Anti-Modernism and Fantasy
Mike Ralls
Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
Also, what are some good counterexamples?
--
Mike Ralls
To E-mail me, please remove all spaces of this address:
mike r ralls @ netscape . net
He that wrestles with us strengthens our nerves and sharpens our skill.
Our antagonist is our helper. - Edmund Burke
The SHWI Book of the month: _Burmese Days_ by George Orwell
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/shwibooks
Karl M Syring
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
He may have liked post-modern times: The Rise of The Warlords
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
Isn't the conservation of the existing order or the restoration
of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
of fantasy?
Karl M. Syring
Peter D. Tillman
Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote:
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
Ford, The Last Hot Time
Swanwick, The Iron Dragon's Dream [well, kinda sorta]
Heinlein, Magic, Inc.
Stirling, Island in the Sea of Time
Flint, 1632
Cheers -- Pete Tillman
--
The director of housing at Princeton University issued a safety
directive to students after two undergraduates fell out of bunk beds in
dorms; it is believed to be the first warning on how to use a bed ever
issued to Ivy League students. [Jan 2002]
Nancy Lebovitz
>Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
Possibly because a world with magic plus a decent rate of innovation
would involve so many changes that it would be hard to write.
>Also, what are some good counterexamples?
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Bumper stickers *and* buttons
War is how Americans learn geography
Ethan Merritt
>Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
Is it really a question of anti- rather than pre-?
An unfortunate preponderance of fantasy is set in a pseudo-medieval
setting, making it pre-modern and pre-industrial, but this does not
by itself convey antagonism to either.
>Also, what are some good counterexamples?
Barbara Hambly's stories of the great mage Antryg Windrose (sp?)
crusading to introduce an industrial reolution to a conservative
magic-based society.
Francine Woodbury's _Shade and Shadow_, in which the utility of
computer analysis of ancient spells is shown.
Caroline Stevermer's _College of Magics_.
Depending on your definition of fantasy, Dorothy Heydt's
_Point of Honor_, in which fantasy worlds are achieved through
modern technology.
Melissa Scott's _Five Twelfths of Heaven_ (or so I'm told; I
haven't read this one).
Any of the modern-vampires-are-among-us fantasies, which again I
haven't read so I can't name names. In fact, the whole genre of
Horror seems to be a couter-example. Not my cup of tea (though
that brings to mind _Tea with the Black Dragon_) but most of
it is set in modern, industrialized, settings is it not? The
point of which, I assume, is to make it that much scarier because
the setting is closer to real life.
--
Ethan A Merritt
Nancy Lebovitz
I don't think so--by that measure, LOTR is only marginally fantasy.
The Shire is restored, but magic has gone out of the world.
On the other hand, there's angle from which the Shire is the best
thing--the thing most preserving--in Middle Earth.
I'd say that the defining characteristic of fantasy is magic, and
leave definitions of magic for further discussion if anyone's interested.
On the other hand, I can't think of any science fiction where the
happy ending is restoration/conservation, but maybe I'm missing something.
Is _A Wrinkle in Time_ fantasy or science fiction? I'd say that most
of the trappings (the three witches, the happy medium) are fantasy,
but Camazotz (sp?) is science fictional, and the ending is a restoration
of an earlier state of affairs.
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
The only kind of people who are going to be writing stories about a
pre-industrial society as if it led to a good, pleasant, and long life,
are those who: A) either don't know or don't care what primitive
hellholes pre-industrial societies were like, and B) don't properly
appreciate the joys and wonders of industrial and post-industrial
societies.
You sometimes get realistically awful fantasy worlds (Glen Cook's
_Black Company_ and Mary Gentle's _Ash_ and _Grunts_, for instance), and
lo and behold, they don't seem to contain any anti-industrial venom.
This is, BTW, why I approve of "When I was a lad, we had it REALLY
hard" stories, they teach people to appreciate what they've got. Even
if I didn't like Charles Dickens' books (which I do), their use in
school needs to be continued, to teach people how hard life used to be
even just a century ago.
<http://www.ernestcline.com/airwolf/When_I_Was_A_Kid-Ernie_Cline.mp3>
<http://www.ernestcline.com/airwolf/>
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in
order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond
the stars to eat our brains." -Charlie Stross, _The Concrete Jungle_
Mike Schilling
"Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes" <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote in message
news:slrnb20sqh.1...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu...
> Sat, 11 Jan 2003 23:08:13 +0900, Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>:
> > I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> > Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> > anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> > Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>
> The only kind of people who are going to be writing stories about a
> pre-industrial society as if it led to a good, pleasant, and long life,
> are those who: A) either don't know or don't care what primitive
> hellholes pre-industrial societies were like, and B) don't properly
> appreciate the joys and wonders of industrial and post-industrial
> societies.
>
As the late Poul Anderson explained so well:
http://www.sfwa.org/writing/thud.htm
Konrad Gaertner
>
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
Tolkien was a Luddite, and I suspect those strongly influenced by
him picked up on that. Also, allowing scientific methods and
innovation into a system of magic means you're writing a science
fiction novel as well as a fantasy novel. Pre-industrial societies
are so much simpler to write about.
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
Pretty much the entire urban fantasy genre.
Steven Brust
Terry Pratchett
Robin Hobb
Robert Asprin
Garth Nix
Ray Feist
Piers Anthony
Mercedes Lackey
Robert Jordan could be argued both ways.
--KG
David Friedman
na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
> In article <3E20254...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>,
> Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote:
> >I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> >Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> >anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>
> Possibly because a world with magic plus a decent rate of innovation
> would involve so many changes that it would be hard to write.
But Tolkien isn't merely leaving industrialization out. He provides a
hostile parody of it during the brief period when Saruman's people have
taken over the shire, and was in fact hostile to it. Somewhere in his
letters he comments that airplanes seem in the abstract a wonderful
idea, but in fact are used mainly to drop bombs on people,and suggests
that that is typical of progress.
William Morris would be another example.
David Friedman
> Isn't the conservation of the existing order or the restoration
> of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
> of fantasy?
No.
A.C.
news:ddfr-37D009.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
I think he had a point.
I mean, I'm the farthest thing from a luddite, and I enjoy modernity, but
what we know as industrial society and what Tolkien knew as industrial
society are much different.
--
nomadi...@hotmail.com | http://nomadic.simspace.net
"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so
certain of themselves, but wiser people so full of doubts." - Bertrand
Russell
Christopher M. Jones
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
I dispute the notion that Fantasy is anti-modernist. Need
we be reminded that these are works of fiction, not political
tracts? They are set in *interesting* settings, not
necessarilly preferable ones (even by the author). The fact
that Fantasy is very popular with very modern people
(programmers, engineers, etc.) seems to me to indicate that
they are not really connected with anti-modernism.
As for Tolkien, the line he draws seems clear to me. It is
not industrialization vs. non-industrialization, it is
creation vs. destruction. Many of the greater works of
middle Earth were created by Dwarves, Numenorians, and Elves,
and were considered good works (Orthanc, the White Tower,
Lorien, Khazad-dum, etc.) Lord of the Rings certainly plays
up many of the dangers and responsibilities of technology and
industry but I do not think it is anti-modern in the slightest.
--
I was never more certain of how far away I was from my goal than when I was
standing right beside it.
David Friedman
"A.C." <nomadi...@removethistomailmehotmail.com> wrote:
> > But Tolkien isn't merely leaving industrialization out. He provides a
> > hostile parody of it during the brief period when Saruman's people have
> > taken over the shire, and was in fact hostile to it. Somewhere in his
> > letters he comments that airplanes seem in the abstract a wonderful
> > idea, but in fact are used mainly to drop bombs on people,and suggests
> > that that is typical of progress.
>
> I think he had a point.
>
> I mean, I'm the farthest thing from a luddite, and I enjoy modernity, but
> what we know as industrial society and what Tolkien knew as industrial
> society are much different.
By the time Tolkien was born, the industrial revolution had strikingly
improved the average welfare of the English population--for data see
T.S. Ashton _The Industrial Revolution_. It's true that many people
didn't believe it at the time--indeed many still don't.
A.C.
Well, even dropping that, which I won't (there are plenty of other
first-hand sources that depict life in urban London as horribly dystopian),
you're forgetting about the two World Wars. The lives of the millions upon
millions of people who died because of the technology certainly weren't
improved. For example, when Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, ubiquitous
passenger air travel didn't exist. Many people's exposure to them was in
fact being bombed from above.
Richard Shewmaker
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
Counterexamples:
* Jim Butcher's Dresden Files series (detective/wizard in contemporary
Chicago).
* Laurell Hamilton's new Meredith Gentry series (detective/sidhe
princess in contemporary LA). I guess her Anita Blake series would
also fit, because it has at least one nasty fairy with magic -- most
of the creatues in the books don't feel magical to me, though
(vampires, werewolves, zombies, ghouls, etc.).
* Greg Bear's "Infinity Concerto" & "The Serpent Mage" (magic world
interfering with human world).
* Clive Barker: "The Great and Secret Show," "Everville," "Imajica,"
"Sacrament," and most likely others.
* Mercedes Lackey's "Diane Tregard" trilogy (detective/witch -- ? I
think that's what she is).
