But I must admit that Captain Deladrier knows her trade. There was no fiddling around once the Rodger Young stopped braking. At once I heard her snap, “Center-line tube … fire!” and there were two recoil bumps as Jelly and his acting platoon sergeant unloaded—and immediately: “Port and starboard tubes—automatic fire! ” and the rest of us started to unload. Bump! and your capsule jerks ahead one place—bump! and it jerks again, precisely like cartridges feeding into the chamber of an old-style automatic weapon. Well, that’s just what we were . . . only the barrels of the gun were twin launching tubes built into a spaceship troop carrier and each cartridge was a capsule big enough (just barely) to hold an infantryman with all field equipment.
Even Stranger in a Strange Land, which many Heinlein fans point to as evidence of how “progressive” he was, had some pretty misogynistic ideas throughout—including the role of women on spaceships.
The first human expedition to Mars (the event which set the story in motion) failed because Earth sent a mixed-gender crew who ended up murdering each other over sexual jealousies. The second human expedition to Mars went off without a hitch because the crew was made up entirely of men, who are of course naturally more rational (at least when there aren’t any women around). The idea of avoiding violent conflict by sending an all-woman crew was apparently too far-fetched to even warrant consideration.
I stopped after two chapters because it was so boring," says Verhoeven of his attempts to read Heinlein’s opus. “It is really quite a bad book. I asked Ed Neumeier to tell me the story because I just couldn’t read the thing. It’s a very right-wing book. And with the movie we tried, and I think at least partially succeeded, in commenting on that at the same time. It would be eat your cake and have it. All the way through we were fighting with the fascism, the ultra-militarism. All the way through I wanted the audience to be asking, ‘Are these people crazy?’”
Jerry Pournelle liked to write about fascist societies-- one could argue that he was a fascist in real life.
If anyone is interested in reading more about how deeply conservative and regressively angry-white-male traditional sci-fi is, John Scalzi has written a lot about the Sad Puppies and Rabid Puppies debacles at the Hugos. It’s hard to find an organized summary of the situation so my best suggestion is to Google sad puppies site:whatever.scalzi.com and read all his articles.
Vox also did an overview piece that I haven’t read but looks good:
It gets kinda interesting when actual government policies are involved:
In 1980 Robert Heinlein was a member of the Citizens Advisory Council on National Space Policy, chaired by Jerry Pournelle, which met at the home of SF writer Larry Niven to write space policy papers for the incoming Reagan Administration. Members included such aerospace industry leaders as former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, General Daniel O. Graham, aerospace engineer Max Hunter and North American Rockwell VP for Space Shuttle development George Merrick. Policy recommendations from the Council included ballistic missile defense concepts which were later transformed into what was called the Strategic Defense Initiative. Heinlein assisted with Council contribution to the Reagan SDI spring 1983 speech.
(Via Jimbopedia)
I’ve been reading a few of Liu Cixin‘s books lately. It is a nice change to have so many non-white, non-Western protagonists in his stories but all his work I’ve read so far is still extremely male-centric.
According to a June 2019 interview and profile article by The New Yorker, Liu avoids talking about politics. In the same article, Liu argued that democracy was not appropriate for modern China, and individual liberty and freedom of governance is “not what Chinese people care about”, adding “If you were to loosen up the country a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” He expressed support for policies such as the one-child policy and the Xinjiang re-education camps, saying “the government is helping their economy and trying to lift them out of poverty”. The article reported that Liu had “become wary of touting the geopolitical underpinnings of his work”
Agreed, he holds a lot of political and policy opinions that most of us (at least in the West) would find odious. But in my opinion we still benefit from being exposed to creative, original fiction written from a variety of perspectives, as it helps us empathize (which does not mean sympathize!) with people from backgrounds and viewpoints different from our own. We just shouldn’t take these stories as something to emulate.
This was a weird read for me. I thought I was pretty plugged in to the early history of TTRPGs in general, but there are often blind spots. I’d never heard of this Barker guy or the Empire of the Petal Throne.
Even weirder, I jumped over to his Wikipedia page to discover that he had a hand in writing at least one book that is on my shelf-- my partner is a member of the Klamath nation, and this weird dead racist was author or co-author on three books on the Klamath language, including a dictionary which I know for a fact we own. Strange connections.
Oh, and for the record, since it seems to be a hot topic in this comment section, I was a huge Heinlein fan as a kid. That doesn’t change the fact (and neither do his areligious tendencies) that he was a huge fascist and misogynist. Sometimes when you grow up you have to realize your heroes were not as great as you thought they were.
Same here. Tunnel in the Sky was my favorite book. Reading it as an adult, it reveals the Heinleinian tendency of mixing pseudo-egalitarianism (a racially diverse cast of characters*) with fascist tendencies (read between the lines of the plot of “survival testing” a bunch of high schoolers and you see a straight-up fascist society). He was a weird dude.
*Which at the time I didn’t grok, and I think few did, because of the whitewashed cover art by Darrell K. Sweet.
He lives in China right? Making art in authoritarian regimes is always a privilege that carries the responsibility to say shit like that. He may believe it to be sure but he may not.
Or maybe it’s because he writes his white characters and then drops some throwaway line towards the end to show that his character isn’t white. “I’m not the racist, you’re the racist! You assumed my characters were white.”
Fuck off Bob, you’re a fascist and your books are shit. Embarassing in their racial and sex politics sure, but shit anyway.
He probably does believe a lot of it. I noticed that several of his stories mentioned the need for governments to put limits on population size due to various planet-wide crises, even though it often made no sense in the context of the story, let alone the morality of it.
But I also noticed that in The Three Body Problem the story didn’t make the 1960’s/1970’s Chinese government look good at all, with one of the main characters losing her professor father to zealots of the Cultural Revolution persecuting him for things like his belief in the Theory of Relativity. But maybe the current regime doesn’t have a problem with criticizing the government from decades back as long as you don’t say anything bad about more recent government policy?
I’m sure you’re right. I only started it and got bored. Like you I did note the criticism of past Chinese governments so I guess your hypothesis on that is right too.
ETA
I have discussed politics and history with Chinese students in contexts where I wouldn’t always expect complete openness and honesty. Like the official government spy could be there and the unnoficial ones too. Anyway the line on Mao seems to be “he was a great man, but he made mistakes, people then didn’t know as much as we do now”.
And to be fair on Mao if you go run the timeline on gapminder
You can see Mao was “flawed” but the English and Japanese… Well Victoria and Hirohito were nothing better than sadistic, thieving, raping, murderous, genocidal thugs.
