Bryan Murphy's Blog - Posts Tagged "culture"

When you write science fiction, you tend to extrapolate current trends to picture the future. If you write social science fiction, you will look keenly at cultural trends. Last night, the BBC (which is watchable because they are prevented by statute from bombarding you into submission with commercials every few minutes) provided a neat juxtaposition of one aspect of culture, popular music, 50 years ago and today. What struck me most was the change in the clothing of the musicians. The men in “Sounds of the Sixties” were seen as alpha males at the time, but they'd only dress so flamboyantly these days if they were striving for recognition as gay icons. And almost every part of their body was clothed. On next was the Reading Festival, where the headliners were all stripped to the waist. So how about 2066? Will the disrobing have continued, perhaps to the point of musicians of all sexes appearing starkers except for high-tech tattoos, the shyer ones preserving their modesty with hologram pixelation? Or will a reaction have set in, with performers only appearing as holograms, perhaps not even of themselves but of depersonalised avatars?

A few years ago, I was at a social gathering in Turin at which two people from Ghana were also present. One of them started churning out negative stereotypes about the English, whereupon his compatriot, a friend of mine, interrupted him with an anecdote of her time in London. She was waiting outside a telephone box when the occupant stumbled out, cursing the machine that had swallowed his money and badmouthing the phone company responsible, too. “Damn them,” he said to her, “they just want to take our money from us.” She now pointed out that in her ten years in Italy, none of the locals had ever so clearly included her as one of “us”. Zadie Smith has now written a whole novel on the question of who “we” are, although “Swing Time” is about much else besides: dance, friendship and parenting are among her themes. Her main character is a British woman of mixed race, whose life is constrained by people disregarding logic and mathematics to decide that in the UK and the USA she is “black”, and in Africa that she is “white” (and “American” to boot). This constant buffeting by other people's perceptions and misperceptions of her does not make her endearing, but it does draw our attention to the range of stronger, well-drawn characters with whom she interacts. Remarkably, Smith has her finger on the pulse of several cultures and subcultures. The only notes that rang false in my ears were an Iranian man identifying with Arabs and a Brazilian talking German English rather than Portuguese English. I was fascinated by the English that the young English characters spoke. I wonder if I'll live long enough in this country not to learn to speak that new variety but for it to come to seem normal, though I guess that if I do, the youngsters will already have changed it again, to keep it out of reach of “us” old fogies. Even so, I expect Zadie Smith's prose will continue to be a joy to read.

In William Gibson's The Peripheral, a policewoman in the future London confirms her British identity for American readers by exclaiming “Bloody Hell!” Sadly, on a recent return to these shores I noticed the disappearance of the word “Bloody” from the contemporary British vocabulary. Cultural subservience to Hollywood and HBO now sends us straight to the F-word. Even in Grimsby, it seems, we want to gab like gangstas.
What's sad about that? Well, a couple of things. First, the purpose of swearing was to shock. But if you use a taboo word as though it were nothing unusual, it eventually loses its power to shock. It will retain little more than its ability to signify that you belong to a particular group: people who (imitate people who) would like to shock if only they could think of a ruder word than the F-word has become. Second, dear old “bloody” was useful in that it had just a little power to shock, because it was rude but less rude than other taboo words: you could break the taboo without breaking the vocabulary bank, leaving yourself options if you wanted to shock more later on. Now, I guess if you say “bloody”, it marks you as a fuddy-duddy. Maybe that's the real reason I want it back. Bloody hell fire!

Review of “Consider Phlebas” by Iain M. Banks, "Culture #1"

Is there something inherently fascistic in Space Opera?
Like in the “Star Wars” film, where a whole world gets annihilated, but what we are supposed to focus on is a lion getting a smile from an aristocrat. In “Consider Phlebas”, I find a similar attitude, even though I believe the author was a noted anti-fascist.
I love sci-fi, especially social sci-fi (which I sometimes write), and the social aspects of the universe Banks portrays here are deeply interesting, but the focus is on the unremitting series of improbable escapes from impending doom.
The fascistic element is that except for the protagonists, individuals are treated as expendable. However, in the end all the characters whose state of mind we were encouraged to consider more important than the lives of their many innocent victims get their come-uppance, and the whole inter-species conflict gets put into perspective.
Nevertheless, I wish I had chosen one of his literary novels instead.