Just got to thinking about this after those threads on The Expanse and Military Sci-Fi (which admittedly is probably the sub-genre least affected by this trend).
I know the case can be made for the existence of some conservative authors or sometimes conservative themes, of course they exist, but are they “swimming upstream” so-to-speak? Going against the flow of “the mainstream” of Sci-Fi?
I’m not looking for a list of conservative authors by the way, I want to hear if the people here think that Sci-Fi as a genre may or may not have an inherent bias towards the new, the previously unseen, and thus “progressive” ideas and ideologies. Not even necessarily to castigate Sci-Fi, merely to attempt to understand what’s happening.
The “Sad Puppies” folks probably have some insights on this subject but I don’t know much about them beyond their existence and their claim that the Sci-Fi book awards system has been subverted by leftist/progressive ideologues:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sad_Puppies
Sad Puppies activists accused the Hugo Awards "of giving awards on the basis of political correctness and favoring authors and artists who aren't straight, white and male".
I do see the ideas of sci-if and “progressivism” as connected, but I’m not sure if that’s an inherent aspect of the genre, or if that is perhaps a cultural relic. I lean towards the idea that it is likely largely cultural (i.e. well respected sci-fi authors of old put “culturally progressive” themes in their books about Scientific “progress”, and that has carried on to this day) but I’m interested in where everyone else falls on the subject.
No more than say, technology is. Or sharing.
The left seeks to appropriate as many normal things into their wicked doctrine as they can in order to appear more palatable to normies.
The truth is that nothing is "inherently" progressive save wickedness and sin, always progressing towards the same old ends of chaos, depravity and evil. That's what their "progress" means.
That’s an interesting point....
Sci-fi has massive overlap with “technology”, and most any story about technology will be about the progress seen in that field. The subject of this thread perhaps comes into play when the author then seeks to apply this notion of “progress” to other things in their story, such as gender/race relations or economics or whatever.
But also, we don’t tend to write stories about just technologies, so authors tend to “spill-over” their notions of “technological progress” into ones of “societal progress” just by dint of writing their story (seemingly - they can’t all be deranged ideologues can they? Lol)
That's because the term progress is yrt another appropriation of the left.
Evil views itself as inevitable.
We’re certainly marching towards a cliff.
How do you deal with the reality that everyone sees themselves as “the Good guy, fighting Evil”?
Because that statement isn't true, simply put. It's Hollywood nonsense, just like that old, remarkably stupid equivocation of one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter. Or that hate leads to the dark side.
Take a good long look at the left, past and present, and tell me that they not only don't know they're the bad guys, but that they don't revel in it.
I dunno dude, I kind of feel like you’re operating in some kind of ontological realm where Truth is something that’s even considered by all, much less understood and agreed upon. That’s not to say that Truth doesn’t exist or any such postmodernist claptrap, I think our lives should, on the whole, be dedicated to the pursuit of Truth. I just also acknowledge that earnest, dedicated seekers (much less the unthinking hordes) can come to different conclusions, especially at different points in time / their lives.
Is not one man’s terrorist another man’s freedom fighter? One man’s junk another’s treasure? Like I say I’m not so sure.
In my experience, everyone who disagrees with me from the left, when pressed, thinks they are being “good”/“kind”/“tolerant” [ed. blegh] in their approach and thus that I am being evil/mean/wrong in mine. Of course their minds and moral frameworks are stuck in the mire of postmodernist brain rot, but within that mire they’ve been convinced of the shit they believe.
If it has to be "agreed on", it's not a truth at all. It's a consensus, crass democracy posing as truth.
And in my experience with terrorists, they know full well exactly what they are.
As for the left, you're making the mistake of assuming that their professed motivations are accurate, or even honest. Bad faith is a matter of course for these people.
Were you more or less leftwing / progressive / liberal in your youth?
What changed?
Is it conceivable that this never changes for some people?
Do you find Truth to be something graspable? Something you can hold in your hands and speak aloud? I’m talking about the actual, important Truth of things, not tautological silliness like “2+2 =4” - for example, what is the Truth of religion/spirit? Can you point me to a denomination of any group and honestly say “yeah, these guys here have the Truth”?
Point being, despite the acknowledged existence of Truth, I don’t think it really enters into our discussions often. It’s almost a meta-physical layer underlying and overlaying our existence, but only rarely and fleetingly breaking through. Most often only with the dedicated conscious effort of motivated individuals, it seems.
Ding, ding, ding. We have a winner.
Sadly, most are.
