tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-19914026683274411422024-02-26T05:41:36.713-08:00Rich Puchalsky's blogRich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.comBlogger142125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-77386489311062507442024-01-27T08:44:00.000-08:002024-02-26T05:41:04.069-08:00My crank list of which novels should have won the Hugos<h3 style="text-align: left;"><br /></h3><p>Why do the Hugos matter? No one really knows. Literary awards are usually judged by a group of experienced critics, academics, and/or writers who put some work into reading widely and trying to evaluate literary quality. The Hugos are chosen by notably provincial SF fans who are typically from the US and who paid $50 for the privilege of voting. Yet the Hugos are still referred to as science fiction's highest award and recommended to people as if they represent books that people may want to read.</p><p>My concern with the Hugos is as a list of recommendations for readers. Every now and then someone decides that it would be interesting to read the major books in SF and they naturally think that maybe they should start with the Hugo list and read one from each year. They shouldn't. </p><p>I'm going to go through the list of Hugo novel winners and pick out which novel should have won in each year. What makes me a good critic, or at least a better than the combined opinion of Hugo voters? Not much, but frankly it does not take much. I've read somewhat widely in SF and fantasy and I'm at least aware of what literary fiction is in a way that Hugo voters do not seem to be (I will get to the much discussed case of <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> around 1973.) There are going to be holes in my recommendations because I am still from the US and have not yet gotten around to reading Italo Calvino or the Strugatsky brothers. For the purpose of this initial list I'm not even going to look at the winners of SF's juried awards and crib off of them: I may do that at some later time.</p><p>Since the Hugos are supposed to be about popularity, I'm going to consider popularity to at least some extent. As explained below, this is for the time being a list that only chooses winners for the 20th century.<br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Eligibility<br /></h3><p>I am going to consider which novel should have won, whether or not it was nominated for that year. For the purpose of doing this, I had to figure out the Hugo award's eligibility rules. To summarize:</p><p>* each Hugo award is for works first published in the year before that, sometimes for a longer period<br /></p><p>* works published that are not in English are eligible in their first year of English translation</p><p>* serialized works can only win once, either for one element of the series or the whole series with its last installment</p><p>* one of the specific ways in which eligibility can be extended is that works are eligible up to their first year of US publication if they were first published outside the US. </p><p>* there are rules that only science fiction cares about concerning the differences in length between novels, novellas, and novelettes that I may or may not follow. <br /></p><p> Lastly, there is one mind-boggling element listed in the <a href="https://www.thehugoawards.org/hugo-categories/">Hugo award rules</a>: the Hugo awards are apparently not for SF after all. A breezy subheader called "Science Fiction? Fantasy? Horror?" says that works of fantasy or horror are also eligible. I had originally looked at the list of Hugo winners and decided that they must have changed the rules to make fantasy eligible in 2000 (there are very few fantasy works nominated before this). It seems clear to me, given that the change around 2000 was so notable, that the Hugos are awards for a <b>marketing category</b> -- in other words, the books placed in the science fiction section of a US bookstore that are now a mixture of SF and fantasy with fantasy predominating. As such I'm going to choose which works should have won the Hugos as if fantasy was always eligible: horror gets a different couple of shelves in the bookstore so I will leave that out.</p><h3 style="text-align: left;">The 1950s </h3><div style="text-align: left;">Amusingly the Hugos started in the 1950s and therefore left out SF's "Golden Age" (1938-1946) entirely. Don't worry, you are not really missing much. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1953: <b>The Demolished Man</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Alfred_Bester">Alfred Bester</a> , eligibility 1952-1953</div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">After all I've written about the Hugos, they arguably got it right for the first ever one. The Demolished Man is probably better than Bester's other major work and since it concerns a mentally ill oligarch who has to be taken down it is still relevant. People will have heard of <i>Fahrenheit 451 </i>by Ray Bradbury a lot more but it is not actually a better work. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1955: <b>They'd Rather Be Right</b> (aka <b>The Forever Machine</b>), <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Mark_Clifton">Mark Clifton</a> & <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Frank_Riley">Frank Riley</a>, eligibility 1954-1955</div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Lord of the Rings</b> trilogy, J.R.R. Tolkien <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The whole trilogy was first published 1954-1955. Not many people may have heard of this obscure work, but it's better than whatever the Hugo process picked out.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1956: <b>Double Star</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Robert_A_Heinlein">Robert A. Heinlein</a>, eligibility 1954-1956 but I will only consider 1956<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick:<b> Till We Have Faces</b>, C.S. Lewis</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Alternatively, <i>The Last Battle </i>by C.S. Lewis was published 1956 so I could have chosen the entire Narnia series but the work above is for adults and is better.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1958: <b>The Big Time</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Fritz_Leiber">Fritz Leiber</a>, eligibility 1957-1958</div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Languages of Pao</b>, Jack Vance</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I've read <i>The Big Time</i> and it is an absolutely horrible work that should be forgotten. That is not to say that Fritz Leiber is a bad writer: he is going to be long remembered for the Fafhrd and Grey Mouser stories but not for this. The Hugos don't seem to have picked much Vance even when he wrote SF, inexplicably.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1959: <b>A Case of Conscience</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/James_Blish">James Blish</a>, eligibility 1958</div><div style="text-align: left;"> my pick: <b>The Zimiamvian trilogy</b>, E.R. Eddison</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">People may start complaining that my list is too fantasy dominated but what can I do -- <i>The Mezentian Gate </i>published in 1958 is the last element of the Zimiamvian trilogy, which is far better than anything Blish ever wrote. That includes <i>A Case of Conscience</i>, which is incidentally one of the most morally and ethically objectionable genocide justifying books that SF has ever produced which is saying a lot.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">This was the first Hugo with runner-up nominations. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> ,</div><div style="text-align: left;">1960: <b>Starship Troopers</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Robert_A_Heinlein">Robert A. Heinlein</a> , eligibility 1959</div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Titus Alone</b>, Mervyn Peake or <b>The Sirens of Titan,</b> Kurt Vonnegut</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Neither of these are fantasy works: <i>Titus Alone</i> has an actual surveillance drone in it and if Arthur C. Clarke invented satellites then Peake probably invented drones. But of course the Gormenghast series, which <i>Titus Alone</i> is the last of, is better as writing than anything that Heinlein ever wrote. T<i>he Sirens of Titan </i>was nominated for a Hugo this year and I should acknowledge that this time they at least nominated something that plausibly should have won.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Hugo score for the 1950s: 1 out of 6<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;">The 1960s </h3><div style="text-align: left;">The 1960s were the time of religious and ecological SF in the US, and were also when 3 of the best SF writers produced many of their major works -- Philip K. Dick. Ursula K. LeGuin, and Stanislaw Lem. Going by the Hugo criterion of first publication in English, Lem's works do not show up in the 1960s although they should: I will try to drop them into later decades. This decade's works were dominated by SF instead of fantasy as with the 1950s, and involved the first actually difficult decisions that I encountered. All Hugos for this decade had the previous year as their eligibility period.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1961: <b>A Canticle for Leibowitz</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Walter_M_Miller_Jr">Walter M. Miller, Jr.</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Rogue Moon</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Algis_Budrys">Algis Budrys</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Rogue Moon</i> was one of the nominees: it's not a great book but it's better than the Hugo winner. I also considered <i>A Fine and Private Place</i> by Peter S.
Beagle.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1962: <b>Stranger in a Strange Land</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Robert_A_Heinlein">Robert A. Heinlein</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">This was amazingly popular and gives a feel for the religious SF of the time: I think that it's amusing that it's likely to be the only Heinlein that makes my list because in terms of general writing quality it is not very good.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1963: <b>The Man in the High Castle</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Philip_K_Dick">Philip K. Dick</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The Hugos are really going strong here: two in a row!<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1964: <b>Way Statio</b>n, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Clifford_D_Simak">Clifford D. Simak</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Cat's Cradle</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Kurt_Vonnegut_Jr">Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Cat's Cradle was nominated, so the Hugos are still doing pretty well.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1965: <b>The Wanderer</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Fritz_Leiber">Fritz Leiber</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Martian Time-Slip</b>, Philip K. Dick </div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css"> </style></div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></div></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I don't know why people kept voting in minor works by Leiber. Martian Time-Slip is a foundational work about the abandonment of people who are disabled, depressed, or old.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1966: tie between <b>This Immortal</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Roger_Zelazny">Roger Zelazny</a> and <b>Dune</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Frank_Herbert">Frank Herbert</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Dune</b>, Frank Herbert</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The Hugos came so close but had to make this a tie. <i>This Immortal</i> by Roger Zelazny is fine: I've read almost everything Zelazny has written and it's not his best but it's OK. <i>Dune</i> was both popular and influential as one of the first major SF works to actually consider that alternate societies and ecosystems to "generic US or medieval Europe" might exist. If there was going to be a tie, it should have been with <i>The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch</i> by PKD.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1967: <b>The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Robert_A_Heinlein">Robert A. Heinlein</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: the totally incongruous combination of <b>Giles Goat-Boy</b>, John Barth, or <b>The Master and Margarita</b>, Mikhail
Bulgakov</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The 1966 publication year was an extremely difficult one to choose from. The Hugos nominated <i>Babel-17</i><b> </b>by Samuel Delany which was certainly in the running, but <i>Giles Goat-Boy </i>was one of the first popular metafictional / postmodern novels. <i>The Master and Margarita</i> is in no real sense "a novel of the sixties" and was written between 1928-1940, but this was the year of its first English publication so in it goes.<style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1968: <b>Lord of Light</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Roger_Zelazny">Roger Zelazny</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I might argue here but I wrote that I'd go along with the Hugos when they were close enough.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1969: <b>Stand on Zanzibar</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/John_Brunner">John Brunner</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Camp Concentration</b> by Thomas Disch or <b>A Wizard of Earthsea</b> by Ursula K. Le Guin</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Brunner wrote some good books but this one should not have won for this year. The year also had <i>Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep</i> by PKD which also would have been better.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1970: <b>The Left Hand of Darkness</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Ursula_K_Le_Guin">Ursula K. Le Guin</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The year had PKD's <i>Ubik</i>, which usually would have won but not against this competition.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Hugo score for the 1960s: 4.5 out of 10. I'm guessing this will be the best decade ever for the award. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;">The 1970s <br /></h3></div><div style="text-align: left;"><div style="text-align: left;">The 1970s were the decade in which people questioned the whole direction of SF as a genre, mostly particularly with a push to integrate SF into literary fiction. The experimentalist fiction of the New Wave was the closest thing SF has had to an avant-garde. People also started to point out how homophobic classical SF was and push a more feminist SF (one classic marker being<i> The Female Man</i>, Joanna Russ, 1975). In general, this was a direction not followed in later decades, with the movie Star Wars (1977) signaling a change in SF from written to visual media and a corresponding reversion back to a more pulp style.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1971: <b>Ringworld</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Larry_Niven">Larry Niven</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Solaris</b>, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation 1970) <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">The conparison between these two is particularly harsh because they are both supposedly hard SF writers. It's just that one is "hard" by convention (how does the Ringworld material stand up under stress? Should the writer handwave something no don't bother, um, it's very hard) and one is the best hard SF writer ever, who wrote a whole oeuvre about the limits of science and how science actually works.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1972: <b>To Your Scattered Bodies Go</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Philip_Jose_Farmer">Philip José Farmer</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Lathe of Heaven,</b> Ursula K. Le Guin </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This was at least nominated for a Hugo.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1973: <b>The Gods Themselves</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Isaac_Asimov">Isaac Asimov</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Iron Dream</b>, Norman Spinrad </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Which should you choose, someone who you want to reward for work they did in the Golden Age, or someone who wrote a work that essentially destroys the Golden Age? I'm not going to forget <i>The Iron Dream </i>and I can barely recall what differentiates <i>The Gods Themselves</i> from similar works.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1974: <b>Rendezvous with Rama</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Arthur_C_Clarke">Arthur C. Clarke</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Gravity's Rainbow</b>, Thomas Pynchon</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Before I get to <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i>, I'll mention that two Stanislaw Lem books, <i>Memoirs Found in a Bathtub </i>and <i>The
