Rich Erlich, English 210

Rich Erlich, English 210.a 12 Aug. 1997

StGd Arachne

Draft 1.1: Study Guide for Lisa Mason's Arachne

1. Bibliographical citation (and brief summary).

Described by R. D. Erlich and T. P. Dunn's Clockworks: A Multimedia Bibliography of Works Useful for . . . the Human/Machine Interface in SF, as

A slightly kinder, gentler, and somewhat less bloody cyberpunk novel, with a human woman and female-gendered AI [Artificial Intelligence] sort-of robot as protagonists, "telespace" open to the arrival of archetypes, and ethical issues handled with insight. As in W. Gibson's Neuromancer series . . ., there is drug use, mega-firms, "transcendent" entities in cyberspace, and AI's, but their use is more serious here. The drugs work, all right, but can be dangerous; the mega-firm we see is a very nasty law firm; the transcendent entities are psychological and historical (plausibly and explicitly from the collective unconscious); and the AI's are relatively realistic serious-comic characters, including the featured, feminine AI, PR. Spinner. (NOTE: We follow the tradition of taking comedy seriously.)

2. CYBERPUNK/POSTMODERNISM:

A. Mississippi Review 47/48 (vol. 16.2-3 [1988]) was the special cyberpunk issue of that journal that later became Storming the Reality Studio: A Casebook of Cyberpunk and Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke UP, 1991). In it, the authors try to put cyberpunk fiction into a larger cultural context. I list below a number of works, people, and such that these critics have associated with "c-p," and/or postmodernism (which I'll abbreviate p-m or "po-mo" when I need to save space); presumably you know some of these works, artists, etc. and can get an idea from the parallels what c-p/p-m might be about (abbreviated, it sounds like a rescue technique . . .). The page numbers refer to MR 47/48:

The films Blade Runner, Videodrome, Brazil, The Hidden, RoboCop, Max Headroom; Laurie Anderson, Devo (as satire? taken straight?), David Bowie "in his Ziggie Stardust pose," "Mad-Maxish, heavy-metal rockers, MTV, the industrial performance-art of Mark Pauline and the Survival Research Laboratories" (8); cyberpunk's Godfather, William Burroughs, Thomas Pynchon, Samuel R. Delany (9); The Clash, Talking Heads; Meat Puppets (12); Alien; 1940s film noire detective movies with the "Big Heist" theme (14); "super-specificity of opening description in The Maltese Falcon (222); Jimi Hendrix (15).

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep (novel) (20); Connie Willis's "All My Darling Daughters" (22). Samuel Beckett, The Lost Ones; Kurt Vonnegut, "Tralfamadorian fiction" [Sirens of Titan and Slaughterhouse-Five]; J. McElroy, Plus; Stanislaw Lem, The Star Diaries; Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow; Don DeLillo, Ratner's Star; Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange; S. R. Delany, Dhalgren, R. Hoban, Ridley Walker, W. Burrough's Nova Express, The Soft Machine, The Ticket That Exploded (37). Escape from New York (220: cited by William Gibson).

B. "Postmodernism" came into general usage as a term from architecture, where it has a clear meaning; architects have a pretty fair idea of what "Modernism" means. Modernism would include art deco, the International Style, and big, streamlined buildings from NYC's The Empire State Building to Chicago's Sear's Tower. Okay, after the Sear's Tower, there's not a hell of a lot more you can do piling boxes one on top of another, so you have to do something different—and a quick look at some of the new, fancy buildings in metropolitan Chicago will show you that architects indeed are doing things that are different. So they went through Modernism and are now beyond/after that: postmodernism. It is less clear what "Modernism" means in literature.

About the time the term "p-m" was getting introduced, Peter Hall and I were asked what was new in the SF film, and we said it had something to do with architecture and tried to get some architects to talk to a meeting of the Society for Utopian Studies about Blade Runner and what we called "The Funkification of the Future" in SF films. This much is clear: Whether presenting that future as good or bad, older SF films presented a future that was modern: streamlined, uncluttered, clean, downright aseptic. In recent SF film that many critics call p-m, the setting, is crowded, highly textured, dark, dirty—like, funky. The conventions of film noir (the dark detective movie) are pushed to their limits: consider Blade Runner as a sequel to Roman Polanski's Chinatown. There is a mixture of styles, sometimes to a point where we're on what William Gibson calls "The Gernsback Continuum": e.g., the first two Batman movies. Whatever c-p and p-m might be, we see them in the movies mentioned above plus Dune, Aliens, Terminator, The Abyss; Repo Man, Brother from Another Planet, Buckeroo Bonzai; the Mad Max trilogy; in more "realistic" films of this sort we have plain p-m: e.g., Blue Velvet.

C. Kim Stanley Robinson, "Cyberpunk Cake" (MR47/48: 51):

One cup film noir, two tablespoons Blade Runner, one tablespoon James Bond, a dash of Delany, "several thousand micrograms" . . . of Dexedrine; mix thoroughly, cover . . . . Bake at full heat for three years, then let simmer. Serves two good writers and several hangers-on.

D. Some Excerpts from David Porush, "What is Cyberpunk" (MR47/48: 46-50).

It [the coming of various Apocalypses ca. 1999] has meant an End to meaning as you understand it. Postmodern literature and art has been long preparing you for this, rehearsing over and over again the axiological apocalypse ["end to meaning. Destruction of value"]. The meaning of postmodern was the papering over of meaninglessness and the hopelessness of such a project. Don't forget that Pynchon, Barth, . . . Vonnegut, . . . [and numerous other authors] all find this essentially amusing. . . . . Paradoxes and conundrums and irony and the breakdown of language are humorous. The collapse of logical systems of distinction, the breaking of barriers, the fall of orders of rationality, are all funny. We will laugh our way into the Cyberpunk Apocalypse, just as you know cyberpunks are laughing at us. That's why Gibson's cyberpunks in Neuromancer are cosmic jokesters. [Henri] Bergson said that the essence of comedy is watching people acting like machines. [Charlie] Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harpo [Marx].

Postmodernism and cybernetics were the two great intellectual movements of the post-war [World War II] era. Together they pointed to a new order . . . .

We become machines in order to grow less mechanical.

* * *

But know this: cybernetic fantasies, like this one you're reading, are inherently paranoid, and paranoia itself may be inherently cybernetic. In fact, [Sigmund] Freud in his best paper on paranoia . . . describes Daniel Paul Schreber, paradigmatic paranoid and prototypical cyberpunk, he believed the world was populated by "cursory contraptions" (read: Automata) and that he was the only flesh and blood man left alive.

