Note

In case one hadn't already guessed, posting will be spotty-to-nonexistant here through the end of November...

Contra MacLeod

So, a couple of months ago, Ken MacLeod posted this on his blog, during the Israel/Lebanon hostilities.

Now, as I may have mentioned before, I have some sympathy for the viewpoint that the idea of 'civilized warfare', that there is any signficant state between 'peace' and 'total war', that that idea is illusory and false. But while I find it a useful illusion, he finds it a pernicious one.

The problem, though, is that while his views on jus in bellum are in my view quite wrong, his views on jus ad bellum are, frankly, outright evil: the idea that it is possible to simultaneously reject self-defense as a just reason for warfare and accept the genocidally racist arab irredentism as a perfectly fine casus belli is so profoundly wrong that one can hardly help but look for alternate, sinister personal motives. One does find traces of a particularly rabid anti-colonialism, but it is one that is premised on the bizarre unspoken contentions that Jewish culture is utterly alien to the Middle East, there were never any indigenous Jews anywhere in the region, and that Arabs are either historically incapable of imperialism and colonialism or that they must, uniquely, be forgiven for it.

Geopolitical Nightmares

One way to characterize eras is by their nightmares, as delivered, of course, by it's culture's fantasists. And so there is, within the Science Fiction umbrella a subgenre of Geopolitical Nightmare Stories. In the Cold War era, we had such things as Robert Heinlein's "If this Goes On", George Orwell's "1984", and any number of various and sundry apocalypses. Post-cold-war, we've been stumbling between various different Nightmares, from the generic Corporate-dominated (and simultaneously Asian-Ascendant) worlds of Cyberpunk (and, for that matter, Kurt Vonnegut's "Hocus Pocus"), to environmental collapse stories like John Barnes' "Mother of Storms" (or the anti-environmental collapse story of Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Michael Flynn's "Fallen Angels" for that matter) to the New World Disorder of John Barnes' "Kaleidescope Century".

Of course, five years ago Geopolitics gave us some new nightmares.

And that's why two of the books scheduled for this coming year have such an interest: two surface-similar Geopolitical Nightmare Stories, from authors about as far apart politically as it is possible to publishably get: Orson Scott Card's "Empire" and Ken MacLeod's "The Execution Channel". Will be interesting to see where they meet and diverge and meet again...

Off-Agenda Linkblogging:

Via TNH's Particles:

Wikipedia's Lamest Edit Wars.

Enjoy.