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.
Interesting background, I think yours might be more unique than most, my general sense of the average user here is that at some point in their life they called themselves “liberals” / “progressives” on at least some issues (drug laws, foreign intervention [which ironically seems to have flipped in the last decade] racial issues, sex/gender issues, etc), regardless of how loathe they might be to admit such today.
How do you go about evaluating intangible notions for their Truth? I go back to the religion point not to be unfair to you or overly rhetorical, but because I just think it’s a great summation of how no matter how much effort and conscious consideration we put to an issue, it’s very hard (if not impossible in some cases, at a given point in time) to discern what exactly the Truth of a matter may be, do you get what I mean?
Edit: to go back to your earlier point about “one man’s terrorist”, wouldn’t Americans have seen the founding fathers as freedom fighters, and the British/British loyalists have seen them as troublemaking terrorists?
Funny enough no. The Americans called themselves such because they still claimed themselves as English. The term American existed to differentiate between that and British.
The British on the other hand considered them to rebels. The Americans didn't attack civilian populations either. They fought peer to peer even if they did so poorly at first. Which is one of the exact definitions of a terrorist, someone who targets civilians out of a lack of desire to fight peer to peer, usually from an aversion to risk.
As for religions there is only one genuinely correct Abraham religion, the rest are various heresies, or in the case of Judaism just outright Satan worship.