urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 5, Issue 16

urth-urth.net-request at lists.urth.net11 Jan 2005

missing from the archive

The list delivered this and never kept it. What survives is what the reply below quoted of it.

I didn't think they were clumsily inserted. I think they were jarring because the plurality of SciFi writers are politically liberal. Thus, placing favorable views to gun-ownership and supply-side economics in the mouth of a very simpathic and (presented as) wise character might have caught you unaware if you did not previously know of Wolfe's conservative politics. ~ Crush

Jeffrey Lefstin11 Jan 2005, 14:03as archived

urth-urth.net Digest, Vol 5, Issue 16

↰ answers James Wynn · by quotation

I can't say I agree - I would have found it just as jarring if Silk had started spouting off about women's rights to control reproduction, or how the government of Viron should provide for the poor or rein in the merchant class. Unless the story is a political allegory (and maybe not even then) dropping blatantly late-20th-century political debates into such a novel does little to improve it. JL

7 quoted lines · 1–2 deep

On Jan 11, 2005, at 12:09 PM, urth-urth.net-request at lists.urth.net wrote:

I wouldn't go so far as to endorse this point of view whole-heartedly, but I was struck by how jarring the paeans to supply-side economics and universal gun ownership were in Exodus from the Long Sun. At the time they seemed so clumsily inserted that I wasn't sure if they were satire or GW's views.... Now I assume the latter?

I didn't think they were clumsily inserted. I think they were jarring because the plurality of SciFi writers are politically liberal. Thus, placing favorable views to gun-ownership and supply-side economics in the mouth of a very simpathic and (presented as) wise character might have caught you unaware if you did not previously know of Wolfe's conservative politics. ~ Crush

James Wynn11 Jan 2005, 15:01as archived

↳ in reply to Jeffrey Lefstin

1 quoted line

I can't say I agree - I would have found it just as jarring if Silk had started spouting off about women's rights to control reproduction, or how the government of Viron should provide for the poor or rein in the merchant class. Unless the story is a political allegory (and maybe not even then) dropping blatantly late-20th-century political debates into such a novel does little to improve it.

Well, I'm more forgiving of this sort of thing. Characters are people and people have political opinions. It would be difficult to avoid touching any current political controversy if a writer wanted to and I can't imagine why one would try. I might not agree with the political and social POV of Atwood, Tiptree, or Morcock, but, well, they have each have one and that's what you get. In "Exodus", the political discussion wasn't thrown in willy-nilly. Silk is responsible for reforming society in a just manner. He does so in a manner that the author thinks is just. What else could happen? (Note that his decision on disarming Viron runs parallel to the choices the Coalition made in Iraq what with letting each household keep and AK-47 <wincing as I anticipate the OT flames>) Wolfe can be subtle too. I wonder if you even noticed that government of Dorp that the Narrator overthrows in "Return To The Whorl" is a tyranny of the Judiciary that he accuses if taking "advantage of [the people's] good qualities, and so the judges had to go; if I had not removed them, the people themselves in few years". If that isn't an intentional contemporary conservative political prophecy for America, then I don't know what is. ~ Crush