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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   35579 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 20, 2023

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Because however few explosions it contains, it's probably infinitely more interesting than whatever is happening here.

This seems very much an "in the eye of the beholder" thing. People with "lunar" personalities will prefer "lunar" stories and people with "solar" personalities will prefer "solar" stories.

As vain as it is to say when it comes to aesthetics: I disagree.

I pride myself on being able to appreciate both Hard Boiled and Pan's Labyrinth which are sublimations of the respective metaphysical tendencies.

The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art. I think lunar science fiction is a contradiction in terms in the same way that you couldn't make a lunar action movie or a solar romantic comedy (or if you can it's definitely a tour de force).

If you manage to sublimate sensation to the degree that you transcend your setting, you are not writing science fiction. You are writing classical literature that just happens to contain spaceships.

My criticism of this particular work isn't so much that it is lunar at all, but rather that it is so unabashedly and inappropriately lunar as to be perverse. And that is a failure. I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.

The lunar essence is not inherently bad or in-conducive to art. It just isn't conducive to the same forms of art.

Fair enough, and probably true. But granting that lunar currently-called-science-fiction is a fundamentally different form of art as compared to solar actual-science-fiction, it's still not clear to me that one is less worthy of existing than the other, or inferior in some objective sense, as opposed to simply being less appealing to people with taste for the other.

If what you mean is that a work of fiction should not be too tilted toward one...

I think a more balanced work would better capture the spirit of the human condition and at least have to ability to qualify as art, and not mere propaganda.

... then I can't disagree; but earlier weren't you proposing hyper-solar fiction, and describing it as superior art to hyper-lunar fiction? Perhaps I misunderstood your point. Thanks for the in-depth answer, in any case.

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