Natural History
Robson, Justina. Natural History. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003. For other publication, translation, awards and nominations, and reviews, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of November 2022, here.[1]
In the blurb for the MP3 CD, we are asked to "Imagine a world" where "Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpion – and just as dangerous. Her claim that she’d found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity who’d created and once enslaved them."[2] We're not sure scorpions actually coil, but the blurb succeeds in identifying a cyborg story.
Advertised as a Google Book: "Alongside the seed-forms of the Unevolved (ordinary humans) live and work the Augmented, people who have been forged, not born. Nonetheless the Augmented are human beneath their vast and complex biotechnological bodies which allow them to live deep in the oceans and out in space. As far as they`re concerned, however, the old ties of blood and genes may just be ancient history. When a new solar system is found, containing an Earth-like world, full of abandoned alien cities and devoid of intelligent life, the Augmented see it as their Forge-right to claim this place as a homeworld. After all, the aliens who once lived there have followed the same path beyond the limits of genetics and organics, adapting themselves to new environments, and heading for the frontiers of deep space."[3]
Discussed in Mitchell Kaye's "Bodies That Matter: Science Fiction, Technoculture, and the Gendered Body"[4]
My suggestion here is that sf allows for the production of radical (gendered and un-gendered, hybrid, cyborgian) bodies that impel us to reflect upon our own understanding of “the body” and upon the ways in which bodies are viewed and regulated in the social world. The texts by Cadigan[5][6] and Robson that I will go on to consider focus on the body’s relationship with technologies that augment and alter it, intervene in its workings, and so modify the subject’s perception of how the physical self is regulated.
From the review by Philip Snyder, SFRA Review #271 (Jan./Feb./March 2005): 27-28, as of October 2023 available, at least to SFRA members, here.[7]
In Robson's distant future, humanity has diverged into the Forged and the Unevolved. The Forged are posthumans who have modified themselves to go into space, matching their form to predetermined functions with the aid of genetic engineering, unions with machines, and a host of hybridizing technologies (not all of them entirely successful). The Unevolved are "natural" humans [...] and a civil war is brewing across the solar system as various factions of the Forged seek to break away from the constraints of their/our evolutionary past. The conflict is brought to a boiling point with the discovery of a chunk of Stuff, a substance than can function as a drive, a wormhole, a jump gate, a teleporter - as almost anything, it turns out, that its user decides is needed. Voyager Lonestar Isol, who discovers the substance in a near-lethal brush with asteroidal debris, is a Forged who has chosen to be embodied as a spacecraft with incredible sensory and cognitive augmentations. She (for Isol is indeed a "she," gendered in mind if not in body) is described by another character as "nothing more than a desire to travel and meet new people fused onto a psychopathic preference for no company at all."
So see especially for the slow-motion debate in SF (and elsewhere) on embodiment and the effect of one's body on one's ... "essence" is a possibility, or if one has some "essential" — or any — existence outside the body. Cf. and contrast "No Woman Born" and the significant number of works as The Müller-Fokker Effect and the works cross-listed there, where personalities are uploaded into computers and sometimes downloaded into bodies, or "vastened" and free forever from a "meat body," as in The Boy Who Would Live Forever and other works in Frederik Pohl's Heechee series.
RDE, finishing, 8Nov22, 28Oct23
