"Who was the best character in Star Trek in my opinion?" ~ by Daniel Alexander Apatiga

The best character in terms of charisma, leadership, and goodness of heart was Patrick Stewart’s portrayal of Captain Picard. In the realm of Star Trek, he knew inside and out Gene Roddenberry’s dream of what Star Trek could do, would do, even when he passed away. Captain Picard carried that vision forward in a way no other character of New Age science fiction has ever been able to do.

In terms of charisma, Captain Picard knew how to make people like him. The officers underneath his high status—albeit not Admiral or even higher like with Captain Jim Kirk (William Shatner)—always followed his steady example, or tried to. And no one ever tried to question his character because there was no reason to, except in “Star Trek : First Contact.” His charisma even carried sway with aliens from previously unknown worlds, because he always respected them even when it was difficult.

In terms of leadership, Captain Picard knew how to inspire people to obey and follow his command, whenever it was necessary. As a leader, he told his officers to do their jobs and they did, because he knew how to compliment them for a job-well-done, and whenever they made mistakes, he brought them up subtlety. Even when he was compromised as a Borg, (because his loyal crew knew him and loved him), they understood they had a duty to him as his bereft acting-officers in command.

In terms of goodness of heart, Captain Picard knew how to do the right thing whenever it was demanded even if it was unpopular. Too many examples exist in episodes I watched in which he helped alien species despite the prime directive. In the prime directive, one is not supposed to alter the future of any alien species by providing technology. Although occasionally he would aid Romulans with the above mentioned when they called for aid (S.O.S.), he would still abide by his principles but never at the cost of Goodness. Captain Kirk, Janeway, and Benjamin Sisko were never so pure.

Even though Star Trek succeeded in breaking many social barriers in cinema, it couldn’t have been done without the help of Patrick Stewart. Captain Picard embodied the proper principles of charisma, leadership, and being good in general. Too bad Patrick Stewart doesn’t portray Captain Picard, since his crew is retired and “Star Trek : The Next Generation” is over.

"A Small Place" Reading Response #13/14

Daniel Apatiga
Reading Response #13/14
11/17/2014


The accusatory tone of the narrator affects the reader’s self-perception when visiting other countries in a positive aspect; it causes him/her to rethink what it means to be viewed as an outsider, essentially. The narrator’s accusatory remarks are founded on the narrator’s observations for the most part on white, typically European and American tourists, despite the novella being a fiction. And these observations that the narrator makes on a few institutions that are set up to create a sense of security, like airport customs, are defamiliarized to the reader when he/she realizes airport customs make it difficult for non-whites, who are considered untrustworthy, to be delayed and be abused—unless of course, one has experienced discrimination. Some of the observations of the androgynous narrator are only half the story in my opinion: “you move through customs swiftly, you move through customs with ease. Your bags are not searched. You emerge from customs into the hot clean air…” as not all white Europeans experience this level of ease in going through customs and most definitely, not people of radically different ethnicities (page 5, Kincaid).

Given the rich history of Antigua, I notice then that the novella’s initial dislike for English domination that is interwoven into the novel’s structure is elaborated on greatly: in regards to the Mill Reef Club, they “ who seemed not to like Antiguans (black people) at all, for the Mill Reef club declared itself completely private” (page 27, Kincaid). This dislike is often in loud complaints, but the 2nd person mode is omitted: “It’s possible that when [the English] saw how rich banking made them, they gave themselves a good beating for ending slave trading (for surely they would have opposed that)” (page 26, Kincaid). In the USA, a private resort would be exclusive of a lower class, unless one still lives in a racist community; if there are racial discrimination, there are also class disparities to complicate the matter. Kincaid’s novel has a narrator who changes tone when using the 2nd person towards the end of the novella.

At the end of the novella, the narrator refrains from accusing the reader of injustices against Antigua almost completely. Only a reference to former colonial domination is expressed, but the focus is clearly on how beautiful a country and innocent a people Antiguans are. Also, in the déneoument, its tone is almost that of begging the reader to visit as though the last chapter were a travel brochure, and so the narrator in a sense asks for forgiveness for his/her prior accusatory remarks.

Since being a tourist and being a non-tourist is natural for every human being to experience, depending on where you are and have been, we can all relate to looking like a fool and an idiot. Jordan’s essay, “Report from the Bahamas,” suggests that looking like a tourist does not necessarily imply one is from another country and is a tourist, rather, one might be a foreigner who dislikes the government. In the setting of A Small Place or any place for that matter, one might be from another part of the country who is exploring other regions of his/her country, which is still technically a tourist. Xenophobia, which is hardly addressed as seriously in this novel as it was in Welcome to our Hillbrow, seems to be rampant in the narrator’s diction that is against Europeans and their ways. I am almost empathetic to them, after reading this novel; however, having a dad who’s from a third world country and visiting Mexico myself, I can see how unfair things are when one is privileged and others are barely scraping by due to the lack of opportunities that we are blessed with in this country. The novella paints the situation in Antigua as hopeless due to corruption, Europeans who exert their power, and Lybians/Syrians who buy properties; but, the desire to climb out of their economic depravity is unaddressed. Rather, we read a frustrated narrator who rants about her legitimate concerns: corruption, unethical/morally bankrupt ministers, and pointless institutions such as the “ministry of culture.”

Racial prejudice in the novella, for me, was lightly touched upon. Between the English and Antiguan sides of the matter, such as: the narrator’s disdain for the private resort and the English and the European’s desire to colonize in underhanded ways like by building condos and buying land. Xenophobia on the part of the Antiguans exists with respect to the English, Libyans, Syrians, and Europeans in general for colonizing and using the Antiguans’ land. The novella also says in multiple places that these others, for instance, people at the Mill Reef Club did “not like Antiguans” (page 27, Kincaid).

The stylistic choice on the part of Kincaid to include instances of the parenthesis seems to denote, for me as a reader, instances of sarcasm and moments in which the narrator is sure that the reader needs to know something, yet, doesn’t know it and often it’s in the form of a geography lesson: “(the size of Antigua)” on page 9; “(while at the same time surrounded by a sea and an ocean—the Caribbean Sea on one side, the Atlantic Ocean on the other)” on page 9 . As for sarcasm, these instances most closely aligns itself with my opinion: “(which is to say special)” on page 5; perhaps more literally, “(or, worse, Europe) on page 4; and at the beginning of one of the chapters, the narrator complains about the unhappiness of the English people in general in one long parenthetical paragraph on pages 23-24. I find these statements helpful, because they offer a glimpse into the narrator’s own bitterness that are somewhat unrelated to the love-our-country-Antigua moral of the story. It exposes narrator as if to say, hey, I’m not perfect and perhaps I’m wrong, but don’t take what I say with a grain of salt.

As I mentioned earlier, I think the Mill Reef Club is a bad instance in which language such as, “private,” is meant as a method of exclusion, which symbolizes the people who-work-at-the-resort’s antagonism and racial prejudice against native Antiguans. Another instance is that of the rich Libyans and Syrians who buy land near the beach and build large condominiums who dirty their landscape, according to the narrator. While this is not my own prejudiced perspective, it does symbolize a new sort of colonial presence in which people from another part of the world build architecturally unsound and unharmonious buildings that conflict with the Antiguan’s own sense of archecture, according to the narrator.

I think the line, “the people in a small place can have no interest in the exact,” sums up the narrator’s argument: Antigua, which is a small place coincidently, has many people who don’t know these foreigners who visit and the Antiguan’s own sense of history and place isn’t necessarily as nuanced. The narrator concedes a lot from prior statements regarding the prejudice of the Europeans and North Africans who are greedy. Also, since the beginning of the new section about people “in a small place” on page 52 seems to apply to anyone who’s from a small place—could be a rural village, or a someone who has never been outside of his/her state, let alone, country. The theme seems to be on limitations by experience and not necessarily memory, in my opinion. But, connecting it to Rushdie’s ideas of memory from “Imaginary Homelands,” his memory is closely connected to photographs, which he states on page 9 of his essay. In relation to A Small Place, memory for the narrator is something it relies upon to push the narrative forward. There is not really any concrete characters in the novella, rather, little anecdotes from her memory that all seem disjointed from one another, such as the ministry who is corrupt in contrast with all the good ministers who lived on to be “taxi drivers.” Also, the mystery of the refrigerator that electrocuted intruders, which killed ambassadors to Libya. The narrator hardly mourns their deaths, but if I remember correctly, this is all memory from the narrator’s past. Either that or the narrator must have read a news reel. The narrator includes a lot of political criticism in the novella.

Film review, "Dear White People"

Daniel Alexander Apatiga

“Dear White People” Film Response #

11/18/2014

                The film, Dear White People, juxtaposes two ethnic groups and shows, psychologically, how they intermingle and behave under different, complicated situations.  Within these two groups, a smaller, highly educated group, the Dean of Students and the President of the University, of whom I want to focus on in my first paragraph, are foreground to all the conflicts: firstly, the cafeteria at the black Greek house sprawl; secondly, the dislike that occurs between the former and then reestablished head of the black Greek house with the son of the President of the University; and thirdly, the fight between the homosexual black man and the formerly mentioned.  These seemingly racially infused situations causes different reactions to these highly, educated powerful elite who work for Winchester University.  The Dean of Students, who is black, has a son who was in a relationship with the president’s daughter (who is also the sister of the head of a white Greek house), and he loses his head status because of a fluke in the mobile app.  He thought he would win, but instead, Sam wins of whom is a female.  This, however, does not go well with the president of the university, who feels that she is too radical and that she is causing racial division rather than bringing about positive change.  He says essentially, racial prejudice at my school does not exist and belonged to an older era.  The Dean of Students, who has a stake in his son’s success, wishes to appease the President of the University by pressuring Sam to end her radio talk show.  She does not end it however, because she feels it right to make the racial prejudices public and also that Winchester University does not have the right to limit her free speech.   Essentially, the film is about creating this balance between what is socially acceptable in a more racially tolerant epoch.   The film does not address the new intolerance of Mexican-American immigrants or central American immigrants.  In fact, there is a line that suggests we black and white folk do not care about them, which I would like to complain about.

                The president of the university is more concerned with the university’s outwards appearance and to his donors, since Winchester is considered to be a prestigious university, and so he does not wish there to be racial division making headline news at his university.  Similarly in terms of selfish-agendas, the Dean of Students is more concerned about his job position and his son’s success in general than resolving Sam’s behavior to a more white-friendly mode of thought.   The Dean of Students seemed to me to be the more corrupted of the two, considering, he may have lied about the election results for the head of the black Greek house.  Indeed, Sam had legitimate concerns that she expressed in her radio talk show, where she always points the finger at white people for being racially prejudiced.    However, the legitimacy of the radio talk show goes unresolved at the end of the slightly comedic film:  a lot of the jokes that I did not get that others immediately laughed at, observationally, made me think of the movie as falling under the drama genre of film.   At the conclusion of the film, Sam resolves to end her talk show, but she does so in a film that she shows to class.  To her amazement, all the people clap and for a long period of time, the camera moves to show the white teacher and her white boyfriend clapping.  Does the film moral seem to suggest that all talks about racial tensions should cave in to a big black hole? 

                To me, racial intolerance is not over for everyone; racial prejudice and racism in general exists on both sides.  However, the moral of the story is based on a correct premise: if both sides agree to stop the hating, and that includes the incitement that Sam causes and the violence that the son of the President of the University exhibits.  The sooner we drop all presumptions about the other side, the sooner we can move on to bigger more important topics, the film seems to suggest.  I think that this film is highly relevant to the pain and pleasure of travel, as the film transports me to a place where I am more aware of issues of racial division and prejudice in America.    

Reading response on "Welcome to Our Hillbrow"

Daniel Apatiga

Reading Response #11

11/13/2014

Regarding the first epigraph at the beginning of the novel, we see that Phaswane Mpe provides an analepsis and a prolepsis throughout that chapter, because we see him foretelling the story of how Refentse dies and providing the background story to Refentse’s past.  In Danticat’s essay, “Creating Dangerously,” I see a similar story developing: that of two or more characters who are going to die, as explained in prolepsis, and for similar reasons.  Like the two American rebel fighters who fought for the Haitians, Refentse fights for love and opposes death until the notion of suicide overwhelms him.  The reasons for ending his life appear to be because of failed relationships with his multiple lovers: Lerato and Refilwe.  In a lot of ways, the notion of xenophobia, which is a central theme to the novel, is similar to Danticat’s “Creating Dangerously” in that the Haitians who were in power were xenophobic to the Americans.  We know for instance that Refentse loves soccer, and we know that even though he’s dead, he  would have loved to know that “Bafana Bafana lost to France in the 1998 Soccer World Cup fiasco” (Mpe, page 1).  In the first epigraph, furthermore, the historical fact of AIDS provides the necessary background story to what’s to come in the novel, where AIDS affects Refilwe’s life detrimentally.

The second epigraph, which I presume you mean and refer to the second chapter—“Notes From Heaven”—I think most of the chapter is almost as if the narrator is talking from heaven, as Prof. Kruger wisely points out.  We see motifs of death throughout the chapter: the death of relationships between Refilwe and Refentse, Refentse mourning the fact that Lerato cheats on him with Sammy.  He’s seeing it all for what actually happened, and in that way, it is factual since I can see this happening.  However, I believe the author stylistically wrote it in a realistic way and that the notion of viewing things from heaven for what the events actually are is a stretch for me.

The characters play an observational role in that they cannot affect the lives of their loved ones on Earth, even though Refentse wants to.  In life, one can change the way things are and make things better (or worse), and in death, these abilities cease to exist; and, in heaven, one can only observe the rest of the planet and hope for the best.  Whether one believes in heaven or not, or a God, does not necessarily impact whether you will go to heaven, the novel seems to suggest.

An important sentence for me, during “Refentse’s short story,” was: “love across racial boundaries became mental instability” (Mpe, page 57).  It is a self-reflection on himself of when he wasn’t contemplating suicide, were everything to happen just right.  Nothing did turn out right though. 

It seems like gossip and rumor helped people in the end, because had people not gossiped about Sammy’s drug addiction, they would not have attempted to help him.  This was before Refentse committed suicide.  Terror was a merely what it was—a rapist—and, to me, it was a metonymy for who he was along with “child of Tiragalong,” except it was a complicating of something that was already simply, a reminder of who he was.  

Opposition to Institutions, Corporations, and Governments in The Left hand of Darkness and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

Daniel Alexander Apatiga

Professor David

11/7/2014

Midterm paper#2

Opposition to Institutions, Corporations, and Governments in The Left hand of Darkness and The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch

In the novels The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and The Left Hand of Darkness, the authors both characterize their protagonists as holding political and economic beliefs that cause them to oppose various institutions and subsequently run into conflict.  The human protagonist in the LHD, Mr. Ai, is subject to the laws and governments of Winter.  He finds himself in opposition to them because he’s at the mercy of people in power: Karhide (because Estraven is considered there a traitor), the Orgoreyn Commensals (they sentence him to prison), and border guards who shoot and kill Estraven before making it across the border.  In the TSPE, Barney is opposed to a corporate institution, P.P Layouts, for its immoral, escapist product, Can-D, which has hallucinatory effects on its users.   Mr. Ai’s and Barney’s opposition to their respective “bosses” is key to understanding each hero’s ideology.  Through understanding LeGuin’s and Dick’s protagonists, we will be more empathetic to what they value.

