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Joe Chill posted:Herbert wasn't a libertarian in the modern definition. He talked about grass roots democracy in a number of interviews he did, talking about how all citizens should be involved in poltical decisions. I mean, good sci-fi really should be capable of being about conditions so different from ours that applying our political precepts doesn't work, and so that the way politics works in the world might not even really reflect what the author thinks would work today. This only works if the author isn't a hack trying to Make A Point of course. I'll even take a stand that it's reductionist to even call Heinlein a libertarian because he was genuine weirdo whose opinions are clearly more nuanced than that (even if they're often wrong and bad and REALLY weird).
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Jun 2, 2020 22:21
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eSports Chaebol posted:I mean, good sci-fi really should be capable of being about conditions so different from ours that applying our political precepts doesn't work, and so that the way politics works in the world might not even really reflect what the author thinks would work today. This only works if the author isn't a hack trying to Make A Point of course. I'll even take a stand that it's reductionist to even call Heinlein a libertarian because he was genuine weirdo whose opinions are clearly more nuanced than that (even if they're often wrong and bad and REALLY weird).
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Jun 2, 2020 22:36
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Nessus posted:I think it's fair to refer to Heinlein as a libertarian because fuckin libertarians quote him like he's writing Two Corinthians. Not necessarily Heinlein's fault, but I doubt the people who put Revelations in the canonical Bible knew how it would be read 1,500+ years hence. Give it 1500 years, Twilight and Ready Player one will be considered sacred texts,
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Jun 2, 2020 22:42
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Nessus posted:I think it's fair to refer to Heinlein as a libertarian because fuckin libertarians quote him like he's writing Two Corinthians. Not necessarily Heinlein's fault, but I doubt the people who put Revelations in the canonical Bible knew how it would be read 1,500+ years hence. Heinlein heavily pushes and exhaustively explains UBI in at least one book Maybe they can quote that part
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Jun 2, 2020 22:50
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I'm confused as to how much Heinlein thought of writing as an art vs a profession. I can't remember him ever being especially deep, unless you count his pulp fetishism, in which I find similarity to Quentin Tarantino of all people. When he does touch the real world, it is often about sexual morality, political righteousness, and economic realities. Of these, the only one that seems to have straight trajectory through his work is sexual morality, in which he freely embraces free, almost communal love. That his other ideas are so all-over the place in his work makes me think he was just inserting how he thought at the time, without Too much thought beyond mechanics. Which is why his work spands from 'We the Living' to 'Starship Troopers' to 'and I will Fear No Evil' to 'Stranger in a Strange Land' He couldn't even write military fiction, because he was in the military and knew how it worked. Which ment he couldn't just churn out whatever happen to be in his brain. He would have to make the scenario actually work
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Jun 2, 2020 23:08
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The Bloop posted:Heinlein heavily pushes and exhaustively explains UBI in at least one book
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Jun 2, 2020 23:36
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Heinlein was anti-nazi but had that particularly American frontier philosophy that nobody is going to look after me but me, charity and community is the bedrock of social fabric, but the problem is that it doesn't really scale up, and the frontier can't expand forever on earth. I can grok some of his philosophy, I don't think he was evil, I am fine with kids reading his books as long as they are able to think critically.
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Jun 3, 2020 01:52
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I don't think UBI is necessarily incompatible with Libertarianism if Libertarianism is understood as a specifically American brand of incredibly ignorant Neoliberalism. Both Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek were for it in some form, they realized that the "free to choose" part of their philosophy made no sense without it.
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Jun 3, 2020 06:53
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The difference is probably that too many libertarians don't put much thought to things, they just want freedoms for themselves?
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Jun 3, 2020 09:51
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Johnny Aztec posted:Give it 1500 years, Twilight and Ready Player one will be considered sacred texts, Considered? 
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Jun 3, 2020 09:53
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The way I've heard with Heinlein is that across his work and writings you can find him pushing almost any philosophy and political stance.
