‘What was knowledge for, I would ask myself’: Science, technology and pharmakon in David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas

Abstract

This chapter reads science and technology in David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas [2004] as a consistently double-edged phenomenon. Starting with an appraisal of the background of techne, I begin by drawing on recent work on technogenesis to highlight the centrality of technology to human history but also to Mitchell's text. From here, I turn to the technology of the book and the systems of remediation upon which Cloud Atlas draws. The chapter then works through a series of case studies, the most pronounced of which centres on the colonial technologies of medicine in the Pacific Diary of Adam Ewing, but which touches on every section of the novel. In conclusion, I point to the ways in which the technologies of Cloud Atlas can be read as reflexive statements on the novel's own cyclical temporal structures, situating its own novelistic form within a technogenetic feedback loop that is at once both remedy and poison (pharmakon).