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

Jerry Friedman · 01 May 2011, 14:27 · from 2011-May.txt.gz

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From: jerry_friedman at yahoo.com (Jerry Friedman)
Date: Sun, 1 May 2011 07:27:43 -0700 (PDT)
Subject: (urth) "Realistic fiction leaves out too much." - Gene Wolfe
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>From: James Wynn <crushtv at gmail.com>
...

> Honestly, I was only attempting to consider SF literature from the POV of 
> what I think were Wolfe's problems with 'The Dispossessed'. The 
> counter-argument could be "Oh, then Wes Craven's 'Halloween' is just a Crime 
> Thriller with a supernatural killer", or "Star Wars is just King Arthur with 
> extra shiny swords". 
>
> But if one see SF (as Wolfe here is arguing it should be IMO) as an     
> opportunity to put Reality on trial to better understand its limits, then 
> "ST" falls short.

I think you're right about what Wolfe is arguing, but it's interesting that he 
divides things up the way he does.  Lots of Americans take it as axiomatic that 
liberal one-adult-one-vote capitalism is the best possible organization of 
society--probably far more than the number who take it as axiomatic that 
supernatural powers don't affect our lives.  TD (and ST) try to put that 
political assumption on trial, convict it, send it to the oubliette, and hire an 

aquastor to replace it.  For Wolfe, though, TD is a realistic Updike novel about 

a college professor, maybe because what it puts on trial isn't fundamental 
enough, in his view.

> Jerry Friedman:
>
>> Both /The Dispossessed/ and /Starship Troopers/ had to be SF because they're
>> about societies that have never existed.
>
> Wolfe's comment was:
>
> "It was about the college professor who's married to a college professor, 
> only science fiction, and this planet is Russia and this planet is the 
> United States."
>
> Wolfe is saying that *really* the societies are *not* intended to be ones 
> that have never existed. We're supposed to see that they are actually quite 
> close.

Supposed by Le Guin?  Hardly.  The counterpart of the Soviet Union in TD is the 
nation of Thu, the America-like nation's rival on Urras.  Anarres is obviously 
different from the Soviet Union.  If Wolfe thought the planet of Anarres was 
Russia, he totally misunderstood the book.  The best way I can understand his 
comment is an oblique criticism, something like "Le Guin meant Anarres to be 
different from the USSR, but actually it's the same in crucial ways."  Or "The 
supposedly stable anarchy of Anarres would soon degenerate into a 
dictatorship that differs from the USSR only in the names of its supposed 
principles."

Jerry Friedman

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