Fantastika za socijaliste

[Melkor]

Nekako mi je ova lista, stara sad skoro 10 godina promakla...


Fifty Fantasy & Science Fiction Works That Socialists Should Read

By China Miéville

This is not a list of the "best" fantasy or SF. There are huge numbers of superb works not on the list. Those below are chosen not just because of their quality—which though mostly good, is variable—but because the politics they embed (deliberately or not) are of particular interest to socialists. Of course, other works—by the same or other writers—could have been chosen: disagreement and alternative suggestions are welcomed. I change my own mind hour to hour on this anyway.

Iain M. Banks—Use of Weapons (1990)

Socialist SF discussing a post-scarcity society. The Culture are "goodies" in narrative and political terms, but here issues of cross-cultural guilt and manipulation complicate the story from being a simplistic utopia.

Edward Bellamy—Looking Backward, 2000–1887 (1888)

A hugely influential, rather bureaucratic egalitarian/naïve communist utopia. Deals very well with the confusion of the "modern" (19th Century) protagonist in a world he hasn't helped create (see Bogdanov).

Alexander Bogdanov—The Red Star: A Utopia (1908; trans. 1984)

This Bolshevik SF sends a revolutionary to socialist Mars. The book's been criticized (with some justification) for being proto-Stalinist, but overall it's been maligned. Deals well with the problem faced by someone trying to adjust to a new society s/he hasn't helped create (see Bellamy).

Emma Bull & Steven Brust—Freedom & Necessity (1997)

Bull is a left-liberal and Brust is a Trotskyist fantasy writer. F&N is set in the 19th Century of the Chartists and class turmoil. It's been described as "the first Marxist steampunk" or "a fantasy for Young Hegelians."

Mikhail Bulgakov—The Master and Margarita (1938; trans. 1967)

Astonishing fantasy set in '30s Moscow, featuring the Devil, Pontius Pilate, The Wandering Jew, and a satire and critique of Stalinist Russia so cutting it is unbelievable that it got past the censors. Utterly brilliant.

Katherine Burdekin (aka "Murray Constantine")—Swastika Night (1937)

An excellent example of the "Hitler Wins" sub-genre of SF. It's unusual in that it was published by the Left Book Club and it was written while Hitler was in power, so the fear of Nazi future was immediate.

Octavia Butler—Survivor (1978)

Black American writer, now discovered by the mainstream after years of acclaim in the SF field. Kindred is her most overtly political novel, the Patternmaster series the most popular. Survivor brilliantly blends genre SF with issues of colonialism and racism.

Julio Cortázar—"House Taken Over" (1963?)

A terrifying short story undermining the notion of the house as sanctity and refuge. A subtle destruction of the bourgeois oppositions between public/private and inside/outside.

Philip K. Dick—A Scanner Darkly (1977)

Could have picked almost any of his books. Like all of them, this deals with identity, power, and betrayal, here tied in more directly to social structures than in some other works (though see Counter-Clock World and The Man in the High Castle). Incredibly moving.

Thomas Disch—The Priest (1994)

Utterly savage work of anti-clericalism. A work of dark fantasy GBH against the Catholic Church (dedicated, among others, to the Pope...)

Gordon Eklund—All Times Possible (1974)

Study of alternative worlds, including an examination of hypothetical Left-wing movements in alternative USAs.

Max Ernst—Une Semaine de Bonté (1934)

The definitive Surrealist collage novel. A succession of images the reader is involved in decoding. A Whodunwhat, with characters from polite commercial catalogues engaged in a story of little deaths and high adventure.

Claude Farrère—Useless Hands (1920; trans. 1926)

Bleak Social Darwinism, and a prototype of "farewell to the working class" arguments. The "useless hands"—workers—revolt is seen as pathetic before inexorable technology. A cold, reactionary, interesting book.

Anatole France—The White Stone (1905; trans. 1910)

In part, a rebuttal to the racist "yellow peril" fever of the time—a book about "white peril" and the rise of socialism. Also interesting is The Revolt of the Angels, which examines now well-worn socialist theme of Lucifer being in the right, rebelling against the despotic God.

Jane Gaskell—Strange Evil (1957)

Written when Gaskell was 14, with the flaws that entails. Still, however, extraordinary. A savage fairytale, with fraught sexuality, meditations on Tom Paine and Marx, revolutionary upheaval depicted sympathetically, but without sentimentality; plus the most disturbing baddy in fiction.

Mary Gentle—Rats and Gargoyles (1990)

Set in a city that undermines the "feudalism lite" of most genre fantasy. An untypical female protagonist has adventures in a cityscape complete with class struggle, corruption, and racial oppression.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman—"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)

Towering work by this radical thinker. Terrifying short story showing how savage gender oppression can inhere in "caring" relationships just as easily as in more obviously abusive ones. See also her feminist/socialistic utopias "Moving the Mountain" (1911) and Herland (1914).

Lisa Goldstein—The Dream Years (1985)

A time-slip oscillating between Paris in the 1920s, during the Surrealist movement, and in 1968, during the Uprising. Uses a popular fantastic mode to examine the relation between Surrealism as the fantastic mode par excellence and revolutionary movements (if nebulously conceived).

Stefan Grabiński—The Dark Domain (1918–22; trans. and collected 1993)

Brilliant horror by this Polish writer. Unusually locates the uncanny and threatening within the very symbols of a modernizing industrialism in Poland: trains, electricity, etc. This awareness of the instability of the everyday marks him out from traditional, "nostalgic" ghost story writers.

George Griffith—The Angel of Revolution (1893)

Rather dated, but unusual in that its heroes are revolutionary terrorists. Very different from the devious anarchist villains of (e.g.) Chesterton.

Imil Habibi—The Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist (1974; trans. 1982)

The full title is much longer. Habiby was a member of the Palestinian Community Party, a veteran of the anti-British struggle of the 40s, and a member of the Knesset for several years. This amiable, surreal book is about the life of a Palestinian in Israel (with surreal bits, and aliens).

M. John Harrison—Viriconium Nights (1984)

A stunning writer, who expresses the alienation of the modern everyday with terrible force. Fantasy that mercilessly uncovers the alienated nature of the longing for fantastic escape, and show how that fantasy will always remain out of reach. Punishes his readers and characters for their involvement with fantasy. See also The Course of the Heart.

Ursula K. Le Guin—The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974)

The most overtly political of this anarchist writer's excellent works. An examination of the relations between a rich, exploitive capitalist world and a poor, nearly barren (though high-tech) communist one.

Jack London—Iron Heel (1907)

London's masterpiece: scholars from a 27th Century socialist world find documents depicting a fascist oligarchy in the US and the revolt of the proletariat. Elsewhere, London's undoubted socialism is undermined by the most appalling racism.

Ken MacLeod—The Star Fraction (1996)

British Trotskyist (of strongly libertarian bent), all of whose (very good) works examine Left politics without sloganeering. The Stone Canal, for example, features arguments about distortions of Marxism. However, The Star Fraction is chosen here as it features Virtual Reality heroes of the left, by name—a roll call of genuine revolutionaries recast in digital form.

Gregory Maguire—Wicked (1995)

Brilliant revisionist fantasy about how the winners write history. The loser whose side is here taken is the Wicked Witch of the West, a fighter for emancipatory politics in the despotic empire of Oz.

J. Leslie Mitchell (Lewis Grassic Gibbon)—Gay Hunter (1934, reissued 1989)

By the Marxist writer of the classic work of vernacular Scots literature A Scots Quair, and Spartacus, the novel that proves that propaganda can be art. This is great science fiction. Bit dewy-eyed about hunter-gatherers perhaps, but superb nonetheless. As an added bonus, it also has a title that sounds amusing today. Check out his short fiction, which includes a lot of SF/Fantasy work.

Michael Moorcock—Hawkmoon (1967–77, reprinted in one edition 1992)

Moorcock is an erudite Left-anarchist and a giant of fantasy literature. Almost everything he's written is of interest, but Hawkmoon is chosen here in honor of Moorcock having said about it: "In a spirit consciously at odds with the jingoism of the day, I chose a German for a hero and the British for villains." There are also plenty of satirical references and gags about 1960s/70s politics for the reader to decode
.
William Morris—News From Nowhere (1888)

A socialist (though naively pastoral) utopia, written in response to Bellamy (above), that unusually doesn't shy away from the hard political question of how we get the desired utopia-proletarian revolution. See also The Well at the World's End and his other fantasies.

Toni Morrison—Beloved (1987)

It's well known that Beloved is a superb book about race and slavery and guilt, but it's less generally accepted that it's a fantasy. It is. It's a ghost story that wouldn't have half the charge without the fantastic element.

Mervyn Peake—The Gormenghast Novels (1946–59)

An austere depiction of dead ritualism and necessary transformation. Don't believe those who say that the third book is disappointing.

Marge Piercy—Woman on the Edge of Time (1976)

A Chicano woman trapped in an asylum makes contact with a messenger from a future utopia, born after a "full feminist revolution".

Philip Pullman—Northern Lights (1995)

Pullman let us down. This book is here because it deals with moral/political complexities with unsentimental respect for its (young adult) readers and characters. Explores freedom and social agency, and the question of using ugly means for emanicipatory ends. It raises the biggest possible questions, and doesn't patronise us that there are easy answers. The second in the trilogy, The Subtle Knife, is a perfectly good bridging volume... and then in book three, The Amber Spyglass, something goes wrong. It has excellent bits, it is streets ahead of its competition... but there's sentimentality, a hesitation, a formalism, which lets us down. Ah well. Northern Lights is still a masterpiece.

Ayn Rand—Atlas Shrugged (1957)

Know your enemy. This panoply of portentous Nietzcheanism lite has had a huge influence on American SF. Rand was an obsessive "objectivist" (libertarian pro-capitalist individualist) whose hatred of socialism and any form of "collectivism" is visible in this important an influential—though vile and ponderous—novel.

Mack Reynolds—Lagrange Five (1979)

Reynolds was, for 25 years, an activist for the U.S. Socialist Labor Party. His radical perspective on political issues is reflected throughout his work. This book—examining a quasi-utopia without sentimentalism—is only one suggestion. Also of huge interest are Tomorrow Might Be Different (1960) and The Rival Rigelians (1960), which explicitly examine the relation between capitalism and Stalinism.

Keith Roberts—Pavane (1968)

These linked stories take place in a present day where Elizabeth I was assassinated and Spain took over Britain. This examines life in a world where a militant feudal Catholicism acts as a fetter on social and productive functions. Though Roberts was no lefty at all, and you could probably power France on the energy from his spinning grave at being included in this list.

Kim Stanley Robinson—The Mars Trilogy (1992–96)

Probably the most powerful center of gravity for Leftist SF in the 1990s. A sprawling and thoughtful examination of the variety of social relations feeding into and leading up to revolutionary change. (It's also got some Gramsci jokes in it.)

Mary Shelley—Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus (1818)

Not a warning "not to mess with things that should be let alone" (which would be a reactionary anti-rationalist message) but an insistence on the necessity of grappling with forces one unleashes and the fact that there is no "innate" nature to people, but a socially-constructed one.

Lucius Shepard—Life During Wartime (1987)

Horrific vision of a future (thinly disguised Vietnam) war. Within the savage examinations of the truth of war and U.S. foreign policy, Shepard also investigates the relation between SF, fantasy, and "magic realism", and uses their shared mode to look back at reality with passion.

Norman Spinrad—The Iron Dream (1972)

A SF novel by Adolf Hitler... Spinrad's funny, disturbing and savage indictment of the fascist aesthetics in much genre SF and fantasy. What if Hitler had become a pulp SF writer in New York? Not a book about that possibility but a book from it. "By the same author: Triumph of the Will and Lord of the Swastika." Brave and nasty.

Eugene Sue—The Wandering Jew (1845)

Huge book by radical socialist Sue, about the adventures of the family of the Wandering Jew of legend. Symbolic fantasy elements: the Jew is the dispossessed laborer and his partner is downtrodden woman. Marx hated Sue as a writer (not without reason—less, for Sue, is not in more) but hell, it's an important book.

