jeff (04/19/83)
I am sorry to interrupt the metadiscussion going on in net.books, but I hope the series I am going to review is relevant to it. Doris Lessing, who has some credentials as a "real" writer, has recently begun a Science Fiction series--I think she slightly prefers to call her work space fiction. Her work is far superior to most Science Fiction. In reading books, I am very concerned with the ethical content--in other words, what does the book tell you about getting along in life. In the "good old days" of hypocrisy, of course, all doers of good deeds always did good deeds and, at least by the end of the book, had triumphed over those who deviated from that course. Lesson to reader: Behave like the good guys. Not bad, quite necessary for many people and far more entertaining than a sermon. Nowadays, even the popular forms of literature, acknowledge (indeed, find it profitable to proclaim) that the world does not quite work that way. In fact, the "good guys wear white" philosophy simply set you up to be knocked down, as often by your fellow hypocrites as anyone. Unfortunately, what we get instead are either amoral works, or celebrations of immorality. Barthelme, for example is an immoralist. In the first case, behavior which can only result in misery all around is presented as being the only real alternative. Science Fiction is loaded with immoralists (Ellison), as is modern popular literature. Raymond Chandler is an example of an excellent stylist devoted to a thoroughly corrupt subject matter, where the hero believes that one has to follow a code of justice, but too much justice and you wind up a stiff. Faulkner is an amoralist. The amoralist describes a world where unethical behavior leads to misery, but does not have any idea of what ethical behavior would be. Pynchon is another amoralist. Amoral literature is a step above both immoral and hypocritically moral literature. It allows the writer to educate us to a large extent, and does not actively mislead us. However, amoral literature is not very nourishing. Lessing's new series, Canopus in Argos: Archives, has four books so far-- Shikasta; The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four and Five; The Sirian Experiments; and The Making of the Representative for Planet 8. They constitute a real attempt at presenting the world as it is, and offering a way to get along in it as well as possible. (Which, by the way, is all I mean here by "morals" and "ethics".) But I am interrupting the metadiscussion. Some people have felt that we should only discuss literature here not science fiction, without saying what literature is, except that it is not science fiction. I will not quote Lessing's explanation of why she choose space fiction as the genre in which to do her work, but a parenthetical comment. "Some people regret this. I was in the States, giving a talk, and the professor who was acting as chairwoman, and whose only fault was that perhaps she had fed too long on the pieties of academia, interrupted me with: 'If I had you in my class you'd never get away with that!' (Of course it is not everyone who finds this funny.)"