Turtles of the Rebellion

Several people posted about Sofia’s role in the revolution. The consensus seems to be that the revolution would still have occurred without her, but that it may not have reached the same scale, or that it may have gone differently. If we’re referring to another member of the original crew taking her place in being the leader of the rebellion, then the full development of the revolution is possible, though her ability to learn just about anything and her affinity for technology certainly were indispensable to the Runa. However, if we’re talking about her having died as we thought at the end of the first book, leaving no one to help lead the rebellion, I’m not sure how far it would have gone. The Runa who go with her into the forest at first seem content to let the conflict blow over and return to their homes, but her continued insistence that they should fight against their oppressors convinces them to propagate the movement. I think that if Sofia had died, the rebellion would have died shortly thereafter.

Also, every time we talk about multiple turtles on fence posts, for some reason, in my head, it turns into multiple turtles on one fence post. So, for your viewing pleasure:

Children of God Substantive

As many of my fellow bloggers, I felt that the second book was far inferior to the first. The Sparrow is one of those texts that has such an interesting ending that you almost don’t want to know what happens next. I’ve only truly felt that way about one other book, and have refused to read its sequel(s?) because I liked the way it left me thinking so well. Despite believing this book to be completely unnecessary to the story, it does have a few interesting developments, i.e. Sofia becoming the Runa Moses/revolutionary leader. Unlike Scott, I would give her the award for Most Unexpectedly Religious.

I think one of the most interesting things about this book is just how much a society can change in a relatively short amount of time. Between the time Emilio left and his return, the Jana’ata have been completely kicked out of power and all but exterminated, while the Runa have managed to overcome their oppressors and set up their own government to take the place of what was there before. It’s also interesting that Emilio returns prepared to find Rakhat exactly the way he left it.

Mistakes? Likely not.

Many of the posts people have written for this text are discussing the idea we talked about in class that the crew somehow made a mistake in either the planning or execution of the mission, however I would like to consider this, not as we did, looking back on the mission with an outsider’s perspective, but by trying to imagine if different decisions and actions were even feasible considering who the characters are and how they think.

I believe we are all agreed that at least until the point where the signal from Rakhat arrives, no one does anything to cause the mission to fail. At this point, the first possibility for different action takes place, instead of calling in his coworkers and superiors, upon receiving the transmission from another world, Jimmy brings his friends in to hear it. If he hadn’t done this, the Jesuit mission may never have been planned because Emilio’s comment would not have sent everyone thinking as to how it could be accomplished. Calling this the mistake that caused the mission to fail is interesting, however, because it implies that the only way the mission could have been successful is if it had been nonexistent. Granted, in that case, none of the characters would have met their horrible fates, but it is a cop out as a choice for preventing the failure of the mission.

Discussing the planning of the mission, I believe that saying they had other choices they could have made in the way they chose to run the mission betrays the characters. Though I agree with most of the class that unmanned craft and attempts at radio communication prior to sending a manned mission would have been a good idea, the characters that we meet in this text would never have gone that route. When everything seems to work out in every stage of planning, why would they question their plan? Particularly as each instance of things working out further backs up Emilio’s belief that they are going on a mission planned for them by God.

Within the mission, I don’t think the fuel situation that stranded them on the planet would have made much of a difference. Most of the deaths that took place would not have been prevented by making a timely retreat to the orbiter. D.W. and Anne were attacked out of the blue, Sofia, Jimmy and the others were caught up in a local conflict that resulted in their deaths. None of these would have been prevented by being able to return to the asteroid. Even if they had fuel, I believe Emilio still would have accepted the protection of Supaari.

The one aspect of the mission that I believe they truly made a mistake in was the planting of a garden. They had enough scientists with them to understand the ways in which foreign species can take over a new land and disrupt an ecology, even though they say they chose low-impact plants, I don’t think that they would have necessarily planted a garden without having more data on the local ecology. Side note: who can think of another time when a garden got people into trouble? (Hint: it’s religious, too).

For a discussion of Sofia’s rebellion see Jen’s post, where you can also get a look at our fun list of who should go on a contact mission.

Psychology

Like Jen, I was very aware of the parallels between the alien/future societies in this book and in Time Machine, though the societies on Rakhat were much more developed than the Morlocks and Eloi. I suppose that what I found most interesting in the alien contact portion of the book was the team’s willingness to settle into a routine life among a group of people who were obviously not the society they came looking for. I understand that some of them wanted to take the time to study certain cultural aspects more in depth, and maybe it’s just me, but I would want to get more of an overarching view of Rakhat before settling in to examine the details.

