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

[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!