a cat can look at a king, if it likes...

[intertribal]

First of all, the creatrix was bad and redid her livejournal, wasting precious time.  Sadly enough userpics may be next.  What can I say!  My overall mood changed.  We'll see, we'll see...

What I really wanted to say, however, was that I think I know the genre I like - "social science fiction", or "soft science fiction" - "concerned less with technology and space opera and more with sociological speculation about human society."  I mean, that's what Ilium is. 

However, this genre is really way too stuck in the Cold War.  It's like every work considered "seminal" has something to do with a rejection of the Soviet iron curtain - they're all obsessed with rejecting sameness and artificial equality and totalitarian control.  I suppose that's a problem other SF has too - Philip K. Dick, for example.  For that matter, it's also a problem that political science has - the Cold War is what these professors grew up with, so that's what they're still convinced is the most important historical factor in shaping modern affairs.  It's a little ludicrous - the world has changed quite a bit since then, and is still changing at a phenomenal pace.  Not only that, but the Cold War was not the decisive "thing" in the lives of people from parts of the world that did not equal the West or Russia, even in the '50s. 

Ah, the age-old problem: the Western-centric outlook.  It definitely exists in SF.  It makes me wonder what SF looks like in "other countries".  I know there's this one Indonesian writer whose name I've forgotten who writes very... horror-inspired speculative stuff, with sensible doses of Islamic mysticism thrown in.  I read some of his short stories once - it was one of those paperback books on my parents' bookshelf that was really too old for me, but I tried.  One story that stuck with me was about a guy who made a deal with Ismail (Gabriel in Christianity, I believe) because he was going to die and his tongue and hands were saying all his sins and he realized he was going to hell (that's one of the most frightening things in Islam, the idea that your body parts will admit to all the sins you forced them to commit when you're being weighed on the scales of judgment) - and he thought he was homefree, and then Ismail said that his daughter would have to die instead.  And the rest of the story consists of the guy running his daughter frantically around Java, trying to keep one step ahead of Ismail.  One scene I remember in particular was him looking out at night and seeing his daughter in a tree swing, swaying back and forth, then looking at the tree and realizing that the tree was Ismail.  God, it freaked me out.  They're still on the run in the end.

I'll admit, though, that "perestroika" is a really cool word.  What the hell is with people taking really cool usernames on lj and producing either: nothing, or, crap? 

Comments

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

1) You rock.

2) I don't think political science is the only discipline stuck in the Cold War... semiotics certainly has a "propaganda and totalitarian control" bent to it, at least sometimes. Anthro, as always, has a strange sort of duality in being Western-centric but obsessed with the non-Western, and I'll leave it at that, for the moment...

In some ways, though, isn't Phillip K. Dick sort of anti-capitalist? I'm not actually sure, just asking... (busybusybusy)

3) That story sounds absolutely terrifying.

4) I couldn't for the life of me remember what perestroika was, why it sounded so familiar, and had to look it up... I think 9/10 English permanently changed me.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

1) Thanks very much.
2) Yeah, I agree, it's a problem that spans across the social sciences. Poli sci just has it worse because it was a political crisis... or something.
3) Yup, it was.
4) 9/10 English permanently changed you? I don't follow.

[royinpink.livejournal.com]

9/10: It was when we had to read those political writings (Marx, Lenin, Adam Smith, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and probably other people I'm forgetting), and when I did my 3-papers project on the Russian Revolution(s). I'm not really sure what, or if, I really thought about politics before then, other than that I fell vaguely under the "liberal" heading, not that it suddenly became what i thought about... I mean, it's the first time i see me obsessing about propaganda or thinking about the Cold War, which is probably why i thought to mention it...goddamn i just can't keep a train of thought today. someone should just shoot me in the face.

[intertribal.livejournal.com]

ahhh... ok, I thought you were saying that you didn't remember what perestroika was because of 9/10.