The Road to Wigan Pier by George Orwell

I had a mental image of this book that wasn't really correct. You might have it, too.

The standard blurb for The Road to Wigan Pier goes something like this: "In 1937, the Left Book Club sent jobbing Socialist writer George Orwell to investigate the plight of unemployed miners in the North of England. He wrote movingly about their suffering, and the lives of their families and their fellows who are still working." That's not entirely untrue, but it only partially describes the first half of this short book.

In the first hundred pages of Wigan Pier, Orwell visits a few mines and a few miner's homes, giving us some specific reportorial details. But he spends as much time with statistics and theory, explaining why the miner's lives are so horrible and how only The March Of International Socialism can save them. The second hundred pages see Orwell grappling with the inconvenient problem that Socialism was a third-rate political movement in England in 1937, populated mostly by cranks and monomaniacs and weirdos. (Not "decent normal people," his tedious refrain, with himself as the type specimen.) It also sees him spend several chapters describing in tedious detail his own specific set of class-prejudices, and extrapolating outward to assume he can diagnose the prejudices of all the "decent normal people."

(Note that "people" here, and throughout Wigan Pier, clearly means "men." One of the categories of people who are not "decent normal people" is feminists. One frankly starts to assume "decent normal people" is code for "middle-class Tory men," and wonders if politics were different enough eighty years ago that Orwell actually believed his beloved Socialists had a chance.)

The big problem with a book of political agitprop, of course, is that it dates quickly. And Wigan Pier has had eighty years to date. The central battle of the 20th century did not turn out to be Fascism vs. Socialism: Fascism was burned out in one big war, though periodic smaller outbreaks have occurred since. And, not to be too nitpicky, but it wasn't Socialism that defeated the Axis powers, either. Yes, the ruins of Europe moved in a generally leftward direction after the war, but Orwell was a true believer at this point: by Socialism he meant the whole shebang, with government ownership of everything and all the middle classes having "[sunk] without further struggles into the working class where we belong." He spends a lot of time on the devil's-advocate side of both Socialism and the then-current Depression, and frankly makes them both look dismal and horrible, like the choice between being strangled and beheaded.

Wigan Pier is additionally very clearly a book from before the Western Left realized what Stalin really was; The USSR is barely mentioned, except for Orwell to complain that his stereotyped Socialist cranks spend too much time singing paeans to Five-Year Plans and new tractor factories and the glory of Russian industry. This is not a view of Socialism that includes gulags or the Great Terror, which incidentally had been going on for the past several years at this point but still could be ignored by true believers. Socialism, in Orwell's conception, is the one true ideology which can save mankind from itself, and nothing can be allowed to halt it, and calling it that rather than Communism is primarily a matter of public relations, not of serious differences.

Luckily, he learned better. We all learned better, eventually. But that was all to come, in the years after Wigan Pier. This is a postcard from a vanished time, when Fascism seemed more transnational, and the spectre of an English Fascism standing up, taking over, and working hand-in-hand with Hitler was real and frightening. That fact that wasn't what actually happened doesn't mean it wasn't possible, and it's impossible to ever give real percentages on historical events -- well, until we get the cross-time machine working, and we can do some field research to work up the real numbers.

But, still, the spectre of English Fascism in 1937 is a creaky, anachronistic thing to read a long screed against, and Wigan Pier is more than 50% screed by volume. I can't exactly recommend it to most readers in the early 21st century, in particular anyone who suspects they would not be included in Orwell's phalanx of "decent normal people." But, then, as an American, he wasn't talking to me anyway.

Oh, one last note. There is no pier in Wigan. Orwell says it was torn down years before he got there, and never actually says why the pier would be important to a book about coal miners, or Socialism, or impending class doom. So the title is just as satisfying as the rest of the book.

Why US Healthcare Costs So Much

Some guy -- if he said his name, I didn't catch it, though he's talking to someone named "Hank" -- explains, far more entertainingly than you'd expect, exactly why the US spends a lot more than similar countries on healthcare and gets much less than they do:



Addendum, several hours later: I believe this guy is trying to be honest and nonpartisan, which is nice, but he skates over the most glaring issue: all that extra money that Americans spend on health care goes primarily to device manufacturers, drug companies, and health-care companies. (Doctors are also paid better in the US than elsewhere, but that's a relatively minor component of the cost differential. There are other minor components as well, most of which he at least mentions.)

So the main obstacles to reform are the entrenched players in those industries, who have huge war-chests funded by their decades of massive profits. And they can be expected to play about as fair as any industry threatened with the evaporation of most of their profit would.

