Normon Spinrad: has to be one of us, surely?

[Cain]

http://www.amazon.com/Agent-Chaos-Norman-Spinrad/dp/1584450428

First published in the 1960s, Spinrad was one of the first writers to perceive the totalitarian implications of the cradle-to-grave welfare state. But at the same time he was too organically a radical ever to be confused with a conservative. Result: "Agent of Chaos!"

Boris Johnson thinks he wants democracy. But in the course of his adventures he discovers that democracy to him means freedom. It's a banned concept from the Millennium of Religion. Like God.

He finds himself dealing with a byzantine political situation worthy of anything from the banned past. The dictatorship is the Hegemony. Opposition is provided by the aptly named agents of C.H.A.O.S. Meanwhile, the Brotherhood of Assassins plays a game that no one can fathom. Whose side are they on? Whose fool are you?

Spinrad explores his philosophical theme in a manner all too rare in contemporary science fiction. The problem is that Order will always try to eliminate any random factors. By its very nature, it encourages opposition and that feeds the forces of chaos. But chaos has built in problems as well. Its victories cannot help but feed the forces of reaction, of order. The heroes in this novel ultimately opt for personal freedom. The villains try to establish a dictatorship over the very nature of reality itself.

And then Spinrad throws in the discovery of aliens. A starship sets forth to meet them, the Prometheus. The Hegemony doesn't like that.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Whoa!

[Cainad (dec.)]

Want.

[Payne]

Boris Johnson thinks he wants democracy. But in the course of his adventures he discovers that democracy to him means freedom. It's a banned concept from the Millennium of Religion. Like God.

[LMNO]

This book is now on The List.

[Cain]

I'm even more certain Spinrad was one of us.

According to the great peeps at TV Tropes, Spinrad also wrote a book where the main character finds a book written by a 1930s demented sci-fi/fantasy author called Adolf Hitler.  Obviously, this is set in a parallel universe or past or whatever. The point though, besides metafictional fun, was to purposefully mock the latent themes of racism inherent in many examples of sci-fi and fantasy literature, where all other races not designated "good guys" are Always Chaotic Evil and thus can be slaughtered without a second thought.

That's always been something that bugged me about those genre's.  Even Tolkein, who was wonderfully enlightened on issues of race for his time and genuinely despised Nazis, hated his portrayal of Orcs in Lord of the Rings, and actually said a few times he wished he could have potrayed them more ambiguously.  Also, his portrayal of the men of the Southern lands being under the sway of Sauron, while almost certainly not done on purpose, has unfortunate implications.  Then again, he got in a good score with the Black Númenoreans, portrayed as creepy racial purity theorists, obssesed with eternal life and who served the Dark Tower.  A Nazi by any other name...

And since most fantasy writers take their cues from Tolkein, and don't have a tenth of his creativity, they often go down the "men from the north are the rugged good guys, people from the south are decadent and evil, and orcs and similar evil races are all evil, or so much so that killing them on sight is never wrong".

So kudos to Spinrad for calling those authors out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Iron_Dream

The book has a nested narrative that tells a story within a story. On the surface, the novel presents an unexceptional science fiction action tale entitled Lord of the Swastika. This is a pro-fascist narrative written by an alternate history version of Adolf Hitler, who in this timeline emigrated from Germany to America in 1919 after the Great War, and used his modest artistic skills to become first a pulp-science fiction illustrator and later a successful science fiction writer, telling lurid, purple-prosed adventure stories under a thin SF-veneer. Spinrad seems intent on demonstrating just how close Joseph Campbell's Hero with a Thousand Faces — and much science fiction and fantasy literature — can be to the racist fantasies of Nazi Germany. The nested narrative is followed by a faux scholarly analysis by a fictional literary critic, Homer Whipple, of New York University.

[LMNO]

Incidentally, "Agent of Chaos" is not available at my local bookstore...


LMNO
-is sad.

[Cain]

Bookchan provides!  Not Agent of Chaos, sadly, but several other books

http://www.anonib.com/bookchan/index.php?t=3887&tcss=0

[Cain]

Incidentally, Spinrad is still alive, still publishing (despite the best attempts of the American publishing Machine to stop him) and has a blog which you can read here http://normanspinradatlarge.blogspot.com/