Invincible</i>, were both first translated into English in 1973. While Clarke was writing a classic Big Dumb Object book Lem was in print with SF's first use of nanomachines (in <i>The Invincible</i>). Both Lem books were better than anything written within the genre that year.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">But what about outside the genre? There was a moment in 1973 when <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> was nominated for a Nebula Award when it seemed like literary fiction and SF might be converging, in which SF would no longer be a ghettoized genre and be evaluated in literary terms. That did not happen. For a longer treatment of this theme, read <a href="https://hipsterbookclub.livejournal.com/1147850.html" rel="nofollow">Jonathan Lethem</a> about it-- this is from a 1998 Village Voice article, but he's written the same in many other places.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">In between <i>Gravity's Rainbow</i> and the end of the 20th century, each famous US literary author wrote approximately one SF novel. In terms of technical writing skill, these were of course better than what SF writers could do: in terms of understanding SF ideas and the history of the genre, they were abysmal. I'm going to ignore most of them.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1975: <b>The Dispossessed</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Ursula_K_Le_Guin">Ursula K. Le Guin</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">As an anarchist I'm supposed to especially like this anarchist novel: I do not -- it is one of the most deprived and disappointing anarchies envisioned. But it's a good book. Quite possibly this should have been the year for <i>Invisible Cities </i>by Italo Calvino (first year of English translation) but I haven't read it.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1976: <b>The Forever War</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Joe_Haldeman">Joe Haldeman</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"> my pick: <b>Dhalgren</b>, Samuel Delany </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I really like <i>The Forever War</i> and I would like to just agree with this Hugo, but I can't. Bonus pick: if you want something as end-of-the-Vietnam-War as <i>The Forever War</i>, but quite possibly a bit better, there is also <i>The Illuminatus! Trilogy</i> by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson also published 1975.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1977: <b>Where Late the Sweet Birds Sang</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Kate_Wilhelm">Kate Wilhelm</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Cornelius Quartet</b>, Michael Moorcock </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I considered and rejected <i>Ratner's Star </i>by Dom DeLillo: the Cornelius quartet (the first four Jerry Cornelius novels, now generally bound into a single volume) are a pure distillation of what the English New Wave was.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1978: <b>Gateway</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Frederik_Pohl">Frederik Pohl</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>A Scanner Darkly</b>, Philip K. Dick </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Gateway</i> is a fairly good book, but <i>A Scanner Darkly</i> captured an era.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1979: <b>Dreamsnake</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Vonda_N_McIntyre">Vonda N. McIntyre</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I thought of <i>The Chain of Chance</i> but this list is already overpopulated with time-shifted Lem books. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1980: <b>The Fountains of Paradise</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Arthur_C_Clarke">Arthur C. Clarke</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>On Wings of Song</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Thomas_M_Disch">Thomas
M. Disch</a></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">This was at least nominated for a Hugo. Runner-up: <i>Engine Summer </i>by John Crowley.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css"> </style></div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css"> </style></div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css">Hugo score for the 1960s: 4.5 out of 10. P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }A:link { so-language: zxx }</style> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> Hugo score for the 1970s: 2 out of 10. </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;">The 1980s </h3><div style="text-align: left;">The 1980s were a fragmented decade for SF -- they were certainly the decade of the emergence of cyberpunk, but the list of authors who have written cyberpunk that will last is a bit thin: it's William Gibson for a book that essentially created the subgenre for the public, and Bruce Sterling. The end of the decade saw the first SF books by Iain M. Banks, part of what I consider to be a renaissance of politically left writing from UK authors.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div></div><div style="text-align: left;">1981: <b>The Snow Queen</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Joan_D_Vinge">Joan D. Vinge</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Return From the Stara</b>, Stanislaw Lem (first English translation) </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This should be the last time-shifted Lem book.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1982: <b>Downbelow Station</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/C_J_Cherryh">C. J. Cherryh</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick:<b> Little, Big</b> by John Crowley </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Little, Big</i> was at least nominated for a Hugo. In almost any other year, <i>Lanark </i>by Alasdair Gray would have been my pick.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1983: <b>Foundation's Edge</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Isaac_Asimov">Isaac Asimov</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Sword of the Lictor</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Gene_Wolfe">Gene Wolfe</a> (standing in some way for the entire <i>Book of the New Sun</i>) </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The last Gene Wolfe book in the series was published in the next year, but this was the year in one of them was nominated for a Hugo so I will stick with this one.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1984: <b>Startide Rising</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/David_Brin">David Brin</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: the <b>Dying Earth</b> series, Jack Vance </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">My pick would have been <i>The Citadel of the Autarch</i> by Gene Wolfe but it is not really a standalone book and the third book in the series was nominated for a Hugo in the last year. Therefore I chose <i>Cugel's Saga</i>, published 1983, as the end (in terms of novels) of Jack Vance's Dying Earth series. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This year is as good as any to mark the start of a trend of popular fantasy series that are more of less open ended and that end when their writers can no longer write. In particular, this year has the first Terry Pratchett Discworld book<i>, The Colour of Magic, </i>and the first Steven Brust Dragaeran book, <i>Jherag</i>. I would expect these to win some kind of series award at some point, but not for any of the individual novels in the series.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1985: <b>Neuromancer</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/William_Gibson">William Gibson</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1986: <b>Ender's Game</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Orson_Scott_Card">Orson Scott Card</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Schismatrix,</b> Bruce Sterling </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">It's understandable that SF fans would like a book in which adults watch a child kick another child to death so that the child can be prepared to naturally accept genocide as a way to win, but <i>Ender's Game </i>is not actually a good book in any sense. <i>Schismatrix </i>is better read as a later book, <i>Schismatrix Plus </i>which adds a number of short stories, but since this is a list of awards for novels I decided on the earlier version.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">I would have liked to fit something by Brian Aldiss in here, such as <i>Helliconia Winter </i>standing for the whole Helliconia series or <i>Hothouse</i> in the previous year, but those are the tail end of the New Wave and this is the time of cyberpunk.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1987: <b>Speaker for the Dead</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Orson_Scott_Card">Orson Scott Card</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Handmaid's Tale</b>, Margaret Atwood </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Margaret Atwood notably does not consider her works to be SF, but in a category that spans SF and fantasy they should be in there somewhere.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1988: <b>The Uplift War</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/David_Brin">David Brin</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Consider Phlebas</b>, Iain M.. Banks</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The first of Iain Banks' Culture books. Not his best, but better than anything else at the time. This is usually classed as a space opera: I think it's better classified as a form of anarchist SF.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This year also has <i>Soldiers of Paradise,</i> the first book by Paul Park. Some book by Paul Park should be on this list somewhere but popularity is part of even a fake Hugo list and I don't think that his books ever got the attention that they deserved.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1989: <b>Cyteen</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/C_J_Cherryh">C. J. Cherryh</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Islands in the Net</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Bruce_Sterling">Bruce Sterling</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">This was at least nominated for a Hugo.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1990: <b>Hyperion</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Dan_Simmons">Dan Simmons</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Player of Games</b>, Iain M. Banks</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Probably Banks' second best book.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Hugo score for the 1980s: 1 out of 10. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;">The 1990s <br /></h3> The 1990s were a decade of decline for written SF. A larger and larger number of novels were published: fewer and fewer had any particular kind of literary quality. For some previous decades it was a challenge to pick the best work in a year: for this one it's a challenge to pick anything.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Lois McMaster Bujold is a perennial favorite for this decade of Hugos. I've read and enjoyed all of her books: as with any everlasting series, they don't seem individually better than the others or rising to the quality of something I could recommend as a single work. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1991: <b>The Vor Game</b>,
<a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Lois_McMaster_Bujold">Lois McMaster
Bujold</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Use of Weapons</b>, Iain M. Banks <style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }A:link { so-language: zxx }</style> <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">Probably Banks' best book and certainly should have won this year.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1992: <b>Barrayar</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Lois_McMaster_Bujold">Lois
McMaster Bujold</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>The Difference Engine</b>, William Gibson and Bruce Sterling </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">The definitive steampunk - as - cyberpunk book. <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1993:
<b>Doomsday Book</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Connie_Willis">Connie Willis</a>, and <b>A Fire Upon the Deep</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Vernor_Vinge">Vernor Vinge</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I am not enthused by either of these but I can't find anything better. I might have chosen <i>Red Mars</i> but another book in its series won the Hugo next year. I really should have chosen <i>The Course of the Heart </i>by M. John Harrison but it wasn't published in the US until 2004 and for a US dominated award like the Hugos should probably win in a later year.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1994: <b>Green Mars</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Kim_Stanley_Robinson">Kim Stanley Robinson</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: same</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><i>Red Mars</i> was a better book, but I will defer to the Hugos since it's close enough.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1995: <b>Mirror Dance</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Lois_McMaster_Bujold">Lois McMaster Bujold</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>A History Maker</b>, Alasdair Gray</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">This one would have been <i>Four Ways to Forgiveness</i> by Ursula K. Le Guin but it is classed as a collection of short stories. There is a trend through the rest of this decade (and to some extent for the rest of SF's existence so far) of ignoring work from the UK because it is not as well known in the US or not even published in the US.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1996: <b>The Diamond Age</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Neal_Stephenson">Neal Stephenson</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Fairyland</b>, Paul McAuley </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1997: <b>Blue Mars</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Kim_Stanley_Robinson">Kim Stanley Robinson</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>Holy Fire</b>, Bruce Sterling </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">This was nominated for a Hugo and is one of Sterling's best books.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> <br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">1998: <b>Forever Peace</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Joe_Haldeman">Joe Haldeman</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: nothing</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I looked diligently over the list of books published in 1997 and couldn't find anything that seemed worth putting on this list. I guess I'll count this as agreement with the Hugos but really this could have been a year for no award.</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">1999: <b>To Say Nothing of the Dog</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Connie_Willis">Connie Willis</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: anything else</div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">I will try not to write too much about the book that won, written as it was in a sentimental style that infiltrated the plot to the extent of characters saving a cat at the risk of destroying the historical timeline. There are a good number of books better than this one published this year: they include <i>A Parable of the Talents,</i> Octavia Butler, <i>The Book of Knights</i>, Yves Mayanrd, and <i>A Clash of Kings</i>, George R.R. Martin. I will count this as disagreement with the Hugos since it should have preferably gone to any of those.</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">2000: <b>A Deepness in the Sky</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Vernor_Vinge">Vernor Vinge</a></div><div style="text-align: left;">my pick: <b>A Civil Campaign</b>, <a href="http://www.sfadb.com/Lois_McMaster_Bujold">Lois McMaster Bujold</a> </div><div style="text-align: left;"> </div><div style="text-align: left;">It seems like a joke that I would choose a book by Bujold after disagreeing with the Hugos so many times about them before, but there is a particular reason why this one should win: there is a trend in popular fantasy / SF that begins around this time in mashing up genres or reworking famous characters, and this book is a successful SF version of a Regency romance.<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css"> </style></div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }A:link { so-language: zxx }</style> </div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css"> </style></div><div style="text-align: left;"><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style> </div></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">Hugo score for the 1990s: 3 out of 10. </div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><h3 style="text-align: left;">The 2000s Through Now</h3><div style="text-align: left;">I don't think that I can trust my own judgement to make a list of winners from this point forward. I was discouraged by the state of SF in the late 1990s and stopped reading as much of it. There were certainly authors that I continued to read, and I could assign a number of years to China Mieville or Adam Roberts. But I really haven't read enough of the field to be as confident of who should have won in each year. For instance, I still haven't read any N.K. Jemison. Here is a list of works that I think should have been at least nominated, by year of publication instead of eligibility year:<br /></div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">2001: <b>Perdido Street Station</b>, China Mieville</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">2002: <b>Altered Carbon</b>, Richard K. Morgan</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">2003: <b>Oryx and Crake</b>, Margaret Atwood</div><div style="text-align: left;"><br /></div><div style="text-align: left;">2004: <b>Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell</b>, Susanna Clarke<b> </b>and <b>The Scar,</b> China Mieville<br /></div></div><p>2007:<b> Land of the Headless</b>, Adam Roberts</p><p>2009: <b>Anathem</b>, Neil Stephanson</p><p>2010: <b>New Model Army</b>, Adam Roberts, <b>the city & the city,</b> China Mieville <br /></p><p>2011: <b>By Light Alone</b>, Adam Roberts, <b>Kraken</b>, China Mieville, <b>The Half-Made World</b>, Felix Gilman</p><p>2012: <b>Embassytown</b>, China Mieville</p><p>2013: <b>The Hydrogen Sonata</b>, Iain M. Banks</p><p>2014: <b>The Islanders</b>, Christopher Priest</p><p>2016: <b>Europe in Winter</b>, Dave Hutchinson </p><p>2017: <b>The Thing Itself,</b> Adam Roberts</p><p>2018: <b>Above the Snowline</b>, Steph Swainston</p><p>2022: <b>The This,</b> Adam Roberts</p><p>I may add to this at some later time if I read more.</p><p><br /></p><h3 style="text-align: left;">Total Score for the 20th Century Hugo novel awards</h3><div style="text-align: left;">Rounding up, this gives the Hugos a total score of 12 good picks out of 46 awards, or 26%. If you had gone back to the Hugo list of novels that won in the 20th century, you would have had a 1/4 chance of getting the best one for each year.<br /></div><br /><p> </p><p><br /></p><p><br /></p>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com11tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-77269279205725651282023-01-31T16:28:00.002-08:002023-01-31T16:28:54.577-08:00Animal and plant labor, part III<p>
</p><p>Part III: Why does it matter?</p>
<p>Before I go on to plant labor – complete with quotes from Luke
12:27 and Buenaventura Durruti – there's the question of why any
this matters. So you can describe animals as doing labor if you
define your terms in a certain way: why should this matter to anyone?</p>
<p>It matters because the classic European leftist imaginary is all
about work. It doesn't matter that newer (or older) imaginaries
exist that aren't so focused on producerism: the left was dominated
by Marxist ideas until the fall of the USSR, and the neoliberal era
after that has suppressed any widespread adoption of anything else.
