Recently, on August 11th 2006, the US government publicly stated that reading science fiction enriches society as it ignites public interest in science and help science programs get government funding. By asking ‘what if?’ questions, science fiction makes scientific research seem relevant and dramatic for researchers but also for the general public, states Margaret A. Weitekamp, curator with the Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum’s division of space history (Walton, “Society, Science Enriched by Science Fiction”).

But already in 1929, science fiction writer and editor Hugo Gernsback said much the same thing, when he wrote an editorial stating that science fiction is “an important factor in making the world a better place to live in, through educating the public to the possibilities of science and the influence of science on life” (quoted in Roberts, 2000: 68).

Who says that sf isn’t prophetic?

I therefore feel more confident because I have in my possession How to Survive a Robot Uprising, by robotics researcher Daniel H. Wilson. Because of this book, I already know that robots with impassive Austrian accents are the most dangerous (82) and that karate is useless against robots, unless one can punch through sheet metal (99).

Wilson’s book is a mix of actual science and robotics research, science fiction and healthy doses of humor, and is a good example of how all-encompassing references to sf have become. Dr. Daniel H. Wilson knows full well that while robots are part and parcel of our everyday lives, to most people, the iconic robot comes straight from science fiction, more than anything which has emerged from actual robotics research.

Robotics. The word ‘robot’ comes from Czech writer Karel Capeck’s proto-sf play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) (1921), where it describes artificial people happy to serve. The word means ‘forced labor’ in Czech and has since entered everyday vocabulary, replacing previous words such as automaton to describe technologically created humanoids. ‘Robotics’ was coined by science fiction author Isaac Asimov, who believed that the word already existed as a parallel to words such as mechanics. It seems that there is a distinct affinity between sf and new technological vocabulary.

I, for one, feel comfortable that I will never experience a generation gap between myself and those younger than me, for I have already beaten them to the punch by reading the Dictionary of the Future, so I already know what ‘netlag’ is and what ‘ear cones’ are for before the kids have even had a chance to see those things.

Unlike Robot Uprising, Faith Popcorn’s book is less an attempt at humour and more an attempt to stay ahead of the wave of technological and social development occurring all around us. While some of it is tongue-in-cheek, much of the dictionary is a serious investigation of how our language will develop because of changes in our society. Innocent as the book may be – and I would certainly caution anyone to put too much stock in what someone called Faith Popcorn predicts – it does point to a certain anxiety, if not outright fear, of being left behind when society and technology change.

Alvin Toffler calls this encounter with the new and undiscovered “future shock”. It seems that every day brings new future shocks and perhaps this feeling that things are changing just a bit faster than you can absorb them, is why we need a vocabulary from somewhere else than our own present, and that vocabulary has in fact been waiting for us, right there, in the pages of sf, where the encounter with new technology and new worlds is commonplace. A place where words such as borg, corpsicle, dalek, doublethink, ESP, ET, FTL, grok, hive-mind, kipple, and waldos are everyday words.

To an increasing extent, the science fictional invades our everyday life as well as the books we read and the films we see. Science fiction crops up where it may seem oddly out of place, but often it seems as though technological and social developments are more easily understood when read as science fiction. Just a few weeks ago, the famous cosmologist Stephen Hawking argued that humans must colonize other planets in order to survive.

In this way, science fiction seems to be a useful interpretative strategy for our current historical moment. It is this interconnection between science fiction and contemporary culture that my work has focussed on, taking as its point of departure the transformations which can be traced within literary and cinematic culture. This starting point is chosen because science fiction originated within literary culture and has since been endlessly adapted into every medium.

In order to describe how science fiction has penetrated much of our cultural discourse, I need a basic terminology which allows me to express not only this penetration, but also the consequences of such penetration. In my dissertation, I have argued for the concept of cultural dissemination, drawing on the work of Jacques Derrida. It is the process where a text “explodes beyond stable meaning and truth toward the radical and ceaseless play of infinite meanings spread across textual surfaces” to quote Vincent Leitch.

It is this movement from one discourse into another which defines dissemination, and makes it obviously a part of intertextuality. Derrida’s point is that meaning occurs in this particular movement from one discourse – novel, film, song, etc – into another, and that such movement always happens: “What interests me is that this re-mark – ever possible for every text, for every corpus of traces – is absolutely necessary for and constitutive of what we call art, poetry, or literature” (Derrida, 1980: 64). This re-mark is what Derrida also refers to as the graft, which is the point of juncture and stress where different discourses blend. Often, this blending goes unnoticed but at other times it is evident and may be subjected to critical analysis. It is this dependency on the earlier discourse – in my case science fiction – that I am interested in.

As for the consequences of this dissemination, I argue for two results at either end of the cultural spectrum: either the graft is completely subsumed by the new discourse, or the new discourse is radically altered by the introduction of the graft. To articulate this, I draw upon the work of the Situationists and of Dick Hebdige’s work on subculture.

Hebdige shows how especially dominant culture is capable of absorbing emergent cultural forms into its own mode, and so naturalize these new forms as if they were always part of the dominant mode. He refers to this process as recuperation, and it is by and large a negative process, where difference from the norm is either effaced as meaningless or transformed into a commodified spectacle.

The flip-side to the process of recuperation, is what the Situationists termed detournement – originating in French and best translated as a mix between ‘diversion’ and ‘subversion’, and its practice best described as an embezzlement of convention. The Situationists – members of the Situationist International – were Marxists, anarchists and general troublemakers in Paris during the late 1950s, some coming from the avant-garde art movement COBRA. The most well-known member was Guy Debord, who also wrote “Methods of Detournement”, where he argued for the use of pre-existing aesthetic elements to create new works and disfigure earlier ones. A kinship can thus be seen between the Situationists, Tristan Tzara’s automatic writing and William Burroughs’ cut-up technique.

We must therefore distinguish between those texts that recuperate new materials and subordinate them into a larger, culturally dominant framework, and those texts that use new materials to detourn representation and so challenge dominant culture through oppositional texts.

