Ageism/Racism & Writers of Worth: 3 Excellent SF Writers to Consider
By Alex Ness
July 31, 2022
JAMES PATTERSON Racism And Ageism
Writer James Patterson decries Racism against old white men
Writer James Patterson has sold many books. I've not found any to be my cup of tea, but others certainly have enjoyed his work. And as he has grown older, his works still sell, but he has found selling new works far more difficult to do. He says, it is a response to rejection of ageing white men by Hollywood and publishers. But, aside from whether or not that is true, aging artists always face issues upon reaching various ages in media based cultures. And again, I'm not discussing whether that is right or not, but he has aimed an accusation of race into that mix. I think the race addition is a load of crap. But I think that not because white men are innocent angels, rather, that whites have likely recently seen less success in areas of culture where they used to dominate. Well, boo hoo.
I heard a metric crap ton of people saying we needed change from old white men as president when Trump was running in 2020, and the person who was chosen to oppose him? Someone who was whiter and even older. If culture has begun to see more races, see more genders, see people for their quality rather than assuming there should be leaders in areas of the arts, I think that is a good thing. To use words of someone far brighter than me, "We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." (Albert Einstein). If we tend as a culture to throw out the elders and ageing, I think that is a bad practice, and one that we rightfully regret and call ageism, if we add race to that, then it sounds a lot more like a grumpy entitled old fart saying I was fortunate to get rich, and now I want more.
Three SciFi Writers who are worth seeking
James Patterson is alive and his work doesn't move me, but here are three white guys who are no longer around who are well worth reading. In the present world in which we live, there are issues that present the human civilization with existential questions that must be answered. These writers were nearly prophetic in their future views.
John Christopher was a serious mind, but for a portion of his career he considered serious questions from the perspective of crisis and human response. To call his work science fiction in genre is fair, but he was far more than writing stories. Each of his works shown ask big questions about the likely human civilization response to the disasters. Would we become desolate and surrender and thereby go extinct in response to a comet impact, drought and vegetation extinction, ice age or plague? He found a way to craft a narrative that let the reader feel the worrisome issue, hope for the future, and finish the work with a perspective worth gaining.
J.G. Ballard was more than a writer of science fiction. His works often balanced utopias and dystopias, love versus lust, decadence and true essence. He wrote in ways that were often stylistically intense, perhaps similar in tone and text to Joseph Conrad's work, especially Heart of Darkness, and placed his characters in extraordinary settings, disasters, future technological societies that function well despite the catastrophically deficient humans that people the society. His works considered enormously worrisome situations, such as plague, sea level rise, drought and famine, and the exhaustion of crop lands leading to massive deserts and lost civilizations. If his human characters were not heroic, they were forced to at least learn to endure the world they were faced with, and by doing so, they give us hope for the future, even a disastrous future.
John Brunner's works were just as profound as Ballard and Christopher, winning awards within the creative world written for and among the professionals in his industry. Stand on Zanzibar features the problem of overpopulation. The Dreaming Earth features a time when humans will choose drugs to create an alternative to the world of misery in which they live. Shockwave Riders was an essentially a cyberpunk work before the idea of the net was developed and being processed, telling a story about life in a corporation led state, human slavery to the corporations, and life's purpose redistributed through new societal ideals. The Sheep Look Up is about the further impact of societal degradation and overpopulation leading to exhausted lands, decay of reserves, and heavy pollution. His works might be seen as dark, but they were prophetic and important.
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“If there is such a phenomenon as absolute evil, it consists in treating another human being as a thing.” John Brunner
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