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blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
The Self-Defeating Politics of the Visionary
The ideal society is not an uncommon subject in Western discourse. Plato suggested what it might look like. The early Christians had a different version. Thomas More wrote about it in his Utopia in the 16th century. Marx sketched his dictatorship of the proletariat in the 19th. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc proposed a sort of medieval paradise based on craft-guilds in the 20th.
All these ideal societies share a common problem: an inability to specify the political system necessary and sufficient first to achieve something approximating the ideal, and then to maintain it in operation. Such a system must be capable of reconciling potentially contrary personal interests into some sort of stable common interest. To date no one has been able to formulate even a theory of such politics, much less succeed in creating a society at any level that shows itself to function effectively.
A Dream of Wessex is a fictional case study of how the search for the ideal society ends up on the rocks. It might be possible, given unlimited resources and no social constraints, to get a small group, say a half dozen people, to converge on a society which ‘works’ for everyone in the group. In fact there are organisational theorists who have proposed methods and experimented with just this, and had some success in large organisations (See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1220422.Idealized_Design?from_search=true).
The political difficulty arises, however, precisely to the degree that a coherent view of a shared world is achieved by the participants. The creation of a stable politics within any group quickly, and understandably, becomes valued by the group. Therefore the established political process, no matter what it is, is considered as something to be protected. Any attempt to add another member to the group is considered, also understandably, as a threat to the political unity of the group. The group is politically stable but at the cost of its social isolation.
This process of political unification and subsequent isolation shows up in phenomena as diverse as the nationalistic disaster of Nazi Germany to the commercial failure of Xerox. To keep politics working, the political process excludes those whose inclusion would alter it. Trump and his Republican enablers have adopted this as their explicit strategy - by restricting immigration, voter intimidation, gerrymandering voting districts, and making unjustified claims of voter fraud.
The paradox, of course, is that the more politics is restricted, the more likely it will take unexpected directions. The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the equally abrupt dissolution of Lehman Brothers are ultimately the consequence of restricting discussion, analysis, and judgment to some cadre of like-minded folk, who for reasons of self-interest, stupidity, or ill-will, desire to maintain the political status quo.
The recurrent theme of A Dream of Wessex is losing oneself in inner space, that is, in that idealised vision of some group which then becomes attached to that vision. Unnoticed by the participants, such a vision transforms itself from being a liberating view of political possibility to a suffocating prison of violently asserted self-interest. Such transformation is not incidental; it is an essential consequence of the way in which the shared vision was achieved in the first place. The national or corporate vision necessarily becomes “the ultimate escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality.”
So beware the man or woman of vision. They are death to good politics, no matter what their vision.
The ideal society is not an uncommon subject in Western discourse. Plato suggested what it might look like. The early Christians had a different version. Thomas More wrote about it in his Utopia in the 16th century. Marx sketched his dictatorship of the proletariat in the 19th. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc proposed a sort of medieval paradise based on craft-guilds in the 20th.
All these ideal societies share a common problem: an inability to specify the political system necessary and sufficient first to achieve something approximating the ideal, and then to maintain it in operation. Such a system must be capable of reconciling potentially contrary personal interests into some sort of stable common interest. To date no one has been able to formulate even a theory of such politics, much less succeed in creating a society at any level that shows itself to function effectively.
A Dream of Wessex is a fictional case study of how the search for the ideal society ends up on the rocks. It might be possible, given unlimited resources and no social constraints, to get a small group, say a half dozen people, to converge on a society which ‘works’ for everyone in the group. In fact there are organisational theorists who have proposed methods and experimented with just this, and had some success in large organisations (See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1220422.Idealized_Design?from_search=true).
The political difficulty arises, however, precisely to the degree that a coherent view of a shared world is achieved by the participants. The creation of a stable politics within any group quickly, and understandably, becomes valued by the group. Therefore the established political process, no matter what it is, is considered as something to be protected. Any attempt to add another member to the group is considered, also understandably, as a threat to the political unity of the group. The group is politically stable but at the cost of its social isolation.
This process of political unification and subsequent isolation shows up in phenomena as diverse as the nationalistic disaster of Nazi Germany to the commercial failure of Xerox. To keep politics working, the political process excludes those whose inclusion would alter it. Trump and his Republican enablers have adopted this as their explicit strategy - by restricting immigration, voter intimidation, gerrymandering voting districts, and making unjustified claims of voter fraud.
The paradox, of course, is that the more politics is restricted, the more likely it will take unexpected directions. The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the equally abrupt dissolution of Lehman Brothers are ultimately the consequence of restricting discussion, analysis, and judgment to some cadre of like-minded folk, who for reasons of self-interest, stupidity, or ill-will, desire to maintain the political status quo.
The recurrent theme of A Dream of Wessex is losing oneself in inner space, that is, in that idealised vision of some group which then becomes attached to that vision. Unnoticed by the participants, such a vision transforms itself from being a liberating view of political possibility to a suffocating prison of violently asserted self-interest. Such transformation is not incidental; it is an essential consequence of the way in which the shared vision was achieved in the first place. The national or corporate vision necessarily becomes “the ultimate escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality.”
So beware the man or woman of vision. They are death to good politics, no matter what their vision.
masonanddixon's review against another edition
3.0
A literal idyllic socialist dream deferred by capitals vampiric desire to sustain itself at all costs. Though, this Jungian dream future is not without concessions to reality: a bad lover, boring jobs, social stratification. The future is already infected by the capitalist realism of the present. The only best world a Leibnizian best of all possible, a Candide awaiting the cancer of material reality. It's almost tragic that this dream, even with all it's capital banalities, is utopian. The ideal remains out of reach, even to the subconscious. Interesting musings Wessex inspired aside, the characters were rather weak, and the ending dissolves into acid fest nonsense, but I'm told this is one of Priest's weaker works. Looking forward to The Separation! A good, not great, virtual reality thriller.
bookpossum's review
2.0
The only other book I have read by Christopher Priest to date is The Prestige which I enjoyed very much indeed. So I was glad to pick up this book in a charity shop.
It's hard to believe it is by the same author, albeit written (or at any rate published) about 20 years earlier. The style is clunky, and the central female character is wooden and unbelievable. I suspect that at that stage of his career, Priest just didn't write convincing female characters. Does he now? I shall have to read more by him to decide that. I was left wondering if it was a very early book, published after he had some success with books written later.
There are probably ideas in this book that he used again later, hopefully to greater effect, as for me, the story, especially the ending, was unconvincing. Not recommended.
It's hard to believe it is by the same author, albeit written (or at any rate published) about 20 years earlier. The style is clunky, and the central female character is wooden and unbelievable. I suspect that at that stage of his career, Priest just didn't write convincing female characters. Does he now? I shall have to read more by him to decide that. I was left wondering if it was a very early book, published after he had some success with books written later.
There are probably ideas in this book that he used again later, hopefully to greater effect, as for me, the story, especially the ending, was unconvincing. Not recommended.
verkisto's review
4.0
This book started out as a slog for me. It had a slow start, to the point of being almost boring, and the only reason I kept returning to the book is because I had heard it was supposed to be some kind of mind-bending story. It had an intriguing idea, but the story itself started off with a lot of discussion about surfing and tidal bores, and it quickly lost me.
By about the halfway point, the story picked up, in part due to Priest's skills at characterization. His two main characters had a chemistry that worked despite the story being told in a very plain, straightforward style, and the two of them drew me in. He also included an antagonist who is loathsome and repulsive, enough to help the reader root for the two protagonists, even if they aren't already invested in their story. By the time the story started to come together, I was invested in the whole thing, and it was hard to tear me away from the book.
The book is also similar to Philip K. Dick's books, in that Priest is examining reality and how we define it. The premise of the book is that a group of scientists, researchers, sociologists, etc., are participating in an experiment where they collectively project their thoughts into a future Wessex. They can move in and out of the projection, from 1985 to 2135 and back again, with the intention of recording what they see in this projected future. Different personalities affect the projection differently, and before long, the reader (and the participants) are questioning what makes one reality more real than another.
This is a book I would recommend with caveats, since it does have such a slow beginning. It's worth persevering, though, and the themes and ideas of the story will leave readers much to think about. Plus, it's much, much better than The Space Machine.
By about the halfway point, the story picked up, in part due to Priest's skills at characterization. His two main characters had a chemistry that worked despite the story being told in a very plain, straightforward style, and the two of them drew me in. He also included an antagonist who is loathsome and repulsive, enough to help the reader root for the two protagonists, even if they aren't already invested in their story. By the time the story started to come together, I was invested in the whole thing, and it was hard to tear me away from the book.
