This post builds on ideas that I developed in my recent article on communication technology and narrative. One of the underlying theories behind this piece was that the location where a story is set is not the mere backdrop to events, but quite fundamentally determines the events that can occur or the way they are plotted. Here, I apply these concepts to the recent film and book, The Martian.

Asking a question like 'Does The Martian have to be set on Mars?' seems very daft. There would be a lot of disgruntled cinemagoers were it to turn out that The Martian is, in fact, a film about a man stranded in a multi-storey car park in Walsall. Of course The Martian has to be located on Mars: the clue is in the title.

As it always has done throughout its mythological history, Mars holds an appeal as a place that seems at once very near and very distant. When H.G. Wells opens The War of the Worlds by imagining Martians peering at us through telescopes just as man peers at bacteria through a microscope, Mars seems uncomfortably close to home. Of course, in an astronomical sense it is anything but close, and the sense of tantalising distance is one reason why Mars provides such a focal point for the scientific and literary imagination. Like our closest neighbour, the moon, it is one place that anyone on earth can see, but that (most likely) nobody living on the planet will visit. The same sensibility pervades The Martian; in terms of an audience's cognitive experience, Mars matters.

Nevertheless, many reviews (here; here; here) have unwittingly downplayed the importance of the place itself to the plot. Notably, and entirely understandably, many have made comparison between The Martian and that ur-story of lone survival, Robinson Crusoe. It's not hard to see why The Martian might be cast as Crusoe-in-Space. While Crusoe is shipwrecked, Mark Watney's crewmates have to evacuate in a spaceship; both Crusoe and Watney are left isolated and can use only those tools that they can salvage or craft; both individuals survive on the basis of their wits and intellect in a powerful (capitalistic) vision of the self-made man; both men perceive themselves as first colonists of an uncharted and unclaimed territory; midway through Defoe's novel Crusoe takes on Man Friday for company and aid, while Watney eventually establishes contact and companionship with NASA.

Both the desert island and Mars - and one could add to this list equivalently isolated places as well, such as the Arctic wastes, the jungle, or a boat in the ocean - offer similar opportunities for storytelling and for tracking the basic attributes of the survivor story: the search for shelter, food and water, communication with the outside world, and ultimate rescue. Mars may be significant in terms of the place it holds in our imaginations, but similar events - and the audience's primary anxieties about isolation that result from them - could be evoked by equivalent places on earth. On this structural interpretation, place is mainly a backdrop where plot events occur; it is events, not places, that most motivate a narrative, and readers or viewers.

This, however, is too simplistic. Far from being backdrops, places are what Mike Baynham has termed 'semiotic resources.' Different settings have within them different resources, geographical configurations, social features etc. and they make these available for the purposes of plotting. Depending on their placement, characters have different objects and technologies to hand, and these influence their decisions and actions that constitute a plot. Extending from this, the way in which that plot is conveyed to us - its discourse with the reader or audience - is also affected by its spatial context.

Because of the emphasis it places on literal resources, and because of the way the story about a distant astronaut is conveyed to those on earth (both the earth-based characters in the story, and the real audience of the story) The Martian encompasses the semiotic theory of place in a clear way. There are perhaps two main categories of resource that are unique to Mars as a place: geography, and communicative delay.

Geography

This places-as-resources model can be applied in a very literal sense to The Martian. The soil and atmosphere of the planet provide Watney with a combination of resources or threats to those resources that could not be found in equivalently isolated places elsewhere.

The wider narrative arc of The Martian involves the problem of food. Watney has immediate supplies, but not enough to last the four years it will take for a rescue mission to arrive. Watney's growing of food (potatoes) to survive is pretty similar to Crusoe's successes with wheat. And of course in a novel and film that pitches for scientific credibility, it is made possible by the fact that, unlike other planets, Mars really does have soil. However, while Crusoe is an experimental agriculturalist, Watney is a botantist only in name; his main capacity is as an electrical engineer: paramount to Watney's survival is his ability to use and reconfigure solar power. Harnessing the sun's energy allows Watney to preserve limited physical resources such as oxygen and water by recycling them through electricity, and it is these in turn which allow him to grow food, eat and above all to breathe.

