There aren’t that many full-blooded fey who can stand to live in a big, crowded city. L.A. was better than New York or Chicago, but it was still exhausting to be surrounded by so much metal, so much technology, so many humans. It didn’t bother me. My human blood allowed me human tolerances for steel and glass prisons. Culturally and personally, I preferred the country, but I didn’t have to have it. It was nice, but I didn’t sicken and fade without it. Some fey would.
–A Kiss of Shadows, Laurell K. Hamilton“Science is a way of talking about the universe in words that bind it to a common reality. Magic is a method of talking to the universe in words that it cannot ignore. The two are rarely compatible.
–Books of Magic, Neil Gaiman
When you venture into any work that feature both science and magic you will almost inevitably come across conflict between the two, whether primary or peripheral to the plot and characters at hand, that usually goes something like, “Tech and magic are like oil and water.” Inevitably one breaks the other: technology doesn’t work in Hogwarts and the “fey” of Merry Gentry’s world–goblins, fairies, elves, et al–are vulnerable to plastics, technology and man-made metals to the point that despite their immortality they may “fade.” Harry Dresden, spit on his author’s name, can actively destroy computers and “complex” firearms malfunction in his hands because he’s so much magic. Gaiman, who never misses a chance to push a retrograde agenda, makes the conflict of American Gods one between the gods of mythology and the gods of technology.
I’ve always found this inexplicable. It also rather coincides with the idea that if you analyze something–apply science to it–it loses its magic and become soulless, boring and no longer cool. Bear with me, this will come to genre and geekdom eventually.
I can accept, more or less, that Hogwarts would put anti-tech jammers around their premises, although even then, what qualifies as “technology”? Pulley systems are technology. Guns are technology (do firearms work in Hogwarts? Why did none of the muggle students ever try smuggling one in given that they’re fighting their version of Hitler who incidentally wants to kill all muggles?). It’s not well-thought out, but then we’re talking about JK Rowling. Not that other writers who implement similar premises think them through either. Forgotten Realms’ goddess of magic, Mystra, seems more specific in that she bans gunpowder but it’s not like that’s the only way to advance societies to an Industrial Revolution. And when you have people walking around dime a dozen who can throw fireballs (and make magical dispensers of fireballs for the non-magically inclined folks to use) banning gunpowder seems risible. The rationale, I understand, is that if mortals are too technologically advanced they’ll stop believing in gods.
Do you know who invented Arabic numerals? What about paper? Block print? Shit, gunpowder? While it’s impossible to go back in time and interview individuals concerned by yelling “WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW” or “DO YOU BELIEVE IN ANCESTRAL SPIRITS???” chances are good none of them were atheists. Now I realize that these geeks are not only really stupid but also from the west where biology is posited as incompatible with religion, where rabid devotion to Christianity means bombing abortion clinics, and where things like Scientology exist, which may make it difficult for their small minds to grasp that being religious and being intelligent/progressive are not mutually exclusive–and I don’t even care to champion religious people.
In fantasy, heroes are firmly on the side of magic. Harry Potter is a wizard, Harry Dresden is a wizard, iconic NPCs of Forgotten Realms are chosen ones of the goddess of magic, American Gods’ Shadow is Baldur reincarnated, and Merry Gentry is a fairy princess granted powers to restore fairyland to its former glory (though she also uses firearms and smartphones) by the mother goddess. We are meant to cheer for James Cameron’s giant furry suits because they’re “one with nature” and venerate what amounts to a tree mother goddess, which is presumably why their arrows can penetrate helicopters. Much of fantasy stew in ersatz medievalism for all eternity, in no small part because Tolkien helped validate this strain of anti-progress nostalgia. The pastoral is glorified, the industrial demonified. To be in the countryside is ennobling, to live in the city soul-destroying. Little wonder many heroes come from a rustic background, farmboys raised up to disdain the lazy decadent city-dwellers who just can’t appreciate a day’s honest work.
At the same time the other side of SFF fandom is devoted to transhumanism the way dogs are devoted to playing fetch–and saying “other side” is a bald lie anyway, because the two groups overlap, able to reconcile and simultaneously maintain the yearning for pastoral nostalgia and a future where everything is awesome because jetpacks and singularity and immortality ‘cuz we’re all uploaded now fuck yeah: the transhumanist utopia is squeaky-clean and free of, for example, things like pollution, class conflict and slave labor, and it’s 24/7 exciting. Where the world is like this:
Genius, good looks, and long life are now considered basic human rights in the developed world: even the poorest backwaters are feeling extended effects from the commoditization of intelligence.
Not everything is sweetness and light in the era of mature nanotechnology. Widespread intelligence amplification doesn’t lead to widespread rational behavior. New religions and mystery cults explode across the planet; much of the Net is unusable, flattened by successive semiotic jihads. India and Pakistan have held their long-awaited nuclear war: external intervention by US and EU nanosats prevented most of the IRBMs from getting through, but the subsequent spate of network raids and Basilisk attacks cause havoc.
–Accelerando, Charles Stross
What’s a post-singularity fairyland without Mighty Whitey riding around to teach those violent brown jihadists what’s what, just like how Eragorn… Aragorn… whatshisname liberates the faceless brown hordes from the clutches of Sauron? Isn’t uncritical techno-optimism nice?
So there’s pastoral nostalgia and technophobic elves on one hand, and post-singularity fairylands filled with self-aware AIs and uploaded minds on the other, and what do they have in common (apart from being dominated by white first-worlders)? Middle-earth with its “legendarium” of Aryan supermen whose greatness springs from genetic predestination. The post-singularity far future populated by white middle-class nerds from the west. They’re reactionary fantasies of a status quo that stands impervious against change and progress. They are created by and for intellectually lazy, politically cowardly readers unwilling to consider changes to a state they consider idyllic (magical lands full of trees, elves, and white supermen) or the changes necessary to bring today’s world to a state they consider idyllic (transhumanist fairylands where no poverty exists and brown people are faceless: traits that seem to me fascistic in the extreme). It’s all worthless wish-fulfillment garbage. None of it considers the politics or the practicalities. None of them is concerned with reality. They are playgrounds for the impoverished imagination. Middle-earth and the like are ruled by rightful kings chosen by the gods–Gandalf being essentially an angel who puts Aragorn on the throne–and never you dare disrupt this righteous order with your pesky “technology,” because technology in pastoral fantasy are tools of the Devil. Transhumanist utopias are ones where the west maintains its power and genocide physical and cultural, and indulges happily in the white man’s burden: let the Aryan masters oppress you long enough and eventually they’ll bring you the singularity, cancer cure, and world peace. It’s no coincidence that much far-future SF erases cultural, religious and national markers in pursuit of generic white western blankness, a void where cultures go to die.
It’s shockingly anti-intellectual, though not of course anti-science. Geeks love science! Why else do they adore evo-pysch so very much? They’ll discuss the potential probability of fucking lightsabers and self-aware AI until you want to cave their heads in with a sledgehammer to make them stop because they love useless made-up trivia more than anything. They love gadgets and they love to systemize: “rational, objective, analytic” are buzzwords chanted like it’s a religion, and they believe with deep, abiding fervor that they are all three things (usually while shrieking everyone else is hysterical or knee-jerky or too emotional) even if their immediate reaction to having their positions criticized is intense testeria and shitfits. Call something they love misogynistic or racist and out comes the screams of rage as they collectively shit themselves and then lob that excrement at everyone else.
The dissonance must be so epic the backlash ought to send them flying into the sun, if only they possessed one tiny smidgen of self-awareness.
Of all the varieties of irritating comment out there, the absolute most annoying has to be “Why can’t you just watch the movie for what it is??? Why can’t you just enjoy it? Why do you have to analyze it???”
If you have posted such a comment, or if you are about to post such a comment, here or anywhere else, let me just advise you: Shut up. Shut the fuck up. Shut your goddamn fucking mouth. SHUT. UP.
[...]
And most annoyingly of all, you’re contributing to the fucking conversation yourselves when you make your stupid, stupid comments. You are basically saying, “I think people shouldn’t think so much and share their thoughts, that’s my thought that I have to share.” If you really think people should just enjoy the movie without thinking about it, then why the fuck did you (1) click on the post in the first place, and (2) bother to leave a comment? If it bugs you so much, GO WATCH A GODDAMN FUNNY CAT VIDEO.
–Moff’s Law
They will admit, as if it’s not the most embarrassing thing to do, to taking “life philosophy” from Patrick Rothfuss, David Eddings and Dragonlance. But say Rothfuss is a sexist shit and that his books reflect it, and you’re a second away from seeing them shit bricks while yelling “IT’S JUST A BOOK” or just as popularly “IT’S ART.” They may devote their worthless lives to every pointless piece of trivia in Tolkien but try saying “Tolkien’s pretty racist, yo” and it’s a temper tantrum en masse accompanied by “YOU WILL FIND IT IS YOU WHO IS RACISM.”
