Hehe, spend 20 years working with them and you just might agree. If 5% of the typical bureaucrat’s time ended up being a positive contribution to society that would be impressive. Most of them devote their time to justifying their continued employment, being a pain in the ass to management, trying not to be noticed until retirement, or trying to keep the whole bunch of misfits under control.
For the record, I remain staunch in my opposition to mass murder. Because otherwise someone will surely accuse me of its advocacy. : P
It’s been a long time since I read it, but the basis of your statement is not clear to me.
Edit: just re-read the plot summary on Wikipedia. It has indeed been a long time. But I’m still not seeing an obvious basis for your claim of mental illness, seems like pretty standard post-apocalypse stuff to me.
Amazing how blinded people are to political content when it jives with their world view or otherwise pleases them. The rest of us are dismayed at constantly being “sucker punched” by that crap in fiction we might otherwise enjoy.
Reading Brubaker’s Captain America Winter Soldier omnibus now, for instance - it’s one of the best comic runs in recent years, but almost every issue features some liberal fantasy element that’s offensive to anyone more lucid. Or anything by Ennis. Or Mark Millar. Or Alan Moore. Or Grant Morrison. A lot of that stuff is still worthwhile because it’s otherwise so well written, but there are many inferior writers who are just insufferable, like J. Michael Straczynski.
Oh right, those highly offensive, massively popular authors. Whose content is, at best, centralist with the occasional left-swinging mention. Millar’s a flipping Labour supporter (who viciously attacked occupy), while Ennis is a vulgar libertarian who’s rabidly anti-religion! The only actual leftist there is Alan Moore.
And ah yes, mjs, that “inferior” writer who wrote that guide to scriptwriting used in first-year University courses…who’s routinely turns down work offers because he’s fully booked…those hacks the Wachowskis, working with his studio on Sense8…
I’ll just leave this here for people who want to evaluate your credibility on this topic. Remember folks, he’s calling Alan Moore, Mark Millar, etc. “centralists” [sic]
Millar is a moderate right winger, a New Labour man. He’s a stateist, a capitalist and a bankers shill…he’s anti-EU (from the right perspective), currently is snuggling up to the right wingers in the SNP…a Catholic who sees no issues with religious people withholding services they object to on those grounds, etc.
You keep making up lies though - I was talking about their creative content, not their personal views. (Which, as I’ve said, I’m entirely happy to do until you get to the real crazies like Kratman whose crazy permeates every single word they right. Are you a big fan of his? A State of Disobedience really must appeal, after all!)
And let’s evaluate you - who’s called any type of centralist, let alone left wing, content “offensive”, and anyone who does not find them so is not “lucid”, and that it’s automagically “fantasy”. That it’s being “sucker punched” to have “crap” which does not accord with your views in fiction, which is “infested” with said contest. Then there’s the bit about non-conservative views being a delusion, and that the concepts of Occupy are ridiculous.
Let’s remember those - they condemned; illegal repossessions, huge bonuses from companies which took bailouts, discrimination, attacks on workers rights, the health insurance pre-existing condition scandal, damage to freedom of the press… Nono, all “ridiculous”
Of course I haven’t lied, since there’s no need when your own statements sufficiently diminish you and your perspective. I also don’t doubt you’re earnest, even if you lack perspective, discernment or wisdom. I have no idea what a Kratman is, though, so clearly I have things to learn too.
Do you actually think that Moore’s V for Vendetta or Watchmen, or Morrison’s Invisibles, or Brubaker’s observations on a Tea Party-ish gathering in Captain America, or JMS’s Civil War stuff, etc. doesn’t contain political content though? That’s why I question your lucidity on this stuff.
And let’s evaluate you - who’s called any type of centralist, et alone left wing, content “offensive”
Well, that’s certainly a very creative interpretation, but obviously manufactured by yourself. While I’m mildly curious as to what “centralist” or even “left-wing” views you think I just find offensive, I think those labels obfuscate more than illuminate so I’ll instead just go back to the thread topic and say this:
I find political metaphors or allegories pidgeon-holed into my fiction to generally be clumsy and, at best, uninteresting, and when the political views espoused are predicated upon ignoring reality, or absurdly malign good things or people, or fantasize that what’s destructive and malevolent in the world is actually something that should be lauded - it ruins what might otherwise be enjoyable.
Then there’s the bit about non-conservative views being a delusion, and that the concepts of Occupy are ridiculous.
I didn’t say that all anti-conservative views are delusional - I just said that I didn’t enjoy the fiction that included such political delusions. Most of what I’ve heard from Occupy Wall Street fans would certainly fit in the category of muddled delusions though. But the items you list as associate with them are the positions most conservatives I know hold, so clearly there’s some malleability.
If you had to worry about encountering some Tea Party mantra in every comic you read, or movie you see, then you’d likely prefer less politics in your fiction as well. Like I said, it’s easy to be blinded to political content if it’s consistent with your perspective since it doesn’t stand in stark contrast with reality to you.
lol, you’re talking to an avid Baen reader. There is a LOT, and I mean a LOT of right wing political wankery in the milscifi I read. Only a few of them overstep the bounds of actively being offensive like Kratman, though (who has been called a wingnut by some Tea Party supporters I know in America). In contrast, there is very little left-wing propagit…much of what you’re complaining about is simply how other countries work! Do remember that America’s politics are sharply right from the rest of the world, and many of those authors are not American.