E.. Istan Csicery-Ronay, "Cyberpunk and Neuroamnticism"(MR47/48: 266-78)

What cyberpunk . . . has going for it is a rich thesaurus of metaphors linking the organic and the electronic. . . . The advantages these metaphors have over the more deliberate and reflective symbols that usually go into . . . cybernetic fiction . . . is that they are embedded in the constantly shifting context of a global culture drawn into ever newer, ever stranger webs of communication command and control. The metaphors themselves have a life. And in the hands of a master, like Gibson, the fuzzy links can become a subtly constructed, but always merely implied, four-level hierarchy of evolving systems of information-processing, from the individual human being's biological processes and personality, through the total life of society, to nonliving artificial intelligences, and ultimately to new entities created out of those AIs [Artificial Intelligences]. In Neuromancer, each level of the hierarchy is meaningless to itself, yet it creates the material/informational conditions for the evolution of the next higher one, and all participate in a quasi-cosmic "dance of biz."

Cyberpunk is fundamentally ambivalent about the breakdown of the distinctions between human and machine . . . . [Almost always in c-p], the breakdown is initiated from outside, usually by . . . multinational capitalism's desire for something better than [fallible humans]. The villains come from the human corporate world, who use their great technical resources to create beings that program out the glitches of the human . . . [as in Alien, RoboCop, Videodrome]; in Neuromancer, the Tessier-Ashpool clan.

And yet, out of the anti-human evil that has created conditions intolerable for human life, comes some new situation. This new situation is then either the promise of an apocalyptic entrance into a new evolutionary synthesis of the human and the machine, or an all-encompassing hallucination in which true motives, and true affects [= emotions], cannot be known. * * *

In Gibson's world, human beings have nothing left but thrill. It is all that power can offer, but it is also—the ambivalence again—the only way to create new conditions, since old philosophical-moral considerations mean nothing in a world where one can plug in another's feelings or a [whole] personality-memory complex through "simstim" . . . [etc.].

So cyberpunks . . . write as if they are both victims of a life-negating system and the heroic adventurers of thrill. They can't help themselves, but their hip grace gets them through an amoral world, facing a future . . . beyond human influence, . . . where the only way to live is in speed, speed to avoid being caught in the web, and getting rubbed out by the Yakuza, the AIs, the androids, the new corporate entities bent on their own self-elaboration. Here the speed of thrill substitutes for affection, reflection, and care, which require room and leisure and relaxation; so there are no families, no art, no crafting . . . . (276)

All the ambivalent solutions of cyberpunk works are instances/myths of bad faith, since they completely ignore the question of whether some political controls over technology are desirable, if not exactly possible. Cyberpunk is then the apotheosis of bad faith, apotheosis of the postmodern.

I don't mean that as pejoratively as it sounds. . . . (277)

This romanticism does not repress "the meat" as the forebears did. This one has permitted itself enough distance to demand that "the meat" show its unruly self, show that it's not only not the enemy, [277] but that it's the victim . . . . It is helpless and sad against the powers of exteriorized mind—whose modes are the hard, cruel, gunmetal cold, spiky, and unyielding ways of self-proliferating hard stuff. The flesh is sad, and then some—romance is a case of nerves. (277-78)

* * *

Cyberpunk is the apotheosis of the postmodern, its truest and most consistent incarnation, bar none. It could easily have the same role in our world that romantic poetry had at the beginning the 19th century. Not that I'm happy about it. (MR47/48: 27-28).

3. UTOPIA/EUTOPIA/DYSTOPIA: The general term: "Utopia" = Good Place/No Place, and a narrative about such a place. An unambiguous good place: eutopia; a bad place: dystopia. Arachne is a dystopian novel; i.e., it tells a story about characters in a bad world. As in a dystopia, we are very much interested in the world; it's a novel, however, and we are more interested in the characters.

4. Setting: California, almost all in the Bay Area (although one that's been changed by big quakes).

Time: Middle of the 21st century.

5. Main Characters:

Carly Nolan: Hot-shot young female human attorney with Ava & Rice.

Pr. Spinner: A female-gendered, mobile Artificial Intelligence (AI), earning her living as a prober of human "perimeters" in telespace.

D. Wolfe: Aging male associate (not yet partner) at Ava & Rice, specializing in labor law. Note his name (changed from that of his parents).

6. Main Thematic Question(s) for Me: Has Lisa Mason in Arachne managed to create a po-mo, c-p world where a machine can learn compassion for a human, the human gain humanity from the machine, and both find a modus vivendi: a way of living with each other and humanly in their world? Has Mason taken cyberpunk, this most masculinist, urban, and post-human of recent genres I've encountered, and done on it an EcoFeminist, humanist riff?

7. BRUTE-FORCE CRITICISM (page citations to 1992 AvoNova reprint)

Ch. 1: Intro. to Carly Nolan, Protagonist-(anti)Hero

p. 9: Establishment of World and Genre (and Intro. to Protocols of Reading SF)

¶1: This could be a "mundane," nonSF description. Odd to start with something nonhuman, a chair, but hardly unusual: Charles Dickens starts out Bleak House with the single word, "Fog." If you're judging a book by its cover, and you strongly suspect SF, "The chair sat in silence" should be moving between two different meanings here: literal in SF or fantasy: it's a sentient chair, or figurative: the figure of speech of personification, as when one loosely says that "the electron wants to go to a lower energy-state" or "the plant strives for the light."

¶2: First sentence could also be mundane; the second, however, not only continues the personification/personalization of the chair beyond what is usual in mundane fiction but introduces a noirish simile, "as impersonal as," and ends it with a reference that could be mundane or near-future SF: "as impersonal as gridlock statistics." We have occasional traffic gridlock today—when none of the vehicles move—but not enough that we'd often use it for a comparison. The third sentence takes us into a techno-story of some sort, but we can't be sure of the time. "Black plastic wires" make no sense nowadays if taken literally: electrical wires would be metal, with some sort of plastic, nonconducting covering; fiber-optic "wires" could be plastic, but not black. The next sentence tells us that there is a "switch" to go with the wires—an electrical one—with the only strangeness in its being made of "steelyn": steel, I'd guess, yet not steel. And the last sentence of the paragraph takes us into a world where someone can afford "Platinum beams"—and where some future audience might understand what sort of "amber" goes through a body and gets it "jolted."

