{"id":29783,"date":"2016-03-31T01:00:36","date_gmt":"2016-03-31T05:00:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29783"},"modified":"2018-09-18T15:25:51","modified_gmt":"2018-09-18T19:25:51","slug":"qotd-the-radical-soul-of-science-fiction","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2016\/03\/31\/qotd-the-radical-soul-of-science-fiction\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: The radical soul of science fiction"},"content":{"rendered":"

SF fans and writers have always instinctively understood this. Thus the genre\u2019s long celebration of individualist anti-politics; thus its fondness for voluntarism and markets over state action, and for storylines in which (as in Heinlein\u2019s archetypal The Man Who Sold The Moon<\/em>) scientific breakthrough and and free-enterprise economics blend into a seamless whole. These stances are not historical accidents, they are structural imperatives that follow from the lust for possibility. Ideological fashions come and go, and the field inevitably rediscovers itself afterwards as a literature of freedom.<\/p>\n

This analysis should put permanently to rest the notion that hard SF is a conservative literature in any sense. It is, in fact, deeply and fundamentally radical \u2014 the literature that celebrates not merely science but science as a permanent revolution, as the final and most inexorable foe of all fixed power relationships everywhere.<\/p>\n

Earlier, I cited the following traits of SF\u2019s libertarian tradition: ornery and insistent individualism, veneration of the competent man, instinctive distrust of coercive social engineering and a rock-ribbed objectivism that values knowing how things work and treats all political ideologizing with suspicion. All should now be readily explicable. These are the traits that mark the enemies of the enemies of the future.<\/p>\n

The partisans of \u201cRadical Hard SF\u201d are thus victims of a category error, an inability to see beyond their own political maps. By jamming SF\u2019s native libertarianism into a box labeled \u201cright wing\u201d or \u201cconservative\u201d they doom themselves to misunderstanding the deepest imperatives of the genre.<\/p>\n

The SF genre and libertarianism will both survive this mistake quite handily. They were symbiotic before libertarianism defined itself as a distinct political stance and they have co-evolved ever since. If four failed revolutions against Campbellian SF have not already demonstrated the futility of attempting to divorce them, I\u2019m certain the future will.<\/p>\n

Eric S. Raymond, “Libertarianism and the Hard SF Renaissance”, Armed and Dangerous<\/em><\/a>, 2002-11-09.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

SF fans and writers have always instinctively understood this. Thus the genre\u2019s long celebration of individualist anti-politics; thus its fondness for voluntarism and markets over state action, and for storylines in which (as in Heinlein\u2019s archetypal The Man Who Sold The Moon) scientific breakthrough and and free-enterprise economics blend into a seamless whole. These stances […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,10,28,41],"tags":[1235,622,550,85],"class_list":["post-29783","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-liberty","category-media","category-quotations","tag-esr","tag-ideology","tag-libertarianism","tag-sf"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Kn","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29783","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29783"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29783\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29784,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29783\/revisions\/29784"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29783"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29783"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29783"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}