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rfmcdonaldI admit to being a fan of John Barnes' Thousand Cultures series. Part of this might be spillover from the way I was introduced to the setting, as a sample first chapter included with my paperback copy of Orbital Resonance, one of the first SF novels I bought and still one that I enjoy. This series is an interesting retelling of our world's current experience with globalization, with the springer technology that allows for instantaneous travel across interstellar distances reuniting the splintered Thousand Cultures of humankind with interesting consequences. So far, Barnes has written three out of a projected total of five books, the most recent being 2001's The Merchants of Souls. He claimed, in an addendum at the end of that title, to have the titles for the final two books in the series already in mind: The Armies of Memory and A Far Cry.
Back in June, in my blogged review of The Merchants of Souls and Michelle Landsberg's popular-cultural/historiographical study Prosthetic Memory, I suggested that The Merchants of Souls was concerned with the question of how to feel empathy across cultural boundaries. The Earth that is still, in the 29th century, the centre of human civilization--and that is, judging by the experiences of nearby early-settled worlds, thefuture of any world with a long enough history of human settlement in Barnes' universe--is one that has dealt with cultural conflict by suppressing all cultural difference, opting for a light-hearted flirtation with ideas. This works for Earth, insofar as a colourless society where a growing minority of people locks themselves into virtual reality machines works; it works very badly when Earth deals with cultures where, as one Terrestrial notes in amazement, people still believe in things. Enslaving the personalities of the Thousand Cultures' dead preserved by psypyx technology for eventual restoration, each with their own diverse and exotic life experiences, is unsurprisingly a trigger. The effect on Giraut himself, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
autopope noted back in March when I posted an earlier version of this essay to rec.arts.sf.written, is interesting. This essay is concerned with the macro-scale.
Towards the novel's end, Barnes' protagonist--Council of Humanity troubleshooter Giraut Leones--helps bring things to a decent conclusion with his dawning realization that cross-cultural differences and misunderstandings can be best thought of as simply larger-scale examples of differences and misunderstandings between people. Empathy--being able to understand the feelings of the other, or Other--is a critical task, necessary to sustain a diverse interstellar civilization, particularly when it's on the verge of first contact with an alien civilization of unknown size.
If The Merchants of Souls makes a good point against assimilationism, the first two books in the series make equally strong cases against separatism. _The Merchants of Souls_ argues against the reduction of human lives to emotionless cultural content; A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass make the reverse arguement, that human lives shouldn't be constrained by cultural ideals. In A Million Open Doors, young Giraut Leones of the Arcturian culture of Nou Occitan is introduced as an enthusiastic young conservative, attached to the traditions of the trobadors recreated almost two millennia later on an alien world, hostile to the encroachment of the Interstellar Metaculture. Only later, after he flees to the adjacent culture of Caledony (briefly, Fundamentalist Christianity meets University of Chicago economics) does he gain the perspective necessary to realize his culture's faults (frex, that rape is not only unequivocally wrong but disturbingly common on his homeworld). As an outsider and dissident on Caledony protected by his status as offworlder, he ends up playing a major role in Caledony's post-contact crises. Oh, and he finds the alien ruins, but that's a side point.
Earth Made of Glass, which takes place a decade after the events of A Million Open Doors, introduces Giraut, his Caledony-born wife Margaret, and the reader to the hostile world of Briand, where two cultures exist determined to run things clockwork. One culture is Tamil, founded by traditionalists centuries ago as part of an ambitious effort to come up with a new consensus-driven paradigm for Tamil poetry, to live out an aesthetically perfect existence. The other is an inspired recreation of the culture of the Classical Maya, preceding the Hispanization and Christianization, massive Russian immigration, and antimatter-fuelled glazing of the Central American isthumus that shifted the Maya far from their pre-Columbian origins. As could be expected, these cultures driven by desires to achieve unattainable levels of perfection in isolated from the wider world get along very badly. There are people of good will on both sides, people willing to experiment and to empathize. Whether there's enough of these people is a question I'll leave to the reader.
I suspect that Barnes is developing, in the course of the Thousand Cultures series, a trajectory describing an ethics of cross-cultural integration, for his fictional creation and for our 21st century globalized world. The sort of unthinking relationship to idealized visions of what one's culture should be like is dangerous; equally dangerous is a tendency to take all cultures equally unseriously. I suspect that Giraut's insight regarding empathy in _The Merchants of Souls_ will end up playing a critical role in the series' remaining two books.
Where will he go with the next two books? Judging by the latest book's concerns with the rights of the psypyx-preserved not-dead, The Armies of Memory might well deal with the consequences of the mass restoration of the dead of the Thousand Cultures to life. Simply because the theme of the need to prepare for first contact with aliens has been an underlying element of the series, I'd be inclined to bet that A Far Cry deals with Giraut's dealings with the aliens whose ancient ruins he found at the beginning of the series. Then again, the world of Addams--a diverse world of 92 cultures, isolated from the remainder of human space at Theta Ursa Majoris, possessing the superluminal springer technology but never having built a springer for unknown reasons--might be the world brought into the fold. Perhaps the aliens and Addams might form part of the same issue since Addams, after all, has been mysteriously silent.
