The Friend/Enemy Dichotomy: Examining Xenophobia (The Concept of the Political)

So I challenged myself before beginning this book to try and find a few points upon which Carl Schmitt and I could agree – I knew from the start that I would be biased reading him. First of all, I think it is important to establish how Schmitt defines “political.” Politics has many meanings and connotations. In my opinion, the political Schmitt is referring to has to do with the “process by which groups of people make collective decisions” (Webster’s Dictionary) and, according to him, the most basic collective decision a group makes is to view everyone not included in this decision as the foreigner, the “other,” which is the enemy, and by virtue of that distinction all of those involved in the decision-making process “us.”

According to Schmitt, “an enemy exists only when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity.” (28) Furthermore, the “political enemy” is not hated personally but is solely the “public enemy.” (28) Since the enemy thus becomes a broad concept it is really more of an idea than something to be tangibly hated. While Osama bin Laden may be the “face” of terrorism, terrorists and terrorism is still a decidedly impersonal enemy. So, there is one point where I can agree with Schmitt.

Backtracking for a moment, I find the presupposition of the friend and enemy distinction suspect. While Schmitt detaches the emotional significance from the word “enemy” he still argues that this group is “in a specially intense way, existentially something different and alien” (27) from us. I argue that looking at political entities as existing in this sort of exclusive antithesis immediately negates any possibility of similarity between diverse groups of people and nations. Arguing that this antithesis presupposes all other domains sets governments on a path to myopia, narrow-mindedness and danger. Furthermore, even in cases of “extreme” otherness, such as seen between the buggers and humans, understanding is possible and commonalities exist on a fundamental level.

I find the sort of rhetoric espoused by Schmitt not to be a truism as he claims it to be, just as I don’t view the world through Bush’s paradigm of good and bad, with nations being either “with us or against us” as in the War on Terror. However, it is an interesting binary to examine because it is so common in human thought. What makes us think in this dichotomy? Is it merely xenophobia, intellectual sloth or something else?

Another interesting point Schmitt makes is that liberalism does not put forth a positive definition of politics, but rather is revolved around attacking the political since it potentially inhibits personal freedoms. In effect, he implies that liberalism is not a “real” political entity but rather somewhat vacuous. I agree that liberalism involves an essential distrust of government but isn’t that a political ideology in and of itself? There is also the whole checks and balances power balance/struggle. Does this not qualify as a political philosophy?

Alternative Views on Ender’s Game

While we talked a lot about the nature of Ender’s personality last week I was left with the question of intentions. Someone pointed out during class that while Ender has consistently had good intentions, his actions have been destructive. While, on the other hand, Peter has consistently had bad intentions and his actions have spared many lives and resulted in positive consequences. This is reflected on p. 238 when Valentine and Ender meet at the lake. She thinks to herself, “Peter has mellowed, but you they’ve made you into a killer. Two sides of the same coin, but which side is which?” This leaves me with the question: are our intentions more important than our actions? I think both are important, but they are more or less significant depending on the situation.

Gunperi raised another fascinating point in last week’s class about Ender’s intelligence. She criticized him severely and claimed that he is a troubled child, and either rather unintelligent because he allowed the military to control him or not as empathic as he claims to be.

I also enjoyed Phil’s criteria of what makes killing acceptable. From the buggers’ and our perspective, it is OK to kill a being if it is less intelligent than us. Only when the buggers discovered that humans are sentient beings with intelligence comparable to their own did they begin to respect us. We do the same with animals by drawing a distinction in our minds between murdering a human and killing animals. It is also rather selfish if you think about it – the buggers changed their mind about us because they not only valued our intelligence but realized they could learn from us and better themselves in the process.

Ender's Paradox of Love and Humanity.

One of the key passages from Ender's Game that we talked about on Thursday was Ender's discussion with Valentine on page 238. He describes the way he kills: "in that very moment when I love them... I destroy them. I make it impossible for them to ever hurt me again." This comes after Ender reveals to his sister that he hates himself. So, when Ender destroys an enemy, he loves that enemy but hates himself.

