[Paracelsus]

(05-22-2016 12:39 PM)XPQ22 Wrote:  

Didn't realize there was a specific thread for this sort of thing. I'll cetainly check that out.

It's a fantasy novel. Some of the concepts listed by ThoughtGypsy have a kernel of truth, but at the end of the day Orwell's imaginary world, to my mind, has as much connection to reality as Middle Earth.

The purpose wasn't to demolish Orwell's philosophy, whatever it may be, by way of ad-hominems. He may be right about everything he predicts, who can say. Tolkien never lived in Middle Earth. So why write a series of novels about Elves and wizards? Because Tolkien was a linguist, and Middle Earth was his vehicle for expressing the linguistic concepts he wished to express, and also likely a Christian parable (though not as heavy handed as his contemporary CS Lewis.) Orwell never lived in Eurasia. So what is that novel the vehicle for? What place does it come from? Every work of art comes from somewhere.

My point is that I feel it comes out of a place of basically narcissistic anger, not genuine concern. And that gives me an uncomfortable feeling about the legitimacy of the message - because that's precisely where many of the political philosophies of the extreme left and right come from.

Someone who had actually lived under a police state would never have written a novel like that. Like Clancy's work, it's a good yarn, but on this forum it often seems that on the ground experience is considered more valuable than armchair philosophizing. Not sure why Orwell gets a pass.

I saw some books by Clancy in the supermarket, stocked next to a bunch of cheesy chick lit novels. It's an appropriate place for them, as they're essentially the same genre.

Maybe I'm already a thought criminal by not liking it. Ooh, so meta.

Wrong genre. 1984 is not a fantasy novel. It is, specifically, a dystopian work. Per Wikipedia, dystopia, derived as an opposite or contrast to the Greek utopia, is defined as an alternate society characterized by a focus on that which is contrary to the author's ethos, portraying it as mass poverty, public mistrust and suspicion, police state, and/or oppression. Most authors of dystopian fiction explore at least one reason why things are that way, often as an analogy for similar issues in the real world. In the words of Keith M. Booker, dystopian literature is used to "provide fresh perspectives on problematic social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted or considered natural and inevitable."

As to why authors -- and there are many, over 400 novels in the 19th century and over 1,000 in the 20th -- choose to write dystopian fiction, one of Dan Simmons' articles describes the urge:

http://www.dansimmons.com/news/message/2011_06.htm

Quote:

I believe that almost every writer has at least one dystopian novel in him or her that's clawing and scratching to get out. Flashback, released on July 1 of 2011, has successfully clawed itself into existence. It will be my one and only dystopian novel. I think it will be a worthwhile and perhaps even memorable reading experience for anyone willing to take the ride.

Why Write Dystopian Novels?

In a 1969 interview, Kurt Vonnegut said -- " I sometimes wondered what the use of any of the arts was. The best thing I could come up with was what I call the canary in the coal mine theory of the arts. This theory says that artists are useful to society because they are so sensitive. They are super-sensitive. They keel over like canaries in poison coal mines long before more robust types realize that there is any danger whatsoever."

For anyone who doesn't quite get the canary in the coal mine analogy, here's a linked explanation -- "The classic example of animals serving as sentinels is the canary in the coal mine. Well into the 20th century, coal miners in the United Kingdom and the United States brought canaries into coal mines as an early-warning signal for toxic gases including methane and carbon monoxide. The birds, being more sensitive, would become sick before the miners, who would then have a chance to escape or put on protective respirators."

Well, to be honest, most of those birds didn't "become sick"; they fell off their perch and went belly up and stone dead. The canaries had ceased to be. The canaries had gone to meet their maker. They were ex-canaries..

So those of us who write dystopian novels do so because we're weaker than the "more robust types" who can carry on with business as usual (even making profits and joining the Führer's favorite country club) through the increasing noxious gases of fascism or communism or limitless capitalism or attacks on our language or attacks on our intelligence and our deepest sense of reality and morality. This particular Vonnegutian super-sensitive canary in its cage on a long pole explores -- in the novel Flashback -- the possibility that the United States of America, if it continues accruing debt without rethinking its spending and social welfare programs, could implode in sudden and total bankruptcy, losing not only its position in the world but its own sense of self for hundreds of millions of its citizens.

