Tag Archives: speculative fiction

Handmaid's Tale, Margaret Atwood, science fiction

Whence Come “The Leftovers”?: Speculative Fiction and the Human Condition

June 25, 2014 plthomasedd 1 Comment

Nora Durst finds herself at the intersection of something routinely normal for middle-class Americans living in the comfort of suburbia and distinctly otherworldly at the same time in Tom Perrotta’s The Leftovers, his 2011 novel venturing into speculative/ dystopian fiction.*

Visiting the mall with her sister during the Christmas season, Nora confronts the sudden disappearance of her entire family several years before on October 14, when millions of people also vanished in the Sudden Departure that prompts many to believe the world has finally experienced The Rapture:

Her heart was still racing when she stepped inside, her face hot with pride and embarrassment. She’d just forced herself to make a solo circuit of the big Christmas tree on the main level, where all the parents and kids were waiting to meet Santa Claus. It was another holiday challenge, an attempt to face her fear head-on, to break her shameful habit of avoiding the sight of small children whenever possible. That wasn’t the kind of person she wanted to be—shut down, defensive, giving a wide berth to anything that might remind her of what she’d lost. A similar logic had inspired her to apply for the day-care job last year, but that had been too much, too soon. This was more controlled, a one-time-only, bite-the-bullet sort of thing. (p. 193)

This moment for a fictional woman who has lost her family, has lost everything, is the essence of Perrotta’s mix of dark satire and moving authenticity about the human condition. But it also leads me to move beyond the book and consider what dystopian fiction, what speculative fiction offers readers that proves time and again to be so compelling.

Our Speculative World, “Off-to-the-Side”

Margaret Atwood has provided her readers four brilliant dystopian/speculative works of fiction—which she often uses to ague against simplistic labels such as “science fiction”: The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood, and MaddAddam. In “Writing Utopia” (from Writing with Intent), Atwood clarifies her distinction about genre, specifically about science fiction:

I define science fiction as fiction in which things happen that are not possible today—that depend, for instance, on advanced space travel, time travel, the discovery of green monsters on other planets or galaxies, or that contain various technologies we have not yet developed. But in The Handmaid’s Tale, nothing happens that the human race has not already done at some time in the past, or that it is not doing now, perhaps in other countries, or for which it has not yet developed the technology. We’ve done it, we’re doing it, or we could start doing it tomorrow. . . .So I think of The Handmaid’s Tale not as science fiction but as speculative fiction; and, more particularly, as that negative form of Utopian fiction that has come to be known as the Dystopia. (pp. 92-93)

Atwood has also turned to considering science fiction, speculative fiction, and dystopian fiction more fully in her In Other Worlds, where she writes about Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go:

Ishiguro likes to experiment with literary hybrids, and to hijack popular forms for his own ends, and to set his novels against tenebrous historical backdrops….An Ishiguro novel is never about what it pretends to pretend to be about, and Never Let Me Go is true to form. (p. 168)

And Perrotta’s dystopia can be described in much the same way; it isn’t “about what it pretends to pretend to be about”—which may be just that thing that makes the hard-to-explain genres of science fiction, speculative fiction, and dystopian fiction so hard to explain.

“I Can’t Look at Everything Hard Enough”

I found reading the passage about Nora quoted above nearly as overwhelming as the experience appears to be for Nora herself. I began to think about my own daughter, Jessica.

Jessica, the three-year-old, is gone, disappeared, seemingly instantaneously, lost forever.

Jessica, the twelve-year-old, gone.

Jessica, the nineteen-year-old, gone.

My daughter is alive, now twenty-five, married, and expecting her first child, a daughter, but the scene with Nora in Perrotta’s world “off-to-the-side,” as Atwood describes Ishiguro’s dystopia in Never Let Me Go, is not about what might happen, not a speculative work about the possibility of The Rapture.

Perrotta is offering his readers a timeless message, one found in Thornton Wilder’s Our Town. As Perrotta explains about the relationship between Our Town and his novel:

This was part of the challenge of The Leftovers, as I wrote about characters left behind in the wake of the disappearances. The last moments of the disappeared people became supercharged with significance—even though that was not a special day, even though they disappeared while doing ordinary things. You might say the line from Our Town—“choose the least important day in your life. It will be important enough”—helped inform these histories, because I looked to simple, everyday moments. Nora’s daughter spills some juice, so she goes into the kitchen for some paper towels—when her daughter disappears. Jill is in the room with an old friend of hers watching a YouTube video, and suddenly the friend is gone. So, cleaning a spill or watching a dumb video: It’s the through minutiae of everyday life these moments come alive.

