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March 30, 2009 4:43 PM   Subscribe

In Star Control II, the Mycon divide everything in the universe up into "Juffo-Wup," "Non," and "Void." More information is available about it here. My question is this: this concept of everything being divided into an autistic self-world, the hostile outside, and nothing at all— also explored in Philip K. Dick's "Null-O"— seems like a motif. Does it have a name? Where else is it explored?
posted by Electrius to Religion & Philosophy (6 answers total) 6 users marked this as a favorite
 
I'm pretty sure that in one of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adams has an anecdotal about an alien race whose home planet is shrouded in dust, thus they evolve without any knowledge of stars beyond their own, and once they finally build rockets and navigate beyond their nebula, the discover the entire universe is full of stars and they decide then to destroy it all.

Sorry if I'm mangling the retelling, but it always stuck with me as a funny type of culture shock.
posted by wfrgms at 5:00 PM on March 30, 2009


There is a sci-fi series called _WarStriders_, where the alien antagonists have a similar mind set and ecology as the Mycon. A single adult alien inhabits the entire crust of a planet, and in the chapters told from the alien viewpoint, they divide the universe between the Self/planet, the Non/human obstacles on the surface, and the Void/Space. I don't remember if the aliens are fungal, but they do spread via asteroid-seeds and fight mostly with spore/nanite clouds.
posted by Balna Watya at 5:17 PM on March 30, 2009


Best answer: You might want to look at notions of the Other versus the Same - it's a lot of what has been driving literary theory, feminist theory, postcolonialist theory, etc. Edward Said's Orientalism is arguably one of the more famous books on this same/other opposition, and I wouldn't be surprised if various sci-fi writers absorbed the a conception of this dynamic while touching on anthropology/sociology.

Also, Orson Scott Card's Ender's Game series sets off a hierarchy between species, and the distinction between ramen and varelse comes into play concerning the piggies in Speaker for the Dead.
posted by suedehead at 5:45 PM on March 30, 2009


Best answer: Closer to home:

Níð.
Divisions of the world in Islam.
Christendom.
posted by zamboni at 7:42 PM on March 30, 2009


You're probably aware of it since you mentioned "Null-O," but Dick's novel Martian Time-Slip gets into this a bit as well.

Also check out David Foster Wallace's The Broom of the System- the concepts of Self and Other (and characters' demented coping strategies) are a major theme of the novel.
posted by Merzbau at 8:53 PM on March 30, 2009


Quotations taken from that wiki page.

Think Freud:

the Void = the subject; consciousness

Juffo-Wup = "power of life;" it flows throughout the universe = id

Non = "impede the flow of Juffo-Wup" = superego

Mycon = "agents of Juffo-Wup;" = ego
posted by hpliferaft at 9:30 PM on March 30, 2009


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