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Jun 3, 2020 12:51
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The way I've heard with Heinlein is that across his work and writings you can find him pushing almost any philosophy and political stance. Stranger in a Strange Land: Everyone should be loving everyone else as much as they can to save the world Starships Troopers: If you don't serve your country you don't get to have a say in what it does
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Jun 3, 2020 14:32
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Inverted Icon posted:Wellll... from the atreides manifesto, we get the idea that rather than predicting the future, the prescient actually creates that future. That's why they say muad'dib locked us into the genocide, and the tyrant brought us out of it. Leto was the stronger psychic. That's why odrade refuses to look at 'the hunter with the axe' lest she lock the BG into destruction. As far as I can derive neither are necessarily true, but prescience and other memory seems to completely fall apart with Leto II. It's been a bit since I read anything but Dune and the encyclopedia (which forever owns, I had an old hardback copy but I finished the electronic one a couple days ago) but Leto seems to call on memories he shouldn't have of his parents when speaking to some folks and is mentioned to have looked at various paths of failure on his route to success. Duncan-the-last seems to have the same noosphere thing as well. Additionally the encyclopedia had a discussion of basically rules lawyering prescience, which is hilarious and might explain part of it. You don't look at the action ITSELF because something might go awry, you look further ahead at yourself looking back at success. Like, you look at now+10 years to see what you did to succeed at now+5 years. That somehow locks in a path but also doesn't? It's magic after all, I dunno. Of course that doesn't work when you consider the rest of the melange usage from mere mortals using it to make them big brained to solve problems. The encyclopedia is forever still a better piece of work than juniors, though. Love the in-universe academic sniping.
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Jun 3, 2020 16:00
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Nessus posted:I think there are still a lot of "granola conservatives" around, they just only really live in some parts of the West Coast (where their numbers may be considerable) and are probably getting gradually subsumed by the mass-marketing of conservative ideology. Which makes sense since thats where Herbert is from.
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Jun 3, 2020 16:50
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Ghost Leviathan posted:The way I've heard with Heinlein is that across his work and writings you can find him pushing almost any philosophy and political stance. Despite coming from the military, he wasn't - as some "critics" have painted him - especially a fan of facism or rule by military law in general. Case in point, Starship Troopers gets held up as an ode to some sort of utopia Heinlein wanted, but the very next book he wrote as the diametrical opposite to it was Stranger In A Strange Land, and that had hippies wanting to treat him as some sort of guru, until he had to threaten them to leave his private property while openly carrying his gun. He even goes so far as to parody the critique of his supposed arthor-insert character in The Number Of The Beast where all of the villains names are either scrambled versions of his own name or some of the pseudonyms he used over the years - and the book famously ends with a scene where the only thing that critics have to do to save themselves from eternal entrapment is to write a honest review. I've been a fan of his works since I read his juveniles as a kid, and I even like the later work despite the fact that it is obviously designed to push as many buttons as his old-horny-man brain could come up with. I've never once been sure about his political leanings, except that he seems to appreciate democracy and freedom with societal responsibility.
