Piers Anthony is an avowed atheist, yet he wrote the *Incarnations *series of books, set in a world where God and The Devil are well known to exist, where bad acts will send you to Hell, and prayer will get you into Heaven. It sometimes seems like he’s preaching a sermon, like the Narnia books. But he isn’t, and doesn’t believe in the message.
Well, maybe not. His writing had a lot of anti-Semitic posing, but he married a Jewish woman. Think of him as R. Crumb from 70 years earlier.
Plato’s Republic is, in some interpretations, a manual of how unworkable republics would be.
I have a book here of Playboy cartoons by Eldon Dedini. The guy depicted orgies and hedonism better than anybody, but nothing in his private life indicates he believed in any of that; he was a chuchgoing Catholic, a faithful husband and rather conservative.
Neil LaBute’s Mormonism is a stark contrast to the rather icky protagonists of his stories.
It certainly is among conservative SF writers; see half of everything Niven and/or Pournelle has written in the past 20 years.
Not Plato’s fault. The actual Greek title is Politea – “polity” – which just means a city-state of any form. The City in Speech is perfectly aligned with Plato’s actual beliefs. In fact . . . From A History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, Chapter XIV, “Plato’s Utopia”:
He was in the Socialist Workers Party once. And in the 1632 novels, the class warriors of the Committees of Correspondence are pretty sympathetic characters and their hostility to the nobles entirely justified.
Not from a sympathetic character, you can’t. No socialist or quasi-socialist in Heinlein’s books is a sympathetic character.
Now that one is worth renting!
It was meant as a resume first and foremost. Machiavelli, having been purged from politics/government in his home state of Florence, was hoping some prince (preferably Cesare Borgia) would read it and hire him as an advisor. That said, the consensus among scholars is that The Discourses better represents Machiavelli’s actual, republican political views. But, he lived in a country of (mainly) principalities, and he would have stood by The Prince so far as it goes: I.e., this is simply how princes do behave if they want to get and keep power, and those prevented by scruples lose out. That is not satire; that is science.
So what? A welfare state of any kind would be technically impossible in that milieu. But class war would still be relevant, and if Marx had lived in 1632, he would have been a member of the Committees of Correspondence.
A couple of years ago, he made an address at the American Humanists convention.
I’m trying to track it down.
That is funny, because he was a supporter of Upton Sinclair’s. The whole End Poverty movement? So he personally supported socialism at one point to some degree. Hm. I suppose there’s some approval of socialism in The Roads Must Roll, perhaps?
Indeed, he’s written about this point - he had an interesting column on Baen’s website a while back, which I cannot dig up at the moment. The gist was that it’s silly to boycott Harlan Ellison’s works because he’s a dick on copyright issues, because an artist’s work can and should be appreciated separately from his political views. For example, Flint and Weber collaborated on the 1632 series - but the two men are on opposite ends of the political spectrum. If Flint insisted upon only reading works by people he agreed with, or only writing stories he agreed with politically, he’d be unable to work with Weber.
Mostly true. However, the thing that makes the Flashman novels such good reads is that Flashman is a remarkably clear-eyed observer of the world around him. A bigot, rapist, coward and all-around terrible human being, yes - but also a very smart and resourceful one. Recall, also, that these books were pretty well-researched.
Obviously, Flashman’s political preferences, endorsement of cowardice, views on women and race and so on are not Fraser’s own. But when Flashman says, as an aside to the audience, “So-and-so historical figure was incompetent” or “The causes of the First Afghan War were such-and-such” - he’s probably saying something pretty close to what Fraser believed.