Paulo Bacigalupi and The Windup Girl

Corporate espionage, the far-reaching consequences of genetic tinkering on food and animals, political intrigue and bloody revolution -- these are all touched on in Paulo Bacigalupi's novel The Windup Girl, but the subject that is the most fascinating for me is the one the book is named for: the windup girl, Emiko.

She is the product of genetic tinkering done in the name of service. She, like so many concepts and creations of sf, was made to be an object of utility. Her initial role is one of absolute obeisance and servitude. She is secretary, lover, servant, designed with a compulsion to always obey a master, to require a master, and given physical chains to further reinforce her role in the form of a "stutter-stop motion" that betrays her nature, and pores so small that her body overheats quickly, making escape seem impossible. Emiko is abandoned by her Japanese owner, discarded on the streets of Bangkok where her nature and training require her to find a new master. She is found by one, a character called Raleigh, who forces her nightly to take the stage and be violated, again and again, by those whose fascination lies in watching the debasement of a "New Person," a more-than-human, "soulless" subhuman creature of genetic scientists.

Revolution is stirring in the City of Divine Beings, and the major players prime themselves for the moment when their machinations can come to fruition, but it is Emiko, a character with no investment in or awareness of the turbulent political climate she lives within, who creates that perfect moment. Up until this point in the text, Emiko's hope for a new life, one without a master where she can live freely among other New People, has been a small, but persistent flame. The catalyst for change, however, is born from moment of despair. A new client comes into the club where she is forced to work, and that night the degradation and humiliation she is made to suffer reaches an unbearable height. It leaves her feeling broken, emptied out, and without hope.

This is a pivotal moment. The final chapter in a cycle of despair always leaves its sufferer with two choices: die, and end the pain at last, or live, and change everything with the knowledge of the absolute freedom that comes when you have nothing left to lose. Emiko chooses life, and wreaks glorious and bloody vengeance on those who were the source of her suffering. The carnage she leaves in her wake and the misinterpretation of the intent behind such an act of violence, begins a revolution. The city goes up in flames as those major players capitalize on the consequences of her actions, and then the city is drowned by those who would preserve its integrity and its people.

Emiko survives this purging, and the novel closes with her living freely in the nearly empty, mostly submerged city. It is here that she meets the aged scientist Gibson and his companion, a young hermaphrodite named Kip. The novel revolves around discussions of genetic manipulation, and reveals many consequences of this sort of tinkering, from plagues and persistent and ever-mutating disease, to genetic monopolies, to New People and the feral, chameleon-like cats called Cheshires. This meeting between Emiko and the scientist, Gibson, posits a new development in the discussion of genetics, one with very different implications.

He cannot alter Emiko to free her from the tells that mark her as a New Person, or the weaknesses that make her physically vulnerable, but he offers her a future that will make her part of a genetic continuum. New People are engineered for sterility, and although they are virtually immune to disease, heal very quickly, and live much longer lifespans than other human beings, there is no genetic remnant left of them when they die save what is preserved in a laboratory.

It is crucial to note that while Emiko cannot be altered and therefore freed, she wishes to be "a part of the natural world" in some capacity, implying that being a part of the natural world entails the ability to produce life. So much of the novel is about an urgent need to maintain human life, and the barriers against survival created by inventions born from a desire for profit. It is this need that shifts the balance of power in the text, but the changes Gibson offers are not for profit. Whatever his own reasons, he says that he will do it for Emiko. A strand of her hair is all he needs, and while her physical being will remain unchanged, she will be part of a continuum that will alter the course of the genetic future of the human race.

Continuation of this nature, however, is not without its surprises. Emiko was created to serve, and yet she found the will to challenge her masters and become her own mistress. Genetic tinkering does not remove the possibility of mutation, aberration, or evolution -- the plagues on gengineered crops in the text demonstrate that very clearly -- and the future Gibson will create through Emiko will likely be rife will changes and consequences that cannot be predicted or fully controlled. Continuation of life will occur regardless, and it will not be for profit or political agenda. What Bacigalupi demonstrates in The Windup Girl is that in a world guided by genetic engineering, a place in the genetic continuum will be the gift of a contrary 'god' to a worthy supplicant, for no better reason than the perpetuation of life in whatever form life can be dreamed.

Ray Bradbury and "The Million Year Picnic"

“’The whole darn planet belongs to us, kids. The whole darn planet.”

-“The Million Year Picnic,” The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury, pg. 179

            There were a lot of quotes from this particular story in The Martian Chronicles that leapt out at me as embodying a sense of colonialist entitlement, but I decided to focus on this particular one because I felt it encapsulated the concepts Bradbury had been putting forward throughout the rest of the text; That is, the enormity of the seemingly available territory of the frontier, the sense of entitlement human ‘pioneers’ seem to have, and the paternalistic bequeathing of both that sense of entitlement and the land itself. I’m not sure Bradbury is criticizing any of these sentiments, exactly, but he does utilize them repeatedly in relation to sermonizing over the horrors of war and depicting the desire to escape from a cultural madness that is presented as all-encompassing. The Thomas Family has been preparing for years to abandon Earth in favor of Mars, which they view as a clean slate upon which to rewrite human history: “We planned this trip years ago, before you were born…” (180). They waited until Earth had truly fallen into chaos before abandoning it and nearly all of its inhabitants, condemning “Earth civilization” as unsalvageable, and William Thomas immolates the ‘things of man’ he’s brought with him as a symbolic (and symmetrical, considering the atomic fire that purged the world of humanity on Earth during the course of the story) rejection of that civilization and everything it stood for, including geographical boundaries. By claiming Mars as the property of the Thomas family, however, Thomas is perpetuating the ethos that lead to nuclear destruction on Earth. Land is to be claimed, cultures to be assimilated, and the same tired old story is continued over and over by these ‘heroic’ blonde-haired ‘idealists.’ 

