Sci-Fi Roots of the Far Right

September 20, 2017 5:33 PM

To wrap up the discussions of Pournelle and his ilk and the so-called "golden age" of SF, here's an interesting essay.
posted by MovableBookLady (66 comments total)

I think may suggest the reason why, after a youth spent reading science fiction, I turned away from it towards actual history.
posted by SPrintF at 6:27 PM on September 20, 2017 [7 favorites]

Indeed, many of Trump’s online supporters refer to him as “God Emperor” with varying levels of irony, referring in part to the benevolent tyrant of Frank Herbert’s Dune series, Leto II, who transforms himself into a gigantic worm in order to direct humanity on his “Golden Path” for 3,500 years.

posted by ovvl at 6:36 PM on September 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

I devoured Niven's work, including the stuff he co-wrote with Pournelle, as a preteen. Fortunately I was apparently too stupid then for any of their wingnuttiness to take root in my brain. (Or not stupid enough?) But now I want to re-read their Inferno—I assume that, as in Dante's own, the book grinds many a political axe. I remember the story pretty well, but the only axe-grindy bit I recall was them just laying into Kurt Vonnegut. Also, Benito Mussolini turned up as a heroic good guy, but I don't know if that was meant as an endorsement.
posted by ejs at 6:43 PM on September 20, 2017 [7 favorites]

I, too, enjoyed Pournelle's work...back before I was politically woke. This was an enlightening essay.

There's a lot of science fiction that isn't so right-wing, thank heavens. And I enjoy "real" history as well.
posted by lhauser at 6:53 PM on September 20, 2017 [6 favorites]

I also read everything from Niven I could get my hands on in my teens and twenties, but I don't think I ever read any Pournelle. I was vaguely aware of his politics, but had been unaware of how extreme they were. It's been interesting getting this retrospective education.
posted by adamrice at 6:59 PM on September 20, 2017 [5 favorites]

I started reading SF about 1950 (age 7 or 8) and devoured it all without discrimination. Along about the time Heinlein wrote Stranger in a Strange Land, I began to say "wait a minute." I kept reading folk like RAH for a while but my mid-20s began to wake me up and I started reading with some critical distance (that's what a degree in English Lit. will do for you). My tastes changed dramatically and I haven't read any of those golden-age guys in a long time, well, except for The Star Beast and a couple other Heinlein juveniles. As to the newer guys, I don't read most of the military sf guys, partially because of the far right attitudes but also because they aren't particularly good writers and tend to mire themselves in info dumps and telling instead of showing. Boring.
posted by MovableBookLady at 7:03 PM on September 20, 2017 [17 favorites]

ejs: "Also, Benito Mussolini turned up as a heroic good guy, but I don't know if that was meant as an endorsement."

Well, he serves as Virgil's stand-in, but he's definitely not portrayed as an unambiguously good guy.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:11 PM on September 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

adamrice: "I also read everything from Niven I could get my hands on in my teens and twenties, but I don't think I ever read any Pournelle. I was vaguely aware of his politics, but had been unaware of how extreme they were. It's been interesting getting this retrospective education."

I came close to reading every single short story, novella and novel that Niven had written up to Ringworld Engineers between '79 and 80 and then never read anything else. By then I'd found Le Guin, Delany, Dick, Disch, Varley, etc and realized how bad a writer Niven was and how terrible his politics were.
posted by octothorpe at 7:18 PM on September 20, 2017 [15 favorites]

*takes my place in the line next to all previous posters*

Yes, I also read this stuff as a kid. Yes, I also moved on when I found better, and less offensive, stuff -- but I would have read more of it if I could have gotten my hands on it. (Not the David Drake books, though: they sucked.)

