Current Politics In SF/F & Atemporality for Artists

[J-Sun]

I post a link to Current Politics In SF/F not so much because I want to talk politics but because it turned me on to Atemporality for the Creative Artist by Bruce Sterling. I'm not sure what to make of that (and I've only got eight years left to decide) but I thought it was really neat and others might like to read it and, if you wouldn't, maybe something else in the first article would be interesting. I don't get anything off the first three in that article at all but the Brown at least led to the Sterling not-so-political piece.

I understand Gibson has a non-fiction pamphlet out which I have no interest in but somebody needs to collect all the snippets of Sterling scattered everywhere and publish them in one of those old-fangledy book things. That I'll buy. Might not agree with all of it, but it would be fun either way.

 

[Toby Frost]

Very interesting stuff. I agree that these are not light debates, and I'm not entirely sure how much of Sterling's piece is actually saying much, but I'm extremely glad that they are happening, and that SF refuses to go the way of 95% of fantasy and become something without real relevance to the present day. I'm also glad that authors (well, Sterling at least) are able to grasp the fact that reflecting the present in SF means something more than writing crude satire of the immediate present (I don't write satire as such so my crudity is ok!) or stupid "marines vs moon-arabs" action stuff (though God knows it would sell like crazy, especially with lots of emotional speeches and manly crying. Just don't mention that the Spartans were bi). Almost any writing can be construed as political, even if it's the politics of no change, so SF writers ought to be aware of when politics are seeping into their work.

For what it's worth, I think the idea of an end of history is laughably arrogant, just as the idea of a war to end wars seems tragically naive. There always will be history, even if a lot of it is medieval nonsense fighting progress (I actually wonder if most history post-1918 is this), and there will always be potential for SF to reflect it. Also, I think that really good SF won't get old. 1984 and Flowers for Algernon are ultimately about people rather than things, and hence will continue to apply when their original backgrounds are gone. I re-read Neuromancer later, and was struck by its quaint belief that Japan would rule everything, which dates it terribly, but impressed by its characters, which stick in my mind like Chandler's.

And as Peter Watts says, never underestimate the capacity of people to mess things up, especially where they claim to be taking orders from a beardy fellow in the sky. Religion (or service to a dictator, which can be similar) permits any level of stupidity if taken far enough. Bad news for mankind, but great for parody.

 

[J-Sun]

Glad you liked it. As far as the end of history, I'm likely wrong but I gather he wasn't speaking about history itself so much as the collection of narrative structures and strategies that, allowing for evolution through time, have basically made up history from Herodotus to now - sort of like how Herodotus and, especially, Thucydides marked the "beginning" of history even though, of course, "things happened" before then.

Neat post - I particularly like your point about representing the present in SF in something other than 1:1 connections to "relevance". This is kind of where, for instance, I understand that Pohl has "updated" The Space Merchants to include references to Wal-mart to make it more "modern" which is kind of beside the point - the underlying depiction of the ad-driven consumption culture or whatever is the still-relevant and still-modern part, whatever the names of the things.

 

[Toby Frost]

Thankyou, and thanks for posting these links. I still think that it's unwise to announce the end of history, because we are too close to what's going on to see an end. There just seem to be a million ways in which some new era could occur - most of them bad! - which would be very different to ours. I can imagine people in the future referring to our time as Pre-Virus X, or Pre-Caliphrate, or more optimistically Back When Cancer Existed. Or maybe I'm not quite getting the idea behind the phrase: I'm not sure.

But I agree that it sounds as if Pohl is missing the point by updating his references (to be honest I always imagined The Space Merchants as Mad Men gone berserk). Occasionally I hear critics saying that 1984 is just about Communism, which also seems to miss the point. It's about all dictatorships and the people who run them, which I think is why it's endured.