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William Gibson is just bafflingly centrist for someone whose books all read like catalogues of the horrors of capitalism.
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Jun 28, 2023 14:25
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Nessus posted:Yes, neither Niven nor Pournelle were particularly progressive people, although Pournelle seems to have been noticeably worse. A lot of golden-age SF authors had, to be charitable, problems; Asimov's social and economic politics were fairly progressive, but he was an inveterate sexual harrasser. I haven't heard much ill about Gibson or Bruce Sterling, at least. Niven’s pretty bad. He’s just much quieter about it. quote:Niven said a good way to help hospitals stem financial losses is to spread rumors in Spanish within the Latino community that emergency rooms are killing patients in order to harvest their organs for transplants.
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Jun 28, 2023 14:48
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I keep mixing them up. Niven is the one who wanted the government to lie to Latinos about organ stealing, Campbell was the one who wanted the government to exterminate black people by giving them free drugs.
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Jun 28, 2023 14:55
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Thanlis posted:Niven’s pretty bad. He’s just much quieter about it. 
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Jun 28, 2023 14:56
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Yeah, gold and silver age sci-fi writers have a low enough moral bar that you’re kind of pleasantly surprised when one is just the normal amount of racist or most of their weird sex stuff is between consenting adults. They’re not good but they seem less egregious when put next L. Ron “kidnapped his own baby” Hubbard or whatever.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:11
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Allegedly Niven's partnership with Pournelle pushed him much further into right-wing rear end in a top hat territory.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:18
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Drakyn posted:I mean, nowadays he's a LOT louder than Pournelle I can buy that Pournelle was a negative influence since most of the Niven stuff I liked was from the Known Space stuff.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:23
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Lemniscate Blue posted:Allegedly Niven's partnership with Pournelle pushed him much further into right-wing rear end in a top hat territory.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:36
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Helical Nightmares posted:Re: Wolves Upon the Coast Nice! Glad you’re feeling it. My one warning is that, while every individual hex is quite evocative, it can be hard to see the larger scope of what’s happening on each island without piecing it together yourself. Blind exploration and discovery is very fun in this game, but I spent some time prepping hooks and rumors for my players last night just to lessen the improv burden on myself.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:42
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:William Gibson is just bafflingly centrist for someone whose books all read like catalogues of the horrors of capitalism. He understands the problem therefore it is solved. The irritating grain of information has been covered in the smooth nacre of rationalization.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:51
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:William Gibson is just bafflingly centrist for someone whose books all read like catalogues of the horrors of capitalism.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:56
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You could probably tweet or toot or blue sky or whatever at him and request answers. He seems like that kind of person. The value of the exercise is ambiguous.
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Jun 28, 2023 15:56
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Xiahou Dun posted:L. Ron “kidnapped his own baby” Hubbard or whatever. * better known for other work
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Jun 28, 2023 16:49
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Absurd Alhazred posted:* better known for other work Yeah, like that collab album he produced with Edgar Winter...
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Jun 28, 2023 18:51
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Famously cancelled by the woke mob just for using the wrong words.
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Jun 28, 2023 18:54
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Yeeeah when I read Niven it isn't for the politics, which can be weird. He's good at interesting aliens. Also Niven and Pournelle wrote The Gripping Hand in 1993, like 20+ years after The Mote in God's Eye, and I had the sense that they wanted to get this story finished but really rushed it at the end and there's at least one plot thread that is sort of forgotten about and left hanging. The story is about finding a way to not do a genocide, and the most sympathetic characters are the ones more firmly on the side of attaining that goal, but... yeah, we're still supposed to just sort of accept the legitimacy of the worldbuilding that put that dilemma into play in the first place and those were all authorial choices, obviously. I can't bring myself to re-read Heinlein any more, though. He's just too weird about sex. I think the last time I read a Heinlein book was in my early 20s and even then I was like, uh, my guy, my dude, mr. author, not 100% of ladies just always throw themselves at the protagonist and believe in free polyamory etc., this is not realistic. I've read all of Gibsons books and I don't know anything about his real-world politics but even his most recent stuff is still pretty adamantly anti-establishment. He writes stories about individuals finding ways to not be controlled by monstrous corporate and government entities and powerful ultra-wealthy people. I'm not sure what exactly qualifies as centrist any more really but I hope he's not another author I need to feel disappointed with.
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Jun 28, 2023 20:52
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Leperflesh posted:Yeeeah when I read Niven it isn't for the politics, which can be weird. He's good at interesting aliens. Yup. The writing (in his good years) was readable and he wasn’t bad at extrapolating social trends. If I’m being especially fair I’ll admit that the Latino thing had some satirical “I know this would be bad but look how clever I am” flavor. Which is not great, but also is not a real recommendation. The other thing about Larry Niven is that his family was rich as gently caress. His great-grandfather drilled the first oil well in Mexico in 1901 and ran one of the largest oil companies in the world before selling to Standard Oil. If you’ve seen There Will Be Blood? Daniel Day-Lewis’ character is lightly based on him. It is not easy to grow up that rich and remain at all progressive.
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Jun 28, 2023 21:35
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Jack Vance was what I'd call a "romantic reactionary," but you have to read a good bit of his work before that worldview shines through. Probably because his work is whimsical and fantastical, and not about how civilization collapsed in 2199 because too many nonwhite people voted and then the Neo-Nordic Empire rose from the ashes and
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Jun 28, 2023 21:39
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Leperflesh posted:I can't bring myself to re-read Heinlein any more, though. He's just too weird about sex. I think the last time I read a Heinlein book was in my early 20s and even then I was like, uh, my guy, my dude, mr. author, not 100% of ladies just always throw themselves at the protagonist and believe in free polyamory etc., this is not realistic. Oh my god I thought it was just me. I read Stranger in a Strange Land yonks ago and I was like, "Man, maybe I'm a prude or something. I guess this is what dorks want out of sci-fi, or at least did in the 60s, but this poo poo is not for me."
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Jun 28, 2023 21:45
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Tekopo posted:The only degeneration I care about is D-Generation X This is the correct opinion Leperflesh posted:Yeeeah when I read Niven it isn't for the politics, which can be weird. He's good at interesting aliens. Also Niven and Pournelle wrote The Gripping Hand in 1993, like 20+ years after The Mote in God's Eye, and I had the sense that they wanted to get this story finished but really rushed it at the end and there's at least one plot thread that is sort of forgotten about and left hanging. The story is about finding a way to not do a genocide, and the most sympathetic characters are the ones more firmly on the side of attaining that goal, but... yeah, we're still supposed to just sort of accept the legitimacy of the worldbuilding that put that dilemma into play in the first place and those were all authorial choices, obviously. Probably why most people just focus on Starship Troopers these days, probably his least horny work
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Jun 28, 2023 21:54
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The 30s-50s scifi stuff where the authors are still into eugenics (and sometimes incest) can be difficult reading. They really want to breed a superior human and have it be a good thing.