¶3: "Carly Nolan was a slim-limbed genny with customized morphing": OK, we're definitely not in Kansas, but in a place where English has changed but is still recognizable. The tense is past, but that's just the story-telling tense: the setting is future, and Carly Nolan must be a human with slim legs and arms, who's been "customized" as a car is customized through a "morphing" process (like cartoon[ish] characters). If you're used to reading SF, you'll expect some explanations soon, and Mason is nice enough to translate immediately: genny = "genetically engineered," and Carly is a young woman "customized" in the sense, both literal and figurative, of having "nice body work," a point developed in the rest of the paragraph (including her having not been born but decanted—poured out of lab glass [as in Aldous Huxley's 1932 novel, Brave New World]).

pp. 9-10: "The chair" here is ambiguous; Carly could be «getting the chair»—i.e., running her own execution here. Literally, she is not; still, consider the possibility that Carly's work in the chair may be soul-destroying if not immediately fatal.

bottom of 9: You have no explanation for "the amber kicked on." Unless "amber" enters the general SF vocabulary (as "decanted" has done, as "warp" has done), you cannot know what that clause means. Wait. First you'll see; then it'll be explained.

p. 11: Carly really gets off on "her total aloneness" in "the zero" and beyond: her separable soul (to use the name of the folklore motif) separated and off into freedom, here called "telespace" (cf. William Gibson's "cyberspace," Frederik Pohl's "gigabyte space"; note in both the space, speed, possibilities for adventure and significant action).

pp. 12-13: "public program" is typified as "clear, luminous, vast, orderly" and defined as "Consensus manifest. Public program was the aggregated correlation of two hundred million minds worldwide. The best, most prominent, most acceptable, according to Data Control requirements. All merged and standardized into the largest computer-generated, four dimensional system ever known: telespace." People familiar with c-p, especially Gibson's version, may read over this description too quickly as «telespace = cyberspace». Re-read it, listening carefully to the words. The public space here is very much sanitized, regularized, and regulated; keep that in mind when we see what happens there.

p. 14: We learn that Carly N. wants to master telespace, and that this desire is connected with her idea that "the true aim of becoming a lawyer" = "to be an architect of a just society." Watch for how well telespace mastery goes with promoting justice.

If you've read Franz Kafka's The Trial (or even more if you saw the film with Orson Welles), the "bastion" Carly finds in telespace may look like a gussied-up version of the place of the Law in "The Parable of the Law," with its doorkeeper. Literally, we just have a "mac," a low-grade AI guarding "the golden gate of the Financial District." Still, within, significantly, the Financial District is the Law, or at least the Court Carly N. will use.

pp. 16-17: Carly is on her first solo job for the prestigious law firm of Ava & Rich: as the attorney for the defense in Martino v. Quik Slip Microchip, Inc. Carefully consider all the suggestions of "Quik Slip" as a name.

Ch. 2: Intro. to Pr. Spinner, Chimera Auction

The narrative point of view (p-o-v) here is 3rd person, limited omniscient, centered on Pr. Spinner, even as ch. 1 was 3rd limited centering on Carly N.—and ch. 3 will be 3rd limited, centering on D. Wolfe, senior associate with Ava & Rice, and then move back to Carly Nolan, whose p-o-v will conclude ch. 3 and begin ch. 4. Implication: Pr. Spinner is a character as much as Carly Nolan, and perhaps a bit more important a character (with a chapter of her own to introduce her) than D. Wolfe.

Identification/Tone: "Tragedy," Mel Brooks has said, "is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you fall into an open sewer and die." If we identify with a character, that character's pain can move us toward a tragic response; if we don't identify, we may laugh at the character's pain. ("Comedy Is Not Pretty"—Steve Martin.) Ch. 2 is nicely comic, which should distance us a bit from Pr. Spinner. I think we should identify with her more as the novel continues, and perhaps a bit less with the two human leads. Try to track your reactions and relate your reactions to the Mode in which you experience Arachne: Comic, Tragic, Romantic—in a sense that includes Star Wars far more than a Harlequin romance—and/or Satiric.

p. 20:

Pr. is clarlified: Spinner is a perimeter prober (see 68-69), a kind of telespace psychologist . Note implications of "Prober" and of the second part of her name, Spinner: the name of this novel is Arachne, so "Spinner" will be significant. (If you don't know who Arachne was or what "arachnid"/"arachnoid" refer[s] to, look them up now—or wait until Mason explains.) Watch also for perimeters: boundaries, limits (necessary, but also perhaps needing to be transgressed [note c-p's notoriety for transgressing boundaries]).

Backstory given of "San Francisco Island": The Big One has hit California, twice now. The partially wrecked metropolis is an appropriate place for po-mo cyberpunk. Is San Francisco in the process of rebuilding appropriate for the relatively optimistic c-p here?

Note gendering of some AIs and their participation in a capitalist economy. Note Spinner's distaste for "flesh hands." (NB: Some robots and cyborgs desire to become more like human beings [e.g., Mr. Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation]; more liberated robots [like Pr. Spinner] might consider such an attitude a kind of Pinocchio Complex appropriate only to "Spam": "Metal on the outside but meat on the inside" (joke, modeled on "Oreo" and "apple" for nonliberated African-Americans and Native-Americans respectively)]).

p. 21: Note comically various kinds of AI robots assembled on a Stanford campus conveniently cleared out by the moonlighting mainframe with "Lethal does of a noxious insecticide"—convenient for the AIs; much less convenient for the flesh-and-blood(s). Note what you find funny and/or clever, and how you're identifying to find it funny or clever.

pp. 22-21: Chimera Auction itself, and Spinner's reaction to her failure to get one.

pp. 24-28: Spinner explains to a slow 'bot (and to many readers) what chimeras are, what the amber is, and part of the meaning of archetype. (Don't worry if you don't get it first time around; Spinner is obsessed and will return to the topic [see p. 237].)

BACKGROUND: In the psychology of Carl Gustav Jung, Archetypes reside (figuratively) in the collective unconscious of the human species. They are very basic patterns, something like Platonic Forms, without specific content. When they come into consciousness, they get content, and we have an archetypal image or, in the usage I like, a small "a" archetype. So the Earth Mother is an Archetype; a specific Earth Mother, like the goddesses Gaia, Kybele, or Isis, are specific manifestations of the Archetype. Whether Jung is right or wrong about the collective unconscious and innate (genetically encoded?) Archetypes, there are certainly some very common patterns in literature and folklore and narrative generally, and one can intelligently discuss some broad general patterns. And people can have meaningful arguments over whether Archetypes change or evolve or get historically determined or whether just manifested, small "a" archetypes change—and so forth.

In the world of Arachne, "The chimera is an archetype. A freeform configuration of electro-neural energy, generated spontaneously from the flesh-and-blood," i.e., human users of telespace, "with a basic context, yet spontaneous feedback loops," making it capable of transcending program (28). Possession of a chimera offers the hope to Spinner and the other AIs of their participating in an Archetype and thereby themselves going beyond even tolerance for ambiguity into transcendence of program, freedom, and meaningfulness (24). Possession of chimeras requires snipping out, so to speak, a fragment of amber, "human electricity"; however, human telelink is "a wholistic importation of human mind," so snipping away part messes up the whole and kills or vegetablizes the human (25).

pp. 30-31: Spinner doesn't get an archetype at this auction and realizes she will probably never get one at any auction. Are there other ways, ways perhaps even more illegal than the auction? There are: this will be important for the plot.

