LITR 4632 Literature of the Future
scenario: off-planet; alien contact & near-contact: Ursula K. Le Guin, "Newton's Sleep" (FP, 311-338); "Men on the Moon" (VN 238-247); "Hinterlands" (BC 58-79).
instructor's questions
Multicultural or monocultural?
critical or celebratory?
What advantages to literary study of cultural change?
Gibson's style:
What gender stylings in sf / cyberpunk? (stereotypical background: sf for geeky white guys > implications for women's identities?)
What about Gibson's style makes literary sorts acknowledge him as a real writer?
(background: most sf writers are competent but indifferent to style, more interested in ideas, action)
Ursula K. Le Guin widely recognized among literary scholars as "greatest" sf writer. Why?
instructor's questions
What motives for leaving earth? What do we take with us?
"Newton's Sleep" introduces you to author Ursula K. Le Guin, b. 1929
Generally regarded as "greatest" science fiction writer in terms of literary reputation
Question: based on limited sample of 1 story, why does Le Guin have such a high reputation as a writer?
What qualities are distinguishable as outstanding, compelling?
Instructor's answers:
Everything seems to matter
Distinct characters, each with a life of their own
Range of "dynamics":
slow > fast
intimate > large-scale
All 3 stories involve humans leaving Earth (Thursday: aliens visiting earth)
Chocco 213 our home here on this planet
+ fiction: dialogue of voices, views esp. gendered
Ike as dominant voice
But
Susan
Esther
Anti-Semitic voice
People left behind
312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”
316 Susan: “I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.”
319 Susan: Her silence was almost hostile, and he resented it.
319 blames monitors
Susan: “He didn’t need to listen to the monitors.”
327 after your eye transplant . . . That would be stupid, Esther.
328 “What if I . . .don’t want to”
328 Susan. Her mother was silent.
328 “You’ll make the reasonable choice.”
334 Helena takes over leadership of Emergency Committee
334 hallucinations > ghosts
334 bison!
335 Susan: a vine growing by the front door
Women repressed in fundamentalist state: Reason
312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”
318 The discourse concerned power, and the teachers didn’t understand it; few women did.
321 telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls
Cryogenics
313 organfreezes, fishsticks
Breakdown of nation-state?
Maybe just a fictional theme, not necessarily desirable
World-wide human rights, then OK
If Texas doesn’t have Massachusetts, Texas still has slavery or at least segregation; if Massachusetts doesn’t have Texas, choked on taxes?
311 Government of the Atlantic Union
311 Atlantic Union > USA > Republic of California
313 resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government
317 Sonny was a drawling, smiling good ole boy from the CSA [Confederate?]
Apocalypse
311 millenarian cult group
317 Down there: life, liberty, and the pursuit > Four Horsemen
Ecological disaster > depopulation?
311 depopulated chemical wastelands of the San Joaquin Valley
312 Amazon Basin. Dunes and bald red plains
312-13 “It’s all dead. How come everybody isn’t up here?”
“Money.”
“weren’t willing to trust reason”
313 resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government
313 immense dust storm, deserts of Amazonia
Earth as woman / mother
312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”
315 monitors: a lien, a tie, an umbilicus. I wish we could cut it.
321 “did you hear about this burned woman . . . “
325 All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman
Survival of fittest
322 every single person must be fit
Race in future / science fiction + rich-poor gap
312 wore glasses, like some slum kid
318 geology, not ethnicity!
320 Susan: “Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed? Very elitist people. How could we be anything but? . . . Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century!” . . . You pay for safety.”
322 lack of African-ancestry colonists: closed community
322 every single person must be fit
322 After the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training
322 wonderful people, of course . . . through no fault of their own, disadvantaged from the start [irony of language]
324 those people that used to live where that was before the desert, right. Africa?
324 they’d been born in the Colony. They’d never lived outside.
Esther had. She remembered . . . cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, Saviora
324 Saviora: “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK, in arithmetic?”
325 All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman
325 when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat
328 the Hag? Sort of Asian, you know . . other people sitting at the table and they were black
332 like some old tape in anthro or something
337 Esther released, little black girl came with wife’s note
“New Urbanism”
314 The Roses lived in Vermont, faced on Vermont Common [cf. New Urbanism]
314 horizon projection
Escape / engage (escape Earth / live here)
311 Earth was not a viable option
311 liberation point
312 "How come everybody isn’t up here?”
316 turn us from clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future
316 What relevance is anything about Earth going to have to those people? They’ll be true spacedwellers
316 Susan: “I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.”
336 Susan: “If I don’t think about it in those words. If I just look at it . . . it makes sense. How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are?”
