Dynamic Subspace

Tag: Science Fiction

  • Vernor Vinge’s “True Names”

    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.

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

    Photo on 2009-10-17 at 15.18

    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.

  • Fandom, Otaku, and Home Guys in Taiwan

    Last week in Taipei, Taiwan, 朱學恒 (Xuei-Hen Ju) recently hosted a big get-together for fans and readers of his blog, 朱學恒的阿宅萬事通事務所 (Xuei-Hen Ju’s Home Guy’s Guide to Everything–I’m not sure about this translation–it could also mean “everything is good”) called 725阿宅反抗軍千人誓師大會 (July 25 Home Guy’s Resistance Army–1000s Show Your Commitment).

    You may be wondering why I’m writing about this event. You may also be wondering what the heck is a ‘home guy.’

    Xuei-Hen Ju is a Taiwanese blogger and translator of English language SF and fantasy novels including Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings, but he originally majored in electrical engineering. He is considered a ‘home guy’, originally because of his education, and later because of his passion for what we in the States would consider geekdom.

    Home guy (阿宅) is a term that was originally reserved for folks who majored in computer science in school, but now the term has an expanded meaning that encompasses someone who is shy, plays video games, and reads comic books (girls are a marginalized minority in this group but there are definitely some out there). Home guys are aligned with geekdom, fandom, otaku, and other marginal groups who are passionate about some aspect of pop culture, SF, fantasy, etc. Due to these cross cultural connections, I wanted to mention the Xuei-Hen Ju’s work and the home guy phenomenon to an English language audience.

    Xuei-Hen Ju uses his blog to promote his own kind of ‘homeness.’ In many ways, he encourages other home guys to break out of the reductionist and stereotypical boxes that have in the past confined and stifled social acceptance of home guys. Through his blog, books, and the 725 event, he promotes a socially aware and proactive sense of what it means to be a home guy.

    Like an otaku Tony Robbins, Xuei-Hen Ju inspires other home guys to follow their passion and tap into their enthusiasms, not as a cross to bear but as a marker for their sense of self. Also, he tells others that anyone, despite their educational background or personal condition, can achieve personal happiness–that it is up to each home guy to achieve what it is that he wants. He connects masculinity to his vision of the home guy by rallying others to maintain social justice (e.g., if you see someone abusing a dog, it is the home guy’s duty to call that person out) and do something with passion. The subtitle of his site is 熱情從來不是被找到的，而是奮戰努力才能獲得的！(Passion is never to be found, but gained by fighting!).

    His idea about what it means to be a home guy may be skewed toward men more so than women. During his posts, he does occasionally insert pictures of attractive girls during an otherwise non-girl related post just to pause or breakup the flow of what he may be talking about.

    However, he is conscious of respect for women when he threw the 725 event, because he warned the other home guys to not hit on girls in attendance (but they could do what they wanted to outside the event). If you click through to the 725 event post with pictures of the event, you will see a number of girls in the audience, and some of the Star Wars cosplayers were women, so there are home girls/gals, too.

    More about the 725 event: I definitely recommend you clicking here to read (if you know Chinese) and see the pictures of the extremely successful event. There was music, Star Wars cosplay and demonstrations, presentations, and video game play on the 400″ screen. There are men, women, and children in the audience. And, the audience beat out an earlier torrential rain storm that killed power to the adjacent movie theater and shopping mall. Folks from all over Taiwan converged on Taipei to go to the free event, and they were determined to go come hell or high water (literally).

    I liked the idea of the event being free, and I don’t exactly know how it was pulled off. Perhaps there was corporate sponsorship, or Xuei-Hen Ju used his own money to pay for the space and the setup. Directly, he didn’t get any money by hosting the home guy get-together, but he did sells some copies of his popular book, which he would personalize for attendees (and those not there–but by saying “loser, why didn’t you come out?!”). Also, there are the Home Guy Army t-shirts that are in some of the pictures. Oh, and the event itself wasn’t advertised anywhere else, except on Xuei-Hen Ju’s blog. Essentially, he told his blog following, home guy friends to “Come here on this particular day and let’s show everyone what we can do.”

    You should definitely check out Xuei-Hen Ju’s blog, and if you know Chinese, you should find out more about home guys and Taiwan fandom. From talking with Y (who was sweet to tell me about the 725 event, and who I asked to help me with the translating and descriptions), Taiwanese popular culture is an amalgamation of cultures from surrounding countries. It seems that much of the culture consumed in Taiwan comes from other places, but I suspect that there must be a local flavor to the way that other cultures are interpreted, consumed, and enjoyed by home guys and every other Taiwanese person. I think that more work should be done on SF fandom in Taiwan, because that country and its people are more unique than many due to their position as a cultural crossroads.

  • 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.

  • David Foster Wallace, Philip K. Dick, and Transgressive Parody

    Mack Hassler set with an interesting task this week after the unfortunate death of David Foster Wallace. He asked me to consider two questions:

    1) Is PKD like Wallace in respect to the concept of “transgressive parody,” which Patrick Novotny defines in his chapter to Hassler and Wilcox’s Political Science Fiction (1997) titled, “No Future!  Cyberpunk, Industrial Music, and the Aesthetics of Postmodern Disintegration,” as, “Parody in the postmodernist aesthetic is the transgression of aesthetic and representational norms” (100).

    2) How does PKD move beyond parody?

    In response to the first query, Philip K. Dick operates in a similar fashion to David Foster Wallace in terms of transgressive parody.  Both authors use their medium of choice, SF for Dick and the non-fiction essay for Wallace (unfortunately, I have not yet read his fiction including Infinite Jest), as the means for their transgressive parody.  Dick parodies the streamlined and perfect futures of Clarke and Asimov through the introduction of kibble, entropy, and the disintegration of reality–a theme that Novotny elaborates in his study of cyberpunk and postmodernism, and Dick obviously is a predecessor of the cyberpunk authors and enjoyed the potential of postmodern play.  On the other hand, Wallace apes the professional essay format and bends it to his own ends through the use of play (there’s that word again), such as through his hyper-footnoting (the best parts of many of his essays are in the footnotes, and his footnotes have footnotes), and his employment of catechresis, or taking the story or argument from one context and applying it elsewhere–much in the vein of Derrida.  Dick and Wallace parody the norms of the writing that they are doing, but they transgress those norms for their own ends rather than making a comic attack on the parodied norms.  The way to think about it is that they take the postmodern sensibility of “whatever” to heart.  They appropriate the norms of the fields in which they work and reshape them, not to make a direct satire of what’s come before, rather to create something new of their own design for their own creative endeavors.  Dick brings the entropic breakdown of the real world and the inner, psychic world to SF, which had largely ignored that important aspect of reality.  Wallace brings a truly reflective mind and sensibility of open curiosity to apparently mundane and boring writing assignments–he grasps those boring moments as a place to begin thinking about more important matters that are, on the surface, only tangentially connected.

    PKD moves beyond parody by using his works as a means of exploration of issues of self, identity, and subjectivity in an increasingly complex world.  On the surface, many of his works parody the cornerstones of the post-pulp era of SF.  For example, Ubik parodies aspects of SF such as space opera, but it does so only on the surface.  This isn’t Dick’s real target.  Instead, he uses the novel as a means to critique the nature of reality and the forces of entropy–two issues largely disregarded in SF until the New Wave.  Another example would be Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?  In that novel, Dick parts ways with Asimov and gives his androids a real soul and a sense of self-preservation.  However, he isn’t parodying Asimov’s R. Daneel Olivaw, but instead, he’s appropriating an element of the SF mega-text for his own purposes, which is to work through his own questions about reality, soul, and memory.