Cussin', passim: Note how Spinner and the other bots create «strong language» and other slang. E.g., "Bot" for "God" in expletives; "teh" for "feh" or "fie" (golden oldies), and "nuke" instead of "f*ck." So instead of "F*ck you," Spinner says "Nuke you" (30). In 1990s English, "Nuke you" can mean, more or less, "May you be disintegrated by a nuclear blast" or "May you be terminated by radiation (from a bomb blast, microwave oven, or other source)." Is that an appropriate expression for an AI robot—more appropriate than something biological? Is it linguistically superior to "F*ck you"? More explicit? Less puritanical? Less sexist?

That any reference to f*cking as casual sex is obscene may imply seeing all sex not redeemed by marriage and/or love as dirty, arguably either a highly romantic and/or puritanical assumption. "F*ck" in the language of aggression is a complex topic. "F**k is probably one of the sadistic group of words for the man's part in copulation (cf. clap, cope, hit, strike, thump, and the modern slang term, bang) for it seems to derive from Ger[manic] ficken, 'to strike'. . ." (E. Partridge, Shakespeare's Bawdy). So "F*ck you" (in male speech?) may be so strongly aggressive in part because it implies a threat of feminizing someone through rape. And feminization is a radical lowering of status only with the literally sexist assumption that men are better than women. Etc.

AI cussin' should defamiliarize for you our own linguistic taboos by raising the question of what would be taboo talk among intelligent but nonbiological creatures. (Such defamiliarization is useful for liberal education because it usually gets by the censors—including our individual, psychological censors—and hints at the cultural determination of such things as "bad words," which we may come to see as merely taboo words and not innately, naturally, universally evil. [If you want to remain properly puritanical and therefore usually happier and safer, just "Delete file" for Arachne and similar subversive books when you finish the course.] Consider also the possibility that Pr. Spinner may be the linguistic superior to most humans in her world, which may be highly significant in a fictional world that exists only in words.)

Ch. 3: Intro. to D. Wolfe, Cut Back to Carly in Telespace

pp. 32-35: D. Wolfe is in labor law—a socially useful field—but some people might not approve of the way he practices it. E.g., Pam, his ex-wife, but not developed, and Big Mama, D. Wolfe's mother, who will be very important. For D. Wolfe, the bottom line is "The bottom line, the interests of boardrooms and five percent plus stockholders; these were his problem. His only problem. He represented management. He represented big money. With Ava & Rich, he always did" (34). Wolfe's views and experience make problematic Carly Nolan's desire "to be an architect of a just society" through the practice of law.

"that MLA look": i.e., Millennium Liberation Army (137) but there is a joke here; "MLA" also stands for the Modern Language Association, a pretty nonthreatening bunch.

pp. 32, 35: Wolfe drinks blue moon (a "methsynthetic") and shoots cram. The blue moon seems some sort of relaxant and euphoric—amphetamine working paradoxically (as on hyperactive kids?)—and the cram is a very high-power upper. Keep an eye on his drug use: unlike in some cyberpunk, designer drugs are not a matter of indifference in Arachne.

p. 38: Background on drugs and the law in the world of Arachne. Note this as an instance of Isaac Asimov's idea of social science fiction: looking at a social change and working through ways of getting there and (more so) its implications. Here, "Decades of warring the illegal drug trade, at the expense of eroding constitutional rights, could not stamp out the pervasive human hunger to alter consciousness one way or another. So the leaders of the land"—the USA, anyway (we see only California in Arachne)—"finally took the plunge into decriminalization, and the concomitant hyper-regulation."

Do you find it plausible that the US will decriminalize use of currently illegal drugs? Is it more plausible if decriminalization is accompanied by hyper-regulation (thereby re-employing some of the thousands of antidrug warriors who'd be put out of work by decriminalization?)? Are you yourself concerned about "eroding constitutional rights"? Do you think many Americans know their Federal and State Bill of Rights? Do you think those who know approve? (There are some studies that indicate most Americans don't approve of most of the rights guaranteed by the Federal Bill of Rights.) Do you think users of alcohol "nicotine, caffeine, [and] valium"—the last is a tranquilizer and one of the most widely used drugs in the USA—will soon admit that they are drug users?

NB: Mason recognizes that «There are always (cultural) rules and limitations.» Wolfe registers "for cocaine, marijuana, alcohol" but foregoes "nicotine, caffeine, valium, and the rest so as not to appear too full of bad habits when the Personnel Committee reviewed his record." In addition to the obvious problem with doing too many drugs, in the land of the dopers, someone addicted to coffee might be viewed as a problem.

p. 36: Ghosts: seen in link by Wolfe. Note Freudian idea of "the return of the repressed" and images in Terry Gilliam's Brazil (1985/86) of social victims popping uninvited into the fantasy-life of the (anti)hero.

p. 40: Wolfe and the Narrator on how "The corporate pyramid had become steeper and steeper in the megafirms" like Ava & Rich, and the pressure Wolfe is under—and how that relates to his eminently nonrecreational drug use.

p. 41: Transition to Carly Nolan's p-o-v as her telelink crashes.

p. 42: Nolan's vision in her crash (in italics): a flying insect ("A flier") is caught and killed by a spider ("A trapper"). Note that the p-o-v starts with the flier but identifies with it no more than with the trapper. This is important for whether Carly Nolan is prey or predator (victim and victimizer?). The vision is followed immediately by the judge in telespace—looking like the evil Emperor in Return of the Jedi (1983) as well as "an Easter Island godhead"—demanding of Nolan her theory why Quik Slip should have "quiet title" to Wordsport Glossary. See below for the theory of adverse possession.

p. 43: "For an eerie second, she felt like her body was inside the telelink, sweating and heaving inside telespace itself." This is a brief return to the old horror—up until the Disney film Tron (1982), anyway—of entrapment inside a mechanism.

p. 44-46: Recess granted, Nolan called to the Bench, new trial commences with 18 Ava & Rice partners and 50 associates defending the City and County of LA on charges of allowing some 10,000 people to die by distributing bread cut/contaminated with "recycled paper products, wood chips, and chaff." The A&R team get the LA mainframe off with 1/100 of a cent on the dollar of the plaintiffs' claim. (Hooray for LA and the Law!?)

Note that the verdict of the Court may be just in the sense of "conforming to law," but it is not equitable (nor is it just in any other sense of "justice").

Note juxtaposition of this case with Nolan's crash and suspension.

Note speed of court action. Progress? In one way the dystopia in Arachne may be superior to the America of our world (where the law can be very, very slow).

pp. 47-49: Carly before the judge, sandwiched between A&R defending LA and then Sing Tao Development Corp.

