My Spring 2012 Near-Future Science Fiction Course

Here's the reading list for my Near-Future Science Fiction course, organized roughly by when the novels that I'll be teaching next semester are set:


George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four
Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale
Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go


Ken MacLeod, The Execution Channel
Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451
Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower


Richard Morgan, Market Forces
Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash
David Brin, Earth


William Gibson, Neuromancer
Maureen McHugh, China Mountain Zhang
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Windup Girl


I'm so psyched that less than a year after waking up with the germ of this course in my head, I'll actually be teaching it.


In addition, the American Studies Film Series next semester will feature near-future SF films.  More on both when the film series schedule is complete and my syllabus for ENGL 216 is online.

Will This Course Idea Seem So Cool in the Light of Day?

All of a sudden, I've got the urge to teach another version of my Science Fiction course. But this time, instead of trying to sample a small number of novels on a small number of topoi, I've got this idea for teaching near-future sci fi that both gets us thinking globally and reveals something about the preoccupations of the time periods in which they were first written and read. So far, I've come up with works like William Gibson's Neuromancer, Masamune Shirow/Mamoru Oshii's Ghost in the Shell, Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, Maureen McHugh's China Mountain Zhang, Cory Doctorow's For the Win, Paolo Bacigalupi's The Windup Girl. What am I not thinking of that would fit that kind of reading list? Particularly from pre-cyberpunk sci fi?

Start Spreading the News: Jeffrey Tucker on Race, Science Fiction, and Delany @Fredonia

I'm pleased to announce that the planet's foremost Samuel Delany authority will be speaking on my campus tomorrow afternoon. Jeffrey Tucker of the University of Rochester's English department has something new to say on the subjects of his fantastic 2004 study A Sense of Wonder: Samuel R. Delany, Race, Identity, and Difference. In "The Necessity of Models, of Alternatives: Samuel Delany's Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand," Tucker starts with two questions: 1) "How does one define science fiction (SF)?" and 2) "What difference does race makes to SF?" and ends by arguing that "Stars in My Pocket can be shown to be participating in the tradition of African-American literature and demonstrating the difference that race--both Delany’s own identity and the social phenomenon that has structured so much of the American experience--makes to the author’s conception of SF and its potential as a tool for critical analysis." To find out how he gets from point A to point B, come on over to room S-121 of the Williams Center Thursday, 10/8/09, at 4:30! This is a preview of an essay that will appear in a special issue of SAQ entitled "Thinking Black Intellectuals" that he's co-editing with Grant Farred, so be there or be square!

[Cross-posted at Citizen of Somewhere Else.]

[Update 1 (4:30 pm): Here's official announcement from SUNY Fredonia.]

The Day the Earth Stood in the Balance

First, a confession. I've never watched the 1951 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still. Nor have I read the short story on which it is based, Harry Bates's "Farewell to the Master" (at least according to the wiki gods).

But I did know enough about them from my interest in the conventions of sf's "first contact" and "alien invasion" subgenres to know what to expect before I sat down to watch the 2008 version. I knew that it was one of the few such movies in Cold War America to use those subgenres to critique the paranoia, militarism, and authoritarianism of a nuclear United States. I knew enough to list it as a precursor to Independence Day (the quintessential American response to War of the Worlds), a movie I love to teach in my Introduction to American Studies course.

What I don't know is whether I should blame the limitations of the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still on its adherence to its sources. Don't get me wrong--the movie gets a lot of things right. It made good dramatic and allusive sense to bring out the double meaning of apocalypse by making Klaatu more of a second-coming-type Jesus figure, bringing judgment to the sinful rather than simply bringing a warning to humanity, as in the original. Making it a chase movie also probably improved on the original, from a narrative standpoint, at least. And turning the original's focus on nuclear weapons in the Cold War into a focus on environmental and ecological issues in the 21st century was a canny political move, not only as a critique of the Bush administration and a spur to the Obama administration, but also as an attempt to define the most pressing global issue in our times. Any movie that tries to start a dialogue between fans of Left Behind and An Inconvenient Truth is doing interesting cultural work, at the very least. There's a lot that's teachable about this movie.

But my impatience, even irritation, with it remains. It's not over-the-top cliche-saturated hyper-cheesy fun like Independence Day (for pre-9/11 audiences, at least) or even a charming, nostalgic, and well-crafted faux-period piece like Iron Giant. Instead, it suffers many of the same faults as Sheri Tepper's much more interesting and better-thought-out 2000 novel, The Fresco, chief among them didacticism. War and peace, fear and love don't have to be treated as simplistically as they are in The Day the Earth Stood Still. Yes, it's almost a nice line when the Secretary of Defense waxes on the lessons of first contact history and it's almost a nice idea when the Nobel Prize-winning biologist argues that species only evolve when their survival is at stake, but even Kathy Bates and John Cleese couldn't quite pull them off. As much as it pains me to say it, Independence Day did a much better job riffing on the conventions of their shared subgenres: alongside its rah-rah Americanism, the movie is pretty green, with the aliens representing industrial-technological consumer capitalism's own worst tendencies and all humanity left to find a different path at the end of the movie.

Finally, I hate sf movies that leave me arguing over plausibility, but that's what the 2008 version of The Day the Earth Stood Still ends up doing best. If there are really so few planetary ecosystems capable of sustaining complex life in the universe, why would the alien civilizations only plant one long-term observer on the planet and wait a human lifetime before acting? Why wouldn't they intervene more directly and more quickly? Or at least collect a lot more ethnographic data? If the filmmakers gave even a hint of the internal politics among the aliens and what they had been doing between 1928 and 2008, questions like these wouldn't be so annoying. But tougher ones would remain. Why only 1 representative? Why the United States? Wouldn't it make more sense to send someone--or even a small team--to each of the world's leading political, business, scientific, and artistic figures? And even if it could have been hinted that all this had already been done and that Klaatu's coming to Earth was the final result of a longer evaluative process, problems still remain. In 80 years the best solution the supposedly enlightened and advanced aliens could come up with was xenocide? If so, why not focus more on Klaatu as a relatively low-level functionary "just following orders" in the banality of alien evil sense, rather than make him into a surprisingly ignorant (and inept) figure of final judgment (I mean, if he wanted to address the UN, why didn't he just wait until he was used to his human body and land right at the UN Building instead of in Central Park--or, better yet, broadcast his intentions to the world before leaving his spacecraft?)?

In the end, Klaatu decides the problem is not us--that we can change--and goes with his backup plan to the nanotech-bugs-eating-everything-human-and-human-made one, which is apparently to disable all fossil-fuel-based and electrical power generation on the planet and leave, taking samples of most species on the planet away with him. (I guess our technology was the problem, after all, or perhaps our underlying way of life.) And that's that. Maybe they're just preparing us for a postapocalyptic sequel, but I have to suspect that Hollywood's butchering of Brin's The Postman precludes that. It's too bad, because it would be interesting to see what happens to the humans and the aliens--and how the filmmakers would use that to get us thinking about what a post-petroleum future ought to be like.

[Update 1 (6:54 am): Purposely wrote this without reading any other reactions to the movie. But it's nice to see that Geeks of Doom's Empress Eve already found other plot howlers (although I think #12 can be partially explained by the fact that the bridge is built into the earth, not to mention by Klaatu's line that he's holding the nanotech bugs off).]

Neal Stephenson, Structuralist

Got this off fimoculous, it's a video of a lecture by Neal Stephenson called "The Fork: Science Fiction versus Munane Culture" at Gresham College.






Watch, learn, comment!

Everything You Wanted to Know About Steampunk but Were Afraid to Ask

Is right here. Can you top this?

Apocalypses Then, Again

Just a quick follow-up to my previous post. One way of thinking about the multiple apocalypses in the science fiction we've been reading so far this semester is to consider the dominant literary mode in which the authors choose to write, what consequences it has on their representation of pre- and post-apocalyptic life, and what connections it might have to the historical era in which they were writing. So what do you make of the following list:

Earth Abides: American primitivism
Fahrenheit 451: American pastoralism
Neuromancer: the American sublime
China Mountain Zhang: American beauty (or is it urbanism?)
Parable of the Sower: American realism

Do you agree I've got the dominant literary mode of each work pegged? Or is it reductive to try to isolate one mode for each--after all, each has multiple strands and participates in multiple traditions--so maybe it would make more sense to try to analyze the relations between the various literary modes in each work before trying to compare and contrast across works and time periods. But then the complexity of the task starts to risk being paralyzing rather than invigorating. We have to start somewhere. Why not keep it simple at first?

Cybergrunge Revisited

I had to miss class Thursday--my older daughter had a stomachache (or so she's been complaining for the past week) and with my wife in Buffalo for work/school, the only doctor's appointment I could get was right in the middle of it (doc couldn't find anything physically wrong with her--yay! boo for how easily manipulated I am by a 4-year-old). So I gave out a silly little handout based on my Cybergrunge post here and and failed to explain it well on our course ANGEL space, and most people mostly didn't know quite what to do with it. What I was hoping would happen was that people would analyze the setting, characters, plot, and style of China Mountain Zhang and Neuromancer, not just describe them. What I was hoping would come out of that analysis is the recognition of features of the novels that could be related to the musical movements of punk and grunge. But a 8 1" x 1" boxes on an 8" x 11" piece of paper don't really lend themselves to that, even if I had explained the task well in handwriting that was halfway legible. (My apologies, but my daughter got bored while I was making it and wandered out of the office to the downstairs front entrance of the building before I noticed she was gone. Yup, another father of the year moment. So in my defense I was a bit freaked out and rushed while finishing it up. And, yes, I did find her, ok?)

