Twenty-second (and last!) lecture for my students in English 192, "Science Fiction," summer 2013 at UC Santa Barbara. Course website: http://patrickbrianmooney.nfshost.com/~patrick/ta/m13/

1. Lecture 22: The Precarious Life of Emiko
English 192
Summer 2013
11 September 2013
“[T]he cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life
which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or
in the long run.”
— Henry David Thoreau
“Give me back the Berlin wall;
Give me Stalin and St. Paul.
I've seen the future, brother:
It is murder.”
— Leonard Cohen, “The Future” (1993)

2. What’s a human?
“But that had been in Kyoto, where New People
were common, where they served well, and were
sometimes well-respected. Not human, certainly, but
also not the threat that the people of this savage
basic culture make her [Emiko] out to be.” (35)
The injured veteran: “‘You think I’d soil myself that
way?’ He shoves her against the wall, making her
cry out. ‘With an animal like you?’” (107)
“She [Emiko] is nothing but a windup. She was a
fool. She was stupid to hope that he [Anderson]
would see her as a person, a woman, as anything
other than offal.” (108)

3. “Emiko is surprised at how happy she is that he
delights in her, that he runs his hands over her
skin, that he wishes to touch her. She has
forgotten what it is to look almost human, to be
nearly respected. […] For a time she forgets
entirely that people call her windup and heechy-
keechy. For a moment she feels entirely
human, and she loses herself in the touching, in
Anderson-sama's skin. In the security of
pleasure and duty.” (221)
“The Environment Ministry sees yellow cards
the same way it sees the other invasive species
and plagues it manages.” (224)

4. Gibbons: “We should all be windups by now. It’s
easier to build a person impervious to blister
rust than to protect an earlier version of the
human creature. A generation from now, we
could be well-suited for our new environment.
Your children could be the beneficiaries. Yet
you people refuse to adapt. You cling to some
idea of a humanity that evolved in concert with
your environment over millennia, and which you
now, perversely, refuse to remain in lockstep
with.” (243)

5. “I have read about your kind,” the old man
[Gibbons] says. “About your genetics. Your training…
“Stand up!” he barks.
Emiko is standing before she knows it. Standing
and shaking with fear and the urge to obey.
The man shakes his head. “It’s a hard thing they
have done to you.”
Emiko blazes with anger. “They also made me
strong. I can hurt you.”
“Yes. That’s true.” He nods. “They took shortcuts.
Your training masks that, but the shortcuts are there.
Your obedience… I don’t know where they got that. A
Labrador of some sort, I suspect.” He shrugs. “Still,
you are better than human in almost all other ways.
Faster, smarter, better eyesight, better hearing. You
are obedient, but you don’t catch diseases like mine.”
(357)

6. New People
“She wills herself to resist, but the in-built urge of
a New Person to obey is too strong, the feeling
of shame at her rebellion too overwhelming. […]
She spins out the story, telling it for this gaijin's
pleasure much as she once played samisen for
Gendo-sama, a dog desperate to serve. She
wishes she could tell him to eat blister rust and
die, but that is not her nature and so instead she
speaks and the gaijin listens.” (45)
“She has good hearing, another thing the
scientists gave her along with her smooth skin
and her doglike urge to obey.” (197)

7. “If her kind had come first, before the
generippers knew better, she would not have
been made sterile. She would not have the
signature tick-tock motions that make her so
physically obvious. […] Without the lesson of the
cheshires, Emiko might have had the
opportunity to supplant the human species
entirely with her own improved version.” (114)
“Mizumi-sensei taught that there are two parts to
a New Person’s nature. The evil half, ruled by
the animal hungers of their genes, by the many
splicings and additions that changed them into
what they were. And balanced against this, the
civilized self, the side that knows the difference
between niche and animal urge.” (154)

8. “She stifles the urge to clean up the rice, to
make things neat for Anderson-sama when he
returns. Instead, she makes herself stare at the
mess and recognize that she is no longer a
slave. If he wishes rice cleaned off the floor
there are others to do his dirty work. She is
something else. Something different. Optimal in
her own way.” (252)
Yashimoto: “All New Japanese are fast. You
have mistaken the question to ask. How they
use their innate qualities is a question of their
training, not of their physical capabilities. Hiroko
has been trained from birth to pace herself
appropriately, with decorum.” (300)

9. People, through a mirror, darkly
“A few yellow cards shuffle the halls. Babies cry,
their small voices echoing against hot concrete.
From somewhere above, the grunt of sex comes.
People screwing in halls like animals, out in the
open because they have given up on privacy.”
(135)
“In the silence, the man’s ragged pleading carries
easily. Around them, hundreds of bodies shift and
breathe. People glance left and right, suddenly
nervous, like an ungulate herd that has suddenly
found a predator in its midst.” (190)

10. “Does she wish this? Or only acquiesce? Is she
even capable of refusing?” (116)
“And yet if he [Lake] is careful to make no
demands, to leave the air between them open,
another version of the windup girl emerges. As
precious and rare as a living bo tree. Her soul,
emerging from within the strangling strands of
her engineered DNA.” (184)
“The girl Mai makes a reflexive wai to the gaijin.
Emiko almost smiles in recognition. She too
knows that knee-jerk urge to show respect.”
(338)

11. The extrapolative move
“all the while he [Lake] had wondered how
everyone had missed the signs. They lost the
facility because of that blindness. And now it is
the same. A sudden eruption, and the surprise
of realizing that the world he understands is not
the one he actually inhabits.” (187)
“And then she [Emiko] thinks that some things
are worse than dying. Some things can never
be borne.” (259)
“An entire city torn to ribbons over… what? A
windup girl who couldn’t keep her place?” (338)

12. A reminder from lecture 9
For Jameson, SF is a site in which the question of
what we want and how this constitutes our
epistemological and ontological categories comes
to the forefront in particularly revelatory ways.
“it does not seem irrelevant to inquire how the Utopias
themselves, or their SF analogues, stage wishing as
such, and what counts in them in particular as the
fulfillment of just such wishes.” (72)
“What is then so often identified as Utopian boredom
corresponds to this withdrawal of cathexis from what are
no longer seen as ‘my own’ projects or ‘my own’ daily
life. This is meanwhile the sense in which
depersonalization as such becomes a fundamental or
constituent feature of Utopia as such.” (97)

13. What do characters in The
Windup Girl want?

14. Some open questions
● How does SF, as a genre, provide us with ways to
understand who we are?
● In what ways, specifically, does SF as a genre
reflect on the world that we live in?
– Or on the world that we think we live in?
● What kind of a world do we want to live in?
● What’s stopping us?
“the experience of Necessity”

15. Thank you for being such an
interesting, engaged group of
students. I’ve enjoyed working
with you this summer.