Knowing I would write about Stone tonight, I decided to spend the day reading this study
How does this relate to Stone? Adam noted
that generations of enthusiastic SF fans have seen nothing distasteful or psychopathological in this sort of [genocidal] thing at all. Killing billions of Starship Trooper bugs? Celebrate! They’re a threat to humanity, and besides they’re only vermin. Insects. Viruses.
One truism of science fiction as a genre, then, is the utter absence of the dynamic responsible for the genre which preceded it. (I belong to the epic to romance to novel school of generic development and take its validity for granted here.) Instead of organizing itself around the symbolic preservation of a dying culture, science fiction novels celebrate obliteration. Only in Stone, Adam recapitulates Dekker's old romantic structure by fashioning a narrator who him/herself belongs to a dying culture . . . one in which humanity is still capable of sin. Stone is not a romance per se but it is romantic in that it forces readers to sympathize with a character who seems natural instead of artificial, wild instead of bounded, mysterious instead of reasoned, and soaring instead of fettered.
In short, Ae bears all the markings of the romantic figure in Scott's historical romances. Why should this matter? I would argue because it allows Adam to address, albeit indirectly, what science fiction seems constitutionally incapable of addressing: the eradication of a culture. That the character whose culture is being eradicated resembles the reader is significant, because it forces the reader (as Scott's romances forced his readers) to sympathize with the known instead of the alien culture of those Ae murders. Ae generates sympathy in the same way Rob Roy did in the novel bearing his name: not because of what he does but because of who he is. Just as Scott's readers could fathom clan life more fully than those produced by the estranging conditions of mercantile capitalism, Adam's readers sympathize with Ae because they can't fathom the alien culture in which she is an atavism.
Or I've gone to insane lengths to justify my sympathetic identification with a sociopath. One or the other.
I think there's something to this interpretation, Scott. It does help to explain why the political element of Banks' utopia is so conspicuously missing in _Stone_. In short, Banks' Culture utopia is populated by anarcho-socialists whose society is underpinned by their historical remembrance of their struggle to free themselves from past tyrannies and determination to help others along this path now that they are powerful (see A Few Notes on the Culture for lots of this). They are recognizeably "us", empowered, and complete with the ability to commit mistakes, crimes, and sins. Writing out this political element is necessary for the kind of reversal of sympathy that you describe.
The rhetoric of "natural instead of artificial, wild instead of bounded, mysterious instead of reasoned" is, I think, recognizeably Burkean. Perhaps that's one reason why SF is so amenable to socialist revival stories. Technodeterminism substitutes for Marxist historical determinism as a reason why all that has to go.
But. The typical SF genocide is most often recognizeably fascist in tone. (Thus, I think, Adam's pointed references to vermin, insects, viruses.) I recognized this element in the book in the insistence that *every one* of the inhabitants of the planet be wiped out, and the reinforcing statement at the end about the purity of the waveform. Ae as agent of this can not really be a sympathetic character, the last clan member nobly falling in battle. I suspect that one of the differences between our reactions to Ae as a character may be the amount of non-literary SF we've read.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Sunday, 29 January 2006 at 11:02 PM
"Instead of organizing itself around the symbolic preservation of a dying culture, science fiction novels celebrate obliteration."
Maybe I'm misunderstanding this statement, but when I think of:
--"The Word for World is Forest", by Ursula K. LeGuin
--Ender's Game, by Orson Scott Card (and the sequels)
just off the top of my head, I don't see a "celebration of obliteration" - precisely the opposite. Even the Man-Kzin novels posit a working relationship after the wars, and a forbearance in victory on mankind's part.
Of course, these may all be in response to the stories celebrating genocide that came before. My SF reading is wide but not at all methodical, but it seems to me that the two competing stories (destroy the enemy vs. work out a truce) have coexisted for a long time, and the genocidal stories have had to consciously exaggerate the enemy's evil in order to get the reader to accept the genocide.
