Science Fiction Multiple Choice Exam

Frankenstein (1831) - Mary Shelley

• Frontispiece:

• the monster is handsome/angelic

• he looks like Adam (which makes Victor a creator)

• is the monster truly evil?

• Victor looks guilty, he is running away from his original sin

• his creation may not be a sin, but his actions are

• Victor’s gaze is not directed at creature

• he does not know how to describe creature

• he makes judgements based on his own perceptions

• optics vs. judgement

• he is avoiding the responsibility

• Victor’s crime is abandoning creature

• skeleton/skull: (the creature is a compilation of dead things, resurrection, skeletal leg of the creature, life and death are no longer fundamental binaries)

• victor is a human monster

• he is willing to kill animals to create creature

• Victor standing (life, human), bones (death), creature (somewhere in the middle) - vertical hierarchy

• the creature looks awkward and afraid, almost human

• light from the books: age of enlightenment

• knowledge is a good thing but criticizing excess

• usurped god-like powers; let there be light

Mary Shelley (bio)

• Born 30 August, 1797, London

• Mother: Mary Wollstonecraft (died 11 days after giving birth to Mary)

• Father: William Godwin (remarried and adopted 2 children of his second wife)

• at 16, she meets a romantic poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley

• 1815 she has her first child, who dies a few days later

• 1 year later, she has a son named William

• Mary, Percy, William, Claire travel to Geneva in the spring

• They meet Lord Byron and John Polidori

• The group passed time by reading stories from Fantasmagoriana

• Lord Byron suggested a scary story writing contest: this is where Shelley started writing Frankenstein

Galvanism (Frankenstein)

• De Viribus Electricitatis (1791) by Luigi Galvani: animals have their own internal source of electricity

• Preface of 1831 Frankenstein: “perhaps a corpse would be re-animated; galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might me manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth”

Compositional Influences on Frankenstein

• nighttime conversations at the Villa Diodati

• Mary’s volatile family life

• enlightenment political theory

• Shelley’s mother’s death and the death of her first-born

• John Milton and Christopher Marlowe

• contemporary romantic writers such as S.T Coleridge, Charles Lamb, Lord Byron, Percy Shelley

• Romanticism

What is Romanticism? (Frankenstein)

• a movement (not limited to literature) that emerged in England at the end of the eighteenth century until 1832, the first year of the Reform Bill

• start of Romanticism may be with the French Revolution in 1789

• 1789 publication of William Wordsworth’s and Taylor Coleridge’s “Lyrical Ballads” as the start of romanticism. It’s preface functions as a manifesto of artistic aims

Features of Romantic Literature (Frankenstein)

• innovation and originality

• vernacular, or common language

• breaks the system of compositional rules, or decorum of neoclassical poetry

• subject matter is private or personal, focuses on the interior world of the writer

• “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”

• visionary poetry: the objects and incidents of everyday life are given transcendent meaning

• concerned with nature and it’s relationship with the mind

• contradicts enlightenment emphasis on reason by focusing on the imagination

• isolated individuals: outlaws, rebels, anti-heroes, and Promethean Satanic figures

• Romantics saw human capacity as infinite, and that art should reach for human limits

1818 Frontispiece (Frankenstein)

• The modern Prometheus; foregrounds the mythological, raising issues of genre

• quotation from Paradise Lost

• introduces multiple themes

• highlights how Frankenstein is an intertextual work, that is, a work made up of other texts

Frankenstein Preface

• Written by Percy Shelley, once posed questions about the authorship of Frankenstein

• identifies Frankenstein as a precursor to/early work of science fiction

• genre hybrid; it can also be considered gothic

• proposes the works’ ability to instill virtue in its readership

Volume 1 (Frankenstein)

• novel starts with a letter, epistolary

• this personal mode of translation allows Shelly to instill thematic ideas: the need for sentimental ties and domestic affection

• de-centers victor

The Sea of Ice (1823-4) by Caspar David Friedrich

• geographical extremes

• the power of nature over man

Walton’s Letters pg. 3 (Frankenstein)

• Victor’s influence on Walton is not positive

• they have similar flaws

• characters commit atrocities in loneliness

• allusion to paradise lost

• Does Walton act as a foil to Victor? (Foil: a character who emphasizes the character traits of the protagonist)

• importance of diction

Figurative Language in Victor’s narration

• imagery, metaphor, simile

• Description of Elizabeth (1818): “gay and playful as a summer insect…[a]s lively as a bird’s… the most fragile creature in the world”

• victor’s aggression towards Elizabeth, nature, woman, and mother nature

• psych-analysis, he is not aware of this violence

Victor’s education

• Fatal influence of cornelius agrippa and his father

• powerful language used to describe science

• his education is flawed. Despite coming from a relatively good family, in a good situation, and getting a good education from a university institution, his education is not well rounded or grounded in critical thought

• Allusions to Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus

Sir Humphry Davy on Chemistry

• “searched to the bottom of the ocean, for the purpose of allaying the restlessness of his desires, or of extending and increasing his power”

• “ruler of all the elements”

• “science has bestowed upon him powers which may be almost called creative”

• “modify and change the beings surrounding him… as a master, active with his own instruments”

