Что значит быть человеком? Тело и машина в новеллизациях ролевой игры Warhammer

Abstract

The article deals with the opposition of a machine and a human being and the theme of corporeity in G.McNeill’s "Mechanicum". McNeill widely uses contrasts, showing strange things from the point of view of an “everyman”, a young girl Dahlia who enters the world of advanced technologies and is surprised and sometimes shocked by the ways human mind and flesh interact with mechanisms. Another character, an officer driving a huge war machine and developing a very intense relationship with it, actually something next to symbiosis, loses his iron “partner” and slowly retreats to the world of simulated sensations resembling a highy advanced computer game, meanwhile losing his body which becomes weaker and weaker until it cannot function independently. These uncommon experiences are described “from within”, which makes them seem familiar, but they also remind us of widely discussed modern issues, such as computer games, artificial intellect, prosthetics and other medical manipulations. He is interested not in the technical aspect of relationships between body and machine but rather in their ethical and psychological aspects, also widely quoting literary and mythic sources. These factors can probably explain why McNeill’s Warhammer novels are successful – not only as novelizations of a game but as a sort of reflexion concerning important issues.