"If you fake the funk, your nose will grow." — Bootsy Collins
I always find Slavoj Zizek alternately (or simultaneously) enthralling and infuriating, and nowhere more so than in his new book Organs Without Bodies in which he takes on Gilles Deleuze.
I always find Slavoj Zizek alternately (or simultaneously) enthralling and infuriating, and nowhere more so than in his new book Organs Without Bodies in which he takes on Gilles Deleuze.
Continue reading “Zizek on Deleuze”
Peter Watts‘ Maelstrom is the sequel to his Starfish (which I discussed here). Maelstrom envisions the possible extinction of the human species, and indeed of all terrestrial life, due to the competition of a nanobacterium brought back from the deep oceans. But the book is much more sympathetic to Lenie Clarke, the woman (from Starfish) who is the (not entirely unwitting) vector of this infection, than it is to the “corpses” (people with power, money, and influence) who are trying to stop it. Emotionally, the book emphasizes victimization, on the one hand, and bitter revenge on the other: these seem to be the only alternatives – since rebellion is largely futile, and not much more than a fashion statement anyway – to craven collaboration with the dominant powers.
But the book’s larger vision is more technopolitical than psychological. It envisions a world in which travel restrictions and other suspensions of civil liberties are the norm, less for explicitly political reasons, than for environmental ones, in order to contain the various biomedical and chemical disasters that Watts presents as a regular feature of mid-21st-century life. (This also includes the control of refugees, who have fled to North America to escape environmental disasters in Asia and other parts of the world). Foucault showed how our ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and control arose, in part, out of efforts to contain things like plague; Watts envisions these technologies returning to their roots, as it were, as a result of our rapacious destruction of the environment (as well as of continued terrorism in a time of extreme technologies).
There’s also a lot about re-engineering the human body, not just to allow physical adaptations to extreme conditions, but also to control behavior; this ranges from the implantation of false memories (of things like having been abused as a child), to implanting triggers for violence and aggression (very useful for breeding and training assassins), to neurochemical manipulations of emotions like guilt. The novel asks us to consider what “free will” might mean under such conditions (and it doesn’t allow us any easy answers).
And then there is the book’s vision of Maelstrom itself, which is the mid-21st-century descendant of the Internet. Instantaneous, worldwide wireless communication is the norm; but cyberspace is infested by “wildlife”, rogue programs of all sorts that are the rapidly-evolved descendants of the spam and viruses and worms of today. There’s a whole online ecology in Maelstrom, and it isn’t pretty: it’s characterized by vicious Darwinian competition. This “wildlife” doesn’t stop people from using the Net for information or for social contact, so much as it insinuates itself within those human uses. blurring lines between fact, rumor, and innuendo, and making all communication rife with suspicion and conflict. (Not to mention Watts’ brilliant and wholly original take on the nature, and the possibilities, of “artificial intelligence”…).
What makes this all work is the way Watts grounds his overall vision of apocalyptic dread (or better, vengeful, don’t-give-a-fuck bitterness) within a wholly concrete framework of techno/bio/politics.
Peter Watts‘ Maelstrom is the sequel to his Starfish (which I discussed here). Maelstrom envisions the possible extinction of the human species, and indeed of all terrestrial life, due to the competition of a nanobacterium brought back from the deep oceans. But the book is much more sympathetic to Lenie Clarke, the woman (from Starfish) who is the (not entirely unwitting) vector of this infection, than it is to the “corpses” (people with power, money, and influence) who are trying to stop it. Emotionally, the book emphasizes victimization, on the one hand, and bitter revenge on the other: these seem to be the only alternatives – since rebellion is largely futile, and not much more than a fashion statement anyway – to craven collaboration with the dominant powers.
But the book’s larger vision is more technopolitical than psychological. It envisions a world in which travel restrictions and other suspensions of civil liberties are the norm, less for explicitly political reasons, than for environmental ones, in order to contain the various biomedical and chemical disasters that Watts presents as a regular feature of mid-21st-century life. (This also includes the control of refugees, who have fled to North America to escape environmental disasters in Asia and other parts of the world). Foucault showed how our ubiquitous technologies of surveillance and control arose, in part, out of efforts to contain things like plague; Watts envisions these technologies returning to their roots, as it were, as a result of our rapacious destruction of the environment (as well as of continued terrorism in a time of extreme technologies).