In Wilder’s play, Emily grows from childhood to falling in love to marriage and to her own too-early death. By the final act, Emily views her life in replay from beyond and exclaims: “I can’t look at everything hard enough.”

She then turns to the Stage Manager and asks, distraught: “Do any human beings ever realize life while they live it—every, every minute?” And the Stage Manager replies, “No—Saints and poets maybe—they do some.”

And this is the very real and starkly True center of Perrotta’s pervasive dark satire and insightful authenticity as a novelist staring at and then breathing life into the human condition, masked as fantastic events that are unimaginable, except for those who look at everything hard enough and pause to realize life every, every minute.

—

* Reposted from Daily Kos 20 October 2011, Whence Come “The Leftovers”?: Speculative Fiction and the Human Condition, slightly revised. See The Leftovers series adaptation from HBO.

Education, science fiction

Our Dystopia Is Now: The Circle (Eggers) and Feed (Anderson)

December 19, 2013 plthomasedd 2 Comments

For twenty-first century readers and students, George Orwell’s dystopian novel 1984 poses, I think, a temporal paradox.

Orwell’s “other world” appears simultaneously a horrifying totalitarian future possibility for humanity as well as a technological mutt of what someone in the past speculated about the future (consider the pneumatic tubes).

As I read The Circle by Dave Eggers, I began to imagine that my experience with this novel published and read in 2013 was repeating what readers during the late 1940s and early 1950s (especially British readers) may have felt turning the pages of Orwell’s Big Brother nightmare, a Kafkan dark satire of their lived England.

My reading experience with The Circle has at least two problematic elements.

First, I read about a third of the novel before I lost interest and picked up Feed by M.T. Anderson, which I read completely before returning to and finishing The Circle.

And second, I never felt fully engaged with The Circle because I couldn’t shake the feeling that the novel details that our dystopia is now.

Both The Circle and Feed provide readers with a genre carnival of sorts—dystopia fiction, young adult fiction, science fiction, and speculative fiction. But I struggled with The Circle in ways that I did not with Feed, despite my usual measured disappointment with many young adult novels.

Since Adam Bessie has explored the importance of Feed, especially as it informs education reform, I want to examine more closely The Circle in the context of Feed as well as my struggles to engage fully with Eggers’s important novel.

Just past the middle of The Circle, I began to see that Eggers’s dystopia is a contemporary 1984. When the main character, Mae, serves the will of the Circle by producing three slogan (Secrets Are Lies, Sharing Is Caring, Privacy Is Theft), Orwell’s “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength” echoed in my mind’s ear.

I feel compelled to place The Circle, then, within a dystopian tradition including 1984 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale—speculative works that weave contemporary social satire (albeit very dark satire) with imaginative logical extensions of what if that holds up one possible future for humankind. [1]

While The Circle reminds me of 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale [2]—including the slogans above alluding to 1984 and elements of zealotry along with totalitarianism’s dependency on currency manipulation (Atwood’s prescience about debit cards) shared with The Handmaid’s Tale—Eggers’s other world is not removed nearly as far from the reader as in Orwell’s and Atwood’s novels.

Since I use and know a great deal about google, Twitter, and Facebook, the Circle as a speculative logical extension of our real-world social media feels less speculative than our dystopia is now.

For the privileged in 2013—and those on the edge of privilege wanting in—smartphones, tablets, and computers connected through the Internet have blurred almost every aspect of the human condition—social with professional, entertainment with commerce, etc.

We don’t flinch when google completes our typing as we search the web or when gmail reads our emails in order to push product banners. We reduce our conversations to 140 letters with glee and among hundreds, even thousands of people we have never met in person. We retweet, favorite, and like (verbing all the way) while double posting on Twitter and Facebook—even clicking “like” under a Facebook post about the death of a dog, or a grandmother.

So when Eggers introduces the more fantastical elements of the novel, and there are some, I remained fixated on my lack of compassion for Mae and my inability to shake the feeling that Eggers is simply cataloguing the world the privileged have created, the lived world of the privileged in 2013. (I must add that The Circle and Feed focus on main characters who are compliant “insiders” of the dystopia, and both have sacrificial radical characters. I found Mae in The Circle really hard to embrace, but did feel compelled by Titus in Feed. I had the same bland response to the radical in The Circle, while caring deeply for Feed‘s Violet, my favorite character of the two novels.)

