On Apr 11, 12:15 am, Eric D. Berge <eric_berge @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
hotmail.com.invalid>
wrote:
> On Mon, 7 Apr 2008 20:44:35 -0700 (PDT), Ahasuerus
>
> <ahasue...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> >On the other hand, it's easy to see how Steve's "discussion of the
> >book[s] here" can eventually help convince a reader that the strength
> >of his convictions is not always fully sup****ted by his command of the
> >facts, something hinted at in the books. Admittedly, this is by no
> >means uncommon in SF, but it can seriously damage the kind of WSOD
> >that you need to enjoy world building scenarios, something that
> >Stirling specializes in. Which is too bad since, as you say:
>
> >> Now, Stirling is a vastly better writer than John Norman, but
still...
>
> AOL to that - I liked (some of) his books a good deal before I
> encountered him on soc.history.what-if.
>
> Now that I know how much of his own **** he believes, I find him
> pretty nearly unreadable. And creepy as hell.
It's an interesting question, but I am not sure how discovering that a
speculative fiction writer truly believes the unorthodox ideas that he
plays with in his books may influence his readers' perception of his
work. For example, does our knowledge of Piper's views on
reincarnation affect the reception of his stories?
In Stirling's case, however, it's not just what his beliefs *are*,
it's the command of the underlying facts and the overall methodology
that may have this effect. Heck, it may have an effect even when the
beliefs themselves are quite orthodox. For example, in a 2000
discussion of the Russian revolution of 1917 (with Eric Flint, another
"world builder" mentioned downthread), Stirling was defending the
traditional view of the Bolshevik coup and their dispersal of the
democratically elected Constituent Assembly. For example, when Flint
claimed (http://groups.google.com/group/rec.arts.sf.written/msg/
6600a1d6222c3698):
"As for the Duma [sic], it was elected in the summer of 1917. By the
time it was to convene, 6 months later, the political equation in
Russia had changed
completely. Nobody thought that Duma reflected anything real any
longer, so the Bolsheviks AND the Left SRs dispersed it. "
Stirling responded:
"come now, this is a pretty poor attempt to avoid the central issue;
the
Duma was elected by the people, and therefore the sole legitimate
source of
power. [T]hey dispersed it because they were in a minority as far as
votes were
concerned, but had the preponderance of physical power.
Coup d'etat, pure and simple."
Stirling's overall position in this case is the mainstream one: the
Bolsheviks didn't have the votes on their side (about 23%, to be
precise), but they had the guns. Lenin even spelled it out a couple of
years later in http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/dec/16.htm
..
The im****tant thing, however, was that Stirling didn't address
numerous factual errors and omissions in Eric Flint's posts, e.g.:
1. "Duma" was a term used to describe two different institutions in
1917. Neither one had anything to do with the Constituent Assembly.
(Both Flint and Stirling made this mistake in a number of posts).
2. The Constituent Assembly elections took place not in the summer,
but in November 1917, two weeks after the Bolshevik coup.
3. When the Bolsheviks were campaigning against the previous
government (i.e. the 4th Provisional Government) in the fall of 1917,
they blasted that government for postponing Constituent Assembly
elections and promised to hold them on schedule (which they did). As
Lenin wrote to his Bolshevik Central Committee colleagues in September
1917 (http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/sep/14.htm):
"Our Party alone, on taking power, can secure the Constituent
Assembly's convocation; it will then accuse the other parties of
procrastination and will be able to substantiate its accusations."
4. When a Bolshevik government (later briefly joined by the Left
Socialist Revolutionaries) was formed, it explicitly referred to
itself as a "provisional" government.
5. The reason that the Constituent Assembly was convened almost 2
months (not 6 months as Eric Flint wrote) after the election was that
the Bolsheviks delayed its convocation once they realized that they
would be in a minority.
6. The Bolsheviks themselves were split on the issue. A majority of
the Bolsheviks elected to the Assembly were against the dispersal and
elected a "bureau" which began acting accordingly. It wasn't until
Lenin prevailed in the Bolshevik Central Committee and forced the
Bolshevik faction to form a new "bureau" that the Bolshevik position
crystallized.
The impression that one gets when reading this kind of Usenet
exchanges is that the participants are arguing based on garbled
recollections of high level overviews of the period in question rather
than on good working knowledge of the actual events. And that can be a
real WSOD killer when reading their specfiction treatments of history :
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