The part of the book that was most interesting to me overall, however, is the portion set farther in the future, when we see the struggles of the other Jesuits to help Emilio and draw his story out. The psychological transformation Emilio goes through between the two time periods is so huge and seemingly abrupt that it continued to draw me on to find out what happened to him. Of the two Emilios, however, I found the traumatized one more engaging to read about because he was more complex and his struggles seemed more real.

I also enjoyed the interactions Emilio had with John Condotti and with the Father General. Both of them were trying to help Emilio to recover, but did not really know what it was they were trying to help him recover from. Because of this lack of knowledge, they would make mistakes in the ways they chose to deal with him. The Father General was more perceptive in his treatment of Emilio, but both men developed a loyalty to Emilio throughout the story even before they knew all of the details of what he had been though. I think much of this is due to Emilio’s perseverance. He does not give up on himself when he has trouble with his hands, and as the Father General points out, “Emilio Sandoz is still trying to find meaning in what happened to him. He is still trying to find God in it all” (400).

Bringing this back to something more relevant to the class, I was interested in the beauty being good concept that Phil brought up as well. Not only does Russell have the characters immediately assume that the beautiful music is good, but she also spends much time discussing Sofia’s beauty, the beauty of Rakhat, and several other things. My question is: where does that leave D.W., whose appearance Russell takes pains to disparage every chance she gets?

Conceptual Wars

I’m going to preface this reflection by saying that much of our discussion from this class focused on concepts that I don’t know much, if anything, about (ex. European history, which I have never studied, and other political theories or conflicts that I’ve not heard of). Because of this, I can’t really comment well on our discussion, so instead I’m going to bring up in more detail one of the points I found interesting in the text.

As Sarah mentioned, our society has become much more likely to declare war on an idea than on a group of people, for example, the war on terror, or the war on drugs. I think this relates back to Schmitt’s discussion of a pacifist movement gaining enough hostility toward war to declare a war against war on page 36. Long quote, bear with me:

If pacifist hostility toward war were so strong as to drive pacifists into a war against nonpacifists, in a war against war, that would prove pacifism truly possesses political energy because it is sufficiently strong to group men according to friend and enemy. If, in fact, the will to abolish war is so strong that it no longer shuns war, then it has become a political motive, i.e., it affirms, even if only as an extreme possibility, war and even the reason for war.…This war is then considered to constitute the absolute last war of humanity….[the enemy] must not only be defeated but also utterly destroyed. In other words, he is an enemy who no longer must be compelled to retreat into his borders only.

Though practically, this would be a war between pacifists and nonpacifists, the war would be more accurately described as a war against war, and in order for war to be defeated, the pacifists must utterly destroy anyone who is not a pacifist so that no possibility of another war could exist.

The same could be said of any of the wars we have declared on concepts. The war on terror will never be complete until we have completely annihilated every terrorist in the world. Simply pushing them back into their “borders” would not work both because we would have to determine what constituted the border of a terrorist organization, and also because once pushed to that border, the remaining terrorists would be unwilling to admit defeat, and continue to participate in terror acts. Similarly, the war on drugs is in all practicality impossible to complete unless all drugs, and people involved in the manufacturing and distribution of illegal drugs were destroyed.

I liked it, at any rate.

Personally, I found Schmitt’s essay to be a fascinating read. I get that most people seem to have been bored by repetition, both internal and external, or galled by oversimplification (Andrew’s post seems to be an example of both). Perhaps it’s just that as a generally apolitical person, I haven’t run across these ideas before, but I thought that Schmitt’s essay was really fun and interesting, both in the general ideas he discusses, and as a period piece. *Acknowledges general grumbling and disagreement.* I do agree that the way he boils down all political action to the ability of a group to declare war, whether it chooses to do so or not, is an oversimplification of the way we view the “political,” however using the definition of the political that Schmitt provides, his theories have an internal consistency. Schmitt says that, “The political is the most intense and extreme antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping” (29). Because this is his definition of the political, it makes sense that he continually comes back to conflict, war, and the enemy as defining factors in what makes a state, the political entity. This definition of the political comes across well in his description of party politics. He says

The equation politics = party politics is possible whenever antagonisms among domestic political parties succeed in weakening the all-embracing political unit, the state. The intensification of internal antagonisms has the effect of weakening the common identity vis-à-vis another state. If domestic conflicts among political parties have become the sole political difference, the most extreme degree of internal political tension is thereby reached; i.e., the domestic, not foreign friend-and-enemy groupings are decisive for armed conflict. (32)

Thus, Schmitt argues, “party politics” can exist without being “political” because the conflict between the two parties would have to escalate to the level of civil war in order for them to be political entities, or groups that have acquired the power to wage war, whether they exercise that power or refuse to exercise it.

