If you end up reading Culture novels, Player of Games is probably the best one to start with.
Enjoyed Player of Games a few years ago, currently reading Matter. Also love Alastair Reynolds' Conjoiners and Demarchists as two takes on future minimally hierarchical societies.
Thanks for the rec! I've only read (n adored) Reynolds' short stories. I've been dying to read anything like those.
oh defs check out his long form stuff then. Revelation space series is fun and good, newer Poseidon's Children also fun and good. Pushing Ice is a fav too.
Asimov was also left wing and did good work. This review of 1984 goes into detail about what sci-fi should be.
Dude ripped into 1984 w so much more eloquence than I ever could.
Is it good sci fi? No. But is it a good story? Also no. Well does it at least clearly portray an ideological viewpoint? Fuck no.
I love that article so much.
Star Wars was always more of fantasy mythology with a coat of space paint on it, rather than being real Sci-Fi.
Lucas likes to change his mind every few years and say off the wall shit about what it was based on (the latest being that the Rebel Alliance were based on the Vietcong) and there has been a recent weird mythologizing of the prequels as being good (they were universally mocked and made fun of until about 7 years ago). The real bread and butter of his work though was based around the Hero's Journey. The original trilogy does a fine job of handling that formula, but Lucas had so much help from better writers who knew what they were doing and able to keep him on the right path, and yet he still nearly screwed that up (see Return of the Jedi which is a mess of a film with no tonal consistency and had a lot of infighting behind the scenes with Lucas overruling Gary Kurtz and Lawrence Kasdan)
The problem with Star Wars is that it's really a small universe and the prequels and later Disney trilogy really hammer this home. The entire galaxy revolves around the Skywalker family and their drama. By basing the prequels just 20 years before the events of A New Hope, he created a small universe where an entire galactic civil war comes down to a dysfunctional family's problems. Disney took this formula and just repeated it and completely blew their chance to expand it and make it something bigger.
The problem with Star Wars is that it’s really a small universe and the prequels and later Disney trilogy really hammer this home. The entire galaxy revolves around the Skywalker family and their drama.
This is the thing that ultimately kills any possibility of my being interested in the setting. I think there are hints of really cool things there, and I only recently watched the original movies for the first time in order to have context for all the other stuff in the universe, of which there is a lot. But when I looked into what all that other stuff was about, I realized that it's all either retellings of the same events, or expansions on the same events, or about the consequences of the actions of characters we've already learned all about. Like, I just want to see what life was like for a normal Jedi, for example. For someone who wasn't "the chosen one." Why can't there be even a single story in this entire universe about that?
Same here. I grew up on Star Wars and am still fond of the OT, but it wasn't until I was older and started reading book series and going through Marvel/DC comics, I realized how small and lifeless the Star Wars universe truly is. I could give you examples about how small it is based on the Expanded Universe all following formulas, but I'll do you one better -
Look at The Empire Strikes Back from beginning, middle and end. It's the best movie of the entire franchise and this isn't a knock on it, but that movie really proves how small the universe is. The entire middle act of the film has nothing to do with the galactic civil war and we don't even know what is going on with the rebellion during that time. After the battle of Hoth, we see Luke go to Dagobah to train with Yoda, meanwhile Leia, Han, Chewie and C-3PO are on the Millennium Falcon being chased by the entire imperial fleet.... Meanwhile, where is the rebel fleet??? Where is the rest of the Rebel Alliance?
This also brings up two huge questions - how long did Luke train with Yoda on Dagobah, and how long did Vader and his fleet chase the Falcon around? Was it a few days? Weeks? Months? We don't really know. It goes to show how small the universe is in those movies. The entire middle act of that movie has nothing to do with the galactic civil war going on, and it all eventually comes down to the Skywalker family and their drama. The more I thought about this stuff, I realized how small of a universe Star Wars truly is.
After the battle of Hoth, we see Luke go to Dagobah to train with Yoda, meanwhile Leia, Han, Chewie and C-3PO are on the Millennium Falcon being chased by the entire imperial fleet… Meanwhile, where is the rebel fleet??? Where is the rest of the Rebel Alliance?
Considering how poorly the sequels trilogy handled your criticism of Empire Strikes Back; maybe it was a good thing. In The Last Skywalker, the rebel alliance is essentially paralyzed in fear and unable to respond - no daring raids, no freeing of slaves or imperial outposts, no additional recruiting. It's just "what do we do, what do we do?!"
Yeah, I wasn't knocking Empire Strikes Back, was just pointing out how small of a universe it is. Star Wars really is more of fantasy/mythology than Sci-Fi. The original movies do a pretty good job with the Hero's Journey, but that's about all they do right.
