The Problem With “Great” Science Fiction
Twitter is abuzz today with an io9 article called “What are the ingredients for great science fiction?” I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised by this, since many of us in the SF community are constantly amused, obsessed, and/or perplexed by the attempt to define the “great” in the title. On some level, it’s probably good for us to be always conscious of the evaluative quality of what we read; after all, what we consider to be wondrous is inevitably what we will try to peddle to others, because, deep down, we want them to experience the same feeling, however unexplainable, that we did when reading a “great” book. On another level, however, I think we often forget that the “great” in the title is both relative and problematic. How do we define what is and is not a “great” SF book? When it comes to literature–or any creative project, for that matter–there are no hard-set definitions; there can’t be precisely because to provide perfect, exception-less definitions is to imply that literature cannot change, that it is hopelessly standardized into a set group of features and objects. Science fiction can never be that. We’ve had the arguments over what “is” and “is not” science fiction before, here and elsewhere, and those discussions rarely get anywhere. So why the attempt to define “great?” In the end, the term will remain hopelessly relative. There is no point at which we can ever set “great” down and say “this is what great means for science fiction, and there are no relevant exceptions to it.” What I consider to be “great” SF will likely run counter to another’s view on the subject. Even if one agrees with my view of “great,” there are bound to be varying degrees to that “great”-ness, to what one considers, as the author of io9’s post suggests, to be an appropriate description or address of/to the “human condition.” While I might agree with that, it doesn’t explain what one means by “human condition,” nor does it provide criteria one might say should go unspoken (the quality of the writing, for example, however relative that may be). I think the questions should be: Does explaining what “great” SF is really matter? If we can agree that evaluative qualities such as those that would apply to “great” are relative and malleable, then shouldn’t we wonder whether there is value in the term or in our opinions on “something?” How do we justify what is “great” in terms of its relativity, let alone the value of our opinions in a relative world? I suppose where I’m going with this is here: If we can’t say what is and is not “great,” then can we as readers, reviewers, or what have you justify saying anything at all about the quality of a thing? I don’t think there are any easy answers to that question. But I’ll leave that up to you.
Haul of Books 2010: Stuff For Me v.24 (Derrida Edition)
I have a few more lovely books for school that I want to let you all know about, although it occurs to me that these may be of even less interest to most of you than they are to me, since they’re not even genre-based. But who am I to say what you’re all interested in, right? This edition rounds up almost all of the remaining books for my schoolwork. There are still a handful of lingering books here or there, which I’ll throw up here in a future edition, but I won’t know what those are for a few more weeks (my science fiction/utopia course has four weeks of “you’ll all decide what we’re reading”). Here’s the image: And now for the descriptions, from left to right, top to bottom (taken from Amazon): 1. Acts of Religion by Jacques Derrida “Is there, today,” asks Jacques Derrida, “another ‘question of religion’?” Derrida’s writings on religion situate and raise anew questions of tradition, faith, and sacredness and their relation to philosophy and political culture. He has amply testified to his growing up in an Algerian Jewish, French-speaking family, to the complex impact of a certain Christianity on his surroundings and himself, and to his being deeply affected by religious persecution. Religion has made demands on Derrida, and, in turn, the study of religion has benefited greatly from his extensive philosophical contributions to the field. Acts of Religion brings together for the first time Derrida’s key writings on religion, along with two new essays translated by Gil Anidjar that appear here for the first time in any language. These eight texts are organized around the secret holding of links between the personal, the political, and the theological. In these texts, Derrida’s reflections on religion span from negative theology to the limits of reason and to hospitality. Acts of Religion will serve as an excellent introduction to Derrida’s remarkable contribution to religious studies. 