Technologies of Immortality: Course Assignments and Critical Texts

With this post, I wanted to talk a bit more about my immortality-focused team-taught Honors course. Specifically, I want to talk about two readings that I assigned that were not science fiction, but rather about it. (My previous post about the precise stories we assigned may be of use.)

For Honors students here at UT, these "Dialectics" courses replace their usual general education requirements. Thus it was important to me that I just not assign literature, but also that I assign something about fiction, to expose the students to literary criticism. I ended up deciding that the two most useful pieces would be two pieces that have been influential on my understanding of science fiction, though neither is a traditional work of literary criticism. I paired each one with one of our groups of sf texts and thus one of our assignments.

Isaac Asimov: "Social Science Fiction"

I've posted here in the past about Isaac Asimov's three-part typology of science fiction: adventure-dominant, technology-dominant, and sociology-dominant. These he articulated in his introductions to the 1962 anthologies Soviet Science Fiction and More Soviet Science Fiction. What I only recently learned (thanks to a query on Reddit) is that he originally discussed the three types of sf in somewhat different terms in a 1952 essay called "Social Science Fiction"; I don't know why this essay wasn't reprinted in Asimov on Science Fiction along with the two Soviet ones, but it has been reprinted a number of other places, including Damon Knight's 1977 anthology Turning Points: Essays on the Art of Science Fiction.

In this essay, he calls the three categories "adventure," "gadget," and "social," and I like how he articulates the differences through a series of examples about how you'd write a story about the automobile if it was sf. An adventure story about the car would use it in a thrilling chase, a gadget story about the car would focus on how internal combustion engines work in exhaustive detail, and a social story about the car would have it already having been invented and focus on the question of "what do we do about automobile accidents? Men, women, and children are being killed by automobiles faster than by artillery shells or airplane bombs. What can be done?" (41).

As you might guess from the essay's title, he's mostly concerned with what social science fiction is and how it works, giving definitions and examples. It's got its weird parts (there's a long digression about the "chess game" of history I don't care for at all) but overall it's a strong definition of sf that gives student writers a lot to work with. I particularly like his statement, "It is easy to predict an automobile in 1880; it is very hard to predict a traffic problem" (41). What social sf tries to do, though, is predict those traffic problems.

Social Science Fiction Paper

What my first paper assignment for the students asked, then, is that they look at one or two stories from the course and think about how it was exploring what you might called the "traffic problem" of immortality. It's easy to predict cryonics, consciousness uploading, or genetic life extension in the 2020s; what's harder to predict is what the implications for society are. They could look at one story in detail, or they could compare two; they could explicitly bring in Asimov if they wanted, or an essay from the MIT Technology Review we had assigned about genetic life extension. (I also said they could cite some stuff I had referred to in class and linked to on Canvas, but not assigned as reading: a New York Times article about cryonics, an MIT Technology Review article about mind uploading, a Jo Walton blog post about "incluing," an essay by Patrick Parrinder about scientists in sf, and some other stuff.)

Here's the prompt:

Overall I was happy with how these came out. Lots of good insights and connections. Perhaps most extraordinarily, the texts the students selected were basically evenly balanced! If you are a writing instructor, you will know how rarely this happens when you give options; everyone will gravitate towards one or two texts. But in this case, every text was chosen by several students.

Grading sixty four-page papers isn't great, especially when you're also teaching two sections of a writing course, but I was able to make it work by just stretching the grading out across an entire month.

China Miéville: "Science, Fiction and Science Fiction"

I find the Asimov piece very useful as a teacher and a thinker—I even cite it in my never-complete book. But it represents a view of sf I don't totally agree with, and in the essay, even Asimov admits it's not quite the full picture, as he struggles to place Ray Bradbury in any of his three categories. So it was important to me that we also talk about how I primarily view science fiction, what I sometimes think of as the doubling effect. This is described really well by China Miéville in his introduction to H. G. Wells's The First Men in the Moon, and I'm forever quoting it to people.

Basically, Miéville's argument is that sf uses "rationalized alienation" to present other worlds to the reader: this isn't the world you live in, but it's different along rational lines. However, sf isn't really about science or the future, no matter what some people (like Asimov) might say. It's about now, using metaphors.

This is definitely true of a lot of the works we read in this course. Is Will McIntosh's "Bridesicle" about a possible future for cryonics? Sure. But it's really about now, about how men treat women as lifeless bodies that solely exist for their own pleasure... even when their intentions are ostensibly good! Is José Pablo Iriarte's "Proof by Induction" about a technology that lets us access the memories of the deceased? Sure. But it's really about now, about how we're unable to let go of the dead even when that's the healthy thing for us to do. Is Ren Qing's "Resurrection" about a soldier brought back to life? Sure. But it's really about now, about how you might be "dead," but it doesn't matter, the government needs you to go back out to the front line. Each of these sf stories takes a metaphor and makes it literal.

Nicely, Sam "qntm" Hughes made this point about his own story "Lena," one of the ones I assigned: 

Quite a lot of science fiction isn't about what it's about.

"Lena" is about uploading, but uploading isn't real. It doesn't exist.

...

The reason "Lena" is a concerning story isn't that one day we may be able to upload one another and when that happens we will do terrible things to those uploads. This isn't a discussion about what if, about whether an upload is a human being or should have rights. (I want to be abundantly clear: within the fictional context of "Lena", uploads definitely are human beings, and therefore automatically, inalienably, have rights.) This is about appetites which, as we are all uncomfortably aware, already exist within human nature. Upload technology is not the last missing piece of this.

Miéville argues that the appeal is that it's not just metaphor, you get the metaphor but also the literal truth. As he says of Gulliver's Travels, "Gulliver's journey to Brobdingnag... clearly casts a remorseless light on Swift's own society; it also, however, features a sword fight with a giant wasp, a passage the enjoyment of which depends on the specific uncanny/​estranging impact of literalizing the impossible: simply, it is a great, weird idea. Weirdness is good to think with, and is also its own end" (xviii). If it was just metaphor, you wouldn't get the sword fight, and that's what makes the story awesome!

