on 24/11/00 4:17 pm, Gord Sellar at [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
> 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.
SF is written according to many different schools of conventions which are
seldom explicitly presented. Editors (such as John Campbell and Michael
Moorcock) and writers (like Bruce Sterling) have occasionally produced
'manifestos' describing what they are looking for or trying to achieve.
_Interzone_ magazine had an editorial asking for 'radical hard sf' many
years ago. Critics have occasionally described what some of these
conventions comprise (and why breaking them without knowing them and having
a good reason mostly doesn't make good fiction). One reason non-genre sf
often seems badly constructed to genre readers is that the author is unaware
of any of these conventions.
One of the standard conventions of Campbellian hard sf was the 'make one
change' story. *Of course* everything in the future will be different, but
for the purpose of the story leave everything the same except for one change
and its logical consequences. In Campbellian hard sf the 'one change' would
be technological. Criticizing such a story for its unimaginative treatment
of future gender politics (or whatever) is missing the point.
Cyril Kornbluth's superficially minor (and reactionary) story 'The Marching
Morons' was considered important at the time because it subverted the
Campbellian model for satirical purposes and led to an alternative school of
sf published by Horace Gold in _Galaxy_ magazine. And so on. Michael
Moorcock invented the British 'New Wave' in _New Worlds_ magazine, Harlan
Ellison edited his huge 'Dangerous Visions" anthologies...
Some sf is *really* about the here and now, some sf is *really* about the
not here and now and quite a lot is in the middle. And a great deal of sf is
mostly some other genre with sf trappings (the Western in space, the war
story in space, the treasure quest in space...)
So now we have many different kinds of sf doing many different things. Greg
Egan is doing radical hard sf, Peter F Hamilton and Dan Simmons are
producing epic fin de siecle riffs on 1950's space opera, Ursula K LeGuin is
writing anthropologically astute feminist dystopias...
I enjoy all of it for different reasons. But I enjoy all of it more because
I appreciate it in depth.
--
William T Goodall
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
http://www.wtgab.demon.co.uk
