In "Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, and the Cape Canaveral Fiction of J.G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis," Melanie Rosen Brown explores the ways in which the so-called "Cape Canaveral" short stories of J.G. Ballard anthologized in the collection Memories of the Space Age exemplify the promises of posthumanity as articulated by posthuman theorists such as Donna Haraway and N. Katherine Hayles. Although Ballard's fiction is viewed by many as a needlessly pessimistic and derogatory portrayal of NASA's space program, viewed through a posthuman lens, Ballard's fiction instead reveals him to be optimistic about the future of space exploration -- cautiously optimistic, but optimistic nonetheless. Ballard's fiction portrays a culture clearly not ready to do away with the human in favor of some new mechanized being; however, in Ballard's worlds, the human is no longer enough either. Only through the merging of technology and humanity -- a hybrid of posthuman and human -- does the world continue to spin for either Ballard's posthuman astronauts or his Earth-bound humans who are capable of escaping the planet only through fugues of space and time.

Dead Astronauts, Cyborgs, and the Cape Canaveral Fiction of J.G. Ballard: A Posthuman Analysis

Melanie Rosen Brown

<1> One of the primary allures of posthuman theory is the promise that as we morph into our new posthuman bodies, the limitations of the human body, including inequities that exist due to gender, will be eliminated. NASA's astronauts, cyborgs completely dependent upon their life-sustaining space suits and space craft, are making this transformation, the astronauts themselves now seemingly faceless, even asexual, drones, both in NASA's and popular culture's portrayal of them. Rather than benefiting NASA, this transformation has in fact undermined NASA due to the agency's mismanagement of its self-portrait.

<2> British science fiction writer J.G. Ballard has recorded his own vision of space exploration in a series of short stories written between 1962 and 1985, and while these stories are anthologized as an ode to what he characterizes as a now-deceased space program in Memories of the Space Age, Ballard's stories focus less on NASA and its technologies than on the ways in which space exploration has affected and is continuing to affect our journey into posthumanity.

<3> Popular culture's portrayal of NASA, its astronauts, its technologies, and its leadership mirrors both the confusion within the agency and Americans' confusion with our own posthuman futures. With popular culture as our measure, it is obvious that NASA simply is not providing a convincing model of the ways in which even more integration of technology will better our lives. However, this inability to understand the potentially liberating ramifications of the dissolution of boundaries is not limited to NASA; in fact, determining whether the changes to humanity are positive continues to be a topic of debate, not just within popular culture but even in the ever-widening circle of posthuman theorists.

A Posthuman Theoretical Framework

<4> In her work "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century," Donna Haraway has outlined what she characterizes as "certain dualisms (that) have been persistent in Western traditions" (177). These dualisms, by their very nature, are exclusionary and serve to value one side of the duality and subjugate the other:

The self is the One who is not dominated, who knows that by the service of the other, the other is the one who holds the future, who knows that by the experience of domination, which gives the lie to the autonomy of the self. To be One is to be autonomous, to be powerful, to be God; but to be One is to be an illusion, and so to be involved in a dialectic of apocalypse with the other. Yet to be other is to be multiple, without clear boundary, frayed, insubstantial. One is too few, but two are too many. (177)

Categories such as public/private and reason/emotion are routinely used in our everyday language, yet these pairs are binary oppositions, mutually exclusive, and oppositional to each other. While the "One" is privileged, controlling, regulating, and even dominating its "Other," the "Other" is denied, controlled, regulated, and dominated by the "One."

<5> In many ways NASA has succeeded in breaking down some of the binaries addressed by Haraway; certainly, the technology/human boundary has been crossed, resulting in our human exploration of space more accurately being described as cyborg exploration. In addition to the technological prostheses of space ships and space suits, our astronauts are posthuman explorers if in no way other than their own mind-set. As we are reminded by N. Katherine Hayles' in How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics:

It is important to recognize that the construction of the posthuman does not require the subject to be a literal cyborg. Whether or not interventions have been made on the body, new models of subjectivity emerging from such fields as cognitive science and artificial life imply that even a biologically unaltered Homo sapiens counts as posthuman. The defining characteristics involve the construction of subjectivity, not the presence of nonbiological components. (4)

Recognizing that biological modification is not in itself a requirement in order for someone to be regarded as posthuman enables NASA's astronauts to be more readily accepted as posthuman. Explorers with a desire to understand the unknown, astronauts are by their very nature likely to have a constructed subjectivity open to experimentation with boundaries. Yet rather than appearing to be the posthumans of both mind and body they so clearly are, NASA's astronauts are curiously unremarkable, the image NASA insists its astronauts maintain doing little to inspire the imaginations or interests of the very public NASA strives to please.

