Thinking About the Revolution

I've read two books in the past two days, Mote in God's Eye, by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle, and Night Watch, by Terry Pratchett.


Both were cracking good reads, by which I mean they kept me up until late at night, turning pages. Both I had read before -- Mote, not since I was a kid, Night Watch last year sometime, when I first discovered Pratchett. Night Watch is much more to my taste politically. Mote is somewhat to the right of my politics.


But as I lay in bed last night (or rather, very early this morning, given that I am suffering from the worst insomnia in my adult life, and am hitting the pillow somewhere around five a.m. these days) considering the differences between the two texts, and why one of them annoyed me so much, while the other appealed to me so strongly, well, it really was not just that one is more leftist and the other is hard right military POV.

Because it's not -- Pratchett has a bit of the practical military POV mixed in with his populist-Leftism, and I'm not bothered by that.


And clearly I am bothered deeply by Niven & Pournelle's ridiculous ideas of a women's place in the world -- and while what they do with the alien Moties sex-change and so on is interesting, it does nothing to negate their insistence that "real" people (by which they mean European-ancestry White Guys) will keep their women at home after marriage, doing the child-raising.



No, here is what bothers me most about the Niven & Pournelle worldview: its insistence that the correct attitude of the citizen toward his leaders is respectful trust. (I do choose that pronoun carefully. Only men are actually people in N&P's world, despite his tossing in of a token woman character.) It is assumed -- and then demonstrated -- in the N&P world that those in command, those who are born to command, and given command, know what they are doing, and having taken command, will do the right thing.


It is assumed, and then demonstrated in the text, that those who object to the actions of leaders -- rebels, outies -- are bad people, who deserve to die, who deserve whatever punishment, up to having their entire planet reduced to radioactive glass, is visited upon them: they deserve this simply for having questioned authority.


Since the story is told from the point of view of one of those in authority, Rod (yes, this is his name, nothing phallic here, move along) Blaine, who is written as an earnest hero type who works very hard to get everything right and worries about getting everything right, the reader is reassured that those in authority are Really Good Guys who Really Want To DO Right by those in their purview.


We're not meant to look at the way Sally (his wife) is stripped of her power ("Rod won't let me think about the Institute after the wedding.") or how everyone with any power is a European white guy or how the decisions are made by fiat behind the scenes by the few white guys with all the power -- oh yes, benevolently, and we are TOLD these guys know best, and since those guys have been written as so noble and brave and intelligent, not like the wicked outies, well, it must be true, yes?


This is the worldview of the conservative, who believes -- I guess -- that, so long as he is the right man, the big man in charge can be trusted; and that everyone in the empire will be happy serfs who will be happy to serve, so long as the big man tells them what to do, except for a few idiots, who can be happily shot, or shot down with cool logic. (One scene that made me dizzy with disbelief early in the book was when the parliament -- I guess it was parliament -- met on New Scotland, and everyone in the parliament "pledges allegiance" to a hologram of the emperor, and then bows to it. I guess N&P think this is realistic. I guess they think grown-up people would actually do this. And, since I can see Sarah Palin, Rick Santorum, and her ilk actually doing it, I suppose they aren't exactly wrong.)


Contrast this with Pratchett's worldview in Night Watch, which strikes me as much more realistic and adult.


For one thing, the leaders are mostly idiots, or crazy. (Which, watching our own Congress, Q.E.D.) The few who actually know what they are doing and actually intend to do what is best for the land under their purview know better than to expect the people to follow them from blind loyalty. Most people, as Pratchett well knows, are mostly interested mainly in their own lives and what is going to affect them. Who has time for more that that, mostly? Maybe five or six percent of us, tops. And even then, only part time.

"Do the job that is put before you," Sam Vimes says in Night Watch: that's what most of us do, and it's what Vimes, who is one of Pratchett's best leaders, and best heroes, mostly does. Vetinari, Pratchett's other best leader, and other best hero, though a more ambiguous one, also appears in this book, at the very beginning of his career. Vetinari is Practchett's demonstration for why we should and should not trust our leaders -- he is a tyrant, the all-powerful, brilliant, wily ruler of Ankh-Morpork, not exactly benevolent, though he may well have, ultimately, benevolent ends.


Still, Sam Vimes does not trust him; Sam Vimes is always wary of him, and always acts to keep him in check. Sam Vimes, at one point, arrests him, because no one should be above the law. In this book, Night Watch, when the leaders of the city are entirely powerful, Sam Vimes (under the name John Keel) leads a revolution: moving the barriacades, bit by bit, so that, daily, more of the city is under control of the law, and less and less is under the control of whim and tyranny.


Niven and Pournelle's worldview, it came to me, as I was lying sleepless last night -- that is exactly what they want. When you want the government to be under the control of some powerful man who you are forced to trust to be benevolent and good, what you are trusting in is whim and tyranny. Sam Vimes/Terry Pratchett's worldview -- where we do not trust, but hedge the rulers around with laws and rules, and then, warily, warily, keep the rulers at heel with those laws and rules -- that worldview puts the government under our control. Perhaps it means the government is less able to act; it also means the government is less able to put its boot on our throats.

