A lot of you have been asking (in class, on the forum, etc.) for book/film/TV show recommendations, things that we don’t have time to get to in class or in our extra screenings. Before the semester’s done, I plan to post a list of my own personal recommendations, and of course there’s also the SF recommendations discussion forum on ANGEL. In the meantime, though, io9 has a useful syllabus and book list for SF novices. I cosign almost everything on this list, not only as a good second intro to science fiction, but as great stuff all on its own. In particular, I’d enthusiastically second the recommendation for Philip K. Dick’s Man in the High Castle, which is about as crazy and wonderful as it gets.
Portal lovers may appreciate this homemade portal gun, sold in last year’s Child’s Play charity auction (awesomely detailed post about its construction here):
And here’s an imagining of what an ’80s retro commercial for Portal might have looked like:
Lastly, if you’re really digging the murderous robot/AI thread of the course, someone posted “Blinkyâ„¢” on the forum a few weeks back, and it’s worth a watch:
Blinkyâ„¢ from Ruairi Robinson on Vimeo.
We’ve been talking a lot recently about how to understand science fiction as in some ways a “realistic” discourse, even though it seems by definition to be something else; in what ways is SF more real than what we normally think of as realism? What kinds of real-world phenomena (race, immigration, interminable wars, the East, homosexuality) are in some sense only sufficiently thinkable through the lens of SF?
On these questions, here‘s a brief account of a conversation between Margaret Atwood (who we’re not reading in this class, but who I suspect many of you are familiar with) and Ursula K. Le Guin (of “Nine Lives”). The kicker here is that Atwood, despite writing a lot of novels that are wholly recognizable as science fiction, claims not to be writing science fiction, because she wants to distance herself from what she imagines the genre to be. Le Guin, on the other hand, has been a major factor in legitimizing (so to speak) science fiction as not just a popular or escapist mode of cultural production, but a substantive, literary mode. So you could see how they might be at odds on the issue of SF and “realism.”
Octavia Butler’s “A Few Rules for Predicting the Future” weighs in on some similar issues, somewhat provocatively. So does this Maureen McHugh talk on “the anti-SF novel,” which may get to the heart of the conversation we had about China Mountain Zhang and whether/how it is or isn’t SF.
- The essay I mentioned and read from in class a week or two ago, Samuel Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction,” is available online. It’s very much worth a read, as an attempt to think through the science fiction community’s troubled relationship to race, the odd blinders SF seems to have about some kinds of otherness even as it interrogates other kinds of otherness. Relatedly, here‘s Janelle Monáe (who I wish we’d had time to talk about week before last) on androids, the singularity, music, and otherness.
- Given that SF has almost as troubled a relationship to gender as it does to race, Sady Doyle’s “Ellen Ripley Saved My Life” is also an excellent read, about (among other things) why Joss Whedon and the Alien movies are great (if complicatedly so), particularly for girls and women. Again, given how strange it is that SF is simultaneously a) primarily a white boy’s arena and b) invested in estranging, denaturalizing, and shattering norms, this seems like a useful thing to think through. Relatedly, here‘s Joss Whedon’s fantastic Equality Now speech, re: “all these strong women characters.”
- It sounds like flying cars may be heading our way, though that may not be a good thing. xkcd adds:
- Lastly, one final reminder that George Lucas is a tool. That said, the Star Wars films do have an awful lot to teach you about running a fascist dictatorship. So, y’know, there’s that.
Because it’s too good not to post, here‘s Simon Pegg and Nick Frost’s Star Wars. It’s worth the two and a half minutes, I promise. CollegeHumor’s TROOPERS is also worth a shot. “Did the forcefield just stop for a breath?”
It’s all okay, though, because Han Solo was in Firefly (kind of).
And Neil Blomkamp’s short film that later became District 9, Alive in Joburg:
If China Mountain Zhang seems insufficiently science-fictional to you, remember the extent to which a lot of American discourse on China is already science-fictional, dystopian, and future-oriented (at least among a certain fear-mongering set, for whom a thriving China means a broken USA, and in whose minds the Roman empire fell apart because of deficit spending and a moderate welfare state):
The Ballad of Serenity:
The final frontier:
Classic space western:
If Wintermute wins, he/it will . . . do very well on Jeopardy?
But before there was Watson, there was The Today Show, asking the hard-hitting questions and wondering what the hell that internet thing was: