{"id":8415,"date":"2018-10-10T10:55:53","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T18:55:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8415"},"modified":"2018-10-11T04:30:02","modified_gmt":"2018-10-11T12:30:02","slug":"a-political-and-a-deferal-on-doomsday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/?p=8415","title":{"rendered":"A\/Political (and a deferral on Doomsday)"},"content":{"rendered":"

(I should be writing about the latest Doomsday Report<\/a> from the IPCC. It’s not often that such an august scientific body concludes that massive and devastating changes to the planet constitutes our best-case<\/em> scenario, that even that best-case depends on the deployment of unicorn tech that hasn’t been developed yet. But there’s a lot to digest here. I’ll need some time to get my shit together.\u00a0 Also, I’m waiting to see how the usual political suspects respond to a report that leaves so very little wiggle room.<\/p>\n

So, while I’m doing that, here’s an extended director’s cut of a recent NF<\/em> column.)<\/p>\n

\n

*<\/p>\n

A reader review of The Freeze-Frame Revolution<\/em>, grabbed off Amazon:<\/p>\n

“An interesting idea and it is well developed. However, I almost gave it zero stars as 1\/2 way into the novella Watts inexplicably begins to use idiotic “words” such as xe, xir, se and other such embarrassing verbal atrocities. This kind of PC wordsmithing\/social engineering must be utterly destroyed root and branch. It is a verbal abomination. It is a giant middle finger to every literate person who speaks or reads the English language. I threw my copy in the trash. It was the only appropriate response.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is not the only review to take exception to my choice of pronouns, although it is perhaps the most vehement. Beyond the usual nitpicks about factual inaccuracy (nowhere does “xe” or “xir” appear anywhere in FFR<\/em>), my immediate gut reaction to this is Fuck you, buddy<\/em>. I imagine most of you would sympathize.<\/p>\n

But at the same time, there are these reviews from the opposite end of the scale\u2014<\/p>\n

“there are so many more great ideas inside this novella. Take for example Kaden, who is referred to as ‘se’ and ‘hir’.” ;<\/p>\n

“There are many examples of Watts\u2019s inventive writing, perhaps most noticeably the use of the gender-neutral pronouns \u201cse\u201d and \u201chir\u201d throughout the book”;<\/p>\n

“there was some awesome diversity casually thrown into the storyline”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\u2014and you might be a bit less sympathetic to see me say Fuck you, too<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Because I did not introduce “se” and “hir” to make any kind of political point. I wasn’t being politically correct, and I wasn’t trying to sneak in any pro-fluid diversity subtext. I used those terms because it’s a statistical certainty that out of a crew thirty thousand, some are going to live off the peaks of the bimodal distribution. It just makes sense to have a pronoun for that. To draw explicit attention<\/em> to those pronouns\u2014 to cite it as “inventiveness” or a “great idea”\u2014 is like praising someone for describing a character’s height or eye color.<\/p>\n

It gets worse. In his review of Blindsight<\/em>, Resolute Reader<\/a> remarks that<\/p>\n

“In this future Earth many social problems have been solved (women are now on an equal footing socially and economically with men)\u2026”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In fact, the subject of gender equality never passed through my mind when I was writing that book. Some of the cast were male; some were female; they had jobs. This is a remarkable scenario? (Others take a dimmer view of my gender portrayals; a couple of readers have grumbled that Sunday Ahzmundin doesn’t “seem particularly female” or “sound like a woman”. I’d be curious to know what “a woman” is supposed to sound like. Maybe, moving forward, I should insert a couple of “Goodness, Ah do declare<\/em>“s into Sunday’s dialog.)<\/p>\n

The gender stuff is only the tip of the iceberg, though. I’ve lost count of the people who assume I’m writing “about” environmental collapse, “about” the way the brain stem overrides the neocortex “about” free will.[1]<\/sup><\/a> (At least a few have grumpily wondered if I’m capable of writing “about” anything else.) I’ve been called everything from a flaming liberal to a full-on reactionary despite repeatedly denying that I write “about” any of this stuff. I do<\/em> write stories in which environmental collapse and physics and human biology exist as elements\u2014 not because they’re the subject of the exercise, but because they’re an undeniable part of the world. It would be\u00a0 unrealistic not<\/em> to have these elements as part of the backdrop\u2014 so why assume that I’m writing about<\/em> them? How many times have you heard someone say “Those Coen Brothers\u2014 man, couldn’t they just once give us a movie that wasn’t about cars? Every single movie<\/em> they’ve ever made has cars<\/em> in it!”<\/p>\n

Almost a decade ago, “The Island” made offhanded reference to a mutiny which the Chimp put down when he “cut off our life support”. I never really thought much about the details at the time, but as the years went by it started to sink in that you can’t just “have a mutiny” under those conditions. Given the panoptical power imbalance aboard Eriophora<\/em>, any uprising would have to take the definition of “conspiracy” to a whole new level. That’s why The Freeze-Frame Revolution<\/em> exists, that’s what was in my mind when I was writing it: not “what does it mean” but “how would it work”?<\/p>\n

And yet you’ve got this guy over here<\/a> opining that FFR<\/em> is<\/p>\n

“centrally political. In spite of the obvious amenity of Chimp, more than of a tutelary State, it is a real Leviathan that we are talking about here. \u2026 It is power and cold state reason that Watts speaks of in this text.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

