Skrying Excremental Fans from Idaho and Manhattan

With the US facing a possible double dip recession, and a resurgent far right political movement poised to sweep into Congress in the Fall elections, I found myself reading two strangely complementary dystopian novels about economic collapse. The first, Patriots: A Novel of Survival in the Coming Collapse by Survivalblog writer James Rawles, is a manual for right-wing survivalist gun-nuts dressed up like a novel. The second, Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story, is an example of contemporary literature at its finest. Although from nearly opposite ends of the social universe both novels see the spiraling economic and political crisis in the United States ending in the complete collapse of the Republic as we know it.

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Complete entry

Posted by Aleksei Riikonen  on  08/31  at  04:31 PM

In the currently very popular genre of vampire fiction, especially in the IMO very good True Blood series, I see interesting and very entertaining parallels between hypothetical future self-absorbed immortalist elitism and the attitude of certain fictional vampires.

For a demonstration, see these clips from True Blood (warning, the first one contains very graphic violence):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LiJuYSB8F6M
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kHJ2k4nZJAs

In the latter clip, I'm mostly referring to a part of the discussion they have in the limo, but I'll happily include the extra minutes to demonstrate what a generally good TV series True Blood is

...and now that I showed these elitist self-absorbed vampires from True Blood, I'll also show one of the more saintly ones:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxJWwYYHaX0

I really recommend True Blood for all transhumanists, because of these themes it contains!

Posted by Summerspeaker  on  09/01  at  12:25 AM

Thanks to John Horgan's glowing review in Scientific American, I have no desire whatsoever to pick up Gary Shteyngart's book. "If you’re tempted by these childish, escapist, sci-fi fantasies, read Super Sad True Love Story," Horgan writes. No thanks. Mocking life extension and applauding death isn't new, isn't interesting, and isn't meaningful political commentary.

Posted by jhughes  on  09/01  at  10:11 AM

@ Aleksei

I completely agree that we can read media products like True Blood for attitudes towards human enhancement. I am an especial fan of True Blood. Team Eric!

@ Summerspeaker

Horgan's chortling is grating, but we need to learn to laugh at ourselves. Shteyngart's novel is savagely satirical towards all its targets, but quite loving at the same time. He is not optimistic in the end about life extension, and in that he will probably be wrong. But his depiction of the moral blindness of life extension in the context of a dystopian future is spot on. Universal life extension begins with improving the life conditions and healthcare access of the world's poor, and only then in ensuring the development and universal access to life extending therapies.

Posted by Summerspeaker  on  09/01  at  04:03 PM

The worthwhile political content you say Shteyngart provides need not come together with a celebration of death. If there's anything that needs to die, it's that tired literary tradition. Authors have been criticizing immortality from the very beginning.

An analogous situation would be a writer who satirized the mainstream gay movement for its unquestioning embrace of privilege and assimilationist agenda but also trumpeted the biological inevitability of heterosexuality. I wouldn't be interested.

Posted by Aleksei Riikonen  on  09/01  at  05:44 PM

Hmm, "the biological inevitability of heterosexuality" is actually a very good comparison for "the biological inevitability of mortality"

Both age-old assumptions that conservative institutions strive to perpetuate for the sake of their own interests, and both very common forms of lazy thinking -- though these days, significantly fewer in western cultures are lazy enough to see heterosexuality this way anymore, but such was ubiquitous just a short while ago.

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