This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires

Nick Lee · 10 Apr 2012, 01:35 · from 2012-April.txt.gz

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From: starwaterstrain at gmail.com (Nick Lee)
Date: Mon, 9 Apr 2012 20:35:18 -0500
Subject: (urth) This Week in Google Alerts: Home Fires
Message-ID: <CAMwAopTghPLLAW+4rLYg0bZAG_R=mJwhuQ2oRynSqYEsXqGoaQ at mail.gmail.com>

"The crazy right-wing politics.?There?s the North American Union, with
its single currency. There?s the European Union, where thieves get
their hands cut off because of?sharia. There?s the UN, which always
takes the sides of the poor nations of the world instead of the NAU."

This childlike view of politics is creeping into all reviews of Wolfe
now. As soon as someone learns Wolfe's political leanings (not that
they know them better than the vague label "conservative"), they start
reading Wolfe like he's Ayn Rand. I'm glad the reviewer put the book
down. He wouldn't want to be exposed to ideas he might disagree with.

I like to point out to these people that Wolfe is 1) an
environmentalist and 2) a believer in a matriarchal pre-history.

"The tech illiteracy.?The setting is Earth, in a resource-poor
near-future. Our protagonist has a cellphone, but nobody else seems
to, and from what we see in the half of the book I read, it?s just a
phone. Websites exist, but there?s no sign of social networking. When
pirates hijack an enormous, luxurious cruise ship, the protagonists
talk for a while as if there?s a possibility of keeping the news under
wraps, as if there wouldn?t have been hundreds of people tweeting ?OMG
pirates!? within ten seconds of the first shots being fired. When the
protagonists talk (via some kind of video-phone communication) with
the authorities on shore, they argue a bit over the location of the
ship, as if there?s no such thing as GPS. The whole thing could?ve
been written in the 1970s."

And here he turns ageist. Why is everyone on board with the idea that
in the future we can have more technology but never the idea we will
have less? Or changes in culture. Why would we necessarily stay
chained to social media in the future?

There are fewer cell phones because we're running out of helium and
silver, among other things.

The implication that Wolfe is wrong about such obvious details strikes
me as a hint of the reader's naivete, not Wolfe's.

Gerry Quinn wrote:

"Is a single North American currency such a right wing concept as all
that?  Nobody calls one a Nazi for favouring European monetary union ?
quite the opposite, if anything.  Personally, I don?t really care what
currency I hold so long as it is hard and fungible."

I'm guessing the "reviewer" thinks the notion of a one-currency NAU,
and the presence of such an alliance itself, is the stuff of
right-wing fantasy. I don't understand what's crazy about it. Neither
do I see how portraying it is itself a criticism of it.

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