For better or for worse, when many people on the left think of what
defines the left, the answer has to do with the working class. Since
Marxism is basically a 19<sup>th</sup> century ideology, it has no
ecological understanding, and has a false model of value in which all
value comes from human work. No socialist state informed by the
Marxist tradition has ever done better than capitalist states have in
ecological terms.</p>
<p>It's not necessary to argue against Marxist ideas directly: these
have more or less died out as living technical ideas for most of the
population. What's left is a kind of folk Marxism. Psychologists
now say that Freud was wrong about many important things: this
doesn't stop generally literate people from thinking about the
conscious and unconscious, the superego, ego, and id, the Freudian
slip, the father complex and so on, or the more pop culture versions
of these ideas like “daddy issues”. In the same way, people who
adhere to class forms of the left rather than identity forms will
immediately come up with ideas about workers, solidarity, and class
interest.</p>
<p>I'm one of these class-form people myself: as an anarchist, I've
seen what happens when people claim leftism on the basis of identity
but otherwise have a liberal politics. Neoliberalism runs on that
kind of thing. So it seems to me to be imperative to re-use or
recycle folk ideas about workers, solidarity, and class interest into
a form that can address the most important problems that we have as a
civilization: our ecological limits. To do that, it becomes
necessary to see animals and maybe even plants as workers, to feel
solidarity, to understand that there is a common interest between them and ourselves.</p>
<p>This is a long-standing part of the anarchist lineage. In the
Eurocentric tradition it goes back to works like Kropotkin's <u>Mutual
Aid: A Factor of Evolution</u>, published in 1902. As such it is
nothing new, but rather represents a kind of 20<sup>th</sup> century
that should have occurred but did not, either in the capitalist west
or the Marxist east. For real 21<sup>st</sup> century ideas we'd
probably do better to turn towards Indigenous anarchists. But I
myself am a product of the Euro tradition, and this is all I can
write about.</p>
<p><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></p>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-65163059539632933842023-01-30T18:20:00.001-08:002023-01-30T18:20:28.721-08:00Animal and Plant Labor, part II<p>
</p><p>Part II. Do animals work?</p>
<p>When people discuss this, they generally attribute work that an
animal does that's supervised by a human as something that only
counts as work because a human being is directing it. So, horses
pull plows, provide transport, were used in war and so on but in
this view they are generally understood as tools or adjuncts to human
beings who are working – as capital, in other words. Dogs do what
we might call emotional labor (and assist in the hunt) in the same
way. Because I don't want to argue about this, I'm not going to
address labor by domesticated animals.</p>
<p>For wild animals, our ideas of what labor is tend to match what we
do in our civilization. So, for instance, models of animal labor
from the last couple of centuries involve building things: beavers
and dams, spiders and webs, birds and nests, bees and honeycombs.
They don't involve packs of wolves doing the work of going out on the
hunt and bringing down prey, because in our civilization we no longer
often go out in hunting groups as a form of work occupation. So for
now I'll only write about animals who build. The immediate objection
is that animals are doing this instinctively, while we think about
it, so our activity counts as work and theirs doesn't.</p>
<p>I suggest that this is not as large or as binary a difference as
some people believe. To start with, Taylorized forms of human work
have been developed that involve human beings doing simple,
repetitive motions over and over on an assembly line: no one doubts
that they are working, even though any opportunity for thought has
been purposefully excluded. But this would be answered that human
adaptability can be used to have people do repetitive motions that
are not instinctual, but instead changeable and appropriate to the
situation – of earning pay via wage labor, in this case. That
leads me to my main argument, which is that both humans and other
animals find their opportunities for routine work limited by their
environment.</p>
<p>You can't define work as something that only geniuses or
extraordinary individuals do. For most of us, it's limited by what
is available: beavers build dams based on the wood that grows nearby,
birds use leaves or human litter, bees build into the confines
whatever hollow exists. Humans have extraordinary capability for
language, culture, and the development of technology, and this
creates a social environment that acts much like their physical
environment. When beavers go into a new region, you'll see beaver
dams appear: when humans do, you'll see characteristic human
structures as defined by the physical resources available, their
culture, and their technology.</p>
<p>I don't expect everyone to be convinced by this, although at least
we are past the days in Europe when animals were considered to be a
kind of machine. People these days at least consider that animals
have emotions, feelings, and (in some cases) tool and language use,
or a form of creativity. At any rate, I will consider labor to be
strenuous, purposeful activity that a living thing does in order to
live. By this measure, animals do work.</p>
<p><style type="text/css">P { margin-bottom: 0.08in }</style></p>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-22807635205903602212023-01-29T13:10:00.001-08:002023-01-29T13:16:49.685-08:00Animal and Plant Labor, part 1<p><blockquote>"Air, virgin soil, and natural meadows are not static piles of things lying in bins. They are the result of ecological processes, which means that they are the result of unremitting labor. It's just animal and plant labor rather than human labor."</blockquote><p>
In what sense do animals and plants do labor? People have talked about the first but generally only as an adjunct to human labor, and very rarely conceive of the second. I'm interested in this as part of a questioning or re-centering of the fundamental ideas of leftist thought, which are still based on Marx's writing as folk ideas.<p>
I wrote a number of Twitter threads about this during the years in which I was on Twitter: I'm going to see whether I can rewrite them as a somewhat more coherent set of blog / Mastodon posts. They never would have been written at all without the sense that someone was reading and replying to them.
Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-58534120946472179322022-12-15T13:14:00.003-08:002022-12-15T13:15:31.992-08:0055 good SF / fantasy books<p>These are all of the science fiction and fantasy books out of the thousands that I've read that I 5 starred on Library Thing. As such the list is not intended as a comprehensive list of the best, and it certainly could be more diverse in various ways, but it is what it is -- SF/F books that I thought at some time in my life (possibly when I was 13) were among the best. They are in alphabetic order by last name of the author.</p>
<ul>
<li>Iain M. Banks: The Player of Games, Use of Weapons
<li>John Bellairs: The Face in the Frost
<li>James Branch Cabell: The Silver Stallion, Figures of Earth, The High Place
<li>G. K. Chesterton: The Man Who Was Thursday
<li>John Crowley: Little, Big , Engine Summer
<li>Avram Davidson: The Enquiries of Doctor Eszterhazy
<li>Philip K. Dick: The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip, Deus Irae (with Roger Zelazny), Ubik, The Penultimate Truth, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, Galactic Pot-Healer
<li>Lord Dunsany: At the Edge of the World, The King of Elfland's Daughter, The Complete Pegana
<li>William Gibson: The Difference Engine (with Bruce Sterling), Neuromancer
<li>Alasdair Gray: Lanark
<li>M. John Harrison: The Course of the Heart
<li>Aldous Huxley: Brave New World
<li>Ursula K. Le Guin: The Left Hand of Darkness, A Wizard of Earthsea
<li>Stanislaw Lem: Solaris, Return From the Stars, The Futurological Congress, Memoirs Found In a Bathtub, The Cyberaid
<li>H.P. Lovecraft: The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, The Case of Charles Dexter Ward
<li>China Mieville: The Scar, Iron Council
<li>Michael Moorcock: The Cornelius Chronicles Vol 1. (collects The Final Programme through The Condition of Muzak)
<li>Ward Moore: Greener Than You Think
<li>Jenna Katerin Moran: An Unclean Legacy
<li>George Orwell: 1984
<li>Mervyn Peake: Titus Groan, Gormenghast
<li>Christopher Priest: The Islanders
<li>Adam Roberts: New Model Army, The This
<li>Michael Shea: Nifft the Lean
<li>Norman Spinrad: The Iron Dream
<li>Olaf Stapledon: Last and First Men, Star Maker
<li>Bruce Sterling: Schismatrix Plus, Holy Fire, Islands in the Net
<li>Robert Louis Stevenson: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
<li>Steph Swainston: Above the Snowline
<li>H.G. Wells: The Invisible Man
<li>Roger Zelazny: Lord of Light
</ul>
Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-47674121279858030162022-09-10T19:12:00.001-07:002022-09-10T19:12:53.505-07:00Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 5V. Other conclusions<p>
Isekai has had a minor <a href="https://comicbook.com/anime/news/russia-anime-ban-isekai-reincarnation-suicide/" target="_blank">Satanic Panic in Russia in 2021</a> due to a belief that the genre depicts reincarnation as desirable and therefore may tempt people to hasten it. Judicial clowning aside, a more serious backlash has occurred throughout the last decade. It probably peaked in 2016-217 when a Shōsetsuka ni Narō short story contest banned isekai entries and the publisher Kadokowa followed suit in its own contest the next year. (1) As far as I can tell, there was a feeling that the genre was overpopulated and might have exhausted itself. Whatever the merits of this, the genre remained popular and the bans did not continue. (2)<p>
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So why has isekai, at least so far, kept coming back? It is not merely because it is an escapist genre about literally escaping to another world. The virtues of escapism are part of an ancient dispute within fantasy, with Tolkein supposedly saying to C.S. Lewis that the people most hostile to the idea of escape are jailers, and Michael Moorcock retorting much later that "Jailers love escapism. What they hate is escape." Whichever side of this you prefer, the point in the present context is that there are many genres that provide escapism if that is what people want. Why isekai?<p>
I suggest that part of the answer is isekai's wholehearted commitment to Eros. There are other escapist genres that are commited to Thanatos – science fiction, for instance, likes to call itself the literature of ideas but might more accurately be called the literature of genocide – but death drive abounds in our societies as we embrace ecological and other catastrophes, and perhaps that is what needs to be escaped from most of all.<p>
Another possible answer is provided by Baudrillard, writing in 1983 just 4 years after Eco's _The Role of the Reader_. In these four years something uneasy has happened to that word "infantilism":<p>
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<blockquote>"The child resists on all levels, and to a contradictory demand he also responds with a double strategy. To the demand to be an object, he opposes all the practices of disobedience, revolt, emancipation; in short, a total claim to subjecthood. To the demand to be a subject, he opposes just as stubbornly and efficaciously with an object's resistance, that is to say, in exactly the opposite manner: infantilism, hyperconformism, a total dependence, passivity, idiocy. Neither of the two strategies has more objective value than the other. The resistance-as-subject is today unilaterally valorized and held as positive - just as in the political sphere only the practices of liberation, emancipation, expression, and constitution as a political subject are taken to be valuable and subversive. But this is to ignore the equal or perhaps even superior impact, of all the practices-as-object - the renunciation of the position of subject and of meaning - exactly the practices of the masses - which we bury and forget under the contemptuous terms of alienation and passivity." <p>
[...] "the system's current argument is the maximization of the word and the maximal production of meaning. Thus the strategic resistance is that of a refusal of meaning and a refusal of the word - or of the hyperconformist simulation of the very mechanisms of the system, which is a form of refusal and of non-reception."</blockquote><p>
Closed genres, with their multitude of slight variations around what the reader already expects, are a way of producing content without also producing meaning, and are therefore ideal for this strategy. I find this somewhat persuasive since the charge of infantilism never made any sense for what is essentially an adolescent pursuit.<p>
In any case, Baudrillard's concept of the mass leads back to the religious beliefs in reincarnation and demiurgy – in this context, practices of the mass rather than the individual genius. The individually talented writer, like Tolkien, may well feel that they are practicing subcreation, a sort of divinely approved inpiration, and we refer to the judgment of the works of these writers as being up to history, as if they have gone to Heaven. <p>
Reincarnation, on the other hand, is a practice that everyone does, taking roles in turn, with no single act or single life being definitive. Demiurgy in its classic Gnostic context was the individual act of a Demiurge, but in a more ordinary sense is the effort of any creator to make a fictional world that they know will be seriously flawed. As such it can be done by anyone, and is done, as the more than a million novels submitted to Shōsetsuka ni Narō show. It is the task of our time to find a way to value this work as itself, without taking the trouble – in any case impossible – of reading all of it. (3)<p>
Endnotes<p>
1. The Kadokowa ban was supposedly in favor of adult content, since teenage protagonists were also banned. The publisher specified that it had to be a male, adult protagonist, so it may have been a matter of them going for a very specific demographic.<p>
2. American reception of isekai is largely based on anime, for which a common perception is that isekai displaces more varied works (anime is a medium that has works in many different genres) and replaces longer series with a succession of 12-episode ones that often only have a single season. Since isekai is not as closely identified with anime in Japan, I don't know whether this is as much of a cause for backlash there.<p>
3. I have thought about a universally produced art for a much longer time in the context of poetry: in the US, the audience for live poetry events comes perilously close to a 1:1 ratio of writers to readers.
Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-92153202179930044542022-08-15T21:02:00.007-07:002022-09-10T19:29:49.419-07:00Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 4IV. Open publishing<p>
How are isekai works produced? My first experience with them was as anime (as I imagine is most common in America) and I vaguely imagined a staff of professionals, dissatisfied by having to work on them instead of some auteur project, set to writing, drawing, and directing them full time much as American TV is produced.<p>
The truth is much stranger. A large majority of isekai (other than a few precursors) started out as amateur web series or "web novels" published on the Japanese site Shōsetsuka ni Narō ("Let's Become A Novelist"). (Of the well-known series I spot checked, one, _Sword Art Online_, started as a web series published on the writer's own site.) Shōsetsuka ni Narō started in 2004 and lets users post written works, read them for free, and upvote them if they like them. By the late 2000s, isekai became so popular on the site that they were called Narō novels: the term isekai itself was coined around 2012.<p>
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As a result, isekai is a genre of fanfic without a canonical fictional universe (at least, without one that is copyrighted). One of the early popular isekai on Shōsetsuka ni Narō was _The Familiar of Zero_, and it became popular to write other isekai on the site that were fanfic of that work. However, the new genre quickly took as its setting the generalized world of computer RPGs, a setting which can not be copyrighted. In every respect the writers and writing style are fanfic. Fanfic was once defined as being commercially unpublishable because of copyright: now it fuels an entire popular genre. <p>
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Studios and publishers go through the site and pick out the highest voted works, then buy rights to them and start them out in some other branch of mass media. Isekai usually starts as web novels, then become light novels (serial written text with occasional illustrations), then become manga and/or anime, gain other spinoffs like a gag manga, and then with even higher popularity may become a movie, live action film, or computer game. The result is that a publisher risks nothing in the way of initial advances or ongoing payments to keep professional writers writing, the writers are pleased to be published (many seem to write as a sideline to their "real job"), and the work produced is perfectly suited to its audience because that audience is generally the same as the people voting on the site. (1)<p>
This seems to me to be the future of how these kinds of works are produced. One can see something similar with the popular (non-isekai) South Korean Webtoon platform, whose most popular series have started to be published as anime and live action TV series in their own right. It only takes one more historical accident or technology transfer to get science fiction, for example, writing thousands of vaguely Star Trek or Star Wars like (but not copywritable) fanfics on some site and that becoming a main source of English-language SF. In this respect isekai had a boost because its setting, the computer RPG, was familiar to an entire generation yet generic and closed.<p>
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This is not to say that a backlash has not already occured. In the last part of this series I'll get into the reception of isekai and try to tie some of these threads together.<p>
<a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2022/09/open-posts-closed-works-other-worlds.html">next part of the series</a><p>
Endnotes <p>
1) I have no idea whether the voting on the site is fair. There may be the usual problems with using a botnet to mass upvote, payola, having insider connections etc. My sense is that the methods for getting works to medium popularity may be unfair but that the number of legitimate voting users is high enough so that it would be difficult to cheat from there to the top.<p>
2) Images: Shōsetsuka ni Narō site logo, chibi versions of popular isekai characters, a scene from the popular early Webtoon _Noblesse_.Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-41839405059888106282022-08-04T15:33:00.007-07:002022-08-15T21:05:09.171-07:00Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 3III. closed Eco system<p>
Umberto Eco was one of the primary 20th century literary critics writing about open vs closed works. His 1962 book _The Open Work_ described open works as having a large number of possible meanings, using ambiguity and sometimes a degree of formal input by a performer or reader (in terms of rearranging of adding to the text) to allow the reader to create meaning that was not necessarily intended by the author. (In order to keep this lowbrow, I've shown as an example below an early TTRPG module that had blank spaces for some encounters that the DM was supposed to fill in.) Closed works, by design or function, restrict interpretation as much as possible. (1)<p>
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This analysis becomes much more complicated by 1979's book _The Role of the Reader_, after Eco took up semiotics. Here it is taken for granted that some degree of reader interpretation is needed to create meaning for any text. The author foresees a model of the possible reader (which Eco calls the Model Reader), and can in some ways guide the creation of this Model Reader via the text, if only by making them look things up or by discouraging other types of readers from reading it. Readers, on the other hand, create as a kind of hypothesis guided by the text a Model Author, and so decide how to read the text. (2)<p>
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As examples of closed works, Eco turns to Superman comics and Ian Fleming's James Bond novels. "They apparently aim at pulling the reader along a predetermined path, carefully displaying their effects so as to arouse pity or fear, excitement or depression at the due place and at the right moment. [...] They seem to be structured according to an inflexible project. Unfortunately, the only one not to have been 'inflexibly' planned is the reader." (Introduction, pg 8). (3) So the next question: why do people read these texts? Why not just always read more open texts and enjoy the readerly creation of meaning via interpretation? (Adam Roberts asks the same kind of thing in <a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2022/05/addressing-dead.html">his piece on the Wheel of Time books</a>.) Eco offers one of the best if rather obvious answers to this that I've read.<p>
Eco starts his chapter / essay "The Myth of Superman" in The Role of the Reader by giving a very good description of the disintegration of temporality in these comics, done so that Superman can not really accumulate a past that changes him as an archetypal character. Then he goes through "the repertoire of topoi, of recurrent stock situations" that animate popular mystery series. Then: "The attraction of the book, the sense of repose, of psychological extension which it is capable of conferring, lies in the fact that, plopped in an easy chair or in the seat of a train compartment, the reader continually recovers, point by point, what he already knows, what he wants to know again: that is why he has purchased the book." Later: "Is it not also natural that the cultured person who in moments of intellectual tension seeks a stimulus in an action painting or in a piece of serial music should in moments of relaxation and escape (healthy and indispensable) tend towards triumphant infantile laziness and turn to the consumer product for pacification in an orgy of redundance?" We should "show more indulgence towards escape entertainments [...] reproving ourselves for having exercised an acid moralism on what is innocuous and perhaps even beneficial" as long as this does not "[become] the norm of every imaginative activity."<p>
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Eco takes pains with "plopped in an easy chair", "infantile", etc. and his general stance of indulgence to signal that he is a respectable intellectual after all. Reading more of his essays, it becomes apparent that he really likes comics, mysteries, all of these closed forms. His extremely popular first book, _The Name of the Rose_, features a medieval monk who functions as a detective a la Sherlock Holmes, and let's check off the list of libidinal forms listed in the last part of this series for isekai and apply them to Sherlock Holmes. Overt sexuality is unsuitable for the period in which it was written, but power as super-competence, leavened by outsider status and therefore not presenting him as a policeman / bully? Yes. Popularity? Holmes becomes well known to the public over the course of the series, and his close friendship with Dr. Watson is legendary. Creativity? The violin, the experiments in scientific methods of detection. Eco wrote his book with expert worldbuilding, using what he had learned as a scholar of medieval writing, but at its core the same operations occur as in any other closed work of this type. Superhero comics more or less add the overt sexuality back to the other tropes. <p>
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In later essays, as I dimly remember, Eco was less defensive about closed works. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find the particular essay that I remember reading. I remember that he credited someone else with the idea of the "tired mind", the mind that having exhausted itself with intellectual work now needed to read a genre of closed texts where each presented some kind of variation around a core set of expectations, and which therefore could not truly surprise the reader or offer a wholly new experience that would only further deplete the reader's mental energy. This, I believe, is what underlies most SF and fantasy, mysteries, superhero comics, and a host of other popular forms.<p>
Why would Japan have developed such a pure genre of the tired-mind type when the genre is, after all, intended for adolescents? Various cultural factors are at play, but I think it's significant that Japanese middle-to-high school students are famously under stress at school, called on for a peak educational performance that may determine their social-economic possibilities for the rest of their lives. Of course they are, after school, tired minds.<p>
<a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2022/08/open-posts-closed-works-other-worlds_15.html">next part of the series</a><p>
Endnotes<p>
1. Eco uses examples from all sorts of media – text, films, music, paintings – but I became interested in _The Open Work_ when I started writing poetry. The degree of ambiguity is critical to the success of a 20th century poem since it must have enough meaning to connect with the reader's own experience yet not so much that one might as well be writing prose. The core problem I've seen in new writers of poetry is that they have emotional connections to the phrases they've used that make them think that readers will have the same connections, but their writing isn't sufficient to suggest a similar response in someone else.<p>
2. Sometime after 1979 it became commonplace to say that communities of readers create their own communal methods of interpretation. I wouldn't ascribe these kinds of preferred-interpretation-guidance powers to a single author in the vast majority of cases.<p>
3. Eco here offers the kind of reversal that academics do when they return to a topic more than a decade later, after adopting a new disciplinary approach: closed works are now open to any interpretation because they assume only one kind of reader, open works are so complex that they guide all readers who engage with them to a single interpretation. Either this is a too-clever ridiculousness or I've misunderstood it or probably both. In any case what I'd call the Model Publisher of closed works really does not care whether someone reads Superman comics with a different interpretation decades later: their immediate sales are based on whether they are reaching their target readers.<p>
Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-25367617508932287552022-08-02T14:10:00.003-07:002022-08-15T21:07:04.918-07:00Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 2<p>II. A libidinal genre<p>
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Isekai appears as an experiment in how to pack as much libidinal drive as possible into works that also require at least a bare minimum of plot and characterization. Formally, the genre is defined around a character or characters being transported to and living in another world: isekai translates as "different world" or "otherworld". But a core part of any isekai work is Freudian eros – sexuality, power, popularity, creativity. The main characters of isekai therefore sometimes resemble Mary Sues / Gary Stus, but without an authorial self-insertion element: instead the reader or viewer is encouraged to identify with the character. <p>
In terms of medium, isekai can be a novel, a manga, an anime, a video game, or other specialized variants such as light novels. This multi-media nature is a core part of how isekai transforms from fanfic into mass entertainment, a process that I'll describe later on. Isekai are almost always serial in form. <p>
What are the core moves of isekai, in a libidinal sense?<p>
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* Sexuality: the main character must attract the attention of sexually attractive people who want to sleep with them, often for no immediately apparent reason. In the majority of isekai, these are women or girls attracted to a man or boy, but they can be of any gender, as can the main character. Because isekai is in theory made for adolescents, this continual sexual appeal often occurs without any actual sex going on – one of the most unbelievable aspects of the genre, given that the main characters are most often older teenagers.<p>
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* Power: the main character has some potentially world-changing ability and becomes one of the important people in their new world. This can be magical combat strength, contemporary knowledge or technology in a pseudo-medieval setting, unusual capacity for development, fated heroism, super-competence at some activity that is not magical or technological per se, or a wide range of other devices. Crucially, the character almost always starts out as weak in perception or reality, because an always super-powerful character would be perceived as a bully and not invite reader / viewer identification. (1) This weakness is referred to throughout the isekai but is quickly subverted, often right at the beginning of the series.<p>
* Popularity: everyone comes to admire the character, or if they hate the character this is an initial weakness as above. They are not merely individually powerful but are seen to be powerful in society and within forms understandable by that society. Similarly, even if they were previously an isolated, alienated individual they quickly make fast friends and enjoy close companionship.<p>
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* Creativity: killing is part of most isekai, but it is rarely the main expression of enjoyment of power for the main character. The main focus is usually creative: figuring out how to improve a society, discovering magic and researching spells, starting businesses, setting up trade, constructing buildings, cooking.<p>
