Since influential people are on this forum, someone should get Bill Watterson nominated for the Nobel prize in literature. His work deserves that honor as much as, if not more than, Bob Dylan.
> His work deserves that honor as much as, if not more than, Bob Dylan.
Could you explain why?
I love Calvin and Hobbes. However Dylan played a role in political and human rights movements at a key time. I don’t see this sort of influence in Calvin and Hobbes and Watterson was apparently fired from one job for his lack of political knowledge (assuming the wikipedia entry is correct).
> fired from one job for his lack of political knowledge (assuming the wikipedia entry is correct)
You should also have noticed from that source that Watterson majored in political science (he initially wanted to be a political cartoonist), and also that unfortunate job was related to local politics.
The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded for producing "the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction" with "the greatest benefit on mankind". This was interpreted into broad qualities (so, including but not reducing to promoting «human rights»). See the list of Nobel Laureates and the formal justifications for the award, at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nobel_laureates_in_Lit...
> The Nobel Prize in Literature is awarded for producing "the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction" with "the greatest benefit on mankind".
They should award one posthumously to Gene Roddenberry then. After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing, and the show itself is one of few examples of aspirational and inspirational writing in modern sci-fi.
The Nobel is famously not awarded posthumously. There are many examples of two or more cofounders where one is not awarded the Nobel due to having died.
>After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing, and the show itself is one of few examples of aspirational and inspirational writing in modern sci-fi.
The Federation only works as a utopia because the writers never bother to address any of the complex questions about how such a utopia would actually work, because they don't care. Star Trek's utopian ideal is mostly just window dressing.
Also, Star Trek isn't very aspirational. We can't aspire to simply evolve beyond human nature as Trek humanity has, such that every human lacks any form of greed, vice or selfishness and is perfectly happy to participate in a society which still has all of the hierarchies of capitalism, including lifetime careers, but with none of the incentives. Nor can we expect the infinite free energy and physics-defying transporters and replicators that allow Star Trek's writers to just handwave away the hard problems of scarcity and thermodynamics. The Fermi paradox tells us plainly that FTL in any form is almost certainly impossible. The Vulcans aren't going to show up in the ruins of our civilization and potty train us. That isn't something we can aspire to, that's never going to happen.
> After all, the Federation from Star Trek is pretty much the only well-known case of an utopia that actually works in fiction writing
Eh. I mean, by Voyager/DS9 it has secret police, and _literal mine slaves_ (old-model sentient holographic doctors). And it appears to be _basically_ a military dictatorship; the civil government in practice always seems to be subordinate to Starfleet. It also happily trades away inhabited territory to the Cardassians, who are essentially Space Nazis. And it has a safety culture that would make the Soviet Union blush. Really, the closer you look, the uglier it looks.
We also don’t see that much of how Federation _civilians_ live, and a lot of what we do see frankly isn’t that great.
All the negative sides you’ve described is portrayed after Gene Roddenberry died and he was famously against a lot of those concepts while he was alive. DS9 would never have been green-lit during Roddenberry’s lifetime.
> We also don’t see that much of how Federation _civilians_ live, and a lot of what we do see frankly isn’t that great.
That’s not true. The worlds that aren’t great are planets outside of federation jurisdiction. Those that are part of it are usually portrayed as utopias.
That all said, you’ve hit on a great premise for a Star Trek spin off.
Edit:
> And it appears to be _basically_ a military dictatorship; the civil government in practice always seems to be subordinate to Starfleet.
The partnership is explored in DS9 and was the exact opposite of that you’ve described.
In the DS9 episode I’m thinking of, shapeshifters (“changelings”) had taken over Star Fleet (the military) and were then trying to bypass the Federation to start a war. Basically a military coup lead by a small number of infiltrators. The remainder of the military were against the coup, which is why they were found out and the coup failed.
> In the DS9 episode I’m thinking of, shapeshifters (“changelings”) had taken over Star Fleet (the military)
It was even more interesting than that - they didn't take Starfleet over at all! They bombed a conference and sow some fear in the backchannels, and then sat back to watch as Starfleet panicked. A few well-positioned people tried to pull a military coup, for more-less the same reason the US gave up on many of its freedoms after 9/11, but unlike in real world, they were denounced by the rest of the military, the coup was stopped, and the entire two-parter served as a strong message that it's fear, not attacks from outside, that can quickly destroy the utopia.
Basically, a Star Trek take on "people willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both" - noticed on time and successfully averted.
> DS9 would never have been green-lit during Roddenberry’s lifetime.
Gene would be wrong about this, IMHO. DS9 is the series that makes the utopia seem more real, as it gives it cracks and puts pressure on them, to show how people can overcome them. It makes the Federation seem less like religion, and more like just great future overall.
