Fascism and Science Fiction

Nikkolas from Texas Since: Dec, 2009 Relationship Status: Anime is my true love

#1: Apr 3rd 2017 at 12:21:12 AM

So recently i was reading a thread elsewhere about Libertarianism and they were discussing its uncomfortable popularity in sci-fi. Now any time uncomfortable political themes is brought up with regards to science fiction literature, Robert Heinlein is invoked. Starship Troopers was fascist and then he wrote some later book that is apparently a Libertarian utopia. Well I went and did some Googling to get other hot takes on this. There is apparently a whole award for Libertarian Science Fiction. Has anyone read this Niven guy because one of his books - going just by the basic description I read - was like WTF. Apparently LA descends into race riots (oh dear) and so they have to build a place for all the good people to live. (OH DEAR) There is some highly confusing overlap between "I want no government in my life" and "I want to fantasize about the days of yore when the government could stab me in the face with impunity."

Anyway, in the course of my researches, I came upon an article on JSTOR titled exactly the same as this thread. I had to buy a whole issue of Science Fiction Studies because apparently JSTOR doesn't actually let you read all the articles on the site, which defeats the whole goddam point of the site in my view but anyway....

Aaron Santesso

Fascism may be understood on one level as a narrative, one that fascist politicians and artists alike have used innumerable times over the past century. For decades, fascist literature—from the work of Gabriele D’Annunzio through the Nazi Schollen-roman [“novel of the soil”] to the journalism of Robert Brasillach—emphasized the “superior” class at the top of society, the importance of race, the nobility of sacrifice in defense of one’s people, and so on—these ideas were connected into a recognizable story about decline and rebirth. It is only natural that this story was told most clearly and forcefully in imaginative literature; by the 1930s, there was a certain mass-production feel to such works. “Blubo” (“blood and soil”) novels—the German fascist equivalent of pulp fiction—were churned out with regularity, always telling more or less the same story revolving around praise of traditional lifestyles and the perils of international urbanism and Jewish bankers. 19 The fascist author has his or her goals and a familiar strategy by which to pursue them: to outline the threat of the alien as opposed to the pure; to emphasize the necessity of unifying and fighting against the threat; to promote “action” as the most appropriate response to any crisis; to celebrate those who are willing to sacrifice for the greater good of the people; to describe the elite class and great leader who will emerge to lead the masses in their struggle. Indeed, we might reduce virtually all of these works to one relatively simple master-plot: a once-great society is now threatened and degraded by inhuman, impure, and hive-minded outsiders (who often blend into the society, corrupting it from the inside); a special, enormously gifted (to the point of being virtually superhuman) individual rises up and begins to fight back in order to restore the society’s original purity and greatness; this fight requires a steely society- wide resolve, a restriction if not outright rejection of democracy, and ideally militarization. The ideal society is imagined as recapturing earlier values and independence—but, ironically, that restoration will be pursued via the use of new, balance-altering technology

Mr. Santesso makes it clear he is not attacking individual authors like Heinlein. Rather his point is to address whether or not a genre can have political inclinations written into its very tropes. He brings up epic poetry and states they naturally lend themselves to imperialism. He is contesting the (apparently very popular) idea that science fiction is inherently Progressive.

Pulp Fascism

That conservative pulp sf is partly aligned with fascist thought is plain enough. More interesting and more subtle is the way this basic structure, and these familiar tropes, begin to infect other strains of writing influenced by pulp sf, so that even consciously progressive science fiction unintentionally offers up pseudo-fascist patterns and themes. A high-profile example is Olaf Stapledon’s Odd John (1935). The title character is a superman of the highest order—as a small boy he reminds those who watch him “of a little old man with snowy hair condescending to play with young gorillas” (19). The young John Wainwright gradually becomes more insistent on his supremacy—beating and humiliating a friend, for example, and causing the friend to confess that he recognized John’s “right” to do so, given his own evident inferiority. While still young, John sniffs out other similarly superior individuals, forming a team of “supernormals” who offer each other “companionship of a calibre

beyond that of normal human beings” (19). These few individuals set out to form their own little republic (en route, they rescue two people from a sinking ship, and then, realizing they will reveal the existence of the “supernormals,” shoot them and dump their bodies overboard). At this point, normal human beings are regarded as a subhuman species:

For to-day the chief lesson which your species has to learn is that it is far better to die, far better to sacrifice even the loftiest of all “sapient” purposes, than to kill beings of one’s own mental order. But just as you kill wolves and tigers so that the far brighter spirits of men may flourish, so we killed those unfortunate creatures that we had rescued. Innocent as they were, they were dangerous. Unwittingly they threatened the noblest practical venture that has yet occurred on this planet. Think! If you … had found yourselves in a world of great apes, clever in their own way, lovable too, but blind, brutish, and violent, would you have refused to kill? Would you have sacrificed the founding of a human world? To refuse would be cowardly, not physically, but spiritually. Well, if we could wipe out your whole species, frankly, we would.

Lecture over, the supernormals continue on their way, sailing to a remote Pacific island and hypnotizing the native tribespeople into committing suicide so that the island might become the private domain of the elite race, who introduce themselves to the native tribe as “gods.” These gods then design a superweapon capable of wiping out the globe’s lesser mortals—though, once they find their new utopia invaded by a force of these “brutes” sent to stop their scheme, and realize that their capital will inevitably be overrun, they decide to commit suicide in their bunker rather than live in a fallen world:

They then decided, I thought, not to await the destruction which was bound sooner or later to overtake them at the hands of the less human species, either through these brutish instruments or through the official forces of the Great Powers. The supernormals might have chosen to end their career by simply falling dead, but seemingly they desired to destroy their handiwork along with themselves. They would not allow their home, and all the objects of beauty with which they had adorned it, to fall into subhuman clutches. Therefore they deliberately blew up their power-station, thereby destroying not only themselves but their whole settlement. (157)

That the decision is described in such hauntingly prescient language, that there would be real-world parallels to this dramatic conclusion within a decade, is perhaps the final misfortune of the work. Stapledon—a proud socialist, dedicated to equality and democracy, critical of empire and elitism—perhaps did not realize the implications of what he was writing, but his friends and critics certainly did, explaining to him privately and publicly that he had, inadvertently or not, written a fascist work (see Crossley 3, 278). (Jack Haldane told him in no uncertain terms that the novel’s “great leader” theory of progress was “a fascist theory”: “your attitude is the kind that leads people to fascism” [Crossley 225]). Stapledon’s mistake, one might say, was to draw too freely on certain core pulp tropes—supermen, heroic self-sacrifice, violence in the defense of a “superior” system, etc.—while underestimating the difficulty of bending those tropes to his own purposes; their original ideology is too tenacious. In setting out to write a work that would give hope to the laboring classes (and there are scenes in which bourgeois businessmen are ridiculed and their scorn for the poor and disenfranchised mocked), he ended up writing one that portrayed them as inferior and disposable. It may be that sf contains moments in which progressive tendencies latent in the genre emerge at unexpected moments; equally, there will be moments at which the power of genre and the pressure of pulp thought transform a John Wainwright into a proto-Ender Wiggins.

Apparently "Heinlein is a fascist" has just been an idea in everyone's head for decades.

Iron Dream

This kind of labeling was at work at least since the 1940s (Under Cover, etc.), but it was logical that the seeking out and condemning of far-right overtones had its heyday during the counterculture era of the 1960s, when several authors spoofed the political overtones of earlier pulp sf—the most famous such parody being Norman Spinrad’s Iron Dream (1972). Spinrad imagined an alternate history in which Hitler failed to become a fascist dictator, and instead, naturally enough, became a science-fiction writer. Hitler’s sf “novel” (“Lord of the Swastika”) contains all the familiar tropes—familiar to both fascism and sf: an obsession with “freakish,” “monstrous,” and collectivized outsiders, with futuristic technology as a sign of enlightenment (or, alternatively, as proof of “alien” decadence and weakness), with the construction of a myth-system that places one chosen culture at its center, and so on. As in other such works, a utopian society is threatened with invasion and can only be saved by a superman figure (Spinrad’s hero “Trueman”)—indeed, the hero unites an entire race of “tall, blond, blue-eyed supermen” (220). Ursula Le Guin quickly identified it as a parody of “the kind of story best exemplified by Robert Heinlein, who believes in the Alpha Male, in the role of the innately (genetically) superior man, in the heroic virtues of militarism, in the desirability and necessity of authoritarian control, etc.” (“On Norman Spinrad” 41).

Speaking of Le Guin....

