Patrick Richardson asks over at Pajamas Media, Is Science Fiction Getting More Conservative?
ESR pulls the rug effectively out from under those that would love to think so... and he actually showed up in the comments to point out his essay.
ESR is one of those guys that I have some admiration for and inspiration from (see this little book and magazine, both using CC-BY-SA licenses.)
I just don't have time to take this one apart, but do yourself a favor and take a few minutes to read ESR's essay about the subject (much more considered than this article.) I'm not ready to say that I agree with him, but he's obviously thought about this and has a point of view worthy of the subject.
As to the question: my short and sweet... The truth is, as with all good fiction, there is great stuff coming from people with all sorts of political beliefs. And, the stuff that sticks is the stuff that anyone can pick up and enjoy, whatever their political beliefs.
There are ax-grinders. Sometimes that ax needs grinding. When that's the case, it sticks around even it if seemed odd or extreme at the time.
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Good for ESR for offering his input. I found the article to which he was replying to be very odd and unthoughtful and not well researched or well composed at all, and I found the whole comment thread following it to be very dismaying. So it was nice that someone with some more informed insight showed up to offer it.
ReplyDeleteI noticed more than once in the comments that it is assumed that the reason that a lot of people (like me) don't like to read Card anymore is that he is a Mormon. So if you don't like Card anymore, then it's because you're a religious bigot. I always knew, back when I used to read his stuff, that he was a religious conservative, but it didn't stop me from reading it. What stopped me is when he started to publicly campaign against gay marriage rights. That erased a line between his work and his real-world actions that cannot, for me at least, be redrawn. It's very odd to me that nearly all those commenters seem to think that the sf genre is the natural home for that sort of thing. It certainly is not, and they need to expand their reading beyond the handful of military sf writers that kept being mentioned again and again.