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LITR 4368 Literature of the Future  |
Sample answers
for Essay 1:
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Victoria Webb
7
July 2015
A Cyberonion is Not a Real Onion:
High Tech Versus Low Tech
Characteristics in Narratives of the Future
More often than not when we think of the future, we think of science
fiction films like The Matrix or
Terminator, which typically depict
dystopic high-tech worlds at war, trench coat wearing protagonists, and
human-hating machines. However, in narratives of the future, it is only
occasional that we see a story that is fully high-tech or fully low-tech; while
there are significant differences between high-tech and low-tech, there are
occasions of intermingling of the genres. When thinking about narratives of the
future, one must understand that these stories are usually taking place either
during or after a great disaster or a world-altering change. This means that the
world the audience dives into, is not in the shape it had always been. For
high-tech dystopian stories, the reader must understand that the world was, at
one point, low-tech. If the story is essentially low-tech, more often than not,
there are elements that hint to a rise in technology or it is the characters who
exhibit the low-tech qualities while living in a
high-tech
world. What is important to keep in mind is that there are elements to either
genre that one may find in different narratives of the future, and it is
essential to understand how to identify them and understand what it means in
regards to the story as a whole.
One of the first elements of high-tech narratives that may be noticed is
the way the characters, particularly women, behave, how they are presented, and
their overall significance to the story. Women, in high-tech narratives of the
future, are complex and may take on multiple roles in the stories. According to
Dr. White’s page “High Tech/Virtual Reality” he explains that the roles taken on
by women in high-tech or cyberpunk narratives, are typically: icons or
celebrities, warrior-chicks, or maternal figures, who “funds or backs up the
protagonists’ operations” (White, 2015). In one of the first high-tech/cyberpunk
stories read in class, Johnny Mnemonic,
we are presented with the male protagonist and his female counterpart. Molly
Millions, the warrior-chick we are introduced to, is sometimes referred to as
“razorgirl” (“Molly Millions”) due to her retractable blades underneath her
fingernails; Molly is also noted to have mirrored lenses that cover her eyes,
which enhance her vision. Further research reveals that Molly was once a
prostitute, which I believe plays a significant part in her present role as the
warrior-chick/body guard (“Molly Millions”). The high contrast between the
prostitute and the warrior emphasizes the great strength that Molly has gained,
and depicts female empowerment in a world that has unclear ethical boundaries.
According to the page “High Tech/Virtual Reality”, in a high-tech setting, there
is a strong sense of individual survival. Dr. White writes that in some cases,
“beauty survives”; the emphasis of beauty in a post-apocalyptic world on a
permanent decline, is perhaps why the women in cyberpunk narratives are either
fighters or they are being objectified.
It
can be noted that the women in Gibson’s work,
Johnny Mnemonic and
Burning Chrome, typically will fall
under the categories of either “warrior” or “icon”; once again playing on the
“fight or be used” theme that I have seen while reading these short stories. In
Burning Chrome, Rikki, is seen as the
icon, or at the very least, an icon-wannabe. She is a beautiful young woman that
is used by Bobby for luck; however, Rikki has her own dreams of gaining “IKON”
eyes and becoming celebrity. Jack, the narrator of
Burning Chrome, explains that Bobby
“set [Rikki] up as a symbol for
everything he wanted and couldn’t have”; this reiterates Rikki’s purpose in the
story as an icon figure and the beauty being used. Later in the story she is
seen in the House of Blue Lights, a brothel, using her body to save up enough
money for her eyes. According to Jack, in the House of Blue Lights, the women
are unconscious in REM sleep while “working”. This image of unconscious women
being “used” can also be seen as form of “icon worship”; the women aren’t
exactly there while the act is taking place, and it is a false sense of
companionship, similarly to the false companionship that Rikki has with her
celebrity icon Tally Isham.
Stepping back from Gibson’s world, we can evaluate the female
protagonists of Audrey Ferber’s short story
Drapes and Folds. The narrator is an
old woman, at almost 100 years old, she has lived through a world which has
undergone epidemics of illnesses, government regulations, and a loss of true
biological humans. Pearl, the narrator, is a mother and a grandmother, and from
a high-tech standpoint, she represents the maternal figure. She is, in her own
way, backing up an operation that is happening behind the backs of the ones in
charge. In Drapes and Folds, certain
cloths and colors have become illegal and she harbors different cloths that her
and her friend Diana spend their time feeling and admiring while they can; her
and her friend also spend time enjoying wall-mounted flavor nipples, “TasteLik”.
