... well, that is the role the tech is playing in the narrative, yes, partly, but we're also I think meant to assume that there's other agriculture and economic stuff going on that the narrative elides because the narrator isn't interested in that/doesn't know about it. We're getting Little Belaire from the POV of a child and adolescent, who has grown up in a post-scarcity society and so has never questioned where the food comes from. What you can generalize from what we are shown of them harvesting the bubble-plant and trading with Dr. Boots' List is the attitude they have about food and trading-- that they do do work to acquire food and smoking materials, that anyone who likes can participate in the work but that it isn't an urgent thing or a thing where people have to devote a lot of time and effort to it, that they do trade with outsiders in a laid-back and polite sort of way. So we are meant to understand that this is a society which doesn't need to do complicated agricultural and hunting stuff if it doesn't want to, but we are not meant to take the examples we see of trading etc. as being the only examples of that kind of thing which go on.
Like, in a novel set in NYC if the protagonist buys something at a bodega the reader, if they have never been in a bodega, takes the description of the bodega as a type of other possible NYC stores, on the assumption that there is more than one store in NYC. The reader is to understand that while the particular store the narrative is set in is both individual in its characteristics and possibly non-existent, there are definitely stores more or less similar to it which one can find in the real city. Of course, if our NYC protagonist goes into a store which is a really weird thing to have in NYC, then said protagonist or the text will flag that in some way, unless the point is for it to be an unflagged weirdness, in which case people who aren't familiar with NYC's real infrastructure are not going to get what is going on.
So what I mean by literalism here is that we are to take the portions we see of Little Belaire's culture as representative of a whole in the way that we would do for the NYC bodega. The harvesting and trading scenes indicate a post-scarcity society because of how we see everyone behaving in them, not because they themselves would fill all the economic needs of the culture. Since our narrator is native to the culture, he is not going to go around thinking to himself 'a harvesting trip similar to the following ones I've never been on in x ways and different from them in others', because that's not how people who are at home in a place think unless they're showing around a tourist-- and Rush isn't showing around tourists; the tourists are being him and sharing his assumptions about how things work, which is quite different.
We the readers are meant to construct, as we go along, a mental picture of how the society works, so that when we get to the things that happen in-text that are strange for that society, we register them as peculiar in the same way as we would register a really-weird-for-NYC shop as being different from our knowledge of New York. You're getting the same thing out of the harvesting trip that I do-- this is a post-scarcity society, these people are really laid back about agriculture-- but it sounds like for different reasons?
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regna
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Date: 2013-07-16 09:35 pm (UTC)Like, in a novel set in NYC if the protagonist buys something at a bodega the reader, if they have never been in a bodega, takes the description of the bodega as a type of other possible NYC stores, on the assumption that there is more than one store in NYC. The reader is to understand that while the particular store the narrative is set in is both individual in its characteristics and possibly non-existent, there are definitely stores more or less similar to it which one can find in the real city. Of course, if our NYC protagonist goes into a store which is a really weird thing to have in NYC, then said protagonist or the text will flag that in some way, unless the point is for it to be an unflagged weirdness, in which case people who aren't familiar with NYC's real infrastructure are not going to get what is going on.
So what I mean by literalism here is that we are to take the portions we see of Little Belaire's culture as representative of a whole in the way that we would do for the NYC bodega. The harvesting and trading scenes indicate a post-scarcity society because of how we see everyone behaving in them, not because they themselves would fill all the economic needs of the culture. Since our narrator is native to the culture, he is not going to go around thinking to himself 'a harvesting trip similar to the following ones I've never been on in x ways and different from them in others', because that's not how people who are at home in a place think unless they're showing around a tourist-- and Rush isn't showing around tourists; the tourists are being him and sharing his assumptions about how things work, which is quite different.
We the readers are meant to construct, as we go along, a mental picture of how the society works, so that when we get to the things that happen in-text that are strange for that society, we register them as peculiar in the same way as we would register a really-weird-for-NYC shop as being different from our knowledge of New York. You're getting the same thing out of the harvesting trip that I do-- this is a post-scarcity society, these people are really laid back about agriculture-- but it sounds like for different reasons?