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011

Journal #5

Ray Bradbury and "There Will Come Soft Rains"

“Dawn showed faintly in the east. Among the ruins, one wall stood alone. Within the wall, a last voice said, over and over again and again, even as the sun rose to shine up on the heaped rubble and steam: ‘Today is August 5, 2026, today is August 5, 2026, today is…’”

-“There Will Come Soft Rains”

The Martian Chronicles, pg. 171-172

Ray Bradbury

In the final scene from Ray Bradbury’s “There Will Come Soft Rains,” a lone house with all its many mechanisms is described as the only one remaining in the wake of nuclear holocaust in the city of Allendale, California: “The house stood alone…” (167).  By way of efficient design it continues on performing daily services for a family that no longer lives within its walls, a family who, by the application of equally efficient technology, no longer lives at all. When a fluke fire destroys the house and all its fine-tuned functions along with it, all that remains is a fragment of tech calculating time on an infinite loop and a voice that speaks into a void that cannot answer back. Throughout the text, Bradbury demonstrates that the house was not just designed for the convenience of the family, it was a part of them in that every facet of family life within the home was synced to the house itself. It fed them, bathed them, put them to sleep, set up their games, alerted them to weather shifts, watered their lawn, read them poetry, and in their absence, the house continued trying to fulfill its purpose. This final scene demonstrates how technology can endure even after the reason for its existence has itself ceased to exist, but that this endurance becomes a series of meaningless repetitions in the absence of a Maker. Ursula Le Guin states in her 1976 essay, “if we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness,” and by making the house the focal point, indeed, the main character of “There Will Come Soft Rains,” Bradbury gives a very vivid support of her argument. Without a human presence, all the many mechanisms of humanity are made useless. Even the calculation of time becomes an absurdity in the absence of those whose lives are dictated by the perception of it passing. 

-LBS 499: Nuclear Holocaust Science Fiction, Fall 2011

Journal #4

Shadow On the Hearth and the Implications Of Omission

The omission of information for the ‘greater good’ in relation to technological advances and consequences is something the US government did quite a lot of during and directly following WWII (the ‘Duck and Cover’ Civil Defense films being just one of many examples of government sanctioned science fictions), and while the reasoning behind these omissions is debatable, it remains that information was omitted. Whatever the true reasons for informational obfuscation or omission during that time, or whether those actions were justified or not, an omission implies a reluctance to communicate a truth. It denotes a belief that the information omitted either should not, will not or cannot be dealt with by those it is being kept from. Judith Merril addresses the question of the validity of omission during a time of crisis in her 1950 novel Shadow On the Hearth predominantly through the parent-child relationship, revealing both the reasoning behind certain omissions and the reality that such reasoning is not always justified.

This situation is best represented by Merril’s portrayal of the characters Gladys and Barbara. Barbara is shown to be a developing teenager, presented as a fifteen-year-old determined to prove her own “maturity” however she can, either by affecting mannerisms that are considered womanly, such as a certain “ladylike pace she read about in a magazine,” or alternating between calling Gladys ‘Mom’ or “Mother,” depending on the situation (Merril, 5, 6). Once the Bomb drops, however, the boundaries between indulging the whims of a young girl straining to assert her womanhood and being a ‘responsible’ parent become a much more serious concern. Gladys must now decide, or struggle to decide until a situation forces a decision on her, what information Barbara will be able to handle. When the announcement on the radio comes through about the location of the bombsites, Barbara is briefly overcome: “Somewhere inside her she heard the beginnings of a scream and then her ears heard it, and it was Barbara, not herself at all” (17). Yet later, when Gladys tries to protect Barbara by hiding information pamphlets on the bomb emergency services provide, Merril shows that this act was not only unnecessary, but counter-productive. After the initial shock passes, Barbara is shown to be both competent, adaptable and helpful when Gladys herself is on the verge of collapse, more than capable of handling the information on “radiation disease” and the possibility that she might be sick (112). The question of “How much should I tell her? How much should she know?” that Gladys asks herself early on in the text becomes one that, while difficult to decide, is increasingly beyond Gladys’s control (23). The difficulty in adjusting to the reality that a growing child cannot be sheltered from a frightening reality, that this ‘child’ is more than a bundle of teenaged self-assertion, but is also an extremely competent young adult whose informed help becomes essential to the greater good of the family group, becomes an irrelevancy that must be overcome. The only child whose cooperation is dependent upon being kept away from certain frightening realities is the pre-pubescent one, Ginny, and the gravity of an apocalyptic situation propels Barbara into the very maturity she has been striving for.

