Too Like the Lightning redux
Nov. 19th, 2018 01:47 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
jackFor the first time for, um, a very very long time I returned to a book I was interested in but didn't finish the first time.
And oh boy. This book is so *interesting*. The gender stuff, the prisoner stuff, the family-structure stuff, the political-group stuff, the utopian other worlds projects, the policing, the transport system. Even before mentioning the miracles-exist-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-that stuff. Almost everything that happened and everything about how the world was sparked another tangent of introspection.
But almost all of them also aggravated me into fits of ranting about them as well.
Being that interesting is clearly a good thing, I think it deserved the attention it got. But I am still aggravated about the things I'm upset about, some of which I think are a real problem with the book, others of which I think are moments of weakness that are not a big deal in theory but really rubbed me up the wrong way.
Having a protagonist who's a terrible person, on the plus side, gives my brain a good workout: you can't just accept what happens, you always have to be considering "is this accurate" and "is this ethical"? But on the bad side is unpleasant to read about and makes it a lot harder to understand aspects of the book you can't trust his description of.
It reminds me of Humbert Humbert from Lolita or Rick from Rick and Morty: it's interesting to understand someone who's a terrible person, but you bear responsibility for the fact that however horrible, readers may sympathise with them and treat them as role models :(
The prison system
There's this idea of convicts guilty of serious offences "serving time" by serving society. Indeed, wandering around in public, forbidden from holding jobs or possessions, surviving on charity, but doing odd jobs (or weirdly important jobs) for people.
The book is clearly not saying this is OK, it raises it as a thought provoking way of dealing with serious crime, but shows how dystopian it can be, so it's hard for me to say that it *shouldn't* have been part of the book.
But as I've grown up, I've got increasingly less patience with clever philosophical experiments about society. I've always *loved* thought experiments of all sorts, I think they often do serve very well to show what we think is important in various circumstances. But I also think, they often gloss over how much of ACTUAL real life problems are problems that depend on the specifics and logistics of the real world problems, and one clever abstract decision does almost nothing to actually help resolve them.
Like, I don't want *every* book to be a morality tale about the problems of contemporary society. That's a good thing, but it's not the *only* good thing. But if you wrote a book about how criminals are stripped of their civil rights and forced to work as slaves... you didn't think to compare that to the way that happens right now AT ALL?
That's a kind of striking omission, isn't it?
Or maybe it's me that's missing the point. Maybe it IS intended as a "this is wrong" polemic.
But if so, it seems strange that it omits the LARGEST question about the situation which the real-life parallel immediately raises. You've described the fate of criminals who (a) have committed crimes sufficiently horrible, mostly murder, that their sentence effectively lasts the rest of their life but (b) are sufficiently harmless they can wander around society without being significantly guarded.
Surely that's a TINY MINORITY of people who commit crimes. So what about everyone else? Are these the ONLY sorts of criminal in this society? If so, how come? Is everyone else humanely rehabilitated? Or not driven to crime because there's a universal good education system and minimum income? Or incarcerated somewhere unmentioned? Or what?
Like, if you took our society, and premeditated murderers were treated worse, but all other crimes everyone just never committed in the first place... that doesn't make it ok, but it probably means life is overwhelmingly better for almost everyone. Shouldn't that have been more prominently mentioned in this system? Or is the system just as bad as our one, but especially bad murderers have special less-humane punishments? That's what America does, and it's awful, but I think those disproportionate punishments don't exist in isolation, they're a part of how the system is inhumane to almost everyone subjected to it.
Was all this deliberately left out?
Or does just "throwing interesting ideas at the wall" lead to this sort of hole where you don't have room to follow through all the implications?
Apparently we have a normal-ish police force? And people committing casual street thuggery are almost inevitably caught immediately? But do it anyway? What?
Gender stuff
Similar questions arise with the gender stuff. The book postulates, as far as I can tell, a society where people are referred to with gender neutral words and pronouns, but people still have some similar tendencies and prejudices in what's likely to be true about people who would be AMAB or AFAB in our society.
This is massively obscured by the protagonist who observes that people are potentially being hypocritical about this, and responds by being incredibly gender-essentialist and judgemental about everything.
This did raise several interesting questions in my mind and as I struggled to put into words his attitude. Eventually I settled on, he has an unexamined belief/assumption that people divide into two boxes, one labelled male, one labelled female, that accord with various personality traits and body types. Which makes *no sense* because it's *not* how the world works, but obviously, he proceeds as if he's correct. For instance, he assigns people pronouns according to how he sees their personality, even though often finding an excuse to mention that he thinks they look like they have a different biological sex. But the fact that he has to do this all the fucking time doesn't clue him in to the idea that maybe his dichotomy doesn't actually work like that.
So, although that was *unpleasant*, it was also certainly *interesting*.
I think (?) that this is deliberately intended to show a society which has weird taboos which are a bit different to ours, to throw light on both our taboos, and the underlying concepts of gender.
