Form: Can it help or hinder exposition in a story and the world around said story?

In science fiction literature, and literature in general, form can really hinder or help a story in terms of its presentation to the reader and how much the reader can understand what is happening. For example, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s story “The New Atlantis”, she implores a first person narrative, with snippets of future characters asking what happened to the original main characters. I believe this is an interesting tactic, but it ends up providing no context for the story, in my opinion, and I believe she should have opened the world to a little more exposition instead and it would have brought me in more as a reader. Throughout the course of the story, there are subtle hints to the world not being the way it should be, such as when Belle describes the “National Forest Preserve” as the “…largest forest left in the United States…” (Guin, 318). The reader is then left to wonder what happened to the United States to have only one large forest, and with more details coming through such as Phil’s invention to harness solar radiation as energy and Belle even possibly being arrested for “unreported pregnancy” (Guin, 335) the reader must try and put together the pieces of what has happened in the world and caused the government and such to be this way. Personally, I’m not a big fan of this as I find heavy world building a much better way to talk about things in a story and while this creates a certain picture the way Guin does it, it most certainly creates a blurry one. In “Bloodchild”, a short story by Octavia E. Butler, she also provides a first person narrative in a story about long legged, almost centipede like aliens who use humans as hosts to bear their children, and then patch them up again. The story is presented from the view of a child, Gan, as somebody who was chosen by his T’lic alien T’Gatoi, to bear her children when the time comes. Now when exposition is needed to find out how humans came to be on this planet in their “Preserve” and used as these hosts Gan just thinks about what happened and explains it, such as firearms being illegal in the preserve because “ There had been incidents right after the Preserve was established – Terrans shooting T’lic, shooting N’Tlic” (Butler, 12) and this perfectly establishes the world and tells me, as the reader what happened. What I’m basically saying is worlds should be built, to an effect, and the form of the story and the narrative can either help with that, such as “Bloodchild” or hinder that, such as with “The New Atlantis”. 

Le Guin, Ursula K. The New Atlantis. 1975. Text. 

Butler, Octavia E. Bloodchild. Davis Publications Inc, 1995. Text.  

The Question of Transcendence and Whether it Benefit's Humanity Go to the Stars

In this week’s blog post I want to bring up the topic of transcendence. At the end of Arthur C. Clarke’s novel, Childhood’s End, the children with their psychic powers join the Overmind, a great psychic entity who actually rules over the Overlord’s and sends them to do its bidding. Overmind does this in a way that turns the Earth into something Jan describes, “like glass- I can see through it” (210). I found this to be a very, for lack of a better word, weird way to have the Earth destroyed and it’s people absorbed into a psychic entity. Is this all that was left for humanity? I ask the question because for all of humanity’s worth, for all we’ve progressed, is it that even that much in the span of the known universe? In the novel, we are shown the two paths that life can take, one being the path of the Overlord’s, “They had preserved their individuality, their independent egos...” (199). The other path is the one of the Overmind who bore “the same relation to man as man bore to amoeba” (199). I argue that for all the merits and ways to go, transcendence into a higher power, or being, or whatever the Overmind may be, is a good way for humanity to go. We’ve showed in the past to be a destructive people, and even Karellen goes so far as to say, “All through that century, the human race was drawing nearer to the abyss- never even suspecting its existence” (175). We were on the brink of destroying ourselves and the Overlords saved us to help cross the bridge over into the next step of evolution, leaving matter behind completely and bonding with a complete psychic entity. I do find it interesting how much Clarke’s view of the next step of evolution (also referenced with Bowman’s transformation into the Star-Child) is into an entity with a hint of omnipotence and being all powerful. This contrasts even Well’s views on humanity’s next step with the split into the Morlocks and the Eloi. Clarke seems to think that humanity will push further than those boundaries. That there’s a better destiny than to just sit on Earth until we kill ourselves or kill the Earth itself. Now in the context of the novel, the Overlord’s make it seem like this path is the best one, to become part of the Overmind, but one must wonder could humanity have continued farther? Possibly even developed the psychic prowess presented further and used it to help the world and maybe even not have the Overlords there anymore. One will never know, but it’s an interesting question of just how far we could have gone.

