This is a stunning cyberpunk novel by a female writer, so close to classic cyberpunk (in the sense that it has not diluted the hard SF feel of the subThis is a stunning cyberpunk novel by a female writer, so close to classic cyberpunk (in the sense that it has not diluted the hard SF feel of the sub-genre) and yet so closely affiliated with its more politically correct, flexible successor feminist cyberpunk. Along with Melissa Scott's Trouble and Her Friends, it is one of those few hard SF works that, while staying true to the specifications of classic cyberpunk simultaneously break its boundaries boldly � or rather, I should say, expand the horizons of classic cyberpunk to make it more inclusive.
The world is divided into two political factions � one part allied with the Commonwealth government, which strictly controls biotechnology and ensures the new systems are registered and do not exceed its stringent specifications � in order to stay in power and do away with potential better programs that may usurp its dominance (so reminiscent of WTO, isn’t it?)
The other part is Spill, that has decided to remain independent of the coalition, but which is nevertheless governed by Commonwealth laws on bio-tech, making it a ripe place for all illegal bio-tech and their Makers to indulge in black-marketing. A slum-infested, poverty-ridden, ugly place, the under-belly of the squeaky- clean Commonwealth.
Nikko is the world’s first “posthuman� � a code of programming with free-will that is bound to expire after the treaty with Commonwealth expires � but he wishes to live, and decides to steal a powerful program � called the Bohr Maker � to ensure he will live on. But the program escapes and ends up in the body of an illiterate, impoverished prostitute Phousita in Spill, who has no understanding of it and thinks she is possessed by a spirit.
With the Commonwealth police on her heels for a program she doesn’t know she possesses, she becomes a fugitive, and with Nikko (and an interesting horde of characters), must escape and find a way to deal with the Bohr Maker. (Of course, this is only the thinnest plot � the vastly interesting other sub-plots are left out to make it a spoiler-free review).
The classic cyberpunk feel is so obvious � the radical breakdown in the political/social aspects strongly alludes to the present world � the Commonwealth representing the “Big, bad corporations� while Nikko, Phousita and other characters are, basically, the punk elements, the rebels who break the rules, who exist on the fringes of the corporate world represented by Kirstin.
It was well paced, thought-provoking. With the main character being a genetically engineered post-human struggling to keep himself alive, it is evident that it will tease our notions of what it means to be human. But it goes a step further - (view spoiler)[Nikko’s body is destroyed while his ghost has to be downloaded in various bodies time and again, and at a point of time, three ghosts inhabit a single body � Phousita’s (hide spoiler)] - which makes it harder.
What is consciousness without a body? How far does a body determine our identity as a human or a living entity? What kind of post-humanism will it be when you can create multiple ghosts of yourself, some of which will not return to you to save you from painful memories? Or when a ghost, its body destroyed, has to merge with a larger network, so that it can go places mentally, but not physically? What is it to be alive? Is it the mind or the body? What is a mind without a body of its own? What happens when a male ghost inhabits a female body? Does it matter? Or does it matter if the mind is preserved, but has no body, and has to exist only as a programming code?
Much unexpected, it was a pleasant change in the cyberpunk comeback to see female characters of consequence. (view spoiler)[With Arif tending to grow violent, Phousita consciously has tender feelings for Sandor � she holds her own against Arif numerous times, and goes ahead with her own convictions, rather than being used as an agent to fulfill the wishes and goals of the men around her. (hide spoiler)] Equally laudable is Phousita’s foil � Kirstin, again a woman, but the exact opposite of the warm, caring Phousita. Kirstin’s negative portrayal completes the circle of breaking female stereotypes as either too-good or too-bad women.
Like classic cyberpunk, it deals with the question of what it means to be human, and the Gibson-esque issue of the merging of metal and “meat�. Like its feminist successor, it teases our expectations of one body, one mind � this is a world where a part of your consciousness, your ghost can be sent out for a virtual meeting, and the ghost might return to you and fill in the info to your mind, or might not, if it deems the info too painful for you to bear. And not one, but innumerable ghosts can be downloaded or uploaded in the atriums of other people’s minds. It is a world where one can live with the ghosts of other people in their minds.