Obviously not, sci-fi existed before the mental illness known as Progressivism even existed. There just tends to be some overlap there because sci-fi sometimes deals with utopian societies and that intersects with the utopian delusions that drive Progressivism.
What are some examples of sci-fi untainted by progressivism? I see wiki listing the “oldest” examples of sci-fi being things like ”the epic of Gilgamesh”, ”1001 Arabian Nights” and “the Canterbury Tales” - are you going that far back?
I'd say we can go, at a minimum, back to Jules Verne (sure, people call him Steampunk today, but he was science fiction at his time). Maybe I'm forgetting things, but I can't recall anything remotely progressive in most of his works. Heck, "Around the World in 80 Days" is almost a minor celebration of the British Empire having conquered most of the world, and you could make the argument that Captain Nemo an early view of someone going Sovereign Citizen.
A counterpoint would be Captain Nemo from 10,000 Leagues Under the Sea being a utopian revolutionary figure, which falls into the left's wheelhouse. As is usual with more complex characters, they defy reductive explanations.
How the hell are those "sci-fi?" Or is whoever wrote that wiki simply lumping fantasy and sci-fi together?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_science_fiction
Some interesting points made - I should have linked the wiki if I was going to mention it.
There are heaps. For films: Star Wars (original trilogy). Blade Runner. The Matrix (this could be interpreted as Gnostic which is connected to Progressivism but still). Robocop. Predator. Solaris. Ghostbusters. Outland. Demolition Man. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. Village of the Damned (original). Jurassic Park (original). The Rover. Dead End Drive-in. Under the Silver Lake. etc
Star Wars = interracial (I’m including Wookiees and such) band of plucky revolutionaries overturn evil Empire clearly emblematic of the Nazis
Blade Runner = non-humans (might?!?) have human rights
The Matrix = were being brainwashed into compliant slaves by corporations maaaaaan
A bunch of good 80s action movies - yeah no doubt, are they right wing / conservative though? I’d say they’re more apolitical and even if we looked at them in depth we could probably find woke-for-its-time notions, while the films might not be dominated by them, thankfully
It seems like it's you that's trying to shoehorn progressive messages into things. Where in The Matrix are the machines referred to as a corporation? Morpheus himself even said we created AI and all of humanity was united and marveling at their own brilliance. Sounds like AI ushered in communism then destroyed us.
I’m just saying dude, one can see certain themes that were, for their time, “progressive” in all these works. The secretary in Ghostbusters, and adding Ernie in 2 come to mind as other examples of “woke-for-their-time”
I think “corporate/Military Industrial Complex america” is one of a few valid interpretations behind “the machine empire”, the agents have a clear “men-in-black”/gmen vibe, while obviously the film was also saying a lot of other things too though.
And that’s without even considering the people behind these works. Lucas is a classical lefty, the Whack-owskis are...well...whatever tf they are these days, and so on.
And besides(!!), from the very beginning I’ve never denied the existence of conservative themes or authors/creatives in Sci-Fi, I simply verbalized the notion that they were “swimming against the current” in the genre, the whole point being to discuss that phenomenon, and not necessarily counter examples (unless you thought the notion was so wrong it should be refuted, but I don’t think anyone can disagree that there is a general leftist slant in the average piece of sci-fi, I just wanted to get at why/what’s going on). I even said I don’t think it’s inherent, the title is mainly a framing for the conversation (though admittedly a far from perfect framing)
The entire conflict driver of that film is that the replicants don't have human rights, because they aren't human. If they did, then the job of Blade Runner literally wouldn't exist. Did you even watch the film?
Yeah, did you? The main character, who you’ve spent the entire film empathizing with, who seemed human this entire time, and spent the entire movie explicitly thinking he was human, turns out to (maybe?!?!) be one of the “non-humans”. Or at a minimum, he fell in love with one. Classic “it could happen to you” progressive morality play.
Just because something was a cool 80s action movie doesn’t preclude it from containing progressivist notions. Even Die Hard, the “badass” spends the whole movie groveling for his wife to love him again and showing how much pain he’s in, regardless of how much one likes the film, those were progressive notions, woke-for-their-time, certainly for an action hero movie.
As I stated in another comment above, you're only thinking of the utopian side. There's plenty of dystopian sci fi.
Wouldn’t you agree that often dystopian sci-fi is/can still be used to promote “progressive” ideology? Just for example, the dystopia often seen in Cyberpunk media could be “fixed” by communist wealth redistribution, according to some character/the author
I don’t think dystopia is mutually exclusive with “progressivist”
So even in their imagination, real communism has never been tried? That's telling.
