The Logic of Illogic

August 22, 2014 9:57 PM

The Logic of Illogic : Published SF author John C. Wright tries to explain why modern art and recent SF and Fantasy are so bleak and uninteresting.

"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."

posted by Chocolate Pickle (6 comments total)

Well, we found someone who makes Margaret Atwood seem pretty reasonable.
posted by GuyZero at 10:09 PM on August 22, 2014 [3 favorites]

The only thing worse than the quality of John C. Wright's prose is the quality of his thinking.
posted by asterix at 10:11 PM on August 22, 2014

Are we just posting racist shit to the front page like it's no big thing now?
posted by Pope Guilty at 10:13 PM on August 22, 2014 [5 favorites]

I really enjoyed his first few novels. Little did I know the mental illness that was lurking underneath.

His biography suggests that he had a sudden conversion a few years ago, but perhaps an undiagnosed stroke gave him visions of angels and the essay style of the timecube guy.
posted by temancl at 10:17 PM on August 22, 2014

I have plenty of gripes about bland sci-fi (filmed in the LA river, no doubt), but this guy's argument just makes him sound like a twentieth-century space cadet.
posted by Phssthpok at 10:18 PM on August 22, 2014 [1 favorite]

OK, granted it's kind of impressive to see somebody be wrong about so many different things in one essay, but John C. Wright is basically the Ann Coulter of SF and I really don't think we need to be giving him any more pageviews.
posted by teraflop at 10:18 PM on August 22, 2014 [1 favorite]