James Blish’s A Case of Conscience

June 16, 2010

After a wonderful dinner at Mack and Sue Hassler’s house with my wife Yufang and our new friend Carter Kaplan, Mack lent me a copy of James Blish’s A Case of Conscience (1958). Mack knew that I had already presented a paper on James Cameron’s Avatar, and that I would present a revised version of that essay at the upcoming SFRA 2010 Conference in Carefree, AZ next week. He told me that Blish’s novel was related to Avatar either as inspiration or merely part of the cultural discursive currents that made Avatar possible today.

A Case of Conscience is about a group of four Earth men on the distant planet of Lithia. They are each scientists in various fields who are studying the planet to make a recommendation to the UN whether Lithia should be made a safe port for future travel there by humanity. What drives the novel is the group of people largely absent from the narrative–the native Lithians. The adult Lithians, who stand 12′ tall in reptilian bodies and have a highly developed culture, cater to their four Earth guests who carry on their deliberations without any input from the Lithians themselves. It is only the innocuous gift of Chtexa to Father Ramon Ruiz-Sanchez, the Jesuit biologist and narrator of the novel, of his not yet ‘born’ child Egtverchi that the Lithians are given a voice of sorts that is still unheard by the humans who play host. Ultimately, the humans are arrogant towards the Lithians and their culture. They cut down their “Message Tree” which enables their global network of navigation and communication, and through their experiments they destroy the entire planet after Egtverchi’s return. Most importantly, Ruiz, who submits the heretical belief aligned with Philip K. Dick’s cosmogony that the adversary or demiurge has creative abilities and that the seemingly perfect Lithian world and its people are a trap for humanity, cannot see that it is humanity that is at fault for their blindness to the possibilities in a vast cosmos for other points of view and other paradises that are not imbued with human-Christian dogmatic trappings.

Ruiz is an interesting character who tries to work out the unique case of conscience of Lithia. He and his other evaluators of Lithia are each blinded by his own cultural and educational restraints. These humans who are on Lithia for some time never get around to studying the Lithians themselves, and it is only at the end that Ruiz learns how the Lithians procreate and develop into adults. This realization comes to Ruiz as a hidden danger, and a fact that leads him to think of the Lithians as creations of the Adversary/Satan rather than souled creations of Almighty God. Their perfections, in Ruiz’s worldview and experience, can only be aberrations of the design that he believes was put into effect on Earth. Even at the end, as he is intoning the rites of exorcism, he cannot see that it is human beliefs that has colored what Lithia is and how humans see Lithia.

A Case of Conscience is a superb example of postcolonial science fiction. It starts off with the power of an Asmovian hard science fiction combined with the social. Lithians have a well developed society that the humans, even Ruiz who knows their language, does not actively work to engage. Even this seemingly interested character does not leave his plant specimens long enough to realize that the Lithians are far more interesting and important to any decision arrived at by the visiting human contingent than the other studies these humans are undertaking. Back on Earth, the social constraints of living underground, which comes about from the Cold War and mirroring Dick’s The Penultimate Truth, explodes when Chtexa’s child Egtverchi incites the human outsiders of society to revolt.

Egtverchi is an outsider to human culture, but he is still a product of human culture. The Lithians do carry a certain amount of memories and ingrained abilities in their DNA, but Egtverchi’s acculturation and learning, particularly his developmental years under observation and scientific examination, mold him into a being divorced from his own people who can pass judgement on humanity as excluding certain individuals from the decision making process and full enjoyment of modern life. However, Ruiz, Michelis, and the others cannot see this. They cannot see that Egtverchi is a creation of humanity and it is not his Lithian-ness that makes him capable of inciting unrest on Earth. They cannot see that humanity had passed judgement on Lithia without understanding the Lithians or even caring that the Lithians had a society and culture or that the Lithians have agency and sovereignty. Ruiz and the others, even the Asian female scientist Liu Meid, use their own discursive background to assert authority over Egtverchi and the Lithians.