Like Liz, I found that I couldn’t help comparing some of what Schmitt said with concepts we discussed in Ender’s Game. Beginning with Schmitt’s concept of the “other” as “existentially something different and alien” (27). I found it interesting, however that only a few paragraphs later, Schmitt argues that “An enemy only exists when, at least potentially, one fighting collectivity of people confronts a similar collectivity” (28). So, despite our finding something completely alien about our enemies, in order for them to be enemies, something similar must exist between “us” and “them.” Unfortunately, this point comes across in the middle of his differentiation between the private and public enemy, so he does not go on to describe what is similar, only that a similarity exists.

Another concept I found spoke well to our discussion of Ender’s Game is Schmitt’s idea of who can legitimately judge the validity of a conflict. He says

Only the actual participants can correctly recognize, understand, and judge the concrete situation and settle the extreme case of conflict. Each participant is in a position to judge whether the adversary intends to negate his opponent’s way of life and therefore must be repulsed or fought in order to preserve one’s own form of existence. (27)

Therefore, as outsiders to the conflict, we cannot judge the legitimacy of the IF’s decision to fight the buggers because we are not actual participants in the conflict. Since the IF believed that the buggers “intend[ed] to negate [their] opponent’s way of life,” they were justified in going to war. Further, Schmitt says, “The justification of war does not reside in its being fought for ideal or norms of justice, but in its being fought against a real enemy” (49). Since the IF viewed the buggers as a “real enemy,” their war is also justifiable, according to Schmitt.

There are a couple of other quotes that I found interesting, but since you're probably getting tired of reading this post by now, I'll spare you. From reading other posts, you all know much more than I do about political theory, so feel free to correct any misapprehensions on my part.

Ender's Game Reflection

I agree with Tim that forcing people to address the IF’s choices regarding how to deal with the buggers as though we were the people responsible for the decision and the consequences eliminated the middle ground, but it did so because making the decision personal prevents us from being able to take the easy way out by justifying both positions. I don’t think that this exercise was a bad idea, and I don’t think that people became so entrenched that they could not see the other side. I think that we seemed to be strictly standing for our positions because we were not allowed to have a middle ground. Making the decision a more personal question caused us to have to make firm justifications for whichever side we chose instead of just sitting on the fence.

Though I disagree with much of what was said during class, I enjoyed the discussion because the different opinions were so far opposed that it allowed us to look at the same evidence and see it in completely different ways.

I still think that because of the nature of human thought and drives, when working with the available information, I would make the same decision as IF, as long as attempts at communication continued to fail. I do believe, however, that some form of communication could have been reached if we had sent a small party of people to their world when we arrived, if only to ascertain whether their attitudes still remained hostile. Granted, if they were still hostile, it would be a suicide mission, but it would have at least been a final attempt at getting through to them without having to sacrifice our own people to destroy them.

Crossing Values

Pg. 269:

“And when she died, the others all died.”

“No, they just went stupid. The first ships we boarded, the buggers were still alive. Organically. But they didn’t move, didn’t respond to anything, even when our scientists vivisected some of them to see if we could learn a few more things about buggers. After a while they all died. No will. There’s nothing in those little bodies when the queen is gone.”

Pg. 270:

“Why did they kill the crew?”

“Why not? To them, losing a few crew members would be like clipping your nails. Nothing to get upset about. They probably thought they were routinely shutting down our communications by turning off the workers running the tug. Not murdering living, sentient beings with an independent genetic future. Murder’s no big deal to them. Only queen-killing, really, is murder, because only queen-killing closes off a genetic path.”

“…Think of it this way. In all the bugger wars so far, they’ve killed thousands and thousands of living, thinking beings. And in all those wars, we’ve killed only one.”

These quotes describe one of the ideas that I found most intriguing this time through Ender’s Game. Mazer justifies their actions in the war by discounting the lives of all of the buggers except for the queen because she is the only bugger who thinks. At the same time, he offers a justification for the actions of the buggers, that they did not understand that all humans are capable of independent thought. The buggers did not understand the value that humans place on each individual life, and by killing the crew of the tug, they were merely following their own standard procedures.

What I find interesting about this is that as each culture came to understand the other, it adopted the other’s values. Since the buggers actions revealed to humans that they did not value individual lives, humans began to disregard the lives of individual buggers. The third quote from above by Mazer Rackham illustrates of just how little concern the lives of the dependent buggers have become to humans. At this point Mazer only counts the single queen that died as a casualty, none of the other buggers matter at all. Buggers, on the other hand, came to respect the individual life more as they realized that each human is an independent person. As the pupa queen let Ender know, “We did not mean to murder, and when we understood, we never came again. We thought we were the only thinking beings in the universe, until we met you, but never did we dream that thought could arise from the lonely animals who cannot dream each other’s dreams.” Once they understood that each human was a thinking being, they gained a more human respect for individual life. It’s interesting that despite the interaction between the two groups having been a war, it allowed them to further understand each other, which caused each group to take on certain values of the other regarding individuality. They already placed the same value on independent thought, as each group considers murder only to have occurred when the subject is a thinking being.

