Natural History

Robson, Justina. Natural History. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2003. For other publication, translation, awards and nominations, and reviews, see Internet Speculative Fiction Database, as of November 2022, here.[1]

In the blurb for the MP3 CD, we are asked to "Imagine a world" where "Half-human, half-machine, Voyager Isol was as beautiful as a coiled scorpion – and just as dangerous. Her claim that she’d found a distant but habitable earthlike planet was welcome news to the rest of the Forged. But it could mean the end of what was left of the humanity who’d created and once enslaved them."[2] We're not sure scorpions actually coil, but the blurb succeeds in identifying a cyborg story.

Advertised as a Google Book: "Alongside the seed-forms of the Unevolved (ordinary humans) live and work the Augmented, people who have been forged, not born. Nonetheless the Augmented are human beneath their vast and complex biotechnological bodies which allow them to live deep in the oceans and out in space. As far as they`re concerned, however, the old ties of blood and genes may just be ancient history. When a new solar system is found, containing an Earth-like world, full of abandoned alien cities and devoid of intelligent life, the Augmented see it as their Forge-right to claim this place as a homeworld. After all, the aliens who once lived there have followed the same path beyond the limits of genetics and organics, adapting themselves to new environments, and heading for the frontiers of deep space."[3]

Discussed in Mitchell Kaye's "Bodies That Matter: Science Fiction, Technoculture, and the Gendered Body"[4]

My suggestion here is that sf allows for the production of radical (gendered and un-gendered, hybrid, cyborgian) bodies that impel us to reflect upon our own understanding of “the body” and upon the ways in which bodies are viewed and regulated in the social world. The texts by Cadigan[5][6] and Robson that I will go on to consider focus on the body’s relationship with technologies that augment and alter it, intervene in its workings, and so modify the subject’s perception of how the physical self is regulated.

RDE, finishing, 8Nov22