Michael Swanwick—The Iron Dragon's Daughter (1993)

Great work that completely destroys the sentimental aspects of genre fantasy. From within the genre—fairies, elves, and all—Swanwick examines the industrial revolution, the Vietnam War, racism and sexism, and the escapist dreams of genre fantasy. A truly great anti-fantasy.

Jonathan Swift—Gulliver's Travels (1726)

Savage attack on hypocrisy and cant that never dilutes its fantasy with its satire: the two elements feed off each other perfectly.

Alexei Tolstoy—Aelita (1922; trans. 1957)

Distant relative of the other Tolstoy. The "revised" version is less good, written in the stern environment of Stalinism. A Red Army officer goes to Mars and foments a rebellion of native Martians. Good rousing stuff, but also interesting in terms of "exporting" revolution. See also the superb avant-garde film version from 1924.

Ian Watson—Slow Birds (1985)

Left-wing author whose short story collection above includes a cold demolition of Thatcher and Thatcherism. His take on oppression—cognitive and political—informs all his rather austere, cerebral writing.

H.G. Wells—The Island of Dr Moreau (1896)

Like a lot of Wells's work, this is an uneasy mixture of progressive and reactionary notions. It makes for one of the great horror stories of all time. A fraught examination of colonialism, science, eugenics, repression, and religion: a kind of fantasy echo of Shakespeare's The Tempest.

E. L. White—"Lukundoo" (1927)

One of the most utterly extraordinary (and almost certainly unconscious) expressions of colonial anxiety and guilt in the history of literature.

Oscar Wilde—The Happy Prince and Other Stories (1888)

Children's fantasies by this romantic, socialist author. Marked by a sharp lack of sentimentality, a deeply subversive cynicism, which doesn't blunt their ability to be intensely moving.

Gene Wolfe—The Fifth Head of Cerberus (1972)

Wolfe is a religious Republican, but his tragico-Catholic perspective leads to a deeply unglamorized and unsanitized awareness of social reality. This book is a very sad and extremely dense, complex meditation on colonialism, identity and oppression.

Yevgeny Zamyatin—We (1920; trans. 1924)

A Bolshevik, who earned semi-official unease in the USSR even in the early 1920s, with this unsettling dystopian view of absolute totalitarianism. These days often retrospectively, ahistorically, and misleadingly judged to be a critique of Stalinism.



With many thanks to Mark Bould, Brian Stableford, and the members of the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts email list (IAFA-L) for their suggestions. I take full responsibility for the final selection...

[Tripp]

    Shvatam da je izbor selektivan i kao takav bezmalo je savrsen. Sam po sebi bi mogao isposlovati i zadovoljiti citavu jednu odrednicu u Nikolsovoj Enciklopediji [gdje sam je trazio ne bih li je postovao ovdje, ali je nepostojeca; doduse u pitanju je Najprvije izdanje; ne znam nista o kasnijim izdanjima].

    'Socijalizma' nema ni u onom sranju kod Manna, Mammoth Encyclopedia of SF gdje tip cak ima i posebnu oblast - 'Terms, Themes, and Devices in Science Fiction'.

   Samo se cudim sto Mjevil nije, makar iz ovog zanrovskijeg konglomerata, uvrstio duo Pohl/Kornbluth sa romanom/romanima The Space Merchants (1953) i The Merchants' War (1984) - tipicna osuda konzumerizma, iako je potonji naslov pisao samo Pohl [Kornbluth je umro mlad]; s te bande, sumnjam da se njihov Wolfbane (1959) moze pridruziti ovima. Velim, ako je na listing mogao biti uvrsten i anti-klerikalni Dischov The Priest [to je cjelina iz njegove nevezane horor-tetralogije, 'Minnesota Novels', koju sacinjavaju izuzetno napisani The Businessman, The M.D., The Priest & The Sub], mogu sigurno i The Space Merchants. 

   I Malzberg je pisao panegirike o satiricnim Pohl/Kornbluth romanima, a narocito o Kornbluthu (opet ja o Malzbergu; oprosti mi, Melkore, medjutim on je jedan od rijetkih SF-ovaca koji su dobili izdanje u Arkham House izdavackoj kuci [In the Stone House, 2000]; i to je nesto).

    Takodje se jos jedan izvanredno pragmaticki autor, prevashodno satiricar, divio Pohl/Kornbluth romanima - Kingsley Amis, otac Martina Amisa. On je cak drzao i donekle komunisticki pogled na svijet sve do Madjarske, 1956. Onda je valjda postao engleski radikal.

     Stavise, K.Ejmis nije trpio proseravanja. Ponajvise nije trpio eksperimentisanje jezikom i knjizevnom formom. Volio je citati romane gdje je sve crno na bijelom i gdje se nije morao muciti sa tumacenjem sadrzaja kako bi naslutio je li to pocela radnja ili se to autor samo zahuktava za dobijanje neke specijalizovane literarne nagrade [od engleskih klasika je postovao samo Sekspira i Fieldinga].

    Smatran je za velikana engleske pisane rijeci i njemu se oprastalo sve pa i kada je na Oxfordu drzao predavanja o SF-u i o krimi zanru. Docnije su upravo ta predavanja o SF-u uvrstena u simpaticnu zbirku New Maps of Hell (1960). Citati njegove intervjue je takodje milina. Vezano za to, upravo je u USA objavljena zbirka njegovih intervjua, Conversations With Kingsley Amis. Recimo, kada je prvi put procitao par tzv. hard SF romana, upitao se, 'Sta je sad pa ovo?' Mogu tek zamisliti kako bi mu pao besmisleni kiberpank.   

    Isto tako, pamtim da je za neki svoj distopijski roman dobio John Campbell Memorial.

    Mozda upravo za The Alteration (1976), koji sigurno zavrijedjuje da se nadje na ovoj listi, kada je vec bivak tu nasao i Kit Robertson sa romanom Pavane. Filip K. Dik je negdje napisao da je The Alteration najbolji roman o alternativnom svijetu koji je ikada citao.

    Evo Amisovog odgovora [iz intervjua casopisu The Paris Review] na pitanje, What attracks you to science fiction?

    AMIS: You start with, as always, something rather simple and perhaps even childish. Because I was attracted to it as a lad on sensational grounds: grounds of excitement, wonder - as they always say - and a liking for the strange, the possibly horrific. And then of course as science fiction came out of the pure monster-and-robot phase and started to do other things, it became very efficient vehicle for social satire, and for investigation of the human character in a different way from the straightforward novel: humanity's character considered as a single thing, rather than the characters of individual beings reacting on one another. Of course, many science-fiction writers aren't equipped to tackle these rather grand themes, but I think it might well happen. So in one way science fiction is more ambitious than the novel we're used to, because these great abstractions can be discussed: immortality, how we feel about the future, what the future mean to us, and how much even we're at the mercy of what's happened in the past. All these things it can do.               

[Mica Milovanovic]

Mislim da bi vas ovo moglo zanimati. Nije slucajno da su vodeci teoreticari SF-a marksisti...

WILLIAM J. BURLING
MARXIST THEORY AND SF
The Marxist interest in and connection to SF is longstanding and well known, but also highly complex, uneven, and mediated. Like its counterparts in feminist, post-colonial, queer, and ethnic literary and cultural theory, Marxist theory is always connected in both spirit and practice to objectives that range beyond a specific literary text and thus employs cultural analysis in the interests of social and political praxis. The first and longest section of this essay will outline fundamental Marxist theoretical concepts and concerns with relation to SF; the second identifies representative theorists and studies. The essay concludes by surveying some significant SF works of fiction and cinema that have been of interest to Marxist critics.

MARXISM CULTURAL THEORY AND PRACTICE: AN OVERVIEW
The particular "flavor" of Marxist Criticism of cultural production is distinguished by several key concepts that theorize the historically specific material articulations of production and consumption. The mode of production is the seminal concept and refers to the differing economic systems which in turn generate specific forms of social relations out of which unique forms of cultural production arise. Of the four (possibly five) modes identified by Marx, capitalism is the most relevant to discussion of SF via the specific developments of science, technology, and economics transpiring from the early nineteenth century to the present time. Capitalism is characterized by the ways in which the surplus value of labor is captured as profit by the owners of the means of production, resulting in a lopsided distribution of material assets. Three effects are especially noteworthy. Alienation results from the facts that workers often cannot afford the very goods and services they create, nor do they own the resources needed for production. The irresolvable material antagonisms existing between capitalist haves and proletarian have-nots result in class struggle, which is replicated in the content, but also especially the forms of cultural practices, as exemplified by such categories as "popular culture" and "high art." The third effect, reification, describes the practice of equating human relationships in terms of relations among things. This component is most readily understood via attention to commodification, i.e., the social valorization of consumption, which is especially characterized by what Marx identified as the commodity fetish. The latter refers to the ideological mystification of imagining that things have "a life of their own" rather than being the products of human labor.
Tying all of these concepts together in Marxist criticism are two basic methodological practices. The first, historicization, insists that only the analysis of practices at specific moments and cultures can one grasp the meaning and significance of cultural practices. In this insistence Marxism vehemently challenges the prevailing bourgeois idealist theory of interpretation which separates "true art" from "popular culture" and characterizes the former as bearing transcendent, universal value. The second is the centrality of critical thinking, a practice that 1) reflects upon its own premises; 2) insists upon supporting evidence; and 3) recognizes the complexities of ideology generated by the mode of production's particular social relations.
With these basic terms in mind, we can turn first to how Marxist critics apply them to the analysis of cultural production in general, and then move on to their particular applications with respect to SF. The present essay examines two main concerns of Marxist cultural theory: attention to the appearance and development of specific forms of production; and ideology critique, i.e., how the particular cultural work expresses or resists the ideological mechanisms and assumptions of the status quo.
***
Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel (1916), while not specifically Marxist, is arguably among the first important and purely theoretical works of the early twentieth century devoted to close analysis of cultural, and this case literary, production. Lukács established the basis for linking particular forms of fiction, such as realism, to specific historical eras and demonstrated the possibilities for sophisticated theoretical analysis of culture. Subsequent historicizing studies by others refined the connections of periodization to forms but also demonstrated how culture production variously replicates or challenges ideology.  The "Frankfurt School" critics T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer in Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947) identified what they termed the emerging "culture industry," i.e., forms of mass cultural production such as film and music which simultaneously generated profits for capitalists while also inculcating uncritical political and social passivity. Countering this overly reductive position, Raymond Williams, especially in Culture and Society, 1780-1950 (1960), established the basis for what became known as Cultural Materialism by arguing for the resistive and even libratory possibilities of mass culture. Also contributing sophisticated theoretical models for interpreting cultural production from materialist perspectives during the post-WWII period were critics such as Roland Barthes in Writing Degree Zero (1953) and Mythologies (1957); Louis Althusser in For Marx (1965) and Reading Capital (1968); and especially Pierre Marchery in A Theory of Literary Production (1966). While almost no Marxist cultural critics appeared in the repressive Cold War culture of the United States after WWII, Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin must certainly be noted. We will return to their specific contributions to SF criticism, but we must here note Jameson's The Political Unconscious (1981) and seminal Postmodernism; or the Cultural Logic of late Capitalism (1991), which offered fresh strategies for historicizing cultural production in relation to the stages of capitalism over the past two centuries. As this brief survey indicates—for many more theorists and works could be noted—Marxist theorization of cultural production had achieved extensive and impressive sophistication proportions by the turn of the recent millennium.

