urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8

turin · 30 Nov 2004, 11:08 · from 2004-November.txt.gz
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From: turin at HELL.COM (turin)
Date: Tue Nov 30 11:08:44 2004
Subject: (urth) Re: urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 3, Issue 8
Message-ID: <20041130190833.05A10393E at sitemail.everyone.net>


<(Gee ... I hope you're male under that name...)

What if I'm a girl?  I'm not but we really can't tell under the internet.  This is kind of a joke, and I'm not suggesting anything that you do, but I have noticed some people feel its dishonest to pretend to be the opposite sex online, not that I've ever pretended to be a girl. But unless you are going to meet in person, I dont know if it matters. I do think bodies are important, but in text we are genderless.


I can't remember but I don't think Gaiman wrote an article on Lewis but he talks about him at length (for Gaiman) in the live journal, which I read for about a year when American Gods came out and when I decided that Gaiman really wasn't a very good novelist.  He also talks about him in "An Early Life Furnished in Michael Moorcock".  Gaiman does like Chesterton Dunsany Lindsey and Wolfe, but is almost completely silent on Tolkien, and I can't remember how he feels about Morris and Macdonald.

<That much is clearly true. In fact, there are times when he comes
<parlously close to Poughkeepsie, to borrow Le Guin's trope.

What is poughkeepsie??? Le Guin is a very interesting person with a very interesting family history.

I'm kind of repeating myself, butt... I do think military sci-fi is very conservative, a lot of it is also Cold War.  And yes sci-fi does have a big conservative vein, but I dont think it dominates the genre or that Christian writers should just be labeled conservative in the fundamentalist, spooky way American like to define conservative now, which has nothing to do with small government or tight budgets, even for the Republicans.  I don't consider Tolkien or Wolfe to be conservative writers by the new definition but perhaps as far as small government is concerned. I think they write about war, because it is so horrible.  I can't remember if Wolfe was in a war but I think he was in the military, and Tolkien was at the Somme, and most of his friends died in the war.  I think that informs his work more than anything, with his relationship with his wife a close second.

I don't want to get into a long discussion on what allegory is, but I think it is unavoidable.  My idea of allegory is very limited, it must be didactic, 100% translatable into an ideology, and ultimately robs the narrative as being able to take place in a possible world.  That is, it steals the story from the text.  

<but both seemed to have first and foremost 
<in their minds the process of _telling a story_;

This depends on what you mean by telling a story, if we want to think of people sitting around a camp fire talking to each other, I'd still say the same thing.   I don't think Spenser cared very much about story in the Faerie Queene. I think Tolkien cared more about story than Lewis. But I think story is entangled with how much you *believe* in the construction, how much complexity you assign it. Allegory for me is the shallow  end of the spectrum when treating the narrative as a virtual world, and I think this is often very proportional to wanting to tell a story,  at least with very long stories and no parables or fables. To imagine that world is to a certain degree to believe in it as a possible world, no matter how improbable and whether it is realized or not, because that is how we attempt to reconstruct the *real* world from our sensory input, through imagination.  In this sense all known worlds are virtual worlds, and so I think Tolkien believes in Ea more than Lewis or Spenser. Spenser's allegory may be a collection of platonic forms in what he thought of as the real world but it is not a collection of what he thought of as people or natural processes.

<  ... well, not the question of "what it means to be a nonhuman
<person," but all the others

       I am talking about Tolkien and Wolfe more than the others.  Whether it's talking animals, androids, gods, or aliens they are still nonhuman persons.  It is impossible not to anthropromorphize them, though.  Tolkien in the Silmarillion wanted to write a narrative history of a nonhuman species, the elves, and then during the writing of the later Quenta S. despaired at being able to accomplish such a thing. Elves in many ways are very similar to human, but to say that they are human in another guise, is to accuse Tolkien of allegory, and Tolkien would say no elves are independent of humans, what I can't describe is not their fault but mine, the limits of my imagination. This is all in Morgoth's Ring.

I think Tolkien did think about the socio-political though not as much the economic situation in Middle-Earth during the Third Age in depth.  Back to the racial complaint, if you look at the military technology of Sauron's human soldiers, the Haradrim, Corsairs of Umbar, Southrons, and Easterlings they are very similar to Zulus, English privateers, Indians (of India), and Mongols.  With the exception of the pirates, South Africa, India, and China were all British colonies.  Sauron's chief servants are black Numenoreans, which represent Atlantis, the hypothetical mother culture of Indo-europe, just as the Quenya language was supposed to be to a certain degree an imaginary reconstruction of Indo-european.  Sauron is if we must make comparisions, industrialized, imperial, colonial Britain, where everyone is either a wage slave, an actual slave, or a bureaucratic and elite slave. In fact Sauron's most powerful servant and commanders, the Nazgul, are the greatest slaves.  Of course Tolkien believed in free will and not social determinism and so they are culpable (but so are the free peoples in their isolationism) people have been lied to, coerced, and enslaved by a stronger force.  Tolkien is not a luddite though, in several essays he distinguishes between two "magics" which also apply to culture and technology, Art and the Machine, and I don't know what else to call magic but benign technology which works with rather than against natural forms.  It seems information technology, nanotech, and genetics can create the extremes Tolkien is talking about.  The Lord of the Rings, though was written before all of these ideas, but it has a cybernetic feel to it. I believe Wolfe to a large degree bridges this gap. 

As for Mieville.  This is simplistic but lt's look at Perdido Street Station. Isaac is obviously Isaac Newton with his unified field theory to replace religious cosmology, at the beginning of the novel Isaac basically says religion is the opiate of the masses or rather the last bastion of the weak when talking to the water manipulating slug about his god, rationalism and science. His lover has a scarab's head, Lin?, and represents an interracial or intercultural forbidden relationship outisde of marriage of course.  The intellectuals, artists, and scientists are pitted against a fascist government masquerading under philanthropist venture capitalists and captains of industry who only want to develop certain technologies which will allow them to maintain control.  New Crobuzon is present day New York and 19th century London, I think it depends on the situation.  I do not know what the remade are, and every government makes terrible weapons, but maybe he thinks "real" socialists wouldn't.  I know he has a phd in socio-economics or something like that and wrote several papers on Marx. I haven't read any good articles discussing his work but I've read some articles he has written and one interview.  I haven't read The Scar yet, just a little bit of King Rat and PSS.  

I dont know if I want to read anymore of his work, not because of his ideology, but just how heterogenous and manic his style is of writing is.  I think he might be churning out books too quickly.  I am biased towards books that take longer to write, but I dont think that's always the case, but for instead.  Wolfe is an exception for me. So far Ive liked everything Ive read, and he is very prolific.  Some people can get away with it I guess. He is a very patient writer, and I like writing that is subtle and restrained and often leaves out the most dramatic bits.  That is a convention of romance, of obscuring the most important parts, because they are inexpressable.

EOT;
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