The Empathy Stories

There is an empathy problem in our society. For the sake of this argument, when I speak about ‘our’ society, I mean American society. Science Fiction is valuable for people of all walks of life, of all cultures, of all creeds, but as I am from the United States, I feel most comfortable speaking from an American perspective about the shortcomings that I see in American society. It seems to me that while Americans as a culture have made leaps and bounds towards equality between people of different races, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds, there is still a fundamental issue with the American definition of ‘normal.’ In the United States, ‘normal’ still means to be white, straight, male, and wealthy. This is how our culture has been constructed since the founding of this nation. The vast, vast majority of those elected to political office are white, straight, male, and wealthy. Those people dictating law, the people inscribing the policies which shape our social and legal codes are operating from a position of privilege, and when there is not nearly enough diversity or representation on the committees that address social issues, those privileged perspectives are simply reinforced and baked into the fabric of our culture. Our legal code takes the privileged perspective of the white, straight, wealthy male, and so in the eyes of the government, anyone who does not fit into the intersection of identities is then othered and held in contrast to this white male perspective. But this issue extends beyond the political and into the cultural inheritance that is passed down to each successive generation of Americans. Which writers are considered to be the cornerstones of American literature? Hemingway? Fitzgerald? Faulkner, Twain, Steinbeck? Toni Morrison only if you have a particularly woke high school English teacher. The vast majority of what young Americans learn is our literary cultural heritage is deeply tied to the white, straight, wealthy, male perspective. That perspective is the norm. The type of thinking that is tied to that perspective is considered ‘normal.’ And so, our society has a deeply felt empathy problem. As a culture, it is harder for us to empathize with people who don’t fit the norm because our entire political and cultural perspective was built around a ‘normal’ in which the majority of Americans do not fit. What do we do about his empathy problem? We read science fiction, of course.

Science fiction, at its core, is a cognitive exercise in the other. As writer Darko Suvin wrote, “SF is, then, a literary genre or verbal construct whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” Though Suvin’s words are self-explanatory, the meaning here is critical. Science fiction is produced at the juncture of writings about cognition and writings about estrangement. Science fiction asks and sometimes answers the question, “What is it like to be different?” To think differently, to have a different body, a different world. American filmmaker James Gunn offers a slightly different definition of science fiction, “Science Fiction is the branch of literature that deals with the effects of change on people in the real world as it can be projected into the past, the future, or to distant places.” In both Suvin and Gunn’s definitions, the critical thread of science fiction is made clear. Science fiction tries to flesh out what it would be like to be different. Science fiction writing tries to puzzle through what it would mean if the world were different, or if people were different.

This can be seen in science fiction stories from different eras and different nations. From Clifford D. Simak’s story “Desertion” where people willingly shed their human skin by stepping into the converter device to explore the surface of Jupiter, only to learn that it is far, far better to be a Loper than to be a human being (Simak 160). Or Rochita Loenen-Ruiz’s story “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” which imagines life as an automaton girl trying to save her automaton father from being sacrificed to the Remembrance Monument (Loenen-Ruiz 7). These stories are not capturing human experiences, nor are they describing experiences that any living human will likely ever have, but there is a critical exercise in imagination in these stories. Science fiction pushes the readers and writers of science fiction to imagine what it would be like to be different. Simak’s “Desertion” challenges the fundamental assumption that to be human is the best way to be. It is only after the main character is transforms himself into a Loper that he realizes how constrained his consciousness was in the limited human form. His mind is expanded, his cognition reaching out to understand the world around him in ways that he never could have previously imagined. Loenen-Ruiz’s “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life” pushes the reader to empathize with a robot, a machine which, in contemporary life, cannot feel emotion or desire. These stories expand the definition of what it means to feel emotion, of who can feel emotion, of what is the best way to be human, and what it means to be human. Following a cursory reading of science fiction stories, a reader can begin to empathize with the perspective of a boy trying to kill the god of sound in Panagiotis Koustas’s “Athos Emfovos in the Temple of Sound,” a millennium-old computer-plant hybrid in Nnedi Okorafor’s “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7,” a sentient pool cleaning robot in Alastair Reynolds’s “Zima Blue,” a Navajo woman saving an expedition to Mars with her people’s corn in Nanobah Becker’s “The 6^th World,” or just a boy who loves science fiction in Federico Schaffler’s “A miscalculation” (Koustas, Okorafor 219, Reynolds, Becker, Schaffler 209). Truly, the different perspectives adopted by science fiction writers is only limited by the imagination, and each new story pushes the science fiction reader to stretch their empathetic capacities to imagine a new mindset, a new way of being, and a new way of interpreting the question of what it means to be human.