A closing thought: He isn't named Ender just because it's a derivative of Andres. Card named him for what he does. He ends things. He ends the war; he ends the buggers, and I'm sure you all can come up with other things he ends. Ender is an ender.

V for Justification...wait...

I think it’s time to question another of our underlying assumptions, yay! So, in class we spent quite some time talking about whether certain of V’s actions were justifiable, for example, killing the priest who had merely been present at Larkhill, but who probably hadn’t contributed to any of the killing or experimentation (though who knows what he did to little girls there), or V’s abduction, imprisonment and torture of Evey. My question is, why should we be concerned as to whether these are justifiable actions or not? V does not feel that he has to justify his actions to anyone, merely take responsibility for them. V is also working to create anarchy, the land of do-as-you-please, not the land of do-as-you-please-then-tell-us-why-it’s-okay. If he is just doing as he pleases, even if he has a reason for doing what he does, do we need to try to justify it if V himself does not think a justification is necessary?

Responsibility, Fate and Anarchy

So, this novel was pretty freaking awesome, just putting that out there. Also, please try to avoid too many movie spoilers. I don’t know about anyone else, but I haven’t seen the film version yet, and since it apparently doesn’t follow the book, please don’t ruin it. Thanks.

Anyway, I went into this book not really knowing what the story was about. It wasn’t my first graphic novel, so I wasn’t in that boat with some of you, but all I knew was that someone was on a vendetta (got that from the title, don’tcha know). Needless to say, I wasn’t really expecting it to be quite that much of a political piece. Still, I really liked it. The mystery, psychology and political commentary were well paced and spaced, and I quite enjoyed the way that characters didn’t just disappear, but we continued to follow up on them throughout the entire novel. For example, I was a little confused as to why we kept following the plight of Rosemary until we discover that she is the one who is going to kill the leader, but at the same time, even when I didn’t know where her story was going, it was interesting to see the long term consequences of her husband’s treatment of her, V’s actions, and her own choices that ultimately led her to stand next to that car with a gun.

V talks about wanting everyone to take responsibility for their actions, and that is a major part of what this book is about. He forces that responsibility on the people who ran Larkhill by killing them or driving them insane (why is Prothero the only person from Larkhill he didn’t kill, by the way?). He never shirks his own responsibility for the things he does. Even when we don’t see characters taking responsibility for their actions, we see the results of those actions, and we know who is to blame for them.

One thing I wish we’d seen more of was Fate. While the whole Susan/Fate relationship was interesting to observe, I wondered what exactly Fate did. They talked about “consulting Fate,” but from what I read, I never really quite grasped what it is that fate does for them, aside from calculating the exact minute when the rain will start. Anyone have a more clear idea than it just being a supercomputer and supercomputing for the government?

One of the most interesting things to me in the novel was V’s distinction between Anarchy and Chaos when Eve asks him, “All this riot and uproar, V…is this anarchy? Is this the land of do-as-you-please?” He replies, “No. This is only the land of take-what-you-want. Anarchy means “without leaders” not “without order.” With anarchy comes an age of ordnung, of true order, which is to say voluntary order. This age of ordung [sic] will begin when the mad and incoherent cycle of verwirrung that these bulletins reveal has run its course. This is not Anarchy, Eve. This is Chaos.” I think it’s quite a fine distinction, and is well explained, but most of all, it’s something I had not thought about before, so I found the concept intriguing.

Cyberpunk and Jewish Folklore

Maybe I’m a minority here, but I think cyberpunk is one of the most fun sub-genres of science fiction because it blurs the lines of what is human and what humans are capable of doing. When an AI becomes so advanced that the difference between it and humans is nigh indistinguishable, who is to say that it isn’t human, especially in societies where body modification has gone to such extremes that the humans are half machine already. I guess what I’m saying is, in a society where machines become more and more human and humans become more and more mechanized, where do you draw the line between them and us? Anyhow, that was my little cyberpunk rant, just ‘cuz I like it.

In He, She and It, however, the lines are not quite that blurred yet. Cyborgs are not commonplace enough that the line between us and them can begin to fade. No, at this point a very concrete line exists, you were manufactured, we were born. Whatever happened later, if you became more human, if I modified myself, our origins continue to define what we are. In this way, I can understand why Yod didn’t want any more cyborgs to be built: he could see that the time for acceptance for artificial people was still a long way off. The parallel story of Joseph tells us that much. His story took place almost 460 years prior to Yod’s, and yet their stories end in nearly the same way, their creator telling them that they have served their purpose, and reclaiming the life from them.

