How Many Dolls in the Dollhouse?

Joss Whedon, the creator of Buffy, Angel, and Firefly (for anyone who’s been living under a rock), has just launched his new show, Dollhouse. Here’s the description from FOX’s website (where you can catch the first two episodes of the show):

ECHO (Dushku) is an "Active," a member of a highly illegal and underground group of individuals who have had their personalities wiped clean so they can be imprinted with any number of new personas. Hired by the wealthy, powerful and connected, the Actives don't just perform their hired roles, they wholly become -- with mind, personality and physiology -- whomever the client wants or needs them to be. Whether imprinted to be a lover, an assassin, a corporate negotiator or a best friend, the Actives know no other life than the specific engagements they are in at that time. Confined between missions to a secret facility known as the "Dollhouse," Echo and the other Actives including SIERRA (Dichen Lachman), are assigned engagements by ADELLE DEWITT (Olivia Williams), one of the Dollhouse leaders. After each scenario, Echo, always under the watchful eye of her handler, BOYD LANGTON (Harry Lennix), returns to the mysterious Dollhouse where her thoughts, feelings, experiences and knowledge are erased by TOPHER BRINK (Fran Kranz), the Dollhouse's genius programmer.

As Adelle says in the second episode, an Active is a tabula rosa (a blank slate), not even really a person, adds Langton. Between missions, that is. But when an Active is on a mission, he or she seems very much a person, specially created to do a job. The catch is that each of these is a very short-lived person.

So, although we only see a handful of human beings serving as Actives in the Dollhouse, it seems to me that the place is "home" to a whole lot of persons who live only a day or so. The Dollhouse seems to pressure desperate people to serve as "hosts" or "body donors" for their organization, effectively giving up five years of their lives, and then they create a series of persons to do their dirty work only to terminate each of those persons when the work is complete. Seems like a pretty nasty outfit to me.

Of course, that assumes that we accept some kind of psychological contintuity account of personal identity. On such accounts, if there's absolutely no psychological connections between the serious hostage negotiator of the first episode and the gutsy outdoorswoman of the second episode, then they're different persons from one another--and from Echo, the in-between, low-functioning person who's mostly interested in massages and swimming.

One of my main questions when I first heard about this show was how Whedon was going to make us care about Echo if there's really no continuity between the various persons who animate this body. Turns out that premise starts to erode as early as the second episode, where we start to hear about "composite events," in which Actives retain memories from previous missions. Seems like the doll is slowly going to become a real girl....

Robots Will Take Over the World!

Many sf stories show us a future in which robots and other sorts of intelligent machines show their true colors--and their colors are evil! The HAL 9000 is classic, of course. And think of The Terminator, or The Matrix, or the original 1970's version of Battlestar Galactica. Of course, as these narratives unfold further, matters get more complicated. Arnold is a good guy in T2 and T3. Not all the sentient programs in the Matrix are bad. And the Cylons in the new BSG? Well, that's a really complicated story, isn't it?

Still, the idea of evil killer robots has a lasting appeal, so it's no surprise that some people have lots of fun playing with this idea. What's your favorite evil robot story?

Stickmen vs. Dinosaurs

Check out chaospet and Dinosaur Comics. Each site houses a long-running web comic that's often funny or philosophical or sf-ish or all three. As an example, here's each site's treatment of egoism...

A Robot Descartes?

Isaac Asimov's many robot stories (some of which are collected in I, Robot, on which the Will Smith film is loosely based) explore what happens when human beings interact with robots who are programmed to comply with Asimov's famous three laws of robotics:

1. A robot may not injure a human being, or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.
2. A robot must obey the orders given it by human beings except where such orders would conflict with the First Law.
3. A robot must protect its own existence as long as such protection does not conflict with the First or Second Law.

Asimov delights in showing how perfectly logical beings who work within these parameters end up behaving in strange and sometimes humorous ways. In "Reason," QT-1 ("Cutie") a robot who has spent his entire "life" on a space station finds himself reflecting on his existence. Like Rene Descartes, Cutie decides to reject everything he doesn't know for certain and start from scratch, accepting only those principles that seem logically self-evident--with a marvelously absurd result: Cutie deduces that he cannot have been created by human beings because he is superior to them and he eventually invents a religion that involves worship of "the Master," an essential piece of machinery on the station.