If having more examples would be valuable, let me know and if I have
time I'll keep thinking.
--
Madgett: "I'm not playing games any more, I've got enough of game
playing -- this is serious. Besides, you're better at game playing
than I am."
Cissy 2: "This game is very dangerous."
Madgett: "Oh, but haven't I told you? All games are dangerous."
-- Peter Greenaway, "Drowning by Numbers"
how...@brazee.net
On 11-Jan-2003, Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote:
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
A good point of modernization is that it offers a gradual, but consistent
improvement in standards. The bad points is that old values change.
There is at least as much fantasy where the environment is worse than the
worst modernization has to offer. But fantasy offers us all the chance to
be Captain America, defeating Hitler by ourselves, even if that Hitler is
the Lord of Darkness Himself!!
One of the characteristics of modernity that is rejected by most fantasy is
Democracy. Fantasy has the unknown boy discovering he really is Royal and
has the power to defeat the oppressors and rule as the Good King. This
ability comes by some unknown inheritance and the reader can associate
himself with this secret royal right.
Craig Richardson
<mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote:
>I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
>Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>Also, what are some good counterexamples?
Duncan's "The Seventh Sword". An engineer from our world is
transported into the body of a high-ranking swordsman in something of
a fantasy milieu - specifically, a pre-literate world with what power
there is held by swordsmen and priests, but this is because they are
the most direct servants of the gods, who are real. The gods give the
engineer/swordsman a destiny, couched in a riddle, to fulfill. He
does, only to find that ...
SPOILER
... He has inadvertently set up a chain of events in which his protege
will overthrow the existing social order, and set himself up as the
first king, with power over pretty much all lands the swordsmen can
reach. He despairs, only to be visited by the same god who gave him
the riddle/destiny, and is told that the empire was what the gods had
in mind all along. He wasn't the first tool they had used, and if he
had failed, he wouldn't have been the last. The gods _wanted_ to
usher in the next "age".
--Craig
--
Managing the Devil Rays is something like competing on "Iron Chef",
and having Chairman Kaga reveal a huge ziggurat of lint.
Gary Huckabay, Baseball Prospectus Online, August 21, 2002
Jordan179
> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
Part of the reason is that people who are drawn to (romanticized)
versions of the past are both more likely to underestimate the good
done by modernization and industrialization, and to be drawn to
fantasy (because fantasy worlds are usually romanticized versions of
various historical eras, with magic added).
Part of the reason is that the original models for fantasy (the myth,
the saga, and the fairy tale) were invented in a pre-industrial world,
and in a pre-industrial world the reality of "progress" was not
generally understood (because it was so slow that most men could see
little change in their lifetimes). In fact, pre-industrial societies
generally believed that the world had "declined" since some "Golden
Age" in the past -- this is commonly mirrored in heroic fantasy.
and part of the reason is that the great innovators in modern heroic
fantasy -- Howard and Tolkien in particular -- tended to be skeptical
of "progress."
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
L. Sprague DeCamp, who tended to depict life in pre-industrial
societies very realistically. Harry Turtledove, who in _every_ fantasy
world he has ever created has depicted progress both in technology and
in magic over time, and has often hung stories on it. (In his Videssos
books, for example, even a culture inspired by the Byzantine Empire
makes slow technological progress through the generations).
Neil Gaiman has written pre-industrial societies and people
realistically, and shown technological progress through the eyes of
immortals (though in his _Sandman_ universe he assumes a cyclical
theory of history with multiple global holocausts).
Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, in her main vampire series, takes a very
unsympathetic view of the pre-industrial past. One of her vampire
characters, Olivia Clemens, who was born in the relatively enlightened
Roman world, spends most of the Dark and Middle Ages praying that
someone will re-institute good hygiene, and goes to great efforts to
practice it herself. Sanct-Germain himself actively works to promote
technological progress (he's an incredibly experienced chemist and
physician).
Anne Rice, in _her_ main vampire series, also favors progress. Her
main viewpoint character, the Vampire Lestat, is literally ecstatic
when he wakes up after a long sleep in the late 20th century and sees
how much progress Man has made. Ramses the Damned ("the Mummy"), her
immortal Egyptian king, is equally enthusiastic about the early 20th
century, after a sleep of two millennia.
Hmm, maybe vampires and progress just mix well?
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Mark
> On the other hand, I can't think of any science fiction where the
> happy ending is restoration/conservation, but maybe I'm missing something.
>
No, I think you're accurate. SF isn't about *restoration*,
though--it's about change and more often than not it's about changing
paradigms. "Breaking through" is the dominant motif and that presumes
something static (or stagnant) and suppressive that has be broken. SF
is about the *next* best thing.
Fantasy, I think, tends to embrace a Rouseau-esque fallacy that there
is an arcadian condition from which the world and its people have
fallen and the motive of the prose is to recapture/regain/restore that
idyll. "Honest" fantasy shows that to be a false hope--of which
Tolkein is the most subversive example. Things are restored in
LotR--the king is back on his throne, the Shire gets scoured, the
lands are made safe from Sauron. But nothing is the same anymore, nor
could it be.
Tolkein was an anti-industrialist. He hated industrialization, just
as a good many British intellectuals did--look at the 19th century
destruction of the old order under the new order of capitalism.
Whatever one thinks of capitalism per se, its worst consequences were
played out in the Victorian Era, and Tolkein and others were reactive
against it and its perceivced dehumanizing effects.
Mark
author of:
COMPASS REACH
METAL OF NIGHT
PEACE & MEMORY (forthcoming)
www.marktiedemann.com
Chris Camfield
[snip]
>One of the characteristics of modernity that is rejected by most fantasy is
>Democracy. Fantasy has the unknown boy discovering he really is Royal and
>has the power to defeat the oppressors and rule as the Good King. This
>ability comes by some unknown inheritance and the reader can associate
>himself with this secret royal right.
I'd really like to read a (good) fantasy novel about overthrowing the king and
setting up a democracy in a land in which the new country is surrounded by more
evil monarchs. :-)
Chris
Scott Robinson
If you want complex societies, especially ones that "modernize" and
adapt to fit plot-driven events then look to L.E.Modesitt Jr,
especially the Recluce series. Note that while writing sf or fantasy,
creating the society seems to be the primary goal. While the list of
authors above (that I've read) might be clearly pro-modern, the
societies aren't nearly as important to the stories.
Scott
Nancy Lebovitz
Mark <mtied...@earthlink.net> wrote:
>>
>> On the other hand, I can't think of any science fiction where the
>> happy ending is restoration/conservation, but maybe I'm missing something.
>>
>
>No, I think you're accurate. SF isn't about *restoration*,
>though--it's about change and more often than not it's about changing
>paradigms. "Breaking through" is the dominant motif and that presumes
>something static (or stagnant) and suppressive that has be broken. SF
>is about the *next* best thing.
>
>Fantasy, I think, tends to embrace a Rouseau-esque fallacy that there
>is an arcadian condition from which the world and its people have
>fallen and the motive of the prose is to recapture/regain/restore that
>idyll. "Honest" fantasy shows that to be a false hope--of which
>Tolkein is the most subversive example. Things are restored in
>LotR--the king is back on his throne, the Shire gets scoured, the
>lands are made safe from Sauron. But nothing is the same anymore, nor
>could it be.
*Good* point.
>
>Tolkein was an anti-industrialist. He hated industrialization, just
>as a good many British intellectuals did--look at the 19th century
>destruction of the old order under the new order of capitalism.
>Whatever one thinks of capitalism per se, its worst consequences were
>played out in the Victorian Era, and Tolkein and others were reactive
>against it and its perceivced dehumanizing effects.
Tolkien was a consistant anti-industrialist, but in LOTR he seems more
apt to attribute industrialization to centrally controlled economies
(Mordor, Sharkey's regime) than to capitalism. This doesn't mean that
he was extremely fond of commerce--what's favored in LOTR is gifts and
loyalty.
Nancy Lebovitz
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>Sat, 11 Jan 2003 23:08:13 +0900, Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>:
>> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
>> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>
> The only kind of people who are going to be writing stories about a
>pre-industrial society as if it led to a good, pleasant, and long life,
>are those who: A) either don't know or don't care what primitive
>hellholes pre-industrial societies were like, and B) don't properly
>appreciate the joys and wonders of industrial and post-industrial
>societies.
I just read LeGuin's _The Other Wind_--there's a lot to like about
the book, but she has a very bad habit of romanticizing low-tech
poverty.
Nancy Lebovitz
Jordan179 <JSBass...@yahoo.com> wrote:
>Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote in message news:<3E20254...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>...
>> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
>> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>
>> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>
>L. Sprague DeCamp, who tended to depict life in pre-industrial
>societies very realistically. Harry Turtledove, who in _every_ fantasy
>world he has ever created has depicted progress both in technology and
>in magic over time, and has often hung stories on it. (In his Videssos
>books, for example, even a culture inspired by the Byzantine Empire
>makes slow technological progress through the generations).
>
I don't remember anything in Bradley's _The Mists of Avalon_ about
technological progress, but she portrays even the Arthurian royalty
as desperately poor by our standards.
