BROKEN KNOWLEDGE (8)
By:
November 3, 2025
University of Toronto philosopher Mark Kingwell and HILOBROW‘s Josh Glenn are coauthors of The Idler’s Glossary (2008), The Wage Slave’s Glossary (2011), and The Adventurer’s Glossary (2021). In 2022, they engaged in an epistolary exchange about science fiction. Via the series BROKEN KNOWLEDGE, the title of which references Francis Bacon’s philosophy, HILOBROW is pleased to share a lightly edited version of their exchange with our readers. Also see Josh and Mark’s previous exchange 49th PARALLEL.
BROKEN KNOWLEDGE: FIRST CONTACT | WHAT IF? | A HYBRID GENRE | COUNTERFACTUALS | A HOT DILUTE SOUP | I’M A CYBORG | APOPHENIC-CURIOUS | AN AESTHETICS OF DIRT | PAGING DR. KRISTEVA | POLICING THE GENRE | FAMILIAR STRANGENESS | GAME OVER | THE WORLD VIEWED | DEFAMILIARIZATION | SINGULAR CREATURES | ALIEN ARCHAEOLOGIST | THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SCREEN-TIME | HOMO SUPERIOR | EVERYTHING IS US.
1st October, 2022
TORONTO GENERAL HOSPITAL
Didn’t mean to bury the lede! Yes, I’ve had two liver transplants since this time last year, plus many associated procedures and courses of medication. (I would advise people: if possible, to avoid the Foley catheter insertion and especially the bone-marrow biopsy.) I feel exceedingly lucky to have received this care, and these organs, plus insurance-covered medications that would otherwise cripple me financially. I’ve always been an in-principle fan of Canadian socialized medicine. This year, it literally saved my life and my future.
When you’re in the hospital, and I’ve been here off and on for a year, there is no reality outside of it: the routine, the pain and discomfort, the dull food (cheese sandwiches twenty or thirty times in a row!). You have to fight a bit to resist what Foucault called “the sick role,” retaining a grasp on your non-medical self.
Since I’m hooked up to medical stuff, mostly for the taking and giving of liquids, I’m not a cyborg in any “upgrade” or next-level transhumanist way. Instead I think of this condition, following Kristeva, as that of the abject cyborg: it’s all about the leaky body, with its unruly foul fluids and awful permeability to external toxins. Using somebody else’s blood — or liver! — to stay alive is just a logical extension of leaking in the first place. Maybe.
Anyway, this makes me think of how much of the uncanniness you mention is actually about the body in relation to its environment. Blake to Huxley to Jim Morrison: even in speculation, mortality and the flesh are never far away. In the classic Freudian study of the uncanny (1919) the focus is on literature that deploys doubling, mirror effects, revenants, returns of the repressed, and so on. These are the familiar tropes of familiar strangeness, and therefore at the heart of the uncanny valley.
A lot of that belongs in the realm of horror, of course, from Lovecraft to Cronenberg, rather than sf; but they are in close alliance. Bodily infection and transformation, especially when unwilled, is a key element of many classic sf works and franchises: The Fly, the Alien series, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, more recently the Battlestar Galactica reboot and District 9. Horror goes nuclear, or ballistic, or supersonic, or something.
Interesting to me here is an aesthetic issue that doesn’t get enough attention, the difference between what we could call “clean” and “dirty” sf production values. Star Trek TOS and TNG were both clean TV series, with spotless consoles, stain-resistant uniforms, and uncluttered decks. Dirty aesthetics became the norm after the original Alien, I think, the poor old Nostromo a model for everything from the various dimly lit BSG interiors to the clunky Rocinante on The Expanse. (The Alien ship is named for a Joseph Conrad novel; the Expanse star is the name of Don Quixote’s broken-down horse in Cervantes.)
Not to range too widely, but we could speculate that this taste for an aesthetics of dirt is itself uncanny, since it represents disorder within ostensible purpose. These ships are the unmade beds of otherwise effective people. They are not squared away sailors, but they prevail (at least sometimes).
