Discussion
#WritersCoffeeClub 14 Sept. Have you ever read a work of fiction you felt was advertising something?
In my own field, a lot of American SF (in particular) is advertising for one strain of crank politics/economics or another—especially libertarianism: from Heinlein's "The Moon is a Harsh Mistress" to "The Unincorporated Man" it's a rich seam of bullshit running through the entire genre.
The product most widely advertised in fiction is the author's own ideological blinkers.
@WellsiteGeo Heinlein's pre-1958 books are generally okay. After that, not so much (although a couple work: needed heavier editing, though).
@cstross I mean, all scifi is political. And lots of politics is bugfuck crazy weirdos shouting absolute nonsense like it's gospel. So you're always gonna end up with at least some scifi that advocates for bugfuck crazy politics.
@cstross L Ron Hubbard and Scientology...
@fazalmajid Hubbard was a protege of Campbell's, and Campbell never saw a crazycakes cult or paranormal grift he didn't go all in on for at least six months afterwards.
@cstross
Guns, lots ans lots of guns and how having guns is great to defend against aliens or zombies ...
Also, the military honor ethos in the whole mil-sf subgenre.
@jadam_fr I note that the Mil-SF sub-genre didn't really begin to grow until AFTER the end of conscription in the US military and the wind-down from Vietnam. (There were isolated works of military SF, but no brigade of Baen authors advancing on all fronts.)
@cstross
Ugh. My childhood was a psyop? I didn't realize there was a starship-troopers-to-baen-mil-sf pipeline. I'm not surprised, mind you, more dispirited.
@brandoncarey Starship Troopers predated most of the genre by a couple of decades: Jim Baen mostly got going in the early 80s at Tor then spun off his own publishing op specializing in this stuff. There were some isolated outcroppings in the 70s—Jerry Pournelle, David Drake, etc—but it took a publisher specializing in the stuff to make a solid niche.
@cstross there has to be an AI Asimov joke here.
@cstross Cordwainer Smith might have been advertising psychoactive substances.
@cstross Basically, you are referring to anything representing the author's political views of the world in a favorable light. It could be intentional, Church of Scientology, or possibly just the author's view of the world. I find that you and @pluralistic are both guilty of the second. I don't mind it and I largely agree with both of you.
@rrb @cstross @pluralistic
Every author's worldview appears or is reflected in their works one way or another, even when they deliberately include other views. The problem is when it goes into polemics, most crudely when it is characters giving lengthy monologues, but also when it disrupts the world-building or creates plot non sequiturs.
@HighlandLawyer @cstross @pluralistic Just saying that if you fault Heinlein for a libertarian viewpoint coloring his works, @pluralistic 's story "Unauthorized Bread" is at least as polemical. Not in a bad way.
@rrb @cstross @pluralistic
Personally I simply consider Heinlein as "a product of his milieu" (and wouldn't consider him a libertarian in the modern (US) usage of the term) and when his characters do monologue a "political" view, it is showing their motivation for the action that follows.
Unlike certain other authors, who part way through wreck the logical premise of their world-building to express their politics <cough>Goodkind</cough>
The same thing occurred in Polish SF, though for different reasons. Under communism, writing SF was a way to avoid censorship and criticise the system without literally criticising the system, so many up and coming SF writers thought about themselves as anti-system fighters.
Then "real socialism" ended and Poland became the poster child for the Chicago school of economics while the SF writers kept "fighting communism".
@Leszek_Karlik Ah yes, how to replace one corrupt and broken system with a more efficient corrupt and broken system!
@cstross I mean, I once got a couple of hundred pages into "Atlas Shrugged" before I realised that I was mentally calling Bullshit! on every second line
@cliffordheath @cstross the rescue mission for Hank Rearden is a good example of everyone in a group contributing according to their abilities, toward each other according to their needs, though.
@GyrosGeier @cliffordheath I have carefully avoided reading Rand, having met enough of her glassy-eyed followers to want to avoid being got to by the brain eater lurking in those pages.
@cstross One of her glassy-eyed followers is a respected colleague of mine, who pushed me to read it. I think I managed to make him understand what is wrong with the whole thing, partly by having read enough to be able to gain his respect by giving concrete counter-examples. Don't ask for them, they are archived under lock and key in a dusty corner of my brain, never to be allowed out, even on parole.
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@cstross I was persuaded into reading a pile of Heinlein in about my 30s. But after a time his obsessions got irritating, and I've largely taken "American" in an authors bio as a reason to move on.
Actually, getting to read the bio should be a sign that the cover dummary (typo, but apt; summary, sample) isn't sufficiently engaging.
[Sigh] rain starts.
Regardless, I wonder if Heinlein has unduly poisoned me against USian writers. Or duly poisoned me.