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Which Book Are You Reading Now? Volume XII
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SS-18 ICBM
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A non-fiction palate cleanser for now, @WAR: the Rise of the Military-Internet Complex by Shane Harris is about the emergence of American cyberwarfare capability during the Bush and Obama administrations. It covers a number of important topics, such as the leading role played by the NSA (the biggest buyer of zero-day vulnerabilities at the time), at one point even leading to turf wars with Homeland Security. The main theme is the partnership government agencies have made with private companies, and the opportunities (e.g. private companies are more responsive) and challenges (e.g. private companies launching their own cyber attacks on other sovereign nations) this creates. A secondary theme is the role China has played in this through its cyberwarfare initiatives: from specialized military units to economic espionage efforts and even patriotic hacktivism. The author's sources include top officials in both public and private institutions and the revelations leaked by Snowden.
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And then back to fiction. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is considered a classic dystopian novel. I don't know how it deserves this prized reputation. What does it really do that Brave New World (consumerism, apathetic populace, bread and circuses) and 1984 (censorship, warmongering) didn't already do better? The book just seems to run off the premise "what if firemen (heh, get it?) started fires to burn books?" with little build-up (the book is short, clocking in at only 158 pages). World-building is rudimentary: houses are suddenly fireproof just so nobody would question if the Firemen's actions cause ludicrous collateral damage (so what about the other things than houses that still catch fire, Mr. Bradbury?). The characters are barely developed, with the most egregious example being Clarisse, a textbook Manic Pixie Dream Girl who gets killed off halfway through. I also finally see the inspiration for Far Cry 5's ending. While the book is written in figurative language and a stream-of-consciousness style, some metaphors fall flat and there is often a lack of subtlety.
The book really boils down to Captain Beatty's rants about books and intellectualism. Society in this universe just decided to forget about the past and become dumb, but unlike Huxley ("There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and..."), Bradbury never provides a compelling history of why this happened. As a result, F451 reads as an old man's rant againsttelevision modern life's tempo and changes. Not even seeing it as mainly about censorship helps. Bradbury's supposed predictions all fall flat: books are still popular (one need only to point at the success of Harry Potter), niche media exists even in a globalized world, there were no atomic wars since 1945, people may actually be getting smarter (as the Flynn Effect demonstrates). The cynic in me thinks this book only gets so much praise just so the Americans can point to it and say "See, it's not only the Brits who can write dystopian novels!" Again, what did this book add that Orwell's and Huxley's masterpieces didn't?
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And then back to fiction. Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury is considered a classic dystopian novel. I don't know how it deserves this prized reputation. What does it really do that Brave New World (consumerism, apathetic populace, bread and circuses) and 1984 (censorship, warmongering) didn't already do better? The book just seems to run off the premise "what if firemen (heh, get it?) started fires to burn books?" with little build-up (the book is short, clocking in at only 158 pages). World-building is rudimentary: houses are suddenly fireproof just so nobody would question if the Firemen's actions cause ludicrous collateral damage (so what about the other things than houses that still catch fire, Mr. Bradbury?). The characters are barely developed, with the most egregious example being Clarisse, a textbook Manic Pixie Dream Girl who gets killed off halfway through. I also finally see the inspiration for Far Cry 5's ending. While the book is written in figurative language and a stream-of-consciousness style, some metaphors fall flat and there is often a lack of subtlety.
The book really boils down to Captain Beatty's rants about books and intellectualism. Society in this universe just decided to forget about the past and become dumb, but unlike Huxley ("There was a choice between World Control and destruction. Between stability and..."), Bradbury never provides a compelling history of why this happened. As a result, F451 reads as an old man's rant against
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ayo @SS-18 ICBM I agree that Fahrenheit 451 ain't that good and is in fact quite flawed but you went ham when you didn't really need to
A lot of Bradbury's oeuvre - not all of it, but a lot of it - kinda boiled down to a cantankerous gripe about where technology was going. (And where society in general was going - in the 1990s, he complained about the alleged "PC culture" that was leading blacks and homosexuals to control people's thoughts. Yeah, okay, sure, buddy.) Not all of the griping panned out. Not all of it even made sense. He definitely wrote in a more short story mold where worldbuilding was a tertiary concern (rightly, so long as the rest of the story "works" in some way) and character development to the full, flowery extent of a novel wasn't appropriate. Sometimes that weakened his stories.
