You don’t often get to have headlines like this. …Thank God.

Well, this is… this is a thing that is a thing.

Harvard discovers three of its library books are bound in human flesh

…and Harvard does not want to know if they have any more.  I am rapidly coming to the conclusion that I do not blame them for that.

Via AoSHQ.

Regarding the Federalist’s Popular Books That People Don’t Actually Read.

Interesting. Of this list*:

  • Have read Atlas Shrugged (sadism porn, frankly).
  • Haven’t read On the Origin of Species (never felt the need).
  • Haven’t read Les Miserables (skipped the musical, too. And the movie. Loved the Animaniacs bit).
  • Have read A Tale of Two Cities (for high school. I think I’ve read a bit of Dickens, actually).
  • Have read 1984 (a hell of a lot more times than the people who love to use it to bash Republicans. Also: masochism porn, frankly).
  • Haven’t read Democracy in America (yes, I am ashamed. I think that I even have it for Kindle).
  • Haven’t read The Wealth of Nations (I have taken a stab at it; hard going).
  • Have read Moby Dick (only once; every time I’ve tried since then, I’ve lost my copy somehow. Seriously weird, actually).
  • I can’t remember if I’ve read The Art of War or not.
  • Have read The Prince (tried to read the Discourses, got sidetracked).
  • I’ve looked at Ulysses.  I’ve looked at it real hard.

I wonder if this really means anything, one way or the other.  I mean, I was an English major; it’s hardly surprising that I like to read.

Moe Lane

*I’ll spare you the tedium of linking each one to its Amazon.com entry. Sorry; it’s been a long week and the kids are on a reduced school schedule.  And I still got four days to go…

Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Type: Book

Written in: 1949

Set in: ...1984.

Why it's a dystopia: The world is broken up into three super-dictatorships, two of which are always at war with the third; everybody is spying on everybody else, everybody lives in more or less abject poverty, and eventually the secret police comes, takes you away, tortures you until you break, and then shoots you.  Also, you can't turn off your television set.  Everything in that first sentence may or may not be true, by the way, even in the context of the book.

Why it's significant: You probably read this book in high school.  Also, every politically-motivated online idiot on the Left will eventually reference this book while whining about whatever the Right's done, or thought to have done, or is incorrectly alleged to have done this week (don't smirk; there's a similar problem on the Right with regard to Atlas Shrugged).  Nineteen Eighty-Four has also more or less interjected itself into our popular culture, and to a certain extent our language.  All in all, it's probably the most mainstream piece of masochism porn in Western literature.

What happened? Well, two things, really. 

First off, as is usual for this type of fiction the author has too low an opinion of human beings, particularly Americans.  Again, don't smirk: lots of people have this problem, and some of them probably share your political views.  In this particular case, Orwell assumed that the postwar West would participate in its own self-immolation... including the parts that weren't actually wrecked in the war itself.  It is never adequately explained how and why the comfortable, optimistic, and confident middle class that runs the USA would voluntarily transform itself into the starving subjects of a multi-continental dictatorship; mostly because there actually isn't a valid reason*.

Which leads to the second point: Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually masochism pornography.  Quite well done masochism porn, at that: the book is almost surgical in the way that it cuts away the extraneous fleshy bits and gets right to the stuff about power imbalances.  Oceania is, for some people, the ultimate dream world: everybody wants power over you, conditions are miserable, and you're given just enough control to delude yourself before the brutality and the pain starts.  There are people pay serious money in the real world for this kind of scenario; I'm moderately surprised that there isn't a specialized theme resort along Oceania's lines. 

Or possibly there is, and I'm just too vanilla to hear about it.

Moe Lane

*A very useful corrective is Charlie Stross's "Big Brother Iron," which can be found in the story collection Toast.  The story updates Nineteen Eighty-Four as things would have happened in that world, absent the author's need to control the plot: I won't give sp0ilers, but if you're familiar with the daily life of Soviet elites in the Brezhnev era and afterward then you can probably guess them anyway.

