Fall 2019

LMC 3203 – Studies in Fiction

The sublime and grotesque are used in science fiction to evoke feelings of awe and

shock in the reader, to open the mind and drive home the experience of a novum one never

considered before. By presenting immense technological feats and technoscientific ideas that

dwarf the mind, the sublime produces a sense of awe and wonder in the reader. The vast

possibilities that science and technology can accomplish unsettle the mind on a grand scale. The

grotesque, on the other hand, defies scientific rationality with absurd, disgusting ideas that

affect the mind on a personal level. Both the sublime and grotesque can induce terror and

cause the viewer to pause and try to rationalize what they’re being shown. Because they are so

closely related, the two concepts can show up in the same stories and even the same novums.

Science fiction authors evoke the sublime and grotesque to push the limits of what we believe

is possible. Stories like “The Poetry Cloud”, “Swarm” and “Sharing Air” all use one or both

concepts.

“The Poetry Cloud”, written by Chinese author Cixin Liu in 1997, uses the sublime in

nearly every scene and every concept to build an astonishingly beautiful, complex universe that

highlights the beauty of technology and art. It takes place in a universe where much of the solar

system was taken apart by a god to use as storage for the creation of every possible poem in

existence. Humans are a tiny, primitive part of this universe, overshadowed by an unknown

number of much more advanced alien species with capabilities far beyond human

comprehension. Among the highest, most advanced of these species are the gods who have
“mastered unimaginable technology, and exist in the form of pure energy” (Liu, 1079). Li Bai is

one of these gods who wishes to surpass the poems of human poet Li Bai using technology, and

he displays how inconceivably advanced his species is by restructuring the entire galaxy to

accomplish his goal. Li Bai recreates the Earth as an oblong Dyson sphere with all the oceans

and continents floating on the inside of the crust. At the South Pole, the low gravity causes “the

water splashes more than ten metres high when waves hit the coast, with surface tension

creating countless balls of water in mid-air… these balls drop slowly [and] refract the glare of

the small sun, bathing Yiyi, Li Bai and Big-tooth in a glittering light”. The purpose of this

restructuring is to create The Poetry Cloud, an enormous storage cloud made up of the mass of

the Devourer Empire and most of the solar system. The Cloud is described as a “spiral nebula…

[that] emits a silvery radiance… large halos of light often surge through the Poetry Cloud… like

giant glowing whales swimming in the Cloud”. The beautiful imagery also provokes a sense of

immensity and vastness that makes the reader feel insignificant, but most importantly all these

sublime scenes are possible because of Li Bai’s advanced technology and science.

The grotesque is less present than the sublime in this story and serves to ring a tinge of

horror to the story. In Li Bai’s arrogant, overdone attempt to surpass the human Li Bai, he

dismembers Big-Tooth’s entire empire to use for storage of poetry. When Li Bai initially

explained that he meant to store all the poems he generated, Big-Tooth “sounded on the verge

of tears”, exclaiming “My venerable god, you shouldn’t do this!!” (Liu, 1089) Big-Tooth’s entire

empire, including majority of his race, is annihilated and their atoms are picked apart and

rearranged to create storage devices. The disturbing reality of what the Poetry Cloud is made of

emphasizes the terrifying ability of the gods to so thoroughly wipe out a race. The grotesque is
present in a similar theme with the humans. Just like how the gods treated the primitive

Devourers as storage, the Devourer Empire had initially carried away “1.2 billion humans, which

the dinosaurs planned to raise like poultry” when they had first visited Earth. These same

humans are reluctant to return to Earth and live independently as opposed to being taken care

of like cattle on the Empire.

“Swarm”, written by U.S. author Bruce Sterling in 1982, is a new space opera story with

some cyberpunk themes. In the future, humanity has split up into two factions, the Shapers and

the Mechanists who compete with each other like corporations for the favor of the more

advanced alien Investors. Captain-Doctor Afriel is a Shaper, a genetically modified space jock

and scientist who was produced as a soldier by the Shaper faction. He is sent to join another

Shaper named Dr. Mirny to study the Swarm, “the only spacefaring race that is essentially

without intelligence”. The Swarm is made up of huge, mindless insects (BEMs), each belonging

to different castes with different functions throughout the colony. At first, Afriel claims he only

wants to study the Swarm to understand how a species without any sentience becomes a

spacefaring race, but reveals he wishes to “breed a slave race” for the Shaper faction. Afriel

convinces Mirny and the two begin to experiment with controlling the different castes of

insects with pheromones, until one day Mirny goes missing. Afriel finds her braindead next to a

new caste of insect, one that is intelligent and aware. It calls itself the Swarm and explains that

it is only born when the colony recognizes intelligent life interfering with its operations. The

Swarm reveals that it has been invaded many times and each time the other species were

assimilated into the Swarm as a defense mechanism for the next time the members of the same

species tried to attack.

 The sublime and grotesque are not apparent in this story until the intelligent Swarm is

revealed. It is described as a “black-spattered white mass of flesh… [with] a mouth and two

damp, shining eyes on stalks...long tendrils dangled, writhing, from a clumped ridge above the

eyes.” The Swarm holds up a braindead-Mirny with a tendril struck through her head and

another connected to a decayed, mutated worker that resembles a human. The grotesque

structure of the Swarm and its mutated victims create a terrifying image and cause Afriel to

vomit. When the Swarm begins to speak and Afriel realizes that the Swarm is intelligent and

well-aware of his intentions, he panics and tries to negotiate. The Swarm reveals that it has

already dealt with fifteen other species who tried to invade it by forcibly assimilating the

species into its colony, eventually producing members that are loyal to the Swarm. The

insignificance of humanity compared to all the other species that came and vanished evokes

the sublime by putting in perspective how short and limited humans are in this universe.

Another grotesque part of “Swarm” is the body modifications Shapers and Mechanists go

through. Afriel is already modified to be more intelligent and to thrive in free fall, but in order

to run pheromone experiments on the Swarm, he stores “ten separate colonies of genetically

altered bacteria” in a blocked off vein. The Mechanists are the other faction more focused on

mechanical upgrades to the body but more extreme groups “are already more than half

machine”. The factions treat their humans like commodities in the war against each other.

“Sharing Air”, written by Indian author Manjula Padmanabhan in 1984,