00:00:08.380And whether we like it or not, we're In Bed with the Right.
00:00:13.400Hello, I'm Adrian Daub, and you're with In Bed with the Right.
00:00:15.960This is the second installment of our two-part series on science fiction fandom.
00:00:22.200And just in case this opening crawl leaves you confused as to why Palpatine would have returned,
00:00:28.080Here is a little rundown of what we talked about last time.
00:00:32.300We started with an episode from the mid-2010s when a slate of voters named the Sad Puppies,
00:00:41.120later joined by a group called the Rabid Puppies,
00:00:44.580tried to sort of stage a right-wing takeover of the Hugo Awards.
00:00:49.540Now, this is admittedly a tempest in a teapot, the kind that we delight in here at In Bed with the Right.
00:00:54.700Well, we use that to sort of zoom out and think about what kind of fandom it is that sort of champions right-wing causes through attachment to science fiction properties or uses science fiction properties to sort of smuggle right-wing thinking, white supremacist thinking, etc., etc., into a mainstream, kind of induct young people who are, you know, primarily fans of a particular IP into a kind of what they would call anti-woke.
00:01:24.320but we would probably call white supremacist view of the world.
00:01:28.360And today, in the second part of this series,
00:01:31.140we're going to be looking at what I call the right-wing canon.
00:01:34.440Not what is their mode of appropriation,
00:01:37.700their mode of laying claim to certain pieces of pop culture ephemera,
00:01:42.440but rather what are the pieces of pop culture that they're drawn to?
00:01:46.680What are the kinds of texts they like grouping around,
00:01:49.700that they like defending against the wokesters,
00:01:51.920that they like to explain to you, you've misunderstood,
00:01:55.900that they like to congregate in, you know, web forums
00:02:27.920A lot of times right-wingers sort of infiltrate these spaces to use,
00:02:32.760hey, you love this book and look what the SJWs are doing to it,
00:02:35.880to kind of especially get young people inducted into sort of right-wing thought, right?
00:02:40.620This was a lot of what the alt-right did.
00:02:42.720Like, don't you hate this kind of woke bullshit, blah, blah, blah?
00:02:45.800Well, check out my white supremacist blog or my QAnon shit, right?
00:02:50.340So there is some of that, where people are sort of floating along with the stream in order to sort of siphon off folks for their other causes.
00:02:58.460But there also very clearly was a community on Parler that just loved military science fiction and hated Democrats and now found themselves on the Baines Bar forum and were like, yeah, fuck it, let's let it rip here.
00:03:12.940But that gets us to a segment that I would like to call the reactionary canon.
00:03:16.960Because in the end, like, yes, there is something opportunistic about the way these people kind of fixate on certain properties.
00:03:24.680At the same time, I would not say that, like, every right-wing sci-fi fan or anti-woke movie reviewer or whatever is not genuine in their appreciation of the work state champion.
00:04:24.320Once upon a time, all the fractious lands of science fiction fandom
00:04:28.220were joined together and worshipped at the altar of Heinlein.
00:04:31.820But in these fallen times, lo do many refuse to worship Heinlein,
00:04:36.800preferring instead their false idols and evil ways.
00:04:39.920What shall we, who continue to attend the Orthodox Church of Heinlein, do with these dirty, dirty people?
00:04:46.840Perhaps we shall wall ourselves away in his sepulcher, for we are the one true church and should not have to sully ourselves with the likes of them.
00:04:55.000P.S. Also, their awards don't mean anything because we don't get nominated for them very much, and maybe we don't want to be nominated anyway.
00:05:14.900What's interesting about what Weisskopf is doing here is, right, true fandom is about a canonic guy, right?
00:05:20.540Author Robert Heinlein, but it's also about being the orthodox church of Heinlein, right?
00:05:25.440Like the true fans versus the fallen fans.
00:05:28.100And as John Scalzi put it back then, at the same time, she also suggests that despite being the one true fandom, Bane folks are also outside the mainstream in science fiction, thus playing the hand of rhetorical cards that includes both heirs to the throne and belittled outsiders.
00:05:46.700It's both, we really understand this guy that, like, everyone still reads and loves, but we understand him in ways that the mainstream doesn't.
00:05:55.300But also, we don't really care about them and their awards anyway.
00:05:58.580Did you know much about Robert Heinlein?