• “acquainted with the most profound secrets of nature”

The Principle of Life (Frankenstein)

• vitalist debate: 1814-19

• very public series of debates between two surgeons from London’s Royal College of Surgeons

• John Abernethy (vitalist)

• William Lawrence (materialist): Shelley family’s personal physician

Debates About Animal Vivisection (Frankenstein)

• animals could be dissected alive, in theaters, without the use of anesthesia

• 1809 Thomas Erskine proposed a bill to the House of Lords to outlaw malicious and cruel treatment towards animals

• a bill prohibiting animal cruelty did not pass until 1822

• debate of vivisection is even more fore-grounded in the 1831 Frankenstein text

• description of creature being made is violent

Description of Creature (Frankenstein)

• philosophical questions about parts and wholes

• can a whole have different emergent properties than its parts?

• organic wholes and forms; Emmanuel Kant, critique of judgement

• notion of emergence in 19th century chem: the creation of new compounds

• questions of aesthetics

• systemic principles of the study of the fine arts

• the nature of beauty

• victor as a failed artist

• beauty as sublime, too much greatness

• victor’s vision of beauty

• uncanny description, he describes large details as aesthetic but the small details aren’t quite right

• creature and victor mirroring each other

• Blazon conventions: he is describing creature from head to toe

• desire creates a unique relationship between them

• he foes not want a heteronormative relationship for reproduction, something sexual between him and creature

• intimacy; hurting each other

Allusion to Doctor Faustus

• faustus raises devils/demons

• developing the monstrous claims of his beliefs

• je is interested in the occult or dark ambitions

• Victor has strands of occult thought from before the enlightenment

• victor acts as absolute authority/God but he excuses his mistakes with the actions/teachings/shortcomings of the lessons other people have taught him

• he is happy to account for success but quick to dismiss any fault

• human nature as mutable

• despite not having god’s powers, he intentionally creates a monster because he wants something evil

• he is trying to create something large, strong, extreme

• he goes to extremes in everything he does

• Victor and Creature as interrelated subconscious

Language of Power (Frankenstein)

• the alchemists promised eternal life and power over the elements

• language of power lures Victor, he desires power and finds it in alchemist science

• novel critiques the powerful language of scientific texts

• masculine use of domination over feminine creation

• Sir Humphry Davy

Comparison: Frankenstein and Good Hunting

“it took almost a whole year to complete the task”

• Yan chokes the governor’s son as a way to resist

• she was stronger because she was turned into a cyborg

• she was replaced, part by part, something terrible happened and they use that to do terrible

• creature also murders with choking

• “my flat became a workshop”

• Victor’s apartment first and then the cottage

• “but her eyes were still the same, and they shone in the moonlight with excitement”

• creature strangles as opposed to Victor' tearing apart

• judgements as incomplete

• Creature wants what Yan wants; to find other creatures like them

Creature’s education

• creature learns by way of his senses

• Empiricism of John Locke; argues that knowledge comes from the senses; posteriori as opposed to priori

• data from the senses is reflected upon other sensory data to form ideas

• tabula rasa; a blank slate; to which fill up with experiences

• Creature learns virtues from watching the DeLacey family (impressed by their “gentle manners”)

• learns morality by listening to Safie’s lessons

• creature also learns from literature (Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther; Plutarch’s Lives; Milton, Paradise Lost)

• The literature informs him of his sense of self, is he an ethical subject because of these works?

• creature ends up sounding very similar to Victor at the end of the text

• Does victor make cognitive change through the text? Does he benefit from interaction with others?

• he realizes virtues must be practiced

• evil as a mutilated desire for good

• creature’s attempts to destroy human ideals: justice, beauty, friendship, intimacy: because he does not have it himself

Creature’s Experience with Paradise Lost (Frankenstein)

• he takes it as truth as Victor takes the alchemist writing as truth

• Adam (creature) eve (his request)

• but he also identifies with satan

• he has no answers about his identity aside from Victor’s journal

• creature’s anger towards his creator comes from this

• burns things down like satan

• his thoughts mirror paradise lost

• proves that his education and personality is built on these texts

• he takes his emotions and turns them into destruction

• Paradise Lost is about a loving creation, while victor’s is a violent creation

• the idea of humans passing judgement on the situation is out of context

• only god could pass a correct judgement

• the complexity of the text is portrayed through the drawings

Henry Clerval’s Role in the Text (Frankenstein)

• beneficial effects on Victor’s life

• different kind of romantic subjectivity

• clerval’s inter-subjectivity

• romantic imagination

• he has sentimentality and reason in proportion to imagination

• he is a balanced individual; contrasting Victor

• his being relies on the people around him

• intrinsically social

• other characters influence his subjectivity

The Sublime (Frankenstein)

• - vastness in dimension/quality

• massively powerful

• obscure

• giant structures or ruins, natural phenomena, disasters, etc

• nature as unknowable, frightening, awe-inspiring

• delightful horror

• an aesthetic experience of terror that is nonetheless pleasurable

• terror to fear to astonishment to admiration to reverence and respect

• Victor never gets to the point of reverence and respect

• he destroys and usurps the power of nature

• he believes that humans are the dominators of nature

• anthropocentric

• Shelley’s description of the Alps and the storm

• Creature himself is a creation of nature and the sublime itself

The Kantian Sublime

• the mathematical sublime: denoting vastness of magnitude in terms of size and number

• the dynamic sublime: owing to objects of overwhelming terror that incite feelings of human hopelessness

• almost exclusively natural and originates in the human subject

“You must create a female for me” Frankenstein

• creature’s demand for a mate echoes Paradise Lost: texts as formative to subjectivity

• creature desires social and sexual companionship

• is he justified in asking for this?

