The Sequel

  This class has really opened my eyes to the world of science fiction. When I first signed up for it, I assumed the stories and our discussions would let the geek in me come out, close-mindedly expecting to read only stories taking place in outer space or with robots or something.  I have to say that I was so pleasantly surprised that this was not the case, and that I absolutely adored coming to class! (No sucking up here, I promise it's true!)  The stories were so interesting and creative.  I can truly say that after learning what it is that makes a science fiction story science fiction, it might just be my new favorite genre.
  Which brings me to what I think was the most useful thing I learned throughout the semester, the concept of the "novum." Looking at a story in terms of what it is that makes that world different from the real world is really the whole point of reading it.  It seems like a pretty basic concept; something has to be different in order for the story to be fiction.  But actually learning more about that concept made me really start to consider it more for every story. Authors of these science fiction stories had such unique ideas, for example with my personal favorite of the semester, "Baby, You Were Great," Wilhelm took the concept of reality television and just added in the factor of being able to experience emotions as well. Since I was focusing a lot more on that little tweak I was able to read the story with, as you mentioned for our third paper, a sort of lens. Everything from minor details in the story to the style in which the author wrote it seemed to be surrounded by that small change.
  Another thing we learned that I found useful was the concept of close focus reading.  Again, though it seems so simple of an idea, it's not something that I really ever thought about.  Examining the text so closely line by line really makes you realize that everything the author puts into a story is there for a reason.  Reading this way taught me to think so much more about a certain character or setting, and why they said something, did something, were described in a certain way, etc.
  I really really enjoyed this class and all the stories, and how you would get us all talking about them every class.  As I said before, "Baby, You Were Great" was my favorite, but "Persistence of Vision" was a close second! Oh, and on that note I think starting the class off with "Liar!" is a really good idea...it is a fast moving interesting read that, at least in my opinion, really did a nice job of getting me excited to see what science fiction was all about!

Bloodchild - Close Reading

"Lomas began to groan and make choked sounds" to "I wouldn't have thought anything about her could seem alien to me"(Butler 126-7). 

"Lomas began to groan and make choked sounds. I had hoped he would stay unconscious. T'Gatoi put her face near his so that he focused on her."

Though Gan has seen and prepared himself for the pain that he knows he will eventually feel when his time to engage in this procedure comes, this is the first time we as the audience are seeing it directly. We feel pain for the man in question, as Gan wishes the man would stay unconscious, and so feel nothing throughout the entire experience.

"'I've stung you as much as I dare for now,' she told him. 'When this is over, I'll sting you to sleep and you won't hurt anymore.'

'Please,' the man begged. 'Wait...'

'There's no more time, Bram. I'll sting you as soon as it's over. When T'Khotgif arrives she'll give you eggs to help you heal. It will all be over soon.'"

Here we see the extreme gruesomeness of what is actually going on here.  These creatures have turned into parasites, essentially breeding humans for the sole purpose of incubating their young. The man is begging for his own Tlic, so that some of his pain may be alleviated as his body is ripped open and the larvae are removed. Despite the torture that this man is going through, the "birthing" process continues, without the help of his Tlic's stings.

"'T'Khotgif!' the man shouted, straining against my hands.

'Soon, Bram.' T'Gatoi glanced at me, then placed a claw against his abdomen slightly to the right of the middle, just below the left rib. There was movement on the right side - tiny, seemingly random pulsations moving his brown flesh, creating a concavity here, a convexity there, over and over until I could see the rhythm of it and knew where the next pulse would be."

Suspense is building here, more and more we see what the whole awful experience is like, and more and more we see Gan coming one step closer to having to go through it himself as well.

Stylistically, we see a pattern start to build in the way in which Butler describes much of the story's action. So far, every movement of these creatures is a flowing, undulating one, described as "not only boneless, but aquatic - something swimming through the air as though it were water." I think it is through this smooth movement that the audience, and even the characters, are supposed to relate to the creature as being natural. If the creature is viewed as natural, it is easier to see the process to which they subject their families as being natural as well.