00:06:27.020The reason Scalzi, I think, cares about this attack on his lack of fealty to Robert Heinlein
00:06:34.120is that Scalzi sort of made his name with Old Man's War, which is also a military
00:06:38.700science fiction, but very much not the military science fiction of Starship Troopers. Starship
00:06:43.680Troopers is a fairly sort of daring-do youth adventure novel about space marines, which,
00:06:50.200you know, the Verhoeven film points out is more than a little fascist. Official politics lean more
00:06:55.520towards the libertarian. We'll get to that later. The Moon is a Harsh Mistress is one of his great
00:07:00.200works, and that's very much sort of a libertarian fable. But as you can imagine, military science
00:07:05.800fiction from the beginning had an element of being largely affirmative of the U.S.
00:07:12.420Armed Forces and their role in global conflict, right?
00:07:17.480Various democratically elected governments that just needed a little bit of tweaking
00:07:22.420and replacement with juntas of various kinds, yes.
00:07:25.840Yeah, or like the obvious commie stand-in that like they had to blast away, right?
00:07:29.960The bugs in Star Trek troopers that have no personality, right?
00:07:34.040It's not hard to map that onto anti-communist propaganda from the 1950s.
00:07:38.640But there is, within military science fiction, a counter-movement to that.
00:07:42.800And I should say there are still, when we talk about right-wing science fiction writers today, a lot of them write this kind of stuff.
00:07:48.980If you look at what the sad puppies try to nominate, a lot of this is like Space Marine Monster Hunter Part 4 or whatever.
00:07:55.560But it's not like the genre as a whole is totally right-wing.
00:07:59.140There's the Joe Haldeman, I think is his name, book, The Forever War from the late 1970s, which is like his reflection.
00:08:06.500This is a Vietnam vet kind of trying to think about what if you had to fight a war in Vietnam, but Vietnam was so far away that due to space dilation, when you come back, you're literally out of time.
00:08:17.780Like it's been 500 years and you realize you've suffered for nothing and you know no one.
00:08:22.500So it's like this pretty poignant reflection on being a soldier in Vietnam, like in a really interesting science fiction story, but it's not rah-rah at all.
00:08:31.500It's this existential horror story, really.
00:08:34.640And Scalzi's Old Man's War is basically in that vein.
00:08:37.720It's military science fiction that largely sort of is like, this fucking sucks.
00:08:44.140Right. And so that's why I think he's taking this a little personally and being like, hey, you know, in a way I do react to Starship Troopers, but, you know, I'm not going to write some weird rah-rah jingoistic bullshit.
00:09:19.680He says again and again, like, oh, like he's writing against snobs.
00:09:23.220His kind of writing is against the literati, against English professors, you know.
00:09:28.200Yeah, I mean, then you get the classic sort of populist anti-intellectualism of a lot of the right in general, right?
00:09:40.020It's like, no, I'm not for the snobs, and fuck you, I'm for the real lovers, I'm for their true heads, I'm for people who just are in it for the love of the genre convention game, right?
00:09:52.380And therefore, don't tweak the genre convention either, right?
00:09:55.040Like, don't play with, don't say, like, oh, I'm going to take Heinlein and do something interesting with him.
00:09:59.120It's like, no, no, no, no, you have to have fealty to it, you have to repeat them, which is, as far as I can tell, what Larry Correa does.
00:10:06.200And this is what he wanted in getting these things nominated.
00:10:09.120He says, he basically wants these voters to have to think, quote, should I vote for the heavy-handed message fic about the dangers of fracking and global warming and dying polar bears and robot rape as a bad feminist analogy with a villain who is a thinly veiled Dick Cheney?
00:10:52.720Because like in this kind of defiant, like a Las Vegas explosion, shooting, everything, dragon, helicopter, he's even imitating the cadence of an enthusiastic child.
00:11:03.680Right. And there's clearly like a reach back towards a defiant simplicity that seems like a claim on childhood.
00:11:12.180Right. Like, no, this genre is where I get to go to return to childhood and try to feel the way I felt when I was, you know, 13 and first read this.
00:11:20.580And that's like a refusal of adulthood, not just personally, but like for the whole genre.
00:11:25.980It's not just that I don't have to grow into responsibility and I get to be sort of like defiantly driven in my consumption and my creation of science fiction.
