There’s a long tradition in Western literature of exoticizing other cultures, particularly the East and the Global South. And recently, there’s been a major effort to undo all that–to de-exoticize the way we depict other cultures. And that’s a a step in the right direction, for sure. Stereotyping and dehumanizing people from other cultures is bad. However, many writers, especially in genre fiction, seem to think that the way to fix exoticism is to homogenize every culture from every part of the world and every time period. For this episode of Rite Gud, we are joined by Karlo Yeager Rodríguez.

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In this episode, we’re talking about artificial intelligence. Not the sympathetic kind played by Haley Joel Osment, not the mean but hot kind like SHODAN, but the kind that generates content. There’s been a lot of hype lately about the power of AI to create writing, visual art, and music. In this episode, Wendy Xu joins us once again to talk about the rise of the machines.
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Anyone who walks into Omelas needs an entry visa. The city’s elders decreed it after immense deliberation. An obstacle, for sure, but not unsurmountable. Papers were easy enough to procure from Omelian emigrants, portraits swapped with razors and glue, text corrected with a few flicks of ink. The hard part was fitting in. Hendrick spent months training. He lived with a refugee and shadowed her movements, learned to glide lethargically in the loose, bright garments of an Omelian, learned to drawl without fully opening or closing his mouth. He altered his exercise regimen--lower weight, more reps, more cardio--to get that lean, sinewy look. He sprawled under a sun lamp. It took surgery to install an insipid half-smile on his face so that he could never give himself away by frowning in concentration, not even in his sleep.

The guard at the entry gate peered at the fake identity card, then at Hendrick’s portrait, then at the card again. “Where do you hail from, friend?” she asked.

Hendrick knew not to answer with a precise address. That would be a very un-Omelian response. “I hail from the South End,” he said, and then added, based on the details of the map he’d memorized, “not too far from the best little juice joint with the yummiest acai bowls in all of Omelas.” One had to say as little as possible with the maximum number of words. That was their way.

“Is that girl with the unicorn tattoo still slinging wheatgrass shots there?”

“She was when I left. She’s a beautiful soul.”

“Send her all my kindness and empathy.”

“I will, friend.”

And Hendrick was in. He immediately headed toward the center of the city, but not near enough to arouse suspicion. He knew he could not reach the Child himself. The way down was narrow and well-observed. All the hypocrites of Omelas who wept with pity for the creature would wedge themselves into the stairwell and say, “Hey, man, I totally get what you’re doing, but this violence is not the way.” He could beat one Omelian in melee combat easily, or two, maybe three, but four was too many, and the city had no guns. They could not even be smuggled in. They dissolved in your holster when you crossed the threshold. Bombs dropped on the city burst impotently in the troposphere, radiation scattering to anywhere but the target. Even the sound dampened to a tolerable level. All Omelas experienced was the clap of pretty fireworks. Such is the magic of suffering.

So the Child could not be rescued. Mercy killing was no good, either: there was always a designated replacement to be snatched from its mother’s arms and dragged down to the cell when necessary. It had happened before and would happen again.

Hendrick found a residential building whose superintendent had recently sashayed away from his duties to follow his bliss on a fishing boat. Hendrick was willing and able to do the work of maintenance. Even in paradise, someone has to fix the toilet. He preferred to labor indoors, away from the relentless sun, with objects rather than people, though one can never escape idle chatter in Omelas. When people summoned him to their dwellings, they would not let him mend a hinge or change a bulb without first inviting him for herbal tea and pastries and then engaging him in a protracted confabulation about their respective hopes and dreams. They talked about their upbringings in the other boroughs of the city, their complicated labyrinthian relationship webs, previous orgies and orgies to come, the daily horse parades that made the streets always smell a bit like shit, and always, always, they talked about the Child: whose it was, how old, how long it would last, where they’d get the next one. They always talked about what stage they were on of recovery from the trauma of seeing it for the first time. In proper Omelian fashion, they had six stages, beyond Kübler-Ross’s five. After acceptance came gratitude.

Hendrick endured these conversations and confessed that at times he, even at his age, sometimes wavered between anger and bargaining. “I can see that you carry the burden of anger,” they would say, caressing his face without asking. “It’s written in your skin. Thank you for sharing your truth with me. I know it took courage.”

Only one occupant of the building did not inflict these dialogs upon Hendrick. That was the quiet woman in the Skymost Room Which Greets the Dawn. (Omelians are too precious to just call a room “Apartment 4B” or anything normal—it must be a whimsical description rife with euphemism, and this particular unit was on the top floor and its windows faced east). Hendrick kept watch on her. She had the look of one who dreamed of walking. She made hardly any talk in common spaces, and she didn’t dance much in the great outdoor festivals, and her consumption of the ambulatory fuck souffles was perfunctory and joyless. Hendrick followed her to work once and saw, to his elation, that she entered that one particular building in that one particular neighborhood.
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Coziness. Comfort. Hygge. We all enjoy it. Maybe we have a favorite comfort food, or a favorite piece of comfort media, or a favorite comfort character. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Sometimes you need it. But when the pursuit of comfort takes over your entire life, and your entire worldview, your art suffers, and maybe society does too. In this episode of Rite Gud, we’re talking about why speculative fiction shouldn’t get too comfortable. We are joined once again by Tai Black.

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