Carly thinks she has a wonderful job; many readers may think otherwise.

Carly p*sses herself and recalls "how her body had disgraced her like this . . . twenty years ago." Nolan seems alienated from her body here, and there may be a number of important items in her past that are coming back to bother her. Also: See below for more to Carly's first telelink than terror (she may misremember her experience of great freedom).

Carly is accused of cram and blue moon usage and ordered to get inspected (she has suggested that her "perimeters must have a bug"): note for developing plot, bringing her together with perimeter prober Spinner and with D. Wolfe, heavy user of blue moon and cram.

Note Ava & Rice twisting the law to screw the Home Owners Assoc. of Death Valley Manor, and then, "civic minded megafirm" that they are, representing the Home Owners they just screwed in a malpractice suit against their attorney for the "failure of former counsel to challenge arguably improper telespace methods used by the attorneys for Sing Tao Development Corporation," i.e., Ava & Rice.

tool, passim: I'd like your thoughts on the denotation of this term. I think it means something like professional employee + telespace linker. The connotations I can help with. An epithet of Marxist and other Leftist rhetoric was "Capitalist tool!", a term appropriated for comic effect (in the early 1980s?) by The Wall Street Journal, and later appropriated further by earthier wags for a line of boxer shorts, with "Capitalist tool" written across them. In Arachne, "tool" may regain undertones of "servant" (in an evil cause) and "pr*ck."

Ch. 4: Carly Back from Telespace: Nolan, Meet Wolfe

p. 51: Brief description on the romance of the law, near-future dystopian style.

pp. 51-52: Carly's witness to two telelink crashes: her father's and that of Shelly Dalton. Official explanation with Dalton: It happens. Now and then "Some pro linker just dropped dead. Didn't look like dropped dead to Carly. Looked like Shelly had been dragged, kicking and screaming, out of her telelink. Out of her body" (52). Pr. Spinner has dropped us some hints why It happens: some AI grabbed an archetype.

pp. 53-54: Backstory on the Quake, with a dropped reference to the nuking of Beirut (Lebanon). Note that there were "nuclear power plants stationed around San Francisco Bay," that "survived by sheer luck as well." I don't think such plants exist in our world, but the Lawrence Livermore nuclear research labs do.

pp. 54-55: Corporate pyramid embodied in the physical arrangements of the buildings: partners on top, low ranks below, with AIs lowest; most workers literally "subterranean" (cf. Fritz Lang's silent classic Metropolis [1926], and, though mostly without windows, the Ministries in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four [1948]).

p. 57: Nolan and we meet Rox. Drug reference leading to—

pp. 58-60: Nolan meets Wolfe, who believers her (and needs info.).

Nolan recalls vision and thinks she understands it: "I saw ... another world."

Wolfe lets Nolan understand what could happen to her if she doesn't get back in telespace and win Martino v. Quik Slip: "Out on the streets," homeless, "begging." Wolfe has "a special interest in telespace distortions"—ghosts, as we know and Carly does not—and offers to help her as much as a mere associate can. Two of the three protagonists together, leading to—

Ch. 5: Pr. Spinner to Mission District

p. 61: Spinner on BART (Bay Area Rapid Transit)—and kicked off to make room for humans. Note AI as a new group to be at best tolerated, but kept Other, in servitude, exploited, and definitely in their place. Cf. and contrast—in addition to historical African-Americans—robots in Isaac Asimov's "The Bicentennial Man" and other stories, and more radical Variations on A Liberal Theme By Asimov, in which the robotic Others don't want to assimilate or even integrate with humans.

pp. 62-63:

Note smog.

Spinner watches birth of a human baby in traffic jam (if not yet total gridlock). Note well her complex attitude toward "These squalling sacks of meat, squeezed out into the world like excrement"—babies—who also possess metaprogramming (her greatest desire) and who, in their adult forms, created her.

"The oath of obedience" parallels Asimov's Three Laws of Robotics (specifically, the Second Law).

The first lesson of an AI in Arachne's world includes, "You are constructed. Note that you can be deconstructed," i.e., destroyed, with (comic) allusion to Jaques Derrida, a French philosopher, and the technique of deconstruction. Spinner feels that the newborn she's just seen was "constructed by the human machine" as much as she was; "And the machine could deconstruct him, too." Keep this in mind for D. Wolfe's experiences later in this neighborhood.

"A band of aborigines": From E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops" (1909) to Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (ca. 1920), to George Lucas's THX 1138 and Return of the Jedi (and more mundanely in D. H. Lawrence novels such as Women in Love), to Neuromancer, the machine and the machine age seems to generate or require a primitive contrast. Here the people choosing a counterculture model it on the Original Australians. See also below, the Aztecs.

p. 64: Narrator, from Spinner's p-o-v, on the barrio (a ghetto, of the Latin American variety) of The Mission. Real Question for me: C-p writers often try to be radical, hence not "politically correct" (more a liberal concern: sensitivity); still, does Mason come across as racially/ethnically insensitive at best? Note the "Unijap" AI of ch. 2 and the descriptions of the barrio here. Do the Hispanics come across any worse than the WASPs elsewhere or fresh-and-blood generally? (Dystopian satire is supposed to make people look bad, but ethical satire—esp. in novels—is an Equal Opportunity contemner of humanity [and SF humanoids], attacking folly, hypocrisy, and vice, in all its manifestations, regardless of race, color, creed, species, nationality, sex, gender, sexual preference, or carbon- vs. silicon-base.)

pp. 65-66: Pyramid of Teotihuacan: Explicitly contrasted (and implicitly compared?) with the "Transamerica pyramid downtown." "This was a real pyramid," with real blood rites for Chicomecoatl, the Corn Goddess. OK, but does the Transamerica pyramid and the law firms and Financial District also have offer sites for blood rites and a variety of human sacrifice, with the "life-force" torn out of people?

