tag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:257141My life in booksBooks in my lifebibliogramma2018-04-16T11:37:34Ztag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:257141:255715Olaf Stapledon: Darkness and the Light2018-04-16T11:37:34Z2018-04-16T11:37:34Zpublic0Olaf Stapledon is not, I think, particularly well-known these days, nor is his fiction often read. Most science fiction fans have likely heard his name mentioned as one of the early lights in the genre, but don’t go much further. Stapledon was a philosopher as well as an author of fiction, and much if his fiction is engaged in working out scenarios that illustrate some of the ‘great questions’ that philosophy seeks to explore.<br /><br />Darkness and the Light is for the most part an exploration of an idea that goes back at least as far as Plato’s Republic, if not further - the question of what are the characteristics of the best society for humans to live in. Stapledon was inclined toward socialism as a basis for a good society, though he did not consider himself a Marxist, and was no supporter of the imperialist and militarist formulations of totalitarian socialism that emerged in China and Russia. <br /><br />In Darkness and the Light, Stapleton imagines two separate futures for humanity, either of which could happen, depending on the choices we make as a global society. One path leads to tyranny, the other to a functional socialist utopia. He begins with a ‘future history’ describing the path of world politics up to a crisis point, at which tine these futures diverge. He calls this the time of balance, in which things could go either way - a concept reminiscent of the principle behind Isaac Asimov’s ‘historical necessity’ as demonstrated in the Foundation series, whose first chapters were also published in 1942. <br /><br />In Stapledon’s time of balance, Russia has conquered the majority of the planet, with China the only major power free of its domination, controlling Japan, Korea and Southeast Asia. The only country which has maintained independence from both powers is Tibet. It is in the success or failure of a political and social renaissance in Tibet that Stapledon locates his ‘crisis point,’ the point in human history where the future splits into two possibilities which he labels the darkness and the light. <br /><br />“... the relations of the new Tibet with its two mighty neighbours constituted the occasion on which the great duplication became unmistakable and irrevocable. Henceforth my experience was dual. On the one hand I witnessed the failure of the Tibetan renaissance, and the destruction of the Tibetan people. This was followed by the final Russo–Chinese war which unified the human race but also undermined its capacity. On the other hand I saw the Tibetans create, seemingly in the very jaws of destruction, a community such as man had never before achieved. And this community, I saw, so fortified the forces of the light in the rival empires that the war developed into a revolutionary war which spread over the whole planet, and did not end until the will for the light had gained victory everywhere.”<br /><br />Stapledon outlines the path toward darkness first. In this future, Chinese psychologists counter the spread of ideas from the Tibetan renaissance by creating a new religion based on acquiescence to the state and the purification of humanity though suffering and cruelty. Both Russia and China wage war against Tibet, which cannot withstand the assault and ultimately capitulates. The country and its people are destroyed. The two superpowers then agree to engage in a limited but long-term war intended to keep their respective peoples engaged and committed. However, over time China, where the doctrine of cruelty has taken precedence over the virtue of subservience - the reverse being true in Russia - slowly gains ground until China emerges as the victor and world ruler. Holding power through fear and sophisticated mind control, and glorifying torture and cruelty, the Chinese Empire slowly declines as its population decreases, natural resources are exhausted, scientific progress fails, the economy falters. Eventually the empire fractures, and humanity slips into a dark age if barbarism from which no escape is possible due to the slow degradation of human beings themselves into a species of limited intelligence and motivation. The end of man comes when a change in the behaviour of rats, making then more aggressive, brings about food shortages and ever increasing numbers of deaths from rat attacks. Thus ends the future of darkness.<br /><br />Stapledon’s narrator then turns toward the future of the light. In this future, the confidence of those influenced by the Tibetan renaissance gives them courage in the face of persecution and allows them to ridicule and ultimately defeat the religion of cruelty and submission promulgated by the Chinese. The core of the Tibetan renaissance - part philosophy, part faith - which takes hold in the other nations of the world is simple:<br /><br />“Love, they said, and wisdom are right absolutely. True community of mutually respecting individuals, and also fearless free intelligence and imagination, are right absolutely. And we all knew it. There is one intrinsic good, they said, and one only, the awakened life, the life of love and wisdom.”<br /><br />Russia wages war against Tibet, but is hampered by numerous rebellions throughout its territories, and by corruption and inefficiency within the war effort itself. Over time the Russian empire disintegrates; many of its territories are seized by China, while a few gain independence and ally with Tibet in the Mountain Federation. Tibet has a more difficult time defending itself against China, but eventually manages, at great cost, to effect a state of truce. During this period, the influence of the Tibetan philosophy continues to spread, quietly eroding the control of the Chinese imperialists over their people. When war came again, despite some serious setbacks, the Federation holds out long enough for the Empire to begin to collapse from within. Much of the world falls into civil and interstate wars and confusion, but over time more and more nations decide to adopt Tibet’s principles and join the Federation. The Light prevails. <br /><br />Stapledon has his narrator ‘quote’ from the preamble to the new global federation’s constitution:<br /><br />“We acknowledge that the high goal of all the lives of men is to awaken themselves and one another to love and wisdom and creative power, in service of the spirit. Of the universe we know very little; but in our hearts we know certainly that for all beings of human stature this is the way of life. In service of the spirit, therefore, we the human inhabitants of this planet, unite in a new order, in which every human being, no matter how lowly his nature, shall be treated with respect as a vessel of the spirit, shall be given every possible aid from infancy onwards to express whatever power is in him for bodily and mental prowess, for his own delight and for service of the common life. We resolve that in future none shall be crippled in body or perverted in mind by unwholesome conditions. For this end we declare that in future no powerful individual or class or nation shall have the means, economic or military, to control the lives of men for private gain.”<br /><br />I must acknowledge here that as a socialist and social justice advocate, these words appeal greatly to me, as does the general shape of the emerging global society the Stapledon goes on to describe in the penultimate, and most political, section of the book - with one very important exceptions. <br /><br />A recurring theme in the novel is a strongly eugenicist argument that the downfall of civilisations results from intelligent and industrious people choosing to have fewer children while the ‘dullards’ of the world procreate indiscriminately. Stapledon incorporates eugenicist policies in his global utopia, including the forced sterilisation of “defectives and certain types prone to criminality” - a policy that is not only abhorrent, but without any scientific basis. <br /><br />But Stapledon does not end with his socialist-syndicalist global utopia. The end of the novel delves deeply into metaphysics, positing a vast uncaring and chaotic universe underlying our material one, that resembles more the darkness deemed vanquished than the prevailing light. Humanity engages upon a final struggle, with the very nature of this universe substrate, seeking to bring light to existential darkness. Despite many setbacks, a new form of human evolves to wage this metaphysical war, and our narrator, unable to comprehend the minds of this advanced humanity, can no longer see where the future leads. <br /><br />This is not a novel as we ordinarily understand the term. There are no characters, no narratives based on personal actions and relationships. Stapledon’s narrator simply offers a sustained description of the events that occur in the two futures he has seen, and of the societies that emerge as a consequence of these events and the forces at work behind them. The metaphysical ending seems rather out of place with the sense of material, historical forces that drive the details of these futures, but does fit into the underlying image of an ongoing struggle between darkness and light. <br /><br />It’s an interesting read, but not a particularly satisfying one.<br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=bibliogramma&ditemid=255715" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:257141:230782Rereading Heinlein: Part Three2017-12-29T05:21:01Z2017-12-29T05:21:01Zpublic5<br><br />And now for my thoughts on a Heinlein book i’d never read before, For Us, the Living. I think I’ve read everything else he wrote, but this was released so late in the game that I hadn’t gotten around to it til now. I’m glad I read it, because it’s in some ways a sourcebook for some of his greatest works.