Gerald R. Lucas

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Clarke and Asimov Audio

by grlucas • on 17. Jul, 2010 • in Notes

I recently returned from a multi-day journey on which I was able to listen to Isaac Asimov’s Foundation and Arthur C. Clarke’s Childhood’s End on audio. Science fiction audio and travel just seem to go together for me. If I don’t have audio books, I like Escape Pod. However, I made sure these two classics were on my iPod before leaving this time. I read the Asimov years ago — probably in high school, but have never read the Clarke. Both of these sf masters like to deal with big ideas, but I find the most provocative aspect of their work is when they examine the limits of science, technology, and reason. I’m going to call this metaphysical science fiction.

Frames in Kafka’s Metamorphosis

by grlucas • on 17. Nov, 2008 • in Literature, Notes

In reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis for class last week, I noticed that the novella is framed in a way that highlights one of its central — if not the central — thematic concerns of the text. Figuratively, frames are a way to organize and structure reality. If you consider a photograph, it is framed or composed in such a way as to present the real world in an organized and predictable fashion. It’s frame includes certain elements while it excludes others. All of the components of the text (novel, photograph, poem, film, etc.), then, tell a unified story which is often an expression of the values of the framer (artist, writer, photographer, etc.).

Kafka presents Gregor’s metamorphosis in such a way, and he gives textual clues to this rhetorical function based around how women are framed in the narrative.

The Gents

by grlucas • on 16. Nov, 2008 • in Notes, Photography, Service

The Norman Mailer Society is now a Pro. On Flickr, that is. As a part of the new-and-improved web site, we purchased a Flickr account where we’ll be posting our photos from the conferences, of the man himself, and other apropos events.

This photo is by Mark James, and shows the Executive Board at Mailer’s house on the last night of the conference. I’m on the bottom left. See more photos from the 2007 Conference. And, if you have a Flickr account, make us a friend.

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Reality (a Working Definition)

by grlucas • on 20. Apr, 2007 • in (New) Media, Notes

The body’s physical, unmediated relationship with its environment.

Chew on that for a while. Thoughts to follow.

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Science Fiction (A Definition)

by grlucas • on 01. Sep, 2006 • in Literature, Notes, Scholarship

Yesterday, in my current sf course, we discussed and attempted to define what we mean when we talk about “science fiction.” We read several introductions to the topic, considered a couple of illustrative texts, and decided that any definition of science fiction must be locally situated: i.e., there is unlikely anything we can call “SF” as in an absolute, immutable genre, but we must content ourselves with the local and contingent “sf.” We decided we like the “sf” more than “sci-fi,” since the former also includes “speculative fiction,” and seems to be the choice of those who do the deepest thinking about science fiction. As one student said yesterday, “sci-fi” is a TV station, suggesting that this is the popular side of science fiction. Both are valid, but our study will stick with “sf.”

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Iliad Observations

by grlucas • on 30. Jul, 2006 • in Literature, Notes

In my old undergraduate notes, I found some sections from Great Books that deal with the Iliad. I cannot give the exact reference, as whatever professor gave me the photocopy had neglected to put in that information. If anyone knows, please let me know so I can give proper credit. From David Denby’s The New Yorker article “Does Homer Have Legs?”

Here, Denby gives his initial impressions of the Iliad, supplying some background information that new readers might not be aware of. He also expresses some discomfort at the Homer’s style: in that the poet offers no guidance through the carnage that was the Trojan war.

By the time the action of the Iliad begins, the deed that set off the whole chain of events — a man making off with another man’s wife — is barely mentioned by the participants. Homer, chanting his poetry to groups of listeners, must have expected everyone to know the outrageous old tale. Years earlier, Paris, a prince of Troy, visiting the house of the Greek king Menelaus, took away, with her full consent, Helen, the king’s beautiful wife. Agamemnon, the brother of the cuckold, then put together a loose federation of kings and princes whose forces voyaged to Troy and laid siege to the city, intending to punish the proud inhabitants and reclaim Helen. But after more than nine years of warfare, the foolish act of sexual abandonment that set the whole cataclysm in motion has been largely forgotten. By this time, Helen, abashed, considers herself merely a slut (her embarrassed appearance on the walls of Troy is actually something of a letdown), and Paris, her second “husband,” more a lover than a fighter, barely comes out to the battlefield. When he does come out, and he and Menelaus fight a duel, the gods muddy the outcome and he war goes on. After nine years, the war itself is causing the war.

How can a book make one feel injured and exhilarated at the same time? What’s shocking about the Iliad is that the cruelty and the nobility of it seem to grow out of each othcr, like the good and evil twins of some malign fantasy who together form a single unstable and frightening personality. After all, Western literature begins with a quarrel beween two arrogant pirates over booty. At the beginning of the poem, the various tribes of the Greeks (whom Homer calls Achaeans — Greece wasn’t a national identity in his time), the various tribes assembled before the walls of Troy are on the verge of disaster. Agamemnon, their leader, the most powerful of the kings, has kidnapped and taken as a mistress from a nearby city a young woman, the danghter of one of Apollo’s priests; Apollo has angrily retaliated by bringing down a plague onthe Greeks. A peevish, bullying king, unsteady in command, Agamemnon, under pressure from the othcr leaders, angrily gives the girl back to her father. But then, demanding compensation, he takes for himself the slave mistress of Achilles, his greatest warrior. The women are passed around like gold pieces or helmets. Achilles is so outraged by this bit of plundering within the ranks that he comes close to killing the king, a much older man. Restraining himself at the last minute, he retires rom the combat and prays to his mother, the goddess Thetis, for the defeat of his own side; he then sits in his tent playing a lyre and “singing of men’s fame” as his friends get cut up by the Trojans. What follows is a series of battles whose savagery remains without parallel in our literature.

It is almost too much, an extreme and bizarre work of literary art at the very beginning of Western literary art. One wants to rise to it, taking full in the face, for the poem depicts life at its utmost, a nearly ceaseless activity of marshaling, deploying, advancing, and fleeing, spelled by peaceful periods so strenuous — the councils and feasts and games — that they hardly seem like relief at all. Reading the poem in its entirety is like confronting a storm that refuses to slacken or die. At first, I had to fight my way through it; I wasn’t bored but I was rebellions, my attention a bucking horse unwilling to submit to the harness. It was too long, I thought, so brutal and repetitive and, for all its power as a portrait of war, strangely distant from us. Where was Homer in all this? He was every where, selecting and shaping the material, but he was nowhere as a palpable presence, a consciousness, and for the modern reader his absence was appalling. No one tells us how to react to the brutalities or to anything else. We are on our own. Movie-fed, I wasn’t used to working so hard, and as I sat on my sofa at home, reading, my body, in daydreams, kept leaping away from the seat and into the bedroom, where I would sink into bed and turn on the TV, or to the kitchen, where 1 would open the fridge. Mentally, I would pull myself back, and eventually I settled clown and read and read, though for a long time I remained out of balance and sore.

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Some Definitions of Science Fiction

by grlucas • on 27. Jul, 2006 • in Literature, Notes

More preparation for the fall semester. Someone sent this to me years ago — I think it was my friend Walter. Some of these definitions are useful; some less so. However, I think it’s smart to see as many ideas as possible when trying to get my head around a concept. Along with these definitions, I’ve also begin to post Ursula K. Le Guin’s Introduction to The Norton Book of Science Fiction on my professional site as another useful source in beginning research into science fiction.

