Of scarcity: I suspect a lot of the cultural environment arises from awareness of Marx's economic theory and relative ignorance of other, later, economists' works (George, Coase, Tulloch ...) Marx was considering an era where the factory system was (1) expanding into all sorts of activities that previously had been managed otherwise and (2) succeeding to produce more product that ever before and (3) was "sharing the wealth" in what Marx portrayed as an unfair, even evil, mal-distribution. Products were plentiful, "wealth" wasn't. Extend that into an SF future and one gets to very few physical needs, but even less agency or autonomy.
What we don't see in SF are new arenas of competition and scarcity. Real world, who predicted competition for radio frequency spectrum bandwidth? For license to protected corridors in low Earth orbit? Competing for "clicks" and "eyeballs" among "influencers" ? What SF author thought up imposing artificial scarcity on carbon dioxide with "cap and trade" schemes? Competition for drugs that cost billion$ to develop, pennies to manufacture, and can be pirated in other nations that don't respect artificial scarcity of patents or do much government quality control testing (rejecting "plenty" of imperfect pills) for some price between the pennies and the billion$. Nobody predicted the problems associated with insufficient WASTE -- we can't economically develop a way to recycle our nuclear fuel because we don't make enough of it; we can't recycle our plastic because there's too little of each separate kind in the one big pile.
I think we're sort of in a Julian Simon world where human ingenuity will continue to provide us new and surprising sorts of expensive and scarce resources -- while the traditional resources continue to become cheaper and more plentiful.
I stopped reading The Draka fairly early into the series too. The problem with the story is that, in its own grimdark way, it's just as unbelievable and idealistic as all those post-scarcity utopia stories. It's not a realistic exploration of the horrors of war and conquest and slavery, it's just an outright paean to evil.
The real world is often quite a bleak place, so we're used to equating realism with bleakness, but that only applies up to a point. When you start to approach maximum bleakness, it stops being realistic and just becomes absurd. In a realistic world, the Draka Empire would've fallen apart within a matter of decades. Probably within just a few years, since their entire culture was based around cartoonishly evil values (which don't exactly tend to promote long-term stability) and their entire society loved to indulge in pointless sadism even at the cost of efficiency. At least the creators of Warhammer 40k had the good sense to avoid taking their setting too seriously.
I tend to think of Socialist societies in SF as being the lazy, convenient way of ignoring the messy parts of how 'things' -- especially manufactured things -- get to be available. That is, the author doesn't have to create in his own mind an economic backstory if he doesn't want to. It's like rogue magic that just happens. You're supposed to ignore it.
E.C Tubb wrote the 33 book series about Dumarest trying to find his way back to earth and almost every book at least implied that the local government was a monarchy or some form of socialism (or some weird mix of both), where everyone got what they needed except the lower classes, who had to 'buy' and travel by spaceship, which was definitely market-based. At least that's how I remembered the books. Like too many series the ending was a disappointment.
I think that science fiction in general tends to be one of the more polarizing forms of fiction - at least politically. While I'm sure they exist, I don't know of too many books in the "literary fiction" genre that would make enough of a political statement for me to dissent with it.
This may be because of the natural tendency of science fiction to lean towards visions of utopia and dystopia. When an author puts aside the mundane and tries to convey what a perfect or pure evil world would look like, they're bound to butt heads with some of their readers. Whereas a normal world may leave room for moral interpretation, an extreme one will often end up taking explicit stances on every moral question.
The pattern you discuss also may hold with older SF. I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. The post-Overlord Golden Age is fairly socialist in nature: end of scarcity, end of unpleasant labor, everyone has what they want, etc. Clarke, I believe, was socialist-leaning. But Heinlein was clearly more on the libertarian right-leaning side. Asimov was apparently a traditional liberal. If anyone knows of any other examples, feel free to share.
The post’s description of the Murderbot situation seems slightly misleading, although ultimately accurate when describing the presumptive attitude of the author.
