Reading Neuromancer for the first time has, quite predictably, drawn me back to The Matrix. I have some familiarity with the cyberpunk genre (Snow Crash is one of my favorites), but Neuromancer reminds me even more just how many elements The Matrix borrowed from the genre, presumably in order to subvert it. And yes, this includes the term, “the matrix” itself, jacking in, Zion, the mirrored shades, and a lot more

As we discussed, The Matrix acts as a response to Neuromancer’s apparent indifference towards or even acceptance of posthumanism. While in The Matrix, the question on everyone’s mind is, “What is real?”, that question just doesn’t seem to matter in Gibson’s novel. Moreover, the question of what it means to be human is much more complicated in Neuromancer. Try contrasting Molly’s artificial mirrored lenses, not to mention her razors, with the plugs built into the humans of The Matrix. While in the novel, these “augmentations” largely viewed as positive, if a little creepy, enhancements of the self, the plugs in The Matrix are viewed as less than human, especially when compared to Tank and Dozer’s “homegrown” humanity.

You could argue that Molly’s augmentations arise from her own free will (as far as we know), while the plugs in the film only allude to the humans’ slavery to the machines. I wonder, then, whether any attempts have been made in the world of The Matrix to remove these plugs. If it were even possible, you could imagine some clinic in Zion dedicated to bringing Matrix-free humans back to humanity.

I may have contradicted my own point a little, but you definitely get the sense in Neuromancer that posthumanism is a reality whether you like it or not, while in The Matrix you see the characters fighting against this notion and turning back to the idea of an authentic humanity. Case, whose drug addictions almost cost him his life, is rewarded by the end of the novel with new organs, so he can continue altering his consciousness without consequence. Who benefits the most in the end? Wintermute! And you’re left unsure whether this is a good thing or a bad thing. But Gibson might argue that this is beside the point.

I could go on and cite all of the instances in which The Matrix emphasizes its humanist agenda, but we’ve discussed this in class already. Instead, I’d like to return to Neuromancer by focusing on the ways in which the Wachowski brothers’ film continues to borrow elements of the novel, even going so far at times to contradict, or complicate, its own definition of humanity. In other words, as much as The Matrix works in reaction against the postmodern, posthuman, cyberpunk genre, at times the film inadvertently supports the claims it tried to reject.

From the outset, the characters as well the audience privilege the unpleasant natural over the pleasant artificial simply because what is real matters to us. We reject the machines, then, as constructs rather than natural beings. And, of course, we reject the Matrix itself as an illusion, as opposed to the reality of the real world.

At times, however, the film complicates this value system by presenting the artificial as having clear advantages over the real. This shouldn’t surprise us, as Morpheus and the others work within the Matrix in order, presumably, to one day dismantle it. As Kathryn has already suggested, however, the end goal might not even be possible. By bending and breaking the rules of the Matrix better than the Agents, is Neo affirming his humanity, or only that he is a better machine than the machines (“you move like they do”)? As Tank downloads all of the combat training programs into Neo, he remarks, “He’s a machine.” What are we to make of this?

And then there is Agent Smith, whose own path in the second and third films mirrors Neo’s in many ways. In Baudrillard’s terms, if Neo is the remainder, Agent Smith is the subtraction of that remainder into reality (or is it the other way around?). As Neo’s story progresses, he sees more and more that Agent Smith is right: the only thing that matters is purpose. By submitting to fate, is Neo asserting his humanity, or is he admitting that human or machine, we are all programs with built-in purposes?

And then there is the fact that by the end of the third film, even after the war, the Matrix still exists. If Morpheus says in the first film that “as long as the Matrix exists, the human race will never be free,” why is everyone celebrating? Maybe because this compromise is the best deal humanity will ever get. As much as Neo and company despise the Matrix, they work pretty well within it, and it becomes essential to all of their schemes and eventually brokering a deal for peace in the end. So, I ask, is The Matrix a posthumanist work after all? For all of its privileging of an authentic humanity, the film casts Neo in the role of a machine, while giving human motives to Agent Smith. I wouldn’t go too far with this argument, but you can see that while The Matrix seemingly reacts against Neuromancer’s acceptance of posthumanism, a few of these ideas carry over after all.

(Note: Poor attempt at a meme. Photograph of Trinity, quote really by Molly, misattributed to Y.T. from Snow Crash).

Now that Verne’s Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea and a collection of Poe’s stories are available to me, I thought I’d share my second batch of runs on science fiction within the Gothic (if you missed it, here’s the first one).

First: Verne who, together with Wells, comprise the Fathers of Science Fiction. While I don’t think this novel is considered a Gothic work, certainly not in the way The Time Machine is sometimes considered Gothic, Twenty Thousand Leagues nonetheless owes a great debt to this genre. Certainly, the mysterious Captain Nemo resembles classic Gothic characters.

