Lost worlds and ports of call

Month: November 2012 (Page 2 of 8)

Science fiction under totalitarianism

Interesting article at io9 about early 20th century science fiction in Germany, mainly under Nazi rule. Some highlights:

In 1935, the government passed a strict preventative censorship law which required that all magazines be submitted to the government for approval before publication. The pulp publishers’ response was to try their trick of twenty years’ previous: change the names of the pulps but not the content of the pulps. The government’s censors were not fooled, and the government, angered, put much greater pressure on the publishers. And then the government proclaimed 1936 to be “the Year of the German Jungvolk,” with the aims that all of the German children and teenagers who were not already part of Hitler Youth would join it, and that all youth dissidence and all causes of youth dissidence would be eliminated.

and

Not every German pulp with fantastic content turned fascist. Up until their end, in 1939, both Tom Shark and John Kling remained as free as realistically possible of fascist content. (The lack of pro-Nazi ideology is what got Tom Shark cancelled, in fact–the German government ordered its cancellation on those grounds).

This is part one of an article, and the next one will look at the USSR.

Dangerous Doctorow?

In this collection of brief science fiction reviews at Toronto’s The Star, reviewer Alex Good takes a swipe at Cory Doctorow’s latest novel, Pirate Cinema, for it’s underlying messages. According to Good, the novel “has to be judged a very irresponsible book.” Rather than focus on any literary merit, Good attacks the content of the book:

[Doctorow] peddles a dangerous fantasy, especially for a YA title: Trent is a kid who runs away from home to the big city, where he is immediately adopted by a lovable street-wise buddy and gets to enjoy a comfortable life of petty crime, playing around on the Internet, casual drug use, and sex with a cute anarchist girl, before becoming an overnight hero and global celebrity by splicing together a bunch of video popcorn (apparently this is the only thing artists are capable of in our age of cannibal culture, where all human life is dependent on the Internet). The fact that Doctorow is a good writer with a large following only makes it more essential that he take a big step back and think a bit more about what kind of message he’s sending.

Perhaps we instead should devote efforts to sending in police to raid the computers of nine-year-old girls? I don’t care much for glamorizing piracy, but IP laws need to examined and gain a measure of sanity. And, oh yes, this is a work of fiction, meant to entertain.

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