Zompist's "Virtual Unrealities" rant

[alice]

It’s also because, to be frank, a lot of classical sf was distorted and deadened by a reactionary streak… mostly due, it appears, to John Campbell, editor of Astounding. Robert Silverberg, in his introduction, describes how Bester ran into this. After a break from sf, Bester returned in 1950, sold one story to Campbell, and no more. Campbell, as Silverberg says, was then “obsessed with Dianetics”, the precursor to Scientology, and Bester hated this. But really, once you’re aware of it, it’s hard not to see that reactionary streak. Mostly it’s expressed as a belief that an educated technocratic class, or maybe supersmart mutants, should control the world: Heinlein’s superscientists, Asimov’s Foundation and robots, Poul Anderson’s time police, Van Vogt’s Weapons Shops and Slans. Bester is one of the few to resist the idea. The Stars My Destination is explicitly populist, while Demolished Man is simply too chaotic a world for anyone to control.

I was reminded of this when I came across this; would anybody like to comment? Reactionary or libertarian?

[WeepingElf]

People call it the "Golden Age of science fiction", but whatever isotope of gold it is, it is definitely not ¹⁹⁷Au.

[alice]

The "Golden Age of SF" is either fourteen, or the period which started when it was discovered that women could have sex and ended when it was realised that they could talk.

The point is whether "libertarian" or "reactionary" is more appropriate to describe what happened when Campbell took over. I'm not familiar enough with classical SF to have an informed opinion, but the topic interests me, and I'd be interested to what those more knowledgeable think.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

Would you mind elaborating a bit more?

[Raphael]

The point is whether "libertarian" or "reactionary" is more appropriate to describe what happened when Campbell took over.

That, of course, depends on what exactly you mean by each of these words. And while I don't know much about classical SF, it's enough to suspect that the tendencies in question didn't start with Campbell, though he probably made them worse.

[zompist]

I was reminded of this when I came across this; would anybody like to comment? Reactionary or libertarian?

The article you cite is from a libertarian magazine, so of course it's eager to claim classic sf for itself under a term that it prefers. It loses a lot of credibility, in my opinion, when it attempts to claim Charles Stross and Ken McLeod as "libertarian-leaning"— they're both socialists of one form or another.

As for "reactionary", you have to judge for yourself, from their works. Sometimes the contempt for ordinary human beings is pretty obvious, as in Kornbluth's "The Marching Morons", or Heinlein's depiction of democratic politics as "yammerheads". It can also be hidden by the hero/mutant class being outnumbered or struggling (Van Vogt loves this trope).

Heinlein— oh lord, you probably don't want to get me going on Heinlein. The thing is, he and his heroes are likeable and wise until they aren't. Like many libertarians, he's a fine satirist— he's brutal about ordinary Americans in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, and he certainly hated fundamentalists. But his attitude toward democracy is not very hidden— he thinks the masses should shut up and let the Heinleinian heroes do what needs to be done. He basically has no concept that this could ever go wrong.

Asimov was, IIRC, politically liberal. But his work shows the same technocrat-worship, though for unfathomable reasons he eventually rejects one set of overlords (the Second Foundation) in favor of another (the robots).

The people who continue to champion "classic sf" and its imitators— the ones who caused trouble at the Hugos for a few years, attacking women and minorities for spoiling their playground— are out-and-out reactionaries.

As you say, most of us start with sf as teenagers. I read all this stuff avidly and enjoyed almost all of it. Plus, you can learn from anything. For instance, I'm sure that on the board or my blog I've made the point multiple times that in democratic politics, victory goes to the side willing to wear out the shoe leather. That is, they work hard, run candidates locally, talk to voters. The lesson (and the reference to shoe leather) are straight Heinlein.

[Moose-tache]

I didn't know about Campbell being into Dianetics, but it doesn't surprise me.

The whole Googie mid-century Modernist Futurism… Thing is fascinating. I don’t hate the kitchy architecture, or the confidence that society will inevitably organize itself for more efficient glorious future. But it’s neither surprising nor coincidental that the brave new world most SF writers of this period envisioned was pretty crappy. They didn’t get all the sexism they wanted, but they sure got all the social atomization. The very notion of Capital P Progress feels like a dirty word these days, and I think most of that is due to these jerks peddling such a loaded vision of what progress means.

For what it’s worth, I think labels like “Libertarian/Reactionary” are fair, but often not sufficiently descriptive. The idea that Science People are going to reorganize society for the better, so just shut up and turn your little factory crank was certainly alive and well among Communists in the early 20th century. It’s less the technocracy or elitism that makes this brand of Modernism so recognizably American. A lot of the classics don’t even have the characteristic Liberal paradox of pursuing freedom from the crown or the church while eliminating freedom from the ownership class. With the exception of Heinlein, Neoliberal “Aw-shucks ain’t Capitalism swell” nonsense is largely absent. Society in The Caves of Steel seems as regimented and publicly oriented as any Soviet propaganda film.

