Retrospective on Sepulveda Baron

Guest post by J. Rama Stephens

Acclaimed futurist Sepulveda Baron, 62, has died suddenly, while transiting a full-body-scanner at Kuala Lumpur airport en-route to speak in Tokyo. The world has lost an intellect described by Locus Magazine as “a piercing searchlight into the darkest corners of dystopian fiction.”

Baron was the third child of Robert and Artemisia Baron. Her mother was a Republican survivor of the retirada following the Spanish Civil War, recruited from the Argelès refugee camp in France as an SOE courier, then as a clerk for MI6 from 1945. There, she worked with (and married) Sepulveda’s father, MI5 section head Robert Baron.

Sepulveda Baron’s early life was (by her account) happy. In a 2005 interview in the Guardian (the only time she talked to the press) she described a family home at Bletchley giving onto woodlands and the Grand Union Canal: “long summer walks on the towpath with my father gave me an early fascination with Victorian-era engineering and morality. That fascination never left me, but I did become more interested in digital tech—the kind that really gets under your skin.” Through her early years her mother often hosted a motley gathering of expat Republicans. Baron would sit in, sipping rioja. Her mother’s civil war stories and heart-on-sleeve politics would shape Baron’s approach to cyberpunk as “literary expression of late capitalism.” She refused to set foot in what she called “Franco’s neoliberal Spain,” but was plugged in to a network of expatriate connections, online and off.

Baron left home (and the South) to study Literature at Manchester, graduating to a Masters with first class honours. After a long correspondence she traveled in 1985 to Budapest to meet Laszlo Antal, a fiery literary critic at Eotvos Lorand faculty of arts. They married immediately and honeymooned at Lake Sevan in Armenia. The same year, the Hungarian regime declared Antal a “reactionary writer.” They fled together on a night train to Vienna (with the last of her US dollars Baron bribed the guard to let she and Antal ride in the conductor’s car, so they avoided the AVH secret police at the border), and they flew to the US, where Antal had the offer of a teaching job at Brown.

Ivy League America suited Baron. She took a PhD in European literature at Brown, and worked as a research assistant to Antal. Her early papers hint at later dominant themes—a relentless focus on the avant-garde, and fearless literary and genre juxtapositions. From 1984 Baron corresponded with (later) cyberpunk luminaries, including Cadigan, Vinge, and Gibson. I first met Baron at Brown, and she began to develop a following long before she had tenure—students and faculty would gather at her modest house for cheap Californian wine, readings, and (sometimes raucous) discussions. Baron was loud, forceful, and usually right.

In 1989 Antal’s affair with a grad student ended their marriage abruptly. Baron’s employment record shows she had applied for maternity leave the following year, so she’d likely arranged an abortion before walking out and flying home to England. The same year that Baron divorced Antal, she was employed as assistant professor (acting chair, SF Studies) at Liverpool. The next few years were almost impossibly productive—Baron published over 20 papers in 48 months, and most racked up citations at academic rock-star speed.

A fateful meeting with Zoltan Istvan at a futurist convention in Santa Clara in 1994 diverted Baron’s (stellar, but mainstream) academic career into something far stranger and more life-threatening. Istvan and the transhumanist community made a powerful impression on Baron. She embarked upon a year of “deep anthropology” at the Extropia Ranch, home to a well-funded transhumanist community in the New Mexico desert. The ranch was a self-contained world where smart drugs flowed freely, top surgeons performed implants, and (if their website was to be believed) novel couplings between machines, women and men were explored. One year became two, then five.