Detractors of my argument might say that, from an anthropological perspective, science fiction must be a reflection of the society which produced it, and therefore cannot truly push our culture to do away with the idea of ‘normal.’ I would argue, in response, that while the author may have produced the work through a particular anthropological lens, the work itself is devoid of meaning save that meaning which the reader imparts to it through the act of reading. It is the act of pushing the reader to process a viewpoint that is different from one’s own that is valuable here, even if how a narrative is constructed is reflective of a dominant cultural perspective.

These science fiction exercises in empathy are, I think, very necessary for our society moving forward. While this change is already happening, science fiction can only speed the process of redefining what it means to be ‘normal,’ or doing away with the idea of ‘normal’ altogether. As we as a society come to realize how critical it is that people of all backgrounds and all races have equal representation under the law and in the dominant cultural narrative, the question then becomes, “How can we as a society prevent this sort of systematic inequality from happening again?” And again, science fiction may be able to help. Science fiction is not only pushing readers to empathize with different ideas of what it means to be human but also to empathize with the populations occupying different potential futures. Worlds where cybernetic enhancements have become the norm, where natural resources have run dry, where the human life span has been preserved indefinitely, or where virtual realities have become more enticing than the world before us. These are all very possible ways that humanity could progress, and as James Gunn said, science fiction is literature that processes how people would handle potential futures. Science fiction has predicted several of the largest cultural and historical upheavals in human history. John W. Campbell predicted the advent of intelligent computers in 1935 and Karel Capek coined the term “robot” in 1920. Science fiction is, then, an exercise in empathy, not only empathizing with people, but with the people who will have to suffer the consequences of our actions. The course of human history might have shifted had popular society understood the terror that the atomic bomb would cause when H.G. Wells predicted the destructive power of atomic weaponry in 1914.

I am not going to sit here and make the argument that science fiction will solve all of our societal problems and that it is the magical cure-all for a world that is so often flirting with a dystopian future. I do, however, believe that science fiction is a genre that promotes expanded viewpoints and empathy in its readers. Empathy with perspectives and futures that are so alien, so confusing and distant, that when we science fiction readers return to the real world, it isn’t as difficult to try and understand one another a little bit better.

Work Cited

Loenen-Ruiz, Rochita. “Alternate Girl’s Expatriate Life.” The Apex Book of World SF 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar, Apex Publications, 2012.

Koustas, Panagiotis. “Athos Emfovos in the Temple of Sound.” The SFWA European Hall of Fame: Sixteen Contemporary Masterpieces of Science Fiction from the Continent, edited by Morrow, James, and Kathryn Morrow, Macmillan, 2007.

Okorafor, Nnedi. “From the Lost Diary of TreeFrog7.” The Apex Book of World SF 2, edited by Lavie Tidhar, Apex Publications, 2012, 219-237.

Reynolds, Alastair. “Zima Blue.” Love, Death, and Robots, produced by Netflix, 2019, https://www.netflix.com/watch/80223962?trackId=13752289&tctx=0%2C13%2C45255f4f-d71b-4af3-9c59-5d229a4330a6-481978327%2C%2C.

Schaffler, Federico. “A Miscalculation.” Cosmos latinos: An anthology of science fiction from Latin America and Spain, edited by Bell, Andrea L., and Yolanda Molina-Gavilán, Wesleyan University Press, 2003, 209-211.

Simak, Clifford D. “Desertion.” The Wesleyan anthology of science fiction, edited by Evans, Arthur B., et al., Wesleyan University Press, 2010, 177-188.

“The 6^th World.” Youtube, uploaded by FUTURESTATESTV, 1 Apr 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7f4Jm0y_iLk.

