Awesome Visual of Sci-Fi History

Excerpted. Map by Ward Shelley.

From io9. You guys should really take a look at it, especially the large version.

Near of Kin: Wheres the Sci fi?

When I read “Near of Kin,” the what ran through my head while I read it was “when is this going to be a science fiction story?” There were no whiz-bang flying cars or androids or anything else. It was only about two thirds of the way through the story that I realized that the spectacle I had come to expect of science fiction was not going to happen. The entire story takes place in one room, hardly a showcase for technology or alien civilizations, and even the surprise twist ending I was sure would come on the last page did not come.
However, perhaps there is a sci fi aspect to the story. While the characters start off seemingly completely normal, throughout the story there is a constant alienation of the characters from the reader, as you learn more and more of their disturbing past. In this case, this would not be science fiction in the literal sense, but an appropriation of the emotions and conventions of science fiction in order to achieve the same alienation (alienation that is usually in a literal sense) in a contemporary, non-speculative story. This alienation arises, of course, from incest.
Incest is the ultimate taboo, and to see this universally reviled act is treated, as the author herself calls it: “a sympathetic story about incest,” creates a huge disconnect between the reader and the characters. I am confident that upon asking any person whether they could be sympathetic toward incest, they would almost always answer with an immediate and emphatic no. Furthermore they would find it difficult to understand the situation in which such an act could even possibly be sympathetic. To be dropped into a world where the narrator’s uncle, while not condoning, has somewhat accepted incest as part of his life is completely unrelatable in the same way as asking a person point-blank what their opinions on incest are.
But then comes the next greatest power that science fiction has: the ability to make the alien relatable, to sympathize with something completely foreign. Octavia’s story is surprisingly relatable. The characters handle incest in a sympathetic and relatable way, and the gradual introduction of the issue in the story, rather than beating the reader over the head with it (a sci fi trope which the story thankfully avoided). So while not a literal science fiction story, Near of Kin appropriates perhaps the best parts of the genre, and employs them in an unexpected, yet no less alien setting.

Reading and Misreading: Author as Guide

My discussion in last week’s blog post about Tiptree and Klimt might have been a bit of a stretch, but this week’s connection between Le Guin and Tolstoy may actually be justified! In her introduction to The Left Hand of Darkness, Le Guin refers a few times to the battle of Borodino (xiii), which to me, brings only one thing to mind: WAR AND PEACE. Besides the problematic issue of truth and lies in fiction, an issue Tolstoy dealt with quite a bit and that appears in both Le Guin’s introduction and the book itself, there are certain parts of The Left Hand of Darkness that seem to echo Tolstoy. For example, here is a bit of conversation between Genly Ai and the Weaver, Faxe:

“Tell me, Genry, what is known? What is sure, predictable, inevitable—the one certain thing you know concerning your future, and mine?

“That we shall die.”

“Yes. There’s really only one question that can be answered, Genry, and we already know the answer…The only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next.” (70)

And here are a few lines from Pierre Bezukhov in War and Peace:

What is bad? What is good? What should we love and what hate? What do we live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What Power governs it all?

There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: ‘You’ll die and all will end. You’ll die and know all, or cease asking.’

…All we can know is that we know nothing. And that’s the height of human wisdom. (372)

Perhaps I imposed this connection on the two texts merely because I happened to be reading this very part of War and Peace (SLA 415 is awesome) and The Left Hand of Darkness at the same time. But, like Tolstoy in his defense of his work in “Some Words About War and Peace,” Le Guin feels the need to defend her novel in “Is Gender Necessary?” As stated in one of the bracketed sections added in 1987, Le Guin felt “resentful” of critics who looked at The Left Hand of Darkness as an essay on “gender problems” and not as a novel (8). Le Guin emphatically states that the book is in fact a novel, “the record of my consciousness, the process of my thinking” (8). This also prompts the question of just what a novel is. Tolstoy famously argues that War and Peace is not a novel at all, but that is a whole other issue.

Le Guin and Tolstoy both felt the need to explain their works more fully to readers—books on their own might be misunderstood and misread, as essays or epics or philosophical tracts instead of novels. What does it mean when an author feels the need to step forward and explain their work? Should a novel be understandable on its own, and readers free to interpret it however they wish, or should the writer exert control not only on what is read but how it is read as well?

*Side note that does not relate to the rest of my post but that might be of interest: In Plato’s Symposium, which includes a variety of short discourses on the nature of love, Aristophanes proposes that in the past, the “sexes were not two as they are now, but originally three in number; there was man, woman, and the union of the two, having a name corresponding to this double nature, which had once a real existence, but is now lost, and the word ‘Androgynous’ is only preserved as a term of reproach.” According to Aristophanes' account, primeval man consisted of what we would think of as two different people (of the same sex or different) merged together: everyone had four hands, four feet, two faces, and two “privy members.” Zeus then split everyone in half so that “Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half.”

Obviously, the androgyny of the Gethenians is quite different from this account, but it might be interesting to compare the two.

If anyone would like to take a look at Plato’s Symposium: http://classics.mit.edu/Plato/symposium.html