Cultural dissemination, for me, is the movement between recuperation and detournement which occurs at various points of the cultural production and process of distinction. In other words, it is part of what Pierre Bourdieu has dubbed the cultural field, and cultural dissemination is part of the struggle for authority, power, and distinction which takes place within this cultural field.

It is also this concept of a field which informs my understanding of genre. In my investigation of science fiction, I emphasize the cultural dimension by focusing specifically on genre as a site of struggle. It is thus struggle which to a large extent determines how science fiction has developed, and what is considered sf. I do this in order to point out the fact that while science fiction consists of a set of recognizable traits which identifies it as science fiction – what Alastair Fowler terms the genre repertoire - this set comes from a continuity established on the basis of precisely a struggle for distinction and authority. Genres do not produce their own categorization, it is rather the producers and readers of science fiction who do so, based on a complex network of power relations.

What allows me to make this move, is the fact that many genre theorists have already argued that genre is a historical process, and that genre classifications serve social as well as aesthetic purposes (Ralph Cohen). Furthermore, genres are integrations of linguistic, social and aesthetic conventions that are located in the archive of culture (Vincent Leitch). In other words, genres are a combination of what Gerard Genette has termed transtextuality and Pierre Bourdieu has termed a space of possibles.

I propose the term genre field as the combination of transtextuality and a space of possibles, where genre is regarded as a cultural field rather than primarily a textual category. In the context of science fiction, this makes particular sense, as the genre has given birth to a very distinct and recognizable subculture, which leads me on to my second point about the genre field. While Pierre Bourdieu sees the field of cultural production as running along an axis of power ranging from the dominant to the dominated, I argue that the cultural field is more complex when we take subcultures into consideration. The cultural field is not one of monopoly, but rather one of a multitude which allows us to view culture as a network rather than a two-dimensional axis.

Bourdieu’s concepts of capital, distinction and struggle remain valid, but no longer is distinction simply a measure of cultural power that the dominant can hold over the dominated, but also a distinction which a subculture may use to distinguish itself as separate and closed off from the mainstream, where people lack this particular subcultural capital.

Subcultural capital may be possessed due to knowledge of genre histories and traditions, the recognition of specific pieces of dialogue considered canonic such as “Klaatu barada nikto”, to realizing the implications of a t-shirt with the inscription “Han shot first”, or knowing the use of specific hand gestures indicating subcultural belongings whether from the distinct, yet generally familiar [horns], to the more geeky [live long and prosper]. Such subcultural genre capital is exclusive in the way it draws a line between members and non-members.

Viewed from a primarily literary point of view, science fiction has traditionally been defined by the presence of cognitive estrangement – the introduction of unfamiliar elements that are presented as plausible. Science fiction thus denies its status as fantastic literature with the introduction of a material rationalization which is often scientific but not always. It is also typical to view science fiction as a literature which speaks critically about contemporary issues, as well as emphasizing social change, thus containing a particular subversive potential.

I emphasize science fiction’s tendency to create representational zones wavering between possibility and impossibility – our mundane reality and the imagined world. This zone creates a rhetorically heightened space which allows a critical, cognitive unmapping. I emphasize this because in the process of grafting science fiction elements onto a new text, a similar rhetorically heightened space is introduced and it is here that the process of recuperation or detournement takes place.

Throughout my dissertation, I discuss the process of dissemination in relation to three specific areas: time, space and identity. Taken as a whole, these areas provide a broad view of significant issues in our contemporary culture and so allow me to suggest specific consequences for the dissemination of science fiction.

Taking my findings one by one, history and temporality has entered a representational crisis in postmodern culture. History no longer asserts our present as following from the past, since the past has been recognized as a problematic construction ever since Jean-Francois Lyotard proclaimed the death of the grand narratives. It is not that the past does not exist, but rather the fact that we only have access to the past via texts that are subject to distortions.
In much critical theory, it has been argued that our current postmodern period is marked by the disappearance of the past, and denies any essential differences between past and present. Such an argument is made by those critics who follow Fredric Jameson’s view of postmodernism as a flattening of history and historicity. On the other hand are critics such as Linda Hutcheon, who argue that history is not obsolete but rather rethought and reimagined.

Science fiction has approached this field for a long time, with the creation of alternate histories, where the ideas of our present are challenged by transforming narratives of our past. Much like Hutcheon’s concept of historiographic metafiction, a number of alternate histories have approached the past in a similar way, by contrasting our present historical moment to that of an alternate past. The difference between our own present and our own past is highlighted in these alternate histories, and this is a strategy which has found its way into the work of contemporary authors.

In my dissertation, I contrast novels by Kingsley Amis – The Alteration – and Philip Roth – The Plot Against America – to Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle. All can be considered alternate history novels, and there are several similarities in the way history reimagined is used as a strategy for social critique. However, neither Amis’ nor Roth’s novels have been categorized as science fiction novels, despite depending on the same literary devices as Dick’s. Clearly a case where the cultural capital previously accumulated by Amis and Roth prevents them from entering the sf gutter, and where a science fictional device has been recuperated into mainstream literary culture, due to a similar preoccupation with history.

History, however, is not the only concern with time that postmodern culture has, temporality itself has become an issue and we find an increasing number of fictions who suspend linear time, or mix various temporally distinct narrative levels. Time travel has become a surprisingly popular device in a variety of texts ranging from experimental films to popular romance novels.

An example of experimental film can be found in Shane Carruth’s Primer, where the time travel device is used to cast the cinematic narration into doubt, and to reject time as a realistic frame for understanding the narrative sequence. By leaving out significant scenes and events, while repeating seemingly inconsequential scenes with slight differences, the temporal frame of the film is broken and we get no clear access to the narrative discourse, making it impossible for us to construct the actual story.

On the other hand, romance fictions such as Audry Niffenegger’s novel The Time Traveler’s Wife and the Warner Brothers TV series Felicity employ time travel as a way of creating a rhetorically heightened space where love and desire take on even deeper emotional resonances than would otherwise be possible. By narrating the love story non-linearly due to male character’s incessant time travel, The Time Traveler’s Wife not only adds an exotic element – sf and time travel – to a formulaic genre – the romance novel - but also emphasizes that the two characters are meant to be together, when even time cannot keep them apart. In the case of Felicity, time travel is used to turn the otherwise rather passive protagonist Felicity into an active subject who alters her own destiny to be with the one she truly loves. In both cases, the science fictional device of time travel is used to augment, but also to some extent problematize, the conventions of romance fiction.

What we can see from these different examples, is that time is no longer considered to be linear or to even have a teleological drive. Rather, temporality is viewed instead as simultaneity: all time periods, whether past, present or future are seen as existing at the same time and time travel is simply the logical extension of this view. History becomes a place instead of a time, and we can clearly see the typical view of postmodernism as the spatialization of time emerging here.

But this does not mean that space – my second area of interest – is more stable than time. It seems, in fact, to be just as problematic as the conception of time. Spatial constructions and representations of place can be seen as becoming increasingly problematic and unstable. We can connect this to the general development of representational language as being viewed as insufficient, and a desire for a metalevel developing. For a number of fictions, science fiction has become part of this metalevel as a way of creating a new representational repertoire, able to deal with these alternate conceptions of space.

In Hal Hartley’s The Girl From Monday, the science fictional mode of the dystopic future becomes the only way to motivate the completely unstable cinematic space which provides the resolution of the film’s story. By drawing a parallel between the paradoxical trap of the future world – no matter what you do, it will be good for business, even revolution is good for business – and the paradoxical trap of the narrative space, the film attempts to articulate that consumerism is an inescapable social structure.

In two other cases – Kathryn Kramer’s Handbook for Visitors From Outer Space and Ted Mooney’s Traffic and Laughter – there is no future world, but instead a constant confrontation between our empirical world and the imagined world of the novels. While both novels seem perfectly realistic, there are small discrepancies that slowly grow so large as to completely destabilize our belief in their existence. In Kramer’s Handbook, we constantly hear about a war, but nobody knows where it is, not even the soldiers have any idea where to find the battlefield. While in Mooney’s novel, The Beatles made a song called “Twitch and Shout”, and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove is a documentary.

These small discrepancies lead up to a major discontinuity – the end of the world, perhaps in Kramer, and the realization that in Mooney’s novel the atom bomb has not yet been invented in 1990. this tie them together with Kazuo Ishiguro’s novel Never Let Me Go, in which clones exist in 1990s England. What appear to be realistic, contemporary novels suddenly turn out to be discontinuous with our own world. The effect these novels have is one of cognitive dissonance – the simultaneous perception of the fictional world as ours, and yet not ours.

These texts and others like them – referred to as slipstream fictions, by a number of authors and critics – work by projecting a representational zone similar to that of science fiction unto our present time, thus arguing that our present time is a liminal zone wavering between the possible and impossible. As Scott Bukatman argues in his book Terminal Identity, we often experience the world as having lost visibility, corporeality and comprehensibility and that new modes of expression must arise to articulate these experiences (164). I have already mentioned how the world can often seem exceedingly difficult to comprehend. To return to Stephen Hawking, what do you pack when moving to another planet?

Of course, the world has always changed, and the feeling that things are changing rapidly has also existed previously. As David Harvey points out, the transition from the 19th to the 20th century was marked by much the same sense of urgency and feeling of acceleration as our transitional period. David Harvey refers to these sensations as feelings of time-space compression, a “speed-up in the pace of life, while so overcoming spatial barriers that the world sometimes seems to collapse inwards upon us” (240). During the last twenty to thirty years, our society has been undergoing such a transformation, which is distinct from yet parallel to that experienced in the early 20th century.

And that period also saw the rise of new modes of expression; the one being an avant-garde response which created what we now know as modernism, and the other being a more popular response and this was the rise and consolidation of the science fiction genre. While it had its predecessors like all genres, it was in the 1920s that science fiction became a recognized genre with magazines devoted only to sf. As we can see, already at this point there was a connection between contemporary issues and science fiction. Modernity – just like postmodernity later – required novel engagements with time and space and science fiction became one place where this happened.

However, although there was some degree of exchange between sf and literary modernism – such as in the case of Franz Kafka – science fiction was primarily isolated in the cultural field. This may seem peculiar to the extent that one could imagine the same interest in and potential significance for science fiction, given the transformations occurring. We may begin to explain this in a number of ways.

From the point of view of modernism, the changes in society should create changes in the arts and particularly by finding new and radical forms. Traditional art was insufficient and traditional forms, structures and themes were rejected. Science fiction, drawing largely on formulas from adventure stories and similar low cultural forms, would definitely seem too traditional for modernist authors to be interested in it.

From the point of view of science fiction, the consolidation of the genre occurred primarily in technical journals before the publication of distinct sf magazines. Readers of sf were therefore mostly technically educated people rather than the literati. Scientific realism was valued higher than literary technique, and avant-garde sf was decades away.

Modernism’s preoccupation with literary form stood in opposition to sf’s preoccupation with the technological object. This resulted in the relegation of sf to the lower parts of the field of cultural production for most people, despite it being continuously popular with technically and scientifically educated people, such as Stephen Hawking who has stated that his early interest in sf was what made him study astronomy. However, the cultural capital of sf has remained very small and accounts for much of the isolation of the genre.

Despite its isolation, science fiction often functioned as an outlet for many of the concerns of modernity. Fear of outsiders, science destroying the world, mass disasters and world wars are themes that have echoed through most sf and thus creating fictional imaginings of these events. It is not unusual to find that low cultural forms have a higher degree of freedom of expression than those considered more significant and thus more subjected to scrutiny.

Science fiction has generally been ambivalent about industrialization, portraying many of the potential problems and pitfalls, but also revelling in technological fetishism. Because science fiction has both criticized and celebrated technological and social development, there is no unified ideological message, and so it allows for both the recuperative and detourning modes of dissemination. When interest in hybridity grew and the division between mass culture and high culture waned, the cultural status of sf was less of an obstacle for those who wanted to experiment with cross-genre forms.

