More on Plastic Surgery - Tilted Forum Project Discussion Community

Lucifer · 03-30-2009, 06:33 PM

Cause the last two threads are so much fun, here's another one. Sci-fi Author William Gibson has speculated in many of his novels and short stories that plastic surgery will eventually become so commonplace that you'll be able to go get it done at the corner store like you are picking up milk. Characters in his stories have various things done to them, like having their teeth replaced with teeth from dogs, getting their eyes modified to reflect light like a cats, or getting their eyes completed sheathed away in mirrored glass.

Do you think that plastic surgery, given the trend towards completely self-gratifying plastic surgery, will eventually head this way, perhaps not to the corner store variety, picking up some bread and a little modification on the way home from work, but more like zipping into your dental office to have your teeth replaced. Even 10 years ago girls getting breast implants in high school was almost unheard of, but now seems to be the cool thing to do.

JumpinJesus · 03-30-2009, 06:36 PM

Yes and no. I think it will become more commonplace, but I don't think it will be done in convenience store fashion as William Gibson described. Who knows what medical technology will be like in another 100 years, though, so I don't want to say with certainty.

We certainly are a vain bunch, though.

Baraka_Guru · 03-30-2009, 07:32 PM

Plastic surgery in high school, and they no longer read books. What's this world coming to?

This Gibson thing reminds me of a book by Mark Leyner, where the main character (Leyner, actually) goes to a self-serve medical clinic to perform self-surgery. He even gets a tattoo on his heart, using an ink that contains a radioactive isotope so that he can flirt with nurses whenever he gets chest x-rays.

I think Leyner's book actually speaks volumes to our culture today, even though it was written over 15 years ago now. It's called Et Tu, Babe? There's a wonderful treatment of Schwarzenegger in there as well.

I look at our increasingly casual acceptance of plastic surgery as another sign that we're moving continuously toward pure materialism in a philosophical sense. Those who steep themselves in surface beauty, who go into debt living the "good life," are those who don't see anything beyond old age and death. They care little about posterity. They assume they will leave their mark on the Internet via Facebook and flickr et al, and they think it will say: See how beautiful I was?

I'm exaggerating, of course.

Or am I?

Lucifer · 03-31-2009, 05:38 AM

I found a website with a collection of cyberpunk stories, including all of Gibsons, so I'm quoting some of them with the ideas that he had, for anyone who doesn't read him:

from Johnny Mnemonic:

Quote:

The meet was set for the Drome at 2300, but I rode the tube three stops past the closest
platform and walked back. Immaculate procedure. I checked myself out in the chrome
siding of a coffee kiosk, your basic sharp-faced Caucasoid with a ruff of stiff, dark hair.
The girls at Under the Knife were big on Sony Mao, and it was getting harder to keep them
from adding the chic suggestion of epicanthic folds. It probably wouldn't fool Ralfi Face,
but it might get me next to his table. The Drome is a single narrow space with a bar down
one side and tables along the other, thick with pimps and handlers and a arcame array of
dealers. The Magnetic Dog Sisters were on the door that night, and I didn't relish trying to
get out past them if things didn't work out. They were two meters tall and thin as
greyhounds. One was black and the other white, but aside from that they were as nearly
identical as cosmetic surgery could make them. They'd been lovers for years and were
bad news in the tussle. I was never quite sure which one had originally been male.

Quote:

'I don't see how the hell I missed him.'
'Cause he's faxt, so fast.' She hugged her knees and rocked back and forth on her
bootheels. 'His nervous system's jacked up. He's factory custom.' She grinned and gave a
little squeal of delight. 'I'm gonna get that boy. Tonight. He's the best, number one, top
dollar, state of the art.'
'What you're going to get, for this boy's two million, is my ass out of here. Your boyfriend
back there was mostly grown in a vat in Chiba City. He's a Yakuza assassin.'
'Chiba. Yeah. See, Molly's been Chiba, too.' And she showed me her hands, fingers
slighly spread. Her fingers were slender, tapered, very white against the polished
burgundy nails. Ten blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails,
each one a narrow, doubleedged scalpel in pale blue steel.

Quote:

An hour later I dragged myself up through another hole, this one sawed crookedly in a
sagging sheet of plywood, and met my first Lo Tek.
'S okay,' Molly said, her hand brushing my shoulder. 'It's just Dog. Hey, Dog.'
In the narrow beam of her taped flash, he regarded us with his one eye and slowly
extruded a thick length of grayish tongue, licking huge canines. I wondered how they wrote
off tooth-bud transplants from Dobermans as low technology. Immunosuppressives don;t
exactly grow on trees.
'Moll.' Dental augmentation impeded his speech. A string of saliva dangled from the
twisted lower lip. 'Heard ya comin'. Long time.' He might have been fifteen, but the fangs
and the bright mosaic of scars combined with the gaping socket to present a mask of total
bestiality. It had taken time and a certain kind of creativity to assemble that face, and his
posture told-me he enjoyed living behind it. He wore a pair of decaying jeans, black with
grime and shiny along the creases. His chest and feet were bare. He did something with
his mouth that approximated a grin.