Star Trek is "What if Communism but it wasn't influenced by human nature?", and totally avoided thinking about how the trillions of humans not in the military lived.
ST:TNG goes into quite a bit of on-the-ground imagining of the lives of Federation individuals and Star Fleet. Colonies, research stations, etc. Though the only earth-side I remember is Jean Luc's winery and estate or when the admiral was mind controlled by some kind of pest.
Part of the challenges of early TNG is that it tries to make the federation perfect. The writing suffers because of it because there appear to be no true internal conflicts. It’s not until Roddenberry takes a back seat in the creative process that the writing starts to get really good. Though that might also in part be the departure of Maurice Hurley as show runner.
When Paramount released the HD remaster of TNG on Blu-ray, I really enjoyed watching the lengthy (like 2 hours per season) documentary they did on the making of the show. And sadly, one thing was abundantly clear watching that documentary: TNG was good despite Roddenberry, not because of him. The writers all talk about how hard it was to write any sort of interesting story when you were forbidden from showing conflict between the main cast of characters.
> The writers all talk about how hard it was to write any sort of interesting story when you were forbidden from showing conflict between the main cast of characters.
And the show was all the better for it. Writers are lazy, too, and conflict between main characters is by far the cheapest way of creating drama, and the main way fiction differs from reality. Being strongly discouraged from using this shortcut is what gave TNG-era Star Trek another unique feature, that's almost unseen in shows and movies (sci-fi or otherwise): the main cast, and Starfleet in general, are portrayed as competent professionals who are good at their jobs and work well together. It's kind of what you'd expect from people whose dayjob is flying around on FTL-capable WMD platforms.
But yeah, Roddenberry had various peculiarities that needed pushback on. Constraints breed creativity, I guess?
Even TNG didn't always follow through with utopian ideals, because that doesn't make for compelling drama. Tasha Yar came from a failed Federation colony where society had collapsed, and spent her childhood avoiding roving rape gangs.
You don’t need to overcome all of human nature, you “just” need to overcome greed and solve scarcity. I put “just” in quotes because I recognize those are a tall order, but I don’t think you really need much else to have a Star Trek collectivist utopia.
> Star Trek is "What if Communism but it wasn't influenced by human nature
On the contrary, the very premise of Star Trek is "what if humans overcome the bad parts of their nature, and embraced the good ones". The core concept of the entire franchise, coming from Gene himself, is that humanity must be recognizably human to the audience, just better than what it is now. The Federation being fully automated communist space utopia is an extension of that.
The only really good Star Trek series I saw was DS9. It was darker, had longer story arcs, religion and fully developed characters. There was even a scene that illustrated this, where Captain Sisko was talking with an Earth politician and telling him that the problem was he lived on Earth, a paradise, and couldn't understand the war and problems those near DS9 faced.
DS9 was really good. But all the shade it threw at the underlying premise was still to reinforce it, not break it. Where any other show would take e.g. the above case of the Federation governance being out of touch with needs of their constituents near the border, and deconstruct it six ways to Sunday in most cynical of fashions, DS9 made the paradise something good, if fragile, and worth fighting for, worth aiming to have here - whether "here" is out there in lthe frontier colonies, or back today in the 21th century real-world. That's why I still say it was an aspirational show, if much darker, and worked to reinforce TNG instead of deconstructing it.
Dylan got the nobel price in litterature, which is awarded for a work of litterature, not for political influence. (Infamously Peter Handke won the litterature price despite his support for Milošević.)
You are probably thinking of the peace price, but that is a different thing.
> The Nobel Prize in Literature […] is awarded annually, since 1901, to an author from any country who has, in the words of the will of Swedish industrialist Alfred Nobel, "in the field of literature, produced the most outstanding work in an idealistic direction"
> Alfred Nobel's guidelines for the prize, stating that the candidate should have bestowed "the greatest benefit on mankind" and written "in an idealistic direction," have sparked much discussion. In the early history of the prize, Nobel's "idealism" was read as "a lofty and sound idealism." The set of criteria, characterised by its conservative idealism, holding church, state, and family sacred, resulted in prizes for Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson, Rudyard Kipling, and Paul Heyse. During World War I, there was a policy of neutrality, which partly explains the number of awards to Scandinavian writers. In the 1920s, "idealistic direction" was interpreted more generously as "wide-hearted humanity," leading to awards for writers like Anatole France, George Bernard Shaw, and Thomas Mann. In the 1930s, "the greatest benefit on mankind" was interpreted as writers within everybody's reach, with authors like Sinclair Lewis and Pearl Buck receiving recognition. From 1946, a renewed Academy changed focus and began to award literary pioneers like Hermann Hesse, André Gide, T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner. During this era, "the greatest benefit on mankind" was interpreted in a more exclusive and generous way than before. Since the 1970s, the Academy has often given attention to important but internationally unnoticed writers, awarding writers like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Odysseus Elytis, Elias Canetti, and Jaroslav Seifert.