This was particularly why I assigned Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," which I think has absolutely no value if you think of sf in an Asimovian sense; he doesn't want to tell us anything about what the year 3001 might be like. Rather, he wants us to reflect on the society we live in now—it's a purely Miévillian piece of sf. 

Final Reflective Paper

I did want there to some kind of writing assignment tied to the readings from the last two weeks of class; I also wanted there to be an assignment that explicitly brought together the different strands of the course, which we didn't otherwise have. But this had to be manageable for both the students and for me. They were doing big group research papers for Cragun, and I would have less than a week to grade whatever I assigned, so it couldn't be a big paper.

I ended up assigning a 1½-page paper that only had to be three paragraphs long. My thought was that the paper would have to be about just one story from the second half of the course, and that it would have to make one concrete, specific connection to something from the sociology or science components of the course.

Here's the prompt:

I'm only halfway through reading these as I write this up back on May 3rd, but overall I am enjoying them so far. They're easy reads, easy to grade, and the students are making solid connections.

Unlike the previous paper, though, there's a clear clustering: a huge plurality of papers about Paolo Bacigalupi's "Pop Squad," tying it to something Professor Cragun taught them about overpopulation. The runner up is Orson Scott Card's "Skipping Stones" and income inequality.

But even in just half the submissions, every story has been represented once. A few about Haldeman's "Four Short Novels," a couple about "Lena," one about Greg Egan's "Border Guards" and religion, and one about Ken Liu's "Staying Behind" and religion. And some of the angles on "Pop Squad" have been unique; in particular, I got a couple good papers about aspects of gender I hadn't thought about. Additionally, I was worried about the students only picking sociology as the thing to connect to, but I did thus far get a couple about science: one about how what they learned about neurons is oversimplified in "Staying Behind" and "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" and another about the issues of preserving bodies in liquid nitrogen, which was briefly mentioned in "Four Short Novels."

No one is directly citing Asimov or Miéville, but most are clearly thinking about their sociological issue in either an Asimovian or Miévillian sense, either arguing these stories show us something about the future, or that they show us something about our own society through the lens of sf.

As is often the case in teaching, I don't know if they had fun, but I did, and that's what matters to me.

Technologies of Immortality: Reading List

This is a sequel to last week's post; I wanted to provide my reading list (with commentary) for my co-taught "Technologies of Immortality" course.

illustration by Galen Dara for Joe Haldeman's "Four Short Novels"

I divided the readings into two halves. The ones from the first half of the course focused on technologies of immortality being in their early stages, societies where they were just being invented or had only recently come into use. In the second half, I wanted societies much further on, where the technologies were commonplace and the long-term ramifications of the technologies on society could be explored. As I said in the previous post, we usually focused on three specific technologies: digital consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic modification to extend life.

If the stories are freely and legally available on the Internet, I've linked to them below. We did a reading ranking on the last day of class, where I had the students sort all of the stories they'd read from 1st (best) to 13th (worst); at the end of each paragraph, I've given how the story ranked by mean and median, and how many students ranked it first or last. Every story was some student's favorite... except two.

Prologue

• Will McIntosh, "Bridesicle" (2009). This is a disturbing story about both cryonics and consciousness uploading; it's about a woman named Mira who dies in a car accident and wakes up in a cryonics facility centuries later. The problem with cryonics has turned out to be that revival is expensive, so the dead don't have the money to be revived... but it turns out that men will pay to revive women who are frozen if the women will sign a marriage contract. The story also incorporates elements of consciousness uploading; people can have mental copies of loved ones called "hitchers" stored in their minds. I liked it a lot as a way to begin; it's a good story, well told, but also works well to grab the attention of students as to the purpose of the course. I think this was Professor Cragun's favorite, and it was something both we and the students referred back to a lot. The story was later expanded into a novel (Love Minus Eighty, 2013), and at first I was skeptical of this, but the students raised a lot of interesting questions about the world in class I'd like to see fleshed out. A student also told me they heard an interview with McIntosh where it was originally written about the man doing the revival; I am curious about this because the story would have nowhere near its power in that format! [ranked 1st by mean, 1st by median, 1st by 18 students, last by 1 student]
  

Part I

• Vanessa Fogg, "Traces of Us" (2018). We began part I of the course with this, because it's actually about the development process for consciousness uploading; it follows a pair of graduate students (later, postdocs) who are working on different aspects of consciousness uploading. It's very cute, a bit sad, and Fogg did some solid research on the science here; Professor Evans-Nguyen was impressed by the rigor and specificity. Fogg's blog post here gives good insight into her inspirations. [ranked 2nd by mean, 3rd by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• José Pablo Iriarte, "Proof by Induction" (2021). This is also about a nascent version of consciousness uploading; a technology called the "coda" has just come into existence, which captures a digital snapshot of consciousness at the moment of death. This consciousness can't evolve or change, but you can interact with a deceased love one to obtain closure (or ask questions like, "where is the will?"). The main character is a math professor interacting with his father, another math professor, as they try to solve a proof together. The story explores the process of grief and dealing with the fact that your loved one will never change. [ranked 4th by mean, 4th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Greg Egan, "Learning to Be Me" (1990). A very weird but very good story about a technology called the Ndoli jewel, an implant in your brain that records your neural processes with the eventual goal of taking over for them. The narrator has a series of existential freakouts over the fact that even if his jewel lives forever, it's not him living forever. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 2 students, last by 2 students]
  
