Sci Fi Isn't All Horrifying

You can ask pretty much anyone what the meaning of life is and 95% of people will probably answer “42”. I haven’t met someone who didn’t at least know what Hitchhikers guide to the Galaxy was, and I’ve never met someone who read it and doesn’t recall it fondly. I attempted to read Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy years ago and was, unfortunately, not able to really get into it. I followed it up with the movie years later and was also not really enthralled with the story. Now, having listened to the radio show, I still can’t say I really love it.

                I found it hard to connect with a character who doesn’t really seem to care about anything. And if he does care he cares in what my mom describes as a “quintessentially British way”, summed up by this clip from an episode of The Tick (00:50-00:55 - https://youtu.be/1Wh2CruhrKk?t=50 ). Funnily enough, the sidekick character in this show is also named Arthur. Arthur from Hitchhiker’s Guide cares about the destruction of Earth in much the same way that he cares about the destruction of his house, enough to leave in the middle of his own protest. While I do think this is very funny and I enjoy the overall comedic tone of the radio show, its hard for me to care about a character that doesn’t really seem committed to anything. For me, it didn’t provide enough of a logical bases for the main character before then bombarding me with crazy weird characters and circumstances. That being said, I think this satire of the Sci Fi genre is much more compelling now that I’ve read more serious Sci Fi stories.

                Much of what we’ve discussed about the futuristic Sci Fi genre is it’s ability to contextualize our own present. Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale puts a lot of these radical abortion bill’s in harsh lighting. However, Hitchhiker’s guide spins that on its head when it introduces a computer that can answer the ultimate question. However, the element that’s supposed to deeply contextualize our own present is… “42”. This is followed by the computer claiming it needs the calculate the ultimate question. Not to get all preachy, but the satire of a genre so devoted to commenting on our own society via uplifting messages or warnings indicates to me that spending so much time trying to make sense of our own existence is stupid because humans are just a tiny tiny part of a huge universe. The world is going to end one day and whether our society was morally “good” or not isn’t going to matter. Besides, I’m not sure many people will care about the end of our moral society as much as they’ll care that that’s where we keep all our stuff.

Too Realistic for It's Own Good?

My first exposure to the story of The HandMaid’s Tale was from the acclaimed TV show on Hulu, starring Elizabeth Moss. I was very excited to watch this show and eagerly sat attentive to the screen, ready to soak up all the dystopian woman-hate. However, after about two seasons I realized that this show was very… boring. Don’t get me wrong there are many great things about it and I don’t doubt the creative team achieved what they set out to make, but the show is very slow moving. So when I saw The Handmaid’s Tale on the list of book to read this week I was pretty jazzed to give it a second chance. Hopefully, the book would give me a little more, right? Well, the short answer is no, but am I even right to ask for more?

                Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale is a story about a society in political unrest. The new form of government promotes a puritan ideology that places huge restrictions on women that prevent them from reading, watching TV, and being alone. Our main character, Offred takes the role of a Handmaid in this society, meaning her primary purpose is to bare children for a wealthy political couple. She does not hold any power outside of her ability to carry a child and this is basically all that protects her from being sent to Colonies. Throughout the story, she encounters characters attempting to break out of their restrictions, but she herself does very little. Her master forces her to break the rules by going to see him at night and play Scrabble, Ofglen asks her to gain information for the resistance, Serena set Offred up to sleep with Nick. People either force Offred to do things or things happen to her. She doesn’t do much at all. She displays very little agency in her own story. Which is what originally made it boring to watch and boring to read. HOWEVER, in a story where woman have no agency, no power, no choices they can make for themselves… is it right of me to expect the lead female character to contradict the entire theme Atwood has established? If anything, Offred’s lack of action enforces just how powerless she is. She CAN’T do anything. Even as the protagonist of the story, a role which is usually reserved for our Katnisses and Harry Potters and even Ted from Harllan Ellison’s ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’, all characters who upset the status quo, Offred doesn’t even have to opportunity to be a typical protagonist. So why should I want so much from her?

                I found this story upsetting to read, as I‘m sure it was intended to be. Atwood has stated that every aspect of the puritan society has happened in real life at some point in some culture. This provides a haunting base for her fictional dystopian future. It’s not a huge stretch to compare Gilead’s culture to our own, especially with some of the extreme laws surrounding abortions in some states and the restrictions of women getting their tubes tied. Many people tend to make comparisons to The Handmaid’s Tale when the new proposed bill comes out and it says something like “doctors are required to reimplant an ectopic pregnancy”, a procedure which is impossible. The general spread of misinformation, lack of woman voices in law making, and religious beliefs invading a government that claims the “separation of church and state”, all seem very at home in Atwoods story.

