I'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.
The 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.
Neuromancer 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.
I 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.
Everything 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
Thanks 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).
I 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.
> 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/)
Yeah, 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.
A 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.
How 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.)
Weirdly, 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.
I 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.
Climate 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.
Much of sci fi and fantasy is in fact commentary on our current world, often political. Almost everything Ursula Le Guin wrote was political. Kim Stanley Robinson talks fairly blatantly about the struggle against capitalism. Orson Scott Card writes a lot about nation state struggles. Margaret Atwood has a popular, political tv show on right now, watered down as it is, adapted from her very political novels. I don't know how you would describe Cory Doctorow without mentioning political struggle. Alan Moore is very, very political, and should be considered a novelist. And it goes without saying, most influential early sci fi was also political (Ray Bradbury, Heinlein, Asimov, Jack London, Frank Herbert, HG Wells).
IMHO this article seems to be more about how the novel has left social consciousness entirely. That's a far less tractable problem than reading the many political novels in print now. Either that or the author is blind to how wide politics can be—pretty much all complex conflict has some political bearing.
Um, 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.
A 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.
28 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 69.6 ms ] threadIt's visionary. For example, even in this sense: we are just entering the age when you not only watch screens, but they watch you.
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.
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/)
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.
IMHO this article seems to be more about how the novel has left social consciousness entirely. That's a far less tractable problem than reading the many political novels in print now. Either that or the author is blind to how wide politics can be—pretty much all complex conflict has some political bearing.