Harry's Place Arts

The following may contain many errors, as the preview button doesn’t work for me right now.

This is spectacularly interesting, Sarah, although you have slightly spoiled my reading of the Hyperion series, which I have recently began. In Hyperion, one of the those on the pilgrimage to the Shrike, the action man character, is an ethnic Palestinian, whose independent, secular Palestine lasts barely a month after Israel is destroyed.

I had to interrupt reading since Christmas, but I recall both Israeli Jews and Palestinian Arabs had to form their off-world diaspora/new lands, Israel’s being ‘Hebron’.

I am afraid housing matters preoccupy, but I will return.

Off hand, Liven/Pournelle’s The Mote in God’s Eye series have ex-terran Arab, Islamic, Israeli, Jewish diaspora worlds. In that series apparently Jews and Arabs don’t talk, because of What Happened.

Dune Messiah (the only one I have read; everything else is film derived, I am ashamed to say) was a mixture of Arab, Islamic and Hebrew, Jewish concepts, though arguably the latter dominated (which I forget, precisely too).

There was a novel, back in the 70s, called ‘Diaspora’ (not Egan’s), about a new Jewish exile, following the destruction of Israel, this time in space, but I forget the author. Also a Star Trek novel, from the late 80s/90s, in which there were characters who were an amalgam of Israel, Jewish, Arab, but I forget its title. Been trying to hunt it down, but can’t find it.

Of course, Herzl’s Altneuland would, I think, be a work of political science fiction, too.

Just finished Stephen Baxter’s Stone Spring, in which a stray builder from Jericho helps build a damn in Doggerland, about 8000 BCE, and prevents its flooding. The tag line for the novel is ‘a world in which Christianity and Islam never arose’, though that hardly appears in the novel.

Baxter alludes to some of these issues tangentially, though it happens more in his collaborations with Arthur C. Clarke, who definitely has a bit of a Wellsian problem with specifically +Judeo+ Christianity, though not so much with Islam, which pokes out here and there.

The Light of other Days, about a device to see back into the past, makes a big deal about no Moses’ having existed, and Israeli, Palestinian Jewish acts of ethnic cleansing. But when it comes to thc crucifixion, it almost deifies Christ, by virtue of the fact of so many people looking back to that event.

There are hints of the Wellsian hostility to Judeo-Christianity in Baxter, alas, but one ignores them. He cannot delve too far as he is far too interested in ancient history and his Roman Catholic Christian roots. Fortunately his virtues far outweigh his flaws. Likewise for Clarke, by and large.

But it may that there is decided Wells-Clarke-Baxter strand, there.

But Howard Jacobson is right, pretty much, when it comes to fiction.

The trouble with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is that a parable, allegory about it has to be quite nuanced, else it becomes racist or reactionary.

Unfortunately it is prone to that, for instance when some essentialize Zionism as an abstract thing called ‘colonialism’, and as innately Jewish supremacism or racism.

It happens on both sides, Palestinian Arab Muslims and Christians essentialised ‘sandrats’, or Nazis.

The trouble is one has to take too much notice of the real world, the particular. There isn’t another situation quite like it, so it resists the kind of abstract, universal modelling that SF requires.

Many-most pro-Palestinian activists force the South Africa Apartheid model on the situation, or the Nazi, sometimes. But the more they try to do so, the more they risk reality i.e. Israeli Jews resisting back. A round hole resisting a square peg, as it were.

The issue of modelling is very important to SF, isn;t it? Some kind of universal model has to be deduced from historical particular instances or events, about which to weave a generally applicable or plausible parable or allegory.

In the I-P conflict, models and modelling play a significant part.

People, for all kinds of reasons, read apartheid South Africa into it, North American European colonialism or the Crusade kingdoms. Or the crucifixion, or persecution of whichever set of saints one venerates.

Stephen Sizer does that, for instance, and perhaps Ben White too.

Partly or mainly because I am sympathetic to Israel and Zionism, I read the discourse of exile and return, but also into the situation of Palestinians, reading one in terms of the other. I justify that on the grounds that it is not just a Jewish narrative, but also historically a (Palestinian) Christian and Islamic narrative.

