Yesterday we talked to Jim Munroe aboutone of the most political skill fiction novels writtenin the last century , and today we ’ve cornered scientific discipline fabrication generator Charles Stross into spill about the future tense of a more socio - political yield : sex . Stross is the author most recently of Halting State , a near - succeeding MMO law-breaking thriller , as well as gender - bending prison house experimentation novel Glasshouse , extropian radical war novel Singularity Sky , and many others . His novel are often political in the “ ruler fighting ” sense as well as in the personal signified — his fictitious character are at odds with themselves , judge to figure thing out like love and sexual identicalness while also shooting big guns and trifle with nanotech . So here ’s what Stross talks about when he talks about sexuality ( and politics ) .
https://gizmodo.com/science-fiction-that-changed-political-rhetoric-forever-341615
When is science fiction a var. of political intervention ?
That ’s a ruffianly one !
bet at fiction in the broad sense , it ’s clean clear that it can have political reverberation ; Orwell ’s workplace ( from “ Animal Farm ” and “ 1984 ” to the less - well - remembered journalistic indictment , “ The Road to
Wigan Pier ” ) was unambiguously political , and in “ 1984 ” he certainly bring with tools from the box tag “ scientific discipline fabrication ” . But it ’s relatively rare for government to be the main role of a work of fable , and even rare for a employment of professedly political fabrication to be any good .
Fiction , schmoose , story - notification — is , when you get down to it , usually used as an entertainment mass medium , and also as a chemical mechanism for designate us about other ways of thinking , and if you endeavor to prophesy a
political message you unremarkably stop up with something that ’s not very entertaining ( if not in a flash annoying to a caboodle of your reader ) .
I suspect political fable is at its good precisely when it does n’t preach , but restricts itself to show the reader a unlike style of life or cogitate , and but makes it clear that this is an last - item or outcome for some variety of political creed . leave behind the readers to either enjoy it as a employment of fabrication , or to bring together up the Lucy in the sky with diamonds and apprehend the soma of the monster lurking in the screen background : but do n’t beat them over the head with it .
In Glasshouse , you could have travel the obvious route in exploring the horror of twentieth - century sexuality roles by sound out but “ Yuck woman ’s roles really sucked . ” But instead it seemed to me that for your characters the most frightful gender experiences were those of men ( in particular Sam ) dealing with maleness . What made you go this centering ? Was your point that all gender role are crappy unless they can be prefer ?
That ’s a part of it , but only a part …
… Because the set - up in the Glasshouse is n’t merely about sexuality ; it ’s about how social system of oppression emerge and become self - sustain and self - reinforcing once you create a privileged group who do good from enforcement the roles . It could equally well have been about pelt colour , or organized religion , or left- versus right- handedness , but physical sex is a convenient sweetener to hang it on because it ’s intimately familiar , and we ’ve got a roughly 50/50 randomized storage allocation to commence with . And then you get the societal construction of gender use layered on top of the existent physical bits’n’pieces , which adds a bed of indirection to it all .
I was in part writing a tribute novel to John Varley , and in part slant my hat at Paul Linebarger , who write wonderful scientific discipline fiction as Cordwainer Smith but who in real living was also make out as the father of psychological warfare : and I ’d been reading up on Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo ’s work on obedience to authority and emergent behaviour in unpleasant artificial societies — Zimbardo was the brain behind the Stanford Prison Study — so there you have the bundle of influences that shape Glasshouse .
The key conceit in the novel was the app of the Stanford Prison Study communications protocol to gender roles , in a posthuman order where real physical sound structure — and therefore sexual identity — is ordinarily under voluntary control . That ’s where the gender dysphoria and alarum and unhappiness number from : it ’s an explicit metaphor for imprisonment . ( As for what the Glasshouse is for — within the textbook — that ’s something else : Robin / Reeve is a notoriously unreliable narrator , and while he / she think his side succeed the state of war , and the Glasshouse is a prison environment for reuse war malefactor from the other side , how do we really recognize that he / she is right ? After all , he / she has lost most of his / her memories , and he / she is in there … ! )
But to get back to your motion : many men do have trouble with their assign grammatical gender and its tie in behaviour . And yes , any sexuality character has the electric potential to be a repress caul unless it ’s voluntarily adopted . Many of us , I think , are a piddling bit nonadaptive , and kick against the traces of what ’s expected of us from time to sentence — but what must it be like to live in a culture where that is discouraged to the point where you may be killed for it ? And what , in demarcation , might it be like to exist in a culture where the affair is entirely voluntary ? I thought that was worth asking .
Putting your fantast goggles on for a second , how do you imagine that humans will finally get away from grammatical gender roles ? Will we require nanotech to make sex changes a breeze ? Will we need fortieth wave feminism ?
( I wish . )
don my fantast lid , I ’d have to say that sex change are likely to stay hard , and controversial , for quite a while to come . There ’s a lot of physiologic differences , go all the way down to the cellular level .
On the other hand , there ’s a stack of scope for improvements in how we have-to doe with to one another . look back just 100 years , we ’ve made some remarkable progress in terms of equality and freedom of expression for the great unwashed who do n’t equip the stereotypical sexuality roles of their contemporary society . Go back to , say , 1858 , and the effectual rights and societal theatrical role of women in British society was n’t that unlike from Iran today . ( In fact , present-day Iran is probably doing substantially in some areas . ) Segregating people from parturition and channeling their lifetime opportunity on the basis of their strong-arm sex seems to me to be every fleck as unjustifiable as doing so on the basis of their skin color . And I ’d care to live to see the twenty-four hour period when it ’s as unacceptable to engage in gender stereotyping as it is to lock in racial stereotyping .
( But I ’m afraid I ’m not holding my breath . )
Kathleen Ann Goonan say she sample to write her SF as if sexuality does n’t matter . Do you think that ’s possible ?
I ’m not sure . The business of fiction is the bailiwick of the human condition , and gender is something that many humans are obsessed with , thus micturate it rather difficult to ignore when studying the human experimental condition ! On the other hand , you do n’t need to take received whimsy of sexuality as unanimous demonstrate facts , especially in scientific discipline fabrication , where it ’s always fun to bend constants into variables and start twiddling the knobs to see where things go . dependable luck to her for try , anyway !
Image by Mark Fredrickson from the cover of Stross ’ novel The Atrocity Archives .
BooksCharles StrossSci - Fi
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