Nineteen Eighty-Four.

Name: Nineteen Eighty-Four, by George Orwell

Type: Book

Written in: 1949

Set in: ...1984.

Why it's a dystopia: The world is broken up into three super-dictatorships, two of which are always at war with the third; everybody is spying on everybody else, everybody lives in more or less abject poverty, and eventually the secret police comes, takes you away, tortures you until you break, and then shoots you.  Also, you can't turn off your television set.  Everything in that first sentence may or may not be true, by the way, even in the context of the book.

Why it's significant: You probably read this book in high school.  Also, every politically-motivated online idiot on the Left will eventually reference this book while whining about whatever the Right's done, or thought to have done, or is incorrectly alleged to have done this week (don't smirk; there's a similar problem on the Right with regard to Atlas Shrugged).  Nineteen Eighty-Four has also more or less interjected itself into our popular culture, and to a certain extent our language.  All in all, it's probably the most mainstream piece of masochism porn in Western literature.

What happened? Well, two things, really. 

First off, as is usual for this type of fiction the author has too low an opinion of human beings, particularly Americans.  Again, don't smirk: lots of people have this problem, and some of them probably share your political views.  In this particular case, Orwell assumed that the postwar West would participate in its own self-immolation... including the parts that weren't actually wrecked in the war itself.  It is never adequately explained how and why the comfortable, optimistic, and confident middle class that runs the USA would voluntarily transform itself into the starving subjects of a multi-continental dictatorship; mostly because there actually isn't a valid reason*.

Which leads to the second point: Nineteen Eighty-Four is actually masochism pornography.  Quite well done masochism porn, at that: the book is almost surgical in the way that it cuts away the extraneous fleshy bits and gets right to the stuff about power imbalances.  Oceania is, for some people, the ultimate dream world: everybody wants power over you, conditions are miserable, and you're given just enough control to delude yourself before the brutality and the pain starts.  There are people pay serious money in the real world for this kind of scenario; I'm moderately surprised that there isn't a specialized theme resort along Oceania's lines. 

Or possibly there is, and I'm just too vanilla to hear about it.

Moe Lane

*A very useful corrective is Charlie Stross's "Big Brother Iron," which can be found in the story collection Toast.  The story updates Nineteen Eighty-Four as things would have happened in that world, absent the author's need to control the plot: I won't give sp0ilers, but if you're familiar with the daily life of Soviet elites in the Brezhnev era and afterward then you can probably guess them anyway.

It Can’t Happen Here.

Name: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis.

Type: Book.

Written in: 1935

Set in: 1936

Why it's a dystopia: Near-bloodless Fascist (Italian-style, not German-style) takeover of the United States of America, followed by a remarkably orderly transition to a totalitarian state.

Why it's significant: Given that it was essentially an agitprop piece reluctantly begging that the American people not reject the New Deal in favor of Huey Long, this book has been surprisingly durable.  In fact, I think that it's second only to 1984 in the field of Overwrought We're All Gonna Get Got By The Man references by the American Left.  Also: Lewis was a good writer (which is an advantage that a lot of these absurd prognostications of DOOM have going for them, by the way).

What happened? Essentially, the American bourgeoisie.

To understand this book, ignore the superficial politics - actually, no, let's address them very quickly.  Sinclair Lewis wasn't exactly a Roosevelt fan; Wikipedia (yeah, I know) suggests that he wrote this book mostly because he was worried about Huey Long going all populist on the New Dealers in the 1936 elections (and whether or not Long was an actual danger to the Republic is beyond the scope of this post).  This book is also very much set in an era where anti-war isolationism was not seen as being completely incompatible with general progressivism, which is why the eventual leader of the American resistance was 1936 Republican nominee Walt Trowbridge, backed up by the LaFolette clan and various and sundry others.  This will no doubt come as a surprise to American Leftists who actually read the book, although probably not as much as the parts where Lewis has his fascist regime be pretty just much as friendly to the Soviet Union as it was to Nazi Germany.

