Appeal
“Contemporary science fiction” is full of cyborgs. These creatures are “simultaneously animal and machine, who populate world ambiguously natural and crafted.” However, a concept of cyborgs is not a new one. For instance, medicine is also “full of” cyborgs, “of couplings between organism and machine, each convinced as coded device.” Cyborgs are going to destroy the whole “history of sexuality” and build a brand new world. Cyborg replication is “uncoupled from organic reproduction.” The modern world - the one we know - turns into “a cyborg orgy.” This imagery evokes a feeling of confusion, for it is difficult to comprehend how quickly the world and life itself change.
Imperfect
The author states that pre-cybernetic machines “could be haunted,” for there was always “the specter of the ghost in the machine.” They were “not self-moving, self- designing, autonomous.” Those machines “could not achieve man’s dream, only mock it.” They were “not man, an author to himself,” but only “a caricature of that masculinist reproductive dream.”However, we can’t be that sure now, when machines have improved so greatly. “Late twentieth-century machines” have almost destroyed “the difference between natural and artificial, mind and body, self-developing and externally designed.” This imagery evokes a feeling of awe of progress.
Modernity
Modern machines are “quintessentially microelectronic devices.” They are “everywhere” and they are “invisible.” Modern machinery could be compared to “an irreverent upstart god, mocking the Father’s ubiquity and spirituality.” The tiny “silicon chip” is “a surface for writing.” It is “etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise.” “Writing, power, and technology” are “old patterns in Western stories of the origin of civilization,” but “miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism.” As it turned out to be, miniaturization is all “about power.” Small is “dangerous.” This imagery is supposed to show how machines change over the time and make us understand that this progress is almost unstoppable.