These are not the reactions of rational, objective people. These are the lashing out of anti-intellectual children who can’t even decide if their genre should be taken seriously (in which case political analyses would be both necessary and normative) or “just fiction”–in which case, yes, expect people to mock the shit out of you for taking “life philosophy” from Rothfuss and fucking Dragonlance. Yes, expect people to make fun of you for gaming or reading fantasy, because if you don’t want to take your own shit seriously (and thus accept political readings as part and parcel) then you deserve that ridicule. No, “IT’S ART” doesn’t work, you insipid little wanker. Real art is subjected to political critiques all the fucking time.
Fandom wants its cake and eat it too, which answers just why both pastoral nostalgia and transhumanist fairylands hold such sway over its collective, impoverished imagination–and equally it explains why they have such a horror of political readings: ”this is racist” or “this is retrograde idiocy” punctures the comfort of wallowing, and takes the magic of it all away by reminding them they’re bathing in pig shit, not milk fresh from the udders. And until you can recognize that if you’re bathing in pig shit people will point out that it’s pig shit, genre will never be taken seriously. Nor does it deserve to be.
Alex D MacFarlane (@foxvertebrae)
/ August 10, 2012While it’s impossible to go back in time and interviewed individuals concerned by yelling “WHERE IS YOUR GOD NOW” or “DO YOU BELIEVE IN ANCESTRAL SPIRITS???” chances are good none of them were atheists.
This is the best sentence.
Although I love this one too, from the Moff’s Law quote:
You are basically saying, “I think people shouldn’t think so much and share their thoughts, that’s my thought that I have to share.”
Because it’s depressing how widely that can applied.
Arthur B (@awakeasaurusrex)
/ August 10, 2012Re: tech-vs-magic – This is something which has bugged me for a long time. I think the worst example of this is actually in the Ars Magica RPG – long story short, in the third edition of it they added an actual metaphysical power called Reason, and people who were steeped in the way of Reason made it difficult for people following the powers of Magic or Faerie or the Divine or the Infernal to do their shit because Reason says that none of that stuff can happen. This despite being in a universe where the application of reason and sufficient empirical data would rapidly lead you to the conclusion that magic, fairies, God and the Devil are all real and can do shit, and the most prominent form of magic in the campaign involves a hefty amount of poring over tomes from old Hellenic philosophers.
I think a certain amount of it stems from authors simply not wanting the headache of working out what happens when you apply magic to technology. Considering that most authors aren’t even up to the challenge of really thinking through what the existence of magic on its own would mean for the societies of their worlds, this should be unsurprising; also, if the sort of story you are going for is “Magic exists but it lurks in the shadows out of sight of the everyday world” then you don’t want magic to become ubiquitous anyway, and magically enchanted software you can download on BitTorrent to summon demons in the comfort of your home would tend to wreck that quite quickly.
But you’re 100% right that whereas some “magic and tech don’t mix” stories arise for entirely sensible reasons, a hell of a lot of them play into a “magic is cool and special, tech is sucky and lame” ideology. I think it says a lot that the two most prominent settings I can think of where tech and magic/religion are fused quite happily are Shadowrun (where the very premise is “let’s add magic to a very generic cyberpunk setting and see what happens”) and Warhammer 40,000 (where the spiritual ur-reality of souls and concepts is objectively real, technologically manipulable, and wants to kill you).
Re: transhumanism – For a long time I’ve thought of transhumanism as a sort of bourgeois cyberpunk. The cyberpunks – the better ones, at any rate – always seemed clear on the point that the distribution of the benefits of new technology would most likely be grossly unequal and tend to reinforce existing privilege. The hacker is your archetypal cyberpunk hero because he or she is someone who subverts technology and uses it to access stuff the powers that be don’t want the little people to have. Cyberpunk regularly had its own issues re: race, women, sexuality, etc. but at the very least it seemed to have some modicum of class consciousness built into it, which is sure as shit better than nothing and is at least a starting point where you can start to work on the other issues (at least in the sense that if you accept that class privilege exists and is unjust, you’re going to be more open to a conversation about over types of privilege than someone who flat out denies that class is a thing).
The transhumanists, meanwhile, have repackaged most of the cyberpunks’ tech but seem to spend more time getting off on the idea of being the overlords who get to control all this shit, or naively imagining that anyone and everyone would be allowed equal access to the brain uploading and the nanotech and all that good shit.
It’s no surprise that whilst transhumanism is purportedly pro-science it’s almost entirely predicated on a failure to understand how scientific and technological discovery actually works in practice. (The Singularity, for instance, is based on absolutely absurd statements about human knowledge increasing exponentially over time based on the number of publications per year, which basically means assuming that my undergrad thesis is of the significance of the Principia Mathematica or Ibn al-Haytham’s Book of Optics or the first gunpowder recipe, and also assumes that once we create self-improving AIs our computer overlords will be able to magic brand new technologies into existence without going through the arduous process of laboratory experimentation. The latter point is particularly interesting because it shows an assumption that you can gain a full understanding of any physical law or technical subject just by sitting in a dark room and thinking about it for long enough… which I guess is why it’s appealing to neckbeards because hey, anything to avoid effort right?).
perich (@perich)
/ August 10, 2012These are the lashing out of anti-intellectual children who can’t even decide if their genre should be taken seriously (in which case political analyses would be both necessary and normative) or “just fiction”–in which case, yes, expect people to mock the shit out of you for taking “life philosophy” from Rothfuss and fucking Dragonlance.
This puts into words a nagging objection I’ve had with genre fiction, and its fans, for years. Thank you.
Aliette de Bodard (@aliettedb)
/ August 10, 2012RE: magic vs science, I think China Mieville was the one who (quite rightly) said that the Western division between religion and science came from the 19th Century, as a result of power dynamics between the new powers and the Church? (I can’t find the interview, so might be misquoting!). Of course the whole dichotomy is bunk: as you point out, lots of science was done by deep believers (the compass, yes, Indian numbers, and you can also throw in people like Isaac Newton and his deep faith that science revealed the will of God). But the division has been amazingly persistent–probably because we’re still dealing with the fallout of the Industrial Revolution–and it’s hard to exorcise, even today.
elodieunderglass
/ August 10, 2012I think the division itself is often a delusion in the minds of politicians and laypeople – that’s not to say that it isn’t powerful. In the field of evolutionary biology alone you’ll find Jews, Muslims, Christians, people with shrines or altars in their homes, people who fast and wear religious headgear and raise their children in their faiths. People who carry all these beliefs in their hearts while, say, working on research that demonstrates that humans probably walked godlessly out of Africa 120,000 years ago, evolving as we went; while up to their elbows in dinosaur bones; while studying the resonance of the Big Bang. I’ve met a deep-earth geologist who was also a Young Earth Christian. It seems that intelligent people are capable of containing entire universes of discourse and beliefs. Darwin, after all, was a very good Christian.
But this reminds me of a very big problem I had with a former lover, who I did believe I loved at the time. He was white and well-off and thought himself very clever for his Atheism and Skepticisocity. And when he saw something terrible and emotive on the news, like the little girl in the Amazon rainforest who was burned alive by loggers, he would shake his head and say in tones of contempt, “Humans!”
“Humans!” Like that, with a sneer. As if he somehow wasn’t human, so it wasn’t his fault. As if he could absolve all blame by looking down his nose from some great height, like a Magical High Elf or Advanced
ElfSpace Alien, and condemn us for our barbaric natures and resource-gobbling greed, shaking his head sadly. Oh, what a shame. There goes the rainforest – humans, again. This is why we can’t have nice things. Heavens, who isn’t looking forward to the clean pure Singularity in such dark, festering times? Or feeling nostalgia for those simple, hobbity values when everybody cherished the earth?BUT IT WASN’T FUCKING HUMANS, was it, my old ex-lover? Because the little girl was human, and valuable, and notably indigenous. And the loggers were white men. It’s not HUMANS who’re screwing up the precious, pure, innocent Mother Earth; it’s men, usually white, usually Western, usually well-off. You know. The audience who gobbles up fantasy that tells them that none of this is their fault; that all of these problems, all of this colonialism, all of these little girls being burned alive, are due to some unshakably flawed gene in all humans. If Europe hadn’t colonized the world first, another culture would have, because destroying nice things is inherent in humans. Of course, There Are Some Who Yet Keep The Spark Alive And Have Not Faded! They Are Probably Half-Alien, Stern And Grey-Eyed, And Also Sons of Gondor. You can recognize them because nothing is their fault and they have no responsibility for it – “Oh, humans did it.” Oh, the humanity! How hard it is for the enlightened, the chosen ones, to remain in this tarnished and imperfect world!