The original Starship Troopers, from what I understand is one such example. There's a lot of other examples you can find from the 60's to the 80's, but you often have to look more into novels than TV shows or film.
A technologically-advanced society has to be racially-''conservative'' in the sense that it cannot exist if you let low-IQ retards demographically-replace us.
The Bantus invaded and appropriated White South Africa with its infrastructure and education system. South Africa is now collapsing due to the damage of black population-level dynamics.
No, ''not all of them''. But enough of them to make it so every place they gather in high number invariably goes to shit when there is no longer Whites or Asians to keep things running.
I'm a realist. They had no history of being in my nation. The instant their second-generation, ungrateful spawn reached their teenage years, the violence, stealing, raping and pimping statistics headed the same way they did everywhere else they went to.
Warhammer 40k is a great example of where it isn't some utopia, where progress is the good thing. Heck, progress leads to Chaos which has been shown to be not too good(even though I think Chaos is a cool faction, blood for the blood god n all).
Doesn't even make the commies(the Tau) the good guys, there aren't good people in the universe at all, no progressivism that's shown to be the force of good....at least for now, we shall see if they fuck it up.
Hell, if I remember right from the lore back when I still played the entire Tau race are pheromone slaves to a small clique of self appointed priests and merchants.
Just like real life
TLDR, no.
People trying to paint sci-fi as 'inherently progressive' are basically taking all the 60s and 70s reactionaries as 'all' of science fiction, while ignoring people who came before and afterwards.
A popular example they love to cite is 'Star Trek' for a multitude of reasons, but they always do it from a superficial twitter/tumbler understanding of the series, as I doubt any of them have actually sat down and, y'know, watched the original series.
One scene as an example that always sticks in my head was the one that introduced Khan in 'Space Seed', where the various characters are looking at the history of the eugenics wars, and Scotty remarked about how Khan was 'one of the good ones', where another character then turned around basically pointed out 'But he was still a fascist, genetic supremacist'. None of it done emotionally, all done in fair debate. Can you imagine any modern sci-fi show pulling off something like this? Giving an extreme side it's own fair soap box? Hell, Khan himself was smooth, charismatic, urbane, sophisticated - yet still clearly arrogant and confident in his own superiority.
People playing the 'sci-fi inherently progressive' are basically holding up a distorted fun-house mirror to science fiction as a whole and going 'See? SEE!?' to try and convince you that the mirror is the real thing.
And when you do the research and point out examples they'll just dismiss it as 'someone's triggered', because they lack the autism most fans of sci-fi tend to posess. It's just another cudgel fake fans/NPCs use in their arsenal to demoralize and break down their opponent.
Debating them is pointless. Just quote Heinlein and Asimov at them till they either freak out or shut up.
I’ve seen the trannies try to claim Heinlein over All.You.Zombies., I think they’re wrong and it’s obviously an interesting analysis of the “Grandfather Paradox”, but I suppose the point being that for as much as one can say “this is true, full stop, end of discussion” - there will always be people who disagree, I don’t think their mere (and pitiful) existence should shut down nuanced discussion though. Personally I do think Trek has always been progressive, it’s just that “progressive” in ‘66 meant something quite distant to “progressive” in ‘23. Distant, but the same path.
Can't say much to tranny delusions.
Heinlein was always very much a writer's writer - he wrote whatever the fuck he wanted and didn't really care how others would take it, and didn't really limit himself.
Even if he did go a little, uh, weird in his old age after his wife died.
Fiction is inherently utopian. The idea of temporarily escaping the real would you don't like into an imaginary place that doesn't have some of the negative aspects you don't want to deal with is fundamentally a childish fantasy.
The converse is facing the real world, accepting it for what it is faults and all, and dealing with the problems you face even if you would rather not.
Legends aren't the same as fiction because they come from a history and tradition that is linked to a specific ethnos.
Also art isn't necessarily subversive, that is just the last 150 years to so. Previously art was used to glorify God or immortalize a great man or great moment in history.
Utopian is one side, but some of the best sci fi is dystopian, understanding that "progress" has downsides. Think of some of the most popular sci fi works of all time, and they'll fall under the dystopian column.