While matching Verne’s novel up with Gothic works, I came across a difficulty that resembled my problem with The Time Machine: a cluttering of novel-specific words. In Twenty Thousand Leagues, the Nautical theme shine through in two categories. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, or: The Transformation provided the most interesting results:

 

Brown’s novel is sometimes categorized as horror, and that shines through here: “death, life, horror, mind, fear.” It’s interesting, however, that Verne’s novel, primarily a science fiction novel arguably emerging from the Gothic, also, to a lesser extent, shares this category.

I decided to investigate this finding by matching up Verne’s novel with other works. This Horror category appeared commonly enough that I was forced to take notice. Is Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea a horror novel after all?

Getting ahead of myself, I matched Verne with Poe, eager to see the results:

 

First, a note about Poe: the collection included, rather than comprising all of the author’s short stories, totals 23 tales. Moreover, while Verne and Wells can unquestionably be considered science fiction, and to a large extent Shelley, as well, Poe is a mixed bag. He is often credited as popularizing many genres, working within the Gothic to produce mystery, early horror, and yes, science fiction (although, you could argue that the stories themselves can represent several genres at once). With a bit of research, this collection appears to be a healthy mix of these genres. In the future, it might be fruitful to work with a collection only of Poe’s science fiction works.

Back to the results. The Horror topic, as predicted, appears again, with Poe stretching out this subfield further. The other curiosity is: “strange, mind, thought, seemed, dream.” While clearly vague, this category has to do with internal thoughts, a theme that has more to do with Gothic fiction than science fiction. The possibly fantastic element of this category, however, alludes to both genres.

Another note before I move on: while it doesn’t appear here, the semi-“Cosmic” or, more accurately, “Light/Darkness” category, “light,” “night,” “moon,” “dark,” “sun,” frequently occurs in my runs with Verne, presenting an interesting, if tenuous, link to my earlier runs with The Time Machine. Running these two texts alone confirms it, with a fairly strong correlation:

 

I now centered my attention on Poe, which more easily matched up with the Gothic texts. Running it with Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray produced interesting results:

 

Once again, you can see Poe’s fascination with Horror. The ambiguous Thoughts/Dreams category appears again, which makes sense because both works contain an element of the fantastic. The word, “seemed,” in this category, as well as in “seemed,” “time,” “appeared,” “made,” “same,” also links it with subjectivity. While this run of course doesn’t point to any clear conclusions, Poe seems to align very well with most Gothic texts, especially ones (like Dorian Gray) that have anything to do with the supernatural and fantastic.

Before concluding, I’ll present the cacophony of running all four science fiction texts together: Shelley, Wells, Verne, and Poe:

 

My semi-color blindness gave me some trouble here. I don’t want to take these comparisons too far, but there are a few things to mention. First, the appearance of the Light/Time or Sun/Moon category did not go unnoticed. To my mind, none of these texts are primarily concerned with outer space (Poe’s story about traveling to the moon is sadly not included here), but the Sun and Moon probably serve other purposes. Is this focus indicative of science fiction’s fascination with space and the heavens? Possibly, but I don’t think Woodchipper offers any greater insights here.

The reappearance of Horror is curious. Poe, Frankenstein, and Twenty Thousand Leagues spread across this category fairly evenly. What does this mean? Without assuming any familiarity with these works, form this run alone, I would probably sooner group them in the horror genre than science fiction. However, because I know these works together influenced an enormous body of science fiction literature, this run tells me that horror and sci-fi might have more in common than I realize. This makes a lot of sense for Poe and Frankenstein, but Verne surprised me.

An aside about the functions of Woodchipper itself: the ability to zoom in on specific sections of the grid, which I believe was recently added, proved exceedingly helpful for runs with three or four texts like this.

Concerning The Time Machine, Wells’ text expressed the fewest comparisons with the other texts. I used the zoom function and noticed the novel’s nodes scattered among the various categories, but I couldn’t see enough evidence to draw any conclusions here.

As in my first run, I was left with more questions than answers. Science fiction, especially as a subgenre within the Gothic, is especially difficult to locate. Indeed, in this second batch of runs, I encountered more associations with Horror than Science Fiction. This may suggest, however, that the two genres have much in common. This isn’t surprising, considering their roots in the Gothic, and their focus on the fantastic and supernatural. I encountered little that supports the idea that science fiction is concerned more with the societal than with the personal. Indeed, I found the opposite to be true, suggesting that this trend may have appeared later on. Perhaps in using these four authors as a template for future science fiction works, I can trace the origins of later texts in early sci-fi and in the Gothic genre itself. This project may prove useful, but I also suspect that while it has the possibility of producing answers, it’s almost a guarantee that I’ll also be left with more questions, as well.