On the surface, it is a Neuromancer kind of novel � fast-paced, full of amiable twists, breathtaking possibilities and radical ideas about the future � but it is also a deeper novel, questioning our notions of what it means to be alive, and what it means for a woman to wield power through technology. Phousita is a prime example, and Kirstin is her foil � both are women in control of immense power � and both grow in radically different directions.
I wonder what is wrong with readers � I used to believe readers will always love a good story, the gender of the writer notwithstanding � now I’m beginning to have serious doubts.
There’s a staggering proportion of extremely creative women writers in feminist cyberpunk, all of whom are mostly unknown to most fans of classic cyberpunk, barring a few discerning, eclectic readers. Wachowski brothers, read this! ...more
This is a review of only one of the stories in the book.
I take this liberty because No Woman Born is such a masterpiece, it must not be overlooked, anThis is a review of only one of the stories in the book.
I take this liberty because No Woman Born is such a masterpiece, it must not be overlooked, and I cannot wait until I have finished reading every story to praise this amazing piece of fiction.
This is a truly memorable classic short story spanning a range of issues from ethics of resurrecting the dead with the help of technology, the ensuing dilemma of what is meat and what is machine, the delicate ramifications of transhumanism, not just from the perspective of humans, but from the perspective of the humanoid itself (itself?), the explicitly painful issue of what makes us women, to how our bodies are appropriated and pigeonholed into what Judith Butler so correctly summarized in three words ”Gender is Performance�.
This is an immensely rich, layered complex work with minimal plot and extensive social, biological and ethical dilemmas � all written in a deceptively simple narrative. It is an unparalleled critique of the limited ways in which we perceive the idea of transhumanism, how narrowly we construct the ideological arguments about the “essential nature� of a human mind in a new metal body, without for once speculating the issue from the perspective of the humanoid itself (see? I’ve already labelled humanoids as “it).
The story begins with Harris coming, with palpable concern, to the lab of his friend Maltzer, who has, after a year’s hard work, succeeded in recreating Deirdre, a theater icon beloved among the masses, after she died in a fire. Her body was burnt, but her brain was retrieved, now caged in a metal body. Deirdre is still what she was before, and now wants to go back onstage to perform, to the horror of her creator. She does go, however, and performs. There is only this much plot.
But the verbal exchanges that take place between Harris, Deirdre and Maltzer in between all this forms the real crux of the work � it is through these dialogues that we see what each of the three think about the nature of life and death, and about the resurrection of Deirdre in particular. Far from being didactic or preachy, the exchanges are food for thought � they stretch our sense of what we consider human, how we perceive womanhood and how we view ourselves, finally.
Maltzer’s apprehensions about how she will be received by people reminded me of Emiko, the windup girl in Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl - heechy-keechy, as she was derisively referred to. Deirdre’s combination of meat and metal often brought back memories of Andrew from Asimov’s The Bicentennial Man - agreed, both Emiko and Andrew are robots that gain consciousness, while Deirdre is a human mind that gains a metal body, but the complex emotions that they face are reminiscent of each other.
The narrative style too, is reminiscent of Asimov � of course, they were both contemporaries, and it is astonishing, given the immense popularity of Asimov and the obscurity of C. L. Moore today, how similar their concerns were, how excellent their works and themes (I now find The Bicentennial Man a pale shadow of No Woman Born) and yet how different their fates!
Along with Tiptree's The Girl Who Was Plugged In and Kurt Vonnegut's 5-minute story 2BR02B, this story figures on the top of my favorite fiction - SF or otherwise.
"No Woman Born" online (not infringing the copyright, it has expired) - Read it here online -
It's a pity I cannot rate it higher than the maximum allowed - it is astonishing that Tiptree, in this short story achieves so much. I liken her to6/5
It's a pity I cannot rate it higher than the maximum allowed - it is astonishing that Tiptree, in this short story achieves so much. I liken her to Vonnegut, who could pull your guts out in a matter of minutes with stories that take usually barely half-an-hour to read.
