Taught by Prof. Sadia Khatri

This is an entirely-online asynchronous course. I am not quite sure what level of notes I’ll keep here yet. For starters, here is the course description.

By depicting invented worlds that differ in some way from the real world, fantastika pushes us to interrogate our present lives, politics, and social structures. […] Through diverse literary texts, and some films, we will explore imagined and extraordinary terrains, characters, cultures, ecologies, genders, languages, races, histories, and technologies. We will ask, what does the unreal reveal about our real lives? 

Resources

• Google Doc Syllabus is HERE
• Google Drive Readings Folder is HERE

Required Texts

• Vajra Chandrasekera, The Saint of Bright Doors ~400 pages
• Miéville, China. The City & The City ~336 pages
• Okorafor, Nnedi. Binti ~96 pages
• Le Guin, Ursula. Left Hand of Darkness ~300 pages
  Mondal, Mimi. His Footsteps, Through Darkness and Light ~27 pages

Not Required but we will read from

• Aguda, Pemi. Ghostroots ~400 pages 
• Enriquez, Mariana. A Sunny Place for Shady People: Stories ~272 pages
• Link, Kelly. Magic for Beginners 

Reading by Week

1. Week 1 — Introduction to SFF and fantasy, our approach to this class
   • Attebery, Brian. “Fantasy as mode, genre, formula.” Chapter 1 of Strategies of Fantasy.]
   • Watch: Sadi’s intro on this class, and first week’s exercise
   • Watch: Sadi’s summary of class logistics
   • Watch: A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès (~15 min)
   • Watch: A Trip to the Moon: Film History #1 (12 min)
   • Bonus: Watch: Kim Stanley Robinson: Science Fiction is the Realism of Our Time
2. Week 2 (Sept 8-14) — The presence of something uncanny
   • Thakur, Sanjana. “Aishwarya Rai.”
   • Enriquez, Mariana. “My Sad Dead”
   • (optional) Le Guin, Ursula. “Introduction”, Left Hand of Darkness. 
   • (optional) Le Guin, Ursula. “The carrier bag theory of fiction.”
   • Watch: Sadi’s intro to Close Reading and Making Notes
   • Watch: Sadi’s close reading of the two stories: changing rules, when something is ‘off’
3. Week 3 (Sept 15-21) — World building, character building
   • Bertetti, Paolo. “Building Science Fiction Worlds.”
   • Chandrasekera, Vajra. The Saint of Bright Doors. Chapter 1 to 23.
   • Watch: Sadi on employing assumptions when worldbuilding
   • Watch: Sadi close reading The Saint: how characters shape the world
4. Week 4 (Sept 22-28) — Fantastika as escapism, as reckoning
   • Chandrasekera, Vajra. The Saint of Bright Doors, read till the end
   • Attebery, Brian. The Politics of Sci Fi.=
   • Watch: Vajra Chandrasekara on writing the real world
   • Watch: Sadi on what fantastika says about us: ‘mirroring’ and ‘re imagining’ as critique and complicity
5. Week 4 (Sept 29- Oct 5) — Sci fi and the mainstream 🙂
   • Chiang, Ted. “Story of Your Life” 
   • Mondal, Mimi. “Rewriting the history of science fantasy fiction” LINK
   • Watch 
   • Arrival, based on the short story.

Week 1 Notes

Summary of Week 1

The substantive materials (e.g. other the course logistics etc) was the first chapter of Brian Attebery’s “Fantasy as mode, genre, formula.critical literature, and a viewing and subsequent exegesis of Miélé’s A Trip to the Moon, arguably the first SF movie. I am only mildly interested in critical analysis, but the chapter by Atterbery seemed OK; A Trip to the Moon is interesting historically, but seemed weird and chaotic — spectacle rather than entertainment. So week 1 was not a hit for me, but then week 1 of anything rarely is.

As a bonus, there was a video on Kim Stanley Robinson’s views of SF. I appreciated this much more, though I’m familiar enough with KSR that I can’t say there are any revelations here. But I did like his comment that now, for him, Utopia is the avoidance of a mass extinction event. .

