Murray Rothbard noted some years ago, somewhat ruefully, the connection between science fiction and libertarianism in his comments on the “modal libertarian”. But, well, what other genre of literature can be argued is fundamentally libertarian? Eric S. Raymond, known because of his role in the open source movement and his seminal essay The Cathedral and the Bazaar, has a fascinating essay on The Political History of SF (Science Fiction).
The strong binding between hard SF and libertarian politics continues to be a fact of life in the field. It it is telling that the only form of politically-inspired award presented annually at the World Science Fiction Convention is the Libertarian Futurist Society’s “Prometheus”. There is no socialist, liberal, moderate, conservative or fascist equivalent of the class of libertarian SF writers including L. Neil Smith, F. Paul Wilson, Brad Linaweaver, or J. Neil Schulman; their books, even when they are shrill and indifferently-written polemical tracts, actually sell — and sell astonishingly well — to SF fans.
…It’s worth asking, then: is the intimate historical relationship between libertarian political thought and SF a mere accident, or is there an intrinsic connection?
He then goes on to make an intriguing argument for an intrinsic connection. The argument is worth reading. Here are some teasers:
…In the narratives at the center of SF, political power is the natural enemy of the future.
…Ideological fashions come and go, and the field inevitably rediscovers itself afterwards as a literature of freedom.
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Just beware this
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3454390638720525451&q=david+brin&hl=en
Mr. Brin is obviously a left libertarian, plainly stating that “what the State does well should be left to it” like State Schooling and the like. It all sounds good at first, but after a while the viewer comes to realize that “libertarian” in this context is “people are free to do as they please – except for this list of necessities”.
After all, isn’t precisely the various “lists of must” that got us the leviathan in the first place?
brad,
Is that really left-libertarianism?, approving public school and the like. I think it is more accurate to say that he has strong libertarian (left-libertarian in this case) leanings, but not a fully coherent liberatarian viewpoint, which is a problem that plagues many people with libertarian leanings, a la john stossel on the right-libertarian side. I don’t think roderick long would consider approval for public school part of his philosophy. your warning should read “beware the inconsistent libertarian of all stripes” perhaps?
Interesting that the assualts on SF came from the left. If you accept that the right dislikes the radical individualism, why hasn’t it challenged the genre?
I don’t believe in the right to privacy and I really found Brin’s “Transparent Society” to be appealing, but in his approach to libertarianism he seems to be guilty of precisely the things he complains about.
What is the problem with John Stossel?
This is directed to Eric S. Raymond’s comment,
I need to put an end to this type of cheap slander right now.
There is nothing “shrill” or “indifferently written” about L. Neil Smith’s, F. Paul Wilson’s, Brad Linaweaver’s, or my novels. All of our novels were written with passion and painstakingly, over years. I know Brad’s career better than Neil’s or Paul’s, so let me just speak about Brad’s literary career, and my own, for the moment.
Brad and I each took years to write our Prometheus-award-winning novels, and a measure of their literary quality can be judged by their appearing in hardcover from major mainstream (not-science-fiction-line) publishers, with endorsements from authors such as Ray Bradbury, William F. Buckley, Isaac Asimov, and Robert A. Heinlein (Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice, published hardcover by William Morrow), Anthony Burgess and Milton Friedman (my novel Alongside Night, published hardcover by Crown) or Colin Wilson and Robert Heinlein (my novel, The Rainbow Cadenza, published hardcover by Simon & Schuster).
Neither were any of these works of fiction written to be tracts. All of us write non-fiction as well as fiction, and when we want to write a tract we are perfectly capable of writing them effectively without the necessity of labelling them fiction. I’ve written Op-Eds for the Los Angeles Times and Brad and I have written articles for many political publications including National Review. In fact, Ronald Reagan once devoted an entire radio program to praising one of Brad Linaweaver’s articles.
My own non-fiction has found as many readers as my fiction, and I get many more emails regarding a couple of articles I wrote on animal rights than I do for my fiction-writing.
Brad and I, however, have always thought of ourselves as artists before we think of ourselves as ideologues. There is nothing in the least political about Brad’s fantasy novel, The Land Beyond Summer, or most of the short stories in his collection, Clownface.
My third novel, Escape from Heaven, is a satirical theological fantasy, and does contain a minor amount of political content, but its overall intent is not political.
If Brad’s and my novels are shrill tracts for containing political content, then so are the novels of Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Franz Kafka, and John Steinbeck. All of these writers have at least the amount of political content as anything written by the winners of the Prometheus Award — yet nobody charges them with writing tracts or the latest buzzword for those who attempt to marginalize libertarian-oriented novelists, “pseudo-novels.”
I also think you’ll be hard-pressed to find a winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, the Pulitzer Prize, or the National Book Award whose novels don’t contain significant political content.
The difference is, the winners of those awards don’t have to put up with critics of their own idelogical stripe constantly underminding and insulting them at every turn.
We novelists who have libertarian, rather than socialist, outlooks, do.
I’m sick of it and if there is anyone who thinks that art can actually have impact on society, it’s time that libertarians stop eating their own.
J. Neil Schulman
I’m a little tired of anyone who says we need “something” from the state being a NON-LIBERTARIAN; there are statist libertarians, anarchist libertarians (of both the left and right), and minarchist/ultraminimalist libertarians.
Purists who believe that one has to reject the state in its entirety to be Libertarian will limit us to only a few thousand. Ron Paul is clearly a libertarian, but he makes no bones about his minarchist beliefs, i.e. that there is a role for the state in security and law-making.
