LITR 4632: Literature of
the Future
Web-Highlight 2007
Tuesday, 19 June: Web-highlighter (final exams from previous semesters): Ashley Jones
Web highlights: high tech, virtual reality
Johnny Mnemonic
Gibson's "Johnny Mnemonic" proves an apt example of the inherent flaws within the efforts to improve--I'm sorry, "improve"--Humanity. Johnny himself is a walking, talking storage device, a hard-drive with a pulse. Molly Millions has had optical enhancements. They encounter an assassin that could give SouthWestern Bell a run for its money, as he can both reach out and touch someone AND let his fingers do the stalking--er, walking. Not content to limit themselves to their own species, the humans of this future have even "augmented" a dolphin. What good is all of this "improvement," though, when the world has gone to hell? All of these augmentations and gadgets are just so much diversion, calling our attention away from a collapsing infrastructure, absent morality, and rampant pollution . . . The future will not be saved by Band-Aids and trinkets, nor bread and circuses; it will require inward-looking and total restructuring of the standards of civilization. (Kevin Kaup, 2005 final exam)
The type of government that we seemed to encounter the most in our readings was the non-existent one. In “Johnny Mnemonic” Johnny lives in a world that is dark and dirty and appears to have no functioning government. Even if there were to be a government, it does not seem to be effective considering that everyone takes matters into their own hands, as evidenced by the large amount of violence in the story. (Annie McCormick, 2005 final exam)
The Logical Legend of Heliopause and Cyberfiddle
The past encroaches on the future in “The Logical Legend of Heliopause and Cyberfiddle”, in which Pryer is mesmerized by the prospect of constructing a violin. The past, in the form of the violin, assumes a sort of irresistible allure which Pryer, although he was born and raised in the Warren, cannot ignore. The Bummer confirms this inextricable connection of past and future when he tells Pryer, “I knew you would come some time” (to collect the past). Indeed, at the end of the story it is implied that the mystery of Heliopause has been unraveled by the appreciation of the violin, or, the past. (Travis Kelly, 2003 Final exam)
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. (Corrie Lawrence, 2003 Final exam)