Students and I read Parable of the Sower together. Despite having read the novel several times now, I remain uncertain of my feelings regarding the starward longings of the book’s protagonist, Lauren Oya Olamina. Does outer space function for her as did the North Star for Frederick Douglass? Are indigenous people present in this vision? Perhaps those stories are not Lauren’s to tell. A student from Albuquerque recommended a book called The Green Glass Sea during our discussion of Leslie Marmon Silko’s Ceremony. Her grandfather moved the family to New Mexico, she said, for work related to the Manhattan Project. “They did some bad stuff there,” she noted. The “green glass sea” is the name given to the crater blasted into the desert by the first atomic device. The Ellen Klages book recommended by my student describes Los Alamos from the perspective of two female characters — children whose parents were scientists involved in the bomb’s creation. The book is in fact written for children. It’s an award-winning work of children’s literature. Given my student’s family connection to the story, I hope she pairs the book with Silko’s Ceremony for her final paper. Stepping away from my desk, I head downstairs and talk with Sarah. The two of us discover we own a freezer in the basement. We have a laugh about how “brat” is one of my go-to words when I’m angry. If so, it’s presumably a mannerism I “picked up” or “inherited” as a child. “Nasty Matt Calls Others ‘Brat'”: let us change that. Let there be no outbursts of anger. Recall instead childhood’s fonder moments. Enjoy. Relish the smell of homemade tomato sauce as it cooks on the stove.
Tag: Science Fiction
Friday August 28, 2020
Algorithms: what are they? When do they enter the history of ideas? What are their presumptions? Ada Lovelace had something to do with it, did she not? Cyberfeminist Sadie Plant explored parts of this history in her book Zeroes & Ones. Lovelace also appears with her partner-in-crime Charles Babbage in William Gibson and Bruce Sterling’s The Difference Engine. The latter novel founded an entire subgenre of science fiction known as “steampunk”: works set in an alternate-Victorian past. In the case of The Difference Engine, the world is one where Lovelace, the daughter of the Romantic poet Lord Byron, succeeds not just in theorizing but in building the world’s first computer. Calculating machines: what are they? What are the consequences of these devices? Where do they lead? Part of me would love to write an occult conspiracy thriller amid such a milieu — though I wouldn’t want it to skew toward horror, as in Alan Moore’s From Hell. More in the direction, rather, of utopian fantasy, with Acid Communism and Red Nation arriving more than a century earlier than planned. That would be a fun book. Where would one posit the “point of divergence”? Where would history happen other than as one was taught? Therein lies the nature of Myth. Yet that’s the point. Rebellion occurs there or not at all. Maybe this is a bit like my once-imagined novel on Project Cybersyn, but “woven” now, in the style of Foucault’s Pendulum, with secret societies and esoteric traditions. Then again, maybe my novel should just zero in on one of the details from The Difference Engine: the scenario, in other words, where Marx and Engels move to America and ally communism with the Iroquois Confederacy. Either way, the time has come for me to reread Plant’s Zeroes & Ones.
Tuesday June 30, 2020
As I reflect upon Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Talents, I think first of the cruelty of the parable itself. It’s a parable that presages evolutionism, is it not? The ones rewarded by its god are those who go forth and multiply. It appears in two synoptic gospels: Matthew 25: 14-30 and Luke 19: 11-27. In each of its versions, the parable features a relationship between a master and his servants. The servants are placed in charge of the master’s goods while he’s away. Upon his return he “assesses” their stewardship. Measures, quantifies, ranks some numerical output or product. And then punishes the one who had the least talent and saved it — the one who produced no surplus. The one who profiteth not. The master, meanwhile, is a slave-master, described by the servant as “an hard man”: one who reaps where he has not sown, gathers where he has not strawed. By parable’s end, the “unprofitable servant” has been cast into “outer darkness.” The master promises, “There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.” So how does Butler, whose ancestors were slaves, respond to this parable? She tells the story of a different god: the god of Earthseed, the god of change. Yet change is a hard master too, is it not? Look at how the god manifests in the lives of Butler’s characters! Comparing Butler’s reply to the parable with the one given by John Milton, I prefer Milton’s: “God doth not need / either man’s work or his own gifts; who best / Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best.” Milton’s god is the more merciful of the two. Other famous authors have critiqued the parable as well. In his Threepenny Novel (1934), Bertolt Brecht presents it as a component of capitalist ideology. “And…all who relate such things, I condemn!” he writes. “And I’ll go further: whoever listens to it and dares to refrain from taking immediate steps against it, him I also condemn!” Perhaps Butler’s great genius, however, was to place this parable in dialogue with another: the Parable of the Sower. Sower precedes Talents in Matthew and Luke, as it does in Butler.
Wednesday June 24, 2020
Octavia E. Butler’s inclusion of a neo-slave narrative at the heart of her book Parable of the Talents leads me to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave. A butterfly greets me at my window as I read, then floats off on its way. In a children’s book, we might follow the butterfly. But when the baby naps, we must reckon with Douglass. Born into slavery, he becomes a fugitive at twenty. Seven years later, in 1845, he authors his narrative.
