Claim for a bizarre form of prejudice in Phillip K. Dick's "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?"

In Phillip K. Dick's novel, "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?", the main character is a bounty hunter that hunts androids, humanoid creatures that are not fully human, because they do not possess concepts of rational thought. This, according to the purely organic humans, makes them inferior, and "subhuman." However, how is it that we define "human?" Can an android, something that is not fully human in our definition, really ever be one of us? Phillp K. Dick is not only saying that an android is a human in same way as anyone else is human, but he is also writing in the context of the Civil Rights Movement, which was hitting a fever pitch at the time the book was written. Therefore, it can be said that Dick is allegorizing the Civil Rights Movement with a bizarre form of racism, where typical humans are prejudice against android humans.

Analysis of Female characters in Miyazaki's films (Previously published on another blog: "Steven Gamella's Wordpress")

Hayao Miyazaki is considered one of the great science-fiction writers of the 20^th and early 21^st century. Using his talent for Japanese animation and comics (anime and manga), he has given us some beautifully rendered worlds of incredible characters, music, art and plot lines that have become classics in the SF and fantasy community. One of his most famous works, “Nausicaa and the Valley of the Wind,” explores a common SF trope seen in many other works, most notably Frank Herbert’s “Dune” and “Seed Stock” and the decidedly dark worlds of “The Road” and the recent summer blockbuster, “Elysium.” That trope, ecological dystopia, involves a decidedly negative view of the future where a planet’s environment has changed so much that life on the planet becomes impossible as we know it today. In Nausicaa, Princess Nausicaa is the leader of the Wind Tribe, a group of holdouts from an environmental apocalypse more than 1,000 years earlier that destroyed all industrialized life on Earth. The town that the tribe lives in is protected from the “Toxic Jungle,” a global, toxic forest guarded by massive, highly-evolved sentient insect monsters by a favorable wind, blowing the toxic spores away from her town. The Wind Tribe is not the only tribal holdout, another group of humans, led by a cyborg Countess and her army of “Torumikkians,” is fighting an endless war with the Toxic Jungle and its insect guardians, and aims to resurrect an ancient superweapon to destroy the Jungle and rebuild industrial society. Here, with this basic synopsis, we see two of Miyazaki’s common literary themes, he regularly has women in power, and he regularly has animals as smart as or smarter than humans. Miyazaki is one of the few SF authors that regularly has female characters on a greater power level than male characters, for cultural and literary reasons involving women. In two of his other films, “Spirited Away” and “Princess Mononoke,” we see that the owner of the bathhouse in “Spirited Away” is an old witch, named Yababa, of great and terrible power who rules over the bathhouse employees like a dictator, turning misbehaving people into pigs and keeping other spirits on “soul contracts,” taking their names away and giving them artificial designations, and in “Mononoke,” we see two female characters, Lady Aboshi and Mononoke herself, with agency, efficacy and scope, something not usually seen with female characters in SF. Also, in “Mononoke” and “Nausicaa,” there are animals that can speak, they can think and they can even fight wars, like the Wolves and Boars in “Mononoke” and the Ohm in “Nausicaa.” Also, in the synopsis of “Nausicaa,” we can see similarities to other authors who write ecological dystopian worlds. In Frank Herbert’s “Dune,” the planet Arrakis is dry, desolate and barren of life, save for the roaming bands of “Fremen” nomads and the giant sandworms, which the main character, Paul Muad’Dib Atreides, must learn to ride to fulfill his destiny of leading the Fremen to salvation. Women also hold a position of power in “Dune,” but not to the extent as in Miyazaki’s films. Lady Jessica is, at best, a supporting character to Dukes Lito and Paul Atreides, but while Paul is learning to fulfill his duties as Duke of Arrakis, Lady Jessica serves as his mentor with her Bene Gesserit training, but is still a woman without much agency. She has only as much power as her son allows her to. Therefore, it can be seen that Herbert might not have been well aware of women’s rights, whereas Miyazaki was, but there are several reasons for this distinction. “Dune” was a product of its time, published in 1965, the Civil Rights movement was in full swing, and feminism was still in its infancy. “Nausicaa,” however, was written in the late 1980s, well after the feminist movement had taken hold. Also, women’s roles in Japan were historically different than in America and Europe, given that the Japanese family was seen as one unit, every person in the household contributed to the well-being of the family, even the women, where in American and other Western cultures, the woman became the man’s property upon marriage, through the process of coverture and the resulting “cult of domesticity.” Japan always valued “women’s work” as a vital part of the economy and not just something that women did because their husbands told them to, women understood that their husbands needed them just as much as they needed their husbands, so the concept of “feminism” and “women’s rights” varies from culture to culture. So, Lady Aboshi or Nausicaa should not be looked at as a “feminist” character, because in medieval Japan, in reality, seeing a strong, iron-willed woman as a regional governor of a town in the absence of a man was not uncommon, though the national, imperial government was solely male, there were never any ruling independent female shoguns or independent Empresses. It is only because of Western biases that we see these characters as feminist, because Japanese family structure was based off an entirely different concept than Western family structure. As for male characters, Miyazaki rarely has a male protagonist of much power, in Mononoke, the main male protagonist, Ashitaka, is cursed by a demon that only Princess Mononoke can help him cure, putting him firmly within Mononoke’s power. Nausicaa’s male protagonist, a man named Lord Yupa, is her loyal guardian and protector of the town, also firmly within Nausicaa’s power. Furthermore, most of Lady Aboshi’s male soldiers are bumbling idiots that she regularly scolds for their incompetence. This theme of gender reversal shows itself through various Petrarchan and Machiavellian themes throughout each of Miyazaki’s main films, and has defined him, above all other SF writers, as truly generating a sense of wonder and extrapolation through colorful environments and reversal of gender roles. They are true masterpieces of science fiction work, and can show a very unique view of the world, if one keeps an open mind to other cultures and not let Western gender perceptions get in the way of interpreting the story. If we choose to see, we can find an entirely new way of looking at the world. Miyazaki is an absolute genius at achieving this end.

Racism in "A Door into Ocean" by Joan Slonsclowski

"We are descendants of the same fish you are." If only someone of power and reason had told Hitler this phrase when he was mulling over how to solve the "Jewish Problem." The story "A Door Into Ocean," about a race of all-female aliens called "Sharers" living on an aquatic planet, involves some very poignant messages about race in society. The quote that started this passage is significant because the Sharer is trying to break down species barriers with the concept of divergent evolution, to eliminate any racism or hateful bias against the Sharers by the human overlords on the planet. It could also be in reverse, perhaps the Sharers are suspicious of the Humans, or simply stating facts, as all life on any given planet is descended from a common ancestor. If they are just stating facts, these facts must be stating a purpose, to defuse racism and conflict, especially from the Patriarch.

Mix of Scientific and Science Fiction

I have a theory. I believe that Pokémon, in their fictional universes, are energy beings that manipulate physics. The inside of a Poke Ball appears to be covered in mirrors, and upon activation, powerful quantum magnets convert the atomic matter in a Pokémon into massless light, which is kept in stasis by constantly reflecting off the mirrors within the Poke Ball. Pokémon can also alter the energy... around them, and a Poke Ball just exploits this. Pokémon can also convert energy into matter and vice-versa, allowing them to perform their elemental and energy attacks, humans and fainted Pokémon can't be captured in a Poke Ball because they cannot execute the conversions, Pokémon store energy as they evolve, and when they evolve, the massive amount they store is converted into their new bodies, at a rate of 600,000 kilodarwins of evolutionary energy needed to manifest a new species in 10 seconds, per my own calculations using Stephen J. Gould's formulas outlined in his 3,500 page book, "Structure of Evolutionary Theory." Who says a world inhabited by electric mice, moon creatures, talking manhole covers and malevolent ghost-jellyfish monsters can't be scientific?