Beggars in Space, Redux
My buddy tacithydra wrote a nice critique of Beggars in Spain in which she politely avoided pointing to the clumsy old post in which I got extremely angry at the book and springboarded from that into a declaration that I was tired of hiding spiritual beliefs. She makes the argument that the book is a response to Objectivism, not an endorsement, since the Sleepless didn't end up winning, and their society ended up fundamentally flawed in many respects.

I can see this argument, but while I respect Ms. Hydra's opinion immensely, I disagree with her here. I've been trying to think about why, because "Because I hated the book a lot" doesn't really have a lot of strong rhetorical backing. I can't say that she's wrong, because she didn't get as passionate as I did about the book, and I am comfortably sure that she came into it with a clearer head. Also, she read it more than once. What I can say is that it didn't work for me as a disagreeing response to Objectivism, and while I had very strong opinions about the book as I read it, I wouldn't consider my reading sloppy or uncritical per se.

Ultimately, for me, what it comes down to is emotional response. I was annoyed when Kress gave weight to the usual arguments of Objectivism by making the Sleepless actually better than the Sleepers. I was annoyed when the vast majority of the Sleepers were set up as hateful and stupid, with occasional forays into stupid-but-wise (for example, Leisha's Sleeper sister, who gets this disturbing treatment that turns her into this "Aw, I didn't need no education, I just needed love" caricature that most closely resembled the happy-go-lucky black characters of old movies, the ones who appear on the surface to be proving that you don't need money or white skin to be happy, but who end up reinforcing class and race boundaries with their demonstrated acceptance of and apparent satisfaction with their unfair position in life, and damn this is turning out to be a long parenthetical).

And actually, that absurdly long parenthetical sums up how I feel about the book. I don't know the term for it -- it's somewhere between an Uncle Tom and a straw-man argument.  If zero is an egalitarian lifestyle, and one hundred is pure Objectivism, then Kress goes straight to one hundred, and then holds her hand to her mouth and goes, "Oh, my goodness! It doesn't work! Sometimes the beggar you give a dollar to today may save your life tomorrow!", and with an air of thoughtful consideration, dials it back to eighty.

It's the literary equivalent of the person who says, "Look, I think you're completely full of crap, and you think you're right, so the only reasonable approach is for us to compromise and say that you're mostly wrong, but not completely. That sound good to you?"

She didn't show the philosophy failing. She showed that when you set up a society with a crazy-ass hatemonger in charge, bad stuff is going to happen... and she did this while setting up everyone in the world who didn't follow that mindset (all the Sleepers) as a bunch of idiots sitting around on the couch lazily complaining that their free lunch didn't have enough chocolate sprinkles.

My opinion on this is of course weighted heavily by the fact that I hated the book, and that by about page 20, I was reading this out of determination, because I wanted to go into Book Club with the full book under my belt, so that I could blow people out of the water if they tried to invalidate my opinion by noting that I hadn't finished the book (which did, in fact happen -- I was sick on Book Club day, but almost nobody finished the book, and the person who picked the book defended her choice by noting that they couldn't understand the book fully without finishing it). Also, I hated Leisha. Hated, hated, hated. I didn't really like anyone, but I hated Leisha with the flaming passion of a thousand suns. Maybe that came from bad experiences with intelligent but emotionally stunted people in real life. I don't know. About the time when she slept with someone's husband, I was rooting for her to get hit by a train and die. So any conclusion Leisha reached resulted in me saying, "Leisha, you are wrong," and then looking for ways to support the opposite of Leisha's conclusion. It's not the most objective and dispassionate way to read a book, but hey, I paid for it. I get to decide how I read it.

On the flip side, I'm currently (still) playing through BioShock, and there is a critique of Objectivism for you. You see all the anthems of Objectivism writ large on the wall of the first room, and then you go down the elevator and see the corpses and the wreckage -- you get to see exactly what happens when a bunch of people who grow up trying to disguise selfishness with logic get into a limited-resources situation, and the end results are dialed down a bit further than eighty on the "here's the way it should be" scale.

Compare Kress's clumsy characterization to the feeling you get while scrounging desperately through a doctor's office for bandages, having just gunned down four screaming madmen while they came at you with knives, while a big-band singer croons "The Best Things in Life are Free" over the radio nearby. That level of irony right there is a bit more my speed.