Downsizing & Satire

Downsizing was a really great satire about the human condition. It was deflated humor, and no one was specifically the target of the jokes. It does talk about capitalism but it more so talks about how this specific situation affects the human condition. There is a still a working class in the small world, assuming that there always will be. This is shown through the Vietnamese woman who is shrunk against her will. Everything is very procedural to get to the small world as well, I found this funny. I also questioned, in a curious way, the logistics of the film. Like who makes all the little people stuff. Who will continue to make their stuff and stay big? And how does the food budget scale? What about the general finances and income?

Literary Speculation

This week we are attempting to distinguish between writing in genre and writing that may use elements of genre but that is essentially literary. Discuss this question in relation to the work(s) you read for this week. Do you think this is an important or necessary distinction, or not? Is your experience of the text affected by these questions? Remember to add a comment to another student's blog.

To be a little meta, I find the distinction between writing in genre and writing with elements of e genre perplexing. I've never been confronted with this subject. From my experience, I don't believe it's necessary to distinct but I can see why we would. But it feels like this is a distinction between literal and figurative writing styles, rather.

The Aquatic Uncle 

This was a fun read that had a loose but well-understood message in between the lines. I assumed it to be about a man that initially cannot accept where future society is (land people) vs. where he is (the sea.) He cannot see beyond his world.

"It just wasn't possible to make him accept a reality different from his own. And yet, his opinions continued to exert an authority over all of us; in the end we asked his advice about matters he didn't begin to understand, though we knew he could be dead wrong. Perhaps his authority stemmed from the fact that he was a leftover from the past."

This point is more so supported by Qfwfq falling in love with Lll, a partner who teaches him how to go beyond his boundaries, something his great-uncle cannot do. But then as Lll begins to humor the uncle and learn of his thoughts, she finds him self-assured in his own ways. I began to think perhaps this was a beneficial relationship, that Lll would enlighten the uncle. However, Qfwfq questions why Lll is always interested in his uncle, but he wants to please her. In this way, Qfwfq is less confident than his uncle, and this makes him less-desirable to Lll. Lll doesn't need him to always please her.

In the end, Lll jumps in the water with Qfwfq's uncle. The author writes some thoughts about adaptation but also staying the same. "...were prepared to change the bases of their existence so radically that the reasons why living was beautiful would be completely overwhelmed and forgotten." He says that despite the other animals adapting and evolving in front of Qfwfq, he was still him, and he wouldn't switch places with any of the other animals.

The Aquatic Uncle felt like a fable or a short story. It was a misty lesson, using a funny plot to talk about evolution and social issues. But I still wouldn't say this distinction, between speculative lit, is valuable.

All at One Point

I believe this was about gossip but that's all I got from it. I liked the simultaneous action going on with evolution and normal life, or at least that's what I got from the text. I also enjoyed it, though. It makes me want to read all of Cosmicomics by Calvino.

"because neither before nor after existed, nor any place to immigrate from, but there were those who insisted that the concept of "immigrant"could be understood in the abstract, outside of space and time."

Bloodchild and Afrofuturism

My initial reaction to Bloodchild is that it's pretty off-putting, frankly. I have fears about child birth and rearing and this hits me in a particular place. It's intimately disturbing, only in a way that a well-hidden family secret could be. Other aspects of the text, like the biological composition of the various species; Terran, Tlic, and N'Tlic, take a bit to process. However, once their purpose, the Terran, is established, to be used as vessels to birth parasitic Tlic, it was easier to understand the story and broader nature of the Preserve. 

The inter-species procreation implications that are suggested, however, are additionally very off-putting. To further this discomfort, it's implied that do to their biological benefits, Terran were once caged for their body heat. The Tlic would let the Terran consume their eggs in order to keep them in a drunken stupor, letting them take advantage of their body heat and bodies as vessels for procreation. This system later changed, though, in favor for the Terran to have more freedom and not be caged as breeding animals. But it's interesting to reflect that the Tlic are (implied) the main political decision-makers, so I believe that maybe they're making decisions that only make the Terran feel like they're have some semblance of equality. And this is what Gan may have realized towards the end when Gatoi cut open Lomas.   

Moreover, Bloodchild made me think about insects and parasitic relationships and how ignorance plays an important role in politics. As mentioned earlier, it seems as though there is a clearly defined parasitic exchange between the Terran and Tlic, however in recent history it is under more mutual terms, maybe. Gan makes a good point, he wishes that the Terran would be more educated so that they would no longer be ignorant of what implantation entails. If people are ignorant of the risks and nature of the process, then of course the Tlic can still abuse the Terran people due to their ignorance, even if not by their (Terran) own doing.

The ideas in Bloodchild would make for an interesting graphic novel. I desperately wanted supplementary visuals to clarify the odd descriptions of the species, however the descriptions weren't as limiting as a Samuel Delaney novel; I could move past their ambiguous nature. I can imagine the Preserve being an overgrown, natural but isolated area of land. Almost dystopian in nature, maybe a land from a Vandermeer novel; you know that type of landscape that is simply unexplainable and intangible. More so, the fluidity with which the characters move could be emphasized in a graphic novel, while simultaneously delivering the complex nature about procreation and politics. I think the story could be well expanded upon in this format if given enough material. 

Cyberpunk in the 90s & Steampunk

I read a summation of cyperpunk and it was helpful to better categorize the subgenres of sci-fi. I found I agreed with the author on many points as I've had the same thoughts on older sci-fi. It also provided an unusual perspective about sci-fi and its origins. For example, the other claims 50s sci-fi had predictions of technology that were usually exciting but unsettling. This wouldn't be unexpected as the 50s was in an era fraught with the potential of nuclear technology and futurism. Despite the massive tools we had, we still didn't know enough and that simultaneously scared and excited us. Society wanted to know more about our future.

