Some SF that’s come out in recent years conveys a definite political message about environmental activism – the message being that environmental activists are at best stupid and naive, at worst fanatical haters of humanity. Consider the following novels:
Fallen Angels, by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle, and Mike Flynn (Baen, 1991). Ecofreaks have risen to power in the Western world, with the result that the next Ice Age, which greenhouse-gas emissions and resultant global warming might have prevented, came right on schedule (in the first decade of the 21st Century), and now Canada is completely covered with ice. There is a self-sustaining L5 colony but Earthside governments have long since cut off contact with it. Two astronauts from the colony are forced to land on Earth, in the U.S., and the ignorant and frightened authorities immediately start trying to hunt them down and arrest them. They are saved by an idealistic band of SF fans (natch!) who are among the few who still keep alive the dream of space travel. The astronauts and fans travel across an America that has descended into irrationalism – scientific and technological learning are despised except by specialists. Our heroes at one point visit a “Museum of Appropriate Technology” where healing crystals are displayed with equal prominence next to actual machines. In some parts of the country social order has broken down and warlords and slavers rule. And it’s all the environmentalists’ fault.
T2: Infiltrator (HarperEntertainment, 2002), and T2: The Rising Storm (HarperEntertainment, 2003), by S.M. Stirling. Sequels, essentially, to the Terminator movies (and you can’t imagine how disappointed I was when I found out Terminator 3 was not to be based on Stirling’s novels). Skynet sends even more killer robots into the past. One of its tactics is to recruit support from a radical ecological movement of self-identified “Luddites,” who hate humanity so much that they share Skynet’s dream of exterminating it. In the period after the nukes fall, Luddite patrols are actually working with Skynet to hunt down and kill non-Luddite humans.
Flinx in Flux by Alan Dean Foster (Del Rey Books, 1988). Flinx the orphan telepath has been trying for some time to discover his roots. He has already found out that he is a result of an illegal genetic-engineering experiment carried out by a secret cabal of scientists, the “Meliorares.” In this volume, it turns out a group of environmental radicals are trying to kill him because they regard all genetic engineering as a defilement of the natural environment.
And so on. You can probably think of more examples. What up with this? Where did all this come from? I can see using SF as political polemic – it’s a tradition almost as old as the genre – but why this particular polemic? How did SF get recruited as a tool of the anti-environmentalist backlash?
SF authors in general, and “hard” SF authors in particular, are often rather fond of technology: spaceships, computers, and all that Buck Rogers stuff.
Some of the more extreme elements of the environmentalists can seem a little nutty. In some drought-stricken areas, people claiming to be environmentalists have sued to divert water from badly-needed agriculture to protect allegedly-endangered fish. Not long ago, in California, a mountain lion killed a woman. Police killed the mountain lion. People donated more money to help the lion’s cubs than to help the woman’s children.
During the 1960s and 1970s, some people advocated going “back to nature”. They wanted to turn away from those evil Big Corporations and return to The Land. The ones who were interviewed on TV often had rather unrealistic ideas about nature, often closer to Disney cartoons than to reality. Many of them used “technology” as a curse word. “Luddite” is not too strong a description.
SF authors quickly pointed out that, if you till your organic garden with a metal spade, you are using technology. In a completely natural setting, humans usually have a rather high infant mortality rate. If you are completely in harmony with nature, you are at the mercy of disease, famine, fire, and flood.
This “backlash” is not new. H.G. Wells and Robert Heinlein often wrote stories in which well-meaning but ignorant people were the technophobic villains.
I think I’ve read all of Heinlein’s fiction and I can’t think of any stories or novels with technophobic villains. I’ve read very little of Wells – what stories are you referring to?
Most SF is an imagining of the future focused on technology and how it affects the human condition, right? So it seems natural to me that new SF could focus on the possible effect of environmental extremists gaining power. It seems as normal as the proliferation of SF about computers.
BTW, the “backlash” is new – that is, the modern anti-environmentalist backlash movement in politics did not really begin to emerge until the late 1980s, and the SF novels I described in the OP might be seen as a literary manifestation of that. Here are a couple of relevant websites about the backlash:
I don’t know, I read a lot of Sci-Fi that does just the opposite. Greg Mandels books for example. I think most authors start with “What if…” and proceed form there. Although I do agree Nivens and Pournelle do seem anti-environmentalist, I’m thinking of some lines from the book with the Quasi-elephants, Footfall maybe.
I don’t really see how the examples given are any different from the literally hundreds of sf movies, TV shows, and novels where everything goes to hell because nobody would listen to the enviromentalists. Witness movies like The Day After Tomorrow, or The Core, or just about any movie where toxic waste/nuclear radiation turns animals or people into rampaging mutant monsters. Same issues, same extremist take, but in different directions, 'sall.
