"Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe

Jeff Wilson · 01 May 2011, 04:27 · from 2011-April.txt.gz

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From: jwilson at io.com (Jeff Wilson)
Date: Sat, 30 Apr 2011 23:27:33 -0500
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
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On 4/30/2011 10:53 PM, Jerry Friedman wrote:
> Both /The Dispossessed/ and /Starship Troopers/ had to be SF because they're
> about societies that have never existed.

Only if the S is for speculative. Plenty of other never-existed 
societies are written about without the benefit of an appeal to the 
authority of science for suspending disbelief in counterfactual elements 
(A HANDMAID'S TALE) or even existence of scientifiction (a trunkload of 
utopian novels and essays from the 16th-19th centuries).

>  Otherwise, it's true they don't
> provide
> much in the way of stfnal thrills beyond the suits in ST and the description of
> Shevek making his discovery in TD.  There's nothing in either that you could
> call religious or spiritual (I think), either.  As some of the Kesh say in
> /Always
> Coming Home/, the problem with novels is they never go beyond the Five
> Houses (the material world, sort of).
>
> Is Heinlein's "lunar imperium" story /The Moon is a Harsh Mistress/?  I can
> certainly
> see thinking of /The Dispossessed/ as a response to that--a different kind of
> anarchy.  (I don't know about "imperium", though.)  And what's his "stellar
> imperium", /Starship Troopers/?

BETWEEN PLANETS for stellar, CITIZEN OF THE GALAXY for interstellar, 
possibly others, esp if you count the settings where earth is largely 
left to itself through lack of importance to the alien galactics.

This is not to say that the humans in ST don't wage a conquering war 
against the bugs, but they apparently ally with the skinnies rather than 
subjugate or exterminate them.

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

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