I feel like I’m swimming upstream in polluted water when I read other works out there for purposes of trying to see how something I would want to write might fit in.
It’s bad.
A lot of what I skimmed over were Mass Effect clones, but somehow further right wing than Mass Effect already was, with the names changed and the numbers filed off.
A lot of what’s left involves “humanity fuck yeah” space imperialism, grizzled tough guys with cold piercing stares and powerlifter physiques well into old age and their adventures with brilliant and hot scientist women that are defined more about who their father is/was and less by their actual job, that try to prove they are Independent Strong Willed Women but of course swoon for the timeless grizzled ego insert’s blandly stoic charms. Also, a space bureaucracy usually interferes with the grizzled tough guy’s very important imperialistic mission and his only chance to save humanity is to go rogue with a ragtag bunch of renegades and kill those filthy aliens before they threaten colonial interests. Or something.
I got some pretty harsh negative feedback for my inclusion of ideas in my own work. The idea that billionaires wanting to colonize Mars aren’t actually going to save humanity by doing that and it would be an insatiable resource sink that would further accelerate Earth’s decay was especially incendiary. Maybe I should have already become a rich and influential writer first before trying something like that, but that seems like it might have involved writing one of the above reactionary works instead and hoping another off-brand Mass Effect got more traction instead.
I’m demoralized, but I’m also nearly done with the third book in my self-published trilogy. It’s a weird place to be.
EDIT: I may as well post a link to the website my wife and my friend helped set up. It has the first five chapters available for free and some other stuff.
Sci Fi’s golden age was defined by American engineers writing stories about how cool engineering would be at some point in the future. During the Golden Age of Science Fiction most of the engineers writing science fiction were 1.) Ex-Military, usually WWII or Korea, 2.) Building weapons for boeing and 3.) Middle class Americans.
What I’m trying to say is that science fiction is really, really fashy because most English language science fiction was written buy white men with military experience working as engineers in the US war machine, aka it was written by fascists. And when they were writing the kids reading Golden Age sci fi were mostly boys, because women were systemically excluded from engineering and science (despite always making important contributions in the shadows). And those boys grew up and went to Vietnam or Iraq, and came back and wrote more fashy science fiction about how awesome space America was and how dirty and evil space aliens are and blah blah blah John Ringo.
There’s always been outliers and counter-narratives, but the cheap paperback main stream Science Fiction has largely been written by fascists for an audience of fascists.
Mass Effect is a basically just a fascists spank fantasy, with handsome and noble militarized empires fighting off ethnic inflected aliens until, oops, a big horde of totally alien monsters decides to destroy Space America for literally no reason, because Space America is perfect and there is no justifiable cultural, economic, or practical reason to go to war with it.
I really hate Mass Effect. “Hey, there’s this species of super hardcore aliens who breed super fast but they’re also bigger and stronger than us and totally warlike and we really have to do a genocide it’s our only choice! But ooooh it’s morally complicated because we’re liberals! But we did it anyway.”
It’s just American Racist fantasies IN SPAAAAAACE
I’m sorry you’re not getting a better reception with your books but in a decade where Halo and Mass Effect are the dominant Sci Fi properties the odds were always stacked against you.
Thank you for your reply.
I haven’t given up yet; how could I, when I have the third and final book in the trilogy nearly completed? Next time, I’ll write something one book at a time so each work can stand on its own instead of being dependent on contextual awareness of the previous books in the series.
Until that time, all I have is what I got. I challenged a lot of assumptions and delusions in the genre, went in swinging, and the algorithm did its thing.
Yeah, I think the archetypal example of the US imperialist writing sci-fi is Cordwainer Smith (a cheeky pseudonym). He was a literal spook, working for the OSS and CIA after, then the State Dept. He hated the hippie movement in the US However, like a lot of fash authors, his works inspired some great stuff. Cordwainer Smith has been cited as an inspiration for Akira, Ghost in the Shell, and Evangelion.
but if it’s just licensed sci-fi paperback shit like mass effect or star wars or whatever, i don’t think there’s anything other than its on-the-face entertainment value there
edit: some choice quotes from Smith’s wiki page (real name Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger)
he was sent to China to coordinate military intelligence operations. When he later pursued his interest in China, Linebarger became a close confidant of Chiang Kai-shek.
He was recalled to advise the British forces in the Malayan Emergency and the U.S. Eighth Army in the Korean War. While he was known to call himself a “visitor to small wars”, he refrained from becoming involved in the Vietnam War, but is known to have done work for the Central Intelligence Agency. In 1969 CIA officer Miles Copeland Jr. wrote that Linebarger was “perhaps the leader practitioner of ‘black’ and ‘gray’ propaganda in the Western world”.[5][6] According to Joseph Burkholder Smith, a former CIA operative, he conducted classes in psychological warfare for CIA agents at his home in Washington under cover of his position at the School of Advanced International Studies.
He used his experiences in the war to write the book Psychological Warfare (1948), regarded by many in the field as a classic text.
Because society is reactionary, thus producing reactionary works of art
You are cool, of course fascist nerds wont like reading anything that irk their stupid ideology. U.K. LeGuin didn’t cater to those idiots and look at her, while nobody remember cookie-cutter-B-movie-plot #23674 made by Dexter McWhimp
Offtopic but i liked how in God Emperor of Dune some guy defeats homophobia with facts and logic (in a weird way but hey, it was the 60s) and then it turns out that the author was a massive homophobe so maybe i read that part of the book in the opposite way it was supposed to, lmao.
It’s surprisingly common for reactionary sci-fi authors to write speculation about how an imagined society should be, and come to good conclusions… and then seem completely oblivious about what the implication are for the society they actually currently live in.
Here’s looking at you Orson Scott Card. Maybe just fuck your sister and stop trying to make everyone else as miserable as you are.
“actkually it’s ok for men soldiers to engage in homosexuality and stuff. Also women soldiers are good due to the nurturing disposition of the female”
Then he humiliates the main character in a fight.
We’re only riding on the coat tails of truly brave leftist authors like Ursula Le Guin
Speaking of, for a really good modern sci-fi series I will never stop shilling for the ‘Murderbot Chronicles’. The author isn’t a leftist herself, but the text could be taken as one.
Also, also, the Ancillary Justice series is equally good. Although not as pulply as I would like.
I’m hoping to finish my own novel’s second draft sometime at the end of this year. First in hopefully a four-part series. There’s absolutely an audience for leftist readers who are begging for books which could imagine a better world. They just have to know they exist! Don’t give up the struggle! :stalin-heart:
