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[glasere_rev]

Last night, I started writing another response in a short conversation I’ve been having with belledezuylen about Canticle for Liebowitz in quirkychipmunk’s comment section, but soon my thinking wandered off and seemed rather too much to put in such a comment, so I’m posting it my journal instead. This quite long and mostly just thinking, so if that

Comments

[belledezuylen]

This is a brilliant post, and I have so much to say in response that I may end up posting an entry of my own. I agree that we are primarily historical animals, but that some instinct makes us maddeningly ahistorical at times--we learn lessons, but fail to live by them; we forget how to mourn. Hume proves, almost incontrovertibly, that nothing can possibly exist, but ends his discussion with a caveat: despite the nebulous nature of the world around us, he writes, we have some emotional or intellectual limitation that forces us to live as if the world really did exist, to develop a deliberate blindness to the real nature of things. In the same way, perhaps, those in power are genuinely incapable of learning from their mistakes, and the public at large would rather push forward than mourn what is gone.

And here, I think, is one of the great ironies of science-fiction and other futuristic writing. Many such novelists create societies that have, for better or worse, arisen from our own actions today. But these societies strike readers as impossibly farfetched, because we have lost the ability, I think, to recognize satire or, for that matter, criticism more oblique than the anti-Bushisms of documentaries: there is no longer any room for creative hyperbole. If an imagined world does not correspond exactly to reality, we dismiss it as entirely fanciful. For this reason, much science fiction (I use the term loosely, given my near-total ignorance of the genre) comes into existence as social criticism, but gets read as "escapist" literature by the very society it's trying to reform.

Anyway. This is not a fully formed response by any means, but simply my first reaction to your post. Thank you.

[glasere_rev]

I really want to respond properly and have this conversation. I've got to go get e_4 now and I might not be online properly till I'm home and he's back at work (about four days) but I'm not disappearing because I don't want to talk--because I do.