But what it says that that's the society they ended up with seems to have a lot of unpleasant implications. Like, they've spent hundreds of years avoiding *saying* there are two binary genders, even if people think that. But my current best guess is that some people strongly identify with a gender and some people don't. If everyone is "they" I would expect a lot of people who today let themselves get sorted into a box corresponding to the sex people see them as, instead thinking of themselves as the equivalent of non-binary. And we *definitely* have plenty of people who don't fit into one of two binary categories personality-wise, even the protagonist admits as much.
But we don't seem to have a society where 40% of people don't really identify with a binary gender. The protagonist makes a big deal about not knowing the right binary box for *one* character. And how the more tabloid-ish sort of newspaper makes a big deal about wanting to know that celebrity's biological sex. That suggests he thinks he can tell in all *other* cases. If everyone dresses gender neutral and lots of people don't choose to grow breasts, I don't think that would be true. I mean, even if he doesn't AGREE, surely he would notice that in order to denounce it?
So where does that leave us? Is this deliberate? Are we supposed to assume the protagonist is lying to himself about this and actually there IS a big nonbinary majority and the protagonist just hides it from us? That would be consistent with the plot, but... if there's no indication that happens, if the book builds up no trust with the reader that the real situation reflects something different to what's shown, are we supposed to know that? Or is it disagreeing, is it saying that most societies DO stream people into binary identities, and that even after hundreds of years of avoiding that we will inevitably still have them just as strongly?
This isn't especially personal to me but I could barely read the book because of it, and writing a book partly about nonbinary gender politics without thinking about whether it would be hurtful to actual real life trans people seems like a really bad idea. But OTOH, I know trans people who had the opposite reaction, that they disliked reading "everything will be fine" futures and almost preferred reading about societies which were fucked up in different ways.
And the economics
So, everyone works a 20 hour week at most, with the exception of people with a strong vocation? We think? Although we only really deal with political leaders and senior scientists and engineers, and prisoners, we don't see anyone in a typical economic situation.
I gather that's supposed to be an actual 20 hour week, not a zero-hour-contract-you-can-barely-live-but-the-economic-figures-look-good week?
But also, everyone is really worried about their rents going up? And land/building ownership is concentrated in one particular political group?
How do these things go together? How many people are living in politics? Many? Few?
As I commented about the prison system, we have a lot of interesting concepts, but seem to miss the most important questions. We have a lot of worry about economics. But like, do most people have enough to eat and shelter and so on? Or not? If so, the system is working *quite well*, even with all the bad things going on. Or is this theoretical utopian work life actually only apply to a small proportion of people and most people, especially people who are discriminated against, get utterly screwed but aren't "counted" when estimating how much people need to work? I can't tell.
Sometimes not telling us stuff is interesting, letting us ponder the question, but when too many important things are left out, it undermines our connection to the world and characters.
And oh boy. This book is so *interesting*. The gender stuff, the prisoner stuff, the family-structure stuff, the political-group stuff, the utopian other worlds projects, the policing, the transport system. Even before mentioning the miracles-exist-what-are-you-going-to-do-about-that stuff. Almost everything that happened and everything about how the world was sparked another tangent of introspection.
But almost all of them also aggravated me into fits of ranting about them as well.
Being that interesting is clearly a good thing, I think it deserved the attention it got. But I am still aggravated about the things I'm upset about, some of which I think are a real problem with the book, others of which I think are moments of weakness that are not a big deal in theory but really rubbed me up the wrong way.
Having a protagonist who's a terrible person, on the plus side, gives my brain a good workout: you can't just accept what happens, you always have to be considering "is this accurate" and "is this ethical"? But on the bad side is unpleasant to read about and makes it a lot harder to understand aspects of the book you can't trust his description of.
It reminds me of Humbert Humbert from Lolita or Rick from Rick and Morty: it's interesting to understand someone who's a terrible person, but you bear responsibility for the fact that however horrible, readers may sympathise with them and treat them as role models :(
The prison system
There's this idea of convicts guilty of serious offences "serving time" by serving society. Indeed, wandering around in public, forbidden from holding jobs or possessions, surviving on charity, but doing odd jobs (or weirdly important jobs) for people.
The book is clearly not saying this is OK, it raises it as a thought provoking way of dealing with serious crime, but shows how dystopian it can be, so it's hard for me to say that it *shouldn't* have been part of the book.
But as I've grown up, I've got increasingly less patience with clever philosophical experiments about society. I've always *loved* thought experiments of all sorts, I think they often do serve very well to show what we think is important in various circumstances. But I also think, they often gloss over how much of ACTUAL real life problems are problems that depend on the specifics and logistics of the real world problems, and one clever abstract decision does almost nothing to actually help resolve them.
Like, I don't want *every* book to be a morality tale about the problems of contemporary society. That's a good thing, but it's not the *only* good thing. But if you wrote a book about how criminals are stripped of their civil rights and forced to work as slaves... you didn't think to compare that to the way that happens right now AT ALL?
That's a kind of striking omission, isn't it?
Or maybe it's me that's missing the point. Maybe it IS intended as a "this is wrong" polemic.
But if so, it seems strange that it omits the LARGEST question about the situation which the real-life parallel immediately raises. You've described the fate of criminals who (a) have committed crimes sufficiently horrible, mostly murder, that their sentence effectively lasts the rest of their life but (b) are sufficiently harmless they can wander around society without being significantly guarded.
