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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, May 31, 2006
It's apparently a rather old piece, but I've just stumbled across Pynchon's article 'Is It O.K. to Be a Luddite?', and its suggestion that science fiction is underpinned by a luddite impulse opposed to science and technology. Needless to add, as someone who thinks abandoning the quill pen in favour of the Gutenberg press was probably not a sensible idea, I was rather taken by it:"If there were such a genre as the Luddite novel, this one, warning of what can happen when technology, and those who practice it, get out of hand, would be the first and among the best... The craze for Gothic fiction after "The Castle of Otranto" was grounded, I suspect, in deep and religious yearnings for that earlier mythic time which had come to be known as the Age of Miracles. In ways more and less literal, folks in the 18th century believed that once upon a time all kinds of things had been possible which were no longer so. The laws of nature had not been so strictly formulated back then. What had once been true working magic had, by the Age of Reason, degenerated into mere machinery. Blake's dark Satanic mills represented an old magic that, like Satan, had fallen from grace. As religion was being more and more secularized into Deism and nonbelief, the abiding human hunger for evidence of God and afterlife, for salvation -- bodily resurrection, if possible -- remained. The Methodist movement and the American Great Awakening were only two sectors on a broad front of resistance to the Age of Reason, a front which included Radicalism and Freemasonry as well as Luddites and the Gothic novel... Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion."
Certainly, if we look at the utopian fictions of the nineteenth century, the role of technology and progress is uncertain. William Morris in News from Nowhere advocated a more decentralised, rural society that had left the cities behind. Morris had believed firmly in the dignity of craftmanship against mass production but nonetheless the novel pronounces that "All work which it would be irksome to do by hand is done by immensely improved machinery." Equally, novels like Gilman's Herland balance the notion that that society has fared better without industrialisation with the inhabitants curiousity about science. Erewhon's polemic about the threat of machine consciousness evolving is partly satirical and points to the backwardness of that society, but nonetheless remains a concept Butler seems to have cleaved to. Similarly, Wells delineates a socialist critique of science in The Time Machine (as opposed to the depiction of science in The Island of Dr. Moreau, which extends back to Frankenstein), suggesting that technology will concentrate power to the ruling Morlock class, while the otherwise utopian existence of the Eloi (one that recalls that of Erewhon or Herland) is characterised as a form of disenfranchisement. Utopia depends on access to the means of production (though equally a counter argument can be made resting on the resemblance of the Morlocks to working class laboureres; "even now, does not an East-end worker live in such artificial conditions as practically to be cut off from the natural surface of the earth?").
However, by the second half of the twentieth century, when Sartre had declared that it was no longer to adhere to the concept of scientific progress, matters become more difficult. Wells marked a turning point and from hereon it is the dystopian novel that has become the cornerstone of the more literary branches of science fiction. For example, Wyndham's novels were more unambiguous in depicting the results of genetic manipulation (Day of the Triffids) and nuclear warfare (The Chrysalids), though the latter is also forthright in depicting a new primitivism as forming the basis of a coercive and repressive society. JG Ballard's novels begin in the Wyndhamite vein, especially The Wind from Nowhere and The Drowned World (depicting a world where global warming has left London a flooded city that is as inhospitable as the Amazon). However, where Wyndham's protagnosts are all practical men of action who strive against their times, Ballard's are largely passive and come to embrace them as fulfilling a repressing instinct. Later, Rushing to Paradise comes to critique environmentalism as a form of pyschopathology, a resurgence of civilisation's discontents.
posted by Richard 7:57 pm