The book revolves around the idea that Ender's empathy makes him well-suited to wipe out the buggers. While this might be true in Ender's case, Ender's is certainly not the typical case. Destroying the buggers required very special talents that only Ender possesses. Usually, genocide and colonization involve overwhelming the "other" with force, not tactically outmatching and destroying it. Ender assimilates the buggers' strategy into his own to defeat them, but he later finds out that he never fully understood or "loved" them. This made me wonder whether Ender was correct in saying that he "loves" his enemy right before he kills them, or if he was trying to describe a different feeling that he did not have words for.

Another topic that we covered extensively in class was humanity; whether it applies to Ender, to the children at battle-school, to the buggers. A few people argued that the buggers were more "human" than the humans who wiped them out. However I think that we incorrectly identify humanity with empathy. The buggers were a naturally empathic species, so we say that they were more "human" than Ender, Graff, and Mazer. Human history would argue against that theory of what is "human." The third invasion follows the pattern that terrestrial human expansion has followed for thousands of years. Wells's narrator in War of the Worlds claims that mankind's supremacy over Earth was won "by the toll of a billion deaths." Humanity as it exists now owes survival to killing off evolutionary competitors, killing countless animal species, and subjugating large portions of its own species. The most realistic conclusion Card could have given Ender's Game is the image of humankind traveling through space to claim the ruins of a civilization it has destroyed. Card weaves the themes of empathy and humanity into a contradiction that makes them inseperable from violence and genocide.

The Perfect Man (well, not quite) for the Job

Much of our discussion in class on Thursday revolved around Ender's abilities and characteristics and the way in which these intersect with the fact that he is still a child. We frequently went back and forth over how Ender's empathy played into the story. It is the key aspect of his character that makes him perfect for the task of defeating the buggers because it allows him to think like them. It is also the reason that the military had to trick him into killing the buggers because it is this characteristic that would not allow him to destroy the buggers if he really knew the stakes. His empathetic nature takes the two contradictory aspects of Valentine and Peter and combines them: Valentine understands people's wants and uses this to make them see her side and Peter uncovers people's fears and exploits them. Ender sees both sides of a person (or a bugger) and uses it, not necessarily to benefit himself, but to do what he thinks is best. He knows, as Phil put it in class, that the key to mastering interactions with other individuals is to understand them completely. And, unlike Peter, Ender can use his empathy to do positive things and not just to destroy. Taking a statement from another blog, "I think it is particularly meaningful that the novel ends with one of these moments of perfect understanding, and that this understanding leads not to further destruction but to a profound expression of mutual regret, and to the possibility of redemption" (http://terrans.tumblr.com/).

All through our discussion of what made Ender the perfect candidate for the task, I could not help thinking about the concept of fate and how this could have possibly played into the story. I was actually surprised that this didn't come up in class. It seemed to me that the idea of fate is a possible piece of the storyline because of the fact that no matter what Ender does, even when he forgets the rules of the games in order to just get it done with, he manages to do what the military wants. He plays right into their plan no matter how he tries to change things. One could argue that this is because it is Ender's fate to kill the buggers and (supposedly) "save humanity." As Valentine puts it, "Nobody controls his own life....The best you can do is choose to fill the roles given to you by good people, by people who love you" (313). She acknowledges that Ender did not have complete control over what happened, but there are choices, nonetheless.

Games and War

Ender's Game prominently features children, three of whom decide the fate of Earth during their teens. Ender Wiggin leads the destruction of an entire race of enemy aliens, saving humanity from inter-species war. His brother and sister amuse themselves by nearly causing a cataclysmic civil war on earth. Before reaching adulthood, these three children make themselves the most influential human beings alive. While very gifted and ambitious, they are still emotionally immature, and most of their decisions bare the marks of that immaturity.

Ender eliminates the race of buggers without any knowledge of doing so. The adults disguise the war campaign as a game. Ender thinks he is training for a future conflict, but in reality he is destroying countless human and bugger lives without even being made aware of his actions. Likewise Peter and Val commit ideological warfare in the media without realizing the consequences (at least, Valentine doesn't immediately realize them). By the end of the novel, Val abandons her political aspirations as Demosthenes, not wanting help her brother by unfairly influencing the uneducated masses. Ender also steps back from his position as "Earth's Savior" to realize he has committed a horrible crime of war, that the games he was playing have real-life consequences.