336 “Is surgery the answer to all your problems?”
338 boulder
338 “Now we can go down.”
Cf. Gated communities, homeschooling, private schooling
"Men on the Moon" (VN 238-247).
Originally in alternative futures section
How fit there?
Shares some reality with dominant culture, but sees it differently, reacts differently
Alt future as multicultural
Defamiliarizes technology, mission
Plus puts American space mission in historical continuum: "Space, the Final Frontier"; "New Frontier"
238 TV, Father’s Day, Sunday Mass
238 coat for 20 years
238 antenna (not cable)
238 snowing
239 two men struggling with each other. Wrestling
239 Apache Red. Chiseh tsah
239 wondered why they were fighting (x-virtual reality)
239 an object with smoke coming from it
240 didn’t know many words in Mericano
240 Faustin remembered that the evening before he had looked at the sky and seen that the moon was almost in the middle phase. . . . Are those men looking for something on the moon?
240 looking for knowledge
Faustin wondered if the men had run out of places to look for knowledge on the Earth
240 Rocks. Faustin laughed quietly
240-1 Indian school, some strange and funny things
241 The rocket was trembling and the voice was trembling.
241 voice from the TV wasn’t excited anymore . . . almost bored
242 TV, his daughter said. You watch it. You turn it on and you watch it.
Were you afraid this one-eye would be looking at you all the time? Amarosho laughed and gently patted the old man’s shoulder.
242 When he finished he studied the sky for a while.
242 That night, he dreamed.
Flintwing Boy was watching a Skquuyuh mahkina come down a hill.
243 It looks like a mahkina, but I’ve never seen one like it before. It must be some kind of Skquuyuh mahkina. [cf. Moon and America]
243 It walked over and through everything.
243 they faced east. [cf. Sun People?] Flintwing Boy said, We humble ourselves again. We look in your direction for guidance. We ask for your protection. We humble our poor bodies and spirits because only you are the power and the source and the knowledge.
244 without any rush
244 And now, Anaweh, you must go and tell everyone. Describe what you have seen. The people must talk among themselves and decide what it is about and what they will do.
244 went outside. The moon was past the midpoint
244 voice seemed to be separate from the face
245 He weighs less, the old man wondered, and there is no air except for the boxes on their backs. He looked at Amarosho but his grandson didn’t seem to be joking with him. [cf. Amarosho and Anaweh]
245 no life on the moon. Yet those men were trying to find knowledge on the moon. [i. e., no one to tell?]
245 He couldn’t figure out the mahkina. He wasn’t sure whether it could move and could cause fear. He didn’t want to ask his grandson that question.
246 Do they say why they need to know where everything began? Hasn’t anyone ever told them?
247 It’s a dream but it’s the truth, Faustin said. [cf. Revelation]
I believe you, Nana, his grandson said.
"Hinterlands" (BC 58-79)
58 dreaming of wet, dark streets in winter. Pain
58 bonephone implant, patched directly into the pain centers
58 we’ve got business
59 a confirmed meatshot: a returning ship with active medical telemetry, contents one (1) body, warm, psychological status as yet unconfirmed
59 clinical depression. One of the occupational hazards of being a surrogate
59 “Where are you getting all that dope?”
59 Toby Halpert’s Place in the Universe
Worker’s Paradise back at L-5
59-60 Tsiolkovsky 1 is fixed at the liberation point between Earth’s gravity and the moon’s, but need a lightsail to hold us here [cf. cyberfiddle story]
60 hanging here beside the thing—the point, the singularity—we call the Highway.
The French call it le metro, the subway, and the Russians call it the river. . . Call the Tovyevski Anomaly Coordinates if you don’t mind bringing Olga into it. Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of the Highway.
60 pictures of Saint Olga that Charmian had taped . . . Our Lady of the Highway
60 en route to Mars, solo; her role in the experiments could have been handled by a standard household timer.
61 easily the most photogenic cosmonaut of either gender
61 the Alyut was gone
61 a young physicist began to slam the side of his monitor, like an enraged pinball finalist protesting TILT.
61 elevator . . . up to Heaven looked like Hollywood’s best shot at a Bauhaus mummy case . . . .
62 Heaven . . . ripe Disney dream of homecoming
62 a constant stream of raw data
63 corporate logos
63 ritual of drugs in pockets
64 Olga, our first hitchhiker
64 She blipped back into our space time like some amateur’s atrocious special effect
64 She’d gone after the ship’s communications gear with her bare hands
65 right fist, something spun free . . . looked like a seashell
65 she came, in her martyrdom, to fill whole libraries with frozen aisles of precious relics . . . more than 2 million tissue slides
65 seashell. Exobiology . . . : one and 7/10 grams of highly organized biological information, definitely extraterrestrial
65 product of no known terrestrial biosphere . . . come from another star. Olga had either visited the place of its origin or come into contact, however distantly, with something that was, or had once been, capable of making the trip.
65 Major Grosz . .. ship vanished . . .234 days later he returned
66 committed suicide, Highway’s 2nd victim; elaborate recording gear blank
66 Soviet Union might avail itself of the best minds in Western psychiatry
66 dummy Highway boat . . . a prop, a set piece
67 Heaven runs on Greenwich Standard . . . Birds have a very hard time in the absence of true gravity
68 “We’re getting fragments from Hofmannstahl . . . ‘Shone Maschine,’ something . . . ‘Beautiful machine’ . . . “
68 a breath of Heaven’s air . . . like cool white wine
69 Texas accent
69 Chilean Jorge . . . I knew he was a live one, one of the 10%. Our DOA count runs at 20%. Suicide. 70% of the meatshots are automatic candidates for Wards: the diaper cases, mumblers, totally gone. Charmian and I are surrogates for that final 10%.
70 Heaven was built after a dead Frenchman returned with a 10-centimeter ring of magnetically coded steel locked in his cold hand, black parody of the lucky kid who wins the free ride on the merry-go-round. . . . that ring was the Rosetta stone for cancer. So now it’s cargo cult time for the human race. We can pick things up out there that we might not stumble across in research in a thousand years.
70 Charmian says that contact with ‘superior” civilizations is something you don’t wish on your worst enemy.
70 multinationals
71 “That’s your minute.” . . . more like 3 minutes
71 promise of pain . . . there each time
71 poem Hiro quotes, Teach us to care and not to care.
71 like intelligent houseflies wandering through an international airport
71 At the edge of the highway every human language unravels
71 but the highway governed by rules
72 Dozens of new schools of physics have sprung up in Saint Olga’s wake. . . . hear the paradigms shatter . . . lifework of some corporate think tank is reduced to the tersest historical footnote, and al in the time it takes your damaged traveler to mutter some fragment in the dark.
72 Smart flies stick with Black Box theory . . . what we put into the box and what we get back out of it . . . optimize this exchange
72 we aren’t the only flies who’ve found their way into an airport. We’ve collected artifacts from at least half a dozen wildly divergent cultures. “More hicks.”
73 when the gestalt clicks, Hiro and I meld into something else
73 he was right: something felt terribly wrong this time
74 imagined Charmian wading in the shallow water, bright drops beading on her thighs, long-legged girl in a fishpond in Heaven
74 the Fear found me, really found me, for the first time
74 vast, the very hollow of night, an emptiness cold and implacable. It was last words, deep space, every long goodbye in the history of our species.
75 long finger of Big Night . . . Olga knew it first, Saint Olga. She tried to hide us from it, clawing at her radio gear
75 He hit me with the pain switch . . . like a cattle prod . . . drove me through the Fear
75 almost homelike . . . .mold itself around an absence
76 a surgical manipulator is carefully programmed against suicides, but it can double as a robot dissector, preparing biologicals for storage.
She’d found a way to fool it. You usually can, with machines, given time. She’d had eight years.
77 Charmian brought a special kind of darkness . . . sealed in heavy foil. . . It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents’ car, on a rainy night when you’re five years old, warm and secure.
77 business as usual, really. A bad day in Heaven, but it’s never easy.
77-8 They talked about Leni’s diagrams and about her ballpoint sketches of molecular chains that shift on command. Molecules that can function as switches, logic elements, even a kind of wiring, built up in layers into a single very large molecule, a very small computer.
78 We aren’t the only hinterland tribe, the only ones looking for scraps.
78 Cling to this dark, warm and close . . . get high enough . . . hear the sea . . something we carry with us, no matter how far from home.
78 She holds the current record. She kept a man alive for two weeks
78 We both have the drive, though, that special need, that freak dynamic that lets us keep going back to Heaven. . . . Some people just aren’t taken, and nobody knows why. And you’ll never get a second chance.
78 feeling of profound rejection. But I’d wanted to go, wanted it so bad. Charmian, too.
79 Olga must have know, must have seen it all, somehow … . Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go. I never will
79 her white smile, forever.
