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Jack comments on Open Thread: May 2010 - Less Wrong
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Shelley and Lovecraft are good calls, I had forgotten to think about the early stuff. We can put Vern in the progressive camp, I think.
There is sort of an interesting division among the "cautionary tales". There's the Crichton/Shelley/Romero zombie tradition of humans try to play God and get their asses kicked as punishment unless traditional values/folkways come to the rescue. And then theres the more leftist tradition: new technology has implications capitalism or statism isn't equipped to deal with, here we include H.G. Wells, Brave New World and other dystopias, cyberpunk, Gattaca, a lot of post-nuke war stuff, etc.
Are both groups reactionary under your definition or just the first?
I totally agree about Hollywood. There is also the whole alien invasion subgenre which originally was really about Cold War anxiety. Cloverfield is probably counts as a modern-day equivalent.
For anyone who hasn't already seen it — Caveman Science Fiction!
How do you classify Egan? Pretty pro-tech in his novels, iirc, but a pretty high proportion of his short stories are effectively horror about new tech.
That isn't how his short stories have struck me. A handful that come to mind about near-future technology, not having the books in front of me, are Axiomatic, Silver Fire, The Moral Virologist, Worthless, and one whose name I forget about artificial nanomcguffins that let you gradually reprogram your own mind just by wishing the change you want. They're pretty dark, but I wouldn't classify them as horror. That is, I don't read them as saying "these are things that man should not know", but "after such knowledge, these are issues that must be faced".
I think those are the "Grey Knights" from "Chaff".
Was this intended to be a reply to Jack's post?
Yes, sorry.
The original The War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells has many similarities to the era's "invasion stories" in which a hostile foreign power (usually Germany or France) launches a very successful surprise invasion of Great Britain. Wells just replaced Germany with Martians.
The point about there being different categories is one I had not thought about. I agree that the first is unambiguously iin the reactionary form. I'm not sure that the second is always reactionary: It might depend on the degree at which the technology is caricatured. Thus for example, Brave New World and Gattaca both seem to be such extreme caricatures of what might happen with those technologies that they seem reactionary. That's in contrast with say "A Deepness in the Sky" which takes the same technologies and shows different societal responses to them (careful use, arguable abuse and outright tyranny). Similar, a lot of Bujold's works raise serious issues about the ethical and policy issues brought up by specific, plausible technologies, but she's generally careful to show both use and abuse, not just horrific dystopias.
This sounds a lot like just debating definitions - is "reactionary" such a useful term here? Sounds to me like you're trying to shoehorn it in a context where it doesn't really fit? Wouldn't replacing it with a more precise and narrow terms make the discussion clearer - such as "romantic about traditional societies" or something?
That's a valid point. Maybe split into two forms: 1) Romantic attitudes towards traditional societies and 2) extreme caricatures of the potential negative ramifications of new technologies. 1 and 2 both seem to be highly correlated in science fiction. Many of the examples given show aspects of both.