BG4 : The Life-Cycle of a Trope

Futurismic has just posted my fourth Blasphemous Geometries column : The Life-cycle of a Trope - Science Fiction's Tragedy of the Commons?

Some bright sparks may be tempted to see in the book's final paragraphs a dig at John Scalzi following our recent contretemps but I actually wrote the piece before that discussion really kicked off so the timing is simply a coincidence.

The column was great fun to write though.  I came up with the idea a couple of weeks ago and originally it was intended to be about the whole undead, old tropes home sub-genres but once I hit upon the idea of tropes as common land the article kind of re-wrote itself.

Comments

[John Scalzi]

I don't see it as a dig, and you're not wrong -- ye shall know a sub-genre by the ruts it has dug, and your tolerance for it will depend on personal inclinations, which is why I like MilSF but get bored with vampires, for example. And inasmuch as I've warned people that trying to map contemporary politics (or my personal politics) to the political universe of the OMW series is filled with folly, I certainly can't complain when someone accuses it (or the genre) of being "politically naive," at least in the context of the real world. What you do hope for is that the author develops some political sophistication in the context of the universe he/she has created, if he/she is allowed space and extra books to do so. I think you see that in some of the more popular MilSF series (I think Elizabeth Moon's Vatta series is a good example here).

[Jonathan M]

I think that reading your politics into OMW is a legitimate interpretation but that's less to do with the text of OMW and more to do with the death of the author and the role of the critic.

However, I recently read something (and I wish I could remember where) that argued that reading contemporary politics into every little thing is actually an incredibly facile form of criticism. So when people read 9/11 into Cloverfield or The Iraq War into There Will Be Blood they're engaging in really lazy criticism because if you take one complex event (like 9/11 or the war in Iraq) and you compare it to a complex text (OMW, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men) then you're bound to find some stuff in common. It's like astrology or the bible code.

I agree with your point about political sophistication. For example, it's easy to just file the numbers of Horatio Hornblower or Tora Tora Tora and write about those kinds of settings in space. The true art is to find interesting sophisticated things to say about both of those periods and have it reflected in the politics of the books.

Not all historical fiction has to be about now and the same can be said of quasi-historical SF.

Thanks for dropping by John :-)

[John Scalzi]

"However, I recently read something (and I wish I could remember where) that argued that reading contemporary politics into every little thing is actually an incredibly facile form of criticism. So when people read 9/11 into Cloverfield or The Iraq War into There Will Be Blood they're engaging in really lazy criticism because if you take one complex event (like 9/11 or the war in Iraq) and you compare it to a complex text (OMW, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men) then you're bound to find some stuff in common."

Yes, a lot will be predicated on your desire to see something there. I know at least one reviewer declared that OMW could have only been written after 9/11, which amused me because the book was 95% written before 9/11, and the only thing written afterward was the last chapter, which sort of ties everything up in the book. The event had nothing to do with the book, but the event certainly colored the reader's approach to the text, and s/he found something there resonating on that frequency.

I do think the reader's context can matter significantly. I recently read Forever War for the first time because I was asked to write an introduction for an upcoming edition, and I suspect that reading it now, when the US is at war, has made it a substantially different experience than if I had read it in the 80s or 90s, when we were largely not. Trying to do something like a 1 to 1 map to events can indeed be lazy or trying to borrow significance, but recognizing that events on the ground have made a text more resonant in context can be a useful observation.

[Max Cairnduff]

I understand that Haldeman couldn't at first get Forever War published, as it was too obviously about Vietnam and many publishers thought that a weakness.

Put another way, sometimes a book is about something fairly specific, Forever War is about the experience of returning from a war to find that nobody supports what you were doing and society has changed since you left to the point where you barely recognise it any more. It's about coming home from Vietnam.

I've not seen Cloverfield, but my impression was it probably was about one fairly simple thing such as 9/11 (well, to the extent it was about anything other than a big monster smashing up Manhattan, sometimes a cigar is just a cigar). There Will be Blood however is a film of Upton Sinclair's novel Oil which was written in 1927. If he wrote 9/11 themes into it he was cleverer than he has been given credit.

Reading contemporary political issues into every work is indeed facile, but some works nonetheless do in fact intentionally address precisely such issues. The trick is identifying when they are really there, and when we are simply reading them in.

By the way, Books Etc in Moorgate clearly contains some John Scalzi fans, his novels are constantly in the "our staff recommends" section.

[Jonathan M]

The writer's intention only ever produces one interpretation though. There are different ways to read pretty much everything (just look at Ender's Game or Starship Troopers).

Obviously it is possible to write about specific things and time periods and it would be possible, I suspect, to write a work of MilSF about the War in Iraq but it would have to put quite a different spin on the existing tropes. For example, ethnic and cultural wars in the aftermath of domination by a greater power and the need for that power to then serve as some kind of peacemaker is not something that pops up that often in MilSF and I suppose that's because it's a political situation that really cannot be solved by good military virtues such as being tough and resourceful and tactically astute.

I don't think Cloverfield is about 9/11. I don't think it's intended to be about anything other than a monster smashing up Manhattan. What it does do though, is steal unapologetically from the iconography of 9/11 including the bit with people hiding in shops from dust clouds.

[Max Cairnduff]

"just look at Ender's Game"

Must I? Once was enough.