Robbing Graves in the 19th Century (Frankenstein)

• when Frankenstein was composed, cadavers were in high demand at medical colleges

• medical students often funded their education by selling cadavers (body-snatching)

• in 1810 the Anatomical Society

• 1828 infamous West Port or Burke and Hare murders took place (murdering people to sell their bodies as cadavers)

• Anatomy Act of 1832

(Un)making the Mate (Frankenstein)

• describing Orkney Islands; relationship between environment, psychological factors, behaviours/thoughts/actions

• Questioning the validity of his behaviour? Should he have made a mate in the first place? Was destroying it the best option?

• “filthy process”

• could be another injustice committed against Creature

• The Orkneys: dangerous and violent place for creation; extremes, cutting off social ties

• Barren: not a fruitful creation

• What does he think creating a creature somewhere miserable will do to the creature?

• creation is reflected in the creator

• misogyny; associating the female creature with a serpent

• giving a female creature power over human men was unacceptable

• victor wants power over women

  He fears the female reproducing

• with creature he wanted the power over creation

• he sees himself as the scourge of the human race

• his ideas are not wholly right or wrong

• Creature was denied a partner, soon Victor will be denied Elizabeth; does he facilitate this?

Clerval’s Murder (Frankenstein)

• Justine Moritz; villagers have all condemned Victor long before he steps foot on the island

• destruction of the mate closely related to Clerval’s murder

• he denies Victor of companionship, foreshadowing the murder of Elizabeth

• victor’s insanity parallels demonic possession

Victor’s Wedding and Elizabeth’s Murder (Frankenstein)

• Victor refuses to see what creature plans to do on his wedding night

• union seems doomed before it begins (Victor’s secret)

• Victor as betraying Elizabeth

• shortly after her death, creature takes his father and friends; driving him to isolated insanity

• her death is a confession of infidelity

• exploring another creature’s body

• Victor thinks creature’s mate would have autonomy despite removing Elizabeth’s autonomy

• Victor delights in a side sense of misery

• maybe he is willing to sacrifice his happiness

• alludes to his knowledge in her death

• marriage and consummation is denied

• creature murders which takes the place of heterosexual reproduction

Victor’s Pursuit of Vengeance

• parallels Creatures devotion to torment Victor

• AND victor’s devotion to create Creature

• views his vengeance as a holy pursuit; guided by the ghosts of his family/friends

• Has victor learned anything from this experience?

• he wanted nothing to do with his family when they were alive yet uses them as an excuse for revenge

• he values their presence only as ghosts

Bildungsroman

• “novel of formation”

• the subject of these novels is in the development of the protagonists mind and character, in the passage from childhood through various experiences - often through a spiritual crisis - and into maturity

Creature’s Final Words (Frankenstein)

• claims he suffered in the act of tormenting Victor

• creature’s conduct is monstrous because he knows he is doing something wrong

• Creature’s vengeance parallels Victor’s creation

• creature has become a monster in his own eyes

• ascending the funeral pile; heroic death

Old Magic Versus New Magic (Good Hunting)

• fantasy and sci fi

• you always want what you don’t have

• self preservation and destruction

• similar or inspired history

• desire for things forbidden

• generic hybridity, resists the label of sci fi

• energetic technology (steam)

• how this conflicts with other energy

• the energy of colonialism

• hybrid state in terms of identity

• evolution between youth with magic and limited technology to the development of technology and the loss of magic

• future oriented text but focuses heavily on the past

• old magic will be resurrected in modern form (evolution)

• traditional stories about evil Hulijing but instead it is a powerful, westernized, male rhetoric

• takes past traditions and rewrites it through technology

Steam Fueled (Good Hunting)

• thermodynamic creatures

• flow of energy

• energy is energy. What matters is the use of technology for the development of life

• how is this steam becoming organic energy? (life force)

• Yan recreating herself finally gives her personal autonomy and control over her body to rekindle magic

• lifeline for the mechanical parts

• giving agency to something not alive; vitality to inorganic things

• life is a debatable category, it is not always black and white

• Yan’s consciousness and physical process continue through change

• Yan is a hybrid being, ongoing identity changes

Colonial Destruction (Good Hunting)

• the technology of the colonizer took their magic, history, and culture

• reclaiming technology to use it against the colonizer

• not revolution, making subversive changes to the system

• especially because she is the first changed

• positive and negative consequences of colonialism

• colonialism took lots of autonomy away from lots of characters, the end of the story helps return it

Connection between Yan and Liang (Good Hunting)

• non-romantic

• Yan’s experiences with men prove her distrust

• magical connection between the two

• their understanding of the world changes with each other

• part 1 focuses on fantasy, part 2 is more sci-fi directed

Hard Science Fiction

• must be scientifically supported

Steam Punk

• technological worlds with steam-dominant technology

• steam functioning computers

• techno-fantasy

• heavily reliant on magic/fantasy

Silk Punk

• classical east-asian antiquity, referring to organic materials present in Asia (bamboo, coconut, silk)

• style inspired by asian-pacific history and culture

• referring to Origami involved with technology

• turning something cultural into a reinvented thing

• salvaging traditional beauty

The Time Machine (1895)

H.G Wells

H.G Wells

• born Sept, 26 1866 at Bromley Kent

• died august 13 1946 in London

• Father: Joseph Wells, a former gardener, pro cricketeer, and a coach

• Mother Sarah was a domestic servant

• Joseph was a skeptic and free thinker

• Sarah had fundamentalist religious views

• Herbert, “Herbie”, was encouraged by his father to read and write. When he was 13 he wrote a 90 page essay titled The Desert Daisy

• a leg injury forced Herbert out of school and into the work force

• his mother got him a job as a apprenticed draper, which he hated

• accepted to a university and studied science with T.H Huxley

Influence of Huxley on Wells

• learned evolutionary theory

• Darwin’s bulldog

• deeply fascinated with the idea of life as an evolutionary process

Higher-Dimensional Geometry

• Wells was interested in the theories and mathematical formulas of higher dimensions

• heard E.A Hamilton-Gordon’s speech about “The Fourth Dimension”. This talk inspired his work of The Time Machine, despite Gordon arguing the fourth dimension is not time

• Wells adopted the fourth dimension as unified space time

• “the normal present is a three-dimensional section of a four-dimensional universe” (From 1931 preface of The Time Machine)

• the only difference between the time and space dimensions is that consciousness moves through time

• these idea’s were crucial to Einstein’s theory of relativity

Evolution

1885, he delivered a speech “The Man of the Year Million”

• evolution is universally agreed

• does it fit the soul? Certainly fits the body

• ape-like ancestors molded by circumstances into man

• because of these changes, it can be assumed that man will continue changing until it becomes an entirely different being

• what will this being be?

• humans as a finite production that have arrived from millions of years of evolution, and will eventually evolve into a species we cannot foresee

Education (The Time Machine)

• left college in 1887 without a degree, eventually gains one in zoology in 1890

• he was unhappy with mentors in physics and wanted to write more

• wanted to study Carlyle, Shelley, Blake, and Ruskin

• tragic football accident left him bedridden for months

• lived at Uppark, where he had ample time to read

Uppark House

• built around 1690

• owners were somewhat eccentric widowed sisters, ensured the country house did not change with the century

• isolated from urban influences, life went on as it did in 1690

• elaborate dinners, shooting, hunting, balls, etc.

• he likened it to being locked in time; anachronism. Undoubtedly inspired The Time Machine

• house had a world-class library

• hierarchical lifestyle of Uppark also had an influence on Wells

• servants living downstairs, gentry living upstairs

• in 1810, a subterranean group of passage ways began to connect the servant hallways with the kitchen, they were ventilated with deep shafts which opened to the outside of the house (Morlock Dwellings)

After Uppark

• 1890 Wells began to write

• had success in 1891 when he had an article published “The Rediscovery of the Unique”

• later the same year he published “Zoological regression”

• no one can forecast whether man’s permanent ascendancy will stand true to time

H.G Wells Marriage

• married his cousin Isabelle, not well suited

• three years later, he marries Amy Catherine Robbins, one of his students

• amy encouraged his literary pursuits and stayed with him when his health began to fail in 1893

• his health forced him to resign for teaching and turn to journalism which improved his writing

“The Time Traveler’s Story”

• 1894 W.E Henley hires Wells to write a series of articles for National Observer

• wrote 7 speculative articles which were very popular

• Henley prompted Wells to write for his new journal New Review

• Wells rewrote his articles, shaping them as narrative, and wrote “The Time Traveler’s Story”

• immediately accepted for publication and released as “The Time Machine”

Wells on Writing Science Fiction

• ought to consider the possibilities for the future more than we do

• the future is hardly speculated

• in the present, we are helpless in the grip of circumstance and I think we ought to strive to shape our destinies”

• things that change the human race happen every day, but they are passed over

Opening of The Time Machine

• Why does the novel begin with a dinner party?

• What is the importance of its frame?

• Is it a “story in quotation marks”?

• talking about late 19th century math and science- higher dimensional geometry- suggesting that time and space are inseparable; may indicate that we can travel through time as we do space

• re-telling of the time traveler’s story

• the audience doesn’t actually get to hear the perspective of the time traveler, just the perspective of someone hearing his story

• inset story in the future

• circular

• similar formatting to Frankenstein

• supernatural element about the description of time

• there are phenomena in nature that we do not understand and because of that misunderstanding it feels supernatural

• highlighting the limitations of science and knowledge

Time Traveling

• the machine is likened to a ghost

• sometimes the time traveler is also described as a ghost

• The Morlocks are also described as ghosts

• this ghastly imagery connects the three of them, proving their similarities and the constructions of danger apparent in each of them

• “a larger edition of the little mechanism”

• Time Travelers reference to suicide; signifies the fear of the unknown, the action of time travelling becomes part of your destiny

• Wells watches the mutability of landscapes and civilizations, Wells is imitating the potentially destructive nature of technology

The Sphinx

• What is the importance of having the Sphinx be the first thing to greet the time traveler in the future?

