Weird Familiarity
The amazing images which accompany the text efficiently carry out the job of endowing this story with a surreal sense of weirdness. The weirdness, however, is not the stuff of dream imagery. It is weirdly purposely situated within the context of the familiar. The narration adds detail and texture to this approach. “I saw something in the distance: a pink piece of cloth protruded from a sand dune, billowing in the wind like a small parachute. I walked over and poked it with my foot. It was a pair of panties.” The specifically of the metaphorical parachute being small and the literal revelation of it being underwear is the texture in this example. Parachutes are not generally conceived as being so small and in fact are usually pictured as quite big. This scene taking place in the Mojave Desert is the essence of weird familiarity.
The Science of the Self
In addition to the first-person narrative account of the main character, there are occasional intrusions into the story by a secondary first-person narrator. His name is known—Walter—but all other important identifying information remains a mystery. What is known that he is well-versed in the technological advancements which have led to dystopic society portrayed in the story. Simile is used to convey that this technological advancement has a philosophical dimension to its innovation. “I suppose you still have the typical twentieth-century view of the whole thing. The self is situated in the brain somehow, like a small pilot in a cockpit behind your eyes… Maybe you don’t even put it into words, but we both know that you’re thinking about an archetypical soul. You believe in an invisible ghost.” As the narrative plays out, it will be revealed that the cause of the collapse of society is virtual reality program that began as military technology. The program allowed for the complete control of enormous drones by pilots who were tiny by comparison. The drones fought the battles of a war without putting the lives of soldiers in jeopardy.
Defining Awe
Trying to define the experience of awe is not easy. It is experiential and almost requires a connotative definition to convey the full emotional range of that experience. The narrator meets the challenge upon confronting one of those mammoth drones. “I was impressed. Like when you suddenly become aware that you’ve walked into the wrong part of the woods and come face-to-face with a gigantic wild animal.” The simile is not universal, of course, since it carries the requirement of actually having come face to face with a large wild animal. It is effective, however, because even if not experience personally, most have experienced the situation second-hand through movies or TV.
Living in Dystopia
Dystopia is often defined as the opposite of utopia. In practice, however, it is really more than that because while it may be the opposite of idealistic perfection, it is also a subversion of everyday reality. “In the real world, everything was backward now. We were the fascinating growth, the insane—the only sick souls in a healthy world.” The narrator puts this idea of living in dystopic conditions into context through metaphor. The subversion of the past is made visceral with the reference to normality becoming some sort of malignant growth.
Upside-Downness
The reference to the world being backwards in the above example lends the new normal a sense of things in opposition to expectations. In addition to being backwards, it is also situated as an upside-down world. “The car moved through the pitch-black desert night like a submarine in a deep-sea trench.” The image put across by this metaphor of comparing the deepest part of the ocean to the driest parts of land serves to foster the relentless tone of the story that while things have completely changed in this new reality, the thing themselves are still the same. Cars and submarines both still exist, but they longer feel completely separated. The world is still the world it always was, but everything is out-of-sync, recognizable and familiar but somehow recognizable and unfamiliar. As if it were a virtual reality and this experience is visually punctuated by the accompanying artwork.
