io9 pal Katayama writes the popular Tokyomango blog and has recently published a series of pieces on Japanese men who marry cartoon characters (she's covered this phenomenon for the New York Times Magazine, as well as in the BoingBoingTV segment above) . Dismayed over the oddly serious, and occasionally insulting, responses from Western audiences, she recently analyzed the idea of "Japanese weirdness" over on BoingBoing. Katayama writes:

Why do so many love to gawk at this mysterious, foreign "other" that is Japanese culture? There are plenty of strange things going on in the US too, but when it happens in Japan, it's suddenly incomprehensible, despicable, awesome, and crazy. This fascination doesn't just end with angry commenters, either. Over the last couple of decades, it has spawned a huge industry of magazines, blogs, and products themed around Japanese culture marketed to Westerners by Westerners who are also obsessed with Japanese culture . . . [But the fact is] that none of this is meant to be taken seriously. One important premise of Japanese popular culture is the commitment to have fun and not take offense. Japanese humor works on many different levels and its nuances can be hard to explain to people who didn't grow up with it.

If you're one of those people who watched our wedding video between the man and his DS girlfriend and said things like: "He's such a loser" "He takes it too seriously LOL" and "God help this poor soul" - not to mention the racist comments about Japs and nukes and one-inch dicks - you just don't get it. You're not in on the joke. You're the one taking it too seriously, and you might be imposing your own biases and hang-ups on someone else's situation.

Being majime (too serious) is not cool in Japan; likewise it is important for voyeurs of Japanese culture to recognize that most everything pop-culture-y that is exported to the West comes at us with a wink. If you're all up in arms about it, then maybe the joke is on you.

I think her comments here apply to far more than videos of Japanese men marrying anime characters. She's talking about a strong tendency in Western culture to misinterpret Japanese goofiness as something seriously weird. In science fiction, this misinterpreted humor is used as a way of showing an "incomprehensible" or bizarre future world.

Obviously some of William Gibson's early works exhibit this fascination with Japan, as does the movie Bladerunner. These days, Western SF has also turned its eye toward the "weirdness" of China (think Firefly, or Neal Stephenson's The Diamond Age) and India (Ian McDonald's River of Gods). And in recent indie flick Moon, our abused clones were manufactured by a Korean company. Is the West doomed to misunderstand the Eastern present as some weird version of the future?

via BoingBoing

"At the Toronto [World Future Society] conference, veteran futurist Joseph Coates put it this way: "Being right or wrong isn't so much the point as being useful. The ultimate purpose is to change people's minds."

"Or as Kenneth Boulding, an influential 20th century futurist, once said: 'The future will always surprise us, but we must not let it dumbfound us.'" — Michael Rogers, writing in MSNBC

Sea City Of The Future, from Positive Negative

Rodriguez tells the L.A. Times:

You know, there's not one detail that [Cameron] misses. If I am looking at a green screen on a scene, he's gonna show me — on a screen — exactly what I should be seeing, which is amazing. Usually when you work with green screen you act and then somebody tells you, "Yeah, we're gonna put this in post and such and such," but he got that out of the way. Whenever I'm looking at something or have a question about something, he shows it to me. As far as the foliage goes and the protrusions from the planet itself, I got to see a lot of that live cause they actually created it for the set. Most of the stuff that I was working with were mechanical creatures that are actual props...

To me, it was like working on "Star Wars" — the first one. You know how now you watch "Star Wars" ["Episode I" in 1999] and you're like "I could've rented or bought the video game then I'd be in control of what's happening' — because everything's so digital and it doesn't feel real. But you watch the first one ["Episode IV" in 1977] and I don't know how you feel, but I wonder, 'Why does this feel so much greater than the digitized world he [George Lucas] created now?' And I realize it's because of the props. And that's the kind of live-action world that Jim created.

[Hero Complex]

Over at the Savage Critics, Khosla puts Marvel Comics' fear of women into some worrying perspective:

"Man Versus Castration Anxiety" has been a recurring theme for this generation of Marvel Comics "events". The first major "Event" Civil War began when Captain America was asked to submit to the authority of a woman named Maria Hill.

Captain America then initiates an all-out superhero civil war rather than take orders from a woman. At the conclusion of the comic, Iron Man has won that contest; however, the comic goes bizarrely out of its way to assure the reader that the patriarchal order has been restored: the comic's celebratory final three pages feature Iron Man forcing Maria Hill to get him coffee.

