The "breaking" of SF?
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This entry was posted at
22:54 GMT on 06 February 2003
Paul Marks has an entry over at Samizdata entitled "The breaking of science fiction" which got the old juices flowing.
He says:
These days science fiction writing seems to have changed. A minority of writers (such as L. Neil Smith) are actual anarchist (real anarchists - not people who do not like the word 'government' but still want a collective power to control everything), but most other writers are welfare state - interventionists writing 'feminist science fiction', 'environmental science fiction', 'psychological science fiction' or even straight science fiction - but with the normal statist slant of main stream literature.
Leaving aside his equating "actual anarchists" with "limited, even minimal statists," which would make this post ten times longer were I to deal with it, I still think he's mistaken, or at least oversimplifying the current state of affairs.
SF and Fantasy are more broadly appealing genres than they once were. Go pick up the latest Year's Best Science Fiction edited by Gardner Dozois and flip through his "Year in Summation" essay. Every year, he documents the number of original SF novels published, usually comparing it with a figure in the 1970s. The last time I checked those figures (a year or two ago), the current figure was about ten times the '70s figure. (And no, those numbers do not include Star Trek/Star Wars books.)
Due to this increase in productive output, you would naturally expect an increase in the number of "world views" represented. It simply follows from the situation.
So, yes, there will undoubtedly be views presented which readers of more classic SF would find odious, or at least distasteful. So what?
Does that mean that the traditional classical liberal, or libertarian, view is no longer represented or relevant?
Let's take a look at some recent Hugo winners. The most recent winner is Neil Gaiman's American Gods, a fantasy which I've not read. Gaiman's politics are a mystery to me, but the synopsis of this book sounds vaguely, allegorically, libertarian to me. But like I said, I don't know.
The 2001 winner was J.K. Rowlings's Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Rowling's books are each about individual responsibility and a healthy distrust of power and authority. She seems classically liberal to me, though her explicit politics may not agree with those implicit in her novels.
In 2000, Vernor Vinge won for his excellent A Deepness in the Sky. Vinge is a true-blue libertarian, and the book also won the Prometheus Award from the Libertarian Futurist Society, so there shouldn't be too much argument on this one.
The next four winners back are Connie Willis, Joe Haldeman, Kim Stanley Robinson and Neal Stephenson. I don't know Willis's or Robinson's politics, and I've never been able to get interested in their work. Haldeman evinces a distrust of authority, but I don't know more than that, and didn't read the book that won. Stephenson's The Diamond Age is reputed to be libertarian in tone, but again, I've not read it.
The year before that, Lois McMaster Bujold won. I didn't read that book, but I know that she's both for a strong military and against much more government than that.
That takes us back to 1995, with a fair showing for limited-government types. (Vinge and Bujold both pop up in the five years before that, as well.)
How about a couple of other popular writers, just to further illustrate my point?
C. J. Cherryh's books are always deeply complicated, at every level, especially politically. I've only read the Chanur series, some of the Morgaine Saga, The Faded Sun Trilogy, Downbelow Station and Tripoint. (That's a mere fraction of her work, else I wouldn't have said "only.") She seems to be of the belief that some form of government is necessary, especially when alien cultures interact, but that more than that is generally a Bad Thing. Her heroes' operating theory tends to be "respect what authority you encounter, until you figure out how to subvert it." I'd say she comes down as a classical liberal.
Michael Flynn's recent series, beginning with the marvelous Firestar, is explicitly private-initiative oriented. He also gets in some classic digs at statist-enviromentalists and other unfavored groups in libertarian and freedom loving circles.
Does this mean that SF is exclusively a limited government domain? No. However, I find that the more "hard SF" a writer is -- that is, the more true to known scientific fact, or the less prone to scientific boners, he is -- the more libertarian he tends to be, at least implicitly. Exceptions? Sure; Allen Steele's a flaming liberal, for instance. But those are still exceptions.
Love of freedom is far from dead in SF, even amongst the more popular authors.