On the colony, Ender comes into contact with the dead alien race, and he comes into the knowledge that his war was against a peaceful people with no intention to continue attacking the humans. His realization comes in a valley shaped from the image of the game he played in battle-school. What seemed to the childish, invading humans to be a game is revealed to Ender to actually have been a massacre.

An Unnecessary War

Unlike many of the people in our class, this was my first time reading Ender's Game. Based on the fact that much of the class said that they had read the book multiple times, I had high expectations for the novel; I was not disappointed. I got very much wrapped up in the story and couldn't help but finish it in two days. While I found the book to be really interesting and engaging, I also noticed quite a few important pieces of commentary on the human condition and our society.

In the previous post by mginsberg, he points out that the humans see the situation with the buggers as "them or us" and therefore act preemptively. This ends up being unnecessary and needlessly destroys the entire bugger race. This whole nasty affair is a result of a complete lack of communication. Ender sums it up quite nicely on page 253 when he says, "'So the whole war is because we can't talk to each other.'" One can see how miscommunication frequently causes conflict in reality as well. It makes me wonder how many battles have been fought because the two sides could not understand each other.

Another theme of Ender's Game that interested me was Orson Scott Card's examination of what is considered murder and what isn't. Toward the end of the novel when Colonel Graff is put on trial, Ender is accused of murder for the deaths of Stilson and Bonzo. However, Ender notes, feeling somewhat amused, that people condemn him for the deaths of two humans and yet they celebrate his murder of ten billion buggers (p309). The killing of the bugger race was essentially genocide and called to mind the many times the "civilized races" killed native races in order to expand. I'm sure if one colonist killed another, they would be prosecuted, but the killing of huge numbers of indigenous peoples either took decades to be acknowledged as a crime, or it continues to be ignored. Obviously, this is slightly different than in the novel because the buggers did attack the humans first and they felt threatened, but the way humans view their deaths is the same. And while we understand Ender's empathy towards the buggers and understand his guilt about their extinction, it is only when we realize that there was never any need to attack them that the true tragedy of the story reveals itself.

Clear and Present Danger: The Buggers, a Real or Imagined Threat?

Now I remember why Ender’s Game is one of my favorite novels. Reading it a second time and 10 years after the first, I was able to draw a lot more from it on how humans encounter the other and deal with the unknown.

I can see why we are reading Ender’s Game after The War of the Worlds – It is a natural progression. At the end of The War of the Worlds, the narrator calls for preparedness in the event of another attack; “I…anticipate a renewal of their adventure…we should be prepared…to anticipate the arrival of the next attack (180).”

Ender’s Game is also an anticipation of the enemy, the buggers,’ next attack. After the First Invasion, in which the buggers attacked Earth, humans felt threatened and saw their contact with the aliens as a win-lose game – either the humans survived or the buggers, there was no room for both species in the universe. I would argue that in Ender’s lifetime the buggers never posed a real threat to Earth’s survival. It was an imagined one, arising out of the global fear of the buggers as a threat, and since communication had not been established between the two species, humans were left to wonder at the buggers’ intentions. After a century of debate, they proceeded with the ideology that it is better to be safe than sorry and wipe out the buggers before they could do the same to us. It was a preemptive strike. The situation could be compared to 9/11 and America’s response – the War in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Throughout the novel, Card provides the reader with an abundance of compelling insights into the human experience. In the face of a menacing enemy, one that inspires fear in the masses, the world comes together under the leadership of a global hegemony that bears the characteristics of both a democracy and a dictatorship. The hegemony enforces a population quota, uses children for battle and suppresses religion and, it seems, all cultures and languages besides the dominant American culture and English language.

Yet, at the same time, free speech is permitted on the net and for the most part the checks and balances of government remain intact, with military officials still hesitant to act recklessly because they know they will be tried in a court of law. Throughout the novel, I felt the world of Ender’s Game to be very familiar – like modern day America, until occasionally I came across something that reminded me of China’s Cultural Revolution or the Ancient Spartans.

Perhaps this is a possible future for America? One in which we feel so threatened that we sacrifice some of our rights in the interests of self-preservation. To some extent that has already happened - with the Patriot Act, which allows the government to investigate domestic communication between citizens much more thoroughly.

