Experiments in SciFi and Fantasy (and Hello again, Third Culture Literature: It has been a long time)

 

I am reading Lois McMaster Bujold's Shards of Honor (for . . . reasons), and I still have Ursula K. LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven on the go ( for those following along, that means War and Peace is neglected for the moment, though I made it as far as the wolf-hunting part, which is roughly half way).

Remember how I wrote that blog , which, among other things, tried to define "Third Culture Literature," and that academic book trying to suggest there were specific characteristics of  Third Culture Literature?  Yeah.  Been a while for me too.  

Anyway, Bujold writes "Radial symmetry was popular among the tiny creatures occupying the ecological niches held by insects on Earth" (17) and "Do you think they could be like those birds from Earth, that pick parasites off cattle?" (21).  

LeGuin writes about Dr. William Haber's office in Portland:  "It did not have a view of Mount Hood [. . .] But on one of the walls was a big photographic mural of Mount Hood" (6).  It is the absence of this mural that first signals the world-changing effect of Orr's dreams (24-5).

These two incidents of the unfamiliar fantastic and scientific compared to Earth (radials, Mount Hood) together made me think "Huh.  Interesting.  I bet a TCK wouldn't compare the current world with a past one.  I bet they'd just occupy the new world, without comparison."  

So, I set up a little experiment re: world-building to see if I was right.

SciFi  (We are on spaceships, new planets and all that):

Bujold's Shards of Honor  vs. CCK Nnedi Okorafor's Binti

Fantasy (We are on Earth, but its crazy different.  Maybe this is also Sci Fi?  I need to tighten up some definitions)

LeGuin's Lathe of Heaven vs TCK Mohsin Hamid's Exit West

I need to do more work on this.  I got blindsided by my second migraine of the week (after swimming which is so virtuous I ought to be radiating health, but I am not) so this is very preliminary.

Guys.  The results of my experiment are surprising.  I expected an absence of comparison in Hamid and Okorafor.  I expected their characters to just get on with being in the new places.  What I may have found instead is the introduction of that ever-mind boggling extra dimension: TIME.

Okorafor roots Binti in a fantasy of the past (ancestral land) as well as a science fiction of the future (launch port)  when she has Binti muse "We Himba don't travel.  We stay put.  Our ancestral land is life; move away from it and you diminish.  We even cover our bodies with it. Otjize is red land.  Here in the launch port, most were Khoush.  [. . . ] Here I was an outsider" (3).

Hamid describes portals through which migrants travel from one part of earth to another.  Migrants cross immense geographic and cultural distance in an instant.  However, the past gets left behind, and all the people in it.  "When we migrate, we murder from our lives those we leave behind" writes Hamid (98), and adds "We are all migrants through time " (209).

It brings us back to Salman Rushdie's "Imaginary Homelands": "The past is a country from which we have all emigrated.  It's loss is a part of our common humanity" (12).  

It's true.  We all do leave the past behind.  

However, an early response to my hasty experiment is that SciFi and Fantasy contrasts "home" places (ancestral lands, Earth, which is home for Bujold's readers if not for protagonist Cordelia Naismith) with imagined ones, without much considering how the home places are necessarily also past places.

CCK and TCK SciFi and Fantasy cannot seem to help themselves in thinking about the importance of the past as it informs the future, and in so doing, reminds us of how irrevocably it is lost to us. Time  as a metaphor for distance from place is of the essence.

Addendum (the good bit, actually.  Best thoughts below):

Perhaps you are infuriated by the Ford Escalade sized hole in this argument?  I received this text at about 6.20 AM, from a good friend who is also a good scientist, and a good reader: 

"George Orr’s dreams [Lathe of Heaven] change the past. That’s the entire premise. Not just for him, but for everyone. "

Doh!

On the one hand: throw this laptop out the window melodramatically for that is correct

BUT!

On the other hand: why did LeGuin's writing about the past automatically feel different to me?