The Civil War can only truly end once a woman is put back in her "place". Civil War was then followed by a comic called— oh God, here I go again— Secret Invasion, in which an alien Queen attempts to institute a matriarchy on Earth. In response, the Earth's superheros murder the Queen, specificially by repeatedly destroying the Queen's head. In issue 7 of the series, her head is shot through with arrows. In issue 8, it is revealed that she's survived the arrows, but then her head is blown off by the Green Goblin. In the same panel as her head being blown off is a drawing of Wolverine, poised to slice into her head with his adamantium claws.

The comic takes a perverse glee in damaging this woman's head, basically. Freud often suggested that the head was a symbol of the repressed desires of the lower body, that is to say, he often associated the female head with a vagina. As David D. Gilmore explained in "Misogyny: the Male Malady": "Freud wrote a paper specificially on this subject, 'The Medusa's Head' published posthumously in 1940. [...] Freud argues that Medusa's head represents the vagina in general and the mother's vagina in particular, the archetypal 'hairy maternal vulva'. Here is the Oedipal terror displaced to the head: Medusa embodies both mother and woman, and the hairy vulva typifies incestuous temptation." The Secret Invasion can only end when the offending vagina has been destroyed.

Lots more at the link, including the comic that started off his observation, in which the monster is a woman who became a monster because she was horny. And, no, I'm sadly not even exaggerating.

It's worth pointing out that Khosla doesn't mention House of M, Marvel's superhero crossover event prior to Civil War, where the plot was essentially "That woman is too powerful and must be stopped before she destroys reality." Which was also the plot - and the same woman, for that matter - as the event prior to that, Avengers Disassembled. Ironically enough, March 2010 starts a year-long program called "Marvel Women" at the publisher, which according to Marvel Snr. VP of Sales David Gabriel, is intended...

...to celebrate the women of the industry, whether they are super-heroines, super-villainesses, artists, writers, editors, colorists, inkers, proofreaders, models, and on and on.

Here's hoping there'll be less disturbing undercurrent to Marvel's stories for that year, as well...

Abhay Wrote a Quick Description of Dark Reign: The List — X-Men #1, For No Reason [Savage Critics]

Grossman explained his disappointment in JK Rowling's choice of future for her boy hero to Newsarama.com:

I loved Harry Potter, but that epilogue was such an astounding failure of imagination on Rowling's part! And in a way, it throws the entirety of all seven novels into doubt retroactively.

I felt the problem she failed to solve was the question of, "here's a young man who can do magic, who has defeated the enemy of humanity when her was 18 – what's the rest of his life look like?" And the best she can imagine is that he marries his high school sweetheart and puts on a big gut and lives in the suburbs. What a disaster!

He went on to say,

There has to be some better fate for Harry Potter than what he gets. I think that's something of the message of [Grossman's new book] The Magicians – you're not going to go to Narnia, but there has to be something better than that bourgeois suburban mediocrity that seems like the only alternative.

Somewhere, a million Potter fans are sharpening their knives in preparation for revenge.

The MAGIC of Lev Grossman [Newsarama.com]

Interviewed by Terry Bisson, Robinson explains:

Anyone can do a dystopia these days just by making a collage of newspaper headlines, but utopias are hard, and important, because we need to imagine what it might be like if we did things well enough to say to our kids, we did our best, this is about as good as it was when it was handed to us, take care of it and do better. Some kind of narrative vision of what we're trying for as a civilization.

It's a slim tradition since [Sir Thomas] More invented the word, but a very interesting one, and at certain points important: the Bellamy clubs after Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward had a big impact on the Progressive movement in American politics, and H.G. Wells's stubborn persistence in writing utopias over about fifty years (not his big sellers) conveyed the vision that got turned into the postwar order of social security and some kind of government-by-meritocracy.

So utopias have had effects in the real world. More recently I think Ecotopia by [Ernest] Callenbach had a big impact on how the hippie generation tried to live in the years after, building families and communities.

There are a lot of problems in writing utopias, but they can be opportunities. The usual objection-that they must be boring-are often political attacks, or ignorant repeating of a line, or another way of saying "No expository lumps please, it has to be about me." The political attacks are interesting to parse. "Utopia would be boring because there would be no conflicts, history would stop, there would be no great art, no drama, no magnificence." This is always said by white people with a full belly. My feeling is that if they were hungry and sick and living in a cardboard shack they would be more willing to give utopia a try.

And if we did achieve a just and sustainable world civilization, I'm confident there would still be enough drama, as I tried to show in Pacific Edge. There would still be love lost, there would still be death. That would be enough. The horribleness of unnecessary tragedy may be lessened and the people who like that kind of thing would have to deal with a reduction in their supply of drama.

