Extended Response - Rachel In Love

Pat Murphy’s Rachel in Love explores the experiences of Rachel, a half-ape half-human girl whose father dies at the very beginning of the story. When Rachel was a girl, she and her mother were killed, at which point her father is able to take Rachel’s human DNA and implant it into an already existent monkey to preserve her character. Thus, Rachel lives in duality: she has memories from her life as a human as well as her past as an ape, and often struggles to find solidity in her identity. Shortly after her father’s death she is taken to a research and breeding center for primates where she encounters other monkeys who cannot speak using sign language, nor do they have the human mentality that Rachel possesses. She befriends and falls in love with the janitor of the center, who is mute and also speaks ASL, only to feel rejected. At this point she takes another monkey as a companion and returns to her father’s home.

Rachel in Love touches on many issues that science fiction addresses as a genre. The first is confusion of identity. In many science fiction stories characters find themselves placed into strange environments, or in places where they fail to easily fit in in one way or another. In this story, we witness Rachel’s inner psyche as both a monkey and a human. As reader’s we easily empathize with the struggles that a young girl would face upon being left alone in a world where there is essentially no one who understands her. Beyond the external difficulty of a human placed in an animal body, Rachel has to try and make sense of who she currently is in relation to her two separate histories. The strangeness of this situation reflects the exploration of the bizarre within the science fiction genre.

Another identity-based motif in this short story is the combination of humans with other non-human forms. Often in science fiction we see cybernetics or some kind of technology integrated with humans. This idea is taken in a different direction with Rachel, where a human mind is morphed with an animal mind and body. These unusual combinations allow for literary exploration of identity within the applications of love, reproduction, and living rights. Both in Rachel in Love  and other science fiction works, the plots encourage readers to examine our own culture by presenting us with something unusual within a fictional scenario, causing us to ponder the ever-present question “what if?”

Asking this question often leads us to ethical issues. Although fantastical scenarios often prompt these concerns, they—if the story is well structured—relate in some way to issues that are present in our own society.  In Rachel’s case, we connect her strange situation to ethical questions regarding some human rights of certain groups of people (perhaps along the lines of severely disabled people, those with mental disorders, the rights of unborn children, etc.) Overall, Rachel in Love is an interesting reflection of the science fiction genre and uses unique literary plot and storytelling techniques to do so. The stories that resonate most with readers are those that are memorable. Evaluating our own identity is something that all of us experience, and following Rachel’s unusual problems in exploring her own identity is thus an engaging conflict. Rachel in Love ventures beyond the stereotypical science fiction story and uses our close relationship with primates as well as our tendencies in developing our own identity to create a fantastical yet relatable story.

TiMER

In all honesty, I did not enjoy the move TiMER at all. Although I think it is indicative of some characteristics of the science fiction genre, it’s value as far as an artistically well-done film is relatively low. My thoughts on this reside in the fact that the idea of a timer that reveals the moment you make eye contact with your “one” goes against anything I would want to have exist in real life. The process of falling in love is not one that can be boiled down to a formula, predicted, or anticipated: as is the case with anything in an individual’s life.

We see through the various experiences of the characters that the timers can have limiting effects, and seem to get in the way of what feels right. That is the key thing that the timer eliminates: feeling. The participation and awareness of the timer wearer is dulled in the midst of being completely absorbed in looking forward to a single moment in time. The greatest moments in our lives (or at least speaking from my own experience) happen when you are actively involved in the process of discovering what is the right path to take, and I know that I would be a much less interesting person if I felt like I was bobbing along a timeline towards a predestined finish.

This brings me to my general thoughts on how this movie relates to science fiction. My experience in watching this film made me think about all of the things that I would change within the extant society, as well as all of the reasons why it is best that science doesn’t meddle too much with such wild things like love. I believe that much of science fiction is meant to show us the dystopia within the potential changes that technology, or other variants, can cause within a civilization. This in turn causes us to reflect on the function and success (or failure I suppose) of our own existence.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas

I found this week’s shorter stories to be more interesting than many of the other things I have read this semester. I enjoy the short-story (or at least, shorter story) format, and often find that this allows for a more concentrated amount of interest. In other words, a small bit of something cool will hold attention more effectively than a lot of something cool. Less information also provides room for the audience imagination to fill in the blanks in ways that are most attractive to them.

