Science fiction and the right.

Many years ago it so happened that the third level educational institution I was in was linked vaguely to TCD. Which meant that we were, should we make the twenty minute walk (or thereabouts) to TCD, be able to join some of their societies. This held zero interest in me bar one. That being the Science Fiction society (actually just thinking of it, were I not in the WP at the time I could have wound up in CPI (M-L), or not, given that there were already two members of that org where I was a student. Wouldn’t that have made this site a bit different. Or perhaps not.).

So of a weekday myself and a good friend who had the same interest in SF would make a journey to the rooms said society had in an old Georgian building on Westland Row. The reason for this was that the society had a small but good library of books which we’d borrow.

I remember on one occasion talking to some of the other members – who seemed to regard us as interlopers and only tolerated us I suspect because we were willing to pay the small membership fee – and the issue of politics came up. I wouldn’t say I was starry eyed about the left. It might have been the new members educationals in Gardiner Place, or perhaps paper sales around the pubs in Kilbarrack and Raheny on a Sunday morning likewise, or perhaps annual collections, or just canvassing the large housing estates of the north side. But somehow uncritical youthful idealism tended to flee the building given all that and the sense of just how much hard work it was. Which I think was a good thing in retrospect. And anyhow, I wasn’t much given to proselytising. That said in the course of a conversation where I was making a case, almost an unthinking case, that science fiction was left-wing it transpired that the society members I was talking to were pretty right wing and baffled by my views.

And you know, in retrospect I think perhaps they had a point. It wasn’t that SF wasn’t at least in part progressive, there were many many writers who were leftist or anarchist or liberals of one stripe or another. Arthur C. Clarke was definitely in the latter camp, Asimov likewise. A tranche of New Wave authors were perhaps more in the anarchist camp, but it was broadly speaking left anarchism. By the 1980s feminist SF was a strong field and again progressive currents in that tended in a left-wing direction – Le Guin, James Tiptree Jnr, etc (one of my favourites from one such writer was a story, whose name I forget where there were no gendered pronouns for characters. It was remarkably effective). The counter culture too had left its mark though as we know at this remove that could tilt left or right.

But then again there was also a weight of authors who, at its most kind, could be termed centre-right. Kenneth Roberts, Edmund Cooper, John Christopher, perhaps even Richard Cowper whose work dipped into the spiritual. And many more. I pick those names because they weren’t hacks. All could when necessary write good prose. Cooper was a man whose writings, while entertaining, had gathered the label of misogyny about them. I’m not sure that’s entirely accurate but he sure couldn’t write women characters and the sexual politics were primitive. Roberts was more nuanced but similarly had issues with female characters and there was that sense of reactionary social structures. John Christopher had better female characterisation but had an almost overtly reactionary thread to some of his work (the Death of Grass in particular). And so on. Tellingly both Christopher and Roberts had started out as “school of John Wyndham” writing about often unlikely catastrophes but where Wyndham’s work earned the prefix of ‘cosy’ in front of catastrophe both Christopher and Roberts had a much darker vision, one that, ironically accorded with the New Wave and its upending of science fictional tropes and conventions.

Whether that further inflected their later work is an interesting question. Or was it that this was a functional of generational influences. They’d started writing in the 50s and never quite shrugged off the mores that informed that decade. For them what happened next must have been deeply and profoundly challenging. Still, if you write SF you have to roll with the punches.

But, and I have to admit to an affection for them all in different ways – Christopher and his Tripods novels and other juvenile oriented works. Pavane by Roberts is a fantastic novel. His Kiteworld perhaps less so but even today I remember the emotional response I had to it on first reading it. The Cloud Walker by Cooper is pulpy but fun. Transit – another novel by him – is problematic but interesting. His efforts to engage with race and gender equally problematic but in an odd way fascinating.

But there’s another point that is worth making – there’s been no end of controversy in recent years about who writes SF and what is written. And frankly there’s been incredibly ignorant comments made about what SF is and isn’t. So, for example, some rather self-serving conservative and worse reactionary analyses have sought over the last few years to argue that science fiction that focuses on the political, on race, class, gender and sexuality is not part of the genre. There’s an extension of that argument that seeks to see only very narrow forms of SF as legitimate – space opera being an example. The most absurd iteration of this is found in the recent complaints about the new Star Trek: Discovery being a problem for having lead female and non-white characters which betrays a breath-taking lack of knowledge of Star Trek.

The overall argument is so incorrect as to be risible. SF has engaged from relatively early on with all those and more. But what interests me is that the authors I mention above were doing so from a socially conservative perspective and doing so in the 1960s on. These authors weren’t writing conventional SF. They eschewed space opera and in their focus on the personal, on gender relations, on interactions, much more clearly are positioned, as noted above, in New Wave SF. One may not like their approaches or conclusions, but at the least they didn’t pretend that those weren’t areas worthy of engagement with. And if their engagement was at times clunky or inept, well, they are in and of themselves evidence of social change.

But further, they and their work stand as testament – along with feminist, socialist, racially aware and other works addressed in SF – to the broadness of the genre and, arguably, to its strength, that there’s room for everything bar outright reaction. And that attempting to define SF in narrow and reactionary ways is pointless and counterproductive. It’s a big genre, it deserves better than that.