• Channing Ren, "Resurrection" (2020). This is a Chinese sf story, again about consciousness uploading. A military engineer dies in battle, but his duplicated consciousness was copied into an artificial body, and then the body dumped on the doorstep of his grieving mother, who is now very confused—and only has a couple weeks with him before he gets sent back to the front. This one began to shift into looking at the social consequences of the technology; Cragun set up in an earlier class that one way sociologists like to look at situations is to as cui bono?—who benefits? And here we see that; it's not the resurrected who benefits from this technology, but those who already have political and economic power. [ranked 5th by mean, 6th by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 1 student]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Will Not Be Chained" and "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" (2014). These are two linked short stories about a girl named Maddie, who (spoilers) discovers that her dead dad isn't actually dead, but that his consciousness has been uploaded to the Internet. I will admit to finding Liu a bit hit or miss, but it is a very accessible story, and again, we get a shift into the social implications of this technology, as Liu explores both who the actual beneficiaries of consciousness uploading would be, what they would use it for, and what the long term consequences would be. [ranked 8th by mean, 8th by median, 1st by 6 students, last by 4 students]
  

Interlude

• qntm [Sam Hughes], "Lena" (2021). This is a hermit-crab story, told in the form of a Wikipedia article about the first digital consciousness. The story explores the dark implications of such a technology, how it would lead to exploitation; the story is named for a famous test image, and HeLa cells are another inspiration. (I taught it in the middle of the course, alongside The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.) What rights do we have to these products of ourselves—our images, our cells, our consciousnesses—that are not ourselves? The story explores these questions in a stripped back, kind of casually horrifying way. I think a couple students really liked it, but most struggled with the unusual conceit. One thing I really liked is this rant from the author: "'Lena' is a true story. You knew it was when you read it." [ranked last by mean, last by median, last by 7 students]
  

Part II

• Greg Egan, "Border Guards" (1999). I opened the "consequences" part of the course with a couple sequels to stories from the earlier parts of the class. This is a sequel to "Learning to Be Me"; it has no characters in common, but instead jumps centuries into the future to see what kind of society might result from the Ndoli jewel being commonplace. How would people treat relationships? What kind of problems would they have? It's a very optimistic story and too much detail about quantum soccer aside, has some beautiful imagery. It's easy to kneejerk reject these technologies, but I liked how this one not only challenges our preconceptions about the necessity of death, but explicitly calls out other fiction that argues for the necessity of death for being intellectually lazy. [ranked 11th by mean, 11th by median, last by 9 students]
  
• Ken Liu, "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" (2015) and "Staying Behind" (2011). These two follow up the Liu stories from the first half. The first is the third Maddie story; the other takes place in the same world, looking at those people still living physical existences after the majority of humankind has been uploaded. The final Maddie story kind of fizzles out, but that's the point, I would argue: Maddie reaches no clear decision about whether it's better to live a physical existence or be uploaded, because Liu wants the reader to explore it for themselves. "Staying Behind" picks right up from the end of the previous story (despite being written first), and like Egan's "Border Guards," it pushes against our preconceptions—the story is told from the perspective of someone resisting this technology, and he's clearly wrong to do so. So... are we? I can find Liu a bit schmaltzy sometimes, but here he's at his best. Really well put together, clever connections, unsettling conclusion. ["Gods Have Not Died..." ranked 12th by mean, last by median, 1st by 1 student, last by 5 students; "Staying Behind" ranked 10th by mean, 9th by median, 1st by 1 student]
  
• Paolo Bacigalupi, "Pop Squad" (2006). In a world where everyone lives forever, wouldn't overpopulation be a problem? Especially if climate change continues unabated, and the amount of resources available to support humanity keeps dwindling. The story follows a police officer on the "pop squad"—he kills illegal babies and arrests their mothers. It's vividly, gruesomely told... but that's the point, as Bacigalupi is actually confronting you with something that happens everyday. Everyday the United States turns away immigrants with children, and those children suffer because we won't share our resources, and we want to continue to live in our current lifestyle, we do exactly what the characters in this story do, we just don't have to see it. [ranked 3rd by mean, 2nd by median, 1st by 8 students, last by 7 students]
  
• Orson Scott Card, "Skipping Stones" (1979). From the moment I knew I was teaching this class, I knew wanted to track this story down and read it, which I read in Card's collection The Worthing Saga. It's about a world where people can use a drug called somec to enter suspended animation; the rich get more than the poor, and it's about a rich boy and poor boy who start out friends but grow apart as one ages years while the other ages decades. Not a very complicated story, to be honest, but a good example of how social class dynamics will impact these kind of technologies. (A student pointed out that as technologies of immortality go, it was "stupid": you don't actually live longer. But as long as people have inequal access to the technology, there is a benefit. The inequality is the point.) [ranked 7th by mean, 5th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 3 students]
  
• Joe Haldeman, "Four Short Novels" (2000). A weird story, but I knew I wanted to end on it: it's four sketches of "novels" about living forever, each with a different conceit: "Eventually it came to pass that no one ever had to die, unless they ran out of money" or "...unless they were so horrible that society had to dispose of them" or "...unless they wanted to, or could be talked into it," and so on. They are funny and have some neat ideas in them... but not really about immortality at all. It was important for me to end with a story that demonstrated China Miéville's claim that sf isn't actually about science or the future. But more on that next time! [ranked 9th by mean, 10th by median, 1st by 3 students, last by 6 students]
  

[Incidentally, "Pop Squad" had the highest standard deviation, and "Traces of Us" the lowest.]

Overall, I was really happy about the collection of stories we read. They were largely high quality tales, and not a single one of them was a dud in the classroom; I was able to get something interesting out of everyone of them. I do wish there were more stories that were more optimistic about these technologies, but I was limited by what sf authors are actually writing! (Later I should do a post on stories I rejected.)

Technologies of Immortality: Team Teaching

I've mentioned it a few times around here, but this semester I've been team-teaching an Honors course. Our Honors program made some big changes over the last few years; one of them was that Honors students would take classes called "Dialectics," where professors from three different colleges would teach a course on a common topic; these could be called "Where Did We Come From?", "Where Are We Now?", and "Where Are We Going?"

I applied to become an Honors fellow back in Spring 2020; the Honors program then arranged a big Zoom meeting where accepted faculty gave quick verbal indications of what they might be interested in. I was interested in science fiction, of course; my argument was that I could basically pair with any science professor, because no matter what science you talk about, there are science fiction stories about it.

