Superhero Thought Experiments: Can Comics Provide Philosophical Insights?

This former graduate student is unintimidated by academic studies.  The idea that superheroes can provide insights into philosophy may sound strange to some. Yet I have an interest in quirky academic works that make forays into popular culture, and would like to encourage this behavior. The last time I blogged about an academic study that dealt with television, movies and comics, it was Speculative Blackness by André M. Carrington  which I was delighted to review here.  So I hoped to make some useful discoveries when I agreed to read and review Superhero Thought Experiments by Chris Gavaler and Nathaniel Goldberg. I received a digital copy free of charge from the publisher.

                       

When I looked at the authors' profiles on Goodreads, I discovered that they had contributed to two critical anthologies dealing with comics that interested me. The first is Superheroes and Philosophy: Truth, Justice and the Socratic Way. Cool! I play on team Socrates. Then there is actually a philosophy anthology devoted to my favorite superhero, Wonder Woman and Philosophy!  I wouldn't have discovered these books, if I hadn't read this one.  So that's an extra benefit of reviewing this anthology.  The main benefit of this book, is that it gave me the opportunity to reflect on my own views of the superheroes that the authors discuss.

In his introduction, Gavaler attempts to define superheroes.  He says that "there is no single necessary or sufficient condition, but only a list of potential ones".  I would start from the word superhero, and would ask two questions.  How is this individual a hero?  How is the individual super?  If the individual is not a hero, he, she or they might be a villain. It could also be that he, she or they might be someone who wants to live an ordinary life, and doesn't want to be involved in saving anyone.  If the individual has no superpowers he, she or they might be a costumed vigilante.  This is a category for some of the greatest most legendary heroes such as Robin Hood and Zorro.  I have no trouble categorizing Batman and Green Arrow as heroes who aren't superheroes.  I still love them.

I can agree with Gavaler and Goldberg's conception of the early Batman as solely centered on his oath to fight criminals without considering the consequences of his actions to ordinary civilians.  Yet one crucial point that is important to my conception of early Batman, is that Bruce Wayne was  grieving when he swore that oath.  This is psychology rather than philosophy, but if philosophy doesn't take a character's context into consideration then it's of limited use for analysis of fictional characters.  Batman's context was that he was traumatized by the violent death of his parents when he committed himself to his mission.  This is the reason why Batman is "imprisoned by his past", as the authors of this book say.   If Batman was too narrowly focused on stopping criminals in his early phase, I would consider his trauma the contextual explanation for his behavior. I also believe that empathy is the bedrock of ethics.  You can't think of the ethical implications of your actions on others without empathy.  Batman's empathy was inhibited by his trauma.

In the chapter about Twin Earths, the authors ask us to imagine an Earth devoted to corruption and chaos called Earth 3.  I don't need to imagine it.  I believe that we live on a planet in which an increasing number of societies are already living in the corruption and chaos of Earth 3, while a few are trying to hold back the corruption and chaos.  Chaos is a consequence of corruption.  When everyone can bribe their way out of following the law, order isn't possible.  The result is chaos.  The supervillains in charge of Earth 3 are portrayed as battling the police.  Yet it seems to me that in a world where corruption reigns, the police would be corrupt.  The only people who would battle these supervillains would be vigilantes who would be generally  regarded as foolish or insane.  They would also be likely to pay the price of their convictions with their lives.

There is a discussion of retcons  (retroactive continuities) which involve changing events in the past, and reboots which involve throwing away the entire continuity and starting a new one.  Gavaler and Goldberg consider whether names or backgrounds are more essential.  My perception is that they are discussing identity.  How do we define identity? People change their names for a variety of reasons without believing that they have become someone else.  Some name changes reflect a self-perception that this individual has become someone else, but  I believe that memories which encapsulate your background are your identity.   This is illustrated by Marvel's Thor being depicted as having been punished by Odin with amnesia that caused him to forget that he was Thor.  There is a science fiction novel that I read this year which also shows that memories are identity by positing beings that embody extracted memories. It's called Mem and I reviewed it here.  I  viewed Mem  as a flawed book, but it's nevertheless a powerful one on the subject of identity.

