Bodies of Tomorrow: Technology, Subjectivity, Science Fiction.

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

As science fiction has become more sophisticated, complex, and literary, it has demanded an equally sophisticated criticism. Sherryl Vint’s Bodies of Tomorrow definitely meets that need. In its careful analyses of works by Gwyneth Jones, Octavia Butler, Iain M. Banks, William Gibson, Pat Cadigan, Raphael Carter, Jack Womack, and Neal Stephenson, Bodies of Tomorrow takes as its starting point Donna Haraway’s comment that “Science fiction is generally concerned with the interpenetration of boundaries of problematic selves and unexpected others.”

Questions “about identity, subjectivity, and embodiment” form the core arguments of this brilliant and evocative study. Vint brings a complex reading of postmodern and post-structural theory to bear on the fiction her study explores, finding innovative ways to utilize a wide range of various and often contradictory approaches so as to provide illuminating readings of a number of the most important recent works of science fiction. Even as the concept of the “post-human,” with its idealizing of some kind of “virtual and technological” augmentation of or escape from the “meat,” has entered the science fiction paradigm, Vint persuasively argues that the “body remains relevant to critical work and ‘real’ life.” Against the continuing legacy of Cartesian dualism, she states, “If we think of self as associated solely with mind, then technological changes to the body are not viewed as significant for human culture or human identity.” She shows how her texts complicate any such simple approach.

What makes Bodies of Tomorrow such a significant study (with science fiction as its critical object) is the way she is able to open up her texts to the complex questions that cultural, psychological, and textual theories present to human artistic practice. What the particularly acute science fiction she studies in Bodies of Tomorrow provides her is a group of intellectually provisionary visions of human possibility that we all approach with each passing day. Not just an important study of what its subtitle points to, Bodies of Tomorrow is an example of the best kind of criticism: carefully researched, provocatively argued, and written in an elegant and lively style.