A writer friend of mine is working on an article and wanted me to comment on the following thesis:
“Since the founding of the tiny corner of academia known as science fiction studies in the 1970s, there has been a sense that science fiction is of the left, while fantasy is of the right. Science fiction is about the future, about the utopias we might someday build, about science—while fantasy is about looking back toward an imaginary past of kings, empires, war, and magic (which is to say, nonsense). If science fiction is about revolution, fantasy is about restoration. Or so the Marxist critics who have championed science fiction and decried fantasy for the past half-century would have it.
Tolkien Against the Grain – Dissent Magazine“
I didn’t entirely agree…, and here’s what I shared with him of my perspective. I have… definite opinions (what a surprise). What about you? (Fire away in the comments…)
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That was then, this is now.
If I shop today for unknown-author SFF books, I assume the following about unknown authors in subgenres:
- MilSciFi. These are often dystopian in setting (resistance to enemies domestic or alien), or alternatively exploratory (To Boldly Go) or defensive (We or our comrades/families will survive!). They generally follow the ethos of all “military” fiction, that is, that resistance to enemies is better than collaboration, that you should never give up hope, that extreme efforts may be necessary in defense of self, comrades, and mission, that organizational/leadership incompetence may be deadly and in that case must be resisted/subverted. There will be a significant focus on How-To: the military-ish procedures of organizations that make current (and any) actions possible. In some contexts, there will be stories that focus on career competence (rising through the ranks).
It’s more about the “how” and contextual competence under stress than the “sensawonda” - OtherSciFi. These have conventions by sub-genre (Alien encounters, Disaster, Exploration, Tech/Survival Puzzles, Scientific Invention, Doom Scrolling (e.g., Medical infection, Alien resistance), Time Travel, etc. Older SciFi was presenting these concepts for the first time, and fell more into Rod Serling cultural commentary forms than current SciFi which assumes we’re all familiar with all the conventions and free to play there.
- Overall “tone”… MilSciFi is reliably on the Right (as in, a reader is really irritated to discover that the book they made that assumption about is not, to the point of book-at-wall reaction, and public Author-Warning activity). It’s pretty much a sub-genre requirement. All the rest is subject to the whims and fashions of the period it was written. As an example: a story on exploration-that-encounters-possibly-humanity-threatening aliens might happen to feature a female primary commander. (Oldtime SFF was often fond of introducing outrageous concepts). You may not be able to tell before reading if the Commander is: (1) In context (training, tech support, leadership, local culture, whatever) non-controversial as a career possibility, (2) A political or other external power structure incompetent appointee, (3) A bad Commander (incompetent leader) who is overthrown from within or simply leads to defeat, (4) A competent commander who cleverly succeeds and survives, etc., etc.
So it depends upon the headlines-de-jour. Older SFF liked to subvert conventions and expectations, and felt obliged to demonstrate how that might work. Modern SFF tends to assume that such subversion is already a “given” possibility and may or may not bother to try and convince a reader about how that could realistically occur. A reader on the left who is not concerned about the “how would the whole girlboss thing work” issue in real life won’t miss the explanation an older work would feel obliged to provide. A reader on the right who might be able to justify special circumstances (sole survivor, unusual culture, etc.) to carry the story situation will be irritated if the author doesn’t feel it necessary to do that work. There’s only so much an author can assume the reader will accept if he blunders into a contemporary hot button, and touchy readers may assume (justifiably or not) that incompetence based on low-information about the story setup.
The sorts of things that convey “this is contemporary bad left” are implausible situations that violate acceptance. Could a teenager be forced to rise to organize his comrades in defense of family from insidious space-aliens? Well, sure, in an SFF story. But we would have to see how he got into the situation, how the process worked (or didn’t), what it took to make this possible, what the barriers were that had to be overcome (or not), etc. If the teenager were female? Yeah, sure. But it requires extra story justification – it can’t just be assumed. Bad Left SFF does the assuming. The whole premise of SFF is “What if…?” The more that story violates present assumptions, the more that has to be explained, even if the explanation is trivial. The Left operates as if those assumptions can simply be accepted, and doesn’t do the work to make their case, resulting in bad story-telling.
