in which Kieran is right
Blade Runner and Firefly-Serenity both imagine bilingual futures, but Blade Runner's is English-Japanese and Serenity's is English-Chinese, illustrating a shift in American economic anxieties over the intervening 23 years.
Zhen duh sh tyen tsai.
Blade Runner and Firefly-Serenity both imagine bilingual futures, but Blade Runner's is English-Japanese and Serenity's is English-Chinese, illustrating a shift in American economic anxieties over the intervening 23 years.
Zhen duh sh tyen tsai.
4 Comments:
Hey -- that's a great point....
I imagined -- somewhat without articulating it -- that the difference had something to do with different modes of high-population density: Chinese if you have the whole sky and its stars to terra-form; Japanese if you're trapped in LA because the rest of the coast is a nuclear wasteland (true more of book than of movie). And our wars with Japan are over, whereas Firefly/Serenity is about tensions between the U.S. and China from the Wild West context Whedon brings in to the show so well all the way to the nuclear age. But I think you're right -- probably at the deepest level it's economic anxiety.
I keep meaning to ask you if you've read, or know, Mandelbrot's (he of the Mandelbrot set) (Mis)behabiour of Markets? It looks great -- I've just ordered it -- but I wondered what you thought.
J here.
What about A Clockwork Orange's fusion of English and Russian?
Absolutely. We can always bring in the econo-politik, too: Clockwork's authoritarian Russians-won-the-Cold-War managed economy; Bladerunner's corporate government; Firefly's bureau-military complex clashing with loosely networked entrepreneurial outlaw startups...
Boy howdy. If I were an academic with time on my hands, I'd have quite a conference paper.
Save this idea for when you have TIME to write that bestselling book.
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