Posted by: morfydd | Monday, 30 January 2006 at 12:29 PM
morfydd, I was thinking of mentioning _The Word For World Is Forest_ for comparative purposes, but decided not to (Ursula K. LeGuin being probably the best-critically-studied SF author). But then you had to go and mention _Ender's Game_. Arghhh.
_Ender's Game_ is structured like a fantasy, a particularly nasty one. It's one in which a kid can literally kick another kid to death, somehow without realizing that he's doing so and thereby preserving his "innocence", and the adults looking on from a distance can let it continue because it's *necessary*. It's the fantasy of genocide that you as Gary Stu can commit without responsibility, because even though you're a genius, you're somehow too stupid to realize that people are setting you up do it (for good reasons, it's all a misunderstanding!). Even the guilt at the end is unreal, a pleasant extra vicarious mopey teenage treat ("oh, woe is me") like the topping on the sundae.
_Ender's Game_ most definitely celebrates obliteration. It near-well dances with glee at obliteration.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Monday, 30 January 2006 at 01:09 PM
Adam is just simply wrong to state that "generations of enthusiastic SF fans have seen nothing distasteful or psychopathological in this sort of [genocidal] thing at all." He mentions Starship Troopers but fails to cite The Forever War which was written in direct response to it about that very issues.
The examples that Rich give are good too, but I think that most science fiction stories that involve aliens aren't really about Manichaean struggles, but about the interaction between humans and aliens. Rather, I would say that it is romance's direct genre descendent: fantasy that has the sins attributed to it. Fantasy is always converative (or even reactionary) about preserving the old ways and old culture. And it (almost always) involves exterminating the subhuman aggressors (the orcs are always wiped out to the last).
Posted by: Jacob | Monday, 30 January 2006 at 01:14 PM
Jacob, you'd be quite right (or 'just simply right') to haul me up on the statement, even the implied statement, that there is nothing else in SF except enthusiastically genocidal fantasy. Clearly that's wrong: I didn't mean to suggest it, and am sorry if I did. There's a great deal of SF very sensitive to the issues of genocide: so, for instance, whilst I agree wholeheartedly with Rich about the moral idiocy of Ender's Game (really quite a dodgy book, made worse by the fact that it's so well written and structured and draws you along its narrative so smoothly)—-nevertheless it bears pointing out that Card wrote not just one but a whole bunch of sequels to that book which are precisely about trying to atone for the guilt of that novel's genocide: a kind of belated recognition of the awfulness of Ender’s position.
My point was to do with 'Hard SF', which is the sub-genre with which Stone is mostly in dialogue, and which has a higher proportion of dramatic-tension genocides (threatening and often enacting the death of the whole world simply in order to ramp up the excitement of the reading experience [says a fictional corpse from under a pile of ten billion of his fictional fellows: ‘thank heavens! At least we didn’t die in vain!’]) than other sorts of literature.
And, actually, my point is a larger one of some abstruseness and complexity, so I'll apologise in advance for stretching this comment out absurdly, and with introducing the sort of speculative theory-bumming more associated with other, http://www.adamkotsko.com/weblog/" target="new"> also excellent, blogs.
I apologise if I sound like a stuck-record, but I recently wrote http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0333970225/qid=1138652287/sr=8-1/ref=sr_8_xs_ap_i1_xgl14/102-1512285-9178567?n=507846&s=books&v=glance" target="new">a critical history of the genre, which has crystallized for me certain things which I think I always used to find in SF. I think it explains, for instance (this is of really interest to nobody but me, but anyway) why I’ve always been fascinated, though an atheist, with religious systems in SF and Fantasy—-both as a reader and a writer.
In a nutshell my http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/0333970225/qid=1138652235/sr=1-1/ref=sr_1_0_1/026-7822614-7951648" target="new"> argument is that SF didn’t begin with Hugo Gernsback, or H G Wells, or Mary Shelley; it began with Kepler (a German Protestant) in 1600. SF is born out of the Reformation. It is a literature, and more broadly a cultural discourse, that is still shaped by the determining dialectic of its inception: (very crudely) Protestant ‘science’, an infinite universe of inhabited worlds, versus Catholic ‘magic’ (in the strong sense of the word), a Dante-sized cosmos that was all God. The problem with the notion that the universe contains an infinity of inhabited worlds perhaps seems like theological quibbling today, but was a really heated matter in the 16/17th centuries: people (Giordano Bruno, for instance) got burned at the stake for suggesting it. Why? Because if there is an infinity of worlds, there must have been an infinity of Christs sacrificed to redeem all those worlds; and in that case the appearance of Christ on our world was not unique, and was indeed fatally diluted (one-infinitieth is tantamount to nothing at all). Rather than accept this monstrous dogma, the Catholic Church simply denied that there was such thing as alien inhabited worlds. This didn’t stop the creation of fantastic narratives (Tolkien, for instance, was a devout Catholic); but it did leave the science, tech, engineering and speculative fiction largely to the Protestants, and (later) to the Jews and atheists.
Now this is a distorting caricature of my argument; but the reason I rehearse it here is because it seems to me that this question of the status of Christ is still present in the subconscious, as it were, of SF: a genre that returns repeatedly to themes of sacrifice and resurrection, to saviour figures, to questions of transcendence, and particularly to questions of atonement. Indeed, writing the history made me much more aware of how ubiquitous, though often buried, the issue of atonement is in SF.
Here, in even more distortingly compressed form, is the history of an idea. In many ancient cultures if you killed somebody you could make recompense: you paid blood money to the family, for instance, and the shame was expunged. Quite a sensible arrangement, I’ve always thought; one that prevents the setting-in-motion of a infinite regress of revenge, revenge against the revenger, and so on (cf the Oresteia). Now to be able to make this restitution there needs to be some scale by which the worth of the lost life can be calculated, like those charts insurance companies give you when you go on holiday: loss of an eye, £500; loss of both legs, £10,000; loss of the ability to enjoy Rich Puchalsky’s incisive critical intelligence, £1,000,000. That sort of thing.
The arrival of Christianity involves, amongst many other things, a shift from a shame ethos to a guilt one; and more importantly (connected with that fact, I think) Christianity is based on a death that bursts the equivalence of the bloodgelt. How do you compensate for the death of a god? What sort of sum would you call appropriate? Of course it’s a stupid question. It is a death that no longer figures in that sort of http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0803983999/qid=1138652364/sr=2-1/ref=pd_bbs_b_2_1/102-1512285-9178567?s=books&v=glance&n=283155" target="new"> economy of symbolic exchange.
Now, the discourse of ‘genocide’ is interestingly paralleled here, I think. The traditional way of waging war has involved reparations: after 1918 Germany is told to pay a certain large sum of money, which is designed to compensate the other countries of Europe. But genocide is a different matter: it’s true that Germany has paid reparations to Israel, of quite a lot of money; but nobody would suggest that this money expunges the guilt of the holocaust. Genocide is in a different category, a crime not against nations but ‘humanity’.
To read even some of the extensive critical literature of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holocaust_%28resources%29" target="new">holocaust studies is to be aware of the way that many thinkers treat this event as more than a simple mass-murder; a common assumption is that it transcends the vocabulary of war, cruelty and evil previously used. This extra, this amount (to talk loosely) by which the holocaust exceeds the limits of conventional representation is also the amount by which the death of a god exceeds the traditional human schema for quantifying worth. Implicit in some holocaust studies is a sense that ‘the numbers game’ is not only misapplied, but offensively so: as if a person were to come along and say ‘you lost six million Jews? But we lost twenty million Russians, so Russia suffered 3.3 times as much as the international Jewish community.’ Of course such a statement would be crazy. The Rabbinical teaching, quoted in Schindler’s List (a text often mocked, I’m not sure why, on this account amongst others) that he who saves a single life saves the world entire is actually another way of saying this. The implication of the statement is that the value of a single life can’t be quantified except in this transcendent scheme of ‘everything’; and so the gift of a single life could, by the same transcendent ‘logic’ redeem the whole world.