I suppose it all depends on what you want from a government: death to the rebels, or people who are free to quarrel in the streets if they damn well feel like it.

Snow!

The weather guy once again predicts snow for our little river valley.  Hah, I no longer believe his coy promises.  It will be more drizzle and sleet.

Meanwhile, Herr Dr. Delagar made the best Sole Meuniere I have ever eaten for dinner last night, even if he did have to use cod rather than sole, sole not being available in Pork Smith.

(What is available in Pork Smith? So glad you asked.  We went out yesterday afternoon to use the kid's book card, at BooksAMillion, that being nearly the only bookstore in town, but of course it did not have the book she wanted.  Six rows of Bibles of various sorts, yes, four shelves of Science Fascism, mais oui, but a copy of Cressida Cowell's new book, no.  Though I was interested to discover two shelves of shrink-wrapped Yaoi among the manga.  Hmm!)

We all have mild colds, relics of our travels.  I plan to spend the day working on my SF stories and drinking coffee.  The kid is playing with her paper kitties (she has drawn dozens of small paper cats, like paper dolls, only cats, which she keeps in an empty Russell Stover box, and constructs elaborate narratives around.  Lately I find 3 or 4 of these kitties in the hallway, outside her room.  "There are kitties in the hallway," I comment.  "Those are the bad kitties," she tells me sternly.) as well as keeping up with her RPGs and online chatgroups and RW friends.  She has a very busy life for an eleven year old, and is deeply distressed that school takes up again on Monday.

"Maybe I'll be too sick to go," she said hopefully, as I gave her her cold medicine this morning.

Yeah, But I Was Making it Up...

This is the premise my SF world starts with: in about 2100, I say, America completely privatizes its prison systems (the real religion of America, as I frequently tell my students, being not Christianity but Capitalism).  

This is an idea I have seen floated about on a few right-leaning economic blogs already; left-of-center bloggers responded with why it was a really stupid idea, which was that once you make something profitable, d'oh, people do more of it.

The commenters on the blogs, though, were who interested me.  You can imagine the comments.

Anyway, I ran with that idea, especially since I had been reading half a dozen other books at the same time -- Billy Bragg, and Octavia Butler's work, and Adam Hochschild's Bury the Chains, and I forget the others.  I didn't read Douglas Blackmon's Slavery By Another Name until later, but that book got folded into my research on the revision level.

However: look here.  Apparently what I thought was fiction, ain't.  And I am entirely off on the year. Go figure.

Oh: and here is why this is a really bad plan.

Turing, Science Fiction, Science Fascism

As my students and my poor suffering mr. delagar and the kid will tell you, I feel strongly about many, many things.  I remember a professor in my second year of graduate school patting my hand at a party: "It's not that important, delagar."  Except, you know, it was!

This is.

Alan Turing was born in 1912: it’s possible he could be alive today, aged 97. In 1953 he was writing what biographer Alan Hodges describes as a “sudden explosion of ideas about the fundamental physics of quantum mechanics and relativity”. But he’d lost so much: he’d lost what Orson Scott Card proposed a man like Alan Turing should lose – the right to be regarded as an acceptable, equal citizen. His friends at Cambridge spoke for him in court and stood by him until death: but he lost his job, he was subjected to routine harassment by the police, and – a known side-effect of the hormones used to castrate him – he had grown breasts. On 7th June 1954, he ate a cyanide-laced apple, and he died.

When I was a kid, like every other kid in fifth grade, we threw the "Don't be queer!" and "That's so gay!" at each other, too.  (It was Louisiana, and it was lower-middle-class Louisiana.)  Then I got older, and I read books, and I looked around and started thinking.

Orson Scott Card calls himself a liberal.  He claims he is a moral human being, who wants a good world.  He needs to rethink his position on his fellow human beings who are gay.

Why does it matter what he does, what he thinks, given that he's just one man?  Well, he's not just one man, as he well knows.  He's the fella who wrote Ender's Game, which makes him someone of influence in the SF world.  What he says gets listened to.  His current position is doing damage.

We win -- nearly always win -- we progressives, we people who speak for equal rights, for the ideas of freedom and justice, we nearly always gain our ground; each year we get a little further ahead, nearly always; except when we give way to the wheedling that gets used by rhetorics and demagogues: but it's not fair, but you're not tolerating my intolerance!  See, those who want us to return gays and PoC and women to the ghetto are telling us they have the right to discriminate, because their religion and their way of life requires that sort of belief; and if we don't tolerate that belief system, why, then we're the hateful ones, clearly.

Sorry.  No belief system which is built on oppression is acceptable, and that includes religious belief systems.  I don't know, maybe that especially includes religious belief systems.  If people want to have religions, I have no objection, but they should practice them in private, and wash their hands afterwards.

SF & Feminism Again

Another fine essay, with Illustrations!

(Via Strange Horizons, where the review for Mindblowing SF had a comment with a link.)

Ow! Ow!

What is happening to my beautiful genre?

Science Fiction ain't Science Fiction no more.  It's Science Fascism*, thanks to tools like this.

*turn of phrase stolen from mr. delagar