Fans have always argued about Boba Fett just being a character that looks cool with no personality or characterization but this same thing can be said for literally all the characters in the background minus the main cast and villain (Vader) and possibly Jabba the Hutt (and that's only cause he was mentioned briefly in ANH and ESB). We don't even know much about the Emperor in the old movies. Every side character is just some cool design that will look striking and cool, but it's a small universe as there was never really much focus put on fleshing that stuff out and adding life to it.
I loved KOTOR too, but they are based on the same tropes of the original trilogy. They just removed the Skywalkers and instead used their own thing with Revan. But it hits every beat and trope of the OT.
It's impossible to do Star Wars without lightsabers, tie fighters, X wings, Jedi, stormtroopers, etc etc. As much as I love KOTOR, it had all those things too. Star Wars is just such a small universe, there really isn't a whole lot you can do with it.
the latest being that the Rebel Alliance were based on the Vietcong
I feel like I've seen an interview with Lucas from the 80s where he draws the Rebel Alliance/NLF comparison, but my brain might be inventing that memory.
Dumbass fans got pissed off that Rey wasn't a secret Kenobi or something so JJ backtracked because he is a coward with no artistic vision.
Realising that you can be "no one" and still be important is a great theme, especially for Star Wars , and they just threw it away.
Say what you will about The Last Jedi but at least at its worst it's not pathetically pandering to dumbass "fans".
Interested in leftist sci-fi? Why not read sci-fi written under actual existing socialism? Strugatsky brothers are noteworthy in that they were socialists, many of their novels were set in utopian communist future, but were allegorically critisizing modern Soviet institutions.
Come to think about it their Noon circle is kinda similar to Bank's Culture. Most people enjoy amazing fulfilling lives in post-scarcity communist society, but the novels focus on all the horrible soulcrashing shit select people who serve as covert influence agents in other cultures get up to.
TBH the Strugatsky brothers are leaned on too heavily in Soviet Sci-fi studies. We have a single book pretty much in the last 30 years looking at soviet sci-fi and far too many of the books examined are by them. There's more written on the sci fi from the 20s than the 50s through the 80s. I don't have many other suggestions though. Historians were just more interested in studying fiction during and right after the revolution than cold war fiction from the 50s to 80s.
Andromeda is one novel I had recommended for non Strugatsky work (which is btw pretty important as it marks a transition away from style of sci-fi during the Stalin period).
Soviet science fiction acted pretty differently than science fiction in the US in some very interesting ways. Checkout the more recent works listed here at the bottom of the page for that. For example, soviet sci-fi is almost devoid of computers/ai as a central plot point. Like in movies, there is no soviet analogue to the ai nuclear war movies at all (and nuclear war if it happens is usually in the context of another planet). Whereas cold war US sci-fi had a lot of AI worries and control systems gone mad stories (remnants up to today, the 100 show uses that trope for example).
In terms of scifi (as fantasy is a blindspot for me) Ive been thinking about this lately. While I agree that a lot of it tends to be reactionary I don't think this is because of a coherent belief, or a consciously stated political opinion--for the most part at least. Its more of a confluence of discourses that comes out of a certain way of thinking, ideology, and so on.
From my wealth of experience in writing (like 1 month lmao) I see that most sci-fi writers are fixated on their "concept". While conceptual writing is obviously not a problem in itself it does have some traps: namely, being reductive. By being so impossibly broad in scope having a novel concept that you then build a world around necessarily leads to being reductive. The world is already an unimaginably complex place, and we understand very little of it. There is no unified grand narrative of sciences, so why can your crafted world implicitly have one? How could that ever be non-ideological? A common example is writers will make a world that has some interesting physical characteristics (say like a highly elliptical orbit) and then try to derive everything from psychology to culture to this one thing. We can't even do that with things that are intimately familiar to us, let alone with so-called aliens! What you end up with are dead, totalizing, and brittle concepts that when re-read onto the world threaten to do very real harm to things that they do not, or cannot account for. My working thesis, or galaxy-brained crackpot theory, is that it's precisely this reductive, leap-of-faith thinking that is the reactionary mindset. Not that i would blame anyone trying to write like this as if it was inherently bad or anything--its not. But imagine applying that same way of thinking to the real world. We would all have Jared Diamond tier takes like 'Africa got colonized because of the shape of the continent' or whatever.
So what can we do? The genre is very much salvageable IMO. Ill leave this as a cliffhanger for now, but there is something.
From my wealth of experience in writing (like 1 month lmao) I see that most sci-fi writers are fixated on their “concept”
Paraphrasing, but I think it was KSR quoting LeGuin(?), saying something along the lines of fantasy explore characters, sci-fi explores ideas. And with all ideas, the dominant forces of society will set the tone for the media. Until the access and distribution is democratized, it will suffer from who decides who’s work get pushed.
