One of the most important purposes of science fiction, fantasy, and other imaginative fiction is to examine what is possible for human societies. Ursula K. Le Guin, who died this week at 88, not only wrote beautifully, but she took her duty to the imagination very seriously. When Le Guin entered the field, novels that imagined statelessness as anything other than bloody chaos were few and far between—it was Heinlein or bust. Le Guin's psychologically complex characters and gorgeous depictions of social and political dynamics influenced many science fiction writers, from Salman Rushdie to Margaret Atwood. Libertarians have another reason to love her.
In one of her most famous novels, 1974's The Dispossessed, a solar system contains two habitable bodies. On the larger planet, Urras, is a state capitalist society. On its smaller moon, Anarres, is a communalist anarchist society made up of the great-grandchildren of revolutionaries from the home planet. Le Guin examines both societies through the eyes of an anarchist physicist named Shevek.
The book was beautiful, brilliant, and personally liberating—I encountered it when it was published in 1974, right around the same time I became involved with libertarianism—and so in 1983 I nominated it for the Libertarian Futurist Society's Prometheus Hall of Fame Award, a prize that honors libertarian-themed fiction. Never in the ongoing history of that award has there been such a battle.
Many members of the Libertarian Futurist Society were up at arms. People threatened to quit the group if the book won. Although everyone admired the book as literature, the fact that the society on Anarres was communalist made the book suspect. It was called "socialist propaganda," and it was deemed not at all what we were supposed to be advocating. "Give it the Lenin Prize instead," said one member. Other members, some of them past winners of the award, defended the novel with passion and grace. We nominated it year after year. Le Guin herself got involved a little, thanking us for the nominations but telling me in a private letter that she expected a blue moon and pigs to fly before she would expect to win. I didn't know what a blue moon was at the time, and I didn't know that they sometimes occur.
In the Libertarian Futurist Society's newsletter, which I edited, I replied to the membership: "It should be repeated, a million times if necessary, that the essence of libertarianism…must be freedom of choice. Although most libertarians may believe that the best society is technologically advanced, economically laissez-faire, with private property cemented into the cornerstone of every community, other free people might choose communalism, back-to-the-bushes hermitism, or any of a thousand cultures, religions, or eccentricities possible to humanity and still remain within a libertarian framework, as long as those societies eschew the initiation of violence and respect the right of others to choose their own way of life." But the dissenting libertarians were not so easily convinced.
From 1983 on, we argued back and forth every time one of us nominated the book. The arguments were good ones on both sides. Socialist countries generally do devolve into fascist and repressive societies, held together with the bindings of terror. And they don't take 400 years to do so. What made Anarres different was that it was self-isolated, small, and committed to nonviolence and personal freedom. This isolation, Le Guin admitted later, might be one of the few ways that such a society could endure. Even then, she shows that the Anarresti were becoming ossified. Although individual behaviors were tolerated in many ways (one man hoarded blankets and broken equipment like a throwback "propertarian"), the society used censure and guilt to control its citizens. In his defense of The Dispossessed, novelist Robert Shea said: "Orwell, who created the archetype of tyrannies that rule by force and fraud, might have given us a novel about tyranny by guilt and shame had he developed his insight. What Orwell did not do, Le Guin has done."
If some members of the group hated that a communal society survived for 400 years and actually had some very positive aspects (no prisons, no jails, no laws to break), they hated even more the depiction of Urras. One member said that "Le Guin tried to paint Urras in the worst possible light." She didn't. Samuel E. Konkin III answered: "Doesn't [Urras] deliberately represent the capitalist United States of America? You bet. Now you tell me: If Murray Rothbard had half of the fictive talent of Ursula Le Guin (and he claims none), how different would his portrayal of Imperial America be in 1972."
And so the arguments ran, until 1993, when The Dispossessed was finally admitted into the Hall of Fame. I don't remember anyone jumping from the Libertarian Futurist Society's ship. Perhaps we just wore the opposition down. Perhaps they re-read the book in light of our arguments. Perhaps there was a blue moon that year. But no pigs flew—I would have heard about that.
The post R.I.P. Ursula K. Le Guin, Author of One of the Greatest Novels About Freedom Ever Written appeared first on Reason.com.
]]>Marooned in Realtime, by Vernor Vinge, New York: Bluejay Books, 356 pages, $17.95
Science-fiction writers have long used the genre as a vehicle for presenting individualist and antigovernment themes. Robert Heinlein and Ray Bradbury, for example, built their reputations on such individualist works as The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress and Fahrenheit 451. These themes are now being taken up with gusto and skill among a new generation of science-fiction writers. Whether or not the literary establishment acknowledges it, a respectable number of very good science-fiction novels—novels that satisfy on literary, philosophical, and narrative terms—have been published lately. These books are so far from being "space operas" that they may at last break down the walls of science fiction's literary ghetto.
Like the works of Heinlein and Bradbury, these novels portray characters who often have very little use for governments. At best they seem to consider them wasteful and inefficient institutions; at worst, the most direct road to slavery or mass extinction.
Bluejay Books is one of the primary publishers recently responsible for quality science fiction of this character. In the past two years, the Libertarian Futurist Society, a group of enthusiasts for science fiction that advances themes of individual liberty, nominated five Bluejay books for its Prometheus Award. If any LFS member had read John Shirley's Eclipse (volume one of A Song Called Youth) before the deadline, I predict that it too would have been nominated. Another recent Bluejay title, Marooned in Realtime, has just been nominated for next year's award.