<br /><br />It’s not actually a novel, of course. It’s a utopian treatise, one in a long line of such works that goes all the way back to Plato’s Republic. The story is the same in every case - dump unsuspecting everyman into your ideal society and find reasons for people to kindly take the time to explain everything about their world in depth. What is interesting is that as one reads For Us, the Living, one sees Heinlein publicly doing the worldbuilding for some of the novels and other writings that would follow. This is the world of Beyond This Horizon, and Coventry. It’s a world that came dangerously close to -If This Goes On, but escaped the theocracy (and tells us everything we needed to know about Nehemiah Scudder). <br /><br />I like many of the ideas of this Heinlein, from a guaranteed annual income for everyone to the end of marriage as a public contract to compulsory voting to running a society on the idea that religious morality has nothing to do with law. To be sure, Heinlein is still pretty sexist - he thinks women are essentially different from men in some crucial ways and he couldn’t quite imagine a utopia where women are fully half of the politicians and engineers and test pilots and surgeons, though he could imagine some women being among the best in any field. But there are some bits in his utopian musings that are very much at the centre of even modern feminist thinking - such as his analysis of how giving women full economic equality, through the GAI he envisions, changes the entire nature of relationships between men and women. And there’s a bit where he accurately describes the way that male possessiveness turns into controlling relationships that stifle women. <br /><br />This is the manifesto of the young (pre-Virginia) Heinlein, and it’s important because it shows where his “future history” came from. I kind of wish this Heinlein had stayed around, and avoided the plunge into John Birchism that influenced aspects of his later work.<br /><br /><br />Having read the first book Heinlein wrote, It seemed somehow appropriate to next read the last book he wrote, To Sail Beyond the Sunset. This is a book I both love and am frustrated by. Maureen Johnson is quite a tour de force of a character, the most vividly presented woman in all of his books - only a few of which are centred on a female protagonist, as this one is. She is everything I appreciate about the feminist Heinlein’s idea of the independent woman, and everything that makes me want to pitch something nasty at the old sexist’s ghost. Maureen is brilliant, practical, she adapts easily to new situations, she earns five or six degrees in subjects as diverse and complex as medicine, the law and philosophy, she is a financial genius, an amazing mother, a sexual free spirit. She also is the ever-ready sexual fantasy of too many entitled man-boys and just loves being pregnant and barefoot in the kitchen. It’s the quintessence of Heinlein’s ideas about the perfect woman, one who is strong but wants her man stronger, one who never says no to the ‘right’ men, one who loves to take care of her men and her children, who is as smart and brave and competent as any man but goes out of her way to make the men in her life feel smarter and braver and more competent. She lets her first husband control her life, make all the important decisions, for over 40 years of marriage, acting for herself only when he decides to ask for a divorce, at which point she outmaneuvers him with impressive ease and goes on to live an unapologetically independent life. She inspires and infuriates me. <br /><br />She’s also the mouthpiece for Heinlein’s later political views. While his attitudes about sexuality and religion remain pretty constant throughout his working life - he was always in favour of sexual freedom and thought religion was a crock used to manipulate the masses - the man who began his writing career extolling the virtues of socialised medicine and a guaranteed annual income ended it ranting against freeloaders snd governments that gave people handouts. <br /><br />And then there’s the stuff that squicks. In the course if her long life, Maureen has sex with her cousin, her son, at least one son-in-law (and probably at least some heavy petting with a daughter or two) and tries her hardest to seduce her father. Heinlein puts a lot of incest in both this book and in Time Enough for Love, his novel about the lives and loves of Maureen’s son Woodrow, aka Lazarus Long. He seems quite unaware of, or unwilling to acknowledge, the power issues of parent-child sex, which exist well into adulthood. Never having had a sibling, I’n not really equipped to comment on his insistence that left to their own devices, siblings are going to form sexual relationships, but even as adults, it seems to me that