from Burning Chrome:

Quote:

I went out and looked for Rikki, found her in a cafe with a boy with Sendai eyes, half-healed suture lines
radiating from his bruised sockets. She had a glossy brochure spread open on the table, Tally Isham smiling up from a dozen photographs, the Girl with the Zeiss Ikon Eyes.
Her little simstim deck was one of the things I'd stacked under my bench the night before, the one I'd fixed for her the day after I'd first seen her. She spent hours jacked into that unit, the contact band across her forehead like a gray plastic tiara. Tally Isham was her favorite, and with the contact band on, she was gone, off somewhere in the recorded sensorium of simstim s biggest star. Simulated stimuli: the world all the interesting parts, anyway as perceived by Tally Isham. Tally raced a black Fokker ground-effect plane across Arizona mesa tops. Tally dived the Truk Island preserves. Tally partied with the superrich on private Greek islands, heartbreaking purity of those tiny white seaports at dawn.
Actually she looked a lot like Tally, same coloring and cheekbones. I thought Rikki's mouth was stronger. More sass. She didn't want to be Tally Isham, but she coveted the job. That was her ambition, to be in simstim. Bobby just laughed it off. She talked to me about it, though. "How'd I look with a pair of these?" she'd ask, holding a full-page headshot, Tally Isham's blue Zeiss Ikons lined up with her own amber-brown. She'd had her corneas done twice, but she still wasn't 20-20; so she wanted Ikons. Brand of the stars. Very expensive.
"You still window-shopping for eyes?" I asked as I sat down.
"Tiger just got some," she said. She looked tired, I thought.
Tiger was so pleased with his Sendais that he couldn't help smiling, but I doubted whether he'd have smiled otherwise. He had the kind of uniform good looks you get after your seventh trip to the surgical boutique; he'd probably spend the rest of his life looking vaguely like each new season's media front-runner; not too obvious a copy, but nothing too original, either.

03-30-2009, 06:33 PM	#1 (permalink)
Lucifer Husband of Seamaiden Location: Nova Scotia	More on Plastic Surgery Cause the last two threads are so much fun, here's another one. Sci-fi Author William Gibson has speculated in many of his novels and short stories that plastic surgery will eventually become so commonplace that you'll be able to go get it done at the corner store like you are picking up milk. Characters in his stories have various things done to them, like having their teeth replaced with teeth from dogs, getting their eyes modified to reflect light like a cats, or getting their eyes completed sheathed away in mirrored glass. Do you think that plastic surgery, given the trend towards completely self-gratifying plastic surgery, will eventually head this way, perhaps not to the corner store variety, picking up some bread and a little modification on the way home from work, but more like zipping into your dental office to have your teeth replaced. Even 10 years ago girls getting breast implants in high school was almost unheard of, but now seems to be the cool thing to do. __________________ I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls. - Job 30:29 1123, 6536, 5321

03-30-2009, 06:36 PM	#2 (permalink)
JumpinJesus Junkie Location: Chicago	Yes and no. I think it will become more commonplace, but I don't think it will be done in convenience store fashion as William Gibson described. Who knows what medical technology will be like in another 100 years, though, so I don't want to say with certainty. We certainly are a vain bunch, though. __________________ "I can normally tell how intelligent a man is by how stupid he thinks I am" - Cormac McCarthy, All The Pretty Horses

03-30-2009, 07:32 PM	#3 (permalink)
Baraka_Guru warrior bodhisattva Super Moderator Location: East-central Canada	Plastic surgery in high school, and they no longer read books. What's this world coming to? This Gibson thing reminds me of a book by Mark Leyner, where the main character (Leyner, actually) goes to a self-serve medical clinic to perform self-surgery. He even gets a tattoo on his heart, using an ink that contains a radioactive isotope so that he can flirt with nurses whenever he gets chest x-rays. I think Leyner's book actually speaks volumes to our culture today, even though it was written over 15 years ago now. It's called Et Tu, Babe? There's a wonderful treatment of Schwarzenegger in there as well. I look at our increasingly casual acceptance of plastic surgery as another sign that we're moving continuously toward pure materialism in a philosophical sense. Those who steep themselves in surface beauty, who go into debt living the "good life," are those who don't see anything beyond old age and death. They care little about posterity. They assume they will leave their mark on the Internet via Facebook and flickr et al, and they think it will say: See how beautiful I was? I'm exaggerating, of course. Or am I? __________________ Knowing that death is certain and that the time of death is uncertain, what's the most important thing? —Bhikkhuni Pema Chödrön Humankind cannot bear very much reality. —From "Burnt Norton," Four Quartets (1936), T. S. Eliot Last edited by Baraka_Guru; 03-30-2009 at 07:40 PM..