Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1990"

The Robinson Crusoe story

Abstract: Robinson Crusoe is one of the great myths of Western literature and one of the great adventures of all time. Martin Green traces the lineage of this influential novel and uses its offspring as cultural touchstones, revealing its universal theme of the white race's triumph, guilt, or anxiety over its relations with other races. Green has chosen representative retellings spanning a 250-year period from English, American, German, French, Swiss, and Scottish literatures to illustrate his theory. He examines the ways in which the story has been told for children, as satire, as romance, as apocalypse and dystopia and he provides the historical and cultural context for each work, broadening literary study into cultural study. Green's ultimate interest is the modern adventure tale, which begins with Defoe and is still being told today, that adventure which is the myth of modern society."

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period, 1926-1970

Abstract: During the past 50 years American science fiction has become one of the most popular forms of fiction throughout the world It provides the best index to the impact of all fields of science, as well as technology, on the literary and popular imaginations Indeed, it has helped to shape the dreams that lie behind the worldwide interest in space exploration, while at the same time it has provided the cutting edge of social and political criticism and satire Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction undertakes an overview of the field during those crucial decades when it evolved from a form of fiction in the pulp magazines to one of the most popular forms of the contemporary novel Clareson traces the principal thematic strains of the field, from the view of a technologically triumphant humanity that foresaw nuclear holocaust and an earthy dystopia, to the rich diversity of the 1960s Writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, John W Campbell, Ray Bradbury, Marjorie Nicolson, Max Ehrlich, Judith Merril, and Kurt Vonnegut are featured

Science Fiction Roots and Branches: Contemporary Critical Approaches

Abstract: Part 1 Some roots: Victorian science fiction and fantasy: counter projects: William Morris and the science fiction of the eighteen eighties, Darko Suvin H.G.Wells' "The War of the Worlds", Stanislaw Lem "Dracula" adn "The Beetle": imperial and sexual guilt and fear in late Victorian fantasy, Rhys Garnett. Part 2 Some branches: post-war science fiction: scientists in science fiction - enlightenment and after, Patrick Parrinder the world as code and labyrinth: Stanislaw Lem's "Memoirs found in a bathtub", Jerzy Jarzebski the neglected fiction of John Wyndham - "Consider Her Ways", trouble with lichen and web, Thomas D.Clarenson and Alice S.Clarenson Frank Herbert's "Dune" and the discourse of Apocalyptic ecologism in the United States, R.J.Ellis Ursula K.LeGuin and Time's dispossession, Robert M.Philmus. Part 3 Some Branches: contemporary feminist responses: men in feminist science fiction - Marge Piercy, Thomas Berger, and the End of Masculinity, Marleen Bar the destabilization of gender in Vonda MacIntyre's "Superluminal", Jenny Wolmark man-made monsters - Suzy McKee Charnas' "Walk to the End of the World" as Dystopian feminist science fiction, Anne Cranny Francis.