SF at its best is a genre that can articulate this surplus, this ‘sense of wonder’ that always exceeds the rational, scientific premise of the story: particularly, I think, in a raft of Golden Age and New Wave texts, but also the post-scarcity-economics fables of Banks and Ken McLeod and others, where the excess is the whole premise of all the symbolic economies.
This is all quite a long way from my novel, and if I’d been thinking of genocide in these terms I daresay I would have written it in a different way. But it is by way of saying that I don’t think SF’s repeated return to genocide marks a trivial obsession. I think it is something enabled by the core logic of the genre itself; and that (to return to the original example, the movement from Ender's Game to Speaker for the Dead is precisely the movement from the exultation of the sacrifice to the awareness, however halting, of the price of atonement.
This may not sound much like SF to you; as I said, it’s more than a little abstruse. But I’m talking about what I take to be the underlying logic of the genre: the fascination with the status and possibility of redemption, atonement, resurrection that inflects its materialist, speculative ‘scientific’ idiom. It might be objected that this underlying logic is pretty well hidden; but that doesn’t put me off. I think one of the things I was trying to do in Stone was to find a way of talking about these questions of symbolic exchange and the moral equivalence of the one death and the death of the whole world. Because (not to shoot off on another tangent) the unspoken correlative of that estimable Rabbinical sentiment, that one life is equal to the whole world, is that if you’re going to kill one person you might as well go for the complete set: you’ve already murdered an entire planet in the important sense.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Monday, 30 January 2006 at 03:20 PM
A PS is more than usually superfluous after a gargantuan comment like my last one, but I realise that I wasn't actually engaging with Scott's v. clever insights in the original post.
Walter Scott. Yes. I do love Sir Walter; I've read him entire (who else can make that boast?); so I'd be surprised if he didn't mark my writing. But it seems to me that Ae lacks the appealing romantic authenticity of Scott's highlanders; she's a bit too lonesome and snivelly for that.
Closer to the truth of it, I think, is when you say the book "recapitulates Dekker's old romantic structure by fashioning a narrator who him/herself belongs to a dying culture . . . one in which humanity is still capable of sin."
It's the inherent sinlessness of utopian societies that is so interesting; for instance, the sinlessness of Banks's Culture. The (Scott-like) clash in Consider Phlebas between the sinless post-religious Culture on the one hand, and the old-fashioned, Highlander, faith-ridden Idirans possesses an unmistakeable fractional bias, rather sentimentally so, towards the latter: who would by normal lights be repellently religious-fundamentalist intolerants. There's something of that in Stone, maybe? The Clockwork Orange sense of not wanting to lose the capacity to sin, even if sin is in itself a bad thing (and the worst sin imaginable is probably genocide). Not that I had that consciously in my mind as I wrote.
'Scott-like', of course, is Walterish, not Kaufmannly.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Monday, 30 January 2006 at 03:33 PM
Very interesting, Adam. There is something funhouse-mirrorish about this for me; I would have definitely characterized the book as bearing on religious questions, but I thought of different ones. Likewise, I immediately thought that narrator sympathy would be an important question for the book, but reached a different conclusion than Scott.
For the rest of this, I'm in danger of going on to a gargantuan comment myself. Instead, I'll just do a comment - outline, and people can ask about "more #7" or something if they actually are interested in more on any of them.
1. Jacob's comment: Tolkien's orcs as ultimate demiurgical sin, born evil straight from the author's pen. (Re-read _Frankenstein_?)
2. Holocaust studies: the 60 million in _Stone_ as the Holocaust times an SF order of magnitude. Dialogue-with-God material, e.g. Facing The Abusing God, a highly depressing book.
3. Problems between the creator and created look like moral ones from below and aesthetic ones from above. The association of Hell and low culture.
4. Disagreement with the sinlessness of Banks' utopia: the Culture universe starts and ends with a guilt / PTSD motivated suicide. List of the guilt-episodes in between.
5. Displeasure at now having to read _Speaker for the Dead_ for evidence of Demiurgical Guilt thesis, just to see what penances Card puts his character through for being scripted into genocide. (Pretty complete, that comment.)