             

Given that Merril is recorded as having stated that Sf provided one of the only means of “political dissent” during the post-WWII time she was writing, the actions of Shadow On the Hearth are very easily translated into social commentary (Yascek, 3). The question of how much information should be provided about life-threatening technology and the application of that technology in real-world settings, to those who have been deemed as incapable of handling frightening information, becomes one that must be rethought. The action of the text demonstrates that omitting information can be counter-productive, that government-sanctioned information designed to pacify the population can lead to denial of certain realities once those realities occur, and that such denial can be more harmful than the brief hysteria that might follow a disturbing epiphany. Those least expected to be able to adapt just might excel, might prove to be integral forces for community-good, while those who are the most informed (such as their neighbor, the threatening Jim Turner) might just be the real source of the trouble. If Shadow On the Hearth is regarded as social commentary, Merril reveals that the omission of information to an adult population of citizens is both paternalistic and ultimately counter-productive to maintaining a state of peace among world communities. The omission of information enables only the informed to be capable of making decisions that affect the lives of the community. It eliminates choice and renders a population reactionary rather than assertive or prepared. It prevents emotional growth and well-being, rather than stimulating them.

          

I focused mainly on the parent-child aspect of omission in the text, but there are many other aspects of it that Merril addresses. Misogynistic or chauvinistic reasoning behind omission were particularly apparent in the male-female interactions in Shadow On the Hearth, for instance, but I felt that the parental aspect of omission was extremely relevant. While Gladys is portrayed by Merril as having loving (and practical) reasons behind questioning how much information Barbara should be given, when the text is regarded as political dissent, the parental mentality of this omission is unavoidably problematic. I’m not sure how much I can argue against how infantile adults can be at times, but Merril seems to be suggesting that these assumptions about the ability of people to behave responsibly in a time of crises may very well be unfounded. Yes, there will be those who are completely inept, as was the case with the Eddie Crowell character, but omitting information to keep people like Eddie in line also prevents women like Gladys, Veda or Barbara from excelling. Merril reveals through these characters that given the chance, those marginalized or infantilized by societal preconceptions might just rise to the occasion and be the most helpful and noble of all. If kept in the dark, the best of society might never have the chance to prove those assumptions wrong. 

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011

Journal #3

on Judith Merril's Shadow On the Hearth

Stuart Cloete and "The Blast"

“There was the girl who ran into Grand Central Station pursued by two men, whom I shot. It was as simple as that.  I was going out to get canned goods from the basement of a ruined store and had a rifle in my hand. I knew the girl by sight; she was a dancer in a nearby musical show. She smiled at me and said thank you as if I had opened a door for her. And I, regretting the expenditure of my own two shells, wondered if it had been worthwhile. The shots on my part, and the smile on the girl’s, were out of their context here.”

-Stuart Cloete, The Blast, pg.15

Cloete addresses this “context” in various points of the 1947 novella, The Blast, and I’m fairly certain his approach to discussing it marks morality as an object of utility. Morality here would stand for the reasoning behind utilizing bullets that could aid in self-preservation for the preservation of a stranger instead. Rather than indicating that morality is essential in all social interaction, Cloete suggests that it is society, the existence of a massive number of humans cohabitating in a country or community, which necessitates and validates moral action. Society provides context, a scenario in which certain behaviors are more appropriate than others for continued survival of the individual or individuals. This passage implies that personal survival in the absence of a social structure is of greater importance than group-survival. The narrator “regrets” using his bullets, and actually wonders if saving a young woman from two male aggressors was worth the “expenditure.” There is nothing to be gained on a social level for an action regarded as ‘good’ by the narrators’ pre-apocalypse society in a post-apocalyptic world, and when the girl smiles and “says thank you as if [he] had opened a door for her,” her response is an indication of a kind of pre-apocalypse echo. She is not relieved, not desperate, but carelessly grateful, as if he had not just saved her from rape and murder. Of course, it has to be considered that the narrator is unreliable. Perhaps if the girl had fallen over herself with gratitude, his character might have been presented as feeling that his actions were justified in preserving her life, but instead he is described as acting on reflex. Both he and the girl are enacting old behaviors rather than consciously creating new ones. There is no sense of rebuilding social structure here: He regrets saving her, and she is barely grateful to him. The morality that would have championed this behavior is gone, replaced by the pragmatism of the Cloete’s lone survivalist.  

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011
Journal #2

LoTR -- The Fanart Cometh

This is gingerhaze. She makes things like this:

And this:

Because Lord of the Rings silliness always needs to be perpetuated.

Philip Morrison and "If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand"

 “The bombs will never again, as in Japan, come in ones or two. They will come in hundreds, even in thousands. Even if, by means as yet unknown, we are able to stop as many as 90 percent of these missiles, their number will still be large. If the bomb gets out of hand, if we do not learn to live together so that science will be our help and not our hurt, there is only one sure future. The cities of men on earth will perish.”

-Philip Morrison, “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand,”  (1947) pg.15

            What interests me particularly about this passage beyond its haunting prose is the fact that Morrison is discussing annihilation as a result of creation. This is man, or men, in the case of the Manhattan Project, creating death, and truly realizing only after seeing their creation at work, the full power of their progeny. The Bomb as an object is projected human Self manifested through combined thought and intent into fatal form, i.e. human thought and intent transformed into a physical objet capable of mass destruction. Once utilized, however, this object does something more astonishing than mass-murder and incalculable violence: it unifies. The creation and use of the Bomb is an act of man leading to an epiphany of widespread consequences that affect the human community as whole. It seems a little ironic that a creation meant to maintain boundaries between human communities unified all communities aware of that creation, through fear of one terrifying fate. Cultures, languages or religions may differ, but all human beings die. The idea of death is dealt with in various ways by the living, but the terror of this particular death and the suddenness with which it can arrive is what makes the Bomb so “unendurable” (7). Action must therefore be taken to prevent this scenario from occurring again, which is why Morrison and the others who wrote in One World Or None, the ones responsible for the birthing of this terror, so urgently argued against its use. “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand” is a didactic text intended to present in clearest written terms that the bomb is so powerful, so very terrifying to all men, that hysteria would be the result of any continued use of it. Fear of a particular death would be so great that reason would vanish in a frenzy of rampant, but completely illogical, self-defense. Mankind united in hysterical frenzy is a terrifying prospect, even more so considering that by creating a weapon that in turn creates mass hysteria, the makers and users of the bomb instigate their own potential destruction. Morrison’s short story here is a warning that this scenario could occur, but it is also a reassurance that the bombs do not have to be used. Control can be regained before the nightmare ever really begins if it is caught in time, if reason masters fear.