I also, on my own, revisited Tolkien’s On Fairy Stories, for a counterpoint to KSR. I entirely mis-remembered the point of Tolkien’s essay — he argues against the notion of the “suspension of disbelief,” and speaks instead of the creation of a secondary world and “enchantment” in which both the creator and reader are within the world. In any event, it is an interesting reflection on that nature of fantasy as something that produces particular effects in its readers. Excerpts in a section father down.

Brian Attebery: Strategies of Fantasy

Preface

• Why study the Fantastic in Literature. Hasn’t it, by now, been properly recognized and characterized? One claim is that recent fantasy has driven a reconsideration of is dimensions and properties. A second claim is that new theoretical examinations of narrative — looking a time, character, feminist and post-structural analyses, and Bakhtin’s dialectic theory — offer a new understanding.
• Le Guin points out that even though genre ought to be a neutral descriptive term, … it is applied only to those genres whose primary readership is outside the power structure of the academy

Chapter 1: Fantasy as mode, genre, formula.

• Formula vs. Mode. Two definitions: (1`) Fantasy as a formula in which stock characters and devices are used to enact a struggle in which good triumphs over evil. (2) Fantasy as a mode of storytelling characterized by “stylistic playfulness, self-reflexiveness, and a subversive treatment of established orders of society and thought,” and aims to recapture the vitality and freedom of epic, folktale, romance and myth.
• Frye’s definition of mode: “One of the most famous uses of the term mode is Northrop Frye’s fivefold division of literature into the mythic, romantic, high mimetic, low mimetic, and ironic modes. These are identifiable according to the status of a story’s primary characters: whether they are superior or inferior in degree or kind to their social and physical environment.”
• Mimesis vs. Fantasy… Claim that two poles of mode are mimesis (trying to create a faithful rendition), and fantasy, though fantasy relies on mimesis to ground it in the sensory.
• Fantastic literature has a long history.“Most narrative literature, except for an aberrant period from the mid nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries (you see the temptation?), has made use of the fantastic. 
• Icons. “Out of groupings of sentences, descriptive and narrative, a storyteller generates the larger systems that we call “characters” or “events” or “settings.” […] these stand in relationship to the extraliterary world not as ordinary signs but as what Charles Sanders Peirce called icons. By this he meant that the sign is recognizably modeled after its referent […] (e.g. one example of an icon is a map of an unknown city…)”
• Borrowing. “Nearly all modern fantasy has made such raids on the recorded inventory of traditional narratives. “
• Fantasy vs. Fantastic.I will use the term fantasy henceforth for the genre, letting fantastic designate the mode
• Categorization as declarative or prototypical
• Fantasy consists of (1) impossible content, (2) comic structure (a positive ending), and (3) a reader response of “consolation,” [Tolkien], but more aptly called wonder

A Trip to the Moon by Georges Méliès (~15 min)

Watching the film with ‘modern eyes,’ it seems weird, chaotic and difficult to follow. To me it falls more into the category of spectacle than entertainment.

