Neal on Neil and Neal

Hey folks, sorry for the long absence.  I'm going to be teaching a summer course on Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson this summer from May 28 through June 28 at SUNY Fredonia, so expect a lot more activity here soon!

Here's how I've been pitching it on campus.

Summer Session I

Bring on the "Ne(a/i)ls":

Bruce Neal Simon Will Be Teaching Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson

ENGL 427 Major Writers: Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson

During Summer Session I, we will examine a sample of works from the major fantasy fiction writer and the major science fiction writer of their generation: Neil Gaiman and Neal Stephenson. We will start by pairing some shorter works that made the writers' early reputations (for instance, Gaiman's Sandman: Season of Mists and Stephenson's "Mother Earth, Mother Board" from Some Remarks). We will then pair Gaiman's (and Terry Pratchett's) Good Omens with Stephenson's Snow Crash as hugely popular and influential experiments in narrative, humor, and apocalypse. Finally, we will pair Gaiman's American Gods with Stephenson's Anathem as mature and major novels. If we have the time (and are completely insane), we will also try to pack in their most recent novels, Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and Stephenson's Reamde--you know, for fun (these novels will be optional purchases)!

We will consider such questions as what makes a writer "major"? how do these very different writers speak to each other, to their own times, and to us? what connections and contrasts can we find between their characters and settings, characteristic themes and figures, central beliefs and values, writing styles and narrative strategies, and literary and political projects?

This course fulfills the "major author course" requirement for undergraduates majoring in English or English Adolescence Education.

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?

Lost and SyFy

My experience with Science Fiction literature is very sparse. My knowledge pretty much ends with some novels read in high school. I enjoy reading, but reading a science fiction novel isn't as appealing to me as watching a SF movie or TV show.

As someone stated in an earlier blog the SyFy channel is mostly low budget (and let's face it) crappy made for TV movies, such as Mosquito Man and The Gingerdead Man. While these movies are painful to watch and predictable, there are many interesting SF movies and shows out there.

The SyFy channel airs re-runs of the TV show Lost. Lost is one of my favorite shows of all-time, so I'm mostly biased, but this show does a great job at entertaining and intriguing it's audience, while making you think at the same time. Yes, the show can become very confusing, frustrating, and complex, but isn't that what SF is supposed to be? If Lost was a book series instead of a television show I don't think it would be as big as it is today because it would be even harder to follow. Visually watching something commits it to memory better. It's much easier to misinterpret something you read than something you watch.

Lost has brought back an interest in SF TV shows that we haven't seen since the Twilight Zone. More shows like Lost are popping up, such as Flash Forward and V. Finally, taking the spotlight and audiences away from all the endless (and pointless) Crime/FBI shows and reality TV that are turning our brains into mush. Of course, much of the plot is far-fetched and impossible to believe, but it intellectually challenges the audience and stimulates our mind and I feel that its about time.

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!

American Otaku and American Imperialism

I found pretty amazing the juxtaposition between this Wired article on the popularity of otaku culture in the United States and this American Prospect article on the ways in which the new Iron Man movie tiptoes around the comic book's legacy of wrestling with the legacy of Vietnam and the tradition of American imperialism. It raises questions for me about the relation between different popular media, how their fans interpret and respond to them, and their larger political ramifications in the U.S. But above all it makes me wonder to what extent Americans' consumerist culture and subcultures might constitute a critique of imperialism, an extension of it, or a new phase of it.

Is Hyperion the Best SF Novel Evah?

Just asking. I kinda think so.

How Big Was Asimov in Japan?

...Particularly in the immediate post-war decades. Because although I suspect his original Foundation trilogy was intended not only a thought experiment in how Europe picked up the pieces after the decline and fall of the Roman Empire but also as a thinkpiece on where the U.S. stood to stand after the decline and fall of the British Empire, it's occurred to me both times I've taught Foundation that it really was Japan that picked up on the whole "how to win friends and influence people through trade in high-tech miniaturization" vibe towards its end (and in the beginning of its sequel).

Not being an Asimov expert, I'm ashamed to admit that I'm probably as influenced by South Park's "Chinpokomon" episode (video/script/commentary) as anything here. And I don't have time to do any real research on the question of how much influence Asimov's 1940s stories and early 1950s novels may have had on Japan's trade and technology policies (or, for that matter, on those running the American post-war occupation of Japan). But wouldn't it be weird/neat if the answer was, "lots"?

Reading Robots Historically

Here are a couple of posts by a former student of mine, Dave Lester, that will be of most use for my students when we're reading Marge Piercy's He, She and It after spring break, but illustrate so well the "significant distortions of the present" and "histories of the future" ideas that structure our syllabus that I had to link to them here on the eve (well, late afternoon) of spring break!

p.s.--Dave, if you happen to come across this post, I'd love to hear your thoughts on my call for a video game studies summer camp over at Citizen of Somewhere Else.... I'm sure this will be of absolutely no interest to my current students, which is why I'm addressing this p.s. solely to you.

p.p.s.--speaking of robots....

p.p.p.s.--and uprisings....