Without getting too much into the Speaker for the Dead, I also realized while reading Ender’s Game again how much of a Jekyll and Hyde inner struggle Card has set up. Ender is extremely intelligent and has the capacity to and choice of whether to kill or to make peace. In his childhood, he is manipulated to do the former. However, as he matures into adulthood he begins to make the conscious decision to be a peacemaker. I love when he tells Valentine. “In the moment when I truly understand my enemy, understand him well enough to defeat him, then in that very moment I also love him (238).” Ender is extraordinarily empathic and, paradoxically, is an excellent killer for that very reason.

The last insight I would like touch on is the malleability of the masses and the power of the intelligent few. It is incredible how much influence Peter and Valentine have on society through their aliases on the net. It boils down to communication theory – the media elite controls and filters the information that gets to the public. They have a lot of power and could potentially use their influence to achieve their political objectives. I wonder, do only a few people have power in society or do the masses influence the few? Are we sheep waiting to be herded unless we rise up and take power ourselves?

Reflections on Survival and Wells' Intentions

After our last class I thought a lot about the question of whether or not we have an inherent “right” to survive. We instinctively have a desire to continue living, which stems from an instinct of self-preservation and exists in most instances, save depression. However, a right entails some sort of greater design for our existence crafted by a supreme being. For instance, it would be odd for a non-religious person to believe in such a right. In the natural world, we have fought and claimed this position through trial and error.

I think, if we do have a “right” to exist, that right holds true for everything else in the universe. Therefore, if we argue our right we better acknowledge that we are robbing other species of their equally deserved existence when we run them into extinction. I think this feeling of a “right” comes from our arrogance, our idea of “manifest destiny.” Wells poked right at this arrogance by titling the book The War of the Worlds for there was never a chance for humans, it was really a battle between Earth and Martian biology.

Another question from our class has been lingering with me – did Wells mean The War of the Worlds to be a critique on imperialism or justification for it? I had been pretty sure he meant it as a critique but since he does come to terms with the Martians as logical beings, it seems he might be providing a logical explanation for the behavior of the British. Perhaps by explaining their behavior rationally he merely meant to make the Martians, and by implication the British, full three-dimensional characters with understandable motives rather than give them the moral "green light."

I think I still believe Wells was speaking out against imperialism. He warned us of the dangers of abandoning our emotions with the full force of the description of the heartless Martians (p. 127). That is why I think it is a cautionary tale, for we are not yet “a mere selfish intelligence, without any of the emotional substratum of the human being” (127) but every violent inconsiderate act of imperialistic gluttony pushes us one step further in that direction.

H.G. Wells and Vegetarianism

To start, I'm going to note that I don't understand the hatred of Tom Cruise that's going on on this blog. To be sure, I'm creeped out by the guy, but I don't have a problem with him. He's been a very solid actor for years in Hollywood, and despite his recent turn as a religious nut, he proved in Tropic Thunder that he is capable of poking fun at himself. In any case, the poor film re-make of The War of the Worlds can probably be blamed more on Steven Spielberg than on Cruise.

Reading Mginsberg's post from the 19th opened my eyes to thinking about the possibility that Wells not only used the Martian invasion as a crude comparison for the British Empire's colonialism, but also to expose the human view of the "other." Human beings, upon finding something that is "alien" or "other," quickly seek to demonize it. In the case of British imperialism, "primitive" human beings are treated as less than human, just as the humans in War of the Worlds view the Martians as alien beings with no trace of humanity. Although the Martians come from another world and look grotesque to human eyes, the narrator reminds us that Martians may more or less embody the far future of the human race.

Mginsberg's final line about vegetarianism also led me to think about Wells's comparisons of the humans in his novel to animals. The humans are compared to dodos or sheep, and the aliens helplessly slaughter them, like animals in slaughterhouses. Quick research on Google of Wells's stance on vegetarianism finds that Wells was critically opposed to the wholesale slaughter of animals.

Wells's criticism of imperialism now seems like an open criticism of animal slaughter. However, he may, by drawing comparisons between the burning English countryside and slaughterhouses, be attempting to condemn cruelty of any living beings. The Martian slaughter of humans is no more cruel than the human slaughter of sheep, which is in turn no more cruel than the mass enslavement and murder of humans by other humans.

