Dynamic Subspace

Category: Science Fiction

  • 2012 Retrospective: My Big Year in Review

    2012 was a big year for me. I earned my PhD and I obtained my first job with that degree. I traveled for my research–first to California, then to Detroit,  and later to Germany. And, my wife, our cat, and I relocated from Ohio to Atlanta for my new job at Georgia Tech and we moved into my old house in Norcross, which had not sold during the past six years of graduate school.

    Unlike years past, I thought that it might be appropriate to jot down some of the milestones of 2012. Here are a few of those big things:

    • January 5-8: Y and I attended the MLA Convention for the first time and met up with a number of our friends and colleagues.
    • February: I spent two weeks in Riverside, California to read and research in the University of California, Riverside’s Eaton Collection in the Library’s Special Collections and Archives. This was an incredibly useful research trip that gave me the original research materials to complete my dissertation. Prior to leaving for my research trip–funded by the prestigious R. D. Mullen Fellowship–I had completed my dissertation’s theory chapter and compiled outlines for the other chapters.
    • April 2: I interviewed for the Marion L. Brittain Fellowship at my alma mater, Georgia Tech.
    • April 9: I delivered printed copies of my dissertation to my committee members. Since my trip to Riverside, I wrote approximately 68,000 words for a final word count of 81,948. Needless to say, I channeled the spirit of Philip K. Dick during this feverish time of hypergraphia. I could not have written this amount in such a short time had I not already created an efficient organization system for my research and deployed a number of digital humanities tools in my workflow. It was a terribly stressful time, because I drove myself relentlessly to complete it as quickly as possible. However, I would not have had it any other way.
    • April 19: I accepted an offer from Georgia Tech to join the rechristened School of Literature, Media, and Communication as a Brittain Fellow! My term of appointment is for three years.
    • May 15: I successfully defended my dissertation titled, “Brains, Minds, and Computers in Literary and Science Fiction Neuronarratives.” I came prepared with a suitcase of gear and donned with my only suit. During my opening statement, I showed off the ebook version of William Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy on a Powerbook 145.
    • June 4-15: I met my parents in Norcross to work on my house. We replaced the main water line, repaired the plumbing, installed a new dishwasher, worked on the house, and cleaned the yard. Prior to this trip, I had maintained a vegetarian lifestyle. During my second day of using a grubbing hoe, I decided that I needed to eat meat again.
    • June 28-July 1: I attended the SFRA Conference in Detroit. This was my second and final meeting as the organization’s vice president. I presented my paper, “Philip K. Dick as Pioneer of the Brain Revolution.”
    • July 10: Y and I said goodbye to our friends in Kent and drove straight through to our new home in Norcross.
    • August 11: While I was unable to attend the ceremony, I officially graduated from Kent State University with the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
    • August 13-17: I attended new hire orientation at Georgia Tech, or as my cohort and I came to know it: Brittain Fellow Boot Camp.
    • August 21: I began teaching at Georgia Tech. I had three sections of ENGL1101. I designed my classes around the theme of becoming better communicators and professionals through neuroscience.
    • September 1: I began building the Lego Death Star set.
    • September 10: My Dad called me early in the morning to tell me that my Granny Ellis had passed away during the night. I wrote about it here.
    • November 15-18: I attended the first international Philip K. Dick conference at UT-Dortmund in Dortmund, Germany. I delivered a heavily revised version of my SFRA 2012 paper, “Philip K. Dick as Pioneer of the Brain Revolution.” The conference was a fantastic experience. I promise to write more about this in a separate post. In the meantime, you can see my pictures from Germany here.
    • November 22: My parents spent the Thanksgiving holiday with us in Norcross.
    • December 16: I filed my students’ grades and completed my first semester teaching at my alma mater. Looking backward, it was a tough semester, but it was extremely rewarding. I will reflect and write about this more soon.
    • December 17: I completed building the Lego Death Star set.
    • December 25: My parents spent Christmas with Y and me. They arrived bearing many gifts, and they took us out for more surprises. I believe that we all had a really wonderful time!
    • December 26+: I am preparing my teaching and publication materials. I also have a few job applications to complete. I have been using my chain saw and weed eater with saw blade a lot. When the weather and wind permit, I get to burn a small bit of excessive yard waste that I have to do something with.
    • December 29: Y and I met our friend (and fellow Georgia Tech alumna) Smitha for pastries and tea at Sweet Hut. We had a great time catching up.
    • December 30: Now, I am writing this post.

  • Trying to Come to Terms with Disney’s Acquisition of Lucasfilm and Star Wars in About 1200 Words

    Earlier today, I heard about Disney’s move to acquire Lucasfilm and the Star Wars franchise from George Lucas for $4.05 billion. At first, I was incredulous. I thought that this was an Internet hoax born of Hurricane Sandy regurgitating seawater onto a New England data server unfortunately left behind by the first responders. There is a nice press release and a photo of Lucas holding a pen above a nondescript piece of paper to prove otherwise.

    Gauging from folks’ responses on the web, Facebook, and Twitter, there seems to be a lot of confusion about this news. I certainly feel it myself. Looking at it through the cold logic of capitalism, Lucas is in the movie making business. What he might have once claimed was art or a manifestation of myth-made-modern was in fact simply a way to make lots of money. To borrow from Jay and Silent Bob, Star Wars (and Indiana Jones–a property apparently not of significant worth in the big scheme of things to Disney) was George Lucas’ “motherfucking movie check.” Lucas made it big–maybe it was part talent, part strategy, and part luck–and now, he has the opportunity to cash out. His ‘art’ was a tremendous investment that he has now leveraged to a lucrative payday. His selling the Star Wars/Lucasfilm property to Disney is an obvious choice. Disney has long partnered with Lucasfilm on part rides and merchandising. Additionally, Disney has shifted its attention toward acquisition of popular cultural properties to supplement what little remains of their own creative impetus. Disney bought Pixar, Steve Jobs’ insanely creative 3D animation studio in 2006 for $7.4 billion. Then, Disney purchased Marvel Comics for around the same price as Lucasfilm in 2009. Of course Disney would want Lucasfilm to join its portfolio of cultural holdings. As a result, a substantial amount of American culture is now owned by a single mega-corporation, Disney.

    Looking at the situation from my Star Wars fanish eyes, I am uneasy about this transaction. Despite Lucas’ attempts at destroying his legacy through the investments he made in the culturally bankrupt Star Wars prequels and the failed continuation of the Indiana Jones series in the “Kingdom of the Crystal Skull,” I have always identified him as being the embodiment of the Star Wars universe. Of course, he originated the idea and benevolently maintained despotic control over that idea (compared to Paramount and Star Trek–Lucas is a saint in permitting and occasionally encouraging fan films and fandom in general). I suppose it always seemed in my mind that the author/text|Lucas/Star Wars were signs signifying the same thing. They were shared significations within my mind about what ‘Star Wars’ was and represented. For example, it seems in retrospect that nearly every pre-prequels Star Wars conversation (certainly EVERY post-prequel conversation operates in this way) eventually would come back around to Lucas’ vision, intentions, mistakes, successes, etc. as it related to the narrative space and its possibilities within the imaginations of me and my friends. In a similar way to Steve Jobs and Apple, it doesn’t feel right to separate the author from the work. Certainly, I can imagine the Star Wars universe–its stories, technologies, and cultural context–without invoking the authorial ghost of Lucas. However, the authorial ghost seems ever near and inseparable from the thing (Stars Wars) itself.

    I can rationally think of how many billions of dollars George Lucas made from the Star Wars films among other things. I can rationally think about the exploited labor and anti-environmental effects of the merchandising that forms feedback cycle of the cultural consumption of ideas and things. I understand that Lucas, through his life, success, and business decisions, has enacted a real-life version of THX 1138. Despite all of these things, I cannot divorce myself from the love that I have of the Star Wars universe, its characters, its technologies (especially the Millennium Falcon–something that I imagine flying far more often than I might have any right to), and its wonder. Perhaps its this love for Star Wars that via the signification system transfers to Lucas in some weird way. He might have mucked up the possible narrative that I imagined and that my friends imagined for the Star Wars prequels, but my delight in Star Wars fills me with positive emotions that inform and shape my dichotomous respect and disdain for Lucas. While he and his vision do not define everything in my mind about Star Wars, his work and choices endowed me with an imaginative appreciation for Star Wars and a curiosity that far exceeds the bounds of “a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” While I cannot give Lucas all the credit, I can safely say that Star Wars played a significant role in my being where and who I am today.

    Lucas made a significant choice today to sell Lucasfilm to Disney. Since Lucas is so interwoven into the very idea of Star Wars and its potential fulfilment in culture, I am left feeling uneasy about the transfer of his intellectual property to Disney, the cultural aggregator, shaper, and producer. If we want to think of this as one artist giving something to be reshaped and retold by another artist, then Lucas has given his property to Walt Disney’s zombie. The Disney of today is a shuffling undead shell of what it once was (and here I am not attempting to wax nostalgically as I did with Star Wars–Disney and his team of storytellers did fantastic things for culture and education through the era just before I was born–what followed after has by-and-large little to be desired). The Disney company today seeks the brains of other culture producers–Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm–on which it feeds and continues its ravenous lurching. I suppose it is this image on the edge of consciousness that disturbs me the most. I am saddened that Lucas gave up control of his property to producers and committees–a fate that I am not sure is any worse than his own revisionist impulse in the prequels. I admit that I am simply being romantic, but I believe that this romantic impulse for the bond between author and text represents something as deep perhaps as the supposed mythical qualities of the stories Lucas told us about the Skywalker clan.