So, I also looked up golems, not having ever studied any Jewish folklore, and Joseph’s story is based on an actual Jewish folktale, and looking at Piercy’s biography on her website, I’m not all that surprised. Considering her grandmother brought her up Jewish and told her stories, she’s probably known that folktale throughout most of her life. That, I think, supports my idea that she did not include the older tale to parallel her own story, but that the folktale was probably an inspiration for Yod’s part in this story, though from what I’ve read, Piercy probably added in Joseph’s love interest, because I’m not seeing her in any of the variations of the story I’m looking at. Anyway, I might have to read some more about Jewish folklore; it seems pretty interesting.

Belief

Since the nominal topic of our discussion was whether Paul was a messiah or not, I think I’ll question our basic assumption. Does it matter whether we define Paul as a messiah? If the people who followed him believed him to be a messiah should that not be enough? The fremen believed that he was their savior, so to them he was their savior, whether he truly had come as a fulfillment to prophecies or whether he merely took advantage of the prophecies. And even if he did simply take advantage of prophecies that had been planted there, he still led the people to their freedom. Does it even matter if the prophecies were real or planted by the Bene Gesserit? If the fremen believed in the prophecies, Paul came and fulfilled the prophecies, and the fremen believed that Paul was their savior, then he was a savior to them. In this situation, I believe that the fremen’s faith in Paul proves he is their messiah. By no means would you ever get a freman to believe that Paul wasn’t a messiah.

I suppose the position I’ve outlined above leads back to the question of a messiah versus the messiah. This question, however, presupposes that in the world Herbert created, a single messiah is possible. My question would then be how would you identify a single messiah as the messiah? That again depends on how Herbert’s world works. Would The Messiah have to fulfill the prophecies of all religions, or do religions exist that claim to expect the one true Messiah? In the first case, would Paul work as The Messiah? He fulfilled prophecies from several different religions, but did he cover all of them? What about the second case? How do you know which religion to trust when they say that their Messiah is the one true savior? I ask these questions strictly from an outsider perspective like us reading Herbert’s novel, not to get into a religious debate about the competing religions we live with, but without getting into a debate, we can think about these questions abstractly in regard to today’s religions. I’ll let you others do that, however. I’m not about to start pulling out the worms now that I’ve opened that particular can.

Putting aside messiahs for a moment, I’d like to talk about Paul as a political instead of a religious leader. In “Politics as a Vocation,” Weber talks about hereditary, charismatic, and legal justifications for leadership. While Paul admittedly has some roles he occupies through charismatic justification, he also has a ninety-generation pedigree set up by the Bene Gesserit. Despite this hereditary justification already being in place, does he actually gain the positions of leadership that should be his through his family ties by his charismatic leadership, or does his justification in those roles rely mainly on his hereditary right to rule? Which justification takes precedence in Paul’s situation if both justifications are present? Wow, a lot of questions in that post, but I’m still more interested in hearing what other people have to say on the political front than trying to come up with my own answers since I’m sure you all know much more about politics than I do (you all don’t actively avoid politics).

Charisma and Corruption

I have to start off by saying that “Politics as a Vocation” has been the most difficult text yet for me to get through. I am not at all interested in politics, and so the little details that Weber continually brought up about the slight differences between this role in this country and that role in that country just drove me up the wall. Despite that, I did find interesting the idea of “the authority of the extraordinary, personal gift of grace of charisma, that is, the wholly personal devotion to, and a personal trust in, the revelations, heroism, or other leadership qualities of an individual.” I had not thought about our political system as being one that functions on trust in the leadership of a charismatic individual, in those exact terms, but it definitely makes sense the way Weber lays it out, especially when you consider how much the personal appearance of candidates matters to the public these days. Back when Weber gave this lecture, we didn’t have televised debates yet, but as soon as candidates began appearing on our screens, appearance began to play a significant role in the public’s confidence in a candidate. Though Weber does not specifically mention appearance as being a part of the charismatic justification for rule, I believe that he might have included this in his list if he was aware of just how image conscious society would become. In that regard, charisma was an apt word choice. According to WordWeb, a dictionary/thesaurus program I’ve installed on my computer, “charisma” is “a personal attractiveness or interestingness that enables you to influence others.” This definition certainly encompasses the qualities Weber laid forth of revelations, heroism and leadership qualities, but it also leaves room for appearance and rhetoric, which are such large parts of how we now tend to think of charisma.

