pungoose (![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} pungoose) wrote,@ 2007-08-25 09:56:00 |
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Why/How Jeanette Winterson drives me up the wall
(or, "Geese are not the only Waterbirds")
JW was interviewed in today's New Scientist, and said (italics are her, normal text is me)
I hate science fiction. But good writers about science, such as Jim Grace or Margaret Atwood, are great...
That is, frankly, a bit rich coming from someone who has just written a book called The Stone Gods, about, er, leaving Earth and settling a new planet, and who is writing a book called Robot Love, featuring a robot. Admittedly, for all I know, JW gave a lengthy and personal description of how genre sci-fi is intolerable after she had a dreadfully embarrassing teenage crush on a Betazoid... but the NS editor went "sod it" and removed the explanation.
Anyway...
When Stephen Hawking bangs on about how the future of mankind is in space, it makes me really depressed. It's a boy's fantasy, like not tidying your bedroom because your mother will do it - trash the place, then leave it. I wanted to challenge the idea that we can simply leave. Even if we could leave, not many of us would be allowed to go. It would be terrible.
Congratulations! You've just found the plot for The Songs of Distant Earth, which you probably never read, because it's science fiction. Anyway, that was a tiny-minded homespun gendered analogy. Here's more:
But there is a sense in which boys get mesmerised with the potential of invention in a mad, Dr Frankenstein way... Women are realistic probably because right across the world they're still the ones who tend the children, or look after the land. It's not wonder that we call the planet "she". It is home: men are always trying to escape from home, but we, women, are "home".
Sheesh. If I tried saying things like that amongst feminists, I'd be swiftly bashed over the head, stuffed with sage and onion, and roast before you could say "Honk". Look, you couldn't be any more sweeping if you were pushing an extremely large broom.
It gets stranger:
I tent to put my faith in the power of thought because I think people need to change from the inside out, not the outside in ...
*sings* I see a little silhoutetto of a false dichotomy
- that never works.
Never? Rarely? Sometimes? Never on a Thursday? I can has citation or argument with sweeping statement pls.
We've got into a "science can fix it" mentality... No matter how much we pollute the planet, science will clean it up, if we run out of oil it doesn't matter because the boffins will think of some other way.
Granted, there are those who argue that, and there have been for ages. Sometimes they're right.
Sometimes.
But I really think that school of thought has declined markedly since (say) the 1970s. Certainly there's currently a chorus of "reduce carbon emissions, switch shit off". I don't hear very many people saying "Noo, there's no problem, science will fix it!". There are certainly some saying "Climate change? Pah! s'all made up" -- including my very own Old Grandmother Goose -- but, hey, let's keep with the stereotypes here, females make homes and crochet cushions, males break stuff. Right? Right. (It's just proper gander).
It's always pushing the responsibility... onto "other" people... giving them enormous power and, at the same time, suggesting that there really aren't any problems.
It's this "delegation" thing. Y'know, we do things to help others? The monkey represents sharing. It doesn't mean the problem "just vanishes". (Then there's the assumption that "science" is done by boffins, who are, naturally, someone else).
It's the George W. Bush school of thought, which cannot be right.
Sod it. Gave up arguing, and used a typographical solution instead.
... the speed of love, which proves to be the one thing faster than light
Um. Squick.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more science fiction written as well as Winterson writes, and I'm more than happy to see sciencefictional themes hopping into mainstream literature and discussion, but too much of this feels like it spins down an entropic funnel, lined with Teflon, greased with non-sequiturs and sweeping, dubious assertions, and everything ends up being about love, domesticity, and untidy bedrooms. You can probably do that to a whole library, but if you're going to smash knowledge to pieces and pour it into a very small heap, a compression algorithm would be less destructive, and a big fire would be funner. With marshmallows. Yum.
(or, "Geese are not the only Waterbirds")
JW was interviewed in today's New Scientist, and said (italics are her, normal text is me)
I hate science fiction. But good writers about science, such as Jim Grace or Margaret Atwood, are great...
That is, frankly, a bit rich coming from someone who has just written a book called The Stone Gods, about, er, leaving Earth and settling a new planet, and who is writing a book called Robot Love, featuring a robot. Admittedly, for all I know, JW gave a lengthy and personal description of how genre sci-fi is intolerable after she had a dreadfully embarrassing teenage crush on a Betazoid... but the NS editor went "sod it" and removed the explanation.
Anyway...
When Stephen Hawking bangs on about how the future of mankind is in space, it makes me really depressed. It's a boy's fantasy, like not tidying your bedroom because your mother will do it - trash the place, then leave it. I wanted to challenge the idea that we can simply leave. Even if we could leave, not many of us would be allowed to go. It would be terrible.
Congratulations! You've just found the plot for The Songs of Distant Earth, which you probably never read, because it's science fiction. Anyway, that was a tiny-minded homespun gendered analogy. Here's more:
But there is a sense in which boys get mesmerised with the potential of invention in a mad, Dr Frankenstein way... Women are realistic probably because right across the world they're still the ones who tend the children, or look after the land. It's not wonder that we call the planet "she". It is home: men are always trying to escape from home, but we, women, are "home".
Sheesh. If I tried saying things like that amongst feminists, I'd be swiftly bashed over the head, stuffed with sage and onion, and roast before you could say "Honk". Look, you couldn't be any more sweeping if you were pushing an extremely large broom.
It gets stranger:
I tent to put my faith in the power of thought because I think people need to change from the inside out, not the outside in ...
*sings* I see a little silhoutetto of a false dichotomy
- that never works.
Never? Rarely? Sometimes? Never on a Thursday? I can has citation or argument with sweeping statement pls.
We've got into a "science can fix it" mentality... No matter how much we pollute the planet, science will clean it up, if we run out of oil it doesn't matter because the boffins will think of some other way.
Granted, there are those who argue that, and there have been for ages. Sometimes they're right.
Sometimes.
But I really think that school of thought has declined markedly since (say) the 1970s. Certainly there's currently a chorus of "reduce carbon emissions, switch shit off". I don't hear very many people saying "Noo, there's no problem, science will fix it!". There are certainly some saying "Climate change? Pah! s'all made up" -- including my very own Old Grandmother Goose -- but, hey, let's keep with the stereotypes here, females make homes and crochet cushions, males break stuff. Right? Right. (It's just proper gander).
It's always pushing the responsibility... onto "other" people... giving them enormous power and, at the same time, suggesting that there really aren't any problems.
It's this "delegation" thing. Y'know, we do things to help others? The monkey represents sharing. It doesn't mean the problem "just vanishes". (Then there's the assumption that "science" is done by boffins, who are, naturally, someone else).
Sod it. Gave up arguing, and used a typographical solution instead.
... the speed of love, which proves to be the one thing faster than light
Um. Squick.
Oh, don't get me wrong, I'd love to see more science fiction written as well as Winterson writes, and I'm more than happy to see sciencefictional themes hopping into mainstream literature and discussion, but too much of this feels like it spins down an entropic funnel, lined with Teflon, greased with non-sequiturs and sweeping, dubious assertions, and everything ends up being about love, domesticity, and untidy bedrooms. You can probably do that to a whole library, but if you're going to smash knowledge to pieces and pour it into a very small heap, a compression algorithm would be less destructive, and a big fire would be funner. With marshmallows. Yum.
