A couple of years ago I relayed several reports that the World Science Fiction convention, where one might expect to find a degree of forward-looking progressivism, had become instead a bastion of white male conservatives, adherents of a vision of sci-fi one might call Rockets and Reactionaries. Last year, SF fans and authors had a welcome conversation about the prospects for women and minorities within the field, and that summer a first-time author’s novel about artificial intelligence and gender identity (among other things) won the Hugo, Nebula, and John Campbell Awards.
This year, the political wheel has turned again, and in the reactionaries’ favor.
It is fair to call Mssr. Beale, who more-or-less drafted the winning ballot in this year's Hugo-grabbing campaign, an
ultraconservative. It is fairer to call him a white supremacist, a deep-dyed misogynist,
a religious zealot, an isolationist, and a supporter of nationalist extremist parties like the True Finns. Beale’s fondness for this Finnish party may
explain why he established Castalia in Finland. That he and his followers have
incorporated their political alignment into their fan-dom is clear from the list
of heroes Beale includes on the press’s front page: J.R.R. Tolkien (Catholic
conservative), Gilbert K. Chesterton (Catholic reactionary), C.S. Lewis
(patriarchal Christian reactionary), Robert Howard (racist scumbag), John W.
Campbell (racist, overbearing, Scientology-supporting weirdo), and Herman
Hesse. Actually, Hesse might seem a bizarre addition to the list, but I imagine
his dystopian fiction The Glass Bead Game appeals to Mr. Beale’s quasi-medievalist
mind, and his press takes its name from that novel's setting.
I mention all of this because I
think outsiders and casual fans don’t often realize how
politicized SF is and always has been. Modern fantasy was, until recently, a
reactionary genre, and science fiction's “Golden-Age” authors were predominantly
white male technocrats whose geekiness and cultural disaffection allowed them
to ignore their other privileges. This only began to change in the late 1960s
and ‘70s, concurrently with the civil rights movements, the return of American women to the
workplace, and the migration of the counterculture into the mainstream. These social changes made it easier for female authors to enter the field, and let authors and fans discuss issues that made previous generations uncomfortable, like gender politics, sexuality, and alternative social and political systems.
The men (they are almost all men) threatened by female and
minority authors, or by novels and stories that challenge social
norms, usually also feel threatened by changes in the larger
world. I suspect many believe that if they can "reclaim" their fan community and authorial genre for conservatives, they can use that beachhead to resist, or perhaps partially to reverse, the unpleasant changes occurring in the larger society. I suppose I should be heartened by their affirmation of my own belief that SF and fantasy stories can make an impact on mainstream thought and politics. Marxists, of course, have long understood that stories and other cultural institutions determine the desirability and limits of change within a society, and thus the extent to which people can redistribute power. Conservative authors like C.S. Lewis and Orson Scott Card learned this lesson some time ago, and they and their latter-day followers are playing the Gramscian culture game to win. Those who enjoy science fiction and fantasy stories, or whose loved ones enjoy them, ought to bear in mind that these have never been apolitical genres, and that today there are well-organized people who want them all to serve a retrograde political agenda.