It's hard to imagine a similar place on earth where this fundamental relationship could be represented, with electricity being abundant as the source of power and allowing a person to meet his needs of water, food and oxygen but not (as I shall come to shortly) communication with the wider world. Unlike Crusoe, who is also a gatherer of food and water already in the environment, Watney is a maker of these things from scratch, crafting life from electricity like a spacesuited Frankenstein. In no earthly surface environment would this be quite the case. Even the most dystopian setting (such as Cormac McCarthy's The Road) would offer some form of food and/or water, and electricity would play less or no role in making these things that can be already scavenged.

Perhaps the contemporary setting most like that inhabited by Watney might be a nuclear submarine, where such resources would also be produced from scratch through abundant electrical power, in a similar life-supporting bubble. Yet even then the fact that Watney uses solar rather than nuclear power - afforded amply by the Martian day-night cycle - is significant. While a nuclear submarine would offer a hermetic support vessel, solar power harnessed at the planet's surface allows Watney to move outside rather than always to be contained. The plot of The Martian entails Watney figuring a way to pack and transport his life support systems from the habitation module onto a rover so he can make his way to the escape craft. In a present-day setting no other power source would be so mobile across a surface. (Of course, one could change both the setting and period - period being an aspect of setting itself - and imagine a futuristic science fiction universe where a small transportable power source is available. However, for the purposes of argument I'm keeping the temporal variable the same, and just thinking through different spatial possibilities.)

The fact that this takes place in a non-earth environment also lends this a metaphorical quality. In a powerful scene in the movie, the planet offers Watney the gift of light, and correspondingly life, as he makes his journey. Light or the sun has a divine status.


Conversely, the permanent threat is air (or the lack of it), and Watney's need to generate his own to survive. A Martian wind is what causes the crew to evacuate and injures Watney. Air explodes from the habitation module when it is breached. Air escapes from Watney's spacesuit, is always on the brink of running out, and needs continually to be replenished by harnessing the power of the sun to recycle carbon dioxide.

The Martian could be seen as a battle between two elemental forces, the air and the sun. At which point, we're returned to where this post began: place is more than just about plot, and setting evokes holistic meanings. But whether looked at from the perspective of setting-and-plot or setting-as-metaphor, it is only on another planet than our own that air (or its lack) would become so paramount. And the quest to maintain air, and the problem solving as a character figures out how to maintain it on a journey, is unique to a narrative set in space and empowered by the sun.

At which point, one could suggest that any number of science fiction films, set on any number of other worlds (real or imaginary), or on a spacecraft, might pose a similar problem. Last year's Gravity treats air with a similar reverence, for instance. However, there is a second feature of choosing Mars as the locale that constitutes the plot in a way unlike that of other zones of the solar system, near or far.

Communicative Delay

There is a notable turn in the plot of The Martian once Watney establishes two-way contact with NASA, at first painfully slowly via the Pioneer rover and then via a rudimentary email system. Just as no man (Watney included) is an island, so no place is ever defined alone, but by its relations with other places removed from it. In most stories, characters move from one place to another, or communicate remotely with different places, and the speed and efficiency of the network influences the way plot unfolds.

To give one example, my article touched on the functional importance of post to Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. In this novel, post goes missing or takes several days to arrive and be replied to from different houses, which allows Austen to create a considerable sense of drama or plot twists, without these appearing to be contrived. They occur as a natural consequence of the delay inherent to post as a communicative system between distributed places.

A similar type of delay occurs in contact between Mars and Earth. Especially when just using the Pioneer rover's camera to type out arduously in hexadecimal, there's a real sense of frustration that communication is slow - and a corresponding degree of tension as Watney is still forced to take decisions on his own. However, unlike the post, and unlike pretty much any communicative system one could imagine in an Earthbound marooned story, the delay on Mars is specific and relatively small: 12 minutes. Significantly, as when Apollo 8 orbited the dark side the moon, so when Watney finally blasts off from Mars the hundreds of scientists on earth are left in radio silence, unable to prevent or influence a course of events that will have, by the time they hear about it 12 minutes later, already have happened. Despite the emphasis placed on teamwork in the second half of the film, at this climax Watney is very much still alone.

