Would I take a spaceship to Anarres?

I read Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, a science fiction novel set in an anarchist utopia on the fictional planet of Anarres, which has no government, corporations, private property, money, buying and selling, police, criminal law or prisons.

I have questions about whether such a society is feasible, but the more interesting and important question for me is whether I would want to live in such a society.  I was undecided when I reviewed the book in an earlier post.

The moral atmosphere of Ursula Le Guin’s Anarres is like the church and volunteer groups to which I belong.  Everybody picks the job they like the best or feel best suited for, the work nobody wants to do is divided up, most people do their share and a vital few do much more than their share, without any reward except respect.  The work gets done, maybe not in the most efficient way, but without anybody being bossed around or made miserable and frustrated.

This is highly appealing.  I have been retired for nearly 15 years, and spent a fair amount of time in retirement doing church work, volunteer work and helping people out.  What I do has no monetary value, but I think what I do has some usefulness to society.  I expect to continue as long as I can.

But I would hate to go back to doing paid work, even though I have been much luckier in my work life than most people.   I’ve been able to do work that I wanted to do, and get paid for it.  As a newspaper reporter, I had much greater freedom than most wage earners to act on my own initiative and use my own judgment, although this diminished in the last few years before I retired.   If I had a guaranteed income and were young, I think I would work as a journalist without pay, and I think I would do as good a job as if I were dependent on an employer for my income.

The other aspect of life on Anarres, no private property and no laws, has less appeal for me.  I like owning my own house, free and clear, from which nobody has the power to turn me out.  I like thinking that I am free to speak and act as I wish, so long as I stay within the bounds of statutory law.   If my sense of security is an illusion, it is an illusion to which I cling.

If there is no private property and no Bill of Rights, then the freedom and security of the individual depends on public opinion.  I do not want my well-being and freedom to depend on public opinion.  As Adlai Stevenson once said, “A free society is a society in which it is safe to be unpopular.”  On Anarres,  I would be an “individualist” and a “propertarian,” both unpopular things to be.   On the other hand it is not exactly safe to be unpopular in the contemporary USA.

Now it is true that I am highly fortunate, even by American standards, and this shapes my judgment.  My new anarchist acquaintances point out that my thinking reflects the assumptions of the capitalist society in which I was born and grew up.  This is true.  The value of a book like The Dispossessed is that it helped me to re-examine my assumptions and think of new possibilities.

Click on Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia for my original post.

Click on The Dispossessed for the full text of the novel in The Anarchist Library.

Click on Planets of the Hainish Cycle for a Wikipedia guide to Ursula Le Guin’s fictional universe.

Click on Takver’s Anarres – Comments on Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed and Anarchism for an admirer’s thoughts.

Click on Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Anarres as Description of the Communist Future for a thoughtful review from a Marxist perspective by Karlo Mikhail Mongaya.

Starships: a musical SF fanvid mashup

Good fun!

I didn’t even know there was a genre called “fanvid” until I came across this a couple of days ago on Obsidian Wings.

Click on bironic for details and background information.

Why I like science fiction so much

Science fiction is a great medium for conducting thought experiments.  What makes it so great is that nothing is at stake.  Science fiction is just a harmless form of entertainment, so you can let your imagination have free rein without worrying about the consequences.

I’ve read science fiction for 60 years, and I’m struck by how many times I am reminded of old science fiction stories when I read speculative articles about politics or metaphysics.

Of course science fiction is also a form of escape literature.  It creates a virtual reality that people enjoy imagining they live in.  There’s nothing wrong with that.  As C.S. Lewis once remarked, the only category of people hostile to the concept of “escape” are jailers.

Currently my favorite science fiction is Ken MacLeod, a Scot whose novels are published in the United Kingdom, but not always in the United States.  I order every book he writes without waiting to see if it will be published in the USA.

Click on The Early Days of a Better Nation for Ken MacLeod’s web log.  I don’t include it on my BlogRoll because he doesn’t post very much.

Click on Science fiction novels for economists for a list.

Click on Science Fiction (Bookshelf) for links to science fiction stories available on-line through Project Gutenberg.

Ursula Le Guin’s anarchist utopia

THE DISPOSSESSED: An Ambiguous Utopia by Ursula LeGuin  is a thought experiment on how an anarchist society would work.  I read this science fiction novel when it first came out in 1974 and I re-read it a few weeks ago because of a new-found interest in anarchism.

The novel begins with the journey of the physicist Shevek from the hardscrabble planet Anarres, which was settled by anarchists a century and a half previously, to the lush planet Urras, a caricature of our own world in the 1970s.

In alternating chapters, it tells the story of Shevek’s life on Annares and its discontents, leading up to his decision to leave, and his adventures on Urras and how grotesque a society based on power and profit seems in his eyes.

The Dispossessed is worth reading as a novel, but in addition it gives an idea of how a possible anarchist society could function and, more importantly, the moral foundations of such a society.  Anarres is flawed and falls short of its ideals of individual freedom, mutual aid and voluntary cooperation, but is still infinitely preferable to the money-hungry, power-hungry nations of Urras.

I think LeGuin was realistic in putting her anarchist society on a separate planet. Utopian societies, anarchist and otherwise, have sometimes flourished in the United States, but they have all been pulled apart by the gravitational pull of the larger society around them.  By this SF device, she was able to show the normal functioning of a hypothetic anarchist society rather than its battles with external enemies.

Ursula Le Guin

Anarres is a society without government, laws, police, courts, corporations, money, salaries, profit, organized religion or private property, except for a few hand-carried personal possessions.  Its people speak an artificial language, a kind of benign Orwellian Newspeak which lacks words for concepts such as “debt” or “winner.”

The society is organized to forestall any possibility of hereditary privilege.  There are no family names.  Everybody has a unique two-syllable, four- or five-letter name assigned by computer.  Couples may stay together or not, as the choose.  Some are bonded for life, but there are no laws pertaining to marriage or divorce.  Children may be raised by both parents, either one or public nurseries.  People live in dormitory rooms.  Nobody lives in an free-standing house.

Productive work on Anarres is done by syndicates of workers, who produce what is needed and receive what they need without monetary payment.  Every local community strives to be self-sufficient in food and energy, but there is some exchange and specialization among the communities.

Although there is no government, there is a coordinating agency called the PDC.  It is guided by policy debates and consensus developed in public meetings in which anyone can take part.  Advanced computer technology substitutes for central planning or the working of the law of supply and demand.  The PDC advises the syndicates on what is needed, and keeps postings of jobs that need to be done.  People volunteer for difficult and dangerous jobs, mostly when young, because of the challenge and because their work is honored.

In the individual syndicates, unpleasant work is done in rotation.   People who shirk their duties are subject to social pressure, then to public reprimand and possibly summary justice with fists and then, in extreme cases, to expulsion.  There are no police and no courts, but there are mental institutions.

By locating her society on a world where living is difficult, Le Guin avoided the easy path of saying that people in the new utopian society would live a life of ease simply because of the absence of exploitation and unnecessary work.

In the course of the novel, there is a near-famine on Anarres which strains the social fabric.  Shevek in one chapter is on a food train which is raided by hungry villagers when it stops.   But the ethic of mutual aid is strong enough to keep things from falling apart.

The people of Anarres possess the full range of human impulses and desires, but as in any society, they suppress some impulses and foster others.  Children are taught to share and not to compete.  They are taught to not be “egoists,” but also not to be altruists.  Nobody, in theory, is asked to sacrifice themselves for the greater good.  Instead they are asked to cooperate with others for their mutual benefit.

In the novel, it is hard to maintain the ideal of the free and equal society.  Power-seeking, privilege and envy creep in, and conformity to the group becomes oppressive.

I might have thought that she was depicting her anarchist society as a failure if it were not for the contrast with Urras, with its wars, power structures,  privileged rich and oppressed poor.  Conformity on Urras is enforced not by social pressure, but by helicopter gunships firing on rioting mobs.

I confess that I don’t completely understand how Le Guin’s hypothetical society would work.  For example, Shevek and his wife Takvar decide Anarres has become too conformist and they form a Syndicate of Initiative which, among other things, publishes works that can’t otherwise find a printer.

My question is:  Who supplies the Syndicate of Initiative with paper?  There is no money, so they can’t buy paper.  They can ask the paper syndicate to allocate paper, but since they are unpopular and paper is scarce, they would be unlikely to get an allocation.  There are no laws that would give them a right to claim a share of paper, or of anything else.

The great merit of the novel, aside from being a good story and a good science fiction story, is that it shows a set of moral values in action that are different from the values that guided the United States of 1974 or of today.  The challenge to the reader is whether the reader would want to live according to those values.

For some people, a society without competition, private property or structures of authority might be the opposite of a utopia.   For myself, I’m not sure.  I rewrote this last paragraph several times, and may rewrite it again.

Click on The Dispossessed for the full text of the novel in The Anarchist Library.

Click on The Dispossessed Quotes for 61 quotations that give the essence of Ursula Le Guin’s novel.

Click on Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed: Anarres as Description of the Communist Future for a thoughtful review from a Marxist perspective by Karlo Mikhail Mongaya.  [Added 5/27/13]

Click on Takver’s Anarres – Comments on Ursula Le Guin, The Dispossessed and Anarchism for thoughtful comment from an admirer.  [Added 5/31/13]

 Click on And Then There Were None for Eric Frank Russell’s classic 1951 anarchist SF satire.

We’re living in a bad science fiction story

Double click to enlarge

I have been worrying about giving the President of the United States unlimited power to order killing by means of flying killer robots, but the world is moving on.  Now we have to worry about giving computer algorithms power to order killing by means of autonomous flying killer robots.

Research is going forward on how to program flying killer drones so they can respond automatically without waiting for the command of a human operator.  This is a bad idea for many reasons, but the basic reason was well stated by P.W. Singer, author of Wired for War: The Robotics Revolution and Conflict in the 21st Century.  The problem, Singer said, is that Moore’s Law [that computer processing power doubles every few years] is still in effect, but so is Murphy’s Law [that whatever can go wrong, will].

There already are many examples of the danger of abdicating decisions to computers.  In 1988, U.S. Navy crewmen shot down an Iranian airliner, killing all the passengers, because the ship’s computer told them it was a war plane, and they believed the computer instead of their lying eyes.  During the Cold War, there were incidents in both the United States and the Soviet Union, in which the warning systems indicated the nation was under attack, but the commanders had the good judgment and moral courage to wait before ordering a retaliatory attack.

Autonomous drones would likely be programmed for what are called “signature strikes”—more accurately “pattern of behavior strikes”.   This is the use of drones to kill men who are behaving in a way an enemy soldier might act.   Over time it is reasonable to think that the actual enemy soldiers learn to avoid suspicious behavior, and an increasing number of “signature strikes” will fall on innocent civilians.

What happens if a malfunctioning autonomous drone wipes out a village like My Lai?   Who is responsible?  The operator who didn’t override the drone’s decision?  The software programmer?  The longer the link of responsibility, the less responsible the decision will be.

What happens if an enemy hacker reprograms the autonomous killer drone to suddenly turn on its operators?

Technology has its own momentum, and the path of least resistance is to adopt policies that fit the technology rather than finding a technology to implement the best policy.   This is a technology that enables killing without human agency and human responsibility.

Click on The Terminator Scenario: Are We Giving Machines Too Much Power? for a good article in Popular Science magazine.

Click on It’s Come to This: Debating Death by Autopilot for Conor Friedersdorf’s thoughts.

Science fiction writers have been speculating about the consequences of autonomous killing systems for a long time.

Click on the following for good stories with food for thought.

WATCHBIRD by Robert Sheckley (1953)

SECOND VARIETY by Philip K. Dick (1953)

JIPI AND THE PARANOID CHIP by Neal Stephenson (1997)

An alternate apocalypse

My previous post was about Philip Wylie’s 1954 novel, Tomorrow!, about a nuclear attack on the United States, which ends with massive retaliation wiping out two-thirds of the population of the Soviet Union.  It reminded me of a 1947 short story, Thunder and Roses, by Theodore Sturgeon, a less renowned, but more gifted and original, writer, also about the United States in the aftermath of a nuclear attack.

In Sturgeon’s story, the United States was wiped out in a first strike, and the remnants of the population are doomed to die by radiation poisoning.  The means of retaliation still exist, however, if someone can find them.  The result, however, would be to raise the total level of background radiation to such a level as to destroy all life on other.  A beautiful and beloved singer and movie star is traveling across what’s left of the USA to try to persuade the survivors to not retaliate.

She begins her performance with her signature song, which is a reminder of all the reasons that life is worth living.

When you gave me your heart, you gave me the world

You gave me the night and the day

And thunder, and roses, and sweet green grass

The sea, and soft white clay

I drank the dawn from a golden cup

From a silver one, the dark

The steed I rode was the wild west wind

My song was the brook and the lark

With thunder, I smote the evil of earth

With roses, I won the right

With the sea, I washed and with clay I built

And the world was a place of light

She then makes her plea against taking justified revenge.

The spark of humanity can still live and grow on this planet.  It will be blown and drenched and shaken and all but extinguished, but it will live if that song is a true one.  It will live if we are human enough to discount the fact that the spark is in the custody of our temporary enemy.  Some—a few—of his children will live to merge with the new humanity that will gradually emerge from the jungle and the wilderness.

The protagonist then discovers the secret missile installation from which massive retaliation can be launched.  His best friend tries to  fire the missiles.  The protagonist (apparently) kills him to stop him, destroys the installation so that the missiles can never be launched and then sits down to die.

“You’ll have your chance,” he said into the far future.  “And, by Heaven, you’d better make good.”

A decade later the anti-war Russell-Einstein manifesto called upon the peoples of the world to “remember your humanity and forget the rest.”   Philip Wylie’s novel Tomorrow!, which describes a U.S. victory through nuclear genocide, is a reminder that the best of us can forget our humanity.  Theodore Sturgeon’s novel reminds us that it is always possible to remember your humanity.

Apocalypse then

A friend of mine recently lent me a novel about World War Three as imagined in 1954 by Philip Wylie, an author who is virtually forgotten now, but famous in his time for his iconoclasm about American political, social and sexual taboos.  Tomorrow! was enjoyable to read, and a reminder of a very real danger which we escaped.

He wrote Tomorrow! to advocate for a better U.S. civilian civil defense program.  The characters live in twin fictional Midwestern cities, resembling Kansas City, Kansas, and Kansas City, Missouri.  One city has a functioning civil defense program; the other does not.

Wylie sketches his characters, and their struggles and hypocrisies, as in a Sinclair Lewis novel, and then the atomic bombs fall, and their reactions reveal their characters, as in a Hollywood disaster movie.   The characters who support and participate in civil defense are self-defined liberals.  The main opponent is a wealthy businesswoman who admires Senator Joe McCarthy and thinks the real Communist enemy is within.

The climax is that the surviving members of the U.S. government decide to unleash their secret Doomsday weapon against the Soviet Union—a superbomb in a nuclear submarine on a suicide mission in the Baltic Sea.

The rays, the temperatures, vaporized Finland’s Gulf in a split part of an instant.  The sea’s bottom was melted.  The Light reached out into the Universe.  Finland (!!) was not.  Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, they were not.  Kronstadt melted.  Leningrad.  …   On the wind currents … a thick dust that widened to a hundred miles and then five hundred, moving, spreading, descending, blanketing the land … The further it surged from the reshaped Finland Gulf, where the sea had come sparkling back, the longer men took to perish.  But they perished. … Men swallowed, ate, breathed, sickened and died in a day, a week, two weeks—men and women and children, dogs and cats and cattle and sheep, all of them. … There was no refuge from the death, it took them all, the birds of Arctic winter, the persistent insects who had survived geologic ages, the bacteria—all.

Everyone in the USSR dies except a remnant in its southern fringes.  Although this is a greater mass slaughter of human beings than carried out by Hitler, Stalin or Mao, it is regarded as a happy ending in the novel.

The last great obstacles to freedom had been removed from the human path.

We then see scenes of rebuilding, with Americans, instead of being condemned for having committed history’s greatest crime, receiving foreign aid from a grateful world.   Of course this was only fiction, but it is sobering to think about what was regarded as acceptable thinking back then, and how easy it is to accept enormities as normal.   I first read the novel back in the 1950s.  I don’t remember my exact reaction, but I was not as appalled as I should have been.

Theodore Sturgeon, another writer of that era, had a similar theme, but opposite conclusion in his 1947 short story Thunder and Roses.   I’ll write about this in my next post.

Can Cloud Atlas be made into a movie?

Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell is an amazing novel.  It consists of six interlocking stories—the journal of an idealistic young American in the South Pacific in the 1850s, the letters of a penniless Englishman working his way into the household of a distinguished Belgian composer in 1931, a hard-boiled detective story about a woman investigator proving wrongdoing at a nuclear power plant in 1970s California, a comic account of an English publisher in the present trying to escape for a home for the elderly where he was confined by mistake, a dystopian science fiction story about a cloned worker in a future totalitarian corporate Korea, and an account of inhabitants of a more-distant future Hawaii who have relapsed into barbarism.

Each of the stories would be good as a stand-alone story.  But in the novel, each of them except the last breaks off in the middle and becomes an element in the next story.  So the novel as a whole is more than the sum of its parts.  It shows how the past shapes the present, and both past and present will shape the future.  The structure was more than a clever trick.   Mitchell made it work—at least for me.

Now Cloud Atlas is going to be made into a movie.  I don’t see how this is possible, but I’ll certainly go to see it.

Click on  David Mullan’s Cloud Atlas Review Part One and Part Two, David Mitchell on Writing Cloud Atlas and Reader Responses for a discussion of Cloud Atlas in The Guardian newspaper’s Guardian Book Club.

Click on The Wachowskis for a New Yorker feature article on the making of the Cloud Atlas movie.

A self-made man looks at how he made it

John Scalzi

The  popular science fiction writer John Scalzi wrote a post on his web log some months back about how he owed his success as a writer not only to his own efforts, but to public services and to people who helped him along the way.  He spoke of his birth at an Air Force hospital, his gratitude for public schools and public libraries, how his divorced mother at times had to rely on welfare and food stamps, and his scholarships to an elite private school and then to the University of Chicago.  He named and thanked teachers who encouraged him and editors who gave him opportunities as a writer.

None of this would have availed him anything if he had not had the talent and the determination to become a good writer.  But it would have been a lot harder, and maybe impossible, to develop as a writer and to find a public without the help of others.  It is not an either/or proposition.

Scalzi concluded as follows.

I have helped others too. I am financially successful now; I pay a lot of taxes.  I don’t mind because I know how taxes helped me to get to the fortunate position I am in today.  I hope the taxes I pay will help some military wife give birth, a mother who needs help feed her child, help another child learn and fall in love with the written word, and help still another get through college.  Likewise, I am in a socially advantageous position now, where I can help promote the work of others here and in other places.  I do it because I can, because I think I should and because I remember those who helped me.  It honors them and it sets the example for those I help to help those who follow them.

I know what I have been given and what I have taken.  I know to whom I owe.  I know that what work I have done and what I have achieved doesn’t exist in a vacuum or outside of a larger context, or without the work and investment of other people, both within the immediate scope of my life and outside of it.  I like the idea that I pay it forward, both with the people I can help personally and with those who will never know that some small portion of their own hopefully good fortune is made possible by me.

So much of how their lives will be depends on them, of course, just as so much of how my life is has depended on my own actions.  We all have to be the primary actors in our own lives.  But so much of their lives will depend on others, too, people near and far.  We all have to ask ourselves what role we play in the lives of others — in the lives of loved ones, in the lives of our community, in the life of our nation and in the life of our world.  I know my own answer for this.  It echoes the answer of those before me, who helped to get me where I am.

via Whatever.