Tom Scudder
> On the other hand, I can't think of any science fiction where the
> happy ending is restoration/conservation, but maybe I'm missing something.
For certain values of restoration/conservation, THE PEACE WAR and "If
This Goes On" both qualify. Possibly also the Dominic Flandry stories,
where the less-bad endings involve slowing the deterioration of the
Empire.
Foundation? (pre-Foundation's Edge (which I haven't read), at least).
GSV Three Minds in a Can
wonderful person Mark <mtied...@earthlink.net> said
<snip>
>Tolkein was an anti-industrialist. He hated industrialization, just
>as a good many British intellectuals did--look at the 19th century
>destruction of the old order under the new order of capitalism.
>Whatever one thinks of capitalism per se, its worst consequences were
>played out in the Victorian Era, and Tolkein and others were reactive
>against it and its perceivced dehumanizing effects.
ObSF: _That Hideous Strength_ by C.S. Lewis. (Which works for me much
better than the other two, for some reason).
--
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Nancy Lebovitz
There's another Asimov novel with a happy restoration (loosely interpreted),
but I can't remember whether it's _Pebble in the Sky_ or _The Stars, Like
Dust_--I think it's the latter.
And Moffitt's _Second Genesis_/_Genesis Quest_ are partly about restoration
and recovery, but they're about opening up the world in other ways.
"Alpha Ralpha Boulevard" is about restoration, but I think it's just
portrayed as a change rather than an improvement.
Do all the stories about how you wouldn't like immortality because not dying
is bad for you count as conservative?
Matt Ruff
>
> But Tolkien isn't merely leaving industrialization out. He provides a
> hostile parody of it during the brief period when Saruman's people have
> taken over the shire, and was in fact hostile to it. Somewhere in his
> letters he comments that airplanes seem in the abstract a wonderful
> idea, but in fact are used mainly to drop bombs on people,
Any idea when he wrote that? It seems like a silly thing to say now, but
early on in the airplane's history it might not have sounded so outrageous.
-- M. Ruff
Scott Robinson
A democracy much more advanced than the Roman republic wouldn't likely
work in most fantasy settings. Unless they communicate by Palentir,
the evil monarchs would have to rule city states.
L. E. Modesitt, Jr's _Soprano Sorceress_ comes pretty close though.
A modern woman is transported into a plausible (the society could
exist, if briefly) fantasy world. She then gets to deal with basic
evil monarchs (and worse, noble retainers).
Scott
David Friedman
Elf M. Sternberg
> Bitstring <78b1aacb.03011...@posting.google.com>, from the
> wonderful person Mark <mtied...@earthlink.net> said
> ObSF: _That Hideous Strength_ by C.S. Lewis. (Which works for me much
> better than the other two, for some reason).
Mention of C.S. Lewis reminds me of the article "Rage Against
The Machine" from American Conservative magazine (curiously enough,
online at http://www.amconmag.com/01_13_03/lind7.html), written by one
of the more forthright neoluddites I've ever seen.
Elf
Mark
> Isn't the conservation of the existing order or the restoration
> of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
> of fantasy?
>
It is a large component of a great deal of fantasy, as least in the
motivations of the characters, but it is not *the* defining element.
For that you must look to the numinous rather than the political.
Karl M Syring
>>
>> Isn't the conservation of the existing order or the restoration
>> of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
>> of fantasy?
>>
>
>
> It is a large component of a great deal of fantasy, as least in the
> motivations of the characters, but it is not *the* defining element.
> For that you must look to the numinous rather than the political.
Does not work for me. FTL IS MAGIC.
Karl M. Syring
Joe Bernstein
Peter D. Tillman <til...@aztec.asu.edu> wrote:
> In article <3E20254...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>,
> Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote:
>
> > I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
> > Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> > anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> > Also, what are some good counterexamples?
[snip some]
> Stirling, Island in the Sea of Time
> Flint, 1632
Those are fantasies to you?
Because the event that precipitates them is fantastical? I haven't
read far enough in Stirling's trilogy to be sure, but I think his
isn't explained. Flint's is explicitly explained in hand-wavingly
sfnal terms.
Neither works for me as fantasy. They're both considerably less
fantastical than Twain's <Connecticut Yankee>, in fact; they both
stress *heavily* the continued operation of the laws of nature as
we know them today, except for their one initiating event each. But
I tend to judge whether a work is fantasy at least to some extent by
the felt experience. (For example, I reject a *lot* of Persian
literature because the allegorical element is too strong and too
explicit.) I acknowledge that there are definitions of science fiction
that would force the exclusion of Flint's book, in which case one's
recourse would be to dump it in fantasy; I think it's *weird* to
do this sort of thing with a large percentage of Golden Age SF (think
Bradbury, Kuttner/Moore, e.g.), but it's a matter of opinion, I suppose.
But Stirling's is another matter. It's not clear to me that you get to
call something a fantasy just because it includes an unexplained event
you don't see a good scientific explanation for. There is nothing even
*slightly* useful in a definition of fantasy that includes all FTL stories,
except possibly to someone who hates to read about anything that isn't
scientifically plausible and needs one word for scientifically implausible
fiction because three is too many. This is, however, an unreasonable
misappropriation of a word, in much the same way that the current trend
towards calling all human societies "civilisations" is.
Getting back to the original poster's question, I should think that
people who disapprove strongly of some aspect of the society that
surrounds them would have extra incentive to make up societies, and
this would explain the reactionary views common in fantasy, but somehow
that doesn't seem like enough. Explicitly pro-modernisation writing isn't
*that* uncommon, though. (He says, then realising he doesn't have good
examples to hand, sigh.)
Joe Bernstein
--
Joe Bernstein, writer j...@sfbooks.com
<http://these-survive.postilion.org/>
Joe Bernstein
> Part of the reason is that the original models for fantasy (the myth,
> the saga, and the fairy tale) were invented in a pre-industrial world,
> and in a pre-industrial world the reality of "progress" was not
> generally understood (because it was so slow that most men could see
> little change in their lifetimes). In fact, pre-industrial societies
> generally believed that the world had "declined" since some "Golden
> Age" in the past -- this is commonly mirrored in heroic fantasy.
This notion of decline is not invariably incorrect.
Agricultural societies normally had somewhat more reliable sources of
food than hunter-gatherer ones, but considerably less diverse. Far as
I know, the Neolithic Revolution didn't normally carry an increase in
lifespan with it. Additionally, agricultural societies tended to be
subject to a whole range of bad things that hunter-gatherer ones weren't,
such as disease (microbes don't bother adapting to infect humans until
there are enough humans in one place to infect) and war (while there's
some evidence for this among hunter-gatherers, it's *massively* less
unambiguous than in Neolithic and later societies) and government (no
further comment).
The oldest works to express the notion of decline known to me are
Sumerian and Egyptian and date from somewhat after 2000 BC. In each
case, the notion is expressed that a specific government's collapse
was a Bad Thing, and in each case, there are various arguments one
can make about how general the badness really was, although in at
least the Sumerian case, one can see where the scribes themselves
might have been pretty unhappy after their empire fell. In each case,
the literary works weren't written until stable government had been
restored.
But to the extent that "things aren't what they used to be" is a folk
motif, it's worth remembering that in many cases through most of
history, peasants were worse off whenever the aristocracy was better
off, and townsfolk were often worse off whenever the aristocracy was
too. Somebody, in other words, was always getting the short end of
the stick.
Andrew Wheeler
Robert Forward, among others, thought that was not necessarily so -- so
I, for one, think it would be presumptuous of me to claim so much.
There's a whole lot of things that probably wouldn't work, but it's the
nature of science that "probably" can get arbitrarily close to
"certainly" over time, as data pile up, but it always remains "probably."
--
Andrew Wheeler
--
"Oh, hey! We're rehearsing a...a scene for the upcoming company play,
called, ah,....'Put That Thing Back Where It Came From, Or So Help Me!'
It's a musical!"
how...@brazee.net
On 12-Jan-2003, Scott Robinson <dsc...@bellatlantic.net> wrote:
> A democracy much more advanced than the Roman republic wouldn't likely
> work in most fantasy settings. Unless they communicate by Palentir,
> the evil monarchs would have to rule city states.
How about Italian city states as your model? What's the fortress across
the Adriatic that was ruled by families who appointed rulers for one month
at a time?
I can't remember the politics in <i>The Spirit Ring</i>.
Mark
FTL is not attributed to the supernatural, nor is there an incantatory
activation component. It does not require the presence of a "gifted"
being to operate, but rather is deployed as an exception to an
otherwise rational and causal universe.
The whole point of deploying magic is to deny the given nature of the
universe and to designate "chosen" or otherwise elite or special
characters. In short, magic is used to expressly separate a
newtonian-einsteinian reality from a milieu in which personality can
supplant reason.
So fantasy is not about mechanics--not even hypothetical mechanics
such as FTL--but about the attributes of Being. Magic is not about
mechanics, but about the physical manifestation of personality. FTL
is not used in that way at all. It is not therefore magic.
Improbable, maybe even impossible, but that alone doesn't make it
magic.
