Animals in the Database: Text, Space, and Communal Being in Tobi Hirotaka’s Science Fiction Literature

The cover image for Tobi Hirotaka’s 2016 collection of short stories Jisei no Yume (Autogenic Dreaming) by illustrator agoera features a female figure standing on a bleached, blasted plain (Figure 1). She faces away from the viewer, gazing at the far horizon and the massive white whale that floats above it in front of an orange-tinged sky. Like many science fiction illustrations, this one captures its viewer’s interest with a surreal space; spaces of all kinds have indeed been a consistent concern of science fiction from its early days. J. G. Ballard famously characterized the New Wave movement in science fiction (SF) as being marked by a shift in interest from outer space to inner space, from neocolonialist narratives of exoplanetary exploration and conquest to more existentialist concerns of the individual subject and its everyday life under conditions of postmodern capital.¹ Cyberpunk fiction, in turn, thematized the digital environs of cyberspace, endowing proliferating computer technologies with an interior expansiveness through which digitized human consciousness could move. Science fiction’s spaces are the milieux through which its subjects are defined, be it through the extraterrestrial or digital colonial frontiers of Golden Age SF and cyberpunk, the coercive systems of postmodern paranoia in New Wave SF, or the hardscrabble state of nature of post-apocalypse narratives.

As the cover image signals, Tobi’s short stories, too, take space as an organizing concern. What I will be terming the “Autogenic Dreaming” tetralogy consists of a novelette and three accompanying short stories, first published between 2009 and 2015. The first, the eponymous “Autogenic Dreaming,” garnered immediate acclaim, winning Tobi the 2010 Seiun Award, one of the two biggest SF awards in Japan, for Best Short Story.² The four texts that make up the tetralogy each provide a different vignette surrounding the central motif of the digital space that serves as the setting for “Autogenic Dreaming”— what Tobi calls “digital textspace” (denshiteki moji kūkan)— as well as the entities that traverse and inhabit it. Tobi’s attention is focused almost entirely on issues of digital ontology, asking what the nature of being and becoming is in an entirely digital realm. Tobi’s uniquely ecological approach to questions of digital space and digital life point the way toward new understandings of subjectivity in digital society.

Figure 1.

Cover image of Jisei no yume 『自生の夢』by TOBI Hirotaka 飛浩隆. Published by Kawade Shobo Shinsha 河出書房新社, Tokyo, 2016. Artist credited as agoera, whose website is http://agoera.org/.

Dreaming Up Textspace

“Autogenic Dreaming” was the earliest published story in the tetralogy, but narratively comes third in the events depicted. Its three companion pieces each explore further the implications of digital space and digital life through vignettes surrounding the life and death of one of its protagonists, the brilliant digital poet Alice Wong. In so doing, they add more fine-grained nuance to the “Autogenic Dreaming” model of digital textspace and the nonhuman subjects within it. The narratively earliest story, “#ginnosaji” (#silverspoon, 2012), details the invention of Cassys— algorithmic AI text programs— by the newborn Alice’s father, Richard, and the universal computing and network infrastructures that enable them. “Kōya ni te” (In the wastes, 2012) picks up five years later at a children’s camp where young Alice and her friend Katsuya play games with their Cassys and experiment with the kinds of creative generation that are possible with the digital agents. They demonstrate the potential of the Cassys to be more than simple information retrieval and reference tools, in particular their capacity to collaborate with their human users in a mode of collective artistic practice. “Yasei no shisō” (The savage expression, 2015, a reference to Mizumi Ryō’s 1982 short story “Yasei no yume”) skips ahead to a few years after the events of “Autogenic Dreaming” and Alice’s death, to find her friend Katsuya and her brother Jack working to contain destructive “stray poems” that Alice left as part of an unfinished project in digital space, and which now...