Category Archives: Science Fiction

>A Difference of Opinion

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I was going to write a nice, luxurious entry on Frankenstein.  I was going to revel in the fact that, despite being laughed at in my lit theory class for suggesting it was a work of Science Fiction, it is the first reading on my Science Fiction syllabus.  I was going to make some poignant remarks about scientific responsibility and how man can’t decide to play god then wuss out halfway through.
But now, I’m going to write about MFA students.
My program is an MA program in English.  It runs concurrent to an MFA program in fiction, writing, you know, that touchy-feely-with-a-pen stuff.  I actually know very little about the MFA program here at Rutgers other than it exists, unlike my program it’s supposed to be a terminal degree program, as a result the MFA students are offered TAships which us MA students are barred from, and that sometimes I encounter MFA students in my classes.
I have found that, with the exception of a class I took on rhetoric and the teaching of writing, I despise having MFA students in my classes.  They are trained to think about literature in a mode entirely different from how I am trained to think about literature.  They speak about literature differently.  They read differently.  And this vast difference in philosophies really annoys the hell out of me.
We in the MA program are constantly looking at books critically with a mind towards theory.  The MFA students look at works as stories.  Pretty amalgamations of words that they could have written better.  As a result, discussions about literature with these people does nothing but make me gnash my teeth and want to kill something.  Preferably something fluffy and cute that thinks it can write better than any/all of the classical authors whose works have become my bread and butter over the course of the last year.  I know, I know, discussions with individuals whose points of view differ vastly from one’s own makes one a better conversationalist and a more well-rounded person.  You know what?  I can live without it.  I like my books unadulterated by artistic frippery.
Last night, ladies and gentlemen, was the final straw.
As you know by now, I’m taking a course in Science Fiction.  The course, though listed under my program, is also cross-listed to the MFAs and the American Studies Grad program.  The majority of its students come from these other two programs and, on the whole, I would say that fellow English MAs comprise about a third of the class.
Last night we were set to talk about Frankenstein.  I came armed and prepared with arguments about Marxist critique, textual differences between the 1818 and 1831 editions, and a lot to say about humanism and minority as portrayed in the book.  The discussion we wound up having was about humanity; what makes a human?  Is the creature human?  How can we define “human”?
About an hour and a half into arguing this out, the question came.  I can still hear it resounding from the MFA side of the room, echoing in the air like some ghastly and hollow funeral dirge.  “We are spending so much time talking about this, but what practical application does it have?  I mean, this is just a book.  What does it really matter?”
I felt the “kill” toggle get thrown in my mind.  Flames burned at the back of my eyes.  I could feel demonic urges begin to overtake me and it is a good thing that a dear friend of mine was sitting between myself and the offender.  The sudden instinct to leap across the table and throttle said MFA overtook my senses and it was all I could do to keep the animalistic instincts and bay and retort with a sharp and not-at-all-well-thought-out reply which probably sounded more rude and jerkish than intelligent.
When I re-claimed my senses, my first thought was “seriously… what are you doing here?”  Honestly, I’m only about 98% certain that he’s an MFA.  If he’s not, he needs to re-evaluate his career choices.
I realize that part of the reason his little off-handed remark offended me so was that it was an invasion of outside sensibilities into my little haven of lore.  At a dinner party the other night, same colleague/friend who saved aforementioned MFA’s life made the following comment, “I think we’re a little uptight about our major because when you…” (referring to his girlfriend who will very soon have a PhD in Chemistry) “tell people what you do, they go ‘wow.’ And back off.  When we…” (referring to the rest of us English people at the table) “tell people what we do, they get that look of pity in their faces and say ‘oh… well… what are you going to do with that?’.”
It’s a battle I’ve fought my entire life.  The world doesn’t see any innate worth in what I do and what I love.  In fact, they understand it all to be a big waste of time.  But at this juncture, I understand that.  I expect it.  When I walk into a cocktail party or family gathering, I am ready to defend my choices from the outsiders. 
But I don’t expect it in the classroom.  I am not ready to throw my warlike shield before my body in the very bastion of my misunderstood life choices.  It was an affront to the companionship and unspoken understanding between us to question the validity of our presence in that classroom while sitting in the classroom itself.  It was like being stabbed in the back, a sneak-attack from a strategic position I had once thought to be well-guarded.  The expressed views are not supposed to be allowed in my citadel.
Questioning the validity of academic inquiry for the sake of academic inquiry is something I am prepared for from the real world.  Not here in this utterly unreal and utopian fantasy of folios where the coin of the realm is Foucault and Derrida. 
And for that, I say this: 
Dear MFAs,
I humbly request that you keep your ideas about the academy to yourself.  I certainly won’t go around vocally criticizing your ultimate decision to take classes in writing poetry which, by the way, is a complete waste of time and money since studies have proven that the classroom is inefficient at teaching individuals to write.  Either you got it or you don’t and the vast majority of you will suffer a lifetime of waiting tables and working dead-end secretarial jobs with the dream of someday being discovered due to your superior memo-writing skills.  Your MFA won’t even get you into a PhD program, though it may get you a job as an adjunct teaching people like you that they have a chance in this world despite your own bitterness at having been passed over time and again in the field of publishing which some young and talented student of yours may some day hit lucky and become more successful than you are.
Bite me. 
Yours sincerely,
Danielle.
PS: next time, you may not be so lucky.  I may be small, but I be fierce.  And I have a lot of big friends who know how to wield cross-bows.  