My professional achievements are less than John Scalzi’s, but my sentiments are the same.

Through my life, many people helped me along the way.  In my old age, I enjoy helping others in my turn, not in a self-sacrificial way but as a source of pleasure and satisfaction.  I benefited and still benefit from public services, from education in public schools and a state university to the benefits of Social Security and Medicare.  I feel shame that the next generation is not going to be able to have what I have.

There is more to life than (1) accumulating stuff and (2) resisting pressure to share my stuff.

A prophetic SF story of a U.S. cyber-police state

Poul Anderson’s short story “Sam Hall,” published in Astounding Science Fiction in 1953, foresaw a 21st century U.S. police state which dominated the world, through use of advanced computer and surveillance technology.

Citizen Blank Blank, Anytown, Somewhere, U.S.A., approaches the hotel desk.  “Single with bath.” … …

Citizen Blank takes out his wallet, extracts his card, gives it to the registry machine, an automatic set of gestures.  Aluminum jaws close on it, copper teeth feel for the magnetic encodings, electronic tongue tastes the life of Citizen Blank.

Place and date of birth.  Parents.  Race.  Religion.  Educational, military and civilian service records.  Marital status.  Children,  Occupations, from the beginning to the present.  Affiliations.  Physical measurements, fingerprints, retinals, blood type.  Basic psychotype.  Loyalty rating.  Loyalty index as a function of time to moment of last test given.  Click, click.  Bzzz.

“Why are you here, sir?”

“Salesman.  I expect to be in Cincinnati tomorrow night.”

The clerk (32 yrs., married, two children; NB, confidential, Jewish.  To be kept out of key occupations) pushes buttons.

Click, click.  The machine returns the card.  Citizen Blank puts it back in his wallet. … …

The machine talks to itself.  Click, click.  A bulb winks at its neighbor as if they shared a private joke.  The total signal goes out over the wires.

Accompanied by a thousand others, it shoots down the last cable and into the sorter unit of Central Records.  Click, click.  Bzzz.  Whrrr.  Wink and glow.  The distorted molecules in a particular spool show the pattern of Citizen Blank, and this is sent back.  It enters the comparison unit, to which the signal corresponding to him has also been shunted.  The two are perfectly in phase; nothing wrong.  Citizen Blank is staying in that town  where, last night, he said he would, so he has not had to file a correction.

The new information is added to the record of Citizen Blank.  The whole of his life returns to the memory bank.  It is wiped from the scanner and comparison units, that these may be free for the next arrival.

The machine has swallowed and digested another day.  It is content.

The surveillance technology that Poul Anderson envisioned in 1953 is today’s reality.  Every telephone call, every credit card transaction, every Google search is on record and available to Homeland Security.  The fascist government in Poul Anderson’s story does not exist, but we’re closer to it that we were in 1953, and the legal, institutional and technological infrastructure needed to implement such a police state is in place.

One of Anderson’s characters reflected on how this came to be.

A recollection touched him, booklegged stuff from the forties and fifties of the last century which he had read: French, German, British, Italian.  The intellectuals had been fretful about the Americanization of Europe, the crumbling of old culture before the mechanized barbarism of soft drinks, hard sells, enormous chrome-plated automobiles (dollar grins, the Danes had called them), chewing gum, plastics. … None of them had protested the simultaneous Europeanization of America: bloated government, unlimited armament, official nastiness, censors, secret police, chauvinism. … Well, for a while there had been objectors, but their own excesses and sillinesses discredited them, then later. …

It would be mean-spirited, small-minded and incorrect to blame Europeans for setting a bad example.  But if somebody had described our present Homeland Security state to me back in 1953, I would have thought the person was talking about some central European dictatorship.  I would have thought of our present reality as science fiction.

The NSA Is Building the World’s Largest Spy Center (Watch What You Say) for an article by James Bamford in Wired.  Hat tip for this to Hal Bauer.

Click on Assange ‘The World Tomorrow’ — Cypherpunks uncut version for an extended discussion of Internet surveillance, privacy and freedom.