Klara and the Sun (Kazuo Ishiguro, 2021)

So, here's something I didn't expect.  A dystopian novel where the dystopia not only isn't a focus, but also isn't actually spelled out at all.

The titular narrator in Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun is an Artificial Friend, a robot specifically manufactured to provide companionship to lonely children.  The world on display is largely our own, though the presence of functional human-like robots should be the first indication that we're firmly in sci-fi territory.  The first 40 pages or so concern Klara's time at the store she is eventually purchased from, where her specific gifts become clear.  Klara is particularly adept at observing details and putting them together, which leads to some combination of insightfulness and surrealism in her interactions with the larger world around her.  She comes to believe, for example, that the Sun (as in the incandescent orb in the sky) is alive, has his own will (and yes, the Sun in Klara's mind is gendered), and is capable of performing acts of miraculous healing.  She also believes that the Cootings Machine, a piece of construction equipment which never has its purpose spelled out but which emits so much Pollution that it can blot out the Sun in its immediate surroundings, is obviously the Sun's great foe (and therefore the villain of Klara's story).

Klara's narration has a strange, somewhat disjointed quality to it; there's an almost child-like diction, with a marked tendency toward referring to others in the third person, even when they're the only person she's speaking to.  Her observations can be somewhat unsettling at times, and she has far from a full understanding of emotions, leading her to say and do things that are perhaps not the best choice at the time.

Most of the book is focused on Klara's interactions with Josie, a sickly adolescent girl who chooses her from the store.  From the start, there's something a little off about the whole situation; Josie's mother directly asks Klara to show her imitation abilities off in the store, after a few encounters across the shop window, and the relationship between the Mother and Klara is anything but normal, as the story progresses; the reason for this becomes clear, but the implications are decidedly chilling.

The world on display is a sort of light dystopia, plausible but thankfully not something currently feasible.  Robots have largely replaced even some highly-trained and creative-thinking workers (referred to as "substitution"), and colleges are actively refusing entry to new students who haven't been "lifted", a process of gene-therapy that yields higher intellect (though in Josie's case, also led to significant health issues).  The stresses that this puts on the system are obvious, and appear generally to be exactly what one might expect increased unemployment on that sort of scale to become.

Klara's place in all of this is initially confusing to her, but as she begins to realize what the purpose of bringing her into the household actually is, she finds herself divided in how best to act.  She believes the clear solution is to requrst assistance from the Sun and his miraculous healing, going so far as to accept a quest from him to kill the Cootings Machine at any cost.

It's a delightful read, and the way that the shape of the dystopia creeps in slowly, only as Klara herself becomes aware of each aspect, is amazing.  The way that Klara sees the world is inherently different than the way humans do (details broken out into boxes, shapes abstracted into primitives when she isn't focusing on them specifically) and this comes out perfectly, though it is a touch jarring at first.

I find myself wondering how similar Ishiguro's other works might be.  I know for sure that he has written other, more overt dystopian literature that deals with rather darker themes, though I have little interest in reading it at this time (so soon after Nineteen Eighty-Four).  Even so, though, he's definitely going on my list of authors I need to read more of.

A-Z 2021 O - Nineteen Eighty-Four (George Orwell, 1948)

...I don't think I was ready for this.

There's two directions I could take this post.  There's the one where I take an objective view of Nineteen Eighty-Four and look at the book in a vacuum, digging into the narrative and the writing style and not much else.

That direction is boring.

There's also the direction where I take a very much subjective view of the book, look at the politics and messages in the text and the warnings that are present here, and dig into the relevance that the book has to the modern world.

That direction is uncomfortable and could potentially put all of my own political and sociological views on display if I'm not careful.

That direction is also the one I have to go in, because this book was an uncomfortable read and I need to unpack things a bit before I move on to my next read.  There was never any other option, I was always going to go down this path in writing this piece.

So, we really have to start with the general idea of what this book is.  The phrase 'Big Brother is watching you' has entered the popular consciousness, to the point that there's a whole global long-running franchise of reality shows called Big Brother.  This comes from a partial understanding of the nature of Big Brother and the general form of the police state that is Oceania and more specifically London under the control of Ingsoc.  Yes, it's a surveillance state; nothing can be done that isn't potentially being watched.  But there's a lot more to it than just the surveillance.

