This quote from Jack London’s The Iron Heel deserves sharing:
“For never was there such a lover as Ernest Everhard” (62).
Socialists and porn stars have the best names.
Category: Science Fiction
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Decoding the Origins of the Tank and “The Land Ironclads”: Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton and H. G. Wells
I just sent off my presentation proposal for SLSA 2009, which as the theme “Decodings” and will be in Atlanta, Georgia in November. Since I’ll be teaching and reading for my PhD exams, I decided to dust off a publishable paper to shorten and present at the conference (assuming it’s accepted). In the meantime, I think I’m going to send this essay out to a journal over the Summer to see if they are interested in publishing it as it is or with minor revision. Here’s my abstract to SLSA:
Decoding the Origins of the Tank and “The Land Ironclads”: Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton and H. G. Wells
Jason W. Ellis
The first popular, and widely cited, fictional account of the military tank is H.G. Wells’ 1903 short story, “The Land Ironclads.” The recognized and widely circulated literary publication, the Strand Magazine published Wells’ short story in 1903–thirteen years before the British tank was unveiled to the world at Flers and Courcelette on 15 September 1916 during the First World War’s Battle of the Somme. However, Wells was not involved in the actual development of the tank, but many historians point to Major-General Sir Ernest Dunlop Swinton as the single person most responsible for convincing the British military to design and commit invaluable war time resources to its development and utilization in the Great War. Interestingly, these two persons–Wells and Swinton–developed a public debate in print and other media, which eventually led to Swinton’s libel suit against Wells, over who was most responsible for the invention of the tank. It is the purpose of this presentation to highlight their public debate, and uncover how the public reacted to these men’s claims. From this very public argument it will be possible to decode the meaning of such claims to invention, and the early history of Science Fiction, which was in part buttressed on imaginative futurology.
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Isaac Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” and Chris Columbus’ Bicentennial Man
Late last night, I finished revising my Bicentennial Man entry for Peter Wright’s The Critical Companion to Science Fiction Film Adaptations (to be published by Liverpool University Press). It was a real joy to dive back into Asimov’s work, because it was through his work that I precariously began my trip into SF scholarship with my presentation on dualism in robot narratives for Georgia Tech’s Monstrous Bodies Symposium.
Having just completed Professor Babacar M’Baye’s African-American Literature course, I was able to engage Asimov’s “The Bicentennial Man” with the history and stories of the African-American experience that were fresh on my mind. I have known for a long time that Asimov’s robots are an allegory for African-Americans, but it was on re-reading “The Bicentennial Man” that I realized how much Asimov’s earlier robot writing culminated in this later robot story, first published in 1976–two and three decades after his much loved early robot stories such as “Runaround” and the R. Daneel Olivaw/ Elijah Bailey detective stories. In fact, I found that “The Bicentennial Man” mirrors the basic structure of American slave narratives, which I go into more detail on in my entry for the collection on film adaptations.
With this rich source material, I was at first resistant to spoiling it by watching the abysmal film adaptation Bicentennial Man by Chris Columbus and starring Robin Williams. However, I discovered that for as bad as the film is, there are subtle gestures toward the spirit of the source material. Unfortunately, the film overall pulls the rug out from under the main character’s efforts and successes by erasing the anxiety and hardship Andrew encountered in Asimov’s original story. I don’t believe the audience understands Andrew’s predicament in the film in the same way that Asimov demonstrates Andrew’s precarious situation in the novelette. Nevertheless, the film does have some redemptive elements, which are more fully explored in my entry for the collection.
When I have more information about the publication of the critical companion, I will post it to dynamicsubspace.net.
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Terminator Salvation and Battlestar Galactica
I spent part of today catching up the last part of Battlestar Galactica Season 4, and I saw Terminator Salvation this evening with Y. I learned in BSG today that the Thirteenth Tribe were actually Cylons–skeletons, bodies, and all. In Terminator Salvation, Marcus Wright is constructed in the other direction than Terminator 3’s Terminatrix–Marcus is the fusion of man and machine. However, Marcus was once a murderer–the unconscionable, monstrous, the inhuman. Given his second chance, he becomes human, or at least what we may consider the human ideal–altruistic, helpful, and self-sacrificing. Thus, the machine makes the man more human. However, throughout Terminator Salvation and BSG, I’m reading a shift in the concern about the machinic appropriation of the human. In Star Trek: The Next Generation, the original Terminator and T2 films, and older SF, the fear was only about the surface, about the appearance of human mapped or stretched over a cold, metallic infrastructure. Now, it seems like the concern has more to do with organs and the organic. Where does this anxiety over our bodies and the tissues that make them work and function come from? Obviously, the fear of losing human-ness to the machine is rooted in the emergence and subsequent evolution of anxieties following the integration of humans into the great machine and system of the Industrial Revolution. Perhaps following the turn of the century into the 2000s, the organic (i.e., genetics) meshes with the machine (i.e., AI representing the networked/computerized landscape of the now). What this might mean for future SF and our engagement with organic and machinic technologies I do not know. However, I am eager to discover where this future might lead.
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Kant Quotes Virgil
As I’ve been reading Kant’s works related to cosmopolitanism, I’ve ran into a lot of Latin quotations. This is the one that I like the best:
Tu ne cede malis, sed contra audentior ito.
Do not yield to misfortunes, but go and face them more boldly.
Virgil, Aeneid 6.96 (qtd. in the collection of Immanuel Kant’s writing titled Toward Perpetual Peace and Other Writings on Politics, Peace, and History).