I ended up paired with Ryan Cragun, a professor of sociology, and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen, a professor of forensic science who specializes in neurochemistry. We kibbitzed and eventually came up with a "Where Are We Going?" class about what I came to call "technologies of immortality": attempts to lengthen the human lifespan. Our three big examples were consciousness uploading, cryonics, and genetic life extension. I could talk about how such technologies had been depicted in sf, Cragun could talk about the real people trying to do this and the sociological implications of doing it, and Kenyon could talk about the actual science of it.

Like I said, this was Spring 2020... we ended up being scheduled to teach the class in Spring 2024, so I had quite a lot of time to prepare! I've chronicled some of that process here on my blog. In next week's post, I'll talk about my specific stories, but here I wanted to talk about the big picture of how we organized the course.

We bookended the course with the science fiction; the first three weeks were largely mine. Aside from the syllabus day, we began with the story "Bridesicle" by Will McIntosh, as a way of capturing students' attention with the course topic; the story features both cryonics and consciousness uploading. We then did one day on real attempts to extend life, to show this was something really happening, and then went back into the sf.

After that, we shifted to the sociology and the science. The students started learning about how neurons actually worked from Kenyon and about the sociological issues from Cragun. These Dialectics classes have sixty students, and you can't really take sixty students into the lab. So what we would sometimes do is split the class up into thirds: one third would go into the lab, one third would attend a sociology lecture, and one third would conference with me about papers. Across a M/W/F week, students would rotate through all three.

In the lab, they did things like:

• measure electrical activity in crickets
• drug crickets and see how that affected their electrical activity
• measure electrical activity in worms
  
• cool worms and see how that affected their electrical activity
• freeze onion slices in liquid nitrogen

"Dad, why are you a scientist?" asked my five-year-old.

I didn't always get to go (sometimes I had to conference), but I did do three of the labs.

We did a week on HeLa cells, where we had students watch The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks and then Cragun talked about the racial issues, Kenyon talked about using HeLa cells during his postdoc (before the book came out, so he didn't know the significance), and I assigned an sf short story that riffed on them.

We also had them read a bit of Gregory Benford's cryonics thriller Chiller, specifically the afterword, where he discusses if he thinks cryonics will work, and we had them research and present on his assumptions.

Finally, at the end of the semester, we circled back to science fiction with two final weeks.

Some Dialectics faculty have the student do common assignments; we broke the grade into four categories, each worth 25%:

• Literature Assignments. I assigned a four-page literary analysis paper near the beginning of the semester, and a 1½-page "reflective" paper near the end, where they had to connect the sf to something from the sociology or science portions of the course.
• Lab Assignments. Kenyon assigned five lab write-ups to go with his five labs.
• Sociology Assignments. Cragun assigned a cumulative sociology research project, where they gathered survey data about attitudes toward immortality, and contextualized it in terms of a literature review they did.
  
• Quizzes and Presentations. I did random reading quizzes, and Kenyon assigned pre-lab quizzes.

I'll talk more about some of this in a future post, too.

---

Overall, I liked it a lot. If nothing else, Honors students are engaged and thoughtful, and I got to discuss literature as literature, not as a thing to write about in an AWR course.

Plus, it's fun to learn things! I wouldn't be in this job if I didn't believe that, and for a few weeks, I got to be a student again, learning about neurons and macromolecules and the history of religion and income inequality. I made some neat connections between my work and their work.

But I also really liked working with both Ryan Cragun and Kenyon Evans-Nguyen; I think we have similar dispositions and worked well as co-teachers. They are, like me, nerdy middle-aged dads! I am trying to convince them both to join my Star Trek Adventures campaign. I can imagine there would be some people you would be miserable team teaching with, but I really enjoyed working with the two of them. (Which is good, because we will do it two more times!)

Science Fiction and the Hermit Crab

In my immortality Honors class (which is probably due a post of its own, but at this point, I'll just wait until the semester is over), the students read "Lena" last week, which is a short story by Sam "qntm" Hughes that's written in the form of a Wikipedia article. As I prepared to teach it, this got me thinking: was there a term for stories, especially science fiction stories, told in nonnarrative forms? I could think of a couple examples right off the top of my head other than Lena; one was Isaac Asimov's thiotimoline stories, which are written in the form of peer-reviewed chemistry articles, another was Yoon Ha Lee's "Entropy War," which is written in the form of rules for a dice game. Some people love this form: Hughes uses it a lot, actually, so does Lee; among its most famous practitioners is surely Stanislaw Lem, who wrote a number of works of fiction in the form of introductions or reviews for books that did not exist!

I posted on r/PrintSF and r/AskLiteraryStudies asking if anyone else knew a term for these kind of tales; the latter was a dud, but the denizens of PrintSF (my favorite subreddit) came up with a bunch of examples and a couple suggestions for terms.

"Epistolary fiction" was suggested, and as a Victorianist, I am of course very aware of epistolary fiction, but what strikes me about all the examples I came up with is that it's a narrative told through a nonnarrative form. I have long had a fascination with what you might call the "non-novel novel," such as Nabokov's Pale Fire, a novel in the form of a poem with annotations and other critical apparatus. Epistolary fiction uses narrative forms, like letters and diaries, for the most part. (I once tried to do this myself. I began a book in the form of an episode guide to a fictional 1980s BBC science fiction show; my writing group seemed largely baffled but were game for it.)

There's also the term the "false document" story, which is one I'm not very familiar with, to be honest, and I'm trying to track down its precise origin and meaning. I think "false document" probably includes both epistolary fiction and what I'm trying to capture here.

The term I really liked, and had not heard before, so thanks to the PrintSF poster who suggested it, was "hermit crab fiction." If you Google "hermit crab fiction," the top hit is a locked Medium post by Dan Brotzel, but I was able to find it on the Wayback Machine. He defines them as "stories made from found verbal structures such as a shopping list or board game rules or FAQs or even a penalty charge notice," but he's not the originator of the term, which largely seems to be one used by creative writers, not literary critics. He doesn't really explain the term, but I assumed it was something like a story disguising itself by looking like something else.

