thought-provoked

[truepenny]

It's a thought-provoking morning in the SFnal corner of the blogosphere. Which is good, because outside the blogosphere it's -5 (F) and snowing, and I am so not leaving the house. Except of course to check the mail.

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John is musing about Hugo categories, with surely the most rigorous casual thoughts ever recorded for posterity on the Intarwebs.

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Scott is ranting a beautiful and well-deserved rant about ideas in SF: "ideas are like cat toys for authors; they're what we play with as cutely as possible when we think people are watching." The phenomenon he's responding to is, I think, one I posted about a while back: to wit, that there are two entirely different categories of people who read SF. Different in that they want COMPLETELY DIFFERENT THINGS from their reading. Sometimes, a writer can please both camps. Sometimes, she can't. Sometimes, he doesn't even WANT to.

And sometimes readers react to that as if it were meant--exquisitely crafted, even--as a personal affront.

SF is no longer monolithically "the literature of ideas," if it ever monolithically was. SF is being written, published, bought, and read that doesn't give a damn about science, hard or soft, or about the sort of social thought experiment that LeGuin brought to SF's table. It's SF that wants to blow things up and not have to think about it.

I'm a member of the SFBC, although I almost never buy anything (budget!), and I've seen in their flyers over the past few months more than one SF book that is defending, even glorifying, genocide.

This is genocide, of course, of evil BEMs* created specifically by the author for the purpose of deserving genocidal retribution.

Circular logic, much?

Because, see, the thing about fiction--any kind of fiction--is that the author sets the parameters. If it is inevitable and necessary for the characters in a story to commit genocide, it is inevitable and necessary because THE AUTHOR MADE IT THAT WAY. Don't forget the puppet master, folks. Don't ignore the man behind the curtain.

I have a problem with the idea of making genocide a simple, inevitable, necessary decision. Or, you know, not even a decision at all. A given. I don't deny the possibility, for the universe is infinite, that there may be, out there somewhere, a race of BEMs so inherently, biologically anathemetic to us that there will be no choice for the brave little toaster human species except to wipe them out.

But I really, really doubt it.

And even if there is such a species and we do have to wipe them out to ensure our survival, that doesn't mean they will have deserved it. It will not be something we should be going around patting ourselves on the back about.

And although I am very very leery of yoking moral purpose and fiction together, if SF has a moral purpose, or any kind of moral responsibility, I think that moral responsibility is NOT to practice the rationalizations that will let future generations commit genocide without guilt. We have enough genocide already, thanks.

If you're gonna blow something up, you should have to think about it first.

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*Bug-Eyed Monsters

Comments

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

Although I don't like everything he writes, I like what Card did with the subject of genocide in his Ender series. His character wrestled with his involvement in it in an ethical, believable way.

I've been wondering lately, with some of the tripe I've been finding at the library, if the neo-cons aren't trying to shift the social ideas discussed in sci-fi rightwards. There's the obvious example of the Left Behind books, which could be classified as sci-fi, and then there's subtler stuff like this book I recently ranted about: http://bifemmefatale.livejournal.com/497210.html I still don't know how that piece of reactionary rhetoric got compared to The Left Hand of Darkness and The Handmaid's Tale.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

Neo-con and the Left Behind series have nothing to do with each other.

The original neoconservatives were anti-Communist Marxists who kept moving right. They are not particularly religious; and a noticeable percentage of them are Jewish or belong to denominations which many Fundamentalists on the Religious Right consider "not really Christian."

[liminalia.livejournal.com]

I stand corrected. Please imagine the "neo" edited off the "con", then. I had heard the word pretty much exclusively in connection with Bush & Co., who do kiss up to the religious right.

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

The Bush Administration is probably no more interested in giving the Religious Right what they want than it is in advancing individual liberty.

[lenora-rose.livejournal.com]

Actually, it was my understanding that there are strong links between the current crop of neo-conservatives and the premillenial dispensationalists. Certainly there are between the PMDs those at the top of the current Republican party.

Is it universal? No... are there other religions involved? Yes... and non-religious. And there have been plenty of debates as to whether the people in power who seem to take that line do so on their own or to feed certain religious groups among their constituents. But it isn't a case of nothing to do with each other.

How can you be an anti-Communist Marxist? (I ask sincerely, not sarcastically)

[dsgood.livejournal.com]

"How can you be an anti-Communist Marxist?"

Same way you can be non-Roman-Catholic Christian. Or a non-Lutheran Christian.

Marxism was a going concern before one particular Marxist group in the Russian revolutionary government won out. (The Revolution was supposed to start in the most industrialized countries, but that's another matter.) Some Marxists in other countries split off from Socialist parties and formed Communist parties. Others didn't. Later on, groups split from the Communists for various doctrinal reasons.

And in Nicaragua, something which makes my head hurt: The Soviet Union had decided a while ago that Latin American Communist Parties weren't useful. So, in Cuba, they bypassed the Communist Party's leaders and backed Fidel Castro -- who probably wasn't yet a member of the Cuban Communist Party.

They then backed the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, who were part of the Socialist International. They didn't bother with the local Communist Party. Which was rather as if the Vatican decided to appoint only Baptists as Archbishops.

And the coalition which put the Sandinistas out of power included the Nicaraguan Communist Party.

Extending the analogy with religion: Socialists are sort of equivalent to Greek Orthodox. Social Democrats to Unitarians. Trotskyites/ists to Old Catholics.

[kateelliott.livejournal.com]

Thanks for that mini-rant. I'm with you.