The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas  by Ursula Le Guin was particularly mesmerizing to me. I found myself thinking about it for several days after I initially read it, which is a quality that I find highly valuable in literature. I believe that the mystery, and lack of explanation is what caused me to connect so strongly to the story. The subject was uncomfortable, which increased my want to know why the child was in the closet, who is it, and why are they so impactful that their freedom would drown an entire society of perfectly pleasant people?

I think that The Ones Who Walk Away From Omelas also speaks to the human condition. It seems such a tragedy that no one is willing to go through with helping the child, however we are given clues that the situation allows for either the happiness of the one child, or the misery of many. Given this pretext, it is difficult to know what could be done.

I also thought that the end part of the story was well constructed. After being presented with such a strange format for the function of a society, we learn that some members simply leave. These people seem not to wander, but instead trudge with intention as if they already have a destination in mind. Of course at this point I want so badly to know what they know, to go with them on their walk to wherever, and get a clearer picture of what is happening below the surface of the text that we as readers are provided with.

This may have been my favorite part of this semester after the Kwaidan. And, I appreciated the shorter text as well J

Lilith's Brood

Octavia Butler’s novel Lilith’s Brood was the most intriguing work to me thus far in terms of the human condition. In short, it redefines what we accept in our current society as normal, and poses questions regarding the value of gender, possession, and isolation. As is the case with other science fiction works, the reader is placed into an alternate existence, and must make their own judgments of right, wrong, and everything in between.

One of the main alterations in Lilith’s Brood is the ambiguity of gender. There exists female, male, and “ooloi.” The ooloi members are able to manipulate the other two genders in order to create more effective connection between male and female. This becomes an ethical issue: it strikes us as alarming, and we immediately assume that this is bad because we—as a group of humans—tend to be protective of our particular way of doing things. However, we see that the collective population of the book may be benefitted from the manipulative abilities of the third gender, and openness to its effects reveal another option for a functioning society.

The concept of aliens is also central to Lilith’s Brood. Another tendency of humans is to consider us the ultimate power in living organisms. However, Lilith experiences the opposite as she is thrown into a situation where she becomes the minority, and must see her own kind as alien.  In short it becomes incredibly multifaceted as we are unsure of how human well-being fits into the motives of the Oankali. I think that the conflict of Lilith vs. humans vs. Oankali adds great interest to the plot, and addresses the issue of the definition of alien. It is a possibility that the human race may have to face similar questions in the near future, which adds to our interest in such conflict of ideas and desires.

Cyberpunk

Cyberpunk is a peculiar genre to me. Upon reading for class and learning more about it through discussion and the power point presentation I realized that I had been aware of the genre, but not with the knowledge that it was a genre. In other words, as we learned about “what makes cyberpunk?” I was able to recognize the elements of technology, dystopia, etc from things that I have experienced in the past. However, I did not even know that cyberpunk was a specific thing and had always lumped it into the general science fiction umbrella.

It seems that technology plays a crucial part in any cyberpunk story. I think that my generation resonates in a peculiar way with literature that deals with technological evolution, space travel, and cybergenetics. Because we more or less grew up as technology exploded (at least as far as the average consumer is concerned), we see its inclusion in literature not as a far off fantasy, but a more attainable aspect of everyday life. This contrasts the experience of those who grew up in the 60s, 70s, and even part of the 80s who—due to the nature of their time—would have more difficulty picturing space travel and robots as an integral part of consumer life.

It is interesting learning about a genre that is still very relevant, or at least has been recently present in literature, because I am most curious about what is coming next, and how the cyberpunk genre will influence future works. Essentially, we are reaching a point where many more things are possible with the use of technology, and are on the cusp of breaking into new frontiers—literary genres included. Like I mentioned in class, I suspect that both in reality and within artistic expression, a new genre will develop that explores deep psychology, the definitions of human and nonhuman, and the effect that newly developed and increasingly personal technology will have on our inner selves.