Gene Wolfe is for Socialists

David Stockhoff · 20 Dec 2010, 12:24 · from 2010-December.txt.gz

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From: dstockhoff at verizon.net (David Stockhoff)
Date: Mon, 20 Dec 2010 07:24:44 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gene Wolfe is for Socialists
In-Reply-To: <4D0EC4D7.5060701 at io.com>
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	<4D0EC4D7.5060701 at io.com>
Message-ID: <4D0F4B0C.1040100 at verizon.net>

That's right---especially the second paragraph---and it's a theme in 
BOTNS, where the oppressive effects of this type of rule are clearly 
seen throughout the Commonwealth, and where the aristocracy are local 
colonial elites supported by alien technology. Typhon did the same with 
these technologies when he had them.

On 12/19/2010 9:52 PM, Jeff Wilson wrote:
> 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.
>


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