David's comments (member since Apr 27, 2009)

David's comments from the SciFi and Fantasy Book Club group.

Yeah, I struggle with a coherence theory of truth. I can imagine it, and so it is at least possible, but we (especially, as an engineer) are acclimated to a correspondence notion of singular truth. People (particularly ideologues) seem to make their reality cohere, but at the cost of strictly limiting dissonance (which is so useful in itself, driving us to ever-better explanations). I suppose, in the back of my mind, there is the fear that the truth I see is simply the undiscovered lie.

I think I agree with that: truth is a complex condition. Although I don't think fiction is about universal truth, rather it's about potential truth. To claim a truth as universal is, in a way, to close the book on its consideration.

I think corporations have the potential for rejuvenation that exists with the popular sovereign, but not with monarchy or singular theocracies. The problem is really the profit motive--their whole 18th Century reason for being, that ran amuck in the 19th Century, and struggled to gain some semblance of social responsibility in the 20th Century (with some pretty amazing failures). Corporations just need to find another currency.

I guess it goes back to Hobbes: we invest the Sovereign in exchange for personal safety. But sometimes people don't feel safe even when they are (or they feel safe when the immediate future proves otherwise). The problem for the Sovereign is that it requires support, and unfettered support only comes from the personally convinced. The argument doesn't have to be valid--or even sincere--just convincing.

For example, the Divine Right of Kings was a great help (for the kings), but few people take it seriously today. Many Americans who reject DRK are nonetheless willing to believe their Sovereign responds to a Divinely inspired Constitution. If Americans loose faith in the potency and benificence of their government, they might be willing to opt for a corporate Sovereign (maybe not GMC or Microsoft).

Corporations are pretty powerful things (zaibatsu are even more powerful). While they don't have to be mis-behaving, it seems like all Sovereigns eventually get there. Misbehaving Sovereigns only needs to find an adequate powerbase among the gullible--which hasn't (historically) proved all that difficult. Ask yourself: is the "truth" generally more convincing then a well fabricated lie? If it were, would anyone be reading fiction (let alone Science Fiction)?

Robert wrote: "... I don't think the whole of America is represented by this view..."

So, is "America" the unconsidered view of its (currently living) majority, the (by now) more-or-less fossilized view of the Founding Fathers, or the esoteric goals of a manipulating oligarchy?

I'm in the middle of Cyteen right now (I bought a copy of Regenisis, and thought that I ought to read Cyteen first) and it presents a fascinating view of deliberative politics. I think most of us just want to feel safe, and so we're particularly susceptible to the eloquent argument (safety is, pretty much, in the spin). Nothing strengthens the appearance of an argument like the plausible mantle of Divine approval, but it's a type, rather than the category of appeal to expertise.

I think we only recognize the cons that haven't worked on us, and most of them come from established power structures that manage to avoid the extreme ossification of their fellows. If appeals to the Divine become ineffective, they'll just be replaced by something less transparent.

L wrote: "Jon asked in the second post if Americans were happy about the end of WW2..."

I think the American survivors of the War (which was just about everyone, compared with countries in the theaters of war) became happier with the War over time. America is a very Calvanist place, and we liked to point to the War as evidence of our own Divine blessedness.

The War was the natural fruit of competing colonial powers, and in a way, defeat redeemed countries like Japan. Even England seemed to have had enough--but we came out of the War unrepentent. American foreign policy between the War and the Tet Offensive was a pretty unabashed, economic Jihad.

If you're looking for involved, coherent storyline, you probably need to look elsewhere. Still, good writing isn't limited to long narrative.

I read this a long time ago, and just started it again. I also have the TV version that Rock Hudson did, and think I'll watch that at the same time. As I recall, the mini-series was a little weak, which might be expected, given the strengths and weaknesses of the story compilation.

Wasn't there a story about Bradbury being rousted by the cops (in Santa Monica?) because they wanted to know what he was doing, and he told them he was walking? There were fairly strong leftist elements in the late 1940s (residual from the Depression) which weren't sucked underground until the post-war Republican ascendency sort of took over.

I seem to recall that he wrote a lot for film, and his politics would have been shaped somewhat by the more atrocious right-wing attacks on "Hollywood."

I finished watching the movie today, and aside from the heavy-handed subaudibles, the casting seems like the biggest problem. For example, I thought Patrick Stewart might have made an intersting Count Fenring (although the skipped him in the movie) but I couldn't swallow him as Gurney Halleck. Who else would you like to see in a "fantasy" Dune movie. They don't have to be alive (Charles Laughton would make a great Vladamir) or even "real"(How about Buffy Summers as Alia). How about Nietzsche (post-syphilitic) as the twisted Mentat Piter deVries?

I watched a little of the movie last night and was struck (again) at what an enormous waste it made of a really good cast--not to mention the cost of the practicals, and in-camera effects. Maybe they just weren't doing good CG in 1984. When did Jedi come out? Whose idea was it to cast Stewart as Gurney? And the Harkonnen scenes were so over the top, I wonder if they weren't all parceled out to the AD.

Of course, it was sort of a no-win situation (so many people love the books--even the fils books) but I often wonder if Frank Herbert's ego was getting in the way (I seem to recall him railing against Lucas for "ripping him off").

I guess the danger in recognizing a personal error, is the possibility of thinking it inevitable. If I consider a prejudice inevitable (and I'm lazy) I may simply dismiss objections to my prejudice as noble, but impractical. I agree that this isn't Genly's attitude.