The central idea that is at work in Ingsoc London is so much worse than merely being a surveillance state, though.  For one, this is where the idea of "thought police" comes from.  Any ideas that are a deviation from the party line, even memories, are considered to be thoughtcrime and are understood to be a crime that carries the death penalty.  This isn't entirely accurate, but it's very close.  There is no evidence allowed to exist that supports the idea of there being an objective reality other than what the Party wants the population to believe there to be.  This is so ingrained into everyone that at one point in the book, during a vast celebration of patriotic xenophobia that includes posters and banners stating that the foe of Oceania is Eurasia, the foe changes abruptly to Eastasia in the middle of a speech and the whole population spontaneously remembers that they've always been at war with Eastasia, so clearly all these posters vilifying their ally Eurasia were placed by rebellious agitators who want to destroy Ingsoc and thus everything needs to be pulled down and destroyed.

It's that abrupt.  The orator changes the direction of his speech in response to a note handed to him, without even missing a beat, and the whole population just turns on a dime.

A big part of this is because of the nature of the society in question.  Ingsoc is a shortened form of 'English Socialism', though in practice it's precisely as much of a socialist party as the National Socialists in Germany were; indeed, this is what Orwell, a socialist himself, was trying to illustrate.  The most insidious part of Ingsoc is not the surveillance state, or even the organized rewriting of the past to fit the present (an act which is the job of protagonist Winston Smith).  It's how language itself is used as a weapon, wielded like a scalpel to shape thoughts themselves.

A useful thought experiment comes in the form of considering how one generates their words when writing.  If you're thinking about an object that can be described in concrete terms (say, an elephant), you first picture an image of the object, then find the words that match it.  If you think about the feel of the elephant's skin, you have to picture the texture before you can attach the word 'rough'.  But if you're thinking about an abstract concept, such as 'democracy', what image can you attach that properly serves as a base?  You have to start from the words.

Ingsoc is actively working to create a new version of the language, called Newspeak, that will eventually replace modern English, referred to as Oldspeak.  One of the hallmarks of Newspeak is that vocabulary is very precisely defined, so that most basic words have a single meaning; additionally, when two words are opposites, one can be removed and replaced with the other, just with an 'un-' prefix added.  Doubleplus ungood if you're a fan of language, though equally an incredibly insidious way of controlling thought.  One can't think about freedom if the definition of 'free' only allows for its use in the sense of 'sugar-free'.  One can't think about general equality of people as a whole when 'equal' is defined as 'precisely the same', so that all people being equal would require that everyone be, essentially, clones.  If you don't have the words for complex abstract thought that goes against the Party because all such concepts have been imprecisely bodged together into the single term 'crimethink', well...  I'm sure the implications are clear.

Nineteen Eighty-Four goes farther, though, than simply explicating these ideas in a narrative form, however.  It goes so far as to show just how such a ruling class will go about maintaining that power, and how they 'fix' anyone whose thoughts are unable to conform.  Winston Smith spends the last part of the book being tortured and systematically stripped of his ability to maintain his badthinking ways, training him in the art of doublethink, having two contradictory thoughts simultaneously in his head and believing only the one that is suitable, so that he can be a productive, obedient and goodthinking member of society.  This begins with a sequence that was absolutely being referenced when Star Trek: The Next Generation did their torture episode, where Smith is told that when a man holds up four fingers in front of him, he is supposed to know instinctively, to truly believe that there are five fingers being held up.  By the end of the book, he genuinely does, willing and eager to accept without a moment's hesitation or doubt that if the party says 2+2=5, then 2+2 couldn't possibly be 4.

This may be the one thing that's the most chilling about this book, in fact: there is absolutely no hope on display here.  This is possibly the most pessimistic dystopia I've ever encountered; through the whole book, Smith is telling himself repeatedly that he knows exactly how the road he's traveling ends.  He knows that his doubt of Big Brother's benevolence and the Party's rightness will inevitably lead him to the torture chambers of the Ministry of Love, and from there, eventually, to execution.  We don't see this last part in the book, but even in his newfound place as a truly obedient Party member, he knows it's eventually going to come.  That's the point; Ingsoc doesn't just kill dissidents; it re-educates them until they've truly repented and can't do anything less than go perfectly with the Party line, before eventually killing them when it's the most appropriate timing.

