An Ordered Universe

There be spoilers ahead.

I saw Paranormal Activity last night and it scared the pants off me. As in, I was shaking by the end. Horrible, inexplicable things happen to innocent people through no fault of their own. In the film a young woman is stalked by a demon for no other reason than it wants her. Unlike a haunted house, which can be abandoned, this entity follows her from place to place. It is inescapable. The film consists of the woman and her boyfriend filming the creature’s escalating acts in their home. They try to convince themselves that they can understand and intervene, when it is clear they are powerless.

I don’t watch a lot of horror movies. Some of my cineaste friends (you know who you are) find this perplexing, given the genre proximity of SF and horror. Watching this movie last night helped me uncover why horror films scare me so much, and why they continue to bother me long after I have left the theatre or turned off the DVD.

I want to believe in an ordered universe. Those of us living in western society are steeped in Christian heritage. One of the fundamentals of Christianity is a reasonable world: God does things we might not always understand, but He is in charge and knows what He’s doing. Science serves a similar purpose: explaining the universe so we feel like we have a grasp on things. Even though scientific practice and Christian faith will admit there are things we don’t understand or can’t explain, they purport that there is an explanation to be had.

Science fiction for the most part subscribes to this notion of a rational existence. Granted, the genre veers into fabulation and horror, but it is largely based on reason and logic. The aliens might be coming from far away to destroy the human race, but we know they got here in ships propelled by fuel, that they came because, like us, they’re colonizing bastards, and that we may be able to outwit them with a bit of human pluck. If people are telepathic it’s because of a genetic mutation. If there’s a zombie plague, some idiot created it in a lab. Etc. Bad things happen, sure. A robot apocalypse, for example, is arguably a much worse catastrophe than a stalking demon, but the former can be explained rationally and the latter can’t.

Horror films expose the universe as disordered. We always knew it was unjust, but now we see that it is inexplicable. There is no way to explain the presence of a demon. We are not only powerless; we are ignorant and can never hope to understand. The desire to know, and hence to control are completely undermined by the supernatural. Our human attempts to explain the universe are stripped away to reveal not only that we can’t explain, but that perhaps there is no explanation. It may be that there is no one at the helm of this ship called existence and that we are living just at the edge of chaos.

Playing Human in Octavia Butler's Imago

This post marks my third and final visit to Octavia Butler’s Lilith’s Brood. I’ve written about colonization, desire, transformation and negotiation in Dawn and Adulthood Rites. Imago ups the ante on all these, raising questions about identity and the performed self.

The human-Oankali breeding program begun a century earlier with Lilith and the events of Dawn reaches a critical turning point in Imago. To everyone’s surprise, one of Lilith’s hybrid children enters its adolescent metamorphosis indicating that it will become ooloi, the third sex. Jodahs is the first ooloi with genes from both species. Uncontrolled, flawed ooloi have the capacity to do massive genetic damage to everything they touch, and an ooloi with a human side poses even greater danger. Lilith and her family move to the deep woods to be isolated during Jodahs’ metamorphosis, awaiting possible exile on the Oankali ship orbiting Earth. Jodahs gains the ability to regrow limbs and change shape. But without human mates it’s unable to control its changes, and there is no chance of finding human mates on Earth before being exiled. Jodahs becomes isolated and silent. Beginning to lose its sense of self, it changes erratically with the weather and environment. Aaor, Jodahs’ closest sibling, follows suit, becoming ooloi. It then transforms into a sea-slug-like creature and nearly physically dissolves in its loneliness.

[More on Tor.com ...]

Negotiating Difference in Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites

As the title of Octavia Butler’s Adulthood Rites indicates, this novel is part coming-of-age story. Yet like its predecessor Dawn, it occurs in the context of colonization, complete with a tangled web of desire, xenophobia and hybridity. (I recently wrote about Dawn, the first volume of Lilith’s Brood, the trilogy formerly known as Xenogenesis.) Dawn is seen through the eyes of Lilith, a human woman faced with impossible decisions when the alien Oankali colonize what’s left of a post-apocalyptic human race. The sequel is the story of Akin, Lilith’s half-human, half-Oankali son, born thirty years after the first novel takes place.

Life isn’t easy when you have five parents representing three genders and two species. Akin is a human-Oankali “construct,” belonging culturally and physiologically to neither group and yet to both. He is precocious, fully verbal, and prodigiously intelligent. He lives in one of Earth’s “trade villages.” In these communities humans were successfully coerced into participating in the Oankali interbreeding program, building mixed families in which they experience both love for and resentment toward their alien mates and hybrid children.

Growing up in a mixed-species village with a deeply embedded power imbalance makes reasonable sense for Akin until he is captured by a group of human resisters. The resisters have refused to join with the Oankali, but are allowed to live in their own communities. The catch, of course, is that the Oankali have sterilized them, so they resort to abducting construct children who look “normal” (sans Oankali tentacles), which Akin does. His captors sell him to a small resister town called Phoenix. As Lilith was imprisoned by the Oankali, now Akin must suffer at the hands of the humans. Yet like his mother, he finds the other both horrifying and compelling, resists his imprisonment yet learns from it, and comes to love some of his captors. He begins to connect with his human side, and to see the value in preserving human culture.

[More on Tor.com ...]