Within these requirements there are multitude of formal variations. The transition of a character to another world is either done through direct transfer of some kind (commonly, the character is somehow transported into the world of an RPG video game through a malfunction in the game's virtual reality system) or through reincarnation. Any case one can think of within these limits has been attempted: reverse isekai where fantasy characters are transported to our world, the main character as putative villain in the new setting, the main character as super-skilled before reincarnation instead of ordinary, the reincarnation fulfilling some unmet goal in the character's past life or as a manipulation for some sinister purpose. There are often comic elements, including those that play off of the tropes of the genre.<p>
But within this formal variation there is a strange consistency of setting. Most often, the other world is a pseudo-medieval fantasy world that is immediately recognizable as the generic form of a Dungeons & Dragons descended RPG, complete with attack magic, monsters, character classes, and levels. The themes of reincarnation and demiurgy (2) are quite visible: reincarnation is the most common way of transferring a character to another world in isekai, while the most common method used in older stories or other genres (the Urashima Tarō Japanese folk tale, Narnia, some Lovecraft stories) is a door between worlds. Demiurgy is present in that the gods involved in this reincarnation or the creation of the other world almost never have a sense of the numinous: they are played for laughs, for erotic appeal, are fairy-tale guardian spirits, or are relatively friendly antagonists. <p>
This initial recognition of the influence of RPGs is followed by a sense (for someone whose main experience is with TTRPGs) that something is off, that something else has intervened. What has intervened is the role-playing video game form. <p>
Character abilities are not just numericized, they are viewable (via a "status scan" or similar) to the character or others within a world, as they are within most computer games of this type, and as they are not within almost all TTRPGs. Almost all isekai with this setting have an "adventurer's guild" that the characters join which provides posted jobs that the characters can do and offers measured ranks. This is not a common element of TTRPGs, but early video game RPGs had a building like this as a typical form of design because it was a convenient hub for players to progress through the game with some element of choice about which part they did next.<p>
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Why would isekai have descended from computer game RPGs instead of TTRPGs directly? I don't know enough to answer this question: I imagine that it has something to do with how by the time RPGs reached mass popularity in Japan they had mostly migrated to computer form. But they evidently have, and the difference is important because it is a difference between an open and a closed form. (I mean these mostly in a sense derived from Umberto Eco, which I'll get into later.) In a TTRPG, in theory you can do anything, because the entity creating the game world is a person. In a computer game one, you can't: your options are limited by the programming of the game. Even in an MMORPG (massively multiplayer online RPG) like World of Warcraft with 20+ million players, players can talk to each other and even act as communities, but their options are fundamentally set and can not be quickly changed.<p>
A multitude of minor variations within a formally closed and libidinal system: this is the basic design of many popular genres that isekai takes to a limit. In the next part I'll write briefly about Umberto Eco, open vs closed works, and why people enjoy closed works.<p>
<a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2022/08/open-posts-closed-works-other-worlds_4.html">next part of the series</a><p>
Endnotes<p>
1) The process of giving a character with amazing abilities or drive a weakness so they don't appear to be a superhuman might be called "Vorkosiganation" after a character of Lois McMaster Bujold's. That popular SF series neatly pairs its main character's birth to wealth and power with his birth defects that make people regard him as a despised mutant: each book pairs his successful efforts with another serious medical injury. <p>
2) Of course reincarnation is a belief of Buddhist and Shinto religion, and what I refer to as demiurgy might be better expressed through the Shinto idea of kami: spirits that do not have omnipresence, omniscience, or omnipotence. These ideas are not necessarily transmitted to this genre along with the overt RPG baggage: they are part of Japanese culture. There is also a classical line of descent of the idea that is European: for instance in Plato's Republic Book X, Chapter III there is the question of what kind of life you would best choose if reincarnated and the story of how Odysseus wisely chooses to be reborn as a common person. But the element of conscious choice and the retention of knowledge from a previous life also occur in Tibetan Buddhism.<p>
3) Images above: a statue of Eros from Freud's collection, a scene from the isekai _My Life As a Villainess_, an unknown scene that I downloaded and promptly lost the reference to, a scene from the isekai _Restaurant To Another World_, a scene depicting a typical RPG Adventurer's Guild complete with job posting board.<p>
Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-75248215984888148472022-08-01T19:58:00.002-07:002022-08-15T21:08:55.751-07:00Open Posts, Closed Works, Other Worlds: part 1
<br>(a meditation on RPGs, isekai, fanfic, and some ideas of Umberto Eco)
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I. Introduction: religious rites<br><br>
If you are an older person, as I am – or perhaps a younger person in a particular subculture – you may have played what is now called a Table-Top Role Playing Game or TTRPG. At once the terminology betrays that this is already an old phrase. These games used to simply be known as RPGs before home computers made widespread computer gaming possible and they had to be distinguished from role-playing video games. The core and representative example of this kind of game is Dungeons & Dragons, but there are now some people who have played this as a computer game and have never played a tabletop version at all. At any rate, if you've never played one, they are basically what the kids play in _Stranger Things_.
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Really, anyone bothering to read this probably knows what a TTRPG is, or at least can glance at the wiki page. But it's important to distinguish them from other forms of RPGs for reasons that I'll get into later in the series: table-top RPGs are formally open, while computerized forms are more or less closed.<p>
A few years after I started to play what were later called TTRPGs, I realized that these games involve an ersatz form of religious practice. This has nothing to do with the religion(s) *in* the game, which usually involve an invented pantheon that is nevertheless flavored by popular ideas about medieval Christianity. Nor do they have anything to do with the recurring moral panics in the US about the game encouraging Satanism or belief in magic. They have to do with reincarnation and demiurgy.<p>
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First, reincarnation. Play a TTRPG for a while, and eventually your character will die, usually from mischance. What you do then is grieve, and then you roll up a new character – you use the game's creation method to start again with a different persona. Or perhaps the Game Master does not run the kind of game where player characters commonly die, or you don't play a single campaign for that long. In that case whenever you start a new campaign or try a new system, there the character creation step is again. It becomes apparent that this is a kind of play-practice for a form of reincarnation: you yourself perform the part of a soul that sequentially animates a number of imagined bodies. This doesn't mean that TTRPG players end up believing in reincarnation, but it is a form of repeated practice, connected with emotion, that reinforces it as a vague folk idea.<p>
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Next, demiurgy. The Game Master or Dungeon Master in one of these games creates the world, both its original form and as a description of what you sense and what happens in response to everything that you do. This person clearly occupies the place of God for the invented world – not one of the gods within the world-setting, who you can sometimes fight and defeat, but the real creator and animator of everything. At the same time, you are aware that this is an ordinary person, one of your acquaintances or friends, who may be called on to DM for the group because they are somewhat better at it than the rest of you but is not superhuman. Therefore, they are a demiurge, the artisan-creator of a world who is not the real, ultimate creator. Gnosticism, the religious tendency most associated with the idea of a demiurge, usually views the demiurge as either ignorant or misguided: to quote wiki "his act of creation occurs in an unconscious semblance of the divine model, and thus is fundamentally flawed, or else is formed with the malevolent intention of entrapping aspects of the divine in materiality."<p>
These two religious ideas are transmitted in latent form through every descendent of the table-top RPG, including the descendent genre known as isekai. In this process they travel from a small-scale communal medium to a mass media product that notably starts out as fanfic, a form of fanfic that is publishable because it has escaped copyrighted characters in favor of an uncopyrighted setting. Isekai reveals something about how a set of creative problems in mass culture have been solved, beginning with the RPG in the mid-1970s.<p>
<a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2022/08/open-posts-closed-works-other-worlds_2.html">next part of the series</a><p>
End notes:<p>
1) I've written some scattered text about the general case of demiurgy as it applies to fiction, especially science fiction or fantasy where the writer creates the world as well as the characters that inhabit it. Most of this was written more than 20 years ago and hardly seems worth recovering. In general, the creation of a fictional world is referred to in one of three ways depending on whether it's given positive, neutral, or negative valence: subcreation, worldbuilding, or demiurgy. (Subcreation is Tolkien's word, which makes it very well studied: worldbuilding is what people teach when you take an SF writing course.)<p>
2) I was unsure where to start with this set of ideas but decided that RPGs made the best starting point. It is not chronologically the earliest form out of the set (RPGs, isekai, fanfic): isekai might be considered to have started earlier if you include texts like C.S. Lewis' _Narnia_ books or Michael Moorcock's _Eternal Champion_ (I don't: I think the genre as such is Japanese) and fanfic has been in existence for as long as published fiction and notably took on its contemporary meaning with _Star Trek_ fanfic in the late 1960s.<p>
3) The illustration I've chosen for the demiurge is a character actually named Demiurge from the popular isekai _Overlord_: it's probably fan art but I got it from google image search and I'm not sure how to credit it. Crediting fan work is one of the important problems that the makers of isekai managed to address.
Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-43062546635353458712022-05-30T20:45:00.008-07:002022-05-30T20:58:34.366-07:00Addressing the dead<p>Adam Roberts, <i>Sibilant Fricative: Essays & Reviews</i> (2014)</p>
<p>(attention warning: this is only about Adam Roberts' book in a tangential and self-indulgent sense)</p>
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<p><blockquote>"Boo! Now the only time I'll get to read you is when I buy your books, which I can't do, because they're not on the Kindle. Boo!" -- blog comment, SEK 30 June 2012 12:42:00 GMT-7</blockquote></p>
<p>1. Rohan Maitzen, <i>The Worth of our Work</i> (2012)</p>
<p><a href="https://rohanmaitzen.com/tag/los-angeles-review-of-books/">https://rohanmaitzen.com/tag/los-angeles-review-of-books/</a></p>
<p>This quite good blog post sets out the basics of what happened: Adam Roberts decided to close down one of his blogs in order to publish collected excerpts from it as a book. (Future textual critics may be confused: the blog closed down was called Punkadiddle, the book of excerpts from Punkaiddle was called Sibilant Fricative, and a new blog of essays and reviews was started that was also called Sibilant Fricative.). The post quickly gets into the basic matter at hand: why should anyone write anything?</p>
<p>There are almost immediate complications. By "close down", Roberts didn't mean that he was merely not writing on that blog any more and perhaps closing comments: he also deleted the blog posts themselves in an effort not to affect sales of the book. As a result, all of the links in Rohan Maitzen's first paragraph are broken. Perhaps that doesn't matter because after all these pieces made it into the book? It is true that Roberts' posts about Robert Jordan's <i>Wheel of Time</i> were the most popular posts on the blog, and were printed in the book, but Maitzen goes on "As a Victorianist, though, I found posts like <a href="http://punkadiddle.blogspot.ca/2008/12/g-k-chesterton-charles-dickens-1906.html">this one</a> of the greatest value to <a href="http://www.openlettersmonthly.com/novelreadings/the-antiquary-a-treasurehouse-of-details-but-an-indifferent-whole"> my own thinking</a>." What is that cryptic first link? Something about G.K. Chesterton and Charles Dickens, and therefore not reprintable in a book of science fiction and fantasy essays and reviews.</p>
<p>The core sentence here -- quoted in Maitzen's blog post, from Adam Roberts' blog post -- is "If the sort of thing I write is worth paying for then I’m a mug to give it away for free; and if it isn’t worth paying for (of course a great deal of online writing isn’t) then I’m wasting everyone’s time, including my own, carrying on."</p>
<p>There are clear problems with this, but -- wait, there's a quote by one Rich Puchalsky, which reads "It’s very easy for people to say that the value of an activity is not measured in what it earns… but part of the monetization of attention is that yes, really, it is hard to say whether written work that people don’t pay for is valued." I seem to have agreed, but this doesn't quite sound like all I would write: I must have written something else as well.</p>
<p>Of course most of this material is not really *gone* in a final sense. I went to the Internet Archive, I navigated their horrible calendar interface, and found:</p>
<p><a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20140821200721/http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2012/06/end.html">https://web.archive.org/web/20140821200721/http://punkadiddle.blogspot.com/2012/06/end.html</a></p>
<p>And there it is, if you scroll down to the 10th comment: the quote above, prefaced by "it's a continuous question as to whether I should be participating in blogging / commenting at all". This, in an American idiom, should perhaps be called "joshing", and it means "If you're wasting your time by carrying on writing things that people won't pay for, think of what mugs we must be for writing comments on things that people won't pay for." </p>
