My favorite genre has been science fiction since I was infatuated with its distant relative in Star Wars at 5 years old. When I saw a course named Cold War Science Fiction listed that I could take to fulfil a gen-ed requirement, my only thought was that this would be a semi-interesting course that I could maybe enjoy as a break from the boring nature of my major required courses that I was also taking this semester. I had read plenty of science fiction from the cold war era in the past, my favorite of which being The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert Heinlein, but I had never taken an inquisitive look into the philosophies and mannerisms that were so thoughtfully put into the books that we have read since August. Never before had a class had me up until 3 am thinking about the failings of our society as represented by the over exaggerations presented in the books we read, nor the many thoughts about the people and unknown universe around us, some of which I incorporated into the blog posts that I picked out for this portfolio.
Of the many overarching themes that carried across from book to book, one of the most interesting to me was the notion of a working form of communism. I had grown up in a house hold where capitalism was commonly stated as the best and only working social ideology, and any mention of socialism or capitalism was stated with the undertone of danger and failure. It wasn’t until we started reading Andromeda by Ivan Yefremov that I understood the real reason behind the communist revolution in 1917, and the goals of the early Soviet Union and communism itself. In Andromeda, as well as the Dispossessed, people took jobs not because it was the most economically viable job, but because it was what brought them joy and fulfillment. There was no mention of the poor or lower class, everyone was considered an equal person who could do pretty much whatever they wanted. This serves as more than enough of an explanation to why communism was so sought after in the early 20th century, why wouldn’t a poor person want to be not poor, and do whatever job they wanted that could bring them contentment. After reading these books, and their different ideas of what a perfect communist society might look like, I came to the conclusion that we are too early in history for communism to be a viable option. In the time that we live in, there are too many menial jobs that take up too much of our population to complete, with little to no satisfaction for those who have to work these jobs, something I explore in depth in my blog post about Social Critiques in The Dispossessed.
Another theme that spanned the many books we read were the different forms that an alien race might take, and what those implications were for our society. In Andromeda, hundreds or even thousands of years passed between communications with other aliens because of the vast distances of space. In Solaris, there wasn’t so much of an alien race as there was an alien planet, one so different from the humans that discovered it that they had almost no way of comprehending how it operated, or what it wanted. In the Dispossessed, the three main species mentioned in the book all stemmed from early expansion of one of them, and they were only just starting to come back together and intermingle again. I go more in depth about this possibility of alien life, and what that would entail in my post on Solaris and Alien Life.
This course also taught me how to think more in depth about how these books are a commentary on the life that we live today, or in the mid 20th century, and where we were and are failing as the human race. The blog post where I did this the most was the one where I analyzed the beginning of Trouble on Titan by Delany. In this analysis, I looked extensively at the commonalities between the civilization Delany outlined in the opening paragraphs of the novel, and the one we live in today, as well as the abrupt differences that immediately tell us this is not a carbon copy of our own society. I also compared our society and the societies of Urras and Anarres in my blog post about the Dispossessed.
This class also challenged me to look deeper than the surface level of the texts that we read, and to try and find the deeper meaning that the authors were trying to impart on their readers. In my analysis of a passage from the Glass Bees, I dove deep into the subtext and meaning behind the passage, in order to dissect what the Ernst Junger was trying to convey with his description of the bees and Zamperini’s other inventions. I also surmised the narrator’s many opinions on technology from this passage and the context around it, and predicted a few possible outcomes for the end of the book, as well as the at the time untold possibilities that the past entailed. As for Leguin’s short text, “Is Gender Necessary,” I stated my take on where I believe she was ahead of her time with her genderless species and writing style. I found her thought experiment to be extremely thought provoking, and her choice to use the male pronoun in English for this genderless society to be intriguing, as well as contrasting to today’s society and pronoun fixation.
My last curated blog post is the one that I think most accurately depicts how I’ve grown as a connoisseur of science fiction from this course, and it is about my opinion of the shortcomings of Tarkovsky’s film adaptation of Solaris. I go in depth about the boring nature of the segment of the film that I chose to analyze, relate it to a movie that I found to be much more entertaining while using many of the same concepts in its scenes, and then relate that to why I think the movie as a whole failed to hold my attention for the vast majority of its 2 hour and 47 minute run time. In this blog post, I also took into consideration different comments on my original blog post, and disproved them with more extensive reasoning of why their position on the matter was wrong, and why mine was right.
For my guest blog posts, I chose to focus on the responses for the prompts from 9/14/20 about the book Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Phillip K. Dick. I chose this specific blog post because it was the only one about Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, which was the only book that I had read before this class, and my favorite book from the novels that we did read throughout this course. The prompt for this post was to do a close reading of any one sentence from the first 13 chapters of the novel. I found that although I had read the book before, I didn’t have a great understanding of how to do an adequate close reading, and thus my blog post for this particular week was in my opinion my weakest one. However, after going back and reading through all of the posts from this week, I found what I considered to be the three most in depth and precise posts. Megan Barber’s post was an extremely intelligent analysis of the society’s use of mood organs to artificially create emotions, and how they would be diagnosed by a medical professional today. Masato Hirakata’s post was a astute dissection of the reasoning behind this society’s need to own and take care of an animal, as well as the implications behind faking an animal with a mechanical replacement for those who couldn’t afford the real deal. Bradley Cisternino chose to evaluate the differences in this book between first animals and humans, and then humans and androids, breaking these complex concepts down into differences in the way that each perceives emotion and empathy, as well as outlining some of Dick’s thoughts that I disagree with. These posts all inspired the way that I analyzed the rest of the novels going forward from Androids, as well as taught me what it really meant to do a close reading of a passage.
Over the course of this very different semester, there has been no course that I more looked forward to attending than this one, and the fruits of my labor are shown off in the blog posts listed on the left of this introduction. I came into this class as an enjoyer of science fiction, and left it as an inquisitive speculator of the future of mankind, and the universe we live in. Hopefully the blog posts that I have chosen can illustrate the journey that I took to become a closer reader of these novels, as well as a more well rounded investigator of not only science fiction writing, but all mediums of entertainment. Enjoy!