Citation:
Date Published:
8 June 2022Abstract:
Contemporary authors of science fiction have taken up the challenge of imagining digital technologies whose functions and effects elude human awareness. Such technologies differ from earlier examples in their environmental aspect, brought on by networks that operate at levels “above” and “below” those of a human subject. Another way to describe environmental digital technologies is through the concept of assemblage, involving not only many forms of human labor and material resources, but also collectivities of entities performing cognitive acts, circulating information, interpretations, and meanings. While these collectivities obviously do involve human subjects pursuing different interests, the way that the assemblage functions as a whole does not correspond to human levels of behavior, perception, or scale.
In this article, we build on the idea of the environmental aspect of digital technologies to examine strategies used in science-fictional attempts to represent in narrative the effects of these technologies on both individual and societal levels. Our case studies, the novels Ancillary Justice (2013) by Ann Leckie and Autonomous (2017) by Annalee Newitz, employ more-or-less technological, individual actor-characters to guide readers to think about the effects of human-technical assemblages within the wider fictional worlds. These novels hinge on the literalization of three literary conventions in their attempts at representing these effects: omniscient narration, character-focalization, and mind-reading of fictional characters.
Through the actor-characters and literalizations, the environmental aspect of digital technologies and their effects are woven into the plots, worldbuilding, and narration of the novels. They are thus able, up to a point, to represent tensions between conscious actors and the various forms within which they operate. However, the novels also illustrate the limits of narrativizing environmental technologies in guiding the readers to think about human-technical assemblages and their effects through forms that remain human-centric in scope — including “gender play” as well as narratives of bildung, quest, and romance. In making the effects of digital technologies accessible for readers, the novels are unable to escape the constraints that the conventions and forms impose.
February 2022: Hanna-Riikka Roine (PhD, literary studies) works as a Postdoctoral Research Fellow funded by the Academy of Finland at the Tampere University and as an affiliated researcher in the consortium Instrumental Narratives. Her current research explores the ways in which our engagement with digital media affects, guides, and shapes our engagement with the possible. Roine is a co-editor of the book The Ethos of Digital Environments: Technology, Literary Theory and Philosophy (2021) and has published articles, for instance, on the ways in which narratological inquiry may be extended towards the machines of computational media.
February 2022: Esko Suoranta is a Doctoral Researcher at the Department of Languages, University of Helsinki. Esko’s dissertation analyzes how contemporary speculative fiction might build affordances for thinking toward complex, systemic phenomena. His publications discuss power, agency, and transhumanity in the contemporary novels of William Gibson, cognitive assemblages and surveillance capitalism in Malka Older’s Infomocracy and Dave Egger’s The Circle, and utopian/dystopian dynamics in Thomas Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge. Esko received the Alan Nadel Prize for Best Graduate Student Paper for his contribution to the 2019 conference of the International Society for the Study of Narrative. He was co-editor-in-chief for Fafnir – Nordic Journal of Science Fiction and Fantasy Research between 2019-2022, in which capacity he won the 2020 World Fantasy Award.