{"id":5962,"date":"2015-01-04T14:10:20","date_gmt":"2015-01-04T19:10:20","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/?p=5962"},"modified":"2015-01-04T14:10:20","modified_gmt":"2015-01-04T19:10:20","slug":"monument-lloyd-biggle","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/2015\/01\/04\/monument-lloyd-biggle\/","title":{"rendered":"Monument &#8212; Lloyd Biggle"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"\/pictures\/books\/monument.jpg\" width=\"234\" height=\"384\" alt=\"Cover of Monument\" class=\"alignleft\" \/><\/p>\n<p class=\"small\"><strong><br \/>\nMonument<br \/>\nLloyd Biggle<br \/>\n173 pages<br \/>\npublished in 1974<br \/>\n<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>\nIt&#8217;s been a while since I&#8217;d read any of Lloyd Biggle&#8217;s novels; the last one had been <cite><a href=\"books\/world-menders.html\">The World Menders<\/a><\/cite> back in 2007. I&#8217;ve always liked his writing, quietly liberal and anti-colonialist in a way that few other science fiction authors of his generation were. His belief in the idea that &#8220;democracy imposed from without is the severest form of tyranny&#8221; seemed especially apt during the darkest days of War Against Terror triumphalism. He is however, not a writer much read these days, having done the bulk of his writing in the sixties and seventies. He died relatively recently, in 2002, after a long illnes, having written only some six novels since the seventies.\n<\/p>\n<p>\nScience fiction is often an imperialist, colonialist genre, in which it&#8217;s taken as natural or even desirable for there to be a galactic imperium to which newly discovered worlds should be gently or firmly &#8212; depending on the author&#8217;s preference &#8212; be persuaded to join. Sometimes this is dressed up as the need to avoid interstellar wars and even in stories with a Galactic Federation rather than an empire the need for newly discovered worlds to be assimilated is rarely questioned. Not so with Lloyd Biggle; several of his books question this mentality and <cite>Monument<\/cite> is one of them. Taken its lead from what was happening in e.g. Polynesia at the time, it&#8217;s  an sfnal attack on ill considered economic development imposed from the outside.\n<\/p>\n<p>\n<a href=\"\/books2\/2015\/01\/monument-lloyd-biggle\/\">Read more<\/a>&#8230;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Monument Lloyd Biggle 173 pages published in 1974 It&#8217;s been a while since I&#8217;d read any of Lloyd Biggle&#8217;s novels; the last one had been The World Menders back in 2007. I&#8217;ve always liked his writing, quietly liberal and anti-colonialist in a way that few other science fiction authors of his generation were. His belief [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26,22],"tags":[2156,2155],"class_list":["post-5962","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-book-review","category-science-fiction","tag-lloyd-biggle","tag-monument"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5962","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5962"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5962\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5963,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5962\/revisions\/5963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5962"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5962"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cloggie.org\/wissewords2\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5962"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}