On Apr 12, 7:35 pm, Ahasuerus <ahasue...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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
> > >Stirlingspecializes in. Which is too bad since, as you say:
>
> > >> Now,Stirlingis 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?
>
I don't know Piper's views and I haven't read much of his work, but
in Stirling's case the fact that he's come off online as a raging
asshole does reflect negatively on his work. And it's not just the
personality but his views. It's one thing to read a story where the
FICTIONAL world contains unsettling elements but quite another to find
out that the author himself believes such to be true. Some people
have mentioned his penchant for lesbian or bi-curious female T&A in
his stories but what I find rather more disturbing is the seemingly
positive attitude towards paternalism that several of his stories
demonstrate. One can, as Stirling has, argue that this is merely him
exploring certain topics but there's not actually much of intellectual
value in Stirling's "explorations" and it crops up a bit too often. I
mean, after the massive Draka series what more do you have to say
about paternalism? Lots of people, myself included, have given
Stirling the business for the lack of realism in the Draka timeline.
Stirling has justified this by saying that those works were an attempt
to create a modern distopia which essentially rejected many of the
ideals which the US and other modern democracies were founded on, and
that's fine, if he had included a bit more exploration of the
consequences of this beyond an action adventure setting. And in
Drakon he gives a literal explanation by explaning that the Draka
timeline is one of many timelines and is a particularly low
probability one surrounded by several ones where the Earth has been
rendered uninhabitable by the Final War. Most of the criticism of the
realism of the books has stemmed from very high political and
technological standpoints, namely that literally EVERYTHING in the
Draka timeline breaks their way and that they are never opposed by
anyone until after 1945 despite their aggressive gobbling up of
territory and enslaving of millions of people (at a time when the rest
of the world was becoming rhetorically committed to free labor). But
I think that Stirling, and his critics, could benefit from more
reading about slavery itself. There's an economic argument which is
almost entirely missing from the critique of the Draka, namely that
plantation societies like the Domination are heavily dependent on
foreign trade. They produce products for ex****t. That means that the
Draka economy collapses come 1945 and the cold war. I mean, the
Citizens aren't consuming all that stuff. Plus, slavery in the modern
era has always been driven by economics, not ideology. People have
slaves because they need laborers. When they don't need laborers they
jettison the slaves.
But there's a far more damaging argument which revolves around
psychology, weapons of the weak, and agency. Stirling assumes that
the Draka develop a perfectly oppressive system which never existed on
earth. Slaves constantly found ways to exploit the system and assert
their power and they were constantly in struggle with their masters.
Slaves in battle zones quite often took the op****tunity to desert to
the enemy and claim their freedom. Stirling ****trays all but the
newest serfs as entirely beaten down and accustomed to the system,
instead of chafing at it and finding ways to screw over the masters.
Stirling has rebuffed some of these criticisms, particularly wrt serf
soldiers by pointing to things like jannisaries in the Ottoman
empire. But jannisaries were a different breed of slave. They
weren't, as the serfs were depicted as being, chattle slaves given
some extra priveleges, instead they were slaves of the state. They
were people who were enslaved, usually from the fringes of the empire,
so that they would be loyal to the empire as a whole and not any
particular faction. But with jannisaries the tail often wagged the
dog and the state had to bend to the will of their slave soldiers,
after all they had the guns. Yet Stirling seems unaware of this and
depicts a perfectly paternalist system. Related to this, is that far
more disturbing than the lesbian T&A which seems to offend so many
people, is the less pronounced slave *** fantasies which go on there.
While ***ual encounters between masters in real life were undoubtedly
complex things ranging from genuine love relation****ps, to consenting
***ual encounters, to prostitution on the part of slaves, to outright
rape, the fact is that the relation****p was a profoundly unequal one,
where the dominant paradigm had to be coercion on the part of the
master (whether this involved actual physical rape or merely letting a
slave know "what was in her best interests.") Yet Stirling seems to
play on male power fantasies by ****traying slave *** as a relatively
uncomplicated affair. There seem to be no short supply of women who
are willing, even eager, to sleep with the masters. Even the main
***ual relation****p in Under the Yoke, that between the master and the
Polish serf, is ****trayed as one which begins as rape and ends as a
relation****p where the serf doesn't really care for, or even like, the
master but enjoys herself ***ually from their encounters. The absence
of any more sophisticated talk on slave *** makes this seem like mere
titilation.
And while the Draka books are obviously Stirling's main narrative of
paternalism it also pops up disturbingly in other works. While
relation****ps between Indians and the British colonizers were
incredibly complex in real life, Stirling ****trays them in Peshawar
Lancers as wholly sup****tive of the Empire, with the noted exception
of a few malcontent terrorists (for good measure he even has a
terrorist get beaten down by the Indians at an air****t where he had
attempted to perpetrate an attack.) A similar thing pops up in
Conquistador, where the surviving Indians of California seem to live
happily under the tutelage of the New Virginians. This is a trend
which is exacerbated by the fact that subaltern peoples are almost
completely absent from Stirling's work except as loyal sidekicks.
Under the Yoke is actually unique in the Stirling works that I've seen
in that you've got two members of a subaltern group prominently
featured (I'm not counting Marya LaFarge in Stone Dogs). These other
subaltern characters exist merely as extensions of the will of the
white protagonists. The frequency with which this theme crops up in
Stirling's work, and his inability, or unwillingness, to do anything
more with the subject, leads me to believe that these elements are
part of Stirlings actual beliefs and not just some subject he's
interested in exploring on an intellectual level.
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