Category: All posts

I, clawfoot

Here is a guest post I did for Sarah Chorn, who edits a column on SF signal called Special Needs in Strange Worlds.   I am very grateful to Sarah for giving me an opportunity to discuss the people with disabilities who appear in Dark Eden and Mother of Eden (the batfaces, clawfeet and slowheads), as I don’t think anyone has specifically asked me about them before and they are absolutely central to the world of Eden.

In this post, I also reveal that I am in a way the original for the so-called clawfeet.  Which, now I think about it, may partly explain my decision to make the clawfooted Jeff Redlantern very wise and absolutely irresistible to women.

“Improving”

Following on from my previous post and the distinction made by Ishiguro there between literature that is “improving” in the sense of providing “spiritual and intellectual nourishment” and literature that is “improving” in the sense of being a way of climbing up the “class ladder.”   This distinction interests me, and also has some slight tangential relevance for what I’m currently writing (Eden 3), so here is a bit more thinking aloud about it:

I’m aware first of all of an immediate (and somewhat priggish) reaction on my part which says that the first of those two meanings relates to the true function of literature (or other kinds of artistic activity), and the second meaning does not.  “Real art is about improving the soul, not about showing off,” this priggish part of me wants to say.

My second thought, though, is that this initial reaction is similar to that of a Christian who complains that we have lost the true meaning of Christmas.  The celebration of the birth of Christ is actually not the true meaning of Christmas, but is a meaning that has been grafted onto a winter solstice junket that existed long long before Christ was born.  And my best guess is that the idea of art as a form of spiritual nourishment (or the even more recent idea of art as subversion) is likewise a meaning that has been grafted onto a long pre-existing activity.   The status aspect almost certainly preceded any idea of art as some sort of personal exploration by the artist.

For surely it is obvious that artistic activity, even way back in history, was all about status, power and conspicuous consumption?  The paintings in the tombs of pharoahs, the colossal relief carvings of muscular Assyrian kings: these things not only depict the power of these rulers directly, but also demonstate it. Look, they say, I am so wealthy and powerful, that I am in a position to have thousands of skilled craftsmen devote their time entirely to me!

In the same way, the tapestries and paintings hanging on the walls of stately homes demonstrate both the wealth and the discernment of their owners, while the artists who made them would have been almost entirely dependant on those wealthy people’s patronage.  And this extends beyond the visual arts.  The praise poets employed by Anglo-Saxon and Brythonic kings, for instance, demonstrated the power, wealth and taste of their masters, not only by singing their praises, but by the wit, skill and beauty of their verses.

The conspicuous consumption aspect of the visual arts is really no less blatant now than it ever was.   Claims that contemporary art serves some kind of subversive purpose often seem quite ludicrous to me when that same art is snapped up by billionaires for huge prices that are then trumpeted in the media.  (Indeed, in some cases, artists seem to have been granted a kind of alchemical power to turn essentially dull and uninteresting objects into investment opportunities and status symbols.)

In respect of books, music, film, plays, which can be consumed relatively cheaply, the link is a little less obvious: simply owning or consuming them does not directly demonstrate our wealth (unless of course you choose to pay for a box at the theatre: you don’t get much more conspicuous than that!), but it certainly can (as per my previous post) demonstrate how refined, discerning, fashionable or “hip” we are.

I’m not even sure that we can know for certain ourselves whether the “improvement” we seek from a book or an exhibition of pictures is of the first or the second kind.  We humans are such status-seeking creatures.  Just like our closest primate relatives (and most other social animals), we are constantly aware of and concerned about our position in the social hierarchy.  It’s as fundamental as sex, and like sex is all tangled up with our other motives.   You go to some fashionable arthouse movie, say, to be elevated by the cutting edge ideas and the ground-breaking cinematography, but can you really be sure that you aren’t least partly motivated by the agreeable awareness that, unlike others, you possess the necessary degree of refinement to enjoy these things?

I guess, if we can speak about pure aesthetic pleasure (pleasure unsullied, so to speak, by the status-climbing instinct) then the times we can be most certain that we are in its presence, are when we are enjoying something that isn’t fashionable, and that won’t win us status points for being seen to consume it.