What I Saw

• We see something that looks sort of like a scientific church, with masked and hatted people seated sort of like a choir. Most appear to male, except for a panel of three women at the front who are either playing an instrument or making notes. The scene seems chaotic and there appear to be disputes among the characters. There is a blackboard with a drawing that shows something heading towards the moon. Apparently a decision is made, though I can’t tell what. But people are changing clothes – some are now wearing tophats and business attire. 
• Now the scene switches to the construction of a space capsule that looks a lot like a bullet. 
• Now people are on rooftops overlooking a smokey Victorian city — they have a telescope. Perhaps they are going to watch the launch. 
• Now people in suits are getting in the craft assisted by young women in shorts and hats who seem to be a cross between cheereaders and stewardesses.
• Now the craft is shown hitting a personified moon in its left eye, and the moon crying…
• Now the people exit the craft onto the surface of the moon and watch the earth rise. Then they go to sleep and a comet goes by… and then we see stars and planets raining snow down on them as they sleep. 
• Now they go down into a cave where there appear to be mushrooms and perhaps plants… a man opens his umbrella and plants it and it turns into a mushroom. Now a moon person shows up. It has a headdress (or perhaps an antennaed head) and hops arounds – something like an ape. The visitors are frightened and attack it with their umbrellas – it vanishes in a puff of smoke. More moon people show up. 
• Next we see the voyagers captured. Then they escape, and are pursued  by a mob of moon people who are carrying spears. All reminiscent of European explorers tangling with ‘natives.’
• The space capsule is now  is now on edge of a cliff. One of the voyagers pulls it off and they plumet back to earth (later it is pointed out that a moon native has been strapped to the back of the craft). The capsule lands in the sea and sinks to the sea bottom, but then it floats up to the surface and a ship brings it back in.
• The voyagers are brought back and celebrated. In a festive atmosphere they appear to be crowned, and a statue is erected of the leader. 

A Trip to the Moon: Film History #1 (12 min)

This  video provides context. First were the Lumiere brothers who made very short (seconds to minutes) documentary videos of daily life (or often exotic or unusual scenes of daily life). The most famous just shows the arrival of a train in the station, and it is said that this produced consternation among the viewers. … — Arrival of train in station.

Against this background Georges Miélés is lauded for his accomplishments. A stage magician, he was excited about the new technology and saw it as a new way to do tricks and special effect. His film, A Trip to the Moon, is considered the first gre
at achievement in movie making. Miélés wrote, produced, and starred in the film. It challenged established notions (which imo weren’t terribly established yet) of
= how long a movie could be,
= how much it could cost,
= and what it was capable of showing.
It was apparently very popular, both in Europe and America.

Science Fiction as Modern Realism, Kim Stanley Robinson

I’m a fan of KSR and his work, so it is no surprise that I gravitated to this video which feels like it excerpts comments from a much longer video. It appears to be shot in a desolate space — I was going to guess the dry valleys of antarctica until later on when various components of infrastructure show up.

Various Notes

• Focus on socio-technical realism. Early on KSR was reacting against Star Trek’s cardboard sets – he wanted the effect of the real and wanted the backgrounds to be deeply real. Thus is focus on geology and geography and (I would suppose, political, cultural and socio-economic factors).
• KSR says SF best described the way he felt about the world: there’s an acceleration of history, rapid technological change. By writing about the future you are really writing about now…
• KSR’s evolution as a writer. When I was young it was a matter of thinking that man would go to space, and that we lived in an interesting neighborhood. But as time whent by it became more and more obvious that we are creatures of earth and expressions of this planet only. What makes an interesting story is that it has to do with what humans could potentially do. 
• Ministry for the Future has been transformative for him – the end of a series of books that tried to describe how we could get to a better relationship to the biosphere. Ministry for the Future is him laying all his cards on the table and trying to envision a positive ending. “Utopia is now just avoiding a mass extinction event” and Ministry is about the collective making the best of a bad situation. 
• The climate crisis is an odd problem to have, in that it is never really happening to you. So its difficult to imagine as a lived experience. 
• Plots are made of things going wrong… when slow violence turns into fast violence. The power of imagination is strong enough to change your behavior in the presence. 
• Science as magic. Some SF treats Science as magic. He calls this Scientism. It is really a quasi-religious belief that science can do anything; it doesn’t have much to do with actual science.  science as a form of magic… Where anything is possible, nothing is interesting. 
• KSR’s writing and research. KSR says: I write the scenes first, and then ask what I need to know. It’s an iterative process. 
• The scientific community. Scientific communities are utopian – they are active in the world and attempting to be fair, accurate, justice. As a SF writer I try to speak for the community….

Excerpts from “On Fairy Stories,” Tolkien

Everything that follows (except the headings or occasional italicized and/or bracketed remarks) is directly taken from Tolkien’s essay. Any emphasis is added.

Definition

The definition of a fairy-story … [depends] upon the nature of Faërie: the Perilous Real itself, and the air that blows in that country.  … Faërie cannot be caught in a net of words; for it is one of its qualities to be indescribable, though not imperceptible. …  For the moment I will say only this: a “fairy-story” is one which touches on or uses Faerie, whatever its own main purpose may be: satire, adventure, morality, fantasy. Faerie itself may perhaps most nearly be translated by Magic—but it is magic of a peculiar mood and power, at the furthest pole from the vulgar devices of the laborious, scientific, magician. There is one proviso: if there is any satire present in the tale, one thing must not be made fun of, the magic itself. That must in that story be taken seriously, neither laughed at nor explained away.

Magic as the satisfaction of primordial desires

The magic of Faerie is not an end in itself, its virtue is in its operations: among these are the satisfaction of certain primordial human desires. One of these desires is to survey the depths of space and time. Another is (as will be seen) to hold communion with other living things. A story may thus deal with the satisfaction of these desires, with or without the operation of either machine or magic, and in proportion as it succeeds it will approach the quality and have the flavour of fairy-story.

Fairy stories are presented as true

It is at any rate essential to a genuine fairy-story, as distinct from the employment of this form for lesser or debased purposes, that it should be presented as “true.” 

Human language as magical

[I like this bit, although it seems to me to apply to far more than fairy stories:]
The human mind, endowed with the powers of generalization and abstraction, sees not only green-grass, discriminating it from other things (and finding it fair to look upon), but sees that it is green as well as being grass. But how powerful, how stimulating to the very faculty that produced it, was the invention of the adjective: no spell or incantation in Faerie is more potent. And that is not surprising: such incantations might indeed be said to be only another view of adjectives, a part of speech in a mythical grammar. The mind that thought of light, heavy, grey, yellow, still, swift, also conceived of magic that would make heavy things light and able to fly, turn grey lead into yellow gold, and the still rock into a swift water. If it could do the one, it could do the other; it inevitably did both. When we can take green from grass, blue from heaven, and red from blood, we have already an enchanter’s power—upon one plane; and the desire to wield that power in the world external to our minds awakes. It does not follow that we shall use that power well upon any plane. […] But in such “fantasy,” as it is called, new form is made; Faerie begins; Man becomes a sub-creator.

On suspension of disbelief

That state of mind has been called “willing suspension of disbelief.” But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story- maker proves a successful “sub-creator.” He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is “true”: it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying (more or less willingly) to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed. A real enthusiast for cricket is in the enchanted state: Secondary Belief.
[…]
 But at no time can I remember that the enjoyment of a story was dependent on belief that such things could happen, or had happened, in “real life.” Fairy-stories were plainly not primarily concerned with possibility, but with desirability. If they awakened desire, satisfying it while often whetting it unbearably, they succeeded. 

The Joyous Turn

[Intesting to compare with KSR’s take on ‘utopian’]
The consolation of fairy-stories, the joy of the happy ending: or more correctly of the good catastrophe, the sudden joyous “turn” (for there is no true end to any fairy-tale): this joy, which is one of the things which fairy-stories can produce supremely well, is not essentially “escapist,” nor “fugitive.” In its fairy-tale—or otherworld—setting, it is a sudden and miraculous grace: never to be counted on to recur. It does not deny the existence of dyscatastrophe, of sorrow and failure: the possibility of these is necessary to the joy of deliverance; it denies (in the face of much evidence, if you will) universal final defeat and in so far is evangelium, giving a fleeting glimpse of Joy, Joy beyond the walls of the world, poignant as grief.It is the mark of a good fairy-story, of the higher or more complete kind, that however wild its events, however fantastic or terrible the adventures, it can give to child or man that hears it, when the “turn” comes, a catch of the breath, a beat and lifting of the heart, near to (or indeed accompanied by) tears, as keen as that given by any form of literary art, and having a peculiar quality.

