207. The Anti-Politics of Sci-Fi

A lot of sci-fi skirts around substantive questions of politics - is this a coincidence, or is there something about the genre that encourages it?

-Links for the Curious-

[TheArchsage]

Bro this is such high quality content. Most underrated channel on the website

[String.Epsilon]

The sci-fi I read tends to be pretty political. There's "Silver Ships" (S.H. Jucha), in which the protagonist very much engages in both his own planets and other civilizations politics. Even action-rumps like Expeditionary Force (Craig Alanson) engage with politics on multiple levels. Qualityland (Mark Uwe Kling) goes a step further and uses sci-fi and the tropes therein to reflect on current political machinations and trends through satire - and is also textually engaged in politics via it's protagonist interacting with the governing system(s). "The Expanse" speaks for itself, really. it's as much political thriller as it is hard science fiction with epic space battles.

And of course my all time favorite piece of sci-fi: Ghost in the Shell, which is both overtly and subtextually political in a lot of different ways.

Other honerary mentions are Psycho-Pass, "We are Bob" (Dennis E Taylor), Altered Carbon and "Player of Games" (Iain M. Banks).

[Xob_Driesestig]

Maybe it's also that the hypothetical technologies that get explored, aren't ones that fundamentally threaten the political status-quo. If they make e.g a cool spaceship, we can more easily explore those technologies without thinking about the political implications. But if we were to introduce e.g hivemind technology this would immediately raise political questions.
Maybe it's not that hypothetical technologies automatically produce more individualist stories, but rather that technologies that don't produce it, get systematically ignored because they are too uncomfortable. That's not to say that we never see those technologies, but when they do show up they tend to have negative connotations so the protagonists aren't inclined to adopt them.

[TheGemsbok]

I spy someone else who likes the hardcover editions that Barnes & Noble has been making of classics for the past ~10 years.

[EngineerNick]

Read some Ann Leckie books. The one I am reading now is called Provenance, and the protagonist's mother is a politician. Scifi seems to be a backdrop to the political intrigue.

[CaraiseLink]

Huh. It never actually occurred to me that most sci-fi was trying to be apolitical. My earliest experiences with sci-fi were Ghost in the Shell and Babylon 5, so I guess I've just been conditioned to pay attention to sci-fi stories' political and philisophical elements regardless of whether the story itself is trying to obscure them. That actually explains a lot about why sci-fi can be hit or miss with me; I'm actually *not* here for the science itself, I'm here to see how science can impact social dynamics and the human condition in general. That does a lot to inform me what sort of sci-fi I should be seeking out in the future. Thanks, Josh! X D

[CosmiaNebula]

The most famous sci-fi in China is The Three Body Problem. Its fame and intellectual influence there is roughly like Star Trek and Star Wars combined. In the Three Body Problem, there is a quite clear political message: democracy is unsuited for making life-and-death decisions on behalf of humanity, and kindness too. Ruthless, rational calculation by a small cabal (preferably a dictator) is the best way to preserve peace and human flourishing.
This is shown most clearly in the third book (the first two were not very political in comparison), where a Mutually Assured Distruction held between Earth and Trisolarian by a single man ("the Swordholder") holding a stick with buttons on it. At his retirement, the stick was handed to someone with too much kindness in her heart. Immediately the Trisolarians attacked. The new Swordholder threw the stick away because she was too kind to destroy both worlds.

[CosmoShidan]

Hey Thunk, this got me to bring up one of my favorite responses to Heinlein! I'm talking Joe Haldeman's "The Forever War", in which the politics in the novel play out as a means of making the world a place for the protagonist, William Mandela, from rejoining civilian life. This is especially as he returns from fighting space aliens (who are revealed to be humankind 1000 years from now). Mandela can't find a job in a fully automated, capitalistic society with mass-unemployment (sound familiar?!) and rampant crime. As a semi-autobiographical sci-fi story that is an allegory about the Vietnamese War, it does not stray from history, all the way down to a war that was based on a lie.

[TheGemsbok]

The frequency and flagrance of Kirk and McCoy's flaunting of the 'prime directive' is by now a common target of ridicule. But I am still quite amused at how often, on our current watching of the original series of Star Trek, my fiancee vehemently opposes the ways in which the Enterprise crew consistently enforces (sometimes violently enforces) not only anthropocentric and libertarian ideals and systems, but even specifically American political and metaphysical ideals on many perfectly functional societies that they deem 'unnatural.'

[Fulgara]

Hmm, I wonder whether it's scifi that's structurally predisposed to a soft libertarianism, or if it's the sort of escapist power fantasies scifi is often used to tell. It might be useful to compare it with similar stories in fantasy.

Part of it might be a publishing preference for a close focus on individual characters combined with a need for those characters to have agency with wide ranging consequences.

