Tag Archives: Science Fiction

Miéville’s The City & the City

Detail of the cover art of Miéville’s The City & the City.

After quickly reading China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011), I picked up Miéville’s The City & the City (2009), and read that one just as fast. I’ve noticed that both novels include tension caused by rules that seem to be impossible to transgress. In Embassytown, the Ariekei are unable to speak in certain ways, and in The City & the City locals of the city of Besźel and the city of Ul Qoma are—to the surprise of distant foreigners—unable to cross the border separating the two cities, even in places where the cities share parts of the same street.

In the acknowledgements section of The City & the City, Miéville mentions his indebtedness to the works of Raymond Chandler and Franz Kafka, among other authors. And on the cover of the book, a review from the Los Angeles Times mentions Philip K. Dick as a reference point in the novel’s style. While I haven’t read any Raymond Chandler yet, I’m familiar with the work of Philip K. Dick and Franz Kafka—both of which exhibit a dreadful paranoid about the mysterious workings of the world.

Another similarity between these two novels by Miéville is that both include important parts of their respective worlds which lay some sort of foundation for the main storyline. In Embassytown, the fascinating realm of “the immer”, with which space travel of great distances is made possible, is only given a cursory—though good—description. In The City & the City, the “cleaving” of the cities that happened at some point in the past, leaving behind ambiguous, confusing archeological evidence, is the other mysterious foundation.

Embassytown, Falsehood, and Change

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Detail of cover art for China Miéville’s Embassytown (2011)

This past week I shot through China Miéville’s science fiction novel Embassytown (2011). Perhaps the driving force behind such quick reading was probably the fascinating idea Miéville introduces early in the novel: an alien species—the Ariekei—who speak with two mouths, and whose language strictly prohibits any falsehood to be spoken. They consider themselves to be speaking only truths, and not merely words as references of the truth. The species of the narrator—possibly human—is the guest in the “Embassytown” section of a strange city on the home planet of the Ariekei. The novel is pushed forward by the tension in the language of the Ariekei due to their need to express similes or even metaphors. This linguistic constructions border dangerously close to untruths and thus are difficult for the Ariekei to imagine. In other words, the necessity for untruths becomes evident.

What I kind of imagine the Ariekei look like. These are “antlions” in the game Half-Life 2.

An interesting coincidence has occurred at the time of this reading. Just as I’ve been reading the works of or about the Frankfurt School, I see that the epigraph of Miéville’s novel is a quote of Walter Benjamin taken from his essay, “On Language as such and on the Language of Man”: “The word must communicate something (other than itself)”. I’ve been reading Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment lately and had just been reading the introduction in which the authors write about the use of instrumental reason in which utopian or imaginative thought is crushed and destroyed because it does not speak of the status quo:

The arid wisdom which acknowledges nothing new under the sun, because all the pieces in the meaningless game have been played out, all the great thoughts have been thought, all possible discoveries can be construed in advance, and human beings are defined by self-preservation through adaptation—this barren wisdom merely reproduces the fantastic doctrine it rejects: the sanction of fate which, through retribution, incessantly reinstates what always was. Whatever might be different is made the same (8).

As I wrote recently, when truth is equated with the current reality, then the use of metaphor or even falsehood is needed as a negation of positivistic thought.

There is a moment in the novel where Miéville compares non-Ariekean language with the money form in that both are mediators between originally incommensurable. Reading that section, after noting the source of his epigraph, confirmed that Miéville had to have been familiar with Marxist thought. Sure enough, he has. In fact, according to Wikipedia, he’s even written about the abstract, equalizing mediation of the commodity form with regard to law: “The Commodity-Form Theory of International Law: An Introduction”, Leiden Journal of International Law, 17 (2): 271–302, 2004. It’s kind of interesting to be able to tell such a thing through a science fiction novel about language.

There’s a short interview with Miéville that I recommend listening to if you’re interested in hearing more about language and Embassytown.

The experiencing of comprehending or trying to comprehend the unknown is always kind of thrilling in science fiction. The word “wonder” probably covers this. Just like the Ariekei hold festivals in which they enjoyed hearing non-Ariekei tell lies or their own attempts at telling untruths, I suppose I also like the feeling of encountering ideas that are seemingly alien.

Solaris: Communication, Perception, and Imperfection

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Still from Steven Soderbergh’s film adaptation, Solaris (2002)

I just finished Stanisław Lem’s novel Solaris (1961) a month or so ago. The driving force of the novel is the attempt to comprehend, and have a meaningful dialogue with an alien entity. The ambiguities of communication are also troubling among the main characters themselves as they try to make sense of the object of their study.

After the crew on the station beamed Kris Kelvin’s brainwaves as x-rays into the ocean, Kelvin experiences dreadful, incredibly lucid dreams, which may well have happened:

I have never had visions of that kind before or since, so I decided to note them down and to transcribe them approximately, in so far as my vocabulary permits, given that I can convey only fragmentary glimpses almost entirely denuded of an incommunicable horror.

A blurred region, in the heart of vastness, far from earth and heaven, with no ground underfoot, no vault of sky overhead, nothing. I am the prisoner of an alien matter and my body is clothed in a dead, formless substance—or rather I have no body, I am that alien matter. Nebulous pale pink globules surround me, suspended in a medium more opaque than air, for objects only become clear at very close range, although when they do approach they are abnormally distinct, and their presence comes home to me with a preternatural vividness. The conviction of its substantial, tangible reality is now so overwhelming that later, when I wake up, I have the impression that I have just left a state of true perception, and everything I see after opening my eyes seems hazy and unreal.

That is how the dream begins. All around me, something is awaiting my consent, my inner acquiescence, and I know, or rather the knowledge exists, that I must not give way to an unknown temptation, for the more the silence seems to promise, the more terrible the outcome will be. Yet I essentially know no such thing, because I would be afraid if I know, and I never felt the slightest fear.

I wait. Out of the enveloping pink mist, an invisible object emerges, and touches me. Inert, locked in the alien matter that encloses me, I can neither retreat nor turn away, and still I am being touched, my prison is being probed, and I feel this contact like a hand, and the hand recreates me. Until now, I thought I saw, but had no eyes: now I have eyes! Under the caress of the hesitant fingers, my lips and cheeks emerge from the void, and as the caress goes further I have a face, breath stirs in my chest—I exist. And recreated, I in my turn create: a face appears before me that I have never seen until now, at once mysterious and known. I strain to meet its gaze, but I cannot impose any direction on my own, and we discover one another mutually, beyond any effort of will, in an absorbed silence. I have become alive again, and I feel as if there is no limitation on my powers. This creature—a woman?—stays near me, and we are motionless. The beat of our hearts combines, and all at once, out of the surrounding void where nothing exists or can exist, steals a presence of indefinable, unimaginable cruelty. The caress that created us and which wrapped us in a golden cloak becomes the crawling of innumerable fingers. Our white, naked bodies dissolve into a swarm of black creeping things, and I am—we are—a mass of glutinous coiling worms, endless, and in that infinity, no, I am infinite, and I howl soundlessly, begging for death and for an end. But simultaneously I am dispersed in all directions, and my grief expands in a suffering more acute than any waking state, a pervasive, scattered pain piercing the distant blacks and reds, hard as rock and ever-increasing, a mountain of grief visible in the dazzling light of another world (178-180).

While the excerpt above reminds me vaguely of various philosophical approaches to the problem of understanding perception, e.g. those of René Descartes and G. W. F. Hegel, it also reminded me of creation myths, with ideas such as there being something that sprouts out of a void.

Of course the excerpt above expresses a sense of imperfection in the narrator’s ability to comprehend this interaction, and, in fact, it’s merely another episode of many in the novel, in which the characters are constantly confounded by their findings in their “Solaristics” research. Obviously communication is an imperfect relation of exchange of ideas, but when no meaningful (to the scientists) findings arise throughout the novel, they come to an acceptance of this frustrating imperfection as it emerges from human communication itself. Characters reflect on the narcissism of humans highlighted by their anger at Solaris’s refusal to affirm humanity in the ways they had hoped. The scientists’ visitors on the station, which are brought about by their own memories, challenge them to ask if they really can handle inhuman communication or even self-reflection via an inhuman mediation.

Slavoj Žižek has written on Solaris, and come to some interesting conclusions in his essay, “The Thing from Inner Space” (Mainview, 1999). The concept he wishes to explore in this essay is the trauma of experiencing an impossible, indiscernible materialization of the Real within a subject.

Here is a short video clip from his film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (2006), in which he talks about the self-reflection that goes on in Solaris, using material from Andrei Tarkovsky’s film adaptation, Солярис [Solaris] (1972).

Because of Nothing

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Sometimes after visiting some friends in the north side of Chicago, I’ll drive home south through the city to get back to the south side. Often, I’ll take Lake Shore Drive, which–as the name implies–hugs the shore of Lake Michigan. As you pass through Downtown Chicago around midnight going south this way, there’s never any traffic. On your right is the city’s skyscrapers, blazing in light, and on your left is the lake, and with it, a relative abyss of darkness. It almost feels intimidating, as if you could be at the edge of the world given the juxtaposition you find yourself in.

I recently shot through Frank M. Robinson’s The Dark Beyond the Stars (1991), which explores that feeling of the dread of encountering the abyss. Without giving too much of the book’s plot away, I think I can say that this anxiety is the starting point from which many ideas bloom. Faced with the idea of crossing the void, characters must make a decision that becomes more religious than scientific. Since I’m reading Slavoj Žižek’s book on G. W. F. Hegel’s philosophy, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, my reading of this novel became imbued with a Hegelian tone that I found rewarding. Specifically, you could say that it’s the Hegelian notion of negativity as a driving force that is appropriate in The Dark Beyond the Stars. The characters traveling between stars fear that they will never find another living being in the galaxy, and yet they push on because they’ve never found another living being in the galaxy. Some fear the abyss of interplanetary space, while others believe that only by crossing that span will their efforts be rewarded. The idea of rebirth through death is another constant motif in the novel, forcing one to rethink the limits of selfhood and subjectivity, destiny and freedom.

