Abstract
It might seem, from the way I closed the previous chapter, as if I’m keen to score cheap ideological points at the expense of SF.
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Notes
- 1.
He closes his essay by pointing to what he sees as fascistic revenants still shaping the work of writers who explicitly self-identify as progressive and liberal: ‘Yet still, even within the work of major contemporary SF authors who announce their commitment to progressive, anti-imperialist causes, we can find non-ironic versions of the old pulp tropes—and, consequently, echoes of the old pulp politics. A towering, charismatic genius struggles to inspire the downtrodden inhabitants of a “degraded” and decadent society, all while fighting against a fanatical cult that is spreading its influence throughout the population (Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Memory of Whiteness [1985]); a “gifted” hero fights a corrupt, alien culture, eventually concluding that extremism and violence in the service of a superior society is no vice (Joanna Russ’ The Two of Them [1986]); a man of almost divine skill and ability is recruited—by an “advanced” and morally superior culture—to outwit and overthrow a rival, “barbaric,” and “catastrophically bad” alien society that has been making incursions into their territory (Iain M. Banks’ The Player of Games [1988]); or, finally, a special, gifted individual awakens to the presence of an alien race of mind-controllers who are able to brainwash a decadent Earth population—until he resolves to lead his people and reclaim the old ways (LeGuin’s City of Illusions [1967])’ [Santesso, 157].
- 2.
‘Historians of ideas usually attribute the dream of a perfect society to the philosophers and jurists of the 18th century; but there was also a military dream of society; its fundamental reference was not to a state of nature, but to the meticulously subordinated cogs of a machine, not to primal social contract, but to permanent coercions’ [Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 169].
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Roberts, A. (2016). The Early 20th Century, 1: High Modernist SF. In: The History of Science Fiction. Palgrave Histories of Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-56957-8_9
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