top of page

Technology in Spit Ghost Woman

 

Technology and Wealth Differentials

 

When we project into the future to guess how technology will change and shape our world, technological development is generally treated as inevitable.  We acknowledge that technology has done bad things in the wrong hands, but technological development as a concept is presented as inherently good, the key to solving problems from hunger to loneliness to climate change.

 

One significant value of “soft” science fiction like is that it can be used, as Ursula K Le Guin writes in her introduction to , as a thought experiment, a way to pre-emptively explore the potential social impacts of technological progress.  I enjoy reading fantastical science fiction like , but I mainly like to write science fiction that addresses scientific progress that is an extension of current social and economic patterns.  That is the focus had originally, though in the past few months I’ve reached more into religious surrealism.

 

The social context of was inspired by readings and conversations I had in my Geology minor, as well as two papers I wrote on the consequences of coal mining in West Virginia and gold mining in El Salvador.  The environmental and social costs of mining are enormous, but there are a lot of good reasons why mining continues to be a lucrative industry.  The main reason is that we use minerals for ev.er.y.thing – if it’s not grown, it’s mined, that’s what Geology professors like to say.  That’s the perspective that makes me look sideways at anyone who acts like a smartphone app can be beneficial for the environment, because any benefit it can give is unlikely to offset the tremendous amount of resources that went into creating the phone, and the planned obsolescence that will send it to an unlined e-waste site in western Africa after two years of use.  The secondary benefit of mining is that it provides jobs.  However, the technology enabled by mined minerals allows companies to employ fewer and fewer workers each year.

 

One problem with mining is that it makes poor places poorer by destroying their natural resources.  That makes it impossible to survive doing anything but mining.  Meanwhile, the mineral resources being mined go toward new technology that the mining companies can buy to replace salaried workers, and the subsequent job scarcity and fear destroys any hope of organizing for better wages/conditions.

 

The technological developments that mining enables are used to justify the social and environmental costs.  It’s true that those developments have improved the lives of many people; however, due to their high cost, much of the new technology is available only to a small moneyed portion of the global population.  If laptops, smartphones, and self-driving cars are as beneficial as they’re marketed to be, then they are driving even more distance between those with money and those without, and making it harder for someone born poor to break into the upper class.  I haven’t devoted a lot of space within Spit Ghost Woman to examining the differences between those with and without money/technology.  Partly that’s because I’ve been focusing on other things, like character development and the development of Io’s religion, but it’s also because it’s simply to imagine future technologies, let alone 700 years of rapidly developing technology and how it would change humanity.  It’s on the back burner at the moment, but it’s an issue I’ll need to address soon.

 

These are concepts I wanted to explore in Spit Ghost Woman; since it’s set so far in the future, it’s an opportunity for a thought experiment on how current social and economic trends might continue.  For instance, if space travel is ever made economical for frequent trips, I’d bet one of the first things we aim for is a planet with some valuable mineral resource – oil, coal, uranium ore, whatever we’re using to power spaceships these days.  Gold, diamond, all the little-known minerals that go into our windmills and our laptop screens.  That is the kind of planet : Naoma, a small, remote moon that was bought up by Miramar for its yttrium supply (yttrium is used in night-vision goggles and illuminating smartphone screens).  Its atmosphere and ecology was adjusted slightly to allow for human habitation, but its entire reason for being is as a resource colony.  One of the many problems I’m having with consistency is why, if this is in a time where there are spaceships and it’s economical to ship water from planet to planet, would it be cheaper to hire actual humans to work in the mines than robots?  Maybe I can manufacture some reason, but for now I’m not going worry about it too much.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Technology and Gender

 

In most parts of the world for most of history, men and women have been divided based on the parts between their legs.  More than anything, it is women’s uteruses which have created the grand division between the sexes: because women are the ones who grow humans inside of them for the first ten months, and because they make baby food in their breasts, they have naturally been assigned the role of raising children even past infancy.  Because women were expending their energy in forming new life, men made their contribution to reproduction by protecting the home and providing food while the women ensured the continuation of the species.

 

At some point, somebody (I’m guessing it was a man) decided that the things that most men did were more important than the things that most women did.  Even now, with all of the progress that feminism has made for white American women over the past sixty years, the way for women to gain social and economic power is to act like men and focus their efforts outside of the home.  There is a disdain and devaluation of traditional women’s work such as nursing, teaching, and raising children, whether it’s done by men or women and despite the importance of these roles in society.