Figure 1: Crew of the space shuttle Challenger. NASA Photo.

<6> In 1971 during a press conference to promote his forthcoming book Of a Fire on the Moon, Norman Mailer chastised NASA for its ineffectual and inaccurate presentation of its astronauts and space program. Mailer blamed the lackluster interest of Americans in the Apollo missions on the fact that NASA required the "tough men -- daredevils" who were selected for the space program to "suddenly … be priests" upon joining NASA's ranks. Referring to the Apollo 11 mission, the first of the missions to land on the moon, Mailer said NASA "succeeded in making the most transcendental event of the 20th century boring." Speaking of the astronauts, Mailer maintained: "If they were presented to the public as the swashbuckling guys they are, they would be more interesting. We don't present football players as saints…. You're asking this country to love saints and Americans are not noted for that." Mailer's characterization of the portrayal of astronauts as "boring … priests" is consistent with others' evaluations of the astronauts as curiously "asexual," and this trait of NASA's asexual astronauts has been frequently duplicated in popular culture, nowhere more obviously than in science fiction.

Figure 2: Crew of the space shuttle Columbia. NASA Photo.

<7> Vivian Sobchak explores the metaphor of science fiction and the portrayal of astronauts in popular culture in her article "The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film," concluding that the very characteristics that make NASA's "real" astronauts so boring for Mailer make science fiction's astronauts heroes.

It is their interchangeable blandness, their programmed cheerfulness, their lack of imagination, their very banality … that makes them heroes, that gives them that aura of mechanical and robotic competence which insists that nothing can go wrong, that everything is A-OK. They all look as if they can accomplish the unthinkable without ever having to think about it. They are a team, all the same -- and certainly never separated by real sexual rivalry. (108)

Science fictions' astronauts have crossed the boundary between "One" and "Other," no longer aspiring to conquer the opposite sex but instead viewing the real prize to be gained through the conquering of space:

Offscreen or on, these men who figure in our public myths neither appeal to prurient interest nor really seem to have any…. As if in training for the big game, they have rejected their biology and sexuality -- pushed it from their minds and bodies to concentrate on the technology required to penetrate and impregnate not a woman, but the universe. (Sobchak 108)

J.G. Ballard's Memories of the Space Age

<8> Through the years, NASA has been far more interested in developing technologies and putting those technologies to use than in researching the effects of space travel on humans. In fact, NASA itself acknowledges that the tests it performed on humans prior to any of the Mercury missions were little like what astronauts would encounter in space. In recent years, much more detailed analysis of the physical effects of space travel on the human body has been conducted; however, little to no information has been released about the psychological effects of space travel. Again, in recent years research studies have begun, but we are still years away from truly learning how astronauts are affected psychologically following space travel of any duration.

<9> While Ballard does address this concern in his stories, even this is not the focus of his fiction. Ballard is instead concerned with how space travel affects humans in general -- all humans, certainly those within NASA but even more importantly the rest of us on Earth. Ballard characterizes our departure from our planet to explore space as a crime against our very humanity. While in his stories both NASA and its astronauts fare poorly, those who suffer the most are in actuality those left behind to deal with the remains of what falls back to Earth.

<10> In a 1975 interview with David Pringle, Ballard discussed the role space exploration should play in fiction. Convinced fiction should be about the life experiences of readers, Ballard explains his difference of opinion from other writers: "Arthur C. Clarke … believes that the future of fiction is in space, that this is the only subject. But I'm certain you can't have a serious fiction based on experience from which the vast body of readers and writers is excluded. It's absurd" (Pringle/Ballard interview). While Ballard's fiction is about the effects of space exploration on society, his fiction is not about space ships, aliens, or any of the other motifs frequently embraced by science fiction. Instead, Ballard paints visions of our lives on earth that question the role technology is playing in the construction of our very humanity.