00:11:35.280But like, I don't think anybody else should.
00:11:37.140I don't think you should give me any spinach or any responsibility in my reading either.
00:17:01.660So I think Niven and Purnell are both sort of right-wingers.
00:17:04.500I think mostly wrote in the 70s and 80s, but they've been active for a long time.
00:17:08.720The mode in God's eye, so spoiler alert, if anyone wants to read this, fast forward a little bit.
00:17:15.200Humanity, very quickly, humanity makes contact with an alien species that seems really peaceful, but that's hiding something.
00:17:23.420And in the end, what turns out they're hiding is that they have to get pregnant or else they die, meaning they reproduce at enormous rates.
00:17:35.960meaning that humanity is then faced with the question of whether they commit genocide or not.
00:18:27.940So this is a book that is extremely popular
00:18:29.880and has always been with members of the armed forces,
00:18:32.060And therefore, like, given that right-wing sci-fi authors tend to sort of recruit from there, there's a lot of affection there.
00:18:38.240As far as I can tell, the politics of the books are, if anything, a little anti-authoritarian, right?
00:18:42.960And it really does feel more like an Oliver Stone kind of approach to talking about marine life.
00:18:49.360Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is a very interesting kind of series, very postmodern, but told from the inside of a cult of torturers, people who literally torture other people.
00:20:18.500And of course, we already mentioned military sci-fi and especially post-apocalyptic sci-fi.
00:20:23.480I think it's very, very strongly sort of right-wing compliant.
00:20:26.880One particular sub-genre that I came across in my reading, super near-future dystopias, so I think like 10 or 20 years in the future, where Muslims have taken over.
00:20:44.780Yeah, where he's like, what if we could have a detente between the, like, socialists and the Islamists, and all we had to do was sacrifice women's rights?
00:20:58.260And I was like, I think that's wish fulfillment.
00:21:00.180I don't think that's, like, actually a dystopian future for you.
00:21:30.200So he had a real right-wing turn late in life.
00:21:33.600He's the author of the Hyperion Chronicles, which are really, really phenomenal.
00:21:39.000He also wrote that book, The Terror, that was turned into an AMC show a couple of years ago about the ship that gets stuck on an ice flow in the Arctic.
00:21:48.200It's a historic story, and he invents, basically, they're stuck on the ice, and either they're all slowly going insane or there's a monster there with them.
00:24:24.020And libertarianism, especially sort of its mid-century variety,
00:24:28.180works really well in having a narrator that's an outsider,
00:24:34.160that doesn't understand the world that well,
00:24:37.060that doesn't really want to be part of the social world,
00:24:39.300that distances themselves from the social world.
00:24:41.340So there's a kind of baseline libertarianism
00:24:43.520built into a lot of science fiction narration.
00:24:46.180It's almost like an authorly conceit more than it is a political conceit
00:24:49.900because it allows the author to explain the world to us, right?
00:24:53.140Someone who's happily ensconced in the power structures of their world
00:24:56.480and doesn't bother explaining it to us,
00:24:58.880that is indeed what Gene Wolfe experiments with in the torturer novels,
00:25:02.980like being like, this guy's not going to explain it.
00:25:04.900He knows, you don't have to know, and it's hard shit to get through.
00:25:08.840Whereas like someone who's like always kind of a little bit at loggerheads with their reality,
00:25:14.200that's like a really easy sort of pose from which to write a science fiction story or novel.
00:25:19.900That's not the only way to do it. Ursula K. Le Guin sort of pioneered another one, which is sort of what we might call the anthropological viewpoint. Her idea is always, well, let's have an outsider come in and explain it, but also have that person be implicated in this in some way. Like what happens when you observe a system, right? This is famously what happens in the left hand of darkness. Like that's a way of solving the same problem without turning into a libertarian creep, basically, right?
00:25:46.760But of course, there's an interesting asterisk to libertarian sci-fi sort of positioning.
00:25:54.260A lot of them were proponents of space exploration at a time when space exploration was almost certainly a government affair.
00:26:01.440So, for instance, Heinlein, who was exactly that kind of libertarian, right?
00:26:05.860Like, Stranger in a Strange Land is about a Martian coming back to Earth and having to encounter Earth society for the first time.