<p>Because of course writing-about-writing is, in contemporary terms, primarily a fan activity. People do it because it's fun and they are interested in the material, not because of the horrible monetization of everything that our society tries to impose. The most characteristic form of fan writing, the fanfic, is completely unpublishable for money because it violates intellectual property rights (with rare exceptions such as <i>50 Shades of Grey,</i> originally a <i>Twilight </i>fanfic.) People attempt to escape monetization by doing precisely things like this, and while (as Rohan Maitzen quotes Tom Lutz) "the future for every writer requires food", a writer who wrote purely out of determination to make money would find much easier paths to this end. Non-hack writers seem to write because they want to write, and continue writing even when not paid.</p>
<p>And this seems true of Adam Roberts as well. In other places (citation needed), he has mentioned that writing down things on a blog somewhere is a part of his process, and it seems probable to me that he's going to continue doing it even with no one fronting the bills. The immediate continuation of Sibilant Fricative the blog is a case in point. A second and soon a third book of essays and reviews have been published from this blog, with the blog posts ceremoniously deleted once published, and so it goes.</p>
<p>Web publication is a form of publication, and the replacement of a Web publication in favor of book publication is a kind of death: the traces of a community replaced by a fossilized object. This is what our society does to everything: dead labor becomes a commodity, dead trees become paper, dead links become a internet archive that is now critical for the functioning of society but must be supported as a wealthy person's hobby because after all it does not make money.</p>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<p><blockquote>"I heard something about what you’re going through, and is there any way I can help distract you? If you want to be distracted." -- Email from rpuchalsky1@gmai.com to scotterickaufman@gmail.com, sent Nov 19, 2016</blockquote></p>
<p>2. Rich Puchalsky, <i>Yawnpiphany</i>, 2009</p>
<p><a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2009/02/yawnpiphany.html">http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2009/02/yawnpiphany.html</a></p>
<p>As a work of SF criticism I think that this holds up, although it also has highly cringy phrases like "strapping your inner fanboy down <i>Clockwork Orange</i> style". Why would a reasonably skilled SF writer purposefully write a boring book? If SF is the literature of ideas, then the only way to rebel is to be anti-ideas. If fantasy is about adventure, then the way to iconoclasm is anti-adventure.</p>
<p>This idea was sparked by the parody neologisms in Adam Roberts' piece on Neil Stephanson's <i>Anathem</i>, which includes"yawngasm". This piece is in the Sibilant Fricative book, it's one of the better ones, and the neologisms are still there, some used in other essays in the book and, really, of use in general SF criticism. </p>
<p>But this is not the core puzzle in <i>Sibilant Fricative. </i>The core puzzle is about the boring books that were *not* written for aesthetic effect. Bad writers exist and some write boring books, but why do these get published and, in some cases, become extremely popular?</p>
<p>Adam Roberts suggests an explanation, credited to someone else, in the section on Robert Jordan's <i>Wheel of Time</i>. (Though the piece on <i>Wheel of Time</i> comes at the end, it's the core of the book). This is a well-known syndrome in which an author first writes something relatively good or at least competent, which becomes popular, then the writer extends this to a series which becomes progressively less edited and more stretched out as they keep the profitable content alive at all costs. One can hardly fail to see this in George R.R. Martin's <i>Song of Ice and Fire </i>books, J.K. Rowling's Harry Potter books, or you prefer film the Star Wars movies and their following prequels. </p>
<p>This is part of it. But part of it is that boredom is what, in many cases, readers are looking for. I refer to the "tired mind".</p>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<p><blockquote>"Why do we become intellectual masochists when suffering from mental fatigue?" -- <a href="https://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/02/duped_by_fools_.html">https://acephalous.typepad.com/acephalous/2006/02/duped_by_fools_.html</a>, 2006</blockquote></p>
<p>3. The shadow of the waxwing</p>
<p>In exasperation at his own masochistic decision to read through thousands of pages of the <i>Wheel of Time</i> books, Adam Roberts writes that he understands the desire to escape (pg. 254):</p>
<p><blockquote>"We're all a bit ground down by life, I know. We all want to get a little drunk, from time to time, so as to ameliorate the grind, to step through the portal to somewhere more appealing. But getting drunk doesn't have to mean sitting on a park bench with a 2-litre plastic bottle of strong cider. It is possible to get something more refined from the experience. [...] With books <i>the difference in quality is not reflected in the cover price!</i> Maybe it should be. Maybe it <i>ought </i>to cost 1.99 to buy a Robert Jordan novel and and 45.99 to buy a Vladimir Nabokov one. But it doesn't! Amazingly, it doesn't! There is nothing stopping you going for the higher quality experience! Honestly!"</blockquote></p>
<p>But there really is. I suggest that Adam Roberts is clearly an unusually prolific writer and reader and is not well qualified to judge from his own experience. I'll try not to generalize from my own experience, but it is inconceivable that I could simply read through all of Vladimir Nabokov's books. I have read two of Vladimir Nabokov's books decades ago, and I still think about them whenever something calls them to mind. I could scarcely dare to just jam a third one in there: who knows what would happen. No, I spend most of my days researching and thinking about how global warming is steadily destroying life on Earth, and when I'm done with that I don't want to really think at all. I want to read something that is completely predictable and will not surprise me, especially not with some kind of unpredictable aesthetic effect. Currently I'm reading R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt books, which hold my interest well enough in the half hour before I fall asleep.</p>
<p>Of course, no one who would be reading this could subsist on endless, interchangeable descriptions of Drow matron mother plottings alone. Some kind of stretch is required sometimes, even if one doesn't feel up to Nabokov's oeuvre. This is why I read Adam Roberts: his books have structure yet are not clones of each other. This lack of predictability is one of the reasons why they are not fit for occupying the tired mind, and really most of us are most often tired minds.</p>
<br>
<hr>
<br>
<p><blockquote>"That's real money for him, which you've denied by passively looking for his books." -- blog comment, SEK June 25, 2010 at 2:24 PM</blockquote></p>
<p>4. Rich Puchalsky, <i>Coda</i> (2010)</p>
<p><a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2010/06/coda.html">http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2010/06/coda.html</a></p>
<p>This piece does not work. Nothing happens, the end is wincingly male-gaze (sparked by Adam Roberts' comment that in the later books of <i>Wheel of Time</i> Robert Jordan really likes to depict women who like to be spanked), the whole best left unlinked even here. Even the comments concern an attempt at joshing, once again, that did not work. </p>
<p>Will any of these references still be comprehensible when you read this? They are still there as of May 30, 2022, but of course at some future time link rot will take them. This piece itself may last somewhat longer. But of course it will certainly never be published in the traditional sense. Even if it is archived, it will not remain meaningful.</p>
<p>I bought a copy of Adam Roberts' book <i>Sibilant Fricative</i> in 2022 because someone decided to make a TV series out of Robert Jordan's <i>Wheel of Time</i>, and Adam Roberts' blog posts about it were gone from the Web and I wanted to see if they held up now that there was a somewhat coherent TV series to set out the derivative story. In the main, they did. I laughed a good deal at the joke about how Perrin should be nicknamed Reginald, because of <i>The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin, </i>although probably fewer and fewer people will now get that reference. It's uneven, but basically a good book. You should buy it.</p><p><br /></p><p> </p>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-29471060890632478032021-05-31T11:20:00.000-07:002021-05-31T11:21:04.503-07:00global warming activism II (a poem)<p> black-swooping over a land of no ice</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I will reincarnate as a corvid</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">(don't know what kind nature will provide)</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I will fly and see your body lying bloated</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">I will alight and eat your eyes</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">in compassion I will feed and they will be gone</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">no one will ever again see as you did</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">did you hide in a bunkered place?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">that lasted you for years the door too thick for pounding</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">then you died and got thrown out,</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">a body will smell up a dead place fast</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">and there it lies outside</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">nothing particular about eyes</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">just easiest to pull out, skin is tougher</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">did you die innocent outside?</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">poor soul none of us are innocent</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">you scrabbled then your kids killed you</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">after all you cursed their lives first</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">and they left you uncovered</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">nothing particular really about how we see</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">all of us saw the world the same way</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;"><br /></p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">only one life is pledged though</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">being a corvid doesn't seem bad</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">but only one life to remove this way of seeing</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">then go on and let it go, let it rot in the heat</p><p style="margin-bottom: 0in;">and fly and see something else at last</p>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-33845901536783896622020-08-21T09:42:00.003-07:002020-08-21T09:42:36.771-07:00Solar / Lunar<p style="text-align: left;">
Rooftop ripples<br>
Sun swings lazy<br>
Down the gleaming gutter<br>
And the tiles hot<br>
Baking brittle, peeling<br>
Chimney a squat idol<br>
Golden brick worship<br>
<br>
Sidewalk snail<br>
Walking along slow<br>
Heat rising<br>
Concrete cracks<br>
In rectangular pattern<br>
Step step look down<br>
<br>
Sea-bird swirl<br>
Over the salt wind the silica<br>
Beach blanket<br>
Rough-weave, grainy<br>
Glistening glare<br>
Of the sun-bake<br>
Low wind whisper<br>
</p>
<p style="text-align: center;">–- 'in the context of some art we must disintegrate and be reconnected with the passion of destruction' --</p>
<p style="text-align: right;">
The moon's rare sinuousness<br>
I can’t put my hand on it<br>
Unearthly. It’s unearthly<br>
How it looks warm and buttery from far<br>
“A bit of handiwork – and he destroys the moon!”<br>
But it always came back somehow<br>
<br>
When I was young I thought about sight<br>
A ground plan that burns and gnaws<br>
Down all the formless places<br>
<br>
what happens when<br>
The sun goes down again? The pattern wears,<br>
It's gone, no sudden flare will bring it back<br>
The words where I scraped away the white part<br>
<br>
(history shown to the sun looking on)<br>
Autumn wind blows through my sleeve<br>
Fallen and windblown, I can return to the fixed stars<br>
</p>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-35174644028544707522020-04-09T11:27:00.001-07:002020-04-09T11:29:53.660-07:00In a time of the plaquewalking in the park I<br>
cleverly avoid the pave<br>
pinecones crunching under<br>
foot ant hills a resolute<br>
few inches apart their<br>
definition and industry<br>
somehow a shock<br>
the surround sound of<br>
twitter and caw<br>
all of that breeding<br>
and working and<br>
here is a bench<br>
in memory of<br>
someone wait if<br>
I touch that plaque<br>
I can't my face<br>
your memory or my face<br>
and wet sneakers<br>
as I walk back<br>
on the sodden grassRich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-10160693287113362502017-10-20T16:42:00.002-07:002017-10-21T16:24:46.922-07:00A bit more on left thesesBack in July, Bruce Wilder wrote a comment in reply to the post below. I wrote an answer which promptly and discouragingly got lost, but I'll write a bit more now, as well as some replies to other comments.<p>
First, on fatuousness. Ideology is supposed to be more or less fatuous. What we need now is a system of belief that is actually widely believed: I wrote it as an outline because I think that those are the major elements that are required. Going into too much justification doesn't help. The "predictably produces" bit wasn't meant to be a claim of historical inevitability, only an observation that whatever supposedly differing choices are being made in different places now are leading to the same outcome everywhere.<p>
The main point I'd make in reply is that ecological value can't really be our gold, because it's not tradable or exchangeable. Human work can not replace or make up for ecological work. If the reports of 75% of insect biomass going away are accurate and represent a widespread rather than local effect, there's no way we can work to make up for that, no way we can say that we'll exchange lower insect biomass for greater something else. We can try to stop doing whatever we're doing that's causing that effect, but that isn't an exchange: it's us trying to get out of the way of a disaster. Even in less fraught circumstances, you can't do things like say that we'll make up for taking more from an ecosystem over here by taking less over there: ecosystems don't generally work that way.<p>
Money does loosely coordinate over scale, but that mechanism is exactly one of the things we should give up. The coordination is not very loose, as evidenced by the observation that we're in a world-system that is producing the same results everywhere despite local differences.