I was amused by philosopher Donald Davidson's thought experiment in which a swamp creature convinced everyone he knew that he was Donald Davidson.  Apparently, Donald Davidson didn't believe that the swamp creature's ability to write articles was a sign of sentience.  I have entertained the notion that a great number of academic journal articles without an iota of original thought weren't written by sentient beings. Yet it could be that like the authors of these unreflective articles, the swamp creature was aware that he needed to publish or perish.

There are some aspects of this book that I have neglected to mention in this review.  I confined myself to the observations that I considered most relevant and significant on the subject of superheroes. Even though I didn't always agree with Gavaler and Goldberg, I did consider Superhero Thought Experiments interesting and thoughtful.

                            

The Deep: Where Is The Heart of This Book?

The premise of fantasy novella The Deep by Rivers Solomon is so intriguing that I was sold on it immediately.   The descendants of pregnant African women that were thrown overboard by slavers during the Middle Passage became mermaids and established an undersea society.  I requested it from Net Galley and was thrilled when I was approved just before the release of this publication.  I couldn't wait to read it.   I prioritized it as my first read of November and this is my honest review.

                             

I discovered that the premise of The Deep wasn't the original creation of Rivers Solomon.  The men's names listed on the cover are the members of Clipping who wrote a song  inspired by the work of Drexciya , and developed it into an Afro-Futurist story line that goes well beyond Solomon's novella. I'd love to see Clipping's entire plot played out in a full length novel.   If you want to know more about  Clipping's song "The Deep"  go to the web page that I've hyperlinked.                   

Readers will also need to know that they will not be seeing the first hand accounts of kidnapped African women who experienced the horrors of the Middle Passage in Solomon's version.

The protagonist of this novella is Yetu who is the historian of this underwater culture.  This doesn't mean that she's written books about their history.  She carries their entire history within her mind.  Yetu tells us repeatedly about the pain of these memories.  I can imagine that they would be painful, but it's difficult for me to fully identify with Yetu if we aren't allowed to experience any of these historical memories in the course of the narrative.  We are told about them in some sort of chaotic montage.   Since Yetu's difficulty with enduring her people's history is supposed to be the central conflict of Solomon's The Deep, I think it's really crucial that we feel some part of it with her.

 I don't claim that this novella is a complete failure.  We are shown part of Yetu's life before she became a historian and what happened to her later in the narrative.   I felt that these aspects of the novella were stronger and more emotionally resonant.   Some might argue that these do represent the heart of the novella.  It's been called a re-telling of Hans Christian Anderson's tale, "The Little Mermaid".  I do see that a radically revisionist retelling is part of what Solomon is trying to accomplish here, but I don't perceive it as central.

I think Solomon was attempting to write about history, its transmission and its importance to society as a whole.  These weighty themes somehow got lost in the telling.  The message got submerged in the ocean's depths.  From an intellectual standpoint, I can see that Solomon intended to include these ideas.  Yet she didn't do any more than touch on them before they sank, and disappeared from view.  This reviewer is not a deep sea diver.  So I cannot retrieve them.  I can only tell you that it seems to me that the heart of Rivers Solomon's The Deep is missing.

                             

                            
                               

  
                           

Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction--A Special Issue of Uncanny Magazine

So this is a first.  I have never blogged about an issue of a magazine previously.  Uncanny Magazine is devoted to science fiction and fantasy.  They have done a series of  special issues entirely written by members of marginalized groups.   I supported  Uncanny issue #24 Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction on Kickstarter and received a free digital copy.   I decided to read it now for a buddy read on a Goodreads group.                      
 
I think that at the outset the idea that these marginalized groups were "destroying" science fiction or fantasy was meant to be satiric.  There were certain fans that have been called "sad puppies" who said things like "Women are destroying science fiction."  So it seemed to me that these special issues started with "Women Destroy Science Fiction" to twist the tails of these "sad puppies".

 Subsequently, members of these groups have let it be known that science fiction and fantasy were portraying them negatively or not meeting their needs as readers.  So they actually did mean to destroy science fiction and fantasy in the sense of re-conceptualizing it. They had visions of  science fiction and fantasy that would be more inclusive.  Their Destroy series issues would be about why some science fiction and fantasy was problematic for them, and what they wanted to see in these genres.