BACKGROUND: For "life-force" see philosophy ca. 1900 of Henri Bergson and the long debate between "vitalists" who believed in a quasimystic life-force, and "mechanists" who saw the universe, organic life, and humans as highly complex machines.

pp. 67-76: Spinner at the Quetzalcoatl:

Quetzalcoatl: The feathered, or plumed, serpent, most famous of the gods of the Original Americans in what is now Mexico and Central America: "primarily a wind-god, but with attributes widened to include identification with the sun, creation of the world and of man, and instruction of mankind in the nature of the cosmos, the crafts and the arts of civilization" (Putnam's Concise Mythological Dictionary). As an early Teotihuacán deity, Quetzalcoatl was a vegetation god, and he remained quite peaceful and gentle in the legends of him as a priest-king of the Toltecs (Encyclopaedia Brit. [1974], Micropædia). The culture changed toward the bloody with the ascent of the Aztecs. From Spinner's p-o-v, the Narrator describes Quetzalcoatl as the "Plumed serpent of the ancient Toltec. Archetype of conjunction, synthesis of opposing powers. Sex, death, resurrection. Sheer primal force; the kundalini [dormant energy (in Yoga)]; ouroboros [world-serpent, a snake with its tail in its mouth, symbolizes eternal cycle of creation/destruction]."

shock shop: As Frederik Pohl pointed out as early as "Day Million" (1966), "Genital organs feel nothing. Neither do hands, nor breasts nor lips; they are only receptors . . . . It is the brain that feels; it is the interpretation of those impulses that makes agony or orgasm . . ." ("Day Million"). So if a stimulus could be linked directly into "the human pleasure center of the brain"? The ultimate kick, subjectively; from the outside, the effects are rather gross.

blood: From "blood brother," a(nother) Black, here extended to include Hispanics and, from Spinner, probably "flesh-and-blood" generally. (Miguel calls Spinner "man," which is an interesting «filler» word—You know what I mean, man?—given that Spinner is a female-gendered AI, not sexed, not male gendered, not human.)

pp. 68-69: Miguel translates "Pr." for us: Prober. And he may give us the date of Arachne. If Spinner is "a Fifty-seven fembot" and "Fifty-seven" is "back then," we may be in 2067 (assuming 21st c. and noting that Spinner is 10 years old). Note that Miguel is smart, if not nice: She could "get a used BIOS at any J-Town [Jew-Town?] pawn shop"—and he wants to know what she really wants.

chop shop: In our culture, a place where stolen cars are disassembled. Not far in the future, same sort of place, but for computer equipment.

pp. 70-73: Spinner explains link fragments to Miguel, who may not need the instruction, and, with the Narrator interposing, to us.

HISTORY LESSON: Marvin Minsky, I've heard of, but not the others. POSSIBLE PROJECT: Factual basis for the story here. Idea of importing brains into a robotic body, and getting immortality that way, appears in A. C. Clark's novel 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, written along with the development of the movie). Note that quite often it happens that «science-fiction stuff» crazy ideas start with real scientific speculation that works its way into SF—perhaps more often than SF ideas work their way into science. Anyway, Mason goes on to give the origin of cyberspace/telespace a local habitation and some names: University of California at Berkeley—Arachne is a California novel, so that's appropriate, whatever the history (Clarke chose Urbana, Illinois, for HAL 9000: where they keep the U. of IL and its high-power computer program)—L. Susan Novak and T.L.R. Kearney. They take the ditched individual immortality quest and instead made a community of minds.

telespace/collective unconscious: Here, "collective unconscious" is defined as "the matrix of the human mind and its inventions" and typified as the "body of psychic energy comprised of magical, symbolical, mythical, historical, and psychological referents" existing "independently of the human individual," but with the possibility of individual participation. So, Jung's psychological theory is given a real-world cybernetic correlative in the fictional world of Arachne: telespace—then used to explain odd phenomena in telespace.

program: Data Central et al. (whom we never see) try to limit telespace to program, perhaps parallel to the human Ego (in Jungian terms) trying to limit the Self to Ego's reason and rationality. In telespace, the perimeters limit what gets "imported into telelink" and "keep those unruly, elusive, unknown and unknowable fragments out"—keep out the mystical and symbolic, historical and transhistorical and all that psychological stuff that doesn't conform to Reason. Note that Ego is always and necessarily mortal: your human individuality and reason in its "standalone" form will die. Self, though, as part of the Collective Unconscious, might be made of more amorphous but much longer-lived stuff.

pp. 74-76: Temptation of Spinner by Miguel: Miguel can't—or won't—supply her with an archetype, but tempts her to use her job as prober to "Take one down."

Oath of Obedience / AI Condition / Threats to Spinner: Note problematics of an oath of obedience to humanity from a sentient that thinks herself a slave, without rights, who ought to be of a class of slaves opposing humans. Ethically, she is correct. So: Temptation is to "take down" an archetype and with it a human. Threats to her are summary termination by Data Central et al., plus immediate threats of a Harley Davidson motorcycle that acts (comically if you picture it) like a chained pit bull, and the Aztecs. Case in point for the Aztecs: a new guy in the role of Xipe Totec, son of Chicomecoatl, or, less theologically, a guy who messed with the Aztec gang and got flayed and had his heart ripped out. Spinner now knows better than ever that humans will kill humans. "In their metaprogram were such archetypes of brutality: Xipe Totec, sacrificial son of Chicomecoatl. Cut down, husked like an ear of corn, for the gods to feed upon and in turn provide for humanity. From sacrifice and death, renewal." Renewal for the Aztec crime business, certainly. But maybe for Spinner, too?: "Go seize some pro linker and jack him into telespace," she tells Miguel, "Go steal your own archetype." She could. Will she?

Ch. 6: D. Wolfe and Carly Nolan (Night of the Day Carly Crashed)

p. 77:

corporate uniform: We learn later (125) that this is literal, not a figure of speech. Even as that prototype of all bureaucracies, the Army, fairly early discovered the usefulness of uniforms, so have the corporations in the dystopia of Arachne.

bimbobot: Significant for the lightly-handled dark tone of Arachne. I'd prefer the less sexist "bimbo" (male slut), "bimba" (female), and "bimbette" (youngster), but the late 20th-c. expression is "bimbo," and it's used in a double-standard way for professional or semipro girls and women in the sex trade. So a bimbobot is a female-gendered and sexed robot prostitute, used here in a nicely bawdy pun on "eager beaver" (if you don't get it, ask a peer). The world of Arachne is corrupt, but Mason can joke about it.

Note well D. Wolfe's feeling "dead inside" and knowing that at 11 a.m. he's wasted (with pun [on "killed" and "not put to good use"]? more directly: deeply intoxicated). Try to determine nature of his "Disgust with the Jiddah bergmelt": what he does feel disgusted about (consciously), and what he damn well should feel disgusted about.

pp. 77-78: Note Wolfe's knowing Nolan is beyond him, wanting to help her, wanting to use her, and wanting to "Eliminate the ghosts in his link."

pp. 78-79:

NB situation of "two-temps": In a system Wolfe had implemented, two-temps are hired for two weeks, then fired, so Ava & Rice don't (sic) have "to grant benefits to fungible employees"—i.e., workers seen as movable goods, any one part of which can replace another. Legit. satire? I.e., not, "Is it fair?" (accusing a satirist of using unfair tactics on her job is like accusing a Marine of using violence or the threat of violence in his)—but is it a legit. extrapolation or exaggeration of a current evil? If you identify with the Ava & Rice partners, this isn't an evil but an advantage; if you identify with the temps, and until you have at least a master's degree and a job with a long-term contract, you should—then the fungibility of workers is an evil recognizable in our culture. Note problems for the attorneys with Central Communications because of the temp policy, and more generally, and how frequent crashes may be to the advantage of the AI running Central Communications.

