Posts

Posted on

The Initative

Andromeda. It is the title of this portfolio, and a name with many meanings. Princess Andromeda, the mythological character that is saved from the wrath of Poseidon by Perseus who later became his wife. M31, or more well known as the Andromeda Galaxy, is the closest galaxy to the Milky Way and another possible reference. It could also be related to the adventures of Captain Erg Noor in the novel Andromeda by Ivan Yefremov that I read for this class: Cold War Science Fictions. For right now, it doesn’t matter what the title is actually referencing because it has done its job of bringing up images and meanings that you have yourself of the word Andromeda. Accompanying the title is an image of a presumably human figure clad in futuristic armor. The deep blacks and the faded reds of the armor do not remind us of camouflage that our current soldiers use. The full face helmet, plated armor, and the full body suit all indicate an advanced state of technology. With the starry background, we can assume that these humans are spacefaring. The weapon in their hands narrows the possibilities somewhat as there is an enemy that is being fought; be it other humans or aliens. It could be about a humanity that finished colonizing the Milky Way and has expanded into the Andromeda Galaxy. Perhaps humanity is fighting off aliens from Andromeda. Finally, the last identifying clues are the alphanumeric engravings of “Ryder,” “N7,” and “TX4877.”  It shows us an organized and industrialized humanity prepared for warfare. All of these ideas, conclusions, and possibilities came from just one word and one image together.

This analysis of the first thing you see on this portfolio is a reflection of what I have learned over the past semester. Cold War Science Fictions was not a class about reading old novels and writing analytical papers about them. It was an investigation into the relationships between the texts and reality, the historical context surrounding them, and progression of the genre over the years. The texts I have read have reshaped how I view science fiction, and I will put it to use in this portfolio by applying it to a modern work of science fiction: Mass Effect: Andromeda. One of my favorite video games of all time, and despite it being a less than formal medium for fiction, it is a brilliant example of what science fiction should be. It explores ideas that can not be answered in our current reality, such as artificial intelligence learning and growing alongside us in a symbiotic relationship, and humanity searching for a new home millions of light years away.

The flexibility that science fiction has allows for the vast worlds and realities that capture our attention. At the core of a science fiction work is the ability to make the reader to understand and be invested into a world that is beyond our preconceived notions of the world. Science fiction uses the idea of ‘cognitive estrangement,’ which is when the reader is pushed past their personal assumptions into ideas that break the rules of possible. This core principle is what allows authors to create any place, society, planet, or galaxy in order to fit their narrative. However, these estranged worlds of fiction do not cut off any connections between them and our reality, which brings us to the purpose of my portfolio and the class Cold War Science Fictions. The class explored the development and progression of science fiction through the lens of its relationship with the Cold War. Science fiction grew alongside the Cold War with the space race and the ideological conflicts between capitalism and communism being ample topics to be covered. Authors used science fiction as a way to explore the ideas that had propped up recently, such as humanity exploring the stars and political division between the West and the East. The historical events in the Cold War had a powerful effect on the works of science fiction at the time. On the flip side, the world around sci-fi literature took notice of its power to criticise. Nations during the Cold War understood the power that literature held over its population. With the Eastern Bloc’s science fiction being focused upon political commentary compared to the entertainment focused western style, it was strictly controlled and censored to ensure it followed communist guidelines.

Posted on

East and West

The subjectivity and other-worldliness  of science fiction has always been used to reflect upon our own world. This blog posts examines how early SF was closely tied to the Cold War.

The histories of science fiction in the Eastern Bloc and the Soviet Union are deeply intertwined because of their interactions of censorship and message. Literature was the start of the communist revolution with writings like Marx’s Communist Manifesto and Lenin’s underground Iskra newspaper. They promoted the communist ideology and soviet science fiction was no different. Zhdanov explains that soviet literature (including science fiction) has “organized the toilers and oppressed for the struggle to abolish once and for all every kind of exploitation and the yoke of wage slavery” (Zhandov 2). Literature’s purpose during the Pre-Cold War and Stalin eras was to spread the message of socialism. This was in contrast to western science fiction, which had “always placed a greater premium on entertainment rather than improvement” (Major 77). For example, Dr. Strangelove’s climax moment is a cowboy hat wearing Air Force crewman riding a nuclear bomb down to Earth which would ignite the world in nuclear fire. In the capitalist west, the problems of nuclear power and the Cold War were freely explored and criticized in science fiction. The U.S.S.R. wasn’t so lenient on critical works of communism.
As much as science fiction was used to push socialist messages on the public, the Soviets were worried about its ability to do the opposite. Science fiction was quickly noted for its inherent nature as “a medium for critiquing the direction of the infant revolution” (Major 75). It would be easy for authors to turn the popular utopian theme in eastern science fiction against the socialists. Soviet Russia’s relationship with science fiction was that of a tight yoke that carefully watched where it walked. Only until after Stalin’s death and the process of the ‘thaw’ began would more critical works of science fiction be allowed past the soviet censors.

However, these works couldn’t be blatant in its ways of criticism. It had to be subtle swipes at the side to make it past. Some methods were exploring the possibility of the convergence of communism and capitalism or to hide it behind humor and irony. (Major 90-91). Soviet science fiction focused on “coded critiques” and political writing (Major 92). It was a powerful yet limited tool for authors to examine communism’s successes and failures.

Posted on

Temperature and Sci-Fi

This blog post continues the investigation of how the real world affected science fiction.  This post delves into how the power of literature has over its population was viewed and used by those in power to fulfill their needs. SF was a simultaneously dangerous and useful tool in propaganda.

The ‘Thaw’ is the period after Joseph Stalin’s death when he was replaced by Nikita Khruschev. Quickly after his inauguration, Khruschev rapidly rolled back or reduced Stalin’s policies of repression, isolationism from the West, and censorship. The Soviet Union was “dangerously backward compared to the technological and economical development of the West” and its population was “exhausted and demoralized” after years of war (Csicsery-Ronay 339). In order to catch up, Khrushchev “encouraged science education, decentralized industrial and educational institutions, and opened the country to Western scientific ideas” (Csicsery-Ronay 339). However, Khrushchev only allowed for this in order to strengthen the regime. Csicsery-Ronay explains that this ‘thaw’ was more of a “volatile alternation of thaws and freezes” that only benefited the regime (340). This brief period allowed for the West to have a glimpse into the world of the Soviet Union and the power literature held over its society. Soviet leaders knew the reach literature had on its citizens so there were major restrictions on writers, such as Stalin’s Writer’s union which had barriers of censorship at every level (Csicsery-Ronay 340). Khrushchev explains that “the role of the writer became more subtle, ambiguous and difficult, yet more important than ever to the ruling class” (qtd. in Csicsery-Ronay 340). Literature and science fiction was far more than the simple entertainment that it was in the West. It was one of the few methods allowed for the public to discuss or criticize the ideas of communism in a public manner. Science fiction was an extension of this because of its ability to “say something about how their lives were to be lived, how the future of their society was to be organized” (qtd. in Csicsery-Ronay 341). This idea of exploring the possibilities of their livelihoods improving expanded into the minds of the youth in the Soviet Union. In return for opening up censorship on writers, science fiction engaged the minds of the youth and interested them in the world of science. The fantastical worlds they would read of could be obtained by their investment into scientific research. Science fiction was limited to the realistic probable future by censors in order to focus their writing that would attract the youth into the fields of science. Khrushchev used literature as a way to convince the population to help in reaching the scientific advancements that the West were so far ahead with.

Posted on

Walls and Humanity

Bringing us back from the focus on the cold war, this blog post talks about The Dispossessed. It is a mix on historical isolationism and recent utopian theory while wrapping it together with the contrasting sides of communist and capitalist ideology. The novel was a great way to connect the real world context that was recently focused on with science fiction texts.