In other words, if disaster strikes and only a small band of humans survive, led by a tough grannie who can verbally whip everyone into line to cooperate for survival, then show us that. It’s a great story – a leader rising to the occasion. But if instead, huddled in a cave after the first strike, the survivors decide, “well it’s her turn to lead, that would only be fair”, then that story is DOA (unless, of course, the story is written to demonstrate how stupid that would be.) - Fantasy also has subgenre conventions, but is mainly defined as “I don’t have to respect (what I know/suspect about) physical reality and its limitations. I can claim impossible things as part of the story environment (as long as I don’t violate how the story people operate as “people” (for various flavors of “people”). Now, perhaps faster-than-light (FTL) travel is truly impossible in this our real world – we simply don’t know – but as a “given” in a SFF story, it’s perfectly acceptable. On the other hand, the notion that people can be reincarnated in a cave (Once and Future King) is impossible on a different scale (assuming we’re not talking about alien technology), and is only acceptable in a religious context (God can do anything). So, whether or not a religion is ever mentioned in such a story, it is surely implied.
Once you can assume you can rely on god-like powers as part of your story world “given”, then a whole different class of “what if” story possibilities arise.
- I’m not familiar with a “genre-term” for it, but there is an equivalent Fantasy genre to MilSciFi – ancient or primitive armies, careers, etc., alternative historical conflicts — the rewriting of “real” history. Like MSF, this leans Right, to a tragic view of constraint and error, even though the constraints may be very different (magic, etc.) and the errors may be removed (this time they win!). The “if only” can be made real at the story level. There’s a special fondness for the “if only” different decision branch had been taken, without any other fantastical change– like playing historical war games. Those hardly qualify as “Fantasy” (though that is how they are classed).
- Most Fantasy operates as pure Adventure Story, with some of the real world constraints removed. As in any adventure story, there’s a situation, and there are characters that live with it. The situation can be absolutely fantastical (magic flying dragons, angry gods). The question is no longer “what if magic flying dragons exist” but how the existence of them might impact the world of characters around them. Now, this is, of course, similar to a SciFi “what if aliens exist” premise. What is meaningfully different is the constraints under which the story-worlds operate. In Fantasy (unlike SciFi), absolutely any premise of worldbuilding is acceptable, but it must operate with rigor. “Given that a virgin can tame a unicorn, what could/should she do with such a power? Must she be willing? Can she be constrained? Can she do it more than once or for several unicorns? Can the unicorn regain its wildness?” Given the (perhaps outrageous) constraints, the story must respect them.
- Adventure Stories are much older than SciFi. For the speculative stories (e.g., Haggard’s She) the focus is on a world which might not exist or has just one difference from our real world. But the whole aspect of retelling historical stories with a “what if” variation (war-gaming historical conflicts) is much closer to straight non-fiction and requires constraints accordingly. The “if only” aspect is so striking, if perhaps illusory (it was the only decision to make at the time) that it resembles the SciFi “If only FTL were possible”).
- The above (G) constraint is what conveys the “Fantasy is Right”. First, any Fantasy that retells an existing story with a small change will limit itself to “what is possible in context”, a recognition of constraints that is more right than left. And any “pure” Fantasy (not a retelling of a constrained story) is concerned primarily with defining the rules of its world and how to operate within them, and that is another right-flavor constraint.
- It’s as if SciFi pays lip-service to physical constraints (FTL) by defining what is possible within its story and adhering to the rules, but explores the ramifications of that using humans (or equivalent sapients). There’s a temptation to speculate about the human constraints as well which lends itself to Left-style role playing.
Fantasy pays lip-service to how-humans-work constraints (Alt-History) and explores the ramifications of different elements of (fantastical) powers, chance, or personality. The backgrounds can be conventional as a convenience (not having to define how a royal court operates in detail), and those conventional backgrounds are more resistant to “leftie” versions, because they would have to be so defined explicitly (and thus can’t just be used as a shortcut setting context).
Hard SciFi and Military-focused SFF (SciFi or Fantasy) operates on the same assumptions re: rigorous “givens” – only so much can be changed via handwavium – so they largely fail with Leftie assumptions. - Another way of looking at it is that the Left doesn’t attempt much with alt-history (lack of interest, competence), and is not attracted to the rigor of “how things work” which keeps it from much grounded exploration of science, tech, governmental/military systems. It disapproves of constraints. It prefers the lower effort wishful thinking of Alt-SciFi, which it treats like a blank canvas re: human behavior, and would rather spin out a story ungrounded by how its premises would work in a real world, ANY real world. It’s the same refusal to come to terms with reality that we all go through in adolescence, but learn to grow out of. Adolescents not only don’t believe in constraints, they can’t see the point of them. That’s how you know they’re not grown up yet.
