special topics in popular culture studies : james tiptree , jr. & science fiction

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction

7/16/14 | Meeting 5: HSRUF—"The Girl Who Was Plugged In" (1973) | "Love Is the Plan the Plan Is Death" (1973) | MMI—“The Laying On of Hands”; “Going Gently Down, or, In Every Young Person There Is an Old Person Screaming to Get Out”; “The Spooks Next Door”; “Harvesting the Sea” | 50KFSF—Baudrillard / Bear / Bester / Clarke | DOSMO—"From the Earth to the Moon—in 101 Years" | WASF—Fritz Leiber, "Coming Attraction" (1950) | Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) | Arthur C. Clarke, "The Sentinel" (1951) | Robert Sheckley, "Specialist" (1953) | Power Points—Meeting 5 | SF Extrapolations—SF Subgenres (III) | Screening—Prophets of Science Fiction: Arthur C. Clarke


50 Key Figures in Science

Fiction: Jean Baudrillard

(1929-2007)

Major Figures

AmericaAmerica

Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007)

Watch Chapters 3, 12, 28-29

Laughter on American television has taken the place of the chorus in Greek tragedy. It is unrelenting; the news, the stock exchange reports, and the weather forecast are about the only things spared. But so obsessive is it that you go on hearing it behind the voice of Reagan or the Marines disaster in Beirut. Even behind the adverts. It is the monster from Alien prowling around in all the corridors of the spaceship. it is the sarcastic exhilaration of a puritan culture. In other countries the business of laughing is left to the viewers. here, their laughter is put on the screen, integrated into the show. It is the screen that is laughing and having a good time. You are simply left alone with your consternation. (49)

AmericaAmericaPopular Culture Studies

The glass facades merely reflect the environment, sending back its own image. This makes them much more formidable than any wall of stone. It's just like people who wear dark glasses. Their eyes are hidden and other see only their own reflection. Everywhere the transparency of interfaces in internal refraction. Everything pretentiously termed 'communication' and 'interaction'—walkman, dark glasses, automatic household appliances, hi-tech cars, even the perpetual dialogue with the computer—ends up with each monad retreating into the shade of its own formula, into its self-regulating little corner and its artificial immunity." (59-60)


There is nothing more mysterious than a TV set left on in an empty room. it is even stranger than a man talking to himself or a woman standing dreaming at her stove. It is as if another planet is communicating with you. Suddenly the TV reveals itself for what it really is: a video of another world, ultimately addressed to no one at all, delivering its images indifferently, indifferent to its own messages (you can easily imagine it still functioning after humanity has disappeared). (50)

AmericaAmerica

In America the arrival of night-time or periods of rest cannot be accepted, nor can the Americans bear to see the technological process halted. Everything has to be working all the time, there has to be no let-up in man's artificial power, and the intermittent character of natural cycles . . . has to be replaced by a functional continuum that is sometimes absurd. . . . "The skylines lit up at night, the air-conditioning systems cooling empty hotels in the desert and artificial light in the middle of the day all have something both demented and admirable about them. The mindless luxury of a rich civilization, and yet of a civilization perhaps as scared to see the lights go out as was the hunter in his primitive night. There is some truth in all this. But what is striking is the fascination with artifice, with energy and space. (50-51)

AmericaAmerica Popular Culture Studies

From a historical standpoint, America is weightless. (52)


Europeans experience anything relating to statistics as tragic. They immediately read in them their individual failure and take refuge in pained denunciation of the merely quantitative. The Americans, by contrast, see statistics as an optimistic stimulus, as representing the dimensions of their good fortune, their joyous membership of the majority. Theirs is the only country where quantity can be extolled without compunction.

AmericaAmerica

Popular Culture Studies

In the future, power will belong to those peoples with no origins and no authenticity. . . . Look at Japan, which to a certain extent has pulled off this trick better than the US itself, managing in what seems to us an unintelligible paradox, to transform the power of territoriality and feudalism into that of deterritoriality and weightlessness. Japan is already a satellite of the planet Earth. but America was already in its day a satellite of the planet Europe. Whether we like it or not, the future has shifted towards artificial satellites.




Fiction: Greg Bear (1951-

)


Greg Bear

Special Topics in Popular Culture

Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction

Greg Bear



Fiction: Alfred Bester

(1913-1987)

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James

Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction

50 Key Figures in Science Fiction: Alfred Bester (1913-1987)

—by Sherryl Vint

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction Alfred Bester



Fiction: Arthur C. Clarke

(1917-2008)

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction Arthur C. Clarke


According to Arthur C. Clarke, it is, after all, the increasing pace of civilization that necessitates our departure from this planet. From the beginning of history, Clarke argues, humankind has been busily engaged in moving both itself and its possessions. Tremendous amounts of energy have been expended in this task, and over the centuries mankind has increased the speed with which transportation takes place. At first, and for thousands of years, we could move only at two or three miles an hour, on foot. Then we accelerated to ten miles an hour thanks to the harnessing of horsepower. Later, with the invention of the locomotive and internal combustion engines, our speed surpassed one hundred miles an hour. However, the creation of jet and rocket engines, and the subsequent conquering of the sound barrier, have forced us off the planet; the Earth is now far too small to contain our speed (Clarke, Profiles 61-69). This "velocity imperative"--so prominent a theme in Koyaanisqatsi--has thus mandated the search for larger fields in which to accelerate. That America has played a prominent role, alternately cause and effect, in all the later phases of this "progress" goes without saying.19 ("It may well be," the poet X. J. Kennedy remarked presciently in 1969, "that when I rev my car/And let it overtake and pass my thinking,/It's space I crave" [Phillips 161].)


The Dreams Our Stuff is

Made Of: "From the Earth

to the Moon—in 101

Years"


Wesleyan Anthology of

Science Fiction: Fritz Leiber,

"Coming Attraction" (1950)



Science Fiction: Ray Bradbury,

"There Will Come Soft Rains"

(1950)


Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction: Ray Bradbury, "There Will Come

Soft Rains" (1950)

Lavery, David. “The Audition of History and the Vocation of Man: Reflections on Extinction and Destiny.” Michigan Quarterly Review 24 (1985): 345-67 (in a special issue on “Science and the Human Image”).



Soft Rains" (1950)

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. &

Science Fiction


Soft Rains" (1950)



Science Fiction: Arthur C.

Clarke, "The Sentinel" (1951)


Wesleyan Anthology of Science

Fiction: Robert Sheckley,

"Specialist" (1953)


Her Smoke Rose Up

Forever: "The Girl Who Was

Plugged In" (1973)


Her Smoke Rose Up Forever:

"Love Is the Plan the Plan Is

Death" (1973)


Meet Me at Infinity: “The Laying On of Hands”; “Going Gently Down, or, In Every Young Person There Is an Old Person Screaming to Get Out”; “The Spooks Next Door”; “Harvesting the Sea”

special topics in popular culture studies : james tiptree , jr. & science fiction

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puritan culture

science fiction50 key

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jean baudrillard

artificial power

dark glasses

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