Honestly, I’m embarrassed to talk about this because the story does NOT end with “So then I punched him in the face.”
* I’d left him long, long before this particular horror occurred, but it was just the sort of thing he’d react like this to.
acrackedmoon
/ August 10, 2012This is a perfect summary of everything wrong with that kind of people. Was this man a redditor by any chance?
the twisted spinster
/ August 10, 2012When I was trying out the normal hetero relationship thingie, my then-fiancé used to do something similar: for example, we’d drive past one of the Orlando, Florida area’s ubiquitous “gated communities” (often having not just a wall, but a gate and even a guard and always, always some pretentious name like “Windsong Star Lake Estates”) he’d make a disapproving face and say something about how people who lived in neighborhoods like this pissed him off. The kicker though, was that he lived in such a community. Sure, his didn’t have a gate, but it had the boundary wall and pretentious name and etc.
That wasn’t the only arrogant, self-consciously posturing thing he did, and he seemed to have no idea how much it irritated me. I was just under him classwise in the fine-tuned way we designate these things in the States (he had grown up in an upper-middle-class neighborhood in Long Island and was used to having enough money and when his father went bankrupt and they had to move downwards for a while it was a horrid shock, while I grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Miami and my parents never had enough money for everything), and I had been raised to never take anything for granted or to judge people by surface appearances. But the uppermiddleclass suburban white dudes that run everything are so spoiled by their privilege, and also completely clueless, because being on the top means you don’t have to care about shit. A lot of the screeching of the dudebros and geeks is just their slow realization that this situation is changing and all those brown people and poor people they used to ignore can get in their face and there isn’t a thing they can do about it.
Next Friday
/ August 10, 2012Yes, it pretty much goes even further back. As the scientific method was evolving, it was applied to religion and to the Church in particular. Obviously, the results were explosive since the Church was ok with gadgets, but not so much with people questioning its authority. It would’ve been impossible NOT to have a conflict.
There are other leftovers from that time that we’re dealing with now. For instance, the belief that if something cannot be proved using formal logic, it’s all a matter of opinion. Hence we got this widespread – “it’s a matter of taste”, “it’s good, cause I Like it”, “all opinions are equal”, etc.
Aleph Craven (@fateslefthand)
/ August 10, 2012Oh, holy crap thank you for writing this.
Athena Andreadis
/ August 10, 2012Terrific entry! It brings together many things that belong naturally together but are artificially kept apart. Bottom line, as you conclude: SF/F “magic” and “science”, unless wielded by authors with imagination, writing talent and really original thinking, are the same: adolescent wishful thinking about avoiding intrinsic limits and becoming Masters of the Universe, be that Hogwarts or Second Life, never-flagging lightsabers worshipped and anointed by acolytes and concubines.
Intellect (and here I speak as a biologist, not a philosopher) has integral emotional and intutive components. Defects in cortical emotions result in inability to make decisions. The best science is done from a foundation that combines deep knowledge, informed intuition and willingness to question dogma. So the split between emotion and thought adored by nerds is not only meaningless but in fact would result in severe dysfunction.
Continuing on artificial splits, those who consider themselves “hard” SF aficionados should do well to consider that the “science” in SF is sciencey at most: the best way to use it is to wave hands vaguely and move as rapidly as possible on to the second half of the “if… then” thought experiment.
Those who demonize technology and uncritically adore the pastoral need to keep firmly in mind that, the vaporings of the likes of Chopra notwithstanding, you cannot pray a tumor away or reverse the ravages of undiagnosed PKU. Although I suspect most people in this category would fold if merely asked to live without air conditioning.
I know a good deal about transhumanism because they tried to recruit me as a working molecular neurobiologist. I think that their outlook can be encapsulated by the a Sad Children cartoon which in one of its frame says “in the future, being rich and white will be even more awesome.” Their paradise is closer to a concentration camp. Their science is a mixture of snake oil and wet fantasies with “Moore’s Law!” as their abracadabra; they call real science and scientists luddites and deathists — this from people who wouldn’t know a PCR machine if it fell on their toes.
Evolutionary psychology might have something to tell us (Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s books certainly do). But that would require that they use rigorous methodology — even plain double blind procedures seem to elude them — and stop conducting studies that are expressly designed to prove that what we now have is 1) the best we can do and 2) dictated by our genes/hormones/brain wiring.
All these convergences of anti-intellectualism at the level of knowledge, of craft, of imagination, have really hurt the genre by rewarding laziness and default thining across the board. I could go on semi-indefinitely… and I have. If anyone is interested, here are a few links that discuss these issues in more detail:
That Shy, Elusive Rape Particle
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=6311
The Persistent Neoteny of Science Fiction
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=5692
To the Hard Members of the Truthy SF Club
http://www.starshipreckless.com/blog/?p=3336
acrackedmoon
/ August 10, 2012Ahh I wish I could promote comments to the top. I’ll settle with linking this one on twitter instead!
the twisted spinster
/ August 10, 2012I can see why a life in nature looked more attractive to people in the West who lived in the polluted big cities of the 50s-60s and have a lot of sympathy for the attitude. Also it’s easy to forget how intimidating and “soulless” computers and associated tech looked to the simple layman when computers were gigantic clattering machines in huge rooms that did (as far as the uneducated person knew) god knows what. When I lived in hot, concrete-covered Miami the idea of the cool, northern forest was very appealing indeed. But of course this was based on ignorance too and a certain sentimental, twee attachment to an ideal of nature that is just as “false” as any robot. Nature isn’t all fluffy bunnies and living on fruit that just falls into your hands. And we’ve never lived a completely “natural” life.
The danger of investing too much of your life in either the wonders of future tech or the wonders of magical nature is it affects the way you interact with the real world. And you find yourself (as I do) living in what is basically the Shire (I could show you pictures, and people here really do talk about their potatoes a lot) and not finding it as wonderful as I would have when I was a kid. (Or you find yourself working for NASA, as a guy I used to know did, and realizing it wasn’t like being in Star Trek of something but instead a real bureau staffed with fallible humans and by the way it’s a government job so please fill out these ten thousand forms.)
welltemperedwriter
/ August 11, 2012I can see why a life in nature looked more attractive to people in the West who lived in the polluted big cities of the 50s-60s and have a lot of sympathy for the attitude.
And, of course (and I think this is what you’re getting at), that’s when Tolkien and authors like him got really, really big in the U.S., along with neopaganism, which has a quasi-environmentalist streak that it doesn’t really have elsewhere that I’ve noticed.
And, yeah, I’m in the cool northern forest now myself, and one thing I did notice about Tolkien was that it had trolls and goblins and giant spiders, but not, y’know, bears and cougars and other wildlife that you just gotta get along with.
I’m reminded of the two weeks I spent in a village in Ireland a couple of years ago that had more houses than people (in fact, we were renting one of the houses from a friend of mine who plans to retire there), because it turns out that most people are not all that interested in raising sheep if there are other options available. The nearest local exceptions were back-to-the-landers from Dublin who actually did enjoy farm life, but they seemed to indeed be exceptions.
Rissy (@TheRedRaptor)
/ August 10, 2012As someone who does science for a living, neckbeard behavior like what you’ve described makes me froth with rage, because I encounter it all the time. And let’s not forget the doofboners like R. Scott Bakker who try to shoehorn science into their dreadful ideologies. Thank you for articulating all of this!
Also: evo-psych ruins everything for everyone.
the twisted spinster
/ August 10, 2012I had someone on my blog claim that humans “evolved to be assholes.” NOPE.
hobbler
/ August 10, 2012I enjoy the books that Rothfuss has written so far (we already know I’m a misogynistic, racist, white imperialist, so come on find an easier target than this), but I’m not sure how someone could take life lessons from his books, or Eddings. I enjoyed Eddings a lot when I was younger. Unfortunately the memory of them is quite a bit better than the reality.
The only YA novel I’ve read that legitimately did have a large impression on me was (shockingly) Starship Troopers, a book that is impossible to separate politics from fiction. These days I disregard a lot of the book and find the politics unrealistic on any scale larger than a small town. Americans especially have this fantasy that the entire world can function on a small town level, and that’s what a lot of scifi/fantasy is. Escapism.
