How very Matrix..

With our burgeoning technological advancements and acceptance in the running of our everday lives, is it really any surprise that Matrix-like concepts begin to arise? Our complacency with being numbers in the system we ourselves devised is disturbing. Our ability to allow our own creations to run our lives is appalling. Welcome to the Matrix. Take the red or blue pill.

The Handler was eerily grotesque in a way. For the human component to be viewed as the unseemly element, the disturbing factor, and looked upon with near disgust is distressing. It is, however, not implausible. The prevailing view of the day is that computers dont make mistakes, humans do and within humanity’s strive for perfection mistakes are unseemly and best to be shoved into the background.

Alpha-Ralpha Boulevard  more applies to The Matrix schema. The world is run by computers and controlled in every aspect. If so many see the pattern how is it that we continue to allow ouselves to be progressively overrun? Is it all in the interests of efficiency and perfection? Do we really wish to remove the unknown form our realm of experience? Personally, I don’t like to watch the weather channel. I’d much rather stick my head out the door in the morning and gauge the day’s weather for myself. This may be my desire for the unknown, or just my grudge against being burned by the weatherman one too many times as a child, but either way the element of surprise, of evaluating your own course in life based on your ability to deal with the unexpected, is something I don’t think we should ever really give up.

Good News from the Vatican: How shall you disturb me, let me count the ways. Not being a fan of the pope myself I honestly didn’t think this story would pull any strings. However, a robot as the pope? It’s perverse. The whole notion of the pope is that he is the closest man to God( in the Catholic religion) and to have a machine in that position solidifies the feeling of inescapable loss of control.  The social context its put into does reflect the tug of rope that we ourselves deal with in terms of machine superiority. That our own society is split in its acceptance of  machine rule is shown by the group’s own division of support. 

Frozen Journey. [as a sidenote this one was hilarious. I felt so bad for the ship doing its best and continually having 'oh crap' moments] If any of the readings portray the Matrix it would be this one. His inability to accept and differentiate between reality and VR is heartbreaking. With his feelings of misplacement, of dislocation, and of guilt for a past crime the reader can feel the snap of his psyche almost physically. Humans are not meant to be in stasis or to live their lives in a virtual reality.

Humans, though we now claim to be the masters, could so easily slip from our pedestals and become the slaves. In our neverending quest for perfection and efficiency we are making ourselves obselete and our society in danger of collapse. We are in charge for now. Who is to say that it will be forever? The Matrix, AI, for that matter Planet of the Apes (though animal based rather than mechanically based) all show the possibility of our collapse and the overturn of power. Man was once hunted by animal until they created the means to overcome their status as prey. The world is in a constant state of circulation. Who is to say that we won’t be overthrown by our own creations if we’re not careful.

Aliens,Tigers and Space ships,oh my!

 

High Weir

On October 30 1938 the world was invaded by aliens as they all listened avidly. In 1947 a UFO crashed in Roswell New Mexico. September 1961  Barney and Betty Hill are abducted by aliens. These are mere glimpses of the claims of alien knowledge. By no means am I discounting these cases; I have no knowledge of their veracity either way, yet  they are examples of a long standing tradition of unverifiable alien claims.  In his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein set forth the ground breaking proposition ‘Wovon man nicht sprechen kann,darüber muß man schweigen (Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent). This does not mean that what cannot be spoken of is irrelevant but rather that it is of the utmost importance but we don’t possess the language skills or factual knowledge necessary to speak about it. Delaney’s inclusion of this propostion leads me to believe that High Weir is a cautionary tale.  As in the cases above, aliens have been throroughly discussed for years, yet we can have no knowledge of them (as of yet anyway) and only succeed in speaking in gibberish and circularity. As maddening as it is NOT knowing, it is our unfortunate state of affiars at present and we must recognize our own limitations. Rimkin suffers the consequences of pretending we understand what we don’t have the capacity to. The fact that he’s a linguist in this piece I found a tad bit entertaining. If a man who works with languages for living and a passion cannot express (he never does say what it is he sees in the broken statue’s eye) then it must be pretty unintelligible. Now, I realize that I’m jumping from DIDN’T say to COULDN’T say, but it seems a fairly accurate jump from here.

Feather Tigers

We feel ourselves to be an invincible race, I’ve found, and I’m positive I’m not the only one. We think that we, as a species, are pretty indestructable. Wolfe manages to bring that notion down around our ears, as it were.  It seems entirely too fitting that groups of people are extinct in the same time frame as the extinction of animals. It draws a tangible line between the two groups. The presence of supersition alludes to our own misheld belief of species superiority and the firmly denounced possibility of our own extinction (superstitions don’t REALLY existy, they’re figments of your imagination= it’s a figment of your imagination if you think we’ll ever disappear) . Something that,  beyond a cautionary tale about our own behaviors and the inevitability of our own disappearance barring some change though, this piece doesn’t portray another message that I can see.

The Mountains of Sunset, The Mountains of Dawn

As with most of the pieces in this week’s selection, the meaning seems cautionary to me.  The beings built a machine to help them go beyond their own limitations and instead found themselves content to be limited by their own creation.  This is appallingly accurate to our own affairs. Maybe I’m missing something, but I don’t recall any significant new advances in technology in a while. We’ve become stagnant and, what’s worst, comfortably stagnant. We’re content with things the way they are (of course we devise IMPROVEMENTS but radical change?)Also, rather than using the technology for what it was truly intended we’ve allowed it to box us in. We use technology for everything. I spend more time on the computer than outdoors. I don’t listen to the birds on a summer day because I have portable music.  We are all victim(and guilty)  in some way or other. I’m not saying that we should denounce technology, but how can we be so dependant upon it for our very survival in the mundane trivialities of life?