Giving myself benefit of the doubt for a second led to this insight: I am  indeed wrong  in my conclusion "CCK and TCK SciFi and Fantasy cannot seem to help themselves in thinking about the importance of the past as it informs the future."  No.  Not correct.  TCK and CCK SciFi show a separation between past and present.  The past is a vision with no direct connection to the present.  The past does not cause the present.  That's the problem really: the rupture between past and present leads to nostalgia for something to which there is no chain of connection from the present.

In LeGuin, you do see how the past informs the present.  Over and over again different pasts inform the present in different ways.  For LeGuin, the focus is on the present, on the ramifications of a tweak to something in the past.  Causality is everything.  The past causes the present.  The present, as outcome of altered past, is relentlessly the focus.

To belabor the point, in CCK and TCK work, the past does NOT cause the present.  Rushdie opens his essay with: "An old photograph in a cheap frame hangs on a wall in the room where I work. It's a picture dating from 1946 of a house into which, at the time of its taking, I had not yet been born" (9).  The past is a relic, static, fetishized even.  It bears no resemblance to the present, and how it connects with the present at all is the mystery because it does not seem to have any bearing on it whatsoever.

Freedom of Movement (War and Peace, Lathe of Heaven, MTA Buses)

 I had to take my Hyundai to the dealership this morning.  It took close to an hour just to check in.  I'll get my vehicle back . . . maybe tomorrow?  Unclear.  

Already impatient after an hour of waiting, and emphatically not first in line for drop off, I opted not to use Hyundai's shuttle service, and instead walked up the hill into Towson towards the red line, a bus route that is actually fairly functional and gets me quite close to home.  Walking, as Thoreau knew, is prime time for thinking, so I was thinking, and feeling.  I felt free.  It was great to leave the car behind, and walk the cool and shady side of the street under the crepe myrtles.  I felt like I was on vacation.  I could be anywhere.  I could be anyone.  The world was bigger because I was slower, and fully exposed to it.  However, I also thought "I have a doctor's appointment in Timonium on Wednesday.  Can I even get there by bus?  And I am supposed to get to Mount Washington later today.  East-West transit is basically impossible."  I felt freer... and inconvenienced.

In War and Peace, very rich people leading affluent lives simply go places.  Pierre goes to Petersburg: we don't get many details.  However, soldiers and cossacks walk.  They walk and walk and walk.  They walk until their boots fall apart. They have no food, so they walk to a village to raid it, but there is no food.  Nikolay is a rich person in the army and like many has been able to purchase/ argue by birth rite his way into the rank of officer.  Nikolay rides his horse to see Denisov in hospital, and even that takes a long time.  His horse is starving, its fur falling out.  Even for Nikolay travel is a big deal.  Nine miles is an enormous distance.

I'm leavening my reading of Tolstoy with LeGuin.  Lathe of Heaven feels light and easy when I switch to it because of its first person narrative POV.  (War and Peace: omniscience.)  

LeGuin's journey is through possibility.  You travel through George Orr's dreams.  You travel a looooong way through those dreams, though technically George never leaves Portland, Oregon.  We fly on his imagination.  The nasty catch here is the manipulation of Orr's imagination and his dreams by Dr. William Haber.  Haber is idealistic, but also self-serving and the realities created by Orr/Haber dreams get corrupt and bizarre.

I guess where I am going with this is a multi-pronged observation: 

*humans like travel stories (they are some kind of metaphor for human life)

*but travel is hard, and delightful as the narrative of an arduous journey may be, humans want their own travel experiences to be easy. 

*the shift of actual journey into imaginary realms doesn't make it less of a journey or less about human life.

That may be as profound as this particular meandering gets.  I'll try for something better next time.

War and Peace & Outlast (Alaska, 2026)

 War and Peace is taking me a while, folks.  I know you are waiting for the review, but it's slow, big, 1400 pages in 10 point font.  

It's a bit of a soul destroyer too.

Take Pierre, for instance.  At the novel's start, he's idealistic, interested in what Bonaparte is up to in the rest of Europe, and a galumphing, socially inept outsider.  He's charming.  

