catsittingstill

The Sharing Knife: Passage is coming out soon. I have already ordered my copy from Amazon. 8 days and counting :-)

There's a review here, along with an interview of Lois McMaster Bujold. She brings up a very interesting point--I think I'll just use her words for it:

I have come to believe that if romances are fantasies of love, and mysteries are fantasies of justice, F&SF are fantasies of political agency. (Of which the stereotypical “male teen power fantasy” is again merely an especially gaudy and visible subset.)

I'm not sure I'm understanding it right. But I'm interested in trying. Are science fiction and fantasy stories "fantasies of political agency"? I would take that to mean that the political results of the characters' actions are sort of the point of the story--the way in a romance the development of the relationship is the point of the story, and in a mystery, the discovery of the truth is the point of the story.

I'd always thought of science fiction as being stories about inventions or discoveries of scientific principles. Some of these stories are about how they play out in a social arena (like part of the whole story of Wildside is how the government reacts to discovering that the main character has a Gate To Elsewhere, and how the characters deal with that). I hadn't really thought about this being the point of the story, and certainly not about the political subset of the social being the point of the story, exactly, but I'm having trouble making a case that it's not, either.

Or take another book I'm reading because it was free: Lord of the Isles. It's about several characters who are magical in one way or another. And their magic certainly gives them a lot of potential to change events around them. And some of that has political implications. I'm not done with the book yet so it's premature to state that the political changes (or the potential for them) are the point of the story. But they certainly add to the sense that the characters are important, and that their choices and achievements matter. (Also parenthetically I had expected to not like it, but started reading because what the heck, I got it free. It turns out to not be great--as one person pointed out, pretty much any baddie has short legs and long arms; why is that?--but it's not lousy. I might like that author's military fiction a lot less, but the straight out fantasy isn't so bad.)

Whereas if I think of a non F&SF book--say Pride and Prejudice, the point of the story is the relationships between the characters. Yes, they live within a social world that is not entirely apolitical, but I don't get the impression that the character's choices will change the political landscape.

Hmm. Interesting. Anybody want to help me think about this, for example with examples of books that support or fail to support the proposition that F&SF are fantasies of political agency?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

randwolf.livejournal.com

I think the the first word on this subject, and one of the best, comes from none other than George Orwell:

And looking back through my work, I see that it is invariably where I lacked a political purpose that I wrote lifeless books and was betrayed into purple passages, sentences without meaning, decorative adjectives and humbug generally.

Political relations, in the broad sense, surround and motivate the characters, readers, and writers in much sf+f. Heinlein and Asimov, certainly. Heinlein was explicitly political and the early "Foundation" books were, as Asimov himself said, based in Roman history. The third of that trinity, of course, is Clarke, and here we find something equally interesting: Childhood's End, The City and the Stars, and 2001 are built around images of transcendence based in scientific philosophy; a mysticism acceptable to a scientifically-inclined readership, in other words. I think if you measure politics and transcendence, you've "got" much of the genre.

BTW, class is a huge motivator in Austen's books: the duties and difficulties of class relations are much of the characters motivations; if you add family politics, those are most of (all of?) their external motivators. (Personality, of course, being the internal motivatior.)

Yawawawn. Wish I could sleep better tonight... Might write more but am Too Tired.

From:

catsittingstill.livejournal.com

I did notice that class was present in Pride and Prejudice, but I didn't get the impression that the characters actions could actually affect the politics or social structure of their times. At most, they might be able to eject themselves from their (higher) class by behaving in ways unacceptable in their society, but there was no real hope of them, say, becoming King, or abolishing the House of Lords in favor of simple representative democracy, or even drumming up a significant faction among the government.

From:

randwolf.livejournal.com

True; the novels are observation rather than reform. But the novels themselves, though not didactic works, critique class--Austen was clearly no conservative!--and in that sense they are political works. BTW, I expect she started with characters, like most novelists of character do; she nonetheless ended up writing some of the definitive novels about the relations of class and family politics to individual intimacy.

From:

dan-ad-nauseam.livejournal.com

Actually, she reportedly was conservative politically, but critical of social expectations.

From:

randwolf.livejournal.com

That doesn't seem to add up; the conservatives of the day sincerely believed that upper class people were "better" than everyone else. She skewers a number of these people--it seems clear she regards that attitude with the liveliest disgust. I don't get a sense that she was a radical firebrand--I think that's incompatible with the close observation of class interaction she is noted for.

From: (Anonymous)

"BTW, class is a huge motivator in Austen's books:.."

Class is a huge motivator in almost any book by a British writer; it's practically a nationality litmus test. (You can, ferex, often spot a Regency romance written by an American by the way the American writer gets servant-employer and other class relations subtly or wildly wrong and doesn't even suspect it.) The Brits have an absolute mania on the subject, quite analogous to race in America, and possibly also due to real unresolved social tensions still lingering there.