The other thing I found interesting in Weber’s justifications for rule is that he does not attempt to address good and bad rulers. Many rulers who fit into one of the three categories of justification have turned out to be poor leaders. Hereditary rule simply cannot produce a good ruler every time. Examples of this can be found in every royal and/or imperial family throughout history. Charismatic rule is just as fallible. To go for the extreme example, Hitler was an extremely charismatic ruler who inspired “the wholly personal devotion” and “personal trust” in his followers that Weber outlines in his description of the justification for charismatic rule. His third category of a legal justification for “servants of the state” is just as prone to corruption. A person in one of these roles may follow orders and carry out their duties, but the motivation behind such service is always open to question. I realize that the point of Weber’s lecture was not necessarily to discuss what made a good politician and how to avoid corruption, but that he was trying to show the seriousness and importance of making the decision to make a career of politics, however, I just found it interesting that a justification for rule does not necessarily mean a good ruler.

Expressing Multiple Roles

When we discussed Dune in class, we spent much of the time talking about which of Paul’s titles best represents who he is, or if he is all of them, and what happens when his different roles come into conflict with each other. I think that the most likely answer is that he takes on each role as the situation demands it. If we all look at our daily lives, this is how we act in different situations. Since I know my life better than any of yours, I’ll use myself as an example. I have many different roles in my life, as I’m sure you all do. I am a Desk Receptionist at Hughes, a Writing Consultant and the Writing Center, the lighting technician for the Gathering service, a junior in college, and many other things depending on the situation. Depending on which role I am playing at the moment, I have to respond differently to different situations. For example, when I am studying in my room, being a student takes precedence, but when I am studying at the front desk in Hughes, checking someone’s spare key out to them becomes more important than reading an article on blackboard or whatever I am doing because I have other responsibilities that are more important. When I am working as a writing consultant, I work one on one with a student to help them improve their writing skills, but when I am setting up lighting for the Gathering, I work on an much more impersonal level with other people, telling them where to run wiring and such. In a way, Paul’s multiple roles are not any different from the multiple roles that we all have to play every day. Paul’s roles just have more impressive titles, and come with more impressive skills. So anyhow, I believe that Paul can be all of his titles at once, but that different situations bring different roles and skills to the forefront, just like different situations in our day-to-day lives call for responses from our own different roles and skill sets.

Dune the Epic Fantasy?

Since this book reminded me more of epic fantasy than of what I expect when I think of science fiction, I thought it would be interesting to take a look at genre and where Dune fits in. I’m not out to make anyone mad or start a whole genre debate, but I think it would be interesting, especially in light of the conversation we had on the first day of class regarding genre, to bring it up again. I’m going to be relying quite a bit on Wikipedia sources here, so please don’t bite my head off about that either, because I’m aware that they can be wrong and that they are not exhaustive. This is more of an exercise in thinking about genre than an argument that Dune has to fit into a specific genre. Now that I’ve written enough of a preface to hopefully avoid any nasty comments, I’ll jump in.

According to the Wikipedia page for Dune, it “is popularly considered one of the greatest science fiction novels of all time, is frequently cited as the best-selling science fiction novel in history, and was the first bestselling hardcover science fiction novel ever.” I dispute none of this and I don’t believe that Dune has a problem fitting into most people’s definitions of science fiction; after all, it is set in a more technologically advanced future that has taken us to new worlds. When I took a closer look at Wikipedia’s (admittedly incomplete) listing of science fiction sub-genres, however, I couldn’t really find one that I felt Dune fit in with well. Hard SF, according to Wikipedia, “is characterized by rigorous attention to detail in quantitative sciences, especially physics, astrophysics, and chemistry.” Dune is not about detailed scientific explanations of future technology, so I discount this sub-genre. Next is Soft SF, which consists of “works based on social sciences such as psychology, economics, political science, sociology and anthropology.” This seems to fit much better with Dune, and yet I would argue that the scope of the book is so much larger than a study of any or all of these topics that this sub-genre cannot contain it. What I mean is that Dune covers all of these areas, but it goes far beyond them because of the huge scope of its story. The next sub-genre down the list is Cyberpunk, which definitely does not fit Dune. Cyberpunk usually takes place in a post-humanist dystopian future where body modification, implants, and full-sensory internet are the norm. Time Travel, the next sub-genre, also does not fit. This is followed by Alternate History, which is also not Dune, and Military SF, which also does not quite fit. Paul may be a good fighter and lead a jihad, but the focus of the book is not “conflict between national, interplanetary, or interstellar armed forces.” The list goes on to include New Wave, Apocalyptic and Post-apocalyptic fiction, Christian science fiction, space opera, and science fiction western, none of which really fit Dune either. I’m sure there are more sub-genres of science fiction out there and that Dune at least partially fits into some of them, but for now, I’m going to move on to the second part of this post, Dune and epic fantasy.