Figure 3: Eastern Standard Dali Time. Degginger Photography. <http://www.degginger.com/flash/html/digitalpage.html>

<11> A recurrent thread running throughout Ballard's Cape Canaveral fiction is the relationship between time and space. In fact, time is the topic of a great number of Ballard's works, the theme most often traced to his 1960 story "The Voices of Time." Throughout Ballard's fiction, he has crafted a superb metaphor in which a loss of time is used to explore the transformation the human is experiencing as a result of rapidly developing technologies. In the article "J.G. Ballard: Time Out of Mind," critic Peter Brigg compares Ballard's explorations of the meanings and boundaries of time in his fiction to artist Salvadore Dali's musings of time:

The key to the characters' perceptions of their needs, situations, and consequent actions is time in both the senses of clock time and occasion. Just as Dali has pictured the soft-time of distorted watches, so Ballard shows characters responding to time as they understand it, often appearing to float through external reality with little consideration of … the regular features of life. (43)

Although it threatens the very structure of human society, this distortion of time should not in itself be regarded as a blight upon society. In fact, those who suffer the most from the time sickness are not the people who have succumbed to the transition but instead those who fight it, determined to maintain their reality as it has always been.

<12> Ballard's Cape Canaveral characters, the majority of whom never physically leave the planet themselves, all battle with a loss of time brought on by humans' exploration of space. While in his first stories this loss of time is illustrated simply by people waiting for someone to return from space, in his later stories humanity has clearly lost all time, slipping into an all together different reality. Ballard opened his 1968 short story "The Dead Astronaut" with the eerie words "Cape Kennedy has gone now" (67). In this of Ballard's worlds, Florida has been long since abandoned by NASA and Cape Kennedy has become a crash-zone, a place where the orbiting satellites home-in on their return to earth and literally crash. In addition to the unmanned satellites in orbit, "a dozen astronauts had died in orbital accidents, their capsules left to revolve through the night sky like the stars of a new constellation" (69). One of these dead astronauts, Robert Hamilton, had become an obsession of Judith and Philip, ex-NASA employees who had only briefly known the astronaut: "At first, Judith had shown little response (to Hamilton's death). Later, after her miscarriage, the

of this dead astronaut circling the sky above us re-emerged in her mind as an obsession with time. For hours, she would stare at the clock, as if waiting for something to happen" (69-70). Twenty years after the astronaut's death, Judith and Philip have come to Cape Kennedy, waiting for Hamilton's capsule to crash to earth, determined to memorialize his life as everyone else seems to have forgotten both him and the others still in space. With them are the "relic hunters," the scavengers who make modest livings from the remains of the space program:

The relic hunters were at Cape Kennedy, scouring the burning saw grass for instrument panels and flying suits and -- most valuable of all -- the mummified corpses of the dead astronauts. These blackened fragments of collarbone and shin, kneecap and rib, were the unique relics of the Space Age, as treasured as the saintly bones of mediaeval shrines. (70)

These fragments of a dead astronaut are what Judith and Philip have come to claim, Philip hoping this will provide closure for Judith, yet he acknowledges "without knowing it, for years Judith and I had used Robert Hamilton for our own reasons. Waiting for him to land, and well aware that after this Judith would have no one to turn to except myself, I said nothing" (73).

<13> Judith and Philip had waited for twenty years for Hamilton's return from space, yet when he does return and they do claim his remains, they lose even more time. Hamilton's remains contaminated by radiation from the atomic bomb he apparently had had on board with him, Judith and Philip themselves become victims of the technology of the Space Age, falling ill from radiation exposure, Philip recognizing the irony of the moment: '"My God, what a joke. For twenty years I put up with him because I couldn't ever be really sure….Don't worry, I used him -- thinking about him was the only thing that kept us going. And all the time he was up there to pay us back!"' (78). The promises of the Space Age long since broken, Philip and Judith had clung to a false reality, lives spent waiting for the promised return of a long-dead astronaut, yet his very return signaled the end of their own lives. Judith's recognition of this signals the end of the story -- the end of the madness: "On her face was an expression I had never seen before, the dumb anger of betrayal" (78). Even Judith whose life for twenty years had been an obsession recognizes what Hamilton -- what NASA -- has taken from her, her very humanity.