Update, five days later: The video disappeared from this post (why, I have no idea), so I've restored it. Also, the vlogger has been identified -- as I could have done, if I clicked just one more time -- as author John Green, which makes me even happier: I like to find out that the smart, articulate people who agree with me are also writers, since I already believe in their superiority.  

In Which I Pretend I Know What I'm Talking About

Every blogger eventually becomes a crank to some degree or other -- you all know that, right? I've been at this for seven-plus years, so it's probably time for me to turn that handle another few turns and find something really nutty to obsess about.

Which is to say that I've had a thought lately that seems plausible inside my own head, though I'm sure it would be laughed at heartily by people who really know about economics. But, since I'm already typing, let me lay it out for you, and then you can explain why I'm wrong.

It's obvious that previous technological and organizational advances -- railroads, stirrups, the wheel, automobiles, the detailed division of labor, antibiotics, air conditioning, etc. -- allowed more business activity, and thus more jobs, more profits, and an expanding economy. That's the general mantra of progress, and it's a clear and obvious progression -- it may not have always seemed like a bigger economic pie to the Luddities who were thrown out of work at their looms, but there was definitely more products being produced, and a greater total value of products entering the marketplace (and there being exchanged for real money). Again, I'm no economist -- so I may be completely wrong about this -- but it looks to me like the transformation sparked by the Internet is very different: that its defining factor is that behavior that was previously part of a business process is being supplanted by similar behavior that does not generate revenue for anyone -- or, in some cases, generates substantially less revenue than the prior model did. Or, perhaps, some transformations are not as complete, so there's still some revenue attached, but not nearly as much as the pre-Internet version.

Some examples:

• Classified ads, which generated tens of millions of dollars of ad revenue yearly for newspapers, are replaced with free-to-the-user websites like Craigslist.
• Physical advertising -- primarily print, in newspapers and magazines, but some outdoor and other formats -- is replaced by a much smaller spend for online advertising.
• CDs are replaced by downloads, and ad-supported radio is replaced by promotional streaming websites and, occasionally, by ad models that bring in, again, much less revenue.
• Hardcover books are replaced with cheaper ebooks.
• Local newspapers are replaced by mostly unpaid bloggers.
• Software development companies are replaced by open source.
• Journal publishing is under pressure by the concept of "open access" -- essentially that the public should get for free the research that their tax dollars helped fund.

(I'm not even touching piracy of digital materials, since that's completely separate -- what concerns me is the devaluing of the work and the goods, even when there's some chance of payment.)

In many of those areas, there's still some money -- actually, enough money that a few superstars can grab a lot of it. That, I think, has camouflaged the larger picture, or made it look like every other transition -- there are winners and losers now, just like the buggy-whip era! But there are only a few winners, and a whole lot of losers. And there are large areas where entire job categories have disappeared, and have only been replaced by unpaid hobbyists. Sure, there are a million food bloggers out there now -- but how many restaurant critic jobs have been lost to get there?

I don't see how this is a sustainable trend for any economy: that more and more activities are done for free by people who hope they're good, lucky, and popular enough to be among the few to actually get paid for it. And I don't have any answer to the problem -- we clearly can't go backward, and those old models are pretty well smashed now, and are being smashed in more and more areas each year. But I don't like the way things are going, and I don't see how we can get from here back to any kind of economy where well-paying jobs are increasing and I can hope that my sons will do something neat and interesting twenty years from now.

Happy 80th Birthday, Ursula K. Le Guin

I know I've been snarky at times about "Bad Ursula" -- fannish shorthand for the tendency of some of her late-period works to rely rather more heavily on a thick thumb on the moral scales than the reader would prefer -- but she's one of the indispensable writers of SF & Fantasy. Even more than that, she's been a great writer for more than forty years, has never denied writing genre stories, and has been a wonderful voice of reason when speaking to and about the larger literary world.

If Ursula K. Le Guin had not existed, we would not have been able to invent her. So my heartiest congratulations on reaching this milestone birthday with her wit, vigor, and literary power undiminished -- her recent novel Lavinia, which I have not read myself, has been widely lauded -- and my most fervent hopes for at least twenty more happy and productive years to come.

It Must Be True -- It's Science!

In case you haven't seen it yet, an earth scientist explains exactly How Gay Marriage Causes Earthquakes.

I'm looking forward to a similar explication of the mechanism on the East Coast, which is less well-known. But I believe the love waves from Christopher Street cause flooding in Central Jersey.

