I grew up with these words, “another world is possible”. On the two council estates I lived on until I was 18. At the radical bookshops I found in my late teens. In the ant-capitalist protests I joined in my 20s. Working for New Internationalist, then Amnesty. And now, I see the idea has made it all the way to Glastonbury.
ANOTHER WORLD IS POSSIBLE.
I believe those words are true.
Let me put the question to you…do you think another world is possible? Can the world be fairer? Can we stop exploiting others and care for everybody? Does somebody have to go without, for you to have yours? Are the weak doomed to suffer at the hands of the strong? Or can those who have the luck of privilege, act with nobility, and use it to look after others?
My general approach to productivity is: if I don’t remember to do it, it’s probably better undone. But I do handwrite a ToDo list every couple of weeks. Not to remember things, but to forget them. A swirl of tasks in the mind gets in the way of more creative thinking. Writing them out as a list is like house cleaning.
Looking back at lists for the last few years, I have a variety of entries along the lines of “Social Media WTF???” and “Blog vs. Patreon!” or “FB page…what is it?” There are a lot of exciting tools today to publish writing of all kinds. In fact, there are far too many, and they can easily stop being useful, and start using you.
Social media is heavily “gamified”. Facebook and other social networks want your attention, and they’re setup to grab it and keep it, by playing on the dopamine hit we get from the little red status alerts indicating people are showing us approval. Social networks are potentially powerful tools. But I suspect for most writers, they are really just an addictive time sink.
Social media. You can’t live with it. But you probably can’t live without it either. I’ve taken the puritan path of switching it all off. But it’s like a starvation diet to solve a fast food addiction. Creatively and professionally social media is HUGELY important. But as it grows more and more powerful, using it without being used by it means much greater self-discipline.
So I set aside a few days to seriously look at and plan out my social media use. My website is recategorised to make sense of the 1000+ posts and essays I’ve written. My patreon page is completely rewritten. I’ve rediscovered my Facebook page and reduced my Twitter usage. Welcome to the new DAMO: Rebranded.
As I shared with my patreon backers this week, branding for writers is a counter productive activity. But that still leaves us with these powerful tools built, in large part, for projecting a brand image. I suspect I’m far from the only writer both intrigued and deterred by the struggle to use them in a balanced way.
Intersectionality is a powerful idea conveyed in an overcomplicated word. But Star Wars is a great way to understand it better.
One thing I love about scifi? It provides all the best metaphors to help folks understand the fierce complexities of contemporary politics. Mid-way through the snap UK general election a lot of Harry-Potter-as-political-metaphor memes went around, like Corbyn Black saviour of the muggles, or my own tweet on the theme.
Labour = Gryffindor LibDem = Hufflepuff Greens = Ravenclaw Tories = Slytherin UKIP = Death Eaters#GE2017
They work well, Harry Potter is after all one huge metaphor for British class structures. Scifi & Fantasy are genres that tell stories as metaphors, and the best of those metaphorical narratives are always applicable to our actual reality today. Lord of the Rings as allegory for World War 1 is well known. But the mother of all scifi political metaphors today must be Star Wars.
Star Wars is a metaphor for a very specific kind of social / political / military conflict. It happens to be the dominant conflict of our era, fought in many forms, and in many places, for well over a century. Amusingly, many people only woke to Star Wars metaphorical meaning with the release of Rogue One, which amped up the political commentary to levels that even weak willed fanboy manchildren could not miss.
A diverse alliance of rebel forces fight for Liberation from an imperial force aiming to Conserve the priviledge and power of one single racial / cultural / gender identity. That’s the political background of Star Wars in a sentence, and it’s also the politics of most 20th and early 21st century conflicts. From WW2 Nazis vs Allies, to the fierce polìtical conflicts tearing up the USA today, it’s the fight between Liberal vs. Conservative powers that we see repeated time and again.
“Admiral Ackbar feels his people are the real leaders of the rebellion, and as allies the humans should probably damn well shut up and take orders.”
Liberals face a serious problem in this battle. Consider the Rebel Alliance. It’s made up of the most diverse possible set of allies. Not even cross species, it includes military and other forces who literally come from different evolutionary systems. Star Wars never goes into it in depth, but we have to presume the Rebel Alliance has overcome a lot of infighting to unify conflicting agendas into one coherent strategy.