00:26:12.080And Heinlein, in the 1980s, sort of in the wake of Apollo 13, in the wake of the Challenger disaster, came out swinging against calls to, you know, stop wasting money in space.
00:26:22.980He was like, the government needs to spend money so that we can get to this future in space.
00:26:26.440You know, there's that old Stephen Colbert joke about how Republicans want a government small enough to fit into your bedroom.
00:26:34.020Heinlein wanted one small enough to fit into the cosmos.
00:26:37.000then the other thing about this libertarianism that i think we do have to talk about in a gender
00:26:43.160podcast is you're fond of this joke about the type of libertarian whose definition of societal
00:26:49.080overreach seems to revolve entirely around the age of consent yeah when we were talking about
00:26:54.620this episode like a week or so ago and you were still writing it you were like they really all
00:29:04.180I do think once I was done vomiting all the contents of my stomach, I did start wondering, like, why was this kind of association so firm in the mind of sci-fi authors, especially ones that were kind of getting up there in age in the 1970s?
00:29:19.260You might say, like, look, they were just all pervy old men.
00:29:22.060And, you know, hopefully this was just fantasy on his part.
00:30:22.300They went through some version of it, even though they were not like long-haired hippies and or, you know, consciousness-raising housewives and Betty Friedan readers, right?
00:30:32.180They had their own version of what the counterculture was doing, at least when it came to sex, right?
00:30:36.780And I think that the sexual rationalism of Heinlein, and that's how he always frames it, he doesn't actually say libertarian, it's just a rationalism, was a way to take on board the sexual revolution without really taking on the ideas of human dignity and especially women's dignity behind it, right?
00:30:53.520That was a very popular way to encounter the sexual revolution.
00:30:57.140I got to say, a lot of people were like, wow.
00:31:00.740Yeah, exactly. The pervert's origins in that very gesture.
00:31:07.620Yeah. And, you know, and libertarianism at the time, of course, in fact, grafted sort of sexual liberation onto a deep anti-humanism. The fact that, like, this is about the species. This is about genetics. This isn't about you treating another person with respect and with gentleness and care. No, it's about, like, not doing this actually, like, destroys the bloodline or whatever, right? Like, it's unscientific for us not to fuck right now, right? That's the idea, I think.
00:31:34.040And that gives us that characteristic creep masculinity, right?
00:31:37.340Being horny without treating the people that you want to sleep with any better for it.
00:31:41.300You're not willing to, like, amp your niceness at all because, like, science says you need to do it, right?
00:31:50.060Yeah, so that's possibility number one.
00:31:51.780The second thing I thought about in terms of the second possibility for why did libertarians in science fiction sort of love taking this weird route has to do with the institutional history we talked about earlier.
00:32:04.040Namely, this is the golden age of science fiction conventions.
00:32:07.420And I would wager that sci-fi writers interacted with a ton of fans, and I imagine that they did a good amount of fucking at those cons.
00:32:16.040And this is where, as I mentioned, it might tell us something that Heinlein's first target in all these, like, pro-free love diatribes is always jealousy.
00:32:46.120Yeah, you've got to be more rationalist and just let me go wild, you know, at the Boulder, Colorado convention hall or whatever, right?
00:32:53.580We should be clear that, of course, like, again, at the fan convention, like, those people would have been of age, and hopefully this was all consensual, so I'm not, like, accusing Heinlein of anything particularly nefarious there.
00:33:03.020But I do think, yeah, I think that's part of it.
00:33:05.520But also the conventions had another side of them, right?
00:33:08.200Conventions also meant that sci-fi writers' personal lives started to matter more to fans than to organizers, right?
00:33:14.760We mentioned that H.P. Lovecraft was a, Stephen King I think called him a galloping racist, and that's even kind.
00:33:36.860But basically, once these conventions sort of really gathered the community, people's private lives and the way they comported themselves at home or at cons sort of became part of how people thought of what the community should be like, right?
00:33:52.380So, the good example here is the 22nd World Science Fiction Convention, which is Pacific Con 2, where the organizers were basically made aware of the fact that one invitee, the numismatist and sci-fi mega-fan Walter Breen, who was Marion Zimmer Bradley's husband, had been convicted of multiple counts of child molestation, and they were like, we've got to disinvite this asshole, right?
00:34:18.080But most fans at the time, it must be said, were against that and said, like, look, this guy's personal life shouldn't matter in terms of whether he gets to come to the fan convention or not, right?
