LITR 4632: Literature of the Future

Sample Student Final Essay 2003

Corrie Lawrence

LITR 4632 2003 Final Exam

            Belonging. Advancement. Discovery – and being discovered. These are all major themes covered in the science fiction read in this class and they are all reflections of the concerns of the collective consciousness of the modern world. We are constantly turning the mirror on ourselves and groping for answers: How are we doing as a society? What are the concerns for tomorrow, and how do we handle them? What compels us forward and what are we moving towards? How do we adapt to our ceaselessly changing world-and will or can we find a balance?

            It is no surprise that these questions that already full much controversy and art are often the raw materials with which the authors of our anthologies and novels forge ideas and construct models to answer and examine these issues.

            Obviously, as it is people producing this literature and perusing problems relating to our enigmatic existence, the overriding theme is unequivocally that of the human factor. All the questions previously posed return to this common thread. This may seem a nearly foolish statement in its unadorned simplicity but it proves significant in the face of the subject matter tackled.

            While some of the stories we have covered have been primitive in their settings such as “House of Bones” or “Chocco,” where man lives simply in intimate acquaintance with his environment, many of our stories venture to highly mechanized futuristic settings as in “Johnny Moremonic” and “Newton’s Sleep,” where the characters are themselves adapted to their environment by means of technology. (Johnny receives canine dental implants when he decides to go lo-tech, and Esther receives new eyes that she might be closer to “perfect”.) These characters of the future are also greatly distanced from nature as they dwell in their society’s own creations of “Johnny’s” ‘Underground’ and “Newton’s” hometown prototype. Many of the stories we deal with involve new realities, new challenges, and technology and scenarios that are unfamiliar to the common thinker. Still even as our characters encounter these futures, technologies, and scenarios advancement & discover, the major issue always remaining in – what of the human and the human concerns? The question is even at times raised, what makes us human? How much of what defines us today could we give up and yet retain our humanity?

            This particular issue was first breathed for us in Thomas Fox Averill’s charming story, “The Onion and I”. This account of the onion farmer, his techie wife, and brilliant son embarking on the Bidwell Project to become the first cyberspace family challenges the lines between reality and the virtual world, questioning the importance of one over the other and even the importance of virtual beings over living, breathing flesh. The final resolution to this complex query is captured in the frustrated farmer’s exclamation to his overwhelmed son is lost in the blur between the real and the virtual, “Feel…Taste… You are mine,” and “if they cannot make a decent cyberonion… then they cannot make a cyberboy who could take a real onion and know the difference.” (FP 20).

            A similar leap is made in Richard Goldstein’s, “The Logical Legend of Heliopause and the Cyberfiddle.” Here as in the “The Onion and I” the main character is faced with a choice between reality and the cyberworld, but unlike the onion farmer and his son, Heliopause lives in a world where virtual reality is the reality; he was born into it and is all he has known. He goes against the grain of all ‘civilized’ mankind finding a fascination with the old world and ways as he comes across the design plan for a fiddle that awakens him to the discovery of an outside world of what he had known as human ‘mess’, but intense reality and possibility. Both of their tales present points of view challenging the notion that more technology equals better life. The extreme technology in which the characters lives provides a setting for the rejection of advancement where it hampers the undefinable quality of man that makes him human.

            The question remaining is where does the circuitry of the mind end and the human soul begin? Perhaps just as we find in much of this literature the issues and answers are often not clear cut and linear but rather complex and overlapping – perhaps it is also with our souls and minds.

            This issue of what defines humanity goes much deeper than can here be explored but it is integral to and overlapping with another major issue dealt with in our readings. The issue of belonging and adaptation – another universally human theme that can be explored in breath-taking ways in on the terms of science fiction. Our texts explore in prehistoric settings in its crudest form in “House of Bones” and also in the most unearthly forms imaginable in William Gibson’s “The Belonging Kind” and Terry Bisson’s “They’re Made Out of Meat.”

            The first two stories though greatly different in setting and scenario deal with belonging in terms of the individual’s need. In “House of Bones” the main character, separated by 30,000 years by time travel from his rightful home has to adapt and conform to the tribal ways of his new people; they accept him as a sort of divinely-favored village idiot and he in turn dwells peacefully among them, learning their ways. “The Belonging Kind” deals with another estranged character after a similar fashion. The protagonist, Coretti, is estranged from mankind as he knows it as well – here however it is by social handicap rather than epochs of time. Gibson reconciles this matter by differently means, and satisfies his character’s need for belonging by having him discover a chameleon-like ‘alien’ species in the bans of his city and eventually, through obsession, evolve into one of these adept irritators of the human species not only does Gibson’s character find the refuge of acceptance and communion with this foreign species, he also gains the instincts of human mimicry that allow him to fit in the society and mingle “Like a real human being.” (Gibson 57).

            While Silverberg and Gibson’s tales serve as strong statements on the issue of community and the necessity human belonging. Bisson’s short dialogue advances the issue to a further apex. “They’re Made Out of Meat” takes us out of our solar system to the finale of our syllabus where we explored the concept of alien-content & study. Conetti did brush shoulders and then some, with a strange species on earth, but there we listen to two extraterrestrials converse on discovering us , and what an enlightenment.

            Looking down on us for being an “intelligent meat” as they say, they shirk off our decades of our attempts through signals and exploration to make contact with other intelligent life. Even in all irony, they underscore the common thread of these three tales as they say of previously self-exiled planet, “Imagine how unbearably now unutterably cold the universe would be if one were all alone…” (Bisson 72). Doubtless that is a frequent human sentiment echoed in many of these stories as we explore the ideas of advancement, technology, and exploration that will not soon vanish. Again the need for belonging is underscored here – to the universal level. We as humans are always searching for a greater context in which to understand our meaning.

            While each of these extraordinary fictional scenarios catapult us out of our everyday life and into a new frame with for examining and understanding the issues and concerns we are faced with as we inhabit this constantly moving an evolving world. Our stories delineate no clear or certain answers and the authors in general do not claim to indefinitely have them but much is accomplished in the asking and exploration. It might seem a strange and un-visionary supposition to assert that the great unifying theme in these works of fantastic futurism and speculative fiction us exploration of the boundaries of the human – in terms of technology, community, and the universal scheme – rather than the technology or conditions of advancement itself. Nevertheless, it is a strong reoccurring theme indicative of the questions raised by quick-approaching future.

            As we continue to press onwards in the fields of science, information, and technology, and as our mindset continues to shift from national to global to universal the conditions of our search will always change – the technology we challenge. The science we struggle not to reject – but the human aspects struggle will continue. We will still ask what it is that makes us human and will yet struggle with which boundaries we need not cross and which must be redrawn. We will struggle to satisfy the immaterial needs we find otherwise unquenchable such as belonging and community; and we will continue attempt to still the pendulum that we might somewhere if only in identity strike a balance as yet not seen in our world.