race/gender/science fiction

If so, would it be okay if I turned my rough draft into you by Friday instead of Wednesday? I'm planning on probably using two grace days.

I was thinking about how Hopkinson's dialect critiques the normal technology-centric language of science fiction books, and the name "Eshu" came to mind. Looking it up on Wikipedia reveals some cool things (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eshu):

anybody want to be my peer review partner? I haven't got one yet.

Chanda

I was watching "The Last Angel of History" this evening, and I spent the first fifteen minutes wondering "When are they gonna talk about Sun Ra? Why aren't they talking about Sun Ra? Who's George Clinton without Sun Ra?"

I've got an annotated bibliography with no name on it; the paper apparently focuses on Snow Crash, and the bibliography includes Pettman, Stockton, Gardner, Wyatt, Dougherty, Haraway, and Lakoff. Anyone care to take credit for their work?

So, I was watching "The Last Angel of History" tonight, and at one point, turntables are mentioned, and earlier today, Walter Kitundu came to my digital art class, and told us about and showed pictured of a ton of different instruments he has made out of turn tables that are played like string instruments, or drums, or by various forces of nature. For me, the concept of taking something so very far beyond its intended/expected/conceived of use really resonated with aspects of the movie. Also, cool sound art.

I really enjoyed this book, because, in large part, everything had a perfect degree of ludicrousness. Everything was so foreign, and so unexpected, yet, Neil Stephenson was able to make it believable, by basing the ideas in historic, scientific, sociological, or linguistic fact. However, this consistency made the advent of the metavirus very strange to me. He mentions briefly that the bitmap which is presented to the hackers and fries their brains was received from space. Somehow rife picked it up on radiowaves, but I don't get how that is even remotely sensible.

As I mentioned in class, this should be of interest to any fans of Snow Crash, or fiction in general...

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SnowCrash

The Shown Their Work entry seems especially relevant, as now I know more about Sumerian mythology than I ever cared to know.

Though somewhat of a periphery character, Juanita is arguably one of the most powerful characters in Stephenson’s “Snow Crash.” While most of the people who were working for Lagos are in the project for their physical power, like Ng’s security and the Mafia’s muscle, Juanita is in the project because of her mind, and she is the only one who looks at Lagos’ goals and makes her own larger, personal goals in the project.

In class we talked about a couple different ways that Snow Crash analogizes issues of race: “thrashers” constitute an ethnic identity; hackers, too, have unique social identities as well as somewhat unique physiologies. In this response, I guess I just want to add another example, but it’s one that I find particularly interesting: the figure of the “black-and-white person” within the Metaverse.