It envisions Large portions of the galaxy being run by corporations, and only one of the settings (out of five or six?) could be described as a left wing utopia. The others seem more like left wing dystopian visions of anarchocapitalism, where corporate types sometimes cooperate with each other, but always need to have enough firepower nearby to make a credible deterrent to simple piracy.
I was expecting a mention of the Culture series by Iain Banks. It has been long enough since I read it that I have little to say about it, other than it was set in a universe imagined by a left anarchist, run by hyperintelligent benevolent AIs, and has some superficial relevance to the theme of the post.
As for explanations: intellectuals have tended to be left-wing for a long time, haven't they? Since before there was what could be described as indoctrination; and even then, the more recent "woke" indoctrination is more about id pol stuff than economics, isn't it?
Not only do good people compete against good people, there are some ways free market liberalism is clearly suboptimal, at least in a theoretical sense. Inequality is generally suboptimal in sum-of-utility terms due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. Some tragedy-of-commons-equivalents don't have good solutions. Public goods don't get produced. Club goods, and goods with large fixed costs and low marginal costs, may not get produced even if the sum of the potential values to consumers exceeds the total production cost, if information asymmetry prevents price discrimination; even if they do get produced, consumers who would derive a value higher than the marginal cost but lower than the price the producer sets get excluded. All these problems have some popular examples.
If one doesn't think a lot about economics, it's easier to see the problems with the current freeish market systems than how many things free markets do well, or how they could do some things even better if they were even freer. And while it's easy to see that the actual attempts to implement communism worked poorly, it's less obvious that a non-market-based system can't possibly work well. So even if an author isn't a full communist advocate in the real world due to the clear pitfalls of communism, these can explain why someone who's trying to paint a picture of an ideal, utopian world may make it a non-market-based one.
I'd argue a novel/series with an ideological view (say, e.g., how Lord of the Rings does for Tolkien's Christian thought) doesn't so much "make the world more Christian" as make that specific Christian worldview more legible, that is, easier to explore and engage with. That could make that brand of Christianity more common... but could also just set it up to become readily rejected. Great novels with really stupid worldviews, I think, tend not to make those worldviews more popular, but rather to make the problems with those worldviews more easily named. (E.g., just as you've done with the Scholomance.) And the experience of enjoying novels (admittedly, not on the *first* novel) eventually produces an awareness of novel-enjoyment as relying on a particular human tendency to want to inhabit a clearly noble perspective which graduates to enjoying ambiguity, miscommunication, error, and struggle as much or more than inhabiting teenager love triangles or true benevolence virtuous goodness vs liar malificence rotten badness.
Amusingly, some really celebrated literature turns on misunderstanding and error and struggle so deeply buried in the plot, teenagers often manage to completely miss it and just get the standard 'good vs evil' feeling off the book anyway. For example, it's probably *most* teen readers who read Gatsby and walk away with the sense they've read a sad story about the good guy (Gatsby) not quite winning in the end, because he got money and parties but was not welcomed. On a shallow read it's just a weirdly stuffy poor-guy-gets-rich-but-isn't-welcomed story. It's only the minority of teen readers (probably the very small minority!) that inform everything the narrator has to share with the awareness that the narrator in The Great Gatsby *misunderstands* the advice of his father's which he (the narrator) advances as core to his identity! And the narrator inflates that [failed] insight into a boast about his general power of insight into people, which in turn frames everything the narrator identifies/notices about Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy as subject to similar misunderstanding and inflation... which makes the novel tragic in a much grander, quieter way.
I do also think there's a phenomenon where some novels attract (create?) fandoms which are healthy places to hangout, whereas other novels attract (create?) toxic fandoms. I think the contrast between the Star Wars fandom (notoriously awful, basically, even on the word of people who hang out there) or the Marvel fandom (huge but shallow) or the Tolkien fandom (practically perfect in every way, hahah, but seriously a great place to spend any amount of energy making friends or just chilling.) What accounts for the difference? Is it the embedded ideology attracting certain people (who have other traits that drive the character of the fandom) or is the embedded ideology affecting those people enough to directly make the fandom better/worse?