• decadency versus decay

• chronological disjointedness

• meta-fiction

• cannibalism

• connecting whiteness to the Morlocks

• intellectual challenges and puzzles

• futurity as a site of question, not answers

• half-beat, half-human fears: darwinism

• science fiction not being displaced from mythology

• questioned by the Sphinx, riddles

• starts on 4 legs, then 3 legs, then 3: morning, young; afternoon, adolescence; evening, old)

• Sphinx eats you if you don’t answer the riddle correctly

The Eloi

• Why liken the Eloi to 18th century consumptive?

• Why describe their hands as tentacles?

• diminutive, frail, beautiful, adorned in silk robes and well-crafted sandals

• The Time Traveler calls the Eloi “fools” who interpret reality with mythology rather than science

• associated with flowers

• lack of intelligence but still pretty

• lack of sex distinguishing features

• evolution has lost the secondary sex traits

• Victorians as afraid to talk about sexuality and used flowers as euphemisms

• the Scientist asks to take the flowers; Gynecomania, female part of the flower is odd, maybe ambiguous, but he is emotionally attached to it

• compares himself as a school master coming to his children

• he decides that the Eloi and their civilization have regressed

• ideas of eugenics

• degenerative ideas associated with racism

Tentacle hands

• to make them seem alien

• invertebrate creatures in past evolution

• backsliding or retrogression

• hands are associated with technological development

• these creatures lost their ability to invent, think, create

“Zoological Retrogression”

• advancement has be fitful and uncertain

• rapid progress has been followed by rapid degeneration or extinction

• a form of lowly degraded life has in its degradation often happened upon some fortunate discovery and has risen

• well-adapted primitive forms according to the environment

• backsliding, retrogression, degradation

• if humans don’t adapt, if humans regress, another creature will surpass humanity

• the coming beast

The Time Traveler’s Fits

Why does he lapse into fits of panic, anger, and confusion? Doesn’t this contradict him as a rational scientist?

• he is so overwhelmed that he overlooks the Morlocks watching him; mirroring Victor’s blindness (Frankenstein)

• his fits highlight the dangers of reckless scientific endeavors

• dismantles his identity as a rational scientist

• makes the readers question his authority

Weena

What does Weena represent to the Time Traveler?

How might she comment on his state in the present?

• Time Traveler saves her from drowning. The other Eloi are so indolent that they can’t, or wont

• Weena can’t speak about the dark or system of tunnels

• the truth about the dark and tunnels is embedded in the text, his narration is oppressive

• she represents all the things he doesn’t have: companionship, futurity, children, peace, joy

• artificial selection

• Empire and imperialist readings of the text

• he claims twisted responsibility and ownership over her

• he both sees her as child and wife

• represents the indigenous people that imperialists have controlled

• he wants to take her as a treasure and use her as his own

The Morlocks

• likened to ghosts

• lower invertebrate

• misidentified until pg. 36

• questioning his rationality as a scientist

• supernatural events versus events of nature that we can’t explain

• as per evolution, humans come from apes and returned to apes in retrogression (Morlocks as ape-like)

• ghosts of the past

• the morlocks seek to understand through touch; more primitive as compared to empirical observation

• Morlock evolution having to do with the hierarchical structure of Victorian society; the morlocks as “have-nots” who have evolved to embody subterranean species; the working class

• Time Traveler sees their feast

Morlocks as Cannibals

Why does The Time Traveler agree with the Eloi?

• despite him being more similar to the Morlocks, he agrees with the Eloi

• he sides with the Eloi because he is navigating the hierarchical structure of victorian society

• he is on the side of the aristocracy

• even in the future with non-humans he chooses to support the ‘wealthy’ even though he is fundamentally more similar to the Morlocks

• the barrier between Morlocks and Eloi are evolutionarily separated, developed into different species

• The cannibalism is an agreement between two evolutionarily distinct species

• cannibalism is not as absurd as he makes it seem

• his repressed critical thinking makes him a bad scientist

• The Time Traveler watching their feast imbues him with hatred towards them

The Place of Green Porcelain

• suggests futility to all supposedly great human endeavors and human existence

• the past contained here is of the future to the Time Traveler

• he attempts to find technology and leaves with an iron rod and matches

• he has retrogressed himself

• the future is a time out of, or beyond human existence

The Iron Rod and Decaying Books

• conflict with these beings has brought his animal side to life

• he has regressed in resorting to digging through artifacts of technology in an attempt to find weapons

• the decaying books represent the future as out of human history

• the literature and scientific writings of humans destroyed alongside their memory

• the uselessness of human superiority is highlighted here

• the violence of humanity is underscored in his desire to seek weapons

Building a Fire

• caveman

• fire as an absolute technology

• harmful anachronism: he introduces something which can and does catastrophically destroys the future

• Weena’s death in the fire

• the use of technology (and fire) is lost in the future; it is unnecessary for their civilization. And when he does carelessly show the Eloi his matches they are fascinated

• Time Traveler himself as a harmful anachronism: good physicist but a bad ecologist/biologist

Into the Darkness (The Time Machine)

How exactly did Weena die? Do we know she died? What is the effect of her death on the Time Traveler?

