Home
Todd Suomela's Library tagged → View Popular, Search in Google
"Battle Royale and The Hunger Games are young adult novels in which governments force teenagers to kill each other. Comparing these books to classic works by William Golding and Robert Sheckley suggests that, while becoming more skeptical about governments, we've become more trusting about our own nature."
-
At the close of the Korean War, it came naturally to Sheckley and Golding to portray people as the problem and government as the solution – Takami and Collins, writing in our times, begin with the reverse assumption, and to make this comparison is to sense how far, in the intervening decades, the pendulum of consensus has swung from Hobbes towards Rousseau. Books like Battle Royale ↑ and The Hunger Games ↑ would have seemed too subversive of adult authority to have been published or perhaps even conceived in the 1950s – but does this mean we have become less naïve, or just that we have become naïve in a different way?
"It's as a response to that cultural void that science fiction becomes genuinely interesting. In the midst of an ever accelerating technological revolution, science fiction has emerged as the literature best able to articulate the relentless pace of social change. And as that technological revolution has spread outward from the western world, so the symbols and archetypes of science fiction have become a shared language for understanding the new world we are entering."
-
The geek culture that made Marvel comics part of its mythology has, like all other cultures, been repurposed by capitalism as a way of selling products to the mass market. And with an estimated 25% of under-34s self-identifying with the geek demographic, it's arguable that geek culture is really just a response to a lack of culture, a generation who have grown up alienated from any sense of cultural belonging, and are left clinging on to Hollywood product
-
There may only be a small wave of translated SF reaching the anglophone world today, but the internet is quickly unleashing much more. I'm only beginning to scratch the surface myself. Who are the other international SF authors we should all be reading today?
-
After you get the a few leads, this is what you do:
Get a CV: The best way to get a CV or list of publications is, imho, to google “[name of professor] department” or “[name of prof] professor department”. Googling for ‘CV’ will get you the CVs of everyone whose committee your prof was on. Googling ‘anthropology’ won’t work because often these people aren’t in anthropology departments. Sometimes ‘professor’ won’t work for non-US schools because they might be ‘senior lecturers’ or something like that.
Download Orgy: download every article and publication, conference paper and report. Often the shorter informal pieces are better because they get to the point quickly and give you a sense of the person. This phase is enjoyable because you have the illusion of making progress merely by right-clicking. Find everything. The more obscure the better. Never give up, never surrender.
"As a student of epidemiology and economics I feel duty-bound to apply my cursory knowledge of statistics to the novel natural cohort presented in the Hunger Games novel, as documented by author Suzanne Collins. I present a Hunger Games survival analysis: in a Cox proportional hazards model, which covariates are associated with the odds (or hazard ratios) being ever in your favor? A taste of what’s to come:"
"As Morton points out, in the age of ecology there is no clean transaction you can walk away from. The fact that everything is connected isn’t something you can turn off when it’s inconvenient. There’s always something still owed, a remaining debt. Morton describes this as the viscous quality of the hyperobject, the more you know about it the more it sticks to you. And as Graeber shows, capital fails to capture the full extent of a transaction because it doesn’t fully represent the object. In the social context of the transaction, there’s always a remainder, the market never fully clears. At the level of capital and pricing, the numbers always add up, but the object of the transaction is broadcasting on multiple frequencies. And if you hold the concept of capital in abeyance for just a moment, you’ll find there were many more parties to the transaction than you had assumed, and if you listen closely, you can hear that the non-human has continued its relationship with you. "
-
One of the laugh lines in Morton’s talk is “anything you can do I can do meta.” The idea behind this quip is to characterize the move to “undermine,” or in Graham Harman’s phrase, to “overmine” an opponent’s position. Either some atom is the basic building block to which all things can be reduced; or some system is the foundation from which all things extend. Generally what is taught in the Academy are the particulars around these atoms and systems. In his talk, Morton reviews the historical progression of these “particulars” in an effort to get to the present ecological moment. The strange thing about Morton’s talk is that he’s not trying to lay out a new complex conceptual framework that wraps up everything that precedes it. Instead he brings up a series of examples of the rift between appearance and essence—the remainder that each of these conceptual transactions always generates as it tries to snugly fit around the contours of the real. For students trained in memorizing and recapitulating particulars, the process of discarding conceptual frameworks to see more clearly must seem counter intuitive. In a line of thought that operates in a space without a center or edges, sometimes it’s difficult to know when it’s arrived at it’s topic. And further, once there, what is the listener meant to take away? What kind of transaction is this?
-
As the author of the Introduction, Richard T. Gray, explains, the collection's title is purposefully ambiguous. The "inventions of the imagination," he writes, should be understood in both senses of the phrase -- that is to say, the imagination as both inventor and invented (3). The more philosophical essays seek to understand the imagination as inventor, and thus investigate the workings of the imagination and its role, above all, in knowledge and interpretation. The more literary essays are concerned with explicating the actual inventions of the imagination -- the literary works. However, several essays cross disciplinary boundaries and accomplish both tasks.
-
4. The future is going to be like the present, only with extra layers.
Let's face it, history doesn't get simpler with time (unless you live in very interesting times indeed, such as those of the First Emperor). Current events take place against a backdrop of old assumptions and grievances, and add their own framing context to tomorrow's events. A story set in Egypt in 2031 is going to inevitably reflect the echoes of the overthrow of Mubarak, and also of today's elections (and the military counter-revolution in train), not to mention tomorrow's subsequent events, which will take place within the frame created by the Arab Spring.
-
5. People evaluate the new using the cognitive toolkit they acquired in the past.
We train our children. In particular, we (or our neighbours, or our schools) train our children early to aspire to a consensus vision of the Good Life. This is based on the assumption that what was achievable in the past is achievable and desirable in the future: grow up, do well at school, get a degree, get a job, get married, buy a house, have children, work, enjoy a long retirement and decline, hand the torch of heredity on to the next generation. This isn't necessarily a bad vision (it worked for the ancestors) but it's an example of a backward-looking one. Break it down into its component sub-stages and they reflect what was necessary to achieve a comfortable/successful life a generation ago.
- 1 more annotation(s)...
"I propose that worldbuilding is the primary distinguishing characteristic of SF and fantasy (at least at a superficial level). Get the worldbuilding wrong, and your readers won't be able to get a grip on the story line or the motivation of your characters. Or worse — they'll get a grip, and realize that your story is, at best, a western or an age-of-sail yarn with the serial numbers filed off: that the trappings of the fantastic are only there to add a spurious sense of exoticism to an everyday tale. "
"After all, the core postulate of true SF is that children can sometimes learn from their parents mistakes... not that they will always do so! This is why genuine sci fi tragedies like On The Beach and Soylent Green are so powerful.
"This does not have to happen," say Huxley and Orwell and Slonczewski and Tiptree, in their masterful self-preventing prophecies. Be smarter, better people. Be a better people."
Selected Tags
Related Tags
Top Contributors
Groups interested in literature
-
Twain
This trail offers a brief in...
Items: 11 | Visits: 228
Created by: professor gill
-
Freeman and Jewett
This trail introduces studen...
Items: 8 | Visits: 337
Created by: professor gill
-
DuBois and Washington
This trail gives a brief int...
Items: 12 | Visits: 235
Created by: professor gill
Diigo is about better ways to research, share and collaborate on information. Learn more »
Join Diigo