Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (203 page)

But we know one truth. We know they were wrong. The new robot and Vandaleur know that because the new robot’s started twitching too. Reet! Here on cold Pollux, the robot is twitching and singing. No heat, but my fingers writhe. No heat, but it’s taken the little Talley girl off for a solitary walk. A cheap labor robot. A servo-mechanism…all I could afford…but it’s twitching and humming and walking alone with the child somewhere and I can’t find them. Christ! Vandaleur can’t find me before it’s too late. Cool and discreet, honey, in the dancing frost while the thermometer registers 10° fondly Fahrenheit.

* * * *

Copyright © 1954 by by Fantasy House, Inc.

Thanks to remarkable technological and biomedical innovations over the past century, the boundaries between humans, computers, and robots have become increasingly thin. Not surprisingly, science fiction authors and filmmakers have eagerly and repeatedly mined these liminal borders for inspiration, preying on the paranoia that humankind could one day very well find itself threatened on the evolutionary ladder by technological beings of its own creation. Read as a barometer of America’s cultural attitude toward and fears regarding modernity and unchecked advances in computer science, artificial intelligence, and cybernetic enhancements, the chief threats portrayed by these works of speculative fiction include computers, robots, and sinister hybrids that could eventually replace humans—silicon creations that potentially represent the next dominant life form on Earth. The progressive manifestation of this insecurity is best illustrated by the
cyborg
, a hybrid creature that personifies the root struggle between humankind and “thinking” machines.

The term
cyborg
developed from the clever combination of the words
cybernetic
and
organism
, describing, according to the
Oxford English Dictionary
, “a person whose physical tolerances or capabilities are extended beyond normal human limitations by a machine or other external agency that modifies the body’s functioning.” The word was first introduced to the science community in 1960 by Manfred E. Clynes and Nathan S. Kline who proposed the cyborg as “essentially a man-machine system in which the control mechanisms of the human portion are modified externally by drugs or regulatory devices so that the being can live in an environment different from the normal one” (“Cyborg”). These scientists were speculating on the best ways for human beings to survive space exploration, and, as a result, the first “real” cyborgs were developed as part of the Russian space program, integrating the biology of their cosmonauts with the technology of the SK-1 space suits. In other words, the cyborg was originally envisioned in a most optimistic and positive light—the logical, technological advancement of the human race.

According to Norbert Wiener, the purpose of cybernetics is primarily to enhance our ability to process information (17); therefore, the cyborg can also be seen as simply a human being with an enhanced ability to access all kinds of information, including that of their physical environment. In our contemporary biotechnology world, then, cyborgs are people who have been enhanced with artificial organs or limbs, giving them the ability to interact more fully with the world around them. Such biomedical advances should be seen as good things for human progress; however, although a number of sci-fi texts
do
make heroic and even desirable use of cyborg characters, many more chose instead to profligate the cyborg as a monster. Why? Put simply, the loss of humanity. Ultimately, the cyborg, as it appears in most science fiction and horror narratives, represents technology’s decisive triumph over human will and independence. As a result, most depictions of the cyborg, especially those on the screen, show not a creature possessing the best of both the biological and the technological worlds, but rather a monstrosity in which the machine has overcome and replaced the human.

Although a traditional sci-fi cyborg integrates human cells with silicon circuits, the historical antecedents of this creature belong to more pedestrian mythology. The ur-cyborg is the
golem
, a magical or mystical automaton brought to life to serve a specific function. The premier example is the legendary Golem of Prague, drawn from Jewish mythology, but the most famous one is certainly the reanimated corpse created by Mary Shelly’s Victor Frankenstein. Similar to the more traditional and modern cyborg, Frankenstein’s monster is cobbled together from various parts and brought back to life through decidedly scientific (although secret and ambiguous) means. Granted, once the creature returns to life, it ceases to be a thing of mere technology, embracing rather its lost organic features and characteristics, but without Frankenstein’s technological intervention, the creature would have remained little more than disparate pieces of dead flesh and rotting corpses. Later cinematic iterations of
Frankenstein
have more overtly embraced the cyborg trope in their depictions of the creature, but most golems remain foundationally animated life, not cybernetically enhanced organisms.

Discounting golems, then, the first legitimate cybernetic organisms in literature appear as the victims/beneficiaries of prostheses. In 1839, the creator of so many now-popular SF subgenres, Edgar Allan Poe, gave the world a disturbing Gothic tale of uncanny horror called “The Man That Was Used Up.” In this brief first-person account, readers are exposed to the remarkable Brevet Brigadier-General John A. B. C. Smith, a man of singular physical perfection and refined carriage. As a result of years of fighting colonized natives and falling victim to their violence and torture, almost nothing of Smith’s body remains organic and “alive”; instead, the man has prosthetically engineered legs, shoulders, arms, teeth, and even eyes. Another early cyborg can be found in L. Frank Baum’s The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. Published in 1900, Baum’s work features the sympathetic character of the Tin Woodman, a man who suffered repeated amputations due to an enchanted axe from the vindictive wicked Witch of the East. After each horrible act of dismemberment, the Woodman had a local tin-smith create a new limb from metal until, unfortunately, even his heart was replaced. Although the science is unclear in these two works of fantasy and whimsy, they clearly laid the groundwork for what would follow.

Truly hybridized, cybernetic creatures and characters began to appear shortly after the dawn of the twentieth century in a variety of pulp fiction works and dime-store novels. The French author Jean de la Hire’s pioneered a number of advances in literary science fiction, including the invention of the proto-superhero Léo Sainte-Claire, also known as the Nyctalope. This cyborg crime fighter first appeared in the 1908 novel L’Homme Qui Peut Vivre Dans L’eau (The Man Who Can Live in the Water), but in later works, such as Le Mystère des XV (The Mystery Of The XV) (1911) and L’Assassinat du Nyctalope (The Assassination of the Nyctalope) (1933), we learn Sainte-Claire can not only see in the dark with his mysterious eyes, but also sports an artificial, mechanical heart. Other developmental cyborg characters soon followed, most notably the hybridized organic/mechanical space explorers featured in Edmond Hamilton’s 1928 novel The Comet Doom and C. L. Moore’s Deirdre, a dancer whose brain has been transplanted into a robotic body, from the 1944 short story “No Woman Born.” Each of these examples demonstrates important developments in the cyborg trope, but the authors generally limited the cybernetic fusion to individual body parts or small-scale integration.

It’s not until the rise of cybernetic technology associated with the space race that we began to see “full-scale” cyborgs in fiction and film, what Donna Haraway defines in her now famous “Cyborg Manifesto” as “a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of machine and organism” (149). One of the first explorations into fully cybernetic humanoids didn’t occur until 1962 with Wesley Barry’s
The Creation of the Humanoids
, a low-budget film featuring robots that function as “resurrected” humans thanks to the mysterious transplantation of the hypothalamus from a human corpse into the computer brain of a replicant android. A more refined and quintessential version of the cyborg finally appeared in a 1966 episode arc of the long-running BBC science-fiction series Doctor Who (1963–89). In “The Tenth Planet,” viewers meet the Cybermen for the first time, a race of humanoid creatures that appear essentially human, but with various synthetic and metal prostheses. In later episodes, of course, the menacing race becomes almost completely robotic, retaining only a biological brain and nerve center, but they remain implicitly created from modified human victims.

About six years after the pioneering efforts of
Doctor Who
, the bionic cyborg found its way to general audiences in the United States as well. In 1972, Martin Caidin published
Cyborg
, a popular novel featuring Steve Austin, a former astronaut and accomplished test pilot who is critically injured after crashing an experimental craft. All but one of Austin’s limbs are destroyed, along with one of his eyes, and cutting-edge technology must be used to restore the man to full health. Austin’s physical enhancements turn him into a “bionic man,” making the pilot a palatable hero and not some kind of hybridized monster. In fact, Austin was so popular that just one year later, Lee Majors was cast to star in a made-for-television movie titled
The Six Million Dollar Man
, directed by Richard Irving. A five-season television series soon followed the film (running 1974–78), along with the popular spin-off series The Bionic Woman (1976–78), staring Lindsay Wagner as Jaime Sommers. Perhaps thanks to real-world advancements in and applications of bionic and mechanical prosthetics, particularly in the wake of the Vietnam War, these television superheroes mark a high point in the cyborg’s development, one of optimism and hope rather than mistrust and fear.