The book is also similar to Philip K. Dick's books, in that Priest is examining reality and how we define it. The premise of the book is that a group of scientists, researchers, sociologists, etc., are participating in an experiment where they collectively project their thoughts into a future Wessex. They can move in and out of the projection, from 1985 to 2135 and back again, with the intention of recording what they see in this projected future. Different personalities affect the projection differently, and before long, the reader (and the participants) are questioning what makes one reality more real than another.
This is a book I would recommend with caveats, since it does have such a slow beginning. It's worth persevering, though, and the themes and ideas of the story will leave readers much to think about. Plus, it's much, much better than The Space Machine.
edgeworth's review against another edition
2.0
A Dream Of Wessex is a serious science fiction/romance novel about virtual reality and the subconscious.
It's quite confusing for the first third or so, but it eventually becomes clear what is taking place: a group of scientists in the 1980s (the near future at the time of publication) have developed a machine that can project a shared virtual reality. They choose to "project" the future of England in the early 22nd century, a utopia, with the hope of discovering how that utopia was accomplished. Why a virtual reality projection of the future would be even remotely accurate, I was never really clear on.
In any case, the projection is of south-west England, which has become an island after a series of earthquakes. It's a peaceful, beautiful place, compared to the dystopic 1980s, in which terrorism is becoming more rampant in England and there are all manner of social and economic problems. It's also here, however, that the book shows its age: England has become a socialist state absorbed into the Soviet bloc. (Also, North America has been taken over by Muslims. Maybe Christopher Priest is racist after all, as I suspected after Fugue For A Darkening Island?)
The story largely revolves around the scientists in the projection who have become more devoted to it than they have to their real lives, and of how they must prevent the new project manager (who also happens to be the narrator's possessive ex-boyfriend) from shutting it down or corrupting it. On the whole it was a fairly decent sci-fi story, but nothing amazingly gripping original; a completely different league from Priest's science fiction masterpiece Inverted World.
It's quite confusing for the first third or so, but it eventually becomes clear what is taking place: a group of scientists in the 1980s (the near future at the time of publication) have developed a machine that can project a shared virtual reality. They choose to "project" the future of England in the early 22nd century, a utopia, with the hope of discovering how that utopia was accomplished. Why a virtual reality projection of the future would be even remotely accurate, I was never really clear on.
In any case, the projection is of south-west England, which has become an island after a series of earthquakes. It's a peaceful, beautiful place, compared to the dystopic 1980s, in which terrorism is becoming more rampant in England and there are all manner of social and economic problems. It's also here, however, that the book shows its age: England has become a socialist state absorbed into the Soviet bloc. (Also, North America has been taken over by Muslims. Maybe Christopher Priest is racist after all, as I suspected after Fugue For A Darkening Island?)
The story largely revolves around the scientists in the projection who have become more devoted to it than they have to their real lives, and of how they must prevent the new project manager (who also happens to be the narrator's possessive ex-boyfriend) from shutting it down or corrupting it. On the whole it was a fairly decent sci-fi story, but nothing amazingly gripping original; a completely different league from Priest's science fiction masterpiece Inverted World.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
The Self-Defeating Politics of the Visionary
The ideal society is not an uncommon subject in Western discourse. Plato suggested what it might look like. The early Christians had a different version. Thomas More wrote about it in his Utopia in the 16th century. Marx sketched his dictatorship of the proletariat in the 19th. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc proposed a sort of medieval paradise based on craft-guilds in the 20th.
All these ideal societies share a common problem: an inability to specify the political system necessary and sufficient first to achieve something approximating the ideal, and then to maintain it in operation. Such a system must be capable of reconciling potentially contrary personal interests into some sort of stable common interest. To date no one has been able to formulate even a theory of such politics, much less succeed in creating a society at any level that shows itself to function effectively.
A Dream of Wessex is a fictional case study of how the search for the ideal society ends up on the rocks. It might be possible, given unlimited resources and no social constraints, to get a small group, say a half dozen people, to converge on a society which ‘works’ for everyone in the group. In fact there are organisational theorists who have proposed methods and experimented with just this, and had some success in large organisations (See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1220422.Idealized_Design?from_search=true).
The political difficulty arises, however, precisely to the degree that a coherent view of a shared world is achieved by the participants. The creation of a stable politics within any group quickly, and understandably, becomes valued by the group. Therefore the established political process, no matter what it is, is considered as something to be protected. Any attempt to add another member to the group is considered, also understandably, as a threat to the political unity of the group. The group is politically stable but at the cost of its social isolation.