Le Guin

Le Guin is indeed an intriguing case: she has made her name by writing anti-fascist pieces, often parodying Gernsbackian hard sf—but she herself dwells, in more than one work, on the idea that a “special” individual might emerge, reconnect with the traditional ways, enlighten those oppressed by new, foreign ideology, and, emboldened by sacred authority and the power of the land, lead the people to rise up against the impure outsiders and their foreign concepts. In The Telling (2000), to take one example, we are presented with a planet corrupted by an alien ideology (collectivist and bureaucratic, and likened to the “communocapitalism” of twentieth-century Earth). The cities have been transformed into hives of conformity, with everyone wearing official uniforms and patronizing government shops—a dreary existence lightened only by official gymnastic displays (“hundreds of tiny children in red uniforms kicking and jumping in unison to shrill cheery music” [29]). Urban party “officials” and “bureaucrats” have set out to root out “reactionary ideology” (212) in the countryside; the natives there, “bewildered by foreign concepts … had let the ideologues … dominate and impoverish them” (120). The heartland, however, has several things on its side: a continuing connection to the “old ways”; a “simple” lifestyle, rooted to the land and uncorrupted by outside decadence; racial purity (the provinces preserve the planet’s original “ethnic homogeneity, [its] lack of societal and cultural diversity … among [them] there were no foreigners” [105; emphasis in original]); and the “maz”—a kind of elite class possessed of “great personal authority …[;] even the mildest of them was surrounded by a kind of aura or field” (195), who lead a resistance against the drone-like party officials and their vast army. 32 All of this comes perilously close to sounding like the Golden Amazons vs. the Crystal Horde. Once again, a utopia must be defended from alien ideas and outsiders by a cadre of supermen—but with additional ironies here because of the way the original intent of the work is so utterly undermined: an author sets out to denounce the dreary uniformity of a society under authoritarian government “ideologues” and ends up celebrating a homogenous society led by a special ideological class invested with “great personal authority.”

The sheer accumulation of these tropes and plot points gives some sense of how the pressures of a genre’s tradition continue to operate on individual works within it and how certain features ostensibly consigned to the dustbin of history still raise their heads in unlikely places. I do not mean to discount here the presence of a certain strategy. It may be that Le Guin intentionally alludes to such tropes as a sign of desperation—that is, the tropes may reflect her increasing skepticism that political change can still occur democratically in the industrialized capitalist world. Yet such an explanation (more plausible with critically high-minded works; to see such a strategy at work in Traviss would be a stretch) does not eliminate the link back to the pulp tradition and its much-maligned politics. The question remains: why would an intelligent, aware, and highly skilled author allow him- or herself to stumble into this kind of territory in the first place? I propose that some writers are so aware of the policing of fascism in postwar sf, so conscious of Spinrad, Gibson, and all the others ready to condemn fascist tendencies in the genre, that they adopt defensive strategies that, ironically, end up creating unintentionally fascist overtones. Their very dedication to the “purification” of a certain politics, for example, sets a tone; if the writer then goes on to borrow pulp tropes (like supermen defending a utopia against dronelike outsiders), they can end up recreating or at least echoing the very politics they are most determined to counter. Other leftist works of sf, in their attempt to avoid fascist overtones, often simply reverse problematic tropes rather than contest them: barbaric aliens threaten a traditional, racially pure society until they are banned and pushed out—only this time, the barbaric aliens are humans (see, for example, China Miéville’s Embassytown [2011], in which humans “infect” a planet with “lying” language, leading to chaos and violence amongst the native population). But reversing the tropes does not eliminate the pattern: a story about an enlightened race militarizing in order to eradicate invasive, hive-minded outsiders and reconnect with old race-based traditional knowledge and rituals does not leave fascism behind by clarifying that the hive-minded outsiders are capitalist aliens rather than communist aliens. The original trope and its attendant ideological implications (outside influences tend to weaken and corrupt traditional, hierarchical, and homogenous societies) survives more or less intact.

I find this absolutely fascinating. It's kind of that whole Horseshoe Theory thing. To be Leftist is, at least in my mind, to be anti-Imperialist. Consequently this leads to a sort of Nativism which is a concept usually associated with the Right. Native Americans and the like are the poor victims of evil foreigners and we should celebrate how great they were before they were brtually destroyed. Fighting off the evil hordes for the sake of a pure, unsullied people is a narrative that fits very snugly both the Left and the Right.