Such experiments have occurred in various forms as I have already pointed out, but one of the more unusual areas sf has cropped up in, has been that of identity. Science fiction has been used as a means to articulate a sense of difference from dominant culture, either by presenting the Other as alien or as stitched together from different narratives in the same way that Frankenstein’s monster is stitched together from different people.

Identity as alien can be seen in the case of David Bowie’s album and character Ziggy Stardust, where he invites teenagers to express their sense of dissatisfaction and rebellion in the form of the androgynous aliens Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars. By assuming an identity as alien, teenagers are able to create a place for themselves in a culture which otherwise might ignore them.

The same move can be seen in Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place, the 1974 science fiction blaxploitation free jazz epic, in which Sun Ra wants to liberate black people by moving them to a new planet on his spaceship fuelled by music. Blackness is shown to be inherently alien to Earth, and instead partakes in a complex, private mythology for Ra consisting of sf, Egyptian gods, jazz and more. Ra’s argument is thus one of separatism, but in the manner of science fictional discourse, where blacks must move to colonize a new planet in order to find their own space.

These spaces have a degree of Utopianism to them, in the way that they attempt to create new communities which can better accommodate the presence of alterity, be it that of youth or race. Utopia is something that I have not dealt with extensively in my dissertation, but Utopian fiction – the concept of imagining a better place than the society one lives in – has existed forever. While the name comes from Thomas Moore’s Utopia, we can trace utopian ideas to Plato’s story of Atlantis and earlier myths. Today utopian fiction has become a subgenre of science fiction to the extent that they are difficult to separate.

The focus of the utopian impulse is the difference between our world and the world projected by the text, especially regarding questions of identity. From a methodological point of view, we can note a convergence here and thus the introduction of a new critical vocabulary.

Fredric Jameson states in his recent book Archaeologies of the Future that utopia’s fundamental dynamic lies in the dialectic of identity and difference (xii). This difference comes from the historical situatedness in which we live and utopian fiction acts as a disruption. Disruption is specific to the utopian impulse for Jameson, and he defines it as break with the universal ideological conviction that no alternative is possible (232). Instead, radical difference is shown to be not only possible but also necessary, and does so focussing on the break rather than simply the state of affairs after the break.

This is what is also referred to as a critical utopia, and we can see that there is a degree of overlap in this thinking with my use of detournement. Both act as a radical break with dominant culture’s ideological assertion that their forms are without alternatives, but there are some differences of which two are particularly important. First, the concept of situatedness emphasizes the historical context in which texts are produced and so links a given text specifically to that time – something which the concept detournement does not do, as it functions as a structural and ahistorical concept. Second, critical utopias often speak for those who are dominated. As Tom Moylan states “critical utopia offers a literary strategy attuned to the process of social negation and transformation of the existing society in the name of those who are oppressed by it” (Moylan, Science Fiction Studies #87).

In other words, the critical utopia is more sensitive to the nature of difference than my concept of cultural dissemination. Many critical utopian fictions attempt specifically to articulate a space for difference within the fictional worlds, and to argue for the creation of such a space in contemporary society. Such a critical approach would have provided a more nuanced tool in the cases of identity construction, but also in the way that we can discuss the reverberation between fiction and culture, as a kind of folding back the fictional into the cultural – which is the desire and hope of Utopian fiction.

While science fiction has served as a form of expression of different cultural movements – where I have focussed on time-space compression – there are also cases where sf has helped produce time-space compression. First of all, by articulating emergent phenomena there have been instances where sf and science have converged. By creating imaginative models of future developments, sf can sometimes provide a concrete case for people to investigate. Such was the case when the computer illiterate sf author William Gibson coined the word ‘cyberspace’ and so provided the fictional model for what developed into the Internet.

Second, sf can help make these emergent phenomena seem cool, interesting or significant. If a text strikes a chord in contemporary culture, it will enter into the cultural fabric and will increase interest in the text, but might also be performed, so to speak. Consider again the concept of cyberspace which not only ignited the imaginations of scientists, but also helped begin cyberculture by becoming the new bible for techno-geeks around the world, who then began populating the newly-developing internet. The same is the case for the virtual world Second Life, where the stated goals of developers Linden Labs is to create a world like the Metaverse in Neal Stephenson’s sf novel Snow Crash. As a virtual world, real world geography breaks down and becomes irrelevant as opposed to Second Life geography.

As can be seen, I have primarily dealt with literary forms more than non-literary ones. Part of this is because science fiction began as a literary phenomenon, but there is something more to this. The narrative aspect is the first point. With the disappearance of the grand narratives, we need to find other narratives and texts become new repositories of narratives for us to make sense of the world. As a result, the stories that we tell take on a larger and more significant role, and the knot between culture and text is tied even closer. Navigating the world becomes a matter of narrating the world.

This brings us to the methodological part of the answer, which is that textual analysis is well suited to deal with narratives and provides a specificity which is often difficult to otherwise establish in cultural analysis. Certainly when dealing with a primarily narrative form and its move into culture, it seems obvious to use textual reading. But that is not all, for such an approach also allows for a way to investigate the particularities of these cultural narratives; what themes, tropes and motifs are plotted into these narratives? Furthermore, where do they come from and how are they used? Only specific textual readings will allow us to do this.

As we have seen, sf has allowed us to articulate how we might feel in our current historical moment. It functions as a form of abstraction that provide ways of making sense of the world around us. It can comfort us by lessening the impact of unexpected developments, or it can cause new movements to spring up that challenge our old conceptions of time, space and self.

That’s all I have to say for now. Thank you for listening.