But through him I was able to trace its origin, which actually comes out of creative nonfiction. Specifically, the term "hermit crab essay" was coined by Brenda Miller and Suzanne Paola in their textbook Tell It Slant: Writing and Shaping Creative Nonfiction (McGraw-Hill, 2005*). They define it as a form of lyric essay that "appropriates other forms as an outer covering, to protect its soft, vulnerable underbelly. It is an essay that deals with material that seems born without its carapace—material that is soft, exposed, and tender, and must look elsewhere to find the form that will best contain it" (111). So in its original concept, the "hermit crab" metaphor was about emotional vulnerability, something of importance to creative nonfiction, I assume, but not necessarily other genres of writing.

The emphasis on nonnarrative form isn't there in this original definition, as they say the "shells" may come "from fiction and poetry, but they also don't hesitate to armor themselves in more mundane structures, such as the descriptions in a mail-order catalog or entries in a checkbook register" (111). So if you're talking about nonfiction, a fictional form is a transformation. As the term has caught on later, though, in its use by fiction writers, it mostly seems to be about nonnarrative forms, as I said above.

They end their section on the hermit crab with this:

Think in terms of transformation. The word itself means to move across forms, to be changed. Think of the hermit crab and his soft, exposed abdomen. Think of the experiences you have that are too raw, too dangerous to write about. What if you found the right shell, the right armor? How could you be transformed? (113)

There's a big emphasis on emotional expression and protection from this transformation. To move back into science fiction, where I started, there's clearly something different at work. "Lena" and the thiotimoline stories and "Entropy War" are not about emotional vulnerability. Indeed, you might argue they're almost about the opposite. There are a lot of these hermit crab sf stories; just while writing this blog post I thought about three more I hadn't before!

I can't find any evidence of previous work on nonnarative forms in sf (which isn't to say it doesn't exist, as I haven't looked very much yet), so it seems to me something worth thinking about and theorizing further.

* At least, 2005 is the copyright date given on my library's first edition copy. The catalog entry, however, includes 2004 in the call number, and some people on the Internet claim it came out in 2003, so who knows when it was actually released.

Chiller by Sterling Blake

Chiller: A Scientific Suspense Novel by Gregory Benford

I read this as part of my ongoing investigation into science fiction about life extension technology. It's a thriller about an Alcor-like cryonics facility originally published in 1993 under the pen name "Sterling Blake," republished in 2011 under the real name of Gregory Benford, hard sf writer.

Originally published: 1993
Read: July 2023

It's cleverly put together. The novel rotates between four perspectives: a scientist who helps out at Immortality Incorporated (I²), a technician and cryonicist who works there, that cryonicist's girlfriend, and a deranged religious killer who sees cryonics as an affront against God. At first it seems like a fairly standard thriller with cryonics as the maguffin: the killer stalks the other characters, his attacks gradually increasing in ferocity and impact.

I don't normally do this, but it seems warranted in this case: DON'T READ IF YOU EVER INTEND TO READ THIS BOOK! Both the back cover and the review blurbs in front give away what I think is a pretty clever twist. The killer succeeds in killing one of the other protagonists... then another... then another! At that point cryonics is reviewed to not just be a maguffin, because all the dead characters suddenly wake up thirty years in the future, revived by the advancements of medical science. Their killer had gone to ground, but now that they're back, he emerges from hiding to finish the job. It's a clever spin on the typical technothiller formula, where usually the specifics of the technological advance don't matter, and any changes to society don't actually transpire. This is also enhanced by how meticulous the story's details about cryonics are. Benford is a paid-up member of the real Alcor, and we get a lot of good detail and defenses of the movement.

That said, at six hundred pages it feels a bit bloated; you could cut at least a hundred, if not more, and accelerate things quite a bit. Around the midpoint I started to get bored waiting for things to pick up. Conversely, I wish we'd gotten to see a bit more of the future and cryonics' impact on society; it seemed like there was only time to quickly finish off the killer plotline once we were there, though maybe 1990s technothrillers aren't a place to expect a lot of interesting futurism.

Also, the small press 2011 reprint is a bit rough: "straight quotes" instead of proper “curly quotes” look amateurish, and lots of paragraphs are missing their indentations. Whole thing read like it was printed from the file Benford sent to his publisher back in 1993, not the properly copy-edited version they would have prepared.

(I won't be teaching it; at six hundred pages, the amount of what is interesting is not proportionate to its length. But it was an interesting insight into cryonics from a true believer.)

Lifespan by David Sinclair

Lifespan: Why We Age—and Why We Don’t Have To
by David A. Sinclair, with Matthew D. LaPlante

I've been reading sf stories about life extension for a class I will teach, but I've also been reading books recommended by one of my co-teachers about the actuality of it. This one is by a Harvard Medical School researcher into aging. Compared to some others that I have read, it has more of a real science feel. It's somewhat written in that breathless style of popular science journalism, but not as often. There's some real science in here, or at least so it seems from the perspective of this nonscientist.

Published: 2019
Read: June 2022

I also appreciated that Sinclair thinks through some of the social consequences of longer lifespan, and he has good answers where he can. Some areas, he freely admits, don't have good answers: the rich will gain access first, and longer lifespan will allow the rich to acquire even more, creating a feedback loop. (This is something I've seen in a number of the sf stories I've read.) On the other hand, I wasn't convinced by all his answers: he says we'll save money from not having to treat diseases that are symptoms of aging... but since he's not promising immortality, wouldn't those diseases catch up with us again at some point?

The book is clearly trying to be accessible but also not be fluff. I think it fails in threading the needle when it comes to explaining epigenetics, which is the key to Sinclair's theory of aging, but which I totally failed to understand the explanation of; it's a mixture of too-much technical detail and too-dumbed down analogies.

But on the whole, I found this to be one of the more convincing advocacies of anti-aging I've read. Should I start taking the supplements he recommends to extend my own lifespan...?

