“‘We’re trying to get you started again,’” one of the anonymous doctors tells the narrator of Invisible Man (1952) after his accident at Liberty Paints (232). The mechanistic vocabulary of this passage conjures the specter of a famous science fiction trope: the android. This paper argues that Ellison’s narrator presages the figure of the android as it appears, in one of its most well-known manifestations, in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Although Invisible Man has not been treated as a work of science fiction, I claim that the novel invokes the trope of the android in its strong form, as it appears in Dick’s novel. For instance, the narrator’s difficulty with his emotions in Invisible Man surfaces in Dick’s novel in the form of empathy tests, which are used to detect androids and separate them from humans. Ellison’s narrator meets the purely physical criteria of the android in the description of his operation after the accident: “A whirring began that snapped and cracked with static […] A flash of cold-edged heat enclosed me. I was pounded between crushing electrical pressures; pumped between live electrodes like an accordion between a player’s hands” (232). Throughout the passage depicting his reanimation, the narrator struggles to affirm his humanity despite continually being deprived of it by those he interacts with. Keeping an eye on this figure of the android, I claim that Invisible Man serves as a prototype of the critical science fiction that emerges in the 1960s. This “New Wave” science fiction was born out of a heightened awareness toward the rapidly developing cybernetic and aeronautic technologies of the twentieth century, combined with a representational concern over the alien, or other, in a culture plagued by racial, sexual, and political intolerance.
About the presenterPatrick Whitmarsh
I am a doctoral student in Boston University’s English department. My interests include the relationship between science fiction and canonical “literary” fiction – a relationship that has witnessed its share of animosity, such as SF author Peter Watts’s recent claim that “science fiction has become more relevant than ‘Literature’.” As modernist fiction appears less realistic throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, science fiction resists absorption into the institutional canon, spiraling further into obscure subgenres (steampunk, cyberpunk, biopunk, neuropunk, etc.). My efforts lie in critiquing and conceptualizing these shifts, with an emphasis on the gradual emergence of posthumanism, new narrative approaches to time and history, and the ambiguous relationship between speculative philosophy and the hard sciences.