My back is cold, I think. I can’t actually feel it but the last time one of my eyes slipped open I was laying on a steel table like those ones in the mortuaries in cop shows. I was naked on the table. My skin pale and bluish, bruised in some places. Someone in surgical scrubs had cut me open from throat to groin, and was taking my organs out, weighing them and speaking in short bursts of technical jargon into a microphone hanging above the table. They palmed my heart and hefted it in their hands, muttering to themselves. Maybe they felt guilty, casually holding the organ that had pumped me full of life for 32 years, because they glanced up at my face and stared briefly into my open eye. Putting my heart back in my chest, they quickly shuffled over and, ever so gently, closed my eye.

That was a while ago. A day? Without light or the feeling of hunger, the time seemed to slip away from me. I was just sitting here in my body, passively observing as the bacteria in my gut slowly ran out of food and turned to the intestinal lining itself, chewing me out from the inside. Then someone pried open my right eye and a flashlight’s beam passed over me. “It’s creepy how they sort of stare at you, isn’t it?” Normally staring into the bulb of a flashlight hurts but the dead flesh of my eyeball didn’t register the pain. The flashlight was attached to a hand attached to an arm attached to a nervous-looking white guy with blonde hair, big thick glasses, and a white lab coat on.

“Don’t worry about this one, he’s not coming back to hurt you,” someone else said. Looking past the nervous wreck I could see the silhouette of a lady with her back turned.

“I’m not worried about zombies, or whatever,” the nervous guy said quickly, “I mean look at the way this guy’s head is caved in, he’s, like, super dead.” The lab guy forced a chuckle out and I had the sudden urge to grab his hand. Just to make him jump a little. My arm didn’t move. The muscles were starved of nutrients and the nerves had been severed or crushed. It wasn’t really my body anymore, I had to remind myself. I was just a passenger in this vessel. “It’s always the eyes that get me, though. They still seem so alive.” The guy pulled the flashlight away and leaned forward, peering into what was my eyeball. As he moved, his greasy nose brushed what was my right cheek. “Ugh! I touched it!” He shouted.

“God, you’re a wimp.” The lady walked briskly over and steered the squirming lab guy away from me. She grabbed the flashlight from his hand and looked quickly into my right then peeled open my left eyelid to check that eye. “Corneas look like they’re in good shape. Make a note that this one is good for 94% donation. The brain is a total bust but the rest of him should be good to go.” She shut my eyes and I heard the sound of two sets of shoes clicking away across the tile floor. “My auntie needs some skin to cover a nasty burn on her arm and this guy is a pretty good color match. Maybe this is her lucky day.” A door closed and I sat alone again in the dark. Fear did not join me where I sat though I expected it to come. I think I was not afraid because I could no longer feel pain. Instead, a strange sense of defensiveness flitted across my consciousness. I had grown this body myself, after all. I had cared for it and protected it, safeguarding it from psychological and physical danger. When my sister had gotten sick, I had bought her a freshly dead heart. The best fit the hospital could find, I’d said. To pay for it I signed some papers that said I’d let them undo me when I died. But do they undo people while they’re still in their bodies? While I’m still living in the shell of my skin? The anger surged, then passed. Time slipped away and my consciousness waxed and waned. Slowly I turned my attention back to the bacteria going to town on my intestinal lining.

My right eyelid flicked back, and light jolted me awake. I could feel the light on my eye, warmth against my fingertips, the soft sound of beeping and the bustle of a hospital reached my ear. I’m awake. They healed me. They didn’t have to undo me. Oh, thank God, thank God. A handsome young doctor was standing at the foot of my bed, smiling gently. He seemed to hear something and walked over to my right side in order to look more directly into my eye. He said something but I could not hear his words. It wasn’t silent, but I couldn’t hear him. The doctor reached down beyond my field of vision. I tried to move my head to keep his hand in view, but my neck would not obey me. Instead, my head turned to the left, forcing me to stare out the window at the New York skyline, East River running far in the background behind a mess of buildings. I’m from Seattle. What am I doing here? Why did they fly me out to New York? I tried to blink but my eyelid would not listen to me. It seemed to have a mind of its own, blinking out of time with my commands.

“Ms. Richards, how is the transplant taking?” Ms. Richards? They must have me confused with someone. The voice came from my right. It was a woman’s voice, kindly and warm. I willed my head to turn, trying to work my mouth, trying to tell the handsome young doctor that they had the wrong person and that my body was disobeying me. Please turn. The panic begun to build in my mind, I had the thought that I was drowning. Please turn. Eventually, my neck obliged, and I began to scan the room, but it was only the handsome young doctor. No woman was to be seen.