• I think it’s safe to assume Weena died

• he uses his careless and violent actions to produce a permanent effect on someone else

• he knows he can get away with it because of the drowning incident; death is inevitable for the Eloi

• usurping the divine right to death

• his ongoing caution towards the Eloi is thrown away when he starts the fire

• utilizing chaos

• releases violence through his anachronism

• her death could potentially answer where he went at the end of the story, he could be attempting to save her

Recovering the Machine (The Time Machine)

• returns to the Sphinx to recover the machine

• views the Eloi as cattle; ironically the first thing he will do upon his return to the present time is consume meat

• he laments the transitory nature of human intelligence; once it is no longer necessary it is thrown aside

• Morlocks instinctually acting as Mechanics; possible less regressed than the Eloi; another similarity between them and Time Traveler

The Dying Earth (The Time Machine)

• continues traveling to the future, witnessing mass extinctions and the sun burning out

• carnivorous creatures inhabit the Earth; crabs and flying saurian monsters

• atmospheric conditions are unsuitable for human life

• the giant crabs are the creatures at the top of the food chain; as compared to our expectation of sophistication

• the crab touches him as a moment of intimacy

• Time Traveler’s desire to each meat parallels the crabs coming to eat him

• he travels short amounts of time to avoid them while still wanting to see them

• we cannot avoid this cosmic/logical future

• humans having relative control over themselves; the future as deterministic but being able to make free-willed decisions within human ability

• morbid curiosity to see the complete extinction

Epilogue (The Time Machine)

• What does the story claim about Earth and humanity?

• Where did he go?

• auditors refuse to believe him; repression

• he is going to another time he does not belong

• gone for 3 years; if you can time travel you can return without anyone knowing you were gone, so is he dead or intentionally staying away? Maybe because he is frustrated at their lack of belief?

• epilogue lists possibilities

• usually an epilogue answers questions but this one gives more

• already been given the ultimate epilogue (mass extinction)

• searching for answers in a human time-frame

• mutual tenderness and gratitude does not show itself through the Time Traveler

• intelligence and curiosity over tenderness

• Hillyer’s voice contradicts the Time Traveler; the humanistic/nihilistic presence of science

Cosmic Trauma (The Time Machine)

• humans were not supposed to witness the end of life

• Time Traveler does not really belong anywhere in time anymore

• because he witnessed the end, he is technically backsliding anywhere he does

• he himself is anachronistic everywhere

• he becomes nomadic within time

• parallel between the start and end of the world; tentacles

• you cannot pull yourself from the eroding nature of time

the last universal common ancestor

• states that all life came from the same place

• parallels with life ending in the same place

Carcinization 1916

• says that crustaceans will dominate the earth

• the supposed inversion of evolution

• this evolution may be seen in a technical sphere

Sphinx, Butterfly, White Symbols of Death (The Time Machine)

• omnipresence of death in evolution

• evolution moves through death itself

• death is the energy which moves evolution forwards

• the flowers have died but the idea of humanity continues

• although nothing survives, the omnipresence of humanity does

• Eloi: wealthy, aristocracy, creative, peace; butterfly

• Morlocks: carnivorous, underclass; crabs

Binti (2015)

Nnedi Okorafor

Sacred Fire (2019)

Nnedi Okorafor

• takes place between Binti and Binti: Home but it was actually the last published

Nnedi Okorafor Biography

• Born 8th April 1974 in Cincinnati Ohio

• her parents are Nigerian immigrants who settled in America because they could not return due to the civil war

• stand out track and tennis athlete

• excelled in science, math, entomology

• diagnosed with scoliosis at 13; underwent surgery at 19 that left her paralyzed from the waist down for several months

• during this time she began to write SF short stories in the margins of a SF book

• after physical therapy she relearned how to walk, but she was unable to compete as an athlete anymore

• She has a degree in journalism, MA, and Ph. D in English studies

• comic books, notably Black Panther

• Wrote her first SF book called Broken Places and Outer Spaces

Afrofuturism

intersection of imagination, technology, the future, and liberation. An imagining of possible Black futures through a cultural lens.

• encourage experimentation, reimagine identities, and promote liberation

• Afrofuturists define notions of blackness for today and the future

• combines elements of science fiction, fantasy, historical fiction, Afrocentricity, speculative fiction and magic realism with non-western beliefs

• re-envisioning of the past and speculation about potential futures

• Nnedi Okorafor does not identify with the Afrofuturist title; she believes it reduces the experiences of African people to an African-American perspective

Africanfuturism and Africanjujuism

Africanfuturism

• emphasizes Africa and the Black diaspora

• “blacks on the continent and in the black diaspora are all connected through blood, spirit, history, and the future

• more directly rooted in African culture, history, mythology, and point of view, it does not privilege or center the west

Africanjujuism

• subcategory of fantasy that combines real and existing African spiritual cosmologies with the imaginative

Opening (Binti)

• suggests compatability between science and spiritualism; future and past; technology and magic; and innovation and tradition

• (Africanjujuism)

• Jellyfish dedication: intelligence is not limited to humans, or even brains (Okwu)

• Does the technology work mechanically or is there some kind of divine intervention? (Like when she prays that the transporter works. Maybe the answer here is both or interplay between the two)

• Contingency versus necessity

• to what extent is Binti involved in this or is it all predetermined?