Assignment: Introduction

I am retired and have been taking courses at the U for about 7 years. My career was in high tech, specifically the design of computers and digital technology; I worked in the research divisions of Apple and IBM for about 30 years, and a small startup in the very early days. Since I’ve retired I’ve stepped away from technology and design, and am focusing on writing, literature, and geology. 

My best guess at my introduction to fantastic literature is that it was The Wonderful Voyage to the Mushroom Planet. I was somewhere around 8. There was a spaceship, a scientist, another planet, aliens, and a need to save the day! One thing that stuck in my mind was a description of returning to earth after a long time away, and a description of what seemed like very weird life forms – these turned out to be ordinary trees, but were described in language that made them seem alien. This is, perhaps, the beginning of my interest in writing that makes the familiar seem strange. I still love that. 

A few years later I encountered the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and then C. S. Lewis. These had a major impact on me. I liked the intricacy and beauty of the worlds they created; I particularly liked the detailed appendices published at the end of The Lord of the Rings, which gave some of this history and backstory of that universe. Today I am still entranced by novels that feature a well-crafted world. 

SF dominates my fiction reading today, and has since my teens. That was in the  early 70’s when New Wave SF was cresting. Authors I liked (and still like) included Ursula Le Guinn, C. J. Cherryh, and Phillip K. Dick. As I entered my 20’s, new authors – William Gibson, Vernor Vinge, Cyril Kornbluth – caught my attention, and I toyed with the idea of writing SF. I tried my hand at that for a few years, while in graduate school, and quit after managing to publish a short story in the pulp magazine Analog in 1982.Fast forwarding to the present, or at least to the last decade or two, I am finding fewer works that really engage me. I loved Lecke’s Ancillary series, and enjoyed Yoon Ha Lee’s Machineries of Empire, but it feels pretty hit and miss these days. It used to be that the Hugo and Nebula winners were invariably interesting, but these days even the award winners often don’t resonate with me.  For example, neither Jemison’s The Fifth Season nor Chandrasekera’s Saint of Bright Doors did much for me – but obviously others are seeing things I’m not.  My hope is that reading and discussing Saint, etc., in this class, will orient me to some new dimensions of SF, and assist in deepening my appreciation for this ever-evolving genre. 

Week 2 Notes

Assignment: Writing the Uncanny

“Instructions: Write an opening to a short story in which the world is geographically and physically the same as ours (more or less), which means that the laws of physics are not disturbed, but something is ‘off’ in its social rules. … See if you can push yourself to introduce worldbuilding elements (such as language/dialogue exchange) that show us the disturbed new rules of this world.”

My piece follows. I enjoyed writing it, though I’m not quite sure how well my piece does at being uncanny — at least if we take “uncanny” to mean things that don’t follow the rules of the normal world. The napkins are really just technology; the characters are perhaps the closest to the uncanny but I don’t really foreground that.

The Napkin Thief

We are at table, Marco the buffoon, Italo the pedant, and I. The wreckage of the meal lies before us. The rising moon and the guttering flames of candles cast erratic shadows. Wine glasses have stamped mackled red rings on the linen, and errant crumbs abound, particularly around Marco. The ancients were slobs.

“Look,” Marco says, gesturing broadly, “the tablecloth, it is like a great napkin.”

“Yes, of course,” says Italo. “It is the ur-napkin. Before napkins, people cleaned their hands on the tablecloth. That was long ago, before your travels Marco. No doubt you saw napkins of many kinds.”

“Indeed I did. They took on many strange and wondrous forms, as singular as the places they dwelt.”

“Please, tell us more,’ I say, “I’m most interested.” I am not, but the old man is cunning, and distraction will serve me.

“As am I,” says Italo.

“Why not.” Marco, leans back in his chair and pats his pockets. “Ah, here we go.” He pulls out a pouch and loads his pipe. “This is the last of the leaf from the royal gardens; the Great Khan shared it with me as I told him of my travels. It will help me think back.”

He lights his pipe with a candle, and a puff of aromatic smoke lofts upwards, hazing the stars for a moment.