I am particularly interested in disability issues.  So I am now going to proceed to my review of Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction.

                               

 
There were two stories in this issue that really impressed me.

My favorite story in Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction is "Disconnect" by Fran Wilde. I feel that this story is more magical realism than science fiction.  There is a veneer of science because the plot involves scientific studies, but so many things that happen in this story are fantastical.  Readers may believe that these events are the protagonist's hallucinations.   The protagonist has constant crippling anxiety and she lives in what I considered a Kafkaesque context which exacerbated her anxiety.  I expected this story to have a pretty dark ending, but instead it's a triumph.  I thought that "Disconnect" was astonishing and original.

The fiction editor, Dominick Parisien, said in his introduction that not all the stories in the issue would deal with disability prominently because identity is complex, and disability is only part of a disabled person's life. "The Frequency of Compassion" by A. Merc Rustad, the second of the stories in this issue that I considered excellent, has an autistic protagonist, but wasn't primarily focused on autism.  It involved the ethics of first contact and gender.  I found it powerful.

The two essays that I liked most were the first and last that appeared in the essay section.  They were wide-ranging essays that brought up numerous issues.

I thought that  " Design A Spaceship" by Andi C. Buchanan was the most extraordinary because it gave me so much food for thought that I felt stuffed with reflections. Buchanan asks a great many pointed questions.

There was one question that I would like to bring up in this review because it brought to the fore some thoughts I'd already had about a particular character.  Is assistive technology in science fiction for the purpose of making the able audience more comfortable with disabled characters?  This had actually occurred to me with regard to Star Trek: The Next Generation's blind character Geordi La Forge's visor.   The audience doesn't have to see his blind eyes.  Of course the actor Levar Burton isn't blind, but I think that it could have been possible to give him blind eyes in post-production.  Instead they found a way to hide his eyes.  Then it occurred to me that we never saw Geordi in his cabin with his visor off because Geordi didn't have a personal life.  I feel that he was largely an undeveloped character.  And then he was cured which made able viewers even more comfortable with him.  This really irritated me.

"The Future Is (Not) Disabled" by Marieke Nijkamp also asks a plethora of provocative questions.

Nijkamp poses questions about the idea that all disabilities will be cured in the future. Will these cures have side effects? Can everyone afford them?  Is health care a right or for profit?

This last essay in the issue also proposes some assistive technologies.  I'd actually seen one in a short story that appeared in a 2018 indie science fiction and fantasy anthology for stories centering on disabled protagonists called A Different Kind of Hero.  "Difficulty: Unlimited" by Anthea Sharp had a protagonist with a wheelchair that could hover above the ground. I found it to be a well developed story. One assistive technology mentioned by Nijkamp that I'd like to see is robot service dogs especially if the robot dogs are very advanced AIs who could become fully developed characters.

Among the poems in this anthology, I preferred the narrative poems that had a story line.  The only narrative poem that focused on disability was "You Wanted Me To Fly" by Julia Watts Belser.  It also contained some wonderful poetic phrases and made a strong statement.

Finally, there is a section of personal essays that are about personal experiences of the authors.  I had two favorites. One was "Nihil de Nobis, Sine Nobis" by Ace Ratcliff which focused on Ratcliff's criticism of ableism in The Expanse which Ratcliff tweeted about.   I also loved "The Only Thing Faster Than Tonight, Mr. Darkness" by deaf contributor Elise Matheson which is about auto-captioning on You Tube.  I had also noticed their inaccuracy.  I found a recent article about this problem which appeared this year in The Atlantic Monthly called When Is A Caption Close Enough?  by Linda Besner.  To be fair, You Tube auto-captions have improved.  Google is quoted in Besner's  article saying that they have improved by 50% since 2015 which is a great deal of progress.

I would recommend Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction.Readers may find stories, essays or poems in this issue other than the ones I've mentioned that feel significant to them. I would also like to point out that Uncanny has recently published Disabled People Destroy Fantasy which I look forward to reading when I have enough time to devote to it.