At 9:17 PM -0400 17/11/2000, John D. Giorgis wrote:
>At 11:43 PM 11/13/00 -0400, Gord wrote:
>>[as a small side note, and not this is not an attack, but a question of my
>>own curiosity: I'm surprised you actually read SF, John. How is it that you
>>enjoy reading literature that fundamentally confronts you with the "other"
>>and with the transience and inevitable erosion of what it seems is
>>everything you value as a conservative? That is something I've scratched my
>>head about several times but never gotten to the point of asking. Honestly
>>I am curious!]
>
>I guess that people see in science fiction what they want to see.
Well, that is true of all literature [as you may recall from our discussion
of literary criticism one time once] and also there is the fact that l am
working with an idiosyncratic set of references. Still, I think there are a
few things inherent in SF that I imagine would you would find anathema to
your personal convictions. Some of your explanation helps alleviate my
puzzlement, but not fully. So, I continue this dialogue a little:
>First of all, I take strong exception to the idea that I wouldn't like
>being confronted with "the other." I'd like to think that I have
>consistently sought out "the other" in my life, from reading _National
>Geographic_ to becoming an avid player in Model U.N. (where not only do I
>have to learn about foreigners, but actually have to *become* a foreigner
>as much as possible, be it a communist, a Muslim, or a Canadian.)
Ooopsie, let me explain. I mean the non-evangelizable (or non-saveable)
other. The other whom you cannot convince that abortion and any other
sexuality than traditional mainstream heterosexuality is morally wrong, or
that "traditional family values" are what needs to be returned to, or
whatever. You yourself have explained that you essentially post about
issues like abortion and politics in the hopes of changing our minds. You
once said that you thought it'd be a good thing if the world converted to
Catholicism en masse. These kinds of things I think express an evangelical
bent, and to the degree that I can empathize (having some small streak of
it myself), I imagine that for you it would be eternally frustrating to
read SF, where the fundamental "religious" denomination is closer to
existential/humanist and so forth, and where the culture is usually
radically *different* from our own and from a lot of what we romanticize as
the past. I'm not saying that you're someone who mixes up reality with
fiction, or that you would get mad because you can't get Alex Lustig to
pray before important plot events in _Earth_, just the simple fact that
novels tend to express worldviews and that the worldviews most common in SF
novels seem to be ones that you would want to argue with and rail against
-- being that they are often similar to the worldviews that you argue with
and rail against so entertainingly here onlist. ;) This relates to the
second point that you found so incomprehensible, so I'll explain it as part
of that clarification.
>Secondly, I don't have the first clue as to what you mean by "the
>transience and inevitable erosion of what it seems is everything you value
>as a conservative", so I will live that without comment.
Well, I was specifying the conservativeness because the question was
directed at you. It could as easily be directed at me, though pn different
areas -- by valuing of certain academic/cultural traditions, and my
utterly nostalgic tendencies. But as I was discussing with one friend
tonight, thinking about the future -- not just the foreseeable future but
the long term future beyond one's own lifetime -- eventually involves the
erasure of one's existence from the world as anything but a kind of part of
the sediment of history . . . and along with the erosion of you as an
individual, so too is eroded almost everything that was certain and "true"
in your own wordview. We don't think like our ancestors, value what they
do, believe what they believed . . . and so on. In fact, we tend to look on
the past pejoratively in our march-toward-improvement aesthetic as modern
Westerners. Which dooms us to being, in ways we can't even fathom, quaint,
superstitious, ignorant, and incomprehensibly blinded by our ignorance.
Bruce Sterling wrote in (a little piece he did for _Wired_ magazine called)
"The Future? You Don't Wanna Know" that: "Real futurism means staring
directly into your own grave and accepting the slow but thorough
obliteration of everyone and everything you know and love." Now, to some
degree SF does mediate this with all kinds of literary tricks, and well, to
be honest plenty of SF isn't all that radical socially, I guess. It's not
realistic futurism but more of the literary use of futurist tropes --
almost always talking about the present to some degree while also talking
about the fictional world of some possible or impossible future. But even
amid the familiarization of the most unrigorously futurist SF, there is
plenty of defamiliarization to be found -- if one reads carefully. For
example, do you realize that it's very likely that most of the women and
men in _Glory Season_ practice what we would essentially consider
bisexuality? Breeding biannually is one thing, but when the sexes are
essentially separated, I seriously doubt the majority of the humans on that
planet simply do without most of the year -- social strictures or not, and
I remember only an offhand comment about girls' first love, offhandedly
being other girls of a certain type or status. Not only is this seen as
inherently value neutral, but it actually doesn't much matter to the story
either. Sexual morality is radically different. It can be. It has been. And
. . . here is the kicker . . . if humans exist for any length of time, it
WILL be again, during *some* period in our future history. It already is in
many subcultures, and that's something to which you seem to be opposed
politically and, more importantly, morally.
Now, why I specified "conservative" should now be clear. Does it bother
you that the values of liberal-humanist society, of pluralist and
existential (rather than essential, which is the belief in God and the Will
of God and absolute morality defining Good and Evil for us, to which I
suspect you ascribe) thought seem to be valorized in SF?