A Case of Conscience is a powerfully moving novel that should be more widely read, not necessarily for its connection to Avatar, but as another science fiction work that challenges humanity to not be so bullheaded and domineering when it comes to excluded persons or groups. This novel would be a strong text for a postcolonialism course as well as other courses in which hegemony of various colors is challenged, critiqued, and questioned. It is a hard science fiction novel, which means that Blish does spend some time explaining his science. Nevertheless, his character development of Ruiz in particular carries the novel. Ruiz is depicted as a likable person who wants to do right, but he cannot see right outside of his situation as a Jesuit scientist. He requires his beliefs in Christianity to provide a basis for his logic. As such, his logic is human and male centric. The Lithians lose their appealing interest to him when he fits them into his domineering logic of Christian belief. For him, that belief cannot change, even allowing for his heresies, so the Lithians must be made to serve a particular preselected role within his belief system. I hope that you will read this novel, and in doing so, find yourself disheartened with human chauvinism. You may also find some relevant threads connecting the novel to America’s current conquests in Iraq and Afghanistan.

And a final question: How many science fictions have Jesuit or religious order protagonists? I’m thinking of Miller’s A Canticle for Leibowitz, Stephenson’s Anathem, and MacDonald’s Brazyl.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Stanislaw Lem’s “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans”

May 9, 2010

In Science Fiction Studies #5 (1975), Stanislaw Lem wrote an article, translated from the Polish by Robert Abernathy, describing, analyzing, and challenging the work of Philip K. Dick (up to that point). Titled “Philip K. Dick: A Visionary Among the Charlatans,” it is a rich essay that has much to say about Dick’s work and the work of the critic.

Lem says that Dick, like other science fiction authors, takes from the “warehouse which has long since become their common property,” or what Damien Broderick later theorized as the SF mega-text (57). One of the themes that Dick relies on is the catastrophe, but unlike most other science fiction authors, the catastrophes in Dick’s fiction occur for unascertainable reasons, i.e., the uncovered causes are deferred to the end. The common denominator in all of Dick’s fiction is a world beset by an unconstrained and monstrous entropy that devours matter and even time. Following his instincts, as Patricia Warrick would later say of Dick that he is understood intuitively, Lem says of Dick that he does not go in for rational explanations, but instead, confounds both the plot and the conventions of the science fiction genre itself. Of this, Lem demonstrates that genres have conventions, but those conventions were formed by previous breaking of convention to make the genre thus. Dick does this to science fiction, changing it to meet his own needs and creativity. Coupled with his genre breaking is the fact that Dick is a bricoleur, though this is not the word Lem uses, but it is very much what he is describing. Lem describes Dick’s work as something offered for sale at a “county fair,” having been made from a variety of concepts and ideas, but making the new creation solidly his own. Dick is not a futurologist, but rather representing the very idea of futureshock in his stories. Dick is not an extrapolator who changes one thing and leaves all the rest unscathed. He shows how civilization goes on, progress forward, but having been changed radically by the events presupposed in his stories. He acknowledges that history cannot be rewound. The fusion of the natural with the artificial, a point also raised by Warrick, Leo Marx, and Sharona Ben-Tov, means that there can be no more talk of a return to nature. In this, Dick does question progress, but not by chucking the concept. Instead, he complicates it, and again, confounds it. For Dick, our technological labyrinth prevents us from returning to nature–again, connections with Warrick, Marx, and Ben-Tov. Lem conjectures on this as something beyond the scope of Dick’s work, but nevertheless should be taken into account. He thinks about how the “irreversibility of history, leads Dick to the pessimistic conclusion that looking far into the future becomes such a fulfillment of dreams of power over matter as converts the ideal of progress into a monstrous caricature” (64). It is this carrying Dick’s ideas further in his criticism that Lem attempts to practice the very thing Dick practiced in his writing. And most importantly, in his short engagement of the novel Ubik, Lem, a good structuralist, avoids the author’s interpretation of the work, and instead considers how the thing ‘ubik’ and its combination of the old and philosophical with the modern and consumer culture resulted in such a powerful metaphor and not a futurological or technical artifact (66).