Again in Wikipedia, epic fantasy is “generally serious in tone and epic in scope, dealing with themes of grand struggle against supernatural, evil forces.” This may be a bit of a stretch, but I believe Dune is at least serious in tone and epic in scope, and while the “grand struggle” may not be against a supernatural, evil force, Paul does lead the fremen against their foe and defeat the corrupt emperor to take over. Where this comparison really takes off is in looking at the qualities of the hero in epic fantasy in comparison to Paul. According to Wikipedia, “Often, much of the plot revolves around his heritage or mysterious nature. In many novels the hero is an orphan or unusual sibling, often with some incredible ability or abilities and skills in a particular area (usually either magic or skill with a weapon). He begins the story young, if not an actual child.” The plot of Dune does revolve around Paul; he is not an orphan, but he does have quite an isolated upbringing, he has many incredible abilities, and he begins the story fairly young. The article goes on, “In the beginning of the storyline, the hero is threatened by the unknown force.” Despite Herbert’s audience knowing the plot against the Atreides family, and them knowing that their enemies have some sort of plot against them, the attack is enough of a surprise that it is a success, and Paul and his mother are forced to flee. Particularly relevant, “the hero slowly gains knowledge of his past through legend, prophecy, lost-and-found-again family members, or encounters with "mentor" characters who know more about him than he does.” Paul encounters all of these: he takes on the legendary figure of being the savior for the fremen, he fulfills the prophecy of being the Kwisatz Haderach, he discovers that he is related to the Harkonnens, and he has several mentor characters who help him in different ways both during the book and before the book began. This is getting ridiculously long, so I’ll cut myself off here, I just thought it was interesting how much better this book seemed to fit in with epic fantasy than with any standard sub-genre of science fiction. Thoughts?

Computers and Cartoons

Since everyone else has provided their thoughts on the computer experiment, I guess I’ll throw in my two cents as well. Like Kaitlin, I enjoy trying different things in class, and I thought this was an interesting program to try out. I found it interesting to see the different ways that our groups went about searching for sources to prove or disprove the validity of Stephanson’s argument, and I think that it is also important to take into consideration the validity of an argument when reading a text like Stephanson. Like most of the class, however, I don’t think that this program worked out very well. We spent a good portion of class time just looking up different things on the computers instead of being in discussion. Because we spent so much time on this question, both in research and in sharing our conclusions, we didn’t really get to spend much time in the text, which is too bad when you have a text this interesting. Also, the technical difficulties and the delay between the sending and receiving computers were distracting. Finally, I also hate Macs (never owned one, but had to suffer through them being the only computers my school district would use).

Despite all of this, I found the different approaches our groups took to the question to be interesting. It’s interesting to see just how little political correctness mattered in society back when those cartoons were produced, but at the same time, not all that surprising. Even cartoons I’ve seen from the early 1930s are sometimes blatantly racist, witness Plane Dumb, featuring Van Buren’s Tom and Jerry, which doesn’t have anything to do with propaganda. It’s just racist.

How Protestant Ideals Became American Nationalism

Stephanson’s Manifest Destiny is an interesting text because it not only looks at what happened in history, but it argues specific motivations behind the actions of the United States as a whole throughout its history. Stephanson is not trying to explain why specific people took specific actions that shaped the history of the United States, though he does a little of that, but he is presenting a theory on how the United States as a nation justified its actions to itself and to the world. What this text showed me were some of the ideals that went into American nationalism, how that nationalism was different from nationalism in other countries around the world and how the ideas that make up American nationalism have affected policies and decision making throughout the history of the United States.

People in the United States needed something under which to band together. Part of what makes up nationalism is what Benedict Anderson called “imagined communities.” This is when people are able to think of themselves as part of a community that is made up of more than just the people they know. American University, for example, is an imagined community because we all consider ourselves to be a part of the group of people that make up American University, but I’m fairly certain that none of us know every single other person who considers her/himself to be a part of American University as well. When the United States fought for independence from Britain, they were banding together under a common oppression by the British government, but they were also banding together under the common ideals of the protestant religions. Many of the colonials had left Europe to escape religious persecution, and despite the differences among the different branches of Protestantism, they did have several ideals in common. Freedom of religion means a society free from religious persecution, not a society free from religion, and many of the men who instigated the American Revolution and worked in the formation of the United States were Protestant. Once they had won the war, Protestant ideals became and even greater part of the commonalities among the people, and thus became the basis for American nationalism.

As the United States continued to develop, the religious ideals became more ingrained into American society, until the phrase "American" came to represent those religious ideals under a secular name. This is why the Biblical argument that came up time and again throughout Stephanson's book went largely unchallenged through American history, and why manifest destiny has constantly emerged in our nation's past.