Conclusion

"Given his influence on progressive sf criticism, we may give the last word to Jameson, and in particular his celebration of the Brechtian notion of plumpes Denken (“crude thinking”), which he defines as the postulate that even the most subtle, academic, or experimental “neo-Marxist” works must contain a core element of “crude” or “vulgar” Marxism in order to qualify as “Marxist” at all. Jameson alludes to plumpes Denken in order to make a point about science fiction: “Something like this may have its equivalent in SF, and I would be tempted to suggest that even within the most devoted reader of ‘soft’ SF—of sociological SF, ‘new wave’ aestheticism, the ‘contemporaries’ from Dick to the present—there has to persist some ultimate ‘hard-core’ commitment to old-fashioned ‘scientific’ SF for the object to preserve its identity and not to dissolve back into Literature, Fantasy, or whatever” (Jameson 245). Might it also be the case that the fascist energies and ideas of pulp sf are precisely the kind of identity-confirming “core” or definitional element that makes it possible to speak of “science fiction,” even when discussing literary, progressive sf? It is understandable that progressive critics would wish to distance themselves from both the aesthetics and the politics that accrued to a generation of stories featuring scenarios of the Golden Races vs. the Scaly Ones variety. But to deny that politics altogether, to claim that it belongs only to the past, is to evade a serious investigation of what makes the genre work, what gives it its identity and indeed its appeal. It is, ultimately, a denial of “science fiction” itself as a genre worthy of discussion, for surely the point of genre criticism is to identify and trace the various constitutional energies, themes, and plots that animate a form and in doing so account for all its variant strains and trends, not just the ones that accord well with a narrow set of critical pieties. To speak of “science fiction” at all is to admit to certain links and ideological ties that go beyond subject and setting, leading readers and critics into unexpected places and opening up unexpected connections. One cannot simply disown unwanted relatives or pretend not to recognize their features when they pop up in later generations. It is, indeed, precisely those ancestral presences—sometimes odd, sometimes eccentric, sometimes distasteful—that give science fiction its remarkable diversity and continuing vitality."

I found this a rather illuminating read. However I've read tragically little sci-fi. I wanted to see what more informed people think.

edited 3rd Apr '17 12:24:08 AM by Nikkolas

Nohbody "In distress", my ass. from Somewhere in Dixie Since: Jan, 2001 Relationship Status: Mu

"In distress", my ass.

#2: Apr 3rd 2017 at 7:01:52 AM

"What I think" other than that article being another demonstration of how useless "fascism" as a label has become through misuse? Though given that this post started with describing Libertarianism as having "uncomfortable popularity" the continuing misuse doesn't surprise me.

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Zendervai Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy from St. Catharines Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: Wishing you were here

Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy

#3: Apr 3rd 2017 at 10:50:06 AM

Science Fiction is actually really hard to compartmentalize like that. If you take it as one genre, then you end up with the absurdity of Star Wars being in the same genre as Neuromancer. Aside from involving futuristic technology, there really isn't much else in common.

One thing to keep in mind though, the idea of one person who shows up to fix everything? That's the protagonist. Just because the story focuses on someone who does that, doesn't mean there's a fascist bent. It just means the author wanted a story that doesn't have forty main characters. You can technically construe that as somewhat fascist, but it's kind of an disingenuous reading because it ignores a lot of the context in a lot of stories.

Not Three Laws compliant.

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Red Spade, Black Heart

#4: Apr 4th 2017 at 7:40:52 AM

Not even futuristic technology works as a common denominator, when you consider some of the Punk Punk genres. Plus, sometimes you have technology that's speculative but not particularly futuristic, as in something like Jurassic Park.

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Jhimmibhob from Where the tea is sweet, and the cornbread ain't Since: Dec, 2010 Relationship Status: My own grandpa

#5: Apr 4th 2017 at 9:11:50 AM

Speculative fiction, being ... well, speculative, will always have a weakness for political thought experiments—even involving political systems that have only ever borne unwholesome fruit in real life. Some systems that seem to work particularly well on paper will always have outsized appeal to creators, no matter how disastrous they tend to be in practice.