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Jun 28, 2023 21:57
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There's never been a time when there weren't creepy sci-fi authors, but I feel like that kind of thing was still all too prevalent at least into the 60s. Dune was published in '65 and only got weirder about that stuff as the series went on. I don't want to turn people's stomachs, but something I have noticed about 60s sci-fi I've skimmed recently is the obsession with rape, and in particular the idea that humans are essentially animals and that women will quickly be brainwashed into loving any man who rapes and enslaves them. The principal example that comes to mind is pretty much anything by DF Jones (the Colossus series) and post-apocalyptic novels like Vogt's Children of Tomorrow.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:09
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It really makes you appreciate the movie of Starship Troopers once you read the book. God I love Verhoeven.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:10
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Starship Troopers, Alphaville, Aguirre the Wrath of God…if you’re a good enough director you don’t need to read the book, just most directors are nowhere near that good
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Jun 28, 2023 22:14
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Halloween Jack posted:I don't want to turn people's stomachs, but something I have noticed about 60s sci-fi I've skimmed recently is the obsession with rape You can add Harlan "A Boy And His Dog" Ellison to that list, too.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:16
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Arivia posted:Starship Troopers, Alphaville, Aguirre the Wrath of God…if you’re a good enough director you don’t need to read the book, just most directors are nowhere near that good O Verhoeven read the book. He famously threw it while calling it fascism. Then he made an entire satire of it.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:18
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Xiahou Dun posted:O Verhoeven read the book. He famously threw it while calling it fascism. Oh I thought he got midway through called it fascism and then didn’t finish
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Jun 28, 2023 22:20
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Yes! Yes! That's the one I forgot! So, Heinlein. Heinlein represents this very weird kind of 60s-70s sci-fi author that I have a hard time summing up with a genre label or pithy statement. They're all about "free love," but it's within the context of this dumbfuck libertarian attitude where free love means a big macho manly man going out to the Frontier and building a house on a thousand-acre homestead and having five wives and fifty children. Lazarus Long refers to sex as "topping a woman you love and making a baby with her hearty help," which might be the least sexy description of sex I've ever heard outside of a pickup line or Nazi propaganda. Such a dreary vision of polygamy. I want to have sex with a billion women, but only in the missionary position. Anyway, you can see shades of this in guys like Gene Roddenberry, and in Vance--the first page of the first novel in the Demon Princes series is an interview with a guy who started a farm, a bed and breakfast, and a big polygamous family on an otherwise uncolonized planet at the rear end-end of space. Halloween Jack fucked around with this message at 14:42 on Jun 30, 2023 |
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Jun 28, 2023 22:28
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Magnetic North posted:Oh my god I thought it was just me. I read Stranger in a Strange Land yonks ago and I was like, "Man, maybe I'm a prude or something. I guess this is what dorks want out of sci-fi, or at least did in the 60s, but this poo poo is not for me." Stranger, Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, I Will Fear No Evil, Farnham's Freehold, are all hard stops for me.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:35
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Xiahou Dun posted:It really makes you appreciate the movie of Starship Troopers once you read the book. Eh personally I heavily disagree, movie is a nonsensical tire fire outside of the special effects and some of the scenes and dialogue being meme bait
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Jun 28, 2023 22:38
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drrockso20 posted:Eh personally I heavily disagree, movie is a nonsensical tire fire outside of the special effects and some of the scenes and dialogue being meme bait Absolutely agree. Troopers is a flawed book, but the movie is just awful.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:46
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It’s a fun movie but Robocop was better. Just without a pithy line.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:49
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Could you elaborate? “Awful” and “bad” aren’t informative adjectives, and since it’s shot like a 40’s propaganda reel a lot of the “bad” stuff is great.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:50
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Halloween Jack posted:Jack Vance was what I'd call a "romantic reactionary," but you have to read a good bit of his work before that worldview shines through. Probably because his work is whimsical and fantastical, and not about how civilization collapsed in 2199 because too many nonwhite people voted and then the Neo-Nordic Empire rose from the ashes and Honestly I was really surprised to learn about Vance's reactionary real life views because it REALLY doesn't come through in his writing. Halloween Jack posted:There's never been a time when there weren't creepy sci-fi authors, but I feel like that kind of thing was still all too prevalent at least into the 60s. Dune was published in '65 and only got weirder about that stuff as the series went on. Honestly I think that's a cultural attitude that's not just limited to sf literature - I've been watching a bunch of 70s and 80s era films lately and you see those sorts of hosed up sexual politics with regards to consent all over the place. It was just sort of this weird, expected paradigm in that era that men were gonna be a little rapey and that's just how things are? There was also this very creepy trend in 70s and 80s media of both sexualizing teenagers and generally portraying relationships between older men and younger or underage women in a creepily positive light...
