(urth) Gene Wolfe is for Socialists

[Jeff Wilson]

On 12/19/2010 8:23 PM, Matthew Knight wrote:
> I'm with Pedro on this one.  I think the list's author is finding
> something of value in 5HOC when viewed through a socialist lens, despite
> recognizing vast differences between Wolfe's perspective and his own.

It's not such a stretch to see how a general dystopia is also a dystopia 
for the working people. "5HC" is even a kind of "fiend confessional", 
where the narrator describes a world where people are openly bought, 
sold, and rented, how he and his gang of junior exploiters seek to steal 
and marry their way up the ladder of oppression, only to find that they 
are just as much exploited by their seniors, and piecemeal removal of 
the ruling progenitors ultimately changes nothing. (Implying wider-scale 
revolution is needed.)

 From an adventure SF POV, "5HC" is a wonderfully subversive story where 
the speculative technologies of freedom or liberation from want (FTL, 
AI, and cloning, in once sense or another) are used instead to reach new 
places to rule, to make more efficient overseers over the working 
prisoners, and to make new races of exploiters and exploited for better 
returns, a good wake-up call to life's realities outside the 
neighborhoods of most US/UK/Commonwealth readers.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
Computational Intelligence Laboratory - Texas A&M Texarkana
< http://www.tamut.edu/CIL >