Cyber-Aesthetics, part one
The BBC recently—presumably to avoid a leak by the tabloid press—released the first publicity picture of the newly redesigned Cybermen, who will be menacing our screens in the second season of the new Doctor Who. It’s a good opportunity to ruminate on the shifting aesthetics of cyber-design over the last 40 years.
The Cybermen were Doctor Who’s first big—to borrow Iain M. Banks’ playful terminology—hegemonising swarm entities—creatures driven to bring others around to their own way of thinking by forcible bodily conversion. Their back-story played on contemporary fears of transplant surgery by positing a race of humanoids (from Earth’s missing twin planet, Mondas, no less) who, faced with their own extinction, replaced their own failing organs and limbs with mechanical devices, becoming inhuman and emotionless in the process. And to extend their numbers, they must go on do the same thing to anyone remotely interesting who they come across. Star Trek’s Borg are an obvious descendent.
In terms of the underlying science fictional ideas, the Cybermen were already old hat when they arrived in 1966, and, to anyone who’s read their Vinge or Banks or Stross, pretty damned creaky now—who cares about hacking off limbs and replacing them with mechanical implants now when you have consciousness uploads and neuro-hacking and singularities? But the aesthetics, the visualisation of these ideas, have always been striking—if not as staggeringly iconic as the pepperpot Daleks.
Over the next couple of days I’m going to review the major shifts in Cyber-design, and talk a bit about the cultural and semiotic evolution that occurred at each revision.
Your Comments
John Gunders writes:
“Creaky” maybe, but don’t dismiss the underlying horror of corporeal assimilation. Even in the age of consciousness uploads, what remains—-even if sick and dying—-is the original body that forms the connection with the flesh-and-blood human that was. I’m thinking Greg Egan here: the virtual human was called a “copy” and was considered expendable because the “original” still existed somewhere. True horror was when there could be no going back, because that connection with the past was gone.
The visceral still has a central place in human thought. The SF tropes hark back to the early-Modern concerns about cannibals and the horror of being consumed (literally) by the environment, and the invasion of the body by the alien or the machine. Possession or mind control is pretty scary, but only mutilation is truly monstrous.
Posted: 15 11 2005 - 12:42 | Permanent link to this comment
Nick Caldwell writes:
Good points. Maybe what I’m trying, unconsciously, to do is suggest that horror was amongst the only available discourses at the time of the Cybermen’s creation for thinking through the relationship between the body and the machine—that SF couldn’t productively imagine new-and-better ways of being (at least not SF produced for a mainstream British television audience in the 1960s)—and was therefore ultimately rather limiting. But that’s probably because I still sometimes want Doctor Who to be a bit more than an entertaining family horror-with-SF-flavouring TV show.
But, yes, hmmm… much to ponder. Thinking further, it’s obvious that a good deal of contemporary post-cyberpunk AI-oriented SF is using (fairly bloodless) horror to produce its aesthetic effects. Ken McLeod, for instance, is interesting here—he clearly doesn’t buy into strong AI, which is why most of his novels have mass AI genocide as a central plot point. And why he’s referred to uploading as a kind of Dilbert after-life. Which is horrifying enough.
Posted: 15 11 2005 - 13:22 | Permanent link to this comment
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