The Politics Of Gene Wolfe

Gwern Branwen · 02 Jul 2010, 11:50 · from 2010-July.txt.gz

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From: gwern0 at gmail.com (Gwern Branwen)
Date: Fri, 2 Jul 2010 07:50:30 -0400
Subject: (urth) The Politics Of Gene Wolfe
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On Tue, Mar 17, 2009 at 11:20 AM,  <brunians at brunians.org> wrote:
>>> I guess I'm a moderate conservative or libertarian on the issue.
>>> I think the Second Amendment creates an individual right and
>>> that that individual right clearly isn't meant to cover every
>>> conceivable form of weapon.
>
>> I would argue that the intent was self-evidently for it to cover every
>> conceivable type of weapon.
>
> Indeed, the most powerful weapons available in the eighteenth century were
> warships, many of which were privately owned, as was much artillery in the
> sense of crew-served weapons.
>
> The intent of the second amendment is to allow the citizenry to more
> readily defend themselves against the government, when this becomes
> necessary, as it inevitably does.

I don't think that this is what the founders thought, but I'd bet good
money this is what Gene thinks.

I've read through most of _Starwater Strains_ now, and my initial
belief has hardened: Gene's writings are definitely getting more
political. In his older works like _Peace_ or _Book of the New Sun_
(pre-90s), I didn't notice anything political, or at least,
contemporary. But in stuff from the last 2 decades? My suspicion has
become certainty.

The stories in SS though are absolutely littered with
libertarian/conservative plots or asides. Some stories do nothing but
push such ideas. "Viewpoint", for example, has a dystopian government
which claims to own all money and which suppresses all weaponry, the
better to oppress its citizenry; the protagonist, who is a heroic
moral wilderness survivalist fellow, spends most of the story trying
to get a weapon. His great victory is to murder a government agent.
"Has Anyone Seen Junie Moon?", when it's not trying to channel
Lafferty, ends with best wishes for a rebellion that will kill 'the
big important gangs with suits and guns' (the government). "The Fat
Magician" ends with a rant about totalitarian governments. Another
story seems to implies that the government is responsible for taking
away everything interesting and handing over power to machines and
rules ("Petting Zoo"), while in "The Dog of the Drops", the government
seems to engineer the extinction of dogs because dogs don't pay taxes
and don't love the government but their owners. (I'm speculating a
little with this one because the dialect is so hard to read.) And so
on.

I haven't even finished, but it's all far more blatant than _An Evil Guest_.

-- 
gwern

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