K. Schwarz
>Karl M Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
>>Mike Ralls wrote on Sat, 11 Jan 2003 23:08:13 +0900:
>>> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
>>> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>>> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>>> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>>
>>of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
>>of fantasy?
>
>The Shire is restored, but magic has gone out of the world.
Isn't there lots of fantasy that ends with magic going out of the
world? Susan Cooper and Prydain, for example.
>On the other hand, there's angle from which the Shire is the best
>thing--the thing most preserving--in Middle Earth.
>
>I'd say that the defining characteristic of fantasy is magic, and
>leave definitions of magic for further discussion if anyone's interested.
Good definition.
>On the other hand, I can't think of any science fiction where the
>happy ending is restoration/conservation, but maybe I'm missing something.
How about the Foundation trilogy? Isn't the goal to minimize decay
and eventually restore the original status quo?
>Is _A Wrinkle in Time_ fantasy or science fiction? I'd say that most
>of the trappings (the three witches, the happy medium) are fantasy,
>but Camazotz (sp?) is science fictional,
Science fiction, although set in a universe where angels and cosmic
evil are real. They travel by space warp, visit other planets
(including a two-dimensional one), meet space aliens. I'd say it's
sf (not, of course, very hard sf) in the way that Lewis's space
trilogy is.
> and the ending is a restoration of an earlier state of affairs.
I don't think so -- Daddy comes home, but the main point of the story
is Meg's personal growth and change.
--
Katie Schwarz
"There's no need to look for a Chimera, or a cat with three legs."
-- Jorge Luis Borges, "Death and the Compass"
Karl M Syring
> Karl M Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote in message news:<avsts4$j6ns1$1...@ID-7529.news.dfncis.de>...
>> Mark wrote on 12 Jan 2003 15:22:53 -0800:
>> >>
>> >> Isn't the conservation of the existing order or the restoration
>> >> of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
>> >> of fantasy?
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > It is a large component of a great deal of fantasy, as least in the
>> > motivations of the characters, but it is not *the* defining element.
>> > For that you must look to the numinous rather than the political.
>>
>> Does not work for me. FTL IS MAGIC.
>>
>> Karl M. Syring
>
> FTL is not attributed to the supernatural, nor is there an incantatory
> activation component. It does not require the presence of a "gifted"
> being to operate, but rather is deployed as an exception to an
> otherwise rational and causal universe.
My point is explicitly that FTL needs the operator, either God or the author.
Karl M. Syring
Brandon Ray
Mark wrote:
>
> FTL is not attributed to the supernatural, nor is there an incantatory
> activation component. It does not require the presence of a "gifted"
> being to operate, but rather is deployed as an exception to an
> otherwise rational and causal universe.
I can think of counterexamples for two of these. The need for a particular substance to make the
star drive work (dilithium crystals, anyone?) is fairly common. Books like Dune, and Bujold's
Vorkosigan series, postulate the need for an operator with special gifts for the star drive to
work. The gifts are technological in nature, but in Bujold's case, at least, only a minority of
humanity are suitable people to receive the necessary implants.
--
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! -- Homer Simpson
John Andrew Fairhurst
til...@aztec.asu.edu says...
> Stirling, Island in the Sea of Time
> Flint, 1632
>
These two are closer to Science Fiction than Fantasy, though?
--
John Fairhurst
In Association with Amazon worldwide:
http://www.johnsbooks.co.uk/
Your One-Stop Site for Classic SF!
Updated for June 2003 Publications
John Andrew Fairhurst
mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp says...
> Why are
> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>
I'm not sure that you could say that it's considered A Good Thing but
there is definite technological development in David Gemmel's Rigante
books and most people seem to be benefiting as far as people did at lower
levels of technological advancement.
r.r...@thevine.net
wrote:
And in _Rebel of Rhada_, the spaceships are piloted by priests, who
have no understanding of the technology behind spaceflight, but who
learn the "incantations" and "ritual gestures" that are used to make
the ships work. Picture Picard's "Make it so" becoming a necessary
part of piloting a starship, and you get the picture.
Rebecca
Karl M Syring
> Karl M Syring wrote:
>>
>> Mark wrote on 12 Jan 2003 15:22:53 -0800:
>> >>
>> >> Isn't the conservation of the existing order or the restoration
>> >> of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
>> >> of fantasy?
>> >>
>> >
>> >
>> > It is a large component of a great deal of fantasy, as least in the
>> > motivations of the characters, but it is not *the* defining element.
>> > For that you must look to the numinous rather than the political.
>>
>> Does not work for me. FTL IS MAGIC.
>
> Robert Forward, among others, thought that was not necessarily so -- so
> I, for one, think it would be presumptuous of me to claim so much.
You would need a system that preserves causality. This would
lead directly to theological discussions, because God "knows"
the relationship between cause and effect.
To preempt some jokers from jumping in here: There author is
perfectly suitable take over this function.
> There's a whole lot of things that probably wouldn't work, but it's the
> nature of science that "probably" can get arbitrarily close to
> "certainly" over time, as data pile up, but it always remains "probably."
The universe would be destroyed if someone would develop FTL. You
may note that the somewhat physically based FTL concepts like
the Alcubierre drive end up as new mobile universes, because
you can not switch off the thing once it gets going. This state
of affairs is, of course, perfectly acceptable as any one-way
voyage to another universe is.
Karl M. Syring
Robrt Pearlman
Joe Bernstein wrote:
[snip]
> Getting back to the original poster's question, I should think that
> people who disapprove strongly of some aspect of the society that
> surrounds them would have extra incentive to make up societies, and
> this would explain the reactionary views common in fantasy, but somehow
> that doesn't seem like enough. Explicitly pro-modernisation writing isn't
> *that* uncommon, though. (He says, then realising he doesn't have good
> examples to hand, sigh.)
>
> Joe Bernstein
First to hand: George R. Stewart's "Earth Abides". The elegiac mood is
attributed by the book itself, pretty explicitly, to the loss of
technology and of scientific knowledge and spirit.
"Lest Darkness Fall"
"Connecticut Yankee"
The Sterling and the Flint.
The parts of Bujold's books dealing with life on Barrayar.
And, to a small degree, Ken Follett's "Pillars of the Earth".
But you're right or rather, your first take was indeed wrong.
Explicitly pro-modernization writing is uncommon. Why so? I propose a
literary reason.
Consider: in what time shall our author set the modernizing activity?
Case 1: in the present or a slightly modernized near future. There must
be some serious conflict, or we get something like "Looking Backward".
In our time, and presumably for some time more, the most easily
visualized opposition to modernization is social. So this case turns
almost immediately into a shoot-em-up between the Forces of Progress and
the Constricted Reactionaries. Early example, Simak's "Lobby".
Case 2: in the far future. Here things have changed so much that we do
not have the necessary constraints to make a decent story. This will be
a Murray Leinster invent-em-up.
Case 3: in the past. All my counter-examples fit this : even Bujold has
a society knocked into its own past by the Time of Isolation.
Furthermore, setting a story in the past has a real advantage, because
the the time traveler can introduce physical or social inventions which
the reader knows will work, and make sense.
So, if my arguments are correct, a pro-progress story will best be set
in the past. And that takes research. Probably, most people who have
studied the past enough to write about it convincingly think that they
would like it to stay that way. Less so perhaps for professional
historians, but few write time-travel stories. This is an empirical
question, and funding for research into it would be appreciated.
Pearlman
Robrt Pearlman
A.C. wrote:
>
> Well, even dropping that, which I won't (there are plenty of other
> first-hand sources that depict life in urban London as horribly dystopian),
> you're forgetting about the two World Wars. The lives of the millions upon
> millions of people who died because of the technology certainly weren't
> improved. For example, when Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, ubiquitous
> passenger air travel didn't exist. Many people's exposure to them was in
> fact being bombed from above.
WWI and WWII did kill a lot of people, but that was just because there
were a lot of people to kill. The enormous population growth of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries had fertilized the fields for the
grim reaper. On a proportional basis, the world wars were quite dainty.
Genghis Kahn killed or enslaved pretty nearly everybody in the tracts he
ran over. The Europeans killed 90% of the Amerindians (mostly by
disease). The Thirty years war killed what, 25% of the population of
central Europe? Does anybody even know the proportional killing rate
for the Russian expansion? What about the Aztec conquests?
Pearlman
Nancy Lebovitz
K. Schwarz <k...@socrates.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>Nancy Lebovitz <na...@unix1.netaxs.com> wrote:
>>Karl M Syring <syr...@email.com> wrote:
>>>Mike Ralls wrote on Sat, 11 Jan 2003 23:08:13 +0900:
>>>> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
>>>> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>>>> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>>>> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>>>
>>>Isn't the conservation of the existing order or the restoration
>>>of a "better", earlier state of affairs the defining element
>>>of fantasy?
>>
>>I don't think so--by that measure, LOTR is only marginally fantasy.
>>The Shire is restored, but magic has gone out of the world.
>
>Isn't there lots of fantasy that ends with magic going out of the
>world? Susan Cooper and Prydain, for example.
I'd forgotten that happening in Prydain.