"Societies that have attempted to eliminate market transactions, with the exception of very small ones, [Most notably families ...] have a bad track record."
Even families. In my observation (from a rather limited number of examples) a lot of conflict within families is caused by that, on the one hand, people don't keep clear track of who owns what, who owes whom what, on the other hand they are not altruistic enough to not mind if they don't get what they consider their fair shake. There is often no clear way to tell who gets to decide something in the absence of a voluntary agreement to depart from the default (as there normally is in a market-based society), so if preferences differ and people are insufficiently altruistic, it results in a fight. And many people *are* insufficiently altruistic even towards their family members for communism to work well; and—just as in the case of broader society—that's not a fault that can be corrected, but something to adapt to.
I’ve read the whole Murderbot series, repeatedly, so clearly I enjoy it. The socialist utopia doesn’t bother me much because she never tries to explain how it works, so I regard it as a pleasant fantasy: it works by magic. As long as the magic goes on working, I’d be happy to live in it.
It occurred to me some time ago that a better name for Murderbot would be SuperNerd. It’s quite like a Typical Reader except for being stronger, less vulnerable, faster, and cleverer—all of which the Typical Reader would presumably like to be.
Naomi Novik—I tried one or more of her Temeraire books some years ago but didn’t become addicted, and haven’t looked at her other books.
S. M. Stirling—my favourite of his is also The Peshawar Lancers, and I also bounced off the Draka books, which I found I didn’t want to read. I was more surprised to find that I liked the Nantucket trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time) but bounced off the slightly related (and much longer) Emberverse series.
Of scarcity: I suspect a lot of the cultural environment arises from awareness of Marx's economic theory and relative ignorance of other, later, economists' works (George, Coase, Tulloch ...) Marx was considering an era where the factory system was (1) expanding into all sorts of activities that previously had been managed otherwise and (2) succeeding to produce more product that ever before and (3) was "sharing the wealth" in what Marx portrayed as an unfair, even evil, mal-distribution. Products were plentiful, "wealth" wasn't. Extend that into an SF future and one gets to very few physical needs, but even less agency or autonomy.
What we don't see in SF are new arenas of competition and scarcity. Real world, who predicted competition for radio frequency spectrum bandwidth? For license to protected corridors in low Earth orbit? Competing for "clicks" and "eyeballs" among "influencers" ? What SF author thought up imposing artificial scarcity on carbon dioxide with "cap and trade" schemes? Competition for drugs that cost billion$ to develop, pennies to manufacture, and can be pirated in other nations that don't respect artificial scarcity of patents or do much government quality control testing (rejecting "plenty" of imperfect pills) for some price between the pennies and the billion$. Nobody predicted the problems associated with insufficient WASTE -- we can't economically develop a way to recycle our nuclear fuel because we don't make enough of it; we can't recycle our plastic because there's too little of each separate kind in the one big pile.
I think we're sort of in a Julian Simon world where human ingenuity will continue to provide us new and surprising sorts of expensive and scarce resources -- while the traditional resources continue to become cheaper and more plentiful.
I stopped reading The Draka fairly early into the series too. The problem with the story is that, in its own grimdark way, it's just as unbelievable and idealistic as all those post-scarcity utopia stories. It's not a realistic exploration of the horrors of war and conquest and slavery, it's just an outright paean to evil.
The real world is often quite a bleak place, so we're used to equating realism with bleakness, but that only applies up to a point. When you start to approach maximum bleakness, it stops being realistic and just becomes absurd. In a realistic world, the Draka Empire would've fallen apart within a matter of decades. Probably within just a few years, since their entire culture was based around cartoonishly evil values (which don't exactly tend to promote long-term stability) and their entire society loved to indulge in pointless sadism even at the cost of efficiency. At least the creators of Warhammer 40k had the good sense to avoid taking their setting too seriously.
