Sim Bajwa, 'HR Confidential' (2018)
An epistolary-in-the-broad-sense fiction comprising HR's notes and transcripts on a troublesome employee. In Shoreline of Infinity.
Elsewhere:
Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts
Showing posts with label bureaucracy. Show all posts
Le Guin, Ursula. The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed: An Ambiguous Utopia (1974). Le Guin's fairly brilliant imagining of a well-established "Odonian" revolutionary anarcho-syndicalist society on the moon Annares. It sets out a utopian vision via a stress test of that vision. The novel is absolutely an anarchist-syndicalist polemic -- to think otherwise is a serious misreading! -- but it dwells on the fragilities and flaws of the society it advocates.
Books like these are really carrying the whole SFF team. Really: The Disposssessed is getting toward half a century old, and is still in many ways the first go-to book for speculative fiction and political economy. That's a testament to the great insight and imagination of the novel itself, of course. But it could also be a wee bit of an indictment of what we've all been up to since then.
A huge amount has been written about it, but I haven't come across any attempt at a brief summary of the key economic institutions and practices of Annares. So I've attempted that below. If you think I've bungled something, please let me know!
Books like these are really carrying the whole SFF team. Really: The Disposssessed is getting toward half a century old, and is still in many ways the first go-to book for speculative fiction and political economy. That's a testament to the great insight and imagination of the novel itself, of course. But it could also be a wee bit of an indictment of what we've all been up to since then.
A huge amount has been written about it, but I haven't come across any attempt at a brief summary of the key economic institutions and practices of Annares. So I've attempted that below. If you think I've bungled something, please let me know!
Levine, David D. Tk'tk'tk
David D. Levine, Tk'tk'tk (2005).
David D. Levine’s Hugo-winning short story ‘Tk’tk’tk’ focuses on the tribulations of Walker, an interstellar salesman, as he struggles to understand local market conditions.
Walker trips up over a variety of linguistic and cultural caltrops. He does not realise that the deepest and darkest room in the hotel is the most desirable and expensive (duh). He falls for the extrastellar equivalent of downing a local liquor he really can’t handle (more literally, his shoulders are sprinkled with strange green rings, but the principle is the same, and even the chanting “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” (p. 170) faintly echoes a frattish ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’). He has difficulty distinguishing high and low denomination currency boluses, since figures are written in fragrances (p.162). Numbers have qualitative associations he is frequently forgets: one buyer is mortified at the idea of paying seventy for an item, but will happily pay seventy-three (p.162). Potential customers profess themselves, with elaborate humility, to be unworthy to take ownership of Walker’s exalted merchandise, calling it “beyond price” (p.161). They do hint at the possibility of compensating him for an “indefinite loan” (p.173, cf. p. 161), but seem to prefer endless, aimless, chinwagging (“did you come through Pthshksthpt or by way of Sthktpth” (p.163)) to talking turkey.
Detail by detail, Levine conjures an amusing and convincingly exotic setting, and only a heartless reader would blame Walker for his bewilderment. Nonetheless, at bottom, Walker’s experiences are just exaggerated versions of what a naive and insensitive late C20th North American (or "Westerner," maybe) might encounter, trying to hock their merch in Asia and East Asia, and perhaps particularly, in Japan.
That is: compared to Walker, the aliens belong to what the anthropologist Edward T. Hall influentially described as a “high-context culture” (Beyond Culture, 1976), in which comparatively greater emphasis is placed on implicature, supported by shared context and experience. Walker’s frustration with meandering chit-chat – what he at best justify as “building rapport” (p.163) – recalls the reactions of some North Americans to a more informal style of decision-making common in Japanese organisations. That is, a style which exhibits a more flexible understanding of what might constitute ‘on-topic’ and ‘off-topic’ conversation, and which closely links the legitimacy of decisions to the social intimacy which has led up to them (cf. e.g. Haru Yamada Snr., Different Games, Different Rules, pp.55-59).
We must be wary of stereotyping, of course -- I'm pretty sure that golfing and drinking is part of work for London City bankers, every bit as much as it is for Tokyo salarymen -- but the broad distinctions are there, at least in the Business Studies and Linguistics literature. And in light of these connections, Walker’s eventual spiritual transformation, which sees him reforming his earlier striving attitudes, is not particularly difficult to understand – he is simply one more tourist-turned-Western Buddhist. Which is still good.
Is the story colonialist, orientalist? When I first wrote this post, I pussyfooted around the question a bit, because I like the story -- and also because I also think I need to try to take an author seriously when they tell me that somebody is a giant alien insect, or an orc, or whatever: and not simply unscramble the story in some way which suits me, and then critique the cleartext as if the ciphertext had never existed. But. The use of insect and swarm imagery, in the depiction of an inscrutable, indirect and exotic people? A people whose ways are a little more collectivist than our narrator's, and who offer him a mystical path to self-transcendence? This is definitely horrible territory.