One can also spot it in SF by Brits; if the futuristic society is presented as one where *social class* has been codified in genetics, like _Brave New World_ or _Blake's 7_, the story is certainly British. (Examples and counter-examples invited.)

Ta, L.

From:

catsittingstill.livejournal.com

it's practically a nationality litmus test

Do you see it as marking out Britons particularly? Or Europeans in general?

My parents were from Europe (the Netherlands) and on those occasions when I came home saying I'd made a new friend, my dad's first question was always "what does her father do?" Which I at first found baffling--why would I care? When I figured out he was trying to make sure my friends were the right social class I was profoundly irritated, having thoroughly absorbed the narrative of my place and time that class didn't matter in America.

Now I realize that class can matter in America, but we're a lot more opaque about it. Not that I think that's any reason to choose your friends, but I understand my dad's interest better.

The only example of a futuristic society where social class has been made in part biological (though I don't remember if the changes were specifically genetic--it is possible to change classes, for instance) is _Clade_ by Mark Butz. Apparently the author grew up in the US; in an interview here (http://journals.aol.com/johnmscalzi/bytheway/entries/2006/10/04/wednesday-author-interview-mark-budz/6570
he says the novel grew out of his observations of the separateness of the migrant worker community there.

But I have no idea whether there are others.

From:

wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com

Courtship Rite by Donald Kingsbury

In the prehistory of this book, humans crash-landed on a very marginal world. The native plants produce oxygen, but also many toxins. The animals produce toxins as well. It is a very metal-poor planet. There are no plants that produce anything analogous to wood. Having no choice, the humans started to farm this world, but sometime in the first few generations, there was severe famine. If they tried to introduce earth animals, those all died.

In the time of the books, the people don’t know this, this is the only planet their history makes any reference of. They have 7 or 8 “sacred” plants, which are all food plants, and which include corn, beans, squash, and potatoes. Tilling the soil is backbreaking work, with no metals for plows and nothing to make long-handled shovels or hoes with. There is nothing analogous to bees. The only milk is human milk, and humans are the only animal whose whole body is edible. Everything else is poisonous to a greater or lesser extent.

The people on this world live by a concept called kalothi. It means something like merit or worthiness. They work hard and compete (in lots of ways, often in formal contests) in tests of intelligence, speed, strategy, health, beauty, fertility, leadership, etc. to prove their kalothi. Kalothi determines who survives by natural selection as well as someone’s kalothi rating affecting how people treat him or her in a multitude of ways, but especially their options with regard to marriage/breeding and their right in hard times to life itself. And life on this planet is always hard.

What brought me to think of this from your comment, however, is that each clan is allowed to determine how it will work to increase the kalothi of its members. Over generations of natural (and human) selection, this has caused the clans to be physically (and mentally) distinct in ways that seem to me to work as a caste structure in their society.

One clan has bred itself to be very fast runners—the messengers of the world. Anther clan has bred itself to be very strong, the cart-horses and truckers of the world. Another clan eats as much of the native foods as they can tolerate; they tend to have short, unhealthy lives and a very high infant and child mortality rate, but they are sought as mates to bring that ability to eat the non-sacred foods into the other clans. Other clans are more interesting.

I found this book to be fascinating. EVERY scene tells us about the main characters AND important information about the “interesting” political situation on this world at the time AND gives us information about their cultures and knowledge of their world. Very nicely crafted so all of this information flows naturally as part of the story. It is well worth reading, so long as you’re not too squicked by either cannibalism or bodily scarification for personal decoration to focus on the story.

The story is the story of three brothers who survived a harrowing childhood, and are rising in influence in their clan. They are in a group marriage with two women; they are seeking their third, and final woman. The shyest of the brothers has started courting, but then they are ordered to marry a heretic from another clan instead, with the expectation that this will allow them to somehow manage the effects of her heresy. In part, their choice to impose a “Courtship Rite” on her is youthful rebellion—they don’t want to be forced to marry this odd woman instead of the one they’ve already chosen—in part it is that they do doubt whether this strange soft-hearted (not a compliment in their minds) woman is worthy of them. If she doesn’t survive the rite, they don’t have to marry her, and her heresy may die with her too. But in implementing the rite, they have to get to know her, and try to understand her heresy, which is gaining many followers, and what that heresy will mean for their world if most people come to believe it. And she is a woman of very high kalothi, even if she has odd ideas.

From:

randwolf.livejournal.com

Well, but part of the reason for this is that Austen wrote so well about class and character, and influenced many later authors. US racial attitudes derive in part from English class attitudes; the Southern colonies to were attempting to recreate English feudalism.