From what we see, Rebel X-Wing pilots are predominantly male, blue collar guys with security / technical backgrounds. In contrast the alliance diplomatic corps lead by Mon Mothma and Leia seem to be mostly women with liberal arts / humanities educations. These two groups probably see the rebellion very differently, and have to continually negotiate to find a good working relationship.
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The Mon Calamari cruisers can take on multiple Imperial star destroyers at once, but were only coverted for military function after the Mon Calamari were targetted and nearly wiped out by Imperial forces. No doubt Admiral Ackbar feels his people are the real leaders of the rebellion, and as allies the humans, who basically caused all these problems with their history of colonialism, should damn well shut up and take orders.
Who knows what the Bothans want from the whole thing, but many of them died to recover those plans, so they probably expect a cut of any political settlement when the Republic is re-established.
In real life we have a word for the problems of factionalism faced by Liberal political alliances.
INTERSECTIONALITY.
It’s a word much mocked by Conservative a*holes. And perhaps with some cause, because while it represents a very useful idea, it is in itself an overly complex term, drawn from academese, expressing the tendency of intellectuals to cloak their discussions in invented jargon. Intersectionality emerged from academic feminist discourse of the 1980s, but is widely used today in the raucous online arguments spawned by social media. But for all its problems, intersectionality does literally mean what it says.
Intersectionality means this. That gender discrimination, racism, classism, homophobia, ableism and other social justice causes all INTERSECT. They share a single common cause. And they all benefit by working together. All of these groups: women, people of colour, LGBT, the working classes, and many more, are all victims of political oppression. And the people doing the oppressing are the Empire. The political and economic elite of the day. The 1%. For whome class, race and gender are all convenient pretexts to divide and conquer the masses they rule over.
Without a widely held concept of intersectionality, of shared political interest, it’s all too easy for different groups of people suffering under political oppression, to blame each other for their problems. Look at the situation today, where the white working classes in America and Europe are told to blame poor immigrants for the lack of jobs. In fact both groups are equally exploited by the 1%. If they work together they can improve their situation. But that can only happen if they recognise the intersection of their shared interests. Otherwise the divided will always be defeated.
Can X-Wing pilots and the diplomatic corps ever work together?
One of the most bitter divides between liberal causes today is along the fault line of gender vs. class. You can see this in the fight between Berniebros socialists vs. Hilary Clinton feminists that broke out in the 2016 US presidential primaries. This is an old, old conflict. Socialism evolved through the late 19th and early 20th century as a political movment focused on liberating working class men, and has always clashed seriously with feminism as it emerged over a similar timeframe, as an ideology lead by middle and upper class women. Berniebros vs HRC Feminists is only the latest flareup among groups who should be alies.
I’m not here to offer a solution to white male working class socialism vs. white female middle class feminism. Only to point out that if X-Wing pilots behaved with the rank misogyny of Berniebros, the Rebel Alliance would never have even formed, let alone found victory at the battle of Yavin. Then again, maybe X-Wing pilot assholery was only resolved by the more intelligent, better educated diplomatic corps never lowering themselves to the level of trading insults.
A better word for the intersection of shared political interests?
The oppresive power of communism was cast off in part because political leaders like Lech Wałęsa in Poland could draw on the idea of Solidarity. Maybe today we need to stop using a confusing term like intersectionality, and return to using simpler words like unity or togetherness.
Of course Star Wars has it’s own word for intersectionality. The Force is, after all, what surrounds us and penetrates us; it binds the galaxy together. So next time you see a Star Wars fanboy making an ignorant rant about intersectional social justice warriors, maybe just calmly point out that he’s taking sides against Jedi knights wielding the Force.
A year ago I began recording a set of 7 talks for the Rhetoric of Story. This week I recorded the seventh.
The large gap between the 6th talk, recorded last September, and the 7th talk, came for a simple reason. I got very sick in January. I’m fine now, but while I was recovering I reduced my work schedule to the minimum. Rhetoric of Story went on hold.
