The Clarion Workshop at UCSD

Today’s PopMatters has a post by Mae-lee Chai on Adilifu Nama’s Black Space: Imagining Race in Science Fiction Film, on the slim presence of blacks in the genre:

How one quarter of the Earth’s population suddenly disappears in the future is not an issue generally addressed in any of these films. How then, does one write a book about black people in a genre that for the most part has deliberately excluded them? The answer: by examining the erasure as well as the limited depictions of black people in science fiction.

The review begins with an anecdote that Nama’s friends, upon learning of his planned study, would tell him it was “going to be a short book.”  According to Chai, however, the depth that the book covers — and what it leaves out, including the treatment of black women, other races, children — indicates that Nama’s volume is only a starting point on a long journey to reconsider race and science fiction.  Octavia Butler once described one of her novels as follows:

I talked to members of my family, and did some personal research that didn’t really have anything to do with the time and place I was writing about, but that gave me a feeling of the experience of being black in a time and place where it was very difficult to be black.

Nama’s work implies that most filmmakers in sf and fantasy have focused on imagining ‘the experience of their (white) world’ in a different time and place without noticing who they were leaving out.  Then again, the relatively smaller numbers of prominent black filmmakers, let alone sf and fantasy filmmakers, begs the question of what one would expect to come first, the filmmakers or the films.

This summer’s Clarion workshop presents an interesting opportunity to discuss issues of race in literature.  We’re hoping to bring Nalo Hopkinson together with some of our Literature Department faculty specializing in African diaspora literature — like Fatima El-Tayeb, Camille Forbes, Dennis Childs or Sara Johnson – together with Clarion students for a conversation.  Just another way we hope that the Clarion workshop’s new UC San Diego home can serve as a resource to the students and broaden the community dialogue.

One of UC San Diego’s most interesting faculty members is Teddy Cruz, a Visual Arts professor specializing in urban architecture who is rethinking the very nature of the urban environment.  For writers thinking about imagined worlds, Teddy’s an exemplar of the ways that reimagining our current society can make for a better future.

Teddy – whose work can best be understood in its political context, as in his Political Equator II project – was the subject of a New York Times Magazine profile a couple of years back, and his work in Hudson, NY, the subject of a more recent article in that paper.  Last week’s issue of San Diego CityBeat described some of Teddy’s work in an article on the future of Barrio Logan, an inner-city neighborhood of San Diego facing much-needed redevelopment:

“It’s about complexity,” he said. “This is an opportunity to think of incubator spaces, to rethink the street itself, how it is appropriated by informal economies, farmers markets. There is a series of histories in these neighborhoods, how the structure is used, how community-based agencies are active in producing social culture.”

Cruz has garnered an international reputation for his work implementing this idea, which he refers to as “pixelation.” Much as a computer image comprises many dots of different colors, a neighborhood comprises many small structures that form a coherent whole. In urban planning terms, that means avoiding exactly the types of projects already underway in Barrio Logan, be they affordable housing or luxury apartments. Three years ago, Cruz persuaded some of his architect friends to purchase nine lots south of the Coronado Bridge in Barrio Logan. The plan was to create a new kind of community-based urban architecture.

“For me it’s been very compelling to imagine that housing or density can be evaluated as the amount of social exchanges per acre,” he said.

Teddy, recently added to the board of the Center City Development Corporation by San Diego Mayor Jerry Sanders, further explains the concept of pixelation in a recent interview with online news source Voice of San Diego.  Teddy’s firm, estudio teddy cruz and its projects like Mi Pueblo — in collaboration with the community development organization Casa Familiar – presents a major opportunity to rethink the ongoing redensification of America’s cities.

The Economist has a fabulous “Special Report” on mobile telecoms in the April 12, 2008 issue, “Nomads at Last.”  It’s about the rise of connectivity as virtually every form of IT and communication goes mobile:

Urban nomads have started appearing only in the past few years. Like their antecedents in the desert, they are defined not by what they carry but by what they leave behind, knowing that the environment will provide it. Thus, Bedouins do not carry their own water, because they know where the oases are. Modern nomads carry almost no paper because they access their documents on their laptop computers, mobile phones or online. Increasingly, they don’t even bring laptops. Many engineers at Google, the leading internet company and a magnet for nomads, travel with only a BlackBerry, iPhone or other “smart phone”. If ever the need arises for a large keyboard and some earnest typing, they sit down in front of the nearest available computer anywhere in the world, open its web browser and access all their documents online.

Another big misunderstanding of previous decades was to confuse nomadism with migration or travel…. Humans have always migrated and travelled, without necessarily living nomadic lives. The nomadism now emerging is different from, and involves much more than, merely making journeys. A modern nomad is as likely to be a teenager in Oslo, Tokyo or suburban America as a jet-setting chief executive. He or she may never have left his or her city, stepped into an aeroplane or changed address. Indeed, how far he moves is completely irrelevant. Even if an urban nomad confines himself to a small perimeter, he nonetheless has a new and surprisingly different relationship to time, to place and to other people. “Permanent connectivity, not motion, is the critical thing,” says Manuel Castells, a sociologist at the Annenberg School for Communication, a part of the University of Southern California, Los Angeles.