The main characters in Drapes and Folds
are inherently low-tech. According to the page “Low-tech/Actual Reality”,
the female characters within a low-tech world are typically sensitive to “family
relations or their loss”. Pearl displays an obvious sadness and an overt
distaste for the world and what has become of it. When Diana tells her that it
doesn’t seem worth “throwing [Pearl’s] life away over a few scraps of cloth”,
Pearl replies angrily that “cloth is [her] life” and asks what happened to
Diana, because she use to be so angry (about the law) (127). Pearl clearly
hasn’t let go of her anger for her loss. She also expresses that once the
“NewSociety” became more sterile she had desired to have her own biological
child; she also expresses that she wished to have her part-roboid part-human
grandchild call her “gran”, perhaps to retain the human-family qualities that
have long since died out.
These
characteristics displayed in Drapes and
Folds correlate with low-tech’s typical characterization and literary appeal
that leans towards the family aspect being maintained during a future that
appears to be post-apocalyptic. In Thomas Fox Averill’s
The Onion and I, we are presented
with a story that appears to be primarily high-tech, but displays many literary
qualities of low-tech narratives. According to “Low Tech/Actual Reality”,
literary appeals of low-tech narratives include “unchanging lives detached from
natural environment”, “voluntary simplicity”, and “re-engagement with actual
reality”, just to name a few appeals. While the setting of
The Onion and I, would seem to be the
virtual world that the narrator appears to be living in, that is not necessarily
the primary focus of the story. Within this world that has gone virtual, the
narrator’s father finds solace in the real world. He reiterates to his son that
cyberspace isn’t the real world, and that the real world will “always be
[there]” (21). The father is low tech due to his sensitivity towards the family
setting and the loss of his real world. He also exhibits a strong desire to
maintain the family unit, which is the reason he agrees to go into cyberspace
with his wife, rather than stay where he feels comfortable. His mother is more a
high-tech character, in the sense that she not only the maternal figure, but she
is also detached from the natural world; she refers to the real world as “his
old world” in regards to her husband and his opinion on the Cyberonions verses
the real onions (15). The narrator describes living in both the cyber world and
the real world, as similar to sitting in between a mother and a father, and if
you read the story closely, his mother and father are in fact just that:
metaphors for the real world and the cyber world. His mother is the force that
has pulled the family into the cyber world, claiming it is a good thing and that
it is the future. His father is the
reminder of the outside world, and the one who actually reminds him that the
real world will always be there, even if the cyberworld were to go away; this is
a demonstration of humanity triumphing over technology, a low-tech appeal (“Low
Tech/ Actual Reality”).
What
is more appealing, the cyberonion or the real onion? It seems more often than
not, we gravitate towards high-tech science fiction narratives or movies; the
appeal of a world that far exceeds our own, triumphs over the mundaneness of the
world we see every day. But what we fail to realize is that one day the world of
the real onions could vanish, and the world of the cyberonions and cyberfamilies
will become the norm. Perhaps by then we could have our own “Zeller ring”
(Silverberg, 100) like in House of Bones,
and transport ourselves back into the Ice Age to get a glimpse of an
ecotopian society. Katherine Fellows states in her 2011 essay “Low-Tech vs. High
Tech: Familiarity vs. Progress”, that the appeal of low-tech narratives is
personal. She states that “low-tech science fiction is appealing because our own
society sprung from a low-tech state, and we have survived, if not thrived”, and
high-tech fiction, “by contrast, is unfamiliar”. I can agree with her statement
to an extent. While I believe that low-tech is more relatable, it is not
necessarily more appealing. I believe that we are drawn to the imaginative world
of high-tech narratives because of
the unfamiliarity. We push our imaginations as far as we can, and still we want
to know more. We imagine technology
that can take us through space and time in order to create a world that is far
from the familiar. Even though we know that the cyberonion will never be
the real onion, that doesn’t stop us
from wanting to peel its layers to see what’s inside.
Works
Cited
“High
Tech/Virtual Reality”. N.d. Terms and
Themes. Web. 9 July 2015.
“Low
Tech/Actual Reality”. N.d. Terms and
Themes. Web. 9 July 2015.
“Molly Millions” N.d. William Gibson Wiki.
http://williamgibson.wikia.com/wiki/Molly_Millions.
Web. 9 July 2015.
Averill, Thomas Fox. “The Onion and I”.
Virtually Now. Ed. Jeanne Schinto. New York: Persea Books, Inc. 1996. 8-21.
Print.
Fellows, Katherine. “Low Tech vs. High Tech: Familiarity vs. Progress”.
Ferber, Audrey. “Drapes and Folds”.
Virtually Now. Ed. Jeanne Schinto. New York: Persea Books, Inc. 1996.
127-139. Print.
Gibson, William. “Burning Chrome”. Online
Texts for Craig White’s Literature Course Web. 9 July 2015.
Gibson, William. “Johnny Mnemonic”.
Online Texts for Craig White’s Literature Course Web. 9 July 2015.
Silverberg, Robert. “House of Bones”.
Future Primitive. Ed. Kim Stanley Robinson.
New York: Tom Doherty Associates, Inc, 1994. 85-107. Print.
