Popular Culture Review Vol. 12, No. 1, February 2001 | Page 145

Machines for Ultimate Questions 141 transcendence as a recurrent symbolic and beyond-reaching institution. Let us recall Case from Gibson’s now legendary Neurom ancer, a successful console cowboy who manages to break the ‘ice’ of the modern fortress Tessier-Ashpool, yet he is a vulnerable and tragic person from the edge of physical survival. The money which is accumulated on his Swiss bank account as a reward for some successful business in cyberspace, he will spend on a new pancreas and liver, i.e., for the urgent salvation of his ultimately endangered existence. He is no full-blooded James Bond and once the mission has been completed, there will be no holiday with beauties awaiting him on the Seychelles, but, as the first thing, the journey to the hospital to get the transplants. Alex in Bruce Sterling’s H eavy Weather ( \994 ) , too, is sickly, fragile, a hero in need of medical intervention. That is why at the end of the novel his sister and rescuer Jane declares their common fate: “We’re not lucky, Alex. This is not a luck time. We’re alive, and I’m glad we’re alive, but we’re people of disaster. We’ll never truly be happy or safe, never. Never, ever.” (Sterling 1994: 275) Neither Case nor Alex are in any way a version of Rambo, and the same holds true for a number of other characters of contemporary SF. But, and this is the most important here, the vulnerability, fragility and tragic condition of the characters as “people of disaster”, who range from the characters found in Hoffmann and Shelley through to those found in Gibson and Sterling, is indeed a prerequisite for the shift in orientation mentioned at the beginning of this text, i. e. the move away from fascination with the achievements of the new technologies (which, however, is still dominant now in a number of cases) towards technologies which sustain the context for articulating the first and the ultimate issues of man as a person and social being. Encounters with technologies—often also in the form of natural disasters and consequences of misconceived social Darwinism and apocalyptic events—are used as a screen which grants insight into the clea r space where the issues of the person, freedom, self-realisation, attitude towards death, fellow-humans and transcendence are articulated. All of a sudden, the most varied, extremely pointed and conflicting options stand side by side: birth, death, sex, transcendence, apocalypse, salvation, pain, happiness, transgressive action. And this background is also extremely productive for language itself, since the extraordinary, the deviant, and the reaching beyond may be adequately described in language which itself is dri ven to its extremes. The issues concerning the characters in these texts, seen in the framework of various theories of post-modernity, point towards the postmodern destabilisation of the individual’s identity. In question are the issues of the individual as merely a software (RAM)construct, virtual agent and net clone (at this point let us recall Mark and his life beyond contingency with flesh in the novel by Pat Cadigan, Synners (1991)). Furthermore, there is the mind/body problem in the sense of the mind/network problem, the issue of the body without organs (the concept found in Deluze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus) and of organs without the body (Arthur