The link above brings you to the first of seven articles in the report; you have to go through them one by one to read the entire report (note the The Economist: Web 2.o=free content).  The whole thing sounds a lot like the visions of Vernor Vinge, especially in “Fast Times at Fairmont High,” reviewed here on Ray Kurzweil’s website.  But it divides the analysis well; pay particular attention to the sixth story in, “A World of Witnesses,” on the democratic pressures that ubiquitous cameras and other digital artifacts will bring.  Great stuff.

Today’s New York Times asks that question in an article titled in my print edition, “Asking a Federal Judge to Save the Planet, and Maybe a Bit More “, and on their website, “Asking a Judge to Save the World, and Maybe a Whole Lot More“:

None of [today’s other news] will matter a bit, though, if two men pursuing a lawsuit in federal court in Hawaii turn out to be right. They think a giant particle accelerator that will begin smashing protons together outside Geneva this summer might produce a black hole or something else that will spell the end of the Earth — and maybe the universe.

… Walter L. Wagner and Luis Sancho contend that scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research, or CERN, have played down the chances that the collider could produce, among other horrors, a tiny black hole, which, they say, could eat the Earth. Or it could spit out something called a “strangelet” that would convert our planet to a shrunken dense dead lump of something called “strange matter.”

I know I’ve read sf novels with that as the premise.  My first question, of course, is whether the New York Times thinks losing the planet is “a bit” important or a “whole lot” important, and why their headline writer could come up with anything more descriptive than those two terms.  But on the same day that lawyers won a case returning copyright rights to the heirs of Superman’s creators, taking them back from corporate giant Time-Warner, anything is possible.

Pardon my riff on Pogo, but I couldn’t help thinking of my favorite possum while reading the Los Angeles Times‘ article this morning, “Reporting live from a cellphone near you …” It focuses on Bay Area start-up Qik.com, leading us to a “dystopian” future by letting “users send live video directly from their Nokia phones to the web.”

 ”The worst moment in almost everybody’s life is going to be captured on film,” [Jason Calacanis, a New York-bred, L.A-based entrepreneur and tech-world celebrity] said. “But if those bad moments can be avoided or we can learn from them, that’s going to be very powerful as well.”

Wait, hold the phone . . . optimism about constant mutual surveillance? How does that work? Well, mull it over and see if Calacanis’ view doesn’t start to make sense. The key is not to think of it in Orwellian terms, in which some unseen entity is monitoring your every move. Not that Big Brother couldn’t happen or that we shouldn’t be vigilant about its creeping up on us — but that’s a different story altogether. What I’m talking about here is Little Brother — since we’re the ones with the cameras….

Consider too that it might not be so bad, collectively, to have more of our unflattering moments out in the open. It seems to me that for a long time now, we’ve all been laboring under the Puritanical myth that to be good is to be perfect.

I’m not so sure that I agree with him on that, but certainly Little Brother seems a bigger threat than Big Brother at this point.  Especially when you think what then-rare video did in the Rodney King case, and jump to today’s New York Times piece on haggling, about the increasing ability of eBay-aware shoppers to negotiate prices downward in department, electronics and other chain stores, particularly as the recession deepens.  And it’s not just pricing information or police-brutality videos that are reshaping the power of the collective individual: at UC San Diego, we have a start-up technology in the works that will put real-time air-quality monitoring in the hands of cell phone users, allowing urbanites to track pollution levels in their neighborhoods and identify hotspots.

 The power of the ‘collective individual’: Childhood’s End, anyone? 

UC San Diego Physics B.A. Philip Rosedale has decided to move up within Second Life, the virtual world his Linden Lab created, to make room for an experienced manager who can manage the world’s explosive growth:

Rosedale founded Second Life, the 3-D virtual world in which players can fly, look like rock stars and build their own palaces, as well as pursue less savory endeavors, in 1999. The fanciful role-playing game now has about 500,000 active users.

The virtual world grew rapidly over the last two years. The number of people who pay $9.95 or more for a premium membership (you can also use the site for free) nearly doubled to 93,219 in late 2007 from the year before. Corporate sponsors such as Nissan Motor Co., Dell Inc. and Best Buy Co. bought virtual land and set up shop in Second Life with the hope of marketing to its residents.

Dean Takahashi at VentureBeat has an interesting review of The Making of Second Life: Notes from the New World, the recent book by Catherine Winters.  It’s a nice take on where Second Life is, as we contemplate where it’s going.

