Week 10: Comes to Venus Melancholy

There were so many short story options on the resource page this week. I decided to chose one at random and ended up reading Come to Venus Melancholy by Thomas M. Disch. And it was definitely melancholy. The story is being spoken by a female cyborg on Venus to a listener who may or may not (more likely not) exist. Initially, the reader is thrown in with no context as to what is going on. However, over this story’s eight pages we learn who this machine is, why she is there, her history, and the absolute despair of her current situation. The android, whose name is Selma, has been in complete isolation for over fifteen years. In her early life, she was a human diagnosed with leukemia, who chose to be striped of her body and placed into a cybernetic tank of some kind. She is attached to a house on Venus, and it was her purpose to keep a man named John company while he lived there in isolation. John’s job was to collect slugs for some unknown power to use for some unknown purpose, and Selma reveals that she was in love with him at one point. However, one day the two got in a fight. John destroyed her hearing and vision, and abandoned her. At the present time, Selma feels as if someone may be in the house with her, but she cannot know for sure. She begs to be destroyed and set free from her prison, however no release seems to come.

This story felt as if it could easily have been inspiration for an episode of Black Mirror. That show spends numerous episodes exploring the idea of combining human minds with the immortal bodies of machines. Many episodes feature characters who are trapped forever as digital copies of themselves in technological prisons. Both these works explore themes of isolation, sanity, and the ethical implications of such advancements. The main character, Selma, would probably much rather had died of leukemia if she known what fate awaited her as a cyborg. The way this story is written gives the readers a tragic look into Selma’s mind, and shows us the psychological horror of being blind, deaf, and trapped forever. All Selma has to entertain herself is the ticking of the clock in her abdomen and the poetry she has memorized. This love of poetry seems to be the main thing she retained from her life as a human. One thing I also found interesting was her description of being a cyborg as a form of “afterlife.” Unfortunately, this afterlife is much more of a hell than a heaven.