Of course, the audience - unlike NASA - do track what Watney and the astronauts on the orbiting rescue craft are doing in the moment of its happening. Without having timed it, I'd guess that these events take place more or less in a realtime of 12 minutes. The audience thus receives a cathartic effect both from the actual rescue of Watney that we witness live as it were, and the way our emotions are correlatively projected on screen by the cheering crowds who learn of it at the very end.

This dramatic irony is a direct product of the distance between Earth and Mars - that is to say, the specific setting of the latter. On our next closest neighbour, the Moon, there would be virtually no delay. On Jupiter, the fifty minute gap would prevent the synchronicity of narrative time and film time that we have in The Martian. Venus is a similar distance from Earth as Mars, but on a semi-molten world the whole premise of the film would be impossible in the first place. In terms of plotting tension, Mars inhabits the Goldilocks zone.

Conclusion

As an astute reader will have observed from that last paragraph, and elsewhere in this discussion, an argument about setting and narrative depends quite heavily upon the construction of counterfactuals: it has to be here because if it were there it would be different. Reductio ad absurdum. At the opposite end it also implies a restrictive view of the powers of the author: it has to be here because storytellers can't possibly find workarounds when setting elsewhere. Reductio onerum auctor.

Both of these are valid points. It's always possible to find alternative examples where a different setting could produce very similar incidents in the plot, via some imaginative authorial workarounds. Nevertheless, thinking through the possibilities afforded by place is valuable. When authors choose a particular setting (Mars), and a particular genre (as close to scientific realism as possible), this dictates that certain events and emphases will happen in that narrative that would not happen otherwise. The value of solar power, the lack of oxygen, a distance from earth that results in communicative delay are all features of the Martian environment. While no one of these is unique to this particular place, they combine uniquely to produce a particular situation for Watney, and a set of puzzles to "science the shit" out of. The placement of The Martian reveals these resources - physically at the disposal of the astronaut, semiotically at the disposal of the narrative - in a particularly prominent way.

Yet on this note we must return to where we began. The fascination of the story, and one might argue of science fiction or fictions-about-science in general, comes from the way the narrative invites us to assess the unknown aspect of the fictional setting (another world, a technological novum) against our own reality, to ponder about the differences and similarities, and the degree to which the human qualities with which we are familiar could apply or work in a new world setting or a different, futuristic time period. Again, one could argue in this vein that Mars does not really matter - that another world in a galaxy far far away would do just as well to invoke this speculation. Except The Martian has been released precisely at a time when, with the commercialisation of space flight and the landing of rovers such as Curiosity, the place that is the Red Planet seems imaginatively and physically closer than ever before.

Labels: narrative, narratology, place, plot, science fiction, setting, storytelling, structuralism, The Martian

Academia is a tough job, but it does have better times when one is given the chance to indulge in one’s own geeky predilections and to call it "work." This last term I have been involved in one of the most enjoyable projects I have worked on, helping to co-curate an exhibition of robots and science fiction at Durham’s Palace Green Library.

We spent several glorious hours pouring over catalogues of life-size robots, many ex-Hollywood props, choosing what to feature in the exhibition. We have had spreads of colourful comics before us on the table, arguing about the relative merits of Godzilla over Mechabot. Some of the text for the exhibition comes from my own PhD research, and it was nice to feel able to contribute knowledge more or less off the top of my head. Best of all, my responsibility was mainly to come up with ideas and think about captions and text. Someone else slogged through the administration and actually put it all together.

I am really proud of this exhibition, which has revealed some interesting things about the history of robotics. The tour moves roughly chronologically, through zones themed from the utopian visions of domestic robot helpers in the 1950s, epitomised by Robby the Robot from Forbidden Planet, to the dystopian allegories of the Cold War, embodied in an especially vivid Terminator skull. Through this approach, it is clear just how robots serve as a screen on which historical aspirations and anxieties have been projected.

It is also interesting to observe how robots reflect a national character. The early robots from Japan are often evidently mechanical; it is possible to see their gears and cogs, with transparent panels revealing their silicon insides. These robots make little attempt to resemble humans. Japanese comic books similarly reflect this, with dystopian robots typically giant creatures, hybrids of machine and mutant lizards. Those from the United States, by contrast, are more homely and realistic – which spills over into later depictions of androids or cyborgs, robot-human hybrids in which the dividing lines between man and machine are uncannily slim (Data from Star Trek is perhaps the best example, though we have the Borg featured in the exhibition).