But many, including Christians, would be highly Resistant to so doing. And the parable or allegory they construct thereby might be very different, such as that by N T Wright, which I think frankly absurd. He is a devout evangelical Christian, but while he can sympathise with Palestinian Christians’ exile, and desire for restoration and return, he cannot so do for Jews (more alluding to than acknowledging a Jewish exile a priori).

http://www.ntwrightpage.com/Wright_Holy_Land_Today.htm

He writes ‘The return from exile has happened’, as though Jewish exile and Jesus’ crucifixion are one and the same, and that, somehow, Jesus’ return from the exile of death has elided the need for a Jewish (he hardly says the same of Palestinian Christians).

How he reads the situations depends on his a priori data and assumptions, and how his agenda dictates the need to use them.

Thanks Zkharya, I hope I haven’t in fact spoiled too much of Hyperion for you – I only read the first two of the series, having been warned off the later ones, but those were brilliant. Thanks for all your thoughts and suggestions – I don’t know most of them and didn’t realize there was so much more on the topic – reading about The Light of Other Days reminded me of the similar device enabling people to look back to the Biblical past in Childhood’s End.

I’m a Baxter fan, as you know, but Stone Spring looked a bit too prehistoric for my tastes. But perhaps it’s gearing up to being an interesting series.

‘I’m a Baxter fan, as you know, but Stone Spring looked a bit too prehistoric for my tastes’

Don’t worry, Sarah, it’s partly down to you that I got to reading H. in the first place. Sorry if I veered the subject too much into obsessions of my own, only tangentially related. Yeah, in Childhood’s End, Clarke wrote of the dissolution of all nations, and that it was hardest for Israel, since it was the most recent. Since then he has written of Abraham the pyschopath who wanted to slaughter his son (not an entirely unreasonable take, in my view), and the pejorative implication for this followers. Judeo-Christian, quasli-North American fundamentalist anti-scientific terrorists play a role in his collaborations with Baxter, and in Baxter, at times.

Re. Stone Spring, Baxter has an abiding interest in ancient and pre-historic Britain (there are a tribe from mainland Britain (Alba) called the ‘Pretani’, derived from the Welsh ‘Prydain’), which chimes with one of mind. But there is also an ingenious allusion to Plato, which It think you would enjoy, Sarah.

He deals with issues of empire, colonizing and colonialism, most ingeniously in Space, in which humans find evidence for the solar system, its planets and bodies, having been colonised again and again, and the indigenous life wiped out, again and again.

Obviously there are those who would like to apply those broad brush strokes to the I-P conflict. Some write utopian visions about how it should end, not unlike in the case of South Africa, going into minute details as to how the Palestinian refugees could return etc. And this is all political science fiction, of a sort.

Issue of exile and return, or emigration and colonization, are universal themes which often appear in SF. Colonizing especially, since it constitutes The Outward Urge that is the basis of most space-based SF, and often the locus of encounters with the Alien.

Thanks! I may have mentioned this to you before, but I wondered recently whether there some potentially interesting parallels between the Aeneid and I/P – potentially interesting in that they might be exploited/hinted at in a creative adaptation of the Aeneid – a film or poem. The Trojans have been all but wiped out and move to a land which they apparently hailed from long ago and clash with the people they find there. There’s quite a bit of debate as to where Virgil’s sympathies lie too – even though Aeneas is ostensibly the hero.

That, Sarah, is a massive issue, which I would love to address in a bit (Battlestar Galactica = mixture of the Aeneid and Exodus).

TBH, I wish Skidmarx would show up, because I know he is interested in SF and these issues, and this is a ‘safe’ place to discuss all kinds of issues. Unfortunately I a bit occupied (!) right now, and will come back shortly.

BTW, have you ever read China Mieville? He went to my school, when I was there (much smarter, literate and successful than me, evidently). He’s a professing Socialist, and member of the SWP (I think). I haven’t yet tackled any of his stuff.