Unsurprisingly, this state of affairs is extraordinarily frustrating for Powell and Donovan (the two men assigned to field-test Cutie). Cutie's logic seems unassailable from within his own perspective, and they're unable to demonstrate his error. Like some of Asimov's other robot stories, this one plays with the limits of reason and implies that we cannot expect abstract reasoning in the absence of empirical evidence to guide us to the truth. Ironically, however, as the story closes we find out that Cutie's seriously mistaken picture of the world and his place in it doesn't prevent him from performing his function on the space station with exact precision. Your thoughts?

The pic is the cover of yet another forthcoming philosophy and popular culture volume. I have nothing to do with this one, but the image of Descartes as a terminator was too good to pass up...

Thinking Meat?

Philosophers often see problems and paradoxes in what look like ordinary places, whether by asking an unexpected question or by turning things on their heads. Terry Bisson's wonderful short story "They're Made Out of Meat!" is a hilarious philosophical exploration of the idea that we are material beings. That we are mere meat is an absurd idea -- according to a pair of extraterrestrial beings who are made of who knows what....

A surprising number of folks have been inspired to create short film versions of this story. See here 1 and here 2 and here 3 and here 4. Which one is the best?

Dangerous Visions?

The cover story of the February issue of Christianity Today is entitled "Sci-Fi's Brave New World," by James Herrick. Herrick's piece is essentially a warning to Christians that sf smuggles anti-Christian myths into our culture. Here's a bit of it:

The spiritual messages conveyed by our most popular television, movie, and literary products are often questionable and sometimes dangerously misleading. We are not the center of the cosmos, nor are we (or extraterrestrials) evolving toward divinity. Evolution is not the benevolent operating principle of the entire universe, and technological transformation of our species is not spiritual rebirth. Ignorance is not our predicament, progress is not redemption, the future is not salvation, and space is not our destiny... the church must attend more diligently to the presentation of her true myth in public settings. The biblical account of human origins and purpose, of our predicament as well as our redemption, and of the nature and purpose of the cosmos we inhabit, is emotionally, spiritually, and rationally more satisfying than modern myths featuring aliens, starships, divine evolution, hidden knowledge, and biomechanical post-humanity.

What do you make of Herrick's diatribe against sf? A couple of Christian sf scholar-bloggers criticize Herrick's book Scientific Mythologies: How Science and Science Fiction Forge New Religious Beliefs (which seems to make the same basic argument as this briefer and more popular article) here and here.

A footnote: Ironically, this post shares its title with a seminal anthology of sf edited by the legendary Harlan Ellison in the late 60s.

sf for free! print edition: John Carter meets Conan

Lots of free sf novels and short stories can be found on the web for free. A couple of sites that link to such finds can be found here and here.

In this post I'll introduce a couple of authors from the early days of sf that you can explore for free. This isn't the most thought-provoking stuff in the world, to be sure, but it's pretty exciting--and you can see lots of the seeds of the fantasy and role-playing genres in these stories.

Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote all kinds of speculative fiction--"pulp" stories, as they're sometimes called--early in the twentieth century. The picture I've included here gives you a pretty good idea of what to expect... Perhaps his best known literary creation is Tarzan, who featured in many, many books. He also wrote fast-paced adventure stories that take place in odd places, including The Land That Time Forgot, At the Earth's Core, and the memorable Barsoom series about a U.S. soldier named John Carter who somehow gets transported to Mars and falls in love and fights against all kinds of enemies, many of whom have four arms. A movie is in the works... I'd start with A Princess of Mars, the first of the John Carter books. But lots of his books are to be had for free at Project Gutenberg.

Robert E. Howard is the creator of Conan the barbarian and other larger than life characters.

A few Conan tales: "The Devil in Iron," "The People of the Black Circle," and "Red Nails." But many more can be found at the same site.

The Hour of the Dragon is a novel-length story about Conan after his adventuring days are over and he's become king.

Other formative sf writers include Fritz Leiber (creator of Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser, the original hulking barbarian and nimble thief duo), and Michael Moorcock, who created Elric of Melnibone, the albino prince-sorcerer who carries Stormbringer, the evil black sword that takes the souls of those it slays. These are familiar tropes from the genre, of course, precisely because of the influence of these authors. No free stuff from these guys, though. And--it goes without saying, right?--J.R.R. Tolkien should be added to the list, along with all kinds of other folks.