More thoughts from an old article of mine: https://hollowlands.com/2012/06/creating-worlds-heroic-fantasy-vs-science-fiction-part-2/
Mad Genius Club 
31 responses to “SciFi is of the left, Fantasy is of the right. Discuss.”
Shorter version: Conservatives do the work. Leftists don’t.
Another way to look at it would be that Leftists are able to default, and thus just cruise along without having to world-build– and thus don’t notice when there are contradictions inside of their world building.
So the work will not hold up as well.
I point to this other way to look at it because I’ve been studying romance novels, and holy crud the stuff that they just Take As A Given is awe inspiring, but not in a good way. Their models of “this is normal, healthy, and probably the only thing actual humans do” is simply gobsmacking.
Succinct and to the point. Thank you!
I think it’s more a matter of ‘science fiction and fantasy studies are done by the left’ with all of their built-in assumptions. There is bad science fiction and bad fantasy of all persuasions out there.
John Ringo’s Dark Tide series is all science fiction; a genetically engineered bioweapon unleashes the Zombie Apocalypse. Definitely not on the left. The best way to take out zombies is with guns, mortars and artillery. Just don’t rely overmuch on Barbie guns. 😀
Larry Correia’s Monster Hunter and Hard Magic series are undeniably fantasy; vampires, werewolves, trailer-trash elves, gangsta gnomes, warrior orcs, magic and world-ending adversaries. Also definitely not on the left. Our Heroes fight their foes with superpowers, super-science, and a whole lot of plain old guns and explosives.
I must say that one of the main things that make Monster Hunter a favorite of mine is Larry’s focus on practicalities. Given a werewolf, what kind of loads are you using in your shotgun? What kind of tactics are your team of misfits and maniacs going to employ to hunt this thing safely? How many guys do you need? What are you driving? What armor do you wear?
This is -awesome- and he’s about the only guy who does it.
Fantastic Fiction is a spectrum; from “how” (scifi) to “why” (fantasy).
If you have nothing but one or the other, it rather sucks, because you either have nowhere to go or no reason to go there.
This doesn’t map well to left or right, of any country’s formation.
“If science fiction is about revolution, fantasy is about restoration.”
Yes, particularly when publishing is 80% captured by Marxists who think fantasy is stupid and don’t pay attention to it.
“Once you can assume you can rely on god-like powers as part of your story world “given”, then a whole different class of “what if” story possibilities arise.”
I’ve been having a great deal of fun with god-like powers in my series. It doesn’t have to be a fantasy, robust nanotechnology can get you there.
If you can make -anything-, what will you make? If you can do -anything-, what will you do? If cost is not an issue, what becomes possible?
Turns out, if you look at it very carefully, god-like powers don’t get you much. Beyond personal gratification and comfort, if you have any respect for other people and value human life, there’s not much you can do. So Our Hero mostly spends his time doing battle with some Bad Guys who -don’t- value human life. Doing battle very carefully.
My third book explores what might happen if FTL travel becomes trivial. If it’s safe, cheap and easy, obviously Our Hero is going to be jetting about the cosmos doing all kinds of things. Of course the question arises, where is everybody else? We figured it out, are we the only ones?
And if we’re not the only ones, what are they all doing out there?
The fourth book, coming out soon I promise, we find out what they’re all doing and what happens if they don’t do it. This one I’m pretty proud of, high fantasy and eldritch powers we know naught of meet megatons per second.
In all of this, Marxism and unifying the masses to march toward Utopia doesn’t really enter into things. This is about the individual. What are -YOU- going to do with god-like power? What’s going to keep -YOU- from throwing your weight around and being an a-hole? If you have the power to -make- people do what you want, if you use it are you going to get what you want?
Making everybody march toward one goal is what Bad Guys do. In fact my series begins with the Bad Guy in the early stages of Unifying the Masses. It’s using nano to turn the population of Earth into meat robots, for use in a construction project. Because although it could make it’s own robots, killing humans and using their bodies is cheaper. More efficient, you know. Cost/benefit calculation.
One thing you can’t have, and that’s fiat currency. Nanotech can duplicate anything. Perfectly. All you need is the right raw materials, a pattern, and energy. Any sort of security features you put into your dollar bills can be trivially replicated. Same for any form of ID. And there are no Arisians to create un-counterfeitable Lenses.
