Spinrad column in Apr/May Asimov's
Remus Shepherd
column _On Books_. I normally skim this column -- my tastes in books seldom
match those of reviewers -- but this time it caught my eye and I read it
through.
I'm really surprised there hasn't been discussion about it. Here it is
on the web if you'd like to look:
http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0505/onbooks.shtml
Spinrad used this review column to go off on a rant about the state of
science fiction today. His viewpoint is, in a word, depressing. To summarize
the column, Spinrad opines that authors who were once top-listed (including
himself) are unable to get published in anything but small presses. Fantasy
is triumphing over science fiction because the goal of science fiction is to
change the world and the world is resisting change and oppressing those who
attempt to change it. Anyone who wants to change the world -- he uses China
Mieville as an example -- has to couch their ideas in fantasy to get
published, and preferably do it only at the apex of a successful career. And
because science fiction is the one and only transformational literature that
helps to evolves the culture it impacts, the death of science fiction might
just be the death of Western Culture.
All that's his opinion, as best as I can distill it.
And already people on the net have been debunking his opinions, like
in this link:
http://mumpsimus.blogspot.com/2005/03/norman-spinrad-messiah.html
The debunking follows the path you'd expect: Spinrad is washed-up, his
latest novel was not published because it was bad, he's gotten old and
conservative, and he's a hypocrite because his views conflict with the views
he had in his youth. A pretty good 'dead-agenting' of the messenger, but not
much debate over what the messenger /said/. The comments are a bit more
enlightening, with SF readers talking about whether the field is healthy and
a famous SF editor insisting that it is -- which is another tainted viewpoint
from which to hold an opinion. But whatever.
There's a summary of the argument so far. I'd like to see some discussion
on it.
Oh, maybe I should put in my opinion? Don't see why, I'm not even half
of nobody -- I'm one of those people writing classic SF that can't get
published by hook or by crook, as Spinrad described. :)
I don't agree with everything he wrote in that column, and I think a lot
of it is embittered by his viewpoint. But I don't see hypocrisy. Spinrad
always struck me as a revolutionary, and he was expecting a revolution --
either literary or social -- that never came. Whether a revolution would
have been a good thing or not, I can't say. All I can say is that Spinrad
does make some good points, and that I don't know enough (and I probably am
not smart enough) to comprehend the big picture.
I suppose my main contributor to this discussion will be a question.
Going by the theory that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil
is for good men to do nothing, what can *I* do?
Keep writing classic, unpublishable SF? Forget about professional
publishing (which means forgetting about a career, or even membership in the
SFWA, damn their elitist standards) and make a name for myself in semi-pros
and on the web?
Look into selling my stories in other places with healthier markets, such
as other countries where science fiction is young and fertile, or in other
venues like comics and games which are not yet so fucked up by the demands
and censorship of big business?
*Stop* writing at all, to give those with greater skill less competition?
Buy more science fiction, to support the field, even if I'm liking the product
it puts out less and less?
Or just say to heck with it all, pile my truck with shotguns and copies
of anarchist sci-fi, and hole up in a ranch somewhere? :)
What do you think about what Spinrad wrote? What do you think an author
who the current publishing paradigm categorically does not want should do
about it?
... ...
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com>
dobey the elf
Well consider he is Norman Spinrad, I'd have to agree. He is one of the
last of the legends. I think his standards are old school and the way
things used to be.
Now will it be the end of Western Civilization?
No. It will be the end of 1950ish Western Civilization. Our world is
more hegemony anyway in that respect, and as Third World interest
spikes, I see most potential sci fi writers actually writing about more
cultural relativistic pieces. The fantasy writers of today are not like
Tolkien, so I see fantasy has become more of a Harlequin Romance
Fantasy, or horror fantasy that sells. Rarely do you buy a good fantasy
boo these days because of the ideals represented in the book. That is
why I am so looking forward to The Kingdom of Heaven movie because it
shines head above heals over the other "fantasy" movies, and you have
to go back to to Lord of the Rings or Excalibur to make any sort of
comparison.
So really the market for High Fantasy is down. The market for Technical
Science fiction is down. And really the metamorphisis continues...
Remus Shepherd
> No. It will be the end of 1950ish Western Civilization. Our world is
> more hegemony anyway in that respect, and as Third World interest
> spikes, I see most potential sci fi writers actually writing about more
> cultural relativistic pieces. The fantasy writers of today are not like
> Tolkien, so I see fantasy has become more of a Harlequin Romance
> Fantasy, or horror fantasy that sells. Rarely do you buy a good fantasy
> boo these days because of the ideals represented in the book. That is
> why I am so looking forward to The Kingdom of Heaven movie because it
> shines head above heals over the other "fantasy" movies, and you have
> to go back to to Lord of the Rings or Excalibur to make any sort of
> comparison.
> So really the market for High Fantasy is down. The market for Technical
> Science fiction is down. And really the metamorphisis continues...
I don't think you read all of my post, nor do I think you read all of
Spinrad's column.
He's saying that fantasy is 'safe' because it is set in another world,
while science fiction is 'dangerous' because it attempts to handle real-world
problems, if only metaphorically. Right now, anything relating to real-world
problems is not selling. This could be because the big publishing companies
are blinkered to the problems and they don't want to hear any solutions, or
because the public is in denial and they don't want to question things too
much, or for some other reason. Nothing was said about high or low,
or about things being technically hard or soft (except that Spinrad called
such distinctions 'horseshit'.)
You're saying it's the end of 1950's Western Civilization. Spinrad is
saying it's the end of a civilization that questions its own future, and
the absence of such introspection in society is not healthy. On those
particular points, I agree with him.
Darkhawk (H. Nicoll)
> He's saying that fantasy is 'safe' because it is set in another world,
> while science fiction is 'dangerous' because it attempts to handle real-world
> problems, if only metaphorically.
This statement is just as true with 'science fiction' and 'fantasy'
swapped.
--
Darkhawk - H. A. Nicoll - http://aelfhame.net/~darkhawk/
They are one person, they are two alone
They are three together, they are for each other
- "Helplessly Hoping", Crosby, Stills, Nash, and Young
Mary K. Kuhner
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
> You're saying it's the end of 1950's Western Civilization. Spinrad is
>saying it's the end of a civilization that questions its own future, and
>the absence of such introspection in society is not healthy. On those
>particular points, I agree with him.
Why reject the idea that civilization swings back and forth, and
things that are popular during one part of the swing aren't during
another? I don't see any reason to suppose that because fantasy
is (may be) more popular right now than SF, that trend must
inevitably continue.
I'm also pretty doubtful about "fantasy doesn't address real-world
problems" given the spate of problem-centric fantasy in the last
few decades. I'd have a *lot* of trouble defending the idea that
_Wizard of the Pigeons_ or _Mockingbird_ (or even _Nobody's Son_
or _Deerskin_) don't address real-world problems.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Eric Jarvis
> I just got to the end of the April/May Asimov's, and Norman Spinrad's
> column _On Books_. I normally skim this column -- my tastes in books seldom
> match those of reviewers -- but this time it caught my eye and I read it
> through.
>
> I'm really surprised there hasn't been discussion about it. Here it is
> on the web if you'd like to look:
>
> http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0505/onbooks.shtml
>
> Spinrad used this review column to go off on a rant about the state of
> science fiction today. His viewpoint is, in a word, depressing. To summarize
> the column, Spinrad opines that authors who were once top-listed (including
> himself) are unable to get published in anything but small presses. Fantasy
> is triumphing over science fiction because the goal of science fiction is to
> change the world and the world is resisting change and oppressing those who
> attempt to change it. Anyone who wants to change the world -- he uses China
> Mieville as an example -- has to couch their ideas in fantasy to get
> published, and preferably do it only at the apex of a successful career. And
> because science fiction is the one and only transformational literature that
> helps to evolves the culture it impacts, the death of science fiction might
> just be the death of Western Culture.
>
> All that's his opinion, as best as I can distill it.
>
It's an interesting column. It runs very close to something that's been
bugging me. However I think he's seeing things the wrong way around. The
change isn't in science fiction. The change is in how people see their
world and their relationship to it.
There's been a crisis of faith in science that has coincided with some
major geopolitical changes. To an extent the two are interlinked though
I'm not convinced that it's possible to tell which happened first,
particularly since any analysis of it requires ignoring what has become
the standard rewriting of the history of the last two decades. Leaving
that aside, the problem for sf is that a vast number of people have
responded to many disastrous political decisions that have been taken
regarding technology to be the failure of science. They respond to this by
looking for faith based interpretations rather than those based on
evidence and logic. That goes just as much for a faith that a free market
will always provide, or a faith in socialism, as it does for religious
faith.
There have always been people who need a core of faith to build their
world view upon. Possibly all of us do. There have always been people who
regard everything with suspicion until it's been proven beyond all
possible doubt. Probably we all have elements of both and all that's
happened is a change in the way we balance them.
I believe that is reflected in publishing. Fewer people want sf, more want
fantasy. The nature of faith is that most people don't take pleasure from
having the basis of their faith analysed in detail from a point of view
that doesn't accept the very idea of faith. If you want to analyse faith
it's more easily done with fantasy anyway.
To an extent that means that fantasy is now more fertile soil for somebody
who wants to write "revolutionary" literature. That's difficult for those
of us who are still very rooted in the belief that science provides better
answers than faith, however that's our problem.
--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
all these years I've waited for the revolution
and all we end up getting is spin
J Cresswell-Jones
"Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
news:d55jg7$2m7$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> I just got to the end of the April/May Asimov's, and Norman Spinrad's
> column _On Books_. I normally skim this column -- my tastes in books
> seldom
> match those of reviewers -- but this time it caught my eye and I read it
> through.
>
> I'm really surprised there hasn't been discussion about it. Here it is
> on the web if you'd like to look:
>
> http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0505/onbooks.shtml
>
> Spinrad used this review column to go off on a rant about the state of
> science fiction today. His viewpoint is, in a word, depressing. To
> summarize
> the column, Spinrad opines that authors who were once top-listed
> (including
> himself) are unable to get published in anything but small presses.
> Fantasy
> is triumphing over science fiction because the goal of science fiction is
> to
> change the world and the world is resisting change and oppressing those
> who
> attempt to change it. Anyone who wants to change the world -- he uses
> China
> Mieville as an example -- has to couch their ideas in fantasy to get
> published, and preferably do it only at the apex of a successful career.
I think Charlie Stross is the one to ask about this. Charlie? *Did* you get
yelled at by thuggish, "what's this gawddam commie stuff?" publishers in
windowless back rooms when you first tried getting _Singularity Sky_ into
print in the US?
> What do you think about what Spinrad wrote? What do you think an author
> who the current publishing paradigm categorically does not want should do
> about it?
He's got a point, but I think he's overgeneralizing. Are SF writers from the
1970s not appealing to buyers in the early 2000s? Is this shocking? Part of
that may be that in the good ol' days, SF had a uniqe ability to frame
current 'unspeakable' issues in less threatening terms ("Surely you see the
difference? Frank Gorshin is black on his LEFT side!"). Now, there's almost
nothing that cannot be said or addressed in popular media, so that aspect of
SF has little value.
In terms of the 'current paradigm', if one has worked through a
statistically significant fraction of it -- that is, submitted four or more
stories to twenty or thirty markets combined, with no sales -- then perhaps
there is a mismatch between what one's selling and they're buying. Write
different stuff, market it, and see what happens.
I have heard people say that it is tougher across the board to sell SF *or*
fantasy to a publisher than it was in the 1980s. There may simply be more
people writing. There's something like 180 million PCs in the US that can be
used for writing; I doubt there ever were 180 million typewriters in use.
--
Jonathan CJ
Mean Green Dancing Machine
>while science fiction is 'dangerous' because it attempts to handle
>real-world problems, if only metaphorically. Right now, anything
>relating to real-world problems is not selling. This could be because
>the big publishing companies are blinkered to the problems and they
>don't want to hear any solutions, or because the public is in denial
>and they don't want to question things too much, or for some other
>reason. Nothing was said about high or low, or about things being
>technically hard or soft (except that Spinrad called such distinctions
>'horseshit'.)
_Fallen Angels_, anyone? ;-)
--
--- Aahz <*> (Copyright 2005 by aa...@pobox.com)
Hugs and backrubs -- I break Rule 6 http://rule6.info/
Androgynous poly kinky vanilla queer het Pythonista
The best way to get information on Usenet is not to ask a question, but
to post the wrong information.
David Friedman
> You're saying it's the end of 1950's Western Civilization. Spinrad is
> saying it's the end of a civilization that questions its own future, and
> the absence of such introspection in society is not healthy. On those
> particular points, I agree with him.
I haven't read the column, but I find "the end of a civilization that
questions its own future" pretty much the opposite of what I am
observing. When I was an undergraduate (early 1960's), the consensus I
observed around me (and didn't share) was pretty confident about the
future--scientific progress, increasing use of government to solve
problems. The one big uncertainty was the possibility of thermonuclear
war.
Currently, insofar as I see a consensus at all, it's one that is very
uncertain about its future. Large scale thermonuclear war seems unlikely
in at least the near future, but lots of people seem to believe in
cataclysmic effects from global warming, genetically engineered foods,
pollution, species extinction, and (for the more sophisticated) nanotech
and AI a little farther down the line.
