The Sword and Laser discussion
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Hyperion
2012 Reads
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Hyp: Chapter Five: Keats is as Keats Does
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While these are interesting questions on their face, I feel as if we are in some well-worn, cliched areas of science fiction. I am sure at the time of its writing these were still vital questions, but these notions have been so popularized that I really can't take questions with regard to AI, consciousness and personhood seriously.That said, I think the author answers your questions in a way different than one may have thought. To my mind, there exists a vast gulf between my conception, and maybe it's just a vague popular conception, of John Keats as a man and John Keats as a cybrid.
I think of Keats as pacifist romantic poet suffering from depression and years of illness, whereas the John Keats that we get from Simmons is more John Keats by way of Lieutenant Commander Data or a Nexus 6.
What do we get of Keats in Simmons' writing? An odd accent, a hair color, a bit of romance, and some Keats references. Through most of the action of the chapter the cybrid is clearly a totally plugged-in kind of superhuman/android that works technological miracles, murders fools, and goes out all RoboCop/Rambo decked out in body armor and mini-guns.
It's got exactly zero to do with Keats as a man and everything to do with the problems, capabilities, and desires of an artificial man who wants to become a real boy. He's got Keats' memories but doesn't act like Keats in any conceivable fashion.
The character isn't Keats and his goal of divesting himself of his extraordinary capabilities as a cybrid won't make him any more Keats than he was before.
Lepton nails it here. The Keats doll is Pinochio, not the doomed poet. Keep in mind that the real John Keats continued writing and revising (at least his shorter lyrics) until his health absolutely prevented work. His overarching concern was not his personal survival, nor even the survival of his reputation, but the poetry itself. Didn't make him a very good poet, mind you, but the self-interested malingerer we see in Hyperion is simply not a believable portrayal.
Johnny even says as much: "I'm not John Keats...There've been a million influences that have separated me from that poor, sad genius." Still, who knows what Keats would have done with a hellwhip?I like your question, Karly: "If Johnny Keats isn't human, is that actually a bad thing?" Most of us are aware of the person we're supposed to be, whether it's a persona we hope to be someday or one someone else wants us to be. Johnny's in the unique position of knowing exactly what he was built to become, and he knows he can't live up to it - I don't know that he ever really comes to grips with it because we don't see a lot of his normal life outside the case, but becoming disconnected from the cloud was a start.
Karly wrote: "I'm not even sure we're supposed to buy Johnny as like the real Keats. I don't think that was the point. I think Johnny exists just as a symbol of the connection to the past..."Perhaps I'm misreading you (or Simmons), but if the point is that there is some connection to "the Past," represented here by John Keats, then isn't that utterly defeated if, in fact, Johnny-5 is *not* anything like the poet Keats? Particularly in the (tragically smarmy) bit in which Johnny stands at the window, declaiming (bad) poetry, I thought Simmons was trying to suggest that this effectively was Keats, the poet, given a new lease on life through technology. I just think Simmons did a bad job of it. The entire tale of the Detective was, I thought, very jarring, really violating the tone established by the other stories.
P. Aaron wrote: "...I thought Simmons was trying to suggest that this effectively was Keats, the poet, given a new lease on life through technology."Interesting! Like Karly, I thought the opposite. The cybrid John Keats was an experiment that failed. That even the super-intelligent AIs capable of re-creating portions of Old Earth and genetically engineering the cybrids still couldn't bring back the dead.
On the subject of John Keats, I did not see how he had anything to do with the book at all, other than the use of his last name and the the word Hyperion. I never saw any sort of connection made between the poem and the book, which was my reason for wanting to read it. Just another the long list of disappointments with the book.
FertileSpade wrote: " I find myself much more interested in why the AI's don't want him to go to Hyperion."This is explained in more detail in book 2 and then after book 4 if you ask the same question you could come up with a different more precise answer again.
Its hard to remember which revelations come in which books but I think at this stage I was thinking that The Cybrid was making moves to gain independance from the Core and they didn't like it. But there was a lot lot more to it as I was to read and find out.
The concepts of re-creating people from memory, or continuance of consciousness, have been bandied about in sci-fi for awhile, and they and their ilk are among the reasons I read sci-fi: they're ways to think about and explore what it is to be human.
Simmons continues playing with the theme of consciousness, and what constitutes a legitimate "person" (e.g. with the ego-less Bikura and the regressing Rachel), but here it's a character who's entirely aware he's less than complete.
Does his awareness of his own falsehood make him more or less human? Does memory make a man/woman? Did anyone else picture Jude Law in A.I. despite Johnny being described with curly red hair?