00:34:28.280Like, if we can't even be child molesters anymore, what are we doing in this comic book convention?
00:34:35.080I got to say, Adrian, I think you might be overthinking this, trying to look for particularities in the sci-fi genre or in libertarian politics that lead people towards pedophilia.
00:34:44.780I think, like, a lot of men are pedophiles.
00:34:46.660It's kind of the logical endpoint of a lot of the ways male heterosexuality is constructed, and it's not really particular to any subculture or politics.
00:35:34.040Yeah, well, I guess I'm kind of trying to figure out what accounts for the level of tolerance for this kind of behavior and this kind of stuff.
00:35:40.400Most people don't—like, a lot of men are pedophiles, and most people don't think it's that big a deal.
00:35:43.700Like, especially if it's, like, teenage girls.
00:36:20.460During the sad puppies fiasco, the same people who decried that, quote unquote, politics had taken over sci-fi fandom were happy to promote, you know, books for the Hugo, whose Wikipedia summaries include phrases like, quote, consenting BDSM harem.
00:36:37.540There's nothing political about that, folks.
00:37:11.640Ergo, if you bring politics here, you're overstepping a line of my human dignity.
00:37:15.900And therefore, you cannot ask why I am so into the BDSM harem, why the BDSM harem has a bunch of female subs in it and, like, one unshowered dude.
00:37:28.540Yeah, this notion that sex is beyond the realm of reasonable political inquiry or, like, reasonable political agitation, once again, not just a sci-fi thing.
00:40:07.920On one timeline, Earth's population swelled to over 30 billion before reaching final disaster.
00:40:12.920disaster. On other timelines, the end came at less than 10 billion. But on all timelines, Dr.
00:40:19.460Malthus had the last laugh. This idea that overpopulation is like super important, it's
00:40:25.960sort of integrated with that kind of sexual rationalism that I was talking about, right?
00:40:30.200And again, I don't think that there's a great mystery as to why they particularly indulge in
00:40:34.780it, but it does have this kind of like population level interest again and again and again.
00:40:39.220And this population imperative also always has the sort of like sexual demand rationalized and built in, right?
00:40:46.740So it's a creep with pervert tendencies, we might call it, because it's about the sort of avatar character, the authorial voice, the stand-in for this like imagined, you know, straight white male sci-fi reader as having this like sexual entitlement that is actually very righteous in like natural and moral terms.
00:41:07.940Exactly. So finally, I want to talk about this genre that we alluded to, this hard sci-fi, because I think that's another sort of gendered trope in right-wing science fiction. Again, like not all hard sci-fi is right-wing, but the way fans tend to congregate around it can have a great deal of right-wing sort of gender policing going on. And there is, again, as with The Mouth is Shit, a rationalist element to it.
00:41:32.620The term originated in the 1950s, and it reemerges with a vengeance in the 1980s when there was a bunch of science fiction that was really influenced by New Age neo-spirituality, when science fiction writers sort of started imagining, you know, other worlds, other planets where, like, minds and objects interacted in interesting ways that were clearly influenced by, like, woo-woo hippies in, like, Northern California or whatever, right?
00:41:58.120So this idea of hard sci-fi, it sort of makes a periodic reappearance.
00:42:02.200People sort of re-articulate it against other things, and it's happening again today.
00:42:07.000But it always presents itself as in battle.
00:42:10.000It's getting crowded out of the marketplace by softer, squishier, poppier sci-fi.
00:42:15.320There's too many Ewoks on your screen.
00:42:17.040We need some hard fucking sci-fi in here, right?
00:42:19.800Part of the problem, I think, is that a lot of hard sci-fi advocates do not, in the end, think of their literature as literature.
00:42:27.240They regard their prose as pretty obviously a vehicle for thought experiment and philosophical puzzles, usually of a very particular kind.
00:42:34.780Like, do you have to commit genocide? Do you put a kid through the airlock? That sort of thing.
00:42:39.460Of course, Ursula K. Le Guin's Omelas is also a thought experiment and is also kind of scientific, but it's not hard sci-fi.
00:42:46.120It's not meant to be. It's meant to be an anthropological kind of observation about suffering, about society, and about social cohesion.