Why Call Them Back from Heaven? by Clifford D. Simak

Why Call Them Back from Heaven? by Clifford D. Simak

I read this as part of my ongoing investigation of life extension in science fiction. In this book's future, everyone is frozen upon death; the society hasn't figured out resurrection yet, but they're sure that bit is coming.

Published: 1967
Acquired: October 2021
Read: November 2021

What really works are the novel's various ideas about how society would change around such a development. People live very frugally, saving all their money for the second life; preventing someone from being frozen, even inadvertently, is a crime because you're essentially killing them; investors buy swampland because they know the Earth will need tons of room for all these people upon resurrection so even worthless land ought to have value.

It's very 1950s/60s sf: kind of off-kilter, a dose of spiritualism, a lot of discussion of marketing, an ending that doesn't quite come together. We follow a group of parallel characters in this future society, but I felt like their stories petered out in the end. Simak had great worldbuilding, but I am not entirely convinced he really knew what the book was about thematically.

It is short, and probably would be pretty fun to teach in my putative course, but hasn't been in print since 1988! There's an ebook from Gollancz, but you can only get it in the UK.

Glasshouse by Charles Stross

 Glasshouse by Charles Stross

I found this while looking for science fiction stories about mind uploading and life extension. It's set in a world where people can rebuild their bodies basically at will; the main character is a (seemingly male) military operative forcibly remade into a 1950s American housewife as part of a bizarre social experiment.

Published: 2006
Read: October 2021

It doesn't really explore the ideas about mind-uploading and consciousness transfer in a way that would make it useful in the class I plan to teach on the topic, but I didn't mind as I thoroughly enjoyed reading it. It's a very weird, very solid thriller, about escaping from prison—only the prison is society itself in a sense. Cool ideas, played with in interesting ways. This was my first Charles Stross novel, but I suspect it will not be my last.

The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer

The Terminal Experiment by Robert J. Sawyer

This was wretched. I read it because it's about mind-uploading, and I am co-teaching a class on that... but I will not be teaching this book. Let me take the time to explain.

Originally published: 1994-95
Acquired: July 2021
Read: August 2021

The book has two concurrent ideas in play. One is that the main character, a designer of medical devices, is preoccupied with the idea that there's no definitive way of knowing when someone transitions between being alive and being dead. He invents an extremely discriminating device to map the brain, and using it on someone at the moment they die, detects what he dubs "the soulwave" leaving their body. This rocks the world: suddenly we know when people are alive and dead, we know what kind of life counts as alive and dead, and so on.  But once the device is invented and made public, this idea basically vanishes from the plot of the novel, and just becomes a background element; between chapters, we read news updates of how this is affecting society. But it never affects the story, it never even really affects our main character, who could have just easily been an inventor of a new type of soda pop, and the plot would have proceeded in exactly the same way. This seems to me to be one of the worst sorts of science fiction; it's a complete lack of imagination. Isaac Asimov says in Asimov on Science Fiction that in sociology-dominant sf, the author should come up with a society affected by a "what if—" and then "[t]he actual plot of the story, the suspense, the conflict, ought to arise—if this were a first-class story—out of the particular needs and frustrations of people in such a society" (p. 172). None of that is true here; Sawyer squanders his central idea. Interesting extrapolation in the background, but none in the foreground.

The other idea is that the main character sells his mind-scanning technology to an AI research firm. He asks if they can upload his consciousness into a computer... and they just do! Apparently all you have to do is scan the brain in order to have a working simulation of the brain. This seems like a huge leap to me. Like, being able to map where neurons are does not equate to being able to simulate how someone thinks! On top of this, the book acts like this is no big deal, and that no one will be interested in it! Even though the soulwave thing doesn't affect the plot at all, it does change the world. But the characters totally brush off the idea that anyone would even want to upload a brain. This surely has theological and philosophical repercussions even bigger than those of the soulwave. Where there was once one person, there are now four (they make three copies of the main character's brain). They call a press conference to announce the soulwave... but treat this advancement as if its old news. Again, it's a complete failure of imagination when it comes to worldbuilding. At one point they even go, "Oh, who would be interested in such technology anyway?" Like, everyone would!

The brain uploading stuff also reads as hugely improbable. Even though the technology was just invented, the AI researcher can just hit a couple buttons to rewrite the main character's personality. Of the three uploaded scans, one is edited to simulate how he would be if he was immortal, the other is edited to simulate how he would be without a physical self. And then all three selves can move themselves around because the original knows how directories work... I don't think that follows. Also, why don't they copy themselves if they are files? Somehow there's only one copy of each of the three versions. That a brain uploaded to a computer instantly becomes a super-hacker seems like something from a cheesy 1970s sci-fi film, not a supposedly serious 1990s near-future sf novel, but it's how the entire plot resolves; they stop the copy that goes evil by uploading the copy of a police officer's brain into the Internet to get him!

On top of all this, the prose reads like it was written by a tedious pedant. Utterly lifeless. This won the Nebula!?

(Not Sawyer's fault, but the way the book is dated by being written in the 1990s but set in 2011 is often hilarious. There's a bit that essentially goes, "He's taken over the entire Internet... AOL and CompuServe!" Well... maybe it is Sawyer's fault; his version of the future seems exactly like his present except that they have e-readers.)

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu

The Hidden Girl and Other Stories by Ken Liu

I continue to work my way through stories about life extension and mind uploading for the class I will eventually teach on the topic. That journey brought me to this collection by Ken Liu (his second; I own his first but have never gotten around to reading it), which contains a sequence of stories about the Singularity. Three of them form a tight sequence about a single character; the others don't share characters, but do seem to be set in the same future history. In this world, imaging the brain destroys it, so you can only be uploaded if you die physically, and quantum considerations mean the programs cannot be duplicated. Though there is a period of initial chaos, by the far future, humanity all exists "in the cloud," essentially, with new, purely digital people being born. The relevant stories are:

Collection published: 2020
Contents originally published: 2011-20
Read: July 2021

• "The Gods Will Not Be Chained" (2014) – a girl named Maddie discovers her father has been uploaded
• "Staying Behind" (2011) – a father clings onto physical life when the majority of humanity has been uploaded
• "The Gods Will Not Be Slain" (2014) – Maddie tries to stay alive with the help of her father as the world goes to hell
• "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer" (2011) – a purely digital human tries to come to terms with her mother's decision to die (her mother is an uploaded human, one of only a few left)
• "The Gods Have Not Died in Vain" (2015) – Maddie discovers she has a cloud-born sister
• "Seven Birthdays" (2016) – a mother and daughter's relationship across an increasingly long life-span; between the daughter's 49th and 343rd birthdays, the upload takes place

These stories are okay. I think they raise some interesting ideas, but I often felt that Liu didn't have much interesting to say about them, and even though Liu is a software engineer, I felt they overrelied on hoary clichés of mind-uploading stories: anyone in the Maddie stories who is uploaded instantly becomes a super-AI capable of hacking and battling on the digital plane, for example. There's a constant reiteration in some stories that the digital world is less "real" feeling than ours, which seems to me a pretty uninteresting idea for sf to explore. What if a technology some people think is good is actually bad!? I wanted to see more of interest done with it.

That said, I think several of them are worth teaching; definitely the first Maddie story and "Staying Behind"; possibly the second and third Maddie stories. These are ones that raise interesting philosophical and ethical questions that would be worth pursuing in a college course, even if Liu's own answers aren't always the most interesting or plausible.

I did take the time to read all the stories collected here, since Liu is someone I've been meaning to read more of. I found it hit or miss. I found Liu at his best when exploring ideas of race or cultural identity: "Ghost Days," contrasting the way that 2310s space colonists, 1980s Connecticut Chinese immigrants, and 1900s Hong Kong residents dealing with the British all play down or play up their cultural identities was pretty neat. "Maxwell's Demon," the story of a "no-no girl" who ends up spying for the Americans in Japan and developing a weapon out of ghosts was sad but good.

I also enjoyed some of his near future stuff when it wasn't about uploading. "Thoughts and Prayers" is a neat story about the weaponization of algorithms. I had previously read "Byzantime Empathy," about an attempt to put empathy on the blockchain, and I liked it a lot this time around, too. On the other hand, "Real Artists," about making the perfect movie by monitoring how the brain responds to it, reminded me too much of one of those Golden Age stories that was more an idea than an actual story.

Outside of his short fiction, Liu primarily writes fantasy novels; interestingly, I found almost all of the fantasy stories here deadly dull. I just could not buy into them for whatever reason. Mostly they are clustered at the end of the book, which didn't help.

By the end of this book, I was very down on it. I think the issue is that Liu is a very one-track writer, at least as represented by this book. There is no sf idea that cannot be hitched to a heartfelt tale of a father and daughter, or less commonly, a mother and daughter. This is the approach of "Thoughts and Prayers," the three "Gods" stories, "Staying Behind," "Altogether Elsewhere, Vast Herds of Reindeer," "Memories of My Mother," "The Hidden Girl," "Seven Birthdays," and "The Message," over half of the collection's nineteen pieces. Done a little, this can give weight to a story. Repeated so much, the theme quickly becomes saccharine; I really hated it by the time I got to "The Message." Also, daughters every time? (Only "Ghost Days" uses a son.) It quickly felt like less a theme Liu wanted to explore and more a crutch he was using to give emotional weight to banal ideas.

This might be unfair—I think I would have liked many of these a bit more on their own—but this is how Liu put his book together, and that's how I read them. In a strong collection, a writer brings out their themes in such a way that it makes you appreciate their writing more, but I finished this book somewhat less enthused for the eventual moment that I finally read The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories.

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

Walkaway by Cory Doctorow

I read this as part of my ongoing exploration of life-extension technology sf for a class I am eventually going to teach. (As of the time I write this in October 2021, this class has finally been scheduled... for Spring 2024! I guess I have a lot of  time to read prospective texts.) I know of Cory Doctorow, of course, as both an sf writer and a cultural critic, but I have never actually read anything by him before aside from a single short story in a Lou Anders Fast Forward collection, so I was curious to see what I thought. I picked up Walkaway because I had read it was, in part, about mind uploading, and specifically I was intrigued by what I had read, that "[p]art of the process is altering the simulation's mental state into something that will be psychologically okay with being a simulation of a dead person."

Published: 2017
Read: July 2021

This idea is indeed intriguing; unfortunately, you have to read the whole rest of the book in order to read about it. This book starts out okay, but then you soon realize that it's a bunch of people giving other people lectures about what an ideal society looks like, repeat for over 350 pages. It's clearly in dialogue with Le Guin's The Dispossessed... it's clearly also so so inferior to The Dispossessed as a utopian text as to be insulting. I dragged myself through to the end of its relentless mediocrity out of some sense of obligation (it's more a series of novellas than a novel, and maybe I would find that one of them worked on its own in a teachable way), and it took me weeks to do it. The actual society is interesting; the characters and a plot are not. The mind uploading thing is barely even a significant component of the book, and not really relevant thematically. Dull and rambling. I will not be teaching it!

Capitol by Orson Scott Card

Capitol: The Worthing Chronicle

by Orson Scott Card

When I was discussing my life-extension technology class with the professors I am co-teaching with, the sociology prof mentioned issues of inequality; only rich people can afford things like Alcor right now. That caused Orson Scott Card's The Worthing Chronicle to pop into my head. Worthing Chronicle was a rewrite of Card's first novel, Hot Sleep, which had a companion book, a collection of short stories called Capitol, which gave the backstory for it. Capitol is the Trantoresque (now we would say Coruscantesque, I guess, but not in 1979) center of a galactic empire, where the elite spend much of their time in suspended animation; the richer you are, the more you can afford. This only multiplies the power of the elite. I had read a selection of stories from Capitol in The Worthing Saga, a collection from Tor that republished Worthing Chronicle along with some related short fiction, but I had never read the book itself. So I tracked it down to see if there were any stories in it that would be worth teaching in our class.

