The Reality in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?

This week I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Phillip K. Dick. It was really interesting! I got through the whole book in a day because it was such a page-turner... even though I was listening to the audiobook... The main theme in this book was empathy and what it means to be human: where the line between human and nonhuman was drawn, and how it blurred. This is a really common theme in science fiction about artificial intelligence. It brought up memories of the movie AI and the book I, Robot because they shared this theme. It also made me think about Fahrenheit 451 and Brave New World because of the weird futuristic settings and strange human behavior.

One of the main similarities I saw between Brave New World and Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (which I am going to start calling Androids because that title is kind of long...) was the religions present in the books. In BNW, everyone worshipped Ford as their god. In Androids, people followed Mercerism. The big difference was that in BNW this was seen as a bad thing. It was the brainwashed people who followed the religion, and they did lots of weird things as parts of the religion. In Androids, it was more complicated, and it was kind of like Life of Pi where religion was shown as good, but may or may not be real, but still may be good despite not being real.

The way that some of the characters acted kind of reminded me of Fahrenheit 451, thought I read that book four years ago so I don't remember it super well anymore. However, the wives in both books were kind of similar, because they were both kind of dumb and lost in the futuristic world. Actually, I think the lady in BNW who the main character had a crush on was kind of like this too, if I'm remembering right. For the wife in Fahrenheit 451, I just remember her using the seashells a lot, which were like little earbuds that spewed government propaganda. The wife in Androids wasn't quite this dumb, but it bothered me that she was purposely getting depressed using the mood organ. Perhaps I was interpreting her motives wrong, but to me it just seemed kind of childish and irresponsible to purposely get depressed. It seemed like she was taking shallow amusement out of a real problem that seriously plagues some people, but again, maybe I was not interpreting this right; I wasn't totally sure why this was something she wanted.

I kind of wondered when I was reading this if Phillip K. Dick was a vegetarian or something. He seemed to really like animals. From the start, Rick really wanted an animal, a real animal, not a fake sheep android. He was hoping that his neighbor would give him one of his horses (get it? NEIGHbor!?), but the neighbor said no, even though the main character tried to use Mercerism to convince the neighbor to give him one so it would be fair. Animals were highly valued by all of this society. Later, Rick got some money from killing a bunch of androids, and immediately he wanted to spend it on an animal, so he got a goat--this was the first priority he had to spend his extra money on. Towards the end of the book, Isadore finds a spider, and one of the androids wonders why spiders need so many legs, so she decides that she wants to cut off four of its legs and see how it does. This was one example of how androids don't have empathy, but humans do. Isadore was really freaked out by the android cutting the spider's legs off, but the android was completely unbothered by it. The weird thing about this though is that in today's world, there are TONS of humans who torture animals in some way. In comparison to some things that humans put animals through in today's world, cutting four of a spider's legs off seems very tame. So is this Phillip K. Dick's way of saying that anyone who tortures animals isn't really human? The humans in this book viewed animals very differently than the humans do in our world; they gave them a lot more respect and value. It could be his way of saying this should be part of what makes us human.

The Fiction of Ideas

I really enjoyed learning about the "fiction of ideas." I think it would be really cool to do a thesis that toys with the fiction of ideas. It would be so hard to do it successfully and convey a whole new idea about the world within a minute-long film, but it's something I'll consider.

I didn't get a chance to read a full novel for this week, but I will talk about the short story "Aye and Gomorrah" by Samuel R. Delany. In class, a few people said that they thought that frelks might not be human or have something weird about them... I found that interesting because for some reason when I was reading it, that thought just didn't really cross my mind. I assumed that frelks were completely normal humans who just happened to have a fetish for spacers, like how it's really common in real life for people who act completely normally to have a weird fetish. I guess the main reason I assumed they weren't aliens was that people couldn't tell who the frelks were so obviously there was nothing about their appearance that people were able to tell. I don't know. I thought it was kind of sad how "frelk" was a really derogatory term for people who seemed to be perfectly normal in the story. They consider being in love with something unattainable to be a perversion, but I think almost everyone has been in love with something unattainable so that's actually really normal.. Maybe that was the point of the story, for the reader to empathize with the frelks. It was kind of hard to tell exactly what the point of the story was but it was still pretty interesting. I read that the author of the story was gay, so maybe he was using the story as a bit of a metaphor on his love life. Being a frelk is kind of like being gay in a way, since there's not really anything bad about them but society can be super judgmental of them anyway.