So I’m very happy to be fully recovered, and to have finally completed the Rhetoric of Story course. To celebrate, I’m offering the full full course at 80% off for this weekend only. Click the link below, and use coupon code STORY at checkout.
A good friend needed help facing the blank page. I found this quote for him. Now I present it too you.
(It’s often attributed to Goethe, but in fact the authorship is unknown.)
Please share with anyone you think might love it.
“Until one is committed, there is hesitancy, the chance to draw back – concerning all acts of initiative (and creation), there is one elementary truth that ignorance of which kills countless ideas and splendid plans:
That the moment one definitely commits oneself, then Providence moves too. All sorts of things occur to help one that would never otherwise have occurred. A whole stream of events issues from the decision, raising in one’s favor all manner of unforeseen incidents and meetings and material assistance, which no man could have dreamed would have come his way.
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius, power, and magic in it. Begin it now.”
We live in strange political times. Around the world far right leaders are adopting traditionaly socialist policies to get elected. Trump promised huge public spending on infrastructure. Le Pen is promising a huge rise in social benefits. What’s going on?
The bottom line is, working and middle class people in America and Europe are poorer than they once were. So much poorer that we are falling into the conditions of developing nations. Wealth is capitalising in the hands of the very rich. Ordinary people can no longer afford college, to own a house, or access proper healthcare. The far right can see this, and are exploiting the fear it’s creating.
In the UK we have one political leader who is offering hope instead of fear. Jeremy Corbyn is similar in politics to Bernie Sanders in the US. A traditional, centre left, democratic socialist. His political offer is similar to the existing policies in the Nordic nations or Germany, all much more equal and fairer societies. But in the UK, that makes him look like a far left radical.
Like Sanders, Corbyn has faced bitter opposition both from conservatives, and the liberal wing of his own party. The liberal agenda doesn’t address poverty effectively, and opposes the policies, like tax rises, needed to tackle it. So a leader like Corbyn faces intense opposition from people who are, theoratically at least, on his side, making his position look much weaker than it really is.
Unlike Sanders, Corbyn succeeded in becoming leader of Britain’s major left wing party. And now with the calling of a snap election by the Tory party, Corbyn has a shot at putting Labour in power. We’re being told that Corbyn absolutely can not win. But we’re being told this by a media entirely owned by conservative and liberal interests, who aren’t presenting a fair picture. In fact, Corbyn has a good chance. Here’s why.
Because of the high expectation of a Tory landslide victory, Corbyn can win simply by holding the ground that Labour currently control. If the Tories don’t gain significantly at this point, it will be seen as a rejection of their destructive stance on Brexit and their austerity policies. And winning is much more difficult for the Tory party than the polls reflect.
To win a large majority, conservaties need to win a raft of small towns surrounding cities like Leicester, Shefield and Manchester in the midlands and north of the UK. These places, which have suffered worst from growing poverty, have protested by voting for UKIP and Brexit. Pollsters are giving the Tories a major advantage on the assumption that UKIP / Brexit votes will translate to Tory votes. This assumption is almost certainly false. Corbyn and Labour are much more likely to hold all these seats, maintaining the status quo, than polls suggest.
In the south the Tory party face a huge resurgent threat from the Liberal Democrats. The south east in particular has been tipping from conservative to liberal for the last 30 years, with constuencies like Guildford flipping yellow to LibDem. Factor in Brexit, which the south east voted against, and there’s a strong possibility the Tories will lose significant seats to the LibDems in this election.
If Labour holds in the midlands and the north, and the LibDems win significant seats in the south east, then the Tories lose their majority and we are into a situation of coalition government. Corbyn would almost certainly emerge as leader of any coalition government in those circumstances. Even if he didn’t, this outcome would shatter the current Tory leadership.
Add to this, that only four days into the election campaign, Labour and Corbyn have halved the Tory poll lead. How? Corbyn’s team have been planning for a snap election. They have a raft of policies ready to go, like the end of college tuition fees, and raising taxes on earners over £70k. These policies offer hope of a fairer and more equal society to millions of Britons who have been crushed into poverty by both conservative and liberal policies over the last 40 years.