[Mica Milovanovic]

MARXISM IN SF, OR, "LEFT SF"
All SF cultural production represents social, economic, and political effects that naturally arise as a result of scientific and the technical extrapolation. The engagement of such issues varies widely, of course, from ostensibly minor details of setting, character, and plot to the most intense foregrounding of utopian agendas, but utopian thought and political theory in the broader sense does not automatically equate to Left-based SF thematics. In fact, much SF simply assumes as given or aggressively advocates the expansion of capitalism. This section therefore will offer 1) a selective historical overview of Left SF cultural production that is not ostensibly utopian yet features anti- or post-capitalist critique; 2) commentary concerning some special examples; and 3) an attempt to historicize overall trends. In general but with some notable exceptions, the North American tradition offers few examples of Left SF, though it does evince a long history of more generalized anti-capitalist critique. By contrast European SF carries on a sustained dialogue with socialist and even Marxist concerns.
Late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century Western SF, in a world reeling from developments of technological advancements, industrial capitalism, and the rise of proletarian movements, shared with other fictions  (e.g., Sister Carrie [1900], MacTeague [1899], etc.) a pointed interest in social issues. The publication of Samuel Butler's Erewhon (1872), Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888) and other socialistically-minded examples of UF set precedents for the conflation of UF and "scientific romance" traditions as they emerged in the work of the first clearly programmatic SF author, H. G. Wells. From The Time Machine (1895) and When the Sleeper Wakes (1899) onward Wells's SF often explored socialistic themes, albeit in conflicted ways. As Suvin rightly points out, "Wells' SF works are 'ideological fables' yet he is a virtuoso in having it ideologically both ways. His satisfaction at the destruction of the false bourgeois idyll is matched by his horror at the alien forces destroying it" (Suvin 1977: 217). Wells's clearest socialist views were expressed in his non-SF, purely utopian, and even non-fiction works, such as A Modern Utopia (1905) and Men like Gods (1923). Wells' contemporary, Jack London, in The Iron Heel (1907) depicts in more pointedly UF form the grim dystopian effects of oligarchic capitalism and is committed to Marxist communism to an extent seldom equaled.
Subsequent political developments which were particularly repressive with respect to proletarian movements in the United States but also to a lesser extent in Western Europe, altered the artistic climate with respect to Left SF in the years following World War I and the Russian Revolution. The specifically American and reactionary Hugo Gernsback/John W. Campbell "pulp" SF era of the 1930s held such sway that aside from George S. Schulyer's satiric commentary on American racism, Black No More (1931), no other notable examples of American Left SF appear until the 1940s, and even those subsequently appearing in the 1950s are few and far between. Left SF flourished in Europe, however, and there we must turn to follow the thread of Left SF.
As might be expected in historical hindsight, Russia, according to Suvin (26), generated considerable SF activity with 25 works appearing before 1917 and at least 155 during the years 1920–1927. Especially significant was Nikolai Chernyshevsky's even earlier What is to be Done? (written 1862; published 1905) for its popularity and seminal contribution to Russian utopian socialist thought, particularly with respect to women's rights, becoming the model of personal freedom emulated in later Russian SF and UF. Alexander Bogdanov-Malinovsky's Red Star (1908) depicts a scientifically advanced and successful socialist society on Mars and served to inspire like-minded SF authors, such as Kim Stanley Robinson (discussed below). Also writing in the glow of the post-October Revolution is Alexi Tolstoy, whose SF works, Aelita (1922) and Engineer Garin's Death-Ray (4 versions, 1926-37), were popular for decades in Russia but seldom read in the West. Yevgeny Zamiatin's important but conflicted We (1924) interrogates the pernicious effects of mindless socialistic scientism but importantly has no sympathy for capitalism. The novel has long been interpreted in the West as an attack upon the Communist experiment, but, as Suvin, Moylan, and Jameson have argued, this novel should be read not as "anti-utopian" but as a "critical dystopia" that advocates "a vision common to Anarchism and libertarian Marxism" (Suvin 1977: 257).
Suvin notes that following the innovative decade of the 1920s, Russian SF stagnated until post-1956 when a "second [though short] great age of Russian SF" emerged (265). This era produced what is perhaps the greatest example of Russian socialist SF and UF, rivaled only by What is to be Done? in terms of historical importance, Ivan Yefremov's monumental Andromeda (1959), which touches virtually every issue relevant to socialist concerns, from science to the arts to ethics and beyond, and engages Western SF "in a well-informed polemical dialogue" (268). The "Yefremov era," according to Suvin, lasted only into the 1960s, at which time Russian and other Warsaw Pact SF lost its utopian, socialist impulse and turned sharply satirical.

[Mica Milovanovic]

   Returning to the American and British West, we find that the inter-war period produces few noteworthy examples of left-leaning SF. One line of British SF reacted fearfully to the promise of the technological future: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) bitterly denigrates technical development, a key dimension of socialist societies, instead stressing an argument in favor of liberal humanist aesthetics that serves to disguise the novel's fundamental reactionary political perspective. Another form of British SF, however, carried on Wells' interest in progressive social issues. Olaf Stapledon's Starmaker (1937) follows up the thrust identified by Roger Luckhurst as "evolutionary SF," a path in British SF that continued on into the 1940s and 50s via Arthur C. Clarke and forward to the 1980s in Stephen Baxter's fiction.
In the United States during the late 1930s, at least two general and loosely aligned factions of SF appeared in opposition to the Gernsback/Campbell school of right-wing, "hard" SF.  The first, exemplified by the fiction of E. E. "Doc" Smith in works such as his "Lensman" stories in Astounding during the late 1930s, insists that SF alone is able to combine fabulation and critical thinking, resulting in a presumably more sophisticated and progressive form of fiction. Despite these attributes and claims to the contrary, the Smith branch of SF's ostensible liberal commitment to cosmic awe is in the final accounting nothing short of an elitist mentality in full complicity with capital's ideological agenda.
The other line emerging just before World War II was advocated by the Futurians, a loose grouping based in New York City, not all of whom were SF authors, which included socialists of several stripes and even some communists. Some went on to various degrees of success, the most notable being Isaac Asimov, Frederik Pohl, Judith Merril, Donald Wollheim, Theodore Sturgeon, C. M. Kornbluth, and Damon Knight. Despite Knight's claim that the socially-minded Futurians had a "mighty mission" to educate SF fans respective to the Futurian agenda as grounded in the spirit of 1930s socialism (Knight 1977: 15), as Luckhurst rightly notes, the Futurians in fact did not produce a mature "left-liberal critique ... until the post-war era" (Luckhurst 2005: 68). By the time the youthful Futurists began to produce something approaching Left SF, however, the contentious but still relatively heady days of 1930s political experimentation had given way to the fearful realities of the atomic bomb, growing uneasiness with rampant consumerism, and the political repercussions from the hard-line anti-communistic milieu of the 1950s HUAC and McCarthy period.
Socialist thought in United States Left SF varies from considerably muted to non-existent during the 1950s and nearly all of the 60s. SF along with much other cultural production of the Cold War era certainly satirizes or questions grey flannel suit conformism, creeping bureaucracy, commodification, and even nascent environmentalism, but it rarely poses solid political questions or offers Left alternatives to capitalism. Perhaps only Heinlein's Double Star (1956) can be said to be manifestly political, though in a Libertarian and accordingly non-socialistic sense. Important examples of satirical critique without alternatives include Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s Player Piano (1952); Ray Bradbury's nostalgic Martian Chronicles (1950); Alfred Bester's vigorously caustic Tiger! Tiger! (U.K., 1956; published in the U. S. as The Stars My Destination); Harlan Ellison's short fiction of the 1960s; and Frank Herbert's richly complex Dune (1965). More focused but still fuzzy examples appeared from the maturing Futurians, such as former Trotskyite Merril's ground-breaking feminist SF "That Only a Mother" (1949) and Shadow on the Hearth (1950); Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth's important The Space Merchants (1953); Pohl's short fiction, e,g., "Tunnel under the World" (1954); and Theodore Sturgeon's More than Human (1953). Not coincidentally, Merril wrote the "Introduction" for Path into the Unknown: The Best of Soviet SF (Dell, 1968). While the connection has not previously been made by critics, I would like also to suggest that Philip K. Dick's early short fiction that is likewise critical of consumerism, such as "Sales Pitch" (1953) and "Paycheck" (1954), bears strong affinities to the themes and narrative strategies of Futurian fiction to a degree far beyond coincidence. Still, despite John Clute's claim (182) that Pohl and Kornbluth in the 1950s "were on the cutting edge of social commitment," with the exception of Sturgeon's utopian Venus Plus X (1960), virtually no genuinely Left SF was published in North America during the 1960s, not excepting Zenna Henderson's important but overlooked The Pilgrimage (1961) which must be passed over in this context. Her alien utopian commune, despite its many progressive features, arises out of mystical spirituality rather than dialectical materialism.
Critique of the capitalist status quo in Left SF found new impetus in the wake of the Vietnam War and the increasing effects of global capitalism in the late 1960s and into the 1970s. To the point, however, 1950s and 60s hegemonic SF, while toying with social critique, is often implicitly and sometimes even overtly anti-socialist and even right-wing libertarian, as evidenced in stories by authors such as Jack Vance and Robert Heinlein. SF in this time period far more often focuses on, variously, the possible negative and often apocalyptic future (e.g., Walter M. Miller, Jr.'s A Canticle for Leibowitz, 1960) or the uncritical celebration of "science and technology" to the exclusion of larger social dynamics (Heinlein, again, and even Asimov), as though science and technology somehow manifest an independent existences free from inherent economic and political concerns. American Left SF once again emerged in the form of the "New Wave," in part related to and supported by public interest in related progressive concerns, such as the anti-war, civil rights, women's, and ecological movements. Some important authors, while offering very different visions, include Roger Zelazny's Nine Princes in Amber (1971); virtually all of Samuel R. Delany's SF, but especially Triton (1976; later retitled as Trouble on Triton) and the tour-de-force Stars in my Pocket like Grains of Sand (1984); and Ursula K. LeGuin's The Left Hand of Darkness (1969) and The Lathe of Heaven (1971, and the surprisingly faithful TV adaptation in 1979). These works fore-grounded vaguely socialist concerns in the areas of human freedom and dignity and offered variations of post-capitalist social visions, though to be sure Le Guin and her contemporaries Joanna Russ and Marge Piercy are better known for their UF in the mid-1970s.
   By the mid-1980s, however, most American SF production in any form of print, television, or film had long since abandoned even the pretense of Left thought except in the work of the newly appeared Kim Stanley Robinson. Demonstrating a clear commitment to intelligent and sustained Left ideals, Robinson's "California Trilogy," beginning with The Wild Shore (1984) initiates an extended mediation on capitalism's future and beyond to post-capitalist societies, a focus Robinson carried on into the 1990s with the important "Mars Trilogy" (1992-96; see below). Also in the 80s the new SF form called cyberpunk registered the profound shifts taking place in the development of what Ernst Mandel terms "late capitalism," i.e., the impact of communications technology made possible by satellites, computers and the Internet; the surging importance of bio-medical technologies; and the growing consolidation of financial transactions under trans-national, global corporations. Exemplary works in this form include William Gibson's seminal Neuromancer (1984), Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net (1988), and Pat Cadigan's Synners (1991) which feature intense and unsympathetic critiques of capitalism's expanding sphere of influence and its often sinister relationship to technology. In no important way, however, can these works be called Left SF though Sterling's later Holy Fire (1996) is regrettably underappreciated despite its thoughtful socialist meditation concerning life-extension and health care.
The decade from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s in the United States features some modestly Left SF works by women. Sherri Tepper's The Gate to Women's Country (1988) presents a feminist Left vision that critiques the relationship of militarism and misogyny, while Octavia Butler's "Xenogenesis" series beginning with Dawn (1987) and her later "Parable" series, initiated with Parable of the Sower (1993), grapple with racism, xenophobia, sexism, and religious fanaticism. Whereas Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (1986) explores similar themes, Butler's more complete Left SF vision emphasizes the rebuilding process for society in ways that resonate with socialist views of material equality and personal freedom, especially in the post-capitalist social order represented in The Parable of the Talents (1998).
   American television and film during the 1980s and into the 90s, increasingly grounded within the corporate commodity apparatus of capitalism, generated almost nothing in the way of Left SF. The vast majority of SF films, despite record box office receipts (several of the top grossing films of all time fall within the genre), are reactionary, dystopian cautionary tales, such as the Terminator franchise (1984-2003); feel-good humanistic fables, like E.T: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982); or reactionary romps, such as the trend-setting Star Wars (1977). A few notable exceptions of interest include the socialist-feminist alternative future depicted in Lizzie Borden's Born in Flames (1983); the scathing indictment of capitalism in Paul Verhoeven's Robocop (1987); and John Sayles's critique of capitalist racism in Brother from another Planet (1984).
The towering achievement in Left SF published during the 1990s in the Americas, however, is Robinson's "Mars Trilogy" consisting of Red Mars (1992), Green Mars (1993), and Blue Mars (1996). Supremely optimistic yet grounded in the awareness that genuine change is both slow and painful, this series raises the standards of Left SF to new levels of commitment and sophistication by engaging in a sustained and non-idealist post-capitalist meditation. The trilogy vividly renders Marx's prediction for the potential of human freedom once released from material-based class struggle, and the triumphal conclusion depicts humanity carrying a socialist vision to worlds beyond our solar system.
   British SF over the past four decades often engages with socialist and even Marxist thematics, which may be said to begin with Michael Moorcock's assumption of the editorship of the magazine New Worlds in 1964. Encouraging the pursuit of experimental and radical social critique in SF, Moorcock published what would in due course become an impressive generation of Left SF authors and their followers, including Brian Aldiss and J. G. Ballard. Taking William Burroughs as their literary inspiration, the first "new wave" SF evinced a latent Left position, that is, one advocating Left views of consciousness but not highlighting the requisite socio-economic components. A second wave was, however, depicted manifestly Left extrapolations: Iain Banks' "Culture" novels, such as Consider Phlebas (1987) offer an extended post-scarcity, left socio-techno vision; Ken Macleod actively engages Marxist ideas in the "Fall Revolution" series, as in The Star Fraction (1995); and China Miéville's remarkable and generically innovative "Bas-Lag" series incorporates an extended meditation on Left political and social issues, most clearly in Iron Council (2004).
Of special and final note is the work of two recent women authors. Tricia Sullivan's Maul (2003) vigorously interrogates social and political issues in her depiction of a near future, but non-utopian, world administered solely by women. Also important is Gwyneth Jones' Bold as Love (2001), winner of the Arthur C. Clarke Award, and the ensuing namesake series: Castles made of Sand (2002), Midnight Lamp (2003), Band of Gypsies (2004), and Rainbow Bridge (2005). Jones near-future depiction of the U.K., originally sketched out in a short story in 1992, grapples with gender, political, economic, social, and environmental issues emerging from the breakdown of the capitalist status quo and the resulting revolutionary possibilities. The novel sequence aggressively challenges the reactionary dystopian bent of much SF by presenting a plausible utopian vision grounded on Left-based values emphasizing shared resources and decision-making. Jones' work thus stands as one of the most important contemporary works of Left SF.
Even this short and admittedly selective survey demonstrates the essential interconnection between SF's representations of the production and consumption of technology and the resulting implications as theorized by Marx and later Left thinkers. While only a few SF works have manifestly engaged the concomitant and irrepressible social, political, and economic issues inherent in their alternative worlds, every SF story, film, or television show bears the latent burden of ideological commitment.