6. Messianism debased into masochistic fantasy: the otherwise inexplicable popularity of Stephan Donaldson's _Thomas Covenant_ series. (Also pretty complete.)
7. List of personal author-as-demiurge influences. Critical insight or Romantic twaddle?
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Monday, 30 January 2006 at 05:53 PM
Too. Many. Points. To. Respond. To . . . and I've a sudden dinner obligation, so I'll have to wait to do so until tomorrow. Damn people and their lives. Don't they know I have a blog to run?
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Monday, 30 January 2006 at 09:23 PM
One drawback to my recent decision to compose posts and comments in rich text emails: I can easily postpone finishing them, whereas in the little box I'm forced into thinking, well, in the little box.
Rich, not to conflate this thread with one-which-shall-go-unnamed, but I think you (and later, Adam) point to one interesting aspect of genocide: it's fascist in tone, but it also functions (in Stone) as a kind of symbolic politics. It's supposed to strike at the felt invulnerability of the utopian society. Sure, there's part with the conspiracy theorists who believe such an event could occur, but that's the typical conspiratorial fear compounded by adolescent rhetoric . . . unless, of course, those misgivings are substantiated by say the destruction of an entire planet for no easily discerned reason. (By which I mean, I'm not sure anyone other than Ae understands why that planet had to be destroyed.) I've been wanting to touch on the AI subplot since starting this event, but haven't gotten around to it yet. Perhaps that'll be my next post.
Jacob writes: but about the interaction between humans and aliens. Rather, I would say that it is romance's direct genre descendent: fantasy that has the sins attributed to it.
It depends on how you think about interaction. Octavia Butler's one of the few authors whose human/alien interactions actually resonate with the sinful historicity of, say, Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!. Most science fiction I've read uses aliens as sock-puppets for "alien" ideology, i.e. what would for us be experimental models of social interaction and/or construction. The exceptions stand out in my mind, like Pohl's Heechee chronicles, or (to turn to television) Babylon 5. I think what made B5 unique was the emphasis on diplomacy, on the establishment of a common basis for meaningful social interaction. Too many times, aliens in scifi are just misshapen heads in the agora, so to speak. Of course, then there's someone like John Clute, whose human/alien interaction is so below the level of thought that the lived complexities of daily life seem outright alien. I'm rambling (and undoubtedly being highly selective as to the novels I discuss), but I do think that the most interesting science fiction is, like Stone, populated entirely by humans, even if those humans aren't recognizably human anymore (Butler's Patternmaster and Clayark, for example). This isn't because I've crunched the numbers and determined there's no possibility for life out there--although I've been convinced by those who have that since intelligence is most likely an adaptation particular to the environment in which it first evolved, that if there's life out there it's not likely to be intelligent in any recognizable way--but because aliens are too often "novel crutches" for poor writers. (Mieville's the obvious exception, but how many people do it as well as he does?)
morfydd, I think Adam nailed the problem with Ender's Game: Card's trying to extirpate the original guilt compulsively at this point . . . although that statement suggests Card's aware of what he's doing, and in my experience he's been a remarkably unselfconscious author. (I'm thinking of his popular essays mostly.) Maybe this case is an exception. (Full disclosure: I only read the first sequel to EG, so maybe his obsession has washed clean the original sin by this point. Although I'm not sure one can erase such genocidal glee by repetition.)
Adam, bit by bit I'll get you to post the entire Palgrave in my comments section. Yes, obviously Ae lacks the Scott-like authenticity of a Scott character, but s/he remains the only recognizably human character in the book, and some of the sympathy granted to her is done so because of the reader's inability to easily sympathize with anyone else. It's as if Rob Roy were the only highlander left--we'd still sympathize because the alternative would be the British. (You know what I mean.) I wager if he'd been the last embittered Scotsman, he'd have been lonesome and snivelly too.
