Oh my God! Jeanette Winterson has written a science fiction novel, The Stone Gods, as a speculation. Nor has she taken the marketing escape of disguising her presence by the addition of the cunning initial. There she is, in plain sight, unadorned, investing the enterprise with the gravitas of her literary reputation. As Ursula K Le Guin remarks, Winterson commits genre.
The story appears to involve a parable of our own world, allowing Winterson to derive her own dystopia from Orwell’s tradition of extrapolation. Unleavened by reality or experience, the future is a hell of advertising and reality television. Did she read Pohl and Kornbluth? Whilst Winterson’s themes of abandoned childhood and the nature of adoption inform much of her fiction, this departure allows us to see how literati react to the symbols of ecological disaster and despair.
The banal title invokes the destruction of Easter Island as symbol for the future of this Island Earth. What limits the visions of the future that mainstream writers depict as a simplistic outlier. The acceptable vision of the future is the resource crisis, the one that swamps our media daily, and forms the backdrop of Winterson’s love story.
The choice of future does not negate the quality of the story, and Winterson serves up a provocative narrative. Yet, does her painted future display a certain narrowness. The degrading and deserving darkness that many prophecy as the outcome of the civilisation they revile is easier to write than the complex and enriched society that few foretell and fewer understand.
I must say this sounds like cutting edge material – I don’t think any writer has tackled these themes before, or in such an original way.
Owell, Dick, and Walter M Miller Jr (to name a few) would be gasping in admiration.
Another must-read blockbuster from this incisive writer.
The underlying Easter Island narrative may be incorrect.(Link)
I’ve just finished reading Ben Elton’s Blind Faith. What a load of crud, I’ll never get those hours back again. The theme would be of interest to libertarians but the book is poorly and simplistically premised and written, not what I’d have expected from Ben Elton (I enjoyed The First Casualty), which suggests to me that writing dystopial fiction is not the same as writing more conventional fiction.
Anything with a commendation from Ursula Le Guin has to be pretty good. Yet another book for the ever growing ‘must read’ pile.
I’m generally a bit sceptical of literary writers delving into genre, because they don’t tend to have the experience and appreciation of the genre and what has gone before in it. I think they tend to feel that as a Great Writer they can bring something new to it, whereas what they come out with is often rather dull because, lacking involvement with the genre, they don’t know the cliches and thus stumble into them. I’m thinking Dennis Potter’s attempt to write sci-fi at the end of his life here, for example.
As to Eater Island, the whole ecocide business is just to conveniently right-on and the whole thing seems a bit done to death. Nowadays we automatically seek environmental and resource depletion explanations for collapses of civilisations. It’s very much the in-thing.
Me, if I were asked for a one-size-fits-all explanation for collapses, I’d say that civilisations seem to naturally wax and then wane. People who’ve read my Eyore posts here know that I’m a doomsayer who thinks our time may be coming to an end. We’re not there yet, but i can’t help but suspect we’re now on the inevitable trajectory to oblivion, as a civilisation. Not because we burned too much coal or didn’t recycle our plastic bags or ate too much food or had too many babies, but because successful societies inevitably present themselves for plunder by ruling elites whose extension of parasitism on the population, and inevitable insane ideas for running things, eventually lead to ruin. As such I would say “civilisations are destroyed by their oligarchies”.
In our case, we’re the first global civilisation. Over the coming decades nations will gradually fade away as rule by the transnational/supranational oligarchy intensifies; the oligarchy in turn will impose ever more ludicrous and harmful policies and ever more burdensome regulations, laws and taxes, until our civilisation’s productve capacity and social structures are unable to sustain themselves, at which point the whole thing will topple over. Things right now seem awful, but they’re nowhere near as bad as they’re going to get. IMHO of course 🙂
I pretty much agree with Ian B’s take on both mainstream fiction writers dipping their toes into SF and the coming collapse of western civilization. These writers simply aren’t familiar enough with the canon to be truly original. Not exactly SF, but I have that same opinion of Stephen King: a very good writer, but I find his “horror” works derivative. Read Lovecraft for the real thing. About the best you can say for these writers is that they expose a wider audience, people who wouldn’t ordinarily read it, to the genre.
Oh, and Ian, if in your mention of your “Eyore posts” you are referring to the A. A. Milne character, the correct spelling is “Eeyore” with two “ee”s. (The Masked Pedant strikes again!)
Ian B, I’m very much of the “Fiddling while Rome burns” and “Counting the angels that can fit on a pinhead” school of civilizational collapse.
I regard our rulers penchant fo massive over-regulation and especially the ‘Green’ obssesion as our own civ’s equivalent.
Add in the ennui of the middle classes and it’s bye-bye Western Civilization, hello barbarians.
As for sf, I’ve been through the dystopia phase and gone back to the “Stars at War” stories that I loved in my youth, and frankly, ‘serious’ writers can’t do that for toffee.
“I have that same opinion of Stephen King: a very good writer, but I find his “horror” works derivative”
Seriously?…
Eeyore. Noted 🙂
Of course.
Laird – you are apparently forgetting that the old aphorism was originally writted as “The Pedants Are Revolting !” …
And it seems that either Philip Chaston did not have English as his first language, or he was poorly educated in the subject (or possibly both) …
“The degrading and deserving darkness that many prophecy as the outcome …”
The NOUN is “prophecy” – the VERB is “prophesy” …
Such atrocities upon the English language can lead to the pulling of one’s “poetic licence” …
For the Uh’murricans amongst us, the general rule in such situations is that the noun is spelled with the C and the verb is spelled with the S … thus, you are licenSed to drive a care when you gain your driver’s licenCe … or, a doctor’s skills are practiSed within that doctor’s practiCe … (this section is brought to you by the letters C and S and by the number 1) …
Ummmm … yes … well … right … ummmm …
I *meant* to leave those two typos in my correctional response …
(blush)
(I could probably type fast and explain away “writted” … “drive a care”, however, would be stretching beyond the snapping point) … (sigh) …
Typoes notwithstanding, I did enjoy your “old aphorism”, Alasdair!
One point of clarification, though: in your aphorism, is “revolting” used as a verb or an adjective?
is “revolting” used as a verb or an adjective?
I would have thought that this question is the point of the pun.
Laird
“One point of clarification, though: in your aphorism, is “revolting” used as a verb or an adjective?”
The answer to your question is “Yes.”
To be more grammatically correct, however, your question would have had to be “One point of clarification, though: in your aphorism, is “revolting” used as a
verbgerund or an adjective?” … and then my answer becomes “No. It is used as a gerund or an adjective.”Would you like some privacy?:-)