Horizon

Thanks, Ben. Just in time to see me through a dull photocopying job.

Strange claim that the Internet is a source of constant "gratification all of the time." (Ha.) But otherwise, yes, worth a listen.

Really striking how closely the format and style of the show still resemble the BBC "Voice" programs that Orwell pioneered for the BBC Eastern Service during the war.

Funny they didn't go on to talk about the post-nuclear dystopias -- stuff like A Canticle for Leibowitz.

Right to name Zamyatin's We as "the novel behind Huxley and Orwell." That's just right.

Interesting notion that after all our ghastly 20th-century large-scale experiments, people have gotten to be afraid of too much imagination. True?

I thought the internet claim was an odd one as well — unless you're looking for pornography, pirated music, or opportunities to argue with strangers, that is.

I agree about the format consistencies — it reminded me of Shirer's comments on arranging roundtables in Berlin Diary. Revealing that the panel had agreed beforehand to shelf discussion of eugenics and dystopias until the topics were introduced by the moderator.

Oy. The amount of sheer wishful-thinking bumpf that gets published on the Internet about Orwell...

You might want to post this quote from Orwell over there. Though of course that might entail reminding folks that Orwell considered his own self to be a socialist.

Revealing that the panel had agreed beforehand to shelf discussion of eugenics and dystopias until the topics were introduced by the moderator.

At least they weren't restricted to a pre-censored transcript like the poor folks on Voice - and that meant a word-for-word, no-deferring-from-the-text-by-even-so-much-as-a-syllable transcript.

...read out under the eye of a switch censor, while trying to make it all sound as naturally conversational as possible. Yes.

Funny they didn't go on to talk about the post-nuclear dystopias

I'm really not sure that post-apocalyptic lit is necessarily dystopic. I'm a huge fan of the stuff (Wolveriiiiines!), and it seems like the stories generally lack any careful presentation of The System. There aren't any expository digressions where someone explains how things work nowadays, which I think is essential to utopia/dystopia lit.

Think about it — Handmaid's Tale excepted, what post-apocalyptic lit has a character who goes into a rhapsody about what the new world is, as opposed to how it came to be?

Dunno about rhapsodies, but "how things work now" is a major source of narrative interest in A Canticle for Leibowitz, Riddley Walker, and the John Christopher A Prince in Waiting series, for example.

Of course *1984* is also post-nuclear, but unobtrusively so, and I agree it's from an older generation of storytelling.

I still disagree -- the story isn't a vehicle for the exposition in Canticle in the same way as it is for the others. It's more akin to Verne's Mysterious Island in its exposition style than it is to — say "The Machine Stops".

It's been a couple of years since I read it, though, so I might be wrong on this.

Maybe if you could explain what you mean by exposition, then? I haven't read Canticle in years either but my memory is that it follows the obscure desert shrine of the Blessed Leibowitz through the post-nuclear development of a new civilization that in time generates new mega-states and a new nuclear conflict. Is that different from the "exposition" you're talking about because it emphasizes a sequence of events rather than the comprehensive design of a system at a particular time?

Hmmm -- I have to reach back in my memory, but yes, the difference between the "sequence of events" versus "comprehensive system" is the important one for me. The expository digression is Goldstein's book, or the hatchery tour in Brave New World, or the airship ride in "The Machine Stops." As I remember, pretty much all of Walden Two is a tour through utopia — there's nothing but exposition in the book. The prologue of Lord of the World is a "how-we-got-this-way", but the most of the remaining chapters contain at least one massive expository paragraph.

That's very different from the exposition in Canticle, The Postman, Reign of Fire, or Road Warrior. In general, those are only providing backstory for a plot in a bizarre landscape. In utopias/dystopias, the plot is primarily a vehicle for exposition.

At least that's how I see it. Haven't taken a lit course since high school, so what do I know?

Where would the LeGuin Hainish series (The Left Hand of Darkness, etc.) fall on that scale for you?

I haven't read it, I'm afraid. And in writing my last comment, it did occur to me that there's a blurry line. "The Machine Stops" in particular can't quite be classed as one but not the other.

LeGuin -- well, you might not like some of her work due to what she admitted was the "sound of axes being ground." But The Left Hand of Darkness is interesting. It's a story about superpower conflict, comradeship, and the meaning of freedom, set on a planet without gender, as told through the adventures of a conventionally human diplomatic visitor.