So, the writing of utopia comes down to figuring out ways of talking about just these issues in an interesting way; how tenuous it would be, how fragile, how much a tightrope walk and a work in progress. That along with the usual science fiction problem of handling exposition. It could be done, and I wish it were being done more often.

[Shareable via Resilience Science]

The key thing to remember when thinking about the economic AI takeover is that it is not something we should be trying to prevent. Why shouldn't we, the human race as a whole, build machines to do the hard work we need done, and spend our time enjoying the resulting wealth? Why shouldn't we spend our efforts deciding what needs to be done, and let the machines do it

Sounds very Asimovian.

via Foresight Institute

As I've mentioned here before, I'm gobsmacked - as we Brits say - with admiration for Greer Gilman's Cloud and Ashes. It's not a book I can claim to understand anything like fully and so, as in the past, I'll duck out of offering a full review. But individual bits of it, images or aspects of its use of language, keep coming back to me like depth-charge puns you only get three months after the fact. (The same is true of another great playing-with-language novel, Damon Knight's Humpty Dumpty: An Oval.)

And sometimes the stuff that stays with you is just plain weird, like the cliff made of earlobes in M John Harrison's otherwise seemingly mimetic Climbers, the description of the desert in Joanna Russ's "Bodies", or - perhaps my favorite piece of prose anywhere - the two pages about toothpaste tubes in Gravity's Rainbow. Nothing really links all of these examples, except that for me (an enormously subjective measure, I know) they stick with me.

As part of a larger piece in Variety about the JJ Abrams-related army of creators taking over genre entertainment, Orci says:

Cinematically, this generational movement is kind of like hip-hop... Entertainment exploded when we were kids. We all became students of film and TV because we were so saturated with it. Now our (work) is kind of like hip-hop where we're sampling things we all know and love.

We're unconvinced that "sampling" really works as a musical metaphor for something like Star Trek, GI Joe or Transformers, mind you. Isn't that more like Goldfinger's cover of "99 Red Balloons"?

Abrams keeps it all in the fan family [Variety]

Discussing his new book, Manhood for Amateurs: the Pleasures and Regrets of a Husband, Father and Son, Chabon explains:

JC: In a couple of the early pieces, you express a concern for the lack of mystery in the lives of children.

MC: I'm not sure it's so much a lack of mystery. I think there's still plenty of mystery. It's a lack of freedom, it's a lack of unsupervised play.

JC: Both physically, and through the proscriptive, highly specialized Legos …

The thing with Legos — I hope it's an example of how I recognize the possibility that I might be overstating my objections. Not everything that at first glance seems to be a further illustration of the kind of cultural imperialism I see at work in the adult world over the world of childhood — not everything is necessarily an example of that. Certainly kids retain their love of subversion, and I think it's just innate to a child's mind to want to subvert authority. I think it's unfortunate that the adult world figured out a way to take over that impulse and package it and retail it and sell it back to children, and to their parents.

In the world of Legos, what I did discover is that my kids were taking these beautiful, gorgeous, incredibly restrictive predetermined Legos Star Wars play sets — and yeah, they really wanted it to be put together just the way the box showed it. I don't think it occurred to them you'd want to do anything else with it. But inevitably, over time, the things kind of crumble and get destroyed and fall apart and then, once they do, the kids take all those pieces, and they create these bizarre, freak hybrids — of pirates and Indians and Star Wars and Spider-Man. Lego-things all getting mashed up together into this post-modern Lego stew. They figure out a way, despite the best efforts of corporate retail marketing.

[Los Angeles Times]

The influence of Herbert's secret muse - environmentalist Rachel Carson, whose Silent Spring appeared shortly before Analog began serializing Dune - distinguishes his own from these other entertainments. Inspired by Carson's defense of the balance of nature, her criticism of man's despoliation of the planet in the name of progress, the desert ecosystem portrayed in Herbert's Dune is far more than a setting: it's a mise en scène, a worldview.

via Hilobrow

Talking to the Independent newspaper to promote a screening of Transcendent Man, Kurzweil said,

The form of opposition [to technology] from fundamentalist humanists, and fundamentalist naturalists – that we should make no change to nature [or] to human beings – is directly contrary to the nature of human beings, because we are the species that goes beyond our limitations... And I think that's quite a destructive school of thought – you can show that hundreds of thousands of kids went blind in Africa due to the opposition to [genetically engineered] golden rice. The opposition to genetically modified organisms is just a blanket, reflexive opposition to the idea of changing nature. Nature, and the natural human condition, generates tremendous suffering. We have the means to overcome that, and we should deploy it.

