There’s no doubt that one of life’s pleasure’s is abuse, both dishing it out oneself and seeing it dished out by others. And here, and again in the comments attached to that posting, some excellent abuse is dished out, to one Thomas Disch, and to a chap who defends Disch. Disch has apparently just committed suicide. He was not so much a science fiction writer as an anti-science fiction writer. He wrote the kind of “science fiction” that was intended to put the world right off the real thing. Good riddance, says whoever it was who wrote the posting.
Jeff Read defends Disch thus:
Most literature is about people. That’s a topic that the Asperger’s-afflicted bulk of the hard SF audience has great difficulty with. And I don’t think you can truly write about people, especially modern people, without a certain anguish that comes from grasping or glimpsing the terror of the situation.
And with more in a similar vein. Eric S. Raymond (“esr”) responds with, among other bon mots, these ones:
This is the kind of self-indulgent, self-pitying crap I expect from English Lit majors in the throes of an excessively prolonged adolescence. The “especially modern people” is particularly silly, considering the conditions of pain, oppression, disease, and early death that almost all premodern humans endured. Aesthetes in air-conditioned rooms who’ve never had to worry about where their next meal is coming from have no fucking business talking about “the terror of the situation”.
The subject of “peak oil” then comes up. This catastrophe has arrived, says Read, “right on schedule”. Replies Raymond:
Another myth. M. King Hubbert originally predicted that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. Later “Peak Oil” models pushed back the date at least four times as it unaccountably failed to materialize.
In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on. Given the rate at which entrepreneurs are making progress on synfuel from photosynthetic algae, I’m not at all worried. The remaining problems are just engineering.
As for copper and platinum – they’re not destroyed by use, you know. We can mine landfills and junkyards for them; in fact that’s better quality “ore” than we could find when we had to pull them out of nature. And when those run out, asteroid mining.
Which is all as maybe, but I particularly like this:
The trouble with doomsaying is that it leads to perversely bad prescriptions. We don’t need to slow down capitalism, we need to speed it up so it can innovate our way out of resource traps more quickly.
Had I been in a hurry, I could have just slapped that up as a SQOTD.
Read then alludes to some arguments against Raymondism, here. So, Raymond, did you read them?
I did. They’re staggeringly dumb, in large part because they assume that the problems they’re describing are things that government action can actually fix reliably. Reality would be better described as follows: there is no form of market failure so egregious that political failure can’t make it worse, and such failure is the normal outcome of politics.
In among that there’s another potential SQOTD, I think.
There are intelligent arguments against libertarianism, …
And so it goes on. I’ve lost the taste for this kind of argy-bargy-ing myself. But it still pleases me to see it being done. Later Raymond links to his essay entitled A Political History of SF, which I intend to read Real Soon Now. I also intend to add, Even Sooner, Eric Raymond’s Home Page to my personal sidebar, here. It should have been there years ago.
Don’t feel too bad, he stopped blogging for almost exactly 2 years for only-vaguely-hinted-at reasons. He only started up again last month.
I’m glad he’s back.
In any case, the relevant economic issue is not when oil peaks but if and when when oil and its functional substititutes become too expensive to run an industrial civilization on.
There is more oil in Canadian tar sands than there is in the Middle East. These were never economic before, but the rise of the oil price in the last few years has meant that they are now economic. Which means that the oil reserves that can be extracted given the current oil price has at least doubled in the last three or four years.
This is of course exactly what you would expect. Rising prices increases supply. For the last few decades, the Middle East and particular Saudi Arabia has controlled most of the marginal supply of oil at the then current price, which has meant that they set the price and this has given them huge power. They no longer set the price and therefore, although they are making a lot of money at the present price, their power is less, and this is unequivocally good.
The modern global economy can run just fine on a $130 oil price. My suspicion is that the price will come down a bit when more of the new supply that is being brought online comes on line, but I suspect that a price of $100 or so is here to stay. However, oil is not going to “run out” in the remotely foreseeable future.
All this is far less important that the point Raymond makes, which is that there are lots of ultimately cleaner and better energy sources that are going to come on line at some point. Sheik Yamani, an OPEC oil minister, once said that “The oil age will come to an end, but not for lack of oil, just like the Stone Age came to an end, but not for lack of stone.”. The more I learn about the subject, the less simplistic this remark seems, in truth.