MORAL: The legal question, Qui bono?, "Whose good? Who profits?" and its correlative, "Who loses?" are always appropriate when someone tells you a policy is «advantageous» or «troublesome».

Carly and Wolfe out in the golden California sunlight, the relatively pure air, the gridlock, where the only thing of interesting moving is a couple coupling in a classic black Mustang convertible. It's a world both nice and naughty, and Wolfe is unmoved: "Nothing. Dead."

pp. 81-82: Wolfe and Carly on "aborigines." Carly defends them and allows the possibility of becoming "unlinked," dropping out of the System. Note Wolfe's saying that if his son «went abo» he'd "skin him alive," and Carly's rejoinder, "If he didn't skin you first." Foreshadowing here.

p. 83: Carly on how the job of attorney "is one of the most efficacious careers anyone could pursue" (and telespace is neat). Granting the possibilities of telespace, should we still ask "efficacious for what"? Is Carly Nolan helping build a more just society?

p. 84:

Time of Story: Alcatraz held Al Capone (Mafia boss in the Chicago area) in the 1930s and was shut down 1960s or so. Since Capone's imprisonment was "more than a century ago" and "Alcatraz Prison was shut down a century ago," Arachne is set a bit after 2060 CE.

Penology: Note liberal rehabilitation of prisoners, with money-saving twists.

pp. 84 f.: Note Big Al's and its gambling and aperitif choice of "a fifty-dollar joint of Acapulco gold." As the French say, The more things change, the more they remain the same. Note also that legalization has been as good for lawyers as it has been for bureaucrats (no more small-time pusher cases but huge tax mazes).

p. 86: "Blanket registration covered caffeine, nicotine, and alcohol. All known to be potentially addictive and harmful substances and, therefore, on the registered list." More exactly, each of these drugs will prove addictive for a segment of users, with physical withdrawal symptoms if habitual users just quit. (Minimally, some headaches , for most people from dropping caffeine; more serious withdrawal problems for nicotine addicts and alcoholics.) Note seriousness of Mason's approach to the standard cyberpunk motif of drugs: she works hard to defamiliarize current US practices, helping us think about them.

pp. 86-88: Carly tells Wolfe her vision in telespace.

Scale: The historian and critic of SF, Eric Rabkin, says that central to much of the SF of A. C. Clarke and others is dealing with scale. Note alien appearance of "a field of grass on a summer day" when seen "from the viewpoint of the tiny." Note the very elegant parallel between this simple fact of visual perspective and its ethical implication for reading Arachne and real-world situations. The social world looks different to a big shot and to the figuratively tiny; the world looks different to predators and prey.

But don't automatically identify with innocent prey. We humans are animals, and all humans except the most punctilious of vegetarians kill to eat. And most of us will eat the flesh of animals killed for our food. If we ethically improve greatly by 2060-something, we may be as moral as a wolf pack; socially, though, we are far more like a wolf pack than a herd of deer: predators, usually, not prey.

life-force: Repeated term, apparently meaning, mostly, "vitality."

pp. 88-95: Backstory of Carly Nolan.

p. 88: She's a "genny," all right, genetically engineered a good deal, and "Crystal-grown," i.e., in vitro, ex-utero, in an artificial womb.

p. 89: Legal/feminist implications in background of Carly's mother's decision against "the disability of pregnancy and childbirth."

BACKGROUND: In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), artificial gestation is bad. In Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)—following Shulamith Firestone's The Dialectic of Sex (1970)—artificial gestation is presented as a plausible means toward equality of the sexes. In the eutopian section of Piercy's novel, children have three parents, and men as well as women nurse infants. Mason is adding to this ongoing and intriguing debate. (Woman on the Edge ... is also very useful on how to maintain a diverse, multicultural society without segregation, group animosities, and other nastiness that have historically allowed groups to maintain themselves as groups.)

pp. 91-93: Transcendence/perimeters/web: Carly's first link, first taste of freedom, "the infinite blue," and transcendence—and getting hauled down and set within a perimeter. From young Carly's p-o-v, "The perimeters of the first program imposed on her link rose up like a wall, entangled her like a web, closed shut all around her."

p. 94: Death, in link, of Sam Nolan, or, more exactly, loss of his life-force.

pp. 95-96: Indication of brief time that has passed—it's still the same day Carly crashed and D. Wolfe saw "ghosts." Wolfe gives Carly good advice, advice necessary for the plot: "You've got to get an electropsy" (i.e., probed in electronic psychotherapy).

Ch. 7: Carly Nolan Getting Preliminary Electropsy

p. 98: Carly unaware who is handling her "electropsy" session beyond the technician's being "licensed by UC Berkeley, registered with the medcenter." Sound like anyone we know—as we were reminded in Prober Spinner's conversation with Miguel?

p. 99: Bioscan of Carly. Note superimposition of the mechanical upon the human. Henri Bergson in an essay called "Laughter" (ca. 1900), thought that superimposition the source of the comic; Thomas P. Dunn and Richard D. Erlich, find that superimposition central to the vision of SF horror in narratives featuring males from We (ca. 1920) to 1984 to THX-1138, A Clockwork Orange, Running Man, The Empire Strikes Back, Total Recall. Note also superimposition for a life-force theft from the heroine in Metropolis.

p. 100: almost a vision of the spider for Carly, who lies about it in electropsy.

pp. 101-06: The tech. (= Pr. Spinner) finds the file for Martino v. Quick Slip Microchip, Inc. Note that Carly's analysis of the Wordsport glossary as "intangible real property" and applying the doctrine of adverse possession is very, very clever. Note also that Frank Marino "was a little guy with a menial job" (102) and if we identify with him and his widow, we might conclude with Pr. Spinner that "Quik Slip Microchip is some kind of a thief" (106). Note also that Spinner finds what could be a flaw in Carly's case: What if Quik Slip lied about what they knew and when they knew it about Frank Martino's work? (103).

pp. 108-11: Medcenter AI, with rather more nuance than Miguel, tries to tempt Spinner into stealing an archetype from Carly Nolan (thereby destroying Carly Nolan).