Being a hypertext, one cannot speak of a linear narrative and it is also difficult to provide citations. I have chosen to cite the title of lexia in question, since it can be located through one of the interface options of the text. However, the ‘proper’ way to read the text is to simply open the text window which begins with a black and white picture of a naked woman titled ‘her’. Clicking anywhere on this image moves the reader to the ‘title page’ where the full title is shown giving the title as Patchwork Girl; or, A Modern Monster by Mary/Shelley, & Herself, with six linked words below “a graveyard, a journal, a quilt, a story, & broken accents, (sources)”. Each of these linked words begin a separate yet interconnected thread about the Patchwork Girl. ‘Sources’ is as mentioned a bibliography.

The connection to Frankenstein is immediately clear in the subtitle to the novel ‘A Modern Monster’ echoing Mary Shelley’s ‘A Modern Prometheus’. The more interesting thing, however, is the author which is noted to be “Mary/Shelley, & Herself” which immediately problematizes the concept of the author, something also inherent in the nature of a hypertext as well. First of all, Mary/Shelley is clearly a version of Mary Shelley as the author of Frankenstein who is a major influence on the text. Yet, the slash indicates that it is not the actual Mary Shelley but rather the implied author of Frankenstein and the influences inherent from palimpsesting Shelley’s novel.

Second of all, the slash indicates that ‘Shelley’ might also be Shelley Jackson the actual author of Patchwork Girl, leaving ‘Herself’ as the Patchwork Girl narrating herself, turning the text into a kind of biography. Given that all of the text is narrated in the first person, it makes it difficult for us as readers to know exactly who is speaking, except when clues are given in the text itself:

I have had plenty of time to make the girl. Yet the task was not so easy as you may suppose. I found that I could not compose a female without devoting several months to profound study and laborious disquisition. I … began to collect the materials necessary for my new creation: magic lanterns, peep show boxes, waking dreams, geometrical demonstrations, philo-sophical doctrines, fortifications and impediments, cartographic surveys, and engineering machines of all sorts. (Lexia: scrap bag, italics, emphasis and ellipses in original)

Here we have a lexia which clearly seems to be written by Shelley Jackson, a meta-comment on how she wrote the text, but immediately this notion is destabilized by the references provided in the same lexia, indicating that some of the text - presumably the various emphasis - was taken from other sources. Here we see how the text explicitly plays with the concept of author, something further enhanced in this lexia: “Assembling these patched words in an electronic space, I feel half-blind, as if the entire text is within reach, but because of some myopic condition I am only familiar with from dreams, I can see only that part most immediately before me, and have no sense of how that part relates to the rest” (Lexia: this writing).

It would at first be obvious to read this lexia as also written by Shelley Jackson, being a similar meta-comment on writing the text, but we realize that it is in fact a meta-comment about reading the text but who is the speaker, then? Clearly there is a degree of ambiguity here about the authority of the author versus the reader, something which is imperative in the case of hypertexts when it is even possible as it is in Patchwork Girl to save one reading and load it later, thus making readings materially different and not simply experientially different. However, I am here less interested in dealing with the material consequences of reading the text, as much as I am interested in investigating how the concept of identity is narrated. One lexia gives us an idea of how to read the entire text:

I am a mixed metaphor. Metaphor, meaning something like “bearing across”, is itself a fine metaphor for my condition. Every part of me is linked to other territories alien to it but equally mine. Shin bone connected to the thigh bone, thigh bone connected to the hip bone: borrowed parts, annexed territories. I cannot be reduced, my metaphors are not tautologies, yet I am equally present in both poles of a pair, each end of the wire is tethered to one of my limbs. The metaphorical principle is my true skeleton. (Lexia ‘metaphor me’)

Here it seems that the Girl is narrating, reflecting on her own status but it also serves as a form of meta-commentary on the text itself, something which seems inherent throughout the text. This seems an obvious choice, as the Girl is presented as a patchwork in the same way the text is. Metaphorically speaking, then, we can say that the Girl is the hypertext we are reading and not a fixed subject or person. In other words, her identity is fluid and changes with every reading depending on which narrator we attribute the different lexias to, and in which sequence we read them. As such, the Girl is shaped by our gestalt of the text, to use Iser’s concept, and that gestalt always changes.

In this sense, whether or not reading the text is linear or not, Patchwork Girl’s identity is constructed narratively by the reader, and this narrative is explicitly one which is constructed by fragments taken from other texts. Jackson even invokes Derrida’s Dissemination as one of the sources of the text, so it is evident that this textual process is not only used explicitly but also viewed as a generative process and one which applies to the construction of identity as much as narrative technique. This connection between narrative and the human is noted explicitly by the text itself: “The comparison between a literary composition and the fitting together of the human body from various members stemmed from ancient rhetoric” (Lexia: typographical).

There is a further connection between composition and the human body in the way that each of the five entry points into the different narrative spaces each is preceded by an image. This image is the same image of the naked woman which opens the text, but in each case it has been cut up and re-arranged. These images are titled, unsurprisingly, ‘hercut’, ‘hercut2′, ‘hercut3′ and ‘hercut4′ with the fifth being titled ‘phrenology’ and shows a phrenological image of a head with a number spaces drawn onto it each of which is filled with a word. In all cases, each of these images lead on to a specific storyspace in which a specific and separate narrative unfolds. Each space provides us with one narrative of the Patchwork Girl, but it is only the combined narratives that allows us to stitch together the entire story of the Patchwork Girl.

What is significant about Patchwork Girl is less the meta-discussion of the text as intertext and more about how identity is viewed as being tied up in similar intertextual strategies and how the text understands identity as being constructed from a repertoire of narratives. Read in this way, the story takes on a different form, being as much a discussion of the way we as readers are positioned today as opposed to the texts Jackson employs.

