![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
james_davis_nicollConvenience: When all you have to show the decision-making process that will end in the Earth being hurtled to Andromeda is about 200 pages, it's a lot easier and dramatic to have Henry Clark make the decision than to try to show the Security Council and voting members of General Assembly debate and deal-cut their way to a decision.
Deglerism: A lot of SF writers are, how to put it nicely? Political freaks whose views have as much chance of becoming the consensus as I have of peeing pure antimatter. When you know the only reason people listen to you is to laugh at the sounds that come out, fantasies about rounding up all of ones enemies to lecture them before machine-gunning most of them and forcing the rest to work in the plutonium mines may appeal.
Deglerism: A lot of SF writers are, how to put it nicely? Political freaks whose views have as much chance of becoming the consensus as I have of peeing pure antimatter. When you know the only reason people listen to you is to laugh at the sounds that come out, fantasies about rounding up all of ones enemies to lecture them before machine-gunning most of them and forcing the rest to work in the plutonium mines may appeal.
![[identity profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/openid.png){kind=small}
James...
Date: 2005-04-20 08:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 08:42 pm (UTC)The preponderance of monarchies does seem a bit odd, especially given that it's perfectly possible to write a decent potboiler set in the supposed Real World that has plenty of complex politics.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 08:52 pm (UTC)I'm not sure I understand Canadian politics well enough to invent something as corrupt and functional. :(
The terrible truth behind Canadian politics
Date: 2005-04-20 08:56 pm (UTC)Re: The terrible truth behind Canadian politics
Date: 2005-04-20 09:33 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 08:52 pm (UTC)Brian Stableford's recent series had sections that seemed to my admittedly biased eye to read like "Finally, the _right kind of people_ were running things". The future history it is vaguely based on (THE THRID MILLENNIUM?) definitely had bits in it about the glories of central planning, even when the outcome for the mob isn't that great and at least in it, most humans were not conveniently scraped off the board before play began.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 08:59 pm (UTC)What you have to watch out for is stuff slipping under the radar, like LMB's Vorkosigan books, where the monarchy has a sop of semi-democracy (the Council of Counts) but the real power is centered on a charismatic dictator, who has had predecessors that have been demonstrably either ruthless power players (Ezar), or utter sociopaths (Yuri).
An exagerration admittedly, but still true in certain contexts.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 09:18 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 10:21 pm (UTC)Why so many monarchies?
Date: 2005-04-21 06:01 pm (UTC)In their piece about writing The Mote In God's Eye, Pournelle and Niven discuss the positive reaction they got to the Imperium--basically, the fashion had been for democracies (In Space-ace-ace-ace!) and they got a nice response because as a fictional basis, there's no problem with a monarchy. So part of it might be simple herd behavior.
Many SF writers are ripping off history, too, and monarchies are much more common than democracies in the past. (The space battles in Bio of a Space Tyrant come to mind, as well as the many versions of Belisarius who have appeared over the years. I think there's a cloning factory somewhere, popping out Belisarii...)
The other--and this is much less sturdy thinking--idea is that it might be an embodiment of the One Man Can Make A Difference thinking that underpins so much genre fiction. (Perhaps necessarily.) There is no clearer way to signal that a single individual can make a difference than by putting a single individual in charge of it all. Whether this is an after-effect of decades of political wrangling and lobbying and subcommittee work, I can't say. (Goodness knows that monarchies have as much wrangling and lobbying, etc.) This creates a background against which your main character can Make A Difference. (The class restrictions of so many monarchies are conveniently ignored; it is perhaps not a coincidence that Mutually Assured Destruction and Make A Difference have the same acronym.) That might be giving them too much credit for conscious symbolism, however.
There's also a class of writers that wants to write about the Movers and the Shakers. They want to write about Kings and Queens and nobility, who are perceived as having much more freedom than the everyday bloke. (I run into them sometimes. Some of them are under the impression that kings have the same responsibilities and freedoms as Captain Kirk, forever beaming down onto the planet where death waits with sharp pointy teeth for the red-shirted. Others are sensible and want to talk about the interactions of countries and policies as well as trying to tell good human stories.)
I think it was James Gunn who said that in SF, all people are equal through technology and anyone can achieve anything; in fantasy, you have to be born special. But there's certainly a measure of the latter in SF, what with the "Fans are Slans" attitude that many have.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 08:56 pm (UTC)*grin* Why put it nicely when not doing so is so much fun?
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 09:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 09:10 pm (UTC)I wonder what the specific impulse of antimatter contaminated urine is? My rocket books don't seem to address this. I am fairly certain that the urethra is not really suited to double-duty as a rocket nozzle and that's going to hurt performance.
no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 09:42 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 11:40 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 10:03 pm (UTC)Huh
Date: 2005-04-21 10:29 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2005-04-20 09:52 pm (UTC)Convenience explains a lot.
Date: 2005-04-21 04:26 pm (UTC)(Has it ever struck anyone else as odd that having decided it was time to slack off on the political/research/publishing track, marry his star student, move to a remote family-friendly small town, and spend his days reading favorite classics like "Three Men in a Boat" -- Kip's father in Have Spacesuit, Will Travel is quite strangely undersupplied with offspring? Pee-wee's father has a better excuse -- one daughter like her would put anybody off the whole thought. But I don't quite understand why Kip is an only...)
This too explains the remote laboratory in which the solitary, near-hermit and possibly mad scientist conducts noisy, smelly, and otherwise obvious experiments that would have the neighbors and sherrif on his porch in a heartbeat were he actually attempting such a thing instead in the room over his garage in the faculty housing area close to campus ...
And the lone barbarian carving his way across the battlefield with a bloody broadsword. The story of one legionaire digging his few yards of fortifications around the encampment, then digging the latrines, then digging the soon-to-be-straw-insulated ice-cream making pit for his commanders ...
It probably even explains why fictional questing companies of, say, nine or so assorted hobbits, elves, dwarves et al tend to quickly break down into more conventional (dialog-able) pairs.
Re: Convenience explains a lot.
Date: 2005-04-21 04:46 pm (UTC)Perhaps they had fertility issues? I don't really remember Kip's mom from that book.
Pee-Wee is a Girl in Charge and if anyone made a decision about how many siblings she'd have, it was probably her. I wonder when the first GIC showed up in RAH's ficiton?
Re: Convenience explains a lot.
Date: 2005-04-22 02:30 pm (UTC)That's about all I remember.
I always assumed fertility issues...but maybe I'm biased.