In opposition, the tech portrayed in 80s sci-fi was depressing and dreadful. At this point, we had knowledge of the things we didn't know. We had been to the moon, been through the Cold War, and survived the fall out of the Vietnam War. But I can imagine we were more broken  after the tune of the 70s era. Now we were less excited and more hesitant of our expectations of the future, as our depictions were more often filled with monsters and horrible dystopias. In 80s sci-fi, we stopped depicting the future as streamlined and desirable. Instead, the city was dirty and had contemporary, not future, problems like drugs, war, crime. Nothing felt solved in the future imagined by the 80s, so it wasn't something to be looked forward to.

In the 80s is when the word cyperpunk was established as it reflected the increase in computer utilization. It came from the word cyperspace. From here, we see artificial intelligence become a character we move along the decades. The author sums up cyperpunk by looking at Frankenstein through its lens:

"FRANKENSTEIN promotes the romantic dictum that there are Some Things Man Was Not Meant to Know. There are no mere physical mechanisms for this higher moral law -- its workings transcend mortal understanding, it is something akin to divine will. Hubris must meet nemesis; this is simply the nature of our universe. Dr. Frankenstein commits a spine-chilling transgression, an affront against the human soul, and with memorable poetic justice, he is direly punished by his own creation, the Monster. Now imagine a cyberpunk version of FRANKENSTEIN. In this imaginary work, the Monster would likely be the well-funded R&D team-project of some global corporation. The Monster might well wreak bloody havoc, most likely on random passers-by. But having done so, he would never have been allowed to wander to the North Pole, uttering Byronic profundities. The Monsters of cyberpunk never vanish so conveniently. They are already loose on the streets. They are next to us. Quite likely *WE* are them. The Monster would have been copyrighted through the new genetics laws, and manufactured worldwide in many thousands. Soon the Monsters would all have lousy night jobs mopping up at fast-food restaurants."

Through this train of thought, the author continues to suggest that cyperpunk is different from a lot of sci-fi is that society already knows what it's not supposed to know. Whereas before, sci-fi often predicted what we could know, and how it would affect us. It was the story of the unknown. Now that cyperpunk instead plays on an existing knowledge but on taboo and inhuman subjects, we can look to our future, or so the author claims. Cyperpunk is a very real reflection of our future, it reflects how we approach an ever-growing need to challenge the human condition.

Babel 17 & Psci-fi

I read Babel 17 and it was a hard read.

Delaney's writing was initially odd and I thought I'd get used to it. Despite the offbeat techniques, Delaney quickly established a dystopian, interplanetary society that has an abundance of poor, violent people due to a 20 year war involving the Invaders and the Alliance. Common technological features of this age involve a process called cosmetisurgery, or cosmetic surgery where people can get animal like enhancements or bio mechanical attachments on their body. There's even a thing called the Morgue where dead people can be revived, or people who wish to die go. Their consciousnesses can be revived. A whole new person can be made from a group's borrowed thoughts, forming a new person with new thoughts and ideas. It's odd. Even then, people seem to live a long time; there are characters upwards 150 years old. The Morgue sequence helped me understand how the world worked, but only a little bit. Here's an excerpt:

"Any suicide who discorpartes through regular Morgue channels can be called back. But a violent death where the Morgue just retrieves the body afterward, or the run-of-the-mill senile ending...then you're dead forever; although there, if you pass through regular channels, your brain pattern is recorded and your thinking ability can be tapped if anyone wants it, though your consciousness is gone wherever consciousness goes."

Additionally there's these beings calls discorporate souls, I still don't know their exact nature but they seem pretty intangible. Rydra Wong, the ship's captain, finds these souls after going to a certain part of town to recruit them as pilots. She refers to them as Nose, Ear, and Mouth (I believe). These discorporate pilots control the ship through "stasis shifts" and "neural networks." Then there's something called psyche-indices and all I could guess is that they're a psyche rating.   

Or at least from what I could gather because I've never read anything so incomprehensible and confusing in my life and I'm not exaggerating. Maybe because it was the 60s and nothing needed further explanation and you could just say "neural networks" and people would go "woah" but damn. The way imagery is described is confusing I don't know what I'm reading or what this world or it's inhabitants are composed of. The use of run-on sentences doesn't help the overall comprehension either. I found that what bothered me the most was that there was no connection between previous events; it's as if events do not matter or the character dialogue has nothing to do with anything. I felt like I picked up a novel from the middle of its series. There's no sense of tension, time, or suspense. No subject, person, place, or event is focused on enough so I'm just left with a cluster-fuck of a short novel with random-ass sci-fi words about language. There is no time spent on anything in this book. (Sorry Delaney)

I wanted to learn about so many of the ideas that Delaney was bringing to the table. Discorporate, tripling, the Morgue, Babel 17, language, etc but it was so confusing and hard to grasp onto anything in the story. The Baron sequence, sort of like the Collector, was the only mildly entertaining thing because more thought was put into describing how fat the Baroness is with her every movement instead of the details of world-building. Shameful.

It was later cleared up in class that Babel 17 was more about the nature of language and communication. There were some great points made about how more knowledge leads to how detailed one sees the world and how that affects their language. I can appreciate media that's less about the plot and more about the idea behind the plot, but Babel 17 was muddled and imperceivable that I couldn't find the point. I felt similar about Aye and Gomorrah.