It’s a pretty safe bet that anyone who uses the phrase “cancel culture” unironically doesn’t really know what they’re talking about, or is intentionally shitposting.
Also, keep moving those goalposts, guy(ll) who doesn’t understand how language works.
Well, at least he fits at least one of those dictionary definitions.
I don’t think you read that essay closely enough, if at all. Campbell’s views, both in his editorial policies and his expressed political positions, map very easily to the following characteristics, at least:
Rejection of modernism (since you won’t read the essay, I’ll clarify that Eco doesn’t equate this with rejection of technology)
The cult of “action for action’s sake”
Fear of difference
Nationalism (really jingo exceptionalism)
Life is permanent warfare.
Popular elitism and contempt for the weak.
Everyone is educated to become a hero
Machismo
A case can be made for some of the others, too, but there’s enough evidence for these.
But, ok, let’s grant that Eco is not the sole definer of fascism, and that it’s easier for you to cite a couple of sentences from Merriam-Webster, instead. Here’s something that’s less easy for you to deny: Campbell was a racist and white supremacist (and, to be clear, at a time when these were regarded by most Americans as deplorable positions). I’m sure you’ll have no objection to that, nor to his name being removed from the award – not by Ng, but by the organisation that gives it out – on that basis, right?
Agree with every point.
Adding that he’s also a fascist by Merriam-Webster/OED/Pictionary standards too.
Lower case dictionary fascism is:
: a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
I feel it’s safe to say that John W Campbell was a fascist.
You know that it’s possible to recognize the Founding Fathers’ contributions to creating a democratic society while still taking them to task for being a bunch of bigoted slavers, right?
Speaking of dictionary definitions, under the one for “fool” I’d add the example of the Libertarian who places himself on-side with fascists because they’re both opposed to Communism.
In fairness, we’re already doing that and burning the planet besides.
Methinks you may have misunderstood the relevance of my comment.
Occupational hazard of being a gif/meme “master,” though…
Quite possibly; it’s been a while since I’ve seen the Wizard of Oz so I just went with a simplistic interpretation of “strawman”… and was only fatalistically joking that they might be setting up strawmen, but what they’re arguing those strawmen should be doing pales in comparison to what the human species already is.
Here’s Michael Moorcock on right wing SF.
https://web.archive.org/web/20021224193414/http://flag.blackened.net/liberty/moorcock.html
I’ve read and enjoyed many of those he criticizes. I don’t much care for Moorcock’s works. They don’t speak to me.
As a matter of politics, I agree with Moorcock. As a matter of literary enjoyment-- well…
Perhaps I should look at his suggested reading list anyway–though it’s a bit dated.
Leaving aside the very worthy but to my mind journalistic The Dispossessed by U.K. Le Guin, it is quite hard for me to find many other examples of sf books which, as it were, ‘promote’ libertarian ideas. M. John Harrison is an anarchist. His books are full of anarchists – some of them very bizarre like the anarchist aesthetes of The Centauri Device. Typical of the New Worlds school he could be described as an existential anarchist. There is Brian Aldiss with his Barefoot in the Head vision of an LSD ‘bombed’ Europe almost totally liberated and developing bizarre new customs. There are J. G. Ballard’s ‘terminal ironies’ such as The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash and so on, which have brought criticisms of ‘nihilism’ against him. There is Joanna Russ’s marvellous The Female Man. So little sf has fundamental humanitarian values, let alone libertarian ideals, one is hard put to find other examples. My own taste, I suppose, is sometimes at odds with my political views. I admire Barrington J. Bayley, whose stories are often extremely abstract. One of his most enjoyable books recently published is The Soul of the Robot which discusses the nature of individual identity. Charles L. Harness is another favourite of mine. The Rose, in particular, lacks the simplifications of most sf, and The Paradox Men with its sense of the nature of Time, its thief hero, its ironic references to America Imperial, is highly entertaining. I also have a soft spot for C. M. Kornbluth who to my mind had a rather stronger political conscience than he allowed himself, so that his stories are sometimes confused as he tried to mesh middle-American ideas with his own radicalism. One of my favourites (though structurally it is a bit weak) is The Syndic (about a society where a rather benign Mafia is paramount). Fritz Leiber is probably the best of the older American sf writers for his prose-style, his wit and his humanity, as well as his abiding contempt for authoritarianism. His Gather, Darkness is one of the best sf books to relate political power to religious power (this was also serialised in Astounding during the forties . John Brunner, author of the CND marching song ‘H-Bomb’s Thunder’, often writes from a distinctly socialist point of view. Harlan Ellison, who for some time had associations with a New York street gang and who has identified himself for many years with radicalism in the US, writes many short stories whose heroes have no truck with authority of any sort, though the conventions of the genre sometimes get in the way of the essential messages of his stories. This has to be true of most genre fiction. Ellison’s best work is written outside the sf genre. Philip K. Dick, John Sladek, Thomas M.Disch, Joanna Russ…
We must keep alert, so that the sense of these words will not be forgotten again. Ur- Fascism is still around us, sometimes in plainclothes. It would be so much easier, for us, if there appeared on the world scene somebody saying, “I want to reopen Auschwitz, I want the Black Shirts to parade again in the Italian squares.” Life is not that simple.
Great stuff.
Has anyone here read Umberto Eco’s fiction? Any recommendations?
Joanna Russ isn’t dated. This thread proves that.
All the people crying about John W Campbell, and canon authors having slightly less shiny halos, when the real problem is the multitudes that were actually unjustly "cancelled by actual prejudice.
(It can be updated and expanded beyond predominantly straight white women, but its central complaint is alive and breathing here today.)
Eco’s fiction is fun and it’s all interesting but if you want to start, maybe start with Foucault’s Pendulum.
Some people might not think he’s a “true” writer because he never punched a baby in the face, but I like him.
She isn’t currently writing new science fiction— for obvious reasons.
In 1977, when Moorcock wrote his piece, she was-- and she had yet to write How to Suppress Women’s writing.
There’s a myth that John Campbell took a literary form that was distinctly pulpy, and (between 1937 and 1950) made it into something that appealed to scientists and engineers.
Now, I happen to like the end result. And many others do too.
To puncture that sense of gratitude, a successful rebuttal can either demonstrate that this “change wasn’t due to Campbell”, or that he rejected a lot of good solid SF for reasons that had more to do with sexism and racism than any concern for the form.
I’ve read a lot of early SF, and while interesting and amusing in parts, handwavium was involved.
If you want SF that promotes libertarian views, have at some John Ringo, David Weber, or any of the “Sad Puppies”. Hell, Heinlein got pretty damn bad with it, as well as a serious incest hangup, although he never seemed quite as ill-natured as most libertarians to me o.o’ . See also “Starship Troopers”, a cracking good yarn AND libertarian screed.
For that matter, Lovecraft was a racist, hateful prick, and Asimov was a serial groper (at least) of women, including my mother. There are MANY still-honored artists, who in reality were quite nasty, foul people. Hemingway, anyone?
Yet I still read many (although certainly not all, nor every title) of them, 'cuz a good story is a good story, nonetheless (well, I also read voraciously and constantly run out of stuff to read; no joke, I read cereal boxes in their entirety, down to the ingredients). Similarly, the Cosby Show didn’t suddenly become crap, because Cosby was found to be a drugger/raper of women. Their works are not them.
ugh. I want hard SF with believable, emotional characters. And frankly, I’ve had to go into mainstream literature-- even, um, women’s literature-- for the latter.
There are so many hard SF novels where the characters seem made out of cardboard. I remember reading Greg Bear Benford’s Cosm, decades ago, and thinking that “this time, the cardboard has “woman” written on it.”
Ah, so you have read Joanna Russ…
That’s just the kind of thing she was talking about. If you want to be ironically bigoted, though, you should mark it, or people will think you’re serious.
I think when Moorcock is talking about libertarians he is talking about the original libertarians; anarcho-communists and similar anti-authoritarian left wing groups.
