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| Home Front: Culture Wars |
| If You Were A Grown Up, My Love |
| 2015-02-01 |
| by Sarah Hoyt When I was very young I used to think that stories where everyone died, or stories where pointless but sad things happened were about the best thing ever. They were profound and so different from every other story I'd read till that time which were all boys-adventures or fairy tales that ended well and with a moral. If You Were A Dinosaur my Love's win bothered me at a level I can't begin to explain, and it still bothers me, like an aching tooth to which the tongue keeps returning. It's not just that could have been written by me at 12 and would have got, from my middle school teacher, exactly the sort of praise it got from science fiction professionals. It's the ideas packed into the story that are truly disturbing. A story that reveals a total lack of knowledge of an entire class of people (manual laborers) and instead others them as sort of scary all purpose evil that will beat to death anyone who doesn't look/act like them won an award voted on by -- supposedly -- adult professionals. Not only that, but adult professionals who keep claiming their tolerance and love of the 'other.' What's more, adult professionals who would almost certainly embrace 'Marxism' as a good or at least correct idea. When did Marxists start loathing and fearing the working class? And admitting it? |
| Posted by:g(r)omgoru |
| #7 John Wright's story is superb. |
| Posted by: Steve White 2015-02-01 14:27 |
| #6 Shirley Jackson's fantasy "The Lottery" originated as a riff on intra faculty politics and backbiting, IIRC at Bennington College in the 1940s, but turned into satire on human nature. Academics still are uncomfortable with the Milgram experiments. The only test subject who behaved as a real mensch (again, IIRC) turned out to be a Holocaust survivor. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2015-02-01 13:27 |
| #5 "choices that sometimes are self limiting and self destructive" I started noticing kids I knew doing this in late grade school. Realizing how common this was came as a great shock to my childish worldview. |
| Posted by: Anguper Hupomosing9418 2015-02-01 13:23 |
| #4 And sometimes a parody is better than the original. Wright decided he could write a better story in one sitting. |
| Posted by: James 2015-02-01 13:19 |
| #3 Go read the comments. These are solid people on that blog -- authors! They even do a riff on Unicorns working for the EPA in a timber company that uses werewolves as the night crew and a Vampire (what else!) as the night crew foreman. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2015-02-01 12:42 |
| #2 Sci Fi has been there done that before: Eloi and Morlocks. |
| Posted by: OldSpook 2015-02-01 10:10 |
| #1 When did Marxists start loathing and fearing the working class? And admitting it? When all their self righteous ego boosting plans fell apart trying to 'elevate' the masses. Can't admit their world was structured by a fundamental fallacy, that the 'poor' are simply victims of oppression. Human free will, which is an anathema to the dialectic, means people make choices that sometimes are self limiting and self destructive. In other words, the poor are often co-conspirators to their own fate. They are the ones who control and influence their 'rise' from the caste more than the self appointed saviors. Thus the Marxists simply became another set of Plantation owners with the same self justifying rationales why they are needed to run the place. |
| Posted by: Procopius2k 2015-02-01 08:36 |