Two other things that I would like to leave with you from this essay is Lem’s idea about the relationship of the critic to a work–as defender rather than prosecutor–a way that I have tried to work in my own scholarship and reviews: “I think, however, that the critic should not be the prosecutor of a book but its defender, though one not allowed to lie: he may only present the work in the most favorable light” (60).

And I would like to quote at length, Lem’s concluding paragraph, in which he gives a honest, gracious, and thoughtful tribute to Dick’s writing. Lem says:

The writings of Philip Dick have deserved a better fate than that to which they were destined by their birthplace. If they are neither of uniform quality nor fully realized, still it is only by brute force that they can be jammed into that pulp of materials, destitute of intellectual value and original structure, which makes up SF. Its fans are attracted by the worst in Dick–the typical dash of American SF, reaching to the stars, and the headlong pace of action moving from one surprise to the next–but they hold it against him that, instead of unraveling puzzles, he leaves the reader at the end on the battlefield, enveloped in the aura of a mystery as grotesque as it is strange. Yet his bizarre blendings of hallucinogenic and palingenetic techniques have not won him many admirers outside the ghetto walls, since there readers are repelled by the shoddiness of the props he has adopted from the inventory of SF. Indeed, these writings sometimes fumble their attempts; but I remain after all under their spell, as it often happens at the sight of a lone imagination’s efforts to cope with a shattering superabundance of opportunities–efforts in which even a partial defeat can resemble a victory (66-67).

I am also under that spell and happily on the battlefield, a little the worse for wear, but with kit in hand. At least, I thought I was on a battlefield until I realized that I was sitting at a desk in front of a computer wildly typing away on this very blog. I suppose the battlefields, like ontologies, can change unexpectedly and for inexplicable reasons.

Image of Lem at the top of the post is from the Wikimedia Commons, details here.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Thank You Spike Jonze for I’m Here, a robot love story

April 1, 2010

When I was in Kindergarten, I convinced my classmates that I was in fact a robot. That was nearly 28 years ago, but I have never lost my love for robots and the secret desire to be an anthropomorphized machine. I suppose my interest in robots comes from the friendly droids in Star Wars or the robot helpers in Walt Disney’s Black Hole. However, I didn’t want to be a robot who played second fiddle to anyone. Instead of Han Solo commanding the Millennium Falcon, my robot alter-ego, aided by superior intelligence, skill, and strength, would commandeer the most badass light freighter in science fiction (sorry, Browncoats). With this short robotic-biographical sketch in mind, you can see why I enjoyed Spike Jonze’s latest short film, I’m Here. This film event (it’s an online, recreated matinee experience coupled with limited ‘seating’ each day), sponsored by Absolut, presents a fully realized world in which humans live side-by-side with robots, but the robots form a racialized and classed oppressed group. The robots work, but their rights are curtailed. They are routinely damaged and hurt by humans, but there does not seem to be any recourse. Some humans are friends with the robots, and another, the doctor at the end in particular, seems to help out when that help is needed most. The story is about Sheldon and Francesca meeting by serendipity, the former waiting for the bus, and the latter illegally driving a car and seeing him by the side of the road. Sheldon is friendly, but he comes up against the limitations of robot existence imposed by humanity in the minutiae of everyday life. He seems on the edge of hopefulness; he wants to connect with others, but the realities of this parallel world prevent it from happening. Francesca, on the other hand, is a free spirit (deus ex machina?) who silently challenges human oppression (dreaming by making up dreams, making art with human trash, or posting ‘i’m here’ stickers to merely let others know that she’s here). She has friends (human and robot), loves music (human made by The Lost Trees, a mashup of Aska Matsumiya and others, perhaps a reference to Shel Silverstein’s The Giving Tree, more could be said about Matsumiya’s theme song in the film, “There Are Many of Us”), and thinks/acts more like a young woman than a robot (but this movie reminds us to give up our preconceived notions about robots). But the story is beyond social issues and robots with emotions. I’m Here is overall a metaphor for being through sacrifice. Sheldon sacrifices for Francesca without forethought, but definitely by his own choice. He has no programming that makes him do the things that he does. He chooses make personal sacrifices, because he loves Francesca. Isn’t this the most that each of us can do for others, particularly those we love, whether they be humans, robots, or animals? I cannot think of any better message than this, and I would like to thank Mr. Jonze for making such a wonderfully fantastic film to playfully relay it to us cyborgs on the Internet.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Before and After: Witus van de Merwe and District 9

March 25, 2010

Yufang and I watched District 9 two weekends ago, but I have only just now found the time to write about it. First, I want to begin by saying how much I enjoyed District 9. I was captivated by the story of Witus van de Merwe as a quasi-corporate/governmental/military bureaucrat, who was given a monumental job that leads to his transformation into the alien Other. I found the interesting thing about the film not that Witus uncovers insight into the Other’s plight, or that he wants to ‘do the right thing’ (e.g., Jake Sully in Avatar). Instead, Witus is presented as a naive, simple fellow who gets pushed around by physically and politically more powerful men (women are largely absent from the film except for the documentary-style explanations by professionals and interviews with his wife). The film allows the viewer to see how much racial hatred has seeped into the seemingly unsophisticated Witus. Before his transformation into prawn begins, he goes about his work with joy, but unlike the joy his tormentor, Col. Koobus, in the film displays. Koobus relishes the opportunity to kill prawns, while Witus believes that what he does is for the greater good (e.g., keeping down the population by ‘aborting’ prawn eggs, and enforcing the move from District 9 to District 10 outside Johannesburg, even if it takes deception and the false belief that prawns aren’t as smart as humans, especially mid-level bureaucrats). Witus is blind to the South African world that he inhabits, and it is the viewer’s experience to see what the character cannot. In the picture above, you can see Witus at the beginning of the film on the left, and at the end of the film on the right. You would think that he would have gained some insight into being othered through this amazing transformation, and it could be argued that at the very end during his face-to-face confrontation with Koobus he does, but in large part, there is still the sneaking suspicion that Witus never develops as a character besides his superficial appearance. This is not to say that this is necessarily a bad thing–it could be a brilliant stroke of genius, because it makes the audience admit the obvious thing that Witus cannot–namely, reviling Others seems to be an almost inescapable human condition. Even in South Africa, the prawns cannot be accepted into human society. Israel cannot meet in the middle with Palestinians over East Jerusalem, and America is, I believe, as far from a post-racial reality as we ever have been. Racist hatred shifts and transforms, ghost-like, into new forms to meet a new perceived threat to the supposedly homogeneous norm. The prawns are themselves an excellent example of how an Othered group of individuals are not necessarily homogeneous either. Christopher Johnson’s escape with his son from District 9 with the mothership illustrates that while he may plan on returning to save the others, this is not necessarily a certainty. We don’t know what he’s really going to do, but I think we are left with the understanding that he will return to help the others since he’s the only character that unwaveringly keeps his word (Witus lies repeatedly, and it is only when Koobus is about to kill Christopher Johnson that he turns in the exo-suit to save him and then works to return him to his boy).

Other thoughts on the film: Witus isn’t acting out against racism or oppression of the prawns. When he dons the prawn battle exo-suit, it is evident from what he says to the UNM forces that he isn’t going to be pushed around any longer. His new prawn DNA and the powers that it affords him to use their technology, interestingly technology that the prawns don’t seem to use against the humans (much), allows him to act against the humans who would rather like to cut him into little pieces for study. He is scared and he wants to get away. While he runs, he wants to hurt the humans who would hurt him. In this action, Witus is close to understanding the oppressed, the desire to act out against the oppressor, the user, the controller. Witus was not that long ago on the other side of the human/prawn dichotomy, but it seems like he doesn’t quite make the leap, as I’ve said, until possibly at the very end of the film. The actions of the other prawns against Koobus may be the event that finally makes Witus understand–that, and his living as one of them, longing for his wife-angel while making flowers with trash.

I believe that Neill Blomkamp and Terri Tatchell wrote a very interesting and provocative story for District 9, and I believe that it can be a useful text in the classroom and in other venues where issues of race and cooperation are discussed. However, I would recommend you watch the special features including the interviews with the cast and crew. I take offense at Tatchell’s claim that the story was written without any political intention behind it. First, saying there are no politics behind District 9 is itself a political statement. Second, how can the director and co-writer, Blomkamp, say that it seemed interesting to place the film in post-apartheid South Africa without acknowledging the obvious parallel with racial hatred and oppression there? I realize that some movie-folk attempt to keep their work in the realm of ‘mere entertainment’, but it is ridiculous to make such claims about a film like District 9.

Read more about the film on Wikipedia here, and on the official film site here.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Further Musings on Avatar: The Na’vi Aren’t As Primitive As We May Think

March 9, 2010

Neytiri of the People. Image copyright 20th Century Fox.

Today, our good friend Masaya took Yufang and I out to lunch at Pufferbelly’s in downtown Kent. It was the first time that Yufang and I had been there, and it was certainly a wonderful treat.

While we were all talking about the Oscars and Avatar’s loss for Best Picture, Masaya mentioned a conversation about Avatar that had taken place in Kevin Floyd’s Marxism class. Another student in the class had talked about the economic imperialism presented in the film. I have already addressed this to some extent in my earlier post on Avatar, and it is certainly something that my friends and I have discussed ad infinitum. However, this got me to thinking about something that I had overlooked before.

Leo Marx, in his book The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, argues that America, following the engagement of the Enlightenment idea of progress, desires a return to the idyllic garden, an Edenic existence, the pastoral. However, our progress, precipitated by technological subjugation and domination of Nature, paradoxically moves us further away from our desired goal of a pastoral existence. And the more that we use technology, the more incapable we will be of reaching the idyllic pastoral.

The Na’vi in Avatar live a pastoral existence, at one with nature. As Swaralipi mentioned in her comment to my earlier post on Avatar, she “will never forgive Cameron for depicting the Na’vis so simplistically in their pristine pre-colonial state.” This pre-colonial state, apparently untouched in a visible way by the human imperialistic incursion, is one form of the pastoral existence described by Marx. The Na’vi are interconnected with their world and environment, and as a result, live with that system as one within a plurality of lifeforms without regret and without malice. Seemingly, they have done this without the need of technology. In fact, they appear to be primitive–the post-Darwinian notion that social groups pass through a series of stages on their forward march to modernity.

However, this outdated notion of social evolution is exactly what I want to argue against. The thing that I noticed during our talk today, which had been staring me in the face, was that the Na’vi are not primitive despite our attribution of primitiveness and backwardness on them. Instead, the Na’vi are much further advanced than we humans are with our starships, mechs, guns, and remotely controlled avatar technology. Perhaps the Na’vi developed a sense of modernity like we experience in our future human selves in the film (i.e., reflecting on the post-Darwinian social evolutionary scale they would be very old), or, more likely, the Na’vi developed in a much different way than humanity did on Pandora. Perhaps it was a co-evolution of lifeforms to integrate into the planetwide network governed by the goddess Eywa. Furthermore, the Na’vi are more connected to ‘technology,’ at least in the human sense, through the networking capability of the life on Pandora. They fuse with the planet, and they fuse with one another. Through their connection they are able to see, not just literally see the physicality of one another, into one another. It isn’t the brain-tunneling sequence when Jake enters his avatar body that is really exciting, it is instead the interfaces made throughout the film by the Na’vi–something that Jake learns to do in time on his path to appropriating the Na’vi myths in order to effect a anti-colonial revolution, as Swaralipi discussed in the previous post’s comments.

