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neonnoodle posted:Chesterton had a huge influence on both Tolkein and C.S. Lewis, and Chesterton (and Belloc)'s Catholic socialism was pretty compatible with monarchy. Not coincidentally, Chesterton and Belloc were also xenophobes who thought the influx of ethnic immigrants to Britain, combined with evil technological capitalism and banking, was going to ruin their pastoral fairyland. David Brin's a cool guy, thanks for this.
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Dec 23, 2014 19:01
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The Vosgian Beast posted:A lot of neo-reactionaries love both SF and Fantasy though, being huge nerds. Do bear in mind that many subgenres of sci-fi have their own distinct politics. 'Space fantasy' like Star Wars borrows heavily from the fantasy politics mentioned above (obviously) with a sci-fi veneer painted over it, and mil-SF (military sci-fi) is notorious for circling around (and sometimes diving right into) overt fascist apologia. A particularly infamous example would be Tom Kratman's 'A Watch on the Rhine', where heroic Waffen-SS were resurrected to fight aliens.
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Dec 23, 2014 19:06
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Lol that someone in here is trying to defend the Futurist manifesto. Then I see it's Count Chocula and remember he did the same thing in the AusPol thread!
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Dec 23, 2014 19:28
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Darth Walrus posted:Do bear in mind that many subgenres of sci-fi have their own distinct politics. 'Space fantasy' like Star Wars borrows heavily from the fantasy politics mentioned above (obviously) with a sci-fi veneer painted over it, and mil-SF (military sci-fi) is notorious for circling around (and sometimes diving right into) overt fascist apologia. A particularly infamous example would be Tom Kratman's 'A Watch on the Rhine', where heroic Waffen-SS were resurrected to fight aliens. As mil-sci-fi goes, it's funny to compare Heinlein, the peacetime Navy vet who wrote Starship Troopers apparently unironically, to Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam war vet who wrote The Forever War.
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Dec 23, 2014 19:46
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Absurd Alhazred posted:As mil-sci-fi goes, it's funny to compare Heinlein, the peacetime Navy vet who wrote Starship Troopers apparently unironically, to Joe Haldeman, a Vietnam war vet who wrote The Forever War. Similarly, everything Kratman's ever written makes the fact that he managed to become a lieutenant colonel in the US military more and more horrifying.
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Dec 23, 2014 19:51
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Darth Walrus posted:Similarly, everything Kratman's ever written makes the fact that he managed to become a lieutenant colonel in the US military more and more horrifying. "[Kratman] then spent time at the U.S. Army War College as Director, Rule of Law, for the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute." 
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Dec 23, 2014 19:53
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Stultus Maximus posted:And I'm done with this nonsense.
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Dec 23, 2014 19:56
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Darth Walrus posted:Do bear in mind that many subgenres of sci-fi have their own distinct politics. 'Space fantasy' like Star Wars borrows heavily from the fantasy politics mentioned above (obviously) with a sci-fi veneer painted over it, and mil-SF (military sci-fi) is notorious for circling around (and sometimes diving right into) overt fascist apologia. A particularly infamous example would be Tom Kratman's 'A Watch on the Rhine', where heroic Waffen-SS were resurrected to fight aliens. I seem to remember that Michael Moorcok's Starship Stormtroopers was all about the fascism in Sci Fi.
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Dec 23, 2014 20:41
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Moorcock will never get over the fact that his name never shows up in '10 Best Author' lists, and that's really all any of his essays are about. Last time I read anything about him, he was considering a plagiarism lawsuit against Andrej Sapkowski.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:09
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Count Chocula posted:Wasn't there an SA troll who claimed to be a 'GK Chesterton style Catholic' who was really into the monarchy and DE stuff? Not a fan of this piece. He's not really wrong about Lewis and not even totally wrong about Tolkien, but his attack on Tolkien is somewhat contradictory; apparently Tolkien is simultaneously too much of a Romantic and not enough of a Romantic. His championing of Susan Cooper over Lloyd Alexander also raised my eyebrow, and at times he resorts to crude Anglophobia ("all these books seem to be written with a slight lisp"). Edit: Good stuff here: http://www.zone-sf.com/mmoorcock.html Moorcock posted:I'm not sure I've ever finished it. I know I started skipping early, looking for the little Gollum character, who was the only character in it I could identify with. I rather liked him. But the rest, I didn't give a drat what happened to them. Silver2195 has a new favorite as of 02:27 on Dec 24, 2014 |
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Dec 24, 2014 02:12
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Silver2195 posted:and at times he resorts to crude Anglophobia ("all these books seem to be written with a slight lisp"). Londoners are indeed the biggest Anglophobes.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:28
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Londoners are indeed the biggest Anglophobes. I can't tell if this is meant to be taken at face value or calling me out for not realizing Moorcock is British.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:33
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Absurd Alhazred posted:"[Kratman] then spent time at the U.S. Army War College as Director, Rule of Law, for the Peacekeeping and Stability Operations Institute." For anyone lucky enough to be unfamiliar with Kratman, his afterword to Caliphate, a book about Europe becoming an evil Muslim empire is completely on-topic for this thread. Remember, this man was a lieutenant colonel in the US Army who gave lectures on the rule of law during peacekeeping operations.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:35
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BravestOfTheLamps posted:Londoners are indeed the biggest Anglophobes. This but unironically. The biggest people who passionately hate every aspect of British culture are Brits.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:42
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Silver2195 posted:I can't tell if this is meant to be taken at face value or calling me out for not realizing Moorcock is British. Yes.
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Dec 24, 2014 02:52
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The Vosgian Beast posted:This but unironically. The biggest people who hate British Culture are Americans. But the people who hate it most are Brits.
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Dec 24, 2014 03:01
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Silver2195 posted:Not a fan of this piece. He's not really wrong about Lewis and not even totally wrong about Tolkien, but his attack on Tolkien is somewhat contradictory; apparently Tolkien is simultaneously too much of a Romantic and not enough of a Romantic. His championing of Susan Cooper over Lloyd Alexander also raised my eyebrow, and at times he resorts to crude Anglophobia ("all these books seem to be written with a slight lisp"). Susan Cooper and Lloyd Alexander were both really good and Moorcock is whiny and dumb.
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Dec 24, 2014 03:51
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The Vosgian Beast posted:This but unironically. Sort of, we all make fun of other parts of Britain and delight in how awful British culture is, but we get very cross when anyone else insults us. Then suddenly we're all best friends.
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Dec 24, 2014 12:02
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FouRPlaY posted:I seem to remember that Michael Moorcok's Starship Stormtroopers was all about the fascism in Sci Fi.
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Dec 24, 2014 16:24
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I'm not super familiar with his work, perhaps he's a left libertarian/socialist libertarian, which was the original meaning before the right-wing co-opted it?
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Dec 24, 2014 16:53
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Moorcock's an old hippie, and generally super left-wing and anti-facist. He's also an awesome writer. 'Libertarian' outside of America seems to mean 'anyone ago talks about free speech'.Darth Walrus posted:Do bear in mind that many subgenres of sci-fi have their own distinct politics. 'Space fantasy' like Star Wars borrows heavily from the fantasy politics mentioned above (obviously) with a sci-fi veneer painted over it, and mil-SF (military sci-fi) is notorious for circling around (and sometimes diving right into) overt fascist apologia. A particularly infamous example would be Tom Kratman's 'A Watch on the Rhine', where heroic Waffen-SS were resurrected to fight aliens. Have you read Norman Spinrad's The Iron Dream? It's a fantasy/sci-fi novel that's meant to be written by Hitler, and it reads just like lots of horrible libertarian fantasy like Sword of Truth (mocked in this thread: http://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=3668845&userid=0&perpage=40&pagenumber=1). He was part of Moorcock's New World's crew, who are awesome. Count Chocula has a new favorite as of 00:07 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 00:04
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Iron Dream was a miserable slog that makes its point in about 20 pages but just goes on and on. And the  factor makes it feel like an extended strawman argument. Admittedly I haven't read the infamously bad science fiction of that era (John Norman? L. Ron Hubbard?) so the comparison may be valid.
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Dec 25, 2014 05:37
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It is absolutely not a strawman. The Sword of Truth books Chocula mentioned feature a scene in which the protagonist righteously massacres a horde of "evil pacifists" for blocking his way to the villain, who is an evil Pseudo-Asian Communist. Him realizing the pacifists are evil for rejecting violence is considered an epiphany about objective morality. The books are completely in earnest.
I Killed GBS has a new favorite as of 06:24 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 06:22
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Small Frozen Thing posted:It is absolutely not a strawman. The Sword of Truth books Chocula mentioned feature a scene in which the protagonist righteously massacres a horde of "evil pacifists" for blocking his way to the villain, who is an evil Pseudo-Asian Communist. Him realizing the pacifists are evil for rejecting violence is considered an epiphany about objective morality. The books are completely in earnest. I remember liking the Dark Elf Trilogy as a kid. I read it again a bit more recently, and I realized that it was truly hosed up that the story is about someone who escapes the evil destined to his race (the evilly evil Dark Elves, who live in darkness and yet also have uselessly dark skin), only to find enlightenment in the undiscriminating butchery of another "essentially evil" race. (People who are familiar with D&D would know that Rangers basically get racism bonuses: bonus points for attacking foes from a favored race).
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Dec 25, 2014 06:47
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Small Frozen Thing posted:It is absolutely not a strawman. The Sword of Truth books Chocula mentioned feature a scene in which the protagonist righteously massacres a horde of "evil pacifists" for blocking his way to the villain, who is an evil Pseudo-Asian Communist. Him realizing the pacifists are evil for rejecting violence is considered an epiphany about objective morality. The books are completely in earnest. That came out decades after Iron Dream, though.
