I always like Heinlien growing up. He took more of a “Classical Liberal” view in that he was more Libertarian.
The Man who sold the moon :)
I also liked Ben Bova and Issac Asimov.
Heinlein was libertarian not liberal
my tagline says it all...
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Heinlein was a Naval Academy graduate.
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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.