Updated it all!

I've been uploading them throughout yesterday and today, keeping the dates sensitive to when they were meant to be posted. Now with more pictures!

This'll be my last entry. Probably gonna delete it soon. Ciao!

The Mediascape: 2015, 2025, 2060

In five years, we can be assured the way knowledge is presented and controlled will be different than it is today. If we can assume China is forward thinking (and indeed, they are), then the future looks dim. Google has been castrated already, while beheadings happen elsewhere when people present knowledge that isn't deemed fruitful to a culture. But the media, specifically. With the downfall of wikileaks, and the recently proposed yet overturned (this year, anyway) COICA bill (which would effectively do to us what China has done to Google) it's a scary sort of reality that we will be hushed. What this means is more advertisements, less freedom of thought, less tolerance for our first amendment, and, frankly, a more archaic outlook (violently?) shoved down the throats' of a population already so stomped on. Five years from now, I envision at the very least Google becoming a bad thing.

In fifteen years, my better guess, assuming control does become more... controlled, I think the thing most subject to change will be the way things are advertised. With the advance of technology, and new ways to view a glowing rectangle, advertisements will be inescapable. An Onion skit said it pretty well with a hypothetical phone that whispers products and businesses into your ear while on the phone. Funny, but not at all ignorable. [link] The military, I believe, will make itself more of a presence, coaxing people to join in newer ways than getting kids and adults alike hooked on Call of Duty and Halo 3. So much money has already been invested in the development of weapons, armor, anything that will give 'us' an advantage over 'them.' The discussion in class today has shown us that if 'they' have any sort of leg up, we just bomb 'them.' New technologies to kill, new technologies to repress and subdue.

Fifty years from now, though I could never really say for sure, I see the world as a wildly different place. I imagine robots and humans existing together, I imagine people finding new ways to stay alive longer through gene manipulation [link] and robotic extensions, and who knows what else. I imagine advertisements being transmitted directly into our brains (or as Futurama postulates, directly into our brains). I think if religion as a whole hasn't collapsed, it will have surely taken over. I see eugenics on the cusp of being normal (or perhaps a fate like in Oryx and Crake, the media and corporations overthrowing society in favor of a 'better world'), I see repression, I see a clearer separation of the haves and the have-nots than ever before. I have no idea where I will be, what I will look like, what I will be doing, any of that. I almost feel like education will be something available to only the few, as with various cultures world-wide today, and I see entertainment being king (Mike Judge seemed to know this with his film Idiocracy, not to mention that it's something that always thrives during repressions, strangely). A best case scenario in fifty years, in my eyes, is that we will have colonized Mars and are given a second start on a planet that doesn't hate us (yet). Or maybe the predictions of the Georgia Guidestones will come to new light. Either way, I'm not too hopeful. But maybe we will find ways to be happy. That's all that is really important.

Bizarro Fiction

I ripped off the art style directly from a panel. This is a piece I don't think I should be allowed to stylize, being so awesome.

Jennie 2.5 is the tragically ironic anti-media, anti-government, anti-everything heroine of the story. She, not too unlike her author Brian Wood, is incredibly sick of the way the world is repressing, controlling, and subduing an otherwise unthinking, uncaring populous. Tagged throughout the book are pages meant to be xeroxed and reprinted, stuck on the sides of buildings, poles, garage doors, cars, anywhere and everywhere with messages that seem to justify an end to a means (usually, if not exclusively, an outcry for violence, as with a gun and suggestive, clever text). This is where Jennie 2.5 seems to differ from her writer in that she is absolutely no holds barred when it comes to being pushed to the edge of what she can take. Her message is timeless, as with every culture in the world having made some advancement through a means of anarchy, and though the ending appears ironic and pointless, Wood really wants you to pay attention to what's happened and what's happening. He must want her message to be taken lightly, or at least appear to be. He may himself be a peaceful person, but he is an angry writer. He knows that anger and a drive to stop being stomped on starts with a spark, and a recognizable image is all you need to put fear into your opponent's heart.

This is made most obvious when he basically compared the revolutionary Che Guevara to Jenny 2.5. He knows the reputation Che has even many years after his death, and I feel like this may be a subtle way at rousing the reader to understand and fight for similar ideologies. Even if all you do is wear a shirt with the man's head, you are at least aware that he was not a man who did not, could not, allow for the government to control him so long as there was breath in his body. So though Jenny does become a media star, which she seems to be okay with even though it's exactly what she was fighting against, she leaves out that there is such a thing as positive attention that can be drawn through the media. If Wood asks you to print his anarchist signs everywhere, than he probably wants someone to see them. He probably wants someone to get angry or afraid. He probably had hopes of seeing these things all around the local streets, people fighting for their rights, as well as a life where what you hear is no longer absolutely controlled. And as much as he wants you to wear a Che shirt, he probably wants you to know exactly what it stands for, and exactly why you should wear it. If nothing else at all, he wants you to at least realize what the world is doing to you, and that you should be fed up.

