Recent Reads – Science Fiction: Questionable and Trash

At least it makes you think—but not too much.  

 

For the second time in my life, I threw out a book because it was not good enough to pass along. Commune 2000 AD by Mack Reynolds was disappointing on many levels, but not too many because it did not have many. I bought the book last year at ArmadilloCon 45. It was clearly a period piece from 1975. As it happened, I later received The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin, as a door prize in return for my judging half a dozen flash fiction entries from the convention’s Writers’ Workshop.  Le Guin complained often about capitalism and the lack of socialist science fiction. So, I googled for “socialist science fiction” and along with Edward Bellamy, Jack London, and others, I found Mack Reynolds. 

In his autobiographical sketch appended to Commune 2000 A. D., Mack Reynolds (1917-1983) tells of being raised in the culture of socialism. He dropped out of high school to volunteer for the Socialist Workers Party. Indeed, at one point in Commune 2000 A.D., Reynolds uses the

word “chauvinism” in a gender context. It is only in passing because the bulk of the book is about the hero having sex with an array of “mopsies.” Not one character with agency is a woman. Tasked by the equivalent of the CIA and FBI (for whom his academic post-doctoral advisor is fronting) to investigate independent countercultural “communes” neither the hero nor Reynolds writes much sociology while visiting only three or four within a day’s drive of New York City. And they are all pretty much alike. The key to their very existence and a basic fact of this future is that the guaranteed annual income created stiff competition for any job that offered surcease from leisure. Intriguing as that is, we spend more time in bed with blondes, natural and bleached, ten or 15 years our junior. And the best part is that the hero rants against the CIA, FBI, and Academe to their faces in a small room and then walks away, The End. I was disappointed that he was not shot dead by lasers in the doorway.

My incentive to read Ursula K. LeGuin came from the movie version of The Jane Austen Book Club. The male in the group, a young tech entrepreneur, eventually introduces his match-up to science fiction and Le Guin is one of his favorites. Already knowing The Lathe of Heaven, I enjoyed The Left Hand of Darkness and The Dispossessed. Much of  The Language of the Night: Essays on Writing, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Ursula K. Le Guin was beyond my ken because she was writing for voracious readers and some of these essays came from acceptance speeches for awards at conventions. I found much of the content here open to question and counter-argument. 

 

Le Guin was not the feminist she claimed to be. She could not be because at some level, we are all products of our environments. In this collection of essays written between 1967 and 1977, LeGuin rarely uses the indefinite “she/her” versus “he/him” to stand for any human being. She was born in 1929. A writer on her own as a child and youth and into her adult years, publication success came at age 40. Early habits form deeply. So, she defaults to a “a person … he.”   

Similarly, her rants against the Establishment are stuck in the 1960s. “From a social point of view most SF has been incredibly regressive an unimaginative. All those Galactic Empires taken straight from the British Empire of 1880. All those planets—with 80 trillion miles between them!—conceived of as warring nation-states, or as colonies to be exploited, or to be nudged by the benevolent Imperium of Earth toward self-development—the White Man’s Burden all over again. The Rotary Club on Alpha Centauri, that’s the size of it.” (“American SF and the Other”)

Le Guin’s imperium in The Left Hand of Darkness is not much different, only vaguer, less well-defined. Limited by the distances between the stars, it has no choice but to balance benign neglect with heartfelt helpfulness. 

 

She advocates mildly for socialism (“American SF and the Other”): “Socialism is never considered as an alternative, and democracy is quite forgotten.” However, that denies Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward. In Jack London’s The Iron Heel fascism is in the past; the story is told from the socialist present of the future. Le Guin might not have known about Octavia Butler, but could not have missed Mack Reynolds, neither of whom appears in this anthology. 

 

I suggest that the reason that SF generally does not present a successful socialist society is that it seems less plausible than FTL and time travel. That being as it may, I did find these resources for those who steer to portside. 