WORKS CITED
Bould, Mark. (2002) "The Dreadful Credibility of Absurd Things: A Tendency in Fantasy Theory." Historical Materialism 10.4.
Freedman, Carl. (2000) Critical Theory and Science Fiction. Hanover: University Press of New England; Wesleyan University Press.
Harway, Donna. (1991) Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature. New York: Routledge.
Jameson, Fredric. (2000) The Jameson Reader. Oxford: Blackwell.
——. (2005) Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso.
Knight, Damon. (1977) The Futurians. New York: John Day.
Luckhurst, Roger. (2005) Science Fiction. Malden, MA: Polity.
Miéville, China. (2002) "Marxism and Fantasy." Historical Materialism 10.4.
Roberts, Adam. (2000) Science Fiction. London: Routledge.
Suvin, Darko. (1979) Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale University Press.

[Mica Milovanovic]

Morao sam da razbijem tekst na tri posta...

[Tripp]

    Osim marksista, mi, naizgled normalni ljudi, svi zaboravismo na Erewhon Semjuela Batlera, kod nas preveden kao Edgin i, njegov svojevrsni nastavak, Ponovo u Edginu. I on se na mnogo nacin moze podvesti pod socijalisticke okvire. Odlicni tekstovi; cak se pominje i Bester, sto mi je iz nekog razloga sasvim prirodno obzirom o kakvom se kontekstu ovdje govori.   

    Uzgred, evo i pasusa-dva o Dzejmisonu, iz Nikolsove Enciklopedije, pod odrednicom POSTMODERNISM AND SF, gdje covjek glorifikuje literarnu magiju kiberpanka:

    Perhaps the most influential critical account is the Marxist Fredric Jameson's. In "Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism" (July/Aug 1984 New Left Review), he itemizes its stigmata. He finds "a flatness or depthlessness" to be
"perhaps the supreme formal feature of all the Postmodernisms", and also a waning of feeling linked to an alleged loss of people's sense of themselves as individuals, and the consequent replacement of "affect" (especially alienated angst) with "a peculiar kind of euphoria"; the end of personal style and a sense of history (and memory) and their replacement by pastiche (not parody, but the transcoding of Modernist styles into jargon, badges and other decorations) and nostalgia; a schizophrenic fragmentation of artistic texts, marked especially by collage; and, most of all, the "hysterical sublime", in which the alien or "other" surpasses our power to represent it and pitches us into a sort of Gothic rapture (see also BIG DUMB OBJECTS; SENSE OF WONDER). All of these qualities often characterize not only the arguably Postmodern environment in which we live but also sf in particular, which Jameson himself has recognized in his many essays on sf topics in SCIENCE-FICTION STUDIES. His theorizing is borrowed explicitly and persuasively for sf by Vivian SOBCHACK in the last chapter of her Screening Space: The American Science Fiction Film (1987), which projects a "postfuturism". Jameson suggests specifically that today's information networks "afford us some glimpse into a post-modern or technological sublime", which is perhaps what we find in the VIRTUAL REALITIES of the CYBERPUNK writers, where simulation and reality dissolve into one another. Indeed, Jameson later claimed in Postmodernism (1991) that cyberpunk was "the supreme literary expression if not of postmodernism, then of late capitalism itself".

[Melkor]

Nije ni cudo da je KSR ostavio takvu impresiju na moju mladjanu brucosku dusu i da se sada drzim Mjevila kao pijan plota...

Steta sto je samo protrcao kroz mnogo angazovaniji britanski SF, ali izgleda da se takva nastrojenost vec podrazumeva, dok u americkoj fantastici... bilo bi zanimljivo videti i neki tekst koji se bavi desnim SFom u SAD i njegovoj jakoj tradiciji koja i sada ima adekvatne naslednike. Takodje, trebalo bi primetiti odredjenu ambivalentnost ili cak nedostatak toga u vecini modernog SFa i tezu da SF odumire. Doduse SF svake decenije iznova umire...

Nego, Mico, da li su nasi autori imali bilo kakve politicke prefikse ili se nasa fantasticna scena nikad nije dovoljno razvila da bi se, kroz politicku prizmu, bavila dekonstrukcijom ili promovisanjem odredjenih drustvenih modela? 

[scallop]

Nego, Mico, da li su nasi autori imali bilo kakve politicke prefikse ili se nasa fantasticna scena nikad nije dovoljno razvila da bi se, kroz politicku prizmu, bavila dekonstrukcijom ili promovisanjem odredjenih drustvenih modela? 

Nije slucajno da su vodeci teoreticari SF-a marksisti...

Izgleda da SF nikada nije ostavio prostor nekim drugim teoretičarima.

[Boban]

bilo bi zanimljivo videti i neki tekst koji se bavi desnim SFom u SAD i njegovoj jakoj tradiciji koja i sada ima adekvatne naslednike.

Bilo je dosta takvih tekstova, upoređenja koji pisci su militantni koji ne, koji su za diplomatiju a koja prednost daju oružju; koji podržavaju rat u Vijetnamu, koji ne... čak se mutno sećam da sam negde, verovatno u Alefu, preštampavao takve liste. I da je bilo neočekivanih iznenađenja.
Pa i nedavno, Den Simons je podržao bombardovanje Srbije; zašto bismo mi sada više čitali tog govnara?

[Tripp]

the cambridge companion to science fiction, 2003

Politics and science fiction

KEN MACLEOD

There are no politics in Utopia; as in its neighbour Dystopia, the government
of people has been replaced by the administration of things. To many
observers, this state of affairs implies anything but freedom. It is the absence
of political debate, as much as the absence of privacy and the relentless presence
of morality, that makes the communism of Anarres, in Ursula Le Guin's
anarchist classic The Dispossessed (1974), so oppressive. When her hero
Shevek finds himself in conflict with aspects of his society he has no forum
in which to express it, no way to find like-minded individuals with whom
he might find common ground; instead, his conflicts become conflicts with
other individuals. Heisas isolated as any dissident in a totalitarian state.
For a Western tradition of political thought which begins with Aristotle
and continues through such diverse philosophers as the conservative Edmund
Burke, the radical Thomas Paine, the liberal Lord Macaulay, the communist
Antonio Gramsci, the socialist Tony Polan and the social democrat Bernard
Crick, politics provides the forum to which free people — not always, of
course, a majority of the adult populace — bring their conflicts of collective
interest for peaceful resolution. For most of these thinkers the forum is as
central an institution of a free society as the market and the court of law, and
the interaction of politics, economics and justice is the substance of public
life.

Politics in this sense occupies two areas within sf distinct from utopia
or dystopia: in stories that take into account, or have as their theme, the
political process itself; and in stories in whose setting or plot the consequences
of a particular political philosophy are examined. In sf the former is the less
common. Politics, as one of the practical arts — of coalition and compromise,
conflict and coercion — requires a different frame of mind and set of priorities
to that of most sf readers and writers, whose characteristic ways of thinking
are economic, technical and scientific. In the words of Macaulay, 'Logic
admits of no compromise. The essence of politics is compromise.' 1 The characteristic sf cast of mind is inclined to the logical and uncompromising. The consequent 'engineering mentality', or an apolitical mentality in general, is,
however, well equipped to dramatize political philosophy, by thought experiments
which take ideologies to uncompromisingly logical conclusions.
In the dystopian tradition the exemplar in this respect is George Orwell.
Orwell's interest in, and aptitude for, politics as a practical art were negligible,
but his interest in, and imaginative grasp of, the implications of political
philosophies were deep. What he said in a sentence about the potentially
repressive underside of the anarchist ideal summarizes most of the message
of Le Guin's The Dispossessed.

Science fiction is essentially the literature of progress, and the political philosophy
of sf is essentially liberal. Much, though as we shall see not all, of the
most popular and enduring sf is firmly within the Western liberal current: the
historically very recent idea that the increase of human power over the rest
of nature through the growth of knowledge and industry is possible and desirable,
and that freedom — political liberty, personal autonomy, free thought
and the free exchange of goods — is desirable in itself and as a means to that
end. 'To increase the power of man over nature and abolish the power of man
over man' was a formulation of the social good on which the Bolshevik Leon
Trotsky and the liberal John Dewey could agree, in the midst of a passionate
disagreement over morals. The link between civic freedom and scientific
progress is conceptually as well as empirically close. Douglas Adams encapsulated
the scientific attitude as 'Any idea is there to be attacked.' 2 A like
iconoclasm in political and social matters is its extension and precondition.
This view is not only recent, but rare. Its global hegemony seemed assured
after the Fall of the Wall; less so, after the Fall of the Towers.