Fahrenheit 451
Bladerunner
Terminator
Brave New World
Black Mirror
Kind of a tangent:
I feel like we create art in an attempt to share what we feel, with other people
If we feel like existence is glorious and blessed, we will attempt to fashion that feeling into a piece of art to express it, and hopefully spread it
If we feel like existence is a weary drudge from cradle to grave in a meaningless world of random chance and indifference (“God is dead, and we have killed him.”), then unfortunately that too ends up being expressed, and shared, and eventually violently enforced like we see today.
We’re all here because on one subject or another we refused to sink down into the mire of their (D)illusions. How do we turn that into a legend? It’s kind of happening unconsciously, but I don’t know if that’s enough, know what I mean?
I think broadening your question to the whole of speculative fiction, rather than just sci-fi, would be useful in terms of framing. Let me explain:
People who imagine things being different enough to write about the topic tend to be discontented with the way things are, which accounts for the bias towards leftism in the genre. Not that there's nothing inherently leftist about imagining the future, per se. It's more that the pool of people who are dissatisfied enough to do so will necessarily exclude more of those who are satisfied with the present. There will be exceptions among those who are intellectually curious enough to imagine different sets of societal compromises, but the majority of conservative writers will be practical and focused on what is and was, as opposed to what could be.
I think you’ve basically solved it, your explanation could be broadened as much as needed but you’ve very succinctly encapsulated things - it’s the authors and their motivations.
I wonder what kind of sci-fi the kids who grow up in today’s dystopia will imagine lol. That could be why Japanese media is so popular over here, it’s being produced by people who are “living 10 years ahead of us” in some respects (less so today than in the 80/90s, when many of the most influential works were being made)
Inherently? Not really. The literary world in general may mostly be a progressive space, but stories that relate to progress aren't necessarily endorsements of technological or societal advances.
The new and previously un[explored] is how you make unique work, I would think. The genre often explores the nature of people in differing environments and situations. How does society/this character navigate itself if X invention or discovery is made? It also highlights potentially unforeseen problems or consequences from such changes. Again, with most writers being regressive, you'll more often have regressive messages, but I don't believe this exploration only directs to regressive thought.
I would say SciFi is traditionally, if not inherently, anti-progressive.
Almost all the early stuff consisted of warnings of what unhindered progress could do, not a blanket endorsement.
From Logan's Run and Soylent Green to The Matrix and Black Mirror, even mainstream SciFi tends to warn against progress for progress' sake.
How is black mirror now? I no longer have Netflix but I liked it at first but then got annoyed by the over hype of the San junipero. Episode. They did have some interesting episodes
Read heinlein's starship troopers. Did it envision a different society? Sure. Sci-fi is all about imagining the unknown and the future. Would you lump in "people are too self-absorbed and we need to return to an earned vote through service" as progressive, though?
Lefties/progressives mostly believe that crime/murder/etc. only happens because people are poor and bad things happen to poor people because life sucks when you're poor. They also believe all races are perfectly equal (in capability/potential) as well as both sexes being perfectly equal (which is so obviously untrue re: women's sports vs. men's sports; but I digress).
Most artists are lefties and yeah they rig the scales nowadays to block out right wing artists; but I think that right wingers/conservatives are so much more likely to get a stable job and live a simple/stable life that it explains why we almost never see right wing/conservative artists. Thus; in a sci-fi story the lefty writer always assumes/portrays everyone as equals getting along in perfect harmony. They think that since no one is poor; that there will not be any more crime or racial hatred or anything like that.
It is their ideology being put forward as though it succeeded and they won. "See! Once we get to post scarcity everything will be fine! Surely black people won't continue to kill white people at a rate 10x higher than the reverse once we fix poverty!"
I didn't answer your question; but I wanted to point this out because of how annoying it is to me. Oh yeah people will become perfectly equal and harmonious once poverty is eliminated. Once we implement your dumbass space communism then all our problems will melt away, right.
Being "progressive" is linked to a denial of the existence of God. This is based on the materialistic worldview that everything in our universe is of a material nature, and thus measurable by modern materialistic science. God is not measurable in this way and thus forbidden by materialistic science. In the absence of God and His moral law, human values and ideas have no constraints leading to perverse value systems that define what you call being "progressive".
So yes, as long as sci-fi does not constrain itself to God's moral law, then it is inherently "progressive".