    What does all of this mean for the future of Star Wars? Disney certainly didn’t wait for the ink to sign on the papers before they announced that a new Star Wars film would be released by 2015. Apparently, the acquisition included treatments that Lucas had been working on, but these will be re-developed by Disney. In a related note, I heard from today’s conference call that Disney CEO Iger said that Disney would focus on mobile gaming instead of big box/console games based on the Star Wars universe. This could have other repurcussions for the cultural impact and interactive engagement with its continuing stories. On this point, I am thinking about how these media are now interdependent and connected for conveying narrative and solidifying the cultural memory of those narratives. It would seem that Disney has hit the ground running with Star Wars, and I expect–for good or ill–a great many new things from Lucas’ universe. Unfortunately, he will not have any control over its further expansion, and I am doubtful that I will be as nearly as eager to be a participant in its expansion under the irksome visage of the Mouse.

  • My Georgia Tech ENGL 1102 Class Description and Reading List for Spring 2012, “The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age Explored Through Science Fiction”

    Martin Widmer’s “Tomb [V’]” (2007).
    [UPDATE: I volunteered to teach three sections of ENGL1101 instead of three sections of ENGL1102 when the school made the request. This gives me an opportunity to immediately revise my ENGL1101 syllabus and try new things with my students!] In Spring 2013, I will be teaching three sections of ENGL 1102 (sections: P1, E, and M). For these sections, I will guide students toward completing and exceeding the desired educational outcomes with a class structured on the them, “The Promise and Peril of the Digital Age Explored Through Science Fiction.”

    Building on the rhetorical strategies and WOVEN modalities introduced in ENGL1101, this class further develops students’ communicative and critical thinking abilities by guiding students through challenging research-based projects. The research focus of this class is on the promise and peril of the contemporary digital age. Science fiction is a uniquely suited genre for considering the digital age, because it is the only literature that is firmly situated at the intersection of science, technology, and culture. Furthermore, science fiction is a literature about the present in which it is written rather than its imagined future. With this in mind, recent science fictions comment on our present and our near future in simultaneously promising and troubling ways. Drawing on science fiction across multiple media (including novels, films, and video games) and using newly acquired tools of critical theory from cultural studies and the study of science and technology, students will develop a number of research-based projects individually and collaboratively that explore how science fiction informs and critiques the on-going digital age. All of these projects will culminate in or include a digital component (e.g., blog posts, Twitter essays, Storify curations, online videos, and Omeka archives). Also, students will learn how to use digital humanities technologies to inform their thinking and research.

    Reading List:

    Oryx and Crake, Margaret Atwood, Anchor, 2004, 978-0385721677

    Ready Player One, Ernest Cline, Broadway, 2012, 978-0307887443

    Neuromancer, William Gibson, Ace, 2000, 978-0441007462

    River of Gods, Ian McDonald, Pyr, 2007, 978-1591025955

    Rainbows End, Vernor Vinge, Tor, 2007, 978-0812536362

    Online reading:

    Little Brother, Cory Doctorow [available here]

    Game List:

    CYPHER: Cyberpunk Text Adventure [available here]

    I am still developing the class syllabus and assignments. When these are completed, I will post copies in a subsequent post.

  • Godspeed, Gary Stephen Thompson (1945-2012)

    Scanning from left to right in the adjacent picture from Christmastime 2008, you will see Bob Rainey, Mark Warbington, Paul Talamas, Gary Thompson, and me. This was the last time that I saw my friend Gary jovial and excited with life.

    On my way home to visit my family that year, I stopped through Atlanta to see the good friends that I made during my Mindspring and Georgia Tech undergraduate days. The five of us in the picture often met up at Mark’s house to tinker with computers (and technology in general), watch Red Green episodes (among many other things), and play Battlefield 1942 (with the Desert Combat patch).

    Since I had left Atlanta for graduate school at the University of Liverpool and Kent State University, I had not stayed in touch as much as I would have liked to. However, news has a strange way of finding its way to you through unexpected paths or random encounters. In Gary’s case, I knew that he continued with his annual participation in the Stone Mountain Highland Games, worked with another group of friends building an experimental kit airplane, and recently retired from General Electric where he was an highly experienced machinist.