Literary Speculation

Because there was no real definition for the characters except for the eponymous 8 year-old child porn star, I have decided to draw a pigoon. This is based on someone else's design, but was fun to draw.

A story that takes until the very end to unfold completely, this is possibly my second favorite book in the list, right behind A Wild Sheep Chase. The pacing is such that one man, Snowman, is living in the present. He's introduced as a prophet to a bizarre group of perfectly beautiful people, and he says he may or may not be the last living human. But more importantly, he was once Jimmy. This is more-or-less Jimmy's story, with Oryx and Crake being very prominent people in his development. When all is said and done, this is a story about the dangers of corporations and the blindness of eugenics.

Jimmy's father is the first person in his life to show an abandonment towards Jimmy, favoring his bio-engineering over his son's happiness. As his company, as well as his rivals, continue to genetically modify animals for any number of reasons, or develop medicines and drugs for a mass, or do whatever they must do the change the world, Jimmy finds himself estranged and somewhat evasive of it all. He ends up in college and becomes sexually active, and sexually unsatisfied, though he does get women who take pity on him. He is increasingly more lost in a world he doesn't quite understand; a theme that is only ever expanded on from the get-go. While the world goes on to do things (such as effectively poisoning and eradicating itself), he is merely lucky in his escape of danger. His only moment of feeling whole, apart from the brief period in his life of having owned a pet rakunk, was the even briefer period where he was finally with the girl he's loved since his teenage years. He is the manifestation of ignorance and jealousy, with his saving grace being his love of the English language. Oryx is in a lot of ways the spirit of acceptance and thankfulness, and Crake is the heart of greed and power-thirst. In many ways, the ultimate representations of yin, yang, and wuji (the space between both, being Jimmy). With this broad concept of gray area, Jimmy makes a very appropriate candidate to look after the new world, though it's clear he resents it.

On the note of the world Snowman inhabits, I feel it's important to analyze the residents. They are in many ways themselves devoid of yin and yang rules, always adhering to a specific code, what is inherent in their programming. They have no need to learn anything, and without Jimmy's presence, they probably wouldn't. Though... his presence seems to create some sort of religious open-mindedness as when they start building an idol in his likeness (or perhaps it is just an innocent detail). If it's not, you might question if the people who survive by routine and schedule could be open to changes like organizations (and how ironic that their creator would shield them from just that). One must wonder if they really are a superior species if they're susceptible to, as they say, the same ol' shit we are. They could just be stupid, though they're not fooled by their sex drives, nor do they see the need for education beyond Jimmy. I suppose the entire book is one big question of ethics. When must we draw the line? Should we? And in fact, will we?

Diverse Position Science Fiction

Pictured is Akin, who looked quite cool on the cover of the second book in the Xenogenesis series. I have regrettably only read through Dawn.

This book starts up at the beginning of the end of man. Ambiguity quickly turns into fear as our protagonist Lilith learns she has been asleep for many, many years, and that the fall of man is old news. It chronicles her steady struggle with acceptance of the life she's been thrusted into, including the decisions she is ultimately not allowed to make, as well as the facts she's not supposed to know (in particular, the briefly evaded subjects of where all the books of the Earth went), despite the promise of being a non-biased group of creatures. She is modified through diet and slight experimentation to live longer and healthier, much to her chagrin. She is treated as she recalls humans having treated animals, though there is some obvious respect given to her by the Oankali, she is being tested for her survival and sexual aptitude through a majority of the pages. While she is initially defiant, she soon becomes reluctant and, eventually, accepting of her fate.

Of course, one of the most interesting themes in this book is the third sex present in the alien race; a genderless role by the name ooloi. Their general purpose is to gather DNA and expand the race, making it perhaps more perfect, perhaps just less the same. It is what their species must do, just as humans have the instinctual drive to reproduce, a fact the aliens take advantage of in their own way. The ooloi gender is one without bias, and represents the potentials of genetic evolution, even for humans, who do eventually sacrifice their own unique encoding in favor of long-term survival, something that isn't surprising by the time it becomes the only option. The hint here is that we are not done evolving, that we are still wrapped up in hating and bombing one another, and that we condition the environment to suit us. When the Oankali come, the structure of human existence is quickly changed, having the survivors live in the new environment around them, and opening up the idea of genetic growth once again, just as animals must change to survive in new environments. Once this happens, Butler has given her interpretation of what potential we might have. Her big message seems to be that if we want to continue evolving, we must seize war and development and instead let nature be our guiding factor. She seems equally interested in the development of proper relationships with those around us; the first time she meets a human in this new world, it's not terribly unlike how she felt when she first met the new alien race, though the human was legitimately more of a threat. This is perhaps a commentary on our naivety in fearing the unknown, and how this is holding us back from advancement. She is told to embrace, and yet she must ease into it. If she didn't, I suppose there wouldn't be a second book. Or a trilogy of books.

