Posted on 01/25/2011 9:58:28 AM PST by Kaslin
Two legends and two newcomers weigh in.
I am a complete science fiction geek.
It started when I was little more than a toddler. One of my earliest memories: sitting in the basement with my parents as they watched Walter Cronkite narrate one of the Apollo missions as it rounded the moon. (Which one? I couldn’t have been more than three or four, and I was born in 1971. You do the math.) It left an impression. I’ve been a fan ever since.
In the last few years, I’ve noticed more and more that science fiction has taken a bit of a turn to the right. I’ve also seen more than a few reviews lambasting those authors for their views — which seems to matter not a whit to their sales.
So I emailed four of them — two relative newcomers and two legends — and asked why.
The legends, Dr. Jerry Pournelle and Orson Scott Card, need no introduction. But it bears mention that Ender’s Game, Card’s best-known work, is on the Commandant of the Marine Corps recommended reading list as a treatise on what it means to be a leader. The newcomers, Lt. Col Tom Kratman (Ret.) and Larry Correia, both write for Baen.
I asked them all three simple questions: Why do you think there has been a trend toward conservatism in mainstream SF over the last few years? What does this mean for the future of the genre? And: is this a good or a bad thing for science fiction, and why?
Being writers, their answers roamed freely — but revealingly.
Suggesting that part of the problem is defining “conservatism,” Dr. Pournelle isn’t sure there’s been such a drift.
“The problem here,” he said, “is that ‘conservatism’ means many things to different people — and many of those you call conservative would not call themselves that, nor would many conservatives call them that. There has certainly been a move toward the concept of freedom as a good thing, but that was always true of most science fiction writers.
“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 as welfare liberalism has become a consensus among a large part of the literary elites in academia.”
Card noted that he wasn’t at all sure where the trends even stood in science fiction these days — because he had long since stopped paying attention. “I left SFWA [the Science Fiction & Fantasy Writers of America] in 1987,” he said, “and haven’t looked back. I have very few friends among sci-fi writers and have no idea at all what their politics might be.”
“Back when I cared,” he continued, “most of the writers of my generation were so extremely leftist in their formal opinions, and so extremely elitist in their practices, that it would be difficult to discern where they actually stood on anything. It’s as if the entire Tsarist aristocracy fervently preached Bolshevism even as they oppressed their peasants. But that view is based on observations back in the mid-1980s. Since then, my only exposure to their views has been the general boycott of mine. In short,” he said, “I’m their Devil, but I have no idea who their God is anymore.”
Correia, author of the excellent Monster Hunter International books, said sci-fi writers are increasingly unafraid to speak out.
“I don’t really know if there are more of us or if we have just become less shy about it,” he said. “The publishing industry is primarily based out of Manhattan, which I’ve been led to believe is a completely paved island that doesn’t even have any shooting ranges. Of course us conservative types from fly-over country are going to seem odd to them. I’ve heard some real horror stories from other writers about the way they’ve been treated because of their personal politics.”
Correia also noted that most of the bad reviews he’s gotten have been from people who apparently objected to his politics.
“I’m primarily known as a contemporary fantasy author rather than a sci-fi author,” he said. “I’m usually writing about our current world with some fantastical elements thrown in.”
“I often get lumped into the genre ‘urban fantasy’,” he said. “Apparently, in urban fantasy it is really odd to have a main character who is a gun-loving, anti-authoritarian, stay-off-my-lawn libertarian accountant, who ends of working for a group of Alabama contractors that are constantly being harassed by petty regulations even while trying to kill monsters. I’ve received many negative reviews from people who don’t think it is realistic that I show the government as lumbering and bureaucratic at best, and cold-bloodedly ruthless at worst. This tells me that these reviewers have never worked with the government in real life. Ironically, every really scathing review I’ve gotten has felt the need to mention my personal politics.”
Dr. Pournelle cautioned that any discussion of an ideological drift would have to account for writers like Stanislaw Lem. While basically “socialist,” they thought that “individual liberty was a good thing,” if not always “easily achieved.” Norman Spinrad, for instance, “has always been for liberty, while embracing socialist economic ideas and often rather radical social beliefs.”
Like Dr. Pournelle, Col. Kratman — perhaps best known for his collaborations with John Ringo and his solo work such as A Desert Called Peace — was not entirely certain there has been a drift to the right, but perhaps for different reasons.
“I’m not sure that’s the way to describe it. If there has been such a drift,” he said, “I sense — and it’s only a sense — that it’s been more of a drift away from socialist Utopian science fiction. The whys of the thing are probably rather complex,” he warned, “and my understanding of them, such as it is, is no doubt colored and clouded by my being very America-centric.”
“Still,” he went on, “surely the collapse of communism in the former USSR, and the revelation of communist crimes so starkly that only loons can deny them — and rejection of the reality while retaining the name in China — have something to do with it.” For Kratman, “previous generations of heavily left-wing sci-fi have probably motivated some conservative writers.”
Motivated him? “No, not so much. I tend to take my motivation from leftist thought outside of science fiction, though I admit to urinating on the glib sci-fi staple of monocultural, unified, peaceful planets wherever possible. We probably ought not discount the growing and obvious failure of the social democratic state and liberalism-slash-progressivism, either.”
As for the future of science fiction, Pournelle submitted that “science fiction will always be just a bit out of the mainstream of political thought.”
The authors weren’t quite in agreement as to whether this move to the right — assuming it exists — was a good thing.
“The thing is, I write what I know,” said Correia. “I’ve been a small business owner, firearms instructor, and a military contractor. That’s the perspective that I have. Some people absolutely hate that I dare to have a worldview that differs from theirs. On the other hand, conservatives are used to being able to overlook the politics of the entertainer we’re watching/reading/listening to, because if we weren’t, we sure wouldn’t be able to watch very many movies.”
“The thing is,” he told me, “all of us red-staters read books too, and though we are used to being constantly beaten over the head about how everything we believe in is wrong by Hollywood and Manhattan, it is really refreshing for us to be able to be entertained while not being bludgeoned about the dangers of global warming, mean capitalists, or whatever the liberal cause of the day is. There is a huge market of people that just want to be entertained, without being personally slighted, and not to be preached to.”
Kratman took a more cynical position. “What does it mean? Probably not much.” Any shift is “probably neutral,” he said. “Some more or less conservative-leaning readers may join or come back to sci-fi. But there will still be enough progressive and socialist pap to feed the — ahem — ‘enlightened cravings of the masses.’”
He admitted that “a close debate may someday rage. It isn’t raging yet because, for the most part, the leftist and rightist wings pretty much ignore each other,” with the lefties “fairly well cocooned by the magazines, the awards system, the reviewers, and no small number of readers who read only them, and the right by — I think — smaller groups of fans who are probably more loyal readers” than their opposite numbers.
“In any case,” Kratman concluded, “nobody converts anybody; we, as a society, are way past that. Right and left don’t share basic assumptions, don’t use the same words with the same meanings, and generally just talk past each other.”
Correia was more optimistic. “It is kind of like how most of the mainstream news outlets can’t figure out why they’re getting lousy ratings and Fox is getting such good ratings,” he said. “When the population is divided in half, and ten outlets are competing for one half, and one outlet is competing for the other half … well, duh. If openly conservative writers sell well, then there will be more writers that aren’t afraid to be open about what they believe in.”
Warning that entertainers shouldn’t “go out of their way to offend any of their potential market,” Correia insisted that more conservative science fiction authors “should write what we’re passionate about and not have to sulk in the shadows. Just because I believe that I shouldn’t have to give half of my income to pay for ACORN’s Honduran sex slaves doesn’t make me a bad person. I’m lucky in that my publishing house doesn’t care what their authors’ politics are. We’ve got actual socialists all the way to people just to the right of Genghis Khan, as long as they write entertaining books.”
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.
Me, I just got to talk to four of my favorite authors.
You could say I’m over the moon.
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.
For a while, SF writers were drinking deeply of the Global Warming Kool-Aid. Maybe they are taking more interest in basing stories in genuine science, now. :)
Heinlein was libertarian not liberal
my tagline says it all...
ping
I’ve read quite a bit of Science fiction, and most authors have never seemed conservative in the least to me. Not that they necessarilly were overtly liberal, but collectivism and such were almost always promoted and individualism unimportant. To say the least.
I’ve read some of Pournelle’s collaborations with Larry Niven. Based on those, I’d say he leans right...
Funny you mention Heinlein’s libertarian leanings. My wife is a modern “liberal” who owns almost everything he ever wrote.
Heinlein was a Naval Academy graduate.
SyFy is still making new destruction movies; destruction, of course, caused by global warming.
It’s hard to write an interesting story about a collective.