I think the key factor that ages these stories so badly is the total, unapologetic confidence in a future that we all know in retrospect to be awful. Robert Moses did more to realize the vision of classic SF writers than anyone at NASA, and we all hate him for it. It’s hard to watch someone go on and on about how great the world will be once we can all take rocket trains to work, when we know deep down that rocket tracks would only be routed through affluent Black neighborhoods, and the author ought to know that, too, if they would just use their eyes and ears. The Cul-du-sac is a harsh mistress, and we all wish the Greatest Generation and their Boomer kids had found a better vision when they had the chance.

[alice]

The article you cite is from a libertarian magazine, so of course it's eager to claim classic sf for itself under a term that it prefers. It loses a lot of credibility, in my opinion, when it attempts to claim Charles Stross and Ken McLeod as "libertarian-leaning"— they're both socialists of one form or another.

Heh. I noticed that; I read Stross's blog, and to describe him as any sort of "libertarian" renders the term pretty much meaningless. I didn't know it was a libertarian magazine; the article seemed a lot less gung-ho and self-congratulatory than ESR's page on the same topic.

Might it be more accurate to state that what appeals to "libertarians" about classic SF is not its libertarianism, but its tacit authoritarianism, but they aren't (or choose not to be) sufficiently aware of this?

I assume my "SF" and your "sf" are the same thing; is this a different-side-of-the-pond artifact?

[Raphael]

Plus, you can learn from anything. For instance, I'm sure that on the board or my blog I've made the point multiple times that in democratic politics, victory goes to the side willing to wear out the shoe leather. That is, they work hard, run candidates locally, talk to voters. The lesson (and the reference to shoe leather) are straight Heinlein.

That reminds me, I seem to have a somewhat weird habit of sometimes agreeing with some of the basic assumptions of some right-wingers, but completely disagreeing with pretty much all their conclusions. For instance, I completely agree with Ayn Rand's "A is A", but I don't accept any of the conclusions she has drawn from that axiom. I completely agree with Heinlein's "TANSTAAFL" ("There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch"), but I disagree with pretty all his conclusions from that starting point. Somewhat related, I mostly agree with libertarians and Continental European liberals that freedom is very important, but I almost entirely disagree with them on what freedom is.

[alice]

Somewhat related, I mostly agree with libertarians and Continental European liberals that freedom is very important, but I almost entirely disagree with them on what freedom is.

That's because "freeedom" by itself is meaningless - it's either freedom to do something or freedom from something, and different freedoms can be in conflict, something proponents of absolute freedom don't like to acknowledge. For example, my freedom to choose with whom I do business conflicts with your freedom from discrimination.

[Raphael]

it's either freedom to do something or freedom from something,

I'd say even that is an oversimplification; "freedom to do something" can already, on its own, mean many different things that might be in conflict with each other, and the same goes for "freedom from something".

[bradrn]

Somewhat related, I mostly agree with libertarians and Continental European liberals that freedom is very important, but I almost entirely disagree with them on what freedom is.

That's because "freeedom" by itself is meaningless - it's either freedom to do something or freedom from something, and different freedoms can be in conflict, something proponents of absolute freedom don't like to acknowledge. For example, my freedom to choose with whom I do business conflicts with your freedom from discrimination.

I’ve had exactly the same thought myself. But Raphael’s objection is correct: both ‘freedom to’ and ‘freedom from’ are hard to define. I think it’s more correct to just say that for each freedom there is an equal and opposite freedom, and we can only have one at a time. (And each freedom in the pair can be characterised both as a ‘freedom from’ and ‘freedom to’.) Sometimes the choice is simple: e.g. my freedom from being murdered is more important than your freedom to murder. But other times it’s trickier: is freedom to discriminate more important than freedom from discrimination, or not?

[Raphael]

Very belated and admittedly somewhat mean comment:

Asimov was, IIRC, politically liberal. But his work shows the same technocrat-worship,

Don't take this the wrong way, but couldn't a sufficiently unsympathetic observer interpret socionomics as a form of technocrat-worship, too?

[Travis B.]

Very belated and admittedly somewhat mean comment:

Asimov was, IIRC, politically liberal. But his work shows the same technocrat-worship,

Don't take this the wrong way, but couldn't a sufficiently unsympathetic observer interpret socionomics as a form of technocrat-worship, too?

I would have to agree here - any kind of discipline involving a highly educated elite even merely predicting things at a societal level could be taken this way.

[zompist]

Very belated and admittedly somewhat mean comment:

Asimov was, IIRC, politically liberal. But his work shows the same technocrat-worship,

Don't take this the wrong way, but couldn't a sufficiently unsympathetic observer interpret socionomics as a form of technocrat-worship, too?

