i mean, they’re never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they’re making.
like that andy weir interview where he says “there are no politics in my books”. i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they’re researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he’s not written them that way. it’s completely by accident, or so he believes.
It’s impossible to know. One thing I love about sci-fi is that it let’s you tell a story that interrogates people’s beliefs without them realizing it until later. They don’t talk about racism, they talk about aliens, for example. If you tell people that you’re saying their beliefs are wrong, they’re not going to listen to you. If you tell them it isn’t political, they may engage with it an accidentally absorb the message.
i mean artemis explicitly has a black female muslim protagonist, which he got a lot of flak for since identity is political for some people. project hail mary is about the whole world banding together to fight catastrophic climate change. for him to have written those things, and then tell a right-winger in an interview that his books are nonpolitical while nutrek is too political, to me can only be ignorance.
Artemis also has the premise that stripping away all the safety regulation that a rich country would add to its space program would make a poorer country able to rapidly develop a superior space program and become a rich country with nothing at all going wrong except the one time
spoiler
the protagonist accidentally chloroforms everyone
when it all works out fine in the end anyway because of ignoring the few rules that they did have. It’s not a stretch to say that it promotes elements of Objectivism, although it’s a lot more pro-state than Ayn Rand was.
i mean, they’re never apolitical, the only difference is whether the author understands the points they’re making.
like that andy weir interview where he says “there are no politics in my books”. i was completely taken aback by that because his stories are so political and they’re researched politics. they are big allegories that make salient points. but he’s not written them that way. it’s completely by accident, or so he believes.
I heard that and assumed he was lying so as to try to not alienate people on the other side.
that would require him to realize that he was indeed speaking to “the other side”. i don’t think he did.
It’s impossible to know. One thing I love about sci-fi is that it let’s you tell a story that interrogates people’s beliefs without them realizing it until later. They don’t talk about racism, they talk about aliens, for example. If you tell people that you’re saying their beliefs are wrong, they’re not going to listen to you. If you tell them it isn’t political, they may engage with it an accidentally absorb the message.
i mean artemis explicitly has a black female muslim protagonist, which he got a lot of flak for since identity is political for some people. project hail mary is about the whole world banding together to fight catastrophic climate change. for him to have written those things, and then tell a right-winger in an interview that his books are nonpolitical while nutrek is too political, to me can only be ignorance.
Artemis also has the premise that stripping away all the safety regulation that a rich country would add to its space program would make a poorer country able to rapidly develop a superior space program and become a rich country with nothing at all going wrong except the one time
spoiler
the protagonist accidentally chloroforms everyone
when it all works out fine in the end anyway because of ignoring the few rules that they did have. It’s not a stretch to say that it promotes elements of Objectivism, although it’s a lot more pro-state than Ayn Rand was.