Casablanca Meets Star Wars: The Blakean Dialectics of Blade Runner

Abstract: Director Ridley Scott and screenwriters Hampton Fancher and David Peoples warn that their adaptation of Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is "a philosophical film," and they can be accused of attempting the real film adaptation of Moby Dick in that respect. For in the immodest guise of a noir/science fiction thriller, Blade Runner leaps from impeccable intricacies of mise-en-scene to questions about the nature of man, God, and beast, the meaning of existence, and the workings of the universe. It is to be expected that a film which intersects with the works of Philip K. Dick grapples with metaphysics, and it follows that in the eyes of many critics. Blade Runner is as pretentious and confusing as are Dick's novels. This is not surprising. What is surprising is the consistency with which the film exceeds Dick's feat of integrating metaphysical suppositions with style and form. In both Blade Runner and Do Androids Dream dialectical opposition is form and content; the hierarchal relationships of apparent contraries are self-consciously deconstructed for thematic purposes. The film expands this formulation by presenting the conflict of opposing styles and genres: film noir vs. expressionism and film noir vs. science fiction. Furthermore, the film's narrative mode poses additional reconciliatory demands on its audience as the classical narrative meets with the poetic. Blade Runner subverts the narrative act of the viewer (the urge for causal and temporal connection) as it depends upon that urge. The subsequent conflict posits the view that unity exists in a chaotic world, but is infinitely expunged by fragmentation. In other words, if we wish to speak in terms of theme, Blade Runner, is "about" coming to terms with the polar oppositions of the world and of the human psyche. It is also about the moral and perceptual ambiguity which results from this dual existence. The central supposition of dialectical contraries and the subsequent ambiguity is supported by a film in which apparent black and white poles bleed all over the screen into a permeating noir fog. The roots of the metaphors which flesh out the film's plot can be traced through Dick's research for his novel Man in the High Castle. He claims he was given the idea of Do Androids Dream while sifting through Nazi records. He writes of his discovery: There is amongst us something that is a bi-pedal humanoid. morphologically identical to the human being but which is not human. It is not human to complain, as one SS man did in his diary, that starving children are keeping you awake. And there, in the 40s, was born my idea that within our species is a bifurcation, a dichotomy between the truly human and that which mimics the truly human. Consequently, on one level. Blade Runner is about human duplication and empathy. The viewer is thrust into a future in which man can create a being in his own image through genetic engineering, an echo of the Frankenstein theme.2 This being not only mimics the truly human, but begins to exceed its creators in human passion and empathy. Throughout his works Dick creates worlds in which concepts can be dramatized by metaphor. This is not to say that he creates allegories for his beliefs; rather, he creates worlds where philosophical questions can be animated and allowed to play among themselves and between his readers and the text. This play is intensified in the world of Blade Runner. After the opening establishment of the eye motif and dystopian Los Angeles, for example. Holden finds Leon while interviewing for infiltrated renegade replicants at the Tyrell Corporation. The scene sets up the dichotomy of replicant vs. human, and blurs the distinction between the two. Antitheses are blended into ambiguity as the blade runner cop is emotionless and perfectly groomed and the suspected replicant is round-shouldered, scruffy, and unshaven with a receding chin and protruding midriff. Immediately the spectator's expectations are frustrated in trying to differentiate the human from the nonhuman. …

The Closed Society and Its Friends: Plato's Republic and Lucas's THX-1138

Abstract: It is not new to find Utopian and dystopian elements combined in a single work. They appear in both an ancient text, Plato's Republic (dates from ca. 375 B.C.), as well as in a modern science fiction film classic, THX-1138 (dir. George Lucas, 1971; based on an award-winning film school short subtitled Electronic Labyrinth). The authoritarian "managerial meritocracy" proposed in Plato's Utopian vision has been most severely criticized by Sir Karl Popper, a philosopher/political scientist who, in The Open Society and Its Enemies, considers Plato's state a closed, tribal, and magically-imposed society. The presentation here attempts to compare and contrast the classic treatise and the modern science fiction film in very broad terms. Our conclusion will draw on Popper's critique of Socrates's pupil.1 Although Plato in part echoes the Golden Age from the dawn of history that is described by his Greek predecessor, Hesiod, his concept of "civil society" remains today nevertheless a controversial Eden. It is a rather naive quest for a definition of justice that leads to an elaborate and revolutionary Utopian construct. In the end, justice, it is decided, "'consists in minding your own business and not interfering with other people'" (Lee 204). For Plato, a strife-free, interdependent, and communitarian society, however remarkable for its promulgation of happiness, would have no personal freedom or liberty as moderns might define these terms. Plato was openly critical of Athenians who were left too much to run their own lives, the result of which, he thought, was unhappiness and undiscipline. In this Ideal State, the leader is followed by the unquestioning faithful. Moreover, it is one man, one function: no "Jack of All Trades," no "Renaissance men" may exist here (Lee 152, 156-57). Fearless and indomitable. Guardians of mettle and vitality rule and govern and protect the civil society (Lee 125); Auxiliaries execute their decisions. According to Plato's "magnificent," or "noble," or "handy lie," the Myth of the Metals, Guardians, like thoroughbreds, have gold in their veins; Auxiliaries have silver; and the rest are made of bronze and iron (Lee 182 ff). Golden parents beget golden children, silver parents silver children, etc. Yet in this world, the family is abolished and replaced by the state. Eugenic breeding will assure that the best men mate with the best women; procreation is regulated so to produce the best possible children for the society (Lee 240). With unified personalities, the "real pedigree herd" (Lee 240) will not be allowed to know their parents and thus will avoid any conflicting loyalties; they will love the state above all and consider all their peers brothers and sisters. Thus allegiance to the community will prevail. Plato calls for a world in which any innovation in education is banned because it might lead to disorder (Lee 191); as in THX-1138, brain-washing indelibly imprints the brain (Lee 200). The wise, gifted and best-educated minority will control the less respectable majority, asserts Plato (Lee 202). But, alas, finally, the ideal pattern cannot exist, insists Plato, until "philosophers become rulers in this world, or till those we now call kings and rulers really and truly become philosophers, and political power and philosophy come into the same hands . . . ." (Lee 263). These are the lovers of knowledge whose eyes are raised up so high they usually step in it! Plato's Ideal State admits of no flaws, but the alert reader will find many reasons to reject life under the royal scepter of the Guardians. Plato envisions the golden Guardians or philosopher-rulers in the allegorical underground cave as unchained; they must be educated so as to recognize the connectedness of all knowledge, the ideal Forms, and ultimately goodness itself. It is they who will be able to leave the cave, understand the realm of knowledge, and see and even be blinded by the sunlight; the shadows of the allegory represent what is assumed to be reality by the prisoners, but which the unchained prisoner/philosopher knows to be mere reflections. …