So far, I suspect, my view of The Circle may feel like less than a ringing endorsement; however, I do believe The Circle is a 1984 for our time, an important and insightful work. Let me, then, offer a few reasons why.

At its essence, The Circle is the fictionalizing of concepts explored in Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze: surveillance, “infinite examination,” “societies of control.” While Foucault and Deleuze are inaccessible in many ways for the general public, Eggers’s other world, even as close as it is to now, is stark in its clarity. At times, The Circle reads with the same sort of dispassionate camera feel that Ernest Hemingway uses in “Hills Like White Elephants.” In both works, there lies the danger that readers will fail to confront what has been placed before them—that the dispassion will read as endorsement or at least could be embraced by the readers.

While true of any artwork, Eggers allows readers to close The Circle in much the same mindset as Mae (Book III is a mere three-pages long in its twist-style ending).

As with Feed, The Circle also speaks directly to education reform, particularly as that overlaps with our current era of mass incarceration (see Education Reform in the New Jim Crow Era):

With fervor, the possibility of the Circle’s role in education is championed—and the discussion sounds eerily close to home:

“That’s the idea,” Jackie said. “…[S]oon we’ll be able to know at any given moment where our sons and daughters stand against the rest of American students, and then against the world’s students.”

“That sounds very helpful,” Mae said. “And would eliminate a lot of doubt and stress out there.”… “And it’ll be updated how often?”

“Oh, daily. Once we get full participation from all schools and districts, we’ll be able to keep daily rankings, with every test, every pop quiz incorporated instantly. And of course these can be broken up between public and private, regional, and the rankings can be merged, weighted, and analyzed to see trends among various other factors—socioeconomic, race, ethnicity, everything.” (p. 341)

In possibly the most disturbing section of the novel, the Circle is characterized as a potential law enforcement tool that can erase crime and racial profiling, by color-coding everyone on the ubiquitous monitors invented by the Circle: “The three men you see in orange and red are repeat offenders” (p. 418). This plan, however, works under the assumption that previous arrests are fair, themselves not the result of race or class bias.

In the end, The Circle is a warning shot about the end of privacy, universal surveillance. If readers feel uncomfortable while reading with their smartphone dinging nearby, it is likely because our dystopia is now, and The Circle is a nearly 500-page pamphlet saying, Welcome to the Machine:

[1] I highly recommend Atwood’s essays—”Writing Utopia” and “George Orwell: Some Personal Connections”—in Writing with Intent and In Other Worlds for Atwood’s brilliant confrontations of science fiction and speculative fiction genre(s). See also Science Fiction and Speculative Fiction: Challenging Genres.

[2] I wonder what the fascination is with red covers and dystopian literature…

science fiction

“Fahrenheit 451” 60 Years Later: “Why do we need the things in books?”

November 12, 2013 plthomasedd 21 Comments

“Sometimes writers write about a world that does not yet exist,” Neil Gaiman begins his Introduction to the 60th Anniversary Edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451:

This is a book of warning. It is a reminder that what we have is valuable, and that sometimes we take what we value for granted….

People think—wrongly—that speculative fiction is about predicting the future, but it isn’t; or if it is, it tends to do a rotten job of it….

What speculative fiction is really good at is not the future but the present—taking an aspect of it that troubles or is dangerous, and extending and extrapolating that aspect into something that allows the people of that time to see what they are doing from a different angle and from a different place. It’s cautionary.

Fahrenheit 451 is speculative fiction. It’s an “If this goes on…” story. Ray Bradbury was writing about his present, which is our past.

Like Margaret Atwood’s In Other Worlds, Gaiman’s clarification about the purposes of science fiction/speculative fiction builds a foundation for reading (or re-reading) Fahrenheit 451 as well as for considering why Bradbury’s novel on book burning endures.

Sixty years ago in October 1953, Fahrenheit 451 was published. In the fall of 2013, the novel reads as an eerie crystal ball—despite Gaiman’s caution: the pervasive Seashells like iPod earbuds, wall-sized monitors and reality TV.

Yet, upon re-reading this anniversary edition, I am less interested in Bradbury’s prescience about technology and its role in isolating humans from each other, and reminded—as Gaiman suggests—of what matters.

Fahrenheit 451: 60th Anniversary Edition

The enduring flame of Fahrenheit 451 is perfectly stoked by Gaiman, in fact:

A young reader finding this book today, or the day after tomorrow, is going to have to imagine first a past, and then a future that belongs to that past.