My latest pop culture book chapter is out (or almost out): "What's Supernatural About Supernatural"? in In the Hunt: Unauthorized Essays on Supernatural, from BenBella Press. Here's an excerpt:

Supernatural seems to be part of what we might think of as a new trend in horror fiction. Classic horror tales describe how something strange and forbidding breaks into our everyday world. As Noel Carroll puts it in “The Nature of Horror,” characters in horror tales “regard the monsters that they encounter as abnormal, as disturbances of the natural order.” Some particular thing shows up that just doesn’t obey the rules; it defies our categories and so we don’t know how to think about it. In fact, this is one way of thinking about what a monster is: something singular that doesn’t fit our view of the world. A number of more recent horror narratives, including our show, seem importantly different. These stories naturalize their horrific elements, making them familiar and, at least in some sense, normal and natural, so that horror somehow becomes part of the mundane world. Although we should be wary of offering exact classifications here, we can divide such stories into two broad categories without exercising too much force.

The first kind of story re-conceives a supernatural creature as a natural one: the monster isn’t from the pit of hell, or animated by an amalgam of magic and science; he’s just a human being who’s been infected by a virus, not really “supernatural” at all. A scientific monstrosity, not a supernatural one. Think of the undead creatures from 28 Days Later or the recent film version of Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. Or consider Ridley Scott’s Alien. These stories locate a horror story inside the natural world as we understand it; they work without any intervention from the outside. Unforeseen events give rise to something that looks supernatural, but really isn’t. This kind of story eliminates the supernatural piece by piece, showing how what looked like magic or mystery can be explained in scientific terms. Although this kind of horror has been flourishing fairly recently, thereby earning the title of a new trend, it’s not really a new phenomenon. In fact, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) is perhaps the quintessential scientific horror tale. And, more generally, a lot of science fiction stories can be classified as belonging to the horror genre, too. It’s no surprise that a modernist sensibility would favor reducing the magical to the scientific, the inexplicable to the explicable. But this isn’t how Supernatural rolls at all; our show isn’t into reductionism.

The second kind of story involves expanding or altering our conception of nature. Such horror stories have a lot in common with fantasy, because they take up the project of building another world, an alternate reality. They’re extended exercises in wondering “What if?” In such a story, vampires are magical creatures, perhaps, but then the world of the narrative is a magical world! Consider Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series or Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse books. In these popular story arcs, vampires and werewolves are just part of American society. They have jobs and they have to pay the rent. They even have their own bars and nightclubs to frequent. Laws have to be written to handle their special circumstances, maybe even some anti-discrimination legislation. And, of course, they’re potential dates for whoever is our current protagonist. Here, too, the presence of a monster requires no intrusion from the outside—there need be nothing supernatural in that sense. It’s just that the inside of these storied worlds is a lot bigger than the inside of our world (and, as we’ve seen, that creates an ambiguity in what it means for something to be supernatural). Joss Whedon’s endearing and enduring Buffyverse is one of the earliest and most formative examples of this kind of story. Buffy goes to class, chats with her friends, and stakes a vampire in the cemetery. As I’ve characterized it in this essay, “the Winchesterverse” is this same kind of place, although sadly it makes for a much less graceful moniker.

Are you a Sim?

After watching The Matrix, a lot of us enjoy flirting with the idea that we might be in some kind of simulation. Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests that this shouldn't be a mere flirtation. He argues that the odds that you are right now living in a computer simulation are pretty good. There's a website dedicated to the presentation and discussion of "the simulation argument." A short version of it can be found here.

Essentially, Bostrom argues that one of the following three claims must be true:

1. Almost all civilisations at our level of development become extinct before becoming technologically mature.

2. The fraction of technologically mature civilisations that are interested in creating ancestor simulations is almost zero.

3. You are almost certainly living in a computer simulation.

To the extent that you're inclined to think that 1 and 2 are false, then, you'd be justified in thinking that 3 is true.

Or, to put it another way, if a civilization advances to the point where they're capable of providing simulated environments, and if that civilization is interested in running simulations of the past (ancestor simulations), then there will be many people living in such simulations. And if the set of persons contains a significant number of people in simulations, there's at least some significant probability that you are such a person!

It's not an easy argument to assess. What do you think?

sf for free! video edition

Every so often I'll point you to a few things you can get for free on the web. For today, think about watching a couple of classic 80s sf movies: Robocop and John Carpenter's The Thing. The first is one of the earlier cyborg pics and the latter is an excellent sf/horror flick.

If you haven't already watched the sadly short and solitary season of Firefly, please do so as soon as possible. For a bit more Joss, check out Dr. Horrible! Or the first couple of seasons of Buffy.

Finally, I'll confess a fondness for the Highlander series. There can be only one.

All this good stuff (and much, much more) courtesy of Hulu. Beware of too much Hulu, however.

UPDATE: You can see The Fifth Element, too--on Joost.