SciFi politics

Alexander, Bryan · 11 Jan 2005, 13:37 · from 2005-January.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: balexan at middlebury.edu (Alexander, Bryan)
Date: Tue Jan 11 13:37:06 2005
Subject: (urth) SciFi politics
Message-ID: <69FFDC55F2614E418DC056ABC0F9A0D6FEA3D4 at bearcat.middlebury.edu>

Bruce Franklin's collection of Vietnam war writing has a reprint from a
1968 issue of Galaxy, which includes two petitions on that war.  One is
a group of writers urging the United States to withdraw, while the other
recommends the nation remain in the fighting.  It's fascinating to read
the two lists (which are roughly equal in size) - in fact, it would make
a great teaching tool for science fiction history!

-----Original Message-----
From: urth-urth.net-bounces at lists.urth.net
[mailto:urth-urth.net-bounces at lists.urth.net] On Behalf Of James Wynn
Sent: Tuesday, January 11, 2005 4:25 PM
To: The Urth Mailing List
Subject: Re: (urth) SciFi politics

>We must not be reading the same SF: Heinlein, Weber, Niven and/or
>Pournelle - well, I gave up on those two years ago... There is a long
and
>rich tradition of conservatism in SF.

That's why I said "the plurality of Sci-Fi writers" -- not even a
majority.
I have no way of ascertaining whether political liberals are in the
majority, but having gone to my share of gatherings of SF writers and
aspiring writers, I feel comfortable in saying that there were far more
liberals than conservatives there. Or perhaps the liberals and
conservatives
only *thought* the liberals held an overwhelming majority there, and so
were
more vocal.

However, it was, I didn't find Silk's opinions on gun-ownership any more
or
less jarring than the omnipresent villainous corporate heads in SF
literature, or the benign and efficient socialist societies.

~ Crush

_______________________________________________
Urth Mailing List
To post, write urth at urth.net
Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net