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bongocrime
Feb. 20th, 2009 11:34 am( A Day And A Night And A Day by Glen Duncan )
Since which I decided, after a few Conan stories which were dubiously racist and rapey even by Robert E Howard's standards ("Women are cheap as plantains in this land, and their willingness or unwillingness matters as little" - this is the hero speaking, remember - "But I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man."), to read some nice light space opera. Except it turns out that like the Glen Duncan book, James Blish's 1956 They Shall Have Stars is about the spiritual malaise of humanity in the first decades of the 21st century. The USA's democratic traditions are wounded after certain elements of the administration decided, for reasons of "security", to place themselves above the law. A key government position became hereditary, building on trends initiated when "a stunningly popular Man-on-Horseback who dripped charisma but had no brains to speak of" was President. Space exploration has stalled, tangled in bureaucracy and vested interests*; "scientific ideas have become so abstract that even their originators can't suggest ways to test them", except by ever more grotesquely massive and experimental means (although at least unlike CERN, theirs seem to work). It's not so much a space opera as a prologue to a space opera in the other books - for one junior senator, against all odds, finds himself in a position to turn things around...and no mention is made of his race, but Bliss Wagoner is at least as silly a name as Barack Obama, right?
*As with Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, this dystopian vision of pretty much now is slightly too optimistic, in that apparently no major moves were made in space since the 1981 establishment of a base on Titan. We should be so lucky as to live in that dystopia.
Since which I decided, after a few Conan stories which were dubiously racist and rapey even by Robert E Howard's standards ("Women are cheap as plantains in this land, and their willingness or unwillingness matters as little" - this is the hero speaking, remember - "But I am not such a dog as to leave a white woman in the clutches of a black man."), to read some nice light space opera. Except it turns out that like the Glen Duncan book, James Blish's 1956 They Shall Have Stars is about the spiritual malaise of humanity in the first decades of the 21st century. The USA's democratic traditions are wounded after certain elements of the administration decided, for reasons of "security", to place themselves above the law. A key government position became hereditary, building on trends initiated when "a stunningly popular Man-on-Horseback who dripped charisma but had no brains to speak of" was President. Space exploration has stalled, tangled in bureaucracy and vested interests*; "scientific ideas have become so abstract that even their originators can't suggest ways to test them", except by ever more grotesquely massive and experimental means (although at least unlike CERN, theirs seem to work). It's not so much a space opera as a prologue to a space opera in the other books - for one junior senator, against all odds, finds himself in a position to turn things around...and no mention is made of his race, but Bliss Wagoner is at least as silly a name as Barack Obama, right?
*As with Brunner's Stand on Zanzibar, this dystopian vision of pretty much now is slightly too optimistic, in that apparently no major moves were made in space since the 1981 establishment of a base on Titan. We should be so lucky as to live in that dystopia.
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