By the later twentieth century, by contrast, as is epitomised in Honda’s Asimo or Sonny from the 2004 film I, Robot, a different and more homogeneous vision is in play. Robots still resemble humans in some ways, but adapt key facial features in order to minimise their threatening effect, giving them large or curious eyes, for example, but making no attempt to reproduce the whole face realistically.


With clean white now replacing the metallic grey of earlier incarnations, the robot adopts the Apple aesthetic in order to smooth the bump in the uncanny valley (whereby robots that too closely resemble humans, something we could in principle achieve today, are unsettling).

As the exhibition makes clear by bringing visitors face-to-face with life-size robots, the visual confrontation between the human observer and the machine created in man's image is striking. Yet it is in the literature that the deepest philosophical thinking about the implications of robots has been done. The Czech text which coined the word "Robot" in 1920, Karel Čapek's play R.U.R., imagines factory robots who rebel against their human owners; the Czech word "robota" means "serf labour" or "drudgery," and it is not hard to see how the robot serves as an allegory for the unthinking worker exploited in the capitalist system. Somewhat unwittingly, however, Capek's text captures the ironic pressure of the ongoing pursuit of better robots. On the one hand, robots are able to do boring and routine mechanical jobs, in principle freeing the working man to pursue higher and more rewarding forms of labour. On the other hand, to become truly useful and to perform multiple functions, machines must start to possess artificial intelligence, whereupon the robot threatens to dispense with the need for human beings and to supersede them altogether. Thus later texts such as Asimov’s short story collection I, Robot, which establishes the three laws of robotics, try to imagine how to mediate between the two poles, keeping robots useful but also leashed to human requirements. The outcomes are not always successful.

The exhibition runs until April, so if you’re up in this part of the world do take the chance to drop by. We have also been engaging online, via the READ blog that I edit, so even if you haven’t been in person still do contribute your favourite literary robots or participate in our Data Poll.

Labels: robots, science fiction, University Life

China Miéville's The City and the City is about two opposing city-states that coexist, not only side by side but also overlapping, the buildings of each blended indistinctly together. In order to maintain a coherent division between the two societies that cohabit this architectural warren, the citizens have adopted a peculiar behavioural code. Even when walking down ostensibly the same street, the Ul Quomans must pretend not to see or engage with the citizens of Beszel, and vice versa, a process labelled as "unseeing." Failure to unsee what is right in front of one's eyes leads to the invocation of Breach, a name given both to the act itself and to the sinister state force that punishes it. A Beszel citizen can stand in a space that also belongs to Ul Qoma, physically inhabiting territory belong to both cities simultaneously, but he or she must maintain the fiction that only their own city and people actually exist.

This is not, in the moment of reading the novel, as perplexing as it sounds in a quick summary. Yet what is most interesting about The City and the City is not the problematic coexistence of two cities that share the same geographical space, but the way in which the novel itself sits adjacent to, overlapping with, or imposed upon, our own reality.

To continue reading this essay, click here.

Labels: English Literature, postmodernism, science fiction

In recent years, literary studies has increasingly appropriated science, opening new fields for critical enquiry. Darwinian literary studies, for example, shows how the reading of literature can be explained in terms of our evolutionary biology. Literary historians of science show how understanding the ways in which writers have represented science can help us better to communicate scientific knowledge today. Critical readers are turning to empirical studies, such as semantic analysis, to give their criticism the status of fact.

I would not want to demean such efforts to engage literature with science. Before I shifted more towards literature and game studies, my PhD research looked at the ways in which cybernetic science had been (mis)represented in literary and film science fiction. Science and Culture has been a key category under which I've posted on this blog over a number of years.

Nevertheless, I remain sceptical about the ultimate destination of such traffic between science and literature. There is always a feeling that such interdisciplinarity, whilst intellectually interesting in its own right, is also an attempt to lend literary studies the superficial credibility of the "real-world impact" that science possesses. If it is effective, scientific research invariably emerges from universities to have some social benefit, such as a new cure for cancer, or a green energy source. The "impacts" of science, especially the most exciting blue skies science, may not always be direct and instantaneous, but they are invariably assumed to be present. Literary studies clings to the coat-tails of the scientific impact-agenda, suggesting to policy makers and public - who increasingly demand pragmatic outcomes from their funding - that it has relevance, even if this is not always immediately obvious.