there are some serious complications arising from the intense emotional cauldron that is the family. I don’t believe in sin myself, only in harm, and if siblings or other close relatives who have never lived in the same family and don’t bring that potentially hazardous baggage with them should meet as adults and decide to enter a sexual relationship, the only major objection I have is that of genetic consequences should there be children. But there’s way too much potential for psychological harm if there are already familial bonds established, and you attempt to build sexual bonds on top f them. So Maureen’s willingness to hop into bed with anyone, even her own father and son, as long as she isn’t risking pregnancy, bothers me. And I wonder what brought it to such a prominent place in Heinlein’s ideas about sexual freedom. <br /><br />The other thing that’s both fun and strange is Heinlein’s quest, in the last years of his creative life, to amalgamate the universes of all of his works - and those of some other authors he admired - into one giant multiverse with multiple timelines. He carefully determined which stories and novels took place in which timelines, and created a Time Corps and a theory of creativity as reality to explain how he brought together not only his own science fiction works, but the fantasy worlds of writers from Burroughs to Baum. It’s fun, in a way - much as Philip Jose Farmer’s Wold Newton family of superheroes is fun - but it also seems oddly obsessive. <br /><br />It’s a sprawling, self-indulgent novel that never ceases to fascinate and infuriate me. <br /><br><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=bibliogramma&ditemid=230782" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:257141:204477Jo Walton: Necessity2016-10-25T11:33:10Z2016-10-25T11:33:10Zpublic0<br>One might not think that a trilogy of science fiction books about the various ways one might go about creating a society based on Plato's Republic, and what the outcomes of those societies might look like, is going to be engaging, at times exciting, and hard to put down. And maybe it isn't, if you have little interest about such ideas as justice, the good life, excellence, the nature of conscious self-awareness and the soul, the origin of the universe and the meaning of time.<br /><br />But since I have a strong interest in these things, and since Jo Walton has, in her Thessaly trilogy, written an amazing set of characters you can't help caring about who take part in explorations of these ideas through debate, daily living, and various travels and adventures, it was probably inevitable that I would fall in love with these somewhat unusual novels.<br /><br />I've already talked about the first two novels in the trilogy, The Just City and The Philosopher Kings. In the third novel, Necessity, Walton continues her explorations of the deep philosophical questions that have troubled humanity for millennia. <br /><br />Necessity begins 40 years after Zeus, in order to save Athene's experiment in building a true Platonic society and continue its isolation from human history, has moved all the existing cities to a distant planet and to a time in the 26th century. Survival on Plato, as its new inhabitants have named it, is not as easy as it was on the island of Thera - the climate is colder, and the planet has no indigenous land-based animal life (though it has fish in abundance). But the people of Pluto have prospered, and their cities occupy the planet in peace. Living with them and taking part in Plato's society are two sentient Worker robots that were transported with them, and some members of an alien space-faring race, the Saeli, who find their Platonic ideals appealing. <br /><br />The narrative that drives the further philosophical explorations Walton engages us in involves the disappearance of the goddess Athene from not only time and space, but the dimensions out of time. When Apollo, returned to his divinity by the death of his human incarnation, Pythias, discovers that he cannot sense Athene anywhere, his decision to search for her becomes a quest to understand the underpinnings of existence and the meaning of life.<br /><br />This quest is interwoven with the lives of several inhabitants of Plato, key among them: Jason, who operates a fishing boat; Marsilia, one of the consuls of the City - the first Platonic community settled by Athene on Earth - who also works with Jason; Thetis, her sister, who works with the City's children; Hilfa, a young Saeli who is also part of Jason's crew; and Crocus, the first sentient Worker.<br /><br />The death of Pythias and Apollo's discovery that Athene is lost take place place against the backdrop of an event the Platonians have long anticipated - the arrival of the first spaceship from another planet of humans. The planet's inhabitants must decide whether to follow the advice of Zeus, and present the story of their arrival on Plato as a kind of origin myth, all the while leading the space-faring humans to believe Plato was settled just as any other human colony - or just to tell the truth and let the other humans make of it what they will.