New Weird: Jack, China Miéville

“People get broken when they get Remade,” is my favorite line. It sums up the whole short story. At first, I really hated reading this story because I thought it was poorly written. And then I thought, no this has to be on purpose. The voice was what threw me off. 

Hearing that it’s a part of the series makes me glad because that means there’s more to this weird story. But I kinda liked that I didn’t have the full context. I didn’t know what I was getting myself into, and I think the story did a great job of introducing the world to me and the core elements of the universe it takes place in. This is more of an appreciation from a writers stand-point, but I liked this story more going into it not knowing anything. The weirdness of the concept was enough to intrigue me. People being Remade. The idea that, after you get punished, you get surgically changed or given an inhuman part or body, and that after that process, you are now less than human. You are nothing. But then one day, a Remade person decides to rise above nothing and go beyond what people expect. 
            Being told from an admiration perspective was great. A point of view of someone that has conflicted morals. They’re not supposed to like this Remade person. They’re not supposed to like Jack because society has told him that Jack was nothing, but yet he still admires Jack. This conflicted narrator added more to this story than what was being told because if he’s having these thoughts about are uncanny hero, then other people in his position are also feeling this as well. They also admire Jack for his actions. This creates a sense of chronic tension, because now there are people who are expected to be functional people of society, but now they have to hide their thoughts and their personal views from people over them. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Urban Fantasy - Neil Gaiman

I read Good Omens for this weeks Neil Gaiman read. I don’t know much about biblical mythology but I’m loving the combination of humor and mythology teaching in this novel. You don’t have to understand it to enjoy reading it, and I’m sure if you did know it’d be that much funnier to read.   Good Omens is incredibly entertaining and it’s definitely a book I’ll finish reading during the summer. (Along with a good number of these other books from this semester.) Even though this week was focused on Neil Gaiman, I think this duo-authored book emphasizes on both of their writing talents.   The worldbuilding with all the demons is great. Having the demons treated to a more modern society really pulls out the Urban Fantasy aspect of Gaiman’s works. And along with the humorous parts of the story, everything feels weirdly nonchalant. As if characters just know whats going on at all times, or at least they don’t care all that much because they know they have no free will of thei
Read more

Cyberpunk: Paprika Viewing

For cyberpunk, I watched the animated film Paprika. Truly a mindfuck. I love anime films like Akira and Perfect Blue that really twist the realms of reality and take that weirdness dial and crank it up to eleven. Paprika is no different. This film perfectly blurs the lines between reality and dreams. I’m more surprised that I’ve never watched this before.   A motif I found in this movie was that things were always in motion. Even the more mundane and expository scenes such as the scientists talking is shown in motion, with them walking down the hallway and not having this conversation simple in an office. The information is given concisely with no loss of movement. And while yes, there are still scenes. This movie is full of seamless transitional scenes where a moving scene quickly goes from the real world to the dream realm.   I was talking about cyberpunk as a genre to a friend of mine, and he argued that cyberpunk meant it needed to have robots in it. And yes, that
Read more

Babel 17, Language that Kills

What interested me about Babel 17 going into it, was the idea that language can be used as a weapon. This is such a unique and interesting concept, and a bit surreal to think about. It’s a little unnerving when you try to wrap your head around it.   Babel 17 is almost like profiling. You read every change in facial expressions and body languages to see what the person is thinking about or what their emotions are. Just like behavior science, it’s rating body language, predicting what someone is thinking and feeling, but with the added ability to predict events like a psychic ability.   I’m curious about how the system Babel 17 works. I know the point isn’t to know, but how knowing the language allow you to predict an impending attack at a port? Unless further in the novel it sets up more rules for Babel 17 (which I’m sure it does) then I don’t get the whole scope of how this language is actually being used as a weapon. I’m imagining it to be similar to how the force wor
Read more