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IMO the author is wrongly characterizing a lot of fundamental themes in sci-fi as specific to some conservative 70s American culture when they are actually fund

• eesmith 3y ago
  Stross did not characterize it as "specific to some conservative 70s American culture". He wrote: "The science-fiction genre that today’s billionaires grew up with—the one that existed in the 1970s—goes back to inventor and publisher Hugo Gernsback. ... His magazine’s strain of SF promoted the combination of the American dream of capitalist success, combined with uncritical technological solutionism and a side order of frontier colonialism." The kids reading SF in the 1970s were reading SF from across multiple previous decades, not just the 70s. One such example is Heinlein's 1947 book Rocket Ship Galileo. In it, they are trying to convince some parents to let their teen-aged children to go on an experimental atomic-powered rocket to the moon. The mother describes why she gives permission: > “Oh, I know what I said,” she went on, “but a mother is bound to cry a little. Just the same, this country was not built by people who were afraid to go. Ross’s great-great-grandfather crossed the mountains in a Conestoga wagon and homesteaded this place. He was nineteen, his bride was seventeen. It’s a matter of family record that their parents opposed the move.” She stirred suddenly and one of her knitting needles broke. “I would hate to think that I had let the blood run thin.” She got up and went quickly from the room. - https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780441012374/page/40/mode/2up?q=conestoga https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780441012374/page/40/mode/... That's an explicit link between space colonization and the mythos of American westward expansionism and "strong blood". (John Varley recontexualizes this scene in his "Red Thunder" where the protagonist is of Cuban descent, and it is his aunt, who fled Cuba by boat, who comes up with a very different reason to grant permission. Alas, I don't have a copy of that book, haven't read it for 20 years, and can't find it in the limited search available from archive.org.) A lot of early SF was based on Westerns, but in space, with blasters, rockets, and aliens instead of guns, trains/horses, and Indians. "Star Trek" was characterized as "Wagon Train to the stars!" as it drew from the Western "Wagon Train." A old SF movie serial I watched from the 1930s had rockets to get from planet to planet, and horses to get from base to base. And Westerns, as a genre, were full of revisionist white supremacist colonial expansionism that collapsed after the frontier myth it was based on collapsed. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6zD1sjnClM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6zD1sjnClM You write: "These are not arbitrary concepts that were uniquely dreamed of by some sci-fi authors because they had colonialism nostalgia." But of course they are not, and I don't see Stross making that claim. They were embedded in a white-supremacist culture produced by violent colonial expansion. Gernsback was a racist even for his era, and used his influence to sideline and suppress alternative viewpoints. John Carter of Mars was a captain in the Confederacy during the American Civil War, which meant he would have committed treason in the name of slavery he he been real. He was portrayed with all the honorable characteristics of Antebellum South, but without the slavery. This was part of a larger range of Lost Cause literature focusing on Southern honor, not "econ-fiction" exploring how slavery supported that culture. The "taser" is an acronym for "Thomas A. Swift's Electric Rifle" because its inventor was inspired by the book "Tom Swift and His Electric Rifle", wherein the titular character invents an electric rifle so he can go to Africa and hunt elephants for their ivory. Africa, and where locals are described as "All about were the natives, tall, gaunt black men, hideous in their savagery, wearing only the loin cloth, and with their kinky hair stuck full of sticks, bones and other odd objects, they presented a curious sight." ("The witch-doctors ran around like so many maniacs, and it looked as much like an American Indian war dance as anything else.") - https://archive.org/details/tomswifthiselect00applrich/page/n113/mode/2up?q=+savagery https://archive.org/details/tomswifthiselect00applrich/page/... And these are some of the most popular series of the early SF era. So you are an author and want to write SF. The readership is primarily white males reading a certain flavor of SF, who want to buy more SF in that flavor. What kind of story do you want to write, and will it make it to market? And that's why the SF market is inherently slow to change, that is, conservative. The existence of a market, and the need for the publishing company to make money, and the views of the editor, are why you can't simply say "that's idiosyncratic to the sci-fi author." There's an old complaint along the lines that it was easier for an SF reader to put himself in the place of an alien named Zxtyqyz than it was to put himself in the place of a black man. That's why Heinlein had to carefully write between the lines to figure out the protagonist in his 1950s "Tunnel in the Sky" is black, instead of saying so explicitly. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_in_the_Sky#Rod's_ethnicity) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tunnel_in_the_Sky#Rod's_ethnic... When you commented "it tells stories about what might go right ... or might go wrong", remember that you can't see the stories that weren't told. If you never revisit and reexamine the SF you read as a teen, you might easily forgot how you've also been enculturated with some outdated ideals. Read "Gone With the Wind" and you get a very different account than reading "The Wind Done Gone".
  • golol 3y ago
    I don't feel like writing a long text so I won't really give an appropriate reply, but for me my point is that all this talk about American history and American sci-fi authors is not actually relevant at all to the common themes of sci-fi that the author talks about and these these billionaires are interested in. Space colonization, life extension, artificial intelligence and virtual reality are not ideas that are products of american culture or any other culture or time period. The world history would have been completely different and sci-gi authors would come up with the same ideas. They are products of a certain technological level and a certain economic situation. Just because in our world they were first entertained by a culture with a colonialist history and with conservative themes doesn't mean that is fundamental to these ideas. I see this as relevant to the article because the author sees it critically that the billionaires have these ideas, which he associates with this colonialist and conservative history. But this is not at all fundamental to these ideas. Space colonization has none of the problematic baggage of historical colonization, by default. Artificial intelligence and life extension does not have the baggage of eugenics and race theory. Virtual reality does not have the baggage of control and suppression. They are all fundamental economic ideas independent of our world and it is our decision to associate them with the stories of certain sci-fi authors or not.