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Science Fiction, Fall 2011
Journal #1

Representations of the Scientist In Western Literature

"Studying the evolution of representations of scientists in Western literature, and more recently in film, allows us to see how clusters of these fictional images have coalesced to produce archetypes that subsequently have acquired a cumulative, even mythical, importance. The pageant of fictional scientists, from the medieval alchemist to the modern computer programmer, atomic physicist, or cyberneticist, is grouped around six recurrent stereotypes:

-The alchemist, who reappears at critical times as the obsessed or maniacal scientist. Driven to pursue an arcane intellectual goal that carries suggestions of ideological evil, this figure has been reincarnated recently as the sinister biologist producing new (and hence allegedly unlawful) species through the quasi-magical processes of genetic engineering.

-The stupid virtuoso, out of touch with the real world of social intercourse. This figure at first appears more comic than sinister, but he too comes with sinister implications. Preoccupied with the trivialities of his private world of science, he ignores his social responsibilities. His modern counterpart, the absent-minded professor of early twentieth-century films, while less overtly censured than his seventeenth-century prototype, is nevertheless an ineffectual figure, a moral failure by default.

-The Romantic depiction of the unfeeling scientist who has reneged on human relationships and suppressed all human affections in the cause of science.  This has been the most enduring stereotype of all and still provides the most common image of the scientist in popular thinking, recurring repeatedly in twentieth-century plays, novels, and films. In portrayals of the 1950's there is an additional ambivalence about this figure: his emotional deficiency is condemned as inhuman, even sinister, but in a less extreme form it is also condoned, even admired, as the inevitable price scientists must pay to achieve their disinterestedness.

-The heroic adventurer in the physical or the intellectual world. Towering like a superman over his contemporaries, exploring new territories, or engaging with new concepts, this character emerges at periods of scientific optimism. His particular appeal to adolescent audiences, deriving from the implicit promise of transcending boundaries, whether material, social, or intellectual, has ensured the popularity of this stereotype in comics and space opera. More subtle analyses of such heroes, however, suggest the danger of their charismatic power as, in the guise of neo-imperialist space travelers, they impose their particular brand of colonization on the universe. 

-The helpless scientist. This character has lost control either over his discovery (which, monsterlike, has grown beyond his expectations) or, as frequently happens in wartime, over the direction of its implementation. In recent decades this situation has been explored in relation to a whole panoply of environmental problems, of which scientists are frequently seen s as the original perpetrators. 

-The scientist as idealist. This figure represents the one unambiguously acceptable scientist, sometimes holding out the possibility of a scientifically sustained utopia with plenty and fulfillment  for all but more frequently engaged in conflict with a technology-based system that fails to provide for individual human values.

The majority of these stereotypes (as well as the overwhelming majority of individual characters) represent scientists in negative terms, as producing long-term liabilities for society. Yet these depiction have not only reflected writers' opinions of the science and scientist of their day; they have, in turn, provided a model for the contemporary evaluation of scientists and, by extension, of science itself. "

-Roslynn D. Haynes

From Faust to Strangelove: Representations of the Scientist in Western Literature

p.3-4

Fall Quarter 2011

It's looking like my Independent Study class is a go. We've worked out a day of the week to meet, and Dr. S is going to tell the English Department to give me the go-ahead on a permit to register for a 499 class (which is the number of Independent Study). I'm living in a permanent giddy haze over this. Nuclear Holocaust Apocalypse Sf. And a month to wait until the class officially starts. This is pretty much all I've been thinking about lately.

The reading/film list looks like this:

Films and Television Series:

 1959

The Twilight Zone: “Time Enough To Last”

 1968

Planet of the Apes

 1984

Terminator

Novels:

 1950

Judith Merril, Shadow On the Hearth

 1960

Walter Miller, A Canticle for Leibowitz

 1963

Philip K. Dick, Dr. Bloodmoney

 1980

Russell Hoban Riddley Walker (British)

 1985

David Brin, The Postman

 1987

Octavia Butler Xenogenesis: Dawn

 2008

Suzanne Collins, The Hunger Games, Book 1

  

Short Stories:

 1946

Philip Morrison, “If the Bomb Gets Out of Hand” from One World Or None

 1947

Stuart Cloete, “The Blast”

 1951

Ray Bradbury, “There Will Come Soft Rains” and/or “Million Year Picnic”

from The Martian Chronicles

Harlan Ellison, “A Boy and His Dog”

Ha! Winning at life. Just a little bit.