By 2040 you will be able to upload your brain... [Independent.co.uk]

"And some of the things I see now, particularly in science fiction juveniles, are of a different character. And part of that I think is because the authors writing them are not trained in the sciences, they're trained in the humanities. And they are looking back at the legacy of what science is doing, has done, on everything from environmental issues to questions of weaponry and warfare, and they're sort of taking stock of this, and I wouldn't say necessarily that it's all pessimism, but you don't see the same sense of wonder balanced in the same way. It's become more self-critical, particularly in these works that are hitting the, say, 14 to 18 year old readers and bringing them into the genre for the first time." — Professor Amy Sturgis, interviewed by NPR station WFPL for "The Subversive Side Of Science Fiction" (Full podcast at link). [via Geekend]

Talking to Ira Glass following a charity screening of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog last night, the BuffyFest blog quoted Whedon as saying:

[Dollhouse] became just a scoach too whore-y. Never had a better meeting, everything was great, then they [FOX] said "so they're kinda like prostitutes and that's not ok" Word came down that it wasn't ok. I wanted to make a show that's about feeling bad about feeling good or good about feeling bad. Fantasy is just that, fantasy. FOX wanted to back away from these implications. Every episode [of the first season] is ridiculously hard, because the central core has been ripped out just enough, that we're constantly dancing around our own premise.

The second season of Dollhouse begins this Friday on Fox.

Recap: Dr Horrible Sing-Along and Joss Whedon Q&A Benefit for 826NYC [Buffyfest]

The Hollywood Reporter quotes the Daisies, Dead Like Me and Wonderfalls creator as saying,

It's a tremendous honor to see 'Daisies' win in so many categories — and in the spirit of the show, win posthumously. Now can we please make the 'Pushing Daisies' movie?

While we're waiting for that, Daisies is set to return in a series published by DC Comics' Wildstorm imprint. Fuller, meanwhile, has left the world of genre TV behind after leaving Heroes for a second time this summer; he's currently developing Augusten Burroughs' novel Sellevision for NBC.

'Pushing Daisies' sees life after death [Hollywood Reporter]

There will be a huge amount of publicity when products like this hit the market. As soon as the media starts writing about 'My fantastic weekend with a sex doll', it will be like the iPhone all over again, but the queues will be longer.

I am firmly convinced there will be a huge demand from people who have a void in their lives because they have no one to love, and no one who loves them. The world will be a much happier place because all those people who are now miserable will suddenly have someone. I think that will be a terrific service to mankind.

Let's talk about sex ... with robots [Guardian]

Bruce Sterling, interviewed by Slashdot's readers in 1999, says that what we think of as community in meatspace is actually a collection of complex infrastructure, and we tend to understimate how vital that stuff is:

Q: It seems that many modern science fiction authors see the future as a time when society gives up on "physical" community in favor of technology. (i.e ruined govt, city states, corporate martial powers, etc..) Do you see this as an amplification of the state of community in today's world, or is it simply a convenient literary device?

A: I think the physical community was a "technology." Irrigation canals, harbors, army barracks, police stations, cathedrals, factories, clocks, forks, running water, that's all "technology."

There are a lot more ruined governments right now than there are sound ones. That's not a literary device. Go try living under a ruined government. Moscow right now — it's about the most William-Gibsonian landscape you are ever likely to see.

And more recently in 2006, BLDGBLOG talked to Jeff VanderMeer about the biggest mistake that science-fiction writers tend to make in thinking about cities and their infrastructure:

BLDGBLOG: How do you achieve – or hope to achieve – believability in an urban setting, giving readers something that (they think) might actually exist?

VanderMeer: As a novelist who is uninterested in replicating "reality" but who is interested in plausibility and verisimilitude, I look for the organizing principles of real cities and for the kinds of bizarre juxtapositions that occur within them. Then I take what I need to be consistent with whatever fantastical city I'm creating. For example, there is a layering effect in many great cities. You don't just see one style or period of architecture. You might also see planning in one section of a city and utter chaos in another. The lesson behind seeing a modern skyscraper next to a 17th-century cathedral is one that many fabulists do not internalize and, as a result, their settings are too homogenous.

Somehow these two quotes, juxtaposed, feel like fruitful ground for some urban world-building. Don't understimate the weight of the past — and don't forget just how much complex technology has gone into building a physical community. Any city, especially a future one, will be littered with the debris of past community-building, and will most likely be broken in some fascinating ways. In other words: don't make your fictional cities too tidy, or you'll be left with a sterile planned community.

Moscow decay image via Seriykotik1970 on Flickr.