Well, it happened. I finally sat down to watch an episode of Doctor Who –an episode that Michael promised me was horrific enough to write about for my blog. And he was correct about that. The episode under examination, “The Girl in the Fireplace,” was at least moderately unnerving—I’ve seen scarier, of course, but it was pretty unsettling—but what excited me the most about the episode was the connection to other science fiction classics it provoked. I have become interested, to that end, in a prevalent motif that I see in contemporary/semi-contemporary science fiction: the fear of sacrificial embodiment. So what exactly do I mean by that? In a lot of contemporary science fiction, we’re afraid that our physical bodies will be sacrificed as vehicles to further technological progress. Underlying that fear, I think, is a perceived incongruence between the so-called “natural” body and the man-made technology that runs off it. But, to further explain my point, let me delve into three science fiction works that elucidate it: Doctor Who’s “The Girl in the Fire Place,” the popular classic The Matrix, and Black Mirror’s “Fifteen Million Merits.”
Continue reading ” Questions of Progress: Scary Sci-Fi Hits and the Sacrificial Human Body”
Men. Let me tell you. When it comes to instinctual animal pleasure, they just can’t control themselves. In fact, they’ll quickly forfeit home and hearth for the wiles of any given anonymous temptress. And don’t even get me started about women, man’s downfall, those brazen homewreckers who are quick to “break a boy just because [they] can,” as Fiona Apple sang in her 90’s hit, Criminal. Humanity. (Sigh). What a contestable, corrupt, lowly lot we are. We may as well abandon our attempts at monogamy, send our worst beings on a mission to Mars, and breed another world of insatiable, pleasure-seeking, polygamous – or cheating – inhabitants. At least, maybe, Earth can look comparatively moral. 
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