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Me and Alice

November 30, 2017May 8, 2024torforge1 Comment

There have been many books written about Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its companion volume Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found by Lewis Carroll: exploring their meaning—psychological, political, mathematical—and about their author, Charles L. Dodgson (1832-1898), a mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon, and photographer—and his relationship with the model for his heroine, Alice Liddell.

I’ve loved Carroll’s two classics since I was young. I wouldn’t say I’m obsessed, but I’ve been a collector of illustrated versions for many years, especially appreciating the enchanting illustrations of books by fine artists such as Mervyn Peake, Arthur Rackham, Barry Moser, Ralph Steadman, Lisbeth Zwerger, Salvador Dali, Rodney Matthews, Anne Bachelier, Maggie Taylor, and so many others, some relatively unknown.

But I must admit that my vision of “Alice” herself has been subverted by the 1985 movie Dreamchild, in which the adult Alice Liddell, who is visiting New York, flashes back to her childhood, where we see the dark-haired little girl (seen in photographs), who inspired the tales and is very different from the long-haired blonde image created in John Tenniel’s ubiquitous illustrations. In that movie, which is very much about the relationship between Dodgson and Liddell and how his creation of her fictional counterpart might have influenced her life as an adult, there are darkly magical partially-animated interstitial sections with amazingly creepy Wonderland inhabitants imagined by Jim Hensen. In fact, it might be the creatures in Carroll’s works that are even more likeable than Alice herself that bring readers back over and over again to the land beyond the looking glass.

Everyone is familiar with the 1951 animated musical Walt Disney version of Alice in Wonderland, which took him about twenty years to get off the ground, and made an indelible mark on child’s psyches with its colorful renderings of the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, White Rabbit, March Hare, the Hookah-smoking caterpillar, and one of my personal favorites Dinah, the kitten.

In 1971, Czech filmmaker Jan Švankmajer made a short animated film based on the Jabberwocky, and in 1987 made the full length feature, the darkly surreal Alice, which in its original language was called Something from Alice. Its tone was entirely different from the Disney.

In 2010 and 2016 Director Tim Burton interpreted the two volumes in his own inimitable way, and love them or hate them, they did create a whole new set of images that one can savor. Then She Fell, a marvelous immersive performance piece created by the theater company Third Rail Projects continues to play in New York City since 2012 demonstrates how strongly Carroll’s work continues to be loved.

So with all this in mind, I was so very happy to be able to gather round other “Alice” lovers and put together an anthology dedicated to the girl whose adventures have inspired and continued to inspire us—and to her creator.

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Author Features

Two Contributors to Iraq + 100 Reflect on Science Fiction in Arabic Literature

September 5, 2017November 1, 2017torforge1 Comment

From contributor Anoud, author of “Kahramana”

I didn’t think too much about Sci-Fi’s absence from Arabic literature or the fact that I was quite ignorant in Arabic Sci-Fi until I was approached to contribute to Iraq + 100. I’d read Jules Verne’s Journey to the Centre of the Earth as a child, as well as superhero comics translated into Arabic, but as an adult, I can only recall reading Orwell’s 1984 and Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad in that genre. You must have noticed by now that, with the exception of Saadawi, none of these titles are Arabic.

The debate in Arab media about the lack of Sci-Fi in Arab literature attributes it to the Arab world hitting a slump when it comes to scientific advances and inventions in the 20th century, in comparison to other parts of the world. Stories of violence and ongoing conflict stomp science when it comes to news headlines. Some Arab writers blame it on religious taboos where—in some countries—imagination offends the clergy as a defiance of nature, a challenge to god. I remember when I was 8, my school teacher in Baghdad told us that the NASA “Challenger” space shuttle exploded because NASA were challenging god. My parents snickered when I told them but you get the idea.

Since getting involved with Iraq + 100, I have been making more of an effort to explore this genre in contemporary Arabic fiction. My reading list includes Utopia by Ahmed Khaled Towfik, published in 2008, and Noura Al Noman’s Ajwan, which won the 2013 Etisalat Award for Young Adult Fiction.

When asked to contribute to the anthology I struggled. It was just too much headspace and I didn’t know where to start. Normally I look at things I’ve lived or seen and dissect them. I can paint a vivid picture of sights, smells, and sounds of a market place in Baghdad, but ask me to imagine it with time travel, aliens, a post apocalypse and I’d not be able to get past that first four lines. I felt strange when I read some of the other writers’ contributions like “Kuszib,” “Nujefa” or “Baghdad Syndrome”. It was a good kind of strange. I’d never imagined Iraq that way and it was as if the other writers just opened up a new portal into Iraq for me, and it was kind of exciting. I find my story “Kahramana” as more futuristic than full on Sci-Fi, if that makes sense.

I’m optimistic that with a little more nourishment more Iraqi writers will turn to Sci-Fi, fantasy, and magical realism. Both as a way to take a break from our miserable realities, and as a way to safely mock and critique the status quo and those in power without seeming too obvious. I’m glad Iraq + 100 started this and I’m both eager and terrified of how the Iraqi readers will respond to the anthology. Will we excite? Offend? Both? Time will tell.

From contributor Ibrahim Al-Marashi, author of “Najufa”

Contributing to Hassan Blasim’s project Iraq + 100 appealed to me, given I’m Iraqi-(American), a historian of sci-fi, and a consumer of sci-fi as well.

