The More I read into this novel, the more I see R. Daneel appear more human then robot. With his relationship with Elijah & his son when they were hiding out in a small hotel on the outskirts of town, you can see Daneel lending a hand to Elijah in a moment where Elijah needed it. Daneel is aware of his surrounding and is able to read others well in conversation. Though he is made up of metal & wire with human like skin on the outside, he has shown me that he is more human than most of the people living in the city.

Trying to understand this relationship between Elijah and Daneel is like to solve a rubrics cube; you seem to find a pattern and on the verge to solve it but that one piece at the end tricks you and you have to do the whole thing again. That’s how I see this relationship as Elijah early in the novel is introduced to Daneel because of an investigation that occurred in Space town. Elijah, who already has a hatred for robots, didn’t realized at first that he was a robot because he looked almost human-like. As we see Elijah get exposed to situations where robots are endangered the more he feels sympathy for them and try’s to learn more from Daneel. But, when they were in space town, Elijah came up with Daneel that killed Dr. Sarton. After trying to know him and understand the mind of a robot, Elijah takes a step back & targets his partner for the crime. Its a complicated relationship and I look forward to read more about it.

In a few ways, the world according to Caves of Steel differ from the world we live in today. For instances, men go to work and are responsible for the money and women and their daughters stay home to cook and clean. Second, citizens are listed according to class and rank are not entitled to certain benefits that someone above them has until they meet that rank. Another is the Earth’s inability to cope with the overpopulation they have and finding a solution to lower that number or support the citizens living in it. Lastly, with I consider the biggest among the differences is how the “Earthman” treat robots/machines because they fear their place in life and work will be replaced by them one day. Oddly enough, the last point is exactly happening now but instead of just outright pushing them out of the workplace, we are being trained how to use and monitor these machines and it has allowed for us to live an easier, more productive life.

La Jetee – 1962

still images — difficult to pay attention

images so beautiful — nice to have time to look at them

very good storytelling – close eyes, examine

even though it lacks current standards —
time/imagination — viewer tries to connect what the narrator is saying to the photos

photos made it more believable

storytelling — voice droned — detached voice

stillness, not happening in the moment

photogaphs crystalize one moment — capture, make static, doesn’t change
why do we take photographs — to remember, memory
film — 28 fps
one photo vs. ten seconds of film

narrator’s voice provides interstitial frames?

back to past, to the future

photography — has the potential to fix time

fixing time

human power to control time

hopes/dreams/romance

—

Nalo Hopkinson, _Brown Girl in the Ring_

Future earth?
Toronto
core of city –
abandoned city — resources that a city should have = gone

is this a future earth?

retro dystopian
almost an 80s vision of the future
Mad Max
Escape from New York
The Warriors

— how do these stories imagine the city? in ruins, disorder, chaos, violence, decay

low end of the city

tales of crime taking over the city

exaggerates worst parts of cities in the 70s, 80s

police state

NH
dropping a breast-feeding mother into the middle of that — gender

mix of sci-fi genre elements + folktales + voodoo

language, race, culture, futurity

in what ways does sci fi tell stories about the present through the figure of the future?

race / culture doesn’t disappear in the future! isn’t a magical erasure of race/culture/tradition in the future as we see in so many standard sci-fi tales.

as a corrective the ways in which the future has traditionally been imagined

code-switching —

diaspora – spreading of a group of people

source of power in this novel — very different from traditional sci-fi

in traditional sci-fi
prizing of technology, mechanization, automation, rationality

vs. Brown Girl in the Ring
religious, witchcraft, demons, folktales, spirituality,

depicting

class and science fiction
caves of steel – spacers, human — limited room, etc., shorter lives — promotion, hierarchy — C7

detective — middle class, move through upper/lower echelons of society

—

why do we read/like sci-fi?

take one element of present — mess w/it, play w/it

let’s us go to different place, from comfortable place

shows incredible potential technology we haven’t invented yet, then shows you how it will kill you

sci-fi vs. science — makes scientific advances seem natural — more focused on what happens w/technology

we feel powerless and limited by bodily, technological, temporal aspects of our lives; sci-fi gives us fantasy of world where we have control over such things

— yet also disrupts those fantasies — not utopian

—

Paper

https://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/747/01/

This paper will examine the ways that Dawn and Brown Girl In the Ring treat the theme of violence. I will argue that the violence in Dawn, though biological rather than physical, does greater damage to characters in the text than the violence we see in BGITR.

Dawn  by Octavia E. Butler is a story about the Earth has been destroyed in a nuclear holocaust and a group of unconscious survivors have been taken by the alien that they are named  Oankalis to the mother ship and placed in “sleeping” pods for some 250 years. One of the humans, Lilith Iyapo, is awakened after 250 years and slowly trained by the Oankali not to be afraid of their horrifying to humans appearance. She comes to an uneasy truce and trust in the Oankali’s explanation of where she is and her role. In this story Lilith lyapo have been thought many obstacles, believing and trust.  How the story goes is very interesting to me that Humanity was saved from the war it waged on itself by an alien species. The alien thinks that letting humans alone is the same as allowing death. I think the theme love is all around not only exceeding in earth but in other planets/species.