I haven’t read any of the books in the post, though I have read a lot of his fiction of all lengths, and he is emblematic of the fact that modern SF is considerably a New York Jewish phenomenon [quick check with Wikipedia confirms, along with Asimov, Pohl]. As such their politics tended to the left liberal (Pohl was a CP member briefly before the Hitler-Stalin pact disillusioned a generation of American leftists with the Soviet Union), and so I imagine will have tended towards the critically supportive of Israel.I guess.
Harry Harrison’s The Daleth Effect(UK pub. as In Our Hands, The Stars) has an Israeli scientist invent workable anti-gravity, only to turn it over to the Danish government because the only state that could be trusted not to trash its enemies is the one where the resistance to Nazism spread so far through society that every Jew in the country was handed over and sent to the concentration camps. He also wrote a story about a missionary nailed to a cross by previously sin-ignorant aliens called “The Streets of Ashkelon”,which might have some relevance to something (though it’s definitely too early to be about rockets from Gaza).

On modelling I’d tend to say the opposite: In her article “The Straining Your Eyes Through The Viewscreen Blues(in Nebula Award Winners Fifteen), Vonda N.McIntyre makes the point that one of the secrets of good writing is “Show, Don’t Tell”. Explicitly addressing I/P, even explicitly analogizing it, is hard to do without the sort of preaching that is normally the death of attention-worthy narrative.

Science Fiction Can Solve The Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.
Apparently.

Operation Shylock!

Aww isn’t it lovely! Sarah AB (yet again) and Zkharya entertaining little skidmarx. Anyone with a bit of sense would tell this red-brown, genocide denying piece of shit to simply fuck off the moment he crawls over to the keyboard. I’m more interested in hearing what Robert Mugabe has to say on Harry Harrison.

Get a fucking grip of yourselves.

‘Explicitly addressing I/P, even explicitly analogizing it, is hard to do without the sort of preaching that is normally the death of attention-worthy narrative.’

Sure, if one is telling like it is. But making an SF allegory or parable, is a bit different. And I do stress the difficulty of doing that.

I also think that, to some extent, everyone models, consciously or unconsciously.

But to return to the theme, I think 7JC is a kind of allegory or parable, or attempt at it, because it attempts to reduce or simplify the conflict to a 10 minute talking head narrative. And what Churchill selects or omits, stresses or the opposite, has a lot to do with her a priori agenda.

Which is one of the reasons Jacobson said it constituted a poor work of art.

Whether or not it is a work of political science fiction, is another matter. Churchill comes from a background of mythopoesis, and that style or influence is fairly clear on her treatment of history. So, in a sense, I’d say the answer is yes.

Zkharya – I do have a China Mieville on my shelf waiting to be read, although obviously he’s not someone whose views I find congenial. Ditto skidmarx, but (pace Django) thanks very much for the comments and particularly the link to the Palestinian sf writer – sounds a very interesting novel.

On interesting, complex as opposed to simplistic modelling – would it be fair to say that there are parallels between the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep and BOTH the Jews as dehumanised and demonised victims of the Holocaust AND the Nazis? And that that is quite an interesting, troubling effect?

Sarah AB – I’d say no (I don’t immediately see those parallels), but I see that Sharon L. Gravett has similar thoughts in reference to the movie:
“‘Blade Runner’ draws on the creation story in Genesis, but also on the founding of the nation of Israel and the patriarch Israel. In ‘Blade Runner’ the replicants represent the new Adams and Eves, but there are parallels between Jacob, his twin brother Esau, Deckard and Batty.” Dick did of course, think that he was possessed by the prophet Elijah for a couple of years, but I’d tend to think that American parallels would be uppermost in his mind (and reflected in the text) when talking about repression and The Other. Israelis as oppressors, when once were victims, might be a possible parallel.

zkharya – China Mieville did say that The Finkler Question was a very poor work of art, as well as deliberately insulting to such as Jews for Justice for Palestinians.
James Gunn, quoting himself from the first volume of The Road to Science Fiction in the third, says:
Science fiction’s religion is skepticism about faith, although there is science fiction about religion…The reasons for this are clear:religion answers all the questions that science fiction wishes to raise, and science fiction written within a religious framework… turns into parable. I guess he’s not a big fan of parable. One counter-example to the idea that strong belief is not easily integrated into fictional narrative is Mack Reynolds, who produced a large quantity of pulp SF socialist propaganda, while managing to be the most popular writer for the most popular US SF magazine, Astounding (I think).

