[As another
semester comes to a close, I’ll reflect on some of my fall courses and conversations,
focusing this time on moments and ways that they were relevant to our own
moment. I’d love to hear your Fall 2016 reflections as well!]
Three great sci
fi stories, three lessons for 21st century America.
1)
Only
Connect: I wrote in my semester preview series about some of the historical
and cultural limits to Ray
Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles
(1950), so it’s only fair that I engage here with one of its most progressive
stories. In “Night Meeting,” Tomás Gomez, an Earthling settler on Mars, has an otherworldly
encounter with Muhe Ca, a Martian who seems to have come from a different time
period (pre-contact, when Martian civilization was at its height). Gomez and Ca
can’t quite bridge the gaps in their respective settings and worlds before they
head their separate ways, but they work much harder to do so than any other
characters in the novel, and in so doing offer through their perspectives and
shared empathy a moving reminder of a very different possibility for
cross-cultural contact and connection. As his works do on many
other topics as well, Bradbury’s eerie story still has a great deal to
teach us in 2016.
2)
How to Resist Authoritarianism: A fair number of
the sci fi stories we read in the course were set in dystopian futures, and like
most dystopias they tended to feature an
authoritarian regime in need of resistance. All such dystopian stories can
offer valuable lessons as the United States moves frustratingly close toward
our own version of authoritarianism, but I would highlight in particular Harlan
Ellison’s “‘Repent, Harlequin!’ Said the Ticktockman” (1965). Ellison’s
authoritarian leader, the titular Ticktockman, isn’t a warmongering dictator so
much as an embodiment of capitalism and corporatism; the leader of the story’s
resistance movement, the titular Harlequin, challenges his society’s authority
with humor, creativity, and a sense of the joy that even a dystopian world has
to offer. Serious and even violent resistance might well be necessary responses
to dystopian authorities, but they also make can both their world and the
resisters even more dystopian; Ellison reminds us of the role creativity and
wit can play in creating a different tone.
3)
The Dangers of Nationalism: Authoritarianism is
something most of us would agree we need to resist; nationalistic pride,
though, is much less overtly negative, or at least has as many advocates as it
does critics. But while I
likewise support a critical form of patriotic sentiment, I am also my
grandfather’s grandson, and Art
Railton spent a lifetime railing against the evils that have been done in
the name of flags and the us vs. them narratives they can help create. I know
of few works that portray the dangers of that narrative more evocatively (if
metaphorically) than Dan
Simmons’ novel Hyperion (1989),
and particularly its closing story “Remembering Siri.” The narrator of Simmons’
story works as a diplomat, helping the novel’s futuristic human government
subdue the native cultures on worlds they’re settling; if the things he does
and sees in the name of his own culture’s hegemony don’t make you question
nationalistic pride, then I’m not a lifelong sci fi fan. Which, as this course
always remind me, I most definitely am.
Next reflection tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Reflections you’d share?
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