You come across to me as moaning. Feel free to stick to ideologically correct media. If there isn’t much outside some genres of novels…you might want to think about that too. There’s certainly a market for it. (Oh, and of course a LOT of video games based on guns guns guns so…). I find most comics, frankly, boring (as it’s normal “Superhero” stuff, yawn) - see my thread about dark settings in them.
(Also, I also can’t stand a some actively offensive LEFT wing propagit in fiction, such as Ken MacLeod’s recent works and some of Charles Stross’s work (Accelerando, Rule 34, some short stories))
I agree with Starlight on this recent line of debate, though I think he may be pressing his point a little too hard.
Even in the works of Trotskyist SF writers like Steve Brust or Ken Macleod you don’t find nearly as much polemical politics as in the Baen world of military sci-fi. Take, MacLeod, Iain Banks, or any of the lefty English and Scottish SF writers of the recent generation, sure, you get a sense of their affinity from their writing, but you don’t get these raving political screeds, these antifeminist marty-stu libertarian characters, this bizarre anti-welfare get-a-job attitude, as often seen in what might a little unfairly be called the Baen Books school of SF. (It’s a little unfair because Baen will happily publish apolitical or even left-leaning fiction; it’s just that they do specialize in military SF, which tends to be written by right-wingers.)
It’s been decades for me as well, but I think if I squint at my memory, I might be able to see some of what they’re saying: in Hammer, the chaff of the modern world is quickly and ruthlessly divided from the wheat in the author’s telling: lawyers, TV broadcasters, hair stylists and the like (i.e., liberal arts majors) are quickly reduced to serfdom or cannibals, while farmers, ranchers and the like are likewise raised to near-nobility, with scientists in “practical” disciplines ascending to the top of the heap.
But in my memory this wasn’t so much a variety of “right-wingism” as much it was the literary end point of the age-old game of “after the apocalypse, I would be useful because…” that we all played in the waning hours of disappointingly sausage-heavy party back in college.
Not too surprising – you tend to write what you like, and if you’re successful, you learn quickly to write for your audience as well. Military-themed writers tend to have a military background or at least a lot of sympathy for those that do, and consumers of military fiction tend to like it because they also admire or sympathize with that mindset. Since (at least in the US) career military persons tend to lean to the right, it’s not too surprising that the writers and the audience would as well.
That’s a stereotype, and like most of those there are exceptions that prove the role. So let’s save some time here: let’s assume that you (the person moving their cursor towards the “reply with quote” button even now) have posted about your favorite left-leaning military sci-fi writer that proves me wrong. Then, let’s also assume that I respond with a thin defense of how your example doesn’t count. Following that, let us all imagine the triumphant post where you rip my counter to shreds and make at least two zingers that no doubt put me into place. Finally, imagine a couple posts by other forum-dwellers congratulating you on your cleverness. Man, you really got me there…
I seem to recall there was some controversy over Lucifer’s Hammer being racist, but it’s been so long since I’ve read it that I don’t feel qualified to comment.
The clumsiest piece of left-wing fiction I’ve seen is Voyage from Yesteryear, which I mentioned earlier. It’s the evil capitalist authoritarians vs. the good socialist colonists, and it’s entirely about this socialist utopia he’s envisioned. Again, as I said before, it’s weird because Hogan did a complete flip-flop within a few years and started writing libertarian political fiction instead.
I don’t recall ever reading anything by Banks I’d consider political. Maybe there’s more under the Iain M. Banks name. Sure, the Culture doesn’t have money, but it’s more about being post-scarcity than a political statement.
Banks doesn’t grab you by the collar and shake you while saying capitalist society is evil, like a typical right-wing author does with respect to their imagined idea of socialism. But many of his Culture books are about malicious and even monstrous non-Culture societies that often portray some exaggerated (or not so exaggerated) quality of modern western society. Whether it’s the sexist and authoritarian cruelty of, uh, whatever that society was in Player of Games, or the hegemonic rapacity of the Affront, I think there’s a lot of direct criticism of western governments and culture in the current day. He did after all burn his UK passport when the Labour (!) government made the decision to send troops to Iraq.
That being said, he never comes out and says “dumbass, if you only voted for a guaranteed minimum income the world would be a happy place” and he doesn’t have his heroic MC who can do no harm take a chapter off to rant about the evils of CEOs and interlocking directorates, so as I was saying, writers like Banks are not nearly as polarizing to read as some of the right-wingers mentioned in this thread.
The politics of intervention and colonialism, superiority mindsets (when they’re justified - the Minds over Humans), societal control, terrorism and subversion (Look To Windward (…if you have it, re-read what The Culture do at the end! Not to mention the issue of the entire failed intervention), means of punishment and state control of such (Surface Detail), experimental ethics and the role of the truth in politics… (The Hydrogen Sonata)
There’s also a lot more subtle stuff, for example how he plays /against/ the heroic ideal, in favour of a collective one. In Consider Phelebus, was anything actually decided by the protagonists?
Excession, where the entire thing is more-or-less a moral panic?
There’s actually a fair amount. Most of it, such as the racism, is more implied or inherent in the world view than explicitly argued, but toward the end the shape of the society to come is firmed up, and we get what amounts to an apologia for various unpleasant bits of history. It turns out things as varied as slavery, arranged marriage, and unequal rights were natural and necessary, and it only became possible to do away with them in the wake of the Industrial Revolution. Thanks, science!
I don’t remember that. I remember it being only so-so and that the bad guys had a doctor vetting which bodies could be eaten, but that’s about. I wonder if I still have my copy?