Hi Skidmarx,

well, it is possible Mieville has a point. I have only read +those+ pages in TFQ. I thought they were quite good, although flawed on one or two points. But I do not recall there was anything specifically insulting the Palestinians. I could be wrong. It was more about a intra-Jewish discussions about Zionism, and correcting the misrepresentations of it and its context to a wider anti-Israel anti-Zionist non-Jews. And they are only a small part of the novel (which admittedly I haven’t read), or so I understand.

Sarah,

I am afraid my knowledge of DADOES? is confined to a 2 hour BBC 7 radio reading of it. I have some thoughts on it, but fear to opine with such scanty.

My brother is P K D fan, and he told me that Dick believed that time had stopped with the destruction of the Temple, and that it had restarted in 1948 with the founding of Israel. I don’t know how true that it is, or relevant to Dick. I think he told me The Divine Invasion had something to do with that.

The original BSG from 1979 or so definitely seemed to combine the narrative of Exodus and the Aeneid, with the whole para-Classical theme of the names of its characters and colonies reflecting their common origin of Classical, Egyptian and other civilization.

The new BSG obviously addressed issues such as suicide bombing as a mode of political resistance, and issues of collaboration with an invading and occupying power, and their fate upon liberation.

The final episode was weird and, for me, disappointing. But the notion of obliterating culture, civilization and technology in a kind of act of social-suicide was more striking than logical, perhaps. But that is a theme dealt with in some SF, namely the redundancy, in some situations, of intelligence, or culture, compared with the attributes necessary for survival. Or the need to curb culture and civilization, lest it alert galactic predators elsewhere.

But it in some ways it reminds of the increasing redundancy of Roman imperial institutions, in the Christian period, especially in the west, once the empire can no longer hold itself together. Life has to become much more local, and much poorer, as the resources to which one is accustomed, via empire, dry up. A bit like the UK today.

zharaya

whats bsg? saorry if i seem dumb.

It’s Battlestar Galactica, John.

“Homeworld”, the first of the “To The Stars” trilogy by Harry Harrison, features an Israel that is the only democracy remaining on Earth.

I would add that there are (apparently) many Judaic concepts in the Marvel/DC Comics universes.

Surely “The Texas-Israeli War” by Howard Waldrop is relevant to this discussion!

didn’t read any of the comments… everyone post too much and too long

Ursula Le Guin’s The Dispossessed features a moon settled by ‘dispossessed’ anarchists which has strong echoes of the kibbutzim of Israel.

And Diaspora is by Greg Bear.

I would add that there are (apparently) many Judaic concepts in the Marvel/DC Comics universes.

Well, the X-Men could be seen an angry post-holocaust rejectionist Zionism against a mainstream American / bundist diaspora identity.

And thanks to the Egyptian Ministry of Culture’s censorship, the Matrix trilogy should also get a mention in case the “Arab Street” might start showing sympathy with people fleeing to Zion.

There is a book called Diasporah by WR Yates which is worth reading for a discussion of Zionism and Space. It is superb.

Of course, there is also the fantastic Joel Rosenberg’s Not For Glory and Hero.

On the Negative side, in his Red Thunder novel, John Varley has a throw away line about the evils of Zionism.

You all need to read Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, set in an alternative present where Jews were settled in Alaska instead of Palestine. It is also a murder mystery.