    When I received a postdoc offer from Georgia Tech, I was excited about the prospect of catching up with my friends and hanging out again like we used to do at Mark’s. I realized that time and life had continued during the six years I was absent from Atlanta, but I did not expect the terrible event that coincided with my moving back to the area.

    (more…)

  • Back from Two Week Trip to UC-Riverside and the Eaton Science Fiction Collection

    From February 5 to 18, I researched in the Eaton Science Fiction Fiction and Fantasy Collection the University of California, Riverside‘s Tomas Rivera Library. As I mentioned last year, I was very appreciative to have won an R. D. Mullen Fellowship to fund my travel and accommodations for the research-oriented trip.

    Professor Rob Latham administers the fellowship and the science fiction work at UC-Riverside, which includes an annual SF symposium and the biannual Eaton Conference co-hosted with the library’s special collections. He is a gracious host, and I enjoyed our conversations while I was in Riverside.

    UC-Riverside is building a strong constellation in science fiction studies. Besides Latham at the helm, the university recently hired the science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson into the creative writing program. Now, the university is conducting a new hire for a science fiction media studies person (I applied, but alas, I didn’t make the short list). I suspect more the university will continue to grow in this direction–at least, I hope that it does, because it can grow the SF program around the significant holdings of the library.

    The Eaton Collection is located on the fourth floor of the Thomas Rivera Library and its hours of operation are from 9:00am to 5:00pm Monday through Friday. I planned my trip so that I would have two full weeks to work in the special collections to conduct research for my dissertation chapter on Philip K. Dick, his 2-3-74 visions, and his health problems. In the event that I found as much material related to Dick’s work as possible, I also planned a contengency set of materials on the following chapter on William Gibson’s work.

    I am very happy to report that I achieved both goals and went a bit beyond my original set of documents thanks to cross referenced connections as well as new leads produced by my readings. Additionally, Reference Library Gwido Zlatkes turned me onto the two boxes of Philip K. Dick archival materials, which included some very cool autographed materials along with a full run of the Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter and other rare magazines and fanzines (including the November 6, 1975 Rolling Stone article).

    I began my research by reading the full thirty issue run of The Philip K. Dick Society Newsletter, which includes a double issue (#9/10) on cassette tape—one side being an interview conducted by Paul Williams with Dick and the other side Dick recording writing notes. The experience of fast-forwarding Dick’s posthumous canonization yielded more primary sources than I could have hoped for in letters and interviews. Interviews with Dick’s friends and former spouses also provide important corroboration and clarification of Dick’s sometimes-unreliable personal narratives.

    References in the Newsletter, combined with other research done before my visit to Riverside, led me to other interviews, notes, and reviews in fanzines including: The Alien Critic (later Science Fiction Review), Algol (later Starship), and The Patchin Review, and magazines including: Locus, Vertex, Science Fiction Eye, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and Analog.

    After exhausting my leads in the collection related to Dick’s later fictions and personal life, I spent the last three days collecting research for the William Gibson chapter of my dissertation. I focused on the Locus reporting of Gibson’s success following the publication of Neuromancer in 1984 and later interviews with the writer in 1991 and 2003. I was pleased to find a fanzine co-edited by Gibson titled Genre Plat, but Gibson’s essay, “Blues for Horselover Fat” in the fanzine Wing Window provides the strongest evidence that I can use to bridge my chapters on Dick and Gibson.

    To fill out the time that I was in the library, I also found photographs and reports of past Science Fiction Research Association meetings, including the one hosted at Kent State University in the mid-1980s where Samuel R. Delany was honored with the Pilgrim Award.

    My UC-Riverside visit was punctuated with a weekend visit to see Patrick and Sharon Sharp in Los Angeles. They played hosts and guides to my first visit to the strange world of LA–a place that actually felt like another country to me. We visited the Little Tokyo area for lunch and snacks and then strolled through the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles photography exhibition (Weegee was doing amazing stuff with photography!). We also enjoyed the sunset from the top of the Westin Bonaventure Hotel (a fascinating hotel with interesting designs and spaces, but is it really postmodern? I think that a better case could be made for Riverside’s Mission Inn in that respect). I also got to meet their very friendly cat, Tonks.

    I believe that the research trip (and my first trip to California for that matter) was a smashing success! I have many materials that I have notes on and many other materials that I need to review again. I also got to reconnect with friends and colleagues there: Pawel Frelik, Mark Biswas, and William Sun.