I have a very odd view on “Suspended Disbelief”. Obviously with any works of fiction you need to draw some kind of line somewhere of what is an acceptable “Suspended Disbelief”, and that depends on the context of the work and genre. For example, in the movie Frozen, I find it completely believable that Elsa has these special powers where she can manipulate ice, and I accept that as a part of my suspended disbelief. I find it completely absurd that the Kingdom of Arendelle has no kind of advisory council and a 16 year old princess is put solely in charge of the kingdom. My odd apprehensions to suspended disbelief played into how much I was able to enjoy and relate to the works we have read so far in class. For the purpose of this post, I will stick more to the settings/worlds of the books and less on the actual character’s actions.

I found Left Hand of Darkness to be very believable, in the sense of outer space science fiction. Le Guin set the entire book on another planet, thus pretty much anything on this planet fell under her set forth rules. The only piece of the work that humans from Earth really had to relate to was that Genly was from Earth and there was some bureaucratic society set up that recruited other planets to join them. Other than that we were on the planet Winter and anything to do with the androgyny of the people there was up to the Author’s discretion. I think that any person who writes science fiction stories about space or other worlds can get away with almost anything. In space or other worlds/dimensions there is almost no tie to our world, so whatever the author makes up must be accepted, it’s a world that they’re creating almost (if not entirely from scratch). So, even though I didn’t find the story to be incredibly interesting I had no problem accepting the other world that Le Guin was creating.

On the other had, Kindred bugged the hell out of me. It’s set in our world and is based entirely around this weird “time travel” ability. The time travel is never really explained, it seems to follow loose rules of Rufus and Dana having their lives endangered, but there are so many unexplained holes in how it works (why is time in one timeline different than the other, why does Kevin travel with Dana but Rufus doesn’t when he is grabbing her arm). The whole time travel thing really just seems like an ill-explained way to explore the concept of what would happen if 2 people from our time were sent back 150 years. There is also the theory of the butterfly effect that altering even one thing slightly in the past has drastic outcomes for the future. This whole concept is kind of ignored considering Dana kills someone and has deep interactions with many other people. The time travel was a driving force of the story of Kindred and I found it very difficult to believe in at a base level. I think that many authors who try to mix science fiction directly into our world can run into these issues. If people aren’t willing to accept some of their claims at a base level, then for those readers the story falls apart. And that is what happened with me reading Kindred.

Reading Handmaid’s Tale was actually kind of scary. I didn’t have to suspend any disbelief for this story. Nothing to me at all seemed like an absurd or even fictional claim. There was mass environmental pollution: currently happening. Negative health effects of pollution: currently happening. Religion persecution: currently happening. Oppression of women: currently happening. Really any “dystopian” aspect of this book has either happened in society or is currently happening. Maybe not for us in the US, and maybe not at the current level, but it was pretty real on a lot of levels. That’s why this was so believable to me, nothing was really fictional as much as just a twisting of our current truths. It reminded me of “The Road”, where the only real fiction was a nuclear fallout (which has happened in other places in the world). I think that we used “speculative fiction” in class and I believe that is a great description of this work. I didn’t have to even really suspend any disbelief because everything was just believable.

Here’s the soundcloud link below.

-Team Gale

One of the biggest things that stands out in the Left Hand of Darkness is the gender (or lack of) of the people living on Winter. For me this was the first time coming across any kind of american literature that addressed such topics. It may be that I am not incredibly well read in american works, however I think it is also the case the topic of transgender (or genderless) people has historically been somewhat taboo in american writing, and even television (you don’t see any transgender characters in Harry Potter). It has just been recently that transgender issues (and even homosexuality) has become acceptable to be expressed in popular mainstream television, thought it has obviously bene prevalent in less popular works for years. Modern Family and Orange is the New Black are two popular shows that come to mind initially.

I found it very interesting that as a kid I never came across any american works that dealt with these issues, but I have seen and read various Japanese anime/manga works that talk about these issues. Off the top of my head, Yu Yu Hakusho and Cowboy Bebop both have transgender characters that appear, Tokyo Ghoul and SAO both have characters who’s gender expression is not aligned with their sex. What was intriguing  to me is that these are popular shows targeted towards teenagers, and some of them were even around in the 90s. From this I have garnered that at least in Japanese Anime/Manga (and possibly the culture overall) the issues of gender were much more acceptable to be discussed in popular works and weren’t restricted to more obscure works.

Perhaps the most interesting piece of work where this appears is in Knights of Cydonia, an animated Netflix Original Series modeled after Japanese Anime. It is actually set in a somewhat dystopian society in which humans have almost been brought to extinction, and has a bunch of cool stuff going on (we’ve genetically changed ourselves to be able to photosynthesize so that we can conserve food resources). People still maintain male and female as the two genders, but there is also a 3rd neutral gender. Someone who is of the 3rd gender can choose to be male or female based on their partner. The series isn’t clear if this is a one time change, or if they can fluctuate back and forth. I thought this was pretty cool and was possibly even inspired by Left Hand of Darkness.