Estranging Reality to Realize the Strange

When both watching EXistenZ and reading Snow Crash (although I’ll focus on the former here, since I’ve not quite completed the latter), I was struck not so much by the creation of such involved virtual worlds as I was the utter strangeness of the “real” worlds. For example, when I first began Snow Crash, I was convinced that I was reading a story about the day to day life of a modern-day pizza delivery boy whose devotion to virtual reality games had driven him to suffer a psychotic break. Once I realized that this explanation wasn’t sufficient—that Hiro was indeed living in a hyper-commercialized version our (very near) future in which pizza companies are run like the mafia and racism has become acceptable and commonplace again—I began to suspect that, in fact, the entire world I was reading about was virtual. After this flailing attempt to ground myself during the exposition, the transition to the metaverse was actually quite calming—finally, a version of reality that I knew wasn’t reality! Not only that, but, compared to “reality”, I found the metaverse to, surprisingly, be comfortingly close to my own perception of reality, or at least what I would expect a virtual version of my own to resemble, with its social hubs and motley collection of avatars.

The “reality” of EXistenZ (and here I’m referring to the world we think is real for most of the film) is similarly disturbing, with its grotesque emphasis on organic-looking technology, not to mention the thickly layered-on, unnatural accents and over-the-top dialogue. This confusion only got worse near the end, when EXistenZ and “reality” started to “bleed together”, making it impossible to distinguish between the two. Even the very end, which presents the most believable world (with technology that actually looks like technology, not perverted body parts, and legitimate accents), the eerie symmetry between situation and dialogue between that “reality” and the first “reality” casts everything into doubt. When Allegra describes EXistenZ as “a game everybody’s already playing”, she’s more right than she knows. Like in Snow Crash, the world that we know is virtual becomes, somehow, the most “real” option, both because of its sheer, dirty grit (real animals instead of technologies that seem to mimic their form but have no explained source) and because we know on which side of reality we— and the characters— stand.

As we saw in “A Rape in Cyberspace”, even lines of text on a screen can create a startling illusion of reality for those invested in the community. Once you add in a second degree of separation, though (reading a book or watching a movie), more drastic action is needed to force the reader or watcher to understand the level of involvement and devotion the characters feel to their virtual realities or games. By making the virtual space the ironically more concrete, understandable option while twisting the “real world” until it’s scarcely recognizable (or until it can’t be sorted into “real” or “virtual”), Stephenson and Cronenberg do a 180 on our perception of reality and, in doing so, draw us more fully into their characters’ lives.

'Body Surfing' and the Demonic Within

“Body Surfing” manipulates the traditional constraints of the body in order to make interesting points about identity and sexuality. Its characters often change embodiments so quickly that it is difficult to remember who is who, and who is within whose body. Gender, race and sexual orientation are rendered fluid; at several points, the demons of the novel have sex in bodies that bear no resemblance to the ones that they initially inhabited.

I was intrigued by the possibilities that ‘body surfing’ allowed, but troubled by the ways in which it was executed: most of the sex in the novel is graphic rape, and the consequences of brutal sexual assault are often described in a very depersonalized manner. ‘Body Surfing’ describes a universe where bodies are disposable; this universe produces characters that are easily replaceable and treated in manners so horrific that it is difficult to make any sense of their torment, or of the motives of the demons which inhabit them.

The demons of ‘Body Surfing’ seem to be an extreme look at many of the embodied disciplinary measures that are currently at work in the world, including the structures of institutional racism and sexism. Patriarchy, for instance, seem to operate under the principle that a woman’s body is not her own, but the property of men, to be used and controlled. This symbology is particularly powerful during Ileana’s rape scene, where a Mogran hides among a group of soldiers. The Mogran are the target of the legion, but in this scene, there seems to be no practical difference between the bloodlust of humans and the brutality of demons. This is, in my opinion, the truly horrifying part of the novel. It’s easy to dismiss the actions of the Mogran as aspects of fantasy, but the actions of the soldiers have historical precedent, and are deeply embedded within the fabric of war. Can a member of the Legion really justify hunting the Mogran, when there are aspects of the demonic within us?

Where is Winter?

The Left Hand of Darkness seems to me to be particularly interested in the act of naming. In the first few pages of the novel I noticed LeGuin’s adoption of the sci-fi trope of giving seemingly everything a strange, unpronounceable name. The talk of Gossiwors and kyorremmy reminds me of a particular criticism of Atwood’s The Blind Assassin: the book was replete with silly “sci-fi” names that were meant to make the world seem alien, but they only really served to distract the reader, rather than immerse him. While this is a stylistic tic that I do personally find somewhat frustrating in sci-fi, its use does not seem too egregious to me in The Left Hand of Darkness.

It is less the strange, invented alien words that struck me, but the ambiguities that were given to names. At the end of his conversation with Estrevan, they come to the name of the planet. Estrevan asks Ai “what do you call it, this world, in your language?” At first, Ai answers with Gethen, the technical name of the planet. Then, upon further provocation, he reveals what he has called it several times in his interior monologue: Winter. Up until that point, I was not even sure whether Gethen and Winter were interchangeable, and not in fact different places. This seems to be a simple analogue for the ambiguous sexuality of the Gethens, where their gender truly is only what an outsider decides to call it, which they inevitably only do so based on their outside appearance, but it seems to me that the naming of Winter resonates more on its proof that this dilemma of the naming of things occurs on every scale in the story. Not only does the gender of a man/woman rely on semantics, but an entire planet can chameleonically change aspects with a single turn of phrase.

To return to the alien words, in terms of ambiguity they do serve an important purpose in science fiction in general. One could argue that these ambiguities are a literalization of the primary appeal of sci fi . A common tactic of immersion is to throw the reader into the setting, to make them experience a narrative without understanding it. Nonsense words are an instantaneous way to achieve the confusion and intrigue required for this form of immersion. Then, the revelation of their meaning parallels an equal understanding of the narrative, characters and background for the story. The appearance of this trope, an apparent sci-fi “shortcut,” makes me wonder what other people think about the phenomena. Do you find the fanciful, invented terminology to be successful immersively, or just annoying, or both? For me, I feel that it can’t help but succeed in immersion, with the unbeatable “throw the baby in the pool” approach, but I also find it to be a consistently annoying tic that, if not erased completely, I wish would be toned down in some cases.