Thursday, March 28, AD 2024 1:57pm

Science Fiction as Politicized Drek

Science Fiction Leftism

They began by controlling books of cartoons and then detective books and, of course, films, one way or another, one group or another, political bias, religious prejudice, union pressures; there was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.

Ray Bradbury, Usher II (1950)

 

John C. Wright, Science Fiction author and a convert to Catholicism, laments the ruin wreaked on Science Fiction by leftist ideologies and pathologies:

Establishment SF is Politically Correct SF, in that it pays slavish homage to all the tired tropes and foolish dogmas of Political Correctness. With its emphasis on collective rights, victimology, and radical egalitarianism, there is no place in the PC SF universe for things like heroes, adventures, inventors, exotic locations, space princesses, or technology portrayed as beneficial.

Politically Correct SF is astonishingly parochial, because it is always assumed that the society of the future will be caught in the grip of the selfsame political controversies as the Victorian Age, which is the age when this worldview was first formulated by Marx. Hence, for all other SF stories, the future differs from the present. For PC SF, the future is just like the past, and nothing changes.

In other words, the stories of PC SF promote the opposite of SF.

SF is about a sense of wonder. PC is about a sense of despair. The two are opposite. Hence, PC SF is a contradiction in terms. What it produces is simply not science fiction.

Go here to read the rest.  I started reading science fiction in 1965 and I have read it ever since.  It gives me considerable grief to see how a genre famed, at its best, for iconoclasm and free thinking has largely become a sounding board for leftist orthodoxy.  Time to call on Commander Eddington again who I think can be taken as a symbol for those science fiction authors who refuse to be cowed by the leftism that now dominates their field:

 

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Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 7:48am

The clip reminds me…

Just for fun Don, you ever watched the Star Trek videos on http://sfdebris.com/? I think you’d get a big kick out of his analysis.

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 1:51pm

Everything’s got to be political, so of course scifi can’t escape. 🙁

It’s sad when the only place my husband and I can come out with a pile of books is a second hand store. When we were kids, B&N was a crisis of budget; now, the only question is if I’ll find one of those big picture books that the kids might like.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 1:58pm

There’s also those stepping into the gap. John C Wright’s recent ebook releases are good (I reviewed them) and you can sometimes find indie gems out there.

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 3:51pm

My mom reads metric tons of the 99c/free stuff on Kindle, plus all the random reduced stuff I send to her.

Dear husband bought me a kindle for Christmas, and it took about… oh… two days for me to be addicted.

Then I finally upgraded my phone to a “smart” one, and started using the kindle on that while my husband uses “my” kindle to read his game background PDFs….

Oh, it’s delightful. If fanfiction.net can figure out how to be accessible without formatting issues, I’ll be in hog heaven.

************

Sarah Hoyt (accordingtohoyt.com) does a lot of ebook promos, my library system has an OK ebook selection (through amazon) and I’ve started reading Dorthy Sawyers and Agatha Christie’s (only the Marples) publications when I can afford them.

It’s delightful to see what is different right after WWI, WWII and now, and I can start to see what on EARTH was going on in, oh, Ann McCaffery’s head with some of her assumptions. Even Mercedes Lackey, though figuring out when she’s thinking and when she’s being a loon can be tough, and figuring out what is her and what is co-writers. Ugh, I wonder what similarly ginormous blindspots I have…. (suggestions without a decent support will be treated like the trolling they are)

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 3:52pm

*sigh* Sayers.

Nate Winchester
Nate Winchester
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 4:15pm

So you’re saying that if I can get this fan stuff put in epub format you’d be set? lol

Foxfier
Admin
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 5:19pm

I greatly suspect that at some point a smart person will come up with a way to RSS to e-readers.

Mary De Voe
Friday, July 25, AD 2014 7:57pm

Foxfier: Aren’t these books at the free public library?

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