24 KiB
[D] On the lack of cultural estrangement in SF
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Author: u/PeridexisErrant put aside fear for courage, and death for life*
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URL: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/12/on-the-lack-of-cultural-estran.html
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Score: 7
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Created: 2015-01-20T07:19:22
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Comments:
u/Bowbreaker [+5] Solitary Locust (33 minutes later)
Any recommendations of stories that actually do this realistically? And I don't mean stories that provide good excuses for little change. I mean stories that have the future culture as different and alien as one would expect, while still being an enjoyable read that isn't just about said future cultural difference.
u/alexanderwales [+7] Time flies like an arrow (8 hours later)
I am mildly surprised that no one has mentioned one of the author's own books, like Accelerando, Singularity Sky, or Glasshouse. Charles Stross (/u/cstross) is generally really good about that sort of thing.
u/ajuc [+3] (6 hours later)
Some good examples:
Anathem by Neal Stephenson
Czarne Oceany by Jacek Dukaj (it was supposed to be translated to English, but I can't find translation anywhere, here is summary http://www.terminally-incoherent.com/blog/2012/02/10/black-oceans-czarne-oceany-by-jacek-dukaj/ - it is deliciously strange and has record novel ideas per page ratio)
Algebraist by Ian Banks (at least the Dwellers species)
u/PeridexisErrant [+2] put aside fear for courage, and death for life (20 hours later)
Also Surface Detail, by Iain Banks. And most other Culture novels, I guess...
u/Putnam3145 [+5] (an hour later)
Eliezer Yudkowsky's Three Worlds Collide is the best at this that I've read myself.
u/eaglejarl [+2] (17 hours later)
May I ask why? To me the differences between the three races seemed like authorial fiat instead of believeable evolution...which is fine, since it wasn't a story about worldbuilding, it was a story about utility function calculations and subjectivity of morality. Good story, just not believeable aliens.
u/Putnam3145 [+5] (18 hours later)
I wasn't talking about the aliens much at all, just the humans.
Also, my language was specifically built to be relative, heh. "Best I've read myself" as opposed to anything like "really good". I don't actually read much science fiction, most of what I've read is whatever I could find on wikisource, heh.
u/derefr [+1] (3 days later)
I think the point was to have each species serve as a clear object lesson: that you can tweak just one tiny thing about humanity, and end up with something that humanity would fundamentally hate, or something that would fundamentally hate humanity. Not that there will ever be an alien species that is only different by one tiny thing—but it shows that we don't need big differences in utility functions to end up in a "considering the Other a plague and trying to wipe them out from the universe" situation.
u/eaglejarl [+0] (4 days later)
I would agree that that was the point of the aliens. Despite that, to me they don't feel like actual aliens that would have really evolved. Instead, they feel like plot devices created by authorial fiat in order to serve the needs of the story. There's nothing wrong with that -- it's an author tract on the nature of utility functions and morality, presented as entertainment in order to make it more digestible. It succeeds admirably at its goal and is also a fun read. It's not trying to provide realistic worldbuilding and so it shouldn't be judged on the basis of whether or not it does.
u/derefr [+1] (4 days later)
Right, but that's what I meant—real aliens would be more different. It couldn't demonstrate what it demonstrate (that even minimal changes effect mutual incompatibility) with plausible aliens; it needs implausible ones.
u/None [+5] (a day later)
Read Dune if you want to actually feel culturally estranged. I suspect one of the reasons cultural estrangement isn't done more often in "futuristic" fiction is that the author doesn't want the reader throwing the book across the room shouting, "YOU'VE BACKSLID ON EVERYTHING BY HUNDREDS OF YEARS!"
u/None [+2] (4 hours later)
I somewhat agree, but I think it's very, very hard to do properly as anything other than an experiment.
u/thakil [+2] (6 hours later)
I don't think he's entirely wrong, although I think he's a little hard on Hamilton, who I think makes some effort in building broadly plausible future worlds (and then fills it with his heroes having all the sex they want, but that's another issue...) with a blend of different ideas. One of the protagonists in Pandora's Star is an old school socialist disgusted that human kind has gone to the stars and built the same damn society it's always built.
u/sephlington [+3] (15 hours later)
Also, the entire Commonwealth's reaction to Huxley's Haven. Paula Myo isn't exactly an insignificant character, and very few people are comfortable with the ideals espoused by The Hive.
u/ajuc [+1] (6 hours later)
I loved the culture created in Anathem by Neal Stephenson. He actually invented whole alternative history of science and based alien planet culture on that.
u/xamueljones [+1] My arch-enemy is entropy (10 hours later)
The Mote in God's Eye by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle have the same problem as mentioned in the article. But! It has a very alien, alien species in the book and it's the book I point to whenever I'm asked (I have never been asked this yet) for an alien species that are truly different from humans.