Random Thoughts on an Unnamed Topic

1) I find it very funny -- in a dark, cynical way -- that persons insisting on their own secrecy and anonymity are loudly calling for other persons -- named, actual, persons -- to be "shunned." It's enough to make me laugh out loud when those anonymous persons refer to themselves as "real human beings" without an iota of irony.

2) Remember that associating with evil people means that you are also evil. In any way, at any time, for any purpose. Always and forever. Also remember that it's the person attacking you who gets to define "evil."

3) You can never be clean, no matter how much you scrub or wring your hands. You were born soiled, and always will be -- unlike the people on my side of the fence, who are perfect and loving and unjustly oppressed.

4) The Internet, like many other places in this world, is full of absolute screaming lunatics.

5) People accusing others of vicious, evil behavior nevertheless become completely shocked when they themselves are accused of doing nasty things. We're all the protagonists of our own stories, and nothing we do can be, by definition, wrong.

6) For some people -- such as those in my line of work -- Search Engine Optimization means becoming more prominent. For others, it's the opposite. Either way, it's a dark art and rarely works the way one wants it too.

7) Everyone wants to be a secret agent; everyone thinks that they're going to be Deidre Dare. (Or closer to home, Jason Pinter. I could name a name much, much closer still.)

8) I still have no clue what's going on, though I'm boggled that it still is going on.

9) My oppression beats your oppression. Nyah!

10) Politeness is a lost art.

Edit, March 9 @ 7PM: Please also see Wheeler's Postulate on Controversy, which may or may not be related.

Movie Log: My Neighbor Totoro

One of the two great holes in my family-movie experience has finally been filled; my two boys and I watched My Neighbor Totoro last weekend over lunch for our "Boys' Movie Saturday" feature. (The other hole is The Iron Giant, which I also hope to get to this fall.)

Totoro is a lovely film, and much quieter than the other Miyazaki movies I've seen. (They've all been fine movies, but the others are much more filled with action and incident than this movie is.) A professor and his two young daughters moves to a house in the Japanese countryside in the what seems to be the late '40s or early '50s, while their wife and mother (respectively) is being treated in a hospital for what might be tuberculosis. And then the girls (Satsuki, about 8, and Mei, about 4) meet some local nature spirits, while they worry about their mother's condition.

That's it for plot: there are some events (and some great scenes, mostly involving the largest spirit, or "Totoro" -- that's him to the left on the cover -- or a bus in the shape of a cat), but that's really all that's going on. There are some secondary characters, such as a boy Satsuki's age who probably likes her but goes out of his way not to show it, and the boy's grandmother, but they do stay secondary characters. This is one part character study and one part mood piece; it's about the two girls and their new home in equal parts.

What's really amazing about Totoro the way it allows itself to be slow. Traditionally filmed movies sometimes linger on scenes, but animation -- where every second of action, every minor movement, has to be hand-drawn over and over again for each frame of film -- is usually much tighter, sacrificing quietness for pace. Totoro doesn't do that at all; it feels like Miyazaki is allowing his camera to run freely, capturing scenes as they happen and soaking up the quiet rural atmosphere.

I'll want to watch this again, and I'll probably want to see the original Fox dub as well, to compare-and-contrast (I see that some viewers have very strong opinions one way or the other) it to this newer Disney version. But, even if this dub isn't as good as the previous one (as some people claim), My Neighbor Totoro is still a wonderful, amazing movie.

The Great Mundane SF Novels!

This was not my idea -- I was commenting on my elves are different -- but I had to copy 'n' paste my comment here, so it will count as a post:

Hm, no one's said Dune yet. (No, an ordinary dune.)

And who can forget those great Heinlein juveniles!
Ship Galileo
Cadet
Blue-Green Planet
Farmer on the Ground
Between Parts of The Same Planet
The Stones That Stay in the Same Place
Sustainable Development Jones
The Locally Grown Beast
Tunnel in the Bering Sea
Time for the Next Town Over
Citizen of a Sensible Local Council
Have Appropriate Working Tools, Will Walk Within City Limits
Aeroplane Troopers
Podkayne of Toronto

A Schoolboy's Guide to The New Wave

I'm about to talk about a New Wave-ish book I read, so I figured I would repost, slightly edited, several posts from rec.art.sf.written from the past week or so, as a kind of context:

We start with my potted, and undoubtedly biased, history of the New Wave, posted in response to an OP essentially asking what the point was of the New Wave:

First of all, you have to remember that there were two New Waves, and that they were not quite identical.

The first New Wave was the English one: centered on Michael Moorcock's New Worlds and aggressively anti-pulp (and semi-covertly anti-American, in the rah-rah gung-ho Cold War sense of America). The exemplar writer was J.G. Ballard, with Brian Aldiss as another major figure.