The literary texts used are old compared to the theoretical texts used, just as much of the text centres on the discussion of identity and selfhood. These concepts are questioned by the practice of the text, showing how the Girl’s identity is one of collage and assemblage. As Katherine Hayles points out “the text not only normalizes the subject-as-assemblage but also presents the subject-as-unity as a grotesque impossibility” (Hayles, 2000: 29). Although the Girl is a named a monster, it also becomes obvious that we have all become this kind of monster, in the way the text breaks down the boundary between author, text and reader. Hayles states that

Because electronic hypertexts are written and read in distributed cognitive environments, the reader necessarily is constructed as a cyborg, spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines. To be positioned as a cyborg is inevitably in some sense to become a cyborg, so electronic hypertexts, regardless of their content, tend toward cyborg subjectivity. (Hayles, 2000: 13)

Jacskon’s text takes up this discussion, and it becomes evident that ‘monster’ in this connection should not be considered as a frightening beast from mythology, but rather the offensive and transgressive entity which is the same concept that we find in Haraway’s concept of the cyborg. Jackson - who cites Haraway’s cyborg essay as one of the sources of Patchwork Girl - shows us how we need to conceive of our identities as fragmented and constructed and that they have in fact always been so.

As I see it, this is one of two reasons for choosing Frankenstein as one of the source texts; it shows that identity has always been constructed and that this is nothing new. The second reason is that it creates a metaphorical dependency which allows us to perform the normalizing move which Hayles notes. We understand Frankenstein’s monster as constructed, and what is more important is that Shelley’s narrative allows us to understand and accept this normalizing move.

By inserting the concept of identity developed by Jackson in Patchwork Girl into the narrative frame of Shelley’s Frankenstein, we can make sense of the lexias as part of a greater whole; we understand that linearity is not necessary for the representation of an identity, just as we accept that our own identity is not fully linear. This realization may seem at odds with the concept of identity as narrative developed earlier in this chapter by Worthington, but one need only remember that the storyspaces developed by Jackson constitute narratives when read, even if the sequence of these narratives differ every time we read them.

We should not presume that just because Jackson employs a metaphoric dependency from Frankenstein that the Girl is identical to the monster; it is evident that what is borrowed from the Frankenstein narrative is a way to concretize the detournment which is taking place in Jackson’s text: identity is shown to be a hybrid always both Same and Other. The monster, though not configured here as an extraterrestrial alien, is still emblematic of that which is alien to the human, but Jackson’s point is that we are all alien to ourselves in the way we all contain a number of different narratives, textual fragments and cultural objects which are disseminated into our sense of self. Technology has simply become the latest addition in a long row of objects that we have assimilated.

In this way, Jackson’s narrative is less one of cultural resistance as it is one of radical reconceptualization and reconfiguration. Jackson refuses to portray this view as original, instead casting her text as one permutation of many intertexts which compose current cultural imagination. By mirroring narrative and textual materiality, she refuses to separate things which are necessarily connected. Gray Kochhar-Lindgren in his book TechnoLogics has an interesting point in this connection, where he states that “we become individuals because we are mediated subjects that exist alongside the others that we add on and subtract” (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 165-166), which is to say that we only become individuals when we are narrated and that this process includes adding and subtracting; in other words when detourning and recuperating a variety of cultural texts into ourselves.

Kochhar-Lindgren is interested in the ways that contemporary society is developing and how we as humans are reconfigured by it, especially in connection with technology and cybernetics. His concerns are thus very close to those of Haraway, Hayles and Jackson. As he argues

There is a profound fear, in transepochal culture, of becoming incorporated into the Borg or of being attacked by the monsters spawned by technics, but, on the other hand, this is a moment of opportunity, for as Guattari argues, “A machine assemblage, through its diverse components, extracts its consistency by crossing ontological thresholds, non-linear thresholds of irreversibility, and creative thresholds of heterogenesis and autopoeisis”. We are the aliens, we are already other, and the work of the hetero- and the auto- must be enacted, with as much panache as we can muster, keeping in mind that the logic of such a move must deal not with an imitation of the human form, much less an ideal Platonic form, but with a technologics of production that wills the perfection of nature along certain of its axes. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 127-128, italics in original)

As we can see, Kochhar-Lindgren also finds it useful to conceptualize the transformation of contemporary culture in terms of sf. He uses the image of the Borg from the Star Trek series and films, where it is an alien race composed of various humanoids assimilated with cybernetic technology. The Borg (or Borg Collective, as it is fully known) is frightening because it eradicates difference, even the ultimate difference between life and death as Adam Roberts puts it (Roberts, 2000: XX).

By positing Sameness as the horrible nightmare, Kochhar-Lindgren reverses the opposition between Same and Other as it is typically envisioned in dominant culture. Being alien, being different, becomes a positive and necessary thing, even as it is something we already are. Being an individual, according to Kochhar-Lindgren, and I would argue, Jackson as well plus Bowie and Ra, is to be different. For Kochhar-Lindgren, this change is already coming in the way the we have begun to understand the human differently because of cybernetics:

Through cybernetics, history has instituted this next stage by combining forms of the human and nonhuman into a provisional “new foundation.” This new form of existence apparently overcomes the hostility inherent in alienation, at least in its simple “classical” form, by erasing the line that separates and distinguishes human from nonhuman (both animal and inorganic forms). The line can be crossed in either direction: humans can incorporate animals and machines (baboon hearts and pacemakers), and animals and machines can begin to incorporate human characteristics (ears, genes, language, thinking). The end of human history, and the beginning of the posthuman, would necessarily entail a humanization of the machine and the mechanization of the human. (Kochhar-Lindgren, 2005: 90)

More than simply dealing with the technological and the mechanization of the human, I would argue that the artists dealt with here have all shown how identity and subjectivity can be reconfigured by detournment and how sf has proved a successful strategy for just such a detournment. Whether it serves as a rebellious resistance for those dissatisfied with the subject positions available to them, or if it serves as an attack on a specific way of conceiving identity, the introduction of sf devices becomes a way of narrating an alternative position.

Just as sf employs a textual strategy which creates a distinct form of fictional space where it can investigates zones of possibility and impossibility, so do the same devices when introduced in terms of subjectivity create spaces where the articulation of alternatives become possible. Specific and unique cultural spaces are opened by the introduction of these dissonant and discontinuous elements.

The conception of the human as cyborg or posthuman, however, need not be resistant. Kochhar-Lindgren is working from the assumption that we are all changing; at least those of us living under technocapitalism, which for him is the episteme which is emerging from the 21st century (4). Technocapitalism, then, is the new dominant culture although it will be different from what is happening now, which is why it represents an opportunity as much as a threat. In the end, when we understand not just our environment but even ourselves through sf narratives, when sf has contaminated our subjectivities, it’s penetration of our culture can be said to be complete.

As can be imagined, afrofuturism is an attempt to articulate a certain blackness within a space - fantastic literature - which has long been seen as colonized exclusively by white people. As Paul Miller (aka DJ Spooky that Subliminal Kid) sees it, afrofuturism is a way of “living through the past as a kind of reflection site for future permutations in african identity–in the present” (Miller, “living through the past…”). In other words, past, present and future are understood as ways of understanding each other and the point for the afrofuturists is that black have been excluded from discussions of the future, developing technology and what Anna Everett refers to as the digital public sphere (Everett, 2002). Finding a cultural space which is oriented toward the future is thus the primary motivation for afrofuturism, and one good example of this is Sun Ra’s film Space is the Place (1974).

When released on DVD in 2003, the tagline describes it as “the 1974 science fiction blaxploitation free jazz epic”. Clearly, we are in hybrid country again, this time blending across media between film and music. Similar to Ziggy Stardust, the character of Sun Ra is obviously a construct but a construct which unlike Bowie’s does not change. Sun Ra has always been Sun Ra as an artist and is not adopting a particular identity for the film. Rather, Sun Ra has been the pseudonym of Herman Poole Blount (Szwed, 1997: 4) since 1961 when he relocated to New York (Szwed, 1997: 183), but even prior to that he had begun using Sonny Blount as a stagename (25), clearly unhappy with his given name and the identity which followed.

The image of Sun Ra, first used only on stage but later as part of his persona, was one that invoked ancient Egypt, just as his name Ra is the name of the Egyptian sun god, so his name is actually Sun Sun. He and his musicians wore costumes on stage, all inspired by Egyptian mythology and this mythology is also heavily present in the film. Briefly, the film’s plot is straightforward even if much of it seems at first incoherent. Sun Ra has found a planet suitable for the black race, travelling in his spaceship fuelled by music. Returning to Earth, he once more battles his old nemesis the Overseer for the fate Earth and the black people. Their battle is represented by Ra and the Overseer drawing Tarot-like cards each of which represents a challenge which Ra must overcome; these challenges are always in the form of whether or not he can persuade the black community to believe in the possibility of altering their destiny. At times he succeeds, and at other times the Overseer foils him. In the end, Ra is persuaded that Earth is doomed and decides to leave with the blacks that believe in him, including a number of people where he only brings their “black parts”, leaving the rest/white parts behind. Having left Earth it explodes, presumably because of Sun Ra.

That the film is fuelled by a racial discourse is obvious, what is more interesting is to examine how this discourse works. It is the status of the black people and the black community which is my primary interest here, as it is clearly also Ra’s. His view of blacks and their place in society is made quite clear when he first arrives back at Earth and meets a group of young blacks. Appearing out of nowhere, Ra explains his presence and answers the question whether he is for real or not in this way:

I’m not real, I’m just like you. You don’t exist in this society. If you did you your people wouldn’t be seeking equal rights. You’re not real, if you were you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we are both myths. I do not come to you as a reality, I come to you as the myth because that is what black people are: myths. I came from a dream that the black man dreamed long ago. I’m actually a presence sent to you by your ancestors. I’m going to be here until I pick out some of you to take back with me.

Back means going back to the other planet Ra has found, where the black people can live free and be real. While not every black person is going to be chosen, those that are do not have much choice of whether they want to come or not. As Ra puts it, if they refuse “then I’m going to have to do you like they did you in Africa, chain you up and take you with me”. Obviously there is an element of force here, but it is also clear that Ra feels that he is doing the best he can for the black people; he is their saviour and this exodus must happen.

A similar spirituality is found throughout the film in the way blacks are portrayed, particularly in connection with music. Ra tells us that music is all part of another tomorrow, another language and that it holds a certain kind of naturalness as well as a certain kind of blackness. Myth, nature, blackness and music are seen to be extensions of each other and were once connected, but has been lost presumably due to white society.

Sun Ra has created a complete mythology as a form of opposition to what he perceives to be white man’s oppressive society which excludes blacks, thus making them unreal. Part of this mythology is to create a sense of past for black people and to provide a sense of direction for the future. I see it as no coincide that Egyptian mythology is part of Sun Ra, as it was one of the first civilizations, it was black and African it and was destroyed/absorbed by the Roman Empire which was obviously white, and so gives historical connotations of ancient greatness destroyed by whites.

However, Ra’s private mythology extends far beyond simple appropriation of Egyptian mythology; it is a complex network of jazz music, Egyptian mythology, B-movie science fiction, blaxploitation movies, and peculiar views of the nature and origins of music. Quite unique, we can see how this bricolage style is a mix of black influences as well as white, particularly those that are disdained by the dominant culture, providing a rather elaborate strategy for resistance. His mythology presents a way for the black community to understand themselves both as original beings who were the first to inhabit Earth, while at the same time being alien to this place, not being real or part of society. As I see it, this view is quite parallel - and most likely influenced - to the concept of double-consciousness as developed by W.E.B. Du Bois in his essay “The Strivings of Black People” (1897).

Rather than being a discussion of the troubles of the black people, Ra attempts in the film to provide a narrative account of how this paradox - native and alien at the same time - can be reconciled or at least understood. Ra’s mythology becomes a narrative meant to provide a specific and liberating subject position for the black community; a way for them to understand their place in society. Thus, it must necessarily be a resistant narrative, but it draws on several well-known narratives already embedded in society. Examples of this are the two characters Jimmy Fey and the Overseer.