Baron became romantically involved with the Extropia family. In 1997 she married into the family as a whole in an unofficial transhumanist ceremony. She stayed on at the ranch writing and helping to raise the children who had the run of the compound. Baron claimed to have a large number of transhumanist modifications and body-implants over these years, but (unusually) none visible in everyday clothes; despite many rumours, she refused to talk about her body mods, citing a political commitment to ethical privacy and body autonomy. She often spoke publicly about one modification, however. Baron had early on augmented her vision, and continued to explore this area as the technology developed, splicing drone and webcam feeds into custom AI lenses, and often projecting the resulting combined feed in talks and lectures. This led to a collaboration with the machine-vision team at Cal Tech for her controversial 2004 foray into political sciences, darksight. This gem of tech-dystopian criticism cemented her reputation, with a prescient (pre social-media boom) take on privacy: “remote surveillance technologies are the ayahuasca of dieselpunk. From radar to CCTV, from packet sniffing to online ad-placement algos. Their history shows that the ageless dream of seeing further, expanding our vision into new wavelengths, inevitably collapses into a militarised panopticon, scrutinised by Telescreens and banishing transgressors to (real or virtual) island prisons.”

When Baron returned to Liverpool in 2004, her classes continued to explore the boundary between the individual and the network, and the implications for privacy and autonomy. Her 2007 class, cryptically entitled “the body electric—impossible bearings” has become apocryphal legend. Professor Steve Wright, a grad student that year, describes it as “psychedelic, atavistic and brutal. So confronting that many walked out, and many didn’t finish the year.” He also affirms that semester’s ideas shaped his life and work: “Baron could quote at length from books, films, and papers, and would do so freestyle, segueing from one writer to another, joining the threads into a tapestry of our darkest futures, a gleaming thread running back down through Mary Shelley, grounded in the golem of Prague, and Promethean clay.”

A second burst of productivity followed. This time the papers came slower, but two longer works were published in quick succession. In this period Baron finally engages with feminist literary theory. She is perhaps best known for her pithy quote ”cyberpunk and pregnancy are similar—they’re both about how a foreign thing inside your body changes who you are and gives you a new relationship with the future, which you couldn’t imagine before,” from the introduction to settler colonialism in cyberspace—the massacre of the digital natives (2008).

Baron continued teaching into the early ’10s, but her health declined, perhaps due to the number of implants (she flew twice to California to have some surgically removed), and perhaps due to long-term microdosing of LSD, which many Extropia alumni blogged about.

Baron taught until 2014, and 2015 saw her last monograph, the short (but often cited) Atavism in SF: character arcs recapitulate genre descent into dystopia.

Baron is survived by her older brother. She has bequeathed her manuscripts, correspondence, and considerable collection of late 20th century home computing hardware to the Swedish Internet museum, with an endowment to host a permanent online “Basilisk defence archive.”

Octavia Flora Fabian (1920–2015)

I recently learned of the sad passing of a former collaborator of ours. Octavia Flora Fabian was known as “Tavie” to her friends (although there’s little agreement on the spelling, since it was mainly a spoken diminutive), but always “Mrs. Fabian” in correspondence, and of course, now famous as “Flora Fabiana” in print publication. This variance in nomenclature was both evidence of her concern for privacy (her family asked that no photos of her be posted) and separation between different roles and circles, and symbolic of the facets of her personality that sometimes seem at odds with one another.

Tavie married Edgar Fabian in 1946, and they remained childless until his death from heart disease in 1980. It was apparently at about this time that Tavie stopped volunteering at the local church, which seems to have been her main activity for all of her married life, since she never took a job. She lived on Edgar’s modest pension for the next few years, but by 1994 her physical health had deteriorated and she chose to take up residence in a care home for the elderly, which she paid for from an investment account she created from the sale of their small house. This account comfortably supported her for the 21 remaining years of her life.

Fearing boredom and mental decline, Tavie asked her niece Jasmine to buy her a typewriter so she could write “articles and stories.” Worried that a typewriter would be too noisy in the close confines of the care home, Jasmine instead prevailed on her son Tony to give his great-aunt an old Compaq laptop PC instead. It was Tony Michael who taught Tavie to use the computer, some years later set her up with an internet account, and periodically updated her laptop with a new hand-me-down model every few years.

Tavie seems to have written prolifically, although she also erased most of her early work when it ceased to be of interest to her, and seldom kept files that she was not intending to publish. Still in the 1990s she began to study at the Open University for a BA in English Language and Literature, and although she never completed the degree, she began to write many short works of criticism and literary biography at this time. She had a talent for digging out little-known but important writers to profile critically and professionally, especially women who wrote on topics or in genres that were more common for men.