Anyone else have other books that involve alien aliens? Or alien humans?
u/E-o_o-3 [+1] (a day later)
The trouble is, that a vision of the future is implicitly taken as an endorsement of that future unless otherwise stated. If you write a truly altered culture which is not explicitly a distopia, your own culture will reject it - much as the faraway past might have rejected a depiction of the present.
Remember Yudkowsky's redrawing of the boundaries of sexual consent in "three worlds collide"'s human utopia? It was only a fictional universe, but people were on the edge of getting fairly upset and quite obviously failing to understand the deeper points about consent, morality, boundaries, and emotional pain that he was making. And those were lesswrongers, imagine how the general population might react.
u/alexanderwales [+3] Time flies like an arrow (a day later)
Remember Yudkowsky's redrawing of the boundaries of sexual consent in "three worlds collide"'s human utopia? It was only a fictional universe, but people were on the edge of getting fairly upset and quite obviously failing to understand the deeper points about consent, morality, boundaries, and emotional pain that he was making. And those were lesswrongers, imagine how the general population might react.
The bigger problem with that was that it was such a throwaway idea, given two lines and not at all fleshed out. It wasn't a redrawing of the boundaries of sexual consent, at least not in the story itself. There are a ton of questions that get raised by this premise, and none of them are even remotely explored. There wasn't a deeper point about consent, morality, boundaries, or emotional pain, because the entire text was a handful of paragraphs which didn't touch on any of that. You only get into that other stuff if you go read the author's commentary on what he meant, which ... is a sign of a problem in the writing. Especially since the world is like reality unless noted and this difference didn't come up until late in the work.
It's totally fine to have a future where things are different and alien - but when they're tacked on like that, of course it's going to get a negative reaction.
u/E-o_o-3 [+4] (a day later)
There are a ton of questions that get raised by this premise, and none of them are even remotely explored.
Your comment of illustrates my point. With a truly alien culture, everything has to constantly be explained and that would break the story. Anyone who goes to a foreign country will immediately be bombarded with weirdness and there is no "author" to sit down and nicely contextualize it. No one can contextualize it to you because no one understands your point of view in the first place. The feeling of "cultural estrangement" is a sense of hopelessness, that you will never understand these people and they can never understand you.
I'm not necessarily defending Yudkowski's choice of including that into the story - I'm explaining why it's hard to write alien words. It's a fairly subtle line between writing alien societies and causing a negative reaction. If your story isn't explicitly about an alien human society, if you have other things to deal with in the plot and don't feel like explaining the alien culture in detail, you can't just casually drop an alien human society in there without causing an uproar.
There wasn't a deeper point about consent, morality, boundaries, or emotional pain, because the entire text was a handful of paragraphs which didn't touch on any of that.
The text doesn't teach you the concepts, it's true. The phrase "memory of a disaster" has a lot of ideas packed into it, and there's a lot of inferential distance that isn't bridged. "Memories of a disaster" pretty much explain 70% of cross cultural misunderstandings, once you wrap your mind around the concept.
I think it only makes sense if you've already spent time thinking about consent and culture. I had read Helliwell's anthropological work on the Gerai's lack of understanding of how rape was possible before reading Yudkowski's story, have spent time thinking about how humans respond to scarcity and pain, and I'm pretty familiar with culture clashes due to being bi-cultural myself, so I personally perceived the entire meaning immediately, even before reading the explanation. But it's true that I didn't acquire the meaning from the text - I had already explored the concept he was exploring, and if I had not I would not have gotten it, and that's arguably a weakness in writing.
That's the thing: it's really hard to judge the true distance of the inferential distance between yourself the author and your average reader. It's not like no one else could possibly have gotten it - Yudkowski just failed to estimate the total ratio of people who would get it to people who would not.
u/rumblestiltsken [-1] (a day later)
As /u/alexanderwales said, the problem isn't that weirdness is weird, it is that the author chose a very fraught and painful topic to exemplify that weirdness. Particularly because the author is discussing a harm largely falling outside his own demographic.
It isn't hard to be careful about things that hurt real living people. No-one can be so obtuse as to not see the cultural detritus an idea like future progress = legal rape will invoke. Like future = legal holocaust, or future = legal ethnic cleansing. Just ...why? There are so many other options.
There is an inferential gap, sure, but it was the author that misjudged it, badly enough to be called on it.
