October 7th, 2008
by
Yonmei
Amanda Marcotte:
io9 asked me to contribute a recommendation for what sci-fi book you should read before the election. I was unduly tickled to be the token female in a question about science fiction. On one hand, I’m not like a huge sci-fi geek or anything. On the other hand, I wrote my honors thesis one million years ago about the place of The Handmaid’s Tale in the pantheon of sci-fi, and so I have a soft spot for the genre. It was sort of my first inkling that feminism could be expanded in creative ways. Of course, as the token feminist, I had to pick The Handmaid’s Tale.
This is 6 Science Fiction Classics To Help You Choose The Next President: And besides The Handmaid’s Tale, chosen by Marcotte, the five boy pundits picked: “Franchise” by Isaac Asimov, Wall-E, Angel season four, Rainbow’s End by Vernor Vinge, The Merchants’ War, Frederik Pohl.
Now obviously: we’re just feminists, we write about non-political issues that affect women and children (and also even more non-political things like gay marriage) so none of us would have got picked to recommend a “sci-fi classic” to this list….
So which (up to six) political SF novels would you recommend to someone the month before an election? Or any time, really.
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Yonmei at
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Filed under geek sexism, politics | Comments (27)
Off the top of my head:
- Blake’s 7 (though modern viewers would have to be warned in advance about the BBC’s special effects budget of 50p per episode) – fighting to overthrow an evil Federation
- Kindred, Octavia E. Butler (not so much for the depiction of racial politics in the past as of poverty in the present).
- Four Ways To Forgiveness, Ursula K. LeGuin (modern political fable about oppression and revolution)
- Queendom Come, Ellen Galford (a dystopic Scotland altered by the advent of a Celtic queen at the Edinburgh Festival)
- The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham (in theory about giant plants taking over a world of the blind… well, yes, that’s even more appropriate, isn’t it? …but also about how human rights die and dictatorship flourishes).
- Woman on the Edge of Time, Marge Piercy (again, more about the poverty and racial and gender politics of the present than about the rainbow future).
- Benefits, Zoe Fairbairns (a novel about a dystopic Britain – a more British version of what happens when you regard women as labour units for producing/looking after children).
For this election, under the threat of a Christian theocracy, I think The Handmaid’s Tale is a fantastic choice.
Day of the Triffids is a good call, but if we’re going with Wyndham I’d also suggest The Chrysalids, with its added overtones of religious hatred and intolerance…
For an examination of political corruption and the dangers of power, Donaldson’s Gap series would be a good one.
Also, while we’re on huge space operas, Bab 5 has some salutory lessons about the evils of vice-presidents and the uses of propaganda; specifically the President Clarke story arc, but I’d also quite like to see a “Get the hell out of our galaxy!” moment aimed at both sides of the house…
I’m disheartened to find I can’t think of titles from Québec or the rest of Canada. There are federal elections being held here next week. Though we’re not getting as much attention internationally as the USA, are we?
Atwood is Canadian, but I still haven’t read THmT, and although I’m not dismissing her novel’s relevence, especially given the ties between the US and Canadian religious rights, I’d be more interested in giving examples of francophone works or something that might take Canadian history into account, except that I either don’t know or don’t remember enough to come up with possible titles.
There is L’Euguélionne (1976) by Louky Bersianik, which is a poetic description of an alien’s arrival provoking consciousness-raising in oppressed women. At election times, this is something I would recommend on the basis of linguistics, though she took French as her purview, which causes translation difficulties, albeit that the problem is not peculiar to French. Some politicians have made efforts to be more inclusive of women in their public discourse of late, which is worth noting, and the form “Québécoises et Québécois” isn’t getting mocked as much. And it’s an ode to liberty, but it’s also a title I haven’t reread in a while.
Another political SF title I can think of, and have read more than once, but which is from an American, the outstanding Lois McMaster Bujold, is Komarr (1998), from her Vorkosigan Saga. It deals with terrorism inside a marriage and between planets, and I especially love the passage where two women are spurred to action because they understand exactly what consequences a political act would bring on a personal level to an entire population.
I would probably recommend the same novel even if it weren’t specifically about the election: Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed.
I’d love for politicians to read Sheri S. Tepper’s “The Fresco.” Simple yet interestingly played out story about how, when the aliens do arrive, they pick as their spokesperson a middle-aged mother with a deadbeat husband. Her personal priorities are well contrasted with the priorities of policy-makers and -breakers.
I would recommend Interface by Stephen Bury. It’s about a presidential election.
I need to reread the Vorkosigan books, but I’m thinking A Civil Campaign by Lois McMaster Bujold might fit the bill.
It Can’t Happen Here by Sinclair Lewis. The assassinated president is black, iirc. It’s been quite some time since I read it last.
Love, C.
I second The Fresco. And the Handmaid’s Tale.
However I don’t have enough faith in the average legislator’s ability to make it all the way through an adult novel. So I think we might be better off recommending short stories, such as James Tiptree Jr/Alice Sheldon’s ‘The Screwfly Solution’….or maybe some young adult political scifi, such as ‘Children of the Dust’ by Louise Lawrence.
Granted both of those are a bit more post-apocalyptic with political ineffectiveness as a sideline….still, it would be nice to teach our politicians to think long term, rather than in terms of reelection/campaign donations.
Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time was the first thing that came to mind.
And The Fresco is good, but I also think of Gibbon’s Decline and Fall when it comes to Tepper vs. right-wing politics. Not her best work, but evocative.
I enjoyed Eleanor Arnason’s Ring of Swords in terms of the take on diplomacy and gender.
Remnant Population by Elizabeth Moon isn’t about an election, per se, but it is about an alien people that choose which sort of human they are willing to talk to.
