Big Jelly

According to Muntius, Solaristics is the space era’s equivalent of religion: faith disguised as science… . Solaristics is a revival of long-vanished myths, the expression of mythical nostalgias which men are unwilling to confess openly. The cornerstone is deeply entrenched in the foundations of the edifice: it is the hope of Redemption. (Lem Solaris 173).

Unlike either Tarkovsky’s or Soderbergh’s film versions, both of whom seem to have taken Muntius’ interpretation of Solaris to heart, Lem’s 1961 novel suggests that Solaris remains alien, something that humanity’s cataloging and ordering cannot explain. The great ocean, despite humanity’s greatest minds, remains essentially mute and inexplicable, unable to be coded by scientific reason, explained through empiricism, or contacted through poetry. Lem seems to suggest, in the aftermath of science fiction’s Golden Age, that science is not the panacea or pinnacle of evolution and striving: it, like religion, is a faith-based language unique to the creatures that invented it. Lem’s vision seems introspective — it turns a mirror on a species that used science to create the possibility of annihilation by splitting the atom and mocks our pretenses to transcend our own human follies. While contact with the other may not be possible in Lem’s vision, perhaps the universe does contain wonders if we can just see past our own desires.

To begin this summer’s section of World Literature I, the class and I brainstormed about just what we mean when we call someone a “hero.” As they suggested ideas, I wrote them on the board, and the whole class discussed each trait. We agreed that the idea of a hero changes with the needs of a culture and his/her literary representation — that while there might be universal characteristics of a hero, each particular, historical culture has its own ideas of what a hero should be. This is called the heroic ideal. For example, the epic hero will not be the same as the tragic hero, but they will, perhaps, share similar characteristics that might seem universal. After of brief discussion, we watched Robert Zemeckis’ 1997 film Contact, a film I’ve discussed in relation to the epic before. I then asked the students to write their first blog entries on Ellie Arroway as a hero. What follows are a few notes from the class as well as my own brief commentary of how Contact’s protagonist meets each. The class’ characteristics of hero are bolded.

An interesting thread on Slashdot addresses a Globe and Mail article that speculates that sf might be coming to an unceremonious end like other historically situated literary genres. I would agree that golden age sf is perhaps on the decline, slowly being replaced by the likes of fantasy disguised as sf (Star Trek, Star Wars, etc.), but it seems to me that good sf addresses humanity’s relationship with its technology and how the two have been merging, and will continue to merge at an increasing rate.

In an essay titled “Which Way to Inner Space?” J. G. Ballard opines that “only science fiction is fully equipped to become the literature of tomorrow, and that it is the only medium with an adequate vocabulary of ideas and situations” (Guide 198). He expands the role of sf and its writer in his introduction to the French version of Crash: sf should “document the uneasy pleasures of living” within a culture spawned by the “marriage of reason and nightmare” that’s preoccupied with “sex and paranoia” (“Words” 46, 45).

In his 1997 study of computers and composition Nostalgic Angels, Johndan Johnson-Eilola writes:

We are like angels without maps, suddenly gifted with wings discovering not only that we cannot find heaven, but also that walking made us less dizzy, that our new wings snag telephone wires and catch in door frames. We recognize the apparently radical enactment of non-linearity inherent in the node-link structure of all hypertext; we proclaim in various ways that revolutionary potential; and then we immediately rearticulate those potentials in terms of our conventional, normal practices.

Like Johnson-Eilola, both Lunenfeld and Manovich seem to place us currently within a media flux, in theory and in practice. We can only know the present through our media forestructure — i.e., though sometimes intimate knowledge of our media past and present. Our current media technologies (will) invariably influence the development of new media and how we contemplate and use this media. Indeed, as Manovich speculates, the computer as “meta-medium” may contain the potential to transcend our imaginations and conceptions as we encode various analog forms into digital representations. We are currently caught in this nexus between a nostalgia for the past and a giddiness for the future.