Cyberpunk

I was pretty excited when this book popped up on the reading list. It's one my father must have loved reading, as I've heard him mention the name Hiro Protagonist a number of times when I was younger (knowing I enjoyed puns and himself being a science fiction nerd). Reading through this, more than anything, I think I enjoyed the vulgar edge to the otherwise very intelligent writing. The way this story was told was really unlike any other writing I've ever gone through. Everything was so unbelievably chaotic. There was a surprising depth of detail and history relating to this bizarre drug, as well as in the very bizarre realities Hiro exists in. While it's not a particularly believable future (not the physical world, anyway) much of this text is rooted in early pretenses about where the digital age would take us, when it was written ~18 years ago. Years later, we do have things either coincidentally like this world, or perhaps (more likely) inspired by this tale. I was immediately reminded of that odd game Second Life that emerged a few years ago, and I have a feeling that if anyone could develop a drug that affected people both in the internet (or metaverse) and in the physical world, that people would probably take it. We are brinking on this concept, though I'm sure there won't be as much interesting history once we're finally there.

In many ways, through the depth of the text, this is spiritually related to Babel-17, in that the Snow Crash virus is related to Sumerian speech, the binary language of the world, wherein both it and this virus are able to spread and infect in a very primitive, all-purpose sort of way. As with Babel-17, this language is itself a virus. It all goes back to code, to binary. In his writing this concept, Stephenson pays very close attention to this place he's created, developing an important hierarchy within the game itself, as well as a functioning tangential narrative for each and every character. Hiro follows a very strange, compelling life in the metaverse as the world's greatest sword fighter, something that greatly assisted his character in overcoming the Snow Crash virus. His concepts of being who you want to be, look as you want to look, and otherwise do what you want to do on the internet have likely given light to the way the internet itself has developed (I read that this book was in fact very influential) and is a likely indicator at what is sure to come. He questions the importance of the real world through out most of this novel, ignoring it almost completely and blurring the lines between the real, the perceived, the necessary, and most importantly, the future. Will we be communicating in this digital place while the world around us falls apart as it's hinted to have done in this book? Will we even care? In all curiousness, do we even care now? As people fall victim to the online games in so many ways including major addictions, many lives have already been changed dramatically. I can bet Stephenson is not surprised one bit.

Narratives from the Multiverse

My read through for this book left me just a bit confused. It was worth a bit of research to get some form of clarification as to what exactly had been going on, and I like to think I've finally picked up on the bulk of this text. Being an older book, it is based on a dated (and generally refuted) theory about how language affects not only the way a person thinks, but also how a person behaves. The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, which was the basis for most of this piece of science fiction, had at one point merit enough to inspire what would happen to Rydra Wong. Without really realizing it, she had been learning an ancient language, the first language, I think we're told, that has basically been booby-trapped and used as a weapon to control (or at least manipulate) the interpreter. In this case, we're in the midst of war-plant sabotage, and Rydra, being a brilliant linguist and all, has been asked to decipher this cryptic code. The more she discovers about it, the more she finds herself enveloped in it, indeed manipulated by it. She accepts this with some surprise, still marveling at the brilliance of the language, which has opened up the world so much wider to her, and Butcher. It ends on a fairly positive note. The varying critiques of this book suggest a second read, which I think I will have to do when I get a little more time. Over the break.

The book gets into other elements that would have otherwise just been thrown in, but fit nicely. There are several characters who have gone through body manipulations, adding robot parts, or gaining additional ligaments, or whatever their hearts may desire; in some cases, people might be modified so that they appear near reptilian (isn't there a guy these days who has gotten many tattoos and his tongue split to achieve this effect? I'm pretty sure there is) or even dragon-esque. Nails, tails, scales, and the like. In some ways, these are just ways of expression, like language is. Sending a message. The other large plot element is that there is a huge galactic war going on, and that the bad guys are never really introduced properly (to my better memory). It's a novelette that is very heavily focused on language and construction, and I'm sure the writer was himself a linguist. He points out the absolute importance of how we perceive, how we express, and how we interact based on just a single language. There are many universal truths that can be explored through his interpretation of a fictional language, most notably that, while it IS a theory that has been tested and refuted time and again, there is some important differences in the fundamentals of a person's thoughts depending on the language that has affected them. In these instances that happen in the book, it is up the reader to decipher how Rydra and Butcher are different in their knowing this language, as it's something they can't recognize themselves. We are asked, therefore, to be more aware of ourselves, and of our surrounders, and to be critical of language in every sense of the word possible. Not bad for a short story, not bad at all.