But the real issue here is Lewis's disdain for the aforementioned bourgeoisie, which he more or less simply assumed would look placidly on as a populist movement replicated in six months (and considerably less violence) the success that the Nazis managed only after thirteen years.  To give you an idea of the utter improbability of this scenario: Lewis postulates that it would only take weeks for a country with a functional and stable democratic system to be converted into a police state that would shrug as:

  • Congress was put in jail;
  • The Constitution shredded, unambigiously;
  • Home-grown stormtroopers would be armed and organized from scratch;
  • And Enemies to the regime would be lined up and shot.

...instead of, say, picking up the nearest firearms and start shooting fascists until the local governor could call up their National Guard contingents, who would be able to handle things until the actual military could arrive to take the new President away for his "rest cure.*"  Because that's something that Lewis (and his later, Leftist admirers) never quite got about this country: our successful revolutions spring from middle class sensibilities.  Which is why the various anti-war movements never got anywhere meaningful (it took Watergate to give the progressives the opportunity to murder the South Vietnamese), and the Tea Party did (and does); the former were radicals, and thus unable to inherently tap into the true revolutionary spirit that informed the latter.  Which is, you know, good and everything.  Certainly less violent.

So, basically, it actually can't happen here.  At least, not the way that we had the country organized back then.  Or today, come to think of it.

Moe Lane

*You may safely assume that I am not impressed by Lewis's handwaving away of those details.

It Can’t Happen Here.

Name: It Can't Happen Here, by Sinclair Lewis.

Type: Book.

Written in: 1935

Set in: 1936

Why it's a dystopia: Near-bloodless Fascist (Italian-style, not German-style) takeover of the United States of America, followed by a remarkably orderly transition to a totalitarian state.

Why it's significant: Given that it was essentially an agitprop piece reluctantly begging that the American people not reject the New Deal in favor of Huey Long, this book has been surprisingly durable.  In fact, I think that it's second only to 1984 in the field of Overwrought We're All Gonna Get Got By The Man references by the American Left.  Also: Lewis was a good writer (which is an advantage that a lot of these absurd prognostications of DOOM have going for them, by the way).

What happened? Essentially, the American bourgeoisie.

To understand this book, ignore the superficial politics - actually, no, let's address them very quickly.  Sinclair Lewis wasn't exactly a Roosevelt fan; Wikipedia (yeah, I know) suggests that he wrote this book mostly because he was worried about Huey Long going all populist on the New Dealers in the 1936 elections (and whether or not Long was an actual danger to the Republic is beyond the scope of this post).  This book is also very much set in an era where anti-war isolationism was not seen as being completely incompatible with general progressivism, which is why the eventual leader of the American resistance was 1936 Republican nominee Walt Trowbridge, backed up by the LaFolette clan and various and sundry others.  This will no doubt come as a surprise to American Leftists who actually read the book, although probably not as much as the parts where Lewis has his fascist regime be pretty just much as friendly to the Soviet Union as it was to Nazi Germany.

But the real issue here is Lewis's disdain for the aforementioned bourgeoisie, which he more or less simply assumed would look placidly on as a populist movement replicated in six months (and considerably less violence) the success that the Nazis managed only after thirteen years.  To give you an idea of the utter improbability of this scenario: Lewis postulates that it would only take weeks for a country with a functional and stable democratic system to be converted into a police state that would shrug as:

  • Congress was put in jail;
  • The Constitution shredded, unambigiously;
  • Home-grown stormtroopers would be armed and organized from scratch;
  • And Enemies to the regime would be lined up and shot.

...instead of, say, picking up the nearest firearms and start shooting fascists until the local governor could call up their National Guard contingents, who would be able to handle things until the actual military could arrive to take the new President away for his "rest cure.*"  Because that's something that Lewis (and his later, Leftist admirers) never quite got about this country: our successful revolutions spring from middle class sensibilities.  Which is why the various anti-war movements never got anywhere meaningful (it took Watergate to give the progressives the opportunity to murder the South Vietnamese), and the Tea Party did (and does); the former were radicals, and thus unable to inherently tap into the true revolutionary spirit that informed the latter.  Which is, you know, good and everything.  Certainly less violent.