This is a good point.
But his award is most definitely political both in how it was awarded and in the positions Dylan took in various events, songs and lyrics.
Jon Fosse was the 2023 winner and to my knowledge his work isn't considered especially political. I can't say confidently if Bill is a deserving candidate, but as others have suggested, political perspective or activism isn't a requirement.
Obviously Dylan is political but this does not mean the price was political. The Handke debacle seems a pretty clear indication they evaluate the litterary merit without regard to the politics of the author.
Some of the best literature ever written isn't very "important" (although, I think you're greatly underestimating Calvin & Hobbes's influence)
Secondly, I also question the influence of Bob Dylan. There's no indication that he was anything but a reflection of the political turmoil at the time. He was just a poet with some banger turns of phrase. I also found his emotional distance to the actual politics to be rather distasteful (compared to, say, 2pac's first album, Joey Bada$$'s "all amerikkkan badass", and like half of Kendrick Lamar's work, many varied feminist artists now like Mitski & Laufey, the anti-war influence on the then Dixie Chicks, now the Chicks... i'm sure you could come up with thousands of artists with more to say than bob dylan).
C&H's political expression speaks much more to the absurdity of the values and habits that entrench themselves by adulthood, and help us question which of these are meaningful, rational, and necessary. A different sort of politics for sure, but one that is certainly relevant to most households across the country. Most of the political angst that comes through the adults in the form of disgust with cultures of consumption and commodification, the absurdity of a biker pitted against car, the joy of giving an F-15 to a trex rather than a modern state, are no less salient today.
I was curious, so I went the Wikipedia page, and it says[0]:
Not the least of these challenges was his unfamiliarity with the Cincinnati political scene, as he had never resided in or near the city, having grown up in the Cleveland area and attending college in central Ohio. The Post fired Watterson before his contract was up.
That passage cites an interview with Watterson[1] as its only source. The source material:
Watterson: I didn't hit the ground running. Cincinnati at that time was also beginning to realize it had major cartooning talent in Jim Borgman, at the city's other paper, and I didn't benefit from the comparison.
Christie: I'm not familiar...
Watterson: He's syndicated through King Features, and had been for a couple years by the time I arrived in Cincinnati. This is an odd story. Borgman graduated from Kenyon Collage the year before I went there, and it was his example that inspired me to pursue political cartooning. He had drawn cartoons at Kenyon, and landed his job at the Cincinnati Enquirer right after graduation. His footsteps seemed like good ones to follow, so I cultivated an interest in politics, and Borgman helped me a lot in learning how to construct an editorial cartoon. Neither of us dreamed I'd end up in the same town on the opposite paper. I don't know to what extent the comparison played a role in my editor's not liking my work, but I was very intimidated by working on a major city paper and I didn't feel free to experiment, really, or to travel down my own path. I very early caught on that the editor had something specific in mind that he was looking for, and I tried to accommodate him in order to get published. His idea was that he was going to publish only my very best work so that I wouldn't embarress the newspaper while I learned the ropes. As sound as that idea may be from the management standpoint, it was disastrous for me because I was only getting a couple cartoons a week printed. I would turn out rough idea after rough idea, and he would veto eighty percent of them. As a result I lost all my self-confidence, and his intervention was really unhealthy, i think, as far as letting me experiment and make mistakes, and become a stronger cartoonist for it. Obviously, if he wanted a more experienced cartoonist, he shouldn't have hired a kid just out of college. I pretty much prostituted myself for six months but I couldn't please him, so he sent me packing.
One should take content on Wikipedia with a grain of salt.
And given the global nature of the award, it’s not necessarily surprising if many of the names are unfamiliar. I’m pretty familiar with writers in English, but would have a hard time naming more than a dozen German authors and more than three or four Scandinavian authors. Scanning the list for authors who wrote exclusively in English the only unfamiliar names were Wole Soyinka and Abdulrazak Gurnah which is as much an indictment of my unfamiliarity with African writers as anything else.
He should. His work has political and cultural significance, and only that: no literary value. I say that as someone who put too much time into reading Bloom County when I was younger.
Not everyone has to be Joyce - there is literary value in more humble works and intentions, and Breathed's Bloom County was sublime in its preposterous ideas. Not perfect, not an Everest - a "local maximum", relatively a peak, if dwarfed by other works in more specialized, high-brow efforts.