And over here on Infinite Text<\/a>:<\/p>\n

“I do have a tendency to read into social criticisms as hidden between the lines of every work, but in all seriousness Watts wrote a book here that is really fun and sprinkled with philosophical questions.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That last bit, there: “a tendency to read into social criticisms as hidden between the lines of every work”. Is that all that’s at work here? Fiction as Rorschach blot, always a political act but only to political readers? I like to think my stories emerge from the data: Here is the science\u2014 these are the ramifications\u2014 this is the tale to illustrate them<\/em>. Sometimes the result may look ideological but that doesn’t mean it is, not if it was derived empirically.<\/p>\n

“The Things”\u2014 one of my most popular stories\u2014 is, among other things, a commentary on the missionary impulse. That makes it political pretty much by definition. And yet it didn’t start that way; it started as a piece of unabashed fanfic, informed by a paper I’d read on intrasomatic cellular competition. I was two thirds of the way through writing the damn thing before the missionary angle even occurred to me. It just\u2014 emerged from the plot, without deliberate intent.<\/p>\n

Is it political? Ideological? Empirical? Can a story be “political” if it’s derived speculempirically? Can a story be a<\/em>political, ever?<\/p>\n

If so, how do you tell?<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Maybe it has to do with set-up.<\/p>\n

Consider “The Screwfly Solution”, by Alice Sheldon; a short story in which unseen aliens use ecofriendly pest-control techniques to wipe out Humanity. They edit the intertwined pathways of sex and violence in the Human brain, amping up male misogyny to the point where\u2014 using the justification offered by a fundamentalist religious cult\u2014 we simply kill all the women.<\/p>\n

Now consider Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale<\/em>: social and political instability allow religious extremists to take over the US government and reshape society according to fundamentalist, Old-Testament rules in which women fare very poorly.<\/p>\n

Both tales have been hailed as feminist masterpieces. Both are chilling and compelling (the plausibility with which the gynocidal imperative is gradually justified and accepted as a societal norm is one reason I regard Screwfly as one of the finest biological-SF stories ever written). And both, I daresay, were written to make a political point.<\/p>\n

But only Handmaid’s <\/em>had<\/em> to be. It’s hard to see how that novel could have come into existence by any means other than Atwood thinking Someone should really point out where this whole fundamentalism thing leads<\/em>. In contrast, I can see\u2014 at least in theory\u2014 how “The Screwfly Solution” could have arisen by asking a completely apolitical question: Aliens want to take over the planet without damaging the biosphere. How might they do that?<\/em><\/p>\n

Compare also the recent TV series “Humans” and “Westworld”. Both deal with AI and consciousness\u2014 but the world of “Humans” seems configured solely to hammer home the tired, utterly safe political point that Slavery Is Wrong. Westworld covers so much more than that, because Westworld is an actual rumination on consciousness and free will (they even brought neuroscientist David Eagleman on board as an adviser). It doesn’t create a world that’s designed to force a predetermined conclusion; it creates a world that asks questions, lets the conclusions emerge from them.<\/p>\n

Ursula Le Guin. The Left Hand of Darkness<\/em>\u2014 hailed as feminist because of its exploration of gender roles in a gender-fluid society. But that exploration doesn’t emerge from an overtly political starting point (“Patriarchy Is Bad”) but rather from a biological question: What would society look like if Humans were sequential hermaphrodites, like oysters or clownfish?<\/em> It’s a much more interesting kernel to build a story around\u2014 and while it lends itself to political commentary, it isn’t rooted<\/em> in it. (Le Guin herself seemed pretty contemptuous of “message stories<\/a>” in general.)<\/p>\n

The difference, I think, comes down not so much to what a given story says, but to how it gets there: does it interrogate, or does it preach? Do political conclusions emerge from the plot or are they built into the premise, as intrinsic and unavoidable as gravity?<\/p>\n

Does the story follow the data to a (possibly political) conclusion, or does it start with the conclusion and cherry-pick the data to get there?<\/p>\n

I’m not entirely sure. I think the first approach carries way more potential for surprise and enlightenment, while the second merely reinforces pre-existing bias\u2014 but only an idiot would pretend that we don’t all come with bias preinstalled. Maybe the difference is, some of us are better than others at hiding that fact. Maybe this whole rigorously-objective argument is just an eloquent retcon to defend my own bias against preachy stories, and to deny that I’d ever let such cooties infest my own work even if appearances say otherwise.<\/p>\n

I expect my thinking on this subject will evolve over time. In the meantime, though, I’d implore you not to project too much ideology onto my writing, no matter how tempting it may seem. I have political opinions, for sure, but I don’t write to force them on you.<\/p>\n

Matter of fact, the stories I’ve written have actually challenged my own political opinions once or twice.<\/p>\n

I consider that a good sign.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

\n

[1]<\/sup><\/a> Despite the fact that in the end notes to Echopraxia<\/em>, I explicity state “I don\u2018t have much to say about [free will] because the arguments seem so clear-cut as to be almost uninteresting.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(I should be writing about the latest Doomsday Report from the IPCC. It’s not often that such an august scientific body concludes that massive and devastating changes to the planet constitutes our best-case scenario, that even that best-case depends on the deployment of unicorn tech that hasn’t been developed yet. But there’s a lot to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8415"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8415\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8420,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8415\/revisions\/8420"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rifters.com\/crawl\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}