There’s also a lot about re-engineering the human body, not just to allow physical adaptations to extreme conditions, but also to control behavior; this ranges from the implantation of false memories (of things like having been abused as a child), to implanting triggers for violence and aggression (very useful for breeding and training assassins), to neurochemical manipulations of emotions like guilt. The novel asks us to consider what “free will” might mean under such conditions (and it doesn’t allow us any easy answers).
And then there is the book’s vision of Maelstrom itself, which is the mid-21st-century descendant of the Internet. Instantaneous, worldwide wireless communication is the norm; but cyberspace is infested by “wildlife”, rogue programs of all sorts that are the rapidly-evolved descendants of the spam and viruses and worms of today. There’s a whole online ecology in Maelstrom, and it isn’t pretty: it’s characterized by vicious Darwinian competition. This “wildlife” doesn’t stop people from using the Net for information or for social contact, so much as it insinuates itself within those human uses. blurring lines between fact, rumor, and innuendo, and making all communication rife with suspicion and conflict. (Not to mention Watts’ brilliant and wholly original take on the nature, and the possibilities, of “artificial intelligence”…).
What makes this all work is the way Watts grounds his overall vision of apocalyptic dread (or better, vengeful, don’t-give-a-fuck bitterness) within a wholly concrete framework of techno/bio/politics.
Windows and Mirrors : Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, by Jay David Bolter and my former colleague Diane Gromala (who left the University of Washington, where I still teach, for Georgia Tech, at least in part because of UW’s stupidity and failure to give her the recognition she deserved) is a book about rethinking the philosophy of web design. It’s a theoretically informed book, but one that is aimed at an audience of Web designers rather than theorists, and hence is lucid and highly accessible. The book’s main thesis is that the value of “transparency” in Web and interface design has been greatly exaggerated. The interface should not simply disappear, as if it were just a window through which we see naked data. Rather, the interface should also be valued for itself; this is what makes “interactivity” possible, as well as being where aesthetic pleasure resides. Web design should be pleasurable, rather than just nakedly utilitarian in the way “usability” experts like Jakob Nielsen have recommended. A good interface is one that oscillates between usability and reflectivity, between being a “window” and being a “mirror.”
I don’t think that Bolter and Gromala’s thesis is new, at least among people who are familiar with theory. But rarely has this sort of argument been presented so elegantly and at the same time so accessibly (in doing both, the book practices what it preaches). Taking off from analyses of art works displayed at SIGGRAPH 2000, Windows and Mirrors shows how self-consciousness and self-reflection are intrinsic dimensions of digital media (indeed, of all media), and how trying (never successfully) to eliminate them in favor of a supposedly unmediated and direct experience has disastrous consequences. Along the way, they Bolter and Gromala affirm the importance of embodiment in digital or virtual experience, debunk totalizing notions of media “convergence,” and look further at the consequences of “remediation” (the way new media take up and alter older media — this was the title and subject of a previous book by Bolter, written in collaboration with Richard Grusin).
Web designers should definitely read this book. Anyone else with an interest in digital media should find it interesting and informative, if only for the clarity and focus it brings to its themes.
Windows and Mirrors : Interaction Design, Digital Art, and the Myth of Transparency, by Jay David Bolter and my former colleague Diane Gromala (who left the University of Washington, where I still teach, for Georgia Tech, at least in part because of UW’s stupidity and failure to give her the recognition she deserved) is a book about rethinking the philosophy of web design. It’s a theoretically informed book, but one that is aimed at an audience of Web designers rather than theorists, and hence is lucid and highly accessible. The book’s main thesis is that the value of “transparency” in Web and interface design has been greatly exaggerated. The interface should not simply disappear, as if it were just a window through which we see naked data. Rather, the interface should also be valued for itself; this is what makes “interactivity” possible, as well as being where aesthetic pleasure resides. Web design should be pleasurable, rather than just nakedly utilitarian in the way “usability” experts like Jakob Nielsen have recommended. A good interface is one that oscillates between usability and reflectivity, between being a “window” and being a “mirror.”
