UBC #12: The Atrocity Archives

UBC #12
Stross, Charles. The Atrocity Archives. Urbana, IL: Golden Gryphon Press, 2004.

I enjoyed The Atrocity Archive and its companion piece, "The Concrete Jungle," but what really made me sit up and take notice was the afterword, "Inside the Fear Factory," which talks about spies and hackers and horror and the Cold War and how they all go together. The afterword couldn't exist without the stories, but possibly because of their present-tense first-person narrator--who doesn't know nearly as much about his cultural history as Stross does--the stories can't really come to grips with their own intellectual background.

The best paragraph in the book is one that straddles the line between fiction and nonfiction. From the afterword:

There's an iron tripod buried in the basement of the Laundry, carved with words in a alien language that humans can only interpret with the aid of a semisentient computer program that emulates Chomsky's deep grammar. Unfortunately the program is prone to fits of sulking, and because it obeys a nondeterminate algorithm it frequently enters a fatal loop when it runs. There is no canonical translation of the inscription. Government linguists tried to decypher the runes the hard way; all those who tried wound up dead or incarcerated in the Funny Farm. After a systems analyst suggested that the carving might really be the function binding for our reality, and that pronouncing it with understanding would cause a fatal exception, Mahogany Row decided to discourage future research along these lines.
(Stross 264)

Situated as it is in a discussion of our cultural and literary history, this paragraph is doing a tremendous amount of work, and it does it effortlessly. It illuminates both sides at once, both the fiction and the cultural work the fiction does.

$0.02

1. White middle-class American child of privilege. Yes, that's me.

2. Three and four generations back, there's hefty chunks of Irish and Scottish in my ethnic heritage. This, however, is so far back as to be nearly meaningless, and is completely irrelevant to my own experience of race. So the fact that some of my ancestors were oppressed minorities? Gets me no bonus points. I'm still a white middle-class American child of privilege.

3. Americans--especially though not exclusively white liberal Americans--are so fucked up about race that we don't even know how to start having a conversation, even with the best intentions on all sides. Does this mean we shouldn't try to have the conversation? Hell, no. It means the opposite: we should try, and KEEP TRYING, and learn. One painful lesson at a time.

4. Because the alternative is for us to keep ignoring it la la la can't hear you la la la. And that is stupid and wrong-headed. And leaves the oppression right where it is.

5. Even writing this post makes me acutely uncomfortable because I know I'm probably saying it wrong.

6. The obverse side of cultural appropriation is that if nobody except people of a particular minority (class, race, gender, sexual orientation, religion, etc.) write about that minority, then representations of that minority will never get out of the ghetto of being "minority writing." Which reinscribes the problem very neatly on itself.

7. "Race" itself is a slippery and problematic term. And in America it is very much bound up with class--another slippery and problematic term.

8. Yes, I am focusing on race in America. Because that's what's under my nose and what I've been engaged with, willy nilly, since I was born. I do not believe that what I'm saying about American attitudes and perceptions and fallibilities applies anywhere else.

9. I don't have any answers.

10. I know good intentions aren't enough.

11. But they're better than bad intentions. Or disingenuity.

12. And as a fiction writer, I have to believe that imaginative empathy is achievable. And that it is worthwhile.

13. And I have to believe that human beings can learn.

14. I'm also fully aware that pronouncing my opinions is another exercise of my white middle-class privilege. Because what right do I have to talk about any of it? But see #6: I think the discussion needs to be had, and I think the people with privilege had damn well better show willing.

The Virtu, Chapter 4

Despite my best efforts, I did not forget to post Chapter Four today. (Plain text here.)

The official release date is June 27. (Less than a month! Eeeee!)