The present story is rich in terms of ideas - it anticipates cyberpunk, rather, feminist cyberpunk - the process of jacking in, and taking up the issues of representing women's bodies in a genre that was indifferent to anyone apart from white loner males. The undertones of the story are overwhelmingly dark and sharpened further by satire.
The thinly veiled attack on consumerist culture, driven by profits with little concern for humans, the ugly side of successful businesses and the ethical conflict presented by P. Burke and Delphi - what begins as emancipation for Burke ends in tragedy for Delphi, Burke and Paul - is so well-portrayed.
The narrative in present continuous is so hard-hitting, the author-as-narrator works so well at stabbing the reader at appropriate times, for instance, the references to Cinderella and the ugly duckling. It intensifies the grim, mocking, sharp tone of the story.
It is absolutely befuddling to believe this story was written so many years ago, yet it refuses to become outdated. And it is infinitely better written than most of the so-called SF/cyberpunk today is churned out.
This is not only SF - it is classic literature, and it is a serious loss to English literature that Tiptree is remembered only as an indispensable SF writer....more
This is going to be one of those works dearest to my heart - not because they are stimulating, nerve-challenging or fast enough to make my heart race.This is going to be one of those works dearest to my heart - not because they are stimulating, nerve-challenging or fast enough to make my heart race. No, this is far from traditional SF - the plot is of no importance here, nor the characters - what matters is the world and how difficult it makes life for those who question its ways.
What makes this novel stand out for me is its setting - it is so rare to see the future in a place that no one has bothered to look at, as if the future will not have it - Morocco.
In the 22nd century, Hariba got jessed at twenty-one - a neurological implant that would make her artificially, but inescapably subservient to her master for life, to whom she would be a slave. Five years later, she flees to her home, Nekropolis - an act that could cost her her life, because it is illegal for a slave to flee her master. Even more scandalous, she bids a harni Akhmim, a bio-engineered being equal in status to a jessed human, an android, a lesser-than-human and the property of her ex-master, to flee with him.
What is disturbing about this simple work is how realistically it looks at a future fundamentalist theocratic state in command of immense technology - and how it marginalizes certain people through the use of invasive technology. Hariba, despite her repulsion for a socially-despised harni, falls for his intelligence, soft, concerned temperament.
Maureen's political concerns are evident - the idea of a chemically indentured woman in an ultra-conservative future and how we willingly tend to give up freedom for security and safety are intriguing, and reflect largely on our own times, despite set in the future. She allows no easy answers, and the farther our freedom is, the steeper is its price.
When you read this book, don't expect adventures, twists and turns or fantastic writing skills. Read between the lines - this is ideological SF - it penetrates our own views of life, of what it means to be human, and reflects on how a current political, social, traditional and moral ideology has an impact on the choices we make. Our choices are not mere reflections of our own selves, but that of the place and community we live in.
A very short read, nevertheless, it is heart-breaking and liberating at the same time, and will be most easily related to by people who find themselves misfits in their cultures....more
A seemingly short (43 pages) but immensely dense tract on the figure of the cyborg in 20th century sci-fi, the work examNew detailed review to follow.
A seemingly short (43 pages) but immensely dense tract on the figure of the cyborg in 20th century sci-fi, the work examines from the socialist-feminist point-of-view the ontological and political aspects of the presence of a transgressive creature such as the cyborg. Analysing literary and cinematic works that depict cyborgs, Haraway emphasizes on the nature of a possible critical framework that seeks to harmonize the spectre of horror that haunts the present world. Haunts - because the cyborg is neither human, nor machine, and yet both - it lacks the metanarrative of genesis and family, yet longs for community - it is not only post-gender, but also post-human, threatening the hierarchy of man and machine - and stretching it further, the female cyborg also defying the hierarchy of man and women and male-cyborgs and female-cyborgs.
Very dense and difficult, requiring multiple readings and spanning ontological, capitalistic and patriarchal concerns, it is brilliant nevertheless. ...more
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