Michael Pons
My story has a handful of thru-lines with many of the concepts we’ve dealt with in our discussions and readings of both critical and creative material over the course of the semester. I would say that the chief interests of my piece in reference to our class are: Anzaldua’s ideas about Nagualismo (spiritual epistemology, transhumanism, conocimiento, etc.), questions of possible futures in the face of environmental collapse, and also questions of “progress” as tied to the Euro-modern telos of empire and technological progression.
The first and perhaps most apparent discussion that I considered when composing my story was the question of Nagualismo, both in my handling of spirituality as a legitimate source of truth, as well as my attempts to push the boundaries on what we consider to be “the future of humanity” when we talk about visionary fiction. Just like how Anzaldua makes the case for spiritualism being a legitimate center for epistemology in This Bridge we call Home, I wanted Mahu as a character to understand something fundamental about humanity because of his Mayan heritage and his exposure to something like the Popol Vuh through his grandmother (Anzaldua 542). In the story, Mahu suspects he know why it is the case that humans can be reduced into corn, because he understands that according to his grandmother humanity came from corn in the first place, when Q’uq’umatz and Tepeu created the first men (Popol Vuh 183). Abraham Quinn on the other hand represents the limits of empirical knowledge and traditionally rational forms of understanding, admitting to Mahu that he doesn’t quite understand why it works the way it does, just that its convenient and he’s going to take advantage of it. Empirical knowledge lags behind spiritual understanding in this exchange, though that is not necessarily always the case.
Another concept I tackled in my story was the notion of de-anthropomorphizing the human body, imagining the human being not as a distinct self but as enmeshed in the natural world, similar to Anzaldua and Zaytoun’s reading of Anzaldua. This, to me, goes hand in hand with my story’s proposed solution for how humanity continues to survive in the face of eco-collapse. I suggested in the collaborative intro that we take a “lateral step” in terms of our position in the natural world, perhaps choosing to reframe our concept of “us” when we think about continued survival. In Snowpiercer this would have been the polar bear eating the two children to survive, and in Qas Winaq it is Mahu asking the Quetzal serpent to turn humanity back into corn so that they can provide for the life in the solar system rather than taking from it. In this vision of future survival, we take a distinctly transhumanist perspective in that we are not choosing to value the “human form” to whatever degree we define that separately from other animals, but instead we choose to value life and subjectivity more broadly. In our discussed possible ending for Snowpiercer it is choosing to say “I’m okay with the polar bear eating the children, because the bear deserves an equal chance at survival and is just as intrinsically valuable as a subject as the humans are.” We establish a criteria that the perpetuation of life in all forms is a source of good, not just “human beings.”
The final issue that I showcase in my story is the issue of traditional views of “progress” and futurity that comes from a Euro-modernist telos/projection of historical arc. Many traditional science fiction narrative like to portray technological advancement as this intrinsic good that leads to other “intrinsic goods” like humanity colonizing other planets and spreading out among the stars. Movies like Star Wars and Star Trek, video games like Halo and Mass Effect, all point towards these ideas of progress as good things, and showcase futures for humanity that take distinctly western shapes in how they operate. Though my story does have some high science fiction aspects to it, I use the character of Abraham Quinn and the discovery of humanity’s nature as a way to showcase the potentially devastating effects that technology and expansion can have when treated as ends in their own right. Unless explicitly serving a purpose that we’ve already decided is “good” technology can often lead to terrible things that create further issues for humanity than it fixes. Think of the H-Bomb, or plasticware and straws. I wanted my story to be a rejection of that Telos.
Overall, I think my story is largely about rejection of traditional arcs in sci-fi. I want to reject the idea of technology and expansion as progress, I want to reject the survival of the human form as something worth valuing over other forms of life, and I want to reject the idea that empirical knowledge takes precedence over spiritual attempts at understanding the universe. I think I largely achieve the things that I set out to do, but I also think I could make this piece significantly longer if I wanted to devote the time to making it a short novel or novella.
Visionary Fiction: Fugitive World-Making and Ethnofuturisms 