The central political voice in genre sf is that of Robert A. Heinlein. To
recognize this is not necessarily to agree with his views. Sociology has been
described as a dialogue with Marx; the political strand in sf can be described
as a dialogue with Heinlein. This dialogue, however, has not been conducted
through sf texts. Gordon R. Dickson's Naked to the Stars (1961), an obvious
rejoinder to Starship Troopers, isa rare exception (and worth seeking out).
Heinlein's influence has, rather, worked on generations of readers, some of
whom have gone on to become writers. Heinlein's liberalism (in the above
sense) is fairly consistent, as is his movement from democratic to elitist formulations of it. His earlier works show a faith in 'the common man'; his
later, in the competent man. His works include some that are sensitive to the
realities of politics, and some that decidedly are not, but which do embody
the imaginative exposition of a political philosophy. The best example of the
former is Double Star; of the latter, Starship Troopers. One that attempts to
do both, and fails to do either, is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. Heinlein's
"'If This Goes On —'" (1940) deals with a revolt against a future American theocracy. The hero, John Lyle, joins the underground revolutionary Cabal
(which is, amusingly enough, nothing other than the Freemasons) and gets
the chance to read uncensored history for the first time. While the revolutionary
politics is a typical Heinleinian top-down conspiracy, the validity of
democratic politics is affirmed:

I had trouble at first in admitting the possibility of what I read; I think perhaps
of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly
the most pernicious. For example, I learned for the first time that the United
States had not been ruled by a bloodthirsty emissary of Satan before the First
Prophet arose in his wrath and cast him out — but had been a community of
free men, deciding their own affairs by peaceful consent. I don't mean that the
first republic had been a scriptural paradise, but it hadn't been anything like
what I had learned in school. 3

Double Star (1956)is unusual in sf in that it presents sympathetically
and realistically — plot shenanigans aside — the workings of a parliamentary
democracy. Even more unusually, the democracy in question is a constitutional
monarchy on the Westminster model, which has expanded from the
Dutch Empire to encompass the solar system. It is unlikely to be accidental
that the Emperor shares the name and house of another Willem — William of
Orange. The political formation issuing from Britain's Glorious Revolution
of 1688 has proven capable of repeated and essentially emancipatory reforms
which — along with the vast increases in both civil and military production
which it stimulated and shielded — have enabled it to endure for centuries and
replicate across the globe. In view of this Darwinian success it is therefore not
as implausible as it may at first seem that a future solar commonwealth might
trace the descent, with modification, of its political institutions to those of
the Empire on which the sun never set. The novel's Willem is a much more
ceremonial figure than his namesake, and it is his First Minister who has the
daunting task of the inclusion of extraterrestrials as Imperial citizens. The
plot's occasional absurd devices need not detain us: what endures from
the book is the transformation and political awakening of its protagonist,
the sense of politics as process, and the experience — so frequent in life, and
so rare in sf — of waiting as the results of a closely contested election come in.
The book ends with a ringing libertarian statement which, unlike so many
in Heinlein, is not vitiated by elitism and solipsism.

Heinlein's far more widely and passionately discussed Starship Troopers
(1959) provides a striking contrast. Instead of the peaceful association of
intelligent beings who share a common moral frame whatever their bodily
form, celebrated in Double Star, there is a pseudo-Darwinian rationale for an
endless inter-species Hobbesian war of all against all. Instead of an imagined enlargement of a political system achieved by happy accident and tested
by history, there is a new political order which has emerged literally from
the ruins of our present civilization in the Third World War. From small
beginnings as a vigilante gang of discharged veterans in Aberdeen, a form of
democracy in which only veterans have the vote has spread to the stars. If
'the franchise is force, naked and raw, the Power of the Rods and the Ax',
as Heinlein's mouthpiece character Major Reid argues, 4 then it is only just
that it should be reserved to those who have shown themselves willing to risk
their lives in its employ. Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun, and
only those who have volunteered to be at both ends of the gun are morally fit
to participate in its aim. They have shown they will put their lives on the line
for the greater good. This is the sole civic virtue attributed to them. These
arguments are ultimately and avowedly irrelevant: the system's justification
is that 'it works' — by authorial fiat. The virtues of the system of veterans'
franchise are the engineering virtues of symmetry and rigour, underpinned by
conformity to a calculus of moral equations which is (wisely) never shown
on the page. For a book where civics infodumps and accounts of brutal
boot-camp training far outweigh the thin and tensionless combat scenes,
Starship Troopers is an oddly compelling read. The system it defends is far
from the fascism it is sometimes accused of. Anyone who can understand the
oath may serve, regardless of their other attributes or abilities. The civilian
society which this political system secures is one without wars within the
human species, with lots of personal freedom, where almost everyone is
reasonably well off, and people who despise the government can do so openly
and fearlessly. The book's effect may be analogously benign. Far more of its
readers must have been stimulated by it to take an interest in political and
moral philosophy than have been converted to that advocated in the text.

The work of Heinlein's which has had a more direct, if small, political
effect — through its influence on David Friedman and other theorists of
anarcho-capitalism, a significant minority strand in modern libertarianism —
is The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (1966). What is not immediately evident is
that the book's hero and narrator is, albeit unwittingly, the villain of the piece.
The carefully plotted revolution in a Lunar penal colony — in the name of
free trade with Earth — establishes a democratic state and destroys the capitalist
anarchy which the colonists already enjoyed under the Warden's distant
rule. They had liberty already, had they but known it, and by the end there
is nothing for a good libertarian to do but move out to the new frontier of
the asteroid belt. Just why this reversal is obscure points up the two main
weaknesses of the book. The first is that the system in which Manny, the
narrator, is born is shown in action only fleetingly and incidentally: the key
scene, where Manny acts as impromptu but legitimate judge — in a potentially capital case, at that — and forms a jury from the drinkers in a bar, can easily
pass by as local colour, and the obvious objections to such frontier justice
as the basis of a stable way of life are never seriously addressed. Instead
they are dismissed in another offhand display of pseudo-Darwinian authorial
legerdemain: those who abuse the system sooner or later find themselves
outside an airlock without a pressure-suit. The second is that the revolutionary
conspiracy whose progress is the spine of the story is run as a process of
top-down manipulation. Heinlein's mouthpiece character, Professor LaPaz,
attributes this technique to Lenin's Bolshevik party—a serious misreading
of the October Revolution. Without the tumultuous feedback of an insurgent
democracy of workers' councils, the Bolsheviks would have been as
isolated as many of their emulators found themselves. Likewise, the party
itself could not have been prepared for revolutionary action without the preceding
decades of factional strife. The 'Fifth International' which provides
Heinlein's conspirators with their initial cadre and milieu is too ideologically
diverse — virtually spanning the visible political spectrum — to be credible as
a potential vanguard.

A more persuasive portrayal of revolutionary politics can be found in
Robert Silverberg's Hawksbill Station (1968). A decade after Silverberg's
protagonist is forced into underground activism by a fascist coup in the USA,
he finds that the revolution for which he and his comrades are working has
faded from his mind: being a revolutionary has become what he does from
day to day. There's always another leaflet to write, another contact to make,
another slogan to spray-bomb. With similar realism, the eventual overthrow
of the dictatorship takes the revolutionaries by surprise.

For readers and writers in the late twentieth — and early twenty-first centuries,
popular revolution has become a familiar television image. The jubilant,
implacable crowd in Republic Square, the parliament building in flames,
the snowstorm of secret police files drifting from the broken windows of the
Ministry of the Interior, the armed students reading the news in the national
television studio ... these have become sights as commonplace as the default
night-vision image of recent wars: the sinister green glare of cruise missiles
exploding over some hapless capital in the Third or Second World.
This demystification and familiarization of insurrection has affected its
portrayal in sf. In the first half of the 1990s, Peter F. Hamilton's Mindstar
Rising (1993) and my own The Star Fraction (1995) both placed in the
back-stories of their future Britain a left-wing republican regime overthrown
in a popular counter-revolution; in both cases the imagery of the
Eastern European uprisings is obvious. Hamilton's Greg Mandel books,
of which Mindstar Rising is the first, have as their implicit political viewpoint
a moderate patriotic conservatism which, in its distance from left-wing 'common sense' and libertarian radicalism alike, is as unusual (for sf) as it
is honourable.

                                                     >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

[Tripp]

   >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

A surprising exception to the influence of recent, and real, revolutions
can be seen in the political high point of 1990s sf, Kim Stanley Robinson's
Mars trilogy (1992–6); surprising, because the work is as much about revolution
as it is about terraforming. Here the Red Planet is a literal new world in
which new societies tumble over each other in a series of revolutions, even as
the landscape is transformed. Nevertheless, Robinson's political imagination
seems stunned by the failures of existing socialisms. An early and interesting
advocacy of communism — in its original sense of voluntary labour and free
access to goods — as an extension of the lifestyle of the scientific community
is not followed up. Instead the eventual Martian Congress adopts an economic
system which is not so much a free socialism as a fettered capitalism.
The most hopeful legacy of the East European regimes was the manner of
their passing — through mass, peaceful, popular protest — but this is nowhere
reflected in the trilogy. Robinson's images of a revolutionary process draw
instead on a 1960s New Left model, of mass discussion backed up by sabotage
and guerrilla warfare. The mass discussions are given in realistically
exhausting detail.

None of this detracts from Robinson's broader achievements, in making
Mars for the first time in sf a land, a world in its own right in which the
names on the map acquire an historical as well as areographical resonance
as the story unfolds; and in projecting a future in which a succession of political
forms are not only (as Marx said of the Paris Commune's radical
democracy) 'at last discovered' but to an extent invented, foreseen and
worked towards, as increasingly ample venues 'under which to work out the
economical emancipation of labour'; 5 until eventually, in the solar system as
a whole, revolution becomes permanent.

In the state-socialist countries of the USSR and Eastern Europe, sf had an
inescapably political role, often critical of its society in ways as obscure to
Western readers even now as it was at the time to the censors. In a society
whose ideological justification was utopian and future-oriented, the relationship
between the political establishment and sf was necessarily fraught. The
iconic salience of space exploration, combined with the perceived status of
cosmonauts as a specialized (and privileged) fraction of the working class —
an orbital labour aristocracy — doubtless contributed to the distinctive
tone of Soviet sf, in which the cosmic environment — hostile or benign — is
treated with the same intimacy as terrestrial nature. The fantastic unconscious
of the Space Age is arguably the UFO phenomenon, and here too the
Soviet combination of official denial with covert investigation and popular
fascination carried a different emotional and symbolic freight to that of its Western counterpart. An analysis of these different but intricately related
forms of reflection on the non-human world and the future in the Soviet
bloc is overdue.

Turning from politics as process to polity as outcome, the great glaring
exception to sf's broadly liberal consensus can be found in Frank Herbert's
Dune (1965) and its sequels. The institutions of Herbert's galaxy are based
on those of the Ottoman Empire, within which model the use of European
feudal nomenclature is deeply misleading. His planetary viceroys are called
dukes, and their domains fiefs, where satrap and satrapy would be the unvarnished
truth. Here the link between freedom and progress is confirmed
in the negative. Progress has long since been halted by the Butlerian Jihad
(a witty refererence to Samuel Butler's Erewhon, 1872), which destroyed all
computers and whose stricture against making 'a machine in the likeness of
a human mind' is still rigorously kept. 6 Politics and religion are devoted to
mass manipulation. The only progress that remains is evolutionary, and is
achieved by the secret long-term breeding programme of the Bene Gesserit
sisterhood and by the random mixing of genes in the bloody tsunami of the
jihad. No world less congenial to the values implicit in most sf has been
presented on such a scale, and with such hermetic absence of intratextual
criticism.

A more troubling exception to the generally progressive spirit of sf might
appear to be feminist sf. Some of it does indeed turn its back on progress
and the conquest of the universe as a typically male power fantasy — and to
that extent, and perhaps for that reason, it has isolated itself from all but a
few sf readers. But not all feminist sf, even of the most radical kind, takes
that view. Joanna Russ's The Female Man (1975) carries a militant message
of progress even in its title. That the English word for the human species and
the word for the male sex is the same, with its implied exclusion of half the
human race from the achievements ascribed to all of it — 'man's conquest
of space', and so on — is an old problem. While some feminist writers have
responded by repudiating the achievements, Russ stakes a claim on all of
them for women. Women can be Man, without being men. Russ makes a
passionate claim for freedom and achievement. That there are no men in her
imagined future world of Whileaway is literally a biological accident — the
women of that world do all the things women do, and all the things men do,
including industrializing the Earth and exploring the universe.

