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

[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.