The precursors would include Piers Anthony (unrereadable, not least for being terribly misogynist and worse), But along with Tolkein the "spec fic"' on this li

The precursors would include Piers Anthony (unrereadable, not least for being terribly misogynist and worse), But along with Tolkein the "spec fic"' on this list might well include Robert Heinlein (and Frank Herbert if he wasn't mentioned). Heinlein made precisely one of the promises well articulated: that beyond the apparently venal and banal world of one's own surroundings, a richer adult world, indeed at a "higher pitch." In Heinlein's case this was a somewhat narrow world reflective in an oblique way. of some real-world problems: exclusivity. In his world, a particular set of political and moral ideas (his ideas about sexuality were are also arguably not re-readable) is often collectively arrived at by his precocious characters, who trade knowingly in it, and have a relationship to the normies that is at best charitable or pitying and often caustic. It was quite a thing to realize as I aged past 16 that he was painting not just a fantasy, but one which was not just not awaiting around the corner, but literally un-realizable, because the attitudes and behaviors of his characters however good on the page, are completely absent from lived experience—at least, in anything like the way he promises. It's not just that the ideas and value he enshrines are not widely held; it's that they cannot are arguably not sustainable and are almost certainly incompatible with both individual human psychology and potential... and do not and cannot serve as a foundation for the sorts of exclusive societies he imagines. In many of his earlier works, progressive sexually liberated intellectually liberal but socially formal cultures have naturally, inevitably, become the norm; and humanity has thereby thrived, leaving behind what he contends is its primitive imperfections. By his later works, he tacitly acknowledged and indeed made central the struggle between the embrace of such values and social and political structures; and a "normie" culture permanently mired in those imperfections. Moving here to the Bay Area in the 90s I met a lot of people who had encountered these ideas at the same impressionable age; and who like me, to some real degree expected to find (or make) communities adopting many of those ideas. Indeed there's probably another more somber essay here: tracing the history of those specific ideas from their source, in a through-line to crypto-utopian effective altruism and its dream of libertarian city states unshackled from the normie masses, down into the ugly mire of resurgent openly racist zero-sum class war fascism and the shrill ideas of Curtis Yarvin. It is easy to imagine disappointment then anger at the non-existent (sexually liberated) libertarian gun-owning utopia of genteel Heinlein, metastasizing into what its adherents understand as Randian "Will" to make it so. To build, damn the consequences, move fast and break things—most of all the ugly banal venal complexities and inherent pluralism and ambiguities of the normies' world. It must seem like a noble fight, in pursuit of a shared vision, but it's a vision that as described ITA is fundamentally and only an adolescent one.