THE VIEW FROM A BLACK HOLE

SF derives its utopian force through its ability to posit a society that appears impossible from our current situation and critically viewing present day society from such an impossible position. This process can be seen as observing the unobservable, and then observing ourselves from the perspective of the unobservable. By positing these impossible situations,

writers whose work lies under the term ‘hard science fiction’ are able to explore concepts that require too great a leap from our everyday common sense perceptions for a genuine scientific study, yet impose a scientific rigour of possibility in stretching concepts such as the

fundamental rules of quantum mechanics to their radical conclusions. Stross, along with Doctorow, crosses the third phase of cyberpunk and hard SF, fusing together alternative modes of thinking digital culture and physics, with novels placed in both near and far futures, using the increased distance of hard SF to move beyond the critique of the digital medium in the near-present of cyberpunk to a critique of the fundamental relation of consciousness to the universe. Greg Egan also combines the two approaches, but places technology as the tool for challenging our relation to reality. Indeed, to Jameson’s suggestion that “SF is the

exploration of all the constraints thrown up by history itself” (2007, 66), we must add ‘all the constraints of physics itself’. For example, in the universe of Egan’s short story Border Guards (2000), an alternative physics is explored, whereby “the topology of this universe let you see the back of your head, but never your reflection” (Egan 2000), an impossible perception that leads to a number of questions concerning consciousness and reality. Such work utilises the same interrogation of possibility that we have seen applied to the subject in cyberpunk fiction.

However, hard SF writers such as Egan, Stross and Rajaniemi all postulate, through differing approaches, a reality that is radically different from our own in order to question the nature of the human (and human consciousness) and the possibilities of its future development. The literary act of staring into the unknowable of future or alternate realities in hard SF is an attempt to gaze back at ourselves from the internal otherness of a black hole: viewing the subject-as-other from within its own void-core of parallax.

The apprehension of cyborg concerns mirrors the dilemma of engaged spectatorship in SF: observing the impossible in order to create a new point of view on the subject from the unobservable. In broader questions of thought this translates to potential methods of thinking the inconceivable. One answer for modelling such a problematic relation of consciousness to the unknown can be seen in quantum computers,²⁶ which can, among other functions,

“provide a virtual laboratory, realizing quantum models of one’s choice” (Knill 2010, 442).

Currently, as was the case for the early history of digital computers and the internet, the implementation of quantum computers rests within the defence sector: the first commercial sale of a quantum computer was to Lockheed Martin (a company with links to the NSA and defence contracts) by D-Wave Systems (who count In-Q-Tel, a business arm of the CIA, among their major investors), ensuring the domination of the US government in any

26 Quantum computers use entanglement and the superposition of the digital one and zero to rapidly perform esoteric or probabilistic calculations such as factorization useful in, for example, cryptography.

cryptographic breakthroughs (Brooks 2013). However, at the theoretical stage, there are great leaps being made within academia and research institutions that have perhaps a more

profound impact on the way we conceive of quantum computing and indeed the quantum universe. The developing ‘decoherence theory’ has suggested that collapse occurs neither instantaneously, nor at a fixed scale (Ball 2008, 23), which leads not only to a blurring of the quantum-classical transition, but also towards notions of reversibility.

In direct relevance to quantum computing, reversibility forms a major breakthrough in the error correction necessary to overcome the noise inherent to calculations at the quantum level which, compared to “classical computers [that] are reliable not because they are

perfectly engineered, but because they are insensitive to noise” (Steane 1998, 161), represents a dilemma and the main criterion for a successful quantum computer.

Furthermore, “the demonstration that it is possible to rescue a collapsing qubit, ‘uncollapse’ it and return it to its original quantum state could one day be used to rectify errors before information is lost” (Meralli 2008, 8), creating a radical ‘undo’ function for quantum computing, even when encountering hardware issues and physical loss. This reversibility presents a fundamental challenge to any theory that privileges the role of the observer, such as ‘consciousness causes collapse’, to the extent that “it tells us that we really can’t assume that measurements create reality, because it is possible to erase the effects of a measurement and start again” (Vedral in Meralli 2008, 9). However, the fact that the control of when to reverse the observation rests with the (technologically equipped and enhanced) observer carries the ‘undo’ function across into reality itself. Under such a premise, observation not only creates reality, but offers a choice of which reality to create, extending the engagement of humanity towards a cyborg subject as causally engaged spectator. The staging of quantum computing in SF creates the conditions for such a shift in thinking about the function

technology and our relation to it within contemporary culture.

However, Jameson insists that SF should move beyond the therapeutic easing of technological progress towards a genuinely utopian function.²⁷ In direct relation to computers, both quantum and digital, this shifting approach to a self-aware creation of reality through observation will discern our future relation to computing technologies. This is already in effect with the digital, through the control of the Real of computer code, demonstrated by the protagonist in Stross’s The Laundry Files series, whose exploits cover the crossover between quantum ‘weirdness’ and digital computing: “I’ve got a couple of cheats up my non-existent

27The relevance of the therapeutic justification for SF is debatable. Given the ‘geek’ culture in which it resides, most readers will already be predisposed in favour of technological progress.

monk’s sleeve, including the fact that I can enter the game with a level eighteen character carrying a laptop with a source-level debugger – all praise the new self-deconstructing reality”

(Stross 2010b, 371). As with other manifestations of digital creative processes, the digital realm has brought forward into consciousness what was already the case in the physical world. Here, the concern of critically engaging within a reality against forces that threaten the freedom of human subjectivity is given a literal embodiment across the digital medium as a realm of the imaginary with its own potential traumas. As one commentator summarises,

“online games, you see, are one of the breeding grounds for inter-dimensional mayhem…echoing some real evil in the multiverse” (Lilley 2006). Our relation to the

potentialities of digital creation can make contact, through the Real of computer code, with the Real of human subjectivity, the excessive void that occupies the centre of the

desubstantialised subject. The artistic elaboration of the theorems and hypotheses of science fused with our own psychological fears brings forth the “squamose, rugose horrors from beyond space and time” (Carter 2007)²⁸ in the form of figurative and literal horrors of digital media: the Real expressed as the unnameable sense (Deleuze 2004b) beneath our superficial realities, objectified as monsters.

This position on the boundary of the imaginary (as the Virtual) and the void (as the Real) questions the suitability of human consciousness for technologically mediated evolution. The point arises from the role of consciousness in creating its own reality. This is true of social as well as quantum reality. The subject exists as the gap within its constituent realities, exerting a creative causal pull defined by its will to choose the nature of its perception. As Egan posits in Permutation City (2010a), the reversibility and emergent creativity of time can be applied also to space:

Every warehouse full of paint and canvas contained the complete works of Rembrandt and Picasso – not in any mere latent form, awaiting some skilful forger to physically rearrange them, but solely by virtue of the potential redefinition of the coordinates of spacetime (Egan 2010a, 120)

This is hypothesised only as a thought experiment for art, but extrapolated through the fiction into self-contained worlds requiring only one engaged spectator to ‘join the dots’ in a creative parallax gesture. However, conceptual art has long established definition of art objects in their labelling as such, and the shifting of the mundane to art object can easily be copied from urinal²⁹ to any form of matter. Algorithmic art, as seen in Dombis’s oeuvre (Chapter 2.4), is one such example within digital culture, blending the Real of code with the subjective Real of artistic creation, unleashing the unknowable and inconceivable void into active perception by

28 These can be compared to a demonic form of Maurice Benayoun’s The Quarxs (1991-3) discussed in 1.4.1 Not object, not immaterial.

29 See, for example, Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917).

choosing it to exist as such. This applies the role of consciousness as creative force seen in the use of nanotech in Egan’s work, through which control of substance is a technologically enabled choice, bringing the role of the quantum observer to the classical scale engaged spectator. ³⁰