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LITR 4632: Literature of the Future  |
Final Exam Essays 2013 Sample answers
for Essay 2:
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Sera Perkins
What do you know now?
In my 2013 midterm, I
explained that science fiction authors use metaphors to make their material more
relatable to their readers. However, metaphors are not the only tools used to
explain alternate universes, alien contact, and high-tech virtual realities. It
was a major flaw in my paper, that only
metaphors could be used to make content relatable: “Literature of the future
uses metaphors to describe the unknown with the known to offer the reader
something he/she can understand to something he/she may know nothing about”
(Perkins, Midterm, Essay 2). Metaphors are not the only means of comparing;
analogies, allegories, allusions, and even extended metaphors can be used to
enhance science fiction literature. Metaphors describe two things without using
“like” or “as” to do it, which would be a simile or analogy. An extended
metaphor is a metaphor that continues on through the next passage or even
throughout the whole of the story. Allusions are a figure of speech that connect
something with a work of art that is obvious or popular and identifiable to the
audience. The authors of Parable of the
Sower, “Somebody up there likes me,” “Johnny Mnemonic,” “Burning Chrome,”
“The Onion and I,” “Hinterlands,” and “House of Bones” uses metaphors,
analogies, extended metaphors, and allusions to make their literature of the
future germane to readers who may not understand science fiction but can still
enjoy the scenario.
From my midterm, I
discussed the use of metaphors in Parable
of the Sower and I succeeded in explaining Butler’s use of metaphors to
describe her low-tech, post-apocalyptic universe in which most people would have
no way of fathoming themselves. As Lauren and her small band of walkers travel,
she compares the horde of people with her to “a broad river of people walking
west on the freeway” (Parable, 176). A freeway is not usually packed with
thousands of people walking, so to offer the reader a way to imagine the freeway
flooded with people she compares them to a river and Lauren and her friends are
caught in its current. Later when the three come across a commercial water
station, the author offers a brief history of people frequently getting robbed
at these places. As Lauren leaves the station she sees “a pair of two-legged
coyotes grab a bottle of water from a woman…” (Parable, 202). By calling the
robbers “coyotes” the reader images scavengers, greedy and primal and vicious
just like the predator they are equaled to. Comparing
a crowd to a river and robbers to coyotes, Butler offers methods for her readers
to understand what is going on without using “like” or “as” to do it. She paints
a picture using words that do not necessarily have much in common.
Continuing from my paper I
correctly explained that in “Somebody up there likes me,” the author uses
metaphors to depict the setting and the feelings he wished to instill in his
audience. In alternative universes, figures of speech manipulate past the
strange new universe and bring it back to something relevant to the reader.
“Somebody up there likes me” is a short story that hints at high-tech, but it’s
more like an alternative universe where people have come to care for computers
as if they were living beings. As Dante and Boyce go to Mickey’s place to pick
up a Revelation 2000, they step into his workshop and the first thing they see
is “mutilated corpses of computers from the past ten years lay in heaps around
the cylindrical room, most horribly crushed or burned or melted” (Somebody,
228). When described as the remains of a battlefield after the battle is over,
there is some sympathy that could be drawn up for the inanimate objects. The
author gives the scene of a tech-geek’s bedroom, taking computers apart just to
see how they work and putting them into the guts of another model. Words like
“corpses” gives the human quality the author depicts the whole universe
operating under, that computers are more like living beings. Metaphors are
special figures of speech in that they paint a picture fluidly. “Like” and “as”
mean that you know something is being
compared to something else but with metaphors the comparison flows together and
doesn’t separate the two things being compared but accepts that they are one and
the same.
One the new stories
“Johnny Mnemonic” use metaphors as well to make a high-tech cyberpunk universe
pertinent to readers. It might seem strange to think of combining organic life
with cold technology, but cyberpunk literature is all about bringing harmony and
sometimes entertaining chaos to the two. Molly Millions modified her body to
serve her purposes working in the underbelly of the gritty city. “Her fingers
were slender, tapered, very white against the polished burgundy nails. Ten
blades snicked straight out from their recesses beneath her nails, each one a
narrow, doubled-edged scalpel in pale blue steel” (Mnemonic, 3.5). The metaphor
is that the blades Molly had imbedded into her fingers and a common surgical
scalpel are quite similar. Tucked cleverly into the metaphor is an onomatopoeia;
the reader doesn’t just see the blade he/she can also
hear it as Molly shows them off.
Where I failed in my paper
was that I stuck with only the use of metaphors to connect the readers to the
authors’ universe. Analogies work just as well to make a high-tech, cyberpunk
story understandable to a reader that might be reading cyberpunk literature for
the first time. Analogies are alike to
similes in that they use an apparatus when comparing, but the purpose of an
analogy is to bring clarity and offer an explanation – making quite ideal to
relate the unknown with the known by explaining the unknown. In “Burning
Chrome,” the main character has a cybernetic arm that he tweaks and tampers with
throughout the story. During one scene he purposefully uses it to annoy the
business man he’s dealing with. “I let my arm clunk down on the table and
started the fingers drumming; the servos in the hand began whining like
overworked mosquitoes. I knew that the Finn really hated the sound” (Chrome,
21). Again there is an
onomatopoeia, “clunk,” as he sets his false arm on the table as the author
offers another sense besides sight to bring the strange to life. William Gibson
compares the annoying drumming of his arm on the table to that of “overworked
mosquitoes,” a description any reader could pick up and understand well enough
to feeling slightly sorry for the Finn to have to hear such a noise. When
explaining the methods of comparing material it isn’t
only metaphors that serve purpose
here.