<14> While Judith and Philip lost time, twenty years of their lives, as a consequence of space exploration, their fate is not unique in Ballard's stories. In 1981 and 1982, Ballard published three short stories that propose space exploration has "violated" the order of the universe, metaphorically driving a wedge through the very essence of our humanity as we understand it. Yet even while he describes this seemingly negative effect of space exploration upon humanity, he is exploring the ways in which this transgression of our humanity can in fact be liberating, offering us new freedoms from the limitations of what it means to be human. In 1981's "News from the Sun" for example, Ballard introduces the idea of space/time sickness, fugues brought on by humanity's ill-guided exploration of space: "the year-long flights … had set off the whole time-plague, cracked the cosmic hourglass" (105). This cracking of the "cosmic hourglass" and resulting madness reflects many of the concepts of the posthuman, including the limitations of the human body and desire for eternal life.

<15> Ballard articulates in "News from the Sun" the premise of which his two subsequent stories are written, characterizing our exploration of space as a crime against the very nature of our humanity:

By leaving his planet and setting off into outer space man had committed an evolutionary crime, a breach of the rules governing his tenancy of the universe, and of the laws of time and space. Perhaps the right to travel through space belonged to another order of beings, but his crime was being punished just as surely as would be any attempt to ignore the laws of gravity…. Sadly, not only the astronauts were affected. Each space-launch left its trace in the minds of those watching the expeditions. Each flight to the moon and each journey around the sun was a trauma that warped their perception of time and space. The brute-force ejection of themselves from their planet had been an act of evolutionary piracy, for which they were now being expelled from the world of time. (108)

Ballard connects the changes within the human over the past fifty years to our exploration of space, yet nowhere does Ballard paint a clear picture of just how the space/time slippage "works." In fact, rather than ever even alluding to the "how," Ballard is content to explore the significance of such a consequence. Ballard is advocating through this fiction the necessity for humans to understand themselves before we attempt to explore beyond our current reality, for fear that ill-conceived plans could at best fail and at worst devastate. While the majority of humans populating Ballard's stories fight and fear the fugues brought on by the space/time sickness, each story's protagonist gains increasing insight of the liberating qualities of this new, no longer human but possibly satisfying, eternal existence.

<16> In his 1982 story "Memories of the Space Age," Ballard once again questions the moral implications of our pursuit of space travel. In this story, Florida itself has been "closed," the poison of the space program having corrupted the entire state. Here, the end of the Space Age was marked by:

an awareness that man had committed an evolutionary crime by traveling into space, that he was tampering with the elements of his own consciousness. The fracture of that fragile continuum erected by the human psyche through millions of years had soon shown itself, in the confused sense of time displayed by the astronauts and NASA personnel, and then by the inhabitants of the towns near the Space Centre. Cape Kennedy and the whole of Florida itself had become a poisoned land to be forever avoided like the nuclear testing grounds of Nevada and Utah. (149)

Through his observation of Hinton, this story's protagonist Mallory comes to believe that the loss of time humanity has been plagued by is instead of an "evolutionary crime" simply a metamorphosis into a new reality, one to be embraced, not fought: "He seems to have embraced the destruction of time, as if this whole malaise were an opportunity we ought to seize, the next evolutionary step forward…. In a strange way he was helping me, guiding me into that new world without time" (157). Mallory's metamorphosis, like the others in all of these stories and even our own journey to the posthuman, is more a task of introspection than a physical journey of any sort. Mallory observes Hinton's descent into madness but concludes "perhaps, instead of going mad in space, Hinton had been the first man to 'go sane'" (149). Throughout this and the other Cape Canaveral stories there is a preponderance of recurrent imagery of abandoned airplanes, airports, runways, shuttles, and launch pads, images critic Gregory Stephenson views as representing "humankind's thwarted, neglected potential for flight, that is for the pure flight of the spirit, for transcendence" (114). Through the metaphor of a loss of time, Ballard is advocating a need within humans to lose much of the trappings of our society and instead aspire to our next evolutionary stage.