• Science fiction and Socialism from Solidarity website https://solidarity-us.org/p2137/
• “50 Sci Fi and Fantasy Works Every Socialist Should Read” https://portside.org/2017-11-18/50-sci-fi-fantasy-works-every-socialist-should-read
• Socialism and Science Fiction from Workers Liberty https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-04-05/socialism-and-science-fiction (or read online at https://workersliberty.org/node/35385).
• Le Guin is recognized for her socialism in “How Sci-Fi Shaped Socialism” by Nick Hubble at Jacobin dot com. https://jacobin.com/2020/12/utopian-science-fiction-socialism-history and https://www.workersliberty.org/story/2020-04-05/socialism-and-science-fiction
• See also, the Comments following Socialist Futurism: Sci-Fi for Reds and Greens at https://solidarity-us.org/p2137/Comments

 

As for Le Guin’s essays on writing, remove the dross and what’s left is gold. Le Guin’s best critiques center on the lack of style in language among writers who mechanically produce fantasy (“sword and sorcery”) and she contrasts poor efforts against J. R. R. Tolkien E. R. Eddison, and Kenneth Morris. (Tolkien I know; the others I do not.) Her complaint is not just against the fake medieval grammar which is often erroneous, but that the conversations could have taken place in Poughkeepsie rather than Elfland. I believe that the word  that she was looking for was “gravitas.” The best stories are important to the reader because they are important to the writer and language delivers that inherent sense of value. 

Those books transcended their authors. Le Guin says in “The Book is What is Real” that as a child she was often unaware and uninterested in the author even as she re-read her favorite books. Reading a book is an interaction. “As you read it word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note in the creation, the coming-t0-be, the existence of the music. And as you read, and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” 

 

In “Do-It-Yourself Cosmology” Le Guin places science fiction within the realm of fantasy. It is a cogent suggestion from someone who wrote both successfully. We perhaps too easily set the genres apart as we separate Westerns from Historical Romance. I long ago lost the citation, but I read a critical essay by a science fiction author who said that science fiction is the appropriate literature for our modern culture whereas so-called mainstream fiction is really historical fiction set in the present. Le Guin says that fantasy is subjective and inward while science fiction is what comes from giving fantasy “the power and intractability of the object.”

 

Overall, I like the language in the stories from mathematician Greg Egan. I found his “Slipway” in The Year’s Top Hard Science Fiction Stories 4 edited by Allan Kaster. I then requested The Best of Greg Egan from my local library and of those, the ones I remember are “Dark Integers,” “Bit Players,” and “Axiomatic.”

 

I had to read “Slipway” twice to understand the narrative. I liked it because it opened with an amateur astronomer terminally ill with cancer. From there, the story went to professionals trying to understand a phenomenon that seems to be swallowing space and the Earth, which it does: we apparently pass through it  or it around us – and we are transported 65,000 light years farther toward the edge of the Galaxy. However, for this story and the others, one criticism summed up my lack of enthusiasm for someone who writes like I do (and why I do not write fiction).

 

RocketStackRank by Greg Hullender and Eric Wong http://www.rocketstackrank.com/2019/06/The-Slipway-Greg-Egan.html had this to say about the downside.

Con: It’s a pretty low-stakes story. The only thing that’s really lost here is the view of the night sky and humanity’s ability to get to the nearest stars. The protagonist has nothing at stake at all, other than the prospect of a better job in a different country.” 

 

And she apparently had the job before the story started but only had not yet been offered it. So, this was truly low stakes for the heroine. That said, though, It did not bother me that no one died or became a better person. It was just a technical story about something that happened. All of his works are like that. “Bit Players” is one of three in a series from the viewpoint of artificial characters in a gaming universe. They are non-playing characters (NPCs gamers call them). They are trying to figure out who they are and what their world is, but they are warned by other characters that if they show too much awareness, they will be deleted. Their situation was depressing and I lost interest in the outcome. As far as I can tell, Egan is in the mainstream of the dystopian present. It was cute when it was cyberpunk in the 1980s and 90s. Now, it is just tiresome.

 

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