The Cell Phone in Bruce Sterling's "In Paradise" differs from cell phones as we know them today in that it serves as an oral language translator, the user can set their phone to a given language, and whatever tongue their callers speak in, the user of the phone will only hear the language that they set the phone to. This indicates that while the cell phones we use today are quite useful the way they are, they, or any other device for that matter, still haven't succeeded in uniting people of different cultures who speak different languages. Even in a fictional world however, cell phone batteries still go dead at inconvenient times! The world presented in this story approaches utopia because the potential to find your soul mate would be much greater if you could even explore people who didn't come from the same country or speak the same language as you, people would truly be united if language barriers were abolished. I agree with the author's implication that a world with language translating cell phones would be better. However, the possibility of a phone like this seems unlikely to me, or at least in the way it is presented in the story.

Perhaps a phone that could translates could be developed but it would have to be capable of recognizing different human speech patterns, speech impediments, etc., it doesn't seem very plausible at this point, and since the story was written in 2003 I don't think it was very plausible then either. However, at this point they do have translators that you can install into your cell phone that will translate words you say into another language, although I don't think it can do phrases, and I don't think you can use it while on the phone with someone. In this fictional world, there is tension between the United States and the Middle East, just like there is in this day and age. In the fictional world, Batool talks on the phone in Farsi to all of her girlfriends, just the way girls in our world do (or stereotypically do). However in the story's version, none of the women she was talking to ever gave her location away to her father, a prominent figure in the Iranian government. In real life, one would think her closest friends would have been interrogated to give up her whereabouts.

The focus of this story is love transcending cultural barriers, and if this were a realistic story Felix and Batool probably would never even have met because they don't speak the same language. This makes us focus on the potential relationships we COULD be having with people that don't speak our language that we are missing out on. In our ordinary lives we pass by people every day who could be the yin to our yang, our true soul mate, but we never get a chance to discover that because we don't understand each other. However, online relationships sometimes blossom in much the same way that Felix and Batool's did, but instead of using Batools phone number Felix would be using her screen name.

Icons of Science Fiction don't seem to be wearing out, but they would wear out if the stories that were told in SF repeated themselves or if the stories got too corny. There are aliens in Star Wars and there are aliens in Signs. In Star Wars the aliens were represented as just another part of everyday life. In Signs they represented the unknown. This is a good example of the same icon being used in different contexts and having a completely different result.

ÒIn ParadiseÓ contains about 5 male characters, and only one female character (that we actually see, Batool is on the phone with other girls but we never ÒseeÓ or hear from them), and the males get more of a chance to talk than the females. The representations of the male and female characters seemed very believable, they didn't seem like extreme stereotypes of either, except for Batool constantly being on the phone. No inanimate objects are given gender characteristics, and there are no non human characters. The narrator of the story is a man because the story is in first person, from Felix's point of view. The story hasn't changed the way I look at genders.