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.