More generally, your post underlines that restoration is a vague
concept--there are all sorts of things which might be restored and/or
changed, and figuring out whether enough is restored to count as
a major theme in a book is left as an exercise for the reader.
>>On the other hand, there's angle from which the Shire is the best
>>thing--the thing most preserving--in Middle Earth.
>>
>>I'd say that the defining characteristic of fantasy is magic, and
>>leave definitions of magic for further discussion if anyone's interested.
>
>Good definition.
>
Thanks.
>>On the other hand, I can't think of any science fiction where the
>>happy ending is restoration/conservation, but maybe I'm missing something.
>
>How about the Foundation trilogy? Isn't the goal to minimize decay
>and eventually restore the original status quo?
>
That would count, though I think it would count more strongly if
the good Empire were more clearly portrayed.
>>Is _A Wrinkle in Time_ fantasy or science fiction? I'd say that most
>>of the trappings (the three witches, the happy medium) are fantasy,
>>but Camazotz (sp?) is science fictional,
>
>Science fiction, although set in a universe where angels and cosmic
>evil are real. They travel by space warp, visit other planets
>(including a two-dimensional one), meet space aliens. I'd say it's
>sf (not, of course, very hard sf) in the way that Lewis's space
>trilogy is.
>
>> and the ending is a restoration of an earlier state of affairs.
>
>I don't think so -- Daddy comes home, but the main point of the story
>is Meg's personal growth and change.
Children growing up is part of the normal order of things.
Werner Arend
> Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote in message news:<3E20254...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>...
>
>>Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>>anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>
>
> versions of the past are both more likely to underestimate the good
> done by modernization and industrialization, and to be drawn to
> fantasy (because fantasy worlds are usually romanticized versions of
> various historical eras, with magic added).
>
> Part of the reason is that the original models for fantasy (the myth,
> the saga, and the fairy tale) were invented in a pre-industrial world,
> and in a pre-industrial world the reality of "progress" was not
> generally understood (because it was so slow that most men could see
> little change in their lifetimes). In fact, pre-industrial societies
> generally believed that the world had "declined" since some "Golden
> Age" in the past -- this is commonly mirrored in heroic fantasy.
>
> fantasy -- Howard and Tolkien in particular -- tended to be skeptical
> of "progress."
>
>
>>Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>
>
> societies very realistically. Harry Turtledove, who in _every_ fantasy
> world he has ever created has depicted progress both in technology and
> in magic over time, and has often hung stories on it. (In his Videssos
> books, for example, even a culture inspired by the Byzantine Empire
> makes slow technological progress through the generations).
>
> realistically, and shown technological progress through the eyes of
> immortals (though in his _Sandman_ universe he assumes a cyclical
> theory of history with multiple global holocausts).
>
> Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, in her main vampire series, takes a very
> unsympathetic view of the pre-industrial past. One of her vampire
> characters, Olivia Clemens, who was born in the relatively enlightened
> Roman world, spends most of the Dark and Middle Ages praying that
> someone will re-institute good hygiene, and goes to great efforts to
> practice it herself. Sanct-Germain himself actively works to promote
> technological progress (he's an incredibly experienced chemist and
> physician).
>
> Anne Rice, in _her_ main vampire series, also favors progress. Her
> main viewpoint character, the Vampire Lestat, is literally ecstatic
> when he wakes up after a long sleep in the late 20th century and sees
> how much progress Man has made. Ramses the Damned ("the Mummy"), her
> immortal Egyptian king, is equally enthusiastic about the early 20th
> century, after a sleep of two millennia.
>
> Hmm, maybe vampires and progress just mix well?
>
> Sincerely Yours,
> Jordan
GSV Three Minds in a Can
Robrt Pearlman <rpea...@optonline.net> said
>
>
>A.C. wrote:
>> Well, even dropping that, which I won't (there are plenty of other
>> first-hand sources that depict life in urban London as horribly dystopian),
>> you're forgetting about the two World Wars. The lives of the millions upon
>> millions of people who died because of the technology certainly weren't
>> improved. For example, when Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, ubiquitous
>> passenger air travel didn't exist. Many people's exposure to them was in
>> fact being bombed from above.
>
>WWI and WWII did kill a lot of people, but that was just because there
>were a lot of people to kill.
ISTR (lost the cite though) that Influenza killed more people than WW1,
at about the same time, so a rational Luddite (were their such a thing)
should be able to see the benefits of =some= technology.
--
Mark
And in our own case, we need a special substance--gasoline--to make
the internal combustion engine work and the vast majority of operators
of vehicles do not understand the principles behind how their machines
work. They are taught a set of procedures and a special "priest
class"--mechanics--maintain the engines.
The engines nevertheless do not function due to any supernatural or
occult mechanism and we all understand that to be the case. Power is
not being funneled etherically through drivers. It's physics.
According to the same sort of...how shall I put it?...terms of
existence, FTL is posited in *most* science fiction, which takes it
out of the realm of fantasy metaphor.
Forgive my insistence on this, but the argument that FTL is
"impossible" and therefore is magic, rendering SF a subset of Fantasy,
is an old argument that, for me, has no validity. SF *as metaphor* is
quite different from Fantasy *as metaphor* and their tropes are
differently deployed for different purposes. This is just one example
of how they differ. It's attitude.
John F. Carr
Ethan Merritt <mer...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>
>Is it really a question of anti- rather than pre-?
>An unfortunate preponderance of fantasy is set in a pseudo-medieval
>setting, making it pre-modern and pre-industrial, but this does not
>by itself convey antagonism to either.
>
>>Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>
>crusading to introduce an industrial reolution to a conservative
>magic-based society.
While Joanna(*) protests that industrialization makes everybody
miserable.
*Or whatever the name of the standard Hambly smart, shy woman
is in that series.
--
John Carr (j...@mit.edu)
Mark
> And in _Rebel of Rhada_, the spaceships are piloted by priests, who
> have no understanding of the technology behind spaceflight, but who
> learn the "incantations" and "ritual gestures" that are used to make
> the ships work. Picture Picard's "Make it so" becoming a necessary
> part of piloting a starship, and you get the picture.
>
> Rebecca
But of course that's just the point--Picard's "make it so" is neither
a necessary nor sufficient condition to make the ship go. In magic
systems, the incantations are directly causal. Picard could just as
easily walk over to the console and push the button himself. But in
magic, getting the spell "right" is essential to anything happening at
all.
Brandon Ray
Mark wrote:
>
> Forgive my insistence on this, but the argument that FTL is
> "impossible" and therefore is magic, rendering SF a subset of Fantasy,
> is an old argument that, for me, has no validity. SF *as metaphor* is
> quite different from Fantasy *as metaphor* and their tropes are
> differently deployed for different purposes. This is just one example
> of how they differ. It's attitude.
I actually agree with you on this, it's just that your original formulation seemed off the point. But
I do agree that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is attitude. One could imagine a
fantasy novel that had FTL -- the wizard casts a spell and transports you to Arcturus. But there is,
as you say, a difference in attitude.
David Friedman
I'm not certain, but I believe that the Taiping rebellion, which was
pretty close in time to WWI, is estimated to have killed more people.
David Tomlin
> Agricultural societies normally had somewhat more reliable sources of
> food than hunter-gatherer ones, but considerably less diverse. Far as
> I know, the Neolithic Revolution didn't normally carry an increase in
> lifespan with it.
There is said to be archeological data to suggesting that early
agriculturalists often had poorer health than h/g. Agriculture
made it possible to support larger populations in areas
suitable for it. That made it easy for agriculturalists to
displace non-agricultural people. It's interesting to note
that such "progress" may not necessarily make the average
person better off.
> Additionally, agricultural societies tended to be
> subject to a whole range of bad things that hunter-gatherer ones weren't,
> such as disease (microbes don't bother adapting to infect humans until
> there are enough humans in one place to infect) and war (while there's
> some evidence for this among hunter-gatherers, it's *massively* less
> unambiguous than in Neolithic and later societies) and government (no
> further comment).
Some time ago there was someone on C-Span lecturing on such matters.
He cited a study that showed hunter-gatherer societies have higher
rates of violent death than modern ones, even with war included.
JoatSimeon
>In fact, pre-industrial societies
>generally believed that the world had "declined" since some "Golden
>Age" in the past -- this is commonly mirrored in heroic fantasy.
-- there was often some basis for this. Preindustrial peasant economies had a
tendency to very gradually undermine the ecological underpinings around them as
they repeatedly bumped up against the maximum carrying capacity of their
environment and then crashed and repeated the cycle.
Eg., the way deforestation spread around the Mediterranean basin.
JoatSimeon
>This doesn't mean that
>he was extremely fond of commerce--what's favored in LOTR is gifts and
>loyalty.
-- that's because Tolkien was saturated with the Dark Age warrior ethos, and
with the related one of feudalism which followed it.
Both heavily emphasized reciprocal gift exchange and hierarchies of sworn
loyalty as the ethical basis of society.
Gillian Bradshaw catches this nicely in one of her fantasies, when her p.o.v.
character (a late Romano-British peasant type) is travelling with a warrior
who's in disguise.
He has no idea of how to pay for things; the peasant, exasperated, is about to
burst out with "haven't you ever _bargained_ before?"