So, basically, it actually can't happen here.  At least, not the way that we had the country organized back then.  Or today, come to think of it.

Moe Lane

*You may safely assume that I am not impressed by Lewis's handwaving away of those details.

The Handmaid’s Tale.

Name: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

Type: Book

Written in: 1985

Set in: At a guess, probably right about now.  I'm kind of pushing it - 2015 might be a safer date - but what the heck.  Definitely the coup should have happened already.

Why it's a dystopia: Extreme - extreme - gender repression, coupled with all the rigorously accurate and scientific depiction of ecological/nuclear disaster that we've come to expect from liberal arts majors.  A good deal of racism, also (including a soupcon of the usual petulance from the Left that modern Evangelical Christianity has found good, sound, Biblical reasons to avoid anti-Semitism like the plague). Oh, and there's like, heavy infertility and so forth (note the previous sneer about liberal arts majors*).

Why it's significant: It is widely rumored that (at least during the latter 80s/early 90s) proof of possession of this book be demonstrated by any individual seeking a bachelor's degree or higher in Women's Studies.  It also got turned into a movie, which was also apparently required watching.  And, to be fair, on a technical level it's fairly well-written.

What happened? Well, two things, essentially:

  1. Margaret Atwood, while a decent writer, has an untreated case of Canadian's Disease: which is to say, she thinks that she perfectly understands the motivations and drives of every facet of every demographic of every sub-culture found inside the United States of America.  This is normally not much of a problem, per se, except when...
  2. ...a sufferer of Canadian's Disease happens to hate one particular sub-culture anyway.  In this case, popular evangelical Christianity, which is why apparently we were all supposed to have come under the grips by now of a totalitarian group of fanatical Old-Testament social conservative misogynists with a nigh-literal lust for power.  Meanwhile, out in the real world, white evangelical groups instead went off funding AIDS prevention programs in Africa, assisting Christian Chinese against widespread religious-based persecution, and winning elections that unaccountably did not result in theocratic terrorist regimes.

More to the point: every social conservative I know is far too terrified that his wife will figure out that she's far too good for him for him to even think about going for this kind of patriarchy gig.  Seriously.  Once you drill down the damn Religious Right is practically a functional matriarchy**.

Hey.  Look around.  Remember, the point of this site is that this is stuff that was confidently and plausibly (to some people, at least) expected to have happened by now.   And no, it didn't happen because Margaret Atwood or anybody else wrote a book, either.  Margaret Atwood had and has virtually no influence over Evangelical Christianity; its members decided to refrain from a theocratic coup all on their own.

Moe Lane

*I am one, yes.  Which means that I know what I'm talking about then, huh?

**I exaggerate, but then: so did Margaret Atwood.

The Handmaid’s Tale.

Name: The Handmaid's Tale, by Margaret Atwood.

Type: Book

Written in: 1985

Set in: At a guess, probably right about now.  I'm kind of pushing it - 2015 might be a safer date - but what the heck.  Definitely the coup should have happened already.

Why it's a dystopia: Extreme - extreme - gender repression, coupled with all the rigorously accurate and scientific depiction of ecological/nuclear disaster that we've come to expect from liberal arts majors.  A good deal of racism, also (including a soupcon of the usual petulance from the Left that modern Evangelical Christianity has found good, sound, Biblical reasons to avoid anti-Semitism like the plague). Oh, and there's like, heavy infertility and so forth (note the previous sneer about liberal arts majors*).

Why it's significant: It is widely rumored that (at least during the latter 80s/early 90s) proof of possession of this book be demonstrated by any individual seeking a bachelor's degree or higher in Women's Studies.  It also got turned into a movie, which was also apparently required watching.  And, to be fair, on a technical level it's fairly well-written.