I mean, if you're saying that Americans have never produced a single, titanic, towering work of truly exceptional dystopian fiction along the lines of 1984...well, that's true, because nobody has, not even Huxley.
Dude. It's fiction. They're different stories. This is like saying "what did The Things They Carried do that the Iliad didn't already do better"?
Yep. Bradbury rarely did "subtle".That's why we teach it to middle school students and why we use his short stories to teach high school freshmen.
I made literally this very joke to some freshmen reading "The Veldt" (a Bradbury short story) several weeks ago.
A lot of Bradbury's oeuvre - not all of it, but a lot of it - kinda boiled down to a cantankerous gripe about where technology was going. (And where society in general was going - in the 1990s, he complained about the alleged "PC culture" that was leading blacks and homosexuals to control people's thoughts. Yeah, okay, sure, buddy.) Not all of the griping panned out. Not all of it even made sense. He definitely wrote in a more short story mold where worldbuilding was a tertiary concern (rightly, so long as the rest of the story "works" in some way) and character development to the full, flowery extent of a novel wasn't appropriate. Sometimes that weakened his stories.
This is a facially absurd statement. If Americans were interested in dystopian-novel-points-scoring (which they, uh, aren't?) they'd presumably point to the likes of Kurt Vonnegut, Harlan Ellison, Ursula K. LeGuin, and Philip K. Dick, not just Bradbury and Fahrenheit 451.
I mean, if you're saying that Americans have never produced a single, titanic, towering work of truly exceptional dystopian fiction along the lines of 1984...well, that's true, because nobody has, not even Huxley.
Dekker
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American War by Omar El Akkad. It's set in the near future during the closing bouts of a second Civil War in the United States. While the concept should be more intriguing and some would say prescient, I don't find that it really offers that much insights into the actual reasons that may lead to such an event, such as the current polarization taking place in the U.S taken to the extreme. It attempts to hold up a mirror to America's actions in places such as the Middle East and show some of what causes someone to do something like put on a suicide vest, but the telling is very dry.
Fun fact: Bradbury himself stated that he considered his books and stories to be more properly thought of as fantasy, rather than science fiction.
Most of Bradbury's science fiction is obsolete now as far as "future predictions/future history" is concerned. So are a lot of Heinlein's books, for that matter (no farms on the moons of Jupiter!). That doesn't mean they didn't write good stories.
F.M. Busby wrote a series of dystopian novels in the space opera sub-genre. He predicted a world run by multinational corporations that became increasingly fascist until one of them took over most of the world (as one novel states, Scandinavia held out until an atomic bomb was dropped on that region). Part of why this happened was due to massive migration from Asia and Africa to North America (due the catastrophic effects of climate change and insufficient resources to feed everyone); things got to the point where the U.S. government could not afford to govern. Therefore the multinationals took over, and what used to be the U.S. annexed Canada and Mexico. Those three countries ceased to exist and formed the basis for what became the world government known as United Energy & Transport (UET).
Busby was a science fiction author who lived in Washington state; I met him at a science fiction convention in 1989. I mentioned that with the exception of the space travel part of the series, the events he wrote about seemed quite plausible. He pooh-poohed that, saying, "It's only a story."
Well, F.M. Busby died some years ago, and I've wondered sometimes what he would think of the society that's been developing in the U.S. and around the world since his death.
So Bradbury isn't the only American SF writer who wrote dystopian fiction.
Canada's got Margaret Atwood for the honor of resident writer of dystopian fiction - The Handmaid's Tale was made into a TV series, with the third season coming next year.