Should no more pussyfooting. Levine should have used squidbears. And/or France.
This was originally part of a blog post that was also about Cory Doctorow's 'Chicken Little.' The two stories are both about making sales, and they both appear in Hartwell and Hayden's 21st Century Science Fiction anthology.
(JLW)
David D. Levine’s Hugo-winning short story ‘Tk’tk’tk’ focuses on the tribulations of Walker, an interstellar salesman, as he struggles to understand local market conditions.
Walker trips up over a variety of linguistic and cultural caltrops. He does not realise that the deepest and darkest room in the hotel is the most desirable and expensive (duh). He falls for the extrastellar equivalent of downing a local liquor he really can’t handle (more literally, his shoulders are sprinkled with strange green rings, but the principle is the same, and even the chanting “Rings, dance! Rings, dance!” (p. 170) faintly echoes a frattish ‘Drink! Drink! Drink!’). He has difficulty distinguishing high and low denomination currency boluses, since figures are written in fragrances (p.162). Numbers have qualitative associations he is frequently forgets: one buyer is mortified at the idea of paying seventy for an item, but will happily pay seventy-three (p.162). Potential customers profess themselves, with elaborate humility, to be unworthy to take ownership of Walker’s exalted merchandise, calling it “beyond price” (p.161). They do hint at the possibility of compensating him for an “indefinite loan” (p.173, cf. p. 161), but seem to prefer endless, aimless, chinwagging (“did you come through Pthshksthpt or by way of Sthktpth” (p.163)) to talking turkey.
Detail by detail, Levine conjures an amusing and convincingly exotic setting, and only a heartless reader would blame Walker for his bewilderment. Nonetheless, at bottom, Walker’s experiences are just exaggerated versions of what a naive and insensitive late C20th North American (or "Westerner," maybe) might encounter, trying to hock their merch in Asia and East Asia, and perhaps particularly, in Japan.
That is: compared to Walker, the aliens belong to what the anthropologist Edward T. Hall influentially described as a “high-context culture” (Beyond Culture, 1976), in which comparatively greater emphasis is placed on implicature, supported by shared context and experience. Walker’s frustration with meandering chit-chat – what he at best justify as “building rapport” (p.163) – recalls the reactions of some North Americans to a more informal style of decision-making common in Japanese organisations. That is, a style which exhibits a more flexible understanding of what might constitute ‘on-topic’ and ‘off-topic’ conversation, and which closely links the legitimacy of decisions to the social intimacy which has led up to them (cf. e.g. Haru Yamada Snr., Different Games, Different Rules, pp.55-59).
We must be wary of stereotyping, of course -- I'm pretty sure that golfing and drinking is part of work for London City bankers, every bit as much as it is for Tokyo salarymen -- but the broad distinctions are there, at least in the Business Studies and Linguistics literature. And in light of these connections, Walker’s eventual spiritual transformation, which sees him reforming his earlier striving attitudes, is not particularly difficult to understand – he is simply one more tourist-turned-Western Buddhist. Which is still good.
Is the story colonialist, orientalist? When I first wrote this post, I pussyfooted around the question a bit, because I like the story -- and also because I also think I need to try to take an author seriously when they tell me that somebody is a giant alien insect, or an orc, or whatever: and not simply unscramble the story in some way which suits me, and then critique the cleartext as if the ciphertext had never existed. But. The use of insect and swarm imagery, in the depiction of an inscrutable, indirect and exotic people? A people whose ways are a little more collectivist than our narrator's, and who offer him a mystical path to self-transcendence? This is definitely horrible territory.
Should no more pussyfooting. Levine should have used squidbears. And/or France.
This was originally part of a blog post that was also about Cory Doctorow's 'Chicken Little.' The two stories are both about making sales, and they both appear in Hartwell and Hayden's 21st Century Science Fiction anthology.
(JLW)
Pohl, Frederik. The Midas Plague
Frederik Pohl, "The Midas Plague" (1954). Online. A topsy-turvy world satire with a lot of very intriguing material in it. A great story for thinking about the fact that scarce, as a technical term of economics, is not the same as limited. Rather, scarce means limited in relation to demand (or desire), and "The Midas Plague" plays with the idea of of manipulating not only the production of resources, but the demand for them (via those eleven psychologists, and of course the bit at the end). Pohl doesn't r-e-a-l-l-y rationalize the initial conceit very rigorously, but perhaps in 2016, with the benefit of CAP surplus foodscapes, with the New Public Management of the 1980s onward and the attendant financialization (and therefore consumer-ification) of public and civic life, the case might be easier to make. Also see "The Waging of the Peace" (1959).
Mild spoiler: in the future, the rich have the luxury of living modest lifestyles, while the "poor" have to constantly consume.
(JLW)
Roberts, Adam. New Model Army
See the Lara Buckerton review of this book, along with Antoine Bousquet's The Scientific Way of Warfare. Originally in Vector.
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