And it is spelled Yudkowsky.
u/E-o_o-3 [+5] (a day later)
problem isn't that weirdness is weird, it is that the author chose a very fraught and painful topic to exemplify that weirdness
All major cross cultural clashes are lined around topics which are fraught and painful for at least one of the cultures. People adapt to the funny quirks in mannerisms of other cultures quite quickly - true cultural estrangement is centered around moral issues which necessarily involve lots of emotional pain. I challenge you to name one that isn't.
Like I said before, that's the entire point of a "memory of disaster".
It isn't hard to be careful about things that hurt real living people. No-one can be so obtuse as to not see the cultural detritus an idea like future progress = legal rape will invoke. Like future = legal holocaust, or future = legal ethnic cleansing. Just ...why?
This is a fair criticism of why one should not do things like that...
There are so many other options.
..but this is not necessarily true. I don't think there can be cultural estrangement without some degree of painfulness, some degree of objection to what you are seeing depicted in this society.
Again, I'm not saying that Yudkowsky is above criticism. I'm saying it's hard to write about a futuristic society in which all involved are quite happy doing something that people feel is deeply wrong, without opening yourself to the same criticism you and /u/alexanderwales are giving Yudkowsky right now. It is hard to create a sense of true cultural estrangement without invoking pain and negativity from readers towards the work itself.
There is a necessary trade off here between invoking (valid) criticism of your decision to depict this particular future and giving the reader an authentic feeling that this future has truly left them behind.
No-one can be so obtuse as to not see the cultural detritus an idea like future progress =
Imagine yourself as a 1950s conservative, reading Heinlein, and then complete that sentence. These people felt deep seated uneasiness against these depictions just as real as your own. (The only difference is, Heinlein really did believe in what he was writing, and that's arguably an important difference. But if you are morally obligated to write utopias that you would actually want to live in, you're not estranged. It's the difference between "The future has left me behind" and "the society has finally caught up to me".)
u/rumblestiltsken [+1] (a day later)
Pain and negativity should be targeted to people who aren't already buried in it. It is no benign act to use a currently oppressed group as a plot device in a way that harms them.
For example, the cultural wtf could come from a babyless-by-choice society, where the entire society feels that depriving a living being of sapience for a decade is immoral and risky, when science can just skip the whole thing with accelerated development and optimal learning algorithms.
There is no current blue-green war among members of our society about the morality or immorality of child rearing, there are no disenfranchised people who are harmed by their inability or ability to rear children (note: not ability to get pregnant, that is definitely something people face discrimination about around the world).
But it is still a weirdtopia. Also note how well this fits with the plot of the story and the revulsion towards the baby-eaters, rather than being massively out of place.
Or a common scifi trope, where society requires augmentation of the members. Weirdtopia, but there is no modern analogue apart from a marginal relationship with disability and people with disabilities would benefit by those sorts of future tech. Hell, you could take it further and posit a society where each person is optimised for a single type of thinking with nonexistant skills in others, but society copes by outsourcing all other requirements. That is a weird but utopic vision for many people with cognitive impairments.
If you have to make it about sex, a society of asexuals is plausible. Or of a-romantics. Or of pansexuals. Or robo-sexuals. Whatever. Confronting for many readers, but doesn't reference a current harm common in our society.
My personal position is, as with the whole "I need to prove my evil character is super evil" plot line, the good rule of thumb is don't make it about rape.
u/E-o_o-3 [+2] (a day later)
Pain and negativity should be targeted to people who aren't already buried in it. It is no benign act to use a currently oppressed group as a plot device in a way that harms them.
...again, I don't disagree.
Again, I'm not saying that Yudkowsky is above criticism. I'm saying it's hard to write about a futuristic society in which all involved are quite happy doing something that people feel is deeply wrong, without opening yourself to the same criticism you and /u/alexanderwales are giving Yudkowsky right now.
Your Weirdtopias are not doing something that I feel is deeply immoral or have any strong gut reaction to. You haven't skirted the trade-off, you've simply chosen a certain position on the tradeoff spectrum: You choose to eliminate gut level moral dissonance from the literary repertoire in exchange for not risking creating pain and not risking the possibly dissemination of immoral ideas from your fictional society to the real world.
I'm not saying I wouldn't make the same choice. I am only acknowledging the existence of the trade off.
u/rumblestiltsken [+0] (a day later)
Most people would find enforced augmentation and cognitive engineering morally dissonant. And if we had a recent and ongoing history of bolting poor people into tractors or performing lobotomies on menial task workers I wouldn't write about those weirdtopias either.
I know we don't disagree about the concept. I just feel it actually isn't that hard to weird people out on a gut level without stomping on the disenfranchised.
u/MugaSofer [+1] (3 days later)
There is no current blue-green war among members of our society about the morality or immorality of child rearing
... um, yes, there is? Contraception is very much a blue/green issue at present.
