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 think its interesting, though I think the post is conflating the ideas of conservatism and the ideas of libertarianism which are not the same thing despite the occasionally overlapping Venn diagram.  I also think there’s really no “trend” insofar that there’s always been a really strong libertarian streak in SF.

However Mr.Card (hailing from the far conservative side of that Venn diagram) does give a quip worthy of William F. Buckley Jr.

“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.”

UPDATE: Eric S. Raymond in the comments says exactly my point:

SF is not a conservative literature at all, but it gets mistaken for one because libertarianism is wired deep into its DNA. In fact, it is structurally *impossible* for SF to be conservative! I have explained this in depth, with references, in my essay A Political History of SF.

The “rightward drift” is SF’s fundamental libertarianism asserting itself as left-wing gatekeepers in the establishment media become less able to suppress it. People who mistake this as a reassertion of conservatism are revealing their own confusion about the ways conservatism and libertarianism are mixed in their thinking.

Burkean conservativism tends to be skeptical of change, always asking first, “will it make things worse?” This isn’t a bad question to ask in and of itself, but we’re immured a period of change unprecedented in human history (it kicked off around the 1650s; its end is not yet in sight) and basing your policies on what you can see in your rear-view mirror leaves you open to driving over unforseen pot-holes.

I tend to see the false dilemma created by assuming that conservative policies are the only ones that fail to forsee potholes. I mean, look at all the great centralized economies of the 20th Century. But that’s neither here nor there.  What Stross would like to see is an attempt to deal with the future in a positive manner:

We need — quite urgently, I think — plausible visions of where we might be fifty or a hundred or a thousand years hence: a hot, densely populated, predominantly urban planetary culture that nevertheless manages to feed everybody, house everybody, and give everybody room to pursue their own happiness without destroying our resource base.

Ok, I can see that.  But even that paragraph starts radiating the inherent bias that gives the lie to the final clause.  All Utopias, since they ARE the solution, are synthetic monocultures that accept no dissent.  The above essentially tells us in this particular “Utopian” vision, we all must adapt to densely-packed urban living.  Those who much prefer to live in a small town or rural environment would be SOL when it comes to peruse their happiness.  But we can fix that, by controlling the population…  Ooops, now we have China.

The problem is inherent in one of Stross’ premises:

[...] we should be able to create a new golden age of utopian visions. A global civilization appears to be emerging for the first time. It’s unstable, unevenly distributed, and blindly fumbling its way forward. But we have unprecedented tools for sharing information; slowly developing theories of behavioural economics, cognitive bias, and communications that move beyond the crudely simplistic (and wrong) 19th century models of perfectly rational market actors [...]

There is the assumption that some universal global order is inevitable and in some sense desirable. It’s neither. It is not inevitable because the cultural and societal norms across the entire planet are divergent enough that a truly universal social order is only going to be possible by either making it so diffuse as to be largely irrelevant, or so powerful that it can crush the outlying populations into a thin paste. It is not desirable because you are giving your whole social order a single point of failure. With a single global order, you insure that when things finally go pear-shaped (and the one immutable rule of history is that things will) it takes down the whole planet with it. Our current series of crises are a demonstration of the principle: If Greece had bankrupted itself fifty years ago, no one would have cared.

So one answer to Stross’ final lament:

Because historically, when a civilization collapsed, it collapsed in isolation: but if our newly global civilization collapses, what then …?

Is to say, “don’t put all your eggs in that particular basket.”

I have a environment without a human POV, everything is from the perspective of my aliens.  Because of this I have, writ large, the problem you have in a 1st person story of describing the protagonist.  When you’re writing from the POV of an alien species, they generally aren’t going to conveniently think of their morphology for the reader’s benefit.  Also, the old trick of passing a character in front of a mirror isn’t going to work, because these guys do not have eyes as such.  They have overdeveloped echolocation and some limited sense of heat/IR radiation.  It is literally impossible for these creatures to perceive themselves as human would.  But I’m trying to give a human reader a mental image of what they “look” like, from within that alien POV.

Oh, then we have pronouns in English used for a species where gender is a completely social construct independent of biology. . .

Fun ways to my my job difficult.

Friday, Oct 29, at 10pm – 1am, join me and authors Lucy A. Snyder, Gary A. Braunbeck, Linda Robertson, Laura Bickle, Maurice Broaddus, Melissa Long, Seressia Glass, and editor Jason Sizemore for an urban fantasy themed party at the WFC convention! (Info on Facebook here.)  There will be booze and cookies.

Saturday, Oct 30, at 11am-1pm, I will be at a humongous mass author signing at the OSU Campus Bookstore 1598 N. High Street, Columbus, OH, 43201.  This is open to the public, so if you’re in the area stop by even if you aren’t attending WFC.  (Facebook info here.)

How humongous is it?  Here’s a list of attendees:

1. Ari Berk
2. Beth Bernobich
3. C.L. Wilson
4. Carol Berg
5. Catherynne Valente
6. Cinda Chima
7. Dan Wells
8. Darrell Schweitzer
9. Dave Sakmyster
10. Delia Sherman
11. Elizabeth Vaughan
12. Ellen Klages
13. Ellen Kushner
14. James Enge
15. Jess Granger
16. Jim Hines
17. Joe Haldeman
18. John (J.A.) Pitts
19. Laura Bickle / Alayna Williams
20. Laura Resnick
21. Linda Robertson
22. Lucy Snyder
23. Marie Brennan
24. Mary Robinette Kowal
25. M K Hobson
26. Paige Cuccaro / Alison Paige
27. S. Andrew Swann
28. S. L. Farrell (aka Stephen Leigh)
29. Sam Sykes
30. Seressia Glass

Hope to see people there.

Here are three of the most memorable anti-heroes in written SF/F, at least the three that come most readily to my mind when the question comes up.

First is Slippery Jim DiGriz of the Stainless Steel Rat series by Harry Harrison. He is the classic example of the lovable rogue, a criminal who is more or less tricked into working for the good guys. Con-man, interplanetary criminal, smooth-talking and charming, and aside from drawing the line at killing people, he’s pretty much without a moral compass at all. In fact, in one of the early books, he goes into a long expository explanation of how robbing a bank is actually a perfectly fine thing to do.

Second we have Elric of Melniboné by Michael Moorcock. If you want memorable, this guy is memorable. In fact, in the whole cannon of SF/F literature, Elric is one of the few characters where the word “unique” is an accurate description. A physical weakling, an albino who needs to take drugs to maintain his strength, emperor of a dying civilization; Elric is not just an anti-hero, he is pretty much the antithesis of any other typical sword and sorcery character. In any other fantasy series, Elric would be the antagonist (and he’d be a bitching one.) He also carries around possibly one of the nastier artifacts created in fantasy fiction.

Lastly, we have Severian from the Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe. The world he inhabits is strange and fascinating, and he is a rather dark guide. In a genre where there are sympathetic assassins galore, here we have a guy who tortures people as a vocation, and who’s point of disgrace is when he allows one of his victims to kill themselves. That’s kind of hard-core. Also carries a kick-ass sword.

Read the other contributions here.

“In other words: space colonization is implicitly incompatible with both libertarian ideology and the myth of the American frontier.”

Okay then.  I guess it should come as no surprise that I think he’s wrong.  Or, should I say, half wrong.

I think I’ll first address the point wherein I think he’s got it right.  He points out, correctly, that space colonization is horrendously expensive in time and resources, the infrastructure needed to independently maintain a technological civilization is pretty damn huge, and the nature of a space borne environment means that voting with one’s feet is pretty much off the table.  Thus he’s quite correct that any analogies to the American frontier are waaaaaay off the mark.  Unfortunately, there’s a bit of a strawman there because this also means the same thing about analogies with the Australian frontier, or the Age of Exploration, or any other historical migration/invasion/colonization you might want to name ever since our Australopithecus ancestors walked out of Africa.  This is for two reasons, one he mentions and one he doesn’t.  Every other historical migration of humans from point A to point B involved a point B that was largely habitable and could support a population on its own.  The point he doesn’t mention is that every human migration also had a motive of somehow exploiting point B for the profit of those migrating: be it better farmland, more slaves, gold, oil, or just some real estate to put between them and the folks who wanted to steal their stuff.

Where he gets it wrong is the following:

I postulate that the organization required for such exploration is utterly anathema to the ideology of the space cadets, because the political roots of the space colonization movement in the United States rise from taproots of nostalgia for the open frontier that give rise to a false consciousness of the problem of space colonization. In particular, the fetishization of autonomy, self-reliance, and progress through mechanical engineering — echoing the desire to escape the suffocating social conditions back east by simply running away — utterly undermine the program itself and are incompatible with life in a space colony (which is likely to be at a minimum somewhat more constrained than life in one of the more bureaucratically obsessive-compulsive European social democracies, and at worst will tend towards the state of North Korea in Space).

This is where he makes a mistake that I fear is endemic in popular political thought on the left; the idea that since libertarianism cannot abide collectivism and believes in a minimal State, it must therefore be a philosophy of social nihilism that opposes any and all collective action, organization, or rules.  (How often I hear, “But don’t you approve of traffic laws?” in a self-congratulatory tone.)  This, to put it mildly, is bullshit.  The libertarian ideology is NOT incompatible with life in a space colony, however draconian the rules of survival need be, as long as the colony is a privately run enterprise and the inhabitants were all there by their own choice, and aren’t living off the threat of force to appropriate the resources needed for their survival. But that scenario runs counter to the unstated assumption that it is impossible to have a massive organized effort of people and resources of the kind required to build a space colony without a State-run effort appropriating, by force, the resources and manpower to do it.  That is also bullshit.  If there is a significant enough return to be had on the investment, a private entity can act with the resources and organization of a State.  (Though, given the corporatist post-fascist globalized world we all live in, the most likely scenario is the corporate hijacking of the State’s monopoly on force to have the State appropriate the resources to invest in space exploration adventures on their behalf, therefore minimizing their own risks by spreading it among the entire taxpaying population, sort of like the banking industry— of course someone will use that as a critique of capitalism and call for more State control of the effort, giving yet more power to the symbiotic State-corporate entity, which is so completely missing the fucking point my head wants to explode…)

The primary reason that neither State nor corporation has built anything remotely like the space colonies envisioned in SF is because there’s absolutely no compelling reason for them to do so.  So far the only profitable uses we’ve found for space is communicating long distances and spying on the enemy.  Neither of which requires a manned presence.  As I said above, every human migration from point A to point B also had a motive of somehow exploiting point B for the profit of those migrating.  So one might as well just say that such colonization— at least until there is some substantial profit in the enterprise— is anathema to human nature.

On the Writing panel:

Signing books (note the cat-shaving battle scars):

]]> http://www.sandrewswann.com/blog/2010/07/me-beard.html/feed 1 http://www.sandrewswann.com/blog/2010/07/tying-the-whole-thing-together.html http://www.sandrewswann.com/blog/2010/07/tying-the-whole-thing-together.html#comments Thu, 08 Jul 2010 11:08:30 +0000 S Andrew Swann http://www.sandrewswann.com/?p=2653 I’ve been light blogging the past few weeks because, even though I’m done with Messiah, I’m not done with Messiah.  Even though the draft is finished (so no one needs to worry about me pulling a Robert Jordon) I’m still in the midst of going through and polishing off the edges of the draft.  I’ll also have one last pass after Sheila at DAW gives me her two cents.  I’ve seen the cover art, and I think it rocks.  All-in-all, I’m rather happy with it.  Especially since, when I began it, I wasn’t thinking of it as the capstone to the whole Moreau/Confederacy universe.  Now I know that it is, I’m very happy I put Nickolai in there.  To a certain extent, he may be the most important character in the entire series of ten books, since he’s a personification of nearly every theme I’ve been using since Forests of the Night. (In fact, you can think of Nick’s conflict with Adam in Apotheosis as a reflection of Nohar’s much smaller-scale conflict with Adam’s precursors in Forests.)

He gets a worthy send off.

One of the better ways to play wit it is to search for a book/movie/tv series you happen to like (or are just familiar with), and scroll down to the section listing what tropes it provides examples of.  Here are some choice entries to get you started:

• Stupid Jetpack Hitler.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever.
• Milkman Conspiracy.
• Deus Sex Machina.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?

