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Science Fictions EN247A Charlotte Jones (Endings ("…

- - - - Much like Kazuo Ishiguro, Mandel's previous works were not science fiction, but her apocalyptic tale weaves the essence of humanity into a story that could easily be about humanity's survival just as much as it is about its end.
      - Station Eleven moves forward and backward non-linearly through time to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the Georgian Flu survivors and create a vast network between so many seemingly separate people.
      - The Traveling Symphony's tagline, "Survival is Insufficient," highlights the desire for art and beauty and literature, suggesting that even when at the end of the world, humanity still craves and needs things which make survival worthwhile. #
      - "Dr. Eleven: What was it like for you, at the end? Dr. Lonergan: It was exactly like waking up from a dream."
      - "The beauty of this world where almost everyone is gone. If hell is other people, what is a world with almost no people in it?" (112) #
  - - - Lisel Mueller was a German American poet who won the U.S. National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize.
      - "The End of Science Fiction" touches on the idea that after these stories are told, once the future is upon us, we will as humanity return to the simple, the basic and mythological and Biblical. Humanity is rooted not in its grandiosity but in its smallest endeavors and stories.
      - The poem uses allusions to ancient stories to mark the broad passage of time humanity encompasses, and claiming that science fiction is "dead," or in effect rendered unnecessary since we are now living it.
      - "Invent real tears, hard love, / slow-spoken, ancient words, / difficult as a child's / first steps across a room."
  - - - Ray Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter whom the New York Times called "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream," with such books as Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles. He has many awards named after him and assuredly contributed to science fiction being critically considered, not just read as pulp. #
      - "There Will Come Soft Rains" encounters the destruction of the final space where humanity still attempts to grind on, even though it has been destroyed and existed in futility. #
      - Even though this short story deals with the end of humanity, it uses the space of a house standing on its last legs and performing those parts of life which seem so integral to point out the brevity and fragility of the human condition.
      - "At ten o'clock, the house began to die." (238)
  - - - Current Writer in Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, a finalist for the National Book Award, winner of the Bard Fiction Prize, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Lambda Literary Award for Lesbian Fiction, and many others. Her collection Her Body and Other Stories is listed in the New York Times as a member of the "New Vanguard," one of "15 remarkable books written by women that are shaping the way we read and write fiction in the 21st century."
      - "Inventory" tells the story of a woman moving through space in seek of safety through her list of sexual encounters, underscoring her need and, more subtly, the human need, for human interaction. The narrator asserts her bodily presence as a way to reconcile space and identity, even as the world falls apart around her.
      - "Afterwards, she traced the indents in my skin from the harness, and confessed to me the CDC was not having any luck developing a vaccine. 'But the fucking thing is only passing through physical contact,' she said. 'If people would just stay apart--' She grew apart." (3) # #
- - - - "This is Maple Street on a late Saturday afternoon. Maple Street in the last calm and reflective moment--before the monsters come."
      - This episode deals with paranoia so strongly present in the Cold War era and humans' fragility in their perception of safety and trust. Even though aliens were ultimately responsible for the destruction caused, the humans were the ones who perpetrated the violence.
      - This story is somewhat apocalyptic in that it hints at a future alien invasion, but more than that the episode functions as a cautionary tale concerning just how quickly humanity and specifically small-town America can fall apart. #
      - "The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street" is an episode of the anthology series The Twilight Zone, from which Black Mirror draws heavily. #
  - - - "We Can Remember It For You Wholesale" explores themes of memories, loss, and reality, questioning where truth and fantasy collide and where within another they might exist continuously.
      - This short story engages with the idea of space in that travel and memory can falsely occupy part of our reality--we can believe we have experienced something even if we have not. #
      - Philip K. Dick won the Hugo Award for his novel Man in the High Castle, and he has also won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
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      - Adapted into the film Total Recall starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1990 and then remade in 2012.
      - "he awoke--and wanted Mars."
  - - - The Word for World is Forest explores themes of the loss of innocence, the destruction of colonialism and war, and the beginning of irreparable violence among the Athsheans, a formerly peaceful people. #
      - "Selver had brought a new word into the language of his people. He had done a new deed. The word, the deed, murder. Only a god could lead so great a newcomer as Death across the bridge between the worlds." (124)
      - This novel uses the Athshean perspective of space as a contrast to the human perception of it--for Athsheans, their whole world is bound up in their belief in its interconnectedness, while humans only destroy the world they are a part of.
      - Ursula K. Le Guin is an extremely well-known science fiction writer who was the first woman ever to win the Nebula and Hugo Awards. She often subverted tropes in speculative fiction to challenge social norms.
  - - - Slaughterhouse-Five manipulates both time and space in order to reconcile the traumatizing events of surviving the fire-bombing of Dresden within a metal meat locker and then emerging onto the street with the eviscerated remains of the city surrounding it. #
      - "'Why you? Why us, for that matter? Why anything? Because this moment simply is. Have you ever seen a bug trapped in amber?' 'Yes.' 'Well here you are, Mr. Pilgrim, trapped in the amber of this moment. There is no why.'" #
      - The book uses alien abduction and manipulation of time in order to better contextualize Billy's fractured outlook on life, even after surviving Dresden and all the other wild and heartbreaking complications of war.
      - Kurt Vonnegut was born and raised in Indiana (like me!) and fought in WW2, where he was captured by the Germans at the Battle of the Bulge and survived the fire-bombing of Dresden. Slaughterhouse-Five is his sixth novel, and it propelled him into fame upon its release. He has since been widely recognized for his dark humor and anti-war sentiments.
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- - - - African-American science fiction writer, multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship. She is well-known for critiquing social hierarchies and empowering her characters who often have minority status.
    - - "'What are you?' I whispered. 'What are we to you?' She lay still, resting her head on her topmost coil. 'You know me as no other does,' she said softly. 'You must decide.'" (15)
      - "Bloodchild" also removes the all-too-common trope of space colonialism by instead placing the Tlic in a position of power, and T'Gatoi is one of the only Tlic who is standing between the abuse of humans by the Tlic, subverting the common narrative of humans remaining the dominant species.
        