At about the same time, more ambiguous explorations into the cybernetic-human hybrid were taking place in popular science fiction literature. One of the first, Arthur C. Clarke’s 1971 novella
A Meeting with Medusa
, actually prefigures
Cyborg
with its tale of astronaut Howard Falcon, a man whose biological body is largely replaced by prosthetics following a devastating airship crash. Two other notable and influential examples were published in 1976: Frederick Pohl’s novel
Man Plus
and Isaac Asimov’s novella
The Bicentennial Man
from his Robot series. In Pohl’s novel, Roger Torraway becomes the first successful participant in the United States’ government’s project to create cybernetic astronauts for the colonization of Mars. Although the operation is technically successful, Torraway begins to find himself disconnected and distanced from humanity—and not merely because of his relocation to the Red Planet. Asimov explores almost the opposite course of cybernetic development, depicting the transformation of a robot into a hybrid creature that becomes virtually indistinguishable from a human. Andrew narrates his own story of evolution: he begins “life” as a fully automatic and mechanized robot, but, in his attempts to achieve the same legal rights as humans, he gradually replaces many of his mechanical components with organic ones. These two landmark works ask serious questions about self and identity, furthering the serious nature of the cyborg trope in fiction.

One of the most ambivalent depictions of a cyborg—although perhaps not initially recognized as one—is Darth Vader from George Lucas’
Star Wars
(1977). In the first film, Vader represents little more than a dangerous amalgam of human biology and mechanical alterations. As the film series progresses, however, audiences learn how Darth Vader’s suit is actually a complex life-support system, allowing him unnatural existence and making him virtually unstoppable. His very appearance—the black suit, the face-concealing helmet, and the raspy ventilator voice—connotes power, fear, and a primal sense of the uncanny. With the Empire’s Dark Lord, then, science fiction definitively breaks from the optimistic tradition of human bionics to establish integrated cybernetics as an unavoidable path to villainy and monstrosity. Of course, thanks to the internal struggle between the man and the machine, Darth Vader ultimately has to choose between the two warring forces of his existence; and although the human is shown to triumph in the end, the powerful Jedi cannot survive without the assistance of his biomechanical components.

An even more sinister and terrifying vision of the cyborg appeared in James Cameron’s 1984 film,
The Terminator (and returned perhaps more famously in the 1991 sequel, Terminator 2: Judgment Day). The titular figure, played by Arnold Schwarzenegger, is depicted as little more than a mindless, unrelenting automaton, one that betrays nothing of its biological roots. In an inversion of Darth Vader, the terminator wears its biological components on the outside, using flesh to mask its robotic endoskeleton. Of course, even though the creature represents a similarly uncanny juggernaut of destruction, it isn’t a true cyborg—as viewers learn in the film’s climax, the robot can function fully without its organic casing. Because the terminator machines must be grown in some kind of lab or manufactured on an assembly line, as they all bear the same likeness, no human entity is altered, enhanced, or changed in their creation. This is a critical point of difference between the once-human Darth Vader and the soulless terminator machine; cyborgs that were once “normal” human beings are more disturbing because of the implied transformation and potential loss of autonomy.

A host of other influential cyborgs appeared during this period as well, and in a variety of print and visual media. For example, robot/human hybrids have been key players in comic books since 1942, with the debut of the DC hero Robotman, also known as Robert Crane, whose brain was transplanted into a robot body upon the scientist’s otherwise fatal shooting. Since then, comics have featured such liminal characters as Iron Man (1963), Deathlok (1974), Cyborg (1980), and Motoko Kusanagi from
Ghost in the Shell
(1989). Additional famous literary cyborgs include Jonas from Gene Wolfe’s Book of the New Sun series (1980–83) and the “razor girl” Molly from William Gibson’s “Johnny Mnemonic” (1981) and his Sprawl trilogy (1984–88). Movie and television manifestations also include Peter Weller’s RoboCop from Paul Verhoeven’s 1987 film, Inspector Gadget from his own animated series (1983–86), and, to some extent, Kryten from Red Dwarf (1988). Despite this diverse proliferation, however, the human-cum-cyborg monster reached a zenith with Star Trek: The Next Generation.