Then he realizes (approximately, from memory):
"No. Gwmalchi hadn't. He would take, from his lord's hand or from an enemy,
at the sword's edge; or he would give with an open hand and count no cost.
Nothing in between."
peter wezeman
> David Friedman wrote:
> >
> > But Tolkien isn't merely leaving industrialization out. He provides a
> > hostile parody of it during the brief period when Saruman's people have
> > taken over the shire, and was in fact hostile to it. Somewhere in his
> > letters he comments that airplanes seem in the abstract a wonderful
> > idea, but in fact are used mainly to drop bombs on people,
>
> Any idea when he wrote that? It seems like a silly thing to say now, but
> early on in the airplane's history it might not have sounded so outrageous.
>
Sounds like something that might have been written during World War Two.
There was limited strategic bombing during World War One, some with
airplanes and some from airships. Between the wars there was no general
agreement among military people that long range bombing was an effective
strategy.
Peter Wezeman
anti-social Darwinist
Pete McCutchen
wrote:
>
>
Is _The Stars My Destination_ fantasy or science fiction?
--
Pete McCutchen
Pete McCutchen
Lebovitz) wrote:
>In article <slrnb20sqh.1...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu>,
>Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes <kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu> wrote:
>>Sat, 11 Jan 2003 23:08:13 +0900, Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>:
>>> I was reading Peters S. Beagle's forward in LotR and reasearching
>>> Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
>>> anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
>>> Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>>
>> The only kind of people who are going to be writing stories about a
>>pre-industrial society as if it led to a good, pleasant, and long life,
>>are those who: A) either don't know or don't care what primitive
>>hellholes pre-industrial societies were like, and B) don't properly
>>appreciate the joys and wonders of industrial and post-industrial
>>societies.
>
>I just read LeGuin's _The Other Wind_--there's a lot to like about
>the book, but she has a very bad habit of romanticizing low-tech
>poverty.
Weren't her parents anthropologists?
--
Pete McCutchen
wth...@godzilla3.acpub.duke.edu
> Bitstring <3E226F1B...@optonline.net>, from the wonderful person
> Robrt Pearlman <rpea...@optonline.net> said
>
> >
> >
> >A.C. wrote:
> >> Well, even dropping that, which I won't (there are plenty of other
> >> first-hand sources that depict life in urban London as horribly dystopian),
> >> you're forgetting about the two World Wars. The lives of the millions upon
> >> millions of people who died because of the technology certainly weren't
> >> improved. For example, when Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, ubiquitous
> >> passenger air travel didn't exist. Many people's exposure to them was in
> >> fact being bombed from above.
> >
> > WWI and WWII did kill a lot of people, but that was just because
> > there were a lot of people to kill.
There were plenty of people in Paris in 1870, but
though the city was shelled, there wasn't the technology
to flatten it as we did to (e.g.) Berlin in WWII. Food
got scarce, but it was no Leningrad.
> ISTR (lost the cite though) that Influenza killed more people than
> WW1, at about the same time, so a rational Luddite (were their such a
> thing) should be able to see the benefits of =some= technology.
Why? The main thing technology did with regard to influenza
in 1918 was to allow it to spread more rapidly.
William Hyde
EOS Department
Duke University
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
By my definition:
<http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/documents/sf.html>
TSMD has rocket ships. Therefore it is science fiction. It's not
hard SF, though, since it uses "one impossible assumption" to bring in
teleportation.
--
<a href="http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/"> Mark Hughes </a>
"We remain convinced that this is the best defensive posture to adopt in
order to minimize casualties when the Great Old Ones return from beyond
the stars to eat our brains." -Charlie Stross, _The Concrete Jungle_
Karl M Syring
<snip>
> Forgive my insistence on this, but the argument that FTL is
> "impossible" and therefore is magic, rendering SF a subset of Fantasy,
> is an old argument that, for me, has no validity. SF *as metaphor* is
> quite different from Fantasy *as metaphor* and their tropes are
> differently deployed for different purposes. This is just one example
> of how they differ. It's attitude.
I used to think along this lines, too, but there is stuff
like the Mageworld series (Debra Doyle & James D. Macdonald),
which is SFnal in style, but has wizards with staffs (urgh!) and
magic drives the space ships.
Karl M. Syring
Doug Lampert
> My point is explicitly that FTL needs the operator, either God or the author.
All it needs is a prefered reference frame. There is no proof of the
nonexistance of such a frame, nor can there be such a proof, and all
proofs that FTL violates causality depend upon taking the lack of a
prefered frame as an axiom. Thus it is an article of faith that FTL
is not possible, both the axiom that there is no prefered frame and
an axiom set where there is a prefered frame are equally good at
matching all observations, it is only due to Occams Razor that we
make the ASSUMPTION that there is no such frame.
DougL
David Cowie
>
> I'm not certain, but I believe that the Taiping rebellion, which was
> pretty close in time to WWI, is estimated to have killed more people.
1851-64, 20 million deaths according to this site
http://www.mrdowling.com/613-taiping.html
and over 30 million according to this one.
http://www-chaos.umd.edu/history/modern2.html
--
David Cowie david_cowie at lineone dot net
So high, so low, so many things to know.
Randy Money
> "David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.com> wrote in message
> news:ddfr-D263B0.1...@sea-read.news.verio.net...
>
>>In article <W4%T9.12754$yi6.3...@twister.nyc.rr.com>,
>> "A.C." <nomadi...@removethistomailmehotmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>
>>>>But Tolkien isn't merely leaving industrialization out. He provides a
>>>>hostile parody of it during the brief period when Saruman's people
>>>
> have
>
>>>>taken over the shire, and was in fact hostile to it. Somewhere in his
>>>>letters he comments that airplanes seem in the abstract a wonderful
>>>>that that is typical of progress.
>>>
>>>I think he had a point.
>>>
>>>I mean, I'm the farthest thing from a luddite, and I enjoy modernity,
>>
> but
>
>>>what we know as industrial society and what Tolkien knew as industrial
>>>society are much different.
>>
>>By the time Tolkien was born, the industrial revolution had strikingly
>>improved the average welfare of the English population--for data see
>>T.S. Ashton _The Industrial Revolution_. It's true that many people
>>didn't believe it at the time--indeed many still don't.
>
>
> Well, even dropping that, which I won't (there are plenty of other
> first-hand sources that depict life in urban London as horribly dystopian),
> you're forgetting about the two World Wars. The lives of the millions upon
> millions of people who died because of the technology certainly weren't
> improved. For example, when Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings, ubiquitous
> passenger air travel didn't exist. Many people's exposure to them was in
> fact being bombed from above.
And you're not even including the smell from factories (ever been near a
rendering plant, for instance? -- yeech), the soul-numbing work of
factories (although I expect agricultural work could be pretty numbing,
too) ...
It's kind of silly to stand on either extreme of this argument. The
advance of technology has been both good -- as someone in the thread
noted, the advance of medical technology has been nothing short of
wondrous in the last century -- and bad -- atomic bombs. Still, it's not
hard to understand Tolkien's lament even if you don't agree.
Randy M.
Randy Money
> In article <3E20254...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>,
> Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote:
>
[...]
>
> Any of the modern-vampires-are-among-us fantasies, which again I
> haven't read so I can't name names. In fact, the whole genre of
> Horror seems to be a couter-example. Not my cup of tea (though
> that brings to mind _Tea with the Black Dragon_) but most of
> it is set in modern, industrialized, settings is it not? The
> point of which, I assume, is to make it that much scarier because
> the setting is closer to real life.
See, Fritz Leiber, "Smoke Ghost"; T. E. D. Klein, _Dark Gods_. If s.f.
is mostly about breaking through paradigms, and fantasy is about
retaining respect for what we were, then horror may be cautionary about
what we don't yet know.
Randy M.
(yes, I do expect someone to argue that)
Karl M Syring
>>
>> And in _Rebel of Rhada_, the spaceships are piloted by priests, who
>> have no understanding of the technology behind spaceflight, but who
>> learn the "incantations" and "ritual gestures" that are used to make
>> the ships work. Picture Picard's "Make it so" becoming a necessary
>> part of piloting a starship, and you get the picture.
>>
>> Rebecca
>
>
> But of course that's just the point--Picard's "make it so" is neither
> a necessary nor sufficient condition to make the ship go. In magic
> systems, the incantations are directly causal. Picard could just as
> easily walk over to the console and push the button himself. But in
> magic, getting the spell "right" is essential to anything happening at
> all.
Not water-tight this argumentation is: Picard could easily
manifest his will in the brain of the operator and force him
to follow his orders. May be, if he would push the button
himself, the magic would cause a backlash that has bad effects
on the scalp.
Karl M. Syring
Ross TenEyck
There's a book, _Systems of Survival_ by Jane Jacobs, that goes
into this topic at great and illuminating length. I highly
recommend it.
--
================== http://www.alumni.caltech.edu/~teneyck ==================
Ross TenEyck Seattle, WA \ Light, kindled in the furnace of hydrogen;
ten...@alumni.caltech.edu \ like smoke, sunlight carries the hot-metal
Are wa yume? Soretomo maboroshi? \ tang of Creation's forge.