I remember when the sad puppies thing started and there was pushback from real sci/fi fans because low selling books were getting awards because they were written by females or lgbt and then we saw the familiar “we need more females in sci-fi”. I will say it was the first time I heard the “it’s always been progressive” argument. Granted a lot of authors are liberal for their day. There is also the truth that sci-fi tends to appeal to more guys so it was bound to get attacked
The nature of sci-fi is to speculate on the future. I feel if all these authors they claim to be woke or progressive were alive today, they would be attacked by the very same people. Look what happened to George RR Martin
I think it’s important to remember that “woke” is a product of its time, which changes and adapts as society ”progresses” (said with a sneer, lol) - what was woke in the 30’s, the 60’s, the 90’s, and today has shifted.
Star Trek for example, how often do lefties circlejerk over mUh FiRsT iNtErRaCiAl KiSs? Yet the same series had all the honeys wearing short skirts. It only took until TNG for them to directly lambast that reality with their weird ass unisex dress outfits, and putting Picard in a skirt (though that never stopped them from framing entire scenes around Troi’s assets, strangely enough).
So while yes, I think you’re totally right, if they got these “progressive” icons like Mary Shelly or whoever reanimated from the grave, it wouldn’t take long at all for them to be canceled, they were still progressive / “woke” for their time
Agreed. I’ve seen young Star Trek “fans” getting upset over Uhura not being offended about Lincoln calling her a charming negress.
Also I’d say writers from the past had more life experience to influence them, and despite their views they were still able to write a story. Not sure if you are familiar with N.K. Jemison but she is a left wing black woman who has won like three straight nebulas and when she won the first one she went on a rant about ……. Wait for it….. racism. The lady grew up in the 80s and 90s so I don’t believe she has experienced the racism she describes. Plus all of her books are about oppressed aliens. That is someone who doesn’t know crap about Sci-fi but keeps getting awards. But they just give awards now based on identity politics. I remember one year Orson Scott card outsold the winners by a lot and wasn’t even nominated
Yes. Science fiction is inherently progressive. It requires an examination of technology's impact on society, or at least a person. War of the Worlds is an allegory for colonialism. Since the English ruled most of the world, it was necessary to introduce a people/technology not from this world to put the English in the role of conquered savages. The "progressivism" there, aside from the political messaging ("see how shitty it feels?") was to examine the impact of the invasion on the British. Star Trek's inherent progressiveness was to look at the impact of technology enabling us to be a spacefaring society. Not just new worlds and new civilizations, but also how it affected OUR civilization. Racial equality, communism, and all that. 1984, in contrast, looked at the way technology could enable tyrants by spying and controlling information. Also communism. The problem is "progressive" has changed from the thoughtful examination of the impact of technology on society to merely "we have gay people in it." Or, in the case of the Hugo's, "we have gay people writing it." That's meta progressivism, where the text is less important than who produced it.
40k is sci-fi for the most part, and about as progressive as an Amish neighborhood. Sci-fi is what you make it out to be, Gene Roddenberry was a flaming commie, and so is his creation. Anyone making a good science fiction universe who happens to be conservative will create a conservative world unless suborned in some way.
There are certain ideas and concepts that inevitibly would crossover with certain progressive stances.
IE, the idea of a one world government while not inherently progressive does have a lot of crossover with what we've actually been seeing play out. (IE, global elites pulling strings on a global scale). This is something that admittedly is liable to happen in some way shape or form whenever mankind ends up expanding and colonizing other planets, even if it's something similar to the US's general structuring.
There is also an inherent risk with how dangerous technology can be in the hands of any random madman when the power, capability, and accessibility of that technology scales up. Just imagine how much damage a single person could potentially do with a Star Trek-styled warp core or nanites. This of course ends up with the typical crossover of regulation measures, all the way down to things like gun control, "loicensing" requirements for anything, etc.
Ooo, you would have loved to watch Prisoners of Gravity back in the day; I think you can still find odd episodes around on YouTube.
I would say that people who write sci fi are inherently "progressive", at least in some ways. That being said, I do remember reading at least one story that involved the POTUS going missing, because he had a plan to nuke his own cities to get rid of all the commies and hippies and reset the US back to an agrarian state. And he succeeds. Can't remember what it was called, bought it for ten cents at a used book store in the 90s.
And some authors just can't resist putting in their own bullshit in an otherwise normal story (Rendezvous with Rama, Clarke just had to put in polyfaggotry as an aside for "character building" reasons or some dumb shit. The story would just the same if we assumed the MC had a normal wife and kid.)
The thing about sci-fi is that it presents a way for authors to send their message (left or right) in a palatable form, like wrapping a bitter pill in bacon or cheese for your dog. Want to know when television started getting subversive? I'd say it was the day that The Twilight Zone debuted in 1959.
So Sci-Fi is fake & gay.