I don’t think that Bolter and Gromala’s thesis is new, at least among people who are familiar with theory. But rarely has this sort of argument been presented so elegantly and at the same time so accessibly (in doing both, the book practices what it preaches). Taking off from analyses of art works displayed at SIGGRAPH 2000, Windows and Mirrors shows how self-consciousness and self-reflection are intrinsic dimensions of digital media (indeed, of all media), and how trying (never successfully) to eliminate them in favor of a supposedly unmediated and direct experience has disastrous consequences. Along the way, they Bolter and Gromala affirm the importance of embodiment in digital or virtual experience, debunk totalizing notions of media “convergence,” and look further at the consequences of “remediation” (the way new media take up and alter older media — this was the title and subject of a previous book by Bolter, written in collaboration with Richard Grusin).
Web designers should definitely read this book. Anyone else with an interest in digital media should find it interesting and informative, if only for the clarity and focus it brings to its themes.
Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young, is a collection of columns that originally appeared in the music magazine The Wire, dealing with the backgrounds and developments of 20th century experimental music. All in all, I found it a useful volume. If some of the essays are little more than lists strung together with anecdotes, they are at least useful lists. And a number of the essays are truly brilliant and thought-provoking (especially those by Erik Davis, on “the esoteric origins of the phonograph,” Marcus Boon, on the history of drones, Peter Shapiro, on turntablism, and the always insightful David Toop, on a number of subjects .
Still, Undercurrents only intimates, without really discussing, the questions in this realm that most interest me. How important will 20th century experimental currents (whether those of the dadaists and futurists in the first half of the century, or those of John Cage in the second) continue to be in the changed technological and socio-political climate of the 21st? (Might not it be time to leave them all behind?) In what ways are technological experiments with sound charting new, ‘posthuman’ ways of being, or at least possibilities of new perceptions, as Kodwo Eshun argues? What relevance, if any, does the old high/low distinction have in this context (or even the distinction between more fringe and more mainstream pop music, when Timbaland is arguably more experimental – in any meaningful sense of that word – than, say Sonic Youth)? And is there any useful way of hooking up the discussion about formal experimentation with discussions about the socio-cultural dimensions of music, e.g. questions of race in the US? (since both these dimensions are unavoidably important).
I seriously mean all these as open questions, ones I haven’t begun to work out for myself.
Undercurrents: The Hidden Wiring of Modern Music, edited by Rob Young, is a collection of columns that originally appeared in the music magazine The Wire, dealing with the backgrounds and developments of 20th century experimental music. All in all, I found it a useful volume. If some of the essays are little more than lists strung together with anecdotes, they are at least useful lists. And a number of the essays are truly brilliant and thought-provoking (especially those by Erik Davis, on “the esoteric origins of the phonograph,” Marcus Boon, on the history of drones, Peter Shapiro, on turntablism, and the always insightful David Toop, on a number of subjects .
Still, Undercurrents only intimates, without really discussing, the questions in this realm that most interest me. How important will 20th century experimental currents (whether those of the dadaists and futurists in the first half of the century, or those of John Cage in the second) continue to be in the changed technological and socio-political climate of the 21st? (Might not it be time to leave them all behind?) In what ways are technological experiments with sound charting new, ‘posthuman’ ways of being, or at least possibilities of new perceptions, as Kodwo Eshun argues? What relevance, if any, does the old high/low distinction have in this context (or even the distinction between more fringe and more mainstream pop music, when Timbaland is arguably more experimental – in any meaningful sense of that word – than, say Sonic Youth)? And is there any useful way of hooking up the discussion about formal experimentation with discussions about the socio-cultural dimensions of music, e.g. questions of race in the US? (since both these dimensions are unavoidably important). And, how do we situate all these musical developments in the context of the larger McLuhanesque changes in sensibility that “electronic culture,” now in digital form, continues to bring us?