Saturday June 20, 2020
Octavia E. Butler’s novels are painful to read; their narrators testify to traumas difficult to endure. In the Parable books, we’re made to identify with a first-person narrator who suffers from “hyperempathy syndrome’; she and others undergo attack, displacement, migrancy, enslavement, rape, torture, freedom from bondage, all manner of tragedy. Through it all is a story of survival. Lauren is a character who worships Change, and experiences her god in the events of her life. Always while reading, one is made to remember these are traumas that are part of black history, traumas inflicted by white supremacy and antiblackness throughout US history and with it the history of the West. The country is still right now trying to dismantle the Confederacy, if by the latter we mean the portion of America that wants to remain a white Christian settler-colonialist slave-state. The Confederacy lives, in other words, in that part of the republic that refuses the thirteenth amendment.
Thursday June 18, 2020
Butler’s version of Afrofuturism is far more pessimistic than the versions crafted by immediate precursors like Sun Ra and Samuel R. Delany. Christianity appears prominently in her work as both early influence and adversary. Think, for instance, of her use of gospel parables as structuring principles. Her narratives are “true” to the parables — grant the parables a kind of truth — even as they formulate Earthseed, a new religious movement discovered by Butler’s heroine and put into practice as Christianity’s replacement and successor.
Tuesday June 16, 2020
In the second book in the Parable series, Parable of the Talents, Earthseed’s status as a religion places it into conflict with neighboring creeds, especially hostile, intolerant ones like US President Andrew Steele Jarret’s Christian America. With Earthseed, Butler creates for us a black feminist reimagining of John Africa’s group MOVE and its 1985 conflict with the Philadelphia Police Department during the reign of Ronald Reagan. Butler projects that earlier conflict forward into a twenty-first century America presaged by the LA riots of 1992. If one teaches this book, one should encourage one’s students to sit with Earthseed. Read its verses. Try it on, test it out as a belief system. Which aspects of it appeal to you? Which, if any, trouble you, and why? My attitude toward Earthseed is a bit like Zahra’s when she tells Lauren, “I don’t care about no outer space. You can keep that part of it. But if you want to put together some kind of community where people look out for each other and don’t have to take being pushed around, I’m with you” (223). After reading Nick Estes, I also find myself pondering Lauren’s relationship to settler-colonialism. Is Earthseed settler-colonialist, both in its establishment of Acorn (a literal settlement intent on growth) and in its advocacy for the spread of a “survivalistic” earthly biology into outer space? Or is its pursuit of multiracial community in fact the only real alternative to settler-colonialism? Settler-colonialism has already, for the past 500 years, been the case here on Turtle Island, and will remain so, unless and until groups commit to decolonization and antiracism. With Earthseed, Butler imagines for us a movement that does this. Earthseed resists the white settler-colonialist project, given that the biology Earthseed wishes to propagate is ethnically and racially diverse. All are welcome. To join, one simply agrees to live by Earthseed’s creed: a belief system that demands only that we serve and protect each other and come to each other’s aid — no more and no less.
Monday June 15, 2020
Earthseed isn’t the first religion invented within the context of science fiction. Scientology comes to mind as another, invented by science fiction writer L. Ron Hubbard. I’m also reminded of Discordianism, a religion of sorts propagated in part by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson’s Illuminatus! trilogy. Like Hubbard’s Scientology, Earthseed is nontheistic — at least in the sense that the latter’s god is simply “change,” a process said to lack consciousness, yet capable of being “shaped” toward humanity’s “destiny” among the stars. Earthseed refuses to console with any promise of an afterlife. (A bit like Stoicism, in that sense.) As a belief system, I find it overly grim.
Saturday June 13, 2020
Earthseed, the religion founded by Lauren Oya Olamina, the heroine who narrates Octavia E. Butler’s novel Parable of the Sower, resembles other faiths (including the Baptism of Butler’s upbringing) in its evangelical cast. Lauren spreads the word and seeks converts, her church being a kind of mutual aid society. Together, she and her followers form a traveling, changing community — a “team” or “tribe” of sorts, decisions made organically based on the group’s capacity to survive amid thieves, murderers, cannibals, junkies, wild dogs, and arsonists. Lauren’s view of the world is paranoid, but it’s a paranoia borne out by lived events of trauma. She “experiences” and “shares” the pain of others due to what she calls “hyperempathy syndrome.” She has an ability that makes her vulnerable, and thus cautious of who she can trust. We needn’t think of this as mere delusion. The reactions to bodily harm sometimes manifest physically, another’s pain sometimes drawing blood. However we view this aspect of Lauren’s experience, it leads her to seek followers. She wants others to believe her, offering in exchange a path toward survival.
Friday April 3, 2020
“Get out into the open. Sit outdoors if possible,” reads the script of a “growth game,” a game people play. Shall we play? Imagine “getting it together” at a scale sufficient to the fact that we are everywhere. World-build a global network of people caring and tending to needs. A place like Whileaway, the cybernetic feminist utopia from Joanna Russ’s novel The Female Man. Shall we revive the tradition of cybernetic socialism, essential to many of the hippie utopias of the 1960s and 1970s? Better that than Silent Running. But to be honest, I’d rather be gardening. Callenbach lacks the sheer linguistic inventiveness and wit of a writer like Russ. Maybe we should read Michael Reynolds’s book about Earthships and Eden Medina’s book on Project Cybersyn. Anyway, Russ is the author on my mind this week, for work if not for play. As a character of hers says of Whileaway, “the ecological housekeeping is enormous” (14).
Trance-Scripts 