This Time Next Year...

I'm happy to announce the publisher Champagne Book Group has finalized the contract for Daughter of Zeus, and it will be out in July of 2014. 

Until then, I will shower you with more academic book reviews and articles. I know, the truly fun stuff in life!

Possible back blurb:

The future can be a terrifying prospect, especially when Ada Freyr discovers she can manipulate electricity. Her newly acquired abilities result in the death of her husband. Ada is numb with shock, and terrified of being discovered by the Prominent-run State. Anyone deemed different is deemed an Undiligent, never to be seen again. She is desperate to find the source of her power, believing her estranged father to be the cause.

After her mother is killed by Prominents, she leaves her hometown in Colorado to begin a trip to Atlanta, Georgia. Ada learns new things about her powers along the way, like that she can manipulate anything with electrical impulses, including humans. Her mother's boyfriend, Kressick Lyman, insists on going with her, keeping his own agenda well hidden.

Once in Atlanta, Ada finds her father, Brontes Corentin, is very different from the alcoholic she met as a child: he’s a House Representative with a new family and a new name, ready to ascend to a Senator’s seat. His family has no knowledge of his dark history.

Ada pretends to like Corentin in order to get close to him, because her ultimate plan, the real reason she came to Atlanta, is to kill her father.

            Ada’s revenge scheme lands her on the Undiligent list, leads a stranger to stalk her every move, and stunts her relationship as a sister to her new siblings. Soon, she has to decide which is more important, an old vendetta or forgiving the man she blames for ruining her life.

The Underrated and Overlooked Utopian Classic: "A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder"

"A Strange Manuscript Found
in a Copper Cylinder" by
James De Mille
(1888)
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Adam More tells of his discovery of a utopia (or in his eyes, a dystopia) via a manuscript he seals in a copper cylinder. His journey begins when More gets separated from his merchant’s ship with his friend, Agnew. Using their rowboat, the two men drift until they find a desolate island with devilish people as inhabitants. Upon first glance, More cannot stomach the Natives and only goes ashore at Agnew's insistence. The Natives are described by More as being less civilized and uglier than Aborigines, which he believes to be the most uncivilized human beings. More's prejudicial fears are well-founded, as Agnew is killed by the Natives.

However, More escapes the island and uses the boat to take an adventure through a cave that is reminiscent of Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth. Eventually, More finds another strange land of foreigners, but he is convinced that these people aren't dangerous from the landmarks he sees as civilized, like roads, buildings and ships. When he meets these strangers, his biased perspective of aliens is fully actualized: the first Natives have black skin and are unkempt (thus, their appearance drove More's distrust), but the second set of Natives have white skin and are what More describes as 'regular'. More's encounter with the first set of Natives he meets illustrates Ursula K. LeGuin's point in her article "American SF and the Other" when she speaks of aliens in sf becoming the Other, be it Galactic aliens, “sexual aliens, class aliens, or cultural aliens.” (LeGuin). Because More does not identify with the first Natives, he thinks them murderous Others from the onset. Upon meeting the second Natives, he is assured of their innate kindness as they more closely resembled what he associates with “regular” and civilized human beings.

His view of the Natives, whom he later calls Kosekins, changes when he learns of their value system that is basically an invert of what he is used to back home in England. To start, Kosekins revere death and hate the burden of living, thus they go on numerous hunts (in which women are included) and basically throw themselves at the feet of the large animals they pursue so as to die an honorable and public death. Secondly, Kosekins detest wealth and aspire to poverty, viewing possessions as burdens. The poorest man in the nation of Kosek has the most influence and respect, while the richest man has the least respect (capitalism is seen as evil). In accordance with their scorn of wealth, Kosekins are very self-sacrificing; they are always to bestow gifts on one another (to get rid of their possessions/wealth), and when one nation surrenders to another, it is considered a great honor and the greatest possible instance of self-sacrifice. That is not to say that Kosekins do not know of violence or war, but their reasons for war or violence differ from the traditional reasons, as Kosekins fight when they receive too many gifts from one person. When one is sick, all is done to nurse them back to health, so that they may die in a more honorable way, yet when someone is sick, every Kosekin trips over themselves to nurse the patient (as that is self-sacrificing to care for someone else). Requited love among two human beings is not a good thing in the Kosekin culture, because “love is self-surrender, and utter self-abnegation. Love gives all away, and cannot possibly receive anything in return. A requital of love would mean selfishness.” Thus, the most self-sacrificing thing a Kosekin can do for the person they love is to arrange their marriage to another. The most deterring fact about Kosekins that More cannot get past is their sacrificial rituals. When their comrades are wounded in battle, even from non-mortal wounds, they kill their fallen brethren with a knife to the heart, and it is their duty to do so. Not only do they kill their own, but they eat them as well, and it is for that purpose that More and another foreigner of Kosek, Almah are in Kosek, to be guests of honor at the next festival of cannibalism. While More might see killing a fellow man and eating them as villainous acts, the Kosek see it as bringing great honor to their fellow man. Almah tells More that he would not deny a man that seeks life, the idea of it would go against all that he believed in. Such is the Kosekins thoughts on denying a man death.