So, my early idea is that the Na’vi are the technological gurus that we wish we could be. They have attained what is unattainable for the Americans described in Marx’s book. The Na’vi have the best of both worlds–through the ability to connect to Eywa, they have an amazing ability to communicate, remember, and coexist–something that Cameron expertly provides a sort of rational explanation for through Grace’s scientific investigations. Paradoxically, most of the humans just can’t make the leap to understand what the Na’vi have, and what Ewya/Pandora (if we can say the two are the same or pointing to the same signification) represents. The Na’vi are where we, and the other Americans in the film (something I would call, perhaps, wishful thinking on the part of Cameron), would like to be, but we cannot apparently figure out that Unobtainium and the rapacious exploitation of Pandora are not where we want to be. The capitalist drive has run the Enlightenment train of progress off the tracks, and the hybrid Jake Sully (human/avatar) is able to bridge the divide and show a way to what the Na’vi and their world have already accomplished, whether it be from some earlier design in the distant history of the Na’vi or a natural evolution that has taken place in that particular environment. Whatever the case may be, it is sufficient to say that the Na’vi represent the return to the garden with a kind of technology, at least what we think of as a kind of technology–networked communication–plugging in, that supports their natural and cooperative existence. Instead of the Na’vi’s connecting ability moving them further away from the garden, it enables their integration into the garden.

And a concluding thought: Perhaps the Na’vi are one possible solution to what we think of as the Singularity, or they could be an anti-Singularity, a controlled and conscious response to the unknowable promises and perils made possible by unconstrained technological expansion.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Nay to the Naysayers: Avatar, Credit, and Intertextuality

March 8, 2010

Even now, months after its premier and its loss for Best Picture at the Oscars, there are still folks online who won’t stop nitpicking Avatar’s ‘sources.’ This in and of itself isn’t that big of a deal. It is important work to uncover the intertextual sources of works of art, including Avatar. It is a necessary and significant contribution to map out the network within which Avatar and other works are situated as well as consider the influences exerted by and on the work within the ever shifting lines of connection. However, what I take issue with is that so many folk frame Cameron’s work in terms of stealing and plagiarism. I have read it on listservs and Facebook, and Google helpfully suggested “Avatar steals plot.” Cameron has a gift, like many other gifted science fiction authors, to synthesize and pull together disparate ideas from culture and merge them into a cohesive work that has a wide audience appeal. Avatar is his latest foray into the science fiction field, and it is by far his most successful attempt at doing so.

Avatar includes themes of cultural imperialism, white man’s burden, and economic exploitation. It brings in ideas from other science fiction including waldo bodies, or remotely controlled organic bodies. He attempts to rationalize the Gaia hypothesis. The alien protagonists have accents, they seem stereotypically Native American-like (they wear feathers with an unknown origin–there was one point in the film I believe I saw a flock of birds escaping from a tree, but I do not know if they had what appear to be feathers), and they have a world consciousness/awareness. And yes, they are blue, as are many other fictional depictions of extraterrestrial life.

Simply put, Cameron knows how to dip into what Damien Broderick calls the mega-text of science fiction. The mega-text, an idea Broderick himself borrows from Christine Brooke-Rose, is a corpus of ideas, terms, and usages that authors within a particular genre evoke, use, repurpose, and disseminate through their works. The cool thing about the mega-text is that for those people who read widely within a given genre, they will eventually learn the mega-text and better understand its employment in a given text without the necessity of too much further explanation. Samuel R. Delany has also written on this subject. For example, my earlier use of the word waldo would, for many, tell them that this is some kind of remotely controlled technology that mirrors the body or its functions in some way. The word, originally used in this context by Heinlein, was appropriated by others to convey the same idea, because readers of science fiction already knew what the word meant from Heinlein’s usage. Furthermore, the popularity of Heinlein’s work and the linguistic concision of the word probably also played a part in its adoption into the shared science fiction mega-text.

Cameron’s Avatar shared in and gives back to this mega-text. Harlan Ellison aside, many authors and readers accept this circulation of ideas within science fiction. The mega-text could be said to be an ancillary or reductive idea from the bigger idea of intertextuality. This is the connections between works and history that has a long history, but has reached a high level of discussion in discussions of postmodernism.

As Linda Hutcheon points out in her book The Poetics of Postmodernism, intertextuality is something that has always been with us. I believe it is something tied to language and writing alike, because communication necessitates a common understanding, and one aspect of that understanding is the conveyance, repetition, and memory of stories and concepts that go beyond the singular signified/signifier relationship. Language is intertextual, and our stories carry forth this intertextuality, too. But what makes postmodern intertextuality different from earlier forms of intertextuality? Postmodern intertextuality is the ironic twist, the challenging of the earlier citation, the questioning of the carried-over idea.