David, have you read Cloud-castles, the Prometheus award winner of last year?
It is the best combination of fun science fiction and libertarian message that I have seen.
I tend to think of Socialist societies in SF as being the lazy, convenient way of ignoring the messy parts of how 'things' -- especially manufactured things -- get to be available. That is, the author doesn't have to create in his own mind an economic backstory if he doesn't want to. It's like rogue magic that just happens. You're supposed to ignore it.
E.C Tubb wrote the 33 book series about Dumarest trying to find his way back to earth and almost every book at least implied that the local government was a monarchy or some form of socialism (or some weird mix of both), where everyone got what they needed except the lower classes, who had to 'buy' and travel by spaceship, which was definitely market-based. At least that's how I remembered the books. Like too many series the ending was a disappointment.
I think that science fiction in general tends to be one of the more polarizing forms of fiction - at least politically. While I'm sure they exist, I don't know of too many books in the "literary fiction" genre that would make enough of a political statement for me to dissent with it.
This may be because of the natural tendency of science fiction to lean towards visions of utopia and dystopia. When an author puts aside the mundane and tries to convey what a perfect or pure evil world would look like, they're bound to butt heads with some of their readers. Whereas a normal world may leave room for moral interpretation, an extreme one will often end up taking explicit stances on every moral question.
The pattern you discuss also may hold with older SF. I'm currently reading Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End. The post-Overlord Golden Age is fairly socialist in nature: end of scarcity, end of unpleasant labor, everyone has what they want, etc. Clarke, I believe, was socialist-leaning. But Heinlein was clearly more on the libertarian right-leaning side. Asimov was apparently a traditional liberal. If anyone knows of any other examples, feel free to share.
The post’s description of the Murderbot situation seems slightly misleading, although ultimately accurate when describing the presumptive attitude of the author.
It envisions Large portions of the galaxy being run by corporations, and only one of the settings (out of five or six?) could be described as a left wing utopia. The others seem more like left wing dystopian visions of anarchocapitalism, where corporate types sometimes cooperate with each other, but always need to have enough firepower nearby to make a credible deterrent to simple piracy.
I was expecting a mention of the Culture series by Iain Banks. It has been long enough since I read it that I have little to say about it, other than it was set in a universe imagined by a left anarchist, run by hyperintelligent benevolent AIs, and has some superficial relevance to the theme of the post.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series
Broken link: https://daviddfriedman.substack.com/p/dreadlocks
As for explanations: intellectuals have tended to be left-wing for a long time, haven't they? Since before there was what could be described as indoctrination; and even then, the more recent "woke" indoctrination is more about id pol stuff than economics, isn't it?
Not only do good people compete against good people, there are some ways free market liberalism is clearly suboptimal, at least in a theoretical sense. Inequality is generally suboptimal in sum-of-utility terms due to the diminishing marginal utility of money. Some tragedy-of-commons-equivalents don't have good solutions. Public goods don't get produced. Club goods, and goods with large fixed costs and low marginal costs, may not get produced even if the sum of the potential values to consumers exceeds the total production cost, if information asymmetry prevents price discrimination; even if they do get produced, consumers who would derive a value higher than the marginal cost but lower than the price the producer sets get excluded. All these problems have some popular examples.
If one doesn't think a lot about economics, it's easier to see the problems with the current freeish market systems than how many things free markets do well, or how they could do some things even better if they were even freer. And while it's easy to see that the actual attempts to implement communism worked poorly, it's less obvious that a non-market-based system can't possibly work well. So even if an author isn't a full communist advocate in the real world due to the clear pitfalls of communism, these can explain why someone who's trying to paint a picture of an ideal, utopian world may make it a non-market-based one.
