ABSTRACT
I want to begin this chapter by calling on Justina Robson’s (2003) book, Natural History. Therein, Robson tries to write a modern science fiction fable about life and technology in which she conjures up a whole series of hybrid human-animalmachine forms of life, ending with an alien form of technology which has evolved into life and vice versa. The irony is, and of course Robson knows this very well, that all of these hybrids exist now, with the single exception that they have not always come together in single bodies easily narrativized but are distributed. Similarly, her most alien form of life, a new material surface generating itself in many dimensions at once and called ‘stuff ’, is a fusion of technology and organic life, which in many ways resembles most what is ‘human’ now in that it is a technology and it is also people, indivisibly fused. You could not define it one way or another at any particular moment. It has no consciousness as you assume individuals must, nor does it have the insensible responses of a tool – but properties of both and also neither. It is intelligent, responsive, compassionate but it does not have an identity of its own, although it contains the fragments of many identities and is capable of creating individuals who could act and exist as ordinary people (Robson 2003: 251).