“By ‘scientifiction’ I mean the Jules Verne, H.G. Wells and Edgar Allan Poe type of story — a charming romance intermingled with scientific fact and prophetic vision.” — Hugo Gernsback, in “Amazing Stories” (April 1926)
“Science Fiction is a branch of fantasy identifiable by the fact that it eases the ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ on the part of its readers by utilizing an atmosphere of scientific credibility for its imaginative speculations in physical science, space, time, social science, and philosophy.” — Sam Moskowitz, in “Explorers of the Infinite” (1963)
“We might try to define science fiction in this broader sense as fiction based upon scientific or pseudo-scientific assumptions (space-travel, robots, telepathy, earthly immortality, and so forth) or laid in any patently unreal though non-supernatural setting (the future, or another world, and so forth).” — L. Sprague de Camp, in “Science Fiction Handbook” (1953)
“A science fiction story is a story built around human beings, with a human problem, and a human solution, which would not have happened at all without its speculative scientific content.” — Theodore Sturgeon, as amended by Damon Knight, in “A Century of Science Fiction” (1962)
“Science fiction is that branch of literature which is concerned with the impact of scientific advance upon human beings.” — Isaac Asimov, in “Modern Science Fiction”, edited by Reginald Bretnor (1953)
“Science fiction is that branch of literature wthat deals with human responses to changes in the level of science and technology.” — Isaac Asimov, in “Isaac Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine” (Mar-Apr 1978)
“Science fiction is that class of prose narrative wtreating of a situation that could not arise in the world we know, but which is hypothesized on the basis of some innovation in science or technology, or pseudo-science or pseudo-technology, whether human or extraterrestrial in origin.” — Kingsley Amis, in “New Maps of Hell” (1961)
“Science fiction is the search for a definition of man and his status in the universe which will stand in our advanced but confused state of knowledge (science), and is cast in the Gothic or post-Gothic mould.” — Brian W. Aldiss, in “Billion Year Spree” (1973)
“A literary genre developed principally in the 20th Century, dealing with scientific discovery or development that, whether set in the future, or the fictitious present, or in the putative past, is superior to or simply other than that known to exist.” — Fred Saberhagen, in “Encyclopedia Britannica” 15th edition (1979)
“The branch of fiction that deals with the possible effects of an altered technology or social system on mankind in an imagined future, an altered present, or an alternative past.” — Barry M. Malzberg, in “Collier’s Encyclopedia” (1981)
“Science fiction deals with improbable possibilities, fantasy with plausible impossibilities.” — Miriam Allen deFord, in “Elsewhere, Elsewhen, Elsehow” (1971)
“A piece of science fiction is a narrative of an imaginary invention or discovery in the natural sciences and consequent adventures and experience.” — J. O. Bailey, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.256, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“[Fiction] in which the author shows awareness of the nature and importance of the human activity known as the scientific method, and shows equal awareness of the great body of knowledge already collected through that activity, and takes into account in his stories the effect and possible future effects on human beings of scientific methods and scientific fact.” — Reginald Bretnor, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.257, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“Science fiction is a label applied to a publishing category and its application is subject to the whims of editors and publishers.” — John Clute & Peter Nichols, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.257, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“A handy short definition of almost all science fiction might read: realistic speculation about possible future events, based solidly on adequate knowledge of the real world, past and present, and on a thorough understanding of the scientific method. To make the definition cover all science fiction (instead of ‘almost all’) it is necessary only to strike out the word ‘future’.” — Robert Heinlein, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.257, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“Speculative fiction: stories whose objective is to explore, to discover, to learn, by means of projection, extrapolation, analogue, hypothesis-and-paper-experimentation, something about the nature of the universe, of man, of ‘reality’.” — Judith Merrill, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.257, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“It is that thing that people who understand science fiction point to, when they point to something and say ‘That’s science fiction!” — Frederik Pohl, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.257, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“Science fiction is hard to define because it is the literature of change and it changes while you are trying to define it.” — Tom Shippey, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.258, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“There is only one definition of science fiction that seems to make pragmatic sense: ‘Science fiction is anything published as science fiction’.” — Norman Spinrad, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.257, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“A literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s empirical environment.” — Darko Suvin, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.258, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982); this is a particularly often-cited definition in the academic study of science fiction
“Science fiction is that branch of fantasy which, while not true of present-day knowledge, is rendered plausible by the reader’s recognition of the scientific possibilities of it being possible at some future date or at some uncertain period in the past.” — Donald A. Wollheim, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.258, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)
“Science fiction is a label applied to a publishing category and its application is subject to the whims of editors and publishers.” — John Clute & Peter Nichols, in “The SF Book of Lists”, p.257, ed. Malcolm Edwards & Maxim Jakubowski, New York: Berkeley (1982)