The characters’ political preferences within their respective structures can thus be deciphered: in the LHD, the Ursula LeGuin portrays the alien species, the Gethenians, as only needing the bare minimum (each other, food, their temples, and marketplaces) despite having complicated technology that at one point, historically, they manufactured.  Technology, such as vehicles and sophisticated castle-like structures, require a process of design and a desire to do so that requires creativity and imagination that the Gethenians appear to have foregone, and Barney lives in a sea of technology.  Development for the Gethenians cannot occur without a demand for such items; but there is demand.  Demand implicates the existence of a market and the intelligence to design things.  The portrayal of technology in the LHD, however, takes a back-seat to more interesting concepts to LeGuin that is characteristic of non-hardcore, New World science fiction.  In TSPE, Barney and Anna desire to destroy corrupted corporations: Palmer Eldritch’s Can-Z company; (less so, Barney, wants to leave Bulero’s P.P. Layouts because of their inability to promote him).  Frederic Jameson claims, and I agree with him, that “world reduction” is when the “sheer teeming multiplicity of what exists of what we call reality, is deliberately thinned and weeded out through an operation of radical abstraction and simplification“ (Jameson, page 271).    This is the case in many of the examples pertaining to each protagonist’s respective economic ideology.  Communistic sharing, essentially, in the Mars setting of TSPE, is reduction of true communism principles; and, capitalistic greediness from CEOs in the LHD as the norm is a reduction of the good things that come out of capitalism. 

The corporations that Barney oppose are both examples of a radical “world reduction” because they resemble an unregulated form of capitalism and all positive facts about corporations are elided.  The various trade networks between different kingdoms in the world of Winter in LeGuin’s novel are also examples of a “world reduction” since they are hardly explored more in depth.  The Martian setting differs from the markets of LeGuin’s Winter world as the markets are in the process of growing as it does in free market capitalism (also partially regulated).  

In Dick’s novel, “world reduction” occurs in terms of Barney’s opposition to evil corporations that is an allegory for activism against real-world corporations that harm people, during his time.  We see corporations as being inherently evil.  For instance, tobacco companies have poisoned and altered humanity, but none have attempted to influence us through alien drugs: "It should be a purifying experience. We lose our fleshly bodies, our corporeality, as they say. And put on imperishable bodies instead, for a time anyhow. Or forever, if you believe as some do that it's outside of time and space-" (Dick, page 41).  In reality, not all corporations want to use alien technology, obviously, to mislead the public on a sinister quest to betray the human race by alien domination, because we have not met any aliens before, officially.   But in Dick’s novel, the notion of a moral corporation does not exist.  In what seems to be a capitalist society, morality is sliced out, like a heart from a captive, into the hands of a King; in other words, his novel is a criticism of consumerism and capitalism.  The omniscient narrator says, “The communal world is gone” (Dick, Page 182).  By communal, we assume that he means communism has disappeared, where the ideal living arrangements are through sharing, and thus, communals.  The narrator seems to take a dire tone about communism, and its history has been elided.  In today’s context, different cultural communistic experiments have been failures.  Though, further evidence suggests that the tone of Barney paints a corrupted form of capitalism through unpleasant imagery: “What we have here, he realized, is not an invasion of Earth by Proxmen, beings from another system. Not an invasion by the legions of a pseudo human race. No. It's Palmer Eldritch who's everywhere, growing and growing like a mad weed (Dick, Page 186).  Palmer Eldritch, who is the head of a corrupt corporation, is a symbol for the franchising of harmful stores that perhaps is a contemporary issue with capitalism.  Furthermore, corporations, in TSPE, it’s a fact that corporations are run by immoral people seeking to establish an unethical monopoly upon one another, creating a demand for escapism through supplying it with the drugs to do so.  This sounds a lot like tobacco companies that have addicted many of their victims to smoking that affects their corporeal health.  In contrast, both novels, in terms of society, institutions, and economics, holds few examples where there are no parallels to the world today, the main of which is the inclusion of extraterrestrial society.