Eclipse confronts many of the worst hobgoblins of Western culture: global war, creeping totalitarianism, and the seeming powerlessness of the individual. In Shirley's future history, the United States and the Soviet Union signed a treaty in 1998 that restricted them to small tactical warheads and conventional weapons in case of conflict. Their first "limited" engagement devastated Western Europe. The starving survivors of once-great European cities—a few compare themselves to unwilling maggots in the corpse of civilization—are so weak and psychologically demoralized that many would have preferred total obliteration.
The terror and hopelessness of the war's aftermath proved to be the perfect medium for the machinations of the Second Alliance, an American-based neofascist organization led by a powerful "Christian" leader. The aims and methods of the Alliance make the Nazis of World War II look like bumbling idiots: Second Alliance leaders are far more subtle, secretive of their goals, clever, and, most dangerously, sincere.
At the book's outset, members of the Alliance have already infiltrated governments and businesses worldwide. They have convinced the citizens of targeted nations that foreigners, especially those with brown skin, are the cause of scarcity and conflict. In each case, Alliance goals are skillfully presented as a national movement, conceived and directed from inside.
Fighting the Second Alliance is a sometimes motley, and often very intelligent, group of men and women who have only one thing in common—they know that human lives and human freedom won't be worth a spit in the wind if the Second Alliance completes its takeover. Shirley introduces his "good guys" one by one. We meet them in a gutted high-rise in Amsterdam, in "Admin" quarters in an orbiting space colony, and in a "mini-mono" (future-punk gone bad) bar on an artificial island in the Atlantic. Steinfeld, the New Resistance leader, gathers them up (a few fall in his lap) and trains them to become freedom fighters.
But the way the Second Alliance is foiled—as ingenious, as just, as wonderful as it is—has less to do with Steinfeld and more to do with the effect of music on the human soul. There is probably no way for a reviewer to write that without sounding silly, but there it is, and it works. One cautionary note: if you loathe rock and roll, I suggest you substitute a concert violinist and a Stradivarius for Rickenharp and his Telecaster. It would work just as well, if on different people.
Eclipse functions well on its own; it has a beginning, an end, and no small amount of satisfaction in between. It is impossible, however, not to anticipate volume two of A Song Called Youth—Eclipse Penumbra—due out this spring. Part of this anticipation is just a reader's reaction to a good novel: one is unwilling to give up interesting characters after living with them, however vicariously, for a time. But another part is what science-fiction author Norman Spinrad calls "something that all natural men and women crave in their heart of hearts in one form or another unless they are totally spiritually dead, namely to transcend, if only for a moment or the length of a book, time, space, and mortality and contemplate some credible vision of one's destiny in the universe entire." For me it is a desire to visualize our future (and our children's future) in some other way than as victims of merciless governments, nuclear war, global terrorism, or killer pollution. If there can be more, if there can be something better, I want to know about it, plan for it, help it happen.
Vernor Vinge takes this desire to see the future several steps further. Marooned in Realtime is the sequel to Vinge's 1984 novel, The Peace War, a beautifully crafted book about an enforced peace. To recapitulate, scientists at Lawrence Livermore invent the "bobbler," a device that creates a perfectly spherical, mirrored artifact—a bobble. Bobbles can instantly surround a weapon, a munitions factory, a capitol building. They are impervious even to heat, light, or nuclear explosion. After the first one pops, it is discovered that bobbles are also a sort of one-way time machine. Everything inside, including humans, is kept in perfect stasis as long as the bobble is intact. In the name of world security, the Peace Authority bobbles any evidence of advanced technology. Out of necessity, illicit subcultures create a technological and pharmaceutical underground that finally overthrows the Peacers.
As fascinating as The Peace War is, it contains one monumental disappointment. At the book's end, some of the main characters discuss the kind of government they hope to institute now that the Peacers have been overthrown, and they long, wistfully, for the present-day U.S. government. Well, it would be an improvement over the Peacers, but I would have expected more of them.
Marooned contains no flaws of that kind; either Vinge or his characters had a change of heart. At one point, in fact, Marooned hero Wil Brierson asks himself, "Could there really be a situation so weird that he would advocate government? He felt like a Victorian pushing sodomy." And at the end of Marooned's 21st century, New Mexico, the last remaining government, finds that it cannot compete with the very successful "ungoverned lands" except as a sort of amusement park. Tourists come to pay taxes, vote, and observe a real Congress, just like their grandparents had done.
Of course, this turn of events makes the president of New Mexico feel a little too much like Rodney Dangerfield. So he and a hundred followers bobble themselves 500 years into the future where they hope to get a little more respect, and they find…no one. But more about that later.
Marooned is fascinating because it can be looked at on three levels. The first is as a science-fiction detective story that is summarized neatly on the dust jacket: Everyone who is still bobbled while the rest of the human race disappears eventually rendezvous 50 million years in the future in order to establish a viable colony and save the human species. One of their number kills a charismatic leader, and detective Brierson must try to find the killer's identity. On a second level is a deeper and more complex problem: can 500 of Earth's most troublesome species put aside their power lusts long enough to build a technologically functional, genetically viable, and coercion-free society? On a third level—and this is what got Vinge to write the book in the first place—what happened to the rest of humanity in the mid-23rd century?
Vinge and many scientists postulate an increasing rate of technological growth and discovery, and this in our lifetimes. What happens to humanity, Vinge asks, after several centuries (or, more likely, several decades) of exponential growth? He, and we, must assume here that we won't blow ourselves up first and that we learn to moderate our population growth, control disease, and limit pollution. In his afterword, as well as in the novel, Vinge predicts a "singularity," some change or metamorphosis in the human animal that we can't foresee but may live through.
Has this metamorphosis happened to extraterrestrial species, and is that why we hear no signs of intelligent life in the universe? Can we live long enough, and well enough, to find out?
Victoria Varga is the editor of Prometheus, the newsletter of the Libertarian Futurist Society.
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