Also, even the hardest SF writers can be shockingly unrealistic about human nature and what motivates actual people and actual cultures. (On the emotional and social levels, few speculative writers are "harder" than Bradbury, few "softer" than Clarke and Niven!) Many systems like fascism are notoriously compelling, if we only posit humanity as something quite different from what it really is. And temperamentally, many SF authors seem all too primed to make this elementary mistake.

"She was the kind of dame they write similes about." —Pterodactyl Jones

ThriceCharming Red Spade, Black Heart from Maryland Since: Nov, 2013 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links

Red Spade, Black Heart

#6: Apr 4th 2017 at 9:32:24 AM

It's funny... One tries not to generalize, but it's almost as if the more you care about making the sci in your sci-fi super duper accurate, the less you care about making your characters recognizably human.

Is that a Wocket in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Jhimmibhob from Where the tea is sweet, and the cornbread ain't Since: Dec, 2010 Relationship Status: My own grandpa

#7: Apr 4th 2017 at 12:48:21 PM

At the very least, I'd say that the two varieties of "realism" don't correlate too well. And this mismatch can sometimes lead to odd sorts of political (and other) enthusiasms.

"She was the kind of dame they write similes about." —Pterodactyl Jones

Bense from 1827/Sol/Solomani Rim Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3

#8: Apr 5th 2017 at 1:13:00 PM

Science Fiction has been described as a genre about ideas rather than characters for a reason.

What most people would call Niven's best novel - Ringworld has a pretty bland protagonist in Louis Wu, who is a tourist who likes seeing new things and talking to funny people but other than that doesn't have any very strong motivations or distinctive character.

Asimov's Foundation and his Robot books are not at all about the characters. Foundation is about the great sweep of future events, and the Robot books are all about the implications of building what amount to slaves. Aside from Hari Seldon and the Mule, is there a Foundation character's name that you can remember without looking it up?

Or try Neurmancer. The characters are more vividly drawn, but are rather one-dimensional. The novel succeeded because of its world and Gibson's style in describing it, not because Case is a character as memorable as, say, the Artful Dodger.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

Zendervai Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy from St. Catharines Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: Wishing you were here

Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy

#9: Apr 6th 2017 at 6:44:35 AM

Golan Trevize from Foundation's Edge and Foundation and Earth. Mostly because he gets two books to himself, not half a book at most like most of the other major characters. Both books are also about him trying to choose whether the best choice for the future is Gaia, the First Foundation or the Second Foundation. He's still kind of thinly sketched, but he sticks out to me.

edited 6th Apr '17 6:15:27 PM by Zendervai

Not Three Laws compliant.

ThriceCharming Red Spade, Black Heart from Maryland Since: Nov, 2013 Relationship Status: Maxing my social links

Red Spade, Black Heart

#10: Apr 7th 2017 at 3:42:24 PM

As a fan of science-fiction, I personally don't embrace the "ideas rather than people" thing. One of the reasons behind the Sci Fi Ghetto is that people assume the genre is nothing but a bunch of nerds gushing about cool spaceships (and exotic Green-Skinned Space Babe sex), and embracing the "ideas" notion does little to combat that view.

Besides, I really don't see why hard science and recognizable human characters can't go together. (But given the choice, I'd pick the latter over the former.)

Is that a Wocket in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

LoniJay from Australia Since: Dec, 2009 Relationship Status: Pining for the fjords

#11: Apr 7th 2017 at 4:55:44 PM

I think the key point is that in this type of story, the protagonist is the protagonist by virtue of being just inherently better than everybody else. It's not a regular person who becomes the protagonist because they're in the right place at the right time to affect events. It's not even a person who has risen to power from the masses with luck and hard work, in addition to natural skill. They are Special and people can tell that they're Special from a young age.

I suppose this kind of trope is hard to avoid if you want to write about, say... people with superpowers or psychic powers. People who are the protagonist because they have some skill or quality that genuinely IS unique and gives them power others will never be able to match. But it's not inherent to the idea of a sole protagonist, I think.

edited 7th Apr '17 4:56:50 PM by LoniJay

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You Give Me Fever

#12: Apr 8th 2017 at 6:35:57 PM

Yes, the idea that the protagonist has to be the best, have the best stuff, be a special specimen or even have agency is a flawed one. Pinball Protagonist, The Everyman, Supporting Protagonist, and Loser Protagonist are common enough to have pages on this very wiki, whose origins are in Buffy The Vampire Slayer(that is to say a pop culture fad rather than literary scholarship project).