For a long time, I've seen a bumper sticker on cars now and then, which reads "The answer to 1984 is 1776."  To me, this indicates that the person who has that sticker on their car hasn't ever actually read the book.  Leaving aside that the appendix on the methods of Newspeak explicitly spells out how the words of Jefferson could never survive the work of those like Smith who rewrite everything to match Party thought, let alone be translated to Newspeak, the book goes out of its way to lay out exactly how Oceanic society has been stratified, how the education system is designed to turn children into good little agents of the Party who are eager to turn in even their own parents for thoughtcrimes, how even the most minor indiscretion will get even the most enthusiastic Party member turned in.  The masses are kept uneducated, the Party members are caught up in infectious hyper-patriotism, and all dissent is rapidly dealt with.  The constant state of war means that even with mechanized production, goods are kept rationed and everyone is left in a state of want, because everything can be sent off to the battle fronts, effectively removing resources and keeping everything in a permanent state of rationing and austerity.  The Party is even going so far as to ensure that future generations will be ever less able to effectively resist, by stripping them of the very words they would need in order to build a resistance, by changing the meaning of words to mean different things than they used to mean...  In short, by building a society designed around the sole purpose of keeping those in power, well... in power.  Objective reality ceases to exist, replaced by the world that the Party and its mouthpieces want those who are subject to its power to believe exists.

Replaced by the world where 2+2=5.

I'm going to be honest here... I look at the world today and it makes me feel decidedly less than optimistic.  An awful lot of people seem to have forgotten that freedom has responsibilities attached, and are more than eager to believe whatever their demagogues of choice spout out, regardless of how those beliefs reflect objective reality.  Words get twisted, so that 'socialism' has over the decades become a political buzzword for 'whatever the political Right doesn't like at the moment, even if they liked it a whole lot just a couple of years ago', and some kind of ridiculous doublethink has people claiming the Newspeak-esque term 'Antifa' (short for anti-fascist) indicates that someone is, in fact, a fascist.  Critical Race Theory, an educational concept that rarely appears outside of post-grad law school, has somehow become something that is taught in Kindergarten, at least if one listens to the mouthpieces.  And far be it for anyone to even suggest that slavery was a problem outside of the American South in the time of the Civil War (which wasn't about slavery, it was state rights! to have legal slavery) and that racism isn't inherently baked into everything that European culture has ever touched.

This book messed me up.  I can't honestly look at Ingsoc and its methods and think of anything other than what I've watched the political landscape turn into over the last decade.  Populism, isolationism, militarism, blind patriotism, the last administration's attempts at a willful rewriting of history to make it reflect what they wanted rather than objective reality, the resulting uncontained crazy that was the January 6th insurrection...

I would have gotten something totally different out of this if I'd read it 20 years ago when I was in high school instead of now.  It probably wouldn't have hit me nearly as hard.  But then, the world was different then.

For one, people generally agreed about objective reality.

A-Z 2021 - B: A Clockwork Orange (Anthony Burgess, 1963)

 

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

First-person narratives seem to come in two general varieties.  There's the ones where everything is still written like a book, just from the viewpoint of one of the characters; in these cases, while that character's way of speaking might appear in the dialogue, it stays out of the narration.  Then there's the ones where it's formatted more as if the narrator is actually telling the story to you out loud, where everything is filled with the slang they use in their conversations with others, where even the most straightforward things might be obscured by the argot that they fill their speech with, so that until you crack the code, as it were, you need a glossary just to keep up.

A Clockwork Orange is perhaps one of the most quintessential examples of this second form of narrative.  Alex, "Your Humble Narrator", govoreets in nadsat as he tells the horrorshow good raskazz with aplomb, and no appy polly loggies if thou art no oomny lewdie who ponies the slovos he skavats, O my brothers.

OK, it's not quite that bad.  But there's times where it's not not that bad.  It creates a kind of strange effect where the language is utterly jarring at the start, but as you read through the book, it starts to sink in, so that everything makes sense by the end and you're not flipping to your Nadsat-English glossary nearly so often, if you even have one available.  This is actually by design; Burgess created an entire slang for the teenage troublemakers in his novel, sort of a combination of the wordplay in Cockney rhyming slang and a sort of pidgin Russian, in an attempt to make everything have a quality that falls outside of any specific time and instead just evokes, well... a dense argot made of near-impenetrable vocabulary that requires the reader to work out meanings from context, unless Your Humble Narrator actually defines the term for you.

"What's it going to be then, eh?"

Alex is... not a likeable character, at least initially.  He's unapologetic, and just comes right out with it, talking about how he and his droogs get themselves high on milk laced with amphetamines, go out on the town to cause havoc, and just generally act like complete hooligans.  It's not pleasant; the nadsat patterns do a little to abstract it, to give a sort of versy quality that straight narration wouldn't give, but that doesn't change that the end result of the first two chapters is that they've beat up an old man, destroyed three rare books, broken into a tobacconist's and ransacked the place, gotten into a gang fight that ends with someone potentially blinded and another with his cheeks slashed with a razor, stolen a car (which is later dumped into a lake), and gangraped a woman before beating her to death.

Yeah, that's what it's going to be, then.

Alex is profoundly disturbed, clearly.  The first third of the book is largely devoted to illustrating this, and there's a lot of it that, well...  He seems downright proud of the chaos he's creating, and there's no getting around that he has no sense of the consequences that his actions actually hold, just living his life in a pattern of doing violence, going home, listening to classical music while fantasizing about doing more violence, sleeping, going out during the day and getting into more trouble (on the day we get to see, this involves statutory rape), then going to meet his droogs and starting the cycle all over again.  This all ends when his crew decides that they're going to break off from him, and contrive to leave him holding the bag, as it were, when they break into an old woman's house and everything goes sideways.  He gets knocked in the head, the droogs run, and he's picked up by the police and carted off to prison.

There's a two-year time skip after that, and we get to see that he's putting on an act of false contrition, working as the audio guy in the prison chapel on Sundays, and getting into conversations about religion with the chaplain, during the seven years he's been sentenced to.  He's a fan of the bible, but much more the first part, where there's all the sex and violence.  Not so much the later part that's all preachy.  It's almost like he's not actually learning anything, but it's at this point that the actual primary theme of the book comes out, the question of free will.  See, there's this new treatment that he's been hearing rumors about, where they'll train you to be a good person and then let you out early, and wouldn't that be nice?

Spoiler alert: It's not nice.

After an altercation involving the entire group of his cellmates beating up a new prisoner for making a sexual advance on Alex, and Your Humble Narrator going completely overboard on him after he's already down, Alex is 'volunteered' to be the test case for the Ludovico Technique, which he's initially pleased about, as he thinks this is a perfect way to get out early, and it certainly can't be that bad, right?

Spoiler alert:  It's very bad.

It takes a full day for Alex to realize what's actually going on here, and even when he starts to fight against it, he simply... can't.  Any thought of resistance makes him physically uncomfortable, so that he's rendered into a state of, well... effectively being an automaton, unable to defend himself, only able to act honorably and nicely toward others, and due to its use in the Technique, even robbed of his ability to enjoy classical music.  And then... he's simply turned out, after the proof of his utter rehabilitation has been publicized by the government as evidence that the prison overcrowding problem will soon be over so they'll have room for political prisoners.

Oh, hello there, totalitarianism.

The last part of the book focuses on how miserable Alex's life becomes in the days immediately after his release, culminating in his being manipulated into a suicide attempt by opposition agitators, and... the government undoing the brainwashing through hypnopaedia while he's recovering, and turning him back loose again with his ability to listen to music and his ability to choose between right and wrong restored... which means his ability to do wrong is also restored.

Here's the optional endpoint.  The American version of the novel ended here, on its initial release; Stanley Kubrick's film version was based on the American version; though he was aware of the final chapter's existence, he chose to take the indication from Burgess's manuscript and end it right here.  Alex comes full circle, and he's just been turned loose again, free will restored, and we don't know what he's going to do from there.  He's either learned from his experiences, or he's still a sociopathic monster.

