Otherworld's "Down the Rocky Road and All the Way to Bedlam"

Hey readers, you may have noticed that Positron has been pretty quiet lately—moving offices and lots of disruptions in my normal routine. But! There's lots of good stuff going on in Chicago, and I would be remiss not to direct you to go check out Otherworld Theatre's Down the Rocky Road and all the Way to Bedlam in its final weekend.

Weird & Wonderful- We Who Are About To...

Much-delayed notes, part 1! Wiscon happened and absorbed me into its beautiful hive-mind for a while; so now I'm playing some catch-up.

Way back in the end of April, City Lit's Weird & Wonderful club discussed "We Who Are About To...", the 1976 novella by Joanna Russ.

Super-brief notes and total spoilers below:

Think Galactic: The Girl in the Road

Meeting once again amidst the erudite shelves and, if our cellular devices are to be believed, Faraday-cage-lined walls of Myopic Books, the ornately robed members of Think Galactic cast back their cowls, exchanged a few cryptic, sweeping gestures, then sat at the circle to discuss Monica Byrne's 2014 novel "The Girl in the Road".

Girls and roads plural both, as it turns out. Byrne's novel weaves together two different stories. Mariama is a refugee girl whose travels take her to Ethiopia, while Meena is a young Indian woman who, fleeing violence, decides to walk "The Trail"--an ocean-spanning tidal generator that stretches from Mumbai to Djibouti.

We none of us quite knew how to summarize our reaction to this book. It's well written--with the caveat that neither narrator is completely reliable. And the characters are well-drawn--but we found it a little hard to sympathize with them nonetheless.

It's definitely a powerful book, and--one doesn't want to say haunting, but definitely a little hard to get out of the mind. One can easily see why it was awarded the Tiptree. More of our thoughts and, most definitely, SPOILERS, below.

Silence and Bright Flashing Lights: A Brief Look at Irrationality in Earthsea and VALIS

John Lodder

At least one version of my paper starts with a joke that if Aristotle secretly wrote science fiction and fantasy as well as philosophy, and the scholastics recovered it and translated it along with De Anima and the Nicomachean Ethics and everything else, would we still have the same persistent notion today of humans as the distinctly rational animals despite the ancient and fantastical stories of space aliens and talking dragons, of intelligences human and otherwise?

Chicago Nerds: Dark Orbit

Just wrapped up the Chicago Nerds' discussion of Carolyn Ives Gilman's "Dark Orbit" (2015). A good discussion of a book that the group mostly enjoyed, with a few reservations. Most of us found it a pretty quick, engrossing read.

"Dark Orbit" takes place in the same universe as some of Gilman's other work. In discussion, we noted that is a distinctly Leguinean universe--humanity colonized many planets so long ago we've forgot about them, humanity somewhat separated into different tribes as a result  (doesn't seem like a species-level change as in Le Guin), there's instantaneous communication. In "Dark Orbit", a group of researchers is exploring a planet with many dark-matter related anomalies when they discover a settlement of blind humans living underground, whose different perception of reality may have granted them some unusual abilities. Possible spoilers below!

Classic Sci-Fi: Woman on the Edge of Time

The era of the Mad River Grille meetings of the Classic Sci-Fi Meetup appears to have passed--another private event forced us to relocate again, this time just a building or two over to Vaughan's Pub, and we'll be trying out a new (hopefully good, long-lasting location) next time.

Still, a lovely patio on a Chicago summer, and a nice discussion of Marge Piercy's "Woman on the Edge of Time" (1976): definitely a bit of classic SF, this one particularly in the feminist SF tradition of the 60s/70s, often mentioned alongside work by Le Guin, Russ, or Atwood. The novel follows Consuelo Ramos, a woman who is (seemingly wrongfully) placed in a mental institution, and who is having (seemingly real, albeit psychic) visits to and from the future.

A couple points that we all agreed on: this is a hard book to read. Partially because it takes a while to really pick up, partially because it is about 30% utopia with attendant infodump-itis, but primarily because, emotionally, it's grim. Connie's experience being held against her will, misdiagnosed as an act of oppression, and the way that sexism, racism, and classism are magnified by being institutionalized all make for a rough read.