Well, for one thing Niven and Pournelle and Stirling are to the right of Attila the Hun in their politics.
The field almost split in half over the Vietnam War, led by, hmm, Niven and Pournelle.
Most hard sf writers, and a good deal of the the writers who most visibly represent that area and are published in Analog, are as right-wing as you can possibly imagine.
One reason, IMO, for the rise in fantasy is that most (American) hard sf is right-wing to the point of nausea. (Oddly, British hard sf is often socialistic to communistic.)
The only question here is why are you first noticing this now instead of decades ago?
I knew Pournelle was a right-winger, because I’ve read a lot of his military SF (the There Will Be War anthologies and the Empire of Man and Warworld series – when I read the Prince of Sparta novels I found myself wanting the Helots to win!), and because I occasionally look at his website (www.jerrypournelle.com). And of course I’m very familiar with the libertarian-militarist leanings in Heinlein’s fiction. But the rest of this stuff is news to me. In particular, I never heard of any split within the SF community over the Vietnam War. Could you supply some details?
And could you give me the names of some of these “socialistic” British hard SF writers?
The older crowd in sf was mostly right-wing. They hated the 60s, the hippies, the New Wave writers, the antiwar protesters, and Democrats. (Heinlein included. Never believe anyone who tries to argue differently.)
The younger writers were their opposites in almost every way, with a few major exceptions like Niven and Pournelle.
At one point, one side - I think the righties - wanted to take out a full-page ad in a major newspaper on the war. Supporting it, if on the right. I don’t remember any more whether they were supposed to be representing sf writers or SFWA or just being a like-minded group, but the other side took major umbrage at this picture of sf writers being presented to the world, and conjured up an opposing ad. People didn’t talk except when they screamed. Took many years to get past this. Many still haven’t. Lib may disagree but all the Libertarians in sf I’m familiar with are Libs because they’re too far right to be Republicans. IMO, of course.
Left-wing British hard sf writers. Charles Stross. Iain Banks (Scots). Peter Hamilton. Brian Stableford. Ian Watson. Ken MacLeod. Stephen Baxter. M. John Harrison. Greg Egan (Australian). Special note to the environmental disaster dystopian satires of Ben Elton. (Hope I’m putting the right names with the right books in my memory at this hour. Someone will surely come along to correct me. )
BTW, EM is the only one with that opinion. Most Libertarian authors I know of are Libertarian because their social views are disliked by the Republicans, and their economic views are disliked by the Democrats. Right and Left don’t enter into it at all.
Well, I’m familiar with the Libertarian political chart, and all that . . .
I must admit, while I have Libertarian friends, the prevalence of Libs at SF conventions disturbs me on a very deep level. The impression I get – which may be mistaken – is that these are people who feel very conscious of their intellectual superiority to the common herd and very confident of their ability to thrive in a hyperfree – even a wild and lawless – society, so fuck the botched and the bungled. I got the same vibe from a lot of Heinlein’s fiction.
I’m sorry, but that’s nonsense. Libertarian philosophy is NOT conservative and certainly not to the right of the Republicans. In point of fact, much of Libertarian Party politics is too far left to be Democrat.
Some of the Amazon reviews accused them of this wrt Lucifer’s Hammer, questioning why, when everything else was destroyed, he had characters managing to keep a nuclear plant running. But it was the only thing that could have worked in the context. A nuclear plant can store years of fuel onsite, while any other power lant would require regular shipments, hardly possible under those conditions.
Read what I wrote carefully. I was very careful to characterize only the libertarian sf writers I’m familar with, not all Libertarians. I said, deliberately and specificially, that their views would not be characteristic of all Libertarians.
And I’m a centrist. There is no scale in existence that would put Steve Stirling’s views and mine at the same level.
I’ve read a lot of Stirling’s fiction, where he seems to revel in the idea of a wild world where the strong and brave and aristocratic can dominate and thrive. Especially if they’re beautiful lesbian warrior-women. But that’s art. I’ve never heard of Stirling expressing an actual political opinion of any kind. You know something I don’t?
No…you got the right impression. You just have to remember that these people all make their living by, or spend a great deal of their time reading, SF. With the exception of E. E. Smith, I am unable to picture any of these people being able to survive without technology. So they pretend. They write about people being able to do it, they read about people doing it, and they see themselves as those kinds of people, whether they are or not. The same thing happens with Romance novelists and their fans, SCAdians and that ilk, etc. Human nature.
Over the last few years, I have talked to Steve quite a bit at conventions, in bars, at hotel room parties and the like. I have never heard him express his political beliefs at all.
Well, by a “wild and lawless” society I meant one without government, not one without technology. The Libertarians I’ve met at SF cons (and, for that matter, Pournelle, Niven, et al.) also seem to have a technophilic world-view which is the exact opposite of the ecofreak world-view.
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