--
Remove NOSPAM to email
Also remove .invalid
www.daviddfriedman.com
Dan Goodman
> I just got to the end of the April/May Asimov's, and Norman Spinrad's
> column _On Books_. I normally skim this column -- my tastes in books
> seldom match those of reviewers -- but this time it caught my eye and I
> read it through.
>
> I'm really surprised there hasn't been discussion about it.
Such discussion belongs on rec.arts.sf.whackoes or
rec.arts.sf.braineater-victims.
My reaction to the column was mostly "Oh, that's just Spinrad again." I
presume a number of others had the same reaction.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Decluttering: http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
James A. Donald
On Mon, 2 May 2005 16:11:51 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
> http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0505/onbooks.shtml
>
> Spinrad used this review column to go off on a rant
> about the state of
> science fiction today. His viewpoint is, in a word,
> depressing. To summarize the column, Spinrad opines
> that authors who were once top-listed (including
> himself) are unable to get published in anything but
> small presses. Fantasy is triumphing over science
> fiction because the goal of science fiction is to
> change the world and the world is resisting change and
> oppressing those who attempt to change it. Anyone who
> wants to change the world -- he uses China Mieville as
> an example -- has to couch their ideas in fantasy to
> get published, and preferably do it only at the apex
> of a successful career. And because science fiction
> is the one and only transformational literature that
> helps to evolves the culture it impacts, the death of
> science fiction might just be the death of Western
> Culture.
He starts out reviewing a fantasy of anarcho socialist
revolution, which like anarcho socialism itself, does
not even attempt to be internally consistent or
logically possible - it lacks even the rather limited
internal consistency that is required of fantasies.
He then eventually tells us:
: : In literary terms, fantasy requires no
: : suspension of disbelief because no belief is
: : required. Whereas science fiction must create
: : [...] Belief that its characters, however
: : altered their states of consciousness,
: : however evolved or devolved or alien, inhabit
: : a fictional universe that, however far in the
: : future or far away or both, could in the
: : future or far away or even right now be
: : contiguous with the reality that the reader
: : inhabits.
He then complains that the decline of science fiction as
a genre indicates our culture has despaired.
He is wrong. Rather, with the fall of the Soviet
Union, the intellectuals have despaired - hence the rise
of postmodernism, magic realism, and the rest of that
pile of manure.
Such despair is a manifestation of the beginnings of
recovery from a terrible disease, not a manifestation of
a terrible disease.
The major publishers are not publishing real science
fiction for roughly the same reasons as the mainstream
press is not publishing real news. Just as absence of
news from the likes of the New York Times led to the
rise of alternative news outlets, it is leading to the
rise of alternative publishing outlets for science
fiction. Publishers are drowning in metacultural
angst, but readers are not.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
cXgGVbVKQHFJOjizxSa2rKCdTt21PmHObkzl3aYR
4V1tn2UuYUa4XzOe6oxoU+euWnfZ1Pm1SBd/HJI0j
Lucy Kemnitzer
mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu (Mary K. Kuhner) seems to have
said:
See, this is the problem when we talk about "fantasy." There are
people who, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary, use the word
"fantasy" to mean "High Fantasy" and ignore all the other kinds of
fantasies -- the urban contemporary fantasy, for example (and if you
use that term people are going to assume you mean Shadowrun or at the
most Borderlands fiction, which are fine but not in the least
indicative of the vast range of work available that fits the face
value description -- Shetterly, some of Brust, de Lint -- me, but I
don't count yet). Or _Deerskin_. And what do you call that? Or what
do you call the Sean Russell books, the "River into Darkness" and
"Moontide and Magic Rise" books -- and in the latter, science is
upheld as the positive value against magic? Or the Philip Pullman
books? Or Pamela Dean's later books? what are they?
There's one thing I won't call _Mockingbird_ and that's "safe."
If there's any big reason why fantasy is more poopular than science
fiction right now -- if it even is, I've never seen convincing numbers
or numbers that made any sense -- it's that the audience is less
interested in the vibrant new science fictional ideas than in the
vibrant new fantasy ideas. Or there are fewer people writing the
vibrant new science fictional ideas than the vibrant new fantasy
ideas. But I don't even know or care if it's true.
What interests me is not the doomdoomdoom song but looking at the cool
new writing in a genre and getting jazzed off it.
Anyways I don't believe that revolution can't be addressed in science
fiction. There are at least three Mars series in the last 20 years
with revolutions in them (the fact that I didn't like them very much
is not the point). All those Scottish guys seem to be writing about
revolution all the time, and they seem to be doing okay. Just for
example straight off the top of my head (and though the science
fiction I've been writing has been all sort of pre-revolutionary at
the moment, I may get there eventually myself, but again, I don't
count yet).
Well, that was more fun than what I'm supposed to be doing. Oops,
I've left the phone off the hook for two hours . . .
Lucy Kemnitzer, still
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ritaxis
Remus Shepherd
> Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
> > He's saying that fantasy is 'safe' because it is set in another world,
> > while science fiction is 'dangerous' because it attempts to handle real-world
> > problems, if only metaphorically.
> This statement is just as true with 'science fiction' and 'fantasy'
> swapped.
Not in Spinrad's terms. Fantasy by definition allows one to shrug off
any disturbing revelations as belonging to another reality, while science
fiction insists that what is depicted could potentially be a part of our own.
James A. Donald
On Mon, 02 May 2005 11:26:44 -0700, David Friedman
> I haven't read the column, but I find "the end of a
> civilization that questions its own future" pretty
> much the opposite of what I am observing.
It reminds of the story of the man who did not know
anyone who voted for Reagan.
There is indeed a substantial circle that has despaired
of progress, the future, and change - and to a
substantial extent it overlaps with the circle that does
not know anyone who voted for Reagan and the circle of
the guys who get published in the New York Times and the
like.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
3Oacui7Dd3a63aeCh0q/LQgC2IkkipzqJzoFUSqp
4PKtWZjttzeC/eG9AXbKN5mXNTePyGBkHnLNyfQYd
James Nicoll
Ah, yes. I was just this morning contemplating the escapist
fantasy of FLYING IN PLACE as opposed to the deep insight offered by
REBEL MOON.
--
http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/immigrate/
http://www.marryanamerican.ca
http://www.livejournal.com/users/james_nicoll
James A. Donald
Eric Jarvis:
> There's been a crisis of faith in science that has
> coincided with some major geopolitical changes. To an
> extent the two are interlinked though I'm not
> convinced that it's possible to tell which happened
> first,
The decline of socialism, foreshadowing its coming
collapse, happened first. In order to continue to
believe in socialism, intellectuals found it necessary
to cease believing in reason, objectivity, facts, the
knowability of the external world, the need for
journalists to tell the truth, and so forth. Hence
postmodernism, magic realism, Robert Fisk, and the rest.
> I believe that is reflected in publishing. Fewer
> people want sf, more want fantasy.
I don't see this. Rather, fewer publishers want sf,
more want fantasy. Hard science fiction is still
selling, just through alternative outlets. We earlier
saw the same problem with news. As the mainstream press
lost interest in depicting what is happening in the
world, people turned to new outlets.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
PSkmWNfj6aTiE642Kvq4sYhU4mHQ0e+Dm1HPtkyY
4owA60fbOzz/tKoe7aFNJLw4zT/iivzTlF4Q5CuWE
Remus Shepherd
> "Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
> 1970s not appealing to buyers in the early 2000s? Is this shocking? Part of
> that may be that in the good ol' days, SF had a uniqe ability to frame
> current 'unspeakable' issues in less threatening terms ("Surely you see the
> difference? Frank Gorshin is black on his LEFT side!"). Now, there's almost
> nothing that cannot be said or addressed in popular media, so that aspect of
> SF has little value.
Your last statement has me flabbergasted. :) 'Almost nothing that cannot
be addressed in popular media'? Popular media in America is more censored and
bland right now than any time I can remember in my nearly fourty years. Any
topics dealing with sex, religion, or rebellion are heavily watered down or
outright forbidden. In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that contains
homosexual characters; in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
'ungodly'. Are you and I looking at the same America?
> In terms of the 'current paradigm', if one has worked through a
> statistically significant fraction of it -- that is, submitted four or more
> stories to twenty or thirty markets combined, with no sales -- then perhaps
> there is a mismatch between what one's selling and they're buying. Write
> different stuff, market it, and see what happens.
Useful advice for the person aiming to be a professional hack writer. Not
so useful for someone who wants to write riskier stuff.
> I have heard people say that it is tougher across the board to sell SF *or*
> fantasy to a publisher than it was in the 1980s. There may simply be more
> people writing.
That's probably very true, and one of the main causes of the problem.
James A. Donald
On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:13:40 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
> Your last statement has me flabbergasted. :) 'Almost
> nothing that cannot be addressed in popular media'?
> Popular media in America is more censored and bland
> right now than any time I can remember in my nearly
> fourty years. Any topics dealing with sex, religion,
> or rebellion are heavily watered down or outright
> forbidden.
Time to upgrade your cable subscription.
Looks to me like sex, religion, and rebellion are not
only the big sellers that they always were, but today
even more creators than ever are lining up to milk that
ever popular market more enthusiastically than ever
before.
Yes, Janet Reno cannot bear her breast on the halftime
football show, but this should not astonish anyone. If,
however, you watch the cartoon channel at 1AM, prepare
to be astonished.
Consider for example South Park:
Here is a synopsis of South Park shows - they are pretty
much all about sex, death, religion, excretion,
rebellion, big political questions, more excretion, more
sex, and more death.
http://www.tvtome.com/tvtome/servlet/GuidePageServlet/showid-344/epid-2450/
And South Park, which you can see at 9PM, is mild stuff
compared to what you can see at 1AM.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
LLXNNHfI8C9CfX/1p1C3f5C9DsGhOvpxRvrJDdP8
4jxDFxLu04nT3exKyhifaF6w/HjTQoM7IqsT06jk1
Lucy Kemnitzer
Those are stupid stipulations for science fiction and fantasy. There
are way too many science fiction stories that really-o truly-o could
never ever happen.
Lucy Kemnitzer
I don't think that's what SPinrad means by questioning the future. I
can't be sure, because I kept falling away when I was trying to read
the article.
Mary K. Kuhner
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
>Not in Spinrad's terms. Fantasy by definition allows one to shrug off
>any disturbing revelations as belonging to another reality, while
>science fiction insists that what is depicted could potentially be
>a part of our own.
But if you define "science fiction" and "fantasy" this far away
from their usual marketing sense, you aren't allowed to use
figures on how books and stories sell to back up your point--
books labelled SF do not necessary insist that what they depict
could potentially be a part of our own reality, books labelled
fantasy do not necessary reject it.
In any case most of the really revolutionary stuff in both
SF and fantasy is about people, and in many stories of both
genres we *are* expected to consider these as potential real
people, even if they live in Faerie or on Mars.
When Sean Stewart says (paraphrase) "Good and evil aren't
about what you say or what you believe, they're about what
you do when the fucking Nazgul come," I don't dismiss it
with "That doesn't apply to me because Nazgul aren't real."
(And that's putting aside the fact that the worldview in
some contemporary fantasy is closer to my personal
understanding of "real life" than the worldview of, say,
the Foundation trilogy is.)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Mary K. Kuhner
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
> Your last statement has me flabbergasted. :) 'Almost
>nothing that cannot be addressed in popular media'? Popular
>media in America is more censored and bland right now than any
>time I can remember in my nearly fourty years. Any
>topics dealing with sex, religion, or rebellion are heavily
>watered down or outright forbidden. In Alabama they're
>trying to ban any book that contains homosexual characters;
>in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
>'ungodly'. Are you and I looking at the same America?
Same America but different perspective, I think.
The cries for censorship are real and troubling, but they
need to be seen in the context of what strikes me as a
vast loosening of authorial self-censorship. If you read
Ellison's _Dangerous Visions_ anthologies today they
don't seem all that dangerous; I don't have the sense I
once had that some topics are just not allowed on the
radar at all. That it's still true for TV I might take
on faith (I don't watch TV) though I haven't seen any
evidence of it; but the range of stuff you can do in
print fiction is very, very wide. People will make a
fuss, but it's *out there* to have a fuss made over it.
You can write and mainstream-publish high fantasy with
explicit, sympathetic gay sex in it. Yes, you may get trouble
in Alabama, but I don't think it's that long ago that you
flatly couldn't find a publisher.
(To add to my previous list I will put forward Rachel
Pollack's _Temporary Agency_ and _Unquenchable Fire_ as
examples of very unsafe fantasy. Not just for the
gay sex, either. They have some sharp things to say
about organized religion and about government and
generally about people.)
Someone older than me might venture a guess as to whether
_Temporary Agency_ could have been published in 1960.
I would be amazed, though.
(I'm 41 but grew up reading older SF. It leaves out a
*lot*.)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Marilee J. Layman
<re...@panix.com> wrote:
> I just got to the end of the April/May Asimov's, and Norman Spinrad's
>column _On Books_. I normally skim this column -- my tastes in books seldom
>match those of reviewers -- but this time it caught my eye and I read it
>through.