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Dec 25, 2014 06:49
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Silver2195 posted:That came out decades after Iron Dream, though. Yeah, which only makes it all the more depressing how fantasy nerds have been lapping that kind of poo poo up even to this day.
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Dec 25, 2014 06:56
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And guys like E. E. Smith, the founder of space opera, were pretty open in their approval of fascism. That guy would certainly have been Hitler the sci-fi writer's contemporary, as would The Iron Dream's other inspiration, Robert Howard, whose entire oeuvre was shaped by his bizarre racial philosophy.
Darth Walrus has a new favorite as of 11:04 on Dec 25, 2014 |
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Dec 25, 2014 11:01
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Moorcock's an anarchist in the original, socialist sense, and IIRC was good buds with Iain M. Banks.
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Dec 25, 2014 11:37
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The Time Dissolver posted:Iron Dream was a miserable slog that makes its point in about 20 pages but just goes on and on. Wow, only a thousand pages quicker than every other fantasy novel.
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Dec 26, 2014 20:29
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HUNDU THE BEAST GOD posted:David Brin's a cool guy, thanks for this. David Brin writes cool stuff, but he is a legendary rear end in a top hat on the con and lecture circuit, particularly to women.
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Dec 27, 2014 05:30
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:David Brin writes cool stuff, but he is a legendary rear end in a top hat on the con and lecture circuit, particularly to women. Check this link out, it's Brin getting into an argument with Peter Watts, another scifi writer, and he comes across as such a ridiculous cartoonishly arrogant blowhard that I feel like I'll have trouble reading anything he writes in the future. http://www.rifters.com/crawl/?p=4937#comments
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Dec 27, 2014 06:12
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uber_stoat posted:Check this link out, it's Brin getting into an argument with Peter Watts, another scifi writer, and he comes across as such a ridiculous cartoonishly arrogant blowhard that I feel like I'll have trouble reading anything he writes in the future. For kicks, look up the time Jo Walton poured a coke on his head during a Tor Publishing party at some con or other. The widespread response among people who'd dealt with his bullshit was apparently a fairly universal "Jesus, I wish I'd done that!"
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Dec 27, 2014 07:25
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BatteredFeltFedora posted:For kicks, look up the time Jo Walton poured a coke on his head during a Tor Publishing party at some con or other. The widespread response among people who'd dealt with his bullshit was apparently a fairly universal "Jesus, I wish I'd done that!" 
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Dec 27, 2014 08:21
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This thread has veered pretty far from its original topic. Maybe we should split this discussion off into a "PYF Fantasy/SF Writer Drama" thread?
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Dec 27, 2014 18:25
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SurreptitiousMuffin posted:It's a joke from /pol/. Like all things 4Chan, it started out taking the piss and ended up attracting a bunch of people who take it way too seriously. Pretty sure they've started chucking the terminology around on Stormfront now. I've seen them chucking it around in GBS. I'm mostly sure they were joking. Mostly. Silver2195 posted:This thread has veered pretty far from its original topic. Maybe we should split this discussion off into a "PYF Fantasy/SF Writer Drama" thread? Yeah, I was thinking this too. At least it's not as bad as that thread in GBS about the libertarian locking the 15-year-old girl in the shipping container that turned into five pages of slapfighting over economics. So, for content:  What does this dude actually look like? Like he's trying very hard to be Edward Norton's character from American History X.  A "white nationalist" (guys, guys, I'm not a white supremacist or a skinhead, honest), ex-Lavey Satanist, and so batshit insane that even the MRA vanguard distances itself from him. I guess this is a typical example of a Dark Enlightenment "thinker"?
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Dec 28, 2014 04:48
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I find it amusing that Dark Enlightenment thinkers make MTG cards for themselves.
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Dec 28, 2014 06:10
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This is great. Nothing about it makes sense. "Men, I need you to care, but not so long as it involves doing anything. Society will collapse under its own decadence. Then we can institute proper tribal anarcho-fascism. SUPERPOWER: ESCAPING PLACES WHERE SOCIETY HAS COLLAPSED."
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Dec 28, 2014 20:42
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Hobo By Design posted:This is great. Nothing about it makes sense. "Men, I need you to care, but not so long as it involves doing anything. Society will collapse under its own decadence. Then we can institute proper tribal anarcho-fascism. SUPERPOWER: ESCAPING PLACES WHERE SOCIETY HAS COLLAPSED." They should ask Marxists how waiting for something to collapse based on historical necessity has worked out.
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Dec 28, 2014 22:25
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I've been to Detroit and also made it out of Detroit. Didn't even seem like a big deal. I guess strength, courage, mastery, and honor just come easily to me.
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Dec 28, 2014 22:29
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The Vosgian Beast posted:They should ask Marxists how waiting for something to collapse based on historical necessity has worked out. Why would brilliant Dark Enlightenment STEMlords/high school dropouts need to consult Cathedral-enslaved idiotic humanities academics about history? 
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