00:42:52.720The problem is then that hard sci-fi is almost set up to be marginal and then become upset about its own marginality, right?
00:43:01.220These are sometimes interesting stories.
00:43:03.480They're not usually books that are like super pleasurable as books.
00:43:08.460This actually is making me sort of revise my old thought about the right-wing science fiction fan now as sort of somebody who's clinging to his childhood.
00:43:19.000I do think that's like still like a decent insight into what's going on.
00:43:23.100But I wonder if this is like an older phenomenon where like new age cohorts came in and absorbed sci-fi that was meant for children.
00:43:34.540Like people who were kids in the 1970s when the first Star Wars came out are very, very attached to Star Wars.
00:43:40.200And that's a very different kind of franchise in this like much more adult, much more severe kind of hard science fiction that you're describing.
00:43:49.000Yeah, right. Like the astronaut in a 1950s space story is not C-3PO. There's definitely that. There's a kind of a revolt of adult nerds against the inkidification of their genre.
00:44:03.560Inkidification. Good, cute spin. I love it.
00:44:06.400At the same time, I would say that the early defenses of hard science fiction against this encroachment was also, I think, often an attack on editors, magazines, and publishers that saw it as their mission, because they wanted to make money, of depulpifying science fiction, right?
00:44:26.720Like, this is where publishers were like, look, why can't we get space stories that are well-written, literary, and aimed at adults?
00:44:32.720Because it turns out adults buy books and not children, right, back then.
00:44:35.600Yeah. So the advocates of hard science fiction were pushing back, on the one hand, maybe in kiddification at certain points, but also at other times on an attempt to professionalize the genre, to make science fiction literature more literary and to move it away from the kind of story that might make a kid want to join the Jet Propulsion Laboratory or NASA.
00:44:56.740Right? So it's weird. It's like, I think at different times, these people occupy a different generational space or a different age space imaginarily. Maybe the best way to think about sci-fi nostalgia is not that it ultimately returns us to childhood. What it does is it subverts the tyranny of chronological age. You get to be different ages at the same time. Does that make sense?
00:45:33.540Like, it ages you up and down at the same time.
00:45:36.800It sort of allows you to cosplay different ages to get into these fights.
00:45:40.800You know, I've been around the block a bunch.
00:45:42.540And, like, you could be, like, 21 and say that.
00:45:44.340Because, like, you have been to a bunch of conventions or whatever.
00:45:46.920So there is a way here that, like, I think age really sort of changes roles.
00:45:51.540Like, sometimes you're the young Padawan, sometimes you're the old Jedi, you know?
00:45:55.300But I do think what it always promotes is a kind of real devotee versus Johnny-come-lately dynamic, right?
00:46:02.460Where people who like different kinds of sci-fi are the wrong kinds of fans, or not even really fans at all.
00:46:09.960And, of course, it also proves, again, that the whole agitas over politics and sci-fi is just completely nuts, right?
00:46:16.700Like, the reason hard sci-fi existed was as an extension of a U.S. imperial project, right?
00:46:24.720You might think that that's okay, but it's very clear that, like, if in 1950 you were trying to get youngsters excited about going into rocket ships into space, that was not an apolitical choice.
00:46:35.580And in fact, as I mentioned at the 1939 Worldcon, right, that there were two fan groups that got into a massive fight over whether there should be a progressive utopian element in science fiction or whether the rocket ships were enough, right?
00:46:54.000Yeah, there is a politics here that is explicitly named and marked as such, right?
00:46:58.560And that's about progressive politics, right?
00:47:00.680And there's a politics, which is like pro-business, pro-government, pro-military, pro-law enforcement, that is kind of reframed as apolitical.
00:47:09.160I think that's really, really central here.
00:47:12.120Who has to be political and who gets to just be the genre?
00:47:17.040Exactly. And I think that this defense of the walled garden of science fiction fandom has been more central to right-wing aggrievement politics in the 2020s than some other fandoms or some other subcultures.
00:47:32.540It's driving at exactly the question that you just raised, who gets to just be, who gets to remain unmarked, which I think in the wake of Black Lives Matter, Me Too, but also of the COVID pandemic, I think like it's just a lot harder to maintain that fiction.
00:47:46.620And so that's made this kind of long inside-outside kind of dialectic-run science fiction fandom such a rife space for these kinds of culture war kerfuffles.