[ngoriyasjil]

Despite Weir's insistence, Artemis is one of the most anticapitalist books I have ever read. The driving force of the plot is the protagonist trying her best to make ends meet in poverty. In the very first scene she is denied a job she would be qualified for because she couldn't afford to maintain her own equipment. The whole book screams "space and capitalism don't mix!"

[stevetheduck]

There is a race / colour trend especially in early SF (defined as that which was published first in pulp magazines or the all-story magazines that preceded them; it's worth examining.
The famous 'blue - green - yellow - red - skinned space babe' is from the time before the Skylark series began as well.
There were laws in many countries intended to prevent miscegenation, so adventures among the 'red indians' where, let's say a US Cavalry officer could meet and relate to a local 'red' tribal princess and a 'black' fighting man is impossible to print, so it becomes, let's say, a visit to Mars, where the same races are colour-coded for our convenience.

The story where races / colours are acting together against tyrants of any shape might be called 'liberal' today, but these magazines still told it, even if in coded form.

[stevetheduck]

There's a belief held by engineers and a belief held by politicians.
They work together well.
The rest of us sometimes are allowed to hold different beliefs.

The Skylark series changes remarkably over time, until the last book which addresses clumsily the mechanistic and belief-based actions of it's heroes, by recognising that 'other people' may continue to exist without 'our' intervention, for example.
To be positive about this, it's a big step forward for people who's opinions and standards were set in the 1920s.

[shivuxdux]

“…as soon as you can see the political slant of the author, you know that the universe of that book is going to conspire to validate the author’s political viewpoint.”

Damn, Andy Weir hit the nail right on the head with that one. This exactly is what I find annoying about works that try to push some political message.

[CompilerHack]

Great insight on how the form of sci fi might encourage authors to reach for the low hanging libertarian fruit. But speaking of sci fi dealing with politics.. The left hand of darkness! It's such a great story and it kinda slapped me at the start because the whole sci fi planet hopping expectation I came with was completely shattered and the whole thing happens on a single planet in a few limited places in a country. And yet it's a pretty cool story! And I've also read a few other works by Ursuka K Le Guin and they were pretty good too. One of her short stories that really stuck with me was "Paradises lost".

[MW-iclr]

A question I have is why are we asking this question mostly of Sci-fi? There's something about it that makes it fit politics for some reason. Lots of philosophical analogies use sci-fi kind of stuff too. Do we ask this of other genres? In sci-fi, everything becomes possible. Technology will save/kill us all. Maybe our modern novels are grand thought experiments? It doesn't hurt that they are fun.

[benmusgrove]

I feel like the obvious text to bring up here is Star Wars and any other text that cribbed the "plucky rebellion against oppressive space dictator" idea from earlier stories. It's pretty hard to be apolitical when your stated goal is to topple the existing political structure. However you could argue that Star Wars just uses that rebellion as a backdrop to focus on the thing it's more interested in: The weird family trees of space wizards with laser swords. Even then though there's the implicit idea of the universe swinging around the actions of just a few people that is at least passively supportive of the "great man model of history" idea because of the dynastic way that the space wizards power is handed down generationally.
Dunno if Lucas intended any of that but it's kind of there by nature of the setting.
Side note: Here's me having never heard of "The Skylark of Space" before and then realising during the episode that at least one sci-fi I thought had a totally original idea was in fact taking beats from a foundational text.

[LeeCarlson]

Have you checked out Leo Frankowski's "Crosstime Engineer" series? Then there is "Cosmonaut Keep" by Ian Macleod.

[AmaranthOriginal]

Nonsense! The trade negotiations were everyone's favourite part of Star Wars!

I know it's not strictly a book, but my mind kept going back to Star Trek in this video. I am very used to the current complaint that politics is being thrust into Star Trek, despite its obvious use of sci fi to explore human morality since the beginning, and I'm wondering if this is a related feature of the genre, or an accident.

I view sci fi as political, but that could be my own sepection bias. I'be read way more Aasimov than Heinlein.

[theuglyhat]

What bothers me about this kind of thinking is the idea that politics can be separated or purged from any kind of media. That as long as we don't touch those words or those topics we can remain safely apolitical. That there is some line that seperates the political from the nonpolitical to begin with.

All media, all fiction, is political. Whether it recognizes it or not. By actively trying to ignore that fact all it does is reinforce the status quo, or atleast the authors perspective of the status quo. The current societal norms. Completely ignoring the fact that some parts of the status quo maybe should be questioned. That they maybe shouldn't be normal.

This comes into especially stark light in the subject of scifi. Where the whole point is to imagine a brighter future, cured of the problems and struggles of today. Because when those problems or politics aren't adressed that only makes it so much more painfully obvius whos ideal society is being built up and whos views gets to be represented in that world. What perspectives are treated as natural and which ones aren't present at all.