Avatar is, I believe, a postmodern science fiction film in that it appropriates ideas and stories from other texts and situates them with an ironic turn. First, there is the irony of the needed element for space travel–Unobtainium. Interestingly, this is something that falls on deaf ears for many non-science fiction reading or watching friends of mine. However, I believe it is the subtle way in which Cameron introduces this to the audience that it works for the audience as a believable macguffin despite the name. So, the Unobtainium creates the framing irony for the entire film–the thing humanity wants, but ultimately cannot have.

A second irony is Jake’s Na’vi avatar body. As a paraplegic, he cannot use his legs, and the only way he can once again enjoy the sensation of walking is by the amazing technological intervention of the avatar technology. Despite the high cost of getting his legs working again in what he describes as a dire economy, he is lucky in a sense to get to take his twin brother’s place on the avatar project.

And a third irony, which I will conclude this post with, considers Poul Anderson’s formulation of avatar technology in “Call Me Joe.” The first hit in Google for “Avatar steals plot” is a reference to this story, which is about a crabby disabled man who explores the surface of Jupiter with an organically created and remotely controlled body. Over time, the human man’s brain atrophies while his ‘mind’ transfers into his body that is capable of living in the unfriendly for human environment of Jove. This does bear striking similarities with Jake Sully in Avatar, but there are ironic twists to this ‘going native’ story. The first is motivation. Anderson’s waldo driving character is fed-up with humanity and his disability. Jake Sully in Avatar has no ties to others, but he isn’t escapist like Anderson’s character. Instead, he, from the very beginning on Pandora, demonstrates an awareness and wonder at the things he sees and the sensations that he feels both in his human body and while inhabiting his Na’vi body. Jake seeks personal and spiritual fulfillment, something that Pandora and the Na’vi offer him and he fights to retain from his human masters. Jake doesn’t wish to escape his bounds, instead he seeks a meaning to his life through responsibility to a people undeserving of humanity’s exploitation of their planet. The irony for the audience is that Jake, of Clan Jarhead, is more than the stereotypical grunt (something explored in Cameron’s Aliens). Jake’s enjoyment of the process of becoming one of the people and his attraction to Neytiri causes him to loose sight of his original mission and the impending danger to the Na’vi and his life among them. He becomes part not only of an alien being in an alien environment (as Anderson’s character does), but also of a social network, a family, a people, an interconnected system of life that spans Pandora. This is the challenge that Cameron brings to what may be an inspirational story by Anderson–the difference between the lone warrior from the pulps into a contemporary growing awareness (or re-awareness) of the interconnectedness of all life and our social structures.

Cameron didn’t rip off Anderson or anyone else in developing his script for Avatar. There were important transformations to his mega-text derived ideas, and he challenged some of their earlier uses. He took good ideas that have been in circulation for awhile and turned them in significant ways and he did it in such a way that a lot of people were able to connect to his story in ways that people didn’t connect or even know about Anderson’s mid-century story.

So please, let’s move along to more important matters such as the cultural implications of Avatar. What does Avatar add to the mega-text, and what are its cultural implications? What are people walking away from the theaters with? Is it changing their attitudes to imperialism and exploitation, or is it instilling in them a desire to leave Earth for Pandora via Poul Anderson’s escapism?

Read more about Avatar on the official website here, wikipedia article on the film here, and the post-zero about Anderson’s possible influence on the film here.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Vernor Vinge’s “True Names”

February 18, 2010

I read Vernor Vinge’s “True Names” last night, and what a read it was! Published in 1981, the story prefigures the Internet and the “true names” of its operators hidden by the disembodied near-anonymity of the virtual space known as the “Other Plane.” Merry prankster hackers come up against the Frankenstein monster creation neglected and forgotten by its Federal government funded researchers in a global network. The capacities for mischief and mayhem are acted out as two of the pranksters/hackers/warlocks/wizards do computer-mediated, real world effective battle for control of real life via its computer and database dependence.

