The Artificial Kid

The first of Bruce Sterling‟s novels, The Artificial Kid, takes place on a different planet named Reverie. Sterling creates a world of coral continents and levitating islands. Reverie is, in a sense what may become of Earth in the future, if technology continues to improve in its current speed together with social and economic inequality. Reverie is introduced as a utopia/dystopia, in which there is serious class division. The protagonist of the work, Arti, is a biologically modified young man from “the Decriminalized Zone”, an area which is free from any legal and social rules. He becomes a popular star by selling his own videos in which he

engages in bloody fights with other fighters. The upper class buys his videos for the sake of entertainment. Arti or The Kid, as his friends call him, creates a theatrical effect with his numchucks, and uses his floating cameras to document the story of his life and his battles.

Reverie is an interesting planet because an ancient group named “Cabal”

established a “utopian” system on it centuries ago. A man named Moses Moses is the leader of this system, and he is introduced as a sort of Jesus Christ, in that his reappearance is depicted and referred to as a “second coming” (The Artificial Kid, 65). When Moses Moses awakes from his seven centuries of “cryosleep”, and Arti discovers that he was a man of politics in his previous life with the same body, they both have to escape from “cabal” and Reverie. He was Rominuald Tanglin, before becoming Arti, and he was one of the most powerful men on the planet. Thus, the Artificial Kid appears to be one person, but he has two groups of enemies. He becomes the destiny of his planet as he learns about his past, which is a common motif in the Cyberpunk works.

As an example of Cyberpunk, The Artificial Kid, is deeply concerned with biological modification which is one of the subject matters Cyberpunk has adopted from hard science. The main character of the work Arti is indeed a product of advanced technology. The novel also reflects another generic feature of the Cyberpunk novel, that is the emphasis on the combination of low life (Arti‟s life as a wrestler takes place in bloody combats to entertain rich people who appear as the

“punk sensibility” of the movement) with advanced technology (Arti as a product of advanced science and technology and making use of technology to earn money to survive). Arti lives with technology and, in a sense, he becomes integrated with

technology. For example, he uses floating cameras over his body to record his fights and to prepare a documentary of his own life. Arti, thus is represented as a kind of

“hopeful monster” as Sterling himself refers to Cyberpunks (Sterling, 1987:4-5).

Arti is both the protagonist and the narrator of the work, and he appears as a kind of anti-hero, unwilling for any type of adventure. He starts his struggle in the bottom part of the planet like other Cyberpunk protagonists. Arti explains why he is called the Artificial Kid as follows:

People used to ask me how I became a combat artist and why I‟m called the Artificial Kid. People stopped asking such prying questions after I ruthlessly beat them up. Every formal interview I‟ve given has ended with me “losing my temper” and secondly clubbing the journalist… all combat artists must have a gimmick, and mine has always been my childishness and wild artificiality. “Kid”, on Reverie, means a young person, but the word also has a certain raffish air of irreverent disrespect (The Artificial Kid, 2).

Like the protagonists of the previously studied novels of Gibson, Arti‟s main concern is himself alone at the beginning of the novel. He just wants to survive in a limited environment, through fighting (and filming his fights in order to sell) like Case or Bobby in Neuromancer and Count Zero. Arti does not care about the rest of the planet or he does not have a purpose like fighting to save the future of it.

Beside characterization, Gibson and Sterling have many common techniques in creating the Cyberpunk atmosphere. For example, Sterling gives a description of

the sky right at the beginning of The Artificial Kid, as Gibson does in Neuromancer:

“The sky over Telset, my island city, is clear as the camera zooms in; I was careful to check with the weather satellites before I did the taping” (The Artificial Kid, 1). This description of the sky, though conveying an opposite effect to Gibson‟s description of sky as “the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel”, still presents the Cyberpunk discourse since it describes nature in terms of technology. On the other hand, Sterling‟s way of describing the first scene, right at the very beginning as “a single block, a single street, a single person, me, and my own image swells to fill the screen” (The Artificial Kid, 1), appears as if describing a camera viewpoint as it zooms in from orbit above the planet.

Sterling deals with the influences of technological advancements applied to the human body in The Artificial Kid. The time in which the work takes place is referred to as the “day of technomedicine” (The Artificial Kid, 8).Technology and advanced medicine are capable of changing lives in various ways. The body turns out to be a machine that is open to processing. Likewise, the brain is demonstrated as a sort of computer that can be formatted or reset. Artificial Kid explains his “first”

and current lives: Rominuald Tanglin was his previous personality and although his memory is erased, he has an idea about his previous life due to records kept by Professor Crossbow, his “tutor and mentor for the first twenty years” of his life (The Artificial Kid, 3). How he gained a new personality or how he was “born” is recounted by Arti himself:

I happen to have the first moments of my “birth” on tape. They were taped by Professor Crossbow…In the first few minutes of the tape it is obvious that, despite

the fact that he says nothing, we are looking at Rominuald Tanglin, my previous personality. He is two hundred and seventy-one standard years old and looks every day of it (The Artificial Kid, 3).