        "Bloodchild" interrogates ideas of bodily autonomy and what exactly bearing children out of love entails. It also works to invert male dominance--the man is impregnated by a female alien, who will bear the burden of "childbirth" as an act of servitude for the Tlic.
        
        What happens when the space humans occupy is not even owned by them? Does the beginning of life through pregnancy change when it comes from a man's body and not a woman's?
  - - - Asian American science fiction writer who has won 4 Nebula Awards, 4 Hugo Awards, the Jon W. Campbell Award for Best New Writer, and 4 Locus Awards.
      - "Story of Your Life" utilizes non-linear storytelling, beginning and ending on the night of Louise's daughter's conception, to tell the entire story of the daughter's life. #
        
        "Story of Your Life" probes ideas of the fragility of time and humanity, and how even beginnings and endings are circular.
      - "From the beginning I knew my destination, and I chose my route accordingly. But am I working toward an extreme of joy, or of pain? Will I achieve a minimum, or a maximum?" (39)
      - Chiang acknowledges that Kurt Vonnegut best sums up the theme of his story in his introduction for the 25th anniversary edition of Slaughterhouse-Five, where he writes that "Stephen Hawking...found it tantalizing that we could not remember the future. But remembering the future is child's play for me now. I Know what will become of my helpless, trusting babies because they are grown-ups now. I know how my closest friends will end up because so many of them are retired or dead now... To Stephen Hawking and all others younger than myself I say, 'Be patient. Your future will come to you and lie down at your feet like a dog who knows and likes you no matter what you are."
- - - - Kindred navigates the complicated relationship of modern day America and the continuing repercussions of slavery and repression by using time travel as a way to access literally a traumatic history.
      - Kindred marks the beginning of Dana's known family line, tracing back her heritage into the depths of difficult and depraved and unsettling times where people were not considered people and yet still fought for their humanity.
      - African-American science fiction writer, multiple recipient of the Hugo and Nebula Awards, and the first science fiction writer to receive a MacArthur Fellowship #
      - "Time passed. Kevin and I became more a part of the household, familiar, accepted, accepting. That disturbed me too when I thought about it. How easily we seemed to acclimatize." (133) #
  - - - The narrator of this story, Kathy H., reflects pretty linearly on her life as a clone and the loss of her friendships over the course of her lifetime, as well as how the passage of time for her is so brief compared to those who will receive her vital organs when she becomes a donor.
      - "'By the time people became concerned about...students, by the time they came to consider just how you were reared, whether you should have been brought into existence at all, well by then it was too late...How can you ask a world that has come to regard cancer as curable, how can you ask such a world to put away that cure, to go back to the dark days? There was no going back." (263) #
      - Kazuo Ishiguro is a British author best known for non-science fiction works such as Remains of the Day, which features his traditional narrator who reflects on his life through complex although often naive contemplation. Never Let Me Go is his first work of sci-fi. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 2017.
      - As Kathy's life ends, so does her time to consider all that has happened to her and around her over the years. Her passivity and acceptance of her lot in life makes her story even more bittersweet. Time is an enemy that cannot be fought.
  - - - "We are always getting away from the present moment. Our mental existence, which are immaterial and have no dimensions, are passing along the Time-Dimension with a uniform velocity from the cradle to the grave." (51)
      - H. G. Wells was an English literature writer in the 19th and 20th century best known for his science fiction works. He is considered the "Father of Science Fiction" along with Jules Verne and Hugo Gernsback, and he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature 4 times. He was also a futurist and an outspoken socialist and pacifist. #
      - The Time Machine functions not only as one of the first sci-fi books concerned with time travel but also as a deeply intellectual treatise concerning class and social structure. Deeply influenced by social Darwinism, The Time Machine toys with both the fragility of humanity's power structures as well as what exactly human decay might look like.
      - The Time Machine marks our class's earliest glance at science fiction in terms of time, and it also begins to hint that science fiction can be used to interrogate social situations just as well as more traditional literature.