But he inherits a massive fortune, folks toady up to him, and he is gullible enough to believe their flattery. He doesn't go to war against Bonaparte as many of his peers do.  He stays at home and manages his enormous wealth instead.  He just doesn't think about politics any more.  He is manipulated into a marriage (Helene's family stand to profit through the connection).  It ends badly (Helene has an affair).  Pierre then flees, becomes a Freemason, and is set to change his life entirely . . . except he doesn't.  He goes to parties instead.  (That's as far as I've gotten with Pierre.  We'll see what happens next.)

It all makes one think about how weak humans are.  Well-intentioned, but easily seduced by money, and, well, sex.

This seems especially trenchant these days (jeez, Antje, why?  What could possibly make you think of the corrupting influences of money,  and sex?).

Enter, of all things, a reality TV program.  Outlast is kind of a Survivor reboot but without tribal council.  In the 2026 Alaska version there aren't even challenges, per se, beyond the challenge of surviving in Alaska's wilderness with primitive supplies.  

An interesting schism happens in this season of the show.  In its end stages only two teams survive.  One, a team of young athletic folks (primarily Texans).  The other, a selection of folks that runs the gamut from model to chef to wilderness expert.  The Texans, hooting and hollering, vote off their ailing friends one by one, and wind up as a duo.  The other team votes off no one.  In fact they even take in an extra player, one who tries to betray them and steal their boat after which they forgive him and take him back in to their team.

Interviews with individual players about what they would do if they won the money show the model talking about wanting to pay for care for her mother with dementia, and the wilderness expert wanting to pay for his knee surgery.  One Texan want to buy more party boats, the other wants to buy a second house.

The team of five make it to the end, all five of them, but the Texans, just the two hooting and hollering young men, win.  Toxic white masculinity triumphs again, it seems.

However, the team of five's exit interviews are striking: the model thinks she made her team lose because she was too slow, but the rest of her team disagrees, they hug her, pat her on the back, tell her to not be so hard on herself, point out that she's the only woman that made it to the end and to be proud.  The Judas who tried to steal the boat and was forgiven cries to the camera and says his team healed something that was cracked inside him, something that goes far beyond the show.  The chef, often thorny and cantankerous during the preceding weeks, breaks down weeping and says that the last month was hard, but the worst part is that it is over and he can't be with his closest friends anymore.  The five person group refers to each other as family.

That five person group represents the kind of life one wants (love, acceptance, survival, warmth, healing).

The two person Texan group represents prevailing culture (Win at all costs.  Get to the end.  Never mind the middle.  Get to the end, the cash.)

You can tell I love the five person group: there's something in there about how to be human because the end really is just death.  To get to the end ruthlessly?  For what?  What about the life in the middle?  Can that be warmer?

I'd like Pierre to get his shit together and think about this.  He needs to watch Outlast.

It is true that Tolstoy is illustrating many of the themes Outlast captures: War and Peace.  We have not figured any of this out, as humans, and continue to be selfish, manipulative, and miserable.  

However, it is also obdurately true that:

The Texans won and can buy duplicates of resources they already have.  

&

I am pretty sure I saw one of the Outlast players on the team that didn't win stocking carrots at Whole Foods.

Summer 2026 starts with War and Peace

 Hello, Blog.  It's been a minute. 

Look what I bought!  You'll never guess where I bought it.

The newsstand at BWI airport!  I felt like I had to support BWI for having stocked this, so I bought it.  It was, of course, an awful thing to carry across the continent and back on my trip to a conference, but I couldn't resist the ridiculousness.  Plus, if you settle War and Peace on your tray table, no one strikes  up a conversation with you mid flight.  It's an excellent social preventative.

I'm about 300 pages in.  The first 50 were hard.  I had to flip repeatedly to the page giving a list of who is who.  It's getting easier to read, and Tolstoy's knack for positioning all of his characters as flawed (and  oblivious to their own flaws), and on the brink of catastrophe (to which these flawed characters are also oblivious) is reeling me in.

I'm coming off a challenging three years.  I have sabbatical coming up this fall.  I will do serious work, I promise.

But I'm not really starting until I finish War and Peace.

Oh, and as a reward for my work these past three years, my colleagues bought me a very generous gift card to The Ivy bookstore.  My first installment just came.  These will also have to wait until after I have finished War and Peace.

It's nice to be back.  What are y'all reading?