Ross TenEyck
>It's kind of silly to stand on either extreme of this argument. The
>advance of technology has been both good -- as someone in the thread
>noted, the advance of medical technology has been nothing short of
>wondrous in the last century -- and bad -- atomic bombs. Still, it's not
>hard to understand Tolkien's lament even if you don't agree.
It's also a lot easier to feel nostalgic for the simple pastoral
life if you weren't personally the one mucking out the pig pens.
Karl M Syring
Nah, it more than that. You would have to produce a model,
about how the preferred frame operates, thus you are back back
to square one.
Karl M. Syring
JoatSimeon
-- actually, both "Island in the Sea of Time" and "1632" are explicitly
science fiction; time-travel is an established SF trope, and no more "fantasy"
than FTL travel.
JoatSimeon
> And that takes research. Probably, most people who have
>studied the past enough to write about it convincingly think that they
>would like it to stay that way.
-- not me! And not Lois, either. Note the sarcastic comment that people who
like to play at knights and ladies in the Time of Isolation rarely play "Dying
of the Red Plague", or "Dying in Childbirth".
Karl M Syring
> Randy Money <rbm...@spamblocklibrary.syr.edu> writes:
>
>>It's kind of silly to stand on either extreme of this argument. The
>>advance of technology has been both good -- as someone in the thread
>>noted, the advance of medical technology has been nothing short of
>>wondrous in the last century -- and bad -- atomic bombs. Still, it's not
>>hard to understand Tolkien's lament even if you don't agree.
>
> It's also a lot easier to feel nostalgic for the simple pastoral
> life if you weren't personally the one mucking out the pig pens.
Still, country life is vastly more interesting for young
children then that of a native city dweller. It gets boring
when you grow older.
Karl M. Syring
JoatSimeon
>
>There is said to be archeological data to suggesting that early
>agriculturalists often had poorer health than h/g.
-- there's an associated drop in height, indicating poorer nutrition
(particularly, less animal protein), more stress due to hard work, and problems
like bad teeth.
>That made it easy for agriculturalists to
>displace non-agricultural people.
- not least because dense, sedentary populations with domesticated animals in
close proximity could support more diseases.
Hunter-gatherers were not only less numerous than farmers, but tended to die
off when they came in contact because of the differences in the disease
environment.
Sort of like the post-1492 demographic crash in the Americas, only more spread
out.
Mike Schilling
news:qat22v0l6o3p05ciq...@4ax.com...
What about the drive in _The Void Captain's Tail_ (umm, Tale_) ? :-)
Pete McCutchen
I think that city life is less interesting for children now because
children are so smothered due to safety concerns. At the age of
twelve or so, friends of mine and I were allowed to take the El from
the 'burbs to Wrigley Field, where we took in a baseball game. We
were then expected to make our way home, again using mass transit.
Today, I think that allowing pre-teen kids to make such an excursion
unaccompanied might very well be considered grounds for removing a
child from a home.
--
Pete McCutchen
how...@brazee.net
On 13-Jan-2003, kami...@kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu (Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes)
wrote:
> > Is _The Stars My Destination_ fantasy or science fiction?
>
> By my definition:
> <http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/documents/sf.html>
>
> TSMD has rocket ships. Therefore it is science fiction. It's not
> hard SF, though, since it uses "one impossible assumption" to bring in
> teleportation.
<i>The Witches of Karres</i>??
GSV Three Minds in a Can
wonderful person wth...@godzilla3.acpub.duke.edu said
<snip>
>> ISTR (lost the cite though) that Influenza killed more people than
>> WW1, at about the same time, so a rational Luddite (were their such a
>> thing) should be able to see the benefits of =some= technology.
>
> Why? The main thing technology did with regard to influenza
> in 1918 was to allow it to spread more rapidly.
You missed the point: =since= 1918 (up thru JRRTs death) technology had
managed to keep Influenza (and the black death, and ..) from having a
repeat performance .. i.e. it probably saved more lives than WW1+WW2
managed to kill.
--
Aaron Denney
> By my definition:
> <http://kuoi.asui.uidaho.edu/~kamikaze/documents/sf.html>
>
> TSMD has rocket ships. Therefore it is science fiction. It's not
> hard SF, though, since it uses "one impossible assumption" to bring in
> teleportation.
A mostly reasonable definition, though your definition of horror requiring
fantastic elements seems odd -- unless you mean the subset of horror that
does fit under SF.
--
Aaron Denney
-><-
Mark 'Kamikaze' Hughes
I've always wanted to join the SCA as a plague-bearer. Even made a
reasonable "buboe makeup kit" for a demonstration, but they're
obsessively ahistorical.
The world needs a *good* medieval recreation society.
Mark
Excellent question. Using the measure of "attitude", it is science
fiction, since Jaunting is shown as a "natural" ability only recently
manifesting. Bester doesn't make the mistake of trying to explain it,
though, but does make it clear by the physical parameters he sets
around it that he's not talking about magic in any mystical sense.
I'm not inclined to put a micrometer to every work, though, to see
which side of the admittedly fuzzy line it might fall on. If pressed,
I'd say TSMD is weak SF but superb fiction nonetheless.
Mark
author of:
COMPASS REACH
METAL OF NIGHT
PEACE & MEMORY (forthcoming)
www.marktiedemann.com
J.B. Moreno
You do realize that you are violently agreeing with Pearlman don't you?
I.e. what "they would like it to stay that way" means is "would like it
to stay that way, past, and I hope like hell the past never becomes the
future".
--
JBM
"Your depression will be added to my own" -- Marvin of Borg
Mark
> > But of course that's just the point--Picard's "make it so" is neither
> > a necessary nor sufficient condition to make the ship go. In magic
> > systems, the incantations are directly causal. Picard could just as
> > easily walk over to the console and push the button himself. But in
> > magic, getting the spell "right" is essential to anything happening at
> > all.
>
> Not water-tight this argumentation is: Picard could easily
> manifest his will in the brain of the operator and force him
> to follow his orders. May be, if he would push the button
> himself, the magic would cause a backlash that has bad effects
> on the scalp.
>
> Karl M. Syring
It doesn't have to be water-tight. It's fiction. It just has to be
metaphorically consistent (which in the case of Star Trek is often
enough of a stretch). My prescriptions of the differences can be read
as always beginning with the phase "Usually, as a rough rule..." That
writers produce work which muddles the distinction is one of the
pleasures of the genres. But, to reiterate, "Usually, as a rough
rule..." FTL is not used by most SF writers the way magic is used by
most fantasy writers. There are different assumptions about the
universe underlying these differences. But again--it's fiction.
Mark
author of:
COMPASS REACH
METAL OF NIGHT
PEACE & MEMORY (fortchoming)
www.marktiedemann.com
Johnny1A
> In article <QbYT9.85$3G3....@monger.newsread.com>,
> na...@unix1.netaxs.com (Nancy Lebovitz) wrote:
>
> > In article <3E20254...@hachigamenet.ne.jp>,
> > Mike Ralls <mikr...@hachigamenet.ne.jp> wrote:
> > >Tolkien's own views on industrialization. It got me thinking: Why are
> > >anti-modernization and anti-industrial meme's so common in fantasy?
> >
> > would involve so many changes that it would be hard to write.
>
> But Tolkien isn't merely leaving industrialization out. He provides a
> hostile parody of it during the brief period when Saruman's people have
> taken over the shire, and was in fact hostile to it. Somewhere in his
> letters he comments that airplanes seem in the abstract a wonderful
> idea, but in fact are used mainly to drop bombs on people,and suggests
> that that is typical of progress.
Tolkien isn't commenting on airplanes, he's commenting on _human
nature_. Tolkien's own views of such matters evolved over time, but
what really set his teeth on edge was not the notion of progress, but
of Progress, that is, the idea that human nature could be perfected by
human efforts alone. He believed that notion to be a dangerous form
of self-deception.
To understand what Tolkien wrote, one needs to keep in mind that he
was a Christian, and unapologetically believed that the Fall of Man,
though it might have been symbollically told in Genesis, was a literal
reality in human life. The stories he wrote reflect that belief.
Shermanlee
Craig Richardson
>In article <avpnkn$96j$1...@brogar.bmsc.washington.edu>,
>Ethan Merritt <mer...@u.washington.edu> wrote:
>>
>>Is it really a question of anti- rather than pre-?
>>An unfortunate preponderance of fantasy is set in a pseudo-medieval
>>setting, making it pre-modern and pre-industrial, but this does not
>>by itself convey antagonism to either.
>>
>>>Also, what are some good counterexamples?
>>
>>Barbara Hambly's stories of the great mage Antryg Windrose (sp?)
>>crusading to introduce an industrial reolution to a conservative
>>magic-based society.
>
>While Joanna(*) protests that industrialization makes everybody
>miserable.
While managing to simultaneously describe and dismiss the worst
aspects of the preindustrial agrarian lifestyle. Not to mention that
the squalor she sees is somewhat better than that of our world, as we
have no wizards (not as much as possible, due to their noninterference
directive, although that one is obeyed about as often as the
Federation's). Plus, it's the height of the Cold War, and Joanna has
a bit of the Bomb fetish that was so common at the time.