Due to her scholarly interest in gothic, fairytale, suspense, and early pulp writers, Tavie’s work naturally found a home in the genre press, especially fanzines and online publications. It was in this capacity that I first corresponded with her, as she was researching women whose names appeared in golden age pulp zines but for whom biographies or later careers were unknown. She wrote a few short reviews for TFF back in the ’oughties, before we were archiving the site, and she had an obvious zest for both library, archive and internet research into the genealogy and bibliography of her subjects.

The first hint of media recognition for Tavie came when she wrote her groundbreaking profile of Emily Goldhill Kenzie, whose short SF mystery “The Airlock” (1950) in Super Science Stories was all anyone else had previously been able to find of her (along with the tenacious but unsubstantiated—and unexplained—rumour that she once publicly slapped Ejler Jakobsson in the face). Tavie had discovered more details about Kenzie than most of us could find about our own great-grandmother in family history research—although she was of course restrained and respectful in how much she included in her profile. Albeit among a small group of critics and editors to begin with, Tavie’s reputation as a serious researcher in the history of speculative fiction was cemented.

After a series of low-profile but impressive critical biographies of obscure writers, Tavie’s real breakthrough came when she apparently tracked down not only the ToC but the entire fiction contents of the inaugural issue of Whatifn’t magazine (1.1 – 1968), whose first dozen issues were assumed completely lost. She wrote detailed reviews of several of the stories, including a rare late SF story by John Moore that she characterized as “proto-eco-SF,” and a reprint of “one of the weaker” Cordwainer Smith stories. No one else has seen the issue Tavie worked from, and she never clarified whether she found a physical copy or a scan; either way she presumably didn’t keep it.

A turning point in this low-key but increasingly exciting career came when Tavie reviewed for a US-based speculative fiction review, an obscure, independently published chapbook titled Three Titans. This slim volume of less than fifty pages, which her review gives no indication of being satirical or otherwise doubtful, purports to publish, for the first time and all together, the final stories by each of John Jacob Astor IV, Jacques Futrelle and W. T. Stead, three SF writers who died in the wreck of the Titanic in 1912. The review is masterful: the stories are all typical of the authors’ respective oeuvres and styles, their flaws are dissected critically but with consideration of their age, and they are all put into the context of their literary surroundings, as well as each other (Astor and Futrelle at least were friends). The only problem was, no one else has ever been able to identify either this modern chapbook or any of the stories in it. Once people started to try, it soon became clear that either the chapbook was itself a pastiche or, more likely, that Tavie had invented it herself for the express purpose of this fabricated review.

We must not forget that at the same time as these increasingly suspicious works of criticism were starting to receive attention, Tavie was still putting out an impressive stream of indubitably genuine reviews, profiles and literary studies (she was after all retired, and writing about genre fiction was her main hobby). She never confirmed or denied that some of her reviews and other articles were fraudulent, even when a couple of crusading fans for a while made it their mission in life to expose and discredit her. With no social media presence or publicly available email address, she was pretty much immune to any harassment that might have ensued, and the zealous “investigators” quickly lost interest. Tavie continued to review, and no doubt to invent, genre authors and works, until only a few months before her death.

Among the more surprising titles Tavie wrote about was an early issue of the psychological, gore and dark crime magazine Shadowed Dreams in 2007, which she analyzed at some depth without ever saying whether the darker stories were to her taste or not. She wrote a short retrospective of the work of eclectic author and editor Tadala Linn, in which she recasts what most reviewers have seen as an eccentric taste in unpredictable supernatural themes as a virtue, as injecting a dose of surrealism into dark fantasy. She wrote a detailed account of C.L. Moore’s unpublished diaries and juvenilia, and how it prefigures many of the themes of her published work.

Through it all, Tavie retained her kindness and generosity, her playfulness and willingness to explore new genres, her obsession with the obscure and the underrepresented. She was a valuable and insightful reviewer, and she deserves to be remembered as one of the most creative authors in the last two decades of the speculative small press, even though she never published a single work labelled as fiction.