Ben Lerner’s 10:04 touches upon the idea of time travel in a way that other authors don’t. While one of the narrator’s favorite movies to refer to is Back to The Future where characters literally travel through time, the narrator travels through time using his mind. In part three, the narrator speaks about how much he enjoys walking across the Brooklyn Bridge because he can “see the latter from the former, and because the latter is more beautiful” (Lerner, part 3), which is a reference to how he always generates a memory from his experiences; earlier in the story, I did not understand how he could believe the latter, or the future, is more beautiful, because he spent more time thinking about his past than his future because of his condition, but once he saw what life had to offer, he started to consider the beauty of the future.

Since he is diagnosed with a life threatening dilated aortic root, he spends a lot of time thinking about the past because of the memories brough up by his New York surroundings and the people he surrounds himself with. He writes “The Golden Vanity”, a story about a character like him, and when asked about his character’s actions and thought process, he says that “it’s more a response to his own mortality- like he’s trying to time-travel, to throw his voice, now that he’s dealing with his own fragility.” (Lerner, part 3).

While he is in Marfa, Texas, he has nothing to really stimulate these memories, so we experience empty, forced thoughts. In this part of the story, it feels like his is just describing his surroundings and doings rather than relating them to experiences like he did when he was in New York. He goes weeks without talking to anyone and uses words like “vastness” to describe the atmosphere of his quarters in Marfa, while roaming around “looking at the walls” (Lerner, part 4). It feels like his thoughts have slowed significantly, as he has nothing to stimulate his memories because Marfa is all new to him. He is forced to live in the present.

Once he gets back to New York, the world is faced with a large cyclonic system that would force the city into evacuation in certain zones, “once-in-a-generation weather” (Lerner, part 5) for the second time, as he describes it. He finally receives published volumes of his own books, which is something he was excited about, and after this, we see him start imagining the future, which he never really considered earlier on in the book. He imagines the state of the world after the storm hits, and a scenario with him and Alex while she is pregnant with his child. To end off the book is a from Ronald Reagan that says “Never has there been a more exciting time to be alive, a time of rousing wonder and heroic achievement”; this quote closely relates to our narrator because we see that even though his condition stunted his thoughts and perception of time, his career progress and achievement gave him excitement for the future. The narrator still overthinks, but now instead of dwelling in the past, he lives in the present and considers a possible future for himself and the world around him.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement : Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Ghosh recognizes challenges that science fiction authors may come across while trying to convey a bigger message about climate change and the human role in the Anthropocene.  Stresses how realism in scientific fiction is important in order for the genre to be taken seriously.

Jeff Menne. “‘I LIVE IN THIS WORLD, TOO’: OCTAVIA BUTLER AND THE STATE OF REALISM.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011, pp. 715–37, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2011.0089.

Menne stresses how science fiction should aim to make humans subject to nature rather than making nature subject to change, using examples from Butler’s Parable. By realistically showing how nature is guided by our actions, it allows us to reflect and act differently.

JIANG Zhenyu. “Contributions and Misunderstandings: Zheng Wenguang and ‘Science Fiction Realism.’” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, vol. 14, no. 2, 2020, pp. 202–27, https://doi.org/10.3868/s010-009-020-0010-3.

Science fiction is used as a derogatory term because of its refractive qualities, but these qualities are used to reflect a realistic future with a degree of accuracy based upon our current actions. Science fiction writers must take on the responsibility of creating a new generation of socialists that take the climate crisis more seriously.

Li, Hua. “Don’t Allow Troubled Visions in Science Fiction to Become Reality.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 47, 2020, pp. 359–61.

Pandemic fiction created a fear of human extinction and the collapse of society. Human society has to rise above national interests to work as a whole to put an end to the pandemic climate crisis. By giving readers a scare with realism, perhaps science fiction will encourage everyone to change how we interact with nature.

Wood, Niamh. “Realism in Eco Fiction: Climate Change and the Short Story Cycle.” Social Alternatives, vol. 41, no. 3, 2022, pp. 43–47.

Science fiction maintains a close relationship with our recognizable reality, rather than a speculative future, presents what we are already experiencing in new ways so we get a broader perspective on global issues. By understanding the larger scale of these climate issues, science fiction encourages readers to understand their current habits and adopt new ones.

Ghosh, Amitav. The Great Derangement : Climate Change and the Unthinkable. The University of Chicago Press, 2016.

Jeff Menne. “‘I LIVE IN THIS WORLD, TOO’: OCTAVIA BUTLER AND THE STATE OF REALISM.” Modern Fiction Studies, vol. 57, no. 4, 2011, pp. 715–37, https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2011.0089.

JIANG Zhenyu. “Contributions and Misunderstandings: Zheng Wenguang and ‘Science Fiction Realism.’” Frontiers of Literary Studies in China, vol. 14, no. 2, 2020, pp. 202–27, https://doi.org/10.3868/s010-009-020-0010-3.

Li, Hua. “Don’t Allow Troubled Visions in Science Fiction to Become Reality.” Science-Fiction Studies, vol. 47, 2020, pp. 359–61.

Wood, Niamh. “Realism in Eco Fiction: Climate Change and the Short Story Cycle.” Social Alternatives, vol. 41, no. 3, 2022, pp. 43–47.

I think that my research process was fairly easy. I used the Hunter college library database to do all of my searching as I found it easily accessible and less confusing than a lot of other sites, also I like that I could find all my sources in the same place. The keywords that I used were all helpful in my search and I did not come across many of difficulties. I used terms like “realism”, “science fiction”, “eco-fiction”, “cli-fi”, and  “climate change”. All my sources are incredibly useful and interrelated.

How does realism in scientific fiction help us better understand the consequences of our role in the Anthropocene?

Honestly, parts one and two of Ben Lerner’s 10:04 left me confused but interested, and it is very difficult for me to make sense of where the story is going. I was left with more questions than answers after reading the first half, and it has been difficult trying to make sense of it all. Because we are in the narrator’s thoughts, his ideas and interactions with others are the only things we are given to understand him as a person, but his thought process was a little bit confusing.

The story feels very unorganized because we are in the head of the narrator, who is never named. It seems like every idea that appears in his mind creates a new branch of thought that we are then taken on as readers, which would explain why it feels like the story is all over the place. The narrator claims to have “intuited an alien intelligence” that allows him to possess memories, sensations, and images that do not belong to him, but all the memories that he recalls are all entirely his own, which leads me to believe that that this is not true. I believe that his flashbacks, overthinking and extreme attention to detail are not symptoms, but all direct results of his Marfan syndrome diagnosis.

The narrator drifts from idea to idea rather quickly, as certain senses lead him to memories of the past; he recalls these memories in intense detail, and they are usually followed by a metaphor in reference to the future. These references to the future say that we are being “pulled” or “propelled” into the future, which speaks to the idea that the future is something that comes hastily, as time passes quickly before our eyes; though this is true, it is ironic that the narrator spends so much time thinking about the future when there is a possibility that he might not have one due to his diagnosis. Even though we get these metaphors in reference to the future, he never really speaks about his plans for future, we only get to know his memories from the past and his present experiences.

With the narrator’s diagnosis and his constant thinking of the past, I have reason to believe that he spends more time thinking about his past life because he knows he might not have a future. While this may not be true, I am interested in seeing where the story goes and what the future brings for the narrator.