Does J.G. Ballard’s ‘disquieting equation’, ‘sex x technology = the future’, still hold? Not in Lidia Yuknavitch’s novel, which imagines a society better described by the formula ‘the future = technology – sex’. There is no procreation in it, and any manifestation of sexuality is a crime. Its inhabitants have left Earth for a space station, a hi-tech prison only the rich can afford, moving away from ‘a lunar landscape of jagged rocks, treeless mountains, or scorched dirt’, the scene of endless wars fought by child soldiers, where ‘technology is seized by those who kill best’. Both the ruined old world and the AI-ruled new one are frightening, and not so much because of their fantastic aspects as because they look so probable from today’s perspective.
The only vestiges of humanity retained by the space-dwelling elite are skin grafts: texts they burn on to their biosynthesised, nano-enhanced bodies as a way of telling stories in their ‘paperless existence’.
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