The Body Politic in Brazilian Science Fiction: Implants and Cyborgs
Ginway, M. Elizabeth. "The Body Politic in Brazilian Science Fiction: Implants and Cyborgs." New Boundaries in Political Science Fiction. Donald M. Hassler and Clyde Wilcox, editors. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina Press, 2008: [198]-222.[1]
Citing Bruce Sterling Preface to Mirrorshades: The Cyberpunk Anthology, Ginway notes that "In Brazilian science fiction the transformation of a human being into a cyborg reveals a sense of violation that is generally lacking in Anglo-American texts, despite fears about corporeal and mental invasion. In Anglo-American works the escape from the body into the virtual world [VR] is viewed as liberating, as is the modification of the body by technology." In this essay, Ginway explores
the portrayal of the Brazilian body politic as a border region between a sense of wholeness and integrity of national identity and the invasion of digital technology and globalization. The ambivalent portrait of an altered human (one implanted with electronic devices) and the cyborg [...] in Brazilian science fiction is partially due to the perception of technology and globalization by authors writing on the economic periphery. (p. 199)
In a work like William Gibson's Neuromancer, a cowboy-hacker's figurative flying around cyberspace is liberation. "Conversely, in Brazilian cyberpunk, there are no trips into virtual space" (pp. 199-200), and implants are usually presented and/or perceived as invasive.
Works discussed include
Henrique Floy's 1991 "Feliz Natal, vinte bilhões!" ("Merry Christmas, Twenty Billion") — voluntary brain implant for news media, with allusion to THE TERMINATOR (1984).
Ivanir Calado's 1992 "O altar dos nossos coraçōes" ("The Altar of Our Hearts") — erotic brain implant to improve (elite) male sexual performance (implant comes with a bomb).
Cid Fernandez's 1993 "Judgments" offers "a more positive portrayal" of "The cyborg," in a novella in the film noir tradition, especially BLADE RUNNER: "[...] androids (robots that look like humans) symbolize the perfect assembly-line and office workers in the new global order. [...] As the text unfolds it becomes clear that cyborgs possess human characteristics such as sympathy and flexibility that androids cannot hope to emulate" (pp. 202-03). The android/cyborg distinction is central to the story, with the cyborgs in a sense representing "Brazilians, and androids, foreigners and outsiders" associated with "capitalism and the market value of the perfect body and the efficiency of robotic production" (pp. 203-04).
Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro's 1997 "Todo o Silicio do Mundo" ("All the Silicon in the World") — "a meditation by a soldier who appears to be an android [...] awaiting certain death at the hands of ruthless invading robots from outer space." But "he discovers that he is not a pure android but a type of cyborg, with a human body underneath all his mechanical armor" — and sensitive attitudes to which cf. and, Ginway asserts, definitely contrast the cyborg in Paul Verhoeven's ROBOCOP (1987) (p. 206).
Jusio Emilio Braz, "one of the few black science fiction writers in Brazil," offers "Genghis" in O universe é un pequeno espaço enter nós, an unpublished manuscript. The story "represents the cyborg in a more menacing way": not sensitive "like Lodi-Ribeiro's" but an entity that "has become all-powerful" in its time "on a moon of Titan," assigned "to terra-form it for human habitation" — during which time it grows into a giant" (to which we'll suggest a contrast with Ted Hughes's Iron Man|) since this cyborg becomes, in the vision of his creator/father "a hybrid colossus, with an infinite number of arms and nerve endings exuding a familiar and brilliant rigidity of metal, a huge unmistakable human mass," who kills its creator/father (a use and variation on the idea of "family ties"). Compared and contrasted with John Varley's 1984 novella "Press Enter," which see at link (Ginway, p. 207).
Conclusion holds that
In these stories about implanted humans and cyborgs, the use of technology illustrates the political crisis of a globalized Brazil [...]. In the case of the implant, technology represents an invasion of the body as if it [the implant] were a type of illness [...]. In the case of cyborgs with reproductive capabilities, it is as if the body was able to develop a type of tolerance of technology, "Brazilianizing" it [...] and incorporating it into the social body .More recent texts [...] reveal cyborgs who, being more machine than human, may initiate the possible extinction of humanity, while the treatmennt of the posthuman and the use of familial, biological, and cosmic ties reveal a body politic ready to open itself to the global age. (p. 209).
Stories discussed from Cosmos Latinos or handled in Ginway's Brazilian Science Fiction: Cultural Myths and Nationhood in the Land of the Future (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell UP, 2004).
RDE, finishing, 26Dec21