>
> I'm really surprised there hasn't been discussion about it. Here it is
>on the web if you'd like to look:
Norman Spinrad is an egotistical grouch. I usually skim the other
reviewers columns, but I just skip his. He'll be sure to get
something in about how such a wonderful writer as he can't get
published these days.
--
Marilee J. Layman
J Cresswell-Jones
>J Cresswell-Jones <jcresswell...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> "Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
>> He's got a point, but I think he's overgeneralizing. Are SF writers from
>> the
>> 1970s not appealing to buyers in the early 2000s? Is this shocking? Part
>> of
>> that may be that in the good ol' days, SF had a uniqe ability to frame
>> current 'unspeakable' issues in less threatening terms ("Surely you see
>> the
>> difference? Frank Gorshin is black on his LEFT side!"). Now, there's
>> almost
>> nothing that cannot be said or addressed in popular media, so that aspect
>> of
>> SF has little value.
>
> Your last statement has me flabbergasted. :) 'Almost nothing that
> cannot
> be addressed in popular media'? Popular media in America is more censored
> and
> bland right now than any time I can remember in my nearly fourty years.
> Any
> topics dealing with sex, religion, or rebellion are heavily watered down
> or
> outright forbidden.
Mmm, I would say that rather than being forbidden, they are disarmed by
being packaged into a safer format. Ie, "XXX: State of the Union" is
ostensibly about a right-wing plot to take over the USA, but is really just
a video game on the big screen. That plot idea itself is not longer even
threatening; its teeth have long since been pulled.
>In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that contains
> homosexual characters; in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
> 'ungodly'. Are you and I looking at the same America?
Probably not. Is there a single American publishing paradigm that accepts or
rejects stories by central command? For instance, are Harry Potter sales
down because of that incident in Kansas?
How many SF books get burned as opposed to fantasy, BTW? If the state is
heavily favouring fantasy and suppressing SF, as Spinrad argued, I'd expect
that hard SF novels would be flopping onto bonfires as the drones obeyed
their masters. Seems just the opposite.
>> In terms of the 'current paradigm', if one has worked through a
>> statistically significant fraction of it -- that is, submitted four or
>> more
>> stories to twenty or thirty markets combined, with no sales -- then
>> perhaps
>> there is a mismatch between what one's selling and they're buying. Write
>> different stuff, market it, and see what happens.
>
> Useful advice for the person aiming to be a professional hack writer.
> Not
> so useful for someone who wants to write riskier stuff.
I won't get into what makes a 'hack' or not. Suffice it to say that if you
want risk, by all means write risky stuff -- but you must accept the
possibility, even a high probability, of failure to get it into commercial
print. The closer that match between what a given publisher is looking for
at the moment, and what a writer offers them, the less risk.
--
Jonathan CJ
Mary K. Kuhner
news:d55u54$kqh$1...@reader1.panix.com...
> Useful advice for the person aiming to be a professional hack writer.
> Not so useful for someone who wants to write riskier stuff.
The demand that writing riskier stuff somehow be made risk-free
strikes me as logically contradictory. The risk of writing
something original will *always* include the risk that people will
hate it or be offended by it.
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
J Cresswell-Jones
"David Friedman" <dd...@daviddfriedman.nospam.com> wrote in message
news:ddfr-719A6C.1...@newsread1.mlpsca01.us.to.verio.net...
Here's where things get blurry -- almost every one of those topics shows up
in the setting of Margaret Atwood's _Oryx and Crake_, but it's not published
as SF or usually stocked in the SF section of bookstores. The Potter books,
or the "Left Behind" series, are also capable of skewing the marketplace
numbers singlehanded.
If we look at the Tor schedule, they seem to be publishing new SF and
fantasy in the ratio of about 2 to 3. That doesn't seem like the death of
SF.
--
Jonathan CJ
Remus Shepherd
> > Popular media in America is more censored and bland
> > right now than any time I can remember in my nearly
> > fourty years. Any topics dealing with sex, religion,
> > or rebellion are heavily watered down or outright
> > forbidden.
> Time to upgrade your cable subscription.
You know, every time I put in the wrong word in a Usenet post, people
focus on that to the exclusion of everything else.
> Consider for example South Park:
South Park's pretty good. I do watch late night shows, mostly on the
Cartoon Network's Adult Swim, but although those are edgy and creative I
wouldn't call them rebellious in any meaningful sense. South Park is.
A quick search for ratings show that it's approaching 3 million viewers
compared to 20 million for hit shows on the major networks, which isn't
really competitive but is definitely a solid niche.
Now if you would, please, replace the word 'media' with 'literature' up
there and give me another example.
Television -- especially cable television -- is still very fluid and
creative. People are still making shows for Cartoon Network in their garage.
There are plenty of niches left to fill on cable. Fiction publishing is a
much rougher and more competitive place, and in major houses the niches are
becoming extinct. At least, that's what I'm being told by essays like
Spinrad's -- I've had little personal experience in those circles, none of it
good. :)
Remus Shepherd
> Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
> >Not in Spinrad's terms. Fantasy by definition allows one to shrug off
> >any disturbing revelations as belonging to another reality, while
> >science fiction insists that what is depicted could potentially be
> >a part of our own.
> But if you define "science fiction" and "fantasy" this far away
> from their usual marketing sense, you aren't allowed to use
> figures on how books and stories sell to back up your point--
> books labelled SF do not necessary insist that what they depict
> could potentially be a part of our own reality, books labelled
> fantasy do not necessary reject it.
You're right, those are lousy definitions.
Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about Fantasy versus
Science Fiction. This is about literature presenting ideas in an attempt
to change society versus literature designed only to entertain the soma-
addled masses.
Why is the former disappearing, and what can be done about it?
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan
> Anyone who wants to change the world -- he uses China
> Mieville as an example -- has to couch their ideas in fantasy to get
> published, and preferably do it only at the apex of a successful career.
Oh, yeah, right. China Mieville really only wanted to write hard science
ficiton but he couldn't, and had to wait until he was at the apex of his
career to write something dangerous as Perdido Street Station. Yeah.
Everybody who's met him knows just how tremulous China is and how eager
to tailor what he writes to the needs of the market.
--
Anna Feruglio Dal Dan - ada...@spamcop.net - this is a valid address
homepage: http://www.fantascienza.net/sfpeople/elethiomel
English blog: http://annafdd.blogspot.com/
LJ: http://www.livejournal.com/users/annafdd/
Mary K. Kuhner
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
> Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about Fantasy versus
>Science Fiction. This is about literature presenting ideas in an attempt
>to change society versus literature designed only to entertain the soma-
>addled masses.
> Why is the former disappearing, and what can be done about it?
You'd have to convince me that the former is disappearing, first!
I think there is a perspective problem here. A lot of fluff
was written in, say, 1950, but who reads it now? We remember
the really good stuff, which was often edgy and provocative.
(Though some stuff that was edgy and provocative then has not
aged as well...edginess in itself is no guarantee of anything.)
So today, there is some really good stuff, and a lot of fluff.
But we see it all, so we think the fluff has increased. I
don't think we can be sure of that at all with an informal
analysis; I'd want to see a careful piece of number-crunching.
_The Golden Compass_ strikes me as, in itself, a strong
proof that challenging things can not only be written,
but be sold, and be successful--even in the young adult
market, which is historically more conservative than the
adult marker.
(Hm, an odd thought in passing. One of the core questions
of _Brave New World_, at least in my reading, is "Is slavery
still wrong if the slaves are happy with it?" This also
comes up heavily in recent Vinge, especially _Deepness in the
Sky_. And it comes up, oddly enough, in Harry Potter.
The line between literature designed to entertain and literature
designed to change society is maybe not as clear-cut for me
as it is for you.)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Remus Shepherd
> Mmm, I would say that rather than being forbidden, they are disarmed by
> being packaged into a safer format.
This was part of Spinrad's point. He proposed lumping fantasy into the
'safe' category and science fiction as 'dangerous', but those are lousy
categories. There probably are categories of safe and dangerous fiction, but
they don't line up with the distinction between fantasy and sci-fi.
> How many SF books get burned as opposed to fantasy, BTW? If the state is
> heavily favouring fantasy and suppressing SF, as Spinrad argued, I'd expect
> that hard SF novels would be flopping onto bonfires as the drones obeyed
> their masters. Seems just the opposite.
Nobody is accusing 'the state', or any government, of doing anything.
I'd say there seems to be two mechanisms at work: Cultural elements that
are growing stronger, and who want to oppress opposing points of view, and
megacorporations who are publishing only safe things in an attempt to
maximize profits, which cause not-so-mega corporations to do the same in
order to stay in business. This is not a battle with democracy or government,
it's a battle against religious orthodoxy, dogmatic ideology, and rampant
capitalism.
> I won't get into what makes a 'hack' or not. Suffice it to say that if you
> want risk, by all means write risky stuff -- but you must accept the
> possibility, even a high probability, of failure to get it into commercial
> print. The closer that match between what a given publisher is looking for
> at the moment, and what a writer offers them, the less risk.
Thanks for outlining it like that. It makes it easy to distill Spinrad's
argument -- as I understand it -- down to a single statement: Publishers
(and by association, our society) have become too afraid of risky ideas.
What can we do about it?
Alma Hromic Deckert
<re...@panix.com> wrote:
>Publishers
>(and by association, our society) have become too afraid of risky ideas.
>
> What can we do about it?
Keep writing them.
No, really. If risky ideas stop being HAD by people, then the drones
have already won.
Spread your wings; show 'em it's still possible to fly. Even if you're
a bumblebee and *everyone* tells you that it's impossible.
A.
Dorothy J Heydt
And the borderlines are so fuzzy as really to be imaginary if not
quite nonexistent, and (as has been many times pointed out) each
of us has his own criteria as to which side a given work falls on.
As to what could and what couldn't really-o truly-o happen,
you probably need to specify "in terms of what": things that
are physically impossible; things that are so unlikely in terms
of observed human nature as to be as near impossible as makes no
difference; things set in our own or another existing culture or
a recent outgrowth of same that diverge so far/fast as to be
similarly unlikely; ...
In addition to which, there's always the observation (so
painfully familiar to all of us here) that you can pull it off if
you can pull it off, and if you can't you can't, and what's more
whether you pull it off is going to be in the eye of the
beholder. E.g., is the culture of _The Handmaid's Tale_
believable? Did Atwood pull it off or not? It's each reader's
call. (Mine is No.)
My son Tristan has just devised for me a culture which worships
the Mother-Goddess and yet is about as restrictive of women as
Saudia Arabia; he has also outlined how it got that way in no
less than three cultural removes on as many planets which I think
makes it believable; but we'll have to see.
Dorothy J. Heydt
Albany, California
djh...@kithrup.com
David Bilek
It isn't. It isn't disappearing. It's all over the place.
A lot of it is coming out of the UK these days (especially in the
science fictional realm) but I don't care where it comes from, only
that it exists.
What can be done about it? Produce entertaining, thought provoking,
challenging, and well-written stories. Lots of people are.
-David
David Friedman
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
> Your last statement has me flabbergasted. :) 'Almost nothing that cannot
> be addressed in popular media'? Popular media in America is more censored
> and
> bland right now than any time I can remember in my nearly fourty years. Any
> topics dealing with sex, religion, or rebellion are heavily watered down or
> outright forbidden.
Perhaps we live in different Americas?
Presumably, if things are outright forbidden, they are forbidden whether
they were written yesterday or forty years ago. It's hard to prove what
isn't being published, but it is easy to see what already published
stuff isn't being forbidden. For example:
_Stranger in a Strange Land_ dealt with sex and religion--still
available.
_Moon is a Harsh Mistress_ dealt with group marriage and
rebellion--still available.
_The Fountainhead_ and _Atlas Shrugged_ dealt with rebellion. Still
available.
For modern stuff, Ken MacLeod doesn't seem to have much problem
publishing stuff largely about rebellion with a little sex mixed in.
I pretty much don't watch movies or television--do they have less sex,
religion and rebellion than a few decades back? Not my impression from
what other people say, but that's second hand.
--
Remove NOSPAM to email
Also remove .invalid
www.daviddfriedman.com
Dorothy J Heydt
Lucy Kemnitzer <rit...@cruzio.com> wrote:
>If there's any big reason why fantasy is more poopular than science
>fiction right now -- if it even is, I've never seen convincing numbers
>or numbers that made any sense -- it's that the audience is less
>interested in the vibrant new science fictional ideas than in the
>vibrant new fantasy ideas. Or there are fewer people writing the
>vibrant new science fictional ideas than the vibrant new fantasy
>ideas. But I don't even know or care if it's true.
Could it, perhaps, be because in order to read fantasy people
don't have to understand any science, which mostly they don't?
There's been a lot of technological advance in, say, well, since
1950, and while people use it eagerly, to an increasing degree
they don't understand it at all and it qualifies as magic under
Clarke's Third Law. The grandson of the guy who could take apart
and put back together his Ford, or his radio, and understand
every bit of it and how it worked or why it didn't work, doesn't
understand how his computer or his PDA or even his microwave
works, and cutting-edge science fiction, attempting to explore
the implications of cutting-edge sience, will put him in the
place of the young woman about seventy-five years ago who tried
to read A. Merritt and put it down saying, "I can't read this, I
have to look up too many words."
dobey the elf
Remus Shepherd wrote:
> dobey the elf <dobe...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> > No. It will be the end of 1950ish Western Civilization. Our world
is
> > more hegemony anyway in that respect, and as Third World interest
> > spikes, I see most potential sci fi writers actually writing about
more
> > cultural relativistic pieces. The fantasy writers of today are not
like
> > Tolkien, so I see fantasy has become more of a Harlequin Romance
> > Fantasy, or horror fantasy that sells. Rarely do you buy a good
fantasy
> > boo these days because of the ideals represented in the book. That
is
> > why I am so looking forward to The Kingdom of Heaven movie because
it
> > shines head above heals over the other "fantasy" movies, and you
have
> > to go back to to Lord of the Rings or Excalibur to make any sort of
> > comparison.
>
> > So really the market for High Fantasy is down. The market for
Technical
> > Science fiction is down. And really the metamorphisis continues...
>
> I don't think you read all of my post, nor do I think you read all
of
> Spinrad's column.
I did read al of your post, just not all of his article.
>
> He's saying that fantasy is 'safe' because it is set in another
world,
> while science fiction is 'dangerous' because it attempts to handle
real-world
> problems, if only metaphorically. Right now, anything relating to
real-world
> problems is not selling. This could be because the big publishing
companies
> are blinkered to the problems and they don't want to hear any
solutions, or
> because the public is in denial and they don't want to question
things too
> much, or for some other reason. Nothing was said about high or low,
> or about things being technically hard or soft
yes that was my take on it. I thought the point of your post was to
start a thread about the state of sci fi and fantasy. I did not realize
it was just another critical diatribe of a legend of sci fi. When you
have written as many stories and sold them as Mr. Spinrad, then I think
your sort of comments might count in regards to what he rights?
Otherwise it is like me criticizing Gordon R. Dickson, doesn't really
help anyone does it?
The mark of real science fiction is to go beyond the modicums of todays
society. Why should I waste my time writing a book about a ethanol
solar powered car when that pretty much has been concieved of? No if I
write, I am going to write about the quasistellar dust between galaxies
as being the remnants of a universe spanning war.. I am going to write
beyond what is available. Good technical sci fi takes the thought
processes of say electronics but then applies it to a futuristic
technology like James Hogan did in his Giants trilogy. Not alot of
people in this day and age are writing those types of stories because
they are euthenized to technology by the internet. They no longer have
to work for their imaginations, because all that they think they can
imagine is just one click away...
(except that Spinrad called
> such distinctions 'horseshit'.)
I think there are many ways to look at distinctions in sci fi, there
are many types and the kind I miss the most in this day and age are the
Golden Age type stories like "The Wall Around the World" or "The Hurkle
is a Happy Beast" --short stories without out all the over the top junk
of sex and violence.
>
> You're saying it's the end of 1950's Western Civilization.
Spinrad is
> saying it's the end of a civilization that questions its own future,
and
> the absence of such introspection in society is not healthy.
Well I think I did quite well with my line of introspection in this
post.
On those
> particular points, I agree with him.
>
Dan Goodman
> Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about Fantasy versus
> Science Fiction. This is about literature presenting ideas in an
> attempt to change society versus literature designed only to entertain
> the soma-addled masses.
>
> Why is the former disappearing,
It isn't. Sheri S. Tepper and L. Neil Smith are still being published;
Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin have realized that their early work
suffered from being insufficiently political and are selling reasonably
well; Eric Flint's stuff (which is about as political as you can get
without abridging _Atlas Shrugged_ to take out characters and plot) is
being published; very much et cetera.
> and what can be done about it?
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Decluttering: http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Dorothy J Heydt
J Cresswell-Jones <jcresswell...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>
>"Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
>
>>In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that contains
>> homosexual characters; in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
>> 'ungodly'. Are you and I looking at the same America?
>
>Probably not. Is there a single American publishing paradigm that accepts or
>rejects stories by central command? For instance, are Harry Potter sales
>down because of that incident in Kansas?
Almost certainly not (no, I have not looked at the figures).
Somewhere on this disk (but I can't find it at the moment) I have
a quotation from Wodehouse about how every British writer's
golden dream is to have his book denounced from the pulpit by a
bishop, because that will magnify his sales severalfold. The
USian equivalent, of course, is to be banned in Boston.
Dorothy J Heydt
>
>> In terms of the 'current paradigm', if one has worked through a
>> statistically significant fraction of it -- that is, submitted four or more
>> stories to twenty or thirty markets combined, with no sales -- then perhaps
>> there is a mismatch between what one's selling and they're buying. Write
>> different stuff, market it, and see what happens.
>
> Useful advice for the person aiming to be a professional hack writer. Not
>so useful for someone who wants to write riskier stuff.
But that has always been the case. The person who wants to write
the risky stuff is taking risks, possibly with his life, but even
more often with his livelihood. The simple, unchallenging,
comforting stuff is always going to be more popular with the
populace than anything that will make them question, wonder, or
in fact think. You choose the rocky path to heaven or the
flowery path to hell, in whatever terms you want to define them.
James A. Donald
Remus Shepherd
> > > Popular media in America is more censored and
> > > bland right now than any time I can remember in my
> > > nearly fourty years. Any topics dealing with sex,
> > > religion, or rebellion are heavily watered down or
> > > outright forbidden.
James A. Donald
> > Time to upgrade your cable subscription.
Remus Shepherd
> Now if you would, please, replace the word 'media'
> with 'literature' up there and give me another
> example.
"A deepness in the sky" is hard science fiction about
rebellion.
"Marooned in realtime", "the peacewar", etc, have
recently been reissued.
The bookstores have lots of christian end-of-days
fantasy, set in a universe where the saved have been
levitated into heaven in the rapture, leaving behind all
the interesting people who are guilty of doing exciting
things.
And I keep encountering novels full of strange
masochistic vampire sex, that I find too icky to finish.
Perhaps what you really mean is that there is no
literature dealing with sex, rebellion, and religion
from the progressive and politically correct point of
view - that the people who don't know anyone who voted
for Reagan, don't know any books dealing with sex,
rebellion, or religion.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
k1xPg2pOCmyGmUkL8pby8U++MwDXiP6WFmKpnjS5
44xQE2OAGjkvILKUjq7qwuzX+f4aX+fAXjvkjIT/9
James A. Donald
On Mon, 2 May 2005 20:30:17 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
> Fantasy versus Science Fiction. This is about
> literature presenting ideas in an attempt to change
> society versus literature designed only to entertain
> the soma- addled masses.
>
> Why is the former disappearing, and what can be done
> about it?
Well it is not disappearing. Changing society has
always been a major part of Vernor Vinge's hard SF, and
it is hard in part because changing society has always
been a major part.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
hvJaq0BPtHSEDrsHwoWOuqcY6XmIBWTgnXW3Sic4
4ChtAD4tP4g/s7j+Ai2O8xF6UrilRxkrXdC02f48R
Jim Campbell
wrote on 2/5/05 9:47 pm:
> cutting-edge science fiction, attempting to explore
> the implications of cutting-edge sience, will put him in the
> place of the young woman about seventy-five years ago who tried
> to read A. Merritt and put it down saying, "I can't read this, I
> have to look up too many words."
This is interesting. I don't know whether the WIR [1] counts as "cutting
edge" but it goes out to the first agent tomorrow and I'm curious as to the
reaction it will receive, because I've purposely written it to be accessible
to people who don't know science. I've _done_ the research, I know how all
the widgets are supposed to work, but I have shied away from the temptation
to show this off.
The pointers are there - if anyone is interested enough in the possibilities
of, say, partial gravity negation, they can find out about it. I haven't
felt the need to burden the novel with a couple of pages of theorizing about
Higgs-Bosons or whatever ...
Further bulletins as events warrant.
Cheers!
Jim
[1] I've revised the relevant portion that goes out as a sample. The rest is
still being revised, but it's typos, grammar and phrasing rather than a
re-write.
Dorothy J Heydt
Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.cojm> wrote:
>On Mon, 2 May 2005 16:11:51 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd wrote:
>
>> I just got to the end of the April/May Asimov's, and Norman Spinrad's
>> column _On Books_. I normally skim this column -- my tastes in books
>> seldom match those of reviewers -- but this time it caught my eye and I
>> read it through.
>>
>> I'm really surprised there hasn't been discussion about it.
>
>rec.arts.sf.braineater-victims.
Well, no. I suspect you posted this before reading most or all
of the other responses.
>
>My reaction to the column was mostly "Oh, that's just Spinrad again." I
>presume a number of others had the same reaction.
Of course. But some of the things people have said *here* have
been neither whacko nor braineaten.
Dorothy J Heydt
Actually, according to responses I've seen here, he said so at
length in the referenced article. (No, I did not read it, I am
not a masochist.)
Suzanne A Blom
Marilee J. Layman <mjla...@erols.com> wrote in message
news:e32d71do1d1q0a8a6...@4ax.com...
fiction.
James A. Donald
On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:13:40 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
> In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that
> contains homosexual characters;
Untrue:
> in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
> 'ungodly'.
Untrue:
Both stories represent the tendency of the mainstream
media to make up fantasy suiting their political
preconceptions.
> Are you and I looking at the same America?
Probably not. I suspect that in your America no one
voted for Reagan.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
rxsw0RNIfe8If49qCSPvdnjZr1udjFmlQLaRWxUw
4v57a/CUTU9SV9iDLr7UGffwyNAkjOA+HnLzh0dZn
James A. Donald
Remus Shepherd:
> > Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about
> > Fantasy versus Science Fiction. This is about
> > literature presenting ideas in an attempt to change
> > society versus literature designed only to entertain
> > the soma-addled masses.
> >
> > Why is the former disappearing,
Dan Goodman
> It isn't. Sheri S. Tepper and L. Neil Smith are still
> being published; Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin
> have realized that their early work suffered from
> being insufficiently political and are selling
> reasonably well; Eric Flint's stuff (which is about as
> political as you can get without abridging _Atlas
> Shrugged_ to take out characters and plot) is being
> published; very much et cetera.
The leftists in your list are excluded from Spinrad's
rant because they are not really writing about genuinely
possible futures any more. Sheri is more ranting about
the unfairness of reality, than anticipating radical
change in it.
What has disappeared is not literature presenting ideas
in an attempt to change society but the "Star Trek the
Next Generation" faith that socialism is the wave of the
future, which has in turn led to a distaste for the
future and science, and thus for hard science fiction in
general, in a certain social circle.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
29DMfDMYPkulRleFCv/4mBFxndNNHdWoXP8R04EX
4z21p1KzB+CGEKSF+0dYhmCLMV1FzLwfAVKYBXSRW
James A. Donald
On Mon, 02 May 2005 14:09:38 -0700, David Friedman
> I pretty much don't watch movies or television--do
> they have less sex, religion and rebellion than a few
> decades back? Not my impression from what other people
> say, but that's second hand.
Broadcast television never used to have sex, religion or
rebellion. Today it has a little bit of safe sex. I do
watch movies. Lots of sex, religion and rebellion.
Same for cable television. Seems to me that "Braveheart"
and "the Patriot" do rebellion in a purer and more
savage way than it has ever been done in the past, "The
passion" similarly does religion in a vastly more pure,
and vastly more brutal way than has ever been done in
the past. Seen in the light of "the passion" , "the ten
commandments" and all that was a compromise between
hollywood blandness and religion.
And as for sex, people are bored with plain sex, and are
exploring the frontiers of deviation, in ways that make
"Wordsworth" look old fashioned, square, and downright
boy scoutish. Compared to a lot of this weird arty
stuff, "Wordsworth" looks like "I love lucy". Seems to
me that artists who are still trying to sock it to the
bourgeoisie using sex have been reduced to flinging
their faeces at the camera like gibbering monkeys.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
twpI0nTci2JGDZo84MHIazTvXtxFpR0axBemWRcs
4Hs7P+7rMaqrSeZQw2ORqMWunAd+bMiLiTQVXJYu3
J Cresswell-Jones
>J Cresswell-Jones <jcresswell...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>> Mmm, I would say that rather than being forbidden, they are disarmed by
>> being packaged into a safer format.
>
> This was part of Spinrad's point. He proposed lumping fantasy into the
> 'safe' category and science fiction as 'dangerous', but those are lousy
> categories. There probably are categories of safe and dangerous fiction,
> but
> they don't line up with the distinction between fantasy and sci-fi.
>
>> How many SF books get burned as opposed to fantasy, BTW? If the state is
>> heavily favouring fantasy and suppressing SF, as Spinrad argued, I'd
>> expect
>> that hard SF novels would be flopping onto bonfires as the drones obeyed
>> their masters. Seems just the opposite.
>
> Nobody is accusing 'the state', or any government, of doing anything.
> I'd say there seems to be two mechanisms at work: Cultural elements that
> are growing stronger, and who want to oppress opposing points of view, and
> megacorporations who are publishing only safe things in an attempt to
> maximize profits, which cause not-so-mega corporations to do the same in
> order to stay in business.