>Cosmic Proportions

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School.  Classes.  Work.  Work again.  School.  Read.  Library.  Research.  Abstracts.  Conference.  PhD applications.  More Work.  Class.  Social Life?  No.  Other Work.  Papers.  Editing.  Read some more.  Die a little.
I think that I may be just a little bit stressy.
The beginning of the semester has hit and it’s hit hard.  Of course, being sick at the starting line is a huge handicap to any runner, but with my eyes clearly set on the finish line (and frequent reminders to breathe), I think I’m gonna make it.  Maybe my tune will change when I hit the halfway-mark, but we’ll cross that monumental bridge when we get to it.
I had my first sci-fi class this past Wednesday (though the class will usually meet on Monday- what the hell, Rutgers?).  I am buzzing with anticipation for this class and the first seminar meeting was no disappointment.  We wound up sitting and debating for a good fifteen to twenty minutes after the class period had ended, and this is without even having done any reading!  There will a great deal of game-face involved in this semester.  I do love having occasion to cleverly disguise myself as an academic pit-bull. 
The Professor, a sharp gray-haired man well into his seventies, is utterly fascinating.  His name is H. Bruce Franklin and though he is more noted for his work on Melville and the Vietnam War (as two separate things, not some weird cultural hybrid), he was one of the first to be teaching Science Fiction as an academic interest.  Despite years of being laughed at by his peers and countless rejection letters for his book (as well as being black-listed in the seventies for being leftist), today he’s got nineteen published books under his belt and hundreds of articles.  He’s also incredibly interesting to speak with and one of the few people I’ve ever met who can work both sides of his brain at the same time (I guess you kinda have to in order to study Science Fiction as literature).
Anyway, class meeting one.  Dr. Franklin shared some facts which really got me thinking and have worked to alleviate some of my stress, if only for a small period of time.  Have a look at these statistics and prepare to be sublimely minimized. 
There are 200-400 Billion Stars in our Galaxy.  There are 100-500 Billion Galaxies in our Universe.
The Observable Known Universe is Comprised of the following…
Dark Energy – 74%
Dark Mater – 22%
Intergalactic Gas – 3.6%
Everything Else (including all those stars, us, galaxies, your computer) – 0.4%
As if that weren’t enough to make you feel slightly insignificant, take a gander at the temporal qualities of the universe-
The Big Bang – 15 Billion Years Ago
The Formation of Earth – 4.55 Billion Years Ago
The First Multi-Cellular Organisms appeared – 1 Billion Years Ago
Plants and Animals Emerge from the Oceans – 400 Million Years Ago
The First Humans (non homo-sapiens… Lucy) – 2 Million Years Ago
First Homo Sapiens – 250 Thousand Years Ago
The Last Ice Age – 12 Thousand Years Ago
The Industrial Revolution, Modern Science and Technology, birth of Sci-Fi – 250 Years Ago
I mentioned that Professor Franklin is a brilliant man.  He’s crunched some numbers and come up with this little anecdote to put above massive span into terms that our measly little human-brains can better understand…
Imagine that you’re a planet.  In fact, you are planet Earth.  You are, in this moment, twenty years old.  The above-mentioned incidents occurred at the following junctures in your lifetime….
The First Multi-Cellular Organisms appeared – 15.5 Years Ago
Plants and Animals Emerge from the Oceans – 18.25 Years Ago
The First Humans (non homo-sapiens… Lucy) – 3 Days Ago
First Homo Sapiens – 10 Hours Ago
The Last Ice Age – 28 Minutes Ago
The Industrial Revolution, Modern Science and Technology, birth of Sci-Fi – 35 Seconds Ago
Brings a certain serenity, doesn’t it?  A little warm glowy feeling in the pit of your stomach that really, no matter what you do today, tomorrow, in your lifetime, your problems are a mere speck of time and matter in terms of the universe.  I suppose there could be some fear that comes with this leading to a Bartlebyesque sense of apathy.  If everything is so tiny and nothing matters, then why even bother? 
The ants build a colony because they must.  Nevermind that said colony could be demolished in half a blink by a giant fifty times their size and there is nothing they can do about it.  I think, when faced with the universe, that same attitude must apply.  Would you keep doing what you are currently doing if the earth were to be swallowed by the sun tomorrow? 
A little perspective can mean a great deal.  And I think that the perspective Dr. Franklin had to offer this past week has gone a long way towards settling my already-strung-out nerves.
PhD programs, after all, are mostly made of air and thereby, while giving the illusion of something solid, are no more yielding than a dream.

>A Person’s a Person no matter how small?

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I am always the first to admit that my taste in movies is abysmal.  Frankly, I don’t plug myself into a screen to be shown something deep or earth-shaking.  If I want my sense of the world challenged, if I want to see real talent, if I want anything other than sugary commercialized feel-good cheeriness, I go see a play.  As a result, I am horribly behind in my acquaintance with classic movies of any genre.  In addition, I am not a huge fan of horror movies.  To be absolutely frank, they scare me.  I don’t like to be scared.  So I avoid seeing them.
It is no small surprise, therefore, that I had not seen Ridley Scott’s 1979 sci-fi staple Alien until just last night.  Another gem of a film on my “to-watch” list for aforementioned sci-fi class in the fall (see my entry on Avatar). 
One thing that occurred to me as I sat down with my brother the film-maker for the viewing experience is how much our culture tends to envelope and dilute classics.  Watching a classic or pioneer film for the first time is very much like seeing Hamlet for the first time.  There are pieces of the film that, despite your previous lack of exposure to it, you nonetheless know simply because they have been repeated, spoofed, and paraphrased in other films, your life, and the lives of those around you.  It’s like déjà vu, there’s a familiarity to culturally appropriated classics that makes seeing them like seeing an old friend for the first time in ten years; there are things you know about them that you didn’t know (or remember) you knew about them.  Watching the chest buster pop out of Kane was very much like hearing the “to be or not to be” speech.  You know the sequence and you can nearly repeat the words and/or actions with the actors (though perhaps with a few comical additions… in my version the alien busts into a high-energy rendition of “Hello My Baby” complete with top hat and cane  just as usually I have trouble seeing the infamous Hamlet speech without picturing an irate Mel Brooks a la 1:59).
Aforementioned brother reminded us frequently during the movie viewing that “this wasn’t a stereotype when they did it”.  How many times have you heard that in reference to Shakespeare?  How many times has a high schooler seen Romeo and Juliet before they actually see Romeo and Juliet?  This movie, just as most of the canon, was groundbreaking.  This was where it started.  It is difficult to maintain fresh eyes throughout the viewing of this movie and, just as I personally contended upon my first encounter with the bard, it seems like a load of strung-together clichés and outdated special effects.
Once I allowed myself to suspend this disbelief, I had to face the reality of what I was seeing.  Here is a film obsessed with the idea of humanity.  To me, it is a movie which explores the depths of the word.  What does it mean to be human?  When to we cease being human?  Who is entitled to human rights and compassion over regulatory rules and proprietary means?  When must a leader treat her crew like people and when must she treat them like hazards to herself and themselves?
The first manifestation we see of this is in the scene when Dallas and Lambert bring back a wounded Kane from their little excursion on the alien planet.  Kane has a face-hugger on him which, unbeknownst to the crew at the time, is laying eggs in his chest.  Ripley, acting officer upon the ships, reminds Dallas of quarantine regulations.  Since something has happened, all three of them must wait outside the airlock of the ship for a period of time.  Dallas and Lambert beg to be let in, saying that Kane’s only hope of survival is to get the thing off of his face.
Here, of course, is the classic first mistake which causes the downfall of the crew and precipitates the true action of the movie.  Ash acts against regulations and against Ripley’s orders and lets his crewmates inside the ship.
This single action, Ash’s refusal to obey orders and protocol, sets the plot in motion.  If the entire crew had listened to Ripley, the outcome of the movie would have changed drastically.  Kane wouldn’t have been any more or less dead in the end, and everyone else would have been significantly more safe (and by that I mean there would have been hope for survivors other than Ripley).  Was Ripley’s order humanitarian?  No.  Was it for the greater good?  Yes.  This decision precipitated a debate amongst myself and my fellow movie watchers; what would you have done?  Your commanding officers orders you not to, clearly someone’s life hangs in the balance, not knowing what is about to happen (or even knowing what is about to happen), what would your course of action have been?
The general consensus amongst us was that it would have depended who was outside.  Someone I don’t care for?  Someone who I could care less about?  Someone I love?  These human emotions effect human decisions, and this (I think) is key to Alien’s continuing appeal as movie.
The big reveal of the movie is that Ash is an android with special secret orders from the company who hired the crew.  These orders are to return with whatever alien life-form he can find, all other objectives being secondary to this objective, and that the crew is expendable.  This adds a few more facets to the movie’s concept of humanity.  It first and foremost begs the question can a robot be human?  Without a doubt in the case mentioned above Ash’ actions (though motivated by a force deeper than compassion) were more humanitarian than Ripley’s.  If something wears our face, can think for itself and act upon these thoughts, does that make it human?
And what about the “human” employers of this crew?  How human can they be if they sent a group of individuals into space on what was essentially viewed as a suicide mission to reach an end important only to them?
One of the movie’s taglines is “sometimes the scariest things come from within”.  Clearly this is a reference to the chest-buster and the fact that the alien was actually “birthed” by one of the crew members.  This “birth” coupled with the tagline creates an anxiety about evil within the human.  What are we capable of?  What is growing within us that we may or may not know about?  Have we, as a species, allowed this to grow there just as Dallas and Ash allowed the alien onto the ship?  Are we clueless that it’s there just as Kane is clueless about his little friend until it bursts through his chest at dinner?  What is this seed inside ourselves that can spawn so great an evil?