I also read Haldeman's Forever War, though, and found more scifi that wasn't so odious. I think the field broadened out to include more than these Old White Dudes, but the recent awards fusses have demonstrated that only time will take care of them. :7(
posted by wenestvedt at 7:21 PM on September 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

(I did like Niven's "Gil the ARM" scifi mysteries.)
posted by wenestvedt at 7:22 PM on September 20, 2017 [2 favorites]

Chrysostom, I do recall that when the narrator/authors avatar figures out who he is, he immediately flings Mussolini into a fiery pit, so it's not exactly a wholehearted endorsement.
posted by ejs at 7:25 PM on September 20, 2017 [1 favorite]

octothorpe: "By then I'd found Le Guin, Delany, Dick, Disch, Varley, etc and realized how bad a writer Niven was and how terrible his politics were."

Well, I like those authors, too. But I'd still somewhat defend Niven's work up through about '76 (when Inferno came out). His politics were pretty background earlier on and less set in stone, in any case - the stratified society of A Gift From Earth is portrayed as bad thing! And his work, at its best, had a sort of casual wit that still makes a story like Neutron Star enjoyable.

I'm certainly not going to defend something like Footfall or Fallen Angels, but I don't think it's necessary to throw the baby out with the bathwater.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:43 PM on September 20, 2017 [6 favorites]

Niven's Protectors are a sfnal 4th stage of human life where a person becomes a biologically hard-wired racist. Protectors only care about related people who smell right; they're locked in unending battle for resources with protectors of other races.

Perhaps Niven took a while to reach protector stage, I don't know. Funny thing is the protectors realize their racism for the trap it is (their homeworld being a radioactive ruin etc), and try to devise ways out of it.
posted by joeyh at 8:07 PM on September 20, 2017 [8 favorites]

I strongly doubt "God Emperor Trump" refers in any way to Leto II - it's very clearly a Warhammer 40K God Emperor of Mankind reference.
posted by dragoon at 9:50 PM on September 20, 2017 [17 favorites]

I think that's a big error lumping Drake in with Niven and Pournell. Redliners has helped a lot of vets process, and a lot of civvies understand. It helped me. I don't know how he votes, but he's definitely not far right.

If I may make a broader point, if Democrats never write about war, then all the war stories will be told through the Republican lense. That's Not Good.
posted by BeeDo at 12:12 AM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

Part of it is not so much racist as engineerist, or nerdist -- the belief that the superior caste are those who keep the machines going, and who understand them. There is an element of this in some of Kipling's lesser stuff -- though Kipling was of course a genius; also, a curious echo in one of the Pohl/Kornbluth books where an insufferable brother-in-law prefaces all his mansplainery with "We Engineers ..." -- as in "Yeah. Not that that's evidence, as We Engineers understand evidence. It's just your untrained recollection of what an untrained woman told you."

In one of the more satisfying climaxes of the story, the hero summons him to his office and beats the living shit out of him.
posted by alloneword at 2:29 AM on September 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

> ...if Democrats never write about war, then all the war stories will be told through the Republican lense. That's Not Good.

Stories of war are told from all possible perspectives but the ones that provide heroic narratives of riteous ass-kicking are the ones that have avid fan cultures forming around them.
posted by ardgedee at 2:42 AM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

a curious echo in one of the Pohl/Kornbluth books

Gladiator-At-Law, 1955.
posted by Chrysostom at 4:47 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

As a dorky teenager in the eighties I got Niven's autograph at a convention in SLC. He was kind of crabby.
posted by craniac at 4:58 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

From the article:
Pournelle — who died earlier this month — first rose to prominence as part of an influential group of right-wing science-fiction writers in the 1970s and 1980s that also included Larry Niven, David Drake, Janet Morris, and S. M. Stirling.

S.M. Stirling is right-wing? I wasn't able to detect that in his books, probably because I spent most of my time with Dies the Fire by hurling it repeatedly against the wall.

To his credit, he was the first author who got me to realize that things like characterization and writing ability are more important than just having a moderately interesting idea for world building.
posted by Telf at 5:31 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

> I think may suggest the reason why, after a youth spent reading science fiction, I turned away from it towards actual history.

