The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

however, it has the ability to observe its higher processes occurring, due to the mechanical nature of its body. The digient is unique in that ithas the potential to inwardly adjust its mental representation of what it perceives, as its consciousness is not contained in a fragile, physicalconstruct.The Philosophy of Mind of Vernor Vinge’s Tine AliensMark BiswasUC RiversideThis paper explores the minds of Vernor Vinge’s tine aliens from his novels, A Fire Upon the Deep and The Children of the Sky. How wouldbeings, composed of separate organisms yet united by telepathy, form a philosophy of mind? Would they gravitate to a materialistic or dualisticphilosophy? The tines are an interesting species to pose this question because they have extreme aspects of each. For example,“broodkenners” are tasked with creating individuals of four or five compatible members united by telepathy, as well as choosing pups to joinindividuals who have lost members. They are, in essence, in the business of building souls, and this “constructing” lends itself to a materialisticphilosophy. However, in an opposing sense, the material body is less important for the tines––over the course of their lifetimes, they losemembers and add replacements, but despite this, the “essence” of their individuality remains. I will argue that it is the varying philosophies ofmind in the texts, which are preexisting beliefs held––sometimes irrationally and despite evidence to the contrary––which sparks conflict.Beliefs aren’t only held by the tines, of course. Humans place value on their single bodies that tines do not; as such, they find the tines’treatment of discarded members––not much different from the way humans treat cut hair––appalling. In all cases--tines, tropicals, andhumans––characters exhibit cultural blinders, derived from their own philosophy of mind, which prohibit them to comprehend the other’spoint of view.*******Saturday March 24, 2012 10:30-12:00 p.m.114. (SF) Evolution, Rhetoric, and Revision in H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine PineChair: John RiederUniversity of Hawai’i-MānoaMonstrous Morlocks and Angelic Eloi: Reading the Evolutionary Signposts in Charles Darwin's Voyage of the Beagle and H. G. Wells’ TimeMachineLisa SwanstromFlorida Atlantic UniversityIn 1839 Charles Darwin publishes the Voyage of Beagle, a narrative account of his five-year journey around the world. Nearly sixty years afterthat, a mysterious stranger known only as the "Time Traveler" steps aboard a strange and motley contraption in order to explore the distantfuture in H.G. Wells' Time Machine. While the two works are not perfect parallels, a careful reading of Wells' book reveals Darwin's influence,especially in the way the Voyage of Beagle evolves from the traditional sea yarn, a hyperbolic adventure medium that Darwin adopts andchallenges. With its departure from England, its encounter with the then-exotic environments of Tierra del Fuego and Tahiti, and with Darwin'striumphant return to England, where he is quickly elected to the Royal Society on the basis of his scientific discoveries at sea (Brown and Nevexi), the Voyage of the Beagle is a quintessential nautical adventure. And the Time Machine, while it does not literally embark upon a body ofwater, uses the metaphor of the sea to express its more speculative voyage through the ages. The Time Traveler, for example, at various pointsuses the stars to chart his navigation; he also has encounters in an exotic land (his own, but 800,000 years in the future) and meets strange"races"--the frightful Morlocks and the harmless Eloi. Additionally, he must endure a period of doldrums when the Morlocks hijack his vehiclebefore he can return to his own time.The Morlocks’ Raw Deal: De-monstrous Rhetoric in The Time MachineLucas HarrimanUniversity of MiamiThe true monster of H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine—by which I refer, of course, to the Time Traveller himself—tells a powerful story. The talehe relates to his audience of late-Victorian British professionals is, in the words of one Wells scholar, “a story that lies like the truth” (Crossley19). Since the Time Traveller’s subjective interpretations of the far distant future present the only truth of that reality for his hearers and for us,his eventual audience, those impressions prove tenacious in their ability to shape our judgments. One of the most prevalent examples of thisphenomenon involves the question of Weena’s gender or, more accurately, the lack of question in most readings. Although the Time Travellermerely guesses she is a “woman, as I believe it was” (66), his guess becomes reified, both in his own construction of Weena’s role in hisnarrative as the ideal Victorian woman and in the tendency of nearly every subsequent reader to miss the ambiguity of this “queer friendship.”Wells’s text provides a perfect site in which to interrogate the relationship between rhetorical demonstration and monstrosity, its etymologicalcousin. The potential power of fiction to “lie like the truth” can have monstrous results, as revealed most clearly in imperial representations ofcolonial spaces. This paper will interrogate the sources of our tendency to view the Morlocks as monsters. When we probe the various thingswe “know” about the Morlocks—they are cannibals, they mean the Time Traveller harm, they are the “inhuman sons of men” to complementthe gentle and angelic Eloi—we realize that all of these traits are as fictitious as Weena’s femininity. Viewed objectively, Morlocks are merelycurious weaklings, ruthlessly massacred by Wells’s blundering intruder. Yet, as film adaptations of the novel reveal in the extreme, readers arelikely to uncritically mimic the Time Traveller’s prejudiced demonstrations