While trying to use Woodchipper to come up with a definition of the Gothic, I was also interested in looking at Gothic literature as spawning numerous forms of popular literature, namely Mystery, Horror, and Science Fiction. Mystery and Horror, at least from the outset, seem like straightforward extensions of elements already present in the Gothic. Science fiction, on the other hand, branches off in different, and I would argue more interesting, ways.

I derive most of my assumptions and questions from this article. Brantlinger focuses on science fiction’s origins in Gothic literature. Like the Gothic, sci-fi questions the limits of rationalization. Both genres emphasize the sublime, namely fear and wonder, to arouse terror. They also favor subjectivity over objectivity, viewing the nature of the universe as essentially unknowable, and therefore we can only determine our own separate accounts; this theme, especially for the Gothic, comes through its epistolary format.

Most importantly, Gothic and sci-fi both take reason to its extreme limit in order to reveal the point where the rules break down. In both genres, this scenario can only lead to disaster. The difference is that for gothic texts, this disaster usually takes place internally, while in science fiction it becomes external. So, in analyzing my findings, another major topic to watch out for would be interiority versus exteriority, and well as the personal versus the societal.

I ran Frankenstein (considered by many to be the first sci-fi novel) and The Time Machine by Wells (one of the fathers of sci-fi) with other Gothic texts and with each other. I also hope to use Verne (the other father of sci-fi) and Poe, who wrote some of the first sci-fi stories and had a huge influence on the genre. I only have enough space here to focus on a few interesting results. Obviously, running two early science fiction / gothic texts alone against thirty or so gothic texts cannot yield definitive results. However, perhaps in conjunction with my own analysis, Woodchipper could offer a useful lens for observing trends between and within these genres, as well as introducing new questions for future runs.

With this in mind, I’ll present my first run: Frankenstein and Caleb Williams:

 

While there is a fair amount of overlap, Caleb favors the Crime/Justice topic, and what Kathryn categorized as the “Sublime” (“man,” “life,” “nature,” “character,” “mind”), although this is less clear, while Frankenstein leans more toward the “Existential” (or “Spiritual”) topic (“life,” “death,” “existence,” “mind,” “heart”). Does this address my questions? Not so much. On the one hand, most of these categories leans more toward interiority than exteriority. So, from these results, Frankenstein doesn’t offer much evidence for science fiction’s emphasis on the social and even cosmic. On the other hand, these categories also privilege subjectivity (especially “seemed” in an alternate run), which aligns with both the Gothic and sci-fi. But, again, Frankenstein has a lot in common with Caleb, and while they diverge in certain respects, these differences appear to have more to do with each novel’s own respective foci rather than an indication of genre. Moreover, Caleb’s deep engagement with the political (which Frankenstein also shares) may signify the work as atypical of its genre, although Woodchipper only represents this aspect here through the Crime/Justice category (without specifying the type of justice: personal or societal).

Another important note: while many texts in my runs tend to densely populate certain topics, Frankenstein is comparatively scattered. Does this make Frankenstein harder to pin down and categorize than other Gothic texts, and is that a clue that it shares another genre: science fiction? It’s too difficult to tell, especially when none of the topics here clearly points to science fiction.

Turning to The Time Machine, I ran the text with The Beetle, which contains a few supernatural elements, such as shape-shifting:

The Time Machine was difficult to use because its own terms and jargon—“Time Traveller,” “morlocks,” ect.—clutter the results. In this pairing, however, both texts are concerned with observation and information-gathering. Two topics leave room for ambiguity and subjectivity (“seemed” appears in both). The other, “told,” “asked,” “knew,” “see,” “thought,” alludes to more concrete evidence. Interestingly, this is where the texts overlap the most. Thus, at least from this run, it appears that while The Beetle is interested in all forms of observation, The Time Machine is more concerned with objectivity.

Choosing a random sample passage quickly complicates this tentative conclusion, however.

The Time Traveller’s privileging of objective reality (“I know it was a dull white”) must yield to his uncertainty (“too fast to see distincly,” “I cannot even say . . .”). In the end, reason gets him nowhere, and he must admit to the unreliability of his senses. This is often what science fiction is all about: the friction between the objective and “scientific” versus the subjective and unknown. Woodchipper can’t really pick up on this, as it can only group common and repeating words together without interpretation.

Another important note: it doesn’t occur here, but the “Cosmic” or “Celestial” (“light, moon, sun, sky, sea”) frequently appears when I run The Time Machine with other texts. Even though Wells’ novel doesn’t deal with spaceflight or space directly, one can see the genre’s fascination with the stars.