"Balls Pyramid" 13 Miles South of
Lord Howe Island
(2006)
Picture by Fanny Schertzer
Source: Wikimedia Commons

More’s friend in Kosek, the Kohen, explains to him why death is such a large part of their culture: “[To love death] is human nature. We cannot help it; and it is what distinguishes us from animals.” The Kohen goes further with his comparison of civilized Kosekins and animals, “Animals fear death; animals love to accumulate such things as they prize; animals, when they love, go in pairs, and remain with one another” (169). All of the things that the Kosekins believe to be against human nature are things that only lowly animals practice, like pairing, keeping possessions, and fearing death.

That is part of why the Kohen cannot understand More’s point of view when More tells him that his culture fears death and loves life. The Kohen tries his best to dissect More’s perspective by asking “If you really fear death, what possible thing is there left to love or hope for?” To which More replies, “Long life, and riches, and requited love”. After the Kohen’s thoughts on those three unmoral life pursuits, More’s reasoning sounds selfish, naïve, and unattainable.

Author James De Mille uses the inverted civilization of the Kosekins to satire the foundations of the world’s “civilized” populations, much in the fashion of Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. At first, reading about the Kosek love of death and their desire for poverty seems absurd, but their reasoning behind it makes sense against the backdrop of humanity’s selfish pursuits for money, love, and a long life. Kosekins live in both a utopian society and a dystopian one, because while their 180 degree way of life is admirable in a backwards way, their love of death (and cannibalism) creates too wide of a gulf to reconcile their beliefs with More’s, or with mine. 

De Mille, James. A Strange Manuscript Found in a Copper Cylinder. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1888. Print.

LeGuin, Kroeber, Ursula. “America SF & The Other”. Science Fiction Studies 2.3 (1975). Print. 

The Idea of Gender Divides in LeGuin's "The Dispossesed"

The Dispossesed (1st Ed. Hardcover)
1974, Harper & Row Cover
Source: Wikimedia

Somewhere in a similar galaxy is a planet much like Earth, called Urras. On Urras, a group of settlers were sent to colonize the moon, Anaress. Cut-off from their home planet, the Anarresti built a different society than the one they came from, one in which there is no central government, no real form of currency, and gender equality isn’t even a thought, it just is.

Shevek, a theoretician from the colonized moon, is invited by a university on the home planet to come and study. When he does, his entire worldview is shaken, as he is exposed to alien concepts, like class divides, crime, money, and ego. Once Shevek understands that the home planet society is driven by profits (i.e. capitalism), he chews on his assumption “that if you removed a human being’s natural incentive to work--his initiative, his spontaneous creative energy--and replaced it with external motivation and coercion, he would become a lazy and careless worker […] The lure and compulsion of profit was evidently a much more effective replacement of the natural initiative than he had been led to believe.” (82). LeGuin is answering  a central question here about the details of a utopian society quite simply: if a citizen is given all they need by the State, they will not become lazy, because their own creativity will be their drive. She also answers the question about innovation in an utopian society, a concept assumed to stagnate in any imagined utopia, because only suffering can foster innovation (the need to make something bad into something better), but if creativity is its own reward, then even in a utopian society citizens will know of and promote innovation.

There are many gender divides Shevek encounters on the home planet. He argues with many of the Urrasti about how they treat their women and why they feel the need to treat women differently at all. Several times, he asks the Urrasti men “Where are the women?” They are amused at the question, and they tell him that women make great wives, but terrible scientists: “[Women] can’t do the math; no head for abstract thought; don’t belong. You know how it is, what women call thinking is done with the uterus! Of course, they’re always a few exceptions, God-awful brainy women with vaginal atrophy.” (73).

When Shevek reveals that 50% of the scientists (and workers in all fields) on his world are women, the Urrasti men become very uncomfortable. They cannot imagine a world in which a man is not made to feel “manly” and a woman is not kept as a feminine object and an object alone.

At the end of one of these gender arguments, Shevek concludes “that he had touched in these men an impersonal animosity that went very deep. Apparently they, like the tables on the ship, contained a woman, a suppressed, silenced, bestialized woman, a fury in a cage. He had no right to tease them. They knew no relation but possession. They were possessed.” (74).

Soon, Shevek comes to realize that the very design of the planet Urras, and the syntax of the Urrasti speech, all help to maintain the binary gender divide, however unintentional (or intentional) the design might be. Aboard his first starship, Shevek notes that the curves and lines on the ship are soft, supple. Even his bunk bed on the star ship is soft and inviting, and he cannot help but have erotic thoughts of yielding women. The language of the Urrasti is as possessive as their nature, as they refer to things as “my hankerchief” or “my wife”, when an Anarresti would say “the hankerchief that I use” or “the woman I share life with”. Shevek does not know of a translation in his language for the possessive pro-nouns Urrasti people are so fond of using.

Overall, LeGuin uses the analogy of a visitor to an Earth-like world to illustrate the cognitive estrangement of Earth-like customs. Through Shevek’s eyes, the reader sees everything backwards, gender included. Everything that is “normal” is odd to Shevek, and the simple nature in which he explains his world makes it seem as real as the Earth-like planet of Urras.

LeGuin, Kroeber, Ursula. The Dispossessed. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. Print.

"Brave New World"- So Close Yet So Far from Utopia

A picture of Richard Stallman, in the style of Che Guevara. 
The title is a play on
"O brave new world / that has such people in it"
from The Tempest and Brave New World.
Date: October 2006
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Huxley’s speculative tale of London in the year A.F. 632 is a Utopian world except for a few distinctive differences. There is the matter of a class system determined even before birth. Fertilized human eggs are chemically treated to be Epsilons, Betas, Alphas, or other derivatives. Once the egg becomes a full-fledged human being, the mental and physical conditioning begins. Children are raised in wards by the State, taught that their god is Ford (as in the Ford that invented the automobile assembly line), and also taught repetitive reasoning in their sleep, such as “Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today” (Huxley 93).

In place of love, there is the pursuit of fun in the form of “the feelies” and drugs like soma. Like in The Giver, the public is unaware of the implications of death or what it really entails, another way to shield citizens from feeling anything real. Similar to both Anthem and The Giver, this dystopia is ruled by a handful of individuals known as Directors. Directors are always male, therefore the gender equality implied by Huxley is severely lacking. The reader need only analyze the sexual dynamic between the genders to come to the conclusion that in Brave New World, women are still beneath men in the social ladder.

Women are required to be sexually available at every turn, and part of that is maintaining a fit and “pneumatic” body. Another burden the women must abide is the responsibility of safe sex. All women carry a belt around, a belt full of different contraceptives. In the book, it is never mentioned that a man must upkeep his body for women, or remember to use contraceptives. Huxley leaves that up to the women.

If a woman (or man) chooses not to be promiscuous, they are seen as socially inept. Given that, there is no marriage in Huxley’s world. If two people are considered a couple, it is prudent for them to begin coupling with anyone and everyone else they can, the sooner the better.