How do you feel about authors like Gibson, Greg Bear, or John Varley? I feel that out of a long list of white, male, sci-fi writers, they’ve done a fairly good job of hitting middle ground. Unfortunately, at the end of the day, most sci-fi/fantasy writers are white males, so more likely to write from the standpoint of a white male. Specifically a lot of insecure white males, hence a lot of the crap.
acrackedmoon
/ August 10, 2012They are also dreadfully written, though. See: the Felurian.
hobbler
/ August 10, 2012Ha. I had to Google it to remember that part. I must have skipped past it. It pretty much was crap and straight neckbeard fantasy, which is what the main character is turning into. He always kind of was, but it is getting a bit D&Dish. Unfortunately, I’ve got a habit of glossing over parts like that to get to the story continuation and I’m really interested in the big bads of the series. I want to see what he’s doing with it, but I’ve got the sinking feeling he’s going to get GRRMish on the series and turn it into a terrible morass.
Darius Wilkins
/ August 10, 2012/me lifts a celadon cup full of expensive tea, and declaims it’s twue, it’s all twue!
I suppose I should mention that Stross has devowed the Accellerando universe, claiming some sort of huge plot hole. While we’re on the topic of Stross, I really wonder what Arthur B would think of Stross’ Laundry novels. The post and thread makes me sorta want to reread Rick Cook’s Wizardry Compiled novels in a bit more firm manner, even though I know it’ll shred like toilet paper.
One slight nitpic with Athena. Dogma is *great* when you have good dogma, because intellect can leverage what’s known so much better and faster–what’s more, you have a ready-made “Does this answer make sense?” factor whenever you see something wierd. People who can’t do math in their heads and are dependent on calculators, they don’t have the dogma that tells them the number displayed by the calculator is really wrong. I consider deep knowledge and dogma to be more or less the same thing, and I don’t equate dogma with abbreviated ideological constructs. So, while “willingness to challenge dogma” is entirely correct, in the paragraph construction, I think people might think dogma might consist entirely of people waving scraps of unexamined paper by some crackpot “prophet” like Kurzweil.
Darius Wilkins
/ August 10, 2012I would not think of Gibson, Bear, and Varley as being especially fantastic on the counts you’re thinking of, hobbler. I would love a critical reading of Bear’s Queen of Angels and Slant, but those guys aren’t really a “middle ground” so much as an attempt to avoid white male howlers, sorta. I mean, is Varley any better than Kipling, *really*?
Athena Andreadis
/ August 10, 2012Darius, the accepted definition of dogma is “set of principles laid down by an authority as incontrovertibly true” Here, specifically, I was talking of “dogma” within scientific paradigms. There’s a famous saying that “scientific theories start as heresies and end as superstitions”.
It’s one thing to want to “re-examine” the heliocentric system or evolution at large. At the same time, here are some dogmas once considered absolute that fell by the wayside: “DNA and RNA are co-linear” (only in eubacteria — and alternative splicing is the major contributor to proteomic complexity); “Genetic information flows in one direction: DNA to RNA to protein” (wrong again — retroviruses exist and impinge upon us, as in HIV, the common cold, etc). I could quote examples from other sciences, but you get the gist.
saajanpatel
/ August 10, 2012Good point on the atheist vs theist dichotomy being more pronounced in the West, or at least it seems like to me as well. Even then it seems like an American battle with the rest of the world munching on popcorn as asshats try to out insult the other.
I’d be curious to hear from people outside the US describe their experiences with this “war”.
Darius Wilkins
/ August 10, 2012Yeah, I wound up not being comfortable with what I said about it, because in general use, dogma has a prejorative meaning, and here I am, talking about what it’d mean in a positive sense.
However, since you kinda went further in why I had a problem about it, allow me a touch more discourse. Nobody has perfect knowledge of all things, and there are limits to anyone’s expertise to judge one or the other body of work. This is true of experts even talking about matters closely related to their studies. Dogma (used this way) is a shorthand, a set of signposts built by trailblazers and other people who reside in this body of knowledge. It’s one way to confer a bit of metis from expert to n00b. Notwithstanding the fact that I don’t agree with Kuhn all that much about the patterns of scientific revolutions, but nobody who anything like a true observer of Nature takes *any* internally consistent information as something incontrovertible. They just don’t belabor the point so long as that information gives them what they really want. That is a major reason why scientific revolutions tends to take hold after the old guard dies off. The value of the old generation’s expertise relative to the new one should not be judged in a binary worthwhile/worthless manner. The delay is even appropriate in the sense that bugs are found, logic tightened, advocates found, as the new theory is tested against an older, more flawed but (at the time) more robust theory. It just doesn’t worth that way, where facts are found to be wrong, and hasn’t worked that way since the days of Tycho Brahe. The old theory, in science terms, exists at all, because it *works*. Sometimes it works according to social factors not really related to what’s going on under the microscope. Sometimes it works because other things more important, and more explosive at the moment is happening. Remaking what we know about something (and not simply adding on), requires that we make an understanding of something in its own terms and relate it to everything else. At the level science is generally operating at, this requires a substantial devotion of philosophical and experimental expertise. That, in the end, is just not worth it for any tangential work unless the old theory just doesn’t work without a redo.
Emil Söderman
/ August 11, 2012“(transhumanist fairylands where no poverty exists and brown people are faceless: traits that seem to me fascistic in the extreme).”
I’m honestly confused, are you saying that imagining a world without poverty is fascistic?
acrackedmoon
/ August 11, 2012How do you get to a world without poverty–one where it’s more awesome than ever to be, well, rich and white?
mcbeezy4070
/ August 11, 2012As an aside, for all the derivative drivel in the Eragon/Inheritence Trilogy/Cycle/Whateverthefuck, I thought it handled the whole magic v. science thing reasonably well. There was a structure for the magic; it had rules and consequences. Granted, there is a huge amount of wand-waving vagery involved in dragons, and a regrettable scene where a scientist is characterized basically as a distracted fool, but otherwise it seemed reasonable. Magic is used to perform daily tasks, revolutionise artisanship, kill not with fireballs, but by squeezing an artery or pinching a nerve, or unlock doors not by dissolving them with Unlimited Power(tm) but by simply manipulating the lock mechanism. Even the elves, otherwise groan-worthy Tolkein ripoffs, make a bit of sense in the context of magic as a syntactic, language-based framework for manipulating energy as it’s framed in the book. The elves “sing” their spells, which seems to belie a deeper, more intellectual understanding of the language, just as a well written novel belies a more complete understanding of a language, and is thus potentially more powerful, than, say, a poem your average two-year-old. I know that’s a bit of a stretch, but of all the fantasy I’ve read (admit tiredly not a ton), the books do seem to have the best, most satisfying implementation of magic I’ve come across. So there’s that.
Seth Ellis
/ August 11, 2012The post-singularity far future populated by white middle-class nerds from the west.
I’m about two-thirds of the way through The Quantum Thief, about which I heard great things, and I’m both enjoying it and disappointed. In one way, it’s super inventive, and there are a lot of interesting ideas, mostly about future technology (and mostly not fully explored); in other ways it’s just bog-standard science fiction. Post-singularity collective intelligences descend directly from 2010 MMPORG guilds; disembodied godlike intelligences started out as 21st-century hackers; and none of them have psychologically changed to any significant degree, really, and nobody else from the current world seems to exist any more. It’s all pretty fanservice-y. There’s an extended scene in which the posthuman ex-gamers actually cosplay as themselves, as though literally nothing happened between 2010 gaming parties and the posthuman future.
It’s a shame, because there are some interesting ideas, if Rajaniemi had just parked on one or two, and thought them all the way through. The singularity isn’t all that interesting a trope, but it does have the potential to examine what it means to be human by examining the edges of human behavior, in classic sf we-talk-about-the-future-to-talk-about-the-present style. But there’s a fundamental lack of social imagination that makes it all just fairly entertaining piffle. It’s convincing me to take a break from sf and read other things for a while.
And this doesn’t even get to the cultural imbalance in the book. So far there’s one (1) non-European character; she has a walk-on part in an interlude, and never appears again. This despite the numbers involved: a lot of the book is set on Mars, which was apparently settled with the help of a billion enslaved uploaded intelligences. Where these billion came from seems to be pretty much Northern Europe.
saajanpatel
/ August 11, 2012I feel like some authors have slowly come around on this magic-vs-science thing. It’s been explored in comics, largely as part of what some might call “New Age” but I’d prefer to think of as a global syncretism…while still deriding the cultural appropriation and faux-knowledge.
I liked that White Wolf’s Mage had those groups that were based around Science as Magic. Also, 40K.
More recently, Mieville sort of does this with Bas-Lag, where magic is done in “steam punk” societies. ‘Course a lot of writers are using the “quantum science” to justify magic, and magic and programming isn’t quite new.
Though just this month Alif the Unseen, by G.Willow Wilson, combines ideas of computer programming and Islamic + Hindu mythology in Alif the Unseen. It seems like an interesting take but I’ve not had a chance to get far.