Still, those who could read my handwriting and took the time to comment on my proposed distinction between cyberpunk and cybergrunge had some neat ideas. Here's the neatest one so far (people are still dropping them off in my mailbox):

Gibson and McHugh took their basic settings and ideas based on popular culture of their decade. The '80s is about punk and going against the man which Gibson shows in Neuromancer. The '90s were a bit more depressed and introverted; it was the decade of grunge and Kurt Cobain. I expect China Mountain Zhang to be about that.

Yeah, this is my basic idea, too. Think Johnny Rotten vs. Kurt Cobain and you get something of the contrast between Case and Zhang. Think the loud and fast DIY aesthetic of punk of the Ramones and the Clash vs. the slow and sad/loud and angry dialectics of Nirvana and Pearl Jam (and, for that matter, early Radiohead) and you have something of the contrast between the plotting and pacing of Gibson's and McHugh's writing.

You can do more with this--like point out that the '80s were also the era of elite as well as "underclass" drug use (think cocaine and crack epidemics), urban crime and government corruption (even by supposed anti-big government "revolutionaries"--anyone remember Iran/Contra?), the heightening and then end of the Cold War (although the line from "evil empire" to the fall of the Berlin Wall is less direct than many today would want to convince you), and the culture wars--in order to complicate the contrasts between the decades and the movements. (Yes, kids, the '80s weren't just about "going against the man" and punk was one of many musical/political responses to the events and tensions of the decade. I can tell you because I was there! Now I feel like Ish. And not in a good way.) And if you go far enough you might also find interesting similarities between the decades, musics, writers, and subgenres I wanted to get you thinking about. Feel free to do that on your own!

As for my analogy proposed in my update, Beeblebrox is right to suggest it stinks, but mostly, I think now, because I got it backwards. It's not:

cyberpunk:existentialism::cybergrunge:postmodernism

but

cyberpunk:postmodernism::cybergrunge:existentialism

. (Made you nostalgic for the SAT, didn't I? Or did you not take them before they got rid of analogies?)

Wait, maybe it's both. I'll just lay out both ways of thinking through these analogies and let you decide if they help at all!

For the first, I was thinking of how dramatic and exciting Gibson makes Neuromancer and linking it to the excitement that early existentialist writings sparked among mid-20th C intellectuals. A kind of despairing, desperate excitement, but one that was self-consciously challenging the big ideas of the West (God, rationality, metaphysics, ontology, yadda yadda yadda) and writing in the heroic mode about becoming over being and making meaning over finding it and challenging dogma and authority and yadda yadda yadda. Whereas their successors, the postmodernists, took that kind of yadda yadda yadda/"been there done that" blase attitude to all that, taking a kind of cool, ironic pleasure in demonstrating that we live in a world characterized by various instabilities (of language, meaning, identity). Which to me captures something of the difference in the tone and atmosphere of McHugh's writing when compared stylistically to Gibson's.

For the second, though, I started thinking about characterization and quickly realized that Zhang is going through a fairly fundamental existentialist crisis, as the "Baffin Island" section dramatizes and thematizes quite well (just think of his response to the Arctic landscape as akin to the existentialists' crises of meaning and metaphysics). China Mountain Zhang really is a classic bildungsroman--it really does tell the story of Zhang's becoming, even as it interweaves it with other characters' lives and developments. On the level of characterization, Gibson is much more postmodernist--it's hard to tell what, if anything, Case and Molly have learned about themselves at the end of Neuromancer; the biggest character development is the merging of Wintermute and Neuromancer, and Gibson leaves for the rest of the Sprawl trilogy an exploration of what they become.

So it's no wonder why the analogy isn't clarifying, although I wouldn't go so far as to say it's complete b.s. (A little joke there for those who know my initials.) Would you?

Cybergrunge

No time to elaborate on this idea, but reading the opening of China Mountain Zhang for class tomorrow prompted this attempt to coin a term to counter the attempt by one of McHugh's blurbers to enlist her in the cyberpunk movement....

[Update: This analogy will probably not clarify anything for anyone, but it works for me: cybergrunge is to cyberpunk as postmodernism is to existentialism.]