The University of Wyoming is hosting a NASAf-funded free (yes, FREE!) writer’s workshop in Laramie, Wyoming this summer, the second such outreach effort designed to teach writers about modern science, especially astronomy, and through their subsequent work hopefully impact the broader public.  Organized around the research of Mike Brotherton and billed as “Improving Science Literacy Through Words and Media,” the Workshop seeks the following:

We hope to both educate the public and reach the next generation of scientists. Therefore selection will be based in part on audience size as demonstrated through print runs, downloads, or sales figures when available.  Secondary considerations will include the content and potential of applicant work — to what extent science in general and astronomy in particular are likely to be a significant factor in their future publications.  Applicants should address these points when they apply.  Several slots will be reserved for the strongest minority/female applicants who may have additional promise in reaching groups less represented in both the physical sciences and hard science fiction.

Based on the past attendee list from 2007, it’s a great place to spend a week just to be surrounded by interesting people.

The program runs July 30 to August 5, and the ‘free’ part comes with a slight catch, in that participants have to get there (some travel can be paid if justified and applied for) and generally buy their own dinner; that’s still one heck of a deal, though.  Rooms are free, as are snacks, coffee and lunch.  Application deadline is March 31, so get cracking! 

A Los Angeles Times article on the upcoming release of “Iron Man,” the first film out of the new Marvel Studios, highlights the changing nature of ’story’ in film thanks to the ongoing digital revolution.  While of Marvel Comics’ most exciting characters – the Fantastic Four, Spiderman, the X-Men and others – are in the hands of other studios, how to leverage the company’s lesser known figures?  And perhaps more importantly, given the economics of moviemaking, ”why go into the movie-making biz now?”

Maisel said the question is the wrong one. “We’re not in the movie business, we’re in the ‘Iron Man’ business right now. Marvel owns the intellectual property. We have an Iron Man video game coming, the toys, the comics, we have an animated television show coming, a direct-to-DVD animated Iron Man movie last year. We’re going to have an Iron Man ride at an amusement park in Dubai in a few years. We have a different perspective.” 

Now there’s an interesting topic for a Comic-Con panel…

 Meanwhile, Gore Verbinski, of “Pirates of the Caribbean 3” fame, talks to the Business section of the Times about his move into gaming with “a secret project that would let him apply his creative vision to the games business.” Again, the nature of narrative itself is at the core of Verbinski’s approach:

After working seven years straight on five movies back to back, I picked up my game controller and started playing. I just was blown away by the potential. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but I feel that we are on the brink of something phenomenal. It’s a completely different form of narrative than being told a story in the traditional sense. So all the narrative rules, although I enjoy them, you have to start throwing them away and say, “Wow, look at what you can do here in this world!”

One of my favorite odd sources of science fiction stories is the “Futures” columns in Nature and Nature Physics – somewhere Clarion grads might want to check out.   The 6 March 2008 issue of Nature  has a neat little story of transfiguration by Chaz Brenchley.  Other favorites include:
      o the February 21 Nature story Ever, by fantasy writer Jeff Crook;
      o two recent stories by 1967 UCSD Ph.D. alum Greg Benford, “The Champagne Award” in Nature and “Reasons Not To Publish” in Nature Physics;
     o Terry Bisson’s “BYOB FAQ” in the 11 October 2007 Nature; and
     o my all-time favorite, Vonda McIntyre’s “A modest proposal,” a riff on Jonathan Swift’s essay of the same name, from the 3 March 2005 issue of Nature.

On the other end of the scale is the wonderful interview with great artwork in the 5 July 2007 issue of Nature, bringing together four science fiction writers with backgrounds in the biological sciences to talk about SF.  It’s a very insightful discussion of the ways that science influences their writing, and vice versa.

Thanks to Cory Doctorow for picking up on this Wired interview with Jeff and Ann VanderMeer about the New Weird, about parenting, and about their current work.  Jeff’s description of how he sees SF and fantasy as part of the literary mainstream nicely summarizes the rationale for our Literature Department wanting the Clarion Workshop to be housed on our campus:

I’m always mixing up science and fantasy, whether it’s mushroom tech or, as in The Situation, strange biotech. I’m writing more and more about the contemporary workplace, too.

I think the main thing is, we always approach our projects not from a genre or non-genre stance, but from a kind of where-does-this-fit-in-in-culture generally. We always have a very keen awareness of popular culture, along with high culture, low culture, noir. So our anthos have focus, but also that kind of “mix”. I mean, some of them, like City of Saints and Madmen, mix fiction/nonfiction forms, and add in tons of graphics–not quite a graphic novel, but… The main thing is, the internet and the way memes move now, there is no monolithic thing called “genre” or “literary mainstream” any more. There’s all of this fascinating cross-pollinations and collaborations that you never really saw before. I think that kind of stuff interests GeekDad readers. I think I like to write stuff that can connect with different kinds of readers in different ways. Like, a fantasy reader is going to perceive The Situation one way, whereas somebody who works in front of a computer all day but doesn’t read fantasy is going to take something else out of it, for example.

Keep an eye out, by the way, for news on another upcoming anthology out of the VanderMeer empire, The Leonardo Variations.  It’s of, for and by Clarion students, a charity effort supporting the Workshop.  Very exciting stuff.