                I admire Atwood for her world building and her attention to detail. Her future puts our present in a humbling context. However, I think I admire her most for writing from the perspective of someone who is not the hero. She is not the person who is going to overthrow the government or right the wrongs of an unchecked power structure. She is an average person who is stuck in an extremely restrictive society. She is what 99.9% of us would be in this situation. Not all of us can be Katniss. Not all of us will be Katniss. Offred is emotional and scared and powerless. She is what makes this one of the most realistic dystopian novels I’ve ever read. She is also what makes it so hard to enjoy. But there is nothing enjoyable about this dystopia. And that seems to be the point.

What if Windows 10 Doesn't Support Tragically Flawed Women?

William Gibson’s The Winter Market tackles the concept of immortality and the relationship to one’s body. The story focuses on a girl, Lise, and her talent for creating dreams and experiences that can be processed and distributed to other people for consumption. Lise is a drug addict and relies on an exoskeleton to move because of a progressive disease. She also has a cutthroat attitude and an obsession with being famous. When she is discovered by the main character, Casey, she becomes a start and is eventually given the opportunity to upload herself onto a computer, leaving her old decaying body behind. However, Casey struggles with whether the new computer version of Lise is really her or just a program.

                Lise is a supreme example of the tough, technologically modified, leading lady in a steam punk or cyberpunk story. She seems almost all powerful and Casey’s description of her functions as our tour through the strange futuristic world they inhabit. A world where what makes a person a person is beginning to be questioned. Casey is the editor of Lise’s dreams and function much like a music producer. Her makes her dreams palatable and easily distributable to a wide audience. He becomes so attached to her that he is distraught when she gives herself over to the computer is effectively “dies”. However, is he really gone? He is still expected to edit and release the dreams she produces from the computer. His life remains sort of unchanged. The death of his artist does not put him out of a job.

                I really enjoyed this story and its commentary on humanity in a future where people are becoming less and less human and more computer. Lise is a human at the start of the story but uses cybernetic enhancements to live. She even describes the suffocating feeling she gets when she takes off her exoskeleton. For her, becoming totally computer may not be a huge leap. I don’t think I could ever upload myself to a computer and expect the computer to actually BE the real me. But for someone who is almost all computer already, that may not be as hard of a decision to make.

I'm Going to be a "Father" *EMOTIONAL*

I thoroughly enjoyed Octavia Butler’s Bloodchild. I think her fear of having something living inside her was very well expressed through the eyes of the young protagonist. While the story as a whole is very strange and thought provoking, the most interesting part of it, to me, was when Gan considered making his sister the host of T'Gatoi’s children. While I was not able to directly connect with this story element, as I am an only child, the idea of coming to terms with your role in society seems pretty universal. He decides against having his sister take his place not only because it’s a harsh life to have to force onto someone else, but also because she has to bear human children. This realization seemed to highlight how women are treated as hosts in human society, similarly to how men are treated in Butler’s story. Childbirth is similar to the alien birth in that it is somewhat secretive, painful, and in some cases quite gory. When we are finally told how the human birthing process works, it is often daunting if not totally off putting. Gan experiences these exact emotions when he finally sees what his role entails.

The switching of gender roles was very interesting to read and is evident, not only in the roles of the humans in the story, but also in the alien society where females dominate. I wonder if the choice of having the alien that takes care of the family be a female reflects Butler’s own upbringing as a child of a single mother. This switch also functions as an extreme inverse of our own society, where men are more typically seen in positions of political power. However, it is heightened to a point where T’Gatoi is excited to see a male being born at all.

One element of the story that I wish was elaborated on was the role of the mother. Gan’s mother seems to resist the advances and traditions of the alien race in the beginning of the story. This may be due to her seeing her husband being used as a host three times in his life. She seems like a character that has a lot to say in opposition to the alien/ human codependency, but instead she takes a back seat in the story. I would love to see her role expanded on.
I think this narrative would make a good accessible graphic novel or short film. However, it would be very interesting to see it as a video game. Instead of the main protagonist being Gan, the player could play as someone coming across a society like this and finding out about the codependency by talking to the humans who live there. It could be played as from an outsider's perspective instead of coming from someone on the inside. While this may lose the personal element Butler has created in her story, I think it could still do well in a horror sci-fi video game genre.

There are also elements of this story that could be considered afro-futurist. As someone who is used to reading futuristic stories from the perspective of white authors, it was interesting to see a future written by someone with a different background. The most obvious element that references this may be the names of the characters. I wish I could point out element other than the implied skin color of the main characters that is particularly afro-futuristic, but as someone who doesn’t know much about the cultural background of the author, it is difficult for me to identify references in her futuristic work. I wonder if someone with a similar background would get more out of the story than I do.

