Who are the new Huxley and Orwell writing fiction about ideologies like Neoliberalism?

[repoman]

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

The ideologies that we really don't recognize that influence us are what a good author can expose.

If this should be moved to M&PC please do it.

Thanks.

 

[fromderinside]

Read Trump's book.

 

[mrzyphl]

What about a new Jack Kerouac or Franz Kafka?

 

[fromderinside]

Current political hot topics are populism and political deconstructionism. Who the hell wants to read stuff like that?

The first is stupid given the state of our interconnected world doing so much better than previous wild west scenarios, now championed by current populists and deconstruction has always been a nihilist counter to positivism of any sort, another snore.

What I'm interested in is a treatment of secularism in a tribal world which is, I believe, a very liberal topic.

 

[LordKiran]

Current political hot topics are populism and political deconstructionism. Who the hell wants to read stuff like that?

The same people interested in Robert Greene I would imagine.

 

[fromderinside]

Current political hot topics are populism and political deconstructionism. Who the hell wants to read stuff like that?

The same people interested in Robert Greene I would imagine.

Naw that would just be leveraging some aspects of secularism like putting me before us.
No counter there at all. Pulling at excess is just titillation.

 

[untermensche]

Neoliberalism is all about these incredibly powerful multi-nationals, small dictatorships, that control governments.

That at least is Neoliberalism in action in the present world.

And when you reach that level of control you don't have to torture people. You don't have to care about people at all.

They either conform or starve.

 

[LordKiran]

The same people interested in Robert Greene I would imagine.

Naw that would just be leveraging some aspects of secularism like putting me before us.
No counter there at all. Pulling at excess is just titillation.

I say they would be interested because Greene's best known work are big-picture treatises on interpersonal power dynamics. I imagine people interested in that would also be interested in a meta-analysis of political structure.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Margret Atwood's "The Hand Maiden's Tale" seems to be one political tale that has been popular in the last few years.
Other than that, I can't think of any books that have had a good effect on the world, such as 1984. The "Turner Diaries" have had a negative effect on some. Ayn Rand's trash is still popular in some circles.

https://www.splcenter.org/fighting-...ther-racist-novels-inspire-extremist-violence

------
Violence and Virtue
In the past 15 years, dozens of racist and extremist novels have been published by writers hoping to use the tool of fiction as persuasively — if, perhaps, to a less explicitly violent end — as Pierce. The novels span every category of extremism — neo-Nazi, neo-Confederate, radical environmentalist, anti-immigration, antigovernment — but most stick to Pierce's formula: a white male hero, learning of a massive conspiracy against law-abiding whites, undertakes violent revenge.
----

 

[iolo]

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

The ideologies that we really don't recognize that influence us are what a good author can expose.

If this should be moved to M&PC please do it.

Thanks.

I think it is more complex than that: Huxley was a person interested in 'religion' who was almost brainwashed into 'scientific' thinking and was at enough of a cultural turning-point to see what was coming, whereas Orwell was a very naïve sort-of-socialist who was so shocked by Stalinism that he adopted the same methods (as a society, that produced in 1984 is totally unbelievable as to origin and organisation). Nowadays the masses are so brainwashed that there is NO powerful alternative - people object to the detail of the destruction of humanity but simply cannot step back and understand it, so we wont get any literary product that's serious out of our destruction, alas.

 

[untermensche]

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

The ideologies that we really don't recognize that influence us are what a good author can expose.

If this should be moved to M&PC please do it.

Thanks.

I think it is more complex than that: Huxley was a person interested in 'religion' who was almost brainwashed into 'scientific' thinking and was at enough of a cultural turning-point to see what was coming, whereas Orwell was a very naïve sort-of-socialist who was so shocked by Stalinism that he adopted the same methods (as a society, that produced in 1984 is totally unbelievable as to origin and organisation). Nowadays the masses are so brainwashed that there is NO powerful alternative - people object to the detail of the destruction of humanity but simply cannot step back and understand it, so we wont get any literary product that's serious out of our destruction, alas.

The entire Western left was shocked at what Stalin was actually doing. Socialism being forced down people's throats by a dictator is not socialism. The roots of socialism is a functioning democracy.

So saying Orwell was shocked is saying very little.

And certainly not evidence of naivete.

He quickly caught on, 'Animal Farm' (1945), helped by his experience in Spain, while others in the West were still supporting Stalin's "socialism".

Although it should be noted that while Animal Farm is about Stalin's Russia the original preface warned of the same things happening in the West.

But not by a dictators force, through a "good education".

 

[iolo]

I think it is more complex than that: Huxley was a person interested in 'religion' who was almost brainwashed into 'scientific' thinking and was at enough of a cultural turning-point to see what was coming, whereas Orwell was a very naïve sort-of-socialist who was so shocked by Stalinism that he adopted the same methods (as a society, that produced in 1984 is totally unbelievable as to origin and organisation). Nowadays the masses are so brainwashed that there is NO powerful alternative - people object to the detail of the destruction of humanity but simply cannot step back and understand it, so we wont get any literary product that's serious out of our destruction, alas.

The entire Western left was shocked at what Stalin was actually doing. Socialism being forced down people's throats by a dictator is not socialism. The roots of socialism is a functioning democracy.

So saying Orwell was shocked is saying very little.

And certainly not evidence of naivete.

He quickly caught on, 'Animal Farm' (1945), helped by his experience in Spain, while others in the West were still supporting Stalin's "socialism".

Although it should be noted that while Animal Farm is about Stalin's Russia the original preface warned of the same things happening in the West.

But not by a dictators force, through a "good education".