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Jun 3, 2020 18:58
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eSports Chaebol posted:I mean, good sci-fi really should be capable of being about conditions so different from ours that applying our political precepts doesn't work, and so that the way politics works in the world might not even really reflect what the author thinks would work today. This only works if the author isn't a hack trying to Make A Point of course. I couldn't disagree more. Ursula K. Le Guin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and even Frank Herbert himself all did this. To me, good sci-fi uses the conceit of a given story to say something meaningful about modern life. Without trying to make A Point, all that's left is genre tripe, written by morons like KJA
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Jun 3, 2020 20:06
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This Moorcock article is worth reading: https://libcom.org/library/starship-stormtroopers-michael-moorcock
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Jun 3, 2020 20:15
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Mooktastical posted:I couldn't disagree more. Ursula K. Le Guin, Aldous Huxley, George Orwell, and even Frank Herbert himself all did this. To me, good sci-fi uses the conceit of a given story to say something meaningful about modern life. Without trying to make A Point, all that's left is genre tripe, written by morons like KJA I should've been more clear: I meant making a point simply by constructing a world such that the author's opinion must be true. You know, like the worst sci-fi novel of all time (so bad we forget that it is sci-fi): Atlas Shrugged e: also you can say something meaningful about non-temporal life, like the best (only?) Catholic sci-fi, A Canticle for Leibowitz eSports Chaebol fucked around with this message at 22:03 on Jun 3, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 22:01
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eSports Chaebol posted:e: also you can say something meaningful about non-temporal life, like the best (only?) Catholic sci-fi, A Canticle for Leibowitz The Sparrow is Catholic Sci-Fi, and also really, really good. I dont know fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jun 3, 2020 |
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Jun 3, 2020 23:04
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quote:The bandit hero -- the underdog rebel -- so frequently becomes the political tyrant; and we are perpetually astonished! Such figures appeal to our infantile selves -- what is harmful about them in real life is that they are usually immature, without self-discipline, frequently surviving on their 'charm'. Fiction lets them stay, like Zorro or Robin Hood, perpetually charming. In reality they become petulant, childish, relying on a mixture of threats and self-pitying pleading, like any baby. These are too often the revolutionary figures on whom we pin our hopes, to whom we sometimes commit our lives and whom we sometimes try to be; because we fail to distinguish fact from fiction. In reality it is too often the small, fanatical men with the faces and stance of neurotic clerks who come to power while the charismatic heroes, if they are lucky, die gloriously, leaving us to discover that while we have been following them, imitating them, a new Tsar has manipulated himself into the position of power and Terror has returned with a vengeance while we have been using all our energies living a romantic lie. Heroes betray us. By having them, in real life, we betray ourselves. The heroes of Heinlein and Ayn Rand are forever competent, forever right: they are oracles and protectors, magic parents (so long as we obey their rules). They are prepared to accept the responsibilities we would rather not bear. They are 'leaders'. Traditional sf is hero fiction on a huge scale, but it is only when it poses as a fiction of ideas that it becomes completely pernicious. At its most spectacular it gives us Charlie Manson and Scientology (invented by the sf writer Ron Hubbard and an authoritarian system to rival the Pope's). To enjoy it is one thing. To claim it as 'radical' is quite another. It is rather unimaginative; it is usually badly written; its characters are ciphers; its propaganda is simple-minded and conservative -- good old-fashioned opium which might be specifically designed for dealing with the potential revolutionary.
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Jun 3, 2020 23:26
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You know, the funny thing about Heinlein, is that the whole facism thing isn't even the elephant in the room
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Jun 4, 2020 01:52
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Inverted Icon posted:You know, the funny thing about Heinlein, is that the whole facism thing isn't even the elephant in the room Is it the incest?
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Jun 4, 2020 02:01
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Is it the time travelling incest?
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Jun 4, 2020 02:10
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Is it incest if it is a gender-swapped clone of yourself?
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Jun 4, 2020 02:12
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Thirstiest SF writer is Philip José Farmer, right? Didn't read much of his stuff, but all of it seemed to involve erotic adventures of some kind, including one where an alien insect thing disguises itself as a sexy human woman to harvest his seed (?). I'm making it sound worse than it is, it's actually pretty benevolent, I should check out more of his books
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Jun 4, 2020 02:13
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Phlegmish posted:Thirstiest SF writer is Philip José Farmer, right? Didn't read much of his stuff, but all of it seemed to involve erotic adventures of some kind, including one where an alien insect thing disguises itself as a sexy human woman to harvest his seed (?). I'm making it sound worse than it is, it's actually pretty benevolent, I should check out more of his books Be sure to check out "A Feast Unknown"!
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Jun 4, 2020 02:56
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I heard that Denis spent a year designing the sandworms. I know I can't be the only one who will be keeping an eye out for these giant desert beauties. Something about how smoothly they glide through the slippery sand and envelop entire crawlers is extremely erotic.