I also thought the movie A Scanner Darkly was really interesting. I liked the style of animation. Have you heard of the movie Waking Life? As I was watching A Scanner Darkly, I thought, Wow, this looks just like Waking Life, and lo-and-behind, the animation stuff was done by the same people. Waking Life was a philosophy-themed movie and it was really good! I saw it for the first time my junior year of high school and I don't think I've made it through one English class since then without bringing it up at least once; I didn't really realize I did this till now.

Waking Life

The Reinvention of Myth in Anansi Boys

I was able to find a few people on Youtube who put up the audiobook of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman, so that was nice. I was happy to see that this was basically Neil Gaiman week because I had been meaning to read a book by him for a while now, and finally I had a good excuse to do so! Over the summer, I'd also started Stardust and I really liked it, but I didn't have time to finish it... maybe someday. I also remember when Neil Gaiman came to our school during the spring of my freshman year and read some of his work. I really liked it, which is what initially made me want to read more of his stories. I really like him because he seems like a really smart person who has a great mind for fantasy and creativity, plus a true understanding of humanity. So obviously I really enjoyed Anansi Boys... I could relate to Fat Charlie because Fat Charlie is like super uptight and awkward and bad in social situations, and sadly I am very similar. However, I think my favorite character was Daisy. It seemed like whenever they were together, interesting/funny things happened and cute dialogue ensued. She kind of reminds me of Lucy from Despicable Me 2 because they unsuccessfully try to be kind of badass authority figures and are both super lovable. I liked the little injections of humor in the story. They were really funny to me. They seemed like British humor, which makes sense I guess since Neil is English. It helped that the guy doing the recording for the audiobook did great voices for the characters.

I found it interesting that the story was based on the Anansi stories. I remember seeing a play and reading stories about Anansi when I was in elementary school, but it wasn't something I had thought about since then, so as I was reading Anansi Boys, it slowly came back to me. The story of the book is based on the Anansi stories, fables about a prankster spider/god in Africa who played tricks on the other animals. Anansi is represented as Fat Charlie's dad. When their father dies, Fat Charlie and Spider come together and craziness ensues. Spider is also a god, so basically he is super cool and can do some amount of magic. He is really good at picking up studs, whereas Fat Charlie is as hopeless as a leftover piece of blubber when it comes to picking up studs. The worst happens when Spider, posing as Charlie, manages to have sex with Fat Charlie's fiancé, who was previously a virgin who kept insisting to Fat Charlie that she wanted to wait until marriage. Spider again posed as Fat Charlie when he went to work in his place, and was again completely convincing, which shows his power. As the story goes on, the ties to the original fables get stronger. Bird Woman is after Spider, and eventually gives him to Tiger, who cuts out Spider's tongue, and Charlie has to negotiate with Bird Woman in a very supernatural, mystical landscape. Even though I could see that the story was based heavily on the old Anansi stories, it didn't really hurt my experience reading the book that I am not really well-versed on those stories at this point because here and there they were retold throughout Anansi Boys.

The Novel of Spiritual Education

I must say, I am really looking forward to class this week because I really like "novels of spiritual education." I'm one of those people who is really into the Harry Potter series, and I have been meaning to watch City of Lost Children for some time now... I remember as a child and teenager, in addition to my love of Harry Potter, I really liked books such as the Guardians of Ga'Hoole series and the Charlie Bone series and The Mysterious Benedict Society, which are also novels of spiritual education.