The idea of walls is a constant in the planet of Urras and its society. The singular walled of spaceport encapsulates the isolationist policy of the planet and the close-minded ideologies of its people. Dr. Shevek notes that Dr. Kimoe’s opinions “had to walk around this and avoid that, and then they ended up smack against a wall” (16). Shevek thinks that Kimoe has “walls around his thoughts, and he seemed utterly unaware of them, though he was perpetually hiding behind them” (16). Shevek’s description comes during their conversation about gender equality, religion, and xenophobia in Urras. Kimoe, and Anarres as a whole, is focused on the idea of superiority in society. Men are superior, Urrasti are superior, and their personal religion is better. Kimoe’s opinions are limited by his need to adhere to the Urrasti ideals while trying to explore possibilities beyond them. This is shown when Kimoe speaks about how he has “known highly intelligent women, women who could think just like a man” right after saying “You can’t pretend, surely, in your work, that women are your equals” (17). Shevek describes him to be “pounding his hands against the locked door and shouting” to leave the walls of his mind (17). It seems the sexist comments are a regurgitation of common Urrasti ideas of women, while the intelligent women he speaks about are his real thoughts. The walls that the Urrasti place on their citizens are firmly entrenched in their minds as well as their spaceport.
Another instance of walls in The Dispossessed is Shevek’s discovery of the idea of prison in his childhood. The Life of Odo is his entry to the idea of people being locked away against their will and being forced to do things through the power of others (34). The walls of the prison and the locked door in the learning center were a lesson for the five boys. It was their first taste of imprisonment and having power over someone else. Shevek was uncomfortable and shaken by the feeling of power over Kadagv. The segment demonstrates how much free will is emphasized in Anarres. The very concept of taking someone else’s free will away from them is unheard of and abhorrent. Walls, as a whole, had no place in their society.

Posted on

Beyond the historical exploration into the ties between science fiction and the Cold War that this class brought was the deeper understanding into how authors develop their reality-bending settings. I touched upon it early with the idea of cognitive estrangement, but the defining text that developed my view of science fiction was Samuel L. Delany’s About 5,750 Words. The first of the main points in the essay is how texts are a constantly evolving image that is caused by every progressive word. The second is how science fiction allows for the images created by the text to be absolutely limitless. With this freedom, authors are able to explore the issues that are present in our reality today from different perspectives, or they can present us entirely new questions for humanity to deal with. Below are blog posts that go more in depth with Delany’s text.

Posted on

Beginnings

The first blog post I wrote and a very important one at that. Delany’s ideas about science fiction has guided me throughout the majority of the course and shaped my interpretations of the future readings of the class.

1: Delany

The most interesting point of Delany’s “About 5,750 Words” is the idea that a written work is an image that is constantly being reworked by every progressive word. From the first word in the novel, your mind is trying to piece together an image or world that the words fit into. Delany uses the example of “The red sun is high, the blue low” (7). He explains that the sentence begins in a somewhat realistic fashion with a red sun, but the second half introducing a second blue sun is what brings us right out of reality. The image of two neighboring suns in our sky breaks our rules and assumptions of how this worlds.  In science fiction, the writer is allowed a broader image to create because science fiction is a world of “has not happened,” in which the reader is forced to accept every possible reality that the author presents them.  This impossibility of two suns is allowed in science fiction because of this. Delany explains that there are three levels of subjunctivity: naturalistic, fantasy, and science fiction. Naturalistic fiction “must be made in accordance with what we know of the personally observable” (11). These works are supposed to be possible in our world. Fantasy is more lenient in its scope, however there are usually reasonable explanations for any deviations from our experiences. Science fiction is the least restrictive of all the levels. It moves beyond our experiences and “make[s] our corrective process in accord with what we know of the physically explainable universe” (12). This freedom allows authors to “produce the most violent leaps of imagery” (12). Science fiction is a type of writing that forces the reader to examine the images created by the author with a perspective beyond what we have experienced personally. Delany explains that in a science fiction work, we must consider if a ‘winged dog’ has forelegs or not, if the dog has working wings, if the rest of the body has modifications to support these wings, and more (12). Mysticism is a core part of great works of science fiction.
The advantage of Delany’s definition of science fiction is the raw freedom that it provides the author. The open mind that the reader is forced to have lets the author create outrageous worlds and realities that few other types of fiction can compare to. The very extremes of humanity can be explored, such as utopian and dystopian societies. These worlds can deal with how humanity deals with very different settings and technologies, or it could explore radically different human societies and behaviors. Through the use of this idea of imagery, authors can effectively create the feeling of cognitive estrangement that is core to most of the other readings.

Posted on

Each and Every Word

This blog post Bradley is an interesting examination of another section of Delany’s text. Instead of my focus on subjunctivity, Bradley instead talks about how individual words in science fiction develop the ideas of “speculative fiction.”

Question 1- Delany’s “About 5,750 Words” by Bradley Cisternino

At first, I was a little confused by Delany’s terminology, as he uses the term “Speculative Fiction,” however I believe that term is either synonymous with or encompasses science fiction. He outlines Speculative Fiction in a number of ways. The key points are (to me) as follows: Speculative Fiction deals with things that have not happened (with accompanying subcategories.) It is not the style or the content which makes SF, but the information itself and how it is presented as an image to the reader. Content as a concept is misunderstood: the words do not create content necessarily, it is the meaning of words when strung together which create the image and story for the reader. I found the following quote to be incredibly striking: “A sixty-thousand word novel is one picture corrected fifty-nine thousand, nine-hundred and ninety-nine times.” I consider this, together with the earlier point, to be Delany’s definition of Science/Speculative Fiction. He goes on to explain this point by constructing a sentence word-by-word, noting the large difference between the image of the sentence as each word is added. He also notes differences between styles and how they can entirely change the meaning/effect of a sentence when referencing the Gurney/Trench translations. Each is a translation of the same text and each sentence should theoretically be about the same thing. However, in practice, they appear entirely different and one is far more effective than the other.
The advantage of this approach (to me) is that it forces one to look both holistically and engage deeply with a given text simultaneously. While you still get the broad image and concepts of the story effectively, you can trace back individual images and points to specific individual WORDS rather than paragraphs or chapters. I can’t say I’m an avid SF reader, however I have read my fair share of it as well as other fiction types, and I’ve never even thought about or tried doing that. With Delany’s approach, it seems not only possible, but easy. Something I disagree with, though, is the narrowness of a story that Delany creates. Does a sixty-thousand word novel really have to be just one picture continuously updated? I can agree that each word has a significant contribution to a larger image, however I’m not sure it’s all the same image they’re contributing to. Instead, I think it would be better presented as a series of different images (or a collage, if you will) that are interconnected in sequence, each building off of the image before it. I think it may narrow the story down too much if it is constrained to a single individual image, as it may cut out or confuse other concepts or themes that are in the novel. This is especially important because most novels, including Science Fiction, will almost always have multiple themes, settings, and overarching concepts.

Posted on

Made Up Words

This blog post by Quinn Hughes focuses on something that Delany would later explain in his interview over his novel Trouble on Triton. The word “kippleization” is a neologism. Science Fiction uses these neologicisms are a core tool to create the images need for cognitive astrangement.

Sentence:
“It’s a universal
principle operating throughout the universe; the entire universe is moving toward a final state of total, absolute kippleization.”

In this sentence, an extremely important topic that pertains to the entire subject of the novel comes up. The entire story is based on a catastrophic post-war world regarding human civilization as we know it. While I’ve only read to chapter 13 at this point of writing this, I can assume that “World War Terminus” as the novel coins it, was a devastating nuclear war that can be evident by examples of “fallout” and “brain damage from the dust”. Furthermore, when focusing on the character of Isidore, we find someone who appears to be far worse off than Rick. Isidore who recently meets a girl named “Pris”, explains to her that “kipple” is useless objects, like junk mail or match folders after you use the last match or gum wrappers or yesterday’s homeopape. When nobody’s around, kipple reproduces itself. For instance, if you go to bed leaving any “kipple” around your apartment, when you wake up the next morning there’s twice as much of it. It always gets more and more”. I include this long quote sheerly for the reason that Kipple in essence, as the way that I interpret its meaning within the novel, is the inevitable doom of how unlivable planet earth as become. The “kipple” is essentially the means to an eventual end that you truly cannot control without human interference. Without such interaction with the “kipple”, the planet will continue to continue, and get worse and worse. It’s almost as if the “kipple” is a side effect of the nuclear fallout and destruction post “World War Terminus”. For further clarification regarding what “kippleization” truly is, we can also look at an excerpt that Rick states, saying that “the entire planet had begun to disintegrate into junk, and to keep the planet habitable for the remaining population the junk had to be hauled away occasionally . . . or, as Buster Friendly liked to declare, Earth would die under a layer – not of radioactive dust – but of “kipple”. Perhaps “kipple” is a more friendly word that suppresses that sheer grimness of the reality surrounding the planet?

