Fragmented Thoughts on a Speculative Art

This link is nothing new, but I thought that China Mieville’s list of Fifty Fantasy and Science Fiction Works that Socialists Should Read was worth another look. Quite apart from its agenda, it would make a good reading list for those who want to learn more about the genre. I confess that I have read almost nothing there, with one exception being Gene Wolfe’s The Fifth Head of Cerberus, which is an important book.

The question that may now be on many of your minds is, why socialists? Of course, speculative fiction is a natural venue for political argument, and the most obvious templates are utopias and negative utopias. More generally, the use of made-up worlds and governments is a way for us to learn about people and situations that are foreign to our own experience.

There are some ways that a good fantasy novel can teach us more about social oppression than a book set in a contemporary dictatorship, and I’ve been trying to think about why. It has something to do with fantasy’s greater freedom to illustrate a situation using imaginative symbols. A number of mainstream novels with international or historical settings adopt the techniques of science fiction, and not always successfully. They try to evoke the sense of a place, for example, through creation myths or a character’s dream visions.

Or here's another way of putting it. Reading The Lord of the Rings (which is not on the "50 Works for Socialists" list) can perhaps teach us a great deal about what it is like to fight in a war. Octavia Butler’s more recent Parable of the Sower (1993) and Parable of the Talents (1998) are set in a future America where social disintegration and climate change have progressed to the point where most people have to leave their homes and wander along the freeways, searching for food. These books would read differently if they were about refugees from a war-torn country that was comfortably located someplace else.

Comments

[nub]

i have read two books on the list: zamyatin's "we," (for a book report for mrs. cotten, in which i compared it to "brave new world") and the phillip pullman "his dark materials" trilogy.

have i talked to you about the latter? have you read them? they are startlingly good. makes me wonder if there are other examples out there of profound and blasphemous young adult literature. and btw, i don't agree with that blogger that the end of the trilogy was a let-down. actually, i don't really think of them as individual books. the trilogy comprises a very cohesive and satisfying whole.

[daniel]

Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy is an amazing set of books! They deal not only with the settlement and terraforming of Mars, but with the areoforming of the people of Earth, who must change their preconceived notions to survive. It touches on almost every point about what it would take to start anew, while keeping a sharp storytelling style, not falling into didacticism as lots of utopian books do.

[Avery Palmer]

Nub: Much as I would prefer otherwise, I do think the last two Dark Materials books were a disappointment.I don't remember the details of the plot any longer, but the third volume in particular seemed to abandon any sort of narrative logic in the service of a philosophical discussion of some sort. We can agree that The Golden Compass was wonderful.

These ones are getting movies soon too. It would be interesting to speculate about how they will compare to the Dark Crystal sequel, both in absolute terms and in comparison to the originals.

Daniel: Yes, the Mars books are on my list but I haven't read them yet. I liked Years of Rice and Salt, an alternate history where everyone in Europe dies in the bubonic plague. I also read Forty Signs of Rain, the first in his global warming politics trilogy, which I enjoyed a lot. It was quite accurate about what it's like to live in Washington, and you don't see that a lot. (Except for one scene where a guy is sitting on the Mall with his toddler and all of the sudden he gets called in to see the president. But that's just imported Hollywood silliness.)

[nub]

see, i didn't even get invested in the story until well into The Golden Compass (about the point where we meet the armored bears). the second and third books were where most of the action took place, after all. i don't agree with you that the end of the series lacked narrative logic. i mean, it certainly lacked scientific logic, but that's kind of missing the point.

we probably don't agree on much when it comes to books.