Ursula K. Le Guin and Science Fiction as Metaphor

"All  fiction is metaphor. Science fiction is metaphor. What sets it apart from older forms of fiction seems to be its use of new metaphors, drawn from certain great dominants of our contemporary life -- science, all the sciences, and technology, and the relativistic and the historical outlook, among them. Space travel is one of those metaphors; so is an alternative society, an alternative biology; the future is another. The future, in fiction, is a metaphor.

A metaphor for what?

If I could have said it nonmetaphorically, I would not have written all these words, this novel; and Genly Ai would never have sat down at my desk and used up my ink and typewriter ribbon in informing me, and you, rather solemnly, that the truth is a matter of the imagination."

-Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness

The Language of the Night, p.159

“…the truth is a matter of the imagination.”

Ursula Le Guin is specifically talking about the function and ability of Sf to describe personal truths through metaphor in this essay, and while I find this description a very satisfying and fantastic defense against those who would say Sf is useless, silly, or insubstantial, what I really take from this passage is that it points to the fact that perception of the world is subjective. If, as she says, “truth is a matter of the imagination,” then truth is an individualized experience. It is a facet of perception, inseparable from our ability to perceive and contemplate our experience of the world, and fiction becomes a medium through which this accumulated perception can be articulated.

These truths are expressed, perhaps can only be expressed with any kind of firm cohesion, through metaphor, but metaphor, like truth, is subjective, and part of the pleasure and frustration of fiction is that, if it is done well, a reader or viewer can begin to see the threads that bind the metaphors that express personal truths. We can begin to see, if we look, how all these images come together to form a tapestry that presents not just the world itself, but what we take from it into ourselves, who we become and what we are because we live in the world. It is through fiction, through storytelling that we get a glimpse of life from an alternate perspective, that we can perceive the chords that link us to other people. And truth becomes visibly malleable, personal, universal, because it is after all, “a matter of the imagination.”

Ursula Le Guin and What A Novel Gives You

Every novel gives you a chance to do certain things you could not do without it; this is true for the writer as for the reader. Gratitude seems the only fit response. Some things I am grateful to this book for:

The chance to invent the patterning frame (I wish I had one).

The chance to use my own "translations" (collation-ripoff) of the Tao Te Ching. 

 The chance to imagine my own country, America, without cities, almost without towns, as sparsely populated by our own species as it was five hundred years ago; the vastness of this land, the empty beauty of it; here and there (random, the pattern broken) a little settlement of human beings; a buried supermarket or a ruined freeway made mysterious and pathetic as all things are by age. The sense of time, but more than that the sense of space, extent, the wideness of the continent. The wideness, the wilderness. Prairie, forest; undergrowth, bushes, grass, weeds; the wilderness. We talk patronizingly now of "saving the wilderness" for "recreational purposes," but the wilderness has no purpose and can neither be destroyed nor saved. Where we tame the prairie, the used-car lots and the slums arise, terrible, crowded, empty. The wilderness is disorder. The wilderness is the earth itself, and the dust between the stars, from which  new earths are made.

The chance to play with forests. The forest of the mind. Forests one within another.

The chance to speak of civilization not as a negative force -- restraint, constraint, repression, authority-- but as an opportunity lost, an ideal of truth. The City as goal and dream. The interdependence of order and honesty. No word or monument or way of being is more or less "real" than any other, and all is "natural"; what varies is vividness and accuracy of perception, clarity and honesty of speech. The measure of a civilization may be the individual's ability to speak the truth.

Thus, the chance to remark that programmed pigs may talk ethics but not truth.

The chance to take another journey. Most of my stories are excuses for a journey. (We shall henceforth respectfully refer to this as the Quest Theme.) I never did care much about plots, all I want is to go from A to B -- or, more often, from A to A -- by the most difficult and circuitous route. 

The chance to give the country between Wichita and Pueblo a ruler worthy of it.

The chance to build a city across the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. 

The chance to argue inconclusively with the slogan "reverence for life," which by leaving out too much lets the lie get in and eat the apple rotten. 

The chance to give Rolery and Jakob Agat a descendant.

The chance to begin and end a book with darkness, like a dream.

-Ursula K. Le Guin, Introduction to City of Illusions 

The Language of the Night, p. 146-148

Ursula Le Guin, Mrs. Brown and Essential Consciousness

"I don't think that Man is the measure of all things, or even of very many things. I don't think man is the end or culmination of anything, and certainly not the center of anything. What we are, who we are, and where we are going, I do not know, nor do I believe anybody who says he knows, except, possibly Beethoven, in the last movement of the last symphony. All I know is that we are here, and that we are aware of the fact, and that it behooves us to be aware -- to pay heed. For we are not objects. That is essential. We are subjects, and whoever among us treats us as objects is acting inhumanly, wrongly, against nature. And with us, nature, the great Object, its tirelessly burning suns, its turning galaxies and planets, its rocks, seas, fish and ferns and fir trees and little furry animals, all have become, also, subjects. As we are part of them, so they are part of us. Bone of our bone, flesh of our flesh. We are their consciousness. If we stop looking, the world goes blind. If we cease to speak and listen, the world goes deaf and dumb. If we stop thinking, there is no thought. If we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness."

-Ursula K. Le Guin, "Science Fiction and Mrs. Brown."

The Language of the Night, p.116

I need to remember this for class in the Fall. Dr. S agreed to do Atomic Holocaust Sf for Independent Study (the one I wanted!), and it might be useful to reference this quote when we read Russell Hoban's Riddley Walker. 