Collection published: 1980
Contents originally published: 1978-79
Acquired: January 2021
Read: March 2021

There is indeed some good stuff. "Skipping Stones" is a decent tale about two boys, one rich and one poor, who grow increasingly separate thanks to use of somec (the drug that creates the suspended animation). I also really enjoyed "Second Chance," which deals with some issues of memory manipulation as well; those are the two that seemed particularly worth teaching in the context of our class.

Outside of that theme, there are some other solid stories here. "Lifeloop" is a trifle obvious but well written, about a person whose whole life is broadcast (we would now say "streamed") such that the self has become a performance, even more relevant now, I suspect, than it would have been in 1979. "And What Will We Do Tomorrow?" delves into the psychology of Mother, the ancient ruler of Capitol, who uses somec so much she's only awake for a day every five years.

I checked the contents of Capitol against the ISFDB's entry for Worthing Saga as I went, and I have to say, I think Card absolutely made the right call on which stories he kept in print, and which ones he did not. Many of the stories here, especially earlier in the book are bad, clumsy vehicles for exposition about Capitol and somec that don't make any sense, especially "A Sleep and a Forgetting." So Capitol is more an interesting curio than something worth tracking down on its own merits; if you want the good stuff, you can already get that from The Worthing Saga.

Review: Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

Originally published: 2002
Read: January 2021

Altered Carbon by Richard K. Morgan

I read this as part of my ongoing investigation of science fiction about mind transference and life extension; it's set in a world where people can move their minds into different bodies ("sleeves") as easily as you or I might change our clothes-- at least, if you have the money for it. It's a hardboiled detective story, about someone investigating the murder of a man who didn't die, because his mind was restored from a backup and loaded into a clone.

At first it's fun. Morgan gets the style of hardboiled down very well, and he explores a lot of the different ways, little and big, that this kind of mind transference technology might affect a society. It's 516 pages, though, and I ended up feeling that there was maybe about 400 pages of actual incident and ideas in it; I hit a point where I was just waiting for the end to come because it seemed nothing new was really happening anymore. I kind of lost track of why the protagonist was doing what he was doing.

Still, the book raises some good issues about this kind of technology and has plenty that entertains. I think I will be teaching it my class on sf and life extension, and I definitely will get around to the sequels someday, too.

Review: Heads by Greg Bear

Originally published: 1991
Read: February 2021

Heads by Greg Bear

I read this novella because of the premise: some lunar colonists come into possession of a bunch of cryogenically-preserved heads, from an Alcor-like foundation. Can they figure out a way to read the memories of those colonists? I've been reading sf stories about life extension technologies for a class I'm guying to teach. Well, this book has very little to say about its actual premise, as it mostly focuses on largely uninteresting and seemingly over-simplistic politics on the Moon. There's also some Scientology satire; maybe this would have felt fresher in 1991, but thirty years on it's pretty dull stuff. The revelation about why the Scientologists don't want the heads revived is blindingly obvious, but takes the protagonists a hundred pages to catch up to the reader on. I guess this is set in the same milieu as Bear's Moving Mars, but that was a much better book.

Review: NeuroGeneration by Tan Le

Published: 2020
Read: January 2021

The NeuroGeneration: The New Era in Brain Enhancement That Is Revolutionizing the Way We Think, Work, and Heal
by Tan Le

Tan Le is an entrepreneur in the area of brain-computer interface; this is a quick-reading overview of where attempts to alter the human brain stand in a number of different areas. She writes chapters on topics such nootropics, brain-computer interfaces, bionics, cyborg implants, AI, and cellular brain repair. Despite Le's personal investment in this area, it kind of feel like a series of breathless pop-science articles you might read in, I dunno, Wired. Plenty of breadth but I don't think much depth; two very short chapters cover the "risks and ethical dilemmas." (I did find the discussion of the lack of diversity in neural imaging research interesting.) There's lots of potential, but to a degree one wonders if we're really on the verge of a breakthrough revolution like Le says, or if this is a lot of technological hype that won't go anywhere. I don't think she penetrates deep enough to answer that question. I did think she had a thoroughly sensible take on AI, which was nice, and there was definitely enough neat stuff in here that I hadn't know to make it all worthwhile.

Review: Immortality, Inc. by Chip Walter

Published: 2020
Read: December 2020

Immortality, Inc.: Renegade Science, Silicon Valley Billions, and the Quest to Live Forever
by Chip Walter

Next school year I am going to be co-teaching a class on the science and science fiction of life-extension technologies (e.g., cryonics, mind uploading, and so on); this is one of the books we are thinking of assigning. The book covers a number of Silicon Valley-associated figures who are working on how to cure aging; it's framed by a discussion of Alcor and cryonic preservation of corpses, but Walter's main focus is on those people who are trying to stop interventions like that from every being necessary in the first place.

To me, the most interesting part was Walter's thesis about why research into these technologies have take off now; basically, he argues that the baby boomers are the first generation to see most people actually die of aging, and they're also the first generation where you can see a doctor and get cured of most things, thanks to widespread vaccination and the use of antibiotics. So they would also be the first generation to think of aging itself as a problem that can be medically solved, as opposed to an inevitability.

The focus of the book is on the people funding and doing this research; I found this kind of interesting, but maybe not interesting enough in proportion to the amount of time spent on the bios of a bunch of (frequently obnoxious sounding) venture capitalists. He also discusses some of the science behind it all. If there's a weakness to this book, it's that it's all a bit breathless and credulous; it felt to me like it was repeating these people's talking points instead of, say, interrogating them. I would have appreciated an outside scientific voice in the narrative, someone who could say if these people were actually pursuing viable lines of research, or if it was all an incredibly expensive vanity project.

 

It's very well researched (Walter did a lot of original interviews) and it gives you a lot to chew on, but I do wish the book had done some of this chewing for you, so to speak. (Okay, that's a bad metaphor.) I don't know enough about the science to know if I should believe in these technologies as they are presented. But maybe that's asking too much for what is clearly meant to be an easy-read pop science book. I think it will be very useful to teach, and with some good framing, I think our students will get a lot out of it.