What happened? Well, two things, essentially:

  1. Margaret Atwood, while a decent writer, has an untreated case of Canadian's Disease: which is to say, she thinks that she perfectly understands the motivations and drives of every facet of every demographic of every sub-culture found inside the United States of America.  This is normally not much of a problem, per se, except when...
  2. ...a sufferer of Canadian's Disease happens to hate one particular sub-culture anyway.  In this case, popular evangelical Christianity, which is why apparently we were all supposed to have come under the grips by now of a totalitarian group of fanatical Old-Testament social conservative misogynists with a nigh-literal lust for power.  Meanwhile, out in the real world, white evangelical groups instead went off funding AIDS prevention programs in Africa, assisting Christian Chinese against widespread religious-based persecution, and winning elections that unaccountably did not result in theocratic terrorist regimes.

More to the point: every social conservative I know is far too terrified that his wife will figure out that she's far too good for him for him to even think about going for this kind of patriarchy gig.  Seriously.  Once you drill down the damn Religious Right is practically a functional matriarchy**.

Hey.  Look around.  Remember, the point of this site is that this is stuff that was confidently and plausibly (to some people, at least) expected to have happened by now.   And no, it didn't happen because Margaret Atwood or anybody else wrote a book, either.  Margaret Atwood had and has virtually no influence over Evangelical Christianity; its members decided to refrain from a theocratic coup all on their own.

Moe Lane

*I am one, yes.  Which means that I know what I'm talking about then, huh?

**I exaggerate, but then: so did Margaret Atwood.

The Sheep Look Up.

Full link here.

Name: The Sheep Look Up, by John Brunner.  E-book pdf here.

Type: Book

Written in: 1972

Set in: Not really clear, but can't be after 1978.  The 'hero' of the book (Austin Train, last seen being blown up while more or less masturbating to the idea of America being under a toxic pollution cloud) was listed as being born in 1938 and being almost forty at the time of the novel's events.

Why it's a dystopia:  Pollution, to the nth degree.  Water rationing, air pollution at toxic levels, dead species everywhere, resource insecurity.  At the end of the book half of America is in civil insurrection, and most of it is on fire.

Why it's significant: It scratches an itch in the Left-SF community, apparently.  They keep reprinting the book.

What happened? From Wikipedia: "On July 9, 1970, citing rising concerns over environmental protection and conservation, President Richard Nixon transmitted Reorganization Plan No. 3 to the United States Congress by executive order, creating the EPA as a single, independent agency from a number of smaller arms of different federal agencies. Prior to the establishment of the EPA, the federal government was not structured to comprehensively regulate environmental pollutants."  Unfortunately, in 1972 and afterward the American Left was sufficiently blinded by rage and anticipatory revenge towards anything that could be described as 'Nixonian' that they completely failed to incorporate the idea that the EPA might actually succeed.

This may be because Brunner was a bit of a hardcore Lefty - I assumed at first that he was a full-blown Communist, which would handily explain why he managed to get societal trends so badly wrong in just four years' worth of projection; Marxism is after all intellectualism for stupid people - and thus not quite as insightful as Brunner was often told that he was (this comment showing the rather fundamental flaw in Brunner's casual analysis of Starship Troopers* demonstrates the problem that can arise when people tell you once too often that your excrement doesn't reek).  Or it may just have been that he couldn't believe that we'd stop fouling our nests while the Commies would just keep on polluting.  Hard to say.

Moe Lane

PS: The Brown Pelican's doing all right, Brunner.  Since you were worried, and everything.

*While lots of people do seem to skip past the fact that the Federal Service requirements for the franchise in Heinlein's book is not the same as 'only military veterans can vote,' it's not because Heinlein didn't make it clear, in several different places in said book, that the vast majority of franchises were earned by non-military service.  I will be polite about why a certain subset of the SF community persists about getting that one wrong, and merely refer you to a certain observation that's a few paragraphs above.