Correspondence

by Sue Thomas

Genres: Science Fiction; Cyberpunk; Genetic Engineering

Synopsis

Cyborg imaginings mix with romance and transformation in this complex first novel where even the reader has a role to play. The narrator works as a compositor, a new kind of storyteller, but she is designing a different future for herself. Once a wife and mother, now she longs to escape from the world of human emotion into the calm and pain-free life of a cyborg. As her surgeries move towards closure, her story characters Shirley and Rosa have other agendas, leading to an unexpected outcome.

Release date: June 25, 2019

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 165

Sample

‘Correspondence’ was written between 1988-1991 and came out in 1992. I had published very little at the time, and was working on two ‘first’ novels simultaneously – ‘Correspondence’ and ‘Pastoral’. The whole process was new to me and I was writing very much in isolation. I was a recently divorced mature student single parent, just graduated from university. My bank account was empty and my head was spinning with education which I longed to use.

‘Pastoral’ was about a woman's deep desire to move to the countryside, that mythically idyllic place where life is pure and uncomplicated. We were living in the suburbs of Nottingham, in the English East Midlands, but I wanted to be out in the country where I could spend my days thinking, writing, and connecting with nature. This was, of course, a lifestyle hardly compatible with two young daughters, so I created the character of Rosa instead, and set her in a rural cottage to see how things might turn out.

‘Correspondence’ was turning into a very different kind of story. I had studied computer programming as part of my recent degree, and became obsessed with the idea of what I liked to call ‘machine-ness’. This novel described a transformation that I wished for but could not have. I had already tried out a couple of ideas in short stories – in one, a woman finds that playing a video game empowers her to end her marriage; in another, the protagonist reprograms her emotions. A novel allow me to dive deeper into the process of transformation. Today, the main character would be seen as a cyborg, an organism whose parts are both organic and mechanical, but I did not have that term in mind when I was writing the book because I hadn't yet come across it, even though it had been invented in the 1960’s, I hadn’t yet come across it. And, in a way, I’m glad of that because the lack of a label makes her condition feel just a little more liminal and, perhaps, more authentic.

The two stories were, of course, almost diametrically opposite each other, with different tones and different potential readerships, but as the months passed and I moved back and forth between them, I gradually understood that they were deeply intertwined. Each explored virtuality, escape, and immersion. Eventually, I sat down one day with the pages of both manuscripts spread out across my bed and wove them together until they formed the core of a single narrative.

Some aspects of the novel now seem a little out of time. When I started writing it in 1989, the internet was already twenty years old but few people beyond the military and academia knew it existed. But that year, Tim Berners-Lee invented a portal to that wealth of information – the World Wide Web. Then in 1992, the year ‘Correspondence’ was published, he released the tool which would make the internet accessible to all – the first web browser. The digital life so familiar to us today was still a long way in the future but, if it had existed then, it’s very probable that our protagonist would not undergo her transformation alone, or perhaps at all, because she would be connected to the internet. There, she would find many others sharing her desire to merge with the machine. She might join the post-humanists, already working to transcend their physical bodies. Or maybe she would be preparing for the Singularity, the moment when, some expect, the creation of artificial superintelligence will trigger runaway technological growth and transform us in ways we do not yet understand. In short, as a citizen of the digital world she would likely find herself altogether less isolated and with more choices than she has in the novel.

And then, there is the nature of her work. She is a professional ‘compositor’ of stories, synthesising the experiences and emotions of countless real individuals and weaving them into a narrative. Of course, in this respect she is exactly like any other creative person at any time in history, since such ‘compositing’ has always been at the centre of artistic creation, but what makes her different in 1992 is that her tools are digital. During the 1990s we would gradually become accustomed to word processors and digital images, but in the early part of the decade they were not in widespread use. The work she produced might today be called interactive virtual reality, or video gaming, or perhaps hyperfiction, none of which existed then. At the time I had no model to follow, but I did have a strong sense that technology would soon be used to process our innermost thoughts and memories into new kinds of entertainments. In 2018, she would be busily mining our social media data and using our own lives to make stories about experiences we have not even had yet.

On a personal note, as the narrator of the narrator, I too became a compositor of the virtual. Three years after the publication of ‘Correspondence’, I joined the text-based virtual world of LambdaMOO, an early online community where identity is fluid and anonymous players can be anything they want to be. For several years I logged on every day and immersed myself in possibilities I had never dreamed of when writing the novel. Sometimes I even wondered whether I might somehow find my characters there, living out their virtual lives forever.

Perhaps my protagonist would be amused to learn that the author of her transformation is now just a little bit bionic! I, also, have hungered to feel the machine-ness within myself and now, over twenty years later, knee replacement surgeries have brought me closer to the cyborg life.

