND THING THAT CLAIRE HAS SAID IN HER LIFE,’ the folding of past and present makes it read in current twitter voice that makes you !!!! and is just funny. Winterson even makes quoting The Eagles sound brainy.
‘This is madness, I said. What is sanity? he said. Can you tell me? Poverty, disease, global warming, terrorism, despotism, nuclear weapons, gross inequality, misogyny, hatred of the stranger.’
Frankissstein is a bold, brash and brilliant novel that takes you through corkscrews of ideas Winterson continues to astonish me and I have to admit it was also the most fun I’ve had with a book lately. I really enjoying doing outside reading on the topics, such as how Lord Byron was a prick. The Mary scenes are extraordinary, I could have read a book of just that. This is a fun book, though those looking for an entry point might want to start with her earlier work, and while having read the source material was nice, it is not necessary. That said, Winterson reanimates Frankenstein here for a further examination of it’s themes coupled with a modern landscape of technology and ethics for a wild ride of a book you won’t soon forget.
4.5/5
‘Humans: so many good ideas. So many failed ideals.'...more
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