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Jun 4, 2020 08:28
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Anne Frank Funk posted:I heard that Denis spent a year designing the sandworms. I know I can't be the only one who will be keeping an eye out for these giant desert beauties. Something about how smoothly they glide through the slippery sand and envelop entire crawlers is extremely erotic.
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Jun 4, 2020 09:18
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pentyne posted:Stranger in a Strange Land: Everyone should be loving everyone else as much as they can to save the world That's about right, his most consistent message was 'it's okay to gently caress whoever turns you on'. That's a good summary of Starship Troopers, but let's not forget The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress where the Loonies claim association with everyone on Earth's revolutionary holiday and end up with a tricameral legislature where the third house exists solely to review and repeal legislation passed by the other two.
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Jun 4, 2020 09:29
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Anne Frank Funk posted:I heard that Denis spent a year designing the sandworms. I know I can't be the only one who will be keeping an eye out for these giant desert beauties. Something about how smoothly they glide through the slippery sand and envelop entire crawlers is extremely erotic. has anyone ever smelled a spice burst what do you think it would smell like haha
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Jun 4, 2020 11:42
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mllaneza posted:That's about right, his most consistent message was 'it's okay to gently caress whoever turns you on'. That's a good summary of Starship Troopers, but let's not forget The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress where the Loonies claim association with everyone on Earth's revolutionary holiday and end up with a tricameral legislature where the third house exists solely to review and repeal legislation passed by the other two.
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Jun 4, 2020 12:15
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I was trying to find Duncan's quote about his sword training and enemies being leaves in the path of whatever the gently caress who cares, but ended up striking the mother lode of Duncan avatar material on the wiki: Don't ever speak to me or my hosed up tiny Gurney-man ever again!  So handsome.  Moebius really capture Duncan's canon passions: falconry, proper welding eye protection and silk negligee wearing.  Smash hit with the ladies for the last 50 centuries.  A true Ginaz Swordmaster of the Tenth Level.
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Jun 4, 2020 12:44
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Bubblyblubber posted:
Muammar Dunkkafi
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Jun 4, 2020 12:56
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Bubblyblubber posted:
I don't remember him being Cardassian!
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Jun 4, 2020 13:02
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I appreciate that in Heretics the Tleiaxu are all like "ha ha ha after pretending to be complete idiots for millenia it is time for us to make our super play, having kept our true faith forever secret" only to be like, immediately made the second they get in the room with a Reverend Mother for five minutes.
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Jun 4, 2020 13:24
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Nessus posted:Please do not be horny about Shai-Hulud, may his passing cleanse the world
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Jun 4, 2020 13:29
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Bubblyblubber posted:I was trying to find Duncan's quote about his sword training and enemies being leaves in the path of whatever the gently caress who cares, but ended up striking the mother lode of Duncan avatar material on the wiki: The last pic is from the excellent ccg, and is the only one that has the only physical trait we know about Duncan, his black, wooly hair. Karakul is a type of wool from Afghanistan, and a hat made of said wool.
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Jun 4, 2020 15:10
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I dont know posted:The Sparrow is Catholic Sci-Fi, and also really, really good. It's sequel isn't as good though, although it's still well-written, because apparently it bothered the author too much that the fundamental question of the first book (how does faith deal with the experience of sickening brutality) was left as a question, so the second book has to go back and show how all the brutality actually served a good end. It undermines how good the original is, because almost nobody actually gets that resolution to their experiences.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:14
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davidspackage posted:has anyone ever smelled a spice burst what do you think it would smell like haha Cinnamon.
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Jun 4, 2020 16:17
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davidspackage posted:has anyone ever smelled a spice burst what do you think it would smell like haha The crysknife I wear around my neck contains an essence that gets recharged when I "ride a worm" with a bro who also has a crysknife. It gives me confidence in the erg, sietch, spice orgy, etc. Nobody knows it's a special crysknife but me and my bros. I have seen it glow white while riding with a bud thats how I know this is real. You can come over for as long as you want but I need a solido of you preferably wearing a crysknife before I waste my time.
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Jun 4, 2020 17:09
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