The same goes for Mr. Brin. Yes, he supports universal education, but so did Thomas Jefferson, according to most folks; and I consider Jefferson a libertarian.
And as far as left vs. right libertarianism goes, it really comes down to arguments over which type of land property system is correct: Hard Lockean, Soft Lockean, or Georgist. The problem is that none of the viewpoints can be praexologically proven. After all, how much labor must one mix with the land in order to obtain property rights? Is merely imprinting a path on it enough — probably not. Is tilling every square inch of farmland necessary to obtain property rights — probably not. It comes down to this: Right-Libertarians believe in absentee landlordism, while the left does not; that’s it.
I consider myself a Right-Libertarian, i.e. land can be appropriated with a minimal amount of work and landowners should be able to vacate their property for an extended period of time without it being expropriated by squatter(s). But since reading some left-libertarian literature (Mutualist, Agorist, Left-Rothbardian, etc.), I have broadened my view. I had no idea of the Enclosure of the British commons and the expropriation of land by the government until reading Joe Stromberg’s “English Enclosures and Soviet Collectivization: Two Instances of an Anti-Peasant Mode of Development”. And did the enclosure movement artificially expand the supply of industrial labor and make the factory system workable, as Kevin Carson so eloquently pointed out in “Studies in Mutualist Political Economy”? Perhaps Walter Block is right, that Libertarianism is neither Left nor Right.
Schulman: “We novelists who have libertarian, rather than socialist, outlooks, do.
I’m sick of it and if there is anyone who thinks that art can actually have impact on society, it’s time that libertarians stop eating their own.”
Raymond was attacking you, but I think Carson was commending your libertarian outlooks. I could be wrong, but that’s how I took the post.
Libertarians are naturally frustrated with how little progress we have made in winning converts, but there are good reasons for it: ideology reaches the mass audience through popular art, such as SF fiction, not through economic journals or even university classes. Even at college, the humanities and social sciences are overwhelming leftist, but they use art, for the most part, to promote leftist ideology. For example, even though Dickens wasn’t a socialist, modern literary profs use his writings to trash the industrial revolution and 19th century capitalism.
Also, Star Trek has done enormous damage to the libertarian cause with its moneyless culture and constant bragging that they had eliminated war and poverty. And the Farengi (sp?) were obviously meant to make capitalism look ridiculous.
If libertarianism is to become a mass movement, it will happen through the works of art like yours. Keep up the good work!
Anyone else out there a fan of Heinlein’s “The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress”?
RogerM:
The Star Trek Movies, The Next Generation and the other later series certainly are guilty of anti-libertarianism. The original series, on the other hand, seemed to take somewhat of an opposite tack. In the episode “Return of the Archons”, they encountered an entire society controlled by a computer, “for the good of the body”. It seems here that they were making the ultimate condemnation of collectivism. Of course, the writers of the original series were totally different from the writers of the later series and of the movies.
Mark:
It’s noteworthy that most of the scripts for the original Star Trek were written by professional science fiction writers as opposed to Hollywood staff writers, as was the case with the later series.
I’m going to take exception to this thread title. Science fiction is the literature of ideas, and sometimes those ideas are political, but often not, or worse, portrayed rather naively by many science fiction writers. As any writer knows, the heart of a story is conflict, and for science fiction, the idea of the individual fighting for his freedom, or a society enthralled by technology, makes for good conflict. But too many sf writers just don’t take it very far, or to any great depth. Only a few do, and only a few of those are libertarian-oriented.
How many times have I read an interesting story by Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Philip K. Dick, or someone else only to be frustrated by the political angle of it? I’ve lost count.
Clearly, most people, sf writers or not, believe in the concept of freedom, but they don’t define freedom as libertarians do, as freedom from coercion.
As an example, I’m currently reading “Some Dreams Are Nightmares” by James Gunn, and the novelette “The Hedonist” was quite tantalizing in its concept. It’s essentially about a good, idealistic government agent doing the best he can for the people he has authority over, and being betrayed by his own government. Alas, while Gunn portrays hedonism in an interesting light, the politics of the story is too shallow and stereotypical to draw any meaningful conclusions.
We should be thankful that there are at least a few sf writers who are libertarian, and hope that at least one of them might make it “big” in one sense or another, perhaps like Philip Dick and all the movies that have been made from his stories.
The best that can be said about sf is that it does encourage people to be open-minded and even optimistic about different ideas and possibilities, including the possibility of a libertarian society, and allows us to explore the concept of freedom in various ways.
Why is Frank Herbert forgotten in the discussion of Libertarian SF-writers?
There are few works more popular or more Libertarian than the Dune series. He knew what he was writing about and his support for individualism, anarchy, and liberty cannot, to my mind, be questioned.
I think the important things to see in Dune are 1) Don’t have leaders; 2) If you do have leaders, don’t make them into gods; and 3) technology cannot replace biology.
It might also be worth looking at the work of Mack Reynolds, who had a strong left wing tradition behind him. And, of course, Poul Anderson’s “Polesotechnic League” is much cleaned up compared with the actual doings of Dutch merchants in foreign parts some centuries ago.
Mostly, however, I am posting here to let people see a link to Eric Frank Russell’s “The Great Explosion”, which has been much admired by anarchists for its exploration of this area.
Axel,
I love that book. “luna shall be free”, Tanstafl and all that. I love the mixture of languages, cultures, etc. I’m sure it would make an amazing tv series, unfortunately libertarians don’t seem to have much clout in Hollywood.
The list of Prometheus Award Winners makes a pretty good libertarian SF reading list.
see http://doted.info
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