From the little I know of economics, the exact opposite happens -- when
large corporations limit themselves to specific products, smaller businesses
move in and exploit the open niche.
The problem as I see it is that, unlike 1970, there are a *lot* of spec-fic
media competing for what one might call 'brain-time' among consumers. We are
not only up against Heinlein and Asimov and Spinrad, as we would have been
then, but also up against Halo and Jade Empire and SWIII. The younger
readers are jaded; the older ones have lived through 40 years of reading
about 'flying cars and fusion and moon colonies by 2001', and seen reality
pan out completely differently. They are, quite simply, a tough crowd to win
over these days.
>This is not a battle with democracy or government,
> it's a battle against religious orthodoxy, dogmatic ideology, and rampant
> capitalism.
The first two seem to be *more* ideologically offended by fantasy than by
SF. The last will sell whatever sells.
>> I won't get into what makes a 'hack' or not. Suffice it to say that if
>> you
>> want risk, by all means write risky stuff -- but you must accept the
>> possibility, even a high probability, of failure to get it into
>> commercial
>> print. The closer that match between what a given publisher is looking
>> for
>> at the moment, and what a writer offers them, the less risk.
>
> Thanks for outlining it like that. It makes it easy to distill
> Spinrad's
> argument -- as I understand it -- down to a single statement: Publishers
> (and by association, our society) have become too afraid of risky ideas.
>
> What can we do about it?
Well, as a writer, one can embrace the comforting notion that one's work is
being rejected solely because it is Too Sophisticated And Edgy For These
Bozos, and therefore not in any need of change or improvement. I suspect
this is Spinrad's outlook (although as I have not read the novel in
question, I'll reserve final opinion til then). I would not recommend this
approach.
Alternatively, one can do what seems natural when faced with entrenched
opposition: do not attack frontally, but via infiltration. Write material
that is subtly subversive, without pushing any obvious buttons. Hide the
risk.
Or there's always the small presses that Spinrad was so horrified to resort
to. After all, if one's not interested in writing in a commercial business
sense, how can it matter what the cheque reads? There are some *very* edgy
small presses out there.
So: write more targeted, write different, write exotic. But I would not
suggest to stop writing at all.
--
Jonathan CJ
Damien R. Sullivan
>Anyways I don't believe that revolution can't be addressed in science
>fiction. There are at least three Mars series in the last 20 years
>with revolutions in them (the fact that I didn't like them very much
>is not the point). All those Scottish guys seem to be writing about
>revolution all the time, and they seem to be doing okay. Just for
Sean McMullen's _Souls in the Great Machine_ trilogy had multiple revolutions.
Bujold does evolution more than revolution -- which might be more relevant
anyway.
-xx- Damien X-)
Damien R. Sullivan
> Your last statement has me flabbergasted. :) 'Almost nothing that cannot
>be addressed in popular media'? Popular media in America is more censored and
>bland right now than any time I can remember in my nearly fourty years. Any
>topics dealing with sex, religion, or rebellion are heavily watered down or
>outright forbidden. In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that contains
>homosexual characters; in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
How many gays are on TV now, or have been in recently ended series? Including
a stable lesbian relationship on "Buffy".
Sex in general seems rampant.
The other two I don't know about -- I'm not up with popular media -- but doubt
they're forbidden relative to 40 years ago.
Babylon-5 and Deep Space 9 did both have coups and reactions against them
(longer plot in B-5, with a fascist government). DS 9 had its religion
ambiguities with the Bajorans and Jem'hadar (both worshipping weird aliens as
gods.) Battlestar has whatever it has.
The Alabama bill targets public school libraries, to be precise. I speculate
that 40 years ago there would have been no bill, but also no books in the
school libraries to be banned.
-xx- Damien X-)
J Cresswell-Jones
>> Mmm, I would say that rather than being forbidden, they are disarmed by
>> being packaged into a safer format.
>
> This was part of Spinrad's point. He proposed lumping fantasy into the
> 'safe' category and science fiction as 'dangerous', but those are lousy
> categories. There probably are categories of safe and dangerous fiction,
> but
> they don't line up with the distinction between fantasy and sci-fi.
>
>> How many SF books get burned as opposed to fantasy, BTW? If the state is
>> heavily favouring fantasy and suppressing SF, as Spinrad argued, I'd
>> expect
>> that hard SF novels would be flopping onto bonfires as the drones obeyed
>> their masters. Seems just the opposite.
>
> Nobody is accusing 'the state', or any government, of doing anything.
To clarify: it was my impression that Spinrad does exactly that.
"For the past four days, I've spent time with demonstrations against the
Coronation of King W, not the official ones which sought and were granted
permits, but the unofficial direct action ones, which neither sought nor
received liceence from the Crown to attempt their revolutionary acts....And
what was I reading in the meantime? [Iron Council]
If it were not the third volume of a fantasy series, the first two of which
established the writer's major reputation, it would have had about as much
chance of being published in the United States as Fidel Castro has of being
invited to a state dinner at the White House."
That, to me, does not suggest that the opposition to the book's being
published as SF would come from some local preacher torching his Springsteen
albums along with Harry Potter, but instead straight from the top. Combined
with the "revolutionary goal of the novel", and "[presenting it as SF]
would, under the present political situation in the United States, probably
make it unpublishable, and if published, result in an unfriendly visit from
the boys from Homeland Security", and the oft-referred "barricades", it's
pretty clear.
--
Jonathan CJ
David Bilek
>On Mon, 2 May 2005 20:30:17 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd wrote:
>
>> Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about Fantasy versus
>> Science Fiction. This is about literature presenting ideas in an
>> attempt to change society versus literature designed only to entertain
>> the soma-addled masses.
>>
>> Why is the former disappearing,
>
>It isn't. Sheri S. Tepper and L. Neil Smith are still being published;
>Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin have realized that their early work
>suffered from being insufficiently political and are selling reasonably
>well; Eric Flint's stuff (which is about as political as you can get
>without abridging _Atlas Shrugged_ to take out characters and plot) is
>being published; very much et cetera.
>
Don't forget John C. Wright. His "Golden Age" trilogy boiled down to
"Objectivism is a law of nature, the end!" and his Everness duology
appears to be similarly influenced.
I especially liked the moustache twirling villains happily twirling
their mustaches as they gloated about how New York, D.C., and parts of
California were easy to subdue because of gun control, while it was
only parts of the "flyover" states that were putting up resistance.
In the gun control areas it was only the "drug dealers" who had guns,
and they "know where their next welfare check is coming from".
Yes, that's right. He wrote it.
-David
Mark Atwood
> Eric Flint's stuff (which is about as political as you can get
> without abridging _Atlas Shrugged_ to take out characters and plot)
Indeed.
If his miner's union in his Grantsville series was more honest, it
would just rename itself the Party (it's already written itself into
the constituion), and be done with it.
European Absolute Aristocracy vs Proletariat Vanguard Crypto Collectivism.
Somehow, they deserve each other.
Talk about the forces of Darkness vs the forces of Evil...
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right, people won't be sure
ma...@atwood.name | you've done anything at all.
http://mark.atwood.name/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/fallenpegasus
Mary K. Kuhner
J Cresswell-Jones <jcresswell...@sympatico.ca> wrote:
>To clarify: it was my impression that Spinrad does exactly that.
>"[...]If it were not the third volume of a fantasy series, the first two of which
>established the writer's major reputation, it would have had about as much
>chance of being published in the United States as Fidel Castro has of being
>invited to a state dinner at the White House."
(Not arguing with the poster here; arguing with Spinrad.)
For crying out loud.
If things were really *that* hostile to the book's publication, would
the fact that it was the third in a series and the first two were
well-regarded make any difference? I mean, Fidel Castro could win a
popularity contest and he still wouldn't get invited to the White House.
A Horrible Conspiracy of Censorship so weak that it can be backed down
by the fact that this is the third in a popular trilogy doesn't seem
all that frightening to me. (And why didn't the Horrible Conspiracy
notice the first two books? I doubt the political content suddenly
appeared out of nowhere in the third volume.)
I just don't see it. There's a lot of dumbed-down stuff published,
SF and fantasy both, but that's not new, and it's not the same as
saying edgier stuff isn't published. I haven't been reading as much
lately as I used to, but even so:
Prisoner of Conscience
The Golden Compass
A Deepness in the Sky
Mockingbird
Temporary Agency
(I'm focusing on political, religious, and ideological content here;
I think the statement that sexual content is more restricted now
than in the past is so obviously wrong as to not need comment, and
for those who disagree I will just put forward Hamilton's Princess
Meredith novels.)
Mary Kuhner mkku...@eskimo.com
Keith Morrison
> I pretty much don't watch movies or television--do they have less sex,
> religion and rebellion than a few decades back? Not my impression from
> what other people say, but that's second hand.
Oh, please. Anyone who says otherwise is suffering from
something. I watch a lot of 1960s television series on
some of the rerun channels and anyone who claims it's not
a lot more explicit now is smoking something.
Just as a for-instance, Sunday's episode of "Enterprise".
Mirror-Archer was doing the horizontal mambo (well, they
were sort of on their knees) with Mirror-Sato. Shot in
silhouette to make it broadcast safe.
For all his reputation, the closest you ever saw to Kirk
actually in the process of having sex was a bit of kissing
and, in one episode, pulling on his boots after it was over.
Religion has changed as well. It was basically limited to
the normal "get dressed up for Church on Sunday, don't mention
it again." Now days, just in terms of more variety of religions,
there's a lot more. Wiccans, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, you
name it.
As for rebellion, kids might have done whacky stuff back in the
day (and received a stern lecture on not smoking again from dad,
between puffs on his pipe) but there's a lot more realistic
behaviour now. A recent show had a mother upset at a 15 year
old for having sex...well, she was more concerned about whether
the 15 year old's friend had been wearing a condom.
--
Keith
Keith Morrison
> The decline of socialism, foreshadowing its coming
> collapse, happened first. In order to continue to
> believe in socialism, intellectuals found it necessary
> to cease believing in reason, objectivity, facts, the
> knowability of the external world, the need for
> journalists to tell the truth, and so forth. Hence
> postmodernism, magic realism, Robert Fisk, and the rest.
Don't mix up socialism with Communism. The former
is doing rather well and forms the general operating
principal, to a assorted degrees, of most of the
democratic countries in the world and the majority of
the rich industrialized ones. The US is an exception
to the degree in which is avoids socialist principles
and methods, not the rule.
The fact that it is still around would tend to invalidate
your thesis. Believers in communism may have been so
afflicted, but most "intellectuals" weren't communist
wannabes.
--
Keith
Keith Morrison
> (Hm, an odd thought in passing. One of the core questions
> of _Brave New World_, at least in my reading, is "Is slavery
> still wrong if the slaves are happy with it?" This also
> comes up heavily in recent Vinge, especially _Deepness in the
> Sky_. And it comes up, oddly enough, in Harry Potter.
Also in Stirling's _Draka_. The servus, while clearly the
subordinate class, are engineered to be happy with it and
have formed a symbiotic relationship with the draka. Thus
putting the remaining humans in something of an uncomfortable
position. If they win, they only have two options for dealing
with the servus: outright genocide or mass genetic engineering.
Both, however, put them on the same level as the enemy they're
fighting.
--
Keith
Erol K. Bayburt
<re...@panix.com> wrote:
> I just got to the end of the April/May Asimov's, and Norman Spinrad's
>column _On Books_. I normally skim this column -- my tastes in books seldom
>match those of reviewers -- but this time it caught my eye and I read it
>through.
>
> I'm really surprised there hasn't been discussion about it. Here it is
>on the web if you'd like to look:
>
>http://www.asimovs.com/_issue_0505/onbooks.shtml
>
> Spinrad used this review column to go off on a rant about the state of
>science fiction today. His viewpoint is, in a word, depressing. To summarize
>the column, Spinrad opines that authors who were once top-listed (including
>himself) are unable to get published in anything but small presses. Fantasy
>is triumphing over science fiction because the goal of science fiction is to
>change the world and the world is resisting change and oppressing those who
>attempt to change it. Anyone who wants to change the world -- he uses China
>Mieville as an example -- has to couch their ideas in fantasy to get
>published, and preferably do it only at the apex of a successful career. And
>because science fiction is the one and only transformational literature that
>helps to evolves the culture it impacts, the death of science fiction might
>just be the death of Western Culture.
L. Neil Smith wrote a piece some time back on the same subject, with
his own... unique... take on it:
http://www.lneilsmith.com/bulgaria.html
--
Erol K. Bayburt
Ero...@aol.com
Dorothy J Heydt
Keith Morrison <kei...@polarnet.ca> wrote:
>
>For all his reputation, the closest you ever saw to Kirk
>actually in the process of having sex was a bit of kissing
>and, in one episode, pulling on his boots after it was over.
I don't remember that one, but in "Bread and Circuses" there was
a scene where a pretty young slave girl is coming onto him pretty
strong; cut to another scene of someone else doing something
else; back to Kirk, lying alone on a bed; someone wakes him up
and he glances to the other side of the bed, sees it empty,
shrugs, and gets up.
