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

[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.