But still, the heart of the book remains untouched, and the questions Bradbury raises remain as valid and important.

Why do we need the things in books?…Why should we read them? Why should we care?…

Ideas—written ideas—are special….

This is a book about caring for things. It’s a love letter to books, but I think, just as much, it’s a love letter to people….

Yes, Gaiman is a writer’s writer so he is naturally suited to understand Bradbury as well as marvel at the magic of Fahrenheit 451. But there is more.

This anniversary edition includes not only Gaiman’s new Introduction but also a concluding section—History, Context, and Criticism. The opening piece by Jonathan R. Eller explains, “Bradbury virtually lived in the public libraries of his time.” And later in a transcript of an audio-introduction, Bradbury adds:

When I left high school, I began to go to the library every day of my life for five, ten, fifteen years. So the library was my nesting place, it was my birthing place, it was my growing place. And my books are full of libraries and librarians and book people, and booksellers. So my love of books is so intense that I finally have done—what? I have written a book about a man falling in love with books.

Here, I think, another important connection between Gaiman and Bradbury highlights why Fahrenheit 451 endures: Both men are readers, the type of readers who love the idea of books, love specific books, and recognize the human dignity represented by the free access to books.

Like Bradbury, then, Gaiman has a life-long love affair with libraries:

Another way to destroy a child’s love of reading, of course, is to make sure there are no books of any kind around. And to give them nowhere to read those books.

I was lucky. I had an excellent local library growing up. I had the kind of parents who could be persuaded to drop me off in the library on their way to work in summer holidays, and the kind of librarians who did not mind a small, unaccompanied boy heading back into the children’s library every morning and working his way through the card catalogue, looking for books with ghosts or magic or rockets in them, looking for vampires or detectives or witches or wonders. And when I had finished reading the children’s’ library I began on the adult books.

They were good librarians. They liked books and they liked the books being read. They taught me how to order books from other libraries on inter-library loans. They had no snobbery about anything I read. They just seemed to like that there was this wide-eyed little boy who loved to read, and would talk to me about the books I was reading, they would find me other books in a series, they would help. They treated me as another reader – nothing less and more – which meant they treated me with respect. I was not used to being treated with respect as an eight year old.

But libraries are about Freedom. Freedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication. They are about education (which is not a process that finishes the day we leave school or university), about entertainment, about making safe spaces, and about access to information.

I worry that here in the 21st Century people misunderstand what libraries are and the purpose of them.

For those of us who share this love of books and the “[f]reedom to read, freedom of ideas, freedom of communication,” then, that Fahrenheit 451 endures is both wonderful and chilling.

If the novel had been published October 2013, I suspect it could have just as easily been applauded as a stark mirror of our present disguised as a futuristic dystopia:

“Jesus God,” said Montag….Why doesn’t someone want to talk about it! We’ve started and won two atomic wars since 2022! Is it because we’re having so much fun at home we’ve forgotten the world? Is it because we’re so rich and the rest of the world’s so poor and we just don’t care if they are? I’ve heard rumors; the world is starving, but we’re well fed. Is it true, the world works hard and we play? Is that why we’re hated so much?

And then Montag recalls a brief encounter with an old man:

The old man admitted to being a retired English professor who had been thrown out upon the world forty years ago when the last liberal arts college shut for lack of students and patronage.

Fahrenheit 451 ends with Montag as a criminal on the run who finds himself on the outskirts of the town among refugees, mostly outcast professors.

If a reader picks up Bradbury’s novel today, and then turns to her iPad to read the online blog The Answer Sheet at The Washington Post, she may read this:

The discussion of why the humanities matter has picked up steam since The New York Times published a piece last week suggesting that even some top institutions are increasingly anxious about the proliferation of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) majors.

Meanwhile, they report a declining interest in topics like French literature.

Only eight percent of students now major in the humanities, according to the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, down from a peak of more than 17 percent in 1967. The trend is worrisome, and plenty of college presidents have come to the defense of the humanities; views of all kinds have since been published….

Tolstoy endured. Will the liberal arts?

From Aldous Huxley to Ray Bradbury to Neil Gaiman—and countless authors and readers alike along the way—Fahrenheit 451 should leave us all with Shakespeare ringing in our ears:

Miranda: O wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
That has such people in’t. (William Shakespeare, The Tempest, Act V, Scene I, ll. 203–206)

Fahrenheit 451 remains a warning we need to heed, but likely won’t—once again: Be careful what brave new world we allow to happen when we aren’t paying attention.

Meritocracy, Poverty

Aren’t All Children Equally Deserving?

October 15, 2013 plthomasedd 1 Comment

A common practice for introducing students to the ethical foundation of philosophy is to pose moral dilemmas, possibly the most typical example being the life-boat dilemma that forces a person to choose who lives, and thus who dies.

Science fiction (SF) and speculative fiction often build entire other worlds in which the given circumstances create a series of moral dilemmas that are the basis of the tensions and actions of the novels and films. Writers such as Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, for example) and Kurt Vonnegut (Cat’s Cradle, for example) often build these worlds in the tradition of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley as a way to say, as Neil Gaiman explains about the power of fiction: “The world doesn’t have to be like this. Things can be different.”

In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, the possible other world is one of scarcity, and by the end, the moral dilemma revolves around the fate of a child. The novel’s given, readers must accept, creates the narrow range of choices the characters face; that is part of the power of SF/speculative fiction.

Pulling back, however, from created other worlds, we are faced continually with moral dilemmas—often ones also involving children.

One such dilemma is how any society governs it schools. Confronting that dilemma in the UK, Polly Toynbee exposes dynamics that sound all too familiar in the U.S.:

Most people, right or left, would be alarmed at a trajectory of ever-worsening inequality. But few know the facts, wildly underestimating widening wealth gaps, still thinking Britain quite meritocratic. This ends the myth of modern classlessness, exposing shrinking mobility. The ladder up is so high and steep few can climb it – while those at the top exert all their power to stop their children falling down.

Citizens and institutions in both the UK and the U.S. are confronted by some troubling moral dilemmas: the rise of inequity in the wider society and the inability of public schools to overcome (as well as perpetuating) that inequity.

While debates often focus on the exact relationship between a meritocracy and its schools (a sort of “which comes first,” “chicken and egg” debate), an ethical decision about children seems to be ignored: To the question “Aren’t all children equally deserving?” the consensus in the U.S. appears to be “No.”

Education reform built on changing standards and high-stakes tests, weeding out “bad” teachers, funding the expansion of charter schools and Teach for America corp members, and retaining third graders based on their test scores is a concession to a fabricated moral dilemma. In other words, some children are more deserving (the standard among reformers is “grit,” by the way) because the reformers have conceded to a fatalistic scarcity that serves the advantages of the privileged, but leaves the middle class, the working class, the working poor, and the impoverished to fight among themselves for the scraps left behind.

Education reform in the U.S. is The Hunger Games.

Arthur H. Camins has identified the ugliest concession of them all in education reform as the Hunger Games, collateral damage:

“Whatever it takes,” is a dangerous philosophy because it tends to justify “collateral damage” in the guise of doing good things for children. It excuses increased segregation wrought by school choice policies. It excuses flawed metrics in teacher evaluation. It excuses the disruptions caused by open and closing of schools. It excuses decreased instructional time for science, social studies and the arts. It avoids exploration of meaningful debate about ideas and evidence. It dismisses all of these consequences with the glib phrase, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good,” as if there were no alternative strategies available for improvement. It is, I think, a calculated avoidance strategy that develops when leaders feel under siege and run out of ways to deflect valid criticism. In the end it is a profoundly undemocratic stance.

And what given have the privileged leaders in the U.S. embraced to justify allowing all their children to remain deserving while “other people’s children” have to fight it out to show who among them are more deserving? Competition and concessions to scarcity.

However, competition and concessions to scarcity are choices, not inevitable conditions in the U.S.

As Michael B. Katz explains in The Undeserving Poor:

Poverty is deeply rooted [in the US]. Before the twentieth century, the nation lacked both the economic surplus and policy tools to eradicate it; all that could be hoped for was to ameliorate the condition of the poor by keeping them from perishing from starvation, wretched housing, and disease. The situation began to change in the twentieth century with what one historian has called the “discovery of abundance” and with increasingly sophisticated methods for transferring income, delivering services, and providing essentials of a decent life. For about a decade, this combination of abundance and method backed by popular support and political will worked spectacularly well. Since then, poverty has been allowed to grow once again, not, it must be emphasized, as the inevitable consequence of government impotence or economic scarcity, but of political will. (p. xi)

When political leaders and self-appointed education reformers point to U.S. public schools reduced to life-boats and demand that we continue to choose which children are deserving and which children are not, instead of playing the moral dilemma game they are handing us, we must begin to point back at the ship wreck they have created and concedes only this: all children are equally deserving.

Margaret Atwood, science fiction