#actualstarposting

[olreid]

niall harrison on narrative structure in scifi for strange horizons

[olreid]

Hi! Sorry to bother you but I remember you mentioning a book a while ago set across three different time periods: mayan civilisation, present day and then a semi-dystopian future. What was it called? have a pleasant day 👍🏻

the actual star by monica byrne!

[olreid]

[ID: She buried her face in the back of Emelle's neck, smelled the lemon oil and lily perfume and mermaid brine all mixed together. She thought and thought. This alchemy will never happen again, she thought. Is this utopia? Is this transcendence? Are we happy? She heard Emelle groan and felt her tighten, so she crouched low, finding her rhythm and rocking with her, pressing her whole weight into her back, practical, skilled, working the problem. end ID]

the actual star by monica byrne

[ID 1: Kinesthetic memory is a way of “thinking through movements — at once remembered and reinvented — the otherwise unthinkable, just as dance is often said to be a way of expressing the unspeakable.” 

ID 2: Dances with things, too, are performative in that they constitute actions: they think, or more accurately, they are the act of thinking. Things script meaningful bodily movements, and these citational movements think the otherwise unthinkable. In the case of Burnett, a black rubber doll prompted a performance that cited Uncle Tom’s Cabin and, through that narrative, an ongoing history of racist viciousness and oppression. The white girl’s action of whipping performed ideas that the girl could not utter in words, as became clear when her mother asked her daughter to explain her actions. In reply, the normally articulate girl could but stammer, “I was — only just — pretending something.”

ID 3 & 4: Robert could have made such a statement without endangering himself, and such an articulation might have helped him to reach his goal of finding family members. The absence of such statement, therefore, suggests that the character did not consciously articulate the thought to himself in words. The singing of the hymn was the articulation of Robert’s idea; the singing was not an expression of a separately conceived, worded thought. end ID]

from racialized innocence by robin bernstein

[olreid]

[ID 1: The landscape is acting on us. We only consider kinetic action, not passive action, the elimination of all other possibilities. "Or," Ida said, "action done over such long periods of time that it's hard for us to see.

ID 2: I lean back on the sun-warmed rock, close my eyes, and listen. The glacier moves forward at a rate of less than one inch every hour. If I could train myself to listen at the same rate, one sound every hour, I would hear the glacier wash up against this rock island, crash like waves, and become water. end ID]

from the actual star by monica byrne and icefields by thomas wharton, respectively

[ID: Yet in order for representability to be achieved, the social or historical moment must somehow offer itself as a situation, allow itself to be read in terms of effects and causes, or problems and solutions, questions and answers. It must have reached a level of shaped complexity that seems to foreground some fundamental ill, and that tempts the social theorist into producing an overview organized around a specific theme. The social totality is always unrepresentable, even for the most numerically limited groups of people; but it can sometimes be mapped and allow a small-scale model to be constructed on which the fundamental tendencies and the lines of flight can more clearly be read. At other times, this representational process is impossible, and people face history and the social totality as a bewildering chaos, whose forces are indiscernible. end ID]

on unrepresentability.. from jameson's archaeologies of the future