In Flashback, this canary also imagines a cheap and available drug called flashback; a drug that allows hundreds of millions of Americans to find an escape hatch from life in such a damned and dismal future simply by reliving the good parts of their former lives. Over and over. And over. Twenty puny newbucks buys twenty perfect memories. And not just mere memories -- a full-sensory reliving of those minutes and hours and days we'd once thought lost forever.

So -- like Sir Thomas More, George Orwell, Kurt Vonnegut, Aldous Huxley, Anthony Burgess, and literally hundreds of other authors ---

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dystopian_novels

--- I confess that I have a canary-in-the-mineshaft weakness to certain noxious gases in the air these days. Each canary, it seems, falls off his or her perch and goes belly up in the cage at different times, in different parts of the mine, reacting to different -- but perhaps equally noxious -- gases.

Flashback is where I topple off my perch and go belly up with the best of them.

What Do the Best Dystopian Novels Give Us?

The language of these "noxious gases" speaks to us across the decades: Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, and Memory hole all set off alarm bells -- even for those pre- or post-literates who never read the book 1984.

In the 1980's, state legislators in Midwestern tornado-alley states pondered making it a legal requirement to add a $5 chip to all televisions; the chip would allow state and federal authoritites to turn on the television in sleeping families' homes from a distant government disaster center, tuning the set to maximum volume, thus assuring that otherwise helpless families in a tornado's path would hear the tornado alert. Thousands of lives could be saved by such a simple, inexpensive early-warning system. All it required was one little harmless, inexpensive chip in the TV's remote control memory, allowing it to be turned on from afar when a twister was in the area.

Both state and federal legislators voted down the idea by a wide margin. The reason, they said, was that it "smacked of Big Brother". It may be that a majority of those senators and congresspeople hadn't even read the book. No matter. Orwell's idea is in the air now, perhaps in our genes.

Almost every American has an aversion to Big Brother, even if they don't know who the hell he was. Big Brother was a gift to freedom-loving peoples from George Orwell, who also gave us such concepts as -- War is Peace!, Freedom is Slavery!, Ignorance is Strength !

Each generation -- whether they have read Orwell's canary-in-the-cage novel 1984 or not -- learns, in its own way and unique context how to be wary of such triumphant statements by whatever party or person in power. War is not peace, and no amount of Orwellian Newspeak can make it so. In a real sense, the novel 1984 was like a smallpox or polio vaccination to immunize future generations from the plague of Ingsoc where the Ministry of Truth, when not spreading its propaganda, is watching us 24/7 through omnipresent telescreens.

So, one can ask, did the book 1984, written in 1948, help us avoid living in a real "1984"? For hundreds of millions of human beings under Communist and various dictators' rule during the second half of the 20th Century, it didn't. They experienced all -- or at least most -- of 1984's perverse horrors and more.

But for Americans and other free peoples, it's my opinion that 1984 has raised, for even the most "robust" among us, a hyper-awareness to certain noxious gases. (You don't have to be a supersensitive canary to detect such gases; you just have to watch the damned and doomed canary.)

Is Flashback A Novel Stating Dan Simmons's Political Biases? In a word . . . no. In two words . . . hell no.

I spent 18 years as an elementary classroom teacher (and loved it!) and one of the things I was proud of when I ended that career and moved on to another one (writing) is that after working with hundreds of kids in so many interesting ways, including "Black History" lectures, social studies simulations such as our five days of "The Cuban Missile Crisis" and the gifted/talented APEX program I helped create to serve thousands of bright kids -- after all that, I stake my reputation that not one of those students I taught ever left with even a hint of my stand on religion or politics or any other adults-only issues. It was simply not my role as an educator to share them.

After 29 novels published, I want (and trust) the same to be true with those who read my novels. I have my own core beliefs, but my profession here is to speculate, not to argue my opinions or to pretend to be a prophet. That latter skill, prophecy. like the trick of walking on water, hasn't been done well in a long, long time.

Finally, it's also true that I've noticed that even the most famous (and popular) (and beloved) writers from the 20th and 21st Century can be abysmally stupid when it comes to politics. This tendency toward idiotic political opinions may be one of the very few ways in which novelists and poets are like movie stars and rock idols.

One is more likely to receive a more common-sense political view and interesting speculation about the future by asking an average citizen on the street than by querying most writers.

And yet . . . .

The Vonnegut--canaries amongst us do fall off our perches from time to time.