Conservative Nutjobbery in Sci-Fi., part n of x.

[matt_doyle]

Before I get into it today, let me confess that I am biased. This isn't going to be a surprise to anyone, my standard response when I'm told that the media or that collegiate education has a liberal bias is "yes, but that's just because the truth has a liberal bias."

Given my bias, I am frequently shocked (not to mention appalled) by the behavior of people in the science fiction community. The Luddite attitudes of the SFWA, for example, in decrying online publishing and things like the Creative Commons license - it just seems so inherently wrong to me that people who write about the new horizons of the future should be so terrified and reactionary about their own subject matter.

Specifically, though, at the moment I'm thinking about Orson Scott Card. Ender's Game and other early Card are some of my favorite books, despite his rampant homophobia and other neocon-flavored ranting these last few years. Now, Card has been a conservative all along, no doubt, but the last decade has marked a particularly emphatic shift in attitude... and with it, his writing has changed. For a long time I thought it was my perceptions of the author coloring my perceptions of his newer work, but then I got to Ender In Exile. Without going into spoilery details, this book recasts a lot of the words, actions, and attitudes of characters depicted earlier as unsympathetic, reactionary, overconservatives as right-thinking and even heroic. My conclusion has to be that his feelings about them have changed - he wants to justify their behavior, apologize for it. I am, unsurprisingly, not convinced.

Has anybody else gotten the same impression, or had similar experiences with other authors' works?

Comments

[darthparadox.livejournal.com]

Sure. Ray Bradbury claiming that Fahrenheit 451 wasn't actually about censorship, for one.

[matt_doyle]

Yikes. Hadn't heard that.

[ap-aelfwine.livejournal.com]

Good grief, that's a new one. I suppose I'll have to go look up what he said, now.

[kitsunehime-aki.livejournal.com]

Heinlein and attitudes towards women, ye gods. Especially when it comes to Jubal Harshaw's POV, never mind Lazarus Himself and everyone in Number of the Beast.

A little different, but Steppenwolf got to be so facepalm inducing I couldn't finish it. No, Steppenwolf! You don't have to be ~*edgy*~ and ~*insane*~ to be a legitimate member of society! I am not a "sheeple" because I'm willing to have a semi-normal life. But this strong reaction to it is probably because I know a some assholes who judge those who are sell-outs by trying to pay the bills every month and live responsibly. Sorry for the rant, it's just the sort of thing that makes me irked these days.

[matt_doyle]

Understandable!

Yeah. Speaking of Heinlein, I just read Saturn's Children by Charles Stross, one of the Hugo nominees this year, and it is very obviously influenced by Friday - there are several in-jokes that made me giggle, and it was a fun book, but some of the problematic things about Friday are still there, too...

[kitsunehime-aki.livejournal.com]

I might check that out...who knows, though. I just discovered Connie Willis, who does very good time travel fiction. I highly recommend To Say Nothing of the Dog (late Victorian period and full of lols) and Doomsday Book (Middle ages, not so full of lols). Passages is her book about near death experiences, and while it's good it's really, really trippy in somewhat frustrating ways. I need to read more of her other stuff, I have decided.

[matt_doyle]

Already read TSNotD, and love it. I liked Passage, too, but I agree that it was intensely frustrating.

[kitsunehime-aki.livejournal.com]

Apparently she wrote an anthology of Christmas stories? It just seems so unlikely that I'm excited to check it out, haha.

[matt_doyle]

...that sounds both weird and amazing!

[lyraeinne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, you're not the only one to notice that change in Card's writing. And it's a shame, because I really do think the man is ridiculously talented and it makes me sad that over time I find myself being able to relate to his work less and less.

I think I often try too hard to keep my ability to enjoy a work of fiction separate from whether or not I agree with an author's metatextually stated principles, so I really don't have much a context for that conservative bent in science fiction literature in general. Do you notice it cropping up on particular issues (ie homophobia or online publishing) more than others?

[matt_doyle]

Sexism is a huge problem, if not one that has its roots in conservative politics. Too many older white guys emulate Bob Heinlein in their treatment of women - that is, they depict them as capable, but also from a very prurient sort of perspective, designing kick-ass women who also meet all their various fetishes... or then there's the Piers Anthony problem of depicting the most important thing in any woman's life, no matter what, as having a man.

Well okay. That's only problem #1 with Piers...

Racism is a problem too. I tend to give credit for good faith - a lot of older authors would never believe they were racist, and were firm supporters of civil rights & etc., but are baffled and offended by modern antiracist activism and associated schools of thought. Hence RaceFail, for the most part - though there are also that select few list of authors, as seen here, who are just genuinely bigoted as Hell and make it harder to cut the others any slack.

[lyraeinne.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I really do think that particular brand of sexism can be even worse in visually oriented mediums; ie television, movies, or comics. By which I mean male titillation disguised as female empowerment and/or the assumption that the primary goal in any women's life is finding a man to hang off of indefinitely.

Racism is an even harder issue I think, just because so much of it is so deeply ingrained into the fabric of normal social interaction and expectation that having someone point it out can feel jarring. But it really does reach a point where cutting people slack based on that alone is more negative than positive.

[sunnyskywalker]

Mm, yes. I gave up on the series at Shadow of the Hegemon - well, I considered going on, but flipping through one of the sequels led me to discover that Petra's Home Eugenics Project was a major plot point, and I decided against it. ("Bean, you are smrt! I must bear your smrt babies for teh good of humanity!!1! Nevermind about that teeny catch where they'll die a slow and agonizing death at 25 when their bodies literally collapse from overgrowth.") At least in the earlier books the experiment that produced Bean and even the whole third child exception for Ender just so the government could get an appropriate candidate for Battle School was presented as slightly dodgy, even if it kinda sorta ended up okay.

Or maybe not, really. I've also found that the early books don't hold up quite as well on re-reads to me. I mean... okay, so Ender kicks Stilson while he's down to scare him off of ever bugging Ender again, sure. But how hard and how many times did he kick him that Stilson actually died? You would think that several kicks, even vicious ones, would not be close to fatal, especially given that Ender weaker and medical science presumably pretty good. I used to think that Graff saying Ender wasn't a killer, he "just wins... thoroughly" was Card using an unreliable narrator to highlight how warped the whole setup was, but now I'm not sure.

This essay has an interesting take on Ender's Game; I have some quibbles (I think intention counts for something at least), but it does have some good points about how the book often creates false dichotomies for Ender (seriously, how often is total genocide the only option? Really? And even supposing it is this time, is it really possible to do that and be so innocent that we should feel more sorry for the mass-murderer than for the entire dead species? Because I remember the book being clear that Ender did know it was real, deep down.)

Also, have you read War of Gifts? I'll ignore the whole "no, I'm totally not a crazy fundie because I don't beat children like real crazy fundies would" and other religion issues in the story for now, though you could probably compare it to the early books and find some indicators of things to come. The part that made me want to throw the book at the wall was where Ender "heroically" convinced the fundy-kid that he didn't need to go home to rescue his mother from his abusive father, because now that he wasn't around for Daddy to beat, surely his mom would see logic and just leave him. Or something like that. Because it's not like there were any other kids... or like Mom might have had some, I don't know, other issues keeping her with that guy, or anything. Saint Ender says it's fine now, so it is, and we can happily engage in charming Christmas traditions now! And all this brought to mind the earlier Ender books, specifically Novinha, and how Ender's speaking for her dead husband revealed that she stayed with his abuse because she thought she deserved it because she was committing adultery, and gosh, it was kinda understandable how he could be angry about that, and you know it isn't like he was a bad guy in most ways...

I think it's not so much that Card's attitudes have shifted so much as... intensified? I'm not sure that's the right word.

ETA: sorry, didn't mean to go tl;dr on you!

[matt_doyle]

I got a very different impression of what was meant in Speaker for the Dead than that, but you're spot-on about the creepy in War of Gifts, and in Ender in Exile the lionizing of Graff gets way worse...

While I agree with the essay about false dichotomies, I'm otherwise not fond of it... still food for thought, though, I just think it's as biased against Card and Ender as Card is biased in the first place...

[sunnyskywalker]

Well, it's been a while since I read Speaker, so I could very well be misremembering it. Mainly I remember the bad impression it left on me. But I'd be glad to be wrong! Early Card tendencies aside, I think there was a lot more nuance and room for interpretation in the earlier books, especially given that we find out the whole second war was unnecessary since the Buggers had realized humans were sentient beings in the interim and weren't going to attack again. Not that Earth knew that, but it still meant the humans had to have deliberately sought out the second conflict with no further provocation, and they turned out to be wrong about the necessity for it. That opens up all kinds of avenues for thought... (Uh, unless this is one of those things that got retconned out?)

Yeah, the essay does flatten the issues a bit, for one thing.

[matt_doyle]

Well, it was the third conflict, not the second, so it isn't like the previous war was an isolated conflict, but besides that I agree.

!

[matt_doyle]

Oh, and feel absolutely damn invited to lave thoughtful rambles in my journal anytime! There's really no greater compliment to me, XD !

Re: !

[sunnyskywalker]

Thanks :D

Oh, and I also want to second the recommendation above for Connie Willis's The Doomsday Book.