Dr. Adder

Dr. Adder is a classic of science fiction. There are certain creations, whether literary or otherwise, that possess an enigmatic and idiosyncratic novelty deserving of immediate praise. Jeter’s debut is original in scope, perhaps a defining text for what might be called proto-cyberpunk or future-sleaze, appearing roughly a decade before the aesthetic would carve out its own importance in the genre. Dr. Adder was notoriously difficult to publish for Jeter. He wrote it in 1972 but couldn’t find a publisher until 1984. I can’t help but be reminded of John Carpenter films that would go on to capture a similar neon-soaked dystopian vision. Think Escape from New York, but more feral, drenched in cigarette smoke and unwashed bodies, a harlequin sprawl of American culture pushed to its extreme.

The novel is singularly imaginative, brilliant, and disgusting in every complimentary sense possible. It is also deliberately difficult to defend, but let me try:

Dr. Adder is youthful and angry, its violence both senseless and political, which probably means it risks being seen as just senseless. The novel can be written off as an amplification of filth and misogyny, and that’s fine if you need it to be. But there is something more clever at play here, something Philip K. Dick recognized when he championed the book. Dick saw the artistic merit, but more importantly, he asserted the right of the artist to be transgressive in their writing, to let filth and horror bless the pages as long as it fulfills an artistic purpose rather than collapsing into exploitation. Dick understood that some novels need to be ugly to tell the truth about what ugliness actually is in a cultural sense.

What Jeter is really writing about is societal mutilation. The capacity for human beings to degrade themselves, both physically and mentally, at the expense of conforming to some “optimal” identity. The bodily degradation in Dr. Adder is voluntary. It’s a cultural drive established by the world’s norms, but the shock of the text may prevent this insight upon first reading. Perhaps this is the operative metaphor: in Jeter’s Los Angeles, people voluntarily remake themselves into monsters because the culture has made monstrosity desirable. There is something Foucauldian here, treating people as objects to be modified, categorized, consumed. Amputate the physical and mental alike. The self dissolves into mutilated surfaces.

The female characters, far from being mere victims, are the most viciously intelligent players in the story. In fact, they are the only ones attempting to cast morality into Jeter’s hellish world. Where they are subjugated, it happens either at the whims of epochal identity norms or at the hands of brutal men, both systems of Foucauldian power rather than individual failures. Jeter doesn’t shy away from depicting violence against both sexes, but he also refuses to let his female characters be entirely passive. They fit their cultural mold in the contextual outlines of the story. They maneuver, manipulate, and survive with a clarity of purpose. This doesn’t absolve the novel of its effort to be brutal, but it complicates any simple reading of it as misogynistic fantasy.

I will admit that my interest is easy to capture if something is originally bizarre. Dr. Adder takes off in outlandish flight and denies all expectations about what it should or should not do. The characters are largely fucking awful, yet you begin to enjoy their company. The irony is comedic: if you saw any of these people walking down the street in real life, you would cross a road with oncoming traffic and untied shoelaces with presto. The novel manages to make you complicit in the spectacle of the depraved.

Dr. Adder remains a relevant comment on the nature of compulsivity, on our endless drive to conform to norms even when those norms demand our self-destruction. In a culture obsessed with optimization, with becoming “the best version of yourself,” Jeter shows what happens when that drive turns cancerous. The pursuit of identity becomes amputation.

Anyways. Dr. Adder wants to offend you, make you flinch. But it does so with black comedy, gusto, and purposeful drive. And as John W. Campbell told Barry Malzberg: “Cheer up kid — I just like to shake ’em up.” And what’s life without exploring its phenomena from all angles?