Identity: The New Final Frontier. Singularity and Multitudes in The Very Pulse of the Machine

Abstract

This article deals with the question of identity and individuality as explored in Michael Swanwick’s short story, The Very Pulse of the Machine, and its subsequent adaptation into a short animated film. The story follows the surviving explorer Martha Kivelson in her attempt to save herself after an accident on Io, while also dragging the lifeless body of her partner, Julier Burton back to their lander. Our aim is to unearth the potentialities of the dissolution of individual identity boundaries, followed by the joining with the singular mega-consciousness, while also employing a feminist reading of the text as a safe haven for womanhood and the female expression of commonality. The genre of science fiction offers us the appropriate medium for such daring considerations and interrogations, liberating both the authors of the texts, as well as the reader from traditional gazes and expectations. Our sight is thus turned to the treatment of identity as the new final frontier, where limitation and glass ceilings are shattered in a new understanding thereof.