Re: [Marxism] Fantasy and SF for socialists.

[Nick Fredman <n.fredman.11@xxxxxxxxxx>]

Yes thanks for an interesting list, about which I'll throw in a few
comments.

The list has Marge Piercy's Woman on the Edge of Time, which is very worthy
but I recall it being quite depressing. I liked her Body of Glass more. This
parallels a retelling of the Prague ghetto golem story with a
post-apocalyptic cyborg story. Maybe the idea of a hi-tech kibbutz-like
settlement of US Jews, which creates the cyborg to fight the corporate
baddies, is a bit Zionist.

Also sort of in the "post-apocalyptic besieged outpost of socialism"
subgenre, and not on the list, is Starhawk's The Fifth Sacred Thing. Some
here might think the idea of a post-capitalist society in which people who
appear to be Marxists are a tolerated minority among masses of hippies,
freaks, and complementary medicine practitioners is highly unlikely, or even
a type of hell, but I think it's set in the Bay Area, so who knows. It is
pretty hippy trippy, but she's a decent writer, and when I heard her speak
here circa 2002, on the anti-corporate movement, she seemed a quite sensible
radical liberal.

Something definitely meant to be a dystopia is Margaret Attwood's A
Handmaid's Tale, about the horrific oppression of women after a military
coup in the US led by a sort of Christian fascist movement (there's a decent
movie of it too). Surprisingly not on this list, though it seems some SF
fans don't like it when serious literary types go slumming in speculative
fiction land. 

Anything by William Gibson is interesting, especially his evocation of urban
landscapes, which he's said are influenced by Mike Davis - though maybe in
the superficial way some postmodernists are influenced by Gramsci.

I've just enjoyed watching HBO's True Blood, a sort of southern Gothic
vampire story with lots of black humour and social and political satire (the
vampires have just "come out", though spilt into separatist and
integrationist factions), by Alan Ball of American Beauty and Six Feet
Under. Forget the books it's based on though, utter rubbish, possibly the
worst published writing I've read.

You've got to beware of cross-media translations - some good stuff by
William Gibson was turned into a dreadful film, Johnny Mnemonic, with
possibly the worst acting I've seen on a screen (by a screaming Henry
Rollins, with Ice T and Keanu Reeves not much better).








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