Lately, in class, we have been exploring the nature of the monster – looking specifically at how monstrosity may function to represent alterity, deviancy or otherness, to reveal sinister or corrupt aspects of the unconscious, to blur the boundary between the real and unknown, to reflect individual, societal or evolutionary anxieties, or to, aesthetically, induce fear or create an atmosphere of strangeness.
However, despite these many potential forms and meanings, it is interesting to consider how monsters are unified (and uniformly made effective) through a shared connection to the sublime.

Colloquially, the sublime is used as a synonym for the enjoyable (for instance, it is not uncommon to hear a person refer to a tasty meal as ‘sublime’). However, Edmund Burke makes an important distinction between the sublime and the beautiful by emphasizing that the sublime transcends straightforward aesthetic or sensual pleasures, dwelling instead in extremities of pain, terror, danger, darkness and expanse.

Burke emphasizes that “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain, and danger, that is to say whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime” (Burke 24). In addition, he observes that “to make any thing very terrible, obscurity seems in general to be necessary. When we know the full extent of any danger, when we can accustom our eyes to it, a great deal of the apprehension vanishes” (Burke 40).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Philosophical_Enquiry_into_the_Origin_of_Our_Ideas_of_the_Sublime_and_Beautiful

Considering our class’ recent discussions, it seems that our understanding of the monster is in agreement with this definition of the sublime; often posing a threat to physiological, psychological, social or aesthetic harmony, the monster is implicitly dangerous. Furthermore, the monster can be seen as meeting Burke’s requirement for obscurity. Slippery in definition, the monster occupies a sort of liminal space – a space in-between life and death, the known and unknown, the comprehensible and incomprehensible.

If we consider monstrosity in this way – monstrosity as something sublime that creates an “overwhelming sense of awe or other high emotion through being vast or grand” (“Sublime”) – we may be able to gain insight into why the monster archetype is, inherently, so powerful. Perhaps the monster is successful at departing rich and diverse meaning in part because it is first able to arrest us through invoking this sense of awe. Perhaps before the monster is meaningful, it is sublime.

Works Cited

Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. 1759. New York: Dover, 2008. Print

“Sublime.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, October 2014. Web. 

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” 
― H.P. Lovecraft, The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories

Is Hard Science Necessary for Science Fiction, or does it get in the way?

Lovecraft knew that to make a great monster, to make a beast that wraps around your soul and chills your core that you can’t fully understand it.  A mistake often made by modern creators is to explain too much to make too much known.

Don’t bother explaining how Han made the made the Kessel run in under 12 parsecs, he just did.

The Force is awesome and omnipresent, it doesn’t need god-damn middiclorians.

Q has amazing powers, don’t even bother trying to understand your weak little human mind would break and the beginning of a notion.

On the other hand some our most profound Spec Fiction comes from Hard Science: Arthur C. Clack and his Orbital Elevators,

Heinlein and his Rejuvenation Techniques

and Asimov and his positronic Brain with its three laws.

For as many stories where the hard science allowed the story to happen there are just as many that the hard science allowed the author to not really worry about character or plot.  And for just as many Soft Science fiction stories don’t let the realities get in the way of a good story there are those where the break from physics just can’t let me into the story.

I grew up on Hard Sci-fi, I had my grandfathers pulp editions of the grandmasters.  There was a reason for everything to exist, and when I was a boy I needed that concreteness of reality to jump into adventure.  I didn’t care about Carter, I wanted to know about the tele-porter, I didn’t care about the financial troubles of the U.S. Robotics company but i  was fascinated by the philisopical nature of the three laws.  But later as i grew older and other people actually became of interest to me i cared less and less about the nature of how but of Why.  I came to understand that in the beginning of this format that writers hid behind how to avoid the extremely difficult why.

But maybe I just found that I enjoy stories with girls in them for than stories with say a man and his Robot Dog.

I recently had a conversation with a family member who has just started watching the Walking Dead series. She said she finally decided to find out what all the fuss was about and ended up getting hooked, and she told me that she wished real life was like the apocalyptic world of the show. I understood what she meant. There is a kind of freedom and simplicity about living in a post-apocalyptic world, zombie or otherwise (although recently, mostly zombie). Our present consumerist society encourages pursuit of wealth and accumulation of stuff, and as we jostle for position in the rat race, we might feel we are in a never-ending competition with no meaningful goal. But in an apocalyptic setting, life is stripped down to the essentials- survival. Life in an apocalyptic world consists of finding food, shelter, safety. We are forced to live by our skills and our wits and everyone must pull their weight to survive; an apocalypse can be a social equalizer- at least temporarily.

 Zombies represent the most monstrous part of ourselves- hungry, ravenous, mindlessly consuming and never satisfied. And if zombies embody our unsatisfiable need to consume, which in turn consumes us, then bashing a physical embodiment of the ugliest part of ourselves is profoundly satisfying.

But while I certainly do not relish the idea of living in a world filled with flesh-eating zombies (especially the terrifyingly fast variety from 28 Days/Weeks Later), there is something appealing about a quiet, empty, bureaucracy-less, low-tech, traffic-free, suit-and-tie-less world. If it weren’t for the zombies it would be utopia.

Apocalyptic and hellish images by Zdzisław Beksiński below:

So, I will be honest here. I do not read a lot of science fiction. I mean, I have read some, and I grew watching Star Trek and Star Wars, and I think my mom has made me watch Galaxy Quest at least a dozen times, but I’ve never really gotten into Science Fiction on my own.

However, ever since we defined what Science Fiction is in the first couple of classes, I’ve realised that it’s actually everywhere. I went to see The Maze Runner a few weeks ago and guess what? Science Fiction. I finally watched Captain American: The Winter Soldier and realised that all of Marvel was Science Fiction (we then had the presentation on it two days later), the movie Lucy, and, as someone pointed out in a previous blog, YA novels, such as The Hunger Games trilogy and Divergent trilogy are also Science Fiction. I guess I always thought it had to have aliens.

However, despite the fact that these are incredibly popular, there still seems to be a stigma against Science Fiction that it is “nerdy.” As it turns out, I have watched and read many Science Fiction movies and novels without even realising it, and I’m guessing many others have too. I’m sure if I asked many of my friends if they liked Science Fiction they would say no, but I also know many of my friends religiously watch, and love, Doctor Who (for more on the genre of Doctor Who, read this).

Why does this happen? My guess would be that people, as I did, have a very narrow view of what Science Fiction is. Movies and TV shows are cast into different genres to make them more mainstream so that people won’t just disregard it because it is Science Fiction. Film trailers will tend to focus on the fact that it is action or comedy instead of focusing on the fact that it is Science Fiction.

What do you guys think? Has Science Fiction slowly been integrated into mainstream society without people noticing, or is it still a land for the “nerds”?

I would like to wage the argument that the producers ruin books on purpose, and it is the fault of the viewer. In order for the producer, now a days, to feel they have made the largest project possible they need to emphasize certain aspects of the tale. Stories such as H.G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and Edgar Rice Burroughs’ “John Carter of Mars” have the action aspects heightened (I am discussing the most current adaptations of these movies). John Carter also has the romantic relationship between John and his Martian princess Dejah Thoris very clearly established throughout the movie. I am suggesting that this is because more people wish to watch movies that involve Tom Cruise being chased by aliens in order to save his children then the depictions that Wells created of less alien and more avoidance. Wells’ novella discusses more of the aftermath and internal ideas then the movie shows. Unfortunately, this allows the science fiction reader to feel slighted by the creation of this style of film because it is not a true representation of the story, it is a recreation that only slightly deals with the actual issues presented throughout the novel. While it is the screen writers and producers that allow for this filtration, it is with the viewers in mind that they produce such creations. Therefore, while it is these people who recreate the stories, it is ultimately the viewers fault they are being recreated in the first place, after all the creators of these movies are highly motivation by how much money they generate. Now having presented this argument I do not in anyway suggest that all movies are created in such a fashion, just that some recreations are done for the audience rather then for the original story. Some recreations are done with close regard to the original novel, however, those are not the focus of this blog.