For those of us who were in the New Left, Orwell is a typical example of those who saw the world naively, as a choice between State and Monopoly capitalism. Not their fault, but not interesting.

 

[untermensche]

The entire Western left was shocked at what Stalin was actually doing. Socialism being forced down people's throats by a dictator is not socialism. The roots of socialism is a functioning democracy.

So saying Orwell was shocked is saying very little.

And certainly not evidence of naivete.

He quickly caught on, 'Animal Farm' (1945), helped by his experience in Spain, while others in the West were still supporting Stalin's "socialism".

Although it should be noted that while Animal Farm is about Stalin's Russia the original preface warned of the same things happening in the West.

But not by a dictators force, through a "good education".

For those of us who were in the New Left, Orwell is a typical example of those who saw the world naively, as a choice between State and Monopoly capitalism. Not their fault, but not interesting.

When did he see the world naively?

In Spain in the late 30's? Orwell was nearly killed by the forces controlled by Stalin. His faith in Stalin was destroyed in the late 1930's.

In the post-War late 40's?

Which book is naive?

To say because Orwell was not all things he was naive is to say every writer in history was naive. Orwell had an insight few have even today.

 

[LordKiran]

I've only ever read Brave New World but based on that alone, I can say I like Huxley far more because he didn't put a political slant on his work that I've read. I can guess little of his politics because he seems to have had more to say about the big picture of humanity than any of the comparatively petty squabbles over political ideology.

 

[KeepTalking]

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

The ideologies that we really don't recognize that influence us are what a good author can expose.

I'm not sure how you feel about Science Fiction, but there are certainly SciFi writers tackling these themes, some more directly than others. William Gibson comes to mind, his cyberpunk novels are usually set in near future dystopias, where the technology presented can be seen to have arisen from neoliberal ideals. He drifted away from that for a decade, or two, but his newest novel from a few years ago, The Peripheral, confronts neoliberalism head on. Unfortunately, we lost Terry Pratchett in 2015, but he often dabbled in this territory, from a more humorous, and less bleak, point of view. More modern SciFi authors inhabiting this space include Corey Doctorow, and Kim Stanley Robinson. A couple of newcomers worth mention are Ann Leckie, and interestingly enough, Marko Kloos.

Kloos was caught up in the recent Hugo Awards "scandal" when his second book Lines of Departure was nominated in 2015 by a group of right-wing voters who were explicitly trying to block Science Fiction works with a political message from receiving the award. Kloos withdrew the book from nomination as a result. The interesting thing is that Kloos writes military SciFi, but if you scratch that surface on Lines of Departure (and the entire Frontlines series), he is presenting a dystopian future that can be seen as a culmination of melding neoliberal and socialist ideals together.

 

[Night Train]

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

The ideologies that we really don't recognize that influence us are what a good author can expose.

If this should be moved to M&PC please do it.

Thanks.

Check out these titles:
The Subprimes, Karl Taro Greenfield
The Army of the Republic, Stuart Archer Cohen
The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi

These are all recent dystopian novels about a near-future America in which privatization has run amok.

 

[Playball40]

Where are you getting the idea that Orwell was in ANY way naïve? Have you actually studied his biography??

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

The ideologies that we really don't recognize that influence us are what a good author can expose.

If this should be moved to M&PC please do it.

Thanks.

I think it is more complex than that: Huxley was a person interested in 'religion' who was almost brainwashed into 'scientific' thinking and was at enough of a cultural turning-point to see what was coming, whereas Orwell was a very naïve sort-of-socialist who was so shocked by Stalinism that he adopted the same methods (as a society, that produced in 1984 is totally unbelievable as to origin and organisation). Nowadays the masses are so brainwashed that there is NO powerful alternative - people object to the detail of the destruction of humanity but simply cannot step back and understand it, so we wont get any literary product that's serious out of our destruction, alas.

 

[KeepTalking]

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

The ideologies that we really don't recognize that influence us are what a good author can expose.

If this should be moved to M&PC please do it.

Thanks.

Check out these titles:
The Subprimes, Karl Taro Greenfield
The Army of the Republic, Stuart Archer Cohen
The Water Knife, Paolo Bacigalupi

These are all recent dystopian novels about a near-future America in which privatization has run amok.

+1 on Paolo Bacigalupi. He is another great modern SciFi author tackling this theme.

I haven't read the other two, I will have to check them out.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

Probably not to anybody's taste here, but one of the Ur texts on political themes is Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi. A crude, dadistic cruel farce, perhaps it's a fitting play for the Trump era.

One could probably create an updated parody, much like McBird, a parody of Macbeth by Barbara Garson, that attacked Lyndon Johnson. Any play that lead to a riot at it's first performance in Paris as did Ubu Roi, can't be all bad.

William S.Burrough's Nova Trilogy is another work that touches on political themes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4N6Jv1kK_8I

 

[lpetrich]

I would like to read some stuff like this, but I am very removed from political based fiction now and don't know where to start.

Maybe someone can write some. I've had some ideas about that sort of thing, like a capitalist version of Animal Farm. Despite the pigs making a big fuss about "freedom", those pigs become a rich oligarchy and the other animals dirt-poor without much freedom at all. All in the name of freedom, of course.

BTW, Animal Farm is rather obviously inspired by the early decades of the Soviet Union. Old Major = Karl Marx, Snowball = Lenin and Trotsky, Napoleon = Stalin, etc. Collectivization. Purges. Rewriting of history.

Likewise, "1984" is inspired by Stalinism, even down to Big Brother looking like Stalin and Emmanuel Goldstein looking like Trotsky -- original name Lev Davidovich Bronshtein. Isaac Asimov panned it as very contrived, and I'm inclined to agree.