Comment by moate | Hacker News Reader

Comment by moate | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

I think we're disagreeing on what "politics" means, perhaps. I'm going with something to the effect of "Politics is the process by which people and groups make decisions, rules, and laws to govern society and share resources" and you seem to be thinking "the affairs of nation-states and how they, specifically, govern". For example, Frankenstein being "social commentary" firmly makes it political to me, but seems to somehow exclude it for you.

Also, the idea that "there's politics in the source, but you can enjoy it without engaging with them" is sort of proving my Rage Against the Machine example from my original post (I picked the most overtly political band I could think of for the ad absurdum of it): Just because you don't CARE or agree with the politics, doesn't mean it's not there. I'm not saying you need to like, or engage with the politics in anything, but denying that they exist is...a political act!

As for your refutations of the people I picked, I didn't see you citing an example of a story Asimov had without politics/social commentary (the man was prolific and I haven't ready everything he wrote, I picked him because his best known works are Foundation and Robots series which are both very very political), if you felt The Man in the High Castle and Do Androids... (or Flow my Tears, or A Scanner Darkly) were just "being weird" and not political, again, I think we're just using different definitions of the word.

In H2G2, Adams says that Vogons, the galactic bureaucrats and face of the space government, make the 3rd worst poetry in the Universe. Now if one wanted to, one can make that a silly joke, or one could interpret that as people who are dedicated to maintaining the systems of government are the among least creative creatures in existence . And the weird thing is, somehow, even if one came to the 2nd conclusion, one could still think Adams wasn't making a political statement. Now why am I suddenly thinking about Claude...

Part of the problem, as always, is what types of people and activities are defined as "political".

Particularly in an office or other "respectable" setting, you've got people who are white, and people who are political.

You've got people who are straight, and people who are political.

You've got executives who are men, and executives who are political.

And so on.

What and whom one chooses to include in stories, and what ones chooses to leave out—and, perhaps even more importantly, what one includes and leaves out without even thinking about it, are, by their very nature, political.

I'm also reminded of the Dungeons and Dragons group I heard about, whose DM made one very simple change to the published adventure path. The players were going through the towns, and finding them filled with women. The other adventurers were women. The blacksmiths were women. Even the prominent goblins in the dungeon were female! The taverns had a couple of men in them, but apart from that, there were seemingly nearly no men in the entire world. The players were convinced there was something deeply sinister going on.

But all that had happened was that the DM reversed the gender of every NPC written into the adventure. An adventure full of men, that no one would have batted an eye at, suddenly caused shock and suspicion when it had exactly the same percentage of women instead.

So: was the original adventure author "political" for the gender ratio they put into it?

^ this one gets it.

Yup, this one gets the ambiguity in the word "political", and then uses the broadest possible definition to avoid the narrower point I was actually making about preachy writing lol

The LITERAL definition from the dictionary?

Again, I get it: you don't want to engage in the politics of the writing you like. That's fine. But you don't get to say the politics don't exist in the text.

I promise, the authors you speak of would not respect your analysis of their text (and you're probably fine with that) but your narrower point is...not worth making? Anyone can like or dislike whatever they want for whatever reasons they want, what they can't do is say "that red barn can't actually red because I hate red barns but I like that one, and my analysis is valid". I mean I guess a P.K Dick character could, but I don't think we're ready to have that discussion.

Sci-fi and Speculative fiction, are, always political. Just like how romance is always about love, and mysteries are always about solving a puzzle. You were responding to my point, so I get to set the terms of engagement. Thems the rules of discourse.

I'll just come out and say it, your ability to analyze texts really comes into question when you say CYBERPUNK (of ALL the subgenres) can be anything but political. Again, if you really only want "political" to mean "involving governments" and not the LITERAL definition of the word, I don't know how we can talk to each other because we're speaking different languages (or rather, using language in entirely different ways).

Sure I did. I addressed it above.

And I'm not using "political" any more broadly than conservatives or self-proclaimed centrists do when they say they don't want anything "political" in their games, TV shows, movies, etc.

Because when they say that, 99.9% of the time, what they mean is they want their media to confirm their pre-existing biases, that straight white men are the most important, that straight women are there for their sexual gratification, and other people mostly shouldn't even show up, etc. We've seen this over and over and over again.

And the other part of what they usually say is that they want no politics in their media, just like in the old days.

But, again: it's always been there. They just didn't see it in the old days. They played Wolfenstein and shot Nazis, and didn't see that as "political", but nowadays if you put Nazis as a villain in a video game, half of those same people will scream that they're being preached to.

So if you read all those books you named, and didn't see any politics in them...

...maybe it's because they were simply confirming your pre-existing biases.

Or maybe it's because you didn't have the reading comprehension skills to understand where the politics in them were.

Because science fiction has always been political.

You've now gone from disagreeing with my definition to inventing beliefs for me and questioning my reading comprehension based on them, so I think I’m done here lol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com