For this week, I read The Magicians' Guild by Trudi Canavan. I actually thought that Night Circus and The Magicians sounded more interesting from their summaries that I read, and maybe I'll read them later on in life. However, I ended up reading The Magicians' Guild since it was the only book that was available online. I didn't like it as much as I hoped to. I didn't feel much of a connection with any of the characters, which is important for me. It also wasn't written in a style that appealed to me. I guess I am not really into super straightforward writing styles. I remember being really excited for The DaVinci Code too, but the writing style reminded me of reading a news article, so it was too boring for me to finish. This is how I felt about The Magicians' Guild. I tend to like books where the writing style is either like real-time storytelling, like with Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and The Hobbit; or poetic, like Ray Bradbury's writing; or if it's in a way where you really feel like you're in the character's head like in The Perks of Being a Wallflower, or just weird, like Chuck Palahniuk's writing. This is kind of bad for me because most books are written in that very straightforward way, and it makes them less interesting for me. As I said before, another important thing is character development, and I can still get into a book if it has that, but I didn't feel like The Magician's Guild had really very interesting character development either. Not that it was a bad book or anything; I can see why some people would really like it. It just wasn't my favorite.

Anyway, in this book, the source of spiritual education is the Guild, a group of administrators for the country of Kyralia. One of the major values of the Guild was adhering to tradition. For example, early on in the book, when the members of the Guild were proposing ideas on what to do about the rogue magician, a female guild member was the one who wanted to accept her into the Guild and educate her, because she wanted another healer in the Guild, and apparently women in the Guild generally become healers, so the guild follows traditional gender roles. Also, when Dannyl touches the hand of a girl in the streets and feels the amount of power she has, he starts thinking about what she would be able to do with the power. He thought that she would probably be used in her family to do tasks for them, and then she would get married off to strengthen the family's name. If she were a boy with the same amount of power, things would be different for her. He thought about this very matter-of-factly. In addition to adhering to old gender roles, the entire conversation had a feeling of old-fashionedness and wanting to do things the way they've always been doing them. It seems like it's a common theme in books about magic for the "good guys" in the story to be going against the way things have always been done. This made me think about how really conservative people are sometimes against books about magic, and maybe this is part of the reason why; conservatives tend to want to stick to old traditions and these books often push against that idea. A big part of the guild's purpose is to get the "dwells" out of the streets of the capital city. The dwells are poor people, and the Guild drives them away each year. The main character, Sonea, wants nothing to do with the Guild because of what they do to the dwells. She is against their old traditions. The society has a very strict and obvious caste system, with the dwells at the bottom and the Guild at the top. It's to a point where the servants for the magicians have to wait for the magicians to say "Speak" before they can say what they came in to say.

As one would expect, there are a lot of parallels that can be drawn between this story and Harry Potter. The biggest similarities are that there is a magical society where people train to learn how to use magic, and that the main character has the magical power but doesn't realize that they have it at first. Another similarity is when Sonea realizes that the magicians are trying to find her mentally, but she is able to block them, and the magicians say that they aren't sure if she is blocking them, because most people have to be trained on how to do that, and they don't think she has received any training. This is like when Snape is trying to teach Harry how to block Voldemort from sending Harry mental pictures, except apparently in this world it's not as hard to do that. On the other hand, there are some elements of realism that weren't in Harry Potter, probably because this book was written for older people. For example, when two girls are complaining about men "hassling" them, like catcalling and harassing them. Sonea says the reason she got short hair was to try to stop this from happening as much, but looking more boyish ended up having its own set of negative consequences.

Also, here is a random fact about a Harry Potter-related experience I had:

A lot of people in America seem to have never heard of this, but there is a place in the suburbs of London that is owned by Warner Bros. and it is basically these two huge connected warehouses, plus a backlot, that are where much of the Harry Potter movies were filmed, and now it's basically a museum that is stuffed full of props, sets, and costumes from the movies. I went this summer, and it was one of the most amazing things I've ever seen! If any of you have the chance of going here, you definitely should... It was one of the most expensive parts of my trip, but for all the tears and awe it inspired in me, and for the fact that I was able to spend about seven hours here pretty easily looking at everything, I think it was worth it. So please go do this ASAP!! I sound like Tony Rice.

Hufflepuffs fo life!!