The real question on which this election turns is this. Will the people of Britain see and vote for the economic justice in the policies Corbyn and Labour are offering? If so, you can expect your next PM to be Jeremy Corbyn. If not, it will be Theresa May. But as poverty and inequality grows even starker, you will eventually see a far right leader exploit that anger to sweep to power in the UK. And that will truly be a dark day.
One of the major barriers to a Corbyn win, is the perception that Corbyn can’t win. If you agree with this post, please share it on social media. Follow me on Twitter @damiengwalter
Sci-fi sells us fantasies. Margaret Atwood’s classic novel is all about the danger of fantasy. Why should they be pigeon holed together?
Damien writes on scifi, culture and politics for The Guardian, Independent, Wired, BBC and Aeon magazine, and also right here. Follow on Twitter @damiengwalter
Women understand, I think much better than men, how horrifying it is to be the object of another person’s fantasy. Glen Close going stalker crazy on Michael Douglas in Fatal Attraction is so alien and horrifying to men that you can make a box office smash from it. Women experience that behaviour from men daily.
“The men who founded Gilead probably read and enjoyed John Norman’s Gor novels.”
The Handmaid’s Tale is a story all about the skincrawling horror of being held captive as an object of fantasy. It’s literary lineage is closer to The Collector by John Fowles than anything by Arthur C Clarke. Margaret Atwood has generally resisted all labels for it, including the most commonly applied, that it is a feminist novel, preferring to call it simply a human story. And despite being nominated for numerous sci’fi awards, has never accepted that label either.
Science fiction fans have proved less than happy with that refusal to pigeon hole. As The Handmaid’s Tale has grown in fame, SF fandom has frequently asked why the book isn’t sold or marketed in the genre. It’s not an unreasonable question, after all it shares some similarities with science fiction. It’s set in the near future, in what you might think of as a branching alternate timeline from our own history.
Imagine an alternate timeline where The Handmaid’s Tale was published as science fiction. Possibly in the kind of pulp cover that many novels featuring women enslaved to strange obsessive Nazis often featured, with a subtitile like “I was a captive of fundamentalist perverts!”, and shipped out to bookshops, as one of many sci-fi novels released in 1985.
The sci-fi edition of The Handmaid’s Tale would have found itself in strange, and deeply inappropriate company. Among the actual scifi bestsellers of 1985 was Mercenaries of Gor, the 21st novel in John Norman’s Gor saga. For the unaware, the Gor novels are about a fantasy world where men are muscular barbarian warriors and women, many abducted from Earth, are their sex slaves. By the standards of the modern internet the Gor novels aren’t terribly shocking, but they are full on BDSM sex fantasies.
To give John Norman some minimal credit, he wove such a potent sexual fantasy in the Gor novels that they gave rise to the Gorean subculture, and remain quite widely read today. Is there anything wrong with the Gor novels? Only if you think there’s anything wrong with Laurel K Hamilton’s kinky wereleopard sex novels, with erotic fiction in general, or with pornography as a whole. Few people today believe that repressing our sexual fantasies leads anywhere good. We live in a liberal society that believes it’s much healthier to recognise, express and even celebrate our sexual fantasies.
But there is a serious problem if we can’t distinguish between indulging fantasy, and critically discussing the dangers of fantasy. Because without that critical discussion, we face the serious risk of fantasy being allowed to slip into reality. The men who founded Gilead probably read and enjoyed John Norman’s Gor novels. And enjoyed their fantasy so much, they used murder and violence to enforce it as America’s new reality.
Look at ISIS today, the Nazis in the 1930s, or any brutal patriarchal society in history. These are men driven to make their personal fantasies of power, dominance and control the reality that others must live under. The newly empowered Trumpist far right is terrifying because it shares so many features with those patriarchal regimes, not least its worrying preference for fantasy over reality and fact.
I fear that, had The Handmaid’s Tale been published as science fiction, it would not today be playing such a pivotal role as a symbol of resistance against Trump and the far right. Because sci-fi floods the world with fantasy. Sometimes high quality entertaining fantasy like those great MARVEL movies. Sometimes rather cheap and exploitative fantasy like John Norman’s Gor novels. But if we’re going to understand, and change for the better, our reality, we need to clearly recognise the work of writers, artists and other creators, who are doing more than selling us escapist fantasies.