<17> In the third of the series of stories to develop the space/time illness fugue, 1982's "Myths of the Near Future" traces the roots of the illness not to space travel as in the previous stories but instead "blame seemed to lie with the depletion of the ozone layer that had continued apace during the 1980s and 1990s" (172). In this story, rather than being the cause of the fugue, an obsession with space exploration was a symptom:

It was always best to take the mad on their own terms. What Elaine and the other victims were trying to do was to explore space, using their illness as an extreme metaphor with which to construct a space vehicle. The astronaut obsession was key…. Could it be that traveling into outer space, even thinking about and watching it on television, was a forced evolutionary step with unforeseen circumstances, the eating of a special kind of forbidden fruit? Perhaps, for the central nervous system, space was not a linear structure at all, but a model for an advanced condition of time, a metaphor for eternity which they were wrong to try to grasp…. (173)

Even as they struggle to understand the transformations taking place in their lives, the characters in these stories come to realize that the solution is not to question and instead just to allow the change to happen. The protagonist of this story, Sheppard, comes to believe that the space sickness is indeed a liberation of the limitations of the human, recognizing it as an escape:

This space sickness -- it's really about time, not space, like all the Apollo flights. We think of it as a kind of madness, but in fact it may be part of a contingency plan laid down millions of years ago, a real space programme, a chance to escape into a world beyond time. Thirty years ago we opened a door in the universe…. (190)

Sheppard's articulation of the space sickness as "a contingency plan laid down millions of years ago" clarifies the space/time fugues as, although misunderstood, a positive evolutionary step. Ballard's discussion of the losing of time, as has been previously discussed, is never sufficient to satisfy the curiosity of the reader, yet this seems intentionally done, diverting the focus from the mechanics of the loss of time to its effects upon what is a rapidly transforming definition of humanity.

<18> Among the casualties of the space/time sickness, the body is a hindrance in Ballard's worlds, a troublesome link to what was once human. Yet even this is escapable for Ballard's evolving humans:

He felt embarrassed by the continued presence of his body, by the sticklike arms and legs, a collection of bones discarded at the foot of the clock. ("News from the Sun" 127)

He slapped his hip, impatient with his undernourished body, an atrophied organ that he would soon discard. ("Memories of the Space Age" 153)

Ballard's Cape Canaveral stories narrate both the end of the Space Age and the end of what it meant to be human prior to our exploring space. While Ballard's characters most certainly struggle to maintain their previous lives, inevitably, they all succumb to their new posthuman futures. These futures Ballard has painted are free of "time," free of the limitations of the human. Ballard's unique portrayal of the future of space exploration is both haunting and hopeful, humans standing to gain more than they will lose.

Conclusion

<19> Ballard has argued that the Space Age ended nearly as soon as it began, over even before Neal Armstrong walked on the moon. In his view, this accomplishment and all of NASA's other accomplishments of the 1960's were overshadowed by the death of President Kennedy and all he had meant to the space program. Yet Ballard is optimistic about the future of space exploration -- cautiously optimistic, but optimistic nonetheless. In his article "The Fourfold Symbolism of J.G. Ballard," critic David Pringle in fact categorized Ballard's tone regarding space travel as fearfully hopeful: "In contrast to most science fiction writers, what characterizes Ballard's approach to space-travel themes is his extreme caution. After all, if the stars 'are' the City of God, they must be approached with suitable awe." Ballard himself has expressed his belief that we will in fact explore space whole-heartedly -- but he cautions this is a journey we as humans simply are not yet ready to make, technologically speaking:

I'm sure there will be a Space Age, but it won't be for fifty, a hundred, two hundred years -- presumably when they develop a new means of propulsion. It's just too expensive. You can't have a Space Age until you've got a lot of people in space. (Ballard/Pringle interview)

Until we have "a lot of people in space," Ballard is content to focus his study on the ways in which NASA's technology and the very idea of space exploration are affecting us as humans involved in an exciting stage of our evolution, the evolution into our posthumanity. Ballard's characters and fans find freedom in his metaphors of space exploration, metaphors in which literal, physical exploration are not necessary. The "space" and "time" being explored in Ballard's works are not the limitations of the human but the potentials, potentials that become clear through the metaphors of space exploration.