And that was about as explicit as you could get on network
television in the 1960s.
Damien R. Sullivan
>it again." Now days, just in terms of more variety of religions,
>there's a lot more. Wiccans, atheists, Muslims, Hindus, you
>name it.
Oh yeah. The Dawson's Creek series premiere twice saved itself from my
turning it off by trotting out atheism. Maybe not by name, but Jen was
defiantly godless vs. her grandmother, and it was mentioned that Dawson and
Joey weren't churchgoing, and they were The Protagonists. I was surprised
enough to find this notable.
And later on I think they had gay males kissing, and maybe even having a
relationship, vs. the stereotypical Single Gay Friend.
-xx- Damien X-)
Damien R. Sullivan
>James A. Donald wrote:
>
>> The decline of socialism, foreshadowing its coming
>> collapse, happened first. In order to continue to
>Don't mix up socialism with Communism. The former
>is doing rather well and forms the general operating
>principal, to a assorted degrees, of most of the
>democratic countries in the world and the majority of
>the rich industrialized ones. The US is an exception
I know it's common among the US right to refer to Socialist Europe and all,
but I thought that was abuse of the language, with socialism meaning state
ownership of capital and this being pretty rare in the West outside of
resource extraction and utilities and health care. Thus "social democracy",
to mean private ownership of capital with high tax rates to support social
goods, what the West does instead -- and with less of a principled difference
(as opposed to degree) between the US and others than people would like to
think.
-xx- Damien X-)
Brian M. Scott
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote in
<news:bq7d719bacpe544r6...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:13:40 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
>> In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that
>> contains homosexual characters;
> Untrue:
It's a sloppy paraphrase of the truth, but it's less
misleading than your unqualified 'untrue'. 'They' is State
Representative Gerald Allen, and the bill would prohibit the
use of public funds for 'the purchase of textbooks or
library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as
an acceptable lifestyle'; an effect would be to ban such
books from public schools and university libraries.
[...]
Ric Locke
> Mary K. Kuhner <mkku...@kingman.gs.washington.edu> wrote:
>> Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
>>>Not in Spinrad's terms. Fantasy by definition allows one to shrug off
>>>any disturbing revelations as belonging to another reality, while
>>>science fiction insists that what is depicted could potentially be
>>>a part of our own.
>
>> But if you define "science fiction" and "fantasy" this far away
>> from their usual marketing sense, you aren't allowed to use
>> figures on how books and stories sell to back up your point--
>> books labelled SF do not necessary insist that what they depict
>> could potentially be a part of our own reality, books labelled
>> fantasy do not necessary reject it.
>
> You're right, those are lousy definitions.
>
> Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about Fantasy versus
> Science Fiction. This is about literature presenting ideas in an attempt
> to change society versus literature designed only to entertain the soma-
> addled masses.
>
> Why is the former disappearing, and what can be done about it?
>
> ... ...
> Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com>
What's been said, plus Goldwyn's Stricture: If you want to send a message,
call Western Union. Of course nowadays it's "Get a VOIP setup."
People can't breathe in continuously, nor out either; it's necessary to
alternate. A time out is not necessarily a bad thing.
And of course, Spinrad being Spinrad[1], the only "examination of the
future" allowable is one in which the Leftist ideal is either (a)
triumphant or (b) unkindly and irresponsibly suppressed, the former being
Utopia and the latter Dystopia. Real-world experience over the last century
and a half stuffs the first straight into the fantasy category and the
latter into offensive triumphalism.
Keep in mind that the most successful (in terms of sales) science fiction
in recent days is the _Left Behind_ series. If you're firmly of the opinion
that believers are deluded, doltish dunderheads you'll have a hard time
seeing them as an examination of the future.
Regards,
Ric
[1] In re typos: the name came out "Spinrant" when my fingers were allowed
to do their own thing.
Dan Goodman
> --
> Remus Shepherd:
>>> Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about
>>> Fantasy versus Science Fiction. This is about
>>> literature presenting ideas in an attempt to change
>>> society versus literature designed only to entertain
>>> the soma-addled masses.
>>>
>>> Why is the former disappearing,
>
> Dan Goodman
>> It isn't. Sheri S. Tepper and L. Neil Smith are still
>> being published; Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin
>> have realized that their early work suffered from
>> being insufficiently political and are selling
>> reasonably well; Eric Flint's stuff (which is about as
>> political as you can get without abridging _Atlas
>> Shrugged_ to take out characters and plot) is being
>> published; very much et cetera.
>
> The leftists in your list are excluded from Spinrad's
> rant because they are not really writing about genuinely
> possible futures any more.
Nor are the non-leftists. L. Neil Smith writes alternate history; for the
US, his take-off point is the Federal Government not becoming powerful, and
the states not filling that vacuum. Larry Niven's futures aren't
high-probability.
> Sheri is more ranting about
> the unfairness of reality, than anticipating radical
> change in it.
>
> What has disappeared is not literature presenting ideas
> in an attempt to change society but the "Star Trek the
> Next Generation" faith that socialism is the wave of the
> future,
I would consider it a subset of the faith that planned societies are the
wave of the future. Which some conservatives thought was a good thing --
so long as they were in charge of the planning. And others saw as the road
to Hell: see various American books of the 1950s with such titles as
_America, Too Young To Die_.
I suspect that by the 1950s in the US, leftists were less likely than
rightists to think that Marxism would take over. They'd seen how Marxist
organizations operated.
> which has in turn led to a distaste for the
> future and science, and thus for hard science fiction in
> general, in a certain social circle.
--
Dan Goodman
Journal http://www.livejournal.com/users/dsgood/
Decluttering: http://decluttering.blogspot.com
Predictions and Politics http://dsgood.blogspot.com
All political parties die at last of swallowing their own lies.
John Arbuthnot (1667-1735), Scottish writer, physician.
Dan Goodman
> Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
>>On Mon, 2 May 2005 20:30:17 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd wrote:
>>
>>> Maybe we should step back a bit. This isn't about Fantasy versus
>>> Science Fiction. This is about literature presenting ideas in an
>>> attempt to change society versus literature designed only to entertain
>>> the soma-addled masses.
>>>
>>> Why is the former disappearing,
>>
>>It isn't. Sheri S. Tepper and L. Neil Smith are still being published;
>>Larry Niven and Ursula K. Le Guin have realized that their early work
>>suffered from being insufficiently political and are selling reasonably
>>well; Eric Flint's stuff (which is about as political as you can get
>>without abridging _Atlas Shrugged_ to take out characters and plot) is
>>being published; very much et cetera.
>
> Don't forget John C. Wright. His "Golden Age" trilogy boiled down to
> "Objectivism is a law of nature, the end!" and his Everness duology
> appears to be similarly influenced.
I haven't read his books. Looked into them to see if they seemed
interesting, decided after a few paragraphs that they weren't.
> I especially liked the moustache twirling villains happily twirling
> their mustaches as they gloated about how New York, D.C., and parts of
> California were easy to subdue because of gun control, while it was
> only parts of the "flyover" states that were putting up resistance.
> In the gun control areas it was only the "drug dealers" who had guns,
> and they "know where their next welfare check is coming from".
>
> Yes, that's right. He wrote it.
>
> -David
--
Dan Goodman
> Keith Morrison <kei...@polarnet.ca> wrote:
>>James A. Donald wrote:
>>
>>> The decline of socialism, foreshadowing its coming
>>> collapse, happened first. In order to continue to
>
>>Don't mix up socialism with Communism. The former
>>is doing rather well and forms the general operating
>>principal, to a assorted degrees, of most of the
>>democratic countries in the world and the majority of
>>the rich industrialized ones. The US is an exception
>
> I know it's common among the US right to refer to Socialist Europe and all,
> but I thought that was abuse of the language, with socialism meaning state
> ownership of capital
Actually, "communism" means ownership of the means of production (etc.) by
_the people_. Anarcho-communism is older than Marxism.
And in theory, Marxist principles are supposed to lead to absence of
government after a transition period. (Marx sneered at anarcho-socialists
for not being realistic enough to realize this was necessary.) For some
reason, Communist governments don't seem to have gotten very far towards
this ideal.
Ric Locke
People get used to things. The word is "inured." Someone who works at a
rendering plant or a cattle feedlot doesn't register the odor. It's
background, and our brains are designed to suppress background (well,
really it's a form of compression.) I once knew an electrician who tested
electric circuits by touching them with two fingers. And there's always the
story of the family who lived next to the railroad track. When the express
_didn't_ come through at 3:00 AM and whistle, everybody sat bolt upright:
"What was that?"
Sometime in the latter part of the nineteenth century the proposition that
art, true art, shocks the senses came to be accepted. That's absolutely
true. That's what art is. But the converse -- that whatever shocks the
senses is Art -- is not. The two sets intersect, but aren't identical.
We've now had three generations of hack artists setting out deliberately to
shock and calling it "Art." In the beginning there was some justification.
The society was highly repressed and shock was easy to accomplish. But like
the stink of the feedlot, the shocks became continuous and receded into the
background, requiring more and more heroic efforts to affect the public's
sensibilities. Meanwhile a segment of the population opted out -- having
been shocked, they decided not to pay attention any more, or started out as
a part of the population not expected to participate. As the shocks got
stronger, more and more opt-outs happened, and the stay-behinds got to the
point where the shocks weren't titillating, weren't thought-provoking; they
were just shocks, to be avoided as an electric fence is.
I'm somewhere in the middle. I can sort of see where, e.g., Robert
Mapplethorpe is coming from, but I make no emotional connection with it; it
doesn't communicate to me; for me, it isn't Art. I have friends and
neighbors for whom it's nothing but piss and insults, not even shocking,
just sad and dreary. They are neither stupid nor unimaginative, but they
aren't "sophisticated" -- they didn't grow up next to the feedlot, so they
aren't inured to the atmosphere and can't perceive subtleties within it.
There's still plenty of stuff around that examines the otherwise unexamined
life, that will shock the sensibilities as Art must, but it's not geared
for people like Spinrad, who have been immersed for so long that they need
tiger scat and pure ammonia to detect any scent whatever. To Spinrad it all
seems bland; to the population that can still react strongly to a single
fresh cow-patty it's pretty powerful stuff. And he, and some others, may
have reached an asymptote, come to a place where a stimulus sufficient to
shock the avant-garde simply isn't humanly possible. If so, all he's ever
going to get in the future is Air-Wick. Poor fellow.
Regards,
Ric
Alma Hromic Deckert
wrote:
>And in theory, Marxist principles are supposed to lead to absence of
>government after a transition period. (Marx sneered at anarcho-socialists
>for not being realistic enough to realize this was necessary.) For some
>reason, Communist governments don't seem to have gotten very far towards
>this ideal.
Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A.
Ric Locke
[...]
>
> The Alabama bill targets public school libraries, to be precise. I speculate
> that 40 years ago there would have been no bill, but also no books in the
> school libraries to be banned.
Ah. You have the beginning of insight, grasshoppah.
Regards,
Ric
Pat Bowne
"J Cresswell-Jones" <jcresswell...@sympatico.ca> wrote
> "...If it were not the third volume of a fantasy series, the first two of
> which established the writer's major reputation, it would have had about
> as much chance of being published in the United States as Fidel Castro has
> of being invited to a state dinner at the White House."
This doesn't make any sense to me. There's a new 'Bush the Bozo is Stealing
America for the Rich' book on the nonfiction shelves every twelve hours, Jon
Stewart's history of the US is selling off the shelves, and the White House
is going to worry about allusions in some sf novel?
I mean, self-important much?
The kind of sf Spinrad likes isn't being suppressed for the same reason it
isn't being published; not enough people care about it. In my case it's not
because the ideas are too radical or too left-wing, but because I couldn't
care less about physics or astronomy if you paid me in gold. And aliens used
to interest me until I started to be cross about the fact that they are,
after all, just made up. If I'm reading science I want to be reading about
something that really exists and real biological constraints, not just
speculation.
Pat
David Friedman
Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com> wrote:
> > What has disappeared is not literature presenting ideas
> > in an attempt to change society but the "Star Trek the
> > Next Generation" faith that socialism is the wave of the
> > future,
>
> I would consider it a subset of the faith that planned societies are the
> wave of the future.
But you don't need planned societies to have interesting future sf--the
things that just happened are at least as good raw material.
> Which some conservatives thought was a good thing --
> so long as they were in charge of the planning. And others saw as the road
> to Hell: see various American books of the 1950s with such titles as
> _America, Too Young To Die_.
>
> I suspect that by the 1950s in the US, leftists were less likely than
> rightists to think that Marxism would take over. They'd seen how Marxist
> organizations operated.
As some evidence both for and against ... .
The one person I knew who expected the communists to win was an editor
of National Review. But he was also an ex-communist, so had presumably
seen how Marxist organizations operated.
--
Remove NOSPAM to email
Also remove .invalid
www.daviddfriedman.com
Dorothy J Heydt
Pat Bowne <pbo...@execpc.com> wrote:
>
>The kind of sf Spinrad likes isn't being suppressed for the same reason it
>isn't being published; not enough people care about it.
Acu tetigisti.
