The Politics of SF

Those wacky liberatians at Samizdata.net bemoan the decline of heroic libertarian SF of the style of Heinlein and co. in this article. It has rude things to say about Robert Jordan.

Actually modern fantasy writing in Britain started out as broadly anti-statist. Tolkien (for all his Catholic distaste for people who were obsessed with money making) was no statist - and neither was C.S. Lewis. And the American fantasy writers followed them in the their belief that a good government was one which protected the nation against other powers and did not do many other things. In short there was similar political outlook among the fantasy writers and the science fiction writers.

This reflected itself in role-playing (when this grow up), the format of most role playing was an individual or group of individuals opposing evil (evil being defined as forces, human or other, who came to rob-kill-control). External invaders, internal corruption, tyrannical government - it was all basically the same thing (force attacking people).

People who were socialists in 'real life' never thought of setting up welfare states in fantasy or science fiction games - because that was not the nature of things (and games did have an effect on "real life" beliefs over time).

So RPGs are a tool of libertarian indoctrination, are they? Seriously, though, I find there's a whole range of political ideologies in science fiction, fantasy and roleplaying games, and I for one much prefer reading something where the writer is more interesting in telling a good story than in writing a political tract. I've also never quite understood the deification of Robert Heinlein, who I find rather dated nowadays.

Several of the commenters have mentioned the two Scottish writers Iain Banks and Ken McLoed, and commented on their politics, both of them too complex to be ideologically pidgeonholed. At least one commenter had trouble with the idea that not all non-villain characters are necessarily mouthpieces for their author's politics.

As for roleplaying games, I haven't seen many with an explicitly political or ideological agenda, except that most games revolve around heroic player-characters stopping bad guys. In some games the good guys are heroic libertarian free agents, but there are plenty of games where the player characters are servants of a quasi-statist higher power.

This reminds me of the playtest on Pyramid Online on an In Nomine sourcebook featuring a writeup of Lilith, Demon Princess of Freedom. One libertarian playtester really, really didn't like the concept of Freedom being a demonic concept, representing the selfish, sociopathic elements of freedom. I suppose his real problem was that In Nomine is set very much in a Judeo-Christian worldview; Angel PCs are very much servants of a benevolent higher power. To some people, that would make it the ultimate Statist game.