Resource 1:

“Scanners Live In Vain” by Cordwainer Smith

“Scanners Live In Vain” by Cordwainer Smith is one of the first modern science fiction short stories. In addition, it is one of the earliest cyborg stories ever written. Anticipating Klines and Clyne by a decade, Smith writes of the need for cybernetically enhanced space explorers. While some of the details of the story, the use of clams, for instance, seem silly now, the underlying insights granted to the reader into the issues of early cybernetic writing is undeniable. In the world of the story, the only means of space travel is for the human travelers to be in cryogenic sleep and the ships to be run by men, called scanners, the most honorable of the habermen. These scanners have to have their bodies disconnected in order to endure the “pain of space.” A brain trapped in an alien shell that was once familiar, the scanners must oversee the maintenance of their ships and their own bodies through a complicated array of instrumentation implanted in their chests. The plot of the story concerns the scanners dealing with their own redundancy when a scientist announces that he has found a solution to the pains of space.

Smith reveals many of the concerns about cyborgs during the 1950s and 60s. Authors grappled with the notion of whether or not it would be possible to remain human after so much technology was implanted into the body. Smith makes this very apparent to the reader by making his scanners minds trapped in a body that is nothing more than another system to control. It was feared, during this time, that this is the path down which all of humanity would walk.

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Resource 2:

Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep by Philip K. Dick

Written in 1968, Philip K. Dick’s novel—Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep—is one of the most important cyborg novels. It is set in a decaying San Francisco of the future, as the fallout from a nuclear war swirls through the air. As an incentive to get people to move off-world and maintain the human race, all colonists are issued android slaves, which are only differentiated from humans by their inability to empathize. The androids in Dick’s novel, it should be noted, are more akin to cyborgs in that they appear to be hybrids of genetically engineered components and machine technology. For some reason, the androids continually escape from the stars and return to Earth. The novel’s main character, Rick Deckard, is assigned to hunt down and kill such rogue androids. After a large escape, Deckard must hunt down several rogue androids.

The novel charts Rick Deckard’s battle to maintain order by defining himself as human and the androids as technology, just as he finds his own ability to differentiate himself from his prey crumbling. In the novel’s first chapter, Dick presents an argument between Deckard and his wife as an escalation of dialing different moods on an electronic mood control system. The people in Dick’s novel are becoming more machine-like, just as the machines become indistinguishable from their creators. While in the end of the novel Deckard is able to adequately reinforce his humanity, he finds he has more in common with the androids’ desire to live free on a blighted Earth than their masters who have left home for a new life amongst the stars. This novel is one of the first to grapple with the increasing inability to differentiate between human and machine.

Resource 3:

“The Cyborg Manifesto” by Donna Haraway

Donna Haraway’s 1991 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto,” details a new mode of being for women, and for all of humanity, in the increasingly technologized modern era. Haraway finds pathways to freedom from within the “informatics of domination” that is assembled by the techno-industrial modern nation, and the metaphor she uses is the cyborg. Suggesting that “the boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,” Haraway dismisses many of the concerns over cybernetics in science fiction’s past and argues that these very anxieties, mainly of the breakdown of such boundaries as human/machine and body/other, are what can enable the informationally and economically disenfranchised of the world to “contest for meanings, as well as for forms of power and pleasure in technologically mediated societies” (Haraway 149 & 154). She uses the cyborg, because, as a hybrid of machine and human, the cyborg is free to move within the lived experiences of traditional society and the high technology of the information age. Where, classically, the cyborg was “about the final imposition of a grid of control on the planet,” Haraway argues that through the embracing of hybrid identity, the proliferation of descriptive adjectives that compose a person’s everyday identity, society can be freed from “origin myths” that long for “fulfillment in apocalypse” (Haraway 154 & 175). With examples drawn from science fiction and constant allusions to nuclear war, multinational corporations, and artificial life, Haraway’s essay often resembles the science fiction from which her central metaphor is drawn. More importantly, especially to the field of science fiction, the essay codified feelings present in works by writers such as William Gibson and Joanna Russ and altered the symbolism of the cyborg within SF literature. By positing a future in which “cyborgs can subvert the apocalypse of returning to nuclear dust,” Haraway presents a world in which welcoming the embrace of technological hybridity yields salvation (Haraway 151). No longer is the cyborg a metaphor for the loss of humanity but, instead, for the species’ redemption.