“I remember the city of Yilandilay,” he said slowly, speaking its name with a lilting series of tones.

“Their napkins there were woven of delicate wire and thread impregnated with exotic chemicals, so that each use of the napkin captured the diner’s enjoyment or distaste .

“A successful dish would be marked by a shimmering glow of oranges and yellows. A failure produced dull greys and greens; diners would at first try to conceal their napkins, hoping that their antipathy was idiosyncratic, as indeed could happen. But more often the contagion would spread, a murky glow silhouetting the table as the servants rushed to clear the dishes and to bring the next course. Dinners were rather fraught in Yilandilay.”

“Most interesting,” said Italo.

I am dubious. “This is far-fetched. Surely nothing of such sophistication was possible so long ago.”

“You moderns and your skepticism, you are endlessly amusing. Fortunately, I am prepared.”

Marco reaches inside his coat and, with a magician’s flourish, unfurls a napkin. Light and diaphanous it floats in the air, a faint glow playing across its surface.

“The traces of the last meal have faded, but, if you will excuse me…” — he seizes it and delicately blots his lips: light flares, intense orange and yellow where his lips have left their mark.

Marco smirks at me. “As you can see, I enjoyed my dessert!”

“I could see that from the plate,” I grumble, “but I admit my error.”

The napkin’s light has changed. Streaks of carmine and sable twist together, dancing like flames. Marco stares: “I’ve not seen that before.”

My cheeks warm. “How embarrassing. You’ve caught me again. That must be the poison.”

#

Assignment: Respond to another student’s piece (The Portrait Gallery, by Jennifer Boudreau)

A very nice job of world building! From the very first sentences, the formality of the writing, the use of language (“delightful agitation,” “particular regard”), the syntax, and the focus on  manners and marriage and social status, all evoke the upper class milieu of the Regency period. Then comes the invitation to dinner, the reaction of her mother, and the journey by coach to Darkwood Hall, all of which consistently reinforce the world being constructed. 

It is only halfway through that the uncanny appears, foreshadowed by Catherine’s feeling of “strange unease” – a marked contrast to her high spirits up to this point. We see the gallery of portraits that evoke her unease, but while it seems unusual there is nothing overtly wrong. As the piece unfold glimpses of the uncanny recur: the intensity of the gazes, the feeling of being observed, the sense that the eyes are shifting to look at *her*. Catherine’s initial attempts to explain away the uncanny give way to increasing anxiety, and it becomes evident to those present that she is transfixed by the portraits – this failure to maintain a façade of calm being an especially acute indicator of Catherine’s distress – and Mrs. Aschcombe’sr remark about the importance of the approval of their forebearers seems to confirm that Catherine’s perceptions are correct. The piece ends with Catherine blushing – another slip that a lady in the culture would no doubt prefer t avoid – and her certainty that a portrait had inclined its head toward her. A well evoked world, and a nice emergence of the uncanny accompanied by a very believable arc of reaction by the protagonist. 

Week 3 Notes

Tne first two items were really from week 2, but I did not do them til week 3 due to travel.

Notes on Le Guin’s Carrier Bag of Fiction

The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction (1986), from At the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, by Ursula Le Guin.

I think this is a great essay. Besides its content, which I find persuasive, I think it is a brilliant piece of writing, engaging and humorous – in particular I like the way that Le Guin creates an imagined hunter-gatherer band in which her perspectives are grounded and enacted. 

The essay begins by summoning up a vision of hunter-gather society in which people lived primarily by gathering and consuming vegetables or small creatures such as insects, birds and small animals. It notes, tongue in cheek, that though the mammoth hunters got all the wall space in the cave, the bands really primarily survived on vegetables.The significant thing that the Mammoth hunters came back with was an exciting story. Note that in this description is put forward as impersonal narrative; over its three paragraphs it use the word “we” once to refer to humans, connecting the readers to the hunter-gatherers.  