Cyberpunk’s literary roots have always dug deep into themes of self destruction…both our terror of losing, and lust to be liberated from, our self.
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It’s hard for a human as universally recognised as Scarlet Johansson to pass as a nobody. But Major Motoko Kusanagi, the protagonist of the new Johanson vehicle and cyberpunk franchise Ghost in the Shell, is the ultimate nobody. The Major is a synthetic human, who appears in the form of an athletic young woman primarily because creator Masamune Shirow understood the young male audience for his 1989 manga series. There’s no small irony that, in the ongoing project to create her star self, Johansson has stumbled by trying to remake a story that is all about the destruction of self.
Beneath the surface of its now cliche iconography – mirrorshades, black leather trench coats, flickering neon lighting – cyberpunk has always been about the self. Or more precisely, a philosophical investigation into what will remain of the self once technology has remade human life. Before cyberpunk gave Bladerunner and The Matrix to cinema, those ideas were evolved in two related literary forms – Japanese manga and American / European hard science fiction, which began asking hard questions of identity and self at around the same time.
“But we’re also powerfully drawn to any experience that allows us to escape our self. Video games, virtual reality, cinematic CGI, all provide a technological liberation from our self.”
William Gibson’s novella Burning Chrome features a young woman who is hustling to buy new eyes, the latest Nikon’s, so she can become a “simstim” star. It’s an image Gibson builds on with the character of Molly Millions (a likely influence over Major Kusanagi), a cybernetically enhanced bodyguard whose eyes are sealed behind mirrorshade insets. His skill at composing such poetic metaphors for self transformation made Gibson the spiritual leader of the cyberpunk movement, even before cyberpunk as a name was coined.
For much of it’s history science fiction treated technology as a power controlled by men. Competent scientists who built rockets, and explored alien worlds. Cyberpunk inverted this equation to ask harder, more interesting questions. When technology allows us to replace first our eyes, then our entire bodies, what will be left of “us” at all? When technology lets us reprogramme our minds as easily as we programme a computer, what of our self will be left? For most of us, especially those brought up to believe in some form of soul or spirit at the centre of our human self, these questions can be terrifying.
That terror at losing our selves gives cyberpunk its strange mix of dystopian darkness and fantasy wish fulfillment. Anyone struggling to “unplug” from the internet understands the terror of having our self obliterated by technology. But we’re also powerfully drawn to any experience that allows us to escape our self. Video games, virtual reality, cinematic CGI, all provide a technological liberation from our self. Watching Scarlet Johansson deconstructed and remade as Major Kusanagi, we’re watching our own selves experience this fantasy…or nightmare.
Japanese creators of cyberpunk perhaps have an advantage in exploring the nightmare fantasy of tecnological self destruction. Buddhist cultures already understand the self as “empty“, a construct of perception, subject to constant change. Akira by Katsuhiro Otomo, arguably the greatest cyberpunk narrative, sculpts a baroque and horrifying metaphor for the self. In the anime’s infamous climax, a young hero cursed with psychic powers is mutated into a vast mound of human flesh, crushing the city beneath muscle and bone, as his full psychic self is manifested in our physical world.
The excitement inspired by a movie adapation of Ghost in the Shell is because, as we stare into our smartphones, and soon our VR headsets, we’re living in the midst of a revolution in how we see our selves. Masamune Shirow’s manga and anime originals have something to say about that. But as is so often the case with Hollywood adaptations, Scarlet Johansson’s visually impressive, but intellectually shallow retelling, does not. That’s a shame, and not only because the movie’s “whitewashing” also robs of it of the cultural context that gave it the Ghost in the Shell meaning. But also because Johansson, as one of the most adept sculptors of self identity alive today, might have had so much more to say on the subject.
I’ve never done a WorldCon, and I’ve never been to Helsinki, so damn it I’m going to tick off both these ambitions in a single weekend! I’ll be at WorldCon 75 in Helsinki, 9-13 August of 2017.
And I’d like you to be there also.
So if you’re hesitating (I know it’s a reasonably major financial commitment for most of us) then just know, if you’re among the many friends I have online, I would LOVE to see your actual face over a drink in the convention bar.
