I have a hard time with RW SF [View all]

Last edited Sun Jan 29, 2012, 09:48 PM - Edit history (2)

Growing up I read every word Heinlein had ever written. Everything. Very few authors I've done that with.

Today I can hardly read a page without laughing. Yes, he's a great and influential writer, indespensible to the hisory of SF. But his work is like a Newt Gingrich ambien rant.

Enders Game and Ender's Shadow are great books, but Card is just not a serious person. A clown, in fact. A brilliant clown.

A. E. Van Vogt is a fascinating paranoid artist, but clearly some sort of Jungian Monarchist. (A whole new category, that.)

Michael Crichton was a great tech-thriller writer (as a kid Andomeda Strain was he first book I read in one sitting), but it is problematic to read hard SF from a global-warming truther.

I am confident that The Mote in God's Eye is the finest classic SF novel I have ever read, and I've read and loved most Niven in genral, but I wouldn't piss on Niven or Pournelle if they were on fire. The RW bullshit just pours off of them in waves. (I was laughing out loud reading The Legacy of Heorot recently. It was the ultimate Didck Cheney masturbation fantasy where all the civilized people spend half the book wailing "Why oh why didn't we listen to the military guy? We are so effete and liberally..." And I fear Oath of Fealty... I'm guessing it's about defnding a gated community against Saul Alinsky.)

I LOVE the Heinlein without the Heinlein guys -- Haldeman, Varley, others. But the Niven novel factory is Heinlein with an extra helping of Heinlein.

A general observation about these guys

The RW thread in American SF is libertarian and/or objectivist. I am not hostile to the libertarian angle except as political science, where it becomes foolish. And objectivist gibberish is a good artistic frame for hero stories, which most genre fiction is one way or another.

But what amuses the hell out of me about Heinlein and his progeny is that their careers are about creating fantasy realms so bizarre that their political ideas appear sensible. Ys, maybe if you are on a space ship it makes sense to summarily execute someone for water theft after a five minute trial. And maybe society should be organized to weed out the unfit who can't read the airlock instructions if you happen to live on the moon. And maybe martial law is the way to go when your planet is infiltrated with alien shape-shifters. And perhaps it makes sense for military service to be a precondition of voting if you are at war with a galaxy of giant insects that shoot plasma out of their butts.

And maybe some offensive old John Birch society crack-pot should rule the world with an iron fist and tell how many babies the women-folk should have... if his bomb shelter was pushed through a time warp into a vacant furutre Earth. (The plot of Heinlein's Farnham's Freehold, which reads like a novelization of Ron Paul's newsletters.)

BUT THOSE ARE NOT REAL THINGS.

1) Here is the belief set that quiets my deep neurotic insecurities.
2) Here is a bizarre fantasy world where my delusions would be more rational than actual rationality.
3) See how useful my ideas are? See? Doncha see!?

Anyway, I'm just ranting along here...

Thoughts?