Strange Wine

What a perfectly wonderful time to trot out the old adages “the grass is always greener on the other side” and “careful what you wish for”. Very little seems to stand out besides these pearls of wisdom.

Homelanding

For the life of me I don’t know why this piece is so drawing Perhaps it is the feeling of life that comes at the end.  If you want to understand the life of another you don’t go to the ‘leaders’, you go to the little things. For are they not what makes us feel truly alive in our own skins? The inevitablility of death prompts us to live in a way that anything immortal cannot. It allows us to enjoy the sunset because there are only so many we’ll be allowed to see. The little things, while seemingly inconsequential, make us who we are.  Why try to know somebody by what their overhead dictates? It is much more valuable (both on a personal basis and an overall basis) to know, say, how one takes their coffee, or what they think rather than what their government tells them to think.

Leiber shoots…He…wait…where’d it go?

This story eludes me. Just when I think I can try and pin it down, even towards a coherent interpretation of it, as wrong minded though it might be, it continues to slip through the fingers, as it were. 

  Gott, in his interactions with (by my understanding) his own creations and therefore self, exhibits a disturbing penchant for focusing on the more negative aspects of his own person. Although, the words spoken by the Jester elude to a balanced creation of ‘beings’, a good and bad, a white and black, and a breath and fart, the Man in the Black Flannel, supposedly the ‘good’ is also focusing on the negative. Beyond promises of greatness, his qualifications for entering the Inner Circle are abhorrent. The Jester is plainly the ‘black’ in this duo, with his focus on Gott’s obvious failings (weakened eyes and ears, weight, sex issues). The Black Girl focuses on Gott’s lustful aspects and, again, there’s not a true yin-yang  relationship between the Black Crone and the Black Girl. This seems to say that he’s a slave to his own lustful impulses (the Crone told him he was a slave to the girls) The final duo offer no pretense of opposition in anything other than name. Death trotts out Gott’s suicidal tendencies while the Philosopher remains almost absolutely silent.  The true dualism seems to reside with Gott and Jane. While Gott is losing himself in his morbid musings Jane is busy creating a cheery picture. For everything that Gott says/does Jane seems to provide a relief. Heine seems to float, the darker Gott gets the more affected Heine is. Finally ,Gott must pull himself from his self- imposed exile and darkness in order to save his son.

While all this is very well and interesting, it doesn’t address much of what is asked. Quesitons such as: Why is this considered sci-fi? I’ll accept it as such mainly because I can see some aspects that lend more to sci-fi than fantasy, but I cannot commit it be sci-fi in my limited understandning of it…then again, that’s why I’m here. What is the true nature of this piece? I have no clue. Hopefully, I’ll be enlightened during class.

Somewhere along those lines

Chrysalid: of or relating to Chrysalis

Chrysalis: pupa of a moth or butterfly enclosed in a cocoon.

How apropos. That a beings ability to become what it is destined to become is dependent upon its residence within a rigid, unyeilding environment and its isolation from the outside world is, of course, a notion best investigated in the comfort and safety of our cushy chairs and cuddly blankets.

We tend to rationalize things, we humans. We like to make it ‘fit’ even when, for all intents and purposes, it shouldn’t. Why must a young boy not even a man go through the horrors of being faced with the abject hatred turned towards him through no fault of his own, the knowledge that his own father has joined the hunting party to capture, study, torture, and probably in the end kill him, the reality of said torture being inflicted upon girls he is linked with, and the responsibility of life and death decisions? In our ‘neat packaging’ we attribute it to that old adage ‘what doesn’t kill you will make you stronger’.  No person should need to be THAT strong.  To contemplate killing your love/cousin and your sister simply to spare them the humiliation, pain, and torment sure to be visited upon them…that is something noone should have to deal with.  The sad fact? Wyndham has managed, not only to create a brilliant work of speculative fiction, but of an all too accurate work of social and historical import.

The Salem Witch trials. Nazi Germany. Slave America. So many lives lost to the blind hatred of DIFFERENCE…senseless…and oh so factual.

I must apologize, though, for my so far bleak portrait of the work. It would be so very wrong to paint the book black and dismiss it as depressing drivel. That is not my aim whatsoever and I have no other expression in my vocabulary other than an emphatic ‘God NO!’  to deny this. Hope is cleverly woven in the words of David and his uncle Axel.  That a child can see the senselessness of the discriminations of his society and a man raised in firmly held beliefs can discount and produce doubt in the ‘True Image’ is a blazing spark of hope. Also, that Wydham himself can be so insightful and address this delicate and timeless issue is an elevating hope for the future of mankind.

To add a sidenote, I also have an issue with the Sealanders. their obvious arrogance and disdain for those who don’t have the ability to mind-speak is no better than the discrimination faced in the beginning towards the ‘mutants’.  [extreme sidenote: I wish I was a telepath..or could fly...or had a tail......]

hmm…I think I’ve run out of words……..

For the cover contest

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     This isn’t a magazine cover, but I came across it whilst searching and needed to share! (Found it on another person’s blog http://showmescifi.com/category/star-wars-legacy-of-the-force/)