As for fascism and science fiction? Well, one of the key traits of the original fascist movement was Anti-Intellectualism. It's not hard for any given writer of any anti intellectual disposition, be it against intellectuals in general or simply deconstructing a specific idea, through either the reader's small reference pools or the author's lack of talent. If your better place, your so called utopia is self evident, why would you waste any time describing why, when you go on about is, how, when? To someone who disagrees fundamentally, it looks suspiciously like Mussolini's "actions for actions sake". Starship Troopers, it's apparent moral of making war with someone you can't understand beyond them wanting something you want is a the quintessential example. The intended message was "these communists are irrational murders who can't be compromised with and want to turn civilization into a subhuman hive mind monstrosity", the message people took away was "permanent martial law and eradication of what can't be fuel the war machine is the way to go." Most readers aren't intimate with the ideologies, history and nuances of communism beyond some of it's economic consequences to really get the satire(and not everyone who did found it very humorous)

edited 8th Apr '17 6:39:18 PM by IndirectActiveTransport

That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes

unknowing from somewhere.. Since: Mar, 2014

#13: Apr 8th 2017 at 10:48:40 PM

the problem with protagonist is not that they are special, but they have a tematic reason to fight, more often than not the protagonist represent everything good against the everything bad in the villian, in part because of the scale: a nature lover facing a evil industrialist feel better than just "dude who like tree fight guy who want to cut it down", politics like to attach narratives of themselves for populist points, is not a lefty guy who dosent like business but "good comunism fighting the corporatist pigs" or a guy who dsent wan foreigner in their country become "a normal guy who want the nation out!", the bigger and more meaningful the conflict the better.

for last I will said that narrative create a disjuntion, the idea the guy is just a guy who want to do the right thing but at the same time he is fighting for a bigger cause, that way we have a guy who can do whatever he wants except exactly he wants...because he is a good guy, that is fascist narrative playing.

"My Name is Bolt, Bolt Crank and I dont care if you believe or not"

CharlesPhipps Since: Jan, 2001

#14: Apr 9th 2017 at 6:38:55 AM

I recommend a friend check out our very own T Vtropes page for The Iron Dream. So, yes, this subject is well known here on T Vtropes.org.

Fascism and its role in military science fiction as well as fantasy has been a well-trodden subject in academia. In general, this is actually more or less an accident than it is a deliberate strategy or a kind of subversive propaganda.

A large number of cop shows are fascist in the premise of supporting authoritarnism, police brutality, and always right protagonists who are unwilling to play by the rules of hamstrung by other authorities. So true is this the case in science fiction where the military is usually portrayed as flawless, badass, and faced against deplorable enemies.

GENE RODDENBERRY created the Prime Directive solely to make there be a rule for Captain Kirk has to rebel against and get in trouble with.

However, there's really often a case of looking too hard at something. The novel "Star Wars On Trial" by the guy who wrote the Postman put it as a group which lionized "special families", bloodlines, monarchy, and feudalism when it's a story about fighting ACTUAL fascists in the name of restoring a democracy.

So in short, yes, there's an uncomfortable jingoistic gung ho streak in science-fiction but it's also important to remember that sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. Halo isn't making any grand speeches about terrorism or religious fanaticism or that we should raise children to be super-soldier cyborgs.

It's just a big old shoot out with enemies to justify Microsoft making $$$

There's also the Lost Aesop, Broken Aesop, and Misaimed Fandom which I think readers should note. Paul Verhoven, for example, is about as anti-fascist as you can get in real life because actual fascists tried to kill him. HOWEVER, Paul made Robocop and Starship Troopers as satire but there's people who don't REALIZE THIS or don't care. The point of the author is ignored for the POV of the interpreter and that's somewhat dumb.

You can also like the Galatcic Empire and principlaity of Zeon without being a RL Nazi. I was banned from a forum once because, I shit you not, they assumed my posts about how the First Order were awesome characters was a support of Nazism. Which....wow.

What's the old saying, "There's a word for people who believe what an author writes reflects their values—that word is moron."

edited 9th Apr '17 6:42:33 AM by CharlesPhipps

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

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You Give Me Fever

#15: Apr 9th 2017 at 11:33:28 AM

Protagonist isn't always good either. There is Unsympathetic Comedy Protagonist, Anti-Role Model, Villain Protagonist and A Lighter Shade of Black too.