To me, the tagline is also a nod to aforementioned explored evils within humanity.  The word “within” creates a binary; us and them.  Without an “us”, there is no “within” to come from.  Alien complicates that binary, forcing us to re-examine our qualifications for joining the softball team of the human race.

>James Cameron and the Furries (a Review of Avatar)

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>Okay, I caved. It took me long enough.

I think my colleague hit the nail on the head with this one when he said, “Whenever I ask someone why I should see ‘Avatar’, they tell me ‘because it’s visually stunning’. I need a better reason than that to want to sit my butt in a chair for three hours and watch a movie”. The story, as the universe at large would tell it to those who stubbornly refused to see the movie, was one we had heard before. Fern Gully in Space. Pocahontas on the Moon. Imperialism at its best with some good old-fashioned furry undertones thrown in.

So I went in expecting the environmentalists on magic mushrooms. What I didn’t expect was what nobody had told me, and what I believe to be the true core of this movie.

Maybe you know people who play any number of games including tabletop RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons, online MMOs including World of Warcraft, Live Action Role Playing Games such as NERO (lightning bolt man aside). Maybe you’re one of those people. If not, let me explain it to you. You live your normal hum-drum life; go to work, take out the trash, perform all manner of assorted mundane activities which constitute your reality. But then, for a few hours, a weekend, sometimes longer depending on the game, you can become someone else in a fantasy world. You insert yourself into a communally agreed-upon reality in which your normal problems don’t matter anymore and in fact pale in comparison to the epic adventures which await you while in the guise of your alter ego.

This is ‘Avatar’. Jake is a marine whose real life sucks because his spine was severed so his legs don’t work and his PhD brother was shot for no particular reason (oh and everyone wishes it had been Jake who was shot instead). Anyway, Jake gets the opportunity to step in for his brother on a mission to an alien planet. In Jake’s world, science has progressed enough to create “avatars”. Biomechanically engineered bodies whose genes are some splice between that of their driver and that of some alien species (in this case, the blue cat-people we’ve seen in the trailers). Jake’s genetics match his brother’s closely enough to be able to drive his brother’s avatar. The government doesn’t want to throw out all the money they invested in creating the avatar, so Jake is asked to step in.