Posted on

Focused Words

This blog post develops on the ideas of the first. I focus on the adjectives that the text uses to develop the images that Captain Richard himself sees. Instead of the words creating images in our mind only, they instead allow us insight into the images the characters have which in turn help us understand the characters and setting.

Passage pg 86-88
This passage is mostly about Captain Richard’s first impressions of Zapparoni. Just meeting the man face to face shows Richard the dichotomy of the public image of Zapparoni and the shrewd businessman that created his empire. Richard seems awed and stunned by Zapparoni’s ability to switch between personas. He can’t comprehend that the Zapparoni could be the “benign grandfather” that “amuse[d] all the children, great and small” and the leader of a massive company that designs automatons for every aspect of life. What makes this possible is the science fiction portion of the passage. Jünger sets it up with the quote “I cannot be in four places at once.” That is just a given limitation of human life. Richard believes that it is impossible for Zapparoni to be these two distinct persons, and he must have automatons to assist in creating his image. Richard believes that Zapparoni has found a way to “enter apparatuses and leave parts of ourself within them.” The use of words like ‘we’ and ‘ourself’ instead of ‘I’ and ‘yourself’ indicated that Richard thinks the multiple Zapparoni’s walking around are their own person. Perhaps Zapparoni has split his personalities for “a profitable extension.”
These automatons are also a sign of the progression of technology. Richard begins his military career with swords on horseback. Two or three wars later, wars are fought with tanks. A few years after that is the possibility of automatons replicating or being parts of Zapparoni’s personality. The fact that Richard even thinks that is possible reflects the mind-boggling speed technology has advanced during his lifetime.
The tone of the passage is complimentary and respectful of Zapparoni’s
accomplishments. He is constantly being described with words such as “skillful,” “great,” “connoisseur,” and “good.” Even when Richard questions Zapparoni’s identity, he can only see Zapparoni as a kind grandfather figure. This could be caused by the extensive PR work done to give Zapparoni such a positive image.
Jünger uses the phrase “Jupiter, Uranus, and Neptune were in powerful conjunction.” When I looked this up, this means that the planets were aligned closely when viewed. I think this metaphor could mean Richard thinks that all the right traits and events were in place for Zapparoni to grow his company, or it could mean Zapparoni assembled his team of inventors in harmony to produce his automatons.

Posted on

The reason Delany’s text was so influential for my understanding of the novels I read during the class was because of how it made me think about how the authors set up their settings and societies in their novels. The beginning of each novel became crucial for me to feel out how the author would challenge my perception of reality. The idea that each and every word contributes to the evolving image of the novel forces me to think about what the novel is trying to make me see. It makes me think about why the author chose to present me with these images, and it makes me think about how the estranged realities serve the messages and themes of the work. This finally brings us back to the introduction of the portfolio. A singular word and image has provided me a vast amount of ideas that the author could be working with. That image was my introduction to Mass Effect: Andromeda three years ago and it has pushed me to think of how it fits into my limited view of the world and how the image challenges me as well. It proves how central the use of imagery is to creating the cognitive estrangement in science fiction.  The human mind searches wildly for something familiar when presented to a new sentence or image. The reason science fiction is good at commenting on the real world is because it engages the reader into understanding the new rules of the world and how the author leverages the setting to their bidding.