> I think the field broadened out to include more than these Old White Dudes

Can we not do this? Gingrich and Pournelle are not in any way representative of "classic science fiction," and to lump all sf writers before, what, Octavia Butler? together as "Old White Dudes" is offensive and wrong. Yes, there was a bias towards science/engineering in early sf (through the '40s), but in 1949 F&SF came along and Galaxy in 1950 and between them they promoted a much more open, liberal, and literary version of the field (Bradbury, Kuttner, Bester, Sturgeon, etc.). I started reading sf in the late '50s and continued gobbling up as much as I could until the early '70s (when I went to grad school and life as we know it ceased), and while I enjoyed early Niven (I sat next to him and Fuzzy Pink at LASFS meetings) and some of the conservative-leaning stuff ASF published, I never thought of it as representative. SF after WWII was a land of contrasts, and it is ignorant and unhelpful to take one especially toxic strand of it as all there was and claim the whole field was shit until the magical new world we live in today.
posted by languagehat at 5:54 AM on September 21, 2017 [27 favorites]

As I pointed out in the Pournelle obit thread, conservative and libertarian SFF has collectively pretty much shit the bed, and it's hard to find authors that aren't full-on, bigoted, authoritarian wackjobs. They're constantly spouting stuff out of the Breitbart/Infowars/etc crazypants crew on a regular basis, and even the ones who hate Trump almost all feel that he's too liberal. The thing I'm worried about most is that they've already shown a predilection for violence, and they've repeatedly characterized their "struggle" as a reaction against people that want more diverse voices and experiences. With folks like Sarah Hoyt foaming at the mouth with apocalyptic, Protocols of the Elders of Zion-esque paranoid rants about the violence of the left, including invoking Dolchstoßlegende both implicitly and explicitly, I worry about both writers and fans that are outspoken in defense of diversity and equality.
posted by zombieflanders at 6:04 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

It's weird that the essay takes that potshot at Herbert. He wasn't an authoritarian, he was a hippie environmentalist before environmentalism had really seeped into mainstream culture. He was very anti-authority, and his books showed it. They're all about the danger of power and control in many forms. The strange attack also leaves out the context of the "Golden Path": in the book, the entire point was that by controlling and constraining humanity Leto would show them that such control was a bad thing and would ultimately lead to humanity exploding outward and fragmenting so that no one could dominate them ever again.
posted by Sangermaine at 6:08 AM on September 21, 2017 [16 favorites]

Looking at the excerpt from Lucifer's Hammer ... So many books I read in my teen years that I should make sure to NEVER REREAD AGAIN because throwing that many books against a wall might damage the wall.
posted by rmd1023 at 6:12 AM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

S.M. Stirling is right-wing? I wasn't able to detect that in his books, probably because I spent most of my time with Dies the Fire by hurling it repeatedly against the wall.

I got a distinct Religious Family Focus vibe from those books. Also that the author should have sought medical attention for that boner over feudal authoritarian governments that lasted waaaaaay longer than four hours.
posted by Slackermagee at 6:17 AM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

I quit reading Pournelle and Niven after reading Fallen Angels.

From the wikipedia description of the setting:

"Set in an unspecified 'near-future' (one of the main characters has childhood memories of the Exxon Valdez disaster) in which a radical left-wing environmentalist movement has joined forces with the religious right through a shared distaste for modern technology. The resulting bipartisan conspiracy has gained control of the US government and imposed draconian luddite laws which, in attempts to curb global warming, have ironically brought about the greatest environmental catastrophe in recorded history - an ice age which may eventually escalate into a Snowball Earth."

Nope.
posted by djeo at 6:19 AM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Pournelle's fiction was always bad - even as a teenager I found his more politically slanted books boring and offensive. I was a big fan of Niven's earlier work, and blamed Pournelle for ruining him (although I do have good memories of The Mote in Gods Eye, probably the best thing that either of them were involved in together or apart). Their collaborations got progressively worse as time went on.

Scfi has always had a spectrum of political thought but the vein of right-wing crypto fascism has always run deep, something Michael Moorcock railed against in his Starship Stormtroopers essay.

I think there is something about the form of scifi that encourages such stories - rugged individualists railing against aliens that can easily be analogues for groups of humans the author (or reader) doesn't like. A lot of fantasy is even worse, with hordes of sub-human's lining up to be put to the sword.

The sad fact is that people like these kinds of stories and always have - I myself enjoy a good splatted alien or decapitated orc as much as anyone. But sensitive and skillful writers are aware of how these stories can look and can mitigate the offensive interpretations. Even Tolkein, who gets a lot of flack, was careful to say that the "evil" races were corrupted or mislead and has his heroes show mercy and forgiveness, which is a start in the right direction.

The problem with Pournelle is that he was smart enough to know the implications of what he was saying but deliberately pushed it even further. I am all for the Death of Authorship, but it is clear Pournelle was just an arse.
posted by AndrewStephens at 6:25 AM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

Are there any interesting conservative contemporary science fiction writers, currently? Is there much out there apart from military-based escapism or sterile hard sci-fi? It's just hard to picture much of a vision in conservatives, since most of them seem to only look backwards.

I haven't really looked into (nor do I really plan to) the er, Puppies. What kind of thing do they write about? Are they just rehashing the old stuff?
posted by picea at 6:32 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

wenestvedt: "(I did like Niven's "Gil the ARM" scifi mysteries.)"

Even those were based on the idea that the prison system acted as an organ farm for the elite and Niven seemed to see that as a good thing. There are jokes about lowering the bar for capital punishment in response to demand for transplant organs.
posted by octothorpe at 6:55 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Are there any interesting conservative contemporary science fiction writers, currently?

Well, Gene Wolfe is conservative, in a way that's pretty orthogonal to the Puppy crowd. But he hasn't really written anything good for some time now.
posted by Chrysostom at 7:24 AM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

Having skimmed the piece, the whole thing strikes me as a fairly facile attempt to link the death of a controversial writer to today's fucked-up politics. I mean, I don't disagree with the general take on Pournelle, nor the take on libertarian sci-fi, but the key assertion: that the books constitute "the roots" of the far right (rather than both being the epiphenomena of deeper historical circumstances) is silly. Sensors indicate a hot take directly ahead of us.

in 1949 F&SF came along and Galaxy in 1950 and between them they promoted a much more open, liberal, and literary version of the field (Bradbury, Kuttner, Bester, Sturgeon, etc.).

Except for attending cons for a few years, I was never involved in SF fandom, but I read a shitload of it between the ages of 10 and 20+, and looking at the recent discussions of Pournelle and Niven is a little like looking at a genre that I don't recognize. My knowledge of Niven's work is limited to Ringworld and some of the short stories. I only know Pournelle through Oath of Fealty (which I'm not sure I ever finished), his SDI advocacy, and his blogging career. I spent my tweens reading authors like Bradbury, Le Guin, L'Engle, the Heinlein juveniles; my early teens on a lot of Asimov, Clarke, Simak, Vance, Herbert, Tolkien, Lee, McCaffery, McKillip, Kurtz (that's what HBO needs, a Deryni series), MacIntyre, Zelazny; and my later teens/early twenties on the New Wavers. Basically, my early interest tracks more Ballantine adult fantasy meets Asmovian "Golden Age"; my later interest more Dangerous Visions. The "hard stuff" just never appealed to me, less for political reasons, I imagine, than because a lot of it just didn't seem weird enough.

As a dorky teenager in the eighties I got Niven's autograph at a convention in SLC. He was kind of crabby.

I met Jack Vance once and he was delightful. He went through my copy of Fantastic Science-Fiction Art, 1926-1954 and signed the covers his stories appeared in.
posted by octobersurprise at 7:39 AM on September 21, 2017 [12 favorites]

> "Are there any interesting conservative contemporary science fiction writers, currently?"

Yes, of course. Gene Wolfe has already been mentioned. Vernor Vinge. Brandon Sanderson, if you want to extend it to SFF generally. Probably a number of others whose politics I know nothing about.

I can think of more terrible ones, though, it's true. I think the problem is that "conservative" in the U.S. is coming more and more to mean something like Pournelle's brand of strident batshit lunatic racist kill-the-liberals hatemongering. That doesn't make for good writing. Or a sane society.
posted by kyrademon at 7:51 AM on September 21, 2017 [9 favorites]

the prison system acted as an organ farm for the elite and Niven seemed to see that as a good thing. There are jokes about lowering the bar for capital punishment in response to demand for transplant organs.

Yeah, while Niven is not exactly a subtle writer, I think this manages a profoundly incorrect reading/recollection of those stories.

The ridiculously lowered bar for capital punishment is not a joke, it's sort of the point of the setting--it's supposed to be a reductio ad absurdum. The reader's reaction to forced transplants (and of course organlegging) is supposed to be one of horror. Or at least distaste, Niven didn't do actual emotional responses well. I think it's obvious in the main stories but he's said as much in essays. There's also a story, for example, where a convicted traffic violator facing the death penalty commits a real crime in a fit of rage and the attitude is, well, at least the punishment now makes sense.

There's an anti-democratic thread, but it's the opposite of what you said. The system is not run for the elite, it's the masses who keep voting elevating lower and lower crimes into capital offenses so there's a bigger supply of organs. So it's a 'unintended consequences of too much state power' parable and also a fear of the masses voting themselves things they aren't smart enough to supply themselves.
posted by mark k at 8:07 AM on September 21, 2017 [13 favorites]

I don't think that it's always so easy to pigeonhole various SF writers, especially given how people change over their lives and careers. Starship Troopers wasn't the last book that Heinlein wrote over his career, by a long shot, and he may have decided to participate in Pournelle's Citizen Advisory Council on National Space Policy in an attempt to modulate their recommendations, although if he did, it seems to have not worked. Whatever good that Drake did with Redliners, he also co-authored a book with the execrable Newt Gingrich. (Looking up info on Redliners, which I have not read, I note that the enemy aliens are nicknamed "Spooks.") The guy who made a teenage girl the protagonist of the third book in his signature trilogy was also the guy who sexually assaulted women at cons and joked about it. &c., &c., land of contrasts. But Pournelle was pretty consistent about it for some period of time, and Ted Beale and his goons have gone beyond the moral event horizon as well.
posted by Halloween Jack at 8:27 AM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

I think that's a big error lumping Drake in with Niven and Pournell.

My apologies: even though Drakes "Hammer's Slammers" wasn't very sophisticated literature, it's still better than what I confused it with -- which is Eric Flint and his series of "1632" novels.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:32 AM on September 21, 2017

languagehat:

Gingrich and Pournelle are not in any way representative of "classic science fiction," and to lump all sf writers before, what, Octavia Butler? together as "Old White Dudes" is offensive and wrong.

Well, yes, I do know that there were people who weren't Old White Dudes writing scifi back then -- but it was my discovery of Le Guin and McCaffrey and R. A. MacAvoy and other non-O.W.D.s that I am specifically talking about: my eyes opening to what was already there, you know?

The row of bookshelves at Odegard Books and Hungry Mind Bookstore where they put the scifi & fantasy was heavily O.W.D.s when I was a kid browsing with no guidance. So I stuck to the names I already knew from my older brothers' books: Tolkien and Niven. But the more I read, the more I realized that other authors there had a different perspective. Oh, "Quag Keep" felt like a TSR product, but "A Wizard of Earthsea" was very eye-opening to me, and those Deryni books were way different (where else did an altar boy like me see church stuff in paperbacks?).

I'm sorry for coming off as ignorant but back then I definitely was.
posted by wenestvedt at 8:35 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

... still better than what I confused it with -- which is Eric Flint and his series of "1632" novels.

There is no possible way you think that socialist labor union organizer Eric Flint is a right-wing white nationalist, so I am certain you must be talking about about the writing of his first published novel, "1632", produced at night while he was still a machinist in a Chicago factory. It is full of bad writing, including probably the most cringe inducingly awful sex scene I've ever read, as well as many other rookie mistakes. So yes, I will give you that.

But he did get better at writing, which many authors do. And he has the sense to frequently collaborate with better prose writers, which improves his work. But to me, the really interesting thing about this socialist author is that he took the dramatic step of opening his universe up to other writers, including amateurs, thus simultaneously creating a new market for his own work while monetizing his fanfiction. The total corpus of 1632 material is said to be over five (nine?) million words now. It is a really fascinating story worthy of an FPP.
posted by seasparrow at 8:52 AM on September 21, 2017 [10 favorites]

> my eyes opening to what was already there, you know?

Yeah, sorry, I didn't mean to come off as attacking you personally or your comment in particular, I was just pushing back against a general attitude I see a lot of these days (get off my lawn). We were all young and ignorant once!
posted by languagehat at 8:53 AM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

I wasn't.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:55 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Judith Tarr had a good re-read of the first two Deryni trilogies over at Tor recently.

tl;dr: Alaric's a dick, Camber is *really* a dick, and they aren't so great on the female agency. Admittedly, Deryni Rising came out in 1970.
posted by Chrysostom at 8:57 AM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Correcting and amending the record, I recall that I also read Niven's A World Out of Time. And despite Gerald Jonas' complaint that "Niven describes everything in the toneless accents of a tour guide on a fall foliage caravan," I loved it, especially the dying Earth setting of the last half.
posted by octobersurprise at 9:20 AM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

I went looking for the Oath of Fealty catch-phrase "Evolution in Action" to sum up my discomfort at Niven and Pournelle's politics, and found this:

Jerry Pournelle is well known to take credit for everything that isn't nailed down (and has also been known to carry a pry bar for the rest). He is never a reliable source for such things.

There were a few books of theirs I really liked, though. The Moat in God's Eye, despite its Malthusian overtones, is a great tragedy.
posted by Coventry at 9:25 AM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Or at least, it was when I was a teenager. I haven't read it in over two decades, but I read it many times, BITD.
posted by Coventry at 9:27 AM on September 21, 2017

Actually, that brings to mind another childhood favorite of mine, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, the first "adult" book I read. I read it over and over, and loved it. A few years ago, when I noticed a meetup book club was going to discuss it, I re-read it so I could attend. It was embarrassingly bad. Probably the most prominently icky political moment was when one of the sympathetic characters insists on referring to the US Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression." As a pre-adolescent then adolescent boy in Australia, I had no idea about the political implications of that. The gender relations in the book are also messed up, though not quite as harmfully as in Heinlein's later work.
posted by Coventry at 9:41 AM on September 21, 2017 [5 favorites]

I came to join the line up of people who read Niven and Pournelle as a teenager, but I stalled on this sentence in TFA

"But conservative techno-futurist Newt Gingrich sees Trump ..." .

How/when did Newt become a "techno-futurist" rather than conservative politician? Gah.

Also, I have never read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series because until recently I mixed it up with the Ringworld Engineers, the first book I ever threw at the wall.
posted by Measured Out my Life in Coffeespoons at 12:00 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Also, I have never read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series because until recently I mixed it up with the Ringworld Engineers, the first book I ever threw at the wall.

That has to be one of the most tragic sentences I've ever read, in the "describing a tragedy" sense.
posted by seyirci at 12:06 PM on September 21, 2017 [17 favorites]

the recent awards fusses have demonstrated that only time will take care of them. :7()

I think the Sad/Rabid Puppies slow executive the opposite- many of them are in their 30s and 40s.

Anyway, every 20 years or so we get a chorus of articles about "Now even WOMEN are writing science fiction! ", and them there's a more or less visible backlash against "literary" SF. And then the current wave of non-white conservative male writers will be forgotten. Take the Cyberpunk movement: it was self described as an attempt to "make SF fun again", as a reaction to the feminist and socially conscious New Wave movement. * And how many of the women writers of the 70s do we remember?

So it's not just a matter of Olds dying off- we have to see this as a deliberate fight against the reactionary, sexist and racist faction of SF fandom. Otherwise in 20 years well have another spate of "Women! Now writing Science Fiction! " articles, and " Best of Science Fiction" lists that list 19 men snd Ursula K LeGuin.
posted by happyroach at 12:34 PM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

Given the connection between right-wing/libertarian/authoritarian scifi and the Republican Party, and the connections between the current Republican slate and Russia (Trump, for one, but also the likes or Russian Representative Rohrabacher, named in the essay, no less), and Putinist Russia's doctrines being informed by the fascist/reactionary ideology of the likes of Aleksandr Dugin, I'm wondering if the circle closes. Whether the path that goes back to Russia via the neoreactionary Right abuts against the Russian Cosmist mysticism from which Transhumanism originated.
posted by acb at 12:46 PM on September 21, 2017

Probably the most prominently icky political moment was when one of the sympathetic characters insists on referring to the US Civil War as the "War of Northern Aggression." As a pre-adolescent then adolescent boy in Australia, I had no idea about the political implications of that

I'd say that the most prominently icky political moment is when the rebels simply publish the names of suspected Authority informers and let the mob do to them what it wishes. And that's not the book's first, or the last, instance of mob justice as I recall. IMO, what's odious about Moon isn't that it celebrates Neo-Confederatism—which it doesn't as I recall—what's odious is its embrace of a juvenile anti-authoritarianism where "rebellion" appears to be whatever someone can con, sucker, deceive, or force someone else into doing and "authority" is whatever keeps one from doing so. As I recall, nearly everyone in the book is running/trying to run some kind of con, or grift, or scam, all justified by the revelations and assistance of a super-intelligent AI (substitute "destiny," "History," or "the will of the People" as you wish). If it didn't seem so evidently pleased with itself, you could almost read it as a satire of revolution.

All that said, I do remember being entertained by Moon when I read it the first time, tho, the idea that the Moon would be exporting agricultural products to the Earth strained the credulity of even a 16 year old.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:17 PM on September 21, 2017 [6 favorites]

Also also, as I recall, doesn't Mike initially help the rebels because "it's fun"? If so, points to Heinlein for anticipating computer-assisted revolution for the lulz.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:24 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

I think Moon is usually cast as the last book where Heinlein wrote well - separate from politics, just in terms of plotting and prose. After this, he was bad politically AND in terms of writing ability.
posted by Chrysostom at 1:32 PM on September 21, 2017 [3 favorites]

A last thought, off the top of my head: if I were going to draw a through line connecting (US) science fiction to current political circumstances, it wouldn't be necessarily a line of fascism, authoritarianism, or racism—tho all that would be implicit in much of it—it would be a line of hucksterism, woo, chicanery, and charlatanism. I mean, American sci-fi starts with pulp writers trying to make a buck, continues through square-jawed inventors, self-proclaimed geniuses, and space real estate developers, on to Hubbardian cults, Heinleinian gurus, and on to the apocalypticism of Pournelle and the like, played out in some cases on the actual political stage.
posted by octobersurprise at 1:58 PM on September 21, 2017 [7 favorites]

Gotta work John W. Campbell in there, for sure.
posted by Chrysostom at 2:04 PM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

picea:

Gene Wolfe is the canonical example of a great contemporary conservative SFF writer. His stuff still contains a fair bit of unexamined misogyny, but he's a fantastic prose stylist and his stories are amazing. He's also getting pretty old, though, so unlikely to be a contemporary author for too many more years, unfortunately.
posted by adrienneleigh at 2:07 PM on September 21, 2017 [1 favorite]

Gingrich claimed that there was gold on the moon and that, as president, he would create a base there to mine it. I think he got this idea from the Dick Tracy comic strip when Chester Gould went through a Moon Phase. I remember people in 1965 or so believing this notion. And, back around the same time, John Campbell had an essay in Astounding (Analog, then?) talking about urban riots. The problem was, he said, all those agricultural workers who had gone to the city; they should be shipped back to Mississippi to work in the fields. Mr. Technology had apparently never heard of mechanical cotton-pickers. So much for being a Seer. These guys were the very definition of the Engineer's Fallacy, but constructed with faulty premises. There is definitely a link between bad SF and bad politics.
posted by CCBC at 2:54 PM on September 21, 2017 [4 favorites]

If it didn't seem so evidently pleased with itself, you could almost read it as a satire of revolution.

