312 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE Synthetic Sexuality, Plastic Futurity. In Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014), the android Ava is a beautifully molded entity with a human face and synthetic skin. Perhaps the most striking part of her body, however, is her transparent plastic mid-section, which both exposes and protects her luminous wiring. At the same time, the translucent casing calls attention to her artificial status; it accentuates the curving lines and graceful contours of her conventionally desirable female form. Contemporary discussions of plastic, the plastiglomerate, and other forms of plastic pollutants are helping to reorient our attitude toward the ecological cost of the production of synthetic products, and grassroots movements to eradicate—or at least curtail—the single-use consumption of plastic are gaining critical mass. It is therefore peculiar that plastic continues to endure in sf, not merely in terms of the glossy background architecture of sleekly designed spaceships but also in ways that work positively to subvert sexual essentialism, as Ava, with her ambiguous and translucent plastic torso, manages to do. Ex Machina’s Ava echoes in each episode of Westworld (2016– ), which makes use of 3D printing to create the luminous skeletal scaffolding upon which organic tissue grows; she is prefigured in the “Alpha Platinum 9000” robot Cindi Mayweather, who is Janelle Monáe’s android doppelgänger in the Many Moons “emotion picture” (2012). Before that was the custom-molded titanium “robo-glove” that signifies Beyoncé’s alter-ego “Sasha Fierce” in a variety of performances (most notably in “I am Sasha Fierce” [2008]), and earlier still were the injection-molded plastic robotic replicas of the Icelandic singer Björk in her “All Is Full of Love” video (1999). Indeed, Ava and her ilk provide contemporary examples of a fairly worn trope. The creation of a robot, android, or gynoid—or some other form of an artificial person—is as old as the genre itself, with Victor Frankenstein’s Creature a first compelling instance. Yet the Creature derives from organic matter, from parts gathered from both abattoirs and charnel houses, suggesting origins both human and bestial. In contrast, science fiction of the pulp era and Golden Age delighted in creating synthetic creatures made from synthetic substances, and it is within this history that the contemporary efficacy of “synthetic sexuality” might be best considered, at least initially, with the invention and widespread dissemination of plastic. Two instances from sf’s earlier days help to illustrate the power of plastic as an aesthetic trope: Lewis Padgett’s “The Proud Robot” (1943) and Lester del Ray’s “Helen O’Loy” (1938). In Padgett’s “The Proud Robot,” a talented but inebriated inventor named Gallegher wakes from his drunken slumber one morning dismayed to find that he has created a narcissistic robot named “Joe.”1 The robot is preening in front of a mirror, admiring his reflection: “the robot stood proudly ... and examined its innards. Its hull was transparent, and wheels were going around at a great rate inside....Wheels and cogs buzzed inside the transplastic shell” (7). While initially Joe is a gender-neutral 313 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE entity who marvels at “its” organs, he swiftly becomes male, at least grammatically: “Joe extended his eyes on stalks and regarded himself with every appearance of appreciation” (11). As Gallegher begins to loathe his creation, he too begins to oscillate between masculine and neuter pronouns to describe Joe: “I hate its gears,” he laments to a client. “But he’s no good, you know. I made him when I was drunk, and I haven’t the slightest idea how or why. All he’ll do is stand there and admire himself. And sing. He sings like a banshee” (9). Plastic is humorously deployed here, but the story also invites a queer reading: when one considers how vanity is so often feminized, Joe’s expression of vanity is significant. It is the very artificiality of his “transplastic” body that allows what is often seen as a highly feminized trait to be displaced onto something that is without a clear biological origin. Plastic provides the enticing real-world substrate for such transpositions. While celluloid plastics had...