Our own Matthew Winslow has an e-mail .sig line that goes something like this:
Calls for subversion are fundamentally off-base,
because they don’t produce the dangerous stuff.
They produce what the ‘cutting edge’ fondly
imagines subverts the beliefs of the little old
lady in a small town, so the readers can read it
and feel smugly morally superior to her.
–Mary Catelli
That led to him posting the link to this essay by Tom Simon’s blog.
Following are my initial comments to the Simon essay:
That’s a long, rambling essay, but, wow.
I liked the bit where he said that if subversion is digging a hole underneath something so that it finally falls apart under its own weight. However, in a culture of subversion, once something has fallen, how do you continue to be subversive? If you have dug a hole and your target has fallen, continuing to be subversive simply means digging a bigger hole, which seems destructive and silly.
No, the answer is that the radical thing to do then is construction, building something fresh to take the place of the thing that fell.
He coins a word for this, “superversive”:
“In such a state, there is only one way to make a difference. You cannot subvert ruins; but you can build right over top of them. If to subvert is to destroy a thing from below, might we not coin an opposite word? We could destroy a state of ruin from above, and, as I like to say, supervert it. Where people have abandoned their standards, we could suggest new ones (or reintroduce whatever was good and useful in the old). Where institutions have been abolished, we could institute others to do their work. Above all, we could instil the ideas of creation and structure and discipline into human minds and hearts, and especially the hearts of the young.”
The author goes on to laud the benefits of imagination in the face of subversion, and that’s where we come in. When we employ what I’ll call sanctified imagination, we can be superversive, building up where our humanistic sci-fi peers have been tearing down (Timothy Zahn does this in _Angelmass_), and tearing down where our humanistic sci-fi peers have been building up (humanistic sci-fi types love to write about mankind becomes gods - we should deflate that and write about mankind coming to accept the genuine article).
This is a fascinating topic, and is worth some good, hard thought.