7 ms·
Is the Political Novel Dead?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- kazinator 7y agoNineteen-Eighty Four is the Nineteen-Eighty Four of our time. It's visionary. For example, even in this sense: we are just entering the age when you not only watch screens, but they watch you.
- inflatableDodo 7y agoI'd say that Neuromancer, though it is not commonly regarded as a political novel, is more useful as a metaphor, given it predicts the explosion of players and political complexity created by the inability of any one group to exercise control over technology, which is a theme pretty much absent from 1984. As to whether the political novel is dead, it is always kicking about in science fiction, where fashions have their own undercurrents that are much less subject to the whims of what can be regarded as literature. Science fiction, probably to its benefit, being rarely regarded as literature in the first place.
- TCR19 7y agoThe Windup Girl is pretty new and is good as well. Although it touches on more environmental/corporate standpoints, but they all relate to each other anyways.
- Apocryphon 7y agoNeuromancer is a seminal work of cyberpunk, but I'd say that it codified (or maybe just typifies) a lot of the tropes and themes of the genre that were to follow. I would actually go with Stand on Zanzibar as the one that truly predicts the social and political changes of technology and globalization that cyberpunk was to embody, though it's often more difficult to follow and darker than Neuromancer.
- 0xdeadb00f 7y agoI own a copy but haven't read it yet. Heard very mixed things about it, from it being a masterpiece to it being boring or overrated. I'd like to hear your (and anyone else who's read it) opinions on it, maybe without any significant spoilers. Obviously I'll read it and come up with my own conclusion as to whether it's good or bad, but I'm curious.
- opsiprogram 7y agoEverything depends on taste but I love Neuromancer, it's really good at building a complicated world that isn't overburdened and I find the notion that it is "boring" kind of crazy! It almost reads like a thriller. Immediately one of my favorite books when I picked it up. It's certainly of our time, one of those books that you won't believe was written when it was. And it doesn't really feel dated, we might still be heading towards the world it portrays, hard to say... haha
- 0xdeadb00f 7y agoThanks for the reply. I read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, by Philip K. Dick and had almost the exact experience you describe with world building. I'll definitely give Neuromancer a read when I finish the three or so books I've started but not finished (it's not an issue of boredom - I'm just very busy at the moment).
- Eric_WVGG 7y agoI think the 1984 of our times is The Road by Cormac McCarthy, and the implications of that are too bleak for either politicians or literary critics to take on.
- andrewclunn 7y agoOh they exist, but they're not heralded by the "keepers of culture" because those institutions and people are all subservient to the powers that be.
- smacktoward 7y ago> Even now, there are still a few novelists who set out to grab the reader by the lapels. Seaton commends Dave Eggers’ urgent Silicon Valley satire The Circle (2013) for crystallising concerns about social media in the form of a thriller and causing ripples in the worlds of tech and politics. Oh God, I hope not. I read The Circle and found it to be a mess, making flawed arguments about subjects Eggers seems to not fully understand. (A review I wrote at the time goes into more detail on this: https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/06/book-review-the-circle/ https://jasonlefkowitz.net/2015/06/book-review-the-circle/)
- jhbadger 7y agoYeah, It reminded me (not in a good way) of Cory Doctorow's works in the sense that even when I agreed with the general sentiment, I was infuriated by how much the "good" characters were winning by arguing against cartoonish villains.
- AWildC182 7y agoIt's a really flimsy story IMO, but I'm glad people are attempting to write about what's going on and where they think things are going.
- wmeredith 7y agoThe novel was bad and the movie was worse.
- notus 7y agoA lot of YA fiction tends to be pretty political. Many of them have dystopian settings where this is conflict with authoritative rulers. What I feel that we are missing is writers like Kurt Vonnegut.
- lazugod 7y agoCould you describe what missing elements Vonnegut had?
- SolaceQuantum 7y agoHow can the Political Novel be dead? Isn't the 2019 Hugo Award Winner for best novel precisely a political novel? (The Calculating Stars is a novel about a woman attempting to become a female astronaut during 1952 America, in a setting where the earth is quickly becoming uninhabitable due to runway global warming.)
- jandrese 7y agoWeirdly, the politics takes a backseat to the protagonists personal problems, in particular her anxiety over public speaking. While the political elements are in there, they feel like they're in the background. The primary antagonist is motivated by a personal vendetta, not his political positions.
- smacktoward 7y agoI haven't read The Calculating Stars (yet), but from the description it sounds like the climate change in the story is caused by a meteor colliding with the Earth, rather than being caused by humans. That seems like an effective way to take climatic change out of its political context -- i.e., it's changing because of a deus ex machina, not because of anything done by any person or group of people. In our world, climate change is a political issue precisely because it's anthropogenic -- because it's something we're doing to ourselves so that some among us might profit. Why you'd want to take climate change out of its political context, I have no idea. Someone's who's read the book can speak to that better than I can. It seems like a weird choice, though.
- jandrese 7y agoClimate Change is mostly just the motivator to get the space program going earlier. There is some political commentary in the way the government officials and public at large can't seem to comprehend the idea of a changing climate, but it's not a major narrative in the book.
- jammygit 7y agoLet’s not forget the Game of Thrones books, which depict politics in a strikingly selfish and human way
- greenie_beans 7y agoUm, no. Not at all. I’d argue that it’s the exact opposite. There are so many new novels that are very political, almost too many that I don’t care to read anymore political novels. Especially in the Trump age. All the writers feel compelled to resist Trump through their writing/art.
- opsiprogram 7y agoIronically on your point, a book seems like a poor way to send a message to this particular president...
- greenie_beans 7y agolol...very true
- Mountain_Skies 7y agoIt's simply been renamed Fantasy & Science Fiction.
- paulddraper 7y agoReally?
- mynameishere 7y agoA book about The Troubles doesn't seem like it would be terribly apt today, would it? I don't know. No mention of one of the more (genuinely) important political novels, Submission by Houellebecq.