The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction Page: 53
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this extension of consciousness is based on many of the processes that underlie
perception itself, used in a different and constructive way.27
The main character in "One Less" prepares and imagines as best suits his self-world crisis. The
extension of his consciousness is the metaphorized weird of his own life, a self-correcting
projection, perhaps. And as Neisser mentions, the extension of this consciousness is powered by
the processes underlying perception itself, meaning this extended self may motivate itself to
notice vastly different aspects of phenomenal space than the main self does. It has, essentially, a
life of its own, a parallel simulation operated by the same brain that sustains the main self. The
extended self-world negotiation is the reality of weird taken to its extreme world-building
conclusions, and, as evidenced by Lundberg's character's full immersion in it, it owes nothing to
negotiating with reality, for it is a negotiation with reality.
In the end, the main character is even disconnected from the self-culture semiotics of
language that, as Dennett and others have demonstrated, did much of the initial heavy lifting in
constructing the self. The main-character-lamp-self can only express "Click," the language of
inanimate function. Language fails often enough to categorize crises in a real self; in a story built
entirely of language, this can be modeled only by metaphor. That very metaphor (when imagistic
instead of linguistic) in a real self can enter, fragment, and inform the negotiation of self as
atemporally, as strangely, and as intermittently as needed.
And Lundberg is not alone in taking affective discharge, experiential space, and
bilocation as the mechanics of weird. The same devices work to different extrapolated ends in
Jeffrey Ford's "Bright Morning," in M. John Harrison's "Entertaining Angels Unawares," and in
Doug Lain's "The Word 'Mermaid' Written on an Index Card."28 Einstein's narrative of self
takes form, in part, according to atemporal concerns about Lieserl in Karen Joy Fowler's
"Lieserl," and Ted Chiang's "Hell is the Absence of God" makes physical the concepts of both53
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Bradley, Darin Colbert. The Little Weird: Self and Consciousness in Contemporary, Small-press, Speculative Fiction, dissertation, May 2007; Denton, Texas. (https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc3703/m1/57/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu; .