<br /><br />Rounding out this mix of events, Sokrates is returned to the Platonic cities, having been found by Apollo on his quest to find Athene. Not at all changed by having spent time in the Jurassic period, living as the gadfly Athene transformed him into, Sokrates becomes an essential part of the continuing philosophical dialogue that is Plato, and of the lives of the Platonians involved in Apollo's quest.<br /><br />In Necessity, Walton proposes some possible answers to the questions being asked in these three novels, but also leaves much still to be considered by the reader, just as she gives her characters some degree of closure in their daily lives, while leaving the future open-ended.<br /><br />The entire trilogy is a kind of experiment, the success of which the reader must judge for themselves. For me, it succeeds gloriously.<br /><br><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=bibliogramma&ditemid=204477" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> commentstag:dreamwidth.org,2009-05-03:257141:176574Jo Walton: The Just City2015-12-24T05:46:32Z2015-12-24T05:46:32Zpublic0<br>Jo Walton is a fearless writer, which is part of what I love about her work. She's willing to experiment, to explore new themes and subjects and styles, to reinvent herself almost every time she begins a new project.<br /><br />In The Just City - the first volume of the Thessaly trilogy - Walton combines Greek gods, robots, some judicious time travel, a thought experiment that brings together some of the greatest philosophers in the history of European civilisation and an extensive critique of Plato's The Republic to create a novel that is as narratively compelling as it is thought provoking.<br /><br />The story begins with Apollo and Athena. Apollo is confused because his latest sexual adventure has ended, not in the enthusiastic compliance he believes all his previous advances have evokes, but in the desperate prayer of his quarry to be transformed into a tree rather than submit to his embrace. Unable to fathom why Daphne would rather give up her life as a nereid than give in to his desires, he seeks out his sister Athena, who tells him: "But she hadn’t chosen you in return. It wasn’t mutual. You decided to pursue her. You didn’t ask, and she certainly didn’t agree. It wasn’t consensual. And, as it happens, she didn’t want you. So she turned into a tree.” <br /><br />Apollo grasps this at an intellectual level, but fails to fully comprehend the concepts of volition and equal significance behind Athena's explanation. He considers incarnating as human in order to explore the matter as a human. Athena suggests that he take part in her experiment - she is in the middle of creating a city based on Plato's The Republic. He agrees. <br /><br />It turns out that Athena has drawn together around 300 scholars from many time periods, all of whom have at one point in their lives prayed in her name for the realisation of The Republic. Assisted by highly developed worker robots Athena has brought from the future, these "masters" have worked for five years to plan and build a city, situated well in the past on the volcanic island of Kallisti (and later, after the explosion that destroyed half of it, Thera), that would operate on the principles laid out by Plato. When all is ready, the masters are sent out into various time periods to purchase 10,000 ten-year old slaves to be the experimental population. Apollo arranges to be born as human at a tine and place where he will be one of these children. <br /><br />As the experiment proceeds, we see what works - and what does not - through the eyes of three people: Apollo, now known as Pytheas; Simmea, another of the children who becomes a friend of Pytheas; and Maia, a master from the 18th century who was drawn to The Republic because of Plato's inclusion of women as full participants in his imagined society, capable of being philosopher-kings.<br /><br />Indeed, as Walton explores the importance of volition and equal significant in the quest to create a truly just society, the issue of gendered justice and free choice in sex and reproduction becomes an important part of the conversation that runs through the novel. Slavery, misogyny, sexual violence, exploitation, the essence of sentience - all these are a part of the examination of freedom and justice that is the heart of The Just City.<br /><br />I know it has had some mixed reviews, but for me The Just City was one of those books I couldn't put down until I finished it.<br /><br><br /><br /><img src="https://www.dreamwidth.org/tools/commentcount?user=bibliogramma&ditemid=176574" width="30" height="12" alt="comment count unavailable" style="vertical-align: middle;"/> comments