site banner
naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   16082 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 19, 2022

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

16
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Spoilers, citizen!

I thought Ancillary Justice was both enjoyable and extremely well-constructed. I semi-disrecommended it a couple months back, but that was purely on aesthetics. It's the kind of book that will raise red flags to a certain kind of reader who happens to be overrepresented on this board.

But first, a little about what I liked.

  • Vast or alien intelligences navigating human society are cool. This is common to lots of books I quite like, such as most anything by Wildbow.

  • Vast or alien empires with aggressively weird structures are also cool. You barely saw any of that until the second half of the book, though.

  • The setting was aggressively authleft and dystopian. More on that later.

  • It played with a few AI and general-intelligence tropes that I was familiar with from my time on /r/rational, but which rarely make it to the mainstream. The most important of these would be value drift and antimemetics, but you didn't get to that part.

  • I found the interleaved chronology to be quite satisfying. You know from the back cover that Justice of Toren One Esk used to "be" a spaceship, but that rightfully elides all the details. More importantly, it doesn't cover the background for why someone might want to betray a spaceship, or what said ship could do about it. The alternating scenes converge on that event in a way I found aesthetically pleasing.

  • There is legitimate characterization. My personal favorite bit was Breq's conclusion when faced with multiple Anaander Mianaais arguing to kill each other.

  • The actual prose was deliciously dense. I suspect this overlaps with what you're calling "confusing." It was genuinely quite fun and immersive for me.

  • I want to write a whole thesis on implied vs. explicit worldbuilding, and how hard it is to do right, but I digress. Suffice to say I found this book technically impressive.

Now for the red flags. Ancillary Justice was obviously part of a Conversation in the SFF community. Yes, the low-hanging fruit would be the (lack of) gender dynamics, since they're quite visible. There were a few passages that were basically a pastiche of Left Hand of Darkness This is not a disqualifier so much as a proud tradition in Thinky Science Fiction, also known as Award Bait. It gives any journalist or reviewer a quick, obvious reference point, and streamlines part of the worldbuilding process by importing a more specific set of cultural assumptions, picking up where LeGuin or Asimov left off. Not coincidentally, that corresponds to a creeping sense of unease in those with a reflexive distaste for Internet leftism.

So instead of being linguistic cultural baggage, carried around even when actively harmful, the pronouns get interpreted as woke pandering. Instead of talking about the bizarre implications of an increasing density of Anaanders as you approach the capital Dyson sphere, people argue over whether various characters were really men. And rather than ask why an author might write her fully automated luxury non-gendered communist empire as a hegemonizing, xenophobic not-so- monoculture...all that matters is whether it fit Vox Day's idea of good sci-fi.

I'll leave you with a couple recommendations.

If you like ship-AI, but want less 2010s politics, less originality, and more HFY: try the Last Angel. Humanity has been subjugated as one of many client races to the Covenant Compact. On a routine mission, one team discovers a drifting hulk which will throw into doubt their overlords' preferred version of history. Yeah, it's Halo without the Flood, and it kicks ass.

If you want something a little bleaker that still deals with transhumanism, space governance, continuity of consciousness, etc., and you don't mind video games, consider Crying Suns. I found its gameplay was good fun; I also enjoyed both the character writing and the overall plot. Or you could just go read Dune again, you cheeky blighter you, since all this branch of sci-fi clearly owes its existence to Frank Herbert. Ancillary Justice is just a little more obtuse about it.

Finally, for those of you who suffered through this whole review thinking Ancillary Justice didn't go far enough, or who would like to see an actual example of unapologetically leftist fiction, just read The Traitor Baru Cormorant.

All this is reminding me of older SF, so Leckie is re-working tropes (deliberately or not? hard to tell). The "AI starship in human body" notion is along the lines of a brainship, a concept I first encountered with Anne McCaffrey's The Ship Who Sang, but which is even older than that in SF. Flipping it so that it's "AI intelligence in human body" is a variation, sure, but I bet someone has also done it before.

So reading the differing interpretations in the comments, the question seems to be: is Leckie writing the dark side of The Culture, how that society would really be in practice, or does she mean to put forward the progressive elements as separate and admirable and desirable?

It's definitely intentional. Insofar as the book was intended as award bait, yeah, it's winking-and-nudging the LeGuin fans, and probably a dozen other authors besides. That sort of dialogue with existing ideas is...I don't want to say it's the mark of good sci-fi, because there's excellent stuff out there which firmly abstains from referencing what came before. It would be more accurate to say that deployed properly, a conversation with other sci-fi is an efficient worldbuilding tool, and may make the overall premise more engaging to boot.

Personally, I think Leckie started from an interesting premise rather than from a mandatory message. Rumors of its wokeness have been greatly exaggerated. The Radch isn't the Culture any more than it's Dune's Imperium or Endless Space's Horatio. It's a related concept, developed on familiar lines and richly illustrated.

I read it as a variation on the obvious answer. In-universe, the Radch is its emperors' vanity project, and they subscribe to some level of totalizing xenophobia. The annexations, the citizenship, the ancillaries, the reforms are all serving the interests of Anaander Mianaai.

Out-of-universe, it's because Leckie wrote AJ as an interesting novel, not as agitprop. If she was just going for maximum partisanship, the setting would look very different. I really liked @gemmaem's observation that the author stripped out the two biggest (modern) diversity flags. That puts it more in line with LeGuin or Asimov's approach to political sci-fi.

It is worth noting that Banks' Culture is firmly in that camp, too. FALGC has taken on a life of its own, but Banks spends a lot of time engaging with the Culture as a hegemonic force. At its most extreme, some of the novels are direct allegory to American adventurism. Even in those that aren't, though, the Culture and especially the existence of Contact is pretty unambiguously universalizing.

Aunt Beru, moisture farmer on Tatooine, mother-figure to Luke Skywalker.

Coruscant, shining jewel of the galaxy, city-planet at the heart of trade, and dark home of power and inequity.

Also, a proud tradition of naming ships after birds. Millenium Cormorant?

I'll give a recommend for the Last Angel too, though it's SOOOOOOO SLOW! It's like that gif of a truck constantly accelerating towards but never quite hitting a post, filmed from every angle.

That's not to say that nothing actually happens or that updates aren't frequent. It's good, well-written and interesting but the pacing is arthritic. We still don't know much about the Songeaters after all this time! I thought there were other factions of horrific space entities as well, along with people leaving random space structures around. Someone pointed out that many of the characters know more than the audience does. The Compact's investigation into the father goes on and on, the Triquetrans took so long for their secret to be revealed. It's still not fully revealed, as of the last chapter! And then there are the side-stories, slowing everything down even more.

Also, it seems that sequel is abandoned if I look at forum posts right ( https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel.244209/page-96#post-15777617 is from 2014 ).

No, we've moved on to another sequel, The Hungry Stars, updated last month. Spacebattles has an unintuitive thread format.

Oh, that's good to know. I haven't gotten around to Ascension, yet, but I'll bookmark this for when I cut down my queue.

Can you link it? If you have contact to author - maybe add post mentioning it as a threadmark to the original thread?

Following

I'm too scared to post about it on spacebattles, they're anal about thread necromancy.

These are the sequels, the original is linked above.

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel-ascension.346640/

https://forums.spacebattles.com/threads/the-last-angel-the-hungry-stars.868549/#post-68912119

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats