How much is political ideology dominating SFF?

[clovis-man]

Originally Posted by Dave

Also, if the USA is more Conservative politically today, then it stands to reason that authors with Conservative views would be more popular. Whereas in the UK we are more Socialist and we get Iain M Banks' Culture ipso facto.

If you read Banks' travelogue piece, Raw Spirit, you get a very good idea of his leanings. Not conservative.

As far as contemporary U. S. writers are concerned, I don't see the ones I'm reading espousing any establishment views, i.e., Nancy Kress, C.J. Cherryh, Kage Baker. And to give the men credit: David Brin and even Joe Haldeman don't seem terribly conservative. Maybe I'm reading the wrong books.

[J-WO]

Originally Posted by Dave

Edit: Oh! And if you read the China Mieville interview right here at Chronicles, he says he is a Marxist.
China Mieville Interview

Iron Council is probably the most marxist story I've ever read. Very refreshing actually, not the sort of thing that generally turns up in fantasy novels. The best thing is, though, is one could read it and never realise that, just read it as a good plot.

[Fried Egg]

Certainly as far as British SF is concerned, I don't think it is in any danger of becomming too conservative.

[jojajihisc]

I don't think so, but like most people I probably don't have a broad enough sample of books consumed to say for sure. There are lots of authors who I think I have a general idea as to what their political orientations are like Bradbury, Card, Heinlein, Ellison, Mieville and some others but whether those ideas make there way into their fiction I don't know. I'm not sure it'd be a problem if it did either. It's fiction after all and will be interpreted in a variety of ways.

[thaddeus6th]

It's a very interesting topic of discussion. What sprang to my mind was Dr Who (Old and New), whose writers seem more lefty. There was an Old Who story with an evil dictator (played by Sheila Hancock) who was a parody of Thatcher and brought down by a revolution, for example.

There's also been a shift in the nature of evil and morality, from the absolute black and white of Lord of the Rings to more morally ambiguous stuff from the people such as Joe Abercrombie. It reflects the post-war era (when the Nazis were near perfect villains) to the more subtle evils of today (terrorism, which is not defined by land borders but ideology and the people involved don't wear uniforms).

[Dave]

I remember reading that news story last year now:
BBC scriptwriters tried to use Doctor Who to bring down Margaret Thatcher | Mail Online
Doctor Who attempted to overthrow Thatcher ? The Register
Doctor Who had anti-Thatcher agenda

At the time my thoughts were that Andrew Cartmel had a seriously over-inflated view of his power as a Doctor Who scriptwriter, but it does disprove, at least in the UK, any right-wing bias. The BBC is always being portrayed as a hotbed of lefties, so nothing is really new there.

Given that all these anecdotal stories I think do show that political ideology does indeed dominate SFF, I guess the only other question remaining is "Is this a good thing?"

Originally Posted by J-WO

Actually, I'll go as far to say that if SF stopped taking on politics it'd wither and die.

Now take a look at this:
Political ideas in science fiction

Now, does anyone feel able to argue against J-WO? I can't say I can. It is like the filling inside the sandwich. Without it, the stories would just be Fairy Tales.

[Duncan]

Much of SF seems to be pretty right of center. Heinlein, Pournelle, and Niven are all obvious about it. Military SF is going to be right wing by nature, it is natural to see Military SF be authoritarian or depict an authoritarian POV. We have seen a decline in Age of Wonder style SF, a lot of SF nowadays is in the military sf genre. There is a certain amount of satire in SF too.

Jennifer Government was a pretty satirical treatment of capitalism. Altered Carbon and the rest of that book don't treat corporations kindly though in that world everything is noir, so ...
Walter Jon Williams recent works are post-cyberpunk and that whole genre is dystopian and noir but I don't think the works are overtly political, neither is Charles Stross' work.

There are a number of overtly political SF authors out there, but their work tends to be so overt that it is unreadable. I find that the few left of center authors are writing satire, or dystopian futures.

I would say that the current tendency is due to space opera and milsf mostly.

[J-WO]

There's been some talk of Vampires on another thread at present--and I didn't want to go all political over there--but it seems to me that the literary Vampire is very political in an insidious way.

At their heart, the Vampire is form of social control. From the basic message of folklore ('Don't wander around at night, Peasant'), through to Bram Stoker's Dracula, ('Shun the Foreigner, British citizen/ Beware male sexuality, Girl) to Anne Rice's Interview... ('If you are gay/ have aids you are cut off from society') right up to Twilight (erm... 'Beware male sexuality, Girl.')

