Date: Tue, 12 Feb 2002 19:07:08 -0800 (PST)
Subject: AUT: Science Fiction and radicals


There's an interesting Moorcock article:

   http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html 

"Starship Stormtroopers"

"There are still a few things which bring a naive
sense of shocked astonishment to me whenever I
experience them -- a church service in which the
rituals of Dark Age superstition are performed without
any apparent sense of incongruity in the participants
-- a fat Soviet bureaucrat pontificating about
bourgeois decadence -- a radical singing the praises
of Robert Heinlein. If I were sitting in a tube train
and all the people opposite me were reading Mein Kampf
with obvious enjoyment and approval it probably
wouldn't disturb me much more than if they were
reading Heinlein, Tolkein or Richard Adams. All this
visionary fiction seems to me to have a great deal in
common. Utopian fiction has been predominantly
reactionary in one form or another (as well as being
predominantly dull) since it began. Most of it warns
the world of 'decadence' in its contemporaries and the
alternatives are usually authoritarian and sweeping --
not to say simple-minded. A look at the books on sale
to Cienfuegos customers shows the same old list of
Lovecraft and Rand, Heinlein and Niven, beloved of so
many people who would be horrified to be accused of
subscribing to the Daily Telegraph or belonging to the
Monday Club and yet are reading with every sign of
satisfaction views by writers who would make Telegraph
editorials look like the work of Bakunin and Monday
Club members sound like spokesmen for the Paris
Commune. 

Some years ago I remember reading an article by John
Pilgrim in Anarchy in which he claimed Robert Heinlein
as a revolutionary leftist writer. As a result of this
article I could not for years bring myself to buy
another issue. I'd been confused in the past by
listening to hardline Communists offering views that
were somewhat at odds with their anti-authoritarian
claims, but I'd never expected to hear similar things
from anarchists. My experience of science fiction fans
at the conventions which are held annually in a number
of countries (mainly the US and England) had taught me
that those who attended were reactionary (claiming to
be 'apolitical' but somehow always happy to vote Tory
and believe Colin Jordan to 'have a point'). I always
assumed these were for one reason or another the
exceptions among sf enthusiasts. Then the underground
papers began to emerge and I found myself in sympathy
with most of their attitudes --but once again I saw
the old arguments aired: Tolkein, C. S. Lewis, Frank
Herbert, Isaac Asimov and the rest, bourgeois
reactionaries to a man, Christian apologists,
crypto-Stalinists, were being praised in IT, Frendz
and Oz and everywhere else by people whose general
political ideals I thought I shared. I started writing
about what I thought was the implicit authoritarianism
of these authors and as often as not found myself
accused of being reactionary, elitist or at very best
a spoilsport who couldn't enjoy good sf for its own
sake. But here I am again at Stuart Christie's
request, to present arguments which I have presented
more than once before."

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