As I was reading the novella, I was struck by two things. First, it felt like I was reading a story about being in a game world like World of Warcraft or Everquest had those things been melded with the daily practices of Internet usage (which can be partly true with the various add-ons for WoW). Also, the way he reduces complex operations, such as switching carrier lines or performing an action to protect himself (like a firewall or virtual private network) or probing another operator (port scan, denial of service attack, etc.), into gestures and realistic actions (like flying and navigating as a bird = charting communication networks).

Second, it is hard to imagine that this story was written in 1981! Furthermore, it, looking back from my personal experiences in the computer age, proves much more prophetic than Neuromancer (though both were overly optimistic regarding human-computer interfaces). TRON, released in 1982, seems to mediate between the worlds of “True Names” and Neuromancer.

I’m left wondering why so much more scholarship is written on Neuromancer than “True Names.” Is it because “True Names” didn’t achieve the circulation that Neuromancer did, or is it because it was too early to attract the attention that Neuromancer (and the cyberpunk authors) did?

If you haven’t read “True Names,” I cannot adequately stress how badly you should read it without burning out your EEG leads. Go read it, now.

You can find a copy online here.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Vandana Singh’s The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories

October 17, 2009

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Professor Masood Raja lent me his signed copy of Vandana Singh’s The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet and Other Stories (2008) a few months ago. Mrs. Singh is an Indian science fiction and fantasy author, who also holds a PhD in theoretical particle physics. You may read some of her work and learn more about her on her official website here.

Due to my PhD reading lists and an enormous amount of other work, I have only just now got around to reading the short story for which the collection got its name, and I can only say, wow, it’s a really great story. “The Woman Who Thought She Was a Planet” is a whimsical answer to the more paranoid invasion stories of Philip K. Dick or the alarming nanotech transformations of Greg Bear. Her writing style reminds me of the fleshiness and texture found in the works of Ted Chiang and Ian McDonald. The “aliens” of this story are not from out there, but from the woman herself. She creates them, and they in turn care for the planet that gave them birth. Her creations, which she is trying to learn how to understand, and her changed behavior as a planet among human beings challenges the relationships of husband-wife/male-female while turning issues of class and face on their heads.

You should check out Mrs. Singh’s collection on the basis of this one story, and if you have the time, let me know what you think of the other stories.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts, Edited by Heather Masri

September 19, 2009

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I just got a copy of Heather Masri’s Science Fiction: Stories and Contexts from Bedford St. Martins as I build a science fiction course for (hopefully) future use. This is a really cool collection.

It is chocked full of fiction–short stories and excerpts–that are introduced by Masri. But that’s not the really slick feature. What I like about the collection is the thematic groups of stories paired with critical essays. For example, the first section on “Alien Encounters,” which includes stories by Wells, Weinbaum, Bradbury, Le Guin, Butler, Egan, and others, is paired with a selection from de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex, Jung’s The Shadow, and Fanon’s The Face of Blackness.  The “Utopias and Dystopias” section has A. E. van Vogt’s “The Weapon Shop,” Ellison’s “Repent, Harlequin! Said the Ticktockman,” Joanna Russ’ “When It Changed,” and more by Zamyatin, Knight, Varley, Ryman, and Hopkinson. With these terrific stories, there are Hannah Arendt’s Ideology and Terror: A Novel Form of Government, William H. Whyte Jr’s The Organization Man, and Jameson’s “Progress versus Utopia; or, Can We Imagine the Future?”.

Not everyone will agree with all of the selections, but I believe that this is a useful and well considered turnkey effort toward a theory centric science fiction course.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction

September 11, 2009

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I just received my copy of The Routledge Companion to Science Fiction today. After browsing through the entire volume, I’m amazed at how much amazing work is packed into this single volume by such a broad swath of the science fiction scholar community. I can see this anthology being useful in an SF survey course or as a companion for any scholar who wants a quick and thorough introduction to a particular field of study within SF scholarship.

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Posted by Jason Ellis

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