"If we destroy ourselves, we destroy consciousness," eh? There's something tricky about that sentence. It assumes that there is no other consciousness than the one that we humans perceive, and further, suggests that all the bones and flesh and rock and sea and ferns and so on need us to impose our perception upon them. The world is still the world whether we're around to think about it or not, but it wouldn't be our world anymore if we weren't here, it would just be a world, spinning in space around a sun, existing without a name or a physics equation or a mathematical sequence to explain it. These things don't need names and mathematical equations to go on carrying about their business, they just happen. It's we who need to name them, and so, yes, if we destroy ourselves, we destroy our consciousness, and all those names and equations will go down in flaming glory with us.

Le Guin touches on a phenomenon, though, that is equally tricky: In imposing our perception onto the objects that make the world, we transform those objects into something more -- into subjects, which is, according to Le Guin, what we are because we are conscious. We make the world into ourselves because we reflect on it, dream about it, are conscious of it, because we name it. 

There's a poem by Tennyson called "Ulysses," that describes the dissatisfaction and yearning Ulysses feels after returning home to his wife Penelope and his people after a lifetime of living for whatever waited beyond the horizon. One of his complaints is that he is a stranger to his people, and they are strange to him:

"It little profits that an idle king1,
By this still hearth, among these barren crags,
Matched with an agèd wife, I mete and dole
Unequal laws unto a savage race,
That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me." 

-Tennsyon, "Ulysses" l.1-5

"...I am become a name; 
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and known; cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments,
Myself not least, but honoured of them all;
And drunk delight of battle with my peers,
Far on the ringing plains of windy Troy3.
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough
Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move."

 -Tennyson, "Ulysses" l.11-21

Here a name is not enough to give meaning to interaction; there must be a connection, a bond that has been forged through shared experiences for a sense of kinship or any kind of understanding to be achieved. Le Guin and Tennyson are talking about different aspects of consciousness, but Le Guin's fascination with consciousness and the importance of names (as is demonstrated by her Earthsea series) reminded me of this poem. In "Ulysses," the shared experience enables the individual to become "a part of all that [they] have met," but I think that those interactions would have been significantly different without his name.

It also demonstrates another aspect of my point, that we need to impose our perception onto the world, not the other way around. There would be one true language if that were the case, and many fantasy authors have explored this concept (including Ursula Le Guin). Naming is just a facet of imposing consciousness, a step towards transforming the object into a subject. Important for us, essential for us, because without it, conscious as we are, we are rendered strange, and a stranger, to everything we consciously perceive.

At The Rugged Foot Of The Mountain

I finished Roger Luckhursts' Science Fiction two nights ago. I'm not as well-read in the nonfictions on Sf as I'd like to be, but even so, I can recognize that I've just read something astonishing. It's not a complete history of Sf, but then, Luckhurst does say in his introduction that it isn't going to be. There are a few things that I wish he'd given more attention, a few things that I wish he'd at least mentioned, but there would be no way of satisfying everyone's opinion of what important Sf is, and he does a very, very thorough job of going over most of what he does mention.

It was a little intimidating to read his work, actually. I'm working towards being an Sf scholar, but there is still so much to learn. It might be a sign that I've chosen the right career path that I'm more excited than put off by the amount of work I'm going to have to do to even come close to being as knowledgeable as Luckhurst.

A quote from Theodore Sturgeon's More Than Human came to mind as I was thinking about all of this:

"So it was that Lone came to know himself; and like the handful of people who have done so before him he found, at this pinnacle, the rugged foot of a mountain."

Theodore Sturgeon, More Than Human, 60

  

Knowing what I want to devote my life to doesn't make the path any easier. I'm beginning to think that figuring out where I wanted to go was the easy part.  There's that rugged foot of a mountain. Up I go.

Luckhurst and Alien Abduction Narratives

Roger Luckhurst did say in the beginning of his work Science Fiction, that he'd be discussing Sf in terms of it's origins stemming from our human reaction to technology, and considering that he did state it, I probably shouldn't have been surprised that he included Alien Abduction Narratives in that analysis. I had never considered these stories as narratives to be included in the Sf genre, though, possibly because they're stories that many people believe. They're told that way, celebrated and feared as potential terrifying or wondrous reality, and yet at the same time those stories have been the inspiration for many films, television series' and written fictions.

Even so, I was surprised. And then incredibly intrigued, because Luckhurst doesn't include them in the genre because they involve aliens, or the possible element of fantasy or fiction, but because they reveal another layer of human reaction to technology, and especially because they reveal the inseparable entanglement of technology and our experience and understanding of time.

"Every stage of abduction concerns technology. Where memory stops and the gap begins is marked by the electrical failures of the car, or power surges that scramble TVs, radios, telephones: you reawake to the flashing zeros of your digital clock. The distress of 'missing time' is in fact one predominant motif of contemporaneous discussions of the technologized lifeworlds of the 1990's: technology promises to save time, 'a mastery...through lifting the burden of our existence in linear time.' Missing time as a sign of abduction is a science-fictionalized account of the space-time compression noted by sociologists of postmodernity, and its penetration into intimate spaces - the car, the home, the bedroom -- is frequently discussed in terms of its traumatic effects. Abductees embody the 'implantation' of the machinic into the human world. Literally so: the body is stuffed with tracking devices and microchips by alien masters."