And, of course, Ursula Le Guin and Joan Slonczewski have each spent much of their careers writing thoughtful, challenging fiction about war, peace, the environment, and culture.
Octavia’s Parable of the Sower…the description of the President could be almost any right-wing elected official. The way the world falls apart in an eco-disaster. Ugh…one of my favorite books even if depresses me so.
My first choice is Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring, because of the selfish and self-righteous Premier Uttley… She reminds me of some of our electoral candidates ’round here!
It just came out this year: Dreamers of the Day by Mary Doria Russell. It talks about how Iraq was invented by Churchill et al, and it has a personal view of the Great Depression. Fascinating ground-level stuff about huge disasters waiting to happen.
Veronica, that was my pick. Parable of the Sower maintains its relevance. My second pick would be my Hugo nomination from 2007, Richard Morgan’s Black Man (published in the US as Thirteen), even if the examination of a breakup of the US is a bit overdone.
Hi there! Though I lurk, I do want to say that I’ve been reading L Timmel DuChamp’s extraordinary Marq’ssan books and they’re just about the smartest fiction I’ve ever read about politics–so great on factions within both left and right, how meetings work, how personal relationships and political action intermingle…They’re a terrific primer on understanding how things work. Also extremely chilling on the torture/rendition front…I was just thinking that if more people could read them, maybe we’d actually see some understanding about how sleep deprivation, cold, stress positions and so on really are torture.
I second Le Guin’s The Dispossessed! This election “season”, I’m inspired by my favorite feminist science fiction that resists the state and representative “democracy.” I enjoy the anarchist feminist alternatives modeled in Fifth Sacred Thing and He, She, and It because both communities survive and resist in a world that also contains capitalist oppression.
I read China Mieville’s Iron Council, and lots of awesome diverse tactics of resistance there, too. And although I haven’t read them yet, I hear the Mars Trilogy rocks on that front, too.
I’d recommend Jo Walton’s alt-hist trilogy (variously called “Small Change” and “Still Life with Fascists”), Farthing, Ha’Penny, and Half a Crown.
@Lake Desire:
robinson’s mars trilogy superscedes any election season or cycle… i take it as a basic primer on energy and resource policy, not to mention the practical organization of autonomous communities. however, it raises red flags, with its extraordinary heteronormativity. there are a grand total of *two* queer characters and their relationship is repeatedly designated a mystery to all and left at that.
and i’d wait on the dispossessed until after we’ve abolished electoral seasons entirely.
After a long time lurking, I have to speak up — to second (or third) The Dispossessed, but also to mention Ken MacLeod’s The Execution Channel as a great way to start someone thinking about how things work.
I vote for Sarah Hall’s Daughters of the North/The Carhullan Army, which is as realistic and hypnotic a portrayal of environmental disaster and political brainwashing as I know.
I think speaks to the present moment better than _The Handmaid’s Tale_, which is a great book, but too well-known. Plus its emphasis on how feminists brought the Big Bad Christians to power by embracing censorship to suppress pornography has always struck me as dated.
Zoe Fairbairns’ Benefits is a little-known work of feminist SF that riffs significantly off attempted legislative reforms.
Suzette Haden Elgin’s Native Tongue has, as its background, a political reversal of women’s rights in the US.
Molly Gloss’s The Dazzle of Day is a beautiful look at council/ consensus-based decision-making, from a Quaker perspective.
While YMMV, Neal Stephenson cowrote a book with his uncle under the name Stephen Bury, Interface, which has an amusing take on the US political system and its obsession with polling. It features an African American woman vice presidential candidate (Eleanor Richmond) , whom I’d much prefer to Sarah Palin …
(… sorry, reading comments afterward, i see that Interface & Benefits were already listed.)
Lake Desire, Kludge – instead of the Mars books, which are pretty complex, I’d recommend 40 Signs of Rain, 50 Degrees Below, and 60 Days and Counting.
They’re SF where the What If is “what would it take to get real action on climate change?” The plot kind of falls apart through 60 Days, but the imaginary president is an excellent measure to use on our current candidates.
They also have something I found almost startling because it is so rare: a heterosexual male parent who parents his children, balances it against his job, misses the kids when the job part gets too big, and loves and honors his wife. In fact, all of the partnerships in the book (even the irritating Elusive Superwoman) have a dynamic where both people in the relationship pursue their own strengths and preferences, and work out their own issues, regardless of gender.
It’s a side note in the books, but still definitely nice to see.
The Mars trilogy was one of my all time favorites, but The Years of Rice and Salt is pretty awesome and has a lot of relevant points about societal organization, geopolitics, and ecology. Antarctica isn’t bad either, as sort of a boiled down and condensed version of the Mars trilogy.
I wasn’t a huge fan of the latest global warming trilogy, though there were large parts of it I liked – the character dynamic Rosa mentioned being one of them. Ultimately, though, I was irritating by the aforementioned Elusive Superwoman Girlfriend, but mostly by the fact that they came up with what seemed to me to be infeasibly simple solutions to a lot of problems.
I think that book (just like Rice & Salt, actually) suffered from not having a natural resolution. They’re not so much problems to solve as stories that take place in the midst of ongoing processes, which doesn’t fit the shape of a SF novel very well.
When Robinson talks about the global warming books, like in his Google Tech Talk, it’s clear he is envisioning unintended consequences from the “solutions” – but they don’t come through in the book at all.
I am feeling him, though, in his going from indirect, allusive, SFinal comparisons to current economics and science to the LOOK AT THIS HERE NOW IT IS RELEVANT TO YOU. Subtle changes in people’s perspectives aren’t going to do it in the next three weeks or the next four years.
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