From: "Neil Faulkner" N.Faulkner@tesco.net

...

To snip an absolutely magnificent post down to its conclusion:

Aww, Fiona <blush>

Wouldn't have said it if I didn't think it.

As a fan, I'm not oblivious

to these deficiencies, but I'm also hard pressed to pin down the counterbalancing merits. Deep characterisation? Hardly - most of the characters are cyphers, two-dimensional at best (and yes, I am talking

about

the likes of Blake and Avon here). Scientific accuracy? Don't make me laugh. Social or political realism? No, please, really, *don't* make me laugh. Taut, gripping plots? Credible visions of the future? What has something like B7 got to offer?

I think you answered your own question in part, when you referred to the fact that we're operating within the conventions of TVSF. Often B7 seems to be viewed in comparison with other programmes: people say "it's cheaper than ST:TNG, but with stronger women and harder-hitting themes." Or else "it's similar to Survivors, but with more of an edge." Or (quoting myself the other night when watching DS9) "Crikey, why doesn't anyone write scripts like Chris Boucher's anymore?!?" Within the conventions of TVSF, B7 does stand out in a number of ways that might be lost on the outsider (just as *Der Mude Tod* is a radical film in many ways lost on people who aren't into expressionist film).

source series itself adopts a position of 'mature naivety', recreating the state of the empty child-mind waiting to be filled with knowledge of the world, *whilst simultaneously* preserving a prior but knowingly incomplete experience of that world.

I agree with you about the source series, at least, to some extent. The best radical work, not just SF, often does strip down a problem to its bare essentials and deal with it in that stylised way. This isn't just naivete I think: William Blake and Robert Frost both wrote very stripped-down poetry, and I don't think you could call "Fire and Ice" naive: rather, deceptively simple. Fritz Lang's "Mabuse" films are often dismissed by their critics as sheer gangster-film schlock-- but the message behind them incurred a ban by the Nazi party as soon as they came to power.

In sci-fi, "The Time Machine" was dismissed by many as sheer fantasy (and Wells IIRC preferred his contemporary-set novel "Kipps" to any of his SF), but it contains a subtle polemicism Wells never again equalled even in his tracts for the Fabian society. And to return to B7, I would also argue less for naivete than for the power of deliberate stylisation. It may be naive to strip a fascist society down to one woman and a handful of guards-- and yet in a way this is also the most powerful part of it, as we are lulled into a false sense of thinking that if Servalan is removed, the Federation will fall--but when she is removed, nothing changes. A sobering thought for those of us who thought that voting Labour would stop the privatisation juggernaut. The underlying Federation society is totally vague: we don't know if Servalan is running a dictatorship or a democracy--but that last possibility should give us pause, rather than set us dismissing the politics as naive. So I would say not so much deliberate naivete as deceptive simplicity, and actually I'd probably say the same about the punk lyrics you quoted too.

The boundary between the childlike and the childish can be a narrow one, which might account for why something like B7, both canon and fanfic, can often veer towards the juvenile if not the infantile.

Hm. I'd agree with you about individual moments of the canon--the Vila scenes in Ultraworld, for instance-- but I'm not so sure about things as a whole. When I think "juvenile" in SF, I think of things like "The Tomorrow People," aimed totally at children with no pretense at anything else, or the faux-educational message of some of early Doctor Who's worse efforts. B7 has its silly moments, but I've never seen it being patronising or faux-educational.

If we ask a simple

question like 'Why?' we might find ourselves answering with an equally simple answer, like: 'The Jews'. And end up heading down an essentially childish path of uniforms, banners, parades and rallies, assured in the knowledge that no one will laugh at us because no one will dare. But if

we

can retain our pre-knowledge of the world as it is whilst simultaneously re-envisaging the world afresh, we might not fall into that trap.

I've been coming to the conclusion lately that it's not following the banner that's the problem. Initially, large numbers of Germans (Italians, Spanish...) did *not* in fact follow the banners: what they did was more disturbing. They said "Oh, that lot over there, with the banners, the parades and the rallies-- they're just a radical fringe. Ignore them and they'll go away." Even under the Nazis, the majority of Germans were neither monsters nor mindless automatons-- they were people like you and me, who simply said "Well, they're in power, not much I can do but keep out of trouble." In occupied Hungary, by contrast, a concerted resistance effort was made and the oppressor held back to an incredible degree. I don't need, I think to quote back Paster Niedermoller (a Lippstadt man, hooray)'s famous statement to the effect that "first they came for the Jews; I was silent, I was not a Jew..." It is this essentially *adult* behaviour that is more dangerous, I think, than the childish behaviour you describe.

Fandom, like SF, like punk, like radical politics, strips reality down to its bare essentials and asks fundamental questions. That, I think, is the root of its appeal. That the answers are not always adequate underlies

much

of the deficiencies of all four.

Perhaps I've just been disillusioned by recent events on the lyst, but Neil-- *how* does fandom in and of itself strip reality down to its bare essentials and ask fundamental questions? Jenkins' assertion that fans are a bunch of heroic resistors of social convention has always sat ill with me, especially given that he is ultimately forced to admit that the fans he studies are usually very much *within* social convention. And I think, were you to go out and ask a group of B7 fans why they're in fandom, 9/10ths of them would say "To have fun, now hand me back my Scorpio clip-gun, I'm late for the masquerade." Individual fanfic stories and audios make one think, it's true, but those describe the activities of individuals--because a group has a few radicals, that doesn't necessarily mean membership therein is a radical act. While the show, as I said, frequently seems to me to be more clever than its surface would suggest, membership in B7 fandom in and of itself in no wise strikes me as a radical act.

Membership in B5 fandom... now that's a radical act. Radicals should always champion lost causes :).

Fiona

The Posthumous Memoirs of Secretary Rontane Personal and political at http://nyder.r67.net

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