I hope to read more stories like Bloodchild. It was fun to see something so outlandish being made so relatable.

aaaaaaaaaaaaah

While the story ‘I have no mouth and I must scream’ by Harlan Ellison is a short one, it has inspired many adaptations. It was the video adaptation that I had encountered first, so when I read this short story, I had an idea of what I was getting into. That being said, I think the short story is more successful than the game. The compressed nature of the short story gives the reader a hint of how exasperated the characters are with their predicament, yet how tedious their lives really are. There is a real sense of torture created by a lack of timeline and an ever-changing environment and circumstance.  One minute, all the characters are stuck in a cave. The next, they’re traversing through snow.

                The element of AM’s torture that was the most interesting was the alterations made to the people. One person was blinded and given monkey-like features, but the other people seemed less physically affected. It called into question the legitimacy of the main character’s claim that AM hadn’t altered his mind in a way. The main character is extremely paranoid, and even loathes the people who are kept with him. He loathes Ellen the most, as she is portrayed as almost exclusively sexually motivated. However, I wonder if the computer altered her to be that way and, is so, does the computer base its alterations on what it perceives humans to be. Although, the main character doesn’t appear to see it that way, the punishments AM inflicts don’t seem to be totally random. Perhaps we are reading this story through the eyes of someone that AM has altered in some way. Altered to think that AM hasn’t altered him.

                This is probably one of the favorite sci-fi stories I’ve read. It’s so far into the dystonia genre that one could argue that the world has already totally ended before the story even takes place. It’s a tale of warning in which all the characters are as good as dead before we even meet them.

At Least the Alien Gets My Jokes

When I first started reading First Contact by Murray Leinster, I was put off by the complex descriptions of the futuristic spaceship. However, when the spaceship and crew encounter an alien ship while investigating a nebula, their attempts to learn about the new life form became more engaging. Not that I’m one to know much about realistic alien encounters, but I really enjoyed that, in contrast to many first encounter stories, the opposing sides didn’t immediately go to war. They didn’t become friends either. Instead, they acknowledged the faults of their own societies and the instinct to start a war with the unknown. The authors exploration of the differences between humans and aliens as well as the ways the main character, Tommy Dort, derived facts about the aliens based on the very limited information they gave was well thought out.

                Tommy’s relationship with the alien, Buck, was part of what made this story accessible, at least to me. The personal element added a lot to what could have been a, while not uninteresting, less “human” alien encounter. This relationship was one of the grounding factors in a story where a lot of the characters barely know what’s going on.

                The ultimate resolution to the story was an interesting one. While, it was a hopeful one, it also left the reader hoping the two societies saw the exchange as a peaceful occurrence. I can think of one specific person who’s pioneering a “space force” who may not react well to such an event. Regardless, the ultimate resolution of finding that aliens are more human than we thought is a pleasant one to say the least.

My Dad's Having an Affair so I Became Friends with a Literal God - by Neil Gaiman

The most prominent thing I noticed about Neil Gaiman’s Ocean at the End of the Lane, is the author’s unique ability to write from a children’s perspective. The unnamed protagonist starts his narration as an adult looking back at his life, but when we read about his younger self, the tone of the story changes. This contrast made the story very immersive for me, especially when his younger self would describe things he didn’t fully understand, such as the dead man in the backseat of the car or his dad having an affair. Gaiman used very simplistic, sort sentence structure, which also aided in transporting me back to when I was young. This made the climax and resolution of the story all the more enlightening.

                When the protagonist first met the three Hempstock women, I figured they were witches. However, when Lettie Hempstock clearly stated that they were not witches, I was left wondering what their existence was meaning to represent. However, after finding out they were a version the Triple Goddess, the story made a lot more sense. The Ocean at the End of the Lane seems to be a sort of coming of age story. The young protagonist faces many situations and characters, both good and bad, that are far beyond his comprehension. He discovers that his parents are not perfect, evident in his father trying to drown him, and that the world can be full of scary things, like Ursula and the Hunger Birds (great band name). Ultimately, Lettie, the maiden of the Triple Goddess, sacrifices herself to save the main character. This indicated to me that his true childhood innocence was gone, to be replaced by a wiser and stronger form of himself that could survive in a less forgiving world. While Lettie is never truly gone, she is no longer with the protagonist.

                The idea that Lettie’s ultimate sacrifice was also a symbol for the protagonist losing his childhood innocence, is made even more evident when the protagonist returns to the Hempstock farm in his later years. Ginnie Hempstock is only seen at the end of the story, indicating that the protagonist may be in the final stage of the Triple Goddess, entering old age and becoming the crone. Furthermore, Ginnie says “Lettie did a very big thing for you. I think she mostly wants to find out what happened next, and whether it was worth everything she did.” Was the sacrifice of our own childhood wonder worth becoming the person we are today?