Session 7b: Visions of the Future: Dreams and Nightmares
Chair: Marcus Leaning

Bound for Transcendence, Bound for Escape – Sub-intelligent Technology and Humanity in Contemporary Science Fiction
Pawel Frelik
Maria Curie-Sklodowska University, Poland

The confrontation between humanity and technology is one of the major tropes of science fiction of the last several decades and has provided momentum to numerous narratives. Their encounter has been portrayed in a variety of ways, some of which include humanity’s envelopment in the secondary techno-nature or the direct clash between human beings and individualized machines. In the latter group, writers have favoured AI’s – super-intelligent programs which have been created or independently evolved to occupy the superior position in relation to humans.
Artificial intelligences are not, however, the only manifestations of technology confronting humanity in contemporary science fiction. A number of recent texts feature what I call sub-intelligent technology – machinic, viral, and nanotechnological manifestations of techne whose goal is to escape the controls imposed by their creators. Not infrequently this drive towards transcendence entails a conflict with humanity while mindlessness and blind determination demonstrated by these “engines of destruction” make them all the more dangerous opponents.
In my paper I would like to concentrate on three selected texts – Pat Cadigan’s Synners (1991), Greg Bear’s Slant (1997), and Bruce Sterling’s “Taklamakan” (1998) – which will constitute the basis (several other texts, including Tom Maddox’s Halo and Patrick James Kelly’s Wildlife, will be mentioned) for the discussion of the ways in which the portrayals of sub-intelligent technology become vehicles for the presentation of machinic autopoiesis on the one hand and the technophobic sensibility permeating so many contemporary texts (both those labeled as cyberpunk and belonging to science fiction at large) on the other. For the three authors sub-intelligent technology appears to be humanity’s mortal foe – the view shared by other authors but also such theorists as Bill Joy, who in “Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us” locates the potential threat to humanity in self-replicating technologies among which artificial intelligence is NOT listed.

Don't Say it Was a Dream
Maya Nieto & David de Ugarte
Spain

The future has a stronger influence on the present than has the past. It is the desired future that is not real. One’s life programme discriminates and selects from among the terribly broad and meaningless range of what is actually lived. It is the imagined future that generates the actual selection from among all the possible choices.
Thus there is no history but the tale of our “backward” desires.
But neither is there a present proper. The iron rule of the future subsumes it within the momentum a of a sense imposed by will and desire.
So-called History is not a succession of snapshots of consecutive presents. History is no cinema.
Were we to make a History which included the motivations and needs which impelled us or others, and were we to demand for it to have an iota of truthfulness, it should include all those dreamt-of futures which never saw the light.
Let us recall all the follies carried out during the Space Race because of two fantasies which never took place: the nuclear holocaust and the colonization of new planets. Follies which today, discreetly hidden, are still part of our present.
In our literature this already appears in Gibson’s first story (“The Gernsbach Continuum”), but also in pulp sci fi classics such as “Forbidden planet”, which is ultimately nothing but a chromed version of Shakespeare’s “Tempest”... Nothing new under the sun.
This paper makes a modest proposal for a new way of narrating History from the awareness of its conventional and selective nature. A way which will be all the more truthful inasmuch as it includes, like Kavafis’s Marco Antonio, the chances denied us, the lost works and the plans which ended up as desires.

Visions of the Human in Greg Egan's Science Fiction
Sylvie Allouche
University of Paris/Sorbonne, France

Greg Egan, born in Perth (Australia) in 1961, is one of the most prominent and innovative science fiction writers since the beginning of the 1990s. Indeed, his familiarity with mathematics and his seemingly universal curiosity allows him to deal convincingly with as various and as difficult questions as virtuality, the theory of evolution or quantum physics. The richness of his scientific background is so impressive that, as a joke on rec.arts.sf.written, Paul Clarke proposed Clarke's Fourth Law, which says : "Any sufficiently advanced technology becomes a Greg Egan story."

But if Greg Egan, out of his desire to reach a high level of scientific verisimilitude in his stories, is often considered a hard science writer, the fact remains that his imaginary technological inventions always aim at a better understanding of what it means to be (and stay) human, with some recurrent issues about immortality, the role played by beliefs in one’s life and the nature of free will.

It will not be possible in this paper to provide a complete review of the ways Greg Egan deals with the various issues raised by the conference because his works, which are already numerous, usually present a high density of speculation. I will have to either demonstrate, with a few examples, how the author's speculative imagination explores many of these questions with great skill or tackle one particular problem and examine as many aspects of it as possible.
Follows a selection of issues and related works which could be discussed in my paper :
1) Science fiction and cyberpunk as a medium for exploring the nature of persons (Permutation city, Quarantine, « Axiomatic », « Transition dreams », « Chaff », « The Safe deposit box »)

2) Humans and cyborgs; the synergy of humans and technology; changing views of the body, biotechnical advances and the impact of life, death, and social existence; the impact on individuality (Quarantine, Distress, « The Extra », « The Caress », « The Cutie »)

3) Gender and new technologies: new feminisms, new masculinities (Distress, « Mitochondrial Eve »)

4) Cyberpunk and the near future: utopias vs. dystopias (Permutation city, Distress)

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