Various institutions are inherently absent from both novels, which is another example of Jameson’s notion of “world reduction,” that the aliens are against.  Since manufactories are not mentioned, according to Jameson, in LeGuin’s novel, one can only assume that this was elided over.  Mr. Ai was more interested in the social complexities of Gethenian life rather than the institution of the factory: their “aspects of ambisexuality which we have only glimpsed or guessed at, and which we may never grasp entirely” was what interested him (LeGuin, page 75).  And again, while from the perspective of Mr. Ai, he thinks, “Being so strictly defined and limited by nature, the sexual urge of Gethenians is really not much interfered with by society: there is less coding, channeling, and repressing of sex there than in any bisexual society I know of… this was the first case I had seen of the social purpose running counter to the sexual drive” (LeGuin, page 144).  Because of the complicated nature of gender roles in humans—traditionally, men would go hunt and women would take care of their children—and later, men would go to work and women would stay home and go shopping; and more lately, men and women would go to the same work so that they can see each other.  The separation of spheres is in the process of disappearing in reality, and so these opposites that I think are byproducts of gender differences never occurs in Gethenian culture.  How then did the Gethenians perfect technology to the point that upkeep is unnecessary?  Do they have unlimited, sustainable power through far more advanced means?  Technology is pertinent to progress.  The world had no progress, however.  And progress, according to Jameson, could only occur through industrialization.  The institution of the factory, for instance, was something that the Gethenians appear to be in opposition towards in favor of a more rudimentary lifestyle.  Were there factories producing complicated goods (I assume that there are primitive factories for castle building), the protagonists would live in a very similar world to earth.  On the stylistic choice by LeGuin, there would be no defamiliarization needed to make the novel enlightening.  Gethenian kingdoms all enjoy complicated technology through the institution of trade, which Mr. Ai, in the world of Winter, was only interested in fermenting between humans and the Gethenians.  So in a way, the institution of trade was absent.  In the dénouement, Mr. Ai sets up trade between them, finally.

Gethenian law-enforcement is another institution that was absent, but in its stead, the culture of “prestige” existed that Mr. Ai and Estraven were opposed to.  Mr. Ai is in opposition to Gethenian’s way of treating alien guests.  They send him to jail.  He escapes from jail with the help of Estraven, who has nothing to lose but everything to gain because he can get his prestige back.  In that way, there are parallels to today’s society.  And he is central to the plot, as the lone human (most of the time throughout out the story, except in the dénouement) who attempts to establish trade, in what seemed to be a sincere undertaking on his part, by the humans to help the Gethenians through economic inclusion.  His preoccupation, however, takes an unanticipated turn that leads him to Estraven again, an exiled Gethenian, whom he has a romantic affair with when Estraven is in Kemmer.  (The combination of the genders into a single, reproductive creature holds back Gethenians from progress).  But before, they escape from jail “[making] a show of laboring to haul the dead load [which was Mr. Ai], for the dothe-strength was full within me…”, and then they seek to correct society’s injustice towards Mr. Ai (LeGuin, page 155).  They attempt to redeem Estraven’s prestige that is so important to him: “Strange how hard it is, for it’s an easy name to call another man, [being called traitor]; a name that sticks, that fits, that convinces.  I was half convinced myself,” Mr. Ai says (LeGuin, page 59).  Crime and punishment are inherently different than the real world: “The Ekumen as a political entity functions through coordination, not by rule.  It does not enforce laws; decisions are reached by council and consent, not by consensus or command” (LeGuin, page 110). The structure of the plot places Mr. Ai and Estraven in opposition to the institutionalization of “prestige” that governs the actions of others.

The reason why Gethenians are not able to make progress is because of an obsession with prestige that Mr. Ai finds himself in opposition with.  Gethenian culture does not understand the alien concept of progress due to their unique racial predicament: “When he looked at me with his clear, kind, candid eyes, he looked at me and way of life so old, so well established, so integral and coherent as to give a human being the unselfconsciousness, the authority, the completeness of a wild animal, a great strange creature who looks straight at you out of his eternal present” (LeGuin, page 57).  By implication, Mr. Ai assumes that pushing for trade is in their best interest.  And in contrast, Dick’s novel portrays the institution of trade in a realistic light, though it’s hardly ideal in capitalist societies.