Traitorfish
The Tighnahulish Kid
I think the first part might help answer the second. Vonnegut and LeGuin were stridently left wing. Ellison was a hardcore libertarian. Dick was just a counterculture weirdo. They're all hard sells to a pretty conservative popular culture. Brabury was a crotchety old man who thought that things were better before Negroes got the vote. I don't know if there really is any desire to present an American model for dystopian fiction, but if there was, I can see why Bradbury might be preferred by the sort of people who get hung up on these things.
To be honest, it's more likely that Farenheit 451 is simply easy to teach, so a lot of people read it, and as the British are collectively capable of shutting up about Orwell for so much as five minutes, there's an inevitable comparison between what are probably the only works of literary dystopian fiction most people encounter, which is easily cast in national terms.
(Orwell was also kind of a crotchety old man. For all his strident socialism, he had a reactionary streak that he never really worked out. It tends to get overlooked because he went to Spain and had his neck blown out by a fascist sniper before getting purged by the NKVD, which, yeah, fair enough, that will earn you some radical cred.)
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SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
I suppose I did. But it's just really annoying that so many have been hyping it up as a classic masterpiece. It's like I'm expecting a steak and got served a hotdog. Hotdogs are enjoyable, but steaks they most certainly aren't.
Let's continue with the food analogies. Steaks, hotdogs, and salads are three different foods. But one of them is less similar to the other two.
I'd like that. I wish I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream got the novel treatment and had more mainstream exposure, instead of F451. Vonnegut gets a lot of deserved praise, but people don't usually point to him as a dystopian author.
Which then begs the question why Bradbury expanded it to a novel without the required work that entails.
I had a previous post here on one of Heinlein's works. While I disliked some things, the good outweighed the bad. I can point to the AI character Mike and the culture of the Loonies as writing that I greatly enjoyed. Unfortunately, I can't think of anything similar for F451.
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I haven't read most of this thread, so I didn't see your previous post.
The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress is one of my favorite Heinlein novels. I'm also partial to Citizen of the Galaxy. There are many in my collection that are now so obsolete with the new knowledge we have of the other planets, I just can't get enthused about re-reading them. At least the Moon hasn't presented us with so much new knowledge that we can't still enjoy the stories about colonies there without thinking they're hopelessly out of touch with current science.
As for Mike, aka Adam Selene... I really like that character, and I don't say that about most AI characters.
Fahrenheit 451 doesn't have likeable characters. It wasn't meant to. I find the idea of book burning a horrible thing, because first of all, I have an extensive personal library that numbers in the thousands, and has been ongoing for decades (I started collecting science fiction in 1975, fantasy in 1985, but prior to 1975 I was into mystery novels). I've got a variety of non-fiction books as well. The idea that somebody could legally march in here and destroy all of it (along with what I've written myself) is nightmarish.
As for the complaints about it not being a lengthy book... novels weren't particularly long in past decades. It's a fairly recent thing to have novels that are really long. I'm slowly working my way through the Outlander novels by Diana Gabaldon, and it's slow going; those things are over 1000 pages each, and I might read a chapter or maybe just a couple of pages at bedtime. Or at least I did before I happened to play a particular video game in August and the characters and storyline in that one just grabbed my attention to the point where I'm now writing fanfiction about it because I want to know more about what happens to the characters and the only way to do that is to write it myself. So my bedtime reading is now taken up with me writing down bits of dialogue and scenes in a notebook for my own stories.
I don't want to live in a world where reading and writing are forbidden - that's the kind of society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale, where most women aren't allowed to read or write (only the Aunts are allowed because they need to be able to keep track of the Handmaids' information as to which woman is stationed at which house, whether or not they're pregnant, which days they're most likely to conceive, etc.). Not even the Commanders' Wives are allowed to read and write.
All of here take reading and writing and even the idea of basic literacy for granted. Would any of us want to live in a world where we didn't have these? That's what these dystopian SF stories are getting at: Be glad you live in a world where you can read this, because the alternative would be a very bad place.
JohannaK
Heroically Clueless
I prefer shorter novels, myself, as I can read them in a more comfortably short time. If 158 pages will do, dont write another 300. One of the best novels I have read, I will never finish. It is 1000 pages long, and though it is very well written and has very interesting things to say, 500 pages were enough for me. I felt as though the other 500 couldnt offer me anything the first 500 had, so I stopped. It is a wonderful novel that I won't finish. It is called I Confess, if you are interested.