Oh, it's definitely that. There's even the Animal Farm twist at the end where all the leaders who take over after the Professor dies turn out to be a bunch of pricks that Manny and the rest turn their back on.
posted by tobascodagama at 6:42 PM on September 21, 2017

I think Andy Weir may be moderately conservative, though it's very hard to tell, because he wants nothing to do with online SF&F "conservatives" and generally is very quiet about politics. On the fantasy side, Sanderson and Butcher are conservative, but rational- not John C. Wright frothing Brain Eater levels of conservative.

One will also note, that in contrast to the Sad/Rabid puppies, all of the above are competent writers. There's probably a connection to be made there...
posted by happyroach at 9:05 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Also, I have never read Terry Pratchett's Discworld series because until recently I mixed it up with the Ringworld Engineers, the first book I ever threw at the wall.
posted by Measured Out my Life in

Oh, I'm so sorry for you! please run out and read Pratchett, he will make you feel wonderful! (and sometimes sad, and always thoughtful and occasionally in awe). He's the most human of writers - always thinking about the humanity of his characters.
posted by jb at 9:38 PM on September 21, 2017 [2 favorites]

Sanderson's prose is really lousy, though, and his extremely systematized magic reads like someone jacking off to AD&D 1e. I'd never put him on a list of great conservative writers. Wolfe is really the only decent prose stylist among them, unless you count Mark Helprin, who wrote one great arguably-genre novel (Winter's Tale).
posted by adrienneleigh at 10:04 PM on September 21, 2017

octothorpe: I think Niven's thoughts on forced organ donation aren't completely sympathetic.
He has a book "A Gift from Earth" where the titular gift is the technology to create cultured organs. This gift helps free a colony from a despotism that is even more extreme in the use of the death penalty with forced organ donation. The regime using this to maintain power is clearly portrayed as evil.
posted by jclarkin at 6:00 AM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

But to be fair (I say after reading th wikipedia synopsys of AGfE), AGfE is a clearly problamatical work even if it shows Niven wasn't all for forced organ donation.
posted by jclarkin at 6:08 AM on September 22, 2017

Loved Ringworld; don't know that I was aware enough at 13 to catch Niven's politics. I recently tried to re-read some H. Beam Piper and was immediately turned off by how knee-jerk conservative everything is. Although the Fuzzies are a bit of a reminder that conservative and conservationist weren't historically antagonistic positions.
posted by aspersioncast at 8:51 AM on September 22, 2017

Oh, man, I recently read H Beam Piper's Space Viking and it pretty much wound up being a hate-read. It was written not long after, and clearly in reaction to, World War 2. It was anti-democracy (you see, too much democracy leads to apocalyptic despotism), anti-compassion, and hid anti-semitism behind a paper-thin metaphor.
posted by adamrice at 10:22 AM on September 22, 2017

Even those were based on the idea that the prison system acted as an organ farm for the elite and Niven seemed to see that as a good thing. There are jokes about lowering the bar for capital punishment in response to demand for transplant organs.

He definitely does not see it as a good thing (or a joke, necessarily). See the story where he first explored the concept. How the politics of that story should be taken is another question.
posted by atoxyl at 4:32 PM on September 22, 2017 [1 favorite]

Newt Gingrich has been a technocrat mostly in the traditional sense for all of his adult life, as far as I can tell. His affiliations over his political career have been pretty head-scratching at times when you think of him that way, but then again he's a liberal arts guy (he was a history scholar before getting into politics) who believes himself to be most deserving of making national leadership contingent on STEM credentials.

He is pretty big, he contains a lot of things.
posted by ardgedee at 8:34 AM on September 23, 2017

Nearly all of them bad.

Remember his book? Baen apparently took a huge bath on it.
posted by Chrysostom at 9:19 AM on September 23, 2017 [2 favorites]