Back in June, in my blogged review of The Merchants of Souls and Michelle Landsberg's popular-cultural/historiographical study Prosthetic Memory, I suggested that The Merchants of Souls was concerned with the question of how to feel empathy across cultural boundaries. The Earth that is still, in the 29th century, the centre of human civilization--and that is, judging by the experiences of nearby early-settled worlds, thefuture of any world with a long enough history of human settlement in Barnes' universe--is one that has dealt with cultural conflict by suppressing all cultural difference, opting for a light-hearted flirtation with ideas. This works for Earth, insofar as a colourless society where a growing minority of people locks themselves into virtual reality machines works; it works very badly when Earth deals with cultures where, as one Terrestrial notes in amazement, people still believe in things. Enslaving the personalities of the Thousand Cultures' dead preserved by psypyx technology for eventual restoration, each with their own diverse and exotic life experiences, is unsurprisingly a trigger. The effect on Giraut himself, as
autopope noted back in March when I posted an earlier version of this essay to rec.arts.sf.written, is interesting. This essay is concerned with the macro-scale.Towards the novel's end, Barnes' protagonist--Council of Humanity troubleshooter Giraut Leones--helps bring things to a decent conclusion with his dawning realization that cross-cultural differences and misunderstandings can be best thought of as simply larger-scale examples of differences and misunderstandings between people. Empathy--being able to understand the feelings of the other, or Other--is a critical task, necessary to sustain a diverse interstellar civilization, particularly when it's on the verge of first contact with an alien civilization of unknown size.
If The Merchants of Souls makes a good point against assimilationism, the first two books in the series make equally strong cases against separatism. _The Merchants of Souls_ argues against the reduction of human lives to emotionless cultural content; A Million Open Doors and Earth Made of Glass make the reverse arguement, that human lives shouldn't be constrained by cultural ideals. In A Million Open Doors, young Giraut Leones of the Arcturian culture of Nou Occitan is introduced as an enthusiastic young conservative, attached to the traditions of the trobadors recreated almost two millennia later on an alien world, hostile to the encroachment of the Interstellar Metaculture. Only later, after he flees to the adjacent culture of Caledony (briefly, Fundamentalist Christianity meets University of Chicago economics) does he gain the perspective necessary to realize his culture's faults (frex, that rape is not only unequivocally wrong but disturbingly common on his homeworld). As an outsider and dissident on Caledony protected by his status as offworlder, he ends up playing a major role in Caledony's post-contact crises. Oh, and he finds the alien ruins, but that's a side point.
Earth Made of Glass, which takes place a decade after the events of A Million Open Doors, introduces Giraut, his Caledony-born wife Margaret, and the reader to the hostile world of Briand, where two cultures exist determined to run things clockwork. One culture is Tamil, founded by traditionalists centuries ago as part of an ambitious effort to come up with a new consensus-driven paradigm for Tamil poetry, to live out an aesthetically perfect existence. The other is an inspired recreation of the culture of the Classical Maya, preceding the Hispanization and Christianization, massive Russian immigration, and antimatter-fuelled glazing of the Central American isthumus that shifted the Maya far from their pre-Columbian origins. As could be expected, these cultures driven by desires to achieve unattainable levels of perfection in isolated from the wider world get along very badly. There are people of good will on both sides, people willing to experiment and to empathize. Whether there's enough of these people is a question I'll leave to the reader.
I suspect that Barnes is developing, in the course of the Thousand Cultures series, a trajectory describing an ethics of cross-cultural integration, for his fictional creation and for our 21st century globalized world. The sort of unthinking relationship to idealized visions of what one's culture should be like is dangerous; equally dangerous is a tendency to take all cultures equally unseriously. I suspect that Giraut's insight regarding empathy in _The Merchants of Souls_ will end up playing a critical role in the series' remaining two books.
Where will he go with the next two books? Judging by the latest book's concerns with the rights of the psypyx-preserved not-dead, The Armies of Memory might well deal with the consequences of the mass restoration of the dead of the Thousand Cultures to life. Simply because the theme of the need to prepare for first contact with aliens has been an underlying element of the series, I'd be inclined to bet that A Far Cry deals with Giraut's dealings with the aliens whose ancient ruins he found at the beginning of the series. Then again, the world of Addams--a diverse world of 92 cultures, isolated from the remainder of human space at Theta Ursa Majoris, possessing the superluminal springer technology but never having built a springer for unknown reasons--might be the world brought into the fold. Perhaps the aliens and Addams might form part of the same issue since Addams, after all, has been mysteriously silent.
