May 02, 2012 1:43am
Hello, Rebecca,
You are the first person I have heard make this comparison publicly, and it does, to me, seem almost too apropos... I had been wondering myself whether the author intended it to be a commentary on our current situation. I was talking recently with a radical East Indian activist who put forth an interesting perspective on it, however, when I suggested that I saw the story as an allegorical attack on our mores and systems. Admittedly she had not read it and was basing her response on my description, but I do feel her take is worth repeating. She feels that the background of the story - that of a global conflict which led to the survivors forming the thirteen colonies - actually feeds into the fear mythos of the powers that be, especially when considering the target audience of the series. She feels that rather than it being a diatribe against inhumanity, it actually supports our whole obsession with the inevitability of war, of doom, of a future which we'll have to survive rather than create.
Someone in a position of influence (could have been someone in Obama's Administration) recently was complaining that science fiction is always too glum about the future, that it is constantly portraying a dismal or even disastrous period ahead which the various protagonists are living through or dealing with in various ways. Personally I feel that there is a lot of that genre that is a serious attempt to look ahead from present trends and tendencies and to mirror the darker sides of our human nature as a warning, to wake us from our fascination with technology and remind us that we must be very careful since it is essentially only a few millennia since our primitive brains were dictating our activities. It is no longer in the interest of the human race to act as if every stranger is a threat, or to feel - like a child of a large family at the dinner table - that we must grab at whatever is near us and hoard it against potential famine, to the detriment of any other unfortunates at the meal.
To the degree that there still seem to be many, many people out there who are determined NOT to see the disturbing aspects of our human civilizations, I think perhaps yet another vision which almost literally throws them back in our face may be helpful: it is so important to wake up and see ourselves as we are - an amazingly creative species which has powerful self-destructive tendencies when common sense is ignored. But I do see the aforementioned activist's point also, that young people need to have hope rooted in a determination to create the kind of world they would LIKE to live in, rather than giving them the sense that - no matter what they do - their best chance is only to survive in the world previous generations are busy foisting on their backs. The Occupy movement is just such a declaration of determination, as I see it: at its root it is a dramatic, vital, radical re-envisioning of human values and relationships, not just with each other, but with the earth itself... a powerful rejection of habitual negativity and short-sightedness. It says, to paraphrase the Hunger Games cry: "We shall make our own odds, in humanity's favor".
You are the first person I have heard make this comparison publicly, and it does, to me, seem almost too apropos... I had been wondering myself whether the author intended it to be a commentary on our current situation. I was talking recently with a radical East Indian activist who put forth an interesting perspective on it, however, when I suggested that I saw the story as an allegorical attack on our mores and systems. Admittedly she had not read it and was basing her response on my description, but I do feel her take is worth repeating. She feels that the background of the story - that of a global conflict which led to the survivors forming the thirteen colonies - actually feeds into the fear mythos of the powers that be, especially when considering the target audience of the series. She feels that rather than it being a diatribe against inhumanity, it actually supports our whole obsession with the inevitability of war, of doom, of a future which we'll have to survive rather than create.
Someone in a position of influence (could have been someone in Obama's Administration) recently was complaining that science fiction is always too glum about the future, that it is constantly portraying a dismal or even disastrous period ahead which the various protagonists are living through or dealing with in various ways. Personally I feel that there is a lot of that genre that is a serious attempt to look ahead from present trends and tendencies and to mirror the darker sides of our human nature as a warning, to wake us from our fascination with technology and remind us that we must be very careful since it is essentially only a few millennia since our primitive brains were dictating our activities. It is no longer in the interest of the human race to act as if every stranger is a threat, or to feel - like a child of a large family at the dinner table - that we must grab at whatever is near us and hoard it against potential famine, to the detriment of any other unfortunates at the meal.
To the degree that there still seem to be many, many people out there who are determined NOT to see the disturbing aspects of our human civilizations, I think perhaps yet another vision which almost literally throws them back in our face may be helpful: it is so important to wake up and see ourselves as we are - an amazingly creative species which has powerful self-destructive tendencies when common sense is ignored. But I do see the aforementioned activist's point also, that young people need to have hope rooted in a determination to create the kind of world they would LIKE to live in, rather than giving them the sense that - no matter what they do - their best chance is only to survive in the world previous generations are busy foisting on their backs. The Occupy movement is just such a declaration of determination, as I see it: at its root it is a dramatic, vital, radical re-envisioning of human values and relationships, not just with each other, but with the earth itself... a powerful rejection of habitual negativity and short-sightedness. It says, to paraphrase the Hunger Games cry: "We shall make our own odds, in humanity's favor".
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