Koby Itzhak
/ August 11, 2012Gandalf was an angel, and that is why it is actually quite intriguing. It puts his conflict with Saruman (of the dreaded technology, who chopped down forests! And ruined the pastoral Shire!) on a lot more interesting level, especially when this conflict persists throughout Tolkien’s books. The Villains are always those who somehow want to have technological advance. There’s an interesting dichotomy in the the god of Knowledge/Craftsmanship, Aule, is married to the goddess of Nature, Yavanna. It never fails – if you were primarily an apprentice of Aule, you’ll be a villain. And who gets to destroy Saruman, Aule’s apprentice? Why the nice tree-people, who were created by Yavanna to guard nature against the depredations of Aule’s kind. The only place a deeper awareness was shown was in The Mariner’s Wife, where Aldarion is focused on technology and advance, and it’s actually approved, while simultaneously he becomes known for care for nature, since he makes sure to reforest and maintain nature.
Sherwood Smith disabled science in her books, but since magic is a force which actually keeps the world wholesome in her universe, it makes a certain kind of sense. And Magic is universal, so there’s no specific nation wielding it against the other, besides the traditional black/white magic conflicts.
At the same time, there’s a pervasive problem with science in my country. It has become a religion of its own, almost a cult. Nobody can possibly suggest that Evolution and New-Darwinism is not perfectly correct, because then then would be kicked out of an academic position they had. I think this is part of a backlash against religion, and it really bothers me, because science replaces religion in this case, in the sense that they are just as bad. They handwave all doubts and questions about faulty theories with ‘we just haven’t discovered it YET’. They never back down from their position, even when other explanations are far more reasonable. Which is far too Messianic and fanatic for my tastes.
Inverarity
/ August 11, 2012I’m not sure what you mean by “Evolution and New-Darwinism is not perfectly correct.” Evolutionary scientists have obviously not figured out every detail about how evolution works, but there is absolutely zero doubt that evolution is, you know, true. And “New-Darwinism” is kind of a fuzzy term that makes me suspicious.
But evolutionary debates raise my hackles because I find it enormously embarrassing that we’re (the U.S.) pretty much the only secular country where politicians have to pretend to take creationism seriously, to the point that Presidential candidates can make themselves non-viable by simply admitting that they believe in scientific facts.
braak
/ August 12, 2012I think, as someone equally embarrassed about the state of science education in the US (for example, Louisiana’s Publicly-Funded Charter Schools are basically the most embarrassing thing), I’m interested in how much of this Science and Technology Are Incompatible divide is nurtured by our enormously confrontational political process. I’m inclined to agree that the split happened primarily as a way of basically undercutting the Catholic Church (in particular, Western public schools, the models of which mostly come from Germany, were explicitly created for that purpose), but we’ve had years and years go by in which every possible idea or belief or personal identity marker must become polarized. Politicians can’t afford to be neutral on any single issue, because neutrality is essentially vulnerability, so if Science and Religion can be described as at odds with each other, our political process pretty much ensures that they will be.
Yael Hoffman
/ August 11, 2012I have nothing of value to add, so I’ll just get to the point:
This is everything I’ve ever wanted to say, so thank you for writing it.
Athena Andreadis
/ August 12, 2012I’m with Inverarity on this. Science is an asymptotic approach to reality. Its fundamental difference from religion is its willingness to examine, even overturn, its premises if the fact warrant it. Scientists themselves are fallible humans, but the scientific process is self-correcting.
You cannot be a practicing scientist and a fundamentalist (creationist, young-earther or believer in the intrinsic inferiority of outsiders) without serious cogntive dissonance. It’s one thing to retain religious customs as part of an identity. It’s another to let it dictate reality.
Emil Söderman
/ August 12, 2012“How do you get to a world without poverty–one where it’s more awesome than ever to be, well, rich and white?”
Surely depends on the individual work of fiction, no?
A lot of this kind of utopianism is obviously rather silly, poorly thought out, unscientific, etc. etc. But it’s hardly fascistic: I think you could even argue that a post-scarcity society kind of defeats the entire point of fascism (such as it is)
acrackedmoon
/ August 12, 2012How is a post-scarcity first-world state built up; on the breaking of whose backs do first-worlders of today enjoy the luxury they do?
Inverarity
/ August 12, 2012I’m not seeing the inherent fascism of the concept either. If it’s one in which first worlders wiped out (or enslaved) everyone else to create their post-scarcity society, well, yeah. But that’s not how things have</em. to go. Aren't we all, theoretically, hoping for some hypothetical future in which everyone really does enjoy equal access to resources and oppression has been eliminated? The steps by which fiction writers think this can be accomplished may be simplistic, and naive, and optimistic fantasies may erase current experiences, but that's a failure of implementation, not a failure to imagine a better world.
acrackedmoon
/ August 12, 2012No. Really, no. Maybe if pressed most people will say that, but when what they produce suggests quite otherwise (i.e. what demographic do protagonists of transhumanist fairylands fall into?)–not really.
Inverarity
/ August 12, 2012Okay… would you mind clarifying? What am I missing? I mean, it’s not like I actually believe a utopia will ever happen, but if ending oppression and want isn’t the end goal, then what is?
(Also, I botched the HTML in the previous comment, but evidently I can’t edit it, sorry.)
saajanpatel
/ August 13, 2012Basically, ACM’s noting that if we illustrated these worlds the actual minorities would be either in short supply or non-existent.
It’s like imagine someone gave you a brochure called FUTURE and the only PoC is Will Smith fighting some robot in the background.
shardbaenre
/ August 12, 2012I think that ACM is saying that to get from a world in which there are poor and oppressed people, you would need to remove them somehow. There are two ways to create a Utopia: 1) The government takes over everything, re: Star Trek, or 2) The people take over in a bid of libertarian fury…the logical extreme of “it doesn’t get done if you don’t do it; and if you didn’t do it, then clearly you didn’t need it.”
In either case, you have to have lock-step agreement that this is what the new order would be. The new order cannot, under any circumstances, keep remnants of the old guard as manifest by unsavory aspects of any form of inequality. To remove that inequality, you have to force all things to be equal or you have to remove the worst of your society, which doesn’t necessarily mean the absolute worst. It could easily be the middle class and lower. That threshold would be set by the government or by people of power. Hilariously enough, anyone who cannot live without the safety or would be virtually guaranteed to fall into a lower category without it, is the worst and would need to be removed. Therefore, some form of fascism and cruelty would be required.
braak
/ August 12, 2012I guess that’s true, but the basic principle of the “post-scarcity economy” is that current oppression is fueled by inequality of resources (starting with just a general, natural imbalance, which was then exacerbated by the colonialist/imperialist control of resources). The fancy dream of the singularity is that things like nanotechnology and computer brains or what have you will obviate all that resource-inequality — it’s “post scarcity” because there is literal a limitless amount of whatever you want available to everyone all the time.
So, I think Charles Stross’s (just to pick an example) tendency to make all of his lead characters white western men is less an example of sort of crypto-fascism — the guy probably really does believe that the post-scarcity economy will literally end oppression for millions of people and create a world of equality for everyone — and more just his regular, current racial prejudice.
braak
/ August 12, 2012Which I guess is to say, it’s not necessarily the idea that the Singularity or the post-scarcity world is implicitly racist, it’s just that because it’s the special fantasy of privileged white western men, all of the books about the idea are infected with their racism, which I think is maybe what Inverarity was suggesting.
Emil Söderman
/ August 12, 2012“How is a post-scarcity first-world state built up;”
I don’t know. No such thing exists yet. (obviously) There’s a couple of ideas around (none of which seems terribly convincing)
“on the breaking of whose backs do first-worlders of today enjoy the luxury they do?”
I think you’re not quite getting the connotations of “post-scarcity”. Our current world and political systems are (explicitly, more or less) based precisely on scarcity: There’s (pretty good argument) that scarcity is kind of a natural part of the world and we’ll never get rid of it. Post-singularists largely ignore that part (which is stupid, but hardly fascistic) and even so there’s some definite critiques to be made re: plausibilty regarding whether or not ending scarcity would actually create equality, but those are different arguments.
“I think that ACM is saying that to get from a world in which there are poor and oppressed people, you would need to remove them somehow. ”
The argument re: Poverty and post-scarcity is that magic technology will somehow get to the point where “poverty” ceases to be an issue: We’ll simply have enough energy/robots that we could concievably create any kind of experience anyone could ever concievably want with no trouble whatsoever. (this is kind of the state of Bank’s Culture-verse for instance, and arguably Star Trek to at least some extent)
This is obviously wishing and fairytales and all that jazz: It’s also pretty grossly optimistic (to put it mildly) about the possibilities of science. And it obviously doesen’t deal with forms of oppression beyond economic ones, but again, it’s hardly fascistic.
(I should note that the only post-scarcity society stuff I’ve come into contact with beyond Star Trek is Bank’s Culture novels, who kind of cheats so blatantly against not just physics but common sense, I’ve only a vague idea of what the more near-future post-singularity utopias are like, they’re probably silly and suspect for all sorts of reasons, utopias generally are)
shardbaenre
/ August 13, 2012@Emil
“The argument re: Poverty and post-scarcity is that magic technology will somehow get to the point where “poverty” ceases to be an issue: We’ll simply have enough energy/robots that we could concievably create any kind of experience anyone could ever concievably want with no trouble whatsoever. (this is kind of the state of Bank’s Culture-verse for instance, and arguably Star Trek to at least some extent)
This is obviously wishing and fairytales and all that jazz: It’s also pretty grossly optimistic (to put it mildly) about the possibilities of science. And it obviously doesen’t deal with forms of oppression beyond economic ones, but again, it’s hardly fascistic.”
That depends. How are you getting those fancy robots? Who developed them and how are they being manufactured and who gets first dibs? Is society going to wait until everyone can do this nanotechnology stuff? If not, would early adopters have an edge? If there isn’t an edge and early adopters are the beta testers and it could end horribly, are you going to make people be an early adopter? Are you going to compensate them? What if people don’t want to adopt it? Are you fine with letting them die out or must they adopt this new technology because being off the grid is helping scarcity? Are you fine with forcing it on them? This adoption of new tech will *make the world better* and you can’t afford to have pockets of resistance because they could throw a wrench into the monkey works. How will you correct that problem? How will you correct the problem of overpopulation or food? Or healthcare?
For instance, there is a very good ethical discussion going on in science in regards to genetic manipulation that goes along the lines of: If you could get rid of all genetic disorders by manipulating the genetic code, whether it is through the germline or somatic cell line (germline would mean that the problem is corrected in your children, but somatic would mean that you and only you would benefit and you would need to genetically engineer your children since the germline would still pass on aberrant conditions), would you? And if you would, how are people going to pay? Is this a right? Or not?
Rich people will invariably be able to afford this for their children regardless. Eventually, you would probably get to a place where everyone benefits, either because rich early adopters would persist and and those who couldn’t afford it would die out. If it is a right, then the government would need to foot the bill. And how would that entity do that? More taxes? Redistributing wealth? How would that work?
So you see to create a whole sale societal change such as the ones proposed by SFF works an element of cruelty would need to exist even if it’s only in the birthing throes of that new society. And once again, everyone has to be on board, either forcefully or not, but there really can’t be wholesale stragglers.
saajanpatel
/ August 13, 2012Shardbaenre, do you mind if I quote this awesome post?
Emil Söderman
/ August 13, 2012“If not, would early adopters have an edge? ”
The idea is that the early adopters would have an edge, presumably, but it would simply vanish: Unequal distribution of resources would simply cease to matter at the point where the amount anyone would be distributed is (effectively) infinite.
Which again, is hardly problem-free as far as a postulate of future social change goes, but it hardly has anything to do with the nationalism, glorification of struggle, etc. eg. Fascism.
“Which I guess is to say, it’s not necessarily the idea that the Singularity or the post-scarcity world is implicitly racist, it’s just that because it’s the special fantasy of privileged white western men, all of the books about the idea are infected with their racism, which I think is maybe what Inverarity was suggesting.”
This. You said it better than I did.
shardbaenre
/ August 13, 2012@Emil
“The idea is that the early adopters would have an edge, presumably, but it would simply vanish: Unequal distribution of resources would simply cease to matter at the point where the amount anyone would be distributed is (effectively) infinite.
Which again, is hardly problem-free as far as a postulate of future social change goes, but it hardly has anything to do with the nationalism, glorification of struggle, etc. eg. Fascism”
That depends. If you are outsourcing the manufacturing of the product and not the idea of the product, this can lead to deep problems, re: Ipod, The Manufacturing.
To get people to do a wholesale societal change wherein they can no longer think about scarcity you have to instill a deep sense of tribe. In this case, tribe could very well be nationalistic pride. You have to make it a stigma to NOT be on board with being in the grid. And the initial inequality DOES matter to the people you would need to oppress to get it to be a universal thing. So then, you must ask yourself “Does the end justify the means?”
Most SFF does not engage that question and merely leap to the end goal. It’s like how a zombie apocalypse is invariably shown AFTER the zombies take over because the steps TO the zombie apocalypse don’t really make any kind of sense. The fascism comes in the birth of the society.
Think of what it took for China to implement and then to maintain the one child policy. Now magnify that to a global level and make it some nanotechnology or whatever. That intense pressure to conform to identify with us (us being “those on the grid) and them (them being those unable to adopt or unwilling to adopt) would by the very nature of what you are asking society to become lead to some intense oppression followed my magic times.
Most societal change comes in some form of extreme upheaval, from civil unrest to civil wars. You are asking people to make ALL things equal. You are telling them that scarcity no longer exists so they no longer have to fight, but this is the very nature of the whole “Communism” thing. People don’t want that until they have it. Wait, let me walk that back: “The United States as a superpower does not want that”. Wait, let me fix that again “The captains of industry in the United States don’t want that.”
I realize that the United States =/= the rest of the world, but whether we want to realize the truth or not, the United States has an outsized global role, so you really think that China would be aboard this new tech train if the US would still get to keep their goodies?
Which circles back to the series of questions I asked in my above post. How are you going to get from point A to B without major intense us vs them? Without the use of pressure and force to MAKE it happen? That force, that pressure, can look like anything, but given what you know about people, do you really think it wouldn’t look very fascistic and conforming?
@Sajaan
Have at you if you think it’s inspired! Totally flattered! :)
Captain Falcon (@psychoxnino)
/ August 13, 2012Somewhat 4th wall of me, but: I think the most racist and classist aspect of the post-scarcity fantasy in science fiction is the fact that it exists in the first place. When used in fiction, it becames a convenient excuse to ignore racial and class-based socioeconomic issues that exist on a global scale. In that fashion, the struggles and conflicts of entire peoples and societies in the real world can be swept completely under the rug. Science fiction prides itself on dealing with “big ideas,” and so not answering to large scale social and cultural issues such as political oppression and poverty and working class struggle and the intersecting racial components is not an option. However, unable to find an effective way of dealing with those issues, or perhaps unwilling to delve into those issues deeper than the superficial level, the technocratic solution was/is to flip a switch and make it all disappear.
But is it offensive? That depends on how much we are defined by our struggles.
Emil Söderman
/ August 14, 2012“Somewhat 4th wall of me, but: I think the most racist and classist aspect of the post-scarcity fantasy in science fiction is the fact that it exists in the first place. When used in fiction, it becames a convenient excuse to ignore racial and class-based socioeconomic issues that exist on a global scale. In that fashion, the struggles and conflicts of entire peoples and societies in the real world can be swept completely under the rug. Science fiction prides itself on dealing with “big ideas,” and so not answering to large scale social and cultural issues such as political oppression and poverty and working class struggle and the intersecting racial components is not an option. However, unable to find an effective way of dealing with those issues, or perhaps unwilling to delve into those issues deeper than the superficial level, the technocratic solution was/is to flip a switch and make it all disappear.”
Which I largely agree with (and this is why I find post-singularity stuff largely uninteresting, it waves a magic wand an says “everything will be better”, basically)
Now, I think that this kind of utopianism is not *entirely* useless: If nothing else it’s going to give a pretty good idea of what a person’s “ideal” is.
“Most societal change comes in some form of extreme upheaval, from civil unrest to civil wars. You are asking people to make ALL things equal. You are telling them that scarcity no longer exists so they no longer have to fight, but this is the very nature of the whole “Communism” thing. People don’t want that until they have it. Wait, let me walk that back: “The United States as a superpower does not want that”. Wait, let me fix that again “The captains of industry in the United States don’t want that.””
There’s obviously a great degree of technological determinism inherent in these kinds of visions (which again, I think is probably the wrong way to look at society) but the assumption really isn’t that far away from Marx: New systems of production will make capitalism (which is based on limited as opposed to unlimited production) obsolete.
And well, for all of the kinds of problems these kinds of utopias have, they still have pretty much nothing to do with fascism at all, whatsoever. They’re not fascist utopias but socialist or liberal ones.
shardbaenre
/ August 14, 2012@Emil
I think that you are missing the point here. I’m not discussing the *formed* Utopia. A Utopia is a Utopia is a Dystopia. I’m discussing the *pre*-formed Utopia. What it takes to get there. That part would probably need to contain elements of fascism to make the Utopia work, especially the ones envisioned by SFF works. Someone has to make that nanotech. That seems like something that would need to be outsourced and the general assumption is that the US came up with it, so India?In which case, when will they get to benefit from this technology? Early adopter or no? Exploited or no?
I mean, just think about what it takes to get the Olympics up and running: mass displacement, you can’t even disagree or bad mouth the Olympics, everyone pays some crazy taxes, massive construction and upheaval of people who *aren’t* being displaced, and, in the Superpowers, you have extreme nationalistic behaviors and the list could really go on and on and on. Those elements would be present in this pre-scarcity world as we march towards our Utopia.
Inverarity
/ August 14, 2012Okay, I follow your argument, shardbaenre – that it’s hard to imagine how we get there from here without some pretty dire and oppressive measures – but that seems to be a problem with any imagined utopia, not just whatever’s fashionable right now, like transhumanism. I still see the goal of ending scarcity as a worthy one, just like ending war in the Middle East is a worthy one. The reality is that there probably isn’t any perfectly humane path to getting there. I just don’t see the inherent fascism/wrongness of imagining such a future eventually coming about. Certainly the alternative is no more benign.
braak
/ August 14, 2012But the Singularity isn’t a real thing. It’s a fantasy. There IS no “pre-Utopia”, because there’s no actual Utopia. It’s fiction; it just skips over that directly to the part where everything isn’t fascist anymore. People indulging in the fantasy of Singularity Utopias are very specifically avoiding indulging in fascist fantasies.
saajanpatel
/ August 15, 2012I think part of the issue is for a lot of people post-Singularity utopias are sort of like people in nations designated “first-world” looking around and saying, “Wow, how did we end up so great?” except projected into the future.
It’s sort of forgetting how someone else was in chains, physical or otherwise, while things were invented and “deep thoughts” were thunk.
I admit I do like some Utopias, like the Culture, as it is an interesting thought game. And I don’t think it’s always meant to be some love letter to the eventual triumph of Western society and the white male, but rather the reason and inventiveness of the human mind. That said, it would be a higher quality fiction to strive for if the path to Utopia was more critically explored.
braak
/ August 17, 2012That’s a perfectly fair position, and I generally agree with it; I just think that it’s not unreasonable to want to distinguish ideas (like post-scarcity Utopias) that might be appealing to fascists (because honestly, a lot of things are appealing to fascist that aren’t necessarily fascist in and of themselves: puppies, sandwiches, neat hats), and ideas that are actually explicitly, clearly fascist ideas (i.e., the Return of the King fantasy trope).
shardbaenre
/ August 15, 2012@Inverarity and Braak
Not imagining the implications of your future world and philosophy, while still trying to maintain the image of “deep thinker” is lazy story-telling, at best. You don’t even have to detail what, exactly, happened, but how easy would it be to toss in a line? I know a lot of people don’t particularly take inspiration from the original Star Wars trilogy, but here’s an example of this: When Obi Wan is talking to Luke about Vader he said something like “Vader was seduced by the Dark side”. Alec Guinness’ face was wistful and nostalgic and his words were a bit sad. That was literally all you need to know about Vader since that sentiment gave a hint as to what Obi Wan had lost when Vader became what he was.
Considering that many of these stories fall into a single narrative, i.e. white people save the day, it really isn’t a singularity. That notion has consequences and implications so I don’t see why I would just need to accept the logic of the singularity on its own terms. I mean, dealing with these issues has been something SF has done. Besides, the triumph of the singularity means nothing if you don’t know what that society sacrificed or didn’t or what decisions they made to get to where they are.
acrackedmoon
/ August 15, 2012Yes. Nerds are only interested in the end result when it’s comfy, shiny and absolutely lazy.
braak
/ August 17, 2012I mean, I’m not going to argue about the idea in general except to say that I don’t think that just because it’s lazy that necessarily means it’s fascist. If you want to argue that specific stories are fascist, or white supremacist or something, that’s fine, we can have that discussion and honestly, I expect you’ll probably be right about most of them — but that the level of generality that you’re talking about here I’m not confident that there’s really any definitive statements to make.
Like, for example: Iain Banks’ Look to Windward is a Culture novel, and the Culture is very clearly a post-scarcity, secular anarchist utopia. Do you think it’s a fascist book, or a racist book? (This is a genuine question, incidentally; I don’t happen to think it is, but I’m open to being wrong about it.)
shardbaenre
/ August 18, 2012@Braak
“I mean, I’m not going to argue about the idea in general except to say that I don’t think that just because it’s lazy that necessarily means it’s fascist.”
We aren’t saying that just because it’s lazy it’s fascist. That is pretty far from what’s happening. We’re bemoaning the lazy that happens when you refuse to consider the ramifications of what the story is or is not about.
“That’s a perfectly fair position, and I generally agree with it; I just think that it’s not unreasonable to want to distinguish ideas (like post-scarcity Utopias) that might be appealing to fascists (because honestly, a lot of things are appealing to fascist that aren’t necessarily fascist in and of themselves: puppies, sandwiches, neat hats), and ideas that are actually explicitly, clearly fascist ideas (i.e., the Return of the King fantasy trope).”
We aren’t saying you can’t. But…you do realize that there really hasn’t been anyone to introduce the idea, right? It’s all this one story and it is boring. It well looks the same.
Inverarity
/ August 18, 2012acrackedmoon‘s original comment was: transhumanist fairylands where no poverty exists and brown people are faceless: traits that seem to me fascistic in the extreme, and that’s what made several of us raise our eyebrows. I get the arguments about laziness, about assuming that the future is white, about not thinking through the implications of your utopia, about not bothering to explore how we get there from here. I just think when you apply a blanket label of “fascism,” you aren’t just accusing white nerds of being ethnocentric and privileged and lazy, you’re ascribing a particular philosophy and set of motivations to them. It’s only one remove from calling someone a Nazi. (And no, I don’t object because I find it offensive – though others might – but because I find it inaccurate and, well, lazy.)
shardbaenre
/ August 15, 2012“Yes. Nerds are only interested in the end result when it’s comfy, shiny and absolutely lazy.”
I honestly and truly understand that impulse…but, how much more meaningful and revealing would knowing that history be to the current story? Oh, this post-scarcity world has terrorists that want to reinstate the previous world? How amazing would the implications of that scenario be knowing what came before it? Oh, they’re terrorists because they liked their old ways and they had never been in a position to fight back until this moment in the story. Oh, they liked their old ways but their people were the oppressors, but why would they want to go back knowing the horror? Are they that selfish? Oh, the protagonist has to make a big decision on whether or not to innovate knowing that it would cause social upheaval and the last time that happened was before scarcity was eliminated and her current society in no way knows how to deal with it. How big of a dilemma would that be? How much more rounded would that character be?
Oh, no, we’re just gonna…be a noir book? Some kind of mystery about a new drug? White guy has big guns and needs that McGuffin? Oh, I see. It was something of a gimmick to tell the same story as that paranormal romance over there. Gotcha. Or how much more exciting would the setting be, just in general, seeing their current innovation and knowing it came at a great cost these people would never realize and you still tell a story about a McGuffin or some kind of cliche noir, but by the very nature of your characters profound ignorance you say something about our current society and privilege? You wouldn’t even need to make a big deal of it. Just let it be a backdrop. Tell me that isn’t vacuous or not worthwhile.
Not everything has to be deep, but can’t some things be deep? No? Just wanna go with the Utopia and how awesome that is, apparently? Gotcha.
acrackedmoon
/ August 15, 2012If more things were less about how awesome the utopia is (and more about socio-political implications), I’d never have had the impulse to write this post. ;)
Aain I feel I should draw a comparison between the perfection of, say, Middle-earth in its “olden days” and the transhumanist fairylands. Both are awesomely perfect: one until shit like social changes and wars happen, ones existing in a stasis where no social change or war will ever happen again. Middle-earth is in that state under the encompassing righteousness of a Judeo-Christian god analogue and a bunch of angels, whereas transhumanist utopias are awesomely perfect under… what? The fruits of white western nerds’ labors?
Athena Andreadis
/ August 15, 2012Most pastoral fantasy works, optimistic first-contact scenarios and post-singularity cyberpunk are perfectibility narratives: under a benevolent deity (Iluvatar, advanced aliens or god-like sentient AIs), humans will be guided to their full potential. Everyone agrees on what the desired endpoint is, and resources are infinite because we (they) have access to the asteroid metals and rare earths, we have infinite energy and can terraform and gene-engineer at will.
