Thu. May 31
Science Fiction Is Inherently Conservative
Editor’s note: This piece is part of a symposium in which a variety of writers and thinkers weigh in on the relationship between conservatism and pop culture.
Science Fiction Author Neal Stephenson
Acculturated: Can you think of good examples of conservatives doing pop culture and could you say a word or two about them?
Glenn Reynolds: Well, the notion that right-leaning pop culture is driven by politics but left-leaning pop culture is not is transparent twaddle. Leftist political messages have simply become so established in pop culture that people treat them as part of the wallpaper–which is, of course, the Gramscian strategy.
One place where conservatives–and particularly libertarians–do pop culture well is in the science fiction field. Authors like Sarah Hoyt, John Ringo, David Drake, and even Harry Turtledove produce excellent writing in the Robert Heinlein vein, which leans libertarian-right. And John Barnes is very capably reprising the brilliant Heinlein juvenile novels of the 1950s in a twenty-first century style.
Of course, academic-writing-seminar types have been proliferating in the science fiction world (often creeping in via fantasy) and some worry that they’ll ruin the field. But I don’t think so. There’s too much of a fan base for more traditional science fiction. In fact, with the new “Human Wave” movement of prohuman, protechnology science fiction, there’s big pushback against dreary literary antiheroes and dystopian futures. Likewise, though I don’t know how Neal Stephenson identifies politically, his Hieroglyph Project harkens back to the muscular science fiction of the Golden Age.
Acculturated: Why do you suppose conservatives do well in SF? Is there something about SF that lends itself to a conservative disposition?
Glenn Reynolds: Science fiction is inherently rational and forward-looking. That puts it at odds with contemporary liberalism.
Glenn Reynolds is the Beauchamp Brogan Distinguished Professor of Law at the University of Tennessee and blogs at Instapundit.
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I’ve known very left-leaning people writing science fiction who suddenly realized that if they applied what they wrote in their fictional universe to the real world; the attitudes, the reasoning, the decision making; it was the polar opposite of their real world political opinions.
I think, and not to be insulting toward them, that what happens is that removing events from the here and now removes the emotional wishful thinking of how the world ought to be. I can easily understand that someone would WANT very badly for there to be no good reason for war. I can easily understand that it would be a good thing if government programs actually worked to end suffering. etc.
Science fiction lets a writer go through the process of asking, “How would that really work? What would go wrong?”
Yes, this happens ALL THE TIME: the writer’s imagination proves to be wiser than his conscious mind. Compare Alison Lurie’s dreary doctrinaire feminist essays to her tough and clever deconstruction of many feminist tropes in the novel “The Truth about Lorin Jones.”
But the best example of all is Joss Whedon, who AFAIK is a typical entertainment-industry liberal, but whose work almost always illuminates either libertarian or, mirabile dictu, traditionalist perspectives.
Let me offer counter examples.
The Star Trek Federation looks so much like Utopian Fascism, the hoi polloi are well hidden and ruled by well meaning Technocrats, the cream of the Academy. All wealth seems to be shared. Maybe it’s a Socialist utopia, from each according to their ability.
The Star Wars universe is not conservative, it’s downright medieval, with princesses and emperors and hereditary wizard/warriors. Authoritarian is an understatement, nothing liberal about it.
Dune, ditto.
All we see of the Star Trek universe is from the POV of the military, government workers, and military families. It is an incomplete society.
While Star Wars is space fantasy, not scifi, I will go with it. The Republic became more and more centralized. It’s currency devalued to the point that worlds outside the Republic refused to accept it (in fact, the only thing I ever saw Republic Credits actually buying was booze). It was run by a relatively small bureaucratic clique under the advisement of an extra-legal religious cult that took children for indoctrination at a very early age and forbid the membership from having any loyalties other than to the cult. It devolved further, as such systems tend to, into dictatorship. In spite of the attempts to liberalize the storyline, Lucas created a liberal dystopia. It could thus be said to support conservative/libertarian viewpoints.
With the exception of the Dune novels, the foundation of everything you’re referring to is an expensive video production which has to pass many more gatekeepers than a book, and in general very liberal ones. (Star Wars is as I remember something of an exception because Lucas was fed up with working with “Hollywood”, but in that case after The Empire Strikes Back it’s entirely his creative work, right? And even then the movies required distribution. And he’s not a conservative, remember his legal actions with “Star Wars” and SDI, but only against conservatives?)
If I want to watch conservative, or at least non-liberal SF video, I watch Japanese animation (anime), the producers of it aren’t in thrall to Western political correctness etc.
That’s because Star Trek isn’t science fiction, but space opera.
That strikes me as a quibble. Is ‘Doc’ Smith’s Lensman series not Science Fiction? It’s certainly space opera!
Star Trek is definitely science fiction, but it’s not a very well-realized world. Because there have been so many writers for so many years, it’s not even a very consistent universe. In particular, the world gets really bogged down on the subject of economy. Once you noticed Star Trek consistently avoids showing the productive side of society, you can’t help but notice it. What’s the point of the Federation and those heavily armed capital ships if no one trades? How do you recruit new redshirts if “pay” is not even a concept? Why did the Romulans and the Klingons build their empires? How do they bring the resources to build those ships?
Without concepts like “expensive,” “profit,” “rich,” and “poor,” the Star Trek universe is always missing something, and indeed, when writers try to show some side of its universe other than “Find new aliens and solve whatever problem it is keeps the Enterprise from leaving,” the woeful inadequacy of the show’s core concept shows itself.
You correct. For Star Trek the background structure of government and society is irrelevant. The sole focus is the new Alien race encountered every episode. The focus is always on the structure and society of that new race, not on the social structures of the human race (which are always portrayed as being, somehow, frictionless, and nearly perfect without providing any details). Deep Space 9 was the only Star Trek series that delved into local economy and politics in any significant way. Apparently, you still had to buy and sell things in Deep Space 9, otherwise, what was the point of the Ferangi character and his bar. In other words, it wasn’t some kind of collectivist utopia, at least in that series. However, what exactly it was, and why different races were constantly going to war when the basic necessities of life (think food replicators) were universal is never explained.
@ Chris Green, great point.
I’ll add that DS-9 was created as a Star Trek alternative to Babylon 5. Since B-5 dealt with economics, DS-9 was forced to do the same. But, the whole Star Trek universe is built on economic ignorance, so the writers were poorly equipped to make DS-9 rational.
I remember when the Ferengi were introduced in Next Gen, and the sneering condescension from the Enterprise crew because the Ferengi were profiteers.
The Ferengi were always my favorite Star Trek characters because they were the only humans in the Trekkie universe.
It’s a post-scarcity world-the exact sort of thing that socialist utopians assume is necessary for their particular social order ideals to function. To the extent that conservatism provides an explanation for why some people should get to eat steak every day while others starve, it is obsolete in that context, but then so are the economic conditions that drive the need for such explanations in the first place. At the same time, one can imagine pulling a kind of virtue ethics out of Star Trek that is possibly conservative-personal excellence, after all, is a requirement to get into Star Fleet, not everyone can hack it, and there is a decidedly meritocratic cloud that hovers around the Enterprise especially.
Be carefull, Orwell wasn’t saying Big Brother was a good thing after all. I don’t think Herbert is saying Jihad is a good thing either and Star Wars is a poor example since on Naboo they elect a Queen you really can’t trust any labels.
Herbert’s writings come from the POV that ‘liberal’, ‘conservative’, ‘libertarian’, etc are ephemeral points of view, and that what’s really going on is a story unfolding over generations and centuries that has little to do with the wishes or fears of any of them. His SF is more realistic than much, for all the presence of psi powers, because he recognizes that underlying politics and economics are deeper and less tractable things like religion, culture, language, race, biology, etc that won’t go away and are more important in the long-term than economics. Herbert was not saying Jihad was good, he was saying that the underlying mechanisms that drive it are far deeper and less amenable to change than the dreamers of any stripe, left, right, libertarian, socialist, anything, want to believe, and that no matter how much time passes, human nature changes only slowly.
Star Trek and Star Wars universes did not come from Science Fiction literature, they were created by movie producers. The books were based on the movies and series, not the other way around. Thus, they don’t fit the kind of science fiction literature that Glen is referring to. With Dune, you bring up an interesting point. However, Dune isn’t liberal. The fact that the author chooses a feudal society in the future instead of some kind of democracy is because he at least entertains the idea that such an old fashion society will be end up being more stable and durable over future millennia. That may not be a modern conservative idea, per say, but it certainly isn’t a liberal idea and probably leans more right than left.
Frank Herbert once had a knowledgeable character muse, in one of his later books, that a liberal is someone with a head full of viscious notions, and a conservative is someone in love with the past. As for libertarianism, his characters tend to be extensively driven by subconscious motivations that make the idea of ‘rational individual’ seem ludicrous.
I think it’s fairer to say that HARD sf leans right. As you go further left, you find more “speculative fiction” (ie fantasy with sci fi trappings). It wasnt always this way. HG Wells was a leading light of liberalism, and writers like Asimov baked their ideology into hard sci fi. Those were the days of the New Deal era rationalists. Modern liberalism is very different, and there simply aren’t many anymore who are sufficiently numerate to write hard sf. Libertarian and conservatism have matured greatly since those days, even as liberalism has become corrupt and sclerotic.
“Science fiction is inherently rational…”
Well, no. That’s just silly. The topic in not ‘scientific literature’ and it does no good to confuse that with fiction. SciFi is inherently escapist, which perfectly aligns with Leftist predilections. (Everyone stuck in a Democrat hellhole dreams of escaping from it.)
I believe the good professor is searching for the word “analytical,” which certainly is at odds with Commie thinking. Generally in SciFi, the author chooses to alter some element of the world we were given, and analyze the broad effects. The story gets better when the alteration is small and the societal changes are large. This illustrates interesting things about how how our world really works.
The last thing a Lefty ever wants anyone to contemplate is how much better everything would be without Lefties. And that is exactly what most SciFi examines.
For those not aware of it, the Libertarian Futurist Society (http://www.lfs.org) annually awards the Prometheus Award for best libertarian science fiction of the year, and a Hall of Fame award for older libertarian science fiction. The 2011 Prometheus Award for Best Novel went to DARKSHIP THIEVES: the Hall of Fame award went to ANIMAL FARM. Check the LFS out; you may find it worth joining.
Here are the 2012 Prometheus finalists, if anyone feels inclined to check them out:
• The Children of the Sky (TOR Books) – Vernor Vinge
• The Freedom Maze (Small Beer Press) – Delia Sherman
• In the Shadow of Ares (Amazon Kindle edition) – Thomas L. James and Carl C. Carlsson
• Ready Player One (Random House) – Ernest Cline
• The Restoration Game (Pyr Books) – Ken MacLeod
• Snuff (Harper Collins) – Terry Pratchett
I would tend to agree with prior comments, here and elsewhere, that SF is more inherently Libertarian than Conservative.
Science fiction has to make sense——– reality doesn’t.
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There are exceptions, of course, in the so-called “New Wave” of the 60s, but on the whole I agree with Lloyd Biggle Jr. In an anthology of short stories that I read long ago, he characterized the difference between SF and mainstream literature like this, as best I can recall: Given a bunch of people stuck in a sewer, mainstream literature will describe, in loving detail, those who are content to stay there. SF will write about those trying to get out.
I like the line of reasoning that creating a world requires the writer to think through the consequences of certain structures and behaviors. I had always liked Star Trek but never realized it was and incomplete world until now, thanks for that comment. What I do get from the Dune’s intent is that Feudalism may be stable and likely to arise, but it reminds me that Freedom is a new concept and extremely fragile. I guess I assume that if inferior systems are at work in the future it’s because freedom was surrendered in the name of politics and/or apathy.
This is malarkey on stilts.
The science fiction I’ve read seems to all be written by disaffected nerds who were picked on in high school and use their characters as punching bags to get their frustration out. There is never any hope, the future is always bleak, and there always seems to be an “F-U” twist in there somewhere near the end to remind us that the good guys don’t always get to win. (They do this by never letting the good guys win).
The Hunger Games is only the latest example of this to go mainstream. Another recent example is how they wrapped up the Mass Effect trilogy. Then there’s any movie producted for the Sci Fi (sorry: SyFy) channel. Like, say, the Cube series. The heroes make sacrifices do great things, and the authors say “Hmmm, yeah. You lose anyway. Aren’t I deep for not having a ‘hollywood’ ending?”
Star Trek isn’t even considered Science FIction by the sort of people who read and write Science Fiction. Or at least that’s the impression I get from the exposure to people who like Science FIction with a capital S and a capital F.
Contrast that with the Fantasy genre, with Tolkien or Pratchett leading the way, and there’s a huge contrast. Honor, duty, sacrifice, and the bad guys are the ones that take it in the shorts in the end.
I’ll grant that much of what you write is sadly true, Greg; The Hunger Games was especially disappointing. (For the Love of Life Orchestra, all that suffering, all that heroism, all that love and devotion, and we get left with “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss” in effect?!) But that sort of thing is NOT the beginning and the end of it. In the original interview itself and many of the earlier posts here, there are recommendations of books and writers that are good reading, with solid emotional payoffs. Your best bet is to go to the Baen Books online free library, and graze at will: (www.baen.com/library)
It’s a little more complex. Tolkien, for ex, does write at a higher, more mature level than most SF (unlike too much modern fantasy who try to imitate his work without understanding it). That very fact, though, means that Tolkien does not do ‘happily ever after’. JRRT firmly believed in the Fall of Man, and it permeates everything he wrote. Thus the Dark Lord does take it in the shorts…but the price has to be paid. Frodo can never find rest or peace in his home again, he and Sam must go where they can not return. Arwen finds happiness with her True Love…for a very, very little while, as Elves know time, and she dies alone. The Elves must depart, the world must change and in some ways become less, and there’s no way out of it.
One of the reasons JRRT’s work endures decade afte decade is precisely that it captures life’s tragic edge, without giving in to the sin of despair.
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There’s a LOT of problems with this article:
First off, obviously writers like Octavia Butler, Sherri Tepper, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a whole host of others don’t exist according to Glenn. Apparently SF is only Heinlein and the raft of bad military SF writers that plague the series shelves at Books-A-Million. Classic writers tended to liberal as well: Isaac Asimov is not conservative by any means, nor Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, and many others. If you are going to write a symposium, please get someone with some actual history and knowledge of the genre?
Second, forward-looking and rational has nothing to do with political ideology. If anything SF writers who look forwards and are proponents of rationality often tend to believe that problems can be entirely fixed through human means or effort, and have little problems with forming bureacracies to do so. That forward look can easily embrace that (Foundation, Gordon Dickson’s Final Encyclopedia, KSR’s Mars books) as well as elite “big man” libertarianism. If anything, conservatives seem to do better with fantasy because it tends to be less about trying to solve as it is just telling a tale.
Lastly, if you are going to argue a point of view, please argue it. This article is barely a blurb, let alone as part of a symposium on anything. SF is a lot deeper than acknowledged and there are plenty of ways you could have made a decent point. If you want to be taken seriously about art, you need more than this.
And yes, I am a conservative. But we do ourselves no favors perpetuating what I call the Heinlein and Tolkien dog and pony show. The reason why we suck at art is because we only read safe works, which is why those two names constantly pop up whenever any conservatives talk about it. We can’t afford to reduce ourselves or the genre that way.
I have some serious problems with this.
First off, obviously writers like Octavia Butler, Sherri Tepper, Greg Bear, Kim Stanley Robinson, and a whole host of others don’t exist according to Glenn. Apparently SF is only Heinlein and the raft of bad military SF writers that plague the series shelves at Books-A-Million. Classic writers tended to liberal as well: Isaac Asimov is not conservative by any means, nor Samuel Delany, Harlan Ellison, and many others. If you are going to write a symposium, please get someone with some actual knowledge of the history of the genre?
Second, forward-looking and rational has nothing to do with political ideology. If anything SF writers who look forwards and are proponents of rationality often tend to believe that problems can be entirely fixed through human means or effort, and have little problems with forming bureacracies to do so. That forward look can easily embrace that (Foundation, Gordon Dickson’s Final Encyclopedia, KSR’s Mars books) as well as elite “big man” libertarianism. If anything, conservatives seem to do better with fantasy because it tends to be less about trying to solve as it is just telling a tale.
Lastly, If we are going to make an argument, we need to make one. This is barely a blurb. We also need to make a good one and transcend why I call the Heinlein and Tolkien dog and pony show. Notice how often those two writers constantly pop up? It’s because they are safe. We’re not going to make decent art if we constantly retreat to safe books and put forth a sanitized history of what a genre is. Staying within what is safe stunts our imaginations and is why we aren’t good at making art in the first place. You will not have your own voice if you aren’t challenged by works as much as comforted by them.
I say this as a Christian Conservative who fell prey to this and still needs to wrestle against this tendency.
I’m sorry for the repost. Apparently even if it gives you a “this email address is associated with a wordpress account” it still publishes it. My apologies and please if possible remove one of the comments.
Glad to see someone stick up for the record here. It would be weird to imagine that a genre would have a bias that mapped onto our tiny little political ontology (left v right) in any meaningful way. The quote from Glenn Reynolds is onanistic twaddle.
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