 

In many ways, technology has enabled men and women to distance themselves from traditional gender roles.  U.S. factories during the industrial revolution were happy to employ women as well as men, especially since they didn’t have to pay them as much; the same thing is happening right now in less-industrialized countries around the world.  Advancements in birth control and safe abortion procedures have made it easier for women to decide when or if they want to grow a little person inside of them.  In-vitro fertilization separates reproduction from sex roles altogether. 

 

I feel very grateful to live in a time where I can be politically and economically self-sufficient, but I think it is strange that despite our progress, the traditional roles of women are still seen as degrading.  Upper-class (mostly white) women like myself are able to thrive in a man’s world, while lower-class women are still paid very little for traditional, supposedly less important women’s work like cleaning, cooking, child care, and sex work.    These themes came out in Spit Ghost Woman almost without my thinking about it.  To me it makes sense that even once robo-sex dolls or whatever are widely available, there will still be a market for human sex workers.  The idea is that even though upper-class people have access to those sexual fulfillment technologies, and upper-class women have access to very effective birth control, it’s still appealing on a fundamental level for men to have sex with a woman and feel like they’re spreading their seed.  I don’t think that’ll get bred out of us, even if it becomes the norm for wealthier women to outsource childbirth just like we’ve already outsourced child-rearing in order to pursue career options.  I wanted to look at the women who are still in the traditional woman’s roles, even though civilization as a whole feels as though it has evolved past that.  I want to explore what the values of the old sexual and conceptual roles of women would be if technology entirely replaces wombs and the birthing process.

 

Simone de Beauvoir’s analysis in of the traditional roles of ordered civilization as a man’s domain and the chaos of natural world as a woman’s domain fed into my conception of Io’s menstrual/birthing cult.  On a planet like Naoma, formed and altered by humans, what can be the power of the natural world against civilization?  In those circumstances, does a natural world exist at all or has nature become curated, an offshoot of civilization and scientific development?  I want Io to be reclaiming the natural world as a source of power for women.  This theme is discussed more in the following section, “Women and Religion.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

Official History of Naoma

 

Humans left Earth around 2300 AD, 700 years before the story occurs.  Things had gotten bad on Earth, as they tend to do in science fiction – high sea levels, land stripped of nutrients, most species dead.  Some humans decided to stay.  It was decided that religious fundamentalism is what caused the downfall of Earth civilization, and so only those willing to surrender their religious histories and artifacts were allowed on the transport to a new solar system, on a nearby arm of the Milky Way.  They settled the new solar system (I need a name for it) much like Europeans colonized the Americas/ Africa; land grants to certain influential people and corporations who promised to develop the planets for human development.  At the time the story takes place, most uneducated people like Rita haven’t even heard of Earth, or they don’t see it as significant. 

 

At first, Naoma was just an icy moon orbiting a large gaseous planet. Miramar bought up the planet after they located yttrium under all the ice, and an idealistic Miramar scientist wanted to form it into a human paradise; he increased the CO2 in the atmosphere until all the ice melted and one rocky island appeared.  He tweaked conditions and brought in species and made a planet that he thought was perfect.  Unfortunately, the workers brought in to mine the yttrium realized that they could do pretty well for themselves just living up in the mountains, and employee turnover was so high that they ended up converting the melted ice fresh-water ocean into a saltwater ocean with acidic properties that even showed up in the precipitation.  They had another planet, Bahia, with freshwater as their only resource, so they shipped water over to Naoma so that everyone had to have a way of making money in order to have clean fresh water.  That brought the miners back to the mines, and more people moved out of the mountains and down to the tiny capital, Sand Creek.

 

Writing the History

The historical set-up was mainly inspired by my experience in West Virginia, where mine runoff in the water gave surrounding communities much higher rates of birth defects and cancer.  People couldn’t trust their water because of the mines, and even though mining companies had replaced most of the workers with advanced machinery, there was still an impenetrable loyalty to the mining companies, a loyalty far deeper, ironically, than there had been when half the state was employed in the mines.  The name of the moon, Naoma, is also the town where I worked with Coal River Mountain Watch over the summer, although I chose that name before working there just because I liked the sound of it.

bottom of page