I seriously mean all these as open questions, ones I haven’t begun to work out for myself. Recent books and articles by Eshun, by Simon Reynolds, by Jonathan Sterne (from appearances – I haven’t read it yet), and by Alex Weheliye (warning: may not be accessible except through a college library or some other such gateway) have begun to tackle these questions, but there is still a lot of work to do – not to mention, of course, the continuing inventions by musicians themselves.
China Mieville’s The Tain is a novella, of 70 or so pages, most easily found in Peter Crowther’s anthology, Cities (UK only). It’s an eerie tale, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about the fauna of mirrors. The mirror people, Borges writes, used to be free, but when they invaded our earth they were imprisoned behind their mirrors, and forced by magic to imitate even the least of our gestures. One day, however, Borges continues, the magic will wear off, and the mirror people will escape the mirrors and invade our world…
Mieville’s novella imagines the aftermath of that invasion. It’s partly an uncanny account (reminiscent of a number of last-man science fiction texts) of the horror that ensues for the few human survivors; and partly a poetic meditation on what it might mean to lose resemblance. If we were to lose our reflections, what would become of us? And what would happen to the reflections, when they were no longer constrained to take our own forms upon themselves? On one side, it’s a story of self-alienation; on the other, of an otherness that offers us no common measure by which we could apprehend and describe it. Nonetheless, these two sides do communicate with one another. To say more would spoil the surprises of this beautifully luminous text. (I use the word luminous, even though – or rather precisely because – the tale is awash in strange descriptions of a “hard” light, a light that “was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth”, being without reflections;”no light rebounded, there were no specular highlights”).
China Mieville’s The Tain is a novella, of 70 or so pages, most easily found in Peter Crowther’s anthology, Cities (UK only). It’s an eerie tale, based on Jorge Luis Borges’ fable about the fauna of mirrors. The mirror people, Borges writes, used to be free, but when they invaded our earth they were imprisoned behind their mirrors, and forced by magic to imitate even the least of our gestures. One day, however, Borges continues, the magic will wear off, and the mirror people will escape the mirrors and invade our world…
Mieville’s novella imagines the aftermath of that invasion. It’s partly an uncanny account (reminiscent of a number of last-man science fiction texts) of the horror that ensues for the few human survivors; and partly a poetic meditation on what it might mean to lose resemblance. If we were to lose our reflections, what would become of us? And what would happen to the reflections, when they were no longer constrained to take our own forms upon themselves? On one side, it’s a story of self-alienation; on the other, of an otherness that offers us no common measure by which we could apprehend and describe it. Nonetheless, these two sides do communicate with one another. To say more would spoil the surprises of this beautifully luminous text. (I use the word luminous, even though – or rather precisely because – the tale is awash in strange descriptions of a “hard” light, a light that “was oppressive: it scoured colours of depth”, being without reflections;”no light rebounded, there were no specular highlights”).
Gilbert Simondon (1926-1987) is another obscure French philosopher championed by Gilles Deleuze. I’ve just finished reading his book L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique. (The Individual and its Physico-biological Individuation; It doesn’t seem to have been translated into English, aside from the Introduction which appeared in Zone 6: Incorporations). And once again, as with other forgotten thinkers recommended by Deleuze, Simondon has proved a revelation, both for his influence upon Deleuze, and for what his own thought suggests.
Gilbert Simondon (1926-1987) is another obscure French philosopher championed by Gilles Deleuze. I’ve just finished reading his book L’individu et sa genese physico-biologique. (The Individual and its Physico-biological Individuation; It doesn’t seem to have been translated into English, aside from the Introduction which appeared in Zone 6: Incorporations). And once again, as with other forgotten thinkers recommended by Deleuze, Simondon has proved a revelation, both for his influence upon Deleuze, and for what his own thought suggests.
Continue reading “Gilbert Simondon”
Chester Brown’s graphic novel Louis Riel, which he has been working on and publishing in serial form since 1999, is finally done, and published as a single volume. I couldn’t be happier…
Chester Brown’s graphic novel Louis Riel, which he has been working on and publishing in serial form since 1999, is finally done, and published as a single volume. I couldn’t be happier…
Continue reading “Louis Riel”
In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. So it is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses” that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology.
In today’s Science section of The New York Times, there’s an article about so-called “Darwinian literary studies,” which purports to find confirmation of evolutionary psychology in works of literature. Female college students were given two passages from Sir Walter Scott, one describing one of Scott’s “dark heroes, rebellious and promiscuous,” and the other describing one of Scott’s “proper heroes, law-abiding and monogamous.” And lo and behold, it turned out that “the women preferred the proper heroes for long-term unions,” but said that the dark heroes “appealed to them most for short-term affairs.”
The psychologist who did this study says that it “demonstrates that the distinction between long-term and short-term mating strategies” postulated by evolutionary psychology “is instinctive.” The reasoning seems to be that only biological “instinct” could explain the response to a two-centuries-old text by women today.
Of course, this is nonsense. Nobody who knows anything about the history of popular culture, or for that matter who has ever gone to the movies or watched TV, will be the least bit surprised that the stereotypes that Scott drew upon, and contributed to, two hundred years ago are still stereotypes today. The cliches and commonplaces that the evolutionary psychologists draw upon when they make their theories are the same ones that Scott drew upon when he wrote his novels. The study proves nothing whatsoever, because it is completely tautological; it is just like Wittgenstein’s witticism about the man who bought several copies of the newspaper in order to assure himself that what it said was true.
Actually, I think that there is a use for Darwinism in literary studies. But it is not this drivel about literature confirming the hoariest cliches about innate instinct and male/female behavior. It is rather what Morse Peckham suggested years ago: that mutation due to “accident, or chance, or randomness” plays a crucial part in cultural innovation, just as it does in biological evolution. It is “the brain’s capacity to produce random responses,” Peckham says, that causes “the indetermination in human behavior of response to any given stimulus”; this indetermination, in turn, is why meanings can never be fixed once and for all (as the deconstructionists are always reminding us), why we have cultural variability and cultural change, and why no society succeeds in totally controlling the behavior of its members. Continual mutation, not a fixed, innate “human nature,” is the lesson that literary study can profitably extract from biology. And it is by drawing on these Darwinian lessons about mutation that Peckham anticipated most of what theorists like Derrida and Foucault said, only without the European metaphysical baggage.
Nalo Hopkinson‘s new novel, The Salt Roads, is, I think, the best book she has done. Rather than fantastic fiction set in future (Brown Girl in the Ring) or alternative (Midnight Robber) worlds, The Salt Roads is a work of historical fiction, albeit a “magical realist” rather than a naturalistic one. It weaves together the stories of three black women from different places and times: Mer, a slave on a plantation in 18th century Haiti; Meritet, slave/prostitute in 4th-century Alexandria, who ends up becoming a kind of saint (claimed by the Christians though not really one of them); and Jeanne Duvall, for many years Charles Baudelaire’s mistress. All three are inhabited, at one point or another by the loa/goddess Ezili (I think – the word “loa” is never actually used in the text), whose free-floating voice and perspective provide a counterpoint to those of the three women…
Nalo Hopkinson‘s new novel, The Salt Roads, is, I think, the best book she has done. Rather than fantastic fiction set in future (Brown Girl in the Ring) or alternative (Midnight Robber) worlds, The Salt Roads is a work of historical fiction, albeit a “magical realist” rather than a naturalistic one. It weaves together the stories of three black women from different places and times, who each has her own inclinations and moods: Mer, a slave on a plantation in 18th century Haiti, who does not live to see liberation; Meritet, slave/prostitute in 4th-century Alexandria, who ends up becoming a kind of saint (claimed by the Christians though not really one of them); and Jeanne Duvall, for many years Charles Baudelaire’s mistress. All three women are inhabited, at one point or another by a spirit, the loa/goddess Ezili (I think – the word “loa” is never actually used in the text), whose free-floating voice and perspective provide a counterpoint to those of the three women. (There are also a few passages written in an omniscient third person).