Surely that's a TINY MINORITY of people who commit crimes. So what about everyone else? Are these the ONLY sorts of criminal in this society? If so, how come? Is everyone else humanely rehabilitated? Or not driven to crime because there's a universal good education system and minimum income? Or incarcerated somewhere unmentioned? Or what?
Like, if you took our society, and premeditated murderers were treated worse, but all other crimes everyone just never committed in the first place... that doesn't make it ok, but it probably means life is overwhelmingly better for almost everyone. Shouldn't that have been more prominently mentioned in this system? Or is the system just as bad as our one, but especially bad murderers have special less-humane punishments? That's what America does, and it's awful, but I think those disproportionate punishments don't exist in isolation, they're a part of how the system is inhumane to almost everyone subjected to it.
Was all this deliberately left out?
Or does just "throwing interesting ideas at the wall" lead to this sort of hole where you don't have room to follow through all the implications?
Apparently we have a normal-ish police force? And people committing casual street thuggery are almost inevitably caught immediately? But do it anyway? What?
Gender stuff
Similar questions arise with the gender stuff. The book postulates, as far as I can tell, a society where people are referred to with gender neutral words and pronouns, but people still have some similar tendencies and prejudices in what's likely to be true about people who would be AMAB or AFAB in our society.
This is massively obscured by the protagonist who observes that people are potentially being hypocritical about this, and responds by being incredibly gender-essentialist and judgemental about everything.
This did raise several interesting questions in my mind and as I struggled to put into words his attitude. Eventually I settled on, he has an unexamined belief/assumption that people divide into two boxes, one labelled male, one labelled female, that accord with various personality traits and body types. Which makes *no sense* because it's *not* how the world works, but obviously, he proceeds as if he's correct. For instance, he assigns people pronouns according to how he sees their personality, even though often finding an excuse to mention that he thinks they look like they have a different biological sex. But the fact that he has to do this all the fucking time doesn't clue him in to the idea that maybe his dichotomy doesn't actually work like that.
So, although that was *unpleasant*, it was also certainly *interesting*.
I think (?) that this is deliberately intended to show a society which has weird taboos which are a bit different to ours, to throw light on both our taboos, and the underlying concepts of gender.
But what it says that that's the society they ended up with seems to have a lot of unpleasant implications. Like, they've spent hundreds of years avoiding *saying* there are two binary genders, even if people think that. But my current best guess is that some people strongly identify with a gender and some people don't. If everyone is "they" I would expect a lot of people who today let themselves get sorted into a box corresponding to the sex people see them as, instead thinking of themselves as the equivalent of non-binary. And we *definitely* have plenty of people who don't fit into one of two binary categories personality-wise, even the protagonist admits as much.
But we don't seem to have a society where 40% of people don't really identify with a binary gender. The protagonist makes a big deal about not knowing the right binary box for *one* character. And how the more tabloid-ish sort of newspaper makes a big deal about wanting to know that celebrity's biological sex. That suggests he thinks he can tell in all *other* cases. If everyone dresses gender neutral and lots of people don't choose to grow breasts, I don't think that would be true. I mean, even if he doesn't AGREE, surely he would notice that in order to denounce it?
So where does that leave us? Is this deliberate? Are we supposed to assume the protagonist is lying to himself about this and actually there IS a big nonbinary majority and the protagonist just hides it from us? That would be consistent with the plot, but... if there's no indication that happens, if the book builds up no trust with the reader that the real situation reflects something different to what's shown, are we supposed to know that? Or is it disagreeing, is it saying that most societies DO stream people into binary identities, and that even after hundreds of years of avoiding that we will inevitably still have them just as strongly?
This isn't especially personal to me but I could barely read the book because of it, and writing a book partly about nonbinary gender politics without thinking about whether it would be hurtful to actual real life trans people seems like a really bad idea. But OTOH, I know trans people who had the opposite reaction, that they disliked reading "everything will be fine" futures and almost preferred reading about societies which were fucked up in different ways.
And the economics
So, everyone works a 20 hour week at most, with the exception of people with a strong vocation? We think? Although we only really deal with political leaders and senior scientists and engineers, and prisoners, we don't see anyone in a typical economic situation.
I gather that's supposed to be an actual 20 hour week, not a zero-hour-contract-you-can-barely-live-but-the-economic-figures-look-good week?
But also, everyone is really worried about their rents going up? And land/building ownership is concentrated in one particular political group?
How do these things go together? How many people are living in politics? Many? Few?
As I commented about the prison system, we have a lot of interesting concepts, but seem to miss the most important questions. We have a lot of worry about economics. But like, do most people have enough to eat and shelter and so on? Or not? If so, the system is working *quite well*, even with all the bad things going on. Or is this theoretical utopian work life actually only apply to a small proportion of people and most people, especially people who are discriminated against, get utterly screwed but aren't "counted" when estimating how much people need to work? I can't tell.
Sometimes not telling us stuff is interesting, letting us ponder the question, but when too many important things are left out, it undermines our connection to the world and characters.
no subject
Date: 2018-11-20 04:25 pm (UTC)