• Binti as dismantling the traditional expectations of her people, and particularly, women

• Otjize keeps Binti grounded, even in the midst of interstellar technology (calling up a current)

• identity and tradition as interrelated

• the clay of the land protects them (healing properties as well)

On the Shuttle

• Africa is not a monolithic continent, multitudes of different people with their own customs

• interethnic, religious, political tension between people; if not, racism

• touching her hair on the shuttle; her hair will soon become okuoko, connection between body and technology, body and culture

• dramatization of translation

• linguistic differences is a metaphor for physiological and cultural differences

• diplomacy is more than linguistic

• in the absence of physical change, diplomacy cannot happen

• touching her hair is a violation of her identity; and an intrusion of the sacred space of identity

• patterns braided into her hair; relates to African-Americans braiding maps into their hair while escaping being enslaved

• family history and culture in her hair inscribes her history which makes it function as technology

Astrolabs and Edans

• the edan is both ancient and a piece of alien technology; collapses past and future

• Darko Suvin’s Novum: a strange piece of futuristic technology that reflects on present day and its conditions

• Astrolabes and Edans, despite their ancientness, suggest cellular technologies

• connections between humans and technology; a necessary relationship in a technologically advancing world

• this technology plays a constitutional role in human identities and the human condition

• Binti feels like her identity lies in her Astrolabe and the possession of her edan

The Meduse

• described like jellyfish

• no centralized nervous system; stingers; gelatenous

• epitomize the inhuman, reflecting on dehumanization of the other and “the enemy”

• although they are powerful and warlike, they are also fragile

• abject alien who’s differences will have to be embraces and incorporated in order to move past warfare

• mooj-ha ki-bira: The Great Wave

• invokes questions about who the true instigators of the conflict are and how these actions are validated by either side

Binti’s Identity

• the edan represents the puzzle of her identity

• falling apart and putting it back togehter

• understanding the edan will supposedly help understand her identity

• addressing trauma: what happened on the ship

The Ship Attack (Binti)

• attacked because of the relationship with Oomza Uni

• stolen stinger; proves that the humans are willing to and able to remove cultural belongings

• colonization

• act of wat is a retaliation against a sort of military institution

• critiques the flaws of the corporate structure of university

• the university acts as a military enterprise of cultural items; maybe this is why they feel justified to steal the stinger

• Does mooj-ha ki-bira become justified because of this?

• tension between middle-eastern people and northern african people

• no open diplomacy between Meduse and humans; the necessity to understand their hive-mind

• 2 individuals at the University were punished; they may have attacked a ship out of the belief of an inter-connected community

Okwu

• Heru’s killing as a source of Binti’s trauma, it must be incorporated into herself to deal with it; signified by intimacy with Okwu

• Trauma as an act that your brain isn’t prepared for

• trauma as an embodied experience through transformation and healing

• Okwu is aggressive; underscoring Binti’s need to heal from trauma for “the enemy” for personal and collective healing

• Okwu and Binti’s relationship is the basis for communication between humans and Meduse

• Otjize heals the Meduse; a type of symbiosis

Master Harmonizer

• can call up currents and build astrolabes

• play diplomatic roles

• communicators who attempt to bridge differences

• Binti specifically is mentally and corporeally transformed by those she encounters

• harmonizing is not easy, tremendous strife and chaos internally and externally

• harmonizing as a sacrifice

Education

• emphasis on Oomza Uni makes education a focal point

• Binti as a bildungsroman

• the process of learning to live in our own skin

• a changing body

• questioning and finding identity

• education as a military institution

• questioning the positive influence on an education based around violence

• Ethicality of Professor Okpala

The Subject of Africanfuturism (Binti)

Subject; the self that is formed by one’s mind, body, language, culture, technology, practices, etc.

• subjects are not whole or singular, integrated or independent

• Binti’s subjectivity characterized with multiplicity, transformation, differences, and ecological symbiosis

• the subject is reliant on the object

• identity is less important than action

• individual and collective experiences

• her hair becomes Okuwoko; signifying her becoming part-meduse

• she applies “foreign” otjize to her okuwoko, indicating the simultaneous tradition and change. Emphasizing the importance of change for survival

Binti: Home (2017)

Nnedi Okorafor

An Enyi Zinariya Proverb

• sacred fire begins with a proverb

• Paratext: refer to all the supplementary, bracketing texts that are situated around the main text of the work; must be close-read because they influence the function of the text

• bridge can refer to one’s path or trajectory through life, one’s self, or more specifically Binti herself, given that she acts as a bridge between cultural, racial, and species differences

• a proverb is a pithy saying that transmits wisdom/advice

• allusion to a fictional body of proverbs, that do not exist (common in SF, Lovecraft)

• proverbs play a critical role in world-building

• creates an aura of authority and truth and can help the reader achieve the suspension of disbelief

• a willing cessation of the reader’s skepticism towards fictional and fantastical narratives and their features

The Golden Age Sci-Fi Model

• problems that are solved by a hero through scientific discovery

• cyber punk writers in 1980’s changes the homogenous nature of sci fi

• golden age tended to be homogenous which doesn’t accurately represent our world let alone a futuristic one

• white savior complex; also present in romanticism

Sacred Fire and Diaspora

• soil here has multivalent meanings; it recalls Binti’s otjize, the Himba homeland, her home Earth, and her social situatedness

• displacement and dislocation turn Binti into a ghost

• she is deprived of her land, society, and traditions

• she is subject to a process of decorporealization and loss of identity

• Diaspora; immigration, spatial and cultural dislocation, losing old and making new homes

• Home is not just a place; it is tied to one’s mind and body

Binti and Intersectional Differences

• differences read through different tenses: race, ethnic, cultural, religion, sexual, gender

• overemphasizing one kind of difference runs the risk of being aribtrary and oversimplifying

• asked to think about who is othered in multiple ways; who multiple differences intersect

• Trans or queer reading of Binti

• is it possible to look at this text through only one lens?

Edans, Identity, and Trauma

• Binti’s name is a relic that safeguards her identity

• When she opens her edan she is discovering her trauma and anger with Heru’s death

• reflectivity between Edan and self, operating the former makes a portal into the latter

• We discover trauma, rupture, and dislocation-surprisingly- as fundamental parts of the self rather than incidents befalling it

Mathematics (Binti)

• communication

• transcending language to equal all people

• math produces everything

• connection to reality

• predates the universe

• synthetic, math applied in many places

• she uses math and treeing as a form of healing

• Alan turning: nature, plants, flowers can all be described by math

• Idealism vs. realism; math helps connect these

The Desert as a Setting (Binti)

• time and place narrative transpires

• Okwu reiterates stereotypes about the desert (barren, death, unfit for life)

• we discover an ecosystem that allows its inhabitants to survive (Alghaza, beetles, Uso ogo, blue lizard)

• bespeaks Binti’s ability as a desert-dwelling Himba, to survive and thrive in harsh environments

• Nomadism; technology; spiritualism; wisdom; ecological associations; community

Role of the desert (Binti)

• fundamental to her identity

• transformational

• Identity also derives from the way that community helps shape us

Tideline (2007)

Elizabeth Bear

Elizabeth Bear Bio

both sept. 22, 1971

• native new englander

• journalist, media industry reporter, technical writer of microbiological reports, stable-hand, import/export manager, donut maker

“Tideline” history

• originally appeared in SF magazine in June 2007

• won several awards

Opening (Tideline)

• “Chalcedony wasn’t built for crying”

• something worth crying over, machines learning to develop emotions OR are the audiences giving her emotion?

• “inferno heat”

• conventions of SF

• deconstruction versus rebuilding

• Chalcedony as a vessel for civilization through knowledge

• post-apocolyptic, nuclear holocaust

• the lack of physical capacity to cry, but machines doing things they weren’t built to do

• storytelling, artisan, mother

• maybe she can feel emotions but cannot express them

• narrow-minded of humans to believe that the other beings are incapable of emotions

• sentience may not be required for art; is that good art?

• potential need to learn emotions to fit into society

Chalcedony

• semiprecious stone, lapidary work: a cryptocrystalline sub-species of quartz (a true quartz, some disseminated goal quartz), lustre near was, transparent or translucent

• in modern lapidary work, different names according to varieties of color/structure

• possibility to take on different shapes

• robots are constantly learning to do things out of expectation

• tendency to change

• quartz alludes to jewelry making

• likens her to a stone; changed or enriched by fire

• her name implies her importance

• vessel for the transmission, ironically, of humanity and culture in the future

• fathers and retains important things and information

• she functions as a library

• Medieval style dark age/rebirth

Chalcedony and Gender

Chalcedony is female. What are the implications of this choice? Why would a machine be given a gender?

• opposing the masculine conventions of war

• evolution as a process of recombination which gives something new to something old

• female gendered war machines

• robots as gender, deconstructs the need for gender to be associated with strict biological conventions

• presumably, no reproductive organs, female detaching from notions of biology

• subverting lovecraft’s fatalist view of biology

• gender as a performance, function, or role that is played/simulated, not a material or biological essence

“Annealed” (Tideline)

1. to set on fire, kindle, aflame

2. to subject to the action of fire; to alter in any way with heat; to fire or bake earthenware, fuze ores, or glaze a surface

3. to burn in colours upon glass, or earthenware, or metal, to enamel by encaustic process

   a. toughen anything, made brittle from the action of fire. by exposure to a continuous and diminished heat, or other equivalent process

   b. to cool down from a great heat

   c. applied to the action of frost

4. to toughen, temper

5. Microbiol. To combine to form a double-strand nucleic acid

• suggests that Chalcedony was formed in the heat of battle

• Microbial definition suggests information transmission and conferring to the afterlife

• biologically passing on DNA

• notion of death; evolution contingent on frath

• figurative DNA encoded into stories

• DNA being adapted and recombined to pass through the future

• Stories being combined and adapted

• is biological evolution fundamentally different than information transmission?

• collapse between machine and biological entities