The one thing nanotech can’t do is transmute elements. So, currency has to go back to gold and silver. Jewels won’t do; they’re just common elements in crystal form. Diamonds are carbon. Sapphires and rubies are aluminum oxide, colored with traces of other elements. Emeralds are beryllium aluminum oxide. And so on.
Once you have nanotech, anybody can make anything in their basement. Vehicles, tools, weapons, drugs, genetically engineered pathogens…anything. They can’t be stopped.
“One thing you can’t have, and that’s fiat currency.”
Yes, and this leads to some interesting world-building problems with aliens who have it. Why do they do anything? What’s their motivation, especially if they live a very long time? Why get out of bed in the morning?
How do they decide who’s the boss and who sweeps up? What happens if the guy sweeping up doesn’t think it’s fair?
What do they use for money? Is that even a useful question?
Yeah, I looked into it. ~:D We find out a lot about fighting a bad guy armed with nanotech in Angels Inc. and we find out what motivates aliens in Secret Empire, as you might expect from the title.
And interesting to note, nobody with any sense is trying to create a Utopia where everybody sits around and writes bad poetry. They’re busy. Things to do, places to go, people to eat.
To whom it may concern… a comment was left on my linked article. I approved it, and it shows up in my management area as “approved”, but the approval for some reason did not go through (it doesn’t show up as a posted comment).
(I suspect that’s because the article dates to 2012 and there may be some time limit setting I can’t locate).
Please feel free to repost that here. I don’t mind that it’s negative. 🙂
If you are referring to the comment by Everett Mickey, it is showing up for me.
I am, and thank you for your feedback. That merely deepens the mystery of why it isn’t displaying for me, but it’s no longer important if others can see it.
WordPress delenda est.
I don’t see the comment, either. On either Mac or PC, both using Firefox or DuckDuck. WPDE?
(Hell is too good for WordPress….)
Here’s the selectively visible comment on the linked article from my WordPress site.
Article: https://hollowlands.com/2012/06/creating-worlds-heroic-fantasy-vs-science-fiction-part-2/
From Everitt Mickey:
“Not even close. The premise is bogus. Science Fiction is fiction about science with all known rules of science adhered to in the story except ‘what if’ (graphe is available in industrial quantities, or something like that. I try to avoid fantasy so I know very little about it. I’m offended that Hard SCIFi is considered left wing.”
The academic left tried to take ownership of SF from the ’70s onward, which is why Robert A. Heinlein had to be defamed and run out of the genre (they haven’t really succeeded, but the keep trying), and Poul Anderson is never studied by “serious” academics.
One hilarious aspect of this is there is a knee-jerk countercurrent. William Gibson was working toward a graduate degree in SF in the ’70s (he dropped out and never finished) and the premise of his thesis was that hard science fiction — that is, SF which respects the laws of physics as currently understood — was inherently fascist. Which means that, yes, the left has always been at war with reality.
The laws of physics are fascist. Math is RRRAAACISSST!! The whole universe is ‘trans-phobic’ because it doesn’t allow them to change immutable biological facts by wishing at them. They are remarkably comprehensive paranoiacs. 😛
This is the same William Gibson whose early story was “The Gernsback Continuum”, wherein a contemporary photographer gets transported to an alternate universe where early SF stories were true, and everybody is *white* and there are mass graves of all the unfit people who were *not* white. Because Gibson is a mind reader and understood better than anybody else what early SF was “really” about. Real piece of work, ain’t he.
God, I hate that story with a passion.
Funny, for the last 100+ years it’s been the Leftroids dumping the ‘unfit’ in mass graves. I guess those don’t count.
Anybody who does something “bad” by lefty lights is automatically on the right.
By the way, I just went and skimmed the connected article by Gerry Canavan in Dissent Magazine.
What a ridiculous confabulation of irredeemable Leftist drivel. I can’t even.
Indeed, which is why my writer friend is planning a mainstream article on the topic.
If I may be so bold as to suggest, a focus on what makes it irredeemable drivel might be useful.
The article is almost negative knowledge, as if the writer was trying to make you dumber when you read it. A thicket of assertions and references summing to “because I said so” and each assertion and reference also amounting to “because some guy said so” when you chase them all down.
They do this all the time. Gun control is my personal specialty, when you follow one of their talking points all the way down the rabbit hole it ends up being a marketing gimmick they deployed to fool the rubes. This article on Tolkien seems to be much the same.
And not even interestingly novel. Just the same old.
