I thought one of the most interesting bits of Pattern Recognition was the way people's online friendships worked out - what with Parkaboy/Cayce and Judy/Taki eventually hooking up in the real world based on affections that were developed almost exclusively through online chatting. Obviously, this stuff says a lot about how Gibson sees the world of 2002 and the relation of technology in it to human interactions.

I thought one of the most interesting bits of Pattern Recognition was the way people's online friendships worked out - what with Parkaboy/Cayce and Judy/Taki eventually hooking up in the real world based on affections that were developed almost exclusively through online chatting. Obviously, this stuff says a lot about how Gibson sees the world of 2002 and the relation of technology in it to human interactions.

As I suspected, there's no way I'm producing a reading response today, between the draft of the final paper and a paper I have to write for another class... Ah well, I saved my second pass because I knew this would happen.

I thought I might take a look at the use of color in this novel. After all, the story has a lot of powerful imagery, and it was originally meant to be a "computer-generated graphic novel", so the design of the imagery must have demanded a lot of attention. Even the title of the book, "Snow Crash," is a term with some intrinsic color qualities. A snow crash displays "white noise", "a pattern of black-and-white pixels" (73-74). The black-and-white of the snow crash is a very bad thing: it's associated with nonsense, an extremely primitive fault with a machine.

Nicola Griffith's Slow River is an acclaimed piece of science fiction, and insofar as it has realistic portrayals of the interactions between chemistry, biology, corporations, and the environment, it's a very successful book. But when it comes to the personal and family intrigue, the book has problems. Too many times, the characters' motivations are in question, so the plausibility of the novel suffers. Katerine, especially, is a character whose actions are never fully explicated, who serves as a major antagonist without a cause.

Taking a pass on this response. Definitely too far braindead this week to come up with something coherent to say about this book.

The Oankali in Lilith's Brood are distinctly alien, in many ways -- but the difference which persists longest and is most troublesome is their culture -- or apparent lack thereof. The Oankali apparently take the view that biology is everything -- that, given the scale of a group of humans throughout a lifetime, the genes they have within them ultimately decide the fate of the entires species. They believe that they can predict the lifestyle of the children their ooloi mix before the children are even born.

So there's a comic book series called "Y - The Last Man" that's actually pretty related to the topics we've been discussing lately. But unlike Left Hand of Darkness, which shows us a world where the two sexes as we know them have been sort of combined, this series shows us a world where one sex just ceases to exist.

Ursula Le Guin, though she makes a big fuss out of the "thought-experimental" nature of her novel, and explicitly says that she's not trying to make a political statement such as "we damned well ought to be androgynous" - but even so, she seems to intentionally pad levels of ambiguity -- maybe even excuses, plausible deniability -- into any possible "message" of her novel.

After reading dreamfall17's comments about the loss of hope in Children of Men, I did some thinking about hope in The Handmaid's Tale, and stumbled on the idea -- which I presume to see, at least -- that sex is the predominant source of hope in this novel.