Darn daylight savings time--I got up at my normal time and was already late---I only have 15 minutes till I have to leave for work.*
(It snowed and the streets are icy, so I'm busing again...)
First: I'd never seen this collage of captains Kirk & Janeway before--fun! (Star Trek: Voyager, with Capt. Janeway, takes place 100 years after Kirk's Star Trek: The Original Series.)
Second, and mostly, I'm going to jot down some questions about Murderbot for myself here.
These and yesterday's notes are kinda random, not very coordinated, preliminary musings...
A big question:
What do I think about all the VIOLENCE as Entertainment in Murderbot?
How is it presented/handled?
Do I enjoy it, and if so, why?
It's largely cartoon outer-space/Wild West violence--or, a mashup of those like Firefly-- (I don't like how that glamorizes it either.)
(Hm, what was the role of Firefly androids/bots? I can't remember... AI was definitely part of it---at least in non-human/physical forms. Code, and the like.)
Are the Murderbot stories different? (Murderbot itself is not---it only kills "bad humans"--what are "bad humans"?)
Is criticism of the violent world it lives in implied?
(Yes. . . . How?)
Question of the Series: "WHO GETS TO BE A PERSON?"
Like the Star Trek Next Gen episode "The Measure of a Man" where Data's personhood is on trial. The prosecution says Data is a TOASTER.
Cue up the Cylons in Battlestar Galactica being called toasters.
RACE: The future is multiracial, but these are not books about that.
Is the implication that race/ethnicity makes no difference at all in the future?
GENDER: Is the implication biological sex/gender makes no difference at all? It seems so.
*Where is the testosterone?
Have future humans been physically altered?
Many of them indeed are "augmented humans", or they have implants, or they constantly wear tech, like we moderns carry our phones.
All of this is gradually revealed.
Murderbot never bothers to explain the norms of its world---I love that---we don't either---like Borges said, the Quran never mentions camels!
Q: VISUALS ("How did they ever make a movie of Lolita?")
How could you reproduce in a VISUAL form (film or illustrations) the "gender/race surprise reveal" of the books?
It would be easy the first time:
In the opening scene, everyone's wearing space suits,
Ratthi is a man with an Asian name--possibly related to the Rath/Rathi tribe in India??? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rath_tribe
Murderbot is... what?
My sense of Murderbot shifts over time, as I read the books---visuals would remove that, would have to choose ONE representation.
(It seems, anyway, that Murderbot doesn't change its face.)
That could happen over and over though, with secondary characters:
For instance, the hired killers show up in suits.
(I read the most violent characters as male, but often they're female.)
Film/graphic novels just have different powers than text. I would miss the experience of being called up short in my automatic identifications,
but Murderbot would make a terrific visual series.
And, a BIG QUESTION I always ask people that I would ask myself, here:
What is it about YOU that makes you like/engage with these stories???
Quick answer: I love feeling my neural network stretch, and these books make that happen.
But so would learning Spanish, and I don't do that.
So, what's in these stories, in particular, that attracts me so much?
_____________________
* P.S. I took the later bus. I could blame daylight savings and miss the 10 a.m. meeting. Not only did I want to keep writing this out (not that I finished...), but the meetings are stupid.
Basically they are Big Boss's Prayer Meeting.
Luckily, they are short.
