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Nov. 18th, 2006 10:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
the_fantastic_ms_foxThe second was Science Fiction
I was browsing through the Science-Fiction section in Chapters, and I realized that the visual narrative of the covers of sci-fi books has deep parallels with the way I look at things and consider how they should look. Not all the covers - certainly not these new abstract covers where The Children of Men just has an empty baby carriage on it, or a Heinlein book that has a picture of some guy's face and a falling car - I mean the ones that show people in their future-y environment. Not heroes standing proudly in armour or diaphenous semi-gowns, but people going about their business.
It's common in a a lot of the progressive social sci-fi, and I imagine that this narrative and my opinions are products of similar social processes.
On the covers, I see people like me: products of their social geography, with channels of meaning flowing up to the ecological scale, down through the culture and state, to be finally inscribed in their clothes, and upon their body. They are unbounded people, who walk in strange places; intellectuals with their feet in the mud; those who wear clothes and learn skills that are elegant insofar as they enhance the raw human, with new materials, pockets, equations, electronics, sharp tailoring and so on. I'm a cyborg, not of chrome welded to flesh, but cells miging with mind mingling with soul miningling with all things.
This has something to do with why I went into the social sciences.
Also: Sasha Fox; S.F.
<:D
I was browsing through the Science-Fiction section in Chapters, and I realized that the visual narrative of the covers of sci-fi books has deep parallels with the way I look at things and consider how they should look. Not all the covers - certainly not these new abstract covers where The Children of Men just has an empty baby carriage on it, or a Heinlein book that has a picture of some guy's face and a falling car - I mean the ones that show people in their future-y environment. Not heroes standing proudly in armour or diaphenous semi-gowns, but people going about their business.
It's common in a a lot of the progressive social sci-fi, and I imagine that this narrative and my opinions are products of similar social processes.
On the covers, I see people like me: products of their social geography, with channels of meaning flowing up to the ecological scale, down through the culture and state, to be finally inscribed in their clothes, and upon their body. They are unbounded people, who walk in strange places; intellectuals with their feet in the mud; those who wear clothes and learn skills that are elegant insofar as they enhance the raw human, with new materials, pockets, equations, electronics, sharp tailoring and so on. I'm a cyborg, not of chrome welded to flesh, but cells miging with mind mingling with soul miningling with all things.
This has something to do with why I went into the social sciences.
Also: Sasha Fox; S.F.
<:D