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To borrow Evola's vocabulary, this is lunar civilization porn.
One couldn't write a more authentic parody of a world dominated by the feminine principle if they tried. All of it is there: materialistic and decadent, based upon money and sensuous pleasures, and lacking even in the contemplation of the possibility of violence (even, action) as a reality of the human condition.
The temptation of course is to just let it rot in the garbage bin of history as the sycophantic drivel that it is. But anger and reaction, though cruel mistresses in everything else, are powerful muses.
I wish I had the talent to infuse this world with a good dose of solar Heinlein and write the story from the other side of the bayonets. Because while your political lesbian MIT graduates are having interspecies sex and playing at carbon neutral inclusive and equitable court intrigue whilst swapping tips on how to be a smothering mother with our alien oppressors, you know someone, somewhere, is dying in a ditch actually fighting for something they believe in.
Who are they? What's their story? Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.
This seems very much an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. People with "lunar" personalities will prefer "lunar" stories and people with "solar" personalities will prefer "solar" stories.
As vain as it is to say when it comes to aesthetics: I disagree.
I pride myself on being able to appreciate both Hard Boiled and Pan's Labyrinth which are sublimations of the respective metaphysical tendencies.
The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art. I think lunar science fiction is a contradiction in terms in the same way that you couldn't make a lunar action movie or a solar romantic comedy (or if you can it's definitely a tour de force).
If you manage to sublimate sensation to the degree that you transcend your setting, you are not writing science fiction. You are writing classical literature that just happens to contain spaceships.
My criticism of this particular work isn't so much that it is lunar at all, but rather that it is so unabashedly and inappropriately lunar as to be perverse. And that is a failure. I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.
Fair enough, and probably true. But granting that lunar currently-called-science-fiction is a fundamentally different form of art as compared to solar actual-science-fiction, it's still not clear to me that one is less worthy of existing than the other, or inferior in some objective sense, as opposed to simply being less appealing to people with taste for the other.
If what you mean is that a work of fiction should not be too tilted toward one...
... then I can't disagree; but earlier weren't you proposing hyper-solar fiction, and describing it as superior art to hyper-lunar fiction? Perhaps I misunderstood your point. Thanks for the in-depth answer, in any case.
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