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Labels: Different Engines: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science, Science and Culture, science fiction, What Scientists Read

Because the broad remit of my research allows such things, since Christmas I have gone beyond the infinite universe of books to write on science fiction film, with my current focus being Stanley Kubrick's 1968 masterpiece, 2001: A Space Odyssey. Watching this in 2008, and reading about its reception at the time, is a slightly bemusing experience.

As Jerome Agel's contemporary edited collection, The Making of Kubrick's 2001 reports, critics at the time were less than complementary about Kubrick's ten million dollar baby (the contrast with the universal acclaim for Grand Theft Auto IV released today could not be more striking). Some excerpts from the more damning reviews:

You could see it a dozen times and still not understand it. But then, you didn't really expect to understand a movie that took $10.5 million and four years to make, did you?

The guesses of Messrs. Kubrick and Clarke must be as good as ours.

Were 2001 cut in half it would be a pithy and potent film, with an impact that might resolve the "enigma" of its point and preclude our wondering why exactly Mr. Kubrick has brought us to outer space in the year 2001...We hope he sticks to his cameras and stays down to earth - for that is where his triumph remains.

Granted: 2001 is the head flick of all time. Note the faintly resinous spoor of the audience, the people fighting at intermission to get those 50-cent chocolate bars, the spaced-out few who contemplate the curtain for long minutes after the movie ends.

The tedium is the message.

That last piece of pithy genius is from Joseph Gelmis, but in a second review, having watched the film again, he acknowledges one of the problems reviewers of the film at the time faced:

When a film of such extraordinary originality as Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey comes along it upsets the members of the critical establishment because it exists outside their framework of apprehending and describing movies. They are threatened. Their most polished puns and witticisms are useless because the conventional standards don't apply. They need an innocent eye, an inconditioned reflex and a flexible vocabulary. With one exception (The New Yorker's Penelope Gilliatt), the daily and weekly reviewers offhandedly dismissed the film as a disappointment or found it an ambitious failure.

Gelmis's first review in Newsday (April 4, 1968) classified it precisely in these terms. However, his second review admired the fact that it "uncompromisingly demands acceptance on its own unique terms." Unfortunately, as Gelmis noted, such a refusal to buckle to the audience's demands for simple plot and exegesis meant that its stark originality did not make sense except on a second or third viewing.

But this is precisely why I am so surprised by all the negative reviews from 1968. Because, in 2008, one can only ever watch 2001 for the first time having already seen it many times before. This is to say that anyone who has ever played Frontier Elite to the soundtrack of the Blue Danube Waltz, or seen adverts for the Apple Macintosh, or watched Star Wars or Star Trek or last year's science fiction hit Sunshine has already experienced Kubrick's vision. It is hard to overemphasise how odd seeing 2001 retrospectively is; its visual coinage has been in the cinematic economy for four decades now, and numerous shots first witnessed in 1968 set off echoes in the head today. It is therefore impossible to read the contemporary reviews objectively, without a sense of historical irony: unless, like Gelmis, they were prepared to watch it a second time, they would all be proved wrong.

However, before one gets too heady with schadenfreude, one is brought down to earth with a bump. Kubrick's aesthetics may have survived in the cinematic medium, but the vision of science has not been realised by 2008 in reality. At the time, that famous dissolve in which the spinning bone morphs into a rotating space satellite signified the compression of technological development. A year before man actually did land on the moon, space travel and intelligent computers must have seemed a mere frame in history in the future. Looking back today, we are reminded that 2001 did not see the rise of artificial intelligence nor space exploration.

Indeed, a year earlier we'd all been terrified by millennium bugs infecting cranky dumb machines. That AI has failed to come to fruition as Kubrick and Clarke anticipated can be seen not as endorsing the fact that the human mind is so advanced no machine can match it, but that the human mind is so limited that it never can invent a machine to match it. For the twenty-first-century spectator of 2001, perhaps the most profound message is that Clarke and Kubrick, writing in the heyday of the space race and the Eliza chatbot, wrongly judged the acceleration of scientific development. In the twenty-first century the chronology of history and the future-time of the novel have switched places. Thus HAL becomes not so much the potential nightmare we want to avoid, but more symbolises the dream we may not ever realise, due to our own limited knowledge in comparison with that represented in his omniscient but fictional mind.

A similarly depressing story is told by 2001's vision of space travel. Famously, this is presented as being entirely mundane. It involves talk about freeze dried sandwiches ("What's that? Chicken?" "Something like that. Tastes the same anyway."), inane birthday greetings from mum and dad, lounging on sun beds. However, as we know from the Columbia disaster, space remains a risky and colossally expensive business. It is the specialist enterprise of big government, not space tourists (though Virgin Galactic may be seeking to change that).

Space science today is mundane, but in a significantly different way to that which Kubrick imagined. Until it was taken over by images of galaxies colliding - admittedly a pretty exciting firework, though not of our making - the BBC space section was reporting news of the Galileo satellite launch. Space is going to give us better sat nav so that we don't get stranded down country lanes on the way to the Dog and Duck. In comparison, the grand voyages to Jupiter and beyond the infinite seem - in the finite historical timeframe that separates 1968, 2001 and 2008 - a sorry world away.

Labels: 2001: A Space Odyssey, Kubrick, Science and Culture, science fiction

I recently presented a conference paper on science fiction, considering the theoretical problems of reading retrospectively, after its one-time futuristic visions have now been technologically realised. In one of the examples I used, contemporary reviewers of H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds were impressed by Wells' evolutionary imaginings of how the Martians might look, and how they might be defeated by bacteria; they enjoyed his novel presentation of heat rays, tripods and flying machines. But they do not seem to have focused much on how the invasion narrative was intended as a critique of Victorian society in his present, showing how quickly the veneer of civilisation would drop away under the stress of war. However, modern readings now emphasise the novel as a social satire, an approach given added plausibility since World War One did indeed bring Victorian civilisation almost to its knees, through the use of poison gas and flying machines.

In a lecture presented to the Royal Institution entitled "The Discovery of the Future," Wells ascribed to creative writers (himself included) the ability to discern the future with a near empirical accuracy. Like a palaeontologist who by piecing together fossil fragments is able to reconstruct prehistory, the creative writer is able to assimilate the ideas of the present and project a reliable scientific vision of the future. Whilst in the postmodern age of textual relativism such a view seems always suspect, Wells is not unique in holding this perspective on science fiction, though he is rare in the objective force of his argument. Wells would, I suspect, have got on with the recently departed Arthur C. Clarke, who similarly argued in his essay "Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination" that good science fiction should be grounded in extrapolations of present reality, unless it was to become mere fantasy.

However, it seems clear that science fiction does not have any strong claim to predictive validity. Any judgements it makes are given empirical weight only with the benefit of hindsight. In order to seem predictive, science fiction only needs to be lucky once. Star Trek's communicator device seems not unlike a contemporary mobile phone, and so Star Trek is taken as a good predictor of the future. But where are the holodecks, warp drives, and voice-activated computers? Certainly, all these sorts of things will come to pass eventually - virtual reality, space travel, intelligent-type machines. But in reality they will come about not because Star Trek made them so, and not primarily because science has been inspired by the series, but because when they come to be we will recollect the fiction and structure the contemporary technologies according to its earlier, fictional versions. If science fiction seems to present an accurate picture of the future, it is principally because fiction is always going to be reframed in terms of the present.

The reason for this excursion into literary theory of science fiction is that the recent debate about the embryology bill currently being legislated in Parliament has also employed a science fiction text in considering the ethics of the present. The bill would allow scientists to create human-animal embryos for research purposes. Cytoplasmic embryos containing 99.9% human DNA, and the remainder animal, would be grown in the lab for a few days, and then be harvested for stem cells to be used in research into cognitive degeneration diseases: Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, Motor Neurone Disease.

However, whilst the scientific research that would be allowed by the legislation is specific and with particular medical benefits, the reaction to the bill - orchestrated by the Catholic church - has been anything but subtle. Particularly grabbing the headlines was the Easter sermon of the Archbishop of Edinburgh, Cardinal Keith O'Brian. He polemicised:

This bill represents a monstrous attack on human rights, human dignity and human life.