Also, I am looking at AirBnb apartments close to the convention centre. Interested in sharing? Shoot me an email: damiengwalter@gmail.com
Trump voters. Brexit voters. The AltRight. The people who read Infowars, and Breitbart, and the Daily Mail. They’re all early stage socialists, who just haven’t figured out that’s what they are yet.
Here’s why.
For most of the 20th century, global capitalism was a pretty good deal. If you were a white western citizen.
Most of the stuff you bought was manufactured by low paid labour in Asia. Most of the drudge work was done, either at home by women, or by immigrants. Life kept geting cheaper, and you kept earning more, assuming you were a white male, even in a relatively low paying job. Global capitalism, clearly an unfair system that exploited millions of people, was widely supported by white Americans, because they benefited from that exploitation.
“As a citizen of a western nation you are now much more likely to be exploited by capitalism.”
My how things have changed! Not. But, if you’re a highly priviledged citizen of the US or Europe, you can see that they are changing. Asia and other less developed areas are quickly catching up with the West. Women play on a more equal footing, and the immigrants who came to work in developed nations are now citizens, demanding and fully deserving equality. People aren’t stupid. Especially when it comes to protecting their own social status. Those who benefited from these inequalities can see those benefits slipping away.
Capitalism remains a deeply unfair and unequal way to organise the global economy. But in one regard it has become fairer. As a citizen of a western nation you are now much more likely to be exploited by capitalism. Capitalism has become trully global. Corporations, banks, hedge funds and billionaires move freely around the world. They are equal opportunities exploiters, as happy to profit from low paid labour in England as in China.
And the benefits of capitalism have also moved around. New middle classes in Asia, South America and Africa are being given the deal that the US and Europe got before them. Capitalism now has many new fans and supporters, in places like China that previously tried to get rid of it. But back where it began, in the US and UK, a lot of people are furious with global capitalism, and the “neo-liberal” agenda that today drives it.
Right now, what the people of the US and UK are demanding is a return to the capitalist deal of 40 years ago. They want jobs brought back from Asia, immigrants sent back beyond their borders, and women back under the thumb. That’s the agenda that got Trump elected, that leads to Britain voting to exit the EU, and is powering audiences for sites like Breitbart. The winners of capitalism can see they’re at risk of being made the losers, and they’re terrified by the prospect.
I don’t think it takes a genius to realise that global capitalism isn’t going to roll back 40 years because some old people in Idaho and Bolton are unhappy about it. And I think anybody with half an eye on the future can see that new technologies and automation are going to make the capitalist deal much, much more unequal.
So what happens when Trump and Brexit fail to deliver a temporal shift back to 1957? This is one of the last campaign advertisements run by Donald Trump before his election as president.
Anyone familiar with socialism will recognise the message of the Trump ad as a radically socialist one. Trump is no socialist, but he was willing to say anything to win. And Steve Bannon of Breitbart, alongside other altright political sites like Infowars, had devised a winning formula. Nationalist yes. Dog whistle racism yes. But also radically socialist, for a huge audience of Americans in the very early stages of questioning capitalism.
In the UK much the same trick was played. Brits were told that £350 million a week would be taken back from the EU and spent on the National Health Service. This lie was believed by many because, for at least 30 years, the British tabloid media has been equating the EU with global capitalism, via the issue of immigration. There’s a deep irony here of course, because the EU actually acts as a bulwark against the worst excesses of capitalism.
“In 5 years or so, the vast majority of Trump voters will be calling for nationalised healthcare, tax hikes on the rich, and free college tuition.”
In the US and UK a huge section of the population, who previously voted to support the free market capitalism of Reagan and Thatcher, are for the first time in their lives questioning that capitalist model. In the short term that’s pushed them towards nationalism, protectionism and racism. But regressing to racist political ideals will only hurt the economies of the UK and the US more deeply. And as that pain kicks in, those people are arriving at exactly the same socialist ideas that exploited people all over the world have been arguing since Karl Marx – socialism.