What Wells is trying to say is that humans cannot expect to be treated better by their fellow humans than they themselves treat helpless animals. If the Martians are blood-sucking monsters, they are no less monsters than the humans who benefit from the bloodshed of both human beings and animals.

A Martian/Human Parallel

Our class discussion of The War of the Worlds seemed to consistently circle around the topic of imperialism and how this social system relates to the invasion of the Martians. The connections seem fairly obvious: an outside society invades a country and seizes the resources they want while either ignoring or acting violently towards the current inhabitants. In the case of The War of the Worlds, that resource is human blood, which, of course puts a much more gruesome spin on things. However, our discussion in class put into question what purpose this horrifying act had in the context of the book and its connection to imperialism. We oscillated back and forth between the idea that the Martians were meant to mirror human nature and the idea that they were to serve as a warning to us. Wrapped up with this debate is the question of what Wells's own opinion of imperialism and colonialism is.

I'm not sure that I can come up with a conclusive decision regarding either of these debates; in fact, I'm sure that I can't. But in my opinion, after hearing many excellent points in class, Wells may not have thought imperialism to be a good thing, but he seemed to see it as a necessary evil. I say this because of something that was mentioned in class (I apologize that I can't remember who brought it up): the narrator never condemns the Martians for their actions. He is somewhat disgusted by them, but he constantly compares their actions towards humans with our own actions towards lesser species and "inferior races." As another enlightened student in class mentioned, it may not have been live or die for the Martians to kill humans but, along this same line, we kill lots of animals when we don't need to do so to survive. Taking this even further, the colonial powers did not need to take over other countries in order to survive, they did it for much more self-promoting reasons than even the Martians.

Support for this viewpoint can be found on the site entitled "Lensman's FAQ for The War of the Worlds." The creator of this site examines various themes of The War of the Worlds and he writes, "It may be a mistake to assume Wells condemned the evils of imperialism as thoroughly we do today. He was, after all, a citizen of a society ruling what was at the time the greatest empire on Earth. Despite Wells' depiction of the Martians as extremely repulsive and utterly without sympathy, he nonetheless suggests the Martians' actions are not so different than what we would have done in their place" (http://www.freewebs.com/wotwfaq/analysis.htm). At the risk of sounding overly dramatic, I would take this one step further and say that what we as humans have done is worse because our immediate health and wellbeing were not at risk when we chose to colonize other peoples.

The War of the Worlds: A Tale of Human Nature

This was also my first time reading The War of the Worlds and I was surprised by how Wells really delved into the human's emotional responses to the Martian attack. There were some characters who degenerated into insanity, the curator, and others who went to the extreme of social Darwinism. What interested me is that the government entirely dissolved when people no longer had the expectation of survival, affirming that government serves a purpose of securing the masses. Without such security, the “organism of government” (90) would swiftly dissolve.

I found Wells’ journalistic first person style an interesting choice. It was no wonder the 1938 broadcasting was so convincing. The story is told realistically, with no unnecessary embellishments and through the eyes of a narrator who is not omniscient and is not a physicist who can comprehensively describe the scientific background for the attacks.

In one aspect, the story is outdated. In terms of today’s communications, news of a Martian attack on earth occurring on Sunday would spread through the world almost instantaneously – there would be no waiting for Monday’s papers. However, I do still think that people would go through the same general steps of acceptance – disbelief and denial, guilt, anger, depression, acceptance and hope. Note these are also the stages of grief. The novel goes through each of these – the disbelieving masses who consider the news exciting, the guilt in the eyes of God as seen through the curator, the anger exhibited in the battles, the narrator’s absolute surrender, and the artilleryman’s acceptance of a new way of life.

A couple of observations about our interaction with the “other:” I found it interesting that in the beginning the narrator constantly makes use of personification or terrestrial-ification in his description of the extraterrestrials and their machines; people expect the Martians to look like humans, and their machines are like “metallic spiders.” We tend to construct the unknown by what we know- in our own image. Perhaps this is why the British and other colonial powers attempted to “remake” or westernize China and its other domains into how a civilization “ought to look.” That desire to reconstruct something foreign into what we know, coupled with ideas of superiority and the want for material wealth, certainly lead to the age of imperialism.