Extended metaphors are
complex but entertaining in that they keep the use of comparing one thing to
another and sticking with that comparison through the next passage or throughout
the story. Readers, if they understand the metaphor the first time, can really
enjoy a story using extended metaphors because it is like they are a part of an
inside joke. In “The Onion and I,” the author makes several comparisons to the
way of life for people, inside and outside the virtual reality, and the life of
an onion. As the son and father work on making a virtual onion more like an
actual onion, the narrator goes to his mother for help “‘Remember’ she said.
‘Everything is layers. It’s like a chemical formula. Many things are made of
carbon, and hydrogen, and oxygen, the simplest building blocks’” (Onion, 19).
The layers of computer codes and virtual makeup create the false reality much
like layered computer codes create a video game or complex security system. The
author continues later in the story as he goes deeper into Cyberspace to learn
the secret of making a better Cyberonion, “…in a territory layered inside
Bidwell, layered below the Bidwell Workshop, and layered even inside the tools
they had given me” (Onion, 19). Instead of describing it as diving into a pool
of information, digging deeper into the pit of technology, the author says he is
peeling back layer after layer of Cyberspace until he comes in contact with the
programing code that controlled his helmet. The whole story is comparing and
contrasting virtual reality with the simple complexity of an actual onion, and
staying with this comparison instead of changing it up to add variety the reader
begins to familiarize Cyberspace with produce.
“Hinterlands” also uses
extended metaphors matching the expanse of space and a highway: “the singularity
we call the Highway” (1.16). Space is obviously not a highway, but the author
describes astronauts as travelers and names the first woman to come back from an
alien encounter as “Olga Tovyevski, Our Lady of Singularities, Patron Saint of
the Highway” (Hinterlands, 1.18).
By containing the vast expanse of space into something simple and
straightforward as a highway, the author tones down the overwhelming vastness
limiting our vision into just a section of space, or a cluster of stars like the
Milky Way that appears like a road made of glitter. The astronauts come into
contact with something but no one
knows what and “are popping back off the Highway dead, or else they come back
drooling, singing nursery rhymes” (Hinterlands, 6.2). The reader can imagine a
troubled hitchhiker, bumbling off the side of a road found by those that cruise
around looking for them. Even as an adamant reader in science fiction, I
appreciated the highway extended metaphor. Space is overwhelming and vast as it
goes on and on forever. But by calling it a highway I can visual just one part
of space that doesn’t go on in all directions but latitudinal in behavior only.
The spacecrafts could be coming from any angle but it is easier and slightly
less nerve-racking to think they travel on a flat surface either east or west.
In one’s mind the story is suddenly less overcoming which could make a story
about space beyond the comprehension of the everyday reader.
The final figure of speech
that offers means of making the unknown known is allusions. An allusion makes a
reference to a place, event, literary or art work, or myth either directly or by
implication. Commonly, the reference is to something that those reading the
material would pick up on quickly—another means of bringing readers in on an
inside joke. The author cleverly uses allusion in “House of Bones,” when he
names off the characters the narrator is interacting with. The men the narrator
relates with, his friends are Paul, B.J., and Marty. These are not their real
names as the narrator explains but they are the names the narrator gives them to
offer some sort of connection with a community he feels like an outsider in.
These are common names making these characters appear relatable to the
narrator and to the reader. But the chief is named Zeus. “Big burly man,
starting to run to fat a little. Mean-looking, just as you’d expect. Heavy black
beard streaked with gray and hard, glittering eyes that glow like rubies in a
face wrinkled and carved by windburn and time” (Bones, 85). Why doesn’t the
narrator name him Bob, or Frank or Richard, older and more refined names when
compared to B.J. or Marty? But he doesn’t; he calls the chieftain after a Greek
god, the ruler of all gods in fact.
The allusion is that Zeus exudes power and respect, appearing larger than life
to the narrator and thusly deserves a name that puts the man on a higher
pedestal. Without explaining all that and losing track of the point of the story
the author quickly names the chieftain after the king of gods and moves on,
expecting the reader to make the conclusion himself with the evidence provided.
There are many forms of
figure of speech to connect the unknown with the known, but by limiting myself
in my midterm to only metaphors I was hampering my paper and restraining
Literature itself which is a wonderful and colorful means of bringing people on
a journey to a new world or even a new universe. Metaphors, analogies,
allusions, and extended metaphors offer readers methods and tools to relate
outrageous and crazy concepts. There could be a future where there is a merge of
scalpel talons and delicate feminine fingers to survive the gritty criminal
world. Virtual realities are probable and we understand how they work, build
layer upon layer of each other. A post-apocalyptic exodus is conceivable as
throngs of people flow through the streams like a river. The trick is to make
the fantastical relatable to realistic material and by using a variety of
figures of speech, authors have the ability to make the journey exciting.
