The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction (review)

The way in which contemporary American novelists and filmmakers employ concepts of science and technology in their art is a subject worthy of study. But not all attempts to do so are of equal value. A few of the essays in this book—a compilation of papers presented at a conference on "Science, Technology, and the Humanities in Recent American Fiction," held in Paderborn, Germany, in May 2003—hit the mark. Others do not, and collapse under the weight of that Orwellian jargon English professors feel compelled to use whenever they discuss "science" and "technology" in public. Years back, in 1959, C. P. Snow speculated that the divide between the humanities and the physical and natural sciences, the "two cultures," was real, and growing, and would never be bridged. Alas, Snow was right. What he said in 1959 is even truer today; if anything, the gap has widened. It seems the best we can do, those would-be bridge builders among us, is to end up speaking a kind of Jacques Derrida–inspired broken English, suitable for fans of Finnegans Wake, but less so for readers who appreciate substance and clarity.

There are three groups of essays in this book. The first, "The Holodeck in the Garden: Informatics in the Age of the Posthuman," actually contains a jargon-free essay by Curtis White, one of two novelists in the group (Carl Djerassi is the other). White's essay centers on a NOVA episode, "Beyond Human," that championed a bionic future of "wired-torsos" (p. 132) and chip-infested brains. NOVA is optimistic about this sort of future; White is not. Another essay, by Christian Berkemeier, compares Steven Spielberg's Minority Report with Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma in order to arrive at an understanding of "emergent phenomena of knowledge formation, perception, and de-centering of the subject" (p. 108). There are three essays about novelists: Neal Stephenson, William Gibson, and Richard Powers. Two essays deal with more abstruse concepts. One of them, "Are Rhizomes Scale-Free? Network Theory and Contemporary American Fiction," only purports to be about literature. The other, "Of Metal Ducks, Embodied Iduros, and Autopoietic Bridges: Tales of Intelligent Materialism in the Age of Artificial Life," by Hanjo Berressem, concerns the mechanical duck in Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon, and its famous predecessor, Vaucanson's 1730s defecating copper duck, a contraption known and loved by students of technology the world over.

Section two, "The Technology in/of Contemporary American Fiction," begins with "Mech/Shaper; or Varieties of Prosthetic Fiction: Matthews, Sorrentino, Acker and Others," by Brian McHale. This article takes seriously a lot of fiction that is recyclable, but does embrace the captivating idea that "literature itself is a technology" (p. xx). Among the other pieces in this section are "Anxieties of Obsolescence: DeLillo's Cosmopolis" and "From Intertextuality to Virtual Reality: Robert Coover's A Night at the Movies and Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash." The titles explain what the essays are about, pretty much.

Section three, "Science in Contemporary American Fiction/Contemporary Science-in-Fiction," aims to study the ways in which "literature registers recent changes in scientific thinking" (p. xxiii). The collection ends with an essay by coeditor Peter Freese on entropy, in which he claims that "an adequate understanding of an ever more important segment of contemporary American fiction presupposes a thorough knowledge of the major variants of the Second Law" (p. 350). This is a large claim, but Freese, in tracing the use of "entropy" from Lord Kelvin to Pynchon and Havelock Ellis (among others), makes a sound argument.

The nineteen essays in this collection act as a contemporary "two culture" barometer. Students of literature and technology, if they aren't thwarted by confections like "the Author is a construction of identity in the collusion of the text and the critic" (p. 29) or "[texts] are artifacts whose...