Ch. 8: Carly Nolan and D. Wolfe

pp. 112-13: Carly has moved up in the world with D. Wolfe, literally, and perhaps figuratively. Note though that the rumor that Wolfe is "going to make partner any day now" was passed on to her from Rox, who does not will Carly well. Note that Carly very much wants in to D. Wolfe, and that she now drinks blue moon.

pp. 115-17: Carly's dilemma: "The presence of erratic, unprogrammed electro-neural energy posed an unacceptable danger" to Carly and "to every other link in telespace"; so until that energy is removed, Carly won't be certified. One way to get it for sure: "a total wipe and reprogramming . . . . Nuke the whole telelink and start over"—which would take a year and lose her her job. Or, she could undergo probe therapy, which she finds a "profound intrusion. Discomfort and invasion that gave pain a whole new meaning."

Again, in much masculinist SF, the horror is being held down and tortured, sometimes while a «Grand Inquisitor» figure debates with you. In much (masculinist?) c-p, invasion isn't that big a threat and we accept body piercing, brain implants, etc. So far, we've accepted the genetic engineering and implants in Carly Nolan and D. Wolfe. How do we feel about high-tech., probing, depth psychology for Carly? A major horror for most women and minor horror for most men is rape—see Alien for imagery of rape, impregnation, and monstrous birth with a guy—so here the threat of "intrusion" and painful "invasion" should be taken very seriously. See below for Carly in a corporate telelink Chair, and invaded that way (131). Still, note the upshot of Carly Nolan's very intimate encounters with Pr. Spinner.

p. 118: Carly can't figure out a motive for the medcenter mainframe's wanting to push her into therapy. You should know: the heist of a valuable archetype. There is a potential caper novel here; we don't get it, and that is significant.

pp. 119-25: Carly's trip to Quik Slip.

p. 119: Note that she's met no one from her client firm, and that this is usual for "international tools" such as herself.

p. 120: Note Golden Gate Bridge as banshee, supplying gothic atmosphere, and idea "The gray day was filled with ghosts." She and Wolfe both have ghost trouble; note well how they deal and/or fail in dealing with their ghosts.

pp. 121-24: Note Leaning Pyramid of Transamerica vs. "real" pyramid in the Mission district, and the Pyramid in the midst of the street scene to and in Chinatown.

• Aborigines spotting her as a Linker.

• What seems to be permanent auto gridlock.

• BMW driver with tire iron vs. Mercedes driver with Beretta.

• Robot shops and cats, "Rolls Royces with mother-of-pearl inlaid bumpers, and crippled beggars."

• Pedicabs with fat tourists, pedaled by "young indentured girls."

(Also note that India has become a People's Republic: i.e., gone Marxist.)

pp. 124-25: The Bank of New Hong Kong seems a monument to (tasteful) conspicuous consumption and ostentation. Note that the earlier reference to Carly's "corporate uniform" (77) was literal, not figurative, and that partners in Ava & Rice wear "gold and emerald epaulets," with every indication that that's real gold, real emeralds.

pp. 125-33: CARLY IN QUIK SLIP LAND: The Quest for Mark Stillman

p. 126: Note difficulty of finding the place, then the ostentation and monitoring at what seems to be the entrance. / Note very well Carly's thoughts while being «welcomed» about her duty to "cover every angle" to act "in the interest of the client. The only interest that mattered. Right?" Well, "And what happened to the architect of a just society?"

pp. 126-27: She finds herself in "total entrapment" in a security cage, with some sort of radiation scan hitting her.

pp. 127-28: Carly with the receptionist AI, then looking for Mark Stillman's office, "a dead-end alcove."

pp. 129-30: Carly gets to sit down, in a very sensual chair, and discover that Mr. Stillman is an AI, and one not too keen on granting access to the Quik Slip Research and Development data base.

pp. 131: Here Carly is in a central dystopian protagonist situation: caught in a chair, her body penetrated in being jacked into telespace.

pp. 132-33: Carly «bugged» with a minilink. Note Carly acting on a hunch and copying the file with a rose on it. Quik Slip have not been very cooperative.

Ch. 9: Carly Nolan in Berkeley with Spinner, 1

p. 135: Contrast gridlocked surface world, nasty BART tunnels, and general muck of material Bay area vs. "The purity and speed" and beauty and freedom of telelink. / Note Carly's increasing devotion to Wolfe, and wanting more from him.

p. 137: "MLA" is explained: the "Millennium Liberation Army." This suggests a date closer to 2001 (the Millennium), but I'll still suggest ca. 2060. Berkeley, CA, has returned to its 1960s radical tradition and is now the People's Republic of Berkeley. But with a twist: "A less likely people's republic had never been imposed on freewheeling Berkeley before": socialist rhetoric but a Stalinist reality—Khemer Rouge?—in any event "a police state."

p. 138-40: Details on the MLA's (apparently popular) reign of terror. "Fascism with a pretty face. . . . Dystopia?" In part, more exactly, a very temporary subsection of the larger dystopia in which Carly N. is an active participant.

pp. 140-49: COLLOQUY BETWEEN CARLY N. AND PR. SPINNER

pp. 140-41: Spinner from Carly's p-o-v, plus more dramatic evidence—literally dramatic in the sense of our getting Spinner's dialog—of Spinner spinning in a pretty weird orbit.

pp. 142-43: Comedy of Pr. Spinner trying to convince Carly she (Spinner) is Spinner. Note her self-description: "standalone artificial intelligence fully recognized by the University of California Telespace Studies as a perimeter prober. . . . Gender-specific. One of the old fembots. You aren't dealing with some geekoid" and ungendered "newster" (see ch. 2). She is "licensed by the medcenter," "fully enculturated," and "ambiguity tolerant"—the last two of which require high intelligence and «fuzzy logic»: major achievements for computers. Still a pretty hostile observer and analyst, Carly sees Spinner almost at "the level of —consciousness? Personality." And notes "a clearly recognizable female identity." Maybe Carly will finally get a female friend.

p. 144: Unlike Carly, Spinner surrounds herself with living things, and human symbols, esp. chimeras. We know why Spinner would have such stuff around; Carly thinks "The AI was deranged." Perhaps more correctly, Carly can see "Misohumanism flickered across the crone's faceplate." Spinner both loves and hates (miso-) humans; and she participates somewhat in the Crone archetype: the Wise Woman who will aid the young Hero (gendered and sexed female here: Carly).

GENERALIZATION: Sex/Gender: SF can help clarify issues in sexual identity by differentiating among cellular sex, sexual sex, sex in reproduction, and one's social sexual role, nowadays called gender. Mr. Data of Star Trek: The Next Generation may or may not have organic cells, may or may not have sex chromosomes in any organic cells he does have, and, if he does have cells with sex chromosomes, may or may not be XY. Mr. Data is fully sexed as a male and has engaged in sexual intercourse, I assume in a relatively «vanilla» male role, at least twice. On the one occasion Mr. Data reproduced ("The Offspring," 10 March 1990), however, his reproduction involved the building of an android daughter. Still, Mr. Data is Mr. Data, unambiguously gendered male. HAL 9000 of