Dream Makers volume two

Charles Platt (editor) Dream Makers volume two (1983)
In addition to the first volume, Santa also bought me this, apparently thanks to my Amazon wish list having been consulted by more than one of his little helpers - so that was all very nice and tidy. Once again Platt, former editor of New Worlds, travels all over, hangs out with a number of seminal science-fiction authors, and interviews them; except it's so much more than is promised by the description. One might almost call it a manifesto, or at least something with equivalent purpose.

This time, Platt opens it out a little further, bringing in a healthy cross section of female authors missing from the first book, in addition to a few persons arguably on the fringe of what is generally termed science-fiction. Throughout the interviews, the one constant seems to have been an acidic disregard for the explosion in the popularity of sword and sorcery which came about towards the close of the seventies. Platt is clearly coaxing his people into slagging it off, but not without some justification, and Joe Haldeman's observation seems particularly broad to the point of neatly summarising what I at least would regard as still very much a problem with culture in general.

'I think I understand the kind of person who reads this stuff. It's not quite as bad as sitting watching situation comedies day after day, but I think it's the same kind of mentality: someone who likes having the same buttons pushed over and over.'

Political sympathies represented come from across the board, left, right, and all points in between, and I found it interesting that relative political polarity seemed to have no bearing on the subjective worth of what is said. Indeed, Jerry Pournelle, seemingly an author much further to the right than I would ordinarily enjoy, gave considerably more thought provoking testimony than at least a few with whom I expected to empathise. At the other end of the scale, James Tiptree, Jr. - the pseudonym of Alice Sheldon in case anyone didn't get the memo - particularly impressed me.

'Life is a denial of entropy; it's a striking manifestation of negative entropy. So I believe it can be shown that things with a high degree of organisation, meaning a low degree of entropy, seem good to us. For example, Nazism is a highly entropic form, and democracy is far more complex. An altruistic act is more complex than a selfish one.'

William Burroughs doesn't disappoint, and nor does L. Ron Hubbard, while the peculiarly humourless Robert Anton Wilson comes across as a massive tosspot, and Larry Niven was about as interesting as I expected him to be.

Naturally it's a mixed bag, but even when interviewing hopeless arseholes, Platt gets something useful from the situation; which all adds up to a collection which is both inspiring and slightly depressing - inspiring because I'm definitely going to have to hunt down the works of a few of these people, and slightly depressing because this is a world which has passed, one built upon worthwhile aspirations which I half suspect have largely been replaced by cosplay, songs about hobbits, and other stuff which serves little purpose but to pass time and signify allegiance to the consumer demographic.