Socialism is a dialectic. Robbed of their faith in capitalism, Trumpists, Brexiteers, Breitbarters and AltRighters are now at stage 1 of the socialist learning process. That’s why so much of what they say sounds like communist revolutionaries shouting “down with the elite”. But as they learn, they’re going to arrive at the same democratic socialist ideas that were squeezed out of US politics decades ago. In 5 years or so, the vast majority of Trump voters will be calling for nationalised healthcare, tax hikes on the rich, and free college tuition. Because these socialist ideas are neccesary to balance a modern economy. Even Trump voters are on track to realise they are socialists, whether they know it now or not.
Why does this matter? Because the political left just lost its best electoral opportunity in decades. A huge swathe of the voting public are looking for answers to failed capitalism. But the left offered the same compromise position that brought it victory in the 2000’s. The left lost because it refused to argue for its own ideals, and stood watching as the right wing stole it’s ground. We can’t afford to make the same mistake again.
With fascism growing at a terrible pace today, Olaf Stapledon’s words from 1937, written at the height of the Nazi menace, hold meaning for all sci-fi fans, readers, and writers.
This post could not have been written without the support of my patrons.
“Perhaps the attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis.”
~Olaf Stapledon
I’m privileged to be a part of the worldwide science fiction community. As a writer and blogger, as a graduate of the Clarion science fiction writers workshop, as a regular columnist on SF for The Guardian, and as a lifelong reader and fan.
Like many in the SF community and beyond, I’ve watched the emergence of modern fascism with bleak Lovecraftian horror. It feels as though our little world of sci-fi readers and writers got an early foretaste of this when a group of far right activists turned the Hugo awards into a platform for their bigoted ideology. But there’s a good reason why the Sadly Rabid Puppies targeted the world’s biggest SF award – science fiction can be a powerful way of resisting fascism.
The small minded nationalism that lead to Brexit in the UK, and the outright racism that fueled the Trump campaign, have left the whole world in no doubt that the far right is making its strongest push to assert fascist ideology on us all since the 1930s. That time it lead to global war. Today we are all searching for any way we can prevent that tragedy repeating. How can science fiction be more than an escape from today’s reality? One of the greats of the genre has an answer.
Writing in March 1937, at the height of the Nazi threat in Europe, the legendary science fiction author Olaf Stapledon wondered what response he and other writers could make in such dark times.
“In these conditions it is difficult for writers to pursue their calling at once with courage and with balanced judgment. Some merely shrug their shoulders and withdraw from the central struggle of our age. These, with minds closed against the world’s most vital issues, inevitably produce works which not only have no depth of significance for their contemporaries, but also are subtly insincere.“
Stapledon is keen to identify that a central risk for any writer, artist or creator in the face of terror, is too hide. But Stapledon sees an equal and opposite risk, for writers who “take up arms” as political activists.
“The very urgency of their service may tend to blind them to the importance of maintaining and extending, what may be called the ‘self critical self consciousness of the human species’, the attempt to see man’s life as a whole in relation to the rest of things. This involves the will to regard all human affairs and ideals and theories with as little human prejudice as possible. Those who are in the thick of the struggle inevitably tend to become, though in a great and just cause, partisan.“
These words, that so accurately capture the conundrum faced by writers today, were written by Stapledon for the introduction to his seminal SF novel Star Maker. It’s a story that reaches beyond the bounds of human existence, to life in the broadest possible sense, on the galactic scale, and has been inspiration to generations of SF authors. And it’s a novel that, far from worshipping only at the altar of science, also dives headlong into the spiritual.
“At the risk of raising thunder both on the Left and the Right, I have occasionally used certain ideas and words derived from religion, and I have tried to interpret them in relation to modern needs. The valuable, though much damaged words “spiritual” and “worship”, which have become almost as obscene to the Left as the good old sexual words are to the Right, are here intended to suggest an experience the Right is apt to pervert and the Left to misconceive.”
That experience, in Olaf Stapledon’s thinking, is to see the world from a perspective beyond the human individual, or any political ideology. Stapledon believed that the highest calling of science fiction was to show us the universe, our world, and our selves in new ways. To see our “turbulent world against a background of stars”.
“The attempt to see our turbulent world against a background of stars may, after all, increase, not lessen, the significance of the present human crisis.”
