Gene Wolfe is for Socialists

Jeff Wilson · 20 Dec 2010, 02:52 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sun, 19 Dec 2010 20:52:07 -0600
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe is for Socialists
In-Reply-To: <AANLkTi=AUDuXrCSiSoFtk0tH1YOggD57+KNdGBf+h6eQ at mail.gmail.com>
References: <4D0A90E8.7010006 at gmail.com>	<000501cb9f58$21bb1bc0$65315340$@net.au>	<COL105-W18A266C8E7DB54A9969E7885180 at phx.gbl>
	<AANLkTi=AUDuXrCSiSoFtk0tH1YOggD57+KNdGBf+h6eQ at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <4D0EC4D7.5060701 at io.com>

On 12/19/2010 8:23 PM, Matthew Knight wrote:
> I'm with Pedro on this one.  I think the list's author is finding
> something of value in 5HOC when viewed through a socialist lens, despite
> recognizing vast differences between Wolfe's perspective and his own.

It's not such a stretch to see how a general dystopia is also a dystopia 
for the working people. "5HC" is even a kind of "fiend confessional", 
where the narrator describes a world where people are openly bought, 
sold, and rented, how he and his gang of junior exploiters seek to steal 
and marry their way up the ladder of oppression, only to find that they 
are just as much exploited by their seniors, and piecemeal removal of 
the ruling progenitors ultimately changes nothing. (Implying wider-scale 
revolution is needed.)

 From an adventure SF POV, "5HC" is a wonderfully subversive story where 
the speculative technologies of freedom or liberation from want (FTL, 
AI, and cloning, in once sense or another) are used instead to reach new 
places to rule, to make more efficient overseers over the working 
prisoners, and to make new races of exploiters and exploited for better 
returns, a good wake-up call to life's realities outside the 
neighborhoods of most US/UK/Commonwealth readers.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net