Writing Correspondence was an absorbing and intense experience, but I had no idea how it might be received if it was ever published. When it came out with The Women’s Press in 1992, I entered a whole new world, especially when I was invited to science fiction conventions, a very unfamiliar milieu. I had always enjoyed reading SF but had no idea of the fandom around it. The conventions were both thrilling and scary, not least because it quickly became clear that my book did not really fit in. But, fortunately, some critics were kind despite the fact that I was obviously adrift in the ‘slipstream’. The book was short-listed for the 1993 Arthur C Clarke Award, and The James Tiptree Jnr Award, and I received an Encouragement Award from the European Science Fiction Society. In 1993, the novel was published in the USA by The Overlook Press, an eclectic publisher which took me in a new direction when it promoted ‘Correspondence’ as a literary novel. American reviewers saw the book as experimental literature, sometimes overlapping with science fiction, but more often reading it as an avant-garde adventure. One critic described it as ‘cheerfully subversive’ which felt about right.

So, how will the experiment be read now, twenty-seven years later? I look forward to finding out.

A note about this edition

This edition is almost identical to the original. The world has changed so much since 1992 that any attempt to update the main elements of the story would destroy the whole thing. But I have made one small concession, and that is to refresh some terms which have since evolved. For example, in the first edition I described the compositor’s job as creating ‘multisensory’ materials, but today the word should be ‘multimedia’, not in common use then. In this edition, therefore, I have replaced it with ‘multimedia/multisensory’. I have also made some small stylistic changes and revised the placement of some headings. Since I no longer have a digital version of the original manuscript, I had a print copy scanned and then converted from PDF to Word, resulting in some odd optical misunderstandings. These have all (I hope) been caught and fixed.

Sue Thomas, Bournemouth, 2018.

People often turn away from you in the street, but you can understand that. You find them pretty scary too, and of course you know that you’re both frightened by the same thing – you see a little bit of yourself in them, and they see you likewise. The only difference is that you understand, and they don’t. You’ve heard them whisper, when they think you’re too far away to hear:

‘There’s something odd about that woman, but I can’t quite figure out what it is. She’s just not quite the same as us…’

Oh, but you are the same! There’s a trace of you in every one of them, but they just can’t see it.

It’s like the story about the man who is killed in a road accident. His son is rushed to hospital seriously injured, but in the operating theatre the surgeon declares, ‘I cannot operate on this patient. He is my son.’ It’s unbelievable how many people just can’t work that one out. It’s necessary to have a certain mind-set to appreciate the obvious, and the same applies when they look at you. The aspects of your difference are incomprehensible to them, despite the fact that they are really very apparent.

Anyway, you make people feel uncomfortable. Because of that, you’ve developed the habit of going out very little. Most of your requirements can be delivered to your house, for which you must thank your Regis 3000 terminal. It was worth every penny – you can do all of your on-line shopping and banking with it, although of course you can’t live entirely on electronic money, and you do need to go to the cash machine occasionally to get something for incidentals.

You look forward to the creature comforts of the cash machine. It provides an affectionate familiarity in a world which offers very little in that direction to people such as yourself (although you don’t actually know whether there are any others like you anyway). You go to the bank in the dead of night when everyone else is safely tucked up in bed. You always drive there, and you spend as little time as possible out of the car.

You used to walk around the streets in the dark quite often, until you had an unpleasant encounter which brought home very forcefully the extent to which you invoke dislike in people. Now these days you’re careful to drive, and if you should meet anyone, even while waiting at traffic lights, you make sure to avoid their stares. They don’t like the look in your eyes, it seems – it incites them to violence, or at the very least, a glowering hostility.

But the cash machine is your friend. Every time you insert your card you feel a thrill as the welcome window slides up:

Please enter your personal number

Most certainly you will! Only too happy to oblige! You tap in your code and the machine hums in greeting. It has a special tone for you – in fact you suspect that you have developed your own discreet mutual admiration society. You like to stand in front of it for as long as you dare, bathing in the orange glow of the screen. It’s not quite like the machines at home – no doubt that’s something to do with the type of work it does. It interacts with people twenty-four hours a day, whereas your machines have only you. But whatever the reason, a trip to the bank does wonders…

Before the Renaissance, there was no distinction between philosophy and science, and the old magicke worked alongside new discoveries. Paracelsus, for example, left us an invaluable legacy of knowledge in the pharmaceutical field, but he also devised a recipe for constructing a homunculus out of human sperm, horse manure and blood.

The Renaissance insisted on defining the machine as a phenomenon separate to humanity, but automata continued to represent the bridge between imagination and empiricism.

Descartes concluded that mind and body are two different states – the rational and the mechanical. The latter could be reproduced by automata and animals. The former, comprising Judgment, Will and Choice, only by humanity.

The connection, or interface between the two, was said to be the Third Eye, or pineal gland.

ENDS

… does wonders for your isolation problem.

You weren’t always such a recluse. That has in fact been rather forced upon you, and there are times when you regret the whole thing and wish you’d never taken it on. But most of the time you’re quite happy, and of course your work takes up a great proportion of your thoughts.

You are a compositor of fantasies. A grand title which doesn’t hint at the day-to-day grind of the job. Often you’re so overwhelmed by the amount of source material that you just stop altogether and take a week off. You’re lucky because you can switch off completely and take a well-earned rest, then begin work again feeling fresh and ready to go.

The project you’re working on right now is quite complex. You got it because of your seniority, but even so you can’t help wondering whether Alan is testing you in some way. Sometimes you imagine him sitting in his big black swivel chair, racking his brains tryi. . .