Jake, of course, likes his life better as a cat-person. He can run, fight, explore the forest with his cat-person girlfriend, fly on dragon monsters, and learn all about this other society that the anthropologists have so far been unable to penetrate for whatever reason. The movie depicts the troubles of the cat-people as the white oppressor tears apart their forest (big surprise, I know). To me, more importantly, it depicts Jake’s dependency upon the life he lives while outside of his own body. He becomes more and more negligent of his actual body (frequently forgetting to eat, shower, etc.) as his obsession with driving his avatar deepens. As Jake becomes increasingly dependant upon the life of the avatar to escape his real life, the movie shows us less and less of Jake as a human. The human world still asserts itself at semi-frequent intervals, but without Jake. We are shown the army base and other characters interacting (perhaps even around Jake’s body while he is out in the jungle with his furry friends), but Jake himself is absent from his own world. At one point, Jake admits that reality has flipped – he begins to wonder if his life as a cat-person is (in fact) reality and his humanity is the dream.

It isn’t just Jake who depends upon some outside body to escape from his life. The movie is full of characters who seem unable to function as people without the assistance of some technologically advanced shell in which to insert themselves. The Big Bad Evil Chief of the White Men Colonel Miles Quaritch has a giant robot suit (reminiscent of a less-colorful malevolent power ranger), cute tough girl on base Trudy is a pilot and seldom depicted outside of her plane (certainly when she is she is not given an important role or personality which doesn’t center around the machine).

There are only two characters in the movie who don’t seem to be utterly dependent upon their avatars to survive. Dr. Grace Augustine and Norm Spellman, both scientists who have cat-people selves, seem to have reached some equilibrium with their alternate realities. Unlike the others, they have important and meaningful interactions while still in their (gasp) human bodies. Though the core of their work is performed as the avatars, it is continued through into their real lives as politics, scientific advances, and well… real life unfolds.

The endings these characters receive further re-enforce their levels of dependence upon their other selves. The Colonel is killed after a massive fight with Jake and his cat-girlfriend while still in the power ranger suit. Trudy dies in her plane. Grace dies on the cat-person operating table while they attempt to put her spirit permanently into her avatar. Norm is allowed to stay with the cat-people, it is unclear whether he remains human or becomes perma-furry.

The one that gets me the most is Jake. The entire movie would have been a beautiful tragedy, a statement about what happens when you allow some imagined alternative life to overcome your true existence, if not for this ending. The cat-people use some cat-people magic to transport Jake’s soul into his avatar. He becomes a cat-person.

What? Really? Come on, James Cameron, give us something to bite on! What kind of message is this? “If you wish hard enough, all of your problems will go away because your escapist universe will accept you permanently and you can live with the fairies and dragons and your online girlfriend happily ever after”. I think I’m going to be sick. This tells every WoW addict out there that, if they just play enough WoW, WoW can become their true reality. They don’t have to live in their mothers’ basements, they can be elfish wizards!

Please don’t mistake me, I’m all for a healthy dose of escapism. However, there’s a limit to it. Too many people who want to escape their lives become like Jake. Instead of dealing with their problems to make their lives better, they chose to ignore them permanently. And Avatar tells them this is a good idea because it will make all of their problems dissolve into cat-person bliss.

And yes, Jake’s reality as a cat-person was better than that as a human, but who is to say that if he had taken half the time and effort to improve his real life that he had invested into being a cat-person this would not have changed? Jake tells us at the beginning of the movie that medical science has advanced enough to be able to fix a spine, he simply can’t afford the procedure. Granted, there is nothing he can do about his brother’s death, but you can’t tell me that Jake was a hopeless cause. He was smart, talented, obviously capable, why couldn’t his human life have been made not to suck rather than the movie giving him an easy out? Jake’s humanity, thus devalued, is something to shed not work at. And it tells us that our problems are too great to overcome without magical cat-people.

Suffice to say I was less than happy with ‘Avatar’’s ending, despite having enjoyed the ride more than this snarky review will let on. As much as I hate to admit it, it was visually stunning. It was an interesting story (if trite and overdone). And I will perhaps watch it again, if only to prep a paper on the dangers of addiction.