What everyone's comments here have made me realize is that I really need to read some Banks. More often than not I'm falling back on turn-of-the-century utopian novels (of which I've read approximately 150 more than any right-thinking person should), so I'm not sure if my conception aligns with yours. Any recommendations on where to start?
Posted by: Scott Eric Kaufman | Tuesday, 31 January 2006 at 04:07 PM
Where to start with Banks depends on how much you eventually plan to read. Assuming that for this purpose you're likely to be sticking to his Culture universe, then if you plan to read them all, _Consider Phlebas_ is the first. If you plan to read only one, _Use of Weapons_ is probably the best. If you plan to read only one and are specifically interested in a Culture protagonist for purposes of assessing guiltiness in a utopia, perhaps _The Player of Games_ would be best. _The Player of Games_ is a sort of bildungsroman in which a young Culture citizen has developed an urge to gain status over other people, as either a side effect or underlying cause of his games-mastery. He is tricked into using his abilities to disrupt a non-Culture society in which games are used in competition for real power, which forces him to reevaluate how he relates to people, and to grow up. It's rather like how _Ender's Game_ might have been written if it were actually, you know, good.
The other Culture novels are _Excession_ (middling good for Banks, which is actually very good), _Inversions_ (as bad as Banks ever gets, which is pretty bad), the novella plus stories _The State of the Art_ (interesting for the Culture's view of Earth), and _Look To Windward_, a middling good Culture novel that ends the series. Banks has written both non-Culture SF (best book probably _Feersum Endjin_) and non-SF (best book probably _The Bridge_) as well.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Tuesday, 31 January 2006 at 06:19 PM
"it also functions (in Stone) as a kind of symbolic politics. It's supposed to strike at the felt invulnerability of the utopian society."
Yeah, if I'd wanted to go in even more directions in addition to points 1-7 above I could have tried out the utopia in _Stone_ as metaphor/parody of a certain view of supposed neoliberality. You know, hegemonic smug confidence that the best possible system has been found, the end of history, people who "think" really only noodling over banalities, any revolutionary shock no matter how violent worthwhile if only to shake people up, etc. The problem is that neither Ae nor his motivators really have even symbolic politics.
There are a couple of other things that I had to gloss through in my original mega-post that I'd like to hear someone's opinion on. One of them is, as you say, the whole implanted AI thing, which I thought functioned as a series of metaphors for the reading experience (the authorial voice inside one's head). Another are the gender issues in the book and their whole relationship to the soap opera vs space opera association with fictional violence.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Tuesday, 31 January 2006 at 06:40 PM
a couple of other things that ... I'd like to hear someone's opinion on. One of them the whole implanted AI thing, which I thought functioned as a series of metaphors for the reading experience (the authorial voice inside one's head).
I'm tempted to say 'spot on', Rich, although I'll hold back in case I sound patronising: or indeed, in case I give the impression that I have some privileged access to the meaning of the text (which obviously I don't). What 'spot on' means is that this was high up in my mind as I wrote. I was, at that time, quite interested in the notion that the metaphoricity of certain key SF texts inflects the formal processes of writing itself: that (for instance) Wells's Invisible Man rehearses some concerns about the invisible, omniscient narrator (the narrator in that novel is a curious hyrbid; sometimes specifically reporting the story as if it has been told him by people present, sometimes including details that only an omniscient narrator could know); or a better example might be Silverberg's superb A Time of Changes from 1971, a book I can't praise highly enough. On Silverberg's imaginary planet the locutions 'I' and 'My' are obscenities (the favoured locution is ‘one’, as in ‘one would wish for warmer encouragement from one’s bondbrother’; although the narrator travels to an even more puritanical society where the only decent locutions are in the passive voice). What the book is, in fact, is an excavation, and in a way a critique, of the premise of the ‘first-person narrative’; it's also a compelling story of the repression of subjectivity. One thing that appealed to me was to take a literary form relatively unused (in this case, epistolary fiction, which is in effect a second-person narration) and then pass that through the self-reflexive, self-oriented and even self-obsessed nature of the main theme, so that it becomes a commentary upon it itself. 'Course, that's not to say it works.