Even when with good intentions or genuine heroism there is Byronic Hero, Grey-and-Gray Morality, Right for the Wrong Reasons, protagonist isn't always totally good or bad.

But I think the Paul Verhoven example is morbidly hilarious. As I posted before, the Starship Troopers novel was a satire on communism, the authors biggest concern being considered racist because a lot of communists are Asian, to the point he made the protagonist Filipino, only to be considered so fascist Verhoven turn the movie adaptation into a satire on fascism in defiance, only to get the same label himself. Poe's Law I believe.

That's not to say there are no genuine fascist glorifying works of science fiction, and not all are as obvious as Northwest Front or The Turner Diaries, just to say it is not always intentional.

edited 14th Apr '17 3:07:48 AM by IndirectActiveTransport

That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes

CharlesPhipps Since: Jan, 2001

#16: Apr 9th 2017 at 4:52:00 PM

Heinlein notably made Starship Troopers as one of his exercises in sci-fi world building that being his most successful work, everyone assumed he believed it 100%. However, Heinlein wrote MANY utopian fiction novels.

Many with dramatically different worlds.

It's just people only read ST.

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

Bense from 1827/Sol/Solomani Rim Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3

#17: Apr 10th 2017 at 8:00:46 AM

As a fan of science-fiction, I personally don't embrace the "ideas rather than people" thing.

I'm not saying you should read science-fiction just for "the ideas", I'm saying that the classics of the genre are remembered for the ideas, not the characters, and usually for good reason. It's a statement about the history of the genre, not a recommendation.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

Jhimmibhob from Where the tea is sweet, and the cornbread ain't Since: Dec, 2010 Relationship Status: My own grandpa

#18: Apr 10th 2017 at 9:13:12 AM

Besides, I really don't see why hard science and recognizable human characters can't go together. (But given the choice, I'd pick the latter over the former.)

I don't think anyone's suggesting that they can't go together ... or that they never do. But in my experience, there's just not a very tight correlation between the two—not much reason to predict they'll be found together more often than random chance might provide.

And this (relatively) hit-or-miss incidence might partly explain why some SF tends to dwell on formally elegant political systems, even those that keep proving human-unfriendly in practice.

"She was the kind of dame they write similes about." —Pterodactyl Jones

Bense from 1827/Sol/Solomani Rim Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3

#19: Apr 10th 2017 at 10:41:29 AM

Does anyone know if the story about Starship Troopers the movie being originally an unrelated script (Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine) that then was adapted to become a Heinlein license is true?

It seems to me more like Verhoeven purposely set out to satirize the novel with his usual utter lack of subtlety, and that some fans are excusing him with the claim "it was an adapted script - it wasn't supposed to be Starship Troopers at all".

I find it a bit amusing that some people still seem to take a movie with the line "they sucked his brains out!" in it as a serious portrayal. Do you think that line was in Bug Hunt at Outpost Nine?

Don't get me wrong, I found the movie somewhat entertaining, but it was pretty brain-dead compared to the book.

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

Zendervai Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy from St. Catharines Since: Oct, 2009 Relationship Status: Wishing you were here

Visiting from the Hoag Galaxy

#20: Apr 10th 2017 at 12:01:02 PM

Considering that the movie pretty much directly mocks the original book...I doubt it. There may have been a script like that, but one thing that happens occasionally is that someone options a script, then Hollywood notices a big name property that's somewhat similar...and then they throw out the script and just adapt the property.

That's not to say that sticking a title on a mostly unrelated property doesn't happen, it infamously happened with I Robot, which started out as a script called Hardwired. Allegedly the studio had the rights to I Robot but no plans to make anything so they stuck the title on the movie for name recognition, added a few references and changed a few names, and called it a day.

Not Three Laws compliant.

Nikkolas from Texas Since: Dec, 2009 Relationship Status: Anime is my true love

#21: Apr 10th 2017 at 12:07:56 PM

Robocop had several ludicrous lines too but it's still an effective and well-loved piece of satire and criticism.

Also considering many reviews at the time thought Movie SST was PRO Fascism, it seems he was being too subtle.

edited 10th Apr '17 12:11:03 PM by Nikkolas

Bense from 1827/Sol/Solomani Rim Since: Aug, 2010 Relationship Status: And they all lived happily ever after <3

#22: Apr 10th 2017 at 12:35:48 PM

Robocop is just as ludicrous as Starship Troopers for the most part, but it doesn't claim to be based on a prior literary work that was not intended as a satire. I think it's also a better film overall.