It's not unrealistic for a shy, retiring programmer to have a fairly
uninformed view of the tradeoffs involved in getting on the
industrialization track. It makes her a nonoptimal spokesperson for
technic civilization, though (I'm sure that, at some level, Antryg
realizes this - no flies on him).
--Craig
--
Managing the Devil Rays is something like competing on "Iron Chef",
and having Chairman Kaga reveal a huge ziggurat of lint.
Gary Huckabay, Baseball Prospectus Online, August 21, 2002
Jordan179
> >From: JSBass...@yahoo.com (Jordan179)
>
> >In fact, pre-industrial societies
> >generally believed that the world had "declined" since some "Golden
> >Age" in the past -- this is commonly mirrored in heroic fantasy.
>
> -- there was often some basis for this. Preindustrial peasant economies had a
> tendency to very gradually undermine the ecological underpinings around them as
> they repeatedly bumped up against the maximum carrying capacity of their
> environment and then crashed and repeated the cycle.
>
> Eg., the way deforestation spread around the Mediterranean basin.
That's quite true. And the myth-makers whose myths survived for us to
read, of course, would tend to live in mature or even temporarily
fallen civilizations (i.e., the Greece of the 9th century BCE), and
would probably have a very parochial view of the world.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
>
> FTL is not attributed to the supernatural, nor is there an incantatory
> activation component. It does not require the presence of a "gifted"
> being to operate, but rather is deployed as an exception to an
> otherwise rational and causal universe.
Even more to the point, it is usually deployed with the at least
implicit explanation that additional physics discoveries showed that
FTL was possible _within_ the framework of a rational and causal
universe -- in other words, that FTL didn't really violate rationality
or causality.
Given that some variants of real-world relativistic theory _do_ allow
forms of FTL action, I'd say that for story purposes this is perfectly
reasonable.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
>
> Nah, it more than that. You would have to produce a model,
> about how the preferred frame operates, thus you are back back
> to square one.
You would if you were proposing a real scientific theory. FOR STORY
PURPOSES you don't need to propose a detailed model -- it's enough to
work out how the FTL communication or transportation systems work out
in human terms.
You are confusing science fiction with science.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
Jordan179
> Randy Money <rbm...@spamblocklibrary.syr.edu> writes:
>
> >It's kind of silly to stand on either extreme of this argument. The
> >advance of technology has been both good -- as someone in the thread
> >noted, the advance of medical technology has been nothing short of
> >wondrous in the last century -- and bad -- atomic bombs. Still, it's not
> >hard to understand Tolkien's lament even if you don't agree.
>
> It's also a lot easier to feel nostalgic for the simple pastoral
> life if you weren't personally the one mucking out the pig pens.
And note that none of Tolkien's heroes would have been, except maybe
Samwise, and his original job was "gardener" -- an occupation which he
found _enjoyable_.
Sincerely Yours,
Jordan
David Friedman
peterw...@hotmail.com (peter wezeman) wrote:
> Matt Ruff <storyt...@worldnet.att.net> wrote in message
> news:<3E21924B...@worldnet.att.net>...
> > David Friedman wrote:
> > >
> > > But Tolkien isn't merely leaving industrialization out. He provides a
> > > hostile parody of it during the brief period when Saruman's people have
> > > taken over the shire, and was in fact hostile to it. Somewhere in his
> > > letters he comments that airplanes seem in the abstract a wonderful
> > > idea, but in fact are used mainly to drop bombs on people,
> >
> > Any idea when he wrote that? It seems like a silly thing to say now, but
> > early on in the airplane's history it might not have sounded so outrageous.
> >
> Sounds like something that might have been written during World War Two.
As best I remember it was written during WWII in a letter to his son who
was in air force training in South Africa at the time.
Robrt Pearlman
Pete McCutchen wrote:
[big snip]
>
> I think that city life is less interesting for children now because
> children are so smothered due to safety concerns. At the age of
> twelve or so, friends of mine and I were allowed to take the El from
> the 'burbs to Wrigley Field, where we took in a baseball game. We
> were then expected to make our way home, again using mass transit.
> Today, I think that allowing pre-teen kids to make such an excursion
> unaccompanied might very well be considered grounds for removing a
> child from a home.
Amen. At about the same age I was regularly sent via the Long Island
Rail Road to New York. Having visited my allergist, and not having
convulsions, I could then browse at Brentano's bookstore or go down to
the LaffMovie on 42nd street, or even both!
At Brentano's I found the first real Mathematics book I'd ever seen
(hooked!) and a description of the Harvard Mark II calculator (hooked
again!). AFAIK there is now no place in NYC where one can browse
technical books. The McGraw Hill bookstore and Book Scientific have
both closed.
The LaffMovie was firmly dedicated to art, e.g. the three stooges, Abbot
and Costello, Elmer Fudd. It's been a long time, but I don't recall
seeing any Mark brothers features there -- too high-toned, probably.
All around me change and decay I see. Get those elves out of here!
Pearlman
Ethan Merritt
Right. And if I recall correctly, early on Antryg is worrying about
the minimum number of generations of sweatshop labor necessary to
emerge into a truly mechanized industrial economy of leisure. He knows t
hat there will be some bad times as things change, but is trying
to minimize them while aiming for what he sees as a brighter future.
I've thought of another example, also. In the third book of Jo Clayton's
_MoonGather_ fantasy trilogy, the protagonists finally find a way out
of the bind their magic-dominated world is in - they import refugees
from a technological world to colonize and modernize. The story ends
before the modernization has started, but their are implied parallels
to Windrose's grand plan of modernization.
--
Ethan A Merritt
John F. Eldredge
Hash: SHA1
Remember, also, that civilian air travel, and widespread usage of air
freight, didn't become commonplace until after World War II. Before
then, most people traveled by train or by private auto. Air travel
was mostly for the rich (and, on many routes, still costs more than
driving the same distance by car).
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: PGPfreeware 7.0.3 for non-commercial use <http://www.pgp.com>
iQA/AwUBPiORmTMYPge5L34aEQLSPwCgtfH0H1yKMrLCY6nRWzgxGMm3J0sAnRrT
lb/BHD4LcPGg2LUYFU/FFuhs
=6hUO
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
--
John F. Eldredge -- jo...@jfeldredge.com
PGP key available from http://pgp.mit.edu
"Reserve your right to think, for even to think wrongly is better
than not to think at all." -- Hypatia of Alexendria
Brandon Ray
"John F. Eldredge" wrote:
> Remember, also, that civilian air travel, and widespread usage of air
> freight, didn't become commonplace until after World War II. Before
> then, most people traveled by train or by private auto. Air travel
> was mostly for the rich (and, on many routes, still costs more than
> driving the same distance by car).
Very true, but I'm not sure how important it is. It would have been very
easy for someone living in the U.K. in the early 40s to have an extremely
jaundiced view of the value of airplanes.
--
In this house we obey the laws of thermodynamics! -- Homer Simpson
JoatSimeon
>Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
>I.e. what "they would like it to stay that way" means is "would like it
>to stay that way, past, and I hope like hell the past never becomes the
>future".
-- ah, I see. My mistake. I thought he meant "would like the past to stay as
it was, because it was good that way".
Possibly had my wires crossed because I was thinking in a time-travel context.
David Friedman
Brandon Ray <pub...@avalon.net> wrote:
> "John F. Eldredge" wrote:
>
> > Remember, also, that civilian air travel, and widespread usage of air
> > freight, didn't become commonplace until after World War II. Before
> > then, most people traveled by train or by private auto. Air travel
> > was mostly for the rich (and, on many routes, still costs more than
> > driving the same distance by car).
>
> Very true, but I'm not sure how important it is. It would have been very
> easy for someone living in the U.K. in the early 40s to have an extremely
> jaundiced view of the value of airplanes.
As best I recall, Tolkien's observation didn't start with anything as
mundane as air transport. He was struck by how wonderful the ability to
fly ought to be--and then observed that in fact it was used mostly to
drop bombs.
Nancy Lebovitz
>>>From: Robrt Pearlman rpea...@optonline.net
>>> And that takes research. Probably, most people who have
>>>studied the past enough to write about it convincingly think that they
>>>would like it to stay that way.
>> -- not me! And not Lois, either. Note the sarcastic comment that people who
>> like to play at knights and ladies in the Time of Isolation rarely play "Dying
>> of the Red Plague", or "Dying in Childbirth".
>
> I've always wanted to join the SCA as a plague-bearer. Even made a
>reasonable "buboe makeup kit" for a demonstration, but they're
>obsessively ahistorical.
>
> The world needs a *good* medieval recreation society.
People keep complaining that the SCA isn't authentic enough, but
realistic medieval recreation apparently isn't enough fun for people
to put the work in.
One of the things I like about the SCA is that it's middle class modern
people using the effects of high tech to simulate being medieval
nobles. (Even if a particular artifact was made by period methods,
it's high tech that gave the person time to make it.)
--
Nancy Lebovitz na...@netaxs.com www.nancybuttons.com
Bumper stickers *and* buttons
War is how Americans learn geography