Briefly, point 2, Disagreement with the sinlessness of Banks' utopia: the Culture universe starts and ends with a guilt; we may have to agree to disagree. The thing to do here, it seems to me, is to look at the longer history of Utopia that underpins a creation like Banks's Culture. Isn't it axiomatic that utopian thought is premised on the perfectibility of mankind? The contrary view, that original sin makes us irredeemble except through divine intervention, rules out the possibility of material earthly utopia.
Scott: It depends on how you think about interaction. Octavia Butler's one of the few authors whose human/alien interactions actually resonate with the sinful historicity of, say, Thomas Sutpen in Absalom, Absalom!. Most science fiction I've read uses aliens as sock-puppets for "alien" ideology, i.e. what would for us be experimental models of social interaction and/or construction. This, I think, is right and very clever. It goes without saying that Butler is in a different class (a far superior one, of course) to me. And to Faulkner, actually. So I havn't really tried to do what she does; my only novel with aliens in it, maybe, is The Snow, and that attracted the most swingeing reviews of my career. So there you go.
genocide... functions as a kind of symbolic politics. Doesn't it though? It's, in a strict analogic sense, like a black hole in representation, is genocide.
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 11:06 AM
Adam: "The thing to do here, it seems to me, is to look at the longer history of Utopia that underpins a creation like Banks's Culture. Isn't it axiomatic that utopian thought is premised on the perfectibility of mankind?"
I'd be happy to agree to disagree, but want to mention one last point. I know that I should avoid generalizing about utopias in front of two people who've read so many more of them than I have (Scott's 150 and your historian-of-SF who-knows-how-many) but isn't a classic attribute of a utopia its splendid isolation? Often the utopias that I remember follow a classic form: the protagonist travels to some remote area, gets lost, and happens on a utopia. A defining feature of Banks' utopia is that it is *not* isolated. It is continually surrounded by non-utopian states that it can proselytize, which gives it its reason to exist. Sure, it is based on perfectability in the abstract, but in practise, Banks has clearly set it up so that the state of perfection will never happen; it's on an endless treadmill -- the kind of treadmill at the gym that you walk on to keep yourself healthy. Most of the crimes and mistakes and, yes, genocides (my interpretation of _Look To Windward_ is that elements of the Culture have set up a competing civilization to be destroyed, a form of slow-motion genocide) that it commits can then occur at the boundary between it and the other cultures. But this boundary doesn't really exist because the Culture can not exist without these other peoples.
(Note that not all Culture crimes occur at the boundary. In one book, a Culture citizen impulsively tries to kill another out of sexual jealousy. But as a general rule...)
What really crystalized the interpretation of the implanted AI as reading experience for me was towards the end of _Stone_, where it is said that its writers left it with certain programmed information, but that mostly Ae was talking to himself. Aha, I thought, it's a book.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 11:47 AM
Aha, I thought, it's a book.
You thought right. (Or, such is my opinion).
Your line on Utopias is eminently respectable: it's Jameson's famous essay 'Trenches and Islands'. On teh other hand ...
Don't know what Scott thinks: but one feature of late C19th century utopia is that so many 'straight' utopians write global utopia. Bellamy's Looking Backwards is the template; not More's isolated island paradise.
[btw "'straight' utopians" are those who genuinely think their utopian plans are realizable, rather than writers making a satirical point. Not heterosexual utopians. That would be a severe and unpleasant vision of society.]
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 12:08 PM
OK -- but a global utopia without other inhabited planets is also isolated, because it encompasses the entire globe.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 12:23 PM
You've moved well beyond my point, but I didn't want to hit and run...
As far as _Ender's Game_, I have to admit that I think of it purely as the setup for _Speaker for the Dead_, and in fact Card states that he wrote _EG_ so that he could write _SftD_. I think of the first as, frankly, YA/children's SF (though taking Rich's criticism to heart, perhaps a poisonous story for children) with a well-paced story and a subversion of the usual war triumph. But it's the second that I re-read, for its themes of atonement and guilt (and nifty riffs on varying flavors of The Other).