Arti‟s body is not a young one but aging gains a different sense in the Cyberpunk world since time appears to be something that lost its influence on human lives. Men can live longer and can have control over their bodies as long as they are not controlled by someone else. The current time system is referred to as “standard”, for example, Tanglin is two hundred and seventy-one “standard” years old. Professor Crossbow ends Tanglin‟s life with a machine and creates Artificial Kid in his body:

The body, momentarily empty of any personality sags in the chair, but transparent plastic braces, barely visible keep the head upright. Tears form in the opened eye ducts and slide down across the broad cheeks. The memory eraser has done its work. Tanglin‟s mind is gone, his personality is scorched away. Quickly, Crossbow touches away the tears and removes the head brace. Within seconds, consciousness returns, I am born, and I lift my head (The Artificial Kid, 4).

Although he has a new personality and a totally new memory, the body remembers its old reflexes. This creation scene reminds the science fiction reader of the birth of Frankenstein. Due to advanced technology, Arti is conscious of his existence and identity and he can learn about the world and his previous personality through records. Thus, in Sterling‟s novel human memory turns into something that can be

played with, erased or re-shaped. In addition, machines gain importance in personal history, in that people record all their lives and keep their memories in personal computers. “It must have hurt Tanglin to erase the hundreds of years of taped memories in the personal computer I inherited from him” (The Artificial Kid, 5).

Since Cyberpunk is about the breakdown of opposites such as the natural and the artificial, The Artificial Kid presents a chance to read Cyberpunk as an analysis of the postmodern identification of the human with the machine.

Having long lives with different memories, human beings have more chance to change their lives. For example, they start to live on various planets in The Artificial Kid, and technology is highly developed on all the planets. The planet Reverie, which is partly transformed into a Decriminalized Zone, an area freed of legal and social restraint, is governed by Elders or the Cabal, and Arti has to fight against the new Cabal to survive and save Reverie. One of the island cities of Reverie, Telset, where Arti was born, was “cooked” by pioneer Reverids five hundred years ago to “a state of red-hot viscosity with powerful orbital lasers, killing all native life” (Artificial Kid, 7). Later, other species also settle on the island and the island turns out to be a “riotous scramble of species from a dozen planets, each seeking a niche in a chaotic, cosmopolitan system” (The Artificial Kid, 7). Arti defines Telset as “wired” which does away with the need for compactness(The Artificial Kid, 7). To Arti, “the primary recreation of her [Telset‟s] citizens is tape:

drone tape, art tape, life tape, memory tape” (The Artificial Kid, 7). In such a city, Arti starts his career as a junior gang member of the “Cognitive Dissonants”, a group led by Chill Factor and his Ice Lady, who were responsible for his development as an artist and tape craftsman.

The beginning of the second chapter gives us an idea about the general inhabitants and the life style of the island. The house of Many Mansions is visited by various people from different layers of society. Among these guests there are poets, explorers, rising porn stars and ambitious tape craftsman. The assembling of people from various fields of study and different layers of life in the house of Mr. Manies and their discussion on social life and technology may remind science fiction readers of the beginning of The Time Machine by H.G.Wells:

we were a markedly heterogeneous group. Alruddin Spinney, the poet and „Ruffian Jack‟ Nimrod, the explorer…But I had never before seen Professor Angeluce of the Academy or Saint Anne Twiceborn, a Niwlindid political refugee (The Artificial Kid, 12-13).

These people from different occupations and social strata come together and talk about life.

Sterling introduces this future world in which technology presents limitless possibilities as a place where economic structure shapes lives. Arti defines his age as the “day of the techno-medicine” (The Artificial Kid, 8), but he adds that it is still not so easy to heal up: “you can‟t fight all the time, there are limits: medical bills and stuff” (The Artificial Kid, 8). Therefore, it appears that physical health is subject to economic power. For Sterling, The Articial Kid is about violence and politics and media. How all three became interwoven is presented through the story of Arti. He fights to earn money and fame, but he is successful with his techniques of taping. If he cannot sell his videos of combat he cannot earn money and he cannot survive.

Hence, Larry McCaffery‟s statement appears to be right in that Cyberpunk works

such as The Artificial Kid seems to be the only art systematically dealing with the most crucial political, moral and cultural issues of our day (McCaffery,1988).

Under the influence of biochemical suppressants, Arti appears sexless, since he has no interest in the opposite sex, nor does he have any kind of physical feature that indicates he belongs to a certain sex. As Baudrillard and Haraway underline, the human and technology are no longer so dichotomous in the postmodern era, and this dissolution leads to the disappearing of the duality of male and female as in the case of Artificial Kid. Through to the end of the Artificial Kid, Kid starts to change physically after he becomes unable to take the suppressants that present the dominance of sex hormones.

