That the dead man's daughter is diagnosed as "infected" because her reaction to her father's death is vengeful anger rather than having enough faith in her society to ask what the socially necessary reason was for him to be killed?
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Note that the infection clearly isn't specifically something like "racism", it's the basic concept of *selfishness* The little girl's mind is diseased because she cares more about her dad than about the abstract idea of society and the welfare of strangers
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
Seriously, it says that once your mind is infected by bad ideas the only two options are death or having brain implants that render you incapable of acting on those ideas And all of us in the real world are so infected and could only have one of these fates in that society
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
It's straightforwardly dystopian by most people's standards and I can only read Jemisin as being ironic or at least intentionally provocative with it It's an attempt to mimic the deliberately confrontational tone of the original Omelas story that I'm not sure came off
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I'm not saying I fully reject the mindset of the story but the presentation didn't work on me The tone of Omelas worked because it was an ironic tragedy, the hectoring voice of the narrator trying to get the reader to accept something the author, irl, doesn't accept
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The snark about the paradox of tolerance notwithstanding, the situation in this story obviously is tragic - the only way to deal with bad ideas is to ban them? Nothing can defeat racism but murder and brain implants? - but the tone doesn't really acknowledge it
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
I mean you can't just crumple up the paradox of tolerance and throw it away The paradox of intolerance is just as bad - great, as soon as someone says anything evil they should get two in the back of the head Now who gets to decide what counts as evil
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The reason I don't believe in Um-Helat isn't just that I don't believe a system run by secret police stamping out thoughtcrime is unstable, although I do think that It's that I don't buy such a system would've been set up by the good guys in the first place
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
How did they breed out selfishness - the original sin of "seeing others as less than human" - but be simultaneously create a caste of police who summarily execute people Those two things don't go together
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
The thing is it reads as science fiction pessimism of a school I'm really fine with but it rubs me the wrong way to not see it treated as pessimism
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Tiptree's Houston, Houston, Do You Read is a chillingly effective story about utopia being created by a plague that kills everyone with a Y chromosome
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Replying to @arthur_affect @Nymphomachy
But it only works because it knows its premise is objectively horrifying and its whole POV is from the viewpoint of the one man who comes through the portal and gets euthanized at the end despite constantly trying to be a good guy, because he's infected
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