Sleeping With the Enemy: Octavia Butler's Dawn

I first read Octavia Butler’s Dawn almost (oh, gods) 10 years ago for an undergraduate course called “Science Fiction? Speculative Fiction?” It is the first in the Xenogenesis trilogy which was republished as Lilith’s Brood. It is also a gateway drug. Dawn introduced me to the troubling and compelling universe of Butler’s mind, populated with complex, defiant, intelligent woman leaders, consensual sex between humans and aliens, and heavy doses of every social issue under the sun.

Dawn’s Lilith Iyapo is a young black woman who awakens 250 years after a nuclear holocaust on an enormous ship orbiting Earth. The alien Oankali have rescued/captured the few remaining humans and begun regenerating the planet so it can again be habitable. These humanoid, tentacled higher beings intend to return the humans to Earth, but it wouldn’t be a Butler novel if there weren’t some sort of tremendous sacrifice involved. The Oankali are gene traders. They travel the galaxy improving their race by joining up with the races they encounter. They’ve saved humanity in order to fulfill their biological imperative to interbreed. Lilith will be a leader in one of the new human-Oankali communities on Earth. Her children will have fun tentacles. And she has no say in the matter. Lilith reacts to this with more than a little skepticism—she almost kills herself.

[More at Tor.com ...]

Ego Boost: One Girl Revolution

Thanks to arefadedaway for this spirit-lifting vid. I watch this when I start to think there's no way I can write a 100-page thesis, or some other self-defeating nonsense.


Find more videos like this on BAM Vid Vault

Vanishing into the Metropolis

New York has the advantage of being a city into which one can vanish, for better or for worse. As Garrison Keillor writes:

New York is a fine place in which to be alone. To walk into a little cafe with an armload of newspapers and sit at the counter and read them over a bowl of chili and a grilled cheese and a white mug of coffee, and a waitress who says, "What else could you like, love?" — this is heaven. In the papers are dozens of people in serious trouble and you are not one of them. You can soak it all up while you eavesdrop on your neighbors ...

I have recently completed Elizabeth Bear's alternate history/fantasy New Amsterdam, in which the millennium-old vampire Sebastien dons and sheds identities like coats, hiding among the crowds of Paris, New Amsterdam (New York. Read your history.) and Boston. In a metropolis, even a blood-sucking predator can disappear (granted, a kind one with a consenting human court and impressive detective skills). Sometimes being alone in crowds isn't enough, though, despite Keillor's observations. There is a different kind of solitude achieved living in the middle of the woods somewhere, which I can only barely emulate hiding in my little Manhattan apartment with the curtains closed.

Keillor's "I vish to be alone" impulse strikes a chord with me not so much because I crave isolation, but because I crave less. Less noise, fewer people, fewer cars. Perhaps, tongue planted firmly in cheek, we can think of this as "post-productivity" syndrome. This is not the same as being lazy, in my view, but rather favoring quality over quantity of experience. The American impulse to produce, whether referring to tangible or intangible goods, has a destructive edge. On this edge we find our apocalyptic narratives. Unbounded creation so easily becomes destruction, in fiction and the world. Just ask global warming or nuclear war. Our collective urge to be always doing, never content simply being may very well lead us to our end. I am so guilty of this, and have only come to see it in the last year or two.

The luxury of disengaging may be a symptom of the American contagion of indifference and narcissism. I like to think it's part of a larger desire to slow down my life, a fantasy of working less, having a lighter schedule, being surrounded by trees and the occasional friend instead of harried crowds. A lot of people seem to be thinking along similar lines. Slow Movement? Sounds like fun.

Haunted by My Digital Ghosts

The Internet. The final frontier. OK, not really. I still think space is the final frontier. I'm old fashioned like that -- more interested in physical than virtual adventures. Yet the Internet does offer the opportunity for self-invention. Nothing like the self free of the constraints of the body, able to engage in relationships that would be impossible or at least difficult in physical space. Good stuff. Yet the online multiplicity of identity can go awry.

In my case, I have an old online profile on the vegan artists' site Veganica.com. "Vegan?" you ask? "Artist?" you inquire. Indeed. Once upon a time my primary form of writing was poetry, and I was a veggie activist. I've since mellowed on the whole vegan thing. (I'm simply an ovo-lacto vegetarian these days.) And I write far more essays than poetry.

Anyway, a friend I haven't seen in 10 years discovered this profile and contacted me through Veganica. I was overjoyed to hear from him, but somewhat chagrined at the inaccurate version of Erika he found online (see visual manifestation left versus newer photo below right).
I experienced a miniature time warp viewing the profile again, having not updated it for years. (With apologies to site creator Derek Goodwin.) Who was this person Erika who talks about her poetry and enthusiastically calls herself a baby vegan?

This is my digital ghost, metaphorically speaking. An NPR report this week warned against the presence of ghost images online. Ghosts are potential leftovers which remain in the Interwebs even after being removed, say, from social networking sites to make profiles more appropriate to ever-curious employers. I enjoy this term and think it should be expanded to lost online selves, frozen in time, forgotten or ignored by their creators. I suppose we all have a number of digital ghosts. I certainly do. After the Veganica Incident, I started searching the Web for my other/former selves. Finding old bios (Friendster!) and photos strikes the same chord as finding an old diary in a closet. My own personal self-haunting.