-Roger Luckhurst, 235

 He goes on to say that a major "defining determinant of abduction narrative" are conspiracy theories, and that this is yet another elaboration of a reaction to the rapid changes that modernity brings with it. The trauma and stress of living in a world that changes so quickly  because of near constant technological innovation is translated into the abduction narrative or the abduction conspiracy narrative. He also mentions the link between sexual abuse and 'missing time,' and a few other theories that it might result from if those narratives are to be taken as examples of psychological trauma and not real accounts, which I appreciated, but the link between modernity, technology and the stress of rapid change in relation to the human experience or awareness of time was particularly interesting for me. 

Part of survival involves forgetting certain traumatic events, but we find so many ways of expressing that trauma anyway. The repressed always returns, in some form or another. In this case, it's in the form of an Sf narrative.

I'm still hesitant to discount the possibility that those abductions actually happened. It doesn't seem likely, but who am I to tell anyone what to believe?

Ursula Le Guin, from "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?"

I don't agree with everything she says about art and sterility in this essay, but as a defense of Fantasy as a genre, this is a pretty interesting approach. To give you some sense of context for the passage from The Language of the Night that I'm about to post, she's theorizing that something must happen in childhood that cultivates a rejection of Sf (and in particular, Fantasy) in people.

"So I arrive at my personal defense of the uses of the imagination, especially in fiction, and most especially in fairy tale, legend, fantasy, science fiction, and the rest of the lunatic fringe. I believe that maturity is not an outgrowing, but a growing up: that an adult is not a dead child, but a child who survived. I believe that all the best faculties of a mature human being exist in the child, and that if these faculties are encouraged in youth they will act well and wisely in the adult, but if they are repressed and denied in the child they will stunt and cripple the adult personality. And finally, I believe that one of the most deeply human, and humane, of these faculties is the power of imagination: so that it is our pleasant duty, as librarians, or teachers, or parents, or writers, or simply as grownups, to encourage that faculty of imagination in our children, to encourage it to grow freely, to flourish like the green bay tree, by giving it the best, absolutely the best and purest, nourishment that it can absorb. And never, under any circumstances, to squelch it, or sneer at it, or imply that it is childish, or unmanly, or untrue.

For fantasy is true, of course. It isn't factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They known that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.

So I believe that we should trust our children. Normal children do not confuse reality and fantasy -- they confuse them much less often that we adults do (as a a certain fantasist pointed out in a story called "The Emperor's New Clothes"). Children know perfectly well that unicorns aren't real, but they also know that books about unicorns, ift hey are good books, are true books. All too often, that's more than Mummy and Daddy know; for, in denying their childhood, the adults have denies half their knowledge, and are left with the sad, sterile little fact: "Unicorns aren't real." And that fact is one that never got anybody anywhere (except in the story "The Unicorn in the Garden," by another great fantasist, in which it is shown that a devotion to the unreality of unicorns may get you straight into the loony bin). It is by such statements as, "Once  upon a time there was a dragon," or "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" -- it is by such beautiful non-facts that we fantastic human beings may arrive, in our peculiar fashion, at the truth (44-45)."

-Ursula Le Guin, "Why Are Americans Afraid of Dragons?" (1974)

Ursula Le Guin and Art as Copulation

I'm nearly finished with Luckhurst (finally), but since it is taking me so long to wade through that text and I want to get more reading accomplished this summer, I've started on Ursula Le Guin's The Language of the Night: Essays On Fantasy and Science Fiction.

This is the book:

I love this woman. Not only because she actually wrote back to me in response to a letter I sent her on her Gifts books series, but because there is something lush and snarky about her writing. It is also a relief to switch gears from Luckhurst who, while lovely, references so many theorists and authors that I spend more time thinking about how much I haven't read yet then about the actual information he's putting forward. It's like having too many people talking to me at one time: not quite incoherent, but close enough to incoherency to be frustrating.

Le Guin is just one voice, speaking sweetly and pleasantly.

Here is a quote from The Language of the Night:

"Art, like sex, cannot be carried on indefinitely solo; after all they have the same mutual enemy, sterility." (Le Guin, 27)

From what I've been reading about Le Guin both in the Luckhurst text and in the introduction to The Language of the Night, she's very much concerned with ethics, balance, sexual identity, and the "necessity of internal exploration...to produce a whole, integrated being" (17).  Which brings me to the quote I cited from her on art and sterility. It's a weighty sentence, so I'll do my best to unpack it as clearly and briefly as possible.

There's a relationship in this quote between art and life -- life in the sense of reproduction, continuity, and self-expression. Art here is an act of creation, a kind of birthing from the interior self rather than the biological self. This birth takes the intangible and renders it tangible, and even communicable by externalizing it into physical form.

Le Guin states that art cannot be carried on "indefinitely solo," the suggestion being that a solitary expression is a part of this process, but that it "cannot" be the only part if it is to truly be meaningful. And meaning, as the warning against sterility implies, lies in reproduction. 

She's obviously not considering cloning or asexuality as a form of reproduction here, so let's take that argument off the table and assume, based on the semantic value in the sentence placed on artistic interaction as something more than solo, that artistic reproduction involves a kind of mental copulation with another individual.

The creative self is externally expressed, and through that externalized expression, capable of being shared. This sharing (or copulation), is where art is truly born. Two minds (or more than two), share an idea of some sort through artistic externalization, and from that communion, new ideas are formed. An essential change occurs in both parties, pleasurable or painful, which always involves inspiration, and that change is transformative. 