The second New Wave, inspired by the first, was American. Harlan Ellison was its biggest exponent, and Samuel R. Delany probably the exemplar writer. Damon Knight's Orbit series of anthologies was the long-term home for the American New Wave, with Ellison's Dangerous Visions and Again, Dangerous Visions being major milestones. The American New Wave was slightly less political (simply because it couldn't possible be more political, but that was a very political era in SF).

Each New Wave ran for a decade or so as an identifiable movement, which seems like an immensely long time these days. Both tried to appropriate techniques and ideas from mainstream literary fiction -- stretching back to the '20s, in some cases, as SF was exceptionally conservative back then -- into SF.

Both movements had something in common with the modern "Mundane SF" movement: they thought genre SF had moved far away from any connection to the real world; that SF wasn't telling stories that related to real people's real lives, and had drifted off into pulpy tales of silly super-science and cardboard strongly-thewed space captains. One of the common calls from the New Wave was to concentrate less on outer space and more on inner space -- that is, to create psychologically complex, believable characters and involve them in plots that didn't require Bug-Eyed Monsters or mad scientists' daughters in mortal danger.

And in 1964, Bester was editing Holiday and had been out of SF for years. Bradbury was mostly in nostalgia-mode, with books like Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes (and also generally did not characterize himself as a science fiction writer to begin with). Kornbluth had been dead for six years. Simak may have been a fine writer (and was coming off Way Station the previous year) but was clearly pastoral and quiet and backwards-looking.

(Also, none of those four were ever particularly identified with Campbell or with Astounding/Analog, except perhaps Simak. That list looks like it's aiming more at the '50s Galaxy axis, which was that decade's attempt to make SF better -- as Campbell was in the '40s and the New Wave in the '60s.)

The burst of feminist SF in the '70s owed much to the New Wave, and the fact that SF is not purely seen as a genre for teenage boys is also in great part down to them. (So you can blame or credit them for the modern spec-fic sex scene -- whichever you choose.)

Did they go too far? Of course; all movements go too far. But Campbellian SF definitely needed a swift kick in the pants in the '60s.

Someone else (an entity known as "Girish") posted to say that the field was pretty much unified before the New Wave. I did not agree.

That wasn't actually the case. For example, in the mid-50s, Galaxy was not F&SF was not Astounding, and each one definitely had its own stable of writers. (And here I'm just talking about the good magazines; there were plenty of others, mostly filled with space opera yardgoods.)

There wasn't actually a unified vision of the field at any time after other magazines joined Amazing in the marketplace, except insofar (post-1939) as Campbell paid the best rates, so people wanting to make decent money toed his party line (which, with the Dean Drive, Dianetics, and so on, often was very odd).

The New Wave wasn't even the first revolt against Campbellian SF. It was just the biggest one at the time.

Then "Girish" talked about having a diverse field meaning that each reader had to find the things he liked individually, instead of everyone reading and liking the same stuff.

Fans never all liked the same things, I'm afraid. The first fan-feud over science fiction (as opposed to the first fan-feud over fan personalities) probably happened in the letter columns of Amazing more than a generation earlier. Fans always had to find the things they liked.

The New Wave did not cast us out of a skiffy Eden, in which Bester and Horace Gold lay down with Ray Palmer and Campbell. I'm afraid there never was such a place.

Later, a "Peter Knutsen" claimed that the New Wave was just a smokescreen for writers who couldn't hack the "necessary scientific literacy," a phrase I took exception to.

Because insulting people you know nothing about is so much easier than actually, y'know, reading some stories.

Let us know how that works out for you.

And then you can explain the level of "science literacy" required to justify the Dean Drive, and Dianetics, and the Shaver Mystery, and...

"Science fiction" does not mean "a story in which all of the science is correct." Ray Palmer wrote SF. Volsted Gridban wrote SF. Edmond Hamilton wrote SF. Lionel Fanthorpe wrote SF. And none of them were "New Wave."

Mr. Knutsen replied, and this was my response.

You wrote "necessary science literacy." I, and others, pointed out that there was never any level of science literacy (however low you want to set the bar) that was "necessary" for writing SF. So your contention that the New Wave was some special aberration of sub-scientifically-literate writers was therefore disproven.

The others, if you don't recognize them, are examples of hideous science unmatched by anything in the New Wave (which generally had decent science, as far as it went -- well, let's not look *too* closely at those spiderwebs in Aldiss's Hothouse).

And I couldn't get any snottier than that, so that's where my part of that thread ended.