I say the right gets both fantasy and science fiction and the left can stick to writing hagiographies of Marx.
What warped priorities. Even if things work like that in practice, do they work like that in theory?
Yeah, the simplest response to anyone claiming that SF is of the left and F is of the right is “okay, boomer”. I’m not gonna say it wasn’t more or less true for some brief moment in the 1960s/1970s., Back then, the left-leaning Futurians and their heirs were ascendant in SF. The right wing of SF-dom consisted of libertarian-ish Robert Heinlein plus a smattering of people straddling the SF and F divide, including Poul Anderson, proto-MilSF author Gordon R. Dickson, and Randall Garrett, while the only really well-known fantasy-only writer was anarcho-monarchist JRR Tolkien – quirky but undeniably conservative by any metric. But IMO that moment in time passed quickly as the MilSF subgenre found its footing, and the disciples of Gimbutas started colonizing fantasy, and both genres have been “purple” in electoral map terms ever since.
I think that a story set in another world, or another time and place, that first subordinates everything to the feeling needs of a current day political faction is gonna trend to garbage, what ever the official flavor of the faction.
If I try to write a story, whose main point is that a my faction dude would be so awesome if he were mayor of the next larger or next smaller city in my state, with tons of improbable ‘good’ events happening with no causal relationship with policy nor with actual concrete actions, it would almost certainly be crap. (It seems like figuring out how to write a good story that fits such description might be an interesting exercise. Probably an utterly stupid waste of time, but a lot of potential projects that sound interesting to me prove to be stupid.)
Almost always, when one is thinking about an own faction future political event, one is either going to overestimate positive possibilities, or be in the habit of spiraling down. It is possible to have pessimistic or depressive habits of mind, but in absence of those and in absence of cynicism, one is probably going to overestimate some of the many estimates for political outcomes. There are a lot of elected positions, a lot of appointed positions, and a lot of possible choices for ever term of office. Too many to think about, we use a reduced order method to think about them, and a lot of the ways to think about one’s own faction may be biased to overstating positives.
There are loads and loads of unknown future events that one can worry about. And fiction can be a place to feel good about things, or to try to solve worries in a distant way. Even if some of the self-therapy types of writing can have a very limited audience. But if a story should have its own mad, perhaps alien, internal logic, and does not, and is instead what a current day political ideology would want to happen… There are maybe good stories about issues with an ideology, but the type of writer who can do them well may need to be able to see the mental worlds inside of that ideology, and outside of it.
An ideology that relies on an eternal now, a model of the future, the past and the other that strictly follows what it currently finds expedient to predict or insist is true… May in fact tend towards terrible fiction.
Machinery largely does not and cannot care what we humans feel or say. Machines in the near future are likely to have partly predictable limitations that do not depend on what it is currently politically expedient to predict that they do. Even for the office politics of my company, and this new system that management wants to procure (1).
Anyway, I do not disagree with a lot of the guestimates of behavioral trends mentioned here.
I’m just normally a little bit too pissy on this topic, I did not want to experience rant mode, and was attempting to be even handed and almost apolitical.
(1) Hypothetical and also pretty much true in most organizations. Hilariously, I am a bit my own boss, and I was actually terrible on this point this very week. (This FOSS software package seems to answer a problem I have. I’mma gonna install it, and things will be hunky dory. (2) )
(2) People may sometimes place blame on the software, but this is somewhat my own predictions and series of choices. I have learned things, but stuff was not hunky dory. May mostly be my own fault for not liking to install the latest versions and not keeping every single thing at the most recent available patch.
Also, I repeat things that did not work, expecting them to work this time, and also I am overly reluctant to stop a process that has clearly gotten hung up on something.
I’ve never seen either Science Fiction nor Fantasy as inherently right or left. Some of the stories trend one way or another, but it’s difficult to place either genre as one or the other. I’ve found good stories and I’ve found bad stories for both, with tends to tell me it’s a writer issue.
My current audioBook listen is described as, “Arthurian legend meets space opera…” which is intriguing. If this had been a deadtreeBook I would have walled it after the first chapter. It’s taken me a month to listen to it (runtime of 9 hrs, still have 40 minutes left), but I want to get to the end to find out just how awful it ends. The main character is a space marine…that can’t follow orders of any kind. “Arthur” barely appears in the story at all. The governments don’t appear sustainable in the least.
A lot of the Matter of Britain was about the knights and not Arthur at all.