Finally, let’s look at the two early science fiction texts together:

Frankenstein appears to have broader concerns than The Time Machine. The former dominates “Justice” and the “Sublime” (with overlap), while the latter stays with the “Cosmic.” However, a new category also appears: “work, science, time, knowledge, life.” I wouldn’t call this the “Science Fiction” category by any means, but does it gesture in that direction? If my results tell me anything at all, it is that separating the gothic from gothic sci-fi is, fittingly, extremely difficult. While Frankenstein branches toward many categories, it appears to have far more in common with Gothic literature than it would science fiction. The Time Machine shies away from the Existential or even the subjective, but as demonstrated there is a lot more going on here not represented in these results alone.

Right now, my questions are: Can Woodchipper distinguish the Gothic from science fiction, and can it recognize sci-fi within the Gothic? Going forward, perhaps Verne and Poe will help illuminate possible trends, but I suspect that only through a juxtaposition with later, non-Gothic science fiction works will a fuller picture present itself.

Brantlinger identifies a trend in more recent science fiction in favor of the rational and “realistic” as opposed to the imaginative. According to Brantlinger, this focus runs counter to science fiction’s origins in the Gothic. At what point, then, if this trend exists at all, did sci-fi cease its critique of the rational and objective and begin to glorify them? Is Woodchipper capable of addressing this question? If so, I’d like to know the answer.

While reading through Jones’ chapter on Frankenstein, I was particularly drawn to the section’s discussion on Victor’s laboratory and his relationship with science in general. I immediately grabbed the novel and found my comments scribbled beside the text, specifically the scene of Frankenstein’s monster’s creation: “vague description,” “so I guess electricity is involved somehow?” and “is this even science?”

For a novel that supposedly pioneered an entire genre, aptly named science fiction, there is very little science to be found in Frankenstein. Jones notes that this choice was made either because Shelley did not know how to describe the science involved, or to express “that technology is not the point of the story” (Jones, 19). The scene itself utilizes vague terms such as “materials,” “the instruments of life,” and the repetition of the word, “secret” (Shelley, 35-38). Jones argues that the scene’s description resembles alchemy, painting Frankenstein as an alchemist or mage. Moreover, in his studies, Frankenstein claims to be more interested in the ancient scientists, who dream big (and promise “impossibilities” such as alchemy and immortality), than the “modern masters [who] promise very little” (Shelley, 30). All of this discussion links Frankenstein with figures such as Faust and Prospero as well as Prometheus. So in a way, Frankenstein is, or wants to be, a magician.

“And now for something completely different,” as the folks of Monty Python would say. I want to bring in the genre of fantasy by turning to Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea. Le Guin is a major science fiction author (no doubt influenced by Mary Shelley), but this novel is one of her forays into fantasy. The novel follows a young wizard named Ged who, after accidentally conjuring a monster or shadow creature in his youth, spends the next stage of his life faced with a number of obstacles while simultaneously avoiding the dark entity he had himself created.

Sound familiar? Despite being rooted in fantasy, Earthsea and its structure resemble Frankenstein. In an act of hubris, each protagonist plays god and creates (whether purposely or accidentally) a monstrous entity that never should have existed. Just as Frankenstein spends the better part of the novel trying to “live his life” while his monster destroys everyone around him, so too does Ged (although he does save his fair share of people). Their turning points even resemble one another. After returning home, Ged reunites with his teacher, who convinces him to pursue his shadow, and suddenly the tables are turned. Frankenstein is not so decisive or confident, but his moment of clarity comes after Elizabeth’s death (or, to a lesser extent, Clerval’s), in which he vows to pursue the monster until one kills the other. Ged is successful in the end, Frankenstein far less so, but one can see the resemblance.

Other parallels exist (Walton even has a counterpart in Earthsea), but I won’t go into them. There are plenty of differences, of course, in content as well as tone and theme. Shelley’s novel humanizes the monster, while for the most part Ged’s shadow remains an abstraction. More importantly, Earthsea is about learning to face your greatest fear (for Ged is able to defeat his shadow in the end, albeit by merging with it), while Frankenstein is more of a cautionary tale.

But despite these differences, Le Guin owes a great debt to Shelley. The point I am trying to make actually ties in perfectly with the reading. If “technology is not the main point of the story,” as Jones argues, then surely one can replace the novel’s science with another force without damaging the story in the slightest. I argue that despite their differences, Le Guin’s novel is an exercise in this viewpoint. Science or magic, both tales follow similar structures and share important themes. With this in mind, arguing that Frankenstein is wholehearted “anti-science” would be akin to arguing that A Wizard of Earthsea is “anti-magic.” The lesson here is not in technology, but in hubris, responsibility, imagination, creation, and a million other abstract terms I will not list here.

In a way, then, with its references to magic and alchemy, Frankenstein helped establish not one genre, but two: science fiction as well as fantasy. Not too shabby.