"Lomas's entire body stiffened under T'Gatoi's claw, though she merely rested it against him as she wound the rear section of her body around his legs. He might break my grip, but he would not break hers. He wept helplessly as she used his pants to tie his hands, then pushed his hands above his head so that I could kneel on the cloth between them and pin them in place. She rolled up his shirt and gave it to him to bite down on."

Though T'Gatoi and the other Tlics do their best and sometimes succeed in appearing as though they actually care for their families, when it comes down to it they are incredibly strong, and will use that force against their "hosts" in order to survive (which in cases such as this one include ensuring the survival of even another Tlic's young). The Tlics now how to ease the agony of their Terran, but at such a small interval that it most likely isn't even noticed.

"And she opened him.

His body convulsed with the first cut. He almost tore himself away from me. The should he made...I had never heard such sounds come from anything human. T'Gatoi seemed to pay no attention as she lengthened and deepened the cut, now and then pausing to lick away blood. His vessels contracted, reacting to the chemistry of her saliva, and the bleeding slowed.

I felt as though I were helping her torture him, helping her consume him. I knew I would vomit soon, didn't know why I hadn't already. I couldn't possibly last until she was finished."

These descriptions further intensify the pain that we as the audience feel for the Terran, and ultimately for Gan. As he stands there watching, he is ambushed with two very real fears: one coming from witnessing the horrific scene in front of him, wishing to ease the man's pain, and the other coming from the knowledge that one day he will be the man in front of him, experiencing the very suffering that he is almost to sick to continue watching.

"She found the first grub. It was fat and deep red with his blood - both inside and out. It had already eaten its own egg case but apparently had not yet begun to eat its host. At this stage, it would eat any flesh except its mother's. Let alone, it would have gone on excreting the poisons that had both sickened and alerted Lomas. Eventually it would have begun to eat. By the time it ate its way out of Lomas's flesh, Lomas would be dead or dying - and unable to take revenge on the thing that was killing him. There was always a grace period between the time the host sickened and the time the grubs began to eat him."

Not only is the gestation and birthing of these creatures excruciatingly painful to the Terran, but it is also potentially lethal to them. The fact that death is a possible outcome of this process yet the Tlic continue to engage the Terran in it just confirms the fact that the Tlic are only using them, and that is it. The 'bond' between Tlic and Terran is a superficial one. The Tlic allow the Terran to believe that to carry their children is a huge honor, and so the Terran are manipulated into somewhat being okay with their Tlics using their bodies for their own purposes. The Terran suffer the beginning stages of death ONLY because of the creature that is PUT inside them, yet the creatures have developed in such a way that the host is rendered incapable of defending itself or inflicting harm on the parasite once the process has begun.

"T'Gatoi picked up the writhing grub carefully and looked at it, somehow ignoring the terrible groans of the man."

Further reminding the reader, and also Gan, that the Tlics feel no remorse for what they do; they have become immune to the anguish they inflict upon their Terran. Their sole concern is with the furthering of their species.

"'Good,' T'Gatoi looked down at him. 'I wish you Terrans could do that at will.' She felt nothing. And the thing she held..."
I think this is Butler's way of saying that not only do the Tlics not care very much, they actually find the screaming and pain the Terrans feel to be annoying, bothersome, a nuisance that comes along with the territory.

"It was limbless and boneless at this stage, perhaps fifteen centimeters long and two thick, blind and slimy with blood. It was like a large worm. T'Gatoi put it into the belly of the achti, and it began at once to borrow. It would stay there and eat as long as there was anything to eat."
This description of the newly born creature shows the reader how blood hungry this species actually is. Their first instinct is to devour whatever there is in front of them, and no matter how savagely, it is encouraged.

"Probing through Lomas's flesh, she found two more, one of them smaller and more vigorous. 'A male!' she said happily. He would be dead before I would. He would be through his metamorphosis and screwing everything that would hold still before his sisters even had limbs. He was the only one to make a serious effort to bite T'Gatoi as she placed him in the achti."
Continuing the graphic description. Even a word like "probing" gives so much description the situation at hand.

"Paler worms oozed to visibility in Lomas's flesh. I closed my eyes. It was worse than finding something dead, rotting and filled with tiny animal grubs. And it was far worse than any drawing or diagram."
Gan is again seeing what it is that is going to happen to him in the future. He probably had been shown on paper what it would be like, but seeing it in person is putting it into perspective for him. He seems to be in shock that this is happening to an actual live being, not something that is already dead and numb.

"'Ah, there are more,' T'Gatoi said, plucking out two long, thick grubs. You may have to kill another animal, Gan. Everything lives inside you Terrans.'
I had been told all my life that this was a good and necessary thing Tlic and Terran did together - a kind of birth. I had believed it until now. I knew birth was painful and bloody, no matter what. But this was something else, something worse. And I wasn't ready to see it. Maybe I never would be. Yet I couldn't see it. Closing my eyes didn't help."
The Tlic depend on the Terran to survive. Up until this time Gan had been preparing for becoming a part of this procedure which ensures their survival. It almost seemed like it was an honor for him to be a part of this, something that would be shameful for him to deny. Now for the first time he is seeing it for what it really is and beginning to question the humanity of it.

"T'Gatoi found a grub still eating its egg case. The remains of the case were still wired into a blood vessel by their own little tube or hook or whatever. That was the way the grubs were anchored and the way they fed. They took only blood until they were ready to emerge. Then they ate their stretched elastic egg cases. Then they ate their hosts.
T'Gatoi bit away the egg case, licked away the blood. Did she like the taste? Did childhood habits die hard - or not die at all?"
Everything about these creatures is barbaric. The way they plant their eggs into their Terran appears to be extremely painful, and the fact that, left in there too long, they could possibly begin to eat the very thing giving them life is altogether chilling. Gan even begins to look at T'Gatoi in a new light, trying to figure out if she is just as savage as these little beings, having only learned to hide it well.

The whole procedure was wrong, alien. I wouldn't have thought anything about her could seem alien to me."
This line wraps up the turning point in the story where Gan goes from loving and feeling safe with his Tlic, to discovering her true nature. He no longer looks forward to the bond they have and will continue to share in the future, and is instead frightened by her. This event has completely changed him forever.

Girls Girls Girls

Though I far from consider myself to be a feminist, I did find several points made by Joanna Russ in When it Changed to be quite insightful. Whereas many feminist authors tend to write in a way that places women in equality with men, Russ asks the question of why there is even a difference in the first place. It is near the end of the story when the narrator says, "Sometimes I laugh at the question those four men hedged about all evening and never quite dared to ask, 'Which of you plays the role of the man?'" (774). This, more so than the detailing of the responsibilities that women have taken on as their own since the absence of men, truly encompasses the idea that gender is solely a social construct. The need to take all of the women and, despite how far they have developed without men, separate them in terms of male or female characteristics, has absolutely nothing to do with the scientific notion of sex. Men no longer exist in this new world, and the need for their genetic contributions is long gone. If this is the case, if women can continue to survive and reproduce on their own, then why should it matter which females "play the role" of the man? This need is a result of the world we live in today, where specific duties have become the responsibility of a certain sex. These duties and behaviors make up a society's idea of gender, something that has become considered all too important by most if not all civilizations.

On a silly note, because as aforementioned I do not claim to be a feminist, I think this story is a good representation of what would happen should the sexes ever in fact become separated: the men were the ones to come crawling back to the women, women were content to continue living on their own as they had been ;)