The thing to note is that this transformation, according to Le Guin's sentence, at least, cannot occur alone. It can be pleasurable, but unless it's shared, that pleasure amounts to masturbation, and nothing comes of that (in the sense of continued life), except temporary relief. 

As I said, speaking sweetly and pleasantly. 

And apparently impregnating my brain with ideas.

The Power of Necessity and -Earth Abides-

I've been procrastinating over making this post for days.

I finished George R. Stewart's Earth Abides several days ago and have been debating with myself over how to approach talking about it here. I could give little summaries of how the book handles gender, race and spirituality, as there is a lot of material on those issues that are dealt with in surprising ways. This was my original plan: fueled by the powers of scholarly initiative, I was going to bestow upon the internet a gem of literary analysis and then bask in my creation. I would glory in how well I had overcome the procrastination that always overtakes me during my writing projects, and feel that this blog was serving its purpose and that with very little effort, I was well on my way to literary badassery.

Clearly, this didn't happen.

And I have to admit that maybe baby steps are a good idea.

So what I'm going to do instead, after having succumbed to procrastination, is talk about how Stewart addresses that old adage that necessity is the mother of invention (or in this case, the force that prods humanity into creativity and innovation when all we really seem to want to do is exert just enough energy to be comfortable). A little summary is required for this.

Ah, and by the way, keep in mind that the book was originally published in 1949.

Stewart's apocalypse is very tidy. Humanity is almost completely wiped out by a mysterious disease in about a week and a half. Civilization handles it well, or at least, America does, keeping order and quickly burying bodies up until the point when there is no one left alive to do the burying. The result of this approach is that the survivors have all the benefits of civilization at their disposal without having to wade through mountains of corpses: They have access to canned food, clothing, weaponry, cars, gasoline, an endless landscape of homes to choose from, and even electricity and running water for a good while. Stewart spends a lot of time describing the decay of the monuments of civilization, including the return of natural wildlife and the eventual deaths of kept animals who have been bred to require human care for their survival. His narrator, Isherwood Williams, is a graduate student who is twenty when the disease wipes out most of the human race. The novel follows Isherwood's life from that point until his death as an old man.

What makes all of this interesting is that Isherwood is alone in his need to keep alive the knowledge and ideologies of America before the disease. He attempts repeatedly to impart the knowledge and values of his civilization onto the younger generations born to him and the other adult survivors, with little to no success. Eventually Stewart writes Isherwood as accepting of the fact that the future generations are not going to bring the world back to what it was, that the world is going to change, that the people in it are going to change, and that ensuring their survival after the supplies left behind by the "Old Timers" runs out, is all that he can really give them.

Necessity and its relation to human creativity plays an enormous role in Isherwood's failure to re-animate the pre-disease world. Part of this has to do with the way Stewart writes this apocalypse. That an almost infinite number of supplies are still undisturbed in all the department and grocery stores in the 1950's America Stewart describes, means that regular hunting and even gardening is unnecessary for survival. Canned food and the occasional hunting of a cow provide the survivors of Isherwood's small community with all the sustenance they need, and all other supplies are available in abundance in the myriad of abandoned stores. Electricity and running water are shown to be mere conveniences whose absence can be easily adapted to, and with or without them, children are born and new generations flourish completely disassociated from the way of life Isherwood grew up with.

The children growing up with this disconnect from Old World knowledge and lifestyles play a pivotal role in the eventual loss of that knowledge and those lifestyles, but the perpetrators of the initial loss of information are the adult survivors of the disease. They, as parents, adults, and as people who remember what life was like pre-apocalypse are the only ones in a position to make the world they came from seem relevant to the new generation. The reality for Isherwood's community, however, is that the ideologies and knowledge of the 'time before' are no longer relevant for the adult survivors, and part of the reason they have become irrelevant is because that knowledge is no longer necessary for their survival.

The link between creativity, innovation and survival revealed here is what really interests me. It comes with a heavy suggestion in Earth Abides that the mechanism that truly binds 'civilization' together is not some inherent rightness, or even religious predestination, but the fact that, while living in such a pervasive system, human survival within it depends on the maintenance of that system through tacit agreement with its laws and many organizations. It is also held in place by the sheer quantity of people who live within it, and once the majority of those people are gone, the system itself is no longer relevant because it can only operate at its previous scale. Stewart presents this irrelevancy partially through the size of Isherwood's community. At its largest, the group is not more than forty people, and those people are all eventually intermarried, so that they become more of a family group than a collaboration of strangers bound together by law. The complexity of government is not necessary in such a small group when the resources needed for survival and comfort are so readily available, and so, with the exception of Isherwood, the other adults are content to live off of the remnants of the past. Without their participation, the knowledge is lost, and the human world changes accordingly.

Civilization, then, and specifically in the context of Earth Abides, American Civilization, is not a sacred permanence. It is an object of utility whose function changes or becomes irrelevant once it outlives its usefulness in relation to the human beings who give its very existence meaning. Stewart reveals that what dictates the endurance of a civilization and all the ideologies and knowledge that comes with that civilization, is how effective it is at maintaining the lives and relative comfort of the people who form it. If there is another way of ensuring that comfort and survival, the old ideologies disintegrate, and the human experience of social life changes.

And I seem to have gone off on a tangent about civilization rather than talking about the relationship between creativity and comfort in a post-apocalyptic world. I keep getting more ideas the longer I work on this and it is preventing me from posting! So I think I will end this post for now, and live to blog more about Earth Abides another day.