What do we mean by “improving”?

A fascinating dialogue here in the New Statesman between Kazuo Ishiguro and Neil Gaiman.

In particular, as someone who chooses to write within SF conventions, but dislikes being confined to a ghetto as a result, I share their exasperation with the policing of frontiers between genres.  “Why are people so preoccupied?” as Ishiguro says of the genre anxieties raised by the fact that his latest novel includes things like ogres.  “What is genre in the first place? Who invented it? Why am I perceived to have crossed a kind of boundary?”

But I was particularly taken by Ishiguro’s observations here about the class aspect of our reading choices:

I don’t have a problem, necessarily, about reading for improvement. I often choose a book because I think I’m going to enjoy it, but I think also it’s going to improve me in some sense. But when you ask yourself, “Is this going to improve me?” what are you really asking? I think I probably do turn to books for some sort of spiritual and intellectual nourishment: I think I’m going to learn something about the world, about people. But if by “improving”, we mean it would help me go up the class ladder, then it’s not what reading and writing should be about. Books are serving the same function as certain brands of cars or jewellery, in just denoting social position.

It has often struck me reading choices (along with other kinds of cultural choices) are indeed in part a form of conspicuous consumption.  They are perceived as demonstrating, not our wealth, but our refinement, taste, discernment, which have long been an important aspect of status (perhaps in part because they hint at an expensive education and a life not dominated by drudgery?).  When I listen to Oxbridge-educated voices on radio arts shows, minutely examining the merits of some cultural artifact or other, it does indeed sometimes seem to me that what is really going on is a kind of status display. Look how well-read, how refined, how exquisitely discerning we are!

And I agree with Gaiman and Ishiguro that this kind of status anxiety is, in part, the basis of the stigmatisation of “genre”.  People who are concerned to be seen as refined are anxious about touching a book with a genre label, at least in part, because they are anxious about calling their refinement into question.   Some might feel the same anxiety about serving an unfashionable wine, or wearing the wrong kind of tie at a social event, or enjoying a piece of music which their peers regard as uncool.

Freedom is slavery

Politics is a rough business everywhere but, from this side of the Atlantic, the tone of political discourse in the US can sometimes look particularly ugly.  One of the worst examples I’ve ever seen, was the suggestion by Senator Rand Paul that a right to free health care is equivalent to a belief in slavery.  The quote in question was the following:

 With regard to the idea of whether you have a right to health care, you have realize what that implies. It’s not an abstraction. I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery. It means that you’re going to enslave not only me, but the janitor at my hospital, the person who cleans my office, the assistants who work in my office, the nurses.

Basically, once you imply a belief in a right to someone’s services — do you have a right to plumbing? Do you have a right to water? Do you have right to food? — you’re basically saying you believe in slavery.

I’m a physician in your community and you say you have a right to health care. You have a right to beat down my door with the police, escort me away and force me to take care of you? That’s ultimately what the right to free health care would be.

(If you think this must be some crude spoof, by the way, here is a clip of him saying it.)

By way of information to US readers, we have a free National Health Service here in the UK, meaning that everyone has a right to healthcare, and my mother and my maternal grandfather both worked for it as doctors.  They were not forced to be doctors, and they were not forced as doctors to work for the state. They were paid well enough to lead prosperous middle class lifestyle.  They were free to resign whenever they wanted.  They could go and work for private healthcare agencies, if they prefered, or for themselves.   There’s absolutely no sense at all in which their condition could be described as slavery, or indeed as different in any fundamental way to the condition of anyone else who works for an organisation of any kind.  When you think what slavery actually means (and the Senator represents the former slave state of Kentucky, so he should know), the very comparison is obscene.

You might say that US politics is not my business.  But actually it is because the US is a global superpower, and what happens in the US matters everywhere, and perhaps especially in the UK, where there is a common cultural heritage, and no language barrier to filter us from its blast. However I freely admit I know very little about the personalities involved, and almost nothing about Senator Paul.  So here are a couple of questions.

