On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, Claire Bickell wrote:
> Andrea Leistra wrote:
> > After reading _The Wasp Factory_, _Use of Weapons_ seems very tame indeed.
>
> You think? Wasp Factory is icky, but it's really about fucked up
> individuals, with less implication for the broader society. But Use of
> Weapons, is a story of a person capable of great evil being used by a
> society capable of great evil. Icky on a grander scale. And, for me,
> ultimately more disturbing.
I don't necessarily see 'icky' and 'evil' as the same thing. The stuff
in the back of my fridge is icky, but not evil (it hasn't been there
*quite* long enough to evolve sentience).
This is necessarily going to involve spoilers for both books, including
*major* ones for UoW. You Have Been Warned.
Well, the ickyness of _Wasp Factory_ was much more immediate, less
removed; Zakalwe in UoW was *capable* of great evil, sure, and had in
fact perpetrated great evil in the past, but at the time of the later
timeline in the book (this is really hard to talk about, we need more
tenses or something) I didn't have the impression that he *would*.
Again, I really need to reread it, because the second time through,
when you know who Zakalwe really is and what he has done, I can easily
see that his later actions, after The Chair, would appear in a
different light. And while the Culture is *capable* of evil, in the
sense of pure physical prowess, they're too nice to actually bother
with it -- Special Circumstances might screw something up, but they
always mean well, for some not too unreasonable definitions of "well".
Certainly they aren't out blowing up stars with inhabited systems for
_fun_, though they certainly could.
In _The Wasp Factory_, though, you have people who are evil to the full
extent of their capabilities -- not just an abstract potential, but
really there acting it out. And there are *no* redeeming features, no
hope, no promise for redemption, no sympathetic characters. Just
nasty people doing nasty things in a nasty world. This isn't to say
I thought it was a bad book, because I didn't. I even found parts
of it very funny (the phone calls, primarily, and frighteningly enough
the giant-kite bit). I just think it's a whole lot darker than UoW.
--
Andrea Leistra [EMAIL PROTECTED]
If we could put a man on the moon, why can't we do it again?