<p>
What would coordinate? Culture, essentially. The post below has a heading for "Societal values" where I was going to write something about how you can't very well have an anarchistic system (which this would be) unless people widely believe in it. The chicken-and-egg problem of how this would come about is best handled elsewhere, but cultural values are coordination over large distances.<p>
Lastly there was another comment about how the left is based on universalist grounds... I don't see what can be more universal than the fact that we all live on and depend on a single planet whose systems are increasingly stressed by all of us. That is why US style "libertarianism" -- not liberators socialism, but the right-wing version -- is so attracted to science fictional dreams. Elon Musk describes his position as "I'm somewhere in the middle, socially liberal and fiscally conservative" and so can be taken as a representative of a type, and he would like Mars colonies. Why? Because that really is the only way to separate oneself from the universal community at this point.Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-43185106338337542582017-07-23T08:44:00.000-07:002017-07-23T08:47:05.134-07:00Theses towards a left ideologyIt's common, on the left, to talk about historical materialism without acknowledging that the primary theories that the left uses have no connection to our contemporary era or its material conditions. Here are my best ideas to correct that.<br>
<br>
1. Ecological value<br>
<br>
a) The primary constraint on human economics is the production of ecological value: powered primarily through solar energy and processed through biomass. <br>
<br>
b) Ecological processes are what create and maintain our air, water, and food. They can not be replaced by human labor. They are not "natural resources" but products of cycles with limited replacement times and limited surpluses.<br>
<br>
c) All human value depends, in the end, on ecological value. We can't live without it, and no human labor can take place without it.<br>
<br>
d) The primary surplus that capitalism, as well as state capitalism, feeds on and appropriates and changes into human value is ecological surplus.<br>
<br>
e) No future left ideology can succeed unless it internalizes the maintenance of ecological value as an ideal and constraint<br>
<br>
2. Democracy and scale<br>
<br>
a) Representative democracy is the primary reproductive and maintenance mode of late capitalism. It predictably produces the exact results that we see around us now.<br>
<br>
b) Large state structures run non-democratically also predictably produce those same results, but with extra misery. Even idealized, democratic left states would make popular decisions that, when averaged over millions of people, are predictably bad. See "ecological value" above, but also racism, xenophobia etc.<br>
<br>
c) The best way of making decisions is to limit the decisions to the people closely or strongly affected by them. Large-scale decisions have to be minimized.<br>
<br>
d) What scale counts as small? From the beginning of the Western political tradition, we know that even city-states are too large. Probably best is groups of less than 100 people.<br>
<br>
e) The anarchist idea of confederalism is an attempt at small-scale democracy with some degree of large-scale coordination. The main element of what needs to be coordinated is built infrastructure, which is the main limit on what people can do.<br>
<br>
3. Work and money<br>
<br>
a) Human labor is no longer a limiting factor of production. We have more than we need, and there is no particular power in withholding it.<br>
<br>
b) All attempts to call on person power as worker power are going to fail, and fail counterproductively, in part because being a prole is now a social identity that puts someone a step up from the class of lumpenproles, and more and more of us are lumpenproles. These two classes have different interests and can no more naturally cooperate than elites and proles do.<br>
<br>
c) For this reason a social revolution requires devaluing work. We don't need everyone to do it: most of it is useless or ecologically harmful. Wage labor should be phased out through shortened workweeks until it disappears: people who believe in the value of work can do it, with most necessities provided through automation.<br>
<br>
d) In a world where necessities can be provided to everyone, there is no reason to use money. Money only results in ridiculous situations like less than 20 people having half of the world's amount of it. Let's abolish it and educate people not to replace it with a new money system.<br>
<br>
e) Without money, there is no real reason to forbid people from doing whatever kind of economic activity they want to do. If they pile up a big pile of some kind of valuable material, someone will eventually take it, and non-violently taking something that someone can't possibly use should not be a crime.<br>
<br>
4. Societal values (in progress)Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-55491474359783442872017-07-12T18:30:00.000-07:002017-07-12T18:30:31.074-07:00Eyeroller: a short comedy in three acts I haven't been blogging much lately: I've been Tweeting. But given the recent back-and-forth over the NY Magazine climate change article and the instant suggestions about individual volunteerism e.g. that people should have fewer kids if they want to do something, I think it's time to repost this short play. (Originally from <a href="http://crookedtimber.org/2015/06/25/an-optimistic-view-on-climate-change/#comment-634572">Crooked Timber comments</a>.)<br>
<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: A short comedy in three acts<br>
<br>
Act I:<br>
<br>
FIRST PERSON: “I put solar panels on my roof. That cost a lot! Why are people always scolding people for not doing more? They should encourage them instead.”<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “Micro-decisions about personal consumption or production will have no real effect, even en masse. The only purpose in talking about them is to give people something useless to do so that they can feel like they’re doing something.”<br>
<br>
SECOND PERSON: “Of course you should tell people to put solar panels on roofs. That pressures the “market signals” to expand production and to further innovation, encourages politicians to get on board, etc., among other complex responses.”<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “OK.. If we’re going to talk about complex responses and signals, let’s talk about what other signals the act of putting solar panels on your roof sends. It says that you’re interested in volunteerism, not collective action: it tells the market that you want middle-class equipment, not large-scale equipment.”<br>
<br>
THIRD PERSON: “What? That’s unworthy. How could you say that putting up solar panels makes things worse?”<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “Well, it might, and anyways if people invest in personal middle class solutions, they’re not going to want to also invest in community solutions.”<br>
<br>
FORUTH PERSON: “Wait. Did you just say that I should have spent my money on the poor rather than putting solar panels up?”<br>
<br>
<i>(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)</i><br>
<br>
Act II<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “We’re stuck inside a neoliberal system within which all messages get turned into messages about personal consumption and personal virtue based on consumption, even if they weren’t intended that way. It becomes impossible to say anything about incentive structures without this being interpreted as whether personal decisions are good or bad, or anything about whether putting solar panels up or not is really a good idea overall without this being interpreted as a personal attack on people who put up solar panels.”<br>
<br>
FIFTH PERSON: “You described reducing overall energy use as a kind of Puritanism, but we need to reduce overall energy use so what’s wrong with using Puritanism to do that? It mobilizes certain limbic system anchors for collective social behaviors you need, like the appeal of common sacrifice as a form of civic action and the kind of righteousness you need for altruistic punishment of deviants.”<br>
<br>
<i>(EYEROLLER looks disconcerted.)</i><br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “Puritanism and its focus on individual virtue is part of this, yes. Are you sure that’s a good idea? Once you start mobilizing limbic system anchors for righteousness to punish deviants, it’s pretty difficult to control –“<br>
<br>
THIRD PERSON: “Are you saying I’m a goody-goody? I want you to apologize.”<br>
<br>
<i>(EYEROLLER rolls eyes.)</i><br>
<br>
Act III<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “One more time. You can reach a kind of limiting case in which certain messages become literally unintelligible. Even if someone starts out thinking that they are doing public health work, how is the public going to interpret that? The public is going to see it as another opportunity for personal status competition–“<br>
<br>
THIRD PERSON: “Are you trying to trash my reputation?”<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “– everything comes back to a discussion of personal virtue and who has it, personal decisions and whether those are moral decisions –“<br>
<br>
SECOND PERSON: “So you’re saying that people who put up solar panels are just motivated by feelings of moral superiority?”<br>
<br>
EYEROLLER: “– and any kind of system critique can only be heard as personal critique — “<br>
<br>
THIRD PERSON: “I have an orientation to public health in my work, and certainly that would never turn into just sanctioning people who didn’t agree with the program! Now talk about this how I want you to or I’ll tell the moderators on you.”<br>
<br>
<i>(EYEROLLER rolls eyes, but has a muscle spasm part way through, eyes pointing in different directions.)</i><br>
<br>
EYEROLLER (in Captain Kirk tones): “FACE… FROZEN! Can’t stop … rolling eyes! CAN’T! STOP! ROLLING! EYES!”<br>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-83757490041551390112017-03-09T11:18:00.001-08:002017-03-09T11:18:38.230-08:00Scott Eric Kaufman (poem)
Youth needs its cyborg identity<br>
tap the fingers, keys,<br>
the mouse runs<br>
each click a heaping of coal<br>
burned, somewhere the ice cap shudders<br>
the CRT glow<br>
imposing on the body<br>
every reality in monochrome<br>
<br>
The rockets go up, you see<br>
Are they acts? What if<br>
if<br>
they never came down?<br>
Hung, sparklelike, webs in air<br>
Is that system?<br>
Does it demand<br>
A fall?<br>
<br>
Looking back<br>
(the cyborg runs, headless)<br>
the debris lies there,<br>
smells of gunpowder<br>
in the green-glow<br>
Looking back, tapping,<br>
For one last unfired<br>Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com1tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-85229400972270377372017-01-29T11:36:00.002-08:002017-01-29T11:36:41.934-08:00Geographical base of US protestThe fixation on social media obscures this, but protest in the US is strongly geographically linked. Other than the rare international meetings or major political conventions that activist networks make an effort to bring people to from a wide area, the kind of horizontalist movements that are the main mode of contemporary protest rely on people who don't have to travel a long distance. Even something like the NoDAPL Sacred Stone Camp, which attracts people from far away, is organized around a base of indigenous people who live there.
<p>
The airport protests around the Muslim Ban are a case in point. They sprung up quickly, without much leadership. This type of protest is made to order for the left, because large international airports tend to be located near large cities. Just as Occupy started with Occupy Wall St., the airport protests seem to have started at JFK. And the largest ones are near instantly recognizable left strongholds.
<p>
I looked at a list of large international airports in the US, and there are about 30 of them. I tried to match them to a reported list of airport protests. There are three large cities -- NYC, DC, and Chicago -- that seem to have an under-protested airport because they have two large airports each and protests focussed on one of them. But otherwise, my impression is that the area with a number of large airports that isn't reliably blue enough to have large protests is Florida.
<p>
The geographic base of protests has good elements and bad. It makes it easy for horizontally organized protest to start in NYC. It makes it difficult for protest to spread to the areas of the country that most need it. It means that left-leaning areas can get a lot of media, but makes them less aware of the attitudes of people elsewhere.
<p>
But the major problem is that it represents a vulnerability. As with OWS, when a protest in NYC gets repressed, the penumbra goes away -- people outside don't have the ability to sustain a national or international movement. That's something that people have to think about.Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-76539572643216931792017-01-28T09:30:00.002-08:002017-01-28T14:08:03.545-08:00After Langston Hughes<br>
Some swear “America will be!”<br>
What has America been to me?<br>
Parents' parents came here bereft<br>
Found a better place than they left<br>
And here almost a century<br>
We’ve lingered – yet eventually<br>
We will move on. Is this a dream<br>
Better, greater than those we’ve seen?<br>
<br>
Should we have stayed in Babylon?<br>
Settled in the empire of Rome?<br>
Converted to the faith of Spain?<br>
Upheld the Tsar, not left again?<br>
<br>
Langston says we must redeem<br>
The rotting flower of the dream<br>
The beauty that hides in its bloom<br>
Our Leader and our own rape rooms<br>
Can America be made real?<br>
Hasn’t by now, it never will<br>
Always ahead, that’s what I’ve heard:<br>
What happens to a dream deferred?<br>
<br>
This place is mighty crush the weak<br>
A dream is not the world we seek<br>
What our history has made clear<br>
You die for dreams: you aren't hereRich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-32560231238787239202017-01-19T12:15:00.002-08:002017-01-20T18:18:17.760-08:00About #theresistanceThere's a Twitter hashtag / meme / whatever: "#theresistance". At first glance it appears, mostly, to be a vehicle for ex-GOP current Dem people like Frum and Brock to continue to try to keep influential positions by making the alternative to Trump be a neocon one, using the techniques of manufactured outrage that doesn't go anywhere that they learned in the GOP.
<p>
But there are some people with similar ideas who are well-meaning and sincere. For instance, here is an article by B Sales-Lee: <a href="https://medium.com/@BrookeSalesLee/keep-calm-and-protect-democracy-9fca7e196106#.ohoa6f4sy">Keep Calm and Protect Democracy</a>. It has the characteristic combination of two assumptions (or, in this case, what are presented as the professional judgements of a historian): 1) we're close to fascism, or at least close to authoritarian martial law; 2) we best prevent this in the short term by being calm and not breaking the rules. Further characteristics not present in the Sales-Lee article are that the goal of this resistance to fascism is implicitly or explicitly to put things back to how they were, back to "functioning democracy" and "functioning government" and generally back to the neoliberal order as it was under Obama, either because this is good in itself or because it is a lesser evil way station on the way to better things.
<p>
I have my doubts about whether Trump is really going to lead us to authoritarian martial law or fascism or however you'd like to describe it. He's a very unpopular and in many ways standard GOP politician, promising to do many of the things that Reagan promised and could not do. As Corey Robin has been writing, it's quite conceivable that plain political opposition will stop him. #theopposition doesn't have the glamour of #theresistance, of course.
<p>
But let's say he is. People are then taking the position that fascism is fast approaching and that we'd better be polite about it. This I just don't understand. It only works if you can get everyone to be polite, but of course you can't, so it predictably ends up with liberals as the "peace police": enforcing their standard of behavior on others and finally turning them in to the police or not supporting them when arrested in order to save us from fascism. (B. Sales-Lee, I should note, isn't a liberal, but rather a pacifist socialist.)
<p>
I really don't have a problem with the center-left saying that Trump is a very bad GOP pol and that we have to oppose him through normal political methods. There are always some people playing the "inside game" in politics, and that's their role. But if that's really what they are going to do, they should stop presenting themselves as resisting imminent fascism, because they aren't. Or if they do really think there's imminent fascism, then they have to recognize that this will in most people's minds demand actions that they aren't comfortable with. I think that a lot of the lower-level #theresistance talk is from people who are realizing that the Democratic party will not do even ordinary political opposition, so they are trying to ramp up expectations rhetorically.
<p>
There is one thing, though -- actual resistance is dangerous. I don't see why anyone should do it if the goal is to, explicitly or implicitly, return to the neoliberal order. That same order created the conditions that made Trump possible as a political leader in the first place, and if we return to it, those conditions will return and we'll get a worse Trump. An actual resistance has to be based around shared values that would not lead to a return to that order. Until people in the center-left are ready to treat the left as serious interlocutors rather than as encumbrances on the way towards putting everything back as it was, those shared values are impossible to work out.