It's a fair question. For those baffled, socionomics is the advanced form of political science found in my Incatena universe.

But I think it can be fairly answered.

* It's not an ideology; it has no values or shoulds. It's a tool any political movement can use. In effect it asks what kind of society you want to have, and tells you how to get there.
* It's not a ruling class. There's no reason any voter can't make use of socionomics.
* If you're worried about a technocratic class... this too is part of the data of socionomics. How ruling classes work, what to do about them if they are oppressive.
* It does not provide all the answers. Sometimes the existing data is too sparse or chaotic. That's why there are Agents.

More importantly, it's what you get when you have 3000 years of data on industrial civilization, rather than 100. It's not psychohistory, because history is not deterministic, and people cannot be reduced to socioeconomic forces.

Got to rush out, probably haven't explained it well but I can add more later.

[Rounin Ryuuji]

I was misreading "socionomics" as "socioeconomics".

[zompist]

More importantly, it's what you get when you have 3000 years of data on industrial civilization, rather than 100. It's not psychohistory, because history is not deterministic, and people cannot be reduced to socioeconomic forces.

To add to this a bit: in my view, political groups are and should be about differing values, but they don't get to make up their own facts.

Normally this should be kind of uncontroversial, shouldn't it? You can't go to your math teacher and say you just don't believe in arithmetic. And people who deny science tend to get bitten back eventually. Like, say, doctors who don't believe in germs end up killing off their patients. Engineers who don't believe in the Second Law of Thermodynamics can't build perpetual motion machines even though they'd really like to.

Of course, science can be incomplete, biased, get things wrong, etc, etc. But it gets better over time, and in the Incatena, it has thousands of years of data to look at. That's enough time for people to try all sorts of wack-ass ideas, so we have an enormous database of failure. Socionomics cannot be applied today because we don't have that data, or the theories that make sense of it.

To put it another way-- currently First World societies are mostly reeling because it turns out that once-in-a-century pandemics are a really big deal. We can draw lessons from the 1918 pandemic, and some of those lessons are great, but a lot of stuff is just not applicable. (E.g., one huge difference is that a flu vaccine wasn't widely available till after 1945.) Something that happened once a hundred years ago is not a great lesson. But over 3000 years, once-in-a-century events have happened 30 times.

[Raphael]

Wow, thank you for the long, thoughtful, and patient replies.

To add to this a bit: in my view, political groups are and should be about differing values, but they don't get to make up their own facts.

Oh, I completely agree. Unfortunately, as I probably don't have to tell you, there are those who don't.

[Ares Land]

Campbell is a fascinating character. He basically took over a literary field that was mostly adventure stories for teenagers and got it to turn out stories that still feel relevant today.
I'm always amazed at the number of people who read Foundation or Dune and keep on thinking about them, even decades later. I'm pretty sure Faulkner is much less widely read.

I read several time that SF authors found working with Campbell increasingly difficult as he got really into Dianetics -- and a whole lot of crazy pseudoscience besides. (This shows up a fair bit in contemporary SF and it's pretty jarring at times.)

'Golden Age' SF is reactionary. Or libertarian. (Same difference. Both amount to the same thing.) Then again, I don't know how much of it is Campbell's fault. There's no question that Campbell was borderline fascist. But I think SF writers were themselves conservative.
Both Herbert and Heinlein were libertarians. (In one of the Dune books, in the far future days of Shai-Hulud knows how many years after Guild, the umpteenth iteration of Duncan Idaho is still complaining about the liberals.) and frankly this seems entirely the product of their upbringing and experience.

On the other hand... Yeah, I think stories with a more liberal/leftist bent just never got published, and few writers even tried.
Asimov's liberalism doesn't show up in his work, partly I think because if he'd tried to get political, the stories would have been rejected.

I should add that science fiction used to be written for engineers (until very recently) and most engineers are conservative/libertarian, or apolitical.

[Raphael]

Asimov's liberalism doesn't show up in his work, partly I think because if he'd tried to get political, the stories would have been rejected.

Didn't he eventually publish his own magazine?

That said, I remember reading a brief essay by him in which he explained his original decision to keep the Foundation universe all-human: Campbell wanted him to write stories with Earth humans as the heroic Übermenschen of the galaxy, and he didn't want to do that, and the only way he could avoid it was by having no aliens at all.

'Golden Age' SF is reactionary. Or libertarian. (Same difference. Both amount to the same thing.) Then again, I don't know how much of it is Campbell's fault. There's no question that Campbell was borderline fascist. But I think SF writers were themselves conservative.

If that's the case, then why wasn't the same true for what you might call "pre-classical" SF? The best-known SF writers of that period were Jules Verne and H. G. Wells, neither of whom, as far as I can see, was conservative.