Reader Response - Kerinyaga

  As I had no problem mentioning in class, I actually really enjoyed this story.  When it first opened, I enjoyed the myth-like quality about it. It had me from the beginning. From the second paragraph I noticed that this story was far from typical (for scifi) in the way in which it was told.  It was sort of olden in nature, an intriguingly told story of history (only later do we find out that it was in fact a story of the future - which makes it more interesting because that means a futuristic story is coming off as primitive, which would normally be a backwards step and therefore usually thought of as undesirable).
  Between the middle and the bottom of the first page is when we discover that this world is one which was created, something manmade and separate from the "real" one. Right after that do we see what kind of rules this new world plays with, as apparently the narrator has killed a baby.
  Because we are not yet privy to the ways of this world, reading the conversation between the narrator and "Koinnage" is extremely intriguing. We are learning much more about their culture, and therefore what kind of people they are.
  As the story continues to unfold and we read of the different stories the narrator tells his people, we start to wonder which is the side we should be rooting for, and which is the side we should fear.  In my opinion the little anecdotes keep the whole story interesting.
  We continue to hear more of this thing referred to as "Maintenance" and finally when we reach page 815 we begin to receive a little bit of an explanation as to what this world actually is. We see that the narrator, the mundumugu has access to a computer! Until this point, I was under the impression that this story was taking place far before our time. It is here where we start to question if the story will be at all like the Village (of course after reading this we know that's the case, but this is the first time where anyone could even make such a guess). Someone else may have guessed that something monumental occurred that threw society into a rudimentary state, perhaps technology became too advanced and burnt itself out, or a nuclear war all but wiped everyone out.
  On page 817, we see that though the mundumugu does not appear to be in power over Maintenance on paper, he does look to be very at home when speaking to Barbara, and not at all in fear of anything she may do to him as a result of her little "check up".
  Over the next couple of pages is when I made the decision that though I would never condone the cold-blooded murder of a live infant, I do understand the need for a society to maintain its traditions, and likewise everything that the mundumugu is doing in an effort to keep their culture alive.  Apparently something devastating happened to his people when they lost sight of who they were a long time ago: "We cannot change our way of life because it makes you uncomfortable. We did that once before, and within a mere handful of years, your culture had corrupted our society. With every factory we built, with every job we created, with every bit of Western technology we accepted, with every Kikuyu who converted to Christianity, we became something we were not meant to be. I am the mundumugu, entrusted with preserving all that makes us Kikuyu, and I will not allow that to happen again" (819).
  This is the point over which our class got into a debate. The young lady who sits in the front (I feel rude for not knowing your name since I enjoy what you have to contribute to all our discussions :]) was saying that there must be a line drawn when it comes to upholding tradition. She found the manner in which the mundumugu lied to his people in order to keep things as they had been to be a bit much. I suppose since I'm not actually in the situation I found it a lot easier to agree with the mundumugu's ways, and to advocate ancient customs.
  As the story came to a close the question remained, albeit only with he and the reader, as only we know both sides of the story, whether or not the mundumugu was in the right. Only in the final paragraph is it apparent that not only does he feel the need to protect his way of life, but is prepared to send his whole village into battle in an effort to do so. For me that was when I thought perhaps the narrator was just crazy, and paranoid about the potential good that could have come from conforming a little bit. Either way Resnick did a great job detailing a country's struggle between tradition and growth, and what lengths some would go to in an attempt to maintain the former.

forgotten expectations...met

To be completely honest, this section sort of embodies every part of taking this class that I was afraid of.  I did not find Burning Chrome to be interesting by any means. It seemed to take every bit of a scifi movie that I don't like, and put it together. I can by all means handle a movie taking place in space, or dealing with robots or computers, but when I am reading just a few pages into a world that someone has created with hardly any room for explanation as to how it got there...needless to say I had a very hard time keeping up with what Gibson was putting down.  Concepts were already very bizarre and outlandish before the reader "arrives" if you will, and I felt nothing but lost the whole time. The story barely seemed to have any huge point beyond being an extremely detailed and simultaneously unfinished description of the way things are done in the future. A flimsy love story acted as a little bit of a filler. My opinion is that Gibson took off more than he could chew, and thought that he would rely on his overly eccentric and rambling storytelling to pull it all together.
Though I did not enjoy this story, reading it did bring to light a lot of things that stylistically I will be sure to avoid, including an overgrown plot line and too much description that ultimately leads to nowhere.
Something else that disappointed me about this story was that it was a reminder of everything I originally thought this class was going to be all about, and ended up being happy when I realized it wasn't. My typical thought of science fiction had been one of every story only consisting of crazy futuristic, electronically scary worlds. For a long time, I had learned this wasn't the case, that the "scientific" aspect of a scifi story could be as minute as a new procedure and its effects on mankind. This story returned me to my original stereotypic thoughts that I had been happy to break away from.