I was exhausted and sick. My scalp tingled, and for the first time I felt the borderline nausea of hormone changeover. My suppressant had worn off, and a whole dancing, capering Harlequinade of male biochemicals were washing through my bloodstream, charging into hair follicles at lip and jaw and groin and armpit, triggering neotenic growth in my vocal cords, even badgering the pituarity into an atavistic state of alertness. I was too sick to notice the erotic effect, at least for the time being (The Artificial Kid, 216).

This change also influences his character and he starts to be interested in the opposite sex. Saint Anne Twiceborn, whose surname is significant in that she also presents a kind of transmutation in terms of character and manners in the course of events, becomes the target of his interest in women:

Anne was the only woman. I saw her with new eyes, not the calm blackrimmed eyes of the Artificial Kid, but older, hotter eyes that showed slow heat shimmering just above the surface of her skin. I had never seen that the lines of a woman‟s body were curves; that they were not static, not just the outside layer of skin over muscle and tendon, but flowing and living. Before, I had seen proportion; now, I saw grace.

When I had seen Anne‟s face before, I sad seen her features; now, I saw a woman (The Artificial Kid, 222).

This quotation includes one of few references to male-female relationship, since Cyberpunk novels usually do not include romantic references to male-female relationships as it was also pointed out in the chapter on the work of Gibson.

Technology in a way satisfies man in different ways, and furthermore in chaotic lives, individuals have no place for such relationships.

The relationship between man and woman is thus also seen to be subject to control, since techno-medicine has reached the stage at which it canan advanced point to control hormones and character: “I‟ve stayed on libido suppressants ever since Professor Crossbow first gave them to me. My hairless face and high-pitched voice attest to that” (The Artificial Kid, 9).

The dependence of man on technology appears as a dominant theme in the work. For instance, Kid‟s weakest point is presented as his cameras, in that Kid feels worthless when he loses his cameras which appear as a part of his body. It is as if he needed his cameras to exist and he loses his identity together with the cameras when

they are lost: “My cameras are gone. It blinded me” (The Artificial Kid, 217). The loss of his cameras becomes a major step in his integration with his prior personality, Rominuald Tanglin. Up to his self-actualization, Artificial Kid appears to live the reality that he created for himself through his cameras, in other words, in his own hyperreality in which, as Baudrillard argues, reality and simulation are perceived as being no different from one another. The image he created through videos has more value than himself.

Cloning of human beings and limbs, which is one of the main concerns of Cyberpunk literature is also employed by Sterling in The Artificial Kid. For example, Mr. Quizein, the food programmer of Money Manies, loses his two legs during an ray attack while swimming in the reef and he awaits the clone growth of a new pair of legs. Technological developments influence, change, and control animals as well as human beings in The Artificial Kid. Animals are subject to change due to advanced science. There are altered pets, mutant and hybrid products created by men of science in the work.

Sterling discusses the concept of government frequently. For instance, St.

Anne Twiceborn, talks about how she was misinformed about the government in Reverie:

I follow the path of righteousness wherever it leads. If to Reverie, so much better. On Niwlind I was told that Reverie is a paradise – that no one has to work, and that the government is an invisible plutocracy. But I find that there is much work for me here (The Artificial Kid, 15).

Thus, in Sterling‟s work it is seen that the people of the near future desire invisible governments. Likewise in the work of Gibson, a country with a government is a subject of amazement “Christ, we‟ve still got a government here. Not run by big companies. Well, not directly…” (Mona Lisa Overdrive, 218) because governments are replaced by companies. As opposed to Gibsonian multi-corporate companies and countries without a government, Reverie has a government and it is said that it has been without a government only once in its history, when Moses Moses died.

“Reverie was ruled by a conspirator‟s council. Faceless men and women. Everyone agreed that they were all rich, all immensely wealthy” (The Artificial Kid, 22). Later, theCabal takes the power. Like the previous faceless Board of Directors, they are also vague figures, who hide their faces to remain unrecognisible:

It‟s a common knowledge that there are thirteen Cabalists. Seven are men and six are women. The men are called Red, Orange, Yellow, Blue, Green, Indigo, and Violet. The women are North, South, East, West, Up and Down. They live in their own oneills [cities]…

(The Artificial Kid, 22).

Clearly, as seen in the examples from the works of William Gibson and Bruce Sterling, multinational corporations in different guises control global economies in Cyberpunk novels, which make these novels reflections of postmodern reality.

To conclude, Sterling employs such Cyberpunk motifss such as life that appears as a combination of low social strata and advanced technology, biological modification, genetic engineering, memory processing and a different global system that reflects the changing economic order in The Artificial Kid. Thus, it reflects the

social and cultural expectations of the period in which it was written. The use of the word “artificial” in the title and the in the name of the protagonist becomes emblematic indicating the power of technology in the futuristic setting. Sterling combines low life with advanced technology by employing prominent cyberpunk themes in The Artificial Kid.