A.C. Clarke’s A Meeting With Medusa: the Cyborg Challenge to This World and the Next

Contemporary culture is haunted by the hybrid, enigmatic figure of the cyborg (cybernetic organism), a living creature whose organic body is modified by the incorporation of inorganic parts. Grounded in scientific discourses, fine arts and the media , the cyborg has proved ever since its first appearance to be a very effective symbol for present and future challenges. This polymorphous creature, endlessly reshaped by the technological landscape as well as by creative imagination, can be studied as a narrative theme primarily related to science fiction. After a few occurrences in the pulps between the twenties and the thirties, cyborgs gained importance in the fifties when Cordwainer Smith portrayed them as the bearers of a fragile and troublesome identity, always on the verge of collapse. In the following decades the theme was further developed and became one of the major sources of inspiration for science fiction writers. In the novel “A Meeting with Medusa” (1971) Arthur C. Clarke imagined a more complex and ideologically contradictory cyborg, at the same time doomed by his fate and ready to take advantage of it in order to accomplish extraordinary deeds and become a trail-blazing pioneer of space flight. By envisaging a machine-dominated future, hostile to human beings as such, Clarke paved the way to a more euphoric Postmodern version of the theme, a version which was soon to spread both within science fiction and without.