Science Fiction Writers Workshop

of all the books i had to read in high school, this was the worst. you're right about the first two thirds. the problem with the whole book is orwell was too interested in making a political statement instead of telling a good story. had this argument with half my class and the teacher. its an interesting book, but essentially its one man's phobia. i coined the term negative utopia stories inorder to classify this thing. i've tried to re-read it in the twenty plus years since high school but it just keeps pushing all my "literary" angst buttons. i end up thorwing it at something and fuming.
on the other hand i used to feel the same way about tolkien, and now that i've forced myself to read every word of his, i think he was a bloody genius. mr. orwell...there's still hope...

I don't want to provoke a political discussion, but I do want to explain:

Big Brother was an extreme case to make a point. I doubt Orwell meant it literally. He was holding it up as a model of what could happen.

If you look at the sweeping powers of the Patriot Act, or similar laws such as the War Measures Act in Canada, or even some of the new Copyright Acts, you can see echoes of 1984. These are laws that shove aside personal liberty for the "good" of the state or some powerful organization.

With the lingering public shock of 9/11, the Bush administration managed to zip the Patriot Act through Congress. Before 9/11 it never would have passed. The ACLU is still fighting it.

Some of the new copyright laws make it high treason (seriously!) if you try to defeat copyright protection schemes, and companies such as internet service providers and CD/DVD burner manufacturers can be implicated if someone violates copyright law using their services. This is all due to pressure by huge lobby groups such as the RIAA and MPAA who claim revenue losses due to copyright infringement -- no proof necessary. In fact, many studies have shown their losses are not due to copying.

And...

The American news media tells people what they want to hear. Fox News in particular is a Republican mouthpiece -- it makes my entire TV lean to the right.

It's not the media's fault. It's our fault. People vehemently resist new ideas. The news stations know this. If they air reports that tell people things they don't want to hear, those people will change the channel. That's why Britney Spears' fake marriage is the #1 story, bumping off the story of a car bombing somewhere or the election of some new foreign leader.

It's not just the western slant on the stories, it's also what the media leaves out. If you only hear one side of a story, you assume that side is true, especially if you hear it over and over.

Plus, the American media reports few world events, and then generally only if it involves Americans. This creates a cultural myopia for the American people. How can anyone appreciate another culture if they know nothing about it?

Not knowing anything about Afghanis and Iraqis, for example, makes it a lot easier for everyone to get behind bombing them. When people only see the bad side of Arabs, they get the impression that everyone in the Middle East are fanatics and terrorists. In truth, only a few Muslims are lunatics. Most are regular folks like us.

By reporting only negative things, the media unwittingly (I hope it's unwittingly) uses propaganda tactics like those used in WW2 against the Japanese. These were very effective in making allied soldiers see the enemy as sub-human and therefore easier to kill.

This was what I meant.

Freedom and security are at opposite ends of the same slider bar. Absolute freedom is anarchy, and absolute security is Big Brother. It is impossible to have absolute security and absolute freedom at the same time. After 9-11, it was to be expected that the slider bar be moved a notch or two towards security. The public demanded it, so don't pin all the blame on the goverment for the Patriot Act. But there is simply no way to increase security in this country without passing a bill that has teeth in it. Obviously, many citizens are now feeling the pain of those teeth and want to set the slider bar back to its original position.

I would not be sad if Bush loses the election. He messed up bad with Iraq. Kerry is more intelligent and his positions are closer to my own. But it disturbs me when someone hijacks a great work of literature and blithely uses it to espouse his own political views. I come to these forums to read about literature, not politics.

Thanks for taking my side of the issue, Mike.

I'm sorry to say that I may not be here much longer. I plan on kicking my writing into high gear and churning out short stories and novel chapters in order to meet my goal of becoming published again. I'll need a lot of help, but I don't see the activity level of this group increasing anytime soon. I think I was the only one to review Camidon's last submission, and I have yet to see a review of my own work. There is another writing workshop I have my eye on that charges a yearly membership fee but seems very good.

I was thinking about sending an angry e-mail to the entire group and demanding that everyone shape up, but I realized that I would just be sounding like a hypocrite since my participation has fallen off too. I blame an online role-playing game that I became heavily addicted too. (I think they found a way to deliver opiates directly to my brain over the Internet.) Now that that game has ended I can focus on being productive again.