The genre itself has to deal with individuals making choices and living with the consequences, which will to some extent causes stories to drift towards conservatism, even if they wouldn’t admit it.
ping
I’ve found BBC seems to have more science fiction than Scyfy
SyFi has little to do with SciFi, sigh.
you have to read ‘State of Fear’, but Michael Crichton(author of Jurassic Park, Andromeda Strain) if you want to read a conservative tome by a Scifi writer.
( this is more of present day science fiction based on the global warming fraud.)
Even some of the other cable channels have sci-fi than SyFy.
SyFy is adding more reality-type stuff. They have lost focus. They recently were bragging that their wrestling program had attained its highest viewership.
Who has time to read sci fi? Little kids? NASA deals in fantasy and fiction by pimping global warming.
[ Heinlein was libertarian not liberal
my tagline says it all... ]
That is why i referenced as “Classical Liberal” not the usurptation of the word Liberal by the Progressives. What the word Liberal meant to someone living over 100 years ago.
[ 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.
I think what everyone should understand is that it is NOT S.F. writers who control the ‘mind’ of the public by the stories they write. They usually write MANY stories.
It is what the PUBLISHERS decide to print, in the long run, that controls WHAT the public is exposed to.
Thank you for an informative and reasoned response to the guy who has found yet another medium for story-telling and idea-sharing that has knotted his panties
Some of my favorite conservative sci-fi writers would have to include David Drake’s Hammer’s Slammers series (and his other works); Robert Adams’ The Horseclans series and; Adams’ “Stairway to Forever.” I never finished the 2nd Adams’ series, but from what I remember it started off very conservative.
I have not read much Sci-Fi fantasy in years and have probably enjoyed many stories regardless of their political affiliation, but w/out a more comprehensive search of my memory/library those come to mind as good examples of conservative sci-fi writing in the past.
In addition to classics like CS Lewis and Tolkien of course. Even LeGuin’s Earthsea series I would characterize as conservative in it’s social mores.
“I’ve read some of Pournelle’s collaborations with Larry Niven. Based on those, I’d say he leans right...”
There was a whole conservative group, Pournelle, Niven, Drake and others, and the reaction to that was a group of liberal-leaning authors (like David Brin) who wrote more stories about people and society than science stuff. Cyberpunk grew out of that, an upwelling of deep cynicism.
It’s hard to find “hard science” fiction any more. I just read This Is Not A Game, sold as Sci fi, but it really was a drama set around alternate reality games and social networking. A good book, but clearly not Neutron Star (Niven) or The Kiln People (Brin).
“It’s hard to write an interesting story about a collective.
The genre itself has to deal with individuals making choices and living with the consequences, which will to some extent causes stories to drift towards conservatism”
You’re basically describing “The Blithedale Romance,” the absolute classic of the commune stories (though not at all a sci-fi novel). It’s a good but not great book, written by a master who could aptly be described as conservative.
I just listened to Vance’s Dying Earth book recently. I was unfamiliar with him, it definately made my drive more enjoyable. I’ll have to look for his books.
Can’t believe nobody’s mentioned David Weber?
They tend toward the liberal side of things and nothing shocks them ... except maybe someone with a conservative viewpoint, which is stunning because they'll have a live-and-let-live attitude toward all sorts of deviant behaviors that they personally wouldn't be involved in.
You can read a ton of out of print scifi from Baen right on your computer. for free.
click on ‘The Books’ on the left sidebar to see the list.
Where are today’s Han Solos, Mad Maxs and Capt. Kirks?
Nowhere,
All males (especially white males) are reduced to subservient whiners.
Instead of strong Alpha male role models all we get is Sarah Connor and Captn. Janeway over & over again.
Just look at V, manly man Marc Singer (A.K.A. The Beastmaster) and Micheal Ironside in the 1980s series were replaced by Murphy Brown in the new, also instead of white guy Freddie Kruger, the 5th columnist is a black guy, the women mouthpiece traitor reporter is now a white guy, the whole Jewish Holocaust thing is missing.
In the new Battletstar Galatica, Starbuck is now a chick and Apollo is the whiny male bee-atch and they created a whole new female teacher president role for Capt. Adama to be subservient to
The Terminator, John Connor when from a hard nose tough kid in II, to a whiny male bee-atch in III.
and on and on and on.
That's why Sci-Fi is bombing, there are no male role models for men & boys to relate to and once the “Wow she’s really hot” factor wears off, watching a 90lb waif beat up 250+ pound men gets old real fast and Scifi becomes unwatchable.
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