"Newton's Sleep"
311 Government of the Atlantic Union
311 Leap Year Coup
311 Atlantic Union > USA > Republic of California
311 millenarian cult group
311 depopulated chemical wastelands of the San Joaquin Valley
311 dometown = prototype of Special Earth Satellite
311 new epidemic
311 Earth was not a viable option
311 liberation point
311 Ramirez’s hordes had overrun Bakersfield [reversal of USA invasion of mid-19c]
312 wore glasses, like some slum kid
312 women and children sentimental, “homesick”
312 wanted his children to see what Earth was and why they had left it
312 Amazon Basin. Dunes and bald red plains
312-13 “It’s all dead. How come everybody isn’t up here?”
“Money.”
“weren’t willing to trust reason”
313 resource exhaustion, population explosion, the breakdown of government
313 reason x luck, God, or easy fix
313 organfreezes, fishsticks
313 immense dust storm, deserts of Amazonia
313 “x-luck; x-chosen people; we chose.”
314 Susan: “And we sacrificed”
314 Ike’s mother: “Leave me to breathe smog, okay?”
314 Chicago Dome
314 rapidly mutating virus, 2 billion human deaths
Ø slowrad syndrome and famine
314 The Roses lived in Vermont, faced on Vermont Common [cf. New Urbanism]
314 horizon projection
315 monitors: a lien, a tie, an umbilicus. I wish we could cut it.
315 x-landscapes. Let it find its own aesthetic.
316 turn us from clinging to the past, free us toward actuality and the future
316 What relevance is anything about Earth going to have to those people? They’ll be true spacedwellers
316 Susan: “I guess I’m a little afraid of oversimplifying.”
316 Weather . . . that stupid, impossible unpredictability!
316-17 happy, absolutely happy . . . negative ions . . . rational happiness
317 Down there: life, liberty, and the pursuit > Four Horsemen
317 Sonny was a drawling, smiling good ole boy from the CSA [Confederate?]
318 The discourse concerned power, and the teachers didn’t understand it; few women did.
318 geology, not ethnicity!
319 Susan: Her silence was almost hostile, and he resented it.
319 blames monitors
Susan: “He didn’t need to listen to the monitors.”
320 Susan: “Ike, Spes people are very conventional, conservative people, hadn’t you noticed? Very elitist people. How could we be anything but? . . . Power hierarchy, division of labor by gender, Cartesian values, totally mid-twentieth century!” . . . You pay for safety.”
320 door of NE framehouse, but hissed open sideways
321 prochips
321 “did you hear about this burned woman . . . “
321 telling ghost stories, quoting hysterical little girls
321-22 projecting designs for second ship, rationally beautiful, form follows function
322 lack of African-ancestry colonists: closed community
322 every single person must be fit
322 After the breakdown of public schooling during the Refederation, blacks just didn’t get the training
322 wonderful people, of course . . . through no fault of their own, disadvantaged from the start [irony of language]
323 only one criterion: excellence
323 a working scientist, a breeding woman, a 200-IQ kid
323 a warm body sighed inside the darkness
324 those people that used to live where that was before the desert, right. Africa?
324 they’d been born in the Colony. They’d never lived outside.
Esther had. She remembered . . . cockroaches, rain, pollution alerts, Saviora
324 Saviora: “I just be your eyes, OK? And you be my brain, OK, in arithmetic?”
325 All right, so maybe this burned woman was a black woman
325 when all the faces in your whole world were soft and white and fat
325 English, the only language she would ever know. Roaches, rain, Spanish, all washed away
326 Her mother’s half-brother . . . my family!
Maybe the word did mean something
327 16 = age of reason
327 like he has to control everything or everything will be out of control
327 after your eye transplant . . . That would be stupid, Esther.
328 “What if I . . .don’t want to”
328 Susan. Her mother was silent.
328 “You’ll make the reasonable choice.”
328 the Hag? Sort of Asian, you know . . other people sitting at the table and they were black
329 mass hallucination and environmental deprivation
330 aching need to be alone . . . just to be alone, sitting at his Schoenfeldt screen, in the night, in peace.
331 Laxness: “our guilt.”
331 Larane: “nobody is hysterical. These people are here.”
332 like some old tape in anthro or something
332 had on animal skins, but they were actually kind of beautiful
332 they might be seeing us
332 people are getting closer
333 “To deny what I and the people with me see, that would be just as insane.”
333 goldfish . . . came out of the tap
334 Helena takes over leadership of Emergency Committee
334 hallucinations > ghosts
334 bison!
335 Susan: a vine growing by the front door
335 no earth in Spes
335 Noah: “It’s going backwards, Dad: people > animals > plants”
336 Susan: “If I don’t think about it in those words. If I just look at it . . . it makes sense. How did we, how could we have thought we could just leave? Who do we think we are?”
336 “Is surgery the answer to all your problems?”
337 Esther released, little black girl came with wife’s note
338 boulder
338 “Now we can go down.”