Humanity

Like Neuromancer, China Mountain Zhang, Fahrenheit 451 and countless others, Parable of the Sower contains a common theme that helps to make science fiction such a human genre. Each of these novels depict a world in which massive organizations drastically oppress the individual. In Fahrenheit 451 for example, this overpowering force is represented by the government, while Parable of the Sower portrays it as organized religion. As the stories progress, they begin to express similar sentiments. Ultimately, they attempt to propose possible ways in which a single person can maintain their identity in a world that is dominated by authoritative figures. They comment on society's lack of interest in human beings as human beings and suggest that perhaps the fate of mankind belongs in the hands of man. I may as well go ahead and recommend The Stars My Destination. It is a late fifties sci-fi novel written by Alfred Bester and it deals with the same sort of material that we have been focusing on in class. It is also just really great.

Significant Distortions?

Today I have seen two websites that really made me think, are Gibson and Bradbury really distorting the present or are they just writing a contemporary fiction piece?

When we think about distorting something in class we rarely think about distorting animals. However i was browsing the internet today and came across something quite interesting. You remember the metal hound that attacked Montag in 451, right? Well take that concept one step further and you have this: http://www.behance.net/LisaBlack

Also i found something that related to the Gibson's concepts of feeling through the direct interactions of two people's nervous systems. Introducing iCyborg: http://www.kevinwarwick.com/ICyborg.htm

If you look at all four of the distorted animals you'll find that some of them are really quite shocking, and that one of them actually has moving parts. Even thinking about the possibilities Warwick has presented is shocking and awe inspiring. While looking at this some of you might seem a little uneasy or even angry. This then begs the question, is the technology that Bradbury and Gibson present in these novels really that far in the future? While it is impossible to find a working mechanical dog that functions in the ways that Bradbury's does, we do have a blueprint for a creating one in Lisa Black's artwork. And while we cannot currently interact between computers in our current state, Warwick believes that we do have the ability and the technology to interact with them if we only try.

Interesting stuff, huh?

~UV~

Significant Distortions of the Present in Earth Abides

If you google "significant distortion of the present," the Samuel Delany idea that I'm using to structure the first half of my science fiction course this semester, you'll come across two provocative review essays from Science Fiction Studies that analyze Delany's SF theorizing. They provide two slightly different perspectives on it, reflecting the evolution of Delany's own thinking from the late 1970s to the mid-1980s:

Patrick Parrinder: science fiction "uses the future as a convention to present a significant distortion of the present."

Kathleen Spencer: the function of SF is to create "a significant distortion of the present that sets up a rich and complex dialogue with the reader's here and now."

For more--and more recent--considerations and extensions of Delany's idea, check out Jeffrey Tucker's A Sense of Wonder and Madhu Dubey's Signs and Cities. What I'll do here, though, is start a list of the ways in which it is relevant to George Stewart's Earth Abides. Feel free to add to it!

• Connie Willis, in her 2005 introduction to the edition of the novel we're reading in class, argues that all the post-apocalypse novels and short stories of the early Cold War years "were at least partly prompted, if not by 'nuclear dread' as Thomas M. Disch believes, then by an uncomfortable post-Hiroshima awareness that humankind's residence on Earth might be only temporary." She situates Earth Abides as part of a "vibrant, ongoing conversation among [post-apocalyptic] authors, not only being inspired by one another but also expanding on, arguing with, making fun of, going off on a tangent from one another."
  
• I see the novel as also looking back to the immediate post-W.W. I era, literally (check out this PBS documentary, this Stanford University overview, and this recent book on the Great Influenza--and for a broader perspective, see William McNeill's Plagues and Peoples and Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel) and figuratively (from H.G. Wells's Outline of History to Madison Grant's Passing of the Great Race to T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land," many writers in the 1920s were speculating on the past and future of humanity and civilization), but through the lenses of new developments in the natural and social sciences, particularly in ecology and sociology.
  
• Even more broadly, I would suggest that Stewart is putting his novel in dialogue with mid-20th C accounts of the "discovery of the New World" and the apocalyptic consequences of the Columbian exchanges for the descendants of the earliest settlers of the Americas.
  
• I think you could find many places where the novel engages contemporary concerns about the effects of segregation and racism, urbanization and suburbanization, and capitalism and the culture industry on the American people, particularly through those who Stewart imagines would most likely survive not only the "Great Disaster" itself, but also the "Secondary Kill," not to mention the ways in which the community the SF-area survivors he focuses on develops over the generations.
  
• It's worth looking into the characterization of Em over the course of the novel and more generally at the ways in which Stewart engages issues of race and cultural difference for insights into the strengths and limitations of early Cold War liberalism in America.
  

In class in a couple of minutes, we'll get into more specifics on these ideas. After class, we'll see if any students want to add to this list!

I Agree with 99% of This

And that's rare! Check out Clive Thompson's piece in Wired on science fiction as simulation and thought experiment and see if you can find the 1% I disagree with!