The potential of Humanity in a future Utopia practically given to us; is it worth it?

In this week’s reading of Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke, I believe Clarke, like Wells in the Time Machine, make’s heavy statements on humanity’s capacity to become lazy, as well as comments on labor and such in his novel. When the Overlords revealed themselves in book II and usher in the Golden Age of humanity, people just cease to work, only for “luxuries, or they did not work at all.” (64). Again, in a future like this, most production is said to be automatic and humans have all their necessities practically given to them. This alludes to the Marxist theory of “means of subsistence” in which humans have what they need (food, clothing, water, etc.) and need nothing else. If this is just practically given to them, is it really deserved? This may seem like just an American blue collar way to think about things, but I believe that the Utopia depicted in the novel isn’t just. One of the definitions of Utopia is an imaginary, indefinite region that is remote and ideally perfect. Now according to this definition, this is a Utopia, but shouldn’t a Utopia be a product, or the reward, of a race that worked hard to achieve it? Now the Overlord’s do not interfere much (specifically only twice in response to animal cruelty and racial relations in Africa) but I believe they do more behind the scenes work than presented. One could argue that they don’t really usher in the utopia and humans do most of the “work,” but I would say that since most things are given to them by the Overlord’s, there wasn’t much to be done. Now that isn’t to say that people still don’t believe in hard work or overachieving (such as Jan Rodricks sneaking away to try and find the Overlord’s homeworld out of pure curiosity) but I would say that people like Jan, or Sullivan who researches the ocean for the Overlord’s, are dwindling. This is alluded to at the end of book II, “And only Karellen knew with what inexorable swiftness the Golden Age was rushing to its close” (130). After the human race ceases to be curious, and is inevitably held back by the Overlord’s, with not being allowed to explore outside the Solar System, what’s next? Humans should be allowed to leave and discover what’s out there for themselves, to make mistakes and eventually reach equality with the Overlords. I would even liken them to a dictatorship, with a false sense of freedom. We are stuck like rats in a cage, not able to go anywhere and develop and go further, we’ve just hit the peak and after that there is nothing. Now it’s possible to assume the second half of the book delves more into this, but for then it could already be too late.

Clarke, Arthur C. Childhood's End. New York: The Random House Publishing Group. 1990. Print. 

Comments on Humanity and our potential to improve and grow

A common theme in science fiction literature is the usage of futuristic devices to comment on today’s problems. Things such as class division, direction of the human race, all authors of science fiction have something to say about it, such as H.G. Wells with his novel, The Time Machine. In the novel, the Time Traveler (as he is called, never referred to by name) goes into what he thinks will be the peak of human society, only to find, what else, class division between the Eloi, the simplistic small beings who live on the surface of the Earth, and the Morlocks, who live underground and are extremely threatening. Both of these species evolved out of human beings, and suffice to say it seems Wells thinks that maybe farther into the future humans will hit a peak, and maybe revert. I, for one, can see this. A future in which human beings get lazy and eventually just give up is unfortunately a plausible site today. For ever overachiever there’s just another trying to get by and do nothing with their lives, and I believe we should fight this. In Wells’ novel, the Morlocks even succumb to cannibalism by preying on the small, defenseless Eloi at night. An interesting point in the novel, that even the Time Traveler mentions, is that he does not know much about the Morlocks, and since they are the ones underground the “gradual widening of the present merely temporary and social difference between the capitalist and the labourer, was the key to the whole position.” (Wells, 41) He’s saying how even for all the efforts to peak in human capacity, we can still revert back to “someone always being better than the other”. There’s no compromise and it is bound to happen. Why, though? Why should humans go back and revert, which brings me to my point of people needing to live up to their potential. Human beings have an infinite amount of time to improve and grow upon the things that we learn. For humanity to devolve is the biggest insult we could give to society and life in general. This is why the beginning of the novel, which focuses on the narrator going to The Time Traveler’s house with a bunch of other colleagues to talk with the Time Traveler and his Time Machine, is important, because it shows how people view those who are eccentric. This got me thinking that just maybe we should embrace eccentricity a little more, because it can give us a path to follow that we may not have before, and it will help progress humanity and live up to our potential that we not just deserve, but it is our responsibility.