My Very, Very Belated Response to the Mundane SF Movement Manifesto

Hey! I'd forgotten about this. Given that I'm trying to start a movement of my own (sort of), I figured I should share this half-serious look at the Mundanes, originally posted to rec.arts.sf.written 5/30/05. I've deleted some extraneous group-specific stuff, but, otherwise, here's what I wrote then:

The Manifesto. (That link doesn't work at the moment; the whole "mundanesf" domain appears to be down. But I can point you to the Mundane SF Blog.)

1) How wonderful, another excuse for metric bargeloads of dreary near-future check-out-my-politics science fiction. I've finally washed the slipstream out of my good jacket, and now this comes along. [sigh]

2) I keep hoping for the Rayguns-and-Spaceships Manifesto, but I guess I need to wait longer.

3) I'm sure they mean well, but the last two hundred years have been one long line of people with Manifestos who meant well. That is an incredibly cheap shot, yes.

4) What I really want to see is writers who want to write real science-fiction stories - not warmed-over Hollywood retreads (official or option-begging), not what-everyone-else-is-doing, not what's-selling-this-year, not well-it's-partially-SF-and-partially-fantasy-with-a-dollop-of-nurse-novel-and-just-a-scintilla-of-romantic-suspense. If they want to write dreary near-future stories, well, OK, that's nice for them, but they'd better be damn good writers. (And even then I probably won't want to read them.)

5) If you want to write a particular kind of story, do it. But saying that everyone else who writes anything else are misguided fools is not only dangerous intellectual arrogance, but also the kind of hubris that nemesis just loves to clobber. I am morally certain that some signatory of this Manifesto will commit a Galactic Empire story within a decade. I hope to be there, pointing and laughing, though it will be much more fun if it's a really good Galactic Empire story.

Aftermath of the "Summon Author" Spell

(See My Elves Are Different for something like an explanation of "Summon Author.")

Actually, I should be more specific: I didn't manage to summon John Scalzi here, as "Summon Author" is supposed to do, I just induced him to post about me back in his own place. Perhaps what I actually cast was a "Poke Author With a Pointy Stick" spell, which is also very common on the 'net.

Anyway, Scalzi wrote a long it's-not-a-manifesto for the New Comprehensible, though he did specifically refuse to drum anyone out or call for all future SF to be written in New Comprehensibilist mode. (You can't win them all.) I still have hope, though -- you can't have a real literary movement without feuds, fights, and blood on the floor.

Minor Point 1: it was Patrick who said that John had already left the con, and so we could take his name in vain (and plan out his future career for him). Matter of fact, he said it gleefully. Of course, we're clearly not the Towering Editorial Overlords we aspire to be if we're not even sure where our putative puppets are, but perhaps practice will make perfect. (Now I need to find another author to make plans for...)

Minor Point 2: This is unrelated, but I wanted to share another thought I had during the "New Millennium" panel -- Steve Erikson's "Malazan" novels are to epic fantasy what Charles Stross's Accelerando is to Hard SF.

My Boskone Schedule

This year, for the first time ever, I'll be at the renowned Boskone science fiction convention in Boston, which is coming up in just about two weeks. In case anyone else is going to be there, and wants to say hello -- or is interested in seeing me pontificating about things -- here's what I'm scheduled to do that weekend:

Sat 12:00 noon
Other neglected authors
Small presses are doing a good job getting a number of authors in print, yet some great SF authors, who everyone should read, are still neglected. Even authors who have some stuff in print can be considered "neglected." To start, each panelist will take one author and make a case for him or her. Some we might consider -- though that's up to the panel -- are Pangborn, Lafferty, Kornbluth, Leiber (yes, Leiber can now fairly be called that). Even Sturgeon probably qualifies. Gwyneth Jones, Joanna Russ.

Sat 3:00pm
The Fantastic and the Mundane: A Look at Urban Fantasy
What is urban fantasy? A discussion of definitions dealing with what is essentially another umbrella term: we have vampires, werewolves, wizards, elves, ghosts and more all falling under the concept of urban fantasy or authors identifying themselves as urban fantasy writers. Is
it new? Who is writing it? Some people self-identify as urban fantasy writers. Some think of themselves as something else. And some reject the categorization. Is Neil Gaiman urban fantasy? Margaret Atwood? Anne Rice? What makes them different or same as Simon R. Green, Jim Butcher or Laurell K. Hamilton?

Sun 2:00pm
The New Millennium: SF and Fantasy in the 21st Century
We're now more than five years into the new century. Who are the major authors writing SF and fantasy today? What are the major works so far in this century? And who will be the major forces and what will be the major trends in the next 10 or 20 years?