And then there's the final chapter.  It starts out as a near-mirror of the first chapter; Alex in the milk bar drinking milk-plus laced with uppers before going out for a night on the town with his new droogs.  There's a few differences, though.  As part of their apology, the government has given him a job in the music archives, and he gets free discs as part of the perks.  So he has money, he doesn't need to steal it.  And when the crew gets ready to go cause some havoc, he... feels bored with it.  He doesn't really want to.  Instead, he tells them to go ahead without him, and leaves them behind, instead going to a tea shop for a cup of chai, and runs into one of the original droogs, who is now married and gainfully employed.  And he realizes... maybe being eighteen is too old to be getting up to all this stuff now, maybe he should see about finding himself a romantic partner, and perhaps dropping the nadsat and starting to talk like an adult.  In short, maybe he needs to actually grow up.  It was all just teenage directionlessness, after all, and you can grow out of that.

So instead of the unclear ending that could go any direction, we get a happy ending where he's off to become a productive member of society.  Maybe he'll be a composer.  He'd enjoy that.

...I honestly don't know if that last chapter is good or not.  There's a collection of essays from Burgess and reviews from others and various relevant writings in the back matter in the copy I have (almost 100 pages' worth, in fact), and it seems like opinions are rather sharply divided on whether that final chapter is or isn't important.  Even Burgess seems unsure, and he's the author.  It's a very sharp tonal shift from the rest of the book, and honestly feels like it wasn't written with the same vicious energy as the rest of the piece.  While it does further the question of what Alex's free will actually entails in the end, it also... just seems like it's not what the rest of the book was building to.  It kind of feels like taking the fairy tale Bluebeard and ending it with 'And they all lived happily ever after.'

Yes, she inherits Bluebeard's wealth and gives all the previous wives proper burials and gets herself remarried herself... but no way she's just living happily ever after.  Not after that trauma.  That's not how psychology works.  Darn fairy tales and their need for happy endings.

I dunno.  I genuinely can't decide if I prefer the book stopping with the open ending or with the happy ending.  I do think the happy ending is horribly flawed.

A tough, but ultimately worthy read.

Herland (Charlotte Perkins Gilman, 1915) (Penguin Classics Charlotte Gilman, 1/2)

 

I think it says a lot for the quality of a book when I can plunge through the whole thing in a matter of hours.  I mean, sure, I'm a fan of well-written utopian/dystopian literature anyways, when a great deal of time is spent exploring the world with some considerable depth, but being able to plunge through a whole novel, even when it's perhaps somewhat short, in a single day, even with interruptions?

Herland is one of the few instances of true utopian literature that I've actually read; the closest thing I can think of is H.G. Wells's "The Country of the Blind", in that the ramifications of the cultural change have been fully explored.  Usually, there's some clear drawback to the society explored; what is Utopia to one is Dystopia to another.  There is some aspect of that in Herland, where one of the 'outsider' characters definitely finds it to be anything but paradise for him, but, well...  I'll get to that.

The central conceit in Herland is that there is a hidden country high in the mountains of... Somewhere; the narrator specifically says he has no intention of making it clear exactly where this country is, but it's about the size of Holland and impossible to reach except by air.  A combination of volcanic activity, slave uprising, and self-defense killings resulted in the complete cutting-off of this land, along with the utter destruction of the entire male gender.  Spontaneously, one of the young women left behind turns out to have the ability to reproduce parthenogenically, which is also passed on to her daughters, and their daughters as well, eventually leading to the country being entirely populated by what is essentially one big family.  Without any outsiders to contend with, the women are able to instead focus on improving the land and their culture for future generations.

Genetic diversity is somewhat handwaved here, but we're in some light fantasy territory so let's just see where this goes.

It's probably most useful to take a moment to consider the author.  Charlotte Perkins Gilman was a prominent feminist writer in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with a socialist leaning in her philosophies, and a particular focus on the inequalities created by capitalism and the tendency for women to have to rely on men instead of being fiscally independent.  During the early part of the 20th century, she even wrote and published her own magazine from 1909-1916, "The Forerunner", in which she expressed her views to her readership. 

This comes out quite clearly in the all-female culture we see in Herland.  The women have no money, few personal belongings, and little need for anything in their lives.  The population, stated as being around 3 million, is kept steady simply through each woman being allowed one child (with certain exemplars being allowed to have a second if others are considered unsuitable), and once a baby is able to leave her mother's side, her upbringing is in a communal child-rearing environment much like a 24/7 Montessori school where all activities are designed to be educational without the child realizing she is learning.  There is an intense focus on lifelong learning in the culture; while children are expected to choose a profession by which to better the land when they reach their teenage years, this is purely based on their interests.  