After this opening, the essay shifts to first person and particular, saying it is hard to tell an engaging story about gathering wild oats, and doing other gatherer things. Le Guin is now using “I” and referring to imaginary clan and family members like Ool, and Ook, and other primitive sounding names, This is contrasted with the kind of story hunters can tell involving violence and death and triumph, and that also picks up on the names and first person. 

Le Guin then grounds this narrative in the work of anthropologist Elizabeth Fisher who advances “the Carrier Bag Theory” of human evolution, which posits that containers were the first human artifacts. She writes about why she likes this theory, and goes on to suggest that there is a variant for stories as well:

“I would go so far as to say that the natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings. A novel is a medicine bundle, holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, from At the Edge of the World: Thoughts on Words, Women, Places, p 169.

She continues to return to her imagined band, at various points, to illustrate and expand her points. She also writes in the first person, invoking the authorial voice. She argues that stories don’t have to be linear with nothing but conflict foregrounded; rather they can be seen as ‘carrier bags’ that hold things in particular powerful relations to one another and to us. Such stories have, as their point, neither resolution nor stasis, but rather ongoing progress. (This brings to mine Carse’s notion of “infinite games,” where the ‘goal’ of the game is to keep the game going…

The effect of this shift is broaden the view of what science fiction is, and how it is viewed:

..,one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all, and in fact less a mythological genre than a realistic one.

It is a strange realism, but it is a strange reality.

Science fiction properly conceived, like all serious fiction, however funny, is a way of trying to describe what is in fact going on, what people actually do and feel, how people relate to everything else in this vast sack, this belly of the universe, this womb of things to be and tomb of things that were, this unending story. In it, as in all fiction, there is room enough to keep even Man where he belongs, in his place in the scheme of things; there is time enough to gather plenty of wild oats and sow them too, and sing to little Oom, and listen to Ool’s joke, and watch newts, and still the story isn’t over. Still there are seeds to be gathered, and room in the bag of stars.

— ibid., p 170

A quote from the Introduction to Le Guin’s Left Hand of Darkness (1976

I am not predicting, or prescribing. I am describing. I am describing certain aspects of psychological reality in the novelist’s way, which is by inventing elaborately circumstantial lies.

Week 4 Notes

The Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

Notes as I read

Linguists trying to communicate with aliens who have a very different vocal tract; parallel narrative of family life that includes a child who died at twenty-five and a now-ex husband.

Now in direct communication with aliens. Trying to establish word correspondences. After one day of this they add writing, and try to establish correspondences that way as well. Now they are trying to get verbs.

Every so often there is an interlude where the narrator illustrates an aspect of language through her child’s communications with her or others…

It’s interesting that their writing is in logograms and sentences are made by just rotating and joining different logograms – so sentences are non-linear and can be read from any direction. It is suggested that this is related to the radial symmetry of their bodies, and that they have eyes and legs on all sides, so they don’t have a notion of front/back/left/right.

Semasiographic writing system – conveys meaning without reference to speech. Maybe consider that writing and speech are two different languages for the aliens.

The second linguist doesn’t seem to be contributing – he’s just an interlocuter for the purposes of the story? …Oh, I think he’s a physicist.

As the interludes continue, I begin to get more of an idea of the daughter and of her relationship with her mother. I notice, also, that the interludes are not in chronological order….

The author is doing strange but consistent things with tense. She is beginning to become fluent with the semagrams, and it is changing the way she thinks. This is connecting with the non-linear nature of semagram and her new way of thinking. She experiences things simultaneously, and this explains the odd use of tense in the story.

Notes after I read

I enjoyed the story. And I thought the writing was very skillful.

I liked how the interludes about the narrator’s daughter did double duty, at first serving as a concrete example of the various ways in which language is acquired and used, and then, more and more, serving to exemplify the uses of tenses to signal simultaneity in thought/experience.

That said, nothing much happened. Aliens showed up, behaved mysteriously, and then the reason for their odd behavior was explained — but the explanation did not really explain any of the things that we’d like to know, like why they came, or who they were, or what they wanted out of the interaction.

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