I'd argue a novel/series with an ideological view (say, e.g., how Lord of the Rings does for Tolkien's Christian thought) doesn't so much "make the world more Christian" as make that specific Christian worldview more legible, that is, easier to explore and engage with. That could make that brand of Christianity more common... but could also just set it up to become readily rejected. Great novels with really stupid worldviews, I think, tend not to make those worldviews more popular, but rather to make the problems with those worldviews more easily named. (E.g., just as you've done with the Scholomance.) And the experience of enjoying novels (admittedly, not on the *first* novel) eventually produces an awareness of novel-enjoyment as relying on a particular human tendency to want to inhabit a clearly noble perspective which graduates to enjoying ambiguity, miscommunication, error, and struggle as much or more than inhabiting teenager love triangles or true benevolence virtuous goodness vs liar malificence rotten badness.
Amusingly, some really celebrated literature turns on misunderstanding and error and struggle so deeply buried in the plot, teenagers often manage to completely miss it and just get the standard 'good vs evil' feeling off the book anyway. For example, it's probably *most* teen readers who read Gatsby and walk away with the sense they've read a sad story about the good guy (Gatsby) not quite winning in the end, because he got money and parties but was not welcomed. On a shallow read it's just a weirdly stuffy poor-guy-gets-rich-but-isn't-welcomed story. It's only the minority of teen readers (probably the very small minority!) that inform everything the narrator has to share with the awareness that the narrator in The Great Gatsby *misunderstands* the advice of his father's which he (the narrator) advances as core to his identity! And the narrator inflates that [failed] insight into a boast about his general power of insight into people, which in turn frames everything the narrator identifies/notices about Gatsby, Tom, and Daisy as subject to similar misunderstanding and inflation... which makes the novel tragic in a much grander, quieter way.
I do also think there's a phenomenon where some novels attract (create?) fandoms which are healthy places to hangout, whereas other novels attract (create?) toxic fandoms. I think the contrast between the Star Wars fandom (notoriously awful, basically, even on the word of people who hang out there) or the Marvel fandom (huge but shallow) or the Tolkien fandom (practically perfect in every way, hahah, but seriously a great place to spend any amount of energy making friends or just chilling.) What accounts for the difference? Is it the embedded ideology attracting certain people (who have other traits that drive the character of the fandom) or is the embedded ideology affecting those people enough to directly make the fandom better/worse?
"Societies that have attempted to eliminate market transactions, with the exception of very small ones, [Most notably families ...] have a bad track record."
Even families. In my observation (from a rather limited number of examples) a lot of conflict within families is caused by that, on the one hand, people don't keep clear track of who owns what, who owes whom what, on the other hand they are not altruistic enough to not mind if they don't get what they consider their fair shake. There is often no clear way to tell who gets to decide something in the absence of a voluntary agreement to depart from the default (as there normally is in a market-based society), so if preferences differ and people are insufficiently altruistic, it results in a fight. And many people *are* insufficiently altruistic even towards their family members for communism to work well; and—just as in the case of broader society—that's not a fault that can be corrected, but something to adapt to.
I’ve read the whole Murderbot series, repeatedly, so clearly I enjoy it. The socialist utopia doesn’t bother me much because she never tries to explain how it works, so I regard it as a pleasant fantasy: it works by magic. As long as the magic goes on working, I’d be happy to live in it.
It occurred to me some time ago that a better name for Murderbot would be SuperNerd. It’s quite like a Typical Reader except for being stronger, less vulnerable, faster, and cleverer—all of which the Typical Reader would presumably like to be.
Naomi Novik—I tried one or more of her Temeraire books some years ago but didn’t become addicted, and haven’t looked at her other books.
S. M. Stirling—my favourite of his is also The Peshawar Lancers, and I also bounced off the Draka books, which I found I didn’t want to read. I was more surprised to find that I liked the Nantucket trilogy (Island in the Sea of Time) but bounced off the slightly related (and much longer) Emberverse series.