Here is what I had in mind in terms of a solution.
What I'm getting at is there is a fundamental misunderstanding of scientific progress at play here. Take Newtonian physics for example: there has never been a neatly packaged idea ordained from god that says 'F=ma'. Instead things like 'F=ma' is something generated out of observing the materials at hand, and out of an intellectual milieu. To put it another way, it's not like you can just unravel enough layers of reality to the point where the laws are literally inscribed there. (I'm vaguely referring to Structural Realism here.) The naive polar opposite of this picture is the "conceptual" world described in the previous comment. The nature of reality in their stories is definite, and final--sometimes they will even out right tell you. They are the God of their world, and their word is Law, etc., etc. But this is not true. You'll have to excuse the poetry but words are like holes in the page, they reveal in themselves innumerable relations to other words, chains of signification, and systems of meaning that by necessity are always connected back to the real world. Any semblance of control over what you create is illusory in my opinion. And we need to acknowledge this in how we write. Both in the characters and our creation of the world itself. There is always an error in understanding, always a misrecognition in seeing, every system has its breakdown, so we should reflect this. Writing then should evoke an openness to interpretation, systems of understanding should be challenged, and most importantly, it should be dynamic in its development.
One example I like to think of is approaching some aspects of worldbuilding as if you were being asked questions. Like you want to write about a completely different society? Okay, take a step back and consider how to approach knowing such a thing. Imagine if someone walked up to you and asked 'What is your society?' without a frame of reference I would be at a loss for words. It is pretty much impossible to answer directly. Woe is you if you are trying to create an actual alien species: 'what is humanity?' That is a question we've been mulling over since the dawn of time! Plus these nebulous concepts only really become apparent out of their everydayness when they break down (the state manifests itself through repression, or even something as simple as the exclamation 'O Humanity!')
Basically just be pretentious, ambiguous, and have a whole lot of double-meanings. At least that is what I'm trying to do. Thoughts?
I think to make the genre better, we need more people writing from perspectives backed up by studying certain fields and then creatively writing stories about using knowledge from them. Le Guin for example was able to bring anthropology into her work, and Kim Stanely Robinson did a PhD studying Philip K. Dick. Tools of the sciences and of history, and politics go a long way to making convincing and interesting science fiction. This is not to say that sci-fi should be left to academics to write, but that if you are going to write a novel about space feudalism you should have the political theory chops to explain how space feudalism could even happen or have a good historical understanding of what feudalism was.
Emphasis on the political theory btw, way too much bad sci-fi is uninterested in politics as more than a back drop (one reason KSR is so great is he does not do this).
Solarpunk is an underused and extrmely cool concept. Though not inherently leftist, it is highly eco-centric and would easily mesh with leftist politics and ideals
More SciFi stories need to be like his. We need some form of optimism in SciFi.
I've been enjoying a lot of more women/poc black scifi over the past decade. It's out there and it makes me happy that it's actually really quite good.
I love sci fi because it's such a good space to explore ideas. Barring the blockbuster audience oriented stuff, I feel like a ton of stuff coming out right now is actually really progressive, morally. I've been listening to DUST, which has some really cool short stories. The one w this future where u can outsource even sleeping and shitting really stood out to me. Like, that's not even subtle.
Like people have said, le Guin, PKD and Asimov are always good. Huxleys brave new world and island could almost have been written today (were it not for his... Antiquated use of language? Regardless I love them deeply).
Also a shoutout to Terry Gilliam, for fixing 1984. I've never liked the book, but by changing the oppressive system to clearly represent capitalism, the whole bureaucratic hellscape thing makes wayyy more sense. Watch Brazil if you haven't. Or don't, I'm not ur mom n it's not everyone's cuppa tea.
I haven't slept for like 30hrs so maybe I'm rambling or not contributing much to the conversation but yea. Sci fi rocks. Always has. Frankenstein? Star trek? Based as fuck. Lotta lowest common denominator stuff out there right now but also looots of specialised good stuff. It's like music. Simple, easily digestible, non-offensive stuff sells.
Edit: I forgot to conclude this wall of text with The Point I Was Trying To Make: I feel like sci fi n spec fi are a rlly good avenue to gently lead common denominator folk who don't think about politics into leftism. Because the big n well known stuff is so centrist n "inoffensive", ppl can come to like the genre from anywhere, n then when they go in deeper, all the classics everybody keeps talking about r so clearly left leaning. Like simple allegories that can make anybody understand how our system is failing. Like sure, things like Robert Heinlein n Black Mirror are Conservative to say the least, but if they make ppl interested in actually thinking about concepts, they will land at Asimov sooner or later. Or maybe that's me being hopeful n utopian or some shit.