ISTR that John Norman ran into the same problem a while back,
once *real* porn became generally available.
Dorothy J Heydt
Ric Locke <warl...@mesh.net> wrote:
>> Seems to
>> me that artists who are still trying to sock it to the
>> bourgeoisie using sex have been reduced to flinging
>> their faeces at the camera like gibbering monkeys.
>
>...
>I'm somewhere in the middle. I can sort of see where, e.g., Robert
>Mapplethorpe is coming from, but I make no emotional connection with it; it
>doesn't communicate to me; for me, it isn't Art. I have friends and
>neighbors for whom it's nothing but piss and insults, not even shocking,
>just sad and dreary. They are neither stupid nor unimaginative, but they
>aren't "sophisticated" -- they didn't grow up next to the feedlot, so they
>aren't inured to the atmosphere and can't perceive subtleties within it.
You're talking about me....
>
>There's still plenty of stuff around that examines the otherwise unexamined
>life, that will shock the sensibilities as Art must, but it's not geared
>for people like Spinrad, who have been immersed for so long that they need
>tiger scat and pure ammonia to detect any scent whatever. To Spinrad it all
>seems bland; to the population that can still react strongly to a single
>fresh cow-patty it's pretty powerful stuff. And he, and some others, may
>have reached an asymptote, come to a place where a stimulus sufficient to
>shock the avant-garde simply isn't humanly possible. If so, all he's ever
Damn you're good.
Lucy Kemnitzer
I was with you for the first half of this paragraph. I don't much go
for astronomy and physics science fiction because I don't often find
it with good stories and so I don't expect to find good stories there.
I don't think there's anything inherently uninteresting about the
field. And aliens, I think, can often provide wonderful stories.
There's a certain barky macho style that I associate with a certain
generation of sf writers, and I don't often like it, but again, I see
no reason why it has to be that way, and I'm willing to be steered in
the direction of things people might think I might like, even if they
have that certain barky macho style. Just like, if there's "god" or
"cosmos" or other Big Concept words in the title, I think I probably
won't like the book, but I'm willing to be shown exceptions.
Lucy Kemnitzer, still
http://www.baymoon.com/~ritaxis
http://www.livejournal.com/users/ritaxis
Eric Jarvis
On the other hand it was assumed that Kirk could have endless casual
sexual relationships without there being any medical or emotional risk. In
the more recent series the sexual content may be more explicit, but it's
also in a realistic context. Sex in the later versions involves emotions,
it takes place between beings that consider it to be something more than a
simple physical action.
The way sex is portrayed in the original series of Star Trek (and a lot of
other film and TV of the era) irritates me immensely. It's a cartoon
version of an adolescent fantasy of sex, not anything that relates to the
real thing.
I don't believe that contemporary TV shows people having more sex than it
used to a few decades ago. What it shows is more about what the sex
entails beyond the act itself. That necessarily requires being more
explicit. In most shows that done the right way and for good reasons.
There's a lot more acceptance of nudity on screen than there was.
Personally I don't have a problem with that. I have a problem with the
sleazier end of UK TV which now includes a lot of excuses for soft core
pornography pretending to be other things. However adult TV in the UK
strikes me as being a lot less violent than it used to be. So something
has been lost and something gained. On the whole I'd rather people got
their kicks from sex rather than violence.
Again there's a change when it comes to the screen portrayal of violence.
There's far less, but what there is gets done in a far more explicit
manner. The violence has consequences just as the sex does. I think that's
a good thing.
Children's TV is another matter. From what little I've seen of European
produced stuff it mostly seems OK, however children's TV is awash with
animations from the USA, Japan and Korea, that are little more than a
succession of scenes of violence portrayed in a way that implies that
violence is not only acceptable, but that it is the correct way to deal
with most situations. I know some friends have had problems with their
children copying behaviours from such programmes. The problem with it,
though, is that the violence ISN'T explicit. The problem is that there's a
lot of it and it has little or no moral context.
There's a lot more to sex and violence on screen than how much you see and
how often. There's definitely more sex on TV, but I'm not sure that the
implication given by mainstream TV is that TV characters are having more
sex than used to be the case, just that it's a lot more complicated for
them than it used to be in the 60s and 70s.
--
eric
www.ericjarvis.co.uk
all these years I've waited for the revolution
and all we end up getting is spin
Eric Jarvis
<9iqd71hoqql6ufgvf...@4ax.com>:
I've always been a little dubious about this one. I've met too many petty
officials and functionaries who have been monstrously corrupted by the
merest smidgeon of power. I'll go with the first sentence, but I'm
inclined to suspect that even the smallest amount of power can corrupt
absolutely.
Dan Goodman
In which case, God -- drat, Philip Pullman and others have already written
that one.
James A. Donald
Ric Locke:
> And of course, Spinrad being Spinrad, the only
> "examination of the future" allowable is one in which
> the Leftist ideal is either (a) triumphant or (b)
> unkindly and irresponsibly suppressed, the former
> being Utopia and the latter Dystopia. Real-world
> experience over the last century and a half stuffs the
> first straight into the fantasy category and the
> latter into offensive triumphalism.
Exactly so.
Observe that "Star Trek The Next Generation" spans the
fall of the Soviet Union. In the earlier episodes,
socialism was triumphant, in the later episodes,
socialism is not working too well
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
dNYjyRzniEGw/APv2Ap+CuTejVSleTxKffz7HdVC
4HNqQxmOo8zbGbJNXwUPp497BsljkkzPVFEzgrMxV
Remus Shepherd
> "Remus Shepherd" <re...@panix.com> wrote in message
> > Nobody is accusing 'the state', or any government, of doing anything.
> To clarify: it was my impression that Spinrad does exactly that.
> "For the past four days, I've spent time with demonstrations against the
> Coronation of King W, not the official ones which sought and were granted
> permits, but the unofficial direct action ones, which neither sought nor
> received liceence from the Crown to attempt their revolutionary acts....And
> what was I reading in the meantime? [Iron Council]
> If it were not the third volume of a fantasy series, the first two of which
> established the writer's major reputation, it would have had about as much
> chance of being published in the United States as Fidel Castro has of being
> invited to a state dinner at the White House."
> That, to me, does not suggest that the opposition to the book's being
> published as SF would come from some local preacher torching his Springsteen
> albums along with Harry Potter, but instead straight from the top. Combined
> with the "revolutionary goal of the novel", and "[presenting it as SF]
> would, under the present political situation in the United States, probably
> make it unpublishable, and if published, result in an unfriendly visit from
> the boys from Homeland Security", and the oft-referred "barricades", it's
> pretty clear.
Hmmn. Perhaps you're right, perhaps Spinrad was making an accusation of
government interference. That's not what I read into it, but you're right,
the implication is there. I would disagree with such an accusation.
Mark Atwood
> shock the avant-garde simply isn't humanly possible. If so, all he's ever
> going to get in the future is Air-Wick. Poor fellow.
He did it to himself.
I have no sympathy.
--
Mark Atwood | When you do things right, people won't be sure
ma...@atwood.name | you've done anything at all.
http://mark.atwood.name/ http://www.livejournal.com/users/fallenpegasus
Remus Shepherd
> Presumably, if things are outright forbidden, they are forbidden whether
> they were written yesterday or forty years ago.
I took the essay as saying that dangerous new ideas are being suppressed,
whether via government influence, puritanical publishers, or just economic
realities. It doesn't matter if dangerous old ideas are still out there --
you can't easily erase ideas if the population already has a hold of them.
Mark Atwood
>
> On the other hand it was assumed that Kirk could have endless casual
> sexual relationships without there being any medical or emotional risk.
It was very New Wave that way, in a way.
Tho it was hardly unique to the New Wave. Instead, a bunch of SF
writers and editors decided to take something bogus from contemporary
fiction, and stir it into SF.
And didn't improve it.
I'm hardly a prude (heh), but for the most part I skip over the
emotionless sexual content spewed onto paper from those eras (and this
one as well). It's *BORING*.
Remus Shepherd
> On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:13:40 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
> > In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that
> > contains homosexual characters;
> Untrue:
http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/26/eveningnews/main691106.shtml
> > in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
> > 'ungodly'.
> Untrue:
http://kansascity.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/2001/04/23/editorial2.html
...although that one is a few years old. Things certainly haven't
gotten better.
> > Are you and I looking at the same America?
> Probably not. I suspect that in your America no one
> voted for Reagan.
You seem to be trying to make this some kind of right wing/left wing
argument, as if I'm some kind of socialist wacko. I assure you that's not
the case. Perhaps it's true of Spinrad; I always took him as an anarchist.
In any event, I don't see how your political leanings (which you've made
very plain, thank you, I got it) factor into this discussion.
Brian M. Scott
<w...@ericjarvis.co.uk> wrote in
<news:MPG.1ce10b4eb...@news.dircon.co.uk> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Alma Hromic Deckert ang...@vaxer.net wrote in
> <9iqd71hoqql6ufgvf...@4ax.com>:
[...]
>> Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
> I've always been a little dubious about this one. I've met
> too many petty officials and functionaries who have been
> monstrously corrupted by the merest smidgeon of power.
> I'll go with the first sentence, but I'm inclined to
> suspect that even the smallest amount of power can
> corrupt absolutely.
And in many cases quite possibly faster than greater power.
Brian
James A. Donald
Remus Shepherd
> > > In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that
> > > contains homosexual characters;
James A. Donald"
> > Untrue:
"Brian M. Scott"
> It's a sloppy paraphrase of the truth, but it's less
> misleading than your unqualified 'untrue'. 'They' is
> State Representative Gerald Allen, and the bill would
> prohibit the use of public funds for 'the purchase of
> textbooks or library materials that recognize or
> promote homosexuality as an acceptable lifestyle'; an
> effect would be to ban such books from public schools
> and university libraries.
When someone claims a book is "banned", that ordinarily
means that I am forbidden to buy it, not that the state
will not buy it.
Certain viewpoints can never appear in the San Francisco
Chronicle - not in their editorials, and not in their
letters pages. Are those viewpoints "banned"?
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
vlj/DaQzpgO/BMC3yZO39kcoDosnslO7fT9K3UUY
4xR5CvW0Ls9pAs2oMSjRRzqQWv8lE54HmIzPOEUxg
Zeborah
Well, it doesn't (from what you say) prevent libraries from keeping any
such books that they may already own; nor from accepting donations of
such books; nor even (perhaps depending on the definition of "public
funds") from holding a cake sale to raise funds for the sole purpose of
buying such books.
It would almost certainly, without a very concerted effort by the
librarians, cut down dramaticallly on the number of such books that
could be easily acquired.
--And in university libraries, it would have a drastic effect on
psychology/psychiatry journal acquisitions. Also on multidisciplinary
databases (JSTOR springs to mind first), though you might be able to get
away with these since databases aren't purchased, they're licensed.
Possibly also some encyclopaedias.
Zeborah
--
Gravity is no joke.
http://www.geocities.com/zeborahnz/
David Friedman
Remus Shepherd <re...@panix.com> wrote:
> James A. Donald <jam...@echeque.com> wrote:
> > On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:13:40 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
> > > In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that
> > > contains homosexual characters;
>
> > Untrue:
>
> http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2005/04/26/eveningnews/main691106.shtml
According to which the "ban" is on public school libraries buying new
copies of plays or books. Not a good idea, but considerably short of
"trying to ban any book that ... ." It doesn't apply to public
libraries or college libraries, let alone to bookstores.
> > > in Kansas they're burning Harry Potter for being
> > > 'ungodly'.
>
> > Untrue:
>
> http://kansascity.bizjournals.com/kansascity/stories/2001/04/23/editorial2.htm
> l
>
> ...although that one is a few years old. Things certainly haven't
> gotten better.
"Book burning" usually refers to seizing other people's books and
burning them. The fact that someone buys some books and burns them as a
publicity stunt does not strike me as particularly ominous, but
apparently you disagree.
Remus Shepherd
> L. Neil Smith wrote a piece some time back on the same subject, with
> his own... unique... take on it:
> http://www.lneilsmith.com/bulgaria.html
Now /there's/ an interesting little essay. I disagree with a lot of his
statements -- particularly, I see science fiction as historically dominated
by Heinlein-esque libertarians, not Star Trek socialists.
I wasn't aware there was such emnity between socialists and conservatives
in science fiction circles. Probably it's another symptom of my social
blindness -- I'm pretty apolitical, and I don't care if you're a Marxist
or a Randite as long as you can demonstrate that your ideas *work*. And by
'work', I mean create a non-stagnant society where every human being has
some basic dignity.
I just want someone in science fiction to point out that what we have
right now is not working (this is my firm opinion), and to offer some
suggestions on how to fix it.
Mark Atwood
>
> I took the essay as saying that dangerous new ideas are being suppressed,
> whether via government influence, puritanical publishers, or just economic
> realities.
And what would those "dangerous new ideas" be?
I mean, he had a soapbox right there to tell us what they were.
Plus, he could always start a blog.