Even in space itself the Zionist Rastafarians have assembled their own orbital archipelago out of abandoned satellites and way-stations – William Gibson, Neuromancer

For example…Palestine. Of course, on the one hand, the overriding strategy has to be – as the ‘New Historians’ like Pappé et al so heroically have – to vigorously undermine the mythic story of zionism. Which in many of its elements is, parenthetically, probably the most preposterously kitsch political myth out there – even more so than the founding pomp of the US. But the thing is, that in destroying that legend, *inevitably*, because humans think and organise information narratively, I think, it’s impossible not to organise a counter-narrative. And in fact, Palestine is a particularly vivid example, because more than any other political issue I can think of, it’s impossible not to turn it into a narrative – a narrative of utter tragedy. One of the things narrative does is militate against complexity. Often the effect of that is straightforwardly invidious. In the case of Palestine, however, it’s a rare example of a time when it needn’t be. Because Palestine is one of the very very few political situations I can think of in which the more you research it, the *less* complicated it gets. The claim that ‘it’s really very complicated’ is almost always special pleading by left Zionists. In fact, in this instance, understanding it as a tragic story of dispossession and exile is more or less fucking bang on. That is, I admit, an unusual case.
China Mieville interview: http://www.long-sunday.net/long_sunday/2005/07/that_alienation.html

China Mieville is an odious anti-Semite so naturally he is going to say what he does, and hate ‘The Finkler Question’ besides. Mieville has campaigned for Galloway’s anti-Semitic Respect Party, supports BDS against Israel and has blogged for the horrid Lenin’s Tomb. It took me ten minutes to discover all this..

The Yiddish Policemen’s Union: I really disliked that book.

Chabon took every unflattering Jewish and Israeli characteristic (I can confirm there are quite a few, but spread among the population no more or less than most other states and peoples) and rolled them all into his characters, protagonists and adversaries alike. This was all set against a background of the 1948 anihilation of the State of Israel and the imminent dispersal of 2 million Jews.

It was every anti-semite’s and anti-Zionist’s justification and dream.

It put me off reading his other books.

koshei you are right the discussion is rellevant to “The Texas-Israeli War”

skidmarx,

They will never make peace

The stories about rome are beautiful, for example the stories of Dan brown!

I am not a fan of China meiville, less for his odious politics, than for his patrician dismissal of all possible alternative points of view, and his visceral hatred of terry pratchett, whose crime is to successful and humanist and not a trot.

Roma Eterna starts with an fascinating idea: The Exodus failed, so there is no Jesus; With out the Christian church, the Roman Empire stands for all time (or a minimum of until the end of the book). The book is chopped up into a number of brief stories.

piece could be made if that fascinating idea is duplicated

love it

science fiction?? what is that, zionism is very cool

not a fan of china meiville neither but you have to admit that was a good part, i am a fan of science fiction for sure

What a fascinating discussion! It just proves that SF is a broad (ahem) church, with room for all viewpoints about Jews and Israel. I didn’t realise that China Mieville was such an anti-Zionist, and I’m very disappointed, as he’s a great writer – but then the same goes for Iain M. Banks. Mieville’s ‘The City and The City’ is an excellent parable on Jerusalem – even though one of the characters explicitly rejects that it is so. Also don’t forget Harry Turtledove: much of his work is Jewish-themed. ‘In the Presence of Mine Enemies’ is about Jews living secretly in a victorious Nazi world-empire where they are assumed to have been exterminated, and his ‘Worldwar’ series has reptilian aliens invade Earth just in time to stop the Holocaust – among other things.

Please be aware that this list is manually edited and moderated, if you do find a blog on the list that is not dofollow please let me know and I will amend the list as soon as I can

Although I like reading a lot, I always come back to two of my favourites – Jonathan Livingston Seagull and The Little Prince. So much wisdom in a few pages.

Youtube Michael Hoffman Judaism exposed.

Absolutely bizarre. I clicked on this thread by mistake, and lo and behold – someone else has just posted here after a long hiatus.

Dune: basically a mishmash of Kaballah (Kfitzat Ha-Derekh) and North African tribes. A great book, which I read decades ago in more or less one sitting. (Don’t watch the laughable film with Sting – a waste of time.)

Zkharya
You mentioned the almost forgotten SF book “Diasphora” . I always felt that this was a strangely profetic 1970s legend of the future …as Israel becomes a leader in teknology and as a nuclear showdown becomes more likely …