Lastly, I wonder if Wells is critiquing our present reliance on technology when he predicts we are on the same evolutionary course as the Martians. We are becoming all “brain” and no “body” – meaning we are sacrificing our emotions for greater intellectual power. Perhaps this is one of his greatest warnings – that we cannot sacrifice all in the interests of expediency. I also did not expect this book to make me rethink becoming a vegetarian .

The War of the Worlds: A look to the future?

This was my first time reading The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells; I had been exposed to it before in the form of the Tom Cruise film, but that hardly counts. Obviously, the book went much deeper into certain philosophical ideas and provided a lot of material with which to base discussions on social science. And an added bonus: no Tom Cruise.

The first thing that really jumped out at me in The War of the Worlds was the fact that H.G. Wells seemed to have some powers of precognition when he wrote the story. Now, keeping in mind that he wrote the story at the turn of the 20th century, it was pretty surprising to me how progressive some of his ideas are (trying to ignore the bit of Antisemitism that he exposes--see the end of chapter 16 in Book 1) and how some of what he writes seems to be a prediction for the future. Firstly, he highlights a female character that was very progressive for the time period. The young lady that the narrator's brother meets up with is first seen trying to fight off three men who are trying to steal a carriage from her and her sister-in-law. She fights back with a whip and a revolver. Wells's illustration of such a heroine is pretty enlightened for the end of the 19th century.

Aside from Wells's modern take on the female character, he also provides some insights that are almost spooky in their foresight. For example, the whole premise of the book seems to plainly anticipate the coming of the two World Wars. One statement at the end of chapter 11 sums this up well: "Never before in the history of warfare had destruction been so indiscriminate and so universal." Many of the passages in which Wells describes the desolation and carnage that the Martians created are oddly reminiscent of descriptions of the post-World War landscape in the most hard-hit countries.

Aside from Wells's seemingly precognitive ideas, his novel is also a good comment on the general feelings of self-assuredness and dominance that mankind has had for ages. The narrator often highlights the faith that people have in humanity's strength and ability to overcome any foe. One of the first things that the narrator comments on after seeing the Martians is that they are sluggish and couldn't possibly pose much of a threat if it came to a fight. He still holds this opinion even after a large number of people are killed by the heat ray. The narrator eventually realizes that humans are not all-powerful, but he leaves us with an interesting point at the end of the book. He comments on the possibility of a return of the Martians and if mankind will be prepared or if they will, again, take their security in the universe for granted.

Quest Number One: What is science fiction?

For our very first quest, the class set out to discover a question that, like Jackie, I had never thoroughly explored before: What exactly defines science fiction? Are works without scientific explanations (or at least explanations based in real science) for their technological phenomena not science fiction? Are they more mythic or magical?

My group, or my crew as they will henceforth be known, determined that science fiction, always grounded in a plausible scientific reality, functions under the assumption that its scientific elements hypothetically can be explained. As the class discussion developed, we began to question the importance of scientific explanation for phenomena in works of science fiction. The professor asked us to ponder the similarity between works of magic, such as Harry Potter, and works involving scientific elements without explanations. Isn’t a technological apparatus without an explanation about how it functions equivalent to a magic wand?

An intriguing question I had never before considered, but examined extensively after class. Ultimately, while fiction with actual scientific extrapolation is ideal, I think science fiction doesn’t need a scientific explanation to support its technological elements as long as there is a presumption that the technology can be sufficiently explained by a character in that universe. As we live in the age of the plausible, I think it is important to remember that science fiction emerged in an age of the possible and in the world of possibilities it shall remain. While the magic in Harry Potter may never be plausible or possible, the science in a story without scientific explanation may still be very possible.

Also, I should clarify that I’m not much of a science gal. Not yet. I’m more of a sociology gal. So that might also help explain why I do not greatly value scientific explanations in science fiction. I’m less interested in the scientific elements and more interested in how these elements are used, by whom these elements are used, and how they are affecting the beings in the story. The sociological elements are becoming increasingly relevant to works of science fiction considering the rapid proliferation of the institution of technology in contemporary society.

