onjapanesecyborgs

cyberpunk, science fiction, japanese literature, visual studies, and other things an academic working on japanese science fiction research finds interesting (find more wordy posts at on japanese cyborgs @ wordpress)

[70sscifiart]

A $2.4 Million Art Auction Hints At Collectors' Growing Interest In Retro Sci-Fi Art

I wrote a new article at Forbes: Retro sci-fi art sales are breaking record after record at auctions, showing a rising collector interest in science fiction art.

The auction sales record for works by James Allen St. John, Michael Whelan, Paul Lehr, and Frank R. Paul were all broken in one auction last week.

[onjapanesecyborgs]

fascinating trend!

[onjapanesecyborgs]

My Godzilla bibliography is available at Oxford Bibliographies!

If you're not familiar with Oxford Bibliographies, they're scholar created and peer-reviewed annotated bibliographies on a vast array of different subjects. While the number of articles that relate to Japanese media/culture and literature are pretty thin, they're expanding daily and even without a subscription I think can be useful preliminary research tools.

[inu1941-1966]

SFシリーズ　「われはロボット」I, Robot  by Isaac Asimov  1971

illustration: taizo IWAI 岩井泰三

Astounding Science Fiction  October 1953 

illustration: Frank Kelly Freas

QUEEN  "News of the World"  1977

[onjapanesecyborgs]

It’s been a while, but I just stumbled across Nerdwriter’s lovely video about SF artwork. While the academic in me wishes he’d mentioned the lurid early covers were in those bright pulsing shades in part because of the printing process, the sf art fan agrees wholeheartedly with the way he closes the vid talking about art that lives in your house, on your desk, in your hands.

[gurafiku]

[onjapanesecyborgs]

The Japanese Censorship Collection contains 1,327 marked-up copies of censored monographs and galley proofs for approximately 1,100 titles, mostly from the 1920s and 1930s. They include copies submitted by publishers for examination by censors in the Home Ministry of the Japanese imperial government as well as books lawfully confiscated by the ministry and local authorities for censor review. The practice of censorship were carried...

[onjapanesecyborgs]

"The Altered Shall Inherit the Earth: Biopower and the Disabled Body in Texhnolyze"

Now appearing in SFS #134: Nolan Boyd notes in "The Altered Shall Inherit the Earth: Biopower and the Disabled Body in Texhnolyze" that the anime series Texhnolyze (2003) is set in the underground city of Lux, where the human body’s ability to heal and repair itself has degraded. Those who wield power and can afford it have their amputated limbs replaced with advanced robotic prosthetics in a process known as texhnolyzation. The disabled body is many things in this world: a marker of class, a political cause, the locus of religious zealotry, and the symbol of humanity’s decline. The disabled body within this text is deeply enmeshed in biopolitical systems that organize power. By examining the flow of power throughout the series among the three leading groups in the city, the medical and scientific discourse surrounding texhnolyzation, and the violent actions of the Class, the city’s elite, Boyd traces the operation of different forms of biopower and examine the series’ relation to the disabled body and to the prosthetic technology of texhnolyzation. He argues that Texhnolyze resists ableist cultural and medical narratives as he examines how it engages with problematic representations of posthuman ideologies.

[onjapanesecyborgs]

"Monstrous Motherhood and Evolutionary Horror in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction"

Now appearing in SFS #134: Raechel Dumas's "Monstrous Motherhood and Evolutionary Horror in Contemporary Japanese Science Fiction" examines how the reproductive female body has been deployed in contemporary Japanese evolutionary horror to connote the counter-hegemonic potential of postmodern identity and social formations. In particular, it focuses on two novels—Hideaki Sena’s Parasite Eve and Ken Asamatsu’s Queen of K’n-yan—published in the mid-1990s as Japan was undergoing dramatic social, political, and economic transformation. Dumas's analysis of Eve examines the monstrous mother as an articulation of neoconservative anxieties concerning the subordination of patriarchal paradigms to the maternal principle. Her reading of K’n-yan focuses on the monstrous mother as a metaphor for the violent underpinnings of the contemporary state and as a signal of the urgent need for Japan to acknowledge its wartime past beyond the prevailing rhetoric of Japanese victimhood and to curb its compulsion toward renewed violence as a means of national rehabilitation.

[11200]

[onjapanesecyborgs]

ah SF Magazine, I’d know your covers anywhere. And that beautiful, mangled, yet comprehensible tagline

[dummy-kanji]

[burning-stmandard-deactivated20]

Expo ‘70 Osaka

[sesiondemadrugada]

Tsutomu Nihei.

[onjapanesecyborgs]

弐瓶 勉 [Tsutomu Nihei]’s stunning landscapes

[onjapanesecyborgs]

Ohayo (オハヨウ) Satoshi Kon

[space-alice]

Hitoshi Ikematsu 

Book jacket illustration, 1984

[onjapanesecyborgs]

When the Posthuman looks back: Oshii Mamoru’s Innocence

While Sharilyn Orbaugh’s discussion of Oshii’s two films in the Ghost in the Shell cycle points out that Oshii is interested in technologies of seeing, and in particular we see the world through mediated visual overlays (Batou’s cyber vision, Kusanagi’s infrared sights, etc.) in Innocence the posthuman consistently stares the camera in the face. 