Still, you're right about the rape thing. "Asexual society!" would have been a good choice.
u/rumblestiltsken [+1] (4 days later)
From the comment you replied to
(note: not ability to get pregnant, that is definitely something people face discrimination about around the world).
u/MugaSofer [+1] (5 days later)
Oh. Sorry, that's embarrassing.(It wasn't edited in or something?) Total brainfart on my part.
I'm not sure how that's a different issue, but fair enough.
u/rumblestiltsken [+2] (6 days later)
Nah, wasn't edited in.
Child rearing is often outsourced, for people who work full time for example, but those people are not socially discriminated against. Nor are people who can't afford childcare or have a preference to do so, looked down on for having a stay at home parent.
But you can imagine societies where either occurred. In fact, historically a mother who left home to work faced some discrimination and that is certainly true in some parts of the world and among some demographics still. The opposite would be fairly novel, or at least I can't think of examples.
Completely different issue to growing a foetus.
u/MugaSofer [+2] (3 days later)
No-one can be so obtuse as to not see the cultural detritus an idea like future progress = legal rape will invoke. Like future = legal holocaust, or future = legal ethnic cleansing. Just ...why? There are so many other options.
Actually, I'm pretty sure that if he had made the characters Space Racist it would have been interpreted quite differently. Like, a lot differently.
People have their future worlds feature slavery and genocide all the damn time; the difference is that they're obviously drawing on our own culture, whereas Yudkowsky used different lines than current gender norms.
u/alexanderwales [+0] Time flies like an arrow (3 days later)
People have their future worlds feature slavery and genocide all the damn time; the difference is that they're obviously drawing on our own culture, whereas Yudkowsky used different lines than current gender norms.
I guess my main argument is that he didn't - he didn't really draw any lines at all. Given the seriousness of rape, and the fact that it's still legal in some parts of the world (mostly marital rape), I don't think that the reader can be faulted for thinking that was what his characters were talking about. Here is the entirety of that section:
The Confessor held up a hand. "I mean it, my lord Akon. It is not polite idealism. We ancients can't steer. We remember too much disaster. We're too cautious to dare the bold path forward. Do you know there was a time when nonconsensual sex was illegal?"
Akon wasn't sure whether to smile or grimace. "The Prohibition, right? During the first century pre-Net? I expect everyone was glad to have that law taken off the books. I can't imagine how boring your sex lives must have been up until then - flirting with a woman, teasing her, leading her on, knowing the whole time that you were perfectly safe because she couldn't take matters into her own hands if you went a little too far -"
"You need a history refresher, my Lord Administrator. At some suitably abstract level. What I'm trying to tell you - and this is not public knowledge - is that we nearly tried to overthrow your government."
"What?" said Akon. "The Confessors?"
"No, us. The ones who remembered the ancient world. Back then we still had our hands on a large share of the capital and tremendous influence in the grant committees. When our children legalized rape, we thought that the Future had gone wrong."
Akon's mouth hung open. "You were that prude?"
I mean, there are women being raped in India and Saudi Arabia right now with no legal recourse. It's a very logical parallel to draw, because that's how some parts of our own society are (and historically, that's even more the case).
u/MugaSofer [+2] (4 days later)
Right, but the slavery/genocide universes always have the characters talk about the Evils Of Discrimination - the dominant narrative surrounding slavery/genocide in our culture. Even when it doesn't really make sense, which is often the case with species featuring wildly different psychology to humans.
Anecdote - I've had people yell at me for suggesting that maybe JK Rowling had intended Hermione to be wrong about the best way to deal with House-Elves. They had read her as the heroine virtuously telling off the evil racists, biding her time to force them all to be free offscreen after the books ended. They were pretty shocked at the idea a book might have "slavery" not be a clear-cut evil, and maybe the best approach to help house-elves wasn't the fist thing that jumped to Hermione's mind.
Eliezer, on the other hand, did not have his characters talk about The Evils of Misogyny (which is the dominant narrative surrounding rape in our culture.) Which makes the Protagonists the bad guys who the hero should be lecturing, and the lack of this an endorsement of Evil.
... with that said, I might be wrong about this, seeing as I doubt a lot of his readers read that comment outlining how he had imagined the lines surrounding sex/rape were drawn in this culture. Maybe if that had been included, if the Confessor had actually tried (and failed) to explain, reactions would have been different. I might be overgeneralizing from laziness to necessity.
u/None [+2] (4 days later)
IMHO, that would have been properly EuWeirdtopian if Akon had understood "rape" to mean "play-acted sexual violation" -- real abuse and violence being so rare that the language shifted to make the genuine evil inconceivable.