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Science Fictions (Posthumans (When Ash dies, Martha gets a replacement…

- - - - Some company has created a way to take a person's voice and personality and put it into something that looks and feels like a real human. This is a technological advancement that will probably never happen because of how challenging it would be to animate flesh and have it not be disgusting.
      - Ash's replacement is based almost entirely on how he portrayed himself on social media. Before he died, he was always buried in his phone, which definitely gave the program a good amount of data to work with.
  - - - The replicants are robots who can pass a Turing test. It is difficult for most people to tell a person from a replicant, which means that AI and robotics have reached a point where they can reproduce something that took mother nature billions of years.
      - Some experimental replicants have fake memories implanted that make them believe that they are humans, not replicants.
  - - - Douglas Quail wants to go to Mars, but his wife is not into it. He goes to a company that can implant memories into his brain and has them make him think that he has gone to Mars. This new, artificial memory messes with a real memory he had that was erased and makes him remember what actually happened, causing him to remember everything that was supposed to have been erased.
        A similar thing happens at the end of the story in which Quail has a different memory implanted about him saving the world by being nice to aliens.
      - Rekal, Inc. implants memories in people's brains. This would require an immense amount of neuroscience research. Researchers would have to figure out what kind of data the brain accepts and what to input so that the brain would believe it had done something that it hadn't done. Unless medical ethics are thrown out in this universe, they would likely have had an artificial brain to test this new technology on, which in itself would be an extremely difficult tool to obtain.
      - Quail must preserve himself because if he does not, then the aliens will come back and destroy everyone on Earth.
  - - - Kathy tells the story of her life as she looks back on it near the end of her life as a carer. After learning new information from Ruth and from Madam, she has a new perspective on her memories from Hailsham and the Cottages.
      - The students of Hailsham have it drilled into their heads that they must preserve their health from the time they start their lives. While they preserve their health, the students that we see do nothing to preserve their lives once they start to give donations. They give donations without any protest, which is quite selfless.
        
        Self-Preservation
      - Scientists in the Never Let Me Go universe have developed a way to clone humans, which is a very difficult task and would require many years of research.
  - - - Social media is the central theme of this episode. People give each other ratings out of five stars based on their interactions with each other. The episode is a critique of the way social media influences people. Once the protagonist, Lacie, finally stops caring about the social media and is in a jail cell yelling insults at a man in another cell, she is truly happy to have broken free.
        
        Social Media
      - Nosedive is set in a future world where people's phones are able to recognize who the person is trying to rate, which would be a fairly difficult technical challenge, especially to have it work as well as it does in the app. There are also many laws in place relating to the technology, such as allowing a security guard to dock her a point for a day for using profanity in public.
      - The protagonist, Lacie, tries to use her friend's network of highly-rated individuals to bump up her score quickly so that she can move into a new apartment sooner. People with higher ratings tend to hang out with others who have higher ratings, and ratings that come from people with high ratings have a higher weight than other ratings. Because of that, it is imperative to Lacie that she does not mess up her opportunity.
        
        Networks of people
- - - - The heptapods tell the humans that they are visiting Earth because they are going to need help in a really long time, so they are helping the humans now by bringing them together so that the humans will help them in the future.
  - - - The people living in the neighborhood started turning against each other, going so far as to shoot one person with a shotgun. They start to get weapons and grab
        weapons and break things, unable to remain act anything but hysterical.
        
        People are Monsters
      - Everyone on Maple Street tries to save themselves by accusing others of being the monster. Charlie goes so far as to shoot someone with a shotgun because he thought they were an alien and he thought that taking the risk of shooting a person was worth the risk that he might get hurt by an alien
  - - - After learning the languages of the heptapods, Louise begins to treat time differently. She can now "remember" the future just as she can remember the past. While she does not act on things that are yet to happen, she still has knowledge of them.
        
        Memory
      - Louise and her team spend most of the story trying to understand the languages of the heptapods. Once she learns their unique languages, her perspectives on life and on time change profoundly.
      - The heptapods are much more advanced than the humans, which is obvious from the fact that they are a space-faring species. As an example of their technology, they bring "looking glasses," which allow them to communicate with the humans without actually coming to Earth. The technology is like nothing scientists on Earth have ever seen before.
  - - - The humans and the Athsheans struggle to understand and communicate with one another, partially because of their different languages. The humans also find it difficult to understand the Athshean practice of dreaming, which may as well be another language because of how poorly the humans understand it.
        