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Jun 28, 2023 22:51
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Humbug Scoolbus posted:Stranger, Number of the Beast, The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, I Will Fear No Evil, Farnham's Freehold, are all hard stops for me. Any one of those plus a few others should have been for me, but I was a teenager and my dad loved Heinlein's work so I went into all of it with rose-colored glasses.
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Jun 28, 2023 22:53
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I like Starship Troopers but I know my reading of it isn't the intended one - I see it as a horror story where a well-meaning kid of unclear political beliefs is very quickly indoctrinated into becoming an unquestioning cog of the machine because if there is one thing the military is good at doing is brainwashing well-meaning kids and it's been doing so for ages. Johnny Rico went into the service wanting to get the right to vote, and never got it because troopers can't vote but he didn't care in the end as long as he continued to be a TRVE SOLDIER. (And I think Heinlein said at one point that Rico doesn't survive his final drop, so the machine wrung out all the use it could out of him before he died.) A lot of the book does feel like Heinlein really wants to hash out arguments against people we don't know and can't answer because it's his book and he gets to write the dialogue though, especially things like his outrage at those 'parlor hussars' in logistics and personnel that dared to have medals when TRVE SOLDIERS had to always fight in the frontline, 24/7, hoorah.
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Jun 28, 2023 23:17
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Traveller posted:I like Starship Troopers but I know my reading of it isn't the intended one - I see it as a horror story where a well-meaning kid of unclear political beliefs is very quickly indoctrinated into becoming an unquestioning cog of the machine because if there is one thing the military is good at doing is brainwashing well-meaning kids and it's been doing so for ages. Johnny Rico went into the service wanting to get the right to vote, and never got it because troopers can't vote but he didn't care in the end as long as he continued to be a TRVE SOLDIER. (And I think Heinlein said at one point that Rico doesn't survive his final drop, so the machine wrung out all the use it could out of him before he died.) It's been awhile, but that's what I got out of it too, it felt very anti-war, anti-MIC, but I guess that wasn't Heinlein's intention?
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Jun 28, 2023 23:27
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Tuxedo Catfish posted:William Gibson is just bafflingly centrist for someone whose books all read like catalogues of the horrors of capitalism. That just seems to be a milder arc of what happens to people who achieve some level of fame and wealth, like Ray Bradbury going all-in for Reagan and both Bushes. Frustratingly centrist is at least better than cheerleading the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis though. BattleMaster fucked around with this message at 10:09 on Jun 29, 2023 |
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Jun 28, 2023 23:36
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Bucnasti posted:It's been awhile, but that's what I got out of it too, it felt very anti-war, anti-MIC, but I guess that wasn't Heinlein's intention? I strongly doubt it. Heinlein himself was (at that point in his life) very pro-war and anti-communist. See the earlier post about the full-page ad decrying the Vietnam peace movement.
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Jun 29, 2023 00:05
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Xiahou Dun posted:Could you elaborate? “Awful” and “bad” aren’t informative adjectives, and since it’s shot like a 40’s propaganda reel a lot of the “bad” stuff is great. Heinlein may have been a serious right-winger at times and occasionally had weird ideas about sex, but he was not a fascist. His line, 'Service Means Citizenship' was supposed to mean (and he said it several times in interviews) that if you want a member of a population to have a voice in a government, they should be an employee of that government first; teacher, soldier, hospital employee(he was all for Universal Health Care), or any other position that contributes to the public good (private lawyers and bankers need not apply, public defenders do). Note that this means you don't have to be a 'Citizen' to reap the benefits, just that you need to be one to vote on public policy. Verhoeven never read the book and has said so, so what he filmed is a satire of something that in a lot of ways, did not deserve it. I'm not saying that Troopers the book is perfect, parts of it are terrible, but one of the throughlines is the importance of accepting responsibility for your actions and a society's responsibility for its members.
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Jun 29, 2023 00:08
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