From: jessec@yang.earlham.edu
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.written,alt.cyberpunk
Subject: Re: Diamond-hard SF
Date: 22 Nov 92 22:03:28 GMT
 <1992Nov21.172005.13480@jupiter.sun.csd.unb.ca> <1elvteINNg50@agate.berkeley.edu> <By4nMF.5y1@nic.umass.edu>
Organization: Earlham College, Richmond, Indiana

In article <By4nMF.5y1@nic.umass.edu>, zgilbert@titan.ucc.umass.edu (Zvi 
Gilbert) writes: 
> curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
>>apace@mta.ca writes:
>>>curtis@cs.berkeley.edu (Curtis Yarvin) writes:
>>>>Me I like my world complex.  Juicy.  Alive.  And that takes
>>>>more than ideology - that takes _imagination_.
>>>>
>>>You know, a metaphor doesn't have to be 100% accurate to be useful.
>>
>>Useful? [...]
>>Now, dogma is not entertaining.  Dogma has never been entertaining.
>>Dogma never will be entertaining.  
>>And the purpose of fiction is to - one way or another - entertain.
> 
> Whoa there, Curtis!
> 
> I appreciate your point of view, and the way that you have been expressin'
> it.  But those last two sentences there have made me join the fray, and
> so, I herewith bop you with the rubber mallet of Overstated Arguementation.
> 
> Let's define our terms:
> 
> Dogma: something held as an established position, esp. a definite authoritative
> tenet. b. a code of such tenets. c. a point of view or tenet put forth as
> authoratative without adequate grounds. 
> 
> "Dogma is not entertaining"?  Nonsense.
> 
> All good fiction contains elements of dogma, even with respect to definition
> c.  The best of it doesn't throw it in your face, but instead gently leads you
> down the garden path. I mean, it isn't just words on a page! (Lukas' quote 
> about the aesthetics of the novel being THE moral problem is relevant here.)
> Everyone has something that they believe in, especially writers.
> 
> In support of this notion, look at Russ' _The Female Man_, Le Guin's _Always
> Coming Home_.  These books are nothing BUT dogma (excellently written, etc.);
> the former a depiction of a feminist utopia, the latter of a humanist/ native
> american type utopia.  
> 
> Even in something as understated and non-strident as say, Crowley's _Little,
> Big_, I daresay we could find some dogma there if we cared to.
> 
> Now REDUCTIVE dogma is bad.  And I completely agree with you (and John Lennon)
> about the dangers of "-isms."  Still, I think that your point of view as 
> stated is... well... henious.
> 
> Fiction has moral consequences.  (Witness the extended debate about 
> Card's _The Lost Boys_.)  It isn't JUST words on a page; there's other 
> stuff there, like ideas, morals, plot, characters, etc.  I think that 
> ignoring the "dogma" or sweeping it under the rug is doubleplusungood.
> 
> And I think that you said something similar before you leapt off into
> unbounded word-space: "Not just ideology."
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> But "ideology" is necessary; and yes, even strong ideology; even dogma.

   Yes!  Thank you.  I cannot *stand* fiction that is reductively 
ideological (a distinction I thank you for stating, Zvi).  I wrote a 
monster paper last year on Marge Piercy's *Woman on the Edge of Time* in 
which I found my most basic problem with the book to be the problem I have 
with all utopian literature-- that it eliminates the shit factor (pun not 
intended, but too scatalogically funny to omit :-)... I'm talking about 
*metaphycial* shit, here, the way Milan Kundera talked about shit as that 
which is really unacceptable about existence.  To build her utopian 
solution, Piercy had to simplify so much that I wound up really mad at her 
for creating a world that was so goddamn creative and so interesting a 
place-- and at the same time, placed at such a remote distance by its 
essential *unrealism*.  An artificial garden...
   So I have a major antagonism towards fiction of this sort.  Was 
cyberpunk a reductively ideological fiction?
   My short answer would be Nope.
   My god, their harshest ideological criticism came from people like 
Samuel R. Delany, who said that they *had* no ideology!  And even that was 
too big a generalization, to my mind, to cover everyone affiliated with 
that circle.  Sterling sets out the c'punk stance so well in the 
introduction to *Mirrorshades*, where he says that the movement denies 
utopias *and* avoids making jeremiads through dystopia.  Gibson and 
Sterling don't preach in their fiction.  They don't offer solutions or 
reductive formulas for understanding the world.  There *is* no cyberpunk 
"ism"; those who've made the literature into a fashion trend have grafted 
on the politics.  Who, in cyberpunk fiction, is a hero? What is the heroic 
action that will solve everything? No one; nothing.  If that is not the 
antithesis of reductive ideology, then tell me what *is*.


   --Jesse.


PS-- I'll be offline for several months after 11/23, so don't anyone take 
my silence for consent! :-)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

But like the best fictional characters, he [Florentino] insists on his 
autonomy, refusing to be anything less ambiguous than human.  We must take 
him as he is, pursuing his tomcat destiny out among the streets and 
lovers' refuges of this city in which he lives on terms of such easy 
intimacy, carrying with him a potential for disasters from which he 
remains safe, immunized by a comical but dangerous indifference to 
consequences that often borders on criminal neglect.

			--Thomas Pynchon on Gabriel Garcia Marquez,
			  *Love in the Time of Cholera*
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