Category: Science Fiction

I took some heat recently for describing some of Jerry Pournelle’s SF as “conservative/militarist power fantasies”. Pournelle uttered a rather sniffy comment about this on his blog; the only substance I could extract from it was that Pournelle thought his lifelong friend Robert Heinlein was caught between a developing libertarian philosophy and his patriotic instincts.… Continue reading The Charms and Terrors of Military SF

(There is an extended and improved version of this essay, A Political History of SF.) When I started reading SF in the late Sixties and early Seventies, the field was in pretty bad shape — not that I understood this at the time. The death of the pulp-zines in the 1950s had pretty much killed… Continue reading Libertarianism and the Hard SF Renaissance

Science fiction, because it deals in extrapolated futures, has a long tradition of employment as a vehicle for political argument. More than that, science fiction encourages politically-minded writers to narratize their beliefs in ways that can sometime reveal more than the writers intended about the problems and contradictions in their own theories. I was powerfully… Continue reading Socialists to the Stars