Space Opera and Progress Essay

I wrote a guest blog for File 770: Space Opera and Progress

The essay considers how the Western--horse opera--(as in books about cowboys) was a genre of progress, taking as its main theme the American myth of manifest destiny. The space opera is an immediate analog of the horse opera, updating 19th-century visions of progress to the 21st century and beyond. It's probably a 6-minute read and I'd say it's well worth your time.

Cognitive Estrangement, Science Fiction, and Michael Crichton's Sphere

How long does it take you to recognize what something is? Have you ever flown in a plane and looked at the ground below and not grokked the vision below? Then you kept looking and realized--yes, that's a river, that's a road, those are cars!

Now imagine that you are in a foreign environment--maybe even an alien planet. You look and look but you don't know what you're looking at. The sky's not blue. The grass isn't green. Heck, the grass isn't even grass. You hear odd things--grinding things, beeps, growls, weird stuff. Nothing makes sense. But you stick around. You begin to make connections. At some point, everything will make sense to you. Though you will always have the memory of not understanding the foreignness of everything. In Science Fiction, cognitive estrangement contains both these elements--the not understanding and the understanding.

Cognitive estrangement amplifies the recognition experience. Recognition is the experience of comprehending a given subject of study. If you've ever had to read something twice or more to get it, then you understand the challenge of comprehension. We don't always recognize the material put in front of us at first, even if the material is standard issue information. Misrecognition is partially a result of how our memories interact with our cognitive function, partially based on focus, and partially based on native intelligence. Humans don't always store memories completely. What we remember is packed away in groups of neurons that, when triggered, fire in the same patterns that the experience was recorded.

Bruce Sterling's Distraction, the Internet, and Media Manipulation

Who would ever have thought that internet 'bots could be programmed to spread disinformation, especially to sew political dissent? Oh yeah, Bruce Sterling did a couple decades ago in Distraction. In the context of the 21st century, it doesn't seem like much of a revelation,  an alarming number of people have a mixed-up read on reality, judging what's real as fake and what's fake as real. Sterling had it right, people are equally impressionable and manipulable, and email, a message delivered right to you, is a perfectly engineered medium for social engineering hacks. People have been falling for mail fraud ever since the pony express took to the trails, accepting as truth messages that forecast the end of the government or the end of Christianity, morality, liberalism, whatever.

Dr. Adder by K.W. Jeter | Cyberpunk and Boundary Transgression

K.W. Jeter's Dr. Adder, originally written in 1974, prefigures Cyberpunk fiction by nearly a decade and does so thoroughly, giving characters mobility through using underground sewer space usually off limits, using a primitive form of cyberspace to extend the individual beyond his normal reach, and viewing the body as meat to ignore, abandon, or enhance. Like later Cyberpunk, drug use also figures into Dr. Adder. Drugs allow for immediate psychical mobility, altering perceptions and thoughts, taking individual consciousness far beyond the normal experience.

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 | Misinformation and the Media

Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 takes part in an odd paradox. For one, Bradbury's firefighters fight with fire rather than against it. For two, Fahrenheit 451's message is about the danger of banning books (or burning them like it's Nazi Germany) and this book has been banned almost more than any other book in America (some books do have a longer banning history--I'm looking at you Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). 

Fahrenheit 451 has been on library blacklists since it was first published in 1953. You'd think the banning would have stopped somewhere in the 21st century, but it hasn't. Librarians are coached about which books to ban from day one of their library studies. Librarians-in-training receive a time-honored blacklist of every classic book that should never find its way into the hands of a pliable mind. Along with Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, Mark Twain's Huck Finn, and James Joyce's Ulysses, Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 is one of the great whipping boys of the puritanical mission to cleanse society of corrupting influences. Yes, sadly, Western society has a long tradition for casting out its best thinkers: think of Galileo and Socrates, or, better, think like Galileo and Socrates and watch as the rank and file hurry to build a pillory to contain you.