As a historian, I was intrigued by Hassan’s lament in the introduction that there is not a strong science fiction and fantasy literary tradition in the modern Middle East. This dearth of genre fiction is surprising given the history of the region. One Thousand and One Nights, the quintessential fantasy collection, was first compiled and published in the Middle East. I also found elements of proto-speculative fiction in the works of the Sufi scholar Ibn Arabi from Murcia (today’s Spain). In his Futuhat al-Makiyya, written around 1238, he describes his travels to “vast cities (outside earth), possessing technologies far superior than ours.”

I have long been fascinated by modern works of science fiction and fantasy as the genre developed in English. H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds was a commentary on the British role of the extermination of the local population of Tasmania, while the Godzilla franchise and the post-apocalyptic genre of Japanese manga, such as Akira, are imaginative spaces to deal with real trauma: the dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945.

My contribution to this anthology is “Najufa,” a story based on my first trip to my family’s ancestral city of Najaf as an adult with my father and mother in 2010, the site of the shrine of Imam Ali. My use of droids in my story was inspired by the fact that cell phones are not allowed within the confines of any shrine, since terrorists use cell phones to detonate explosives remotely. Visitors and pilgrims have to check their cell phones outside the shrine, like a coat check. Within the Najaf shrine I remembered how the younger pilgrims became fidgety, anxious to see if they had any missed calls or texts. I felt a disconnect between the spirituality of the place and something as mundane as worrying about a missed call. This phenomenon is no different from life anywhere else in the world. We are living in a techno-addicted world. But in Iraq, whether it is a terrorist or a pilgrim, the phone had become an extension of ourselves, and it was in Najaf that I realized we are essentially cyborgs, human-techno hybrids, where the phone might as well be an extension of ourselves.

My story was also inspired by the writer Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (made into the film Blade Runner), and the French thinker Jean Baudrillard, whose oeuvre provided the inspiration for the Matrix franchise. I found those works bring up philosophical issues of how one determines reality in an age of digital and virtual reality. My story sought to bring our current techno-phobias, and combine them with Iraq’s real problems that began after the 2003 invasion by U.S. forces.

Collectively, the authors of Iraq + 100 project their ideas into Iraq’s future, which highlights Iraq’s reality in the present. That is what attracts me to speculative fiction. While as a genre it is escapist in nature, it simultaneously brings our current reality into greater focus. Sci-fi reveals our anxieties of the convergence between science, automated realities, and what it means to be human. Science fiction is a reflection of our socio-political facts.

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Dolls Aren’t Just For Children

March 2, 2015May 14, 2024torforge5 Comments

Written by Ellen Datlow

Dolls, perhaps more than any other object, demonstrate just how thin the line between love and fear, comfort and horror, can be. They are objects of love and sources of reassurance for children, coveted prizes for collectors, sources of terror and horror in numerous movies, television shows, books, and stories. Dolls fire our collective imagination, for better and—too often, for worse. From life-size dolls the same height as the little girls who carry them, to dolls whose long hair can “grow” even longer, to Barbie and her fashionable sisters, dolls do double duty as child’s play and the focus of adult art and adult fear.

The Doll Collection, Introduction

I’m a doll lover. I admit it. I collect whole dolls and parts of dolls: heads and arms and legs and torsos. Voodoo dolls (I used to go down to New Orleans every few years and each time would discover different styles); three-faced dolls, the kind whose faces change from sleeping to smiling to crying with a twist of a little gadget at the top of the head; kewpie dolls, the adorable creatures invented by Rose O’Neill; Japanese kokeshi dolls, made of wood with painted faces and bodies. A changeable Little Red Riding Hood/wolf/grandma doll given to me by a friend. A two headed Chernobyl kitty made for me by that same person, inspired by my account of the tour I took to the infamous nuclear accident site in Ukraine, and given to me by my class, the summer I taught Clarion West. The next time I taught, several years later, my students each made me a doll on a stick modeled after themselves. My love of dolls is no secret. Anyone who enters my apartment can witness that interest.

Why do I collect weird dolls? No idea. I’ve recently found photographs of me as a young child with a doll I was given by my grandparents. She’s pretty normal. I remember owning a knock off of the popular “Ginny” doll of the 1950s. Again, nothing weird about her. My mom wouldn’t buy me or my sister Barbie dolls—she thought they were too mature for kids, but also they and their clothing were expensive.

So I never owned a Barbie doll—until an enterprising friend created a three-faced Barbie for me: Piranha Barbie (with a mouth made of a wicked-looking sea shell), Vampire Barbie (a couple of very pointy canine teeth) , and the dog-faced girl (not adapted from a Barbie, but instead a baby doll). I’ve also been privileged to visit Japan’s largest private collection of Barbie Dolls, owned by a Tokyo businessman.

I personally am not creeped-out by most dolls (except perhaps the very disturbing, lifelike dolls created by Japanese artist Katan Amano), but I know many people who are. Why might that be? Dolls often reside in “the uncanny valley” a phrase that refers to a theory developed by robotics professor Masahiro Mori in 1970: it posits that objects with features that are human-like, that look and move almost, but not quite, like actual human beings, elicit visceral feelings of revulsion in many people. The “valley” in question refers to the change in our comfort with these objects—our comfort level increases as the objects look more human, until, suddenly, they look simultaneously too human and not quite human enough, and our comfort level drops off sharply, only to rise again on the other side of the valley when something appears and moves exactly like a human being.

Follow Ellen on Twitter at @EllenDatlow, on Facebook, or visit her website.