Ah, I think I understand. I didn’t realise that Armed and Dangerous is the blog of Raymond himself, but having gone from his main website to his blog, and reached Armed and Dangerous, my penny has now dropped. That explains why he was commenting so vigorously. At the blog, there is no mention of who writes the posts. I found the blog, and liked it, without knowing who wrote it. Ah well.
Actually, the best science fiction DOES concern itself with people. Peter Hamilton is one of my favourites. The science seems solid, and the people are still people. I also like the Australian Author Sean McMullen, for the same reasons.
This is slightly off-topic, but does relate-
Someone used the name Jackbooted Thug from the SEC on a vonmises site, and I just realised- Big Brother has a name! Jack Boot! If you wanted to disguise your intentions from T. Government, you might want to refer to Mr. Boot, J. Boot. (James Bond’s nastier fellow government employee.)
And that reminds me- Israel is not the only thing that is 60, so is “1984”. Happy 60th!
Oh, I like the name “Jack Boot.” Sounds like a perfect name for some grim and gritty post-Watchmen superhero, probably written by Warren Ellis or Grant Morrison. May I borrow it for rpg use? I’m just starting up a supers campaign where it would fit right in (this is a campaign where the world’s sixty most powerful supers are recognized in international law as nonterritorial sovereign states).
As to science fiction being about people, that has been true for a long, long time. I have the Naval Institute Press edition of “20,000 Leagues under the Sea,” and in edition to gadget fiction, it has a moving story about the friendship between Nemo and Arronax and its ultimate failure. Kipling’s classic “As Easy as A.B.C.” gives us an airship-based future with detailed technology, but also vividly portrayed human beings dealing with a political crisis—the threat that someone will bring back the horrifying ancient custom of democracy, complete with lynchings (one of the story’s most memorable lines is the warning, “your Crowd that can do no wrong will kill you”). Isaac Asimov was almost a prototypical Astounding writer with a flat prose style and limited emotional compass, but he gave us such characters as the Jewish tailor fallen through a hole in time onto a radioactive future Earth, and the unattractive nurse coming to love a Neanderthal child she’s hired to care for, not to mention the friendship between Lije Bailey and R. Daneel Olivaw. Not being able to see that these are human beings reflects more on the critic or the general reader than on the writer.
I do like Eric Raymond. Having originally visited his site for his open source software advocacy, I then found his political stuff. He is responsible for my “ah, so I’m a libertarian” moment, and his was the first blog I ever read (blogs were new back then). He’s also a vehement anarcho-capitalist, which probably explains my leanings in that direction.
PS — His essay Ethics from the Barrel of a Gun is excellent.
I like Raymond’s curt dismissal of Philip K. Dick, whom he regards as seriously over-rated. Yup.
So it’s anonymous, is it?
Big Brother’s real name is Mr. Boot, Jack Boot. His licence to intimidate is numbered 666, of course. The rest is still unsettled.
William H.Stoddard-
No Worries! Perhaps you could even have the Super claim that he is only living up to his name, after all! We’re all victims in some form. All you need is to find the right excuse, SORRY, I meant, find how you’re being victimised by ‘society’, and demand compensation. As was said in a Spiderman movie, “Why doesn’t he get rich the American way, by finding someone to sue?”
A nanny-state liberal friend of mine tossed the “peak oil” argument into a conversation about drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge recently. Until that moment M. King Hubbert was just a distant memory from early college days. The then conventional wisdom was that “this time it would be right now that he had the model calibrated. The companion was the debate between the two academics about pending shortages of precious metals. The more things change, the more they remain the same.
This is what I posted at the “Armed and Dangerous” blog’s disgusting gloating over the death of Thomas Disch. The author of that post also threatens some sort of expose of Philip K. Dick. I wish nekulturny engineering types would stick to their Asimov and withhold comment on their betters.:
“Well, this kind of illiterate, arrogant know-nothingism is why I gave up on sci-fi and started reading real literature. It is certainly significant that both you and your opposite numbers over at the “feminist sf” blog agree – sf is only worthwhile if it advances some kind of agenda or is educational. In other words, agitprop. Libertarian realism, to coin a phrase.
As for poor Phil, none of you are worthy to say anything about him. Yes, he was a drug addict. Please tell me how that makes him worse than all the alcoholic “hard sf”writers I used to see at SF conventions, stumbling around the hallways.”