The Overseer is a strange character whom we never learn much about, he was the reason Sun Ra left Earth in 1943 when he still called himself Sonny Ray, and he is Ra’s opponent in the strange game of the black people’s fate. Represented less flattering, the Overseer is always seen in a white suit with sunglasses, hat and a silver-topped cane, thus drawing on the stereotype of the black pimp, a rather negative one for black people. In combination with his name, it becomes quite clear that he is an agent of the white people. Not only does he attempt to hide his blackness by his all-white outfit (even shoes and socks), but his name invokes the time of slavery when overseers were those who punished black slaves and helped the plantation owners.

In a more figurative sense, that is precisely what the Overseer does now, helping agents of white society keeping black people oppressed. The game he sets up with Ra is just an extension of this, and this is further showcased by his helper Jimmy Fey who works as in the music industry and helps the Overseer against Ra. Although we learn little of Fey, he often acts as a go-between for the Overseer but is always subordinate and is often put down.

What is most interesting about Fey is that in the end, when Ra is leaving Earth bringing only some with him, Fey asks to come with Ra and Ra accepts but will only bring Fey’s “black parts” leaving the rest of Fey behind, acting as a white. As Ra leaves, the Overseer has not only lost the game but also his function as overseer. The now-white Fey (although still black by colour) treats the Overseer as if he is black and thus below his dignity. This reversal shows how the Overseer was always just a servant of white, dominant society and did not really hold any authority.

The few whites that are in the film are negatively portrayed; we see two agents following the Overseer to a brothel to have fun with some girls. They are first humiliated, having slurred one of the black girls at the brothel, but then proceed to beat the girls to punish them for the humiliation. Although they are first said to be working for NASA, they later try to stop Ra giving the impression that they are police officers or agents of some sort. It is unclear exactly what they are, but there is a degree of paranoia and suspicion towards all whites throughout the film.

White society is thus portrayed as inherently oppressive to black people, and the only way to leave white society behind, if black people are to be free. A poster of Malcom X in a scene where black kids are discussing Sun Ra and whether or not to join him seems to indicate a similar perspective of X’s radical views, except that Ra wishes to lead the black people to a better place. In the end, those he brings seem to be those who have the right spirit, even Fey’s black parts, so that being black is a matter of spirituality. Again we are close to the spirituality of Du Bois’ who also spoke of the “souls of black people”, but Ra’s mythology is different and it is constructed differently.

It is first of all far more abstract and based on a peculiar bricolage style which combines, as we have seen, many separate elements to create something unique. It is unclear exactly what black spirituality is to Ra and it does not seem to be of that much interest to Ra, he brings those who are deemed worthy, but the interesting thing is the way that he uses history as a repertoire to draw on by inserting the Egyptian style into his imagery and uses the concept to rationalize why blacks have been treated poorly on Earth. Even when Ra attempts to solve the racial problems, the white race destroys it, leaving Ra no other option but to leave Earth and destroy it.

The concert Ra puts on in the film is cast as what should bring some form of revelation about for the black community, to make them understand that they need to leave Earth, but even here the whites are vicious and racist. They kill a black kid who saves Ra from being shot, which is the final straw and what makes Ra leave. Again we see how a Christ imagery is inserted into the image of the saviour, as Ra resurrects the kid before transferring him to his spaceship. The whites have shown themselves to be unredeemable and so Ra can leave and kill them in good conscience.

The narrative imagery of the alien is what fuels the film and it is also an attempt to resolve the problem that Du Bois pointed to of the strange doubleness of Afro-American life

this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness, — an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. (Du Bois, XX)

The story of the black people thus becomes the story of aliens on a wrong planet, moving to another planet is not just an inversion of the alien invasion story but also becomes an way of narrating how immense the differences between white and black people are in 20th century USA. It is interesting to note that Du Bois in fact himself also wrote a speculative piece of fiction which partakes in the same question of race. His piece, titled “The Comet” (1920), is about a disaster when a comet almost hits New York and destroys most of it. The protagonist Jim Davis saves a white woman, Julia, from the wreckage, but the way they talk and think about each other is quite telling:

They stared a moment in silence. She had not noticed before that he was a Negro. He had not thought of her as white. She was a woman of perhaps twenty-five - rarely beautiful and richly gowned, with darkly-golden hair, and jewels. Yesterday, he thought with bitterness, she would scarcely have looked at him twice. He would have been dirt beneath her silken feet. She stared at him. Of all the sorts of men she had pictured as coming to her rescue she had not dreamed of one like him. Not that he was not human, but he dwelt in a world so far from hers, so infinitely far, that he seldom even entered her thought. (Du Bois, 2000: 9)

Julia’s assertion that he certainly is human seems hollow when we later hear this conversation:

“Yes,” she said slowly, “and how foolish our human distinctions seem - now,” looking down to the great dead city stretched below, swimming in unlightened shadows.
“Yes - I was not - human, yesterday,” he said.
She looked at him. “And your people were not my people,” she said; “but today -“(Du Bois, 2000: 14-15)

Clearly some of the same strategy is used here, by casting black Jim Davis as non-human for whites, but Du Bois speculative thrust is used differently. In his story, Julia is reunited with her beloved Fred who immediately suspects the worst of Jim, but Julia assures him that Jim is a good and proper man. This does not appease the white crowd, however, who is about to lynch him as Julia and Fred leave, but Du Bois’s story ends with hope and the erasure of racial boundaries as Julia runs back to Jim and throws herself into his arms.

Ra’s narrative is different, it is separatist and while he and Du Bois share the image of black as alien and non-human, Ra does not share Du Bois’ optimism. His narrative creates a black community which is spiritual, musical and original within their own myth, but they cannot stay on Earth, which has deserved to be destroyed. Space is the Place thus refuses to accept that any kind of resistant narrative may forge a space for the black community within white society and instead, space, the black and endless void as Ra calls it, is the only place this community can properly exist. This exodus is not cast negatively, however, but rather seen as a transition to a far better place on the unnamed planet, with its lush forests, reminiscent of African rainforests. Leaving Earth behind is not just necessary but a positive thing, a liberating move. As in the case of Ziggy Stardust, we see how the sf narrative becomes a way to express the difference the subjects feel.