<p>
ETA --
<h2>Tally of the day</h2>
3/4 of National Mall empty, in part due to checkpoint blockades<br>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1fmYk87W000-I7MziDOejlbSyJjxBIug5QdACbFaagRC229ROYYLvkKyyBetg7rgcPM0xAJB2dOkFxxcdckiT-V-TGJUa4mOVRHhaCnpm4Qrke0M1Yf6jVMHR6uN_4EaT1339rUeCMWgO/s1600/Screen_Shot_2017_01_20_at_11.04.49_AM.png" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEg1fmYk87W000-I7MziDOejlbSyJjxBIug5QdACbFaagRC229ROYYLvkKyyBetg7rgcPM0xAJB2dOkFxxcdckiT-V-TGJUa4mOVRHhaCnpm4Qrke0M1Yf6jVMHR6uN_4EaT1339rUeCMWgO/s320/Screen_Shot_2017_01_20_at_11.04.49_AM.png" width="320" height="175" /></a><br>
1 limo burned<br>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcdfLhfuSlbzj5CYAcOGM3w8PQsvlx7SMjdXYqH2G38gPeOztUM_kth5AH90v918UUtnQwTQbPnuqbFyhQHRSxSBAnD1sdSK8jJdc329g0pfKSyn3lC-AkvdW0ptbHXI6_J8E4qJAq3YvE/s1600/C2pQ6D4XAAE0aYr.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhcdfLhfuSlbzj5CYAcOGM3w8PQsvlx7SMjdXYqH2G38gPeOztUM_kth5AH90v918UUtnQwTQbPnuqbFyhQHRSxSBAnD1sdSK8jJdc329g0pfKSyn3lC-AkvdW0ptbHXI6_J8E4qJAq3YvE/s320/C2pQ6D4XAAE0aYr.jpg" width="320" height="240" /></a><br>
1 Nazi leader punched (didn't want to embed the GIF, you can find it easily enough)<br>
<a href="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDJpL7UTuZLVzxi6zUZKkrxO7wB69wd7ExYGJsGumSmmExKJby-cXS6n8bykI7LMm8uMV85PcEYKV2dSt-dDtsH6OUpHy4DJobMinRW8l92fVveYhpePu3nM9brlokB1HCyf1ZXc9LagzL/s1600/captain-america-hitler.jpg" imageanchor="1" ><img border="0" src="https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEhDJpL7UTuZLVzxi6zUZKkrxO7wB69wd7ExYGJsGumSmmExKJby-cXS6n8bykI7LMm8uMV85PcEYKV2dSt-dDtsH6OUpHy4DJobMinRW8l92fVveYhpePu3nM9brlokB1HCyf1ZXc9LagzL/s320/captain-america-hitler.jpg" width="320" height="213" /></a><br>
<br>
0 declarations of martial law
Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-76854938979497026012017-01-11T08:41:00.000-08:002017-01-11T08:46:20.907-08:00The Buzzfeed leaked document<p>Buzzfeed has leaked the <a href="https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/3259984/Trump-Intelligence-Allegations.pdf">dossier on Trump</a> supposedly compiled by a former British intelligence person for election opposition research purposes. This document is apparently the ur-source of all of the claims that Russians have compromising material on Trump, that he is a Russian agent, etc. -- the David Corn article, the Reid letter, the supposed FBI investigation, etc. There's just one basic problem with this dossier. Anyone who reads it, rather than summarizing its contents, has to realize that it's crazy. It's not just "unverified" or "unsubstantiated" or "contains errors" or whatever the latest weasel words are: it's kook-conspiratorial and I defy anyone to read through it without laughing, preserving their sense of its credibility to the end. If, as Buzzfeed claims, this is the document that everyone has been looking at, then the system is full of credulous fools.
<p>
Here are some of the assertions in the document:
<p>* That the Kremlin has been feeding Trump intelligence on his opponents, including HRC, for years. (Who were his opponents for the years before he even decided to run?) And offering him deniable bribes as real estate deals. But he apparently never used any of this information or took any of these deals.
<p>* People don't go into details of the "golden showers" thing, because they are so ridiculous. The core compromising material that the Kremlin is supposed to have on Trump is that he specifically stayed in a Presidential suite at a hotel because Obama had stayed there and because he disliked Obama, and then defiled it by hiring prostitutes to perform a golden shower show in it (which the Russians secretly videoed). In other words, it wasn't even that he just secretly liked this fetish, it was supposed to be also that he was insulting Obama.
<p>* Trump was supposed to be actively participating in gathering intelligence for the Russians by reporting back on the activities of the families of Russian oligarchs living in the US. Just imagine this for a minute.
<p>* Trump also participated by hiring his own hackers, in addition to the Russian hackers, and by having moles in the DNC. Trump's known associates (his lawyer, etc.) are supposed to have had multiple, personal meetings with Russian agents in Europe. One doc in the dossier is titled "Further Details of Secret Dialogue Between Trump Campaign Team, Kremlin, and Assorted Hackers in Prague".
<p> * Trump's team is "happy to have Russia as media bogeyman to mask more extensive corrupt ties to China"
<p> * There are various tells, within the document, that it comes from a kook right-wing source. It's anti-Semitic -- one assertion is that the FSB is approaching "US citizens of Russian (Jewish) origin" as agents, rather than just any citizen of Russian origin. It says that the Russians are also supporting Jill Stein and *Lyndon LaRouche*.
<p>
That last bit is a telling detail. Lyndon LaRouche is utterly irrelevant, and the only people who tend to mention him out of the blue are LaRouchites. LaRouchites have a core skill in making up long tracts about how various world leaders are conspiring and having lurid sex with each other, and they're fascinated with Russia. My best guess is that some LaRouchite wrote this and it's since been circulated by people who know it's BS but want it out there anyways.
<p>
The document is full of specific claims, such as that a named lawyer went to Prague for secret meetings in a specific month. The lawyer, of course, denies having ever been to Prague. It is completely not credible that our surveillance agencies, the greatest panopticon ever invented, can simply not corroborate this assertion rather than proving or disproving it.
<p>
Laughing at Trump is fine. Actually believing in this stuff isn't, not if you expect people to believe in actual scandals about Trump.Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com5tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-84534845044869848592016-12-30T14:07:00.000-08:002016-12-30T14:08:48.410-08:00Protest (III)I wrote <a href="http://rpuchalsky.blogspot.com/2016/11/protest-ii.html">a previous post</a> with a few notes about a FEMA training manual for police that Unicorn Riot turned up. Here are a few notes about another, older one (from 2008):
<p>
From <a href="http://www.unicornriot.ninja/?p=3893">here</a>:
<p>
<blockquote>"Last week, after filing a Colorado Open Records Act (CORA) request, Unicorn Riot received a heavily redacted copy of the Denver Police Crowd Control Manual. Most sections of the manual relevant to the policing of protests (our primary interest) were redacted. One redaction was 15 pages long!
<p>
Since then, an anonymous source provided Unicorn Riot with an unredacted copy of the manual. This version is dated May 2008, while the redacted version via CORA request is dated October 2011."</blockquote>
<p>
This one doesn't have as much useful information as the FEMA one, but there are a few points of interest. From the "Denver Police Department Crowd Management Matrix":
<p>
* If you use passive resistance (towards police), i.e. going limp or remaining in a prone position, it is official policy that police are justified in using pain compliance techniques against you. What these are is not spelled out -- a strange or perhaps not so strange omission in a document that spells out a lot of other things. But basically, if you go limp, police are authorized to torture you into compliance by causing pain to move you along.
<p>
* If you use "Defensive resistance" (towards police), i.e. actions that do not attempt to harm an officer but instead are actions like attempting to flee, police are authorized to shoot you with a pepper ball. Additional text helpfully explains that people can be shot with pepper balls if they have climbed up trees, walls, signs etc. to get them to come down "when their elevated position or actions pose a threat to the field force".
<p>
* If someone is passively resisting, police aren't supposed to hit them with batons. They can use batons in "escort techniques" i.e. come-alongs. That isn't even considered to be a use of force and doesn't even trigger the paperwork of having to fill out a use of force report.
<p>
* There are the usual mentions of Shadow Teams to pick people out of crowds and of Cut Teams, which are groups of police specifically trained in how to cut peaceful protestors out of devices where they chain themselves to things or to each other in order to block something. People usually think of specialized police training as being in detective work or in how to handle various kinds of violent criminals, but some of it is in how to make people move along more quickly because they are in some business's way (complete with the above mentioned pain compliance).
<p>
This is the reality of peaceful protest in America, long before Donald Trump. Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-17384190472846619702016-12-29T17:09:00.001-08:002016-12-29T17:09:28.847-08:00Partisanship is no substitute for valuesToday, Obama wrote in an <a href="https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2016/12/29/statement-president-actions-response-russian-malicious-cyber-activity">official statement</a> that "All Americans should be alarmed by Russia’s actions." That is what Obama ran on, after all, hope and change and universal alarm.
<p>
It goes without saying that Russian interference -- if Russia was indeed behind the DNC hacks, which is far from proven -- amounted to releasing true but embarrassing Emails. Unauthorized journalism, in other words.
<p>
Since the election, the American center-left has shown itself as completely incapable of resistance to anything. Resistance requires integrity and solidarity and the guidance of strongly held values. There is no left value that says that embarrassing Emails from politicians should not be released. On the contrary, there are -- or should be -- strong left values against mindless war fever and unthinking trust in the security apparatus, and in favor of openness in the political process. Imagine that the Russians were responsible for the hacks. OK, then what? What kind of left idea says that the response should be escalation, tough-guy posturing, and ratcheting up tensions with a nuclear power that we have no essential grievance with? Defense of American institutions, even when those institutions are corrupt? Because the DNC certainly was corrupt: it used the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hillary_Victory_Fund">Hillary Victory Fund</a> among other means to slant the primary in favor of one candidate (thereby hurting the party in the general election). Should we retrospectively condemn Daniel Ellsberg for releasing the Pentagon Papers and harming America's defense forces?
<p>
Partisanship can not substitute for having some kind of basic idea -- both for oneself and for simple communication with others -- about what you do and don't support. The left can not be the party of trust-the-CIA and war posturing when that is convenient. The whole concept is sickening and should shame any putative center-left person who once mumbled something about what a shame it was, what the US did in Central America. Death squads then, trust now, all because of an election that the left legitimately lost according to the completely ridiculous but fixed rules of the US political process.
<p>
Since then the center-left has done almost everything that it accused the right of. Not accepting the election results and attempting to overturn the election with the "Hamilton Electors" foolishness. Believing in every fake news story that flatters their preconceptions. Accusing journalists of being Russian agents if they write non-approved stories. Allowing their party to be taken over by grifters (most of them ex-Republicans looking for easy pickings) who tell them whatever they want to hear. The main difference is that the center-left is ineffectual and when it does these things that doesn't even bring any results.
<p>
Both central American parties and tendencies are tottering, hollowed out and ready to collapse. What's going to come next? Something from the margins, from people who have the courage of their convictions, good or bad.Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-1991402668327441142.post-57182195590843663852016-12-16T10:35:00.002-08:002016-12-16T10:42:14.453-08:00Anonymous sources are more credible than named onesI'm doing some eldercare this week, so NPR has been on. A day or so back there was an earnest interview with someone who said that unnamed sources in the CIA assured them that Russia had interfered in the US election. Today there was a followup. They had gotten some kind of listener feedback about anonymous sources so they brought people back to say that all was well. We were given a kind of child's first reader of CIA reporting.
<p>
The text for this is probably up on the Internet somewhere, so someone who cares can impeach my memory. But what I remember being told is:
<p>
<p>* Reporters assess anonymous sources carefully for why they are saying what they are saying (institutional interests, etc.)
<p>* We should actually trust anonymous sources more than named sources (!). Whenever we hear a reporter citing an anonymous source from an intelligence service, that means that the reporter has done the utmost checking on whether the person is credible, has knowledge, and has a good reason to tell us
<p>* Pretty much all reporting from intelligence services is from anonymous sources, because one of their rules is that they are not supposed to talk to reporters
<p>* In fact, they take periodic polygraph tests where they are asked whether they have talked to reporters. The interviewer mused that anonymous sources must have to lie and hope that they pass the polygraph.
<p>
This is ridiculous, and no one who thinks about it for two minutes could not find it ridiculous. If everyone is given periodic polygraph tests where they are asked whether they have talked to reporters, then polygraph tests must not work. I find that pretty believable that they don't work well at all, but security services keep using them. Is it really credible that all of these "leaks" that favor the CIA's favored story really are from truth-tellers half-assedly hoping that they pass their next polygraph?
<p>
There's a much more credible story. All of these "leaks" -- the only things that reporters get -- are officially authorized leaks meant to tell a story that the CIA wants to be told. The people doing the leaking don't have to fear their next polygraph, because they were told to leak the information to the reporter. The reporters have every motive to play along, because if they don't, they don't get any news from this beat at all.
<p>
It's self-serving twaddle all around: from the CIA, from the reporters, from the listeners who want to believe the latest story that flatters their prejudices.Rich Puchalskyhttp://www.blogger.com/profile/10543499708727953026noreply@blogger.com0