I love science fiction

December 25, 2023

Merry Christmas

I love science fiction

I love science fiction growing up in its golden age. Isaac Asimov, Ursula K. LeGuin, Samuel Delany, Roger Zelazny, Frank Herbert, Arthur C. Clarke, Aldous Huxley, Philip K. Dick, Larry Nevin, Poul Anderson, and my favorite Robert Heinlein were in their glory. Today not so much. When you look at lists for the best Sci Fi of 2022 or 2023, most of the books are from women writers of fantasy not science fiction. Today’s science fiction/fantasy is mostly anticapitalism with the wealthy subjugating and exploiting the poor. If big government is the tyrant, it is usually because it is doing the work of the uber rich. There is precious little hard science fiction with the wonderful books by Andy Weir being the exception. Saxon Andrew is as prolific as Edgar Rice Burroughs but his novels get tiresome quickly with humans of psychic power dominating his universes. I have tried Arkady Martine, Ann Leckie, Martha Wells and Cory Doctorow. I like Octavia Butler and occasionally John Scalzi and have yet to figure out what all the shouting is about for Neal Stephenson and Neil Galman. Frustrated with today’s woke authors, I find myself rereading the books of my youth. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land, The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Starship Troopers and Methuselah’s Children are all favorites but any of his novels are worth the read. He had the ability to weave his political thinking into his works without belaboring them but make no mistake he was no “progressive” democrat. 

Here are a few of his quotes.

Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded — here and there, now and then — are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty. This is known as “bad luck.

[T]here seems to have been an actual decline in rational thinking. The United States had become a place where entertainers and professional athletes were mistaken for people of importance. They were idolized and treated as leaders; their opinions were sought on everything and they took themselves just as seriously-after all, if an athlete is paid a million or more a year, he knows he is important … so his opinions of foreign affairs and domestic policies must be important, too, even though he proves himself to be ignorant and subliterate every time he opens his mouth.

You can sway a thousand men by appealing to their prejudices quicker than you can convince one man by logic.

Political tags – such as royalist, communist, democrat, populist, fascist, liberal, conservative, and so forth – are never basic criteria. The human race divides politically into those who want people to be controlled and those who have no such desire.

Secrecy is the keystone to all tyranny. Not force, but secrecy and censorship. When any government or church for that matter, undertakes to say to its subjects, “This you may not read, this you must not know,” the end result is tyranny and oppression, no matter how holy the motives. Mighty little force is needed to control a man who has been hoodwinked in this fashion; contrariwise, no amount of force can control a free man, whose mind is free. No, not the rack nor the atomic bomb, not anything. You can’t conquer a free man; the most you can do is kill him.

I am free, no matter what rules surround me. If I find them tolerable, I tolerate them; if I find them too obnoxious, I break them. I am free because I know that I alone am morally responsible for everything I do.

It is a bad sign when the people of a country stop identifying themselves with the country and start identifying with a group. A racial group. Or a religion. Or a language. Anything, as long as it isn’t the whole population.

Democracy can survive anything except Democrats

Patriotism is not ‘my country right or wrong’; patriotism means loving the ideals for which America stands and having the courage to speak up when these ideals are distorted for personal or political gain. The American government was instituted to be the servant of the people, not our master.

Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.

A dying culture invariably exhibits personal rudeness. Bad manners. Lack of consideration for others in minor matters. A loss of politeness, of gentle manners, is more significant than is a riot.

I think perhaps of all the things a police state can do to its citizens, distorting history is possibly the most pernicious.

Women and cats will do as they please, and men and dogs should relax and get used to the idea.

There are two ways of forming an opinion. One is the scientific method; the other, the scholastic. To the scientific mind, experimental proof is all-important, and theory is merely a convenience in description, to be junked when it no longer fits. To the academic mind, authority is everything, and facts are junked when they do not fit theory.

The lessons of history teach us – if the lessons of history teach us anything – that nobody learns the lessons that history teaches us.

There is an old song which asserts ‘the best things in life are free.’ Not true! Utterly false! This was the tragic fallacy which brought on the decadence and collapse of the democracies of the twentieth century; those noble experiments failed because the people had been led to believe that they could simply vote for whatever they wanted…and get it without toil, without sweat, without tears. Nothing of value is free. Even the breath of life is purchased at birth only through gasping effort and pain.

Anyone who clings to the historically untrue-and thoroughly immoral-doctrine that, ‘violence never settles anything’ I would advise to conjure the ghosts of Napoleon Bonaparte and the Duke of Wellington and let them debate it. The ghost of Hitler could referee, and the jury might well be the Dodo, the Great Auk and the Passenger Pigeon. Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and freedom.

An armed society is a polite society. Manners are good when one may have to back up his acts with his life.