Trauma

[threemonkeys]

Many years ago I watched a documentary piece about the gospels and in particular when they were written. Part of the analysis was that anything written after the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem must reflect the cultural trauma of that event. At the time I didn't buy it. My thinking was that if you were writing about an earlier time, how would that traumatic event show up in your writing - it hadn't happened yet as far as the subject of the writing was concerned. But I totally get it now. In the 5 years since 11/Sep/01 it seems that all American writing shows to some extent the impact of the two towers and the aftermath. Well maybe not all, but enough to really notice it.

Red Lightning is John Varley's sequel to Red Thunder. The earlier work was a fun little Heinlein pastiche about a bunch of kids who use an invention of their friend to stage a rescue mission on Mars. Without being up to the standards of earlier work, it was still an enjoyable little piece but certainly not deep. If if had any social comment it was about the lack of funding for science and space research in the America of today. But in the new book, the social change of the last 5 years has hit home in a big way.

Red Lightning is set about 20 years after the first book. This time the kids of the first kids are in action rescuing their grandmother from a tsunami aftermath before aiding their inventor friend to escape from his captors and finally freeing Mars from invaders. Featuring large in the story is a fascist American government and its black helmeted homeland security stormtroopers. A government slow to come to the aid of its people when disaster strikes. A government which clamps down on news and communication to control what people see and hear. A government which holds people without trial and tortures them. A government which invades other nations to get what it wants. Well you get the idea - September 11, Iraq invasion, war on terror, hurricane Katrina relief - it is all rolled in there at one level or another.

At heart this book is still a bunch of teenagers running a caper. The story is about as well done as in the first novel - perhaps a bit better. But then you add in all the social commentary. I have to hand it to Varley - he does integrate it into the story very well without being too heavy handed. Squint a bit and you can lose the commentary side of it and just read it as an adventure story with really nasty (but still obviously human) bad guys. Creating different social environments was Varley's great strength during his heyday and he uses those skills to good effect here to create a scary future. For all that it isn't the wildly inventive writing that gave us the eight worlds stories, Persistence of Vision, the Gaean books and many other great stories. It is a more conventional piece of writing but a pretty good one. One that will make you think - even if it just makes you nod and give a big sigh.

Comments

[girliejones.livejournal.com]

My thinking was that if you were writing about an earlier time, how would that traumatic event show up in your writing - it hadn't happened yet as far as the subject of the writing was concerned.

I think that's a really interesting comment, and I think you can only answer it if a dramatic event has impacted on you. (As in, if one hasn't, you might not see how it affects you?)

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

From the "learn by experience" school of life eh?. If I had been more astute I would have noticed it with the impact the Vietnam war had on the global psyche but it took a while to put the pieces together intellectually. And of course I wasn't in a situation where family & cultural trauma wasn't being passed down to me.

[bytheseaside.livejournal.com]

I think writers are very much subject to their perceptions when they write. Whatever is hovering in their minds, that is important to them as people, it doesn't matter what they write, if they do it well, it will come out in their writing whether they intend such things to or not.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Yep, that is pretty much the conclusion I came to too. In many cases the effect is subtle but for Varley it was overt but either way it is there.

[thoatherder.livejournal.com]

I knew a woman who was doing her thesis on a post-WWII French author. The aim of the thesis was to deconstruct the author's writings with regard to how they didn't mention the Holocaust. Her explanation tended to make my head hurt. But apparently the idea was that the Holocaust was such a traumatic event, that it took an effort of will not to include any mention of it in novels, so you could examine a novel and look at the silences to obtain some idea of what the author thought of this major event.

***

My problem with Red Thunder (apart from the 'magic' of the Macguffin) was that I wasn't quite sure who it was aimed at in terms of a readership. It didn't feel that it was aimed at adults, but the tone also seemed wrong for teenagers. Certainly the overt references to sex in it jarred me given I was raised on the Heinlein juveniles. I honestly couldn't see me giving it to my 16 year old son for example. Perhaps that just shows I'm out of touch with teenagers today. Perhaps Varley has just turned into a dirty old man.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Varley was always a dirty old man. Pretty much everything he ever wrote had plenty of sex in it and look how many of the eight worlds stories involved young people having sex. Actually he more struck me as a free love hippie type than a dirty old man.

[thoatherder.livejournal.com]

There's a Varley story where it is presented as perfectly reasonable for a teacher to be having sex with his pupils, and as the character becomes a teenager, they are assigned a different teacher for life and sex. So there's that whole intergenerational sex thing without the Heinlein fascination for incest.

Then again my son loves the Xanth series by Piers Anthony, and you couldn't find a more juvenile approach to teenager sex if you tried.

Have you ever talked to someone who was in a commune? The woman I spoke to said that the main problem was that while 'free love' is a great concept, it doesn't work in practice, and at the commune she was at, there was always a huge amount of tension as people paired up for the evening, everyone was watching who everyone was going with for the night.

[threemonkeys.livejournal.com]

Yes Beatnik Bayou was one of the first stories that came to mind. That and Picnic on Nearside.

No I haven't discussed that aspect of commune life with anybody but it does not surprise me in the least. We are competitive animals after all. My hippie notions of Varley were largely formed by some of the autobiographical notes in The Varley Reader.