From: curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written
Subject: Re: Is SF imaginative? (somewhat long)
Date: 23 Jan 93 01:17:09 GMT
Organization: UC Berkeley CS Dept.
NNTP-Posting-Host: cobra.cs.berkeley.edu

In article <ESCHNEID.93Jan22151211@sparc8.tamu.edu> eschneid@sparc8.tamu.edu (Erich R Schneider) writes:
>In article <1joah2$134@agate.berkeley.edu> curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
>>
>>You are considerable free with your dichotomies.  I admire this.
>>It indicates cojones.
>
>I thank you for praising my metaphorical masculinity in public. However, I
>hope you won't be too disappointed if I disclaim any attempt to create two
>huge bins, labeled "confrontational" and "saps of the Old Order", and 
>proceed to toss every SF volume in the Library of Congress into one or
>the other. 

Oh.  Well, then, I guess I have to retract the cojones.

On the other hand this is a much more reasonable position, and it
encourages me to state mine.  Perhaps we actually agree.

It is clear that some sf is sociopolitically "confrontational"; it is
also clear that some sf is sociopolitically sappy.  But if you are
asserting that a book must be one or the other, or find compromise
only in a stance which is neither radical enough to be confrontational
nor conventional enough to be sappy, I must disagree.

I do not believe that any great - or, to return to the subject of the
thread, imaginative - book must take a sociopolitical stance.  In
fact, I find that doing so more often diminishes fiction than
strengthens it; there are many novels, within sf or without it, that I
would consider "great" if they did not fall into the trap of politics.
(In politics I include social, psychological, and scientific debate.)

If the conflict in a story is a purely human conflict, or a purely
moral one, it is easy to avoid sinking into polemic; the narrative will
never touch on it.  There are quite a number of great books built thus.
Does _Moby-Dick_ have a political stance?  _Hamlet_?  I believe it is
folly to suggest that all "imaginative" sf must contain themes
relevant to today's society, and in fact would suggest that such more
often signifies lack of imagination than its presence.

But some stories must, by their nature, touch on sociopolitical themes.
And to write them without preaching is hard.  Very hard.  Probably
harder than I think.  The drive to polemicise, to evangelize, to let
people borrow your colored glasses, is so great that it can compromise
even the most mild-mannered of men.  And writers are in general
opinionated sons of bitches.

To do things right, one has to remain at all times non-judgmental.  To
present the problem, and let the reader come up with his own solution.
To avoid contrivances of plot and character, bogus "realizations,"
obvious pigeonholing of good and evil... and so forth.

It may sound easy, but it is not.  Everyone sees the world through the
filter of their own ideology; it is hard to show it clearly.

But I believe it is worth the attempt.  Examples of success might
include some of the works of Iain Banks; of Ian McDonald; William
Gibson (though it's easy to be cool, when you're such a damn
minimalist); Bruce Sterling; Charles Oberndorf (_Sheltered Lives_);
and so on.

Now once more unto the mud:

>>Iain Banks' _Consider Phlebas_
>
>An interesting puzzle, here. "State of the Art" and _The Player of
>Games_ are very much direct attacks on the sacred cows of capitalism
>as preached in the United States.

I'll buy that for "State of the Art"; but _Player of Games_?  Don't
you think you're reaching a bit?  I can't refute you, here, because I
don't know what you mean.

>But in _CP_, Banks shows the bad side of the socialist, relativistic
>Culture as well (the Eaters), and thus shows that he knows that the
>most effective way to argue against what's wrong with our current
>culture is not merely inverting it and setting the inversion up as
>"good" and the current culture "evil".

Do you really think Banks wrote _Consider Phlebas_ to argue against
what's wrong with our current culture?  It may be a symptom of my
terminal derangement at the hands of consumerist decadence, but I sure
don't.

Rather, I'd use _Consider Phlebas_ as an example of what I think is
the right way to write political novels.  Banks sets up two societies,
neither of which is much like anything on Earth, but both of which
represent issues which are important to present-day societies, and
uses the dynamics of the conflict between them to set a story.  Not
only is he quite careful to remain non-judgmental, he uses a nice
trick to keep the reader as non-judgmental as possible: skewing the
viewpoint character away from the naturally-sympathetic human society.

The result is a book which you can read as an argument for socialism,
I can read as a nonpolitical tale, and I'd bet someone from a
theocentric society could read as a scathing attack on the secularist
Culture.

Compare, for example, to _The Dispossessed_.

>>Lucius Shepard's _Life During Wartime_
>
>Very much an attack on our current "Corporate-Government War Machine", as
>some might put it. When was this originally written? It has more relevance,
>I think, if one can viscerally identify with the US's military adventures
>in Central America, which seem to be tapering off a bit.

_Huh_?  Be careful, here.  

In _Life During Wartime_, a US intervention in Central America is
indeed cast as evil.  I don't want to spoil the book - but if you find
_LDW_ an attack on the present US regime, you must have a much, much
stranger view of American government than the media has been giving us!

(Shepard's Central America also seems to derive much more from Vietnam
than from our recent piddling efforts in that region; does anyone know
if Shepard actually served in Vietnam?  The vividness of description
is remarkable.)

>>Do they reinforce our Eurocentric, patrimonial, mammonistic,
>>homophobic, and (of course) profoundly decadent Social Norms?  Or do
>>they boldly step out into this literary chasm, where No Man hath Gone
>>Before, and Subvert the Dominant Paradigm?
>
>I wouldn't call our dominant social norms "profoundly decadent". Not a
>while ago our leaders were pounding the pulpit denouncing decadence in
>American culture. That aside, I'd say the three works I talked about
>do in some sense attempt to "subvert the dominant paradigm".

Again, be careful.  This here sword has got two edges to it.

Suppose, say, _Consider Phlebas_ really is an attack on the Sacred
Cows of Murrican Capitalism.  Would it really be subverting the
dominant paradigm?

Banks, after all, isn't a die-hard Republican from the redneck-swamps
of Maine.  He's an English (Scottish?) socialist of academic circles.
His "dominant paradigm" isn't laissez-faire capitalism - it's
socialism.  Sacred cows?  More like sacrificial cows if you ask me.
For a man in Banks' circles to write a socialist book is about as
courageous as shitting in the toilet.  If you want to subvert the
dominant paradigm you got to shit in the sink.

And what about yourself?  I don't pretend to presume but my guess
would be that _your_ dominant paradigm is liberal socialism.  Are you
so brave and avant-garde, to read Delany and Le Guin?  You should be
chowing down on Vernor Vinge and L. Neil Smith.

Me I reserve the right to loathe them all equally - although Delany
and Le Guin are, to be sure, far better craftsmen than the likes of
Vinge and Smith.  Politics is for ballot booths.

(With some exceptions.  It _is_ possible to write a good polemical
novel; it requires honesty, daring, and as good a grasp of polemic as
of fiction.  But it can be done.  Look at Margaret Atwood.)

c