>Suffice to say, though, that I am overwhelming concerned with "The Big
>Picture." That's why I went to work for the US Government, despite my
>conservative politics. I just can't find much joy in earning money in
>private business for the sake of earning money. I want to do something
>that will benefit my civilization. In other words, I feel a strong calling
>to public service.
All of that is commendable, and is a feeling I share with you. I wouldn't,
by calling you a conservative, mean to imply that you would be incapable of
such concern. But I can't imagine that SF doesn't frustrate you endlessly
BECAUSE of that concern. The only novel in which I've seen, for example,
the Church depicted in a really positive light, was in Bruce Sterling's
_Holy Fire_, and there I got the distinct impression this was done for the
shock value of the Church actually being worthwhile and good for humanity
for once, ie. as an ironic comment. *grin* Maybe I'm forgetting more
favorable treatments, and I am sure I have missed some, but . . . I've seen
far more of just outright atheist characters (all of the Greg Egan that I
have read), along with a little mockery of, and/or collapse of, the Church
(such as in Brunner's _Stand on Zanzibar_ and plenty of short stories).
>By the same token, it is science fiction that explores
>the issues of not just individuals, but of concerns that face out entire
>civilization.
Right, but one of the major factors in that is the change to the nature of
the way we answer our questions, and even the questions we ASK, in the face
of new science and new technology. Human nature ain't what it used to be,
no matter how many quaint essentialisms we cling to.
I realize, in writing this, though, that many works in SF actually *don't*
do the work I've proposed SF does; some SF is just the present in the
future's clothing. Granted, _Glory Season_ is not such a radical critique
of gender: it's a simple reversal in some ways, sometimes doing this with
such comedic intent that it merely points back to the real world and fails
to suggest a radically different form of social organization: men on top
becomes women on top. That's something, but it's not too far off the
mainline of gender-criticism. Still, there are many works which I think are
composed from an angle that I am fairly certain would disturb you deeply if
you thought out the full implications of those texts and their commentary
on the present as well as the future. And I don't need to go all the way to
_The Female Man_ by Joanna Russ or Olaf Stapledon's _Star Maker_ (which,
even thought it has a God, has a God who puts humanity in a far different
place from how we have been conditioned to think of us, and even questions
the notion of a "saviour for all" being born to one species in one galaxy
in one of many teeming universes. But you needn't go that far afield. More
recent and popular work, such as Greg Egan's wonderfully atheistic and
existential morality as outlined in the closing section of _Teranesia_, or
the take on the outcome of North American capitalist society in Bruce
Sterling's _Distraction_ are viewpoints I think you would find offensive
and aesthetically unpleasing.
So maybe this leads me to ask, what SF besides Brin (which, as I mentioned
above, still has some potential to fit into the category I imagine would
offend you) do you enjoy reading? And when you encounter a series of texts
with which you disagree and by which you are offended, how do you react? Do
you finish the novel?
I'm thinking about reader response partially because one friend of mine, a
Tunisian woman, was deeply frustrated by a class discussion of the novel
_Heart of Darkness_. Whereas most of her classmates were reading it in some
twencen version of the way Conrad seems to have intended, she was so
disturbed by the kind of rhetoric and appropriation of the Congolese
natives as symbols first of all for "savagery" and second of all for white
mans savagery. She discussed it in terms of postcolonialist readings such
as the main one by Ngugi Wa Thiongu, who's basically THE Postcolonial
critic of _Heart of Darkness_; in any case . . . what I found striking was
her immense frustration with the text because you cannot argue or correct
or force a text to be reasonable. Books are fixed and finished things,
right? Even if we buy into Edward Said's claim that "Texts are unfinished
objects" and then proceed to finish them by pointing out what they elude
and ignore and leave out as part of the critical apparatus -- or engage
with them in a creative way, rewriting the texts -- there is still tat
level in which a novel says what it says, no matter what we would like. We
cannot ask Heinlein to defend his weird political views. But you open the
book, and there they are. There is an aura forcefulness to the authority of
the printed book, I think, or we learn to think of it that way anyway. So
how do you resist, or reply, or whatever, when a novel says something that
is the polar opposite of what you believe, John?
But maybe I'm also plotting my way of reading, which is a very active,
enagaged, and critical way, onto your way. I can see how you might be
simply reading these texts for entertainment value. But then I try to
imagine a Congolese reading _Heart of Darkness_ for distraction and not
being offended by all that goes on in it; I have to admit that I have
trouble seeing it.
Another pertinent question would be, what authors do you read?
[To be fair, I should answer that question myself when I ask it, but I
think my above post illuminates a decent list of authors I enjoy reading,
and I think the answer to why is pretty obvious -- I like the way that
their work critiques my own worldview and what I perceive as the
mainstream, and I like the way they write.]
Anyway, not to pry or to pick on you, I am just really curious, John.
Anyone else is welcome to respond to this set of questions, though.
Gord