I'm not saying that's the writer's conscious intent (though the jury's still out on Meyer...), but storyteller's are only ever the reflection of whatever culture they are living in.

Its no surprise Twilight went nova in the states at about the same time Virginity pledges got endorsed by government. As a general rule, the less moody fang-boy books there are on the market in any decade, the more young women can live their lives.

[J-WO]

DUNCAN- See what you mean about Millitary SF. Personally I'd love to read a left wing David Webber, a space Opera analogue of the Spanish Civil War for instance, though in the current climate it'd probably be celebrated as a Libertarian epic. How ironic that would be...

[Heck Tate]

I see politics more in science fiction than fantasy, mostly because it's pretty easy to take the ideologies you disagree with and weave a dystopia in which those views are held by the majority of the future population. This is exactly what Ayn Rand did in Atlas Shrugged and almost everything else she wrote. I don't see it too often in fantasy, but one notable series which ended up with a lot of political ranting was the Sword of Truth series. Terry Goodkind (like Ayn Rand) ends up preaching against communism like it's the 11th plague.

On a related note, the political message I got from the A Song of Ice and Fire books is that politics suck and get lots of people killed.

[J-WO]

Originally Posted by Heck Tate

On a related note, the political message I got from the A Song of Ice and Fire books is that politics suck and get lots of people killed.

Thats a valid message for a book to have.

[Vertigo]

Interesting discussion that I have completely missed somehow until now

Does politics dominate SFF? I think the answer to that is broadly no, at least no more than any other genre. It is an important part of a large number of SF books as it will always be an important part of most other genres (except possibly Romance!).

So I don't think SFF is dominated by politics but does use politics a lot to provide a deeper and more colourful backdrop and would be sadly drab without it. Of course one of the beauties of SFF is that it can play with different politics a lot more than many genres with experimental future or fantasy worlds that allow for very different approaches to politics.

I don't think too much looking at individual authors is very helpful (at least not to the original question); there will always be some authors for whom putting across a strong political message is important and if well done that is just fine (thinking of books like 1984) but if it's not well done it's just tedious and probably most readers will dislike it and that author is unlikely to be widely successful. The question here seems more to do with the (impossible to define) average SFF book and here I don't think SFF is really any different to other genres.

So for me at least politics should be at least an interesting backdrop to books I read. I don't mind the some taking it much further but if it is absent altogether then I think you get a rather lacklustre book.

Having said all that I'll now pass a couple of comments on just one author!

If you read Banks' travelogue piece, Raw Spirit, you get a very good idea of his leanings. Not conservative

Clovis, interestingly enough after I read Raw Spirit I found it impossible to imagine Banks living in his own Culture - I suspect he would have fought the authorities violently. If you think about the Culture; everyone is largely free to do whatever they want, but that is (bizarrely) within what is essentially a very authoritarian state.

[Ursa major]

I haven't read all the Culture books (please, no hissing), but I often get the feeling that the Minds keep the "humans" as we keep cats, as pets who are allowed their (more-or-less limited) freedom to roam and to do as they (mostly) please.

[J-WO]

Originally Posted by Vertigo

Clovis, interestingly enough after I read Raw Spirit I found it impossible to imagine Banks living in his own Culture - I suspect he would have fought the authorities violently. If you think about the Culture; everyone is largely free to do whatever they want, but that is (bizarrely) within what is essentially a very authoritarian state.

Oh, I dunno. They only get authoritarian when someone tries to do something that'll lead to someone else getting hurt. Its only the Minds nanny-like, 'told-you-so smugness that makes it seem authoritarian.

Banks could feasibly live in the Culture, its just whenever he'd drink single malt he'd tell Drones/ Minds to 'Pishhh Orfff...'

[J-WO]

Originally Posted by Ursa major

I haven't read all the Culture books (please, no hissing), but I often get the feeling that the Minds keep the "humans" as we keep cats, as pets who are allowed their (more-or-less limited) freedom to roam.

Yeah, I sense that. Though at other times I sense they actually respect the fact we created them and that its no real bother to aid us to live in comfort. Unlike in The Matrix, say, we (as a species) seem to have raised our AI 'children' with love and respect, and they have become adults we can be proud of.

In that respect, Banks displays the liberal belief that sentients (read people) are essentially good at heart and will definitely be so if you treat them so. I've always thought The Culture make Asimov's 3 laws look rather sadistic in outlook. The former would certainly find the latter to be so, at any rate.