As the last year has unfolded, and the peril of our new political situation has become clearer, my thoughts have gone to Star Maker many times. Seeing our moment in the full context of our history, and potential future, is a form of self-healing, and a way to reorient our perspective away from the immediate tumult, and back to the bigger, universal, picture.
Fascism can only win by reducing us to the most narrow minded and bigoted ways of seeing the world. Science fiction is a perfect way to show people the widest, most imaginative, and most hopeful ways of seeing. As SF readers and writers we might choose activism, we might choose withdrawal. But if we really want to make a difference, our best tool is to write, read and promote great science fiction.
A myth is more than just an old story. In their day, hundreds or thouands of years ago, myths shaped reality. WOAH! That’s a big claim, right? That the Ramayana actually shaped the reality of the people who read it two thousand years ago? That’s like saying Star Wars: Rogue One is shaping our reality today. Maybe it is. Story is how our mind works, and the stories we tell say everything about how we think.
“If Viking myths made humans fearless, I think ours tend to make us fearful.”
If like me you have a new addiction to the Vikings tv show, you’ve probably been doing some thinking about Viking myths. Stories of Odin One-Eye, that eye given to look in the well of knowledge, resonate especially in the frozen months of northen climates. Thor, Loki, Baldur, Freya and the other gods have never truly gone away. Their still on every cinema screen thanks to Marvel, and being read by millions thanks to authors like Neil Gaiman.
Viking myths described a world that was remarkably small. The world was only as wide a longboat could row. The gods lived just overhead, but out of reach, in the heavens above. And they watched and judged our lives. Men and women lived out their destiny, and fought bloody battles to pursue their fate, all to be judged well by the gods. Where today we see the universe as infinite, Vikings saw their cosmos as eternal. An endless battlefield, on which the eternal dramas of gods and men cycled forever. A mortal man was just a shadow of a greater reality. The point of life wasn’t to live a long life in safety and comfort. It was to commit acts that would echo in eternity.
Vikings weren’t alone in this worldview. The myths of the Greeks and Romans, and of the ancient Hindu world, all painted a similar picture. These were all pagan mythologies, and warrior cultures. We idolise these times, because they were well suited to the telling of great heroic tales. Of course they were, by our standards, brutal and unjust times, filled with terrible human suffering. But that’s to judge another reality by our own standards. Those who really believed the pagan worldview had no reason to fear death or suffering. Those things were just a gateway to eternal life.
Vikings is impressive as a tv show because, under the guidance of writer Michael Hirst, it dedicates a lot of time to the clash of Viking culture with the Christian culture of Anglo-Saxon Britain. In a memorable scene, a small band of Viking warriors in a “shieldwall” obliterate a far larger Saxon army. The Vikings are better warriors because they do not fear death. The weird mashup of pagan and juedo-christian beliefs that were Anglo-Saxon Christianity made them fearful of death, and of the judgement that would be made upon their sinful souls.
If stories are the operating system of human consciousness, then myths are culture specific upgrades, each new version bringing new features and retiring some old ones. Viking myths made men fearless. Christian myths made us compliant. They took the wild heroism of Viking and pagan cultures, and tamed it into the more stable, communal Anglo-Saxon world. We’re a thousand years or more on from that cultural shift. What do our myths make us?
Our tv screens are filled with heroic tales. And you don’t have to look far to find overbearing patriarchal sky gods still stalking the world. But the real myths of the modern world are stories told by science. A universe some 12 billion years old, measured by the speed of light in a vacumn. Life emerging from a blind process of evolution. All of it beginning with a Big Bang. A very 20th century idea, reflecting all the bullets, combustion engines and nuclear bombs that kept recent history banging. And we do have all these stories of powerful machines, The Terminator or The Matrix, determined to enslave or kill human life.
If Viking myths made humans fearless, I think ours tend to make us fearful. Terrified specks of animate matter in a vast inanimate universe. Once the gods walked with us shoulder to shoulder. Now there are no gods. No eternal drama of life. Only an infinite empty universe, not even ambivalent to our cause, but utterly unaware of it. These are the stories that shape our reality. These are our myths. And even a fearless Viking would find them soul shudderingly bleak.