The idea of hygiene is a threshold function, just as significant as an actual door (of perception) or the skin itself (that injection hurts! here comes that virus!). The clean versus the unclean is an ancient trope, like the sacred and the profane, which can be executed by a threshold mechanism. When I dip my hands in holy water before entering a church, for example, I am not washing my fingers but my soul. I am preparing to be in another state of being, not sluicing away wing sauce. In this way I cross into the space of otherness with appropriate rituals (smoke, ash, incantations, proper dress, gestures, and so on). I am now occupying a world within a world, usually understood to be a higher one: temple, church, sweat lodge, even classroom. I am no longer my mundane self.
The line drawn by the threshold is thus a map of meaning. It takes its place with other cartographic lines in what Bachelard called the poetics of space. It tells us where we are, what we are doing, and who else is allowed. (No vampires unless invited!) These conceptual maps remind me of how important maps are to sf and fantasy: when you sketch a new world of the imagination, a visual display of its features is essential. I can still remember poring over the maps of Middle Earth and Narnia, often included as foldouts in paperback editions. Star Trek, really a show about navigation, is unimaginable without the display of star charts on screen (maybe that’s why my father the navigator liked it).
Spinning this associative cluster out even farther, if I may, we see another uncanny effect: the map is not the territory, as Alfred Korzybski said, though it can be mistaken for it. By the same token, maps are not mere representations but, instead, also graphic assertions of power or dominance. The 1811 Commissioner’s Plan that created the Manhattan grid also parcelled the entire American territory into monetizable chunks. Gerrymandered congressional districts that make no cartographical sense stand on the books to cluster like-minded voters together for the force-multiplying of influence.
As I write this, it is Truth and Reconciliations Day in Canada. This date marker is meant to observe how far we still need to go with respect to Indigenous people who fall under the strange map that is mostly bounded on the south by the 49th parallel. It is well meant, I guess, but not terribly pragmatic. Some place, street, and institution names will be changed, and that affects maps of course. I already live in a city with an Indigenous name, but my academic colleagues just south of here went from teaching at Ryerson University (named for a “educational reformer” and main architect of the brutal colonialist residential school system) to University X to Toronto Metropolitan University. Meanwhile, the big lines, the ones that mark out the very field of play called politics, were drawn a long time ago by white men in Ottawa. The four corners of Saskatchewan. The ragged Rocky Mountain west of Alberta. Labrador’s kooky vectored negotiation with Eastern Quebec. The feds and the provinces as fields of power, not land masses. I don’t see much of that changing.
Finally: Josh, we both know that English novelist Kingsley Amis published a critical survey of sf in 1959 called New Maps of Hell, based on a series of lectures he gave at an American college. At the time, speaking and writing seriously about sf, especially in an academic setting, was rare to the point of eccentricity. Amis would do a similar thing with Ian Fleming’s James Bond novels in The James Bond Dossier (1965). His aim in both studies was to challenge the dismissal of “genre” fiction by more serious (we would say high-brow) writers and critics.
Nowadays I’d considered such efforts to be protest-too-much special pleasing. (It doesn’t help the quality of Fleming’s prose to note that Bond doesn’t drink or have sex as much as you think, or that he needs to exercise to get into shape for a mission.) I guess that’s our good luck. But I still want you to comment on the idea of genre. We’ve sidestepped it a bit. Are we simply post-genre now? (I don’t think so.) Or has there been a high-low-brow revolution? Or something else?
Amis, by the way, never wrote any science fiction. His closest efforts are an alt-history fantasy called The Alteration (warning: eunuchs) and a mild horror-intrusion tale, The Green Man (made into a TV mini-series with Albert Finney, if you can believe). Amis also did a Bond riff called Colonel Sun, which is just barely worth reading. It’s certainly better than John Gardner’s fourteen (!) Bond originals. Actually, I shouldn’t say that — I only read two before giving up…
Mark
ALSO SEE: Josh’s BEST 250 ADVENTURES of the 20th CENTURY list | Mark on BATTLESTAR GALACTICA and THE HONG KONG CAVALIERS | Mark and Josh’s exchange 49th PARALLEL.