“The new ear feels fine. Like, I don’t have any pain or anything. But I can only hear on my left side, still.” It was a second female voice, shriller and younger sounding, coming from below or right behind me. I tried to turn my head around to see this new person, but again, my neck would not oblige.

“That’s totally, totally normal. It sometimes takes a few days for the transplant to really start to work as it should. We had to replace a lot of the auditory nerves so it will take a while to heal. Plus, your insurance company will cover up to two replacements if this ear doesn’t take, so if this one doesn’t work out you should be covered.” The warm, kindly female voice said. Her words sounded rehearsed, as though she had said them hundreds of times before. Cover a replacement? Then I understood. It was my ear they were talking about, my auditory nerves. I could hear them. I thought to myself that I should feel sick, but my stomach, wherever it was, felt fine.

In New York, the handsome young doctor stood and touched my hand. But it wasn’t my hand, the nails were long and unkempt and the skin was a deeper tan then my own had been. I could feel strongly the pressure of a mug containing something cold being placed into a hand that I could not see.

Somewhere, on someone, my lips smiled without my command. My toes shifted slightly, stiffly, and the muscles of my back flexed as someone tried to sit upright. An eyelid flicked back, and my left eye looked out into a quiet hospital at night. A woman sat in a chair to my left and held a left hand that was connected to an arm and a shoulder and a head where my eye was stuck. Her head rested on someone’s thigh and I saw a small puddle of drool forming under her slightly open mouth. I did not know her, but as I watched someone’s hand reach out to stroke her hair, I knew that the body I was in loved her.

In New York, the handsome young doctor was speaking, and I still could not hear him. He had let go of the tan hand with the unkempt nails. Somewhere else I heard the kind female voice say, “It’s important that you start to think of it as, ‘MY ear.’ Don’t get wrapped up in who it used to belong to. You paid for it, it’s your property now.” The kindly voice wasn’t speaking to me, I knew it. But it wasn’t Ms. Richard’s ear. It was mine. They couldn’t take it from me. I watched a woman drool adorably and I watched the handsome young New York doctor wave goodbye and leave the hospital room. I felt my fingers tap and my heart beat and the sunlight on my skin and the cool night air on my skin. I was there and not there, stretched out over space like a tower of blocks that had been knocked over. The anger I held was washed away in the wave of sensations. I had been trapped so long in the numb flesh of my body. Now I was alive.

I tried to hate them, these people who had stolen my body. The feeling of everything all at once was too much. I learned to focus on one ear or one eye or one kneecap. I found that when I let all the information come in at once, the edges of my mind began to fray and pull apart. I was being tugged in so many different directions, and I would think to myself over and over, “They are taking my body from me.” A hundred different people, 98 of which I could not see.

But Ned, the New Yorker, was a nice enough fellow. He was an accountant and he lived his life with such honest regularity that I couldn’t help but love him for the joy he felt when his mother called. Ned’s boyfriend was abusive, and I grew to hate the man.

Daisy, Ms. Richards, played the violin so beautifully that it made me ache.

I fell in love with Emmeline, just as Eric, the owner of my left eye, had.

Whoever owned my right hand had a newborn baby, and I could feel the soft skin under my fingertips. Whoever had my left hand was a mechanic or something, and I could feel my finger grow calloused and strong under a constant layer of grease and grime.

I had been given many second lives. The many of them took care of me. I helped them go through life and in return, I got to feel a shiver run down my spine again.

But as the months past, I found it harder and harder to feel. It started in my left toes. I was living with Ned for a few days, but when I revisited my toes, I found them numb and distant. I realized I couldn’t feel my heartbeat so strongly. My vision began to fade. They were claiming my body parts. Beginning to think of each muscle and sinew as their own. That left me with nothing. I stayed with Daisy the longest, letting the rest of my body fade away so that I could listen to her beautiful violin. Eventually, even she left me, and I was alone again in the darkness.

I lost track of the time without even a single piece of a body to feel the sun passing overhead. Adrift, I could no longer say what I was. I did not have the outline of a body through which I could know myself. I was not a mind without a brain. Maybe I was a soul. Maybe the protracted hallucination of an oxygen-starved body. I began to fray once again as I strained against the enveloping numb and ultimately, I became nothing.