Genly is a worlds-traveler, and is embarassed, not by Estraven's kemmer-interest, but because he (Genly) had made an automatic, and rather parochial (or, at least, Ekumen) "male" gender assignment. Genly recognizes that he should have known better.

Of course, Hollywood would probably jump them into the sack--so it might be a good thing that the book hasn't been rendered into celluloid yet.

Le Guin also uses the term "face" in the book, so it has to be something distinct (she's far too good of a writer to leave a term untranslated if she thinks it has an English equivalent). Maybe she makes the additional reference to "face" because she wants us to recognize that "face" is only a part of shifgrethor. While the loss of face is a self-conceit, changes in shifgrethor seem to carry a very particular, Gethenian currency (and seem, to me, to be more applicable in the more hierarchical monarchy).

**spoiler**

It's been a couple years since my first reading of the book, and I'd forgotten how finely crafted the split narrative was. I think it's especially effective in showing the narrators' isolation. It's sort of a neat solution to the problem of a story that requires a first-person perspective from a character that's going to be killed at the end of the book.

Jim wrote: "David, I think you're obscuring the point behind animal extremes..."

Probably.

I guess it was Hobbes who said that the desires of wealth are endless—so wealth as a telos is a dead end. (I think we can define wealth broadly here, after Rawls, to include things like intelligence, health, position, and even luck—the point is that we’re naturally jealous of the stuff we have, because we try to own the outcome of our efforts). If we are naturally lazy, and our destiny (final cause) is to create stuff or to perfect our capacity—then we might want to be driven by the differential of desire. But if we want the telos of quietude (or if the perfection of our nature is something other than material efficiency), then we need to get off the never-ending track of desire. But renouncing desire (the outcome) isn’t the same as withholding our effort (responding from duty—doing the things we think we should do, simply because we think we should do them). I think the model here would be the Bodhisattva.

Michelle M. wrote: "David, I think Brit-wit relies very often on word-play. The authors not only depend on you reading the text, but also imagining it aloud..."

Yeah, Prachett is very auditory.

The limited absurdity is like giving your narrator a thread of loving insanity. Total insanity lacks a reference point, but a little insanity makes things different enough to be interesting. Mean-spirited insanity (Three Stooges) can be interesting but not very funny, while loving insanity (Laurel & Hardy) can be just as violent, but also funny.

Jim wrote: "I don't buy that..."

Happiness is an awfully obscure goal. I think we would all like to be happy, other things being equal, but we would also like to deserve being happy.

I guess, technically, anger or fear (fight or flight) would be the negative, aversion response to some contingency we wish to avoid. The animal response to fear is to either run away, or shut down and take it (learned helplessness, in the extreme). Fear might keep us safe, or it might not, but it doesn’t get us religion or philosophy.

Animals are probably limited to visceral and safety needs (maybe esteem needs, in the case of our dogs), and so stimulus-response works pretty well. But as rational beings, we have at least the potential to transcend our animal needs.

For example, when someone wanted to be warm in a smoke-free house, they refined a flue and chimney, rather than rely on the old owl’s hole. This wasn’t from the visceral need to be warm (a fire and an owl’s hole worked well enough), but was the very human desire to be self-actualized (eudaimonia—probably closer to what we consider, when we think that we want to be happy). We don’t want the happiness of our dogs, lazing by the fireplace—we want the quietude of earned control. Harmony doesn't imply the bland acceptance of some lowest-common-denominator. From a practical (for humans) perspective, harmony requires that we function at the level of higher, prepotent needs (Maslow)

Jim wrote: "Fear is another great motivator..."

Fear is a limbic motivator, along with anger, and, maybe, the desire for sex-without-an-aftermath. They're negative emotions, and seldom take us any place new (developmentally).

Harmony doesn't imply equality, just equity.

I think you would have to rank Le Guin with Theodore Sturgeon, as probably the two most significant authors, in terms of changing the nature of Science Fiction (making it psychological rather than technological). I think I would call her work pivotal, rather than classic—perhaps in the way that Jane Austen took the sentimental novel of the 18th Century and gave it a literary face.

BTW, I don’t think anyone has mentioned Le Guin’s parents. She obviously had a special, nurturing childhood, and her mother’s book on Ishi was required reading in anthropology, while Le Guin was writing her Hainish Cycle.

On page 282 I read: "The kitchen tap dribbled like a diuretic gerbil," thought, what?!? went back and re-read it, and had one of those audible chuckles. Maybe the enjoyment of the written word is a function of invested mental effort (comedy just being a subset of the things we enjoy reading). This might have a bearing on Le Guin’s rejection notice for LHOD linked on one of the other discussions. LHOD is complex, and the complexity makes it both good (for those who invest the requisite mental effort) and bad (for those who don’t). I first read LHOD a year or so ago, having been told that it was good. If I had been reading it as a manuscript, without the anticipation that there was some special meat at the core of it, I might have passed on it too.

The Platonic myth of the bifurcated hermaphrodite—4 arms, 4 legs, both sets of genitalia—seems a little like the fragmented Atman. We aren’t individually seeking an Alter Idem, but the collective reunification of masculine and feminine. Shunted into separate gender roles, we are simply broken.

I think Le Guin loves her male characters, maybe in the way that Austen loves her ninnies (male and female). Love isn’t blinding. The fearful dependence on gender performance is blinding.