<20> Running among Ballard's metaphors is Donna Haraway's figure of the cyborg -- "a hybrid of machine and organism" (149) -- which has been instrumental in subverting "biological-determinist ideology" as well as the "animal-human (organism) and machine" distinction (152). Furthermore, Haraway invokes the cyborg as being a creature of both "science fiction" and "social reality," suggesting that the cyborg questions the infallibility of boundaries integral to the organization of Western society (149).

<21> Haraway's juxtaposition of the words "fiction" and "reality" illustrates the arbitrary nature of these and other binaries in Western society. Haraway has told us the power of "cyborg imagery" lies in its ability to "suggest a way out of the maze of dualisms in which we have explained our bodies and our tools to ourselves" (181). Yet the dissolution of boundaries -- the turning from the dualisms upon which our very society is structured -- threatens to upset the organization of our culture. While Haraway argues that this is the promise of the posthuman, the "Ones" continue to view this instead as a very real threat to their place in society from the "Others."

<23> Popular culture's portrayal of NASA and its astronauts clearly illustrates Americans' obsession with the future and the role space exploration will play in this future. Examining science fiction works such as Ballard's stories explored here as posthuman narratives reveals not an image of the future as much as it reveals an image of the times in which the texts were produced and the hopes, expectations, and fears we have and have had of our posthuman futures.

<24> These popular culture texts clearly reveal that we are not ready to do away with the human in favor of some new mechanized being, but the human is no longer enough either. Only through the merging of technology and humanity -- a hybrid of posthuman and human -- does the world continue to spin for the astronauts of Ballard's worlds. NASA's rote mechanization of itself and its astronauts has simply stripped the agency of what we value as the essence of our humanity: our subjectivity, our free will.

<25> Popular culture's portrayal of NASA is not flattering, but neither is NASA's portrayal of itself. Plagued by mismanagement, confusion, and a lack of both focus and identity, NASA's struggles have not gone unnoticed -- yet NASA remains the quintessential symbol of cyborg and posthuman life, the tool for moving us beyond the limitations of our human lives here, on Earth.

Works Cited

Ballard, J.G. "The Dead Astronaut." 1968. Memories of the Space Age. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1988. 65-78.

---. "Memories of the Space Age." 1982. Memories of the Space Age. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1988. 131-163.

---. "Myths of the Near Future." 1982. Memories of the Space Age. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1988. 165-199.

---. "News from the Sun." 1981. Memories of the Space Age. Sauk City: Arkham House, 1988. 93-130.

Brigg, Peter. "J.G. Ballard: Time Out of Mind." Extrapolation 35:1 (1994). 43-59.

Haraway, Donna J. "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century." Simians, Cyborgs, and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge, 1991. 149-181.

Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.

"Mailer Says Piety Dulls Moon Appeal." 31 January 1971. Available online 28 December 2003. http://spot.colorado.edu/~marscase/cfm/nmailer.html

Pringle, David. "The Fourfold Symbolism of J.G. Ballard." Foundation 4 (1973). 48-60.

Pringle, David and Goodard. "Interview with J.G. Ballard." 4 January 1975. Available online 5 January 2004. http://www.solaris-books.co.uk/Ballard/Pages/Miscpages/interview4a.htm

Sobchack, Vivian. "The Virginity of Astronauts: Sex and the Science Fiction Film." Alien Zone: Cultural Theory and Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema. Kuhn, Annette, ed. London: Verso, 1990. 103-114.

Stephenson, Gregory. "'Trapped Aircraft': The Later Short Fiction." Out of the Night and Into the Dream: A Thematic Study of the Fiction of J.G. Ballard. New York: Greenwood Press, 1991. 85-116.