Focus of Discussion - Wells versus Heinlein

I found it interesting how different our discussion on The Moon is a Harsh Mistress was from the discussion we previously had on The Time Machine. With Wells’s book, we spent much time discussing what we found implausible and poking fun at the way the Time Traveller handled his trip into the future, whereas most of our discussion of Heinlein’s book centered around questions of morality and ethics, which Chris outlined nicely in his “Morality vs. Ethics” post, and about the logistics of the Lunar society. Why the difference in discussion? I believe the difference came about partly because we better understand the context from which Heinlein is writing. Both the politics from the era Heinlein’s book was written and the understanding of science people had at that time are easier for us to relate to than those from Wells’s era. I also think that the difference in conversation had to do with The Moon is a Harsh Mistress being more what we now expect from a science fiction text. Though The Time Machine contained its titular device, the world the Time Traveller transported us to seemed less of a science fiction setting, and more of a canvas on which Wells could explore his political theories. I don’t mean to say that a setting cannot have both, because as we see in Heinlein’s book, it can, I just mean that Wells’s world contains little in the way of imagined technology outside of the time machine itself, but instead is practically wiped clean of technology and all we expect from science fiction texts now. Because it is so different, we had to spend time discussing how it worked at the time it was written and explaining to ourselves why the lack of advancement and other things in the book bothered us. With Heinlein, we don’t have this issue because his story is chock full of futuristic technology, and shows us a world we can more easily understand as being our future because we see the human instinct to strive for achievement and discovery played out.

American versus Lunar Revolution

One thing I found interesting about Heinlein’s The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is that despite the many correlations between the prison colony on Luna and European colonies, particularly British colonies of the 17^th and 18^th Centuries, the choice he made to set his colony on the moon created differences that altered his society from developing the way that colonies developed on Earth. For example, the British colonies in America were exploited in a similar fashion to the way Terra exploits Luna. The British reaped materials from their colonies, which they transformed into finished goods and sold back at a much higher price. The colonies were not supposed to engage in trade with other countries, which was supposed to give Britain full advantage of both the materials and the colonists’ money. Because this system is set up between Britain and its colonies, the colonials had the outside recourse of smuggling with which to bring in needed supplies and cash flow so that they would not be bled dry. The situation on Luna in which the Loonies ship wheat back to Terra reminded me of that colonial system on Earth because Luna will exhaust its own food supply if it continues to make the required wheat shipments. The difference in this situation is that the Loonies do not have an outside source that they can use to relieve the stress on their food supply because no such source exists. This dilemma leads them to planning their revolution, which again is reminiscent of the American Revolution. One of the many causes leading up to the American Revolution was that the Britains, though they knew that smuggling provided continued income into their colonies for them to take away through their exploitative policies, cracked down on smuggling and tried to actually uphold the trading regulations they had set down.

Another difference I found interesting between the colony on Luna and the British colonies is that British colonials were able to return to Britain. Living in the Americas would not have made them unable to survive in the English atmosphere, which made them more able to be vocal in Britain than the Loonies are on Terra. Since the Loonies have an extremely difficult time surviving for any extended period on Terra, they are even easier to exploit than the colonies in American were for Britain. Because they cannot fight back (I’m talking pre-revolution here) through official or political avenues, they are forced to a revolution more quickly. They have to fight physically, and on their own turf, because they cannot survive on Terra, and no one will listen to them until they take power and make their words be heard.

Questioning Our Assumptions in The Time Machine

We spent much of class discussing the problems we had with The Time Machine, most of which were issues with the scientific believability of the world as Wells described it. I believe that our discussion on those issues was useful because it let us discuss why the issues we had problems with made sense or were at least possible explanations in the time in which the book was written. This led to discussion of what the book said about society in relation to the context of the society at the time Wells wrote it, which allows us a deeper understanding of what he was trying to say about society and the pitfalls it needs to avoid.

On the other hand, the fact that we had to discuss the believability of the novel at all leads me to question how we were reading it. Though it was meant to take place in our world, the world of today is so different from both the world in which Wells lived and the one he created that we cannot judge the book based on criteria from today’s world. The book consistently follows it’s own logic, so we should not have to question the world it shows us. However, we do question that world, and not just because we are reading the book from a modern perspective. We also question that world because the Time Traveller himself questions that world. He doesn’t question it by pointing out what doesn’t make sense, but he questions it by creating hypotheses about it that are continually wrong. Because Wells forces us to see this new world through the Time Traveller’s eyes, his assumptions become our own, and as those assumptions are disproved, we begin to mistrust our own judgments of what is taking place in the future that Wells shows us.