[marykaykare.livejournal.com]

Please ma'am, if it's entirely uninhabited, yea, free of even the lowliest lichen, can I blow it up? 'Cause explosions pretty!

Ahem. Yes, of course you're right and most of us *are* more socially conscious these days. Well, most of us.

MKK

[hlglne.livejournal.com]

We need more SF about self-genocide, (autogenocide?) IMNSHO. I like John Ringo for the vicarious thrill of the human characters killing each other as lustily as the BEMs. Why? because the Man Behind the Curtain is like that. Oh yes she is. Can't fool li'l ol' me.

[takumashii.livejournal.com]

I just finished the YA novel "Wide Awake" by David Levithan, not especially science-fictional though it's set 50 years in the future--mostly just a fictional reenaction of the 2000 election debacle with a happy ending. And all the conservatives were really, really, really evil. And even though I tend to think of conservatives as at least a little evil, I went, WTF, you can't do that. Because there's a difference between your enemies' own real-life actions and the fictional actions the author makes up for them in order to make them look bad.

...And of course the worse class of "inspirational" novels do the same thing, to a different set of people. And the anti-Catholic novels of the 1800s which fail to indict anyone but made-up Catholics.

I think fiction does have some moral responsibility not to erect easy targets for the express purpose of shooting them down, whether it's SF or something altogether different.

[pnh.livejournal.com]

Ursula K. Le Guin is such a titanic presence in the history of SF that it seems almost churlish to say so, but she certainly was not the first to use SF as a means of conducting a "sort of social thought experiment." I mean, good grief, Kornbluth. Merril. H**nl**n. That H.G. Wells guy. Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley .

Le Guin wasn't even the first to use SF to make strong feminist points. She's just a really, really good writer. She doesn't need any spurious claims to first-ness.

As for SF being "the" (as opposed to "a") "literature of ideas," that was always tosh.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Yes, of course I should have said "Le Guin, among others."

I wasn't citing her as the inventor of the social thought experiment. (More than one person can bring tuna casserole to the potluck.) Hello, Thomas More? Plato? She was just a really good example of somebody who took sf and said, Here. Think about this. (The specific book in my head was The Dispossessed.)

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

It's been a gazillion years (OK, it's been at least 25--and probably closer to 27--years) since I read The Mote in God's Eye. What I took away from that (and for every other person who's read this book, YMMV), was that conflict, with genocidal consequences, was inevitable between the humans and the Moties and that this was tragic. The Moties were not intrinsically evil, and if the humans eliminated them, something of value would be lost from the universe and it would really suck, even if the humans felt that they had no choice. I suppose it was possible to read this as justifying the elimination of various groups of indigenous groups of humans, but I didn't happen to do so--perhaps because I wasn't trying to justify eliminating any indigenous groups, other than the cockroaches we had at that time.

Otherwise--I can't recall reading any books. other than Card*, who made what I can recognize as a good-faith effort to really look the topic over. Everything else I've seen (not to be confused with a representative sampling) looks, taste, smells, sounds, and feels like an excuse, just like certain TV shows and movies read like an excuse for, um, euphemistic interrogation.

*Not to be taken as a general endorsement of OSC, his writings or opinions.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* You read one of mine that at least tried to tackle it, I believe. Although I may have failed.

And it *was* fantasy.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

What you turned out isn't quite the same thing, really*--at least not for me. Which is not, as far as I'm concerned, a drawback.

*And not just because the Prometheans have been at it a long time, without having the capacity, for much of that time, to do what they tried to do.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* And Ian's plan to get even?

Anyway, I was certainly thinking of genocides when I wrote it.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but there's so much going on there in so many different directions--which is not, let me make it plain, something I'm complaining about. Just that while it may have been an issue YOU were thinking about, there are so many shiny things there that they distract from that thread. The main thing that kept hitting me about that one was the familial issues (both actual and surrogate parents &c.,) but mainly and most shinily, the personal responsibility issues. And yeah, the genocide is part of the latter, but only part.

Do not take this as a suggestion that you need to put less shiny stuff in there next time, please.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

*g* See, it was of the lot, the theme I was most interested in.

Just goes to show what I know.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

It's entirely possible that if I read it more than a couple of times, this theme will get stronger. Go give me a year and I'll get back with you. *G*

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Hee. Well, the book we think we are writing is never the one on the page.

[fidelioscabinet.livejournal.com]

You can't count on us readers to do the right thing and read the book you thought you wrote, either.
We're really bad about that.

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

Hee.

See the thing I just posted in my blog. *g*

I'm sqieamish

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

About genocide in SF Tho it works wekk enuf in Doc Smith.
Deeply uninterested in Shoot'em ups (well I enjoyrd the 1st couple of Bruce willis films) to the extent Tjhat I want a warning sticker.
Dr who in this country is headfing that way.

[callunav.livejournal.com]

In response to my beating my head against the question "what is a genre, anyway?" jerusha pointed me toward your tag.

So I just thought I'd let you know I'm slowly chewing backwards through these posts, and thinking thinkily, and grateful to you for writing them.

Also, I need to get Tsvetan Todorov's The fantastic;a structural approach to a literary genre, because I read about half of it when I was seventeen and it changed my head, but seventeen was a long time ago.

Also, there is Le Guin writing on this subject that I haven't read yet. Shame on me. But that means there is Le Guin writing on this subject which I can read. Happy me.

(Also, I only realized after your comment about it that you are exactly right about The Book of Atrix Wolfe. I'm generally a pretty uncritical reader of McKillip, so it wasn't until you mentioned it (or rather, until I came along much later and read you mentioning it) that I realized that the introduction had thrown me off all along.)