The Salt Roads is a dense and passionate book, fluctuating between visionary hopes of revolution and a better world, and the grimly pragmatic necessity of negotiating possibilities of resignation at least, and perhaps even flashes of happiness, in oppressive and straightened circumstances. Hopkinson’s work is similar to a number of other recent books by other black women authors (the book jacket blurbs compare her to Toni Morrison and Edwige Danticat); but what’s unique to her is the particular voice that speaks in this book: or perhaps I should say voice(s), because of the way she/it is both one and many; the transversal communication of the three women through Ezili, in a way that doesn’t absorb them into one (they never become aware of one another), but also doesn’t permit them to remain in isolation from one another, is what gives this novel its emotional resonance, as it reminds its readers of what black women have historically had to face (and to a great extent, still do) in a way that is necessarily unfamiliar to white male readers such as myself; but also without giving a simplistic, inspirational message of fortitude and strength in the face of adversity, which is something many white (and a few black as well) readers like to get from black women’s texts.
I’m describing this novel from the outside, I fear, having read it in constant consciousness that it is not addressed to me; but the strength of The Salt Roads, I think, resides precisely in its outsideness, its indirectness, its non-address. This means, among other things, that it cannot be pigeonholed as an exercise in “identity politics” – even as it also (rightly) rejects the way that accusations of “identity politics” are often a cover, and a crass excuse, for ignoring and dismissing the injuries of class, race, and gender altogether.
Nothing’s really resolved in this book, precisely as nothing’s really resolved in the course of history (situations shift, and their problems may be forgotten but are not resolved/redeemed for good). All three women end by finding a sort of happiness, but not one that erases the scars of the past, or changes the conditions that produced all that suffering. What we’re left with, instead, is a series of flashes, or glimpses, of happiness and pain, of beauty and horror, of ecstatic (and not-so-ecstatic) sexuality, and of the small details of everyday life, in 19th century France, 18th century Haiti, 4th century Alexandria and Palestine. This book is a journey, not for the sake of some goal or final resting point, but for the sake of the journey itself.
Starfish, by Peter Watts, is a dark and brooding SF novel that takes place mostly in the deep ocean. Human beings are surgically modified so that they can breathe underwater, and survive the immense pressures of the deep ocean. They work and repair the machinery that harvests geothermal energy from volcanic rifts on the ocean floor. But it turns out that only people with very particular psychopatholgies, perpetrators and/or victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, are able to stand the claustrophobic, almost lightless deep-sea environment without going crazy….
Starfish, by Peter Watts, is a dark and brooding SF novel that takes place mostly in the deep ocean. Human beings are surgically modified so that they can breathe underwater, and survive the immense pressures of the extreme deep. They work and repair the machinery that harvests geothermal energy from volcanic rifts on the ocean floor, to serve the world’s ever-greater energy needs. But it turns out that only people with very particular psychopatholgies, perpetrators and/or victims of domestic violence and sexual abuse, are able to stand the claustrophobic, almost lightless deep-sea environment without going crazy. Actually, they don’t just endure it; they love it. Sexual pathology leads to psychobiological metamorphosis, under the influence of an unfamiliar and stressful environment. Add to this telepathic empathy, “smart gels” (computing devices made out of living, functioning human neurons), alternative biologies, (justified) political paranoia, and an apocalyptic vision of the big (Richter 9.5 or so) subduction earthquake that is due to occur one of these days on the Juan de Fuca rift, leading to massive destruction in the Pacific Northwest (where I live). Without ever departing from the (seeming) plausibility of hard SF, Watts delivers a striking vision of a posthuman future – or more precisely of several disconcerting, mutually intersecting posthuman futures at once. Starfish is deeply pessimistic, but also, in a strange way, fiercely affirmative (though the metamorphosed future it affirms is not one that most of us would find sustainable, let alone comfortable).