Speaking of crossing great divides, a few days ago I crossed the Atlantic for the first time in order to attend a conference on Hegel at Birkbeck, University of London. I’ll post more on the conference later.

Imagined Scientific Practices

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It’s always kind of interesting to find the parts of science fiction in which fictional sciences are discussed. Here are a couple of my favorites that come to mind:

Shevek’s work in Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, specifically his “General Temporal Theory.” He attempts to tie a physics of time to philosophy and ethics:

The Anarresti hoped to restore the fertility of that restless earth by replanting the forest. This was, Shevek thought, in accordance with the principle of Causative Reversibility, ignored by the Sequency school of physics currently respectable on Anarres, but still an intimate, tacit element of Odonian thought. He would like to write a paper showing the relationship of Odo’s ideas to the ideas of temporal physics, and particularly the influence of Causative Reversibility on her handling of the problem of ends and means.

Next up is Hamid Parsani’s study of the “Telluro-Magnetic Conspiracy Towards the Sun” in Reza Negarestani’s Cyclonopedia:

cycl_tellur

An essayist in Cyclonopedia writes:

For a long time now the magnetosphere, this ultra-ancient cocoon around the planetary body, has enriched the earth’s tellurian insurgency, telling the earth forbidden stories from the Outside, teaching it how to reach immanence with the Sun, and ultimately completing the hatching process of its inner black Egg, or the treacherous Insider. In Tellurian Insurgency, everything—whether stratified or not—assists the earth in hatching its xeno-chemical Insider.

Finally, as the second part of Stanisław Lem’s Imaginary Magnitude, is the introduction to fictional author Reginald Gulliver’s Eruntics—a work on bacterial linguistics:

The biochemical action of Gulliveria coli prophetissima behaves then as a transmitter linking various space-time intervals. Bacteria are a hypersensitive receiver of certain likelihoods, and nothing more. Bacterial futurology has admittedly become a reality, though it is fundamentally unpredictable in its consequences, since the future-tracking behavior of bacteria cannot be controlled.

This kind of inventive science can be fun to think about. I think it kind of influenced my input on the Data and Algorithm projects.

ReS Futurae’s Official Opening

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The French journal ReS Futurae, which focuses on science fiction, has officially premiered online. In its growth I had written two short pieces for its carnet.

Irène Langlet, the director of the project, made the announcement. The journal’s introduction reads:

ReS Futurae est une revue francophone internationale dédiée à l’étude de la science-fiction sous toutes ses formes : littérature, cinéma, arts graphiques, jeux vidéo, musique, design et phénomènes culturels divers. C’est une revue académique, à comité de lecture et arbitrage par les pairs, fondée sur un partenariat avec la revue Science Fiction Studies : des traductions croisées d’articles acceptés dans l’une et l’autre revue seront publiées régulièrement. Dans le paysage académique francophone, ce sera la première revue de cette nature.

I look forward to good things from it, as its gestation stage looked promising.

Being Introduced to Stanisław Lem

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About a month ago I saw a great short film, Golem [above], on vimeo of morphing computer-animated forms set with an entrancing voice-over that directly addresses the viewer. The video’s description pointed out that it was based on the short story, “Golem XIV”, in Imaginary Magnitude by Stanisław Lem. Shortly after seeing the film, I picked up the book, but it wasn’t until today that I finally opened it. Apparently the book is made up only of introductions, in such a way that they present imaginary worlds. It’s a fantastic idea—one that embraces the awe-inspiring qualities of science fiction. In the first introduction, which may be an additional level of fictional introduction, Lem declares, “So I shall show you Introductions as one shows a richly carved doorframe chased in gold and surmounted by counts and griffins on a majestic lintel. [. . .] What will you gain? Supreme liberty, for no words of mine will obtrude upon your ear in your pure upward flight. I shall take you only as a pigeon-fancier takes a pigeon, and slings it like David’s stone, like a rock in the path, so that it may fly off into this immensity—for eternal enjoyment.”1

Looking back, I find that this is not entirely my first meeting with Lem’s work. I’ve seen two adaptations of Lem’s 1961 novel, Solaris: Andrei Tarkovsky’s from 1972, and Steven Soderbergh’s from 2002. Apparently there is another adaptation that precedes both of these, which came out in 1968, and was directed by Boris Nirenburg. I enjoyed the two films I saw, and now it seems I have more incentive to read the original novel, given the exciting opening of Imaginary Magnitude.

Note:

1. Stanisław Lem, Imaginary Magnitude, trans. Marc E. Heine (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984), 9.