The main female characters in the novel, Lenina and Lydia, are both insipid and promiscuous, a product of their society. Two main male characters in the novel, Bernard and Helmholtz, are likewise products of their society, however, Huxley allows them to question their surroundings and long for a better world. Helmholtz confides in his friend Bernard that he is unhappy, even though he is at the top of the class system as an Alpha and women literally line up to sleep with him: “I’m thinking of a queer feeling I sometimes get, a feeling that I’ve got something important to say and the power to say it---only I don’t know what it is, and I can’t make any use of the power” (Huxley 69). Bernard tries to explain to Lenina what is lacking in their society after she repeats the mantra learned in their childhood, Everybody’s happy nowadays. “Yes," Bernard tells her, "‘Everybody’s happy nowadays.’ We begin giving the children that at five. But wouldn't you like to be free to be happy in some other way, Lenina? In your own way, for example; not in everybody else’s way.” (Huxley 91).

Aldous Huxley
Date: (original upload) May 2007
Transferred from Wikipedia
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Happiness is the main objective of Huxley’s alternative London, but as Bernard and Helmholtz illustrate, their world is far from perfect. Even though there is no war, disease, or poverty, not everyone feels happy because they are too controlled. Everyone’s absolute place in the world is chosen from birth, down to what they’re going to look like, their place in the class system, and where they’re going to work. There are no creative freedoms, and that is what is most stifling about Huxley’s dystopia. Everything else, such as gender and class disparities, follows in the wake of that.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. London: Chatto and Windus, 1932. Print.

Overview of Sci-Fi short Story, "The Machine Stops"

"The Machine Stops"
Source: TheMachineStopsFilm.wordpress.com

In this futuristic short story by E.M. Forster, humanity no longer resides on the surface of the Earth, but far below. The air above is unable to sustain life (or so everyone is led to believe). Human action, need, and desire are guided by the Machine: a super computer that caters to a person’s every wish. Need a hot bath? There’s a button for that. Need to give a lecture about Australian music? There’s a button for that.

Sameness is like a disease that has spread across civilization. Every room in every part of the underground Earth looks the same, everyone speaks the same language and feels the same sort of god-like worship for the Machine. The goal of the people is to eventually ‘be free from the taint of personality; live colorlessly’. Living underground requires certain characteristics, so those babies that are born with athletic traits are euthanized, as an athletic person would never be content with a life of solitary confinement. When people want to visit, they do so via cinamotrophes (3-D images of each other, like video chat). To see someone physically over a great distance, people travel by air-ships. The thought of touching one another or seeing daylight is abhorrent.

Vashti is a conformist, of the highest degree. However, her son, Kuno, has discovered that humanity has lost touch with each other, and with Nature. He visits the surface (without permission from the machine), and supposedly encounters others. Vashti is embarrassed that her son would go against the Machine, and both of them know that his actions will mean his eviction from his room underground (meaning, he will be forced to live above-ground, which will kill him).

Kuno does not care that he will be Homeless. He is passionate about what he experienced on the surface: “"Cannot you see, cannot all you lecturers see, that it is we that are dying, and that down here the only thing that really lives in the Machine? We created the Machine, to do our will, but we cannot make it do our will now. It was robbed us of the sense of space and of the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal act, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it.”

After Kuno’s unscheduled visit to the Earth’s surface is made known to others, above-ground visits are made illegal. Another change is the re-instatement of religion (before it was thought to be perverse to be spiritual in any capacity). The religion that forms is based around the love of the Machine, and its all powerful knowledge and applications.

Themes in this story are plentiful. To begin with, man has lost touch with being an individual. The idea of conformity is one of comfort and pleasure. To be different is dangerous and unheard of. Another theme is man’s acquiescence to technology and the risks and rewards behind that. Technology in the story serves man’s every need so that the people begin to pray to it, considering it a divine being (though they acknowledge time and time again that it is a man-made structure). Is it right to worship something simply because it provides for you, even if it is clothing you, feeding you, keeping you safe? Do those conditions create the need for a spiritual connection?

There is an theme in the story that really resonated with me, and that is man’s ignorance to the past. People perpetuate traditions, habits, and cultural norms without knowing why (often without caring why. The narrator states “Humanity, in its desire for comfort, had over-reached itself. It had exploited the riches of nature too far. Quietly and complacently, it was sinking into decadence, and progress had come to mean the progress of the Machine.”

Once the Machine stops, society breaks almost instantly. People are used to being taken care of, and they do not know how to exist without the thrum of the Machine, and all that it provides for them. As humans equally dependant on technology, I wonder how quietly (or loudly) we would fade after our Machines stopped.