From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Apr 28 2002 - 18:40:15 MDT
Hal writes
> My main interest in the novel was not so much the story as the society.
> What would happen in a world in which conscious intelligence could be
> replicated at will? How do people treat the golems?...
> Unfortunately, in Brin's world, the answer is [badly].
> The reasoning he offers is that, first, people don't mind being treated
> like this when they are clay because they know that this means that
> when they are human, they get to enjoy the superior state.
It's very difficult to identify with entities that don't mind
being treated badly. For one thing, as a reader you need to
be convinced of an explanation for why they wouldn't mind. None
was satisfactory.
> I don't accept the first reason, in fact it is downright immoral
> to justify inflicting pain and hardship on others just because some
> people might play either the top or bottom role from time to time.
I agree: it is completely unacceptable to inflict needless pain
and hardship. Moreover, it's unrealistic. I made plenty of
marginal annotations pointing out that even today animals are
invariably better treated.
> Why would it be so impossible simply to treat everyone with respect?
Quite right: not only would it be possible, but 21st century people
would, for the most part, be very uncomfortable being so nastly to
conscious and sensitive beings.
> Another aspect of the society that I found unbelievable and disturbing was
> that many people care little about their own death when they are golems.
This did not surprise me. I bet that in a few generations, the
implications of materialism will have sunk in to a greater degree.
If all our intuitions about who we are come to be based on physics,
then folks will accept the reality that duplicates are selves.
Such a "death" is, physically, tantamount to the erasure of a day's
memories.
While people will never be able to "anticipate" being the duplicate
in the next room (or, the "archie" back home), they'll come to
understand that the whole concept of anticipation is logically
unviable, and no longer allow feelings of "anticipation" to dictate
to them.
> I also thought the writing suffered. In my opinion Brin's last few books
> have been deteriorating. His writing is becoming over-wrought, over-
> dramatized. He works too hard to try to milk drama from each scene.
> Italics appear everywhere so that we see how much *meaning* people are
> putting into their words.
Though I should save it for another thread, I think that there are
three reasons behind the obvious deterioration that afflicts many
experienced SF writers:
1. the very successful ones (e.g. Brin) just don't have to
work hard anymore. Worse, this can lead to appalling
self-indulgence.
2. their erudition and experience within the field of SF
itself becomes so great that they have difficulty
writing for the unsophisticated amateurs that make up
the audience. Worse, style, wit, and over-wrought phony
sophistication become everything, and the art of telling
a story so simply that the reader forgets he's reading
becomes lost.
3. SF is idea based, and after a certain number of stories,
many authors really have nothing further to say.
> While the story moves along with plenty of action, related by Albert and
> his various dittos, I never found myself that involved. In fact I put the
> book down midway through out of boredom, and had to force myself to finish
> it a couple of weeks later.
Good man! I gave up 1/3 of the way through.
> Overall I was quite disappointed with this novel. The basic idea
> was unbelievaable to me, and even suspending that, the social changes
> were abhorrent. I would like to believe that society would respond very
> differently to such a technology.
Distopian SF is all right for me, as long as it's half-way believable.
And I agree with your assessment that this wasn't.
Lee
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