        Language
      - The humans who settle on Athshe treat the Athsheans as subhuman, destroying their forest/world, enslaving them, raping them, and killing them. The Athsheans doubt that the humans are people because of their crimes.
      - The Athsheans must make a decision about whether they want to maintain their peaceful ways or preserve themselves. They choose to preserve themselves by becoming a violent civilization by fighting back against their human oppressors.
- - - - The protagonist tells the story of the apocalypse through a list about her past lovers. She makes many lists, such as all of the trees she can remember that start with the letter m, all of the people she has loved, and all of the people that have probably loved her.
      - Our protagonist keeps moving east to more and more remote locations in an attempt to survive. At the end, when her lover falls ill, she leaves without saying anything to a remote island with no other inhabitants because she would rather survive than spend a couple more days with someone and then die.
  - - - Kirsten remembers nothing from the first year after the epidemic, likely because it was too traumatic for her to handle remembering.
        The Museum of Civilization holds technologies that helped make the world what it is today and what it was before the epidemic hit. It serves as a memorial for a world that has faded into memory.
      - After the epidemic, technology is missed and memorialized. The Museum of Civilization is a testament to the fact that post-apocalypse people miss the technology that used to exist
      - The Traveling Symphony goes around and loots places in an attempt to preserve themselves.
      - All of the characters in the story have some sort of connection to Arthur Leander, and, besides being a story about the apocalypse, it is really a story about Arthur's network of people.
  - - - There are no humans in this short story to have memories, but the house that performs all the tasks that it would if there were humans serves as the last bit of humanity in a world that was destroyed by a nuclear holocaust. In a way, the house has its own memories of what it did before the apocalypse.
      - Some world leader somewhere decided that it would be a good idea to drop a nuclear bomb on someone else (or themselves, we really don't know), killing seemingly everyone in the country/world. That someone would do that is clear indication that Ray Bradbury believes that people, or at least people in power, are monsters.
      - The house acts autonomously to ensure that its residents have the easiest life possible. It makes them breakfast, it reads them poetry before they go to bed, it lets the dog in, it has mice that clean up, etc. The amount of engineering that would go into constructing such a house is immense.
      - The house tries to protect itself from outside threats by letting in nothing that it does not recognize and by shutting its blinds whenever birds come by the windows. Once the fire starts, it tries to put the fire out.
- - - - The Eloi and the Morlocks both appear to descend from humans, but their evolutions have diverged. The Morlocks live underground and their work makes life easy for the Eloi. While Wells is most likely trying to comment on communism, the situation here mirrors American slavery and is quite literally segregation based on race.
        
        Race
        
        Le Guin comments on race by making the humans on Athshe discriminate against the Athsheans, treating them as slaves. Le Guin makes it clear that the Athshean society is equal, if not better than, most modern human societies in terms of their values, yet the colonists still view them as lesser because they are different.
      - The Time Traveler invents a time machine. Unfortunately, Wells does not go into the science of it, so the reader never learns how to make a real time machine. Either way, the Time Traveler uses some crazy advanced technology to get into the future.
      - The Eloi all sleep together in big halls so that they don't get eaten by the Morlocks.
        When the Time Traveler goes to the future, he takes the knobs off of his machine so that he will be able to return to his time without anybody stealing his machine.
  - - - Kindred deals with race in the most literal way possible, by removing Dana from her home in the modern world and placing her in American slavery. This forces her to confront slavery and slave-owners directly. Things get more complicated because Kevin, her white husband, does not quite understand her struggles.
      - The monster-ness of people is exemplified first through Rufus' father and then through Rufus himself. Rufus truly turns into a monster. Dana's essential role in his life is to save his life each time he is about to die, but Rufus still treats her as a slave and even tries to rape her at the end of the book.
      - Dana is taken out of her modern life and dropped hundreds of years in the past. That means that her usual means of getting by are nonexistent. She has to learn how to do the things that people did before technology made those things obsolete.
      - When Dana is sent to the past, she is forced to stay alive. That means evading members of the KKK, not making Rufus or his father mad at her, and sometimes attempting to kill herself in order to be sent back to the future