Satire betrayed: A Look at Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: This paper proposes to investigate the success of Orwell's Nineteen EightyFour as a work of satire. With this objective in mind, it is first of all necessary to establish what Orwell's purpose in writing the book was. Most critics today agree that Nineteen Eighty-Four2 can best be described as a work of satire under the form of a dystopian fiction, and that Orwell had a satirical purpose in mind now seems clear.

Man-Made Monsters: Suzy McKee Charnas’s Walk to the End of the World as Dystopian Feminist Science Fiction

Abstract: Suzy McKee Charnas’s dystopian novel, Walk to the End of the World and its sequel, Motherline, trace a particular trajectory in feminist genre writing — from fiction used to explicate the socialisation of women and men in a patriarchal society (Walk) to fiction used to explicate the role of fiction in that socialisation process (Motherlines).1 It is arguable, however, whether Motherlines ever achieves the degree of self-consciousness attained by a text like James Tiptree Jr’s ‘The Women Men Don’t See’, which combines both explicatory functions, thus negotiating the contradiction between fiction as a ‘representation’ of ‘life’ (with all the naive realist readings to which that gives rise) and fiction as a strategic intervention in the dominant discursive formations.2

De-fanging the Vampire: S. M. Charnas’s The Vampire Tapestry as Subversive Horror Fiction

Abstract: The Vampire Tapestry1 is an innovative exploration of the horror genre by Suzy McKee Charnas, American author of the feminist dystopia Walk to the End of the World and its disturbing and ambiguous sequal, Motherlines. Horror literature, like all fantasy,2 has the potential to be either a radical exploration of contemporary definitions of the ‘real’ or a conservative affirmation of that ‘real’, via the political ideologies (of gender, race, class) operative in the text. In this essay I analyse Charnas’s textual inflections of these ideologies, principally through her characterisaton of the vampire. This characterisation is remarkable for Charnas’s sophisticated manipulation of textual polyphony, characteristically foregrounded in the fantasy text. Accordingly, her characterisation of the vampire is subject to neither humanist reductionism nor generic stereotyping. Instead Charnas constructs him as a fragmented consciousness, the decentred subject, characteristic of the fantastic in its most radically interrogative mode. By tracing Charnas’s textual strategies and their ideological consequences, I present a case for The Vampire Tapesty as an example of the use of generic fiction by a politically committed writer to raise fundamental debate about social and political ideologies within a popular and accessible fictional format.