This process of political unification and subsequent isolation shows up in phenomena as diverse as the nationalistic disaster of Nazi Germany to the commercial failure of Xerox. To keep politics working, the political process excludes those whose inclusion would alter it. Trump and his Republican enablers have adopted this as their explicit strategy - by restricting immigration, voter intimidation, gerrymandering voting districts, and making unjustified claims of voter fraud.
The paradox, of course, is that the more politics is restricted, the more likely it will take unexpected directions. The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the equally abrupt dissolution of Lehman Brothers are ultimately the consequence of restricting discussion, analysis, and judgment to some cadre of like-minded folk, who for reasons of self-interest, stupidity, or ill-will, desire to maintain the political status quo.
The recurrent theme of A Dream of Wessex is losing oneself in inner space, that is, in that idealised vision of some group which then becomes attached to that vision. Unnoticed by the participants, such a vision transforms itself from being a liberating view of political possibility to a suffocating prison of violently asserted self-interest. Such transformation is not incidental; it is an essential consequence of the way in which the shared vision was achieved in the first place. The national or corporate vision necessarily becomes “the ultimate escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality.”
So beware the man or woman of vision. They are death to good politics, no matter what their vision.
The ideal society is not an uncommon subject in Western discourse. Plato suggested what it might look like. The early Christians had a different version. Thomas More wrote about it in his Utopia in the 16th century. Marx sketched his dictatorship of the proletariat in the 19th. G.K. Chesterton and Hillaire Belloc proposed a sort of medieval paradise based on craft-guilds in the 20th.
All these ideal societies share a common problem: an inability to specify the political system necessary and sufficient first to achieve something approximating the ideal, and then to maintain it in operation. Such a system must be capable of reconciling potentially contrary personal interests into some sort of stable common interest. To date no one has been able to formulate even a theory of such politics, much less succeed in creating a society at any level that shows itself to function effectively.
A Dream of Wessex is a fictional case study of how the search for the ideal society ends up on the rocks. It might be possible, given unlimited resources and no social constraints, to get a small group, say a half dozen people, to converge on a society which ‘works’ for everyone in the group. In fact there are organisational theorists who have proposed methods and experimented with just this, and had some success in large organisations (See https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1220422.Idealized_Design?from_search=true).
The political difficulty arises, however, precisely to the degree that a coherent view of a shared world is achieved by the participants. The creation of a stable politics within any group quickly, and understandably, becomes valued by the group. Therefore the established political process, no matter what it is, is considered as something to be protected. Any attempt to add another member to the group is considered, also understandably, as a threat to the political unity of the group. The group is politically stable but at the cost of its social isolation.
This process of political unification and subsequent isolation shows up in phenomena as diverse as the nationalistic disaster of Nazi Germany to the commercial failure of Xerox. To keep politics working, the political process excludes those whose inclusion would alter it. Trump and his Republican enablers have adopted this as their explicit strategy - by restricting immigration, voter intimidation, gerrymandering voting districts, and making unjustified claims of voter fraud.
The paradox, of course, is that the more politics is restricted, the more likely it will take unexpected directions. The abrupt dissolution of the Soviet Union, and the equally abrupt dissolution of Lehman Brothers are ultimately the consequence of restricting discussion, analysis, and judgment to some cadre of like-minded folk, who for reasons of self-interest, stupidity, or ill-will, desire to maintain the political status quo.
The recurrent theme of A Dream of Wessex is losing oneself in inner space, that is, in that idealised vision of some group which then becomes attached to that vision. Unnoticed by the participants, such a vision transforms itself from being a liberating view of political possibility to a suffocating prison of violently asserted self-interest. Such transformation is not incidental; it is an essential consequence of the way in which the shared vision was achieved in the first place. The national or corporate vision necessarily becomes “the ultimate escapist fantasy, a bolt-hole from reality.”
So beware the man or woman of vision. They are death to good politics, no matter what their vision.
lordofthemoon's review
3.0
I have to admit that I approached this book with some trepidation, having not really liked [b:The Separation|5148|A Separate Peace|John Knowles|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165517852s/5148.jpg|39755], but I enjoyed this quite a lot. It's about a group of scientists who explore the nature of reality by creating their own "projected" world and living in it, with alternate personalities for months at a time. A nice little piece about the nature of reality, and a good human story of conflict with one of the participants having to deal with an abusive ex-boyfriend. The end was confusing, but when you get layers of reality like this, it often is. It could probably do with a re-read.
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