Is Senator Paul an extremely stupid man, so lacking in curiosity that he hasn’t bothered to look into the many free health services around the world, and so lacking in imagination that he can’t figure out for himself how such a service might work without breaking down doctors’ doors?

Or is he cynical and mendacious man, who in order to serve his own political ends, tries to besmirch something that, whatever its snags, is basically benign (a community agreeing to club together to provide healthcare for everyone) by equating it with something that is evil and foul?

Echoing in the back of my mind are the slogans of George Orwell’s Oceania: WAR IS PEACE.  FREEDOM IS SLAVERY.  IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH.  Not an exact parallel of course, but what Orwell was warning about was the misuse of language to destroy our capacity to think.

Mother of Eden interview

Here is an interview with Paul Semel about Mother of Eden.  (Many thanks, Paul, for your interest.)  Paul also interviewed me last year about Dark Eden, and that interview is here.

Incidentally Mother of Eden is out in the UK on June 4th (in spite of some slightly confusing statements on Amazon UK, which the publishers are currently fixing).  It’s out in the US this week.

In the picture I’m standing on a Roman road outside Cambridge, where I go to walk our dogs.   Sort of appropriate really, in a book which talks a lot about living among the residue of the past.

Invisible electors

One thing that strikes me about the results of the UK election is the arbitary relationship between the number of seats won by each party, and their proportion of the popular vote. The Scottish National Party is now the 3rd largest party in the UK parliament, with 56 seats, but it did this on the basis of 1.5 million votes, while the Lib Dems, with 2.4 million votes, only got 8 seats. Even more bizarrely, the largest Northern Ireland party, the DUP, also won 8 seats, but did so with only 184,000 votes (the same number of seats as the Lib Dems, but less than a tenth of their votes).  Meanwhile the Green Party, with eight times as many votes as the DUP, came out of the process with only one seat.

Suffering a brief attack of geekery, I’ve just done the sums (see table below).  If seats were awarded proportionally, the Greens would have won 25 seats, the SNP  31, and the Lib Dems 52.  The most spectacular difference, though, would have been that UKIP, with 12.6% of the popular vote, would have won 82 parliamentary seats, as opposed to the single seat which it actually won*.

I can’t say that I’m personally sorry that this particular outfit has not got those 82 seats.  But, all the same, I can’t help thinking that the lack of relationship between votes cast and MPs elected is one of the causes of cynicism about the democratic process.

What we have at the moment is a system which rewards parties that have concentrated powerbases in particular geographical areas (like the DUP and the SNP, but also Labour and Conservatives, with their heartlands respectively in the big industrial cities and the leafy suburbs and shires).  But it punishes parties whose support is more widely and thinly distributed across the country, and so grossly misrepresents the relative strength of opinion in the country in general, to the point where whole swathes of electors are rendered virtually invisible.

The fact that the SNP won all but three seats in Scotland, for instance, gives the impression that the whole of Scotland is fervently nationalist, though in fact the SNP only won half the Scottish votes, leaving the unionist half of Scotland almost completely unrepresented.  (And who would have thought, from the coverage of the result that the disgraced and humiliated Lib Dems actually won 900,000 more UK votes than the proud and triumphant SNP?)

A proportional system would still, just, have yielded a right-of-centre majority, based on the popular vote in this election, with Conservatives, UKIP, DUP and UUP between them winning 329 seats, but it would have been a smaller and much more precarious majority than the one the Conservatives won on their own under the first-past-the-post system.  There are lots of downsides of PR, but surely the benefit would be that there would be less triumphalism, fewer spurious claims to have the backing of “the people”, and a more transparent process of negotation between parties that represent the enormous diversity of views that actually exist?

Party table*Of course, these figures assume that everyone would still vote for the same party under a PR system.  In fact, supporters of smaller parties often decide to vote tactically for parties they think likely to win.  My guess is that under a PR system, the Green Party would actually have won quite a lot more than 25 seats, because a lot of potential Green voters voted Labour this time round.  No doubt this would be true of UKIP sympathisers too, many of whom probably voted Conservative for similar reasons.

 

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