The economic implications of the existence of a jail is that law enforcement is somehow paid, or there is some kind of exchange, and thus there is economics though in an alien way we are not able to understand.  But there is an absence of money—prestige rules this transaction instead.  There are no parallels to today’s civilized world. This is just like how Mr. Ai is not able to understand why they are in a perpetual dark age, “The Palace of Erhenrang is an inner city, a walled wilderness of palaces, towers, gardens, court-yards, cloisters, roofed bridge ways, roofless tunnel-walks, small forests and dungeon-keeps, the product of centuries of paranoia on a grand scale” (LeGuin, page 9), an age that has no progress.  By inductive reasoning of the Winter world, people steal, people violate other people’s space, people break all sorts of laws, and thus, some form of mercantilism must exist or a Marxist mode of radical, communistic sharing.  But in a sci-fi novel, alien is alien.

In Dick’s novel, the lack of police is similar to that of the lack of police, as we understand it, in LHD.  In TSPE, the law is through a new totalitarian like government, because of the draft that Barney opposes that sends citizens to Mars.  The novel has many motifs from the free market.  The UN is there to regulate it since the UN requires human test subjects to take the drug, if I remember correctly.  Corporations regulate themselves through the lawlessness like it is in the Wild West film genre.  Barney’s success, in the dénouement, of toppling the Palmer Eldritch Corporation was bloodless, like it is usually when a corporation goes under.  This moral suggests the free market and nonviolence can save humanity.  However, there doesn’t exist a real-life parallel of an alien being who procreates through the infiltration of the human economic system.

Barney finds himself in opposition to the institution of drug addiction; he only uses Can-Z when bribed.  Capitalism or mercantilism, in the TSPE, is a central theme throughout it that centers on the trade and entrepreneurship of businessmen trying to sell hallucinatory, drugs—one of which is alien, Can-Z, the other, Can-D, not so.  However, Barney works for Leo Bulero’s corporation nonetheless, unethically: “While translated one could commit incest, murder, anything, and it remained from a juridical standpoint a mere fantasy, an impotent wish. Can-D had made this possible; they continued to require it. In no way were they free” (Dick, Page 49).  Dick’s novel does not portray anything similar to what has happened in today’s context in any country; drugs cannot or do not have such a powerful, escapist effect that one can travel to different places and come out of the experience feeling normal; there is no parallel to hallucinatory drugs without adverse effects.

Can Z and Can D, which when used, are metaphors for drug addiction that Barney are opposed to, in Dick’s novel.  They are symbols for similar drugs in contemporary society, such as: cocaine, heroin, marijuana, LSD, caffeine (in high doses), alcohol (which isn’t so bad). However, the degree to which they cause hallucinatory effects greatly dwarfs contemporary examples as I have never heard of anyone becoming schizophrenic, and biconditionally, able to live in a dream world, as a direct result of the use of cocaine, LSD, etc.   The stereotype that people moreover, and statistically liberals, love drugs, aka. Marijuana, etc. but they do not care about the negative health effects that it has on one’s life is a moral stance that Barney and Anna, more or less, fall in line with: “Once you've taken Chew-Z you're delivered over. At least that's how dogmatic, devout, fanatical Anne Hawthorne would phrase it. Like sin, Barney Mayerson thought; it's the condition of slavery. Like the Fall. And the temptation is similar” (Dick, Page 189).  Barney questions the morality of taking drugs from his boss Leo Bulero, who represents a giant corporation, despite the unethicality of working for him.  This important fact is not enough to cause Barney to question his own firm belief in the morality of not taking drugs.  He contradicts his own beliefs when Palmer Eldritch meets him and expects him to take Can-Z in order to promote his drug by bribing him that if he does not do what he asks, he will make him stay in Mars forever.