2. Rogues: Two Essays on Reason by Jacques Derrida Rogues, published in France under the title Voyous, comprises two major lectures that Derrida delivered in 2002 investigating the foundations of the sovereignty of the nation-state. The term “État voyou” is the French equivalent of “rogue state,” and it is this outlaw designation of certain countries by the leading global powers that Derrida rigorously and exhaustively examines. Derrida examines the history of the concept of sovereignty, engaging with the work of Bodin, Hobbes, Rousseau, Schmitt, and others. Against this background, he delineates his understanding of “democracy to come,” which he distinguishes clearly from any kind of regulating ideal or teleological horizon. The idea that democracy will always remain in the future is not a temporal notion. Rather, the phrase would name the coming of the unforeseeable other, the structure of an event beyond calculation and program. Derrida thus aligns this understanding of democracy with the logic he has worked out elsewhere. But it is not just political philosophy that is brought under deconstructive scrutiny here: Derrida provides unflinching and hard-hitting assessments of current political realities, and these essays are highly engaged with events of the post-9/11 world. 3. Points: Interviews — 1974-1994 by Jacques Derrida This volume collects 23 interviews given over the course of the last two decades by the author. It illustrates the extraordinary breadth of the Derrida’s concerns, touching upon such subjects as AIDS, philosophy, sexual difference and feminine identity, the media, politics, and nationalism. 4. The Beast and the Sovereign, Vol. 1 by Jacques Derrida When he died in 2004, Jacques Derrida left behind a vast legacy of unpublished material, much of it in the form of written lectures. With The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1, the University of Chicago Press inaugurates an ambitious series, edited by Geoffrey Bennington and Peggy Kamuf, translating these important works into English. The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume 1 launches the series with Derrida’s exploration of the persistent association of bestiality or animality with sovereignty. In this seminar from 2001–2002, Derrida continues his deconstruction of the traditional determinations of the human. The beast and the sovereign are connected, he contends, because neither animals nor kings are subject to the law—the sovereign stands above it, while the beast falls outside the law from below. He then traces this association through an astonishing array of texts, including La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” Hobbes’s biblical sea monster in Leviathan, D. H. Lawrence’s poem “Snake,” Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, a historical account of Louis XIV attending an elephant autopsy, and Rousseau’s evocation of werewolves in The Social Contract. Deleuze, Lacan, and Agamben also come into critical play as Derrida focuses in on questions of force, right, justice, and philosophical interpretations of the limits between man and animal. 5. Politics of Friendship by Jacques Derrida The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences. “O, my friends, there is no friend.” The most influential of contemporary philosophers explores the idea of friendship and its political consequences, past and future. Until relatively recently, Jacques Derrida was seen by many as nothing more than the high priest of Deconstruction, by turns stimulating and fascinating, yet always somewhat disengaged from the central political questions of our time. Or so it seemed. Derrida’s “political turn,” marked especially by the appearance of Specters of Marx, has surprised some and delighted others. In The Politics of Friendship Derrida renews and enriches this orientation through an examination of the political history of the idea of friendship pursued down the ages. Derrida’s thoughts are haunted throughout the book by the strange and provocative address attributed to Aristotle, “my friends, there is no friend” and its inversions by later philosophers such as Montaigne, Kant, Nietzsche, Schmitt and Blanchot. The exploration allows Derrida to recall and restage the ways in which all the oppositional couples of Western philosophy and political thought—friendship and enmity, private and public life — have become madly and dangerously unstable. At the same time he dissects genealogy itself, the familiar
A Brief Linking to the Manifesto of No-Consequence
I’m contemplating whether I want to say something more about this fellow’s counter-boycott against those who have condemned Elizabeth Moon over her recent comments on Islam (you can read what I’ve had to say about consumer activism in relation to literature here). The level of hypocrisy, intellectual vacuity (the argument of no-consequence, specifically), and repetition of fallacious arguments is alarming, particularly considering that I’ve agreed with the author of the post in the past on issues related to what he calls the “fail community.” The fact that he can’t separate the truly awful from the misunderstood or mistaken is mind boggling to me. So, I’m going to throw the link to all of you for now. Read the comments if you dare. Maybe I’ll talk about it. There’s certainly plenty to be said about the rhetoric being forced there, but I don’t know if I have the stomach for it right now. Elizabeth Moon’s misguided and incredibly problematic rant is enough to swallow from the SF community at the moment. What do you think?