Signing off with an explanation of my name. I’m not actually a sociopath (Then again, I wouldn’t tell if I was! Ha!). It’s a reference to the character of Topher Brink from the TV show Dollhouse, which you should start watching immediately if it hasn’t yet graced your life. Ecstatic for more fun and interesting class discussions! Maybe many of my viewpoints about this topic will change over the course of this semester.

Science Fiction vs. Magic

In class last week we discussed the genre of science fiction, its limitations and overlaps with other categories. We also discussed what science fiction tells us about our perception of reality and world politics. Science fiction has always been one of my favorite areas of literature and cinema. I often find myself daydreaming about the concepts of teleportation and time travel, yep I am a nerd.

I have never given much thought to the definition of science fiction, having always ‘felt’ whether a certain book or movie does or does not fit the category. There are exceptions to most of the characterizations we invented. However, they guide us and point to commonalities amongst science fiction works. Our group considered that science fiction can be contrasted with fantasy because it is grounded in our reality, involves science rather than magic, and there is a presumption that things can be explained.

I think I find the difference between science and magic more subtle than most. They are both ways of perceiving the world, like looking at the world through different eyes. Hence, phenomena can be explained both scientifically and magically – that is why Einstein was a strong believer in God. In the film Avatar, the aliens perceived their natural world magically – the braids in their hair synched with the spirit of other living beings. Scientifically, they forged a neurological connection with those other creatures.

What I mean to say is that magical and scientific explanations are not mutually exclusive, they are just different discourses. Obviously, science is the main discourse of present society, but it was not always so – in medieval times most was explained through Christianity. Personally, I prefer the scientific perspective because of the social implications of a community guided by magic, but science has its limitations. There are still mysteries in the realms of meaning beyond science that “magic” assists in understanding. There is romanticism about magic. Magic often becomes science with greater understanding. A marriage between the two perspectives might be nice for the future – so we remain in awe of the universe despite our empirical understanding of it.

Anyway, I look forward to next class and our future discussions.

Class Response

In last week's discussion, we were able to list some of the qualities that we felt most works of Science Fiction share. It seems that a single solid definition of the Science Fiction genre still eludes us. Whatever defining characteristic we gave the genre, someone could usually find an example that is generally considered Science Fiction, but falls outside that definition.

We examined Sci Fi that falls under Asimov or Heinlein's definitions, in which Science Fiction extrapolates real-life problems and examines the impact of scientific development on human beings. We also talked about Sci Fi in the mold of Douglas Adams' stories and Star Wars, in which the science is treated more as a vehicle for fantastic occurrences.

Although we heard quotes from Arthur C. Clarke and Asimov that attempted to define Science Fiction, it should be conceded that Science Fiction has developed since the days of the classic Sci Fi writers. Science Fiction is not now easy to definitively categorize as a vision of the future or an extrapolation of the effects of science on modern society.

After our discussions in class, it seemed to me that Science Fiction might only be definable by separating it into different classes of "science-fantasy" or "science-social-allegory." The now varied array of Science Fiction makes definition cumbersome. Still, I think that we noted many important common features of Science Fiction works, such as the supposition of scientific realism and the incorporation of the fantastic by way of technology.

Defining science fiction

In the first meeting of our Social/Science/Fiction course, we discussed a topic which I have honestly never thought about before. After meeting each other and comparing our geekiness to that of every one else in the class, we launched into a discussion on what defines science fiction.

In groups, we brainstormed. Our group came up with the idea that science fiction must always be grounded, somewhat, in reality. That isn't to say that science fiction is realistic; it just means that the ideas and events that exist in pieces of science fiction can, theoretically be explained by some aspect of science (this explanation usually does not adhere to the rules of science as we know them today, but it relates to a field of science that does currently exist). It is simply a matter of comparing which films and literature use science as an explanation and which use magic.

I found this discussion to be pretty interesting (geek that I am) and it became more so when the point was raised that this definition would imply that Star Wars (the end-all and be-all of science fiction for a lot of people) cannot be strictly considered science fiction because of the existence of "The Force," which is, of course, not related to science (unless you wait for the explanation in the new films). While this makes sense to me, I still find it hard to disqualify Star Wars as science fiction. I think it should be considered a high-ranking, honorary member of the genre.

Anyway, the discussion in class on Thursday brought out my inner nerd and I look forward to more in-depth looks at the intellectual side of various pieces of science fiction.