This scenario, of course, stares us in the face when we contemplate crewed star travel even to Mars. In that instance, though, the plight is different: any changes will be made not to “optimize” (however defined) but to try and ensure survival. Armchair utopias of the perfection sort tend to evaporate when they touch reality, like fey sensitivity to iron.
shardbaenre
/ August 18, 2012@Inverarity
acrackedmoon‘s original comment was: transhumanist fairylands where no poverty exists and brown people are faceless: traits that seem to me fascistic in the extreme, and that’s what made several of us raise our eyebrows. I get the arguments about laziness, about assuming that the future is white, about not thinking through the implications of your utopia, about not bothering to explore how we get there from here. I just think when you apply a blanket label of “fascism,” you aren’t just accusing white nerds of being ethnocentric and privileged and lazy, you’re ascribing a particular philosophy and set of motivations to them. It’s only one remove from calling someone a Nazi. (And no, I don’t object because I find it offensive – though others might – but because I find it inaccurate and, well, lazy.)
And I think the reply to this is: Well how did that happen? This magical land where all things are, apparently equal, and yet there are no minorities? It sounds like you want a meta interpretation where we ascribe some kind of good will. We can do that, sure. But if you take the narrative as it is: a constructed world. Then there are implications to that. Are all the black and brown people in their own lands or something? If so, why? How did they get there? Willingly? Or no? Are they, perhaps, dead? What happened with that? War of some kind? What is going on? When your story doesn’t even bother to try to justify it with a “well, the protagonist just happens to live and move in circles that only include white for some hand wavey reason” then isn’t that particularly grievous? It is to me.
If this is truly an equal place and we’ve created this Utopia and we’re all over in a transhumanist land and all kinds of happiness is jizzing all over the place then there is NO OBJECTIVE REASON FOR THERE TO NOT BE CRAZY AMOUNTS OF DIVERSITY! This protagonist should look around and see a sea of diversity. And it should be conveyed to the reader in such a way that it’s organic and not new to the protagonist because it isn’t noteworthy. It’s life. That’s good, hard writing that takes the world that was created seriously and respects the reader. So, yes, either laziness (assign meta narrative and write that person off no matter how good the story) or ascribe some level of genocide or inequality or fascism. Either way. Could it be a good story? Sure. But right off the bat, I know it probably isn’t for me and that it makes no logical sense for such lily whiteness. And this is in regard to the Utopia now and not just the pre-formed. So yes, you could make ACM’s statement if you are being particularly uncharitable towards the concept. And I think that’s fair and not particularly lazy.
saajanpatel
/ August 19, 2012Repeating myself, but more I think about it part of the problem with future Utopias is it’s so similar to today’s way of thinking – today’s greatness has no reason to reflect on yesterday’s atrocities.
I remember in history we’d hand wave Native American genocide and slavery, but then suddenly when the Nazis come up we’re interested in Evil. To be fair there was praise of the Civil Rights Movement, but looking back there’s some weirdness about that like “Well, that was bad but thank God racism is over right?”
How many people can talk about “history”, wherever they are in the world, and somehow gloss over slavery/subjugation/caste and war as they imagine the past?
Emil Söderman
/ August 18, 2012“you’re ascribing a particular philosophy and set of motivations to them. ”
Precisely. “Fascist” isn’t just a substitute for “bad”, it’s a very specific charge.
“And I think the reply to this is: Well how did that happen? This magical land where all things are, apparently equal, and yet there are no minorities? It sounds like you want a meta interpretation where we ascribe some kind of good will. We can do that, sure. But if you take the narrative as it is: a constructed world. Then there are implications to that. Are all the black and brown people in their own lands or something? If so, why? How did they get there? Willingly? Or no? Are they, perhaps, dead? What happened with that? War of some kind? What is going on? When your story doesn’t even bother to try to justify it with a “well, the protagonist just happens to live and move in circles that only include white for some hand wavey reason” then isn’t that particularly grievous? It is to me.”
Again, I think Inverarity isn’t disputing any of these points. (I know I am not) what we’re disputing are in what ways these relate to the doctrine of fascism. (even in an indirect way, I think it’s perfectly OK to describe things non-fascists do as “fascistic” if it’s something in line with fascist ideology)
And no, I don’t think a fascist would hide that kind of thing: Because one of the things about fascism (indeed, one of the distinguishing things) is that they *like* struggle. They *like* conflict. They think that is what makes them strong. And that’s partially why I’m saying both the conservative fairylands and the post-singularity fairylands aren’t precisely fascist, because they are, at their core, *peaceful* utopias, and that’s anathema to fascism. (this, incidentally, is one of the differences between fascism and communism: To the communist violence is acceptable in order to create a utopia where no violence exists, to the fascist violence, struggle, is a good thing in itself)
Note that even when fascists describe the blood-and-soil romanticism of the mythical farmer they still emphasize struggle: These are people grown hard and salt of the earth in constant contest with nature, etc. etc.
saajanpatel
/ August 19, 2012Plus hey it’s a bit scary when the Paradise that is the Future has managed to erase everyone who looks like you.
(Now Culture is a big of a tricky one, since they aren’t humans from earth and there IIRC at least a bit of diversity to the humans.)
shardbaenre
/ August 19, 2012“And no, I don’t think a fascist would hide that kind of thing: Because one of the things about fascism (indeed, one of the distinguishing things) is that they *like* struggle. They *like* conflict. They think that is what makes them strong. And that’s partially why I’m saying both the conservative fairylands and the post-singularity fairylands aren’t precisely fascist, because they are, at their core, *peaceful* utopias, and that’s anathema to fascism.”
I don’t think you can discount the elements of fascism that may or may not be present in a Utopia just because the Utopia is “peaceful” or that it’s against “fascism”. The requirements, in my view, of fascism is extreme nationalistic tendencies and some form of indoctrination. Fascism does promote political violence but that’s in service to some kind of revolution to purge ideas and differences to forge a community. Fascism, in this way, can be used as a tool. Besides, the end result doesn’t mitigate the steps to that result, i.e., just because it’s a Utopia now doesn’t mean that its birth through fascism discounts that fascism. It doesn’t make it better. Therefore, I think it an interpretation to many Utopias, without being a dystopia because it functions, can be that it’s fascist or has elements of fascism.
shardbaenre
/ August 19, 2012Addendum:
“(even in an indirect way, I think it’s perfectly OK to describe things non-fascists do as “fascistic” if it’s something in line with fascist ideology)”
I think this is basically what is happening now between us…and we might possibly be talking over each other. I think it boils down to this though as evidenced, but not said directly, by my previous post. I think ACM’s initial statement is fair, but harsh, but not unduly so. I think you have some points but discount the notion. And I can agree that this is full on (most of the time) Mussolini here, but it doesn’t have to be the end of the spectra to be part of the spectra…And I think that’s implied in your statement?
Inverarity
/ August 19, 2012I think you think we are saying “You shouldn’t call them fascist because they don’t mean to be fascist” (i.e., that we are giving them a pass for presumed good intentions). What I, at any rate, am saying is that fascism is a real thing with a specific meaning, it’s not just an umbrella term for any kind of oppressive ideology that may or may not include elements of nationalism and/or racism. A utopian future where there are no non-white people (which, incidentally, I am not sure I’ve ever seen — most utopians are probably pretty blind to their unintended erasure of actual POC in their imagined futures, but I think very few utopias are actually conceived of or deliberately represented as all-white, and most transhumanists would probably strongly argue to the contrary) could have come about through some kind of global fascism that then was replaced by the utopian society, I guess, but frankly, I can think of a lot of more likely (not necessarily more benevolent) scenarios. But at this point, I fear that arguing over one dubious word choice risks derailing into pedantry.
mariethea
/ August 22, 2012This is a fantastic post. Would you mind if I wrote a response linking to it? I don’t read a lot of science fiction, and don’t really keep up in fantasy, but this relates to a lot of other cultural shifts I’ve been thinking about and struggling with lately.
I do wish I had your stylistic handle on language, though :)
acrackedmoon
/ August 23, 2012Not a problem.
saajanpatel
/ September 20, 2012“Although the characters of Rue and Thresh are described within the book as having “dark brown skin and eyes,” many fans leveled racist insults at the Black actors playing the roles. However, it was the actress Amandla Stenberg (Rue) who received the most flack. Fans tweeted that they were unable to connect to the character after being confronted with her Black presence in the film. The problem was not only that this Black girl did not deserve sympathy, but that she was in the wrong place; she did not belong in their fantasy futurist society. Give her a couple of years, throw her on stage as a teen seductress (àla Lisa Bonet in Angel Heart), and everything will be exactly as it should be.”
-Another Word:
Super Duper Sexual Spiritual Black Woman: The New and Improved Magical N*gro
(I censored the last word because I wasn’t sure if it would be offensive even in context.)
Alharen (@Alharen)
/ February 4, 2013Transhumanism is Christianity for nerds.
Alharen (@Alharen)
/ February 4, 2013Also, the “fight” between “science” and “religion” is one that keeps on being pushed by westerners. Not every culture on Earth has ever bothered making up some sort of widespread conflict between the two. Which is yet another example of oversimplification within the west.