Me, I teared up during the episode, had a bit of a WTF when Christian opened up his mouth at the end, and spent a good long time afterward thinking that was so weak.  Originally, I was going to write a blog post about how I would have ended the whole thing better. . .  And the more I thought about it, the more I realized that I wasn’t giving the show and the writers enough credit.  This ending was telegraphed from the start.  After all, with the constant visitations by the dead, one of the commonest theories about the island the first few seasons was that it was some portal to the afterlife.  The sfnal trappings only really appeared in the middle seasons— the first season, like the last, was much more supernatural in feel.  It’s also obvious in the motifs they used; remember Locke staring down into the light in the first season?  As well as the faith vs. reason battle that began with Jack and Locke (which became more and more faith vs. nihilism) which was repeated throughout the series with Ben vs. Whitmore, Dharma vs. the Others, Jacob vs. Smokey, and ended with Jack and pseudo-Locke in mirrored roles.  The last season mirrored the first even by reversing the original fan theory by making the Island the “real world” and “flash-sideways” the afterlife.

Love or hate the ending, this is where Lost was going from the start.  And, while I may have some issues with how they ended, I don’t think I could do a better one.  Not without re-writing most of the whole last season.

And the more I think of it, the more I think they did a pretty good job with what might have been an impossible task.  (I mean, when some of the more strident complaints are “Sayid and Shannon?  You’re kidding me.  They ruined it.” methinks there’s not a lot of deep thinking going on.)  It probably would have been a first magnitude error to whip the curtain completely away, because whatever explicit reveal you did on the nature of the island would never have lived up to the mystery in everyone’s head.  In fact, if there was a fault, it was probably going into the light cave.  After thinking about it, the one change I might do now would be to rewrite things so that we never see exactly what’s going on down there.  Just have Desmond describe it when they pull him back up.

That, and I’d rewrite Christian’s speech.  I still think it was kind of lame.

Thanks to an NPR article we have a concept worthy of a Phillip K Dick novel, with Orwellian commentary that should scare the crap out of you if you have any imagination— or remember the CIA’s history dealing with other chemical substances.

The money quote:

Does Biology Affect Our Trust In Government?

Zak first got interested in trust more than a decade ago after co-authoring a study that looked at trust levels in different nations and their economic stability. The study found that the higher the level of trust, the better the economic status of the nation.

The work got Zak thinking more generally about different ways to manipulate trust, and so starting in 2001, Zak began spraying oxytocin up the noses of college students to see if the hormone would change the way they interacted with strangers.

It did. Squirt oxytocin up the nose of a college kid, and he’s 80 percent more likely to distribute his own money to perfect strangers.

The coolest robots in SF? That’s a tall order. The field is vast, including everything from the ambulatory logical puzzle machines of Isaac Asimov’s Robot stories, to the Cylons of BSG. Gort to Wall-E. It’s almost an impossible task to narrow it down…But, if we agree that we’re talking about “coolness”, I think it becomes a little easier. If we define cool in the sense that ninjas, Harleys and dinosaurs are cool, and in the way that a ninja dinosaur riding a Harley is way cooler, well I think we can narrow things down a bit (I mean, Wall-E is cute, and cute <> cool).

So my three coolest robots:

• Bender from Futurama. Bender is anti-social, lecherous, dishonest, and hard-drinking. His only visible means of support is grand larceny. His evil twin is the good guy. If Han Solo was a robot, he’d be Bender, and he’d kick C3P0′s metrosexual ass.
• The Terminator, from the movie, natch. The Terminator defines cool for cinematic ass-kicking robotdom. The opening scene has him walking up to a set of Doomed Punks™ bare ass naked, and rips a guy’s stomach out for the poor schlub’s clothes. He dresses in a motorcycle jacket, carries an arsenal, wears a badass pair of shades- after doing home surgery on his own eyeball- and, after delivering one of the most quoted one-liners in cinema history, drives a truck into a police station before ventilating everyone in the place. And he’s a time-traveling robot from the future! That will always give bonus cool points.

And speaking of time-traveling robots from the future, there’s one robot cooler than the Terminator by at least five levels of Chuck Norris badassery (and please note that’s a logarithmic scale):

• The Shrike from Dan Simmons’ Hyperion and sequels. If Edward Scissorhands (another good robot, but emo, and emo<>cool) was a prophet, the Shrike would be his God. Here we have an near-omnipotent, near-invulnerable, time-traveling walking knife drawer that- if it doesn’t turn you into sushi while dodging every weapon that you throw at it- takes you home so it can impale you alive in its front yard where you get to writhe in agony forever while it looks on like the silent mega-badass it is.