A dialectical trope of sf is the notion of imperial expansion as the vehicle
of escape: if empire begins by extending the reach of oppression, it ends
by undermining it. A galactic empire has been a staple of sf since Asimov's
Foundation trilogy, and his Roman original and its parabolic trajectory has
provided the template for many a tale of decline and fall, and of post-imperial diversity analogous to the rise of feudalism and capitalism in Europe. That
a genuinely feudal polity is not a limitless despotism is a point underlined by
Lois MacMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan series. Her Barrayar has emerged
from centuries of isolation as a galactic anachronism, with an emperor and
his counts and their armsmen, and the gradual transition from a politics
conducted by baronial war and dynastic coup to one in which the holders of
a still-restricted franchise have to take into account the views and interests of
an increasingly self-assertive citizenry provides the milieu for her maturing
hero's adventures and intrigues. Other possible orders — the eugenic human
topiary of Cetaganda, the social-democratic brave new world of Beta Colony,
the anarcho-capitalist tyranny of Jackson's Whole — are sharply limned and
deftly satirized.

If freedom is the engine of progress, as liberalism and with it most sf
affirm, the possibility seems to arise of escaping the political realm altogether
through an individual or voluntarily communal autonomy enabled by interstellar
distance or technological self-sufficiency. Poul Anderson's 'The Last of
the Deliverers' 7 is set in a future where cheap, small fusion power plants have
made possible a radical decentralization of population and power into small
and largely self-sufficient communities. The confrontation between the last
communist and the last enthusiast for capitalism, on which the story turns, is
given added bite by its ending, in which it becomes apparent that the passing
of class struggle and the state has not been the end of conflict, or even of
'self-evident' ideological blind-spots.

In its most moderate form this physical realization of autonomy is an extension
of pluralism, as in Peter F. Hamilton's Night's Dawn trilogy (1996–9),
which portrays with panache a diverse interstellar order within a capitalist
framework. His pluralistic Confederation is a worthy competitor to Empire,
Federation and Culture.

A further development of pluralism was shown in Eric Frank Russell's
fix-up The Great Explosion (1962), in which scores of scattered colonies
are being corralled into Earth's bureaucratic empire, with mixed success.
In the collection's culminating story, '... And Then There Were None',
one particular shipload of bureaucrats and their increasingly mutinous crew
confront a highly individualistic anarchy whose 'secret weapon' of Gandhian
disobedience is both operating principle (if co-operation is voluntary, its
withdrawal is an effective means of enforcement) and revolutionary strategy.
A less idealistic withdrawal of consent is through tax evasion, or indulgence
in prohibited entertainment, sex and drugs. In Cyril Kornbluth's The
Syndic (1953) finance capitalism and the welfare state have collapsed under
the strain of competing with their black-market rival: far from the State
abolishing the family, the Family has abolished the state.

The suspicion that the state is a vehicle for activities no less self-seeking
than those of corporations or criminal gangs has seeped into the groundwater
of US culture since the first Kennedy assassination. In this context
of popular paranoia Robert Shea's and Robert Anton Wilson's Illuminatus!
(1975) trilogy works as a parable to impart a subtler insight. The reader
is introduced to a succession of conspiracy theories, each of which explodes
the previous one by revealing, behind the secret masters, other masters
more secret still. Behind the Bilderbergers, Trilateralists and other usual suspects
we find the Freemasons, behind them the Illuminati, behind them the
Templars, the Cathars, the Gnostics ... by the time the ultimate manipulator
of events is exposed as a Lovecraftian monster in the pre-Cambrian epoch,
the reader has long since got the point (a point similarly made, though perhaps
less self-consciously, by the labyrinthine elaborations of The X-Files,
and entirely consciously in Umberto Eco's Foucault's Pendulum (1989)): that
such conspiracy theories serve to deflect attention from the quite visible holders
of, and contenders for, political power.

The extremism of pluralism is anarchy. The closest analogy to a functioning
anarchy in everyday experience is the Internet, and this analogy
has been explored and not yet exhausted in recent sf. Neal Stephenson's
Snow Crash (1992) has the US government reduced to a gang among gangs,
printing trillion-dollar bills ('Reagans') as small change. It reflects vividly
the freewheeling ethos of the Internet's pioneering years, when mutually
hostile 'online communities' of researchers, libertarians, anarchists, labour
and human-rights activists, Holocaust revisionists and pornographers found
common cause in evading censorship. A cynical saying in the geek culture of
programming is 'If you document a bug, it's a feature' and Stephenson gleefully
takes this approach to some obvious objections to anarchy: unstable
individuals with personal nuclear weapons are dealt with by ... extreme politeness.
With Greater Hong Kong as a chain of motorway service areas, the
Mafia as pizza delivery franchise ('You have a friend in the Family') and
the whites-only enclaves of New South Africa brandishing their bazookas,
the anarchy of cyberspace has been mapped on to the dismembered body
of the state. That a stateless society can, as Thomas Hobbes warned, become
riven by mutual warfare is not always seen as a decisive objection to it. The
war of all against all provides endless options to love or leave. At worst one
can keep running: happiness, as Hobbes also said, is to go forward.

Vernor Vinge's A Fire Upon the Deep (1992) uses the Internet not only as
the model for his galactic communications web, the 'Net of a Million Lies',
but also for the galactic society of societies. Vinge radically flattens the distinction
between public and private associations. For him, anarchism is not
a programme; rather, anarchy is a description of the existing state of affairs.

There are in his world statists, but no states, in the sense of authorities whose
claim to legitimacy can be upheld or attacked. For Vinge, as for the political
philosopher Robert Paul Wolff, there simply is no legitimate authority. 8 It's
turtles, all the way down — or pretenders, all the way up. Neither humanity
nor its successors nor its superiors ever emerge from the state of nature, and
they never have, and never can. There is no overall hegemon, no final court
of appeal and to all appearances, no God. There are indeed gods — in Vinge's
universe theology is an applied science — but these superhuman but not supernatural beings are themselves in the state of nature, more pandaemonium
than pantheon. Powers and Perversions and 'Powers beyond the Powers'
make the 'appeal to Heaven' a literal possibility, albeit too dangerous for
all but the very last resort. Vinge thus accomplishes for political philosophy
what Heinlein achieved for world-building: the economical avoidance of explication,
by what is taken for granted. In Vinge's works, unlike Heinlein's,
few authorial spokesmen dilate.

What makes the Internet so attractive as a model of anarchic co-operation
is that it vastly extends both private initiative and public space. Communal
utopias are paradoxically, and endemically, deficient in their provision for
public debate. My own, the Solar Union of The Cassini Division (1998), is no
exception. In my other Fall Revolution books I have explored other problems
of anarchy: in The Star Fraction (1995), the conflict between community and
individual autonomy; in The Stone Canal (1996) that between inequality and
liberty; and in The Sky Road (1999), those between legality and humanity,
and between stability and progress. In all of them I have used — perhaps
over-used — the real Fourth International (seedbed of most of the sects on
the British far Left) as a model of revolutionary politics. The obscurity of this
inspiration is admittedly paralleled by its levity. Nonetheless, I am confident
that any story set in the near future — say, the remainder of the twenty-first
century — gains realism and relevance from a recognition that the 'epoch of
wars and revolutions' is far from over.

The future of political themes in sf is to some extent dependent on political
developments in the real world, which at the time of writing are in
considerable flux. The post-political future adumbrated in 1980s cyberpunk,
where government is irrelevant in the face of the corporate power wielded
by zaibatsus and policed by their ninja hitmen, seems like a vision tuned to
a dead channel. Writers such as Bruce Sterling, Paul McAuley and Alastair
Reynolds have shown new political issues and alignments emerging from
new technological possibilities in the areas of life-extension and other forms
of human self-modification. Their Mechanists and Shapers, Demarchists and
Radical Primitives point towards a postmodern and indeed posthuman political
field not polarized by the issues of liberty and authority which have preoccupied the Western tradition I referred to at the outset. They suggest
that collective disagreements can be debated, and that political engagement
can exist, without public or private coercion. In doing so they ably carry
forward the most subversive message in sf: that humanity or its successors
may yet outlive the state.

NOTES

1
Thomas Macaulay, The History of England, vol. ii, ch.10 (Everyman edn, London,
J. M. Dent, 1906), p. 184.
   
2
Douglas Adams, in 'an impromptu speech in 1998', quoted in Richard Dawkins,
'Time to Stand Up', The Freethinker 122:1 (January 2002), p. 8.
   
3
Robert A. Heinlein, "'If This Goes On —'" (1940), in Heinlein, The Past Through
Tomorrow (1967) (New York: Ace, 1987), pp. 498–9.
   
4
Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959) (London: NEL, 1970), p. 155.
   
5
Karl Marx, 'The Civil War in France: Address of the General Council', in D.
Fernbach, ed., The First International and After (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1974), p. 212.
   
6
Frank Herbert, Dune (London: New English Library, 1977), pp. 495–6.
   
7
Poul Anderson, 'The Last of the Deliverers' (1958)in Harry Harrison, ed., Backdrop
of Stars (1968) (London: NEL, 1975), pp. 27–40.
   
8
See Robert Paul Wolff's In Defense of Anarchism (New York: Harper and Row,
1970).

[Lord Kufer]

Nije samo Den Simons, već i Noam Čomski, koji je smatrao da je Srbija ipak preoštro kažnjena, mada ju je trebalo kazniti  

Ali, što se tiče socijalizma u SF-u, pa Star Trek je u velikoj meri idealizovan kao utopijski socijalizam zasnovan na etičkim principima (što je paradoksalno, zar ne)...
Paradoksalan je i kapetan Krk, koji je čisti anarho-individualista (ostatak kapitalističke ideje o privatnoj inicijativi). I drugi kapetani su čist naglasak na pragmatično kršenje Prime Directive, ali uvek na etičkom osnovu. Svi, osim kapetana Arčera, koji, osim što ima glas identičan Džordžu Bušu, muči zarobljenike...

[Ghoul]

vidiš, zanimljiva je ova distinkcija, i savršeno se uklapa u moju genijalnu (moraću da je kopirajtujem!) distinkciju, prema kojoj je horor – JA-ŽANR, a SF= MI-ŽANR.

većina najvećih horor pisaca naginjala je udesno, neki su bili rojalisti, ili čak i rasisti, dok su SF-ovci uglavnom naginjali ulevo...

trebalo bi da elaboriram ovu tezu.

[Milosh]

vidiš, zanimljiva je ova distinkcija, i savršeno se uklapa u moju genijalnu (moraću da je kopirajtujem!) distinkciju, prema kojoj je horor – JA-ŽANR, a SF= MI-ŽANR.

većina najvećih horor pisaca naginjala je udesno, neki su bili rojalisti, ili čak i rasisti, dok su SF-ovci uglavnom naginjali ulevo...

trebalo bi da elaboriram ovu tezu.

Bolje nemoj, ako ćeš ovako da izvodiš zaključke kao što si olako povezao tu tezu o JA/Mi žanru sa političkim tj. ideološkim opredeljenjem pojedinih INDIVIDUA (a i ta priča o većini je klimava do zla boga, znaš li ti koliko je istraživanja potrebno za statistiku te vrste koja je iole upotrebljiva); ukratko - o toj JA/MI žanrovskoj distinkciji se još i da diskutovati, dok to svođenje JA - desno, MI - levo, nema puno veze s mozgom, ako mene neko pita.

[Lord Kufer]

Horor eksploatiše društveno uslovljavanje a SF se bavi opisivanjem mehanizmima tog uslovljavanja. Zbog toga u SF-u ima mnogo više filozofije, a u hororu mnogo više konkretnog "sraza", što bi reko Balard.

