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And who among us cannot sympathize with Albert Brock, The Murderer? https://www.readkong.com/page/the-murderer-by-ray-bradbury-8...
It's not clear to me if the story is supposed to be a second degree satire of left-leaning doctrine or a third degree satire of right-leaning fantasies. No matter its goal, the story hits a raw nerve. The mix of emotions over inequality, natural superiority, and its implications one way or the other is one of the strongest cocktails, I feel.
I decided to twist the story and make it about a world in which everyone had to constantly be coming up with new ideas, and couldn't think of the same ideas twice, or else they'd be punished (squeezed by a collar, that I called Doublethought Inhibitors), as the world craves novelty and new ideas and the government recognized it and decided to enforce it. There wasn't any TVs anymore, as those showed the same images to people, just individual Inspirators that showed unique imagery to everyone to help them come up with new ideas.
One cute thing I just remembered now that I'm reading it over again for the first time in a couple years. In Harrison Bergeron, the couple is named George and Hazel. In my story, I decided to name my couple Curious and Nut. You have to compare their names in both stories to catch the joke there.
It's not the same story but I did refer to the original while writing it and kind of kept similar beats.
Ended up calling it 'Fatterson Boogieton', just what popped into my head when I was trying to twist the original name. It's mostly a humorous story anyway, that tends to be what I write.
The paperback of the anthology is on Amazon pretty cheaply at the moment, if anyone is curious. They never made a Kindle version, which is unfortunate.
https://www.amazon.com/Near-Myths-Tim-Yao/dp/1977642527/
I should probably get the story online somewhere. It's been long enough I should be able to do so now. Not sure where though, without creating a proper personal website again.
My hot take is that this story is highly overrated. It’s boring, poorly written, and lacks nuance. The reason people remember it fondly is (1) everyone loves Vonnegut because he’s funny, so they don’t want to criticize it and (2) everyone read this story in middle school and are blinded by nostalgia.
Beauty, and human attraction to beauty, is impossible to overcome. While sometimes informed by culture, attributes like symmetrical faces are desirable across all cultures. And those attributes are often powerfully informed by genetics. Absent absurd handicaps like in the story, people with those attributes will have better lives. Life is not fair. In some ways it’s better that it’s not. Our perception of beauty, and…
Even various animals prefer attractive people. It's pretty crazy
It's not clear to me if the story is supposed to be a second degree satire of left-leaning doctrine or a third degree satire of right-leaning fantasies. No matter its goal, the story hits a raw nerve. The mix of emotions over inequality, natural superiority, and its implications one way or the other is one of the strongest cocktails, I feel.
What's a first degree satire look like then?
i dont know Vonnegut's politics but i have always wondered if this story was secretly a fairytale for the right-leaning. it paints wanting equality as intensely evil, holding back the best of humanity. which, yes, true in communist regimes, but you see echoes in some less well considered laws and policies in modern life. i am afraid to like, or even publicly discuss, the story because of what it might say about me.
'Harrison Bergeron' is a nightmare tale, not a Utopia… but Harrison is not sympathetic, he is a tyrant, 'justifying' the world as established. If the story is a fairytale for the right-leaning, it's for the very childish right-leaning. It's also too aggressive to be a fairytale for would-be left-leaning moralists.
It's an exaggerated picture of a condition: forced equality of outcome made hideous, a presentation like Swift's 'A Modest Proposal'.
As a reader, your job is to get the picture, not to take it literally or apply it. If it were truly a parable for the right, Harrison might've broke into his parents' house and liberated them, or rescued a chosen ballerina (with or without his eventual fate) as if he'd loved her, but no: everything in the story is just a nightmare and awful. Harrison is a parody of an ubermensch and is destroyed, and there's no escape from the proposition, nor anybody to understand the horror of it: that's left to the reader.
As both a better-than and lesser-than in different sorts of ways, I'm more than happy to discuss the story without concern of what it might say about me. I think it's a very good story and an intentionally terrible philosophy. No way was Vonnegut attempting to indoctrinate anybody with this wild vision. At best it's a cautionary tale, but if you're taking it too literally there's a caution for you in there as well: note that Harrison is a monster wanting only power and sex, bullying those around him in between Hulking out. That is no argument for giving him the world that he wants handed to him.