Hangovers from 2000

I'm only even writing this post because Kim Stanley Robinson has written the best political scifi out there. His best known works are Red Mars and its sequels, which played a big role in my getting political. Plenty of his other works are, if anything, even better. The Three Californias Trilogy (reprinted not long ago) and Years of Rice and Salt are absolutely astonishing, as are some of his less remembered works, like Icehenge and The Memory of Whiteness. He's written a lot of clangers, though.
I've just picked up Kim Stanley Robinson's Fifty Degrees Below (the middle of a trilogy on climate change) again after a break. It has some good parts, but on the whole it's probably his worst book so far. There are plenty of reasons for this, but I'm particularly struck by the asinine politics.

A good deal of it centers around a miracle democratic presidential candidate, Phil Chase, who likes to talk about getting along with the rest of the world, pays attention to what scientists say about global warming and so on; in spite of that, he feels so threatened by a hypothetical independent 'scientific' candidate "polling about five percent in the blue states" in spite of not being on the ballot or even actually existing that the protagonists feel obliged to have it 'withdraw' from the race.

It's one of the best examples of the really bizarre reactions a lot of folks on the left are still having to the 2000 election. Robinson, who is pretty sharp politically, seems to have been so traumatized that he thinks that even an imaginary third party candidate - that is, even the idea that we might be able to do better than what's on the official menu - needs a sort of ritual exorcism.

Of course, we shouldn't forget that real democratic nominees are nowhere near as attractive as Phil Chase, but that every four years millions of people try to convince themselves that they are. Before Al Gore reinvented himself last year as a born-again environmentalist, he had worked hard to kneecap the Kyoto protocol - something that I think a lot of Nader voters knew or suspected in 2000.

This is part of the reason that, in spite of some reservations, I'm still glad I campaigned for Nader in 2000 and voted for him in 2004. There is a big problem with the political culture in the US, and one small but important part of it is that so many of the people who should be trying to do something about it are too pessimistic to even think seriously about it.

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Incidentally, there was an excellent piece by Garret Keizer in this month's Harper's to do with Al Gore and the politics of global warming. Among the many interesting points, he suggested that global warming could be a good counterpart to the "war on terror" in keeping people from thinking about everything else that's going on. That's an interesting way of looking at what's happened to Robinson.

Ken Macleod, Science Fiction and politics

I was very pleased to hear today that Resistance MP3s has posted new files from Marxism 2006. I've already listened to Ken MacLeod's talk on science fiction which is very interesting, though unfortunately his wrap up is missing, and I hope I haven't said anything unfair as a result.

I always enjoy talks like this, partly because looking back I've realized that a lot of what got me started thinking about politics and was reading Scifi, both good and bad. Ken's written some of each; his Fall Revolution series is absolutely fantastic on a lot of different levels, but his other books are mainly good for in-jokes (for example who naming a starship after a book by Tony Cliff), although still better than some. I think my favorite book of his is The Cassini Division, which deals with a the common problem in political Scifi -- that utopia is boring -- by contrasting two "utopias": the socialist society on earth and a sort of cyberpunk-libertarian "utopia" on the other side of the wormhole. It's one of my favorite depictions of a possible socialist society that I've seen anywhere.

For me the most interesting point in his talk the was about the prominence of the idea of a "singularity" and post-humanism in recent Scifi which I think he's quite right to see the as reflecting how much difficulty people have nowadays of envisioning an attractive human future and a sense of powerlessness. He puts this mainly down to the reaction to the collapse of the Soviet bloc and so forth. I'm sure this is significant; there were no shortage of science fiction writers who had the same kinds of attitudes about "really existing socialism" as other left and soft-left intellectuals (it always struck me how much Isaac Asimov's more pleasant future societies reminded me of an idealized version of the Soviet Union). However I think you can already see that demoralization in Cyberpunk and a lot of the dystopian turn in the eighties. As with the the shifts in the academic "left", I bet it has a lot more to do with disappointment in the outcome social movements and upheavals of the sixties and seventies. The shift from that towards posthumanism I think reflects a shift from a sense that things are more or less just decaying to more prominent feeling (presumably down to a sense of the effects of globalization and all that) that something overpowering is happening, and many people can't sort out whether or not they are frightened of it.

All this, and some of the comments in the discussion, also got me wondering about why people think so highly of Iain M. Banks -- although he's a very skilled rider in a lot of ways I don't find any of his work all that interesting, I think because he's so wrapped up in post-humanism that he just doesn't have that much to say to me. His culture series also has the Star Trek problem of having a supposedly classless etc. society which has to "defend" itself in a way that sneaks in a lot of bits from defenses of contemporary imperialism.

A lot of the discussions didn't touch that much on what Ken was saying but it did bring up some good points about what China Miéville usually covers in these sorts of talks, the role of fantasy and imagination in politics. I was happy to hear a few people stick up for the politics of Firefly, although I think the comments actually didn't give it credit for being as subversive as it actually is. One intervention described the Alliance (the central government in Firefly) as totalitarian, but in fact it's a version of our contemporary government, admittedly viewed through a conspiratorial lens: a nominal democracy, actually dominated by big corporations, and perfectly willing to resort to all sorts of sinister means to maintain its power -- and the tremendous gap between the wealthy "core worlds" and the mostly impoverished periphery. It's a very good example of what I think another one of the participants was trying to get at, which is that Scifi can have a Brechtian effect (if you'll pardon me for being pretentious about it), of making a familiar thing more comprehensible by presenting it in an unfamiliar way.

This discussion took place in the summer, so there are two incredible examples to add since then. The first few episodes of the new season of Battlestar Galactica were one of the most incredible commentaries on the Iraq war I've seen anywhere near the mainstream media, and Children of Men (the film; I haven't had a chance to read the book yet) had more going on than I can hope to cover.