SS-18 ICBM
Oscillator
"Likeable" and "developed" are not always synonymous for literary characters. The Loonies are well-characterized, but I don't think I could live with them.
Ajidica
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Orwell was a bit of a weirdo. He opposed the creation of British Rail because he thought having different classes of passengers was hierarchical; and also opposed Labour's post-war housing construction as too hierarchical because Reasons. (Something to do with him believing blocks of flats and towers weren't conducive to creative expression.)
Still working my way through Barbarians at the Gate: The Rise and Fall of RJR Nabisco. Well written book that really shows how much corporate culture changed in the 80s, and the shift from the idea that managements job was to ensure the corporation slowly and steadily expanded -with a sense of patrician responsibility toward the workers- toward the idea the focus should be on short term profits to reward the shareholders and really reward the executives.
hobbsyoyo
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The edict that increasing shareholder value is the only duty of a corporation is a legal and economic fiction. Well, actually, it may now have a bit of legal standing due to the tendency for Republican-controlled courts to service the monied class but still.
Of course not, since they grew up in a prison, and developed social customs and mores necessary to ensure as much cooperation as possible among the inmates/descendants of inmates in a closed environment. Due to the imbalance of the sexes (many more men than women), marriage and dating customs changed so that polygamous marriages were not only accepted, but considered quite normal - and that's one of the cultural things that separated the people of Luna from Earth.
Don't forget: The Moon was a penal colony, and anyone who didn't adhere to acceptable standards of courtesy and pulling their share of the work was likely to be tossed out an airlock.
I realize that a lot of readers feel disgust at Heinlein's stories in which polygamy and incest occur (I still shake my head over that group marriage at the end of To Sail Beyond the Sunset, in which Maureen Johnson marries not only her son, but also her father), but there is one point that he makes repeatedly in all his novels including that theme: The care, nurturing, and safety of the children are paramount, no matter who the biological parents may be.
I just heard the voice of Michael Douglas saying ‘Greed is good’ in my head, and then my mind jumped to Gordon of Gekko.
Estebonrober
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Death's End, been on a sci fi splurge since witnessing The Expanse on prime.
https://www.npr.org/2016/09/27/494927821/deaths-end-brings-an-epic-trilogy-to-a-satisfying-close
https://www.npr.org/2016/09/27/494927821/deaths-end-brings-an-epic-trilogy-to-a-satisfying-close
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog". Really good, so good in fact I almost finished it in a matter of hours. It's also really short. It's not "Master and Margarita", but it's as cynical as a novel about a dog should be 
boooooooobut it's as cynical as a novel about a dog should be
(I still smiled)
boooooooo
I see and approve of what you did there.Bulgakov's "Heart of a Dog". Really good, so good in fact I almost finished it in a matter of hours. It's also really short. It's not "Master and Margarita", but it's as cynical as a novel about a dog should be
Anyway, I got myself a copy of Daily life of the Etruscans by Jacques Heurgon.
yung.carl.jung
Hey Bird! I'm Morose & Lugubrious
currently reading lolita, started today and am about 1/3 done (due to the ****** trainwreck I submit myself to every monday and thursday.. 4 hours by train to my uni, then, at some ungodly time like 8:15 in the eve, 4 hours back. I almost never come home before midnight. today one of my trains ran late and I was stranded in ******** nowhere for 2 hours and got home at 1 am (now)
I really like Nabokov's style. it's not the easiest book to read in public, but gave me a weird feeling of me being "in the know", it felt like I was doing something wrong while ppl were watching me
finished heart of a dog yesterday. I loved the last third, it lifted the entire novel up a bit for me.
I really like Nabokov's style. it's not the easiest book to read in public, but gave me a weird feeling of me being "in the know", it felt like I was doing something wrong while ppl were watching me
finished heart of a dog yesterday. I loved the last third, it lifted the entire novel up a bit for me.
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