SF is such a diverse field, and so much of it is merely other genres with laser cannons and aliens, that one can make any criticsm or rebut it with multiple examples. I like to pretend that it's moved past the "standard war story that happens to be based on Mars", but then I know plenty of friends who prefer precisely those series. And don't get me started on "standard romance that happens to involve psychics"...
Posted by: morfydd | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 12:50 PM
morfydd: "But it's the second that I re-read, for its themes of atonement and guilt (and nifty riffs on varying flavors of The Other)."
I guess I really should read _SftD_. But, knowing nothing about it other than its startup in _Ender's Game_, I have to ask, atonement for what exactly? Or rather, I know for what, but the way in which this appears to work is a prime example of Demiurgic Guilt.
The kid in _Ender's Game_ shows no consciousness of what is going on (however unlikely that is) until after the fact. As far as he knows, he's playing a game. Therefore aren't the guilty ones really those who fooled him? Imagine that you liked playing _Civilization_, say, and someone told you that in fact they had replicated all your moves in an alternate world, and remember that one game where you decided to nuke everything? You'd be pissed off at the people who translated your game into reality, sure, but guilty? Maybe, maybe not.
The people who are really guilty in the story are the adults, but they can claim necessity and misunderstanding. So who's really guilty? Orson Scott Card. He's the one who literally scripted the whole thing, after all. And of course he's not guilty of killing real beings, but he is guilty of crafting a book with a reader-identification fantasy of necessary, innocent genocide.
And at some level he must know this. So, for book after book thereafter (apparently) he punishes his shadow-character for the sin that Card committed. My impression is not that, as Adam said, this involves him coming to terms with it at least haltingly; it strikes me as a repressive maneuver with a handcrafted scapegoat.
Posted by: Rich Puchalsky | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 06:09 PM
Hm. How to explain without too many spoilers?
Ender's guilt is really the least relevant in _SftD_; he's had many years to come to terms with the fact that it was his finger on the trigger *and* that even if he'd known it was for real he would likely have pulled it.
Human society as a whole has felt the most guilt at committing one genocide and is trying to make up for it by avoiding a second. However, that lesson has faded, and when the society feels threatened again, they come back to genocide as a solution.
And everyone else in the book feels guilty about something or other for variously meaningful (though not genocidal) reasons.
As far as the themes he explores, it may be a too facile treatment for this audience. I'm certainly out of my depth in most of this discussion. However, they're themes I haven't seen elsewhere in normal mainstream writing and they're addressed more explicitly in _SftD_ than in most other SF I've read (which includes some Butler and Banks, but clearly not enough).
Posted by: morfydd | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 08:49 PM
Thanks for the heads up, Scott. I'm definitely in here over my head, just reading SftD with my 6th grader. Obviously we'll have a more in-depth discussion now that I've read these comments.
What a reading list here. Better get started.
Posted by: timna | Wednesday, 01 February 2006 at 09:17 PM
Rich: Therefore aren't the guilty ones really those who fooled him? Imagine that you liked playing _Civilization_, say, and someone told you that in fact they had replicated all your moves in an alternate world, and remember that one game where you decided to nuke everything? You'd be pissed off at the people who translated your game into reality, sure, but guilty? Maybe, maybe not.
"Imagine that you genuinely believed you were defending Civilization, say, and someone told you that in fact all these Jews and Slavs you had been executing were not really 'viruses in the body of the civilised world' but were actually human beings just like you and me. You'd be pissed off at the people who tricked you into sharing their racist fantasies, sure, but guilty?"
I'd say the answer to that one would be: Hell, yes, guilty. Unless there was something wrong with you.
['wrong with you' = more wrong that the usual human fallibility under which if a man in a white coat tells you to turn up the electrical charge on subject #7 you do so, not enjoying the subject's pain in the least, or even really understanding why you have to give him these shocks, but finding it preferable to obey the guy in the white coat than challenge Authority.]
Posted by: Adam Roberts | Thursday, 02 February 2006 at 07:34 AM