In some other European countries one could be jailed for doing what we intend to make legal.

I can say that the government has no mandate for these changes: they were not in any election manifesto, nor do they enjoy widespread public support.

The opposite has indeed taken place - the time allowed for debate in parliament and indeed in the country at large has been shockingly short.

One might say that in our country we are about to have a public government endorsement of experiments of Frankenstein proportion - without many people really being aware of what is going on.

Many excuses are being made for this present legislation, particularly that cures will soon be found for various diseases which afflict mankind through this legislation.

My objection to the Cardinal's squeals of objection lies in his use of the terms "monstrous" and "Frankenstein" as a catch-all phrase designed to prevent engagement with his argument on any logical grounds, instead invoking the spirit of innate disgust. Given my introductory discussion about the retrospectivity of science fiction, what happens when Frankenstein is introduced into a debate like this (as it has previously been in relation to Genetic Modification, in the form of "Frankenfoods")?

The use of the "Frankenstein" metaphor disrupts logic. It prevents readers and listeners from considering what the science's future really is - immediate and specialised, to grow cells for a few days in a petri dish - and expands it in a limitless bubble of blind ambition. As we inevitably reconstruct the present science in terms of the past text, it seems as if Mary Shelley definitively predicted this would happen, that scientists in a laboratory in Newcastle would try to tamper with life in a grand way (they are, objectively, not doing this - simply manipulating a few cells not whole human bodies). Therefore, any other such claims made in the fiction take on empirical weight as the definition of where science will inevitably, with absolute predictive truth as envisaged by Wells, want to travel morally in its discovery of the future.

Like a giant and unilateral weight, the fiction text is dropped on the science to make a number of associative predictions. The Cardinal invokes sexual deviancy: "The norm has always been that children have been born as the result of the love of man and woman in the unity of a marriage." Frankenstein indeed insinuates a slightly incestuous relationship between Victor and Elizabeth; because Frankenstein was right about scientists tampering with life, it must also be right about the horror of a society in which heterosexual monogamy is no longer an automatic given. The Cardinal challenges us to allow life "to triumph over these deathly proposals"; given the connection with Frankenstein, the implication is that if we fail to prevent the legislation we are performing the moral equivalent to Frankenstein's graveyard robberies. Because one aspect of Frankenstein's legacy appears to have come true, so must all the other aspects of the text.

Rereading Frankenstein, though, as I currently am, I am struck by how much more nuanced it is. Frankenstein is far from pure evil, which is why he is such a compelling and interesting figure. His ambition is directed to the best of purposes, to "renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption." This is a reading which would also apply to the scientists, but the focus in the Cardinal's argument is not on them personally, but on the hideous objects - hybrids of life and technology - which they create. Does the Cardinal not think that scientists doing the work have themselves weighed carefully and personally the ethics of doing this research against the ethics of failing to pursue research which will almost certain provide great medical benefits? In the novel there are numerous cases of ambition and intent for far less admirable and transient ends than those of Frankenstein - financial gain, sexual desire - even if Victor's methods are the most distasteful. Victor Frankenstein may confront the reader with a moral case, but he is far from simply morally corrupt. Frankenstein is a dialogue in the life sciences, not a diagram against it. It is also a science - in the broadest sense - of human life, human nature, human passion and desire, and where the limits of the desire that drives civilisation should be curtailed.

Frankenstein is a wholly appropriate text to bring to the debate about embryological research, and the biosciences generally. Its nuances make it an ideal philosophical abstraction by which we can think through the ethics of science in a general sense, outside of the frantic contexts of our current time. However, it needs to be done in a way that treats the narrative with the complexity it deserves, not just extracting those elements which seem to mesh, with absolute predictive force, with where science is in the present. Constructing the present in terms of the past is a dangerous business, because we are doomed to carry out only the lessons from it which stand out most starkly. Those who oppose embryological research need to read carefully the fictional texts that they choose to use as empirical evidence; they should not unreflexively extract those moments that seem to suit their singular ends so well in the present.

Labels: Cardinal Keith O'Brian, embryology, H.G. Wells, Science and Culture, science fiction