Posted on 01/25/2011 9:58:28 AM PST by Kaslin
[ I’ve found BBC seems to have more science fiction than Scyfy ]
And now syfy is stealing it from them.... LOL...
Libertarian, maybe, and it’s telling that the two “new” authors in this piece write for Baen which is probably the biggest seller of right-leaning, libertarian SF.
It’s nice not to have SF be automatically liberal pap but I think the libertarian bent is missing something too.... I need to figure out a good story to fit a Christian-influenced Libertarian world-setting, and then write it.
I love Tom Kratman, you never see him in Conventions anymore, but he and John Ringo are a blast in person. He happens to live right here in Blacksburg.
Last moon mission was 1972. Either our author is a prodigy and remembers things from age 1, or he's too lazy to look up the dates for Apollo because "Skylab" doesn't make as cool-sounding a story.
No thanks.
Try Baen.com
They have have several authors that are wide right. Kratman considers himself to the right of Attila the Hun
I think one of the components of most sci-fi is the setting is a futuristic dystopia, with usually a despotic leader or a group of elite thinkers. The story follows someone trying to break free of the chains and open people’s eyes to liberty.
Without having to say it is conservative, the plot is conservative.
I’ve read Spinrad, and found his politics objectionable and his writing leaden.
Why should I believe that he has any idea legitimate thoughts about trends in SciFi literature?
Just another blogger trying to convince a miniscule readership that he and his blog is relevant. Pfft.
I just began reading Card’s Xenocide.
An interesting, and I think correct, point. Nobody cares about the fate of the mass. Even in apocalyptic science fiction, where the world as we know it is destroyed, it was the lone survivor protagonist that was the story.
I would recommend reading just about anything by Jack Vance. His themes are the opposite of what you describe.
interest ping
(Thanks for posting this interesting article. )
“In the end, all four men seemed to see science fiction as a place where ideas like individual freedom could be freely examined and explored.”
... Or where LOSS of individual freedom could be freely examined and explored.
Hopefully they can continue to do both. Unfortunately, we live in a time where there are those who would take away the individual freedom to write a book about ‘loss of individual freedom’, claiming that such books ‘destroy’ their own ‘individual freedom’ (as if they were being forced to read those stories).
No one forced you to read the article
“Meanwhile, planetary history has shown that vast powerful central bureaucracies don’t generally produce either general welfare or freedom or wealth, and science fiction writers have sort of noticed that
Even liberal writers have noticed that and they write dystopian stories where corporations run amuk in place of governments. lol.
“Who has time to read sci fi? Little kids?”
I commute over 90 minutes every day with the option of listening to NPR or music I don’t enjoy on the radio. Enter the library with it’s selection of books on CD. I have more time for SciFi and other literature now than I ever had growing up.
In fact, I have developed a real affinity for some of the new writers.
Sci-fi has long had a strong libertarian bent. It didn’t start that way, as H.G. Wells was anything else. It also didn’t continue that way, with such popular socialistic masterpieces as Edward Bellamy’s “Looking Backward.” However, when the genre shifted from monster of the week and girls in gold bikini schlock to a serious interest in scientific reality, for whatever reason, the characters tended to be hard realists and rugged individualists with a distrust for the state (or whatever happened to be in authority). The quintessential representative of this school was Robert Heinlein.*
One might expect radicial visions of different social and political arrangments, and often changes in human nature itself, not to appeal to conservatives. But of course conservatives and libertarians are united by their hatred of socialists and meddlers of all varieties. So even if this isn’t what’s being talked about with the conservative movement in sci-fi, to a certain extent it’s always been there.
The libertarian trend never ended, but with the 60s came the popularity of the New Wave, which in addition to being less heroic and more cynical was also decidedly leftist, associated with the typical antiwar, anti-tradition, anti-Nixon, etc. stances. It is best exemplified by Philip K. Dick, though he was more interested in the non-linear, non-happy ending style of storytelling than politics (it seems to me). Given the “long march through the institutions,” former hippies have monopolized literary opinion, and of course this sort of thing has gotten all the respect (aside from the respect reserved for Heinlein, who is too large a figure to be denied). Ever subsequent movement, from cyberpunk on down, has been interpreted in its light. Nothing respectable could possibly be libertarian/conservative, and so nothing was. At least so far as we’re told.
But that’s just belly-aching on my part, I guess. I’d just like it to be remembered that there was a time when sci-fi was considered rightwing, though one might seldom hear of it.
*See also Poul Anderson, L. Neil Smith, Vernor Vinge, Eric Frank Russell, Ken MacLeod, Victor Koman, Neal Stephenson, Ayn Rand (if you consider Atlas Shrugged sci-fi), Ray Bradbury (perhaps), Ursula K. LeGuin (?)
Plus, various dystopias written by people who may have been actual communists, but wrote things that appeal to conservatives/libertarians: Yevgeny Zamyatin, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, etc.
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