This way of choosing a calling is exemplified by the character of Ellidor, one of the first women met in the narrative.  At one point, she describes how she brought a moth she had caught to an "insect teacher" to ask what it was, learned that it was a pest that threatened a particular variety of nut tree and that was actively being eradicated as a result.  The ensuing course of education as she dug deeper and deeper led her to decide to devote her life to forestry.

Spirituality is somewhat passive; the belief is that the Deity lives within everyone, expressed as the feeling of motherhood that drives the culture as a whole, with no afterlife, everything instead being focused on the betterment of society for future generations, with little reverence for the beliefs and laws of the past if they can be made more just and equitable.  Those whose callings lead them to be able to serve as counselors to those who need psychological help spend part of their days in the temples located in each town, so that someone is always there to listen and offer guidance to the troubled.

Into this idyllic country, where the focus of everything is to make the land better than it was before, come the three outsider characters: Terry, a swaggering alpha male sort who is convinced that the legendary "Land of Girls" that they are searching for is sure to make him king because obviously they're all going to fawn over him; Jeff, a romantic sort of man who believes that his one purpose in life is to worship and serve a woman who loves him; and Vandyck, the narrator, who holds a view somewhat in the middle.  All three come in with an essentially androcentric worldview, and while they exoect to find a patriarchal society, they very much don't expect to find a complete lack of the Y chromosome.

The three reach the plateau where this country exists via a biplane, but find themselves quickly captured, imprisoned in decidedly comfortable surroundings, and forced to simultaneously learn the native language (streamlined and made elegant over time so that it is easy to teach and learn) and teach English to the inhabitants (who show little difficulty in learning).  This is quite fine with Van and Jeff, but Terry quickly grows frustrated by the captivity and the fact that the teaching staff and guards are all middle-aged, and talks the others into engaging in an escape.  This works well enough, and they manage to make it all the way back to the plane, only to discover that it has been seen into a gigantic cloth bag to protect it from the elements, and also that their entire escape and flight into the forest has been observed without their knowledge.

The book progresses from there as the three learn about the culture they have dropped into (which all three men find disappointing in certain ways, though only one is unable to come to terms with it), teach the women about the outside world, and slowly find love, of a sort.

And then Terry tries to get overly macho about his unchanged notion of gender roles, attempts to force himself on the woman he loves, is thoroughly and physically rebuffed, and gets himself thrown out.  The last chapter deals with this final part, and the preparations for a return to the outside world.  Van will come along to make sure he gets back to the outside world safely, and Ellidor won't allow Van to leave without being by his side.  Jeff has no intention of leaving; his lover is pregnant with the first two-parent child the country has seen in 2000 years, and he wouldn't dream of leaving her side.

Throughout the book, the injustices and inequalities of the outside world are shown to be problematic, not only when Van is forced to consider them, but also through the reactions when the women are told about them.  The final chapter includes a lot of foreshadowing about how Ellidor reacts when faced with these injustices up close, but only that; it ends with the three who are leaving, well... Leaving.

Herland was originally published in a serialized form in "The Forerunner".  Perhaps unsurprisingly, the very next month she began serializing the sequel, With Her in Ourland.  Unfortunately, the volume I'm reading from doesn't include that novel, instead following Herland with a selection of short stories and poetry from the whole of Gilman's career.  I find myself rather disappointed by this; I rather want to read the sequel now just to see where she chose to look for the contrasts that would surely be offered.

The Time Machine (H.G. Wells, 1895)

 

This is not science fiction.

I know everyone thinks it's science fiction.  It's cited as an early entry in the genre.  H.G. Wells, it is said, is the father of modern science fiction.

(I'd point more at Mary Shelley as the mother of the genre, but Wells certainly does fit the bill, through some of his other works.)

The thing is, though...  This is barely a science fiction book.  If anything, it's a class-conscious satire, a Utopian work in a the same genre as Swift's Gulliver's Travels, but using a scientific framework based on then-current understandings of the world to hold it up and make its point.