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Antifa Turkeesian posted:The decline of American hegemony and a multipolar future has been a fixation for Americans since the 70s, though. It wasn't Japan, but Americans have been obsessed with the idea that they would be culturally dominated in the same way they culturally dominated the rest of the world after World War II, and in a very deep, pathological way, since well before the end of the Cold War. Yes. Losing in Vietnam and then suffering through the fuel crises and stagflation made us realize our empire could and would decline like all others and created a great deal of social anxiety. The particular fear that Japan would come to dominate us culturally and economically, a reversal of how we had dominated Japan after 1945, was a major anxiety in the 80s, expressed in films ranging from Gremlins to Gung Ho. It became a big part of the cyberpunk milieu--see CP2077's main antagonists. And it turned out to be as accurate a prediction as datajacks and razorgirls. Zophar posted:I taught a Cyberpunk lit class last Spring and at each new step underscored how the genre was always much more about processing the present moment at the time of their creation, aligning the events of the novels/stories with the transitions in global social/economic paradigms that accompanied them. This applies to a great deal of science fiction, not just cyberpunk in particular. The Time Machine isn't about the wonders of time travel. It's an allegory about the dangers of Victorian class divisions. Spice in Dune stands in for oil. The Forever War is about the Vietnam War. More recently, Famous Men Who Never Lived is about being a refugee.
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Feb 11, 2021 19:05
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Aruan posted:for acclaimed, maybe william gibson? as far as i know there are no weird sex things in any of his work. there's also dan simmons, but, uh, don't read anything after 9/11 because 9/11 broke his brain. but hyperion is still one of the best scifi books ever written, and i like the sequels. In Neuromancer, Molly explains that she sold the use of her body as a sex doll to afford her implants, and one time she woke up while she was being raped. I think Riviera uses his hologram implants to make her re-experience that during the Straylight Run.
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Feb 11, 2021 21:24
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Aruan posted:i think the distinction is that's presented as a bad thing and a symptom of the exploitation and brutally of their corporate controlled dystopia, which is a pretty stark difference from so many other scifi authors who bend over backwards with "rape is good because..." (see dan simmons). the specific context is that as a sex doll part of the arrangement was that she wouldn't have memory of anything that happened (they install a neural cutout), but her corrupt boss found out she was getting implants and exploited her - and the cutout failed - and she got revenge. riviera references it during his performance at the restaurant before they start the run because that type of visceral horror was appealing to the living tessier-ashpool as part of a commentary on how rich people are bad. That's a fair distinction. selec posted:Here’s the thing about William Gibson: I see two flaws in this characterization. First, I don't think he ever actually dreaded megacorps all that much. I think he takes late capitalist dystopia as a given and is more interested in writing stories about computer programs coming to life. Second, I think you're right to say that he's concerned about his first-world life being disrupted, but you're wrong to imply that the people he used to cast as protagonists were not themselves also first-worlders. But it is disappointing that the follow up to his novel about the first world turning around and exploiting itself after destroying the rest of the world is a novel about how an app comes to life and Hillary saves the world.
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Feb 11, 2021 23:13
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selec posted:I think the obvious glee he took in writing the Panther Modern-assisted sub-caper kind of undercuts this take. He obviously has picked a side in those novels, and his sympathies were more with the people disrupting and trying to route around the corps than the people working for them. Saying he doesn't sympathize with the megacorps he writes about is a lot different than saying he dreads them. He doesn't present Sense/Net in a particularly antagonistic light. They're just a really big company that the protagonists need to rob to get the Dixie Flatline. I think he takes a similar glee in writing the drone attack on the Touring Police on Freeside. I'd chalk these scenes and the others like them to his distaste and distrust of authority rather than a particular animus towards corporations. I get what you're saying about his politics, and I think phrasing it in those terms works a lot better than phrasing it in terms of first-worlders. But I still don't think that's particularly accurate. I think Gibson in '80 would be less a social democrat Bernie Bro and more a libertarian Ron Paul Rloveution type. Gibson didn't trust or want government. That's why he wrote so many romanticized versions of the Kowloon Walled City. And I think his class sympathies are still largely the same. Verity is hardly his first out-of-work middle class professional protagonist. She's of a type he's been using since Marly in Count Zero. And she's there alongside Flynn, who's just the latest version of his Horatio Alger hero that he's been using for over 30 years. In short, I think the narrative that Gibson was some lefty who got brain worms and became a boomer centrist is incorrect. Gibson has just followed the normal arc of boomer centrism.
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Feb 12, 2021 18:02
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Owlspiracy posted:the other thing about x men is that mutants were legitimately an existential threat and it made sense to fight them or even wipe them out from the perspective of non-mutants - like, having a random person with the capacity for destruction greater than a nuclear weapon and hoping that they don’t use their power capriciously is uhh not a good gamble and no sane person would be ok with that The problem with discrimination is not that it's rooted in irrational beliefs about other people. The problem is the harm it causes to those people. Making those beliefs rational does not excuse the harm they cause.
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Jun 7, 2021 19:23
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Sanguinia posted:I mean, like I said above, in the context of the larger Marvel Universe and how it treats superpeople in general its not even a rational belief, it just can be made to look rational in a total vacuum. Oh yeah. I'm speaking about this argument in general. Even in something like The Broken Earth trilogy, the idea that a group's special powers justify their marginalization and create a logical flaw in the allegory is gross and completely misses the forest for the trees.
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Jun 8, 2021 00:08
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