Lola_Manifesto_SF2020

My manifesto on the role of science fiction to tackle the climate crisis.

I have to say I’m a bit surprised by this distribution of terms. This word bubble makes it look like I spent most of my research looking into time travel. While I do a  have a few articles looking into the feasibility of time travel inspired by our conversations in class on the topic, my research was fairly focused otherwise. The two main areas I looked into were feminism and architecture/urbanism in science fiction. I find myself especially interested in feminism in science fiction, because I have found myself reading many of the stories in class from a feminist lens, and while I feel the genre has a unique opportunity to explore gender it seems many works handle the subject poorly. One really interesting thing I read was that in a futuristic society without gender, people would have less freedom than men in our society, because you need a hierarchy to achieve more power. I also looked into a theme of feminist utopias in SF. I also focused on architecture and urban planning in SF, and while I didn’t find many articles I loved I did discover there’s a science fiction novel “The Municipalizes” targeted towards urban planners (it takes place in a future city that reveals the strengths and failures of American cities now).

We had a discussion in class about Transhumanism a while back, which reminded me of the TV show Years and Years. It might be a bit heavy to watch right now given all that’s going on, but essentially it’s realistic Sci-Fi following a family from 2019 to 2034, predicting what will happen in the next 15 years based on what’s happening now. It’s amazing and I would really recommend it! One of the characters comes out to her parents as transhuman (in this youtube clip), and you continue to see her efforts to become less human and more machine throughout the season, in a fairly believable way.

In class when we’d been struggling to think of modern day SF music, I don’t think anyone brought up Grimes. Claire Boucher AKA Grimes has music featuring a lot of electronic/futuristic noises paired with her very high pitched, almost alien sounding voice. A New York  Times article about her wrote, “Boucher likes to say that her albums toggle between her two favorite literary genres, science fiction and fantasy. “ ‘Visions’ was sci-fi,” she says, recorded under the influence of high-tech pop stars like Beyoncé and Britney Spears.” Not to get too TMZ, but she and Elon Musk are having a baby together, and met because they’d both made the same obscure joke about artificial intelligence. I think this is really an interesting pairing, because they are both clearly invested in science fiction and the future, but one from the artistic end and the other from technology.

I’ve attached one of her music videos that has a woodland science fiction aesthetic to it. I’ve also attached some of her album covers that display her obsession with science fiction, one having post apocalyptic imagery and the other reportedly being anime she drew herself. For a sample of her futuristic sounds, I would recommend listening to her album visions (specifically the song Oblivion) (I couldn’t figure out how to link music from Spotify).

Just wanted to pass on this podcast I love, after todays discussion on Joanna Russ’ story. The podcast links the short SF story Herland (about an island of super women (I feel like this has come up in a reading but I can’t place which one)) to an actual women’s commune/utopia. It’s a good look into how feminist sci fi writers approach world building, and a (newer) attempt at making utopias more inclusive.

This was a big story a few years back, but I remembered it in class today when we started talking about the uncanny valley. There’s a girl on Instagram with over a million followers called Lil Miquela, except she’s actually CGI. There’s something so real looking about her that most of the comments on her posts are asking if she’s real. She has a back story, and online fights with other CGI characters. They have a whole world for themselves in the Instagram app. But then it starts to blur on reality. She advertises for different companies. She wears CGI versions of a companies clothes in a very strange marketing technique.

For example, in this recent Calvin Klein ad Lil Miquela (on the right) is kissing a real model.

This Vox article had an interesting tie back to SF that I thought would be interesting to share: “‘The boundary between science fiction and social reality is an optical illusion,’ Donna Haraway wrote in her famous 1985 essay ‘A Cyborg Manifesto.'” As SF has already moved from books to the screen, is this the next step? Is science fiction just becoming our social reality? Does this even count as science fiction?

Welcome to your Bowdoin Course Sites for the class World Science Fiction.

The first thing to do is go to DASHBOARD –> SETTINGS —> GENERAL and put your name in the SITE TITLE

Then you can change the HEADER IMAGE (using directions in Header Image above)

Then you can change the background color with CUSTOMIZE —> COLORS —>  BACKGROUND COLOR

Then you can play ith the Menus in DASHBOARD –>  APPEARANCE —> MENUS

And the right side cand be adjusted with DASHBOARD –>  APPEARANCE —> WIDGETS

The difference between PAGE and POST
Reverse chronological order vs. static, hierarchical content.

CATEGORIES and TAGS
Categories and tags help you organize your posts and make it easier for readers to find content

This is your first post. Edit or delete it, then start posting.