Alma Hromic Deckert
>Alma Hromic Deckert ang...@vaxer.net wrote in
><9iqd71hoqql6ufgvf...@4ax.com>:
>> On Mon, 2 May 2005 21:31:49 -0500, Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> >And in theory, Marxist principles are supposed to lead to absence of
>> >government after a transition period. (Marx sneered at anarcho-socialists
>> >for not being realistic enough to realize this was necessary.) For some
>> >reason, Communist governments don't seem to have gotten very far towards
>> >this ideal.
>>
>> Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
>>
>
>I've always been a little dubious about this one. I've met too many petty
>officials and functionaries who have been monstrously corrupted by the
>merest smidgeon of power. I'll go with the first sentence, but I'm
>inclined to suspect that even the smallest amount of power can corrupt
>absolutely.
Fair enough, as far as that goes, but I have to admit the the old
chestnut of "power for the people by the people" never quite worked
for me - there's always ONE of the people who floats on top and that
one takes steps, eventually, maybe later rather than sooner but
eventually, to protect that power. It happens. Orwell hit the nail on
the head in "Animal Farm" - some animals are just more equal than
others.
That's why there's something to be said for a heritable power
structure - at least the aristocrats are born to it. WHy on earth
would I want to knuckle under to another schmuck just like me who
thinks that somehow the fact that (s)he bribed, bought, bullied or
sweettalked enough people into VOTING for him or her makes that
particular person my superior in some weird way. YES, voting makes it
easier, in theory, to oust leaders you are disenchanted with - but
tehre are many many ways to "fix" voting. I recall one example where a
bunch of totally illiterate tribesmen from somewhere in the middle of
the kalahari desert were brought in for the elections in what used to
be SOuth West Africa and is now Namibia, and where told to make their
X "... here. right here. Make the mark right here". Seeing as they had
no clue what they were doing, could not read the ballot, did not know
(or care) whom the ballot elected. But someone got elected anyway,
*and those votes counted*. It boggled me.
I don't know - the older I get the less I am sure that there is ANY
system that is ever going to work for the human race, given our
natures. There are always loopholes and people always find them. But
that power corrupts... that is a true thing. Perhaps not everyone,
perhaps there are stalwarts who cannot be bought, but it has also been
said that every man has his price and all it takes is a bit of
haggling....
So - ObSF - what do you think will happen in the end? Oligarchy?
Anarchy? COmmunism? Star Trek?...
...Annihilation before we have a chance to find out...?
A.
David Friedman
Eric Jarvis <w...@ericjarvis.co.uk> wrote:
> Alma Hromic Deckert ang...@vaxer.net wrote in
> <9iqd71hoqql6ufgvf...@4ax.com>:
> > On Mon, 2 May 2005 21:31:49 -0500, Dan Goodman <dsg...@iphouse.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > >And in theory, Marxist principles are supposed to lead to absence of
> > >government after a transition period. (Marx sneered at anarcho-socialists
> > >for not being realistic enough to realize this was necessary.) For some
> > >reason, Communist governments don't seem to have gotten very far towards
> > >this ideal.
> >
> > Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
> >
>
> I've always been a little dubious about this one. I've met too many petty
> officials and functionaries who have been monstrously corrupted by the
> merest smidgeon of power. I'll go with the first sentence, but I'm
> inclined to suspect that even the smallest amount of power can corrupt
> absolutely.
It's even possible, now that I think of it, that absolute power might be
less corrupting.
One of temptations to corruption, after all, is the risk that someone
else might seize the power from you; practically anything is justified
in preventing such a catastrophe. Exempla gratia: Watergate. With
sufficiently absolute power, one at least has the option of just sitting
back and enjoying the show.
James A. Donald
James A. Donald:
> > The decline of socialism, foreshadowing its coming
> > collapse, happened first. In order to continue to
> > believe in socialism, intellectuals found it
> > necessary to cease believing in reason, objectivity,
> > facts, the knowability of the external world, the
> > need for journalists to tell the truth, and so
> > forth. Hence postmodernism, magic realism, Robert
> > Fisk, and the rest.
Keith Morrison
> Don't mix up socialism with Communism.
When communism fell, the people who say socialism is not
communism, reacted emotionally, and continue to react,
as if communism was the epitome of socialism.
When communism was a going concern, socialists seemed
remarkably sure that anti communists were witch burning
nazis, that the Soviet Union was doing just fine, and so
on and so forth. We still hear with great regularity
about just how great Cuban health care is. America's
defeat in Vietnam is still celebrated by a curiously
large chunk of the Democrat party.
Why do various people in this thread claim the media is
bland and censored, when quite obviously there is more
sex, more diverse sex, some of it unpleasantly and
disturbingly deviant, more revolution, and so on and so
forth? It is because the media no longer reports
socialism as a viable program, because science fiction
no longer envisions socialism as a viable program.
Socialism has faded out from science fiction, because it
is so very retro.
> The former is doing rather well and forms the general
> operating principal, to a assorted degrees, of most of
> the democratic countries in the world and the majority
> of the rich industrialized ones.
What we have in the democratic countries is a mixed
economy, in which the socialist sector limps along by
unpleasantly parasitizing the capitalist sector.
If that is socialism, if that is what socialism means,
if that is what socialists always wanted and intended,
if that is what socialism meant to socialists, Tony
Blair would put big posters on the London subway saying
"Vote for socialism". Obviously he would rather hammer
nine inch nails through his head than do any such thing.
The mixed economy was always intended as a halfway step
to total and absolute control of everyone and
everything, a half way step to a state that would have
all the apparatus and institutions of the existent
totalitarian terror states, but would be really nice
because the nomenclatura would still be democratically
elected - indeed even more democratically elected than
at present since that unpleasant pressure of capitalist
voices would be gently but firmly silenced.
Now there is no prospect of that desired end state ever
being achieved, hence the complaints we see in this very
thread by various people that they are being repressed.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
NAFV7WPNIX0EzyfFhdGqFLxkKlsmS2+/4DJZIvjH
4l4HCoSQnNKUQbJVExkFoqfIkblbfG62Q52v94/TZ
James A. Donald
Damien R. Sullivan:
> I know it's common among the US right to refer to
> Socialist Europe and all, but I thought that was abuse
> of the language, with socialism meaning state
> ownership of capital and this being pretty rare in the
> West
All economies are mixed, the socialist sector being
larger or smaller, with the possible exception of
Somalia. But the dictionary definition of socialism is
www.webster.com
: : socialism
: :
: : 1 : any of various economic and political
: : theories advocating collective or
: : governmental ownership and administration of
: : the means of production and distribution of
: : goods
: :
: : 2 a : a system of society or group living in
: : which there is no private property b : a
: : system or condition of society in which the
: : means of production are owned and controlled
: : by the state
: :
: : 3 : a stage of society in Marxist theory
: : transitional between capitalism and communism
: : and distinguished by unequal distribution of
: : goods and pay according to work done
And by that definition, europe is not socialist.
If Tony Blair invited the voters to vote for socialism,
they would be horrified.
Before World War II, the labor party and its equivalents
were indeed socialist - they fully intended to socialize
the world in accordance with the dictionary definition.
After world war II, they had a go at it in Britain,
Germany, and Australia. This turned out to be
disastrous, and in 1949 they backed away from it, and
have been backing away from it ever since, but they deny
backing away from it, hence claim to be still socialist,
deny they tried it, and deny that it failed. As long as
the Soviet Union existed, they could still believe that
the troubles of 1944 - 1949 had just been an unfortunate
mischance, the result of war and capitalism, and they
would gradually get around to apply real socialism by
and by, but after the fall of the soviet union, in large
part due to problems very reminiscent of 1949 -
repression and shortages - it was no longer possible to
believe this.
And those people who are being forced to reluctantly
change their beliefs, claim they are being repressed.
--digsig
James A. Donald
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Brian M. Scott
<zeb...@gmail.com> wrote in
<news:1gvzugf.fmnppv1xv2zd0N%zeb...@gmail.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
> Brian M. Scott <b.s...@csuohio.edu> wrote:
>> On Mon, 02 May 2005 14:46:57 -0700, "James A. Donald"
>> <jam...@echeque.com> wrote in
>> <news:bq7d719bacpe544r6...@4ax.com> in
>> rec.arts.sf.composition:
>>> On Mon, 2 May 2005 19:13:40 +0000 (UTC), Remus Shepherd
>>>> In Alabama they're trying to ban any book that
>>>> contains homosexual characters;
>>> Untrue:
>> It's a sloppy paraphrase of the truth, but it's less
>> misleading than your unqualified 'untrue'. 'They' is State
>> Representative Gerald Allen, and the bill would prohibit the
>> use of public funds for 'the purchase of textbooks or
>> library materials that recognize or promote homosexuality as
>> an acceptable lifestyle'; an effect would be to ban such
>> books from public schools and university libraries.
> Well, it doesn't (from what you say) prevent libraries
> from keeping any such books that they may already own;
> nor from accepting donations of such books; nor even
> (perhaps depending on the definition of "public funds")
> from holding a cake sale to raise funds for the sole
> purpose of buying such books.
I haven't seen the actual text, but I've seen quotes from
him that seem to imply that the bill would actually force
removal of the books from institutions receiving state
support.
[...]
Brian
Brian M. Scott
<jam...@echeque.com> wrote in
<news:441e71l16dhcs89tr...@4ax.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> When someone claims a book is "banned", that ordinarily
> means that I am forbidden to buy it,
No, it does not.
> not that the state will not buy it.
[...]
Brian M. Scott
<re...@panix.com> wrote in
<news:d57126$m93$1...@reader1.panix.com> in
rec.arts.sf.composition:
[...]
> I wasn't aware there was such emnity between socialists
> and conservatives in science fiction circles. Probably
> it's another symptom of my social blindness -- I'm pretty
> apolitical, and I don't care if you're a Marxist or a
> Randite as long as you can demonstrate that your ideas
> *work*. And by 'work', I mean create a non-stagnant
> society where every human being has some basic dignity.
No one can demonstrate that his ideas work in the long term,
and in fact I rather doubt that any theoretical approach
*does* work indefinitely.
> I just want someone in science fiction to point out that
> what we have right now is not working (this is my firm
> opinion), and to offer some suggestions on how to fix
> it.
Good grief, why? (The suggestions, not the pointing out of
problems.)
Brian
James A. Donald
On Mon, 02 May 2005 19:18:54 -0500, Erol K. Bayburt
> L. Neil Smith wrote a piece some time back on the same
> subject, with his own... unique... take on it:
> http://www.lneilsmith.com/bulgaria.html
Neil Smith tells us:
: : Which is how it came to be that all those
: : lonely, toothless, quakey-voiced old-timers
: : (of all ages) still eking out their
: : existences in the philosophical badlands and
: : political ghost-towns that Left-Wing Utopia
: : has become -- and even those lucky enough to
: : be living in far greater luxury off the
: : tailings of the statist mother-lode they once
: : helped mine -- have nothing but bad news for
: : us now. They're mistaking the failure of
: : their ideas for a failure of reality.
: :
: : As a consequence, many of them have simply
: : given up and become whining nihilists.
"Whining Nihilists" seems to me an accurate description
of many voices in this thread.
He also tells us:
: : So what happens to a community of timeworn
: : left-wing Utopian writers who for decades
: : have continued to insist on seeing a future
: : that demonstrably -- to anyone who isn't
: : tenured, working for television, or living in
: : Sri Lanka -- doesn't work? Enter J.R.R.
: : Tolkien, along with what seemed at the time
: : like thousands of blatant imitators, sucked
: : into the world-swallowing vacuum in the
: : science fiction market created by the
: : implosion of Marxoid idealism. Enter the
: : dragons, the dwarves, and the enchanted
: : swords. Bazookas and armored personnel
: : carriers came later, and when they did, it
: : seemed like a breath of fresh air.
: :
: : And so, as irrationality and magic began to
: : displace reason and science as the motivating
: : epistemology, and as the genre began looking
: : backward to feudalism and the Middle Ages
: : (for all its socialism, science fiction had
: : been a forward-looking literature of
: : limitless perspectives) and as readers began
: : to tire of narrowed horizons (not to mention
: : the same old thing re- rewritten over and
: : over), the rack space -- "inevitably" once
: : again -- began to diminish.
Which seems an accurate description of the publishing
trends that Spinrad complains about.
And where Spinrad talks of the formerly small press,
curiously starting to publish science fiction, Neil
predicts what sounds very like the same phenomenon:
: : Even better, I know of at least a dozen more
: : science fiction manuscripts by other, mostly
: : younger writers with the same viewpoint as
: : ours, languishing now for lack of proper
: : editorial attention. I predict that if New
: : York publishing doesn't make a place for them
: : soon, they will make a place for themselves,
: : and on their own terms.
--digsig
James A. Donald
6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG
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48Iu7RxvDdntbFQ/fa/EbcBVwBCqAPdhPgQHkiakW
David Friedman
Alma Hromic Deckert <ang...@vaxer.net> wrote:
> So - ObSF - what do you think will happen in the end? Oligarchy?
> Anarchy? COmmunism? Star Trek?...
I suspect it has a good deal to do with technologies--of communication,
repression, defense, offence, and the like. I can imagine circumstances
where my least bad society--private property anarchy--would be stable. I
can also imagine circumstances where it wouldn't and where one of its
opposites--the Draka, or Nazi Germany, say--would.