I think it's pretty clear that I Robot is a Will Smith action vehicle that got a few Asimov names added to it rather than an intentional adaptation or satire of Asimov. It is also a better film than Starship Troopers, by the way, featuring Alan Tudyk's first turn as a CGI robot, a dozen years before he was the CGI robot in Rogue One.

I think it would be inaccurate to say that Starship Troopers (the book) is a satire of communism. Certainly it is a criticism of communism, at least communism in human beings. The Bugs are natural communists, and part of the point of Troopers is that humans can't possibly out-communist a hive mind. "We were learning, expensively, just how efficient a total communism can be when used by a people actually adapted to it by evolution."

edited 10th Apr '17 12:36:58 PM by Bense

“Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” -Philip K. Dick

IndirectActiveTransport You Give Me Fever from Chicago Since: Nov, 2010 Relationship Status: Coming soon to theaters

You Give Me Fever

#23: Apr 14th 2017 at 3:39:01 AM

That's why I thought it was a satire. One of the Marxist ideals is that his ideals were going to fundamentally change human nature, when objectively speaking, few things documented ever really have(language-fire-sanitation-it's a depressingly short list). "This, this is what we'd have to look like for it to work, and it wouldn't be pretty".

But for the sake of not getting too far off topic I will admit, I could be wrong about the nature of the criticism.

That's why he wants you to have the money. Not so you can buy 14 Cadillacs but so you can help build up the wastes

CharlesPhipps Since: Jan, 2001

#24: Apr 28th 2017 at 4:10:40 PM

Amusingly, scifi's glorification of the military kind of the premise of my Lucifer's Star novel. I wrote it with the idea that too many military science fiction stories are based around the premise of "Ra, Ra, Ra Military is awesome!"

I had it from the perspective of the equivalent of a TIE pilot and pretty much had the entire book be one long series of deconstructions of the ideas of 1. Humanity being special. 2. Never surrendering being a good thing. 3. That there's "good guys" in most wars. 4. That space opera battles are anything other than the same bloody wars for resources that anything else is. I had a lot of fun making humanity slaughtering each other over what most people considered a backwater region of space no one wanted to visit.

Interestingly, there's not that many books which go with that kind of War Is Hell attitude. Ironically, one of the best ones for it is Mobile Suit Gundam's spin-off material. Tomino really wanted to write a more adult take on the subject and his novels as well as Origins nicely makes a children's cartoon's view of war into something more bloody and awful.

But yeah, really, we need a Game Of Thrones deconstruction of space opera like it is of fantasy.

edited 28th Apr '17 4:12:09 PM by CharlesPhipps

Author of The Rules of Supervillainy, Cthulhu Armageddon, and United States of Monsters.

Reymma RJ Savoy from Edinburgh Since: Feb, 2015 Relationship Status: Wanna dance with somebody

RJ Savoy

#25: Apr 29th 2017 at 5:35:28 PM

Nikkolas: the novel is Oath of Fealty by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle. The basic idea is suburbia (and hence white flight) taken a step further. A private company builds an arcology towering above Los Angeles, a residential complex that offers everything the city below does under one roof. There's a Ripped from the Headlines mention of race-tinged riots years back for why so many citizens chose the security of this enclosed, surveyed city.

I would be interested in an analysis of it now that I know more about American libertarianism. It highlights, perhaps unintentionally, the paradox of a company being free to organise as it wants, and then setting up its own rigid control over its customers and employees. The novel mentions some of the issues with corporate governance, and seems set up to explore them; but it never does. The antagonists are luddite eco-terrorists with a flimsy motivation. A conflict with the city authorities flares up realistically, but gets resolved in a rather one-sided victory for the company that did not sit right with me. No-one living in the arcology expresses dissatisfaction.

It treats matters too simplistically, and may be influenced by libertarianism, but it isn't racist, nor are the people in the arcology better, just richer. And finally, I'm not going to read it again because it's not a good novel. The cast is huge, and shallow even by Niven's standards. It has some neat technical ideas but cops out on the social implications. The conflict is bogged down by the many flaccid subplots and there's no sense of climax. Bad, but not fascist.

Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.

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