Jedna od glavnim tema u hororu je "dodir" - dodir kao zabrana, dodir kao prenosilac zaraze, dodir kao uništenje poretka. Izvorno (u tradiciji) su zombiji "kontrolisani ljudi" (vidi novi film Gamer) a kasnije postaju nosioci zaraze koji hoće po svaku cenu da te dotaknu i tako unište. U društvu postoji i te kako važan monopol na dodir, skoro sve u vezi s dodirom je sankcionisano. Dodir je nepristojan, kažnjiv, rezervisan (za bračnog partnera, recimo, ili u specijalnim "kontakt" zanimanjima, sportu npr.).

Vampiri, recimo, nisu nikad bili to - oni su jednostavno apoteoza emocija ili ideja, koje proždiru (isisavaju). To su na kraju postali i zombiji, ako ćemo pravo.

Kod Stivena Kinga je ono što je "pretnja" uvek nejasno - zato i jeste pretnja. U društvenom kontekstu, ono što je nejasno jeste sam društveni mehanizam, koji se krije iza isturenih predstava idealnog, koje su suviše "komplikovane" da bi svako mogao da o njima raspravlja ili da ih analizira. To je ono što ih čini nejasnim - lenjost, nespremnost aktera koji zbog toga i trpe.

Žrtve horora su skoro uvek ljudi koji samo hoće da "žive normalno", ali iz te normalnosti vreba neposrednost koja razara. To je Hičkok najbolje opisao u Psihu - tuširanje je idealni trenutak konformiste i upravo tu je trenutak kad nastupa horor. To je trenutak raspada "zdravog" tela, iz toga naviru sva ta raspadnuta tela modernog horora.

[Ghoul]

polako, miki, to je samo teorija.
to tek treba ispitati.

ali ima neki đavo u tome - da horor pretežno privlači individualiste (vukove), a SF one koji razmišljaju u terminima stada (ovce).

[Lord Kufer]

Kad je reč o Heinleinu, tipično, insistira se na njegovom tvrdom, vojničkom mentalitetu (spartakovskom, republikanskom) iz Starship Troopersa i sl. ali u njegovim knjigama Glory Road i još više u Stranger in a Strange Land, izuzetno je kritičan prema postojećem poretku. Suprotstavljanjem Majka (koji je odrastao na Marsu), a Majk je u potpunosti neuslovljenog ponašanja, postigao je savršen (isusovski) kontrast između idealno slobodne ličnosti i ličnosti koja ima idealna "prava" (tj. dužnosti).

Heinlein dalje u svojim knjigama (I will fear no evil) razmatra drugačije rešenje od društvenog - pokušava da osmisli "zajednicu" ličnosti (karakteristično je da su te ličnosti veoma agilne u smislu analitičkog pristupa u svom delanju).

Naizgled sličan je bio pokušaj Dilejnija (Triton) ali potpuno pogrešno koncipiran. Umesto analitičkog pristupa on je insistirao na principu "razlikovanja" i "specifične razlike koja čini distinkciju". Naravno, tu se ličnost svodi na imidž i od nje ne ostaje baš ništa. Šteta za Dilejnija, u tu je rupu i sam upao.

[Melkor]

dok su SF-ovci uglavnom naginjali ulevo...

Svi ovi tekstovi se uglavnom bave izuzecima (u SAD). Mislim, da kada bi postojao nacin da sve pisce razvrstas na levo, desno, centar i slicno, da bi najveci broj pripadao desnom centru. Ali to je samo moj utisak, nemam nikakvu ozbiljnu argumentaciju za to.

[Mica Milovanovic]

I ja mislim da je veći deo američkih pisaca koji su se bavili SF-om do šezdesetih bio pre desno orijentisan nego levo...

A što se tiče domaćih pisaca, mislim da je uzorak suviše mali da bi se moglo nešto značajnije zaključivati. Međutim, hteli ne hteli (vidi Ivana i njegovu sociološku analizu), u našim delima se značajno reflektuje vreme u kome su ona nastajala. Mislim da, na primer, Bakićev Novi Vavilon, Bagra diše, pa i neka druga dela za koje se to možda na prvi pogled ne bi reklo (Bobanov Crni cvet ili Skrobonjin Nakot) imaju vrlo određen odnos prema našoj sadašnjosti.

[Lord Kufer]

Naročito je Bakić ultra-svestan političkog položaja ličnosti, a kod njega je odmak od stvarnog ka distopijskom praktično "presuptilan". Stvarnost kao istinski horor - o tome su već pisali...

[vilja]

ali ima neki đavo u tome - da horor pretežno privlači individualiste (vukove), a SF one koji razmišljaju u terminima stada (ovce).

A šta je sa onima koji podjednako vole i SF i horor? I vukovi i ovce? Pa ako uz to vole da čitaju i epsku fantastiku a nisu gadljivi ni na glavnotokovsku književnost ? Koje su onda to životinje? A ima i stvarno nastranih () koji čitaju i čak vole poeziju...i sigurno nisu ovce...a ni vukovi...

[Lord Kufer]

Ima u SF-u dosta horora, samo nije tipičan žanrovski.

[mac]

ali ima neki đavo u tome - da horor pretežno privlači individualiste (vukove), a SF one koji razmišljaju u terminima stada (ovce).

Razlika između SF-a i horora je u tome što se SF bavi svime, pa i društvom, dok se horor bavi samo strahom. Iako je moguće iskonstruisati horor u kome se nalazi čitavo društvo, takav strah nije dovoljno upečatljiv za prosečnog konzumenta horora, i horor-pregaoci prosto ne bi imali publiku za takav "društveni horor".

Horor je nagonski žanr, a društvo je civilizacijska tvorevina. To dvoje imaju malo doditnih tačaka.

[Ghoul]

mac, otpisaću ti ovo što si reko pod 'provokacija' ili 'text pod uticajem opijata' jer nemoguće je da neko sposoban da uključi kompjuter i ode na internet i dovoljno pismen da na tom internetu nešto nakuca – zaista ozbiljno misli ove neozbiljne i neodržive generalizacije koje si izneo.
(naravno, i ja sam generalizovao gore, ali u ironičnom duhu, ne očekujem da neko 100% ozbiljno shvati moju teoriju 'vukova' i 'ovaca'; s druge strane, kod tebe ne osećam nikakav odmak, rekao bih da ti stvarno 'misliš' ovo što si napisao.)


"Razlika između SF-a i horora je u tome što se SF bavi svime, pa i društvom, dok se horor bavi samo strahom."
=ovo je potpuno retardirana tvrdnja.
razmisli: sf se bavi 'svime' (wow!) – čak i društvom (WOW!), a horor – 'samo strahom'!
a taj strah nastaje u vakuumu? izvan društva? nema kljudi, nema klasnih odnosa, nema kulture i civilizacije, nema istorijskog trenutka, nego to sve lebdi u nekoj tmuši u kojoj se pisci bave isključivo i jedino – strahom?!


"Iako je moguće iskonstruisati horor u kome se nalazi čitavo društvo, takav strah nije dovoljno upečatljiv za prosečnog konzumenta horora, i horor-pregaoci prosto ne bi imali publiku za takav "društveni horor". "
=nisam čak ni siguran da shvatam šta znači "društveni horor"!
horor u kome se nalazi čitavo društvo? misliš, kao u apokaliptičnim delima, poput filma DAWN OF THE DEAD? ili romaniam slične provenijencije?

Horor je nagonski žanr, a društvo je civilizacijska tvorevina. To dvoje imaju malo doditnih tačaka.
=ma daj. ajd sad probaj malo s mozgom.
ti zaista veruješ da su nagoni i civilizacija toliko oštro razdeljeni da imaju malo dodirnih tačaka?
šta ti znači "nagonski žanr"? i šta je nasuprot tome – SF kao "razumni žanr"?

[mac]

Naravno da sam pisao kontra-provokaciju, i voleo bih da sada mogu i da je argumentujem, ali nisam dovoljno potkovan (šta ću kad nisam išao u te škole). Recimo da konzumenta horora prosto ne zanima što je društvo u rasulu, to je za njega samo kontekst u kome se krljaju ljudi i zombiji, i ljudi međusobno. Konzumenta SF-a bi već moglo da zanima nešto više o padu društva, o formiranju novih društvenih odnosa, o opstanku klasnih podela čak i usred sudnjeg dana, itd. Pisac SF-a ima slobodu da napiše delo u kome detaljno opisuje sve te stvari, i u tom delu društvo nije samo kontekst nego je i protagonista. Horor pisac nema tu mogućnost, jer u hororu društvo ne može da bude protagonista, nego samo kontekst.

[Bab Jaga]

vidiš, zanimljiva je ova distinkcija, i savršeno se uklapa u moju genijalnu (moraću da je kopirajtujem!) distinkciju, prema kojoj je horor – JA-ŽANR, a SF= MI-ŽANR.

većina najvećih horor pisaca naginjala je udesno, neki su bili rojalisti, ili čak i rasisti, dok su SF-ovci uglavnom naginjali ulevo...

trebalo bi da elaboriram ovu tezu.

Zanimljivo... Na koju bi stranu onda trebali se  naginjati mom srcu drage D.L. Oldi, koji sretno i veselo mješaju u istu kašu Sf, horor i fantasy?

[scallop]

A što se tiče domaćih pisaca, mislim da je uzorak suviše mali da bi se moglo nešto značajnije zaključivati. Međutim, hteli ne hteli (vidi Ivana i njegovu sociološku analizu), u našim delima se značajno reflektuje vreme u kome su ona nastajala. Mislim da, na primer, Bakićev Novi Vavilon, Bagra diše, pa i neka druga dela za koje se to možda na prvi pogled ne bi reklo (Bobanov Crni cvet ili Skrobonjin Nakot) imaju vrlo određen odnos prema našoj sadašnjosti.

Mićo, ponekad me nerviraš. Sve to što pominješ je nastalo posle 1990. Dakle, u Slobino vreme. I Ivanova sociološka analiza je krajnje oskudna (izem mu uzorak!). Da ne govorimo o tome kad Ghoul otvori temu sa Titovom nogom na čelu. To je bilo pre 1980. Tada ni ja nisam znao za domaći SF. Boban je maltene bio Titov pionir. I ti si nosio štafetu. Današnja kritika titoizma je kritika unazad. Paušalna, površna i neargumentovana.

Možemo da posmatramo Slobino vreme i reakciju SF (ili horora). Ali, devedesete za devedesete. Ne tiče me se kritika Slobe posle Slobe. To je lešinarenje. Uzmemo lepo domaći SF u periodu 1987-2001. Uzorak je dovoljan. Nije teško naći sve. Pa, komparativna studija odnosa prema režimu. Tako možemo da saznamo šta su pisci osećali i pisali i da li je domaći SF bio kritički ili režimski. Ocene bez argumenata su mlaćenje prazne slame.

[Tripp]

Ovo je starija vijest i ne znam je l publikovana na Forumu. Vrijedi je prenijeti. Love it. I, zacudo, imam svaki naslov - naravno, tada mislim one novijeg datuma.   

Na sajtu SFX nadjoh listu 10 Most Crucial British Science Fiction Novels. A pod ovim topikom pominjali su se Britanci.   

Evo linka >  http://www.sfx.co.uk/page/sfx?entry=10_most_crucial_british_science

A evo i liste:


1 --- Frankenstein [Mary Shelley] 1818

2 --- The War Of The Worlds [H.G. Wells] 1898

3 --- Brave New World [Aldous Huxley] 1932

4 --- Nineteen Eighty-Four [George Orwell] 1949

5 --- The Day Of The Triffids [John Wyndham] 1951

6 --- Crash [J.G. Ballard] 1973

7 --- The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy [Douglas Adams] 1979

8 --- Consider Phlebas [Iain M. Banks] 1987

9 --- Light [M John Harrison] 2002

10 -- River Of Gods [Ian McDonald] 2004

[Tripp]

New Scientist, 16 Sept. 2009

Kim Stanley Robinson

Science fiction: The stories of now: or, The British Golden Age of SF


8th July 1937

Dear Mr. Stapledon,

I would have thanked you for your book before, but I have been very busy and have only just had time to read it. I don't suppose that I have understood more than a small part - all the same I have understood enough to be greatly interested, and elated too, since sometimes it seems to me that you are grasping ideas that I have tried to express, much more fumblingly, in fiction. But you have gone much further and I can't help envying you - as one does those who reach what one has aimed at.

Many thanks for giving me a copy,

yours sincerely,

Virginia Woolf


THIS was Virginia Woolf's reply to the influential science fiction writer Olaf Stapledon after he had sent her a copy of his recently published novel Star Maker. In an earlier exchange of letters, she made it clear that she had also enjoyed previous works of his, probably including Last and First Men from 1931. These two novels, Stapledon's masterpieces, are enduring monuments of science fiction and of British literature generally. Within a decade of Edwin Hubble's discovery of the red shift, which revealed the universe to be vastly bigger than anyone had imagined, Stapledon's work compressed an entire poetic history of humanity and the cosmos into two slight volumes.

These strange novels made a real impact on Woolf. After reading them, her writing changed. She had always been interested in writing historically, but her stream-of-consciousness style made that difficult to accomplish. Her character Orlando's fantastically long life, and the chapter "Time Passes" in To the Lighthouse, were two attempts at solving this problem. The modular structure of The Years was another. But after reading Star Maker, she tried harder still. In her last years she planned to write a survey of all British literature that she was going to call Anon; and her final novel, Between the Acts, concerns a dramaturge struggling to tell the history of England in the form of a summer village pageant. The novel ends with Stapledonian imagery, describing our species steeped in the eons. Woolf's last pages were a kind of science fiction.

I tell this story here because it has not been told before (Woolf's letters to Stapledon are in his papers at the University of Liverpool, and were not included in her Collected Letters); and also because it shows so clearly how open Woolf was to science fiction. When it came to literature, she had no prejudices. She read widely and her judgement was superb. And so I am confident that if she were reading today, she would be reading science fiction along with everything else. And she would still be "greatly interested, and elated too" - because British science fiction is now in a golden age.

I say this as a happy fan and an awed colleague: the range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of the science fiction being published in the UK these days is simply amazing. The eight wonderful writers featured here are only a representative sampling of a community of artists so strong that it is hard to explain. Add to these Brian Aldiss, Neal Asher, Iain Banks, Christopher Evans, Alasdair Gray, Colin Greenland, John Courtenay Grimwood, Peter Hamilton, Nick Harkaway, M. John Harrison, Robert Holdstock, Gwyneth Jones, Garry Kilworth, Doris Lessing, Ian R. MacLeod, China Miéville, Richard Morgan, Christopher Priest, Alastair Reynolds, Adam Roberts, Jennifer Rohn, Brian Stableford, Charles Stross, Lisa Tuttle - and no doubt others I have forgotten, or am unaware of (sorry) - and one has to ask, how is it that a group of such intellectual power could be working at one time, and our time at that?

The range, depth, intensity, wit and beauty of science fiction in the UK is amazing.

The explanation is multiple and complex. H. G. Wells and Stapledon gave things a tremendous start, of course. Then the weird, alpha-and-omega dichotomy of Arthur C. Clarke and J. G. Ballard - Clarke with his cheery leap to the stars, Ballard with his apocalyptic introversion - created between them an immense artistic space. Michael Moorcock edited New Worlds, the British science fiction magazine, explicitly to explore this space and, led by Brian Aldiss, a large group of talented writers took off in all directions. From then on, each decade has seen new talent appear, and many of them are still working, making for a cumulative effect.

Two other factors, countervailing in a way reminiscent of Clarke and Ballard's incommensurability, were also important. First, an active and intelligent fan community provided instant feedback to the writers, so that individual works were always part of an ongoing discussion. Balanced against that was a quality I see in British artists across all the arts: a fierce, autodidactic, gnarly idiosyncrasy, which in this case meant that science fiction could be a genre without ever becoming a house style.

Many recent British science fiction novels describe the near future, creating a kind of anticipatory realism, the best description of the first decade of this century. Others venture into the depths of distant space and time, creating a new space opera that is not only sophisticated entertainment, but also usually a surreal allegory for the choices we have to make as a civilisation and a species. Some even explore what I think is the hardest zone of all (which is why I asked the writers here to give it a go) - the time about a century from now, when our growing capabilities will be confronted by immense dangers, creating an unstable and unpredictable future.

The result is the best British literature of our time. Oh, I know there is a Booker prize, I've heard of it even in California - supposedly given to the best fiction published in the Commonwealth every year - but there are no Woolves on those juries, and so they judge in ignorance and give their awards to what usually turn out to be historical novels.

Sometimes these are fine historical novels, written by tremendous writers; I particularly like Roddy Doyle, John Banville, Vikram Seth and Amitav Ghosh, and my favorite was Penelope Fitzgerald. But working, like all of us, in the rain shadow of the great modernists, they tend to do the same things the modernists did in smaller ways. A good new novel about the first world war, for instance, is still not going to tell us more than Parade's End by Ford Madox Ford. More importantly, these novels are not about now in the way science fiction is. Thus it seems to me that three or four of the last 10 Booker prizes should have gone to science fiction novels the juries hadn't read. Should I name names? Why not: Air by Geoff Ryman should have won in 2005, Life by Gwyneth Jones in 2004, and Signs of Life by M. John Harrison in 1997. Indeed this year the prize should probably go to a science fiction comedy called Yellow Blue Tibia, by Adam Roberts.

This is not going to happen. But it is a minor injustice, which can be ameliorated by the readers of New Scientist: simply buy the book and read it. Be the jury yourself. Read like Woolf, widely and without preconceptions. Read science fiction, read historical fiction, make your own judgement, and then talk about it. Try this as a kind of experiment: read 30 writers new to you. It's a big project, but what a lot of good reading would come of it. And New Scientist readers will be quickest of all to see that the literature that best expresses our time, that speaks to our time, is science fiction. How could it be otherwise? Our world is a science fiction.

This is important, because you need the literature of your time. You can't get the meaning of our life in 2009 from historical fiction, nor from science alone. Novels serve us, and are treasured, because we want meaning, and fiction is where meaning is created. Scientifically minded people could perhaps conceptualise novels as case studies or thought experiments, both finer grained and wider ranging in their approach to meaning than cruder genres such as religion, psychology or common sense. A literary life is an ongoing moral education, a complete geography of the human world.

You can't get the meaning of life in 2009 from historical fiction or science alone

And when we like novels, we pass them along. Word of mouth is a crucial step in the process, but in the scientific community this form of transmission is often badly hampered or missing entirely. If you tell five friends about a good novel but four of them never read fiction, the information cascade becomes a mere trickle. This is bad for the books, but even worse for the people who never read. More scientifically literate people need to rejoin the game. The rewards would be huge. So many wander in a vacuum, wondering what things mean, wondering where real pleasure and value can be found. It is always in literature. When you were young you knew. Try it again and see. The world will light up for you as if illuminated by a grand hypothesis, by an ongoing science of meaning - by the literature of your time.

[Tripp]

     Otkad je ozgubio posao, famozni britanski filozof John Gray [Straw Dogs, Heresies: Against Progress and Other Illusions, Al Qaeda and What it Means to Be Modern, Black Mass, itd.], izmedju ostalog, pise knjizevne kritike i za New Statesman. Najnovija, iz oktobra mu je o PKD-u, a donji link je za JG Ballard Appreciation.

     http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/10/world-dick-human-japan-fiction

    http://www.newstatesman.com/books/2009/04/ballard-work-life-world
         

[Tripp]

        Iain Banks pokazuje svoje spisateljsko gnijezdo u segmentu 'The Write Place':

          http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZB1riyVLRcU

[scallop]

Ajd' sad pokušaj da napraviš komparaciju sa ovim našim traljavim okruženjem.

[Melkor]

Red Planets: Marxism and Science Fiction
edited by Mark Bould and China Miéville



f writers. And, indeed, however radical their take on theory, their views of science fiction tend to be conventional; no-one seems to imagine any earlier work of sf than Frankenstein, no-one seeks to place science fiction within a spectrum of the fantastic (indeed all seem to regard sf as fully definable, even if they don't all conform to Suvin's definition), no-one cites an sf film more recent than The Matrix.

One of the most influential thinkers in the philosophy of science was Karl Popper, an anti-Marxist who probably wouldn't be too popular in this company. Nevertheless, his notion of falsifiability is one of the simplest and most useful ways of looking at how science actually works. Put briefly, he argued that we accept any theory that is the simplest explanation for what we actually observe only so long as we robustly test that theory and try to make it fail. So long as it doesn't fail, the theory can be said to work for us. I see no reason why some similar process of challenge should not be applied to other theories, but most of the contributors here seem to take a verificationist approach, in other words they are looking for ways to prove rather than disprove the theory. That is, when they compare a work of science fiction to the theory, if the two do not agree then it is the fiction that is said to fail rather than the theory.

What we have, therefore, is a collection of essays that too often seem to be more about theory than science fiction. Some essays, indeed, barely seem to engage with science fiction at all. The Jorgensen essay I've already quoted, for example, is mostly concerned with the contrasting views of revolutionary Marxism espoused by Althusser and Jameson, to which science fiction is little more than a vaguely interested spectator. While the essay that opens the collection, 'The Anamorphic Estrangements of Science Fiction' by Matthew Beaumont, begins as a fascinating discussion of anamophism in art (think of the distorted skull in Holbein's portrait of The Ambassadors), but ends as just another way of presenting Suvin's cognitive estrangement.

Not surprisingly, those essays which engage with specific works seem to have the most focussed and therefore the most interesting things to say: Phillip Wegner's analysis of Ken MacLeod's Fall Revolution quartet (and the internecine warfare between factions of the left familiar from so many of MacLeod's stories are a good way of approaching the theory wars that seem to be glimpsed from the corner of the eye so often in this collection); Rob Latham on Disch; Steven Shaviro on Charles Stross's Accelerando. Among the essays on film (Carl Freedman very readably comparing science fiction and film noir, John Rieder on Until the End of the World by Wim Wenders) the one that stood out for me was '"Madonna in moon rocket with breeches": Weimar SF Film Criticism during the Stabilisation Period' which examines contemporary leftist film criticism of Lang's Frau im Mond, perhaps because this is a topic I know little about.

In the end, though, and perhaps perversely given what I have said so far, the essay I most engaged with was 'Utopia and Science Fiction Revisited' by Andrew Milner, one of the more heavily theoretical of the contributions. It uses the work of Raymond Williams to offer a contrast to Suvin's definition of science fiction, approaching it primarily from the position that utopian literature is separate from science fiction. I don't agree with much of what Milner has to say, I think he is too wedded to the notion that there is a hard and fast definition of science fiction that clearly differentiates it from other forms of the fantastic, a position that I believe to be increasingly difficult to sustain. Nevertheless, it is a good essay to disagree with because it is well argued and does offer an insightful way of approaching the genre.

Marxism and science fiction do have revealing things to say about each other, but I have to conclude that this volume would have explored the symbiosis more fruitfully if the contributors had been less willing to take the precepts of theory on trust and more willing to question both sides of the equation. It is only right at the end, with China Miéville's Afterword, 'Cognition as Ideology: a Dialectic of SF Theory', that we do get such questioning of both theory and of genre. Working from the position that fantasy can be as worthy of academic consideration as science fiction, he generates a fascinating critique of Suvin's notion of 'cognitive estrangement' and Carl Freedman's related notion of the "cognition effect." The result is to open up both science fiction and Marxist theory to new approaches, new arguments. One could only wish that such openness had been appended to a collection that was itself more open.

Copyright © 2010 by Paul Kincaid

Paul Kincaid is the recipient of the SFRA's Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service for 2006. His collection of essays and reviews, What it is we do when we read science fiction is published by Beccon Publications.