In first appearance of gynoids, when Batou is deciding whether to kill the malfunctioning and murderous pleasure gynoid, she backs herself into a wall, pulls open her clothes, then her skin, and her chest erupts from the inside. Last, but in no way the least, her face had been turned to the side, but she turns to stare at Batou and the camera (one of the first times -- but not the only time --Batou is aligned with the camera in a kind of masculinist centering of the gaze), and her face-panels open up to reveal the mechanics inside (see my post from a couple of days ago). This same reveal of the tech-under-the-skin occurs in Togusa’s ghost-hack hallucination - but this time it’s Batou’s face that splits open to reveal it’s circuitry. Now there’s a long discussion to be had about how this scene is both hallucination and yet is entirely true, but that’s for another post. For now note that the camera is set over Togusa’s shoulder, and Batou reveals himself by looking straight at US.  

Togusa’s own puppet doppleganger does the same thing in an earlier scene. This continued positioning is neither unconscious nor innocent - Oshii deliberately makes us exchange gazes with the posthuman throughout the film, using a focus on posthuman eyes looking back out of the frame in order to create a sense of unease, to implicate the audience in the destruction of that innocence, in order to remind us of the stakes of our fascination with mechanical reproduction. From the arm of the diagnostic bot in the morgue (the first frame of this post), to the face of another gynoid encased in some kind of a preservative sack in that same morgue (the second frame), to the wall of hanging gynoid bodies that are watching us from behind Togusa’s shoulder, artificial life is watching us. 

The final frame of this post is from the sequence of shots that introduce the gynoid army on the factory boat that Batou and Kusanagi team up to fight. They are being programmed with military protocols and almost ready to fight, and we see them here in rows of staring, haunting, eery, almost-hostility. They are getting ready to attack, but only because we wrote the programs that enable them to do so.

[onjapanesecyborgs]

A Love Story for the Ages: Batou & Gabriel

In Oshii Mamoru’s Innocence the posthuman aren’t just represented by the gynoids or humanoid-cyborgs. Batou’s dog Gabriel is both the most humanizing figure in the film, and the cause that leads to Batou’s own cyberhack (because he’s going to buy dog food when his infection manifests). 

Gabriel is not just any dog, however, he’s a clone. Manufactured and produced by human technological intervention he’s evidence that the post- doesn’t always need to be structured and defined as humanoid. 

His relationship with Batou is ridiculously sweet. Stoic Batou rarely shows expression throughout the film, whether he’s gunning down mobsters or reuniting with the new form of Major Kusanagi. But his rigid and implacable features soften when he’s cuddling up with his dog. We see him at his most vulnerable - with bare feet - in his kitchen heating up the special brand of dog food and adding vitamins to Gabriel’s food. 

Twice during the film their reunion is the clear source of joy and also articulates the film’s return to “normal” for Batou. The first is after the ghost hack of Batou’s brain scrambles his perceptions and leaves him shooting up a convenience store. He’s stopped by another member of Section 9, and we cut to him waking up learning he has a new robot arm, perhaps replacing the very last flesh-based appendage he has. As soon as Gabriel enters Batou’s attempts to get used to his new body are ignored/dropped, and he enfolds his fuzzy friend in his arms. The second is at the end of the film, after the gynoids and children are rescued and Batou and Togusa return to Togusa’s house. Togusa reunites with his daugher and there’s a clear visual parallel to Batou reuniting with Gabriel (whose paw he waves at Togusa’s daughter in the last frames).

On a meta-textual level, Gabriel haunts a variety of advertisements and visual spaces in the mis-en-scene. All dog food is branded with Gabriel’s image, including a billboard for dog food that Batou drives past. Batou even drinks a beer with a basset hound on the label. In the hacker Kim’s Chinese Gothic castle, Gabriel’s face (along with a series of other animals) is superimposed on a revolving globe, as if to remind the viewer that the inhabitants and owners of the earth are not only humans. 

A cute note - Gabriel is based on Oshii Mamoru’s dog basset-hound Gabriel, who often makes appearances in Oshii’s movies. 

[onjapanesecyborgs]

On Oshii’s Chinese Gothic

In honor of my presentation on Innocence at SFRA 2017 yesterday, some screenshots from the amazing, beautiful, haunting film.  

Oshii calls the architectures of his imaginary cityscapes in Ghost in the Shell: Innocence the “Chinese Gothic” style. Although sf fans will probably recognize his citation of Blade Runner’s city in the industrial spires of buildings rising through an orange-fog, the baroque details and flying buttresses also recall everything from classical Chinese temples to the form of Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris. Oshii builds a hybrid city space -- not of “old” mixed with “new” but rather new technologies mixing traditional forms in new ways.