    • eesmith 3y ago
      You write "and sci-fi authors would come up with the same ideas" and list some examples of technologies. SF authors did not come up with any of the technologies you listed. SF authors are primarily story tellers who incorporate the ideas of others to tell the story they want to tell. That's not to say they don't come up with new ideas. "John Carter of Barsoom", Captain in the Virginia Army of the Confederacy is an idea too. Do you think a black science fiction author of the early 1910s would write the same story? I don't. If world history had been completely different, why would we get another Lost Cause hero, rather than "John Carter of Barsoom", freed slave from Virginia, who found the portal while working as a cowboy in the US West? Your focus on just the inventions clearly rejects the following observation from the article: "SF is a profoundly ideological genre—it’s about much more than new gadgets or inventions. Canadian science-fiction novelist and futurist Karl Schroeder has told me that “every technology comes with an implied political agenda.” And the tech plutocracy seems intent on imposing its agenda on our planet’s eight billion inhabitants." You want to focus on the idea "Electric Rifle" when the bigger part of the story is "invent something to make a lot of money", in this case by killing elephants for their ivory, with little consideration for the land or property rights of the local inhabitants. (L. Neil Smith gives an example of clearly ideological SF - imagine libertarianism works, that it results in faster economic development and more freedom, and there's an inter-dimensional war between libertarians and (evil) anti-libertarians.) These fans of Swift, and of John Carter, and of pulps in general, wanted more of this, and authors and publishers were more than willing to provide it. Some of these fans became the next generation of authors. SF was not leading the way in understanding non-white, non-male, non-hetero ideas, even though NONE of the ideas you mention are gender or race specific. Instead, you need to look to outsiders, like James Tiptree Jr., or Cordwainer Smith, to see what alternate SF might look like. In Smith's universe, humans aren't able to travel in space until Haber develops a technique to shut down all senses but sight. Only these habermen were able to withstand the cold stillness of space. Even once the great planoformers were invented, which used life itself to buffer humans from space, human ships couldn't survive against creatures that lived in the depths of space, that looked to humans like great dragons, and attacked faster than humans could respond. Only with luck did we discover that cats see them as large rats, and via a telepathic link with their human could direct the defenses. The universe still contain indescribable dangers, like the Douglas-Ouyang planets, which must be guarded against. In Smith's universe, human cultures tend towards long-term stability not expansive growth; on Earth maintained for tens of thousands of years by the Instrumentality striving to keep man man, but even on Norstrilia there's been 150 generations of the same family on the same farm - and these people live for hundreds of years due to stroon, a life extending drug extracted from a sheep infection, though after 800 years or so your brain no longer really works. > Space colonization has none of the problematic baggage of historical colonization, by default. No? Who gets to be the colonizers? Who pays for it? Who gets left behind? Why are they starting a colony? Who runs the colony? Will there be a class system? The fact that it's in space doesn't change any of the historic baggage attached with colonialism. > which he associates with this colonialist and conservative history But they do. These billionaires have a view of space conquest clearly based in mid-20th century views back when people thought it was simple. We don't know how to make a self-sustaining colony in space. We don't even know how to make a self-sustaining independent ecosphere on Earth, which is much easier. So any colony is going to require continuous resupply. Who will pay for that, and why? (Back 50 years ago that was wished away with terms like "hydroponics" and "atomic energy".) Even harder is to colonize space with a self-sustaining population. We know just being in space is tough on human bodies. I don't think it's at all ethical to experiment with pregnancy in space and giving birth/raising children there. So, now we have a space colony on Mars. How many people does it need to be self-sustaining, so we don't "have all of our eggs in one basket"? Besides food and maintenance, we need people who can raise children, and educate those children in all the technology required. If there are computers then they need a chip fabber, and a way to make silicon, and all sorts of other technology. This web of technology needs, what, a million people to have enough with the right sort of expertise and with enough redundancy? None of this was really discussed in mid-20th century SF, nor by these space billionaires and their supporters. That's because it's harder to write an entertaining story based on the real life limitations we know. Magic up a warp drive and your heroes can visit the stars in days rather than multiple lifetimes from now. > Artificial intelligence and life extension does not have the baggage of eugenics and race theory AI does have the baggage of labor rights, which in turn goes back to the early Industrial Age and the Luddites. AI use was one of the reasons for the recent Hollywood strikes. Who gets life extension? Those who can afford it? Those in rich countries? Those who are awarded it by a panel, and how to they decide? Random draw? You'll notice that several of these are proxies for wealth and race, and do recall how "IQ tests" and "literacy tests" were long used as a history for racial and economic discrimination. This is also very much like the baggage concerning who gets health care. > Virtual reality does not have the baggage of control and suppression. I still don't get the hype of VR, but given how companies want to surveil and control their employees working from home, what would it be life if they could surveil the employee's entire 3D experience? > They are all fundamental economic ideas independent of our world and it is our decision to associate them with the stories of certain sci-fi authors or not. The problem is "the billionaires behind the steering wheel have mistaken cautionary tales and entertainments for a road map", not that those ideas are associated with SF stories.
• oska 3y ago
  > They are extrapolations of fundamental human economic desires i.e. they are fantasy