The notion of the “invisible hand” of economics in Gethenian society is a central theme to LeGuin’s novel that Mr. Ai opposes.  LeGuin draws upon conservative notions of economics, which is in a way, dystopic of the real world, when progress is at a standstill. It is also a demagogue-like mode of thought that seeks to justify top-down capitalism as being positive for society, in the real world.  Capitalism that assumes supply and demand are the governing forces of economics without any regulation will not lead to the general well-being of an individual without some upper regulation.

Some institutions that Jameson forgot to mention are not examples of “world reduction” according to Jameson and are ambiguous as to whether Mr. Ai was opposed to or simply trying to understand them.  For instance, in terms of economics, the Gethenians possessed an “Orgota Naval Trade Commission in Erhenrang” on page 67; there are markets in the world of Winter: “the Great Markets of South Mishnory” on page 65; “Orgoreyn had gradually built up a unified and increasingly efficient centralized state.   Now Karhide was to pull herself together and do the same; and the way to make her do it was not by sparking her pride, or building up her trade, or improving her roads, farms, colleges, and so on; none of that; that’s all civilization, veneer, and Tibe dismissed it with scorn” on page 83.  Was he interested in submitting the Karhidians, the subjects of Orgoreyn, and Erhenrangians to human economic domination?  His actions implies he has no malintent, yet he is sentenced to prison because they do not believe him.  Moreover, economically, Jameson’s “world reduction” quote applies to economics and society of today’s histories and religions.  The difference between the Gethenians and Mr. Ai, who is a representative of humanity, pushes Mr. Ai’s to oppose the Gethenian prestige-based, law-enforcing institutions.

Dick paints an outlandish, divided solar system to symbolize the opposition that Barney has to society, (since he was drafted to go to Mars), since part of the setting is on Mars.  There isn’t a stark contrast between the settings of Dick’s novel with LeGuin’s Winter world—both are “rude environment[s and] inhospitable” (Jameson, page 269).  Mars is like a desert.  Also, Mars is a place where people live in small, enclosed hovels, because the UN must make people move out of Earth due to limited space and heat, in the novel.  This horrendous fact is another example of a setting, like in LeGuin’s Winter world, that serves as a catalyst for opposition to Barney’s corporation institution.   Here, everyone knows each other because of the similarity between Martian life and rural life.

The opposition to the systems of economics, prestige-based law enforcement, being unethical, and injustice in general are all central to LHD and TSPE.  Both novels try to address real problems in the real world, which is in line with Jameson’s essay about LeGuin as an author: “such is our entry into the other world of The Left Hand of Darkness, a world which, like all invented ones, that awakens irresistible reminisces of this the real one” (Jameson, page 267).  A lot of what Jameson suggests in his essay also applies to Dick’s novel: “SF [is] a form [that] precisely [has] this capacity to provide something like an experimental variation on our own empirical universe” (as an observation of LeGuin’s novel, LHD) (Jameson, page 270).  Examples of excellent SF prose that share no parallels with contemporary society are present in LeGuin’s LHD and Dick’s TSPE.

Bibliography

LeGuin, Ursula. The Left Hand of Darkness. London: Orbit, 1969. Paperback.

Dick, Phillip K.. The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Boston/New York: First Mariner

Books, 1965. Kindle file.

Jameson, Frederic. "World Reduction in Le Guin." Archaeologies of The Future: The Desire

Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. Verso, 2005, pages 268-280. 

"Time" - a poem

Time passes slowly:
times of suffering;
times of joy;
times of ecstatic love;
and times of meaningful,
curvy roads.

Time is a young face posing as thought it were old.
Time's enigmatic impetus that is invisible proceeds while we learn everything we can,
while fighting the alien.

Time is misery of knowing what has come to pass will no longer be.
Wind by contrast speeds,
ages whistle past,
whispers of 'bye, bye foreigner' that is time.

Time is an alien who utters not and lives in the fourth dimension.
It can speak of Earth's home,
but it wont reveal its watch on the alien's wrist.
Goodness of love can depart and shocking death can return,
once time shocks my anti-Utopian paradigm.

Time may return, reengaging frozen gears designed for progress,
but science doesn't accept the existence of love potions as ethical,
since the beginning of time.